An Interview with Classicist and Military Historian Barry Strauss

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Hello, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, the listeners of the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

Welcome to the Saturday weekend edition.

We have a special show today.

We have a scholar with us, Dr.

Barry Strauss, and he and Victor are going to talk together on an interview.

But first, let's take a moment for some messages, and we'll be right back.

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Welcome back and welcome to you, Dr.

Strauss.

We're glad to have you with us.

We know that you're a very busy man, so we appreciate your time.

Thank you.

It's a pleasure to be here.

Yeah.

And I would like to tell our listeners that Dr.

Barry Strauss is a classicist and military and naval historian at Cornell University.

He is the Bryce and Edith Baumar Professor of Humanistic Studies at Cornell University.

He's authored nine books on topics from the Trojan War to the Battle of Actium, from Athenian ideology to the genius of leaders like Hannibal and Caesar.

His most well-known book is The Ten Caesars, Roman Emperors from Augustine to Constantine.

And those books have all been translated into 19 languages.

So that to me is the most impressive part about that, Barry.

We were really happy to have you here.

Before I pass this off to Victor, I'd like to remind everybody that Victor is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marcia Buskie Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

And with that, I would like to...

pass the baton to Victor Davis-Hanson to go ahead and have a conversation with Barry Strauss.

Thank you, Sammy.

Barry,

it's good to have you here.

I should tell our listeners that I think, Barry, it was 45 years ago when we first met, 1977, I think, at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens.

It was a very unique experience because there were three of us in that school of class of about 20: Barry Strauss, myself, and Josiah Olber.

And we were all more or less interested in the same thing, and that is the terrain, landscape, economic conditions of classical Athens after the Peloponnesian War.

And all three of us wrote books.

Barry wrote a book on Athens socially, economically, the conditions after the war.

Josh wrote one on the defensive borderline fortifications of the Attic countryside in the fourth century.

And I wrote one on warfare and agriculture, that is the ravaging of cropland.

So we've had a long friendship, Barry.

Yeah.

And I appreciate you coming on.

This latest book, before we start on the war that made the Roman Empire, and it's an account of Cleopatra, Octavian, or Mark Anthony, I should say, first, Cleopatra, and Octavian, later the Augustus.

But before we start, you were a classical scholar.

You had a number of very impressive publications.

And then maybe, I know that I think I reviewed a book for yours on Salamis, maybe.

nine years ago or something.

But what was it that you wanted to reach this large audience that you've now established with, oh, the Battle of Salamis, the Trojan War, Masters and Commanders,

and books like that?

What happened?

I mean, you have that skill, but was it a certain time in your career or what was the catalyst for you to sort of really expand beyond just classics to a broader intellectual and just general public audience?

Well, thanks, Victor.

Like you, I had the bug bite me.

It was always in me.

I started out my my career as a journalist.

I thought I wanted to be a journalist.

Then I got a job working for a newspaper and I realized, no, I think I want to go to graduate school and study history in more depth.

But I always liked the idea of writing to a wider audience.

And I think there was a thirst for history in a wider audience.

I enjoyed the scholarly give and take.

but I also felt that I had something to contribute to a wider audience.

And I love writing.

So

those are skill sets you don't always get to use in scholarly articles.

And reaching out to people, reaching out to different people, taking the stories that we know so well from the classical world and explaining what current research is doing to our wider audience.

To me, it's very rewarding.

And I think it's part of what we should be doing as academics and as scholars.

We shouldn't only want to speak to a very small audience.

You get to speak to a larger audience to your students, of course, but they're just a small, select group, slice of society.

They're kids at a certain age.

They're kids.

It's terrific to reach out to adults as well.

So

those are some of the reasons that I wanted to reach out.

Well, that's, I couldn't agree more.

I know that when you go to, say, the history or military history sections of a chain bookstore like Barnes and Noble, too often, there are very few scholars that are writing for a popular audience, even in our field that's kind of narrow.

