Western Civilization 17/07/2023

July 17, 2023·57 min·5 clips

Septimius Severus tries to bring Shadrapa into Rome by calling him Liber.

1. Western Civilization frames Liber, the Aventine Hill, and Catiline as a Roman religion-and-politics argument. 2. Guy Williams hosts the lecture and uses Septimius Severus, Melkart, and Shadrapa to show how Roman syncretism worked. 3. The episode asks how Rome could absorb foreign gods while treating plebeian worship as a threat to order. 4. Williams says Melkart was easy to identify with Hercules, especially through the Tyrian Hercules title tied to Tyre. 5. He contrasts that with Shadrapa, a healing and wine god from Leptis Magna in Libya, whom Septimius Severus tries to recast as Liber. 6. The Aventine Hill, Remus's hill, is presented as a place of plebeian resistance outside the old sacred boundary of Rome. 7. Caius Sestius's pyramid and Monte Testaccio show burial rules, broken amphorae, and the olive-oil trade from Beatis in southern Iberia. 8. Williams links that trade wealth to Trajan and Hadrian, the Spanish emperors from what is today Andalusia. 9. He says Liber stood for liberty and libation at once, turning 'in vino libertas' into a Roman joke on freedom and wine. 10. Pliny is cited for calling Liber the first to adopt buying and selling, the triumphal procession, and theater. 11. After the Second Punic War, Carthage's destruction, latifundia, and urban migration create the inequality that feeds bread and circuses. 12. Roman historians then describe Bacchanalia worshippers as having 'levitas anime' rather than gravitas. 13. Williams reports that priestesses told followers to break sexual rules, and a loyal slave exposed the group to the Senate. 14. He says the Senate responded by executing 6,000 people and restricting worship to five participants with local permission. 15. The episode notes that archaeology places similar practices in southern Italy long before the Roman crackdown story. 16. Williams also folds in the Gracchus brothers, who tried to answer Rome's decline with social justice and were destroyed by the Senate. 17. The tone is lecture-like but conversational, with Williams constantly translating terms like 'sacrima,' 'vinum spercum,' and 'toga virilis'. 18. He shifts between English, Spanish, and Latin to explain Roman ritual, politics, and etymology without stopping the flow. 19. Anyone interested in Roman religion and class conflict will get the most from it. 20. Listeners wanting a short, plot-driven story may skip it.

As heard by us

Roman religion and Ovid's free speech make the coming-of-age toga a civic map of adulthood.

The episode follows Emperor Septimius Severus as he tries to carry gods from Leptis Magna, his North African hometown, into Rome. It is clearest when it treats religion as a language of assimilation: Melkart had already been understood as Hercules, often the Tyrian Hercules, so…

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Want Roman religion with citizenship, first beards, and a late detour into Catiline?

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