Pod Insights Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society How Wild Were The Last Days Of Rome? About this episode As Rome fell, was it really non-stop orgies and parties?
That's become a popular connotation, and in today's episode Kate is joined by historian and friend of the show Emma Southon (https://www.emmasouthon.com https://www.emmasouthon.com/) to find out what was happening on the ground as the Roman empire crumbled.
This episode was edited by Tom Delargy and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long.
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0:00 Kate Lister? Do you want even more shocking and scandalous history? Like why the ancient Greek statues had such small manhoods? Or what went on behind closed doors in the Georgian era? Well, sign up to History Hit, where you can see me discover the scandalous side of history, as well as hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, covering everything from prehistoric Scotland to the Treaty of Versailles. Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe.
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1:19 Kate Lister? Hello, my lovely betwixters. It's me, Kate Lester, and you are listening to Betwixter Sheets. And we are gonna get down and dirty with some historical smut. And because of that, I do have to tell you once again that this is an adult podcast spoken by adults to other adults about adulty things and adulty ways of going around adult subjects and used by an adult too. We call that the Fair Do's Warning, because if you keep listening and you happen to get upset, well, that one's on you, pal, because Fair Do's, we did warn ya. Right, on with the show.
1:53 Kate Lister? Pass the wine, don't let my goblet run dry. If popular history is to be believed, the last days of Rome were a wild, orgy-filled, non-stop party of unbridled decadence and excess. Sounds like a Leeds Wetherspoons. But what was it really like? How did the Romans react when the invaders were closing in? Were they really ripping the knickers off one another? Well, I can't wait to find out if you can't, so let's do it.
2:26 Speaker 02 What do you look for in a man?
2:28 Speaker 03 Oh, money, of course.
2:29 Speaker 04 You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you.
2:31 Speaker 03 I make perfect copies of whatever my boss needs by just turning a knob and pushing the button.
2:44 Speaker 04 Yes, social courtesy does make a difference.
2:46 Speaker 05 Goodness, what beautiful time. Goodness has nothing to do with it, Derek.
2:54 Kate Lister? Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society with me, Kate Lister. With history, it is so easy for myth to become fact. It just takes a few old duffers a couple of centuries ago to write some nonsense and then it gets written up in the history books as exactly what happened. And this seems to be what happened when we think about the last days of Rome. The connotations that we have of that time of being debauched and immoral have definitely become stuck in the public imagination, but where did that come from? Is there any truth behind it? I mean, I think I know how I'd react if the barbarians were closing in, but maybe the Romans were different. So how did it go down and how did Rome fall?
3:37 Kate Lister? Joining me today is the always marvelous Emma Southon and she is going to help us find out. But before we go all Roman decadence and decay, I do have to ask you once more if you wouldn't mind giving us a little cheeky vote for the British Podcast Awards Listener's Choice Award. We've managed to get through to the next round, we have, guys, and that is thanks to you. That's thanks to you and me lying about what Dan Snow would do to us if we didn't win. But even with that, let's keep voting, let's keep doing it, we can do it, I'm sure that we can. Right, on with the show.
4:15 Kate Lister? Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets. It's only Emma Southon. How are you doing?
4:22 Speaker 06 I'm very well, thank you very much. How are you today?
4:25 Kate Lister? Well, obviously, I'm very excited to be talking to you because I always have a lot of fun when you're on the show, mostly learning, as if, like, I don't know if the bar can go much lower for my estimation of the Romans, but every time I talk to you, it seems that something new is brought out of the bag and it's like, yeah, they got worse. They actually managed to get worse. I don't know how that happened.
4:47 Speaker 06 That's my raise on Detra these days. It's just, every time someone comes away from a conversation with me, ideally, they feel a bit worse about the Romans.
4:56 Kate Lister? See, this, I kind of do think about them every day now, but mostly just, like, they were awful.
5:02 Speaker 06 They were horrible, yeah.
5:03 Kate Lister? My Roman Empire is how horrible the Roman Empire was.
5:06 Speaker 06 That's, yeah. Welcome to my world.
5:12 Speaker 06 It's just, just me pointing at things going, do you know what that is? Slavery. Pedarasty.
5:19 Kate Lister? There must have been one or two nice Romans somewhere that just never got a look in. Just someone who'd set up a little animal sanctuary without, like, having to sacrifice all the animals, or trying to shag all the animals, or trying to enslave all of the animals. Just someone, somewhere, there must have been somebody who was just a nice Roman.
5:36 Speaker 06 Maybe. I'm sure that there must have been. There must have been somebody who was like, have we ever thought of, like, look at this lovely puppy? But I'll be honest, the first two things I think of when I think of Romans and puppies is one guy who killed a puppy in a temple and Pliny, the elder, saying that you can cure epilepsy with a puppy brain.
5:53 Kate Lister? Just stop it. That, they wreck everything.
