Spring is here. And to celebrate, Princeton University Press is having an incredible say. Use the code BLOOM50 to receive nearly 50% off of every single Princeton University Press print book, e-book, and audio book. The sale ends May 31st. So go to press.princeton.edu and use the code BLOOM50 as soon as possible. You won't regret it. Welcome to Network.
Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today because we get to talk about a book titled miraculous weird and wonderful stories of ancient grace and rome published by reaction in 2025 by paul crystal who has joined me today to tell us about these stories, these facts, these really crazy things, to be honest, from ancient Greece and Rome that have rarely been translated, rarely been told in English.
And so these are all sorts of things that have been around for obviously quite a long time, but are probably a lot less familiar to us. than some of the other things we have from this period. The book covers a massive range of topics. We probably won't get to all of them, but hopefully this will give us an idea of some of the many things that were being discussed by writers in ancient Greece and Rome.
So Paul, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast. Right. Yeah. Thank you very much for inviting me. Would you mind starting us off by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book? Julia, as Miranda says, my name is Paul Crystal. I'm supposedly retired now, but spend... most of my life writing various books. mainly on subjects relating to the classical world. So I've written quite a few books that deal with certain aspects of Greco-Roman civilisation.
Why did I write it? In writing the books that I've just mentioned, it became apparent over time that there was a lot of stuff. thrown up by my research which Possibly didn't always qualify for inclusion in the book that was... in hand at the time. So I started compiling these oddities, these bits and pieces of information which rarely saw the light of day either in books or academic papers and such like. So the compilation grew and grew and grew.
and it didn't take long for it to become obvious to me that it was part of a genre of classical literature which is little heard of, not just by the interested. historian, the person who's fascinated by classical civilisation and classical podcasts, radio broadcasts, television programmes, Mary Beard and the life and so on.
so I was compiling these and discovered a genre called paradoxology and what that amounted to was ancient writers Some of them very obscure, so obscure that no one's ever heard of them, including classicists.
but others which are very familiar to us like Herodotus, Thucydides Cicero and so on because it wasn't just the paradoxographers who were writing this strange stuff it was also the more sort of canonical authors Cicero, for example, wrote a book on what we would call Miracula Herodotus, is full of what would qualify as paradoxography, with numerous paradoxes peppered throughout his history.
So this is becoming something that I couldn't ignore after a while and I decided a year or two ago that I would write a book. on the subject of the absurd, the unusual, the unheard of and the sometimes downright silly aspects of some aspects of Roman and Greek literature and hence the book Miracula took a while to find a publisher it wasn't called Miracula by me
but Reaction eventually took it on board. Philip Matysak, who I have worked with in a sort of long-distance capacity, he lives in Canada, I live in the UK. agreed to write the foreword and Reaction took it on board and published it a couple of weeks ago in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world.
That's a very fun brief of the unusual, the somewhat silly, the kind of things that don't usually get included. But that is rather a lot of material, even if, as you said, you're kind of compiling it as you were doing other projects. Did you have to make any tricky decisions about kind of what to include or how to organize or make sense of all of this? Like, how did that process work?
Well, obviously, writing any book, you've got to be quite strict into what you put in and what you don't and what you leave out, as you suggested.
writing a book on the paradoxical is sort of playing by by what do you leave out because there is so much out there which again is surprising given the relative obscurity of some of this information some of this literature but you have to be quite quite sort of disciplined in deciding what goes in and I suppose my My personal rules were if it's obscure, it's got a chance.
If it's by someone who's famous or relatively famous, it's got a chance. But more importantly, if it's written by someone who... many people, most people in fact, I've never heard of, then it's certainly got a chance. The other sort of qualification for inclusion related to just how... how strange it was because you get people like Aristotle spouting stuff that you wouldn't expect him to say or to do or whatever given the rest of his extant corpus.
