Pod Insights Let's Talk About Myths, Baby! | Greek Mythology & the Ancient Mediterranean Ancient History Fangirl: How an Empire Ends, Rome's Gothic Immigrants About this episode An episode of Ancient History Fangirl. One that I, Liv, really want you all to hear. This story isn’t just about Goths that lived outside Rome. It’s also about the Goths that lived inside the Empire—as everything from slaves to soldiers to free citizens. How they were treated within that empire fueled and fed the wheel of the Migration era. Hatred of immigrants played a major role in Migration-Era conflicts–in ways scarily similar to events today. Get the show notes here https://wp.me/p9hxAY-2wv. Listen to all the episode on How An Empire Ends via this Spotify playlist https://open.spotify.com/playlist/68E9Vm2GDosXNeWQVefhYf. Find more from Ancient History Fangirl here https://www.ancienthistoryfangirl.com/episodes/. Find more information https://linktr.ee/jennywilliamson on Jenny's novel which is featured at the end (and is an amazing romance novel featuring the dying Roman Empire as the Big Bad).
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Transcript 12,320 words · 8 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Liv Albert? Hey nerds, really quick note from me. I want to tell you that we now have the applications open for the next set of listener group trips. This is us going back to the original, the trips that we have held in the past that have been so much fun, so successful, and pretty affordable in terms of wandering around Greece with a bunch of nerds. So check out the details and get your applications in at mythsbaby.com/groups.
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2:08 Liv Albert? Hello, this is Let's Talk About Myths, baby! Except, actually, it's not. Hi, I'm Liv. I'm here with something special today. I am here with another episode of Ancient History Fangirl. This is, I've played, I guess, at least one, I'm trying, time is a flat circle. I'm here with another episode of Ancient History Fangirl. This time, it's honestly just something I really wanted to put into my feed and to present to you all. Right now, Jen and Jenny, who, as you probably know, are two very good friends of mine, so I won't pretend this isn't also that.
2:49 Liv Albert? But Jen and Jenny with Ancient History Fangirl right now are doing this kind of simultaneous series on the, sort of, the end of the Roman Empire, as well as some other, you know, alternate side quests that I won't pretend I fully understand because they're just, they're doing so much and I love them for it. But this episode specifically, I listened to and I just thought immediately, I would love to put this in my feed. I would love to share it with all of you and have you be aware of this series that they're working on. Because it is about how Rome fell as an empire, the long and slow decline of it. But in that story is
3:34 Liv Albert? an absolutely unimaginable amount of parallels. And so, without saying much more, I will just say that you can find the rest of this incredible series on the Ancient History Fangirl feed, wherever you get your podcasts. I've linked to their website in the episode's description. Make sure you're subscribed to these guys. They are a member of the Memory Collective, just not on the Podcast Network, but they are a member of the Collective. And this episode is about
4:08 Liv Albert? immigration, forced immigration, migrants, and...
4:16 Liv Albert? And the horrors of the Roman Empire.
4:20 Liv Albert? And it, you know,
4:22 Liv Albert? it definitely doesn't resemble everything happening right now. And by that, I mean, obviously, it absolutely does. But fuck, they did great in this episode. Enjoy.
4:37 Speaker 02 Cruelty is the point.
4:54 Speaker 03 All day, you have tasted the smoke in your throat from a hundred thousand fires, all burning in one place. You have never come so close to a city before. Your parents tell you not to be afraid, that there will be other children in this city, other boys like you. Boys fled from the fields and forests who speak your language. Maybe some of your friends from the village will be there. You will see them again, they say. Your mother has filled your head with hope for a warm bed, a night at a hostel, shelter behind high walls. It's that safety you want most. Weeks ago, you barely escaped the Huns, and you still wake up with screaming nightmares. For days, you walk beside the cart.
5:37 Speaker 03 You take turns driving the oxen and walking ahead to kick stones out of their way. Sometimes, there are other refugees around you, some of them carrying nothing, some with entire households on their wagons. You play and run with the children, darting among the moving wagons, avoiding cuffs and curses from the adults. Finally, after days and days of walking, you see the walled city looming in the distance. The great gates loom up over your head, higher than any building you've seen. Roman sentries patrol the walls with bows drawn and helmets gleaming. A crowd has gathered outside the gates, hundreds of ragged refugees. Your parents wait all day in the dust and the heat before they get close to the front.
6:22 Speaker 03 Your father is speaking to the sentries at the gate, and there's a tense To their voices. You tug on your mother's tunic. Not now, says your mother, and she throws a glance at the door. A tenseness to her you've never seen before, not even when the huns were coming. Get in the wagon, she says in a low voice, under the blankets. Ahead your father and the sentry are arguing, their voices raised to shouts. Before you can move, someone seizes your arm in a hard metal grip. It hurts. It's one of the Roman sentries. He says something to your mother, words incomprehensible, falling from his lips as harsh and pure as metal striking metal. The sentry and your father almost come to blows and your mother lunges for you. One of the guards hauls back and strikes her a clean hit to the jaw.
7:07 Speaker 03 She goes down and the crowd rises up in fury and suddenly you are in the middle of a riot. The crowd shoves and shoves and when the sentries draw their swords with a cold metal hiss, that's when they start screaming. You can't see your parents anymore, only a furious group of refugees raising clubs and their bare hands against Roman steel. Someone pulls you away from the riots, picks you up and shoves you into a cart, the kind used to transport slaves. It's already full of children and you are all crushed together, pushed against the bars. You still can't see your parents. You shout, where are my parents? But the Romans ignore you. The cart lurches forward. You grasp at the bars, losing your balance. The children are crying all around you, screaming for their parents.
7:51 Speaker 03 Somewhere in the crowd you think you catch sight of your father, lunging after you as a sword punches through his chest. And then the gate closes. What did you just see? The cart is through the gates and you fall back away from the bars. Did you see that? Was it real? You must be dreaming. Your father is not dead. He cannot die. Your mother is outside the gates and soon she will find you. You'll wake up soon, in the hostel she promised. Any minute, you'll wake up. I'm Jenny Williamson.
8:22 Speaker 02 And I'm Jen McMenamy.
8:24 Speaker 03 And this is Ancient History Fangirl.
8:26 Speaker 02 Whew, that feels like a little rip from the headlines there Jenny. This, this season, it's really difficult sometimes to read and record and be a part of, given the state of the world today. I'm really heartbroken by that cold open, but I'm, I'm glad that you wrote it. This is still happening.
8:44 Speaker 03 In our last episode, we took a look at the outside forces driving the engine of the migration era. Honeck migrations and invasions, constant displacement and conflict at the Roman borders. And if you look at that alone, it's easy to get a picture of the migration era as caused by forces outside of Roman control and outside of Roman borders. That isn't the full picture. The reality is that Goths did not live just outside of Rome's borders. They lived inside Rome too, in the heart of the Italian peninsula, side by side with Italians, and also in the outer provinces, in territories that were conquered by force. Some didn't choose to live in the Roman Empire. The empire came to them. And how they were treated within that empire fueled and fed that violence. It kept the wheel spinning.
9:29 Speaker 02 Goths living inside Rome also revolted during those Gothic wars. They joined with Goths on the outside to wreak havoc whenever they could. And sometimes the Goths on the outside became the Goths on the inside and vice versa. I'm feeling like inside and outside Gauls from the Verisign Gettys episode, right?