5:59 Speaker 06 They do, even a puppy. They've somehow managed to ruin it. There's nice ones. There's some nice little, like, epitaphs for dogs, people writing little things about how much they like their dogs. So there you go.
6:09 Kate Lister? Okay.
6:10 Speaker 06 Yeah, there you go. So people who like their dogs at least, yeah.
6:13 Kate Lister? All right, okay. So that's like a universal constant. That's good to know. Actually, it's so appropriate today. We're talking about the fall of the Roman Empire, which is just, I guess, where the rest of the world just went, right, no, you've done too much now. Stop it.
6:27 Kate Lister? You are too awful. We have to put a stop to this.
6:30 Speaker 06 Yeah, you're too rich. You're too awful. What they mostly think, to be fair, is you're really rich and it looks like you've got a good thing going on. Can we join in? And then that ends up being a bunch of wars, basically.
6:43 Kate Lister? Right. So we have this idea of like the fall of the Roman Empire and we'll get on to the last days of Rome and where this idea of it being a time of even worse debauchery and madness, who came up with that idea? But the idea that the Roman Empire fell is a slightly odd one because Rome is still there. So like, what do we mean when we say there was a fall of the Roman Empire? Like, what, at Tuesday, four o'clock, everyone just decided that's enough of that? Thank you very much. What are we talking about here?
7:13 Speaker 06 So there is like a moment when people, like, I think if you ask most people these days, like, when is the end of the classical Roman Empire? Then the moment, or I would always say is when Oadica, who is an Ostrogothic king, has taken over Rome and he basically takes the Western Roman Emperor, who is a child named Romulus Augustulus, basically packs up all of his ceremonial gear and just sends him to Constantinople. It's like, we're not having a Roman Emperor in the West anymore.
7:46 Kate Lister? What? So who was this guy then? The Goth king, which is just, I know that the joke's been done before, but it's just, you can't help but envisioning these people as people wearing black, holding skateboards and hanging around supermarkets, can you?
7:59 Speaker 06 Yeah, massive jeans.
8:02 Kate Lister? All ripped up the back.
8:04 Speaker 06 Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, so he is basically an Ostrogothic leader. He takes over Rome kind of fairly bloodlessly. It takes a while to do it and the emperor by that time in the West is largely powerless and has no military anymore and has been for a while. And so when he just moves in, he basically just packs up Romulus Augustulus and is like, I'm in charge of Rome now and sends him on his way.
8:31 Kate Lister? So this is a German Goth king and he just, what, he just walks into Rome? That by this time is not as strong as it was and just picks up this little boy and goes, you're off on your holidays.
8:42 Speaker 06 Simplifying me monstrously, yeah, basically.
8:44 Kate Lister? Wow.
8:45 Speaker 06 It's pretty bloodless.
8:46 Kate Lister? I would have thought they'd have put up a better fight than that.
8:49 Speaker 06 I mean, this takes centuries to get through. So this is four, seven, six that he packs up.
8:54 Kate Lister? Right.
8:54 Speaker 06 Romulus Augustulus.
8:55 Kate Lister? Four, seven, six.
8:56 Speaker 06 And so four, ten is when the Goths first sack Rome. So the first big sack of Rome, which is considered, like it's a cataclysmic event when it happens. That happens in four, ten.
9:10 Kate Lister? Did they see it coming or was it like a complete surprise to them?
9:12 Speaker 06 They do see it coming because they've been fighting the Goths. The Goths have come across the Danube. So they're actually from like the Caucasus. So these are people from what is now kind of Ukraine and southern Russia. And so they have come across the Danube, running away from the Huns, who have come from even further east. And there's centuries worth of fighting the Goths on the Danube, which means that they build themselves into an army. And then led by Alaric, they start marching around Western Europe and nobody can stop them. And they take Rome in four, ten. What they basically want is some land to call their own. They just want to move into the empire, essentially, and they want to be given a bit of land and set up.
9:56 Kate Lister? Just that bit that the Romans are living on, that bit of land?
9:59 Speaker 06 Yeah, basically. Like, there's already people there, but they would quite like to just have some of it.
10:04 Kate Lister? Okay, fair enough.
10:05 Speaker 06 Yeah. And they constantly fought and eventually they become an enemy. And so they first besiege and then sack Rome in four, ten. And everybody kind of knows it's coming. No big D has any power to stop it. The emperor at the time is Onorius, who is rubbish. And it is so drastic that they actually take the emperor's sister hostage. And she's great, Galaparidia. She's fascinating. So that is like the cataclysmic event. And then it takes like another sixty years for the Goths to have fully moved into Rome.
10:36 Kate Lister? So they come in and then they fuck off again?
10:39 Speaker 06 They do fuck off again, yes, because they don't really want Rome at that point. They basically just want to live somewhere. They fuck off to France and then they go down to Spain. They hang around in Barcelona for ages on a holiday.
10:50 Kate Lister? Okay.