But, and I see your books there, and it's really refreshing to see somebody that A, wants to write for a broader audience, B, is very good at it, and C, brings kind of a scholarly rigor, but without, you know, not ostentatiously.

So it's just the right mixture.

One other question before we get to

you were trained on Ardon Kagan at Yale.

Nominally, we're all, you know, classicists as Greece and Rome, but your emphases for your first books were on ancient Greece.

And you wrote two or three of them.

And then your first broader books on the Trojan War and Salamis were on Greece.

But now the last three, you've been emphasizing Rome more.

Was there a reason or do you just feel that that was an area that also hadn't been mined sufficiently or wasn't as well known as it should be to the public?

I mean, there are lots of reasons.

It's true.

I started out thinking I was going to become a Roman historian.

Roman history was originally a great love of mine.

And then I met Don Kagan and kind of hard man not to want to study with, even though there was great Roman history at Yale as well, Ramsey McMullen.

But I always had in the back of my mind that I'd go back to Roman history.

And Italy has a kind of funny place in my psyche, both because I grew up in a very heavily Italian-American part of Brooklyn.

I always felt identified some with Italy, and also because my father was a soldier in the U.S.

Army, a machine gunner in World War II in Italy.

And he always, you know, he loved Italy.

He spent time in Italy after the war.

So I always had a passion for Italy as well,

as well as Greece.

So a bit of unfinished business and personal biography.

I think that's part of it.

But of course, Roman history is so amazing.

It's hard to say no to it.

Yeah, in some ways, it's much more difficult, isn't it?

Because it expands over such a huge area and such over

and there's more known about it in the sense yeah we have there's a lot more evidence

yeah it's different kind of sources on the other hand it is more difficult but in some ways it's less frustrating I mean what what we do in Greek history and what you do so well Victor is you know we just take these scraps of evidence and draw meaning out of them and that's a very difficult thing to do as well one thing I should say to our audience one thing about Roman historians is at least until globalization of the last 30 years it requires a knowledge because it was for so long a French and German, especially German-dominated field.

One thing that I learned 45 years ago about Barry and being with him in hikes is that Barry was not just a classicist, he was a natural linguist.

He mastered modern Greek, German, French, Italian.

So that was always very impressive that you could walk out into the countryside where you were exploring these battles and actually talk in the language of the inhabitants and gain their trust and familiarity.

I think that's also comes through in your book.

Well, thanks.

You know, as you say, it's natural.

I deserve no credit for it.

I think, you know, it's just some hereditary thing.

And so I've been very fortunate, though, to be able to have a bunch of languages.

It's great to talk to people.

It made a big difference in Greece.

Also in Italy, when I did the Spartac, my book on Spartacus, being able to go to places in southern Italy where people didn't speak English.

I gained a lot of information just being able to talk to the locals, people in museums, but also just people out on the roads and in the countryside about how things worked and how you get from A to B and where ancients might have put forts that it really helped a lot.

Let's get to the war, the recent book.

I reviewed this book in March and I thought it was excellent.

It's in real clear book reviews and we'll have that link on our website, but the war that made Roman, the Roman Empire.

And your thesis was that this seminal battle at Active, and I remember, I think, being with you the first time either one visited it in the American School of Classical Studies.

And we saw that wonderful inscription there but you really believe had

Octavian lost and Cleopatra and Mark Antony won then there would have been a Hellenization or the empire would have been more Eastern than Western and that would have had lasting ramifications on later Western civilization yeah I mean I really do the more I study the Roman Empire the more I realize it was the Greco-Roman Empire and Greek culture had a huge impact on it but I think it would have been even more like that if Antony and Cleopatra had won.

I mean, Cleopatra was a major strategist, and she was also a major patron of culture.

I think Alexandria would have been Constantinople before Constantinople.

Centuries before Constantinople, the empire would have turned eastward.

I think, you know, remember when Octavian wins and becomes Augustus, he says, war against Parthia?

I don't think so.

Let's negotiate a peace.

Well, if Antony had won, he would have gone right back to go to that war against Parthia.

