Gregory Aldrete: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah, they pulled that off pretty well. If you could talk about the long line of emperors that made up the Roman Empire, how were they selected? Oh, boy. We’ve been talking about Augustus’ great achievements and how clever he was with propaganda and all, this is his great failure. So his great failure is that he did not solve was the problem of succession. How do you ensure that the next person who follows you is not just the best person but is qualified? And he fails to do it. So the principle he settles on is heredity. So the nearest blood relative. And he goes through all these people, all these young kids in his family die that he keeps trying to make the heir, and he ends up making his heir Tiberius, who he never liked, it was his stepson, he didn’t like him, but he ends up inheriting it. And the next set of emperors, the Julio-Claudians, which is the family that Augustus starts, they all basically are who is the nearest male relative to the previous emperor. And that’s how we get a lot of crazy emperors like Caligula or Nero. And then the next family, the Flavians, the first guy is kind of an Augustus, it’s Vespasian, the one who builds the Flavian Amphitheater, and then one of his sons takes over, Titus, who’s okay, and then the next son takes over, Domitian, who’s nuts again. So heredity just isn’t working, And Rome fights a couple civil wars, and in 98 AD, we’re 100 years now into the Empire, and they look back at this track record and say, “Okay, we’ve been picking our emperors by heredity and we’ve gotten some real duds here, some real problematic people. Is there a way to fix this?” And this is one of the few instances where the Romans, who I keep saying are very traditional and resist change, I think actually make a change and realize we got to do something different. And so the next guy looks around and says, “Okay, forget who’s my nearest male relative, who’s the best qualified to be emperor after me? I’ll pick that person and then I’ll adopt him as my son.” So they kind of stick with heredity. Now, it’s this fake adoption, and you end up with a lot of old guys adopting middle-aged adults as their son, which is a little strange, but it works. And so for the next 80 years, you have only five emperors, and they’re often called the Five Good Emperors, they’re not related necessarily by blood, they sort of picked the best qualified guy, and they’re all sound, competent, good emperors. And the 2nd century AD, from Nerva to Marcus Aurelius, is often regarded as the high point of the Roman Empire. And a lot of that comes from you have political stability, you have a succession of decent guys being emperor who rule relatively wisely, promote good policies. There’s other things working to Rome’s advantage, but that’s good. And then where it falls apart is where the last guy, Marcus Aurelius, looks around and says, “Who’s the best qualified guy to succeed me? What a coincidence, it’s my own dear son.”, who turns out to be a psycho. And then it all goes downhill. And some people place the sort of the collapse of the Roman Empire there at the end of Marcus Aurelius’ rule.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.