0:00

Wonder E plus subscribers can listen to Tides

0:02

of History early and ad free right now.

0:04

Join Wonder E plus in the Wonder E

0:06

app or Apple podcasts. Hi,

0:18

everybody from Wonder E. Welcome to another episode of

0:20

Tides of History. I'm Patrick Wyman. Thanks so much for

0:22

being here with me today. War

0:25

and Rome are so tightly linked that

0:27

in the popular imagination, it's hard to

0:29

imagine the eternal city without its legions

0:31

and triumphs. The old adage

0:33

from the sociologist Charles Tilly that war made the

0:35

state and the state made war holds true throughout

0:37

history, but rarely more so than in the case

0:40

of Rome. From the quasi-legendary

0:42

regal period all the way through the rise of

0:44

Augustus, five centuries, there was rarely a time when

0:46

Rome was at peace for more than a few

0:48

years. But what can we

0:50

actually know about how the Romans made war in

0:52

the city's hazy past, who was

0:54

doing the fighting in the earliest years of the Republic

0:56

and for what reasons? And how

0:58

did war fit into the broader context of

1:01

life in Italy before the age of Roman

1:03

hegemony? To help us answer

1:05

those questions and many more, we have the perfect

1:07

guest on today's show. Jeremy Armstrong

1:09

is associate professor of classics and ancient history

1:11

at the University of Auckland in New Zealand.

1:14

He's an expert on warfare in early Rome

1:16

and the author of the outstanding book War

1:18

and Society in Early Rome from Warlords to

1:20

Generals. He's also co-edited a

1:22

number of volumes, most recently Money, Warfare

1:24

and Power in the Ancient World, studies

1:27

in honor of Matthew Freeman Trundle, Production,

1:29

Trade and Connectivity in Pre-Roman Italy and

1:31

Romans at War, Soldiers, Citizens and Society

1:34

in the Roman Republic, which is freely

1:36

available on open access. Professor

1:38

Armstrong, thank you so much for joining me today. Thanks

1:41

so much for having me. I'm looking forward to it. So

1:44

how did you get interested in early Rome

1:46

and pre-Roman Italy? And why that period and

1:48

not the later centuries that tend to get

1:50

so much more of the attention? Well,

1:54

I actually didn't start in early Rome. When I

1:56

first got into classics and ancient history, I didn't

1:58

even know it was something It could study.

2:00

I wasn't exposed to it at all. Our

2:02

we didn't cover the Ancient Mediterranean at all.

2:04

when I was in high school and middle

2:06

school and I we really began to take

2:08

courses in ancient history Once I got to

2:10

university and when I was there we focused

2:13

on the more traditional aspect sounds classical Greece,

2:15

Hellenistic Period, and our when it came to

2:17

the Republic. I

2:19

think we we skipped over the Regal period

2:21

and early republican baby a lecture or so

2:23

and really kind of bye week to. we

2:25

were already down to the Punic wars blasting

2:27

on from there. So I actually when I

2:29

got into Roman history I started off in

2:32

the Late Republic like so many other people

2:34

did. I was interested in Caesar and Mari

2:36

Us and Cela calling the colors are male

2:38

novels. I got really into those. I was

2:40

in high school and and university not really

2:42

could have turned me onto that whole period.

2:45

So that's for I began and our that's

2:47

why did my masters. Thesis on our when

2:49

I went to St. Andrews. Basically.

2:51

I just started moving earlier and earlier I

2:53

found the earlier I once the more interesting

2:56

questions I could ask of the material I

2:58

would have been looking at the Leave Republic

3:00

I always felt like was kind of arguing

3:02

over the minutiae of little bitty details as

3:04

kind of did something happen on a Wednesday

3:06

or Thursday and assist these these kind of

3:09

you know very kind of tight details but

3:11

the earlier I got I found I could

3:13

ask bigger questions and nice things. were at

3:15

a more open and accessible so I guess

3:17

it's it's kind of the less we know

3:19

for sure them were kind of opportunity. There

3:22

is for speculation and that I really really

3:24

liked. So I just started going earlier and

3:26

earlier. and I think by kind of the

3:28

first year of my phd I was looking

3:31

at the Punic wars and then by the

3:33

second year I was into the into the

3:35

for century and then eventually I kind of

3:37

getting to to the fifth century. Yeah.

3:40

I mean it's a I think. As

3:42

she didn't interesting questions. I also personally and

3:44

and really interested in the beginnings of things,

3:47

the origins of things I've every time I

3:49

came across something in the late Republic I

3:51

would wonder where did that come from and

3:53

looking at our sources, the Romans themselves are

3:55

obviously very concerned with that. so get all

3:57

that kept pushing me earlier and earlier and

4:00

I'm and eventually ended up kind of looking

4:02

a century was was basically kind of the

4:04

core of my phd work and then I've

4:06

sensed and kind of brings back and I'll

4:08

move a little bit before century and also

4:10

back into the six months as a whole

4:13

series a different things By def we didn't

4:15

start out there. This is not something I

4:17

thought I was going to be doing when

4:19

I first got into Roman history, but I

4:21

really enjoy it's now that I'm here. It's

4:24

so interesting because these periods in the early

4:26

in the first part of the Middle Republics,

4:28

they seem so familiar when you read about

4:30

them in a standard account because the sources

4:32

that talk about them are so much later

4:35

and their translating all of the things that

4:37

are happening in this early period into terms

4:39

that makes sense for later Romans, later Greeks

4:41

for later periods of time. And say at

4:43

first glance you think, oh, okay, to consoles

4:45

and there's there's an army and they're They're

4:47

all of these offices that I recognize as

4:49

it would you actually dig into it? You're

4:51

like, wait, this is not at all the

4:53

same sex. Isn't. Totally.

4:56

right? It's the yeah, I mean it. It

4:58

makes total sense that almost all of our

5:00

sources agree on that kind of the basic

5:02

outline of it because they're all basically trying

5:04

to tell the same stories of the same

5:07

audience. They're all writing for a late Republican

5:09

audience of they're using terms and concepts which

5:11

they understand, and they are basically all largely

5:13

giving the backstory to try to explain how

5:15

we got where we are so we can

5:17

talk about the things which really impress them,

5:19

which is what's going on. In

5:21

the Late Republic and in the really empire,

5:24

how did we get here? What's the context?

5:26

That's what they're really interested in. So the

5:28

early period. It's again, it's just it's the

5:30

background. A sincere rebels up some context year

5:32

and move on. at least as part of

5:34

it. I mean, obviously I live, He and

5:36

others are also looking for really go into

5:38

examples that they can bring up on. This

5:40

is what good Romans is is appropriate Roman

5:43

behavior. And yeah, we should look back to

5:45

the wings of our ancestors for that. But

5:47

yeah, Abby To does all made total sense

5:49

when you're looking at it from blink Republican

5:51

contacts. That's exactly how it was written. but

5:53

yes the more you delve into it the

5:56

more you realize actually maybe that's not quite

5:58

right maybe that's a little bit over simple

6:00

find this kind of view back from

6:03

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vary. So

7:36

before we dig into kind of the meat of

7:38

it, I want to ask a little bit more

7:40

about those later sources. So what

7:42

gets remembered? It's not like the people

7:44

who are writing these histories in the

7:46

late republic have a lot

7:49

of firsthand accounts of the periods that

7:51

they're writing about. They have stories, legends,

7:53

traditions. I mean, it was probably a

7:55

good general umbrella term for them. But

7:57

how do those get passed down? What

8:00

kinds of things get passed down? How

8:02

does that shape what we know about that earlier period or what

8:04

we think we can know? This

8:07

is a really hotly debated topic. Actually,

8:09

the sources of our sources is something

8:11

which ancient historians so really agree on

8:14

at the moment, because

8:16

again, the actual sources live

8:18

die in ISIS. These men writing these

8:20

histories, they weren't very good about citing

8:22

where they were getting bits of information

8:24

from. So there's a lot of speculation

8:27

here. But I

8:29

mean, the vast majority of it does seem

8:31

to come through what we would just call

8:33

the oral tradition. It's yeah, tradition, stories, family

8:35

histories largely. So passed down within discrete families,

8:38

which of course are gonna be a little biased

8:40

and skewed. I mean, anytime you have a good

8:42

storyteller, they're gonna be changing the story slightly for

8:44

their audience. And so it's gonna change over time.

