Part One: Christopher B. Zeichmann on Radical Antiquity

Margaret interviews ancient historian Christopher B. Zeichmann about all the wild stuff happening in the ancient world and confirms her guesses about Spartacus and the Third Servile War

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media, Hello, and welcome to Cool People who
Did cool stuff. You're a weekly reminder that when there's
bad things happening, there's people try to do good things,
including sometimes a lot of the bad things happened a
really really long time ago, but there were still people
trying to do good things in the face of the
bad things a really really long time ago. And you've

(00:23):
probably noticed that because for the past month or two,
that's like all at three months, I don't know. I've
been obsessed with antiquity for the first time ever on
the show, since I decided to deep dive the Druids
for Halloween, and here I am three months later into
this hole. And what I decided to do for the
very first time was bring on an actual historian and

(00:44):
just ask that historian questions live. I don't know the
answers to these questions yet, but I'm going to ask
our guest Christopher Zeichmann. Hi, how are you great?

Speaker 2 (00:55):
Thanks so much for having me today.

Speaker 1 (00:56):
Yeah, I'm I am very excited. So anyone who has
been listening to the last couple episodes, you know, we
did an episode recently about Spartacus and the Third Servile War,
and it was one of the first times I got
to say, wow, this this was actually cooler than I expected.
And the point of that is that you are the
main source. Well, you have a book. It came out

(01:18):
in twenty twenty five from Pluto Press. It's called Radical Antiquity,
and that book is what made me decide to finally
do a Spartacus episode and discover that they were way
cooler than I thought.

Speaker 2 (01:30):
Well, I'm glad hear they could kind of open that door.
I feel like it's sort of Spartacus, right, we see
those movies and like the was it, like, yeah, Stars
or something had a TV show Spartacus a few yearsgo.
I think they're like reviving it now, but like when
you actually look at the data, then it's just fascinating,
incredible stuff. I feel like scholars even today overlook quite
a bit. Anyway.

Speaker 1 (01:48):
Yeah, and to just dive right into the Spartacus part
of this, yeah, yeah, I think it's the Brave Heart
effect where we're all kind of burned out on movies
like Braveheart or even Gladiator, which is on some level
of retail of the Spartacus story, right where I just
kind of I just kind of expected Spartacus to kind
of suck, like because I read a lot of history,

(02:09):
and so I keep finding people who are like, Oh,
there's this really cool thing, and you're like, ah, he's
just like the first two Servile Wars would have been
a perfect example of this. Okay, wait, I'm going to
try and speed run the three Servile Wars to see
if you can tell me if I'm right without my
notes in front of me.

Speaker 2 (02:25):
Sure.

Speaker 1 (02:25):
So, there are these servile Wars, the slave Wars, the
slave uprisings that happen in a rapid secession about a
generation apart each one in the end of the BC.
I don't remember exactly, like they're all in like the
second century, in the first century BCE, I think exactly.

Speaker 2 (02:41):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (02:41):
And the first two are on an island whose name
I totally remember. This is really not embarrassing. It's the
football that Italy is kicking sicily, thank you, the hacky
sack that's being kicked. And the first two they're up
ending society, but they're just like putting it right back
together again in the same way this is society was
constructed with a monarch with it certainly seems like at

(03:03):
least one of them had slavery because they were like, hey, you,
we've captured you. Now you have to make stuff for
us and things like that. And so what made the
Third Survival or whatever? I can't ask this question because
I already said it on the show. The Third Servile
War was different because they instead created an attempt at
a free society. Is what it certainly seems like, is

(03:24):
that it's an accurate.

Speaker 2 (03:27):
Yeah, I think so. I think they probably, like you said,
these are kind of all happening in kind of southern
Italy Sicily kind of that same general region there, right,
And I think it's pretty safe to say that kind
of Spartakiss Crisis and the other sort of rebels engaged
in the Third Servile War were aware of kind of
what worked and what didn't work with those kind of
earlier servilel wars kind of where there were successes. But

(03:49):
also you see the visions that kind of flame out, right,
those things like you're saying in the Brave Heart Effect,
these things that seem really cool in the abstract, and
then you oh, hey, this is just calling a different
person king now, right, And it maybe it's a litle
little bit better than before, but it's not really overhauling
society in any meaningful way. And I think, yeah, sort
of Sparta kissing these other slaves in the Third Servil
War seems like they had more of a vision anyway,

(04:10):
and it seems like it was a lot more I
would say democratic, in the sense that like there's a
much wider involvement in terms of like developing what these
policies were. Right, it wasn't just sort of the king
who's making these decisions and his advisors, right, the slave kings.
That is, we kind of find like it looks like
more involvement from kind of the common slaves who are

(04:30):
also rebelling, right, not necessarily the generals and leaders, but
and I think that's kind of what makes this sort
of Third serviol War seem a lot more exciting to
me anyway.

Speaker 1 (04:38):
Yeah, no, it makes sense. And Okay, I said at
the beginning, or maybe it was before we were started talking,
that I'm not a historian, right, I'm a pop historian.
I say history to people after reading it. But I
did come to a conclusion about Third Servile War that
I then conjectured on air like a responsible person, which is,
there's this whole thing where they march up to the

(04:59):
very top of it Italy right in the Third Servile War,
and then for whatever reason, they turned back around again.
And historians antique historians, what do you call it? A
historian from the era, but a couple hundred years.

Speaker 2 (05:12):
Later ancient historians is what I would normally call it.
Then maybe classists to be modern writers talking about the past.

Speaker 1 (05:18):
Okay, So ancient historians who were still talking about the
past at this point were like, why did Spartacus turn around?
And they wanted to kind of ennoble this one guy
because they had like it seems like the Romans invented
everything bad, or at least Rome brought out everything bad
in history, like the Great Man of History theory. They
were all about that. It looks like right they were.

(05:40):
They were like, Spartacus did this, whereas even even now,
like I couldn't remember the other guy's name, so I
got lazy and just said Spartacus. But there was like
five generals.