10:51 Speaker 06 Yeah, then the Vandals attack it a few years later and that it's a kind of, it's a very long process of eroding away power in the West. So that by the time Oadica moves in, everything has been eroded to a nubbin of nothingness, essentially.
11:09 Kate Lister? How did that happen though? Because one thing that I do know about the Romans is they were very good at fighting. Like they were the bestest at it. If they could do, if as horrible as they were, they could channel the awfulness and they were very good at going around and beating up other people and taking their stuff. And we've got this idea of them being highly militarised and super organised and they were the first to go, hey, let's use shields, what a great idea and this kind of stuff. So how did we go from that to just, oh, there's a bunch of German Goths coming in? Oh, no.
11:40 Speaker 06 About a million different things. So one, we have the fact that they have started, they start quite early on, but by the kind of fourth century, using it extensively, they're using auxiliary troops and mercenary troops a lot. So a lot of these Goths and Vandals and all the other people have served in the Roman army at some point.
12:01 Kate Lister? Oh.
12:03 Speaker 06 And quite a lot of what their argument is for being given land is that they have served in the Roman army for 20 years. They've served in the Roman army and they're not getting any benefits from that. So that's one thing.
12:15 Kate Lister? That's interesting. So they've learnt the tricks of the trade then. So we no longer have this like, oh, surprise, we're the best in the world. Now it's, well, they've been trained that way too.
12:25 Speaker 06 Yeah. And also they would quite like something in return for the service that they gave the empire.
12:30 Kate Lister? Aha. Okay, that's interesting.
12:33 Speaker 06 The other thing is that there are plagues rampaging through the empire. The plague of Cyprian destroys millions of people.
12:43 Kate Lister? Was that a Black Death thing or is that something else?
12:45 Speaker 06 They think it's actually possibly an Ebola-like plague, so.
12:48 Kate Lister? Ooh, a nasty.
12:50 Speaker 06 A very nasty plague. And then the other thing is that the climate is changing. So the period of the Roman Empire corresponds to this kind of ideal period for harvests where the weather is very warm and very rainy. And so they have been having bounteous harvests for 500 years. And now the weather is shifting, it's becoming drier and it's becoming colder. And they're having terrible droughts in North Africa and Egypt. And those places were feeding the armies in the West. And they are no longer growing anywhere near enough wheat to feed the armies. So you have a series of controllable and uncontrollable events that severely weaken
13:35 Speaker 06 Western power.
13:36 Kate Lister? It's like Viagra, this. This is how I'm going to compare this to. Like when Viagra first launched, it was the only one of its kind. It had patents on it. No one had ever seen anything like it before. It did stuff that nothing else, nothing could touch it. But eventually the patent runs out and everybody else can manufacture the exact same stuff. And they've got their own systems of distribution. And now there's lots of alternatives to Viagra and they don't have the stranglehold anymore.
14:02 Speaker 06 Exactly. And that's what happens. And then, and people are hungry. And when people are hungry, there's always unrest.
14:07 Kate Lister? That's not good. Okay, so there's lots of different things coming together to weaken what was the biggest and strongest empire at the time. Why this Goth king though? Were they particularly good at fighting? Like, why them? Why not? I was gonna say, why not the British? Because we were just pissed. But like, why, why was it them that decided they were gonna do this?
14:31 Speaker 06 Well, actually, the Romans considered the Britons to be a hotbed of revolution. And it was always very considered to be very dangerous to send anyone powerful to Britain because they would get to Britain, get their heads swollen and then try to invade Gaul with their army and declare themselves an emperor, happen constantly.
14:50 Kate Lister? Oh, did it? Oh, I'm quite proud of them for that. Well done. Well done, ancient Britons.
14:54 Speaker 06 There was something about coming to Britain that made people think that they could rule the empire. I mean, it takes a ghost a long time. Like, they appear in the middle of the third century crisis. So they appear in the middle of the third century. It takes them about a century and a half to eventually take over the Western Roman Empire. They're basically taught by the Romans to hate the Romans.
15:11 Kate Lister? Bad move that.
15:11 Speaker 06 Yeah.
15:12 Kate Lister? Bad move.
15:13 Speaker 06 And they're just very good at what they do. Like, they are a spectacle. One of my favourite stories about them actually is after the sack of Rome, they then kind of go marching around Italy for a little bit because they're not, they don't really have a goal particular.
15:25 Kate Lister? I love that about them. Just chaotic, just mad chaos goblins wandering around just looking for a fight and just like, no, no, we'll go to Barcelona now.
15:34 Speaker 06 Yeah. And so they, Alaric was the king at the time. He was their leader and he dies while they're in southern Italy. And they worry that if they bury him or have a tomb for him, that the Romans will desecrate it. So they dam a river and divert it temporarily, bury him under the river and then remove the dam. So he's buried underneath a river.
16:01 Kate Lister? That's clever. Oh, I like that.
16:04 Speaker 06 Which I think is very impressive.
16:06 Kate Lister? That is impressive. Or I might, I might put that on my funeral plan.
