Ada Palmer: belief

Transcript context

…We talked about last time how both Machiavelli and the other umanisti, in the different ways they understood virtue, were trying to emulate the virtues that made Rome originally great. How much are they going off of just these random myths that Livy or whoever would write down about something that supposedly happened, where Brutus killed his own sons, or who was that guy who put his hand in a fire to show that the Roman people will be loyal and you shouldn’t fight us? You look at actual Roman history, and it’s incredibly fucked up. We were just talking before we started recording about the life of Claudius and the period of the emperors and so forth, and surely this must have been known to them that actually… Part of it is they’re zooming in on different emperors. When we want to make an HBO drama, we don’t make it about the boring, competent emperors who just do a really good job. Our society might be better off if we did. But the dramatic emperors where there’s lots of stabbing and lots of orgies make for good television. Everybody curates their history. Often when you’re writing the history of your own culture, you pick the heroes. You look at a middle school history textbook, it’s going to celebrate the heroes of that country. If it’s trying hard to be unbiased, it will also acknowledge the faults, but the heroes are going to be in there. When they are trying to create a handbook of what was, what stands out for them is what’s different from their present. Their present has plenty of tyrants. Their present has plenty of orgies. Their present has plenty of massacres. Their present does not have 70 years of peace. So that’s what stands out as different. I think for us, some of the orgies and massacres stand out more because we don’t have as many orgies and massacres now, or at least not publicly that we know about. When we do expose that our leaders have been involved in scandalous orgies, we get very upset about it. But to them, they read about all of this, and they read about the successes and the stability from Trajan, Hadrian, and Marcus Aurelius, and they say, “That is alien to us. That we haven’t had in so long. That is what we want to have again.” So much so that when Gibbon is writing The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, in multiple volumes, in the late 18th century he says that there’s never been a better time for humanity than during the era of the five good emperors.…

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