9:47 Speaker 03 Right, the inside and outside Gauls. I mean, it's, it's different because the borders were porous, is what I'm trying to say.
9:53 Speaker 02 Um, as Jenny said, these boundaries were porous and Rome's policies about immigrants, citizens, in-groups and out-groups played a huge role in how things actually played out. This story isn't just about Goths that lived outside Rome. It's also about the Goths that lived inside the empire, as everything from slaves to soldiers to free citizens.
10:14 Speaker 03 A huge source for this episode is Douglas Boyne's outstanding book, Alaric the Goth: An Outsider's History of the Fall of Rome. It is such an excellent book, and it's one of the most evocative and thorough I've found in discussing conditions not just outside the Roman Empire on those contentious Borders, but inside it as well. Boyn really zeroes in on the immigrant experience in Rome leading up to and during Alaric's invasions of Rome. So I'm going to be relying heavily on that here. And we did an interview with him recently. It's called In Search of the Real Alaric. You should give it a listen.
10:45 Speaker 02 Yeah, it's a great interview and he's just really fascinating. I believe you can find him on Instagram. We highly recommend checking out the work he's doing.
10:53 Speaker 03 Yeah. One of the reasons I haven't done a series on this before and why I struggled so much to understand the full history of the Goths in the Roman Empire was that we're not just talking about one relationship between these two people. We're talking about many very complex relationships between the Roman Empire and multiple groups of Goths outside the borders and inside. Because while the Goths were outsiders, they were to some extent insiders too. They were slaves and slave owners, federati, soldiers in the Roman army proper, merchants and laborers, and everyone in between. There was even a half Gothic emperor as early as the 200s. It was Maximinius Thrax, maybe. I mean, this is a little bit questionable because the only source for this is the Historia Augusta, but it's possible.
11:35 Speaker 02 Adding some levity to this dark season, my dog Jake's middle name is Maximinius. It's Max after Maximinius Thrax because Jenny is like, I really think you should name a tiny dog Maximinius Thrax, like a teacup poodle. And Jake's a Yorkie, so pretty close.
11:49 Speaker 03 Yeah, that was like the running joke in that episode. I think it was one of the Child Emperor episodes or something. Oh, no, it was one of the Praetorian Guard episodes. Very early episode where we talk about Maximinius Thrax. And like, he was like this big, muscular, manly man. And like, he had such a like, kind of bruiser name that I thought the funniest thing about him was that this is a name somebody should give a tiny dog.
12:10 Speaker 02 Yeah. And it kind of, it kind of came back to me a little after I had started getting the dog used to his first name. So that's his middle name whenever he's naughty. So moving away from the levity.
12:19 Speaker 03 Oh, are we moving away from the levity now?
12:22 Speaker 02 I mean, we kind of have to.
12:24 Speaker 03 Never to return until this episode is over.
12:27 Speaker 02 I mean, look, this is, this is going to be a long season. It's going to be the first season we can currently run with another season alternating with it, but are both the beginning and end of an empire. So it's, it's going to be a lot of dark stuff, but we will inject levity where we can, including my very silly looking foopy dog. So inside the empire, any individual goths place in it would have varied depending on social status, geographic location, whether this particular goth assimilated well into Roman society and a wide range of other factors. We can't break down every single relationship each Gothic person had with the Roman Empire. That would have been as unique as fingerprints, right? And it's kind of also the experience that like many immigrants have in their new countries. Like they're all different experiences.
13:11 Speaker 02 Like my experience in the UK as an immigrant in that country is very different from other people's experiences, even though like we might've come from the same country. So again, it is all individual and you need to kind of like keep that in your mind. However, what we can do is talk about the immigrant experience in Rome and how that would have applied to the goths broadly and inequities that would have fueled the conflicts that were such a part of the migration era.
13:37 Speaker 03 Here's one thing I want to flag is that racists have argued in the past, based on this history, that it was immigrants who were the cause of the Roman Empire's downfall because they didn't assimilate well enough.
13:49 Speaker 02 I thought it was queer people.
13:50 Speaker 03 I thought it was lyciency.
13:52 Speaker 02 I thought it was like climate change.
13:54 Speaker 03 I mean, I mean, climate change, I would believe.
13:56 Speaker 02 I thought it was the lead in the aqueducts that were slowly making everyone go insane.
14:00 Speaker 03 Well, that I also would believe, like, these are, these are like, these are plausible. Then there's like, oh, you know, it was all of those brown people, you know? Like, that's what the racists are saying, essentially. That isn't what I'm arguing at all. I'm arguing that the way ancient Rome treated its immigrants, its cultural divisions at all levels of society and its violence toward them led to a level of instability that contributed to its unraveling in a way that in some places is shockingly similar to conditions today. We are not blaming the immigrants. We are blaming the inequality and the bigotry. And as you'll see, There were many immigrants who were not immigrants by choice. There were people in areas that Rome conquered. And then what they would do is settle there and call the indigenous people who already lived there foreigners on their own soil and treat them like immigrants. That's what they would do.
14:45 Speaker 03 So you could just not go into Rome at all and find yourself quote unquote un-immigrant or a foreigner in the place you've lived all your life.
14:52 Speaker 02 Kind of like the idea of, I don't know, taking over Greenland, calling everyone who lives in Greenland foreigners.
14:58 Speaker 03 Yeah, or Canada.
14:59 Speaker 02 Or Ukraine. I don't know. Like, this isn't happening.
15:03 Speaker 03 This isn't applicable to today at all, you guys.
15:17 Speaker 02 So we're going to talk a little bit about Roman citizenship, which is, which is really complicated, so bear with us. As we said, the conflicts of the migration era weren't just about outsiders being driven out of their homes by the Huns and hurled into the borders of a hostile empire. They were also about goths inside the empire, disaffected with how things were and joining groups like Alaric's in droves. It was about people on the borders, living in Rome's shadow, shut out from opportunities and how that experience wound up radicalizing them. Alaric is a prime example of this. His region in Dacia, the pine tree island, had once been Roman territory and then was ceded. His people may have once been considered Roman citizens and were still Romanized.
16:00 Speaker 02 He was still close to the border, his people still subject to slave raids. And because his people didn't have full citizenship, they could be enslaved, whereas those on the other side, the literal other side of the river, couldn't be enslaved. Wild.
16:13 Speaker 03 At least some of them, the ones that were full citizens.
16:16 Speaker 02 Exactly. Alaric could probably see over the border, see how life was better, people were more wealthy, and there was more opportunity. Opportunities that should have been open to him, but it turns out weren't. That could have been a big part of Alaric's story, and that's how Douglas Boyne interprets it.
16:33 Speaker 03 I can't tell this story without going in depth into Roman citizenship, which is a thing I also try to avoid during this podcast. Like, there were other opportunities I've had to go in-depth into Roman citizenship. But looking, just peeling back the hood on that and just looking in, it is complicated, you guys. There were lots of different levels of citizenship in the Roman Empire. It varied based on time period, location, the social status and rank of the individual in question, their gender, and a range of other factors. The oldest right we have of a right to Roman citizenship is the Twelve Tables, which dates to roughly 449 B.C. The Twelve Tables were an original document outlining the laws of Rome. And while we currently only have fragments,
17:16 Speaker 03 there once would have been a copy of these set up in the Roman Forum for anyone to look at.
