The Lavish Eating Habits Of The Ancient Romans | Let's East History | Timeline

Hi everybody and welcome to this documentary on Timeline. My name's Dan Snow and I want to tell you about History Hit TV. It's like the Netflix for history. Hundreds of exclusive documentaries and interviews with the world's best historians. We've got an exclusive offer available to fans of Timeline. If you go to History Hit TV, you can either follow the information below this video or just Google History Hit TV and use the code Timeline. You get a special introductory offer. Go and check it out. In the meantime, enjoy this video. Wars tore the heart out of the 20th century. They are a rent in the fabric of history. When the first great war ended, the world faced the challenge of making a lasting peace. At Versailles, in remaking the map in reordering the world's economy, they fumbled and made an impossible peace. On February the 6th, 1922, at the Washington Naval Conference, a deal was struck that ended three months of debate about armament, disarmament, and rearmament. For every five ships the United States and Great Britain had, Japan would have three and Italy and France would have 1.75 each. What was called the Rolls-Royce, Rolls-Royce Ford ratio. By such shaky steps might peace be maintained if it was given a chance. On the morning of June the 24th, 1922, Walter Rathenau, a dominant and sensible minister of Weimar, set off for work from his villa in the Berlin suburb of Grunewald. The weather was fine, so he instructed his chauffeur to use the open top limousine. And alone in the... He was gunned down by... Although it was probably the most famous of these assassinations, it's not the only assassination of a moderate centrist or left-wing figure in the early years of the Weimar Republic. There is a concerted campaign of right-wing terrorism, really from 1919 until 1921, 22, 23. And in some ways, I think Rathenau's significance is almost bound up with his assassination and his death. In the subsequent Reichstag debate, the chancellor, Josef Wirth, caused uproar, accusing the right-wing press of inciting the murder. There stands the enemy, he called across the chamber. And there is no doubt about it. The enemy is on the right. With violence becoming commonplace, political murders in the hundreds, Germany, a unified nation for less than half a century, was at risk of disintegration. The political scene, rallies, street demonstrations, and paramilitary turnouts that first lifted Hitler to prominence were fractious and feverish because living was descending into chaos. Food prices increased almost eightfold between 1918 and 1921. In 1922, they increased 130-fold. When numbers are so fantastic, unreality permeates everything. Everyone is liable to follow Alice through the looking glass. Thus, the Bavarian parliament, with its deficit doubling in 1922, and having not a clue how to deal with massive tax liabilities, voted to double its annual grant, encouraging gymnastics. In the whole course of history, the Reichsbank has never run after its own tail with the speed of the Reichsbank. A policy described by Joseph Addison of the British Embassy in Berlin as the daily creation of fresh paper money. Things were worse in Austria, where by the end of August, the kroner hit 350,000 to the pound. The Austrian capital, the capital of Austria, had been abandoned and was still untethered. Allowed to survive with its elegant capital as the barely viable rump of a once-tremendous empire, Austria comprised, in the words of historian Adam Ferguson, a few million bankrupt, hungry people floundering about on a map they did not recognize. Dr. Seeple, the chancellor, addressed the League of Nations and made clear that unless help was forthcoming, Austria would be obliged to surrender some of her autonomy. Help forthcame. The Geneva Protocol for the reconstruction of Austria was signed on October the 4th. Prices began to fall. The value of the kroner stabilized. Such things were possible. But not universal. In Italy, between 1920 and 1921, there had been a 500% increase in unemployment and a 50% hike in prices. In 1922, Mussolini took power. He did not seem to have a particular plan. In September, he confessed that, our program is simple. We want to govern Italy. And that pretty much was the entire program. What starts in Italy is something that looks very, very small. A small group of activists, led by a maverick, come to power. They have no programmatic document. They have no equivalent of Mein Kampf. And in fact, even the declarations by Mussolini don't help either. I mean, Mussolini famously has said that fascism is action. Mussolini did not seize power by marching on Rome. History and King Victor Emmanuel were misinformed. There's a sort of military-ish coup, in the sense that armed fascists march on the capital city, Rome. They don't really get there, but they march towards it. It rains heavily and the maps are poor. It's not quite clear whether the army is going to resist them or something or other. Rome is defended by soldiers and barbed wire. The king is asked to declare martial law. That means fighting in bloodshed, and the king refuses. He will permit no civil war. He