A full transcript of the interview can be found below. This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Sarah E. Bond: Justinian and Theodora send out their soldiers to gather the factions together. This is what anybody else would call a union meeting, with all of the union heads—

Hrag Vartanian: A negotiation, yeah.

Sarah E. Bond: —except for we have thousands of people brought into the Hippodrome. Then the doors are locked and the soldiers slaughter...tens of thousands of them.

Hrag Vartanian: The “Red Wedding”

Sarah E. Bond: It is a “Red Wedding!”

Hrag Vartanian: They’re like, “Come in, we’re going to negotiate with you.” And then, “Just kidding, you’re not leaving.”

Sarah E. Bond: Well, there’s a very famous line from Tacitus saying, “The Romans make a desert and call it peace.”

Hrag Vartanian: Welcome back to the Hyperallergic Podcast. When you think about ancient Rome, what do you think about? Gladiators, arenas, chariots, columns? But do you ever think about labor? In this episode, we’re talking to longtime Hyperallergic contributor Sarah E. Bond. Her new book is titled Strike: Labor, Unions, and Resistance in the Roman Empire. Sarah, for those of you who’ve been long-time Hyperallergic readers will know she’s the type of public intellectual who wants to reach out to a public that’s eager to learn accurate facts, rather than the Hollywood versions we’re often duped into believing.

And now, she’s breaking open one of those other topics of the ancient world that is very little discussed: labor organizing and strikes. This is particularly poignant, of course, to Hyperallergic audiences, since protests are something we cover extensively. as well as many of the issues bubbling up today, as we see with a lot of labor organizing in places that haven’t had that type of energy for decades.

In this episode, we discuss the very first walkout that took place in Ancient Egypt, the ancient Roman emperor who staged a massacre, and how many of the early founding fathers and leaders of the United States would often use quotes by ancient Roman writers to justify the institution of chattel slavery. When we look at these ancient stories of labor and organizing, I think we really learned something about ourselves today.

I’m Hrag Vartanian, the Editor-in-Chief and Co-founder of Hyperallergic. Let’s get started.

Hrag Vartanian: Well, today we have a very special, special episode with Sarah E. Bond. And anyone who’s read Hyperallergic for years now is no stranger to Sarah’s work. Sarah is a public intellectual, an academic, and somebody who engages with the classical world for a contemporary audience and really brings to life so much. So I just first of all want to say thank you for doing that.

Today we’re going to talk about your latest book, Strike: Labor, Unions, and Resistance in the Roman Empire. And anyone who probably follows Hyperallergic knows that we love to talk about strikes, and obviously this is of great interest to us for many reasons, including that. So welcome, Sarah.

Sarah E. Bond: Thank you for having me.

Hrag Vartanian: Let’s start with a little bit of your earlier life. You were born in Roanoke, is that correct?

Sarah E. Bond: That’s right, I’m from Roanoke, Virginia. And I don’t have my southern accent anymore until I get around my cousins and around my family. But I’m from real Appalachia as opposed to JD Vance, who is from fake Appalachia. But Roanoke is right in the Appalachian Mountains, and so in the South they have Latin programs in public schools and this is a remnant specifically of the Antebellum South.

Hrag Vartanian: Is it really?

Sarah E. Bond: Well, they loved the Classics. Many of the founding fathers, but especially Thomas Jefferson, wanted to always make sure that Latin was taught in public schools. And so I did get the chance to take Latin as a fourteen-year-old going into high school. And then I kept taking it at the University of Virginia. But what changed the game is that I started working at Monticello as an archeological field director and GIS overseer, somebody who helps with the mapping. But we were working on Sally Hemings’ mother’s house. We were excavating what we call a subfloor pit, which is a basement. And that introduced me to enslaved people and their lives at Monticello and thinking more deeply about enslaved persons and wanting to know more. When I went to UNC for my PhD, a professor there named Heather Williams was like, “We need to know a lot more about slavery and marginalized persons for the ancient world.”

Hrag Vartanian: Right. So in the Antebellum South, were they interested in Classics because they were both societies with enslavement?

Sarah E. Bond: Exactly. That was emphasized in a lot of the writings that you find, particularly in Aristotle. Aristotle was one of the ones favored by enslavers because he seems to justify the idea of enslaved persons being “lesser than,” that they are “given to slaving behaviors.” And so the articulation of enslaved people deserving their enslavement is something that was constantly reused and articulated by people who enslaved people as justification for their actions. So people like Aristotle, and Cicero, (who had a number of enslaved people who wrote down his works, for instance), they’re all using literature that supports their point of view, which is that slavery should exist and that, “Look, the Romans did it, why wouldn’t we do it?” And so they had huge classical libraries that they would pull from and that they would quote from, and that oftentimes young White men would be trained in school, in both Latin and Greek, to spout off the same thing.

Hrag Vartanian: Well, I know that the Classics field is pretty patriarchal, for lack of a better word.

Sarah E. Bond: Go on.

Hrag Vartanian: And certainly very male dominated.

Sarah E. Bond: Absolutely. I entered UVA in 2001 and looking around at conferences, it was very apparent that not only were there not very many women in the field of ancient history, but also that, and I am also one, a lot of White people. It is the Whitest field that we have in the American academy, it hovers around 2% people of color, depending, at the level of tenured professors.