8:46

You might have certain lessons and things that are

8:48

consistent, you know, parables, these

8:50

kind of things, but you're gonna tinker with

8:52

them. So what

8:56

gets preserved there is, you know, maybe

8:58

some names, maybe some big events, a

9:00

war, a particular conflict. These

9:03

aspects were probably preserved. There

9:05

does seem to be some sort of kind of written

9:07

tradition. I mean, people were writing things down around

9:10

the site of Rome going back to the

9:12

sixth century. We have some inscriptional evidence there.

9:15

And a lot of historians used to hang

9:17

a lot of kind of their models on

9:20

things like the annals or the records of

9:22

the Plonifex maximus and things

9:24

like the list of consoles. Every

9:27

year, the Romans seem to have remembered that

9:29

they would write certain key events down. And

9:31

so we often thought we could trust those.

9:34

Now we started to find out that actually

9:36

maybe even those aren't as reliable as they

9:38

could be. So the

9:40

long story short is it's very, very patchy. And none

9:42

of us at all agree on what sort of material

9:44

would have been transmitted or

9:47

how reliable it is. Every different

9:49

historian will probably have a slightly

9:51

different model. The way I explain it to my classes is

9:53

a bit like The evidence for

9:55

early Rome is a bit like looking at stars and

9:57

trying to make constellations out of them. We have a-

10:00

Few points of light the we kind

10:02

of generally agree on but how we

10:04

group that and I we make sense

10:06

of it's is really down to your

10:08

own personal perspective, an interpretation what you

10:10

want to see their in a dentist.

10:12

This allows for really interesting models as

10:14

it is something has been increasingly fleshed

10:16

out with the archaeology to the military

10:18

sources. One thing the archaeology that is

10:20

as a body of evidence that's increasingly

10:22

growing so we can use a bit

10:24

more that but it's hard to say

10:26

we actually don't know how much reliable

10:28

stuff with passed down so I can.

10:30

That's what allows us to have so

10:32

many different opinions on this particular time

10:34

period. I love these kinds of questions

10:36

because. It's so easy if

10:38

you read kind of a standard textbook

10:41

accounts to get a skewed idea of

10:43

the reliability of these sources because it's

10:45

possible in people have been doing it

10:47

for you know, couple of centuries now

10:49

to take these little bits and pieces

10:51

of information and tell it really coherent

10:53

story from beginning to end about what

10:55

Romans were up to in this period,

10:57

and you know you can elaborate on

10:59

it, and you toss in a couple

11:01

of archaeological sites to give a color,

11:03

But basically you've got the same frameworks,

11:05

but when you actually dig into the

11:07

raw materials from what you build that

11:09

stories, it's just a this incredibly shaky

11:11

foundation in. A

11:13

Totally right and people don't like this. This

11:16

is a sort of the reasons why think

11:18

more people don't get into an early Roman

11:20

history as that's you know people when they

11:22

like is when they get into history, they

11:24

like something solid, They like facts, they like

11:26

these types of things and and early round

11:29

you just have to embrace the fact that

11:31

we just don't know. We can come up

11:33

with kind of better models and slightly improve

11:35

our understanding of things and things which are

11:37

more convincing interpretations of the evidence. But I've

11:39

me Early Roman History is one of the

11:41

few areas which has been and from. various

11:44

periods of academic history kind of discounted is

11:46

impossible to work on our the nineteenth century

11:48

in particular there's a lot of people that

11:51

said it's basically kind of yeah no roman

11:53

fan section i it's not really history really

11:55

there's nothing you can do with the sources

11:57

that we have They're just too bad. Again,

12:00

it's a funny time period like that. Yeah,

12:02

and but again people don't like that I

12:04

I really enjoy it, but not every it's

12:07

not everyone's cup of tea Well,

12:09

it's funny because it reminds me a lot of The

12:12

very early middle ages kind of the cusp of

12:14

late antiquity in the middle ages where you have

12:16

A discrete number of written sources that

12:19

are held in very high regard by

12:21

Scholarly traditions that have been operating and

12:24

working on them for a very long

12:26

time So you have to dig through

12:28

this really complicated apparatus of scholarship To

12:31

understand what people have said about these sources

12:33

over very long periods of time And it's

12:35

possible to just get mired in endless debates

12:37

about the meaning of one particular word

12:40

in one particular source Without focusing on the

12:42

larger question of does that bear any relationship

12:44

to what was happening on the ground in

12:46

fifth century gall? but the flip

12:48

side of it is that you have A

12:51

really fascinating archaeological record a growing

12:53

archaeological record and one that you

12:55

can approach with increasing sophistication So

12:58

there are these kinds of bifurcated fields where

13:00

you have A textual tradition that

13:02

you don't really know what to do with or

13:04

that you can do a lot of different things

13:06

with but it's confusing And then archaeological material that

13:09

is like oh These are things that people who

13:11

were actually alive in this period of time were

13:13

making and using For reasons that made sense to

13:15

them and the way that they were deposited or

13:17

lost we can do a lot with that So

13:20

it reminds me a lot of that in ways

13:22

that I think is it's exciting. It's exciting and

13:24

it's interesting I absolutely

13:26

agree. Actually, there's a colleague in my

13:28

department Associate professor lisa bailey who works

13:30

on late antiquity and we often comment

13:32

on the similarities between late antiquity and

13:34

the early medieval period And what I

13:37

deal with as well And

13:39

yeah part of that is as you've just touched

13:41

on this need To use all of the

13:43

available evidence that we have for these time periods.

13:45

You can't just use the literature You can't just

13:47

I mean in some ways you can just

13:49

use the archaeology But it's best to use both

13:52

and you can tell really interesting

13:54

stories with both the interesting Thing

13:56

about the archaeology and the literature: Is They

13:58

both tell us. Stories about different

14:01

parts of the population. the literature is

14:03

all about kind of politics and identity

14:05

and warfare and these kind of big

14:07

ideas and the archaeology told us about

14:09

the lived experience And you know again

14:11

it's as that you can tell some

14:14

really interesting stories when you combine those

14:16

two for periods like curly brown. Early.

14:18

Middle Ages again d These periods where

14:21

picky, the literature falls down a bit

14:23

and we can kind of they've if

14:25

we need both to have to really

14:27

tell ape and interesting and useful story.

14:29

So. I want to follow up with

14:31

a question about a concrete manifestation of this

14:34

self. We have a sense of there being

14:36

very discreet groups that are living in Italy

14:38

prior to Roman a Gemini we as we

14:40

have a trust skins and we have Latins

14:42

and we have Romans as a subset of

14:45

Latins and we have a we've got Ah

14:47

skins and I'm Bree Ends and all was

14:49

got all of these different groups when we're

14:51

looking at. The. Archaeological record in particular.

14:53

How distinct are these groups? I mean,

14:55

do you feel like it's possible to

14:58

look at an assemblage of material and

15:00

be like wow, that's obviously asked and

15:02

or that's obviously Latins or is are

15:04

sort of lot of similarities materially between

15:06

these groups. There's. A lot

15:08

of similarities materially between all these

15:11

groups are basically these. All these

15:13

labels are on can largely literary

15:15

a very late, many of them

15:17

are probably pretty arbitrary. It's leader

15:19

authors often trying to put labels

15:22

on groups to make the narrative

15:24

makes sense. yeah no

15:26

the says i can always the most vivid

15:28

oversimplification but that that's kind of largely what's

15:31

going on the archaeology doesn't reveal any of

15:33

this there's been some some great work are

15:35

being dumped a good looking at kind of

15:37

early roman expansion showing that went you know

15:39

the literary sources and and really lot of

15:41

other evidence to some of the archaeologists while

15:44

shows some major changes which we can probably

15:46

a tribute to the expansion of some sort

15:48

of roman system a roman empire into these

15:50

areas that the archaeological signature doesn't change there's

15:52

really no way to identify are can logically

15:55

on the etruscans of the romans of the

15:57

say buy into the all skins as discreet

15:59

groups at least associated

16:01

with those labels. It's all much messier

16:03

than that. And kind of a key

16:05

part of this is the fact that Italy

16:07

seems to have been incredibly dynamic and

16:10

fluid in terms of its population. People

16:12

didn't stay in one place long enough

16:14

to develop a discrete material

16:16

culture. They were always on the move. Large,

16:18

and not just the elites, but really everybody

16:20

seems to have had a fair bit of

16:22

mobility. You know, it's again, they're

16:24

all fairly these communities, these areas are all

16:26

fairly close to each other. And if they're

16:29

moving between constantly, they're going to be sharing

16:31

a kind of large material culture. So again,

16:33

a lot of these labels don't

16:36

really hold up, particularly when we look at

16:39

the archaeology here. It doesn't mean that people

16:41

didn't have groupings, they didn't have relationships and

16:43

networks and kind of people that they associated

16:45

with more than others. But

16:48

it was probably more to do with

16:50

their friends and their relationships and their

16:52

networks rather than being a discrete culture

16:54

or, you know, kind of that

16:56

they viewed themselves as a totally different people. You

16:59

can, you know, have grumbles with your neighbor and

17:02

not be a, you know, kind of completely different

17:04

culture from them. So very, very messy,

17:06

which again, kind of complicates a

17:09

lot of these very neat stories

17:11

we have of Roman expansion and,

17:13

you know, Etruscan domination. These are

17:15

all again, we probably considered the

17:17

same population. There's been some

17:19

really fascinating recent work on this in looking

17:21

at the ancient DNA record, where the authors

17:24

went in and they're trying to find Etruscans.