But as I said at the beginning, many of our familiar authors have... have actually written paradoxography Possibly in their time it was unknowingly, but it's there all the same. So at the end of the day, the dafter it was, the more chance it had of actually going in, because it surprises people. If someone leafs through the book in all the bookshops that hopefully it's stocked in today, they will be surprised when they read the context list of the index.
just the range of subjects and material relating to paradoxes or basically miraculous stories that were... sloshing around in the ancient world for all the illiterate people to enjoy. Well, I'm glad you mentioned the massive range the book covers because that is both enticing to listeners and also a bit of a caveat. There's no way we can possibly cover
all of the topics that the book does. But I do want to, in some ways, do exactly what you said, sort of leaf through some of the pieces to get a sense of these ridiculous, silly, over the top sorts of stories. So I wonder if we can start with monsters, please, because they seem to be, the ancient Greeks and Romans seem to be really fascinated by monsters. Why was this such a big thing?
well monsters you're absolutely right if you god forbid google monsters in the classical world you will come up with one page that deals with monsters in the great world which really is monsters in Greek mythology and the page, the Google page that deals with those monsters. well it's pages, there's hundreds, literally hundreds of Greek monsters that have appeared in various forms of literature or the visual art. That gives you an idea of the immensity.
Of the subject of monsters In Greek society, Greek civilization Greek literature, Greek philosophy, Greek religion and so on So, yeah, I mean, monsters were big news and no myth, really. I think it's true to say it was complete without a monster at least one month. So why did they put monsters in? Monsters, I suppose, for Greek society, which we all are told that it was one of the greatest civilizations in the world. always has been and probably always will be.
And I'll come back to the aspect of civilisation or so-called civilisation later. monsters were there. as i say it was mythology and the same applies to roman mythology as it did to Greek and Babylonian and such like other pre-classical civilisation monsters were a major aspect of of mythology and what it did do it opened the door opened a window to the darker sides of in this case Greek civilization it showed readers
Or people looking at mosaics or wall paintings. The darker side of life, the evil bits, the nasty bits. and things that probably the average Greek, the average Greek author didn't really want to sort of... sort of labor too much didn't want to focus on them because he was more inclined to celebrate the good things about greek civilization so the dark bits were sort of in a way transformed into monsters they provided a vehicle for the horrible bits of life and god knows
well the gods know there was plenty of that so the the monster takes on this role as the the sort of harbinger of the uh of the awful the nasty the miraculous and the Unbelievable to some extent. There's one example you could take from that list I mentioned. There's one monster called Ouroboros and I defy anyone including professional classicists.
to know about this because how could you because this monster is rarely mentioned and appears very very rarely in Greek literature Ouroboros was an immortal self-eating dragon or snake that was formed physiologically in a loop and his His role really was to sort of eat himself to death constantly and to that end he was formed in a loop as I say and he constantly bit off his tail every time he could reach it. I mean, exactly what that meant to the illiterate Greek.
is beyond us because we'll never know because no one actually told us why would they but this is an example of the monster depicting and defining something that was obviously not quite right in in Greek society and provided a good metaphor for For the evil that awaits the... the unsuspecting Greek who defies the gods and is hubristic and doesn't perform the precise rituals. And we know about... other monsters of similar elk with similar metaphors related to them.
Kerberos the watchdog of the underworld for example As Sulla and Charybdis the list goes on. And they're more familiar because they feature in very familiar works in this case. the Iliad and the Odyssey by Homer and Hesio and the Homeric Cycle so yeah they were a sort of metaphor for the not so good, miraculous things that were going on in this sort of dark web of Greek mythology. Very interesting indeed, especially given how in many ways unfamiliar some of those monsters sound today.
which made it even more interesting for me as a reader to then, to some extent, kind of immediately turn the page and discover the first science fiction novel. And it's like, wait a second, that sounds very familiar. That's a really popular genre now. How, tell us about this first science fiction novel, please.
