Speaker 1: What's uh warming my my globe. I'm Robert Evans. My
Speaker 1: hair conditioning is not currently functioning, so I'm hiding in
Speaker 1: my basement, which I think this is a historic moment
Speaker 1: everybody marks the first time a human being has experienced
Speaker 1: the consequences of climate change. That that's that's me right now.
Speaker 1: Number one. It is seventy four degrees maybe in my
Speaker 1: basement upwards of seventy three degrees. So yeah, suffering, suffering
Speaker 1: here still, I mean that in a basement. Is that's
Speaker 1: a pretty That's pretty warm, dog, It's pretty It's pretty
Speaker 1: warm for the basement. It might be more like seventy degrees.
Speaker 1: I don't know what temperatures are. And I'm drinking coffee.
Speaker 1: Andrew T. How are you doing today? Hi? What's up?
Speaker 1: How's it going? I'm I'm um. I'm This is the honestly,
Speaker 1: probably the first or second week that me long time
Speaker 1: shorts Denier is wearing short Wow, I'm not short. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm not a short person. I wore I wore black
Speaker 1: jeans to a Dodger game two years ago when it
Speaker 1: was like a hundred and ten outside, and I did
Speaker 1: almost pass out, but I was pretty committed and now
Speaker 1: I'm now I'm wearing shorts. I have also purchased a
Speaker 1: pair of shorts recently. I mean, just take this evidence
Speaker 1: to any climate change and I are and be like Andrew,
Speaker 1: two wear shorts. Now that's your that's the proof. Yeah,
Speaker 1: climate change is a real problem. This is the first
Speaker 1: evidence anyone has of it. Um, Andrew, it's good to
Speaker 1: have you back. You are having Sophie and eyes one
Speaker 1: of our very, very very favorite people to have on
Speaker 1: the show. You have been doing a lot of Hollywood.
Speaker 1: We call you Mr Hollywood with a private conversation. Such
Speaker 1: a big Hollywood guy. But you know what other kind
Speaker 1: of guy you are, Andrew. It's a very funny guy
Speaker 1: who we like to have on every now and again
Speaker 1: to talk about bits of history. You and I have
Speaker 1: talked about King Leopold of Belgium. We've talked about the
Speaker 1: Andaman Islands. We've had all sorts of history conversations. Andrew,
Speaker 1: how do you How do you feel about the Roman Empire? Oh?
Speaker 1: I probably as far as like contemporary Americans go, I
Speaker 1: probably took more Latin than I think most people like.
Speaker 1: That was my primary to Andrew corn quote unquote foreign language.
Speaker 1: So I and ultimately all of three useless years propaganda. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so yeah, I probably to the extent that I know anything,
Speaker 1: I probably I'm like more aware of a sort of
Speaker 1: sugarcoated version of whatever whatever the funk is happening here. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we're we're today. We're going to tell the story about
Speaker 1: how the Roman Republic became a police stay um which did,
Speaker 1: which is quite a tale um I have. You know,
Speaker 1: we've we'ven't. We haven't done a lot of ancient history
Speaker 1: stuff on this podcast for good reasons, among other things,
Speaker 1: it's kind of hard to like get good details about
Speaker 1: people who died two thousand years ago that aren't just
Speaker 1: like nonsense propaganda, right, because it's usually just like, yeah,
Speaker 1: some like poem about some kings. History is written by
Speaker 1: the winners, especially yeah, when it's like sucking epigrams like
Speaker 1: leftover from the Roman But also I I feel like
Speaker 1: they're they're the the The worry is the sliding scale
Speaker 1: of bastardom through history is Yes, I would imagine the
Speaker 1: trickiest part because it's like there's sort of like no
Speaker 1: amount of fascism and or um, you know, brutality that
Speaker 1: doesn't eventually get justified by everyone else was doing it. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean that that's like it's are you gonna call
Speaker 1: like Genghis Khan a bastard? Okay, well then like what
Speaker 1: like sure, but but what is I It seems like
Speaker 1: kind of pointless to be like and this guy was
Speaker 1: a king who murdered people when it's like, well, yeah,
Speaker 1: they all were, like why why is that? Like nobody's
Speaker 1: like really going other than some people were better at it.
Speaker 1: It's not that interesting to talk about them being like shitty,
Speaker 1: that's not the One of the cool things about the
Speaker 1: Roman Republic is number one, we have a lot of
Speaker 1: detail on these guys and all that's bad, right, all
Speaker 1: of our historians are propagandists, but at least there's more
Speaker 1: than one of them. So you get like the this
Speaker 1: dude rocked and like this dude was terrible story usually um.
Speaker 1: And number two, they're basically exactly the same as modern
Speaker 1: Americans um politically, so you get really modern like political
Speaker 1: dick moves from from from from terrible people in a
Speaker 1: way that's like very familiar. Um. And in fact, like
Speaker 1: so we're talking about a lot of the things that
Speaker 1: led up to the fall of the Roman Republic, and
Speaker 1: like the end of of you the kind of democratic
Speaker 1: experiment that had existed there for a few centuries. And
Speaker 1: this is something that like people are talking about a
Speaker 1: lot right now. So when when you get like history
Speaker 1: nerds talking about how funked up politics are in America,
Speaker 1: they're either going to go back to Weimar Germany, which
Speaker 1: we've already done, or they're going to talk about the
Speaker 1: fall of the Roman Republic, which is why there's like
Speaker 1: three three books out right. It's like three or four
Speaker 1: books that have come out in the last year that
Speaker 1: are like, here's what the Fall of the Roman Republic
Speaker 1: can teach us about the fall of American or like
Speaker 1: what's happening in American democracy. Most of these books are stupid. Um.
Speaker 1: There is one really good book by podcaster Mike Duncan
Speaker 1: who does the Revolutions podcast, called The Storm Before the Storm.
Speaker 1: That's the one I would recommend if you want to
Speaker 1: read a book like that. We're not gonna mainly be
Speaker 1: telling that story. Instead, we're gonna talk about how Rome
Speaker 1: invented militarized policing and the first police state and kind
Speaker 1: of the first fbi um, because that's not a history,
Speaker 1: and I think most people know, and it's pretty cool. Um,
Speaker 1: but first we're going to talk about well some guys, well,
Speaker 1: we're gonna talk about a lot of ship. We're gonna
Speaker 1: we're gonna have to cover quite a bit of ground today.
Speaker 1: This is one of the reasons we don't do so
Speaker 1: many ancient history ones, because it's like, all right, well,
Speaker 1: if you want to tell this story, you have to
Speaker 1: go through like a thousand years shit. Yeah. Well, also
Speaker 1: because the audience is like, like me, probably is like
Speaker 1: not just a thousand years of ship, but so much
Speaker 1: backstory in context. Yeah, I don't envy you. You have
Speaker 1: to explain a lot. But thankfully the Romans were pretty
Speaker 1: entertaining sons of bitches, um, not if they were killing
Speaker 1: or enslaving you, but like sometimes if they were enslaving you.
Speaker 1: There were some Greeks who had fun with that. So
Speaker 1: the city of Rome andrew founded on April one, seven
Speaker 1: fifty three BC by two brothers who were nursed by
Speaker 1: a wolf. If you believe the myths that a lot
Speaker 1: of Romans didn't believe, right, like, these are like the
Speaker 1: things that we we we tell about Lindon, this is
Speaker 1: what the Romans thought, Like most of them are like
Speaker 1: I don't. I've never seen a wolf nurse two babies,
Speaker 1: Like I don't think statue of of the of like
Speaker 1: to two infants sucking on a wolf's breasts is or
Speaker 1: you're talking about the statue in my living room, right,
Speaker 1: yeah you know I have that instead of a television. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I made it out of a macaroni. Yes, um, just
Speaker 1: harrowing stuff if you think about it, like it's just
Speaker 1: so gross. Yeah, bad for the wolf, bad for the babies,
Speaker 1: for anyone. But yeah, this is Romulus and Remus, right,
Speaker 1: like that's the that's the legend. There's a good line
Speaker 1: in um. I think it's the movie Spartacus where Julius
Speaker 1: Caesar and I believe it would have been Pompy are
Speaker 1: like walking around and talking about like they're walking past
Speaker 1: like a temple, and Caesar asked a question like don't
Speaker 1: you venerate the gods and and Pompys Like well, publicly sure,
Speaker 1: but privately I don't believe in any of them. And
Speaker 1: that's probably how it was for a lot of Romans.
Speaker 1: Like everyone's like, people aren't lockstep believing these silly as myths,
Speaker 1: but this is the myth. April seventh through fifty three BC,
Speaker 1: which is a slutely not when Rome was founded. Archaeologists
Speaker 1: know that people have been living in that spot for
Speaker 1: about fourteen thousand years um, because very rarely do just
Speaker 1: there's just like a bunch of people suddenly arrive at
Speaker 1: a chunk of land and be like and now it's
Speaker 1: a city. That's not. Yeah, you just have like groups
Speaker 1: of people farming. Like Rome has a bunch of hills,
Speaker 1: so you could set up shop on a hill. It's
Speaker 1: a good place to grow food. You can beat up
Speaker 1: people if they try to like come onto your property
Speaker 1: and stuff, because hills are easy to defend. You know.
Speaker 1: It's just a good place for people to exist up
Speaker 1: until the present day, where it's about to die because
Speaker 1: there's no water. But for a while it was a
Speaker 1: good place to be a person until we invented the car.
Speaker 1: Yeah we're changing, we're changing the good places to be
Speaker 1: a person. Yeah. Yeah, everybody's gonna have to go. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's not gonna be so many Italians in the future.
Speaker 1: I was just I was just in Yeah, right, I
Speaker 1: guess peninsula. Peninsula life is about to be Island life
Speaker 1: is about to be Atlantis life. Yeah, I us just
Speaker 1: in Minneapolis, and there was a real palpable sense of like,
Speaker 1: we're going to be the new Miami Soude. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: Minneapolis is going to be dealing with those hundred and
Speaker 1: ten degree days. Time to get your beach body on,
Speaker 1: Midwesterners or whatever part of the country. Minneapolis is lakes
Speaker 1: fucking lakes. So even ancient Romans had a lot of
Speaker 1: competing stories about the founding of the city. Uh. Probably
Speaker 1: most likely, like most of them, tended to think that
Speaker 1: it had been basically like a Greek colonial offshoot. There. Later,
Speaker 1: when Rome becomes an empire, there's this state propaganda line
Speaker 1: that it had been founded by a bunch of Trojan
Speaker 1: war refugees and a Trojan king named Aeneas. None of
Speaker 1: that's true either, um, and it doesn't really matter what.
Speaker 1: What we definitely know is that sometime around the seven
Speaker 1: hundred spec uh, there's this city state called Rome that
Speaker 1: kind of comes together, probably from a bunch of different
Speaker 1: light communities in the area, gradually sort of you know, merging,
Speaker 1: and it starts to gain power and influence in central Italy. Now,
Speaker 1: like most places, it's ruled by kings, and over time,
Speaker 1: the Latins, who were like a tribe, right the Latins
Speaker 1: are a tribe in Italy, and it's because they speak
Speaker 1: Latin that that's yeah, or or vice versa. But yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: these these at this point, they're just like primitive tribesmen
Speaker 1: wandering around Italy. They don't even know that in a
Speaker 1: couple of thousand years you and I will be learning
Speaker 1: their language badly, uh Eca, Romani and whatnot, because we
Speaker 1: because we got scared by French and didn't want to
Speaker 1: have to the pressure of learning a real language. I
Speaker 1: honestly I cannot get back into the mindset of the bozoh.
