Be sure to subscribe to the Past Lives Patreon for tons of great bonus content, including Q&As, interviews with amazing scholars, and much more.

The wind never stopped here. Patricius ran, hard and fast, through the woods of Focluth, buffeted by the gusts at his back. The many branches above and around him rattled and shook in the wind blowing in from the open ocean a few miles away. It always carried an icy edge that chilled anyone standing in its path to the bone. More often than not, rain came with it in great sheets of driving bullets that stung where they struck skin. Patricius had thought he knew rain and wind and cold before the raiders snatched him from his home in Britain and brought him across the sea to this foreign land. He had been wrong about so many things.

That was six years ago. Six years of cold, wet nights camped on green hills with the flocks of sheep his master made him tend. Patricius hadn’t felt warm since the day the Irish slavers came to his father’s villa and herded him, and so many others, onto waiting boats. Then came the short, storm-lashed crossing, the long forced marches along muddy roads with chains and ropes chafing at his limbs, the incessant blisters on his feet, and the sting of his master’s hand. It was cold and wet up in the hills with the sheep, but at least there he wasn’t constantly at risk of a beating for a wayward word or perceived cheek.

Subscribe to Past Lives on your platform of choice, or listen here:

His bare, frozen feet sank into the mud of the forest path; his soaked wool tunic clung to his chafed legs. But now Patricius heard the voice of God telling him it was time to leave. He thought it was God’s voice, at least; he had sometimes wondered if it was despair or madness speaking to him, or one of the ancient spirits of this benighted land, but here and now in the woods of Focluth, he was certain it was God. Patricius would return home. God would make it so, because Patricius was now a slave of God, no longer his master’s property. He had nothing to fear. God told him so.

Slaves were rarely freed here in Ireland. His father, a Roman, had always treated the slaves he owned decently, and had freed several of them over the years, Patricius remembered. For a while after his own capture, he had held out hope that he might eventually leave captivity. But these Irish were barbarians compared to the Romans amongst whom he’d grown up.

The wind at Patricius’s back ebbed as he ran deeper into the woods. The rain continued to fall, trickling down through the branches, but it was slowing. He heard the voice again, telling him to continue, to not stop, that God was with him. One day, Patricius promised himself, he would return here, and bring the word of God to his former enslavers.

Alongside Attila the Hun and the Prophet Muhammad, Saint Patrick is probably the single best-known person who lived in the period we call Late Antiquity, spanning the fourth to the eighth centuries AD. He was the Apostle of the Irish, a towering figure who converted a formerly pagan people to Christianity, the foundation of the vibrant Christian culture that would eventually reach far beyond that small island. He also drove out the snakes, if the legends are to be believed. For most, that’s precisely what Patrick is: a legend who barely even belongs in a past world that actually existed.

But Saint Patrick - Patricius - was a real person, and the world he lived in was very real. He was born and grew up somewhere in western Britain while the Roman Empire fell apart. At some point, raiders from Ireland captured him, took him across the Irish Sea, and enslaved him for a period of years. Eventually, he escaped back to Britain, became a bishop, and then returned to Ireland to convert his former enslavers to Christianity. Enslavement was a central experience in Saint Patrick’s life. It made him who he was and set him on a course to everlasting fame. We know all of this not only because of the many later stories and traditions that circulated about Saint Patrick and his actions, but because he himself wrote about them: Patrick is almost unique in that he is one of the very few people in the ancient world who left any firsthand account of their experience of being enslaved. His Confession, a defense of his actions and his past written amid some indecipherable Church controversy, lays out his version of his life story. He also wrote a second surviving text, Letter to the Soldiers of Coroticus, in which he upbraids and excommunicates a British warlord whose Christian soldiers abducted and enslaved some of Patrick’s Christian converts in Ireland.

I care a great deal about Saint Patrick. He’s my namesake, for one, and I remember my extremely Irish-American Catholic grandfather - whose own father was named Patrick - telling me stories about him when I was little. I lived in Ireland for two years, and it was an incredibly formative place and time for me. Beyond that, Saint Patrick inhabited a world in which I’ve spent a lot of my professional time over the past twenty years: the waning days of the Roman Empire in the west. Whatever else he was or became, however later generations remembered him and used his memory, Saint Patrick was first and foremost a product of the late Roman Empire. In today’s episode, we seek to understand Patrick in his context: a very real, and increasingly well-understood world, with the years he was enslaved serving as the defining period of his life. While Patrick eventually became the legend we know today, that’s not what makes him interesting to us; instead, it’s the fact that much of his life echoed broader patterns we rarely see illuminated in such depth. Saint Patrick was one of history’s Great Men, but Patricius the slave wasn’t.

A quick note here: For this episode, I’m relying a great deal on a recent book by the scholar Roy Flechner, entitled Saint Patrick Retold. It’s an excellent overview and well worth reading, but there are a few key points I disagree with the author on, which I’ll discuss further in a moment.

Patrick was born somewhere in western Britain in the late fourth or early fifth century AD. We don’t know precisely when, because Patrick’s own writings give us almost no temporal markers to work with. At one point he refers to the Franks of Gaul as a pagan people, which tells us he lived before the year 500 or so; later writings give two dates of death, 457 and 493 AD, with most scholars preferring the latter. Roy Flechner argues that Patrick lived even earlier than the mid-fifth century AD, placing his key actions in the late fourth century, but I disagree with that: His reasoning rests on the idea that Romanness was well and truly dead in Britain by the dates traditionally associated with Patrick’s life. I don’t think we can say that with any confidence. We have practically no surviving texts from Britain in that period, and reading identity through archaeology is a tricky business. Archaeologically, the material markers of Rome were disappearing from Britain over the course of the fifth century; we have no idea how people thought of themselves or what languages they spoke on a day-to-day basis.

But we do know Patrick was a Roman, or had at the very least grown up in a world of Romans. He wrote in Latin, and his language makes it obvious that he had received some of the standard Roman education. He tells us that his father was a decurion, a member of a city council with administrative responsibilities. At the very beginning of his letter to the soldiers of Coroticus, he says: “I live among barbarian peoples, an exile on account of the love of God.” Some have suggested that by “barbarians,” he means non-Christians, and I don’t think that’s right: He distinguishes explicitly between Christians and pagans elsewhere, and doesn’t use “Roman” as a synonym for “Christian” at any point. For Patrick, like many other Latin authors of the fifth century (and I’ve read nearly all of them), the counterpoint to “barbarians” wasn’t “Christians,” but Romans. Patrick tells us implicitly on which side of that divide he belongs. His Britain sat at the very edges of the Roman world, but it was still recognizably part of the Roman world, even at this late date.

Britain had been a Roman province for more than 300 years by the time Patrick was born. Conquered by the Romans piece by piece in the years after the emperor Claudius’s invasion in 43 AD, Britain held the claim (a good one) to being the empire’s most distant outpost. In both space and thought Britain was further from the Mediterranean heart of the empire than all of the outposts dotting the edges of the Sahara or looking up at the peaks of the Caucasus Mountains. Despite that distance, by the time of Patrick’s birth, Britain was as Roman as anywhere in the empire.

What does that mean, exactly? The late Roman Empire into which Patrick was born wasn’t a homogeneous place. Dozens of languages were spoken inside its frontiers, from Syriac and Greek to Frankish and Gaulish. Wheat, olives, and grapes were the empire’s holy trifecta of Mediterranean foodstuffs, but olives and grapes didn’t grow through much of its territory; local people continued to eat the same kinds of foods as they had before the Romans arrived, with a few additions. Local gods stuck around, either on their own or assimilated with Roman deities. The aristocrats filling town councils and later acting as bishops were almost certainly descended, at least in part, from the people who had been powerful in those regions prior to conquest. Decades of recent research has made it clear that even after centuries of Roman rule, there was no evenly distributed process of “Romanization.” There were shepherds in the Balkans speaking Illyrian and farmers in Wales conversing in British Celtic, living in ways that differed little from those of their ancestors before Roman armies arrived. In a state with tens of millions of inhabitants, diversity was the rule by necessity.

Despite all that variety, there were plenty of commonalities between subjects of the empire, some cultural and some material. Latin was spoken everywhere by the late fourth century, from the Adriatic to Hadrian’s Wall and the Sahara to the Rhine. Where common folk continued to use other tongues, they were often bilingual, using their native language at home and Latin in the marketplace. Latin was spoken so widely that it had distinctive regional varieties and accents; a well-traveled individual could distinguish a native of Roman Britain from a person raised in Italy or North Africa purely by their speech. Still, those regional varieties were mutually intelligible, probably more so than English as it’s spoken around the world today. Latin was the language of administration and the army, so when citizens interacted with the state, they did so through Latin. On a deeper level, when asked, practically every free person living in the Roman Empire - no matter what they spoke at home or where they lived - would identify themselves as a Roman. That was true in the Greek-speaking east, in the venerable and still-enormous city of Rome, and in the rain-drenched hills facing the Irish Sea, where Saint Patrick was born and raised. There were plenty of divisions within Roman society, particularly based on wealth and whether a person held office, and many different forms of identity; but nearly every free person would, on some level, have considered themselves to be Roman. When Patrick refers to himself as the son of a decurion, he’s telling his readers precisely where he belonged in the Roman social hierarchy.

Cities were the places most tied to long-distance trade and migration networks, the most important nodes in the economic and political systems keeping the Roman world alive. Rome, Carthage, Milan, Trier, Arles, Tarragona, and dozens of others were the linchpins of Romanness. They were the settlements most likely to have huge quantities of Roman coins and pottery; to be built along the standardized grid patterns the Romans preferred; and to show evidence of Roman religious cults and cultural practices, like inscriptions. New ways of speaking, like accents and slang, tended to start in cities, and to jump between them rather than slowly seeping into the countryside. We could pick up Londinium in the middle of the fourth century AD and put it on the Seine or the Ebro and it wouldn’t have been out of place.

The further one traveled from the cities, the more things were made and consumed locally. Old pre-Roman methods of production stuck around either because there was no need for them to change, or the locals liked doing things a bit differently than elsewhere; people didn’t change how they made and decorated pottery or their clothing just because they were now ruled by Roman officials. They didn’t immediately start planting vines just because Roman soldiers had come through a few times.

It’s more like Roman material culture was another layer of stuff superimposed onto people’s lives, which over time melded with the old into something new. This happened at the local village level, within cities, and across the region, with all of them differing in some small way from their neighbors. Mass-produced Roman pottery, roof tiles, coins, and metalwork could be found anywhere - the Roman world was kind of like an Ikea in that sense - but not at every site, or every time. One villa might have had a yen for fancy but widely distributed fineware; another splurged on fancy mosaic tiles from a distant workshop but used mostly local pottery; while at a third, the owner had a habit of importing amphorae of fine wine to impress his neighbors. There were many different ways of being Roman, and just as many ways to use objects produced in the empire to display status and identity.

That was the world into which Saint Patrick was born. But that world was crumbling, and nowhere more so than in Britain. Only the northernmost parts of Gaul, what is present-day Belgium and the Low Countries, experienced a faster and more complete devolution. Patrick belonged to the last generation that would grow up with memories of town councils and deliveries of mass-produced trade goods. But unlike many people who lived through what we call the fall of the Roman Empire, he didn’t experience it as a lo ng, quiet transformation; he was quite literally ripped away from that world and made a slave.

