Conversations: When the Emperors Ruled Greece, the Roman Period w/ Dan Stewart

Published Jun 30, 2023, 7:00 AM

Liv speaks with lecturer Dan Stewart about the world of Greece (Particularly Crete!) during the Roman Period. Follow Dan on Twitter. Help keep LTAMB going by subscribing to Liv's Patreon for bonus content!

CW/TW: far too many Greek myths involve assault. Given it's fiction, and typically involves gods and/or monsters, I'm not as deferential as I would be were I referencing the real thing.

Attributions and licensing information for music used in the podcast can be found here: mythsbaby.com/sources-attributions.

Oh hi, hello there. This is let's talk about miss Baby, and I am your host, she who unabashedly prefers Greece to Rome because frankly, it's better live today. I am here though, with a kind of melding of the two. Dan Stewart, a lecturer at the University of Leicestershire. Did I pronounce it right? Who knows? I'm Canadian? Joins me to talk about Greece during the Roman period, that enormous amount of time that Greece was ruled by the Roman and while they were still very Greek, they had some fascinating changes and peculiarities influenced or directly as a result of the Romans taking control. We talk about Roman Sparta, Roman Crete, Pausanius, Polutarch, and so much more. This was such a fascinating conversation. I rarely ever deal with Greece after the Classical period, because that's just when my own personal passion starts to dwindle. But I am so thrilled when people can come on the show and tell me why it's all interesting throughout all the time periods. Actually, particularly Roman Crete is fascinating because they were like taking control of this island. Like fifteen hundred years after the Minoan's ruled, so they're dealing with an already ancient culture, and then we come in as modern people and we have to navigate ancient culture that built a city on top of an even more ancient culture. Gods, I love conversation episodes. We will truly never even remotely exhaust all of the things that they're are to learn about the ancient world. They were just they were really cool, you know, those ancient Mediterranean people conversations when the emperors ruled Greece the Roman period with Dan Stewart, we're here to talk about Roman Greece, which is something I honestly know almost nothing about. I'm really obsessed with the archaic and classical periods, so that's kind of where all of my knowledge lies, which is why I love when people want to come onto the show and talk to me about time periods that are not that And especially because I just recently did my series on Sparta, where I talked about kind of what Sparta becomes under Rome, which seems to be sort of like a world in itself. So I'm really curious about really anything to do with Roman Greece. But you did mention Kenoso specifically too. So this is me getting rambly. Basically, please tell me any and everything and we'll kind of go from there.

Sure. Yeah, I mean, Roman Greece is a topic that's kind of very close to my heart, and I've been working like in Greece since two thousand, basically when I did my masters. And one of the things that really fascinates me about Roman Greece is how so much of what we think about the classical period in the Archaic period actually have their a lot of their roots in the Roman period. So, like I listened to your excellent series on Sparta to try and prepare for this as well, Oh thank you, And I teach a course on Sparta at Leicester, and we deal a lot with the Roman period because that's my specialty. And you know, a lot of the ideas that we have about what constitutes Spartanus see this kind of ratification in the Roman period, and we see a lot of kind of myths and tropes about aspects of classical and Archaic Greek culture really kind of coming to the fore in the Roman period and being banded about as Greeks, but also Romans at that time have kind of a lot of anxiety about like what does it mean to be Greek in the Roman period? You know, what does it mean to be a culture that has this kind of ingrained sense of superiority, which Greeks definitely have, and then to kind of realize that, like militarily, economically and politically, that that's not really true anymore. So how do they deal with this new reality of being controlled by this outside force? And a lot of it is about looking backwards, and that's part of what really fascinates me about kind of like that Roman period in Greece and for the Romans as well, they have this kind of general anxiety because they also think of the Greeks, like in very broad terms, as being slightly culturally superior to them. You know, you've got like the beginning of Virgil where he's kind of talking about arms and a man in order to juxtapose Roman culture with Greek epic like specifically right like, and you have later on in the Aid when you have basically you know, Eneus goes down to the underworld and he's getting kind of toured around the underworld like you do, and he gets presented with this parade of Romans to come basically you know, so in the Inneid, Virgil is saying, like, you know, here's all the great things that are going to come once Rome actually gets founded, whenever the hell that's going to happen, and we see in there like Anchises telling Aeneas. Look like the cultural mission of the Romans is to rule other people. Like other people will make better statutes, other people are going to write the poetry, other people are going to write the histories. There's your job to rule them. And so you have that kind of slight intellectual inferiority kind of built in to a lot of Roman intellectual life at around the same time when they are firmly in control of the each of Mediterranean and kind of the former cultural powerhouse of Greece. And that's just to find that really fascinating.

Yeah, well, I were just saying it, like even just the existence of the Eneid is part of that, right, Like, I mean, there's a reason that the India takes place after the Trojan War and that it like I mean, I like to jokingly call it fan fiction because it is so you know, like it is this like rewrite affiliate in the Odyssey, like but make it roam and so yeah, I mean it makes sense that even even that like in itself as a concept is like a kind of an ode to Greece or just like a sign of respect I guess to the grease of before.

For sure, But also like it's a bit of a stake as well, isn't it, because they are like Virgil is essentially saying like, look, I can do in one book what you guys did in two.

Yeah.

Right, I'm gonna punch it up. I'm going to make it more exciting, and we're going to have you know, it's like the Hollywood remake of a classic film Elosions.

Yeah, yeah, it'd always I have. My favorite part is just the idea that he kind of like it's like Aneas can do everything but better, especially in the like sort of Odysseus Eska bits, the like kind of avoiding all the monsters because he doesn't you know, he won't fall for that, and all of those little bits and piece. It's thriller. I haven't read any ad in Ages, but it was as like a person who's deeply obsessed with Greece alone. I remember just reading it and being perpetually blown away by by kind of everything he was playing with there, but so okay, so this is me him jumping ahead. But one of the things that I do have like a better knowledge base on is like the Hadrian aspect. Of course he's later but coming in and just like kind of being obsessed with Greece himself. He seems like an interesting He is certainly an extra interesting bit when it comes to the Romans appreciating Greece. Do you I don't know what question I'm asking there Hadrian. Sorry, my brain is still turning on today. Apparently.