Speaker 2 (05:48):
Right, yeah, like on a Maas, Cryptsis, all these other
sort of people. And but you're right, like these ancient writers,
you know, because you're saying, this is all very retrospective
for them, and so kind of when they're most these
sources were written, you know, be two hundred or so
years after this revolt took place, and by this time
kind of the second century of the Common Era, with
scholars often referred second sophistic they're very interested in kind

(06:10):
of this great man mode of history, like biographies of
Alexander the Great in around this time period. Right, So
this great man mode of history writing huge part of
how they're telling these histories. Then, so you're right, like
they're upholding Spartacus as this sort of genius who's like
just through circumstance, happened to be a slave, right, but
in every other way he's just as good as one
of us Greeks or Romans.

Speaker 1 (06:30):
Right, yeah, yeah, exactly, And that's why they didn't want
him to just be a nomad from the from thrace,
right yea. Yeah. So it's presented that he gets all
the way up to the top of Italy and then
for no one can understand why he was trying to say,
we shouldn't really attack Rome, we should just go home.
But then instead they turned around his men against him

(06:52):
and they marched back on Rome, and he said, well,
I guess everyone else is doing it, so I'm going
to do it too. And my theory when I this
is that this is one of the greatest acts of
solidarity that's ever happened. Is that a lot of the
people wanted to go home. So they're like, all right,
I'll walk you to the end of the block, like

(07:12):
I will walk you to the mountains. I will get
you out of Italy. And then they're like, cool, everyone
who wants to leave. This is part of why I'm
holding the Third Survival War is successful. I'm I'm an anarchist,
so I have to pick failures in history and call
them successful. It's the only way I can reconcile anything.
But like, all of these slaves were like, all right,

(07:33):
we want to go home, and so a bunch of
them all head north all together, and then presumably I
can't remember which, I get all of my sources mixed up.
I read a lot of different things for that episode.
Some historians were like, well, we think some of them left, right,
and so presumably a bunch of them went home, and
then the rest were like, yeah, but I like being
a bandit and like fuck Rome, you know, and so

(07:54):
then they march back and keep doing essentially you know,
social banditry. This is my theory.

Speaker 2 (08:00):
Yeah, absolutely, I love this theory, right. And the thing is,
these sources are so sparse in many ways, right, that
you get these little glimpses as to what happened, and
those are kind of course filtered through all these incredible
biases against slaves, against rebels, against foreigners, and so it's
often really hard to be able to piece what it
else is together. And I kind of love this theory

(08:21):
that you've put forward here. Gonna have to go back
and reread these sources with that in mind anyway, But yeah,
you're right. I think you're kind of also pointing this
other question too, right, So, like when we talk about
anarchist politics, it's often we think about these kind of
moments of failures, right, that these unsuccessful movements, right, you know,
whether we talk about them, and most you kind of
fear people talk about them optimistically as sort of like

(08:42):
these temporary autonomous zones and stuff like that, Right, these
kind of projects that weren't designed to last long period
of time. But whether like pirate ship or you know
a few years ago with the Seattle was it Seattle
Temporary Autonomous zone or whatever it was.

Speaker 1 (08:55):
Yeah, the chop chats depending on how you ask.

Speaker 2 (08:58):
Yeah, but we tend to think is like very temporary things.
And I think that we can still call those successes
in many ways. Right, Yeah, they don't need to last forever,
but they can accomplish something in that insistence upon liberating
here and now. And I think, I don't know, I
think you're right that we can look at this sort
of slaver role of the Spartacus and this third several
Wars as a remarkable success in many ways. Right. It

(09:18):
certainly outlasted the you know, crasses, the general suppressed and everything.
They It's pretty clear that these are people still living
in southern Italy here and there, and it took decades
for them to all be wiped out by the Romans
over the sort of you know, long period of time.

Speaker 1 (09:33):
Anyway. Yeah, yeah, that's like one of the things that
I again barely found any information about was that. Okay,
so for people didn't listen to the Third Servile War episodes,
you know, the Third Servile War lasts about four years
or so. I think actually all of the Servile Wars
lasted exactly the same number of years, and I think
it was four and you know, and then it was
essentially militarily defeated, right, and in this particular case, actually

(09:57):
I think in all of them, thousands or tens of
thousands of them end up crucified, right, because Rome is
very metal and dark. But then Thuri is that how
you say the name of this story? Yeah, yeah, yeah,
So Thuria is this liberated zone right where they showed up.
And in a remarkable difference between what Third Servile War

(10:17):
was doing versus the first two, as best as it
seems like people can tell, In the first two Servile Wars,
when the slaves took over a city, they were like, ah,
we're going to kind of murder everyone and then enslave
the people that we don't want to kill because they're useful,
and you know, maybe this one guy was nice to me,
and you know, the people at the party who are
nice to the seer who ran the first one, they
may or may not be freed, right. But the Third

(10:40):
Servile War, it seems like when they took over this town,
they kind of were like, all right, well, we're all
going to make these decisions us and the original inhabitants
of this town they might not have asked like, hey,
can we come do this, right, but they did not
show up and slaughter everyone, and like even the Romans
who were mad at them and were like, oh, this

(11:00):
is a little different. They're doing something a little different here.

Speaker 2 (11:04):
Yeah, which is yeah, pretty fascinated. So it's again another way,
which is something I think is pretty unique about this
Third Servile War that like this kind of what it's
certainly a conquest of a town in a certain way, right,
or of a city that like, like you said, the
slave's not invited in by the residents of three I
or anything like that, but they managed to find a
way of working together, living together, and in a way
that really presented a problem for later Roman historians who

(11:26):
wanted to make Spartakiss Revolt out to be villainous. Right.
So when we look at you know, half millennium later, right,
Like one historian that talks about this is Eurosius, and
he's writing around you know, five hundred of the Common Era,
and he just needs to like contact all these wild
tales about how how evily they treated all the people
of Thury I and in a way that just you

(11:48):
look at earlier records and there's no evidence of this, right,
So just as time goes on, it becomes to the well,
if we're going to tell a tale of a slaver vault,
we need to be clear that these are evil people
that you can't trust slaves, and you if you're even
an inkling of slavabole for your own sake, you better,
you know, punish them, be violent against them, and suppress
any inkling of independence they might have in them. Right.