While we can’t pinpoint the exact dates of Saint Patrick’s life, it’s not actually that important, because we have almost no knowledge of specific events in Britain during the fifth century AD. We’re not just ignorant of the years in which things took place; we don’t even know exactly what took place. There are no comprehensive narrative histories telling us who did what, who ruled in particular regions, where battles took place or between which forces, much less what people made of the massive upheavals shaping and reshaping their lives. What we have are impressions - vibes, for lack of a better word - from the very few textual sources available to us, and from the immense amount of archaeological material left behind.

The physical evidence of this period tells a stark story. In 350 AD, roughly the year we would assume Saint Patrick’s father was born, Britain was as Roman as anywhere in the Roman Empire; by the time Patrick died, probably sometime in the second half of the fifth century, Britain was completely transformed. Cities like Londinium and Eboracum - York - emptied of people. The market towns scattered across the countryside of lowland Britain were abandoned. The army, the most visible symbol of Roman rule and an essential driver of economic activity, either withdrew from the island completely or stuck around and became local warlords. Coins stopped arriving when the army stopped getting paid, so the economy reverted to barter. The fine villas of the Romano-British aristocracy remained occupied, but their heated baths and mosaic floors fell into disrepair. Anglo-Saxon migrants from the continent’s North Sea coast began settling in the lowlands of eastern Britain; within a couple of centuries, English would be the predominant language in that part of the country, which was well on its way to becoming England.

Patrick probably didn’t experience the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons firsthand, since he lived in the west, but the breakdown of Roman authority was no less noticeable in his part of the island: Picts from north of Hadrian’s Wall and Irish raiders from across the narrow sea attacked formerly safe areas like Patrick’s home, while local strongmen stepped into the power vacuum left by the departing army and disappearin g officials. There are some indications that life was more violent: One study found four times as many identifiable injuries from edged weapons on skeletons in the post-Roman period compared to the era of Roman rule. The canonical date for the army’s exit from Britain is 410 AD, but units had been peeling off for decades before that, and scattered remnants stuck around afterward, sometimes in the same forts legionaries had been occupying for centuries.

Patrick grew up in a place he calls Bannavem Taburniae, which has never been positively identified. The most likely candidates are clustered around the city of Carlisle in Cumbria, which marked the western end of Hadrian’s Wall. This was one of the most remote parts of the Roman Empire, quite literally within sight of a territory where Roman officials held no sway. Yet Patrick’s father was a member of a town council, a decurion, a rank that could be found anywhere west of the Adriatic. He received at least part of the traditional education most well-off Roman boys received, something we can discern from the sprinklings of quotations from the classic texts everyone read. But the best proof of Patrick’s Romanness is in the way he writes, how he assembles sentences in Latin, the words he chooses, the persuasive style he utilizes, and a thousand other details that aren’t visible when reading his writings in translation. Scholars have agreed for a long time that Patrick’s Latin is a bit strange: He wasn’t a native speaker, most say, and some of his weirder word choices, spellings, and sentence structures must therefore have been due to interference from his native - presumably British Celtic - language. But that’s not actually the case.

Way back when I was doing my master’s degree, I got very into late Latin: not the literary style that aristocrats and bishops used to show how learned they were, but the meat and potatoes Latin - spoken and written - that residents of the later Roman Empire used on an everyday basis. Late Latin was well on its way to becoming the Romance languages we know from the Middle Ages and beyond, and its non-literary and spoken forms had diverged a great deal from the ornate, almost impenetrable style favored by pretentious elites. I’m not going to give you a tedious rundown of the sociolinguistics of late Latin or toot my own horn too much, but practically none of the scholars who have studied Patrick’s writings know this material. Had the Anglo-Saxons not migrated in substantial numbers, or Roman rule lasted a little while longer, Britain may well have produced its own Romance language, as Africa was on its way to doing before the Arab conquest. Patrick makes much more sense this way than as a half-competent Latin stylist. There’s no evidence of what we call “bilingual interference” in his Latin, no identifiable sign that he was a native British-speaker whose first language seeped into the way he wrote; the peculiarities in his language aren’t the kinds of mistakes that second-language learners tend to make. In fact, its peculiar qualities are all standard for Latin-speakers who hadn’t been steeped in Latin literary culture: people who, for example, were enslaved in their teen years, missed the final stages of their education, and returned to a place where that education no longer existed.

That was Saint Patrick. Growing up somewhere around the northernmost edge of the Roman Empire, speaking a regional variety of Latin that would have made him understood everywhere from Carthage to Trier to Tarragona, his life straddled the end of one world and the beginning of another. In recent decades, scholars have stressed the slow, often barely noticeable aspects of that shift, calling it a transformation instead of a fall. In Britain, however, the word “fall” makes perfect sense. The lives of real people, people like Patrick, were shaped in enormous ways by the disappearance of the state that had formerly governed them.

Enslavement defined Patrick’s life. As he tells the story in his Confession, he was abducted from his home along with thousands of others when he was 16 years old and taken across the sea to Ireland. His journey didn’t end at Ireland’s eastern shore; from there, he was taken to the far northwest of Ireland, present-day County Mayo, near the open waters of the north Atlantic. For the next six years, he says, his life consisted of tending sheep as an enslaved shepherd. It was during his captivity that he experienced a religious conversion. His father had been a deacon; Patrick was nominally Christian, at the very least, but he hadn’t really believed before this. On his own in a foreign land, with seemingly no chance of escape or freedom, Patrick found solace in the one place he still could: in prayer, building a relationship with a God who had previously been only a distant force in his life. One night, after six years of captivity, Patrick dreamed a voice told him a ship was being prepared to take him back across the sea to Britain. Compelled, he ran away, traveling some 200 Roman miles across Ireland, until he found the promised ship. More trials and tribulations followed, but Patrick eventually returned to his family and resumed his life. But now, he had a mission: He determined that he would one day return to Ireland and convert the people who enslaved him to Christianity. This is where the story of Patricius, a Roman teenager, ends, and the legend of Saint Patrick begins.

There are all sorts of issues with the internal coherence of Patrick’s autobiography, and so little to work with that practically every detail has been called into question in the years since he wrote it: how long he was in Ireland and where he was held; whether he was freed, or ran away; how he managed to convince a shipful of sailors to take him across the sea to Britain; and even whether he was actually enslaved, or was instead running away from his inherited responsibilities as a Roman official, a common late Roman phenomenon called “curial flight.”

I’m not casting aspersions on the scholars who have questioned Patrick’s narrative - it’s pretty clear that my namesake was playing fast and loose with the facts in his writing - but there’s nothing implausible about the basic outline he gives us. Slave-trading across the Irish Sea had been going on for centuries, probably even before the Romans arrived in Britain. There were petty kings in eastern Ireland capable of assembling military forces large enough to grab hundreds or even thousands of captives at a time. And in this misty time somewhere between the 390s and the 430s, the Roman army that would have served as a powerful deterrent to large-scale raiding in northwest Britain was either crumbling or gone. Had he lived along Britain’s southeastern coast, Patrick might have been taken by Saxons across the North Sea to the Continent; had he lived in the northeast, he might have been taken north to present-day Scotland by Picts; had he lived in the southwest, he might have been taken by local British-speaking warlords. Because of where he lived, it was Irish raiders who got him. What Patrick experienced - being abducted and enslaved - was a more common experience in the Britain of his time than it had been in his father’s or grandfather’s.

Patrick had grown up with slaves. He tells us that his father’s estate - he calls it a villula, a little villa - housed both male and female slaves who were captured by the Irish along with him. Late Roman slavery had changed a bit since the time of Crixus, Eurysaces’ bakers, and little Abbas, but it was still slavery in every way that mattered. Patrick saw his enslavement as an unfortunate occurrence, a punishment for his and his neighbors’ sins, but there was nothing out of the ordinary about being enslaved. Slavery in Ireland functioned a bit differently than it did in other times and places: It was more akin to the general, and less intense unfreedom of later medieval serfdom, though it still operated on the principle of people as property, and Patrick draws no distinctions between the two. Not that his experiences gave Patrick any sort of fundamental opposition to slavery as an institution, even once he returned to Ireland on his mission of conversion: His Letter to the Soldiers of Coroticus takes issue not with slave-raiding or slavery as a whole, but with the fact that Coroticus’s men were targeting Patrick’s Christian converts in Ireland. It was unseemly for Christians to enslave free Christians, and one gets the sense that Patrick was angriest of all that his authority and prestige were being damaged by Coroticus’s actions.

Yet slavery nevertheless had a profound impact on Patrick’s way of thinking about the world, and especially on his faith in God. Patrick was far from the only late Roman author to use slavery as a metaphor for the relationship between the human and the divine: The parable of the faithful servant, from the Gospel of Matthew, left a particularly outsize impression. For example, the Church father Saint Jerome writes of Paul, “the apostle, who was not a slave to sin, is rightly called the slave of God the Father and Christ.” Yet despite its commonality, the extent to which that metaphor dominates Patrick’s thinking is remarkable. He doesn’t just reach for the allusions to support his arguments; they effectively structure the way he tells his life story. Being led away into slavery parallels his journey from lacking faith - being a slave to sin, in Jerome’s terms - to becoming a dedicated servant of God.

We can read Patrick’s life in all sorts of different ways. He was clearly a complex figure for his contemporaries: His fellow bishops and Church officials weren’t altogether fond of him, hence the need for Patrick to write his Confessio as a form of self-defence. He’s even more complicated for us today, as we try to disentangle the real person—as well as historical fact—from the legend. But he was indeed a real person, one who sheds a great deal of light on both a dying world and how enslavement could shape a person’s life. In that, more than his missionary activity or his later fame, Patrick is unique in the ancient world.

Next time on Past Lives, we’re going to jump forward into the Middle Ages, but probably not to a place you’ve visited before: the shores of the Black Sea during the age of Mongol conquest, where a boy named Baybars watched his parents die before he was being sold into slavery. Through a twist of fate, Baybars became one of the most powerful people in the world: the ruler of Mamluk Egypt.

Until then, thanks so much for joining me, and I look forward to chatting with you again. If you haven’t already, please subscribe to our Patreon. It’s only 7 bucks a month, and you get access to tons of bonus content, like interviews with great scholars, Q&As with me, our book club, and much more. You can follow me on Instagram or on Bluesky.

Past Lives is written and narrated by me, Patrick Wyman. The producer is Morgan Jaffe. The music and sound design is by Gabriel Gould. The story editor is Rachel Kambury.

Subscribe to Past Lives and don’t forget to sign up for the Past Lives Patreon!

Be sure to subscribe to the Past Lives Patreon for tons of great bonus content, including Q&As, interviews with amazing scholars, and much more.

The coals of the little cookfire glowed white-hot in the dark night, illuminating a lump of clothing that had been left on the ground, abandoned by its previous owner. Crixus picked it up: a red cloak, the garb of a Roman soldier who was now either dead somewhere in the remains of this camp, or off running for his life. The woollen fabric served nicely as a rag to clean the blood from the edge of Crixus’s curved sword. Perhaps, he thought, some of that blood belonged to the man who had been wearing the cloak up until a few minutes ago.

