Episode #99: Quick Roman Questions
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Hi Janina. Hi Ema. How you doing? I'm not bad, how are you? I'm alright. I had Livia asleep on me and then I leaned forward and pressed record and woke her up. So she might now attack the microphone and aggressively purr, for which I apologise if everybody is wondering what the hell that noise is. But...

I mean, you know, she's our second producer. She's got to get her voice in from time to time. Exactly. She has to appear in case people forget that she exists. Yeah. She does not like it. But yes. Hi, Janina. Hello. All is well here. How are you?

I'm not too bad. I also have an animal in the room. I have a dog with me called Typo that we're looking after. That's such a good name for a dog. It is. It is a good name for a dog. Yeah, it's because her owner is also a writer and wanted a writing themed name.

And she went with typo. And she went with typo. Good name. Good name. I like it. So we have a minor confession to make this week on History of Sexy, which is that we are very good at history and words and very bad at numbers. We simply cannot count to 100. LAUGHTER

Turns out I had missed out an entire number in my notes. And this is episode 99, not the previous episode. Yeah. So our 100th episode is the next one. So we're not doing 100th episode this time. We are not doing the 100th episode, which we realized distressingly late in the process of planning for this episode.

when oliver said is this not episode 98 by just interestingly late we mean this morning we do mean this morning when oliver said oh well episode 98 just went out so i don't know where episode 99's gone so yeah well done us thank god we have oliver who can count yeah

Because otherwise we would think we were on God knows what at this precise moment. So instead of episode 100, which we will now be doing instead next time, we are doing episode 99. Yes. And we're going to do some quick...

Roman questions. Because what we do have is a fair amount of questions that are not necessarily long enough for a whole episode, but which are still interesting to talk about.

And will hopefully be interesting for people to hear the answers to. And we're going to get through as many of them as we can in a reasonable amount of time, basically. We are also doing our first ever bonus episode for Patreon subscribers, which will be going out probably around the time that this goes out. We will be talking about Gladiator 2.

which we have both seen and Emma will be attempting to explain Megalopolis to me which I have not seen because I only have one magic life and I don't want to watch Megalopolis with it and spoilers but I would not recommend that you waste your beautiful precious minutes on earth

On Megalophilus. I don't regret that I did. So yes, that will be out probably in between this episode and episode 100. And if you would like to support us on Patreon, then you can find the links to that at historysexy.com. You also get a sticker if you support us at three pounds or above, which comes from my own fair hands and sometimes has been sniffed or mildly chewed by Livia.

Yeah, and bonus episodes and access to the Discord. And we also asked our Patreon people what they would like episode 100 to be. So you get some input occasionally. But yeah, so sign up there if you would like to support us. We appreciate it. Yeah. And we like our patrons very much. But...

For now, Janina, Roman questions. Roman questions. Questions. The first question comes from Hadley Moon. And the question is, was Sulla gay and what impact did that have on his career and legacy? Okay. Do you know who Sulla is for a start? I feel like nobody knows who he is. It's definitely a name I've heard around the place. Okay.

I feel like Scylla is one of these guys who probably should have had TV shows made about him and big books, but really Julius Caesar kind of sucks up all the energy in that room. And so he never gets anything. He's basically like the proto-Julius Caesar. So he's a guy who comes out of nowhere in the late Republic, so in the 90s, I

BCE, he appears out of nowhere, rises up through the ranks of the Roman army, becomes a very important general in the huge amount of expansion that is happening at that stage. One of the things that he does is he takes Athens very famously. So he is the general that absorbs Athens into the Roman Empire. Mm-hmm.

And he also fights in Spain and Portugal and Africa and various other places. And then he gets into a civil war with his former boss general called Marius, defeats him.

and makes himself dictator. He revives the kind of the office of dictator, has a load of people killed, and then dies of kind of a horrible, gouty, lice-ridden, vile and slightly disgusting sounding disease of his body ulcerating. Death that suggests a life well lived though.

Is this a life that's just, yes. Yeah, he's had a great time. He's never denied himself anything. He does not. He never denied himself anything. And he loved to drink, loved to fuck, loved to party, loved to kill people. Just kind of whatever whim he had, he would go with it. And sometimes that involved invading Athens and sometimes that involved fucking whoever he was near. And one of the things that...

I think for a long time, when people were making Roman generals famous in the 18th and 19th century, one of the reasons that they don't particularly like Sulla is that he doesn't adhere to these ideas of self-control.

that the Romans loved so much and then 19th century guys loved so much. He did just love to drink and fuck. But more importantly, he had a very long-term extramarital relationship with an actor called Metrobius. Okay. Who he first started this relationship when they were quite young. Like he appears in his biography well before he is...

kind of dictator or general or particularly famous. And then he is still with... Metrobius is still with him right up until the end of his life. And this kind of baffles a lot of the Roman commentators because it breaks the rule that you fuck pretty actors because they're young and pretty. Right. And...

is part of the kind of Greek-inspired Roman delight for pederasty, basically. Like beardless youths, fine. Adult men, not fine. You can't simply have an emotionally fulfilling relationship that lasts for decades.

