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I'm delighted to be joined this afternoon by Dr. George Maher, who is an actuary who has had a long career in financial services.

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He's an expert who's worked across the world. But he also has a PhD in the economy of the Roman Empire.

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And combining these two interests and experiences.

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He's now the CIA's honorary treasurer. His book, Pugnare: Economic Success and Failure, explores the past from a business perspective,

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and it was listed by the week as one of the ten business books of 2021.

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So hello, George, it's lovely to have you on the podcast and thank you very much for having me.

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It's our pleasure. So can we start by going back a little bit and can you tell us about your

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first encounter or the first time that you became aware of the ancient world?

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The first time I became aware of the ancient world was when I started secondary school in Dublin.

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And you had a choice. You had a choice between commerce and Latin.

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And I picked Latin. And it was it was just fascinating to read Julius Caesar.

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And I can remember the words and he's invading Gaul and all these battles and everything like that.

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And so it's so amazing that you're sitting there.

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There is this distant world or this strange language and you're engaging with it, you're learning it, and it's easy.

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And that was that was great. Then I, I went to a boarding school after that in Tipperary,

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and there the choice had not been between commerce and Latin, it had been between commerce and Greek.

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And it was too late for me then to start Greek.

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And I always kind of miss that. So later on I came back and learnt Greek.

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So that was my first encounter of that wonderful world with wonderful teachers who had written textbooks.

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Some of the textbooks I can actually sort of still see.

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So when the when I'm going to come to the subjunctive of amo, it's on the page over and at the top is the present,

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subjunctive it stays with you and, and the sense and the sense of the time.

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So when I when I really look at some of these things, it brings back to life when I was 12 or 14.

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It's fascinating how so much we remember through rote or through what we've heard or listened to,

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but as often as well, from what we see on the page, and that it's that real memory of childhood.

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It sticks with you. Sure. It's fascinating then that you had to choose between commerce and classics at a young age.

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And that's something which obviously has impacted the entirety of your career.

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So you then went on to choose commerce as a career, but also you studied, I think mathematics.

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Is that at university as well as Classics?

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So what was your decision and your and your choice there between those two different different worlds and careers at that point?

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When I was when I was at school, I was good at mathematics and I loved mathematics and the purity of it.

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I also loved English, but I could.

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The best I could manage in English was a C, and I could get it in mathematics, was an A

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If I put the work in and so forth.

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And, you know, I remember before the exams, before the English exams, you know, reading T.S. Eliot or Dylan Thomas and thinking,

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This is beautiful, but you're going to get a C George. So what was I going to do at university?

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It sort of had to be mathematics because I could do it well and I would enjoy it.

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And then when I had my degree and I did well and did enjoy it, I had to to find something to do out in the big wide world.

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And I was in a I was in a pub with some friends and there was some fellow there and he was telling me that new

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Ireland Insurance on Dawson's Street were looking for actuaries.

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And he explained that an actuary was someone who was good at mathematics.

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So I said, Well, I'll see if I can get an interview.

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So I turned up and there was a fellow there and the chief actuary, and he tried to impress me by explaining all about his expense analysis.

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And I tried to impress him by telling him about the astronomy course I just been on.

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And after that, I walked up Dawson Street and I sat down on a bench in St Stephen's Green, and I said to myself, I've got a job.

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And then one thing leads to another.

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You have to do the actuarial exams and you're qualified as an actuary then this happens, that happens and all the rest.

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And you learn along the way.

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And one of the things, one of the things that I learnt along the way and they taught me that when I when I came to came to London,

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was, you know, all of this mathematics is beautiful, but if you want to be a successful consultant,

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you have to understand the business,

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You have to understand this business that you're now engaging with and we're paying for your advice and they really want your mathematical abilities.

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And business is about people.

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And through that apprenticeship I learnt a lot about business and how it interacts with the mathematical talent and the fascinating,

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the fascinating ways in which businesses work, the ways in which businesses thrive, and the ways in which businesses destroy themselves.

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So, so so that that was, that was where it goes from Latin through mathematics to commerce.

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Thank you, George. And you've mentioned that so much of actually what we understand about business and we understand

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about life and actually we understand about the past is through the stories and the lives of people.

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It is it is about people, in essence.

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And I'm sure you would argue that economics is as much about people and interactions as it is about the money itself and financial contracts, etc.

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So how how do you think that we can learn from the past, from the Romans?

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I think in particular is your interest when it comes to understanding the people behind finance.