Yeah, I mean, he's a fascinating figure. I think. You know. One of the things that the emperors tried to do, and this goes all the way back to Augustus, actually, is they try to leverage local forms of power as much as possible to make their own rules as easy as possible. And Greece and Greek culture feature quite heavily in that, in the sense that if we go back in time to the Hellenistic period, we can see that Hellenistic monarchs, your Ptolemy's and your Salucids and your Antigonids, you know, the successors of Alexander the Great, They are competing with each other for power in Eastern Mediterranean. One of the ways that they do that is by trying to buy off the old centers of power, right, so they invest lots of money in Corinth and in Athens, and to a lesser extent, and to Sparta and to lots of other cities in Eastern Mediterranean to basically be in this form of like competitive benefaction, you know, in the same way that you might have you know, sports stadiums being named after different companies because of sponsorship deals and stuff like that in the contemporary world. You've got the same thing happening in antiquity, and the Romans kind of inherit big aspects of that in the Eastern Mediterranean, and they take on the mantle of these kind of Hellenistic monarchies to some extent when it comes to this kind of form of benefaction. And Augustus is kind of interested in doing it because he's just crushed Anthony and Cleopatra and they were big into doing the Hellenistic dynast thing and spending lots of money, and so Augustus is also spending lots of money, and he's kind of quelling rebellion while he's doing that. And an he writes about it and is raised Guesta because of course you do. So Hadrian is kind of following in kind of well established footsteps at that point. You know, he's like one hundred and twenty years essentially, after maybe one hundred years after Augustus, from Augustus's death, and by that point, you know, the Eastern Mediterranean has kind of recovered economically from the shock of the Roman Civil Wars and kind of the period of turbulence in this late second and first centuries DC, and you have, you know, some really big The two other biggest cities in the Mediterranean apart from Rome, are Alexandria and Antioch, both in the East, and so they can't be ignored, right, So if you want to succeed as an emperor, you have to make sure that those places are are happy. And so Hadrian is kind of following in those footsteps. But he definitely has quite an affinity for certain aspects of Greek culture, and he's i mean, he's called the phil Helene in terms of his his kind of epithet as an emperor, and of course he piles around with lots of different Greeks, Greek architects who are responsible for like big building projects in Rome and across the Mediterranean. He's a big patron of the arts as well, So you know, his villa at Tivoli in Italy has lots and lots of copies of Greek statues and presumably Bronze originals as well don't survive, and he's getting Greek artists and artisans in there to build that stuff as well. And he's always going off on Greek vacations as well, turning around the Eastern med and and engaging in benefaction as he goes. So he builds a lot of like really big kind of infrastructure projects in Greece. There's there's a big aqueduct that he builds in the Peloponnese that takes water from Stymphalus in Arcadia down to Corinth. He builds lots of other kind of big infrastructure things within Athens as well, So there's a library, and he reverbs some buildings and temples and stuff. Kind of spreads the money around as well, and of course famously take he takes up with Antinous, who is complicated figure in his own right, but I think it's probably safest to explain him as like a victim of sexual violence. Probably in contemporary terms rather than a great gay love story, which is how he used to be presented. But he was a slave, he was bought, he was used. Adrian was sad when he died.

Yeah, Yeah, that's yeah, I mean, that's the wilds bit is navigating that now, especially like the leftover kind of ways that Antinous is often referred to. But as somebody who's spent so much time in Athens, that's what always stands out to me so much, is like how what an imprint Hadrian had and that still has on Athens in this really interesting way, like between like you're saying the library and then the arch that he built, which I always find interesting that it's like, you know, the one side says something like the city of Theseus versus the city of Hadrian on the other side, which is just sort of a beautiful and interesting way of looking at how he handled that city. But I think a lot about the Temple of Zeus Olympion there too, where you know, he finished this epic temple that was sort of started and stopped so many times. But yeah, I mean, I guess that's that's sort of the reason I even just bring it up is because that's sort of my entire knowledge point on Roman Greece is that like Hadrian just really put his mark in Athens. But it's it's hard to kind of remember that they did so much there for so long. It Yeah, it's often gets lost in my brain in favor of the classical anarchaic.

Yeah, and I would like for sure, like there's a lot of Roman investment in Athens from the get go. I mean, it is destroyed essentially by Sola in the eighties BC when there's a big siege in the Mithridatic War. And again Athens like famously always picks the losing side in every conflict from the late hell On Thistu period onwards. So we have like Julius Caesar pitching up during his own civil war and basically saying to the Athenians, like, how often will the glory of your ancestors save you from destruction? And that is is very much kind of the elite Roman attitude when it comes to the Greek East, that they are a shadow of what they once were, right, and it is only the past that makes them relevant in the Roman contemporary presence. And we see that kind of reiterated time and again in different types of literature. But at the same time we also have the Romans. You know, part of a standard Roman elite education is to send your kid off to the East to get like a philosophical education. So like that's what Cicero does. Like Cicero just like goes off on a tour of the East and studies philosophy in Athens and at Rhodes and then comes back and kind of spreads notions of Greek philosophy and rhetoric within Italy. And we also know that he spent some time at Sparta as well, So he's the one that kind of tells us about the evolution of the whipping contest that you talked about in relation to Artemis or thea.

Yeah, So you know, there's always this kind of tension built into the relationship between the Romans and the Greeks, where the Romans want some of that cultural cachet that the Greeks have to offer, but at the same time they kind of look down their noses at what they see is the state of contemporary Greece, and a lot of that kind of rubs off, I think on Greek elite populations as well.

So like unlike other areas of the Roman Empire. Greek elites don't really engage that much in the Roman imperial project, so we do not have a large number of Greeks taking up Roman citizenship before everybody has citizenship in two twelve. So there's some notable exceptions, but for the most part, it looks like there's a smaller proportion of Greek elites are voluntarily taking up Greek citizenship, unlike places like Gaul or Spain or bits of North Africa, where they seem much more inclined to do that. And we have many fewer Greeks kind of becoming senators and working with the imperial administration directly as Roman citizens as well in comparison to other areas of the Empire. So there is this kind of like reluctance to engage with the situation as it stands, I think in the Greek East, especially in mainline Greece, as compared to like Turkey or the Levant or Egypt. And I think that it's like that's really interesting to kind of think through kind of the implications of that, And I think it's also reflective in the way in which Greek authors write about their own past, So like Plutarch, I know, somebody that you've talked about a lot on the podcast, But you know, it's interesting to kind of think about the way that Plutarch framed his project. That you know, when you pick up a Penguin or an Oxfordoro Classics version of Plutarch, they're frequently packaged in a completely different way than it would have been in antiquity, because you know, you pick up you know, the Lives of Spartans or the Lives of the Athenians, or whatever kind of exerted version it is that you've got of Plutarch. But he's always written pairs of Greek and Roman lives, so he's always got a Greek paired with the Roman. And he is makes the claim, like several times in the Parallel Lives, that he's not a historian, he's not interested in writing history. He's writing character studies. Basically. I think it's really interesting to kind of think about, like why is he doing, Like what is the point of this thing? Why is he writing like in Greek but pairing Greek and Roman lives, like to whose benefit? For what purpose? And I think a big part of it is about trying to explain to both a Greek and a Roman audience. Why being Greek still matters in the Roman Empire? Right, So he can say, look for every great Roman, there's an equally great Greek, and if we look at their characters, they can teach us lessons about leadership and how to be a good man, because almost all of the examples that he uses are people who have who have flaws of some sort. And as part of what makes him like a problematic source for history, because he's not interested in in accuracy. He's interested in character studies and biography, which is like a different thing. Yeah, but like that that kind of anxiety is like permeates the literature of the time.

Yeah, that's really interesting. I just I had a listener point out to like actually contact me forget how but basically, when I talked about Plutarch and explained that he was interested in biography, and you know, in the way that I was talking about how he is both an interesting source and a source we have to question at all times. Somebody had to reach out to set to thank me for pointing that out, because I think it is something that when you're just coming to these sources trying to learn on your own, you really don't know. It's the same issue of like using Plutarch as a source when who's talking about you know, if they existed, they existed seven hundred year before he's writing or so, you know, and it's like, if you're not steeped in the context, often that does not come across. And then in addition, like you're saying the way they're packaged, where they're not packaged parallel now they're typically packaged as like you just want to know about this one person. That also, yeah, like without knowing the context, I think it really takes away a lot of what he's trying to do and like how much we actually can learn from him as a source.

