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Episode 172 - An New Republic?

As we emerge, bleary-eyed and slightly peckish from the Gallic Sack of Rome, we find ourselves in a new era – a new Republic, one might say! It is 389 BCE and Rome is in its rebuilding era. A Turning Point? Livy would like us to see 389 BCE as a turning point. He has more sources, better sources than ever before, just you wait! Historians are less confident than he is about how reliable his material is, but there is no doubt that this century is going to see Rome enter a new phase in its history. In spite of the many battles we covered so far on the pod, it is really in this century that Rome’s territorial control will start to expand in a meaningful way. This journey will lead to other exciting political, social and military developments along the way, and we might find Rome starting to look more recognisable by the end of the 300s BCE. The Clash of Historians It depends on whether you believe Diodorus or Livy as to what unfolded in 389 BCE. The dating is still shaky, in spite of Livy’s grand promises. However, we certainly get a sense that Rome suffered a crushing blow at around this time, and their neighbours, including their allies, tried to take advantage of that. It would the logical move. Thank God Camillus is still around to make sure that Rome hangs in there! Things to Look Out For: Horrific behaviour from Dionysius ‘They-don’t-call-me-a-tyrant-for-nothing’ of Syracuse against the Rhegians The launch of our bizarro world podcast – The Objective Historians The suspicious death of one of the Foolish Fabians   The publication of some Roman laws – but only some! Some calendar redesign – partly due to some dodgy sacrificing by Quintus Sulpicius Longus Evil Etruscan plotting at the Shrine of Voltumna An interregnum Slick thinking from a lower-class lady named Tutula Our Players 389 BCE Military Tribunes with Consular Power L. Valerius L. f. L. n. Poplicola (Pat) Mil. Tr. c.p. 394, 387, 383, 380 L. Verginius – f. -n. Tricostus (Pat) Mil. Tr. c.p. 402? P. Cornelius – f.-n. —– (Pat) A. Manlius (T. f. A. n. Capitolinus) (Pat) Mil. Tr. c.p. 387? 385, 383, 370 L. Aemilius Mam. f. M. n. Mamercinus (Pat) Mil. Tr. c. p. 391, 387, 383, 382, 380 L. Postumius – f. – n. Albinus Regillensis (Pat) Mil. Tr. c.p. 381 [?L. Papirius (-f. -n. Mugillanus?) (Pat) Mil. Tr. c.p. 380? ?M. Furius] Dictator M. Furius L. f. Sp. n. Camillus (Pat) Mil. Tr. c.p. 401, 398, 393, 386, 384, 381 Master of the Horse C. Servilius -f. -n. Ahala (Pat) Censors ?M. Furius (Fusus?) (Pat) Mil. Tr. c.p. 403? ?L. Papirius (Mugillanus?) (Pat) Mil. Tr. c.p. 380? Interreges P. Cornelius Scipio (Pat) Mil. Tr. c. p. 395, 394? M. Furius Camillus (Pat) Mil. Tr. c.p. 401, 398, 394, 386, 384, 381 Tribunes of the Plebs Cn. Marcius Prefects L. Furius Camillus (Pat) Cos. 349 Our Sources Dr Rad reads Livy, Ab Urbe Condita, 6.1-2 Dr G reads Diodorus Siculus 14.113-117; Dionysius of Halicarnassus 13.6-12; Macrobius, Saturnalia 1.16.22; Aulus Gellius, Noctes Atticae 5.17 Armstrong, Jeremy. War and Society in Early Rome. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781316145241. Bernard, Seth. “Rome from the Sack of Veii to the Gallic Sack.” In Building Mid-Republican Rome. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190878788.003.0003. Bradley, G. 2020. Early Rome to 290 BC (Edinburgh University Press). Broughton, T. R. S., Patterson, M. L. 1951. The Magistrates of the Roman Republic Volume 1: 509 B.C. – 100 B.C. (The American Philological Association) Cornell, T. J. 1995. The Beginnings of Rome: Italy and Rome from the Bronze Age to the Punic Wars (c. 1000-264 BC) (Taylor & Francis) Forsythe, G. 2006. A Critical History of Early Rome: From Prehistory to the First Punic War (University of California Press)  Duff, T. E. 2010. ‘Plutarch’s Themistocles and Camillus’. In N. Humble, ed., Plutarch’s Lives: parallelism and purpose (Classical Press of Wales: Swansea, 2010), pp. 45-86. Elvers, K. (., Courtney, E. (. V., Richmond, J. A. (. V., Eder, W. (., Giaro, T. (., Eck, W. (., & Franke, T. (. (2006). Furius. In Brill’s New Pauly Online. Brill. https://doi.org/10.1163/1574-9347_bnp_e416550 Gowing, Alain M. 2009. “The Roman exempla tradition in imperial Greek historiography: The case of Camillus in Feldherr, A., ed. The Cambridge Companion to the Roman Historians. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Hyden, Marc, Marcus Furius Camillus: The Life of Rome’s Second Founder. Pen and Sword, 2023. Lomas, Kathryn (2018). The rise of Rome. History of the Ancient World. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. doi:10.4159/9780674919938. ISBN978-0-674-65965-0. S2CID239349186. McIntyre, Gwynaeth. “Camillus as Numa: Religion in Livy’s Refoundation Narratives.” Journal of Ancient History 6, no. 1 (2018): 63–79. https://doi.org/10.1515/jah-2017-0011. Oakley, S. P. (Ed.). (2016). A commentary on Livy : books VI-X. Vol. 1, Introduction and book VI. Oxford University Press. Ogilvie, R. M. 1965. A Commentary on Livy: Books 1-5 (Clarendon Press).  Raaflaub, K. A. 2006. Social struggles in archaic Rome: new perspectives on the conflict of the orders (2nd ed). (Wiley). Stevenson, T.R. “Parens Patriae and Livy’s Camillus.” Ramus 29, no. 1 (2000): 27–46. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0048671X00001673. Sound Credits Our music is by Bettina Joy de Guzman. Automated Transcript Dr Rad 0:15Welcome to the partial historians. Dr G 0:19We explore all the details of ancient Rome, Dr Rad 0:23Everything from political scandals, the love affairs, the battle’s waged and when citizens turn against each other, I’m Dr Rad Dr G 0:33and 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 0:44Join us as we trace the journey of Rome from the founding of the city. Dr G 0:57Hello and welcome to a brand new episode of the Partial Historians. I am Dr G Dr Rad 1:04And I am Dr Rad, and we are Dr G 1:06Currently in the very, very edges of time, the end the liminal space of 390 BCE Dr Rad 1:16Yes. Dr G, boy, has this been an epic year! Gauls marauding around Rome itself, the Romans almost starving to death. Camillus. Was he there? Was he not? Lots of debate there in our last episode on the Gallic sack of Rome, and we’ve been barreling our way through 390 BCE, my account was basically just a gigantic speech from Camillus where he was trying very, very hard to convince the Romans that they did not want to just pick up sticks and move to ve because it was just, quite frankly, easier than trying to rebuild The damage to Rome the Gauls had allegedly been responsible for, and at the end of all of that, he managed to convince them, and the Romans did indeed start rebuilding, which apparently all happened in a year. And that’s why Rome is the way that it is today, a higgledy, piggledy, confusing layout. Dr G 2:20Yes. I mean, there’s reasons to poke holes in most of those stories. Dr Rad 2:25Poke holes? We do that at the partial historians? Dr G 2:32Not usually, but I’m gonna take this rare occasion to suggest that we’ve got some issues here. First of all, if a city has been destroyed, as they claim, that Rome has on some level, then surely the real building process is a great time to lay down some order, some straight lines, some roads that intersect with each other, but no chaotic. Rebuilding commences, and everybody gets their own public tile to stick in their house. It’s like they prioritize the pottery aspect, but not the planning aspect, Dr Rad 3:05which seems very un roman, I have to say. I mean, the Romans of the popular imagination are quite orderly folk. Dr G 3:12This is true, and I think Rome is trying to now explain to itself why their main city, their personal stronghold, does not replicate the Roman camp system and the Roman colony system that develops later on. It’s like they only get into straight lines in the future, and they have to kind of backtrack on this. Dr Rad 3:31It’s like when someone really immaculate invites you to their home, and it’s like, disgusting, and they’re like, oh yes, sorry. It’s just been a really chaotic way. Dr G 3:41It’s been tough. I haven’t had a chance to clean up. And you’re like, what? Dr Rad 3:45But why? How? How does this happen? You’re so put together. How is this where you live? Dr G 3:50Like every time I see you out, you’re looking great, and it’s like, oh yeah, I just threw that on. But at home, I’m just like a little gremlin. So that is how the Romans seem to be treating the story of their origins, and how the topography of the city really looks in later periods of history. And so for to some extent, I think I’ve mostly done with 390 BCE, and I know that in the previous episode, we talked about a whole bunch of things, or I talked about a whole bunch of things that the Romans were supposed to have done, particularly Camillus in the latter part of this year, which you assure me he could not possibly have done, because that is all still to come in Livy, Dr Rad 4:33he was too busy giving speeches. Dr G he had some convincing to do. There was some serious rhetoric happening. Dr G 4:39It was a lot. This was reminiscent of the moment maybe 20 or 30 episodes ago where I was deep in the bowels of Dionysius of Halicarnassus, and every single person in the Senate gave an epic speech, and you just have to wade through it and listen. And I’ve got my chance now, because Camilla’s boy can he talk. Dr Rad 4:55I know, like you know, it’s actually making me quite nostalgic for our old Dr Rad 4:59episodes. Words, where it would just be basically a speechifying Dr G 5:03back and forth, having an argument. So before we move on from this year and the general chaos that may be some of the events that cover more years than just 390 there is some detail that I’d like to bring in, which is kind of like my side series from Diodorus Siculus, which is Meanwhile in Sicily. Dr Rad 5:27Yeah, yes. Dr G’s side hustle, Dr Rad 5:28My side branching out from Rome, I know, like, let’s check out what the Greek colonies are doing greater I know well, I feel like it’s going to become important later on to appreciate what’s happening here. But also we have this supposed connection between Dionysius, the tyrant of Syracuse, and the imputation that he might be involved with the Gaulish force as well. And some of our sources suggest that maybe he had paid the Gauls to like swing around further into Italy than they were planning to initially and to do something about Rome. Now, why he would care about that is anyone’s guess, because he himself is really bogged down in minucii, in the toe Dr Rad 6:13of Italy. We see one of my accounts, I can’t remember, which did suggest that he had hired the Gauls to serve as auxiliaries in his own little shenanigans, so in the in the conflicts that he was caught up in. And it was just that the Gauls happened to be passing by see Rome and say, Hey, that looks like a nice place to raid. And so it was kind of an accidental sacking Dr G 6:41well to rub salt into Rome’s wound, we weren’t even planning on stopping here. Yeah, this wasn’t our game at all. We were just passing through and you looked pretty so another account. And again, because there’s so many sources for this, I legitimately cannot remember which source told me this, but the idea was that after the Gauls left Rome, one of the accounts has them heading south rather than North, and they get all the way down into the Calabrian region, and they do have contact with Dionysius of Syracuse’s forces as well, before they decide to swing back and head north and leave Italy all together, apparently. So there’s a lot going on that suggests that this potential interconnection, it sounds a little bit like a conspiracy to me, where people are like, doing the red string everywhere, being like they’re all connected. And whether that’s the case or not, I’m not sure that we’re ever really going to be able to solve but it is certainly the case that in this moment of time, Diodorus Siculus tells us that the tyrant of Syracuse has taken a whole bunch of his forces across to the toe of Italy and has been engaging in a very long siege of rhegium. And Rhegium is you can see it from Sicily. It’s on the west coast of Italy, and he has managed to cut off all of the supplies into Rhegium. So this siege has been going on for quite some time. This whole process has led to substantial problems for the population of Rhegium, apparently, obviously, they’ve eaten through their food supplies. First of all, then they start to eat their animals, beasts of burden. They also then start boiling up the skins and the leathers in order to get nutrients out of them. Yeah. Yeah. And eventually they’re forced into a situation where they feel like there is legitimately nothing left for them to eat inside the walls of the city. So they go out of the city and they start eating the grass. Yes. So this is a horrifying siege situation, much more devastating it sounds than the sorts of descriptions we had of the Gallic siege of Rome, and potentially because it’s just been going on for months longer, some of the suggestions in our sources about the Gallic sack of Rome is that the siege went on for about six or seven months. The siege of Rhegium has been going on for almost double that amount of time, and it has led to some really tragic consequences. So there is no way for Dionysus of Syracuse’s forces to find out what is happening. They’re clearly besieging this city. They have been for a long time. You would notice people in a really weak physical condition leaving the city in order to eat the grass surrounding the city. There is no sense of compassion that comes from the Syracusan forces. When Dionysius learns that this is happening, he basically brings out his own cattle to eat all of the grass in front of the city walls. Dr Rad 9:59Oh. My God, and see this is why he’s called the tyrant of Syracuse, not the cuddly wuddly Teddy Bear of Syracuse. Dr G 10:06Exactly. This is not a nice guy, and it is so grim what he is up to here, but he ensures that all of the surrounding land of the city is stripped of anything that could be edible, and as a result, the people of regium have no choice but to surrender. Dr Rad 10:28Sad after going to all those lengths to try and hold out against him. Dr G 10:33Yes, they tried to hold out as long as they could. They weren’t able to do it. When the Syracusan forces enter into Rhegium, they find heaped up dead bodies in the streets. People have just been starving to death, and the people that he does capture are completely weakened, very emaciated. He takes 6000 captives, and he sends most of them back to Syracuse, and they’re obviously going to become enslaved, that is, if they survive the whole process of becoming re nutritioned. Because that is a real issue as well when you’ve really nutritioned, yeah, so if you go into a period of starvation, there is a point where your body cannot handle taking in nutrition. Dr Rad 11:23I know I was just, I was just enjoying your word play re nutrition. Dr G 11:27I mean, it’s pretty horrific. And I suppose the contemporary example that is worth mentioning is what is happening to Palestinians in Gaza and the challenges that are there, and we’re seeing a very similar situation in the ancient world, in terms of people who have been so starved that it’s going to be very difficult to bring them back to a good, healthy condition, even if you were to enslave them, which seems to be The intent so beyond that, which is the horrifying nature of siege warfare and the devastation that wreaks upon people. The general of the regians, a guy called Photon, is also captured. Dr Rad 12:14Ooh, I remember this guy. Dr Rad 12:15This guy, and Dionysius, first of all, takes Photon’s son and drowns him in the sea. Bloody hell yes. And Photon himself is then bound to the siege engines and sort of driven around by the Syracusan forces so he can look upon the devastation of the city treated pretty terribly. And Photon says to Dionysius, reputedly, according to Diodorus Siculus, that he had been more fortunate than his father in one day about the drowning of his son, that his son had received a greater sense of peace and closure by being drowned in the sea than what was happening to him, and Dionysius then leads him around the city, flogging him in front of everybody with a herald announcing the vengeance of the Syracusans, and particularly against Photon for having lead, led the resistance movement against the Syracusans. And the Syracusans have turned up from a different island. They come from Sicily. What are they even doing in Italy? So it seems really legitimate that the regians would be like, This is our place. You cannot have it. So Photon really pays the biggest price for that in terms of his treatment by the Syracusan forces and particularly by Dionysius. So he’s now his legacy in terms of the historical record, is that he is recognized as a hugely brave General has endured a lot of pain and suffering, and this is suggestive of his high courage and spirit, and this doesn’t leave a good reputation for Dionysius of Syracuse, obviously, but he is gaining a reputation that people are going to fear, for sure. Dr Rad 14:15Well, thanks for that peppy little episode to kick off. Dr G 14:21Just in case we thought the galaxy of Rome was was bad. It seems it’s a time of sieges in Italy in general, and some of them are going pretty terribly. Yeah, all of a sudden Dr Rad 14:34it seems like the Romans were more having a pleasant vacation when it came to the Gauls, rather than what they could have been enduring Exactly. Dr G 14:41They still had their jewelry. They still had their sacred geese that they hadn’t eaten yet. Dr Rad 14:45You know, hey, gold stashed away somehow. Dr G 14:47Exactly. So there is what seems to be. The larger issue at play is that Italy seems to be increasingly unstable. Places are not able necessarily, to defend themselves. Themselves against invading forces, and we’ve got two examples in 390 or thereabouts, of foreign invaders coming into mainland Italy and making a real dent in local populations, which gels with what we’ve been talking about probably for the last decade or so, where it seems like Italy’s not doing great. There’s been a lot of pestilence, there’s been poor harvests, and it seems like trade is not at its greatest extent either. And we’re now seeing what could be some of the opportunistic moments that emerge from that process, which is people being like, now’s my chance to get in on Italy, and definitely what we get from Dionysius of Syracuse is a very mean and uncompassionate approach to siege warfare. This is probably of the descriptions of sieges that we’ve encountered so far in broader Roman history up until this point, this one sounds like the worst to me in terms of the nature of the suffering of the people and how the generals are treated in the aftermath of their defeat. So that that concludes 390 BCE, from me. Dr Rad 16:24What a note to end on. Dr, G, thank you so much for that. That will haunt me in my dreams later tonight. Dr G 16:30You’re most welcome. Dr Rad 16:32But I think what you said is really interesting. If we look at that wider view of you know what’s been happening in the period that we’ve been talking about, probably for us, over the course of a couple of years. But you know, in terms of Roman history and the history of Italy and this region, you know talking about the last sort of 10-20, years, if we are seeing hardship brought about by things like, as you say, poor harvest and pestilence and that sort of thing, these are exactly the kinds of trends that people who are trying to understand what history can teach us about what our future holds are studying. The idea is, obviously that in times of hardship, it would often be easier if humans could pool resources and also pool ideas, band together and work as a community in order to solve these problems and deal with hardships, you know, spread resources out and that sort of thing. But realistically, if we look at what humans have done in the past, generally, it’s actually kind of easier. It’s the easy road to just take, to just steal what you need and what resources you feel like you want, rather than to work towards a solution. And that’s kind of what we’re seeing with the impact of climate change. So often humans are taking that easy but incredibly slippery route, you know, and also giving money towards band aiding the damage, rather than investing in the solutions to prevent those kinds of things from happening in the first place, and and that’s the real concern, as climate change starts have more and more of an impact on resource shortage, particularly things like food and water, which is so crucial. Are we going to see more war as people are fighting for access to those resources because it’s easier to take than to work towards a solution, or are we going to take the other path, which probably is harder because it requires patience and dedication and and maybe a bit of self denial and those sorts of things, and, you know, hardship in the in the short moment, but in the long term, hopefully it would lead to a better solution. Now the good news is, obviously that the history of the future isn’t written. We can decide what path it is we want to take. But I do find it interesting to sort of look at these examples from ancient history, because I feel like they actually do have some bearing on our present moment, even though, for those of us who are fortunate enough to live in wealthy parts of the world. We might not be feeling it right now. It is something that I think in our in our lifetimes, we’ll probably have to Dr G 19:08start thinking about, yeah, definitely. And I think one of the great benefits of history as you know, is this, it gives us a whole bunch of exemplar where be like if this was the situation, and these are the ways that it played out. This is potentially a way that we could anticipate that this would play out as well. It seems a reasonable expectation that if we don’t make systems change, that people will be forced into a situation of reactionary change, where warfare and theft the predominant drivers in order to continue survival, rather than a slow implementation of systems change which will allow a more equitable distribution of resources for everybody. And so I think there is a sense in which being a historian is also tied very much into. To your political activism in the sense that you can see where these things have gone in the past, you have a potential to be an influence on what the future is like, knowing what those consequences look like if they play out in a certain way rather than another. And then you can think about how you’re going to push your personal energy and think about how that looks to create that systems change that you’re really interested in for that equality later down the track. So dear listeners, whip out your political activism. Stay strong. Dr Rad 20:36Stay strong. I’ve never been political in my life. Dr G 20:43We are an apolitical podcast. Dr Rad 20:45Absolutely never had an opinion. You know, objective, objective history. That’s what we’re all about here. Dr G 20:51It’s all about the facts, and only the facts. Dr Rad 20:54That’s why we’re called the objective historians. Exactly, exactly. All right? Dr, G, well, it gives me great pleasure to announce that I think that this means that we might be moving into 389, BCE, no, it can’t be possible. Did this day come? Were my prayers answered? Dr G 21:15I refuse to believe there must be so many more things that happened in that year. In fact, all of Roman history happens in 390 BCE, and I refuse to leave that year until we’ve done it all. Dr Rad 21:26All right, let’s do it. Dr, G, let’s go into the future. You. Dr Rad 21:53All right. Dr, G, it feels like way too long since I have asked you this question. But can you tell me who were the magistrates for 389 BCE? Dr G 22:02Oh, I’m so glad you’ve asked. I have a pretty long laundry list of people to get through. It is long. Yeah, it is so long. All right, we have military tribunes with consular power. First of all. And excuse me, dear listeners, it’s been so long since I’ve had to pronounce so much Latin one after the other that this might go terribly, terribly wrong. Dr Rad 22:24Doing our transcriptions, I must admit, has been a lot easier in some ways, for the Gallic sack of Rome, because without the magistrates, there’s been far fewer corrections from the generative AI Exactly. Dr G 22:36Well, first off the ranks is Lucius Valerius, son of Lucius, grandson of Lucius Publicola. He is a patrician. No surprises there the great Valerii Publicii. Dr Rad 22:51Yes. This is Dr G 22:53a very old name. This is a very old name at this point. Now, he was also a military tribune with consular power in 394, and he’s also going to hold the same role in the future. But I won’t spoil that for you by telling you those years yet. Dr Rad 23:06Please don’t Dr G 23:08We also have Lucius Verginius Tricostus. Now we think he might have been previously military tribune in 402, but frankly, in my mind, that was so long ago that I can’t recall well, Dr Rad 23:21Even Broughton has a question mark there. So I think you’re entitled to your lack of certainty. Dr G 23:26I have questions. Publius Cornelius, and we think he has a third name, but we don’t know what it is. Dr Rad 23:35Well, I mean, if he’s a patrician, he probably does. Dr G 23:37He probably does, but we’re not sure about it. Aulius Manlius Capitolinius, and we’ve seen some Manlii before, so I think none of these names are going to be surprising, but it is confusing because they all sound kind of the same. Yeah. Lucius Aemilius Mamercinus, Lucius Postumius Albinus Regillensis. So that gives us what 123456, military tribunes with consular power, which is kind of like the upper limit of what we’ve seen in terms of this cohort. Nevertheless, our trusty friend Broughton also has another couple of possibilities on this list a guy called Lucius Papirius Mugillanus. Dr Rad 24:25I remember that horrible Latin name – Mugillanus. Dr G 24:32And also big question marks are Marcus Furius, which sounds like maybe it would be Camillus, but maybe we’re not really sure anyway. Suffice it to say that Camillus seems to still be the dictator, or is reinstated as the dictator of Rome. So Marcus Furius Camillus is back in the role as dictator, but he does have a new master of the horse, which suggest that he’s come out of the role and then gone back into the role because he’s appointed a new guy to be his second in charge. Dr Rad 25:08He’s just your side kick Robin to his Batman, indeed. Dr G 25:12Indeed, And the Robin to his Batman is a guy called Gaius Servilius Ahala. Dr Rad 25:19We know this name. They so often crop up as master of the horse. I mean, one might be suspicious of what the historians are doing. Dr G 25:27I am concerned about the list of names that we have, yeah, but he is a new guy. Last year’s master of the horse was a guy called Lucius Valerius, either Publicola or Potitus. I’m not really entirely sure there. So there’s some confusion, but this guy has a sufficiently different name that we’re pretty sure it must be a different guy, right? We also have some really large question marks about censors. It’s been maybe a hot minute since Rome has decided to count its population. Dr Rad 25:59Well, they were, they were spread out everywhere. Dr, G, and then they weren’t there. They were. Dr G 26:04Some of them were hanging out in Veii. Some of them wanted to leave for they. Some of them were in the countryside, hiding from the Gauls in a tree. Dr Rad 26:11Yeah, don’t get any way. This is my tree house, mine. Dr G 26:14I’m pretending to be a statue, like, so realistic. And I say, like the statues. And so we have some question marks, one, because we don’t know whether there are later things that happen a few years from now that mean that they needed to have senses in this year for those things to be true, or whether those things that happen in the future could have been done without the senses and they just got around it some other way. So there’s a high level of doubt, but we have potentially Marcus Furius and Lucius Papirius Mugillanus again, because he was question mark, one of the military tribunes with consular power, and this Marcus Furius is obviously the other question mark on military tribune with consular power. So these two guys might have been the censors, but we’re not entirely sure. And we also have some interreges, Dr Rad 27:13oh yes, which Dr G 27:15it’s like stepping back in time, because I think to myself, the interreges are kind of like this lingering role from the kingship period of Rome’s history and interreges is the guy who fills in when you don’t have the king, but he must have a slightly different role at this point, because it does not make any sense whatsoever to be like we just got the interim King Dr Rad 27:37hanging around, right? I think it’s just about the transfer of power, because they have been cropping up all throughout this Republican period. So I think it’s just about those times when Rome needs a placeholder. Every now and then you need a placeholder. Dr, G, yeah, and they just Dr G 27:51haven’t updated the name. Yeah, they’re never going to have kings, but they’re they don’t mind having interim guys. That’s right. Dr Rad 27:58We’ll never have kings again, except temporarily in this weird shift system that we’ve got going every now and then. Dr G 28:04So there may have been a moment where they’ve yet to hold elections, which would make sense. They’ve had a pretty devastating year. They might not have gotten organized in time, and the previous magistrates have exited a role, and they just need somebody to cover the reins of power while they get the next election organized. Something like that would make sense to have interreges for. And according to our list, we have Pubilius Cornelius Scipio and Marcus Furius Camillus. Well, who else this guy’s everywhere. There’s not a role this man doesn’t hold. And so these two, apparently, are sort of getting things organized for a transfer of power, which I don’t know, conveniently ends with Camillus being the dictator. Dr Rad 28:50I was gonna say, from Camillus to Camillus as interreges, and then to Camillus again as dictator. On the other side. Dr G 28:55This man has sticky fingers, and we also finally, oh, no, not finally. Correction, I’ve got more to go. There is a named tribune of the plebs. Yay, Power to the People. Hey, yes, up until now, I haven’t emphasized this, but up until now, every name has been a patrician name, and the tribune of the plebs is Gnaeus Marcius, so we’ll see how he goes in the role. And we also have the name of a prefect who just so happens to be the son of Camillus, yes, it seems. And this prefect is Lucius Furius Camillus, so we suspect that he wouldn’t be the first son, because the first son would definitely be called Marcus, if this family has held on to the Roman traditions of always naming the first son after the dad, so he might be the second kid. Dr Rad 29:54It’s definitely evidence of a conspiracy against the Romans to make things difficult for. Of the people that would study them. Yeah, we’ll have these really complicated names, and then we’ll force the first son to always have the same name as the father, just to really confuse them. Dr G 30:12Which Marcus are you talking about? And this is why I suspect greatly that the Romans mostly operated in their day to day life on nicknames, because otherwise you would just spend your whole time being like Lucius and 20 guys turn around. It’s not okay. Everyone would have to have a nickname for their day to day life, even if it doesn’t make it into the inscription, I think all right, so that is my really long list of our players for 389, BCE, oh, it just, it doesn’t even roll off the tongue properly. Dr Rad 30:48I think you did very well. Dr G, it was hard to go back to and then to have such a long list as your first time in a while. Oh, it’s tough. Dr G 30:55So what’s happening in this year? That’s my big question. Dr Rad 30:59Well. Dr G, this is the big question, isn’t it? Because Livy, in this moment, I think, wants to paint the transition from 390 to 389 as somewhat of a turning point, as you shall see, historians do question the nature of the turning point that he highlights. However, there is no denying that there are some notable changes that we start to see in terms of Roman history after the Gallic sack of Rome, whether it happened in exactly 390 or maybe a few years later, who knows. But around this time, we do start to see a shift. And for some historians, this is really kind of the true beginning of the Roman Republic as we understand it, because so many of our sources come from later in the Roman Republic. By that, I mean we start to see Rome truly embark upon a period of expansionism, where conquest, conquest, conquest is the name of the day. They’re going to be engaged in a lot of warfare, as we will see. And by the time we’re getting towards the end of this century, we will start to see more of Central Italy under Roman control. Sorry, everyone, spoilers. Dr G 32:17Oh my No, goodness, Dr Rad 32:19I know I always forget to say spoilers before I say the spoiler. Dr G 32:23Can I just note as well is that we’ve talked a little bit about how Livy book one to book five is kind of like his setup for the rest of his history. And 389 I’m not personally reading Livy, but 389 sort of marks his shift into book six. Yes, which is so we’ve got this narrative turning point that we see for Livy as well, which is where we start to feel like we’re going to get more solid Roman history before. Up until now, we feel like we’ve been wading through a lot of question marks, and I’m sure we’ll still have a lot of questions. But the history of the fifth century, of the Republic and this early fourth century, has been tricky in terms of, how do we know what we know? We don’t have a lot of archeological evidence to sort of support one way or the other, the way that these things are operating. We’re not sure about the Gaelic sack at all in terms of stratification layers and things like that. So we end up in a situation where the literature is fundamental to our appreciation of what might be going on, but this means that we’re also limited by the narrative frameworks that our writers are interested in using. How do they want to see Rome themselves? And what does that also tell us about the history? Dr Rad 33:50Absolutely, and so we’re also going to see some changes for the conflict of the orders. I’m not going to spoil that. I’ll just say plebeian and patricians. There’s some big things that are going to happen in this century. So that’s going to change