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The Roman Empire, the Roman Republic as well, was a fantastic human achievement.

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And if we look at the the economics of it, the business of it, the opportunities it gave individuals to prosper,

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to trade, to grow across an enormous canvas that went from Britain to India.

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As far as trade is concerned, it was mankind's greatest economic achievement until our time.

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And if you want to if you want to learn great lessons, take a great teacher.

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If you go to Barcelona and you look at you go to the Picasso Museum,

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you will see examples of his paintings from early childhood all the way up to early adulthood and beyond.

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And you see what he's doing. He's starting out and he's painting very realistically.

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He is copying the old masters, so he's absorbing all of the greatness that preceded him.

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For him then to create something which is unique in and in addition to.

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Our knowledge are the achievements of mankind because it is such a great achievement.

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We can see great failures, great near failures, we can see great recoveries, and and we can learn from all of that.

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I think one of the most tremendous achievements of the Republic, the empire, the whole thing is

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what happened after the horrible first century B.C. when the system is tearing itself apart,

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when vast amounts of wealth are coming in, destabilising it.

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And it could have gone to hell in a handbasket. But it didn't.

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It didn't. It changed itself. It kept a lot of the forms.

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It kept the stories, it kept the sense of of self-belief and all the rest.

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But it had to transform itself to survive. And it did.

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And it went on to even even greater and better things.

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And, you know, I've been involved in some very interesting and amazing projects, and some of them have one particularly involved Lloyd's of London,

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a great British institution, which in the late nineties, early nineties as well, was at risk of of imploding.

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And as you watch it do, all that is necessary to survive.

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Dropping some traditions, keeping others, changing things.

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Do you just see the same thing as us as I see happening in the time of Augustus?

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And what was very interesting for me, you know, as a junior,

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actuary watching that thing that happened at Lloyds was I saw people putting in massive amounts of effort for actually little gain,

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because many of these people, you know, they were wealthy, their careers had were finished.

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Ah, but it was they loved the thing the thing had given them so much study to study great achievement, watch great failures.

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And you know, you learn a lot from them.

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And the Roman Empire, economically speaking, is one of mankind's greatest achievements.

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But what was it then that Augustus did to prevent that implosion and to create that change to allow Rome to capitalise upon its success at that time?

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Many and various things happened. And it's easy.

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It's easy for us to put a name to it as a you know, to help us remember it or make the story or something like that.

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But something like this never happened just because of, you know, one man, even even though the Res Gestae I talks about him, it's him.

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The people, the the people at the top, the people, the people of of influence, the the the businessmen, the senators.

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It's more than just one man. Just as Lloyds survived not because of Mr. Roland, but because of everyone there.

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The things they did were tremendous. It's to rebuild the city.

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The aqueducts were broken through neglect. So the flow of water is is disrupted.

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And that is so injurious to life and peaceful life.

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Another thing they did was they they took the gains.

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So some of the gains that were coming in from from Egypt,

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all of all of that gold and what you can do with gold is you can make flashy ornaments for me and my friends.

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What they did was they used it to make coins and coins go out and they go out to the people who are doing the construction work.

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So they become wealthy and they spend it and it goes it goes around and it

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increases the money supply while activity is increasing and that raises the boats.

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They did some things that aren't appreciated now but were transformative.

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So, for example, the denarius was the well-established silver coin that bring along the Aureus,

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and the aureus had been there before and gold coins had been there before.

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But they did absolutely amazing thing, which is they fixed the relationship between the gold coin and the silver coin.

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So if I have a gold coin, I know exactly how many silver coins I will get for it with absolute certainty.

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And one silver coin and one denarius is the wage of an unskilled labourer for a day.

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So this gold coin, I know how many labourers I can bring to my fields and so on.

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And we so underestimate we so underestimate the importance of that fiat currency to economic achievement.

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Great minds try to reproduce that in England in the 17th and 18th century.

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People like, for example, Isaac Newton. And they didn't get it to work.

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And it wasn't until 1816 that the problem was resolved in Great Britain and that we again had a stable currency which would have

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fixed relationships between the coins and not be subject to a lot of the risks that Britain had experienced in the 18th century,

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where people melt down the gold coin or they melt down the silver coin,

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or they take the coins out of the country and bring them across to the Netherlands.

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But the relationship is different and so on.

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So it's not until 1816 and 1873, in the case of the United States that we again had a currency as stable as the Romans had.

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And that was another one of the things that they did in the transformation process.

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But you what you very importantly said just a little while ago is, you know, this whole thing isn't just about money.

