Keeping up with the theme on capturing lessons from content I consume, I’ve recently seen an interview from Lex Fridman to Gregory Aldrete, an historian specializing in ancient Rome and military history, in which Gregory eloquently spoke about many of the fascinating details on the rise and fall of ancient rome. Here are my takeaways from it.¹

Rise and Fall of Rome

Romans were obsessed with the past

Romans were absolutely obsessed with the past, especially with their own family.

Entering an aristocrat Roman’s house, the first thing you would see would be a big wooden cabinet with several rows of wax death masks. These masks were imprints of Roman aristocrats at the time of their death.

Every child in the family had obsessively memorized every accomplishment of every one of those ancestors: their career, what offices they held, what battles they fought in, what they did.

At a funeral, people would talk about all the things their ancestors had done. The children would take out these masks, tie them onto their own faces, and wear them in the funeral procession. They were wearing the face of their own ancestors. You, as an individual, weren’t important. You were just the latest iteration of that family, and was a huge weight to live up to the deeds of their ancestors.

Brutus honors the past, kills Julius Caesar, Roman Republic dawns

Rome started out as a monarchy. They had kings and were not happy with their kings. Around 500 BC, they held a revolution and they kicked out the kings, and the Roman Republic started at that point. One of the people who played a key role in this was a man named Lucius Junius Brutus.

500 years later, Julius Caesar² came along as the culmination of a sequence of generals trying to overtake Rome and declare themselves as kings. Even though he was populist who provided entertainment to the state, Julius Caesar was arrogant, didn’t hide his power, ignored the senate, and got several people angry. Romans don’t like kings.

Just so happens that one of Caesar’s best friends is Marcus Junius Brutus. People went to Brutus’ house and wrote graffiti saying “Remember your ancestor” or “You are no real Brutus”. He had no choice. He forms a conspiracy, and on the Ides of March, 44 BC, he and 23 other senators take daggers, stick them in Julius Caesar, and kill him for acting like a king.

Brutus killed his best friend because of something his late ancestor did.

Filling Julius Caesar’s power void

Julius Caesar and left a power void. There are many contenders for filling it up:

• Mark Antony: a relative and supporter of Julius Caesar. Most expected him to be the new Ceaser.
• Lepidus: another of Caesar’s lieutenants.
• Senate: which wants to reassert its power, to become the dominant force in Rome again.
• Assassins who killed Caesar: Led by Brutus and Cassius.
• Pompey’s son: Pompey was Caesar’s great rival. Pompey’s son, Sextus Pompey, was at the time a warlord who seized control of Sicily, one of the richest provinces, and amassed a whole navy.
• Octavian: Julius Caesar’s 18-year-old kid grand nephew. When Caesar’s will was opened after his death, he posthumously adopted Octavian as his son.

Octavian emerges victorious

By now being Caesar’s son, Octavian gets to rename himself Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus, and it just so happened that in the Mediterranean, there were about 12 legions full of hardened soldiers following the orders of a man named Gaius Julius Caesar.

As such, Octavian inherits an army overnight and becomes a player in this game for power, and a civil war starts.

Octavian emerges from it as the victor. He wasn’t a good general and lost almost every battle, but was politically savvy and very good at manipulating public image and propaganda. Octavian waged a propaganda war against Antony, portraying Antony as a foreign aggressor allied with an enemy queen, Cleopatra, and who was an official enemy of the Roman state). Octavian takes what’s a civil war and makes it look like a war against a foreign enemy.

Octavian is the “king”, but can’t act like one

Octavian now becomes the sole ruler, essentially a king, but could not take the same approach as Julius Caesar, otherwise he would end up murdered all the same.

Instead, he was very modest, lived in an ordinary house like other aristocrats, wore just a plain toga, was respectful to the Senate, and ate simple foods. He’s someone who cared about the reality of power, not its external trappings. He wanted real power, not the appearance of it.

In terms of government, everything seemed the same from the outside, but in reality Octavian was able to retain absolute power. He did by resigning from all public offices to give that appearance, but at the same time got voted to have the powers of a consul, by which he could command armies, he got tribune power, to control meetings at the Senate, he could veto anything, and got several other powers.

Each year elections are held, and notionally, these people are in charge. But floating off to the side, there Octavian, who can just appear and say that “I don’t like this, let’s change it”

Nor can he be named like a king

Octavian wondered what to call himself. He couldn’t call himself a king, or anything that could suggest it, so instead he picked ambiguous names, that when joined an interpret in a certain way, would proved to be powerful:

• Augustus: Augustus could mean that someone is very pious, or could mean that something is divine.
• Princep³: Meaning, first citizen. Could be interpreted as a citizen just like everybody, or the first citizen, superior to all the others.
• Imperator: traditionally something that soldiers shout at a victorious general who’s won a battle. Octavian took this as a permanent title, implying he was a good general⁴.

What being Roman meant

It’s wonderful to contemplate how the roman empire in about 100 AD overlaps with the regions where olives could be grown. Romans consumed olives, grapes, wheat. Barbarians meat, dairy, beer. When you are a farmer, you tend to stay in the same place, when you raise cattle you follow them around. They are two fundamental forms of living. Diet was a big part of their culture and one of characteristics that was considered fundamentally Roman. Not having their diet was barbaric.

Roman empire crumbles

There are many factors that could explain the fall of Rome, and there is not a single clear cut explanation. Even the date of the empire fall is debated.

Geography, climate, religion, disease (there were a whole series of waves of plague that started to hit under Marcus Aurelius and continued after him, which seemed to caused real serious death and economic disruption), Marcus Aurelius leaving is succession to his child (who turned out to be deranged), instead of picking the best suited person for that role ⁵, as it was done on the previous 80 years, which is often regarded as the high point of the Roman Empire.

Power of the past

No way to escape the power of the past

Gregory and his wife wife wrote The Long Shadow of Antiquity: What Have the Greeks and Romans Done for Us?”, where they provide several examples of things that we think are just in truly unique parts of our culture or things that we think are just innate to human nature, that are actually rooted in the past, such as government, education, art, architecture, language / words, culture, medicine, habits, law, the way we get married, the calendar (Julius Caesar was the one who basically came up with the 365 days, 12 months, leap years).

We’re the accumulation of the knowledge of several generations that have come before us. Everything we do is based on that. Otherwise, we’d all just be starting at ground zero.

Understanding the past to mold the future

It’s vital to have some understanding of the past in order to make competent decisions in the present. Not just in your own life, but it’s in understanding others. You need to understand where they’re coming from, where they came from, and what shaped them, and what forces affect them.

The study of history is the best medicine for a sick mind; for in history you have a record of the infinite variety of human experience plainly set out for all to see: and in that record you can find for yourself and your country both examples and warnings: fine things to take as models, base things, rotten through and through, to avoid.

― Livy, The History of Rome

People from antiquity had different environments, technologies, and information available, but were just as sharp as we are nowadays. They were not stupid. Even though it might seem that many concepts and ideas were invented by our contemporaries, many lessons, successes and mistakes were already discovered in the past ⁶. The real challenge is to incorporate them into our own lives.