a little bit. And perhaps we also as a result of the expansion that Rome is going to undergo over the next sort of, you know, 50 to 70 years or so, we’re going to see a bit of a change in terms of the way that the Romans conceive of their government, things like citizenship. And we’re also going to see some military changes. It seems to be in this century that we start to see the inclusion of the Scutum and the pilum in, yeah, as weaponry. And we also see the transition from the hoplite phalanx to the manipular Legion. Oh, hello. Dr G 34:41Okay, so the Scutum is the fancy shield. It is the rectangular one. I believe. Dr Rad 34:47I believe so. Dr G 34:48And the pilum is the little javelin, which you can also, you can throw it, but you can also stab somebody with Dr Rad 34:54it, bop it, switch it, change it. Dr G 34:58It’s universal. Yeah, got a problem. Hit it with your pilum. Dr Rad 35:04Hit it with your pilum stick. And so, yes, it is that kind of shift to what most people probably think of like the as the Republican Army. You know, a lot of the things that most people would sort of know about. And so, yeah, it’s kind of an interesting phase that we’re getting into. So now I’m going to actually that was something I was borrowing from. Jeremy Armstrong, Thanks, Jeremy. I’m now gonna get into Livy Dr G 35:26himself also, Jeremy, come on the show. Dr Rad 35:29Let’s chat. I was, you know, we should ask him to come on the show. I was thinking that when I was reading this chapter, I was like, Yeah, this guy, he is on the same wavelength. So Livy, he starts book six with his big sort of transition speech where he’s like, Look, guys, I’m going to be real with you. It’s been tough to write rooms history up to this point. I know I’ve been doing it for a really long time, but I’m not going to lie. Didn’t really have great source material, not really sure how true. What I’ve told you is Dr G 36:03disclaimer, the last five books may have been entirely made up. Dr Rad 36:07And he says, you know, really, it’s because early in Rome, people just didn’t write things down enough those archaic knob heads rude and so that’s an issue. But also the sack of Rome. The sack of Rome meant that whatever little records he had, like, you know, things that priests were keeping track of, and, you know, recording their commentaries, all of that had been burned when the Gauls had attacked and sacked the city, but now everything is going to be different. Dr G Livy assures you that he has 100% reliable records from this point on. Did you say 100% I’m bringing in my Australian vernacular to our show. Dr G 37:01This is not a good sign. Livy, not a good sign. Yeah, look, I’m Dr Rad 37:07going to then immediately swell that by saying most historians think this is total bullshit. Dr G 37:12Well, exactly. I mean, if the city has been sacked, as you say, and things like the linen scrolls haven’t made Dr Rad 37:18it through the fires, well, they’re made of linen. Dr, G, I mean, it’s one of the most lovely materials. But delight, Dr G 37:25not sturdy, not fire proof, yeah. So the idea that somehow, from this point onwards, there would be immediately a great profusion of written material surprises. Dr Rad 37:38They’re writing everything down now they’ve learned they left. Dr G 37:41It’s got to be documented, and you’ve got to put it in the filing cabinet, and there needs to be a backup. Dr Rad 37:47Well, I do like the way that my translator has put this little quotation from Livy. He talks about writing as being the sole, trustworthy guardian of the memory of past events. Dr G 37:59Oh, that’s actually really beautiful. I don’t know if I 100% agree with that, but certainly it’s very useful when people write stuff down and it lasts and we Dr Rad 38:08can read it later, precisely, yeah. Look, most people don’t think as we know, because we’ve been through this in enough detail that Rome was set on fire, to the extent that Livy would like us to believe. So the idea that all written records in the city were destroyed questionable, but also probably not true, that Livy has really reliable records. There’s definitely still some development. I think that needs to happen before we can safely say that what he is reporting is probably really reliable. Dr G 38:50And you’ll see why, yes, and look and that’s okay, I think yeah, our doubt about the source material and where it comes from is going to continue for a little while, and I think this is where having alternative sources becomes really useful, because we can see to a certain extent, where they might have taken a piece of information from a similar place, or they’ve consulted a similar source, or whether they’re just operating in a sort of rogue fashion, or maybe have access to sources that other writers aren’t getting their hands on. So it’ll be interesting to see how this plays out. Dr Rad 39:29Yeah, look and humans do look for turning points in their histories. That’s kind of natural. So I can understand how, in the way that Livy’s conceived of everything, particularly with his seeming obsession with Camillus, that he wants to see the Gallic sack of Rome, I think, as a real transition point. And he obviously has a sense that his records get better from around this time. And so, you know, when you’re writing things down, it’s nice to make a grand statement that, you know, we’re starting fresh guys, everything’s. To be different after the Gallic sack of Rome. Except it’s not because Camillus is still everywhere. Dr G 40:07Yeah. So Well, I mean, Camillus has a lot of places to be, and my sources went through them and thought that they all happened in 390 but Livy seems to think that he was a bit slower off the bat. Dr Rad 40:19I assure you, that is not the guess so okay, where we’re at at the beginning of 389 so Rome has obviously been heavily reliant upon Camillus. In my account, as we have seen, he’s a big deal in 390 they’re very reliant on him during this rebuilding period. And they basically say, No, Camillus, you can’t put down your dictatorship until you’ve held it for a full year, because we need you, buddy. We need your power. Now this is unusual. Perhaps it doesn’t sound crazy because of what we know of dictatorships that happen later in Rome’s history, but up until this point, even though we have had quite a lot of dictatorships, when you actually step back and look at what’s happened during those dictatorships, you realize that, like two weeks have passed. It’s not something that people have necessarily helped for a really long time. I haven’t actually added up the statistics, and I now I’m regretting that, but I reckon that the longest dictatorship we’ve generally seen, pre Camillus’ time, I reckon at most was probably a couple of months. Dr G 41:22Yeah, we’ve got this sense, and this comes from later history than where we’re at now that the dictatorship is something that you hold for six months. But what we’ve tended to see in these very early versions of the dictatorship that it’s about just getting a single job done, yeah, and as soon as that job is done, and it’s this emergency power, then the dictator steps back down. And we’ve got this really unusual situation now, because it seems like Camillus is being asked to continue well beyond a strict time frame. And they’re kind of saying you need to hold it until X amount of time, which is very different from the idea that as soon as the job is done, you step down, they’re anticipating that he will have to keep going, and they’re not letting him step down to a certain extent, or they’re reinstating him in a way that’s going to force the role to continue. Dr Rad 42:15Well, really, he got everything done he needed to in six months, but then that speech he gave lasted for six months, and that’s why they were just factoring in time for the Dr G 42:25speech. Yeah, look, that speech Dr Rad 42:27was a whopper. Now, eventually, obviously, camilius dictatorship has to come to an end, and this is when Rome decides it’s time to have an interregnum. Dr, G, now, the reason being was that it had been under military tribunes at Rome had been captured, and so they think, you know what, let’s just, let’s take a beat. We need to refresh, and let’s just have an interregnum and not hold the elections straight away. So the Roman citizens are completely oblivious to this, apparently, and just working away at doing their rebuilding. Chip, chip, chip. Dig, dig, brick, Dr G 43:01brick, brick. And I assume that Romans are trickling in from the countryside, returning to the city. They’ve heard the news people are randomly turning up being like, do we still live here? Dr Rad 43:11And so I’m told that Publius Cornelius Scipio and then Marcus Furius Camillus, are holders of the interregnum, and that eventually Camillus will arrange the elections. So, I mean, I’m like, Come on, guys, is this really necessary? Dr G 43:27I’m the guy, and then I’m the guy, yeah, and then I’m gonna be Dr Rad 43:31the guy again. Yeah, you thought I was joking when I said it goes from Camillus to Camillus to Camillus. I’m not joking. Dr G 43:36No, I can see it in in the list of people for the year. He’s in every Dr Rad 43:40role, yeah. But meanwhile, whilst all this election stuff is going on in the background, we have a trial on the horizon. So Quintus Fabius is no longer a military Tribune, one of the foolish Fabii, after the whole Gallic sack, helped to contribute to that whole shimozle, and he is indicted by a tribune of the pleb, one, Gnaeus Marcius. So he’s basically indicting him because he says, Look, you violated a Roman law because you got into a fight with one of the goals when you were just meant to be there as a representative, as an envoy. You really screwed the pooch, man. And so he was 100% going to be put on trial, but he died suspicious. Dr G 44:33Question mark, Dr Rad 44:35yeah, I think that even Livy believes this is far too convenient and that it might have been a suicide or something like that, because I think he knew he wasn’t going to be able to get out of this one. Yeah, he Dr G 44:46definitely stabbed somebody he shouldn’t have. Dr Rad 44:50Yeah, and this, this, I kind of love going back to that moment in the sense that this, I think, shows this transitional period where we’re perhaps starting to see Rome. Come out of that more sort of archaic Republican period and into maybe a new phase, perhaps, because it does seem like the fabii were maybe behaving like these sort of elite war leaders, and that’s maybe how all this began, in the way that they were conducting themselves with the Gauls and the Romans when they were writing the history, there’s hints of that behavior, but they’re not conceiving of it that way, and that’s where perhaps the confusion arises. Dr G 45:28Yeah, I do like this idea that we’re seeing what is potentially the start of a slow transition from Warband leaders doing what they want to heading up their family and Rome is their second consideration and maybe a small increase in understanding that Rome is the thing that has to come first, and your family is part of Rome, and that’s why you can’t just go out and stab somebody when you’re supposed to be a Roman ambassador. Yeah, yeah, stabbing Dr Rad 45:56someone when you’re meant to be an ambassador is not a good idea. I mean, Dr G 46:00it seems risky at best. Dr Rad 46:03All right, so back to our elections. Dr, G, so there are question marks around this because of Camillus repeated involvement in this whole process. As we know, Camillus seems to have been inserted into events where maybe he wasn’t originally involved, so not entirely sure if there was actually an interregnum or not. However, given that the Romans definitely have been through something traumatic, it wouldn’t be the craziest thing for them to be thinking about, like the renewing the auspices, trying to make sure they’re on, you know, the right path with the gods. So it’s possible that there was an interregnum of sorts at this time period to ease with the transition and sort of, you know, start afresh, basically, now our military tribunes, as you’ve highlighted, we’ve got Lucius Valerius Publicola in Livy’s account, Lucius Verginius, Publius Cornelius, Aulus Manlius, Lucius Aemilius, and Lucius Postumius in Livy’s account, the new military tribunes asked the Senate immediately about some matters concerning religion, because they also are on the Camillus campaign trail. It’s all about doing right by the gods. And so one of their first decrees is, all right, everyone, get your Sherlock Holmes outfits out. We need to find the Twelve Tables and some of the laws that were made by the kings, if it’s even possible, after our city’s been burned to the ground, Dr G 47:29somebody find the tablets we need to have law and order around here. They do, Dr Rad 47:34apparently, do this investigation, uncover some of the laws, and then some of the laws are even made public so that your average Roman citizen knows what they are. This is Dr G 47:47incredible stuff. This is a huge development in Roman history. Everybody, Alert, alert. People can read the laws for themselves. Dr Rad 47:54They actually know the rules that they’re supposed to be playing by. It’s outrageous, shocking. However, there is a very deliberate decision made that anything that touches on the sacred rights, and I’m directly quoting my translation there, is only allowed to be known by the pontiffs, basically because, and again, I’m going to directly quote this, they want to hold the minds of the populace in subjection through religious fear. Dr G 48:29Look, you win a point and you lose a point, these patricians really okay. So this, unfortunately, makes a good deal of sense for the ancient Roman mindset, particularly the patricians. Dr Rad 48:43Oh, look, it’s what we’ve seen time and time again. Dr, G, they really want to keep a stranglehold on that religious aspect. They do, Dr G 48:50and we know that religious positions tend to be filled almost exclusively by very elite patrician families. So there’s a sense in which they are holding those secrets very close, and they can decide in the moment what might be best, either according to the things that they’ve kept hidden, or potentially the things that they’ve decided not to reveal to the people. Yeah, so I Dr Rad 49:16like that they also start discussing which were going to be the days of evil omen? Dr G 49:24Oh, okay, so we’re starting to see the emergence of some calendar details. Which days will be fast, suitable for business, and which days will be nefas, unsuitable for business, Dr Rad 49:36unsuitable for business. So the 18th of July. No shock. This is known as a particularly awful day, because not only is it the day where the Romans were defeated by the Gauls at the Alia, but it also was coincidentally, the same exact day of that huge Fabian loss at the Cremera, like way back in the early republic. Hmm. Yeah, they decided to call it the day of the Alia. No public or private business to be conducted on the day of the Alia. Dr G 50:07Dr, G, yeah, terribly nefast will have none of that around here. Dr Rad 50:11Now, there are also some days that fell out of favor because of the conduct of Sulpicius during this campaign. So basically, on a day after the Ides of July. So like a full moon, sort of period, he had made a dodgy sacrifice, and then, without the divine approval to do so, had led the Romans against the goals. We all know how that turned out. Dr G 50:35Oh no, dodgy sacrifices. Dr Rad 50:38Good. Yes. Me, not good, not good. So it means that, and I am just going to read this part out, because I think it’s just easier afterwards, it became traditional that the morrow after the Kalends so after the first day of the month and the nones, actually, is it knowns or nones? Dr G 50:58I say nones, but don’t let that stop you. Dr Rad 51:01Okay, and nones that these should also be avoided because of the issues around the conduct of Sulpicius. Wow. Okay, so, yeah, it all is basically, I think, to do with like, moon cycles and whatnot. Dr G 51:18Yeah, interesting. Very interesting. The Romans Dr Rad 51:23are now, obviously interested. Now they’ve dealt with all this, the Romans are trying to get themselves back together, back on track, when the Volscians decide to kick off. Because what better time to attack the Romans than now, when they’re still down, and I think that they had come into your account last episode, I see that Dr G 51:45Livy is falling behind on the narrative history of Rome. This has already happened, Livy, this all happened in 390 BCE, yeah. Dr Rad 51:55And it gets way more sinister, because the Romans also hear through the trade grapevine that the elite from all the major Etruscan cities had met up at the old shrine of Voltumna, which we actually think was more a place of sort of, you know, religious and social and cultural importance, but it pretty much exclusively turns up in Livy’s account as a place of evil plotting against the Romans. They get together and they decide it is time to wage war against the Romans. There’s a lot of evil now we’re not even entirely sure. I’m just going to remind you exactly who Livy’s talking about with the major Etruscan cities. We can be fairly certain of some of them, so probably places like Kari, which is featured very prominently in our account, Clusium, Cortona and that sort of thing. But we’re not entirely sure exactly who would be included in this fabled Twelve. We’re not even sure exactly where this shrine of Voltumna is. Well, I hope it’s in Dr G 53:01Etruscan territory for what it’s called. What it’s worth. Dr Rad 53:04I think we can say that. I think we can say that. And while we used Dr G 53:07to be able to say that they was part of the Twelve, they no longer exists as an Etruscan. I was gonna Dr Rad 53:12say he’s on my list, but obviously it does Dr G 53:14not exist anymore. Does not count. So if there’s 12, it turned out that there was 11, and they immediately opened up an additional spot for another Etruscan city who was just on the outskirts, being like, why can’t I be part of the 12? And they’re like, No, we have 12. They lose Veii. And they’re like, a place has opened for another city to Dr Rad 53:34join us. Yes, only my opportunity. Finally I’m in and then to really cut things off and make 389 a terrible year when Rome really just needed some good news. Dr G the Latins and Hernicians also decide to revolt, which is bizarre, because they have been very loyal allies of Rome for almost a century at this point, Dr G 53:59wow, this is where you really find out who your friends are. First you get sacked, and then your friends decide that they’re going to attack you, frenemies at best, as it turns out. Dr Rad 54:09And look, there is confusion about exactly what was going on here. And there are a couple of different accounts. I believe Plutarch gives a different reason. It’s possible that there is kind of something else going on in the background here between the Latins and Hernici

Special Episode - Archaic Roman Religion

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, one of our lovely Patreons requested that we talk about archaic Roman religion. Religion is Dr G’s favourite topic, so we decided it was well and truly time for us to chat about what the Romans were up to in their early days. As with all aspects of the archaic period, it can be difficult to find reliable and detailed source material for certain aspects of religious life. However, the gods were hugely important to the Romans, so there are a variety of sources that we can use to piece together an accurate picture. This includes: shrines, temples and tombs inscriptions votive offerings the religious calendar artwork, such as frescoes and sculptures coinage the priestly colleges details of rituals Records, including from groups like the Arval Brethren, a group of 12 priests who worshipped Dea Dia, an agricultural goddess   Roman law Extra special sources like the Iguvine Tablets from the mid to late Republic, which were written in Umbrian as well as literary sources   Where did religion sit in ancient Rome? We discuss the nature and role of Roman religion in society, whilst trying to mythbust the belief that the Romans just stole everything from the Greeks. Archaic Roman religion is fascinating, with deities like Quirinus and Robigo (goddess of grain mildew) seeming to date back a long way. As Rome progressed, the state cults became more formalised and ritualised, and new gods were incorporated. You may recall that when the Romans conquered Veii in 396 BCE, they went to great lengths to coax the resident goddess, Juno Regina, to their city. Roman expansion allowed them to come into contact with a greater variety of deities. There were several important priestly positions in Rome that we refer to in this episode, so here’s your cheat sheet: Rex sacrorum/ Rex sacrificulus – The rex sacrorum was a patrician and seems to have assumed the priestly duties of the kings in the Republic. Flamen Dialis (Jupiter) Flamen Martialis (Mars) Flamens Quirinalis (Quirinus – eventually associated with Romulus) Pontifex Maximus (chief pontiff or priest) And then there were minor flamens, who served gods such as Vulcan, Ceres and Flora   And, of course, we also talk about the Vestals! Dr G would never leave these ladies out Image of lararium from the Thermopolium of Lucius Vetutius Placidus. The lares stand on either side of the central figure, the Genius of the household. On the far left and far right stand Mercery and Bacchus. Courtesy of Becks on Flickr. Getting Personal On a more personal level, the Romans were also surrounded by the lares, guardian spirits who were seemingly connected to place, such as the hearth, streets, neighbourhoods and boundaries. If you have been to Pompeii or Herculaneum, you may have seen a lararium, or one of the shrines that people could have in their houses for these deities. Their origin is debated, but no one can deny their presence in the Roman world. Things to Look Out For: Augury – and our musings on how the Romans would have responded to kookaburras The importance of nature   The invention of a new dessert: Flamines banana The sacred tree house where only patricians are allowed   Our Sources Cicero, De natura deorum Cicero, On the Reply of the Haruspices Seneca the Younger, Letters, 41.3 Flower, Harriet I. The Dancing Lares and the Serpent in the Garden: Religion at the Roman Street Corner. 1st ed. Princeton ; Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2017. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400888016. Forsythe, Gary. A Critical History of Early Rome : From Prehistory to the First Punic War. Berkeley, Calif. ; University of California Press, 2005. Scheid, John, and Clifford Ando. The Gods, the State, and the Individual : Reflections on Civic Religion in Rome. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. https://doi.org/10.9783/9780812291988. Tellegen-Couperus, O. E. (Olga Eveline). Law and Religion in the Roman Republic. Edited by Olga Tellegen-Couperus. 1st ed. Vol. 336. Leiden: Brill, 2012. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004219205. Warrior, Valerie M. Roman Religion. Cambridge ; Cambridge University Press, 2006. Sound Credits Our music is by Bettina Joy de Guzman. Automated Transcript Dr Rad 0:15P Welcome to the partial historians. Dr G 0:19We explore all the details of ancient Rome, Dr Rad 0:23everything from political scandals, the love affairs, the battle’s waged and when citizens turn against each other, I’m Dr Rad Dr G 0:33and 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 0:44Join us as we trace the journey of Rome from the founding of the city. Dr G 0:59Hello and welcome to a brand new special episode of the partial historians. I am Dr G, and I am Dr Rad, and today we are talking about ancient Roman religion. Dr Rad 1:17If ever there was a topic that is right up your alley. Dr G 1:19Dr G, I know I’m so excited. Oh, there are so many things we could talk about, but I’m going to try and contain myself to a very specific time limit. Dr Rad 1:28We have got a request from a Patreon, actually, quite some time ago. So sorry about taking so long to do this. But you know, there are just so many books coming out, so many people to be interviewed. We are going to be looking at archaic Roman religion, which is obviously very in keeping with the time period that we have been covering for the last decade. Dr G 1:51Yes, it’s an interesting, really interesting period of Rome’s history, partly because of what we simply don’t know, as listeners will be well aware the written historical record doesn’t kick in for quite some time. So the traditional foundation date of Rome is 753 BCE, but our real historiographical style of writing doesn’t really start to crop up until about the second century BCE, and then we only have sort of fragmentary things until we get into the first century BCE. So this means there’s a huge chunk of Romans history’s time where the Romans understand themselves and talk about themselves and maybe write it down, but we don’t have the evidence for it, and this means that trying to figure out what their practices were, what they were into, what they believe, a lot of that is, on some level, Dr Rad 2:49unretrievable, absolutely. However, the good news is that, because we are talking about religion, it’s obviously something that is pretty important to the Romans. And so there are certain types of material, certain kinds of sources that we can turn to that give us little clues. So obviously, there are inscriptions, there are certain kinds of records. They’re nothing like a narrative history, but we do have certain kinds of records that seem to have been around for a long time, which might give us some indication. And of course, you can also look at, you know, etymological kinds of tracing things, try and figure out why that name. What would that mean? How can we trace that back? So there are certain types of material that are around, but you know what? Dr, G, I have to go back to an old story at the start of this episode. I know you heard this many times, but for people like me who were raised on the 1950s golden era of Hollywood, kinds of movies about Rome, the impression I think you often get when you watch these sorts of movies is that the Romans didn’t really believe in anything like they do have Gods Absolutely, but they’re not gods that they have any sort of deep investment in. It’s kind of a tokenistic sort of religion. It comes across as just about decadence. And I think that’s because obviously in those sorts of movies, either you have the Romans being very unfavorably contrasted to the Christians, because it’s usually that sort of a storyline, or it just sort of feeds into the general cynicism of Roman characters. Now I am, of course, thinking about Spartacus, in which there is directly a scene in in which the senator Gracchus, who’s kind of a bit of an anti hero, I suppose he’s the best person on the Roman side, which isn’t saying a ton, but he is meant to be kind of a good guy. He says that he publicly believes in the gods, but privately, of course, it’s. He knows it’s rubbish. And so I always kind of had this impression from movies that the Romans, Therefore were not a particularly religious or pious people, that it was just all about, you know, show, and it wasn’t anything particularly important, since studying that is either mental view I’ve had to really overcome, because I kind of think it’s the opposite. What do you think? Dr G 5:29Yeah, what a great setup. It is. Definitely not all that it appears. Thanks Hollywood. I would say that what the Hollywood films are really offering us is big Christianity and its propaganda, which has been incredibly powerful over 1000s of years at this point in terms of demonizing what came before in terms of belief systems and relationships with the divine, because what we see In those films is Roman belief systems being positioned as merely idolatry and a veneration of the object and the decadence that you mentioned, but with no substance behind it whatsoever. And this would be a mistake, because the Romans are deeply, deeply spiritual people and will not move a muscle unless they feel confident that they have divine approval on their side. Dr Rad 6:26I have a joke for you. Dr, G, why did the chicken cross the road? Dr G 6:30Why did the chicken cross the road? Dr Rad 6:33You know what? It’s not so much about why it’s that we have to watch the chicken cross the road, and that will tell us what the gods want us to do. Dr G 6:39It’s very important, always, always keep a good eye on the birds. One of the things that I will never get over, I don’t think, is the way that the murmuration of birds above the city of Rome, which you can still witness today, gives us a sense of what it must have been like to be an augur in the ancient Roman world, and an augur is the kind of priest who does spend their time watching the patterns of birds. And because murmurations are so patterned across the sky, this beautiful sort of flow effect that’s created by these birds following each other in patterns which you don’t necessarily see everywhere. I’ve never seen a murmuration in Australia, for instance, you don’t have those kinds of birds. We have very different birds here. Dr Rad 7:29So can I say we do have birds that laugh? Dr G 7:31We do. We have incredible birds. Dr Rad 7:34I am what would the Romans make of that a bird up in the tree laughing? Dr G 7:38I am not going to…. Dr Rad 7:39Just freaked out! Dr G 7:40Yeah, the beauty and the magnificence of Australian birds cannot be underestimated, but they are very different from the birds that you would see over the city of Rome today and in the ancient world. And so I can understand how augury developed, and this idea of taking the auspices, because it’s fundamentally embedded in the patterns of nature. And this is where, when we think about archaic Roman religion, the basis in nature is the first place to start. So we’ve got a really beautiful insight from Seneca the younger where he talks about the powerful effects that nature has upon people. And he talks about, if you ever go into a glade of trees, where the trees have grown up so tall and that their canopies intersect with each other in such a way that it feels like you almost cannot see the sky anymore, this will generate within you a very specific type of feeling. And he calls this feeling, the feeling of numen, a sense of the Divine. And likewise, he also talks about, if you are in a cavernous spot where you can see the rock formation naturally created, creating a crevice above which there’s a whole nother section of land, you’re going to have a feeling of awe, a feeling which is described in the Latin as religio, which is where we get our idea and the term religious from. Dr Rad 9:09See etymology, etymology. Dr G 9:12So, but the Romans think about these things, not necessarily as religion, because I think again, we’re in a very tricky spot as human beings in this point in time, in this point in context where we tend to think about things like a separation between state and religion and all of this kind of stuff. And for the Romans, it wasn’t like that state and religion are not separate things. They are intertwined things. The Divine is everywhere, present in reality. And it’s how do you navigate that? How do you ensure that your relationship with the gods is appropriate? How do you maintain a good relationship with the gods in order to ensure favorable outcomes for yourself and those that you love Dr Rad 9:56absolutely and this is where we come back to that very. Wrong idea I had from the 1950s ethics, which is, as you say, Roman religious beliefs, practices. It just permeates every aspect of life like you wouldn’t start any sort of meeting of a political nature without observing the proper rituals, without having certain ceremonies, which would be somewhat unthinkable in certain places in the world today, where we do pride ourselves on having those things quite separate, although sometimes I don’t think they’re as separate as people like to believe. But yeah, definitely the idea that it’s just everywhere, particularly if you even think about things like the lares. The lares are something. They are particularly household gods, which we might get into a little bit later. But they’re also the kinds of gods that you would find out in the streets everywhere, like it’s just everywhere. And if you think about walking around places like Pompeii, the amount of religious imagery you know, relating to gods or mythology, it’s just everywhere. So it just wouldn’t be something that you escaped. It would just be part of your day to day life. But I also want to say how much I loved what you were saying about nature until, yes, Dr rad’s about to get a bit preachy here, but I do think that sometimes people when they look at other cultures, particularly ancient cultures, and they look at their religious beliefs, and the type of religious beliefs, when you bring up things like it being rooted in nature or sort of coming from natural observances, there’s sometimes an attitude that you get from certain types of people where it’s like, oh, how simplistic. You know, they looked at the trees. They looked at the birds. You know, they don’t have an understanding of science and kind of looking down on that sort of belief system as being somewhat primitive compared to what people have access to today in terms of information. Now, obviously it’s illogical to expect people in the ancient times to have a scientific understanding of the world akin to anything like what we have now. They just can’t, obviously. But I also don’t think that it should be dismissed as simplistic or primitive or anything like that. In fact, I think we actually probably need a little bit more of that these days. Now, I am a city girl. I am aware of the dangerous pedestal I am ascending right now, but genuinely, I think that part of our problem when dealing with current environmental issues is that we actually don’t pay enough attention to nature going on around us. And it is actually really miraculous what we have around us, the variety of animal life, the way that this planet functions, the gifts that we are given, and what we’ve been able to turn them into, and how we’ve been able to harness a certain lifestyle from entirely the natural resources around us, we are not paying enough attention to nature and the signals that are being sent to us, and that is a huge problem. We know. You know from so many studies how much nature is connected to human well being, and yet, instead, we turn to other things, rather than just embracing the need, we have to connect with nature and have a deeper, a deeper relationship with nature. And