Crixus and the other former slaves had fallen on the camp during the blackest part of the night. The moon peeked out only occasionally behind rolling veils of clouds, and few stars shone through. That helped give them the element of surprise. The Romans’ utter disbelief that a band of fugitives could do them any harm helped them even more.

Subscribe to Past Lives on your platform of choice, or listen here:

Crixus knew the Romans. He knew how they operated, and what they thought about people—slaves—like him. Not like him, he corrected himself: Crixus was a slave no longer, not since the day he, the Thracian Spartacus, and 70 others escaped from the gladiatorial school near Capua where they’d been imprisoned. He would never be a slave again. Death was preferable to the monotony of life in the ludus, with its frequent stings of the lash and the pain of the blade cutting his flesh. He had spent years fighting for the adulation of the crowd and the wealth of his master; now, Crixus fought for his own freedom.

The skills he’d learned in the arena served him well in battle. His body certainly remembered every single one: cut and thrust, block and parry, sidestep and strike. He would never forget them, could never forget them, not after all the countless hours of training he’d been subjected to, the copious sweat and blood spilled in the process. Crixus had been a fine gladiator, and received his fair share of ovations, but he considered this new work a far better use of his skills. It was certainly a better use of his time—what else would he do? Herd sheep? The thought was absurd.

It had been years since the concept of death bothered Crixus. A frisson of awareness of his own mortality came to him during this last fight, when the point of a Roman dagger slid along his cheek, leaving a thin, deep cut. Nevertheless, he was determined to live without any fear of death, especially in battle. Far better to die free, sword in hand, than nailed to a cross or on the sands of the arena.

Enslaved people did not become so willingly. From the moment they were taken to the moment they died, in ways both large and small, they resisted. Captives taken from battlefields and sacked cities might commit suicide rather than be forced into captivity, a last act of human defiance in the face of an inhumane fate. From ancient Athens to 19th-century South Carolina, enslaved people found ways to flout their circumstances, frustrate their masters, and maintain some semblance of human dignity. Masters who complained constantly about their slaves being too lazy or stupid to do what they were told were ignorant of the reality, which was that enslaved people knew how to use their masters’ unearned sense of superiority—and their ignorance of the work itself—against them. They saw no reason to work quickly, or do anything more than the bare minimum necessary to avoid retaliation. These were the techniques anthropologist James Scott famously called, “the weapons of the weak.” To wield these weapons, plausible deniability was essential; if they weren’t careful enough, or edged into outright disobedience, then violent punishment was the inevitable result.

Considering the conditions under which so many enslaved people experienced life over the millennia, the fact that there weren’t more large-scale rebellions does come as a surprise. When faced with conditions that oscillated between unpleasant and outright lethal, actively fighting against one’s oppressors would seem like a logical choice. Yet that observation fails to account for the care masters took in controlling their human property. Slaveowners were fundamentally aware of the fact that enslaved people did not want to be enslaved, and treated them accordingly. Close surveillance, the use of ropes and chains, and locking the enslaved in their quarters overnight were all standard “management” techniques. Other, less overt forms of control were often used, although they were no less violent: Masters might threaten to break up a troublesome slave’s family by selling one or more of its members, or reassign them to a particularly degrading or dangerous task. It was violence that kept enslaved people trapped in their circumstances: violence experienced in the past, violence witnessed in the present, and violence promised in the future. If we want to understand why enslaved people didn’t rebel more often, the primary reason lies in the continuous application of vicious, excessive force.

This makes the fact that on some rare occasions slaves did rebel, sometimes on an extraordinarily large scale, all the more remarkable. Between 1791 and 1804,, enslaved Haitians overthrew the sugar-planting elite and fought off French attempts to regain control of their native island in one of the only truly successful revolts in history. In the early years of the Protestant Reformation, downtrodden German peasants dreamt of a better world, and 100,000 of them would die for that dream when their lords retaliated. But the most famous revolt of all took place in the Roman world. It was led by a man whose legend survives to this day, told and retold in numerous books, movies, and TV shows: Spartacus. For two years, between 73 and 71 BC, tens of thousands of formerly enslaved people lived free in Italy, until the combined might of the Roman Republic and two of its most brilliant generals brought them back down to heel. Thousands of victims were captured and crucified along the road from Rome to Capua, where Spartacus’ rebellion began. Their bodies may be dust, but their actions have never been forgotten.

I mention Spartacus because in today’s episode, we’ll be focusing not on the legend himself, but on Crixus, one of his lieutenants. We only know a few hard facts about Crixus: He was a Gaul; he had been among the gladiators who escaped the training-school - ludus - in Capua; and he died commanding a portion of the rebel army before Spartacus and the others met their end. We have far more knowledge about the world in which Crixus lived and rebelled, which means the picture we draw of him in this episode will be informed by the events through which he lived, if not the exact events of his life. But he will be our guiding light through this episode as we try to understand one of the most indelible events in ancient history. Before we can get into the rebellion and Crixus himself, however, we need to acquaint ourselves with Roman Italy in the 70s BC, the world of Roman slavery, and the life of a gladiator.

The Roman world in Crixus’s time looked far different than it had in Terence’s nearly a century before. The process of Mediterranean conquest was over: Carthage had been destroyed, Roman officials governed territories from Iberia to Sicily to western Asia, and Rome itself had ballooned to just shy of a million inhabitants, the largest city in the world. But the Republic was not well: Two decades before the Spartacus Rebellion, in 91 BC, a massive rebellion of Rome’s Italian allies rocked the very foundation of the state. Formerly reliable friends who were fed up with the arrogant Roman elite who ran the state and frustrated by the uneven dispersals of the enormous spoils of empire spent four years battling it out for a better deal. In the end, they got it. Full Roman citizenship was extended widely throughout Italy, and the division between citizens and allies that had defined the Republic for 300 years came to an end.

But the Social War was just the beginning of Rome’s problems. The roots of them lay within the senatorial aristocracy that governed the city, the blue-blooded officials who competed with one another for elected offices, prestige, and plunder from military campaigns and governorships. Political murder, unthinkable within the Roman system for centuries, reappeared with a vengeance: The reforming brothers Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus were both assassinated by political opponents within the Senate, in 133 and 121 BC, respectively, after they attempted to introduce major land reforms. As the aristocrats got richer, the story goes, they used their vast wealth to buy up the farms of poor Roman citizens. Then, they turned those farms into huge plantations called latifundia, employing dozens or even hundreds of enslaved laborers to work the land, usually in awful conditions. The Gracchi brothers intended to place limits on landowning by the richest Romans and redistribute the excess land to Roman citizens.

These reforms were fairly mild, all things considered, but the Roman aristocracy responded with overwhelming violence. When I say “assassinated,” I mean that senators and their supporters beat Tiberius Gracchus to death with whatever blunt objects were at hand, killed Gaius (or forced him to commit suicide), and then executed anyone they could get their hands on. This kind of violence carried over into the Social War a few decades later, and then with still greater force during the civil wars between Marius and Sulla that threatened to rip apart the Roman state in the 80s and 70s BC. All of this was wrapping up in the years prior to Spartacus’s rebellion.

The issue of land—who owned it and how it was worked—is an important one in Crixus’s case, because it’s directly tied to the Spartacus rebellion. The story about rich Romans dispossessing the poor and turning their small farms into huge plantations isn’t borne out by the evidence; Italy was as full of small farmers in the 70s BC, as it had been a century or even two centuries before. What was real, however, were the latifundia that poured safe wealth into the pockets of Rome’s already-wealthy elite. Scholars argue about how many slaves there were in Italy at this time, and what percentage of the population they comprised: Safe estimates are 1-1.5 million, making up 20-25 percent of the population. Latifundia , and the slaves working them, were particularly dense in southern Italy and Sicily. Chain-gangs worked the fields and vineyards, enslaved drovers ran huge herds of cattle, and enslaved shepherds maintained the vast flocks of sheep whose wool clothed the Roman public. That meant there were dozens, even hundreds of brutalized workers on each individual plantation living out in the countryside, and dozens of plantations crammed into a single province. Sicily, for example, had hundreds of thousands of enslaved workers by the 130s BC, when the first major slave revolt in Roman history erupted. This was the First Servile War. In the three years it took to suppress it, tens of thousands of rebels across Sicily were killed, executed, or crucified en masse as a warning to others. The Romans learned nothing from this incident, and a Second Servile War broke out in Sicily 30 years later. It too took several years to end, lasting from 104 to 100 BC. Like the First, it cost thousands upon thousands of lives.

I’ve studied a lot of different elite groups over my years doing history, and I honestly think the equestrians and senators of the late Republic place first for collective and individual wealth. These men were orders of magnitude richer than their grandfathers had been, who had in turn been orders of magnitude richer than their grandfather; each aristocratic family was basically the equivalent of a large, diversified multinational corporation. They owned latifundia, smaller commercial farms, tasteful rural villas, lavish vacation homes on the Bay of Naples, herds of cattle and flocks of sheep, manufacturing facilities for pottery, and merchant shipping concerns. The equestrians, who weren’t active in political life, lacked the senatorial aristocracy’s aversion to the grubby business of money-making, and were often even wealthier and more diversified than their social and political superiors.

All of these businesses were effectively run by slaves on behalf of their owners, from the lowliest field-hand or shepherd up to the banking specialists, secretaries, managers, and advisors who often lived better than free Romans. Many of those at the bottom of enslaved life had little or no contact with any free people, much less their distant owners. Roman citizens, for their part, had no illusions about their dependence on their slaves, and the potential danger those vast numbers of brutalized people could pose. The orator Cicero tells us that the Roman aristocrat Domitius, governing Sicily after the Second Servile War, marveled at the size of a wild boar that had been hunted and killed. When he found out a slave had killed the boar, and told him he had used a spear for the deed, Domitius ordered the man to be crucified. “Domitius preferred cruelty in punishment rather than to seem lax by overlooking a crime.”

These were the foundations of Spartacus’s rebellion. Italy was simmering with discontent. The Italian allies, recently remade as citizens, hadn’t forgotten the bloody repression of their bid for better status. Two massive slave rebellions had left Roman owners fully aware of the risk presented by hundreds of thousands of enslaved people who were now unsupervised and isolated amongst themselves. Anecdotally, in my opinion, the Roman approach to slavery was never more brutal than at this time. The fabric of the Roman state had nearly ripped itself to pieces;.the time was ripe for the Italian countryside to once again explode in unrest and violence.

We know only three things about Crixus. He was a Gaul; he had been a gladiator at the same school as Spartacus; and he went on to lead a portion of the rebel army, dying in battle about a year before Spartacus himself famously met his end. Still, that’s enough for us to reconstruct a relief map of Crixus’s world, a starting point for the experiences that defined his life.