Hrag Vartanian: Wow.

Sarah E. Bond: And that is extremely low, and that is something that has to be addressed and that we have been addressed for many years. But the impact of a lot of the cuts to DEI and a lot of the slashing of hiring programs in higher ed years from now, Classics is not going to get any less White with these programs going away.

Hrag Vartanian: Yeah, exactly.

Sarah E. Bond: So the work continues in earnest. But it is a very patriarchal and traditional field.

Hrag Vartanian: Totally.

Sarah E. Bond: But there’s still so much of a community that I’ve found within Classics that are still extremely focused on social justice and change.

Hrag Vartanian: And so your own research has been connected to labor and now strikes. How did that come about? Why that aspect of the Classics or the ancient world, what is it about those topics that speak to you?

Sarah E. Bond: I mean, my dad was from West Virginia, and was always talking about railroad workers and coal miners. A lot of what we would call blue collar workers were from my family, people who get called “hicks” and “rednecks,” and who oftentimes are playing the villains in movies. Those are my people.

And so I completely reject the racism of the south, but the blue collar nature of workers and unionization was something that’s been close to my heart and my family. And when I was introduced to a lot of the people at conferences and people within Classics, seeing many of them display complete disinterest in artisans, and labor, and enslaved people at that time...this was now 20 years ago. The field has completely changed since then and many more people are studying slavery than ever had been prior. Thinking about labor and blue collar workers was always important to me. And my advisor, Richard Talbert, really encouraged me to look at marginalized people and how marginalized people banded together, and specifically how you create community within a larger state that is oppressing you.

Hrag Vartanian: And what I loved about this book is that you mentioned that you thought this book would’ve been written by now, and you realize that nobody had written about this topic. And you used something which you called a “strategic anachronism.” Because the word strike was invented in the 18th century in the UK, and specifically around the protests of port workers where they would “strike” the sails so that ships couldn’t sail out. So we get that word from there. And obviously, the word doesn’t come from antiquity, but you see strategic similarities.

Sarah E. Bond: So translators are still doing amazing work, but words oftentimes trip us up in the world of history. There have been a few very short articles on how strikes were intermittent in the ancient world and that they didn’t really exist. But to me, looking at the Latin and the Greek and trying to find out what words they were using to describe a methodology that has existed since at least 1157 BCE, they were describing that behavior was really important to me because I think it transcends any kind of label that we put on it.

Hrag Vartanian: Absolutely.

Sarah E. Bond: And sometimes those labels really trip us up, leading us to say, “Oh, this has only existed in the modern world.”

Hrag Vartanian: Absolutely. One of the topics you talk about specifically is the first so-called strike or the first that you see, and that took place, as you said, in Egypt in 1157 or 1155 BCE. Do you want to talk a little bit about that? Because I also thought it was interesting that the first recorded example came from Egypt.

Sarah E. Bond: Right. We have a strike papyrus, which we’ll show you guys in just a second. This is called the Turin Strike Papyrus, and it tells us that a scribe is writing down the record of an uprising in the 29th year, I think, of Ramesses III’s reign. And he has not been delivering on his promises of emmer and wheat. Money has not been invented yet as a form of technology, so we don’t have coinage being paid to these individual workers. They’re getting paid in kind, and specifically in sustenance.

And when that sustenance is being held back, of course, we have workers who are working in a place called Deir el-Medina. They are artisans, they are crafts people, they’re construction workers, they’re fine artists that are creating sculptures for tombs and things like this. And they’re not getting paid the way that they should. And so they collectively decide to go and sit in the back of a temple that is nearby. And they just all go together. And at first they sit in the back of it, then they sit outside of it, they have various strikes that they engage in until eventually they are paid on time what they are owed. And they see this as a tactic, that they are stronger together if they go sit in the back of the temple. And this is our first known instance of collectives withholding their labor in order to collectively bargain for better working conditions.

Hrag Vartanian: I think part of it is, it’s so interesting to me, because why would they have thought that was the action to take? What do you think?

Sarah E. Bond: Yes. I mean, there’s a very good reason for this. And the biggest reason is that within ancient belief systems, there is a sacredness to the temples that they are going into. And this is where we get the word asylum from, is the right of asylia. And so they are pulling on the right of asylia in order to go sit in the back of the temple because they’re inviolable. When you sit in a temple or within what we call the temenos of a temple, that is the basic grounds of a temple, no violence can be taken upon you. So let’s say you want to go sit in the back of a temple in Egypt, I can’t drag you out of there. And later on in early Christianity, this is what we call sanctuary and this is the early development of sanctuaries, the concept of asylia or asylum.

Hrag Vartanian: Which is what there’s been fighting today with the ICE raids in churches. So it’s interesting to see how there’s this long history of sacred spaces being considered places of sanctuary.

Sarah E. Bond: Absolutely. And I wrote on this years ago, but this happens in Greek temples, it happens in Roman temples. The idea of the sanctuary city is a very ancient one, and the idea of getting rid of sanctuary cities and the idea of sanctuary being done away with is not only anti-Christian, it’s anti-religious beliefs that go back thousands of years. So if they really want to bring the Roman Empire back, they would have a little bit more respect.