That was his great white whale.

He would never have given up on that.

In fact, he was poised to go back to war with Parthia when Octavian pulled the plug and forced him to fight the battle, what became

the Actium War.

So I think the Roman Empire would have looked eastward.

And I'm not convinced that they would have tried to conquer Britain.

Maybe they would have, maybe they wouldn't have.

Whether they would have tried to conquer Germany, I'm not so sure that would have been so important for them either.

And so I think think you would have gotten a much more Hellenized empire.

I think if it had become Christian, it would have become more like Orthodox Christianity.

It would have become more like the Eastern world.

And whatever Romance languages developed in Europe, they would have been much more Greek than they are.

And whatever language we would speak today, I think would have a lot more Greek in it than it does.

So yeah, I think it would have made a big difference.

Do you see in the visions of people like Cleopatra and the earlier successors some of the ingredients maybe why

when Romanity and the West dissolve in the fifth century AD, we keep forgetting, and maybe it's because of the influence of Western historians like Gibbon that seemed very unsympathetic to Byzantine culture.

But that paradigm, rigid and orthodox as it was, it lasted for a thousand years in a way that the West could not.

You see that when you're writing about it, I say that because you're very sympathetic almost to these traitorous inconditioned Cleopatra.

And, you know,

I grew up as a literary, I mean, I was trained as a literary classist, and I remember all of the invective in Greek, Latin poetry, like Horace's odes about these effeminate Easterners who were going to hijack the Roman Empire, but you don't buy that.

I don't think they were effeminate.

No, I don't think they were effeminate.

Remember Horace?

Yeah.

Horace is a court.

He's a court poet.

He's paid to preach the gospel of Augustus, and he's doing that.

I think in a way, Augustus's Octavian and Agrippa's achievement was even more impressive at Actium when you realize that Antony and Cleopatra, they were serious players.

They had a very serious navy.

Luckily for Octavian, they really didn't know how to use it.

And Agrippa.

and Octavian had had the experience of fighting and defeating Sextus Pompey.

I think that was crucial.

And also, they took risks.

They took great risks.

I mean, attacking Mithoni in, say, March of 31,

going this far distance from southern Italy and going after Antony's base, that was a huge risk, but it paid off very, very handsomely for them.

I'm going to ask Barry some more questions in just a second.

We're going to break for a word from our sponsors.

And we're back.

Barry, I think you're very fair, but do you feel that Marcus Agrippa is underrated?

Because in your book, and as in many,

he seems to sort of come out of nowhere and he really didn't have a strong naval background growing up, but he seems to be a master naval strategist, tactician.

And he has this strange, fierce loyalty to young Octavian, doesn't he?

He's a man.

I mean, he kind of makes what will become Augustus, don't you think, in some way?

Yeah, I mean, he is underrated.

Absolutely.

Agrippa is underrated.

But in a sense, he wants to be underrated.

He's one of these people who seems to be satisfied with being number two.

I also don't think he could have become number one because we can't underestimate how snobby the Roman elite was.

Remember that something like a third of the Senate, if not more, supported Antony and not Octavian.

And I think one of the reasons was that Antony was one of them.

He was a full-blooded Roman noble.

Octavian, he was Octavius.

His father was not a nobody.

He just wasn't a member of the Roman nobility.

He's only a member of the Roman nobility through his mother and through his mother's mother, a member of the Julian clan.

And for Octavian to marry up and marry Livia, who is Olivia and Drusus, this is a major step up for him.

Agrippa is even more of a nobody.

You know, Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, this is not someone who the Romans would have accepted as their leader.

So in a way, he's both he's modest, but he also doesn't really have a whole lot of choice.

There's no way he's going to be the top dog, not in this period of history.

The Romans aren't ready for that yet.

You're very also, I think, fair to Mark Anthony.

I mean, we don't get the impression that we do in Roman pro-Augustan literature of the dissolute, the drunk, the debauched.

And you feel he was a man of talent, at least

until the very end, or till the very end.