When our sources refer to Crixus as a Gaul - his name means “curly-haired” in the Gaulish language - that’s a pretty broad designation, an ethnic category that referred to people born everywhere from the Pyrenees to the North Sea to the Hungarian Plain. We sometimes call these people Celts; they’re the same term, with “Gaul” coming from Latin and “Celt” from Greek. There were Gauls living in what we now think of as Italy: The region between the Po River and the Alps was “Cisalpine Gaul,” though by Crixus’s time they were more likely to be found on the far side of the great mountains. Gauls could find their way to Roman slave-markets through both military campaigning and the more routine slave-trade that exchanged wine and fine pottery for human beings at ports like Massilia, today known as Marseille. That’s one possible origin story for Crixus: taken from his home in Gaul, then forced on a long walk or boat-trip down the Rhone, followed by either a short sail along the coast to Italy or a chained march along the French Riviera. Alternatively, he might have been hustled through the Alps from what’s now Switzerland or Austria, shivering in the cold as he trudged over through well-worn passes. He might even have been born to Gaulish parents in Italy. We simply don’t know.

What’s certain is that Crixus must have cut an imposing figure on the auction block, stripped down to a loincloth and presented for sale, degraded and dehumanized into a commodity, because he ended up at a gladiatorial school owned by Gnaeus Cornelius Lentulus Vatia, sometimes called Batiatus. The fact that one could be a trainer of gladiators by occupation and own a school dedicated to the craft gives some sense of the scale of the industry at this time: The Roman public were increasingly becoming connoisseurs of violence, with specific tastes in the bloodletting they packed into temporary arenas and stone amphitheatres to watch, while ambitious men footed the bill for the entertainment.

While we tend to think of gladiatorial games as to-the-death free-for-alls, that wasn’t actually the case. There were match officials and rules, like keeping one’s distance from a wounded opponent, and the editor - sponsor - of the games always determined whether the loser would survive. The gravestones of gladiators often indicate that they lost on numerous occasions, so losing a match wasn’t the death sentence Hollywood may have led us to believe. The content of the games varied, as well: Fights between wild beasts or between people and beasts were always a favorite. Gladiators could also be called upon to serve as entertaining executioners of war captives or criminals. Low-brow gladiatorial entertainment might involve a few hundred people crowded into an open marketplace to watch a starving bear tear apart a few condemned criminals; at the highest end, a would-be consul might empty his cash reserves to hire dozens of pairs of the best-trained gladiators in Italy for a production that would ensure the crowd never forgot its benefactor. In either case, the message to the viewers in the stands was always the same: No matter how far a Roman citizen might fall, no matter how destitute his financial situation or reputation, he would never be subjected to the humiliation of a public death. For a Roman, there was nothing more shameful, nothing more indicative of slave status, than dying in full sight of a jeering crowd.

Naturally, savvy entrepreneurs saw endless opportunity in this bloody marketplace. By the time Crixus was fighting in the arena, the industry was highly developed. Entrepreneurs like Gnaeus Cornelius Lentulus Vatia were operating at a substantial scale: Vatia had some 200 gladiators at his ludus, or gladiatorial school. The 60 pairs of gladiators hired for the funeral games of Publius Licinius Crassus in 183 BC, a previously unheard-of spectacle, would have seemed like a quaint offering for an elite Roman of Crixus’s time. By then, gladiators were everywhere in Roman life: serving as bodyguards for the wealthy, instructors in arms for the legions, thugs for hire when politicians needed muscle, and a constant source of anxiety among Roman civilians, who were keenly aware of the dangers the gladiators posed. These were brutalized men forced to brutalize others, outsiders enmeshed with Roman society, and they were stewing.

Archaeological investigations of Pompeii have unearthed gladiatorial schools just like Vatia’s: These were essentially fortified prisons designed to keep their occupants inside, away from polite Roman society. Guards watched the doors; bars and gates blocked potential exits; and punishments - lashings by the trainer, beatings for poor conduct or performance, and solitary confinement - kept the enslaved fighters in line.

Crixus and his comrades were a motley group: barbarians and outcasts from all over the Roman world and beyond, a mixture of Gauls, Thracians, Germans, and even down-on-their-luck Romans. They weren’t an army, and they weren’t soldiers, but they were all highly skilled warriors. They lifted heavy, wrestled and boxed, and practiced at length with wooden swords to train and strengthen their bodies. They treated injuries and wounds after fights and did it all over again the next day.

This was Crixus’s life: training, eating, fighting in front of thousands of people, and then returning to the ludus, where the gates would be locked behind him. Crixus and the others must have felt they had no chance of a better life, no shot at freedom or even a daily routine that didn’t consist of endless violence. That may have been why, at some point in 73 BC, something snapped inside the house of Batiatus. Crixus and his compatriots could no longer take it, and dozens of them decided together to break out. They did this despite knowing the likely consequences of their actions. Individual slaves ran away all the time, and those who returned by their own volition might get away with a beating or tattooing or branding; mass escape was a more serious issue, and it became even more serious when it boiled over into full-scale rebellion. The usual penalty for that was crucifixion, perhaps the most horrible way to die in the ancient world, and that only came after a period of the most extreme torture. Crixus, Spartacus, and the rest must have known this. The fact that they went ahead with their plan anyway speaks volumes about the conditions of their lives as gladiators.

Consider, for a moment, what that decision also says about Crixus and his compatriots. Romans knew their slaves didn’t want to be slaves, and the whole framework of the system that enslaved them was designed to avoid a revolt. Positive inducements - freedom, better food, the chance to marry - served as the proverbial carrot dangling from the end of a very literal and painful stick. By 73 BC, the system of subjugation that enslaved men like Crixus and Spartacus had developed weak points they could exploit.. How? Why? Was Vatia a particularly brutal master? Did the memory of the massive Sicilian rebellions get passed around between enslaved people in whispers, quietly brewing collective action? Was it the fact that these gladiators were all people who had come from outside Roman society, had no ties to its civic structure, and little hope of gaining citizenship? Or was it that they were trained killers who knew how to fight and weren’t afraid of death, a potent combination that drove them to take the ultimate step? These were real people, and fear of death and injury are powerful disincentives to action. Those fears weren’t enough to stop Crixus, Spartacus, and the others from inciting full-fledged rebellion.

Crixus seems to have been one of the leaders of the rebel band from the beginning, right alongside Spartacus. More than 200 men planned their escape; somewhere between 70 and 78 got away from thethe house of Vatia in 73 BC. They immediately seized a convoy of proper weapons - gladiators’ weapons, ironically - bound for another city. Now armed, they headed south toward Mount Vesuvius, about 20 miles away from Capua, where they could set up a temporary community and try to make new lives as free people. Here their story diverges from most mass escapes: Instead of being felled by the first group of soldiers sent from Capua to apprehend them, Crixus, Spartacus, and the others inflicted a stinging defeat on their pursuers. It would be the first rebel victory of many, the flashpoint of a mass uprising that soon engulfed much of southern Italy. Remember, this was the heartland of mass enslavement in the Roman world: The region was full of latifundia, with their grim barracks and brutal working conditions, which Crixus and the other gladiators would have seen time and again as they went to their next bout. Thousands of enslaved were inspired enough, and desperate enough, to risk the same punishment that Crixus and the other gladiators had by setting out, choosing to run away en masse to join the rebels atVesuvius. There, the swelling rebel army defeated the praetor Gaius Claudius Glaber and a few thousand men sent to apprehend them, further fueling the fires of rebellion. Over the rest of 73 BC, Shepherds and drovers from the distant countryside poured into what had become a city of the formerly enslaved. Had Crixus ever envisioned such a thing?

It was probably around this time that Crixus’s vision of the rebellion diverged from that of Spartacus, his more famous colleague. Crixus wanted to directly attack the Roman forces that were stalking them throughout Italy, armies far more daunting than the militia and part-timers they had previously defeated. Spartacus, by contrast, wanted to get the rebels out of Italy entirely, and as quickly as possible. After several more victories and plundering portions of southern Italy, Crixus took a large group - perhaps 10,000 people - to Gargano, near the heel of Italy’s boot. There he and his followers ran into a full consular army, roughly 10,000 fully trained and equipped men. After a hard fight, the army cut Crixus and his compatriots to pieces. They died bravely, we’re told, but they died nonetheless.

Modern accounts tend to contrast Crixus’s recklessness with Spartacus’s careful planning. I don’t think we have enough information to be able to say that conclusively. It would be more accurate to say that these were poorly equipped people who had little military training aside from whatever Spartacus, Crixus, and the other ex-gladiators and former soldiers among them had been able to impart in a relatively short amount of time. Their triumph wasn’t their victories over Glaber and the others; it was the fact that they escaped slavery on the latifundia or in the ludus at all, and lived free for a time before the Romans reclaimed them in death. Spartacus himself wouldn’t live to see victory: Like Crixus, he too died in battle, and 6,000 survivors were crucified along the road from Capua to Rome just a year later.

But death was still a year away when Spartacus received news of Crixus’s defeat. To honor his fellow rebel and mark his funeral celebrations, Spartacus forced 300 Roman prisoners to fight to the death. It’s not difficult to imagine what Spartacus was thinking. How many times had Crixus been forced to fight for the benefit and entertainment of others? How much of his own blood had he spilled to please the crowd? How many men had Crixus been forced to kill at the command of a rich sponsor who would never know the grit of the sand or the pain of the lash? To me, this moment - not the final defeat or the mass crucifixion - marks the real flashpoint of the rebellion, the beating heart of its purpose. In death, Crixus got the exact kind of send-off that he himself had provided in the arena, inverting the very system that had made him who he was. In the end, Crixus died a free man, sword in hand. He was celebrated, honored, and remembered, not as a disposable piece of property fit only to die for the entertainment of the crowd, but as a leader and warrior. Spartacus’s name rings out through the millennia, but there were thousands upon thousands of others who shared his burning desire for freedom, Crixus not least among them.

Next time on Past Lives, we’ll continue with our focus on Rome, but move from the gladiatorial school to even more lethal surroundings: an industrial bakery, one of the bleakest places in the Roman world.

Subscribe to Past Lives and don’t forget to sign up for the Past Lives Patreon!

Subscribers to the Past Lives Patreon have access to an audio version of this essay, along with tons of other great bonus content.

This will be my first Christmas without my dad.

He died on a beautiful Tuesday morning in May. The sun was shining in through the open curtains of his bedroom. I remember the shadows from the tree limbs just outside the windows, little patches of darkness cutting across the bright light, moving ever so slightly as the branches swayed in a gentle breeze. On his nightstand was a book I’d bought for him: Henry V, written by my dear friend (and one of my Dad’s favorite writers), Dan Jones. His glasses were neatly folded on top of the book, ready for the next time he picked them up.

He never did pick them, of course. He didn’t finish the book, and he was in such rough shape beforehand that I don’t know how much of it stuck. But he was never going to quit reading, right up until the end. It was his routine: Every night, without fail, my dad laid down in bed and read for about half an hour. He did this for as long as I can remember, back to my earliest childhood, and the books were almost always history.

Dad might dabble in the occasional bit of fiction, especially when he and my mom were on one of their many long road trips and needed an audiobook, but history was his one true love. I don’t know how long he did this before my memory kicked in, but I can’t remember a time when there wasn’t a popular history title or biography sitting on that nightstand next to his glasses. He must have read hundreds of books over the years, ranging from the many excellent Oxford Histories of the United States to biographies of Churchill and Kit Carson to Mary Beard’s SPQR.

