Why Did Rome Fall — and Are We Next?

If you think history’s boring, chances are that you’ve never listened to today’s guest, Tom Holland. He’s a best-selling author and co-host of the ultra-popular podcast, The Rest is History. I’m not exactly sure how they do it, but he and his co-host, Dominic Sandbrook, can find a way to make just about any historical event fascinating.

HOLLAND: I think that the stories that cultures tell about themselves, about their past, these are, with all respect, are as important to understanding the past as, say, a knowledge of economics or of sociology.

Welcome to People I (Mostly) Admire, with Steve Levitt.

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 Of course, the purpose of history isn’t just to entertain, it’s also to help us better understand what’s happening in the world today. With that in mind, I started off our conversation with a question that I think a lot of Americans have on their mind these days. My whole life, I’ve taken for granted that democracy and political representation are a natural state of the world. If you ask me whether the United States 200 years from now will still have a smoothly functioning democracy, without really thinking, I’d say, “Of course.” But I wonder whether I’m being naive. Tom Holland wrote a book called Rubicon that tackles the downfall of Rome’s democracy. So I asked Tom whether a more accurate reading of history would conclude that democratic governments are both extremely anomalous and quite fragile.

HOLLAND: I think so, yes. Because if you look at the broad sweep of the world and the many centuries and millennia of human civilization, democracies are fairly apparent and unusual. And you mentioned Rubicon, which is a book I wrote in the early years of the 21st century. There was this kind of drum roll of 9/11 and the buildup to the Iraq War going on in the background. And I realized when I reread it a few years ago for a new edition, just how much that sense of the imperial public of Rome was reverberating into the 21st century with the imperial republic of the United States. And of course now again, there is quite a lot of political commentary on whether America is Rome. And to be honest, that’s something that’s been present right from the very beginning of the United States because parallels were very consciously drawn by the founding fathers. They identified their outrageous rebellion against their anointed king and their refusal to pay their due rate of taxes, as a kind of gesture of claiming liberty on par with the Romans throwing out their monarchy. That’s why there’s a Senate, and a Capitol Hill, and all of that in Washington, and why the Capitol looks so Roman. 

LEVITT: And our buildings look very Roman too.

HOLLAND: Yeah, absolutely. And it’s why you have those extraordinary statues from the early years of the American republic. My favorite one of George Washington in his wig, but also in a toga, which is a most unfortunate look. But obviously if you are comparing your infant republic with the Roman Republic, the one thing that everyone knows about the Roman Republic is that the Roman Republic ends up an autocracy. And so this very famously expressed by Benjamin Franklin when he comes out of the convention that’s drawing up the constitution, and he’s asked, “Well, what is it to be?” And he famously says, “A republic, if you can keep it.” And I would say that anxiety has been a shadow over American political life pretty much ever since. And it waxes and wanes, the anxiety that the constitutional frameworks that govern liberty and democracy will be put in the shade by a new Caesar who will establish a new framework of autocracy. And of course, the other thing that everyone knows about Rome is that it declines and falls. It’s not just that the Roman Republic might fall, but that the Roman Empire might fall. But I think that those anxieties aren’t, you know — Athenian democracy ceased to be a functioning democracy. Republics in Renaissance Italy repeatedly succumbed to a form of tyranny. And looking in modern history, it’s not just on your side of the Atlantic, but in Europe as well, illustrated by the course of the French Revolution. So you get rid of a king, you have a republic; a Caesar in the form of Napoleon emerges, and then Napoleon ends up defeated by barbarians from across the Rhine.

LEVITT: I don’t know much about the British Civil War, but it seems like the same thing happened there, where the Parliament fought the king and it took no time at all before the parliament side had gone back to an autocracy.

HOLLAND: Yes. So the civil wars that convulse England, Scotland, and Ireland, the three kingdoms that are ruled by Charles I, who ends up fighting a civil war against parliament in England, and ends up having his head chopped off. Again, there is a sense that Rome in particular provides a model, and in fact, Hobbes in the wake of the civil wars, essentially proposes that the study of Greek and Roman history should be banned because it just stirs up Republican dreams. But of course, a much stronger part of that particular mix is biblical. Both sides in the civil wars are saturated with a sense that they are moving to the rhythms of God’s purpose. Of course that’s been an element in American history as well, and in a kind of secularized way it’s present in the French Revolution too.

LEVITT: So we’ve been focused on how democracies fall apart, but what seems even stranger to me is how they got started in the first place. I can’t really see who had the right incentives — let’s take the Romans, how did they make it happen?