16:11 Speaker 06 Demand to have a river moved for you.
16:15 Kate Lister? That, okay, I'm warming to him slightly. But then, having said that, I wasn't chased bare ass through the streets of Rome by Alaric, which might change your, your perception of him quite severely.
16:26 Speaker 06 It might, although I will say that even the people who are really freaked out about the Goths sacking Rome, and it really is considered to be like earth shattering. Like you have all, all of these writers write about it because you start getting loads of refugees from Rome and they end up in North Africa and they cross the seas and into the Levant. And they are coming with these kind of stories, but Alaric does quite like Rome and so they don't damage it. They don't damage anything.
16:54 Kate Lister? Very respectful barbarians.
16:56 Speaker 06 They are very respectful barbarians. And so they, they really do very little. And so they're able to have, within 30 years, they've effectively rebuilt Rome completely. Like fixed up all of the minor burnings that they did. And by the 450s, when Galliputidio has become empress, like Rome is back to glory essentially.
17:21 Kate Lister? I'll be back with Emma after this short break.
17:35 Kate Lister? Hello Betwixters, I'm jumping in here because I have some very exciting news. Betwixt the Sheets has set up camp on YouTube. That's right, it took us a while, but we are there now. So if you are the kind of person who likes to see your podcasts as well as hear your podcasts, you can now go and find us right there and the link is in the show notes. And please remember to like and subscribe because the people in charge of the money really do like that. Right, let's get on with it.
18:17 Kate Lister? So they've got this initial sack and everybody loses their mind. It sounds like the Goths wandered in and went, oh, nice statues, everyone. Oh, no, it's lovely. They're almost just tourists and then they go away again.
18:29 Speaker 06 They're kind of like, oh, well, we've been now and we didn't really have a plan and we're going to take some stuff, but we're on the move. So it's not like they've got a place to take all the stuff back to. So they can't steal all the statues because what are they going to do, drag it around with?
18:42 Kate Lister? Yeah, very good point. Very good point.
18:44 Speaker 06 They're basically a nomadic army at this time. They haven't got a place to take loads of golden statues.
18:51 Kate Lister? That would limit what you were going to take away.
18:55 Speaker 06 It really limits mobility, yeah.
18:57 Kate Lister? But then we've got this big push for 76.
19:01 Speaker 06 Yeah. So, and this is like a lot of, because you've also got the Vandals who are in North Africa. They sack roam in 455 and so then it becomes like a kind of constant battle of eroding.
19:17 Kate Lister? Taking potshots.
19:18 Speaker 06 Yeah, basically of people coming from all sides because there's, you've got the Goths who are kind of all over the show. You've got the Franks who are coming from Germany into kind of France and Belgium and Gaul. You have the Vandals who are coming from North Africa. And so on every side, there are people who are sometimes working together, sometimes not, sometimes fighting each other.
19:40 Speaker 06 And the Romans are just kind of fighting fires on all sides and they're constantly fighting each other as well. And so you run through like dozens of emperors of the West who all have ludicrous names and who no one's ever heard of. And they're just become less and less relevant in the fights. Like it becomes that there is, there are lots and lots of people competing for territory in Europe and North Africa. And the Romans just become one of those guys rather than
20:10 Kate Lister? The guy.
20:11 Speaker 06 The people, the guy, exactly. And so it just kind of, they become less and less important in the fight until they're not important at all. The only money that they have is none of the resources or money or anything they have is coming from Europe. It's also coming from overseas, from literally overseas. So it all has to travel into Rome and people just stop sending it. Like the people in Constantinople, the Western, the Eastern emperors just stop sending resources eventually.
20:40 Kate Lister? It must have been a very stressful, I mean, it's always a stressful time to be a Roman, but a particularly stressful time. Bearing in mind actually that this is nothing worse than the crap that they've inflicted on other nations throughout, throughout their time as the top dog.
20:53 Speaker 06 If anything, they don't suffer anywhere near as much. And it's surprising how much when you read the sources about what's happening in Rome and Ravenna, which has become like a real power, that they seem to be having quite a chill time if you're not in the army.
21:09 Kate Lister? If you're like, you're a regular Roman then, because I suppose one of the reasons that I assume that all the Romans are absolutely horrific is because most of the history that you get left from is from very powerful people, people that were interesting enough to have stuff written about them, wars that happened. And I don't think you get nice, powerful people. I think that to be powerful like that, you have to be an asshole. I think that's sort of baked into it, isn't it? So it's kind of their history, but if you were just like a regular Roman person, you know, you've got a bit of land, maybe you're growing some grapes or something. How much of this would you have been aware of?
21:44 Speaker 06 You are going to be aware of it in that if you're a rich Roman, you've got far away lands and some of them are being damaged.
21:51 Kate Lister? Yep, that, okay.