Yeah, absolutely, And for each of the paired lives. He also wrote a comparison essay at the end of the second life that was like, now, what can we learn from these two lives? And most of those don't survive, So we've only got a couple of those kind of comparative essays that survive, and usually they don't make it into the Penguin or whatever, right, like because yeah, they're honestly a little bit boring, So they they're not they're not why people are addressing it, So I think it is interesting to kind of think about those kind of those anxieties and those tensions and the length of time that those anxieties last in the East in the Roman period. So, like another author that I love working on is pasaneous who I know you've also covered on your show, and Maria was on talking about him at one point, and she definitely knows way more than I do about Pasanius. But like the thing that i's he's a great source. He's he's one of my favorite sources for this particular period. And you know, he's not easy to read because he's not a great writer. So and for a long time he was called a dependable dullard because antiquarians when they visited Greece, they always took a copy of Pasaneus with them. But because he didn't seem to be particularly literary as an author, that his Greek was like kind of like cokey and complicated and grammatically kind of not that great, somehow made him more reliable as a reporter of what it was that he was seeing, right, And so he's like Pausanius lies at the heart of classical archaeology in Greece and one of the other hats that I wear is as an archaeologist, so I have I'm active in archaeology in Greece as well as being an ancient historian. And so like all the archaeologists antiquarians were using Pazzanius to try and identify sites and monuments and no sorts of things, and so, you know, like the Hephisteon in Athens. The only reason we call it the Hephaisteon is because of the description of that part of the Athenian agoraw in Pausanius. And yeah, and up until really immediately before the Second World War, everybody called the Hephistion the Thesaion, huh, because of it's got kind of the labors of theseus on the freeze on the temple. So they were like, well, it's obviously something to do with ESIAs, so it's the Theayan. But also Pizzaneus describes the Seyon in somewhere around that part of Athens as well, so a different reading of Pisanius supported this identification of it as being the Sayan. The Americans started working in the Agara in the thirties and they were like, this doesn't really make sense anymore, and suggested that it was the hepicion that has become kind of the dominant interpretation. But it's not the only one. There's other people that think it's a temple of Artemis. Really like even now, Yeah, I.

Can't believe I didn't know any of this. I'm so excited.

Yeah. So it's like, because so Pizzaneus lies at the heart of the classical archaeological project within Greece. Now, what's really fascinating about him as a text? It's like, we don't really know that much about him. We know he's from Asia Minor, we know he's writing in the second century AD. We don't really know that much more about him. We only get his name from a sixth century a d commentary on his writings. Doesn't look like anybody ever read him in the second century or the third century. It's just like he wrote the work and you know, like a million MySpace pages just went off into the ether. Nope, he ever looked at again.

And my listeners are going to get that reference.

That's right, I'm an old Your listeners can't see that I've covered a gray hair the Yeah, but when you read his travelogue, right, so he's traveling around Greece, in the second century, and he's recording all these different sites and sanctuaries that he's visited. He's in the Roman period. He's firmly in the Roman period. He barely ever mentions anything Roman. Yeah, right, And we can also we can see from some of its descriptions that he must, like he must literally be standing on a Roman monument in in order to be talking about the things that he sees, and yet he's not mentioning that monument, so he's not really an accurate reporter of what it is that he's seeing. He's not the equivalent of like a lonely planet or a rough guide to Greece. He's attempting to do something quite literary within his writings, and a big part of that is you can see in his focus on like Hellenistic stuff, but archaic and classical in particular, like he's touring around Greece and he's, as he says, pointing out what he sees as being most worth remembering within Greece, and that is the older stuff that shows to a Greek audience why it still matters to be Greek in the Roman period. And it's just like when you think of it that way, it's really kind of fascinating text. Right, it would be like describing a landscape, like like I live in London in the UK, and it would be like picking up a travel guide to the UK that stopped describing anything after the seventeen hundreds.

Yeah.

Right, So if you want to come to the UK in twenty twenty three, if you've only got descriptions of things in the seventeen hundreds, it's like you can still see those some of those things, but it's going to be very difficult to navigate the city.

Yeah, that's really interesting. I didn't I mean, I've been really enjoying Pausanias, like I mean broadly, I think I've read some of his stuff before, but after I spoke with Maria, I sort of really was taking in how fascinating he is and starting to find more things. But this additional context is so interesting, and just the idea that probably nobody read him, that we didn't even have his name from that time period, that's absolutely fascinating.

Yeah, there's a sixth century eighty guy called Stephanus of Byzantian who's our first kind of mention of Pausanius. And then I mean the history of Pizaneus that we could do a whole separate podcast on him. He's so fascinating just because he's been essentially ignored until the fall of Constantinople in the fifteenth century, when obviously there's like massive libraries of ancient sources that were in Constantinople, and you have all of these Italian elites essentially trying to buy up these libraries around the time of the fall of Constantinople so that those sources aren't lost, presumably also because they thought it would be cheaper to do it then and previously. So we have like the Medici's buying essentially big chunks of this library from Constantinople, which included copies of Pasanius, and they're making then copies of Pisanius that get disseminated around kind of the non Ottoman parts of the Mediterranean, And at that point Pasaneus becomes really important for Greek diaspora communities. So once there is no longer kind of a Byzantine Empire, which is essentially Greek, all of those Greek communities now start to engage with Pasanius as a way to visit the homeland that they can no longer get to and that's what makes pasaneous kind of the important source for then Western Europeans when Greece starts to open up again in the in this eighteenth century and it can get over there as part of the Grand Tour. So it's just like he is like completely fascinating that this kind of neglected author in antiquity becomes so important for our understanding of the archaeology of Greece and our understanding of religion and a lot of myth as well, which just comes from this kind of this really weird path of this of this guy in the second century. We have Maria stuff, it's stuff to read about him.

Yeah, yeah, I want to read her book on him because he he's already fascinated me by just being the source where like you're saying, we can learn so much about religion and myth because you know, he went around and talked to people and ask them questions and described like he's the one who describes that like death oracle in the southern Peloponnese. Right, I think it was Maria who talked about that or No, no, it was doctor Ellie Mack and Roberts who can want to talk about that because of underworld deities. But like, yeah, so many things like that where we wouldn't know, oh, the more practical aspects because nobody wrote them down otherwise. I mean I talk about this all the time of just like we just don't know things because people didn't write them down. So then you have somebody like Paustanius who made an effort to try at least writing as much down as he was you know, intending with his goals, but it adds so much to our knowledge, Like without him, we would really be lacking on so much when it comes to like the practical aspects of Greek history. It seems or that from that time period.

Yeah, it's hard to overstate his importance, but it's also important to remember that he's just like he's one dude. It's one perspective. Yeah, and you know, if he just happens to rock up to Olympia on a day that Demetrius is a local guide and not antinuous, then he's getting totally different information and reporting that, right. So I mean he's not uncritical. He is skeptical of some of his sources. So there are some really interesting passages where he talks about like religh so like a big part of what Passanius is interested in is going to see kind of religious relics within sanctuaries in a way that you know, there are like four heads of John de Baptist kicking around Europe, and you know, if you put all the bits of the True Cross together, you'd have enough to make a boat. It's that kind of situation also within Greece in this period, where there are these kind of relics, and so he will talk about, oh, you know, I saw the scepter of Agamemnon, the supposed scepter of Agamemnon. It's like, I don't believe it. It's not true, whereas other ones he's he's more believing. So there's a like a chest in Corinth of a Corinthian tyrant sor it's the chest is in Olympia, but it was dedicated at Olympia by Kypsalis, the Corinthian tyrant. And he gives this really lengthy description of this object that he sees, and it's fascinating because it shows like it shows scenes from myth on the chest and it has like epigrammatic inscriptions on the freezes of the chest as well, like describing the scenes. It's a real Shane and we don't have it because it would be awesome to have it. But he basically says, like I saw this thing. They say it's archaic. It probably is, and from his description, it certainly sounds like he is seeing something that is that old and is accurately describing it as far as we can tell. Yeah.

That's the sad thing too, is the number of things he'll describe and then you're like, but why don't we have it now? Like I just want to see so many of those things, especially to have something that has the depicts myth and also explains it. Like I feel like that at least, I mean from what I've seen, which is not everything, but that seems like a rare thing to have it actually describe it versus having to try to interpret it ourselves.