It’s not hard to imagine the effect that had on me. Reading history books was what he did, so it became what I did. He loved going to Powell’s City of Books in Portland, and I could go with him to pick out a reasonably priced used book on generals of the Civil War or the Flying Tigers and Claire Chennault or Lewis and Clark. We could always talk about history, any kind of history, because he had always read something about any topic that might come up.

Looking back at it now, I can’t tell how much of my enthusiasm for history was a product of wanting to have something to talk about with my dad, and how much of it was my own interests pulling me in that direction. They’re not separable in any meaningful way: The desire to make ourselves into a person our parents can be proud of gets wired in so deeply that pinpointing where their influence stops and our desires and needs begin isn’t really possible. For that matter, I don’t know how much of my dad’s history-reading habits were driven by his need for structure and routine - he found something that worked to get him to sleep every night and he stuck with it - and how much was his genuine love for the subject matter. Again, they’re not really separable. I’d guess that history was, on some level, comforting for him.

I don’t remember telling my dad I wanted to be a historian. There’s no specific moment I can recall when we had a conversation about what history meant to us, why it was important to study it, or what kind of career I might have in the field. It’s odd now, considering just how much time we spent reading and talking about history, that we never had a come-to-Jesus discussion of the topic as a whole. Maybe we did, and I’ve just forgotten it. There were a few great years before he got sick where he and I were playing a lot of golf and having a few too many frosty beverages, with him smoking Kool Mild 100s and pretending I wasn’t sneaking off to have a cigarette myself. We talked incessantly about baseball and history while we rattled around from one mediocre shot to the next. There were probably some profound moments in there, and I don’t remember them.

I do remember us getting a little bit too drunk at a bar on the Oregon coast, and walking into a stop sign on the way back to our motel while he laughed around the Kool jammed in his mouth. He had a great laugh, but you had to work to get it. People who didn’t know him well thought he was a little dour, perhaps even curmudgeonly, as many disciplinarian school principals are. He wasn’t: He appreciated the sight of a 23-year-old fool running face-first into an obvious pole as much as anyone I’ve ever seen. While I don’t recall our conversations about history in any detail, I’ll keep that laugh forever.

When we got back to that motel, he got out his book, laid down in bed, and read, just like he always did. I think it was Daniel Walker Howe’s What Hath God Wrought, one of the best of the Oxford Histories of the US.

Dad’s tastes were specific. The book had to have a great story. It had to be competently written. It couldn’t go too hard into the academic aspects of a topic; that was the author’s job, to do the underlying work and communicate it without overwhelming a non-specialist with minutiae that detracted from the narrative. That was his problem with Mary Beard’s SPQR: too much detail, not enough story. We disagreed on that; SPQR is one of my favorite books, a masterpiece of popular history. As I told him at the time, he was allowed to be wrong about it.

SPQR is one of the many books I bought for my dad. He was extraordinarily easy to shop for: You just had to find a good popular history that matched his interests, which could be anything from the Plantagenets to the Comanches to Omar Bradley. As Christmas approaches, this first Christmas without him, I realize now just how much I miss picking out that book for him, knowing that some little piece of our relationship was on that nightstand with him for weeks at a time. It was something we shared, something between the two of us, and now it’s gone.

Losing one of the most important and formative people in your life makes you ask yourself all sorts of questions. Who am I? What do I want out of life? Why am I like this? Who will I be without the person whose influence shaped me in the most profound ways?

After seven months, I don’t know the answer to any of those questions. They’re not the kinds of questions you ask and answer once, for that matter. They present themselves over and over again, often when you’re least expecting them to rear their heads: while you’re watching your own son melt down over a homework assignment; when a stab of guilt reminds you that you haven’t looked for a book for someone who’s no longer there to receive it; and in those quiet moments, late at night or early in the morning, when the sadness and the grief creep in, and it’s just you, the loss, and your memories, pulling on your sense of self until anxiety overwhelms or peace sets in.

I felt all that very strongly a couple of weeks ago, as I was editing the draft of my new book, Lost Worlds, for the last time. The process of writing that book is inextricably bound up with my memories of my dad at the end of his life. Drafts of early chapters came together while he was still well enough to read them and offer his feedback: more story, less extraneous detail, as always. It was good advice the first dozen times he gave it, and remained words to live by. By the end, he no longer had the energy to read. I’ll never know what he thought of the finished product, whether it did indeed have enough story to satisfy the most discerning reader of the genre I’ve ever known.

That’s one of death’s more minor tragedies: the not knowing, the never being able to ask, the reality that what you have now is all there will ever be. Sometimes, as I’m writing, I hear my dad’s voice in my head, clear as day: “Nobody needs to hear that part, Pat. If you know the reader’s gonna skip it, why would you write it?” Or: “Just do it right the first time, and you won’t have to go back and do it again.”

Those are good words. They don’t answer the questions I have about myself, questions raised by his absence, but they’re not a bad place to start: by doing the job, a job I know he appreciated, and doing it well. I’m glad when they pop up, and I cherish the echo of his voice, like a lifeline that ties us back to those conversations in his truck on the way to the garbage dump, or the time we drove from Portland to LA and documented the trip by taking pictures only at freeway rest stops.

I miss how much he loved Felix Hernandez and Damian Lillard and Shaun Alexander. I miss the satisfaction he got when someone complimented his omnipresent pair of Nike AirMax sneakers; nobody expects a 73-year-old man to appreciate fresh kicks like that. I miss the way he threw the rope over the bed of the truck when he was tying down a load. But most of all, I miss seeing him with a book in his hand, and that little spark he got on his face when he knew I was going to ask him what he thought about it.

For half a decade, I tried to get my dad to do an interview with me on his taste in popular history: what he thought made good and bad books, which ones were his favorites, what got him into the genre, that sort of thing. He never had the slightest interest in it. Nobody wanted to hear him talk, he said; what did he have to offer? No, I replied, he knew a ton about the topic, and he had genuinely great taste. People would enjoy hearing it. I probably asked him five times, once a year, and he never wavered, not even as he got sicker and sicker and the end was obviously drawing near.

What I really meant was that I wanted to hear him talk about those things in a form that would preserve it for posterity. Maybe if I’d put it that way, he would have agreed; more likely, it wouldn’t have changed anything. He was a stubborn guy, maybe the most stubborn I’ve ever known. Once he made up his mind, it wasn’t shifting. I think he saw doing that interview as giving up, as admitting that he wouldn’t be around forever to keep reading. There would always be another book, another story. Then, one day in May, there wasn’t. Now it’s Christmas, and there’s no book waiting for him under the tree. There will never be another.

But he’s still here. He’s on this page now, and he’s on every page I’ll ever write, because who I am and what I do can’t be separated from the way he shaped me. His voice will always be there, asking, questioning, critiquing, reminding me not to half-ass something that requires a full ass, telling me to just do the part I don’t want to do because it’s not going anywhere. I hope I can still hear that voice as clearly in the future as I do now, as strongly as if he were standing right here next to me. I believe I will.

Subscribers to the Past Lives Patreon have access to an audio version of this essay, along with tons of other great bonus content.

A quick note here before we get started: In this episode I’ll be speaking at length about sex work and other related topics, which means this one might not be appropriate for younger listeners. It’s generally understood that past societies were deeply different from ours, even alien. How ancient Greeks understood sex and gender doesn’t mesh well with our modern sense of morality, to say the least. If you’re not already familiar with this world, and even if you are, some of what we discuss in this episode might be shocking, disturbing, or triggering.

Be sure to subscribe to Past Lives on your podcast platform of choice. If you’d like to support the show, please join our Patreon, where you’ll find a bunch of bonus content, including interviews, sources discussions, and much more.

Neaira’s cane tapped on the paving stones as she walked. Nearly sixty, her pace was slower than it used to be, but she was still brisk enough to leave her two aging maids struggling to keep up. The two women, Thratta and Coccalinê, had been with Neaira for more than thirty years. They were her confidants and her closest friends. They were also her slaves, though they wore that status lightly these days.

Stephanus, Neaira’s Athenian man, had joked that it cost more to keep them than they were worth. That wasn’t funny, Neaira snapped at him. Thratta and Coccalinê had gone with her to Megara, they had come back with her to Athens, and they had stuck with her through the very worst of times. She would never see them parted from her. If they were freed, where would they go? How would they care for themselves? Thratta and Coccalinê’s days in the ergasterion were long since over.

The ergasterion. Neaira disdained that word, looked down on it as if it lay at the bottom of a deep well of bitterness. These days, when she heard ergasterion, it referred to the cobblers’ shops Stephanus owned, or the noisy shield-factory between their city house and the agora, the market—not the establishment in which she had spent her youth. The shops sold shoes and armor; her ergasterion had sold her body. She had called herself a hetaira, a courtesan, but there were other, meaner ways to describe her work.

Most days, Neaira tried not to think about any of it. Those years in Nikarete’s house, back in Corinth, were long past. Thank all the gods for that. Neaira certainly did—she made offerings regularly to a number of different deities, seeking them out in their rich temples and sacrificing in return for what they’d given her. Her mind turned to one of her of her acquaintances, a friend and fellow former hetaira. The other woman was immortalized in bronze, a statue of her residing at the sanctuary of Delphi. It stood between statues of King Philip of Macedonia and Archidamos of Sparta.

Neaira wasn’t in the market for a statue at Delphi; right now, she was searching for fine painted pottery, something to replace the piece Antidorides had broken a few days before. The boy - not a boy, she reminded herself, a full-grown man - had dropped the red krater, the mixing-vase, when his foot slipped. Antidorides was the finest runner she had ever seen, and she had seen some great ones at Olympia and Nemea. Even so, he was so clumsy around the house.
Thoughts of Antidorides and her other children made Neaira smile. They were Stephanus’s, but she had been in their lives for some 30 years, since just after their mother died. That had been the end of Neaira’s first life as a hetaira and the beginning of her second. She lived a free life now, but that’s not to say it was an easy one; it certainly wasn’t as intellectually stimulating as it used to be. But there was no question which she preferred. The problem was, her past refused to stay there. When the fool Apollodorus filed his lawsuit against her, that past reemerged with a vengeance.

Prostitution was everywhere in ancient Greece. The first time we hear the word porne, the standard term for a prostitute throughout the Greek-language corpus, is in the earliest poetry outside the works of Homer, dating back to the 8th century BC. In fact, there are more than 200 different Greek words for different kinds of sex workers: male and female, enslaved and free, adults and children, high-end companions and streetwalkers. Some of these people chose their line of work; many, probably by a considerable margin, did not. Literary types waxed rhapsodic about beautiful, educated hetairai, the sophisticated courtesans who graced the elite drinking parties of Athens with their presence. The cruel wit of the early poet Archilochus saw it rather differently: “Just as a Thracian or Phrygian man sucks barley beer through a straw, she was bent over, toiling.” Ancient Greeks saw nothing wrong with paying for sex, but that doesn’t mean they celebrated those who provided it. While the language we use to refer to sex workers has changed over the millennia, the way they are treated has not: In Ancient Greece, sex workers were marginalized, excluded from polite society, mocked, degraded, and looked down upon by those very same men who had hetairai at their elegant symposia or thought nothing of visiting a brothel.