Yes, which is what he seems to have had with Metrobius alongside his relationships with many other people. So he has five wives as well. He has children with three of them and one of whom he divorces later.

for infertility because he wants more children. He keeps having daughters is the problem. He has a kind of classic Henry VIII problem. Yeah. What good is a daughter? Right. So he keeps having daughters and so he keeps kind of divorcing people until they give him a son. He doesn't execute any of them though, so he does have that going for him.

That's a better way to behave. Just simply divorce them. Yeah. So he has a very long marriage with a woman called Kaikelea Metella, who...

The marriage is definitely political and quite scandalous at the time because he's thought to be not good enough for her. She is very posh. He is very not. But they have three children, including a son. And then he is... And this is my favorite actual story about Sulla. She dies...

And he does a kind of big grand funeral for her. And he's very sad. But then he is then like, by the time she dies, he is dictator of Rome. He's the most powerful person in Rome. And he becomes like Rome's most eligible bachelor, even though he's like 55. And he is seduced immediately by a woman who walks past him in the theater and does a full pickup artist line on him. Yeah.

And it's like feels like something out of like, do you remember the game by Neil Strauss and like when Mystery was really big and had an MTV show and stuff? I mean, yeah, I remember the time. I obviously have not personally read the book because it's clearly hot nonsense.

It is, but I was kind of obsessed with pickup artists for a while. And so I do know a lot of their stuff. And one of the things, so they did it as negging because they're horrible. So one of the like pickup artist tricks that Mystery used to do was that you would walk past a woman in a bar and you would like pick a bit of lint off of her clothes. Ideally, a bit of lint that you had in your pocket, like a normal person. Yeah.

And then you would be like, oh, I just picked this off your clothes. Like, you should wash your clothes better. And that was like a pickup line. What Valeria does is she walks past Sulla in the theater and she picks a bit of lint off of his clothes.

And when he says, what are you doing? She says, oh, I was just trying to collect a bit of your good fortune. Oh, that's that's a nicer way to do it. It is. And you can see there that the male approaches to denigrate the woman and bring down her self-esteem and the female approaches to big up the self-esteem of them. Yeah. Make them feel so special. Yeah.

And this works on him and he falls in love with her and absolutely becomes obsessed with her until she marries him. Which, this is in the life of Plutarch. Plutarch thinks that this is ludicrous and stupid and incredibly disgusting because he thinks that old men shouldn't have, which is why he includes this story. But...

Old men obviously do feel lust and he just goes for her. And they have a child together who is born just after he dies. He also has two other boyfriends who are also actors, so called Roscius and Sorex. But Metrobius is his like

one who stays with him for his whole life. So in general, my answer is not gay in the sense that he is not exclusively interested in men. Sulla is interested in both men and women. He has...

sexual relationships that last for a long time with men. He has sexual relationships that last for a long time with women. He gets married out of not just a desire for children or kind of the respectability that comes with marriage, but also he marries Valeria, his final wife,

because he is really into her and his first relationship is with a wealthy woman called Nicopolis, which is a strange name for a woman, but because he's just really sexually interested in her. So in general, I would say he is not interested

Like we had, we do have kind of like people who are specifically interested in one gender, like who are lesbian, who are what we would call gay, who are homosexual and have no interest in the opposite gender. And I would say he is probably bisexual or pansexual or interested in,

basically just sex with everybody and and also emotional relationships with everybody yeah and this affects how much people at the time like him because it is seen as basically a lack of of self-control to give in to lust more than anything they're like yeah sure we all like fucking but the rule is that you keep it like within some bounds whereas he has like

A problem that is part of his legend is that he has no self-control. Yeah. And it is a problem for his modern representation because so much of what we understand to be...

Roman history, like important Roman history comes from through the lens of guys from like the 17th to 19th century who considered homosexuality to be like deviants of the highest form and eventually a kind of mental illness rather than just something that people do and people are and it's fine. So it's

He doesn't get a lot of those like big biopics or he doesn't get talked about in the way that some other leaders do because of that reputation. There's time for a corrective there.

HBO's next big prestige drama about Sulla, I think. I mean, I think that there's very least there's a good like Robert Harris series of books to be written about him. Yeah. Okay. The next question comes from Charlotte Gitter. What is the deal with scrolls from Herculaneum? What's the most recent discovery before them of texts that had been thought lost? Yeah. Yeah.

So these have all been in the news recently, although Charlotte's question came from before that. So she can be ahead of the curve. She's very prescient.

Yeah, because people love to talk about what they hope will be in the scrolls of Herculaneum and they're going to be disappointed for the rest of their lives by what is actually in the scrolls in Herculaneum. Because the scrolls of Herculaneum are these scrolls from the Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum, which is kind of near Pompeii that didn't get burned in the same way. It just got kind of covered with cooler ash and it kind of got blanketed real fast with ash and

And so one of the things that it did very conveniently for us is it carbonized a load of scrolls in this library that was owned by a guy who liked books. So that's fun. And basically turned them...

into charcoal which is a better form of preservation than literally every other scroll in the ancient world in the ancient west anyway but it's not great for actually reading and there's like there's like 1800 of them of which about 300 are complete scrolls and the rest are kind of in various forms of fragmentation bunch were thrown out when they were found because people just thought they were charcoal good classic

A load more were damaged beyond repair or like exploded into a million fragments when people tried to unroll them because people like invented machines to try to unroll them. People tried to unroll them by hand. Yeah, there was like 100 years where people were just doing monstrous things to them and it was a nightmare. Yeah.