It sounds strange that a book, even on the miraculous, the wondrous, the fascinating in classical literature, does actually cover... science fiction as a genre but it does it's there for all to see it's available in the classical series and the author is a guy called Lucien who was flourished in the sort of first century AD and his book was called a true story now alarm bells should start to ring immediately you find a book
call that in a book called Mirafula because essentially it wasn't a true story but his job was at the time of writing and publication presumably to actually get this This book sort of circulated and read by groups of people or individuals who were looking for a work of fiction. And that again is one of the definitions I suppose.
of most elements of paradoxography. So it qualifies in every respect for inclusion in the book. So to go back to the question, we have an example here in Lucian's... true story of a work of science fiction, which to me is one of the most amusing and most famous. and favourite pieces of classical literature that I've included in the book. Yeah, so what did this wondrous work include? Let me just sort of find it in the book. To me. Yeah, the first science fiction book is the subtitle, and it's...
It's Lucian's true story. I said 1st century AD. It's 2nd century, actually. It's the first known work. The earliest known work could include interplanetary travel in outer space. alien life forms, interplanetary warfare, colonization of planets. artificial atmospheres, liquid air, reflecting telescopes, creatures as products of human technology, i.e. robots.
And the list goes on and on and on. So basically, this guy in the second century AD had grasped what science fiction was all about. And basically, more importantly, I suppose, he knew because of the scientific studies that were... current in his day or had happened. before he was born and while he was living he was au fait, quite up to speed with what was going on in scientific research at the time and the knowledge that was existent.
in his society and had been probably for a good few years before. before he actually put pen to paper. Fascinating to believe that science fiction, as you say, a very popular genre of literature now has its roots. so long ago and was presumably very popular as sort of witnessed by the fact that the book survived and most of Greek literature didn't survive or doesn't survive. is still extant and was obviously being rewritten, copied and whatever by people which ensured its continued existence.
so much so that it was still available for the classical library to do an addition of it. That's one of the most interesting and most illuminating, I think, aspects of paradoxography. And it really does shed light, not just on the genre of paradoxography in literature, but also in what... scientific work was being done or had been done at the time of Lucian's efforts to break the mould and write a book that covers what we now term science fiction.
Fascinating. Dear old work platform. It's not you. It's us. Actually, it is you. Endless onboarding. Constant IT bottlenecks. We need a platform We've met someone new. They're called Monday.com, and it was love at first onboarding. So no harm. We're moving on you'll love to use yeah really really interesting piece of the book thank you for telling us about it
I wonder if we can talk about another aspect that very much, at least to me, falls into the category of kind of the paradox. The section of the book where you talk not just about aphrodisiacs, but also anti-aphrodisiacs, putting them very much in conversation with each other. Given that obviously food and the moods it produces is still something we are interested in today, what sorts of ideas did these ancients have about which foods fit into which of these two categories?
It's quite complicated, actually, because it sort of ties in with a number of other aspects of Greek. and Roman, civilization, education, social psychology, all sorts of different sort of subgenre of science. literature. So the most important thing I suppose is that it is part of the Greek and Roman obsession with superstition. There were loads and loads of Greeks and Romans who... professed to be au fait with poultices. charms and such like relating to sex
Sex was also in its own right sort of related to other aspects of Greek and Roman civilization. Sex in a physical sense, not in a gender sense. So you have... loads and loads of literature that relates to mysteries.
to the arcane, the chthonic, the underworld, voodoos and such like, and superstition. Just as an example, I could point to any aspect really, or most aspects of Greco-Roman civilization where it was replete with gods, goddesses, minor gods and major gods who actually looked after that particular aspect of social activity. Take, for example, midwifery, childbirth and such like.
as an example but obviously it's quite important because it's a universality that we all go through all societies go through childbirth and such like replenishing the population, restoring the birth rate to populate. the civilization to sort of bolster the army, to bolster politics and such like. So it's something that is familiar with and important to any civilization that's ever been or ever will be. So you have reproduction, you have childbirth.