17:21 Speaker 02 The Twelve Tables outlines the rights of free citizens of Rome with regard to property, court proceedings, death and inheritance, and expectations around public behavior. This one mainly applies to women who must be strictly controlled naturally and also weren't citizens.
17:36 Speaker 03 Well, I mean, that's actually not true. I think time period, depending on the individual woman's status and stuff, but women were citizens, it's just that they had a lot less rights as citizens, as far as I understand it.
17:48 Speaker 02 You're right, and I take it back. Women could be citizens, but they did not have the same rights, and they most certainly didn't have any votes or the same property rights and stuff that men had. So there's a lot of inequality, and I feel the need to just keep hammering this home when I hear people suggest that women who don't have children should maybe not have as many votes as people who do. Moving on.
18:08 Speaker 03 And if you think natalism isn't part of empire building, you'd be wrong. We'll get to that, don't worry.
18:15 Speaker 02 Male citizens had certain responsibilities, such as taxes and military service. If you refused to serve in the military, for instance, you might lose your right to vote, and this actually happened in the Second Punic War. Is that the one where Hannibal went over the Alps?
18:28 Speaker 03 Yeah, I think so, because the third one was the Big Siege.
18:32 Speaker 02 Yeah, I don't know that I'd want to fight in that war with the guy who's like, "I'm gonna be so badass, I'm going over the Alps with war elephants." But, you know.
18:39 Speaker 03 The fun thing is, Jen, you might not have a choice. The battle might come to you.
18:43 Speaker 02 Well, that's actually what he did, right? He went over the Alps, it came to them.
18:46 Speaker 03 Exactly, and then he's just wandering around in Italy, you know, raising towns and trampling- Your garden with his elephants.
18:53 Speaker 02 Me and war elephants, we have a very tacit agreement. We're very good friends.
18:57 Speaker 03 You invite them in, you offer them a cocktail.
19:00 Speaker 02 I do. I give them a human gall cocktail. I'm not going to tell them where I got the human gall from, but you know.
19:04 Speaker 03 I have a vat of human gall in the back, just in case any war elephants show up and I might have to placate them with drink.
19:09 Speaker 02 Absolutely. I make them a nice little Froze, a little human gall. It's fine.
19:14 Speaker 03 These are survival tactics when shit hits the fan in ancient Rome.
19:19 Speaker 02 Or modern America. So, general rights of citizens included the right to own property, vote, hold civic office, only if you were an aristocrat and depending on the time period and also only if you were a man.
19:32 Speaker 03 That depends on the time period. There were times when non-aristocrats, like plebeians, could vote and hold public office. That's not always true.
19:39 Speaker 02 So, your dad or the male head of the household had the right to execute you at any time, at any age. Although this may have only really been used in practice to decide whether to expose an infant or raise it, the man got to make that decision. So citizenship included, from its earliest history, a man's right to rule, life or death, over his family.
20:02 Speaker 03 Roman citizens had certain protections. The right not to be tortured, not to be whipped, not to be enslaved, not to be executed, unless by your head of household. A death sentence could be commuted to voluntary exile. And while some offenses were still death sentences, like treason, Roman citizens could not be crucified even for that. Other legal rights included the right to enter into a contract, the right to appeal a court decision, to bring a lawsuit to the court, or be sued and have a legal trial, the right to have your citizenship passed down to your children, and the right not to pay certain taxes and follow certain onerous local rules. Details depend on your location and the time period. And while those rules seem kind of less dramatic than the ones about enslavement and execution,
20:45 Speaker 03 they were no less important because built into citizenship from its earliest times was a mechanism where people on the inside could dominate those on the outside. They had certain advantages, not just in how the state treated them, but in how they were treated under the law.
20:58 Speaker 02 As I always tell you, over and over, I feel like it's my Catchphrase, Jenny. When people talk about the vaunted democracy of ancient Rome, we always have to ask, democracy for who? Who has a vote and who has a right to take part in that democracy? It's pretty narrow. It's the same thing here with citizenship, right? Citizenship for who? Rights for who? Even among full citizens, some had the right to vote and hold office while others didn't. Women were technically citizens, but they couldn't vote, couldn't serve in public office, their public behavior was severely restricted, severely constrained, and their husbands had rights over them, including the right to execute them or dictate whether they exposed their children. Sounds like
21:40 Speaker 02 they don't have a lot of bodily autonomy here, Jenny. That this doesn't, this doesn't frighteningly sound like something that could happen today.
21:47 Speaker 03 None of this should surprise you because we are still mucking around in the basement of the patriarchy.
21:53 Speaker 02 Yeah, and we're still dealing with people who think that this was a great way to structure a society and live their lives. And of course, enslaved people were not citizens. Their masters had complete control over them. Freedmen, slaves who had been set free, were not automatically citizens. They had more rights than an enslaved person, but not by a lot.
22:15 Speaker 03 As Rome expanded, it colonized different regions and started taking a carrot-and-stick approach to integrating conquered communities. The stick, of course, was war and occupation. If people didn't accept Roman rule, they could expect any rebellion to be violently crushed. The carrot was that if they did accept Roman rule, certain people would be afforded at least some privileges of Roman citizenship, all the comforts and luxuries and wealth of being part of the great might of Rome, and for some, a chance for upward mobility that may not have existed among the entrenched power structure of the pre-existing culture. Or for the cooperative upper class, a chance to preserve that status in a world that was now completely overturned. And we talk about this in an episode that is a pretty far back in our history now. It's the Benevenavich episode, Rivers of Old
22:59 Speaker 03 Londinium. I feel like that episode was really eye-opening in terms of how the Romans completely overturned existing power structures in the communities that they conquered, which could work in the favor of some people, depending on where and when.
23:14 Speaker 02 Exactly, and it also like really gave me a different insight into how upending that class system and promoting other people or allowing some people to have more power than would traditionally be given to them, like in Boudicca's case, not acknowledging her rule, created this instability and destabilization and allowed the Romans to sort of put people in charge that would work best for them and while also sort of eroding the cultural identity and autonomy of the people.
23:42 Speaker 03 It's divide and conquer. Like, the Romans were basically providing incentives to colluders to side with them against their own people by saying, "Yeah, in our regime, you can be in charge." Or, "In our regime, you can have citizenship. You can have all these rights that you didn't have before." Offering certain people citizenship in that process was just one tool that they had in their arsenal. We really see it at work in situations like, yeah, Boudicca and other places. They did this a lot in Britain.
24:08 Speaker 02 Anyway, when an invasion started, citizenship was sometimes offered individually to local leaders in conquered territories to get them to help the Romans conquer their own people. When Romans expanded into Britain, as Jenny just said, they offered citizenship to some prominent tribal leaders on an individual basis to make them allies. And as Rome expanded, it started offering some privileges of citizenship to whole populations. This was usually not full citizenship status as you would get if you were born in Rome to two citizen parents, though. It was varied case by case. The rights varied depending on the place and time period. Some examples of various levels of rights in the Roman Empire include:
24:49 Speaker 03 Or it might be the Roman Republic, depending on history. Latin rights. At the end of the Latin War in 338 B.C., the Romans extended certain rights to people living in areas of Italy that had come under Roman control during the war. People had the right to practice business in Rome, the right to move around in Roman-controlled areas without losing citizenship, and some other rights, but not full citizenship rights.