Well, he's a man of limited talent.

I mean, you don't get to be as successful as he was and be a complete drunken incompetent and one of the things that even the pro-augustan people always concede is that anthony was a great diplomat and he puts together this settlement of rome's eastern frontier that lasts for a century augustus just takes it over he gets rid of a few people but mostly he keeps anthony's men there forgives them people like herod and keeps anthony's settlement but you know though anthony wins this this one great battle at Philippi, he's also kind of lucky because it turns out that Brutus and Cassius make mistakes.

Octavian and Agrippa learn from those mistakes and they don't repeat them at Actium.

Other than that, Antony, again and again, his finest hour is when he loses.

His finest hour is the retreat from Eutyna and then the retreat from Parthia.

These are great retreats, but you know, you don't win, as Churchill says, wars, paraphrase Churchill, you don't win wars with retreats.

If Caesar had lived, where would he have weighed down on what would have obviously been a rivalry between his grandnephew and Antony, his close associate?

We know because he chose Octavian in his will.

Antony is a distant relative of Caesar.

His mother is a distant cousin of Caesar.

Caesar could conceivably have chosen, given the nod to Antony, but he chooses Octavian.

It's partly because Octavian is a closer relative, but also, you know, Gaius Octavius goes to Spain in 45, and he spends six months or so with Uncle Julius.

And Uncle Julius gets the real sense of this kid, who he's been impressed by before, because he grew up in, Octavian grew up in Julius's sister's house.

I think Julius gets a sense, you know, this guy has, he has the X factor.

He is brilliant, strategic, ruthless, ambitious.

He will stop at nothing to succeed.

And Antony, he has a lot of talent, but he doesn't have quite the drive that Octavian has.

He's not quite as intelligent.

He's not quite as ruthless and vicious as Octavian.

That's a good point.

I mean, we think of this late teenager 20-something, but everybody who wrote him off as a guy who got stomach cramps on the eve of battle, or he was he was a lightweight, that ended up badly for him because, as you say, he was a real viper.

And you eliminate almost everybody.

He had a brilliant, it's funny that after eliminating all of the opposition, he did sort of mature into a statesman of sorts, didn't he, that found the principle?

No, he does become a statesman.

I think maybe in retrospect, I think more highly of him than when I wrote the book.

And one of the things that impresses me about Octavian is that, you know, it's recorded that before the Battle of Actium, Octavian says, the meeting in headquarters, here's what we do.

We let Antony and Cleopatra escape, and then we'll take care of them later.

The army will be there.

We don't really have to worry about them.

And then Agrippa says, terrible idea, boss.

We've really got to fight a battle and octavian says oh okay the fact that octavian allows that to exist in his records and this is probably in augustus's lost memoirs it says to me okay here's a guy who is willing to give some credit to number two and a guy who's willing to learn that's impressive that's impressive that he's able to do that i think it is i i think in the english-speaking world that the work of the great ronald sign had a lot to do with the augustan Revolution and this idea that while Augustus was very talented, he was, and it was true, he was a force for the elimination of the free willing, free expression of the Republic.

And that's been very dominant in the English-speaking world.

I don't know if you could have a graduate student, could you, in a modern program today who wrote a thesis that was pro-Augustus or

was pro-principate as a replacement of the Republic.

I think it would be almost career-ending, don't you?

Oh, oh no no

uh yeah i think have you ever met anybody barry who thought that augustus was a swell guy and he had to you know use the iron hand against these uh troublesome free speech advocates i think that

i mean

yeah i wish it weren't the case but you know the romans did themselves in i mean they were

just unwilling to make the compromises that they needed to keep the Republic.

And in the end, they gave themselves over to somebody like, they gave themselves over to Caesar and Octavian, who are ruthless and, you know, these ruthless monarchical egotists, but they were extremely unwise, extremely foolish.

You're sounding like the great German historian Theodore Momsen,

who never finished his history, but he finished enough of the Republican segments to tell us that he thought that the Republic was innately flawed and the people, as you say, in it were very unrealistic.