Hrag Vartanian: It’s very selective, their understanding of Ancient Rome.

Sarah E. Bond: It is. They’re cherry-picking from the Roman Empire.

Hrag Vartanian: Wouldn’t fig picking be more appropriate?

Sarah E. Bond: Oh, yes. Yeah. They’re picking just little things that they really love.

Hrag Vartanian: Little fig here, or a little fig here.

Sarah E. Bond: Oh, “I love this laurel.”

[Both laugh]

But with the Egyptian workers, they recognize that the foreman, and especially the Pharaoh’s soldiers, cannot come and drag them out of the temple. And so they’re pulling on a civil right that existed then and should exist now.

Hrag Vartanian: One of the things about this that I thought was really interesting was how a lot of the tips you got that there were these strikes which may have often characterized in the written record as riots. I think that is so interesting because even today, there’s that same fear. Like when people discredit BLM, they’re always talking about damaged property. Even the environmental protests at museums, right? People were like, “Oh my God, they might be damaging the art!” It’s sort of like, there’s this immediate idea that somehow it’s about violence. Rather than dealing with the actual issue that they’re bringing up. But this idea of a threat of violence from these masses seems to be at the basis of how the elite see these power struggles, right?

Sarah E. Bond: Well, as soon as you demonize somebody, you take away the legitimacy of their cause.

Hrag Vartanian: Exactly.

Sarah E. Bond: And as soon as you accuse them of violence, you have shifted the narrative then to their actions rather than the cause that they’re supporting. The First Amendment protects the right to peaceful assembly and association. And as soon as you can be called unpeaceful, as soon as you can be called violent, then you no longer are protected in your civil right.
So I think that there is a long history in this country and many others of instigating violence by people who are throwing water, water bottles, things like this, pushing people, trying to get you to break. MLK talked about this, and many other civil rights movement leaders talked about this: “Do not give in to the people that are trying to incite the violence because then they can call you ‘unpatriotic.’”

Hrag Vartanian: Or “terrorists.”

Sarah E. Bond: They can call you “terrorists,” they can call you “mobs.” And unions, for instance, in the late 19th and early 20th century, were completely cast as “anti-American.” And that was the narrative that people like President Garfield, for instance, attached to unions, to cast them and to demonize them. And so the rhetoric of marginalization so that you can then break them apart is something very familiar to us in collective action today.

Hrag Vartanian: Absolutely.

Sarah E. Bond: You’re right, that this anti-assembly legislation and anti-assembly behavior that demonizes people that come together and congregate, calling them “mobs,” is something that goes back many thousands of years. The best way to pump yourself up as the hero is to make somebody else the villain.

Hrag Vartanian: Amen, that’s exactly what it looks like. So I want to move on to one of the other protests. Because one of the things I found interesting was how many of these earlier protests took place in Egypt. And as you point out, it’s because there was sort of a history there before even the Romans showed up. But during the female textile worker walkout in 116 or 117 CE in Hermopolis, Roman Egypt. Tell us a little bit about this.

And one of the great things about the ancient world is we have different illustrations, and the incredible amount of texts, obviously. One of the things I love about your research is that it brings into question who was protesting or striking, because I think the assumption was they were men. Sometimes you even mentioned that enslaved people were protesting, which isn’t something we’re used to hearing about, I think maybe because of American slavery, with chattel slavery, there is this idea of slavery being much more kind of separated from society, right? But in the ancient world, was it 20% of ancient Rome was enslaved?

Sarah E. Bond: 20–25% of the entirety of the Italic peninsula.

Hrag Vartanian: Got it.

Sarah E. Bond: And then about 20% of the entirety of the Mediterranean at the height of the Roman Empire were enslaved people. And there was oftentimes a direct route to manumission. And so many scholars have said over the years that, “Oh, well, because of manumission, it wasn't so bad.” That is to say, the freeing of an enslaved person was more regularized within the ancient world, because you have high manumission rates that sometimes are well above 50% of people are going to be eventually freed. But those freed persons are then tied to a patron that used to own them, that they have legal ties to them still for the rest of their life.

Hrag Vartanian: Oh, for the rest of their life?

Sarah E. Bond: Yes, they still have to show up at various campaigns to vote for them, and do various acts of service.

Hrag Vartanian: Wow, I didn’t realize it was a lifetime thing.

Sarah E. Bond: Strings are attached, okay?

Hrag Vartanian: Right. Did it go to your children too then?

Sarah E. Bond: No, it does not. The poet Horace, for example, his father was a freed person. And then he, Horace, is free to do as he pleases and to become a poet, for instance.

Hrag Vartanian: I see. Got it.

Sarah E. Bond: But the manumission levels in the United States, and I’ll have to look at the exact numbers, it’s very low. 1% to 2% of people are ever going to manumitted.

Hrag Vartanian: So, very different.

Sarah E. Bond: Thomas Jefferson didn’t even manumit all of his children out of slavery. So manumission was not as regularized. And that is not in any way a defense of Roman slavery, it’s just a lot of people have explained it by saying, “Well, why would you rebel? If you’re going to be manumitted one day? Wouldn’t you want to just depend on that in the future?”