And the example I'm struggling to give you is every aspect relating to childbirth, the birth of a baby. or preferably, much preferably, a baby boy, is covered by the panoply of gods that populate the Greek and Roman pantheons. taking childbirth as an example it all starts with obviously desire Man fancies woman. Then sexual relationships. Man and women sort of have sexual intercourse most of the time, not always obviously. Woman becomes pregnant.
The baby is sort of... in the womb developing all the time, eventually is born, comes out as a baby. and so on and so forth right through to when the child at the age of four or whatever goes to school so for each and every one of those stages in life There is a god or goddess that's looking after them. So there's a god or goddess of penetration. There's a god or goddess of ejaculation. There's a god or goddess of the sperm being fertilized. there's a god or a goddess
of the baby developing in the embryo and eventually being born and is sort of introduced to the world. There's a god or goddess who looks after the baby when it first... sees the light of day that we all experience or just as importantly when it utters its first cry hopefully so yeah every aspect of childbirth of human reproduction, civilization, maintenance is covered by
one god or another of the Greek or Roman pantheon and that doesn't just apply obviously to childbirth or reproduction it applies to every aspect of social intercourse and communication whatsoever so that gives you an idea of the extent of superstition and such like within the classical world and that's why Greek mythology is so complicated and very difficult to know very much about it apart from when you're a when you're a famous celebrity and you've got a publisher doing it all for you.
Yeah, it's definitely a very complicated cosmology that is hard to kind of access today, given how differently we think about some things. Yeah, well, that ties in, actually, quite coincidentally, with the innate... sort of obscurity of paradoxography that's obscure as well and part of the reason is because of the stuff it can go in Yeah, no, fair enough. One thing I'd love to ask next about is you include a number of examples in the book of graffiti and sort of like everyday phrases and truism.
And I was really sort of bemused by the fact that some of them honestly sounded like things we'd say today about like the NHS, for example, like really familiar. And some of them, even after reading the explanation, I was kind of like, hang on, wait, what is going on here? So I wonder if you can take us through that paradox, the extent to which these sorts of things that are scribbled, you know, they're not published, they're just written on a wall. How much have those changed or not over time?
Well, that's interesting because the graffiti that I've quoted in the book, much of it comes from... from Pompeii and Herculaneum and other major archaeological sites Pompeii has been extremely good to us in terms of what it gives up in terms of graffiti. The thing about, as anyone knows about graffiti, it tends to concentrate on the universality. It's stuff that the average in this case Greek or Roman would do or find or experience during his or her
life on a day-to-day basis. And that's why with the modern explanations of Pompeii and Herculaneum that are going on as we speak, that more and more graffiti... is being uncovered. One of those universalities is again sort of linked to what we've just been talking about in relation to aphrodisiacs. and childbirth, and that is obviously sex. Much of the most common graffitis are related to sex and they obviously...
contain or feature aspects of what a man was able to do in a brothel in Pompeii. Loads and loads of stuff relating to the sort of use of sex and whatever in his sort of daily experience brothels, there were many brothels no one really knows how many but
there's been various attempts to quantify it but they were there and they were popular and they were very frequently used so it's not surprising that the walls around these brothels and Praverna and other buildings that other businesses that really... sort of used prostitutes or prostitutes users it's not surprising when they get the usual vulgar stuff about what went on and in some cases shocking detail in relation to
the sort of journey of the sperm or whatever into the prostitute and so on and so forth. I won't quote anything direct because it's quite obscene and probably might offend some listeners. uh if you look on the relevant pages which i think is Round about page 180. You'll see what I mean. It's... It's certainly there to be seen, and you can still see it today. in these sites, but also in the museum in Naples. Yeah, it's all about universalities. So what was good for a Greek or Roman and sort of...
69 AD was probably, is still probably good for us. It's about universal experience. You know, there's a lot of sort of alpha male stuff going on as well at the same time, trying to shock his friends or neighbours into realising just how... how sort of virile and whatever he was, because he did this, that, and the other in terms of sexual experience with a prostitute. So that's it.
