In our latest special episode, we were positively tickled to be able to chat to Dr Jane Draycott about her latest historical biography Fulvia: The Woman who Broke All the Rules in Ancient Rome (published with Atlantic Books).

For the uninitiated, Fulvia is one of the more notorious characters from the Late Roman Republic. If you’ve heard of her, it is probably as the wife of Mark Antony – the one he first cheated on with Cleopatra. What an honour.

However, in this episode, you will get to hear why Dr Draycott thinks she is so much more than that. Join us to hear all about Fulvia’s other husbands, her many children and the rhetoric that destroyed her reputation.

Dr Jane Draycott is a historian and archaeologist and is currently Lecturer in Ancient History at the University of Glasgow. Her research interests are extensive and include: displays of extraordinary bodies in the ancient world; the depiction of the ancient world in computer games; and domestic medical practice in ancient Rome. 

In 2023, Dr Draycott published Prosthetics and Assistive Technology in Ancient Greece and Rome with Cambridge University Press. 

2022 was a huge year for Dr Draycott in terms of publications! 

We know that you will be running out to get yourself a copy of Fulvia once you have heard the fascinating details shared in this episode.

And for keen listeners, rest assured that Dr Rad was keeping a tally throughout the interview of all of Augustus’ hideous crimes 🙂

Our music is provided by the wonderful Bettina Joy de Guzman.

Dr Rad 0:00
Welcome to a special episode of the partial historians today. We are joined by Dr Jane Draycott, who is a historian and archeologist and currently Lecturer in ancient history at the University of Glasgow. Her research interests are extensive and include displays of extraordinary bodies in the ancient world, the depiction of the ancient world in computer games and domestic medical practice in ancient Rome. In 2023 Dr Draycott published Prosthetics and Assistive Technology in Ancient Greece and Rome with Cambridge University Press. Now 2022 was a huge year for Dr Draycott in terms of publications. First, there was a co edited collection, Bodies of Evidence, Ancient anatomical Votives, Past, Present and Future with Routledge Then, there was a co edited volume, Women in Classical Video Games with Bloomsbury. Third, there was an edited volume, Women in Historical and Archeological Video Games with De Gruyter and fourth (and we’re already tired thinking about this much coming out all in one year) the biography Cleopatra’s Daughter, Egyptian princess, Roman Princess, African Queen Bloomsbury, which was all about Cleopatra Selene. So we are completely thrilled to be sitting down with Jane today to discuss her latest historical biography, Fulvia, the Woman who Broke all the Rules in Ancient Rome, which has been published with Atlantic books, Fulvia is one of the most fascinating women of the late Roman republic, very deserving of having a full length treatment. So we’re excited to get into the details, because she is rudely often overlooked for those. Julio Claudian hussies.

Dr G 2:00
hello and welcome to a brand new special episode of the partial historians. I am Dr G

Dr Rad 2:08
and I am Dr rad,

Dr G 2:10
and we are thrilled today to be sitting down with Jane Draycott to discuss her latest historical biography, fauvia, the woman who broke all the rules in ancient Rome. So Fulvia is one of the most fascinating women of the late Roman republic, so very deserving of having a full length treatment such as this one. And so we are very excited to get into all of the details. Welcome, Jane. Well,

Jane Draycott 2:42
hello. Thank you for having me. It

Dr G 2:45
is an absolute pleasure. It is a bit of a fan girl moment for me, because I love your work. And before we get too far into the nitty gritty details of Fulvia’s life, I’m wondering if you can tell us a little bit about what drew you to the study of Fulvia and what inspired you to write a biography about her different

Jane Draycott 3:07
ways I could try and answer this question, and I think all of them would be true in sort of some small measure. I mean, the first is that I suppose, as someone who has studied the Roman Republic and the early Roman imperial period for probably what, how do I do this about aging myself? And I’ve been teaching it for a long time as well. I’m a, sort of been broadly aware period, broadly aware of the historical characters in it. And to be honest, it’s never really been that interesting to me, because I’m more of a social historian. I’m not a political historian. I also really don’t find men that interesting. Sorry, male listeners, also

Dr G 3:53
ancient Rome,

Jane Draycott 3:55
yeah. So, so people, people like Cicero and Caesar. I’m just like and politics the same. I don’t really care about, you know, senatorial debates and that kind of stuff. I’m much more at the sort of from below sort of situation, you know, like, yes, okay, you’ve got the great men in Senate who are making all decisions. But what does that actually mean in day to day life for everybody else? And so I’ve never really paid a huge amount of attention to that sort of history. But when I wrote my first popular history book, Cleopatra’s daughter, and I focused on Cleopatra Selene And as part of that, I looked at Cleopatra and Antony and their relationship, and how Cleopatra Selene came to be, literally, I became sort of aware that there was a lot of other interesting stuff happening at that time. I mean, I teach a course on Cleopatra. I never really wanted to be someone who worked on or someone who people thought worked on Cleopatra, because it just seemed to be so obvious. You know, you’re sort of like, oh. You’re a woman, you’re a historian. Of course, you’re interested in Cleopatra because she’s, like, literally, the only you know, ancient woman who ever did anything interesting. And so you sort of, yeah, that’s exactly, that’s the reason. That is the that’s the reason why. But for me, because I worked on Greco Roman Egypt. That was my PhD, was on, you can’t really avoid Cleopatra. You can’t really avoid the sort of the end of Ptolemaic Egypt and the start of Rome in Egypt and everything that goes along with that. And if you work on sort of the late Republic, the Augustan Principate, you also can’t really ignore Antony and Octavian and the Second Triumvirate and that sort of thing. And so I guess I was looking for ways that I could approach this period from a different angle, an angle that I found personally interesting. Because I don’t, as I said, I don’t find men interesting. I certainly don’t find like male rivalry, you know, toxic masculinity, particularly interesting, either. And so cleopatraini was a way in, because she sort of breached Egypt and Rome and North Africa in the end. And there was a sort of a brief period where I touched on Fulvia, because, of course, Antony was married to Fulvia at the time that he met Cleopatra, and it did play into the perusing war and the sort of the the way that the the initial enmity between Antony and Octavian changed into this kind of rather fake, you know, bromance with with the Pact of Brundusium and the marriage of of Antony to Octavius sister’ Octavia. And so when I was looking for something to do for my next topic. And I did want to work on something female related, simply because I find, I find women interesting. I think that there, there is not so much about women, really, Roman women. I mean, if you go into the sort of the bookshop and you look at the shelves of the ancient history section, there is a lot of stuff about politicians like Caesar, military campaigns, about various different wars, and for women, you know, there are some things about the the judicallian empresses and stuff like that. But, and there’s loads about Cleopatra, inevitably, there’s a whole shelf of, there’s Tutankhamun and Cleopatra, that is the the Egypt section.

Dr G 7:25
That’s all you get people that’s all of Egypt,

Unknown Speaker 7:29
3000 years apart. But sure, whatever, you know. And so basically, I was sort of thinking about, Okay, well, what, what would be the logical thing to do here? And my agent and my editor, they actually said, Well, you know, what about this phobia character? She sounds quite interesting. And so I sort of thought right then, and I started, I started looking a little bit more because I came into it from, you know, she was married to Anthony, and she was the victim of a lot of sort of hostile invective. But when I read more about her, I was like, Oh, she actually, Anthony is the very end of her very interesting life. You know, he is her last husband. He is, he’s one small part of a much longer and more interesting life. Because that’s, that’s the other thing as well. It’s that ancient history is one of those funny things where people sort of pop up and suddenly, you know they’re 30 years old, or 40 years old, or whatever else, but you’ve never heard of them before because the ancient historiography just didn’t think they were interesting. That ancient writers don’t care about children. They don’t care about people’s early lives. They they only really care about once. Once they’re sort of adults and they are doing military or whatever sorts of things. And so I found that she was actually very interesting. She was very active. She there was a lot that could potentially be said about her, and it was also what she represents, as well as someone who is very literally on the point where the Republic dies and the Empire was born, and she’s right there. And she is, as I argue in the book towards the end, she is actually, I think we could see her as one of those individuals in history where there really is this kind of point where things could have gone very different ways. And she was right there, and she was involved in that, if she, if she hadn’t died, when she had died, and and things might have turned out quite differently. And obviously various people, I guess you could say all people are important, and all people have, you know, an effect, a ripple effect, what we do. But some people are a bit more important and a bit more ripple creating than others. And I think Fulvia was one of those people, and because she is a woman in this time, she’s not had as much attention as if she had been a man in the same situation. So think about Antony, for example, and how much attention he has got. I mean, even he has fallen victim to. Of being Caesar’s sidekick, you know, and Octavians, sort of, you know, the loser of the of the battle between them, and Cleopatra sidekick, too. Whereas thing Antony and his own right is very interesting. There is a lot that could be said, and it hasn’t been said because it’s been sort of covered over by other looking at other people or other events. And so I think we’ll, we can talk a little bit later, I suppose, about why Fulvia isn’t more widely known. I mean, people who study ancient history know about her because she’s, she’s one of the women of the late Republic. You know, along with Servilia and Caesar’s daughter, Julia and Cicero’s wife and daughter, that they we know who they were, and we know that they were important to these people in this period, but she hasn’t had that, that sort of very lavish popular history, TV, film, etc, treatment at all. So I think a lot of people don’t necessarily know her, but they know the period, and so doing a book about her allows them to approach the period in a different way, and see it from a different perspective, someone who’s not a consul or a general or a senator, but who is on the periphery of all of those things.

Dr Rad 11:11
I know it is crazy that there hasn’t been a movie about Fulvia when you actually think about how action packed her life seems to

Jane Draycott 11:20
be. It is. It is interesting. I mean, when you, when you think about the way that this period tends to show up on film, it’s pretty much always about Caesar. It’s, it’s, it’s following Caesar through his career and then to his assassination. And if it goes beyond that, the it then pivots to Cleopatra, when you, when you when you think of it like that, and the way that TV shows and films are sort of created primarily in a sort of by by by male creatives, the big the big budget ones that are seen as sort of epic. It’s primarily male directors, male writers, and it’s about men, male, male actors playing these male characters. And they don’t really have a lot of women in them, you know, if they have women, it is as the sort of the the love interest. And so if you’ve got, you’ve already got Cleopatra and she, she is sort of, literally every single sort of a woman you could possibly want rolled into one that you can put on film. And then as a foil, you’ve got Octavia, who is you the good girl, the lovely, kind, gentle, caring, Roman wife, Roman mother. And there’s no room for Fulvia there, because you’ve already got, you know, the ball buster and and the sort of the the vamp and the sort of the the kind of aggressive, power hungry, money hungry, whatever, woman in the form of Cleopatra. And so you can’t, you know, have two of those. I mean, this is why I think if there was a story of Mark Antony’s life and you, you would have to include Fulvia. And I think you could sufficient, if you want, if you cared to, you could differentiate full beer and Cleopatra very much. But in, in in TV and films, it’s like, well, another woman, another female character, you know, too confusing. Too many women here already. They’re just

Dr G 13:17
taking up too much space. Well,

Dr Rad 13:20
let’s think a little bit about this, because obviously one of the issues for a woman in ancient Rome, as opposed to someone like Cleopatra in ancient Egypt, in that they couldn’t really hold anything officially, in terms of political office. So I’m going to really embarrass you and quote you to yourself, a woman could not hold any sort of political or military office herself, yet she might exert influence upon those who could. So let’s talk a little bit about a different husband of Fulvia. How do we see this particular idea upheld when it comes to thinking about Fulvia’s first marriage to Clodius Pulcher, a person who probably also deserves his own movie because of the controversy he excited in his lifetime. And yet, where is it Hollywood? Where is it? You

Jane Draycott 14:07
know, it’s funny. Where you said you were going to quote my words back to me. I have the brain of a bird, so as soon as I finish something, I feel about

Dr Rad 14:16
it. I’m glad I’m not alone in that. So I was like,

Jane Draycott 14:19
it doesn’t embarrass me, because I’m like, Oh yeah, that’s good. Those are good words. Yes, I find I thank Clodius quite interesting, and for much the same reasons, actually, as several other people at this period, in that we do not we do not know what he looked like. We have no portrait of him. We do not have any thing from his perspective or anything else. Everything about him is is mediated through primarily Cicero, who obviously hated his guts and and sort of other people as well, who who found him rather problematic because of his his sort of when it comes to Fulvia’s marriage to him. I mean, the thing. We don’t really know very much about that at all. We know that happened because she is obviously involved in the sort of events surrounding Clodius’ death and the funeral and the riot and the trial of Milo. So that is where we hear about Fulvia for the very first time. So we don’t know when she was born, and we don’t know really much about her, her childhood. We can, we can sort of venture to reconstruct based on knowledge of who her parents were and what their situation was. And you know that she had two children with with Clodius, so she’s, you know, a relatively, relatively young as Roman girls women were when they first married to marry him, and she has this marriage, and these children, and what we what we know about their marriage is based on what Cicero tells us when he’s trying to blacken Clodius’ reputation, he tries to argue, in the ultimate act of victim blaming the man that got, you know, brutally murdered in the street and then run over by their horses and carriages and things like that. But it was all his own fault, because he actually, he was planning to murder Milo himself, but he severely, you know, underestimated how large Milo’s entourage was and how many, you know, gladiators with with lethal weapons would happen to be in it at that point in time. And so the thing that Cicero tried, that the smoking gun for Cicero is, is that clearly close was up to no good, because usually Fulvia went everywhere with him, and on that particular day she was not there. And why was she not there? This is suspicious. And so the interesting thing about that is, is like, Well, I mean, you could say a lot about Cicero’s attitude to women, including his own wives, but the idea that it’s weird for a Roman man to want to spend time with his wife.

Dr Rad 14:20
Gives me goosebumps just thinking about it.

Dr G 16:58
What is Roman masculinity?

Jane Draycott 17:00
is, I think this is interesting for us to think about from from Fulvia’s introduction to politics. I mean, we know that her own father was not really a political animal. He had a speech impairment, and so that might have been part of it. He just didn’t. He was just rich and that, well, that was fine, not everybody. I mean, this is the other thing about the Roman Republic. We get this sense, everybody’s constantly trying to be the Consul General. And actually, a lot of guys were just like, You know what? I’m going to enjoy traveling around the ancient Mediterranean. Enjoy my villas. I’m going to enjoy, you know, my my my philosophical works, etc. But her stepfather, her mother, her parents divorced, and her mother remarried someone who became a consul, and was was at this very point in the in the sort of late 60s. So she certainly had sort of access to politics, you know, with her, with her stepfather, the Consul, and it was through him, it’s, it’s thought that her marriage to Clodius was arranged because the pair of them were connected. And so I think that there’s something there that we can think about, that she, her marriage gives her sort of portray in into Roman politics and Roman populist politics. I mean, she, her three husbands, are all we could say populist politicians. They all hold the office of Tribune, so they all have a specific political position we, I wouldn’t go so far as to call it ideology, but, you know, they have certain ways of doing things, and so she is given, I would say I would see it as a introduction to this world, and this, this way of of potentially attempting to connect with the plebs, the the generally ordinary people, the extent to which any of The Roman populist politicians genuinely cared about the plebs. I cared about the plebs. I mean, we can, we can debate that. I think till the cows come home. It is actually

Dr Rad 18:48
probably something we should unpack for our audience, so our listeners would be very familiar with the idea that the tribune of the plebs is a troublesome person who is out there to make politics difficult for everybody. However, it’s a little different, because we’re in the 390s BCE, and this is much, much later. This is hundreds of years later. Perhaps we can quickly unpack the landscape of late Republican politics and this idea of the big clash that’s happening between those who are trying to rule through more populist measures and those who disdain such politics.

Jane Draycott 19:26
Disclaimer, I did say earlier, though I’m not, I’m not really one for the for the political history, but I do think it’s something that happens in this period. So what we see in the first century BCE is this this increasing dominance by individuals and they, they are obstructing political business for their own benefits. So we have Sulla, we have Marius. We have the first triumvirate of Caesar and Pompey, and Crassus ,Antony. We have Octavian, and they are all stepping outside of the system the way that it was designed. So they they are not holding power for the short periods of time that they are supposed to. They they extend and extend and extend their Imperium, and they make sure that their armies are loyal only to them, rather than to the state as a whole. And I mean, I sort of again, I think that I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s exactly the same as what’s happening today, but you can see why people would become, shall we say, dissatisfied and discontented with the political system that it is dominated by a handful of extremely wealthy individuals who do not really care about anything except themselves and sort of limited circle of other people, and are using all the they have their disposal. And these powers are considerable, not to make other people’s lives better, but to just enrich themselves, give themselves the the best assignments and things like that. So one of the things I find quite interesting about Caesar’s assassination is that there was this period where, when Caesar came back from Egypt from the civil wars, that there are apparently all these ideas that he had. And we hear about some of them in Suetonius and Plutarch, but he was going to alter the course of the Tiber, for example. And he’s going to do this because the Campus Martius, and then the part of Rome where the Tiber bends around, was prone to flooding horribly boggy and stagnant and unhealthy. And by changing the course of Tiber could actually be an improvement for people’s like the ordinary people’s lives in the city of Rome and other other initiatives like that. And so on the one hand, the the ancient historians are like, oh, you know, he thinks he’s a god. Make these big, enormous, sweeping changes to the way that things have always been, and we don’t like that. And for ordinary people, like, Well, my house isn’t going to flood anymore, and I’m not going to die of malaria. I think that’s pretty good. Yeah.

Dr G 21:52
I mean the time, it does have this terrible reputation,

Jane Draycott 21:55
when the when the so called liberators, Brutus and Cassius and all their cronies. They assassinated Caesar, and they just assumed that everybody would be as happy about it as they were, and the entire city just sort of looks at them, and they’re like, What did you do? Why did you do that? And we’re going to kill you. Run up to the capital, and they’re like, hide themselves in the temple. Because they’re just like, Oh, whoops. We didn’t have Canberra afterwards. We just thought everyone would be as happy about it as we are, because our senatorial dignity has been tarnished by, you know, Caesar clemency. And it’s like, yeah, that’s exactly what everyone else cared about. You know, you cared about your senatorial dignity, and not you know how they were going to eat and you know how they were going to sort of support their families and everything else?

Dr G 22:44
No, no. But I think it’s really interesting, because what it does is it sets up the idea that the politics of this period is really at a knife’s edge, like people are holding the extremities of their positions, whether they are coming from that tribunate position of I’m supposed to be upholding the will of the people in particular ways, or they’re coming from that more senatorial position of the consulship and those more rigorous prestige positions on the cursus honorum, everybody is heading towards great and greater extremity. And I think this actually flows in nicely into thinking about Fulvia’s reputation, because everybody is so on edge that everybody is willing to take the nth degree in the way that they pursue their opinions about topics and people. And she has an incredible reputation in the ancient sources. So I’m keen to know a little bit more about what are some of the big accusations that are leveled against her. So you’ve sort of foreshadowed Cicero a little bit, but I’m sure he’s not going to be the only one who comes up here.

Jane Draycott 23:54
So I think Cicero starts it to be perfectly honest. I mean, he it’s interesting the way that when he talks about Fulvia in relation to Clodius, he mentions her a couple of times in a very sort of detached way. He’s he’s talking more about Clodius than he is about her. And I think it’s interesting that 10 years or so later, when he’s talking about her in relation to Antony, he talks about her in a very different way, and how much of that is about phobia herself, and the way that her, her behavior has changed. That’s probably part of it is that, you know, back back in the day, when she was a sort of young, you know, early 20 something widow, there was only so much you could really say about her in public. And then towards the end, when, when she’s a mature woman, mother of five, and very much involved in in political and military business, he can say different things about her. And of course, the standard way that you go about directing sort of negative. Of invective, oratory, etcetera, towards your enemies as you is you criticize things like their masculinity. I mean, in some respects, nothing really much has changed. You know, you attack people based on certain characteristics. And one of those characteristics, this is where Antony gets attacked, first, over Fulvia, later, over Cleopatra. So Cicero in his Philippics, really. And so in some of his letters, I mean, they weren’t, they weren’t necessarily widely disseminated at the time. You know, you get from his his letters, this is what he does, actually think what he’s talking to his friends about, and he is criticizing the amount that Fulvia is involved in the business of running Rome, because Antony, he is away. He is He is off doing military things, first in the sort of the triangle period, when when there was the sort of the civil war against the the liberators, and then subsequently, when he is off in the east, sorting out the mess that the civil war left behind that so he’s not there. And so who is running things in his absence? Well, the person who always runs everything in the absence of the patio familias, and this is, this is not something new, really. When, when Cicero was in exile after his his consulship, who was running things for him, his wife Terentia, was running things she she was running her her estates, his estates. She was trying to deal with the consequences of his exile. She was trying to arrange marriage for their daughter, etc. And so Fulvia is is basically no different to any other Roman senatorial wife, because in this period, wives did not go on campaigns with their husbands. They did not go with them to their their provinces. When they were being a provincial governor, they stayed at home. And so while they were at home, they were running things in their husband’s absence. They were the ones that were seeing, you know, the the clients, and acting as patron and sort of doing that kind of thing. And so this is what Fulvia’s doing. She is She is basically acting in Antony’s place while Antony is away. And Cicero is not happy about this. I mean, he’s not happy about what Antony is doing, but he’s also not happy about the fact that Fulvia is is the means by which he’s doing it. Yeah. So, so the reason, then, that we we get such negative accounts of Fulvia is is partnered with what Cicero was writing at the time, and Cicero’s perspective, and also octavians perspective as well, with the poetry he wrote and the propaganda surrounding the perusing war. But also later than that, in 40 BCE, when Antony, and Octavian. Fulvia has died, conveniently, it must be said for both of them, and they form the Pact of Brundisium and Anthony marries Octavia. There is this agreement that the convenient and expedient thing to do, basically blame everything on Fulvia so that the two guys can wipe the slate clean, and they can make their alliance, and they can make the marriage, and they can enter a new era as as sort of brothers, not just brothers in arms, but actual brothers, because they’re linked now by marriage. And so that’s the second stage of it. Is this agreement that will blame everything on Fulvia. And then later than that, once Octavian is the last man standing, and he becomes Augustus. He spends the next, sort of 40 years of his life, and brain attempting to whitewash everything that he did earlier. And so in the in the progress of the process of him doing that, there are people that he ends up using to sort of hang all the bad stuff on. So, you know, the prescriptions, that’s not his fault. He was young, he was innocent, he was he was overruled by Anthony and Lepidus. And also Fulvia because, you know, she was adding, adding names to the prescriptions as well, and and so this is, I suppose it sort of crystallizes in the Augustan principled and then all of our latest sources who were drawing on this period as the history being written by the victors, that sort of thing. They are using those official stories. And so as time goes on, Fulvia becomes more and more and more of a villain, until we get to Cassius Dio who is the one with the really sort of lurid account of how she abused Cicero’s head. And Dio, he has, he has lots of he loves a little bit of color. I mean, his his descriptions of Cleopatra lying on her couch and attempting to seduce Octavian by showing him Caesar’s love letters and things that the weirdest seduction strategy you can imagine. You want

Dr Rad 29:33
to hear what got your great uncle going.

Jane Draycott 29:35
I know, like father, like son, you know, yeah.

Dr Rad 29:40
But the Romans, I mean, let’s face it, they do like that kind of stuff, right? They do like following in the footsteps of their fathers, not

Jane Draycott 29:47
as much as the Ptolemies, I think. Yeah.

Dr Rad 30:20
The interesting thing, I suppose, about this late Republican period is that there are quite a few women running around, seemingly violating these traditional standards of behavior, particularly those for women. And so you’ve got Julia the Elder, for example, Augustus, only biological child, who infamously ends up in exile because of her bad behavior. And of course, you also have to go back to the Clodii, Clodia Metelli. What is it that makes her different from them, like, How is her behavior and the way that she breaks the rules different to those sorts of women in some ways,

Jane Draycott 30:55
I don’t think it really is. It’s, it’s that she’s, she’s unlucky in that she is the one who is held up as as the sort of, the paragon of bad behavior, and through, through her links to, to Antony. So this is one of the interesting things about her, because, on the one hand, a lot of what she was doing, I don’t think was particularly different. And yes, I mean, potentially, she she was, she was breaking rules, in the sense of, you know, that whole thing about the the letter of the law and the spirit of the law, but she wasn’t doing anything that lots of other women weren’t also doing in this period, but the prominence that she comes to because of who it is that she happens to be married to, and The the fact that he is drawing so much criticism from from the person who I mean, if we if we didn’t have Cicero’s letters and his speeches, I think our view of the late Republic and the fall of the Republic would be quite different. And it is interesting that we have two separate accounts of the Capitol area and conspiracy and but from people who were there at the time, and the Cicero’s tells us one thing, and Salus tells us something different, or puts quite a different spin on it. And so, you know, it’s something that I think should be born in mind that the sources are hostile towards her, but the the source is hostile towards her, that the two, the two people who, the person who writes about this period is, is hostile towards her and her husband and her previous husband as well. Um, it’s also one of the reasons I think I don’t really have a problem with with Fulvia, supposedly, like enjoying the fact that that Cicero was was murdered because he’d been a thorn in her side for years. He had defended the man who had murdered her first husband and who had apparently planned to murder her son, the man who drove Antony out of out of Rome, and meant that she was being targeted and her other children were being targeted, and who were making very inflammatory speeches and writing about her. I mean, really, is it a bad thing that she was pleased that he was there? So, you know, thinking, oh

Dr Rad 33:07
yeah, Sister sounds like a jerk from her point of view, from her, from her perspective. And also remember

Jane Draycott 33:11
that Claudia had been her sister in law, and had probably been someone that she because she was older, she she was probably someone who she admired and, and, and thought was, was, yes, this is the kind of, the kind of life I want to lead, to be this sort of rich and influential woman with this great life, I kind of, I want some of that for myself. And so, you know, Cicero wrote the pro killio and destroyed, you know, Claudia’s reputation. So, so he had done a lot of wrong to her and the people that she loved, and even if she didn’t necessarily love them that much, they were still her family. They were still people that were associated with her. And so I don’t think it’s unreasonable for phobia to be very anti Cicero. And I think it’s more unreasonable for Cicero to be anti phobia, to be perfectly honest, because how much of it was his, his own personal sort of opinion of her, and how much of it was him using her as a way to get to other people. And that’s, you know, she’s collateral damage in his campaign against against Anthony. Yeah, that’s

Dr G 34:17
that’s not fair, definitely. And there’s this moment where, in the wake of the murder of Clodius, she is sometimes attributed as giving a public speech, which seems to be quite moving to the people of Rome. And I wonder if that’s where it started for Cicero, because Cicero has the task of defending the murderer, and all of a sudden, things are being swayed by somebody who ultimately is outside of the rhetorical tradition, or ought to be. She may have had theoretical training, but she’s not supposed to be good. At it, and she’s not supposed to be standing up and saying stuff like this in public, and effectively maybe showing him up. And so I wonder if that’s where Cicero started. He’s

Jane Draycott 35:13
chewing for some reason he finds plastic bags incredibly tasty, and obviously it’s not really something he should be hunting. But back to the question. I mean, this is, this is another example, actually, of Fulvia doing something that is not actually a bad thing for her to have done. So women were responsible for the funeral, or a lot of the sort of funerary rights. They were the ones who were supposed to, sort of, you know, prepare the deceased, and they were the ones who were supposed to mourn and, you know, wail and tear their hair, tear their skin, rend their clothes, etc. And so she’s not doing something that, or at least see the thing that she’s doing, the very basic kind of fundamental core of it is what she’s meant to be doing as a Roman woman who has who has been bereaved. It’s then how she is developing that, or how she is potentially steering that in the direction that she wants it to go. And yes, the direction that obviously other people like Cicero and Milo don’t want it to go. They don’t they don’t want people to feel bad for Clodius, you know, the husband and the father. They want people to think, oh yes, that that rabble rouser, he’s gone. That’s brilliant. And so I think this is something that we sort of see with her again and again, is that the things that she does are very sort of standard, traditional Roman Republican Woman things to do, but the way that she perhaps does them, the way that she expands them, the way that other people see them as as inconvenient. This is what draws the ire and that it’s possible to put this negative slant on it. Because perhaps, you know, she’s very high profile, she’s she’s very visible, she’s first. She’s She’s Clodius’ wife, and if she’s with him all the time, then people can see her. And then she’s Antony’s wife. And if she’s with him, or she’s with him when he’s when he’s around, and if she’s acting in his stead when he’s not, again, she’s very visible. She’s making herself visible because she needs to remind people of Antony. I mean, this is because, partly the the the one of the motivations for the Perusine war is that Antony is not around, and Octavian is attempting to woo the soldiers and the Veterans away from Antony by giving them like land that that has been promised to them and making him their patron. And so Fulvia, along with Antony’s Brother, don’t forget, and his brother, Lucius, who is Consul at that time. The pair of them are like, no, no, hang on. You know, Antony deserves to be involved in this. He deserves the credit for this. You you can’t do this. And cut him out of it completely. And so Fulvia is there to represent Antony. She’s got his sons, their sons with her, to represent the next generation. And this is the other thing I think that that is important to remember, is that she’s got five children. You know, she she is pretty much the ideal Roman wife, because she has produced children for all three of her husbands. She’s given all three of them a son. In Antony’s case, she gave

Dr G 38:19
them two. I mean, that’s incredible, good work. You know that is, that is peak Roman woman, right there.

Jane Draycott 38:26
I mean, she, she is married to her second husband, cheerio, for, like, literally a matter of months before he goes off to Africa and he leaves her with, you know, his his son. He’s his only son. So, you know she, she is she, she did better than Livia. She did better than Octavia. You know, Octavia had, like one, one boy out of about five children. Livia had had two sons with her first husband, but didn’t have any, any children at all with with Octavian. So she is actually the kind of woman that that Roman women in this period should be aspiring to be, because she is. She’s ticking all the boxes. I mean, this is what makes it so funny, really, that she and so sad, that she gets the criticism that she gets. Because realistically, she is doing that is expected of a Roman matron, and yet, because she’s doing it for the wrong people, it becomes something that that she, she loses all of the positives, and she, you know, the negatives are amplified.

Dr G 39:26
It sounds like some people might be jealous and are trying to ruin her reputation, but I think you’ve touched on the children, and this is a nice lead into thinking about them. What is fulvius legacy in terms of her children. Do we know anything about what happened to them?

Jane Draycott 39:44
Tha patchy nature of ancient Roman history is that we don’t know very much about people that we really should know about. And so one of the things that we don’t tend to know about is what children were doing, what happened to children. And and what you end up having to do is, if they don’t make it into the sort of literary, uh, sources of the period, you end up having to do sort of prospography with inscriptions and things like that to try and find out what happened to people. And so Fulvia has five children. She has a son and a daughter with with Clodius. And we know about the son because he is mentioned in the course of the sort of the trial of Milo, because there is this suggestion that Milo, after murdering Clodius, was going to go to the villa and murder the young the young boy, the young Claudius. Then we hear about him in a letter that Antony sends to Cicero some years later, when Anthony was married to Fulvia, and he is he’s close young Clodius or Claudius, and he seems to go by Claudius, his he’s a stepfather, and he’s sort of, essentially, he’s trying to get Cicero to just let it go with his sort of enmity with with Clodius, and sort of agree to kind of focus on the next generation. And at this time, Cicero is sort of sucking up to ants. He’s like, Yes, all right, then and then after that, what we hear about just just briefly in a later source, is that however much promise he had as a young man, he basically goes off the rails and sort of eats himself to death and falls into a life of dissipation. We have his funerary urn with with his sort of epitaph on it, and that allows us to sort of reconstruct his political career. So he has the standard cursus honorum political career, but because he’s having it under the Augustan principle, where everybody’s focused on the imperial family, we just don’t really hear anything about it. So he has what seems to be a sort of a normal senatorial life in this period. And that’s that’s basically it. Her daughter Claudia, after she’s divorced by Octavian we don’t hear anything about her again. And so possibly, possibly she died, possibly She remarried, and just had, you know, again, the standard Roman life of marriage, children, etc, with the three younger boys. That’s where things I think are really sad. And this is, this is one of the things that doesn’t get so much attention. So Young Curio, he goes to Egypt with Antony and Antony’s and Fulvia’s oldest son, Antyllus. So clearly, Antony has has been this boy’s father. He’s been married to Fulvia since, since he was a baby. He was Curio’s, one of curious closest friends. So I think it’s quite nice that Antony sort of stepped in and married Fulvia and sort of took on her three prior children. But this is, this is very bad for this young man, because he’s he is around 18 when the invasion of Egypt happens, and Octavian murders him. He comes to a sticky end because of who his his stepfather and his mother are. The same thing happens to Antyllus. Antyllus is murdered, and he is even younger. He’s 16 or so when, when he’s murdered in Egypt. So that’s two of Fulvia’ssons gone around about the same time. Antyllus gets more attention because he’s included in the Plutarch Life of Antony, which is where we get most of our details of this at the end of this period in Egypt from. And then Curio is just mentioned briefly in a different source. And then the one that everybody, I think knows the most about is Ulus, the youngest, and he is raised by Octavia. So he he is only a bottler, perhaps when Fulvia dies in 40 and so he ends up going into Octavius household during her marriage to Antony. And so he probably didn’t have any memories of his father, or very, very few memories of his father, because Antony spent most of his his, you know, the next sort of 10 years between, between the marriage to Octavia and his death, off in Egypt or off in the east or trying to campaign against papius. So, so Iullus doesn’t really have any memories of his mother or his father. He’s been raised by Octavia, and he again, like his oldest brother, probably as Clodius Pulcher. He he goes off the cursus honorum. He reaches the point of consul. He’s never allowed to command an army or govern a province. He’s kept very close to to Augustus in Rome. And then he gets tangled up with Julia and her intrigues and her adulteries. And he, he is forced to fall on his sword over that. And so, except for, well, we don’t know what happened to Claudia, the daughter, but the four boys all come to quite sad, pathetic ends in one way or another, and three of them die by violence at the hands or or sort of indirectly, at the hands of Octavian or Augustus, and so I don’t know how much of that we can attribute to his feelings about Fulvia. He doesn’t seem to have liked her very much. His poetry on the subject and the way that he campaigns against her in the in the Perusine War, that seems to imply that he’s quite anti Fulvia, possibly because she represents all the things about women that he really doesn’t like, but that it’s probably part of it that he wants to make sure that there is literally nothing left of Fulvia or Antony in Rome that can be a problem for him during his his reign.

Dr Rad 45:17
It is wild, though, how those families keep intertwining. I mean, the fact that Fulvia could have been octavians mother in law. I mean, was who she

Jane Draycott 45:26
was, yes, yeah. And Claudia had been a little bit older, and if she had had a child with Octavian, you know, again, it’s these things. Of things might have been quite different, because Octavian only has Julia with with his his second wife, scribonia, and she, she becomes very important for the Julio-Claudian dynasty, because she is, she’s literally the, the only sort of direct line of descent from from Octavian, as opposed to Octavia.

Dr Rad 45:56
absolutely crazy. And then for one of their children to be so enmeshed in Julia, he’s one biological child’s downfall. It is crazy. So Fulvia obviously lived at a time that we very much see now looking back as a crossroads for Rome, that tipping point from Republic to Empire, and given that the Romans were a big fan of the exemplar when they were writing their histories. So these examples of how to live your life or how not to live your life, can you perhaps explain what Fulvia’s potential legacy would have been for people living under Octavian slash, Augustus and then into the Julio Claudian dynasty? This

Jane Draycott 46:37
is a really interesting thing to think about, because there is this question of how long were people’s memories. And one of the things that Tacitus actually he when he opens the the Annals, he opens it with the death of Augustus in in 14. And one of the things he talks about is how, basically, because Augustus had lived so long, you know, he was, he was 74 or so when he died. And so he had been in control of the the the Empire, really, for 44 years, and had plenty of time to sort of rewrite history to his liking. And so he talks about the fact that one of the reasons that Augustus is able to do this is because literally, everybody else was dead, and nobody, nobody alive, remembered what it was like. Or very few people remembered what it was like to live under, well, a functioning Republic. I mean, some of them did remember what it was like to live in in sort of times of horrific Civil War where people were being murdered in the streets, and their bodies threw in the Tiber and prescribed and all the rest of it. And so he’s sort of like they were seduced by the promise of peace. And like, Oh yeah, Tacitus, that’s terrible. You know this idea that you might actually be able to live your life and grow to old age and see your children grow up and not be in danger of assassination or or street gangs or conscription or whatever else. Yeah, so bad

Dr Rad 48:05
to not have their father brutally murdered in the street and have to start a riot,

Jane Draycott 48:09
exactly. And so with the question of Fulvia, the the interesting thing is, is that how, how long did people remember her for bearing in mind? She was sort of replaced by Octavia. She was replaced by Cleopatra, and there were attempts made to present Roman women in a different way. So part of octavians strategy was to highlight Octavia, to highlight Livia, and to present them as these paragons of Roman womanhood, and to give them the same sort of legal and sort of religious protection that the best virgins and the Caribbeans had to make it make them sacrosanct, so that they couldn’t be used against him the way that he had used Fulvia and Cleopatra against Antony. And so there is this. This is a concerted attempt through this period to sort of rebrand Roman women, I suppose. I mean we have, we have the Augustan or the sort of moral legislation, the attempts to get both women and men married and having babies for the Roman state, and the attempts to keep the senatorial and equestrian orders separate from the lower orders and stop people marrying foreigners and non citizens and things like that. So there is this attempt being made to tell Roman women that you you should be like this. You should behave like this. In the material record, we see things like the araparius and all of the the coins and the cameos that present this image of, you know, woman, babies, etc. And I mean, we know with the times that we’re living through that it’s not that easy that you the state, can tell people all day long that you should get married, you should have children, you should behave like this, and plenty of people can say no, thank you. You know, get get your your nose out of my private life. Get out of my bedroom. I’m going to do what I want to do. Do. And we know that he wasn’t so successful because he kept having to reintroduce more moral legislation to try and get people behaving the way he wanted them to. So Fulvia is also she is mentioned in the histories as as time goes on. She’s always being mentioned alongside Antony and Cleopatra and everything else. So clearly people remembered her, and they they had a certain amount of information about her. And the thing that I think is is really thought provoking, is the way that the women of the imperial family behave in in the sort of the next few decades. So you have Octavia and Livia, for example, who are trying very hard to be as public as they can be, but in very sort of specific ways. You know, they’re presenting themselves as wives and mothers, and they’re quite successful at that. They it’s the where it starts to fall down is this sort of subsequent generation. So you see Julia the Elder and Julia the Younger being really quite stupid

Speaker 1 51:05
with their adulteries and their conspiracies. It’s like, really very risky you’re doing this so, you know, okay,

Jane Draycott 51:13
and then you have Agrippina the elder and Agrippina the younger and Messalina as well. And there are elements of the things that they do. They the accusations made against them, the allegations about their behavior. These are quite similar to Fulvia you have this so Agrippina and Messalina are both accused of having people killed so that they can seize their property. So this, this seems to be this, this sort of standard accusation against women. Women are greedy and they covet things that they’ve got no business coveting. And good men find themselves coming to bad ends because these women want their villas and want their gardens I mean, it’s funny, really, because one of the one of the things I think is quite amusing about Fulvia is that she’s never accused of wanting, you know, jewelry and pretty dresses and all the stuff that women are supposed to want. She she’s accused of wanting money and property and power and and diplomatic, you know, advantage and things, which I think is great,

Dr Rad 52:12
which is similar to Agrippina, isn’t it? Because when Nero tries to bribe her with dresses, she’s like, nooo, thank you!

Dr G 52:19
Not my flavor, actually. And

Jane Draycott 52:21
I mean that that in itself, gives us a perspective on Roman women, that that, you know, that that we all of the sort of the sum tree legislation and things like that, and the the all the writing about the cosmetics and the perfume and the the silk and the things that that women are spending their husband’s money on. It’s like, well, yeah, some women, maybe not all women. You know, some women were like, I’ve got my own jewelry and my own silk man, because my thanks. I want some other stuff. I want the stuff that actually matters. But, but, yeah, so. And we see with acropony The elder the the her involvement in Germanicus is military campaigns, the fact that she goes with him, the fact that she she uses their marriage and their children in the camp, and is able to transfer some of the troops loyalty from Germanicus to her and to her children, particularly Caligula, who would, of course, grow up to sort of try and take advantage of that. And so it is this all, is this all coincidental? Are these women just doing this stuff with no knowledge of Fulvia, or no interest in Fulvia, or was there a sort of a slightly more calculated approach to it, that just as as I said earlier, she she was actually a pretty good Roman wife and mother. She was doing the things that Roman wives and mothers are expected to do, and so were women looking to her and thinking, Oh, yes, I will do some of that. But then they too, found that there is clearly a very fine, almost invisible line as to what it’s okay to do and what it’s not okay to do, and especially for high profile women who are very visible to to members of the public, like the imperial family, they they seem to have have difficulty. I mean, Livia has difficulty. It’s one thing. During the the reign of Augustus, she seems to get away with literally everything that she wants to do. But when it comes to the reign of Tiberius, he is like no mother go away. You know, I’m a 50 year old man. I’m not having you tell me what to be involved in my reign. And he, he does very much try and put the brakes on everything that Augustus had apparently been happy enough with her doing. And so, yeah, when women can go so far, but when they, when they reach that invisible fine

Dr G 54:42
line, well, it seems like the fine, the fine line might just be being on the more powerful side, essentially, because what Agrippina the elder is doing is actually very similar to what Fulvia is doing. As you say, and you. For both of them, it works out quite differently, because one is in the imperial family at that stage, and obviously they’re holding all of the cards. And Fulvia is not furious.

Jane Draycott 55:11
Is not happy about Agrippa and the elder either. I mean, he is very angry about her behavior, and is treats her very brutally after the death of Germanicus. So she she is sort of, she manages, for a little while, while Germanicus is alive, she manages to sort of thread this needle. But once he’s gone and she’s lost her male protector, then it is a different matter. She is much more vulnerable. He refuses to allow her to remarry, because he he doesn’t. He doesn’t want to face any more influential men or any more Imperial babies. And this is, this is something that Fulvia, I mean, she, she had experienced the death of two husbands that left her vulnerable, but she always had another husband that she she could then turn to to protect her and and the same thing with with Livia, for example, she she is protected during the life of her husband, but then once her husband is gone, she she has lost her plausible deniability. As long as your husband is letting you do things, it’s fine. And then as soon as he’s He’s gone, he’s not doing it. Other people have got things they want to say about it, even your son, or your horrible son,

Dr G 56:20
really interesting to think about, isn’t it, this whole period is just such a fascinating moment in Rome’s history, and we’re so lucky to have so many sources. I think this is part of how we get to that sense of it being interesting, because I’m sure every period of history has the capacity to be as interesting. And it’s just we’re lacking source material, but

Jane Draycott 56:41
we’re not looking in that. We’re not looking at the right direction either. We’re not looking at the right people. I mean, one of the things that, and I sort of, I didn’t think this initially, when I was researching formula and I was writing the book, by the end of it, I came to realize that one of, one of the sort of the really interesting things about her is how important she was in the sense of what happened when she was no longer around. You know, it’s, it’s like, you you don’t necessarily realize that someone is the linchpin of your social group until they’re not there anymore, and then suddenly no one, no one’s getting together. No, no. You know nothing’s happening. And you’re like, I didn’t realize that that person was the heart of the group, but they clearly are, because without them, we’re terrible. But with Fulvia, I think the really interesting thing to think about is, if she hadn’t died in 40 when she did, I think Roman history would have been quite different.

Dr Rad 57:32
It is so frustrating that she died at that moment. It’s

Jane Draycott 57:35
not that she I mean, she was one of these sort of quite dynamic, mover and shaker type people, but it was as much where she was situated and all of her connections that that was part of that. And so, so if she hadn’t died in 40 she, let’s assume that she had stayed married to Antony. And even if she hadn’t stayed married to Antony, she was still the mother of his children and the the mother of his political heirs in Rome. And so while he was away in the 30s in Parthia or attempting to take water Parthia and in Egypt and everything else, he didn’t have anyone protecting him in Rome anymore. His brother Lucius had gone to Spain and seems to have just died because he didn’t. He’s not really featured again after the Peruvian war. And so Fulvia was not in Rome on the spot to protect him. And so Octavian is able to completely demolish his reputation and do things like the will that may or may not have been fake that he opens and says, Oh, Antony wants to be you know, he wants to move Rome to Egypt. He wants to be buried with Cleopatra. He wants to leave all of his money, etc, to his Egyptian children, and so on so forth. If Fulvia had been around, that would not have happened like Antony’s will. Would have been different if that even was Anthony’s will. She had four young boys growing up to be Roman politicians, all of whom were part of very influential Roman families. So she had her oldest son, Publius Clodius Pulcher she had her second son, Gaius Scribonius Curio, and then she had her two sons of Antony. And so those four boys, growing up would have been able to basically take control of the Senate and have have a lot to say in Antony’s defense. In Rome, they would have been able to run things to Antony’s advantage, and then at the same time with if Antony had been able to put all of his his Eastern children into the positions that he and Cleopatra had planned for them, he already had. He had his his eldest child, Antonia, was already married into an Eastern royal family, and the four, those four children sort of ruling different parts of Near East, with Fulvia’s four sons ruling the Roman West. I mean, that’s the thing that I think is really interesting, what the world would have looked like, and when, when people would try and speculate on what would have happened if, if Antony and Cleopatra had won the Battle of Actium, how would his people look different things? Never think about that. They think more in the sense of Oh, Antony’s in Egypt, and the Roman Empire moves its focus to the east and and things like. It’s like, yes, but think about what’s going on, what would be going on in Rome at that point. And Antony would dominate Rome as well in the traditional Roman way. It wouldn’t have been Oh. Rome would become Egyptian and go Eastern. There would have been highly placed Romans in the Roman political system making sure that Rome sort of ticked over as well. And, and that is something that, because I hadn’t really thought about that until I came to the end of a writing book, and I was like, oh my god, this is, this is really, potentially this fascinating sort of counterfactual history element of it. And of course, the Julio Claudian dynasty as we know it, would not have existed, because Octavius daughters, Antonia Major and Minor, would never have been born. And therefore, the only thing Augustus really had going to him without his Julia and her, her children with with Marcellus or Agrippa and well, the three boys die young, and the girls have have troubles with their own. So he Julio-Claudian dynasty would would be, would have been very different as well, assuming it had even, you know, come to be. So Fulvia is the sort of at the center of this very interesting, sort of complex network of cause and effect. And if you take her away, or you put her back in, you know, she, she, it really is. These are, these are turning points for world

Speaker 2 1:01:28
history. Absolutely. Octavia obviously has completely conflicted loyalties between Antony and Octavian. In that decade, she’s hardly going to do the same sort of job that Fulvia would have done if she had lived and remained his wife. And

Jane Draycott 1:01:45
she does, she does try. And then she she does, apparently, voice, you know that it’s very hard to be the wife of one imperator and the sister of another imperator, it’s like, oh yeah, cry me a river, Octavia. But, I mean, she starts to try. She tries to support Anthony as much as she can,

Dr Rad 1:02:01
totally but that’s exactly it. It’s still not the same, because Fulvia just doesn’t have that, you know, that obligation to Octavian at all in spite of their brief familial relationship,

Jane Draycott 1:02:15
he might have been quite keen to remarry her daughter. Then Julia wouldn’t have been born, and potentially he’d have had other so. So yes, it’s for people who dismiss Roman women as not being important because they don’t hold the political or military offices. And why do we need women’s history? Oh, it’s just work, nonsense, etc. Well, individual women can actually be quite significant, whether it’s because of the things that they say and do, or whether it’s simply because of the person that they are in the position that they’re in, they can have quite far reaching effects on on things and then. So that’s that’s another, another reason, I suppose, why I wanted to sort of write this book and write books like this that sort of put the women back in, because women are 50% or slightly more of the population, and they, I mean this all of our important family period. I mean, I went once sitting down and trying to work out Roman prospography In this period. It, oh, my God, it brings on a migraine. Once you start doing that, you realize marriage was really important. And we hear about the men because it’s the men that have the public facing life and the literary and material and documentary evidence for them, but they are marrying women from other families, and they are creating links. And when you think about it, if you once you’ve traced all the family trees, you realize that the fall of the Republic was basically an extended family squabble. It

Dr Rad 1:03:53
does increasingly feel that way, especially when you consider that. As you pointed out, Antony’s children with Octavia become key players and makers of the Julio Claudian dynasty, Antonia Maior and Minor, without them, you don’t have the members of the Julio Claudian family.

Jane Draycott 1:04:12
But even even beyond that, outside of our specific sort of Fulvia, Anthony, Octavia, Octavian sort of situation, Fulvia was related to Caesar through marriage. You have, you have families like the she was, well, she was related to the Clodii by marriage. And they were related all the they were all married to the girls. Were all married to important members of individual families and things so, so really, what we’re seeing in the Roman Republic, because the Roman senatorial class is so basically incestuous. I mean, they’re all marrying each other cousins are marrying second cousins and so on so forth. So they are fighting amongst themselves and their own families and their own extended families. And it’s sort of, it’s almost like, you know, someone. Those situations where, at the reading of the Will all of the descendants start fighting over who gets the biggest share of it? And that is basically what the fall of the Republic is. It’s all these, all these related people, related by blood, related by marriage, fighting over who gets to have the biggest share. And they’re not. They’re not very good at sharing. It’s a zero sum game – one Person has to come out on top, and that means everybody else has to lose. And that’s why we find ourselves in this situation.

Dr G 1:05:30
Roman history summed up so well,

Dr Rad 1:05:33
the Romans not very good at sharing,

Dr G 1:05:36
not very good at sharing and ruining everything in the process,

Jane Draycott 1:05:40
just like any elite, really, if we, if we think about it, any any modern country, you know, they’re sucking up all of the money and all of the resources, and they’re wondering why all of the sort of people beneath them are getting progressively more annoyed about sex.

Dr G 1:05:57
Well, thank you, Jane, so much for coming on the show. It has been excellent to have a good old chat about Fulvia, the late Republic, how all of these pieces might be fitting together with what’s going on with women. Where are they? What are they up to, and and how is this influencing the very nature of history itself. And I love your consideration of the counterfactual history here as well, and Fulvia’s central positioning as this kind of linchpin person that is really holding different types of potential rooms together within herself, so the way she decides to act is pivotal, not just for her, but for everything that it influences the moment of her death is obviously pivotal, as well, as you’ve noted. And I would encourage anybody who is interested to seek out your book and to delve into the details even further. So thank you so much for your time. Thank you for having me, and

Speaker 2 1:07:03
clearly we’re sending out the message to Hollywood that it’s a mystery that Fulvia has been so overlooked in popular culture given her importance, as demonstrated by this chat. Yes, because,

Jane Draycott 1:07:14
because what Hollywood is doing currently is is green lighting, lots of stories about complex women and overlooked minorities.

Dr Rad 1:07:33
Thank you for listening to this special episode of the partial historians. You can find our sources sound credits and an automated transcript in our show notes at http://www.partialhistorians.com Our music is by Bettina Joy De Guzman. You too can support our show and help us to produce more fascinating content about the ancient world by becoming a Patreon. In return, you receive exclusive early access to our special episodes, just like this one. However, if you lost all your money betting on a chariot race, please just tell someone about the show or give us a five star review. Until next time we are yours in ancient Rome.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

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Rounding out our trilogy of special episodes on Ridley Scott’s Gladiator II, we are joined by gladiator expert, Alexandra Sills.

Special Episode – Gladiator II with Alexandra Sills

Alexandra holds a BA in Classical Studies from Birkbeck College, University of London and a MA in The Classical Mediterranean from the University of Leicester. Alexandra’s MA dissertation was awarded the Mark Pluciennik prize in Archaeology & Ancient History. Alexandra has published outreach articles for Bad Ancient and Working Classicists and recently published an academic article entitled ‘The Tropification of Hollywood Heroes Thrown Into the Arena’ for Melita Classica in 2023. Alexandra’s current research focuses on gladiators in the ancient world and their reception on film and television. We’re thrilled to have her on the show to discuss all things gladiators.

We start with a history of the development of the gladiator in the Roman world including:

Are there things that Gladiator II gets right from the perspective of the ancient evidence? We discuss the possibilities with Alexandra.