And lost a lot of them. Then basically they invented x-rays and people started x-raying them and doing like electroscopic, electromagnetic microscopy on them and things like that. And they briefly thought that they might be able to like just x-ray them and get the

get the text off of the scrolls, but they can't because basically the ink doesn't show up. Right. But they now do have ways of kind of reading them or trying to read them anyway. And things recently have started to come out. So in the past two years, people have started using 3D scanning on them, specifically on the x-rays that were done, like the...

This is really funny. Brigham Young University ran a program for like two decades to scan them all. And so they're all digitized by this Mormon university. And the reason that they did it and the reason that they have always been so into it is because they basically will re-baptize anybody whose name they find as a Mormon. So they're just claiming anyone whose name is in these scrolls. Yeah, as a Mormon. Yeah.

And this is a big project for the Mormon church. It's a thing they spent a lot of money on. There was a few years back quite a spectacular controversy where they had to promise to stop baptizing people from Holocaust victims.

wronged as Mormon on the basis that that was just profoundly wrong and that was a thing that they were doing for a while but they basically are like these people didn't have a chance to be a Mormon and if they had then they would know the true religion so we're just going to baptize them which is mad but okay it's well

one of those mad things that for the most part when it's like ancient scrolls instead of holocaust victims you can just be like okay dear that's fine no one else gives a shit if that makes you happy sure fine whatever but if you're gonna do it if you're gonna do it like keep it ancient yeah and irrelevant so technically like Plato's a Mormon now

Which is very fun. But they couldn't get much out of it because basically they can scan them, they can digitize them, but they couldn't read what it is because they're so badly damaged you couldn't really see the ink. But now they have started using new 3D x-rays and also AI to kind of predict what's going on.

They're basically using predictive forms of AI to try to extract texts and they are extracting texts out of them, which would be super fun and is super fun. But the only thing that comes out is text by this one Epicurean philosopher, not even the best, like the most famous or most popular form of Greek philosophy the Romans loved. Epicureanism, a guy called Philodemus.

who no one has any interest in. Like you literally, like his books really did not survive at all. He wrote like 700 books about Epicurean philosophy and no one cared to keep them except they survive this guy's house in the Villa of the Papyri. And that is the main thing that is coming out. That is amazing. I love it so much. Like just this one guy really was really into this guy and that's,

He had like, as far as we can tell, the full collection of all of Philodemus' works. A couple of other bits and bobs have come out. So like a bit of a lost history of Seneca the Elder came out and a poem about the Battle of Actium. And so there is other stuff in there. So maybe some more history stuff will come out. But nine times out of 10, whenever they translate something or they decipher something, it is a chunk of Philodemus.

This is, I think, the thing about preservation of information, which is something that I don't think we take seriously enough now because everyone takes digital for granted, which is a mistake. But the reason things last is because they mattered enough to enough people to keep going through this process of reproducing them to make sure they stayed alive. Because we always understood how ephemeral any writing was. We always understood that it gets destroyed over time. It doesn't last forever.

um so if any like there is obviously is going to be stuff that's lost that has value in the same way as there's stuff that's being produced now that no one sees because it just that that has value just because it doesn't happen to to get the attention of the right people to push it further but 99 of the time the good you know what the good stuff is i mean look i

Who knows what else might be in there. But maybe Philodemus had something really fascinating to say about something. The thing that made the news earlier this year, in like April 2024, was a chunk of Philodemus' writing about Plato that had some stuff about where Plato was buried and like the life of Plato, which everybody got really excited about. I see if Philodemus has some kind of like special line to the truth, but...

But still, so you never know what like fun stuff he might have written that might come out. And maybe there will be some lost history. But mostly it's good news for Epicureans and bad news for all of the people who say, God, I hope it's not more Philodemus. I always had a soft spot for Epicureanism, to be honest.

I do mostly because Epicureans and Stoics were kind of against one another and I like annoying Stoics. Yeah, that's fair. I'm fine with Epicureanism. I like a bit of kind of light-headedism and everything should be comfortable. Yeah.

Yeah. So that is what is coming constantly out of that. Maybe something else will appear. Maybe like the Vesuvius project, which is this thing that Nat Fielder, like a bunch of billionaires are funding the use of computer. They basically are paying...

giving prizes to computer scientists who can get stuff out of these texts and they are finding lines that they can decipher. But it's a really hard process. This is the rarely seen good use of billionaire money. Most billionaires are not doing anything interesting with their money these days. They're just funding...

nonsense tech stuff yeah these guys are doing something interesting getting involved in history is yeah I approve this is good everything about this question has been great yes Tom I'm glad the next question is why is Augustus a little terrorist scamp

That question is a reference to my book in which I call Augustus a little terrorist scamp. Great. This comes from Talia Schmickler, by the way. Sorry, I forgot to say. Thank you, Talia. Thank you for reading my book. I appreciate it. And the reason that he is a little terrorist scamp is because he is...

Basically, the way that Augustus comes to the attention of the Roman political world is through what I would describe as terrifying acts of terrorism against the state. Yeah.