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It's it's about stories and it's about what we believe about ourselves.

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And that is true of companies.

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You know, a company which has as its priority, the maximisation of profits fails.

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There has to be something else.

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I mean, Steve Jobs, when he said that Apple serious business matter, you know, ruthless in some respects, but his A-1 priority is a class product.

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What the what they also did in that time was they rewrote their story.

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So you have the Aeneid, you have the work of Horace, of Ovid and all the rest.

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They rewrote their story, They took the bits from the past, they reassembled it, they preserved, they created a great literature,

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they created a great literature to revive, to rival that of that of Greece and said to themselves  who they were.

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That's an important part of the transformation.

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And then the the other thing, the last thing I will mention on this.

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Is the problems that they had experienced in the first century B.C. have come because of a massive

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increase in wealth coming in through conquest and going to certain parts of the population.

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And inequality is hugely destabilising.

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And excessive inequality and hyper visible inequality is now a hyper destabilising and hyper destructive to aggregate wealth and well-being.

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They moved from being a structure from which wealth came principally through conquest to one where it came principally through trade.

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And then we move further on from Augustus and we now see under Claudius the

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building of massive port infrastructure stuff that Julius Caesar had never seen.

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And then you see use of Egypt as a conduit to India.

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From those people then that were making these innovations and realising about the

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fiat currency and the exchange rate and how to how to make this economy a success.

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How do we know about them? Is it something we've had to work out through archaeology,

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or was there somebody that was producing a kind of guide leaving a blueprint for how to run an empire successfully?

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Archaeology is massive and we are discovering things now which which just show the stuff.

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So all the excavations going around Rome into the port structure, all the stuff being done on the ports in North Africa,

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which were enormous, the stuff being done on what was actually being produced in North Africa, for example,

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there was a wonderful map recently produced and published in the Journal of Roman Studies,

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which where people had just basically taken these 6 million coins that had been found over the centuries and mapping them out.

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And you just look at that and you just see this is a trademark.

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It's things like that. I think also what is what is happening is that.

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You know, some things that have been known about for a while. By a while, I mean centuries.

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It is it's only now that people are beginning to appreciate the significance of those things.

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So, for example, the relationship between the coins has been known about for a while.

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The fact that that happened under the time of Augustus has been known for a while.

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But the significance of it is, is only being appreciated.

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And one thing that can be very, very enriching is that if a long established subject is looked at from different angles.

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So, for example, you know, looking at the stories of the Roman Empire from the angle of pure business,

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pure strategy courageously comparing it to medieval activities.

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In a way, the blueprint is there on the table for those who want to pick it up.

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So you have Tacitus' Agricola, and that, as you know, explains the settlement of Britain.

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And to cut a long story short, they come along and they they tried by brute conquest and by being rather arrogant.

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And then they find a different way of doing things. And there's a blueprint there.

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And that was that was a blueprint in the 19th century for people looking to govern.

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The founding fathers of the United States, I mean,

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obviously they're looking at the whole thing as as a blueprint, a blueprint to the extent that, you know,

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they're going to copy the architectural language when they build their new capital,

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they're going to copy some of the constitutional language of the Senate, some of the constitutional structures.

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But what they were seeing, which we don't see when we get to Rome nowadays,

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you say we're seeing an economic achievement way beyond what they had in their few states when they started out.

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And what they were seeing is something that we cannot have, which was they were seeing a blueprint for the future.

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They were saying this is what can be built. Going back a little bit to those coins, because I think coins to the modern eye or something,

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which we often really think about now, we don't use them very much. In some ways, they're being phased out.

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They're so tiny and insignificant.

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And yet to an archaeologist and a historian and therefore perhaps to somebody studying the ancient economy or indeed a business person today,

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as you say, the relevance continues. And coins are such an important tool and record.

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You mentioned all those 6 million coins that have been found across the former Roman Empire.

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Can you tell us a little bit about where the clusters of those have been found and what might some of the reasons be?

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You mentioned trade as one of why coins are found in particular places.

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What they created in the first century A.D. was a system where the relationship between the coins was fixed,

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trusted and universal, and that was reproduced.

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Then in the 19th century, when people got around to solving, getting the same problems solved again.

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And the paper was only valuable. The paper was only valuable because it could be converted into the into the coins.

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And the Bank of England, £50 note, says, I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of £50 in coins.

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But then in time, the confidence which had been attached to the coins and the relationship between them moved on to the paper.