Things have changed. No one in ancient Greece is going to write graffiti about something that wasn't discovered or invented. But by and large, it's all about the human nature and human psychology. Framed that way, it's not hugely surprising. As a species, we tend to still be quite interested in social relations and sexual relations.
I was, however, quite surprised to read that ancient traffic might actually be more similar today than we'd expect, which, given how much technology has changed, I was a bit surprised by that. So could you tell us more? the problems that beset us today with parking restrictions. and loading times and unloading times. But probably more contentious at the very moment that we're talking is potholes. All of those were bad news for the average Greek or Roman.
He or she, but mainly he, because of the societal forces and values. He was bedeviled by the fact that he couldn't get his horse and cart or donkey and cart. down the street in downtown Rome to sort of unload the materials for the building site he was going to, to the grocer's shop that he was going to because of the traffic. The traffic was other traders and merchants.
trying to provide the same service and delivery to other shops and building sites, but also to litters. Litter not in the sort of... people dropping little cent hospitals but for the posh people who are being carried around by two or four slaves in a litter going from one appointment to another visiting friends visiting posh friends going to the senate speaking in the Senate and such. So the daily grind was complicated by too much traffic.
too many vehicles in too small places to accommodate them. I live in York and we still suffer exactly the same today in a sort of frightening sense, as you say. Parking. unloading potholes are all still with us. It seems to have defied the best minds of civil engineering and such like to actually get a handle on it and deal with it. But that's been the case for two and a half thousand years.
It was back longer than I expected. Yeah, well, I mean, it was well before the day of the white van and such like, and, you know, sort of annoying things like that and the sort of average motorist. who just decides he can stop or she can stop wherever they want well before that yeah it was
It was a frequent curse for the city liver in ancient cities and towns. I mean, it sort of... it still shines as well with something else and that is the fact that These are laws and there's restrictions that are being imposed but I'm me and I can do what I want in relation to the law and it doesn't bother me so long as I'm alright Jack.
So, yeah, I mean, there's still an element of that. And I think, again, that goes back to human nature. That's something in human nature that you can't really eradicate because I think we call it selfishness. And, yeah, so it is linked to that as well, which is, I think, psychologically and sociologically, it's very interesting that those things were sort of current. Page 316 is where you need to look for that. And there was that feeling as well in Rome, certainly amongst the...
the sort of richer people, the more privileged people who could afford it. There was that feeling in Rome that living in a city was hell on earth. It starts Juvenal, for example, in its satires and other satirists. They sort of make a point of saying how crap life was in the cities and they long to go to their coastal houses, their country houses. than places in Posh Bayi, which was the sort of Saint-Tropez of the Gulf of Naples. They couldn't wait to get away.
from city life and one aspect of their escape was the dreadful traffic and noise Yeah that does sound rather familiar. Continuing then our tour from the familiar to the unfamiliar and back and forth, that does sound really quite striking to what we might experience today. However, using cats as weapons of war and elephants of weapons of mass destruction is not so familiar. So can you help us understand this ancient reality? I mean, if it wasn't so...
Cruel and destructive it would be funny because I mean who would imagine a cat could change? the outcome of a battle. Or a war. But they did. It goes back to. Again. Man's. sort of creativity when it comes to making life impossible or terminal for fellow man. whatever happened to Christianity or Roman religion. But yeah, I mean, Katz sort of first made an appearance well before... Roman and Greek civilization. They featured in wars and battles.
in Mesopotamia and such like and other civilizations and Egypt, the Egyptian civilization and what they were used for along with other animals including human beings. which is probably even more shocking, well it is even more shocking, they were used as sort of projectiles. So your average catapult operative would get hold of a rotting, festering, diseased corpse. dog cat donkey human being
something that was festering and could be a vehicle, a vector for a disease. They would place them on the catapult and then lob them over the city walls. of the defending enemy, and hopefully that would result in a disease spreading amongst the populace, because these were often used in sieges. They were great favourites of thinning out the population.
