Tag: Holland, Tom

In Our Time: The Roman Republic

The Roman Republic was the subject of an In Our Time episode all the way back in 2004 – we listened to it last August while there weren’t any new In Our Times airing. It’s a pretty broad subject for a 45 minute programme – 500 years of history plus its rise and fall – so of necessity it was painting with fairly broad brushstrokes and looking at themes and commonalities across the centuries. Tackling it were Greg Woolf (St Andrews University), Catherine Steel (University of Glasgow) and Tom Holland (historian and author). (NB: Institutions presumably out of date, it being 12 years ago.)

They started by talking about the foundational myths of the Republic as the stories they told themselves shaped how the Republic functioned. This isn’t Romulus and Remus – they are a foundational myth for the city – instead the two key stories are the rape of Lucretia and Horatius on the bridge. Lucretia was raped by the son of the King of Rome, and afterwards she committed suicide whilst calling on her kin to avenge her. This sparked an uprising (led by a man called Brutus) which drove out King Tarquin. Following this the Romans declared they would have no more kings. The second legend follows on directly from this one* – Tarquin didn’t take kindly to losing his kingdom like this, and enlisted the support of one of the nearby Etruscan cities. He returned to Rome at the head of an army and it seemed like the Romans were going to be forced to take their king back. However before this could happen Horatius stepped forward to stand on the bridge the army were marching over. He and two companions held off the army for long enough for the bridge to be destroyed behind them, preventing the army from reaching the city. So you have this ideal that the people will rule themselves (with no kings) and when a hero is needed a citizen will step forward to give his own life for his city.

*Well, that’s the way they told the legend on the programme, when looking it up on wikipedia to check spellings of names I saw that there it’s set much later in the Republic’s history – the point remains the same though.

The Roman Republic was the first constitutional democracy meaning that people were voted into positions of responsibility. (Athens was a direct democracy, where everyone voted on what should be done.) The political structure was based on sharing power around in two different ways. Firstly the many powers that a king had once had were distributed between several people. Secondly any given person only held a particular office for a short term (rather than for life). The ephemerality of power and glory were a key concept for the Republic. A consul was consul for a year. A general who’d won a victory was given a triumph and treated like a god for a day. Theatres and celebratory buildings (like triumphal arches) were temporary structures. Even the permanent infrastructure buildings weren’t built of stone but of more ephemeral materials. Which puts the Emperor Augustus “coming to Rome a city of brick and leaving it a city of marble” (as discussed on the In Our Time about the Augustan Age (post)) in a different light: that’s not just an upgrade to the buildings, that’s a change of ethos.

Clearly the Republic wasn’t static over its 500 years of history – in particular the balance of power between the people and the aristocracy was constantly shifting and evolving. But it was at heart a very conservative society which looked back to a prior Golden Age. Much was written in later days in the Republic about how it had been better in the early days (before whatever the most recent crisis had been) – and this genre includes most of the surviving texts written about how the Republic was founded. Changes were often brought in by announcing that they were returns to the ways things were done in the past – whether or not this was actually true. This continues after the Republic as well – they brought up on the programme that Augustus’s propaganda cast the beginning of the Empire as a restoration of the good old days of the Republic.

The end of the Republic can be thought of as it becoming a victim of its own success. Before they went out and conquered such vast lands it was possible for every key political figure to come back every year to Rome and vote for the new Consuls and so on. And when your campaigns only last a year and are nearby then the army can be based on the idea of farmer-soldier citizens. Every able-bodied land-owning male citizen was supposed to enlist – easily done when he comes back in time for harvest, but what do you do about his farm if he’s on campaign for 5 years at a time? And once the land-owning requirement was abolished where do long term soldiers retire to when they’re done in the army? The Senate generally prevaricated over the provision of awards and recompense to these retired soldiers – which left a gap for the generals of the armies to fill. And if your reward would come from the charismatic general you were serving under, then your loyalty would be to him first rather than to Rome or to the Senate.

The Triumvirate of Pompey, Crassus and Caesar (the first stage in the transition from Republic to Empire) can be seen as having grown out of Pompey not liking his downgrade in status when he returned to Rome. Whilst out campaigning in the East he had been treated like a king, back home in Rome he was only one amongst equals. And not a particularly important one at that – having been away he was out of the loop, politically speaking. The experts said that Caesar’s motivation was probably that he saw there as being only so many “slots” for important people in any new regime and he wanted to make sure he occupied one of them.