But the fact is that enslaved people knew that they were highly skilled artisans and professionals in many ways. And so the papyrus that comes from 116 or 117 CE—we don’t know the exact date on it—is a letter from a grandmother who is writing to her daughter-in-law who is pregnant and about to have a child. And she’s flipping out because she has been left to watch over the textile workshop where young enslaved women work. And apparently, they’re going out into the streets and leaving the workshop, which is to say that they’re deserting their jobs to go work at other workshops that are within this area of Hermopolis.

Hrag Vartanian: I mean, that’s incredible. That’s incredible. First of all, that the evidence is a letter between two women in Rome and Egypt talking about what they’re experiencing. How would the Romans in that period have seen that event, that strike?

Sarah E. Bond: They would’ve seen it as very economically disruptive. Enslaved people are extremely vulnerable to being beaten, and their bodies themselves very much are oftentimes abused. And so I just wonder to myself, and I cannot prove this, because we ask so many questions of the evidence that it may not be able to always tell us, is the grandmother just not strong enough in terms of her enforcement? Does she not have any backup? Does she not have any guards or people that are there within the textile workshop to enforce these young women walking out and going into the streets?

Hrag Vartanian: Got it.

Sarah E. Bond: And I don’t want that to happen, I’m just saying that enslaved persons oftentimes were coerced through threat of bodily violence. And so there must be something happening in this textile workshop that is not being enforced and that they’re not as afraid. But of course, there are no photographs in the ancient world as well and so when you want to escape as a fugitive enslaved person, there are fewer bars to you leaving and going off and having a different life if you’re never caught.

Hrag Vartanian: Right. But we have this amazing sculpture of all these textile workers working with each other, which we’ll show you right now.

Sarah E. Bond: Yes.

Hrag Vartanian: So I mean, we may have not had photography, but we have some pretty damn good visual evidence about the world.

Sarah E. Bond: Yes. And that’s from a little bit earlier, but it’s still these models that are extremely popular, especially during the period of the New and the Middle Kingdom, you can see a bunch of them at the Metropolitan Museum of Art as well. But these models oftentimes are of who you want to take with you to the afterlife and so we have these recreations of granaries of various textile workshops. Because in the afterlife, Hrag, you’re going to need clothes.

Hrag Vartanian: Yeah!

Sarah E. Bond: You’re going to need clothes, you’re going to need beer, you’re going to need baskets.

Hrag Vartanian: Otherwise, what’s the point? What kind of heaven is that?

Sarah E. Bond: Of course. I mean, look, you can’t show up there without all of the things you need. And so all of these tombs have recreations of life to take with you to the afterlife. So clearly, they want to take some nice threads with them.

Hrag Vartanian: Right, absolutely.

So, many of these examples come from the Eastern Mediterranean, not the Western Mediterranean. And I know it’s partly because urbanism was different in the Eastern Mediterranean. But it also sounds like in the case of Egypt, there was a longer tradition of this.

So why do you think that there are more examples in the Eastern Mediterranean?

Sarah E. Bond: Well, it’s two things. One thing is that preservation is higher within Egypt than any other province within the Roman Empire. It’s a very arid climate, it’s super dry. We have higher literacy rates, and high preservation.

Hrag Vartanian: Absolutely.

Sarah E. Bond: But second to that is that I do think that this was a cultural habit that got passed down to generations, that people tell each other what is effective and what is something that is going to work in the workplace for many generations. And in places like Ephesus, as well as areas near the Black Sea, like Pontus, Bithynia, as well as Egypt, that you have so many more records of strikes than elsewhere. This may be just an accident of preservation, or it may be, as I think it more is, that this is a cultural push-back against Romanization and against any other colonizer that is coming.

Hrag Vartanian: Oh, interesting. That’s right.

Sarah E. Bond: I genuinely think, and I cannot always prove this, they are just pissed about the Romans being there.

Hrag Vartanian: Right, that makes sense.

Sarah E. Bond: Antioch is pissed, okay? Antioch is not happy that you are telling them what to do as a Roman magistrate, and that you’re coming in and asking them to pay a certain amount of taxes, and that you’re implementing different types of legislation that oftentimes they aren’t chill with.

Hrag Vartanian: Right, makes sense.

Sarah E. Bond: I think in part, it’s a sentiment of pushing back against the colonizer.

Hrag Vartanian: Absolutely.

What aspect of this sort of ancient conversation around strike and labor is the most difficult for contemporary audiences to understand?

Sarah E. Bond: We’re so used to living in a world where protest is protected and where resistance is something that we think about all the time and we write about. And you have to ask yourself why Tacitus and some of the major historians never wrote about these protests and never wrote about these uprisings. And if they did, they wrote it in a very pejorative negative light.

We tend to celebrate pushing back against the man. And that’s not something Roman writers are interested in. So reading against the grain, that is to say, reading literature and texts in a new way that shows us how people are pushing back is not something that we’re always trained to do. Because people like Hyperallergic and many others, especially independent news outlets, are talking about protests on a regular basis. So we expect to look at the ancient world and see it everywhere. And if we don’t, we think, “Oh, it must’ve been a nice place. It must’ve been like the Golden Age.”