Yeah, I mean, yes, and no. I think that there's quite a few vases that are kind of labeled the story. They Yeah, yeah, they'll put names on, or they put scenes on, or they'll put kind of quotes from plays on sometimes like short short kind of line readings on vases. But I think it's kind of like literacy in writing is used as another way to show your elite status. And so those things become more precious if they have writing on them rather than rather than less precious, and that makes them kind of more valuable and more more subject to you know, if they're made of metal being melted down and reused and and kind of lost in that sense, right, But it is, Yeah, it would be nice to have a lot of the things that Pozanous is talking about. Yeah, like you can go to Olympia and you can see the statue bases and you can crack open your copy of Pazaneaus and they're in the same So it is that kind of stuff that makes people think that he is this accurate reporter or what it is that he's seeing. Yeah, when it's I think he's a much more complicated figure because of what it is that he's trying to do.

Yeah, Yeah, it's it's interesting the ways that you know. It's I mean, this is very I feel like surface level thing to say, but as somebody who comes at this like without the full academic background, like it is hard to overstate how much I think people just sort of assume that ancient sources are all just accurate, like they're just like the thing we should trust because it's what we have. But it's so much more interesting to think about them in that way. Of Sure, but he had like other intentions in mind. He probably described a lot of things correctly, but like you're saying, he ignored a lot of things or chose not to write about them, And that makes it frustrating, but almost, I mean, it's certainly more interesting to sort of consider what he was doing and why, and what he might have left out and why.

Yeah, absolutely, Like I mean, this is one of the things that we that we always struggle with in our study of the past, is the extent to which we can accept what our sources are telling us. And I think just there's no reason to treat people in antiquity as being somehow less complicated than people in the contemporary present, right, And so some people are trustworthy sometimes, some people are trustworthy are less trustworthy at other times. And it's the same in antiquity, and it's the same with what they're writing. That everybody always has an agenda, But that doesn't mean that we can't use it as a source, right, And saying that a source is biased is not a reason not to use the source, because Ultimately, these are all ways that we've got, So what can we say about the past and behavior in the past and people in the past given disinformation? And I just think it makes the sources richer if we allow them to be trying to do other things successfully or otherwise.

Yeah, yeah, I think about that a lot when it comes to the plays, because so often, like a play is our only source for a myth, and so it's really all we have. But at the same time, it's like these people are creating their own version of something, and who knows what they might have changed and for what reason, and so like, yeah, considering that in respect of just mythology, which is of course, like what I spend most of my time doing, is particularly interesting and imagining like what maybe was invented or might have come from a source we don't have or what have you.

Yeah, Or it's just like, ultimately, like people are storytellers, and as much as people like to hear the same stories over and over again, a lot of the time those those retellings are also being modified in some way to fit to contemporary circumstances. And I think that you know, like myth in the Greek world, right and in the Roman world does a lot of that in terms of helping it explaining contemporary presence to people. And so when we're getting like versions of these myths being recorded and people are like, oh, well, they don't agree what's going on, it's like because for different audiences and they're meant to do different things, so just using the same characters, but they just will emphasize different episodes. And I think that's why it's really interesting to look at kind of the stories that the Greeks tell about themselves in the Roman period about their own past, because it then tells us about how they view their own histories and kind of complicates the stories of those histories, you know. And like a good example that I'd like to give for this sort of thing is again like going back to Sister and going back to Sparta. Cicero is a smart guy. If you ever read any Cisro, he will tell you constantly how smart he is.

I had to read in university.

Yeah, obviously not a fun hang, I'm pretty sure about that, all constantly bringing up that time he said the Republic. But the so he's a spark guy. He knows history, he knows philosophy, and he knows Greece, and yet he does tell us when he visits Sparta, he's like, it's amazing to be in Sparta, this place where it has an unchanging. It's the only place I know that whose constitution is not changed in seven hundred years. And it's like he obviously knows that's not true. He knows it's not true. He's sitting in this kind of sanctuary of Artemis or Thea, he's watching Spartan boys just stand there and get whipped to death. And he tells us this also, like you can see them not cry out, and you can see them like some of them die. But he's read Xenophon, so we know that he's read Xenophon. He tells us he's read Xenophon, and Xenophon describes a completely different situation in Sparta, right, And of course in the Sparta in CITs Rose days, it's not two kings, right, so obviously the constitution is very different. And yet he just says, like, here's this line, right, And presumably he's just bought into the story of what Sparta was so hard that it's just really easy to just let that lie, just like roll off the tongue, right, and One of the things that we can see is that people within Sparta in the Roman period are also telling themselves that same lie. Right, they would be very happy with that, Zack Snyder three hundred film, like, yeah, that's us. Yeah, when they are are blatantly not that, when they can look around and they've got fortifications, and they've got Roman buildings, and they've got a fancy theater with a rolling stage and all these other things that you know, classical and archaic Sparta did not have, and yet also maintain the fiction that they are the same people in this unbroken line with an unbroken constitution.

Yeah, that's really interesting. I mean, Sparta seems like such a I mean, obviously I just spent like a month talking about how it's fascinating in that respect, but it seems very unique in that way like it. I mean, I understand that it seems like a lot of the Roman Greece was holding on to its greekness sort of as much as possible. But would you say that Sparta is like a little bit more of that like unchanging nature, that that idea of like they are the same as they were back then, or was that kind of like a broader.

Idea I think. I think broadly within Greece in the Roman period, there is this desire to present themselves as being the equals to their forebears, right, and how that gets expressed differs from Paulus to Paulus, because the different polices have different reputations essentially, so Athens is desperate to hold on to its its status is kind of a cultural and intellectual center in the Roman period, and that's the thing that they push as much as possible. And the Spartans are desperate to hold onto their status in regards to like two things really, which is supposed would be the notion of their militarism and their piety as well. So the Spartans were held up as being kind of amongst the most pious of the Greeks, and that's the thing that they kind of promote to outsiders, which is why this kind of this whipping contest takes place in the context of a of a religious festival and a ritual which is related to the Spartan education system, which is related to these kind of myths of militarism, Yeah, that were promoted around the time. And it is interesting that you know, well into the Roman period Sparta is providing auxiliary troops to the Roman military when no other Greek polus on mainland Greece is really and it's like, it's like, you know, they're sending off I don't know how many this is, let's say, like fifty guys to go serve the Roman military. It's like, are they going to be like, really does that matter? That doesn't make it, That doesn't make it. Damit a difference to the Romans whether these fifty Spartans show up, But it's I think I think the Romans would have liked it because then they can view themselves as being the inheritors of Spartan military prowess. And the Spartans in the Roman period obviously liked it because it played up to their notions of who they had been in the past in relation to the kind of the myth of Spartan militarism. And I think it is really in the Roman period that we begin to see the rareification of so many of those kind of tropes around the Spartan mirage that you talked about in that excellent series.

Well, thank you, yeah, yeah, I mean it's it was fascinating to try to learn all of that and distill it. Yeah, I mean, Sparta just is so unique and weird, which I said a lot in that series. But one of the things that you mentioned when we were first talking about doing this is Roman crete. So I'm fascinated by that because I know absolutely nothing about what was going on in crete in that time period. I feel like I don't know much about crete beyond the Bronze Age, Like I don't know if it's just like my knowledge base or just that, Like there's not a lot talked about what was going on in crete after the Bronze Age, but I would love to know everything.

