Special Episode – Totally Chaotic History with Dr Emma Southon

Podcast Archives - The Partial Historians

Are you ready to have a Totally Chaotic time?

We certainly hope so, as we are thrilled to welcome Dr Emma Southon back on the show for the FOURTH TIME (not the third, as incorrectly said by Dr Rad). Emma has released her first children’s book, which was co-authored with Greg Jenner and illustrated by Rikin Parekh.

Special Episode – Totally Chaotic History with Dr Emma Southon

The cover of Totally Chaotic History: Roman Britain Gets Rowdy!

This powerhouse trio have produced Totally Chaotic History: Roman History Gets Rowdy! Whilst the target audience for this latest instalment in the Totally Chaotic series is 7-12 year olds, we thoroughly enjoyed it. Turns out that we didn’t know as much about Roman Britain as we thought!

If you would like to chuckle and LOL your way through the lengthy history of the British and their interactions with the Romans, you need to grab a copy of this book. We were intrigued to find out how Greg, Emma and Rikin managed to pack so much historiography into a children’s history book. It was intriguing to find out about the process that went into building the layers of historical meaning on every page.

Are you ready to get rowdy?

Things to Listen Out For:

• Robot hamsters
• Chaos ratings
• Tips on sight-seeing in Britain
• Emma’s upcoming projects

Ask Santa for Totally Chaotic History: Roman History Gets Rowdy! Naturally, Mr Claus shops at your local independent bookstore.

Want more from Emma Southon? Check out our previous interview about A History of Rome in 21 Women from 2023.

Sound Credits

Our music is by Bettina Joy de Guzman.

Automated Transcript

Dr Rad 0:15
Music. Welcome to the partial historians.

Dr G 0:18
We explore all the details of ancient Rome,

Dr Rad 0:23
everything from political scandals, the love affairs, the battles wage and when citizens turn against each other, I’m Dr Rad and

Dr G 0:33
I’m Dr G, we consider Rome as the Romans saw it, by reading different authors from the ancient past and comparing their stories.

Dr Rad 0:44
Join us as we trace the journey of Rome from the founding of the city.

Welcome to a special episode of the partial historians. I am one of your hosts, Dr Rad, and I am Dr G and Dr G, we are joined by someone who is now, I think, a triple guest, which I don’t think we’ve ever had before. We are joined by Dr Emma Southon, who is without doubt, our top drag race fan to have on the podcast, but she also happens to be a top notch historian and hilarious, so that’s very handy for us. She is the author of a biography of Agrippina the Younger as well as a book called A fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, and, most recently, a history of Rome in 21 women, all of which you need to check out if you have not read them already, Emma is also the co host of the podcast. History is sexy, but we are here today to graduate her on her latest book, which is totally chaotic history Roman Britain gets rowdy, and in this collaboration, Emma gets together with a podcaster and all around famous author Greg Jenner and illustrator Rikin Parekh. So Emma, welcome,

Dr Emma Southon 2:06
hello. What a joy to be back. Am I really your first third person? That makes me feel special.

Dr Rad 2:11
I think so

Dr G 2:14
special you’ve come to the right place. So we

Dr Rad 2:17
are so excited to talk about this book, because it is very different, and we’re going to explore some of those differences in a moment for you. But let’s start with the general premise of the book. Shall we? The book is about Roman Britain, and we actually learned a lot by reading this, right? Because it is actually a children’s book, I should point out to people.

Dr Emma Southon 2:37
It isn’t for, technically, for like seven to 12 year olds, but both Greg and I love history, and so we put in about as much as we learned. Everything that we learned that we found was interesting, we chucked in there, and we’re very keen to make it a book that is proper history like So the premise is that Greg is an amateur historian who is telling the reader the story of whatever the period he’s covering, so telling the story of Roman Britain. And then that’s all in the present tense, and then he has expert interruptions from a professional historian and expert in the field, who, in the past tense, comes in and says, Actually, Greg, we used to think that, but now we think says, and we know this because we found x, y, z, or and this is what the evidence is. And kind of then gives you the historiography of the period as well, and the like, how we know what we know what kind of things historians have had arguments about what has shifted in our understanding of it, how we interpret the sources and just both widening the subjects as it’s usually taught to children. So it’s not just like decontextualized Roman Britain, which has like no time period, which is what you very often get with kids books. You just get, like, the Romans or and as if there was no change in the entire period. Or like, you know, the Romans are in Britain for 500 years, and there’s just pretense that it’s all the same and all the whole time, and also showing how we expanding what history is as it’s taught to children. So it’s not just giving them facts, as though we just we know those facts, but what historians actually do like how we learn, how we change our minds, how we have big history fights all the time, and have arguments about things, and how there isn’t, like one right answer in history. Most of the time, there’s a lot of wrong answers, but there’s very rare there’s also a lot of right answers. And so it sounds quite complicated, but because Greg is naturally hilarious, and because there a lot of it is done through illustration and the way that the page is laid out, it means that there can be lots of a lot going on on the page, and you can learn a whole lot from what looks like just a really fun, silly joke.

Dr Rad 4:59
Like, you’re making me feel a lot better about the fact that I learned a lot from reading

Dr Emma Southon 5:04
good that’s the aim. Is that? Because, I think that, especially with because I read the first is a series that Greg is doing, and he’s doing four initially. The first one was totally chaotic Egypt, and he sent me that, like, before it came out, to say, like, this is what the thing’s gonna look like. And I learned so much from that. And like I did, I haven’t technically done Egypt since I was an undergraduate, but I still felt like I had, you know, a basic grasp of it, but like, there’s a whole debate in there about why Egyptians mummified people and, like, what is the purpose of that? And I was like, Oh my God, I’ve never even thought about that as an like it’s just in a kid’s book for eight year olds, and a complete shift in my understanding of why Egyptian culture mummified people. Is it preservation, or is it actually a deliberate transformation? Because if it’s preservation, why are you taking the organs out that’s not preserving? Is it that’s transforming the body.