Fred Hechinger plays Emperor Caracalla, Pedro Pascal plays General Acacius and Joseph Quinn plays Emperor Geta in Gladiator II

Gladiator II – Macrinus played by Denzel Washington

Check out our other episodes on Gladiator II with experts Dr Lindsay Steenberg and Professor Martin M. Winkler.

Our theme music is by Bettina Joy de Guzman.

Lightly edited for the Latin and our wonderful Australian accents!

Dr Rad 0:15
Welcome to The Partial Historians.

Dr G 0:19
We explore all the details of ancient Rome,

Dr Rad 0:23
everything from political scandals, the love affairs, the battled wage and when citizens turn against each other. I’m Dr Rad.

Dr G 0:33
And I’m Dr G. We consider Rome as the Romans saw it, by reading different authors from the ancient past and comparing their stories.

Dr Rad 0:44
Join us as we trace the journey of Rome from the founding of the city.

Dr G 0:54
Hello and welcome to a new, very special episode of The Partial Historians. I am one of your hosts, Dr G.

Dr Rad 1:04
And I am Dr Rad.

Dr G 1:07
And we are super thrilled to have a special guest with us today, Alexandra Sills. Now I’ll just give you a quick bio. Alexandra Sills holds a BA in Classical Studies from Birkbeck College, University of London, and an MA in the Classical Mediterranean from the University of Leicester. Alexandra’s MA dissertation was awarded the Mark Pluciennik prize in Archeology and Ancient History. Alexandra has published a range of articles for Bad Ancient and Working Classicists, and recently published an academic article entitled ‘The tropification of Hollywood heroes thrown into the arena’ for Melita Classica in 2023. Alexandra’s current research focuses on gladiators in the ancient world and their reception on film and television. And if you haven’t guessed already, we are thrilled to have Alexandra on the show to discuss gladiators. And of course, the most recent foray of gladiators on the big screen, Ridley Scott’s Gladiator Two. Welcome Alexandra.

Alexandra Sills 2:21
Hello. Thank you for having me. Absolutely thrilled to talk about this film. There’s so much to talk about.

Dr G 2:28
Soooo much to talk about. So to get us started, a soft launch, if you like, into this foray. What makes a gladiator in the ancient Roman world. When do they originate and when do they go out of fashion?

Alexandra Sills 2:45
Okay, that’s a really good question, and it’s one that’s got quite an interesting answer, I think, because everyone assumes that they’re really stereotypically Roman. But actually, the Romans stole the idea from other cultures, and we’re not entirely sure which other cultures they got the most inspiration from, because nobody bothered writing that down. But we do know that down in Campania, which is the area around Naples and Pompeii, they were having fights long before they did in Rome. That tended to be something that they did after battles with prisoners of war and sometimes during feasts. And also, the Etruscans were having combats as well. So the Romans were looking to the north and to the south and seeing, Oh, this is actually quite a fun entertainment. Why don’t we try it? So the first recorded fight in Rome, according to Livy, was in 264 it was for a funeral of a former consul, and it was put on by his sons. They decided that they were going to have something to make this particular funeral, something really memorable for everyone who turned up. And the Romans had just won a battle, and some of the guests were told, brought along some prisoners of war as guests, as presents for the family. And someone had the idea, let’s make them fight. So they did. And there were three pairs of gladiators at that first funeral, and then as funerals, it became, you know, popular to have that first one, obviously, was a hit. You see more and more and more gladiators being at each funeral until that part of the funeral could last multiple days, and it was put on either by the tomb or in the forum, if it was particularly big, and the whole of Rome would come out. And it was the point was not necessarily as a sacrifice to the dead, because that’s not something that the Romans were particularly interested in. But it was a show, particularly since these men were former consuls, and that’s a military role to show some military prowess, particularly, and. Prisoners of war, they’re usually caught with their own kit and their own skills, so they don’t need a lot of training, and so that they could be presented as a celebration. This is a former consul he was in charge of the army, and look, we’ve got prisoners of war fighting to the death, because we can do that because we’re winners. So that’s how they kind of started. And then Julius Caesar decides, I’m going to use this to my political advantage. Because why not? So he, of course, Julius Caesar started to say, I need to put on some games, because I can see how they’re making my peers really popular and look fantastic, especially to voters, but no one in my family’s died. What do I do? So he starts,

Dr Rad 5:48
What a tragedy.

Alexandra Sills 5:50
No one’s dead. It’s awful. So he starts putting on games 20 years after his family members have died, slightly delayed saying, Oh, I wasn’t rich enough to do it before, or, you know, I didn’t have the means, but I can do now, and I want to catch up. And it was always –

Dr Rad 6:09
We’ve all had those situations where your to do list gets away from you.

Alexandra Sills 6:13
Especially when your to do list is as long as his was. But, you know, he was saying, I can do it now, so I should, and it was very convenient that it was always in a year where he needed to win an election soon. So then you start having laws brought in by the senate saying, Julius, he’s been nuts. We need to put caps on how many gladiators you can have at a funeral, for instance. And he is assassinated before he can start completely divorcing funerals from gladiators. But then you get Augustus, and he’s been watching and he thinks, yeah, I can’t have rivals putting on a show bigger than I can. I’m going to monopolize gladiatorial combat, take it away from funerals and just make it mine. I’m the only one who can do it.

Dr G 7:04
Oh, the classic Augustus power move.

Dr Rad 7:07
It’s my thing. Yeah.

Alexandra Sills 7:08
Yeah. And that’s when it starts turning into the Imperial thing, where it’s put on by the emperor for the people, instead of by the sun for a dead father. And it carries on going and getting bigger and bigger and bigger for a couple of centuries, and we don’t really see it decline until the four or five hundreds. So it happened for an awfully long time. 1000s and 1000s, 10s of 1000s of gladiators were fighting across the entire empire.

Dr Rad 7:37
That is crazy when you think about it.

Dr G 7:39
It becomes quite an industry, hmm.

Dr Rad 7:42
I know now for some people seeing gladiator or gladiator two or some such might be the extent of their exposure to gladiators. You know, this is might be where they’re learning about gladiators. So thinking about gladiator two, tell us what are some perhaps surprising things that this film gets right about gladiators?

Alexandra Sills 8:08
So one of them seems to be accidental, but I’m going to go with it anyway.

Dr Rad 8:13
I love when historical movies do this.

Alexandra Sills 8:15
They had a character who was played by a Palestinian actress, and we don’t know who she was, but we think from the the stills that have been released that she was part of the staff of Denzel Washington’s character, but for reasons unknown to be diplomatic, she was cut from the film, and apparently it’s her narrative arc has been replaced at the last minute by a character who is the doctor in the gladiatorial school. And that’s brilliant, not for the actress, but for my purposes, because it does show that gladiatorial combat was not brutal, but survivable. And that, because they were huge investments and they were worth a lot of money, you would absolutely provide the best medical care available. For instance, one of the most famous doctors from the ancient world, chap called Galen started his career in Pergamon in Turkey as a gladiatorial doctor. And he credits his wonderful breadth of knowledge with spending two years with these guys who are getting sliced open all the time so that he can actually See inside what’s happening with tendons, muscles, internal organs. He wouldn’t have got access to that otherwise. So he credits two years at a gladiatorial school with giving him the wonderful amount of knowledge that meant that he could later come to Rome, and I think, you know, be a doctor for emperors, for goodness sake. So, yeah, the the gladiators were getting injured a lot. We don’t have a lot of gladiatorial skeletons. There’s a cemetery in York and a cemetery in Ephesus, and both of those cemeteries have skeletons with huge amounts of wounds, some of them we can tell time of death. This is what caused the guy to die. But there are also loads of wounds that have shown signs of healing and show signs of care in the healing as well, not just breaks, but cuts, slices. These bones are, you know, they tell a story. There’s even some bones. There’s one from York, which has got bites in it, you can see the teeth marks.

Dr G 10:43
Oh, God.

Alexandra Sills 10:46
And they go deep. I think it was into a hip bone. And, my goodness, I can’t imagine how that must have felt. I think they’ve measured the gaps between the teeth and how big the teeth are. I think they said it might have been a bear.

Dr G 10:58
Wow

Alexandra Sills 10:59
Horrifying.

Dr G 10:59
Okay, yeah,

Dr Rad 11:02
The hip bone’s connected to the jaw bone

Alexandra Sills 11:07
But, yeah, absolutely, these guys would have had the top line of medical care. So it was really nice that, accidentally, they had this character added at the last minute and gave him that profession, because it does show that they were receiving some care. They weren’t just thrown away the first time they got a cut, because a cut is more dangerous in many ways, because you can get an infection.

Dr Rad 11:32
So I agree. I really liked that aspect of the doctor character was probably one of my favorite parts, because it wasn’t something that you actually saw very much of in the first movie, either. So that was like a new addition. And yeah, I agree that was a really nice touch. And it also does show, as you say, that the Romans, as much as obviously, we struggle with this aspect of their culture, sometimes it does show that they weren’t just keen to throw away the lives of these particular fighters. That wasn’t the purpose of these games, which I think is what people think. Sometimes they think the Romans wanted to see death. And I’m like, Well, it’s a little bit more complicated.

Alexandra Sills 12:17
Yeah, they absolutely weren’t going to see death. They were going to see how men reacted to impending death with dignity. It was like a kind of teachable moment. If you’re going to die, do it with some dignity, like these guys are, but they weren’t going for that. Specifically. They were going to see how you prevent your death through skill, through discipline. So it wasn’t going to see people die. It was going to see people try to kill using skill and discipline, but also to save their own skins, and that was a far, far more important aspect.

Dr Rad 12:56
Now, Little Timmy, we’ve brought you here for your fifth birthday so that you can learn life’s most important lesson.

Alexandra Sills 13:03
I mean, it’s, can you imagine the wiggles?

Dr G 13:07
It’s a whole new show now.

Alexandra Sills 13:12
But yeah, it was. It was not a conveyor belt of of death and destruction like we sometimes see in Hollywood. It was much more about the tactics and thinking things through. And you can see them thinking what their next move is going to be. How am I going to defend from this blow? So I think instead of, you know, just like mindless violence, we should consider it like how some people watch sport now from sofas. They’re not just thinking, ‘yeah, get him’ necessarily. They’re thinking, ‘okay, if it was me, I would go this way around, and I would make sure that I’ve got this defense’. And I, you know, we should think of the spectators as kind of back seat drivers, and they’re analyzing little pieces. It’s not mindless. They they know what they’re looking at. And they’re thinking, Yeah, okay, I like that. That technique is going to work. I think, yeah, okay, that’s good. Or I really don’t like that guy’s style. Does he not realize he’s leaving this side of his body, and, you know, undefended, what’s he doing? That kind of thing. We should consider them to be connoisseurs. I think that’s, that’s the better way to think about it.

Dr Rad 14:31
Yeah, which we’ve normally seen as, like, this crazy, mindless mob, which is what we normally see in movies, yeah,

Dr G 14:36
Uh oh, not the, not the crowd in the film.

Dr Rad 14:40
Not the crowd. Look, he’s coming in with the two swords, and he’s chopping that guy’s head right off. I hate it when he does that.

Dr G 14:49
Classic. I think this leads in really nicely to thinking about what, what makes a cinematic gladiator, as opposed to an an ancient world old gladiator. So we’ve got this idea that there there’s a sophistication to the fighting, a sophistication to the way that they’re looked after. The crowd is intelligent, knows what they’re looking for. How does this compare to the idea of the cinematic gladiator, and some of the tropes that come through in that version of the gladiator?

Alexandra Sills 15:24
Yeah, I’ve looked at a lot, a lot of screen gladiators for my research, and there are certain things that happen almost every single time. So one of them is the spectators will just be bloodthirsty, mindless, an anonymized mass incapable of any sophisticated thought. So let’s get rid of that straight away. One of the other things that makes a screen gladiator is that they don’t start off in a lowered position. The gladiator in Rome was the lowest of the low they were classed as infamia, which is where we get the word infamous, obviously. And that’s the same class as sex workers and funeral directors, because funeral directors, they touch corpses so they’re not clean anyone who sells their body. Sex workers, actors, these are people that you might cheer when you see them perform, but you’re not going to want to be seen next to them at a dinner party. That would be awful. But screen gladiators, they don’t start off as enslaved people or something like this. They’re always noble in their own way. They’re not, you know anyone plucked from obscurity, that they’re always generals or Starfleet commanders in Star Trek, that kind of thing, and they always have to be demoted before they can be thrown into the arena. And we see this in both gladiator movies, because Maximus is a general. Acacius is a general. Lucius is, you know, grandson of an emperor who is a general. So these guys aren’t the lowest of the low. They’re performing for plebs, because that’s what these spectators always are plebs. But they always have to have an honor that they’ve always had. They can’t earn honor in the arena. They can only claw some of it back, which I think is interesting, because that’s not what gladiators were doing in the real world. They were plucked from obscurity and completely self making their honor, rather than having to fight for it back. And there’s there’s other things that make a screen gladiator. You’ve always got to have a wife who’s killed horribly, or a family member who’s tortured.

Dr Rad 18:03
Gives you a reason to fight. Gotta get that rage.

Alexandra Sills 18:07
Yeah, it gives you, it gives them a reason to fight, but it kind of gives the audience permission to approve of them doing these horrible things that we see. If it was any other character beheading another for no other reason than this guy told me to you’d think it was awful, and that’s how we think of their opponents, who are not given any backstory. They’re just awful, aren’t they, but our heroes have something noble to fight for because they’re mourning or they have a love interest that they want to get back to, so it kind of gives them a humanity that therefore gives us permission to say, Yeah, okay, we’re gonna let you stab that guy, because we understand why you want to do it. And that is kind of giving us permission to not be the mindless, bloodthirsty mass of the Roman spectators, even though we’re all watching the same thing, which is interesting, because the Romans kind of did give their spectators permission to watch this by anonymizing their gladiators. They did the opposite. They didn’t give them back stories and make them underdogs. And you know, talk about the loved ones that they had at home. The Romans, put a helmet on them, gave them stage names and absolutely no personality whatsoever, so that they were dehumanized in a way that the spectators could think, yeah, okay, I can watch them die because I can’t see their face. I can’t see the fear on their face. There’s no emotion there. It might – it’s barely a person. We can watch them die if necessary, but we do the opposite. We give them families, and we give them hopes and dreams and a reason to escape the arena and the life that they can just see for themselves, just over the horizon, if they can just get out. So I think that’s an interesting kind of inversion to what we do.

Dr Rad 19:58
It is interesting.

Alexandra Sills 19:59
Yeah.

Dr Rad 19:59
Yeah, yeah. It is interesting when you think about the comparison to, like, modern day, you know, WWF fighters or MMA. I can’t even remember what those things are called, because I’m no interest in them whatsoever in real life. But we also don’t do that with them either, like you don’t have them coming out going, well, here’s Steve Austin, and he’s got a lovely wife, who’s 35 at home and two adorable children. He is going to slam his opponent. Nor can you actually imagine, in ancient Rome someone announcing Spartacus coming out and saying, This is Spartacus. He was sold into slavery with the love of his life. He’s going to be fighting for her today.

Alexandra Sills 20:38
Yeah, they would have thought that was bizarre. So yeah, it’s, it’s interesting that for us, obviously there has to be a storyline to make a movie, although someone needs to perhaps remind Ridley Scott that storylines need a bit more work. It’s, it’s not just that we need a narrative arc, but they all have the same ones. They all have the murdered wife. They all have a love interest outside of the murdered wife, just to give them a little bit more love to still to come. They all have the same inner turmoil, which means that pretty much every gladiator on screen, including in fantasy, sci fi comedy, they all copy Spartacus, in a way, and it means that they’re all kind of copy pastes. It’s always the same storyline, just in a slightly different setting, which

Dr Rad 21:38
is an interesting thing to bring up, actually, because whilst I know the Starz series is quite different, and there are so many versions of Spartacus which don’t follow this particular storyline, but the really famous Spartacus from 1960 he actually doesn’t start from a high point. He, I mean, his character starts from a high point. That’s what we’re meant to leave, right? But he actually does start from obscurity. He’s meant to be the mines. So in that, in that respect, he doesn’t fit this particular trope, but we see enough of him, in terms of his training at the gladiator school and the relationship that he builds with verinia that a lot of those tropes you’re talking about apply. And that’s exactly what Howard Fast was going for he as incredibly unlikely it was that somebody would be taken from the mines and put into the arena. He wanted to have that particular arc where he goes from nothing to being this incredibly noble, admirable person, and that’s what we see in in that movie, but, but that is weird. It’s weird to see, yeah, coming from slavery.

Alexandra Sills 22:42
I think that’s really interesting, because Howard Fast obviously has him as this messianic figure that manages to really, truly threaten Rome. And let’s be honest, he really did truly threaten Rome. And yeah, but you know, we all know how that movie was made, and he had to be brought down a peg or two – communism – but the Starz series has him as a warrior who who’s telling the Roman general, if you did it my way, we’d be winning this battle right now, which you know feeds in again, the more that gladiators develop on screen, the more they have to have martial experience before the arena. Not only is it a shortcut, a narrative shortcut, you don’t have to train them because they’ve already, you know, won all of these big battles, but they –

Dr Rad 23:35
And they’re brilliant. They’re naturally just brilliant.

Alexandra Sills 23:38
They’re all, you know, prodigies of of warfare. But it’s really interesting. Even in in speculative fiction, you’ve got say, Katniss Everdeen, going into the Hunger Games, they make sure to mention she’s an ace with a bow because of her hunting. In all of them, you have to have this kind of, don’t worry, guys, this person’s going to be fine, or perhaps not fine, but they’re going to do well because they have prior experience that ties along with their inner honor. So yeah, it’s it wasn’t a surprise to me when they had Lucius in that first battle, you know, doing his thing, being amazing, even though he clearly had no training as a child back in Rome, he’s received it elsewhere, and now he’s a military genius, just like the other ones. Of course, he is.

Dr Rad 24:35
Well, I mean, this is, I’m so glad you brought up Lucius Verus Aurelius, supposed hero of this film, perhaps the most disappointing aspect of Gladiator Two, not because of you, Paul. I’m not blaming you, but yeah, let’s talk about him and how he is matching up to these tropes. Because, yeah, you’re totally right. He was a little pampered imperial prince when we saw him last, and now he is a rugged, masculine sword on legs.

Alexandra Sills 25:08
Yeah, none of this decadence that you see in Rome, obviously that would be awful.

Dr Rad 25:14
I turned my back on my noble heritage.

Alexandra Sills 25:17
So we obviously you see him first tending his farm. Because, guess what? His dad had a farm. It’s in his blood, tending his farm with his wife, and they have a little bit of a kiss over the laundry. And you know she’s going to be dead in two minutes.

Dr G 25:36
Yeah, the setup is real.

Alexandra Sills 25:38
So she immediately gets pushed into a refrigerator off of a wall, into the sea within minutes. And you know that’s going to happen because it happens. Every single one of these stories follows the same path, the same narrative blocks. So you knew she was going to die, and she does thankful at least that they gave her a bow and arrow so that she at least went down fighting, which is a massive improvement.

Dr Rad 26:02
Women are always now military geniuses as well, but not genius enough to not get killed immediately in their very stylish corseted kind of breast armor.

Alexandra Sills 26:13
Oh, the boob armor. Yeah, that wall had crenalltions. She could have hidden herself perfectly well, but no, she stands up completely undefended. Of course she does. So, yeah, he’s obviously devastated. His wife’s just died. Because you have to have them devastated. It gives them a reason to fight the imperialism itself. Isn’t enough of a reason, because that happens to all of them. You need to give them personal reason, because they are special. They’re the main character. So he’s given his reason. That’s lovely. You see her go off to the underworld. Nice touch. I have to say, I enjoyed seeing Charon. I do think it was a bit of a missed opportunity. I love seeing Charon with his little boat, bless him, but I think they could have tied in, if you’re going to have anachronisms, go for it, but I think it would have been really cool to see his wife get on the real Charon’s boat over to the underworld and then in the arena later to feature the Charon character that you sometimes see in literature in the arena, who was a member of the staff dressed as the god, the Etruscan version of the God, who would come in with a hammer. And if there are any prone gladiators, and you think, are they dead? Are they faking it? Are they just trying to get out of, you know, being stabbed, the usual way, Charon would come on as massive hammer and whack him on the head, just to make sure that they were truly dead and weren’t faking it. I thought that would have been such a wonderful call back. You could have had him have it like a PTSD episode when he sees this guy dressed as Charon and remember his wife and go into berserker mode. But, you know,

Dr Rad 26:34
That would have been cool.

Alexandra Sills 27:34
It would have been cool, but you know, that would have required a movie that had more time spent on the script, maybe.

Dr Rad 28:08
It irritated me at the time that they had that afterlife segment, because to me, it was just trying to give Lucius the Maximus thing with the grain. It was just his version of the grain that we constantly saw Maximus, you know, running his hand through with the sad music. And, yeah, the biggest thing I hated, I suppose, about this movie was how much it was just trying to hit those same notes as the first film, and doing it so badly.

Alexandra Sills 28:35
Yeah

Dr Rad 28:36
That, yeah, it actually irritated me. But I do see where you’re coming from, and I like your vision.

Alexandra Sills 28:41
Yeah, you know, if there is a Gladiator Three, and apparently there is going to be, you know, call me. I work for cheap.

Dr G 28:49
Yeah, get some real gladiator information in there. You know, stack that script with something really cool.

Alexandra Sills 28:55
He doesn’t allow, you know, experts on on set. I think he did talk to someone beforehand with the script, but they weren’t allowed on set because he was so annoyed about the Napoleon comments, it would have made the film better having the expert on set. It didn’t have to be, you know, every day, but just little things would have been anyway.

Dr G 29:20
Well, I was thinking, like, in terms of thinking about these tropes related to the cinematic gladiators. Obviously Lucius is fitting right in there, and also creating this kind of, like mirror image, if you like, to Maximus, which is obviously part of what this film is all about. But now that we’re talking about Charon as well, and this element of the Underworld, I think it’s time to hit that note of Virgil’s Aeneid. And the quotation that is floating through this film that gets repeated again and again, and it’s a famous translation of Virgil’s Aeneid. It comes from John Dryden and. And it’s Aeneid Book Six, lines 126 to 129, for the cool kids in the crowd who want to go and have a look at their Virgil’s Aeneid, “The gates of hell are open night and day. Smooth, the descent and easy is the way, but to return and view the cheerful skies in this the task and mighty labor lies.” Now, I think, first of all, it was hilarious to me that we saw it in English in some places. But this also is a direct reference to Aeneas attempt to go down into the Underworld. So, yeah, this is an idea that comes through in a lot of ancient heroic literature. This really symbolic katabasis, a journey to the underworld, where you survive and are able to return.

Alexandra Sills 30:52
Yeah.

Dr G 30:53
And I’m interested in your perspective on what’s going on with Lucius and this idea of the journey to the Underworld. There’s clearly a moment where he’s getting access to seeing parts of the Underworld in moments. So yeah, I’m keen for your thoughts on this.

Alexandra Sills 31:09
I thought it was really interesting. And to start off, I thought, Oh, they’re making a real attempt to engage with, you know how the ancients thought about death. Then I thought, maybe I’m giving them too much credit, but it was interesting the way that they made him quote that they’re they’re not only harking back to the education that he had as a childhood and that he clearly still remembers. He he still connects with that part of his identity before he was forced to flee. But I thought it was interesting because it’s clearly marking Lucius. He’s got an education. He’s elite, he’s noble. He can quote Virgil, he’s noble, and that’s how you can tell he’s not your average gladiator. And in a film that’s supposed to be saying that gladiators can change the world, even though that we know that they didn’t. It’s interesting that they have to mark him out as superior to the other ones. He’s different. It’s only the exceptional gladiator that can change the world, because the rest of them are mindless drones who just, you know, they have a sword put in their hand and do as they’re told. So I did think it was interesting that they kind of had to make him the literary gladiator. He’s got a mind. He thinks for himself. Oh, okay, fine. Everyone clapped. But yet, I thought it was again interesting to think of his whole journey as a katabasis. He goes into the arena. It’s the liminal place of death. He’s constantly trying to communicate with his dead father, who, of course, failed in his katabasis. They’re not always successful in Greek literature, I think it was, oh, who was it? Theseus went down there, and Hercules went down there. Someone didn’t come back up. And I can’t remember who my professor, who taught me my katabasis module, is currently slamming her head against the table.

Dr G 33:08
The important point is that not everybody makes it some attempt it and do not return.

Alexandra Sills 33:11
Absolutely. Some attempts fail. And it’s important to remember that the katabasis is a huge undertaking that is supposed to be difficult. That’s why it’s such a great story. So, yeah, he, of course, goes into the arena. It’s a place of death communicating. He wants to achieve something. You don’t just go down there for a holiday. You’re going down to achieve something. And it brings it back to the idea that his father didn’t survive. And the thing is, with the first film, it ends with a positive note, Maximus has died, but he sacrificed himself for the greater good, and everything’s going to be fine now, and we’re going to end with a sunrise to symbolize it. But the problem with coming up with a sequel that never should have happened is you have to admit to yourself, we’re following history. So we have to say to our audience, the whole first film happened for nothing, because it didn’t change anything. And in fact, it’s worse. So it’s kind of putting that katabasis in to say the first katabasis was amazing, but it failed. You didn’t come back out of the arena. So technically, it wasn’t a katabasis at all. It was just a really elongated suicide mission. But Lucius, he knows this in advance. He’s watched one happen before. He’s thinking about the past all the time. It’s like he’s read the Odyssey and the Indian that have got these maps of the underworld, and this is how he’s going to survive. He’s going to learn from previous trips into the liminal space full of death. So I did think that was interesting, particularly since he does survive. But it’s actually in in all of the other gladiatorial stories, you’re far more likely to survive in sci fi, fantasy, speculative fiction, if you’re the protagonist, loads of your friends will die. But in the swords and sandals, your chances of dying are much higher. So Spartacus, obviously, he doesn’t die in an arena, but the battle is shown as one large arena. So he obviously does. He has to. Pompeii Milo, played by Kit Harington, with his 0% body fat, he dies again, not in an arena, but you could talk about Vesuvius as you know, the ultimate opponent. He dies.

Dr Rad 35:45
He’s close to an arena.

Alexandra Sills 35:46
Yeah, he’s he’s adjacent, and Maximus dies. Lucius is one of the only swords and sandals gladiatorial protagonists to actually reach the end credits with all of his limbs intact and still breathing. So that’s pretty incredible. So the whole katabasis motif that they’re using is pretty fitting, because not only in the literature, but in the movie history of gladiators, the swords and sandals ones, they don’t leave generally. So yeah, I thought it was interesting. But again, if you’re, if you’re going to introduce these ideas and then announce another sequel that perhaps doesn’t need to happen, you’re going to need to change it again. So it’ll be interesting to see what they do. If they do, I don’t know.

Dr G 36:41
I’m very excited for Gladiator Three, which doesn’t involve the arena at all, but is just senatorial politics, as Lucius tries to wrangle everybody into line in in the way and manner of Tiberius and getting frustrated and then maybe leaving Rome again, being like, you know, I’m done with you guys, I can’t.

Dr Rad 37:04
that would be cool if we had a Tiberius inspired Lucius, I’d be on board for that. But I have to come back to this idea that that Lucius survives. I totally get what you’re saying about the particular storyline they’re possibly following. But as someone who constantly disappointed me in this film, what do you think about the lack of a tragic death volusus, I mean, would it have made it a better movie if he also, I think, died, or is it too much like Maximus?

Alexandra Sills 37:38
They did follow the storyline of the first one almost exactly, and they had to change it somewhere. But I do think he probably should have died, because, for a start, we know that he never became emperor. So you’ve got that hurdle, you’ve you’ve changed history so much, either you’ve got to start saying we’re going completely fictional, or you’ve got to admit this guy should have been dead for a couple of decades already. What I found interesting was the way that Macrinus is constantly talking about Lucius rage and how it’s a gift. Never let it go. It will carry you to greatness. And I thought that that probably unintentionally, had kind of parallels to Achilles in the Iliad, his rage is a tool that will carry him to greatness. Because Achilles, everyone knows the name Achilles now. And I thought that was an interesting parallel. On the other hand, for a gladiator, I think rage is the last thing that you want, because rage makes you careless, and we do see him being fairly careless at times during the movie.

Dr Rad 39:01
And that’s a big difference with Maximus, actually.

Alexandra Sills 39:03
Yeah

Dr Rad 39:05
That’s a bit of a difference with Maximus, because Maximus is dead inside. He is calm and calculated when he is forced to fight because he doesn’t care. He’s like, I don’t care if I live or die. I don’t he like. He has a certain level of rage towards certain people and about certain things, but it’s nothing like what Lucius is shown to have in this particular film I don’t think.

Alexandra Sills 39:29
No, you’re right. I think Maximus died when he saw his family at the farm. Really exactly Lucius is angrier. It’s not an anger that particularly goes anywhere. It’s kind of –

Dr Rad 39:47
We’re told he’s angry, but is he? I mean, he has moments, but it’s like when people tell me, you seem upset and I wasn’t upset, but then I feel upset because they’ve said that. I feel like that’s what happens to Lucius. People say You seem angry. You seem filled with rage. And he’s like, what?

Alexandra Sills 40:02
Well, I am now. What are you trying to say about my face?

Dr Rad 40:03
Exactly! What are you trying to say about me?

Alexandra Sills 40:09
For a start, he he’s sent straight to the arena, which, again, it didn’t happen the there’s a line Macrinus says in the film, gladiators are nearly all prisoners of war. That might have been true in the middle Republic, but it’s certainly not true into a mature empire. There were, there was no point. By that point gladiators, and this is something that the film doesn’t understand, gladiators were highly, highly specialized. They were fighters, but they weren’t soldier fighters. They weren’t transferable skills necessarily. You wouldn’t put a legionary in untrained into an arena, just as you wouldn’t send an army of gladiators out onto the field, because it’s not the same style. So we see a little bit of training, but we don’t see the weird differences in between the gladiators. So for instance, the retiarius with his trident and net, that’s weird, and it’s cool because it’s weird. They’re seeing something that they don’t see on battlefields, all of these different types, the retiarius, the mermelo, they’re all highly, highly specialized in style, and that’s what gives you the novelty, the diversity in fights, because they’re not all the same. Every single fighter has a different style. They’re always put on against the same type of opponent, so that’s specifically what they train for. And because of this, this specific styles and training that they need, they weren’t using prisoners of war. They were much more likely to have a stable of gladiators that was mainly enslaved people that they’d bought for the purpose and would train from scratch so that they didn’t have any bad habits from their previous life. You could train them to do exactly what you wanted them to do, and volunteers from from free men. So again, the fact that he’s a soldier, the fact that Acacia Maximus, they’re all soldiers, and that’s supposed to set them apart. I think actually, it would have been a more interesting film to say, yes, these guys are battlefield whizzes, but it doesn’t help them in the arena, because this is an entirely new ball game.

Dr Rad 42:45
Well, I think it’s how they fight when we see them in battle scenes, because they are the hero. We are still seeing them in these kinds of moments that I think Livy would have loved, these fantastic jewels on the battlefield between them and another fantastic warrior from the other side, which is the kind of moment that historians like Livy enjoyed celebrating, but was not really, obviously what most people would have experienced being in the Roman military. You know, you have to be a team. You have to work together. It’s not about the one guy breaking through the lines and, you know, and challenging the other leader of the other side, that’s so unlikely to happen all the time.

Dr G 43:31
I think it also hits towards the problem of filmic gladiators, in the sense that the arena fighting in no way resembles what we would expect from the ancient evidence for how these things were conducted. So we know that there were umpires essentially who were always looking on and making sure that the rules of gladiatorial combat were being followed, and allowing for breaks and pauses and also seeking additional advice if needed. So there’s a whole apparatus around ancient gladiatorial fighting, which we I don’t, not in my expectation or not in my experience. And both of you have watched more gladiator films than I have so but I have not seen that on film?

Alexandra Sills 44:21
No, I mean, Spartacus Starz has probably the closest to what I would call authenticity in the fights, but even they don’t show a lot of referees or things like that, then they’re more consistent with their pairings, for instance. But there are certain things I would love to see a fight between two rivals, and they’re constantly calling ref, ref. Are you gonna? Are you seeing this?

Dr Rad 44:50
We agreed nothing on the face! I’ve got a really important date later on today.

Dr G 44:57
That’s right, the old falling over and clutching the legs. Being like, Oh, you got me!

Dr Rad 45:03
And they’re like, typical, he’s from Spain.

Alexandra Sills 45:09
And there is always this argument of, you can’t do authentic Roman fighting styles because it doesn’t work on screen. But it certainly worked for an arena where you’ve got people in a huge seating area who could still perfectly see what was going on.

Dr Rad 45:28
I think that’s because of what we’ve been trained to expect. There’s a certain with all of these things, like what you’re talking about with you, the tropes and the way that gladiator films mimic each other so closely, there’s a reason for that, right. Hollywood is, in its bones, conservative, because the number one goal is to make money, and the best way to make money is to stick with the sure thing, something that you know is going to pay dividends. And so you take the formula that’s always worked, and then you tweak it a bit, and there is something to be said for audiences going in and knowing what to expect and enjoying that, because they know what to expect, like for example, I am sadly and tragically. I know for 2024 almost 2025 will be 2025 by the time we release this, a fan of the James Bond movies. Why? Because I know what I’m getting when I go into a James Bond movie, and I get really upset when they play with the world. I don’t like it. I don’t like to I mean, spoilers everybody, but I didn’t like it that they killed off James Bond. Didn’t like it, didn’t care for it. And so I think that’s something to be said for gladiator films as well. We know what to expect. It’s a particular style of fighting. It’s a particular way of showing the arena sequences, and we enjoy it with a twist.

Alexandra Sills 46:46
Yeah, I think. And to be fair, that does mirror the Romans. That’s why they had these styles, so that they knew what to expect, so that they could analyze the tiny details, and, you know, learn, learn the ropes themselves, so that they could comment. So it is a fair comment. Um, I would love to see shields, though. I say this all the time, the shield. And this goes into another one of my points that I really wanted to make. There’s nowhere near enough nipples on display. All of these guys have got massive breast plates on, and this works if you’re on a battlefield. But the whole point of gladiatorial combat was it was different from being a soldier if you have all this armor on, the fight becomes too easy. If you’re half naked and you’re just wearing a little loin cloth and some padding around your arms and legs, it suddenly becomes a lot harder. The stakes suddenly become a lot higher. We should be seeing nipples left, right and center.

Dr Rad 47:56
So you’d like them with three nipples.

Dr G 47:59
Hollywood, are you paying attention?

Alexandra Sills 48:01
And this is where the shield comes in, because all of a sudden the shield doesn’t become something that’s handy. Suddenly it becomes absolutely essential. And you’ve got two different types. You have the scutarii. They’re using the Roman-style scutum, and which is quite large. It should, if held in the right position, come just above the base of your helmet, and then go just below your knee, so it’s covering most of you, which means that your opponent can see metal helmet, scutum, metal grieve. They’re seeing a tank. You’re an armored tank. And then you’ve got the guys the parmularii. They’re using the small parmula style sheet shields, which are smaller, sometimes round, about the size of a dustbin lid. And they’re a little bit smaller so they’ve got more on display, which means that their Greaves and their arm things are longer to compensate for that, but they have to work a little bit harder to protect their torsos as well. They’re the light that they didn’t really have heavy weight or light weight, so they don’t have weight classes at all. But if you think about it this way, you’ve got the tanks with the big shields, and you’ve got the more nimble guys with their little shields. They’ve got to move a bit harder.

Dr Rad 49:16
So not only guys, you know, they’re they’re pros and cons, basically.

Alexandra Sills 49:20
Absolutely. So not only have you got these guys that have got different fighting styles because of the gear that they’re wearing, you’ve also got a little bit of novelty and a little bit of diversity there in the styles, but it becomes something that’s absolutely essential, and it’s not just for defense. You can use it as an offensive weapon, and all of a sudden, the fights become more interesting because of that, because you’ve got to have two arms constantly working at once, which involves more brain power, more tactics. When we’ve seen fights on screen, they they look exactly the same as the. Jewels in medieval movies, because they don’t use the shields either. I think it’s just an opportunity maybe to show a different style, because it’s fun to watch. There was a little bit of shield work on the star Spartacus series, a little bit of shield work in the new ‘Those About To Die’ series on Peacock, and it does kind of demonstrate that it’s not, you’re not a soldier, and they’ve got these massive breast plates on, and it became a whole plot point, didn’t it with he’s got his father’s breastplate on, and it protected him.

Dr G 50:41
I mean, it does make you invincible. It’s like, it’s incredible, that breastplate, whatever it’s made out of, that’s what I want mine made out of.

Alexandra Sills 50:49
His plot armor was literally plot armor, which was a little bit on the nose for me, not, not the most subtle.

Dr G 50:58
No, no, and you’re expecting tragedy at that point, and that’s the moment that we don’t get the tragedy, and you realize something else is going to happen instead, you’re like, Uh oh. Taking this – you’ve mentioned Macrinus earlier, and so I want to bring things around to him, because to me, he is my favorite character in this film, yeah, but there is Denzel Washington, I think, brings the most amazing performance to this, and everybody else is kind of just trying to, like, actively catch up. But one of the things that I think is really interesting that they’ve decided to explore is the sort of fluidity of sexual expression that comes with this character, and we see this particularly with his interactions with the senator Thrax. And I’m interested about your perspective on how this sort of shapes up in comparison to the ancient evidence we have for Roman sexuality, particularly in this imperial period.

Alexandra Sills 52:00
Okay, so speaking about ancient sexuality, I think it’s interesting that all of the gladiators in particularly, in particular, are all very heterosexual, apart from in Starz Spartacus, which I don’t think is likely, personally, with Macrinus. I think it’s really interesting that they decided to go the way they did. And by what I’ve read about various interviews, particularly from Denzel Washington, is that he was pushing for it more than perhaps Ridley Scott intended. I heard there was a kiss that got cut. I would have loved to have seen that.

Dr G 52:40
Yes, I heard that too.

Alexandra Sills 52:41
Yeah, I think it’s interesting when these films put in ideas about race, gender and sexuality, but we have to be careful, because they’re always doing it from a modern perspective. So for instance, when we’re talking about black gladiators, they’re always doing it from a post 1960s experience in America. And I think they’re doing the same kind of thing with gender and sexuality. They want to talk about how the Roman world was different. It’s alien, but they’re doing it in a way that is commenting on the modern world, just a little bit too much for comfort. So for instance, in these movies, in the first one, the only queer character was a giraffe-

Dr Rad 53:41
Which was delightful.

Alexandra Sills 53:42
In the second in the second one, it’s Macrinus. Turns out to be evil. Sorry, spoiler alert, and the emperors are queer, coded and they’re evil. I would have liked to have seen something that wasn’t so cheap and predictable. I think it is possible to show that sexuality was entirely different without trying to take pot shots at wokery in a movie. So that that disappointed me, especially with the the Severans, because how do we show that they’re bad? We could show them doing bad things, or we could show them in makeup and and, you know, demonstrate, oh, these guys are gay, and that’s how you know that they’re bad. I thought that was really disappointing,

Dr Rad 54:40
Especially because, as you say, with Caracalla and Gaeta, this was a real opportunity, which people might not be aware of, because these are not particularly well known emperors, I would say. And I mean people who’ve been to Rome, they might have heard Caracalla name because of the baths, but they’re not very well known. They haven’t been shown widely in popular culture before, so people don’t really know them as personalities particularly well, the same way that they know someone like Caligula or Nero. And what they might be unaware of is where these guys come from, their parents, I suppose, in to put it into modern terms, that people would understand people of color and casting, and then the makeup on top of that, and then the queerness, I mean, it’s just it’s taking you so far away from reality. Now that might not be a problem if it was doing something interesting with it or doing something creative with it. But as you say, I was really disappointed that really Scott chose to go this direction, because I feel like it actually did him no – it just it did nobody any favors to go this direction. It didn’t add anything to the story. I don’t think it was just so problematic on so many levels, like when we saw the trailer and we saw their makeup, we were like, What is going on with that? And then to actually get into the movie and realize we were 100% right? And that was the message that Ridley Scott was trying to send. I was like, dude, what is this here? Like, I know you. I know you are an older director, but to me, that should bring wisdom. Yeah, you harking back to these 1950s 1960s things that we saw in Spartacus, where, you know, Crassus is the evil one, so he’s queer. It’s just, yeah,

Alexandra Sills 56:30
Exactly, yeah. It was cheap and it was unimaginative, and it could have been so much better, particularly Caracalla. Not only was he a person of color, but in the first film, you’ve got Commodus, who wishes that he was a guy that soldiers could identify with and admire, but Caracalla was the soldier’s emperor. They loved him. He loved them most of the time, but he was someone that they could identify with because he was a rough, tough, military type.

Dr Rad 57:07
Yeah, that’s where his name comes from, right?

Alexandra Sills 57:10
Yeah, exactly. And instead, you’ve got, I mean, it’s a film that talks about Rome is corrupt, and the fringes are where you will find honor. And then in the next breath, says, but the fringes are also they’re a different race, so let’s not be too kind about them. Then you’ve also got a wasted opportunity. With Caracalla being the type of emperor that Commodus wishes that he was, it would have been great to see Maximus son go up against the Emperor that his uncle wishes he was.

Dr Rad 57:48
Absolutely.

Alexandra Sills 57:49
It would have been great.

Dr Rad 57:50
Yeah, and this is where it’s like, okay, you don’t have to stick to history. Nobody’s saying that these days, most academics we speak to totally get that movies are not history lessons, and therefore you’re allowed to have creative license, but when you’re going against the history, and you’re not doing something better with it, and the actual history would have made for a better storyline, that’s where I’m lost, because I’m thinking the same thing as you. I’m thinking this film could have been so much better if you’d actually paid attention to the history, because it’s more interesting than what you came up with, which isn’t creative, it is rehashed garbage.

Alexandra Sills 58:26
Yeah and I think, I mean, I do agree it is a movie and it’s not, it’s not a lecture in some institution. On the other hand, I think that if a movie production shows attention to detail with the source material to the tiniest details. It also goes hand in hand with them being the type of production that spends time and effort thinking about smaller details, like, I don’t know, the narrative characterization, the dialog. I think it’s interesting that we can see very clearly that films that don’t care about authenticity also have terrible scripts and terrible dialog awful it’s the ones that pay attention to the little details that they’re the type to get the big details right. And I think this is why this movie was so disappointing, because it felt so it felt like something it’s difficult to describe. And the reason is because I’ve recently been doing some research on how the first gladiators movie has been viewed since by far right extremists, particularly in America, and reading that researching for that paper was so disheartening. I. Because I had to ask myself, why do they love the first film? What is there to see? So I was reading blogs and reading what they’re saying, you know, why are there people dressed as Maximus in the January 6 riots? There’s got to be reason for it. So I went back to look at the first film. And there is racism, there is misogyny, there’s all these kind of things, homophobia. In the second film, I can see all of this, except it’s been the volume has been turned up on it. Not only have you got whitewashed severins, who are now queer because queer equals evil, but you’ve got Macrinus. Macrinus is a black man who’s angry, which is, in itself, quite the trope already, is it not? But I think it’s really dangerous in the current climate to have a black man who used to be a slave and is now freed to go on such a revenge story, I think it’s sending the wrong message. You can’t free these men. You can’t give them equal opportunities, because they’re still angry, and they will come back at you with a sword in their hand. I think that’s the first film has become very popular with alt right groups, and I think the second film is going to be even more so. And the messaging in it, I get a little bit frustrated with it’s just a movie, because I’ve just spent, you know, a year deep, diving into people who don’t think it’s just a movie. They think it’s a manifesto, and it is having real world consequences, to the point where, if you see on social media, for instance, someone with a gladiator in their profile picture, nine times out of 10, if you read that bio, you’re going to be absolutely horrified.

Dr Rad 1:02:01
So that’s that’s accurate to say, in the sense that I don’t say any of these things, because I don’t think release got has any talent, obviously, hugely talented director, I love a lot of his movies, and I know that this isn’t held an opinion, held by every historian out there, but I actually really loved the first Gladiator, not because I am part of an alt right group. I should say.

Alexandra Sills 1:02:26
Yeah, it’s hard that you have to clarify.

Dr Rad 1:02:28
Yeah, exactly, but because it did exactly what I was just talking about. It did fictionalize the past massively, but it did so in a way that I think it still spoke to something that I recognized in the Rome that I study, which is that nostalgia for the Republic, which people like Tacitus, I mean, that’s their that’s their thing, that’s their brand. And so I recognize that, and also a character like Maximus, I recognize the Cincinnati’s character type, and I love seeing it on the screen. I totally recognize the way that people like to look at Marcus Aurelius and the way that he was characterized as well. And so I felt the first movie, whilst fictionalizing, still said something about the Rome that I studied, and it didn’t do it in such a problematic way that I couldn’t get into it. And it was cinematically stunning. This is the this is the thing with Ridley Scott, right? He is such a talented director, and he works with people who are obviously hugely talented as well in terms of the esthetic that they create. So all of his films, whether the storyline is good or not, are visually arresting. I mean, Napoleon Woo, My God, what a slog, and yet visually amazing, gorgeous, beautiful. Couldn’t floor what I was seeing, floored what I was hearing and the actual storyline. And that’s the danger, because we humans are very visual creatures. I mean, Ridley Scott himself is a visual creature, right? He’s influenced by other films. He’s influenced by art. Hell, Gladiator was supposedly inspired by a piece of art, and so surely he must understand the power of visual media to influence people’s real world actions, because that’s exactly why that’s a mythology that we’re fed about the reason that he got involved in the first gladiator film in the first place.

Alexandra Sills 1:04:14
Yeah, I mean, he’d already cast Caracalla and Geta with the palest actors he could have possibly found, I think, I can’t remember whether it was go to a Caracalla, but one of them was originally supposed to be Barry Keoghan, who is really incredibly pale, but he decided that he wanted to go off and do, I think it was Salt Burn, which, you know, is a whole different movie. So that’s why we got, I think it was Fred Hechinger, so he was Caracalla, who’s even paler, if that was even possible, because, you know, Barry Keoghan is properly Irish, milky white. And then to add white on top of that, and then to have Denzel Washington and with his authentic accent, for instance, which I know has caused issues, because, you know, everyone’s saying it’s New York accent, and that’s inauthentic. So is British RP. Sorry to disappoint everyone, on both those counts, noone ever spoke in an English accent in Rome. But I think what disappointed me so much was that all of these they’re not even micro aggressions, their aggression aggressions, and they felt more deliberate this time around.

Dr Rad 1:05:27
Agreed, yeah.

Dr G 1:05:28
Yes it was – It was turning up the dial on the lack of subtlety.

Alexandra Sills 1:05:32
Yeah, it was. It was the Gladiator Two, frankly, that perhaps 2024 deserved.

Dr Rad 1:05:40
Maybe, yeah, with Trump being elected into office, I he, I mean, I think that’s the thing with the first one, I could feel Ridley Scott channeling, you know, Suetonius and Tacitus in the way that he was characterizing some of the people in the film and the storylines that he was going for, not that they don’t have enough scandal going on anyway. There’s plenty there to play with, but I could feel that real Tacitean and Suetonian kind of influence. And so I was like, oh, okay, he’s channeling the source material there. But with this one, for some reason, I just did not get that same feeling. Instead, I was like, Oh, this is actually making me feel uncomfortable. This doesn’t feel like he’s channeling something from ancient Rome. This feels different somehow. And I really didn’t expect that from him. I mean, this is the guy who directed Thelma and Louise, like didn’t expect this.

Dr G 1:06:32
But I think you’ve make a fair point in the sense that what we’re looking at with GladiatorT wo is not a film that’s necessarily interested in the history it’s interested in Gladiator the original film,

Dr Rad 1:06:44
That’s true.

Alexandra Sills 1:06:45
Yeah.

Dr G 1:06:45
So like all of its touch points are not Tacitus. For instance, like we see a very sort of truncated Senate, they seem even less capable than they did in the first film, yeah? And yet, here we are. And so everything is kind of revamped, but, but with an expectation that your main source is Gladiator.

Dr Rad 1:07:16
That’s true, yeah? And Gladiator was channeling Spartacus and Fall of the Roman Empire, and maybe, I think we ended up getting back to this point with another person we were talking about this film with, and I sort of wondered that I’m like, is the problem that Ridley Scott was drawing on previous masterpieces like fall of the Roman Empire and Spartacus, which are really interesting films about ancient Rome, even though they also fictionalize. And with this one, he is just drawing on Gladiator. Maybe that’s the problem.

Alexandra Sills 1:07:45
I think it shows that he he’s demonstrating that he believes that Roman was corrupt and needed to be fixed, but also that he has no idea how to fix it. Because, as you say, the Senate is even worse in this film. But the whole point of both films is that they should go back to a Republic where the Senate are the dominant power.

Dr G 1:08:05
Yeah, terrible idea.

Alexandra Sills 1:08:07
Yeah, exactly. Both Maximus and Lucius are saying, oh, Republic, Republic. And you’re looking at senators like, like tracks in the second film, and you’re thinking, Well, why? Why are you trying to bring these people back to the point where, when Macrinus says his speech about Rome is corrupt and he could knock it over, and he intends to, I started thinking, Yes, show me that. Show me that. Because the Senate is useless. These emperors are useless. If we’re going to have any kind of revolution, don’t put the Senate back in charge, that would be the worst thing possible. But Macrinus at least shows some sense that he understands how Rome works.

Dr Rad 1:08:47
Yes, exactly, well. And that’s that’s what the previous Gladiator had, though, see again, and this is what it got from Spartacus. It had Gracchus.

Alexandra Sills 1:08:55
Yeah.

Dr Rad 1:08:56
which Spartacus also had Gracchus? Literally, the same character name and everything. They have these senators who are meant to be the inspirational ones, the ones that know what to do, and the senators in the first Gladiator, they at least do have intellectual discussions, debates about what room should be doing in this film. Oh, my God. I mean you, you don’t get any of that. And Gracchus, even though he’s still alive. Oh, we get the tiniest snippets of him, and one of them, he’s being killed and so it’s not the same!

Alexandra Sills 1:09:28
It was a quicxk scene as well, wasn’t it? Derek Jacobi deserves a grand death scene. If he’s gonna have to die, don’t just quickly slit his throat and then move on immediately to a next shot. Give him, you know, let him cook. He is one of the best actors in the world. Well, what a waste.

Dr Rad 1:09:46
I have confidence that if anybody could do a death scene theatrically and over the top, it’s him.

Alexandra Sills 1:09:51
Exactly. I mean, I know that they cut a lot from the first film, and I know that Ridley Scott has said this was my final cut, but I wonder what is on the cutting room floor, and what scenes with perhaps Derek Jacobi, and perhaps even with Thrax showing a little bit more backbone and a little bit more intelligence, because I don’t think in this film, Macrinus was right. I said it. Macrinus was right. He should have won, because he was the only one who knew what should be happening and had the balls to do it.

Dr G 1:10:30
Yup.

Dr Rad 1:10:31
Yeah.

Dr G 1:10:31
Yeah, that scene in the river was a setup. I mean, yeah, he should have survived. And Lucius clearly that breastplate should not have held up under those circumstances. And we could have moved back into something of a historical narrative, actually. I mean, macarinus does become emperor at some point, not in this way historically, but certainly eventually in our source material. Are there any historical inaccuracies that you haven’t mentioned so far that really drove you crazy about this film.

Alexandra Sills 1:11:08
Yeah, yeah. So and this, this happened a little bit in the first one as well, but much more in the second one. The film doesn’t really understand that the program in a day at the Colosseum was very rigid. In the morning, you had beast hunts. In lunchtime, you had executions, and at the afternoon, part of the show, you had the gladiators, and they were separate, with different sets of performers. Or condemned. You didn’t mix and match. You did. Certainly didn’t have someone who would fight a rhino one day and then fight a human the next. That didn’t happen and and I understand that they wanted to do it because it looked good the animals that they used. We know there have been a couple of academics, and I will mention no names who have gone in the medium and said that there weren’t rhinos. And we know that there were actually, I think it was Pompey Magnus bought the first Rhino over there were rhinos in the arena. Often what there weren’t was people writing them.

Dr Rad 1:12:17
Does seem dangerous.