So he is 19 years old when Julius Caesar is assassinated and he is not in Rome. He is away in Greece training to be an officer, learning how to ride a horse properly and boss people about. He gets the news that he's dead. He comes back to Rome and then he arrives in Brindisi and is told the contents of Julius Caesar's will, which is that he has been adopted and he is now the heir

to Julius Caesar's money and if he wants he can change his name to Julius Caesar and he can be his like one day in the future when he's an adult because he's not be a political heir and he hears this and says

What if I did that now? And he turns up to Julius Caesar's troops who are in Brindisi because they were preparing to go to the east to launch an invasion of Parthia. It's one of the reasons that Julius Caesar was assassinated, because if he had been successful there, he would have been unstoppable. And he was leaving Rome and he wasn't going to be back for years. So they needed to assassinate him now.

He goes there and he is warmly welcomed by the troops who are like, you are the child of Julius Caesar now. You are our new Julius Caesar. We love you. What do you want us to do? And he decides to do just the worst things imaginable from the perspective of everyone who is not Octavian.

The way that he describes this is in his res gestae, which is like my deeds, the deeds of my life that he had written when he died. And he says, at the age of 19, at my own expense and on my own initiative, I raised an army by means of which I restored liberty of the Republic, which had been oppressed by a faction, for which service the Senate, with complementary resolutions, enrolled me in the order, gave me the consulship,

It gave me consulship precedence, sorry, in voting. It also gave me imperium, which is the right to run an army. As procrator, it ordered me, along with the consuls, to see that the Republic suffered no harm. And in the same year, as both consuls had fallen in war, the people elected me consul and triumvir.

So he says that he just turned up and raised an army, not a normal thing to do. And then they just kept giving him things. And he didn't want them. He didn't ask them. He just kept saying, oh, have powers, Augustus, even though you are literally a child that we have never heard of. Right.

What he actually did was turned up, stole all of the money that the army had that was supposed to pay for the Parthian war. So there's loads of money with the army that is supposed to pay for food, pay for transport, pay for wages, pay for everything that an army needs for a long-term war very far away from home. This is taxation money. It belongs to the state. Augustus pockets it. Sure.

There is a later senatorial investigation into what happened to this money, and it is decided that probably don't want to fuck with Octavian, just going to forget about it.

Because the second thing that he does is in order to continue paying for the rest of the army that he needs to raise and to bribe other legions to join his cause, he intercepts a delivery of tribute from some of the eastern provinces. Because when you're a Roman province, you have to send money to Rome. That's one of the ways that they have loads of money. He intercepts the ship bringing that tribute to Rome, which is tax money, and pops it in his own little pocket.

Sure. So he just goes from zero to everything's mine like immediately. So fast. Yeah.

So he then has this army. He now has loads of money, which is not his, to pay them with. He uses some of this money to bribe legions away from Antony, who is his enemy at this time. Fair enough. So two legions then join him from that. By the time he is 20, he has eight legions and he uses those legions to march on Rome. Of course he does. Yep. Why wouldn't you? Okay. Okay.

He has marched on Rome because he has basically, he has this huge power. He's in Italy. He's marching around with a load of Julius Caesar's troops and other troops that he has raised. He has scared the life out of everybody. Cicero hates Mark Antony and basically convinces the Senate to let him join, even though he's not old enough to join and to give him whatever he wants in the hope that that will make Octavian be nice to the Senate. Everything goes terribly. Exactly.

It goes very, very poorly. Never, ever, ever try to reason with or give power to a tiny little tyrant because they will turn on you. You cannot bribe them. You cannot make them your friends. If they raised an army and or burned down a public building and blamed it on the communists, then you cannot befriend them.

Basically, once in the Senate and being given consular power for no good reason, even though he is only 20 at this time, he then says, I need you to make Barc Anthony a public enemy and go to war against him. And the Senate refuses. And so he takes his legions. He marches on Rome. He surrounds them. He says, you're going to make me consul. They say, no, we're not. And his centurion, who is like his personal bodyguard, steps forward and says, with a sword...

This will make him consul if you do not. And they go, okay, he's consul now. Even though it is not legal to be consul until you're 40, even though they're only making him consul because he has surrounded Rome and is threatening to invade it, and they are clearly terrified. He is 20 years old. He is very, very frightening. He is clearly a terrorist and terrifying.

Everything that happens after this, he fights Antony. He then gets up with Antony. He creates a trombone, blah, blah, blah. All of that happens because of this initial act. All of this happens within like a year, 15 months, something like that. And that is the beginning of his political career. Octavian is very frightening. Octavian is a terrorist. Octavian reshapes the entire Roman world around him and...

should be treated as a much, much more frightening and horrific character than we treat him. Yeah. So that's why he's a little terrorist scamp due to his little terrorist scamp activities. That is what usually indicates it. Yeah. They try what everybody who thinks that they can control an outlier does, which is that they thought if they gave him a bit, he would be happy because he was young, because he was inexperienced. They didn't realize that...

You can't just give people like this a bit. They want everything and they will burn down and betray. And, you know, it is Octavian who lets Cicero be murdered in the end. So, yeah, there is, I think I had a lovely conversation with a lovely journalist in Rome when I was in Rome last week. I think that there is a book to be written in rewriting this story of the end of the Roman Empire.

as a terrifying story rather than the kind of semi-neutral political story that it is often told as. But it is actually a very frightening story of the total collapse of political order and the rise that is at the point of assault. Yeah, it's a military coup. Yeah. Yeah. So that's why he's a little terrorist scamp. Yeah.