telegraphs Mussolini to come and take the government. Mussolini arrived on an overnight train from Milan. Mussolini, according to A.J.P. Taylor, entered his sleeping car in a black shirt and stepped out in a top hat and tailcoat. What Taylor characterised as a parable of the variations between respectability and revolution that he maintained thereafter. And then the fascists come into Rome and actually commit a few murders and beat up the socialists they can find and sack their newspaper offices and do all those sort of fascist things. The legendary march on Rome had an official death toll of three. So, why do I insist on proclaiming that that October was historically a revolution, asked Mussolini. Because words have their own tremendous magic power, he answered. He led a coalition government which included only four fascist ministers, including himself. Once he becomes prime minister, almost all of the respectable Italy rallies behind his coalition government. It's approved by the king, obviously, it's approved by the Vatican, it's approved by Italian industry and commerce, it's approved by the large landowners, it's approved by Freemasonry. I think the prevalent feeling was that Mussolini could be controlled. So, he could perhaps promote the rule of law and law and order and crack down on any dissent. But I don't think that any of the people who are at the decision-making table calculate that things are going to go where they end up going. Britain had been, at least the city of London had been, banker to the world. Sterling was the reserve currency. And it was a matter unanimously agreed in the city that a return to the pound's pre-war relationship to gold was fundamental to the recovery of that cherished position. Devaluation would have made exports more competitive and carried other benefits, but confidence and prestige would have suffered. Choosing deflation, the Bank of England increased interest rates to 7% in 1920 and threw two million people out of work. Still, 1922 was, according to writer and critic Cyril Connolly, the annus morabilis of the modern movement. Except for the Dadaists, who suffered a terminal falling out. According to Theo van Doesburg, the group of artist anarchist revolutionaries clashed over whether a locomotive was more modern than a bowler hat. More enduringly, Ulysses, generally voted the most significant novel of the 20th century, was published in 1922. But the Ireland that James Joyce, its expatriate author, so lovingly detailed, was no more. Even though about 150,000 Irishmen had fought in the Great War, in Ireland there was a very significant political movement calling itself Sinn Féin. Which wanted nothing to do with the Great War, had had nothing to do with the Great War, and instead had allegiance to a republic which had been proclaimed in 1916. Ireland's war of independence had ended and a civil war followed. After the Irish Civil War and the granting of limited independence in 1922, Ireland was still viewed by the British as a kind of, you know, as a lost dominion. For most people, it was not violence that was transforming daily life. It was progress. Church attendance fell as automobilists, as they were called, day excursionists, drove out of town and, to give their journeys some point, pursued a new interest. Which was reflected in 1922, when the car magazine changed its name to Car. By 1922, 1923, a run of prosperity begins. And I think this is the moment when the power of American industry and manufacturing in the United States and the world becomes apparent. Washing machines, refrigerators appear for the first time, millions of cars on the road. Mass production is Main Street's inspiration. Folks who don't even own a bathtub own a Model T, a Tin Lizzy. After all, you can't drive into town in a bathtub. If the car was left in the garage and the family remained at home, there was a new marvel to entertain. During 1922, the number of American radio stations grew from 28 to 570. And moviegoing was a universal pastime. It's a misnomer to assume that silent cinema, as we call it, was watched in silence. It was a babel of noise, not just perhaps the honky-tonk piano twiddling away somewhere, but the fact that children who grew up in, shall we say, in America and who had learned English from virtually from birth or going to school would actually translate the titles to their parents in Italian or in more frequently in Yiddish. On August the 14th, 1922, a man who had, in his day, been a candidate for most powerful person in England, died. He had been amongst the first to realize the potential influence of the popular press. But Lord Northcliffe spent his final weeks raving mad in a hutch on the roof of a house in Carlton Gardens, belonging to the Duke of Devonshire, which also seems like a parable. On January the 9th, 1923, with Britain dissenting, the French, Belgian and Italian members of the Reparation Commission agreed that Germany was in default. Specifically, it had failed to make an in-kind reparations payment to France of 100,000 telegraph poles. Under the terms of treaties and settlements galore, this was a trigger for French occupation of the Ruhr, which her Belgian premier, Raymond