21:52 Speaker 06 But. They remain rich, they remain pretty powerful. What happens is if you're a rich and powerful Roman, as the senate stops being useful, the senate becomes something that only people from the city of Rome go to. It used to be something that people would come from all over the empire to go to. But it becomes kind of a bit more provincial and it becomes kind of a last bastion of of paganism. As everything else christianises around it, but the rest of the western empires kind of shifts into the church and starts building up the church as power base. And so you see people from the the fifth century who are writing, they are all all start writing about
22:33 Speaker 06 church stuff basically instead of going to the senate, but they're still rich, they've still got lots of land. They will complain about barbarians in there. There's these letters from fifth century Gaul, from a guy called Sidonius, writing about how he I mean, this is such a like daily mail thing. He's like, I when I'm walking around in town, I hear all these different languages and no one speaks proper Latin anymore. I hear all these barbarian languages.
22:58 Speaker 06 So you get the like those complaints and there's you get people talking about how they can't travel as much as they would like to anymore, but they don't become any less rich and on a day to day basis, it doesn't change as much as you would think. There's this guy called Olympiodorus who writes about how astonishingly rich Rome still is in his time and he's writing from the east in the fifth century and he's like every great house has a city inside it. He's like they've all got their own bars, they've all got their own stadia, they're all like they have so much money which comes in from their land and then he is like they have games that go on for 10 days and they spend four thousand pounds of gold on it.
23:43 Speaker 06 And so there still are people having a good time in Rome while, you know, most of the fighting apart from at one or two points is happening far away and people find ways to enjoy their lives anyway.
23:57 Kate Lister? Of course they do. So when the Goths finally show up then, do they move into Rome? And like, what exactly, it's just all of their outlying lands that they've conquered, they're not allowed to have many more. Like you just allowed the Italian bit. Like, what are we talking about here? Did they, did they stay this time, the Goths?
24:15 Speaker 06 They do stay and they stay for ages and they become like the next king after Oedipus, Theodoric the Great, who does a lot in Rome and does a lot of building and he's like quite classicising. So he likes the idea of like rebuilding stuff in the image of Rome. And he has all these advisers who were Roman senators like Cassiodorus.
24:34 Kate Lister? It's all very civilised this. It's just, it's like, it's just an exchange of power that's going on. This is, this isn't quite the burn it to the ground and let's murder everybody that I was expecting. This is.
24:45 Speaker 06 That happens a bit earlier.
24:46 Kate Lister? This is more administrative than anything else.
24:49 Speaker 06 It kind of is because basically Oedipus literally sends Romulus Augustus off with a letter that says like, we're not going to be in the empire anymore. We'll be a client, like we don't mind working with you, but we're not gonna be like subordinate to you. We're not gonna be in your empire. The East are like, okay. And then that's basically what happens. And you have, we have these letters of Cassiodorus, which go back and forth where he's writing to the Eastern emperors saying like, oh, Theodoric says X, Y's. And they, you know, they are exchanging diplomacy back and forwards. And then it's not, there's one attempt in the sixth century to kind of retake Rome, which retakes Ravenna. But other than that, it's fairly.
25:26 Kate Lister? So very civilised.
25:27 Speaker 06 It's kind of a bit of a whimper at the very end.
25:29 Kate Lister? It is, isn't it? It's, it's just more like, like we've just voted in a new board of governors. That's sort of the, the feel of it. It's not quite what I was expecting at the end of this really bonkers time and this really powerful empire. So it kind of keeps going, doesn't it? Cause you've got like the Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire, that's still there. How long does that hang on for?
25:53 Speaker 06 Oh, it depends on how annoying you want to be.
25:56 Kate Lister? Oh, okay. Go on. Let's arm everyone with some pedantic information that they can use to correct people around them.
26:02 Speaker 06 Yeah, if you want to be really annoying, you could say that the end of the Holy Roman Empire.
26:06 Kate Lister? Oh.
26:07 Speaker 06 That would be really annoying. More reasonably, you would say it is the Ottoman sack of Constantinople in the fourteen fifty's, so fourteen fifty three. Like, that's the end of continuous rule from Constantine through to the, the final, like, Eastern Roman Emperor. And it is a centre of power and then the, the Ottomans destroy it. But then if you want to be difficult, you can say that the Ottoman Empire is a continuation and go all the way through until the end of the Ottoman Empire, which is like nineteen twenty something.
26:38 Kate Lister? Wow, wow.
26:40 Speaker 06 But yeah, it depends on how much of a dick you want to be. Thing is, it's difficult to say, like, when does an empire end? Like, there are points when the Byzantine Empire is Constantinople and Two Fields. And so calling it an empire is a bit of a stretch. But there are people calling themselves Roman until the end of the Holy Roman Empire. Like, there are people throughout, you know, the Middle Ages calling themselves Roman emperors.
27:03 Kate Lister? Because it's not, I don't know how Germanic Italy is as a result of this. So they must have left again at some point and just kind of left the Italians to get on with it.
