Welcome back to Drafting the Past. I’m thrilled to be joined in this episode by historian Dr. Edward Watts.
Ed is a professor of history at the University of California San Diego. He is the author of seven books, including Mortal Republic: How Rome Fell Into Tyranny, and The Eternal Decline and Fall of Rome: The History of a Dangerous Idea. He has published extensively in academic journals and his work is regularly featured in the popular press. You can also check out his YouTube channel, Rome’s Eternal Decline, where he shares bite-size facts about Roman history. Ed’s newest book is The Romans: A 2,000-Year History, which came out earlier this year with Basic.
I was excited to talk with Ed about how he tackled such a vast subject. I was also eager to hear how he gets so much writing done. But above all, I really wanted to dig into his style and talk about what goes in to making such a huge history so enjoyable to read. Let me tell you, he did not disappoint. Even if you focus on history far removed from the Roman Empire, you’re going to get a lot out of this one. Enjoy my conversation with Dr. Edward Watts.
P.S. This one was so much for that I even asked Ed a bonus question! You can hear that one (truffle hunter or parachutist, IYKYK) as an exclusive audio bonus for Patreon subscribers here. For as little as $2 month, you can help to keep the show going and get access to ad-free episodes, too.
Note: Bookshop.org links are affiliate links.
Mentioned in this episode:
- Edward J. Watts, The Romans: A 2,000-Year History
- Edward J. Watts, The Eternal Decline and Fall of Rome: The History of a Dangerous Idea
- Edward J. Watts, Mortal Republic: How Rome Fell Into Tyranny
- Edward J. Watts, The Final Pagan Generation: Rome’s Unexpected Path to Christianity
- Edward J. Watts, City and School in Late Antique Athens and Alexandria
- Edward J. Watts, Riot in Alexandria: Tradition and Group Dynamics in Late Antique Pagan and Christian Communities
- Edward J. Watts, Hypatia: The Life and Legend of an Ancient Philosopher
- Ed’s YouTube channel
- Ernest Hemingway
- Peter Brown
- Sallust
- Caesar
- Xenophon
- Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
Transcript:
Kate Carpenter 0:01
Hey everyone, welcome back to Drafting the Past, a podcast about the craft of writing history. My name is Kate Carpenter, and I’m thrilled to be joined in this episode by historian Dr. Edward Watts.
Ed Watts 0:13
Thank you for having me. This is exciting.
Kate Carpenter 0:15
Ed is a professor of history at the University of California San Diego. He is the author of seven books, including Mortal Republic: How Rome Fell Into Tyranny, and The Eternal Decline and Fall of Rome: The History of a Dangerous Idea. He has published extensively in academic journals and his work is regularly featured in the popular press. You can also check out his YouTube channel, Rome’s Eternal Decline, where he shares bite-size facts about Roman history. Ed’s newest book is The Romans: A 2,000-Year History, which came out earlier this year with Basic. I was excited to talk with Ed about how he tackled such a vast subject. I was also eager to hear how he gets so much writing done. But above all, I really wanted to dig into his style and talk about what goes in to making such a huge history so enjoyable to read. Let me tell you, he did not disappoint. Even if you focus on history far removed from the Roman Empire, you’re going to get a lot out of this one. Enjoy my conversation with Dr. Edward Watts.
Ed Watts 1:20
So I started, you know, obviously I started doing work in antiquity when I was an undergraduate. And I actually came, I was an undergraduate at Brown, which gave me this, like, wonderful opportunity to kind of immerse myself in the classical world, which I knew I wanted to do when I got there. And so I think of the 32 classes I took, like 27 of them were ancient, so I did a lot of a lot of writing and engagement with antiquity while I was there, and I did a lot of Greek and Latin. And so that really did help me become very aware of how one could structure writing. You know, what style I liked, what style I didn't like, like, I hate Ciceronian styles. I didn't like that at all. But when I got to graduate school, I became really interested in I didn't realize it at the time, but I became really interested in taking the things that I was experiencing at that moment and looking at questions in antiquity that I felt I could understand because of those experiences. So the first my dissertation and the first few articles I wrote were about student life, because I was a student and I was living. I grew up in Princeton, I went to Brown I, you know, did my PhD at Yale. I had a very not normal set of environments to grow up in and you know, and until I was 27 that's the world I lived in. Was like. I never lived farther than two miles from a major research university. So the first book that I worked on was about academic centers and the interaction of like local life and student life and professorial life in antiquity, in Athens and Alexandria, which were basically like the Oxford and Cambridge of the Roman Empire, you know. And then what I have realized subsequently is, as my experiences developed and I got different perspectives, my work kind of moved in those directions. You know, I think a great example of that was my third book, which was about the generation that lived through the transformation from paganism to Christianity and didn't know they were living through that transformation that was motivated by basically being in my late 30s and realizing as Gen X like, we are not going to actually control the narrative of the world that we live in. We're too small, and baby boomers are going to hang on a long time, and they're going to hand right off to millennials. And so that book was really motivated by the reality of like, we thought we had a story, right? We thought that we were crafting a world, and in the end, like, Gen X is going to produce some pretty good music and, like, a little bit of interesting fashion, and like, be forgotten. So what is, what is a antique version of that? And I thought that generation of the 310s was a version of that. You know, they they really thought they were doing something. They really thought they were crafting their own version of a world that would be formative and transformative and would last for a very long time. And in the end, when they were in their 70s, they realized it didn't happen. The world they thought that they were living in and they thought they were building never actually emerged. And, you know, I think that this has been something, the next project that I think reflects kind of the moment of time when it was written, was mortal Republic, where I was really trying to figure out how to work through a situation where I have noticed, and my students noticed a real transformation. In the world around us, and what antiquity can tell us about it. So when I started teaching in 25 years ago, the ancient world was really something that was engaged with abstractly. There were people talking about ideas of empire in the first moments that I was teaching, and they were really thinking about Rome, and like late Rome, like the fourth, fifth, sixth centuries. AD, what happened around 2015 is people started thinking that late Roman story is like interesting, but not relevant. What's really relevant is the end of the Republic. And so mortal Republic was something that reflected my