Yeah, there's not You're not alone, there's there's really not a lot on crete in the Roman period, or the Hellenistic period or the Classical period. To be fair, the focus of most scholarship on crete is is on the Minoans. Yeah, and obviously they're fascinating and stuff. But you know, one of one of my recent projects has been studying the site of Roman Canassas, And if anybody ever goes to crete, I'm sure they will visit the Palace of Conassas. It's the second most visited tourist site in Greece after the Acropolis and people that kind of get busted from Heraclion into this giant car park and then they get led into the Minoan remains and they tour around those remains and they get back in the bus and then they leave. But that whole palace complex sits within the remains of a seventy hectar Roman city. Wow, so there's a Roman city around and at one point on top of all of that Minoan stuff. And when Arthur Evans came in in the nineteen hundreds, he basically like blasted the Roman stuff away in order to get down to the Minoan stuff. Yeah. Yeah, that's what he did. And so there's like tons of Roman stuff on the island. Cree is like fascinating because it was seen even within our classical sources as being slightly backward and a problematic place. And it's largely, i think, because those sources are Athenian, and there's definitely a point in the late Archaic and the classical period where the Athenians and the and the and the po Lace of Crete are competing for economic access in the eastern Mediterranean, and so the Athenians are presenting the Cretans as being obviously you know, despicable and othered. And this is why we get theseus and the Minotaur and all that kind of stuff happening around that time, because they're they're like, those are the bad guys. We've got to defeat them, and we're going to take over their economic networks and be in control. Yeah, and so, and that's specific I think to the cities in on the north coast of Crete at around that time. So Canasos gets kind of out come by the Athenians in the Classical period and everybody kind of turns inwards in Crete and they're just all of those there's in between fifty and one hundred polace on crete in the Archaic and the Classical period. Nobody can really agree on the number. So there's it's kind of densely populated in terms of cities, and they're just constantly fighting with each other. In the Hellenistic period, it is a haven for kind of piracy, so we're told. And so we have kind of the extension of Cretan naval power at various points in the Hellenistic period, which other people don't like, and so they again call them names and clamp down on it. And this kind of reputation for piracy is what brings the Romans into Crete in the sixties. So marc Antony's father gets his ass handed to him by the Cretans when he's been said there to kind of like get rid of the pirates, and the Cretans defeat him, and then the Romans come back with a march much bigger force basically, and use that defeat as a pretext for invading the island and taking it over. And there's a brutal kind of two year campaign for the Romans. It kind of crush centers of resistance in really not very nice ways, and the result of that is that Conossos, which had been one of the most important and powerful poles on Crete, it was the center of resistance to the Roman invasion, and so it loses chunks of its territory and bits of its status, and its rival in the south, a place called Gordon, where Gortina gets rewarded because it did not oppose the Romans and kind of supported the invasion signed up to the Roman side, so reaps the rewards afterwards, and Crete then becomes a place that exports wine in the Roman period, so it's economy is based very much on kind of like wine exports, and it becomes it's kind of economically central part of the Eastern Mediterranean because all of the trade routes essentially passed by Crete, because you know, if you're coming from Egypt, then you would cross the water and you would follow kind of the south coast to Crete and then curve around it and then go up around the Peloponnese and over to Italy that way. And if you're going into the Eastern Mediterranean, maybe you would go along the north coast of Crete off the Peloponnese and then up over towards the Levant and Cyprus and stuff like that. So it's like sits on this nexus, but doesn't have like a ton of natural resources south that apart from wine and all of and the kind of standard agricultural fair that that means that it becomes super super central in that sense, it's more like a transhipment point. But it is like it is kind of really it's just quiet in the Roman period, like there's there's after the initial invasion, there's not a lot of rebellion, there's not a lot of revolts. Canassas becomes smaller in the Roman period than it had been in a Hellenistic period, but it's fantastically wealthy as far as we can tell. There's a ridiculous number of mosaics that have been recovered and mosaic tessa that have been recovered in the fields around the Minoan Palace, and Rebecca Sweetmen has written really well about those. We have lots of marble wallveniers, lots of kind of imported goods, so like conassas super rich place. Gordon just becomes this monster of the city because it becomes the capital of the joint province of Crete and Cyenaica, so syenic I was also a Greek bit of North Africa, kind of bits of modern day Libya. It is really wealthy in antiquity as well, and kind of the Romans kind of shove Crete and Cyrenaica together into one province and make the capital Gorton, and it becomes the city of perhaps like three hundred thousand people. Is massive. It has an amphitheater, it has like a couple of theaters. It's like gigantic. It's huge and becomes like pretty wealthy itself obviously as a result of its size, and becomes kind of a standard kind of protocol of Roman senators as they're moving up, kind of the imperial cursus that you'll do a stint in crete and you'll serve some time there and then you'll move on to like a nicer position somewhere else. So it's like it's really quiet. Doesn't show up in our source as much except for kind of generally disparaging comment from various outsiders who are complaining about dishonesty of the locals and those sorts of things, but it does it again also latches onto core aspects of its of its past as a way to explain its contemporary situation. So like the coinage of Conassas has the labyrinth on it, you know they're they're identifying with that myth of theseusts and the minotaur. We're told in various Roman sources that you know, as a tourist, you can pitch up on crete and there's at least three different places that are are claiming to be the site of the original labyrinth and you can go and see them. One of those is Connassauce, but there's like two other ones which are not Connassas, which go to also playing to be the home of the labyrinth. Yea, and so it's it's really kind of a fascinating place to kind of to think of the impact of Roman power on this island that doesn't feature much in our wider stories after the Bronze Age.

Yeah, that's so interesting. So did they. I mean, it's sort of I suppose it's like chicken or the egg, but like it's interesting that they would latch onto the labyrinth and not like I guess, I guess, I guess the labyrinth and the Minoan culture are like tied enough, but it just feels to me like the Labyrinth is like the bad part kind of, or like the minotaur is sort of the part that makes you look bad, whereas the sort of like wealth of the Minoans looks good. But again, like I mean, I'm now I'm just talking a loud because I do think I guess those two things are too closely tied in the you know, mythic historical kind of context to really be separated. But yeah, that's.

Yeah, No, I mean it's interesting like in a literary sense, like where we do here see crete in like the Hellenistic and in the Roman period is in mythic retellings, and so it is is in those periods that absolutely at like loads of different versions of Ariadne, and she becomes quite a popular figure in the Roman period. So we have Avid writing poems about Ariadne and talking about her in various kind of metamorphosis and herodies and stuff like that. And but we also have like King Minus and his brother radamanthus who who become kind of representatives of law and law giving in the mythic tradition in the Hellenistic and the Roman period. So in like the standard mythic tradition, Minus in radamanthis end up as being judges in the underworld. And so there's whole there's this whole strand of myth that talks that is essentially setting the Cretans up as being the people who invented law and gave law to people, and that's represented within Minus and radamanthis. But of course the Athenian propaganda has Minus as being as bad guy who you know, defeats the Athenians and extracts like human sacrifices tribute, and so it gives us Catinus Everden as a result. And so it is kind of fascinating to see how you get these kind of competing visions occurring at the same time that in the Roman period, we can have them playing up the mythic tradition of the labyrinth and the minotaur and obviously the kind of connotations and relation to that, while also embracing kind of the law giving aspects and the kind of civilizing components of the mythic tradition in relation to crete as well, they see themselves as having the oldest cities and no sorts of things, and that is reflected then in the way in which in which Roman authors write about those mythic figures as well as being like central to the notion of law and order, which is really interesting, and you see it all over the place on the island. You see it in in kind of low pottery traditions, you see it in coinage, you see it in like wall decorations and those sorts of things as well with my archaeologist hat on as well at like places like Conossos. It's really fascinating because we sometimes have Roman buildings that are are using the Minoan foundations for the Roman buildings, so they're well aware of the existence of the Bronze Age Minoan structures on the island. Because like if you ever see it built by the Minoans. So you have these massive worth estates, they're like gigantic, and you know, in the Roman period they're just like, well we can we're not moving that, We'll just build on top of it. We'll just use it for ours. And so part of my work has been to kind of look at, you know, what is the form of the realm of the city in the Roman period, and we can see that it is essentially it is dependent on the Minoan city because it's using the same big blocks for its fundamental kind of layout of the grid on the city, which is really so they're obviously and they're digging down and they're like hitting the blocks, and the Minoans use mason marks on their blocks, and so some of those are the double headed acts the Labras as well. So they're like they're encountering like ancient material culture and ancient archaeological remains, and they're obviously thinking about it and then incorporating aspects of that iconography in the Roman period into their own, yeah, which is kind of fascinating.