27:14 Speaker 06 Well, they don't really impose anything other than Arianism. Ostrogoths are Arian, so they are not Trinitarians. They believe in, just to bring some theology into this as well. They don't believe in the Trinity, so they don't believe in the, the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit as a single. They believe in separate. But that's like the only thing that they really introduce as massively different. Otherwise, they run it and they don't have a senate anymore because they have a king. But they like, you know, they like the Roman stuff. They have quite a lot of laws that are like, we would really like it if you built temples that looked like Roman temples, actually.
27:50 Kate Lister? So where did the idea come from? Because I've heard the expression, oh, it was like the last days of Rome. It was like the final days of Rome. And you say that when you mean something is just absolutely chaotic and it's got a kind of a tinge of like. Back an alien orgies to it, like, you know, if something's really excessive. I've heard it say many, many times, but actually, if you're saying it's like the last days of Rome, really you mean there's an administrative exchange of power. That's exactly, that's actually what happened.
28:16 Speaker 06 Yeah.
28:17 Kate Lister? But where did the idea that like it was this hedonistic, people were ripping the knickers off each other? Where does that idea come from?
28:24 Speaker 06 So that idea really comes from like the 19th century.
28:28 Kate Lister? I've thought it would. I thought this sounds like something they would come up with.
28:31 Speaker 06 Yeah, and that these ideas that there is, that there had to be a moral failing for Rome to have fallen.
28:38 Kate Lister? Now, that's quite important because I've seen that be repeated even today in certain
28:43 Speaker 06 Yes.
28:43 Kate Lister? quarters and certain circles and certain philosopher people have this idea that a fall of an empire or a country is predicated by a looseness of moral laxity. I've seen that argued by people.
28:59 Speaker 06 Yeah, and you know, people very much still say this today, and it is this, this idea that.
29:05 Kate Lister? Blowjobs equal a loss of power.
29:07 Speaker 06 Exactly.
29:08 Kate Lister? Hashtag science.
29:09 Speaker 06 I was Googling around to see if I could find like when the concept of the last days of Rome was like first used. And I found a blog from 2011 where somebody, some random blogger had said that it was the last days of Rome because a woman had said fuck on the television.
29:30 Speaker 06 Which I thought was hilarious.
29:31 Kate Lister? Oh dear.
29:31 Speaker 06 But women didn't used to swear. And that's very much like, I mean, this is something that to an extent, the Romans are saying about themselves that if they were better, then the gods would love them more and they wouldn't lose their empire. And then the Christians say this as well. And you see a lot of Christian writers in the fifth century saying the barbarians wouldn't be here if we were better Christians. And then this continues through. And then when in the Enlightenment, when people start thinking about the, you know, why Rome quote unquote fell, or why this empire didn't continue forever. What they look at is texts from all eras of Roman history. So they will pick up on Caligula, who is like the third Roman emperor, and Nero, the fifth Roman emperor.
30:13 Speaker 06 And then they'll pick some bits from Juvenal, who's like 100 years after that, but all from like the first and second centuries. So 300 years before Rome falls and be like, look at these guys. Obviously they couldn't have an empire. Like they were shagging constantly. They are. Talking about all the women that they have sex with, they are like having mad orgies. You read Marshall, who's writing in the second century, and they are disgusting.
30:35 Kate Lister? Hmm.
30:35 Speaker 06 Like, he is to, he is absolute filth. And he does make his social circle sound like they've never got any clothes on at all.
30:44 Kate Lister? Right.
30:45 Speaker 06 And then in the like eighteen thirty years, you start getting like French and English philosophers, who are, who say, start saying this stuff like, oh, it fell because it was decadent.
30:53 Kate Lister? It's this strange equation, and really what's going on, in my humble opinion, I haven't researched as much as I think I, I probably should have done before I say this, is what they're doing is they're linking it to a feminisation of something. You, you kind of see that.
31:06 Speaker 06 Yes.
31:06 Kate Lister? And that goes right the way back to even the ancient Greek writers, where you get this sort of, Odysseus like goes on the island and then he gets distracted by the beautiful, by girls. And you get that kind of motif cropping, and it happens with, with Aeneas and Dido. Like, they get stuck, they're on this big manly quest, and they're gonna do questing and manly war stuff. And suddenly some chick turns up on an island and is all like, oh, but you just come here and just like have some wine and I'll rub your shoulders.
31:33 Speaker 06 Yeah.
31:34 Kate Lister? And it's this whole big like fear that they're gonna be infected by this feminine world and lose their masculine potency.
31:41 Speaker 06 Yeah. And this is something that Romans worried about constantly, like Romans themselves, and this is how nineteenth century writers are able to have so much kind of ammunition for this idea of decadence. So the Romans were saying it about themselves. They were saying at the very height of their empire, like in the late Republic and the early imperial period, and then into the, you know, the period of Trajan and Hadrian, when it's at its biggest and it's the most military successful it's ever been. They're saying, we like baths too much.
32:10 Kate Lister? Yeah, don't be too soft.