Hrag Vartanian: Was it the patronage? Is that why the writers of the ancient world, because they had patrons that were often elite, wouldn’t write about these kinds of histories from below?

Sarah E. Bond: Right. Well, a lot of these writers themselves are extremely wealthy. Tacitus is a senator.

Hrag Vartanian: So it’s class solidarity a little bit.

Sarah E. Bond: Exactly. They’re writing for a specific audience. We all write for the audience that we want to reach. And so Tacitus, Suetonius, and many of our major historians, are of the belief that vulgarity starts with the people from below. The word vulgar only means pedestrian, it is lower class—

Hrag Vartanian: “Hoi polloi.”

Sarah E. Bond: Yes. History as a discipline at that time was supposed to be specifically a record of military and political accomplishments. The quotidian, the daily life, the things that I love reading about in things like Petronius or Apuleius that we do have records of, that’s not considered to be “history.” The people that we allow into our narratives are the people that we have respect for. And Tacitus has no respect for the people from below. This movement for history of below really doesn’t start until after a lot of the Marxist philosophies and histories from below of the mid-19th century going forward.

Hrag Vartanian: Right, that makes sense.

Sarah E. Bond: So that’s when we really start seeing “the people’s history of the United States” later on, or the Bolshevik Rebellion that inspires a lot of people to write histories from below. And Tacitus is just not interested in that.

Hrag Vartanian: So one of the things that I really enjoyed was how you tried to recontextualize and understand anew some very famous events. And the Nika Riots are one of them, which happened in Constantinople. And this was a riot that took place— or strike, perhaps— but the word that’s come down to us is riot. But it was between these groups at the Circus or the forum? What is it?

Sarah E. Bond: Oh, the Circus is the same as the Hippodrome. So you can call it a Circus.

Hrag Vartanian: Okay. So tell us the difference between the terms, just for the audience who may not know.

Sarah E. Bond: In the Latin West, it’s called Circus, and then in the Greek East it’s called a Hippodrome.

Hrag Vartanian: Right. So in the Hippodrome, were these groups that protested or sort of stood up. What was it that they were protesting at the time?

Sarah E. Bond: So the most popular sport in the sixth century CE in Constantinople, which is what is modern day Istanbul, is chariot races. And so we have four main teams, and we’ll show you guys a mosaic of this, but it’s the Blues, and the Greens, and the Reds, and the Whites. They’re just the major charioteer factions. And in Latin, in the singular, that’s a factio, or you can call factiones, and it’s where we get the word “faction” today. They’re just the teams. But those teams are gigantic, into the thousands, and so we can have veterinarians, doctors, horse trainers, assistants, bear trainers, dancers, mimes. There are a lot of mimes. A lot of actors are within it.

These are the largest entertainment troops that we have from the ancient world and the sixth century are these factions. And about every five days they put on races in the Circus. But the thing is that charioteers often involve themselves because they’re incredibly famous and they have a lot of social capital.

Hrag Vartanian: They’re celebrities.

Sarah E. Bond: Celebrity is very much a part of this. They have great power to speak directly to the emperor because the emperor has a box within the Hippodrome. But also, if you’re a very famous charioteer, you can oftentimes speak to them more directly as an interlocutor between the populace and those people in power. And so we have a lot of charioteers, not just at Constantinople, but places like Thessaloniki, which in the ancient world is called Thessalonica, at Alexandria and elsewhere, that we know had a lot of sway with magistrates. And in this particular instance, a little bit earlier in the year 532, we have the arrest of various members of the Blue and Green factions.

Hrag Vartanian: Which were the biggest teams.

Sarah E. Bond: Yeah, two biggest, most popular teams. So just imagine today, how much would things break out if, like, an NFL quarterback were arrested?

Hrag Vartanian: Right, exactly.

Sarah E. Bond: Or you know, a running back.

Hrag Vartanian: So that’s a good example like, major league sports.

Sarah E. Bond: Major league sports. And so we have them arrested, and then we have a botched killing of a number of them by the state. And two of them survive. And so the heads of the Blues and the Greens go to Justinian’s people— Justinian and Theodora are the emperors at the time—and they say, “Can you release these two people who survived this botched execution?” And they say, “No. No, we’re not going to release them. These are rabble rousers, these are people that are leading protests and causing riots.” And then mass violence throughout Constantinople breaks out for numerous days. And so we have multiple days where, pivotally, the Hippodrome is not in use. So I guess the question is then, is that a strike of the charioteers—

Hrag Vartanian: It's a withholding of labor, right?

Sarah E. Bond: Yeah. They are out protesting in the streets. They cannot do their job, but they’re also choosing not to do their job.

Hrag Vartanian: So that’s the thing, you’re taking it in terms of withholding labor, which is what a strike is essentially.

Sarah E. Bond: Right. But when Procopius writes about it, who is our main source for the Nika Riots...and it’s called that because in Greek, when you go
“Nika, Nika, Nika!” That’s, “Conquer, conquer, conquer!”

Hrag Vartanian: Oh, I see, got it.

Sarah E. Bond: It’s where we get “Nike.”

Hrag Vartanian: I was calling it Nike earlier.

Sarah E. Bond: No, no, that’s the goddess of victory.