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And then in the last decade or so, because people were always confident that they could get money out of the machine,

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the card became valuable and so it's gone up from there.

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So so, you know, a lot of time and a lot of work has built that.

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But the coins, the coins and where are they? It is fascinating beyond belief.

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They are they're all where you would expect them to be. So they're these little dots on a map.

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They're all where you expect to be. They're all in Italy, there in Spain, they're in Gaul or France.

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But that's not the wonder of the map. The wonder of the map is.

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They're in India. They're in India on the East Coast.

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They're in India on the West Coast. They are.

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They are in Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka is

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Dotted dotted with them. They are in Dubai.

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And what is this? This is Indian trade that the contemporaries of Christopher Columbus could only dream about.

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And it is trade that is happening because of peace and a uniform system of government.

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So you or I are doing business doing business in Rome.

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We are in the import export business. We we import perfumes from the Himalayas.

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We can do business through Egypt. It's governed by the same the same system.

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It's safe. If someone robs from us, there is a system.

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It's the same legal system. My contract that I draw up with you, for example, in Rome, is is valid there and is enforceable in Alexandria.

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People clearly on these journeys, you know, stopped off in places like Aden and Dubai and, you know, to restock and so forth.

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So, I mean, they have strategic importance, I mean, there are itineraries that survive which list out the places that you would go to along the way.

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And they are very, very helpful for you and me doing business in Rome,

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because what they tell us in each of these places for each of these places is what the people there have got to sell and what they like to buy.

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People talk a lot. People talk a lot about the Silk Road.

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If you go to the grocer's company in London, which is a medieval company,

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that has a livery, you know, they have a very, very nice livery hall not far from here.

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And their symbol is a camel. Camel bringing spices in. Camel. 

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That's what happened in medieval times. You want a camel to bring spices in?

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You will have to have a camel train. And it's got to go on.

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perilous routes, not perilous because of the sea, but perilous because, you know,

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some people might want to take your spices. The maximum that you can realistically get on a camping trip is ten tonnes.

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ten tonnes. Your average ship going down towards India was 300 tonnes.

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300 tonnes. Now, you and I sitting in Rome, mapping out how we might make a little bit more money.

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Might have someone come along and say, well, I, you know, got a shipping contract with 300 tonnes.

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And then this other fellow comes along and says, well, I could do it by camel, I could take ten tonnes.

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There are papyri that survive. And this is another part of the archaeological story, these things and these things being discovered.

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And then people who delight in language, translating them and making them available, papyri that,

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you know, set out the terms of these these these ventures that went down the Red Sea and all the way up to India.

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And, you know, one of them it's got some numbers in it.

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And I look at the numbers and I say that's £50 million in our terms.

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The two of us could set up this venture if we had all the necessary, you know,

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credit worthiness to borrow the money knowledge of this start and the other ability to negotiate and all the rest,

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we could set up a venture which brings in 50 million. In Petronius' Satyricon. 

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We have the wonderful feast of Trimalchio,

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and the aristocratic narrator clearly looks down on this parvenu and is normally presented as someone who exaggerates.

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He does exaggerate, and he talks about one of his ventures producing a profit of, in our terms, 100 million, you know.

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So it's an exaggeration, but not not so much.

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So that is that is one of the things that I see when I see that map of coins.

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But the other thing that you see is you draw onto them that map mentally the boundaries of the empire.

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And those coins go well, well, well beyond the boundaries of the empire.

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And it is exactly the same as the US dollar.

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The US dollar is essential for trade across the world.

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It's essential. And I'm in London now. And this is a you know, it's essential here.

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The US dollar goes well beyond in terms of its use, the political balance of the United States.

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There are other patterns. One of the things that I think is very interesting is the relative sparsity.

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Of the coins in the Middle East and what we call the Middle East, which for me is in terms of this story,

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a fascinating region because it is it is the region where I see a lot of the destabilisation of the system.

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I mean, trade is one of the main reasons why these coins are found outside the borders of the empire.

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What role did the army have as well, if they were mostly going to be based on those sort of frontier areas of the empire,

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but also being paid in cash and using coinage? And this is a very good point.

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And in terms of the army being paid in coins, I think we also underestimate the importance of their banking system.

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We underestimate the importance of their money transfer system.

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One of the beautiful things that has emerged from Oxyrynchus are the Army pay accounts, Temple of Mithras,

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which has now been put into a proper setting underneath the Bloomberg building and in the ground floor.