Speaker 1: I wasn't made the decision in middle school to just
Speaker 1: be like, you know what Latin. I think I was
Speaker 1: intimidated by like, oh no, that I don't want to
Speaker 1: have to because the thing they promised us is you
Speaker 1: don't have to do like pronunciation tests because nobody knows
Speaker 1: how a lot of Latin was spro spoken. I did
Speaker 1: actually my senior year of high school, they let me
Speaker 1: go to the university and take Italian, oh, which Latin,
Speaker 1: bicy Latin did not help me out very much for
Speaker 1: I have so my family is incredibly fucking like my
Speaker 1: my dad is first generation like American, like that's how
Speaker 1: Italian my family is. And we had some relatives when
Speaker 1: I was a kid come over who spoke only Italian,
Speaker 1: and because they were old Catholics, Latin and so when
Speaker 1: they were in town, my dad, who was also an
Speaker 1: old Catholic, had to like translate for them, so they
Speaker 1: would speak in Latin and then my dad would translate
Speaker 1: to the rest of the family. Damn. Yeah, um, which
Speaker 1: I think makes this yet crazy. Well, that was your
Speaker 1: your Romulus is air, that's what everybody says. I mean,
Speaker 1: that was one of the benefits of the fact that,
Speaker 1: like all church services in the Catholic Church took place
Speaker 1: in Latin. Is that like you could have people from
Speaker 1: like England and Spain and fucking Portugal all in the
Speaker 1: same room and they might not speak each other's land
Speaker 1: which is but they all know Latin, right because they
Speaker 1: have to do the Jesus stuff. Um So anyway, uh so, yeah,
Speaker 1: you get these Latins hanging around, and you know, these
Speaker 1: are the people who are going to become the Romans,
Speaker 1: but at the time they're just like some other group
Speaker 1: of assholes in Italy. And these dudes called the Etruscans
Speaker 1: are much more powerful and there's this Etruscan dynasty that
Speaker 1: comes to be the Kings of Rome, known as the
Speaker 1: Great House of Tarquin. But that's just kind of like
Speaker 1: what more modern people call them. They were not a
Speaker 1: great house. This is not game of throne ship. These
Speaker 1: guys are like like petty petty chiefs. These are like
Speaker 1: dudes with like sharpened sticks beating anybody who like the
Speaker 1: tark Wins are the guys who have the most muscly
Speaker 1: friends with sharpened sticks and are the best at stabbing
Speaker 1: people who don't pay protection money. Right. Think of them
Speaker 1: more as like street thugs than it's always it's always like, uh, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a it's organized crime until it's taxes, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: And like the so they in the seven hundreds, they
Speaker 1: kind of start to make the jump from organized crime
Speaker 1: to taxes, but it's still more organized crime than anything.
Speaker 1: So for a while Rome is like pretty much every
Speaker 1: other city in the Mediterranean, um, and then in the
Speaker 1: five hundreds ship changes. Um. The last king of Rome
Speaker 1: is a guy named Lucius tarquinas Superbus, which is where
Speaker 1: we get the words superb, although that's like anyway, that's
Speaker 1: the nickname people gave him, and it's kind of Romans
Speaker 1: have like a history of like this guy's an asshole.
Speaker 1: Let's let's call him great or like superb or like
Speaker 1: an awesome or something. Um. So, he's he gets to
Speaker 1: power like five thirty four BC. He has a pretty
Speaker 1: good reign for a while. He wins a bunch of
Speaker 1: wars um, he signs the city's first treaty with Carthage.
Speaker 1: He builds a big gas temple um and yeah, he
Speaker 1: enslaves a bunch of people to make the first sewers
Speaker 1: and drainage systems in Rome. Um. So he's he's definitely like,
Speaker 1: you know, that's solid king stuff. He's he's he's made
Speaker 1: a step beyond gang leader. When you're making sewage, you've
Speaker 1: made a move, have passed past gang shit. Um. And then,
Speaker 1: according to myth, his son rapes a Roman noble woman
Speaker 1: named Lucretia um and this this becomes a problem for him.
Speaker 1: Here's how the Getty summarizes what's said to have happened.
Speaker 1: The tragedy of Lucretia began when Sextist, son of the
Speaker 1: tyrannical Etruscan King of Rome and member of the Tarquin family,
Speaker 1: raped her. For the ancient Romans, a woman who was raped,
Speaker 1: was guilty of adultery, a crime punishable by death, even
Speaker 1: though she had not given herself willingly. After she was raped,
Speaker 1: Lucretia made her husband and father swear an oath of
Speaker 1: vengeance against the Tarkwin's, and then killed herself in shame.
Speaker 1: Enraged by her death, Junius Brutus led a victorious rebellion
Speaker 1: against the Etruscan king. So a couple of things there.
Speaker 1: A couple of things there. Number one looked, obviously you
Speaker 1: should be angry at the guy who did the rape,
Speaker 1: but also most of your anger might be at like
Speaker 1: the social custom that says that she has to kill
Speaker 1: herself after this, Like that might that might be the
Speaker 1: thing to be angrier at. The people don't think that way.
Speaker 1: I guess it really is like this, this like it's
Speaker 1: it's spoken so a matter of factly, and this is
Speaker 1: where like the context of it makes it so hard
Speaker 1: to figure out what the what the approach of this
Speaker 1: is because I mean, look, the entire misogynist society, like
Speaker 1: every misogyst society, this one, you know, worse by modern standards,
Speaker 1: but you know it's pretty normal behind the yeah, but yeah,
Speaker 1: and then you're just like you know, you're the family
Speaker 1: members watching this happen, enraged that this had to happen,
Speaker 1: but not not because of the like the society. Like
Speaker 1: it's sort of like this classic everyone is always mad
Speaker 1: at the wrong thing it is. It's also, though, I
Speaker 1: think if you get yourself in a different mind state,
Speaker 1: you can really feel this because like this is a
Speaker 1: stupid rule that's like cruel and evil and is it
Speaker 1: makes like a bad situation even more horrifying, and like
Speaker 1: we can look at that as like, oh, look at
Speaker 1: these fund up people in their cocked up rules. But
Speaker 1: also the story you get is that like all of
Speaker 1: the Romans are pissed at this, and Lucretia is a
Speaker 1: sympathetic figure in their history. And think about all of
Speaker 1: the different times in recent past when like everyone in
Speaker 1: America has been like, wait, that's the law, that's the
Speaker 1: way it works. That's stupid as ship, why the hell
Speaker 1: are we doing it this way? But then the stupid
Speaker 1: thing happens. That's fucked up because like can't change the law, yeah,
Speaker 1: or we're not going to yeah, I mean you can't
Speaker 1: just change laws. And you get the feeling that's kind
Speaker 1: of the attitude people have. It's like, well, this is
Speaker 1: all like stupid and fucked up. But at the end
Speaker 1: of the day, the only person we can really take
Speaker 1: our anger out on is the Tarquin families. Let's get
Speaker 1: them kings out of here um, which they do. And
Speaker 1: it's also worth noting the guy who leads the rebellion,
Speaker 1: Junius Brutus. That name Brutus should be familiar, right, that's
Speaker 1: the guy who kills Well that the guy who kills
Speaker 1: Caesar is this kid's descendant, you know, hundreds and hundreds
Speaker 1: of years down the line. That's part of why he
Speaker 1: kills Caesar's his family's got this reputation of like when
Speaker 1: people try to do kings stuff, murder them anyway, to
Speaker 1: be fair, pretty good family tradition. It's a cool family tradition.
Speaker 1: It does. So Junius Brutus is one of like forty
Speaker 1: guys that all have the same name. So one of
Speaker 1: the cool things in Roman history, and by cool I
Speaker 1: mean very frustrating, is that if there's ever a guy
Speaker 1: who does anything worth noting, there will be three other
Speaker 1: guys who are also really important with the exact same name,
Speaker 1: because that's how the Romans did things. To be like, yes,
Speaker 1: Scipio Africanus. Well, which one the one from like the
Speaker 1: one sixties or the one from like the or like
Speaker 1: the two d the one from the one fifties and like, um, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's very frustrating, but that's if you're if you're
Speaker 1: early on in Western civilization. How many names you can't
Speaker 1: have that there's like seven names? Yeah, there's like seven names. Um.
Speaker 1: So the details of obviously the Lucretia story are almost
Speaker 1: certainly not exact, but there's a pretty decent chance that
Speaker 1: it broadly is accurate as to what caused the insurrection
Speaker 1: against Etruscan power. Um. Most people probably heard of the
Speaker 1: right of prima nocta right which you see in Brave Heart.
Speaker 1: You know this this right that like nobles supposedly had
Speaker 1: to have sex with a woman the first night after
Speaker 1: a marriage and stuff that. Like in Brave Heart, this
Speaker 1: is depicted as like what sparks the Scottish. But it's
Speaker 1: not a real thing. It never it was not a
Speaker 1: thing in any medieval law. It didn't happen. It certainly
Speaker 1: had nothing to do with fucking William Wallace. Um. There
Speaker 1: were some similar rules in history. The Epic of Gilgamesh
Speaker 1: references customs that are similar to that, as do Herodotus histories.
Speaker 1: And we know that around this same period at least
Speaker 1: one other Italian city revolted from Etruscan control because their
Speaker 1: women were abused. You know, you often don't get a
Speaker 1: lot of detail about this, just something notes that, like
Speaker 1: they were angry about something the Etruscans had done to
Speaker 1: their women, and so like there's a war and they win,
Speaker 1: right right, yeah, right, and it is yeah, that's history.
Speaker 1: I mean it's yeah, I mean often angry that they're
Speaker 1: doing the thing because you were supposed to be doing
Speaker 1: the thing. But yeah, well it's just like you know,
Speaker 1: military occupations haven't changed, you can there's a long ugly
Speaker 1: history of like when the US occupied Japan, you know,
Speaker 1: raped by US service members and stuff that caused a
Speaker 1: lot of problems. And that's it's the thing everywhere. It's
Speaker 1: a thing in interrac it's the thing all throughout history. Um,
Speaker 1: so whatever the excesses of Rome's last king, uh, they
Speaker 1: kick out that last dude, Tarquin and a republic is
Speaker 1: founded in five oh nine b c e UM. And
Speaker 1: it was it was not a super different government in
Speaker 1: a lot of ways from the ones that are quote
Speaker 1: unquote founding fathers established UM, and what I mean by
Speaker 1: that is that only the very wealthiest people could actually
Speaker 1: hold office UM. Now, one thing that's interesting is that
Speaker 1: like pretty much everyone could vote though, so they didn't
Speaker 1: have that difference like when when the United States is established,
Speaker 1: you have to be like a property owning white male
Speaker 1: in order to vote UM, and it's not until later
Speaker 1: that every guy gets the vote. Basically, every freeman has
Speaker 1: a vote in the Roman Republic. But it also doesn't
Speaker 1: really work that way because so the Romans have this
Speaker 1: this system, the client system, where every rich guy just
Speaker 1: over the course of their life picks up hundreds or
Speaker 1: even thousands or tens of thousands of like clients. And
Speaker 1: these are like dudes who he has to give them
Speaker 1: money and or food or something on a pretty regular basis.