HOLLAND: It’s rooted in a myth. And the Roman myth is that the Roman people are all immigrants. So even Romulus, the first king who founds Rome, and gives it his name, is descended from an immigrant. Now that immigrant happens to be the son of a goddess, Venus. When he founds Rome, he needs to attract people. And so on the capitol there’s a stretch that has the name of asylum and he says that anyone can come to this asylum. It doesn’t matter whether you are bandits, or runaway slaves, or whatever you are, you can come and become Romans. And he attracts lots of interest from that. And then he realizes that he needs women. And so famously, he looks around to the Sabines, who are near neighbors, and he invites them to a festival and then grabs all their women, the Rape of the Sabine Women, and there’s going to be a great battle between the Romans and the Sabines, but then they decide that the Sabine women come out and appeal on one side to their fathers and brothers, and on the other to their husbands. And so the Romans and Sabines merge again to become a single people. Although this is clearly a myth, myths I think are really, really important because they both explain and are created by the ways that cities see themselves. And for Rome, the notion that a common civic identity can be fashioned out of all these various people means, firstly, that they’re very good at absorbing outsiders into their civic frameworks. And this essentially explains why Rome becomes as powerful as it does, because it is able to swell its citizen body over the course of the centuries until it provides them with vast reserves of manpower that dwarf those of their enemies. But at the same time, that civic identity is sufficiently strong enough that the experience of fighting as a citizen body where everyone has a common civic identity, this also is something that Romans seem to have harnessed more effectively than any other city in the Mediterranean. With the consequence that this is what sets them on the path to what becomes this extraordinary empire.

LEVITT: Now, I can’t help but think that sounds a lot like the United States as you describe Rome. So you’ve written a book, Rubicon, which is about the end of the Roman Republic, and Julius Caesar is the central player in that. And I don’t think anyone would confuse Julius Caesar and Donald Trump, but it does seem like given the chance Donald Trump would love to be America’s Julius Caesar. Can you talk about Caesar’s role in bringing down the Roman Republic and what probability you put on Trump becoming America’s Caesar?

HOLLAND: The problem that the Roman Republic faces by the first century B.C. is essentially a problem of success. There is so much wealth coming in that those who are able to seize command of that wealth are able to put the whole republic in their shadow. And there are two or three people who have sufficient resources to do that. And the first person who realizes this is Pompey, or Magnus the Great. And then the second guy who realizes this is Julius Caesar. And Julius Caesar is of a very aristocratic background. He claims descent from Venus as Romulus had done. But this is inadequate in the new age of Rome’s kind of Mediterranean-wide empire. And Caesar realizes that if he’s going to rival Pompey and attain the status that he feels is his due, he has no choice but to make himself as rich as Pompey who had conquered and absorbed into the Roman Empire, vast swathes of the East, rich kingdoms like Syria, and so on. So Caesar looks around and he decides he’s going to conquer Gaul.

LEVITT: When you’re a Roman general, when you conquer an area, you get to keep personally much of the wealth of that area, which I didn’t realize.

HOLLAND: You get the loot, but you then have to spend it on the mass of the Roman people, because if you don’t do that, then they’re not going to like you. And so that’s what Pompey does very effectively, and it’s what Caesar does. And Caesar brings to this loot that he has, a very populist eye. Caesar was what they called a Populares, which is someone who appeals to the people. Politics in ancient Rome is about vibe. It’s about whether you cast yourself as a stern, flinty defender of the traditional order, or whether you play up to the gallery. Whether you make yourself the darling of the people. And Caesar’s incredible reserves of wealth, and also the battle hardened legions that he ends up having because of his successes in Gaul, are combined with an ability to read and understand what the people want. And I guess the expression of that is a genius for showmanship. He will humiliate the stiff, stern representatives of political tradition, and thereby make himself popular. It turns out that the mass of the people really enjoy seeing their political betters humiliated. And Caesar is a very flamboyant guy. Notoriously he commissions a massive villa for himself, then decides that he doesn’t like the interior decoration, so has the whole thing pulled down. And this doesn’t alienate the mass of the people because, in a way, Caesar is living the Roman dream. He is behaving as the mass of the people think a very rich person should behave. And Caesar’s ability to combine wealth, political ruthlessness, and showmanship, ends up bringing the republic crashing down. The consequence of that, in turn, is that he will end up murdered. The person who ultimately succeeds in establishing a permanent autocracy amid the rubble of the republic is Julius Caesar’s great nephew, who will come to be called Augustus. But I think you could perhaps recognize in that vibe, that Populares vibe, something that resonates with the reasons for Donald Trump’s success. Which obviously isn’t to compare him with Julius Caesar, either in the scale of Caesar’s genius or in the scale of his autocratic ambitions. But, I think that there are elements there. And it’s because, perhaps, in a republic this is the yin and yang, the kind of the appealing to the people, the appealing to tradition, and you have to keep those in balance. And it’s when that balance starts to break down, perhaps, that a republic finds itself in political choppy waters.

LEVITT: Now reading Rubicon, if I understand correctly, one of the reasons that Caesar brought the troops to Rome and essentially started civil war was because he was facing criminal charges in Rome, despite all the success he had away from Rome. Which again, is an interesting parallel to Trump, because I think a lot of what Trump has done is in response to the fact that it was a way to get out of the criminal charges.