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As you come in, there's an exhibition of the findings that emerged in the in the excavations a few years ago,

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and one of them is a document called W.t 44,

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which sits there beside discarded, discarded half the door, discards a pair of shoes and this, this, that and the other.

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And it sits there modestly.

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And I look at it and anytime I've been there three times and any time I go there with a friend, I just say, look, just look at that.

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And, you know, they they will say, well, that is a transferable promissory note payable on demand that's a banknote.

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So just to that point, the Army being paid in cash.

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The Army have coins, but also they are they are being paid through an accounting system like bank accounts.

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You know, loss, loss, the abandonment of Armenia as a province, its conversion into its own state.

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The destruction that happens as a consequence and the calling of the army away from the Rhine and the Danube.

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And as a consequence, so the beginning of the reign of Marcus Aurelius.

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And as a consequence, the movement down across the Rhine and Danube into the north of Italy, an event which hadn't happened for hundreds of years.

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So so it it was extremely important as a border, border, defence and trade, what happened way beyond the border and the influence of the coin.

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The banking system would go way beyond the border. But it's very important for that reason.

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It's also it also serves as a police force which which we need to remember as well.

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But it does other things. You know, it's it's, it's a symbol of order and it is an opportunity for a sector of the population.

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You know, to develop a career, to join the army,

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to be there with people who are expert blacksmiths, accountants, you know, this, that and the other.

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And then after 25 years to come away with a retirement lump sum of £90,000 in our terms, absolutely fascinating.

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A a pension fund that existed for over 200 years.

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Better manage than some of the pension funds I see today. They had they had annuity factors.

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And, you know, you could retire as a soldier with your 90,000 in our terms.

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And, you know, get that converted into annuity, a good value annuity.

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I wouldn't buy annuities nowadays or else what you could do is you could you could set up a business.

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So maybe you might end up in Rome and you had done service in Alexandria and while you had been there, you had gossiped and you thought.

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So it was also a way of it also, as well as being a police force defence at the border, gave people the career opportunities,

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it gave them a lump sum and you know, that fuels that fuels economic growth, that fuels prosperity for all of us.

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And talking of careers,

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do you think that the role of being an accountant or an actuary in the Roman world was something that was valued and was prestigious?

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And is it something that you would have also liked to have done had you been living in

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that time rather than ours? if I had come to London beginning of the second century A.D.

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You know, maybe. Yeah, maybe that is maybe that is what I would have done. But it would have.

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It would have depended on who I was apprenticed to.

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So if I ended up working for this businessman and he was, you know, trading all over this fantastic world, you know, that I had not been to.

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And, you know, I might have I might have learned negotiating skills from him.

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I might have learnt relationship skills from him.

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I might have known that, you know, doing the numbers right is important and I might have learnt about credit worthiness.

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And, you know, I might have looked at this notes with a face value and I might have said, Who is behind it?

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Were Roman accountants or actuaries considered to be as important as we understand that they were in society.

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But was that a prestigious position at the time? Yeah, I think we have to we have to infer, We have to infer and we have to look at a Roman camp,

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the pay of the Roman soldier being recorded in the accounts individual to each soldier, just as your bank account is to you and mine is is to me.

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And you have to look at the man in charge of that camp.

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And how vitally important to him is, is this accountant getting it right if he gets it wrong, we have disorder.

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You know, maybe maybe the soldiers would have laughed and joked about this accountant.

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You know, he could barely lift his sword, for example.

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But they they trusted him. So in that camp, you know, very prestigious.

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But lots of other people were very prestigious, prestigious to.

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What do you think that the Romans would have thought of cryptocurrency had it been something feasible at that time?

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In essence, it's an accounting system.

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And I have if I were to buy a Bitcoin, I would have ten credits or 20 credits in the system and they could be transferred around the place.

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And the thing about it is that for me to get these ten bitcoins, I must hand over my dollars and my pounds.

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And so in terms of having an accounting system that works across, you know, quite a wide, wide area, they would have said, yeah, whatever.

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What's new about that. in terms of them wanting to hand over, you know,

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valuable stuff like a gold coin or silver coin for an entry into this accounting system.

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They probably would have said, Why? Why would I do that?

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I'm happy with what I have. Although there is another another point,

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which is when you ask them the question and the catastrophic thing that happened was the collapse of their currency,

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and that was that was catastrophic.

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When the relationship between the coins was no longer accepted, it was no longer universal, and there was no relationship.

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When the banking system collapsed, then so much was destroyed because so much depended on the easy trade,

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the specialisation, the urbanisation which needs needs, the currency is going to if it's at any high level.