17:27

And they sample a bunch of ancient

17:29

samples and they sample a bunch from

17:31

Rome, they sample a bunch from the

17:33

Bronze Age and into the Neolithic. And

17:36

there's no discernible difference between the samples

17:38

that are quote unquote Etruscan and those

17:40

that are quote unquote Latin. So even

17:42

if those people were speaking distinct

17:45

languages belonging to entirely different language

17:47

families, genetically, there's no real difference

17:49

between them. They're all part of the

17:51

same population, which tells us that language

17:54

or ethnic identity to the extent that those are things

17:56

are serving very different functions than we might expect. They're

17:58

not hard divided. England's. That's.

18:02

Very true. I mean in terms of Dna,

18:04

some of in the it's been coming out

18:06

more recently showing that this mobility is not

18:08

just limited to Italy, that actually it and

18:10

the entire Mediterranean his release be a tightly

18:12

connected. There's a ton of mobility across a

18:14

going back at least as far as the

18:16

Bronze age if not earlier. Ah, it's lots

18:19

and lots of movement of people around. So

18:21

the idea of some people coming to Italy

18:23

and suddenly in a tree from modern day

18:25

Turkey or Ancient Asia Minor which is one

18:27

of the points of origin for the Etruscans

18:29

wants us. Of course the suppose a point.

18:31

Of origin of an E S and

18:34

and are against that. That's not unusual.

18:36

This is not a one off example

18:38

of one person making this gigantic voyage.

18:40

Actually, there seems to be quite a

18:43

lot of that throughout history, so I

18:45

guess it's very interesting that again, there's

18:47

no real dna difference there with in

18:50

Italy, but also really the entire Mediterranean

18:52

as is as kind of churning sort

18:54

of movement and interaction out across the

18:56

centuries which again kind of messes with

18:59

a lot of these very neat labels

19:01

that. We'd like to put on things

19:03

Roman and Greek that these are fundamentally

19:05

different or Etruscan and any of the

19:07

are asking that these are distinct populations.

19:09

Ah, I didn't. In terms of the

19:11

cynical people, they're probably not. That doesn't

19:13

mean they, they all do. You think

19:15

similarly. Er, again to that they don't

19:17

have rivalries or kind of think that

19:19

they are family group is better than

19:21

another, but again, it's it's not. They

19:23

could have differences we often see was

19:25

kind of early modern colonization where we

19:27

have people crossing the Atlantic and populations

19:29

which were properly separates coming together. We

19:32

have in the Mediterranean is again it's people

19:34

that know each other at have been interacting

19:36

with each other for millennia. It's. All

19:38

about your neighbors that are interacting with

19:40

each other here and that's the story

19:42

Is kind of early Roman warfare and

19:44

and Roman expansion. It's it's amongst unknown

19:46

group of people with people that they

19:48

yeah no have been interacting with for

19:50

a very long time. So.

19:52

i want to dig more into that because

19:55

one of the com and topics that comes

19:57

up when we're talking about pre roman italy

19:59

and and early roman for is this idea

20:01

of mobile elites. This comes up over and

20:04

over again, and I'm absolutely fascinated by this.

20:06

And this speaks to what we were talking

20:08

about, the idea of like these ethnic labels

20:10

not being necessarily the most important way to

20:13

understand who these people were, that family identity

20:15

is what matters to them, and the family

20:17

is not necessarily tied to any particular place,

20:19

any particular one of those labels. So who

20:22

are these mobile elites? What are they doing?

20:24

What are they up to? And how do

20:26

we see them in our sources? Yeah,

20:30

I mean, again, so

20:32

I talked about earlier a little bit, it's not

20:34

just the elites which are mobile. And I think

20:36

that's kind of one of the key things here.

20:38

The elites are very important people who are, they're

20:41

leading other groups with other people with

20:43

them. I'd say

20:45

they're generally family leaders, but

20:48

again, this is family kind of broadly

20:50

considered. It's not necessarily just by blood

20:52

you have, that's for instance,

20:54

with the Claudii, when they moved to Rome,

20:56

and at the end of the sixth century,

20:58

they are explicitly recorded as coming with a

21:00

whole bunch of followers. And this seems to

21:02

be the kind of the norm there, you'd

21:04

have your blood relatives, but also your clients

21:06

and your good friends and everybody who kind

21:08

of travel together. So it's an

21:10

extended clan, effectively. The Latin term for

21:13

this would be Gens, which

21:15

sometimes slip into, but it's kind of a

21:17

large clan. And the elites are

21:19

the ones leading this. So they aren't kind

21:21

of traveling on their own, they may have

21:23

some independent wealth, but really their power comes

21:25

from their ability to lead

21:28

a group of people. And what are

21:30

they doing? They're doing all kinds of

21:32

things. Some parts of that clan might

21:34

be involved in farming, that

21:37

might be a good reason for them to stay in a

21:39

place for a year or two. Some bits are probably doing

21:41

so, they're not necessarily all traveling

21:43

together, but they are a kind of

21:45

power structure and a social set

21:47

of relationships that all connect through

21:50

a particular individual. The

21:52

family had the Planter Familius. And

21:54

that's the kind of the key

21:56

point where that guy goes, what hit decisions he

21:58

makes. dictates what happens with the

22:01

larger group. And that's one of the reasons why I

22:03

think they're so important in

22:05

terms of understanding archaic Italian society

22:07

and particularly archaic Italian warfare. The

22:09

alliances those elites make would dictate

22:11

what all their warriors do and

22:13

who follows them. But

22:16

I think again, they're traveling around doing the

22:18

same types of things everybody else is doing.

22:20

They're going to religious festivals. They are, you

22:22

know, again, maybe sometimes staying in the countryside

22:24

and, you know, with part of their family

22:26

farming. I think a lot

22:28

of them are involved in moving animals and

22:30

herding. So pastoralism is a very big

22:32

part here. We often see looking at

22:34

the ancient sources, they're very concerned with

22:36

stealing cattle from each other. And this

22:38

is probably because that's part of what

22:40

their family was doing. They were moving

22:42

cattle back and forth across the landscape

22:44

from the summer pastures to

22:46

the winter pastures. It's a regular movement, which

22:48

people still do today. So we can kind

22:51

of see this in modern ethnographic studies. And

22:54

these they can be leads to the people that are

22:56

able to dictate these

22:58

clan based structures. One

23:01

of my favorite kind of observations that I've made,

23:03

because I've gone over very, very long periods of

23:06

time in the last few years, as I've been

23:08

doing episodes on prehistory and now the Bronze Age

23:10

and the Iron Age, is

23:12

the idea of like, just

23:14

how important cattle raiding

23:17

and livestock stealing is to the formation

23:19

of power structures. That on the one

23:21

hand, you have this narrative that formal

23:24

power grows out of the ability to

23:26

extract agricultural surplus. But I think the

23:28

ability to get all your boys together

23:30

and go steal a bunch of cattle

23:33

is a much more concrete form of power.