25:12 Speaker 02 Soci or federati rights. Groups that were not in Rome but allied to Rome or conquered territories were sometimes given some legal rights as long as they provided soldiers for Roman wars. And this is where a lot of Federati military groups come from. A lot of friction was caused over the course of Rome's history because of the paltriness of these rights versus the high manpower demands of these conscriptions. Conscription of his people was a key concern of Alaric's.
25:39 Speaker 03 Provincial rights. The provincials were people who lived in conquered areas under Roman control, who had some rights, but quite a bit less than full citizenship. And it would really depend on the treaty that your leaders had negotiated with Rome when they were conquered.
25:52 Speaker 02 Exactly. Pergrini, and this means foreigner, and refers to anyone living in areas under Roman control who had only the most basic sets of rights. Romans considered them immigrants on their own soil. These are the people who are native to this territory, who are now being considered foreigners in their own land. I just, my brain is broken.
26:14 Speaker 03 Yeah. A noted example of that is the Welsh. We talk about that in our series on the conquest of Britain, which starts with the Druids episode, Last Stand of the Druids. So, these were just some of the classes of Roman citizenship that you might have. There are many others. And if you didn't have full 100% Roman citizenship rights, you would be at a class disadvantage. You might not have the right to vote or run for office, so you couldn't have a say in determining the rules of your own community. Your kids might not automatically be citizens, so they would have fewer rights than you do. You might not have the right to marry anyone outside your own citizenship class. You might not have the right to leave any inheritance to your children on your death. We see this at work with Boudica.
26:57 Speaker 03 So you couldn't build wealth for later generations. You could be at a disadvantage in the courts if, say, a full citizen wanted to challenge your ownership of land or property. Full citizens were automatically favored by the courts if there was a dispute. A full citizen could theoretically just take your house or land, as I understand it. I'm not 100% sure, but that's what it seems like to me.
27:18 Speaker 02 And if you had a legal dispute, you might not have the right to bring it up in court. Your local law enforcement could torture you with impunity if they thought you had information about a crime. You could be whipped or sentenced to death or be crucified. You might not have the right to not be enslaved, meaning you could be enslaved. You might be facing conscription, willing or not, because of the terms of the treaty that your leaders made with the Roman government. And a lot of times, those treaties were kind of treaties at knife point, you know?
27:44 Speaker 03 Oh, absolutely, yeah. These are treaties made by the conquered with the conqueror.
27:49 Speaker 02 Exactly. So you weren't getting the best terms. These weren't things that were being negotiated with people having equal footing to, you know, make certain concessions for each other, right? This is very much lose everything.
27:59 Speaker 03 I would say it really does depend. Some places, the Romans would probably give them better terms, depending on how much it would cost to fully conquer them versus negotiate this treaty with them.
28:09 Speaker 02 Probably also the time period, what was going on back in Rome and where their resources could be spent. You know, other wars that might be happening that would take away from it if they had to conquer a certain place. It's a complicated issue, but for the most part, these treaties were not being negotiated on equal terms.
28:24 Speaker 03 There's definitely times in Roman history where they're in the midst of fighting a war and then some other fire breaks out over here. And the emperor has to negotiate a settlement with the people he was just fighting with so he can go and put out that fire. And I would guess, I'm not 100% sure, but I would guess that in those cases, those people maybe get better terms. This heavily varies on the individual circumstances, but yeah.
28:46 Speaker 02 Yeah, and we are speaking in broad strokes here. So there were different levels of rights or lack of rights for women. Freedmen, freed enslaved people, immigrants, and others of differing social classes in various territories under different Roman treaties at different times. To sort through it all, we would need an ancient Roman law degree, probably an advanced law degree.
29:09 Speaker 03 But let's just say that from the beginning, the Romans were very, very used to vast inequalities in their society, where large groups of people were treated differently under the law. They were used to full citizens having every advantage, including lawmaking and legal privileges, over conquered peoples who now lived in the empire, not by choice, but by conquest. And this, of course, led to and fed into interpersonal dynamics of derision, contempt, and violence against those deemed "other", even when those "others" were in fact legally fellow Romans. In 212 AD, the Emperor Caracalla issued the Edict of Caracalla, which granted all free men and women full Roman citizenship. All free men would have all the same rights as full citizen men, and all free women the same rights as full citizen women. This did not include slaves.
29:54 Speaker 02 This would have sent a huge shockwave across the empire. Suddenly, vast swaths of people who couldn't before could now run for office, vote, and hold other rights that put them on an equal footing with legacy Roman citizens. But it may shock you to hear that this did not eradicate discrimination from the empire. No. The old habit of looking down on the "other" went too deep, and legal inequities remained. First off, women and men still didn't have the same rights. Let's not get crazy. And enslaved people still had absolutely no rights or bodily autonomy, because this is still the worst. The Edict of Caracalla also didn't apply to the "deditici", a broad category of people living in conquered regions,
30:39 Speaker 02 various types of immigrants and former enslaved people who had committed serious wrongdoings before being manumitted. Or, and this is key, had been punished by their masters for doing wrong, whether they did wrong or not.
30:53 Speaker 03 Having committed serious wrongdoing, that's a thing that your master determines about you, whether or not you actually did that thing. I don't think there's any mechanism of investigation here.
31:03 Speaker 02 So, if you lived on the border of the Roman Empire, if you were part of a society that had been conquered by the Romans, you still might have lesser rights than other Roman citizens, even after the Edict of Caracalla.
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33:08 Speaker 01 Hot flashes, rage crying, forgetting words mid-sent-ten.
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34:16 Speaker 03 This is Jenny Williamson from Ancient History Fangirl, here to tell you about my upcoming scorching romance novel, Enemy of My Dreams. In the last days of the Roman Empire, a desperate princess and a brutal Gothic warlord forged a dangerous alliance. Julia, only daughter of the Emperor of Rome, lives a life of excess and freedom. But when her father dies and her teenage brother takes the throne, he will stop at nothing to seize control of both the empire and his wayward sister. And now Alaric of the Visigoths, a ferocious warrior who has battled Rome for years, has come to the capital to bargain for his homeland. Realizing how perilous her position is, Julia impulsively turns to Alaric, the empire's sworn enemy, and the one man who can make Rome tremble.
35:00 Speaker 03 Bestselling author Elodie Harper says, quote, "This is a hugely entertaining Roman world romanticy with a hilarious heroine and smoldering hero, whose adventures in love and war are set against the backdrop of the last dangerous days of an ancient empire." Enemy of My Dreams is available wherever books are sold.
35:26 Speaker 03 So Jen, around this time, you might be wondering if you were ambitious and wanted the upward mobility that came from buying fully into the system, could you rise in status and gain full Roman citizenship? Could your citizenship rank change? So the answer is that it depends. And from what I understand, it's kind of rare there were ways to do this. One way was military service. As a member of a conquered people, at some times, depending on a lot of things probably, you could earn Roman citizenship if you served in the Roman auxiliaries like Alaric did, I think. So some people with lesser citizenship privileges joined the military voluntarily to improve their status, but many others were conscripted without their consent because of a treaty their leaders signed with Rome.