own understanding that, you know, we're using Rome as a way to expand our sense of what's possible in the world around us, and the realm we're using has changed because the world around us has changed. And so you know that reflected, really my sense that starting about 2015 but especially after the 2016 election, Rome has a different set of things that it can teach us, and I wanted to explore those different set of things by writing about them, and, you know, and writing about them in a way that is true to the Roman story, and if it resonates now, I mean, that's great, because I'm seeing those resonances, but it's not saying that those things are the same. It's just saying that there's a similarity in how we can understand elements of Roman life because of what we're experiencing in our lives. And so the Romans is the kind of culmination of that, like realizing that we can do Roman history in a way that is really big picture. You know, 2000 years is sort of really big picture, but also engages with themes that we need to think about more seriously, because we live in a moment where we try not to think big picture, you know, we try to work in these, these very short bursts of, okay, here's the past. The past this three years ago. And you know, what does it mean, and how should we respond? And we don't realize that a lot of the trends we're looking at are very, very long standing. They, you know, exist across lifetimes. And some of the things that we can find to the deep historical past. You know, there are people who still people still alive, who grew up in those moments. So, so what the Romans is trying to do is look at these long term trends and get a sense of what long term trends make a society stable and make a society functional, and ultimately, make a society able to adapt to new realities without ever losing the sense of, you know, what it is and how it works. And you know that's very motivated by not just the world in the United States and the conditions in the United States, but a lot of this book was written in France and in Italy. And so some of this was written when Maloney was elected, some of this was written in the moments when it looks like the Fifth Republic in France is sort of teetering because of instability about how you evolve as a society. This is, I think, a global story, but it's a story that I think reflects, really the experiences that I've had that have allowed me to see new things and think in new ways about the Roman experience.
Kate Carpenter 8:25
You've just named a bunch of books, and have not even named all of the books that you've published. So I really have to ask you, you're a very prolific writer. For any writer, but especially for an academic, what kind of systems do you have set up to allow you to get so much writing done?
Ed Watts 8:43
So I guess what I would what I would say is I have always, you know, since that, that deep dive that I did at Brown, I mean, I've always actually taken really good notes, and I'm, like, intensely organized about where my notes go, you know. So I have different folders where I keep things that are thematically structured. And I keep my notes so that I can always kind of go back and remember, okay, I remember this kind of thing happened in this source, and I can go find it weirdly that was motivated by a practice of the ancient author, Plutarch, who would just read voraciously, you know, he'd just go through everything he could find. And he would disaggregate pieces of it and keep it on, kind of like file cards, you know. And so he would have, oh, I'm writing about Caesar. I remember this, this, this, this, and this about Caesar. And it was harder for Plutarch to go back and check the sources than it is for me. You know, Plutarch didn't have PDFs of the entire Loeb classical library that he could go back through and look at, but he did kind of know what was where, and I read that when I was in graduate school, and I thought, this is totally sensible, right? This is this is just the way to do things. So I've been really intense about organizing all of the material that. I work with, and that includes textual sources. But it also I travel quite a bit in the Roman world. And every time I go somewhere, I take pictures that I then organize in files. And so, you know, if I'm writing about, say, a site like the portico of Octavia, which is a an amazing site set up by the sister of the Emperor Augustus in the period right when He's establishing himself. And it's this incredible space that she basically included a lot of artwork that were it was connected to prominent women in the Roman past. And so it was a sort of gender defined sort of space about particular notions of female political power. And, you know, there's sources that talk about the artwork in there, and then they're my pictures of that site at various times. And so, you know, if I'm working on the portico of Octavia, I can find that stuff very easily, you know. So I have my sources pretty intensely organized in lots of different ways that overlap with the material in the literary but then I think what also inspires me is, you know, I will see something where I'm, like, reading the news or talking to friends or, you know, parenting my children, or just experiencing something in sort of daily life, and something will resonate. And I'll, I'll sort of realize, wait now this is actually pretty similar to this thing in a Roman context, and then I can go back and find my sources, and then, you know, I reread the evidence I am working with a building. I'll look at the plans for the building that I have, again, filed with the images. And so what that does is it kind of allows me to really rapidly rebuild my familiarity with whatever it is I'm talking about. But I guess if there's any kind of system to that, it's just having a passion for this that's really long standing. I have been passionate about Roman things since I was like 14, and I'm 50 now, so there's a lot of a lot there, but then also kind of knowing where my notes are and where my resources are when I initially engaged with these Roman things, and then sort of keeping a record each time I engage with them differently. Because another thing that you know, again, having done this now for a long time, another thing that I've realized is you can read the same source when you're 20 and when you're 40, and you will see something different when you're 40, and it doesn't mean you read it wrong when you were 20, it just means that you have more experience, and so you see a different level of this, and it just sort of resonates With you differently. And so having these layers of notes actually is very, very useful. And it also means you can't just rely on your notes, because you know, you need to go back. You need to look at the source. You ideally need to look at the source in in Greek or Latin or whatever, Syriac or Coptic, whatever language it's in, and then react again. And both of those reactions, all of those reactions, if you're doing this more than two times, it's very useful, but I think it is, again, part of, I think being productive in this capacity is loving what you're doing enough that you have reactions. You know that nothing is stale, but then knowing how when you react to something, how you can find that material that you remember somewhere is you know in your notes, you go back, you find it and you read it again, just to be sure that your memory is right and your reaction is right.