came up in a city that had no food or little, had no water or little, and then to finish them off, give them a dose of some nasty sort of disease. So you lob over a festering corpse of one kind or another, and hopefully that will just, over time, do its work. Some obviously will lob back, but I think... history such as it is on this subject. tells us that they were affected to some degree. And the elephant, the elephant is interesting. The Indians started the sort of craze for elephants.
in war and to an Indian in the sort of prehistory period in their civilisations. An army without an elephant was like a forest without trees. It was unthinkable. You had to have a core of elephants. in your ranks to actually help defeat the enemy. Alexander the Great took it over and was much taken by elephants and he sort of incorporated them, he recruited them into his armies when he was trying to conquer the sort of...
far eastern sort of countries, some of which came under his sway in due course. So the elephant had a good introduction. Unfortunately, though, Although, when used properly, or when the elephant behaved properly, they were certainly very effective. People who came upon them they were seeing this monster for the very first time when elephant when the Romans invaded Britain.
the ancient britons or the anglo-saxons or whatever depending on the period they had never seen an elephant before so when one of these was unleashed upon them what did they do they didn't hang about to see what it was going to do they fled the Romans actually won the day. But yeah, the elephant was great if it worked and it did what it was told. But being an elephant, it didn't sort of respond to discipline or orders and such like in much the same way as most.
human armies would. So it sort of terrorised the people but in doing that it just ran them off. The elephant couldn't recognize a uniform or a standard or a flag or an eagle. To them they were all people who were annoying him or her and basically what do you do when... someone like us annoys you and you're an elephant, you trample them to death. So there was absolute mayhem in many of the battles that elephants were used. by the Greeks and certainly the Romans.
Pyrrhus was a sort of fan of the elephant, but he, like everyone else, suffered by the fact that once the elephant was spooked, He or she, the elephant, just trampled everyone within sight. And then once they'd done the damage, I decimated the army. Then they just left the scene of war. Yeah, and usually lived to destroy another army another day. So yeah, elephants were weapons of mass destruction, unlike the ones that we toyed with, with the Iraq war and such like, they did exist.
Wow. Yeah, that's definitely very different scenes to imagine today. As were, to some extent, another thing I'd love to ask you about, which is ancient doom cafes. That's quite a phrase. What were these? Well, yeah, I mean, the thing about that is that we have doom cafes. I've never been in one, but there is one in York that I might go in one day just to sort of experience it. But essentially, the sort of Roman version of a doom cafe sort of...
stems from Domitian, one of the bad emperors who came to power at the end of the first century, early second century AD. Now he was a bit of a... Bit of a sadist, to say the least. and a masochist and one of his sort of favorite. exploits was he didn't like the Senate. He thought there were a bunch of nobodies who just meddled with things. A bit like people today don't vote and say, well, they just get in the way of things.
they're not worth it. So Domitian had some fun with his sort of senators and politicians local politicians and national politicians and what he used to do periodically he'd invite a group of these people to the famous banquet the roman banquet which has got a reputation for courtesans dancers musicians and such like too much food too much drink and a bit of fun at the guest
And what Domitian used to do, he'd organize a sort of invitation list. You couldn't not go. That was a sure way to end your political career as well as your life. And they would turn up and all of a sudden... they would see that they were surrounded by slaves, which wasn't abnormal, but these slaves were dressed in a certain way that sort of suggested an element of doom was about to descend on them. They'd be dressed up, the lights would go out, the candles would go out.
the oil lamps would go out they'd be plunged into darkness and the food would be served and the mission would joke well nine out of ten of these dishes is all right but there's one that I've poisoned and God help you if you take it, because you'll just be throwing yourself to my mercy. There's all sorts of sort of sinister, nasty death. death sort of harbing us that could befall these poor people and naturally their appetite quickly disappeared and they were scared to death.
They didn't know whether Domitian meant it. Certainly when they were invited to leave the party, as it were, they believed in the accounts that we had of what was going on, they believed that that was it. was the end of their lives but in some cases if not most cases they did live to um attend another doom cafe under Domitian's invitation. So yeah, that's the ancient equivalent of what we do today with the Modern Doom Cafe. Yeah, very interesting indeed.