Speaker 1: It's kind of like their social welfare program. Like this
Speaker 1: rich guy has to take care of you a little bit,
Speaker 1: but you have to do what he says when it's
Speaker 1: time to vote, right, And this is kind of what
Speaker 1: they have instead of political parties is these coalitions of
Speaker 1: rich guys and their clients who are like, well, like
Speaker 1: this is the guy that like my family, we all
Speaker 1: go and he gives us bread every couple of weeks
Speaker 1: and we vote for right. I guess it is just
Speaker 1: the like local local gang leader. Yeah, it's a little
Speaker 1: different from that yet at this point in that there's
Speaker 1: not really violent coercion holding that together. At this point,
Speaker 1: it's more like an extension of like the way familial
Speaker 1: units and tribes and stuff would have worked in In In fact,
Speaker 1: a lot of it kind of is based on tribal stuff.
Speaker 1: You know, um, probably likely, well probably I make that
Speaker 1: point because these are going to turn into street gangs.
Speaker 1: This absolutely ends with street gangs of people murdering each other.
Speaker 1: But it doesn't mean yeah it was. It's almost it's
Speaker 1: like the same as the electoral college, or like you know,
Speaker 1: it's exactly like the electoral college. Yeah, and we in
Speaker 1: American need to get to the point where our electoral
Speaker 1: college is just several hundred people beating each other to
Speaker 1: death with SAPs in the street. We're getting closer every everything.
Speaker 1: You know, I'm waiting for it. I gotta fucking baseball
Speaker 1: bat with a nail through it. I'm I'm down. Let's
Speaker 1: let's let's become electors. Do you do you put the
Speaker 1: nail like a big nail through making. You got a
Speaker 1: couple of options, so yeah, I mean, I think you
Speaker 1: just One of the better ways is you just kind
Speaker 1: of like hammer the nail in through the edges and stuff,
Speaker 1: so you get a couple of different nails poking out.
Speaker 1: Another thing you could do you can actually like get
Speaker 1: long screws and just like screw with like a like
Speaker 1: a drill through a couple of areas of the bat.
Speaker 1: That'll that'll help you. Like that's a little bit easier. Um.
Speaker 1: You know, a fun thing to do is you get
Speaker 1: some like JB. Wild or a POxy or something. You
Speaker 1: cut little runnels in the sides of the bat. You
Speaker 1: jam razor blades in there, and yeah, you're kind of
Speaker 1: making like a maquahedel. Anyway, I think I know what
Speaker 1: that is, the stick with the It's like what the
Speaker 1: Aztecs used. It's like the stick with all the obsidian,
Speaker 1: but using dollar store razor blades on a baseball bat. Yeah,
Speaker 1: right right, anyway, I get I'm just I'm not I'm
Speaker 1: not as crafty, but I just got an electric drill,
Speaker 1: So I'm like, you know, man, do this anywhere to
Speaker 1: interrupt the spark in your eye when I asked you
Speaker 1: how to make a spike bat a little a little much.
Speaker 1: I knew one of these days, Yeah, one of these days.
Speaker 1: That's that's what We'll get back to the roots of
Speaker 1: Western democracy and I'll be able to have a street
Speaker 1: fight with my home made razor bat. Um. So, yeah,
Speaker 1: you got all these So the Roman Republic, yeah, five
Speaker 1: o nine BC. And you know, we don't exactly know
Speaker 1: what all of the rules were at the start of
Speaker 1: the republic because they were unwritten. Um So their constitution
Speaker 1: is like it's not put down anywhere. It exists only
Speaker 1: in the memories of the oldest rich people. So it's
Speaker 1: kind of like all of the rules are like whatever
Speaker 1: the old people say they are. Um. So, again, very
Speaker 1: similar to our current system in a lot of ways.
Speaker 1: Um And yeah, what if Thomas Jefferson think, oh, now
Speaker 1: the Senate parliamentary and is a thing that matters, Like
Speaker 1: nobody thought about this before, but suddenly it's a huge problem.
Speaker 1: Um So this caused problems over time, which I know
Speaker 1: will surprise you because those patricians and patricians are like
Speaker 1: they're basically nobility. At the start of the Roman Empire,
Speaker 1: they're all of the rich people who's like, families have
Speaker 1: been powerful for a long time. Um and yeah, they
Speaker 1: are the ones who kind of get to tell everyone
Speaker 1: what the constitution says effectively, and people say, yeah, it's
Speaker 1: extremely American. These are the most American, but the Roman
Speaker 1: Republic is the most American thing that ever existed. Um.
Speaker 1: So the poor, the pleabs, the poor people, you know,
Speaker 1: or at least you could call them the regular people
Speaker 1: start to be like, well, this doesn't seem like a
Speaker 1: very good system, Like if we're supposed to be a republic,
Speaker 1: it kind of seems like this, this is a bad
Speaker 1: way to do things. Um and yeah. It also over time,
Speaker 1: as the republic goes on, it starts to change, like
Speaker 1: the wealth situations. So the patricians are like noble because
Speaker 1: of their birth, but they're not necessarily rich, um because
Speaker 1: number one, they have all these obligations. So they have
Speaker 1: all these clients that they have to like pay and feed,
Speaker 1: and they have all these like when they get political office,
Speaker 1: that often means they have to throw parties for everybody
Speaker 1: in the city or like big religious festivals. So a
Speaker 1: lot of them are fucking broke all of the time.
Speaker 1: And this class of merchants rises up who aren't noble,
Speaker 1: but they have a bunch of money. And they're like, well,
Speaker 1: we're the ones paying for everything now, like one way
Speaker 1: or the other. And we're like buying these patricians and
Speaker 1: having them do stuff. Why don't we get to like
Speaker 1: hold political office or have any kind of power. Um.
Speaker 1: And part of like what's fucking these patricians over is
Speaker 1: that the only way that they can acceptably make money
Speaker 1: is like either going to war and conquering shit or
Speaker 1: like agriculture. It's kind of considered gross for them to
Speaker 1: be in business. So anyway, ship starts to change in
Speaker 1: Rome and you get this like wealthy class of people
Speaker 1: who are like plebeian but but have money. Um. And
Speaker 1: over time, like the folks who are not patrician get
Speaker 1: increasingly angry, and you know, you get your riots and
Speaker 1: you get people threatening each other in the streets. And
Speaker 1: then in four one BC they force the patricians to
Speaker 1: commission a series to actually write out a constitution where
Speaker 1: they're like, okay, we're gonna actually like lay out what
Speaker 1: the rules are in a way that people can see
Speaker 1: as opposed to us just being like oh yeah, I
Speaker 1: remember the way. It's all it's supposed to be. I
Speaker 1: remember how the law works. Um, So because it's the past,
Speaker 1: they just like hammer a bunch of rules into big
Speaker 1: bronze tablets, twelve of them, and stick them in the
Speaker 1: center of town, so that if you want to know
Speaker 1: what the law is, you just like walk up to
Speaker 1: the bronze tablets and read them, um, which is a
Speaker 1: flich is a fun way to do it. Now, Like
Speaker 1: all democratic compromises, the new written Constitution codified extraordinary powers
Speaker 1: for the wealthy. Most of it dealt with debts and debtors,
Speaker 1: and noted that in the event that a debtor was
Speaker 1: ruled to have failed to like pay a debt uh,
Speaker 1: he would have to be basically on the after three
Speaker 1: days or so, he would either be executed or sold
Speaker 1: uh into slavery. So like, debt's a serious thing. And
Speaker 1: this is on the separate point. Something that like a
Speaker 1: Corey doctor and a couple of other people will make
Speaker 1: a point of is that, like the Romans were the
Speaker 1: first people would be like, debt is a thing that
Speaker 1: exists forever for you and eventually like your family, as
Speaker 1: opposed to like every twenty years we'd have a jubilee
Speaker 1: and there's no more debt the Romans, because they have
Speaker 1: this entrenched power structure that actually holds. You don't have
Speaker 1: like a king who might be like, well, every twenty
Speaker 1: years or so, I'm gonna do a jubilee because then
Speaker 1: people get their debts cleared and they like the king more.
Speaker 1: Now the people running it are like all of the
Speaker 1: rich people, and they're like, well, no, we're never gonna
Speaker 1: white people's debts. Where the funk would we do that? Ship,
Speaker 1: And so that's where that whole process starts in history.
Speaker 1: That's the source of our power right right as opposed. Yeah,
Speaker 1: when it switched from large as to money, you know what,
Speaker 1: making me miss kings Robert. Yeah, well it's not entirely
Speaker 1: a good thing that they get rid of theirs, I
Speaker 1: guess um. The Constitution also enshrined incredible powers for Roman men.
Speaker 1: The pattern familius, or the head of each family was
Speaker 1: essentially a little dictator. So we don't have a king,
Speaker 1: but like if you're the dad, you you have the
Speaker 1: absolute power of life and death. So number one, deformed
Speaker 1: children have to be killed immediately. That's one of their
Speaker 1: that's like there, that's like their first amendment in ancient
Speaker 1: rome Um, which you know it's the past. Um. And
Speaker 1: fathers have the power of life and death over their children,
Speaker 1: UM and their wife. So you can, as the father,
Speaker 1: execute your kids or other members of your family anytime
Speaker 1: you want to. Um, the classic law of I brought
Speaker 1: you into this world, I can take you out. Yeah,
Speaker 1: which one is the most important societal bedrock? Look, if
Speaker 1: that was the rule, I would have kids. I'd have
Speaker 1: a buckload of kids, and they'd be they'd be doing
Speaker 1: a lot of work for me. So. Um. There are
Speaker 1: some like more sensible rules though, that kind of limits. So,
Speaker 1: among other things, if you're a dad and you sell
Speaker 1: your kid into slavery three times, um, then your son
Speaker 1: no longer has to do what you say. I don't
Speaker 1: know why three times is the rule, but like you
Speaker 1: have to pick a number. I guess where. It's like
Speaker 1: Genie ship, what is happening here? Uh, It's it's cool.
Speaker 1: Um so yeah, it's it's good stuff. It's this weird
Speaker 1: mix of like nightmare social laws and then like broadly
Speaker 1: reasonable stuff like yeah, if a child's born within ten
Speaker 1: months of the father's death, they get some of the inheritance,
Speaker 1: you know, like stuff like that. It's like, well, that's
Speaker 1: just like a pretty reasonable solution to a problem. Um. Now,
Speaker 1: the Twelve Tables also note that women are always legally children.