I feel like Scamp makes him sound more adorable than... It does. It's because I was being amusing. And that's... Doing that classic thing known as a joke. When I prioritize the joke, because sometimes the joke is more important. I think the joke is always more important. Yeah. So do I. It's just a problem. Okay. The next question is from Rebecca Whitman.

What is the deal with the BCE years going backwards? When did people start this weird system? And why was it just about later Christians counting down until the birth of Christ? Yes, it is. It's actually quite late, the BCE thing, which is interesting. The Anno Domini thing starts in like the 6th century. So there's like lots of different forms of Christian dating before we settled on...

on AD Anno Domini. And the main one for a long time was the Anno Martorum, so the year of the martyrs, which counted from the reign of Diocletian. So it counted year one of the reign of Diocletian as the beginning of the age of martyrs.

And everything before that would be counted as consular years. But that was eventually got rid of because people didn't like to commemorate Diocletian. So Diocletian did the great persecution when the most amount of Christians died.

And so then they decided that they didn't like that. So they weren't going to use that one anymore. I mean, that seems reasonable. It seems fair enough. Yeah. And then, so for a while there was... The other one was from the year of creation. So Anomundi, in the year of the world, which counts to like...

Year zero is like 6,000 and then says that Christ was born in the year 5,500, 550. No, 5,500, 5,500. So AM. But that one, that caused a bit of millennial panic. Yeah.

Not like, oh my God, I'm adulting panic. But like when it got to the year 6,000 AM, people thought that was like the end of the calendar. Like the world was only going to exist for 6,000 years. And so there was a bit of like millenarianism, like, ah, oh my God, the world's going to end. But then it didn't. It's like OG Y2K. Yeah, exactly. But that one never really caught on because there were quite a lot of debates about...

how old the earth was and so there would be a lot of like fussing about what year a.m. it was yeah and so Anno Domini kind of Anno Domini is invented by a Scythian monk called Dionysus Exegesis and

And then kind of catches on because it sort of works for everybody and doesn't have that many problems. And the counting, the different ways that people count only diverges by like two years. Sure. Which as far as counting systems diverging goes is actually pretty good. Yeah.

And it also only diverges a bit depending on whether you're counting from the nativity, the birth of Jesus or the conception. And that's only really nine months. That's okay. We can deal with a nine month shift.

But BC kind of eventually catches on in the West because the Carolingians get into it. Sorry, AD get into it because the Carolingians get into it. But they count BC as just, they're still using like old systems of dating for that. So they don't use a like before Christ system.

they'll be like in the consulship of whoever and whoever or in the regnal year of whatever. And then Jesus comes and then they start counting AD. Okay. And it's not until...

Bede in like the 9th century who invents this idea of counting backwards and saying you know in the 10th year he says his is like super long it's like before the creation and birth of our lord and it's like 7 letters long but

Eventually becomes AC, which is like Antichristos before Christ, and then becomes BC later on. But it does not become... The reason that it's BC in English instead of AC is that it doesn't become a big thing until like the 17th century. Okay, sure.

So AC is used for a while, but then BC is not picked up until English language writing and people are printing. And that's why it's English rather than Latin, because Latin people who are still writing in Latin are just writing in like using regnal years. But people decided that they didn't like that anymore. That's fair enough. It's a lot. I do like that method of counting years, though. It makes me think of Peronisi. Yeah, yeah.

The year the albatross came to the Great Hall, you know. Yeah. It's much more interesting than just 1426. I like that one because it describes a thing that happened in the year. You have to look back on the year and then decide what the most important things were that occurred in this year. What is the landmark of that year? Yeah. Yeah. And then you have to name it. But more commonly, it was just regnal years and you'd have to know what the regnal year of every...

king of every possible blasted tiny little area was like who's the king of Bohemia it's his seventh regnal year which is the ninth regnal year of Henry VIII which is the thirteenth regnal year of Francis I or whatever yeah and that's complicated and involves knowing a lot more as how you keep history and

Yeah. Inside monasteries. Cool. Then we have a few shorter ones. So we have a question from Amelia Harvey. What's up with the Greeks and Romans having more or less the same gods and statues? This one is one of my bugbears, which is why I have included it. Because otherwise I will do a full episode on it and then it would just be me shouting. So I was like, I'm going to do this in 10 minutes. And that way I can't get hysterical about it. There's no time to get hysterical. Exactly.

Yeah, exactly. Because this is like, basically, Connor loves to make fun of me with this. He loves to show me memes where you have a beautiful drawing of a horse at the front and then a terrible child's drawing of a horse at the back. And then it will be labeled like Greek gods and Roman gods. Yeah.

And like the idea that Roman religion is just like a poor knockoff of the complex and beautiful Greek religion. Whereas Roman religion is just like four men standing around banging themselves on the head and pretending that they have different gods. Whereas actually Roman religion is complex and multifaceted. It is just, and it's actually quite different from Greek religion. They just liked Greek mythology as a form of literature. Yeah.