The defining point for the end of the Republic was the crossing of the Rubicon by Caesar and his army. The Rubicon is a river between Italy and Gaul, and it marked the boundary between the provinces (where a general could be a king in all but name) and the core territories (where the general was no more important than any other aristocrat). The tradition was that you could not bring your army with you into the core – and so Caesar camps on the other side, which makes the Senate nervous. He’s given the choice between dismissing his army and crossing himself, or taking his army and leaving. But Caesar knows that if he does this then he loses all the power he’s worked for – and so he brings his army across the Rubicon.

I said that was the defining point of the end, but as they discussed on the programme that’s only obvious with hindsight. It probably wasn’t clear to the Romans that the Republic was gone forever until one Emperor inherited from another … and perhaps not even until an Emperor was deposed and yet still the Republic was not not restored.

Around the World in 60 Minutes; Dinosaurs, Myths and Monsters

Around the World in 60 Minutes was a hybrid of a programme – part “what’s it like to be an astronaut?” and part travelogue. The two strands of the programme were woven together by looking at what you see during one orbit of the International Space Station – which takes 90 minutes to go round the Earth. The travelogue side of it went to about a dozen different places round the world, in the direction of the orbit, and told us something about the place and an interesting stat or two. For instance at Greenwich they talked about the meridian, and how in some sense the charts produced by the British after longitude was formalised were the GPS of their day. There was also a distinct environmental message to the whole programme – for instance they visited Brazil where they talked about the Amazon rainforest and how it’s the lungs of the planet. Brazil has had laws against deforestation for decades, but it’s only since they’ve put up a couple of satellites to keep watch over the forest that they’ve been able to enforce the rules. Now any deforestation can be seen by comparing images and the landowner can be fined. But the rainforest still loses something like 450 acres of forest every orbit of the ISS (I think that number’s right, it was something close to that anyway).

This travelogue stuff was interspersed with footage from the ISS (both inside and out) and interviews with an astronaut who’s been to the ISS. The emphasis here was strongly on how cool it is to go to space although they did mention things like nausea in microgravity being a problem initially, and talked a bit about the difficulties of getting in and out for space walks. But overall it felt a little like a recruiting film in these bits 😉 There were also sections about the sorts of scientific experiments that are done in space, like taking viruses up because once they’re returned to earth you can make better vaccines (tho I don’t think I followed why that happened).

It wasn’t quite what I’d expected from the description – I think I was expecting more travelogue and less recruiting for astronauts. It was cool tho, in its own hippy sort of way 🙂

Another quirky one-off programme that we watched last week was Dinosaurs, Myths and Monsters. This was presented by Tom Holland, who opened the programme with a description of how much he was fascinated by dinosaurs when he was a small child. It went on from there to look at how a variety of different cultures have interpreted the fossilised bones they discover – what they made of dinosaur bones.

His main theme was that even though we now know most of the stories are wrong, they’re still attempts to explain these bones and most have some element of truth (or at least you can see where they came from). For instance there are myths from Native American societies that live on the Great Plains that talk of huge birds with teeth and sea snakes with feet that lived a long time ago in a different age of the world when there was water over the land. And if you look at the fossils you find in the area then you can see that once it was a shallow sea (lots of sea creatures), with pterodactyls and aquatic dinosaurs.

He didn’t just stick to dinosaur bones – several Greek myths might have come from discoveries of large mammal fossils. He suggested that elephant skulls look a bit like one-eyed monsters, because of the gap in the skull for the trunk which might look like an eye socket. Back before the Greeks knew what an elephant was perhaps they told stories of the cyclops to explain these bones. But the most striking Greek one was his suggestion for where griffins originate. There aren’t any dinosaur fossils in Greek territory, but if you go out along the silk routes towards China, then there are fossils in the Gobi desert of dinosaurs – they are beaked, and have four legs (with claws) and even nests of fossilised eggs. Stories about these bones could easily have been the original travellers’ tales about griffins.

As well as these older myths Holland also talked about the first more scientific attempts to figure out what dinosaur bones were. He visited Crystal Palace and looked at the dinosaur reconstructions there – which to modern eyes look ludicrously wrong, with their heavyset clumsy looking frames. And he did note that there are still many things we don’t actually know and are still just extrapolating according to our own prejudices.

This was a fun programme, it covered quite a lot of ground and all with a sense of humour. Although it did at times get a bit too carried away with itself (lots of “surely it must’ve been based on this!!”) but mostly it stayed the right side of the line, and anyway it wasn’t taking itself too seriously.

Other programmes watched this week:

Episode 2 and episode 3 of The First World War – a 10 part series covering the whole of the war.

Episode 2 of Unnatural Histories – series about human influence on areas of the world that we traditionally think of as “untamed nature”.

Viking Art: A Culture Show Special – programme about the current British Museum exhibition, tho the programme concentrated more on Britain than the exhibition does.