Dr Rad 6:02
That’s true. That’s true. Yeah.

Dr Emma Southon 6:04
So, so I also learned a lot, and the next one is a stone age, and I’m looking forward to learning stuff about that. Okay,

Dr G 6:10
I’m ready to dig in. I’m gonna have to acquire the whole series. On the back of this amazing

Dr Rad 6:16
it makes me feel terrified that all these children are gonna grow up to be so incredibly educated

Dr Emma Southon 6:21
they are. They’re going to be smarter than by the time they’re 12. They’re going to know so

Dr Rad 6:26
exactly they’re going to be like, Excuse me, I think you’ll find that there’s historiographical debate about that exactly, that’s what we want, which I find terrific, because I’m a teacher, I’m actually going to encounter this. Thanks.

Dr Emma Southon 6:40
They’ll be the best kids, though. Yeah.

Dr G 6:43
We want that kind of smarts coming through. That’s that’s really exciting.

Dr Rad 6:47
So that’s an amazing description of what the book is all about, in sort of general terms. And it sort of made us realize that when we have looked at Roman Britain, it’s been very much about Caesar Claudius and Boudicca, the highlights, yeah, as I like to call them, which all happened in a very short period of time. So can you tell us a bit about some of the other chapters and what they specifically focus on?

Dr Emma Southon 7:06
So we have a chapter first at the beginning, about the late Iron Age and like, what is Britain like before Caesar gets there? Basically, very important, yeah, because I think that everybody thinks that see the Britain like before Caesar got there, is basically what Caesar describes, which is eight men with mustaches and 200 cows and nothing. So

Dr Rad 7:30
we’ve got a bit sounds like a party, yeah.

Dr Emma Southon 7:32
And then it effectively goes through, kind of chronologically, the the history of of the Roman occupation of Britain. And Britain as part of the Empire. So it does Caesar. And then the massive impacts that Caesar brings, because he makes Britain, or at least southern Britain, big chunks of it, become client kingdoms of the Roman Empire. And so there’s these relationships with Tiberius and Augustus that are very rarely written about in anywhere, to be honest, but they’re all there. And then Claudius, kind of second invasion, his big invasion, and then the resistance period after that. So you’ve got about 100 years of people like coraticus and the kind of ongoing attempts to remove the Romans. And then we really wanted it to not just focus on London. So we have a section on Wales. We’ve got sections on what’s happening in the north of England, on how these places are kind of slowly absorbed into the empire in different ways, especially Wales, which takes, like, a really concerted effort to get it in. And then we go all the way through talking about both how unique Britain is, in terms of how much of the army is there, how you get these kind of syncretic, syncretistic gods that you find in Britain? So we’ve got a god swap game where you get to match your gods to your local Yeah, all of them just match with Mars, because apparently the British just really took to Mars and were like, we hear you said he’s a god of war, but we’ve decided he’s the God of Everything. So and fashion. What do we you know? What are people wearing? What are people doing? Building fancy villas, building a town? Because what Rome really brings is urbanization, and then so you get towns for the first time and cities, but also you get these huge Villa estates that are like areas of agricultural production for export, which never existed before, and they’re really unique, like the way they’re built. And when everybody draws a Roman villa, they draw that kind of bracket shaped, you know, classic Italian Palace, but the ones in Britain are like corridors, and they’re kind of weird. So we’ve got lots of archeology and mosaics and how you build your villa. So we have a, we originally wrote a Grand Designs thing for that. So it was going to be like, someone’s coming to video. But they were like, I.

Dr Rad 10:00
Only 40 year olds will get eight year old is watching,

Dr Emma Southon 10:09
like he was really funny for us. And then we were like, no, no. Eight year old knows. So we did it as a catalog instead, like they’ll get that. And then we did, like, the building your villa, you’re building your town as a kind of Minecraft thing. So you get to did it as constructor the game, and then talked through all of the actually big history that happens in in Britain at the end of the Roman Empire. So from like 200 to 400 there are like three emperors that are proclaimed in Britain, including Caracalla and Geta of Gladiator II fame,

Dr Rad 10:42
absolutely, I was very, so excited to see the section on them. There

Dr G 10:46
they are hanging out. I will

Dr Emma Southon 10:49
tell you now, and I’m sorry they’re going to probably have to edit this out. But I spent the entire thing going, why is Geta the big one?

Dr G 10:58
Yeah. Surely this really assumed, yeah, miscasting,

Dr Emma Southon 11:03
yeah, like, Geta is the big one and the little one is Caracalla.

Dr G 11:08
Don’t tell Fiona too much. She hasn’t seen it yet.

Dr Rad 11:11
Oh, you’ve seen it. Okay, we’re actually going together to what we call Gold Class here, which basically is, like the super fancy cinema with, like this, you know, the recliner I

Dr G 11:21
want? I want to Colosseum popcorn bucket. That’s what I’m after. Yeah,

Dr Emma Southon 11:26
I cannot get it here, and it breaks my heart. I’m not going to spoil anything else, but I’m just going to say Gator is the big one, and I genuinely spent a third of a movie with

Dr Rad 11:34
my mind blown. Yeah, no, that is crazy to me. Yeah.