And also, like a lot of Indo-European cultures, had very similar gods. In part, they have similar gods, very similar gods, because they absorbed Greek gods in Roman proto-history. So the Etruscans, they also absorb a load of Etruscan gods that they have. But the Greeks colonize Italy before the Romans exist. Right.

And so they bring their gods and the kind of 12 Olympian gods and all the other little ones are brought with them into Italy. Like Naples is Napoli because it's Neapolita, New Polis. That is a Greek city and there's loads of Greek cities. And that is how Roman religion develops out of Greek religion. But they also have their own interesting series of gods and the Greek gods.

12, 12 Olympians and the Roman 12 who are called the De Consentes are not exactly the same or not as exactly the same as people think they are. Yeah. Because the Romans don't have Neptune in their big 12, whereas Poseidon is obviously a very important god, is one of the kind of big three in the Greek pantheon.

But they do have Vesta, who is one of the three most important gods in the Roman pantheon. But Hestia, the Greek version, is almost non-existent and has no mythology at all. I think it's one of those things that a lot of polytheistic societies have similar gods because gods are associated with things on Earth, right? There's a god of the sun and there's a god of thunder and a god of the harvest because...

you are looking for somewhere to channel your anxieties about all of those different areas of life. Yeah. And there's a lot of writing about like Indo-European mythologies and the similarities, like the sky god, the dawn goddess. Hmm.

these ideas that come up over and over again. But Roman religion, the other thing, the reason that people think the Greek and Roman religion is really similar and much more similar than it actually is, is that Romans love to write about Greek mythology and do not have their own mythology about their gods. Right.

Roman mythology is much more pragmatic and is about people and will sometimes be about people who are related to or interacting with gods, but it's always focused on the person. It's always focused on Aeneas rather than Mars. It's always focused on Numa rather than Diana. Right.

And also Roman religion is intensely focused on ritual in a way that Greek religion isn't. Greek religion has much more storytelling involved and is much more developed in terms of the kind of personalities and actions and backstories of all the gods, whereas Romans are not enormously interested in that kind of thing, but they're very, very interested in correct ritual behavior and their ritual behavior dominates Roman life.

And, you know, they have all kinds of things like if you do a ritual wrong, the gods will be angry and you will have to do it all over again. Yeah. They are much less interested in the kind of

battles and and and what the gods are actually doing they're just interested in keeping them happy through intensely complicated rituals but they think that greek myth is a fun thing and so they like to retell it and talk about it and include it and they think it's super delightful they don't really think that it relates to their own religion that much sure

But we do have lots of Romans telling Greek stories, but that is quite separate from their idea of what important religion is. Important religion is making sure that the hearth doesn't go out, making sure that the right virgin has jumped over this wall.

fire at the right time making sure that the correct animal has been sacrificed to Quirinus who is a god that is like super important to the Romans but doesn't exist at all in Greek mythology

Yeah. Or Janus is another one that doesn't really exist at all. So they're not actually as similar as people think they are. They are actually quite different. They have a ton of overlaps with these kind of 12 male-female pair gods.

which are because Roman religion develops out of Greek religion. Greek religion is older and Roman culture is intensely influenced by Greek religion at every point in kind of Roman proto-history. So that is why they have similar gods and religions.

why they love to copy Greek art. A lot of the statues are the same because they think that Greek art is the most beautiful art in the world. So they copy it, but they copy it in stone instead of bronze quite a lot of the time and therefore have to make it uglier because this is one of my favorite things about looking at Roman statues. It's really funny because stone is not as

It's heavier, obviously, than bronze. So you can't... When you're copying a bronze statue, you can't have it identical because it'll fall over or the top will fall off. Like, it'll just, like...

like it's too heavy to support itself. So they very often have to put in that the statue is leaning on something. So almost all stone statues that you see of people standing up, for example, will have them like they're leaning on a tree trunk or they're like, they've got their hand on an animal or like they always have to be leaning on something. And sometimes they do that really clunky fashion and they've just got like a pole running up through it.

And it's very funny. But they basically just really appreciate and love and think that Greek art is the highest form of art. And so they try to copy it as much as possible as an artistic form rather than as a religious form. Sure. The next one is from David Galloway. I heard about a one-eyed Sudanese queen who defeated the Roman armies as they tried to expand the Roman Empire up the Nile River. Is this a thing? And can you tell us more about her?

Yes, I can. Although she did not defeat the Roman armies, disappointingly. I always feel like her story could have been better, but she did a good job. So her name is Amenira Venas, and she is the queen of Kush, which is this very, very, very ancient civilization in northern Sudan and like a southern bit of Egypt along the Nile.

She is not very well known and neither is Kush, in part because it's African. And as we've talked about before, African history has largely been erased with this pretense that Africa has no history. Mm-hmm.

Partly because the language of the kingdom of Kush, which lasted from the 8th century BCE to the 4th century CE. So, was that 1,200 years worth of civilization there? And it's fairly well preserved in a lot of ways. The language has never been deciphered. Uh-huh.