yeah, I just, I just see it as a huge problem. So I don’t see it as simplistic or primitive. I see it as something that actually probably really did bring the Romans something really powerful. Dr G 13:25Yeah, definitely. And I see where you’re coming from when we’re thinking about the sustainability of the planet and having an outlook like the early Romans did, I wouldn’t necessarily get on board with maybe their later Imperial cult business, but certainly early, archaic religion from a Roman perspective, very grounded in nature, very grounded in observations about the natural world, and then considering quite carefully, what is our relationship in response to those things, what are these signs from nature trying To tell us about the will of the Divine and and then thinking about what would be the best behavior and the best action to take in order to cultivate the best outcome, not just for yourself, but ultimately for your synergistic relationship with nature. So those things, I think, are really interesting, and in this sense, the ancient Romans share many parallels with a lot of indigenous cultures, and having seen the powerful effects of what nature can do and how you can respond to it and nurture it and care for nature around you, that is something that has a really strong and powerful force which we could harness today, I think, in a much more robust way. One of the things I was thinking about when researching for this topic was the other sort of big misconception that people often bring to the table when I say, Oh, I’m an ancient historian of ancient Rome. And the first thing. A lot of people will say, as a bit of a joke, but with a relative undercurrent of seriousness, is oh well, they just copied everything from the Greeks, and they just stole stuff. Dr Rad 15:11Wait, you mean they didn’t, Dr G 15:15I mean, the thing is that Rome, as it develops, does really encourage syncretism over time. They are not an exclusive kind of people when it comes to their belief systems. They’re very open minded in this respect. If they come across a group of people practicing something, they are more likely to welcome it into their own space and to incorporate it into their own culture, maybe with some little changes that make sense for them, but they certainly don’t dismiss other people’s gods or other people’s practices. They’re more inclined to bring in rather than push out. So in this sense, by the time we get to our written sources for what ancient Rome is like, the Greek influence has already been there for centuries, and so then it gets very hard to disentangle, because they’ve done a lot of work to be like Jupiter is a bit like Zeus, and Aphrodite is a bit like Venus, and they’ve created and established all of these relational parallels, not like the other Yeah, they’ve done so much work to be like, yes, we can bring it all together that people are like, Oh, well, the Greeks were earlier in history, and therefore the Greeks did it first, and then the Romans were just like, Dr Rad 16:37but as you say, you’re totally right, particularly When we’ve been looking at this earlier period for so long, whilst Absolutely, there’s a Greek influence, and that’s also not just because the Greeks literally exists earlier, but as we’ve talked about, the Greeks are in Italy. Dr G 16:53They have colonized South Italy. They are in Sicily. They are in Campania. They are in Puglia. The Greeks, you can’t avoid the Greeks. They’re already they’ve already turned up, and they’ve already been like, this place is also ours. And the people who are indigenous to Italy are like, Dr Rad 17:12okay, and that’s exactly it. So it would make sense that when the Romans are presumably engaged in trading and coming into contact with these people that they are, of course, exposed to their beliefs, and vice versa, and it’s really hard to trace that exact process, as you said. I mean, even if we turn to Greek sources, we don’t have the complete story of exactly how those interactions go, particularly really early on, certainly not ones that we would stake our lives on, or anything like that. So we do have that. So of course, the Romans have probably incorporated that into their own system. But we absolutely have come across stuff that is decidedly italic and doesn’t come from the Greeks, particularly from these earlier cultures. Because, of course, we’ve got all these little italic cultures, the ones that the Romans keep fighting. So they’ve obviously got the Latins, who they presumably have things in common with, like their language and certain structures that they have in their society, because they’re really, really close to each other. But there are all these other people, the ones that the Romans keep fighting, or having alliances with or fighting again. They also have their own religious beliefs, and it can be hard to trace those too, because they get subsumed by Rome itself. And then, of course, we’ve got the Etruscans to the north, yeah. And we know that a lot of their religious practices and stuff are influenced by the Etruscans, as far as we can tell, including probably augury, which you were just talking about, yeah, definitely. Dr G 18:41So we’ve got very few sources actually to help us out that that sort of sit within the realm of sort of written evidence. So it gets quite tricky, but we do have a few things. One of them is Etruscan. So we have a piece of evidence that is called the liber lintius, oh yeah, linen book. And this is an Etruscan piece of evidence, written in Etruscan and dates to the third or second centuries BCE. So even an Etruscan piece of evidence, we’re not talking about it being an archaic piece of evidence, it still sits firmly within Rome’s written historical record, but it does detail things that we think come from earlier periods of Etruscan history, and it talks about a duality of gods. There’s a God of lightness and a god of darkness. This is a concept that we don’t necessarily see come through in later religious practice and details of offerings being made to these gods, things that include roasted barley and oil and fire as a medium for ritual practice, all of which pretty standard in terms of the ancient world and in terms of Italy. Okay, and the other big piece of evidence that we have, it’s a much smaller piece of evidence in comparison, but it’s called the Iguvine tablets. Dr Rad 20:09And, oh yes, I did come across these. These are written in ancient Umbrian Dr G 20:15so the umbrians are a bit further south and east, and the Etruscans are a bit further north and west, and these two influences give us a sense that there is something different going on in Italy, as opposed to elsewhere. So these tablets include references to a number of Gods which seem to then end up having some parallels with Roman gods. There’s a reference to a god called Iuve which seems to be similar to Jupiter, Marte, a reference to Mars and Vufiune, a reference that ends up being to Quirinus, we think. But we also have animal sacrifice described there, which was not true in the Etruscan evidence, libations being made of both wine and Mead and then some practices also associated with augury. So this idea of watching birds seems to be quite prevalent throughout the Italian peninsula, and whether it came from the Etruscans first, or whether it sort of developed sui generis throughout this period of the archaic Italian epoch, hard to know. But it doesn’t seem like something that has come from somewhere else. It seems very much about what is happening here, and how can we make meaningful understanding of it within this context. Dr Rad 21:43Yeah, and we’ve also got things like tombs, which can give a little bit of light. I mean, unfortunately there’s not when you’re talking about tombs, if you’re talking about artwork and things that have been left behind, and the way that bodies have been buried, it’s obviously highly open to interpretation. We don’t have written explanations of what these things mean. But certainly, if we’re going way, way back into the pre regal slash regal period, because we’re not exactly sure when there were kings of Rome, or even if there were kings of Rome. I mean, no, I shouldn’t say that. I think there were. Dr G 22:17We wrote a whole book on the kings of Rome. They definitely existed. Dr Rad 22:21It’s written down. It must be true. I think we can safely say they were kings, but we don’t know exactly, you know, we can’t be 100% sure about exactly when they were, exactly who they were, and all of that kind of For more details, read our book, exactly, yes. But if we go like way back, there definitely are tombs in this region. We’ve got also tombs from, you know, the etrurian area, which, some of them are extremely lavish. They’re often called princely tombs. And that can tell us a little bit about, obviously, some sort of spirituality and belief systems. And the interesting thing is that, as we start to see, I think, less of these styles of burials, what is suggested to us, at least by the material record, is that we do start to see the erection of these quite monumental temples compared to what has gone before. And we can’t obviously be 100% sure why, but it’s theorized by one of the academics that I read that maybe it’s a shift in terms of the way that the elite in these societies are sort of competing in their displays of wealth and in an effort to obviously demonstrate their power in the community. Maybe previously, one of their ways of showing off was having these extremely lavish burials and tombs and that sort of thing. But as we shift into a different political scenario over the centuries, it becomes more an area of competition of what you can do for the community and how you can have a very physical presence of yourself and your family and also show your dedication to the gods a different way. And so we start to get more of these monumental temples being built. And in spite of the fact that the Romans have this very powerful story about Rome being razed to the ground during the Gallic sack in 390 we do actually have buildings that are referenced that clearly survived that. And a lot of these are obviously things that were pretty substantial, like temples. The most notable one that we’ve talked about a number of times, of course, is the temple of Castor and Pollux, which way back in the early republic, is something that is dedicated after the Roman victory over the Latin league in the Battle of Lake Regillus. And we do also have, in the accounts that we’ve been talking about, it sort of comes up from time to time. Also reference to these spaces which seem to exist, you know, cultic spaces where it’s not just the Romans, it’s something that’s used by the people of the area, and it seems to be where they come together, not necessarily for political reasons, but probably because, you know, socially and culturally, the. This is a cultic space that is important to all of them. So we’ve referenced there’s a particular space which the Etruscan cities and the Etruscan people seem to share. It’s often, I think, probably misrepresented in Livy as a place where they come together for political powerhouse and to plot the demise of the Romans. Unknown Speaker 25:17Well, we’re here, guys, Dr Rad 25:21but it’s actually probably more likely a cultic space where they come together, maybe for trade, but probably more religious rights and that sort of thing. And we’ve also made reference to spaces like the Temple of Diana, one at arikia oricia, depending on how you want to this was Dr G 25:38exactly the one I was going to mention. Now that you’ve brought up sacred space, well, Dr Rad 25:42I’ll let you take it over. Dr G, because I am no expert in this area. Dr G 25:46It’s not that I have that much to say about it, but Diana of Nemi is positioned within Aricia. And so we’re talking to the southeast of Rome, but we’re going into the Castelli Romani, so we have to hike up a hill a little bit. Your favorite people, the Tusculuns. They’re hanging out there as well. So the Latin people tend to gather in these sacred spaces, usually at particular times of the year, to perform specific rituals that are important to all of the peoples in the area. And it seems that these sorts of places are quite common. And people will travel around to these sacred areas, knowing that these rituals need to perform, be performed at certain times. And Diana of Nemi stands out to me because I made it my mission to find her sacred spot. Various travels to Rome. The local people do not want to tell you the location, but with a little bit of wandering around in the area, you can find the remains of one of her later temples in that area, and there are still people who offer modern ritual offerings into that space, which I think is a beautiful sense of cultural continuity. Oh, Dr G 27:28thinking about other evidence that might help us understand archaic religion in this area, the one thing that we do have that stands out as being very specific and different from things like a Greek influence, are the votive offerings that have remained. So we’re quite lucky to have a number of ceramic remains. These votive offerings are really specific to Italy. We don’t tend to see them elsewhere, they’re often in the shape of body parts or internal organs, which are, how did they know? How did they know? Let’s not ask too many questions about that. Dr Rad 28:14I hate to spoil it for you. Dr G, but actually what you found is the ancient remains of the Roman version of operation Dr G 28:22at all. Everybody was into that game. Everyone had a different addition. So these votive offerings seem to be particularly body parts, often hands, feet, but also organs, and sometimes depictions of swaddled babies. Is the other really common one, and we think that these votive offerings are probably elite offerings, rather than from everyday people, and partly that’s because they’ve been designed to symbolize the object, whereas we think a lot of the votive offerings probably would have been actual objects. So things like an offering of food, an offering of hair, a piece of clothing, a tool doesn’t survive. Yeah, the sorts of things that are probably not going to make it through in the archeological record, just because they’re natural materials, conditions have to be so specific to preserve those for a long period of time, whereas the beauty of ceramic is that it toughens up, it holds up shape, and 1000s of years later can be like, Aha, I found a foot. So we don’t really know what these votive offerings are doing, necessarily. They they seem to be some sort of personal conversation between the offerer and the divine. But what that practice meant, what people might have thought while they were doing it, these are the things that still and probably will always elude us, because we simply don’t have this kind of source material that would. Get inside somebody’s head for things like that, but there’s enough of them that we’re like something’s going on here. Dr Rad 30:06Dear Marcia, today I went to the shrine and left a little statue of my foot. Yeah, I’ll leave the guards to decide what that means exactly. I must admit, whenever I’ve thought about votive offerings, because you say it’s not like this is an uncommon practice in many ancient cultures to make these sorts of offerings. I’ve always wondered if it’s some sort of connection to someone suffering in that part of the body, or maybe a relative is suffering in that part of the body, or that part of the body symbolizes something to do with something that’s going on in their life, and that’s what’s sort of going on in this and this is something I think that highlights, perhaps something that probably is true in terms of the way we understand religion, as far as we can tell, in the archaic Roman period. And to be honest, beyond the Archaic period. Roman religion doesn’t exactly offer ethical guidelines in the sense of in the way that someone who comes from a different kind of religious tradition would perhaps understand it, you absolutely have lots of rules and lots of things that are really important in terms of how you live your life. It tells us a lot about cultural taboos. So there are rules and things like that, but it’s not quite the same as, like an ethical code, that this is how you personally need to live your life. Would you agree with that? Dr G 31:34Yeah, definitely. And I think for the Romans, that sort of idea of an ethical guideline comes far more through their legal system than it would through their relationship with the gods. This is more a system of acknowledgement that there are greater beings and greater forces at play. And can you establish a strong enough reciprocal relationship that things will work in your favor when push comes to shove and to circle back to this idea that the Romans didn’t care about the gods at all, very, just very pragmatic people just waiting for Christianity to come Dr Rad 32:12and get them. They just care about cement and the army. Yeah, as Dr G 32:17long as I can build this bridge and hit somebody with my sword, I’m a happy camper. Exactly nothing else matters. Cicero does talk a lot about religion. He wrote a number of books, many things. Thanks Cicero. Whether you love him or whether you think he’s annoying, doesn’t really matter. He does leave us a lot of information that has stood the test of time. And he tells us, in his De natura deorum, On the nature of the gods, that most thinkers have affirmed that the gods exist most and that there are a few outliers, a few who are like not sure, and some who are strongly there are no gods, but the bulk of people, in Cicero’s view, believe in the divine existence. And it’s more a matter of the quibbles about how divinity is having an effect in the world around them, and that is another matter entirely. So yeah, but from the Roman perspective, this starts to firm up as we get more into the historical period, it firms up into a set of behaviors and ritual practices that define the Roman calendar. So the way that they think about time is very much embedded with how they think about the gods and what things need to be done when, whether it’s a matter of preparing for something that’s going to happen in the future. And the gods are also participants in those kinds of actions. And we get to a point where it becomes so formalized that we get situations like we get with the Vestal virgins, where they must be able to speak without impediment, because every word that they say in a ritual practice needs to be said perfectly to align with the needs of the gods in order to ensure the right relationship. So the Romans become more fixated, I would say, with their ritual practices and their relationship with the gods over time, rather than Dr Rad 34:21less well, I think it goes back to what we were actually talking about in a narrative episode the other day, which is the other day. Look at me in the same outfit, trying to pretend like we’ve had recorded on two separate days when we were talking earlier today, actually in a narrative episode, we were talking about the fact that we do have these narrative histories. We have the annalist tradition, and we have narrative histories which start to develop as we get into sort of the mid to late Republic. And we’ve also got things like family histories, which actually can tell us things about religion. If you look at someone like Julius Caesar claiming that Venus is his home girl, etc. There are obviously connections between particular families and particular cults and religious practices and that sort of thing, particularly if we’re talking about the elites who we can mostly track in the written sources. But in this late Republican period, when there’s so much conflict, where it obviously seems like things are somewhat coming apart at the seams, and then we have this transition into empire. There is this renewed fascination for the Romans themselves in understanding their ancient past. And so we do also get these records from people who are now referenced as the antiquarians, who are interested into looking into the, I suppose, kind of the minuci in a way, although they give us some really important evidence, but things like explaining place names, explaining practices, explaining why Romans do certain things the way that they do. And we do, obviously get some of our information about religion and cults, and therefore, from these sorts of people. And I think that ties into like Cicero, is very much a part of that time period where there’s that interest in figuring out who they are, what they are, and looking back to their past in particular, to try and understand their own history and practices as well as possible. Dr G 36:15Yeah, definitely. And it becomes a matter of formality. It’s ingrained in everyday life. So you talked about the lares, there’s these family gods. So there is a domestic aspect to cult that develops, and probably that, I would say, probably always existed, regardless of what time period we’re in, the way that people personally venerate gods, and then we have things that are much more sort of state run, where it’s like this ritual is happening on behalf of all of the people, and Rome is broken up into a whole bunch of priesthoods by the time we sort of start to get into the mid Republic. And we think some of these priests definitely pre date the Regal period, at least, augurs seem to be crucial to the foundation story of Rome. And so this idea that we’re observing birds comes through the whole time, and augury doesn’t disappear as Roman history progresses. It goes right up to the part where what I think it’s Honorius does something terrible to his chickens. Remember that let’s not talk about when we get into that period of Roman history, many decades from now, but the idea that the birds play a really important role, hugely significant. They end up keeping chickens in order to observe them. Do they eat the food? Do they not eat the food? All of this is very important, but there are priests for just about everything. We think the flamins, of which there are 15, three major flamens, 12 Minor flamens, we think they’re very early in terms of priesthood, and they’re related to the fundamental gods, the Flamen Dialis, connected with Jupiter, the Flamen Martialus, connected with Mars. And the Flamen Quirinalis, relating to Quirinus, a God which is also connected with Romulus. These are really early priests, and they seem to have a lot of restrictions placed upon them. At least the major flamens do in terms of what they’re allowed to wear, where they’re allowed to go, what sort of actions they’re able to participate in. And many of them come in a set, because not only do they run a priesthood specifically related to a particular God, but their wife is also a sacred Priestess of the same God, and they operate as a pair. And if one of them dies, you could get a whole new set one. Can’t just Dr Rad 38:55Collect all five! Dr G 38:56You can’t just have one. You gotta have two. Well, and this is definitely Dr Rad 38:57something interesting to talk about with the interesting to talk about with the priesthoods, because we can’t exactly pinpoint all the details about where these priesthoods come from and exactly when they become in, you know, more and more influential in Roman society. But something that’s interesting, which I hadn’t really thought about, because we, we do have references, obviously, to people who are acting in in certain priesthoods in our narrative accounts, because sometimes, obviously, they intersect, obviously, when we’re talking about those major flamins That you were talking about, or flamines, I don’t know how to say the plural out loud, Dr G 39:36Flamines is correct. Dr Rad 39:37It sounds like some sort of fancy dessert, you know, like flamines banana Dr G 39:42Delicious. Dr Rad 39:43They are patricians, which, given all the stuff that we’ve been talking about with this narrative that we’re fed, that very early on in the early republic, there seems to be this real concern by the patrician class, who we. Don’t know who they are. We don’t know where they came from. We’re not even entirely sure if they existed straight away or something that had developed over time. But let’s go with the narrative. Just to keep things relatively simple, they apparently have this real concern about dominating the knowledge about sacred law, sacred practices, and there’s this real impression that things would be sullied somehow if plebeians had access to these roles. And so it’s probably, perhaps no surprise that these major flaminais from patrician background traditionally, and something I hadn’t really thought about is the fact that obviously Rome is all about electing magistrates. They serve their period, and then they move on. You can serve more than once, but you still have to be re elected and that sort of thing. But priests are appointed for life, unless something untoward happens. Dr G 40:57Something untoward, yeah. So there is a sense that within the context of the elite of Rome, the patricians, as they like to call themselves, perhaps they’re hard to know it’s one of those chicken or the egg scenarios, like, is it the fact that some people are in charge of these ritual practices and have been given this responsibility, which leads to them becoming focal points for the development of an elite class, or is it the case that these families, through virtue of having greater power from a physical sense, were able to co opt that power into a soft power that was the divine understanding and the ritual knowledge, and it might be a little bit of both. It’s difficult to note, but certainly, once we have this idea that Rome has a set of priesthoods and that there is a way of honoring the gods that is good and appropriate for Rome as a whole, and that’s the point where we start to see a real consolidation of secret knowledge. Because, yes, priests don’t want to have that stuff written down. Or if they do write it down, like we we get sometimes in stories of the early King Numa, if they do write it down, they then immediately hide them somewhere so no one can look at it except for them. Dr Rad 42:27It’s a secret clubhouse. You’ve got to have the password. Dr G 42:30Yeah, you are not allowed in the tree house. Dr Rad 42:34But the thing I’d never realized before, because as I say, it’s not really a thing like I know obviously how important religion is, because it comes into our accounts all accounts all the time in terms of the Romans being out of kilter with the gods or being blessed by the gods. It’s all about maintaining that relationship, and this is where, obviously priests would play a really important role. Because whilst Roman religion might not provide like an ethical code of conduct in the way that say, maybe Abrahamic kind of religions do. It does have those rules, and it’s almost like the Public Religion, the kind of state religion it is about like the joint wellness of the community and observing what needs to be observed in order to maintain peace and prosperity, which makes total sense when you think about it, working as a community to make sure that you all benefit from a state. And if something goes wrong, well, you know you need to get to the bottom of that and fix the relationship so that things prosper again. Dr G 43:37And at the root of that is a real fundamental truth, which is that natural signs are telling us things. Yes, so if we look at the most fundamental and earliest understanding of augury, bird movement in the sky is telling us something absolutely and I, like you, am a city girl, I could not tell you what the birds might be trying to tell me. But if we think about people who are less certified than ourselves, much more ancient, what are the things that they have to hold on to in terms of their understanding of the natural world? One of these things that can reliably be seen and then hopefully reliably interpreted, is the movement of various animals, including birds. I would say birds would not be the only animals that you’d be interested in observing, for sure, but they’re showing you something very clear. They do different things at different times of the year. They can be a good indication of what is happening seasonally, or what is about to happen seasonally, in the same way that observing the trees could be very useful as well. So keeping in touch with the landscape, being aware of river systems, the Tiber floods all the time, but not without a pattern. So when the snow melts further up. And then you get in, or you get a high flow of rain. In another part of Italy, you’re going to have a flood with the Tiber. And if you’ve got somebody who is able to sort of pick out the signs around that, start to maybe make some judgment calls ahead of time about when might be important to move a little bit further away from the edge of that river. All of those things become really important. We know that the forum consistently flooded for centuries, and it’s very low lying, and it’s only after they do some dramatic earthworks that they’re able sort of to minimize the flooding that happens to the forum, which is kind of incredible because it’s their it’s their meeting place, like, let’s just go down the hill. Dr Rad 45:45Any other Wellingtons on? Not looking good out there today. Yeah, I can’t believe we’ve Dr G 45:49got another meeting and all this mud. Dr Rad 45:52Damn Wellingtons really don’t match my toga. Dr G 45:55Why can’t we do it on a hill? For a change? We’ll have none of that around here, Valley or bust. But all of these things mean that as we get further and further into the modern world, we feel more and more removed from these kinds of observations. The Tiber still floods, but because the walls have been built around the Tiber to prevent the flood from having a destructive capacity, by and large, you notice the river rising, but you don’t notice the effects of a flood. Yeah, things like that change the way you engage with a landscape. The same sort of thing as a comparison would be the flooding of the Nile and fundamental to ancient Egyptian way of life and understanding of the crop cycle. And yet that river system has been completely altered by modern technology to the point where it’s no longer recognizable as a life giving River in the way that it would have been to the ancient Egyptians. Dr Rad 46:50Yeah, and I’d say there’s a certain logic to me. I mean, we were joking about the fact that, oh, the Romans aren’t really these really pragmatic people, but in a way, it is pragmatic. It is completely logical to pay attention to the world around you and the well being of the planet that you depend on. And if something really unusual happens, like a really crazy storm, happens in a way that doesn’t normally happen, or, as you say, something’s flooding at a time it doesn’t normally flood, you actually stop and pay attention to it and think, why is that happening, and what can we do to fix it, rather than just ignoring it or claiming it’s some sort of government conspiracy. That’s illogical, that’s dumb. Where’s my insurance? Yeah, if you have bushfires happening abnormal amounts of times. If you have a number of record days hitting massively high temperatures in a country, if you have animals dropping dead from the sky in huge numbers, if you have fish that are dying in rivers that they would not normally die in en mass, then yes, you should be paying attention to that and trying to do something about that as a community. That’s just logical, the way that we live our lives, not logical because we actually know exactly what’s happening. We have exactly the tools we need to fix it, and yet not happening, having to fight these ridiculous battles. But anyway, I’m getting sidetracked to go back to the priests, the Roman priests. One thing I hadn’t realized, and this obviously suggests the very archaic nature of certain aspects of Roman religion. I have to admit, I always thought it was kind of funny that Roman priests were called flamen. Again, it sounds kind of disgusting. It sounds kind of like a side effect of a disease that you might get like, oh, just get so much flamen. And I never really understood why Roman priests had that title, and I don’t think I can offer a full explanation of it, but it was really interesting that one of the academics I suggested that I read, suggested that it comes from the Hindu priestly title of Brahman, which would obviously take it way back, in terms of Going right back to very antique times. And also, similarly, when we think about Quirinus. So Quirinus being like an embodiment of, you know, Romulus, in a way, and having associations, and therefore being a very specifically Roman God, not something stolen from the Greeks, but the idea that that like the sort of stem of that name, the Quir- bit of the of the Latin might sort of come from a Sanskrit word, again, making it seem really, really ancient, and maybe being something that was brought to the area by people who sort of moved in there. I mean, that makes it even more archaic than I could possibly have imagined, if it’s true? Obviously, this is all speculative. Dr G 49:43But well, these are the things I mean, the Indo-European language branches. They’re all really interesting. The one that seems to struggle to fit into them is the Etruscan and aside from that, even there, there are some sort of crossover. Over, but we do get a sense that there are at least some connections to a broader east to west cultural movement. And it’s happening really gradually, it seems. But it does end up definitely in Italy, and we get some connections also with the idea of fire. And I can’t remember the root term for that right now, but that concept of fire in the Sanskrit coming across, gradually hitting Greece, getting to Italy, and then we get things like Hestia in Greek and Vesta in the Latin, yeah. And even though those two goddesses are both virginal and are both associated with the hearth fire, there’s also lots of differences between how the ritual practice associated with the two goddesses in the different cultures plays out. So there’s a sense in which we might be looking at sort of an independent, sort of flourishing of ideas in two different locations. But the root language behind both is similar. The other god, which seems to be distinctly Roman, is Janus, the two faced God, Dr Rad 51:23yeah. We’re in the month of January at the time of recording. Dr G 51:25At the time of recording, we are in Janice’s special time. Dr Rad 51:29We are, hey, Janice Dr G 51:32and I do like that. There are little moments that come through for us where we’re like we we can’t quite pair Janus up to anything else, and we’re like, Aha, this might be a hint, whereas, definitely there seems to be ideas about Gods and