Dr Emma Southon 11:38
So Caracalla,, Geta, Constantine the great he is crowned in Britain. And then Britain is called like a hotbed of usurpers, because people keep rising up, taking chunks of the army and invading mainland Britain, basically. And then there’s a lot that goes on there. Britain, I think, is very often considered to be like a massive backwater that Rome didn’t care about at all. But you see hundreds of years of them desperately trying to keep Britain in the empire, because it is very important as both a space for which is agriculturally, producing enormously, and it is a place where people have loads of property and they want to keep it. And it is, you know, they don’t want to lose it as a space. And the period that Britain is the richest and when the most beautiful things are being built, and when it’s spending the most money on villas and mosaics and paintings, and is the third and fourth century, like this period that we think of as a period of decline and misery is actually a period of kind of gold and luxury in Roman Britain. So, so we have all of that, and then we have the kind of final sad decline, I suppose, of Britain as the army just keeps leaving, and then no one has any money to travel across the sea anymore. So

Dr G 12:56
this ferry system is getting very expensive. I don’t know if I can put my army on boats,

Dr Emma Southon 13:02
and their Saxons got very, very good at piracy, so it became real expensive to keep sending stuff over. And so this kind of last hurrah of Roman Britain is kind of ends with a bit of a whimper. And that famous letter from Honorius where he says, you know, we wrote to Britain and said that they’d have to deal with themselves, which may or may not be about Britain, but yeah, so it hopefully gives, like, a very different perspective on Roman Britain, and then that, it does the whole of it, from the first contact in 150 BCE all the way through to, kind of The final dregs of Roman culture in like 500 and tells you everything that happened, basically, and get a good idea of what living at any period under Roman occupation was like,

Dr G 13:53
Oh, fantastic. So I like the fact that there’s a chronology here. It’s, as you say, it’s not just a smattering of facts without any sort of contextual detail. So everybody gets to go on a journey through this whole few 100 years of Roman contact with the Britons. When you’re thinking about your research and work on this book, was there anything in particular you were surprised to learn as you went through this process,

Dr Emma Southon 14:20
the kind of uniqueness of Romano British culture, like archeologically, because the archeology of Roman Britain is not something that I had ever like looked at in huge detail, and I’d certainly never sat down and read all of the many British archeological reports I read. And because British archeological reports basically publish every archeology PhD that wants to be published. Oh, that’s on British archeology, and it’s brilliant. And as a result, you can read the tiny little niches that people do and see what they’re looking at. And the there are real uniquenesses to Roman British culture, like they didn’t. We used to call it romanizing Back in the day, but you know, they didn’t hell themselves into being as Roman as possible on a copy. But they took what they wanted and absorbed it. But so they were like, Okay, we’ll do villas, but we’re doing them in a way that we like, like, we’ll do corners. Now, really funny thing is that there was a drought 2007-2008, that, for archeologists, was brilliant, because all of the dried out fields meant that they could see with aerial photography, loads of foundations that they wouldn’t have been able to see, and so they could suddenly see loads of Roman and pre Roman archeological sites, or like sites of locations of inhabitation where that they hadn’t known existed before. And you can tell which ones are the pre Roman because they’re all round. And then the Romans come and put corners on

Dr G 15:41
all those Romans. They love their lines. They love their angles.

Dr Emma Southon 15:48
I just really amused me to imagine, like early Roman Britons being like, and they’ve got coordinates, you say,

Dr Rad 15:58
or something. There’s something there about, like, a square pig and

Dr Emma Southon 16:04
a round you get these things, these really specific villas. And like, they build Roman temples, but they build them in a really specific way that is doesn’t look like Roman temple has got like a circular bit in the middle. So they’ll be like, Okay, we’ll do like 50-50, and they were, like, all of the religious sites that appear, which don’t appear until, like, relatively late, but they appeared, but they’re like, we’ll do votive offering. We get that, but we are only going to put it in water, because water is our thing. So we’re gonna, like, make we’re gonna absorb it into our culture, rather than absorbing ourselves into you, basically, which was fascinating to me. And at no point does Britain in general seem to have, like, wholeheartedly thrown itself into you get the odd guy, like the guy who built fishborne Roman palace. But mostly people are like, yeah. Don’t know how I feel about guys

Unknown Speaker 16:58
that might work, but

Dr Emma Southon 17:02
they are still building roundhouses. And like you can see, like, they’ll get on board with things that are useful, like lamps and locks. But apart from that, they’re a bit like, there is a real uniqueness. And like face pots, as well as this thing that you only find in Roman Britain, which is urns for cremains. And they would bury the cremains in a pot with a little face on it. So they make these little face pots interesting. They are adorable. And I don’t know if they’re like the face of the person, sometimes they have a little penis on them because they’re Roman. So they’ll just have, like, a penis, actually, yeah, wouldn’t

Dr G 17:38
want to miss an opportunity,

Dr Emma Southon 17:41
yeah. But you find it in, like, you only find the Britain and, like, a little bit in northern Gaul, but they’re just like these unique aspects of Roman Britain culture that I thought were really delightful. And every single one of them that I learned about was so charming. Because, like, certainly, when I was in school, we went, I grew up near fish born Roman Palace, which is, like the Roman palace, and it is the villa that everybody talks about, and it’s ginormous. It’s like four times the size of most villas. And it is so Roman. It’s so square. It’s got, like, the atrium, it’s got the big wings that go round a bit of grass. And so for a long time, I was like, Okay, so that’s what a Roman villa is. But then when you look at what they all look like, they have a specific layout that the British designed themselves. And so it was, yeah, it was um, eye opening to see how, how the the people for 400 years, were like, okay, we can get along with some of this. But I kind of like, that’s like, feels profoundly British, yeah,

Dr G 18:42
okay, the pragmatism of like, well, you say you do it that way, but we’ve always done it like this, so I think we’re just gonna keep doing it like this. We’re gonna

Dr Emma Southon 18:53
keep we’ll incorporate the bits that we like, but otherwise we will be avoiding virtually all of it.