23:35

And it's a much more flexible one. And it's

23:38

one that appears in a great

23:40

many more historical and archaeological

23:42

contexts than settled agriculturalists turning

23:44

into power. And often I think if you

23:47

find a Case of like a

23:49

settled agricultural state with these mechanisms of surplus

23:51

extraction, at the root of it, you will

23:53

often find some guy who got together with

23:56

his boys and stole a bunch of cattle.

23:58

Like That's a really like trade. Shortly,

24:00

that's a really powerful thing. To be

24:02

able to go do is to get

24:04

a raiding party together to take something,

24:07

and then to be able to enjoy

24:09

the fruits of your theft and to

24:11

distribute the fruits of that to other

24:13

people. That's a really, really, really powerful

24:15

dynamic to be able to play with

24:17

and a social context. Absolutely.

24:20

And that seems to be with the

24:22

Romans are largely interested in. Ah, I'm.

24:24

Definitely. All the way through the fifth

24:26

century, they are basically just trying to get

24:29

portable booty and by far the preferred option

24:31

seems to be livestock. It also makes sense

24:33

in terms of one they're fighting is while

24:35

and see how they're going out and I

24:37

have the usual campaigning season actually a lines

24:39

almost exactly with the usual time when the

24:41

herds are on the move. Ah, so it's

24:43

a time when they're moving herds and their

24:45

rivals are moving hard. So it's it's it's

24:47

and time time when they're both a little

24:49

bit honorable. So you've got guys. Yes, it's

24:51

of reading party, but also it's a whole

24:53

bunch of separates. I've been. Or gentle herdsmen.

24:55

They are bowl taking care of their

24:58

own herds as well as probably trying

25:00

to steal from their neighbors. And so

25:02

it's part of the regular routine of

25:04

life. I don't think we should always

25:06

going to see it as this. Absolutely

25:08

Yeah, No, it's It's obviously probably impulse

25:11

violence. Ah, but we can't downplay that.

25:13

But it's. Probably. Part of the

25:15

usual economic and social movements of that or anything

25:17

is actually they probably there's there's there's a whole

25:19

bunch of of reasons not to be. Overly.

25:22

Violence when they're doing these raids

25:24

because they're probably rating friends and

25:26

family members and people who they

25:28

might be allied with another years

25:30

as a thing of again about

25:32

these relationships as so really tight

25:34

network of people in Italy and

25:36

that began they know each other

25:38

and they often sift through their

25:40

allied with so ah, it's. I

25:43

can see why would I often court

25:45

reciprocal writing? And again it's It's probably

25:47

more social. Than. On. in

25:50

our kind of imperialist as we often see

25:52

me get basically any earlier period guinness all

25:54

changes when we started in the fourth century

25:57

bc sings take on a slightly different kind

25:59

of slave But again,

26:01

we see that across the Mediterranean. The fourth century

26:03

is also the time we get the campaigns of

26:05

Alexander the Great and others. This kind of age

26:07

of empires where power suddenly starts

26:10

to go in a very different direction and

26:12

the Romans get carried along with this as

26:14

well. But earlier on, I kind

26:16

of again, their baseline that what they go

26:18

back to their old traditional habits seem to

26:20

be largely reciprocal waiting where

26:23

they're trying to get their cows and sheep and

26:25

portable wealth if they've got any other nice, you

26:27

know, bits of gold or silver, they'll take that

26:29

too. But again, on the expectation that

26:31

they'll probably end up having to give it back in

26:33

the next year when someone raids them. here

26:40

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only valid on monthly. I'm fascinated by the

28:00

social aspect of this and the network aspect of

28:03

this that you mentioned, because

28:18

these people all know each other at

28:20

the elite level. They're familiar with one

28:22

another. You talked about religious festivals earlier.

28:24

They go to the same festivals. They're

28:26

all married to each other. And my

28:29

favorite artifacts from this period are the

28:31

hospitality tokens, the tessera hospitalis, where

28:33

you can see they have these formal

28:35

relationships with one another that transcend what

28:37

we would think of as an ethnic

28:39

or a political boundary, because they're all

28:41

doing business with one another. These

28:43

elites have much more in common

28:46

with one another than they might with, even

28:48

if they live in Rome, than they might

28:50

with your average resident of the city of

28:52

Rome. These relationships are tight

28:54

knit. They extend over many generations, which I

28:56

think is another fascinating thing. If

28:59

you're trying to understand the structure of

29:01

these things, the state per se

29:03

is not necessarily the one that's going to help you

29:05

make sense of what these people are doing and why.

29:09

That's exactly right. The real driving force seems to

29:11

be the personal ambitions of

29:13

these individual leaders and their

29:15

personal friendships and networks. It's

29:18

incredibly personal in this early period. And in fact, that's

29:20

something that I think gets carried all the way through.

29:22

If we look at what's going on in the late

29:24

Republic with Marius and Sulla and

29:26

Caesar and some of these other characters, we

29:28

say, oh, it's like the rise of warlordism

29:30

in the late Republic. It's the breakdown of

29:33

the Republic. No, actually, it's there

29:35

all the way through. That's kind of how

29:37

the system worked. It was all

29:39

about powerful family leaders, rivals to

29:41

each other. I mean, generally, you

29:43

try to direct that energy outside

29:45

of the Roman network

29:47

to those who aren't within that. But as a

29:50

baseline, it's OK to have a bit of rivalry

29:52

within it as well, because that's really what the

29:54

fundamental thing is. And this is where people

29:57

like Nicholas Arnazzo and his view of the Republic

29:59

were in, say, grand bargain of Italian elites.

30:01

I very much agree with that. I think

30:03

that fits exactly with what I see in

30:06

the evidence where the state

30:08

such as it is, is basically

30:10

an agreement between these powerful

30:12

family leaders to work together

30:15

into at least generally not

30:17

attack each other if they

30:19

are within this particular Roman

30:21

alliance structure. But it's

30:23

a very kind of loose bargain amongst these

30:25

people at the top. It's not this very

30:28

deep, powerful, entrenched state system, which

30:30

I think we today often kind of

30:32

connect with this idea of a nation

30:34

state where it's all about the citizens

30:36

and this very kind of strong sense

30:38

of kind of some sort of

30:40

Roman nationalism. I don't think

30:42

that's really what's going on for most of the

30:44

Republican period. I think there's a few moments where

30:47

we might see kind of little bits of it.

30:49

The Second Punic War is always a really interesting

30:51

one where there's kind of a really big reinterpretation

30:53

of what it means to be Roman in that

30:55

time period. But looking definitely at the

30:57

earlier period, and I think again in the later period,

31:00

we can see kind of again that the baseline of

31:02

it is again a very loose federation

31:05

of powerful elites who

31:07

are largely coming together in a

31:10

military context. I generally think of what

31:12

I think of the Roman Republic rather

31:14

than thinking of a, you know, the

31:16

British Empire or, you know,

31:18

America or any kind of modern nation

31:20

states. One of the closest parallels I

31:22

often think of is NATO. It's

31:25

a collection of existing powers. You

31:27

know, NATO is an alliance of

31:29

particular nations, and I think the Roman Republic

31:31

is an alliance of clans

31:34

coming together for mutual benefit, agreeing

31:36

again not to fight each other, but it's much

31:38

more in those kind of terms. I

31:41

feel like from the perspective of a scholarship maybe

31:43

50 or 100 years ago, that

31:45

would be harder to square with the

31:47

idea of formal institutions than it is

31:49

now. Kind of the direction

31:52

that scholarship on institutions has taken places a

31:54

lot more emphasis on informal institutions and unwritten

31:56

rules and the rules of the game that

31:58

people know they're playing by, and the ways

32:01

in which those can be a really powerful

32:03

uniting force. So you can have these people

32:05

who are rivals, but as long as they

32:07

understand the rules of the game that they're

32:10

playing within kind of this informal institutional structure

32:12

that can be very powerful and durable. And

32:14

it's not like you have to have these

32:17

formal names for these bodies. So like the

32:19

kind of contradictions that you see in source

32:21

material where they're like, what was this official

32:23

cult? Or what was this group

32:26

of people who came together to vote called or

32:28

what was the structure of it is less important

32:30

than the understanding that those were

32:32

things that you were supposed to do that like, okay,

32:34

well, somebody's got to be in charge. And

32:36

I think the apparent discrepancies or difficulties

32:39

with the record disappear if you think about it

32:41

in those terms, as opposed to like, well, there

32:43

has to be somebody called a console who was

32:45

doing x, y and z things. I

32:48

entirely agree. Yeah. And I think we can put our

32:50

fingers in two different directions. There. One of them is

32:53

actually at the sources themselves course of when they were

32:55

being written. We rely on

32:57

people who are basically creating a kind of

32:59

idealized view of the Roman state, which really

33:02

wants it to make sense to be highly

33:04

structured, because that's part of

33:06

what's going to underpin Augustus' rule and others

33:08

this kind of bureaucratic machinery that that that

33:11

approach there, they want this to be the

33:13

case, even if it's not. And

33:15

the other one, of course, is kind of

33:17

19th century Roman historians, people like the Ador

33:20

Momsen, who is, of course, a legal scholar.