36:11 Speaker 03 This may have been a major factor in at least some Gothic wars and rebellions that we told you about in the last episode. Peter Heather mentions how some of the Gothic rebellions can be timed to military campaigns that the Roman emperors were waging and were probably at least partially caused by mass mobilization of Gothic populations inside the Roman Empire who did not want to fight in those wars. In other words, the Goths rebelled when they were too heavily conscripted. But also, as I said, some Goths enlisted voluntarily, sometimes to improve their status in the Roman world. And also, one other key thing about the army is it was steady pay, and that was kind of rare outside of that setting.
36:49 Speaker 02 Absolutely. And you know, you're talking about people who have been moved around and may or may not have like a actual home that is theirs, you know, like this would give them a steady pay, some kind of roof over their head, be it a tent or whatever, like they would have things that they maybe didn't have before or were having problems getting within like Roman society for a host of reasons.
37:10 Speaker 03 One of those things would be land, because you could become a landowner after your service. There would be these land grants for veterans, and land grants for veterans is always this big contentious beast that emperors were dealing with, like where would they get the land, where would they put the veterans? The veterans weren't getting the land they were promised, so now we have a revolt, you know, like this is kind of a big theme. But theoretically, you could retire after your Service in the military and be a landowner with a significantly higher status in life than you had when you began. So this is one of the ways that you raise your status in the system.
37:41 Speaker 02 This is still something that does happen for people to get citizenship. This is part of how my grandfather got citizenship when he came over from Italy in the 20th century. So, you know, we still do this, you know, it's not something that has changed.
37:52 Speaker 03 Free college, you know, other benefits for veterans, like there's still that promise we have now in America theoretically that you enter the military and you can come out with all these benefits that can boost your status in life.
38:05 Speaker 02 And it's something that can give you another path to citizenship. I certainly know that that was the case in the mid 20th century. I suspect it probably is today, too. So I don't know what Alaric's citizenship status was, but it's possible he was one of those ambitious people born on the edge of an empire on the wrong side of the river, who tried to rise through the ranks and gain citizenship from the inside. Being denied his ambitions was radicalizing to him. That's one way to write his story. Douglas Boyne takes this view. And if this is not true for Alaric, or completely true for him, it certainly was for many of the people who followed him. But the inequities weren't just about the laws on the books about what citizenship rights various people had.
38:49 Speaker 02 It also had to do with remanitas, colloquially known as the Roman way of life. Who had it and who didn't? This is where those biases were in play that kept certain people down regardless of the edict of Caracalla. Having remanitas meant being culturally Roman. And while it was vaguely defined, it implied in-groups and out-groups. Douglas Boyne tells us that, quote, mockery and derision, end quote, was part of the immigrant experience, as many Romans saw new immigrants as not being sufficiently culturally Roman. And here's another quote from Douglas Boyne.
39:25 Speaker 03 "Citizens and non-citizens still lived side by side, sometimes in the same Roman village, but they had widely different legal rights. The language of the bureaucracy variously categorized these immigrants as allies (federa di), transfers (deditici), or fortunate ones (leiti). But they stayed confined to these categories of Latin legalism, with no mechanism for attaining full citizenship status. As a result, foreigners could regularly expect ridicule through no fault of their own for their ethnic dress, their language, or the cultural practices they brought with them." "Everyone insults the immigrant," the 4th-century Latin poet Claudian sneered. I mean, to be fair, Claudian sneered at everybody. Like, he was big on the sneering.
40:08 Speaker 03 Douglas Boyne tells us that "as the empire moved into the 400s, a sense of virulent xenophobia grew. Roman poets and playwrights worked anti-immigrant themes into their most popular works. Aristocrats decorated their gardens with statues of conquered 'noble savages' dying or committing suicide. Drunk crowds at chariot races would chant for immigrants to be thrown out of cities, just as, you know, part of their rambunctiousness." Despite the fact that, as Boyne points out from a Roman writer, "the Roman people had always been dependent on the help of these same foreigners for their livelihood." Gosh, Jen, does this sound familiar?
40:46 Speaker 02 I don't know, "Romanahtos: Americanized, Make America, Something, Something."
40:52 Speaker 03 Something about assimilation, "English is now the national language of the country." And yet, we depend on these same immigrants for our livelihood.
41:02 Speaker 02 I gotta just stop, because I'm just like, I get that, like, depressed laugh where I'm just like, if I don't laugh, I'll cry.
41:09 Speaker 03 I mean, look, once you see it, you can't unsee it. And we are giving you guys all of this so that you can live in it with us and not unsee it.
41:18 Speaker 02 And also so you have a framework to understand what's happening and, you know, to help you look at ways in which you can dismantle this way of thinking in your own lives. There are many stories of how hatred of immigrants turned violent. And some of this violence targeted the Goths specifically. The Romans saw the Goths, whether inside or outside the Roman Empire, as particularly lacking in "Romanahtos."
41:42 Speaker 02 I'm just kidding, just gonna say it like that. The Goths wore beards and had long hair. They wore trousers and animal skins.
41:50 Speaker 03 Mustaches.
41:52 Speaker 02 Fantastical mustaches. Civilized Romans, Romans with the real Romanatos.
41:58 Speaker 03 Romanatos.
41:59 Speaker 02 Found the Gothic culture weird, incomprehensible, and violent. They did not assimilate well, at least according to this account. And Douglas Boyne explains it like this, quote, "After Caracalla's law, to be treated with dignity in the later empire always depended on how one dressed, how one spoke, and how one behaved. The acceptance of immigrants in Alaric's time was not, as it were, based on tolerance or on open-mindedness, or even on protected legal principles. It was based on a self-righteous sense of Roman cultural superiority. Basic rights were never guaranteed, for apart from its volumes of laws and the emperor's occasional declarations, the ancient Romans lacked any formal drafted constitution.
42:44 Speaker 02 If the lowliest Roman citizen disapproved of how a foreigner looked, sounded, or acted, there was no recourse from this discrimination. Foreigners were at the mercy of these racial and ethnic structural biases and suffered disproportionately for them. Even soldiers felt slighted in their day-to-day routines."
43:12 Speaker 03 There's an example of a violent clash involving a local Gothic community that occurred in the 380s A.D., probably while Alaric was still a teenager. It happened in Thessaloniki, a Greek town on the northeastern border of the Aegean Sea. Thessaloniki was a seaside resort town with a robust sports culture, and in that town there were a lot of chariot racing hooligans. A military officer named Bootheric had a renowned charioteer arrested for pederasty. He was trying to rape a minor in a tavern. At the time, the punishment for pederasty was death. And you would think that this would be a fairly straightforward case, but Bootheric, the Roman soldier doing the arresting, was a Goth. And this was a really popular sports star.
43:55 Speaker 03 When he arrested the charioteer, the crowd rioted, not just because their favorite charioteer was arrested, but also because of pent-up xenophobic rage against Goths in general, this Goth in particular.
44:06 Speaker 02 I know, a furious mob captured Putheric and hanged him in the circus. And that's not like the fun circus. That's like the circus maximus, I'm guessing, or like a track, pretty much.
44:18 Speaker 03 I think it's like the chariot racing track.
44:19 Speaker 02 I think so, yeah.
44:21 Speaker 03 I think it was also the fun circus, like, just a different fun circus.
44:25 Speaker 02 Well, it was a racing circus. It wasn't like the elephant ones, so you probably would see that more in like the arena, but it wouldn't be fun for the elephants.