Dr Rad 19:03
We’ll take the luck, yeah, throw it.

Dr Emma Southon 19:06
We’ll take this, but we’re not getting on board with we’ll take the wine, but we’re not getting on board with the garam

Dr Rad 19:13
there’s got to be a new Monty Python skit in there somewhere.

Dr Emma Southon 19:16
Yeah, there’s a horrible history skit in there somewhere with this, yeah,

Dr Rad 19:21
exactly, yeah. Which is, which is obviously very apt, given that Greg Jenner was involved in me. He was,

Dr Emma Southon 19:26
and you can tell he was the historical consultant for Horrible Histories for a long time. And he wrote the, or helped write the film, The Boudicca film. And, yeah, did a was kind of locked, very responsible for a lot of horrible history stuff. So you can see that humor in there. He has a very the puns and word play. And we share a hilarity of just imagining how these things play out when people talk about and then they cleared some land. We both find it really funny to imagine, like, how does that like? There is a horrible history. Sketch of, like, somebody turning up at a guy’s door and saying, we’re going to build a wall through here. Going to build a massive wall right the way across the island, and if you could just move your sheep out. I think,

Dr Rad 20:11
I think that is something that that we also share. We delight in imagining these scenes of when people come up to the door of, you know, Cincinnatus, whilst he’s farming shirtless. And, yeah, exactly,

Dr Emma Southon 20:26
giving Cato a call, and he’s talking about with cabbages yet again.

Dr Rad 20:33
So obviously, as you sort of highlighted before, there are sometimes these sort of different ideas behind each chapter, the way you laid it out, and the sort of approach that you’ve taken, so when you sort of saw it all come together, which part ended up being your favorite?

Dr Emma Southon 20:47
That’s my favorite. I find the Julius Caesar YouTube bit really funny. So we did Julius Caesar as like a manosphere YouTube bro who is trying to pass off his ludicrous, his ludicrous turning up in Britain, fundamentally unprepared and being chased out and then constantly complaining that doesn’t matter how many hostages he takes, they just keep stabbing him in the back, trying to pass it off as a brilliant victory. And we imagined him kind of, what’s that guy that just fought?

Dr G 21:23
Oh, the guy that just fought my boxer guy,

Dr Emma Southon 21:27
yes,

Dr G 21:28
I can’t remember his name. What’s his name? But isn’t he fundamentally a YouTuber? Yeah, he is.

Dr Emma Southon 21:34
So basically, we imagined him as one of those youtubers who’s, like, always doing stunts, or like a kind of Mr. Beast type bro guy who just wants to impress everybody with, like, the massive stunts that he’s doing. And then we had, like, his description of Britain. We ended up doing it as, like a Q and A while he’s trapped in because he can’t go out because the weather’s so bad that it’s destroyed all of his ships that genuinely happened. So he got trapped on the island well, because all his ships got destroyed and stopped. So, like, he’s got nothing to do. So he can do an AMA, and he’ll describe Britain, and that’s how we’ll have, like, his description of what Britain is like. And yeah, that ended up. And when we were recording the audio book, Greg was doing voices, doing his YouTube voice. And it took a while to get through that, because it was just made us both really laughed that one. I really like that chapter. I think it’s really funny.

Dr G 22:30
That’s a good one. Julius Caesar, what a man, what a time I know, what a guy. And maybe this will help some people, you know, young people, come to a better sense of what he might have really been like. Yeah, he spends a lot of time talking about himself, that’s for sure. In

Dr Emma Southon 22:51
the third person we did, let him say, I we should have we thought they might be a bit far if we had him saying, Caesar has been to British. Yeah. Ridiculous.

Dr G 23:04
It would have served him right in some respects, but I can appreciate the change,

Dr Emma Southon 23:07
yeah, but yeah. Still, it still tickles me to imagine him on YouTube.

Dr G 23:11
Definitely. He’d have quite a following. I can only imagine

Dr Emma Southon 23:16
he really would. He’d have a podcast following, be doing massive things and filming them. Yeah, it would be ridiculous.

Dr G 23:27
So I like the fact that this is a new kind of Avenue, if you like, for your work as a way, because not only is this a co authorship situation that, but there’s also an illustrator involved, and you’ve talked a little bit about how the layout of the page is doing a lot of the work and sort of helping create the the argumentative structures and to point people in particular directions. I’m wondering, if you can take us a little bit through that process, what was it like coming together to collaborate on that visual as well as the written

