Gregory Aldrete: uncertainty

Transcript context

…On the topic of war, it may be a ridiculous span of time and scale, but how do you think the world wars of the 20th century compare to the wars that we’ve been talking about of the Roman Empire, of Greece, and so on? I mean, what’s interesting about some of the Roman civil wars, particularly, is that they are world wars at the time. So let’s take the war after the assassination of Julius Caesar. We’ve talked about that one a lot. That was fought. There were battles there fought in Spain, in North Africa, in Greece, in Egypt, in Italy. I mean, truly across the entire breadth of the Mediterranean involving at least seven or eight different factions of Romans, and that was the world to them. I mean, that’s very similar in a way to our modern world wars where this was a global conflict, at least as they envisioned the world they knew of. And if we sort of, I don’t know, somehow factor for transportation time, I mean, I think you can argue that that was a bigger war than World War II. In World War II, if you hopped on a plane, you could get from the US to China in a week or something, right? In little hops. I mean, in the ancient world, if you wanted to go from Spain to Egypt, it would take you a month. So they were fighting across a larger space- time zone in terms of their technology to move, then World War II took place across. So in a sense, World War II was quite contained.…

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