So although we do have like inscriptions and steles and things, we don't know what they say yet. Hopefully one day they will be because it would be fantastic. So we know of her from some inscriptions that survived from Kush, but we mostly know of her from the geography of Strabo, who included, basically explained why the Roman Empire's borders end where they do in what he called Ethiopia, and

Because after Rome took Egypt in 27 BCE, so in 31, sorry, BCE, which is Augustus after, well, he was still being Julius Caesar and terrorizing other people instead. Yeah.

About kind of seven or eight years after that, they were obviously pushing the borders of Egypt a little bit and stressing out the kingdom of Kush. And at that time, Amin-Iranas was the queen. She was apparently born blind in one eye, which is where the one-eyed comes from.

but she does seem to have two eyes she's just blind in one of them sure did not like this and so led an offensive against the Romans and invaded Upper Egypt and

and took a bunch of cities and basically enslaved people, did a lot of massacring, and most importantly, destroyed a bunch of Roman statues of Augustus. That's the experience. Including one, which she beheaded it and buried its head beneath a temple in Cush.

And that head is now the famous one that is in the British Museum, the marrowhead, the bronze terrifying one with what is still got his white eyes. Mm-hmm.

And it's fantastic. And it's one of the very few bronzes that survived because it was not melted down. And it's glorious. So that's there because of her. So that initial success triggered a response from the Romans. And the Romans sent a bunch, two legions, like 10,000 men against her. They forced her back into Cush.

There's kind of back and forth situation. They defeated her. She tried to surrender. They said no. So she said, okay, well, I'll fight you then. She fought them and it's kind of unclear what happened, but they let her send ambassadors to Augustus who was in Syria at the time. And he said, okay, sure, fine. And they came to a peace agreement, which was surprisingly friendly to Emma and us to agree.

in a way that the Romans are not often this friendly to people. But basically the agreement was that they would give up the territory that they had taken in Kush because they had taken one of their cities called Primis. They would give up that territory. They would withdraw back to basically their original lines that Amun-Ras had crossed. Like they would go back there. She would go back to where she was. They would have like a buffer zone, a military buffer zone, which was like a 12 mile zone between them.

And they promised that they would never expand. And she promised that she would never expand or try to fight them. And they also said that she didn't have to pay tribute to the Romans, which is the like really surprising part. They basically exempted her from tribute. Mm-hmm.

And said, we're just going to leave each other alone and we will never fight each other again. And she said, fine. And they said, fine. And both sides stuck to it for like 400 years. That does seem like a victory. That does seem like she won. It really does. And they both then stuck to it. The Romans never expanded any further into what is now Sudan, never expanded further into Africa. Mm-hmm.

They were kind of turned their attentions to Arabia for a while and that went very poorly. And nobody, none of her successors ever pushed upwards either. They both just agreed they would leave each other alone. Yeah. And they did for like several hundred years. And like the second century CE is when they start to clash again. And they're eventually, Kush is eventually destroyed in the fourth century. But for a long time, they just chill. And she...

manages to persuade Augustus who we have just established is terrifying to leave her alone and he does well well done that's fantastic yeah the next one is from Bob Gale how could Minerva be revered for her brains while the brains of real women were ignored by the same society this is because gods are gods and people are people and

There's a question I get asked kind of quite often. So that's why I decided to include it here, which is that gods do not have to adhere to natural law. They're already outside of natural law because they are immortal and divine and all powerful and they can shake the earth and send thunder and make earth...

goat with two heads be born or make a cow talk or they can do anything. They're already outside of

the laws that govern everything mortal and earthly. They are more than that. And that includes how they present in their gender. Gods can be masculine and feminine at the same time. Gods don't have to adhere to any of the rules of human behavior.

gods don't have to they don't have to be faithful in their marriages they don't have to be good people they don't have to not kill and murder and rape like all of the like humans do they can they exist outside of all of that and that includes their

Their ability to be either multiple genders or their ability to have characteristics that in humans are considered to be gendered, but in gods are not. They can be gender fluid. They can switch genders. They can do whatever the hell they like.

And they do not have to apply to humans. There's also a thing here with like, because obviously it's a very patriarchal society and patriarchy is a means to an end, right? The point of it is to preserve patrilineal values.

systems of ownership and to maintain control over where wealth and power is consolidated and everything within a patriarchy is controlling women to that end and in systems like that female paragons like gods goddesses are a means of controlling women because they're something that real women can't aspire to you know so you can't

You give women an example of purity or wisdom or strength or whatever that they can't live up to. And because they can't live up to that, they can't be trusted and they have to be controlled and sequestered and protected. Yeah, and they can never be...

Perfect. But also, Minerva, who we're talking about, is also a goddess of war to a certain extent. She presents in armor. She is wise and she is also very strong. And she has a spear and all of these things that men prevent women from ever being able to do and say is disgusting for women to be able to do because she's not really a woman. She's a goddess. And-

There's a super duper interesting article which really shaped my thinking on a lot of this, which is by a guy called Filippo Carla Uhink. It's called Between the Human and Divine Cross-Dressing and Transgender Dynamics in the Greco-Roman World. Mm-hmm.

in a really great volume called Trans Antiquity about how gender fluidity and gender kind of cross-gender presentation as well is something that is considered to be associated with and

emblematic of the gods that the gods can do this that they are not bound by the rules that confine everybody else they can be freer to a certain extent that kind of opened up a world of thinking about I quite like it because I like the idea of gender fluidity being kind of a form of divinity yeah

and as being a part of a divine world rather than a kind of rubbish mortal one which is constrained and suffocating. If anybody is interested in that, I highly recommend it. The last question we have is from Ben Newman-Girwin. I would love to know more about funny graffiti in ancient Rome.

which is classic. I remember us not Rome, but getting very excited about graffiti in Pompeii when I was studying classics at high school. Yes. It is fun. It is fun and it is great. And it is amazing how much time Romans spent writing about their poo. Like they write about sex and they write about poo and not that much else.