(12:09):
Whereas again, when you look at what actually has talked
on these ancient text the ones closest written to this
Third Servile War, it's pretty remarkable, like these notions of
a cooperation living alongside each other that I'm sure it
was tense, right, Like it can't have been easy to
do that, but yet they find a way of making
this work anyway. Absolutely, Yeah.

Speaker 1 (12:28):
And so this idea of these like ups and downs
of history and what we declare victories, right, is one
of these things I think about a lot, because, Yeah,
after the four years of the Third Servile War, and
you know, the soldiers of it, the warriors of it,
get crucified, and you know, but ten years later whatever,
they have to go down and put down more uprisings

(12:50):
in that town. Because yeah, as you're saying, like these
ideas stuck around. And one of the things that I
think about from twenty twenty is that no one forgets
the first time they see the police run away from them.
Sure like no one forgets. Like I remember, I think
it was during the Freddie Gray uprising in Baltimore. There's
this period where school kids come out of school and

(13:14):
throw rocks at cops and drive a line of police
back and you can see the cops like just running
from these kids, and these kids who have been preyed
upon by the police their entire lives and you know,
told that they're going to get murdered or whatever, right,
and like, you don't forget that, and you don't forget
that taste of freedom. And the other thing that I

(13:35):
try to remember is the bigger picture you take of history,
the more you realize there's not really static states that
we reach, Like there's not equilibrium, there's not you never
reach utopia, and you also never reach dystopia. So we
never win and we never lose. And so we have
to understand things in that way where like, yeah, okay,

(13:56):
everyone who fought in the Third Survival War died, you
know who else is dead from that? Everybody? No one
is alive from that era, they all.

Speaker 2 (14:04):
Die, you know, absolutely, right, like this is going to
happen always at one point and beyond that too, right,
Like I think that these are people who, you know,
even when we talk about the flaws of those first
two survey wars, they were inspirations, right, Like their inspirations
like Sparta Kiss and that third Servyvoll could not have
happened if it weren't for those earlier slaver volts to
one and two generations earlier there, right, So yeah, yeah,

(14:26):
I completely agree, right, like these may have been suppressed,
they may have been violently suppressed. But again I think
stuff were you know, with the eventual abolition slavery and
all these sorts of things like these are sources of
inspiration that people pointed to for centuries, need millennia afterwards,
right absolutely, And it's I think that's something that we
need to take seriously with all this.

Speaker 1 (14:44):
Yeah, and with the third surviv War in particular, it
was hard to tell where the chickens are and the
eggs are in this particular thing. But and I actually
don't remember if it was your book that I got
this from another source, but Roman slavery changed very dramatically
and quickly around the time of the Third Servile War
after it, and it moved away from as much of

(15:08):
an agrarian slave society, and therefore the people who were
the worst treated amongst the enslaved people, that was like
no longer as much the case now. Partly I believe
that that was because and whoever I was reading. Again,
it's very strange to be maybe quoting someone's own work
at them but not being sure. And I do track

(15:28):
my sources, but I don't always remember which idea comes
from which source, which is why I can't write a
book out of all of this. It's so frustrating. I've
done so much work and I can't write a book
out of it. Okay, but I remember reading that Roman
imperial expansion kind of slowed down at that period, and
the Roman slave society was largely fueled by expansion, and

(15:51):
they tied into each other, right because like, you know,
once you have slaves working in the fields, you can
send to everyone else to war better. And like you
have the centralization of the plantations and moving from small
farmers to you know, plantation systems allowed for more colonial expansion.
But on some level it seems like if you want

(16:11):
to make giant leaps that I wish I didn't like making,
but I do like making the Third Servile War like
fucks up Roman imperial expansion and like shrinks the state
of slavery within the Roman Empire.

Speaker 2 (16:25):
Yeah, so I don't think this is my book anyway
that you were getting this from, so you know, after
about queening it at me, okay, but yeah, I think
you're right. So there's kind of a lot of reforms
and changes that happened around this time within kind of
the Roman Empire, and you know what it comes to
encompass pretty quickly, you know, around this time period, basically
the entire Mediterranean. You know, it expands, ebbs and flows
a little bit kind of what those borders are there.
But you're right, like basically, once you hit as much

(16:47):
as you're going to hit conquers much you're going to conquer,
that kind of main way of enslaving people becomes much
more difficult, right, you know, you kind of depend upon
other things, whether it's you know, kind of you know, procreation, right,
slave giving birth to other slaves, and you know a
few other things as well. But really it's kind of
around this time that it ceases to grow in quite

(17:08):
that same way. And we also find surely afterwards a
number of laws kind of changing Roman slavery a bit
here and there. A lot of it is kind of
under the pretense of making it more tolerable for slaves.
I don't you know for this, of course not safe
actually getting more tolerable. But I suspect this is at
least kind of the Roman rulers way of saying, like,

(17:29):
don't do any shit that's going to create another spartacus, right,
like going it down, Like don't make it so unbearable
that like they're going to, you know, get violent with
you or anything like that. Right, So I think a
lot of this is sort of Romans trying to test
what the limits of what they can get slaves to
tolerate before uprise or anything like that. So you're right,
there's a lot of changes around this kind of the

(17:50):
late first century before the Common Era, in kind of
the early first century of the Common Era as well.
There's a lot of little law changes there and kind
of regulations being put in and again fitting with kind
of the more or less the full extent to throw
an empire happening around this time as well right, yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 1 (18:05):
Yeah that makes sense. And like I don't want to say, oh,
the expansion stopped because of this, but slavery and expansion
were so inexorably linked, right, and like it's interesting to
think about how, you know, Yeah, again, this uprising happens,
and it quote unquote failed, but it changes society because
it makes the plantation owners just like a little bit

(18:26):
more afraid of everybody, right, absolutely, And that's kind of where,
especially historically, like respect comes from, is like the ability
to exert power, right, and the three survival wars, And
I don't mean to I'm also not trying to talk
trash entirely on the first two. Like if you're enslaved
in the city and then you like rise up and
kill everyone in the city, like I'm kind of like, yeah,

(18:46):
like I don't know, that's like how I like wish
you'd done it, but whatever, you know.