Poincaré, had foreshadowed to the British prime minister several weeks earlier. It was an act which was to double Germany's budget deficit. Lloyd George called the French move an act of military aggression against an unarmed nation. General de Goote led five French and one Belgian divisions, 60,000 men, into the Ruhr on January the 11th. They occupied the region in which were 85% of Germany's coal resources, 80% of her steel and pig iron production and 10% of her population. Who promptly downed tools. On January the 16th, the government in Berlin announced its official support for non-cooperation in the Ruhr. Germany was in a very bad way indeed. There'd been an attempt by the French and the Belgians to extract reparations from Germany and the German government had reacted by sort of, they didn't call it that then, but a policy of passive resistance. And it had destroyed the German economy and German inflation was absolutely wild. The Reichsmark plunged from 7,260 to the dollar to 49,000 to the dollar. Within three weeks of the invasion, the Reichsbank had issued its first million mark note. At the end of July, the German people found themselves folding 10, 20 and 50 million mark notes. And with ridiculous predictability, on August the 22nd, the first 100 million mark note was issued as hyperinflation stripped the currency of all value. By autumn, the non-cooperation policy could not be sustained. It collapsed in ignominious acquiescence as the newspaper, Corniche Zeitung, priced five million marks off September the 30th, published the oath of service to the French and Belgians that German workers were being compelled to swear. To see for himself whether it was true that there was food in the country which the farmers were not sending to the towns, Joseph Addison, counsellor at the British Embassy, left Berlin. But when he tried to buy an egg from a country dweller, he was told, Wir wollen keine Judenfetzen von Berlin. We don't want any Jewish confetti from Berlin. In the first six months of 1923, about 17 trillion marks were printed. It involved, according to one estimate, the output of more than 30 paper mills, 150 printing firms and 2,000 printing presses. As the money flooded the country, the greatest inflation in history elevated the exchange rates stratospherically. From 620,000 marks to the dollar in August 1923 to 630 billion three months later, by which time a kilo of butter cost 250 billion marks. People walked along the street pushing prams full of banknotes and if one blew away, no one chased it. The price of a cup of coffee on the Unter den Linden might double between placing the order and adding the sugar. Petty thieves were tipping banknotes from people's baskets and trolleys and stealing the baskets. As the mark sailed past 60 milliard to the pound, the British ambassador was pleased to observe that this was approximately one mark for every second that has elapsed since the birth of Christ. The number of banknotes in circulation is better written than spoken. On November the 5th, the price of a two kilogram loaf of bread vaulted from 20 billion to 140 billion marks. And there were nations. Berlin, once so proudly and antiseptically clean, was looking grubby. A stone grey corpse, according to artist George Grosz. And into all of this, at least into the Burka Braukeller, stowed Adolf Hitler. It was November the 8th, 1923. Armed stormtroopers entered the building and their leader, Adolf Hitler, fired two shots into the air and announced that the revolution had begun. The next day, November the 9th, 1923, Hitler and 3,000 supporters marched through Munich. Planning to link up, their way was blocked. Shots from the Munich police defending the Odeonplatz were enough to bring the intended coup to a spluttering end. 21 people were killed. And Adolf Hitler's revolution ended as quickly as it had begun. He was arrested and the printing presses continued to roll. 74 million, million, million marks a week. And the 100 billion mark note went safely into circulation. By the time Hitler was released from the Landsberg prison, support for the Volkisch bloc had collapsed. Not because of Hitler's absence, but because of Germany's recovery. Spearheaded by the Doors plan and the issue of a new currency, the Rentenmark. It was private bankers that helped stabilise the German economy and private bankers gave Germany a seal of approval. And because interest rates were higher in Germany than they were in the United States, this encouraged a flow of capital from the United States to Germany. The finance minister, Dr Luther, likened the issue of the Rentenmark to building a house starting with the roof. Confidence was all. Halmar Schacht, head of the Reichsbank and later an important player in the Third Reich economy, transformed chaos into something that at least promised order. He did it, his secretary, Fraulein Steffens, said, by reading no letters and writing no letters. He telephoned a great deal, telephoned in every direction. And he smoked. Apart from that, he did nothing. Japan's recovery had been more disciplined and altogether more effective. The economy had almost dragged the yen back to its pre-war rate against the dollar. When, just