Alexandra Sills 1:12:18
That was a little bit jumpy the shark for me. I think if you’re going to have someone riding an animal, you can do it. I would have suggested a war elephant, because we know that the ancients had loads of those, and the Romans came up against them often. So you could have had an elephant instead of the rhino with an archer on top, which is something that Roman soldiers would have had to deal with. That would have been brilliant. The sharks were, I wouldn’t have minded the sharks if they’d have looked better. They obviously weren’t in the arena. Because, yes, again, the Romans did know what sharks were, despite what some people have gone in the news to say, um, however, they had no way of catching, transporting and keeping them. They did have crocodiles. We know that they had crocodiles because they wrote about it. What I do wonder is perhaps those about to die also had a flooded Colosseum scene, and they had crocodiles. So I’m wondering if Ridley changed it because he’d been beaten to the punch and he knew it was going to be really second, and he didn’t want to be seen as copying either way have a shark, because if the Romans could have they would have just make them look better.

Dr G 1:13:34
Oh, you want some improvements to the CGI. Fair enough. Fair enough.

Dr Rad 1:13:38
As an animal rights person, I’m embracing this new trend to have CGI animals instead of actual animals knowing what’s happened to animals entertainment in the past. I’d rather they were paid with CGI because of what’s happened in the past. And I totally, I agree with you about all those, all those points, I have to say. Dr, G, this is one thing that I have to bring up as something that we haven’t talked about yet, Lucilla. I have to know Alexandra. What’s your opinion on Lucilla?

Alexandra Sills 1:14:16
Well, she should have been dead in the first film, if we’re going by the history. She died before Commodus in history, but she survived the first film, and that’s only because the only female person in their production team on the first film said, we’ve got two women, only one of them talks, and you’re talking about killing them both off. A woman has to survive, please, if the year is 2000 so in Gladiator Two, I think we’ve got four women, and two of them talk, so yay for progress. So she should she should be dead already. I thought that in the first film, she. Is weakened by her maternal instinct, and that kind of declaws her as being the premier politician in Rome because she is smarter than anyone else in that room. In the second film, they, they discuss that she misses her son, and perhaps it’s depression, but they, they’ve, they’ve really weakened her into just a woman who cries a lot, and I think that’s so sad, because she’s still the smartest person in any room. And the death scene again, pushing women into refrigerators, perhaps she did need to die for that narrative, but good grief, could she not have gone down slightly fighting it was I thought Lucilla, they really did a disservice to a wonderful character there.

Dr Rad 1:15:53
Yeah, and look, that’s, that’s what I think I have to say again, just in case Ridley Scott listens to this episode. I don’t think any of the actors did bad jobs with the parts that they were hand they were handed. I really think that a lot of the issues in this film come down to the storyline and the characterization. And again, it’s not about me being a historian who’s like you went against history. It is about the lack of a solid, consistent, coherent storyline, good characterization that makes sense for all of the characters. That’s really what this film is lacking more than anything. Visually, great. No problems really there, apart from those monkeys. And as I say, I can see all the actors were trying really hard to do a good job with what they had, but what they had was not a lot. That’s my final take on it.

Alexandra Sills 1:16:54
They were trying to deliver Michelin starred acting with a McDonald’s menu.

Dr G 1:17:02
I think that’s an excellent way to put it, and yeah, and also an excellent point to, to conclude, Like, what an image. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Alexandra Sills 1:17:19
That’s a pleasure. It’s been delightful. I don’t like the movie, but I love you guys, so

Dr Rad 1:17:24
That’s also a good point to finish on.

Dr G 1:17:27
I think that has been our real challenge in this process, is that we got very excited for Gladiator Two, lined up interviews, then went and saw it and was like, oh no!

Thank you for listening to this episode of The Partial Historians. You can find our sources sound credits and transcript in our show notes over at partialhistorians.com we offer a huge thank you to you, if you’re one of our illustrious Patreon supporters, if you enjoy the show, we’d love your support in a way that works for you. Leaving a nice review really makes our day. We’re on Ko-Fi for one or four ongoing donations or Patreon, of course, our latest book, Your Cheeky Guide to the Roman Empire, is published through Ulysses Press. It is full of stories that the Romans probably don’t want you to know about them. This book is packed with some of our favorite tales of the colorful history of ancient Rome. Treat yourself or an open minded friend to Rome’s glories, embarrassments and most salacious claims. With Your Cheeky Guide to the Roman Empire.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

The post Special Episode – Gladiator II with Alexandra Sills appeared first on The Partial Historians - Ancient Roman History with smart ladies.

WARNING! This post and episode both contain spoilers!

We are back to discuss Gladiator II, the sequel to Ridley Scott’s smash hit Gladiator (2000). Gladiator II is set in the joint reign of Caracalla and Geta. These emperors were brothers in real life, but not the creepy twins shown in the movie. However, let’s not get caught up in historical detail! After all, Lucilla should have been executed by Commodus in the first film if we were sticking to the facts.

Special Episode – Gladiator II with Professor Martin M. Winkler

In Gladiator II, we learn that Lucilla’s precious son, Lucius Verus, was hidden away in the provinces after Commodus’ death and became alienated from the imperial family. He clearly inherited the military skills of his real father (Maximus or Russell Crowe), as Lucius is something of a local hero in his new home.

But no one can resist the power of Rome forever. After a military defeat, Lucius ends up in the arena and spends the film wrestling with his past, his trauma and the corruption of Rome. Just like his dad!

Whilst Lucius Verus is the hero of this film, as is so often the case in movies about Ancient Rome, the villain steals the show. Macrinus (Denzel Washington) is a master manipulator, skilfully playing a dangerous political game. Will the ghost of Maximus past allow Lucius to finally set Rome on a virtuous path? Or is Rome doomed to be dominated by corrupt politicians?    

And boy, do we have a treat in store for you all! We were privileged to talk to a giant in the field of classical reception, a man who has spent many decades studying Roman history on film.

The cover of Professor Winkler’s volume on Gladiator (2000).

Martin M. Winkler is Distinguished University Professor and Professor of Classics at George Mason University in Northern Virginia. His research interests include classical mythology, Roman history, classical literature, the classical tradition, and classical literature, history and myth on film. Professor Winkler’s list of publications is long indeed, but we will cite a few of our favourites. The Roman Salute: Cinema, History and Ideology (2009), Ovid on Screen: A Montage of Attractions (2020) and most recently, Classical Antiquity and the Cinematic Imagination (2024). Professor Winkler has edited and contributed to volumes on the films Troy (from 2004), Kubrick’s 1960 Spartacus, and importantly for today, Ridley Scott’s original 2000 Gladiator.

We hope that you enjoy our conversation with Professor Winkler in which we discuss:

Our music is by Bettina Joy de Guzman.

Dr Rad 0:00
Hello, listeners, prepare to be entertained. Sorry. I just can’t help myself when we’re going to be talking about Gladiator and that is indeed what this special episode is all about. We return with another one of our special installments on Gladiator II, the sequel to the 2000 smash hit where we get some of the old gang back together. There’s Lucilla, there’s Gracchus, there’s Lucius Verus, and we meet some new historical characters like Macrinus, as well as the Emperors Caracalla and Geta. Please make sure you check out our show notes for a plot summary if you haven’t seen the film yet. And Be warned, this episode does contain spoilers, and now I think it’s time that we get into the arena on with the episode!

Welcome to the Partial Historians.

Dr G 1:09
We explore all the details of ancient Rome,

Dr Rad 1:14
everything from political scandals, the love affairs, the battles wage and when citizens turn against each other. I’m Dr rad,

Dr G 1:23
and I’m Dr G. We consider Rome as the Romans saw it, by reading different authors from the ancient past and comparing their stories.

Dr Rad 1:34
Join us as we trace the journey of Rome from the founding of the city. You music.

Hello and welcome to a special episode of the partial historians. I am one of your hosts, Dr rad, and I’m Dr G, and we are here once again to discuss gladiator two, which is currently taking the world by storm. We are so fortunate to be joined by a true giant in the field of history on film, Martin M Winkler is distinguished university professor and professor of classics at George Mason University in Northern Virginia. His research interests include classical mythology, Roman history, classical literature, the classical tradition and classical literature, history and myth on film. Professor Winkler’s list of publications is long indeed, but we will cite a few of our favorites: The Roman Salute: Cinema, History and Ideology, which came out in 2009, Ovid on Screen:, A Montage of Attractions from 2020 and most recently, Classical Antiquity and the Cinematic Imagination in 2024. Professor Winkler has edited and contributed to volumes on the films Troy from 2004 Kubrick’s 1960s Spartacus, and importantly for today, Ridley Scott’s original Gladiator from the year 2000. We are extremely excited to have one of the world’s leading academics in classical reception here to talk about Gladiator II. Welcome, Professor Winkler.

Martin Winkler 3:15
Thank you very much, ladies. Dr Rad and Dr G, I should say for your kind invitation. I have never made it to Australia in person, so maybe in this virtual trip, I can at least partly, partially remedy the situation. I also might be allowed, I hope, a personal confession. The cinema and classical antiquity are two of my sort of what greatest lovers, and particularly in conjunction. So any chance I get to talk about them together, I jump at so I’m particularly grateful for you to give me the chance to talk about this new release, Gladiator II, which has not taken me quite by the storm that you mentioned just to remind a go, but that’s okay.

Dr Rad 4:05
That is okay. That should provide plenty of things for us to

Dr G 4:07
talk about. That is some good foreshadowing, I think. So obviously

Dr Rad 4:12
we want to draw on your expertise about the first film as well as the second film. So what we found particularly interesting about this new gladiator is that Ridley Scott has teamed up with some of the original cast and crew for this sequel, including production designer Arthur Max, costume designer Janty Yates, with perhaps a bit of help from somebody else for the military costumes, we think this time, as well as producer Douglas Wick, you’ve already noted in your work on the first film that Scott tries to present us with a Rome that is very lived in, but we also know that Scott and his team, the first time, were very inspired by the paintings from the Victorian era of Rome. What is your reaction to the aesthetic of this sequel?

Martin Winkler 4:54
Well, if by aesthetic you mean visual style, I think I am a bit underwhelmed,, if I may say so, by the secret, the first Gladiator, the enormous success that it was, surprisingly worldwide, the first big screen, silver screen, epic, huge epic, center set in antiquity, was obviously also and deservedly quite influential. The new Gladiator, I think gladiator too is a bit of a disappointment. The Connect and this also seen individual style, I think others, and I have pointed out to some of the Victorian background in Victorian also European painting, most famously, Gerome’s painting, Police Verso, the thumbs up, thumbs down, seen in the Coliseum with a gladiator, over raising a sword, over falling gladiator and so on that. I think was perhaps the direct inspiration for Scott to take on this project, as you said at the time when he was thrown this in between. So yeah, I’m not quoting verbatim. He said something like, Yes, I can make that kind of movie. I noticed some of these pictorial backgrounds or influences in Gladiator II, also less so perhaps Gerome, than the British Dutch painter. One of my favorites, actually Lawrence Alma Tadema that influence, I think, could be seen in certain scenes here and there. On the other hand, the Greeks and Romans indemus paintings usually are appear in very sunny, beautiful, pleasant, relaxing, vacation type, almost surroundings, and there’s very little of that in Gladiator II. That’s also true for gladiator one, the first gladiator which presented a sort of dark, bloody kind of image of Rome. I’ll say a quick word about the Coliseum in just a moment. But before I do so, let me add that the lived in quality that I think actually was very strongly there and to be seen in the first gladiator brought the computer generated images, the animation to life. I meant that, particularly at that time, I do not I meant it particularly because these days 3d or other sort of computer animations of Roman architecture or other historical periods in architecture take very great pains to show you as accurately as possible the buildings, The streets, the sculpture architecture, what have you. But usually it’s kind of a dead city or dead environment. There’s hardly anybody around and in the cyber room, as I might call it, particularly the first Gladiator. That was not the case. Yeah, that really was a kind of lived in sort of environment. And one of its strongest visual science in this regard, I think, was the Coliseum, which was the main place of action, the main what place of spectacle in that film. And the coliseums had at that time, was built, I think, up to one or two stories, and everything else was computer generated imagery. But the low views, low angle views of the Coliseum on the one hand, and the very spectacular flyover, as it’s usually called, on the other hand, I think, very successfully conveyed the impression of what an amazing building this was, notwithstanding all the death and destruction and bloodshed and animal slaughter that was going on, or would be going on, as simply as an architectural marvel. I think the first gladiator put that point across very, very effectively and impressively too. Remember also the year, another famous moment when Maximus and the other Gladiators, for the first time, enter the arena through this dark tunnel and then are in the year on the sand in the arena, and look around and you have sort of, if not 300 Yeah, I think it’s actually 360 degrees, sort of panoramic shot. Yeah, they’re looking up, and it’s, it really is a kind of big wow effect. I’m saying this because, and this leads on to the fact that I was underwhelmed, as I said earlier about the sequel the Coliseum in Gladiator two, which, of course, again, is a major site for action spectacle near plot development. And such looks by comparison. May I be totally frank, it looks almost puny. I was very, very disappointed the power of the images that the first gladiator had in this regard, and then others do, for that matter, I think was largely, largely an angle, and I think that’s symptomatic, perhaps, for the film as a whole. Not to mince any words, I was a bit disappointed. It’s a common tourism that sequels to earlier films are usually books. Sometimes too are inferior. That’s usually true, although there are exceptions. But later too, I don’t think is an exception. It’s by no means boring or poorly put together anything like that. Scott is a far too good director for that, and the whole thing, of course, is far too expensive to do for anybody to get away with a sloppy job. But it’s, I think. Think a somewhat perfunctory, pale rehash of the plot with some new characters and with connections back to the risk of the plot of gladiator

Dr G 10:10
Yeah, no, I think that what you’re saying is like there’s a parallel of smallness of what we see on the screen with gladiator two, in some respects, to the smallness of the story that comes across, yes,

Martin Winkler 10:21
yes, I think that’s that’s true. Because, for one thing, the story, the plot in later two is pretty much predictable. It is painfully predictable, if I may say so, for anybody who remembers later to one. Now, many people these days in 2024 may not be up on recent viewings of later one, as probably you two are, and as I am, yeah, I’ve watched gradator on, I don’t know how many times by now, I recently revisited it too. That I think, is another kind of well, as I said, it’s sort of a rehash. Almost since the originator came out in 2000 there had been talks, had been talk or questions about, will there be a remake? It was difficult to do that because the year or Maximus is dead at the end. So how can you do this? So it took her. It took a long time for that remake to come out, but I don’t think Scott or anybody else did their own reputation much of a favor. I believe actually, Russell Crowe said something to that effect some of the plot developments. And I don’t know if I’m allowed to give spoilers, say spoilers, or give anything away. Well, the big revelation that the hero then turns out to be, well, it’s not that big of a revelation that it turns out to be the son of Lucilla, but the super revelation is that he now is also the son of Maximus. And that flies in the face of everything that near the first later film and Lucilla and Maximus and there, to a large extent, actually quite intriguing backstory of as lovers and then being separated and all coming back together in order to battle Commodus, the evil Emperor. This is a pale rehash in glator two of that constellation. And that’s, I think that’s a disappointment, you know, I think both the audience and perhaps if I may say so also, even Lucilla, as a character of Lucilla in Gladiator II, deserved a lot better than that. And I

Dr G 12:18
would definitely agree with that. And I think this leads really nicely into thinking about some of the parallels that we see between Maximus as the protagonist of the original film and Lucius as kind of this heir to Maximus, as is revealed in Gladiator two. I think this is one of the moments where, when Dr Rad and I left the cinema, that was one of the things where we’re like, Oh no, that’s that’s what they decided to do. They decided to make Lucius the son of Lucilla and Maximus, when that intriguing connection that they did have offered a hint of that possibility. But you think to yourself, within the terms of Imperial politics, it would be very unlikely that such a child would be raised as he was in the Imperial Household. So I’m interested in your thoughts on the characters of Maximus and Lucius as they compare as separate examples of the heroic in each of these films.

Martin Winkler 13:14
Well, that is practically no contest. I think Russell Crowe wins. Wins this one very easily, either hands down. He’ll be thrilled to hear that, either hands down or thumbs up, whichever way you want to put this, as you remember, Gladiator in 2000 or actually in 2001 won the Oscar for Best Picture, and Crow won for best best actor. I don’t think there is any danger of that sort of thing being repeated this time around, although, of course, I’m not a prophet. I may word be wrong. Crow really had a major presence in the film, as he did also in many of his earlier films, particularly with also which are not that well known in the US, those he made in in Australia, his native country, the actor who plays solutions is, I’m not saying by any chance that he is bad. Paul masculin is a good actor, but his character is so underwritten and so thin in terms of characterization, because he’s basically the sort of a warming up of Maximus, of an inferior Maximus, I should say, or mini Maximus.

Dr G 14:20
I think, I think you should say that.

Martin Winkler 14:23
Sorry, but I think that’s, that’s what it is. In addition to that, there’s also very little psychological conviction to this. The boy Lucius that he turns out to be, grew up with his mother, as we saw in in the original Gladiator. It’s hardly likely that when he comes back to Rome as an adult, he does not recognize her or repudiates her, as he does in the film and that sort of thing for that, the boy, I think was, was far too old. So that’s not, that’s not, at least, to me, it was not convincing. The very fact that he repudiates Lucilla when he’s in the prison is an echo. Of, I think, a very powerful scene in the first Gladiator, when Lucilla visits Maximus imprisoned. You know, the scene then culminates, then in the famous, I think of the bottom line, you know, the lady has finished with me. And it’s, it’s a subdued, I think, erotically, quite, yeah, with an erotic undercurrent, you know, the former levels reunited and such, at least momentarily. The very fact that in Gladiator II, the rehash of that scene, if I may say so, Lucius actually yells at her. At Lucilla shows you that the strong connection emotional, intellectual, if you like, also connection between the two lovers, now, between mother and son is is very weak. If you can’t get something across, be loud and noisy, then an audience won’t notice. That’s unfortunately sort of the general maxim these days.

Dr Rad 15:50
Yeah, I must admit, I agree with you that I think when I was reflecting on the film Lucius was probably one of the biggest disappointments, and it it wasn’t something I thought about very much, because I guess our attention is so much on working Phoenix and Russell Crowe and those sorts of characters in the first one, but the child who played Lucius actually did a fantastic job in the first movie. I thought in terms of acting like an imperial Prince and the way that he interacted with Maximus and, yeah, to have him turn out to be like this? And I, as you say, I don’t think it’s necessarily the actor’s fault. I think it’s definitely he was trying to do the most he could with a bad script for his

Martin Winkler 16:33
largely underwritten, underwritten character, because he just goes, he’s put the script puts him, and there’s the direction also, they put him through the motions. You know, yet you’re here now, and you have to go to this, this, this, and this and this, in order to end up at certain subject. The one exception to this I would like to add, after all my negative comments, is the plot development, which, in retrospect, is quite predictable, but at least it took me by a surprise, is to have father and I’m sorry, stepfather and son or step father and stepson, then meeting in the arena and Jewel it out now if that had actually happened, and if the one, if one of them had defeated the other one, rather than a case, the husband of Lucilla being shot by an by hail of arrows that could have actually made from intense climax. Because whichever way this goes, does Acacius skip loses or defeat, loses at least, or does lose defeat acacia and then an appeal to the crowd, thumbs up, thumbs down. That could have made for, I think, quite an exciting ending. Spectacle. Ending this way it’s, it’s almost like a cop out. The characters are not pushed to the extreme that in that epic heroes, or particularly tragic heroes, often do get pushed to. So the final duel, you know, the sort of big climax. Then this postponed, and it’s a duel between Lucius and Macrinus, whose name, unfortunately, is pronounced macronus In the film, and that’s a disappointing view, too. After two and a half hours, almost two and a half hours, you deserve a bigger climax, a bigger action climax and Gladiator. One firm essay called it that delivered, because you had Crow and Joaquin Phoenix, who was a really, really, really great villain. So you have the great hero and the great villain facing off, and the fact that Maximus then dies, yeah, he kills the bad guy has this to be expected, but then dies himself adds greater potency to this. And then when Lucilla says he was a hero of Rome, as is repeated in later it has a resonance in later II. It virtually does it because there’s, there’s nothing to resonate, I dare say,

Dr Rad 18:43
yeah, the way that that final duel ends with Lucius surviving again, it’s kind of like another slight disappointment. He

Martin Winkler 18:50
survives and he gives a speech to the soldiers, I dare say, also the the audience, and the whole thing ends on talk. And talk is not an action. It’s not to be recommended a lot of films not to be recommended, to come in action films, no,

Dr Rad 19:04
if the way that the film plays out, the way that the action is paced, it is a bit off, given that they’re obviously trying to mimic so much of the first gladiator they missed some of those key things that made the first gladiator so good. So gladiator two takes us back to Ridley Scott’s vision of ancient Rome, and it’s obviously a generation ahead of where the first film ended. So we’ve skipped all the way over Septimius Severus rise to power. He’s not mentioned, really, and we’re in this situation where Septimius Severus has died and his sons are co Emperors of Rome. There’s obviously an argument to be made for the convenience of that with the 24 years between the first gladiator and then gladiator two. But there’s obviously a lot of challenges with getting the same actors who were in the first film to play the same parts in this particular movie. But there also might be a narrative reason for Scott to have chosen. To set the film in this particular time period. What do you think are some of the advantages of leaning into this co-emperorship between Caracalla and Geta?

Martin Winkler 20:09
Well, the chronology, let me say quick word about that. First, if you don’t mind the chronology, the condensation or telescoping, if you might say so of chronology is not a surprise in Gladiator, the first Gladiator, Commodus, gets his from Maximus pretty soon after he takes power. The real Commodus route from 180 to 192 that’s 12 years. So why if he was this bad, sort of a creepy psychopath and psychotic or whatever else, how could he have lasted for that long? So he doesn’t, and that’s that’s perfectly okay in a dramatic conversation of a story. In let me just mention a couple of other examples from earlier epic cinema, if you don’t mind, in the big 1951 MGM spectacular Quo Vadis is Nero dies with the help of his former concubine or lover, acti shortly after the fire of Rome, but he ruled, which was in 64 ad but he ruled and died and was overthrown only in 68 so what happened in between that’s inconvenient for the condensed narrative there to feel like that presents. So it gets swept under these total carpet, which is perfectly okay, because epic storytelling and cinema and such, all novels for that matter, are not history lessons. The death of Commodus shortly after his accession in Gladiator is actually apparent on the earlier film from 1964 the fall of the Roman Empire, which was usually not acknowledged as the model for Gladiator when Gladiator, it came out in 2000 which made me somewhere between SAD and MAD at that time, because film may make a personal confession, the fall of the emperor is my number one favorite Roman film. And they are also the duel, the public duel between the analogy of the returning hero and earlier friend of the Emperor the man called Livius. They duelled it out on the in the Roman Forum, not in the Coliseum. But that also happens shortly after comet, or, comparatively, shortly after Commodus takes power. So leaving out all kinds of episodes or even rains of emperors inside the story is not a problem. The question is, Does having two villains instead of one an added advantage, sort of two for the price of one, or is it the opposite effect? I think it’s the opposite. And I’m not saying this because I just want to be contrarian about a contrarian about her gladiator two, or Scott, or anything like that. Far from it. For one thing, the part the screen time that the two emperors, or the actual supervisor Tempus have is not that extensive, so they never really have a chance to show their villainy. That also is far more superficial than it need be in the first Gladiator, it was significantly different and far, far more effective, particularly the creep you seen between Commodus and Lucilla on the bed, which is almost leads almost to incestuous seduction, and then later when he loses in the story of Emperor Claudius and the busy bee. These are very, very well written and also very powerful and visually beautifully staged and edited scenes. Caracalla and Geta have nothing to show for themselves. In that regard, there’s one obvious instance of sheer madness which is also very silly, and that’s the monkey becoming a concert, which seems to be sorry, which seems to be parent on Caligula making his horse in kitata concert. So it’s a pale rehash of that. But for the first time I saw the first time I saw the Emperor Geta, I was wondering whether he had not walked in from a zombie movie. The sort of pale, bloodless, I’m sorry to say this so bluntly to me, excuse me, you know this bloodless face, and then the sort of eye makeup, the pale eyes, yeah, highly emphasized eyes. That’s something that was effective. I don’t think it is. It is effective in 2024 unless it’s a zombie movie. But that was very, very effective in the sonnet era, when emphasis on the eyes, particularly in the absence of speech, except for brief movements of intertalks and such, the expression laws of actors had to become, had to go through, mainly through their faces, if that could be helped by the eye makeup and sort of the circles above and around and below the eyes, so that the eyes sort of look received recessed or dark and such. That could be very, very effective. And that was the case not only for actresses playing, you know, the female parts, but also for actors quite often. And at that time, I think that really worked nowadays Well, am I the only one to have thought of zombies in this regard, if that’s the case, and if the listeners disagree, I stand corrected. No,

Dr G 24:49
I think, I think it’s a great observation, but it does put me in mind of like, what would lead a creative team to make the decision to embody getter in. That particular way, and I think about the way that the Colosseum is supposed to be really big, even if it doesn’t quite have the overwhelming effect that we want it to have in this film. But it might be something that would be useful for an emperor to illustrate and draw attention to their expressiveness, for a crowd that might be really far away from where they’re sitting. Now, it doesn’t really gel very nicely with what we know about Ancient Rome and the way they thought about cosmetics and used them, necessarily, but I can see how they might have made a creative cinematic leap to how do you get an emperor to express themselves on a really big stage in a way that’s quite unique and visually striking, and that might be part that

Martin Winkler 25:43
may well be true. I agree with you in this regard. On the other hand, I don’t think that invalidates the weakness of the character as such. Again, contrast to work in Phoenix, he didn’t have to resort to that sort of thing. He had the power as an actor in protecting that power. Yes, he was dressed in sort of very fancy robes, also invented completely by the Oscar winning costume designer. But that’s another story. He didn’t have to resort to, as I said, resort to that kind of crutch, if I may say so. It’s particularly sad because Caracalla, and this is an advantage of moving the story on, onto the the early third century, our Caracalla to Edward Gibbon in the history of the decline for the Roman Empire. Empire was one of the evil, bad Roman emperors who brought about, or did a major, but major contribution, in a negative sense, to propelling Rome to the Decline and Fall, invasion of barbarians and whatever else. And that, in a manner speaking, here is a completely missed opportunity. So instead of having one great hero and one great villain, you have two heroes, or let’s say one and a half, Lucius and Aacius, because Acacius doesn’t get that much screen time either. And you have two villains who don’t, in combination, barely measure up to one really memorable villain. And if you’re not convinced, think back I mentioned earlier, follow from the Empire and providers. Think back on Peter Ustinov as one of the most memorable screen dealers of all time, if not the number one, most memorable one, who could pull all that off by himself. And Ustinov also was nominated for an Academy Award. I think he should have had it. Or think back on the earlier comment displayed by Christopher Plummer in the fall of Roman Empire, a suave villain in an almost may I say this in an almost sub Laurence Olivier way. If you think back on Olivier in Kubrick’s and Spartacus, these are really, really great villains, the two emperors here. Well, even if they had been one, or they had been combined into one, they could not hold up a chalice to the other great villains to drink the toast to, or something like

Dr G 27:53
that. And it seems a real missed opportunity, because the story of Caracalla and Geta historically is incredibly fascinating and full of tension, and because we seem to be missing a lot of the backstory that they could have lent into it, does a real disservice to these two as villains, because there is a lot to delve into in terms of what’s going

Martin Winkler 28:15
to there would be another sort of dysfunctional dynasty in Rome or something like that. On the other hand, not to say nothing but negative things here, on the one hand, on the other hand, I’m very happy to see that Geta and Caracalla finally made it onto the big screen, because I’m not aware maybe you are. I’m not aware that they’ve ever been a part of a historical epic, not in not on television and not in the cinema. If anybody knows of of a film or a TV show or whatever. Please, let me know. Put

Dr G 28:43
the call out to our listeners.

Dr Rad 28:45
Get researching guys. Okay, yeah, I must admit we were. We were also similarly, a bit disappointed with the way that they were portrayed and seemingly the fact that they overlooked their heritage as well, in the in the way that they cast them, and then also made them up. It just didn’t there was just so much they could have done with that, which would have been so interesting, particularly with Denzel Washington being a major character in this film. And it just was just passed over so completely. It was, yeah, a bit of a disappointment.

Martin Winkler 29:19
You just made a good point. I hadn’t thought about this. But what if you re imagine this and push the story back a little further in time during the rule of Macrinus, although he was in power only for two months, but we already saw that telescoping history was not a problem. Would that not have been much better and more effective to have a great actor be the anti, the bad force, the bad power, the villain against a great hero. Could that not have worked? Because watching nothing really, would have pulled off being a villain with great ease, and it would have been, I think, very convincing. Then,

Dr G 29:58
yeah, and I think. A way he kind of steals the show from a villain perspective as well, because he does seem to be a more well fleshed out character in terms of the dialog that he gets to express, but also the way he has gone about delivering that character on screen as well has produced a Macrinus that is really interesting. And you can feel that this is somebody who is not just pushing towards power, but has the capacity to take it when the opportunity arises. I think that’s

Martin Winkler 30:28
completely on target. I agree entirely. That’s very true. And that’s sort of an indication that his character was underwritten and he was underused. Yeah,

Dr Rad 30:37
I kind of feel that that’s exactly what we kind of dancing around here the fact that the people who are meant to be the main heroes and villains in this film, so Lucius and then Caracalla and getter are not really given enough to do in the script to fulfill those roles. And really the General and Macrinus are the ones that are more interesting. The acting, I think, just comes across better somehow. And I feel like I wanted to know more about those characters, and they just didn’t get the screen time.

Martin Winkler 31:09
You’re right again. But I said earlier two villains for the price of one, I should have said to three, because the third villain really should have been the real villain. He overshadows Washington really overshadows the other two. And that shows their punniness as characters, not as emperors in history and such. I’m not saying that, but as dramatic characters here, they sort of almost fade into into the background. And the very fact that Macrinus kills Geta shows you that this is not really, yeah, it’s not the hero who kills the villain. It’s a villain who should be the real villain, killing a minor villain, and so on. So there are various perspectives. That’s it. It’s an example of the road and not taken, or various roles not taken in the screenplay. Yeah, the story could have been far more powerful, and I think in that sense, worthy, or worthy, or at least of the origin, than it turns out to be. I

Dr G 31:59
definitely agree with that?

Dr Rad 32:01
Yeah, definitely. Now, there is a particularly striking scene in the sequel where Lucilla and her husband, the Roman General Acacius, secretly meet with key members of the Senate with a view to taking down Caracalla and Geta and the Senator Gracchus, played by the great Derek Jacobi, who was in the first film, take the lead by suggesting that instead of returning Rome to the Senate and the people that Lucilla would be the appropriate person to raise into power, this position is later at odds with Lucius dream to restore the Roman Republic. So what might we learn here about the reception of Rome on screen. Well,

Martin Winkler 32:43
let me take on the part of a podcast villain, maybe one more time, and answer your question, what do we learn here? My direct answer would be, not very much. That’s because what Lucius? When Lucius talks about the Republican such, he just channeled his Maximus. That’s just a repeat of repetition of what was far more powerful and far stronger in in Gladiator, the first Gladiator, the fact that the senator Gracchus, who represented in the first Gladiator, represented, to, you know, the traditional senatorial quote, unquote, good government of Rome. That goes back to Senator Gregor, played by Charles Lawton in Kubrick’s ospartakers, who really was sort of the last Republican one. I’d say in that film, the return of the imperial government to the Senate, actually, during the Empire, was not entire, an entire anachronism, because this was being discussed, I think I pointed this out in the book and Gladiator in one of my chapters. This was actually discussed after the assassination of Claudius. It didn’t go anywhere, but at least there was people were talking about this, you know. And there was sort of, perhaps a hankering to the good old days of the Republic, except that the fall of the Republic was anything, but any good or days. But that’s another story. So we, I don’t think we learned a lot about this here. That’s another disappointment, because the gladiator two was filmed, I think, earlier this year, and edited. It filmed in something like no more than two months or such. So this was a very rapid, surprisingly quick production. At that time, the entire modern history of research and autocrats target and some Putin and Trump, to mention only the most prominent ones. This is something that sort of cried out to be incorporated as a modern analogy. But there is nothing like that in the film, and everything is another big missed, missed opportunity. Allow me briefly to point to a film we haven’t mentioned yet, we haven’t yet mentioned here. And this is about comparisons film Troy from 2004 which was produced here, about the chosen war and so on, and was produced during the time that the Iraq war was. Going on, and Peterson in an interview, or actually, probably more than on one occasion, said it’s kind of strange. I’m just paraphrasing this. I’m not quoting verbatim. He said something like the following. It’s strange when you come back from a day of shooting out on the location and editing whatever else to your hotel room, and you turn on the television and the same story is on the news. So Peterson was clearly aware of the not just chosen war, but also modern connection of this Homeric epic, the chosen one bed in the myth and the contemporary political situation. But there’s virtually nothing like that in in Gladiator II.

Dr G 35:38
This is a real missed opportunity, isn’t it? And I think one of the ways that we could potentially consider this is through the lens of the Senate itself, because the Senate is kind of some of them are revolutionary. Some of them are looking to depose Caracella and Geta. But more often, we see them in moments of hesitation. They’re failing to act when they have opportunities, and they don’t seem to be powerful within any particular structures in which they operate. There is a sick of phantism that is going on for them. And my first question about this was really related to like, how does that sort of match up to what we might know about the Roman Senate in this period of Rome’s history, but it might also be the case that it helps us think about what’s going on with politics today, and maybe the weakness that we see in this group is maybe a reflection of some of the frustrations people have with what appears to be the weakness of government structures In the here and now. Oh, that’s a

Martin Winkler 36:41
nice point, yes, and that’s something that I think deserves more thought, certainly on my part, and perhaps on some of the our heroes parts too. The sycophantism, as you rightly call it, of the Senate in later two is very striking. And I think that actually does have whether intention or not does not matter a modern analogy, and that is the sequence of all the Republicans, including those who were against Donald Trump in 2016 because famously, those who were called the never Trumpers all became Trumpers. I doubt if there was a single or maybe one or two exceptions mid Romney, for instance, when it comes to mind. So that’s that’s very much the case. On the other hand, there’s also a a Roman analogy to this. As you probably noticed, there is a quotation from Tacitus in in Gladiator two, not verbatim, but it takes up the famous saying, uh, by Caratacas, they make a desert and call it peace. So this the image of the Senator, I think also has a strong Tacitian analogy or echo, because Tacitus is a very, very anti Imperial historian. I think that’s safe to say. And he wrote from his own experience. So yeah, having been a concert, a concert subject, I believe, actually himself, I was reminded very strongly of one of the most famous sort of sententia sentences in Tacitus, which is also one of my favorites upon the accession of Tiberius after the death of Augustus, when he says in Rome, everybody rushed headlong into slavery, concerts, senators and the Knights. So this abject secrecy is clearly an indication that in the empire you really have, well, you still have the Seminoles of the Republic. The Republic has not been formally abolished. You still have a Senate. You have people’s assemblies and whatever else but the Empire, the Emperor calls the shots, and the Senate is basically kind of a rubber stamping body of executives, with some exceptions and sometimes you do have good consults and what have you. In addition to that, this scene, particularly when Caracalla decrees his monkey to be or quotes for the vote for his monkey to be called declared Council. I think there’s a more direct analogy to this, rather than tassien. One of that is to be found in the 1964 the fall of the Roman empire. There’s the scene in the Roman Senate in which Commodus sitting on his throne beneath the lupa Romana, the Roman wolf with these babies, Romulus and Remus and so on, one of his henchmen and sycophants proposes a motion that, or rather, asks Commodus for the permission that the city of Rome be renamed the city of Commodus the office Commodiana in them as in fact, there was some talk about that back at that time. And this, this is great moment in which Christopher Plummer really rises to the occasion. You know, he sort of rubs his fingernails against his costume, looks at it in contemplation and and then says, I allow it, or I permit it in such a very condescending way. And everybody breaks out into great. Of applause and cheering and so on and so on and so on so this abject bootlicking. Or, you know, you know what, kissing, I won’t even say it there.

Dr G 40:12
It is permitted to say such things on this we’ve said worse.

Dr Rad 40:15
Thank you.

Martin Winkler 40:16
So there, in that sense, one might say later too, fits very well into this sort of anti Roman, bad Roman history kind of archetype that goes back to the silent era. Yeah,

Dr Rad 40:27
it’s very interesting. I love to actually do a more comprehensive study of the influence of the Tacitus vibes on Roman film, because I feel like even when it’s not about a period that Tacitus wrote about, Tacitus still really has an influence over the way that directors and screenwriters sort of conceive of Rome under the emperors. That that’s

Martin Winkler 40:47
actually a nice point. That’s something one should pursue further. Tacitus are sort of the presiding ghost, the eminence grise over over Hollywood’s history. I think he would have

Dr Rad 41:01
liked to know he had such an influence. Pleased him greatly. So thinking very much about power and how it plays out in this film, you know, we’ve talked about, obviously, the villains, the heroes, we talked about the Senate. But in the first film, I think we had quite a strong presence from the Praetorian Guard in particular, and the army were also quite important to the plot in the first film. What is your opinion of the way that the Praetorians and the army come across in this sequel, again,

Martin Winkler 41:30
by comparison with the original, the sequel suffers significantly. The good point that the film makes, as did the first one, I think too, is that the Praetorians are pretty much the Emperor’s personal army, which they were in history. Also, in that sense, they were kind of a counterweight, if you like, to the regular army. And for that, there is a very strong, at least one very strong modern analogy, and that is in Nazi Germany, yeah, the SS, or first the SA and SS, and then only the essay or the SS, sorry, the portrait of the Praetorians in the original gladiator actually brought this out quite obviously, the black uniforms, the drumming and everything. In fact, if I may, point to a contribution to the gladiator book that I edited some years ago, there’s a contribution by Arthur Pomeroy, called the vision of a Fascist Roman Gladiator, in which he follows through some of the iconography, not just the pretorians, but also the triumphal scene when Commodus enters home with the Coliseum in the background and what have you. So that’s, I think that’s a strong point in the original Gladiator here. The point is still there, but it’s barely brought up. It’s sort of de emphasized, if it’s there at all. So in that sense, also, it’s not nothing. Then the rehash, really, of the original.

Dr Rad 42:52
I did wonder whether he’d actually read your book

Martin Winkler 42:57
and been like, oh, I would be flattered, but I doubt it’s very strong.

Dr Rad 43:03
I noticed the same thing. I thought the way that the Praetorians were costumed and just the general way that they were so much in the background in this film, even though they were still playing a significant role at times, it was just such a pale limitation of the first movie, and they were so de emphasized, I was like, oh my god, did he notice that? We all noticed nacino returns from that first movie I

Martin Winkler 43:27
saw somewhere. It may have been on the IMDB that there is a much longer cut of gladiator two, which runs to well over three hours, or three and a half hours, or something like that. I believe 220 minutes that might, presumably that will end up on home video at some point to make more money. So we should perhaps withhold final judgment on related to two until, if it ever shows up, until that and we can see that that footage, I’m not holding my breath, and I’m not expecting a great improvement, but at least some improvement in that regard. So it made us be that this is a bit of a sort of too much of a cutting down to get the film out into release before Christmas, or something like that.

Dr Rad 44:10
Yeah, I think Napoleon definitely suffered from trying to pack too much into the time that was allowed for the release, because even though it was beautiful, it was just such a was very, just such a pared down version of Napoleon’s life.

Martin Winkler 44:30
Yes, yes, yeah. Good point too.

Dr G 44:32
So thinking about things that may potentially be disappointing, we do get a great reference to John Dryden’s translation of part of Virgil’s Aeneid from book six, the gates of hell are open night and day, smooth the descent and easy as the way, but to return and view the cheerful skies in this the task and mighty labor lies Now this seems like they’re. Trying to draw a parallel between Lucius journey in this film and the idea of the katabasis and going through that descent, potentially to the underworld, and returning back from it. Do you think this might be justified for Lucius’ journey in the film?

Martin Winkler 45:19
Perhaps less so in a mythical Greek katabasis sense, than in a dramatic plot development sense. There is a brief moment early on when Lucius ends up in the water and sees care under the ferryman and such. You know when his wife has been killed and so on. And I understand that in an earlier screenplay written by the musician Dick cave, there would would have been a much longer underworld sequence. Who knows? Maybe that’s in the long version that we don’t see, at least not yet. So that’s a possibility. At the same time, this kind of thing is an effective plot development or plot device. It’s basically a story pattern. It’s not so much the rise and fall of a bad guy, you know, like Nero or something like that, but rather the fall and rise in terms of both Lucius and also Maximus in the two gladiator defense. So you have Maximus as a general farmer who becomes a general close associate, friend, soul mate, almost of the Emperor, Marcus Aurelius. He comes into line for power, becoming Emperor himself. Then he has a reversal of fortune, a very bad one. He becomes a slave and a gladiator, and then he comes back as the Avenger. He kills the bad guy, the Emperor. And although he dies, had he not died, he might have been programmed emperor, but at least he saves from the Gladiator. One perspective, he saves Rome from the tyrant. And now Senator Gracchus and the other senators, if they get to act together, can perhaps try to return Rome to the central government that Marcus Aurelius, and historically also had envisioned in Gladiator II. It’s very similar. The young prince gets saved, hustled away from Rome to Africa, where he is more of a commoner, but becomes prominent in his community, sort of military leader and so on. He’s defeated. He becomes a slave Gladiator, yes, as with the Maximus. And then he comes back and reasserts himself, and he survives, and he proclaims that the times of tyranny and so on are over. All of that has yet another, has yet another, very strong earlier parallel in the story of Ben Hur who starts out as a rich and powerful Prince of her as is called in the William Wyler, 1959 film, with the Roman as his friend. They become bitter enemies. He also has to fall into tragedy, fall from grace. He becomes an abject slave, galley slave, as it were, although let me just add this in parenthesis. The people who wrote the Roman military galleys were not slaves, but Marines, David soldiers, if you like. So he survives by the grace of God, literally, in this case, Jesus, and he comes back and avenge us himself. So it’s this, this basic arc from falling from the heights into abject misery and then coming back. And that’s a very, very clever Well, it’s primitive, like simple or simplistic, but it’s a very clever plot device. It’s also so much adaptable that you can put, put this template, if you like, or over practically any story, any kind of heroic story. And heroes always have their setbacks, and then come, yeah, come back more gloriously. And so you see candidates at this weekly you see this. This is basically shape in fight scenes, boxing scenes and whatever in the cinema, the one who gets most punishment first almost always wins. That’s the basic story, and that has an ancient rhetorical or historiographical slash rhetorical parallel when in debates, whoever you hear, whoever speaks first, practically never wins. The one who wins the debate is the one who speaks last, because otherwise it will be very under magic, let down and enter a climax. You know? Why? Why do we report the speech of somebody who doesn’t win at the end?

Dr Rad 49:03
That actually such an interesting point. I hadn’t thought about that potential. Parallel with Ben Hur and that actually leads me to a question which I feel only you could really answer, which is Ridley Scott, obviously, is an older director at this point in his career, and he’s directed many smash hit movies, and he had a background where he grew up, obviously, when these films that like Quo Vadis and Spartacus and Ben Hur were actually out in the cinema for the first time, and you have actually noticed in your work, the influence of his previous experience watching epics as a child, and also his background in making TV commercials had on the earlier film, particularly, I think, from Fall of the Roman Empire, Spartacus, and even with those potential Nazi influences, with Triumph of the Will and the way that it was shot, I was wondering, apart from Ben Hur, were there any other cinematic traditions that you noticed in Gladiator two that might have been in. Influencing the way it came together, not specifically.

Martin Winkler 50:04
I don’t think it’s yet another installment, or episode, if you like, in the usually negative portrayal of the Romans that has been the case from day one or even day one in the history of cinema, or even before day one in the history of novels. Think back on The Last Days Pompeii, Quo Vadis, Fabiola. It’s usually evil pagans against good Christians. Gladiator patterning itself on the Fall of the Roman Empire, and later too, fortunately, does not fall back onto this very horrid which is one saving grace of both of the gladiator films. But again, the impulse of that, or for that, comes from follow the Roman Empire. On the other hand, let me add that the entire narrative tradition of Romans on screen, or even of history on screen, is basically one big, mighty river, mighty stream. And that’s a stream of sameness, largely with exceptions, of course. So let me put it this way, if you don’t mind, let me quote a saying by Alfred Hitchcock, who said at one point, and he should know, the master of suspense. He said a movie is only as good as its villain. And we talked about this earlier, and you that Caracalla and Geta are not really good enough, not really good enough as as villains. So if you have a great villain, you can have a great story. And that worked really well in Spartacus, in Ben Hur in the earlier Gladiator, and follow me about the two Commodus films and so on. So there is a huge tradition in all of this, and it’s very difficult, consciously or even unconsciously, if you like to deviate from this and that regard to both gladiator and Gladiator two are, just as I said, additional episodes in this long road that Rome has gone in the history of popular media and earlier, as I said, in novel so stage plays and similar kind of things. The cliches of the about the Romans are so indirect that it’s, as I said, very, very difficult to go against these that reminds me of something completely different. So if I may be more depressed and ask for just a moment, let me mention the following. I remember, and I may be wrong in remembering this incorrectly. I remember when the first X Men movie came out many, many years ago, it was advertised as well. This is great, and the special effects hasn’t happened. I never been seen before, so I went. I was very much underwhelmed by that film, too, and I never bothered to watch any of the secrets. But there is one moment that I still remember in which one of the hero characters, or soon to be hero characters, I think it was Wolverine. I may be wrong. The one paper you Jackman. He comes to a kind of school, and there’s a school room with a Blackboard, and the Blackboard is has been erased, except for three words, they are still readable on the blank board. And presumably, and the classroom itself is empty too. So presumably this was the subject of the lesson that had gone on there before. And the three words are, I quote, The Roman Empire. So the Roman Empire is sort of the paradigm of an evil empire, be it Star Wars or transfixion or whatever else, or or in history, and not just an evil empire, but also a fascinating empire. You can’t get Romans out of your system. And if you do spectacle, yeah, and cinema is primarily a visual medium, stating the painfully obvious, if you do spectacle, you can’t really go worse, or do do worse than with recreating room or the Roman Empire and its decadence, so gladiatorial games, chariot races or orgies and on and on and on. So in that sense, the creation of the past is as much fictional as the creation of the future in science fiction. And Scott’s Blade Runner, and also Alien two of his I think really great films are in character or in principle, not that much different from what we have here. So historical epics or future epics set in the future, heroes, villains, shows the story patterns don’t really change, which is just as well, because they are tried and true.

Dr G 54:14
And I think to a certain extent, there’s a an audience expectation for stories to have particular arts, particularly in cinema, and particularly when it involves the Roman Empire, to start to to wrap up this conversation, because this has been so interesting, but I also can see that, you know, we’ve talked for a long time, actually, no, no, it’s been. It’s you,

Martin Winkler 54:39
you can, you can throw me to the lines, or crucify me or visually like

Dr G 54:46
look. We’ll create a suitable spectacle, it’s fair to say. But Hollywood does have a tendency to lean in to the spectacle. Obviously, that’s part of part of its job, in a way. Yeah, but there is that potential to sort of cross a line into things that might start to feel a little bit too much. And I’m wondering if there were any moments that stood out for you watching gladiator two, where you’re like, Oh, I think that might have gone a bit too far.

Martin Winkler 55:15
To be frank. No, not anymore. That’s because at my age, I’ve seen so much that virtually nothing surprises me anymore. In that regard, I do admit that during gladiator two, I had to laugh several times. But that’s, that’s, that’s another thing. The his talking inaccuracies are to be expected. You can’t help that. That’s because of the fictionalization, if you like. Let me put it that way, of the past. That’s something that you find in antiquity itself. Also consider we talked earlier I mentioned briefly the film Troy for the Trojan War. Consider that in antiquity of the chosen war, which to us, is basically mythology, even after the excavations of Troy, the discovery by Freeman and what have you, and others too, to Greeks and Romans and antiquity of the Trojan War was a historical fact. So when you retell this, as Virgil does, the fall of toy in the indeed other historical epics, Greek religions putting plays on tragedies on set among Trojan characters, The Trojan Women, by Euripides and many others, they take great liberties with the quote, unquote facts, as they probably understood this. A case in point is the story about Helen who, in one version, pretty much canonized by Homer in The Odyssey, I’m sorry, in the Iliad. And then perhaps also reinforced in The Odyssey is in Troy during the entire war in another version. And to read this, I’m sorry, Homer hints had this in the Odyssey briefly too. Helen is in Egypt. Hence the modern HD. Helen Egypt, in Egypt. What have you now in Euripides, two plays, the chosen women. Helen is now a captive of the Greeks because she’s been in tour the entire time. In another play by Euripides, she wasn’t there at all. And the entire chosen war was sort of over a few times phantom Helen, the image of Helen and what have you now. How can this be? How can one of the same author, the great, very learned author, he repeat this play so freely with what probably he also considered to be fact, the fact of the chosen war. So either she is Helen is entering or she’s not. But he does it both ways. He has his cake and eats it too, in one play this one and the other play the other one. So that’s perfectly okay. So history, historical facts are flexible. They can be reinterpreted, and usually are. This will probably remind you of a great book from maybe two decades, 25 or so years ago, Hayden. Why it’s meta history, which deals with historic, modern historiography, not ancient historiography as literary artifacts. And historians also sift through the facts. It’s not just an amalgamation of anything that comes in, sort of like a squirrel, as if a squirrel were collecting historical nuts and then presenting all of them. They sift and sword and put them into a coherent, explanatory kind of storyline, as Tacitus did, As Sallust, Thucydides, everybody really did, and the ancient historians also gave a moral slant to the effectual accounts. One of the greatest examples is probably also at least in English, is Gibbon with this gigantic history of the client for the Roman Empire, so and that that is a literary kind of work, allow me to mention maybe one more example, one of the greatest, perhaps the greatest, German historian of ancient Rome, Theodore Mommsen. He wrote a gigantic book, history of Rome, for which he received a Nobel Prize in literature. So why would a historian receive a literary, poets, novelist, whatever kind of prize? But it makes sense to come back to the subject matter here I came across, not too long ago, across something that the late great French director Jacques Rivitte, who in the 60s, 50s and 60s, was associated with the French New Wave for cinema, the Nouvelle bar. He said, at one point in a conversation or interview, I forget, I quote this almost verbatim in English. He said, As soon as something is put on film, it becomes fiction. And I think that is exactly right. The lament by historians, oh, this is wrong. That is wrong. They should have done this. It wasn’t like that. That’s all true. It never was like that. In the best case scenario, it could have been pretty much like that, but certainly, we never know for sure. And of course, the filmmakers, the studios, the producers, the actors, the screenwriters. They’re not classic scholars or classical historians, and they don’t make their movies for classicists and people with PhD in Roman history and what have you. They’re popular writers. And I don’t mean this in a negative sense. Apart from it,

Dr G 59:56
I’m not sure anyone should put a classicist or historian in. Charge of attempting time, because they’d be crippled by the details, I think, and I don’t know if it would ever see the light of day, because of the frustrations with the whole process of trying to pull the production together to be accurate as possible.