ideas about their areas of influence, which seem to have gradually moved east to West. And so things like Apollo and Artemis become Apollo and Diana, that seems to be something that has come across. And the Etruscans have a pairing that is very similar, although slightly different in name, and we see this with also things like Dionysus and Bacchus. And it’s like you look at those two words, they don’t look anything alike, but there is a real overlap in sort of how they end up being even if they started off being slightly different, they end up becoming quite similar over time. Dr Rad 52:32So, and let’s face it’s not like Dionysus was something that the Greeks invented, like, like, he’s definitely considered to be a god that migrated from elsewhere, exactly. Dr G 52:41And then we’ve got the idea that Rome does seek out foreign gods as well. When we get further into the historical record in the mid and late Republic, they’re encouraging and sometimes taking foreign gods. I mean, like you see that sacred rock you’ve got that represents that particular goddess, Cybele, come with me, get in this boat. We’re heading to Rome. So they do also have moments where they’re like, We don’t have enough gods to deal with the specific issues that we’ve got right now. The ones that we’ve got are not enough. Dr Rad 53:15The world is not enough. Yeah, Dr G 53:16expand the Pantheon. Expand. Dr Rad 53:20It’s so funny, isn’t it, that when we actually look at Rome’s history, particularly the period that we’ve been looking at, as you say, we’ve not that long ago, dealt with the Romans, inviting Juno to come with them from they come to them, but they also, even though they promised her lots of things, they’re also like, we’re not going to put your temple inside the pomerium. We don’t trust you yet, the way that they do these sorts of things, it does actually kind of go against that popular image that we have of Rome, of being a representative of very intolerant imperialism, and understandably so, in the sense that there are a few notable exceptions to the embracing attitude of the Romans. But I don’t think that people know exactly how that particular relationship with notably, say, Judaism and Christianity, have actually evolved from that early period into when the Romans obviously themselves start becoming more Christian and eventually officially adopt Christianity as a state religion, because it is that complex relationship between the communal well being being tied to religious well being and political well being, like you can’t separate those things, and that’s partly why we do have these notable clashes between People of certain faiths and the Romans, it’s not just, oh, they don’t like your religion and they don’t understand it. It’s very different, obviously, but there are efforts made to under to have some sort of a relationship with obviously, Jewish people in Rome. It doesn’t go well overall. But there are efforts. It’s made. But yeah, it’s that complex overlap of the politics of the situation, the religion of the situation, and how they all feed in together, on top of which just probably the very particular people that are alive at that moment, making those decisions, which I think lead to the combustive situations that we get. I think Dr G 55:20there’s also a bigger systemic matter at plays, because, if we’re thinking about because we’ve been talking predominantly about sort of archaic and also touching on some Republican ideas about Roman beliefs, and Cicero falls into that category as well. But I think we’re dealing with a very, very different ball game when we get into the idea of the imperial period of Rome, totally, yeah. And we’ve moved into the idea of the Imperial cult, and that produces a top down Roman hierarchy, yeah, of this is how it is, yeah. And if you don’t like how it is, we’re gonna, we’re gonna have some problems. Dr Rad 55:59Yeah, absolutely, yeah. No, you’re right. It is. It is. It is completely different. But I do want to take you back to the beginning, Dr G, because I do have some questions. If we’re talking about priests and the people who are very significant in early Roman religion, we actually can’t avoid talking about the Roman kings and also this very shady character of the Rex sacrificulus, and also, eventually the Pontifex Maximus, a part of Roman religion that obviously still has something of a legacy to this day, because that is the title of the Pope lives in the Vatican. Dr G 56:38Hello, Mr. Pope. He has a long and storied history, the Rex sacroficulus, yeah, and I sort of a parallel to that. Might be the Rex sacrorum as well. So there seems to be a priest that is aligned with a specific building called the Regia, which is also got all of this monarchical connotation about it, this weird, little trapezoidal building that is on the Via Sacra, right near vesta’s Temple and the rec sacrificius hangs out in this building. We’re not really sure what he’s up to, necessarily most of the time, but there does seem to be a sense in which this priest functions as a sacrificial victim, or a figure in which you can place the idea of communal pollution upon, and then they will carry that pollution away from Rome. So it’s not necessarily a huge honor to become the wrecked sacrificial list, because you often will end up dead at some point. Dr Rad 57:41Sounds pretty gross. It’s part of the deal gotta be done. Someone’s got to do it. Someone’s got to take one for the team. Dr G 57:47Yeah. In the same way that a lot of the behaviors and ritual practices are designed for the right relationship with the gods, the Romans also have this conception of pollution being quite an issue, which is fair enough, because if you don’t look after the mess, it leads to disease outbreak and all sorts of things. And so that really dictates, like, where you can place dead bodies. This is why they’ve got to be placed outside the pomerium. All of these things make sense from a practical measure, but also from a divine one, ultimately, and the rec sort of fits into that category. Sometimes somebody comes into that role, and they’re not necessarily a high level, elite person, but what their job is is to live a really rich life like a king, and they’re treated as such for the time that they’re in office, right up until the point where it’s time for their role to Dr Rad 58:44come to an end. Well, that’s kind of what the name implies. Isn’t it like the sacrificial King, the Dr G 58:48sacrificial King, and I kind of love this. This is something that fades out of Roman practice at a certain point Dr Rad 58:55well, and it’s something the link to the kings, obviously, is that it’s thought that this is something that comes into being when the Kings go, Dr G 59:01right, yeah. So the king has a whole bunch of priestly functions. And so if we think about Romulus, he was an augur king. He was able to read the signs, and he was also somebody who ruled, and as they got further into the king, Dr Rad 59:16so he says, I don’t know if Remus would agree with you on that one. Dr G 59:20Remus himself may also have been an auger king, but only for like, one day. Yeah, it did not work out for him. But Romulus certainly has this idea like associated with him, of being able to read the signs of the birds and to be able to rule that flow

Episode 171 – The Gallic Sack of Rome – Part 6

We have finally reached the LAST part of our coverage of the Gallic Sack of Rome. Once again, whilst there are similar elements in our sources, it is astonishing to see the different way the authors weave the details together. Episode 171 – The Gallic Sack of Rome – Part 6 Another Amazing Camillus Montage It is not often that Diodorus Sicilus is praised for his accuracy, but this is one of those rare moments. Savour it, everyone! Dr G takes us through the details of his account, in which Camillus is on a military rampage. Forget the Rocky training montage that Livy includes. This is a Rambo montage, with Camillus kicking ass all over Italy. He’s taking down the Volscians, the Aequians, the Etruscans…. where does he find the time? It is during his escapades that Camillus recovers the ransomed gold, not the rather more dramatic intervention included in Livy’s history. However, Diodorus and Livy are not the only sources to have different explanations for the return of the gold! Some sources claim it was the people of Caere who retrieve the ransom after defeating the Gauls in a battle, and others claim it was one of the Emperor Tiberius’ ancestors who won it back in a battle with a Gallic chieftain. We will let you guess which version Dr Rad prefers… Gold bullion, image courtesy of World History Encyclopedia. Original image by Andrzej Barabasz . There’s No Place Like Rome Unlike Diodorus, Livy is content to keep the focus on affairs inside Rome. Camillus gets a triumph and then keeps his dictatorship because things are not yet as they should be. Camillus needs to make sure that Rome remains on the good side of the gods. Purification and restoration of the temples was the name of the game. However, most of the remainder of Livy’s account for this year is dedicated to Camillus giving the MOTHER of all speeches. The tribunes of the plebs were stirring up trouble by pushing for Rome to be moved to Veii. Urgh, the tribunes. They were the only people Camillus did not miss whilst he was in exile. Why go to the effort of rebuilding the city when there’s a perfectly good abandoned one right over there? Well, Camillus can tell you exactly why and in a painful level of detail. To cut a long story short: Rome is far too amazeballs to leave It seems incredibly DUMB to have defended it fiercely against the Gauls if they just planned to up sticks Um, the location?! The views? You can’t just relocate your religion – we JUST patched things up with the gods, guys This is just lazy behaviour and he doesn’t like it. In fact, it is UN-ROMAN Camillus’ rhetoric was incredibly powerful, but a sign sent straight from the gods helped to seal the deal. The Romans were staying put! Time to get Bob the Builder on the phone. Whichever historian you prefer, we both end up in roughly similar places by the end of 390 BCE (or thereabouts): the gods have been taken care of, the city has been rebuilt, the gold is back in Roman hands, and Camillus is the most awesome general… well, ever! And THAT brings the Gallic Sack of Rome to a close. Things To Look Out For: The famously preserved head that was allegedly discovered on the Capitoline The possible founding of the Capitoline Games for Jupiter Optimus Maximus The building of a temple to Aius Locutius who TRIED to warn them about the Gauls. Schwoops! Matrons! Yes, finally some women briefly grace our podcast once more A mention of the Social War (91-87 BCE) between Rome and its Italian allies over their rights. Some of Camillus’ speech may have been shaped by pro-Roman propaganda that originated during this conflict. Ancient building programs – state-funded, no less Very sweaty historians by the end of this show Our Players 390 BCE Military Tribunes with Consular Power Q. Fabius M. f. Q. n. Ambustus (Pat) K. Fabius M. f. Q n. Ambustus (Pat) Mil. Tr. c. p. 404, 401, 395 N. Fabius M. f. Q. n. Ambustus (Pat) Mil. Tr. c. p. 406 Q. Sulpicius -f. -n. Longus (Pat) Q. Servilius Q. f. P. n. Fidenas (Pat) Mil. Tr. c. p. 402, 398, 395, 388, 386 P. Cornelius P. f. M. n. Maluginensis (Pat) Cos. 393? Mil. Tr. c. p. 397 Dictator M. Furius L. f. Sp. n. Camillus (Pat) Mil. Tr. c.p. 401, 398, 394, 386, 384, 381 Master of the Horse L. Valerius (L. f. L. n. Poplicola) (Pat) Mil. Tr. c.p. 394, 389, 387, 383 OR L. Valerius (L. f. P. n. Potitus) (Pat) Cos. 393, 392; Mil. Tr. c.p. 414, 406, 403, 401, 398 Pontifices ?-390: M. Folius (Flaccinator?) (Pat) Mil. Tr. c.p. 433 Pontifex Maximus; slain by the Gauls C. or K. Fabius Dorsuo (Pat) Augurs or Pontifex 439-390: Q. ? Servilius P. f. (Sp. n. Priscus or Structus Fidenas?) (Pat) Successor: [—- Furi]us Q. f. P. nepos Fusus Mil. Tr. c.p. 403 Our Sources Dr Rad reads Livy, Ab Urbe Condita, 5.50-55 Dr G reads Diodorus Siculus 14.113-117; Dionysius of Halicarnassus 13.6-12; Appian, BC, 2.50; Appian, Gallic History, 1-4; Justinus, Epitome of Pompeius’ Trogus’ Philippic Histories; Aurelius Victor, De virus illustribus 23; Eutropius 1.20 Armstrong, Jeremy. War and Society in Early Rome. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781316145241. Bernard, Seth. “Rome from the Sack of Veii to the Gallic Sack.” In Building Mid-Republican Rome. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190878788.003.0003. Bradley, G. 2020. Early Rome to 290 BC (Edinburgh University Press). Broughton, T. R. S., Patterson, M. L. 1951. The Magistrates of the Roman Republic Volume 1: 509 B.C. – 100 B.C. (The American Philological Association) Cornell, T. J. 1995. The Beginnings of Rome: Italy and Rome from the Bronze Age to the Punic Wars (c. 1000-264 BC) (Taylor & Francis) Forsythe, G. 2006. A Critical History of Early Rome: From Prehistory to the First Punic War (University of California Press) Duff, T. E. 2010. ‘Plutarch’s Themistocles and Camillus’. In N. Humble, ed., Plutarch’s Lives: parallelism and purpose (Classical Press of Wales: Swansea, 2010), pp. 45-86. Elvers, K. (., Courtney, E. (. V., Richmond, J. A. (. V., Eder, W. (., Giaro, T. (., Eck, W. (., & Franke, T. (. (2006). Furius. In Brill’s New Pauly Online. Brill. https://doi.org/10.1163/1574-9347_bnp_e416550 Gowing, Alain M. 2009. “The Roman exempla tradition in imperial Greek historiography: The case of Camillus in Feldherr, A., ed. The Cambridge Companion to the Roman Historians. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Hyden, Marc, Marcus Furius Camillus: The Life of Rome’s Second Founder. Pen and Sword, 2023. Lomas, Kathryn (2018). The rise of Rome. History of the Ancient World. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. doi:10.4159/9780674919938. ISBN978-0-674-65965-0. S2CID239349186. McIntyre, Gwynaeth. “Camillus as Numa: Religion in Livy’s Refoundation Narratives.” Journal of Ancient History 6, no. 1 (2018): 63–79. https://doi.org/10.1515/jah-2017-0011. Ogilvie, R. M. 1965. A Commentary on Livy: Books 1-5 (Clarendon Press). Raaflaub, K. A. 2006. Social struggles in archaic Rome: new perspectives on the conflict of the orders (2nd ed). (Wiley). Roth, Ulrike. “The Gallic Ransom and the Sack of Rome: Livy 5.48.7-8.” Mnemosyne 71, no. 3 (2018): 460–84. https://doi.org/10.1163/1568525X-12342339. Roth, Ulrike. “Was Camillus Right? Roman History and Narratological Strategy in Livy 5.49.2″ Classical Quarterly 70, no. 1 (2020): 212–29. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0009838820000385. Stevenson, T.R. “Parens Patriae and Livy’s Camillus.” Ramus 29, no. 1 (2000): 27–46. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0048671X00001673. Sound Credits Our music is by Bettina Joy de Guzman. Sound effects courtesy of BBC Sounds and Orange Free Sounds. Automated Transcript Dr Rad 0:15Welcome to the partial historians. Dr G 0:19We explore all the details of ancient Rome, Dr Rad 0:23everything from political scandals, the love affairs, the battle’s waged and when citizens turn against each other, I’m Dr rad Dr G 0:33and 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 0:44Join us as we trace the journey of Rome from the founding of the city. Dr Rad 0:56Welcome to a brand new episode of the partial historians. I am one of your hosts. Dr Rad, Dr G 1:04and I am, Dr G, and we are deep, deep, deep in the Gallic sack of Rome. Dr Rad 1:12Is this our longest kind of series, if you will? Dr G 1:17Dr G, our longest mini series. It might be. It could possibly be rivaled by Coriolanus, but nevertheless, we are now in what is part six of 390 BCE, and that is a lot of parts. Dr Rad 1:33It is, I feel like the decemvirate, it lasted for a long time that dragged on. Dr G 1:39That’s true. I don’t even think forgotten, yeah, Dr Rad 1:42I don’t even think that the decemvirate it lasted as long as 390 BCE, but there’s just so much drama. Listeners, we have to explore every detail, Dr G 1:52so many of those details. And in our previous episode, it was a lot of Livy’s details, if I recall rightly. Dr Rad 2:01It was so to give a broad recap of where we have been, the Romans have been very rude to the Gauls interfering in something that really was, quite frankly, none of their business. Whereas maybe what actually happened is maybe we had some sort of Fabian rogue warlords who did something a bit trashy that they weren’t supposed to do, like, I don’t know, kill a Gallic leader and strip his body during the battle, sparked off some resentment between the Romans and the Gauls, if we are to believe it, although, again, alternative accounts would suggest that maybe Rome was just something that the Gauls encountered on their way to somewhere else, and they decided, Hey, that looks like a cool place to sack. Dr G 2:46Yeah, there seems to be competing theories. Either Dr Rad 2:49way, we have had a military encounter between the Gauls and the Romans. Didn’t go well for the Romans. The Gauls have then followed them back to Rome itself. They’ve set up siege. Lots of Romans have had to flee to various places, including just randomly, the countryside or other cities for safety. But we have a valiant band of Romans who remained in the city, Dr G and they were holding out for so long, but finally, in our last episode, they realized that they couldn’t hold out much longer in my account, they were waiting for Camillus to turn up, because Camillus had somehow been appointed dictator, even though the Romans are scattered throughout Italy at this point in time. And indeed, Camillus does show up, not in time to stop the people who are defending the Capitolini and the citadel of Rome from the Gauls from surrendering, but he shows up just in the nick of time to prevent the Romans from having to hand over this ransom that they were going to pay to the Gauls in order for them to go away, which was very opportune. And then Camillus proceeds to use the soldiers that he’s been training whilst in exile to kick some Gallic butt. Excellent. Dr G 4:08It strikes me that Livy is offering us a very convenient narrative that really positions Camillus as the Lord and Savior of our grand city, Rome, and yet his account does not tally up very well with Diodorus Siculus. And I have been flagging this for a little while, and it is, it is now time, I think, to see the great divergence that happens in our source material. Because up until now, they’ve agreed about a lot of things, stories like the sacred geese, stories like people approaching Rome from Fay being like, we’re here to help. There’s a secret force in another place, and all of that kind of stuff. The offensiveness that has happened from the Fabian side that has precipitated this insult, all of these details seen. Him to be part of various narrative sources. But when we get to the issue of what is going on with Camillus, we have Livy’s suggesting that he’s made dictator in absentia and has been preparing even though he’s been in exile for quite some time. And yet, when we turn to Diodorus Siculus, we get a very different sort of recount of the unfolding of these events. So I’d like to take you through some of them. Dr Rad 5:31I’m not sure I want to hear this. Dr G I would rather Camillus remained on his pedestal. But if you insist, I shall not be rude. Dr G 5:40I’m not sure that I’m going to tear his pedestal completely away, but just to add a bit of complexity. Dr Rad 5:50You mean, I haven’t added complexity where I basically questioned almost every detail. I mean, last episode, we basically agreed that there’s very little archeological evidence that the Gauls actually did sack Rome, even though we’re in part six of the Gallic sack, we’re going to Dr G 6:06work with the premise for now. Yeah, there was some sort of Gallic sack, yeah, but obviously, a lot of this is open to question, and from an archeological perspective, we’re a little bit confused, and particularly because our sources do emphasize this idea that there is a rebuilding phase, yes, so we have the Gauls take the gold, and the Romans do hand over this huge sum of money, and the Gauls do walk away. Dr Rad 6:37Do they agree on the amount of gold that was handed over? At least Diodorus and Livy. Dr G 6:41Oh yes, oh yes, yeah. It’s 1000 pounds of gold. It’s, it is a huge sum for this time period. I mean, it would be a huge sum at any time if somebody came to say 1000 pounds of gold, I’d be like, I cannot. Dr Rad 6:54I didn’t even have any gold jewelry to give you. Yeah, my Dr G 6:57earthly possessions, if you converted it to gold, would not tally up to anywhere near that. So it is massive what has been asked and what has been handed over. And in Diodorus Siculus, there is no Camillus on the scene. Dr Rad 7:14Well, suspect immediately, suspect. Dr G 7:18Questions need to be asked. So the Gauls start to leave. They take the gold with them, and the Romans immediately turn to rebuilding the city, because there has been plenty of damage created by the siege. And we get this idea that the Romans gather together, they decide that there will be a state funded rebuilding program, Dr Rad 7:42essentially sounds very formal, Dr G 7:44very formal. Yes. Sign on the line here, and you’re entitled to 10 Roman roof tiles which you can use to rebuild your home. Yeah. So these, this idea of roof tiles being manufactured and given out to Roman citizens seems to be part of the rebuilding program, and Camillus still nowhere to be seen. People are like, I’m just gonna rebuild my house. I got these public tiles. I’ve got my willpower, and I’m just gonna try to rebuild So fair enough at the same time. And I think I’ve mentioned this previously as well. The Volscians have seen this as a prime opportunity. Rome is at its most vulnerable, and they can see from afar that presumably there’s like a sort of a pile of trash where a city used to be, and there’s some people picking through it being like, I can rebuild. It’s our time to take the spot we can take them. So that’s what they decide to do. They roll up to Rome, essentially, and the Romans can see them coming, and they’re like, Oh, we better try and muster as many people as we possibly can. This is a Roman force that has just endured a siege. They’re probably not most robust in their physicality right now, but they do try to field an army to propel the Volscians. And it is only at this point where, and we don’t know where Camillus has been all this time, because it’s not entirely clear. Dr Rad 9:21Ardea, obviously, he’s been doing a rocky montage. Dr G 9:29He has been very busy with his rocky montage, that’s true, and he is now appointed dictator. So finally, he re enters the narrative way too late for the Gallic sack of Rome. He misses it all not there. Just want to underline that point. He missed the whole thing. Dr Rad 9:50Livy has far too many rhetorical gems for this to be untrue. Dr, G, I mean, what are you suggesting that he can. Instructed most of the first of his 10 books, and almost certainly book six to 10, around the figure of Camillus, because he had such a grand reputation in the late Republic. Dr G 10:13Maybe, certainly, certainly Livy’s operating under the constraints that Diodorus Siculus is not and this might mean that for this portion of Diodorus’ history, for which he rarely focuses on Rome, because let’s face it, he’s more interested in what’s actually happening in the broader Mediterranean, which is Greece, naturally. But when he does decide to focus on Rome, he might be a little bit more objective than say, somebody like Livy putting it out there. Dr Rad 10:49You’re gonna be very sorry when I tell you what else Livy has to say about this whole deal, my friend. Because we haven’t even got to the end of this year in Livy’s account, there is plenty more Camillus to come. Dr G 11:01Oh, and there’s plenty more Camillus to come in Diodorus Siculus as well. So there might be moments where this all starts to make sense again. On some level, Camillus forces are able to take down the Volscians, and apparently they are slaughtered, almost to a man. So that’s pretty bad. And it’s at that point that Camillus then starts to go on what appears to be an all over Italy sort of rampage with his forces, because once he locks in the victory over the volscian he immediately turns towards the city of bola, which is thought to be the same place as modern Labici, 35 kilometers south east of Rome. So we’re in the Castelli Romani region. Something’s been going on there. Bola is being besieged by the Aequians. So, you know, while the Gauls have been doing things, all the neighboring people have been getting up to naughtiness. As far as the Romans are concerned, Camillus goes and clears them out as well. So he immediately heads 35 kilometers south. So we really need, like, a map montage for the things that are going to happen, because he starts off with the volscian He then marches south east, deals with the Aequians. He then marches all the way to Sutrium, 50 kilometers north of Rome, a Roman colony there is being plagued by the Etruscans, so they need to be dealt with as well. Dr Rad 12:33This all adds up. Now I see where Diodorus is going. And look, I think this has to do with our confusing chronology for the events of this year. Because, of course, we’re saying that the Gallic sack of Rome, Gaelic attack on Rome, whatever you want to call it, happens in 390 but of course, that’s not 100% certain. In fact, I would say it probably didn’t happen in that year. It’s just the confusing nature of the chronology of this time. And certainly in Livy’s account, Camillus is about to do all of those things, but not yet. Dr G, he has something else to deal with. And this is again, where you can see how Livy’s very much making this the Camillus show, and he’s focusing on something totally different to what you’ve just been talking about, because that’s going to come later. Dr G 13:21So he takes Sutrium back, because apparently it was a Roman colony and it needed to be returned to Roman control. So the Etruscans, they see Camillus coming and like, Oh no, Rome’s back, and it’s a disaster for them. And then it turns out that the Gauls have not really left Italy. After all, they’ve taken a small break at a city called Vascium, which is 125 kilometers north of Rome. Camillus hears wind of this, and he’s like, this is our chance we can get the gold back. And so it’s another quick march further up into Etruscan territory, they attack the Gaulish force. Slay them in huge numbers, because obviously the Gauls are also sort of suffering from the siege aftermath, and they’re not having a great time. And it is there, apparently, all this way north of Rome, deep inside Etruscan territory, that Camillus is finally able to take back Rome’s gold and return it back to the city. So this is a quick fire, sort of moving south, moving north, moving north again, attacking everybody. Camillus comes in like a train, and nobody can, nobody can resist the power of his militarism, and he gets back the gold. Dr Rad 14:46So Diodorus still has Camillus being responsible for the return of the gold, which is interesting, because we do have these snippets in other sources, like Suetonius tells the story about one of Tiberius’ ancestors in. Getting into like a duel with a Gallic character, and winning the gold back that way. We also have a little tidbit in Strabo, I believe, where he talks about the people of Caere which was the city you might recall, where the Vestal virgins took, apparently, a lot of room sacred objects when the siege was imminent. And it’s perhaps because of this and the people from Caere recovering the gold and giving it back to the Romans, that the Romans have this special relationship with them, which we’ll get to, I’m sure, in both of our accounts very shortly. So it’s interesting that Diodorus is still maintaining that Camillus is responsible for it, even though it happens in a very different order and a different way. Dr G 15:42Yeah, so we have a certain amount of consistency with Livy. It’s just that the timelines really don’t match up at all. And Camillus does all of these sort of really what sounds like fantastical, sort of military movements in quick succession, one after the other, and is kind of everywhere in central Italy, and then all of a sudden, is like, Haha, I found it. And then comes back to Rome, Dr Rad 16:06the goal at the end of the rainbow, Dr G 16:09definitely, as far as he’s concerned, he’s found the treasure. Yeah. Dr Rad 16:13Okay, so in Livy, the timeline is quite different. He gives a lot more detail to these, these military escapades that you’re talking about, and they happen in, I think, different years. So that’s why it’s it’s kind of a bit more spaced out. And this is, perhaps, again, as we talked about, like the the slight padding that might have gone on with some of the years in this time period, and the way things are, the way things are adding up, and perhaps also, as you have highlighted, the way that Livy may or may not have inserted Camillus in moments where Camillus did not actually belong. So we will see. But in my account, Camillus goes from basically killing all of the Gauls immediately so he prevents the gold from leaving Rome. He then uses the troops that he’s been training in exile once he knew that Rome wanted him back and wanted him as dictator to absolutely annihilate them. The Romans are thrilled. Everything is looking much, much better, even though, obviously it’s still not great because they still just come out of the siege and their city apparently has been burnt to the ground. However, this is where we need to switch to the classic conflict of the orders kind of material? Dr G 17:24Ooh, yes, yes, do tell Dr Rad 17:28we’re going back to an issue which has been flagged in some of our previous episodes, which is that ever since the Romans have conquered they there has been a group that think it would be a good idea to move at least some of the Romans to ve to live there. So this is where this issue comes back up. The tribune of the plebs, who we haven’t talked about for a while, decide to be bothersome ruin camilius good time, because they desperately still want the Romans to move to vain now they have a real reason to argue for that. It’s not just, Oh, hey, there’s this whole city just sitting there. Why don’t we move some people over there? Now they’re looking around and saying, Hey, did you notice that our city’s just been burnt to the ground by some invading Gauls, rather than hanging around here, which is depressing and there’s no shelter, etc, why don’t we just take this opportunity to pack up and move to they the plebs are listening because they can see the sense in this. Because they’re looking around too and saying, Oh yes, I see what you mean. Burnt city seems like a lot of hassle when there’s this empty city just sitting right there, not that far away from Rome. However, this is absolutely abhorrent to Camillus. He completely shuts it down. Won’t hear talk of this at all, and he actually gets to keep his dictatorship, even after he has dealt with the Gauls and massacred them, because the Senate feel that they need him in this position of authority in order to make sure that this whole crazy Veii plan doesn’t gain any traction. So he’s still got some time. He’s managed to accomplish everything very quickly, saying once he’s back on the scene in Livy’s account. So he’s still got some time. And so they want him around to oversee the process for Rome at this point in time, post sack by the Gauls. Okay? Dr G 19:41So he’s kind of in a disaster relief position, Dr Rad 19:45yes, and they the Senate feel safer because, again, this is lending, This is lending to that conflict of the orders narrative. We’re presuming that most of the senators, at least in Livy’s account, are meant to be, obviously, patricians, we presume, even though we know that. That’s not always the case, apparently, and Camillus would be protecting their interests and what they want to see happening at this point in time. So what ends up happening is Camillus decides that religion needs to be his focus as dictator. Because this is a very big characteristic of Camillus and Livy’s account, he’s extremely pious, and as I’ve been trying to highlight with Livy’s account, he is at pains to emphasize when the Romans have been displeasing the gods, and then to emphasize when the Romans are actually doing things by the book, and therefore kind of deserve the God’s favor. And what we’ve seen is that ever since the Gauls started attacking Rome, and things went bad for them at the Alia in that initial battle, the Romans have been trying to do things correctly. So we’ve had, you know, Fabians wandering about with seemingly not a care in the world in order to carry out family rituals. And we’ve seen Camillus, you know, refuse to be accepted as a refuse to be appointed as a dictator unless the proper procedures have been followed. So this is carrying on, this idea that the Romans are back on track. They’re laser focused. Dr, G, they’re not just to do anything to upset the guards. This time around, they’ve learned their lesson. Dr G 21:19It is a very bizarre time, and it’s a confusing time within the source material as well. So this is where I would start to have a look at plutarch’s Life of Camillus, because he is obviously trying to write some moral edifying biographies. And it’s like, what can we learn from people, and what would be the appropriate things to do. And he taps into some of this. And there is a sense in which Camillus becomes fundamental in certain narratives, and certainly in plutarch’s narrative, to the proper and right way of doing things when it comes to ritual practice in the wake of the Gallic sack. So we first of all hear about the priests all returning, so slowly the news gets out that the Gauls have gone and people can start coming back to Rome. That’s really important, because a lot of Rome’s ritual practice is dependent on the geography. So you can’t be a Vestal virgin in practice, unless you’re in the temple in the Aedes Vestae. Likewise, what would it mean to read the signs of the birds if you’re not standing in the right location? Because it would be bird signs for somewhere else, not for where you are. All of these things become dependent on geography. So having the priest come back, super important moment in terms of getting Rome back on track, and that seems to be facilitated by the Gauls leaving. And Camillus seems to also be involved in this, to a certain degree. He apparently starts to restore some of the temples that have been damaged in the wake of the sack. And plutek makes reference to one that we really don’t know anything about, called