Sex work is a complex and thorny topic, which is why I’ve mostly shied away from talking about it in my decade of history podcasting: I was afraid that I would say the wrong thing, and in the process fail in my obligations to the past people I’m trying to bring to light. What’s clear to me now, however, is that it’s an absolutely essential topic. Sex work is work, and has to be understood as a meaningful economic activity that involves physical labor, just like mining, craft production, or mercenary soldiering. But it’s also so much more than that. Sex work speaks to sexual and social mores as well as concepts around things like gender and sexuality. These are defining aspects of any society, and they require exploration and explanation. Anxieties about masculinity and femininity and the fragility of the social order show themselves with extraordinary clarity in the context of sex work. Who provides it, who can access it, and what the provision and consumption (up to and including abuse) of those services says about the participants are all open questions whose answers vary, depending on when and where we look. Because prostitution was omnipresent in ancient Greece, and they talked and wrote about it so much, we can come up with strong answers to all of those questions. More importantly, we can highlight the experiences of some of the people who were sex workers in this time and learn how it impacted their lives.

Athens was a democracy, one of the most comprehensive in the ancient world, where even comparatively humble farmers and shopkeepers had a political voice so long as they held citizenship. Most of the people living in Athens and its environs, called Attica, weren’t citizens: They included resident foreigners, called metics, along with vast numbers of enslaved people - tens of thousands of them - whose labor made Athens run. But within this so-called
“comprehensive” democracy was one notable exception: There were no female citizens with actual political rights, and no potential pathway to achieving them. Wealthy foreign residents and former slaves had a small, nearly nonexistent chance of becoming citizens so long as they were men. Citizenship, despite its relative breadth, was still guarded with extraordinary jealousy in Athens. To falsely claim to be a citizen was a serious offense, one that carried major penalties. Accusing someone of such an act inevitably led to legal proceedings in open court. That’s how we know a woman named Neaira, the subject of today’s episode, existed.

The Athenians were fond of public speeches. Because they had to persuade large bodies of their fellow citizens - members of the voting Assembly or jurors in the law courts - oration became one of the defining features of political life. Luckily for us in the present, a great many of those speeches survive, copied and recopied in scrolls and manuscripts down the centuries, hidden on the dusty shelves of monastery libraries until scholars found them. One of these orations, attributed to (but probably not written by) fourth-century-BC Athenian statesman Demosthenes, is entitled Against Neaira.

We’ll talk more about the specifics later, but the gist of the incident is this: Neaira, a former hetaira, was sued by Apollodorus for illegally marrying an Athenian citizen and passing off the daughter they had together as a citizen. That by itself is fascinating material for us to work with, but what makes Against Neaira such an extraordinary text is that the author of the oration goes into great detail about Neaira’s background. She is one of the very few sex workers in ancient Greece for whom we have such a complete life history. Even though it comes from a profoundly hostile source - the purpose of the oration was to convince the jury of Neaira’s wrongdoing - the information it contains is unique. It’s not an exaggeration to say that Against Neaira is the single most important historical source we have from ancient Greece regarding prostitution specifically and gender norms and relations more generally. Before we can start to unpack Neaira’s fascinating life story, however, we need to try to understand the broader context of sex work in classical Athens.

Old scholarship on prostitution in ancient Greece made a hard distinction between pornai, the generic term for sex workers, and hetairai, the courtesans who enlivened the elegant drinking parties, or symposia, with their wit, grace, and physical beauty. This distinction is partially a result of modern biases, in particular the long-lasting influence of Victorian prudishness on our understanding of the Greeks. Victorians were a squeamish bunch by our standards, and even those who fully grasped the comparatively deviant world of ancient Greek sexuality were inclined to speak about it in euphemisms and half-truths. This unhelpful distinction between pornai and hetairai is also a product of the period sources we have at our disposal. The vast majority of those sources were written by elite men for other elite men. Their writings reflect their world, its viewpoints and its blind spots, not the real world that surrounded them, the world in which people like Neaira lived and worked. Those texts were then filtered through centuries of copying, almost entirely in monastery libraries, where the monks had their own well-documented hang-ups about sex; this informed what the monks decided to copy or not copy from a crumbling, centuries-old manuscript onto fresh parchment. As a result, our portrait of ancient Greek sex and prostitution is warped in ways that make it hard to see the forest for the trees. We have a comparative wealth of information about high-end hetairai; but our understanding of the lives of humbler sex workers is much narrower.

What we can say with clarity and certainty is that sex work was everywhere in ancient Greece. For ancient Greek men, absent from the definition of adultery were interactions with sex workers. I already mentioned the sheer variety of terms, more than 200 of them, ancient Greeks used for different kinds of sex workers. Much like the old adage about the Inuit and their cornucopia of terms for snow and ice, you only need so many if there’s a commensurate number of real-world applications that require definition. The third-century BC Greek writer Aristophanes of Byzantium saw so much variation in terms, and so much confusion about them, that he felt the need to write a detailed study of the topic, entitled On Insults. The standard words were porne and pornos, referring to a woman or man for sale, respectively: This is the origin of our term “pornography.” Hetaira referred euphemistically to a high-end companion. Auletris - flute player - and orchestris, dancer, were likewise euphemisms, while chamaitupe, “ground-beater,” was our equivalent of “streetwalker.” Neaira would have heard all of these terms and more besides in her lifetime.

Male sex workers were less common in this world, but they did exist: The Athenian playwright Aristophanes - a different Aristophanes from the one I just mentioned - discusses an old woman hiring a young man to provide sexual services. For men who engaged in prostitution, the price was steep: The terms generally fall into the category of impurity, like akathartos, “unclean,” or imply the loss of one’s masculinity. The classicist Konstantinos Kapparis sums this up succinctly, so I’ll quote him at length: “Unlike the female prostitute, who is easily available and accessible to everyone but does not have control over her body, the male prostitute does have control over his body and his fate and chooses to relinquish this control and make his body, youth, and good looks available to anyone who wants to buy it. In the case of the female prostitute the invective focuses on easy access, but in the case of the male prostitute the focus is on his choice to sell himself.” Along those lines, there was no term for a brothel with male prostitutes, nor was male prostitution considered work in the same way it was for women. Female sex workers, however, labored in an ergasterion, a “workshop,” just like cobblers and other physical laborers, doing what they had to do to survive.

Despite their ubiquity, however, attitudes toward sex workers were not positive at any time in ancient Greek history, and they became blatantly negative as time went on. The early Athenian playwrights found immense humor - cruel, demeaning, abusive humor that made light of serious trauma - in prostitution: Their vocabulary is inventive, such as the term lakkoproktos, “ditch-ass,” a compound of the words for “deep ditch” and “anus.” An old Athenian comic might call a sex worker a kreagra, or “meat catcher,” or radia, “easy.” As time went on, into the Hellenistic and Roman periods, the humor disappeared, replaced by an increasing emphasis on filth, uncleanliness, and degradation. Those elements were always present, though, and they shaped Neaira’s life from beginning to end.

Now with some crucial background in place, we can turn to Neaira and what we know of her life. Unlike the first two individuals we encountered on Past Lives, Nanaya’ila’i and Sosias, whose scant historical footprints had to be squeezed of every ounce of detail from the tiniest bits of evidence, a lot was been written about Neaira. This presents an even thornier problem, however, because those writings come from a hostile context. Everything we know about Neaira derives from that oration, Against Neaira, delivered in an Athenian court sometime in the 340s BC. What can we trust from this account?

Scholars have spent a lot of time and energy debating this question, because Against Neaira is so central to our understanding of both prostitution and women’s lives in ancient Greece. Here are the fundamentals of the case that produced the oration: A man named Theomnestus brought the suit against Neaira, then over 50 years old, on behalf of his father-in-law, Apollodorus. Theomnestus and Apollodorus claimed Neaira had misrepresented herself as an Athenian citizen, and that her daughter, Phano, who had married an aristocratic Athenian citizen, likewise didn’t have that status. The background is complex: Neaira was the concubine of a prominent Athenian named Stephanus, who had a long and contentious history with Apollodorus, the man who brought the suit. We have to bear in mind that the purpose of the lawsuit and the oration was to persuade a jury of ancient Greek men, not to give us in the present a sustained, accurate narrative of Neaira’s life. The biographical sketch Apollodorus gives us was intended to make Neaira look bad to an audience of Athenian citizens, to play on their anxieties about the thin line between citizenship and slavery, and not least the dangers of independent women.

With that said, Apollodorus must have told a life story for Neaira that would have rung true to that audience. Remember, these Athenian men were all familiar with sex work in its various manifestations. Many in the audience would have known Stephanus, or known of him, and told other members of the jury if Apollodorus was outright lying. It’s possible some of the men on that jury were familiar with Neaira personally. We don’t have to believe the accusations Apollodorus hurls at Neaira, like the callous assertion that she pimped out her daughter, Phano, while claiming the girl was a citizen. We can feel reasonably confident that the basic outline of Neaira’s life story, if not the slanderous details Apollodorus provides, is accurate.

The story of Neaira’s life begins not in Athens, but in Corinth, one of the largest, wealthiest, and most populous Greek cities in this period. Corinth in the 390s or 380s BC was famous for its high-end sex industry, and one of its major players was a woman named Nikarete. Nikarete had been enslaved at one time, but was eventually freed by her master; she then went into business on her own, probably with her former master’s financial and logistical support. She was a pornoboskousa, a procurer or keeper of pornai. Her job was to purchase young, desirable girls before they reached maturity - paidiskai - and teach them what they needed to know about their trade. She would present these children as her own daughters to her clients, men who were established among the famous, wealthy, and powerful not just in Corinth, but across Greece: Against Neaira tells us that orators, poets, and actors all sought out Nikarete’s establishment and engaged the services of her enslaved workers. Apollodorus expected the audience of his oration to be familiar with this business model, if not Nikarete specifically, though she seems to have had quite a reputation.

Neaira was one of the girls Nikarete bought, probably sometime between 390 and 380 BC. The details of her early years, which Apollodorus presents as a shameful, degrading past that ought to disqualify Neaira from living an honorable life, read as extraordinarily harrowing to us today. We don’t know anything about Neaira’s background before Nikarete purchased her: Archaeological evidence tells us that many women working in brothels came from points east, and that may have been true of Neaira as well. What we can say with certainty is that she was a child. According to Apollodorus, who may or may not have been exaggerating for effect, Nikarete had put Neaira to work before she reached puberty. This was young by ancient Greek standards, but far from unheard of. Nobody questioned the fact that pubescent girls and boys were readily available as sexual fodder for adult men.

For perhaps a decade, this would have been Neaira’s life: being treated as an expensive rental by some of the wealthier, more powerful men in Greece. She was a hetaira, courtesans who accompanied men to symposia, wine-guzzling parties where discussions of philosophy, law, and history took place, conversations that defined the intellectual life of ancient Greece. We know that Neaira traveled widely. The famous Athenian orator Lysias was fond of another of Nikarete’s enslaved hetaira, Metaneira, and arranged for her and Neaira to accompany him to Eleusis for initiation into the Eleusinian Mysteries, an ancient and prestigious religious cult. She may also have been to the Peloponnese, Thessaly, and even the Greek cities of Ionia on the coast of Asia. Not many free women had that kind of exposure to the world.