Dr Rad 1:00:13
Your point there, which is very well taken, leads me to my final question for you. As someone who also loves looking at history on a film. I’ve often found that the way that I can explain it best to my students is that there’s a difference between accuracy and authenticity on the screen, and this is often something I think you find filmmakers and also the people that write about historical filmmakers talk about which is this idea that they’re not necessarily trying to get every little detail right. They don’t actually necessarily care about getting every little detail right, but they do want to have an accurate feel to the movie, or, as you’ve put it, staying true to the spirit of the period overall, looking at the film altogether, because we’ve talked about it in little pieces today. Do you think that Gladiator II does stay true to the spirit of the period? It

Martin Winkler 1:01:05
stays true to the spirit of the historical period, third century, early third century. Ad, sort of given the fact that this was pretty much the beginning, or more than the beginning of the decline of the empire, I mean all the violence and decadence and whatever in that sense, yes, but again, it’s not specific enough for you to make a point about about that. On the other hand, Scott stays too to the spirit of his own time and his own spirit and his own experience as a filmmaker, because glad the two obviously goes back to Gladiator, and that goes back to as you saw Spartacus problema and and what have you. He also stays true to himself. You pointed out earlier that he had his first start in making advertisements for television. And these are very, very sort of tiny mini films. And rapid editing is sort of a necessity, a cynical one, for that. So hence the rapid editing in later the special effects, the volume, the cranked up volume of the sound, and whatever else that is now familiar to moviegoers. You mentioned his film, Napoleon, I think that’s a good example of playing fast and loose with history and still getting across a kind of, at least sort of fleeting, if you like, impression of what the past may have been like, although they are, think they are much better films said during the Napoleonic era, including films about Napoleon himself, I have said many bad things about Scott, particularly in the connection with related to so maybe as my last word, let me mention his first film, the feature film that which I think is still his best, and also my favorite of his, and that is the duelist with Harvey cartel and Keith Carradine. That’s very, very powerful film, also a heroic story, not on this sort of overblown epic spectacle, three hour platform. It’s because of the story by Joseph Conrad, which is a great source, and Scott rises to the occasion. It’s a beautiful film, beautifully shot. It reveals a little bit of his television, TV ad, aesthetic, if you may not, come in a ring composition back to the subject of aesthetic that was brought up first, but it holds very well together. And I think that’s perhaps the essence of Scott even at the very beginning. Many of his other films, and I can’t claim to have watched all of them, many of his other films are sometimes too long, too overblown, alien and breed one I will gladly accept from that. But if anybody, if those of our listeners have not looked at the dualists, please do so. I think it’s a very rewarding experience. It’s now available in the beautifully restored blu ray edition, so I recommend it very, very early. Oh, that’s good to know it

Dr Rad 1:03:49
is. And I think that’s a good point to finish up on, because I think the reason why we’ve been picking apart gladiator two today is because we all really liked the first one. It was such an interesting addition to the catalog of films about Rome. And even though, obviously there’s a lot to say about the historical inaccuracy of that film, it really embodied what I think I love about history in general, which is that history is good to think with. It helps you to reflect on your own time and also on the time that it’s about. And I think that that’s what I was missing from gladiator two. I didn’t have that same urge to reflect or to use this film to think about anything that I find particularly interesting. It did seem like just spectacle, and I know that Ridley Scott is capable of delivering so much more, and that’s why I think I was disappointed at the end.

Martin Winkler 1:04:39
Yes, I would sign off on that completely too. Maybe he has a much bigger and better, bigger and qualitative sense, better surprise in store for you with his upcoming films. Who knows? So let’s not put paid to him yet. Absolutely,

Dr G 1:04:53
I will always thank him for creating the first film that, that gladiator film. I mean. It sort of sets the tone for a way. A lot of scholars in our generation think about Rome in that period as a touchstone for how does that sort of shift if we look at the ancient evidence, but it’s also, I think it’s a great film. It’s actually really powerful film, and it’s one that I’m happy to re watch and obviously I revisited it in order before I saw gladiator two at sort of us, I was like, well, obviously I need to re watch Gladiator, you know, I’ve got to be prepared. Obviously, it’s another moment where I was like, Oh, I have to watch this film again. And it’s not a burden to do that with gladiator because the performances are so well executed, I think, and the world building feels really quite strong. So thank you so much for taking this time to sit down and chat with us. We’re immensely privileged to have you here and to learn from your insights. Not

Martin Winkler 1:05:54
at all, it’s my pleasure entirely Thank you, and thank you for being such gracious host. And I hope I was not too disappointing with or my natural negativity.

Dr Rad 1:06:04
We had the same sort of feeling. We enjoyed going to see it, but we had the same feeling, which was that the sequel was just trying to hit those same beats and yet just didn’t execute it effectively enough for it to be anything more than really a shadow of the first film, which, as you say, is quite common for sequels. But I was kind of hoping, because of the gap between the first and the second, that Ridley Scott would maybe have a bit of license to break free

Dr G 1:06:35
from and really craft a new story. Yeah, exactly, yeah. That didn’t seem to be the case, sadly.

Dr Rad 1:06:43
Well, listeners, if you enjoy learning about Rome on film, I definitely suggest that you go and consult one of the many excellent volumes that Professor Winkler has edited over the years. They are filled with very insightful articles from lots of academics, and I can definitely say that a lot of my work on history on film has been based on something from one of those volumes, and they’re very readable, so please go and check them out.

Thank you for listening to this special episode of the partial historians, you can find our sources sound credits and an automated transcript in our show notes. Our music is by Bettina Joy De Guzman. You too can support our show and help us to produce more engaging content about the ancient world by becoming a Patreon. In return, you receive exclusive early access to our special episodes, and you get to make suggestions for future episodes. Today, we would like to thank all of our wonderful Patreon and Ko fi supporters for helping us to cover the costs of making the show and taking it in new directions. However, if you have spent all your money at the Coliseum on larks tongues and wren’s livers, please just tell someone about the show or give us a five star review Until next time we are yours in ancient Rome

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The post Special Episode – Gladiator II with Professor Martin M. Winkler appeared first on The Partial Historians - Ancient Roman History with smart ladies.

We are super excited for this conversation. Owen Rees is the founder of the website badancient.com and we’ve been lucky enough to write a couple of articles over there on some misconceptions about the ancient Romans. So when we heard that Owen had a book coming out, we absolutely wanted to have a chat.

Special Episode – The Far Edges of the Known World with Owen Rees

The Far Edges of the Known World is coming out through Bloomsbury Press February 2025 and is all about what’s happening beyond the traditional centres of power that are the focus of historians such as Greece and Rome. What becomes clear in this conversation is that the written sources produce a focus on the centres of power for historians and that the archaeological record is critical to appreciating what’s happening in areas that weren’t the centre.

We start with a little bit on Ovid’s poor attitude to being in Tomis on the Black Sea and what that reveals about Rome BUT also reveals inadvertently about that society. There are generalisations about what place is where to navigate – where was Libya or India really? There’s also plenty of scope to dip into the particulars of the archaeological record. To get a sense of the breadth and depth of Rees’ work we have a chat about:

Author of The Far Edges of the Known World: A New History of the Ancient Past, Owen Rees

Our music is composed by the amazing Bettina Joy de Guzman.

Lightly edited for the Latin and our wonderful Australian accents!

Dr Rad 0:15
Welcome to the Partial Historians.

Dr G 0:19
We explore all the details of ancient Rome

Dr Rad 0:23
Everything from political scandals, the love affairs, the battled wage and when citizens turn against each other. I’m Dr Rad

Dr G 0:33
and I’m Dr G, we consider Rome as the Romans saw it, by reading different authors from the ancient past and comparing their stories.

Dr Rad 0:44
Join us as we trace the journey of Rome from the founding of the city.

Dr G 0:50
Hello and welcome to a brand new episode of the Partial Historians. I am one of your hosts, Dr G

Dr Rad 0:58
And I am Dr Rad

Dr G 1:00
And we are very excited to sit down today with Owen Rees to talk about his new book ‘The Far Edges of the Known World’. Even the title sounds very impressive. I’m like OoOoo. Owen Rees is an ancient historian. He held a Leverhulme early career fellowship at the University of Nottingham, and is a lecturer in applied humanities for Birmingham Newman University. He is the founder and lead editor of the website badancient.com which brings together specialists to fact check common claims. I’ll say that again, which brings together specialists to fact check common claims made about the ancient world. We are absolutely thrilled to talk with Owen about his new book, ‘The Far Edges of the Known World, which is published by Bloomsbury Press. Welcome Owen.

Owen Rees 1:57
Thank you very much. Thanks for having me.

Dr G 1:59
An absolute pleasure. So to get us softly into this topic, because I feel like this topic is actually huge, I’m wondering what sparked your fascination for this idea of borders and edges when it comes to the ancient world.

Owen Rees 2:16
Yeah, it’s a valid question, because it’s not really talked about a lot, or when it is talked about, it’s often in terms of conflict. So especially in the Roman Empire, we think hard borders, conflict and wars generally. So I mean, put it simply, it bugs me that the ancient world is always done from cultural centers. So every time we talk about ancient history, we talk about Athens, we talk about Rome, Alexandria, places like this. And that’s all fascinating and interesting stuff, but I’m always struck with the kind of question in my head of, well, what about everyone else? What’s everyone else up to? And how do these highfalutin ideas that people are coming up with like Plato and the like. How does that play out for, shall we say, normal people around the world? So first of all, it was to kind of get away from the obvious stories and the obvious narratives of the ancient world, ones that you know, we’ve all read, listened to and watched and kind of grew up with. I suppose another aspect was I was I was really interested in the idea of the ancient world being the whole world. You know, we often talk about, we study the ancient world, we love the ancient world, but all we really talk about is the Mediterranean, or the Mediterranean basin, really. So, you know, Egypt, Italy, Greece, maybe a bit of Turkey

Dr G 3:39
Guilty as charged.

Owen Rees 3:41
Yeah, we all do it. We all do it. And I just, I wanted to move away from that. And I mean, ultimately, I think it also played into an obsession of mine, which is, I love underdogs. I’ve always loved underdog stories from, you know, sort of watching films growing up in England, you know, watching films like Zulu, and I find the Zulus much more interesting than than the British forces, you know, sort of watching westerns. And it was never the cowboys I was that interested in. My siblings used to always take the mick that I always supported the losing side, but I always just found their stories more interesting, and I found their cultures more interesting. So that’s kind of like underpinning, shall we say, of what interested me in this. But otherwise it’s from a historical point of view. I hate inconsistencies. And what you often find when you read about Roman culture, Roman law, Greek culture and Greek laws, is they stop applying the further away you get from Greece, from Rome. I mean, a classic example from the Roman period is the idea of the imperial army, in particular, soldiers. It’s illegal for soldiers to marry, not allowed to marry, and this has influenced the way archeologists have studied numerous. Forts and numerous sites over the years. And if anyone had ever thought early on to look at places like Egypt, for instance, we have loads of evidence in the Greek language that Roman soldiers are married, and then it turns out they’re just not married in the Latin language. So you get this lovely interplay of an accepted rule breaking and almost like, Okay, well, we can’t officially say it, but of course you are. And as a result, like studies of Roman thoughts over the past 20 years have started realizing that perhaps you know, evidence of women or children in forts doesn’t need to be explained with strange excuses. And actually, maybe they were supposed to be there.

Dr G 5:46
What. What are the women doing there?

Owen Rees 5:50
I know, what is this chaos?

Dr Rad 5:53
There’s a keep out sign, very clearly on the door.

Owen Rees 5:59
So it was, yeah, it was just, I think looking at the board has just challenged a lot of what I grew up thinking I knew about the ancient world, what other people taught me about the ancient world. And I just found that really interesting. The way I often sell it to other people is from a more general point of view. If you look at the ancient world and only look at the center, you are basically committing the cardinal sin of a traveler who goes to London and thinks they’ve seen Great Britain, you know, goes to Sydney and so think they’ve seen Australia, and you just haven’t. You’ve seen something amazing. You’ve seen something flamboyant and spectacular and culturally fascinating, but you have not seen everything, and you have not seen anything close to everything. And so that was kind of what inspired the idea of the book in the first place.

Dr G 6:49
Oh, that is really cool.

Dr Rad 6:50
It is. And so for people who would like to pick up a copy of your book, you’re going to take them to places across Africa, the Caucasus, and Asia. But as Roman historians, we’re very aware that there are the very serious limitations when it comes to the way that Roman perspectives can be imposed, and the kind of world that is created from Roman sources. So what were the challenges that you encountered when researching these edges of the world? And how did you tackle those challenges?

Owen Rees 7:21
Oh, there were quite a few. I’ll be honest with you, I suppose the biggest. I’m a historian by background. So my main bread and butter are written sources, you know. So I think Herodotus, think Plutarch, you know, people like this. This is, this is where I spend my time. When you start going to the edges of the ancient world, there’s a lot less of it, and those written sources are either less interested in what’s going on at the edge or have a very skewed perspective of what’s going on at the edge. So first thing I had to embrace very early on was that archeology was a much closer friend than sort of the standard historical text I’m used to working with. So that’s the first thing, but the second thing, this kind of opens up opportunities. So we don’t have large narratives from all these kind of sites. I There are no large narratives coming out of Ukraine in the ancient period that just aren’t but what there is alongside the archeology in some of these sites are fascinating written sources that don’t appear anywhere else. So oddly enough, whilst we we obsess over Greece and Rome, our best evidence, in terms of the amount of evidence and in terms of what it tells us about everyday life, comes in the Roman period from two places, really, to my mind, one is Vindolanda. So that’s a Hadrian’s Wall in the north of England, where we have surviving written tablets from a fort. So we have a remarkably large cache of letters, basically, and notes from a Roman fort telling us what’s going in and out, telling us what’s happening. It’s really boring, but it’s really fascinating at the same time. And that’s what I love, because, you know, life isn’t always exciting. So you know, there’s lovely letters of people complaining they haven’t been sent socks, and things like this. It’s just amazing. If you haven’t seen it, anyone listening, you gotta have a look. They’re great fun. But the other site, well, the site I look at, but actually it’s the entire region of the Faiyum region in Roman Egypt. So when Egypt is on Roman control, you’ve got the Faiyum Oasis, which is to the west of, or southwest of what is now modern Cairo. Amazing place to go. And we have just a remarkable amount of papyri. So you know, the written paper from Egypt just stored in people’s houses whilst they kept them safe. So these are, like people’s personal archives, really. So it’s documents that they want to keep safe, things that are important to them. Some of them are like contracts. Some of them are personal letters between like themselves and their mother or their father, who might have died by that point. Some of them are just sort of family papers. So we’ve got all this amazing evidence just sitting there telling us about normal people, normal life, everyday life. So whilst I had to get away from this idea that history has to be grand narratives to write this book, what I get to really embrace is those small personal narratives and those little snapshots and stories of just normal people. And that’s just something we don’t really get to hear much about in the ancient world. But going back to, like your point on Roman writers and the world they’re building us. This is such an important point, because often when they talk about the edge of the world, one the really vague, and this is infuriating. I had to, I had to work with a map illustrator, and they were like, you mentioned Ethiopia as a region. Where is it? And I was like, south in Libya. And they’re like, Okay, so the country of Libya, no, Libya is a random continent. Kind of makes up most of Africa at this point, but doesn’t include Egypt most of the time. And they’re like, so where is Ethiopia in that? I’m like, to the south, like, where that’s that’s all they tell us. So, you know, you got the it’s the same with you mentioned the Caucasus. The Greeks and Romans talk about Scythia, which is very vaguely north of the Black Sea, and to the east. And that’s kind of it. It can be as big or as small as you want it to be, depending on what you’re talking about and who you’re talking who you’re talking about. So they do talk about these things in general terms, because often what they’re talking about is very, very far away land. So when they talk about skiffia, they mean very far away to the north and the east. When they talk about Libya, they mean very far away to the south. When they talk about Ethiopia, they talk about even further away to the south. India is my other favorite, because we think of India. India is a very clear place. The Romans, the Greeks, knew about India. They went to India. They traded with India. They must know what India is when they talk about it, and they do not. Sometimes, it includes Arabia the Arabian Gulf. Sometimes they’re talking about much further east than India, you know, the unknown lands of Southeast Asia, Vietnam, maybe even China. Sometimes. So they’re not always, they’re not consistent in their terminology at all. And I suppose the final point, really, when dealing with this is Roman writers in particular, if they’re talking about the borders, it’s usually to make a point about something else. And so we’re always stuck with that question, how accurate a reflection are we getting about the place they’re talking about? Some of these things can be overcome with archeology. Some of these things can be overcome with other evidence. Some of it has to be left kind of open ended. Ovid is a good example of this, and his description of a town called Tomis, where we don’t have loads of evidence about Tomis, but we know he’s wrong, but how wrong we’re not quite sure, but definitely incorrect.

Dr G 13:31
Yeah, I was going to say you’ve led me straight to this idea of Ovid’s perception of Tomis on the Black Sea, where he gets exiled to because he’s clearly not having a good time. He is most upset to be here, and he believes it’s probably the worst place ever, at least that’s the kind of impression you get from the letters that he writes back to the city, being like, please, please, please, guys, this exile needs to end. I cannot stand another minute here, but it seems to be at least in the way that you’re describing it, is that maybe it’s quite jarring for him because he doesn’t get to live the life that he prefers or is used to anymore. It’s not so much that he doesn’t understand the place, it’s just that it’s not something he wants to experience. So I’m wondering like, is Ovid a bit emblematic for some of these problems we get with our bigger written sources when it comes to thinking about the edges of things?

Owen Rees 14:27
Yeah, I think is he is indicative of the issue I may so much so he bookends my book for a reason. He really sums up not only the problem we have with Roman writers, Greek writers, Egyptian all these different people. But also, I think he’s indicative of the problem historians have where we’re so stuck on focusing on what’s not going on, or what it doesn’t look like, much like he does, we kind of miss it for what it is. But Ovid’s, Ovid’s a fascinating guy. He comes off a bit badly in my book. I think I went for him a little bit because he’s held up in this kind of canon of Roman writers, and he is a moany so and so. But I think you’re right. I think what he’s moaning about is things not as they are, but also it’s because he wants to go home. So so much of his poetry, so much of his letters, are about convincing people to petition on his behalf, send me home from his exile. So he portrays it in the most horrific ways. And if you read this, you just think, why would anyone ever go there? It is a nasty place. It’s constant war, constant freezing. They can’t even grow grapes. They don’t speak Greek properly, which is laughable, because it’s a Greek city. You know, he’s moaning about all these things, and it’s just fantastic, is this idea of I’m too good for this place? That’s kind of how he presents it. But on the same token, I’m not always 100% convinced. That he’s reflect not just the reality of the town, but his own reality in that town. So for instance, we know he brags at one point of writing a poem in a local language. So we get this idea he is learning local languages. He doesn’t need to know the local languages. Greek is a standard language. He learns like a Gatic language, but he’s not in learning. He’s mastered it enough to do his poetry. We know he serves in the militia. One of the things he moans about, they made me do military service, which I got out of him Rome. So there’s no doubt he’s actually getting quite involved in the community around him, but he will never let on these in any way enjoying it, or any way settling in. But the other thing it’s the interesting one, something we get a lot at the borders when people from the center so these kind of figures go there is this idea of being forgotten, this idea of no one will know what’s going on, because no one really understands the edges, and if I’m there, they’ll forget me. And Ovid has this kind of paranoia that he’ll be forgotten, and that mediocre poets in Rome will be remembered better than he will. And of course, that’s we know in hindsight, that’s not true at all. So his greatest fear of being left at the edge just doesn’t come true in the slightest, if anything, his time in exile are, I mean, I think some of his best work, I don’t think every academic would agree with me there, but they’re certainly, historically, the most interesting pieces of work he does. So yeah, Ovid, absolutely, he is emblematic of a lot of the issues where we’re seeing, but not just from the ancient world itself, but also from our own perspective.

Dr Rad 17:46
As podcasters from Sydney, we kind of get that feeling, always, you know, our timing is just always off. We’re always, you know, in another day, in another time zone. It’s,

Owen Rees 18:02
Yeah, but you’ll never be forgotten. You know, remember that.

Dr G 18:05
That’s the dream.

Dr Rad 18:07
We are writing the most epic podcast known to man, so… In scale, I mean in scale. So turning our attention away for a moment from the Romans and their world and their perspective, you also take the reader through some of the details of the borders that emerge in parallel to the cataracts along the Nile River in ancient Sudan. Can you take us through some of the details of the edges of the world as conceived in ancient Sudan?

Owen Rees 18:35
Yeah, it’s an interesting one. So for the cataract. So we’re talking about these kind of insurpassible parts of the Nile cataracts. So they’re basically heavy rapids. There’s boulders and stones. It’s just sort of harder to get through. It’s not just like a direct route, shall we say. And further south from these cataracts, you enter what’s generally thought of as Nubia, the lands of Nubia and during, I mean, this is like second millennium, well out of our wheelhouse for Greek and Roman historians. But second millennium BCE, where Egypt, you know, has built its pyramids, have all this beautiful monuments, and the pharaohs have well and truly established themselves on the throne. But to the south, in Nubia, we have a another kingdom called the Kushite kingdom, who are growing a fascinating place. The archeology of this area and this sort of Kingdom and the towns they build are absolutely phenomenal, but like, there’s no written texts to work with. So unfortunately, it’s one of the kind of curses of living at the edge. Your story is told by your enemies, and Egypt is the the writer of the history of the Kush. To put this in context, they generally refer to the Kush as the ‘wretched Kush’. That’s their name for them. So that kind of gives you an idea of the storyline we’re getting. So Egypt keeps trying to push its influence further and further south, moving up the Nile, and it does this by building a series of forts along the cataracts, really. I mean, you can see this as expansion. You can see this is imperialist expansion. That’s certainly what it becomes later in the New Kingdom. But at this point, I’ll often visualize this as almost creating a buffer zone. So they’re trying to create an area where the Kush are pastoralist people by origin. Even though they’re now building their towns and stuff, they still have sort of this semi-nomadic underpinning to their life. So movement around is quite a common thing, and sedentary cultures, urbanized cultures, generally, do not like nomadism because it doesn’t abide by the rules of borders and things like that still true to this day, let’s be honest. So they build these forts, and they create this kind of middle ground within it. And what I found fascinating about this is we have a perfect example of stretch of land where the two cultures kind of mash and mesh and intermingle. And rather than look at the Egyptians from their perspective further north, and rather look at the Kush from their perspective further south, I was fascinated by what was going on here, in this in this middle ground, in this buffer zone, and ultimately what we get is Egyptian garrisons, settling, raising families. And kind of setting themselves up in just normal life. It’s just normal garrison life. It’s not always very exciting. There’s generally a lot of raiders, bandits, but also just trade. So it’s that, it’s that snapshot of the everyday, which I love. But we also get some lovely characters and some lovely events for anyone who’s, if you fans of ‘The Mummy’?

Dr G 22:09
Ooo yeah

Dr Rad 22:09
Ah yes

Owen Rees 22:11
Yes, what do you take me for? But also, I’ve just, I’ve just got into Assassin’s Creed Origins, so I’m obssessed at the moment with the Medjay

Dr G 22:21
Yeah, beautiful. I love that game.

Owen Rees 22:23
Yeah, brilliant game. And they’re brilliant characters in ‘The Mummy’, where the Medjay first kind of appear at this border as a group. Historians aren’t 100% sure who they are in terms of ethnicity, but the general consensus at the moment is that they are one of the nomadic Nubian groups floating about in this region, in this area. So they’re not Kush, and they’re not Egyptian, they’re this nomadic group, or one of many nomadic groups, and they’re called the Medjay, and they turn up in the the fort records, basically, of people moving about, and this is where we first start to see them used as like a rudimentary police force. And to give you an idea of the kind of complexities of what’s going on and the lack of simplicity of us versus them, the Medjay who form part of this nomadic Nubian group are often policing other nomadic Nubian groups in the area. So they’re like enforcing Egyptian rules on it, because ultimately the fort brings food, it brings money, well, it brings support, it brings income of some sort. And so it makes more sense for them to look to the Egyptians for basically work. So we get individuals like this, but also we see in the force themselves. We mentioned them earlier with the Roman forts, but we get these, these people. They’re called women

Dr G 23:54
What?

Owen Rees 23:55
And they do, they do exist in history.

Dr G 23:57
Again? What’s going on?

Dr Rad 23:59
Just break this down for a second. Wo-men. I think I might have heard of them, yeah.

Owen Rees 24:05
Have you heard of them? My academic background is military history, and you’d be amazed. Well, you won’t be amazed how many books to where they don’t appear.

Dr G 24:16
It’s incredible.

Dr Rad 24:17
We sympathize, we sympathize, yeah.

Owen Rees 24:19
And at the forts, what we see is Nubian women, even possibly Kush women, entering the forts and living in the homes of Egyptian soldiers and men. There’s no reason to not presume that they’ve actually intermarried. So again, what we see, you know, away from the narratives of the Egyptians, where there’s ‘wretched Kush’ and they can’t be trusted in the region, and they should all be killed because they’re animals, we see the borders soldiers who are supposed to be kind of enforcing that and epitomizing that ideology, marrying them, living with them, having kids with them. And I just, I just find that amazing. I find it beautiful. I just think it’s, it’s a fascinating inversion of what we expect.

Dr Rad 25:07
It’s almost as though when people actually get to know each other instead of believing what they’re told. They actually find that humans are quite similar and they can get along with,

Owen Rees 25:22
I mean, you said it not me. I don’t want to get in trouble.

Dr Rad 25:25
These are the kind of mind blowing ideas that people come to the Partial Historians for, you know,

Owen Rees 25:30
This is it

Dr G 25:32
Oh, boy.

Owen Rees 25:34
This is it. This is beautiful stuff. It is beautiful stuff, um, but like, within the sort of historical narrative. I mean, ultimately, Egypt goes through its own periods of chaos. And during that chaos, we see the borders fluctuation. So during one of those periods of chaos where Egypt has basically an incursion from the north, the Kush push further north and actually take control of a lot of these fortifications.

Dr G 26:00
Uh oh

Owen Rees 26:01
Now, yeah. To put this in kind of perspective, these forts are enormous, like they’re absolutely amazing in size, in scale. I mean, really, we see nothing like it in the ancient world until, like the Roman structures, 1000s of years later, in terms of fortifications on the borders, and in terms of the investment that goes into it, there’s nothing quite like them, but the Kush basically walk into them, because the Egyptians have to focus on what’s going on further north. And again, you’re like, Okay, so the Kush have pushed north taking control. This is going to be a bloodbath. Are they even going to keep the forts. What’s going to go on? There is no archeological evidence that there is any destruction.

Dr G 26:47
Wow

Owen Rees 26:48
At all. So it very much creates this impression they just kind of walk in. And we even have examples of Egyptians at the forts who keep their jobs.

Dr G 26:59
What?

Dr Rad 27:01
Now that’s the kind of job security that I envy.

Owen Rees 27:05
Exactly, exactly. I mean, from a pragmatic point of view, if you’ve got an infrastructure in place and they’re happy to stay in place, there’s no need to change it. So you know, as long as they’re not leaving and they’re not constantly out to try and get you and to try and overthrow you. Why wouldn’t you keep them in place?

Dr Rad 27:22
Is Elon Musk listening?

Owen Rees 27:22
You’re gonna get me in a lot of trouble! So, yeah, so we, so what we basically see is people go right, like my dad was here under the Pharaoh. I’m now here under the Kush happy days. Let’s just keep going. Because ultimately, what happens, this is what I love about the borders. What happens at the border is that’s life. Life isn’t what happens to the south or to the north. Life is what’s going on there and then. And you know, they’re not going to uproot themselves if they’ve got family there, if they’ve got lineage there. If they you know, they’ve been there six, seven generations. This is their home. This is their homeland. It’s at that point where you see where loyalties really lie. Now, that’s not true of all the sites I talk about in my book, and that in itself, is interesting because it gives you an idea of how, I don’t know how deep people will put their roots when they come to the edge, you know, how do they see their time there? But at the fault, we see quite these kind of thoughts. We see quite clearly people that’s home. So, you know, why would they leave just because another king is asking for tax rather than the previous king who was asking for tax? You know, it’s that kind of perspective. So I think that was it really. I wanted this kind of fortification, boundary, these barriers. I wanted to look at it rather than through a lens of conflict and through a lens of imperial or political power. I wanted to see it through everyday life. I wanted to see it as normal and just how life went on even in places like this.

Dr G 29:04
I love this sense of pragmatism about daily life that is coming through and is a real thread through this whole book, actually, because it’s kind of like, what sort of decisions do you make when you’re not the powerful person, when you’re not the person writing the laws? And you find yourself, you know, well, I’ve been sent to this for it, and I guess I’ll figure out life from here. And, you know, opportunities come along, you make some friends, you meet a girl, it’s kind of nice, and all of a sudden your family’s been there for like, two or three generations, and you’re like, Oh, it’s good here. You know, we’re these kind of people now.

Dr Rad 29:38
I think it also speaks to the universal human hatred of moving.

Dr G 29:45
There’s nothing worse than having to pack up all those boxes.

Dr Rad 29:49
I hate it, and I’m glad to know that people in the ancient world hated it too.

Owen Rees 29:56
Well. There we go. They are just like us,

Dr G 29:58
So similar. And you touched on this idea of language with this idea of the ‘wretched Kushite’, and I think this leads us really nicely into thinking about these really loaded terms that we tend to get when we think about the center versus the edge, and that idea of the ‘civilized’ center and the ‘barbarian’ edges. And these sorts of terms are hugely problematic, obviously been repurposed in terrible ways throughout all of human history, even recently. And I’m interested in how a study like yours can help us combat this sort of us versus them dichotomy that comes through in that kind of language use?

Owen Rees 30:41
Yeah, I think it ultimately, it rips it apart. Absolutely rips it apart. It shows it for what it is, which is a rhetoric of privilege, basically from the center, because they can think like that, because the only I mean classics, classical, Athens for fifth, fourth century. Athens, a good example of this, if you are Plato, living in, you know, walking around, Athens the only barbarian, one of the better word, the only foreigner you will meet is predominantly either a trader or an enslaved person. That’s pretty much it. So you can have these kind of views, you know, of foreign peoples, because it doesn’t really affect you day to day. But when you look to the edges, where, you know, like we were talking about you, you end up marrying these people. You end up living with these people. These people become your friends. These people become your colleagues. These people become your network for trade. You just can’t you just can’t think like that, or you can’t internalize all those beliefs of well, you can definitely internalize your belief of your own superiority, but you can’t really internalize the belief of their innate inferiority in every way. So the idea that the barbarian person is intellectually inferior, morally inferior in just every single possible way, it just doesn’t make day to day feasible. So the distinction very much kind of falls apart when they live side by side. So we we see this in particular in the book or two sections on Greece, the Greek world and the Roman world. And it just falls apart time and again as you look at it. I mean, ultimately, barbarianism as a construct and civilization as an idea are usually. They usually appear in the ancient world to justify something or to garner support for something. So think about, you know, the anti-Gaul rhetoric just before Caesar’s invasion. Think of the anti-Persian rhetoric after the Persian Wars in classical Athens. It’s all to justify things that are either happening or are going to happen or have happened. So you’ve got to see it for the ideological rhetoric is what I find quite interesting about it is, if you, if you take it at face value, it kind of counters a lot of stories we tell ourselves about our own history, maybe not Australia.

Dr G 33:11
Oh, I think definitely Australia.

Dr Rad 33:13
Oh I don’t know about that

Owen Rees 33:15
I’ll leave that with you, but a classic one in Britain. So British British history. One of the key parts is the Roman invasion. We don’t talk about ourselves as an invaded imperial opponent. We don’t talk about stuff like that. So what we inherit, in terms of the ancient history from Roman period, is that we take the role of the Romans, which is quite odd when you think about it, because we were not the Romans.

Dr G 33:49
I don’t want to say that this is a classic English move, but

Owen Rees 33:55
It definitely is. But what we don’t talk about, for instance, and I love this, doing the research for the book is just how much Britain is a backwater of the ancient world, just how looked down on, just how how much it is looked down on, like to the point where, before the Roman expansion, really, the Greeks aren’t even convinced it’s real, because it just sounds so horrific.

Dr Rad 34:19
It rains ALL the time

Owen Rees 34:24
I know, and it’s not wrong, so we know that. But the other thing is, ultimately, it’s the edge of the world. I mean, even the early Roman, sort of early Roman, imperial writers talk about it as literally, the edge of the world. So it gets to this point where, okay, we accept it probably is real. But God, no human would live any further than that. And it’s just, it’s just amazing. So you know, what we inherit as British people is this story from the Roman perspective, about Roman power. What we don’t inherit is the Roman perspective on Britain itself, which is like this is not a very great place to be, very great place to be. And I just love that. I love that I love not only the history of the ancient world, but also how the ancient world is translated into the modern day, and what bits of it we like to choose and what bits of it we like to ignore. But in terms of the barbarian civilization, yes, I mean, the ancient world is the foundation of it. To this day, you’ve kind of alluded to it already. I’ve said it outright. Britain has, for a long time considered itself the inheritor of the Roman Empire. You know, if it’s not Britain, it’s Napoleon. If it’s not Napoleon, and it’s bloody the Third Reich. Everyone wants to be the Roman Empire. Everyone wants to be the harbinger of civilization, shall we say, and make themselves the inheritor of what they consider the lineage of civilization. And when you look at the edge of the world, you just kind of see how ridiculous an idea that really is.

Dr Rad 36:00
I think somebody needs to Hollywood that, because I don’t know if you noticed, but the Romans always have British accents.

Dr G 36:10
This does – as a side note – this does weird out my Italian husband, he cannot watch HBO’s Rome because he is thoroughly baffled by the representation of Romanness through the English accent.

Owen Rees 36:24
Well, did you see the whole complaint about Denzel Washington and Gladiator 2, having basically the New York accent, I think it’s the New York accent

Dr Rad 36:33
I think he talks like Denzel

Owen Rees 36:36
Yeah he does, it’s his voice. And I just love it, because people are like, this is the wrong accent. And everyone’s like, you mean British, don’t you? You mean he hasn’t got a British accent, which is just ridiculous. Yeah, fair point.

Dr Rad 36:48
Yeah, well, look, you know, I have to defend it, because that’s what Kirk Douglas was going for with his whole casting thing. He had real issues with certain people he wanted to cast you didn’t have the right accent. He was like, Oh, the British versus American accent. It’s so important, it must be preserved at all costs, regardless of acting ability. Moving on, though, we really loved the chapter on the city of Olbia, which was located in what is now Ukraine. Olbia draws influences from many peoples, and the result is a layered culture. Can you take us through some of the key moments in olbia’s ancient history as a city at the edges?

Owen Rees 37:30
Me, yeah, so we’re looking at, literally at the very edge of what is now Crimea, and it’s set up as a marketing a market city, basically, to kind of capitalize on the trade of the Black Sea and to try and push Greek trade further north into what is Scythia. So the land of the Scythians, this elusive conglomeration of various nomadic, semi-nomadic and static groups that the Greeks aren’t 100% sure who they are. And Olbia goes through – like the history of Olbia is just fascinating. I fell in love with the city whilst writing about it, because, basically: it sets itself up, has to deal with the Persian expansion in the region, survives the Persian Wars, but we don’t know how, in what way. We don’t know if it sides with the Persians. We don’t, we don’t know what it did to get by. It then has to deal with ancient Athens expansion in the Black Sea. That’s when the city becomes democratic, because Athens doesn’t really give you a choice with this. It then basically, can’t we cope with being democratic? So it relies a lot on the patronage of rich individuals. It then has to deal with the expansion of Alexander, Alexander the Great, the Macedonians. It survives that it looks to Scythian kings for one of a better term for support and for protection over time. But in the end, it’s abandoned for a period. We’re not a hundred percent sure why. It just kind of stops being a useful place to be. Too much conflict in the area is not worthwhile. And then, interestingly, some of the Scythian groups actually implore Greeks to come back and re establish it. So Olbia is re established, and that’s when we get the Romans interacting with it. And there’s a beautiful moment where one of our Roman writers is complaining because he goes there meets a Greek guy, young lad who’s Greek, is very bad, apparently, and is dressed like a Scythian which is a fascinating moment, because the Scythians wear the most effeminate of clothing known to the ancient Mediterranean.

Dr Rad 39:51
Is it pants?

Owen Rees 39:52
It is pants, it is trousers, and he’s described wearing them. He also described as holding a cavalryman’s sword as well. Very unusual, very unexpected, and it’s just the perfect encapsulation at Olbia of what’s going on, which is Greek people clinging to Greek identity, but adapting and embracing Scythian or local traditions as well. And we see this in a few ways. So we see in the coinage. Coins are not always the most exciting of things, but they tell us a lot. And at Olbia, they tell us an amazing story where the first coins we see at Olbia aren’t round coins like drachma and things like that. They’re actually shaped like arrowheads and dolphins. There’s a lot of speculation as to why it might be related to cult of Apollo. These are two symbols of Apollo in the region, but there are also two symbols that relate closely with the culture of the non Greeks in the region. Let’s call them Scythians, who put a lot of stock in archery as their sort of military prowess. And the dolphins is a local symbol because of the population in the Black Sea. So there is an argument that’s been made that this is possibly evidence of them trying to get local groups to embrace a financial system that they don’t have. So Olbia, the Greeks at Olbia are creating a monetary system that they can relate to and use in some way, which in itself, is interesting. So by the time we get proper coinage, so the kind of round drachma in Olbia, what we see are symbols that relate to Scythian culture. So we see a distinctive bow. We see a distinctive bow case imprinted on the coins. We also see a particular axe, the sagarius, which is not Greek. The Greeks are not interested in it. This is about this is clearly about giving a iconographic marker, an image that the Scythian groups or the local groups in the area understand what it is. And I just find that amazing. And it kind of feeds into something Herodotus, so the father of history tells us about the region and about the city. He describes a group living near Olbia. In his list of Scythians, he gives a long list of different Scythian groups, and in it, there’s one which he describes as Greek-Scythians, which doesn’t make a lot of sense if you think of it through the perspective of barbarians and Greeks and separations. So what does he actually mean about this? And so it was, you know, maybe they’re living more of a sedentary agricultural life, maybe saying, well, that’s going on, but maybe it’s because Greece and Scythians are actually intermingling and living together and marrying and intermarrying. And this is actually supported by a later inscription at Olbia, which talks about a group called the ‘mixellenes’, literally the half Greeks who live just outside of Obia. So we have this kind of archeological verification, corroboration, really, of what Herodotus is talking about, yes, Greeks and Scythians. This isn’t pie in the sky hippy nonsense. These people are actually living together, marrying, intermarrying, raising families like this is reality. This is what’s going on. And to kind of come back to both your points earlier, this contrast this with the center to this point is Athens. In Athens fifth century, fourth century. Plato has a little mini rant in one of his works about intermarriage, and he refers to a group called the ‘mixebarbaroi’. So the half barbarians, and I think this perfectly encapsulates the difference between the center and the edge. So in the center, if you intermarry with foreign peoples, you’re a half barbarian. At the edge, if you’re intermarry with other people, you’re half Greek. Don’t get me wrong, you’re still not Greek, you’re still not quite us, but it just gives you that inverted perspective that you see at the edge. If we only listen to Plato, you would think that was all there was.

Dr G 43:52
I do like this idea that not only is there sort of, like fine, sort of definitions within this, because that speaks to like people trying to like, find their identity and position themselves in particular ways. And Herodotus seems to be picking up on that as well. But you’ve mentioned a couple of times now that when we get out into this sort of really eastern section, that there is a sense from people from the center that the Greek is spoken differently, for sure, and the idea that the accent is shifting, and that maybe the language is bringing in loan words and things like this from the surrounding areas. And it’s not that they’re not speaking Greek, but it’s not, it’s not the Greek of the center, for sure, by the sounds of it. And to tie this back into thinking about your own journey as an author, this book takes us through heaps and heaps of places, and I feel like the thing that you would want to do to prepare to write for this book is to do a lot of travel and get to these edges and really, really come to grips with it from in the topographical sense, you know, just feel what it’s like to be in these places as well, because that would also decenter you as an author from your position in your natural center. And I’m interested in the sort of challenges that you have found in writing this book when it comes to that kind of thing.

Owen Rees 45:22
Yeah, this book was not pitched at a good time for what I wanted to do, because you’re right, I had, I had real plans to be a jet setting historian. I was going to live my dream since I was a kid. I was going to go around the world, go to all the ancient sites and just write stories about them. It was going to be amazing. The first planned trip I had. So I’ve got chapter on ancient Vietnam, and I was like, It’s the one place I’ve never been. I’ve never been anywhere like it. I’ve got to get to Vietnam. And I planned out the entire trip, and then the COVID lockdowns happened.

Dr G 45:54
Noo

Owen Rees 45:56
Yeah. So that was great. So that scuppered that plan. It scuppered my plans to go to Ethiopia. It scuppered my plans to go to Morocco. I had ambitions, and every time lockdown was lifted, I was like, Okay, I probably won’t get to Vietnam. Now, let’s try Ethiopia. Okay, next lockdown. I won’t get to Ethiopic Morocco. That’s just down the road a bit. Let’s try that next lockdown occurrence. By the time all restrictions were lifted, my deadlines were looming, so I had to readdress my expectations and my ambitions. So I was like, fair enough. I won’t be able to get to that. I’ve got to look but I’ve got to look nearer to home to get to some of these sites. I’ll go to Ukraine. I’ve got two chapters in the book. I’ll go to Ukraine. As I came up with that plan, Putin, tanks crossed the border. So that’s scuppered that plan. Another idea was I’ll get to Israel. That was a terrible idea, Sudan, that was never going to start. Basically everywhere I wanted to go, either terrible things that were happening started happening, or, in hindsight, went on to happen. So that was that was a bit of a problem.

Dr G 47:15
Sounds like you’re a powerful figure, Owen on world history and current affairs.

Speaker 1 47:21
You don’t want to appear in my books, but I’ll tell you that. Tou don’t, you don’t want to be named in my books.

Dr Rad 47:25
It seems like not a coincidence that all these places you wanted to go are still areas where sometimes you can’t.

Owen Rees 47:35
Yeah, there is something to be said for the edges of the world haven’t changed that much in our own perspective, and that in itself, is very interesting, and we do not have enough time to explore that one. But yeah, it is interesting just how many of these places are still considered these sort of no go places or problematic places or difficult places, rightly or wrongly, they still hold these reputations. And as you can kind of see, some of these reputations go back 1000s of years. I mean, to get around it, I ended up having to rely on a massive network of historians around the world, archeologists around the world, many of whom I’ve never met, never spoken to. And bless them, they were so supportive and so helpful, because, yeah, we were all in the same boat. Anyone who wanted to write about any of these places, we were in the same boat. We couldn’t travel. So as a result, I was able to tap into that and be sort of fed and guided to a lot of the cutting edge research. So a lot of academics were bored during lockdown, and so anyone who spoke to them about their own work got very excited. And so there was a lot of zoom calls because they wanted to talk to anyone, and they were like, have a look at this draft that I’m publishing in two years time. Have a look at this draft of stuff I’ve just found when I was last in Vietnam and all this kind of stuff. So the book, one of the things I liked about putting this book together was it was fed by a lot of the very, very current research coming out. And from my perspective, from your perspective, and all the amazing work you do, I think part of our job is to kind of translate that for the public and feed it to them in some way. So I love the idea that we’re not, you know, I’m not feeding them a narrative that’s been around for 10, 15, years in academia. Some academics will read some of this stuff and not know that’s been discovered yet, not know it’s come out, which is just beautiful, because I think the public should be, you know, as much of the forefront as everyone else.

Dr Rad 49:38
Absolutely. And that segues nicely into a question we thought we used to sort of wrap things up, which is, what questions or ideas would you like to leave listeners with when it comes to them thinking about the boundaries and the edges of the world?

Owen Rees 49:57
I suppose I’d love for you to be left with the same question that started the book. I don’t like to think I’ve answered it, because it was an open ended question, but ultimately, my first question when it came to this book was, okay, we know Greece, we know Rome. What else is going on? So I talk about, I think it’s 13 sites around the ancient world. I could have picked a completely different 13. And I just, if this book is to inspire anything, I want it to inspire inquisitiveness. There are lots of works, lots of podcasts, lots of documentaries about these other places. They’re just not the big, famous ones that everyone’s kind of reading and watching and listening to. So kind of, you know, follow your inquisitiveness, because ultimately, that’s what history is. I mean, history literally means inquiry. It is to be inquisitive. It’s not to tell narratives and have answers. It’s to ask questions and to keep exploring. And that includes people who just love history. You know, it’s not just academics and scholars. So I suppose the other thing, which I’m glad you two picked up on as well, so it’s we read a lot about ideas in Rome, in Egypt and Greece and all these places. Lot of ideas. How does that play out in reality? How does it play out in the other sides of the world? You know, it’s all well and good thinking. You know, what life is like in London? What’s it like in rural Scotland? You know, as for the British example. So kind of, yeah, follow your own interests, follow your own inquisitiveness, follow your own questions. And I suppose the final thing for this, and we kind of touched on it at the end. Does any of this stuff sound familiar? You know, we’re talking about life at the edge. We’re talking about all these regions. We’re talking about all these regions. We’re talking about conflict, but we’re talking about fear of foreigners, which is very easy to say when we live in the urban center, fear of migration, fear of movement of peoples, fear of nomadism. In Britain, we one of our most persecuted ethnic groups, or sort of ethnic minority groups, are the Gypsy, Romany and traveler community, the antithesis of sedentary life, constant movement. You know, we can get very focused on why people don’t like them right now, but actually, are we hearing a lot of the same themes, a lot of the same ideas from 2000 plus? I mean, even easier 4000 years ago, are we just rehashing the same fears and the same concerns, and when we start to realize why they did it in the ancient world, you can then start to ask questions of rule. Is that why we’re doing it now? You know, ancient history has a currency in the modern world. It has a pertinence in the modern world. And I think books like this kind of encourage us to ask those questions and to look a little deeper at our own, our own perspectives, as you both kind of rightly pointed out with me.

Dr Rad 52:50
No, well, I mean, I think this is the thing in that we’ve talking talking a lot about barbarism and civilization and those sorts of ideas as teachers of ancient history, I’m sure we’ve all encountered I know I have plenty of students who look at the past and say, Oh, how ridiculous they were. So backwards. We’ve got all the answers now, and I constantly have to ask them now. I’m like, Okay, if we have all the answers, then why is it this time period that’s facing an existential crisis in the form of climate change, which people are still actually taking the time to argue about. I mean, do we have all the answers? If we do, I’d love to have a look at them.

Dr G 53:32
Please show me that book.

Dr Rad 53:33
Yeah, exactly. So when people, when people do, say to you, when they encounter something that’s very strange about the ancient past, obviously, there’s nothing wrong with laughing at the way that humans behave at any time period or in any place. But it is that idea that a lot of people have that now is the best and the past has to be there for the worst, so…

Owen Rees 53:53
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Well, I think the other thing, I suppose, one of the other drivers of this book, so you mentioned in my introduction, my lovely introduction, by the way, appreciated that where I run this website, badancient which is website dedicated to kind of debunking a lot of misconceptions about the ancient world. Now this isn’t just pyramids being built by aliens and things like that. It’s also perspectives. So we get asked questions from not a naive perspective, not even an ill informed perspective, but a narrow perspective. And the answer isn’t that you’re wrong about a question about Roman culture or Egyptian life or anything. It’s not that you’re wrong, but it’s that you’re only giving an answer based on life for 5% of the people. A classic example would be if you look at the Egyptian evidence, I mentioned in Roman Egypt all these amazing papyrus papyrological evidence we have. We’ve got a lot of it, which shows independent women living normal independent women lives. But you know, it’s the classic, isn’t it? If you pick up any ancient history. Book about Greece, Rome, Egypt, anything like that, you’ll generally get this impression that women may stay at home, women have no autonomy, women have no authority, and there is some truth to bits of that, but we shouldn’t limit their potential in our own storytelling of them and our own narrative of them when the evidence shows us differently. So in there’s a lovely village called Karanis, which is a very poor village in Faiyum in Roman Egypt. And we have evidence of women running businesses. We have evidence of women living entirely independent of men. In one of the census records, we have all female households. So Roman history tells us there has to be a male guardian at all times. It has to be a son, if it’s not a father, if it’s not a husband, but we have census records. Well, that’s just not true. There are still legal issues. They have to officially have a guardian. But that doesn’t look the same in normal life. You know, it’s a paperwork issue rather than an everyday issue.

Dr G 55:58
That’s fine, you make a statue, you call it a dude, and you’ll be like, that’s the man, don’t worry about that.

Dr Rad 56:03
I’m thrilled to hear that Destiny’s Child would have been very at home in this place.

Owen Rees 56:11
So yeah, so it’s – completely lost your train of thought – But ultimately, this is this is it. So when we have our laughing moments in the classroom or in conversations about the ancient world ago. They’re very backwards, they’re very this, they’re very that. Yes, we got to ask questions about ourself. Yes, we can ask questions about how different are we really with a lot of these topics. But the other question is always worth asking, which is, well, how much of that is just an elite male perspective of what they think life should be like. Because on the edge of the world, evidence tells us differently.

Dr Rad 56:45
Yeah. I mean, if we had only left behind the blog of someone who was part of, like, a, you know, men’s rights group, and that was it for for you know, a lot of civilization, I think our perspective on what was happening now would be quite different.

Owen Rees 57:02
Yeah, I love the idea that Aristotle was just a blogger, really angry blogger, in the basement of his mom’s house,

Dr Rad 57:10
and that Pliny the Elder was just a kook.

Owen Rees 57:14
No one took him seriously.

Dr G 57:16
He was all over the trivial details, that’s for sure.

Owen Rees 57:21
That’s right, it belongs on Reddit.

Dr G 57:24
Well, thank you so much for joining us, Owen, this has been a real treat, and I’m very excited for people to get your book ‘The Far Edges of the Known World’ into their hands and to get their eyeballs on the page and to do as much exploration of this kind of topic as they can, because there is so much fun to be had. I think, in coming to grips with like, what is life actually like when we don’t just read elite men.

Owen Rees 57:59
There’s the tagline, yeah, brilliant. Thank you so much for having me. I’ve really enjoyed this.

Dr G 58:12
Thank you for listening to this episode of the Partial Historians. You can find our sources sound credits and transcript in our show notes over at partialhistorians.com. We offer a huge thank you to you, if you’re one of our illustrious Patreon supporters, if you enjoy the show, we’d love your support in a way that works for you. Leaving a nice review really makes our day. We’re on Ko-Fi for one off or ongoing donations, or Patreon, of course. Our latest book, ‘Your Cheeky Guide to the Roman Empire’, is published through Ulysses Press. It is full of stories that the Romans probably don’t want you to know about them. This book is packed with some of our favorite tales of the colorful history of ancient Rome. Treat yourself or an open minded friend to Rome’s glories, embarrassments and most salacious claims with ‘Your Cheeky Guide to the Roman Empire’.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

The post Special Episode – The Far Edges of the Known World with Owen Rees appeared first on The Partial Historians - Ancient Roman History with smart ladies.

WARNING! This post and episode both contain spoilers!

In case you somehow missed it, the hotly anticipated sequel to Gladiator (2000) hit the cinemas in November 2024. Gladiator II follows the story of Lucius Verus, the child of Lucilla and the hero from the first film, Maximus. Nope, we did not know that was a thing either.

Poster for Gladiator II, Source: https://deadline.com

After being separated from his imperial family following the death of his uncle (the Emperor Commodus), the adult Lucius ends up in the arena. His owner is Macrinus, an actual historical figure who served as emperor briefly in the third century CE. The film follows Macrinus and Lucius as they navigate the complicated political world of Rome under the Emperors Caracalla and Geta. Will Lucius be able to rid Rome of corruption, once and for all? (Dramatic music)   

Joining us today to discuss the film is the delightful Lindsay Steenberg.

Special Episode – Gladiator II with Dr Lindsay Steenberg

Dr Lindsay Steenberg is currently a Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at Oxford Brookes University where she co-ordinates the graduate programme in Popular Cinema. Her research interests are violence and gender in postmodern and postfeminist media culture. If you like true crime, you should definitely check out her back catalogue. Whilst Dr Steenberg has published widely and regularly presents at conferences, our particular point of connection is her interest in gladiators.  She is the author Are you not entertained? Mapping the Gladiator Across Visual Media, which was published by Bloomsbury in 2020.

We hope that you enjoy our conversation as we unpack:

Our music is by Bettina Joy de Guzman.

Dr Lindsay Steenberg’s book Are You Not Entertained? Mapping the Gladiator Across Visual Media.
We recommend it!

Dr Rad 0:00
Hello. You’re about to listen to a special episode of the partial historians, which is all about gladiator two, a movie set in the reign of Caracalla and Geta

so

Dr G 0:12
so we are warning you in advance that this conversation will contain spoilers if you have not yet gone to the cinemapost haste, my friends get there soon and come back and listen. Or if you don’t care about spoilers, and in fact, you thrive in an environment where you know all of the details before you see a thing, please continue listening and enjoying.

Dr Rad 0:35
And it pretty much turns out as we all expected. Dr G Maximus came back to life and married me in the future, just as I always wanted. Finally, a New Zealand man finds his Australian bride, that’s right, and now on with the show you.

Music. Welcome to the partial historians.