Dr Emma Southon 23:59
fun? I’m not a visual thinker, so the what the page looked like was probably the bit that I was least involved in. We had kind of as we were going through. So what we did was we went through and put together, like a chronology of what we thought the chapter should be and what we wanted to include and how to break it up. And then we went through and sat on Zoom for hours, and like, chapter by chapter, we’re like, what’s the funniest way to do this chapter? And then we wrote them. So I would do the research, and then send loads of research to Greg, and he would write it and send it back to me, and then I would edit it and fiddle about with it and send it back to him. And then we would go back and forth. And then we basically sent a giant Word document, and we came would come up with kind of ideas of things that we would think were funny to for it to look like, but we basically then sent the text to Rikin and then he drew what he thought were funny, basically versions about Greg thinks of jokes really easily, like visual jokes, because of his work in TV. So sometimes he. Would put in a LIKE, Would it be funny to have like? When I found, archeologists have found skulls, cow skulls with Roman bullets in them, because the Roman army would use cows as target practice, or were just shooting cows for fun, which is bizarre. And so he was like, we have to have a picture of we have to have a picture of that. Or he would think of a caption, and then we would send that to Rikin, and then Rikin and just drew loads. And part of it is of what the page looks like is done by the editors, because it has to fit onto a certain amount of pages, essentially. And so we would lose text in order to keep a picture, or lose a picture in order to keep text. And so go went through probably 10 or 12 different iterations of what the page is going to look like. If we have this image here, the joke is before, like, the visual joke is before the paragraph, so we’re going to have to shift it around. But if we do that, then it’s going to push the visual joke onto the next page. So we’re going to have to cut out like 13 words of this paragraph so that it will all fit on this one page. And it’s a very kind of careful I have a lot more appreciation for kids books and illustrated books now, of the of how much work goes in, like page by page, to making sure that you don’t end up with a big bit of blank space. You don’t end up with a especially because we’ve got like, three layers of text. We’ve got the Greg’s text and then the interruptions. And some of them are interruptions and some of them are definitions, so where I’ve underlined something and then defined it, and keeping that all on the one page so that the jokes run in the right order, and that the paragraph doesn’t ruin the visual joke, and the visual joke doesn’t come completely out of context, is quite an undertaking, and I now have a lot of respect for children’s books editors who would happen to balance this like very visually that I did not have before. I did not appreciate them as much as I should have. So it is quite present. And sometimes I sent Rikin a lot of visual references so that everything would be as accurate as possible. So when we have at the beginning, when they you start seeing things like cosmetic mixes, cosmetic sets like appear in southern Britain. I was like, we should totally like, we’re gonna have if we can’t be having like, I don’t need. Want you to be having like, a mirror and a brush. I want it to be a Roman cosmetic set. Don’t look like what you consider to be a cosmetic set. It looks like a pestle and mortar. That’s tiny. But he was great asking for more. What does this look like? What does an actual pot look like? Like one of the original pots he drew? I was like, No, that’s a Greek pot. Sorry, I love you, but that like, there’s a difference between a Greek pot and a Roman. And you’ve drawn a Greek pot, and I need you to draw me a Roman. Like, the handles are smaller, the neck is different. And so we did go kind of back and forth, a few on that, but he really wanted to be accurate as well. So he I would send him, like, big PDFs full of images, often drawings of things from bar reports. And he would make them funny. God bless him. That

Dr G 28:17
is an art, I think, being able to take, you know, archeological drawings, and turn them into something hilarious as well as informative at the same time.

Dr Emma Southon 28:26
And we really did our best to be like, you know, what’s the difference between a Roman chariot and a like, I see any chariot like, do we know? What can we tell? How do we make them look different? What does what’s the difference between a Greek pot and a Roman so we’re not misleading people.

Dr Rad 28:44
And, yeah, yeah, well, I mean, and I think that that you’ve actually highlighted something which is also a bit of a departure for you, which is that you have most definitely been writing for adults in your previous books, all the murder, yeah,

Dr Emma Southon 28:58
all the murder, all the swearing. Oh, yeah, exactly. Development jokes, not.

Dr Rad 29:04
So what was it like having to write for children?

Dr Emma Southon 29:07
I was very lucky that I was with Greg, so he did the first draft of everything. And he obviously has been writing for kids for a very long time, and he has other kids books that he has written. This was his third or fourth one, and he did a he’s like, does he did a podcast series for kids during the lockdown called homeschool history, like he knows how to make children laugh, and he has a kid and he’s not afraid of them like I am. So he did the first pass, basically, of everything, and then I just went through and was either like, I understand the sentence, or just kind of tweet things. So I was very it felt like a kind of apprenticeship in a way of seeing Greg do his thing, and I would give him, like, quite dense 1520, page research articles that I would written up, or like lists of things. You know what? It. All the things I thought would be interesting for this chapter. And he would pare those down into 2000 words of that contained a ton of jokes for kids and some references to like, robot hamsters, or like it is a real work of genius to be able to do this and make it like, snappy and funny and yeah, and then we would just edit it down together until it got kind of littler and littler. And the only bit I wrote by myself was, which was by the time we had got, like, quite a few chapters in, was the myth buster part on the on Hadrian’s Wall. So I’d seen him write like, six or seven chapters by that point, so I felt like I could have a go. And then he edited it into something better. But it is a real it’s a real art form to talk to kids and entertain them without patronizing them, and without being like cost you the clown or something. And so it was or doing what I do to children in real life, which is to talk to them like they’re just adults, but smaller. Charles, how was your day at work? Let’s

Dr Rad 31:10
please talk about the difference between Roman and Greek pots. It’s very important that you understand the subtle differences.

Dr Emma Southon 31:15
I do as an example of how I usually am with children, I was talking to my nephew quite recently. It was his 21st birthday. And he I took him out for dinner, and we were out, and he said, Do you remember Auntie Emma when I was about six and you taught me what genocide was? I was like, yes,

Dr Rad 31:38
that is exactly the kind of thing that I would do.