33:23

And so he's we all have to kind of

33:25

trace our academic lineage back to him. But he

33:28

was, you know, he very much wanted

33:30

this legal structure to be the one

33:32

which was important and the one which

33:35

actually described how things really were. And

33:38

again, being one of the first people to write

33:40

down these great books on Roman history, we've, he

33:42

was able to get his kind of chips out

33:44

there in the middle early. And we've been kind

33:46

of constantly responding to that ever since. But yeah,

33:48

I think you're right that when you

33:50

actually look at what's going on, there are

33:53

always exceptions to every rule. And

33:55

if you actually look at the real

33:57

dynamics, which seem to explain the actual

33:59

behavior. It is largely

34:02

to do with this kind of personal

34:04

power and the soft power, you know,

34:06

Pompey and others. The fact that they're

34:08

able to do this, able to

34:11

basically kind of mobilize private armies and

34:13

do what they want based on their

34:16

own personal connections, that shows

34:18

really what's going on. And

34:20

again, despite the fact that all our sources try

34:22

and idealize the early republic and say, oh, we

34:24

didn't used to be like this, actually, even in

34:26

those stories, it's clear that it was. So

34:29

one of my questions here is because we talk

34:31

a lot about the elite and the elite are

34:33

more visible in our sources, they're more visible in

34:35

the archaeology. If we're trying to

34:38

understand warfare in this period, and then when we get

34:40

more into the fourth century and the scale of things

34:42

increases, who is

34:44

actually participating in warfare? So elites, they're

34:46

bringing their clients along, sure, they have

34:48

their private armies. Do they

34:50

have the ability to coerce kind of regular

34:52

people into fighting for them? Do people want

34:54

to go and fight? Are they getting something

34:57

out of it? Because the

34:59

big question is, Rome builds this military

35:01

machine that ends up being very efficient and

35:04

ends up, they do some pretty impressive things

35:06

with this. How far back

35:08

does that go? How do you get people to

35:11

participate in this? It's

35:13

a good question. In terms

35:15

of who's fighting, I can think

35:17

these words like elite with a lot of

35:19

heavy lifting. I

35:22

mean, the fact that these Roman soldiers would

35:24

have supplied their own equipment really all the

35:26

way through the Republic. Even

35:29

now, we've started to question and increasingly

35:31

discard the idea of the Mauryan reforms

35:33

as being kind of real things that

35:35

there may have been a one-off time

35:37

when he brought in people who didn't

35:39

have their own equipment, but actually it's

35:41

now going back to afterwards, people

35:43

were still supplying their own equipment. That

35:45

suggests a certain level of kind of status,

35:48

that these are people that have military equipment.

35:50

Now everybody's going to have that in the

35:52

closet, that they can just bring out dust

35:54

off and go and fight here. Also, having

35:56

the equipment doesn't mean you don't have to

35:58

be in the closet. how to use it. So

36:02

there is probably always all the

36:04

way through the Republic, warfare is

36:06

being fought by kind of, you

36:09

know, the upper segments of

36:11

society, people who have a

36:14

military tradition, a military background, some experience and

36:16

are able to go and do this. So

36:18

whether we want to call those elite or

36:20

kind of, again, I hate to use terms

36:22

like middle class or upper middle class or

36:24

these types of things, but it was always

36:26

being fought kind of largely by those, what

36:28

was he, she said, mostly, not always. We

36:31

again, we have these exceptional moments like the

36:33

Second Punic War, where we have kind of

36:35

a few times where there's a

36:37

mass mobilization. And this is the Romans

36:40

have a term for the Stetsomoltus, where kind

36:42

of everybody gets mobilized. And you would have

36:44

this with, you know, maybe if the city

36:46

itself was under siege or something like that,

36:49

where everybody gets mobilized. But 99% of the

36:51

time, it's going to be a small segment

36:53

of the population who are

36:55

kind of a warrior class. And

36:58

they would have fought for all kinds of different

37:01

reasons, they would have fought partly for because their

37:03

family has told them to partly because it's kind

37:05

of their, we'll say it's their job, but it's

37:07

part of who they are. And

37:09

it's what they're expected to do. And of

37:11

course, there are also economic benefits as well.

37:14

Early on, it would be maybe getting a share of

37:16

the spoils, spoils seem to be very important all the

37:19

way through, really, but definitely early on, there's that. And

37:21

then increasingly, as we go on,

37:24

there's maybe possibility of land getting

37:26

status, all these kinds of

37:28

things there, there are perks to fighting. But

37:31

I think internal people would have done it because

37:33

that's what they were, that's what they wanted to

37:35

do. That's part of their job. And they

37:38

may not have actually wanted to necessarily retire

37:40

and become a farmer right away. As soon

37:42

as they were given the opportunity, many of

37:44

them may have wanted to stay fighting.

37:46

And that's actually one of the reasons why Rome

37:49

is able to be so successful, is they can

37:51

continually recruit veteran warriors into their armies for a

37:53

very long period of time. I

37:56

think it's a dynamic that's hard for

37:58

modern people to understand. And if you're

38:00

used to either A, a conscript army,

38:03

or B, a professional standing

38:05

army, the idea that there would just

38:07

be a large body of

38:09

people scattered throughout society who

38:11

have military experience, and

38:14

that it's a continuum rather than

38:16

a yes-no question, where there are

38:18

some people who more habitually participate

38:20

in military activities than others. But

38:23

there's a lot of people who when you want to

38:25

or need to, you can draw on to fill those

38:27

things. I'm thinking of 16th

38:30

century mercenaries where in southern Germany, there are

38:32

some people who are basically professional soldiers, and

38:34

that's what they do, and they get paid

38:36

double what the rest of them do. But

38:39

there's a ton of guys who just will

38:41

go one summer because they need a little

38:43

bit of extra money, or because they're bored,

38:46

or because they got somebody pregnant, or they

38:49

need to get out of town. That there's a

38:51

large body of people who know

38:53

what they're doing and have equipment, and they can

38:55

go when they need to, and

38:57

that you can raise extraordinarily

38:59

large bodies of troops with the right

39:02

incentives to do so. Yeah,

39:05

I mean, the interesting thing here, again,

39:07

with what's going on in Rome is

39:09

that you don't actually need a massive

39:12

chunk of the population to be available

39:14

to fight here. What you need is

39:18

really wide networks. And that seems to

39:20

be what the Romans and also what

39:22

the Hellenistic powers and others do. The

39:24

big thing about the 4th century is

39:26

we have these massive armies, but they're

39:28

not necessarily recruiting deeper down the kind

39:32

of socioeconomic ladder. They're just

39:34

recruiting more widely. So

39:36

we have definitely in the 4th century, a

39:39

lot of good evidence for kind of powers.

39:41

The Hellenistic kings love to recruit from Italy.

39:45

We have them recruiting Gauls, people

39:48

from Spain. When the

39:50

Romans expand, then one of the main reasons

39:52

why they're expanding is actually to increase the

39:55

number of populations and the number of people

39:57

and the number of groups they can tap.