32:12 Speaker 06 Men wear too much perfume and it's all, everyone's gone a bit Greek and girly. And no one is a good masculine man like they used to be anymore. And we've all become terribly soft. And you're like, well, you're doing pretty well for a bunch of soft lads.
32:29 Kate Lister? Yeah, he's still pretty stabby for a bunch of softies.
32:31 Speaker 06 Exactly, but they are like, everybody always thinks that their period is the worst it's ever been.
32:37 Kate Lister? Yeah, true.
32:38 Speaker 06 And they always think, but weirdly enough, that, you know, the time when it is the worst it's ever been, people are trying to find new ways forward. But at every point in Roman history, they're always saying, this is the worst it's ever been, and it's this way because we've gone soft.
32:55 Kate Lister? We've gone soft. And then the Victorians picked up on that idea and really ran with it and sort of created this idea that it was this increasing horrendous feminisation and moral laxity and just looshness and everyone's lounging around eating sandwiches. That's what caused the fall of the Roman Empire.
33:16 Speaker 06 That's what caused it because they went too soft. And then you get the racist arguments as well because you get eastern emperors, so people like Septimius Severus, who is Libyan, people like Philip the Arab. And there are these articles from the twenties and thirties that are just horrific, where scholars were writing articles about how there were too many foreign names, like they went through the epigraphy and looked at names from the third and fourth centuries, like there were too many foreign names, and that's why the empire-
33:43 Kate Lister? Hashtag science.
33:45 Speaker 06 You're like, what?
33:45 Kate Lister? Hashtag, oh dear.
33:47 Speaker 06 Hashtag 1930s science, yeah.
33:49 Kate Lister? Well, I mean, that was peak eugenics, wasn't it? That was, and then, you know, and look where we ended up with that crap.
34:01 Kate Lister? I'll be back with Emma after this short break.
34:15 Kate Lister? Hello, betwixters. I'm jumping in here because I have some very exciting news. Betwixt the Sheets has set up camp on YouTube. That's right, it took us a while, but we are there now. So if you are the kind of person who likes to see your podcasts as well as hear your podcasts, you can now go and find us right there. And the link is in the show notes. And please remember to like and subscribe because the people in charge of the money really do like that.
34:44 Kate Lister? Right, let's get on with it.
34:57 Kate Lister? The Victorians had an extra special reason to be concerned about this and projecting a lot of stuff onto the Roman Empire, because they had an empire all of their very own, which they also got by being assholes.
35:10 Speaker 06 Yeah, and they then immediately began to fear that they might lose it by not being as strong as their grandads were, and imagining their grandads to be the hardiest men who ever hardied, and their grandmothers to be the most pure and wonderful women. And then they look around at the women and men in their lives and they're like, "That man's trousers are terribly tight."
35:32 Kate Lister? We're gonna lose Constantinople.
35:35 Speaker 06 This must be the end of days. Yeah. And no empire is ever in a state of...
35:42 Kate Lister? Chill.
35:43 Speaker 06 Yeah, it's never in a state of chill. It has to be constantly reasserting itself. And there is never a point in the Roman Empire, there is never a point in the history of any empire where everybody was like, "God, I'm so glad that I'm in this empire," and where there weren't people trying to leave it. But every imperial power always thinks that if only they could just subdue this one guy, or if they could only just be perfect in some way, everything would be fine. If only they could understand that this is best.
36:10 Kate Lister? I mean, the Victorians had a very odd attitude towards the Romans anyway, because when they discovered Pompeii, they were genuinely quite upset to find as many cocks as they did. Like, that really, that really freaked them out. So you've sort of got this weird juxtaposition of that they're projecting a lot of like, "Oh, well, they lost their empire because they were too morally loose and sexy." But then also, at the same time, they really revere them and get very upset when they realise that they quite like looking at a lot of sexy stuff.
36:39 Speaker 06 The British Victorian, like, relationship with the Roman Empire is so confused.
36:45 Kate Lister? Very confused.
36:46 Speaker 06 Like, the fact that Victoria builds this statue of Boudicca and then has this statue be proclaimed that Boudicca was so great that she managed to defeat the Romans and then also become the Romans. They simultaneously love and hate them, and they want to be them, but be better than them. And there is this kind of general belief that the Romans lost their empire because they were decadent, and we can keep ours forever and ever if we don't go down that route. If we can just stay... Morally pure, then we'll be able to hold on to ours forever and we'll defeat Romans. As it turns out, the Romans kept theirs for much longer. Because it has absolutely nothing to do with morality.
37:28 Kate Lister? No, no, we should say that as well, that it really, if you hear somebody saying, oh, you know, all empires before they collapsed were in a state of moral and sexual excess, just hit them with something. Just, you don't even need to talk to them, just find a book and hit them with it.
37:43 Speaker 06 Just hit them with anything, yeah.
37:44 Kate Lister? Yeah, anything, just throw fists, it's just, it's, it's, it's, it's like.