I wonder if we can zoom out, I suppose, from any of the one instances of things we've been talking about and kind of look at this overall, because on the one hand, of course, This is fascinating just from a like, whoa, what was their life like? You know, what was their world like? Excavating all of that through the lens of the sort of seemingly silly things that nevertheless tell us a lot about their everyday lives and ways people thought.
um we can of course think about it that way and that's mainly what we've been doing but some of the things you talk about in the book are writers at the time very much saying like here's my advice here's how life should be lived And a lot of it, maybe all of it, I don't know, seems kind of odd given how we live today. So is there any advice listeners might want to take from these sources? Or should we maybe not trust the ancients so much? Well, let's go.
if you haven't already bought it is 460 pages long and it's full of stuff the like of which as I say, has probably never seen much of the light of day and would surprise an awful lot of people, even though there is a familiar with. modern sort of versions of classical life and mythology and so on and so forth. So there's a lot in there. There's hundreds. hundreds literally of examples of miraculous things, weird and wonderful stories of ancient Greece and Rome. And some of them are just daft.
Which I've explained. I won't give any away because that's a spoiler. But they're there for all to see. Some of them are... sort of odds with civilization. We all go around and are on the same at school and whatever or college, university. saying the grandeur that was Greece or the glory that was Rome. And the sort of Victorians and Georgians didn't help.
The assumption about Greece and Rome is that it was a marvellous, wonderful civilisation and everyone was living in a bed of roses and such. It takes you about three pages of this book to realise that that is simply not the case. Life was hard for the majority of people. Life was dangerous for the majority of the majority of people. profile you had, the more obtrusive you were, the more likely you were to be either poisoned or have your head cut off or be burned.
modern life for the average Roman be they poor because then you'd starve to death or whether they were rich and privileged had it had its challenges and some of them, quite a lot of them, ended in death. So you have to be very careful who you're consorted with, who you're supported and such like. But the other thing about some of the content of this book is it manifestly shows that Greece and Rome...
Although they had their sort of civilizing aspects, it's called Romanitas, although most Romans would never have. acknowledged that word or recognised it and it only really emerged in the second or third. century AD with Tertullian who was using it to annoy his fellow Carthaginian. So Roman civilization for the Roman was just something that he or she looked at. in terms of a building, a mosaic a wall painting or a flushing toilet, a central heating system, an aqueduct.
flushing water and some of them that was there and you know like us you just take it for granted but a lot of stuff in the book deals with issues that are still plaguing us today and which essentially if you apply them all to a civilization you would not admit that this was a civilization. Awful, so terrible, slavery being an example of aspects of prostitution. sort of stigmas, disabilities. women, all of these people.
types of people were stigmatized and they would not get entry into a country or civilization that you would describe as civilized. So that's a big learning thing about the book. It tells you that we haven't in some cases. some would say many cases, moved on from the barbarity that prevailed within Greek and Roman civilisation. And that's ironic in itself, it's paradoxical in itself. The Romans delighted in calling people who weren't Romans barbarians.
And who were the biggest barbarians? Well, the Goths, the Huns, and the Visigoths, certainly. And after them, Vikings and such like. But the biggest barbarians were the Romans themselves. And yeah, so to get back to your question, no, I wouldn't recommend very much of the content of this book to be taken on by the modern civilized. person from the Western world or certain places in Far East and so on. Now read it with caution and the book begins actually with a couple of caveats saying Bye-bye.
Even the authors of some of this stuff, most of this stuff, Pliny the Elder being a case in point. Didn't believe it was true.
but they didn't believe it wasn't true either. So the advice to them is take it with care, read it with care, and make your own mind up as to whether, you know, whether Ethiopians were all... had dogs heads and such like preposterous things like that take it with care take it with a pinch of salt and make your own mind up Definitely a very interesting perspective on the ancient world that we do so often kind of.
assume oh they must have gotten so many things right it's like well actually the similarities between then and now um perhaps are more striking than we think and maybe not all in terms of the shiny great things so thank you for giving us this highlights to her of the many paradoxes that come from these lit piece sources of literature.
