Barry Strauss

Historian, professor.

Barry Strauss is a leading authority on ancient military history and a master storyteller of the classical world. He’s the best-selling author of numerous acclaimed books, including The Death of Caesar, Ten Caesars, The War That Made the Roman Empire, and The Spartacus War—all praised for their fresh perspectives and page-turning prose. His work has been translated into multiple languages and featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. At Cornell, he acts as a Professor of History and Classics and is the former Director of the Cornell Institute for Archaeology and Material Studies, Strauss is known for combining scholarly rigour with cinematic storytelling. He also hosts the podcast "Antiquitas: Leaders and Legends of the Ancient World", where he distils lessons from the past for today’s world.

Why did we invite him on?

Last year, we invited Barry to relay the history of antiquity and its great leaders. While not one that grabbed the headlines, it remains one of our absolute favourite interviews. If you haven’t seen it, we insist you do.

Since then, we’ve been itching to have Barry back. This time, we wanted to talk about one of his key areas of expertise, and a subject that seems to have captured the public imagination again: Rome.

Much has been made about the apparent parallels between the West today and the final gasps of the Roman Empire. We wanted to know if there was any truth to that, but we didn’t want to myopically fixate on shallow comparisons. We knew we needed someone with the appropriate depth of knowledge and the ability to share the story to the degree such a discussion demands.

For that, there is no one better than Barry.

What did we learn?

”Rome [believed it] had a destiny. It had a destiny to rule the world, to tame the proud, to teach laws to other people. Rome was ‘greatness’, and if you wanted to buy into this great enterprise, you had to become a Roman citizen. A lot of people weren’t buying it, but the belief was that Rome wasn’t just powerful; it was great. It was the ‘eternal city’.”

Reaching from the Middle East and North Africa, across the Med and up to England, for centuries, Rome’s empire was the most dominant on Earth. It has done as much to define the word ‘empire’ as any colonising force that has ever graced the globe. That was until it, rather suddenly, all fell apart. Its collapse continues to fascinate. How did it happen?

As Barry explains, Rome was fat on its success. Overexpansion, wealth inequality, a “slave class”, fat cats, declining infrastructure, economic downturn, lost sight of core principles; any one of us, an empire might survive, but taken in their totality, they bring down giants.

It all sounds a little familiar. It’s not a strain to find parallels between the fall of Rome and the situation we find ourselves in today, and it's a comparison that gets made all the time. Is that accurate?