44:31 Speaker 03 Right, fun for who, Jen?
44:33 Speaker 02 Fun for who? This is the story of my life. In retaliation, the Emperor Theodosius sent more soldiers of Gothic descent into the city, slaughtering as many as 7,000 men, women, and children in the span of three hours. That was how the Romans calmed things down, which no doubt did not inflame racial tensions at all.
44:53 Speaker 03 The story is that this was a pointed slaughter of Roman citizens by Gothic soldiers in particular because Theodosius wanted to send a message. Stamping down your xenophobia with an act that no doubt is going to inspire a lot more xenophobia.
45:09 Speaker 02 I mean, I just love how these lawmakers understand how to sort out a problem and not just pour gasoline on it. Wait.
45:16 Speaker 03 Dump a bucket of gasoline on that fire.
45:19 Speaker 02 So, this event in general is not well documented. Not all ancient sources agree on the details, but this is just one example of how violent the tensions between Gothic immigrants and other Romans could get. And this wasn't the only instance of that violence.
45:35 Speaker 03 Here's another one, from around the same time period. If you listened to our episode on Alaric, or in any of the episodes previously to this one, because I've talked about it a lot, you already know how, in the year 376 A.D., a group of Goths living just north of the Danube on the western coast of the Black Sea, Alaric's people, were pushed over the Danube River and into Rome by invading Huns. Fleeing violence, 30,000 people tried to cross the river in rafts made out of hollow logs. Many drowned. Those who survived were warehoused in refugee camps. The emperor sent food, but corrupt Roman soldiers sold it and left the refugees to starve. Those Gothic refugees eventually broke out of the camps, and some never made it into the camps, as this particular group of Goths wasn't the only one affected by the Huns.
46:19 Speaker 03 People were pouring over the borders in droves. This event became known as the Gothic Refugee Crisis of 376.
46:27 Speaker 02 Douglas Boyne tells us that hostility toward immigrants, Goths in particular, led to atrocities when Gothic refugees were forced into Rome. Quote, "This generalized hostility probably explains why, as Goths crossed the border in 376, lacking much money with which to purchase food or water, many fell victim to the border guards, who preyed on the immigrants' vulnerabilities. The new immigrants were acting like wild animals who had escaped from their cages, the Romans said. Goths made decent cooks and butlers, but why were they camped in their wagons on Roman land? Demoralized Gothic men, the heads of families, learned to be wary. Dinner invitations were extended by
47:08 Speaker 02 enthusiastic Roman soldiers with the pretense of camaraderie. Only the Goths never came home after the purported meal." So, Boyne talks about how luring foreign dignitaries to assassination banquets had kind of become a tool of Roman statecraft by this point. That is so fucked up. It happened to inconvenient leaders that the Romans wanted gone. But Boyne tells us here that it was also happening to ordinary people. Roman soldiers would lure Gothic men, leaders of their communities, to dinners, perhaps with promises of cooperation and protection for their people, only to murder them. Because, yeah, the Romans are the bad guys here.
47:45 Speaker 03 When people are like, "Oh, Rome was such a shining democracy on a hill." I don't know if they know about the assassination banquets.
47:52 Speaker 02 I don't know if they do, but they do now.
47:55 Speaker 03 Now they can't unsee it. Douglas Boyne continues, quote, "At the Danube border, nervous Roman cities increasingly often locked their gates when they saw ragged Gothic mothers with children coming to the markets. Jordan says that some Gothic parents relinquished their children to slavery during these hard years because they concluded it was better to lose liberty than life. One Roman called the human trafficking morally justifiable." So, the refugee crisis eventually led to one of the Gothic wars from 376 to 382 AD. And this Gothic war is a prime example of how the migration era conflicts were caused not just by factors outside the Roman borders, but by those inside Rome, to do specifically with Roman culture and xenophobia that fueled the conflict. And there's one event I want
48:40 Speaker 03 to zero in on here.
48:41 Speaker 02 The year was 377 A.D. The refugee Goths had broken out of their camps. Refugee Gothic women and children with no money were causing tension in Roman towns by existing and needing help. Romanized Goths who lived among the Romans for years were joining the rebellion. And in this incendiary environment, border guards started separating Gothic boys aged about eight to 10 from their parents at the border. The plan was to distribute these boys among Roman families in various cities and towns, separating them from their cultures and ensuring they grew up with the appropriate amount of Romanitas. So what the Romans were afraid of was a large group of armed Goths inside their borders who might get violent, which was really already happening.
49:25 Speaker 02 They wanted to cut the next generation off at the knees. I mean, ask Arminius how that went down when they did that to him and his people.
49:33 Speaker 03 Ask Bootharic how it went down.
49:35 Speaker 02 Ask Germanicus where those eagles are.
49:38 Speaker 03 Right, seriously. Like, the way that the Romans wanted to tab down on xenophobic violence was adding more xenophobic violence to the fire.
49:46 Speaker 02 This does not at all sound like something that could happen right now in today's... What? No, never mind.
49:52 Speaker 03 Separating children from their parents at the border, parents and children who are fleeing violent situations in their own homeland who don't have a choice.
50:01 Speaker 02 And then not keeping good records to put people back together once the crisis has been managed.
50:06 Speaker 03 No spoilers. So Gothic boys were being separated from their parents at the border and fostered in Roman homes. Again, does this sound familiar? The soldiers were also separating Gothic wives and daughters from their families and taking them as sex slaves. This was also the fate of boys that the soldiers found attractive. So this is how Douglas Boyne describes it. Quote, "State resources were soon allocated to implement the border separation policy in full. An office of the Roman government was set up to oversee the relocation program, and a military appointee received a government salary to manage it. The rugged plateaus and cities beyond the Taurus Mountains in Roman Asia were identified as suitable holding pens for the children. Gothic children were forced to say goodbye
50:51 Speaker 03 Not only to a familiar landscape of childhood memories, but their actual parents, grandparents, and siblings. No documentation was ever kept, as far as historians know, that would have identified the children or helped reunite them with their families. An obvious paper trail, in fact, is quite likely what the Roman government wanted to avoid. Cruelty was the intention. Many Gothic parents never saw their sons again. Have you heard the saying, cruelty is the point, about the Maga movement?
51:19 Speaker 02 Yep.
51:20 Speaker 03 Cruelty was the intention.
51:22 Speaker 02 This is, this is a playbook. Some of these people in charge know exactly what they're doing, and they're taking some shit out of history's darkest corners, excavating it, not to understand and avoid it, they're weaponizing it again.
51:35 Speaker 03 Inflict it on us in modern times.
51:38 Speaker 02 Cruelty is the point. Not long after this, in the summer of 378, the Emperor Valens traveled to the Janub frontier to personally neutralize the violent bands of Gothic bandits ravaging the countryside. A battle erupted, the Battle of Adrianople, and Valens was wounded by an arrow. He was taking refuge in a farmhouse when the Goths set it on fire. At least, that's one version of his death. I'm cool with that version.
52:03 Speaker 03 There are multiple versions, and I will go into detail on all of them in a later episode. Get excited.
52:09 Speaker 02 The Romans were incensed because of the death of their emperor.
52:13 Speaker 03 Due to a problem they created, but anyway.
