Aldrete, Gregory

historian of ancient Rome and military history, University of Wisconsin-Green Bay

Gregory Aldrete: The Roman Empire - Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome

Lex Fridman Podcast · Sep 12, 2024

• Gregory Aldrete
• Roman Empire
• Roman Republic
• Punic Wars
• Hannibal
• Julius Caesar
• Augustus
• Roman law
• gladiators
• fall of Rome
• Roman oratory

Core ideas

Aldrete frames the biggest gap between ancient and modern life not as technology but as mortality (30–40% child death rates before puberty) and the sheer ubiquity of subsistence farming — he argues a realistic history of Rome should devote most of its attention to anonymous small farmers rather than emperors and philosophers, since that's what nearly everyone actually was. He argues the Romans' defining psychological trait was an oppressive reverence for ancestors and tradition (mos maiorum) — illustrated through aristocratic households displaying ancestral wax death masks worn by descendants at funerals, and the story of Marcus Junius Brutus, shamed by graffiti invoking his ancestor's overthrow of the monarchy into joining the conspiracy to assassinate his friend Julius Caesar. This ancestor-worship gave Rome cohesion but also made it resistant to structural reform even when reform was badly needed, a dynamic he sees echoed in modern ethnic conflicts (citing Serbian justifications for 1990s violence citing 800-year-old battles).

He divides Roman history into three periods — Monarchy (753–509 BCE), Republic (509–31/27 BCE, subdivided into conquering Italy then the Mediterranean), and Empire (starting with Augustus) — while noting Rome arguably persisted through the Byzantine Empire until 1453. A recurring theme is Rome's genius for absorbing rather than annihilating conquered peoples: unlike most ancient conquerors, Rome extended citizenship or half-citizenship to defeated Italian cities in exchange for military manpower, which Aldrete identifies as the actual secret to early Roman military success — not superior generalship, but limitless replaceable manpower, illustrated by Pyrrhus of Epirus winning every battle against Rome yet losing the war because Rome kept raising new armies ("fighting the Romans is like fighting a hydra"). Rome later extended this integration strategy to its 250,000-strong Auxiliary forces (non-citizen recruits who earned citizenship after 25 years of service, with children who then became citizen Legionaries) and to elite political advancement — emperors like Trajan and Hadrian came from Spain, Septimius Severus from North Africa. Rome also freely absorbed Etruscan cultural inventions (the toga, gladiator games, animal-based divination) it later presented as "Roman."

The Punic Wars receive detailed treatment: Hannibal's strategic insight that Rome's weakness was its allied manpower system, his invasion of Italy and crossing of the Alps, the catastrophic Battle of Cannae (~60,000 Roman dead in one afternoon via Hannibal's "double envelopment" tactic — a maneuver later echoed in German Blitzkrieg cauldron battles and reportedly the Gulf War), and Rome's disciplined refusal to re-engage Hannibal directly while Scipio conquered Spain and North Africa, eventually defeating Hannibal at Zama. He then walks through Alexander the Great's success as a combination of inherited infrastructure (his father Philip II's military reforms, including the 15-foot sarissa pike phalanx) and personal charisma/ambition, contrasting Alexander's failure to establish any succession mechanism (his empire fragmented instantly upon his death) with Rome's structural durability. A substantial digression covers Aldrete's own experimental-archaeology project reconstructing the linothorax (linen-and-glue Greek/Macedonian body armor worn by Alexander), begun with an undergraduate student and eventually involving 150 students, ballistics testing with reconstructed bronze arrowheads, and the finding that one centimeter of laminated linen offered protection roughly equivalent to two millimeters of bronze at a fraction of the weight and cost.

On Roman law, Aldrete traces its evolution from the agrarian, retaliatory Twelve Tables (451 BCE) through centuries of increasingly sophisticated jurisprudence culminating in Justinian's 6th-century Code, the basis for roughly 90% of the world's legal systems today — illustrating its idiosyncratic complexity through unresolved hypothetical liability cases (a barbershop accident involving a stray ball and a slave's death; a flood carrying furniture into a neighbor's apartment) and noting that citizenship (Civis Romanus Sum — "I am a Roman citizen") carried real legal protection, though this applied to perhaps only 6 million of 50 million people in the empire. On slavery, he stresses it was not racially defined in Rome, was economically rather than ideologically organized (most slaves came from war captives), and existed on a spectrum from brutal chained plantation labor to trained professionals (doctors, scribes, accountants) who could earn manumission — while emphasizing the fundamentally dehumanizing core of the institution (Roman agricultural writers classified slaves as a category of "articulate tools," and runaway slaves wore bronze collars like dog tags). Lex explicitly reflects that most people, given the same historical circumstances, could have been either enslaver or enslaved — a caution against moral self-exemption.

The late Republic's collapse is explained as a case of unequally distributed success producing universal resentment: veterans who fought Rome's wars felt shortchanged, aristocrats outside the dominant Scipio-adjacent cliques felt excluded, Italian allies who'd stayed loyal through Hannibal's invasion were denied full citizenship, and slaves working consolidated plantations were simply exploited — creating a century (133–31 BCE) of internal strife as a succession of ambitious strongmen (Marius, Sulla, Pompey, Caesar) progressively broke precedents that had subordinated individual ambition to the state, culminating in Caesar's assassination for behaving like a king. Aldrete details Octavian's (later Augustus's) political genius in solving "Caesar's riddle" — how to rule as one man without being killed for looking like a king — through deliberate personal modesty, ambiguous titles (Augustus, Princeps, Imperator) that implied without asserting supreme status, retaining the powers of Rome's chief magistracies without holding the offices themselves, and framing his seizure of total power as merely restoring the Republic in his own autobiography (titled, self-effacingly, "stuff I did"). It took Roman writers roughly 200 years to openly call Augustus a king. Augustus also won a decisive propaganda war against Mark Antony by recasting a Roman civil war as a foreign war against Cleopatra, and benefited enormously from simply outliving nearly everyone who remembered the Republic. Cleopatra herself receives extended treatment as a genuinely capable ruler (the only Ptolemaic monarch to learn Egyptian) whose alliances with Caesar and then Antony were plausibly both genuine attachments and strategic moves to preserve Egyptian independence — alongside a broader point about historians systematically underreporting powerful Roman-era women (Musa, a slave gifted to the Parthian king who became his wife, murdered him, and ruled the Parthian Empire through her son; multiple women who were prominent civic patrons in Pompeii).