It wasn't innately flawed, but you need to make compromises with change to keep the good of the old.

And they just said, we ain't making any compromises.

You know, 100 families are going to run, we're going to govern 50 million people, take it or leave it.

And they didn't have any idea, did they, that a legate or a tribune or a provincial official, if he was stationed in a rich eastern province, they had more money, more power, more territory, more people under their thumb than all of Italy.

And yet they weren't, by the system, they wouldn't have commiserate authority.

That's shocking.

It was the first globalization, wasn't it?

In some ways, it really was.

And, you know, Pompey and Caesar figured it out.

Pompey didn't have what it took to really break with the elite, but Caesar did.

you know they started making guys from spain for instance into roman citizens and this was horrifying to people like cato and cicero but pompey and caesar said no choice, folks.

We got to make deals with the provincial elites.

They have to be brought into the tent.

And it's unfortunate that the people who believed in freedom and freedom of speech and liberty that they didn't see the need to do this.

And that was their undoing.

Let me.

Because I've ignored deliberately Sammy, because Sammy, to be frank, your internet connection were less than good today, but I'm going to give you a second chance.

So come in here with a couple of questions.

Okay, thank you.

Barry, I'm not a classicist, but I would like to ask you a couple of softball questions.

Donald Kagan died this summer, and we've done a show on him, and he's sort of bigger than life for me.

And I was wondering what your experience was or your reflections on your training with Donald Kagan.

He was larger than life for all of us, all of us who were his students.

I mean, we were utterly devoted to him.

He just, he was a force of nature.

I'm going to speak in clichés, I'm afraid, but

to me, one of the amazing things about Don, well, first of all, he was a great lecturer.

He was really a great lecturer, and he had amazing comic timing on top of everything else, so the lessons that he taught.

Secondly, he just made it, he believed in history and the lessons of history and the value of history.

The fact that he taught not only a great Greek history course, but a course on the origins of war, in which we looked at the Peloponnesian War, the Second Punic War, the First World War, the Second World War, and and the Cuban Missile Crisis, as if anybody would do this.

Everybody would want to study history in this way.

Just remarkable.

But on top of that, he was also the most amazing seminar leader.

And as a seminar leader, he had the ability to step back and to let the class run the seminar.

And that was remarkable to see these two things.

In addition to all that, he was a man of amazing courage, astonishing courage, the way he stood up against the tide of, we didn't call it political correctness then or progressivism, but certainly it was that.

And he stood up for things like freedom of speech.

This was back in the 1970s.

This was really very, very remarkable.

And in addition to that, he was a man of the people.

He was just a regular guy at Yale.

So

it was quite astonishing.

He had a Brooklyn accent, didn't he?

Or is that Bron?

Brooklyn?

Brooklyn.

I'm not an expert on New York pet law.

yes i i just interject i met him sammy and i knew i had met him before but in the fall of 1992 i was at the center for behavioral studies for the year very and it was very left-wing and i was having lunch and he came up to me kind of brusque and he said i i wanted to have my office next to yours and we were kind of away from everybody so is that all right with you and i said yeah yeah i i and then we went i went to the first lunch and it was pretty much all left-wing academics.

And they were, I got in an argument about something and they kind of pounced.

And as I walked out, Donald Kagan came up to me and said, you and I are going to be having a lot of lunches together.

And then he paused and said, it's going to be off campus, Victor.

And I said to him, I quoted.

Bogart from Casablanca.

I said, Louis, this is the beginning of a beautiful relationship.

So he was very friendly.

He was very, I wasn't a student of him, but we corresponded a lot.

He came out to Fresno once.

He gave a wonderful lecture to a lot of disadvantaged students and people from the valley in general.

And boy,

was he effective.

So I would like to take a break for some messages and then we'll come back.

And I have one more softball question for you, Barry.

Sure.

Welcome back.

And Barry, my other softball, I have actually two, so I'm not sure which one you want to answer.

I'm going to give you the one I'm more interested in.