HOLLAND: Yeah, so essentially there were two careers you could follow in Rome if you were from the elite; you either become a soldier or you follow a career in the law courts. And both of them are pretty essential because that is how you then climb the ladder to political power. And so in that sense, the law in Rome was always an extension of politics. It wasn’t done really on a party basis. The Romans didn’t have parties in the modern sense, but it was about making alliances, about stabbing someone in the back at the right time. And this meant that if you couldn’t fight someone like Caesar with an army, then you try and tie him down with legal cases. One of the problems in Rome for people who are pursuing this strategy, is that Caesar as the governor of Gaul, as long as he has his post, he has a legal immunity to criminal charges. But the moment that term finishes, then his legal immunity goes and his enemies can bring him to trial. And Caesar sees this as outrageous. He has achieved these great conquests, these great feats. He has won incredible wealth and glory for the Roman people. And now as he sees it, these political pygmies back in Rome want to drag him down. And so they try and back him into a corner, and that corner essentially is the banks of the Rubicon. Caesar stands there and he has the choice: do I submit to the law and risk having all my achievements destroyed by my enemies in a law case, or do I defend my dignitas — his political heft, everything that he’s achieved, even if that risks civil war. And he rolls the dice and he crosses the Rubicon, and Rome collapses into civil war. But I think it’s not just in the United States. So you can see that in France recently where Marine Le Pen has been banned from politics. And it’s interesting that both the United States and France would define themselves as republics, and the founders of those republics both looked back to Rome as a model. So it may be that’s how it’s been imported into the politics of both countries.

LEVITT: So what probability do you put on Trump playing the role of American Caesar and bringing down the Republic?

HOLLAND: I just don’t think that he has the patience, really. He’s too old. I think he’s too lazy, really. He’s too fond of the golf course. Caesar was one of the most relentlessly active men of all time. Ask me in four years time, but I don’t think Trump has what it takes to bring down the American Republic. And just to reiterate, these are anxieties that Americans have had since the founding of the republic, and I think Trump lacks the patience and the hard work to become a Caesar.

We’ll be right back with more of my conversation with historian Tom Holland after this short break.

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LEVITT: I read your books, I listen to your podcast, The Rest Is History — I’m amazed at how many details we know about events that happened a long time ago — 2,000 years ago. So many examples. In the Roman Republic, you write about a particular Roman who first cornered the market on oysters, and then invented the heated swimming pool. 

HOLLAND: Yes, Sergius Orata.

LEVITT: How do we know these kinds of details? I would think that almost nothing of such little consequence would’ve survived to the present day.

HOLLAND: We know about that from this great encyclopedia that was compiled by Pliny the Elder. And he’s called Pliny The Elder because there’s also Pliny the Younger, who’s his nephew, who’s also a very kind of famous literary figure and gives the great description of the eruption of Vesuvius that entombs Pompeii and Herculaneum, and his uncle died in that explosion. But before he died in that explosion, Pliny the Elder had compiled this enormous encyclopedia. It was an attempt to contain the whole of knowledge of the functioning of the universe within a single, vast series of scrolls. And he includes the details of Sergius Orata and his oysters. We are dependent for that knowledge, about Sergius Orata and his shellfish, from the fact that Pliny wrote it, but then just as importantly, that Pliny’s encyclopedia survived. And if it hadn’t, then we wouldn’t know about it.

LEVITT: They wrote on papyrus?

HOLLAND: Yeah.

LEVITT: Doesn’t papyrus rot?

HOLLAND: Yes it does. So from Mesopotamia, we have libraries that have survived because they were written on clay tablets. The only library from classical antiquity that has survived is the library in Herculaneum that ironically survived because it was entombed by pyroclastic flow. There’s kind of incredible work being done at the cutting edge of technology at the moment to try and decipher what might be in that library. But otherwise it all crumbles and people wonder, the Library of Alexandria, what happened to that? The famous library that supposedly was committed to the idea that all the world’s wisdom would be there. Would’ve been amazing had the Library of Alexandria survived. And so there’s debate about, was it Julius Caesar who destroyed it? Was it Christians who destroyed it? Was it Muslims who destroyed it? I don’t think it was any of those. It was a natural process of weathering because it’s very difficult to keep papyrus from being devoured by insects or crumbling to nothing. In a way, what’s surprising isn’t how little has survived, but how much has survived. Then there are these kind of terrible bottlenecks. So I’ve just done a translation of the Lives of the Caesars by Suetonius. It’s this collection of 12 lives running from Julius Caesar, Augustus, and then 10 emperors. And that survived thanks to a single manuscript that we know was in circulation in the time of Charlemagne. Had that gone, there is so much about ancient Rome that we wouldn’t know. I always remember, when I was researching Rubicon and reading the letters of Cicero; this great corpus of correspondence from Rome’s greatest orator of his day, a contemporary of Julius Caesar, and it’s absolutely crucial for enabling a kind of coherent narrative of the fall of the Republic. But one thing I always remember is that he describes going to one of his homes and there’s a crack in the plaster on one of the rooms. This is from over 2,000 years ago. And we know that on a specific day Cicero noticed there was a crack in the plaster of one of his rooms. That is kind of an amazing detail — fit to send shivers down the spine, I think.