Dr G 1:10
We explore all the details of ancient Rome,

Dr Rad 1:15
everything from political scandals, the love affairs, the battles wage and when citizens turn against each other, I’m Dr rad and

Dr G 1:25
I’m Dr G. We consider Rome as the Romans saw it by reading different authors from the ancient past and comparing their stories. Join

Dr Rad 1:36
us as we trace the journey of Rome from the founding of the city.

Hello and welcome to another special episode of the partial historians. I am one of your hosts, Dr rad,

Dr G 2:00
and I’m Dr G

Dr Rad 2:02
And we are super excited because we’re going to be talking about another gladiator movie today. Dr G, just when you thought you couldn’t get enough,

Dr G 2:10
I can’t get enough. That’s why I’m here, exactly. And

Dr Rad 2:15
we are super lucky to be joined by an expert, an international expert, Dr Lindsay Steenberg is currently a senior lecturer in Film Studies at Oxford Brookes University, where she coordinates the graduate program in popular cinema. Her research interests are violence and gender in post modern and post feminist media culture. If you like true crime, you should definitely check out her back catalog. Whilst Dr Steenberg has published widely and regularly presents at conferences, our particular point of connection is her interest in gladiators. She is the author of, are you not entertained? Mapping the gladiator across visual media, which was published by Bloomsbury in 2020. Being astute listeners, I am sure that you have all correctly guessed that she is here to discuss gladiator two with us, which was at time of recording, just released in cinemas. Welcome Dr Steenberg,

Lindsay Steenberg 3:15
thank you so much for having me and for giving me the opportunity to talk about one of my favorite subject matters gladiator movies, you’re

Dr Rad 3:23
in good company here. You know, it’s one of the things I think that we do the most around here. So look, we are so keen to talk a little bit about gladiator two with you, and also the aspects that you have looked at in your work. So we thought we might start off with the part that people probably remember most vividly when they see a gladiator film, particularly a Ridley Scott gladiator film, and that is, of course, the arena sequences. So please tell us what is often the function of the arena in Gladiator films.

Lindsay Steenberg 3:54
Okay, again, favorite subject matter within my favorite subject, yeah. So I’ve spent more time than really any human should, thinking about arena fights. And I can say that when it comes to the almost the genre of gladiator movies, they’re the most important part. You can’t have a gladiator movie if there’s not any gladiating So I have spent quite a bit of time over quite a few different films, looking at the kinds of conventions, the way that the arena works. Why we keep going back there again and again? So in terms of what the function is really, it kind of defies the logic of a lot of action movies, which is, it isn’t just story or spectacle, it’s both at once. So you get them in a handy little place. The Arena fights almost a movie within a movie, it has a beginning, it has a middle, it has an end. You enter the amphitheater. You have some looking around to see what’s there, some spectacle over architecture and bodies. You get the quality violence in the middle. And then you sort of exit the amphitheater, and that’s the end of your of your. Little mini film within a film, they often are great places where you come to understand how power works in the film itself. It’s a nice little structure. I mean, if you think about the way an amphitheater is designed in that in that oval kind of shape, it means everybody can see everybody else. So the kind of layers of the way that the looking works. It’s like we in the cinema are looking at the amphitheater. The people who are in the audience are looking and being looked at. You’ve got the sort of authority figure sitting there watching, and we’re watching them. Then you’ve got the people down on the sands doing their thing. So it really it becomes a way to further the plot, to show who’s good, who’s bad, who’s skilled, who’s dead. It also sort of provides an opportunity to raise the stakes of the plot. So you’ve got sort of Concerned Women are often there in the audience, rarely on the sands, and they can kind of look and look worried, or look very desiringly at the gladiators on the sands as well. That’s a bit of a spectacle, in that sense, as well. And then the Gladiator, of course, is looking at the audience as well. And that’s why you get are you not entertained? He’s judging us for watching him. So it kind of does all of that at once, very economical kind of spectacle,

Dr G 6:10
a bit like an ancient panopticon where viewing is happening in all directions.

Lindsay Steenberg 6:15
It absolutely is. And that and the sort of really seamless functioning of power works. You know, you don’t have to work for it. The shape almost guarantees that. And you know, the movies love that. They love that shape. You can do some amazing things just with a nice little pan across the audience with a nice aerial establishing shot to see the shape of the amphitheater, so you can see, see deliberately, the way that power works in a very spatial sense. I

Dr Rad 6:39
must admit, I do love a good camera pan around the arena. It’s

Lindsay Steenberg 6:45
got to be done. It’s it’s hard to tell who that gaze belongs to when you do the full kind of almost 360 probably to the gladiators on the sand. But it just get lets you see questions what the spectacle is. Maybe it’s the audience. Because if you’ve seen, if you’ve seen the stars show Spartacus, the crowds and theaters are as much they’re frequently naked. One wonders why? Well, I guess one does,

Dr Rad 7:10
yeah, they kind of

Lindsay Steenberg 7:12
look around and they’re like, oh yes, look at the audience. So, you know, you get to do everything with that 360 pan.

Dr G 7:17
I think this sets things up really nicely, because you you’ve described it as this sort of miniature film within a film. And I do love that that kind of MIS on a beam aspect of it, and that leads us really nicely into thinking about what some of the conventions might be for these arena sequences. What are audiences expecting, and where have those expectations come from in cinematic history?

Lindsay Steenberg 7:39
Oh, I’ve got stuff on this. Let me tell you, it is a kind of mise en a beam. And one scholar describes it as a mise en spectacle. So, you know, a spectacle within the spectacle of the film. So the kinds of conventions that you get, it’s really interesting. As somebody who studies film, I hate saying that, like, oh, it’s universal. It’s always the same. Because films, you know, reveal a lot about the time and place they were made and the time and place they’re watched. But a gladiator fight is remarkably consistent. So the conventions are really, really sticky. We really like them. We’re not giving them up as to where they came from. It’s a little bit hard, you know, there’s a there’s a myth that may have basis in fact that when Ridley Scott was going to make the original gladiator film. Someone showed him a picture of the painting pelica verso, which has a gladiator waiting to kind of decide if he for the Emperor, decide if he’s going to die. And it’s, you know, so this neoclassical, sumptuous painting, and someone held it up and said, I want to make this painting into a movie. And that was how they kind of worked. So like in the Colosseum with those conventions. So the way the sort of typical, the typical arena fight goes is that you always want to have the pre fight sequence down in the backstage area, bonus points if it’s in that nice little basement beneath the trap doors, kind of area that’s very exciting. It always it often sounds really similar, like there’s like whisperings of gladiators in the corner, this kind of metallic clangings, and then you have that beautiful from the dark tunnel into the amphitheater sequence. It’s often sort of backlit, so you can see the outline, the silhouette. And then all of a sudden, you get the spectacle and that pan of of the arena and who’s watching and who’s there, the way that I sort of tend to shorthand describe what are the conventions of a gladiator fight. Are from the movie Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. So Tina Turner’s there, Mel Gibson’s there,

Dr Rad 9:29
two men into. One man leaves, two men enter, one man leaves. You know, how

Lindsay Steenberg 9:33
do you do a gladiator fight? That’s it. That’s what you do. It’s just two men enter. That’s the scenario. That’s the setup. But within that, of course, there’s nuance, there’s always a moment where the camera is going to spend a little extra time looking at the gladiator who wants you to have time to enjoy that he is part of the spectacle. You know, you’re going to have a moment where, if the gladiator fight is between more than just one versus one, you’re going to have a moment where the men bond, you know, where Maximus is like, you know, if any of you. Been in the army. Stick with me the same in the second film, like, Okay, guys, we’re going to do this together. So you get the bonding, the Brotherhood of the gladiators. You sort of do that. You get that moment of the salute, which I know historians, it makes them a bit itchy, because it never happens, but Hollywood says it did, and apparently we love that. We want the gladiatorial salute. I noticed that in the second gladiator film, they don’t really do that. I think they’re sidestepping. They’re trying not to get them themselves into some historical trouble. But the we who about are about to die, salute you is, is part of so many gladiator movies that we really like that, that part. So you normally get the salute before or the presentation of the gladiators before the fight. The fight is interesting because I am currently also writing a book now on fight scenes, so I spend a lot of time watching fighting. There’s not as much fighting in an arena fight as one might expect. A lot of it is talking, planning, staring at rhinoceros, thinking about what you’re going to do next, you know, giving a nice little speech to the crowd. How very dare you watch me staring at the Emperor? So, you know, the actual percentage of sword on shield action is quite small because it’s, it’s a narrative spectacles, whether as well as a violent spectacle. So you’ll always get that talking the moment of sort of dialog in there. And then, of course, you always have the thumbs up or the thumbs down again. I think it’s something that makes historians itchy, but it’s something that Hollywood says, Yep, we want it. We want thumbs up, we want thumbs down. It’s really easy and where it all comes from. I mean, I’ve probably, I’ve probably watched more gladiator movies than than most humans. Any human it comes from. The beginning of cinema, you get these kind of biblical or historical epics that were made in Italy. I mean, Hollywood loves a biblical epic. So you know, right down, even in the in the silent era, or the early era of cinema, that you still got these kind of conventions. You still would have somebody fighting animals inside of an amphitheater. You would still get the thumbs up, thumbs down. So it’s, I’d say, that the gladiator fights on screen are as old as cinema, so they often involve Pompeii. That’s that’s a place we like to fight, and

Dr Rad 12:07
we like it when the volcano erupts during a gladiator we

Lindsay Steenberg 12:11
really do. If you can get gladiators fighting for their lives behind the volcano exploding, we get disaster movie. We get action movie. It’s all

Dr Rad 12:17
happening exactly, and what are they going to do to finish the fight or run?

Lindsay Steenberg 12:21
I think you’ll find both. They’re running, fighting what’s happening, and

Dr Rad 12:27
they should grab their romantic interest as they leave, because you

Lindsay Steenberg 12:31
don’t want to leave her. I mean, you do. A lot of ladies have been killed in Gladiator movies. They Yeah, in movies that were we watch now. Sometimes she doesn’t even get a name. Maximus, wife has no name. She she’s the dead wife, the murdered wife who who prompts him to vengeance. That didn’t always used to be the case in an old Italian pedlum film, you often had the ladies had names. But in the millennial sort of moment, it was all about the sort of the gladiators trauma rather than any kind of romance. It seems that, you know, after Maximus, there’s no love story anymore. We’ve abandoned that which is one sadness and violence. We want

Dr Rad 13:14
those Wistful glances. You

Lindsay Steenberg 13:16
know, so much wistful yeah,

Dr Rad 13:18
now I am so curious to ask you now what you thought about the arena sequences in Gladiator two. Because I must admit, I really quite liked the first gladiator film, and I remember when it initially came out, there was a lot of talk, obviously, about the way that they’d staged those arena sequences, particularly the ones that involved the Tigers and that sort of thing. And there is a really curious thing that Dr G has often picked up on, which is the picking up of the arena sand and the rubbing between the hands that Maximus and now Lucius does spoilers, everybody. But yeah, so we’d love to know what you think. Yeah, we’d love to know what you think about the arena sequences in Gladiator too.

Lindsay Steenberg 14:01
I mean, I was, I was in it for the arena sequences. That’s what I was there for. So glad that there were sharks involved. It was, I don’t know too much, I think it was delightful. In terms of the arena sequences. I did do the kind of slightly nerdy film thing. I brought a notebook to the cinema hoping that no one would notice, because I wanted to count the arena sequences, because in the original film, there’s five arena sequences, and they range from that first one in North Africa, where he fights in that wooden structure, and it’s quite sort of homespun, I guess, the amphitheater, and then up into the logical Yeah, just a little a baby, baby amphitheater, and then he goes to the Colosseum, and part of the shock and awe of that fight is the structure, the architecture itself, like this is Rome. So I was quite curious to see how many there would be and where, and they echo each other so closely. We get the first fight sequence with Lucius and this terrifying CGI, apes, monkeys.

Dr G 14:58
Yeah, we. CGI baboons

Lindsay Steenberg 15:01
aliens. Like, why didn’t they have fur? I find

Dr G 15:05
it was a shocking choice. It

Lindsay Steenberg 15:07
was such a strange choice. And I find monkeys very frightening. So I was like, Whoa, I would I’d rather they would be, yeah,

Dr Rad 15:12
they were frightening, but also so unreal, like, so unrealistic for the first fight, like you said, like the first film. It seemed right that we started off in that sort of humble, provincial setting. Yeah, with this one, it feels like we started too big and

Lindsay Steenberg 15:28
and then with a with a strange, almost science fiction element. So yes, what I think marked the Coliseum or the the amphitheater fights of the first film was the combination of this digital spectacle like the crowd generation software was state of the art at the turn of the millennium, and people were really impressed with it, but it was also that it was rooted on the sands in that authenticity of like face punching action. So this in that fight, I thought, okay, here we’re going to get that lovely combination of digital augmentation, but authentic, like corporeal authenticity. And then I don’t know, crazy bald monkeys came, so I was sort of like, okay, I’m willing to I’m it was okay. But then that they was, soon as they got back to Rome, I felt okay. We can recall, we can recover this the arena fights were pretty spectacular. I’d say the choreography of the violence within the amphitheaters was probably more nuanced. It speaks to a franchise based American cinema that demands very sophisticated fighting. It doesn’t just want your John Wayne walk up, punch a guy in the face and leave no it doesn’t want that thing that they used to do in sort of Hollywood swashbucklers, where you sort of gently slice somebody, they bend over and they die. They wanted to have that kind of brutal realism, and it did deliver. So I haven’t, I haven’t crunched the numbers on the density of the violence, but I suspect if it follows the pattern that all other Hollywood movies do, there will be more violence, Less talking, more fighting. And I would say that kind of I loved the naval battle, probably just for the spectacle rather than, I don’t know where the boats were gonna go. It was a pretty tight space,

Dr G 17:08
a tight space with artificial islands. So where were

Lindsay Steenberg 17:13
they gonna go and the sale? Did they need a sale? They didn’t need a sale. But, you know, they crashed together. And we did get some some fighting there. And it, I kind of it felt like the sequel to 300 which was sort of 300 but in water, this was sort of like Gladiator, but in water speed. So I felt like that’s, that’s what they were doing, like now it’s not safe to get in the water. The sharks were great. I loved them, and so were the kind of battle they had the rhinoceros, which I have to admit, I I felt very emotionally attached to that Rhino, and the little sad noises it was making, oh, poor Rhino. And then Pedro Pascal brings his mustache into the amphitheater for some quality, sort of like Oedipal father surrogate son kind of moment. And it that that sort of like that was a good kind of way to wrap up a narrative moment, but make it violent so that you get plot moved lots of violence. And then, of course, it was a little disappointing that Denzel Washington and Paul Mescal didn’t fight each other in the Colosseum, but I understand that they wanted to fight in water and beyond Rome, so I forgave them for that. I just kind of wish they’d brought it back into the Colosseum for the final point. Oh, that

Dr G 18:25
would have been a moment, yeah, because it did feel like the river sequence, if we can call that body of river, is maybe the smallest tributary of the Tiber I’ve ever seen. It

Lindsay Steenberg 18:37
was a modest, little, very

Dr G 18:39
modest, yeah. I’m like, Guys, are you sure this is where

Lindsay Steenberg 18:44
you want to have your final fight? Yeah, I

Dr Rad 18:46
think you put your finger on something there. I actually was not that enamored of Lucius as a character. I think that you did a good job in the action sequences. There was enough brawn there and everything. But I must admit, I found Pedro Pascal and Denzel Washington much more compelling to watch. And I agree. I would have loved to have seen them come together rather than what we actually got, which is, of course, is Lucius and Macrinus coming together after his confrontation with his stepfather. I’m going to call

Lindsay Steenberg 19:22
him Pedro Pascal, is the surrogate dad we all didn’t know we needed. Yeah, he’s always picking up something like whether it’s a little Yoda or, you know, video game character,

Dr G 19:34
finding the child in all of us along the way. I want to hone in for a little moment on the nomarchia sequence, because I think this is one of those things that as a lover of Roman history, even though I’d be I’m very willing to pick up on the detail. I was super excited that this was something that was included in this film, because I feel like it’s highly unlikely that I’m going to get to see a sea battle. People in the Colosseum, again, in any film in my lifetime. And I’m interested in your assessment on how well Ridley Scott is bringing that idea to life, and how his conception of it sort of compares to some of the ancient evidence we have for this kind of thing happening. Well,

Lindsay Steenberg 20:18
I was very excited about it as well, and it has been the foremost question that I’ve been asked, you know, by colleagues, by students, just interested, friends, going there, they didn’t flood the Colosseum, how that’s so unrealistic, and they kind of see it as this way over the top spectacle. And when I say no, they they did. This was a thing that happened. There were naval battles. People watched them. People are a bit astonished. Now, I

Dr G 20:41
can’t, I can’t

Lindsay Steenberg 20:43
testify to any evidence that sharks were involved. I think they’re sort of quite how did they transport the where was the tank? There’s many, many of this would mean

Dr G 20:52
that the salt the water in the Colosseum would need to be salt water. It seems very unlikely. A

Lindsay Steenberg 20:58
little tricky, a little tricky, but the fact that it’s within the realm of possibility, I think that is something that is I was like, Yes, I want to see this. I want, I want all that CGI has to offer to bring this spectacle to me. Because I have seen naval battles in other gladiator films. I think I can only recall one I looked at my list before speaking to you, there is a 19 I’ve wrote it down, 1962 film called The Last Days of Herculaneum, or the destruction of Herculaneum, depending on the translation and they have, they stage a naval battle. Our hero is going undercover as a gladiator for reasons we we don’t need to know. There is a lot, it doesn’t matter. But he goes and they have this, and it is a low budget Italian- French co-production. So this is the days of those cheap muscle men, Italian films, which are kind of joyful and really fun to watch. And he goes and there’s a pond, and they stage a full sort of canoe battle with, you know, all the finest that you know, homespun low budget gladiator movies had to offer. So I found that was one of the most memorable gladiator moments that I recall out of all the Italian movies that I watched, Steve Reeves, the former Mr. Universe, Breaking Chains and stuff and throwing trees. I’m like, no, no, I was in it for that pond battle. That was great. It was slightly awkward as they all tried to fight on tiny boats, but that sort of shows you the what if you just got together, grabbed a camera and some rafts and tried on the pond, versus Ridley Scott’s imagining of all the tools and the toys and the spectacles and the islands and the sharks and the arrows and the fire. So I, sort of part of me, wanted it to be even more over the top. We’re here. We’re on the water. Let’s make it happen. I mean, we know that it’s a possibility, so let’s just roll with that. But I expect he had to sort of temper his his shock and awe vision to be able to still tell a story, because it’s hard to make the human element stand out in that kind of a naval battle. Naval battles, I think, are often quite tricky in terms of staging a fight scene. You have to be on the two sides. If they’re just shooting at each other from their opposite boats. That’s a different kind of scenario. If you want the stakes to be personal, they have to go on each other’s boats. They have to get close enough. So I think in that sense, it did work. People who I saw the film with suggested that it was very video game like that. That moment seemed a little bit like an Assassin’s Creed video game. So I think there was something kind of like, this is the next level to it as well. But I think they, I think they did a good job. I enjoyed it. I like I said, I would have liked even more just, I throw it all, throw it all at a water fight scene. I

Dr Rad 23:45
have to ask, What? What is more? What is more? On top of islands and sharks and ramming, it could have

Lindsay Steenberg 23:49
been islands. It could have been sure. I mean, we could have brought some, some women right into the amphitheater, and perhaps an emperor could have fallen at least one of them. I mean, there were two. There’s a spare. Let’s get, let’s get Caracalla.

Dr Rad 24:00
Let’s have one of them drown. Yeah, maybe

Lindsay Steenberg 24:03
some

Dr G 24:04
nunchucks falls onto a boat. Yeah?

Lindsay Steenberg 24:08
An explosion or two, like, bring Michael Bay on to consult, something could explode.

Dr Rad 24:12
You’re right. You know, we’ve also had the Colosseum actually start to collapse and the crowds start to fall into, you know,

Lindsay Steenberg 24:21
the crowd falling in later. So that was, yeah, more, maybe more sort of Errol Flynn style, like ropes, a little, little swinging in there as

Dr G 24:31
well. Yeah, missed opportunity that one. So, yeah, it was, it

Lindsay Steenberg 24:34
was enough. It was definitely excessive. But somebody could have ridden a shark,

Dr Rad 24:38
yeah, you say Right? Because that was the main thing that people have said to me, they’re like sharks gamma.

Lindsay Steenberg 24:43
I mean, yes, like I said, I don’t think there were sharks, but there could have been other that they have reported, other animals, look

Dr G 24:50
but the thing that I’ve talked to people about, and I firmly stand by, is that if the Romans could have put sharks in there, they would have

Lindsay Steenberg 24:59
that’s a. Exactly what I said. I’m like, Look, if they could find a way to get a shark into an amphitheater, they would have been 100% behind it. They’ve been a yes,

Dr G 25:09
very keeping in the spirit of the Romans, could

the sharks fight each other? They would have found a way to make this happen. So

Dr Rad 25:15
really, the great tragedy of this is that the Romans themselves will never see this movie. They will

Lindsay Steenberg 25:20
never see the movie about themselves, although, I mean, when it comes to sort of Rome on screen, the interesting thing is that that, of course, it is, is rarely about Rome. Gladiator is as much about America as it is about Ancient Rome and what we think it was like. So the heroism we see there is very American. Yes,

Dr Rad 25:38
it’s okay. So now that you brought this up, I definitely would love to probe a little bit more about this, because one of the things I felt after seeing gladiator two, I didn’t like it as much as the first film, and I felt that it was because it was kind of a typical sequel, you know, and that the villains were worse, the explosions were bigger, you know, There was more action, but I felt there was a little less heart and soul and story, and like the main character, for me, was lacking. I mean, as kind of laughable sometimes, as Maximus is, in some ways, there’s something so strangely compelling about him, as characterized by Russell Crowe, which I did not find with Lucius so much as I did with fake characters like Macrinus. And I also felt that the first gladiator did have a more obvious commentary on contemporary America and that sort of thing with its I always got the impression that it was sort of talking about how the American people are distracted from politics and what is really going on by entertainment and those sorts of messages, which actually sort of stem a little bit from, obviously, what some of the critics of ancient Rome said as well about their own society. So I’m curious to know what you think about gladiator two and what it speaks to at this moment in time.

Lindsay Steenberg 26:57
Yeah, absolutely. The first one did seem to be a very kind of, you know, it’s putting a toga on something, but it is commenting on, what is it like to live in a spectacle driven society? What’s it like to kind of worship celebrities, to create a celebrity who becomes so powerful that even the Emperor can’t give them a thumbs down. That idea, the sort of the Oliver Reed moment where he says, You know, I didn’t succeed because I was the best. I succeeded because I was the most loved. I was most famous. To me, that was an excellent kind of way of thinking about how this fighter performer worked, and how celebrity can be built and manipulated. Whereas there was, I thought that there was going to be a little bit of the similar kind of thing, you know, Lucius would be built up as this celebrity gladiator and and that celebrity would be something that we could think about that seemed to have been emptied a little bit. Yes, he was famous. They were chanting. They liked him, but that didn’t seem to make much of a difference. They also quite liked Pedro Pascal’s character as this heroic general, but that didn’t seem to be something we were thinking about. So it did seem to be a little bit emptied out of some of the more poetic, allegorical moments that the film had, which I found a bit disappointing, because, you know, a nice ancient allegory worked so well, and that idea that the barbarians are at the gate, or, sort of, you know, something is falling, we’re under threat. That’s something that that gladiator really wanted to think about, you know, what happens when the Empire Falls? What happens if we imagine something beyond this kind of rule? Whereas I found that sort of Lucius speeches were sort of, they don’t end tyranny, which is, yes, nobody wants tyranny, but it didn’t seem to be very specific. It didn’t seem to speak to the moment of what would happen after. So I was a bit disappointed for that missing satire commentary. I was sad when Maximus died. I mean, he was a bit funny sometimes, you’re right, he was a bit over the top, and his trauma was so over the top. My name is Gladiator, and I loved it. I loved that melodrama, and I did feel moved when he died. And you know, he was this dream of Rome. Could it ever be good enough to sort of be worthy of his death? Of course not. There was no, no real sacrifice that we were meant to mark in the second one, because Lucius didn’t die. Maybe it would have been better if he died. Do I sound horrible, because then he would have fallen again for Rome, and you know, Pedro Pascal’s general didn’t that that moment didn’t have enough gravity and weight to really make us be like, oh, oh, okay, we’ve lost something here. And you know, why was he there? Why did they want to stop their takeover of Rome to save Lucius? It some of the things were sort of missing in that it was, I think, standard run of the mill, mid level gladiator Movie. Yeah, what it didn’t do was chew the scenery too much that I was expecting. I thought that Denzel Washington was going to go full Oliver Reed. He didn’t like, like Kiefer Sutherland in Pompeii. I thought he was going to go, yes, he he sort of held a kind of emotional center in the movie that. So it didn’t spin out of control. But yeah, I think I don’t know whether it depends on when you see it. You know, if I saw it when I was younger, and I hadn’t seen a film like it, does that make it more impactful? So maybe if I were 15 years old, seeing this film, knowing Paul Mezcal from other shows, like normal people, I would feel like I did in sort of watching the first film. I’m not sure if it is, but I do feel it was a bit a bit more superficial than the first Yeah.

Dr Rad 30:46
And it felt like it was divided between Lucius, Lucilla and the general, as he’s so often called, Pedro Pascal character, gotta have a call in the game, just the general. Yeah. It just felt like it was maybe more divided between them, whereas the first film, it was really all centered on Maximus, even though there were other people who got involved, like Gracchus and Lucilla and that sort of thing. This one, I felt like it was, again, like a typical sequel. There were more distractions and rabbit holes, and there was just, there was just less to root for, I think, with Lucius, you know. And it was just Yeah, I was that was actually the main thing that disappointed me. It wasn’t so much the you know, as you say, the arena sequences were executed really well in terms of their cinematography and the spectacle and that sort of thing. But I just felt I was lacking that, that classic gladiator message that films like Spartacus and glad he had to have, yeah,

Dr G 31:42
if I may, I think the reason why you might be disappointed is because the general represents the kind of vision that Maximus was attempting to pursue but was unable to fulfill through his death in the arena, and for him to exit the film so suddenly means that actually, that that narrative aspect is completely lost, and all we’re left with now is what we now know is the idea of the natural Imperial inheritance that has already been laid out by Marcus Aurelius through Commodus. And we know how that goes, and it doesn’t go well, so there’s not a lot of optimism Fauci is coming into this. No, even though he’s very angry and he’s filled with rage, he’s still a prince of Rome. And are we supposed to go for those guys? Because the other ones that we’ve got on show in this movie, Caracalla and Geta, not, not great, exactly. They’re

Lindsay Steenberg 32:39
not, they’re not great. They’re standard Roman villains. They’re, you know, excessive and effeminate, which, you know, classical Hollywood often equates with sort of perversity. Yeah, the notion that it is this ATRA lineal kind of inheritance, like he’s his destiny is to be Prince of Rome. It felt like what I kept thinking, what Weren’t we going for a republic was that I thought we were talking about a republic. No, yeah, we’re good.

Dr Rad 33:04
And there’s so much that’s left unexplained about, you know, they just have this, you know, this scene where Lucille hurries Lucius out of the arena after Maximus and Commodus both die to get him to safety, to explain how he exists and how this whole storyline is possible. But there’s no explanation about Well, why didn’t Gracchus and the rest of the senators step up and do what they wanted to do in that power vacuum moment? How on earth did Caracalla and Geta ever get into power where did they come from? Exactly, there’s a total lack of any, you know, connecting the dots there, which, which is why it’s so frustrating. Because you’re like, I don’t understand. It seemed like Maximus was getting there. I felt like the only moment where there was a possibility for something similar was when the general dies. Although I didn’t really love the timing of that. When Lucius says, Is this how Rome treats its heroes? I’m like, Okay, well, that’s a little that’s something a little bit different. There was maybe some possibilities there in terms of some, you know, some commentary about how, you know, people can be treated, particularly how good people are treated in more corrupt societies. But again, it never went anywhere. He just, he just died. And that was that it wasn’t really followed through in any major way.

Lindsay Steenberg 34:22
I think some of it, too is down to the shorthand that Marcus Aurelius has as a good emperor, and the sort of recent movement towards sort of popular or vernacular stoicism. So, you know, there are places on the internet where it’s called broicism. It is this kind of popular, populist philosophy where, you know, it’s used a lot people like martial artists or MMA fighters. So you’ve got the sense that Marcus Aurelius is a good philosopher king, and that Lucius, you don’t have to answer the questions because he is. Angry and stoic at the same time. So it isn’t that you want to get rid of the kings, it’s you just want a good one, not a bad one, which I think to me, even though I knew that Commodus wasn’t going to die and leave a republic in his wake, because we may have studied a little bit of history here, I loved that. That’s what they went for, that they were like, You know what? We don’t want a good king. We don’t want a bad king. We want no king, no king. So this one kind of backpedaled on that a little bit. So I thought, Oh, you could have, especially since the two emperors were awful and, you know, have this interesting moment in US leadership there, there was, there was room to do some interesting things that they sort of

Dr Rad 35:39
picked away Exactly, yeah, and Caracalla and geta don’t have the backstory that Commodus does as much as Commodus is obviously Caligula 2.0 in the way that they’ve presented him. You understand very clearly that he has this tortured relationship with his father and never living up to expectations and so and he just has this desperate desire for love and family and connection and so. And maybe it’s also partly down to how Joaquin Phoenix obviously played him, because he’s a brilliant actor, but you have a certain amount of sympathy and understanding for Commodus, even whilst you totally know he’s the bad guy wheras Caracalla and Geta again, there is nothing redeeming these guys nothing, and they have such interesting back stories in real life. It’s crazy to me that that none of that was used a real

Dr G 36:30
missed opportunity. I

Lindsay Steenberg 36:31
was gonna say you could hear the difference in the two films too, because in the first film, the the music that you know, the scoring, had the really, meaty themes for Commodus and for Maximus. And, you know, I’ve read a really interesting article about how the entire film, you hear it, and it is these two motifs coming together and then moving apart. And it’s this struggle between two interesting men struggling for power and paternal love, whereas the scoring in the second film, I heard the ghost of some of the classic themes from the original, but didn’t quite set up its own unique motifs and identity for its characters. So in some ways, you could hear the difference in the story as much as you could see it. You didn’t get those really notable kind of kind of motifs sliding through the film.

Dr G 37:23
I think, yeah, this is one of those things where it’s like, do you have Hans Zimmer and his team on board, or do you not have

Lindsay Steenberg 37:31
he’s some some film music. People don’t care for him very much. But the score of gladiator was really and then Lisa Gerrard, I think that her contribution there, I think really raised it. It just makes a big difference for how you remember the film, and how the film kind of prompts you to feel, and for the scoring in that, yeah,

Dr Rad 37:49
I shouldn’t really venture an opinion here, because I’m I cannot to be unbiased, because I actually walked down the aisle to the theme from Gladiator.

Lindsay Steenberg 37:58
It’s a very memorable theme.

Dr Rad 38:00
It is

Lindsay Steenberg 38:02
the the much talked about similar melody to the Pirates of the Caribbean fight theme to the to the music and Gladiator I mean, you just have to kind of hum that, and people are ready to find their swords that it’s, yeah, it’s not exciting. So it was a huge part of that. And I don’t recall kind of fight moment with the same musical kind of weight to it. It felt a little bit, you know, I’m not a musicologist, but it felt a lot like the kinds of scoring that you used to see in biblical epic epics from Hollywood, quite orchestral. And I was sort of like, okay, I recognize this. It’s just I can’t remember it once it’s over. And I like to remember the music and think, okay, yeah, that makes me feel like I’m I’m ready for an amphitheater fight. Well,

Dr Rad 38:45
when you think about some of the more notable gladiator films from the past, and I am going to go to Spartacus, just because it’s the one I know best, yep, but should Spartacus has that very memorable scoring all throughout it from Alex north, and I know that for some younger people these days, it’s a bit much, because there is music every single moment, yeah. But they have, as you say, they’ve, they very clearly had themes for each character. You know, virinius theme is beautiful. It’s a really lovely piece of music. And even though I can see it, I can see that, okay, yeah, that maybe it’s a little too much music, but at the same time, it gives the film such a signature, and I only have to hear a few notes, and I’m I’m right back watching that movie, because it does just work like that, I suppose, in our brain. So yeah, I think that there is a lot to be said for scoring, even though it’s kind of a bit of an invisible, yeah, part of a movie,

Lindsay Steenberg 39:38
the scoring. And then the other thing that’s quite invisible, which I’m always paying attention to, is the stunt performance. So I’m fascinated by the way that that spectacle it, you know, it wasn’t just Denzel, Washington, Pedro, Pascal and Paul mescale. It was all of the stunt performers who did an astonishing job of jumping out of boats and, you know, grappling on the sands. So you. I thought that part of it was, was pretty astonishing, but there would have been no point in fighting the twin emperors. They weren’t, you know, they’re not like Commodus, who we, I think we all know, or most people know, wanted to be a gladiator. So he has, like, you knew it was gonna, it was all coming to that we are gonna find this final battle in the Colosseum. Whereas, you know, not, not so much the similar kind of sort of gladiatorial backstory for the for the

Dr G 40:28
one. And to hone in a little bit, because I think Macrinus is my favorite character in Gladiator and my theory is that he’s actually the protagonist of this film. Yeah, he’s the one who is demonstrably acting in ways that further plot points, and we see his whole arc across the course of this film as well. And I’m wondering if when we’re thinking about it, rather than focusing on our disappointment with maybe what felt like a bit of a flat Lucius, unfortunately, despite, I think, a really workable performance from Paul Mescal. Instead, we get a really sort of shining light with Macrinus, who seems comfortable in his costumes, and, you know, is owning every room that he moves into, and is finding ways to make things happen for him rather than against him, when it could go either way, really, before he gets there. I’m wondering how this might be a useful way to think about this film. I

Lindsay Steenberg 41:25
think so. And I think Denzel Washington’s performance really did stand out in this film, like he was interesting, he was baffling in some ways, because at one point I thought, well, he wants the same thing as Lucius. Let’s topple Rome. Let’s do it. Let’s go and I think that’s what he wanted. We’re not sure why, and I sort of like that. They never gave him a tragic backstory or tried to kind of bulk that up. It was just, this is what I’m doing. This is politics. I am the puppet master. I, you know, I will manipulate everybody to get what I want. So I think if you look at it from that journey, at first I thought he was going to be the Oliver Reed. He was going to sort of give him a pep top, be the coach, you know, get in there. But he wasn’t. And he was, he was evil in a pretty great way. So I think that it was that one performance that all the other ones sort of circulated around. He did not, though, have that kind of physicality where it was going to end in a fist fight, even though it ended in a sword fight, I guess so. I think that if you look at it from he is this canny, disappointed, cynical, almost motiveless kind of angry revolutionary. I think that that makes it a much more interesting film. That makes it something to go. What, whoa, okay. What? Okay, Denzel take us along for the ride. So I do think he was the more interesting character. And he did own all the rooms, although sometimes I it did seem like he was wrestling his his clothes a little, and I was sort of like, okay, and I found that a lot of the upper class people, with the exception of Connie Nielsen’s Lucilla, did seem to wrestle their clothes a little. And I sort of figured that this must be deliberate, and that, you know, the gladiators with their almost no clothes, they can move, they can stand, they can be embodied, whereas the upper class characters are struggling with togas and and trying to kind of manage themselves, whereas, you know, the Denzel mostly just sat there looking like, yeah, okay, unfold in front of me. I’ve made this Yeah,

Dr G 43:31
I look I feel like the toga is a bit of a constraining garment at the best of times. It’s a bit awkward, it’s a bit heavy. Does get in your way? So it does make the Senate an easy target if you’re planning a revolution, but it doesn’t seem anybody’s taking real advantage of that. Unfortunately.

Lindsay Steenberg 43:48
I mean, I almost missed it that they paraded the senators with Lucilla into the amphitheater for execution. I almost missed that. I was like, Who are they? Oh, okay, those are the senators. Okay, like they seem to be less important than they were in the first one and that no, you know, nobody. None of the senators were fighting. None of them seemed very good at puppet mastering. They were outmaneuvered completely by Denzel Washington’s character, by the monkey, even like they they didn’t have

Dr G 44:17
a clout. Their job seemed to be to roll over when required to

Lindsay Steenberg 44:22
do what somebody said. You know, Lucilla said this, okay. You know, Denzel Washington says this, okay.

Dr Rad 44:28
You got well, Macrinus is such an interesting choice because this is not my area of specialty, this time period. But from what I am, from what I know, Macrinus is a bit of a blank slate of a historical figure. I mean, we know some things about him, but we don’t know as much as we would like. So And certainly, there were problems when he became involved in Imperial politics because of his lowly background. But he certainly wasn’t as low as the movie seems to indicate. You know, they’ve, I think they’ve tried to heighten the drama by I think it would be hard for a modern audience to really get. On board with the idea that, Oh, he was equestrian and not from a senatorial family, or how disgusting that he was really equally rich class.

Lindsay Steenberg 45:08
Is he middle class? Can we do that? Yeah, exactly.

Dr Rad 45:12
Whereas trying to give him this other backstory where he, you know, came from nothing, and then, you know, took himself to the top. I think that was meant to be the drama of it, the self made American man, exactly. Americans love a bit of rugged individualism, you know? They

Lindsay Steenberg 45:27
really do. And he, yeah, the hold himself up by his bootstraps. This, this is, these are heroic qualities. They’ve come to be villainous qualities as well, but often in action films where we’re supposed to wonder about the motives of the villain. I’m thinking about Black Panther, or something like that, villains who, you know, made something of themselves from nothing in an unjust system. So he has that kind of backstory. But yes, it would not have worked if they were like, actually, he had a house like this. He didn’t need to steal the other guys. Yeah, and that would have been okay for him, and he had power, just not as much. So, you know, we need the story. The underdog is a really important character archetype, and often in cinema, people have to work really hard to make their characters be underdogs. So, you know, you can just throw them in an amphitheater, and that works because they’re automatically on the sand, not up in the stands, but giving them that pull themselves up by their bootstrap story is a good one that

Dr Rad 46:28
might, that might turn to our earlier conversation about America. Perhaps, maybe that was meant to be something there and just wasn’t emphasized enough for it to come through.

Lindsay Steenberg 46:36
Yeah. I mean, heroic kind of conventions are so interesting, what we think of as a heroic quality and who we want to be our heroes that is very, very specific. Even if a the kind of gladiator as a man forced to fight against his will is pretty standard, who he is and what he get represents, does shift quite a lot depending on if you’re looking at an Italian story from the 50s or the 60s, are you looking at like an Asian tournament film from the 1980s so much changes into in what we think is heroic that it’s interesting to kind of trace it back to that, that kind of national specificity of where that hero is made and who he’s supposed to appeal to.

Dr Rad 47:17
That’s actually a perfect segue for us to talk about the idea of the gladiator and celebrity, which you did allude to before, when we were talking about Maximus and that sort of thing, but we would love to know a little bit more about the relationship between gladiators and celebrity on film, especially because we know that gladiators had a very interesting position in Roman society as someone who was both disgusting but also embodying certain Roman values that were much admired and were meant to kind of inspire in terms of when they were performing

Lindsay Steenberg 47:51
absolutely that that double status of them. I think that that speaks to exactly how we view celebrities, from a Kardashian to a sports celebrity. The idea that somebody is both, you know, a bit of a train wreck, but also somebody to admire and imitate is, I think, you know, a kind of quite an ancient formulation that stuck that notion that a gladiator is sort of the best and the worst of a society and somehow mixed together. I think that is also really interesting, and that’s something that I’ve wanted to analyze and talk about, because over, you know, quite frankly, hundreds of films, television shows, adverts, the gladiator is when you see a gladiator character, you know right away that you’re in a world that’s corrupt and falling so you see him, you’re like, oh, barbarians are at the gate. The Apocalypse is going to happen. That’s Maximus. That’s katnius, Everdeen, whoever it is, you see the Gladiator, like, Oh, we’re forcing people to fight for fun. It’s the end of the world. But they’re also simultaneously the best of their world. If you’re facing an apocalypse, whether it’s Vesuvius or a nuclear war, you find a gladiator, you make friends with them, and they will see you through because they they say that the apocalypse is happening just seeing them, and that they’re the one who can, uniquely with their particular set of skills, survive the apocalypse. So they’re the best and the worst at all times. So I think that there is something that remains the idea that a celebrity is somebody who we want to imitate and admire and even who has influence over us, but at the same time we’re deeply suspicious of that’s really easy to talk about when we have infamous celebrities and the whole True Crime boom, and how we’ve come to elevate serial murderers as celebrities. That’s like the tail end of that spectrum. That’s way over there. Whereas a gladiator uses violence to make themselves famous, we love them. We admire them. Sometimes, maybe even the Romans wanted to be them. So there, I believe that there are records of aristocrats really wanting to try their hand at being a gladiator, but at the same time to. Put yourself and your body on display for entertainment is kind of quite taboo, and I love that they often found themselves in the same category as actors and even as sex workers, because that is something that has continued and many gladiator fictions, from the sort of television Spartacus to the Pompeii film they do enmesh the kind of sex work and gladiators as a similar category, and that’s often another moment of spectacle that’s layered on top of the violence is the sexuality of the believing that when

Dr Rad 50:33
I get to see it, there is an allusion to it in the first gladiator film, obviously that scene between Maximus And Lucilla. And obviously, at some point they did have relationship, although not when he was Gladiator, to be fair, as we now know, because of Lucius, all revealed. It’s all revealed. I actually, genuinely did not see that coming. I didn’t think that that was a thing. I mean,

Lindsay Steenberg 50:55
it, they kind of dropped it like it wasn’t a thing, but it was, I mean, maybe hinted in the first movie that Lucilla and Maximus, they definitely had a relationship at some point, totally, but I don’t know that we were ever supposed to believe that Lucius was Maximus son. But this one, they were just like, yippee. Is

Dr Rad 51:12
totally Yeah. No, exactly, I thought so too. I was like, Whoa. Okay, you seem very certain about this all of a sudden,

Dr G 51:17
yeah, if you weren’t paying attention, yeah, exactly.

Dr Rad 51:21
There’s trinkets being passed down.

Lindsay Steenberg 51:25
There’s heirlooms. What? Yeah, did this happen? Just

Dr G 51:28
to recap on the first season, he’s the son.

Lindsay Steenberg 51:32
Spoilers, he’s the son. I mean, in some of this is when I was researching for the book on Gladiators, I came across the unrealized screenplay for a gladiator two that was written by Nick Cave,

Dr Rad 51:45
oh yes, I did see this referred to in your book, and I was so intrigued.

Lindsay Steenberg 51:50
I mean, I’ll be honest that no gladiator two could ever live up to the absolute insanity that was part of that screenplay. And Nick Cave, I think he has said, like, I wrote it because I knew they’d never make it. I just knew they wouldn’t. And Lucius was in it. He was in it. He was not Maximus son, but he was in it. And if I recall the screenplay correctly, the afterlife, there’s gods, and it ends with like a 25 minute montage of Maximus fighting in every single war in history, like from the trenches of World War One to Vietnam, to the Civil War, like, just, let’s give up. Let’s just put this celebrity gladiator in every battle ever, and sit back and watch. And I was like, you know, and win. I would have watched that,

Dr Rad 52:34
you know. I saw Lucius being a character. I did. I thought as soon as I heard that there was going to be a secret, which I never thought there would be because of the way that the first one ended. But as soon as I heard I thought, yeah, for sure, Lucius is going to be a character. But never thought he was going to be a character in this way. I again, kind of wish they’d done something different with him. But thinking about Lucius, and again, going back to this idea that he was not quite the same as Maximus. Why is it you think that Maximus was built up so successfully as this sort of celebrity fighter, and yet in Gladiator two, it’s, again, it’s a little bit more muddled. You know, he is, as you say, he does earn his stripes in the arena, but it’s just never quite as focused and clear as it is in the first film,

Lindsay Steenberg 53:22
I think it maybe is that they gave up on thinking about celebrity a little bit. So the first film they did have, you know, win the crowd. Win the crowd. You’ll win your freedom. This is what you want, the dream of Rome. Win the crowd. In the second one, that wasn’t quite as much a part of it. He was a good fighter, and that was enough, like it was, he was good at fighting, but he the kind of theatricality of what the battle was, and the fact that Maximus spectacle was that he hated them all and that he blamed them for the spectacle like that itself was a spectacle that we loved. We loved him being angry at us. That was great. Lucius was just kind of diffuse force of anger. He didn’t it wasn’t for a reason. It was just, I’m angry. I do all the fighting, all the fight. You just put someone in front of me, let a fight him. Whereas Maximus, I think that we often kind of read a lot of hesitation, like, I don’t want to kill all you guys, or I’m protecting my friends, you know, stick with me. We will, we’ll. We’ll fight this battle. I saw that they wanted to build Lucius up as a leader, you know. They kept saying, you know, you need to lead your men. He gave the speeches. But that didn’t seem to it didn’t seem to stick as well as I think it probably did in the first film, you didn’t get the same side characters, I think, like even if the gladiators, I can’t recall, I can’t recall all of their names, but he did have his friend, his very good friend. And then we saw, you know, a few of the same figures again and again. And we got a sense that there was a fraternity, that he was becoming closer. And that’s something like in Spartacus. I am Spartacus. You have that fraternity, that crowd gathering around them, whereas Lucius had the one friend who was the doctor, but I and the one who died in the first arena fight. But I didn’t get the sense of his, his family of gladiators with him in the same way that I did in the first one. And of course, in all the Spartacus, the Sparta chi, the many Spartacus films, TV shows, retellings, just that, that that brotherhood didn’t seem to be quite where it could have been. I think

Dr G 55:33
they, they did definitely try to shortcut that by having a Spartacus esque moment.

Lindsay Steenberg 55:38
They so had a Spartacus moment. And when I was in the cinema, everybody giggled. It was

Dr G 55:41
like, Yeah, and I think, I think that’s a reasonable response, because the back work on the additional characters in the gladiator troupe wasn’t there to justify them all sort of taking part in that moment and being willing to step in and defend Lucius in that way. We didn’t have a reason for that to be true. So I think that’s why it felt, felt flat and maybe a little bit comedic. Yeah,

Dr Rad 56:06
whereas Maximus is so clearly someone who’s earnt the loyalty and the trust of the men around him, and they clearly, they clearly adore him. Same thing with Spartacus, but yeah, you don’t ever really get that with Lucius. It’s kind of like, Why does everybody care about this guy?

Lindsay Steenberg 56:21
We’re just gonna follow him to our Yeah. Okay. I mean, sure. Why not? Gladiator movies are written in shorthand, so I you know there’s, there’s often not time. I guess what gladiator the original one was, wasn’t a bit of an exception. It was a bit of a gladiator movie that did offer you a backstory, that did think through things like male friendship and things like that. Whereas most gladiator movies are sort of delightfully one dimensional, it’s like, what are we fighting for? For fighting? That’s why we’re here. You know, why do you fight? Because I can, like, there doesn’t need to be too much complexity necessarily behind the fictions. So I sort of, when I came out of the theater, I was like, Gladiator two is a gladiator movie, like so many others. It has the same things. It has the same conventions, the same short hands. Everything feels familiar. It’s just, I think that they’re the first gladiator film was a bit of an exception. The trauma was more melodramatic. You know, there’s also theorists have sort of noticed a break around that time too. The sort of the world has already fallen and we’re all doomed that comes from Maximus onward. So we just, you know, we’ve just accepted that our hero is always sad. He’s never going to get another wife. He’s too sad. She’s dead. All ladies don’t matter to him, because he only fights. He has no time for romance, whereas the kind of pre millennial Gladiator, even Conan, even Conan the Barbarian, is kind of being raised as a gladiator, still gets a little bit of romance. He still has a bit of joy. He gets a sequel as well. So you get a little bit more playfulness and joy in the pre millennial gladiator who bite gladiate because he likes it. Why do you fight? It’s awesome. I love fighting. The second sort of iteration is, oh, I’m sad, and I have to, and they’re making me and then I’ll die. So there is a kind of break in there. Whereas, you know, I think Paul Mescal was enjoying himself. He looked sad, but it felt like he liked fighting. So it was a bit of a throwback to the more traditional, actually, and it’s

Dr Rad 58:23
interesting that you bring up the ladies side of thing, because I felt that that was, again, another aspect that was inexplicable, and that was his relationship with Lucilla as his mother, because that was the real relationship. But it went from being completely one way where he was like, Get out of my set. You were banished me. You mean nothing to me. I don’t even remember who you are, mother who I’m sorry you didn’t raise me. And then all of a sudden it was like, I would die for you. I would do anything for you, just like, what is happening. And that is an unusual That’s an unusual turn events, because we don’t often have the mother of a gladiator as a

Lindsay Steenberg 59:03
there are no mothers in Gladiator movies. They have all been killed, all of them. Yeah, she was really interesting. And I did enjoy her performance. She had a kind of, you know, dignity that’s normally lacking in a gladiator movie. So I thought Connie Nielsen did a great job reprising her role. He switched with her, the way he did with the Pedro Pascal character, with the sort of, all, you know, I hate you. You replaced my father, kind of very Oedipal sort of struggle, like, how very dare you come and steal my mom. But then was like, oh, but okay, in the same thing, I hate you, mom. Okay, no, I don’t. So it was a very kind of strange turn of events. And they did have her, you know, all in white on the sort of sacrificial thing, so that it was clear that she was going to be this, this sacrifice, and she was going to be the tragedy that kept him burning for some time afterwards, although I was secretly hoping. Think that the ending would have been every man was dead, and she’s like, well, Rome is mine. Obviously the best person for this

Dr Rad 1:00:08
job. It looked like that’s where it was going for I thought it was going there. I

Lindsay Steenberg 1:00:11
got excited. Yeah, I also found it. You know, the most unrealistic thing that Hollywood did was not the sharks in the Colosseum. It was imagining a relationship where a woman was older than a man, so Connie Nielsen is a bit older than Pedro Pascal. That never happens. It happens so infrequently, and it’s always such a big deal that people commenting, you know, Anne Hathaway is in a romance film with a much younger man. Oh, they didn’t comment on it, and it was just there, and I was watching, going, are they going to say something? No, they’re not. Okay, Googling it afterwards, just getting a very niche difference. She’s just, she’s just going to be the love interest of a younger man. Oh, she died. I’m not going to say it was because of that, but I found it was, like, one of those striking moments. I was like, okay, Gladiator, too interesting. So if they had let her keep her her Pedro Pascal and rural Rome, I would have decided that that was much more exciting at the end. I agree.

Dr G 1:01:12
It’s a wrap up question, because I feel like we’re heading in that direction now with with this sort of alternative ending, which that’s a film I would love to see, was there any particular moments in this film that did drive you crazy in terms of historical accuracy?

Lindsay Steenberg 1:01:28
I mean, I think I’m probably better than most people at being able to put that on a bit of a back burner, because I’m a film scholar, and I’m a scholar who studies a lot of historical films, a lot of historical films that are so incorrect that it’s you just, you get itchy, it drives you crazy, or you give up. So I do, I do know how to, you know, healthily, give up on historical accuracy. There are some things where I felt they missed a trick, because history was more interesting. I’m like, Why? Why didn’t you go into the backstories of those emperors. That was a crazy stuff happening. I would have been really cinematic. Also, the why, where was their mom? I guess Lucilla was offered as a maternal character. Like at the end, Caracalla said, you know, do we? Do we have to kill her? So maybe. So they missed a few tricks, and also the the gender politics and hierarchy of the of the actual arena, like the way things might have been segregated, who sits where i It’s so interesting, the way that a hierarchy can be written in space that way. I’m like, Come on, let’s do it. Let’s we’re those Vestal virgins. We’re always thinking about them.

Dr G 1:02:41
They seem to be in the Senate House. I’m sorry, but that’s where they seem to be hanging out. Yeah, I

Lindsay Steenberg 1:02:46
guess so weird.