a temple to rumor and voice, which is a new temple, apparently. Dr Rad 23:11Yeah, that might be related to the, you know, how there was that plebeian who heard the voice warning? I think that might Dr G 23:18be that was ignored. Yes, quite possibly it’s called the Ara Aii Locutii, yeah, that’s the one, yeah, and we kind of don’t hear about it again, but it’s apparently very important, and Camillus is involved, so there is that. But we also have this continuing discussion, as you mentioned, between what about they versus what about Rome? And it seems to be an almost irresolvable question for the Romans about what do we do with this place that we’ve we took so long to take but now we’re not really doing anything with it’s Dr Rad 23:57Valuable real estate. It’s just sitting there. Dr G 24:00Yeah, I’m just gonna let it accumulate value in this late stage capitalism. It’s gonna be great. So they’re just sort of sitting on Veii, but not actually utilizing it. And I can see, from a plebeian perspective, why that would be such a waste. And I’m not sure that I understand the mindset of these very conservative patricians about nobody can go there, and maybe they’re just worried about having rivals, because obviously a new elite would emerge in a different location. So I find these things really quite interesting, because it’s all happening at the same time. We’ve got Rome expanding and then immediately contracting, and now having to deal with its expansionist legacy in a moment where they’re still recovering from the contraction, which is the Gauls arrival. Dr Rad 24:50Well, Dr, G, you could not have given me any more perfect a segue. You want to understand the mindset of the conservatives that don’t want to go to Veii. You’re about to get pages of it be. Because Livy’s about to give you a giant speech from Camillus. No, before I get into the speech, I will give you the exact details that Livy tells me Camillus focuses on first. So he goes to the Senate and he gets them to issue a decree so that he can actually go about the religious program that he thinks needs to happen in order to make sure that everything is square for the Romans. So exactly as you said, shrines and temples, they obviously need to be purified. They need to be restored after the Gallic sack. If we think of the Gallic sack as maybe being more about the Gauls seizing any portable wealth that Rome had as a city, that would make sense. Shrines and temples are places that the Gauls definitely would have gone to to see if there was anything valuable inside those buildings, which presumably would have been a bit more monumental or perhaps well cared for than some of the other dwellings that would have existed in Rome at this time. And I kind of do think that that’s probably what the Gauls were more after. I don’t think they were actually that interested in setting Rome on fire, and certainly there’s no evidence of that. And we also have this reference to duumvirs, who who are asked to look through the sibylline books to make sure that the proper rights are followed. And the sibylline books come up again and again in our histories of Rome. These are books that the Romans tend to turn to in times of trouble when they need to look to the answers for things in this collection that has been put together and and also make sure that everything is is going according to plan, as seems to be what they’re doing here. This is where Camillus also suggests that Rome needs to have this covenant of hospitality with car a now in Livy’s account, that’s because car a took in the refugee Romans, so the vessels who were fleeing with the sacred objects, carre took them in and kept them safe. And this is why it’s important to honor that. Because of that, the Roman gods have still been able to receive some worship whilst the galaxy was going on, which, as we’ve talked about in a previous episode, apparently, was like six or seven months, so quite a long time. However, it could be, as we were just talking about, that the people of carre are the ones that actually retrieved the gold for the Romans, and therefore that’s why they have this reputation. But that is not mentioned by Livy, Dr G 27:33yeah, we owe you big time. Dr Rad 27:37He also wants the Capitolini games to be held. So these are games that are set up in honor of Jupiter, because Jupiter did not allow Rome to completely fall. They held that tiny piece of territory amidst all the trouble, even though some modern historians don’t actually think that that is true, and that Rome was maybe captured in its entirety. We’ll run with the version that the Romans have, which is that they held that Capitolini Hill till their dying breath. Dr G 28:09They held out that little square where Jupiter’s temple also stands. They managed to salvage that. Thank you, Jupiter, Dr Rad 28:18yes, and in order for this to happen, he puts together a college of priests who are going to be involved in organizing and holding the Capitolini games called the Capitolini, once again, Rome with the clever names. Dr G 28:36They do love a clever name. Dr Rad 28:37These men are chosen from the men who were involved in holding the hill originally. Obviously, that can’t be true forever, but he chooses from amongst those men who had stayed behind in Rome the whole time and helped to hold the hill. Now, we actually don’t know for certain when the Capitolini games were first held in Rome. We, as usual, have varying accounts that show the Romans themselves are a little confused. Certainly, Camillus is a popular choice as the person who founds the Capitolini games or sets up the Capitolini games, but we do also have references to figures like Romulus organizing the first Capitolini games. What we can say safely is that they old. They real old, Dr G 29:22quite, quite old. Yes, okay, that’s really interesting. I think tapping into the idea of having held the Capitol line, and that being the foundation story essentially for the capitolini’s games is it feels like a nice, neat narrative. So I can see why it would be an appealing sort of backstory, so an etiology for what’s going on here. Yes, there are some weird sort of connections that sort of crop up amongst all of this, and I don’t want to destroy what might be coming up for you, but. But are we going to talk about the head? Dr Rad 30:03Yes, but not quite yet. That comes up in the speech, okay. Oh, building up. We’re talking about the same head. Dr G 30:12Wink Wink. Listeners, watch out if you already know about the head. This is a spoiler. Dr Rad 30:19So this is where Livy also tells me about the temple being set up to Aius Locutius. So that’s the God that is now recognized because of the omen that was given to that plebeian who was ridiculed and not believed before the Gallic Sack actually happened. And now, of course, Camillus also has to decide what to do with the gold because in this account, the Gauls never got it. The Romans collected it, but they kept it. Now, this is where it gets a bit confusing, because, as you know, Livy was very clear that the gold was somehow taken from state funds and also topped up by contributions from people like the matrons, this group of random women that we get to reference every now and then, Dr G 31:04oh, look. And Diodorus Siculus also backs up that idea that the women contributed to that fund. So that is a sort of an enduring, kind of repeated narrative as well, that the women were involved. Dr Rad 31:16Sure, I believe that the women were involved. Do I believe that the Romans didn’t borrow a little bit of their funding from maybe some temple treasury. I don’t know that I do. Dr G, Dr G 31:30it’s hard, you know, you’re stuck on a hill. What are you gonna do? Dr Rad 31:33Yeah, well, the Romans had gathered up certain temple treasure and stored it all in the temple of Jupiter, because, of course, that’s on the Capitoline, which is what they were defending. And now that the siege is all over, they can’t remember where it all came from. They’re like, Ah, I guess we should have labeled this. Oh, this is awkward. I don’t know what to do. Dr G 31:56Did nobody keep a spreadsheet for this guys? Guys, I Dr Rad 32:00know this is what Excel was invented for Jesus Christ, Marcus. So they decide that they’re just going to wave their magic wand and say, poof, all of this gold is now sacred and it’s going to be placed under Jupiter’s throne. Dr G 32:18Ta, da, ooh. All right, well, at the risk of making all the other gods that have their temples elsewhere in the city, that have had their treasure poor loin to go up to the top of that hill. Well, that’s bold move Rome. Dr Rad 32:32It didn’t happen. That’s why we don’t have to worry about it. Now this is where the Romans also decide they’re going to give a vote of thanks to the matrons for their contribution, and they are, once again, recognized in the traditional manner that matrons usually are when they help the other Romans out, which is they get to have eulogies at their funerals, like their superior men or something. Dr G 32:59This is big, all right, somebody’s going to talk about you after you die. It’s a special privilege, exactly. Dr Rad 33:06It’s very unusual for women to get this sort of honor. Again, we’re not entirely sure that this would have happened, but sure, let’s run with it. Give the women something in return for their contributions. Dr G 33:19You can have a gift, but you have to be dead first, so make the most of it. Dr Rad 33:23Well, I think that in See, this is the thing in Livy’s account, as you say, it is very neat. In Livy’s account, the Roman women contribute this. They contribute their gold so that sacred treasure can be left untouched. So they’ve got their state funds secured on the Capitol. They don’t have quite enough to pay the Gauls, so the Roman matrons chip in, and that way it’s all nice and neat. No sacred treasure is touched in Livy’s account. But as we say at this point in time, what is money? What is goods? What are we talking about? And it just seems really unlikely that these besieged Romans, when everyone else has fled the city, actually had this large lump of capital just sitting there that wasn’t temple treasure. But anyway, I’ve talked about this enough. Once all of this stuff is taken care of, Camillus can rest easy. Dr G he’s got all his piety out of his system. He feels like Rome is now in a good place. Now is when he can turn to properly deal with these troublesome tribunes and the question of they so he goes to an assembly, as do the Senate, and he’s about to give the mother of all speeches. Dr G 34:38Dare I ask? How many pages this runs to in the translation. Dr Rad 34:42Oh, pages. Well, I mean, for Livy, it’s long, like it’s nothing compared to probably what you used to have to go through with Dionysius back in the good old days. But it’s long as far Dr G 34:51as when I had a source. Okay, all right, I’m gonna strap myself in. Dr Rad 34:56Yep. Get ready for it. Yeah. Camillus is particular. Ly distressed by this whole situation, because the one thing that sort of made him feel somewhat okay about being in exile in Ardea was the fact that he actually he hated the idea that people even wanted to go to they kind of made him go, You know what? Maybe I shouldn’t be in Rome. Maybe Rome does suck. Maybe our deer is not so bad, because the Romans are actually considering going to Veii – disgusting, Dr G 35:29such a low move, he Dr Rad 35:31actually says he would never have even gone back to Rome, even if the Senate and the people had begged him just so he could avoid tribunes like this. Dr G 35:44I just this Roman mindset is baffling. It really is. Dr Rad 35:48He really only came back because Rome was just in such a bad situation. He felt like he really couldn’t say no. But I mean, if it had been a little bit better, maybe he wouldn’t Dr G because tribunes, they’re the worst. He then points out, annoyingly logically, why even bother to fight the Gauls? Why drive them out of Roman territory if you’re then just going to turn around and abandon the City immediately? Why did I do all of this? Why did I come out of exile? Why did I do the Rocky montage? Dr G 36:21But counterpoint, counterpoint. It’s not all Rome moving to Veii. It’s just some of the people moving to ve like we’re not talking about leaving Rome in the dust and pretending like it never existed. We’re just saying some people are now living on this hill over here. Dr Rad 36:38That was the initial proposal back before the Gallic sack had happened, you’re absolutely right, they were talking about maybe dividing the population and only sending some I think at this point though, Rome is so atrociously destroyed in Livy’s account that maybe it’s more we actually all relocate. Even worse, even be like, Dr G 36:59Guys, yeah, everything’s been burnt down here. Like, let’s Veii still has some building standing. Like, bite the bullet, just let’s move. Dr Rad 37:08Yeah, so Camillus so Camillus then says, you know, the Romans have managed to hold the Capitol and the Citadel all throughout this terrible time. Again. Why would you put yourself through that. I mean, basically the brink of starvation and all that deprivation. We can’t even imagine what those guys went through, and then they’re just going to walk away and leave it voluntarily, that patch that they defended for so long. I don’t think so. Camillus also brings in his religious side here. Of course, he feels like Rome’s gods, their religious traditions that had endured for hundreds of years at this point had always managed to protect Rome, even in this moment, there has been that level of protection. How could the Romans think of turning their backs on their gods now? Because, as you pointed out, there are certain things which are very much tied to the city of Rome itself. You can’t just move them to a new location, at least the way that the Romans have done them in the past. Camillus points out that if the Romans actually do their math, get out their Excel spreadsheet over the past few years, whilst Yes, they’d had some very high hives and some very low lows, but the highs had always coincided with moments where the Romans were listening to the gods. Need he say more? Dr G, this misfortune with the gods had all happened because the Romans had started turning their backs on the gods and not listening to the many warnings that were provided to them that could have helped them to avoid this whole situation. Once the chips were down with the Gauls, then the Romans started to get back on track again, get religious again. They had made sure that they held the capital and Jupiter Optimus, Maximus had helped them out as well. The Gauls had never managed to take the Capitol line. They’d also buried their holy relics, because the Romans were trying to make sure that such things could not fall into barbarian hands as mere loot, mere booty. It had all been protected. The earth of Rome itself had protected their holy relics. How could the Romans think of leaving the earth the soil? Dr, G, Dr G 39:31well, I feel like Camillus is getting carried away, because part of the trouble that Rome has faced is because he’s forgotten some of his oaths. Like, lest we forget that Camillus is part of the problem. Dr Rad 39:45Look, maybe he’s not trying to deny that. Maybe he’s trying to, I think the thing is, here’s the thing is forgetfulness. You know, once you realize you forgot something, he’s like, Ooh, this is going to be awkward, guys, but I need some of that booty back. Yeah, he always tries and does the right thing. He just sometimes he seems to be a little bit of a buffoon, Dr G 40:12debatable, but yeah, look here he is getting up and being like, you just got to make things right with the gods. I’m like, buddy, you need a mirror. Dr Rad 40:20Nonetheless, he’s very much on this bandwagon that once the Romans were facing danger, they did the right thing. They made sure that everything was safe, that was holy, kept the temple treasures safe, and due to this, it’s because of this that the Romans managed to get back their land, not necessarily because of him, but because the gods were now back on their side, and this is something that Livy also mentioned, that fortune was now back on the Roman side. When they were able to massacre every living goal, there are no goals left. Dr G, the Romans have killed them all, and the Gauls got their punishment, because when they tried to do their trickery with the scales, what happened? They didn’t get the girl, did they? No, no, the gods made sure that Camilla showed up at just the right time to make sure that they would be punished. I mean, do you need any Dr G 41:21certain scholarly accounts only for certain types of evidence? Dr Rad 41:28Camillus really wants the Romans to realize that they have only, just by the skin of their teeth, managed to avert total disaster, and yet, if they decide to relocate today, they’re just going to be running headlong into another one, and he is here to give them their wake up call. The entire city of Rome is completely shot through with their religion, their gods, the sacrifices that need to happen every year, the Holy Days that have to be observed every year. Are the Romans really thinking they can just leave? He comes back to this point a lot. Do the Romans really think they can just leave? Not just the state deities. Dr G, think of the family gods. So I presume he’s referring to things like the lares, which FYI we’ve done a special episode on archaic religion in Republican Rome that you might like to listen to to understand more about that. But they are definitely important to the Romans. He thinks, how does this stack up when you also compare the conduct of the Romans right now where they’re thinking of leaving to that of Gaius Fabius during the Gallic sack. I mean, he had risked death to make sure that the appropriate rituals had been carried out. He did not let the worship slip. Famine or no famine, Siege or no siege, and now the citizens we’re not even faced with any danger are again thinking that they can somehow be more cash about all these rituals when there’s no immediate reason for them to ignore what is going on? What are they thinking? Dr G 43:20Just a slight question, is it the case that when Livy is writing that there seems to be some concerns about people leaving Rome for other places? Is Is there some sort of contemporary anxiety around robe itself at this point in time when Livy is composing this history? Because this sounds like somebody who’s a little bit scared that maybe things aren’t going well in contemporary, late Republican Rome. Dr Rad 43:47Well, I mean, I think the Gallic sack is meant to be a pretty bad time, even if it didn’t happen exactly the way that Romans say it happened. I mean, we’re calling into question a lot of the details that we’re given, but I don’t doubt there was some conflict with Gallic peoples at this point in time. I absolutely don’t dispute that. There’s way too much evidence to the contrary, and not just in Rome. Definitely there are Gauls about they’re looking, probably for land. They probably are looking for portable wealth. So I’m not disputing that. It might be a bad time, but they, I think, is the big thing here about Romans sort of deciding its destiny, as we’ve talked about. It seems odd, given that the siege of Veil lasted for 10 years, and then when the Romans finally win, they seem somewhat surprised and don’t really have a plan as to what they’re going to actually do with Veii once and conquer it. Dr G 44:36But this is one of those classic lessons from history where people do not anticipate the consequences of their actions, and then things work out in the way that they were hoping, but they do not have any idea about the next step. And you’re like guys, you’re now in the position where you have exactly what you want. Dr Rad 44:55Now this is where Camillus also starts to try and anticipate some of the arguments that the tribunes. Going to throw back at him, of course, he says, you know, maybe the tribunes are going to say, don’t worry about it. You can just transfer all the rites and rituals and all the family gods to Veii. Or what if the pontiffs and the flamens, they just visit the old side of Rome when they need to for the rites. You know, they just fly in, fly out, they’re there and back in the day. No sweat. But to this, Camillus says, No, this will not satisfy the gods. It is not good enough. So don’t even think about it. The gods have high standards. You cannot hold the feast of Jupiter anywhere else but the Capitol period. Now, what he is referring to here is a banquet that was held on the 15th of November where a couch would be set up for Jupiter and Juno and Minerva had little stools on either side, and they would have this feast for Jupiter. So that’s what he’s particularly referring to, and you’ll like this. Dr G, this is where he brings up the Vestal Virgins. What about Vesta’s fires? They can’t just be moved. They belong to Rome itself. He also brings up, and I’m going to quote my translation directly here, the image which is preserved as a pledge of empire in her temple, which is a reference to an image of Pallas known as the Palladium, which was supposedly brought to Italy by Aeneas, so very much part of the Roman foundational myths, linking them to the Trojan Wars, something very important to them. He also brings up what he refers to as the sacred shields. Yes, these go back to the reign of NUMA Doctor G Another favorite of yours, indeed. Yes. So it started up with Mars Gradivus, or Gradivus and Quirinus, the idea of the sacred shields, and they’re sometimes, I think, called the ancillia. I believe, I think we probably actually referred to these things before, but supposedly the original one came from heaven. There were 11 replicas made, and each one was given to one of the 12 Salii Priests of Mars. No one knows which one the original one is, but there is an original. Dr G and Camillus is not happy about this situation. Dr G 47:32There is an original. And the priests of the Salii are the ones who look after that, right? And it is very important, and you do not want to lose any of the shields, because each one of them could be the one that fell from heaven. And Camillus is tapping into ideas here that Romans do have about location being a primary feature of their devotion to the gods, because there is no doubt, from a Roman perspective, that you would not be able to perform the rites of Vesta in a different location. Each city could have priestesses to Vesta, but if you went to Veii, they would be priestesses of Vesta in Veii. So it’s fundamentally not Rome anymore. So this taps into a kind of fundamental sense of like, what is Rome? In terms of like, the broader understanding of self and Rome is at least in part, fundamentally about the location. It’s that spot on the Tiber. It is those hills on which they have built those structures, and nothing is able to replicate that. And the real concern is that their understanding of their relationship with the gods is dependent on that location as well. So there’s no guarantees if you move to Veii that things will work out for you, because the gods are the same, but you are now different. And what does being in a right relationship with the Roman gods really look like? And because they have this sense that it’s tied to location, it’s impossible to leave, and we see that coming through in other things as well. So I think we talked recently on Let’s Talk about Myths, Baby podcast, about the triumphal procession, and that in two is geographically tied to the city of Rome. You wouldn’t have a triumph somewhere else. Romans up expanding a lot, but some things are fundamental to location, and so Camillus is tapping into a deep Roman definition of self, which is about this place, and only this place which is really quite fascinating. And I think Livy is doing something interesting here by tapping into that as well, definitely. Dr Rad 49:51And so even though this might be a speech invented for Camillus by Livy, maybe May, May. See at the same time the stuff that Camillus is referring to as examples of things that are particularly tied to Rome. As you’ve just say, they are definitely of tremendous antiquity to the Roman people. You know this feast of Jupiter that was held every year, it does go all the way back to a point where we can’t really trace when it started the Palladium. Again, there’s definitely question marks about how Aeneas supposedly brought this to Rome. But nonetheless, the idea of it is something again, that’s it’s quite old. It’s meant to be quite an old example, and it just goes to show some of the stuff that the vessels were put in charge of protecting the vessels themselves, obviously very ancient. You know that there’s a lot of stuff here that he’s tapping into that is so archaic we can’t be 100% sure of the origin these things. So he is tapping into those really, really archaic traditions, including like the lares, for example. You know, when we were talking about religion, the lares, the Romans themselves, didn’t even know exactly when that all began and when that started, and exactly where that came from. They have lots of theories, and some of them are probably tapping into something, but we can’t say for certain this is how it began and this is how it evolved. So he’s bringing in all of that kind of stuff, which makes sense, because at for this time period, obviously that stuff is a little less ancient than it is for someone like Livy writing many years later. And so Camillus goes back and points out there’s just such a contrast he feels between the Romans that he’s addressing now and the ancestors of the Romans who helped to establish these temples, these rites. I mean, they set them up as rituals to be passed down and to be carried out. And what are the current day Romans actually going to do with them? Just leave them, disregard them. He points out exactly what you said. How can they actually move cities and move all this ritual without it ending up being absolutely horrific. I mean, they thought the Gallic sack was bad. That was just after ignoring a couple of things and getting a few things wrong. What are you gonna do now Dr G 52:13when you ignore a plebeian, what if you ignore the whole geography of the city? Yeah, exactly, guys, it’s too risky. Yeah. Dr Rad 52:21And he also points out the effort they went to to entice Juno over when they conquered they’re like, why did we even try and tempt Juno over to Rome and then build her this whole temple on the Aventine? Why did I just build the temple to Aius Locutius? Why did I found the Capitoline and games if you’re all just gonna leave, because this is all stuff that’s obviously, you know, happening in the city. The vestals always stay in their same place, unless there is an extremely serious enemy attack, like the one that just happened that absolutely forces them to leave the flamen diailis, which, again, we talked about in our episode on religion. As you said, there are so many rules that the Flamen dialis has to follow, including they’re not allowed to sleep outside of Rome even for one night. So how is that going to work if you just want to move to they? Is he just gonna stay there by himself, all alone? Dr G 53:23Well, obviously he’s not moving, so, yeah, well, he’ll be there with his wife. So cute. Those two can stay. Everybody else has to move. Dr Rad 53:34Yeah, sorry. I probably should actually say, sorry, he Flamen dialis is one of the most important flamens In the Roman system, there are three big ones, and he’s one of the three big ones. Very important, very important. And he says, And what about all the other stuff? What about the pomerium? We have a sacred boundary. Have you not noticed it’s a pretty big deal. We have all these rules about what you can and cannot do inside, outside that line. You know, there’s all these rituals that have to go with making it bigger. What are we going to do about that? How is that all going to work? How does that work if we just going to move posh? What

Special Episode - Swords and Cinema with Dr Jeremiah McCall

You know that the Partial Historians can’t resist talking about Ancient Rome on film, so we were thrilled to chat to Dr Jeremiah McCall about his book, Swords and Cinema. The cover of Swords and Cinema by Dr Jeremiah McCall Who is our special guest? Dr Jeremiah McCall (or DMac as his students call him) is a teacher at Cincinnati Country Day School in Ohio with a PhD in Ancient History. Along with an interest in Roman military and political systems in the Republic, he has done a lot of work on pedagogy of using video games to learn about history, publishing Gaming the Past: Using Video Games to Teach Secondary History in 2022. He divides his research time between historical game studies and Roman history. Dr McCall’s other publications include The Cavalry of the Roman Republic (2002); the Sword of Rome (2012), Clan Fabius: Defenders of Rome (2018) and Rivalries that Destroyed the Roman Republic (2022). Manly Men We will touch on the battle scenes and depiction of the Roman military in all your favourite Roman movies and TV shows. Things to Look Out For: The defeat of Spartacus – Spartacus vs. Rome: The Last Battle The battle of Alessia (52 BCE) in HBO’s Rome – Rome Fighting with Gauls HD The battle of Philippi in HBO’s Rome – HBO Rome – Battle of Philippi (Battle only) The opening battle sequence in Gladiator (2000) – Gladiator 2000 Opening Battle And a bit on Centurion (2010) and The Eagle (2011) to finish! The Eagle | Channing Tatum Fends Off A Midnight Sneak Attack The Eagle | Channing Tatum Leads Roman Centurions Into Battle Centurion 2010 Best movie Scene HD Plus some things that get set on fire! You will need your popcorn for this special episode! Sound Credits Our music is by Bettina Joy de Guzman. Automated Transcript Dr Rad 0:15Welcome to the partial historians. Speaker 1 0:19We explore all the details of ancient Rome, Dr Rad 0:23everything from political scandals, the love affairs, the battle’s waged, and when citizens turn against each other, I’m Dr Rad Speaker 1 0:33And 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 0:44Join us as we trace the journey of Rome from the founding of the city. Dr Rad 0:54Hello and welcome to a special episode of the partial historians. I am one of your hosts. Dr rad, Dr G 1:02and I am Dr G, Dr Rad 1:05Dr G, we are joined by somebody who shares a passionate interest of mine, actually a couple, I think, probably as well as yours. We are very lucky to be joined by Dr Jeremiah McCall, or DMac, as his students call him, which I think makes him very much at home on this particular show. He is a teacher at Cincinnati Country Day School in Ohio, and he has a PhD in ancient history, along with an interest in Roman military and political systems in the Republic. He has done a lot of work on pedagogy, of using video games to learn about history, publishing Gaming the Past: Using video games to teach secondary history in 2022. He divides his research time between historical game studies and Roman history. Dr McCall’s other publications include The Cavalry of the Roman Republic in 2002, The Sword of Rome in 2012, Clan Fabius: Defenders of Rome in 2018 and Rivalries that destroyed the Roman Republic in 2022 but today we are here to talk all things, movies and the military. Welcome. D Mac, thanks. Dr Jeremiah McCall 2:21It’s great to be here. I’m really excited to talk about this. Dr Rad 2:24Oh, we are very excited. I always cannot turn down an opportunity to talk about Rome on film. Dr Jeremiah McCall 2:32It’s interesting the book, I gather the book did well enough, right? Like I didn’t make a fortune. Buy me a coffee, coffee, and that’s better than buying a book, but I gather it did well enough that they put it into a paperback, but it’s one that really I haven’t gotten to talk to you about a lot, and I certainly thought it was kind of a fun idea, so I’m glad to be here. So Dr Rad 2:53can you please maybe start by giving us a bit of an overview of the development of the Roman army, because your interest in this book is all about the military and the Roman army and how they appear on screen as well as the Greeks, but we’re just going to ignore that part for today. So maybe knowing a little bit about the Roman military would help our listeners sort of get situated. Dr Jeremiah McCall 3:12Sure, absolutely. I guess one of the things I should say about the book is there are lots of different ways one can approach film and history, and I was absolutely not approaching it as a trained scholar of film in history. I was approaching it as a bunch of years sitting around on a couch having a beer or something like that, and you’re watching the movie, and somebody’s like, Oh, that’s so fake. Or yeah, that’s how it really was. And, you know, writing a book for that just sort of like, okay, they’re films, and some of them are really great films. But you know, are they depicting battle? Are they depicting armies and soldiers and fighting in ways that kind of fit the evidence? So the Roman army of the Republic, if you go back, so I was, I was saying to Dr G A little earlier that I had just listened to part of your we’re too episode. So if listeners are kind of in the fourth century with you about to attack, they at that point, sort of in the late three hundreds. We think that Rome had a military that was essentially like most of the Greek city states. So it was called a phalanx. I’m not sure if your readers are familiar with it, but basically the idea is you got your citizen soldiers together, and they had big, round shields and stabby spears and maybe a helmet or something else like that, but they lined up in these sort of large formations, with the idea being that it’s kind of like a shield wall. Everybody covered themselves and the people next to them, and phalanxes don’t turn well, and they don’t go on rough ground well. And the only thing they’re really, really good at is kind of moving forward and going stabby, stabby, at anything that they see in front of them. So that seems to be. Earliest Roman military system, and like the Greeks, they divided it up so that your wealth determined whether you would fight in the Phalanx, or whether you might be a slinger or something like that. But eventually, and we don’t know why, right? I mean, the thing about the Roman Republic is our evidence is so bad for most things that we’re looking at. Amen, yeah, right, exactly. Well, you two are so courageously going through, you know, military tribunes with consular powers and all that stuff. And I’m like, oh my goodness, yeah, wouldn’t it be nice if we really knew about that? I think that’s our conclusion most episodes, yeah. Well, I mean, I think it’s important, right? I