Kate Carpenter 13:35
So when you say files and notes, are we talking just folder structure on your computer and word, or do you? Do you have specific tools?
Ed Watts 13:43
Oh, yeah, no, definitely. Folder structure. I think that in terms of images of sites, I probably have 10,000 pictures. There was a moment. It actually was while I was working on Mortal Republic, and I went back and I had to do some, honestly, had to do some site visits because the images of a few Republican structures that I wanted to use. Plane ticket was cheaper than buying the rights to those images. So I went to Rome, and I, you know, I was just, I need to take pictures of, like, these five things. And I went and I took tons of pictures, because I'm like, Well, you know, if I just paid $800 for plane ticket, I better, like, get my money's worth out of this. And so I filed them, and then I thought, you know, this is actually excellent, because I have some images of these sites before, but they weren't what I needed. So I created master files of that, and then I went back through and digitized pictures from when I was much younger, and then systematize the other things that I had on my phone and on my computer. And then every time I've traveled since I've been really diligent about every time I visit a site, I make a file, I always take a picture of everything that I think might be interesting. It. Or in a museum, I take pictures of every object I think might be interesting, and the card, you know, the identification, and that allows you to go back through. You'll have the inventory for the museum, or you'll have the site indicated and the notification of it and and you can go back through and reconstruct that experience pretty quickly. But you have to, basically, I mean, you have to do it kind of in the moment, because otherwise, going through 10,000 pictures and figuring out, wait like, this is a temple that's ruined somewhere, right? That's worthless, you know, you have to do it kind of when it's 30 pictures and not 3000
Kate Carpenter 15:39
Well, let me keep pressing you here for some practical details. So when and where do you like to write?
Ed Watts 15:44
Again, because of some of the work for this particular book that I was doing, a lot of it was site specific, and so I would be writing about a monument. And if I knew that I would be writing about a bunch of monuments, I would try to be on site to do it. So a lot of the material about high Empire Rome. So this is really kind of reign of Tiberius, reign of Augustus through basically the Severin period. A lot of that was written in Rome because it was essential for me to be able to get in and see if I'm writing about, say, the Domus Aurea. I wanted to get in and see the Domus Aurea to be sure that I was writing about it in the right way. There's a great moment in the book where I'm writing about the accession of the Emperor Didius Julianus, who's notorious because he basically bought the throne. And so there's, you know, he buys it. He shows up at the end of the business day. The next day, there's a meeting in the Senate, and there's a popular outcry in the forum, and he can, he basically has to have the Praetorian guards fight his way back to the Imperial Palace. So I was trying to capture that. So I went to the forum and I walked it. You know, you can walk from the Senate up to there's a ramp that goes from the forum up to the gate of the Imperial Palace and the Palatine. So I walked it and I timed it, and I, you know, and I tried to understand what it would be like for somebody who thinks at the beginning of that walk that everything's okay, and by the end of that walk, realizes they're basically going to fall from power very quickly. They don't know how long, but it's not going to be they're not going to be there 10 years, you know. And the walk was two and a half minutes. And so being able to realize that how quickly that experience would happen, and then, especially once you get out of the forum, you have this walk through a passageway, and the walk from the forum up to the palace, it is a covered passageway. You know, there's a guard at the bottom. There's a guard chamber in the middle with a latrine. So you know the guy's standing there for a while, and then, you know, you emerge and there's a gate. You can hear what's going on in the forum through that entire walk, you're protected from it, but you can hear it. And it takes, I think, about two and a half minutes to get from the Senate House to the gate of that passageway, and takes another 90 seconds or so to walk up that passageway, maybe a little longer, I don't know how fast he would walk. You can feel the terror. Right when you do that, you can feel the terror. And so what I tried to do in moments where I knew there was something human that I could like, drill down to and really get at, because our sources are precise enough about what happens and where. I tried to be on site to do that if I'm writing just from text, or if I'm writing about a place I can't visit. You know, obviously some of the work that I was doing in in that book relates to sites in Syria that were not accessible. If it's a site that I have visited and I have pictures, I can reconstruct some of that. But, you know, in other times, you do the best you can, but I try to write in places that are evocative. And if I know I'm writing about something that involves a physical space, I really want to be there, because it really does help my conception of not just the logistics of what happens, but also the personal experience of living through what happened. And so I definitely, if you are able to do that, I recommend doing that, you know, because you all historians are writing about people. Ultimately, we're storytellers, and the stories that we tell are compelling because they are about other human beings. And this is why, you know, I don't think we'll ever be AI'd away, because we have to have human experiences to be able to do that, and a machine will never have human experiences that can allow it to replicate the experiences that someone went through in the past. And the closer we can get to those experiences in the past, the better I think we're going to do at describing them and to. Describing the reality of those people and making our stories, you know, work for us now. So you know, I do really very strongly suggest, recommend whatever if you are able to get into the space where your people worked and lived and loved and suffered and felt joy and felt anxiety. You can get a lot closer to those experiences if you're just sort of standing there and realizing, oh, you know, there's, there's a hill here, or, you know, there's a passageway here, or this is what it would be like to walk through this space.
Kate Carpenter 20:37
Do you write every day then, or do you sort of write in chunks as you're able to be in those kind of spaces?