Hrag Vartanian: That’s right.

Sarah E. Bond: It derives from the same word.

Hrag Vartanian: Oh, ok.

Sarah E. Bond: So you have “conquer,” or you can say “victory, victory,” essentially. And so that’s why your shoes are called Nike, they’re named after the goddess.

Hrag Vartanian: Oh, I see.

Sarah E. Bond: But “Nika” is just a cheer that you do in the Hippodrome. So Procopius tells us about this, but Procopius is part of the state apparatus.

Hrag Vartanian: Right, so tens of thousands of people die.

Sarah E. Bond: Yes. So what eventually happens is a collective bargaining meeting, where Justinian and Theodora send out their soldiers to gather the factions together. This is what would anybody else would call a union meeting with all of the union heads—

Hrag Vartanian: A negotiation.

Sarah E. Bond: —except we have thousands of people brought into the Hippodrome. Then the doors are locked, and the soldiers slaughter tens of thousands of them.

Hrag Vartanian: The “Red Wedding.”

Sarah E. Bond: It is a “Red Wedding,” it is!

Hrag Vartanian: So they’re like, “Come in, we’re going to negotiate with you.” And then they’re like, “Oh, just kidding, you’re not leaving.”

Sarah E. Bond: Well, there’s a very famous line from Tacitus saying, “The Romans make a desert and call it peace.”

Hrag Vartanian: Oh, wow. Yeah.

Sarah E. Bond: So what they’re doing is creating a desert and then going, “The riots are over, guys! The riots are up!”

Hrag Vartanian: They don’t explain how they were over.

Sarah E. Bond: Yeah. Deserts come sometimes from the creation of man and from the violence of individuals. And so those soldiers are carrying out the will of Theodora, apparently. She gets the blame for it, but also Procopius hates her, so I’m not sure. But Justinian and Theodora decide the best way to get rid of resistance is killing everybody.

Hrag Vartanian: It’s so Roman.

Sarah E. Bond: It is Roman. And it had happened previously under other administrations under an emperor named Theodosius that about 5,000 people had been killed at Thessalonica in the same manner.

Hrag Vartanian: Oh, wow.

Sarah E. Bond: So this isn’t the first time.

Hrag Vartanian: There’s a history of these kinds of slaughter.

Sarah E. Bond: Exactly. When there is resistance, Romans will come back one louder, and then just decimate.

Hrag Vartanian: Sounds very American, doesn’t it?

Sarah E. Bond: It’s a lot of violence. I mean, I think that Romans are an example in many ways, and not a positive example.

Hrag Vartanian: I’d love to ask you, because the ancient world gets thrown around a lot now by the people in power right now, and let’s not name them right now, but we know who they are. What is it about the ancient world that they don’t understand? Because from what I’ve seen in your work, I get the sense that people had much more agency than people like to give them credit for. Does that sound accurate?

Sarah E. Bond: Exactly. I think talking about the Romans, as many have done, as not having the capacity to strike is one way that we take away the agency from the people of the ancient world. And we often say, “We’re just modern people, we’re better, we’re more progressive, we have more technology.” But just because we’re living in a modern world doesn’t necessarily mean that individuals from the past didn’t have agency. It’s simply that the elite writers who are writing about it don’t give it to them. They don’t give them the dignity of telling us about a lot of their actions or beliefs, or giving us a lot of individual personhood.

But I think understanding that the people of the past were much smarter, much more complex—and we’re talking about enslaved people, we’re talking about regular laborers, and things like this—then we have necessarily a full understanding of. And that’s just simply because most people are only talking about emperors. Still, to this day, when I go and I look at the bookshelves at Barnes & Noble, or I look at any of the other bookstores, I see more representation of persons from below, but it’s still predominantly books that are about emperors. Right now there’s a bestselling translation by Tom Holland of Suetonius of the Caesars. And Tom Holland was the advisor for Succession. So Rome creeps into our pop culture—

Hrag Vartanian: It’s everywhere.

Sarah E. Bond: And I’m not bashing Tom Holland. I’m just saying that he’s translating Suetonius for a new audience. What does Suetonius write about? The lives of the 12 Caesars. And so if we choose to only read about the Caesars, then we’re only going to see Caesar within Rome. And the fact is 60 million people lived within the ancient Mediterranean.

Hrag Vartanian: That’s a lot of people.

Sarah E. Bond: Sixty million people, and one person was emperor. Although there are some usurpers...

Hrag Vartanian: And triumvirate and stuff.

Sarah E. Bond: Sometimes it's multiple ones, and people are killing each other, like The Year of the Four Emperors. But why are we focusing so much on this 1.5%, the super elite, rich people, and not the 98.5% that we’re not senators, and not what we call equestrians, (which were also a very wealthy class), but instead just regular people. Merchants, people going about their daily life. If we invest our dollars in books and documentaries that are exploring more of that life, I think we will see the books change on the shelves as well.

Hrag Vartanian: Absolutely, I’m with you. And I think it’s interesting because in the case of the Nika Riots, I think in art history, for instance, when we think of Justinian and Theodora, there are beautiful monuments to them. We don’t talk about the violence and the absolutely terrible things they did during their reigns. And it’s interesting how art, just like documents that come down to us sort of sanitize and whitewash these histories—

Sarah E. Bond: Metonyms do that, don’t they?

