Name: How Accurate is the Recorded History of Rome?
Uploaded: 2025-06-17T23:15:00.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'How Accurate is the Recorded History of Rome?' from Theo Von Clips on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-06-17. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'How Accurate is the Recorded History of Rome?' from Theo Von Clips on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-06-17. Transcript available.

Where did we get all of the information we have on Rome?
There's many different places.
I think we could start by talking about what are called the literary sources,
which is collections of either Latin histories or Greek histories that were
written at the time.
And again, like when I say at the time, and I'll just keep going back to Livy,
Livy was writing at the time, but he's telling us about events from 200 years
earlier,
400 years earlier, 600 years earlier.
So it's not really a contemporary history, but he's a huge source of
information.
Sorry to interrupt you, but why weren't there histories at the time?
Some of them were.
And the ones that we like a lot are the ones that are written very close to
events.
Like there's a guy called Solace who wrote a couple of histories
where he is writing about events very near to his own lifetime,
where he is able to talk to people who were there at the time.
And he himself was a political actor.
He was in Caesar's faction during the wars.
And so some of what he's writing about happened at the time.
Polybius definitely gets into stuff that happened in his own lifetime.
And then sort of off of Rome, you know, there's a great history of the Peloponnesian
War by Thucydides,
who's one of the main sort of architects of what we think of as history.
And he was definitely like, you can't write about history if you can't talk to
people who were there.
Like that was his theory.
So there's sort of two branches of the literary sources.
Most of the literary sources that existed have been lost.
We are dealing with a microscopic fraction of what actually existed at the time.
And the thing that is very frustrating is like we know that there were these
great histories that were written that are referenced by other historians.
And you're like, God, if we could just get a hold of that.
Oh, my God.
I mean, the great white whale is the emperor Claudius wrote.
And he comes from the Julio-Claudian dynasty.
And he wrote a history of the civil wars that put the Julio-Claudian dynasty in
power.
Wow.
That was allegedly subsequently destroyed.
For what reason?
Because it was too honest and it was too truthful.
And so like, oh, man, Claudius's history of how the Julio-Claudians got into
power.
Like, I would love to have a piece of that.
But so we only have like a microscopic amount.
And this stuff is like, you know, how did it get to us?
It's like it's stuff that winds up in like monasteries, you know, like monks
are copying this stuff down and forwarding it along.
Things are just like found randomly in libraries.
So those are the literary sources.
And then we supplement that with a lot of archaeology and like analysis of
material culture because there are limits to what the literary sources can tell
us.
And this is how we know more about how they lived like on a daily basis, you
know, because we've got pottery.
We've got, you know, different how would how did their furnaces run?
Like, how did their ovens run?
Like all of this stuff is coming from is coming from archaeology.
In Roman history in particular, we also do a lot of study of coins because they
were constantly pumping out coins.
And coins were a means of sort of universalizing.
You could call it propaganda, but like messages that the emperor, the state
wanted to put out there.
Like that was a big thing.
If you started to get some control, you'd have a coin almost.
It was the thing.
Like you could almost say that, like, what did it mean to be the Roman emperor?
And there are lots of different sort of things that that means.
The main thing it means is that your face is on the money and your face goes on
the money.
And when we talk about like people rising up and trying to usurp, like, like
rival emperors, like there's always this point where they start minting their
own coins with their own face on it.
And that's okay.
Now we've got a viable dude here because he's got control of a mint.
Right.
Instead of show me the money, it's like show the money me.
Show the show the money to the people.
And it's and it's always stuff like I love the army and then they and then they
and then they bump out all these coins.
And then and then the army's like, oh, he loves us.
Maybe we should support him.
Oh, they would put little slogans on him.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And they had all this like shorthand for like what different symbols meant and
and they would recognize these things like like Romans would recognize these
things at the time where these days you've got to be an expert to really like
decode what's going on on these coins.
But but they had slang at the time almost like almost emoji, not emojis, but I
mean emojis isn't far gone.
I mean, it's iconography and this emojis are just iconography.
And there's also changes in like sort of how the faces are depicted depending
on what era of Roman history we're into.
And so people can spend their entire lives just studying like Roman coinage.
But those are roughly like the three main pillars of then how we how we know
things about the Roman Empire.
How much of ancient history from Rome is factual, do you think?
Or how much was adjusted to make things look a certain way?
That's a you know, I don't know what percentage I could give on things.
You know, how much of it is true, like some of it for sure, because we can
independently verify it from inscriptions and from other sort of physical
evidence.
But like I said at the beginning, what what the Roman and Greek historians were
mostly interested in was was telling these morality tales about how to live a
contemporaneous how to live in contemporary society rather than sort of
fidelity to the objective truth.
Like this is what really happened.
Now, that said, they cared a lot about, you know, like they were looking
through documents the same way that historians do today.