Speaker 2 (18:53):
I kind of understand why you would react that way
at the very least, right, Yeah.

Speaker 1 (18:56):
Yeah, exactly, Like, look, sometimes these things have to be
proven to intolerable and that's just the what it is.

Speaker 2 (19:06):
Okay.

Speaker 1 (19:06):
So the other thing I want to ask about the
third surwell, the greatest leap that I made during this thing.
You talk in the introduction to your book Radical Antiquity,
out from twenty twenty five for Pluto Press, which, okay,
just as an aside, I've probably never read a book
more perfectly fit for this show. It was like a
little present to me. I was at this little bookstore

(19:27):
in Ohio and I'm walking through the bookstore and here's
a you know, Greek statue with a red bandana mask
over its face and says Radical Antiquity. And I looked
at it and I was like, I'm either going to
love or hate this book, and I bought it to
find out whether I would love or hate it. In
the introduction, you talk a bunch about anarchia, about the Greek,

(19:50):
and I believe by inference Roman conception of anarchia, and
you talk about how it's a completely different series of connotation.
Then there is an I would say, the modern and
especially kind of the pre anarchism as an ideology era, right, Okay.
So I had always had this assumption that when the

(20:12):
first person in the Western tradition to call himself an anarchist, Prudalin,
who I have very mixed feelings about, when he said
I am an anarchist. He was kind of like coming
out being like, I'm a terrorist, right, right, Because the
connotations around that word at the time, coming from the
French Revolution, were like the extremes and the violent end
of things, And so it's a little bit of our

(20:34):
own fault that we have those connotations to this day.
We did pick a little edge lord word, you know,
and run with it.

Speaker 2 (20:41):
Sure, but.

Speaker 1 (20:44):
I had kind of just accidentally assumed I knew it
come from the Greek and it was from an archon
without leaders, right, But like I just kind of assumed
that it always had those connotations. And you make the case,
I'm gonna say it a little bit, but then try
and convince you to say it a little bit more.
You make the case that the context, the connotations and
Greek culture are entirely different for anarchia, and that it

(21:08):
doesn't mean like non organized it just kind of means
like radical democracy or like just like literally just a
situation where no one's directly in charge. Is that fair reading?

Speaker 2 (21:18):
Yeah? Absolutely, I think that's a good summary of it there. Yeah.
So when we look at kind of those very early
uses of this word anarchia in antiquity, right, so here
I'm talking you know, maybe what's kind of some of
the classical Greek playwrights talking about kind of Plato Socrates,
that sort of era. This word is very closely linked
with democracy, right, So when Plato has the Dialogues of Socrates,

(21:40):
he clearly talks about anarchia being an aspect of democracy. Right.
He says, oh, Socrates hates democracy. What he wants, of course,
is that philosopher king, you know, the sort of eugenic
fascist state that he wants to have run there. So
he hates democracy, and he says, oh, we've got to Mary,
I mean Plato, right, yes, yes, sorry, excuse me that again.
I was like, oh no, I've only kind of learned
about these guys. So I was like, wait, hold on, okay, yeah, yeah,

(22:02):
but you know, once this sort of you know, fascist,
eugenic state, and he hates democracy, and he says, you know,
if we have democracy, right. You know the terrible thing
about Greek democracy it means that every home people are
just gonna believe in this anarchia, right, that people should
be able to have this freedom, right, that they should
be able to have this sort of leaderlessness. Right. And
it's not saying there's no structure, but that structure I

(22:24):
think in some ways it's you know, it can mean
something akin to what we talk about like horizontal leadership
with the kind of anarchistic circles there. Right, So we
had that sort of verticality where you've had that kind
of hierarchy of you know, I don't know, like the
first in command, second in command and so on. Here. Instead,
anarchya tends to kind of refer to kind of more
democratic ways of organizing and this, you know, sometimes it's

(22:46):
talked about as a bad thing, for instance with Plato
in this case. In other cases, you know, Greek writers
use it in a pretty neutral way. Right. So just like, hey,
this year, we just didn't elect an Arcan, and so
it was the year of anarchy, right, And it's still
like society functioned more or less as normal, but it's
just a year of anarchy because we didn't have this
leader in place, right or the first ever historian Herodotus

(23:11):
as this sort of tale where he talks about others
these kind of Persian a military unit who they lost
their commander in battle, and so we just said they
were in a state of anarchy. This unit was they
made decisions among themselves and eventually worked the way back
to the nearby city of Persians anyway, right, and this
is not to say that they were chaotic. This wasn't

(23:31):
to say that they were dangerous or anything, but just
sort of like they were engaged in a form of
decision making that was what I would call radically democratic, right,
one that's not built around kind of orders from above
or anything like that. And you know, the first person
ever to call themselves an anarchist, right, so prudan you know,

(23:52):
kind of first modern Western the most ancient one is
a fictional character Antigony. So in kind of a couple
of different plays in kind of written around this time period,
she calls herself an anarchist, right. And in this case,
she's just basically saying like she's not respecting the power
of the king of the city of Thebes, who issue
commands about you know, what to do. You know, basically

(24:13):
she's told not to bury her brother in this case.
And it's again, we're supposed to sympathize with this character,
right when you watch these plays, that this is not
something that is discrediting her, but this is say like, oh,
like we are admiring her for standing up to kind
of these natural principles, and you're supposed to give someone
a proper burial in the state the King of thebes
is telling her not to do that, right, And so

(24:34):
when we look at antiquity, it tends to bear different connotations, right,
And over time it does kind of take on those
connotations that we associate with more colloquial uses today, right
of unbridaled chaos and stuff like that, But at least
in very early uses, it doesn't seem to bear those connotations.
And that's kind of what I'm more interested in the
book anyway, Right, So, kind of the way in which

(24:55):
those sort of ancient uses of the word anarchia overlapped
to a certain extent with kind modern anarchistic conceptions of
what anarchy is. Right, And so I think there's a
Venn diagram. There's enough there that, you know, at least
enough for me to write a book about it anyway.