Cicero's rise through pure oratorical skill (despite lacking family, wealth, or military talent) leads into a detailed discussion of ancient rhetoric as applied psychology: Cicero explicitly believed audiences are ruled by emotion rather than reason and used deliberate theatrical props (cradling a client's infant, propping up a defendant's crying son or elderly parents) to manipulate juries, alongside a codified system of oratorical hand gestures (documented by Quintilian) meant to instill specific emotions in listeners almost involuntarily, much like music — with Aldrete's own dissertation reconstructing this "sign language" from rhetorical handbooks and Roman statuary. He and Lex explicitly extend this to modern political speech, contrasting effective natural gesticulators (Martin Luther King, chillingly, Hitler) with more mechanical ones (Trump), and noting the technique's moral neutrality — equally usable for uplift or atrocity.

On religion, Aldrete frames the shift from Roman polytheism (auxiliary to daily life, not centrally determinative) to monotheism as one of history's great mentality shifts, and explains early Roman-Christian conflict as substantially a communication failure — Romans expected loyalty oaths to the emperor's genius as civic patriotism, not real theological allegiance, and (per the famous Pliny–Trajan correspondence) had almost no real knowledge of what Christians actually believed or practiced even a century after Christ's death, contrary to Hollywood's image of constant persecution. He explains Christianity's appeal (a genuinely appealing afterlife versus the bleak Greco-Roman one; radical equality of value regardless of status, notably attracting slaves and women as early leaders — Pliny reports two female slave "deaconesses" leading a congregation); and Constantine's and later Theodosius's adoption of it as partly solving the empire's chronic legitimacy crisis (with one God endorsing one emperor, rival claimants become illegitimate by definition).

On spectacle, Aldrete corrects the common image of gladiatorial combat as constant slaughter (only ~10% of documented matches ended in death, since gladiators were expensively trained investments), frames gladiators as an example of "status dissonance" (simultaneously the lowest social rank and genuine celebrities), and discusses competing explanations for the games' appeal (a culture practicing to be inured to violence; a ritual assertion of Roman dominance over the fates of foreigners/slaves/criminals; or simply an honest expression of humans' latent attraction to violence, per Dan Carlin's "painfotainment" concept). He highlights Roman engineering excellence (concrete varying in density and weight to structurally optimize the Pantheon's dome, still the world's largest unreinforced concrete dome) as directly ancestral to nearly every domed public building today.

Roman imperial succession is treated as Augustus's one major unsolved problem: heredity produced catastrophic emperors (Caligula, Nero, Domitian) until the 2nd century's "adoptive emperors" (Nerva through Marcus Aurelius, the "Five Good Emperors") selected successors by merit via adoption rather than blood — ending when Marcus Aurelius reverted to biological succession with his son Commodus, a widely cited marker (180 CE) for the empire's decline. Aldrete speculates that emperors who inherited power very young (unformed personalities exposed to absolute power) disproportionately became tyrannical, while noting Augustus as a counterexample. He also stresses a structurally important but under-appreciated point: given communication delays of months across the empire, a "crazy" emperor's practical impact on daily life for most subjects (distant farmers) was often minimal — the real emperor-driven variables that mattered empire-wide were wars and taxation. On the empire's economic system, he describes the initially disastrous privatized tax-farming system (publicani, the Biblical "publicans"), later reforms toward direct in-kind taxation, and Diocletian's attempted currency stabilization (the Solidus gold coin, and a price-control edict whose priciest listed service was, notably, hiring a lawyer) following the 3rd-century military-anarchy "Crisis."

On the fall of Rome, Aldrete presents "when/why did Rome fall" as an unresolvable interpretive game (with candidate dates ranging from 180 CE to 476 CE to 1453 CE) complicated by the fact that Romans and "barbarians" had been culturally and militarily intermixed for centuries, making any clean ethnic dividing line largely arbitrary — and offers a plurality of causal theories (barbarian invasions/migrations under Hunnic pressure, Christianity, climate cooling, recurring plague, currency debasement/inflation, loss of North African and Spanish grain supplies to the Vandals) without endorsing any single one as sufficient, while explicitly rejecting lead poisoning and moral decline as unsupported. He closes on decisive battles (defined either by immediate political rupture, like Gaugamela, or unforeseen long-term consequences), the outsized role of geography and even diet (Roman "civilization" self-defined by olive oil, wine, and wheat cultivation versus "barbarian" meat/dairy/beer pastoralism) in shaping historical outcomes, and a sobering observation that great powers have repeated the identical strategic mistakes in Afghanistan (terrain, tribal loyalty structures) from Alexander through the British, Soviets, and Americans. He ends on the historian's core epistemic challenge — radically incomplete, biased, elite-authored, repeatedly-copied source material, illustrated by a 19th-century scholar mistaking a North African Roman olive-press ruin for evidence of Celtic migration from Africa — and grounds his hope for humanity in curiosity and the cumulative, intergenerational transmission of knowledge as humanity's defining trait.

Excerpts