I have to ask whether you've got your eye on a next project. I mean, it sounds like this project very much kind of grew out of things you'd been working on previously. Has this sparked any ideas? There is more work to be done as any classicist. who are listening would agree there is more work to be done on these aspects of this arcane aspect of classical literature and how it impinges upon society.
their society and more importantly our society as well because there's lessons there's lessons to be learned from all of it be it you know good bad or ugly and as I said a lot of it's quite ugly Yeah, there's more work to be done, but whether a publisher would publish it, it remains to be seen. I mean this book I think will be commercially successful.
academically, that's up to the academics. They tend not to value, or some tend not to value, the works of people like me, because I'm not an accredited academic. And, you know, the attitude I've had over the, been writing books for 20, no, 15 years now, the attitude I've had with.
classical journals in particular is that basically you're not an academic what do you know but my answer to that is well anyone can do research Not everyone can do it properly, but Wyatt screened a large number of people who were writing important books, and I regard this as an important book because there isn't one available. I don't know, authors always say that, but there isn't one available, and I think there's a value to be gained from more work in this subject.
Hopefully there will be. It may not be by me because I'm under extreme pressure from... my wife and my children to stop doing it and retire. I was meant to retire 10 years ago but didn't quite make it. So I may do something more on it in time, but the prospect of a publisher, because of this prejudice that exists among not all, I mean some... Some academics and teachers and such are very encouraging. And, you know, Philip Matthysak, for example, a good example, has sort of always encouraged me.
to write more and he acknowledges me in one of his latest books on ancient magic. as being the source of his inspiration. So there is hope, but I'm not going to retire to Costa del Sol.
any time but yeah I mean there are books I'm working on at the moment one on Roman trade outside of the Roman Empire I mean not many people for example No, and I didn't know at some point in my life, that we did quite a lot of trade with ancient China, with ancient India and such like, which were beyond the borders of the Roman Empire. So yeah, there's a book coming out on that soon, which I hope will be revelatory and of some academic value in the long run. So yeah, I'm also doing a book on...
This will surprise you on Bridget and that series. I think the fourth series is coming out next year. And my book is about Bridgerton. It's not Bridgerton. It's not knocking Bridgerton. It's trying to acknowledge it.
value as a sort of cultural experience for people who like that sort of thing period dramas and whatever but also the information I give on it is about the production itself, which is absolutely astonishing, not just in the visual sense, turning it on and watching it and waiting for the next episode or series, just the amount of money. and the amount of work and time that went into the wardrobe, the costumes, the scenarios, the locations. It is absolutely astonishing.
You know, it's up there with Star Wars and whatever, you know, the big budget movies. How much work, effort and grease serve. research has gone into it. My book covers that. It sort of acknowledges what a work of art and culture it is. some people sort of dismiss it out of hand. But what my book does, it sort of juxtaposes the life
of the Bridgerton cast and people characters with what was really going on in the Regency, the Georgian world at the time. You know, the underwall, the prostitution, the vagrancy, the disease. the industrial diseases in particular, the pausals, the workhouses. It's a bit of a spoiler, really. It wasn't really like this, folks. This is the real world that the privileged, the aristocrat. the Royal Court were living off the back of.
Which, as I say, isn't intended to damage or nullify or dismiss the efforts and work that the team, the production team. of the series that have gone so far. It's not about that. It's just showing the content. Well, it certainly sounds like you have plenty of projects.
to keep you busy. So best of luck with all of those. And while you're working on them, listeners can read the book we've been discussing titled Miracula, Weird and Wonderful Stories of Ancient Greece and Rome, published by Reaction in 2025. Paul, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast. No, pleasure. It was enjoyable.