Dr G 31:42
I mean, if it comes up in conversation and it’s the right time to learn the information I don’t I mean,

Dr Emma Southon 31:48
in my defense, he had, he was in a school that was very progressive, and they had decided to name all of their classes after countries, like each year group was a continent and each class was a country. The year before, he had been in hedgehog class, and this year, I asked him what class he was in, and he said, Cambodia. Oh, God. Well,

Dr Rad 32:07
that makes total sense that you would instantly go there. And so after

Dr Emma Southon 32:11
some questioning, we obviously got around to Cambodian history, fair enough. And yeah, and he considers a very formative part of his like, he’s now very politically engaged, and he’s a journalist, so I feel like I did a good job, but still,

Dr Rad 32:24
I think that’s one of the things, yeah, that is one of the things I find when you’re actually talking to a small child, because I also have a couple of nephews who are toddlers at the moment, and I find that it’s one of those things where I’ll just be talking to them normally, just as I’m like, you know, bustling around, and I’ll just say something, and then all of a sudden, as the words leave my mouth, I’m like, Oh no, that’s gonna lead to more questions. And I don’t know what their parents want me to say about this. And I literally did that the other day, where I was talking about how I was a step parent and that, and then I was like, oh no, oh no. That’s gonna lead to questions about what. What does that involve? And so I had to go through the whole thing of, look, so you know those people I call my children? Yeah, they weren’t actually ever inside of me. Oh crap, yeah. And I think, I think we ended up finishing the conversation with him, concluding that to have a step parent means that you have three mothers. And I was like, yep, you know what? Let’s just Yeah.

Dr G 33:21
We can clear that up. That’s

Dr Emma Southon 33:23
worse things that could come out. But

Dr Rad 33:26
yeah, so I am terrible at explaining things to really small

Dr Emma Southon 33:28
children. Yeah, they’re very challenging. That’s why they can see right through you. And this is the thing with writing for kids and talking to kids really like they, they know, if you’re like, trying to bullshit them, they can. They don’t have time for any kind of patronizing them or pretending like they and so you have to be enthusiastic, and you have to take them seriously. And that was which is good, because that’s what I like to do, I take everything well, that’s not true. I don’t take everything seriously, but I do take history,

Dr Rad 34:05
I think seriously underneath hilarious on the top, yeah, exactly.

Dr Emma Southon 34:08
And I wouldn’t have done a book for children if it had been anything other than what Greg does, which is to teach kids history, not just teach them history facts like or history stories, but teach them what history is and what historians do, and that history is largely arguing and interpretation. It’s not just like a static series of stories or facts or myths. It is a kind of constantly evolving discipline, and he takes that very seriously indeed. And then does robot hamster jokes.

Dr G 34:50
This actually leads me into something that I did want to ask you about, because this book has things like the the chaos ratings in it, as you as you go through. True. And, you know, this is obviously a really great mechanism, I think, for giving us sort of a little bit of a foreshadowing of what is to come or indicating just how complex the thing that is about to be discussed is going to be. And I’m wondering about how, like, a feature like that may have evolved during the discussion process.

Dr Rad 35:18
Yeah, because that’s the historic graphical bit, I think,

Dr Emma Southon 35:21
yeah, because this is so Greg’s original like pitch for this was that he will be the guy who is living through it, essentially, like he’s in present tense, and he is living through it. And sometimes he you never know what’s coming next. And sometimes what comes next is really chaotic, and like in the moment, you have no clue what’s happening, and the historian can come in and say, Oh, x, y, z is what is occurring. But like, so you have this period at the end, which is, I think, when the chaos meter goes to totally chaotic, when Britain is like in three separate empires, technically, in about a 20 year period. So the Gallic Empire splits away from the Roman Empire in the third century, and then Aurelian brings it back in, and then it splits off into a tiny British Empire, which consists of Britain.

Dr G 36:12
We’re all by ourselves,

Dr Emma Southon 36:14
yeah, for like 10 years, it’s the British Empire, and then it’s back into the Roman Empire again. And so we had that as a news reader, who’s, like, constantly being like, and then this guy’s been murdered, and then this guy’s been murdered, there’s constantly coins like, appearing, which, and who the hell is this guy? And so his feeling is that it like, sometimes it’s going to feel like you don’t know what’s going to happen, like, who you can who’s going to be the Emperor when you wake up tomorrow, who? What Empire Am I in when I wake up tomorrow? Like sometimes when you’re living day to day, it feels totally chaotic and like you don’t know how anything is going to survive, but in you can be, then be a historian, and look back and say, Ah, the forces, an Aurelian is going to come and save everybody, and it’s all going to be okay. Don’t worry, guys. Yeah. And so the chaos meter is basically how the person at the time would be feeling if they were living through this. Are they feeling like they’re in a good, chill, useful time where everything is delightful and it’s the end of history, or are they living in interesting historical times and they feel like they don’t know what their world is going to look like tomorrow, and they’re burying their gold because they’re worried that someone’s going to come and

Dr G 37:26
rob them. Fair enough,

Dr Rad 37:28
I was really impressed by all those additional elements, because, as I say, I think that’s where the historiography comes in, with the accuracy alerts the myth bust, seeing, you know, it was so layered, as you say, I was like, Whoa, there’s like, so much historiography going on on this page, and it’s a children’s book. And I think, without a doubt, this isn’t a question. I’m just saying this, without a doubt, my favorite part was the historian head to head over Buddha cup, mostly because of the illustration of you and Greg fighting each other with books.

Dr Emma Southon 37:56
Yeah, a genuinely delightful Yeah. And, you know, and that is an argument that, for some reason, I tried to keep trying to avoid Boudicca, but you come back to her constantly. I know I’ve accidentally written two books that she’s in, and like there are so many different interpretations of her and so many like that. You know you can talk to French archeologists who argue that she never existed. You can talk to like, really intense patriots who are like she was a woman, and this and like the Tacitus story, is exactly what happened to her, and that is precisely it I kind of like to sit in the middle. And I think that Tacitus is telling a very specific, fictionalized mythic story about her, and that it best, almost no resemblance to the Dio version of her, that these are, you know, she’s a real woman told as a literary device. And but then you have, you know, there’s the Amanda Scott who is like, no, she was Welsh. And Boudicca actually means vodaker, and it means victory. And like there’s so many different ways of understanding her and of of interpreting her, but all we have, really is two guys who know something about her and are writing about her for a very specific political audience, and that kind of arguing about her, that’s what history is, especially ancient history. And you know this, when you’re dealing with Roman texts and you’ve got nothing else to where you’ve got nothing else to work with, it’s just arguing over two guys and how much you want to believe those two guys were telling the truth, and if they were both telling the truth, then why their story is so different?