Speaker 1 (25:09):
So yeah, okay, So then I'm going to make two
jumps from this, and this is the most like I've
always been a little bit of like red string drawing
between all of the like yarn on a big board.
When I realized that, like Tolstoi, is in every story
about the nineteenth century, and then Tuberculos has killed everybody
that the state didn't kill, and you know, all these
like connections or whatever. Right, But I feel like I'm

(25:32):
a little bit out on a limb here, But it's
because I'm so interested in what's out on this limb.
That apple that's at the edge of this limb is
so interesting to me. If the connotations that the Greeks
have for anarchia is neutral to like, obviously Plato hates it,
but Plato hates democracy right to it, you know, being like, ah,
it just means kind of like particularly radical democracy, which

(25:55):
will make a lot of mind an anarchist really upset,
because there's a lot of work people do to try
and stept anarchism from democracy. I think that's kind of
nonsensical personally, but I don't care. Whatever. People can be
into whatever they're into, And if it has those connotations,
would Rome have similar connotations for it? And therefore would
the Third Servile War and specifically not the war itself,

(26:17):
because that was at least on some level hierarchical, Although
I'm curious about what hierarchy at generalship really means in
that time, And I'll ask you that in a second.
But you discussed in this book that the civil community,
there's no implication that Spartacus or any of the generals
are in charge of the civil community of thirty I
would they have called themselves anarchists? Would that be the

(26:38):
first self consciously anarchia in history?

Speaker 2 (26:45):
This? I love where you're going with this. I had
not thought this for but I'm gonna like push this
speculation even a step further.

Speaker 1 (26:50):
All right, perfect, is that you've become a repeated guest.

Speaker 2 (26:54):
Bartacus is from Thrace, right, and Thrace is right next
to like Macedon and Greece. I think he knows Greek
better than he knows Latin, is my guess, right, So
he may well be using those Greek words himself anyway.
So I think that there's at least a chance that
they would have characterized it this way or right that
certainly when you see how it's talked about, right, one

(27:15):
of the things that I think it was appy, and
one of the ancient historians says is that one of
the things that really droop people into this revolt was
the fact that after go to a battle, they're dividing
spoils equally among everyone. So Spartacus isn't getting more than
any weals, the other generals aren't getting more than anyone else,
the commanders aren't getting more than anmals. But it really
seems to be like, outside the context of battle, everyone

(27:37):
is treated equally. It's absolutely impression get from this. So
I think you could at least welcomely speculate that they
would have called themselves engaging anarchia of some sort there anyway, right,
certainly in defiance of slave owners and stuff like that, right,
kind of one of those classic forms of hierarchy at
the time. Right. And I make the case in the

(27:57):
book too that they're pushing back against some signal get
forms of patriarchy too, right, in terms of sexual violence
in the time. And I think that all this seems
to land up pretty well with me about quite pathetically.
I think you probably knew Greek art kiss and so
I certainly other slaves revolting there. I could well imagine
they would have called themselves something like that, at least

(28:17):
I like to imagine it too, right, I'm fully on
board with this, Mario, you got me here. I love
it well.

Speaker 1 (28:22):
So one of the things that I started this project
really reading about like nineteenth century early twentieth century history, right,
and that's, you know, for my own sort of background.
That's like where a lot of the modern left, you know,
in the Western world, you can see where the socialists
and the anarchists and the communists exist and disagree and
everything is kind of happening during that time period. So

(28:43):
I studied a lot more about that time period. And
with that time period, you're trying to get everything right,
and it's impossible, but you're trying to write because a
lot of the people who were involved in those things
wrote stuff down right, and so you can kind of
compare a bunch of different people's accounts, and we have
just so much more of the contextual information about the

(29:04):
time people lived in and stuff like that. It's been
scary and freeing to read ancient history, because ancient history, now,
if you get outside of cradle of civilization writing, I
don't know the right words I'm supposed to use here,
If you get outside of the Mediterranean in the ancient world,
you get really sketchy, like we don't know at all,

(29:27):
We're all going on vibes or like understanding oral traditions
as best as we can. It's not just pure vibes,
but like it seems like Mediterranean ancient history. It's like
a connect the dots where we have some dots that
are specific and drawn in and permanent ink, and then
there's no picture on the box, and you're like, all right,

(29:49):
just how do these dots connect? And you can draw
any picture as long as it hits all those dots.
And then it seems like the historian job is to
not just wildly imagine, but to try and understand like
sort of like probable dots based on all of the
other contexts they have available to them. Like, it seems
like I have a lot of respect for historians, especially

(30:09):
after doing this ancient history stuff. But it is interesting
because it's still unsem leble vibes based like and once
you realize that, then you realize that the story we've
been told of history is the vibes of the dominant paradigm.
Absolutely going back in history and say like, ah, everyone

(30:30):
was like this until civilization saved them or whatever it is, you.