LEVITT: Wait, I’m still confused though; papyrus rots, so the way these things survive is that over and over monks or someone with nothing else to do—

HOLLAND: Yeah, they have to be copied.

LEVITT: And then someone else copies it by hand and someone else copies it by hand over the centuries, and it requires somebody thinking it’s worth copying for this stuff to survive.

HOLLAND: Yeah, exactly. The opportunity for a mis-transliteration is always there, and also the chance that someone may decide, “Well, I don’t really think this is worth copying. Let’s not bother.” And then that’s it, it’s gone. In part it’s a kind of popularity contest, which is why the great classics have survived. Iliad and The Odyssey, or the Ennead, or whatever — these were always probably going to survive. Cicero is copied because he’s seen first by Pagan Romans, and then by Christian Romans as the model of Latin prose. He’s a school text as much as anything else. And that’s why he continues to be copied and copied and copied throughout the Christian period, long after the Roman Republic has vanished and long after the Roman Empire itself has crumbled.

LEVITT: It’s not always the case though that we have a lot of detailed documentation about famous figures. You’ve written about Islam, for instance. If I remember correctly, it was really surprising to me that other than the Quran, there’s virtually no contemporaneous sources available that document the Prophet Muhammad, is that right?

HOLLAND: Not entirely. So there are texts that seem to mention him. So one of them was written by a Jewish convert to Christianity in Carthage, who is describing an Arab invasion of Palestine. And he says that the Saracens, the Arabs, as he calls them, are led by a prophet. And this writer in Carthage denies that this man is actually a prophet, because he says, “Do prophets come in chariots and with swords?” But this does seem to be Muhammad because it’s the right period. The only problem is that according to Muslim tradition, Muhammad did not lead the invasion of Palestine that saw the Arabs conquer Palestine, but had died earlier. The earliest life we have written by a Muslim about Muhammad is well over a century later. And I think the answer to that is that there is a lot of religiously motivated weathering going on. Because when Muslims compose their biographies of Muhammad, their aim is not to write a biography of the kind that contemporary biographers today would recognize. They see Muhammad as the climax of the prophetic tradition. He is bearing God’s final revelation for humankind. So in other words, the historical Muhammad has had many layers of theologically inspired wallpaper kind of plastered over him to the extent that it’s actually very difficult to know what lies beneath that wallpaper.

LEVITT: Do you think that much was written about him and didn’t survive? Or you think that there simply wasn’t much being written?

HOLLAND: I should say that the traditional assumption of Muslims throughout most of Islamic history and of most Muslims living today is that actually we know enormous amounts about Muhammad because we have sayings either about him or from him that provide us with all kinds of details about what his favorite food was, how he cleaned his teeth, his relations with his wives, all this kind of stuff. It was pretty much assumed until about a century ago that these were authentic, historical records of what Muhammad had actually done. But again, I think almost all of these are theologically motivated. And that, of course, means that it’s quite a sensitive field of historical inquiry.

LEVITT: I don’t think many people realize that Muhammad led troops in battles. He was very different than Jesus or Buddha or Confucius. How does someone like Muhammad learn to be a general? I’m confused about how any of these old leaders learn to be a general. I mean, I understand Caesar or Alexander the Great or Attila the Hun, they’d spent their lives fighting. But when a King of England would mount his horse and go fight a battle, or Muhammad, how in the world did they know how to be a general?

HOLLAND: Well with Muhammad, we don’t really know. We do have these very detailed lives that give us all kinds of information about the battles that Muhammad is supposed to have fought, some of which he almost certainly did. But I think it’s clear from the way that the Arabs emerge to conquer vast swathes of the Roman Empire and to swallow up the Persian Empire pretty much in its entirety that they are clearly fueled by a sense that these revelations do authentically come from God and that they have been promised dominion by God. The historical Muhammad is able to surf that wave of conviction. Presumably also, he’s a very competent general. And I think the same is true of most commanders throughout history. Julius Caesar is an example of an amazingly competent, brilliant general, but there were plenty of Roman generals who were absolutely terrible. I’m just at the moment getting ready a series for The Rest Is History, my podcast, on Hannibal. And you ask yourself how was it that Hannibal was able to lead a polyglot army recruited from across the western Mediterranean, across the Alps, endearing terrible conditions, then to come down and to inflict three staggering defeats on Rome, which was the greatest military power of its day. And in part it must be because Hannibal had an instinctive genius as a general, but it’s also because the Romans were led by generals who, lots of them were pretty terrible. The same in the American Revolutionary War. It took time for the American leaders to work out how to defeat the British. You learn on the job.

LEVITT: So you’ve written a book called Dominion, which if I took away the right message, gives Christianity a surprising amount of credit for much of what is good about modern society. Values like human rights and compassion, the sanctity of life — your argument is that these are not universally held ideas, but they’re specifically Christian ideas. That they weren’t widely accepted before Christianity, and wouldn’t be widely accepted now if we didn’t have this long Western tradition of Christianity. Is that a faithful capturing of your views?