Hrag Vartanian: Exactly.

Sarah E. Bond: They just allow for laundering.

Hrag Vartanian: Just Theodora, we think of her beautiful gold mosaic, not her ordering the slaughter of tens of thousands of people who just wanted their rights.

Sarah E. Bond: Yeah. And she comes from a faction background. Her father had been a bear trainer and so she—

Hrag Vartanian: Like JD Vance.

Sarah E. Bond: Yeah. People turning on their background is something that really disturbs me.

Hrag Vartanian: It’s very common among the elite. And that’s the thing, it’s this idea of even Alexander Hamilton, that is such a part of this. And I think that’s something that the US and ancient Rome had. This idea that you could be a common enslaved baker and then turn out to be a rich person that builds a monument in the middle of Rome.

Sarah E. Bond: And Romans are still going to hold it against you, as a way of bringing you down a peg in politics, for instance. But even Justinian had come from very humble origins, because his uncle had been the one that originally was raised to the purple, and they came from very humble backgrounds in Thrace, originally.

Hrag Vartanian: But they had to show their loyalty to the elite.

Sarah E. Bond: Exactly. And so they’re trying to use their power in order to silence people who are pushing back against them and charioteers are sometimes the biggest leaders of political speech because they can actually speak truth to power in a way because they have the protection of popular support, just like actors today.

Hrag Vartanian: Yeah. I’d love to ask you for general observations you have now that you’ve done this important archival research of what we can learn today about it. Because museums in particular have become the focus of so much strike, and labor organizing, and protests in a way that I think we’ve never had before.

And my theory is that it’s partly that museums are those places because we have very few places we consider public, that we spend time lingering, looking, expecting something new in the world, right? There are very few places where we do that. Even in a sports arena, you’re not waiting for something new. Maybe a good shot or something, but it’s not the same thing. But I’d love to hear your thoughts about why you think museums, perhaps where a lot of these objects that we’re talking about are stored, why they’ve become the focus of some of these conversations?

Sarah E. Bond: I think that we have people who are realizing their worth within museum spaces. They are seeing that they’re not just cogs contributing to a larger kind of arts movement, that they are not being well paid, especially within museums.

I would love to see more librarians unionized, because I think that that is another space that is incredibly important and is suffering from a lot of book bans right now and a lot of modification from above. And so I think having librarians would be strengthening this movement even more. But I think you’re right that we’re seeing it within museums because museum workers are very much speaking to each other, but also realizing that they thought that they were contributing to the public good by working in a museum space.

Hrag Vartanian: Such a good point. No one joins a museum and goes, “Oh, I’m part of the elite.”

Sarah E. Bond: No, of course. You’re saying, “I want to contribute to society and in a positive way.”

Hrag Vartanian: Educating people, like school groups...

Sarah E. Bond: These are good people, and they’re coming together because they’re realizing that their individuality and their dignity is not being fully served or understood. And they know history oftentimes better than many historians. These museum workers are seeing that collective action is effective. Unionization reached its height in America in the 1950s. That has decreased, and the rhetoric against unions is coming back right now. But we are seeing at places like Amazon, at places like Starbucks, that this is an effective tactic. And so I think museum workers really are setting an example from many other parts of the country that I hope follows suit.

But what we’re already seeing—with the judiciary especially, and Donald Trump’s social media posts and things like that—is that union busting efforts are already ramping up. And this happened in ancient Rome. There will always be attempts to break up collective actions and to call it by another name. So I think museum workers are realizing that they still want to serve the public good, but maybe that public good is through unionization.

Hrag Vartanian: Absolutely. And I think one of the things that’s so important about your work is you don’t let people get away with this pseudo history. You’re like, “No, let’s look at what the actual facts are here.” Because I do think some of the idealization that certain elites have of the ancient world is that it was more ordered, and that protests didn’t take place in the same way, and slaves “knew their place,” and all these kinds of bullshit Hollywood things... I mean, really, let’s blame Hollywood for a lot of this, right? I don’t know, it sort of mimicked European colonialism in the way it viewed the world as these sort of haves and have-nots and populations that deserve to be put down or something.

Sarah E. Bond: And things like Stoicism reinforce this. We see right now that Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, almost every single technocrat, Peter Thiel, they all love Stoicism.

Hrag Vartanian: Why? Why?

Sarah E. Bond: Oh, because “bro-icism,” as we call it—

Hrag Vartanian: Is that really a term you guys use?

Sarah E. Bond: I want to say that Joel Christensen, who is a good friend, he calls it “bro-icism,” and I do as well. And people love a good Marcus Aurelius quote, and that is because Stoicism reinforces the social order. And what do technocrats want except for you to just sit at your desk and to code, and don’t ask questions, right?

Hrag Vartanian: Follow the order.

Sarah E. Bond: Right? Because Marcus Aurelius says, “I was born emperor, it was essentially fate that I become emperor.” And if you believe in a fatalist approach and that you should be the best slave you could be, and be the best coder that you should be, and be the best emperor that you ever could be. That’s kind of what Stoicism ingrains in us, is not protesting, not overthrowing the status quo. Reinforce the status quo, make it the best status quo you could be.