was, I was saying, before we started recording, you know, I took notes for this, and, and, and you both know, as you’re, you know, with your own PhDs in the field, it’s not about instant recall or memorizing facts, right? It’s about being able to look at the evidence and ask the questions and, and sort of go from there, you know, point of fact, I had to review to make sure that I had my Roman army talk in good shape. Anyways, going back to the Phalanx, somewhere in the late three hundreds, three elevens, often given as a date, the Romans seem to have shifted their military away from the Phalanx, and they adopted this system that persisted through most of the Republic, which was called the manipular army, Plutarch and Livy are sources for this. They don’t agree on most of the major points. They’ve got different names, they’ve got different types of units. They’ve got different numbers involved. Bless all the philologists out there that can figure out, you know, who’s got the better source, or something like that. That is beyond me, but this seems to be the basic deal. Basically, you had four legions under the command, each under the command of a council by 311 they had passed a law to do that, apparently. And each of those legions was divided up into maniples. And maniples, I think the word means handful, I believe, or something like that, is where it comes from. But basically we’re a group of soldiers, 120 normally, and then 60 and the smallest side. And so if you had 120 soldiers, I believe, you had 10 maniples of what they called the Hastati. So these were the guys with the big spears that kind of charged forward and stab. Sometimes. They had a pilum, which we’re going to talk a lot about pilam pila today, because they’re not in any of the movies, and I don’t understand why. So the Hastati were the heavy infantry who would start the battle. The principes were behind them, and they were sort of the men in their prime, and they would kind of continue on the battle. And then after them were the triarii, who were probably armed like hoplites, and their job was just, if everything hit the fan, they could sort of form a defensive group. So the idea seems to be that these maniples were arranged in, sort of think about like the five spots on a die. So you have a gap in between each line that’s being filled by a manifold behind it, and we kind of think they fought that way with gaps in their lines, but we don’t really understand how they did. But the thing that the sources seem to agree upon is somehow the back lines were able to relieve the front lines, maybe even in the middle of battle. We’re not entirely sure about that, and that’s something that shows up in the sources, too. Anyway, the manipular army was flexible. It had small units that could go around and do important things on the battlefield. And right, the Romans ended up winning lots and lots and lots and lots of battles. Dr Rad 8:34What they did, oh, my god, everybody, Dr Jeremiah McCall 8:41it’s so true. Well, it was so funny, because, like, on a certain level, right? The movies all depict the the opponents of the Romans as not being as effective. And I guess that must be true, right? I mean, on some Speaker 1 8:52level, on a practical level, it seems like that might be the case. So you mentioned a couple of written sources like Livy and Plutarch when we’re talking about the ways that we start to understand the Roman army is the written source material, the kind of material we’re able to use when we’re evaluating depictions of battles and Roman soldiers on screen. Or are there other sources we should be interested in, and what things do we know very little about? Dr Jeremiah McCall 9:22Sure, fantastic. So we’ve got the literary sources right. Livy Polybius, little bit of Plutarch when we start, when we get to the end of the Republic, Caesar, becomes invaluable with his civil war and his and his Gallic Wars. When we get into the Empire, we have tastus talks about military things, and Ammianus Marcellinus on the late end of those things. In all of that, there are no soldiers accounts. We do not have anything that’s coming from people that actually fought in battle, other than as a general, or certainly, at least didn’t fight in the battles they were describing. If you think about the Greeks as a difference, right? We have poetry fragments. We have. Have a historical account written by people who actually did fight in some of their battles. So that’s kind of one of our big things, is we have all these sources, some of them right when you get to Livy, he never participated in a battle in his life, as far as we know. So we have a lot of unexpert people talking about something that they didn’t directly experience. And then there’s all of us, thankfully. So right, not fighting with each other, with with, well, I’m not fighting with anybody with anything but, but certainly not with stab stabby spears and swords and things like that. And so, you know, one of the things that happens is trying to figure out, well, what was this actually like when the stakes were real and people, you know, people were trying to kill each other. Archeological sources almost non existent for the Republic. We would love to have a depiction of what the soldiers, different soldiers in the maniples, look like. There is an altar to demius, ahenobarbus, Bronzebeard in first century, I think early first century, that seems to show a Roman infantry soldier and a Roman cavalry person, but that’s kind of it. When we get to the Empire, we have all of those victory columns, right? And the triumphal arches are like Titus triumphal arch, and it’s Trajan and Marcus Aurelius, right? I think that have the columns. I think Trajan Speaker 1 11:19has a column, doesn’t? He doesn’t. Marcus. Marcus Aurelius has a column as well. Yeah, yeah, yeah, with the spiraling sort of reliefs, yep. Dr Jeremiah McCall 11:27And so they show soldiers in battle, and that helps us a little bit too. So those are kind of our big things, as far as what we have for sources. Now, what don’t we know as a result of that? Well, everything. Dr Rad 11:39Damn, let’s just end this podcast right now. Dr Jeremiah McCall 11:46Much like Socrates, we are wise and that we know, we know nothing. No, that’s actually, that’s Dr Rad 11:50actually wild when you think about it, because the Roman army is obviously such a big part of what people think about when they think of Rome, and generally when we do obviously see Rome appear in the cinema. It is focusing around moments of conflict where there are going to be the spectacular battle scenes. So it is wild to think about how little we actually know. Dr Jeremiah McCall 12:10Yeah, so you got to fill in a lot of imagination. And I guess, you know, we’ll talk about that more, but I guess that’s where I kind of come down on these movies, is you’ve got to have some imagination. You can’t, you know, you’ve got to picture this somehow in your head if you’re really going to kind of bring it to life. So what? What do you do when you know nothing other than these, you know, carved in stone figures, absolutely. Dr Rad 12:30Well, maybe we should start talking about a real example. And listeners of the show will not be surprised to hear that. We’re going to start with my personal favorite, Spartacus, 1960 now, this is a bit of an unusual one, in the sense that it is set in the late Republic. We don’t have a ton of movies that are set in the Republic, and this obviously details the uprising of the gladiator Spartacus and his war against Rome. However, one of the weird things about this film is that there is a bit of a lack of battle scenes. You know, you might expect, given that this is about a war between a gladiator and Rome, that there’s a lot of battle scenes, but there aren’t a ton. But can you talk us through the way that that final battle scene between the slave army and Crassus Roman forces was represented because that’s perhaps one of the more spectacular sequences. Yeah, absolutely. Dr Jeremiah McCall 13:23And I really had fun kind of going back. I don’t think I had all the video clips when I wrote the book originally, so it was great going back. And so when you look at Spartacus, yeah, and I think I remember reading about this somewhere, I’m pretty sure they had more battle scenes that they had to cut along the way that. Dr Rad 13:40Yeah, it’s part of the very troubled production history of this film. There was a lot of talk about what they were going to film, when they were going to film it. The battle scenes were certainly something that they were going to add some in at the end, because they realized that they hadn’t really shown Spartacus winning and so the Romans being afraid of him didn’t entirely make sense in the way that the film came together. They’re like, Wait, why are they afraid of him? You don’t really see him winning terribly much, but it became part of the incredibly chaotic later production of this film that they didn’t end up getting a ton of them back into the movie. The one that you do see, of course, is Spartacus defeat, which is this battle that we’re talking about, which not everybody in the film was thrilled about. That. That was the big spectacular sequence, because they were trying to build up a Spartacus who was a very impressive military figure in the equal of the Romans. And they felt that by giving all this screen time to his defeat, it again, didn’t quite match up with the portrayal that they were going for. Dr Jeremiah McCall 14:43Do I understand correctly? I swear I came across this recently, that there’s also that, you know, sort of cold war mentality, that there was a fear that Spartacus could represent, sort of the proletariat forces, kind of triumphing over the good imperialist America. I’m sorry, Romans, no. Speaker 1 14:59Yeah, we can’t have that happening under no circumstances. Dr Jeremiah McCall 15:03Oh, I’m going to be so good and not talk about politics today. Dr Rad 15:08Oh, no, look, I think there definitely could have been a bit of that going on. But of course, one of the things that’s interesting about Spartacus is the fact that so many people who were working on this film were communists or ex communists. So Dalton Trumbo, obviously was one of the people fighting to show Spartacus as an impressive military figure. And Howard Fast, whose novel The movie was based on, had very deliberately set up Spartacus and the slaves as a kind of proto communist society, where it was very ideal and utopian. In his novel, that was a very clear message, if you read the book that this is based on, so they’re probably actually not wrong, isn’t it? Dr Jeremiah McCall 15:50It’s fascinating how it’s all a playground. I, you know, I I came into reception studies, really long way around that wasn’t my training. And then I got into video games and history. But as you both know, as teachers, as high school educators, you’re both high school educators, right? I thought, I thought I got that right. Reception studies is everything we do, right? What’s a student? But you know, you know, learning with you and studying with you, and then you have this interesting example of, well, how do they take this, this evidence? How do they take their readings and their discussion and their video games and stuff like that? So, yeah, it’s all reception studies sort of on a certain level. Okay, so last battle scene, right? Spartacus and his army are up at the top of the hill. Crassus and his army, his army has sort of paraded by as he’s sort of sitting on the side watching, and that’s probably reasonably accurate, since the generals wouldn’t necessarily be in the front as they were doing that. But basically, you’ve got this mash up. There’s a scholar in Manchester, I think Manchester in Britain, Richard Cole, who’s been doing some work on video games as historical video games as mashups and Spartacus, the battle is definitely a mash up. You’ve got, first of all, the classic, you’ve got the sculpted body armor made out of leather with all the muscles. Not ever do we have any evidence that any average soldier was wearing these. They’re probably expensive. They may not even have been that comfortable. So they’re wearing those they’ve got the Taru gaze right the letter, leather flaps going down to guard their abdomen, and that’s all mash up. The shields are mostly straight instead of curved, and so their helmets are kind of okay, but otherwise, it’s a little Greek, it’s a little Etruscan. It’s a little Roman as they’re going on. And leather armor seems to be a fascination for lots of filmmakers, and they just didn’t wear it for good reason. It doesn’t stop a spear or a sword or anything like that. Don’t you think it must be about what props they had, you know, like what they had on set, what they were able to kind of get? Dr Rad 17:59Oh, they like reusing things. They Dr G 18:02definitely like reusing things. Yeah. So they’ve Dr Jeremiah McCall 18:05got, they’ve got their Gladius looking swords, um, so that’s okay, um, but the spears that they have are clearly thrusting spears. Now here is nerd 101, on spears. Okay, if, if the diameter of the spear shaft is like an inch and a half or two inches, and it is straight the long way, and you have kind of like a broad shade, broad tip on it. Then it is a spear, and you’re using it to stab somebody and keep in your hands. But the Romans used the pilum, which was this kind of specialized javelin, where you throw it, and it was made of a wooden shaft and socket, and then it had kind of like a really thin spit of metal, and then a really kind of fine tip. And the idea was they would throw it before they went into battle, as far as our sources can tell us, and it did a devastating job, demoralizing enemies. And sometimes, if it went through shields, it bent very easily. And we don’t know whether they plan for it to bend or it was just was just luck on their part, but it goes through the shields and bends, and then you’ve got this six to 10 pound weight holding down your shield as well, so it makes it harder to defend yourself. And listeners will have to report into you, and you’ll have to get back to me. I don’t think there’s a single movie that’s tried to represent Dr Rad 19:19this. I can’t think of one. No, Dr G 19:22I’m keen for details. Get in touch listeners. Dr Jeremiah McCall 19:26I think it must be really well. See today though, they have all the special effects, but it must be really hard to represent a bunch of javelins, like going through the air and people. So usually what they end up doing is sort of just a shield smash instead. So they don’t, so they have stabby spears, they don’t have pila as they’re going in the part that kind of fascinated me as I was looking at it. There’s some promotional materials that talk about how the Roman was organized. A Roman army was organized in the in the first century, and they had shifted. The short version is they shifted from maniples to. Cohorts. The cohorts were uniform soldiers. They were all heavy infantry, equipped and armed the same, but they still seem to have that gap system where the rear lines could kind of support the front lines. Kubrick goes for this. He has 10 units, as you should have a Roman legion should have 10 cohorts, and he’s got 10 units, and there’s a gap between them, they look like the five sided dice, except for there’s actually four rows of them, which no source ever attests to, but he’s got four rows of them. And they march up, and then when they get to the bottom of the hill, the front line extends so the two cohorts are in front extend so that they become a solid line of soldiers. And then they march up the hill, and the rest sit back. And I don’t know if they’re taking tea or having a holiday or something like that, but they’re not doing the thing that you would expect them to do, which is support the front lines. So I love the fact that they tried to do something with these gaps in the mandibles, and they tried to do something with formation. And I think when it comes to sort of the grandeur of the Roman army. They did a really cool job. But this is not how it happened. This is clearly not how it happened, but that’s actually one of the areas we don’t know a lot about. We don’t know how it happened, but it doesn’t seem to be this. Suppose you were a soldier going up a hill, and you saw some people at the top of the hill, and they had these logs, and they were standing there, and they lit the logs on fire. Okay, so you’ve got the flaming logs and you’re at the bottom of the hill, and they’re at the top of the hill, and they’re still holding the flaming logs, and they seem to have two people on each side to drag them. What Speaker 1 21:31do you do? Well, I wouldn’t be woken up that hill. And I was Dr Jeremiah McCall 21:36trying to think about because on the one hand, it’s like, right, why are you? It’s like, No, I think I’ll just wait down Speaker 1 21:42here. Yeah. Like, I can wait it out. Those logs will eventually burn through. It will take days, but I can wait to the logs are gone, and then I’ll go up the hill Exactly. Dr Jeremiah McCall 21:52So then, then it’s like, well, maybe the commander made them go up. Now, I don’t know we actually, I think we have, like, maybe one reference to incendiary items being used in any of these battles. And believe it or not, I thought this was I thought this was absolutely false. I couldn’t believe it, but I was researching a Roman video game, Rome, total war once. And apparently there is a testimony, I think Appian says it at once, a flaming pig. Yes, I’m a vegetarian. I’m not a big fan of lighting pigs on fire. Yeah, me too, yeah. So anyway, so, yeah. So they’re going up that hill, and the Rolling Rock logs come down, and much as you would expect, they burn people. And some of the soldiers jump over the logs, and some of them get rolled over by the logs. Logs done damage, done. Front row not supported. Then you basically have the troops all run down the hill, getting to each other, and you have a brawl. Military History, Roman, military, well, any ancient military history for at least the past 140 years, it’s been seriously questioned whether armies, when they got into battle, kind of broke up into these groups that you see, pretty much you see it all over Spartacus, right? There is all doing duels, this little clump, that little clump, right? And so on. And the argument was made a long time ago, in the 1870s by a French artillery officer. I think that if all you did was have the two sides kind of mix it up and Brawl, then the larger force would always win, because there’d always be more people right in in the bar fight as it were, not, not that I have any experience with bar fights, Speaker 1 23:27but I think that’s one of these things where our inability as modern people, living in very lush lifestyles, where we’re Not conscripted into armed forces, but we study history is, how do we understand these things? And I think this is where people who have been in military settings and do military history become highly valuable, because they do see how it works and how it doesn’t work and what would immediately make sense and not make sense in these contexts. Dr Jeremiah McCall 24:02Yeah, I think you’re absolutely right. It’s really stretching your mind into something, into an area that most of us just have no experience with, gratefully, certainly. So they’re all brawling. We’ll get into it a little more in some of the other films about how they deal with that idea of combat. But Spartacus, they’re all, they’re all duking it out. And then you have the aristeia, right? You have the courageous individual Spartacus going through, and he’s lopping off. He’s stabbing people. I forgot the part where he chops off somebody’s arm and they show and I was like, oh, that’s 1960 special effects. That’s good stuff, right there. So he cuts off somebody’s arm, and he stabs somebody, and he’s he takes them all out. And there’s a lot of focus on that, and there’s a lot of room. There’s so much room to just sort of wander around with your horse and stuff like that. It’s like, how did you get these 10s of 1000s of soldiers to come together and fight? But there’s all this room. It all stays very. Open. It’s all very much a brawl. It’s not really going to help us visualize first century battles very well at all. I love that they tried it. I think that kudos goes to anybody who tries it. I think one of the limitations that we often don’t think about with with movies is everything’s on screen, so you’ve got to have an answer to everything. How did they fight? How did they march? What did they wear? What were they wearing? Because you like, I mean, we get away with writing, right? We can write a sentence and leave 1000s of details out and nobody necessarily notices because the sentence is so self contained. You can’t just have like a big blank screen with just like a Roman standing there and nothing else you got to fill it in, Speaker 1 25:43awaiting historians details come back. Right, exactly. No. Dr Rad 25:48I mean, I think, I think that raises such a good point, because we’ve been talking a lot about gladiator movies, obviously with Gladiator two coming out recently, and one of the things that we often talk about is the fact that, obviously in modern retellings of gladiator movies, particularly like, think about the Russell Crowe ones. I should have called them the Ridley Scott ones. Sorry, sorry, Australian loyalty. Exactly. We do tend to see gladiators fighting without a helmet, particularly if they’re the star of the movie, and that’s because they’re being paid millions of dollars as an actor, for us to actually see them, and we want to see the emotion, you want to see the terror. We want to see them scowling at each other and all of that kind of stuff. But that obviously, genuinely rarely happened. If you were Gladiator, you generally had some sort of head covering on because, you know, protecting the head that seems to be a priority. I feel like it’s the same thing sometimes with these battle sequences, with the brawling in that the person who’s shooting the film wants to be able to get in there, close and see, you know, some of the main characters duking it out with each other, because they don’t necessarily really care about what else is happening around them. They’re focusing in on the main characters, you know, Crassus versus Spartacus, and that’s what we as the audience also kind of want to see. So I feel like cinematically, that’s probably more a reflection of what they want to deliver to us emotionally, and that’s perhaps why they don’t really think about the accuracy of what’s going on around these people. Dr Jeremiah McCall 27:15I think that that’s a really good take. I hadn’t, I hadn’t quite thought about that way, but you must be right, certainly about the helmets, but I think you must be right too about the having the space to be able to maneuver the cameras and things like that. You know what it is the ultimate effect in Spartacus gets you very much at something that. Okay, quick disclaimer, everything I say is based on 25 years old research and occasionally writing new books. So anything I say can be, I’m sure, contradicted and countered and told that I’m silly by whoever the current crop of historians is on this that being said least 20 years ago, conventional wisdom was that Homeric fighting might have been like this, where you have the heroes. I mean, obviously the Iliad depicts it as the heroes fighting and the soldiers mobbing around. But apparently there’s some scholarship that suggests that there is something like that going on that you have these sort of Battle Plan leaders who are better equipped and more focused on and a bunch of supporting soldiers. Spartacus, really kind of does that sort of that Homeric fighting, and he’s not as cool as Diomedes because he doesn’t stab a god. But, you know, Dr Rad 28:29yeah, I also like to think that with Spartacus, I feel like the reason why some stories tend to make it into TV and film multiple times is partly because the source material that it’s drawing from is naturally more cinematic in the way that it’s described than others. So for example, I feel like Herodotus, the way that he writes, you can literally lift dialog out of that and put it on the screen, and that’s been done in 300 and I feel like it’s the same thing with Spartacus, because of the way that Plutarch writes, there are these inherently cinematic moments, and one of them is Spartacus supposed death scene. We do have this description of him in that final battle, heroically trying to cut his way. You know, through to Crassus. You know him being protected by some of his most loyal adherents. And gradually they’re cut down one by one, until finally, Spartacus is dealt a death blow. I mean, that is screaming out for Hollywood, and that’s, I think, what we’re kind of seeing on the screen here. Now, did Plutarch know what he was talking about? Probably not. Dr Jeremiah McCall 29:34I know. I know you both have found this to be the case because I’ve listened enough. And you know, as far as like looking at the reconstructions that these ancient sources give and how little they’re based upon. And I, I think at the end of the day, it’s one of the things that makes somebody like me think that video game and movie adaptations and scholars like you two as well are reasonable because we’re doing everything from. Secondary sources from people who had not a clue and were at least 500 years after the fact, and not always. I mean, sometimes they were only 100 years after the fact. It doesn’t seem so strange to take, you know? I mean, I think the battle scene in Spartacus is at least as is least as likely to be authentic as Plutarch version of what’s going on there. Neither of them is really giving you much of a version of what the mechanics are. Wow. Dr G 30:26Okay, so turning away from Spartacus, because I know Dr Rad could stay here for a whole hour, if not longer, I want to sort of switch focus to a much more recent adaptation. HBO is Rome, which I still love after all of this time. So I think the first season aired in like 2005 which is probably showing its age at this point. But it’s a very different time period for bringing a Roman army onto the screen. It’s post dating Gladiator, which it obviously sort of kicked off in everybody’s minds. Oh, we need to think about Rome and Rome on screen. But how does HBO is Rome fair when depicting Roman soldiers? Dr Jeremiah McCall 31:09Yeah, it’s a really great question. Yeah, that was such a fantastic series and and they stopped. Dr G 31:15I was so sad. Yeah Dr Rad 31:17Capitalism ruins the party again. Dr Jeremiah McCall 31:22Okay, so when you, when you get, when you get to HBO, is wrong. I think there are some problems, I think, with what they do, but, and I know nothing about who was behind the filming or the directing, or the or anything like that, but you really start to see a vision of a Roman battle that I think becomes useful. You know, we talk sometimes about, can you learn from this movie, or what can you learn from that movie, or stuff like that? And I guess I’m always reminded, right, that, and I think this is a Plutarch quote, but it’s the you’re not a vessel to be filled with education, right? You’re, you’re a set of logs that are supposed to be sparked and, you know, and lighting a fire. And so I wouldn’t want my students to be passively learning something ever if I can avoid it, I would want to be actively engaged in it. And so I think the interesting question is, do these films allow us, if we’re interested in either because we’re professional historians, or we’re nerding out, or whatever it is that gives us joy, do they help us visualize what it might have been like, so that we can then compare it to our sources and talk with people on podcasts and things like that. So I think HBO Rome does it. I think that the battle of Alessia, I don’t think it says Alessia. I think it says Alessia. I think it just says Gaul. So this was in, I believe, 52 BC, and Caesar was up in Gaul right on his 10 year campaign. Again, if you guys ever make it to the third and second and first century, I am so ready to come on back and talk about those books we intend to I will be old. I will be significantly older then, but still excited to talk about Roman things. So the Battle of Alessia, Caesar’s there. He’s conquering Gauls. That’s a siege. It’s an interesting siege of the town of Alessia, because a Gallic army comes up, and so Caesar’s soldiers are in fortifications where they’re both fencing in the city that they’re besieging and fencing out the other army that’s coming to support them. HBO is Rome. Does nothing with that. It’s Gauls. There’s no reason for them all to be standing in this woody area. But they don’t care. They’re just going for it. So what exactly this is supposed to be, I’m not quite sure, but that’s but that’s not to detract, I think, from from the achievement. So you look at it and you really see that they’re trying to make this idea of the organized Romans versus the semi organized or disorganized goals. Interestingly, as far as we can tell, the goals weren’t that disorganized. By the first century BC, the Romans had taken a lot of techniques and a lot of equipment from the Gauls. And so as Roman historians, we always love a good, you know, barbarian joke here or there. But the reality is that it wasn’t quite that distinct. And yet, clearly the Romans put a lot of energy into maintaining a training system and a formation system and an officer system that could hold up the stresses. So they’re standing there the soldiers under Vorenus is centurion. It must be because he’s a centurion, and you can see an optimally equipped legionnaire, almost. They’ve got scale armor. They got ring chain mail, which is absolutely what was being worn at the time by the wealthiest. But by the first century, most were being supplied with that. They have their Scutum, they have their they have their shields, probably a little too early, they have these shields that are rectangular and curved, and that seems to be early empire. But it’s okay. They look good. They’ve got their helmets. They’ve got their Gallic helmet, actually, and they’re looking good. And they. Got their Gladius, and they don’t have pila. They do not have a single Dr G 35:06missing an opportunity. Again, Dr Jeremiah McCall 35:08I know, and you’re thinking to yourself as an armchair general, right? You’re like a throw of some pila could be really useful here. I would think, I reckon, I wonder if Dr Rad 35:18it’s a health and safety thing that you know, just hurling these gigantic javelins is just too risky. But then again, there are so many scenes where they love having the rain of arrows. Speaker 1 35:28I was gonna say, why don’t they sub out the rain of arrows, which we know is historically inaccurate, and put in some throwing javelins. Come on. Yeah, I Speaker 2 35:38know. I know. So, okay, so Okay, so they don’t have that great vision here, you know, we’ll forgive them those things again. I do wonder about equipment costs and how much they were trying to borrow and whatever. So they’re waiting there, and there’s tension, and soldiers are all gritty and dirty looking, as you would expect them to, and this is some pretty serious business. And so they clash, and it looks really good. They’re smashing shields into shields. They’re trying to knock each other down. The Romans are using their stabbing motion. The Gladius was supposed to be good for both a cut and a stab. They seem to be doing a good job with that. And the Gauls are a bit more disorganized, and they’re not having an easy time of it. So the first part is where Vorenus is mad at pulley Pullo because he’s broken ranks. So that happens first. So, so pull over at the headstrong one breaks ranks and he’s off fighting his own personal battle. And and again, this fits what we know personal battles were not being fought by Romans in the middle of battles before the battle, quite possibly, maybe with the cavalry off on the side of a battle, but they weren’t doing it in the middle of the battle, because that’s when you have to keep your formations and everything. So there’s this wonderful scene where Vorenus is, and I just love it. He’s like, formation pull though, and you just, you’re like, you can, you can feel it. You go, okay, yeah, I would assume a century and had to grunt like that. I mean, because it’s battle, it’s serious business. Pullo goes ahead, doesn’t listen to anybody. Kill some balls. And Vorenus says on me. And he gets a group of loyal soldiers to come with him, and they go out into this little group. And suddenly, as you were saying, Dr Rad, you have all this space for the camera. Suddenly, there’s space for varenus to punch Pullo, have people grab him, force him back into line as he’s turning and talking and calling him a drunken fool, and then have him walk back to the front lines without any of the calls hitting them. Okay, so that’s drama. The idea of emphasizing military discipline definitely over aggrandized. And I almost, I almost feel like we have to make a moral note here, by the way, a side note, which you are welcome to cut if you’d like. But let’s remember that there are horrific white supremacists in the world that over state Roman order and fascism and all these things, and they do it for evil purposes. So I don’t want to, I don’t want to overstate the Roman order thing, but clearly our sources say that that was part of it, that they were trained and disciplined. So the Varanus and polo episode, that makes sense. So I’m stoked I’m watching it. This is great. It’s only been two minutes, and then I see it, and I said, What the hell was that? Do you know what I’m talking about? Okay, so what the hell was that? Okay? So he blows his whistle. Cool a whistle for command. Sure. Why not? I don’t know that we have evidence for that, but they had to do this. Somehow. He blows his whistle, varenus, and then the front line, the front line, dudes in the Roman army all turn sideways and sidle their way down between the tight rows of infantry on their side. And when you look from the top, they’re sidling down and going to the back. The next person in line goes to the front. What they don’t show you it well, they show you in the in the clip on the overhead shot is each of those soldiers has their left hand with their Scutum, with their shield and their right hand, sorry, and their left hand is also holding their Gladius, because their right hand is on the straps of the soldier in front of them. What is that so? So basically, we’re asked to imagine, and I’m going to be nice to this after so we have to assume is the front guys would all be able to