HOLLAND: Well, I think that things like human rights and the notion that every individual has inherent dignity — I think that these are ideals. But I have come to the conclusion that I think this because I’ve grown up in a country that has been Christian for over a millennium. I think that Christianity has been such a profound conditioning influence on the way that people in what was Latin Europe, so I’m particularly focusing on the Roman church and then in due course the Protestant churches, that it is very difficult for us, even if we may define ourselves as atheists, to escape that. That shouldn’t really be unsettling to atheists because it’s not to say that Christianity is true. It’s not even to say that the values of Christianity are good. It’s to say that we are conditioned to assume that they’re good because we are the products of Christian society.

LEVITT: I’ll give you an example of that: Richard Dawkins, who is against formal religion as anyone you’ll ever meet, he describes himself as a cultural Christian with the kind of pride that goes with it, which really surprised me when I had him on the show and he was talking like that. I guess what surprises me is I just thought that it was a human thing to think that other humans were decent or to have compassion, because I’ve grown up in this environment. But I think what’s surprising is you’re saying, look, the Romans thought about the world in a totally different way, and it’s not just because it was a long time ago. Christianity overturned the whole framework of how people think about the world. Could you talk about that in some detail?

HOLLAND: Yeah, every culture, every civilization has frameworks of morality. The Romans were a very moral people. They had a very stern moral framework — if we think of them as indulging constantly in orgies or whatever, that’s because Roman moralists are complaining about it. So the Romans see the evidence for the fact that they are the most moral of people is the fact that the Gods have favored them and have given them the rule of the world. And we’ve talked about Julius Caesar and his conquest of Gaul, according to a biographer of him, he killed a million people and enslaved another million people. So near genocidal figures.

LEVITT: And the population of Rome was like a million. So that’s a really big number of people. 

HOLLAND: Right. But Caesar seems to have thought this was brilliant. When he celebrates his triumph, there are placards boasting of how many people he’s killed. Troops of slaves are drawn through the streets. Most people think it’s brilliant. And likewise, the sexual morality of the Romans, again, it’s very, very stern. It’s very strict. It’s not a free for all, but it’s very radically different to our sexual morality. The Roman male citizen can do what he likes, can penetrate any way he wants, and those who must be penetrated, which obviously would include women, but also would include male inferiors and slaves in particular. And this is obviously an understanding of sexual morality that seems very frightening to us. And the process of changing that, of introducing the sexual morality that today I think we would probably take for granted, one that doesn’t celebrate what we would define as rape, for instance, is a very long process that takes centuries and centuries, and sees the church laboring incredibly hard to rewire the instincts of the Christian people so that the trace elements of that previous understanding of sexuality is eliminated. But of course, it’s never eliminated because the lust for power that Roman sexual morality kind of formalized, it’s always with us. And I remember, when I was writing Dominion, I wasn’t a hundred percent certain what conclusions I would come to or what path I would take as I was writing it. And when I came to the ‘60s, I did think, “Well, okay, the celebration of sexual freedom, this is an ending of a point. This is clearly a moment where Christian notions have come to a kind of terminus.” But just as I was gearing up to write it, the Harvey Weinstein affair broke. And it struck me that no one really said, “Well, what’s wrong? Why shouldn’t a powerful man use his inferiors and his subordinates any way he wants?” Because that is what a Roman would’ve said. A Roman would’ve seen nothing wrong at all with what Harvey Weinstein did. And the fact that it prompted such a mass revulsion on the part of men as well as women, and it promoted as a kind of self-evident moral truth the fact that it was unacceptable for men to follow their instincts any way that they wanted and that they should show respect towards the bodily autonomy of women. It just highlighted for me the complexity of the matrix that we are in at the moment. Where people are adopting Christian attitudes and takes, even as they think that they are condemning Christianity. And I would go so far as to say that there’s pretty much nothing in the culture wars that have been blazing across the United States over the past few decades that in some way are not arguments about Christian theology.

You’re listening to People I (Mostly) Admire. I’m Steve Levitt. And after this short break, Tom Holland and I will return to talk about vampires.

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Like many of my guests, Tom Holland’s path has been a winding one. I don’t think anyone, much less Tom, would have imagined where he would end up, given where he started. Many years ago, Tom dropped out of a Ph.D. program at Oxford. I’m wondering if that was an easy decision or an excruciating one.

