Asa Bennett Discusses Roman Politics

Asa Bennett Discusses Roman Politics | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra

"Tongues wag about how awful you are and just so over luxuriant. And so this, we get this in a lot of social customs that Augustus will play to, for example. He, despite being an emperor, despite being someone of great wealth that you'd expect from a man of a station, he would be very ostentatious in trying to show off how apparently humble he was.

He would make his wife weave clothes in the public eye, as if you know, by hand as if implying that this is genuinely the sort of humble Roman methods. Look, my wife is an average matron just like many other women in this town. And he would always propagate this myth that, you know, he was born in a humble hut just like Romulus and Remus, the founders of Rome, very much played down his station.

Because it's this curious balance that they were trying to strike back then as modern politicians do now of acknowledging that yes, they obviously are remarkable beings, given they've got to where they've got to, but you know, they're as thrifty as the rest of us, you know...

[On Caligula] One of the tales that is often quoted is that he wanted to make his horse a senator, as a sign of lunacy, people suggest, but actually, it's, you could argue a popular misconception or the fact that he hated the senators so much and thought they were such idiots, that he effectively said, oh, I might as well make my horse a senator.

And then because at that point, at the end of his reign, and time in office, people wanting to vilify him for the sake of writers trying to impress later emperors, and to generally show up to those later emperors how wonderful things are unlike that time of Nero and Caligula, that would be easy. They just twist the facts a bit. No one would protest, obviously, you won't be able to sue posthumously.

And at the same time with Nero. Although now we look at him as a terrible person who then vilified the Christians and persecuted them after the Great Fire of Rome so unfairly. Actually, many writers back then acknowledged that going after the Christians, it was a thing you just generally did if you're a Roman because they were perceived as a very sort of odd cult at the time. And this is acknowledged by many of the writers.

Very intriguingly though the fake news about Christians abounded plentifully in these sources, and that we know from the early Christian writers who came in after this pagan era, that the Romans thought the Christians were a sort of cult of can- incestuous cannibals. And that and the source of the reason for this is absurd, when we think about it now.

They would hear the Christians talking about how they're all your brother and oh, I love you, dear sort of brother. And, you know, this is a Christian love as we know, this is when it's about Brotherhood. It’s a brotherhood, you know of fellowship in Jesus Christ. But they took that literally - they thought these people actually love each other in a sort of passionate erotic sense, and they actually are all part of a weird extended family. And when you think, where's this, where does the cannibalism come from as a rumor, well the transubstantiation ritual and the idea that the bread would be the body of Christ and the wine that you drink at rituals would be the blood of Christ…

There'll be a divine fire cleansing the world, that when there was a fire in Rome, that it made it, became so easy almost to pin it on the Christians"