Ed Watts 20:43
I try to write every day. I do feel that changing your your setting in which you're writing can provide you with a jumpstart, but I think it is. It's like a sugar rush, right? The effect fades. So I found that if I'm in Rome for, say, four weeks, I can write very effectively for about three of them. And then things start kind of fading, you know, and by the fourth week, I'm kind of back to where I would be if I was staying just in San Diego. And so I think you can change things up. And I do really strongly suggest, if somebody is kind of stuck to go just find another space, you know, a space where you don't have a lot of distractions, and a space where you can really just focus. And that focus will come, but it will also rapidly erode. So I think it is good to try to write every day. It's also good to even plan out a project and say, Okay, well, this is a moment where I'm definitely going to need a jolt, or this is a moment where I know I'm going to have something that connects to a character or a person or a space, and I need to be there, because I need to feel that, and feeling, you know, the connection to that person in that space, it does sort of juice your writing, you know, because it's new and it and it's exciting, and you chose to be there because it is meaningful to the story you're telling. But after four weeks or so there, it's not that different, right? You're, you're just going to the grocery store, just like you would at home, and you're, you know, just you have a routine. And the fact that that routine is in Italy or France or Syria or Ghana or wherever you are, it's a routine now. And so the excitement of being there does kind of fade. But I think if you're going to write about like Nkrumah, you got to go to akra you got to you maybe don't stay there for four years, but if you stay there for four weeks, you're gonna feel something very different, and it's exciting and it's useful.
Kate Carpenter 22:48
Are you as organized when it comes to drafting as you are in your research and note taking process? Do you go in with an outline and a sort of step by step plan?
Ed Watts 22:58
I guess what I would say is I'm very strategic, but I'm not very tactical. So what I do is I have a big picture sense of how projects are going to go. Most of the time, they end up following that, but I don't outline the specific approaches to individual writing days, you know? I'll go in and say, Okay, so today, what I want to do is focus on so today, specifically this day after we talk, I am going in and I'm working on a book now about Roman emperors and the idea of Imperial office distorting and changing their personalities. And so I'm at a moment where I'm now building out the first part of this, talking about how the late Republic creates these conditions where you need an office like that, and I need today to shift from a discussion of notions of fear in 5253 BC, to Caesar and feeling fear in 49 BC, and so I know I need to do that. I know more or less what sources I'm going to use, but once I get into it, what's probably I mean, what always happens is you pull a source that you think is going to do something, and it mostly does it, but you see something else, and then you think, okay, so you know, I know at the end of this, I need to end up in 44 BC. I don't know if we'll do it today, but in the next couple days, I need to end up in 44 BC with the assassination and somehow transition to Octavian I think I know what sources are going to line up to do that. But probably what's going to happen is, you know, I'm going to start with Caesar's Civil War, read the very first part of it, and see something, probably in the Latin that I didn't see before. And then we'll go where we go. I know where I'll end up. I think I know where the theme is going to go by the time I end up there, you know. But tactically, I don't have a fixed plan, just because when I actually make contact with the sources. And I don't know that a fixed plan is going to take me where I want to go and I want to react to the material without being kind of constrained by an outline. So, you know, I think in the very big picture, if we were to again, sort of use this, like light military metaphor I'm using in the big picture, I kind of know where the war is going. In the short picture, the small the intermediate picture, I kind of know where the battlefield is. But once I make contact with, you know, my enemy, I don't like this metaphor as much as I thought I would. Yeah, when I make contact with my sources, it will go where it goes and I have to be flexible with that, and I have to be willing to say, Okay, wait, this didn't exactly do what I wanted it to do. Does it connect back to where I was before? If not, you know, do I need to revise where I'm going before, or do I need to change the transition? And then how do I move it so it gets like, how do I move the story so it gets to where I need it to be, which is the kind of next phase in, you know, the storytelling. And I think you have to be flexible like that, because if you, if you aren't, you don't see the full potential of what your sources can do for that story. And you might, like, undersell something that's super important, or you might miss something that actually leads you on a very, very rich kind of path. And so I think you have to flexible like that.
Kate Carpenter 26:30
What does revision look like for you, then? Are you revising as you go or or once you get to the end?
Ed Watts 26:37
I mean, if I, if I see something that doesn't work in the course of writing, yeah, I will go back and say, Okay, well, I need to, I need to go back and fix kind of this transition, or I need to go back and fix this thing. But usually what I do is I keep a running set of notes where it's like, okay, so I saw this in so with the Romans. I mean, it's, it's 40 odd chapters, it's a very long book. So there would be places where I would see something and say, Okay, so this that I saw in the fourth century AD, it actually connects back to this material in the second century BC, I'm not going to go back and rework, you know, I'm not going to jump from chapter 24 to chapter six. I'm just going to keep running notes saying, like this theme in 24 needs to go back to six and sort of just do, when I do my revisions, do a sort of back check to it. When I was younger, I used to have a rule that I would never send anything out unless I had revised it 10 times. I don't do that anymore. But what I felt like with that was, you know, your first couple rounds of revision, what you're doing is almost always truncating. So you're finding what's extraneous. You're finding things that are they repeat themselves. You're finding things where the structure just includes, like, a block quote, when you could embed half a sentence, and then I think, like, around, sort of your third revision, you're doing stylistic revisions. And I really didn't feel comfortable with my style and the way that I was embedding and working with my materials so early on, it took a while for me to feel like, okay, everything in this I feel good about Now I tend to basically do up to that third revision. And stylistically, I think I'm I draft better than I used to. So at this point I, you know, I still do believe, you know, that first revision is probably 30% of the product you're producing. You draft something, and then your first revision is really where you go through and you say, okay, you know, probably a big chunk of this is doesn't need to be here, or I can do it better, or I need different materials. But what I tend to really not do is add at that point, unless it's necessary. But mostly I don't add at the first revision I'm already at that point, kind of subtracting.
Kate Carpenter 29:13
Since we were talking about style already, this seemed like a good time to have read an excerpt of his work so that we could talk about it in more detail. Here’s Dr. Edward J. Watts reading from the opening of Chapter 14 of The Romans.