Speaker 1: They always have to have a guardian. This is because
Speaker 1: of quote their levity of mind. Uh. And the only
Speaker 1: exception to this are the vestal virgins, which are basically
Speaker 1: older like O. G. Nuns um, but they're much cooler
Speaker 1: than the nuns um and a lot more weird sex
Speaker 1: stuff going on allegedly. And you know who else is
Speaker 1: allegedly engaging in a lot of weird sex shit. Andrew
Speaker 1: Yo hit me the products and services that support this podcast.
Speaker 1: They never stop fucking, not not not once. And that
Speaker 1: ship I was gonna say, is not in the Bible,
Speaker 1: but it very much is in the Bible. What they're doing,
Speaker 1: most of what they're doing is in the Bible. But
Speaker 1: they go off the map every now and then. You
Speaker 1: know it's gonna enter any situation. It goes into cock first,
Speaker 1: and you don't know what's going to happen. Like they're
Speaker 1: just they're just gonna they live to penetrate. That's actually
Speaker 1: the corporate motto, we live to penetrate. I was going
Speaker 1: to ask you which sponsor you were specifically referring to
Speaker 1: and then I realized that you already had one in mind,
Speaker 1: and that sorry, good luck with that. Bleep. I know
Speaker 1: you love it. I would love I would love a
Speaker 1: Bible that has like a just like a map of
Speaker 1: you know, the Bible, parts of the parts of the
Speaker 1: Bible story like like the like an edition of Lord
Speaker 1: of the Rings or whatever, just like a little map
Speaker 1: of the front page. Yeah, lit, they should do that.
Speaker 1: They probably do. So there's this broad understanding that political
Speaker 1: violence is undesirable, um, and there's actually not as far
Speaker 1: as we can tell. It doesn't seem to have been
Speaker 1: a thing that happened very often, um in in the
Speaker 1: early Republic, right, like when people had political disputes, they
Speaker 1: didn't murder each other generally, which is a big thing
Speaker 1: right in this period of time, If you've like gotten
Speaker 1: to that point in your society, that's pretty cool. Um.
Speaker 1: We have trouble with that today. We don't. We don't
Speaker 1: do that. Yeah. And one of the reasons for this,
Speaker 1: so the Romans have this written constitution kind of thing. Now,
Speaker 1: they also have this thing called the most mal um,
Speaker 1: which is it just literally means way of the ancestors,
Speaker 1: and it's it's another unwritten legal code kind of and
Speaker 1: it's basically just a bunch of like, you don't murder
Speaker 1: people who are elected leaders, you know, you don't like
Speaker 1: bribe people in order to make them vote the way
Speaker 1: you want. You don't do this, you don't do that, um.
Speaker 1: And there's a couple of different things in there, including
Speaker 1: there's a rule that you don't carry weapons inside the city. Now,
Speaker 1: this band gets misinterpreted a lot of times. You might
Speaker 1: think of it as the ancient equivalent of an assault
Speaker 1: weapons ban, right, So they're not banning all weapons because spoilers,
Speaker 1: everybody still has weapons, but they don't have military weapons,
Speaker 1: so they're not support you're it's like you can get
Speaker 1: executed and ship if you're caught carrying a sword or
Speaker 1: like a dagger within the what's called the pomarium, which
Speaker 1: is this like kind of sacred quasi ethereal boundary that
Speaker 1: like is the supposed to be the actual like boundary
Speaker 1: of rome Um. Now obviously, so again this just refers
Speaker 1: to like military weapons. So when people do have fights
Speaker 1: and stuff, they'll usually have like chair legs that they'll
Speaker 1: stick sharp things into, or they'll they'll make SAPs or
Speaker 1: brass knuckles are super popular. The Romans have their own
Speaker 1: kind of thing. Yeah, yeah, they call it a cestis. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's basically brass knuckles or like punch daggers that like
Speaker 1: really nasty fighting weapons, right, so you don't have swords
Speaker 1: and stuff. So people are just like calling it and
Speaker 1: beating the ship out of each other with like stuff
Speaker 1: they make in their fucking garages. Um, which is pretty cool.
Speaker 1: It's like the Warriors stuff, right, Like that's that's very
Speaker 1: very Yeah, you spike bat is just too big? Yeah,
Speaker 1: what's the what's the what's the fucking millwall thing where
Speaker 1: you make it with just like a bunch of editions
Speaker 1: of like the like the Daily Mirror or whatever. Yeah
Speaker 1: yeah yeah, for some fucking it's basically the Jason Bourne
Speaker 1: shop where he fights a dude with the magazine or whatever. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean the the coolest thing that the fucking Romans
Speaker 1: had was this thing called a cestus or castis or whatever,
Speaker 1: and it was basically it was like a boxing glove
Speaker 1: that had was covered in iron balls, so that like
Speaker 1: when you so it's like this combination box singlove slash,
Speaker 1: brass knuckles and yeah you can eat. Yeah, they so
Speaker 1: they had plenty of weapons, they just did not allow
Speaker 1: military weapons. And you're not allowed to bring soldiers into
Speaker 1: the city of Rome. Nobody can take an army into Rome.
Speaker 1: They have to camp outside of the city if you've
Speaker 1: got an army nearby, because again they recognize pretty early
Speaker 1: on that, like, well, if we want to have a republic,
Speaker 1: it's probably a bad idea to let people march their
Speaker 1: army into the city. That could end badly, that might
Speaker 1: not go well. Um, but most of this stuff is
Speaker 1: just like it's not written law. It's everybody knows that
Speaker 1: you're not supposed to do these things, right, right, A
Speaker 1: wonderful way to run a government. Yes, a norm, right,
Speaker 1: these are their norms. You know. The other thing, too,
Speaker 1: is like the army thing is like I think it's
Speaker 1: I mean obviously just because I'm a soft child of
Speaker 1: the twentieth century, but it is like wild to kind
Speaker 1: of remember how threatening a parade really should be. Yeah,
Speaker 1: a parade. I mean historically, the Romans are kind of
Speaker 1: one of the first groups of people to try to
Speaker 1: stop a raid from being a threat because they have
Speaker 1: this these things called triumphs, and so if you win
Speaker 1: a military victory, that's big enough, the Senate will vote
Speaker 1: you a triumph and you basically are king of the
Speaker 1: city for a day and you get to take your
Speaker 1: army and march them through the city with all your captives,
Speaker 1: and everybody pretty much worships you. But the whole time
Speaker 1: you're doing it, Number one, it's just for a day,
Speaker 1: And the whole time you're doing it, there's a guy
Speaker 1: whose only job is to like walk behind you and
Speaker 1: be like, hey, bro, you're gonna die one of these days.
Speaker 1: Hey bro, Like you're still fucked. Like everybody's fucked. Nobody
Speaker 1: lives forever, Like you're not actually a king or a god.
Speaker 1: You're gonna die, dude, like, which is kind of neat.
Speaker 1: I think it's it's one of my favorite parts of
Speaker 1: Roman history. Um yeah, so the best job, Yeah, civic life.
Speaker 1: This These were the first. Like nowadays, anybody can like
Speaker 1: go on Twitter and ratio a political leader, um, if
Speaker 1: they're if they're good enough at trolling. This was. This
Speaker 1: was that job in the ancient world, like the dude
Speaker 1: who follows the imperatore around being like, hey bro, you
Speaker 1: kind of suck. Actually, yeah exactly. My god, Rome would
Speaker 1: have adopted Twitter immediately, like they basically they had like
Speaker 1: like their Roman graffiti is a whole other story, but
Speaker 1: like they had Twitter, they had their own Twitter. Um.
Speaker 1: I think my favorite piece of Roman graffiti that was
Speaker 1: like found in fucking POMPEII is this guy being like
Speaker 1: all of the women in Rome or all of the
Speaker 1: women in the Empire should weep because I'm just fucking
Speaker 1: dudes now, Like I'm I'm so tired of fucking ladies.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna i'm my dicks for nothing, but men. Now
Speaker 1: that's pretty. That is peaked Twitter. It is incredibly peaked Twitter.
Speaker 1: Amazing Twitter. How does it? What is it just like
Speaker 1: paint and brush? I guess yeah, they're just like paint
Speaker 1: and ship. Yeah, they've got paint, Like they're just like
Speaker 1: painting stuff on walls and whatnot. I guess I was
Speaker 1: just thinking, like the advent of spray paint for graffiti,
Speaker 1: Like what again they would have taken to spray paint
Speaker 1: Immediately you show like literally any Roman citizen spray paint
Speaker 1: and they're like, oh fuck, I'm gonna be able to
Speaker 1: yell at like my neighbor so much more efficiently. Um,
Speaker 1: you'll probably make a primitive air brush Yeah. So the
Speaker 1: Roman system is it's it's a little bit wacky, but
Speaker 1: it works really well, and for most of like three
Speaker 1: hundred years they get by without any massive internal political violence. Now,
Speaker 1: a big part of this is that for these first
Speaker 1: couple of hundred years, Romans nearly destroyed. Like every thirty
Speaker 1: years or so, like every couple of decades, somebody will
Speaker 1: invade Italy and almost wipe them out. And usually the
Speaker 1: way it goes is the Romans. There's an invasion, the
Speaker 1: Romans get together a massive army and they send it
Speaker 1: to fight the invasion, and they all get wiped out
Speaker 1: because some idiot makes a stupid mistake on the Roman side.
Speaker 1: And then the Romans some how put together another army
Speaker 1: and eventually win the war. Um. And this is like
Speaker 1: how every war works out for Rome. They take these
Speaker 1: like the thing that distinguishes Romans as a military power
Speaker 1: is they're able to like lose all of their guys
Speaker 1: and then win the war anyway, um, which is like
Speaker 1: a mixed sort of reputation to have militarily UM. A
Speaker 1: good example of this would be the Pyric War from
Speaker 1: two eighty to two seventy b c. The gist of
Speaker 1: it is that the Romans go to war with a
Speaker 1: bunch of Greek cities in southern Italy, and those Greek
Speaker 1: cities are like, hey, we need help, and they called
Speaker 1: to this Greek king over in Greece called Pyrus, and
Speaker 1: he invades Italy to like funk up the Romans. And
Speaker 1: Pirus is a scary old son of a bit. She's
Speaker 1: got a big army, a bunch of war elephants, and
Speaker 1: he just shatters the Roman military. And this series of
Speaker 1: horrible grinding thousands and thousands of people massacred, but also
Speaker 1: every battle is so ugly that like he loses most
Speaker 1: of his army fighting it, so kind of at the
Speaker 1: end of this series of battles, the Romans can't continue
Speaker 1: to prosecute the war um. But Pirrus doesn't really want
Speaker 1: to keep fighting either, because he doesn't have much of
Speaker 1: an army left. And this is where we get the
Speaker 1: term pyric victory, right. Um. So he like goes to
Speaker 1: Rome and he's like, hey, guys, you're you're y'all are fucked,
Speaker 1: let's do a peace deal. Um. And he offers them
Speaker 1: pretty good terms. And I'm gonna quote what comes next
Speaker 1: from a rite up in the New York Times. When
Speaker 1: the Senate convened to debate the offer, an old blind
Speaker 1: senator named Appius Claudius was carried into the Senate house
Speaker 1: by his sons. As the chamber fell silent, he stood
Speaker 1: to chastise his colleagues. I have, he said, long thought
Speaker 1: of the unfortunate state of my eyes as an affliction.
