Lex Fridman: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Right. I agree with you that this is, in fact, a very important… It’s a, it’s a real turning point in a sense, but it also is part of a process. So for various reasons, the Roman polity tended to bestow its metropolitan citizenship, that is, Roman citizenship on its allies, and eventually in time, on many people that it had conquered. And it had various mechanisms for doing so. It could bestow block grants. Sometimes it allowed its generals to bestow citizenship on people they thought would, you know, would be necessary players for controlling local societies. Sometimes they even allowed foreign cities to, like non-Roman cities, to decide who would get Roman citizenship by basically electing them to certain kinds of offices. Like they, they outsourced a lot of this. And so you have over time the steady growth of a Roman community of citizens who are not all in Rome, and who are not all of Roman origin, whatever that means, but they, they were not descended from people who were from Rome. And this proceeds, you know, it expands, it expands, it expands. By Caracalla’s time, so early third century AD, we can estimate that maybe at, at most a third of the free citizens of the empire are Roman citizens. Everyone else has local citizenship, like you’re Alexandrian or Athenian or, or whatever. And with… You’re subject to those laws. This emperor, Caracalla, now that’s his nickname. His reigning name is Marcus Aurelius Antoninus. So just like Marcus Aurelius, it’s the same name two generations later. Some badass names for emperors, by the way. I don’t know if it’s the chicken or the egg, but just- … some epic names. They’ve been remembered that way, and so we read that back into the name-…

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