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And at that point, you know, and they desperately tried to recreate the currency and keep failing, so many of them must have said.

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As they as I kept trying to rebuild and kept failing, I wish there were an alternative.

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And to that extent, cryptocurrencies is interesting.

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When Germany lost the last war and its currency was, you know, destroyed, there was there was an alternative.

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There was the US dollar, for example, and the US dollar was being made freely available to rebuild, and they didn't have that.

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So I think the answer to your question might be for many and for many points in their history, they would have said, well, whatever.

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And then when they had nothing, they would have said, I wish I had it.

322
00:38:04,060 --> 00:38:11,890
And the power of hindsight. Can you explain briefly just some of the factors that precipitated that collapse in around the third century?

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CE. The succession to the CEO can be can be very important and.

324
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You know, Commodus is is a most unfortunate individual to have in charge of the enterprise.

325
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I think there was there was an unfortunate change in military strategy under Hadrian and the giving up

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of Armenia as a province in a region that was always troublesome and where the greatest competitor was,

327
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you know, was was, was also very, very unfortunate.

328
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But when companies when companies fail.

329
00:39:02,620 --> 00:39:09,639
It is seldom because of some external event coming in and smashing them up.

330
00:39:09,640 --> 00:39:13,630
You know, it's not a hurricane that does it for them. It's they do it to themselves.

331
00:39:13,750 --> 00:39:24,310
You know, so much depends on the culture within the within the organisations and the culture within the company, the culture within the country.

332
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And when you come into the second century AD,

333
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You see you see worrying signs, you know that there's still there is still the building going on at Rome in terms of the port infrastructure.

334
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They're still building and they will continue to build warehouses which are very important for capacity and growth is slowing.

335
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And we also underestimate, you know, how important growth is and for keeping a show like ours on the road.

336
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I think that people became complacent.

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I think they had had, you know, 150 years of great prosperity, of things forever being better than they were for their parents.

338
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You know, and complacency is when you forget how much work you had to do to get to where you are.

339
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How much work had to be done for things to get to where they are.

340
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How much work needs to be done?

341
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It does not need to be a major part of the daily work, But how much work needs to be done, you know, to keep this beautiful, beautiful story going.

342
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And when the mindset sets in that this is how it has always been and this is how it always will be.

343
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Then you have the complacency that allows you to be, you know, too indifferent to incipient political mistakes.

344
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I think complacency is. So then would the one thing the main takeaway from the ancient world and its successes and

345
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its failures that you think all politicians or financial leaders should take on board today,

346
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would it be to avoid complacency or is that something else you think that's even more important that we should learn from the past?

347
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I think there's something more and more important than the politicians or the financial people, because if truth be told, they come and they go.

348
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I'm sitting here in a building, in an office building, in the Guildhall.

349
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And outside marked on the ground is the outline of the amphitheatre.

350
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If you go down in the Guildhall a few layers.

351
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You come to the old amphitheatre that existed in Roman times.

352
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And if you compare this Roman city and you compare it with this medieval city, people assembled in different ways,

353
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so they assembled in the amphitheatre in Roman times and you have the crowd.

354
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all looking in on a central object or so performances of in medieval times as these beautiful churches,

355
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the Gothic churches that existed until they were burnt in 1666.

356
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And there everyone looks at the congregation beyond the priest, eternal and ineffable.

357
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There is something very similar. Between what was happening in the amphitheatre and what happens in Wembley in Wembley.

358
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You would have the football supporters there looking at the performance.

359
00:43:02,360 --> 00:43:07,640
They're judging the performance there. Judging the performance of.

360
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The players, judging the performance of the managers.

361
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And there is an emperor. He's a chairman of the club.

362
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And they market the euro and he expects. And I think it's not so much.

363
00:43:30,060 --> 00:43:39,110
And the essence of it is not so much the politicians who are on the stage or the players who are playing beautifully on the pitch.

364
00:43:39,120 --> 00:43:42,850
They come and they go. The essence of it is the crowd.

365
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Looking at the performance. Having its standards.

366
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Having its dialogue with itself and saying this manager must go, us together, you know, valuing the game.

367
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And wanting it to be played well for us. And within your own career, you've obviously done many things, travelled the world extensively,

368
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and then you came back to study, you came back to actually pursue this interest in the ancient economy with a degree at King's College, London.

369
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Can you just tell us a little bit about what it was that made you want to do that and actually do that in a more

370
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formal setting and to study and have that second aspect to your career as you've later become a successful author.