As she aged out of the paidiskai category of child sex slaves, Neaira’s value to Nikarete decreased; there would be new girls, bought and brought up as Neaira had been, to take her place. Nothing about Nikarete suggests that she was sentimental about her workers, or even that she sympathized with the difficulties of their lives: After all, she had probably experienced much the same, and exploiting that same business model was her way out of that life. Nikarete’s niche in the market was built on the youth and feigned respectability of the enslaved children she called her daughters.

To others, however, Neaira’s value was extraordinary. Two men, Eukrates and Timanoridas, bought her from Nikarete for the high price of 30 minae of silver. That’s about half a talent, the price the Athenian Nikias had paid for the mining overseer Sosias half a century or more earlier. We know from our episode on Sosias that ancient Greeks judged the monetary worth of enslaved people keenly; there’s no reason to assume Eukrates and Timanoridas were besotted when they decided to pay 30 minae, though whether they employed her as Nikarete had done or retained her services for themselves is unknown. When the two men married their wives three years later, they agreed to allow Neaira to buy her freedom. She paid 20 minae, sourced from earnings she’d been allowed to keep and a combination of gifts and loans from former clients. Whether her lower sale price was a gift from Eukrates and Timanoridas or reflected the lower monetary value of a sex worker as she aged, we cannot say.

One of the conditions of Neaira buying her freedom was her agreement to no longer work in her former profession in Corinth. Phrynion, one of her former clients, brought her with him to Athens around 373 BC. Against Neaira describes Neaira’s life with him in this manner: “he [Phrynion] treated her in an outrageous and reckless way; he took her to dinner with him everywhere, wherever he was drinking, she joined in all his carousals, and he had intercourse with her in public whenever and wherever he pleased, making a display of his privilege in front of onlookers.” On one occasion, however, Neaira accompanied him to a raucous party given by the Athenian general Chabrias. There, according to Apollodorus, guests and even the host’s own slaves sexually assaulted her. Apollodorus treats this as evidence of her debauchery and degradation; it’s far more likely she was raped. Sex workers today, like all women, are constantly at risk of sexual violence, and the past was no different. Neaira’s experience at Chabrias’s party was probably far more common than the textual record tells us. The fact that she operated among the elite in both Corinth and Athens offered Neaira no protection, nor did her dearly purchased freedom. In the aftermath of this incident, Neaira decamped for the city of Megara with two maids - Thratta and Coccalinê - and her jewelry.

Neaira’s circumstances improved in Megara: It was there she met Stephanus, who brought her back to Athens with him. Apollodorus claims that Neaira had three children at this point, but this is a baseless attack: the children were Stephanus’s legitimate offspring, two boys and a girl. Once she had returned to Athens, Phrynion tried to take Neaira back from Stephanus. The matter went to arbitration, and the arbitrators made it clear that Neaira was both legally free and outside any man’s direct supervision, a status and a privilege practically no women in Athens enjoyed. At the same time, however, the arbitrators agreed that Neaira would have to divide her time between Phrynion and Stephanus. Her freedom only went so far.

We hear no more about Phrynion after that point. Presumably Neaira went to live with Stephanus for the ensuing decades between then and the lawsuit in the 340s BC. He claimed that he didn’t marry her, and kept her as a concubine; Stephanus’s three children were his by his previous wife, an Athenian-born woman. We cannot say what any of these relationships were really like: whether the children, who had probably known Neaira since their early years, saw her as a surrogate mother; whether Neaira and Stephanus were living happily ever after, or with an eye to the simple management of their lives; or whether they did in fact consider themselves married, albeit not legally. Stephanus was a reasonably prominent man. He could never marry a former hetaira, and certainly not have children by her. By the time of the case, when she must have been well into her 50s, Neaira’s options for a different life were nonexistent, even if she had wanted to leave Stephanus. There were power dynamics at play in her life as a free woman, no less than when she had been an enslaved sex worker. By then, Neaira had probably spent more than half her life as a free woman; her days in Nikarete’s brothel were far in the past. But Apollodorus could still bring those memories to the fore and weaponize them against her. The result of the lawsuit is sadly unknown, but we can hope the jury saw through Apollodorus’s attacks as easily as we can 2300 years later.

Neaira’s life ought to neutralize any remaining myths about the glamor of high-end hetairai in classical Athens. Women like Neaira were an intimate part of a world of intellectual sophistication and cultural production. A generation before, hetairai had talked philosophy with Socrates; hetairai would accompany Alexander the Great and his generals on their rampage across Asia in the coming decades. Neaira herself rubbed shoulders with some of the greatest orators, philosophers, and soldiers of her day. But the context of those experiences—the facts of these women’s lives—cannot be ignored, or placed on some other contextual level separate from reality in order to assuage our modern sensibilities. Neaira and countless women like her were trafficked, sexually assaulted, abused, and forced into long-term relationships in order to survive a world that was deeply hostile to them. Neaira was extraordinary in that she occupied the very highest and most visible echelons of an industry whose workers typically toiled and suffered in anonymity. All of their lives were intrinsically woven into the tapestry of life in ancient Greece, no less so than Socrates, Alexander the Great, or Apollodorus. Ultimately, we ought to take some satisfaction in knowing that it’s Neaira, not Apollodorus, whose name we’re more likely to carry with us.

Past Lives is written and narrated by me, Patrick Wyman. The producer is Morgan Jaffe. The sound designer is Gabriel Gould. The story editor is Rachel Kambury.

Be sure to subscribe to Past Lives on your podcast platform of choice. If you’d like to support the show, please join our Patreon, where you’ll find a bunch of bonus content, including interviews, sources discussions, and much more.

Hi, everyone! Today marks the launch of my new history podcast, Past Lives, which focuses on the experiences of everyday people throughout the human past. This is the first episode, “On Historical Storytelling,” a discussion of how we make narratives about history, who has agency in those narratives, and why we can and should do better.

Everyone who subscribes on the Past Lives Patreon will receive the text of every episode sent straight to their inbox at the same time as the audio drops on the podcast feed, so be sure to head over and smash that button. It’s only $7 per month, and you get access to tons of bonus interviews, videos, bibliographies, Q&As, and much more - if you’ve enjoyed my writing here over the years, or Tides of History, I can promise you’ll enjoy this as well.

For those who prefer to listen, you can find the Past Lives RSS feed here, subscribe on Apple Podcasts, or subscribe on Spotify. I hope you’ll check it out: Past Lives is the show I’ve been dreaming of making since I was in graduate school, and I couldn’t possibly be more excited to go independent and do some cool stuff.

Also, how cool is this art?!?

!

If you lived a hundred years ago, who would you have been? What about a thousand years ago? Ten thousand?

I can promise you this much: You - yes, you - wouldn’t have been someone you’ve heard of before.

The stories we tell about the past revolve around towering figures like Alexander the Great and Napoleon and Cleopatra, individuals whose myths have their own centers of gravity. When we’re taught history in school, it’s largely through the lives and experiences of these people who, we’re told, are significant. Important. We learn to memorize their names and the dates of battles, coronations, and other key events associated with them.

Now, don’t get me wrong: We can learn a lot about the past from these people—who they were and what they did. This is what historical figureheads are for. But they’re not you. You listening to this might be rich, famous, and powerful, but statistically, you’re probably not. And there’s nothing wrong with that! Most of us aren’t. But we—you, me, people like us—are the raw material of history, the stuff history is made of. We always have been.

Most of us actually have a king or queen or two decorating our family trees. As a matter of probability, with everyone having millions upon millions of ancestors, it’s practically certain. But the vast majority of your ancestors and mine were the common clay of humanity. At best, they were advisors to those famous kings, or military officers, or members of the court. Maybe they were merchants or priestesses or administrators. More of them weren’t even that elevated. They were farmers clinging to the edge of survival. They were shepherds tending their flocks and herds, worrying about wolves and winter frosts. They were skilled craftspeople breathing in smoke from forges or digging wood splinters out of their fingers.

Most of those people, our ancestors, left only tiny traces in the historical record, if they left any at all: a single clay tablet recording the sale of a pair of enslaved prisoners of war in Assyria; an epitaph for a well-to-do Roman merchant; an entry in a medieval account book; the rusted fragments of an iron knife found among a few bones in a 2000-year-old grave. And still, each and every one of those people was real, and they mattered.

Past Lives is a show about those people and their stories. Every week, we’ll explore the lived experiences and world of a real person who lived in the past. Spanning years and the entire globe, these are the stories of the people who came before us. By understanding them, we can strive to better understand ourselves and our place in this great ongoing endeavor we call humanity. These people were us, and we are them. They mattered, and so do you.

----

You’ll have heard of some of the people we explore on Past Lives before. The vast majority of them, however, will be new to you, even if you’re a huge history buff who has read widely and deeply across different times and places in the past. That’s intentional.

I’ve taken this approach not because there’s nothing left to be learned from the towering figures who dominate the study of human history. Even those of us who took history classes in college mostly learn the subject through the lens of these “greats.” It’s simply a way to reduce the vast sweep of our past into a more manageable form. And every year, fantastic scholars uncover new things about these great individuals—mostly men—and sometimes, they fundamentally change the way we understand them.

That’s awesome. There’s nothing wrong with an enthralling biography or a radical new treatment of a major figure. I’m partial to them myself! I’ve written my fair share of words about famous folks over the years; if you want recommendations, I’m happy to provide a few, or a dozen, or a hundred, enough to keep you thoroughly occupied until the heat death of the universe. In the grand scheme of things, “Great Man” history, as it’s called, isn’t a bad way of simplifying our human past into something we can confidently grasp. A lot of stuff has happened over the past 10,000 years or so, and in that time, millions of lives have been lived.

That’s exactly why we’re not doing “Great Man” history here on Past Lives. Let me tell you why.

At a fundamental level, turning great people into the main characters of history is not only misleading, but also reductive, because these people are all outliers. They’re not normal. They’re not ordinary. Being important or lucky enough to be recorded in some text to which we still have access centuries after that person’s death is in itself unusual. The vast majority of the people who have ever stepped foot on the surface of this planet left no trace of their existence: not a mention in a tax record, not the foundations of the house they lived in, not a footprint in some wet mud that happened to survive the millennia. They were born, they lived, and they died.

While we in the 21st century might not know them, those largely unknown individuals in all their billions were no less or more human than we are. Whether they lived 10 years ago or 10,000, that much remains true. They lived different lives than we do, of course, but their experiences weren’t so very different from ours. These were people: They had favorite foods. They sweated in the heat and shivered in the cold. Their backs and knees ached when they woke up in the morning. Despite an infant and childhood mortality rate that beggars modern belief, they loved their kids every bit as much as we do today.

Past Lives is about forgotten people, not the kings and queens who ruled them, nor the chieftains, lords, aristocrats, and other notables whose names are so much more likely to have survived the vagaries of time. These forgotten people are, in my estimation, the true raw material of human history. Their lives, their experiences, their stories: that’s the iron we ought to be using to forge a better, more inclusive, more representative way of understanding our shared past.