37:47 Speaker 06 It's a stupid thing.
37:48 Kate Lister? It's the thin end of a wedge to women wreck everything, that's what that argument is, there's a direct.
37:54 Speaker 06 Women and foreigners, yeah.
37:55 Kate Lister? Women and foreigners and blowjobs spoil everything, frankly.
38:00 Speaker 06 And that there is some kind of universal standard of, of pure masculinity which you can apply.
38:06 Kate Lister? That can be infected.
38:07 Speaker 06 Yeah, which can be infected and diluted.
38:10 Kate Lister? Yeah.
38:11 Speaker 06 And it is, it's very European thinking and it's daft, because they only ever are thinking about European empires, they're never thinking about South American empires or Asian empires or North African empires.
38:23 Kate Lister? And as you rightly point out, the Romans have been absolute dirtbags the entire time that they were there. It didn't get worse, did it, just before they left, it's like their levels of debauchery were fairly consistent.
38:34 Speaker 06 The Romans founded their city by one brother killing another brother and then the murderer brother stealing a hundred women from nearby towns.
38:45 Kate Lister? See?
38:46 Speaker 06 Like tricking all of his neighbours to come to a party and then stealing their daughters.
38:51 Kate Lister? They've never behaved themselves.
38:53 Speaker 06 How Rome is founded, like that is their glorious myth, it is not great from the start.
38:59 Kate Lister? Do you think that it would be fair, because you know, I don't, I don't want to defend the Victorians, I certainly don't want to give them any ammunition or anyone thinks that their ideas are good, but was there anything in their understanding of the Romans? I mean, were they a good people that? Constantly had orgies. We still like to think of them like that, that like even if the Romans could barely walk from one end of the street to the other without being invited to an orgy.
39:20 Speaker 06 I mean, if the poetry is anything to go by and the art, then they were certainly having plenty of sex and surprisingly public sex. Like, it is impossible to read Marshall without even, you know, being fairly like open to various kinds of sexuality and not be like, Jesus Christ.
39:39 Kate Lister? Yeah, steady, steady on.
39:40 Speaker 06 Like, steady on, lads. And you're reading this at dinner parties, are you?
39:46 Kate Lister? You'd phone the police. It's like, if you were just going around to have tea with your mate and they put Pornhub on the telly, that's the sort of the equivalent.
39:51 Speaker 06 Basically, that's how it feels, yeah. And then all of a sudden, he's gonna be just giving you a six-line poem about how that girl over there is a lesbian, and it's very funny indeed. With like graphic descriptions of her sex life. And, or like, there's this list he has of, of poems that you can write on gift tags for presents at Satinalia. And like, one of them is just a man for sex, and another one is a penis made out of flour.
40:20 Kate Lister? So we've all known a Marshall, haven't we, that just, you know, you just ignore him the best that you can and try not to laugh too hard at his jokes.
40:26 Speaker 06 Except the Romans were like, God, you're brilliant. We're gonna make you incredibly rich, because we love your poems so much.
40:35 Kate Lister? See, they are consistently rude. But it's interesting, you know, that we've spoken about Roman sex before many, many times, but it's not that it was a complete free-for-all. They had their hang-ups. They were just different hang-ups to the ones we have today.
40:49 Speaker 06 They are, and they are free about some things and not free about other things. And also, the people that we are talking about are always like the richest of the rich.
40:59 Kate Lister? Yeah, the people that can get away with this.
41:01 Speaker 06 Yeah, they're not the middle classes, they're not the lower classes. They are the, you know, the moneyed leisure classes, basically, whose job is writing poetry. Or just being very rich, or being the wife of a senator. Like, they are not people who have jobs to go to.
41:16 Kate Lister? No. But one thing we can say with some confidence is that the fall of the Roman Empire was not caused by people having too much sex.
41:24 Speaker 06 It was not caused by too much sex. It was caused by, uh, play, climate change and shifting, uh, borders.
41:33 Kate Lister? Which is decidedly less exciting.
41:35 Speaker 06 It's, uh, it's less thrilling. It's, uh, it's less fun to bring up in the pub, I'll be up.
41:40 Kate Lister? Oh, Emma, you have been wonderful once again. Thank you so much. If people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you?
41:47 Speaker 06 They can find me at emmasouthon.com or they can find me at historyosexy.com and listen to my podcast with Janina Mattison.
41:54 Kate Lister? Amazing. Thank you so much. Will you come back again?
41:58 Speaker 06 Anytime.
42:04 Kate Lister? Thank you for listening and thank you so much to Emma for joining us once again. And if you have got an idea for a subject, or maybe you just wanted to say hello, then you can email us at [email protected] . Coming up, we've got episodes on the real Virgin Mary, uh huh huh, and an episode on the vanity of Henry VIII, no less. It's quite a long episode. This podcast was edited by Tom Delargy and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long. Join me again, Betwixt the Sheet, the history of sex scandal in society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.
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