You know, Livy is or excuse me, like Polybius is is interviewing people.
He's he's looking at documents and they are trying to tell a correct story.
And I think that they're just they're definitely trying to do it.
But if the if the sort of morality tale runs into the facts, like which is
going to win, they're going to massage it towards the morality tale.
And then you have to sit down and you have to ask yourself, OK, well, well,
what where did this person come from?
What is their own social position?
What is you know, what is their own family connections?
There's a for some reason we keep going back to Livy because he's just
apparently on the forefront of my mind.
But there's a description of the Battle of Cannae, which is Cannae, C-A-N-N-A-E.
OK.
And this is one of the greatest defeats in Roman history.
This is Hannibal is defeating the Romans.
He just absolutely wipes them out there.
And this is during the Second Punic War.
And the story that Livy tells is about one particular Roman consul who was
basically an idiot and caused all of this to happen.
Right.
The one consul did not want to go into battle.
The other consul did want to go into battle.
And they alternated days of who was in charge.
Right.
So it's like I'm in charge on Monday.
You're in charge on Tuesday.
I'm in charge on Wednesday.
And so the guy.
Yeah.
So the guy who was in charge on Wednesday was like, we're going into battle.
And you couldn't argue with him because he was the consul and he was in charge
that day.
And and then they get wiped out by Hannibal.
And then you go look into Livy's past and his own family tree.
And you find out that he's maybe trying to make one of his ancestors look
better than they actually were.
So this is a this and this is actually like if you lean into it, this is one of
the it is a fun part of sort of deconstructing and decoding these things.
If you really get into it, this stuff is fun.
It's kind of it's it's entertaining and it's interesting.
You have to examine the author and some of his motivations and how much would
he be willing to adjust things and possibly why?
And then you have to put that on the same scale on the other side of the scale
of the facts and information that you do have.
The book that I'm writing right now, which is about the crisis of the third
century, has like a missing battle that we have to contend with, where there's
this huge inscription of these great Sassanid kings, this guy Sharpur and Ardashir,
who have this like huge monuments that were built to them.
And then on the side of these cliffs, they etched in huge letters, like
basically their resume, all of their accomplishments, all the things that they
did.
And one of the things references this battle where they defeated the Romans.
And then you go look through the Roman historical record and it's patchy at the
time, right?
This is one of the things about the crisis of the third century is we don't
have a ton of information because it was so chaotic.
But we don't have any reference to this battle.
And they're specifically referencing like which emperor was defeated.
So it's like, who's lying?
Are the Romans trying to cover up a defeat by not mentioning it?
Or did this guy just make up a battle to tell his own people, look, I defeated
the Romans this time too.
And he did beat the Romans many times.
Like we just, we don't, and the thing is, we don't know.
We, absent a time machine, there's ambiguity in the historical record at all
times.
And this is, you know, again, like when you become a real sicko for history,
you stop needing history to be just an objective set of events.
Like just tell me what happened is something that, like take out your
ideological biases.
Like take this, like just tell me the facts.
That never happens and it can never happen because humans are always going to
be writing in their own subconscious biases.
When we pick and choose what information to share, when we pick and choose how
to frame a certain event,
nobody can ever just sit down.
Even me, like, and as I'm just trying to tell you the facts of Roman history,
of course, my little biases are coming into it.
Of course, my opinions are coming into it.
There's no, there's no sort of escaping that.
And once you understand that it's inescapable, then it just becomes a layer to
have an even greater understanding of the human condition in human society,
which is, I think, what we're really after when we study history.
Oh, yeah, that's fascinating.
I was going to ask you kind of what makes a good historian.
But obviously one of the things is being able to recognize that you're not
going to be able to get something absolute because it's kind of impossible.
Yeah, and at the end of the day, it's impossible.
Now, leading up to that, like, what makes a good historian?
Yeah, fidelity to the facts, fidelity to the sources.
Like, don't say something if you don't have a source backing it up.
Go to the primary sources.
Read those primary sources.
Try to present those sources in as accurate a way as possible.
And so it's absolutely not the case that professional historians are just
running around out there only publishing their biases, right?
Only doing things in the service of their own political or social beliefs.
Most historians, most of the time, are trying to do that project of, like, I
just want to examine this.
I want to examine the evidence.
And I want to talk about it.
It's just that it's an impossible dream.
But moving towards that dream in a way that is rooted in the facts is really
important.
And that does make a good historian, for sure.
Yeah, we certainly got off that path in the past 20 years where it's like it
felt like news outlets had – it used to feel like it was real information and
it was factual and it wasn't biased.
And then it went down this other road, it felt like, you know.
But then it's always been like, can you trust your government?
Can you trust the reporting?
Can you trust these, you know, the councils that are running things?
You know, who can you trust?
You know, and that feels – it seems like from listening to you that that's
kind of – it's always been some version of that.
Mm-hmm.