before lunchtime on September the 1st, 1923, the Great Kanto Earthquake subjected Tokyo, Yokohama and surrounding areas to almost five minutes of shaking, with an energy release equivalent to some 400 Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs, followed by a tsunami 11 meters in height. Japan, the land of the cherry blossom and the geisha, but always living under the shadow of nature's most dreaded manifestations. The Japanese view the wreckage with a stasis more or less unbelievable to the Western mind. Soon, small fires merged to form a firestorm. By the morning of September the 3rd, at least 140,000 people were dead and two-thirds of Tokyo and four-fifths of Yokohama were ashes. The capital area around Tokyo, its main port of Yokohama, were hit by what is certainly the most devastating earthquake that Japan has faced in its modern history. It had a number of sort of longer-term consequences. It increased the power temporarily of the military. It affected longer-term thinking about how to cope with disaster, and disaster included attack by other countries. And it did influence the way in which new prime ministers were chosen. A correspondent from an Osaka newspaper flying over Tokyo's ruins in an open cockpit army reconnaissance plane observed that even at a height of 1,000 meters, the disagreeable and unmistakable odor of death overpowered the smell of engine exhaust. Much of urban Japan was knocked down, and within three months, Japan had been forced to seek a loan, taking one organized through J.P. Morgan at the punitive rate of 6.5%. At some levels, it fed into longer-term economic woes, which, without doubt, laid fertile ground for the political trends that emerged, particularly in the 1930s. President Warren Harding, who had been elected to preside over the peace in the most sweeping presidential victory in history, was classed by his own party as not a first-rater. Opponents said that his speeches leave the impression of an army of pompous phrases moving across the landscape in search of an idea. He was also a serial womanizer, which may or may not have contributed to the heart attack that killed him. He was succeeded by the vice president, Calvin Coolidge. Calvin Coolidge symbolizes the period, I think, very much so. Silent Cowell, who was well-known for not being drawn in conversation, would just like to sit there and have a quiet time and just let everything else unfold around him. America in the 20s did not have paramilitary fascist street fighters like the gangs that transformed German and Italian politics. But one organization that had almost faded out did enjoy a revival. The Ku Klux Klan had nearly a million members by 1923 and at $3 million, an annual income that matched that of Al Capone's empire. Despite being, in the view of William Allen White, a self-constituted body of moral idiots, the Klan, whose original appeal and action was more anti-Catholic than anti-Black, touched something in American society. Not a nerve, but a nervousness about a loss of identity, of Americanism. What most inspired membership of the Klan was the seriously held, seriously clownish belief that the Catholic Church was plotted to install the Pope in the White House. And the Pope will sit in the White House when hell freezes was a popular slogan. The America of the biggest cities was a very different place. When young Duke Ellington arrived in New York for the first time in 1923, he exclaimed, Why, it's just like the Arabian Nights. It was the bright lights of department stores. The jewel in the crown of a large city's downtown section would be the department store. The appeal of window shopping, the beginnings of fashion as an industry for everyone. And so, for the first time, by about 1922-23, you can compare perhaps a flesh-toned silk satin rayon dress by Chanel with the cheapest level of production that would cost just a few shillings. These were basic consumer goods that gave the ordinary man or woman a little bit of a pick-me-up. Let them step through that portal of consumer society. By buying a China elephant for their knick-knack show. Mussolini was shopping for an empire. On August 31st, Italian troops landed on Corfu. He called the invasion peaceful and provisional, a description that seems absurd now and must have seemed so then. After 15 days and the first fascist essay in territorial aggrandizement, Italy withdrew from Corfu. And in one of history's typical and pleasing ironies, Italy sponsored Ethiopia's application to join the League of Nations in 1923. As the leaves started to fall, it seemed that so many competing tensions across the European continent must lead to a calamity of some sort. Communist coup. Fascist coup. German disintegration. Military intervention. In Spain, in a pronunciamento, the Captain General of Catalonia, with the King's support, made himself dictator. This great social tension led in September of 1923 to the establishment of a dictatorship. And the dictator, in many ways, was, if you like, the perfect praetorian guard for those sectors of Spanish society that felt threatened. The dictator was Miguel Primo de Rivera. King Alfonso XIII later called him My Mussolini. In Russia, in the