Gregory Aldrete: evaluation

Transcript context

…The following is a conversation with Gregory Aldrete, a historian specializing in ancient Rome and military history. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our in the description. And now, dear friends, here’s Gregory Aldrete. What do you think is the big difference between the ancient world and the modern world? Well, the easy answer, the one you often get is technology, and obviously, there’s huge differences in technology between the ancient world and today. But I think some of the more interesting stuff is a little bit more amorphous things, more structural things. I would say, first of all, childhood mortality. In the ancient world, and this is true, Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, really anybody up until about the industrial Revolution, about 30 to 40% of kids died before they hit puberty. I mean, put yourself in the place of average inhabitant of the ancient world. If you were an ancient person, three or four of your kids probably would’ve died. You would’ve buried your children. And nowadays, we think of that as an unusual thing, and just psychologically, that’s a huge thing. You would’ve seen multiple of your siblings die. If you were a woman, for example, if you were lucky enough to make it to let’s say age 13, you probably would have to give birth four or five times in order just to keep the population from dying out. Those kind of grim mortality statistics, I think, are a huge difference psychologically between the ancient world and the modern. But fundamentally, do you think human nature changed much? Do you think the same elements of what we see today, fear, greed, love, hope, optimism and the cynicism, the underlying forces that result in war, all of that, permeates human history?…

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