sidle their way back. The person behind them would be able to let go of the guy, shuffle forward, take his Gladius from his from his hand, from his shield hand, hold up his shield and and refresh while people were trying to kill them. Speaker 1 39:40I do think this might be a logistic way of trying to solve like, how do we do it? Like they’re standing there with all of the equipment and they’ve got whoever is their master of battles behind the scenes being like, how are we going to do this change of formation? Like, how do we make that work physically? It’s like you’ve got this giant shield, you got this sword, if you’re holding both at the same time. Maybe you’ll accidentally injure the person who you’re relieving. So we’ve got to get them out of the way. But this obviously sets up that next line to be completely vulnerable. So presumably, it’s not how it was done. Dr Jeremiah McCall 40:12I think you’re right, though. I mean, I think you know, props are due. This is the most serious, scholarly version of this you’ve seen in film, right? I mean, Spartacus isn’t doing anything close. They tried with their cohorts. So there are a couple of historians, I can’t remember. It’s been a while. I don’t think anybody supported the Rome version recently, but there have been a couple of scholars that suggested this is what happened, that in the midst of the fight, individual roles of soldiers would relieve each other. But, yeah, it kind of staggers the imagination that that could work. But that’s one of those gaps in our evidence. We don’t know how they relieved each other. We have no idea how that worked. It seems impossible. The best argument that I’ve heard well, I mean, we don’t even know. We don’t even know if the if the cohorts fought in those regular lines, as much, or whether they were just all sort of clumped, it’s the best answer I’ve heard is that there are actually probably a lot of gaps in fighting and a lot of pauses. Particularly if you stayed in your kind of orderly groups, you’d clash together, and people would die, and energy would be exerted, and then they’d back off. There’d be a natural pause every so often, and maybe that’s it. But I think you’re right. I think this is a serious I shouldn’t have said scholarly, because scholarly is not the standard by which history is history. It is instead interpretation of the past selectively in a way that you find meaningful. So maybe, maybe scholarly is not the word, but it is a serious attempt, I think you’re right to figure out what the heck might have this Dr Rad 41:44is the tricky thing about being an academic who studies history on film, because so often you’re like, that is completely inaccurate. And then people say, Okay, well, how should it have been? I have no idea, but I know that that’s not how it was, exactly, Dr Jeremiah McCall 41:57and that’s that. And that goes back to like, I’m not going to try and pronounce the French on it, because my French pronunciation has been made fun of in like six US states. And the setting of a film, right? All right, I’m going to try. It’s mise en scene. Oh, yeah, the mise en scene, yeah, yeah. There you go. See, I knew I could goad you into pronouncing it, because I can’t, in any event, right? The setting of the setting of the scene, everything that’s in the shot. And yeah, they’ve got everybody in the shot, so they got to figure out some way to relieve and so, yeah, that’s what they do. So, yeah, you know, I mean, fair enough at the end, this is probably the best that you’re going to see. And then they get to Philippi, and they kind of go for it even more. Still, don’t have pila. It’s a civil war. Romans are afraid of spears too. Why aren’t they doing a nice I Dr Rad 42:43mean, surely if you’re gonna have peeler, it’d be in a civil war when they’re wrong, you think right, because everybody’s got them, Speaker 1 42:49that’s when you have to surprise them by showing up without them. I mean, yeah, Speaker 2 42:53it’s like, it’s like a pila fight in a phone booth or a knife, but you brought a dope Philippi. The sources are pretty clear. There were two battles, not one, but, but this telescope says, cinema does the setting they’re making dry and dusty, although I don’t actually, I mean, it was, I think it was spring or summer time, and Greece can be dry and dusty in that time. I think the seriousness of the soldiers, their shields are kind of at rest, leaning against their knee, which makes a lot of sense. And, you know, kind of the seriousness on their face, and that’s something that HBO really kind of goes with, is trying to get sort of the gravity of this. And I love the fact that when they do this, I assume they must be using CGI stuff to add on to it, but they have many, many units on the field, and they’re taking these aerial shots, and you absolutely have the sense that they’re in different units coming together, and they come together and they clash again. They didn’t throw a pila at each other, but they clash with each other, and they’re stabbing and they’re thrusting, and it devolves into chaos in the front, but it doesn’t devolve into quite as much chaos. So you got a sense, maybe, that there are still formations back there, but it’s, it’s a brutal slug fest. Is a brutal stab Fest in the front rows. And I think they do a really good job with all of that. And then no whistles are blown, but they relieve the front lines and do that thing again. You’re like, okay, they’re committed to this. This is how it’s, it’s the way. And I should say it looks really cool. It looks really cool when they do it. The shot of the relief. Couldn’t ask for anything more interesting, too, except for when Brutus commits suicide. There’s no aristeia, there’s no there’s no individual leaders going through and making a show. I don’t think that our protagonists are even in there. I don’t think verenus And polo are even at that battle. I can’t remember, but Anthony’s not going in doing that. Of course, Octavian is not doing that. Was sick. He was not feeling well, Speaker 1 44:50yeah, excuse me, I’m not I’m not sure what anybody’s trying to say here about Dr Jeremiah McCall 44:56he had to rest in his tent. Apparently, we thought. Ahead. Now, of course, I’m a middle I’m a middle aged history teacher in high school, so I would not be doing any better. I mean, so I should not be throwing stones. But in any event, the No Irish days makes sense. You got the generals kind of behind commanding and sending in reserves and things like that. So I think they do a really good job on that. I don’t think they do starting speeches. I think, you know? I mean, if we’re going to nitpick, right, Antonius was certainly charismatic to his soldiers, and we don’t ever have him being, like, giving a speech or something like that. And I believe Brutus and Cassius, I think all this show, because I just went back to the video clips, I think all they’re doing is arguing or is talking about what he wants on his birthday. And isn’t it his birthday? And shall he have a cake? Which do Romans have cake? I don’t. Well, the bigger Dr Rad 45:44questions. Feel like, no, like, I take cake very seriously, and I feel like they don’t have cake. Like, I understand Dr Jeremiah McCall 45:50it, yeah, okay. I mean, right, they’ve got fish guts, but they don’t have cake, Dr Rad 45:53yeah? Maybe like a sweet bread of some kind or something, yeah, Dr Jeremiah McCall 45:58sure, there you go. But okay, we’re agreed it’s not really cake, okay. But anyways, they don’t seem to do a very good job speaking to the soldiers, either. And we actually kind of think that happened. We think that it’s impossible for the commanders to have actually reached all the people in their armies when they were giving speeches. But the speech for your local group was probably something you tried to do, because at the end of the day, battles were not lost primarily through wounds. They weren’t lost when more people got killed. They were lost when one side lost its morale to the point that it decided self defense, self preservation was a better shot for them than staying in this orderly formation. And that’s when the real devastating killing goes on. So speeches and stuff are kind of an important reminder Dr Rad 46:41of that. So let’s switch, perhaps, from the late Republic to the Empire, because we don’t want to miss that. Of course, Gladiator 2000 we can’t not mention that, especially because the opening scene of that movie has a particularly memorable battle scene between the Romans and Germanic tribes. How accurate do you think this scene was? Dr Jeremiah McCall 47:05It’s funny. I don’t Are you familiar at all with Brett Devereaux blogs and things? Dr G 47:09He rips this one to shreds. Speaker 2 47:12Yeah, yeah. And I think he does gladiator too. And I went back to read because I was like, Oh my gosh. I mean, I know him digitally, like we all know each other, right? And I said, Oh my gosh, I better go and read that. Because if he says gladiator one was horrific after I was being kind of positive on it, I want to at least be ready for that. But apparently it’s just gladiator two. And you all had a good time a few weeks ago ripping a hole into that one too. We did. So they finally have the right arm, the segmented Lorica, the Lorica segmentata, which makes them kind of look like lobsters, right with the overlapping plates. They have put those in movies in the Republic, all over the place, and they never existed in the Republic. And that is the armor. If you want to show Romans, you show them in the segmented armor. By gladiators day, by the second century, they actually were using this armor. So finally, we’ve got the right armor, and it looks really great on them. And they’ve got head scarves, which I would imagine you’d want if you were throwing a helmet on that’s kind of banging around stuff like that. I mean, it would have a lining, but, and they’ve got pila that they don’t use, and they’ve got Gladius, and their and their shields are curved. And they, I didn’t look but I bet their military sandals are I bet they look great too. You totally, I think, get the authentic visualization of what this is like. Nitpicky details, sure, but I’m not an imperial historian, so I don’t know what they are. I think this is a great visual. Then they move into battle, right? Okay, and so first thing, of course, is we have to have the fireworks. The Roman catapults launch flaming balls of something at the Germans who are yelling in the trees. It’s a trope, right? You’ve got the disorganized but courageous Germanic people and the disciplined Roman people, and they’re standing firm, because after the fires come, they still go, ah, and everybody knows that they’re really tough. And you just kind of wonder, did they do that? I really didn’t think they did. I thought the, I thought the chances of using catapults to hit people on foot was almost nil, but apparently there is a little of that. We’ve got a few places in the sources where artillery was used. But I’m still kind of skeptical. I think they wanted fire. They wanted the they wanted the wolf dog. They wanted Maximus, Wolf, dog, to leap through the flames. Oh yeah, which, sadly, doesn’t look as good as I remember it looking Dr Rad 49:27I just, I’m glad that, because I feel like that means that that animal was not hurt. They were more concerned about hurting the animal than doing this, that which 50 years ago would not have mattered. Dr Jeremiah McCall 49:39Oh, God, they formed their Testudo. We have no evidence of anybody ever forming a Testudo, right? That’s the ones with the shields on top and the shields in front, like the tortoise. We have no accounts of that ever being done, except for in a siege, when they were trying to lift people up over towers and things like that. Thing. We might have one example, but they use it against the German arrows. Now this is clever based. Likely the Germans fire their arrows. The legionaries clam up like a Testudo to block the arrows, and the Germans take that moment when they’re kind of hunkering to run in and charge two into them. Now this is clever because it means there’s no space to throw their pila Aha, and looking at us like, oh my gosh, that’s how they did that. That’s totally right. That is the most legit falsehood ever. It’s like they ran too fast. You couldn’t use it. They keep formations, but then they devolve into a brawl, because they always got to devolve into a brawl. And my original nerd specialty is the Roman cavalry. That is not what I went to school for. It just sort of worked that way. As you know, dissertation is kind dissertations kind of work that way. And the classic misunderstanding of of ancient and medieval cavalry is that they rode their horses into people, and that the impact of riding their horses into people was what took out the infantry. And about 24 about 50 years ago, John Keegan wrote a book called Face of battle that’s been kind of inspirational to many, at least my generation of military historians, where he pointed out, and I guess he knew horses. I don’t know horses that you really can’t make horses run into obstacles that they can’t jump over or get or get around. They’re gonna they’re gonna stop. And furthermore, if you did ride the horses in then you’re talking about these very expensive animals that cost training and food and everything like that, and you’re running them into a bunch of infantry, wrecking the horse, wrecking you on top the horse. And let’s not forget, these were usually nobles riding the cavalry, riding the horses, so it’s not going to happen. And that’s what I like about the gladiator cavalry charge, because it suggests that they just got in there and mixed it up. And as far as we can tell, that’s what cavalry did. They took an already occupied infantry enemy, and they added fear and disruption by coming in from some other side and roughing things up. And I really like that. And I like, I like his little speech at the beginning, right? You’re dead. And in Elysium, I like that the lines are sort of deforming of the horses. He says, Stay in line. And of course, some horses are faster than other horses, so they don’t completely stay in line. I think it’s a good cavalry charge. And then it gets back to a melee. It gets back to a brawl, like they always do. But I think with those caveats, just as I think Rome, the Rome series is the one to watch if you want to come as close as you can to visualize and what these might look like. I think you can do the same with that gladiator intro if you’re looking for the Imperial Army. By the way, you can move this earlier if you want. But Spartacus, in the midst of the Army, after having downed a soldier, grabs a six foot handled mace club and starts swinging it around. I don’t Speaker 1 52:45know if you remember a pivotal moment. All of the Dr Jeremiah McCall 52:48enslaved people had Roman equipment, and the Roman people had Roman equipment. Where did he get this six foot tall mace that he was able to like swing around? Dr Rad 52:56Well, we do know that the slaves did manufacture their own armor and weapons, so perhaps that he had a creative person on his team Dr Jeremiah McCall 53:05and that, and that’s the beauty we can we can go conspiracy theory logic, prove that they didn’t make a club like Exactly, exactly. Audience, please, don’t do that. We

The Gallic Sack of Rome - Part 5

The sacred geese have attempted to save Rome, but the siege of the Gauls is still not over! What could possibly happen next? We continue our deep dive into the events purported to all take place in 390 BCE. Despite the Romans apparently being surprised by the Gauls turning up on their doorstep, the Gauls have been in northern Italy for some time as far as we can trace archaeological evidence. Rumour has it that the Gauls came to central Italy in the search for cooler weather, but instead what they find is a city of Romans, and as the siege drags on, hygiene starts to emerge as a problem. Maybe we can come to an arrangement? The siege is getting tedious for both sides, so amidst the military encounters, conversations start about maybe bringing the siege to a close through mutual agreement. The details of the siege consequences include lack of food, issues with cadavers, and spread of disease. And it seems neither the Romans or the Gauls want to keep going with this situation. “Woe to the Conquered!” Those Gauls are pretty cheeky in the moment of coming to a monetary agreement to ensure they’ll pack up their siege and leave Roman territory. Not only do they ask for 1000 pounds of gold, but they have the nerve to add some extra items to the scales to encourage the Romans to pay even more than this sum. Perhaps even worse, are our sources really telling us a story of Rome resisting the Gauls, or could it be the case that ALL the city was taken and the Romans were legitimately and completely defeated? We explore the possibilities. Where in the world is Camillus? Is he in Ardea pumping out a training montage with the locals in preparation to swoop in and rescue Rome? Or is waiting in the wings but misses his cue to come on stage leaving Rome to deal with the Gauls all by themselves? Our sources have some disagreements which we’ll delve into. Things to listen out for: An origin story for Jupiter Pistor (Jupiter ‘the baker’) The centrality or not of Camillus to the siege narrative Important references to “Eye of the Tiger” What are the Gauls interested in? What might colour the Romans’ perceptions of the Gauls? Where did the Romans find 1000 POUNDS of gold???? The role of the Roman matrons in saving the City The tricky legacy of who paid the ransom to the Gauls and what happens afterwards… Salt’N’Pepa and Roman history together at last Our Players Military Tribunes with Consular Power Q. Fabius M. f. Q. n. Ambustus (Pat) K. Fabius M. f. Q n. Ambustus (Pat) Mil. Tr. c. p. 404, 401, 395 N. Fabius M. f. Q. n. Ambustus (Pat) Mil. Tr. c. p. 406 Q. Sulpicius -f. -n. Longus (Pat) Q. Servilius Q. f. P. n. Fidenas (Pat) Mil. Tr. c. p. 402, 398, 395, 388, 386 P. Cornelius P. f. M. n. Maluginensis (Pat) Cos. 393? Mil. Tr. c. p. 397 Dictator M. Furius L. f. Sp. n. Camillus (Pat) Mil. Tr. c.p. 401, 398, 394, 386, 384, 381 Master of the Horse L. Valerius (L. f. L. n. Poplicola) (Pat) Mil. Tr. c.p. 394, 389, 387, 383 OR L. Valerius (L. f. P. n. Potitus) (Pat) Cos. 393, 392; Mil. Tr. c.p. 414, 406, 403, 401, 398 Pontifices ?-390: M. Folius (Flaccinator?) (Pat) Mil. Tr. c.p. 433 Pontifex Maximus; slain by the Gauls C. or K. Fabius Dorsuo (Pat) Augurs or Pontifex 439-390: Q. ? Servilius P. f. (Sp. n. Priscus or Structus Fidenas?) (Pat) Successor: [—- Furi]us Q. f. P. nepos Fusus Mil. Tr. c.p. 403 Other notable Romans Marcius Manlius Capitolinus Gauls King Brennus (questionable identity in this narrative) Our Sources Dr Rad reads Livy, Ab Urbe Condita, 5.45-55; Dr G reads Diodorus Siculus 14.113-117; Dionysius of Halicarnassus 13.6-12; Appian, BC, 2.50; Appian, Gallic History, 1-4; Justinus, Epitome of Pompeius’ Trogus’ Philippic Histories; Aurelius Victor, De virus illustribus 23; Eutropius 1.20 Armstrong, Jeremy. War and Society in Early Rome. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781316145241. Bernard, Seth. “Rome from the Sack of Veii to the Gallic Sack.” In Building Mid-Republican Rome. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190878788.003.0003. Bradley, G. 2020. Early Rome to 290 BC (Edinburgh University Press). Broughton, T. R. S., Patterson, M. L. 1951. The Magistrates of the Roman Republic Volume 1: 509 B.C. – 100 B.C. (The American Philological Association) Cornell, T. J. 1995. The Beginnings of Rome: Italy and Rome from the Bronze Age to the Punic Wars (c. 1000-264 BC) (Taylor & Francis) Forsythe, G. 2006. A Critical History of Early Rome: From Prehistory to the First Punic War (University of California Press)  Duff, T. E. 2010. ‘Plutarch’s Themistocles and Camillus’. In N. Humble, ed., Plutarch’s Lives: parallelism and purpose (Classical Press of Wales: Swansea, 2010), pp. 45-86. Elvers, K. (., Courtney, E. (. V., Richmond, J. A. (. V., Eder, W. (., Giaro, T. (., Eck, W. (., & Franke, T. (. (2006). Furius. In Brill’s New Pauly Online. Brill. https://doi.org/10.1163/1574-9347_bnp_e416550 Gowing, Alain M. 2009. “The Roman exempla tradition in imperial Greek historiography: The case of Camillus in Feldherr, A., ed. The Cambridge Companion to the Roman Historians. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Hyden, Marc, Marcus Furius Camillus: The Life of Rome’s Second Founder. Pen and Sword, 2023. Lomas, Kathryn (2018). The rise of Rome. History of the Ancient World. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. doi:10.4159/9780674919938. ISBN978-0-674-65965-0. S2CID239349186. McIntyre, Gwynaeth. “Camillus as Numa: Religion in Livy’s Refoundation Narratives.” Journal of Ancient History 6, no. 1 (2018): 63–79. https://doi.org/10.1515/jah-2017-0011. Ogilvie, R. M. 1965. A Commentary on Livy: Books 1-5 (Clarendon Press).  Raaflaub, K. A. 2006. Social struggles in archaic Rome: new perspectives on the conflict of the orders (2nd ed). (Wiley). Roth, Ulrike. “The Gallic Ransom and the Sack of Rome: Livy 5.48.7-8.” Mnemosyne 71, no. 3 (2018): 460–84. https://doi.org/10.1163/1568525X-12342339. Roth, Ulrike. “Was Camillus Right? Roman History and Narratological Strategy in Livy 5.49.2″ Classical Quarterly 70, no. 1 (2020): 212–29. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0009838820000385. Stevenson, T.R. “Parens Patriae and Livy’s Camillus.” Ramus 29, no. 1 (2000): 27–46. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0048671X00001673. Sound Credits Our music is by the superb Bettina Joy de Guzman. Ancient Roman Coins – These ones come from the imperial period and Rome wasn’t necessarily using coinage in 390 BCE! Automated Transcript Lightly edited for our wonderful Australian accents Dr Rad 0:12Welcome to the Partial Historians. Dr G 0:16We explore all the details of ancient Rome, Dr Rad 0:20Everything from political scandals to love affairs, the battles waged and when citizens turn against each other, I’m Dr Rad Dr G 0:30and I’m Dr G, we consider Rome as the Romans saw it, by reading different ancient authors and comparing their accounts. Dr Rad 0:41Join us as we trace the journey of Rome from the founding of the city. Hello and welcome to a brand new episode of the Partial Historians. I am one of your hosts, Dr Rad. Dr G 1:01And I’m Dr G, hello. Dr Rad 1:04This is going to be a tough one. I think Dr G, in more ways than one, because for listeners who might be listening at a different point in time, we are currently recording in the midst of an Australian summer as affected by climate change. Dr G 1:24It is a heat wave, a tropical heat wave. Dr Rad 1:27Exactly. We’re having a heat wave. That’s a Marilyn reference, in case you didn’t pick up on that one, Dr G 1:35I knew you would figure that one out. Dr Rad 1:39But not only that. Dr, G, of course, we are in a year that seemingly never ends. As far as ancient Rome is concerned, Dr G 1:47the hottest year on Roman history’s record 390 BCE Dr Rad 1:52Yeah, I knew it was going to be a big one, but it’s it’s even surprised me. Dr G 1:57We are many parts into this effective mini series on this year, and the last time we talked about this, there were some interesting moments. There was visitations down the Tiber, aided by cork Dr Rad 2:13visitations Dr G 2:14visitations. There were sacred geese, and boy did they honk. And there were some people thrown down off the top of what we think is the Capitolini Hill rather than the Tarpeian rock, although we can’t be entirely certain. And some Roman bodies end up amongst the Gaulish forces, it seems. Dr Rad 2:34Absolutely yeah. So we’re right in the midst of this Gallic siege of Rome. We’ve got this stalwart band of Romans who have remained behind to defend the Capitol and all the sacred buildings and animals, apparently, that reside upon it. And when the Gauls tried to assault them, it almost worked, not quite, and that’s where we got people being flung off rocks, etc, etc, etc, yes. Dr G 3:07So this siege, we think, has been going on for quite some time at this point, our sources suggest that it’s anywhere between six or seven months at this stage, and everybody’s really starting to feel the effects of it would seem. So Plutarch, who I would not consider a close source to the action at hand, nevertheless suggests that the Gauls themselves are running into some trouble engaging and maintaining this siege, partly because they lack provisions, but partly because, in an encamped situation for a long period of time, outbreaks of disease are quite common. It’s hard to keep up sanitary conditions when you’re in a place where you’ve kind of constructed everything from scratch, but it’s all kind of temporary. And they’re also encamped amongst ruins of Roman buildings. Effectively, in some parts of this siege area, there’s also a growing extent of corpses because they’re engaging in various raids. And obviously some people die in those and they haven’t seemed to have dealt with those bodies necessarily in the best way possible. Dr Rad 3:07Well that’s just gross. Dr G 3:07Some of them, they’ve been able to cremate, but seems some of them, they haven’t, so they’re also amongst the dead at the same time. So this would be pushing disease outbreaks as well. But the worst thing of all, according to Plutarch, is that the Gauls came from a cool place, and as we know, one of the theories that brought the Gauls into Italy is that they were looking for somewhere even cooler. But boy, were they wrong, because Italy is hot, and even in autumn, apparently, when this siege is still continuing, it’s still quite hot, and they are unhappy campers about the weather. Dr Rad 4:56I could not feel more simpatico with the Gauls than right now recording this ridiculous Australian heat. God, I hope we do something about climate change so it doesn’t get any worse. Because I was going to make fun of this whole scenario and say, this sounds like anti-Gallic propaganda in a sense, where they’re like, they can’t function when it’s hot, when it gets above 35 degrees celsius, they just completely melt, like the Wicked Witch of the West. But then I’m like, You know what? I don’t think I function particularly well, when I get too hot. Mind you though. Dr G 5:32Yes, now, now, it comes down to it. Yes. Dr Rad 5:36They have been in Italy for a bit of time at this point. But maybe it’s because this is one of their forays more into, you know, central Italy, whereas when they started crossing the Alps, which I mean at this point, the Gauls are meant to have been crossing the Alps for a couple of hundreds years, like we think it starts around sort of 600 BCE, that we start getting Gallic peoples on the move and coming into Italian territory, but I think they have tended to stay further north, which for anyone who’s been to Italy, it is a bit of a different climate to other parts of the country. Dr G 6:17Very much so, much cooler, maybe more delightful if you’re you prefer the wintertime, but now they’re in central Italy and doesn’t agree with them, not not in their constitution. It would seem, physically, they’re having a tough time. Dr Rad 6:32Yeah, no. Look, this is what Plutarch has said. Is very much what Livy says. He says, look, the siege is obviously terrible because the goals aren’t making the headway that they need. They weren’t necessarily planning on this whole situation. It was somewhat foisted upon them. If we had to leave our accounts by the Romans, terrible behaviour. Dr G 6:52That’s right, you can’t deny an insult like that and just walk away, Dr Rad 6:56Even if we say like, whether we say it was the insult which, let’s face it, most people don’t think that that was probably what happened, or whether we say the Gauls were actually on their way somewhere else, maybe to do something particular, like serve as auxiliaries, or something like that. Either way, they haven’t planned for a lengthy siege, so they don’t, as you say, have all the provisions that they need. The Romans are certainly feeling it because they’re really lacking in provisions, because they can’t really leave the capital to get anything, and they just up there, God knows what kind of exercise they’re getting. Dr G, and this is exactly when, yes, a pestilence hits. Livy also mentions where the Gauls had set up their camp, that because it was low ground between hills, and there was also, like, polluted air, I guess in his in his mind, you know, because they’ve torched so many beautiful Roman buildings that barbarians, it’s just not good. And he also mentions the the corpses, and the fact that they kind of had tried to dispose of some bodies they’ve made, like, mass burial pyres. But when it comes to people who’ve maybe died just, you know, randomly and like a little siege, they’re kind of like, it’s just one body. I don’t know if I can be bothered sitting on fire. Dr G 8:15Bad choice. Bad choice. At least bury it. Dr Rad 8:17Yeah. And so this is what drives the Gauls to seek out the Romans and to try and enter, introduce get some talks going, see what they can sort out here. Dr G 8:33Yes, this is an interesting moment, because it seems like the siege actually becomes a bit of a fizzer, and it’s like the Gallic sack of Rome, and here we are, and everybody’s tired, and we’re months into it, and the Gauls are like, we kind of want this to be over. And the Romans like, we’d like this to be over too. And the Gauls are like, how about you give us 1000 pounds of gold. Dr Rad 8:53Oh, well, it gets a little bit heated before we get to that point in my account. Dr, G, there’s a little detail in mind that I particularly like, which is that the commanders on both sides are obviously talking trying to figure things out, and I guess to drive home that they were in the stronger position in this siege situation, the Gauls start making fun of the Romans and mocking them for the fact that they’re literally starving to death in front of their eyes, which, after, say, six or seven months, I can understand. And they’re like, surely the Romans should just give in. I mean, you’re clearly going to die from starvation if we don’t kill you first. Now this is not the way that you negotiate with the Romans, as we know. Dr G, it’s not going to get them on side. It riled them up so much that they started, apparently, throwing bread down from the Capitol towards the Gallic camp being like that’ll show them. We rain down bread upon you. We’re not starving to death. We’re strong, stronger than we’ve ever been. Whoa. I think I’m feeling a little woozy from the lack of food. Phew. Dr G 8:54First of all, the Gauls are like, is this the hill that you’re willing to die on? And the Romans are like, yes, it is. Dr Rad 8:54Yes, the Capitol is the best. Dr G 8:54This is the the exact hill that I’m willing to die on. And not only that, it doesn’t seem in any way strategic to be like, how about you guys have some of the bread. We’re having a tough time, but you’re gonna have it tougher because you can’t handle this level of gluten. Dr Rad 8:54That’s right, yeah, exactly. We know how you guys are. You can’t handle the food here. You can’t handle the climate here. Get outta here. Dr G 8:54Yeah, good luck with this bread. The Gauls are like, I will eat it. Dr Rad 8:54My commentator believes that this little tidbit that Livy includes might have been something that’s trying to explain a development of the cult of Jupiter Pistor, which is the story that turns up in some other sources like Valerius Maximus, Ovid, etc, etc. Dr G 8:54Lovely. Dr Rad 9:41Well, I mean, this is the thing about the way that our stories are coming together at this point in time, as we’ve talked about, Livy’s drawing on multiple things. He’s using earlier analysts. He’s also using, probably family histories that have been passed down. They might be oral stories. They might be oral stories that became something that was written down or preserved in some other way. He’s using archeological sources like inscriptions, etc, etc. But one of the things that might be influencing him is this antiquarian tradition as well, where the Romans are obviously trying to explain all sorts of details about their culture, and that’s particularly flowering at the time that Livy’s writing probably because Rome has undergone such a troubled century in the sort of late Republic and early Empire, the Romans seem to have been inspired to figure out their origins, to find out, why do we call it that place name, and, where did that cult come from? And how do we explain this building or this monument? And sometimes they might have come up with things at some point to try and explain why something is the way it is. And obviously it’s really hard for us to trace exactly how strong their evidence is for these stories. They’re coming up with another example of that is the story that we talked about last time about the crucifixion of the dogs, which happened every year, obviously, with the whole thing with the geese and the dogs and the assaults on the Capitol, if you don’t know what I’m talking about, you need to go back and listen again. It’s one of those things where it’s obviously a tradition that has survived. But is this really what happened? Is this really why the Romans had this cultural practice, or is this something that’s been woven into the account of the Gallic sack to try and explain a custom that people have kind of lost track perhaps, of exactly why they do what they do? Dr G 12:56Yeah, fair enough. There is a sense in which the Romans are definitely trying to figure out what their identity is like, and this is a landmark event in their imagination, at the very least, because we don’t have a lot of archeological evidence to back up. Dr Rad 13:12We certainly don’t Dr G 13:13This Gallic sack and so even this idea of a Gallic invasion that moves so far down into Central Italy is difficult to navigate from an evidential perspective as ancient historians, and the significance of this tale for the Romans is huge. Dr Rad 13:32Absolutely. Dr G 13:33There’s so much detail. This is why we’re in part five of this narrative, because they do focus in on every moment, and this idea that eventually, what it sort of boils down to is this embarrassing exchange where Rome gives up, essentially. Dr Rad 13:59Yeah. Dr G 14:00They do, they do pay the money to the Gauls. And even though both sides are looking a little worse for wear and neither are having a good time, there does seem to be a recognition from those who remain on the Capitol that they cannot stick this out, that if this does go on, ultimately they will be the losers from it. They’re not sure whether any of their neighbours are going to turn up with