winter of 1923-4, as Lenin near death, figures shuffled impatiently, ready to step into the light. Trotsky, hero of the Red Army because of his role in the 1921 victory in the Civil War. Zinoviev, head of the Comintern. And Bukharin, the revolution's leading theorist. The succession would fall on none of them. Deeper in the shadows stood a man who had been in the tsarist equivalent of the gulag. Not as a political martyr, but as a bank robber. His party name was Josef Stalin. As General Secretary of the Bolshevik Party, Stalin had enormous patronage opportunities. As the General Secretary, he was in charge of the mechanisms of appointing key people to key posts across the Soviet Union. Do you know, said Britain's ambassador after first meeting Stalin, I think the chap's a gentleman. Calvin Coolidge was elected in his own right in 1924. The slogan that carried the day was, Coolidge or chaos. I want the people of America to be able to work less for the government and more for themselves. I want them to have the rewards of their own industry. This is the chief meaning of freedom. Coolidge believed that the less government, the better. And he aspired, in Irving Stone's words, to become the least president the country had ever had. Coolidge possessed what one writer described as God-given inertia. And a famed riposte, reportedly by Dorothy Parker, could stand as an indictment of Coolidge's presidency. On being told in 1933 that Coolidge had died, she is said to have asked, how can you tell? In Europe, the threat of chaos seemed more present than in America. In France, the franc, which had traded at 93 to the pound, by April 25th, had dropped to 164, and by July 26th, to 243, which had a savage effect on French government spending. But it was deliciously appealing to expats on tight budgets, and they poured in. In the Italian election of April 1924, Mussolini's bloc, by now dominated by the fascists, won 375 of the 535 seats. Giacomo Mattiotti, the leader of the socialists, protested the legitimacy of the result. He disappeared, and was later found murdered. In repressive actions that followed, in Mussolini's own words, the foundations of the totalitarian state were laid. The socialist trade unions, they become illegal. The newspapers are more and more censored. Their editors are replaced, and instead of having some editor who might be a critic of Mussolini, you get editors who will always toady and express enthusiasm. Mussolini was one of the most wonderful men of our times, according to Winston Churchill's wife. Pope Pius XI called him the man whom providence has sent us. Steps where, meanwhile, and at last, being taken to stabilize Germany's economy. Compromise, the election of Gustav Stressman, and a committee set up to re-examine the issue of reparations under American banker Charles Dawes looked for a way forward. There is an effort by this Republican administration to try and help Europe back on its feet. The Dawes plan and the Young plans of the 1920s are an effort to revive the European economy, which had obviously been hugely disrupted by the war. Constructive diplomacy in one part of the world was offset by prejudice in another. 1919's Paris settlement had rejected Tokyo's proposal racial equality clause. In 1921, Britain chose not to renew the Anglo-Japanese alliance. And in 1924, the United States Congress enacted legislation excluding Japanese from immigration quotas. The stage was set for an upsurge in Japanese nationalism, for the emergence of a new class the Japanese called double patriots. But it was in Russia that the most significant event happened. When Lenin died on January the 22nd, an immortalization commission was set up, which, in contravention of the widow's wishes, decided to mummify the leader. He remains on display almost a century later. But that, of course, does not make him immortal. Neither does it make him a saint. Stalin inherited a fully formed terror state. He ramped up the scale of its oppression. But the machinery was there and ticking over. Lenin had built it, yet Manning Clark, long the doyen of Australian historians, was able to find Lenin Christ-like, at least in his compassion. Similar claims would be made for his successor, but not by Trotsky, who in 1924 wrote, he is needed by all of them, and in all the sneaks that are crawling out of the upturned soil of the revolution, Stalin will become the dictator of the USSR. It was not only totalitarian regimes that employed institutional violence. This was a world in which men could get away with statements that would now lead to crucifixion on social media. We presume in South Africa that white civilization must be the guiding influence. Gisbert Hofmeyer, administrator of South West Africa, told the League of Nations Mandate Commission in 1924. And the Syro-Palestinian Congress wrote to the president of the Fifth Assembly of the League on September 17th, 1924, arguing that their lands could not be placed alongside Cameroon, Togo, and other savage countries in justifying Western rule. Racism is colorblind. Hitler was released into this rather topsy-turvy world on the 20th of December. He had 333 days of his sentence still to serve. Had he spent those days