Speaker 2 (30:33):
Know, absolutely I couldn't agree bar it. This is a
great way of characterizing because kind of the way the
study of ancient history has been practice changed a lot
over the past like two centuries or so, and for
a number of different reasons. So first, like the emergence
of kind of modern archaeology, we're able to find things
like ancient PAPYRII in a way we just didn't have
for so these ancient papyri, which you know, a lot

(30:56):
of this is coming from ancient Egypt, where it just
like we get letters from Joe Schmoe to his mom
that gives you like daily life insights in a way
that like we just didn't have available to us before
the emergence of modern kind of archaeologia. Right, So that's
kind of gives you much like lower level like not
just kind of Julius Caesar and his palace, but like
you know, average folks like you and I anyway, right,

(31:17):
kind of what their incarnter of life was. The second
thing you're absolutely right is is I would I connect
a lot of this to kind of the emergence of
classics as a field of study. Right, So kind of
that ancient history, Greco Roman history has been connected to
like a few distinct things from its emergence, and only
people are starting to now take account of this. So
a lot of it is connected with kind of like
the nationalisms of like the eighteenth and nineteenth century. Right.

(31:40):
A lot of this is like, let's read these ancient
texts to think about how do you properly run a state,
how does a people define itself? And so on. So
you have these kind of very well educated, you know,
people grew up reading Greek and Latin, and they become
professors in write books about this stuff, and so they're
kind of used to reading these texts in a way
that's oriented course the powerful interests of kind of the

(32:01):
state and kind of you know, wealth extraction, profit, all
these sorts of things too. And it's really only been
the last handful of decades that we've started to have
this exact realization you talk about, like, oh, what if
we don't assume these dudes living in you know, eighteen
fifty are brilliant in their interpretation of these ancient texts
that in fact there's a wide range of you know,

(32:23):
blind spots they had, right, that they're kind of coming
to it from their own distinct perspective, and that there's
different ways of connecting these dots, right. And I think
that the emergence of kind of like the social sciences
as a field. You know, these other ancient you know,
like I said, papyri and kind of those things from
common folk, and give us a great deal of insights
as to more compelling ways of connecting these dots, right,

(32:44):
Because I would also create with what you're saying, a
lot of what historian does is informed speculation, right, Like
we try to learn enough about the laws, the functioning
of society, these ancient texts, the bias of this ancient author,
of the bias of that ancient author, to be able
to kind of connect these dots in a way that
is going to be as compelling as possible, but always
being aware that, like there's so much we don't know

(33:06):
about this, right, Like to read every ancient text that's
been written about Spartacus in the ancient world would take
you maybe about an hour to do, right, Like, There's
just isn't that much there, right, Like, it's just so
a lot of is kind of correlating that with what
we know from other sources, and again driving what we
know from kind of other knowledge and connecting those doubts
in a compelling way. So this is this is a

(33:26):
great characterization, Margaret.

Speaker 1 (33:27):
Thank you. I yeah, it's been a weird realization where
like again I came into this, I took three years
of Latin in high school because it was a blowoff class.
I did not learn any Latin besides sums sumass a
sunt arama rast a rama serata sarunt That is the extent.
I think agricola is like farm or something, right, Like
literally the teacher let us cheat and didn't care and

(33:51):
then got fired for sexually harassing students.

Speaker 2 (33:54):
Right, holy cow, All right, well I'm after hearing all
of that, I'm surprised you're wanting to read this book
the first place.

Speaker 1 (34:01):
I didn't have positive impressions about. And he was really
into Cicero, and he was very like a he probably
would have called himself a stoic, you know, he's like
this like free thinker guy and like whatever. Anyway, and
I've also disliked so much about the way that people
only talk about history is if it relates to like

(34:22):
Roman Greece. Like I've had a kind of oppositional like
if that's the center of like where Western ideas come from.
I'm I've never been really big on Western ideas, you know, yeah, sure,
And so I've always had this antagonism to it. But
it's it's actually really interesting, and it's specifically interesting if
we stop saying like this is the most important thing. Oh.

(34:44):
But the thing that I realized is I was like,
so I came into it not knowing who Tacitus was, right,
and then it was like my third episode in of
like and then this guy Tacitus says, I think this
is the main guy who said things, you know. Yeah, Like,
I did a couple episodes about different rebellions against Rome,
and of course both of those have turned into nationalisms

(35:07):
for the various like I'm not gonna remember either of
these people's names off the top of my head, unfortunately.
The woman who led a rebellion in northern England against.

Speaker 2 (35:15):
Yeah, Budica.

Speaker 1 (35:16):
Yeah Boudica, who's fascinating. And also my big leap from
that one is that maybe she's trans because they eventually
found a grave. Okay, hold on, let me just tangent here.
So they found a grave in twenty years ago where
they were like it says Boudica on the grave and
they're like, we found it. They open it up and
there's a man skelt and they're like, ah, we still
haven't found her, there's still no historical proof that she exists.
Will never find her, you know, and I'm like, look,

(35:38):
probably that wasn't her. But like, also, everything I've learned
about history is like, ah, man, the trans people have
always been here.

Speaker 2 (35:45):
You know for sure.

Speaker 1 (35:47):
And then the uh, the guy that Nazis liked to
has kicked Rome's ass in Germany or Minius, yeah, Arminius
of the chorus, Yeah, yeah, yeah, which is a story.
And I actually really like that people are trying to
detangle that from German nationalism. You know, there's so much here,

(36:08):
Like I love the fact that like Budica is also
incorporated into like English nationalism and like therefore pro imperialism.
We're like, literally, what this lady did was kill imperialists, sure, sure,
Like I don't think she was like and what day
will conquer the world, you know, yeah, whereas our Minis
probably would have. And then they killed him for it.

(36:29):
His friends were like, nah, man, we actually didn't want
a king. I'm gonna kill you now anyway, Why am
I talking about that? So I didn't know any of
this shit about history, and then I'm seeing that there's
like I read all of the everything, there is no
about Budica in thirty minutes, everything was know about Spartacus
in one hour, and then everything else. Yeah, comes from
work that people like you have done, where you look

(36:51):
at all of the surrounding stuff. When I referenced you
as a serious historian despite writing this kind of pop
history book, I maybe read out a list of all
of your other titles that are much more academic sounding.

Speaker 2 (37:03):
Much more boring sounding too. I mean, I'll be honest,
My one goal with this book was to write a
book that my parents would read. I was like, if
I could write one book that my parents will like
read past the acknowledgments page, I will die happy person, right,
And that's like that was my goal with this anyway, right, Yeah, I.

Speaker 1 (37:19):
Mean like eventually I'll read papyri.

Speaker 2 (37:21):
Of really Roman Palestine that stuff. Yeah, I yeah, really exciting.

Speaker 1 (37:26):
I know. What's interesting to me about history is that,
like I didn't care about history when I was a student.
And I think partly it's the public school system, and
partly it's my own attention deficit problems, and partly was
that I didn't see myself in history. I didn't see
myself as part of this grand story that's being told

(37:47):
and I also didn't see things in context of each other.
And I think on some level I knew a lot
of what I was being told about the American Project
was kind of a lie, because every now and then
I have honest teachers that would be like, yes, a
civil war'sbout slavery, you know, And I'm like, wait, but
the that's true. Why is the Thanksgiving story a positive story?
And you're like, ah, I don't worry.

Speaker 2 (38:04):
About that, sure, you know.

Speaker 1 (38:05):
And so what I'm trying to say is that one
day I'll probably read your book about the papyri of
Roman Palestine, because like, that's actually really interesting once you
start geeking out about it, once you understand enough to
understand what you're reading, which I'm probably not there yet,
but that's one of my goals.

Speaker 2 (38:21):
Yeah, well, I think it's like there's a lot of
that fascinating data out there, and I think I don't know,
like just sort of one thing that's been kind of
on the mind of a lot of my colleagues my
own lately is sort of, you know, the university system
as is right now is kind of lying right like
us is very clearly an active effort by kind of
the current political administration to defund and kind of get

(38:42):
rid of, you know, anything that reeks of you know,
scare quote equity, right, m right, So like black studies,
cultural studies, LGBT studies also means like religious size and
history also get defund to write Harvard Davindi School because
it had a program that you know, focus a bit
on Palestine, got you know, all day had to deal
with a lot right there and even here in Canada,
right Like, there's still like this kind of crisis of

(39:04):
the humanities. And I think that one thing that scholars
have not been good at is convincing people why they
should care about what we do. Right. A lot of
it is just sort of, like you said, kind of
these academic books that we write that are just kind
of conversations that you know, I'll publish this book, and
then what five other people will read the book that
I wrote about this stuff, right, Whereas I think we

(39:25):
bear responsibility to the public to do a better job
of saying, here's why it's worth thinking about antiquity or
for this or that reason, or this or that figure
from antiquity. And I don't know. My hope is that
this book can kind of demonstrate why I think at
least some of this is relevant to the twenty first
century and are curent political moment anyway.

Speaker 1 (39:42):
No, I think it's a really excellent job of that,
because I think it does a really good job of
We tend to see the history as like completely other
people who are completely different, and there are ways that
people thought about the world very differently, right, Like, it's
hard to overestimate how important Christian theology was to Western
Europe in the Middle Ages, right to the point where

(40:04):
even a modern Christian might struggle a little bit to
understand why certain things are done the way they are,
right absolutely, And when I read about radical movements in
the Middle Ages, I'm mostly reading about heretical sect of
Christians who are like, hey, there's no such thing as sin.
We can all fuck, you know, which is a common refrain.
Radical is either one to all fuck or not fuck

(40:26):
at all, which does map to the modern world, where
everyone I know is either wildly polly and or ace
or both, you know. And I think that being able
to see ourselves is really useful and see that some
of these same patterns, like even if the Third Surviyal
War didn't call themselves anarchists, and you do a good
job of like not saying that these people were anarchists,

(40:47):
and they call themselves anarchists, and they're tied into the
same lineage as everyone who fought at Haymarket, you know. Sure,
but you can see these same things that people have
law come up with to try and do, where people
are like, hey, this patriarchy thing isn't working out for
least half of us and honestly most of us, you know,

(41:08):
or people being like, hey, why do we own people?
This seems a little weird or even just like greater
levelings than that right to use the medieval theological word
for communism or for social equity or whatever. So it's
really interesting to me that you're you're presenting just to
continue to pitch this book that I think everyone should read,
because I'm not going to do all of the chapters
as episodes, although I'm going to do some of the

(41:29):
chapters of episodes. It's going through all of these different
societies that do these things that both are and aren't
recognizable to us as like within the same lineage. And
I love that there's these things that come up over
and over again, including ones that I like, look I
don't eat meat, but like that's not part of my
politics really, I mean it is, but not in a
complicated way where I'm trying to tell anyone to do.

(41:50):
But like when you talk about the North African Christian
Socialists who's name, I can't remember the circumsilience, the circumcillience. Yeah, yeah,
like they didn't eat me, right? Or is that as
I get that mixed up with another group that you
talked about.

Speaker 2 (42:03):
I think it was a different group, but I think
that might have been the therapew type. But they're also
they were in Egypt, so also yeah.

Speaker 1 (42:08):
Yeah, And I'm like, why do I keep running across
these these things over and over and over again. M hmm, Yeah,
I don't know. I'm just I think that I'm just
trying to pitch everyone on this book. It's just really good.
It's very accessible. If you can listen to this podcast
and enjoy it and understand it, you can you can
read your book and enjoy it and understand it.

Speaker 2 (42:26):
Thank you. Yeah, I mean I think that's kind of
one of things I was hoping to communicate with this too, right,
that the historian's job is kind of this contradictory job
of on the one hand, to make the ancient world
seem incredibly strange, right, that it's very much a different
world from us, right, Like we don't live in world
where slavery is legalized. That you know, all these sorts
of things are just so different. Must But on the

(42:48):
other hand, like there are these resonances with the present day. Right,
So I think you know, one example therapew type, for instance,
is one was I talked about where the sort of
Jewish second kind of outside of Alexandra Egypt. And I
don't think I say this explicit, but I think I
hinted it repeatedly anyway, is that this would have been
a group that would have been very enticing for kind

(43:09):
of queer women in particular. Right, That this is like
you know, for women who don't find the prospect of
marriage appealing, right, whether it's because they're asexual, whether it's
because they're lesbian, whether for whatever reason, right, Right, that
groups like this, these sort of monastic groups can be
an easy way of like escaping certain aspects of patriarchy. Right.
And this doesn't say they were perfect, but like these

(43:30):
you know kind of desires or lack of desires that
people might have have always been there, right, And like
you're saying also before too, right, like trans people have
always existed, right, it's just a matter of whether they're erased,
whether they're insulted, all these sorts of kind of resonances
that we find. And I think part of it is
what you're saying before too, right, that previous generations of
historians have not wanted to see that, right, Yeah, pretty

(43:53):
clear reasons why. And I think now when we start
being more open to the idea of like stuff that
doesn't sound too radical to most of us. Right. In addition,
you know, autonomy and in kind of agency, right, kind
of the trans people existing and having lives that are
compelling of their own right, all these sorts of things, right,
that it kind of invites us to read ancient texts
in a way that is very different, right, And not

(44:15):
to say that they're the same as us, but I
think that we can still see those resonances between past
and present that can help us learn something about ourselves
and maybe reflect on how things can be done differently
than from how they're done today or how they were
done them for that matter.

Speaker 1 (44:28):
Yeah, I've I write a lot of fiction, and when
I first started writing fiction. I was like, speculat fiction
is a way to show the way that the world
could be different and to example the things that you
want to see in the world. And I still believe that,
but more and more I've realized all I want is
for my fiction, both of the one that I write
and that I consume, to acknowledge that the world can

(44:49):
be different. Like, my biggest problem with Dungeons and Dragons,
aside some issues around power scaling and mechanics, is the
idea that it kind of just takes like nineteen seventies
and me Erica and then like it's like the Middle
Ages are like that, yeah, you know, and it's like
everyone just has gold pieces and you're like, motherfuckers are
paying their rent with eels, you know, yeah, or you

(45:09):
can have the other accidental like kind of noble savage
thing and saying like every indigenous culture before civilization was
entirely egalitarian and like had no money. And then I
read David Graeber's Debt and was like, oh no. I
was like, money is real old. Money is older than writing.
But that doesn't mean that all societies had it either, right,

(45:31):
And so what I'm interested in doing is just saying like, yeah,
just a riff off what you're saying. Things can be different.
And I think that more than saying like we need
to do it exactly like the Third Servile War did
and that's the only way to have a good society,
or like the therapeudi you know we talked about in
the book. They're the ones who let both men and

(45:52):
women in as equals but very separate.

Speaker 2 (45:54):
Right yeah, absolutely, yep.

Speaker 1 (45:56):
And you know I mostly associate that with like conservative
Christian sex, right yeah, in the modern era, including ones
that like see themselves as kind of like radical but
like you know, you can't like touch someone of the
opposite sex or whatever. Right, I'm not interested in that.
But they are saying society can be different. And when
we understand that society can be different, we can start thinking, well,

(46:18):
how do we want it to be different?

Speaker 2 (46:19):
Absolutely? I think a lot of this has to do
with how our imaginations often really foreclosed by those possibilities.
I think that Dungeons and dram as an example, is
like perfect there, right, Like you can imagine any world
you want and it's the same economy. It's just like
you know, just gruden Evils a little more stark and
we're wearing you magic you know, devices and stuff like that, right, Yeah,
And I think the historical record can give us so

(46:42):
many glimpses in these lives. I think, you know, we
mentioned David Graebersherta in the anthropological record, right, can give
us glimpses in just so many different ways of doing things.
And I think it's just sort of I don't know.
I grew up in a very small town in rural Michigan,
you know, three thousand people, and even moving here to
the city of Toronto, where it's just arguably the most
diverse city in the world. I think there's more dialects

(47:04):
and language spoken in Toronto than any other city in
the world. Oh wow, And just the people you meet
is just astounding and just like learning like, oh hey,
like this thing that I assumed everybody did is not inevitable, right,
And it's just there's so much of encountering that that
invites you to say, well, if everything I'm taking for
granted doesn't have to be that way, then it really
invites you just again those kind of lego bricks you

(47:24):
can use to create a society that's a bit more appealing,
whether that's a whole large scale society, or even just
kind of your own small communities, right, those households or
organizations or whatever it might be. Right, I think that
there's so many different possibilities out there that if you
take the chance to look at them, whether again historically
or anthropologically, there's a lot of compelling stuff out there.

Speaker 1 (47:43):
Well, this seems like probably where we should break it
for today, because I'm not surprised. After reading this. I
was like, again, you are the first person that I
invited to this particular style of episode, because I was like, oh, no,
I kind of want to just pick your brain anyway,
but I was like, I'm going to do it on air,
but I'm going to continue to pick your brain, and
we're going to talk about more stuff, including diogenes and
the cynics. In case you really like those episodes, dear

(48:05):
listener and are mad at me about how I re
present diogenies, We'll talk about that and some other stuff
on Wednesday. But in the meantime, kind anything you want
to plug here at the end of the episode.

Speaker 2 (48:17):
Why Radical Antiquity. I think there will be an audiobook
out in February sometimes soon, I don't remember the exact date. Anyway,
Oh amazing. But if you want to get through your
local library or you have audiobook credits, feel free to
check that out in February as well.

Speaker 1 (48:29):
Hell yeah, what do I have to plug? I don't know?
To help people, I don't know. They sometimes I have
something better than that, but I didn't prepare. This isn't
my usual recording day. I'm hungry and I will talk
to you all on Wednesday. Cool People Who Did Cool
Stuff is a production of a Whole Zone Media. For

(48:51):
more podcasts and.

Speaker 2 (48:52):
Cool Zone Media, visit our website Goolezonemedia dot com or
check us out on.

Speaker 1 (48:57):
iHeartRadio, on app a Podcasts, or wherever you get your
podcast m