forces. What has happened with the messages from they has not necessarily resulted in something positive or tangible that they’ve been able to see. And there is still the looming figure of Camillus, who is in exile, and nobody really knows where he is, and nobody knows if he’s ever turning up. And even if he did, would he have any forces with him? Dr Rad 14:42Well, of course, at this point, they have sought him out. They’ve tried to go through the proper processes in my account, because for Livy, at this point in time, it’s the Camilla show. We know that, as you say, this story is such a big part of the way that the Romans imagine their history by the time people like. Livy were writing the traditions around it had been fairly well established. The narrative had been fairly well established. However, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t obviously these differences in exactly how the story unfolds. And certainly Livy works Camillus in in a very particular way, and he constructs the whole of his first 10 books kind of around Camillus, particularly now that we’re into this, this later period here we’re talking about, you know, books sort of five to 10, and 10 is where we unfortunately lose the detailed Livy for a little while. But yes, Camillus is a big part of that. And exactly as you say in my account, the Romans pelt the Gauls with bread, feel good about themselves and like that’ll show them. But then they turn to each other and they say, but I’m actually really, very hungry. Really, really hungry. I don’t know how much longer I can last. And you know what? I think we just used up the last of the bread to make an emphatic point, yeah. Dr G 15:59Do we have any grain stores on hand? No, we don’t. Dr Rad 16:03No, I think maybe, maybe I might have let my temper get the best of me. Dr G 16:12Rome – never! Dr Rad 16:15And meanwhile in Livy’s account, this is where we flash to what’s going on in Ardea, because that is where Camillus is in exile. Camilius- Dr G 16:24and now for a new chapter, Dr Rad 16:25Yeah. Now that Camillus has managed to have his proper appointment where he’s been properly selected as dictator, he’s getting into action. So he’s conducting a levy. He’s also selected a master of the horse, naturally, a guy called Lucius Valerius, and he’s asking him to bring his army from Veii meet Camillus in Ardea, I presume. Camillus is then starting to train the troops – Drill, baby drill! This is the time he wants to make sure that they’re going to be able to kick some Gallic ass. Yeah, gun show. Mwa Mwa. Dr G 17:04It’s time for a training montage. Dr Rad 17:05It is, yeah, it very much is. It’s a point where, if we could afford it, we would play Eye of the Tiger. He’s got them punching meat in butchers shops, in the animal warehouses. He’s got them in gray, sweatpants. They’re running up and downstairs. Dr G 17:22It’s all happening. Yeah, look, I don’t want to ruin Livy’s show just yet, but I’m just going to put a flag here to say that the stories that Dr Rad is about to tell you from Livy are highly contentious. Dr Rad 17:36Whoa, I can’t believe you’re throwing me under a bus in front of the listeners. Dr, G, they’re watching. They’e listening. Dr G 17:45Just putting it out there. Listen carefully. Listen well. Warning. Warning. Dr Rad 17:50Sorry. It’s very confusing, because we’re kind of video recording this as well as audio recording this. So I’m like, I don’t know who to address. Do I address YouTube? Do I address people who have just got me in their areas? I don’t know. Okay, so back in Rome, we’re switching back. Okay, we’ve gone from the butcher storehouse to Rome. So the army on the Capitol really is at their absolute lowest at this point in time. They are well worn down, not so much from fighting the Gauls, just just doing their regular duties that they have to do, which I presume means, you know, standing guard being centuries and presumably helping each other out to keep life turning as well as it can up there on the Capitol, because we know that some of them have family out there. It’s not just fighting men there and then obviously the level of starvation, that old chestnut, of which I’m sure it’s much worse by the bread display earlier, they are desperately wanting to hold out until Camillus shows up, because that’s the plan, as far as they’re concerned. You know, Camillus has been made dictator. They’re watching. They’re waiting. And nothing happens. There’s just nothing on the horizon. They don’t know what Camillus is up to. They unfortunately can’t hear ‘Eye of the Tiger’ from the Capitol, Ardea is just a little bit too far away, and so they’re almost getting to the point where they’re too weak to even wear armour when they’re on the lookout. They are at that level of starvation, which actually does sound pretty somber and terrible. Dr G 17:50That’s bad. Dr Rad 17:50Yeah. No surprises. So the Romans are starting to discuss, what are we going to do in terms of surrender? How do we handle this whole situation? Do we literally just surrender? You know, get us the whitest piece of fabric that we have left after being up here on the Capitol for seven months and wave it. Or do we do something like, say, ransom ourselves to the Gauls. The Gauls had said that they weren’t necessarily like looking for a lot in order to bring this whole situation to the end. Because, as we talked about, it’s not like the Gauls are having a fabulous time either. This isn’t like ‘Roman Holiday’ here. So the Senate have a meeting, naturally, process, process, yes, and they say to the military tribunes with consular power that are up there, look, just, just organise some terms. Have a meeting and somehow organising this, this can’t go on much longer, so a meeting is set up. A guy called Quinctius Sulpicius, one of our military tribunes, meets with the so called leader of the Gauls Brennus. Suspicious name, but sure, here we are, and this is where, in my account, the Romans agree to pay 1000 pounds of gold. Livy, at this moment is like, I’m wigging out, guys, this is crazy. Rome is about to become the greatest empire ever, and here they are on their knees agreeing to pay these barbarians. I mean, how hilarious and ironic, right? Guys, wink, wink, nudge, nudge. Yeah. Dr Rad 19:22It is an interesting moment for the Romans where they’re like, okay, not only is that an outlandish sum to ask of us, but yes, we’re going to pay it. And we have Quinctius Sulpicius, as you mentioned, is the military tribune who’s sort of leading the conference with Brennus. And they agree that they’ll deliver that gold, and then the Gauls will depart, not just away from Rome, the city, but out of Roman territory. They’re just, they’re just gonna leave everything. Dr Rad 20:08Which sounds extensive, but isn’t really that. Dr Rad 20:08It means they have to get past right at the very least, I’ve got to go, at least, keep going, get out in here, it’s going to be at least a day’s walk. And this is where we start to get the stories about the interference with the scales. Dr Rad 20:31Yes. Dr G 20:31So the Gauls are like, you know what’s going to be fun if we just keep piling things on our side of the scales? And the Romans are like, what are you what are you doing? We’re weighing out a precise measure. You can’t just keep adding things to the scales. Dr Rad 20:31It’s 1000 pounds, not like, whatever pounds. Dr Rad 20:31Yeah, and the Gauls are like, we might be hungry and willing to leave, but we still got a sense of humour. And if you want us to leave, we’re just going to add this little extra piece to our side of the scale and be like, oh, well, that’s that’s not 1000 pounds of gold. The Romans are like, you’ve got to be kidding me. Dr Rad 20:54Yeah. And when the Romans try and point this out in my account, this is a very dramatic moment where the military tribunes say, I’m very sorry to be that guy. But I couldn’t help but notice that the mathematics of this situation, they just don’t seem to be 100% correct. I think you might be asking for more than 1000 pounds of gold, and this is where a Gallic soldier rips out his sword, throws it on the pile where they’re stacking up all their stuff to skew the weights, and says “Woe to the conquered”, which is a fancy way of saying tough titties, guys, we get to call the shots around here. Dr G 20:59Yeah, this idea of this phrase that variously translated as “Woe to the conquered”, “Woe to the vanquished”, and the Gauls basically standing there at this moment of a peace treaty being like some of these ones. Dr Rad 23:52Dr G is giving me two fingers up for those listening in audio format only. Dr G 23:58And this phrase passes into Latin proverb, it becomes a thing that they say to each other. Dr Rad 24:03It does. Well, and this, it’s no wonder the Romans go back to this supposed moment, because it’s obviously deeply shameful that not only was their city taken, not only did the Gauls steal a bunch of their stuff and set a bunch of their buildings on fire, allegedly, not only did they massacre the elderly patricians, senators, whatever you want to call them, and not only have they continued to siege for a number of months, but they haven’t been able to get themselves out of this situation, and now they’re actually having to pay to get these guys to go. I mean, I can’t really imagine much of a lower point for the Romans at this moment in time. Dr G 24:45This is a huge low point. I don’t think Rome has ever been so low. I put it to you because from the very beginning, they’ve been on a upwards trajectory with some little bumps in the road, admittedly. But always quite quickly back to an upwards trajectory, and this, this is a massive blow. Most of their population doesn’t seem to be in the city. It’s limited in supplies. They’re at their wits end. They don’t think they’ve got any help coming. If they know about Camillus, which is not clear from my source material that they do, then they really are having to make the best decision that they can for their own survival under terrible circumstances, and they’re just really lucky that the Gauls agree to go away for a sum of cash, because, I mean, any other enemy in central Italy at this time, and Rome has a few of them would probably not have gone, yeah, give us some cash and we’ll go. Dr Rad 25:48Yeah, well, and that, I think, shows the fact that the Gauls aren’t necessarily here because they want to establish, like a permanent settlement themselves in this particular location. I think that’s why they’re happy to accept this money. Apparently, in order to go away, they’re interested in having portable wealth. And this is, this is part of the narrative that we’re given about why Gauls are on the move at this time, they are looking for more land. They’re looking for more goods. And so with them being so far south at this point in time, they probably do want stuff that they can carry – cash and carry only, thank you very much. And that might explain some of the archaeology, the fact that we don’t find a huge conflagration in the in the records when we sort of dig down deep enough, there is evidence of a great fire that probably was fairly destructive, but it’s just not the right time period. And even though we might be a few years off here with the Gallic siege, obviously, people sort of speculate it happened sort of between 390 and sort of 387 386 because of the differences in dating. But it’s definitely at around this time that this supposedly happened, this encounter. So the dating is just off. It would make sense if the Gauls were more interested in stealing things, because that wouldn’t leave any trace in the archaeological records for us to see, and it explains why, in spite of the fact that the Romans think that the Gauls set most of their city on fire, there are, in fact, still buildings and inscriptions and statues that predate the Gallic sack of Rome standing hundreds of years later into Livy’s time. Dr G 27:24I think there’s also something to be said for the way that the authors of the sources that we’re able to access have particular ideas about the Gauls because of Rome’s engagement with Gallia in the first century BC as well. So there’s a very particular picture that has been built up about what Gallic people are like on the basis of things like Caesar’s campaigns in Gaul and so for a Roman writer like Livy and even for a Greek writer like Didorus Siculus, there is a sense in which there is a pre-established idea about what Gallic people are like. They’re a raid and plunder kind of people. They are not about firm sort of settlements, necessarily. They’re more about moving and raiding and being able to pick up and be on the go if they need to. And those kinds of ideas, I think, are partly what is feeding into this narrative as well, because the Romans don’t conceive of the Gallic people as a people that would want to stay in Italy, even though, historically, they’ve been in the northern parts of Italy for a few centuries already, and they got to have lived somewhere. Dr Rad 28:49Hey Dr G 28:50They’ve probably put down some roots. Dr Rad 28:52It’s well beyond where the Romans are at this point in time. Northern Italy, what’s that? Now, this is where I’d like to do a bit of a tangent, if I may. Dr, G, I mean, I know, I know, I’m making this series even longer, but I have been doing a bit of extra reading around these accounts, because it’s so complicated, picking apart the slightly different narratives that we get and the details that we get. And as we say, we’re dealing with this thing where we’ve got this very epic, detailed narrative history, and yet at the same time, we’re kind of like, did this happen though, Livy, did it? I have some questions, exactly, so I’m going to put it to you. Dr G, where the hell did this 1000 pounds of gold come from? Dr G 29:35Well, I would say if it came from anywhere, it’d have to be the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, because that’s on the Capitolini hill. Otherwise, not sure. Dr Rad 29:47Yeah, and this is exactly the problem. This is something that one of the academics I read has delved into. If you’d like to read the article, please check out our show notes. They have tried to figure out, okay, so where’s the money coming from? Because in our different accounts, we’re given slightly different details, which probably reflects the particular perspective of the person writing. So the account that we get of this whole galaxy each of course, is that most Romans have left by the time the Gauls arrive. You know they the Romans are defeated at the Alia. They know things aren’t going well for them. They’ve scattered. We know that a lot of the population has therefore left the city. The whole idea is you just have this band of fighting men and a couple of extras who are left behind, and then, of course, the older gentlemen who are all sorted so they don’t count. Dr G 30:37Yeah, anybody who reasonably could go has gone. Dr Rad 30:41Yes, exactly. And we know that because this was seen as such a monumental moment for Roman history. Obviously, this is a story that was told and retold, and, you know, we slightly reworked over time, depending, I guess, on what the Romans needed to sort of get out of it, I suppose. So, what this person has actually suggested is that what we’re witnessing here was, in fact, a total Gallic capture of Rome. So the entire city is taken. It’s not this situation where some of the buildings are set on fire, but then the girls say, You know what? We’re going to leave you just a tiny little bit of hope so that you’re going to pierce the ransom and leave some of the buildings, etc, etc. Dr G 31:20I like that one, leave it. Dr Rad 31:23I think this is a total takeover. And then we have to figure out where are the assets coming from? Because we only have this tiny group who are left behind and starving to death. Where are they coming up with 1000 pounds of gold? Now, in Livy’s account, he is very particular that they do not use temple treasure in the ransom. Dr G 31:43Oh, well, that’s a problem that’s my one source. Dr Rad 31:49Well, the reason being, of course, and this feeds into the other things I’ve been telling you, Livy is all about protocol at this point in time. You know, the Romans have got themselves into this situation, apparently, because of their lack of attention to the signs that the gods are sending them there, they got off balance with the gods. They weren’t doing things properly, not pious enough. And so now they’re in this situation. And once they’re in this situation, when the chips are down, they’re doing everything by the book. So even when they’re besieged, they’re like, We have to go through the proper procedures to appoint a dictator. Guys, can’t just wait for someone to come in on a white horse. You know how we feel about white horses, especially if there’s more than one of them, we really got to make sure we do everything properly. You know, cross every T, dot every I. Dr G 32:36You know what? In our alternative history, it’s really fortunate that Camillus isn’t around, actually, because he would have talked them into giving over the temple treasure, and then it would have all gone downhill from, Dr Rad 32:47I don’t know, I don’t know if he would. He’s such a pious guy, it’s all very confusing. But anyway, in Livy’s account, it’s not the temple treasure, okay? Because that would be, obviously, it’s, I suppose, slightly offensive to the gods, you know, not perhaps exactly the picture he wants to paint at this point in time. And so it’s just state gold. I mean, I guess it’s possible that they just have some state gold with them, because, as I constantly point out, when discussing climate change, you can’t eat money, so you may as well use your money to fix the situation around. But yeah, so maybe they do, I suppose, have some state gold. They don’t have quite enough, and this is where Roman matrons apparently chip in some of their gold in order to make up the balance. This will come back to later, and it’s because of the Roman citizens pulling together, uniting, showing what Rome is all about, showing off those values that they’re able to make up the account. In other accounts, it absolutely is temple treasure that is used. However, we also have to question exactly the nature of this temple treasure, because, of course, we know that a lot of valuable objects have been taken. We had that whole story, Dr G about the Vestals fleeing in a cart meant for a family, and they’re far, far away, and they’ve buried some of the treasure as well, so they don’t have access to everything at this point in time, even Varro, who is one of these antiquarians we were talking about before, who we only have snippets of, he is one of the sources that we have that mentions that temple treasures were used, but also jewelry donated by Roman matrons. Dr G 34:31Look, it wouldn’t surprise me if they’re scrounging for every piece of gold that can get their hands on. Really, they’re confined to the Capitoline hill, so that immediately limits their physical accessibility to storage. So it’s either temples or if they do have a physical structure that houses the public treasury at this point, which is when I’m not sure archaeologists, please weigh in and let us know. Did they have a public treasury building at this point? Was it on the Capitoline? If yes, we can all start to make sense of this. But turning to the people themselves seems the ultimate answer to this as well, because once you’ve depleted all of the publicly accessible wealth, what do you do next? If you’re still falling short, and this is a very specific figure that we’ve been given 1000 pounds of gold is a massive amount to ask, and it’s the kind of round figure that that feels questionable, like many of the round figures that we get from ancient sources, but it’s obviously designed, from a literary perspective, to give us a sense of the overwhelming nature of what the Gauls require in order to go away, to perhaps lessen Roman shame around this idea that they had to capitulate, that it was a capitulation that was substantial enough to make sense, that they they did it, and it was possible, and it allows them maybe to save some face there. But I think it’s really, it’s a really interesting question that this scholar has asked, like, what gold? Dr Rad 36:09Follow the money Dr G 36:10Like where? Yeah yeah yeah. And it’s hard to follow the money when we have so little understanding of what’s going on in that archaeological record. Dr Rad 36:19Well, yeah, the more they pulled these threads, the more I was like, Oh, my God, they’re totally right. Because not only have all the Romans gone, not only have they apparently removed a lot of the valuables for safe keeping, the Gauls have then plundered all the rest of the parts of the city, apart from the capital. So it’s not like the Romans can sneak out and get their little piggy bank from their house that they left behind. It’s all gone. Dr G 36:42Although maybe that’s exactly what they did. I mean, we had that priest who snuck down into the forum… Dr Rad 36:48Not snuck he just walked out. He was just like, out of my way. I’ve got a ritual to perform. Dr G 36:52But if he could get away with that, maybe everyone’s like, you know what? I’m just gonna do a quick, sneaky run to my house. I’ll be back. Dr Rad 36:59I’m now come back, bring a Gallic warrior with like a spear held above somebody’s head, as a Roman, you know, pulls aside like a fresco, and it’s like, yeah, getting into their wall safe. Dr G 37:10Exactly. It was like, I know where the family jewels are hidden. I’ll be back, guys. Give me five minutes. Dr Rad 37:15I think this is the way this scholar is sort of imagining it. So basically, to preserve Rome’s dignity, as you were talking about, we have this scenario where they have at least managed to keep the Gauls off the Capitol, and even though that it’s extremely shameful to enter into these negotiations, have to pay the Gauls to go away, at least the Gauls, in this narrative, didn’t take the Capitol. You know, it was all protected. This scholar, I think, is suggesting that’s actually not the case. Everything was taken, and this is why the Romans find themselves in this scenario. And of course, they actually probably don’t have the resources. And if everything was taken, then maybe we are actually dealing with a ransom situation. Because if we think about that particular institution of Rome, the patron-client relationship, which, whilst we can’t obviously be 100% sure exactly how it played out at this point in time, it is a constant. We know it existed at this point in time, there would have been an obligation to help out. If you could, you know, call on your clients, or, you know, you know, call on your patrons. There’s an obligation there to help each other out. And so it’s possible that what actually happened in this scholar’s imagination is that the Romans are calling on outside sources, maybe even other cities. So like Caere has come up in our narrative, we know that Rome is going to, after all this is over, have a special relationship with Caere because they, you know, they were real, a real pal, a real solid friend in Rome’s time of need. And maybe this is indicative of a role that Caere played that has not made it into the narrative in the most accurate way, perhaps that you know the reason why the Romans have this sense of obligation to them, and with so many Romans sort of spread in the surrounding area, this scholar sort of highlighted that it would have been potentially possible to call on these outside sources To deal with this ransom situation, and it would explain why Livy can’t exactly pinpoint for us, where have these state funds been hidden this entire time? What’s going on with, you know, the matrons? You know, not, not even all the patricians, are in Rome. It’s not like, we’re talking about, like all the rich guys stayed behind to fight. No, they didn’t. It’s just a select group of people, so it’s just a question of, yeah, it doesn’t seem likely that they’re going to have everything that they possibly need, particularly if they are completely under Gaelic control, and the capital was potentially actually seized. At this point in time? Dr G 40:01Yeah, definitely. And thinking back to earlier accounts of this same situation, we know that even though some of the women stayed that the men weren’t happy about that, they thought they were just going to be a burden. Dr Rad 40:18Well, women can’t fight or do anything useful! Dr G 40:25Not from a Roman perspective, but maybe they were making the bread. Goodness knows, if I was a matron who had finally made some bread and then my fellow men had thrown it off the Capitoline, I mean, I would be ropeable. Dr Rad 40:43Talk about the mental load. Dr G 40:46And so even in the context where I think this is a nice, also a literary echo, the idea that the matrons are giving up their jewelry, because this is referencing another moment in history a couple of centuries later. Dr Rad 40:59Yes, well, we’ve had this happen before, not that long ago as well, like where matrons have given up, yeah, yeah. Dr G 41:05And again, probably that one also maybe a literary echo. Dr Rad 41:09You ruin everything, Dr G. Dr G 41:12And this idea that in in times where Rome is really in strife, that it’s actually the women who come forward and do the thing that needs to be done in order to get things across the line. And so Rome has this sort of ongoing narrative about itself, where, when it when push comes to shove, it is the matrons who stand up, and it makes all of their narratives around women being unhelpful or not useful, not in their place, blah, blah, blah, or the misogyny incredibly infuriating, because every time the Roman men have ruined it to the point where it’s not working anymore, those women stand up and say, fine, you know what? I’ll get us out of this. Dr Rad 41:58I’m getting a big scenario here. Okay, so these starving Roman men have just pelted Gallic soldiers underneath with the remaining bread that they have left. And then they turn around, their anger kind of disappears, and they’re like, What are we going to do now? And there are some women just sitting there on a couch, and they’re like, Well, who needs my help now, boys? Dr G 42:25Exactly – every time Roman women come through. Dr Rad 42:28Now, there is a detail that this scholar has highlighted, which I actually probably would have missed, because there’s a bit of a gap. We’ll come to it later, but there is a bit of a gap in between this moment and when this reference comes up in a few years, when we get to another moment involving our hero of the Capitol, Marcius Manlius Capitolinius, he’s going to become a real douchebag in a few years. And when he is being a douchebag, he makes reference to the fact that the patricians are somehow hiding the Gallic gold, and they’re somehow abusing public funds. And it’s thought that this could be a reference to the fact that it is definitely the plebs that have managed to escape with all their movable wealth, which might be more than usual, because, of course, we’ve just had the conquest. They things have been going relatively well for Rome. So who knows what the plebs managed to escape with? Who knows what they’ve got in Veii. But these people who have pitched in to pay this ransom, if they are indeed from outside of the city at this moment in time, they then obviously want that money to be accounted for in the aftermath of this ransom being paid. And there’s this very brief reference that sort of indicates that Livy knows, or at least he’s repeating something, and maybe he hasn’t even picked up on, you know, the significance of what he’s sort of saying here, but that there is something else that’s gone on here that’s been kind of concealed in his original narrative. Dr Rad 42:29Wow. Look like I said earlier. I think Livy’s account has some question marks over it, so… Dr Rad 43:58Well it does, because, of course, one of the things we’re going to get into in the aftermath, and I’m sorry to give this away, but there is going to be disputes about land, as we’re going to go back to that old chestnut in a few years. And it’s possible that one of the reasons why this pops up is because the plebs contributed to saving Rome in this moment. And therefore, when we’re talking about distributing land, which, of course, is a form of wealth, a base of wealth, and particularly in this sort of society here, that there is something to do with this moment of crisis in terms of why they feel perhaps they have a stake in what’s going on going forward after this particular moment. Definitely, I think it makes sense to raise all these sorts of questions, and we’re about to get to this moment in my account, and I’m sorry again for spoilers, because I don’t want to ruin the drama here, but I sort of have to highlight it now. I have no choice, Dr G, Camillus is going to show up in my account whilst this is all happening. Okay, this is where he makes his heroic return. Dr G 45:17Agent of chaos – back on the scene. Dr Rad 45:19Yeah, absolutely. And he’s going to set everything to rights. Don’t you worry. Dr G, here he comes to save the day. But it’s possible that the Gauls are the ones that actually get screwed over here. So we have this account, obviously, where the Gauls are being tricksy, because, you know, that’s what they’re like. Where’s their code of honour? But what if it’s actually the other way around, and Camillus showing up here? Maybe Camillus is showing up to make the payment, or maybe there’s, maybe there’s a band of Romans showing up to make the payment, and then they get all tricksy. Dr G 45:59I’m going to hold on to to what I’ve said earlier, which is that there was at least one other scholar in my corner who says Diodorus Siculus has the most accurate account of the stuff that’s going on. Dr Rad 46:12Look, I have read such things, even though it seems ludicrous. Dr G 46:16And the thing is that Camillus is in no way involved in the Gallic siege, beginning to end. He’s not there. He’s just not there, and he turns up not only after the Gauls have left, so they’ve received their payment and keeping to their word, although winking and laughing to themselves as they go, being like, wasn’t that a bit of fun. As they exit stage left, the Volscians enter stage right. And it is only when the Volscians have turned up being like, oh, Rome, this is the best thing we’ve seen. Look at you now, and the Volscians are gearing up for what they think is going to be a very easy takedown of Rome at this point, because the Romans are just sort of lying on the Capitol line Hill being like, I’m so glad the Gauls have gone and I don’t even know what I’m going to eat, because there’s nothing up here, and I don’t know if I can crawl down far enough to find a piece of bread that I threw three days ago. And while they’re doing that, the Volscians are like and it is only then, it seems, that Camillus sort of emerges out of the countryside with a fully fledged force that he’s been gathering for quite some time, probably made up from the folk of Veii and people he’s come across in the countryside who are also Roman, who like, oh, Camilius! Ah! Well! And he has turned up, and it’s the Volscians that he engages with initially, because that’s the most immediate threat that Rome is facing. Dr Rad 47:59Well, look, I am just going to say that Livy’s account is far more comforting than this rubbish you are spewing, Dr G, if we go with Livy’s account, then the Romans are not so impious or lame as to use their temple treasures in order to pay the Gauls. They hold onto the Capitol. There is no complete Gallic invasion the Romans at least, can say that they’ve done their duty to the city, and then they get Camillus to show up and put everything to right and put those freaking barbarians in their place. Livy’s account is the account to go for because, let me tell you. Dr G, this is the moment where Camillus settles up. Because, of course, the gods are not going to let the Romans be pulverized into the ground because they’ve been doing the right thing. They’ve been making sure that everything is appropriate. So it’s whilst there’s argument over the weight where the Romans keep saying, No, I refuse to believe that this is 1000 pounds in gold. I think you’re being a tricksy little Gaul. And the Gauls are saying, I am so evil. I have no interest in your concerns, Roman accountant. Dr G 49:18And it’s like, what are you gonna do about it? How you’re going to stop me? Dr Rad 49:21Exactly. So the stalling is when Camillus enters the scene and no money has actually changed hands. So the shame of Rome is somewhat averted by the entrance of Camillus, because whilst they’re about to make the payment, they don’t. No, instead, Camillus shows up and says, hey guys, why don’t you make like a tree and leave the Gauls say, I don’t think so, mate, we had a deal. Now this, of course, is the moment where maybe Camillus is actually showing up with the money the Gauls are just waiting to get the money. And instead of paying them, Camillus and his band start a war. And the Gauls are like, what the hell I thought we had a deal? Dr G 50:09I don’t want to say that this is almost unbelievable, but there’s a lot of holes in this story. Dr Rad 50:15It gets better. Camillus then says, pish-tosh, your deal is null and void because you made it with some other magistrate, some lowly military tribune with consular power. Whereas I am dictator. So put that in your pipe and smoke it King Brennus. Instead of a pile of gold, I’m going to be giving you a steaming pile of war. How do you like that? Dr G 50:46I do like how the Romans have turned into British imperial, aka Star Wars style. Dr Rad 50:53Entirely intentional, I assure you. I’m just following Livy’s account to the letter. Dr G 51:00Look. So problem number one the timeline. Camillus is not here. He’s just not here. He’s somewhere else. He doesn’t turn up. The money definitely changes hands. As far as Diodorus Siculus is concerned, the Romans give over the 1000 pounds of gold. The Gauls start to walk away. In Diodorus’ account, Camillus isn’t even appointed dictator until he turns up and the Volscians are already at Rome’s door. And Rome is like, We really need your assistance. And he’s like, Well, I need to be able to command troops, because I don’t have permission to do that, because I’m an exile. And they’re like, oh, right, right, right, right, right. Quick meeting. Quick meeting. Quick dictator title is offered. And so it’s this idea in this intense situation where the Gauls are moving off into the distance with all of the treasure, the Volscians there being like, and the Romans are like, okay, we’ll make it legal for you to lead this army