Ed Watts 29:28
The orderly transition between the elderly Tiberius and the young Caligula in March of 37 occurred amid widespread excitement. Rome was used to being run by old men. No one younger than fifty had ruled since Augustus’s fiftieth birthday in 13 BC, a half century before Caligula took power, and Caligula offered a vitality that few Romans could remember their emperors possessing. They saw no sign of the violent, capricious ruler he would become. Caligula changed Rome’s political tenor almost immediately through a series of mostly symbolic breaks with the recent past. He displayed an ostentatious generosity that contrasted with Tiberius’s parsimoniousness by cutting taxes; paying compensation to fire victims; granted money to gladiators, actors, soldiers, and regular Romans; and sponsoring lavish games and races. He demonstrated a commitment to liberty by restoring the voting assemblies through which regular Roman citizens elected magistrates, and he ‘promised to share his power’ with the Senate. He suspended investigations of maiestas, freed prisoners being held on that charge, and claimed (falsely) to have burned all documents connected to their cases. He even reversed Tiberius’s ban on Cordus’s history of Brutus and Cassius. When Caligula assumed the consulship in July of 37, alongside his uncle Claudius, he gave a speech ‘denouncing [the emperor] Tiberius for each and every one of the crimes of which he was commonly accused’ that so impressed the Senate that Cassius Dio claims it was ‘decreed that this speech should be read every year.’ Caligula also quickly took steps to emphasize a familial piety that Tiberius had lacked. He dedicated a shrine to his maternal great-grandfather Augustus; had his paternal grandmother, Antonia, declared Augusta; and brought the ashes of his brother and his mother, Agrippina, to Rome so they could be interred in the Mausoleum of Augustus on the Campus Martius. He asked the Senate to divinize Tiberius, although he decided not to press the issue when the Senate demurred. Caligula adopted Tiberius Gemellus, Drusus’s son, as his own and arranged for him to receive the title princeps iuventutis, a clear marker that designated Gemellus as his successor. And then, seven months into his reign, Caligula became very sick.
Kate Carpenter 31:46
What went into writing these paragraphs? What kind of sources make this happen?
Ed Watts 31:50
So I think I probably already betrayed my great affection for this idea of using generations to mark kind of conceptual frameworks in antiquity. And I think what you have here is, you know, what I wanted to emphasize is this generational shift is really, really profound, because Rome had been for the, you know, the lifetime of most people who were alive in 37 it had been ruled by old men, and so all of a sudden to have somebody young who's in charge. It represents a very profound shift in expectations. But there's also a sort of generational aspect to this, where you have, in a sense, jumped three generations, two or three generations. And so I wanted to make it clear to people that this is extremely disorienting, but also exciting, and it's a particularly exciting for people who are caligula's age. I mean, Caligula is, you know, around 30 when he takes power. So the people of that age all of a sudden, you know, they move away from having these guys in their 70s controlling things and not really even understanding the world or the experience of people alive who are younger than them to somebody their age. And so there's an excitement there that I really wanted to try to convey. And I also think it's really important to understand that, you know, we see Caligula as this terrible figure, a person who is absolutely incapable of ruling, a person who is violent and vicious and completely out of control. But he wasn't like that at the beginning. You know, he very much understood the moment. He very much understood what he could and should do to capitalize on those expectations in that moment. And he actually managed the first months of his reign very, very well. And so this isn't somebody who is like you'll have later in Roman history, a child, where somebody is running this for him. It isn't somebody who is relying on a cadre of advisors to make choices. He's making these choices because he understands their good choices, and he understands how they're going to play in the popular mindset. And so I want, I really wanted to establish this as a moment of, you know, a very positive moment in Roman history, and a positive moment that we have lost because of what Caligula becomes. But I think you have to set Caligula up with this understanding that at the beginning, not only was there considerable excitement, but he was skilled. He knew what he was doing, and he knew how to build on that excitement, and he knew how to build something that could have been a sustainable foundation for a really long and prosperous reign. And then, you know, I really wanted to emphasize, there's a massive and sudden transition, and so that's why you have the single sentence paragraph. You know, I really did want that to be something that stands out to the reader. I mean, oh, this is, this is like, the record skips, right? This is, this is the Jumpstart everything now just pivots immediately for something that is not his. Fault, but profoundly changes everything that we everything about him, and creates the Caligula we know out of this character, who actually, I think, would have been a very different figure had he not gotten sick.
Kate Carpenter 35:11
What are the sources it takes to write this? I mean, I had a deeply embarrassing realization reading this book that I have no idea how you do Roman history. I write about, you know, 19th and 20th Century American history. It's a very different source space. So what are you turning to to write these paragraphs?
