17. Colton Murray Talks Great Houses

17. Colton Murray Talks Great Houses

This episode features a conversation with Colton Murray, a second-generation entrepreneur whose father built and sold major candy brands including Dynamic Confections and Tru Fru (acquired by Mars). Colton shares how his family's identity was shaped by ancestor stories, faith, and a deep sense of stewardship — and how he came to understand these as rare and intentional practices only by contrast when meeting other families.

16. Rebuilding a Great House: The Fabian Gens Part 2

In this episode, Gregory Treat concludes the series on the Fabian gens — one of Rome's six Gentes Maiores — by tracing how the trauma of near-total family annihilation at the Cremera River forged a unique countercultural virtue: disciplined patience over aggressive courage.

15. Rebuilding a Great House: The Fabian Gens Part 1

In this episode, host Gregory Treat continues the Ancient City series with a deep dive into the Fabian gens — one of Rome's six great aristocratic houses. The episode centers on how House Fabia was nearly wiped out at the Battle of Cremera (479 BC), where all 306 adult male Fabians marched out to establish a frontier fortress and were ambushed and killed, leaving behind a single boy — Quintus Fabius Vibulanus — to rebuild the entire lineage alone.

14. The Ancient City Part 2

In this episode of the Great Houses Forum, Gregory Treat continues the Ancient City Series with a deep dive into the six gentes maiores — the great patrician houses of ancient Rome — and the systems they used to pass virtue and character across generations. Gregory breaks down three core mechanisms of intergenerational transmission: the imagines (ancestral death masks worn at funerals), the laudatio funebris (a rigorous, accurate funeral oration covering every honor and shame), and the cursus honorum (the structured ladder of offices from military tribune to consul). He also covers adoption as a character-first alternative to bloodline succession, and the patron-client web that kept aristocratic conduct under constant public scrutiny.

13. The Ancient City Part 1

Host Gregory Treat launches a new series examining why Rome's greatest families produced so many exceptional men. Drawing on a childhood spent in his great-grandmother's library reading Plutarch, Aristotle, and Xenophon, Gregory argues that Rome's secret was not bloodline — it was character, and the deliberate, multi-generational cultivation of it.