52:15 Speaker 02 Absolutely. Before the next emperor could even give an order, the Roman official overseeing the separation program enacted his revenge. He gave orders to the officials in all towns and cities where the Gothic boys were housed. Quote, "Call an assembly on your own, offer financial assistance to all the boys placed with Roman families, gather the refugee children in the marketplaces and town squares." And then, as the boys were gathered, archers stationed on the walls shot the boys down, one by one, their blood running red in the market squares across Rome.
52:53 Speaker 02 They were all standing in a town square, these innocent little boys between age eight and 10, and they were shot by professional archers who were stationed there with one purpose: to kill them and watch their blood stain the Roman streets across the empire and send a message: fuck you.
53:11 Speaker 03 This is not the only time the Romans took revenge on Gothic families living integrated in their own cities. Prior to Alaric's last invasion of Rome in the early 400s AD, the official Olympius had the general Stilicho murdered and then gave the order for the families of Gothic Federati troops all up and down the Italian peninsula to be murdered in their homes: men, women, and children. For this reason, 30,000 disaffected Roman troops stationed in towns inside Italy joined Alaric in taking their grievance to the gates of Rome itself. Is it any mystery? There was tension between Goths and Romans during this period, exacerbated by the climate change, violent incursions from the Huns, and upheaval of the migration era? This is not a simple story. It's complicated.
53:55 Speaker 03 And I want to zero in on one of the Gothic wars and tell the story in more detail, because this war, the Gothic War of 376 to 382 AD, was where it all began.
54:06 Speaker 02 It's the melting crucible that gave rise to the migration era as it was defined by most historians. But not just that. It's the war that made everything wrought by Alaric possible. This is the moment where everything changed, where the measure of power tilted towards the Goths, where the Roman Empire, by some accounts, started its centuries-long fall. In the next episode, we'll be telling you the story of the Gothic refugee crisis and of the Gothic War of 376 to 382 in more detail. Because it's the bedrock on which everything else was built. And it's a wild story. Strap in, bring your tissues.
54:44 Speaker 03 So that's it for this week. Join us in two weeks for the next installment in this story. And in the meantime, join us at Ancient History Fangirl at Instagram, Blue Sky, and TikTok. We're most active on Instagram. We still have a Twitter account, which we don't even check anymore. We're still around on Facebook, barely. Or sign up for our newsletter at AncientHistoryFangirl.com.
55:07 Speaker 02 Yeah, our newsletter is a great place to get some insight behind the scenes on what we're working on. But the best place, the best place to find out what we're working on to get extra episodes, ad-free episodes, is our Patreon. Patreon is literally the reason we can still keep doing this work. We can still keep telling these stories. And, you know, I feel really strongly, I don't want to speak for Jenny, that right now, we need as many voices as possible telling history, keeping it alive, and bringing the past to light, and showing how the past is indeed prologue and affects our present. So if you want to help us keep doing this work, become a patron at patreon.com/ancienthistoryfangirl.
55:46 Speaker 03 So usually, this is the point where we thank our Patreon subscribers, but we don't have any to thank this month. So if you sign up, perhaps we can thank you next time we record. So thank you all so much for listening, and we will see you whenever we see you next.
56:06 Speaker 02 Hey, everyone. It's Jen and Jenny here. And as an extra special treat, we're giving you an excerpt from the audiobook version of Jenny's novel, Enemy of My Dreams, narrated by the superb Lisa Flanagan.
56:18 Speaker 03 This is the infamous tent scene. Well, one of them. There's actually two tent scenes, but the other one's kind of later on, and it's a bit spoilery. So I love this scene so much because it's boozy, and funny, and kind of sexy. And it introduces some of the side characters that I love in this book. And I also love it because it's Julia trying to persuade Alaric to come over to her side and not give her away for ransom. And it goes awesome.
56:41 Speaker 02 Julia's machinations go just as well as you'd expect.
56:44 Speaker 03 I love that. And Lisa Flanagan does such a good job with this scene. She really makes it come alive. And I just get such a kick out of this scene. So I just had to share it with all of you. I love reading this scene at readings because it's just so entertaining. I mean, I'm entertained.
56:57 Speaker 02 Are you not entertained?
56:59 Speaker 03 The book, and the audiobook, and the ebook are all out in stores, and you can find them wherever books are sold.
57:07 Speaker 04 Alaric thrust aside the door flap with one arm, staring with no small measure of astonishment, down at the Princess Julia. She was staring up at him, swaying slightly on her feet and looking surprised to see him in his own damn tent. Alaric glanced at Riga, speaking in Gothic. "How the hell did she get in here?" "Mystery to me. I think she's drunk." That much was certain. There was a fresh scent of wine on the woman's breath, and an unfocused look to her eyes that spoke of something more. Opium, maybe? He switched to her own imperial Latin.
57:47 Speaker 04 "Hello, Julia." "Send your men away, won't you?" She looked at him beseechingly. The pitch-perfect tone of a manipulator in distress. "What I have to say concerns your ears alone." Alaric gave her a particularly nasty smile. "No." Clearly, people didn't tell her that very often. Julia's delicate jaw clenched and her eyes lit with temper.
58:17 Speaker 04 "Have it your way. I'll say it right here." She raised her chin. "You were talking to the wrong child of Theodosius at that banquet. I'm here to give you an empire."
58:31 Speaker 04 If Julia was capable of one thing in this world, it was holding her liquor. She'd drunk only enough to drown the fear. But now, craning her neck to meet the barbarian king's gaze, she realized too late that it hadn't worked. She was terrified. His eyes slid to her lips and suddenly she was very aware of his nearness, in a way entirely different than fear. "You have my attention, Julia." He gave her a mocking smile. He knew exactly the effect he had on her. Damn him! And crossed the tent, taking a seat in a battered camp chair. At his signal, one of his men brought her a three-legged stool. Sit. She did.
59:18 Speaker 04 What is it you want? So blunt. If I was a man, I would be given all the courtesies. She needed wine of the non-drugged variety. That would calm her nerves. I believe it's customary to offer refreshment to a royal guest before negotiations. So we are to negotiate now? He said softly. But to her surprise, he acquiesced. At another of his wordless signals, someone handed him a wine skin. Alaric poured some onto the ground, speaking in Gothic. Then he drank, muscles moving in the golden column of his throat. A tradition among my people, he told her solemnly, offering her the wine skin.
1:00:02 Speaker 04 We drink to vauden that he may grant us wise and fruitful conversation.
1:00:08 Speaker 04 Julia eyed what he offered with trepidation. She'd never drunk to honor a barbarian god. She wasn't sure such an action was entirely sanitary. But there was a challenge in Alaric's eyes. He didn't think she had the nerve.
1:00:25 Speaker 04 Julia snatched the wine skin with firm resolve. Wise and fruitful indeed, she said, smiling through her teeth. Then she put the wine skin to her lips and drank deep. Searing fire streaked down her throat. Bloody hell! She managed, bent in half by a fit of gasping coughs. What in all that's holy is this? Iyalu, a liquor made from barley. He watched her struggle with cool dispassion. If it is too strong for you, we have water. A pox on your water! She took another swallow. The bright, burning line lit up the inside of her throat again. But this time, she was ready.
1:01:10 Speaker 04 The drink was good. The drink was what she needed.