Speaker 1: But now that I hear you debates shameful resolutions which
Speaker 1: would diminish the glory of Rome, I wish that I
Speaker 1: were not only blind, but also death. By giving in
Speaker 1: to Pyrus, Claudius warned, the Roman Republic would only invite
Speaker 1: more outside powers to mess with it. Low as the
Speaker 1: odds of victory might be, Rome had no choice but
Speaker 1: to keep fighting, and they actually somehow win. Um. Pyrus like, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's it's the whole thing. Um. He tries to
Speaker 1: to bribe a bunch of his way out of like
Speaker 1: fighting the more, but it doesn't work. Um. And yeah,
Speaker 1: this is like this is a somewhat idolized version of
Speaker 1: events of how like Warm beats Rome beats pirates And
Speaker 1: it's based on the writings of a guy named Edward J. Watts,
Speaker 1: who is one of these historians who's written a book
Speaker 1: about the Roman Republic to talk about the collapse of
Speaker 1: the United States. Um. Yeah, But as kind of biased
Speaker 1: as his take on things is, it is worth noting
Speaker 1: that like what they build really works, like as flawed
Speaker 1: as we're going to talk about all of the flaws
Speaker 1: as it is, the Romans create this political structure that's
Speaker 1: able to like repeatedly almost get wiped out in disastrous
Speaker 1: military defeats and not lose wars um. And part of
Speaker 1: it is because everybody's got skin in the game. The
Speaker 1: entire ruling class is out there fighting whenever there's a war,
Speaker 1: along with like all of the and and in fact,
Speaker 1: most of the people fighting are people with like property.
Speaker 1: The Roman army, you have to pay for your own weapons,
Speaker 1: so poor people are not fighting. It's basically like the
Speaker 1: middle class and the rich people who are actually like
Speaker 1: going to war. And one of the downsides is that
Speaker 1: all of their armies are led by the equivalent of
Speaker 1: like Nancy Pelosi, which goes really badly sometimes, right because
Speaker 1: you'll have like this eighty year old career politician trying
Speaker 1: to like lead an army of seventy thousand guys and
Speaker 1: he doesn't know what the funk he's doing? Um, probably
Speaker 1: there there's some argument that that is sort of why
Speaker 1: the first the first crack at our first draft. At
Speaker 1: any given Roman army is sort of just the ship
Speaker 1: that needs to be exactly They all it's the guys
Speaker 1: who suck the most, and you get like Ted Cruz
Speaker 1: out there, and you just need to get rid of him.
Speaker 1: Anyone who survives that first one plus the fresh recruits
Speaker 1: is probably the way to go. Yeah, we gotta burn
Speaker 1: off an army before we can get anything done. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's like making it's like making pancakes. The first one's
Speaker 1: just for the trash. If we had invaded Afghanistan by
Speaker 1: sending all of Congress in first, I think the United
Speaker 1: States and Afghanistan would be in a state of perfect
Speaker 1: peace with each other and there would be no more
Speaker 1: problems in the world. I mean truly, this, like you know,
Speaker 1: are the that is the least American thing about this
Speaker 1: is about this particular iteration of Rome is putting middle
Speaker 1: class and nobles on the line at all. Yeah, um,
Speaker 1: if only, if only, but all of these nobles they
Speaker 1: have fucking so like one of the things pirates tries
Speaker 1: to bribe a bunch of guys and he can't bribe
Speaker 1: them because they're like, well, no, this is like my
Speaker 1: whole family's fighting, Like this is what we do. We
Speaker 1: have this like system and we're kind of all in
Speaker 1: it together. And one of the reasons this works is
Speaker 1: that there's not a massive like there's rich people and
Speaker 1: there's poor people. But within all of the people who
Speaker 1: the freemen who have property, there's not a massive disparity
Speaker 1: in wealth. Right, the rich are not very rich, um,
Speaker 1: because like it's Rome's just kind of this scrappy little
Speaker 1: city in the middle of Italy. Right, it's not like
Speaker 1: this super powerful force. Um. But as time goes on,
Speaker 1: they keep winning these wars, and so they wind up
Speaker 1: in control of more and more and more of Italy,
Speaker 1: and they get all of this land, and all of
Speaker 1: this money starts coming in, and that's when things start
Speaker 1: to go awry. Right. So, after Rome beats Purists and
Speaker 1: conquers most of southern Italy, they settle into what's what's
Speaker 1: going to be two hundred straight years of unbroken victories
Speaker 1: in foreign wars. Rome's military record here Basically they spend
Speaker 1: the length of the time that the United States has
Speaker 1: existed as a country winning every fight they get into, um,
Speaker 1: which is like a pretty solid record. Now they lose
Speaker 1: battles constantly, like with Devon in the First Punic War,
Speaker 1: which starts in two sixty BC. This is with Carthage.
Speaker 1: It lasts twenty years. Like to tell you how silly
Speaker 1: some of their wars go. So this war starts with
Speaker 1: Rome going to Sicily to fight Carthage and they win there.
Speaker 1: They invade North Africa and they win what's probably what
Speaker 1: might be the largest naval battle in all history still
Speaker 1: to this day. Like if you listen to the historians,
Speaker 1: then it's like three hundred thousand people are all fighting
Speaker 1: in boats. Um. And again this is like twenty three
Speaker 1: hundred years ago. Fucking wild, how like many people that
Speaker 1: they could put together at this point. Um. But they
Speaker 1: win this series of battles. They win these naval battles.
Speaker 1: Carthage sues for peace and Rome refuses to like have peace,
Speaker 1: So Carthage keeps fighting and then beats them and like
Speaker 1: chatters a Roman army. So Rome has to send a
Speaker 1: fleet to evacuate the remains of this army that's gotten
Speaker 1: it's askect in Africa, and then the entire fleet and
Speaker 1: a hundred thousand men all die in a storm like
Speaker 1: heading back to Italy. That kind of ship happens constantly
Speaker 1: to the Romans, and it just never stops them. Um.
Speaker 1: Then you've got the Second Punic War, which starts into
Speaker 1: eighteen BC. It also lasts like twenty fucking years. And
Speaker 1: there's like we've talked about the Battle of kan I,
Speaker 1: which is one of the most famous battles in history. Hannibal,
Speaker 1: you know, the elephant guy encircles their army and kills
Speaker 1: fifty thou Romans in a day. It's like ten percent
Speaker 1: of the male population of the Republic he like wipes out,
Speaker 1: including like eight senators, like a bunch of a significant
Speaker 1: percentage of the Roman It's like if it's like if
Speaker 1: the United States had like ten percent of its male
Speaker 1: population and half of its political class wiped out in
Speaker 1: a battle in fucking Afghanistan. Um, Like, it's pretty it's
Speaker 1: it's a bad day for them, and they just do
Speaker 1: the same thing they always do. They make more guys senators,
Speaker 1: they make more guys soldiers, and they send them back
Speaker 1: out to fight, right um Um, And it's it's fine. Um.
Speaker 1: But while these wars are going on, and they win
Speaker 1: these wars. They win the First Punic War, they win
Speaker 1: the Second Punic War, they get control of Sicily, they
Speaker 1: get a bunch of influence and power in northern uh
Speaker 1: in Northern Africa. They take control of all of Spain
Speaker 1: in the Second Punic War, like Rome is now running Iberia.
Speaker 1: While all this is going on, a couple of other
Speaker 1: things are happening. One is that a lot of Roman
Speaker 1: soldiers are dying right like shipload because Nancy Pelosi is
Speaker 1: very often the battlefield commander, and she's not very good
Speaker 1: at that. Um And and since these guys these are
Speaker 1: like the Roman middle class, right, most of them are
Speaker 1: small independent farmers. They have enough money to buy their
Speaker 1: own weapons and armor and stuff and sometimes even horses.
Speaker 1: Um And so the system that they set up works
Speaker 1: really well when war means you have to like walk
Speaker 1: two days to like funk with this town across like
Speaker 1: the river from you. Um. But when you're going to
Speaker 1: war for twenty years and your army is all of
Speaker 1: the guys who make your food, then it becomes a problem, right,
Speaker 1: are you seeing like the flaw and the Roman social
Speaker 1: system also, it's it's like I mean and this I
Speaker 1: guess is the thing that's like distressing is like you
Speaker 1: would hope what this would do is lead towards like
Speaker 1: more measured wars and like you know, no, no, it's
Speaker 1: simply the opposite, is we will I mean your well,
Speaker 1: we're seeing it obviously in our time also, I was like,
Speaker 1: we will simply let society crumble rather than and that's
Speaker 1: what happens because here's the thing. If you were to
Speaker 1: make have less wars, well, the only ways that the
Speaker 1: nobility can make money is war or taking a bunch
Speaker 1: of farming land, right, because they're not allowed to have businesses,
Speaker 1: they're not allowed to be merchants. Uh. And if they
Speaker 1: don't get to have more wars and massacre more generations
Speaker 1: of Roman boys, then the merchants who aren't nobles will
Speaker 1: have more money than them and nicer houses. Do you
Speaker 1: see why this is a problem, right? I know it's
Speaker 1: so just like but like instead of being like the
Speaker 1: custom is weird, and we could just diversify our ruling
Speaker 1: classes economy look at the same point. Nope, I'm the farmers.
Speaker 1: I'm all for restricting our ruling classes economic sources of income.
Speaker 1: It is interesting that if you look at the two
Speaker 1: longest lived republics in history, which is the Roman Republic
Speaker 1: and now US, and both of them, you have this group,
Speaker 1: this hereditary nobility, who are like, well, if we're going
Speaker 1: to stay rich, we're gonna have to kill the middle class.
Speaker 1: We're gonna have to We're gonna have to get rid
Speaker 1: of those people. Um. So yeah, you this is you
Speaker 1: start to get these serious problems where like these farmers
Speaker 1: soldiers are spending like five years at a time out
Speaker 1: on campaigns, and like fucking Africa or Spain which is
Speaker 1: quite a distance from Italy when you have to walk
Speaker 1: it right, like they are far as funk away and
Speaker 1: a lot of people listening probably are not farmers. I'll
Speaker 1: let you in on a secret about farming. If you
Speaker 1: don't do anything to your farm for five years, it
Speaker 1: is no longer a farm. It's it's just the woods
Speaker 1: like um, and that's that that that causes an issue.
Speaker 1: These soldiers are spending like half a decade at a time,
Speaker 1: you know, in addition to like whatever injuries and trauma
Speaker 1: they suffer, they come home and their farms are ruined
Speaker 1: and they can't afford to like put them back into shape.
Speaker 1: So again, and as you noted a reasonable country might
Speaker 1: go like, well, clearly, we need farmers and we need
Speaker 1: people to become soldiers, so it's in our best interest
Speaker 1: to like figure out a way to deal with this
Speaker 1: um that is not and this is a volunteer army.