Yeah, And I'm just going to say to like the casual listener of my show in case I haven't I probably drilled it in into them enough because I'm obsessed. But like, the difference in time period between the Bronze Age Minoans and the Romans is like seventeen hundred years probably right like that, It's that like a pretty decent guess.

Yeah, yeah, it's it's it's a big it's a big gap for sure.

Yeah, Like it's that's really ancient for them even.

Yeah, And I think it's like just in the same way that we have an interest and fascination with the past, so too did people in antiquity, and so you know, those people are also looking for ways to understand themselves in relation to what came before and are fascinated by the stories and by the histories, but also by the stuff as well. And there they are encountering the physical remains of the past themselves in their daily lives, and you know, are finding ways to make sense of it or incorporate it, or destroy it, or to profit from it or all the things that we do as well, they're also doing, which is part of why you know, when we think about uh Roman art and Roman statues, you know, we casually say, oh, this is a Roman copy of a Greek original, but it's like, why why are the Romans copying Greek statues?

Right?

Why is it that that the Romans are like shipping hundreds of statues which are original from Greece back to Italy, you know, taking it as booty, that's conquest. Why are they doing that? And part of it is is the same way that you know, people are buying antiquities now, like why do you why do people purchase antiquities? Why do you why do you go to Greece and try to buy a coin? It's like it's the same reason. You know, they're fascinated by aspects of that past and that culture and those stories that are associated with those things, and they want those things also in their fancy houses.

Yeah. Okay. So one of the things that's always been one of my sort of obsessions to talk about, but I've never really known how to go about learning more is what you mentioned of like the kind of Athenian propaganda that's so inherent in the story of Theseus because I think, I mean, I've always just sort of found it to be obvious, because Theseus, I mean, I could talk about him forever, like he's just fascinatingly bizarre and like objectively bad hero who's a hero, and like there's just so much, but it's always interested me, like his connection to Canoso's and the Labyrinth and Ariadne and everything, because like you can tell it's the Athenians trying to make him look good. He still manages to not look totally great, but like it's one of his most redeeming stories. I would say, if you ignore the versions where he leaves her on an island, you know, which I doubt, he's just the worst. But it's always fascinating me because it's like it feels like a story that just exists, like so many other myths, like say the Homeric tradition, Like it almost feels like one of those, but when you really look at it, you see, like, no, it's deeply propagandic the but the Athenians seem to have gone about it in such a way that they even convinced people that it was like a more timeless myth. And I'm curious sort of if if people were convinced back then, I guess because I think certainly now you know, if you're not deep in this world, like it sounds like any other myth where it's sort of an oral tradition rather than propaganda. But this came up. I was doing an episode where I was answering leftover questions people had about Sparta, and somebody asked me about the like the myth of theseus abducting Helen, and like how that connects to like the relationship between Athens and Sparta and so many things. And what I wanted to emphasize is like, not only is it, you know, a connection to the relationship between those two city states, but it's also explicitly Athens trying to write themselves into the Homeric tradition, which seems like is kind of what they were doing all around with theseus.

There is some really interesting stuff that kind of relates to it in a thematic sense around kind of foundation myths and so Niche McSweeney has written on kind of foundation myths, primarily in relation to Ionia, but it has themes which relate broadly to the Greek world, and I think that like one of the takeaways from that from a propagandistic sense is that is that I think that everybody is doing what the Athenians are doing with theseus. So everybody has a version of a local hero who is in their stories and helps justify aspects of their contemporary present. And everybody will have a version of that hero who will plug into the wider narratives like some sort of Marvel cinematic universe, right Like they all want to be part of it, and some of them are are more successful at plugging into that than others. And I mean, the great thing about myth as well is that nobody is ever striving to have a definitive version or or only one version, and so it's part of this part of the conception of myth within the Greek world is that it allows for multiple versions and for multiple stories. And that's why we can have so many different sanctuaries to Athena within one polus, for example. And bringing back to Pazaneous, he's very good at explaining to us the local mythic traditions that justify the existence of this particular sanctuary as opposed to the others sanctuary Athena that's just down the road. And I think, you know, and theseus isn't part a reaction to the to the success of Heracles, and like for me, in a way, like I see what the Athenians are trying to do with theseus is are trying to create this kind of attic version of the Dorian superhero who is Heracles, and to be like, look, we've got our own version. And he also does awesome stuff, and he has labors just like Heracles, and he like impregnates lots of people just like Heracles, and he treats people terribly just like Heracles. So it's like does all the stuff that a hero is supposed to do. And I think that that the difference is that the Heracles is just He's just a better version of that, And so's he's accepted more broadly. He's not Heracles isn't tied to a specific place in the way that Theseus is. Like, he's seen as being Dorian, but he's not seen as being like Spartan or Corinthian or Olympian or any of those other things. So he's he's broadly related to the Dorians, but he belongs to everybody, and certainly by the time we get into the Hellenistic period, he's strongly associated with physical education in Greek Polace, and that is what causes the explosion in his cult. So you have Heracles everywhere, there's a gymnasium there's there's a sanctuary or a shrine to Heracles within that genesium because he is associated with education. Theseus is just like he's just a less successful version of that because he is tied to Athens specifically rather than to an Ethnos in a way that Heracles is he seems to be more of a more of a an overtly propagandistic figure as a result of that. But and I think I think people by the Hellenistic period anyway, were more willing to see the flaws than the things that the Athenians were doing. And we're much more critical of what the Athenians have been up to in the Classical period, especially in the in the in the late Classical period, and so we're just weren't willing to accept a crappy substitute.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, Heracles. Yeah. Heracles has just always fascinated me because he seems, I mean, he is, like like you're saying, he's sort of from everywhere. It feels like everyone wants to claim him, so he just kind of gets to be this like all of Greece hero versus. Yeah, Theseus being so specifically tied to Athens. But I like that description of him just being like a less successful Heracles.

Yeah, he's like a he's like a crappy knockoff of a stablished figure. You know, if you go to the second hand store and you pick up a Spider Man toy for your kid, and instead of it looks like Spider Man, but the package is just like Spider Guy or something, so it's like it's not it close. But no.

Yeah, even like everything he does is like that. I mean, other than the Minotaur, I think kind of is on the Heracles level. But it's always fascinating to me that, like most of what Theseus does is kill humans, whereas Heracles gets to kill these like terrifying monstrosities of you know, just like the wildest monsters. And then Heracles is like, well, this guy was like torturing people along a road and so I killed him. Yeah.

I read something I cannot remember where I read this years and years ago that basically talked about Heracles as being a hero of the rural world and Theseus is a hero of the urban world, and that's why the challenges that they face are different. If I buy that or not, but it's a kind of an interesting thing to think with in terms of the challenges that certainly if we think it would go back to Sparta again that you know, Sparta is a very different sort of community than Athens is significantly less urban. It is it's not really a proper city in the classical period because it is this collection of five villages that doesn't have a central urban core, whereas Athens is like the archetypical urban space in the classical world. It's like the biggest Greek city, and it's very very much focused on its urban core as opposed to its its territory or or horror, whereas I think in the Peloponnese there's much more of a balance between city and country within the territories of each Paula's mh, So maybe there's some truth to that. Heracles is kind of he's he he reflects more of the concerns of the rural folk, and that makes it more translatable to other places when most people don't live in cities in antiquity, you know, most people are stuck out in the fields. Yeah, and that also makes like Heracles translates further east as well, so he gets absorbed into the old Persian empire and stuff, and gets kind of syncretized or amalgamated with other local deities. So he's that kind of he's nebulous enough that he is palatable to many many audiences, whereas theseus is just too specific. It's hard to have Captain America being the hero of France.

