Lex Fridman: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yeah, and there’s a law of citizenship, and it, basically it says something like, “Anyone born within the Roman Empire is a Roman citizen.” And the Roman jurists and policymakers who were behind this had some very interesting ideas about, you know, creating this kind of community. Look, like, imagine if, I mean, it’s almost impossible to, to imagine, but the, the British at the time of the peak of the empire bestowed British citizenship on everyone, including in India, and, like, suddenly made positions of power in London available to people from India, like, including the throne. Like, it’s just unthinkable. And that has to do, you know, with race and colonialism and all kinds of things, right? But not in the Roman Empire. So we have a situation where the emperors are all from the provinces. The most powerful officials are all from the provinces. And so a century later, when Constantinople is created, this is, it’s created, right, like, in, in the Bosporus, so, like, where modern Istanbul is, in the Eastern Roman Empire. It’s created within the preexisting Roman context, right? It doesn’t bring Romanness to the East. It’s already there. And so it’s not such a leap to create a center of Roman power in the East because of that. And you’ve helped put together a book on the history of intellectual thought in the East Roman Empire. But this is the interesting thing here, and I can ask that many times, but let me ask it here also, is the great man, the great woman view of history. Were there, like, Thomas Jefferson or those types of characters in the meetings as, as, as they’re executing on the edict or developing the edict? Is that important, or is it more about the system and the culture and just… … Is it, how important was it? ‘Cause this seems like a revolutionary idea, and when we think about the American Revolution and the founding documents, it seems like a few individuals- … were really critical about the wording of things, and then words matter because those words create the reality, and then it propagates through time. Yeah. For the edict, I suspect that yes, there were a few people who were behind it, and quite possibly jurists, that is, Roman legal scholars. And 212 is in an age of very important Roman legal scholars: Ulpian, for example, and others. But we just don’t have those… We have- … minutes of the meetings for the- … American Revolution. Not only do we not know who was in the room, we don’t actually even have the whole edict. We have a papyrus fragment, this is a piece of ancient paper- … that’s mostly torn and mutilated, and we have, like, a bit of a paragraph from it. In Greek, not even the Latin original. And it’s kind of torn, but it actually preserves the key clause. Right? And that’s, that’s all we have of the original. We have contemporary sources that mention it, we have legal documents, but nothing like a, like we can talk about the people involved in it. Or even how it was immediately implemented. Like, suddenly we know everyone in the provinces, like, there’s this explosion in the number of people called Aurelius, because that was his, his Roman family name. And so when you acquired citizenship from that edict, you became an Aurelius. Right? And there are lots of Aurelii suddenly all over the place. Like, we can see it immediately. But we can’t actually see the implementation.…

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