40:00

into to get to their warrior class to fight

40:02

for them. So, you know,

40:04

when the robots expand, they are interested in land

40:06

a little bit, but the main thing they do

40:08

is expand citizenship. And what is citizenship? It's

40:11

fundamentally military obligation. They

40:13

are trying to tap into and bring

40:15

together all of these warrior groups from

40:18

across Italy, and then even further, and

40:20

bring them together to fight in their

40:22

armies. So, you don't actually

40:24

need to go that far down to

40:26

get a very large army. You can

40:28

just recruit these little groups of top

40:30

tier warriors from all these different clans

40:32

and communities. You know, a couple hundred

40:35

here, a couple hundred here, suddenly you've

40:37

built up an army of a few

40:39

thousand. And again, maybe they're

40:41

not all fighting every year, but you

40:43

know, you can, when you move that that

40:45

obligation around on a yearly basis, you

40:49

can regularly build up a good army. And the other thing to

40:51

remember is that these guys, when they're not fighting for Rome, are

40:54

not necessarily being peaceful. They're not going back

40:56

to their just staying on their farms. They

40:58

might be, there's a lot of evidence for

41:00

them continuing to do private raiding just because

41:02

they're, they're fighting for Rome and doing that

41:04

doesn't mean they're not doing something else in

41:06

their own kind of leisure time, or indeed

41:08

serving as mercenaries and other armies. The

41:11

interesting thing about the Roman system is it basically

41:13

kind of comes to monopolize the entire Mediterranean military

41:15

marketplace. But that takes them a fair bit of

41:18

time up until that, you know,

41:20

they are basically trying to tap

41:23

into these very particular professionals and

41:25

increasingly professional when we get to

41:27

the fourth century, because they can

41:29

just do this as their main

41:31

job. Earlier on, they were

41:33

probably also shepherds and again herdsmen and things

41:35

doing other things as well. But we get

41:37

to the fourth century, they can basically be

41:40

professional lawyers, because there's always a position for

41:42

them here. But it doesn't mean that everybody

41:44

is doing it. I think our

41:46

sources are very interested in the people that

41:48

are involved in warfare. So they're prioritizing them.

41:51

But Roman society as a whole,

41:53

we should talk about Roman society necessarily

41:55

in this way, Italian society was

41:58

not particularly kind of militarized,

42:00

top to bottom. It was

42:03

clearly a part of everyday life for them.

42:05

For a lot of them, partly just being

42:07

protected from that or kind of worried a

42:09

little bit about predation by these groups, but

42:11

it doesn't. It's not

42:13

like every single person was being conscripted

42:15

into the army on a regular basis.

42:18

It was probably a relatively small group

42:20

for most of the time. There

42:23

are a whole bunch of implications of that

42:25

that I want to talk through. But the

42:27

first is just basically demographic. That forces you

42:29

to look differently at Italy as a

42:31

place because you're thinking like, okay,

42:34

you don't have to recruit every third farmer

42:36

to get him to fight in your army.

42:38

It's just that there are millions of people.

42:40

And if you have millions of people and

42:42

a certain percentage of them have that level

42:44

of resources, then you don't even have to

42:46

get all of them to come fight for

42:48

you to assemble a substantial force. The

42:50

second is, this is something I talked

42:53

about in a book I wrote on the

42:55

early modern period. I did

42:57

a chapter on kind of military marketplaces

42:59

and mercenaries and recruitment. And

43:01

the extent to which there's no distinction between

43:03

large wars and small wars. We get these

43:06

in our sources because our sources are very

43:08

concerned with large wars. But the people who

43:10

are fighting these things, and I talked about

43:12

this 16th century German knight, he got his

43:14

hand blown off in a battle when he

43:16

was pretty young and got it replaced with

43:18

an iron prosthetic. He only

43:20

fights in like three major campaigns in his entire

43:22

career, but he's fighting every

43:25

year. Every year he's fighting in some small

43:27

war, he's getting hired by a bishop to

43:29

go raid the convoys of a nearby raid

43:31

the convoys of a nearby city, because they

43:33

refuse to pay the bishop protection money. He's

43:36

going out and he's fighting on his own

43:38

behalf because he's got a feud with the

43:40

noble next door. And every time he does

43:42

that, he gets 50 guys or 100

43:44

guys. And when you stack that up,

43:46

and you look at it in the

43:48

aggregate, suddenly, you're talking about an enormous

43:50

pool of military manpower that can be

43:52

aggregated to fight in much larger

43:55

conflicts. And that these larger

43:57

armies are just aggregates of these small groups

43:59

of somebody who brings 50 guys a

44:01

knight who hangs out his shingle and he's got

44:03

20 guys from the local neighborhood and they're ready

44:05

to Go and that a big army

44:07

is nothing more than an agglomeration of all of

44:10

these small groups And that makes a ton of

44:12

sense if you're thinking about Pre-Roman

44:14

Italy as well if you're thinking about Italy in

44:16

this period It's the local clan leader who's got

44:18

20 good guys and and he's got a connection

44:20

to some a trust can official on the Etruscan

44:22

officials Okay, we need an army. We're gonna go

44:25

out fighting this summer. Can you bring 20 guys?

44:27

Yeah, I got 20 guys for you sure Yeah,

44:30

I think you're entirely right That's even if you

44:32

look at how the Romans are fighting their baseline

44:34

when you move into kind of the much later

44:37

period of the late Republic I

44:39

mean this seems to be kind of how

44:41

they operate even tactically I mean the Roman

44:43

army be looking about the Manipular Legion. It's

44:45

a bunch of small groups It's basically a

44:47

series of clans dotted across the landscape They

44:49

might not trust the guys next to them

44:51

because they were fighting them maybe a couple

44:53

years earlier. So there's a little bit of

44:55

space It's all about

44:57

getting this kind of large You know

44:59

a glomeration of soldiers together on the battlefield

45:01

at the same time pointing in the right

45:03

direction and working in at least roughly Similar

45:06

ways but again the way the Roman army

45:08

seems to operate tactically is with an immense

45:10

amount of kind of tactical

45:12

independence Each of these

45:14

kind of units is able to operate on

45:16

its own They are kind of functioning and

45:18

that's just even considering a single large battle

45:21

There's been some great work done by people

45:23

like Louie Rawlings Which is

45:25

he's got a chapter in a book. I edited

45:27

on the the significant of insignificant engagements

45:30

really emphasizing the fact that Most

45:33

wars in the ancient world were small-scale battles

45:35

raids. It's again, particularly when you're looking in

45:37

Italian context That's what these people have been

45:40

doing for centuries and that's what they still

45:42

do You can

45:44

look at even the actions and say the

45:46

first Punic War. It's largely raiding It's just

45:49

going over to Sicily to do it this

45:52

kind of small-scale activity How

45:54

it all operates you have these exceptional big

45:57

battles, but even there again, I think you've

45:59

got a fair bit of evidence for

46:01

independence there. So I think

46:03

it kind of changes how we think about

46:05

the Roman army operating. What is the default

46:08

position? Is the default position is this collection

46:10

of independent entities, independent military

46:13

units, which only happen to come together

46:15

every once in a while for a

46:17

relatively short period. Again, remember the campaign

46:19

season, I say campaign season, the

46:21

campaigns, these guys were all on even down to

46:23

the fourth century is maybe a couple of weeks.

46:26

They're not coming together for long periods of time. You

46:28

don't want a large group of people together for a

46:31

long period of time. That's all kinds of

46:33

trouble with logistics, with sanitation, it's disease vectors,

46:35

all those kinds of things. You don't want

46:37

that. You want them to come together right

46:39

when you need them to fight or

46:42

actually just keep them separate and fight these other

46:44

separate entities, these other separate groups, which are operating

46:46

in a very similar way too. I got

46:49

our sources like to present this as the

46:51

Romans against the Etruscans. It wouldn't make sense

46:53

to them to necessarily describe all the individual

46:56

family members, but if we kind of read

46:58

between the lines, we can still

47:00

see that there. But again, it's all about

47:02

the kind of the preconceptions and the ideas

47:04

you're coming in with, which

47:06

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48:39

I mean this is so fascinating. There

48:41

are so many things that I want

48:43

to follow up on and ask you

48:46

about. The first is just the observation

48:48

that this makes perfect sense in the

48:50

social context that you've outlined where you

48:52

have clans and these are the fundamental

48:54

units that are kind of extending up

48:56

and down the social hierarchy within society

48:58

and the society and the state to

49:01

the extent that that's a thing is

49:03

an agglomeration of these groups that are

49:05

finding ways to work together in particular

49:07

contexts. That why would warfare not be

49:09

an extension of that or a venue through which

49:11

you build those bonds in the first place? I

49:13

mean that makes absolutely perfect

49:16

sense as a kind of

49:18

a holistic view of how this society functions.