Ed Watts 35:28
So for this particular material, we have primarily narrative histories of Cassius Dio and then we have Suetonius biography of Caligula and Suetonius biography of Caligula is and then we also have some material written by the Jewish author Philo of Alexandria, who visits Caligula. And so his account of what's going on in 37 it's important to get at the expectations, because he's playing the same game I'm playing, in a sense, you know, what he wants you to see is Caligula actually starts out good. And there's this tremendous enthusiasm in this sort of Roman Empire that is becoming more unified. The elites across the Mediterranean are becoming Roman and so Caligula represents like a new start. That is kind of the first new start that many of these new Roman citizens came to experience and, you know, so those, these three sources, give us both the narrative construct, and then they also give us this, this notion that, yeah, things are good, you know, things are actually good. And so a lot of the details of what he does come from Suetonius. And Suetonius is telling, you know, the giving you these details in order to set up a his own pivot in the text, where he says at a certain point, okay, enough of the Emperor. Now let's talk about the monster. And I wanted to sort of flip that, because Suetonius, I think, is working off of this idea that Caligula is always a monster, and that this stuff is basically just like window dressing to try to hide a deeper, kind of deeply flawed and dangerous figure. And I just don't think that's true at all. And I think Philo allows us to correct for that. So it's really blending the details that Suetonius gives us with the kind of perspective that that Philo is giving us. And then, you know, augmenting this with some of what Cassius IO is giving us. For some of the rest of this, you do have, like, coinage evidence that you can supplement. But for this, this period, caligula's coins are moderately interesting. They're not super interesting. So you're really working, you know, for this paragraph, I'm really working off of literary evidence, and the kind of tension between what Philo is telling us, what Suetonius is telling us, and you know, and how you regulate the details in Suetonius that he's sort of spinning in, almost into irrelevance, in the nature of in the portrait of his that captures the nature of Caligula with Philo, who's really trying to emphasize to you know, there is a significant break. And so I think that the source has worked pretty well for showing that. But yeah, our sources for this moment, because it is really only a few months, they really are pretty limited in what you can do with it.
Kate Carpenter 38:18
I want to get a little more specific than I often do about the writing. I want to talk about your sentences in part because, as I was reading this book, I was really reflecting on, what is it that makes this book so engaging? You know, it's not, it's not like you discovered some, I don't think, some previously unknown source base that allows us to tell fascinating story, you know? And so what is it that allows this very long book of 2000 years of history to be really quite fun to read? And I say that as a person who doesn't usually find Roman history fun to read, and I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that you employ a really simple sentence structure a lot of the time you say what you mean and it is compelling, is that, I mean, you talked a little bit about your style and how that's kind of developed, and that you draft a little more now in style, but how do you work to get your writing to that point?
Ed Watts 39:12
I so deeply appreciate what you just said. That means a ton to me. So I would say, like stylistically, a lot of what I learned about style really did come from reading Greek and Latin, and particularly Latin, you know, I think I read more Greek because my initial work was really on the eastern Mediterranean. And so a lot of the source base that, you know, I spent a lot of time with is Greek sources, but it's really Latin style, and maybe Latin style grafted into sort of early 20th century English style in America, American English style that really influenced me so deeply. So I love Ciceronian style. I mentioned that already. I think that it's terrible because it is. It's a style where you have lots and lots of clauses. Ultimately kind of wrap together and come together with a final verb. And this is something that you can do in Latin. But what I found in that was, first of all, I don't have my brain just doesn't work in such a way that I can capture the overlaying of clauses in the way that Cicero does. But second, I don't like it, and so, you know, so I knew what I didn't like, and I also didn't like long, convoluted styles or things that are more elusive than straightforward. And then, when I was working on Mortal Republic, I read the Latin historian Sallust all the way through in Latin. Initially I was reading him in English, just for material, and I would check when I had passages I was interested in, I would check the Latin. And what I realized is his Latin is very, very precise, and there's a lot that he does with that precision, and his sentences tend to be very concise as well. There's a lot of power that you can build up that way. And it also, I think, corresponds much more closely to the way that you speak. And so if you think about working as you think about us as historians, working as storytellers, the best stories are stories that people can follow, and the best stories, you know, tend to minimize digression, and they tend to actually move in a way that allows you to follow the action. And they use a lot of active verbs. They tend not to focus on a lot of adverbs and adjectives, unless they're necessary. But if they're necessary, you realize they're necessary, right? They're there for a reason. And so you know, what I learned from Salus is, every word is power is can be purposeful, and if it is, you have a very powerful narrative. And I realized too, from fiction writing, I've always been very partial to Hemingway's style, which is that same kind of thing done in English. And so what I tried to do was really to the degree that I could make everything short and purposeful, and in going back through and revising, I paid attention to every adjective and adverb that was in there. If it didn't do something, then I got rid of it. I paid attention to every kind of verbal structure that I used, every verbal construction that I used, and if I could abbreviate it and use something more active I did. And so that was that was part of the process in really refining that, because I realized that that's a style that works for me as a reader, and it's also a style that I can pull off as an author, and I think that's that's always an important consideration, right? Does it work for you as a reader? Then that is probably a good sign that it can work. But you also don't want to adopt a style that you can't pull off. And I know, I mean, I love reading the work of Peter Brown, but I cannot write that way. I just don't, I don't have the capacity to maintain these images and these metaphors for as long as he does. We've already seen that in this interview. So I want to be sure that my writing is always something that I you know, that I have the skills to pull off, and I have the capacity to pull off, and that means there's some things that like I would love to do. And I even try in drafts where I'm like, yeah, that that didn't work. You know, you should have known better than to try that, because you weren't going to be able to pull it off anyway.
Kate Carpenter 43:30
I also want to ask about suspense, and how you sort of build narrative suspense into your work. You see it in this passage you just read, as you said, like that, that one sentence paragraph of saying no, and then he got sick. And how that kind of keeps readers, at least those that aren't necessarily well versed in Roman history, wondering what's coming and what you know, sort of turning the page, so to speak. Isn't that always something easy to do for historians? Is it something you think about consciously?