Dr Rad 1:02:48
Yeah. We both saw that woman and the dress the way that she was in the Senate scene. And we were like,

Lindsay Steenberg 1:02:52
is that a vessel? Yeah. And there were a few women sort of wearing white in the background, looking disapproving. And I sort of wondered, I’m like, is that? Is, are they the best? Is we could use her? She would be a great character. So I just, I think that it didn’t, it didn’t upset me that that, you know, there wouldn’t have been sharks in the Colosseum, or that I knew that the story was different in history than it was in the film. It was more like history is such a wild ride in this time and in this place. Why wouldn’t you want to go there? And I know that the historical consultant for the first film, I think she worked with them, and then sort of said, Could you not put my name on that? Actually? Yeah.

Dr Rad 1:03:34
Kathleen Coleman, yeah, she absolutely did. Like,

Lindsay Steenberg 1:03:38
I’m happy to be involved in films, but you might not have listened to what I was telling you, so I can understand that the first one was more accurate, and somehow it was more accurate. But yeah, so I think that the thing that that is is sort of often a disappointment is, is not necessarily the gladiatorial salute that never happened, or the the thumbs up, thumbs down. It’s more like, oh man, you missed some amazing parts of history that would have been so cinematic. I do think, though, for my students, especially, the films are so visually arresting that they will replace history in our minds as a collective. So there’s always when you watch these movies, it’s not a risk, it’s just an interesting function and effect that if you see something that is so astonishing, it kind of sits there in your brain and it’s not going to shift. So even if you know there’s no thumbs up, thumbs down, or you know that they weren’t saying we are the moratorium, we are about to die, it’s in there, and it’s part of the myth, so it can replace so I don’t get too mad when the history’s off, but I do think there always needs to be a place where someone says, Actually, no, or actually, yeah, you could have, you could have brought the, you know, you could have flooded the Colosseum. So, yeah, that, I guess my fundamental thing is, movies are spectacle. They’re not real. I love it when they do things that are over the top. They could bring more historical over the topness and. And But effectively, we always do have to have the moment of conversation where we say that Rome is beautiful, but that’s a Rome that the American imagination in 2024 built out of computers and, you know, martial arts trained bodies. It’s not necessarily telling us too much about Rome. Yeah, I

Dr Rad 1:05:17
think that’s the thing. I also am very forgiving of historical films, because it’s also what I like to focus on. But I must admit, when I see a film like this, where I feel like the major issue was the story and the characterization, because the technology was there, the money was there, the talent was there, both, you know, both in front of us in terms of the actors, but also behind the camera and putting all the bits and pieces together. There was just so much talent actually in this film. And I’m just like, why did you make it harder for yourself? Like you obviously struggled with the story

Lindsay Steenberg 1:05:52
more than anything about plot points, you were exactly your plot is all

Dr Rad 1:05:57
over the place. So why wouldn’t you use what is actually there, because, you know what, it’s already been crafted into a story by ancient historians who are probably making stuff up to and

Lindsay Steenberg 1:06:07
they knew their audience wanted to hear that as well. And they they knew how to tell a good story.

Dr Rad 1:06:12
Yeah. And I was a bit disappointed, actually. And I don’t, I don’t think of Ridley Scott is someone who is, I don’t really know how I feel about this, actually, but Caracalla and geta being portrayed the way that they were in that white face makeup, given their ancestry, I was so confused as to why those actors were cast, and that was the makeup choice they went for, especially, again, in a film with Denzel Washington playing the krius. It just didn’t make sense to me.

Lindsay Steenberg 1:06:44
What yet they did make it harder for themselves, and could have kind of Lent back on some of the stories that were or the mythology that’s already there. I wonder if they felt shackled to the first film, because the story, you know, had that like and then he was a leader, and then the wife died, and it was captured, and he came to Rome, and he fought for Rome. So I wondered if they were thinking that they needed to stay so close to the film that they forgot that they’re telling historical story.

Dr Rad 1:07:16
Yeah. Look, as you say, it’s a fascinating addition, because Ridley Scott being someone who is an older director, and someone who grew up watching the original, like golden epics of Hollywood, you can definitely see those reference points in there if you know the history of film. But I think again, that’s the weird thing. Like Gladiator, to me, is just the love child of Spartacus and full of the Roman Empire, you

Lindsay Steenberg 1:07:39
know, yeah, and Anthony Mann’s film Fall of the Roman Empire does not get nearly enough credit for having influenced that film and for for just being an AWESOME film, really. So yeah, it absolutely was kind of those biblical epics, sort of those those Hollywood epics stuck together, but sad. So

Dr Rad 1:07:57
you think you’d think, really, Scott could therefore take his own film turned into something good too.

Lindsay Steenberg 1:08:03
It’s like, What happened, man, what were you doing? And I mean, when you watch a Ridley Scott film, you often whatever you think about what’s happening, you’re like, Yeah, but it was visually amazing. And I yeah, I did think this one was arresting and spectacular. I’m glad I saw it in a big screen, but I think it did miss a little bit of its own stylization, like when you watch kingdom of heaven, you were like, Whoa. You know, I don’t, I don’t know why Liam neesons here, but I’m enjoying what I’m watching, and it’s stylish and it’s interesting. For this one, it was spectacle. It was good, but I sort of felt like it. It missed a little bit of what Ridley Scott used to be really good at, yeah, Blade Runner good at, yeah, that kind of esthetic that belongs to its own world and makes its own visual language. So this, this felt like I said, mid range gladiator film, which I will always watch,

Dr Rad 1:08:58
yeah, very watchable. Yeah, very watchable. But I think, to be honest, that actually was the same issue with his Napoleon for me, because that was so visually stunning.

Lindsay Steenberg 1:09:10
Yeah, amazing. No matter what you think of what’s happening in that film, you’re like, well, it looks amazing.

Dr G 1:09:18
I was so angry

Dr Rad 1:09:21
about it, because the acting was terrible. And again, it came down to the plot being a total mess, trying to do way too much.

Lindsay Steenberg 1:09:29
And again, history had a great plot there. Yeah,

Dr Rad 1:09:32
exactly it’s, I don’t know how he made Napoleon so dull it was, it was crazy. Yeah,

Lindsay Steenberg 1:09:43
I’m gonna keep in my pocket his reaction to historians watching the film, which I think is one of the funniest things a director’s ever said, is, you know, people like, oh, it’s not very accurate. It’s not this. And he just said, f off. It’s a movie. Yeah, guys, I was like, Okay. Ridley Scott, I see where you’re going. I. Yeah,

Dr Rad 1:10:00
and it’s, it’s not that, as you say, it’s not about the accuracy, per se. It’s more that. I’m like, Well, if you can’t come up with something better, then why wouldn’t you go to the original story, which is good. That’s why people want to see a film about Napoleon. You know that that’s the issue I have. I’m like, well, by all means, go. Be fictional. Make it up. But yeah,

Lindsay Steenberg 1:10:19
make it crazy. Yeah, exactly. Give us a bit of bridgerton, sure. Fine. Yeah, absolutely. Why not? Yeah.

Dr G 1:10:25
I think this draws our attention to the really important role of the screenwriters and the creation of screenplays in general, and maybe what is going on inside the Hollywood system at this current epoch with script writing and the way these things get changed and altered to suit what seems to be like a committee like structure of like what needs to be in this film. And so instead of being able to tell an original story of gladiator two, which is a natural continuation of the point where the first film ended instead, what you get is a film that is trying to hit the same notes exactly, because that’s what made that film a blockbuster, and that’s what that’s what made it great. So we’ve got to do that same story again, but now we’ve just got to have some slight alterations to see if we can enhance that spectrum. Repetition

Lindsay Steenberg 1:11:16
with variation. Works in movies. It works in myths. It works in novels. You know that must make that’s a genre repetition with variation. But you have, you have to vary. You have to surprise people, even just a little as you give them what you want. So I don’t, I mean, I’ve spent a lot of my career studying big franchises like Mission Impossible, like John Wick, even Fast and the Furious. And they have that. They’re an ecosystem. They have that committee logic, where, you know, you have the one, and then you have to have this, but more this, but more, you know, now with nunchucks now on water, so you do have the logic. You just

Dr Rad 1:11:51
got to go to Tokyo drifting. Yeah, we’re gonna get gladiator

Lindsay Steenberg 1:11:55
three. Tokyo Drift would still watch the chariot. There’ll be chariot. There’s got to be, like, a take on this, like, I want to see that. But then you do feel like what is missed, what loses is that what made the first one special was its variation, and you haven’t varied it, so you’ve given me tried to make literally, what is the first one. And I think you’re right about the screenwriters as well. I mean, in an era where, you know, Hollywood is striking because of things like AI, an AI can write a script to gladiator two, it will not be like Nick caves. It will not it’ll probably be a little closer to this film that we saw. I’m not saying that an AI wrote this. They absolutely didn’t, but the notion that you feed in the kind of familiar tropes and it pops out what you wanted, I think that’s often just not enough for us as viewers, even though, historically, often the sequels do make more money than the first. So I’ll be curious to see how gladiator two performs at the box office, because when I went to go see it. It was sold out. I have not gone to a cinema where I’ve been turned away and they’ve said, No, it’s sold out. Or since the 90s, like, I couldn’t believe it. I’m like, wow. Okay, that’s amazing. So I will see it. Might be enough of a same thing we wanted, but slightly different this time on water that it makes a lot of money, in which case, even if we are feeling a little disappointed that we might get gladiator three Tokyo Drift too fast to gladiator something I would 100%

Dr Rad 1:13:35
like today, Gladiator film where they’re too fast and too furious. I would watch that. Well, I think that’s probably a perfect note to end up on with our wishes for the future. Dear Ridley, Scott, do you have another one in you? Thank you chariot racing, exactly. Yep. Thank you so much for coming and chatting to us all about the gladiator movies, and Gladiator two in particular, it has been a complete delight. Is there anything that you’d like to tell us about that you are working on that we should keep our eyes peeled for in terms of articles or books or anything like that? Okay,

Lindsay Steenberg 1:14:07
a little shameless self promotion time. Yeah. I guess I think what has been so interesting for me that I’m working on right now is modern interpretations of gladiators that kind of stand out as metaphors for precarious workers in our kind of gig economy. So I’ve been very interested in things like squid game, very interested in reality TV shows where people gladiate, there’s a there’s a British show called Romans, Oh,

Dr Rad 1:14:35
yeah.

Lindsay Steenberg 1:14:37
Quite interested in the way that like metaphors like freelancer and stuff like that have become so entrenched in the way we talk about precarious employment. So yeah, I’m, I’m quite interested in writing about things like squid game and and finding out how gladiators have really kind of embedded themselves in our in our in our lives, in sort of like Anglo American and Australian culture.

Dr Rad 1:14:58
Well, that sounds fascinating. We are here for that excellent

Lindsay Steenberg 1:15:01
look forward to squid game two.

Dr Rad 1:15:03
Yeah, it’ll come. Thank you so much for coming on the show, and we look forward to perhaps talking to you again when gladiator three eventually makes its appearance on our screens. That would be my pleasure.

Thank you for listening to this special episode of the partial historians. You can find our sources sound credits and an automated transcript in our show notes. Our music is by Bettina and joy De Guzman. You too can support our show and help us to produce more lively content about the ancient world by becoming our Patreon. In return, you receive exclusive early access to our special episodes. And today, we would like to thank all of our wonderful Patreons and Ko fi supporters for helping us to cover the cost of making the show and taking it in new directions. However, if you have overindulged and blown all your cash on Jaguars earlobes and Wolf nipple chips whilst watching the games, then please just tell someone about the show or give us a five star review. You have no idea how much that kind of stuff really helps these days, Until next time we are yours in ancient Rome.

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The post Special Episode – Gladiator II with Dr Lindsay Steenberg appeared first on The Partial Historians - Ancient Roman History with smart ladies.

We were titillated to speak to the scintillating Jenny Freaking Williamson. Jenny is one of the co-hosts of Ancient History Fangirl, which we like to consider part of the unofficial but highly exclusive #ladypodsquad. Jenny and Genn have been on our show before to discuss their fabulous book, Women and Myth, which was released in 2023. However, today Jenny is here to discuss a solo venture. She has just completed her debut novel, a historical romantasy called Enemy of My Dreams, slated for release through Harlequin in February 2025 and available for pre-order now.

Enemy of my Dreams is set during the late Roman Empire and focuses on a romance between an imperial princess named Julia and a ‘barbarian’ leader, Alaric of the Visigoths. Julia was largely inspired by three historical figures: Julia the Elder (daughter of Augustus), Galla Placidia and Honoria.

It was a delight to hear about Jenny’s process in crafting historical fiction.

Special Episode – Enemy of my Dreams with Jenny Williamson

Here are some quick bios for the ladies in question!

Julia the Elder was the only biological child of Augustus, which was a nasty surprise for him. Without a son, Julia’s importance as a dynastic pawn grew. She was married off to her cousin, then Augustus’ BFF Agrippa, and finally her stepbrother, Tiberius. Although it was normal for an elite woman to marry for the benefit of her family, there was a huge amount of pressure on Julia to in these scenarios, especially as her last marriage a trainwreck. Let that be a lesson to you – don’t marry your step-siblings!

Julia was suddenly exiled for scandalous behaviour in 2 BCE… or was she plotting against her father? We will never know. All we can be sure of is her fate. Julia was exiled to the island of Pandataria before her exile was moved to Rhegium. She was never allowed to return and died of “malnutrition” early in the reign of Tiberius, her ex-husband. If Augustus intended to put his errant daughter in her place, mission accomplished.  

Bust of Julia the Elder by Egisto Sani on Flickr. 

Galla Placidia lived hundreds of years after Julia, in the twilight of the 4th century CE. She was the daughter of Theodosius the Great, a very capable emperor (as the name implies). Sadly for Rome, he died in 395 CE and left the purple to his sons, Honorius and Arcadius, who split the empire between them. Placidia resided in the west with Honorius

These were not easy times for Rome as there was a lot of movement around their borders, and within the empire. The Goths were looking for a new home and the Roman Empire was it! The Romans were not always so thrilled by this prospect. In Placidia’s youth, they decided to unite behind a Visigoth named Alaric. Alaric was a pretty successful guy, and in 410 CE he and his followers managed to penetrate the walls of Rome itself. It’s hard to put into words how shameful and shocking this event was for the Romans.

It became even more embarrassing when Placidia was taken captive by the Goths. She remained with them for years, eventually marrying Alaric’s brother-in-law Athaulf, who became the leader of the Gothic forces after Alaric’s death. It is one of the tragedies of history that we know so little about this time in her life. Did she and Athaulf fall in love, or did it just seem wise to marry a man of status, given the circumstances?

This could have been an interesting union that changed history as we know it, except that Athaulf was murdered soon after their wedding and eventually the Romans found the time to negotiate for her return. Placidia was married to her brother’s right-hand man, Constantius, whom she despised. Hatred is not an effective birth control method, and she had two children by this marriage. Honorius had not produced any children, so Placidia’s son was a likely heir.

Placidia was highly respected in her lifetime for her piety and for her capabilities. When her brother died, she helped to engineer the succession of her son, Valentinian III. As Valentinian was so young, Placidia acted as regent, and she never really left the imperial stage. This probably had something to due with the fact that Valentinian was as useless an emperor as Honorius. She died peacefully in 450. She did not have to witness the assassination of Valentinian a few years later.

We know very little about Honoria, the daughter of Galla Placidia and sister to the rather pathetic Valentinian III. Honoria was either born with a wild streak or developed one because she was oddly left single for too long, which was a weird status for an imperial princess. After an affair with one of the imperial stewards, she was being forced into a marriage with a rich senator. That oughtta fix this whole situation!

Honoria refused to go down quietly. She may have contacted Atilla the Hun, the latest barbarian threat on the block. She sent him a ring and asked for his help – was this an offer of marriage? Atilla certainly thought so.

We don’t know much about Honoria’s life after this treasonous act, aside from the fact that Placidia intervened to prevent her execution, and she was not given over to Atilla when he came knocking for his bride. She fades into obscurity, best known for this bizarre rebellion.   

Jenny Williamson pictured with her book.

You can order Enemy of My Dreams now through your local independent bookstore, as well as online suppliers such as Amazon. Use this link! For our fellow Sydneysiders, you might consider Abbey’s Bookstore.

If you’re keen to follow Jenny’s work, we suggest checking out her blog and the wonderful Ancient History Fangirl podcast.

And if you would like to read more about the history behind this novel, you might consider consulting the following:

Our music is by Bettina Joy de Guzman

Dr Rad 0:15
Music. Welcome to the partial historians.

Dr G 0:18
We explore all the details of ancient Rome,

Speaker 1 0:23
everything from political scandals, the love affairs, the battled wage and when citizens turn against each other. I’m Dr rad and

Dr G 0:33
I’m Dr G, we consider Rome as the Romans saw it, by reading different authors from the ancient past and comparing their stories.

Speaker 1 0:44
Join us as we trace the journey of Rome from the founding of the city.

Dr G 0:54
Welcome to this special episode of the partial historians. I am Dr G

And I am Dr Rad

And we are absolutely thrilled to be joined today by Jenny Williamson. Now we have talked to Jenny before. She is one of the fabulous co hosts of ancient history fangirl and part of the exclusive and unofficial lady pod squad. So we had Jenny and Jen on the show to discuss their book, women and myth, which was released in 2023 which doesn’t feel like that long ago, but at the same time, is actually ages ago. And we’re really excited to have Jenny here today to discuss her latest solo venture. She’s just completed her debut novel, which is labeled as a historical romanticy. And I love that sort of portmanteau of going on there, and it is called enemy of my dreams, and it’s going to be coming out in February 2025, at the time of recording. It’s a pre order situation. But maybe when you hear this episode, it’ll be out and about, in which case you should just go and grab it. Welcome to the show. Jenny,

Jenny W 2:08
hi. Thank you so much for having me.

Dr G 2:12
It is an absolute pleasure.

Jenny W 2:16
So much fun.

Speaker 1 2:17
So look, enemy of my dreams is right up our alley as it takes place in the later Roman Empire. We love our things Roman, and one of the lead characters is Alaric of the Visigoths. However, we are most interested in your female lead, Julia, daughter of the Emperor of Rome, Theodosius the great. And we’re here to talk about the history that inspired you to create this intriguing character today. So we believe that there are three women from ancient Rome whose lives inspired your story, Julia, the elder, daughter of the First Emperor. I’m using my little flesh rabbits there Augustus, as well as some women from the fifth century CE such as the Empress gala Placidia or plaquitia, depending on your preference, and her daughter, Honoria. So we’re very excited to delve into that today.

Jenny W 3:14
Yes, I am so thrilled to talk about all these ladies.

Dr G 3:18
So I think we’d still like to start with, like, maybe the originator of bad women under the imperial system, and that would be Julia the elder. And I love this woman. She’s great. I’m wondering if you can talk us through a little bit about her family connections and her character. Yeah,

Jenny W 3:40
so Julia the Elder is such a she’s such a fun character for me. And I really, I think that my very early draft of this book, my Julia was just absolutely straight up Julia the elder, like she was just and Julia the Elder as a, sort of like very surface reading of Julia the Elder, who is very much just like a party girl who likes to sleep around and do what she wants, you know, which is kind of like I said the surface reading, she was the only biological child of the Emperor Augustus, quote, unquote, Emperor Augustus, you know. And listeners of our podcast will also know him as Octavian. We had a whole series about Mark Antony and Cleopatra, in which he figured very prominently. And we’re gonna do a series on him later on in the year, I think, where he takes the Empire the, you know, Rome from Republic to Empire. So she was his only biological daughter, his only child, and he had her with, I believe it would have been his second wife, scribonia, and his first wife. I think, was I correct me if I’m wrong here, but I think it was the daughter of Fulvia, who he married very early on and then wound up cruelly rejecting based on the sort of wars that he was having with Mark Antony, who was her dad. So that was his second wife, Scribonia, and I think he divorced her while she was pregnant. And definitely did, yeah, embarrassing, yeah, to marry his third wife, Livia, who was also a badass. And I believe that Julia the Elder as a child, was sent to live with Livia, her stepmom, and was taught to be like a noble woman in her house. She grew up and was engaged to various people, starting at a very young age, wound up being married, I think, first to her cousin at a very early age, I want to say, like 14 or 15 or something like that. Her cousin was Marcellus, was maybe a few years older. He died, and she wound up being married to Agrippa, her dad’s best friend, who was also her dad’s age. Ew, yeah, gross. They were married for a little while. They had a bunch of kids together, and then when Agrippa died, her dad married her off again to his other son. Was it his adopted? I don’t know. How are they related…?

Dr G 5:57
Yeah, Tiberius, he’s Livia’s son.

Jenny W 6:00
right? That’s what it was, you’re right. He did adopt him, yeah, he adopted him. So, like keeping, keeping their, you know, family trees straight in my head is always a struggle. But it was her step brother. So yeah, it was, yeah, she was engaged her own step brother. They hated each other. And I think ever since her marriage to Agrippa, there were rumors about Julia the elder, you know, sleeping around, having boyfriends. And as far as I know, this really kind of got started with Tiberius, who also had been married to somebody else, and was made to divorce that person, to marry Julia. Neither of them were happy about it. And at some point, Augustus was trying to put he was trying to take Rome from Republic to Empire. And he was doing a lot of things like trying to craft this sort of unifying story about who Rome was, and change the laws to, like, restore what he considered to be, quote, unquote, Roman greatness. And one of the problems he noticed was that the women they were just were having affairs and being slutty and horrible things. So he was like, you know, tightening these laws around women and reducing their freedoms and kind of expecting them to be more embodying of the traits of a, you know, virtuous Roman Matron. This involved a lot of spinning. As far as I know, he really expected his daughter, Julia, to embody all of these traits of like an upright Roman matron herself, and she just did not want to do it. And there were all these wild rumors about her sleeping with with men in the forum and doing all kinds of crazy things. And she got exiled to Pandatarea, where it was kind of like a prison situation. And she was there for, I don’t know, several years, like very, very curtailed, and was eventually allowed to come back. I think she might have been, I’m not 100% sure, but I think she might have been exiled several times. She

Speaker 1 7:46
was allowed to return to the mainland, I believe, for some of her exile, but she was never taken out of exile, and she actually died in exile under Tiberius, yeah,

Dr G 7:58
yeah. So yeah. Part of what happens is that when Julia is exiled. So this is in around two BC, she goes to Pandataria, this island in the Mediterranean. And do you think to yourself now, oh, that sounds not so bad, but it’s not ideal when you’re an imperial daughter and you’re used to living in the city, and now you’re on like, you know, a goat ridden island in the middle of the Mediterranean. Her mother, Scribonia, goes with her, so that’s nice. She’s got a mum, and they do have fun, so they’re able to live a modest life. But what Tiberius does is he withdraws all funding from the exile, so they are essentially a starved to death. I don’t know how they end up actually dying, but the withdrawal of funds sort of means that they’re unable to maintain any life whatsoever, and it seems like they maybe haven’t made enough friends on the island to sustain a life and be taken in by others.

Dr Rad 8:58
Ancient Rome. Survivor edition, yeah, exactly.

Dr G 9:02
It’s like, there were only chickens here.

Jenny W 9:05
I don’t think there would have been people to befriend. I mean, there were maybe not even that, I don’t know. Like it was a very dire situation, right? I remember doing an interview with an author who had written a book, kind of a fictionalized version of the life of Julia the younger, and Julia the elder was in it as well. Who Julia the younger was also exiled for something like 20 years. And we were discussing like, the dangers of having this happen, where you were ex, you’re sent into exile and then starved to death, or perhaps, you know, beaten by the guards, or really mistreated like this is not a good situation. And what she was telling me, her name is Tana Rebellis. She has she’s written some really interesting, I think it was a duology about Julia the younger. But what she was discussing was how, you know, the power of Augustus in his time meant that the guards were gonna be pretty careful about Julia the elder, at least maintain her health and make sure she was okay. When Augustus died like that, was when you had to worry about the guards. That’s when it got a little more dangerous because you didn’t have that protection anymore. Yeah,

Dr G 10:07
and certainly, like, the orders are now coming from somebody else, and they’re coming from somebody who has not liked her time. Think

Speaker 1 10:15
we all have nightmares about our ex being in control of our lives. No, like, Oh no,

Dr G 10:20
Tiberius is now in charge. But I really enjoy the focus of what is Julia the elder trying to do, because she’s kind of like a classic, sort of stick it to the man figure in this scenario, because she gets caught in the forum, that’s the rumor. And she’s kind of got this whole group of senatorial young bloods who are very happy to like party on and have orgies in the forum. So it’s like she’s hanging out with some very elite characters, and she’s really flaunting it all. And at the same time, this is precisely when Augustus is building up his reputation, and he’s been awarded a really prestigious title pater patriae, the father of the Fatherland. So he’s kind of gotten to this real pinnacle of his own political success, but at the same time that family life is like completely falling apart. And I think there is a really nice mirror to the opening scene of your novel, of how your protagonist, Julia, is kind of as we meet her for the first time, and the kinds of things that she’s up to gives that real sense of somebody who’s like, I’m going to do exactly what I please. I have the right I’m in a position of power. Life is here for the taking

Jenny W 11:37
exactly. And I think in my book, I was also really thinking about, and I’m sure, like, this was, this is an issue for Julia too, because she kind of lived in the midst of this time, like, what happens when there’s a transfer of power, you know? And that’s always a really dangerous time for for emperors and, you know, ruling, ruling families and their survivors when they die. So just thinking about how, how the rules are going to change, and they’re changing underneath her. And my Julia doesn’t really realize that that is what’s happening until, until she does kind of too late.

Dr G 12:06
Yeah, interesting. So when we’re thinking about the connections between, like the ancient source material and the way that you’ve interwoven it into this new form, what were the sort of aspects of Julia the elder that really appealed to you, and which elements Did you really try to bring in for this novel?

Jenny W 12:26
So I really enjoyed, and like, I said, like, I really enjoyed this idea of, here’s here’s this woman who’s just kind of careening LIKE A WRECKING BALL through this very upright society, and just, you know, having these orgies and doing whatever she feels like, and probably having a lot of sex and drugs and just that is not normally what you hear about women in the ancient world at all. So I was just very drawn to this party animal character, and I think I wanted to bring that into my book. But you know, my my Julia, has reasons why she’s like that and things that she’s sort of coping with by sort of drowning her sorrows, basically, and it’s like a coping mechanism for her. But I was also thinking about Julia the elder, and kind of how she’s perceived, and all these screwless rumors that kind of show up in the sources about her and other figures, where you kind of wonder, like, is this the whole story? Did this actually happen this way, or is this kind of a smear campaign? So my Julia is, she’s kind of wild, but she’s not as wild as you think at first. And there are, of course, like rumors swirling around her, just like there would have been rumors around Julia the elder, and that was something that really interested me later, is that, you know, the reasons given for her exile, and whether they, in fact, did involve her sleeping around, or whether she was doing some deeper plotting against her dad, is kind of something I’ve always been interested in, yeah,

Dr G 13:46
and that’s the thing, isn’t it? Because what we get in the historical source material a lot of the time, we have to question it, because the political invective nature of how do you make it possible to exile somebody like you? Do have to find a way to really trash their reputation. And is it more useful to say openly that there was a political plot against you? It’s probably not a great move that might just encourage more plots, for instance, so being able to find a way to tarnish somebody’s character is a much more convenient way of ensuring that they’re effectively disposed of, and people can no longer associate with them because it becomes hugely problematic. And also, like, if they’re stuck on an island, good luck. How are they going to organize anything from there?

Jenny W 14:30
Exactly, exactly. So my Julia, I would say she’s, she’s a partier, but she’s also a plotter, you know? So I kind of was inspired by those two sides that I saw in Julia the elder that I kind of wanted to be true, fair enough.

Speaker 1 14:43
I definitely got visions of I saw Megalopolis, which I would not recommend to anybody, but the opening sequence of Megalopolis, where they have this character of Julia as a party girl. I definitely got visions of your Julia like. When I was reading your book from that movie,

Jenny W 15:03
I have got to watch this. I have got to watch it. I haven’t seen it yet. It is so terrible.

Speaker 1 15:07
It’s honestly one of the worst movies I have ever seen in my whole life. Oh, wow. The fact that it is inspired by ancient Rome is the reason why I went to see it. But oh my god, what a trash fire. What a mess.

Jenny W 15:22
My goodness, I feel like I maybe just have to watch the first scene then,

Speaker 1 15:26
yeah, maybe the opening five minutes. That’s what I would recommend you watch. Gotcha. So thinking about Julia the elder and how you wove various pieces into your book, I was just wondering what specific sources did you actually revisit? Because, as you said, you’ve done a series where Julie the elder was a major feature in the podcast before, when you were writing the book. Did you go back to any of the ancient source material, or were you more using sort of secondary sources? What was your sort of process with that? So

Jenny W 15:56
it’s been so long since I actually had to do it, you know? But like, I remember going back to, like, the gossipy sources like Cassius Dio has some things to say about Julia, if I remember right, who else covered her Suetonius. I honestly forget at this point. But like any book that I could find, and I used a lot of secondary sources, too, and fiction, like whatever I could find, basically, and my own imagination, you know, because that’s ultimately what it’s about?

Speaker 1 16:21
No, I think what you’ve done is actually, it’s really hard for people that tend to write history, which obviously is what we all do when we’re podcasting. I find it really interesting to think about taking all of that material and then turning it into a fictionalized story, because it sort of goes against, in some ways, what we’ve been trained to do in terms of using so much of your imagination.

Jenny W 16:46
Yeah, I think that’s true. When we started the podcast, Jen and I remember being very, sort of intimidated by the idea that I would have to be correct about things, because I did not train as a historian at all, like I have a degree in English, so I was always a little bit nervous, what if I just, you know, write this whole episode about something and just completely because I was, I loved history. I always loved history, but I was just like, what if I just get it wrong? And what’s interesting about that in the podcast, in fangirl is that we have a lot of historians and archeologists who listen to us. So far, that seems to be a lot of our fan base. And I’m just like, that seems to be going okay so far. But it’s not, it’s not that weird to me, because we always kind of incorporated that into our podcast already. You know, like we do Jen and I, my podcast co host and I, we’ve done a lot of sort of fictionalized, kind of micro fiction intros to podcast episodes that we’ve done. Then we do a lot of extrapolating, you know, and kind of fan fictioning, and like imagining these scenarios and things like that, and picking a lane like I’m sure you have to do that as historians too, where there’s many different possibilities of how the sources could be interpreted, or how the archeology could be interpreted. And you kind of even, even when you have that material in front of you, you have to kind of craft a story about what has happened here in order to make sense of it. So I don’t know, like I feel like in my work, in the podcast, I find myself using my imagination more than I thought. Yeah,

Dr G 18:15
definitely, I would agree with that, because, and particularly for ancient history, like modern history, you’re almost overwhelmed by the amount of source material you have access to, so you’ve really got to pick a niche. But with ancient history, I feel like it’s more like you’re crafting a lace, or you’re a spider that’s sort of creating a web. And like, what can you connect to? What and what would be most plausible to connect to something else given the other little pieces of information you’ve been able to scrounge together. So ultimately, the imaginative process is fundamental to doing ancient history, because you’re trying to join together things that are just sort of sitting slightly far apart from each other, and how they are connected is going to be the key, and you have to make that connection. Yeah,

Jenny W 18:57
I think that’s exactly right. Yeah. I

Speaker 1 19:00
think it’s more the idea of having to put it all into the format of a fictionalized book, you know, having the actual conversations and interactions between characters and, you know, and really fully fleshing out the pieces where we don’t know as much and that sort of aspect, that’s where I think I would struggle,

Jenny W 19:19
yeah, like giving them a voice, like, What do they sound like, you know, when they’re irritated or when they’re excited, or, you know, like, well, actual words come out of their mouth, and what would that sound like if you translate that into English? Yes, I frequently struggle with dialog.

Speaker 1 19:32
I can, I can understand that. That’s, I think, where I would struggle. As you say, it’s not that unusual for us to have to pick a lane, but then to have to turn that into something that is more of a story where you’ve got people interacting and having those sorts of moments between each other. It’s a different kind of style of writing completely to what we tend to do.

Jenny W 19:52
Yeah, and it’s just to for me in this moment, it was two characters who obviously never met, like if I took Julia the Elder and introduced her to Alaric of the Goths, how would that conversation go like? These are two people from wildly different parts of the empire, from the beginning and the end, you know. So that also kind of interested me as like an exercise is to bring those two people together in a way, and just see what kind of sparks flew and like, how would their understanding of the world be different? And I think, like in the very, very beginning of the book, when I first started it. This was ages ago, and I was really, did not know what I was doing, and I was just kind of playing around. I was like, what if Augustus just lived in the time of Alaric, and this was the real Julia the Elder, like, what if I just did that? And I had, like, a few, you know, scenes written, you know, Intro scenes written with just Julia, where that was her dad instead of her brother. And there were lots of conversations about these, you know, laws, these, sort of like, “women can’t be slutty anymore” laws, it was just me having fun. But that is definitely a huge source of inspiration for me. Is these, this sort of wild, what if of history, absolutely.

Speaker 1 21:02
So we can definitely see the influence of Julie the Elder in the characterization, particularly earlier on in your novel, but obviously a large part of your inspiration comes from much later in Roman history, and that is talking about Galla Placidia. Now I’d say that a lot of our listeners probably have heard of Julia the elder, but they probably haven’t heard that much about Galla Placidia. She is definitely a lesser known figure, even though she was also very important at Rome’s history. So can you tell us a little bit about her family background, her connections and the time in which she lived?

Jenny W 21:37
Yeah, absolutely so Galla Placidia, she was the daughter of Theodosius, the real daughter of Theodosius, and Theodosius was this emperor who lived in the late three hundreds. AD, I don’t think he made it into the four hundreds. Ad, I’m trying to think, but he was a really big figure in the history of Roman Christianity, and establishing Christianity as the state religion of Rome. I think he was involved in the Nicene I think he was like the guy who laid down the Nicene Creed, which established Nicene Christianity as the state religion that would be different from Arian Christianity, which was the form of Christianity that alarca The Visigoths was part of. So she was his daughter, and she would have been in Rome during multiple Alaric related sieges, or, like, you know, invasions, he made it down to Rome several times. Yeah, he got there a couple of times. Yeah, yeah. It’s actually kind of weird, because I’m like, there are so many times when he made it into the peninsula and then had to leave, and then made it all the way down, and then kind of went up again and then back down. Like, there was a lot of moving around, you know, but she was in the city for a lot of that, I think, 15 years old. There was news of Alaric at one of his sieges. This was not the final one, coming down the peninsula and setting fire to cities along his way. And all these, this horrible news of like sacking and burning, terrible things happening. And the people in Rome were freaking out. And there’s all this paranoia. At one point, the priests in the city, these would have been Christian priests, allowed the pagan priests, the worshipers of the old religion, to fire up the old altars again because of all this, you know, horrible stuff happening, and they wanted them to appeal to the gods in every way that they could. And the wife of Stilicho, the old general who had been Alaric’s main opponent, the guy who had been keeping him out, who had previously been executed for suspicion of colluding with Alaric. And that’s a whole backstory of its own. Anyway, he had been executed. His wife, Serena was arrested on the belief that she was somehow colluding with Alaric. And like, strangled and Galla Placidia at one point, I think, was like witness that, and like, voted for it, or something like that. And from that early age, she just had this kind of cold spine to her that just fascinated me. And she was in the city of Rome when it was sacked by Alaric and the Visigoths. We’re not sure exactly how she came to be in his entourage, but she was probably a captive who was taken at that point, she possibly met Alaric himself, but she wound up marrying Alaric’s second in command, and his brother in law, Athaulf. Athaulf was this guy who was another Gothic warlord type of guy, said to be very attractive, said to be also short. So, you know, hot, but we is kind of how I pictured him. Here. They got married. It’s, there’s all kinds of stuff in Edward Gibbon about, like, the history of Rome, about her dowry, which is absolutely amazing, like she supposedly had this enormous table made entirely of precious stones that had 365, legs and, like, just giant gold, solid gold plates, the size of wagon wheels and all kinds of crazy things, supposedly awesome. And I’m just like, you know, reading all this, I’m like, How can I work this in? Where do I put the giant table in Alaric’s war tent? So supposedly, depending on the source you. This is really kind of presented as these were two people who fell in love, which is another thing that really drew me to this story, because that’s another thing you actually don’t see a lot in in the sources about women in the ancient world falling in love with somebody that they wind up marrying, like a lot of is a lot of these noble marriages were like, marriage is a convenience, and if this is a kidnapping, obviously you would not think that that would be the case. And I think that that there are definitely sources that don’t show it that way. And I think modern historians that I’ve read have been more skeptical of that interpretation. So it kind of depends on how you see it. But that’s one interpretation. I remember being super drawn to that, because I was just like, oh my gosh, a situation where it’s not the worst for the woman, how about that? So I liked it. And I thought, you know, I have early commentary about my book and the way I kind of wove Galla Placidia in. I don’t use that name. I couldn’t have her fall in love with Athaulf because he gets killed by this guy who was a servant of an enemy of Alaric about, like, a year or maybe two years in the bath after they get married. So they don’t stay married long, and it’s not a happy story for that reason. So I couldn’t have written just a straight historical fiction romance novel about them. I kind of had to make it my own thing. And I definitely, you know, allergic dies five minutes after sacking Rome, so that that had, like, I knew it was suspending disbelief anyway, writing this book, and I wanted to give it a happy ending, so that’s what I did. And, you know, early, sort of, you know, reviews about this book have pointed out that this is not historically accurate, like, if I wanted to write a romance novel about this time period, why didn’t I just write about gull of lasidia? And my answer to that is, well, because that wouldn’t be a romance novel, because romance novels have to have a happy ending any way I did it. If I was writing about Alaric, or if I was writing about Ataulf and Galla Placidia, I would have to completely change it to give them the happy ending anyway. So as long as I was messing with the history, I wanted to do it my way,

Speaker 1 27:02
absolutely. I mean, that’s the whole idea, again, of writing historical fiction and not writing a history

Jenny W 27:09
Exactly, exactly. So Galla Placidia, after a tough dies, she gets basically sold back to the Romans. They’re like a series of unfortunate events that happened where the Goths are in a terrible position again and wind up having to negotiate with the Romans to survive and send her back, along with a bunch of other concessions, she winds up marrying this general called Constantius, who she loathed, down to her soul, hated this guy. I think that’s pretty clear in the sources, as I remember, he eventually becomes emperor, and then dies, and then she becomes Empress, and rules for about 12 years. And she is really, really good at it. Rules completely with an iron fist. She’s like, very good at, like, negotiating disputes. She oversaw a lot of building projects in Ravenna, and was really pretty much undisputed. And I just love the idea of my Julia kind of growing into the gala Placidia, part of herself over the course of this story. So that’s kind of part of the clay I was working with.

Speaker 1 28:12
I kind of imagine Agrippina, the younger, loving the position that Galla Placidia ends up having, which is after making it through all the marriages and all the men, she ends up getting to be regent for her son and effectively being Empress of the Roman Empire, which I think is what Agrippina the younger probably had in mind when Nero came to reign, and it just didn’t work out for her that way. Oh, absolutely.

Jenny W 28:35
And, I mean, I think that there’s a lot, there’s a there’s a huge interesting conversation to be had, because we saw how Cleopatra dealt with her brother husbands, you know, having them killed off. As long as you have a son who is a child, you can rule undisputed. But once that kid gets to be about Nero’s age, he’s like, 15 years old, he starts to want to do it himself. Then you have a problem, you know, and you see Cleopatra having a similar situation with these brother husbands that she’s married to who are like, you know, 12 years old. I mean, she starts to assassinate them. At least that’s the rumor. I don’t know that’s actually all 100% historically accurate all the time. I’ve

Dr G 29:16
got opinions. They’ve got to go,

Jenny W 29:18
you know, there’s all kinds of stuff happening here, where, as a woman, if you want to rule, you have to rule through this son that you have most of the time if you’re alone, you don’t have, like, a husband. So that can be a problem as the son ages, unless, unless you have a good relationship with him, or, like, you know, you work it out somehow, I guess.

Speaker 1 29:39
Valentinian the third from memory was not the most inspirational character in history.

Jenny W 29:47
No, no, I don’t know what happened with him.

Dr Rad 29:51
Nothing good.

Jenny W 29:53
Yeah, I

Dr G 29:55
think it’s a really interesting aspect of history, is that we get the. Women who grow up in the imperial court, so they’re very familiar with how things are done. They understand that on some in some respects, that they’re locked out of official power in many ways. And we see that with particularly with Honoria as well. And yet, if they get the chance, some of them are like, I can make this work, and it’s like, I found my conduit. I’ve got the small child. It’s a man that’s great, and now I can start to leverage within that system of power, which I’m very familiar with. I know he’s working against me, but if I say I’m speaking on behalf of this kid over here, all of a sudden I can get some stuff done. And I was like, it’s like, really face in the face of adversity, finding a way to be powerful anyway, which I think is pretty cool.

Jenny W 30:50
Yeah, I think it’s fascinating, too. And it’s also dangerous. Like, I think that as your son ages, that can become a time of transition that’s dangerous for women rulers. Just as you know, times of transition when a male king dies could be dangerous for everybody. And

Speaker 1 31:02
it’s interesting to think about you using Galla Placidia as well, because, as you highlighted when you were talking about the timing of her life, it isn’t a completely different Rome. It’s the room that most people don’t really think about because it’s not often presented in popular history, I think, is effectively as earlier parts of Roman history, because this is a really Christianized version of the Roman Empire. And as a result, the way that our sources write about people is different to the way that say, you know your Suetonius, your A Tacitus, would write about people. So what sense Did you really get of the character of Galla Placidia when you were crafting her, I just

Jenny W 31:44
got this sense of just this is a woman who is going to make it work no matter what. You know. She finds herself in the midst of this Gothic horde of people who has just sacked her city and she’s gonna rule them. And she finds herself depending on this man who maybe makes her marry him. I don’t know exactly how that would have happened, but, or maybe she fell in love with him, but what I suspect is that she wound up having to marry him because he took a shine to her. He decided that it would be politically advantageous to him to marry the daughter of Theodosius. And she decided, I’m going to rule over this man, and then I’m going to rule over your people. And when that fell apart and she wound up going back to Rome and having to marry this other guy, she made it work that way as well. Like she was somebody who was just not gonna she was not gonna take anything lying down, you know, like, whatever situation she came into, she was gonna dominate that situation. And that was really interesting to me.

Dr Rad 32:38
It is really interesting when you think about the what if of that situation, because, as you say, definitely the accepted version of things, even though modern scholars might be a bit more skeptical about it, is that there was some sort of affection or relationship developing between Galla Placidia and her husband, Adolf in that they had a child, they seem to have been really sad when that child died, and if her husband hadn’t died so quickly as well. I mean, who knows what would have happened, given that her son ends up dying only a few years after she does, and it’s during these increasing problems with the quote, unquote, barbarians. It’s just so interesting to think about what would have happened if gala had managed to hold everything together and have preserved a union between the barbarians, again, flesh rabbits and the Romans. Yeah.

Jenny W 33:36
I mean, I think that it would have been a stronger kingdom, you know, because she she leaves it at a point of weakness. And I’m gonna do a whole series coming up on the history of the Goths, and what happens to the Goths after this whole episode with the Romans, after they move out of Italy and things like that like that’s also just really interesting history, but I haven’t quite gotten to that yet. It’s a big undertaking. That’s a lot of them. That’s the thing. It’s a huge undertaking. And that’s what part of what made this book so heavily fictionalized, like how I had to write it that way, is because there’s so much we don’t know about Gothic culture. We have reams and reams and reams and reams and reams of military history, but there’s a lot we don’t know about how they saw things in just sort of daily life. And it’s really easy to assume that they were kind of proto Vikings for various reasons, but that may not have been the case. I am doing a deep dive later. I’m not sure, but I made some choices in the book, you know, because there’s a lot of gaps to fill in,

Dr G 34:38
for sure, and I think in a way that becomes like a perfect sort of Canvas for historical fiction, because we don’t have those insights into exactly how they live their lives, how their leadership was structured in many respects, and sort of like cross culturally between different Gothic groups as well. Were not sure about when they really sort of came together and decided to work in a more unified way, and what led to that? So there’s lots of potential for coloring in all of those gaps to create a really rich world for the reader to explore. Yeah, exactly.

Jenny W 35:17
And that’s just so much fun like that is something I absolutely love to do. And

Dr Rad 35:21
so I’d love to ask for Galla Placidia, because, as I say, she’s someone that people don’t know as well, but she definitely was a major part of your character of Julia. What kind of source material was out there for you for her? So

Jenny W 35:35
I think I first met her in Edward Gibbon. So like the honestly, I’m terrible with names of books, so I should have had a list of things. There is Jordanes, there’s Zosimus. There’s various writers at the time who come at this mainly from a Christian lens. I would say, I think it’s Jordanes, who is actually Gothic and who is writing a history of things. Those are like sources from my for the world in general, and about Alaric, and some of them also talk about Galla Placidia and Athaulf as well. So I think there was one, I forget the name, but there was one that was definitely talking about the relationship between Galla Placidita and Athaulf as servitude. That was the word that was used. But most of them talk about it as she fell in love with him, and he was very handsome, if just a bit short, but she didn’t mind. They were in love. One

Dr Rad 36:25
down, full,

Jenny W 36:27
right? No, she was like, You know what? I like a guy who’s my height. I don’t know. I mean, that’s definitely, I feel like that’s just definitely a more positive interpretation that I really fell in love with at the time. But you never, you never know with these things, and I don’t know, but I was very intrigued by this idea of a woman who could, who could just walk into that situation and make it hers. Yeah,

Dr G 36:49
I think it’s really tricky, because obviously we don’t have sources from the inside for that kind of situation, but obviously as a hostage, there is a certain degree in which it would be wise to follow along certain decision making paths in order to preserve yourself and to try to create a ring of safety around you and a bit of a buffer. So if somebody has taken a shine to you, for instance, and he does happen to be a little bit shorter, and to all of our short kings out there. Don’t worry. It’s okay. No,

Speaker 2 37:22
sure, it’s all right, yeah, yes, yeah. Well,

Speaker 1 37:27
her brother wasn’t exactly the most again. I mean, this is another another woman who isn’t surrounded by men who were not the most capable, inspirational characters. Her brother was also a bit of a waste of space. Basically, I think her dad is the only one who anyone it would look at and go. Now there’s an emperor. Her brother and my son were kind of a waste of space.

Jenny W 37:52
That is so true.

Dr G 37:55
She’s doing the best she can. I

Dr Rad 37:56
think the interesting thing about Galla Placidia, as opposed to characters like Julia and Agrippina the Younger, who I’m just mentioning because of her ambition, not because she necessarily has any connection to your book. But the thing about Galla Placidia is that living in this Christianized world, it did give women a different set of tools to play with, I suppose, and a different avenue for power, because if they were admirable religious figures, it kind of, I think, allowed men to admire them and respect them in a slightly different way to what they had before. Yeah, and

Jenny W 38:34
that comes up in the sources, how she was perceived. I believe she’s described as beautiful and very pious, and that was kind of a shield that she was holding. And remember that the Goths at this point were also Christian, so that would have been something that that was respected. I did a very early episode, like one of the first episodes that I ever did was about, I did a kind of a series about Alaric, Athaulf, and Galla Placidia, and Honoria and Attila the Hun and in the Athaulf and Galla Placidia episode. This is many, many years ago, like when we first started the podcast. Started the podcast, I made a case that the Gothic culture was less misogynist than the Roman one, and would have valued women more highly, even if they were both Christian at the time, like they had a long history of venerating women as ciruses and listening to them as, you know, community leaders. And there wasn’t the sense. One of the things that I picked up on was this sort of scorn for love that occurs, at least in upper class aristocratic Roman culture, like, for example, Pompey was a wife guy and was ridiculed for it. And this happens occasionally, where, you know, people really make fun of someone for loving their wife, and it’s kind of looked down on, is like, Oh, you’re just kind of enthralled by this woman, and love was seen as this madness and things like that

Speaker 1 39:49
disgusting. I’ve never heard of such films, right?

Jenny W 39:52
I mean, the appropriate feeling for your spouse should be a sort of fondness and familial duty. That’s what you’re supposed to feel. You’re certainly not supposed to get too excited about it. So this idea that maybe the Gothic culture gave Galla Placidia a little bit more room to breathe, I like the idea that maybe she enjoyed that about it when she found it.

Speaker 1 40:14
It is so intriguing to think about the possibilities of what her life was like in that very brief moment where she was living amongst them, yeah.

Jenny W 40:22
And this is, of course, fan fiction on my part, mostly, and potentially fan fiction on the sources part, depending, you know, because we don’t have anything from her point of view, I think it’s high, highly likely that when she got into that situation, she wasn’t like, I mean, maybe, I don’t know, maybe she fell in love with a tall first glance, unlikely. I think it was a bad situation that she was trying to make the best of. She could make this guy enthralled with her all the better. And then, if she could, once she was back in Rome, things worked out for her there too. And I think that kind of shows that that was the kind of person she was

Dr G 40:57
good at making the best of a bad set of circumstances.

Jenny W 41:00
Yeah, good, good at, like, walking into a situation that would be really bad and just ruling it fine of steel. And I just respected that about her, like that was the thing that came across to me.

Speaker 1 41:12
Well, I think you’re right. I think when we’re talking about her character, as I said, after her father died, which was in 395, ce really, there were a lot of, I mean, I suppose it’s not the best way to characterize them, but weaker rulers. There weren’t really any strong Roman emperors after Theodosius, and it was the people around them that were more holding things together. I think, after that, particularly if we’re talking about, obviously, this sort of Western Roman court, and gallopicity is one of those people. We also have all these, again, quote, unquote, barbarian figures, and we also have people like Constantius, who, even though galapaciti Apparently couldn’t stand him, these are the strong characters around the Emperors that seem to be driving events and holding things together. But the Emperors themselves a very meh from this time period, yeah,

Jenny W 42:03
and, and, I mean, that is kind of a, you know, in a way, she has a channel of power because her son is sort of her, her excuse to hang on to power when she is in that position. But there are situations where we kind of see Agrippina, the Younger doing this with Claudius, you know, like there are situations where women to hold on to power need a strong husband that they can operate through. So potentially, at that point, a tough was that guy, maybe potentially where she’s like, all right, I can work with this clay.

Speaker 1 42:35
Now, just to wrap up, we’re not going to go into heaps of detail, because, to be honest, there’s not heaps of detail to be had, but we did mention at the top that Honoria was also worked into this story somewhat. She’s a very shadowy figure in the histories, and we have even less from her point of view than we do about someone like Galla Placidia. Can you tell us a little bit about Honoria and how she factored into your story as

Jenny W 43:01
well. Oh yeah, this is actually one of my favorite parts. So Honoria was gala Placidia, his daughter with Constantius, and she did not want to marry the guy that her mom picked out for her, and she rebelled. And what is wild about this is that Galla Placidia, theoretically, again, depending on if you believe the sources, had been married to a man that she maybe loved or had some affection for, possibly, and then married to a man that she absolutely loathed, consensus, and she was really adamant that her daughter was going to marry this man that she loathed, which is wild to me, like this, this idea that she was going to make her daughter do this thing. And so Honoria, at this time, Attila the Hun was kind of ravaging various territories in Rome, and I don’t think he had made it all the way into Italy or had made it to Gaul yet, but what she did was she, essentially, she sent him a message inviting him to come and get her,

Dr G 44:03
please. Yes, babe, I would really appreciate

Jenny W 44:06
and get me and I will marry you. Get me out of here. Is that amazing? And as far as I remember, this is a very long time ago that I did these episodes. But this is something that stuck in my mind. He basically took this as a pretext, you know, well, if I marry this woman, that means I own half the Roman Empire. So he invaded on that pretext alone, before they were even married. Now, I don’t think these people ever met. Honoria was, I believe, eventually forced to marry somebody, or there’s a question mark about what happened to her. I’m not sure she might have been sent into exile. Again. These are like just various theories that I’ve seen come across, but I’m not sure. I don’t think people know, as you said, but yeah, she and Attila the Hun never met in person. And that, again, that scenario, again, was one of the inspirations for this book. And like, I kind of played with the idea of Augustus and Julia the elder living in 410 ad. I also played with the. Idea that maybe this romance novel I was writing was about anoria and Attila the Hun, like, what if they met in person? My Julia kind of propositioning Alaric of the Visigoths, comes from that sort of that just absolutely balls to the walls, you know, rebellious spirit that anoria had, and like, this absolute refusal to just do what most women did at that time, which is, marry who your parents told you to.