49:22

I'd agree. I mean but I think the key thing is

49:24

that thinking about though why do we call

49:26

them Romans then if it is just a bunch of

49:28

family members, in some ways they need something

49:31

that does kind of bring them together

49:33

and Rome as a

49:35

urban site emerges as kind of a

49:37

point of contact. I always think the

49:39

old line all roads lead to Rome

49:41

is probably truer than we often think

49:43

because it's a meeting place. This is

49:45

increasingly what we're thinking about how ancient

49:47

communities work. They

49:49

probably don't have a stable population at least not

49:52

in the way that we kind of you know

49:54

would imagine today where there's a population that just

49:56

lives works does everything within the city. I often

50:00

And describing it to my classes, I often talk about

50:02

ancient cities as operating a bit like a shopping mall,

50:05

where there is a, you know, the stable population

50:07

is like the workers who are there, they keep

50:09

it running, they keep it ticking over, but actually

50:12

kind of what makes a shopping mall successful are

50:14

the people that come there to do

50:16

something and then they leave again. That's

50:18

what urban sites are about. And I think when we

50:20

think about Rome, Rome increasingly

50:23

becomes the place where these

50:25

elites come together. They

50:27

come together for festivals, they come together for

50:30

economic reasons, they come together for all sorts

50:32

of different things. And

50:34

basically, it's kind of a slowly

50:36

developing critical mass of that's where

50:39

the conversation happens. If

50:41

you want to be part of the movers

50:43

and shakers in central Italy, you want to

50:45

be going to Rome on a regular basis,

50:47

you want that on your itinerary. And

50:50

then the conversation and the deals that

50:52

happen there, that is kind of

50:54

the basis for the Roman system,

50:56

the Roman military system, the political

50:59

system. And that's kind

51:01

of, you know, like it

51:03

gives them the place where they can make these arrangements

51:05

and to sort out who's going to lead the army

51:07

this year. You know, the elites that

51:09

are making this decision could make that decision anywhere. And

51:11

it seems that earlier on, they used to make it

51:13

in the Alban hills at a festival there, the Lucas

51:15

Valentini. Other

51:18

groups might come together at various

51:20

other communities, but increasingly Rome becomes

51:22

where it's at. And they also

51:24

kind of, I think, kind of think

51:26

of it to a capitalistic model, they start

51:28

to remove competition. The Romans, for instance, with

51:30

the destruction of they, they

51:33

seems to have been another rival place

51:35

where important meetings happened. And

51:37

the elites associated with Rome said, no, no, no,

51:40

if it's going to be an important

51:42

conversation, it's going to happen here in

51:44

Rome. And they remove they as a

51:46

competing site there. It's not necessarily about

51:48

a massive population or even land, I

51:50

think, really, it's much more about we're

51:53

going to make Rome where all the decisions happen.

51:56

But again, still there, it's not about the city.

51:59

It's about about the conversation that's

52:01

happening in the city and being

52:04

a place that's attractive to these planned

52:06

leaders to come together there. I'm

52:09

just absolutely fascinated by this dynamic. And

52:11

the idea of early Rome as being

52:13

like Soho House or like the New

52:15

York Athletic Club or something where we're

52:17

like, or like, like a really nice

52:19

steakhouse that's predicated on people coming to

52:21

use their corporate card. Like

52:23

that cracks me up, but it does, it makes a

52:25

ton of sense because these guys like to show off.

52:28

They like flashy things. They like to

52:30

be seen with entourages because control of

52:32

people is the basis of power. Like

52:34

it makes absolutely perfect sense. And

52:37

I mean, the thing that I keep coming back to in

52:39

my mind, and this is maybe just because I've

52:41

just spent a whole bunch of time doing stuff

52:43

on classical Greece and archaic Greece, is what a

52:45

contrast that is with a Greek model. There

52:48

is a substantial difference in the way

52:50

that you've outlined warfare as happening at

52:52

a basic level, the goals of warfare,

52:54

what people are doing, who's participating. That's

52:57

a much different thing than a whole bunch

52:59

of citizens marching out of the polis with

53:02

their arms and armor and going to fight a pitched battle.

53:05

You erect your trophy on the spot and then you go

53:07

back home. That's much different. And

53:09

so there's this old idea that warfare in

53:11

early Rome was kind of on a hoplite

53:14

model that this was what they were doing.

53:17

This is not at all what you're outlining here. This is

53:19

something much different. That, yep,

53:21

yes. Bobby, there's probably two points

53:23

there. One of them is that we've started to reevaluate

53:26

that old traditional polis

53:28

model. I probably put myself in the

53:30

Hans von Reiss camp or category of

53:33

reevaluating some of that and saying that

53:35

probably what we have there is an

53:37

idealized picture, which again, may be anachronistic

53:39

and looking back. For instance, the whole

53:41

idea of going out and

53:44

putting a trophy there after you've won a battle,

53:46

that actually probably only came about in the Persian

53:48

wars. That might not be there early on with

53:50

these developments of the polis. The

53:53

big difference there is just the nature

53:55

of these communities and how they function in the

53:57

landscape. Greece is these...

54:00

smaller pockets of arable lands separated by

54:02

mountains. The geography is very different, and

54:04

it promoted a very kind of different

54:06

role for these urban zones. They

54:08

very much became clusters of local activity. While

54:11

if you look at Rome and you

54:13

look at all the other communities there,

54:16

they are centers of a much wider

54:18

set of kind of regional movements and

54:20

regional interaction. You have people that are

54:22

traveling much longer distances within Italy, kind

54:24

of regularly passing through Rome. So I

54:26

think that's kind of one key bit

54:28

there. These communities cater to different populations.

54:31

And again, the ones in Greece,

54:34

puts them throughout Athens and Attica, it seems

54:36

to be a little bit more kind of

54:38

stable and not tied to the land, but

54:40

kind of at least kind of regionally defined.

54:43

But yeah, I think a big thing is looking

54:45

at how they would have fought. We have definitely

54:47

moved away from the idea of the

54:50

Romans fighting in a phalanx. There's

54:52

still some debate there. Not everyone

54:54

agrees with this. But

54:57

all the sources, the ancient literary sources do say

54:59

the Romans once fought in this way. But

55:02

it represents a weird shift in that seems to

55:04

happen in the sixth and fifth centuries where they

55:07

were originally quite tribal. And then later

55:09

on, they seem to be quite broken up. And then

55:11

in the sixth and fifth centuries, the sources say,

55:13

but then they came together and fought in

55:15

a phalanx. Again, this time period

55:18

that as far as we can tell that

55:20

our sources would have had no idea actually

55:22

what was going on. But I

55:24

think a lot of this goes down to our

55:26

ancient sources wanting Rome to

55:28

be like Athens, wanting it

55:30

to follow those models. But

55:34

again, I think I would say probably the more

55:36

likely situation is that Rome is always fighting in

55:38

a much more kind of dispersed, broken up sort

55:40

of way. And that's just a product of being

55:42

in Italy and not in Greece, to

55:45

very different kind of context and the

55:47

way that the elites interacted through it

55:49

and the way the families interacted through

55:51

it. That seems to be

55:54

how they preferred to work. I'm

55:56

really interested in this because I'm interested in cities

55:58

and how cities form and what functions

56:01

cities serve. And it's really interesting to me

56:03

in the way that we're talking about this,

56:05

that the military aspect, the function that warfare

56:07

serves and who's participating in it, seems to

56:10

reflect on a pretty basic level, the differences

56:12

in the fabric of society and the differences

56:14

in the fabric of the urban landscape, that

56:17

cities are doing much different things. They grow

56:20

out of much different routes in Italy than

56:22

they do in Greece. There are some real

56:24

distinct differences in that when you look at,

56:26

when you try to look at Italy through

56:29

a framework that's derived from a

56:31

Greek model, you're going to

56:33

make some errors. You're going to end up cramming

56:35

some square pegs into round holes, as it were,

56:38

because Italy isn't Greece and the

56:40

models look different. The reasons are

56:42

different and the history is different. I

56:44

think that's right. I think this is always

56:46

the problem with comparing and contrasting Greece with

56:48

Rome. I think what you've really got to

56:50

do is take a much wider look and

56:52

look at both Greece and Rome within a

56:54

wider Mediterranean context and look at seeing what's

56:57

happening in the Near East, what's

56:59

happening in North Africa, what's happening

57:01

in Egypt, also even what's going on

57:03

up in Europe as well. When

57:06

you look at that, you can see, okay, actually

57:09

Greece should not be our default.