Dr Rad 39:44
Yeah, look as two people who base their entire podcast basically on Livy and Dionysus of Halicarnassus for a long time, and we generally do, often get to the point where I end up sort of saying at the end of the episode, so wait, maybe none of this ever actually happened. And Peta’s like, whoa, whoa.

Dr G 39:59
I mean, something happened, like, have we

Dr Rad 40:04
just proven that none of this ever happened?

Dr Emma Southon 40:06
Rome appeared fully formed, 27 BCE with Augustine

Dr G 40:14
before that. We can’t possibly know anything.

Dr Rad 40:20
You know, look, I think it’s, it is amazing how much you guys have been able to show, as you say, what history actually is, which is all these different perspectives, all this problematic evidence. It is amazing that you have been able to delve into all of these issues and cover the entire history of Britain all in one book.

Dr Emma Southon 40:36
Yeah, amazing in like 25,000 words. It’s, yeah,

Dr Rad 40:39
I might have something to learn. So tell us, if people are really keen to dive right in, and we mean physically dive in, are there any places in Britain that you would recommend going?

Dr Emma Southon 40:52
So there are a bunch of villas. So I honestly do think that fishborne is brilliant. It is very much a it’s like an early Roman villa. It’s in Sussex, and it is, it’s like the most Roman of all the Roman villas, but it is amazing, and it is like a genuine delight to see chedworth is also great. And that’s much more of a what’s the word, like British one? But, yeah, it’s a corridor, but it’s also it has great like mosaics, and it’s a great site to go to. The British Museum has all the cool stuff. So, you know, you can’t say no to the British Museum, really, it does have all the best stuff. But the great thing about Britain is you can come one day, me and my husband say we’re going to get an English Heritage membership and just spend a year like driving around Britain looking all the English Heritage stuff, because there’s so much in the way of in every town, there’s something almost every town, there’s something that is Roman, and then, like, my dad lives in Dover, and they have a fort That’s under a car park that you can go to

Dr G 42:04
classic, come to our car park fort, yeah, and

Dr Emma Southon 42:08
then and you can go to Dover.

And Dover Castle has a Roman lighthouse, so it’s still standing. Yes, it’s like next to a 12th century church, but it’s this Roman lighthouse that you can go to and virtually anywhere that you go. And quite often, because we wanted to do a whole chapter on the rediscovery of Roman Britain, because Roman Britain was not appreciated, particularly until, like, the 18th century, when they redug up bath in order to make it kind of Spa, Georgian spa destination. And we discovered all of the stuff in Bath, and all of the stuff there, you can see the Roman stuff, but a lot of it is still buried. And a lot of the stuff that they say is Roman is actually Victorian, but it’s like pseudo neoclassical. It’s still gorgeous. It’s worth going to but and just be aware that it’s not all that, but so much of it was not appreciated. And you get all of these stories of like 17th century, 16th century farmers digging up mosaics and then just chucking them in the bin. Oh, no. Ooh. There was one story that was like from 1840 something of a farmer plowing up a mosaic and then load it being in the papers, and loads of people coming to see them, and then everyone just taking some of it home. And it kind of makes you feel a bit sick,

Dr Rad 43:36
but, and this is my charm, how much stuff I mean when you combine that with all the stories of early archeologists at places like Pompeii and Herculaneum, you know, being like, that’s not important, tossing it out. Give me the good stuff. Just like, Oh my god. How much of this stuff that we complain we don’t have enough of has actually ended up in the bin. But

Dr Emma Southon 43:55
since then, it’s got a bit better. But now virtually every town in Britain has something and it will have a mosaic or something cool and Roman in their like Village Museum, and which is kind of delightful to see how much of it there is just everywhere, and not just the monumental stuff that you get if you go like, there’s no arches, there’s no big buildings, particularly, there’s just lots of little things. I will do one shout out for the Mithraeum in London, actually, if you’re in London, which is in the bottom of the Bloomberg building, but they have a load of they have the oldest writing tablets that have been found in Western Europe, which are from like 100 CE, that were all found in the Thames, and they’re all Business Tablets, so they’re well, boring, but they’re delightful to see. But then what they’ve done with the Mithraeum,with these kind of light show and holograms and this recreation of mithraic worship is really cool to see. Sounds like a delight. Yeah?

Dr Rad 44:58
Indeed. Yeah. I. Never been, actually, even though I’ve been to London several times, I didn’t know was there the last time I

Dr Emma Southon 45:05
was, yeah, you have to, like, go to the business districts and then, like, go into the bottom of a building that really feels like you shouldn’t be in

Unknown Speaker 45:13
this all Bloomberg cannon. But, yeah,

Dr Emma Southon 45:15
but it’s freedom, and it is like an hour, and you get to see, and they’ve got these kind of displays of all of the stuff that they found. Their archeological reports are great as well, actually. But yeah, there’s just so much on the army. You can go up and see all the forts in the north, and you can go and see Hadrian’s Wall and walk along it. And you can go to Vindolanda, although the good tablets are in the British Museum.

Dr G 45:39
Fair warning, fair warning. Yeah,

Dr Emma Southon 45:41
they do have lots

Dr Rad 45:42
Start at the British Museum, then work your way up.