HOLLAND: It was something that slowly dawned on me. I was unbelievably arrogant and I wanted to write a great novel. And so I did the Ph.D. as a way of getting funding to write my great novel, really. But then, it was a painful discovery that I wasn’t a great novelist. My Ph.D. was on Byron and his relationship to classical literature. But I just felt that writing academic prose killed Byron dead, that there are certain figures and writers who are just not suited to being approached academically. And it was at the same time as Interview of the Vampire, the film where Tom Cruise puts on a blonde wig, was out. And it struck me that Byron had authored the first vampire story in which a vampire is an aristocrat. He told this story as part of the ghost storytelling evening that also gave rise to Frankenstein with the Shelley’s. And his doctor, John Polidori, picked up on this story that Byron had told and wrote a short novella called The Vampyre with a Y and it was widely assumed to be by Byron and became a massive bestseller. And it essentially established the notion of the vampire as being aristocratic and pale and beautiful, rather than a red faced, ugly peasant, which was what had previously happened. And so I thought, it would be quite fun to write a novel in which Byron literally is a vampire.

LEVITT: Well, you say it was fun, but from what I’ve read, you really do believe that Byron was a vampire. 

HOLLAND: I didn’t really believe it, but I started reading through his poetry and his letters with the assumption that I’m looking for evidence that Byron was a vampire. And I kept coming across all kinds of stuff that really substantiated the case. And I remember one in particular, it was quite eerie because I took a volume of Byron’s at random and opened it at random. And there was this phrase that he’d written where he talked about how he’d written his autobiography, which in due course would be burnt. And he said, “I’ve set down all kinds of amazing details in this autobiography, but I haven’t been able to put down everything out of respect for those who are living, those who are dead, and those who must be both.” I felt a shiver down my spine. Thought, ‘Wow, that’s amazing.’ And so I ran with that and my great novel kind of died a death, but— 

LEVITT: Wait, it didn’t die a death. you wrote it, your first book was called The Vampire—

HOLLAND: The great novel that I’d wanted to write.

LEVITT: Oh, that wasn’t your great novel. That’s what came after the great novel.

HOLLAND: It was a romp. It was fun. I enjoyed writing it and I’m proud of it. I then signed a three book deal to do three more vampire novels. And as I was writing those, I was thinking this was never part of my life plan. I wanted to be Proust and here I am writing about zombies and things.

LEVITT: You were supporting yourself by writing vampire novels or you had a real job and vampire novels were your hobby?

HOLLAND: I just about made enough from the vampire novels to keep my head above water, but I also had the love of a good woman. So between us, we were able to survive. I did journalism and various things like that. But I remember when I became 30 thinking I’ve really messed up here. I don’t really want to be writing horror stories. Didn’t particularly like horror. I had a wonderful agent who’s still with me, who said, “Well, what book would you really love to write if you could write anything you wanted?” And I realized that all the vampire books that I’d written had been historically themed. To be honest, the vampires got in the way of everything that made the history interesting. And so I thought, “Well, what I would really like to do, and clearly what I should have been doing, and I was an idiot not to have realized it, is writing history.” Because history was my great love from a very early age, six or seven. And so I wrote Rubicon, because Rome was what I had particularly loved as a child and going through my teens. It had stirred and moved and excited me. And I remember when I began writing Rubicon, I think it was one of the happiest times of my life. You change from one lane into another lane, and suddenly there are no traffic jams. There are no roadworks. You’re just driving away into the sunset.

LEVITT: You had essentially zero formal qualifications as a historian when you launched off onto your first book of historical nonfiction. And obviously all the things you’ve accomplished as a historian over the last 20 years demonstrate your talent for history. My limited interaction with academic historians makes me believe that they are extremely hostile to outsiders who think, “Well, anyone can write history.” Were academic historians welcoming to you at the start? Are they welcoming to you now?

HOLLAND: I’m sure there are lots of academic historians, who, I’m sure are very hostile to what I’ve written perhaps. But, by and large, if they are, they don’t tell me. When I was writing Rubicon, in my head I had my best friend from school who literally knew nothing about history, I wanted him to enjoy it. But I also wanted Mary Beard, the great Cambridge classicist, I wanted her to enjoy it as well. And she very kindly read it and has been hugely supportive and kind to me from that point on. I shouldn’t really be surprised anymore, maybe I should have come to take it for granted, but I don’t. The kindness that I have received from scholars who are just titans in their field. There hasn’t been a book where I haven’t benefited from that. It leads me to think either I’ve been very lucky or the stereotype that academics, historians, you know, a kind of jealous defender of their turf, isn’t necessarily true. And I think it may also be something specific to do with history, which is that history is really the only academic discipline that is also a branch of literature. Particularly in antiquity and throughout the Middle Ages actually, what are called primary sources are usually nothing of the kind. They’re usually literary texts that have been very consciously shaped as literary texts. When I went to university, I was drunk with a love of literature. But history was my first love. And it may be that it’s the interface between literature and history that I find particularly fascinating. That may explain why I’m so interested in the dimensions of myth or of religion or scripture because I think that the stories that cultures tell about themselves, about their past, these are, with all respect, are as important to understanding the past as, say, a knowledge of economics or of sociology. I would say, if you want to understand Marx, it’s probably as important to have a familiarity with the bible as it is to be versed in the writings of the economists who had proceeded him. I’m very nervous to say that to a great economist. Like a bad general, I find myself trapped in a defile.

