What Was It Like?

I'm not sure when I came up with the idea of this blog. I'll tell you about it, at least, what I can remember.

Lately, I've been digging around the world of podcasts and, more specifically, I've been listening to essentially "factual" podcasts: stuff about the fall of Rome, or a happily odd podcast about storytelling and folklore. There's podcasts about "interesting" unsolved murders. And of course, organizations like the BBC have a slew of podcasts and audio documentaries about current events, that you can find here. I'm never pleased for very long with podcasts: my longest torrid affair with a podcast was maybe two years, when I first found the Your Mom's House podcast.

I got to thinking about how I choose to create and play the sorts of music that I personally enjoy. I pointed out to a friend once the the music that I find most difficult to play, like with my hands, is very frequently the music I create myself. I told the friend I was rather ashamed of the conceit, and he replied, "Man, look, when you create your own stuff, that's usually what you put the most effort into. Of course that's the stuff that will hurt your hands."

What that means is, of course I will eventually create the audio version of this podcast. So, what is it?

What I want to do is just babble about historical people, places, events, and just plain old things that I like. The idea is I don't fact check, I'll just run on at the mouth or hands until I tire of it, give it a cursory edit, add some links, and Bob's your uncle.

The dates will be wrong. The names will be wrong. The events will be wrong in a lot of cases. But I'll try only to talk about things I actually know for certain. That doesn't make me right. It makes me a knowledge nerd.

Take, for example, the Roman Emperor Septimius Severus. He was Emperor from somewhere around 192 (not sure of that) until 211 (I am sure of that). His sons Geta (assassinated in a year or two by Caracalla) and Caracalla (assassinated in 217 while taking a piss) followed him. The Emperor before him was Didius Julianus, the guy who bought the Empire from the Praetorian Guard. He only lasted a minute.

If I had to guess, the ancient Romans who get the most notice are, in no particular order, Julius Caesar, Augustus Caesar, Marcus Tullius Cicero, Mark Antony, and Pompey. Oh, and much later, Constantine the Great. With the exception of Constantine, all these dudes knew one another. They're all from the same historical period, and because of the writings of Cicero, the end of the Republic is the period we actually know the most about. Yeah, we pretty much know all the Emperor's names through to the end of both the Western and Eastern (Byzantine) Empire, but we know various amounts of stuff about people, based on writings, on lack of writings, coinage, and whatever archaeology has managed to make it to this time. It various wildly, and it's the holes in things that I'm the most interested in. The stuff that seems in part not explainable.

For me, the most fascinating time of ancient Rome is actually not documented all that well--the period right after the reigns of what Edward Gibbon (the "Decline of the Roman Empire" guy) the Five Good Emperors. (I might get this wrong, but I don't think so. The five good Emperors were: Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, and Marcus Aurelius.)

Actually, that's basically where Gibson starts his work, implying that between the plague brought back from Marcus Aurelius's campaigns (the so called "Antonine plague," probably smallpox) and the shit reign of the megalomaniac Commodus, that's where the decline began. It's hard to dispute Gibbon, either. But the fact is, we start losing really good historians around that time, due to lost works or no writers.

I guess it's important to realize that we'd been getting less historians and stuff for years by this point, but in a way, the wheels came totally off around Severus's time.

After the assassination of Commodus, there was a year where there were five or six Emperors all vying for the big chair, the purple robes. This was essentially a civil war, but the documentation that's come down to us sort of leads us to assume it was a bunch of barbaric jerks. And pretty much any writings that have arrived are either scant, or we get a blurb that essentially days "so and so was a brutal scumbag, and was murdered by his own troops when he couldn't pay them."

After a bit, an African Roman general, Septimius Severus, ends up winning all the fighting. Gibbon talks about this period as being one of military rule and a rather oppressed State in some ways, and it's hard to dispute that, which I'll get to. But Septimius was also a full-fledged Roman as well. He went through the cursus honorum, the traditional sequence of offices that a guy worked through to become (hopefully) consul, which means that the guy was of at least some political standing. Also, later on that doesn't much get mentioned because the writings are even more scarce and the Empire had changed a whole lot more. There's a lot of reasons. But the fact that the cursus is even mentioned in this guy's case is relevant.

I guess what's fascinating most about this guy is that when you read about him, you hear the phrase "it is likely" a lot. "It is likely" that he did this thing or that thing. There's a whole block of Severus's life that's just not attested at all, despite the occasional war and consolidation of power. I don't know the years without looking (and I'm not gonna, that's the whole point), but there's a block of five or ten years where we just have no information. I think that's the interesting bit. He reigned for somewhere around twenty years, in a period where it became completely common for Emperors to reign for three years and then get assassinated in captain somewhere. There's even a term for it: "Barracks Emperor," an emperor who commanded a few legions in a province, and then basically drove a school bus filled with soldiers around, grabbing up everyone's armies and provinces, then getting killed after a few years.

He was undoubtedly a military dictator guy: one of his famous quotes ran something like "pay the army, and fuck the haters." But I mean, when I break it down in my head, I wonder what made him special, or safer in some ways. His pattern was pretty much the same as a bunch of guys who followed him--become a general, pay the shit out of the army, civil the hell out of some wars, take the purple robes. And that's what he did. But why did he last until he died of age (probably)? The guy was in his sixties, and died in York, England. That's a long way from Rome, or Leptis Magna, where he was born in Roman Africa (specifically Libya today).

The fact is, we don't know really, because we don't have any real news on the subject. We've got the Historia Augusta, a largely fictitious work with straight up lies in it, and some of Cassius Dio's stuff, and Dio was writing like a generation later, and he was a senator, and Severus didn't like senators. And they didn't like him, either. Dio would've not really had the best shit to say anyway.

And that's where we sit. We just don't know a bunch of stuff. And I wish we did. You now, they're always digging up shit in Israel and Palestine, or Italy, or Egypt, out wherever the cool archaeology stuff is. Always. This stuff is always going on. But, I guess maybe we will. I mean shit, I read some article one time that said it'll take like a hundred years or more to basically dig out sand from ancient Egypt. And then do archaeology.

Also, we know a ridiculously small amount about Julia Domna, his formidable wife, and her sister, Julia Mamaea. (And Mamaea's kids.) This is partially because they were women, yeah, but also we just don't know anything. I wish we did. Some folks say that Mamaea was a legit power behind the throne for a whole bunch of years. I wish we knew the extent.

That's the sort of stuff I want to write about in this blog. I hope readers will join me for every actually and fuck up that I make. It's fun! History is fun. So let's do this.