Yeah, yeah, so that's good connection. Yeah yeah, he's just like he's the Athenian hero. When it comes to Roman to Roman Greece broadly, like, were there any other areas where they were like particularly interested or doing particularly interesting things during that time, like areas of Greece.

Ah, yeah, of course, there's like endless amounts of fascination fascinating topics that we could cover in relation to Roman Greece. But one of the one of the other things is really interesting is the Greek relationship with spectacle and like gladiatorial combats. So one of the things that we think of when we think of the Romans, it's like, you know what the big things we think of pompe We think of weird sex, and we think of gladiators. Yeah, and just like you know, Greeks were already doing weird sex, so they uh, when it comes to gladiators and spectacle entertainment, the Greeks have a very kind of specific response to it. So in the Western Empire, in the Western Mediterranean, where there's not a long history of urbanization or his or cities, loads of places build amphitheaters in the Roman period because it essentially becomes a religious and political test of your loyalty to Rome to house to put off spectacle entertainment. It gets tied very closely to the imperial cult in kind of the late first and early second centuries AD, and so it's kind of like you have to do it otherwise big brother will come and ask awkward questions. And so the Greek East they have to do it as well, but they don't build amphitheaters. Typically, they're not interested in importing this kind of new form of architecture in order to house spectacle. And for a long time this was interpreted as being like, well, the Greeks are generally impoverished in the Roman period. They don't have any money, so of course they're not going to build big amphitheaters and they'll make do with temporary structures or something else. But you know, research since the nineteen eighties has basically shown that that's not true. That the Eastern Mediterranean and is economically perhaps the richest part of the Mediterranean, and that there's loads of resources kicking around in the Greek East for building amphitheaters that they wanted to, but they just don't want to, and instead what they do is they take existing structures, primarily theaters, and convert those for spectacle entertainment. So the theater of Dionysus and Athens, you know that where all those plays were put off, gets converted for spectacle in the first century a d. And so they kind of they take out the first row of seats and they build this kind of this parapet and net system to protect the audience, and then they put off spectacle there. And then we see that this becomes kind of the predominant mode of conducting spectacle in the East is the conversion of theaters and to a lesser extent, stadia to be multi purpose entertainment venues basically that can also have spectacle. And it's really interesting because the Greek elites have a hard time with this. So we have various Greek authors who are like, what the hell is going on? How can we be desegrating these holy places with the blood of people and animals in this way because the theaters are they're almost always in sanctuaries or part of sanctuaries. But clearly the Greeks are deep into it, and they love their spectacle as much as anybody else. So there's loads of epigraphic evidence to show kind of the extent of the of the games that they're putting off. There's loads of evidence to show that from a relatively early stage they're kind of firmly embracing spectacle. But the big difference is we're not importing your building. We're going to do it the way that we want to do it, and that is within the theater. And it's really interesting that Corinth, which is one of the big cities of the Greek world, economic powerhouse in the Archaic and the classical world, kind of core part of the Peloponnesian League in the classical period, but it is also a seat of resistance to Rome in the second century BC, and when the Romans get fed up with the Greeks, they come in and they in BC they lay siege to the city of Corinth and they destroy it. And so in the same year that Carthage is destroyed, Corinth is also destroyed, and the Roman Lucius Mummius, you know, cuts off all the treasures and brings it back to Rome. And about a century later, Julius Caesar decides that he's going to refound the city of Corinth as a Roman colony, and he's suffers some several stab wounds before you can carry that plan out, but his successor Augustus kind of sees it through, and so Corinth has refounded as the Roman colony. And when the Romans turn Greece into a formal administrative province of Ikia, Corinth becomes the capital and not Athens. And so what's really interesting is that because it's Roman colony, it's the administration is Roman veterans. They use centuriation in the countryside around corns, so they turn it into like a Roman landscape. It's a Roman city full of Roman citizens as well as a bunch of Greeks. And they build an amphitheater because of course you have to have an amphitheater if you're a Roman city. But that amphitheater goes out of use after about a century of use, and instead the Corinthians convert their theater for spectacle entertainment, so they stop using the amphitheater that is the building that is designed for spectacle, and instead they convert their theater just like everybody else in the Greek East and kind of use that as the venue for spectacle. And I think it ties back into the kind of those notions of like of anxiety about what does it mean to be Greek in the Roman period. And one of the ways that they do that is by you know, adopting and adapting and changing, but not too much. You know, I'm trying to have some kind of control over it.

Yeah. Yeah, they're willing to like take on the Roman form of entertainment, but in their very Greek way.

Yeah.

Absolutely, Yeah, it sounds like that would be really close to the action in a way that like immediately makes me feel uncomfortable, like you, I mean, you were saying that there was like they would set up like nets and stuff like, but that feels like you're like really in it in those theaters.

Yeah, I mean that there's a there's a couple of different ways that they modify theaters. So as we get further into the Roman period into the second and the third centuries, we see slightly different things being done depending on the nature of the theater, so at Ephesus and Asia Minor, they not only take out the first couple of rows of seats, but they kind of reinforce a parapet wall, so it creates that kind of like a twelve foot basic like a drop between the seats and what we might think of as the arena floor or the orchestra area of the old theater, and then they would have nets on the top of that, so it would be more kind of protect thee But they don't ever really do that in the Theater of Dionysis, and they don't do that at places like Argos. They just have this post and net system. So I imagine it is like the people are getting people in the in the first rows of seats. It's like going to sea world. You know, maybe they get that like a splash zone.

That's horrified. God. Yeah. Yeah, Like there's a huge difference between like a twelve foot wall and a net on top and like the theater of Dionysius in Athens, which is all I can picture.

Yeah, I mean, health and safety is not a major concern as a robot period, but they do they do kind of get very enamored of their blood sports in the Greek East, which is one of the things again that we have various philosophers kind of complaining about, you know, about the desecration with the blood. Yeah, but obviously people love it, so there they keep doing it. Yeah, So it is it is like fascinating to kind of think about how culture translates between you know, the East and the West, and the ways in which Greek elites have different attitudes to the non elites and yet can't ignore entirely the attitudes of the populace as well.

Yeah, so you're.

Kind of, you know, giving them what they want in terms of the sport and the spectacle, but they're kind of trying to keep a rain on it a little bit so that it is has more of a local flavor perhaps.

Yeah. I'm picturing the difference between like a performers of Aschylus and like a gladiator competition at like Epidavros or something like it. Just that feels absolutely wild. Yeah, like what an enormous change in culture.

Yeah, but I mean those theaters remain as theatrical spaces in the Roman period as well, so you know, you can take down your post on your nets and you can have a play but you know there obviously other they introduce the stage and the formalized scene building and stuff like that, and the Hellenistic period, so it's like a different type of theater then you would get in a classical period. But they're they're keeping them as spaces that can be used for lots of different things, and in lots of polas as well, the theater would double as a political space. They wouldn't have a separate kind of meeting point like the pinnix that Athens has, that most of it would happen in the theater. Interesting, and I think that that stays in the Roman period as well, and the big it is practical, Yeah, but like one of the big distinctions I think like one of the things I think it's important to point out is that when we talk about like Roman Greece is for the most part, this is Greeks who are doing all of these things. This is not it's not the Romans coming in and deciding how things are going to be. For the most part, the Romans are quite hands off in laissez faire. So long as they get their taxes and as long as nobody is revolting, then you can do whatever you want, And so when we're talking about Greece in the Roman period, we're still talking fundamentally about Greeks making decisions on behalf of other Greeks about how things are going to function and how things are going to work, and that the major kind of stated, the major difference between kind of the lived experience of people in the Greek world would be would still be class and status as opposed to kind of notions of citizenship or Greek versus Roman or any of those other things. Like the thing that would be the determinant of whether you had like an easy life or a hard life would be your family and how wealthy you were.