LEVITT: In many ways you are one of the most successful historians of all time. You have managed to harness technology in a way that you are reaching more people than virtually any historian has ever reached. The Wall Street Journal reports that you get more than 11 million downloads a month.

HOLLAND: It’s gone up to 18.

LEVITT: Eighteen million? God, that’s unbelievable! What do you attribute your success to?

HOLLAND: Well, I think in large part it’s because I have an incredible colleague, who’s long time friend, Dominic Sandbrook, who I do it with. And when we began, Goalhanger, the company that produces The Rest Is History, the guys who run it said, “Who could you imagine talking to week in, week out about history?” And I immediately thought of Dominic. And I think that the relationship that we have on the podcast is a really fundamental part of its success. There’s an immense compatibility there. But I think also part of that compatibility is that both of us do not enjoy the notion that history should be an extension of theology really. We don’t like the idea that it should teach moral stories. I am obviously very interested in theology. I’m interested in the evolution of morality. But, I’m interested in it as something that is always evolving and can’t be taken for granted. And I think that ultimately what history provides is an illustration of just how many ways there are to be human. It’s possible for humans at different periods, different places, to think things that seem to us radically strange, often terrifying, often horrific, but they all contribute to our understanding of just how complex human beings are and human societies are. And I think that there’s an inherent fascination there. And I hope that the range of topics that we discuss on the podcast gives the listener who commits to listening to a number of episodes and series, a sense of just how extraordinary human beings are. Romans and Aztecs and Quakers and Ottomans — we’re all human.

LEVITT: It’s my sense that it’s hard to know in real time as one lives through events, what history will view as important. And an example that comes to mind is Covid. Covid felt really important to people in the moment, but my guess is historians looking back, won’t care very much about Covid. What recent people or events do you think historians of the future will see as having an outsized impact relative to how we’re experiencing them now?

HOLLAND: I think with Covid, it depends what happens in the future. And also it depends, if we can pin down what caused it. Because if, as seems certainly possible, Covid was a lab leak, then it suggests there’s potential for similar things to happen in the future. And it would be a pointer to the way in which the attempt to research things that are threatening to public health may in themselves generate future threats. Then people like historians, I imagine, would be very interested in Covid. I think also the other thing that Covid did certainly for me was to draw attention to just how astonishing the change has been of what antibiotics have done and of the improvements in medical health over the 20th century. And it gives you a reminder of what life was like before that. Where you could catch an infection, and potentially die of it just by going out on the street or sitting in a room with someone who was ill, in a way that hasn’t been the case, certainly, in the first world for decades and decades. And it opened up one’s eyes to what happens if antibiotics no longer work. I guess in terms of what will people think looking back at the early years of the 21st century, it’s clear that developments in technology, particularly in artificial intelligence, are moving at a pace where there is genuine disagreement among people who do know their technology, as to whether this is a threat to the future of humanity. So I would say that is obviously something that our robot overlords, when they start writing history in two months? Three months? That might interest them. And I guess the process of mass extinction as well. I’m not a zoologist or qualified to opine on this from my own learning, but I read people who are, and they compare what we’re going through to previous mass extinctions, which would include the asteroid that destroyed the dinosaurs and the end of the Permian. And if they’re comparing what we’re going through now to that, then that seems to me something pretty major that I imagine historians would write about. We exist in the shadow of humanity’s ability to wipe ourselves out. And we have done ever since 1945. And the ways in which we can wipe ourselves out have simply become more varied and more complex and more difficult to understand, and nothing that’s happened in the 21st century has served to halt that process.

I believe that Tom Holland can make the most uninteresting historical events entertaining. I’d actually like to test that hypothesis with your help. So here’s my challenge for interested listeners. I want you to find The Rest is History podcast wherever you get your podcasts. Scroll through their archive until you find a topic that sounds absolutely dismal to you, something you have zero curiosity about. Then listen to, say, 15 minutes of that episode, and then send an email. The address is PIMA@Freakonomics.com, and I want you to put two pieces of information in that email. First, tell me if you found the episode you listened to interesting, or at least the first 15 minutes of it. And second, I want you to tell me what percent of all the people who take this challenge say that they found the episode they chose interesting. Okay? So, I both want to know if it was interesting for you, and what share of other PIMA listeners who take the challenge will find their episode interesting. I’ll tally the results and report back what I find.

LEVITT: So this is a point in the show where I invite my producer Morgan on to take a listener question.

LEVEY: Hi, Steve. We had a recent episode with Jens Ludwig who runs the crime lab at the University of Chicago, and he wrote a book called Unforgiving Places, which explores some innovative solutions to America’s gun problem. So a listener named Steve sent us an email that asked about ammunition. In the episode, you make the point that guns are such a problem because they have a long lifespan. Even if we were to enact policies that would limit new gun ownership, we still have this problem of over 400 million guns currently in this country. The listener is curious about ammunition. Clearly guns need ammunition to be lethal. So are there any thoughts about how controlling the supply of ammunition could be effective in addressing the gun problem in this country?