371
00:44:39,070 --> 00:44:46,520
One of my grandfathers once was a farmer in Ireland, and over time he had fewer cattle.

372
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But she never retired. Another one of my grand and the other of my grandfathers when he was a boy.

373
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ran away from Dublin to join the Navy.

374
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And. His grandmother faked the parents note so that he could do it.

375
00:45:09,870 --> 00:45:14,070
He came back and he was one of the people who set up Are Lingus

376
00:45:14,610 --> 00:45:19,430
And when he. When he retired, he wasn't going to retire.

377
00:45:19,790 --> 00:45:22,790
So he moved into it, moved into something else,

378
00:45:22,890 --> 00:45:31,730
became the aviation consultant for films that were being made at the time, which involved Second World War Planes.

379
00:45:31,970 --> 00:45:42,350
So he moved from one to the other and from both of them, I just sort of learned you should always be looking to do something else.

380
00:45:43,880 --> 00:45:50,400
You should always be looking to do something else. You don't have to do it today, but someday, maybe, maybe, maybe.

381
00:45:51,260 --> 00:45:59,660
Good that you did do it. So I had I decided I would go to Birkbeck in the evening.

382
00:46:00,820 --> 00:46:14,860
And I would do anything, a course. So I got the brochure and I'm going to do an evening course in English because I always got Cs in English,

383
00:46:14,860 --> 00:46:22,839
but I loved it and I'm flicking through it and I see classics and of course classics sounds classic and I see Greek.

384
00:46:22,840 --> 00:46:26,600
And I said. But on the other hand.

385
00:46:27,650 --> 00:46:45,090
You never got to learn Greek. So I went, I went to I went to Birkbeck and Professor Edwards interviewed me and we talked about Plato's Cave.

386
00:46:45,210 --> 00:46:49,560
And whatever I said was obviously good enough. So I got that interview as well.

387
00:46:50,340 --> 00:46:53,520
And so there I am.

388
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And I revive the joys of my youth as I yet again read Latin.

389
00:47:02,580 --> 00:47:05,880
And I go on a new adventure as I learn Greek.

390
00:47:08,890 --> 00:47:16,180
Did an M.A. and Seraphina Cuomo said One of the essays you've done here was on Roman GDP.

391
00:47:16,870 --> 00:47:24,190
And, you know, Professor Rathbone is quite interested in the global economy.

392
00:47:24,520 --> 00:47:29,850
I met the absolutely amazing professor Rathbone at King's, and he very kindly agreed to take me on.

393
00:47:29,890 --> 00:47:35,350
So. The actuarial training I had been given was essentially an.

394
00:47:36,800 --> 00:47:41,870
Here is here is the business problem. The client is asking this question.

395
00:47:42,530 --> 00:47:53,930
And and the question might be as, for example, the finance minister of South Africa asked how severe might riots be in our country?

396
00:47:54,290 --> 00:48:01,080
So there's a I call a business problem. And it involves a number.

397
00:48:01,650 --> 00:48:09,480
And in this case, the number would be how many billions of rands damage could realistically be caused.

398
00:48:12,040 --> 00:48:20,769
And that's actually a skills set. And and then. Which which I had learned in an apprenticeship similar to what is similar to the

399
00:48:20,770 --> 00:48:24,460
apprenticeship I would have gone through in Roman times if I'd wandered into the city.

400
00:48:24,970 --> 00:48:33,540
And that skill set, which my predecessors had taught me, was just applied to this thing.

401
00:48:33,550 --> 00:48:40,340
So it's it's, it's in a way, like my my grandfather, you know, you learn about films, then what are you going to do next?

402
00:48:40,360 --> 00:48:43,710
Well, I'll advise people on films about planes. What business you in?

403
00:48:43,720 --> 00:48:46,390
I'm in the film business. This is same.

404
00:48:48,550 --> 00:48:55,540
So therefore, what advice would you give to somebody either who has studied the ancient world and wants to move into finance or something similar,

405
00:48:55,810 --> 00:49:01,150
or somebody who's done the opposite and has come from a financial background but also has that interest?

406
00:49:01,420 --> 00:49:05,230
How could we engage people with classics coming from all different avenues?

407
00:49:08,280 --> 00:49:15,390
Because I have been to places like Birkbeck and because of what my teachers taught me at school,

408
00:49:16,890 --> 00:49:20,340
the world around me, and just not so sort of top of mind.