Speaker 1: It wasn't right. Yeah, well, they do have conscriptions, like
Speaker 1: especially during emergencies, they have conscriptions and stuff. So it's
Speaker 1: more like it's kind of like a draft um a
Speaker 1: lot of the time with these wars. So yeah, it's
Speaker 1: generally sort of a you get called up, your number
Speaker 1: gets called up effectively, and like it's time for you
Speaker 1: to go serve. They do have a lot of like
Speaker 1: there are volunteer anyway. Whatever. It's a whole thing that
Speaker 1: we don't have the time to get into that today,
Speaker 1: but it's worth noting that, like the money that they
Speaker 1: are making by conquering everything around Rome is plenty of
Speaker 1: money to take care of these farmers. And I want
Speaker 1: to quote now from a Marxist account of Roman history
Speaker 1: written by Alan Woods. Quote, after the Second Punic War
Speaker 1: ended in two o two b c. The economy of
Speaker 1: Italy and dured a massive up people. The legions that
Speaker 1: conquered Spain Greece and North Africa returned home with riches
Speaker 1: on an unprecedented scale. A proconsul that's like the mix
Speaker 1: between the president and a general returned from campaign in
Speaker 1: the East bearing a hundred and thirty seven thousand pounds
Speaker 1: of raw silver, six hundred thousand silver pieces and a
Speaker 1: hundred and forty thousand gold pieces. So like the nobles
Speaker 1: are getting fucking rich in all of this money stays
Speaker 1: in the hands of these the patricians and this new
Speaker 1: class of people called the equities, who are like rich businessmen, right,
Speaker 1: because the trade is a lot. The more you conquer,
Speaker 1: the better trade gets for you if you're a fucking
Speaker 1: Roman businessman, So they're making fucking bank um. Now, all
Speaker 1: of the land that the Roman army captures during this
Speaker 1: conquest of Italy they go over become state owned land,
Speaker 1: which seems fair right. They call it the the ager
Speaker 1: publicists popular Romani, which means the public land of the
Speaker 1: Roman people. And over time the Senate votes to allow
Speaker 1: people to own parcels of this public land and perpetuity
Speaker 1: as long as they work it right. So that's how initially,
Speaker 1: like soldiers get rewarded as you get some of this
Speaker 1: public land and you can start a farm on it
Speaker 1: and that will allow you to have like a degree
Speaker 1: of economic independence. Um. But I'm gonna quote here from
Speaker 1: a write up in the Anthropology Review. Quote the problem
Speaker 1: was that if the land was left uncultivated, it could
Speaker 1: be taken over by someone who could work it. So
Speaker 1: soldiers who were out of the country fighting for the
Speaker 1: glory of Rome came back to find themselves dispossessed. Vast
Speaker 1: stretches of land were taken over by rich and powerful
Speaker 1: Romans who used slaves who were not called for military service,
Speaker 1: and thus we're always present to plow the fields and
Speaker 1: tend to the crops and livestock. This meant that peasants
Speaker 1: and returning soldiers had not only lost their land, but
Speaker 1: also the possibility of finding decently paid work with which
Speaker 1: to support their family, because it was impossible to compete
Speaker 1: with slaves who had to work for free. So that's
Speaker 1: that's a bad way to have the situation work, right,
Speaker 1: So just like it is, Yeah, it's I guess it's
Speaker 1: like like all things that's just cobbled together from like
Speaker 1: tradition and like is what happened last time? Just like
Speaker 1: the fact that well, I want to be rich. I
Speaker 1: want to be rich. Nothing nothing really matters more to
Speaker 1: me than personally being richer. So let's let's do whatever
Speaker 1: gets me the most money in the short term. And
Speaker 1: I will never back down. This system can't change because
Speaker 1: it's absolutely can work for us. And again, people at
Speaker 1: the time noted note that this is like bad. Like
Speaker 1: there's like a decent number of people in the Roman
Speaker 1: political structure who are like, hey, guys, this is gonna
Speaker 1: be a problem as as as we have in the
Speaker 1: United States who are consistently being like, this is not
Speaker 1: a good way to do things, um, because they're noticing
Speaker 1: that all of these formerly independent freemen, the veterans who
Speaker 1: have like conquered the world for Rome, are winding up
Speaker 1: as almost like homeless in the city of Rome itself,
Speaker 1: Like they have no work, no way to make money,
Speaker 1: and they just kind of swell the city because the
Speaker 1: state will will give them food when they're in the city,
Speaker 1: kind of like it's the only thing they can do
Speaker 1: is kind of become clients to some fucking rich guy
Speaker 1: or whatever, um, and you know, basically exist to provide
Speaker 1: a vote for a rich man and live marginally on
Speaker 1: the edges of society. Um so as you can imagine
Speaker 1: the fact that like the only way for a lot
Speaker 1: of these poor people to get any kind of support
Speaker 1: at all is to like vote for whatever guy has
Speaker 1: the most money and thus can give them food. It
Speaker 1: makes this political system twist even more in favor of
Speaker 1: the wealthy. Right, inequality becomes a serious problem in the
Speaker 1: Roman Republic. Now again, a lot of people recognize this
Speaker 1: as an issue, and in his wonderful book The Storm
Speaker 1: Before the Storm, Mike Duncan writes quote as early as
Speaker 1: one nine, Kato the Elder warned his colleagues, we have
Speaker 1: crossed in degrease in Asia, places filled with all the
Speaker 1: allurements of vice, and we are handling the treasures of kings.
Speaker 1: I fear that these things will capture us rather than
Speaker 1: we them. Every few years, the Senate would attempt to
Speaker 1: rein in the ostentatious displays of wealth, but the resulting
Speaker 1: limitations inevitably went unheeded and unenforced. By little coincidence, the
Speaker 1: Roman people at the same moment both acquired a taste
Speaker 1: for vice and obtained a license for gratifying it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's that's that's the way it always goes, right, they're
Speaker 1: no different from us. Oh god, yeah, they just we
Speaker 1: just have phones. Yeah, and it's it's it's interesting Karl
Speaker 1: Marx when he writes Capital is specifically looking at this
Speaker 1: period in Roman history, he bases a lot of his
Speaker 1: conclusions off of like what the history that he's like
Speaker 1: reading about. Why, like what happens in the Roman Republic?
Speaker 1: And he writes in Capital, quote it requires but a
Speaker 1: slight acquaintance with the history of the Roman Republic to
Speaker 1: be aware that it's secret history is the history of
Speaker 1: its landed property, right that like and essentially what he's
Speaker 1: saying is that, like you have this vision of what
Speaker 1: the Roman Republic was that like dudes like our quote
Speaker 1: unquote founding fathers have where they're just like masturbating over
Speaker 1: these like austere figures, and then you have the reality,
Speaker 1: which is that, yeah, this venal corrupt land holding class
Speaker 1: is choking out the middle class and the poor in
Speaker 1: order to make their already vast fortunes even larger. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and destroying the entire state as they do it, because
Speaker 1: they care about nothing but increasing the amount of wealth
Speaker 1: that they have, like like parasites on every level. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's good stuff, you know, who else is a parasite
Speaker 1: on every level. Andrew, I've got to find out the
Speaker 1: sponsors of this podcast absolutely blood sucking ticks, just just
Speaker 1: guzzling the life out of your your veins. So if
Speaker 1: he is that a good wittily dads that gonna make
Speaker 1: him happen, that's the only way you can lead into ads,
Speaker 1: my friend. Excellent, excellent, Oh we're back. So this all
Speaker 1: brings us to the story of a guy who, depending
Speaker 1: on who you ask, is either the first socialist in
Speaker 1: history or this sinister populist precursor to Donald Trump. You
Speaker 1: there are think pieces that will say both things. They're
Speaker 1: all pretty silly because he's his own person and this
Speaker 1: is a long time ago, so stop stop it. But
Speaker 1: this guy's name is Tiberius Sempronius gracchus Um, and he's
Speaker 1: born in either one sixty three or one sixty two
Speaker 1: b C. And he comes into into being as like
Speaker 1: the bluest blood motherfucker. It is possible to be his
Speaker 1: father had served as console, which is kind of like again,
Speaker 1: it's like a mix between president in general, like if
Speaker 1: the senators are also leading art right, Yeah, exactly, it
Speaker 1: should be the same job. Get you get like voted
Speaker 1: to get a military command effectively. Um so in his
Speaker 1: dad like celebrates two triumphs for military victories, is like
Speaker 1: a young man. His mother is like the daughter of
Speaker 1: this great Roman war hero. Um. Now, everybody's main source
Speaker 1: on Tiberius gracuss life is a guy named Plutarch, who
Speaker 1: is a Greek historian who writes about him like a
Speaker 1: hundred years after he died. And it's worth knowing what
Speaker 1: Plutarch says because Plutarch's working from like sources that were
Speaker 1: written by people at the time when Gracis was alive.
Speaker 1: But like most Roman history, we still you're still just
Speaker 1: like most of Plutarch's history is like, well a guy
Speaker 1: told me this, Like I heard this from like a
Speaker 1: dude who's like his grandpa was around, and like I
Speaker 1: heard this, I heard the I a lot of It's
Speaker 1: like I guess that's all history anyway, But yeah, like
Speaker 1: after this, after what happens with this guy happens is
Speaker 1: like brother writes a pamphlet that he hands out and
Speaker 1: like a lot of Plutarch is based on like what
Speaker 1: people remember from being in the pamphlet. But I don't
Speaker 1: think we have the pamphlet still so it's like it's
Speaker 1: like if somebody if lot's like if somebody wrote a
Speaker 1: history of the of the George Floyd protests based on
Speaker 1: like a conversation with someone who remembered some zines about
Speaker 1: them right where it's like, yeah, like you're you're you're
Speaker 1: probably not gonna get all of the facts, but yeah,
Speaker 1: history is fucking crazy. Yeah it's good stuff. There's a
Speaker 1: story that Plutarch tells that like when Tiberius's dad is
Speaker 1: a kid, he goes to a soothsayer, you know, basically
Speaker 1: a fucking you know, a fortune teller, and uh, she's
Speaker 1: like you're gonna have to either. Uh like, I'll just
Speaker 1: read the quote because it's kind of weird. We're told
Speaker 1: moreover that he once caught a pair of serpents on
Speaker 1: his bed, and that the soothsayers, after considering the prodigy,
Speaker 1: forbade him to kill both serpents, or to let both go,
Speaker 1: but to decide the fate of one or the other
Speaker 1: of them, declaring that also the male serpent, if killed,
Speaker 1: would bring death to Tiberius and the female to Cornelia.
Speaker 1: That's his wife. Uh So Tiberius, accordingly, who loved his
Speaker 1: wife and thought that she was still young and he
Speaker 1: was older, and it was more fitting that he should
Speaker 1: die killed the male serpent, but let the female go.
Speaker 1: A short time afterwards, as the story goes, he died.
Speaker 1: So that's what happens with this guy's dad. Like his
Speaker 1: dad supposedly dies because he kills the snake that represents
Speaker 1: him to let his wife live. Um, he leaves her
Speaker 1: with twelve children, three of which survived to adulthoods just
Speaker 1: like what a bonker's day at the the fortune teller's dates.