LEVITT: Yeah, so this is an interesting idea from listener Steve, because what he’s saying is, look, it’s hard to regulate guns, but in economics we have this term, which is a complement. So it’s complement, spelled C-O-M-P-L-E-M-E-N-T, and it means something that goes along with it. You can’t use a gun without a bullet. So if you can get rid of the bullets, you can get rid of the guns. Now, I have to be honest, this is an idea that I had myself a while back and actually I thought about it, and whenever I’ve got a new idea, I always try to do what I call a fast first cut to figure out whether or not the idea has real potential, whether it’s worth pursuing further. And unfortunately for me, and unfortunately for listener Steve, and unfortunately for the country, if we want to reduce gun violence, when I did my fast first cut, I came to the conclusion that it actually has no legs at all. So, let me ask you, Morgan, how many rounds of ammunition do you think are sold each year in the U.S.A.?

LEVEY: For any type of gun?

LEVITT: Yeah. For any type of gun.

LEVEY: Oh, man. 5 billion?

LEVITT: That is an excellent guess. So between 8 and 10 billion rounds of ammunition are sold each year. Okay. Let’s just say that this idea got some legs and it was being discussed and debated in Congress and there was some thought that maybe we would restrict access to ammunition or tax it in some way. So another quiz for you, Morgan: what do you think gun owners would do as this debate unfolded?

LEVEY: They’d start hoarding ammunition.

LEVITT: I think you would sell 8 billion rounds of ammunition in two days. I think you would empty the shelves of ammunition. And what would the ammunition manufacturers do?

LEVEY: They would increase their supply.

LEVITT: They would run their factories 24 hours a day to get as many bullets as they could in the hands of people. Okay, so I think from that very practical sense, just from a policy sense, I think it’s unlikely that you could make this work because there would just be now a massive stock of ammunition out there. And with a black market, I think anyone who wanted to get their hands on ammunition would still have no trouble regardless of what we did in terms of public policy. And so that right there, I think makes it a non-starter. But then if you dive deeper into the data, you actually realize how futile this is to begin with. So listener Steve’s point related to mass shootings, and the idea is, well, if you made it hard to get ammunition, then it would be hard for people to shoot off hundreds or thousands of rounds of bullets at people. But the actual facts about mass shootings, and I think this will surprise people, is that that is not where the gun deaths are coming from. By my quick calculations, it looks like less than 1 percent of all homicide deaths in the U.S. are coming from cases where an individual is killing four or more people in an incident. Gun violence is just incredibly dispersed. It’s mostly single victims; single shooter, single victim. So the idea that the way to stop gun shootings is to make sure that people don’t have very many bullets, I think just doesn’t really get at the fundamental notion that one bullet is enough to do the killing and there’s just no way that we’re going to keep bullets away from people.

LEVEY: I think a good takeaway though is even though you’ve just talked about why this would be a terrible public policy, you had the same idea as listener Steve, and I think it’s important to try to bring creative ideas to the gun problem, which is something that Jens talks a lot about, but also I think you believe in general.

LEVITT: Yeah, the simple fact is that it’s really hard to know whether an idea is good or not. It’s hard to judge ideas in the abstract, and I would say at least nine out of 10 ideas that I’ve had where the light bulb goes off and I get super excited and I think, “Oh, my God, this is going to be the thing that changes society.” At least nine times out of 10, maybe 99 times out of 100, in the end, it doesn’t turn out to be right. And so I always like to celebrate ideas that have creativity and a spark to them, even if in the end it doesn’t solve any real problem. So while it might’ve sounded like I was being critical of listener Steve, absolutely not. A hundred percent hats off.

LEVEY: Listener Steve, thank you so much for your question. If you have a question for Steve Levitt, our email is PIMA@Freakonomics.com. That’s P-I-M-A@Freakonomics.com. We read every email that’s sent and we look forward to reading yours.

Next week, we’ve got an encore presentation of my conversation with B.J. Miller. He is a doctor who specializes in end-of-life care. It is one of the most powerful episodes we’ve ever done. And in two weeks, we’re back with a brand new episode featuring Robin Wall Kimmerer. She’s a botanist whose book Braiding Sweetgrass is one of the beloved and popular books of the last decade.

KIMMERER: Just a few weeks ago, we celebrated five years on the bestseller list. Go figure. A book about indigenous plant knowledge? I certainly wouldn’t have predicted it.

As always, thanks for listening, and we’ll see you back soon.

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 People I (Mostly) Admire is part of the Freakonomics Radio Network, which also includes Freakonomics Radio and The Economics of Everyday Things. All our shows are produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio. This episode was produced by Morgan Levey, and mixed by Greg Rippin. We had research assistance from Daniel Moritz-Rabson. Our theme music was composed by Luis Guerra. We can be reached at PIMA@Freakonomics.com, that’s P-I-M-A@Freakonomics.com. Thanks for listening.

LEVITT: Well, that’s a really dark place to end it.

HOLLAND: Yeah, sorry.

LEVITT: But I think it’s perfect.