And I'm going to put a link in the show notes to a list of good graffiti from Pompeii and Herculaneum. One of my top favorites actually comes from Rome and is one of the earliest examples. It's from the second century and it is from the Palatine. And it's from the school that was on the Palatine for training

enslaved boys there and it is a picture of a donkey headed man on a crucifix with a little boy standing next to him and then underneath it says Alex Semenos worshipping his god and it is one of the very earliest examples of someone taking the piss out of Christians and

And like early critiques of Christianity thought, like basically didn't understand the stories and they kind of, there was some donkey stuff and there was a guy who was crucified. And so he became a donkey headed God who was crucified. And,

And so this is a very, very early example of a Christian on the Palatine and people making fun of him for being different. And people saw Christianity very early and how they understood it. But also that people were out there saying in central Rome, like, I am a Christian. And people were like, weird. And I really, I think that that one is kind of delightful in a lot of ways.

Because also it's nice to see one that isn't about shit, to be honest. I don't love the amount of time that Romans spend talking about their poo. They talk a lot about poo and all about sex and then every so often there's something funny or sweet, like the one that's just two guys who were best friends were here. Yes, that one is nice. It's nice. Yeah. And sometimes it's just like, you know, I made bread today. Yeah. Yeah.

Which is delightful. But they talk so much about poo that even that one, people are like, is this a euphemism for shit? I hope not. I mean, why would they need euphemisms when everyone else is just saying it? It's true. It would be unlikely. They're not...

They're not shy about it for the most time. Yeah. But, yeah. So, and there is a lot of... I like the ones that are kind of like TripAdvisor reviews as well. They're like... Let me find it. Where's it gone? One that is next to a bar that says, With that you pay for all your tricks, innkeeper, you sell us water and keep the good wine for yourself. You've got to tell people. You've got to go and yell. Exactly.

Exactly. It's useful to know that this is a place that if you go there, you are not going to get good wine. You're going to get watered wine. Yeah. Yeah. Or two friends were here. While they were, they had bad service in every way from a man called Ephroditus. They threw him out and spent 105 and a half sesterce, most agreeably on prostitutes. Yeah.

So they did well. That's nice. It's one of those TripAdvisor reviews where somebody is telling you way too much. They've decided this is their travel blog and they're going to tell you everything. Yeah. And you didn't need to, but you're kind of delighted that they did. Yeah. That's nice. Significantly later on, many years later. I like all of the graffiti and I liked...

When I was in Rome in the Colosseum, they're very, very strict about graffiti in the Colosseum. Like if you try to write on something, they'll put you in prison and they'll fine you like a load of money. And there's all these signs all over it that are like, do not, if you write your name on something, you will go to prison for five years and we will fine you like 100,000 euro. And then they have two separate exhibitions celebrating graffiti. This is what...

what time does, right? Like, stops being graffiti and starts being history. I'm always fascinated by when the turning point comes. Like, when did Dickens stop being, like, fun, like, blockbuster serialized fiction? When did he stop being the marvel of his era and start being, like, classic literature? You know?

When does it stop being grave robbing and start becoming and become archaeology? It's a wibbly wobbly line, Janina. It's a wibbly wobbly line and it's very interesting. I am. I will tell you that if you were around in like 1755 and you carved your name in massive letters on the Coliseum, they will put that behind glass and do a whole exhibition about it.

But if you are there in 2024 and you put your name on it, then they will put you in prison. Despite the fact that that graffiti might be just as valuable to people 500 years from now as this stuff is now. No. History has stopped now as far as the Coliseum is concerned. And I do find this fascinating. Like history has stopped now. Like everything up to now was history. But as soon as we rebuilt that bit of it and put in a subway station called Coliseo, that was the history stopped. Yeah.

And there is no more history involved in it. And now it is frozen forever and will never change. Yeah. Yeah. So that's our short questions. That was a reasonable amount of time, I think. I think that was a reasonable amount of time. I actually was not looking at the time at all. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. That was probably a reasonable amount of time. Yeah. Not too bad. So next time, it is our actual 100th episode.

It is. It's genuinely our 100th episode, unless Oliver says it is our 100th episode. I believe him. So we will be following the advice of our Patreon subscribers and doing some requested stuff from them. If you have opinions, then you can express those to us on the Patreon and we might. Yeah, you can join the Patreon. It's a bargain, honestly. Yeah. Buy us a wee coffee and we appreciate you. Yeah.

Yeah. And you can find all of the show notes and merch and other bits and bobs at historyofsexy.com. Is there anything else? Is that it? I think that's it. I think that's it. Okay, until episode 100. That's actually episode 100, Janina. Or until the bonus episode for those who are subscribed. And there's still the bonus episode. Yeah. Bye. Bye. Bye.