Right, interesting, Yeah, So like is it more so that I guess the culture is just spreading and so they're just sort of taking on some of the more originally specific Roman things purely because of sort of an evolution and cultural you know, shifting and sharing of those kind of traditions.

Or it's just I mean, it's quite a big debate within ancient history about how cultural interaction and cultural change works in antiquity. And there are two broad schools of thought, I suppose. So there's really an excellent book written by Tony spawforth called Greece and the Augustan Cultural Revolution, which came out about a decade ago, which kind of seeks to explain one of those models, which is that culture change essentially happens from the top down, and so that when we see changes in broad culture, it is because of elite emulation, so that elites are changing the way that they're doing things because the power structures are different and they want to keep power, so they do the new thing, and then people lower down the social ladder are emulating those elites because everybody always wants to be like them, and that's how culture change happens. And the other school of thought would would be slightly more organic and haphazard. I suppose that said that it's not driven from the top, but rather like broad changes, largely driven from the bottom, I suppose. And essentially there's no way to reconcile those two points of view. So like that, the the elite emulation point of view, we used to call it romanization, so it was about other areas becoming more like Rome, the implicit kind of understanding that Rome is somehow remaining unchanged in that process. So it's a cultural monolith. It moves into a place, and then that place becomes more like Rome and less like what it had been, and Rome is just a monolith unchanged through that process. Now we have a much more kind of nuanced understanding. We don't really like to talk about Romanization anymore. If we do talk about Romanization, we put air quotes around it to show that we're being critical, and we think of cultural interaction as being a much more kind of complicated picture than that that number one, there is no monolith that is Rome. So there is no one thing that defines Roman culture in the same way that there's no Greek culture. There's like you know, there's twelve hundred different Polayce they all have their own culture. They just share a language and kind of bits of the pantheon. And that's the same for Rome essentially. But also we can see lots of ways in which Rome changes through its interactions with non Italic people's h and kind of adopts aspects of different culture. So, like you know, second century BC Rome what we would call kind of like the High Republic. It's the same as the Hellenistic period in the Greek East, and it's around that time when Rome is trying to emulate Hellenistic monarchies, and Greek becomes the second language of kind of elite Romans that if you want to show that you're educated, and you want to show that you got your finger on the pulse, and you also know Greek as well as Latin. And that causes problems in Rome where we have you know, old aristocrats being like, why does everything have to change? And then the young blood's being like, well, this is the reality. The Greek culture is school and I'm all over it, you know. Twas Ever, thus I.

Suppose, yeah, nothing's changed.

That I don't know that. That's what I'm like. When my kids are listening to crabby music, I'm like, ah, why does this have to change the old stuff better? So I think, you know, that's kind of what's what we think about cultural interaction in the Greek East. There's like a long and sordid tale of some local Greek elites adopting aspects of Roman culture in order to get in with the new paymasters and kind of promote their own local careers. Because the Romans aren't going to have anti Roman people in charge of anything, so you have to be pro Roman, and so they adopt aspects of that in order to show themselves as being pro Roman. But they'll deploy that pro romanness for different audiences in different ways. So again, if we go back to Sparta, we get into the like the early Roman period in Sparta, there's one guy in charge of Sparta, guy called Eurycles, and he's in charge because his family supported Livia, Augustus's wife during the civil war hit her basically was she fled, and then they supported Augustus at the Battle of Actium. The Euroclids did unlike most of the rest degrees right, and so they were rewarded with like okay, well now you're in charge of Sparta. And so Eurycles is one of the one of the exceptions. He gets Roman citizenship in like ten BC. That's look quite rare at that time. So it's a Greek he gets Roman citizenship. All of the epigraphy we have related to Eurycles within Sparta never mentions his Roman citizenship. All of the epigraphy we have about Eurycles outside of Sparta mentions his Roman citizenship, right, so's he's using it for different audiences. So in Sparta he's a local boy, he's still a Spartan. He knows where he came from. He hasn't forgotten his roots outside in Corinth or in Argos or in Olympia, where he's like spending the money and flashing the cash because now he's got Roman money to spend. He's emphasizing his Roman connections to kind of rubb it in everybody's faces, like I'm Spartan and I'm Roman and you can't mess with me now. Yeah, And I think we see a lot of that in kind of aspect pockets of cultural change within the Greek East, of those kind of tensions always being played out.

Well, that's yeah, that's fascinating. I like, I love those little aspects that just feel so very real and just normal, you know, compared to our world. Like that the idea of using using those things depending on where they're going to get you the most sort of benefits.

Yeah, of course, I mean, and that's the that's the elite game, right, that's the game is that if you want to be financially successful, if you want to be politically politically successful, then you have to have connections. And that it's like true in the classical world, and it's true the Roman world, Like it's your connections that secure your position and you don't ever do anything alone.

Yeah, that's wonderful. Well, honestly, this has been so fascinating. I didn't know I needed to know so much about Roman Greece. So thank you so much for doing this. I really appreciate it.

It's been a pleasure.

I'm glad it's I mean, I, like I said at the top, I just like getting people talking because I get to learn so much and just nerd out a lot. Is there anything you want to share with my listeners in terms of like where they can read more from you, or if you want to be followed anywhere, whatever you want or don't want.

I'm on Twitter, so you can find me there as doctor Dan Stewart. One. I think I can actually remember what my Twitter handle is.

I can link it to the episode two.

So yeah, I'll be there for as long as that thing, as long as it takes for that house to burn down. And yeah, apart from that, I have that. I don't have anything else to promote. Really, I've come my academic work. I got my academic work. If anybody wants a copy of any of that, by all means, we're very happy to send it along.

So well, thank you so much for doing this. I really, I really appreciate it. It's been incredibly fun to learn all of this uugh nerds. As always, thank you so much for listening. I fucking love conversation episodes. This one was so fascinating, so great to talk to Dan about God. All of these things, like Roman Greece was just a complete mystery to me, beyond generally having heard some stuff about Roman Sparta and being aware of Gorton as a place on crete. And that's honestly kind of the extent of my knowledge because I just really love the classical and Arcic periods. But there is so much value to learning beyond that, and thankfully I have people to come and tell me all the things that matter and are so interesting and even bigger thank you because all of you want to hear these things and you love it too, and God said so cool. Conversation episodes are the most fun. They are so rewarding. Anyway, I love you all. Let's talk about Miths. Baby is written and produced by me Live Albert. Mikayla Smith is the hermes to my Olympian's Gods. She does so many things. She's the absolute best, just give her a hand ye out right now. I think when this airs she'll be in Italy doing like a cool archaeological dig, like a cool classicist. It's incredible. My god, wait to go Mikaela. Stephanie Foley works to transcribe the podcast for YouTube captions and accessibility. She is wonderful. The podcast is hosted and monetized by iHeartMedia. Help me continue bringing you the world of Greek mythology and the Mediterranean by becoming a patron where really get access to bonus episodes and more. Visit patreon dot com slash Myth's Baby, or click the link in this episode's description. This job is so cool. You're all the best freaking fun. I am live and I love this shit.