Dr G 45:26
Under no circumstances. I’d rather marry a hun. Everyone’s like,

Jenny W 45:30
at least she picked him out herself. I mean, granted, she hadn’t met him, but

Speaker 1 45:36
it is wild when you think about the reputation that Attila the Hun has, yeah, it is wild to think about a Roman imperial Princess being like, you know what? I don’t like the guy that you’ve picked for me, mom. I’d like that guy well.

Jenny W 45:51
And I think at one point, Honoria was sent to live with the Eastern Roman court, which was a lot more rigidly Christian than where she was living before. So if I remember, right, I don’t know if this, honestly, don’t know if this is fan fiction at this point, but I wrote, I wrote an intro to this episode that I did about Honoria, where she’s in the Eastern Roman court, and she’s been living this extremely strictured Christian life, and she can’t stand it. And there’s this point where Attila the Hun is bearing down on Constantinople. And there’s all these wild like, like with the Alaric story, you know, there’s all these wild rumors flying before him about his brutality and all of the horrible things he’s going to do to the city as soon as he gets to it. And the people are building the walls that have been just destroyed by an earthquake, and they have, like, two weeks to do this, or, you know, some extremely short time to do this before the the Huns are going to get here, and everybody’s praying for the walls to rise, and anoria is praying for the walls to fall and for the Huns to just sweep into the city and burn everything and rescue her from this extremely rigid lifestyle. Like that. She just it just didn’t fit her. She couldn’t stand it. That’s who anoria is in my head. I think about that all the time like that. What she was refusing to do was what women did all the time, like that was extremely common back then, is just you married whoever your parents told you to marry, and that was it. And if you were 15 and he was 50 years old, that was fine. That’s just what people did. Or, you know, whatever other horrible situation it was like the these were, you know, women and girls who did not get a choice, and the fact that she just dug in her heels and said, No, nobody did that like gala Placidia didn’t even do that well,

Dr G 47:28
not directly, but as Honoria is sort of growing up and witnessing what is happening in the imperial court. It’s her mom in charge. So it’s kind of like as a child, I think you would be seeing very much a situation where you’re like, Well, mom gets to do what she likes.

Speaker 1 47:48
I know just imagining this confrontation where it’s like, But mom, you got to run off with a barbarian who open you, and my age is a son. That’s such

Jenny W 47:56
a good point. Like, why can’t I have a barbarian husband? You got

Dr G 48:00
to do it. Yeah. And I think maybe if I’m thinking of like, in a historical fiction kind of way, I feel like that conversation will be like, But mom, you already said you love that guy, and it’s like, I just want my own. How bad

Jenny W 48:13
could Attila the Hun be really? I mean, isn’t it all just girl is rumor Exactly. It’s

Speaker 1 48:21
also that thing of, as you say, We know so little about anoria, which is mental because she is often brought up as being a key factor in Attila the Hun attacking at this point in time. But again, it’s that question of, was that just some sort of pretense on behalf of the sources to blame it all on her, when maybe Attila was going to attack anyway. Or maybe there were much larger reasons. It’s so hard to understand, but at the same time, you can understand why he would if he thought there was a chance of nailing an Imperial Princess, yeah.

Jenny W 48:53
Or just, you know, maybe this comes up in my book, where my Alaric kind of sells the idea of being married to a Roman Princess, to his people by saying, like this, this is obviously going to mean that when I invade, we’re going to have a son, and he’s going to be the heir. So I basically already rule Rome. I just have to go and take it, you know, like there’s that sort of, that motivation that I think Attila probably had, or at least he’s, he’s been presented as having. I mean, whether that’s the actual case is anybody’s guess. Well, I

Speaker 1 49:23
think that’s what’s so interesting about thinking about this period of Rome’s history, in that it is one where a lot of the groups that are putting pressure on Rome’s borders, or putting pressure on Rome systems from within. It is about them wanting to be integrated into the Roman Empire, and a lot of the time the Romans are causing problems for themselves by not effectively doing that, by either resisting it, fighting back, or putting all these terms and conditions which are kind of unacceptable on it. And when we see them thriving more, I think is where they are. Able to come to some sort of agreement with these peoples, because, after all, a lot of the barbarians are moving into Rome and putting pressure on Rome because they themselves are having pressure put on them, you know, because they’re being driven out of their traditional lands. And so it is an interesting thing to think about when there’s so much discussion about immigration in a lot of parts of the world at this point in time, and given that there’s only going to be increasing number of people who are fleeing from war, genocide and climate change, it’s such an interesting thing for us to be considering at this moment in time. Yeah, that’s

Jenny W 50:35
a huge part of this story, because it was the migration era, right? And like, what that means is that there were Huns coming down from. People aren’t actually sure where the Huns were coming down from. It might have been the Eastern Asian steppes. It might have been elsewhere. There’s a lot of question about who the Huns were, but they were kind of crashing into these other populations of Germanic and Gothic tribes, and they were crashing into the Roman Empire, and that was starting in alaric’s time. And so you have, like, you know, refugee crisis piled upon refugee crisis in this time period anyway, which is really the engine for what is happening right now. And Alaric wanted to be integrated. Like a big part of his story was that he had been a federate leader, and he wanted the legitimate, highly placed generalship position in the Roman army proper. And there’s questions, you know, about what that means. Did he want that? Because it would have put his people in a better position. Did he want that? Because he just was really petty about the job title for some reason, like,

Dr Rad 51:30
I want the official title, god damn it,

Jenny W 51:32
right. But like the real Alaric, I messed with this history a little bit in my book. Like my Alaric is kind of more focused on the on the homeland part, but the real Alaric was really focused on part of his story was this was a story about integration and what immigrants into Rome did and didn’t have the right to do and have, and what was happening to these people. And there’s a biography that I’ve read that came out actually just as I was polishing up and finishing the final draft of book one. Unfortunately, that would have been so helpful, always, always. And it’s about, it’s called Alaric the Goth, like An Outsider’s History of Rome. It’s by Douglas Boin, and it is an excellent, excellent biography, and it really focuses on the immigrant part. And it’s just fascinating, and just sheds a lot of light on this, on this topic. Well,

Dr G 52:20
at this point in time, I reckon we should wrap up, and I think there’s lots of really interesting ideas that come up through your novel that sort of relate and raise questions about what we know about this history and that it is also a case that you’re receiving a lot of high praise, so I want to just quote one of them. So Elodie Harper, who is the author of the acclaimed ‘The Wolf Den’, has said, this is a hugely entertaining Roman world romanticy with a hilarious heroine and a smoldering hero, whose adventures in love and war are set against the backdrop of the last dangerous days of an ancient empire. So enticing, very enticing, that’s Yeah. Congratulations,

Speaker 1 53:10
Jenny. You must be so thrilled to have such an amazing endorsement of your debut novel. And we’re wondering, are there any hints about what you might be working on? Well,

Jenny W 53:22
I just want to say thank you to Elodie for that glowing praise. I am eternally grateful. I’m so glad that she loved the book. And yes, I am working on book two of this series where, yeah, which is the continuation of the story. I definitely, when I started it, thought it might be one book, but it is not. It is two books. I’m getting that draft ready. I’m actually, as we’re doing this interview, scheduled to pass in the first draft of it to my editor in two days, three, two or three days. I don’t know what day is it? It’s Friday. Scary

Dr G 53:55
times. Yeah, it’s

Jenny W 53:56
a little intimidating. That’s what I’m going to be doing all weekend. So, yeah. So I’m working on Book Two, which is as yet untitled. I have an idea for a book three, but I’m kind of sitting on it for now. Gonna see how these edits go, and you know how everything goes, whether I keep the plot point that it’s all based on. But yeah, I have an idea for one, at least. And yeah, we’ll see. We’ll see what’s next.

Speaker 1 54:21
Oh, how exciting to hear that this might be a trilogy in the making, potentially,

Jenny W 54:25
I don’t know at this point, it’s a duology.

Speaker 1 54:30
Yeah, fair enough. So just to wrap up, Jenny, we have mentioned the podcast, obviously. But can you tell our listeners where people can find you? And of course, ancient Yeah?

Jenny W 54:39
So I my podcast is ancient history. Fan girl, it can be found wherever you get podcasts. And I’m Jenny Williamson. Mainly, I’m mainly active on Instagram. My handle is Jenny freaking Williamson. I have a website, Jenny Williamson, author, and from there, you can pretty much find out everything about me that you want to

Speaker 1 54:59
know. Fan. Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for coming on and telling us all about your book and your process and your source material, your inspiration and listeners, we hope that you also run out and buy a copy of Jenny’s book. Yeah,

Jenny W 55:13
enemy of my dreams, it drops February 4. And yeah, thank you guys so much for having me

Dr G 55:19
an absolute pleasure.

Dr Rad 55:26
Thank you for listening to this episode of the partial historians. You can find our sources sound credits and an automated transcript in our show notes. Our music is by Bettina Joy De Guzman, and because this is a special episode, we would like to say thank you to all of our Patreon and Kofi supporters who helped to make bonus content like this possible, and in return, they get early access to all of our extra content. We’d also like to say that if you found the people we were discussing in today’s episode particularly fascinating, and let’s face it, why wouldn’t you? You might want to check out your cheeky guide to the Roman Empire, which is the book that Dr G and I just wrote, which has entries on both Julia the elder and Galla Placidia. We’d also like to recommend Emma Southon’s excellent book, a History of Rome in 21 women, which also has some content that might interest you, particularly about Gallup Placidia and Honoria. Until next time we are yours in ancient Rome, you

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

The post Special Episode – Enemy of My Dreams with Jenny Williamson appeared first on The Partial Historians - Ancient Roman History with smart ladies.

We are thrilled to sit down in conversation with Professor Joel P. Christensen to discuss some of the ideas explored in his forthcoming book Storylife: On Epic, Narrative, and Living Things (Yale University Press).

Special Episode – Storylife with Professor Joel P. Christensen

Joel Christensen is Professor of Classical Studies at Brandeis University. He received his BA and MA from Brandeis in Classics and English and holds a PhD in Classics from New York University. His publications include A Beginner’s Guide to Homer (2013), A Commentary on the Homeric Battle of Frogs and Mice with Erik Robinson (2018), Homer’s Thebes: Epic Rivalries and the Appropriation of Mythical Pasts with Elton T. E. Barker (2019),  and The Many-Minded Man: the Odyssey, Psychology, and the Therapy of Epic (2020). 

Professor Christensen is also famous online for his engaging work on ancient Greece and Rome through his website sententiaeantiquae.com

In this episode we delve into some of the ideas that Christensen explores in his forthcoming book Storylife: On Epic, Narrative, and Living Things (Yale University Press). With chapters exploring Homer in tandem with the COVID-19 pandemic and people’s response to it, particularly in the context of the United States.

The cover for Storylife

Keen on the Ancient Greek recited by Professor Christensen in this episode?

He recites the opening line of the Iliad:

μῆνιν ἄειδε θεὰ Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος

which can be found online at Perseus.

And he also cites the first line of the Odyssey:

ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, μοῦσα, πολύτροπον, ὃς μάλα πολλὰ

which can also be found online at Perseus.

Our music is composed by the amazing Bettina Joy de Guzman.

Lightly edited for the Latin and our wonderful Australian accents!

Dr G 0:15
Welcome to The Partial Historians.

We explore all the details of ancient Rome.

Everything from political scandals, the love affairs, the battled wage and when citizens turn against each other. I’m Dr Rad.

And I’m Dr G. We consider Rome as the Romans saw it, by reading different authors from the ancient past and comparing their stories.

Join us as we trace the journey of Rome from the founding of the city.

Welcome everybody to a very special episode of The Partial Historians. I am one of your hosts, Dr G.

And I am Dr Rad.

And we are super thrilled today to be welcoming a special guest, Professor JoelChristiensen. Now, Joel Christiensen is professor of Classical Studies at Brandeis University. He received his BA and MA from Brandeis in classics and English, and holds a PhD in classics from New York University, and has many exciting publications in his back catalog, including ‘A Beginner’s guide to Homer’, ‘A Commentary on the Homeric Battle of Frogs and Mice’ with Eric Robinson, ‘Homer’s Thebes’ with Elton T. E. Barker and ‘The Many-Minded Man:The Odyssey, Psychology, and the Therapy of Epic’. Also, Professor Christensen is famous online for his engaging work on ancient Greece and Rome through his website, which I’m about to mispronounce, sententiaeantiquae.com

Yup, you stuff that up completely.

I did. Somebody correct me, please. Somebody correct me.

Sententiae, I think.

See, there you go. It’s easy. Just don’t rely on me for pronouncing things. So you could say, from this back catalog that we are incredibly starstruck and also completely out of our death, because we are Roman historians. And you will have noticed that Professor Christensen is really a Greek specialist in all of these sorts of areas that he’s focused on in his work. And we are going to be really junior learners in this process of this interview, which we’re excited about as we talk about Professor Christensen’s forthcoming book, ‘Storylife: On Epic Narrative and Living Things’, which is coming out in 2025 through Yale University Press. So thank you, Joel, so much for joining us.

Professor Joel Christensen 2:57
Hey, thank you for inviting me. I was so psyched when you guys sent that email, it’s a pleasure to be here.

Dr G 3:03
Fantastic. Woo hoo. I’m glad that the excitement is mutual, because we’re definitely starstruck. So this is, this is thrilling stuff. So to start off with, thinking about story life, in the preface, you say that this is an exploration of how we think about stories if we externalize them. And I’m wondering if you can take us a little bit about what led you to this idea to consider stories as external agents.

Speaker 1 3:31
Yeah, so I mean, what’s probably connected and animated my work, in fact, my interest in scholarship, since I was, I don’t know, middle school is thinking about how stories function in the world, why we respond to them so much, why we care about them and really like how we depend on them and what they do. And so, you know, for many years, in teaching myth, I, you know, grasp about for different metaphors and how to think about getting people to understand why makes vary, why stories are embedded in different contexts, and what similarities and differences from one context to another means. And at the same time, while I was doing this, I have been, as you note in the introduction, sort of habitually online, watching everything that’s happened in Twitter and Facebook since it started, I’m, you know, I feel like I’m not that old, but I’m old enough to remember a world before Google and before Facebook. In fact, both debuted while I was in graduate school, and you really got a sense of watching them unfold, of how much faster narratives were moving and changing, and how they could really make people act in different ways. And so part of it is, for me, I’ve always felt sort of on the outside of what we might see as American centrism and what we do in the world. To go back again to around the time Google debuted, I was in New York City for 911. I was there for the peace protest. And you know, I lost friends and, like, ruined family relationships. Because from the beginning, I didn’t understand why a terrorist attack in the US meant we should be going on an endless war and terror and, you know, invading Afghanistan, Iraq, all of those things. And so constantly, you know, I was interested in rhetoric, in politics. And then, you know, post the 2008 election and Obama, I got really interested in the way that stories shape our notion by identity and belonging to larger groups. And so that’s a very long answer for your for your question, but I’m getting, you know, I’m getting to the point, I got to the point where I, you know, everyone’s talking about intention and responsibility, like, who’s creating stories, who’s responsible for it? But one of the things that I think is really clear from watching the way narratives, you know, metastasize online and change, is I don’t think there are agents, right? We can point to specific moments where someone floats in there, gets accepted, but it’s so much more complicated than and so for me, what? But, you know, Trump’s victory in 2016 like bored me. I was like, How does this happen? How do people think like we can actually do? And then what really made me start to think of narratives as being independent of us was our collective response of us, especially to COVID, just the very notion that people were rejecting vaccination, not believing that we could understand the way the disease is working, rejecting masking and public health things, you know, it made me think, well, what if, just for sake of argument, we imagine that stories have nothing to do with our attention, right, but that they have a reason for existing on their own, and they operate by their own logic. And what if, in this logic is the very logic that animates the rest of creation, which is the need to perpetuate itself, not for good, not for evil, just for basic survival. And so that, for me, was sort of the starting proposition, what would it mean to just think about stories as independent from us, and that, in a way, can help sort of soften the blow of us understanding that something that we create and participate in willingly actually causes us harm. And so for me, this is also connected. It’s not just about COVID, of course. It’s also about climate change, it’s about so many of the narratives that we participate in that actually cause harm to us, individually and collectively. And so I think the ideas have been brewing and simmering for a very long time, but the real catalyst was just spending 18 months sitting at home watching us make bad decision after bad decision, and wondering if there’s a different way of thinking about things.

Dr G 7:45
Yeah, I think that’s really amazing. I think that puts things in a really great context as well, to set up, like the questions that we’re going to start to delve into further as we get into this interview as well, but this sense in which stories sort of sit both outside of the realm of the self, but are also constantly interacting with us as we move through space and time. And I think your analogy of, well, it’s not even an analogy, it’s just a fact of history, the way that the explosiveness of the internet over time, and so I don’t think that we’re that old, either, but we also pre date some of that stuff.

Speaker 1 8:24
Well, I mean, look for full disclosure, my age. I’m 46 right? And, you know, the first time I ever sent an email was when I was a freshman in college, yeah. And, you know, I never used the internet till I applied for college. And so I think this means, to a certain extent, that my consciousness and cognitive capacity formed before that and have a different relationship to information, but we can see that change. It’s like my parents talk about what life was like before cable TV. Like I really understand that, but I can clock the way it works. And just one thing to add to that, you know, that can another connection that that really primed all this thought is the work I did for my Odyssey book, which was really engaged in cognitive psychology and neurobiology and sort of collective notions of thinking and minds to sort of lay the basis for epic being a therapeutic experience. And I think one of our big challenges, and this again, lead back to the book, is as human beings, we are both culturally set up to think of ourselves as individuals and separate from things, and we’re biologically encouraged to consider the world in that way, but our language and our engagement with ideas, with others, is actually a collective experience. And so I think one of the reasons why I find these analogies not just useful, but absolutely necessary, is it’s so hard for us to defamiliarize ourselves, with our with the experiences that we have. Have like, we don’t think well in the aggregate, and it’s really hard to think outside of our individual subjectivity and imagine ourselves as part of a larger narrative ecosystem that shapes our identities, instead of sort of, you know, like free agents in the world making all of our own choices.

Dr G 10:15
Yeah, obviously, as of time of recording, to totally date this podcast, which I know we’re not supposed to do. But hey, watch me do it yet again. We are obviously all reeling with the news of Trump’s re election as of a few weeks ago, and definitely, as somebody who is constantly struggling with the lack of serious action on climate change, on the on the behalf of both institutions and individuals, I totally get what you’re saying in terms of, it just constantly boggles my mind that this kind of stuff is happening in the world. And I do think it has a lot to do with with narratives and the way that people interact with them. Yeah, that’s drive that, you know, helping to drive sort of action on these sorts of issues.

Speaker 1 10:55
No, I look it’s mind boggling. And you know, the the stance I always had, you know, when we elected, when we re elected, George Bush in 2004 you know, my first stance was, everybody’s stupid, right? But, but then I had to step back and say, look like, while it might be attractive to dismiss more than 50% of the country, like, we can’t assume that everyone’s just insane, right? Like, there has to be some other way to think about it, you know. And part of is about to reading people with empathy, trying to under, like, trying to understand the world in a generous way, which is really, really hard. And so that’s where it’s like, sort of, you know, to think of us as not individuals making rational decisions may seem to, you know, deprive us of agency, in a way, but it also is a fundamentally important framing for understanding human action, and I think that’s one of our real challenges in public policy and education. Is really seeing that problem there, that we are part of these larger tides in the world. And no matter how much smarter more informed we think we are like, we still have to look at the larger picture.

Dr G 12:11
So perhaps to segue from modern American politics to ancient Greece, such a jump time traveling a little bit obviously, even the average person on the street is probably aware that one of the standout figures in ancient Greek thought and storytelling is Homer. And one of the big questions that usually concerns scholars of Homer is important enough to receive capitalized letters, which is the Homeric question. Can you briefly explain to us what the Homeric question is all about?

Speaker 1 12:45
So, so that modifier, briefly, there is, is a dangerous request, but I’ll see. I’ll see what I could do. So the Homeric question, it’s not really one question, it’s multiple questions, and it has the following elements, one first one are the alien the Odyssey by the same person in scare quotes? Two, whether or not they’re by the same person, or if they are, are the alien Odyssey as we have them unitary? Are each of them whole in the way they’re meant to be, instead of sort of Malcolm text that were put together by later, by later editors? Three if these texts are unitary, or if they not, or if they’re not, what is the relationship between the texts we have and the oral tradition that we’re very certain predated the textualizations of the epic right? So, how did they move from an oral tradition of performance into a textual tradition of reading. And I think an additional question there is, how does that change the way we think about the epics, even if they came from an oral tradition, but they’re also in text? How do we analyze them? And then I think I’d add to that, how and when did it happen? And, you know it, did it happen in a single time or over time? And what’s the dirty relationship between the oral tradition and the text? So complicating features of this is that we have no certain evidence about a person called Homer. There are biographical traditions that are clearly false. They’re from all over the place. The best book on this is by Barbara Graziosi. It’s called ‘Inventing Homer’, and it really goes through the ancient evidence for the creation of Homer as a as a sort of poetic figure. You guys may like this next anecdote. I’ll try to make it simple. But my daughter came home. She is in She’s a freshman in high school, so first year in high school, she’s 14, and to hassle me, she took out her textbook, and she showed me in her history textbook, line, Homer was a blind poet who wrote The Iliad of the Odyssey, and she knew I was going to die from that. And she’s like, Well, why isn’t this right? I’m like, it. To and I tried to explain to her about composition and performance and how important it was over time. And then she said, Well, Encyclopedia Britannica says this is right. And she took out a phone and started fact checking me. And then she went to karate class and kept texting me. She texted, you know, what is Homer, according to you, and then she followed up people in my class say who was a real guy. And I just like, you’re trying to murder me, my daughter. And so I think the biographical tradition is clearly false. And in addition, there are significant features that are different between sort of oral derived literature and literary culture. And to add to all that, and make it more complicated, as a literate culture, where prejudice towards a sort of God author model for the creation of things. And I think if you read really carefully in the development of ancient Greek literature, you can see culture changing. I think Aristotle doesn’t understand oral culture. He doesn’t see the tradition as being indebted to variety and multiplicity and performance. He sees it as a written thing, because he’s a writer, and I think our number one challenge in conceptualizing a non written, fixed textual tradition for Homer is our own cultural framework that privileges authorship over genius over almost all else, and dis privileges collective contributions and creations.

Dr G 16:35
Well, you convinced me I’m going to go out and smash my bust of Homer immediately after recording this episode. Oh no, take that genius.

Professor Joel Christensen 16:45
Somebody might find it useful.

Dr G 16:49
Just fragments. Just leave fragments behind.

That should be appropriate, like that’s a good metaphor for what’s gonna happen here with the test, I shook that Aristotle was wrong about something. I mean, my god.

Speaker 1 17:02
I may be, I may be veering into iconoclastic territory by saying that, but I think, look, we have good evidence in studies in sort of oral culture, that the shift in mindset is less than a generation like even one person’s lifetime, as they move from an oral performance culture. Once they move to relying on reading and fixing things on a page, their sort of neurological relationship to creation changes. So there’s some good stuff, but like about that, but it’s something again, it’s so hard for us to think outside of it’s like thinking in another language completely, or like breathing different kind of air.

Dr G 17:41
Well, this is very much like what you were saying, though, because we are of the same generation as you, not to disclose our age too much, but yeah, as you said, like the creation of the internet in our youth, let’s say did definitely lead to some changes. And I am a teacher of teenagers, and so I definitely see the different way that they think about information and communication and all of that kind of stuff, in terms of how they interact with social media and AI and all of those sorts of tools which they’ve grown up with.

Speaker 1 18:14
Yeah, yeah. And I think that’s just a small sample of how much it changes. And just imagine the difference if you’re embedded in a cultural group that’s not relying on reading or writing at all, right, and that’s used to attributing authority externally. And so that, to go to your earlier question about sort of externalizing stories, one of the most important things, I think, differences in early Greek literature is the externalizing of agency for an authority, for narrative to the muse. We now think of that as a poetic device that’s a way like it’s taught like this is just something you do, but I think it was taken very seriously prior to Plato, and even you know among in his time, like this is a way of saying this comes from somewhere else without actually being sure about where it comes to them.

Dr G 19:02
I think this has good parallels to draw upon in connection with oral culture that still exists within indigenous traditions. So definitely in Australia, there is a sort of a reclamation of a lot of indigenous oral tradition, and the way that storytelling is embedded in a really layered way, and it’s about relationships between people. But it’s also the case that it’s very explicitly made clear that if you are being told a story by an elder, you’re only being told the first version of that story. There’s going to be deeper layers as you get further embedded into the culture and you demonstrate your responsibility and your obligations and things like that. So there’s a sense in which the complexity of something like a Homeric text in its oral form is really beyond our capacity to be able to comprehend, because we’ve only got this written version that remains. That oral tradition has not continued, because it would have evolved and changed through the retelling every single time.

Speaker 1 20:01
Yeah. And, I mean, I think this is one of the things that we miss the most in our tradition, about Homer as well, in that we’re taught to read ancient literature as if it’s modern literature, as if we just sit there reading it literally. And there’s been this sort of, this movement for about 300 years in reading ancient literature that discounts allegory and, you know, symbolism and indirect meaning. You know, as early we have evidence of 600 BCE Pythagorean traditions of, you know, of reading Homer’s allegory, of seeing everything in the Odyssey about being the reincarnation of souls. It’s not actually about the story of Odysseus. Instead, it’s a secret included message. And so I think you know that goes exactly with what you were saying about so traditional literature and community and layers of interpretation and passing down the authority of the past, it’s just something we’re so separate from, because we’re raised with sort of the belief in scriptural traditions where the word is on the page and we interpret it, and we have this idea of universal, timeless meaning, which seems to be inflexible in a way.

Dr G 21:09
So challenging, but also now I’m feeling a little bit riled up. The English teacher side of me is like, but no, it’s always about the interpretation every valid and different.

Professor Joel Christensen 21:19
But my guess is you would be a better English teacher, because there are different models, right? There’s the model where there’s one interpretation and the authority gives it to you, and then there’s the other one, where there are where it’s the ambiguity and multiplicity of interpretations that makes literature special. And so I think there’s a real tension there in the Western tradition of approaching literature, right? It goes back to who has the authority to interpret? Is it supply side poetics, where it’s all about whatever the author meant, or is it about something more, much more complicated, about that dance between tradition and the individual and audiences and sort of narratives?

Yeah, for sure, there’s so much to think about with this sort of thing. So yeah, I feel like I’m just like, I’m just letting my brain absorb it and and take it in um. But taking this idea a little bit further with the Homeric tradition, and starting to think about the external elements of it as well. You discuss the idea of thinking about Homer’s writing home, is writing get out my flesh rabbits through both an oral metaphor and an arboreal metaphor. So a metaphor related to trees. And I don’t know if you’re open to it, but I’m wondering if you’d be willing to recreate this experience of the arboreal metaphor for us.Okay, sure. So in the introduction, the first thing I talk about is, instead of thinking about the Iliad of the Odyssey as a complex symphony played in different rooms by musicians who can’t hear each other, the next one I think, I ask people to think about is the object of the elite. The Odyssey is something fixed like a tree in the landscape. So I have a section where I say, you know, I’ll quote myself, and I’ll go through it right. If you can get someone to read the next few paragraphs aloud, close your eyes and listen. And here we go. Take a minute and imagine a tree in a manicured park, a private garden. Make it a really lovely tree, one you would notice and remember, if you lingered on a bit, one that has been well situated in its environment. Think about the trees in perfect symmetry, the way it occupies its space. Has it grown? It’s in odd angles to meet the sun’s changing rays over the seasons or in response to persistent winds. How deeply is it rooted? Now think about this. Someone planted the tree, others tended to it and trimmed it. More people spent generations selecting this domesticated tree from its ancestral stock. Think about the uncountable hands that made this tree possible. The saplings transplanted, the varieties combined over time. What were their lives like? What stories did they tell? What were trees to them, think about the tree’s beauty, its esthetics. What makes us set this tree apart from others? What is essential about it? Our appreciation is based on other trees we might not remember, as well as an entire grammar of human beings in the environment, like any native language, you learned its basic syntax without trying. You have a sense of the way trees should be. You probably judge a tree differently from a shrub for historical esthetic reasons. You have expectations of what trees should do, how they should look and how they relate to the world around them. For the most part, you’re not cognizant of these assumptions, but you almost certainly have different notions about a shrub or a bush. Now, if you’ve been listening, open your eyes, but keep the tree in your mind. If someone asks Who is responsible for the tree, what do you say? Is that the person who designed the park? Is it the gardener is the first person who imagined a tree in the garden, any single answer ignores those countless hands, minds and environments that contribute to the treeness of the tree. I can keep going, and there’s more, but enough of it.

Dr G 25:07
No I think that’s good, that that starts to open up the pathways they’re thinking about the complexities of anything. So I think one of the challenges that students often come with is when they’re sold an idea that, like, Homer, is a guy, you know, he’s a blind poet. He did these things is that it gives it that singular point of generation. It’s like this is emerged from a singular moment of genius from one person. And perhaps it was a response to their world. But it somehow all comes down to them, and anything that we can take away from that text, we also then have to acknowledge the genius of the creator, and by stepping back and trying to place the poetry and the ideas that come with that poetry in the broader landscape. And I think this is part of the power of this metaphor, is that it allows us to see the whole context, or a window into that whole context. And it’s like we’re always looking at so much more than just some phrasing, just a moment of singular genius. I mean, Western culture does have this sort of propensity for the for the white male genius aspect, model of creation, but it’s so much more than that, and so I think that it shows a real potential for how we can start to think about literature completely differently. So thank you,

Speaker 1 26:33
Yeah, and well, and I think what I found useful or attractive about is that there are two angles, and it really gets into what I’ll just call, perhaps unfairly ecological thinking, right? Like we all, anybody who’s taking basic science understands how a tree is part of an ecosystem, what we lose track of, though, is that most of our ecosystems are human shaped. At this point, there are few that don’t have some sort of influence from us, that have kept a different equilibrium that wouldn’t be natural, whatever that means, because we’re still natural in a way, right? Or, you know, have had some other influence on what we’re seeing. So there’s that ecosystem that’s really critical, because every every piece of the tree is shaped by, you know, inheritance that it has from its own tree genes, right? And then the experience of the world, how the world has shaped it the secondary ecosystem that comes from our judgment, right, and our judgment is similarly constituted in an ecosystem of ideas, of our own history, of other people’s influence of esthetic judgments, of our interaction of our senses in the world that shape those esthetic judgments, but also shaped by them. I mean, all those things are really complicated, and then we live in a specific slice of time and have a real hard ability seeing duration of time and how things change. And so we pick a point, and we see things in one way or another, and we it’s very hard for us to think about these overlapping ecologies of sort of the nature and ecologies of thought.

Dr G 28:06
Indeed, yes, and I really, I liked, I liked that tree metaphor. That was actually the part that really jumped out at me when I was reading the introduction. Now I have to ask you a question about my most feared subject, which is ancient languages.

Professor Joel Christensen 28:25
I’ll try not to be too scary.

Dr G 28:28
Well, I am someone who struggles with language in any form, modern, ancient doesn’t matter. Latin, Greek, either way, I don’t understand it, so Homeric Greek is a big challenge. But even to people who are better at languages than I am. This is a big challenge. So in the first chapter, you explore parallels between Homeric language and DNA. What are some of the key features of Homeric meter and language, and how do you think DNA helps us to better appreciate the ethics?

Speaker 1 28:58
All right, so the first thing I’m going to say that’s probably going to upset you more, or maybe it won’t, is that I actually think that all language is going to be governed by the principles that I’ll talk about, but that it’s easier for us to think about Homeric language in this way, because we think of it in some way as artificial, even though that’s completely false. So I’ll talk about Homeric Greek a little bit, but, you know, interrupt me at any point, because I don’t want to send people screaming after they listen to this bit, right? So look, we know that all languages are governed by rules, right? And the rules are essentially arbitrary. They exist within a system of contrast, and we have learned them at a young age, right? And so there’s no sort of universal syntax or grammar or universal semantics or meaning. Those two axes are always engaging in the way that things unfold in time, right? So any languages, as I see it, has building blocks that are akin to. DNA. And the building blocks are the morphologies, the actual sounds, the grammar, how these morphologies fit together to unveil meaning right in an ordered way, following rules we know. And then there’s the semantic sphere, which is, well, what do these words mean in contact with each other? And so the very basic idea that I have is that, you know, DNA that’s not activated in an environment, that’s not living, is just a string of proteins, but when you put it in an environment in contact with other things, then various traits are triggered. They are, you know, they are activated and they reveal themselves to the world. So a big, you know, big thing people talk about in genetics for a while is epigenetics, right? The way that certain features of DNA or of a creature will be activated by its environment, right? And so, you know, a hand or foot doesn’t make any sense unless it’s articulated with the rest of the body. It doesn’t make sense in space to have four limbs, right? It’s really based on engagement with the environment. So in a very simplistic way, language functions the same way. Now Homeric Greek, I think, lends itself to this analysis a little better because of the way it developed, it has a limit on it that other languages don’t, and that limit is meter, right? So one of the things that people used to think about Homeric language is that it was composed the way Virgil composed the Aeneid or Shakespeare composed some of his poetry, which is that you had to, like, take your language and put it into meter, right? But that’s not actually what happened with ancient with a Homeric Greek. Homeric Greek developed over time with the metrical shapes as part of its repertoire. So just as our language is bounded by tense forms, whether it’s ed on the end for past tense or your ablouding with grew and grow. Ancient Greek had rhythmic features that drew from different dialects. And so that’s another reason why I find the DNA for attractive is because we can look at strands of DNA and see how one organism is actually comprised of many different historical organisms like DNA put together to make a entity that functions in a particular environment with particular constraints. So Homeric language has drawn from several different dialects with different forms for any given word that make it possible to fill the six foot line, and now I’m going to make it really concrete for me. All right, so the first line of the Iliad is μῆνιν ἄειδε θεὰ Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος. First line of the Odyssey: ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, μοῦσα, πολύτροπον, ὃς μάλα πολλὰ. The basic rule there is that the final two feet end in a shave and a haircut, right bump ba-da bump, bump, right, a dactyl and a spondee. Everything before that can be two longs, like may, like, sorry, long and two shorts, μῆνιν ἄει, it can be two longs. And the main rule is that ending. Now, if you follow the history of Greek poetry over time, as you move towards writing, the rules become much more rigid. If you you know, if you were turned off by Greek poetry or by prosody, it’s probably because someone made you learn a bunch of laws or rules. But the fact is, it’s much simpler. If you think of it as music, if you imagine, you know, four bars, four bars of four, four time, and your options are like a quarter notes and eighth notes, and I can mix them together, right? If you’re listening to music that’s in four, four time. You’re not sitting there thinking that’s a quarter note, that’s an eighth note, right? You’re listening to it, and you tolerate creativity. People shove a bunch of syllables and like one line or they go, the meaning goes over one line or another. Like, music has that variety that we don’t often attribute to prose. Now, to go back to Homeric week, part of what’s really amazing about it is that it’s not just single words put together. Most of the time, we’re looking at phrases that can be repeated. And so the line I mentioned, μῆνιν ἄειδε θεὰ Πηληϊάδεω Ἀχιλῆος, really has three parts to it, and you can split most Homeric lines into two or three parts, and most lines of the Iliad and the Odyssey, 16,000 of the Iliad or so, 12, 13,000 of the Odyssey. Majority of them don’t roll over into the next line. Each line is a single unit of meaning, which is first thing that floored me when I read Homeric Greek when I was I must have been 21 the first time I read it in Greek, because it was so different from, again, Milton or Shakespeare or Virgil, where you could definitely see the joins where we’re trying to fit our ideas in this. And so this means that somebody who was trained to perform Homeric Greek could speak, or at least converse the way I am right now, in meter, right? It wouldn’t be the same cadence or flow, because the esthetics would be different. But the whole system was conducive to composing in performance. And so the actual performance of Homeric poetry, Hesiodic poetry, anything in the same language, was a combination between sort of plans that happened ahead of time and the actual performance itself, which could change. And a lot of this comes from work that people don’t know about it, Millman Perry, Albert Lord, studying living epic and what used to be Yugoslavia, they really found that there were traditions where things like this were still happening, where it was absolutely possible for someone to compose in the spot a very complicated narrative. And so to go back to the Homeric question, before I wrap up on the language, all of this is connected to whether or not people thought it was possible to develop a super long narrative without writing as a planning and it comes down to that sort of last moment of whether or not we credit the amazingness of the Odyssey to this really fluid multicultural tradition, or we credit it to a final composer who inherited this tradition and put it all down. But back to the language itself. It is so hard to explain, to convince someone of how the Homeric language works if they don’t actually learn Greek. So if you’re not fully persuaded, you know, maybe come, learn Greek with me or learn it on your own. But I mean, it is. It’s qualitatively and quantitatively different from any language I’ve studied. And you can really feel it when you get into it if you move from a literate author, even a Greek one, like Apollonius Rhodes from several centuries later. And it’s even more severe if you jump to say Virgil, Lucan or Ovid.

Dr G 37:22
I know. Look, I think we should convince them by forcing them to sit through nine hours of, you know, Irish bard performance, or, you know,

Speaker 1 37:31
Right, right? And there are, I mean, that’s the thing. I mean, there are so many different traditions around the world that support it. But the challenging thing is that they’re not all the same, right? Just that. So I think one of the mistakes early studies in oral poetry made is making the assertion that they were monolithic in nature, culturally and esthetic, right? But we know that written forms of poetry, say a Shakespearean sonnet or a haiku, follow, follow very different cultural rules and adhere to very different expectations. So why would oral poetry be any different, right? So if you look at, you know, Sub-Saharan African epic traditions, Arabic epic traditions, Yugoslavian, Indian you know the oral traditions of the of the Maori, or, you know, indigenous people in Australia, there are very different rules, right? But they do show some commonalities and difference from literary cultures. I think there, you know, if people looking for reading recommendations or classic texts on this is Ruth Finnegan’s, Oral Poetry’ really shows the variety of things available in oral poetic traditions. And then Walter Ong’s ‘Orality and Literacy’ really focuses on difference in esthetics between oral cultures and literary cultures, and they read really well together.

Dr G 38:51
I think this is amazing, because this is opening up some pathways that I’ve definitely thought about before within literary English teaching, but and have understood sort of tacitly, because people who do study Homeric literature, if we and the flesh rabbits again, I think definitely wax lyrical in ways that other people who study other types of of poetry do not, and I’ve never really been able to put my finger on why, because I’ve always been a Roman person, and I’m like mad Latin, you know, it’s a bit like a mathematical part.

Speaker 1 39:36
I became a classics major because I loved Catullus.

Dr G 39:40
Ah, well, that’s a good place to start.

Professor Joel Christensen 39:43
Yeah, I read Catullus and Horace, I think, when I was 16 in high school, and I hated Horace, I’ll be honest there, but Catullus, like I did. I was floored, right? I was like, This is amazing. I want to understand more about it. And I took Greek just because you had to, yeah, you know. And, you know, I’d stumbled through. It, I was okay at it. I don’t think anybody would say I was an exceptional Greek student, but I remember from the first moment reading the Iliad in the original that I was like, this is different, yeah. And at that time, I said, I want to spend a little time figuring out how and a little time turned into a senior thesis. A senior thesis turned into a dissertation. And now I’m over 25 years into it, and I’m still figuring out how Homer’s different.

Dr G 40:26
That’s amazing.

Too late to turn back now.

Yeah, yeah, you gotta keep going

Professor Joel Christensen 40:33
Yeah, it is

Dr G 40:35
Focus now, focus now, You’ve got to be getting close

Professor Joel Christensen 40:40
I may have another 25 years.

Dr G 40:44
And I also think that’s one of the values, and the part of the great richness of studying the ancient world is actually it offers so much potential for rethinking and recalibrating your thoughts.

Professor Joel Christensen 40:55
It does, well I think, you know, yeah, in the spirit of the work I do, though, is sort of focusing on the opportunities rather than what’s been closed off. When I was in graduate school, I told my advisor, David Cider, who won’t listen to this, but if he did, he won’t mind me sharing that I wanted to do homework. And he said, why the bibliography is so long? He’s like, you can’t say anything new. And I’ve always been someone who does what people tell me not to do. I just got that problem. But I think, you know, I think there’s the challenge of it, but there’s also, you know, the depth of what people have said already is impressive, and you can learn from it. And that, you know, it was never boring conversation.

Dr G 41:38
Yeah, for sure.

Yeah. And I think what you said about language, though, is so true. Because I think one of the reasons why I actually struggle so much with other languages is that I struggle to see the different ways that people put together their sentence structures. I can learn the meaning of words and grammar and that sort of thing, but then put me in front of a passage which I have no idea what it’s about. And I’m like, Oh my God. It’s like they’re speaking like Yoda, and it makes no sense at all.

Speaker 1 42:07
But actually I think, I mean, I’ve been teaching languages since I was in college in Latin and Greek, and I actually think that some people just have are cognitively blocked and to move from word order dominant languages to inflected languages, just, I think there’s a percentage of the population where it’s just a huge challenge, right? It’s like being colorblind. And I don’t I don’t know of any studies that prove this, but I can tell you that I’ve had so many students who are smart people, but when it comes down to it, they will never understand an indirect statement in Latin and Greek. It just doesn’t come naturally, and it hurts. And I can’t explain that in any other way, except the brains are just not set up.

Dr G 42:48
No, look, I’m really glad that we have this on recording. So everyone out there, including my old Latin teachers, Professor Joel Christensen, has just said that I am a smart person, but cognitively blocked and it is impossible for me to understand.

Speaker 1 43:01
I didn’t say impossible. I just said harder. Like my wife. I met my wife when I was an undergraduate, but like in our like in our third week, and when I met her, she was studying Spanish, French, Arabic and Latin, like she was involved in those four classes. I said, What are you doing? She’s like, I don’t know. I like languages, but I remember her coming up and like, it was Latin indirect statements, and no matter how many times we went through it, she just couldn’t get it. Now she can speak any language better than I can. She’s a pediatric dentist. Now she’s gone to Ivy League schools. I haven’t, right, but there’s just that one thing, like, her brain’s just like, No, I hate it. I will not accept it.

Dr G 43:43
Under no circumstances

Dr Rad 43:43
Exactly what I think about Latin.

Dr G 43:48
Oh, look, I don’t want to speak too much about my facility with or with, not with languages. No, I keep trying. I was okay at Latin when I was able to study it four hours a day. That was, that was the time I got good at it.

Yeah and look, I think, as well, in Australia, in the in the era that we grew up, English was taught in a very strange way in that it wasn’t explicit. And then on top of that, back in, back in Australia in the 1980s your engagement with other languages in public schooling systems was generally fairly limited. So I think it’s also to do with, yeah, potentially, the culture you grow up in, and how it encourages you to perhaps engage with other languages.

Speaker 1 44:32
No doubt, yeah, like, I mean, I spent, you know, the few two years ago, we were in Denmark, and I think we, you know, told we’re in Scandinavia maybe a week and a half. And, you know, I had a graduate student study. I had to pass French exams, German exams. I don’t know any of it well, but just being in an environment where everybody’s speaking different languages all the time changes the way your brain works, right, like when you’re in and. Monoglot culture, like the US, for many of us, because we are really, really segregated, or or Australia, like, your brain’s just not primed for it. And it’s like, if you spend your life doing very little physical activity, and then suddenly you have to do a 5k like, it’s going to be the worst pain you’ve ever felt, right, but if you spend all your time really active, like, it’s not that bad. And so I just think it’s about training and and, you know, like, you can do everything you want in primary school and public school, but if you’re not embarrassed in languages and exposed to them, like more than 45 minutes, three days a week, like you’re not going to learn anything, like you’re always going to be blocked.

Dr G 45:40
Yeah. Well, okay, okay, okay, focusing in, focusing in, because

enough about my trauma.

I’m not disinterested in your trauma, Dr Rad.

No no, I have spoken about it many times.

I’m trying to learn Italian. My husband’s Italian, and that that is my new quest in life, and I’ve tried to learn so many times, and this is the first time where I feel like I’m actually getting it, because I’m no longer a beginner student, but I’m no yet, nowhere near yet, competent. But I have moments where I’m like, Oh, I think, I think I have it and and so, like, those little breakthroughs are really important, but it’s, it’s a struggle, but to to bring everything to a bit of a close, because we’re coming up on on our hour together, so we’re surrounded by stories. I think this is this has become really clear through what we’ve talked about and thinking about that context of politics, and the way that with the advent of the Internet, in particularly the the way that narratives shift and change so quickly. So there’s the stories that we’re told however we receive them. There’s the ones that we read so we go out and and we we either read them or we receive them. And then there’s the stories that we actually tell. So there’s the orality. So we might hear stories, we might read them. We might be telling stories as well. There’s this whole nexus. Stories create a capacity, I think, to glimpse lives and experiences that we will never have, the capacity to confront for ourselves. So there’s so much opportunity when it comes to stories, and particularly when we’re thinking about the Homeric tradition as well, and the things that extend out of that, the capacity to come in contact with generations of people so far removed from our own experience as well. If there’s one last thing that you’d like to leave us with in terms of thinking about stories, what sort of idea or question Would you like to leave us to contemplate?

Speaker 1 47:36
Oh, well, um, one idea I’m going to go over time.

Dr G 47:43
Also, you don’t need to limit yourself. If there’s more than one, that’s okay.

Speaker 1 47:46
No, no. I mean, so I think the main so, the thing you just said about story, giving us the capacity to experience 1000 lives is one of the most important things to acknowledge about narrative, right? And so I think that one of the ways that people often talk about language and narrative is to think of it as a technology, right? If we imagine that narrative and stories are akin to our ability to use fire or, you know, to cook food and to things like that, then we can see it as something we that we use that facilitates culture, etc. But I think another way to think about it, and this is the one I’ll go back to, is the notion that stories actually do keep on living on their own. And so the reason I really focus on the biological narrative in the book is to give us the understanding that stories combine and recombine with other features in the world, and they act on their own, so in a different environment, let’s say a heroic narrative is is successful and useful for getting people to stand up and defend their communities. On the other hand, that very same narrative can cause people to have expectations of their communities that are unfair and damaging, right? And so, you know, maybe I’ll answer your question by getting concrete and going to the Iliad and then jumping outside of the Iliad, if I can, right? So, too often people see the Iliad as a simple narrative where it’s about Achilles as a hero, and they’re not wrong, he’s a hero, but in the sense that Erwin Cook describes heroes in an article about Herakles and Odysseus, which is that heroes cause suffering and they suffer. So the biggest thing to understand about the Iliad and the Odyssey is that both of our primary heroes are mentioned for being serial killers, like from the beginning, Achilles is said to send myriad Achaeans to their doom, not Trojans, Achaeans. And from the beginning, we hear about Odysseus, that he tried really, really hard to save his men, but he failed. And then we’re asked. To consider how human beings make their own fate harder or worse than it has to be because of their own recklessness. And if you read the Odyssey carefully, it’s constantly pointing its finger, finger at Odysseus, right? So the ill in the Odyssey are not praise narratives. That’s the biggest reason people or biggest way people misunderstand them instead their narratives about mismatched expectations and about how dangerous elevating individuals above the collective can be, right? And that’s where I’ll go back to Achilles and try to say something positive, right? Because what I think the Iliad is offering is the very same thing that the Pfizer vaccine I just got last week is offering me vis-a-vis COVID, and that’s project protection. Because if you read the Iliad carefully, it lets you know that a heroic narrative is damaging. It lets you know that because Achilles expected to be honored by his community for being so awesome, and then wasn’t, and through a fit, his best friend or lover died. Patroclus dies because of Achilles, and that’s the hardest thing for the Iliad to convey, because people want to point fingers elsewhere. They want to talk about his rage, about how he is dishonored. No Achilles made a choice, and it was the wrong one, but the Iliad doesn’t end with that. Instead, if you carefully read the Iliad, and I’m not going to sound like a conspiracy theorist here, I hope it has Achilles many moments, this moment, moment in Book 19, where he laments for Patroclus and the other people watch him lament and feel pity, and they lament for themselves as well. This is Book 19, but if you read the language closely, it’s echoed at that magnificent moment in Book 24 when Priam comes to Achilles and he says to Achilles, remember your father and you know, and then they weep together, like they see in each other the suffering and the loss that they feel in themselves and the languages they pity each other, and they felt something about it. I think the notion the lesson of the Iliad is something that modern science has confirmed, and that’s the stories can actually make you feel the very same things, cognitively and neurobiology, biologically, that real life can make you feel they can change you. And it’s an avenue to be re humanized, right? And so what the Iliad offers, I think, and the Odyssey, too, if you listen to it carefully, is the understanding that narratives can send you in completely the wrong direction. They can make you instrumentalize other people. They can make you misunderstand people. They help you dehumanize other people in order to slaughter them and and continue with war. But narrative also has that potential when you understand somebody else’s story to make them real to you, and for you to see yourself in them and to maybe change. And so that’s a powerful moment. And the one person who acts like in The Iliad is actually zoops. He sees Achilles and he pities, and he changes the way he does things, because he has that feeling. And I think that the Iliad is that we as audience members are supposed to go through that process. And so like when I close the book, I talk about different stories. I talk about Kleomedes, this, you know, boxer who kills a bunch of young kids because he’s upset that he lost. And I talk about heroic narratives and the damage they do. But I don’t end by saying we’re screwed. Let’s just give up, right? Instead, like we actually need to get away from, you know, the very simplistic and superficial approaches to narrative that we have. We need to understand that it’s going to keep doing whatever it wants to do, but we can actually live alongside it, right? Like we can educate people. The thing I always tell students and my colleagues now increasingly, is that we’re born, we’re not giving a manual to the human mind and body, right? One doesn’t exist. And to be frank, if we were given a manual, I wouldn’t read it, because I never read the manuals anyway, right? But I think a fundamental function of education has to be especially in universities, where we say we’re preparing people to be citizens of the world, right? A fundamental part of education has to be understanding how narrative binds us and breaks us, how it allows us to work together as a group, but it also constrains our view of the future and what we think is possible, and how understanding narrative is actually prior to political activity, because political activity is presupposed on us, actually understanding each other. And so I think, like, you know, again, a long answer to your question. It wasn’t a simple question, to be fair, but I think at the end, the one thing to take away is that you. Oh, wait, I’m going to get negative. Now almost all of our educational systems are moving in the wrong direction, right? I mean, we don’t acknowledge that science is a narrative, right? That a whole notion of like causality is narrative. That what we need to train people from a young age to understand is, you know, differences between propaganda and narrative, identity and belonging, all of these things that make our life together possible. We take it for granted, to our own detriment, and then people who are good at manipulating it intentionally or not, I don’t think, for example, major politician, politician just elected the US President, again, actually thinking about what he’s doing instead, he’s leaning into a system that favors a certain type of madness. And so we need to have anti madness out there. We need to inoculate people against the disruptions of narrative and actually give them a control, a choice in their lives, both individually and together. And I know to say, Oh, this is all what’s going on the Iliad sounds a little crazy, right? But again, I think that the Iliad and the Odyssey emerge during periods of increasing political complexity, in a period when Greek city states were moving from little households and fiefdoms into larger entities that were experimenting with oligarchy and tyranny, aristocracy and democracy, and that the questions of language and how we lived together under the weight of the past were central to what they were doing together, and it’s no different for us today.

Dr G 56:36
Oh, this is a powerful conclusion. Thank you so much. I think there is ways in which the dismissal of the power of narrative across education broadly has been to its detriment. I definitely agree with you on this, because so much of the role of humanity subjects, not just classics, is to try and give students the potential critical tools to be able to see narratives for what they are, and to pull out the pieces of information that that don’t marry up quite well, to like expectation, To see the things that are potentially endangering society.

Speaker 1 57:23
And what you just said, I mean, you know, but the way we’ve been forced to sell the humanities right, is with these two insidious words, critical thinking, right? And we say it because, oh, this will make you a better stock broker. This will make you a better surgeon. Critical thinking will make you a better I don’t know baker, whatever it is, but what we need to double down on is that one of the original meetings of the liberal arts was the, you know, the studies worthy of a free person, but another one or the skills and studies that make you a free person. And I think no again, to put my conspiracy hat back on, I think there’s an intentional reason why corporations, governments don’t want to lean into that aspect of it, because, as you said, they’re the very skills the humanities social sciences, are the very skills that force us to question the basis of our social structures, of our inequalities, of our histories. And you know, there’s a there’s a reason why people might be disinclined to encourage that.