1:01:16 Speaker 04 Does she know she's supposed to sip it? Riga asked, sitting cross-legged on the floor. Perhaps we should tell her. Atolf mused, looking not the least inclined to do it. We can't let her drink all of it. That's the last of the batch.
1:01:34 Speaker 04 Thorismund sounded distinctly irate. If you piss-weasels won't stop her, I will. No. Alaric held up a hand. Let her dig her own grave. Whatever she wanted, she seemed intent on making a fool of herself in getting it. Maybe she'd come to seduce him to her cause, he thought, eyes lazily tracing the fine lines of her collarbones. Maybe he'd let her try.
1:02:01 Speaker 04 You've had your drink. Custom demanded they pass the skin back and forth between them, taking small sips as offer met with counteroffer. Julia gave no sign she intended to pass it back. Now speak.
1:02:16 Speaker 04 Her voice dropped low, the affected purr of a gifted seductress. You plan to ransom me, but I have a better proposition. We share the same enemy. My brother. Put me on his throne and you can have any land you want. Point to a place on a map and it's yours.
1:02:37 Speaker 04 Not a chance. He had been betrayed for the last time by Theodosius and his children. Put you on the throne. Alaric struggled not to laugh. You. She frowned. You laugh because I was born a woman. I laugh because you were born a lapdog. Perhaps I should let my people bleed and die to raise one of your brother's peacocks to the purple. It makes just as much sense. The look she gave him could freeze fire. They're cockerels. I wonder, he mused lazily. What would drive an emperor's sister to slip me a knife in the middle of a battle and engineer her own kidnapping?
1:03:21 Speaker 04 You've met my promised husband. Olympius, she said coolly. I loathe the very ground he stands on.
1:03:32 Speaker 04 She meant it well enough. The venom in her voice was real. So the woman was running away from her engagement. And what is this to do with me? Honorius ordered me to marry him. The only way to argue with Honorius is with an army at my back. She raised her eyes, blue-green and fierce as a cat in a trap.
1:03:56 Speaker 04 Your army.
1:03:59 Speaker 04 Julia took another hard slug from the wine skin. If she just kept drinking, she could be Cleopatra. You will need allies when the time comes. She informed the barbarian warlord who was currently glaring at her in an intimidating fashion. No one knows the snake pit of Roman politics like I do. You cannot hold Rome by force of arms alone. Take it, maybe, but not hold it. Who says I want to hold it? Maybe I just want to see it burn. He bared his teeth in a brutal smile. Grow up, woman. What does it matter if you hate your husband? Marriage does not follow love, it never has. You'd be less of a fool to lie on your back as you were made to do.
1:04:45 Speaker 04 Julia bristled. A searing flush swept across her body, bright heat just beneath the skin. Outrage choked her throat. The nerve. How far down the peninsula do you think you'll get without support from at least some of the people? She snapped. Not everyone in Rome is happy at my brother's rise. I could lend your next invasion legit... Legitimacy. Somehow her tongue got tangled over the word. And beyond that, money. I have a fortune in villas all up and down the coast. All yours, King of the Goths. She let out a hiccup. When had there become two of him?
1:05:27 Speaker 04 I think I should sit down. Alaric's reply seemed to come from the bottom of a well. Julia barely heard. Slowly, she slid off the chair and onto the bare-skin rug.
1:05:42 Speaker 04 Alaric watched the princess slide off the stool and list onto the bearskin like a sinking ship. That last pull from the wine skin had been the one that broke her. He could not trust a thing she said, of course. She was a daughter of Theodosius. She'd shred any agreement the moment it suited her. Even so, he wanted her. Even now.
1:06:06 Speaker 04 You're already sitting. She ignored that. He knelt beside her and offered her water, which she regarded with scorn. I'd be emperor already if I were a man, she declared accusingly. Certainly, he drawled.
1:06:25 Speaker 04 Drink.
1:06:27 Speaker 04 She took the water skin. Up close she smelled of iolu and sweat, and beneath it the intoxicating scent of roses. She took a sip and grimaced. This is water! He laughed. And what else should it be? She stared up at him as if just realizing he was there. Eyes green as gemstones one moment, dark blue the next. Like the sea over a vast crevasse. What else do you want from me, king of the goths?
1:07:01 Speaker 04 Her lush red lips curved in a drowsy, knowing smile. Her hand rested boldly on his arm. A scorching burn.
1:07:12 Speaker 04 Fuck. He'd put her in the farthest tent from his. He'd been scrupulously careful. Do you even know what you're offering, Julia?
1:07:23 Speaker 04 I... She let the sentence fall away. Her mouth abreath from his, begging to be plundered. Fuck it. He could send his men away, then press her back on this bearskin and take what she offered. He would make her sob for him. It would be his own kind of revenge. I believe I shall take a nap. The princess Julia announced to the room at large, fingers curling in the bearskin. I am indisposed. You may all come back later. Come back tomorrow.
1:08:01 Speaker 04 Then she lay down on her side on Alaric's bearskin rug, and let out a particularly loud snork. For a breath, quiet reigned in his tent. "Well," Riga said cheerfully, "now what?" "Let's have a bit of fun with her," Thorismond growled. "Show her the consequences of drinking the last of a man's batch."
1:08:29 Speaker 04 "Maybe tie her to a stake outside," Riga said agreeably. "Leave her for the beasts." "Not one of you touches her," Alaric spoke softly but with a force that shut them up.
1:08:43 Speaker 04 The edge of her stola rode up her perfect leg, and he took off his cloak to cover her. There was a thin line of drool dangling from her mouth now. "Drool?" Alaric shook his head in disgust. "He didn't even like this woman." "We cannot take her," Atolf said. "She's a distraction." Alaric glanced pointedly at Atolf's new lover, the Gothic ex-slave with the calculating eyes who had stayed conspicuously quiet.
1:09:15 Speaker 04 "As if you don't have your own distractions."
1:09:19 Speaker 04 "Do you honestly think the Romans will bargain for her? She's defied her own brother." "They'll bargain," Alaric said. "The boy emperor can't afford to look so weak as to have his kin kidnapped out from under him." He lifted his eyes to the twins, who had come bursting into the tent just now. He hadn't the patience for whatever elaborate excuse they'd no doubt invented to explain their failure to keep the princess confined.
1:09:46 Speaker 04 "Take her back to the tent," he ordered them before they could say a word. "He would deal with them later." Then he called his men around him and bent over the maps, the plan for their escape already building in his mind.
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1:12:36 Speaker 02 Enemy of My Dreams by Jenny Williamson is a historical romance novel set in the time of the late Roman Empire, where Alaric, a brutal Gothic warlord, and Julia, a Roman princess, with a love of good wine, team up to take down Rome.
1:12:53 Speaker 03 The much awaited sequel, Game of Thieves, comes out December 8. In this sequel, Julia and Alaric must overcome centuries of conflict to work together, or the turbulent riptides of rebellion and the demons of their past will tear them apart.
1:13:06 Speaker 02 And now, for a limited time, when you preorder Game of Thieves through Burning Pages Bookstore, you'll get a signed book plate and a free art print of one of Jenny's favorite spicy scenes from across the series.
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Previous Liv Reads Statius: The Thebaid (Part 4) Next Conversations: Fulvia, the Woman Who Broke All the Rules in Ancient Rome w/ Dr Jane Draycott Page updated November 3, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated