Gregory Aldrete: belief

Transcript context

…Well, I mean, ancient Greece comes… The classical era of Greek civilization is around the 500s BC. That’s when you have the great achievements of Athens. It becomes the first sort of true democracy. They defeat the Persian invasions. A lot of famous stuff happens in the 400s, let’s say. So that is contemporaneous with Rome, but the Greek civilization, in a sense, is peaking earlier. And one of the things that happens is that Greece ends up being conquered by Rome in that second half of the Roman Republic between 250 and about 30 BC. And so, Greece falls under the control of Rome and Rome is very heavily influenced by Greek culture. They themselves see the Greeks as a superior civilization, culturally more sophisticated, great art, great philosophy, all this. Another thing about the Romans is they’re super competitive. One of the engines that drives Romans is this public competitiveness, especially among the upper classes. They care more about their status and standing among their peers than they do about money or even their own life, so there’s this intense competition. When they conquer Greece, Greek culture just becomes one more arena of competition. Romans will start to learn Greek. They’ll start to memorize Homer. They’ll start to see who can quote more passages of Homer in Greek in their letters to one another because that increases their status. Rome absorbs Greek civilization, and then the two get fused together. The other thing I should mention in terms of influences that’s really huge on Rome is the Etruscans, and this is one that comes along before the Greeks. The Etruscans were this kind of mysterious culture that flourished in northern Italy before the Romans, so way back 800 BC. They were much more powerful than the Romans. They were a loose confederation of states. For awhile, the Romans even seemed to have been under Etruscan control. The last of the Roman kings was really an Etruscan guy pretty clearly. But the Etruscans end up giving to Rome, or you could say Rome ends up stealing perhaps, a lot of elements of Etruscan culture. Many of the things that we today think of as distinctively Roman, our cliches of what a Roman is, actually aren’t truly Roman, they’re stuff they stole from the Etruscans. Just a couple examples, the toga. What do you think of a Roman? It’s a guy wearing a toga, and the toga is the mark of a Roman citizen. Well, that’s what Etruscan kings wore, probably. the Etruscans. Just a couple examples, the toga. What do you think of a Roman? It’s a guy wearing a toga, and the toga is the mark of a Roman citizen. Well, that’s what Etruscan kings wore, probably. Gladiator games. We associate those very intensely with the Romans. Well, they probably stole that from the Etruscans. A lot of Roman religion. Jupiter is a thunder God, all sorts of divination. The Romans love to chop open animals and look at their livers and predict the future, that comes from the Etruscans. Watching the flight of birds to predict the future, that comes from the Etruscans. There’s a lot of central elements of what we think of as Roman civilization, which actually are borrowings, let’s say, from these older, slightly mysterious Etruscans. I mean, that’s a really powerful thing. It’s a powerful aspect of a civilization to be able to, we can call it stealing which is a negative connotation, but you can also see its integration basically. Yes, steal the best stuff from the peoples you conquer or the peoples that you interact with. Not every empire does that. There’s a lot of nations and empires that when they conquer, they annihilate versus integrate. And so, it’s an interesting thing to be able to culturally… The form that the competitiveness takes is that you want to compete in the realm of ideas in culture versus compete strictly in the realm of military conquest.…

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