Ed Watts 43:59
Yeah, yeah. Because what I think about again is, if I'm doing this right, I want it to be like I'm sitting down with you, talking and telling the story. And if you are telling that story, you know, and you are trying to build a sort of build up to a moment of immediate transition, right, the story is going in one direction, and now it's going to go in a completely different way. Completely different one. You will pause when you're telling that to you know, you're telling a story to a friend, you're going to pause. You're going to focus on something. And so I think in writing, when you're trying, when I'm trying to build suspense, what I want to do is create in the text that pause, right? That thing that's going to basically make it so that if I was telling the story in person, you would hear me. Pause. You know you would hear me, sort of set up. Okay, narration. Stop, transition. Stop. Now we're going in a new direction, and we all do it naturally when we're talking. We don't necessarily do it when we're. Writing, because we don't think about that. We don't think about writing is ultimately like going all the way back to the very beginnings of written literature. It's basically conveying the script for something that will be performed orally. And this is how Romans did you know? This is what Romans used writing for. You know, you would perform this, because what you're trying to do is actually capture the experience of listening to it. And it's really not until, I mean, quite famously, Augustine's confessions talks about Ambrose reading silently, like it's this amazing thing, because most Romans didn't, you know. And so thinking about, like writing in that way, I think, allows me to just imagine, okay, so I want this to happen in the story and in the narration. How do I set it up so that I'm conveying to a reader? This is how I want you to understand the progression here and the moment of kind of a shift, so that we're now going to go in a different direction, in a way that, like a Roman reading a text would immediately get but we don't, because we don't think of reading as oral communication, even though it once was.
Kate Carpenter 46:18
I think there's an element, too, that you hinted at earlier, where you work really hard to keep us in a sort of place of contingency historically, that being a great example, that they don't know that things are about to go rapidly downhill, and you make sure that readers are in that space alongside the historical actors, rather than sort of just assuming knowledge of the future.
Ed Watts 46:43
Yeah, that's, that's one of the things that I really wanted this book to do, because with, with, you know, Roman history being so long, it's very common for us to, you know, to periodize it in such a way where we just cut through stories and lives. Because we have, in a sense, because of our periodization, we have a teleology where we're like, Okay, well, like the early republic is going to move towards the conclusion of the conflict of the orders, where everyone is going to have kind of patricians and plebeians will have equal status in the society. But nobody knows that. And when it happens, nobody knows that that's actually the end. And so to say, Oh, well, yeah, the early Republicans in 287 BC. I mean, 287 BC is a big there's something big that happens in 287 BC. But the lives of the people in Rome in 287 BC continue. You know, 286 and 288 are not that different to most of the people living in Rome, even people who are in government. So, you know, I think we have to really capture the fact that, like the the historical trajectory that we know isn't what they knew, and the things that we see as significant moments of change, they might not recognize that, or they might not care, and it might not even become clear that this is a significant moment of change until 2530 100 years later, and so we have to tell if we want to actually get at those people who are living through these moments, we have to sort of be aware of how they are understanding things and understand, you know, the progression as they apprehended it, and not as we kind of impose it from 2300 years later.
Kate Carpenter 48:23
I want to switch gears a little bit, because I'm curious about your publishing history. So your first few books were with the university press, and then you turned to publishing with the trade press. I think I gathered from your acknowledgments, maybe that you followed an editor from one to the other, which is a less common trajectory for getting from from university that to trade press. But can you talk to me a little bit about that change, what prompted it, and what was it like to move to trade publication?
Ed Watts 48:54
Yeah, I think so. I started with an Academic Press, obviously, because this is what, because of the nature of our profession, this is like, what you need to do to get tenure and get promoted. But I built a really good relationship with Eric Schmidt, who, I mean, deserves a shout out. I mean, he's a wonderful editor and incredible in seeing through the creation of like, new ways of approaching antiquity, both in a university context and then also in a trade context. And Eric really was the editor who said, you know, you should try that pagan generation book like that. Sounds interesting. I don't know what it'll look like, but you should try it. So I moved into trade mainly because I was contacted by an editor from a trade press with an I, you know, just what are you working on? And so we talked through a project that ultimately became mortal Republic. But even though mortal Republic came out in a trade context, I still published academically. I still do publish in, you know, in journals and other things. It's a different sort of writing. And so I think what I find in. Invigorating about academic work is in a sense, you get to show the approach to the material. And if you're writing a trade book, nobody particularly cares why you're reading this Latin word in this way, or how you're reading a manuscript in a fashion that sees the entire manuscript as a thematically unified object, instead of disaggregating one piece of it, so you can focus on that text. That's not something that a regular a regular person, particularly cares about, but it's interesting, and it helps you understand the world you're interacting with better. So I find both of those things useful, but I do also think that academic publishing does not really encourage you to write a book that is storytelling. It's hard for an academic publisher to provide you with that kind of feedback, and then also, the peer review process is something that discourages some of that aspect too, because readers, academic readers, in particular, tend not to respond in the way that a regular audience of intelligent people in the world would respond to that. And so it's just a different sort of writing. And I think both types of writing are fulfilling and both types of writing are interesting, but I think both have their appeals and their limitations and and there's definitely stuff that you look at and you're like, that is really cool, and there is no way that that's going to show up in an academic journal or vice versa.
Kate Carpenter 51:39
What's the most influential writing advice you've ever gotten?
Ed Watts 51:42
So I would say that there are a couple things. My wife is not an academic, and very early on, when I was still trying to figure out what kind of writing style I was most comfortable with, I was reading a lot of, you know, German scholarship and a lot of Cicero, and I was putting together these sort of super convoluted sentences. And she read something that I wrote, and she said, this is like four sentences, like, why don't you just make it four sentences? And it's like, yeah, right, I'll do that. Right? That makes sense. But roughly at that same time, there's a great Roman historian named Ramsey McMullen, who was at Yale for many years and retired, but was still kind of active and working and in the Yale library and attending events and things. And we were sitting down at lunch and we were talking about writing, and I don't even think I asked him for advice, but I think, you know, he said I was talking once to a cognitive scientist who said that it's very difficult for the human mind to grasp any sort of sentence that's longer than about eight words, and so after about eight words, the mind kind of resets and then goes back through so he said, you know, anytime you write a sentence more than eight words, you have to understand your reader is going to reset in the middle of that, and so you should try your best like you can be much more understandable the shorter your sentences are, because if you can just get somebody who moves through each sentence without having to reset in the middle, then the concepts are much easily, much more easily understood, and your argument and your story and everything you're trying to communicate is something that they can grasp very quickly, as opposed to, you know, a 40 word sentence where they reset five times in the middle. It's going to take multiple times to read that sentence, and all of the flow in the text, then is lost. It was wonderful advice. You know, it was absolutely outstanding, of course, super consistent with, like, what my natural inclinations are anyway. But it explained why that worked, and it explained why those things were powerful.