Speaker 1: Check this out. I tell him if he kills them
Speaker 1: fails snake, he's gonna die. Yeah at all. I'm gonna
Speaker 1: tell him kill one snake only Yeah, only one snake,
Speaker 1: let the other go. They had to just be I
Speaker 1: assume the fortune teller colleagues are just all, you know,
Speaker 1: fucking with you. Oh yeah, I mean they're fucking highest ship.
Speaker 1: They are unbearably lit. So Cornelia takes charge of the
Speaker 1: children in the estate. Uh she you know, she's good
Speaker 1: enough at being a mom that like a solid of
Speaker 1: her children lived to adulthood. Um. And two of those
Speaker 1: kids are the brothers Tiberius and Gaius Gracus. Now both
Speaker 1: of them are like a fancy boys. They hold a
Speaker 1: bunch of public offices that young patrician kids are expected
Speaker 1: to hold, uh as they climb up the political ladder. UM.
Speaker 1: At age seventeen, Tiberius goes to Africa to fight, you know,
Speaker 1: in the last big war against Carthage, and he's supposed
Speaker 1: to be the first man over the walls of Carthage
Speaker 1: during that final siege. Um. After that he goes to
Speaker 1: another war. So by the time you know he comes
Speaker 1: around in you know the one hundreds, like like ish BC,
Speaker 1: Rome is kind of locked into this Afghanistan style situation
Speaker 1: in Spain where they have conquered Spain, but like it's
Speaker 1: kind of hard to hold onto Spain. Like if you're anyone,
Speaker 1: there's a reason why Spain has mostly belonged to Spain
Speaker 1: throughout history. Um, it's not all that it's not always
Speaker 1: all that easy for Spain to be in charge of Spain. Um.
Speaker 1: So they're fighting this like endless series of like brush
Speaker 1: fire rebellions against and it is it's like Afghanistan that
Speaker 1: you've got like this this Roman military that's very organized
Speaker 1: and fairly modern and like it's it's command structure, and
Speaker 1: then there's these guys who are just like throwing rocks
Speaker 1: at them from the bushes and then running away. Um.
Speaker 1: And it works pretty well for the fucking Spanish. So
Speaker 1: Tiberius Gracis goes to go fight in northern Spain against
Speaker 1: these the city called Normentia um. And the war does
Speaker 1: not go very well, and the guy who's in charge
Speaker 1: of the Roman army gets his ass kicked, and so
Speaker 1: they have to negotiate a surrender. Um. Now the new
Speaker 1: maintains new Tiberius because his dad had beaten them in
Speaker 1: a war like twenty years ago, and he'd been cool
Speaker 1: about it, right, Like he hadn't been a dick about
Speaker 1: beating them in a war. So they were like, well,
Speaker 1: we'll let we'll talk with this guy. Will negotiate with
Speaker 1: this guy, because if he makes a peace treaty with us,
Speaker 1: we feel like Rome will will stick to it. So
Speaker 1: Tiberius works out a truce and a peace treaty and
Speaker 1: he saves this Roman army. But when they get back
Speaker 1: to Rome, all of these politicians, um, who had not
Speaker 1: left the city and who wanted the war to keep
Speaker 1: going because there was money in Spain, but didn't actually
Speaker 1: want to figure out how to fight it or like
Speaker 1: how dare you pull out of Spain with this army? Like,
Speaker 1: how how dare you? It's a little bit familiar to
Speaker 1: some things that have happened. It's like this bad situation
Speaker 1: and the guys back home had like didn't have any
Speaker 1: idea how to deal with it better than Tiberius did.
Speaker 1: But they're still angry about it, because that's what you
Speaker 1: do in politics. Probably, well, it's tell me more honest
Speaker 1: to just have the military industrial complex openly advocating like
Speaker 1: we need this war for money to continue, we need
Speaker 1: this war for money to continue, and for pride um,
Speaker 1: how fucking dare you? Uh So, Tiberius he takes a
Speaker 1: beating from these guys, but they can't punish him because
Speaker 1: he did just save the entire army's life and that
Speaker 1: kind of makes you popular in a way that's dangerous
Speaker 1: to funk with too much. But they do his commanding
Speaker 1: officer who had lost the war, They like strip him
Speaker 1: naked and chain him up and send him back to
Speaker 1: the enemy and are like, you guys can have him,
Speaker 1: like we don't want this guy anymore, like do whatever
Speaker 1: you want to him, which again, if we've done that
Speaker 1: with David Petre s would have I think been cool.
Speaker 1: I think that's what we should have done with David.
Speaker 1: A few more conuences for some of the people's fucking
Speaker 1: strip Dick Cheney naked and just air drop him into
Speaker 1: Bosra like like let and whatever happens happens. Right, we're
Speaker 1: not saying what the penalty should be. It's up to
Speaker 1: them to figure it out. Um. So the people vote
Speaker 1: to clear Tiberius of all charges, YadA YadA. Things go
Speaker 1: pretty good for him. Um. And and this is like
Speaker 1: what you might call a pretty decent start in Roman
Speaker 1: public life. Um. And as he's you know, there's a
Speaker 1: story that later gets told that like while he's kind
Speaker 1: of going back and forth between Spain and Rome, he's
Speaker 1: like walking around the countryside and he notices quote um
Speaker 1: or he notices basically that like there's nobody here. There's
Speaker 1: no Romans here. It's all slaves. All of these farms
Speaker 1: are worked by slaves. Um. All of the actual free
Speaker 1: people are like desperately poor because they've all lost their lands.
Speaker 1: They're just like huddled in these shanties at the edge
Speaker 1: of town. Um And like, oh wow, it kind of
Speaker 1: seems like we've done a terrible thing. And destroyed the
Speaker 1: class of people who have made like our success possible.
Speaker 1: This is probably a problem, right, So again basic observation. Um.
Speaker 1: So he decides to set up this policy to reform
Speaker 1: the public lands of Rome, to make it impossible for
Speaker 1: individual rich guys to buy a huge tracts of land,
Speaker 1: and to guarantee that small, freeholding farmers will continue to
Speaker 1: be the core of Roman society. Now, the way the
Speaker 1: popular story gets told, it's just Tiberius who like sees
Speaker 1: these poor farmers who are dispossessed and has this idea
Speaker 1: to fix everything. That's not really true. The reality is
Speaker 1: that this block of senators had been working for years
Speaker 1: to figure out a way to reform the land system
Speaker 1: to fix this problem, and Tiberius is just kind of
Speaker 1: like he's young and he's popular, and these senators are like,
Speaker 1: you're the guy to be like the fucking frontman, right,
Speaker 1: which I guess is how a lot of big political
Speaker 1: form has to work. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's again
Speaker 1: a fairly modern seeming story. So they come up with
Speaker 1: this plan where they're going to limit the amount of
Speaker 1: public land that any individual can have to three hundred
Speaker 1: and thirty acres um. Now, this is like too harsh
Speaker 1: for the rich people, and so they start howling. Um,
Speaker 1: so they kind of like alter it in order to
Speaker 1: allow like an additional like I don't know, a hundred
Speaker 1: or so acres or a couple of hundred acres if
Speaker 1: you like already hold the legs they put in like
Speaker 1: some again, they immediately are like, all right, we'll look
Speaker 1: like we'll work. We like, we understand like the rich people,
Speaker 1: and you already have all this land, so we'll let
Speaker 1: you have more than we think that you should should
Speaker 1: be having, just to try to be friendly. Now, think
Speaker 1: about modern politics. When you offer to let rich conservatives
Speaker 1: like to compromise with them, do they a compromise or
Speaker 1: be go ape ship and declare war on you? Yeah, exactly, Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's like exactly so no, we like the lesson that
Speaker 1: we I guess we'll never learn from, uh is like
Speaker 1: don't negotiate with conservative terrorists. No, no, exactly, do not
Speaker 1: do not talk with these guys. They're not you can't
Speaker 1: they're not trustworthy. Yeah. Um, so you know, they they
Speaker 1: start Tiberius Gratis and these other senators and stuff, start
Speaker 1: putting together this legislation that they're going to introduce at
Speaker 1: the forum. And while they're doing all of this, this
Speaker 1: horrible war in Spain is raging on because the Senates
Speaker 1: rejected the peace deal that Tiberius cooked up, which means
Speaker 1: they have to raise another army and send it to Spain.
Speaker 1: But at this point they're kind of having trouble finding soldiers,
Speaker 1: right because nobody has enough money to like buy weapons,
Speaker 1: and like, it doesn't matter even if you can script people,
Speaker 1: they don't have the ability to like arm themselves. Um.
Speaker 1: And so there's this rich politician who's very much against
Speaker 1: land reform, Skipio Aemilianus, who figures out how to fix
Speaker 1: this problem, and it's by using his vast personal wealth
Speaker 1: to recruit and arm an army of his own. This
Speaker 1: is the first time this happens in Roman history where
Speaker 1: just a rich guy buys an army and takes it
Speaker 1: to war. Um. This will not be the last time
Speaker 1: this happens, and it will prove to be a serious problem.
Speaker 1: He's kind of like, he's kind of like the Roman
Speaker 1: Eric prince where he's like, well, what do I just
Speaker 1: buy an army? Why don't we just do it that way?
Speaker 1: And then I can take minerals and ship you know, um. So,
Speaker 1: this guy Amilianis is again super against the land reform bill,
Speaker 1: and he's one of the big people organizing against Tiberius
Speaker 1: and his block. But once he leaves the city to
Speaker 1: go funk with Spain, he can't like do anything politically,
Speaker 1: Like there's no sending messages back effectively. So once he
Speaker 1: leaves the city with this army he's bought, Tiberius and
Speaker 1: his rivals take this law that they've built and they
Speaker 1: put it on the docket and they like which literally
Speaker 1: means that it go to the middle of the city
Speaker 1: and they're like, hey, guys, we got a fucking law
Speaker 1: to vote on. Everybody show up and let's vote our
Speaker 1: asses off around gather around motherfucker's um. Now, since most
Speaker 1: of the Senate is against land reform, Tiberius and his
Speaker 1: allies decided to present the bill directly to the Assembly
Speaker 1: to the voters without letting the Senate debate it. Now,
Speaker 1: this was not illegal. You did not have to present
Speaker 1: a law to the Senate first and let them debate it.
Speaker 1: But the most majoram this like unwritten set of agreement,
Speaker 1: says that you don't propose a law to the public
Speaker 1: without letting the Senate debate it. Right, So this is
Speaker 1: the first big break with like political tradition and decorum,
Speaker 1: and it's from Tiberius a side. They're like, well, now
Speaker 1: where fun the Senate, Like, we're just gonna take this
Speaker 1: one straight to the people. Um. So the rich people
Speaker 1: are like, okay, well, I guess fuck all of the
Speaker 1: things that we used to do like now now now
Speaker 1: there's no rules, right, so so we're just gonna fucking
Speaker 1: do it. Um, you're went, you went nuclear, and yeah,
Speaker 1: now we're going to do that too, right, And this
Speaker 1: is he does go nuclear because when Tiberius light goes
Speaker 1: up and he's like, hey, guys, I want to take
Speaker 1: all of this land that only the rich people have,
Speaker 1: that's supposed to be all of our land, and give
Speaker 1: it to all of you. And this makes people very excited, right.