Dr G 58:28
Oh no, let’s not create a disruptive citizenry that is expecting more, that’s unproductive for us all. But don’t get me started on productivity before I get angry.

Speaker 1 58:41
I mean, at times I find myself like, sort of even railing against the academic humanities, because we are, you know, you teach English, you know how much of it is like, what’s this genre? What’s this form? What’s the main character, right? When, when the humanities, if they’re useful, are the studies that help us be human. It’s a study of what that means and what’s uniquely so. And too much of it is just now the sort of rope stuff. We won’t want to be dangerous. We don’t want to unsettle people’s notions of reality. But at the end of it, if we don’t do so, what are we looking at, right? I mean, we’re going to break that three degrees celsius mark, right? Pretty soon, right? And we have people are saying, oh, we should go to Mars. We should invest all this money and stuff. Like, human beings cannot gestate in non, non-Earth gravity, like it’s a medical fact, like, we cannot survive on Mars. It’s insanity to even think so.

Dr G 59:38
I mean, I do agree with you, but I’m also not against billionaires taking themselves out of this context and leaving us to then sort it out, because they’re not helping

Speaker 1 59:47
But taking all that wealth that could feed people with them. Yeah, it’s problem. I keep wanting to post online, but I’m afraid I’ll get fired someday, and all I want to write is: Where are the good billionaires? Is a trick question.

Dr G 1:00:04
yeah for sure

Speaker 1 1:00:06
because it’s where does wealth come from?

Dr G 1:00:11
As someone who has been increasingly concerned about the problems with communication into over climate change, I remember reading this really amazing book which really changed the way that I tried to talk to people about this a number of years ago, which was literally called ‘How to Talk About Climate Change’ and and also thinking about the work of there’s actually a really amazing Australian filmmaker whose name I’ve totally forgotten. I think it’s, is it, Damon Gameau, but yeah, he his whole thing about, he made this film called ‘2040’, and his whole thing was that part of the problem with the environmental movement is that it has not clearly communicated to people a better story you know about, you know, like, Why wouldn’t you want to live in a cleaner, healthier environment that’s, you know, that’s much better for you, like, Why? Why wouldn’t you want that? And so, you know, you have to tell people the story that shows them, you know, what is possible and what this is all about, rather than just being it all about, you know, the the scientific facts, or this really complicated, you know, scientific language, and it has to be a story,

Speaker 1 1:01:22
And we fail. I mean, we fail all the time. I mean another example that’s not from climate change, but you know, from from the recent elections, so many people are upset in the US about inflation. Yeah, right. And they say, but I didn’t, at once see the Democratic Party make the very true and clear argument that inflation went up because we had to lower our money policies to avoid a generation defining Depression during COVID Right? We rate, lowered the money down like that, increased the flow of money. The interest rates gave lots of people flush with cash, which created inflation that then we had to exert deflationary pressure on, which takes time, right? It was actually handled really well from a macroeconomic, economic perspective. But we didn’t make the argument like we didn’t tell the story that this is about COVID, and I just, I don’t know why like it, just it flabbergasted me that we didn’t like directly address a very clear cause and effect situation.

Dr G 1:02:23
Oh, look, I actually been talking. I actually teach about America in the 1920s and 1930s to my senior students, and I see so many parallels between that time period and now. And I constantly have to say to them about the Great Depression and the Wall Street crash. Correlation is not causation, and you can see that very much in American politics right now. People sometimes think that just because something’s happening at around the same time, that therefore there is a direct cause and effect link, and it’s just not the case.

Speaker 1 1:02:54
Yeah, yeah, no. And so, I mean all the way around, though, like from from simple things, like one election to, like massive things like the environment and what we’re doing to the world, it is so hard to tell clear and simple narratives about complex things. So those of us who like study it and are experts are at some level, like, paralyzed by our knowledge and incapable of translating it to a way that people who haven’t learned it can accept, just like me, with like, Homeric language,

Dr G 1:03:24
Yeah, no. Look, I think it’s one of those things where, on the positive side, we do actually have a course here in New South Wales for high school students called extension history. And it is actually all about getting into these really higher order ideas about the way that history is constructed and potentially misrepresented, used and abused as a narrative. And it’s one, it’s one of those subjects that when people get into it, they actually, they actually, really like it, because it is moving away from exactly what you said. What was wrong with education? It’s not about rote learning. It’s not about, you know, just learning facts. It is about the students developing their own voice, their own capacity to tell stories, and also their own capacity to read stories. I’m going to use that word in a critical manner, but I mean in the sense of, you know, engaging with the way that things have been pieced together and then are potentially, yeah, used and abused in the world. So yeah, there are some things out there which are little glimmers of hope education.

Well, thank you so much, Joel for joining us. It has been a really interesting hour to delve into some of the ideas that are coming up in your forthcoming book ‘Storylife’. So very excited to see it out in the world. And, yeah, thank you so much.

Speaker 1 1:04:49
Well, thank you. And you know, I’m always happy to talk to you again, and I really, I just want to say I appreciate the work that you all do in you know. Popularizing and bringing all these ideas. I think that the you know, the podcast that you do reach, you know, an order of magnitude more people than any article I write ever will. So you’re doing important work, and I appreciate it.

Dr G 1:05:13
Oh, thank you.

Dr Rad 1:05:14
Thank you.

Dr G 1:05:45
Music. Thank you for listening to this episode of The Partial Historians. You can find our sources sound credits and transcript in our show notesover at partialhistorians.com . We offer a huge thank you to you, if you’re one of our illustrious Patreon supporters. If you enjoy the show, we’d love your support in a way that works for you. Leaving a nice review really makes our day. We’re on Ko-fi for one or four ongoing donations or Patreon, of course, our latest book, ‘Your Cheeky Guide to the Roman Empire’ is published through Ulysses Press. It is full of stories that the Romans probably don’t want you to know about them. This book is packed with some of our favorite tales of the colorful history of ancient Rome. Treat yourself or an open minded friend to Rome’s glories, embarrassments and most salacious claims with ‘Your Cheeky Guide To the Roman Empire’.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

The post Special Episode – Storylife with Professor Joel P. Christensen appeared first on The Partial Historians - Ancient Roman History with smart ladies.

Are you ready to have a Totally Chaotic time?

We certainly hope so, as we are thrilled to welcome Dr Emma Southon back on the show for the FOURTH TIME (not the third, as incorrectly said by Dr Rad). Emma has released her first children’s book, which was co-authored with Greg Jenner and illustrated by Rikin Parekh.

Special Episode – Totally Chaotic History with Dr Emma Southon

The cover of Totally Chaotic History: Roman Britain Gets Rowdy!

This powerhouse trio have produced Totally Chaotic History: Roman History Gets Rowdy! Whilst the target audience for this latest instalment in the Totally Chaotic series is 7-12 year olds, we thoroughly enjoyed it. Turns out that we didn’t know as much about Roman Britain as we thought!  

If you would like to chuckle and LOL your way through the lengthy history of the British and their interactions with the Romans, you need to grab a copy of this book. We were intrigued to find out how Greg, Emma and Rikin managed to pack so much historiography into a children’s history book. It was intriguing to find out about the process that went into building the layers of historical meaning on every page.   

Are you ready to get rowdy?

Ask Santa for Totally Chaotic History: Roman History Gets Rowdy! Naturally, Mr Claus shops at your local independent bookstore.

Want more from Emma Southon? Check out our previous interview about A History of Rome in 21 Women from 2023.

Our music is by Bettina Joy de Guzman.

Dr Rad 0:15
Music. Welcome to the partial historians.

Dr G 0:18
We explore all the details of ancient Rome,

Dr Rad 0:23
everything from political scandals, the love affairs, the battles wage and when citizens turn against each other, I’m Dr Rad and

Dr G 0:33
I’m Dr G, we consider Rome as the Romans saw it, by reading different authors from the ancient past and comparing their stories.

Dr Rad 0:44
Join us as we trace the journey of Rome from the founding of the city.

Welcome to a special episode of the partial historians. I am one of your hosts, Dr Rad, and I am Dr G and Dr G, we are joined by someone who is now, I think, a triple guest, which I don’t think we’ve ever had before. We are joined by Dr Emma Southon, who is without doubt, our top drag race fan to have on the podcast, but she also happens to be a top notch historian and hilarious, so that’s very handy for us. She is the author of a biography of Agrippina the Younger as well as a book called A fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, and, most recently, a history of Rome in 21 women, all of which you need to check out if you have not read them already, Emma is also the co host of the podcast. History is sexy, but we are here today to graduate her on her latest book, which is totally chaotic history Roman Britain gets rowdy, and in this collaboration, Emma gets together with a podcaster and all around famous author Greg Jenner and illustrator Rikin Parekh. So Emma, welcome,

Dr Emma Southon 2:06
hello. What a joy to be back. Am I really your first third person? That makes me feel special.

Dr Rad 2:11
I think so

Dr G 2:14
special you’ve come to the right place. So we

Dr Rad 2:17
are so excited to talk about this book, because it is very different, and we’re going to explore some of those differences in a moment for you. But let’s start with the general premise of the book. Shall we? The book is about Roman Britain, and we actually learned a lot by reading this, right? Because it is actually a children’s book, I should point out to people.

Dr Emma Southon 2:37
It isn’t for, technically, for like seven to 12 year olds, but both Greg and I love history, and so we put in about as much as we learned. Everything that we learned that we found was interesting, we chucked in there, and we’re very keen to make it a book that is proper history like So the premise is that Greg is an amateur historian who is telling the reader the story of whatever the period he’s covering, so telling the story of Roman Britain. And then that’s all in the present tense, and then he has expert interruptions from a professional historian and expert in the field, who, in the past tense, comes in and says, Actually, Greg, we used to think that, but now we think says, and we know this because we found x, y, z, or and this is what the evidence is. And kind of then gives you the historiography of the period as well, and the like, how we know what we know what kind of things historians have had arguments about what has shifted in our understanding of it, how we interpret the sources and just both widening the subjects as it’s usually taught to children. So it’s not just like decontextualized Roman Britain, which has like no time period, which is what you very often get with kids books. You just get, like, the Romans or and as if there was no change in the entire period. Or like, you know, the Romans are in Britain for 500 years, and there’s just pretense that it’s all the same and all the whole time, and also showing how we expanding what history is as it’s taught to children. So it’s not just giving them facts, as though we just we know those facts, but what historians actually do like how we learn, how we change our minds, how we have big history fights all the time, and have arguments about things, and how there isn’t, like one right answer in history. Most of the time, there’s a lot of wrong answers, but there’s very rare there’s also a lot of right answers. And so it sounds quite complicated, but because Greg is naturally hilarious, and because there a lot of it is done through illustration and the way that the page is laid out, it means that there can be lots of a lot going on on the page, and you can learn a whole lot from what looks like just a really fun, silly joke.

Dr Rad 4:59
Like, you’re making me feel a lot better about the fact that I learned a lot from reading

Dr Emma Southon 5:04
good that’s the aim. Is that? Because, I think that, especially with because I read the first is a series that Greg is doing, and he’s doing four initially. The first one was totally chaotic Egypt, and he sent me that, like, before it came out, to say, like, this is what the thing’s gonna look like. And I learned so much from that. And like I did, I haven’t technically done Egypt since I was an undergraduate, but I still felt like I had, you know, a basic grasp of it, but like, there’s a whole debate in there about why Egyptians mummified people and, like, what is the purpose of that? And I was like, Oh my God, I’ve never even thought about that as an like it’s just in a kid’s book for eight year olds, and a complete shift in my understanding of why Egyptian culture mummified people. Is it preservation, or is it actually a deliberate transformation? Because if it’s preservation, why are you taking the organs out that’s not preserving? Is it that’s transforming the body.

Dr Rad 6:02
That’s true. That’s true. Yeah.

Dr Emma Southon 6:04
So, so I also learned a lot, and the next one is a stone age, and I’m looking forward to learning stuff about that. Okay,

Dr G 6:10
I’m ready to dig in. I’m gonna have to acquire the whole series. On the back of this amazing

Dr Rad 6:16
it makes me feel terrified that all these children are gonna grow up to be so incredibly educated

Dr Emma Southon 6:21
they are. They’re going to be smarter than by the time they’re 12. They’re going to know so

Dr Rad 6:26
exactly they’re going to be like, Excuse me, I think you’ll find that there’s historiographical debate about that exactly, that’s what we want, which I find terrific, because I’m a teacher, I’m actually going to encounter this. Thanks.

Dr Emma Southon 6:40
They’ll be the best kids, though. Yeah.

Dr G 6:43
We want that kind of smarts coming through. That’s that’s really exciting.

Dr Rad 6:47
So that’s an amazing description of what the book is all about, in sort of general terms. And it sort of made us realize that when we have looked at Roman Britain, it’s been very much about Caesar Claudius and Boudicca, the highlights, yeah, as I like to call them, which all happened in a very short period of time. So can you tell us a bit about some of the other chapters and what they specifically focus on?

Dr Emma Southon 7:06
So we have a chapter first at the beginning, about the late Iron Age and like, what is Britain like before Caesar gets there? Basically, very important, yeah, because I think that everybody thinks that see the Britain like before Caesar got there, is basically what Caesar describes, which is eight men with mustaches and 200 cows and nothing. So

Dr Rad 7:30
we’ve got a bit sounds like a party, yeah.

Dr Emma Southon 7:32
And then it effectively goes through, kind of chronologically, the the history of of the Roman occupation of Britain. And Britain as part of the Empire. So it does Caesar. And then the massive impacts that Caesar brings, because he makes Britain, or at least southern Britain, big chunks of it, become client kingdoms of the Roman Empire. And so there’s these relationships with Tiberius and Augustus that are very rarely written about in anywhere, to be honest, but they’re all there. And then Claudius, kind of second invasion, his big invasion, and then the resistance period after that. So you’ve got about 100 years of people like coraticus and the kind of ongoing attempts to remove the Romans. And then we really wanted it to not just focus on London. So we have a section on Wales. We’ve got sections on what’s happening in the north of England, on how these places are kind of slowly absorbed into the empire in different ways, especially Wales, which takes, like, a really concerted effort to get it in. And then we go all the way through talking about both how unique Britain is, in terms of how much of the army is there, how you get these kind of syncretic, syncretistic gods that you find in Britain? So we’ve got a god swap game where you get to match your gods to your local Yeah, all of them just match with Mars, because apparently the British just really took to Mars and were like, we hear you said he’s a god of war, but we’ve decided he’s the God of Everything. So and fashion. What do we you know? What are people wearing? What are people doing? Building fancy villas, building a town? Because what Rome really brings is urbanization, and then so you get towns for the first time and cities, but also you get these huge Villa estates that are like areas of agricultural production for export, which never existed before, and they’re really unique, like the way they’re built. And when everybody draws a Roman villa, they draw that kind of bracket shaped, you know, classic Italian Palace, but the ones in Britain are like corridors, and they’re kind of weird. So we’ve got lots of archeology and mosaics and how you build your villa. So we have a, we originally wrote a Grand Designs thing for that. So it was going to be like, someone’s coming to video. But they were like, I.

Dr Rad 10:00
Only 40 year olds will get eight year old is watching,

Dr Emma Southon 10:09
like he was really funny for us. And then we were like, no, no. Eight year old knows. So we did it as a catalog instead, like they’ll get that. And then we did, like, the building your villa, you’re building your town as a kind of Minecraft thing. So you get to did it as constructor the game, and then talked through all of the actually big history that happens in in Britain at the end of the Roman Empire. So from like 200 to 400 there are like three emperors that are proclaimed in Britain, including Caracalla and Geta of Gladiator II fame,

Dr Rad 10:42
absolutely, I was very, so excited to see the section on them. There

Dr G 10:46
they are hanging out. I will

Dr Emma Southon 10:49
tell you now, and I’m sorry they’re going to probably have to edit this out. But I spent the entire thing going, why is Geta the big one?

Dr G 10:58
Yeah. Surely this really assumed, yeah, miscasting,

Dr Emma Southon 11:03
yeah, like, Geta is the big one and the little one is Caracalla.

Dr G 11:08
Don’t tell Fiona too much. She hasn’t seen it yet.

Dr Rad 11:11
Oh, you’ve seen it. Okay, we’re actually going together to what we call Gold Class here, which basically is, like the super fancy cinema with, like this, you know, the recliner I

Dr G 11:21
want? I want to Colosseum popcorn bucket. That’s what I’m after. Yeah,

Dr Emma Southon 11:26
I cannot get it here, and it breaks my heart. I’m not going to spoil anything else, but I’m just going to say Gator is the big one, and I genuinely spent a third of a movie with

Dr Rad 11:34
my mind blown. Yeah, no, that is crazy to me. Yeah.

Dr Emma Southon 11:38
So Caracalla,, Geta, Constantine the great he is crowned in Britain. And then Britain is called like a hotbed of usurpers, because people keep rising up, taking chunks of the army and invading mainland Britain, basically. And then there’s a lot that goes on there. Britain, I think, is very often considered to be like a massive backwater that Rome didn’t care about at all. But you see hundreds of years of them desperately trying to keep Britain in the empire, because it is very important as both a space for which is agriculturally, producing enormously, and it is a place where people have loads of property and they want to keep it. And it is, you know, they don’t want to lose it as a space. And the period that Britain is the richest and when the most beautiful things are being built, and when it’s spending the most money on villas and mosaics and paintings, and is the third and fourth century, like this period that we think of as a period of decline and misery is actually a period of kind of gold and luxury in Roman Britain. So, so we have all of that, and then we have the kind of final sad decline, I suppose, of Britain as the army just keeps leaving, and then no one has any money to travel across the sea anymore. So

Dr G 12:56
this ferry system is getting very expensive. I don’t know if I can put my army on boats,

Dr Emma Southon 13:02
and their Saxons got very, very good at piracy, so it became real expensive to keep sending stuff over. And so this kind of last hurrah of Roman Britain is kind of ends with a bit of a whimper. And that famous letter from Honorius where he says, you know, we wrote to Britain and said that they’d have to deal with themselves, which may or may not be about Britain, but yeah, so it hopefully gives, like, a very different perspective on Roman Britain, and then that, it does the whole of it, from the first contact in 150 BCE all the way through to, kind of The final dregs of Roman culture in like 500 and tells you everything that happened, basically, and get a good idea of what living at any period under Roman occupation was like,

Dr G 13:53
Oh, fantastic. So I like the fact that there’s a chronology here. It’s, as you say, it’s not just a smattering of facts without any sort of contextual detail. So everybody gets to go on a journey through this whole few 100 years of Roman contact with the Britons. When you’re thinking about your research and work on this book, was there anything in particular you were surprised to learn as you went through this process,

Dr Emma Southon 14:20
the kind of uniqueness of Romano British culture, like archeologically, because the archeology of Roman Britain is not something that I had ever like looked at in huge detail, and I’d certainly never sat down and read all of the many British archeological reports I read. And because British archeological reports basically publish every archeology PhD that wants to be published. Oh, that’s on British archeology, and it’s brilliant. And as a result, you can read the tiny little niches that people do and see what they’re looking at. And the there are real uniquenesses to Roman British culture, like they didn’t. We used to call it romanizing Back in the day, but you know, they didn’t hell themselves into being as Roman as possible on a copy. But they took what they wanted and absorbed it. But so they were like, Okay, we’ll do villas, but we’re doing them in a way that we like, like, we’ll do corners. Now, really funny thing is that there was a drought 2007-2008, that, for archeologists, was brilliant, because all of the dried out fields meant that they could see with aerial photography, loads of foundations that they wouldn’t have been able to see, and so they could suddenly see loads of Roman and pre Roman archeological sites, or like sites of locations of inhabitation where that they hadn’t known existed before. And you can tell which ones are the pre Roman because they’re all round. And then the Romans come and put corners on

Dr G 15:41
all those Romans. They love their lines. They love their angles.

Dr Emma Southon 15:48
I just really amused me to imagine, like early Roman Britons being like, and they’ve got coordinates, you say,

Dr Rad 15:58
or something. There’s something there about, like, a square pig and

Dr Emma Southon 16:04
a round you get these things, these really specific villas. And like, they build Roman temples, but they build them in a really specific way that is doesn’t look like Roman temple has got like a circular bit in the middle. So they’ll be like, Okay, we’ll do like 50-50, and they were, like, all of the religious sites that appear, which don’t appear until, like, relatively late, but they appeared, but they’re like, we’ll do votive offering. We get that, but we are only going to put it in water, because water is our thing. So we’re gonna, like, make we’re gonna absorb it into our culture, rather than absorbing ourselves into you, basically, which was fascinating to me. And at no point does Britain in general seem to have, like, wholeheartedly thrown itself into you get the odd guy, like the guy who built fishborne Roman palace. But mostly people are like, yeah. Don’t know how I feel about guys

Unknown Speaker 16:58
that might work, but

Dr Emma Southon 17:02
they are still building roundhouses. And like you can see, like, they’ll get on board with things that are useful, like lamps and locks. But apart from that, they’re a bit like, there is a real uniqueness. And like face pots, as well as this thing that you only find in Roman Britain, which is urns for cremains. And they would bury the cremains in a pot with a little face on it. So they make these little face pots interesting. They are adorable. And I don’t know if they’re like the face of the person, sometimes they have a little penis on them because they’re Roman. So they’ll just have, like, a penis, actually, yeah, wouldn’t

Dr G 17:38
want to miss an opportunity,

Dr Emma Southon 17:41
yeah. But you find it in, like, you only find the Britain and, like, a little bit in northern Gaul, but they’re just like these unique aspects of Roman Britain culture that I thought were really delightful. And every single one of them that I learned about was so charming. Because, like, certainly, when I was in school, we went, I grew up near fish born Roman Palace, which is, like the Roman palace, and it is the villa that everybody talks about, and it’s ginormous. It’s like four times the size of most villas. And it is so Roman. It’s so square. It’s got, like, the atrium, it’s got the big wings that go round a bit of grass. And so for a long time, I was like, Okay, so that’s what a Roman villa is. But then when you look at what they all look like, they have a specific layout that the British designed themselves. And so it was, yeah, it was um, eye opening to see how, how the the people for 400 years, were like, okay, we can get along with some of this. But I kind of like, that’s like, feels profoundly British, yeah,

Dr G 18:42
okay, the pragmatism of like, well, you say you do it that way, but we’ve always done it like this, so I think we’re just gonna keep doing it like this. We’re gonna

Dr Emma Southon 18:53
keep we’ll incorporate the bits that we like, but otherwise we will be avoiding virtually all of it.

Dr Rad 19:03
We’ll take the luck, yeah, throw it.

Dr Emma Southon 19:06
We’ll take this, but we’re not getting on board with we’ll take the wine, but we’re not getting on board with the garam

Dr Rad 19:13
there’s got to be a new Monty Python skit in there somewhere.

Dr Emma Southon 19:16
Yeah, there’s a horrible history skit in there somewhere with this, yeah,

Dr Rad 19:21
exactly, yeah. Which is, which is obviously very apt, given that Greg Jenner was involved in me. He was,

Dr Emma Southon 19:26
and you can tell he was the historical consultant for Horrible Histories for a long time. And he wrote the, or helped write the film, The Boudicca film. And, yeah, did a was kind of locked, very responsible for a lot of horrible history stuff. So you can see that humor in there. He has a very the puns and word play. And we share a hilarity of just imagining how these things play out when people talk about and then they cleared some land. We both find it really funny to imagine, like, how does that like? There is a horrible history. Sketch of, like, somebody turning up at a guy’s door and saying, we’re going to build a wall through here. Going to build a massive wall right the way across the island, and if you could just move your sheep out. I think,

Dr Rad 20:11
I think that is something that that we also share. We delight in imagining these scenes of when people come up to the door of, you know, Cincinnatus, whilst he’s farming shirtless. And, yeah, exactly,

Dr Emma Southon 20:26
giving Cato a call, and he’s talking about with cabbages yet again.

Dr Rad 20:33
So obviously, as you sort of highlighted before, there are sometimes these sort of different ideas behind each chapter, the way you laid it out, and the sort of approach that you’ve taken, so when you sort of saw it all come together, which part ended up being your favorite?

Dr Emma Southon 20:47
That’s my favorite. I find the Julius Caesar YouTube bit really funny. So we did Julius Caesar as like a manosphere YouTube bro who is trying to pass off his ludicrous, his ludicrous turning up in Britain, fundamentally unprepared and being chased out and then constantly complaining that doesn’t matter how many hostages he takes, they just keep stabbing him in the back, trying to pass it off as a brilliant victory. And we imagined him kind of, what’s that guy that just fought?

Dr G 21:23
Oh, the guy that just fought my boxer guy,

Dr Emma Southon 21:27
yes,

Dr G 21:28
I can’t remember his name. What’s his name? But isn’t he fundamentally a YouTuber? Yeah, he is.

Dr Emma Southon 21:34
So basically, we imagined him as one of those youtubers who’s, like, always doing stunts, or like a kind of Mr. Beast type bro guy who just wants to impress everybody with, like, the massive stunts that he’s doing. And then we had, like, his description of Britain. We ended up doing it as, like a Q and A while he’s trapped in because he can’t go out because the weather’s so bad that it’s destroyed all of his ships that genuinely happened. So he got trapped on the island well, because all his ships got destroyed and stopped. So, like, he’s got nothing to do. So he can do an AMA, and he’ll describe Britain, and that’s how we’ll have, like, his description of what Britain is like. And yeah, that ended up. And when we were recording the audio book, Greg was doing voices, doing his YouTube voice. And it took a while to get through that, because it was just made us both really laughed that one. I really like that chapter. I think it’s really funny.

Dr G 22:30
That’s a good one. Julius Caesar, what a man, what a time I know, what a guy. And maybe this will help some people, you know, young people, come to a better sense of what he might have really been like. Yeah, he spends a lot of time talking about himself, that’s for sure. In

Dr Emma Southon 22:51
the third person we did, let him say, I we should have we thought they might be a bit far if we had him saying, Caesar has been to British. Yeah. Ridiculous.

Dr G 23:04
It would have served him right in some respects, but I can appreciate the change,

Dr Emma Southon 23:07
yeah, but yeah. Still, it still tickles me to imagine him on YouTube.

Dr G 23:11
Definitely. He’d have quite a following. I can only imagine

Dr Emma Southon 23:16
he really would. He’d have a podcast following, be doing massive things and filming them. Yeah, it would be ridiculous.

Dr G 23:27
So I like the fact that this is a new kind of Avenue, if you like, for your work as a way, because not only is this a co authorship situation that, but there’s also an illustrator involved, and you’ve talked a little bit about how the layout of the page is doing a lot of the work and sort of helping create the the argumentative structures and to point people in particular directions. I’m wondering, if you can take us a little bit through that process, what was it like coming together to collaborate on that visual as well as the written

Dr Emma Southon 23:59
fun? I’m not a visual thinker, so the what the page looked like was probably the bit that I was least involved in. We had kind of as we were going through. So what we did was we went through and put together, like a chronology of what we thought the chapter should be and what we wanted to include and how to break it up. And then we went through and sat on Zoom for hours, and like, chapter by chapter, we’re like, what’s the funniest way to do this chapter? And then we wrote them. So I would do the research, and then send loads of research to Greg, and he would write it and send it back to me, and then I would edit it and fiddle about with it and send it back to him. And then we would go back and forth. And then we basically sent a giant Word document, and we came would come up with kind of ideas of things that we would think were funny to for it to look like, but we basically then sent the text to Rikin and then he drew what he thought were funny, basically versions about Greg thinks of jokes really easily, like visual jokes, because of his work in TV. So sometimes he. Would put in a LIKE, Would it be funny to have like? When I found, archeologists have found skulls, cow skulls with Roman bullets in them, because the Roman army would use cows as target practice, or were just shooting cows for fun, which is bizarre. And so he was like, we have to have a picture of we have to have a picture of that. Or he would think of a caption, and then we would send that to Rikin, and then Rikin and just drew loads. And part of it is of what the page looks like is done by the editors, because it has to fit onto a certain amount of pages, essentially. And so we would lose text in order to keep a picture, or lose a picture in order to keep text. And so go went through probably 10 or 12 different iterations of what the page is going to look like. If we have this image here, the joke is before, like, the visual joke is before the paragraph, so we’re going to have to shift it around. But if we do that, then it’s going to push the visual joke onto the next page. So we’re going to have to cut out like 13 words of this paragraph so that it will all fit on this one page. And it’s a very kind of careful I have a lot more appreciation for kids books and illustrated books now, of the of how much work goes in, like page by page, to making sure that you don’t end up with a big bit of blank space. You don’t end up with a especially because we’ve got like, three layers of text. We’ve got the Greg’s text and then the interruptions. And some of them are interruptions and some of them are definitions, so where I’ve underlined something and then defined it, and keeping that all on the one page so that the jokes run in the right order, and that the paragraph doesn’t ruin the visual joke, and the visual joke doesn’t come completely out of context, is quite an undertaking, and I now have a lot of respect for children’s books editors who would happen to balance this like very visually that I did not have before. I did not appreciate them as much as I should have. So it is quite present. And sometimes I sent Rikin a lot of visual references so that everything would be as accurate as possible. So when we have at the beginning, when they you start seeing things like cosmetic mixes, cosmetic sets like appear in southern Britain. I was like, we should totally like, we’re gonna have if we can’t be having like, I don’t need. Want you to be having like, a mirror and a brush. I want it to be a Roman cosmetic set. Don’t look like what you consider to be a cosmetic set. It looks like a pestle and mortar. That’s tiny. But he was great asking for more. What does this look like? What does an actual pot look like? Like one of the original pots he drew? I was like, No, that’s a Greek pot. Sorry, I love you, but that like, there’s a difference between a Greek pot and a Roman. And you’ve drawn a Greek pot, and I need you to draw me a Roman. Like, the handles are smaller, the neck is different. And so we did go kind of back and forth, a few on that, but he really wanted to be accurate as well. So he I would send him, like, big PDFs full of images, often drawings of things from bar reports. And he would make them funny. God bless him. That

Dr G 28:17
is an art, I think, being able to take, you know, archeological drawings, and turn them into something hilarious as well as informative at the same time.

Dr Emma Southon 28:26
And we really did our best to be like, you know, what’s the difference between a Roman chariot and a like, I see any chariot like, do we know? What can we tell? How do we make them look different? What does what’s the difference between a Greek pot and a Roman so we’re not misleading people.

Dr Rad 28:44
And, yeah, yeah, well, I mean, and I think that that you’ve actually highlighted something which is also a bit of a departure for you, which is that you have most definitely been writing for adults in your previous books, all the murder, yeah,

Dr Emma Southon 28:58
all the murder, all the swearing. Oh, yeah, exactly. Development jokes, not.

Dr Rad 29:04
So what was it like having to write for children?

Dr Emma Southon 29:07
I was very lucky that I was with Greg, so he did the first draft of everything. And he obviously has been writing for kids for a very long time, and he has other kids books that he has written. This was his third or fourth one, and he did a he’s like, does he did a podcast series for kids during the lockdown called homeschool history, like he knows how to make children laugh, and he has a kid and he’s not afraid of them like I am. So he did the first pass, basically, of everything, and then I just went through and was either like, I understand the sentence, or just kind of tweet things. So I was very it felt like a kind of apprenticeship in a way of seeing Greg do his thing, and I would give him, like, quite dense 1520, page research articles that I would written up, or like lists of things. You know what? It. All the things I thought would be interesting for this chapter. And he would pare those down into 2000 words of that contained a ton of jokes for kids and some references to like, robot hamsters, or like it is a real work of genius to be able to do this and make it like, snappy and funny and yeah, and then we would just edit it down together until it got kind of littler and littler. And the only bit I wrote by myself was, which was by the time we had got, like, quite a few chapters in, was the myth buster part on the on Hadrian’s Wall. So I’d seen him write like, six or seven chapters by that point, so I felt like I could have a go. And then he edited it into something better. But it is a real it’s a real art form to talk to kids and entertain them without patronizing them, and without being like cost you the clown or something. And so it was or doing what I do to children in real life, which is to talk to them like they’re just adults, but smaller. Charles, how was your day at work? Let’s

Dr Rad 31:10
please talk about the difference between Roman and Greek pots. It’s very important that you understand the subtle differences.

Dr Emma Southon 31:15
I do as an example of how I usually am with children, I was talking to my nephew quite recently. It was his 21st birthday. And he I took him out for dinner, and we were out, and he said, Do you remember Auntie Emma when I was about six and you taught me what genocide was? I was like, yes,

Dr Rad 31:38
that is exactly the kind of thing that I would do.

Dr G 31:42
I mean, if it comes up in conversation and it’s the right time to learn the information I don’t I mean,

Dr Emma Southon 31:48
in my defense, he had, he was in a school that was very progressive, and they had decided to name all of their classes after countries, like each year group was a continent and each class was a country. The year before, he had been in hedgehog class, and this year, I asked him what class he was in, and he said, Cambodia. Oh, God. Well,

Dr Rad 32:07
that makes total sense that you would instantly go there. And so after

Dr Emma Southon 32:11
some questioning, we obviously got around to Cambodian history, fair enough. And yeah, and he considers a very formative part of his like, he’s now very politically engaged, and he’s a journalist, so I feel like I did a good job, but still,

Dr Rad 32:24
I think that’s one of the things, yeah, that is one of the things I find when you’re actually talking to a small child, because I also have a couple of nephews who are toddlers at the moment, and I find that it’s one of those things where I’ll just be talking to them normally, just as I’m like, you know, bustling around, and I’ll just say something, and then all of a sudden, as the words leave my mouth, I’m like, Oh no, that’s gonna lead to more questions. And I don’t know what their parents want me to say about this. And I literally did that the other day, where I was talking about how I was a step parent and that, and then I was like, oh no, oh no. That’s gonna lead to questions about what. What does that involve? And so I had to go through the whole thing of, look, so you know those people I call my children? Yeah, they weren’t actually ever inside of me. Oh crap, yeah. And I think, I think we ended up finishing the conversation with him, concluding that to have a step parent means that you have three mothers. And I was like, yep, you know what? Let’s just Yeah.

Dr G 33:21
We can clear that up. That’s

Dr Emma Southon 33:23
worse things that could come out. But

Dr Rad 33:26
yeah, so I am terrible at explaining things to really small

Dr Emma Southon 33:28
children. Yeah, they’re very challenging. That’s why they can see right through you. And this is the thing with writing for kids and talking to kids really like they, they know, if you’re like, trying to bullshit them, they can. They don’t have time for any kind of patronizing them or pretending like they and so you have to be enthusiastic, and you have to take them seriously. And that was which is good, because that’s what I like to do, I take everything well, that’s not true. I don’t take everything seriously, but I do take history,

Dr Rad 34:05
I think seriously underneath hilarious on the top, yeah, exactly.

Dr Emma Southon 34:08
And I wouldn’t have done a book for children if it had been anything other than what Greg does, which is to teach kids history, not just teach them history facts like or history stories, but teach them what history is and what historians do, and that history is largely arguing and interpretation. It’s not just like a static series of stories or facts or myths. It is a kind of constantly evolving discipline, and he takes that very seriously indeed. And then does robot hamster jokes.

Dr G 34:50
This actually leads me into something that I did want to ask you about, because this book has things like the the chaos ratings in it, as you as you go through. True. And, you know, this is obviously a really great mechanism, I think, for giving us sort of a little bit of a foreshadowing of what is to come or indicating just how complex the thing that is about to be discussed is going to be. And I’m wondering about how, like, a feature like that may have evolved during the discussion process.

Dr Rad 35:18
Yeah, because that’s the historic graphical bit, I think,

Dr Emma Southon 35:21
yeah, because this is so Greg’s original like pitch for this was that he will be the guy who is living through it, essentially, like he’s in present tense, and he is living through it. And sometimes he you never know what’s coming next. And sometimes what comes next is really chaotic, and like in the moment, you have no clue what’s happening, and the historian can come in and say, Oh, x, y, z is what is occurring. But like, so you have this period at the end, which is, I think, when the chaos meter goes to totally chaotic, when Britain is like in three separate empires, technically, in about a 20 year period. So the Gallic Empire splits away from the Roman Empire in the third century, and then Aurelian brings it back in, and then it splits off into a tiny British Empire, which consists of Britain.

Dr G 36:12
We’re all by ourselves,

Dr Emma Southon 36:14
yeah, for like 10 years, it’s the British Empire, and then it’s back into the Roman Empire again. And so we had that as a news reader, who’s, like, constantly being like, and then this guy’s been murdered, and then this guy’s been murdered, there’s constantly coins like, appearing, which, and who the hell is this guy? And so his feeling is that it like, sometimes it’s going to feel like you don’t know what’s going to happen, like, who you can who’s going to be the Emperor when you wake up tomorrow, who? What Empire Am I in when I wake up tomorrow? Like sometimes when you’re living day to day, it feels totally chaotic and like you don’t know how anything is going to survive, but in you can be, then be a historian, and look back and say, Ah, the forces, an Aurelian is going to come and save everybody, and it’s all going to be okay. Don’t worry, guys. Yeah. And so the chaos meter is basically how the person at the time would be feeling if they were living through this. Are they feeling like they’re in a good, chill, useful time where everything is delightful and it’s the end of history, or are they living in interesting historical times and they feel like they don’t know what their world is going to look like tomorrow, and they’re burying their gold because they’re worried that someone’s going to come and

Dr G 37:26
rob them. Fair enough,

Dr Rad 37:28
I was really impressed by all those additional elements, because, as I say, I think that’s where the historiography comes in, with the accuracy alerts the myth bust, seeing, you know, it was so layered, as you say, I was like, Whoa, there’s like, so much historiography going on on this page, and it’s a children’s book. And I think, without a doubt, this isn’t a question. I’m just saying this, without a doubt, my favorite part was the historian head to head over Buddha cup, mostly because of the illustration of you and Greg fighting each other with books.

Dr Emma Southon 37:56
Yeah, a genuinely delightful Yeah. And, you know, and that is an argument that, for some reason, I tried to keep trying to avoid Boudicca, but you come back to her constantly. I know I’ve accidentally written two books that she’s in, and like there are so many different interpretations of her and so many like that. You know you can talk to French archeologists who argue that she never existed. You can talk to like, really intense patriots who are like she was a woman, and this and like the Tacitus story, is exactly what happened to her, and that is precisely it I kind of like to sit in the middle. And I think that Tacitus is telling a very specific, fictionalized mythic story about her, and that it best, almost no resemblance to the Dio version of her, that these are, you know, she’s a real woman told as a literary device. And but then you have, you know, there’s the Amanda Scott who is like, no, she was Welsh. And Boudicca actually means vodaker, and it means victory. And like there’s so many different ways of understanding her and of of interpreting her, but all we have, really is two guys who know something about her and are writing about her for a very specific political audience, and that kind of arguing about her, that’s what history is, especially ancient history. And you know this, when you’re dealing with Roman texts and you’ve got nothing else to where you’ve got nothing else to work with, it’s just arguing over two guys and how much you want to believe those two guys were telling the truth, and if they were both telling the truth, then why their story is so different?

Dr Rad 39:44
Yeah, look as two people who base their entire podcast basically on Livy and Dionysus of Halicarnassus for a long time, and we generally do, often get to the point where I end up sort of saying at the end of the episode, so wait, maybe none of this ever actually happened. And Peta’s like, whoa, whoa.

Dr G 39:59
I mean, something happened, like, have we

Dr Rad 40:04
just proven that none of this ever happened?

Dr Emma Southon 40:06
Rome appeared fully formed, 27 BCE with Augustine

Dr G 40:14
before that. We can’t possibly know anything.

Dr Rad 40:20
You know, look, I think it’s, it is amazing how much you guys have been able to show, as you say, what history actually is, which is all these different perspectives, all this problematic evidence. It is amazing that you have been able to delve into all of these issues and cover the entire history of Britain all in one book.

Dr Emma Southon 40:36
Yeah, amazing in like 25,000 words. It’s, yeah,

Dr Rad 40:39
I might have something to learn. So tell us, if people are really keen to dive right in, and we mean physically dive in, are there any places in Britain that you would recommend going?

Dr Emma Southon 40:52
So there are a bunch of villas. So I honestly do think that fishborne is brilliant. It is very much a it’s like an early Roman villa. It’s in Sussex, and it is, it’s like the most Roman of all the Roman villas, but it is amazing, and it is like a genuine delight to see chedworth is also great. And that’s much more of a what’s the word, like British one? But, yeah, it’s a corridor, but it’s also it has great like mosaics, and it’s a great site to go to. The British Museum has all the cool stuff. So, you know, you can’t say no to the British Museum, really, it does have all the best stuff. But the great thing about Britain is you can come one day, me and my husband say we’re going to get an English Heritage membership and just spend a year like driving around Britain looking all the English Heritage stuff, because there’s so much in the way of in every town, there’s something almost every town, there’s something that is Roman, and then, like, my dad lives in Dover, and they have a fort That’s under a car park that you can go to

Dr G 42:04
classic, come to our car park fort, yeah, and

Dr Emma Southon 42:08
then and you can go to Dover.

And Dover Castle has a Roman lighthouse, so it’s still standing. Yes, it’s like next to a 12th century church, but it’s this Roman lighthouse that you can go to and virtually anywhere that you go. And quite often, because we wanted to do a whole chapter on the rediscovery of Roman Britain, because Roman Britain was not appreciated, particularly until, like, the 18th century, when they redug up bath in order to make it kind of Spa, Georgian spa destination. And we discovered all of the stuff in Bath, and all of the stuff there, you can see the Roman stuff, but a lot of it is still buried. And a lot of the stuff that they say is Roman is actually Victorian, but it’s like pseudo neoclassical. It’s still gorgeous. It’s worth going to but and just be aware that it’s not all that, but so much of it was not appreciated. And you get all of these stories of like 17th century, 16th century farmers digging up mosaics and then just chucking them in the bin. Oh, no. Ooh. There was one story that was like from 1840 something of a farmer plowing up a mosaic and then load it being in the papers, and loads of people coming to see them, and then everyone just taking some of it home. And it kind of makes you feel a bit sick,

Dr Rad 43:36
but, and this is my charm, how much stuff I mean when you combine that with all the stories of early archeologists at places like Pompeii and Herculaneum, you know, being like, that’s not important, tossing it out. Give me the good stuff. Just like, Oh my god. How much of this stuff that we complain we don’t have enough of has actually ended up in the bin. But

Dr Emma Southon 43:55
since then, it’s got a bit better. But now virtually every town in Britain has something and it will have a mosaic or something cool and Roman in their like Village Museum, and which is kind of delightful to see how much of it there is just everywhere, and not just the monumental stuff that you get if you go like, there’s no arches, there’s no big buildings, particularly, there’s just lots of little things. I will do one shout out for the Mithraeum in London, actually, if you’re in London, which is in the bottom of the Bloomberg building, but they have a load of they have the oldest writing tablets that have been found in Western Europe, which are from like 100 CE, that were all found in the Thames, and they’re all Business Tablets, so they’re well, boring, but they’re delightful to see. But then what they’ve done with the Mithraeum,with these kind of light show and holograms and this recreation of mithraic worship is really cool to see. Sounds like a delight. Yeah?

Dr Rad 44:58
Indeed. Yeah. I. Never been, actually, even though I’ve been to London several times, I didn’t know was there the last time I

Dr Emma Southon 45:05
was, yeah, you have to, like, go to the business districts and then, like, go into the bottom of a building that really feels like you shouldn’t be in

Unknown Speaker 45:13
this all Bloomberg cannon. But, yeah,

Dr Emma Southon 45:15
but it’s freedom, and it is like an hour, and you get to see, and they’ve got these kind of displays of all of the stuff that they found. Their archeological reports are great as well, actually. But yeah, there’s just so much on the army. You can go up and see all the forts in the north, and you can go and see Hadrian’s Wall and walk along it. And you can go to Vindolanda, although the good tablets are in the British Museum.

Dr G 45:39
Fair warning, fair warning. Yeah,

Dr Emma Southon 45:41
they do have lots

Dr Rad 45:42
Start at the British Museum, then work your way up.

Dr Emma Southon 45:44
Yeah, pretty much start the bottom, work your way up, drive around. There is a great book, actually, about driving around Roman Britain, by Charlotte Higgins, oh, okay, and she drove around a few years old now, she drove around Britain and went to loads and loads of different Roman sites, and, like really explored the impact that Rome left on on the British landscape that you can still see. So I would recommend that

Dr G 46:10
fantastic. All right. Well, to wrap this up, because this has been a fabulous conversation, as always, we hear that there might be exciting new, upcoming projects in your life

Dr Emma Southon 46:22
there are, and

Dr G 46:23
we’re wondering, if you can tell us hints and tips I can.

Dr Emma Southon 46:26
So the book that I’m writing at the moment is very definitely for adults, and is a kind of big cultural history of slavery in the Roman Empire and all of the ways that slavery was embedded into the Empire, and supported it and made it possible for the Empire to exist, basically, which I’m trying not to make depressing, largely by focusing on people, and as many people as I can that to experience slavery in one day or one way or another, which is everybody in the empire, like there is not one single person in the whole Roman Empire who experienced a day without coming into contact with slavery in some way, either by owning them, being one or dealing with an enslaved person. So that’s the one I’m writing at the moment. And then I have a two book deal now, so there’s minimum of two books coming. So the next one after that is going to be about the Palatine and a history of the Palatine complex, through the emperors who lived there, how it grew, the what was there? What’s going on? Who are these guys? It takes up the takes of, like, two miles of Rome. It takes up like a nearly a quarter of the city in its original walls. It’s enormous, and it’s full of people, and yeah, what’s going on up there, and how it changes, and everybody from the guy who is in charge of import taxes from Alexandria to the guy whose job is to be a sexy human pet.

Dr Rad 48:06
Sounds fascinating. You

Dr G 48:09
can go up that hill, but you don’t know what anybody will ask you to do once you get to the top of the

Dr Emma Southon 48:14
map. You do not and it could be very boring, or it’s almost only gonna be very boring, but it might also be very weird,

Dr G 48:22
amazing. Both of those projects actually sound really incredible and important, actually, because I think for readers who are interested in Rome but haven’t had the opportunity to really study it in depth, the extent to which slavery shapes Rome and how it operates is is massive. And yeah, it needs to be better understood. I think, yeah. And

Dr Emma Southon 48:44
when I talk to people, and I tell people who are not Roman historians that this is what I’m doing 99% of the time, the response is, Oh, I hear slavery in Rome was actually fine, like everybody was freed, and it was basically like being a serf, and you have to be like, no,

Dr G 49:04
actually pretty terrible.

Dr Rad 49:07
Just generally not a good idea. It

Dr Emma Southon 49:09
is still very much slavery. So, yeah,

Dr G 49:12
like, just

Dr Rad 49:14
because it’s better than some forms of Greek slavery, does it mean that people are like, Oh, that’s totally cool. I’ll totally do

Dr Emma Southon 49:21
Yeah. Just because it doesn’t have a philosophy behind it doesn’t mean that it isn’t still slavery, yeah, yeah. So part of it is going to be overcoming the fact that people think that Roman slavery is not really slavery, or they don’t think it’s chattel slavery, or, yeah, or they’re just really focused on one specific form of domestic slavery like that. You are the secretary of Cicero, and therefore you have a certain amount of power, forgetting all of the people in the fields and the mines and their Fullers and the people doing the monstrous jobs that no one will take, you know is being paid to do. They’re doing it forever.

Dr Rad 49:59
Yeah, you gotta think of that opening of Spartacus, because as much as there is zero evidence that that’s what Spartacus originally did, the film does show him working in pretty terrible job. At first, there’s

Dr Emma Southon 50:13
a lot of people talking about like mining and field work and chain gangs and, you know, and how terrible it was, but that’s the next project, which it not forget. Are

Dr Rad 50:25
you sure? I don’t know. Yeah,

Dr Emma Southon 50:27
I don’t know. Maybe, all right, yeah, just really depressed some children, yeah.

Dr Rad 50:32
Well, that is very exciting. We will be looking forward to hopefully chatting to you again when that is finished. But thank you so much for talking to us today. As usual, we have, not only did we learn a lot from the book, but we learned a lot about the process of producing a book like this. And I definitely would encourage actually adults to read it as well as get it for your kids, because I think you’ll find it’s a genuinely delightful read. Yeah,

Dr Emma Southon 50:59
I think that everybody will learn a lot from it. There are not that many books on Roman Britain for adults or for anybody that do a big tell you all about it, and this is a good starting point, I think.

Dr G 51:15
Yeah, fantastic. Well, thank you so much for telling us more about this book. So for people who are listening at home or wherever you are out and about, the book is called totally chaotic history. Roman Britain gets rowdy with an exclamation mark. So get the excitement pumping. Get into some historiography. Go and enjoy the whole swath of Roman British history. Yeah,

Dr Rad 51:39
and it is available in e book as well as print and audio book from the sounds of it. Yeah,

Dr Emma Southon 51:43
my first audio book reading experience, I do a voice. I do a good couple of amusing voices. So if you want to hear me do my first full range of voice acting,

Dr Rad 51:55
how exciting? Yeah, I look forward to hearing what you think Agrippina the younger sounds, all right. Well, thank you so much, and we will definitely be talking to you hopefully shortly about thank you so much. Thank you for listening to this special episode of the partial historians. You can find our sources sound credits and an automated transcript in our show [email protected] Our music is by Bettina Joy De Guzman. You too can support our show and help us to produce more fascinating content about the ancient world by becoming a Patreon. In return, you receive exclusive early access to our special episodes, just like this one. However, if you lost all your money betting on a chariot race, please just tell someone about the show or give us a five star review until next time we are yours in ancient Rome.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

The post Special Episode – Totally Chaotic History with Dr Emma Southon appeared first on The Partial Historians - Ancient Roman History with smart ladies.

We love it when we get to chat with some of our podcast friends, and this week we got to catch up with the hilarious Liv Albert from ‘Let’s talk about myths, baby!’ to talk about relationships between gods and mortals.

Please be warned, this episode does contain references to sexual assault.

Special Episode – Gods and Mortals with Liv Albert

The lovely Liv Albert herself!

When we get together with Liv, we pick a theme and compare the Roman and Greek myths on the topic. This episode, we decided to compare what each civilisation had to say about gods and mortals get involved with each other.

We found some interesting points of divergence as we delved into the tales of Rhea Silvia and Mars, Servius Tullius and Fortuna, and Aphrodite and Anchises.

Join us for this mini-myth conversation!

Our music is by Bettina Joy de Guzman.

The post Special Episode – Gods and Mortals with Liv Albert appeared first on The Partial Historians - Ancient Roman History with smart ladies.

We sit down with Casie Vogel, VP Publisher at Ulysses Press to talk about the process of bringing an ancient Roman history book into the world and some of the cheeky details about the past that Casie learnt along the way.

To celebrate the publication of ‘Your Cheeky Guide to the Roman Empire’ this special episode is even in video form!

Join us as we talk about books, publishing, and ancient Rome (of course)!

Your Cheeky Guide to the Roman Empire is out now! We hope you love it as much as we enjoyed writing it. Have a chat to your local independent bookstore about getting a copy or two in or let your library know that you’d love them to keep a copy in their collection.

Libraries are a bastion of hope and a refuge for so many and surely a joy-filled exploration of Rome is just the ticket!

This is what the tome looks like it in all its glory!

US – You can read more about the book as well as how to order it at Ulysses Press.

UK – If you’re based in the UK, check out Bookshop.org

Australia – If you’re based in Australia, check out Abbey’s Bookstore, Booktopia, or check in with your local independent bookseller.

Our music is by the amazing Bettina Joy de Guzman.

The header image includes the highly detailed, but very idealised imagining of ancient Rome at its height by Thomas Cole. This painting dates to 1836 and is part of the series The Course of Empire. This painting in particular is entitled The Consummation. There are vibrant crowds of people on a bridge crossing the Tiber surrounded by white buildings with hints of gold everywhere.

The post Your Cheeky Guide to the Roman Empire with Ulysses Press appeared first on The Partial Historians - Ancient Roman History with smart ladies.