409
00:49:20,370 --> 00:49:25,650
But but it is there. The world around me is a richer place, you know.

410
00:49:25,880 --> 00:49:34,500
I see. I see buildings and I can see how they are connected to what was built when this city was founded.

411
00:49:34,980 --> 00:49:39,030
As I walk past, you know, two people in a coffee shop,

412
00:49:39,030 --> 00:49:49,230
I can see people who are the successors of the people who did business when this city was founded for the purpose it serves today.

413
00:49:49,890 --> 00:49:57,810
I think that if you can look out across the very, very broad landscape.

414
00:49:59,620 --> 00:50:04,610
You have a better sense of. You know where you are standing.

415
00:50:05,300 --> 00:50:13,460
There's a lovely pub was a lovely pub not far from here called Ye Olde Watling and a good friend of mine at Kings

416
00:50:14,870 --> 00:50:21,470
We walked, we walked down to it and she said, oh this is the old Roman road because it's, it's from the old Roman road.

417
00:50:22,100 --> 00:50:28,759
And I said, Yeah, and it's still working. there's a lot that's gone to make us.

418
00:50:28,760 --> 00:50:34,760
And it enriches us to appreciate, you know, the work that's gone in to make us.

419
00:50:37,190 --> 00:50:40,170
Thank you, George. I think that's a perfect way to wrap up.

420
00:50:40,210 --> 00:50:52,520
And so just to conclude our final question, which ancient idea place artefact, perhaps any of your choosing, which has the most resonance with you?

421
00:50:53,590 --> 00:51:02,950
There is there is a memorial that was erected by a man to his wife, and it is called Lamentation Victoria.

422
00:51:03,730 --> 00:51:17,440
And it was a fantastic, very large object with a lot of words on it and about a statue of the lady that stood in front of it.

423
00:51:18,400 --> 00:51:25,780
And it was to be seen as you walked into walked into the city of Rome and the city of

424
00:51:25,780 --> 00:51:31,690
Rome had roads going in that were lined to the left and to the right with memorials.

425
00:51:32,740 --> 00:51:38,260
And we think of we think of memorials as, you know, a mark of death.

426
00:51:39,190 --> 00:51:45,040
These were marks of life and achievements. And they are it's astonishing.

427
00:51:45,040 --> 00:51:48,750
And it's almost as if, you know, when you were coming in, you know,

428
00:51:48,790 --> 00:51:59,260
to come into London from Heathrow and all the way along with these be these beautiful memorials in which people said things like,

429
00:52:00,070 --> 00:52:06,070
you know, I was a carpenter, I kept I kept the streets.

430
00:52:06,190 --> 00:52:14,800
Another might say I kept the streets of Kensington clean. So it is people celebrating their lives and and work.

431
00:52:15,700 --> 00:52:21,250
And to me, to me, it's beautiful. And it's beautiful because of the love in it.

432
00:52:22,150 --> 00:52:26,139
And it tells the story of this man and his wife.

433
00:52:26,140 --> 00:52:34,990
And it's set, it starts during the terrible civil war, destruction and all the rest.

434
00:52:35,710 --> 00:52:42,670
And before the settlement under Augustus, one of the things it tells and he boasts about her,

435
00:52:42,700 --> 00:52:47,740
he boasted about how wonderful she was and his political, he's in exile.

436
00:52:48,040 --> 00:52:
And his political opponents are trying to seize their family wealth.

437
00:52:53,250 --> 00:52:56,550
And she she defends.

438
00:52:56,790 --> 00:53:04,170
She defends their wealth and she defends their wealth in the in the law courts.

439
00:53:04,650 --> 00:53:10,440
And the case, her case against those who are illegally trying to take the money.

440
00:53:10,920 --> 00:53:24,210
And her case wins. And he describes her also as, you know, standing up to these big political people arguing for him.

441
00:53:25,590 --> 00:53:33,930
And he also talks at the end. Of how he's put this up so that she will be remembered.

442
00:53:33,930 --> 00:53:37,470
And she is. But nothing that he does.

443
00:53:37,590 --> 00:53:49,710
Nothing that he does will ever will ever replace the love that she that she gave him and that he is at a loss without her.

444
00:53:50,610 --> 00:53:57,840
But there is something so particularly beautiful and so particularly innocent about it all.

445
00:53:58,850 --> 00:54:04,340
I think that's a perfect choice. Thank you, Dr. George Maher, for being on the Classics podcast.

446
00:54:05,740 --> 00:54:06,730
Thank you very much for having me.