Kate Carpenter 53:57
I think you are the only person I've interviewed who has cited ancient historians as inspirations as your work. But I did want to ask you, what other writers you look to for inspiration? Are there other people you've been reading that you draw on?
Unknown Speaker 54:12
You know, I really do. I really do love ancient authors with that particular style. So Sallust and Caesar are are really outstanding for this, another ancient author who I think is great. Those styles a little bit different, but I think is great, is Xenophon. He gets a lot of he gets trashed a lot by ancient historians. He's not always the most accurate, but there are just, there are aspects of what Xenophon does, where he can combine in really vibrant and powerful ways, the combination of, you know, descriptive words and the soundscape of the people's life that he's describing. And so there's this wonderful scene where he's talking about an army coming down from Persia, and they're Greek, so they, you know, that they're people. Little of the coast, and they're stuck inland. And they're, you know, they're coming out of, like, months and months and months without seeing any kind of large bodies of water at all. And the Army's marching in a column, and he talks about how he is, you know, near the back of the column. And the only thing that people, all of a sudden, people just start hearing this chant, Thallus, alis, Alissa, Thallus. A Thallus. And that's the Greek word for sea, but it's also the sound of the waves, right? And so you have the waves where the first part of the army is seeing the ocean, and then you have the sound of the waves, that is their apprehension of it. And then you have the sound of the waves being carried through this word that goes through the entire army. It's a short sentence, but it's one of the most powerful things I've ever seen. And so, you know, so I think for for ancient authors, you see these just really amazing techniques that they can employ that are so rare. And, you know, and we can do stuff like that, it's just the examples are just not that common. And so I, you know, so right now, I'm actually rereading Heart of Darkness, and I love some of the style of Conrad, and I particularly love the way of using kind of Marlowe as a storyteller to sort of get at and you and doing it in a way that is oral, right? If you read it, it's clear that he's, you know, simulating the experience of a blowhard, kind of boring storyteller, giving you this, this actually immensely interesting story, but you're also able to understand it's flawed. He's a flawed character. His understandings of this are not Conrad's understandings of this. Like, I think that's really interesting. That's kind of where I am now. But I think for, I still think for stylistic purposes, the author that I really turn to, that I love, is Hemingway.
Kate Carpenter 56:50
You have hinted at it already, but what is next for you? What are you working on now?
Ed Watts 56:55
I was actually inspired by a friend of mine who was talking she does a sub stack blog, and she was talking about how we tend to see the character of people manifested in individual actions, but that's actually unfair. And so she, you know, she wrote this blog saying, for very long time, I criticized myself because of things that I was unable to do. You know, she suffers from long covid And, you know, and she's no longer able to do the things she could before she got sick, and she said I felt like I was a bad person, and realized that I am changed. My ability to do these things is different, and I can't evaluate my character as a person based on what I can and can't do, and that actually inspired me to do some work on recovering change in the characters of ancient people, and in particular, looking at conditions that might change the way they function and how we then can What happens if we take, like my friend Kate's advice, and look at them not as good or bad people, but as people who make choices that are good or bad, and what happens when those choices string together in certain ways, and we acknowledge, you know, that these choices occur because of conditions, but not because there's an inherent good or badness to the person. So I'm writing two books that deal with this. One is, in a sense, a biography of the Roman imperial office and what it does to people. And then the other one is a biography of Caesar, who I think, actually, I think we actually get Caesar wrong. I'm, I'm a very, I very much believe that Caesar had convictions. I don't think he was cynical at all. I think he really did believe in things, but I think he did not understand how actions shaped the perception of him. Because he fundamentally, you know, believed that when he made mistakes, there were one offs. He didn't understand that people saw this differently. So one of these is a kind of description of, like a condition, I suppose, like being Emperor, I think is a condition, and what it does to a bunch of different people and, you know? And what happens if we take the good or bad person out, and then the other is looking at one individual and trying to figure out how the good or bad person thing gets inserted in a way they don't understand and they aren't able to anticipate, you know, what response comes from it. So I suppose what I'm moving from is a description of big systems to trying to get at a much more intimate understanding of people, so that those are the next two things, hopefully over the next like five years or so that those will come out, and maybe we can talk again about that.
Kate Carpenter 59:44
I would love that. I am super excited. I suspect that I will be reading more Roman history in the future. Thanks to you, and hopefully by you. Dr Edward watts, thanks so much for joining me on Drafting the past to talk about writing.
Ed Watts 59:57
Thanks so much, Kate. This was so much fun.
Kate Carpenter 59:59
This conversation was so much fun that I actually snuck in one more question with Ed before I wrapped up. If you’d like to hear me ask Ed whether he’s a truffle hunter or a parachutist—and what that even means—you’ll have to go to Patreon.com/draftingthepast, where I’ve included the clip as bonus audio for Patreon supporters. Thanks for joining us for this episode. As always, you can visit draftingthepast.com for complete show notes, as well as links to Ed’s books and everything else we talked about in this episode. For now, remember that friends don’t let friends write boring history.