I know that you've written a lot on Rome and your closer experience, as you just said, was with Italian culture.

And I was wondering if you could let us have some in on where to find the real Italy if we went to Italy.

Or I'm not sure how much exploration of Italy itself, but what would you say if somebody asked you, where's the real Italy?

The real Italy or the fun part of Italy or what?

The slums of Naples.

The slums of Naples, yeah.

I mean, Naples is a world unto itself, and it's really, you know, it's an amazing place.

You also sort of have to be a little bit look lively when you're in Naples.

There is crime in Naples.

It's an absolutely wonderful city.

Yeah, I mean, Italy is a very variegated place, but they're also, there are places that you've never heard of that are off the beaten tourist track, like Cisena.

I had friends in Cisena, they've since moved, but Cisena is a really lovely town.

It's between Ravenna and Rimini.

And, you know, that you can see the real Italy there.

It's also got a very charming square.

And it's one of the more remarkable scenes in Machiavelli's Prince, where Cesare Borgia has this thug who's working for him, named, his name escapes me, but something dorco, Dorco, and he goes too far.

So Cesare Borgia has him executed on the town square of Cisena.

And he has his, I believe he's decapitated, maybe telling the story wrong.

Renero Dorco, I think it's his name.

And the knife that's used to kill him is there on the block next to him, and he's there as an example.

So I'm not really selling Cisena, I think.

But people in that part of Italy, Cisena, Forli, there are lots of little towns.

They live a beautiful life, but it's not one that tourists go to so much.

Naples is quite fantastic.

There are lots of little cities.

I think Genoa.

I like Genoa a lot.

Genoa is like Naples.

It's real people Italy and it's very lively.

It's a port town.

It's really fun and there's beautiful places on the Italian Riviera just south of Genoa.

So I recommend Liguria.

I recommend the Riviera as a beautiful place and going to Genoa as well.

Wonderful.

Thank you.

And so then I'll ask my last question.

What was your favorite book, either to write or in its content?

Well, I love all my children.

You know, Salamis was my love, you know, my love song to Athens.

You know, Salamis, I've been wanting to write about the experience of Greece for so long, as Victor knows, since the late 1970s.

So Salamis, the Battle of Salamis, was that.

They made you an honorary citizen, didn't they?

They made me an honorary citizen, yes.

I mean, did you eat any of that?

You you never ate any of the shellfish in the bay of salamis i hope did you no

no uh you got to be careful but i've had an octopus in salamis it was delicious and you know the other side of the island is really beautiful it's a resort it's a tourist area

i haven't been there in a while is it opened up now was there less military restrictions on the island than say in the the 90s or is it

there's still a lot of military restrictions i have been there in a couple of years but still a lot of military restrictions but the south part of the island southwestern part there's a Mycenaean site.

I mean, they think they found Ajax's palace, and I think they made it favorite character, Ajax.

You got to go.

You got to go, Victor.

I put that inscription from Sophocles Ajax on my father's grave, live nobly or nobly die.

That's really nice.

Yeah.

Great.

Sammy, do you have another question?

No, I think that's about it for me.

We have enough time.

Yeah, we have enough time for one more question, Barry.

Yeah.

Before I ask it, what was the pub date?

Has this been out two months now?

The book?

The pub date was March 22nd.

So it's

only been a month.

It's only been out a month.

And

it's in Amazon, Barnes and Noble.

Oh, yeah.

All the usual places.

Yes.

All the usual places.

I urge everybody to get it.

I reviewed it, as I said, Real Clear Politics, and I just started in the morning.

I read the entire book by late afternoon.

It was so engaging.

The ships were, Barry wrote a book on rowing, and he's a nautical historian.

And you've got some great descriptions of whether it was the stereotype idea that the Egyptian ships were ornamental.

Maybe that comes from that awful movie Cleopatra, but that wasn't quite true.

You were kind of fair to Egyptian shipbuilding and naval engineering, huh?

Yeah, they were really good naval engineers.

They really were.