Dr Emma Southon 45:44
Yeah, pretty much start the bottom, work your way up, drive around. There is a great book, actually, about driving around Roman Britain, by Charlotte Higgins, oh, okay, and she drove around a few years old now, she drove around Britain and went to loads and loads of different Roman sites, and, like really explored the impact that Rome left on on the British landscape that you can still see. So I would recommend that

Dr G 46:10
fantastic. All right. Well, to wrap this up, because this has been a fabulous conversation, as always, we hear that there might be exciting new, upcoming projects in your life

Dr Emma Southon 46:22
there are, and

Dr G 46:23
we’re wondering, if you can tell us hints and tips I can.

Dr Emma Southon 46:26
So the book that I’m writing at the moment is very definitely for adults, and is a kind of big cultural history of slavery in the Roman Empire and all of the ways that slavery was embedded into the Empire, and supported it and made it possible for the Empire to exist, basically, which I’m trying not to make depressing, largely by focusing on people, and as many people as I can that to experience slavery in one day or one way or another, which is everybody in the empire, like there is not one single person in the whole Roman Empire who experienced a day without coming into contact with slavery in some way, either by owning them, being one or dealing with an enslaved person. So that’s the one I’m writing at the moment. And then I have a two book deal now, so there’s minimum of two books coming. So the next one after that is going to be about the Palatine and a history of the Palatine complex, through the emperors who lived there, how it grew, the what was there? What’s going on? Who are these guys? It takes up the takes of, like, two miles of Rome. It takes up like a nearly a quarter of the city in its original walls. It’s enormous, and it’s full of people, and yeah, what’s going on up there, and how it changes, and everybody from the guy who is in charge of import taxes from Alexandria to the guy whose job is to be a sexy human pet.

Dr Rad 48:06
Sounds fascinating. You

Dr G 48:09
can go up that hill, but you don’t know what anybody will ask you to do once you get to the top of the

Dr Emma Southon 48:14
map. You do not and it could be very boring, or it’s almost only gonna be very boring, but it might also be very weird,

Dr G 48:22
amazing. Both of those projects actually sound really incredible and important, actually, because I think for readers who are interested in Rome but haven’t had the opportunity to really study it in depth, the extent to which slavery shapes Rome and how it operates is is massive. And yeah, it needs to be better understood. I think, yeah. And

Dr Emma Southon 48:44
when I talk to people, and I tell people who are not Roman historians that this is what I’m doing 99% of the time, the response is, Oh, I hear slavery in Rome was actually fine, like everybody was freed, and it was basically like being a serf, and you have to be like, no,

Dr G 49:04
actually pretty terrible.

Dr Rad 49:07
Just generally not a good idea. It

Dr Emma Southon 49:09
is still very much slavery. So, yeah,

Dr G 49:12
like, just

Dr Rad 49:14
because it’s better than some forms of Greek slavery, does it mean that people are like, Oh, that’s totally cool. I’ll totally do

Dr Emma Southon 49:21
Yeah. Just because it doesn’t have a philosophy behind it doesn’t mean that it isn’t still slavery, yeah, yeah. So part of it is going to be overcoming the fact that people think that Roman slavery is not really slavery, or they don’t think it’s chattel slavery, or, yeah, or they’re just really focused on one specific form of domestic slavery like that. You are the secretary of Cicero, and therefore you have a certain amount of power, forgetting all of the people in the fields and the mines and their Fullers and the people doing the monstrous jobs that no one will take, you know is being paid to do. They’re doing it forever.

Dr Rad 49:59
Yeah, you gotta think of that opening of Spartacus, because as much as there is zero evidence that that’s what Spartacus originally did, the film does show him working in pretty terrible job. At first, there’s

Dr Emma Southon 50:13
a lot of people talking about like mining and field work and chain gangs and, you know, and how terrible it was, but that’s the next project, which it not forget. Are

Dr Rad 50:25
you sure? I don’t know. Yeah,

Dr Emma Southon 50:27
I don’t know. Maybe, all right, yeah, just really depressed some children, yeah.

Dr Rad 50:32
Well, that is very exciting. We will be looking forward to hopefully chatting to you again when that is finished. But thank you so much for talking to us today. As usual, we have, not only did we learn a lot from the book, but we learned a lot about the process of producing a book like this. And I definitely would encourage actually adults to read it as well as get it for your kids, because I think you’ll find it’s a genuinely delightful read. Yeah,

Dr Emma Southon 50:59
I think that everybody will learn a lot from it. There are not that many books on Roman Britain for adults or for anybody that do a big tell you all about it, and this is a good starting point, I think.

Dr G 51:15
Yeah, fantastic. Well, thank you so much for telling us more about this book. So for people who are listening at home or wherever you are out and about, the book is called totally chaotic history. Roman Britain gets rowdy with an exclamation mark. So get the excitement pumping. Get into some historiography. Go and enjoy the whole swath of Roman British history. Yeah,

Dr Rad 51:39
and it is available in e book as well as print and audio book from the sounds of it. Yeah,

Dr Emma Southon 51:43
my first audio book reading experience, I do a voice. I do a good couple of amusing voices. So if you want to hear me do my first full range of voice acting,

Dr Rad 51:55
how exciting? Yeah, I look forward to hearing what you think Agrippina the younger sounds, all right. Well, thank you so much, and we will definitely be talking to you hopefully shortly about thank you so much. Thank you for listening to this special episode of the partial historians. You can find our sources sound credits and an automated transcript in our show [e-mail] Our music is by Bettina Joy De Guzman. You too can support our show and help us to produce more fascinating content about the ancient world by becoming a Patreon. In return, you receive exclusive early access to our special episodes, just like this one. However, if you lost all your money betting on a chariot race, please just tell someone about the show or give us a five star review until next time we are yours in ancient Rome.

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