in prison, this might be a very different story. The Charleston arrived in England in 1925. The eponymous melody was composed by an African-American pianist named James P. Johnson for the Broadway show Running Wild. The reliably noxious Daily Mail likened it to Negro. But bright young things weren't about to be deterred. It swept Britain as it had swept the States, and it became, and it remains, the emblem of an age. Motifs of racial theory, social Darwinism, and the faux science of eugenics weave like a toxic thread through the era, buttressing the exceptionalist attitude that validated the idea of empire. Oldest city in the world that is still standing. Damascus was ancient when the Apostle Paul departed through that eastern gate. To sally forth and give Christianity to the Gentile world. To the French, for example, the Syrian revolt of 1925 was the work of brigands. But to the Syrians, it was a response to a system in which every petty local official needed French approval for every action. Where officers who had served in the Ottoman army were forced to accept commissions of a lower rank. And where pegging the local currency to the franc led inevitably to inflation and distress. By 1923, 1924, disillusion is very, very substantial. And by 1925, you start to see armed risings taking place in Syria against French rule. The great Syrian revolt breaks out in those years in the Jebel Druze, the Druze Mountains. The revolt against French rule found the whole of Syria was dry kindling. On August the 23rd, styling himself commander of the Syrian Revolutionary Armies, Al-Attrash issued a general call to arms. The story takes a predictable course. Druze and Bedouin fighters hammered by aircraft and tanks. The suppression of these revolts is... How shall I put this? The revolts are suppressed with force. Less predictably, the bombing of Damascus led to an international outcry and a crisis for the League of Nations mandate system. Here was a turning point. How could violence used to control the child races be reconciled with attacks on ancient civilized and biblical places? Bomb Damascus? What also happened to the Permanent Mandates Commission is that as they developed their rules for running the mandates, they create an amazing forum for press, for publicity, for lobbying, for complaint. And the bombing of Damascus in 1925 and 1926 is a great example of this. Outrage was easily hosed down. When the Permanent Mandates Commission concluded its inquiry, France's representative, Decay, could with some satisfaction report to his masters at the Quai d'Orsay an agreement that neither the mandate nor the choice of mandatory was up for discussion. In fact, the inquiry had refused to hear from Syrian representatives who had traveled to give evidence. Hindsight is a luxury, but I really struggle sometimes to understand how they possibly thought what they were doing was ever going to end well. On May the 30th, in the same spirit, British police opened fire on a patriotic demonstration in Shanghai, killing 12 and wounding scores. The early death of the Republic's most prominent leader, like other untimely deaths in the period, was destabilizing. Sun Yat-sen had become quite ill and he was very politically isolated by the 1920s. When he died in 1925, his position as leader of China's nationalist revolution was taken up by Chiang Kai-shek. Now, why should someone like Chiang Kai-shek have come to power? The reason is that essentially he understood military tactics. It may have been his rival, Mao, who later said that power comes out of the barrel of a gun. But Chiang Kai-shek was one of the first figures to learn that lesson. At least the Europeans were making an effort to get on with each other. The terms of a crucial Franco-German detente were spelled out in the Treaty of Locarno, signed on October the 16th. Those terms had been agreed by the foreign ministers Briand of France, Stressman of Germany and Austin Chamberlain of Great Britain during a five-hour cruise across Lake Maggiore aboard the Orange Blossom. They saw Germany rehabilitated as an equal partner. A little under a year later, she was to join the League of Nations thanks to Stressman's pragmatism. He recognised that simply denying the treaty, as so many Germans wanted, was a pass to nowhere. And so what he did was open relations, improve relations with France, with Britain and with these very famous agreements that were negotiated. This reconciliation was engineered against a backdrop of growing extremism in Germany. On both left... and right. In 1923, there were only 71 Nazi groups outside of Bavaria. In 1925, there were 262. And Hitler commissioned his photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann, to take a series of posed portraits of him gesticulating. And looking at these, and, we must suppose, a mirror, whilst listening to a recording of one of his speeches, he rehearsed his offence. It was calculated charisma. But had he need of it? He jumps to his feet and there he is, shakes my hand like an old friend and those big blue eyes like stars. He is glad to see me. I am in heaven. So wrote Josef Goebbels in his diary. It was November 1925 and he had just met Adolf Hitler.