57:12

It is one point of reference

57:14

within a much larger context there.

57:16

What's happening in Greece, what's happening in

57:18

Italy, these are ... If we

57:20

look at that much wider kind of context, we can

57:22

see the key thing about cities is, again, they are

57:24

places where people come together. That's

57:26

one of their main functions, particularly

57:29

thinking about religion. Religion seems to

57:31

be vitally important in terms of

57:33

Mediterranean cities. Religion,

57:35

we could talk about belief and things like

57:38

that, but a key thing that religion brings

57:40

is a regular cycle of movement to that

57:42

place. You come there for the religious festivals,

57:44

you know when they're going to be. It's

57:47

a time where you can come together in

57:49

safety, you can intermarry then,

57:51

you can trade, you can do all

57:53

these types of things. Cities

57:55

are about people. They are about

57:58

interactions. They're about networks. And

58:00

that's true kind of across the board,

58:02

but they of course they cater to

58:04

the specific networks interactions

58:07

of You

58:09

know different populations and different groups.

58:11

So so they're there. They

58:13

are doing very similar things But

58:15

how they're doing it is a little bit different if

58:18

that makes sense Yeah, there are all of these things

58:20

that are weird about the

58:22

Greek model I mean the durability of

58:24

an individual polis over time is pretty

58:26

wild like the the way that They

58:30

I mean that which we just talked about Vase Take

58:32

it off the map Essentially as a rival the

58:34

idea of doing that to a Greek polis is

58:37

hard to swallow for the Greeks the idea that

58:39

your polis Just wouldn't be there anymore like that's

58:41

I that's wild and you know over the whole

58:43

of Classical history or I mean

58:45

even beyond the classical period I think according

58:47

to the recent tally it's only something like

58:49

20 police out of thousands

58:52

in our ever wiped off the map and The

58:56

durability of that as an urban model

58:58

should not be translated To other places

59:00

and times where cities are doing different

59:02

things and are tied to different people

59:04

differently You're absolutely right.

59:06

I mean, this is the thing is looking across

59:09

the all the cities across

59:11

the Mediterranean You know

59:13

cities die, you know cities go into

59:15

decline all the time. It's pretty normal

59:17

So the fact that they don't increase says something

59:20

quite specific. I think the key thing there is

59:22

that It's again largely

59:24

related to kind of the geography and the nature of

59:26

them is that you need a place for people to

59:28

come together In each of these regions where there's sufficient

59:31

farm land and where people are naturally going to be

59:33

going through if you look at where A lot of

59:35

these cities are located. They are Points

59:38

of you know where people are regularly going

59:40

to be passing through that area and you

59:42

it makes sense to have that as a

59:44

meeting Point and it doesn't you just don't

59:46

have as many options But Italy

59:48

you've got a lot more you've got a

59:50

whole range of different options there Some of

59:52

them are better than others Rome, of course

59:54

emerges as a quite important one Again,

59:57

it might not always be that important. There's been some interest

1:00:00

work, Andrea Brock in particular has done some

1:00:02

really good stuff there talking about the changing

1:00:04

Tiber and how that's going on, that how

1:00:06

that Rome may have emerged only in kind

1:00:08

of the sixth century as a really good

1:00:10

site before that it was okay. But yeah,

1:00:13

it's again, Italy seems to have a lot more

1:00:15

options and you do have sites that die

1:00:17

quite naturally, Gabi and others, they just disappear.

1:00:20

So yeah, again, one more reason to be

1:00:23

very careful about taking the Greek model as

1:00:25

the default and to always be kind of

1:00:27

using that as that's how we should think

1:00:29

about all cities, particularly Rome because yeah,

1:00:31

I think if when you remove that

1:00:33

suddenly again, you've got more options, you've

1:00:36

got more possibilities and you can make

1:00:38

sense of the evidence in

1:00:40

I think more convincing ways when you're not

1:00:42

always trying to fit it into this kind

1:00:44

of particularly Athenian box. Athens

1:00:47

is weird. They do like there

1:00:49

are lots of things that are

1:00:51

weird about Athens that get taken

1:00:53

for granted when you use it

1:00:55

as kind of the default against

1:00:57

which to compare with it's weird

1:00:59

in the Greek context. Absolutely. Absolutely.

1:01:01

Okay, so I have one kind of one final question

1:01:03

because I've taken up so much of your time that

1:01:06

I want to end on here. And as you're doing

1:01:08

all of this work as you're exploring these questions, what

1:01:10

is the most interesting and exciting to you? Most

1:01:14

interesting and exciting. Huh? That's a tricky one.

1:01:16

I really do find it all really interesting

1:01:18

and exciting. It's asking me what's my favorite

1:01:20

child or something here. It's all very, it's

1:01:23

all wonderful. I think at

1:01:25

the moment just how dynamic the conversation is

1:01:27

and how many different possibilities there are right

1:01:29

now. And all the different bits of evidence

1:01:31

that are being kind of applied to it.

1:01:34

There's loads of archaeology now, which is

1:01:37

focusing on this time period. So we're

1:01:39

learning so much more about other communities

1:01:41

outside of Rome, particularly

1:01:43

Christa Mariam, Gabi. There's a number of sites that

1:01:45

we've known about for ages that are mentioned in

1:01:47

the sources, but they're only

1:01:50

archaeologically now coming into focus. So

1:01:52

we're starting to get points of comparison archaeologically that

1:01:54

we can say, all right, so this is what's

1:01:57

happening here. This is also what's happening at Rome.

1:01:59

Oh, this is different, how

1:02:01

does that change our models? But that's

1:02:03

really exciting. Also the

1:02:05

applicability of ethnography and things like that.

1:02:08

So looking at, you know, for instance,

1:02:10

how modern day pastoralists in Italy, how

1:02:12

they behave, how they move around, what

1:02:15

are they interested in? How do they come

1:02:17

into conflict with each other? How do they

1:02:20

interact with communities? How do they fit into

1:02:22

that? Those types of things there. So

1:02:24

it's kind of the much more fleshed out picture

1:02:26

that we're starting to get now and just all

1:02:28

the other bits of evidence. Again, this is a

1:02:30

great thing about early Rome is that it's

1:02:33

because our literary evidence is so bad, we

1:02:36

have to use so many other bits of

1:02:38

evidence and so many other kind of strands

1:02:40

that it encourages us to think outside the

1:02:42

box and to think what else can I

1:02:45

apply in this situation. And that's really exciting

1:02:47

to me and particularly again, how there's

1:02:50

so many other people now working on this

1:02:52

particular time period. It used to be there's

1:02:54

maybe kind of 10 or

1:02:56

15 in the world and now there's 100 or

1:02:59

so that are working on this all from very

1:03:01

different perspectives and evidentiary

1:03:04

bases that is really, really interesting

1:03:06

and useful. And it's again, a

1:03:10

lot of really fun conferences going on right now as

1:03:12

we're all trying to convince each other that our way

1:03:14

of approaching it is right. Well,

1:03:16

it is an incredibly fascinating field to be watching

1:03:18

as an observer. I mean, it's so different than

1:03:21

how it was when I learned about it in

1:03:23

grad school, you know, 10, 15 years

1:03:26

ago, like just to see how far things

1:03:28

have come. And I mean, I was cracking

1:03:30

up when you were talking about the hoplite

1:03:32

phalanx in early Rome, because I wrote my

1:03:34

high school honors thesis on Roman

1:03:36

warfare, and I had a whole couple of paragraphs

1:03:39

in there about the hoplite phalanx. And I'm like,

1:03:41

Oh, God, I was wrong. I was wrong when

1:03:43

I was 18. But that was one of

1:03:45

many things I was wrong about when I was 18. So

1:03:48

but this is this is fascinating as a

1:03:51

long time observer of these fields to see

1:03:53

how far things have come and the exciting

1:03:55

work that you all are doing on it. Professor

1:03:58

Armstrong, thank you so much for your time. I

1:04:00

hope we get to chat again because this was awesome. Thank

1:04:03

you so much for having me. It's been a pleasure. Hey

1:04:06

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1:04:08

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1:04:27

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1:04:45

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1:04:50

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Marcia Louie. What

1:05:08

kind of fun is waiting for you at Kings Island? The

1:05:10

holy cow, we're way too high up here to

1:05:12

put drops kind of fun. The

1:05:16

mixed bush, all summer kind of fun.