A historical narrative that focuses entirely on the actions of a few people - mostly capital-G, capital-M Great Men - is to treat them as the driving force behind everything important that has ever happened. This isn’t a knock on a propulsive Lincoln biography or an incisive look at the Mughal founder, Babur, or against any rigorous work of reportage on what really happened in the White House War Room the night Osama bin Laden was killed; what I’m saying is that to study history exclusively through the lens of quote-unquote “Great Men” means missing out on a lot of really essential stuff about how the world works. Perspective matters.

I use the word “perspective” deliberately. One of the common misconceptions about history that non-historians tend to have is this idea of bias. Bias implies that there’s a single true version of a given set of events, and that if we just remove the bias from the accounts we have, we can get to that core truth. That’s just not how it works, so allow me to explain.

I’ll give you a concrete example. The great Greek historian Polybius wrote the definitive account of the Roman Republic’s rise to power in the Mediterranean. Polybius was closely associated with a particular clique among the Roman aristocracy, at the center of which was a guy named Scipio Aemilianus. Polybius, unsurprisingly, is pretty complimentary of Scipio Aemilianus. That shapes how he presents Aemilianus’s involvement in some pretty nasty events, like the destruction of Carthage in 146 BC.

Now, if we approach Polybius’s work with the intention of removing his bias, we’d say “Well, he probably exaggerated a bit when it came to Aemilianus, made him look better than he was,” that kind of thing. That stands to reason.

But how are we to understand Polybius’s other, less immediately visible, biases? How are we supposed to know how those biases informed what events he chose to include in his history, what he left out, what he chose to emphasize, and what really crucial thing he glossed over in a few sentences? Enough outside evidence survives that tells us that Polybius, like any writer, was indeed making active choices about how to shape his story. Centuries or millennia removed, we can’t simply excise the writer from the work, or presume to understand precisely what made them tick. That’s the problem with bias.

Perspective, on the other hand, is an empowering concept, especially for a historian. Perspective says that everybody is working from their own, usually implicit, assumptions about how the world works and what matters most. It says that even when we’re recording firsthand accounts of something we’ve just seen, there’s still plenty of room for those assumptions to inform our representation of those events.

Let me give you another example. If you have kids, you’ve probably heard them recount a story about something that happened at school or daycare: Somebody cut somebody else’s hair with the classroom scissors, or there was a shoving match over the swing, or one kid threw a pair of headphones, missed, and cracked the screen on the video board. If you ask five different children what happened, you’ll get five different stories; in the absence of video evidence recording every single moment of the incident, trying to figure out the actual sequence of events isn’t exactly straightforward. And that’s kids doing something innocuous that doesn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things. What happens when we apply this to thornier, more complex events? Political dealings, coups, conquests, and the like? These are the kinds of events no single observer could hope to comprehend anyway, and certainly not without bias.

We’re not going to get a clean recounting of stuff that took place by removing “bias.” Honestly, even the idea that a bare-bones understanding of what happened actually constitutes history seems pretty dubious to me. Far too often, “what happened” is shorthand for focusing on the actions of those so-called great people I was bemoaning a little while ago. History is so much more than that. For every Great Man bending the arc of history to his - almost always his - will, there were uncounted others who had their own perspectives on what was happening, their own experiences of those events. We ought to embrace those perspectives. That starts by changing our approach to studying history, namely by questioning who and what matters most.

----

History is a mosaic of different people’s experiences and stories. It seems natural to tell the story of the American Civil War through the eyes of Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson Davis, Ulysses S. Grant, and Robert E. Lee. Such a story leads us from the election of 1860 and Fort Sumter to Shiloh and Gettysburg to Ford’s Theater and Appomattox. Lincoln’s letters, Grant’s and Lee’s memoirs, Davis’s official papers: their records become the mortar and glass that comprises our mosaic and creates the larger (and most widely accepted) image of the time. To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with that story. It’s a fine way of doing a political overview of a crucial and transformative five-year period in American history.

But an overview is not the whole story, or even most of it. If we move away from Lincoln and Davis and Grant and Lee and instead use other people’s experiences as our little pieces of colored glass, we could construct an entirely different mosaic, thereby creating an entirely different portrait of the age. We could appreciate what the bullets must have sounded like whistling through the trees on Little Round Top. We could understand the jubilation of enslaved people when Union soldiers arrived in the South Carolina Low Country, burned down the hated big house, and told them what was in the Emancipation Proclamation. We could talk about guerrilla warfare, banditry, and the breakdown of civil society in border states like Missouri. Or we could talk about what was going through the mind of a 26-year-old immigrant from Schleswig-Holstein on the battlefield at Nashville in 1864 right before he was hit with a piece of shrapnel. That was my great-great-great grandfather, a fella named Hans Jordt. If we build our mosaic of the Civil War from pieces like that, how might the broader picture of that age appear? That’s history, too: history from the bottom up, or sometimes the middle out. This approach assembles a more complete narrative because it draws from the lives of ordinary people, that precious raw material I mentioned before.

There’s a fancy term for this kind of narrative approach. We call it “sociological storytelling,” as opposed to biographical storytelling, the kind with which most of us are familiar. Biography is all about understanding the course of a person’s life, what they saw and experienced, and uses that person as a lens for understanding the world in which they lived. Biographies tend to spend a great deal of time on the inner world of their subjects, their psychology, their motivations for doing the things we know they did. That doesn’t mean they leave out the broader world: Any competent biography of Abraham Lincoln is going to spend some time talking about how his experiences in Kentucky and Illinois shaped his character; how his views on slavery evolved in the context of the fight between abolition and slave power before the Civil War; and, not to put too fine a point on it, what made Lincoln so extraordinary compared to his contemporaries. That’s also the weakness of biography. We tend to write biographies of outliers, not ordinary folks. Even when we do see a biography of a regular person, having access to enough information to assemble their full life story is a heck of a lot rarer than we’d like it to be.

Sociological storytelling, by contrast, uses what we know about the world that existed around a given person to illuminate their subjective life and experiences. It looks for the ordinary rather than the extraordinary, how the surviving fragments of a known person’s life might have fit into the society of which they were a part. We can very easily do sociological storytelling for a famous, well-documented person: In the case of Abraham Lincoln, that approach would focus on what aspects of his life and experiences were broadly shared across the antebellum United States, the extent to which his contemporaries shared his views, what he ate and drank, even the chairs he sat in and the way the ever-present clouds of tobacco smoke around him smelled. A sociological approach to Lincoln would situate him firmly in his world first, and then focus on the individual second.

That’s what we’re going to do here on Past Lives. Most of the people we want to get to know better, our raw historical material, didn’t leave enough traces in the record for us to reconstruct their entire life story. They appear in flashes, blinks of an eye, as if we’ve caught a glimpse of them running through a dense forest. Those glimpses - a mention of an enslaved person’s sale in a crumbling ledger, a set of human remains, a throwaway line in a well-known account of a king - are all we have to work with. All I have of my great-great-great grandfather Hans Jordt is his wartime Bible, a photograph of him as an elderly man, and a couple of Grand Army of the Republic ribbons, along with the barest information from census returns. The diary we know he kept during the war is nowhere to be found. Now, we might throw our hands in the air and bemoan how little we can know about these people. We can lament the loss of the evidence, like Hans Jordt’s diary, that would have told us more about an individual’s life story: how the enslaved person recorded in that ledger felt about being ripped away from their culture and family and sold to the highest bidder, who the human remains belonged to, or what my great-great-great grandfather was thinking as the bullets whizzed and shells exploded around him at Nashville.

But even those glimpses matter, because they tell us that these people really did exist. They really were born, lived, and died, and along that journey, their actions shaped the world around them. Those famous Roman senators and generals whose names we still remember were surrounded by dozens, even hundreds of anonymous enslaved people who made their clothing, prepared their food, and ran their baths. Thousands of humble Roman citizens, their names lost to time, cast votes to put them in office. We can talk about the miracles of the Industrial Revolution all we want—the genius of inventors and the cleverness of the investors who poured capital into new technologies—but it was factory workers who made the things that propelled the world into a new age. Lincoln’s views on slavery, even the fact of him being president at that moment of crisis, wouldn’t have mattered unless hundreds of thousands of people like Hans Jordt were willing to pick up a rifle and put on a blue uniform and march off to war. History is made of the millions upon millions of individual moments that ordinary people do every day, not just the actions of Great Men.

That’s what Past Lives is all about. Each season will focus on a particular unifying theme that spans space and time, giving us an opportunity to look at the lives of regular folks. My hope is that by assembling a wide variety of perspectives from different eras and regions around the world, we’ll be able to illuminate some larger aspects of that theme: our very own mosaic view of a topic, made up of the experiences of ordinary people.

Our first theme will be slavery. Slavery as an institution has existed on this planet since the beginning of recorded history more than 5,000 years ago, and it almost certainly goes back even further. In several times and places, like the antebellum South or the ancient Mediterranean, the entirety of the economic and social system was rooted in slavery; elsewhere and at other times, enslaved people lived among the free masses, silently shaping their own lives as well as those of their masters in ways both large and small.

Over the next twelve episodes, we’ll look at twelve people who were enslaved at some point in their lives. They range in time and space from ancient Assyria, where a woman named Nanaya’ila’i and her daughter were brutally kidnapped from their home, to Matilda McCrear, the last survivor of the Transatlantic slave trade. Some of our subjects were counted among the lowest of the low in their societies. Others - not many, but a few - were quite well off, or even rose to extraordinary heights. For a few, slavery was a lifelong condition that followed them from birth to death. For most, it wasn’t. The experience of being enslaved marked a fundamental break with their past selves, a kind of social death. My hope is that by understanding a spectrum of experiences of the enslaved, we’ll understand slavery itself better: how it benefited the owners, how those benefits have continued to trickle down through time, and far more importantly, what it did to its victims.

Be sure to go and listen to episode two of Past Lives, where we’ll spend a little time making sense of slavery over the big picture and the long term. It’s already available right now, and so is our look at our first real people, Nanaya’ila’i and her daughter, in ancient Assyria.

Make sure you subscribe to this feed, and click the link in the episode description to head over to the Past Lives Patreon! It’s only seven bucks a month. We already have tons of bonus content, like interviews with great historians about their favorite historical people, and we’re adding more every week. Our Patreon is also where you’ll also find our Past Lives chat, where you can talk about history with other interested folks—I’ll even drop in from time to time. We’ll have a weekly discussion thread - the first one is about the best history books you’ve ever read - and, if you’re a patron, you’ll get to vote on what we read for our monthly Past Lives book club. Past Lives is a 100-percent independent production, and your support is what allows us to make this show. So, thank you.

Past Lives is written and narrated by me, Patrick Wyman. The producer is Morgan Jaffe. The sound designer is Gabriel Gould. The story editor is Rachel Kambury.

Don’t forget to subscribe to the Past Lives Patreon to receive access to all the bonus content, including text versions of every episode, and you can find the Past Lives RSS feed here, subscribe on Apple Podcasts, or subscribe on Spotify.