Hrag Vartanian: Right, right, right.

Sarah E. Bond: And so of course stoicism is something that is getting a revival. If you look at the Amazon list right now with Jeff Bezos, very much a part of this movement, Marcus Aurelius meditations is always at the top.

Hrag Vartanian: It always is, it’s so surprising to me that that happens.

Sarah E. Bond: Always. Yeah.

Hrag Vartanian: I mean, I like the meditations, but it’s so strange.

Sarah E. Bond: But “being the best slave you could be” is such a thing that a technocrat would say, right? It’s like, “Don’t push back against your dominus or domina.” That is to say, “You’re in slavery. Don’t push back against them, just live every day to the best of your ability.” And it’s like, “Bitch, I don’t want to be a slave anymore!” That’s what Romans are saying. And so when we look at films like Spartacus, we have to look at the actual meaning behind that and why it was filmed in 1960 as part of the blacklist. This is pushing back against McCarthyism and the blacklist. And so there is a reason that Spartacus comes out in 1960, right? It’s because it’s like, “Screw the Hollywood elite that have been throwing out people who are perceived as Communists.” And so even when we do have resistance from Ancient Rome, there’s a reason for that because it was all a metaphor for what was going on in Hollywood at the time.

Hrag Vartanian: Yeah, that makes sense. That absolutely makes sense. So the last question—and I mean, this has been such a great conversation—is I want you pick your favorite artwork from the ancient world. Do you have a favorite?

Sarah E. Bond: I do, and it’s meaningful to me for a lot of reasons. There is a mosaic at the Worcester Art Museum, and Hrag knows my love for the Worcester Art Museum.

Hrag Vartanian: Yes, I love it too. It’s such a lovely museum.

Sarah E. Bond: It’s just one of those spaces that my husband is from Worcester, and I always go back—

Hrag Vartanian: Oh, I forget that.

Sarah E. Bond: —and visit it. Yeah, he’s from the heart of the Commonwealth. The Worcester Art Museum has a ton of the Antioch mosaics that were excavated in the 1930s. But there’s specifically one that’s hanging on the wall and it has Ktisis. And she is the goddess of foundations and beginnings.

Hrag Vartanian: Oh, wow.

Sarah E. Bond: It’s who you speak to when you build a new house, when you start anew, that you speak to this goddess and you say, “Ktisis, be here for my new foundation, for my new job, for my new whatever.” I mean, it’s usually for the foundations of cities. But I love Ktisis. She is a woman, oftentimes with a crown on her head. But I love mosaics and I love mosaicists...

Hrag Vartanian: I love that.

Sarah E. Bond: ...and so this is perhaps my favorite. It’s a late antique mosaic, and Antioch doesn’t flourish for that much longer after that at that time.

Hrag Vartanian: That was the great earthquake, right?

Sarah E. Bond: We have one not long after that. And so we have a lot of upheaval that is happening in the midst of foundation. And so I have a lot of pictures of her.

Hrag Vartanian: Oh, wow. I love that. So can we ask her for helping us with
the foundations of the new world we’re embarked upon?

Sarah E. Bond: Oh my gosh.

Hrag Vartanian: Can we do that? How would we do that?

Sarah E. Bond: I think we got to build our house on some serious Ktisis together. But coming together as—and I don’t mean to sound too earnest when I say this—but I think digitally we can all come together, but also as supporters of this new labor movement. I don’t want it to die with this new administration. We saw some of the most important and most amazing labor organizing in the wake of COVID-19 and we saw so many new movements of people collectivizing that are so important. And so, yeah, if we can speak to Ktisis and help us to move forward, I think unions are one way that we’ll find community as we’re trying to survive what is a very horrendous political moment.

Hrag Vartanian: It is, it is.

Sarah E. Bond: Yeah, so we got to lean on each other, but also we got to know our worth and fight for it.

Hrag Vartanian: From your lips to the goddess’s ears.

Sarah E. Bond: Come on, Ktisis.

Hrag Vartanian: I love it.

Sarah E. Bond: Let’s go. Let’s go.

Hrag Vartanian: Let’s go, next phase. Okay, you heard it here first. So thank you, Sarah...

Sarah E. Bond: Thank you for having me.

Hrag Vartanian: ...for always being so open and wonderful and for doing this important research to sort of expand our minds to not get stuck in the contemporary without understanding. And more importantly, not allowing other people to hijack this history in order to then make claims that are not justified. So I just think it’s so important, and I don’t know anybody doing it with the sensitivity and with the real contemporary ear that you have, so thank you so much, Sarah. It’s such a pleasure to learn from you.

Sarah E. Bond: I love being here. Thank you guys. Thanks for listening in.

Hrag Vartanian: Thanks so much for listening. This episode was produced by Isabella Segalovich and this podcast, as well as all our podcasts are supported by Hyperallergic members. So, thank you to the Hyperallergic members. You too can support independent arts journalism for just $8 a month or $80 a year, and help us tell these stories that often no one else is telling. My name is Hrag Vartanian, I’m the Editor-in-Chief and Co-founder of Hyperallergic. Thanks for listening. Until next time.