I think we underestimate Alexandria and the Ptolemies.

I mean, they were on the ropes, but they still had a lot to offer in terms of science and technology.

i'll just finish with a kind of a larger question you're very sympathetic in the book toward the hellenic influence on the empire that's where a lot of the cultural developments took place and when you look at what happened in the west and then you see that rome under transmogrified somewhat but just stinian and belisaris and on for the next 900 years Is there anything we can learn that as a civilization in crisis, half of it survives?

What do you think it did?

Was it just the geography was easier to be defended?

Or they just said, you know what, we're going to have an orthodox religion, no more schisms and fighting, and we're going to be a little bit more unified.

And if we got the blues and the greens, we're just going to eliminate them.

Or what was the difference that allowed them?

I don't know if the Bosphorus was more defensible than the Rhine and Danube, but have you ever thought about that?

Because it's a natural question when you look at it.

Yeah, it is a really natural question.

I think in part they were lucky, you know, in the time of crisis, so the mid-4th, mid-fifth century, the Sasanian Empire was fairly quiescent for once, whereas the Germans had really gotten their act together and they were a more serious threat to Rome.

Also, the Roman Empire, for a long time, when it really needed to have the right kind of leadership, you know, it just had a long reign of an emperor who really didn't know what he was doing.

And then infighting in the elite, they really weren't up to it i also personally think i don't know how much of this is true i gotta think that a lot of the talent went east you know when constantine builds constantinople and says in effect this is the place

i think it's got to attract a lot of the talent and money i mean there's nothing really like that in the west rome has become kind of a a fossil a university town a cultural center milan is where the action is but how come there aren't all these great monuments in Milan?

And how come, you know, nobody talks about Milan in the same way?

Well, eventually you get Ravenna, but it's Byzantine Ravenna and Ostrogothic Ravenna.

It's not the Ravenna of the last years of the empire.

So personally, I think a lot of it is that the talent and the money goes to the East.

Of course, the Bosphorus is tremendously helpful and the defenses of Constantinople are helpful.

But when you've got Roman skill and all the money and wealth of the East, that helps a lot.

That helps a lot.

Barry, thank you so much for visiting us on the podcast.

And I hope you'll come back because if the past is any guide to the future, in a year or two, we're going to be seeing another book.

And just a final question is, what are you working on or think you might want to, what's your next book?

So, yeah, my next book is called Rebels.

Rebels.

Rebels, the Jews in the Roman Empire.

The Jews?

Yes.

It's about Jewish revolts against Rome and Jewish, well, Jewish ways of dealing with Rome.

Were the first ones, the Saqqari, the guys with the knives that were active in Jerusalem and the revolt and stuff.

Well, there's the Great Revolt, and the Saqqari are part of it, you know, the one from 66 to 70, and then with Masada and the end.

And then there's the Bar Kokhba revolt in 132 to 135.

What are going to be the chronological expanse of the book?

Well, the book's going to like start in the second century BC, and it's going to end in the 7th century AD.

So it's going to, you know, look back to the Maccabees and end with Heraclius's invasion of what's by then Palestine and what the degree to which Jews fought for the Persians.

And it's going to end with the Islamic conquest.

And it will look at what's going on in Babylon, Babylonia, as well as what's going on in the West.

So a pretty big purview.

pretty much of an epic.

Well, that's great.

We're going to have you back on the day it comes out.

How's that?

That'd be great.

I'd love it.

Thank you.

Well, thank you, Barry, for joining us today.

And thank you.

I'll turn it over to you to close out.

Yeah.

Thank you, Barry.

I just want to remind everybody that Barry Strauss's new book is The War That Made the Roman Empire.

I encourage everybody to go out and get it.

It's a great book.

And I'd like to thank you, too, Barry, for answering my softball questions.

I love it.

Thank you.

I love them.

And anytime you want tourist tips about Italy, I'm your man.

All right, great.

This is Sammy Wink, Victor Davis Hansen, and Barry Strauss, and we're signing off.