Speaker 1: It's it's such a big deal that like because basically
Speaker 1: he gets up and he announces this and says in
Speaker 1: like a couple of weeks, we're gonna have a vote
Speaker 1: on it. And so all of these poor citizens start
Speaker 1: flooding out of the city and like finding their relatives
Speaker 1: who are like living on the outskirts of town or
Speaker 1: in other towns and bringing them in. And so suddenly
Speaker 1: thousands and thousands of people start heading into Room Rome,
Speaker 1: including Italians, people who are not Roman citizens but agree
Speaker 1: with this like land reform bill because fuck the rich
Speaker 1: people in Rome, UM who like show up and like
Speaker 1: are protesting. Basically, they're showing placards, they're like announcing their
Speaker 1: support for this thing. Obviously, Rome does not have mass
Speaker 1: media the way we have it, but they do have
Speaker 1: this forum, which is like Times Square mixed with c
Speaker 1: Span and also a nineties era mall right, it's this
Speaker 1: like big stage with shops around it, and it's not
Speaker 1: it's not even that big a stage. And if you're
Speaker 1: doing politics, you stand up there and you talk to
Speaker 1: people about like what you're trying to get them to do. UM.
Speaker 1: So every day Tiberius is up there while they're waiting
Speaker 1: for because they're like saying, we're gonna have the vote
Speaker 1: in you know, excenent of days, right, So, and that's
Speaker 1: to give everyone time to get into the city because
Speaker 1: you have to physically be there to vote. So while
Speaker 1: all he's waiting for everyone to get in town, he's
Speaker 1: like speaking every day. And I'm gonna quote again from
Speaker 1: Plutarch here about like that's describing one of his speeches.
Speaker 1: The wild beasts that roam over Italy, he would say,
Speaker 1: have every one of them a cave or a layer
Speaker 1: to lurkin. But the men who fight and die for
Speaker 1: Italy enjoy the common air and light, indeed, but nothing else.
Speaker 1: Houseless and homeless, they wander about with their wives and children.
Speaker 1: It is with lying lips that their imperators exhort the
Speaker 1: soldiers in their battles to defend some pokers and shrines
Speaker 1: from the enemy. For not a man of them has
Speaker 1: an hereditary altar, not one of these many Romans an
Speaker 1: ancestral tomb. But they fight and die to support others
Speaker 1: in wealth and luxury. And though they are styled masters
Speaker 1: of the world, they have not a single clot of
Speaker 1: earth that is their own. Pretty good speech, Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: pretty speech. You put on you put on your speech
Speaker 1: voice hard I was. I might have been doing a
Speaker 1: little bit of Dan Carlin there. Um. So this goes
Speaker 1: really well, And this is where the Trump comparisons get in, right.
Speaker 1: He is the first like populist politician in Roman history.
Speaker 1: He's tapping into decades of anger and resentment among the
Speaker 1: lower classes. He's promising to take the fight to the elite,
Speaker 1: which he is clearly a member of, right on their behalf. Um,
Speaker 1: So you could you can make some Trump comparisons, but
Speaker 1: you can also make direct comparisons to Lennon and Mao. Right.
Speaker 1: Lennon and maw are both upper class, rich people who
Speaker 1: become these socialist fire brands and ignite uprising again against
Speaker 1: an entrenched in decade and elite. Right, you can see
Speaker 1: comparisons to all these guys, right, you can see him
Speaker 1: as like this first uh like um, like a grarian
Speaker 1: populist sort of Trumpian figure. Or he could be like, well,
Speaker 1: he's the first socialist, you know, I mean, I I
Speaker 1: think I think though it's the like like contemporary illusion
Speaker 1: of the word populist with just like a small band
Speaker 1: of raceists. Yes, so that's where Trump fits in everyone
Speaker 1: the other ones are more truly populist. Yeah, because he's
Speaker 1: this is a real problem he's trying to solve. Is
Speaker 1: supposed to like howling about again like and like calling
Speaker 1: calling Trump like a populist is such like a New
Speaker 1: York Times thing, because they the only population that matters
Speaker 1: to them is like racists in Ohio. Well, and also like, yeah,
Speaker 1: it is weird to call him a populist because he's
Speaker 1: never literally not a popular vote, Like it's literally not
Speaker 1: most people. Um, whereas most people are really on board
Speaker 1: with what Tiberians is saying because most people are fucking
Speaker 1: poor as shit, right, and they're like, yeah, this sounds great.
Speaker 1: So the rich people they know they have to be
Speaker 1: careful because he has this huge mob of people who
Speaker 1: are like on his side, and it would be really
Speaker 1: easy for them to just murder anybody who who tries
Speaker 1: to stop him from passing this law. So they bribe
Speaker 1: a tribune and tribunes are like, it's this political office
Speaker 1: that the main thing the tribunes can do is they
Speaker 1: can veto any law that anyone may right. The tribunes,
Speaker 1: their primary power is that they can just say no
Speaker 1: and nothing can be done. Right. It's just like there's
Speaker 1: two guys who get that job, and that's like a
Speaker 1: thing that they can do. Yeah, it is a little
Speaker 1: bit supreme courty, although it's more of a it's more
Speaker 1: of a populist position because one of the tribunes, the
Speaker 1: tribune of the police, can only be a poor person, right,
Speaker 1: or if they're not actually poor people, but likely be
Speaker 1: a non noble um. So it's there is like there
Speaker 1: is a cool thing in this which is that like, well,
Speaker 1: the poor people should have a representative who can just
Speaker 1: say no to everybody, right, But in this case, the
Speaker 1: tribune gets bribed, um, and so he says, hey, you
Speaker 1: can't vote on this bill, period. So now Tiberius has
Speaker 1: to take action. So Tiberius is like, because Tiberius is
Speaker 1: also a tribune, right, so you've got one tribune who's like,
Speaker 1: I'm not going to let anyone vote on this fucking
Speaker 1: land reform bills. So Tiberius is like, all right, well
Speaker 1: then I won't let anyone vote on fucking anything, and
Speaker 1: I won't let anyone spend the state's money. And he
Speaker 1: locks the treasury, like he physically locks the Roman treasury
Speaker 1: and says, like, the government just he does a government shutdown, right,
Speaker 1: Like that's what happens, Like no one can do anything now. Um.
Speaker 1: So while all this is happening, this is becoming like
Speaker 1: a show, so like people are flooding into the forum
Speaker 1: to watch. Most a lot of the people who are
Speaker 1: like in the streets arguing and debating and like watching
Speaker 1: this political drama unfold are like veterans. They're like former
Speaker 1: farmers and sons of farmers and all this ship, and
Speaker 1: they start talking about violence, and Tiberia starts stoking this
Speaker 1: talk of violence by telling everyone. He gets up on
Speaker 1: stage and he says, hey, I have evidence that my
Speaker 1: enemies are planning to assassinate me. And he starts carrying
Speaker 1: a dagger under his cloak, which is technically illegal, but
Speaker 1: he'll like pull it out during speeches and be like
Speaker 1: so serious that I gotta keep a knife on me,
Speaker 1: you know, I gotta be ready to cut a bit.
Speaker 1: He's exactly like fifty cent um. So the Tribune, who
Speaker 1: had been bribed this guy Octavia's, decides at this point
Speaker 1: to let the people vote about He's not gonna let
Speaker 1: them vote on the land bill, but will be like,
Speaker 1: all right, look, if you guys are so unhappy with
Speaker 1: what I'm doing, you can vote about whether or not
Speaker 1: to strip me of like my office. Um so, this
Speaker 1: had never happened before, and this starts to scare Tiberius
Speaker 1: because he's like, ship, we're now kind of like way
Speaker 1: off the beaten path of like what politics is supposed
Speaker 1: to be. And I'm kind of worried that the wheels
Speaker 1: that there's no breaks on this thing, um, because it
Speaker 1: gets scary to everyone when all of the social and
Speaker 1: political mores stop start crumbling at once. Um. But this
Speaker 1: vote happens, Octavius gets stripped out of his office. He
Speaker 1: only survives the mob like murdering him because his friends
Speaker 1: like push their way through a crowd to get him away. Um.
Speaker 1: And Tiberius gets to have a vote on his law
Speaker 1: and it passes resoundingly passes. Now, when the law passes,
Speaker 1: they have to set up a state commission to like
Speaker 1: redistribute this public land. And so his enemies, these rich people,
Speaker 1: are like, well, we won't vote to actually pay any
Speaker 1: funds for the commission to redistribute public lands, so you
Speaker 1: can't afford to do anything with this new law. And
Speaker 1: right as this happens is they're like fuck you. Type Arius,
Speaker 1: A rich king dies. And this king, for completely separate reasons,
Speaker 1: wants to funk over his dumbship kids, so he leaves
Speaker 1: all of his money to the Roman people. Right, So
Speaker 1: Tiberius is like, all right, you're not gonna fund me. Well,
Speaker 1: this guy left his money to the Roman people, so
Speaker 1: I'm just gonna use his money to fund this Land
Speaker 1: Reform Commission. And this is a problem for a bunch
Speaker 1: of reasons, but basically, the rich people are number one
Speaker 1: angry that they're not going to get that gold. And
Speaker 1: number two, they're like, well, you're not supposed to have
Speaker 1: the power to decide how state money gets spent. So
Speaker 1: now you've number one year deciding what what can get
Speaker 1: voted on. You've stripped this other tribune of his power.
Speaker 1: You're now like exercising power of the purse and like
Speaker 1: what the state can be spent on. Like you're getting
Speaker 1: kind of close to becoming a king, right, which is
Speaker 1: not entirely like wrong. Like they're like, wow, this, you
Speaker 1: are exercising more power than a single person is supposed
Speaker 1: to have in our system. So they get really they
Speaker 1: decide like some ship needs to get done. And I'm
Speaker 1: gonna quote from Anthropology Review here. At the time, tribunes
Speaker 1: were considered inviolable, so Siberius was encouraged to run for
Speaker 1: a third term to retain the protection that the position bestowed.
Speaker 1: To bolster his popularity with the citizens and increase his
Speaker 1: chances of being elected, he proposed several new populist measures
Speaker 1: that further enraged his enemies. These included proposals to reduce
Speaker 1: the mandatory term of military service as well has changed
Speaker 1: the balance of power in the Senate by increasing the
Speaker 1: number of equities to match that of the senators. Uh
Speaker 1: the night before the vote, Tiberius implored the citizens to
Speaker 1: vote for him because he feared for his life and
Speaker 1: the life of his family. His plea was so compelling
Speaker 1: that many people guarded his house all night to make
Speaker 1: sure he was safe. The next day, Tiberius went to
Speaker 1: the capital, where he was surrounded by a crowd of
Speaker 1: people who wanted to protect him. Plutarch says that one
Speaker 1: of the senators, Flavius Flaccus, warned Tiberius that the wealthy
Speaker 1: Romans had resolved to assassinate him. Tiberius pointed at his
Speaker 1: head to indicate to his supporters that his life was
Speaker 1: in danger. This was interpreted by the spy sent from
Speaker 1: the Senate as a request for a crown, a claim
Speaker 1: they raced to relate to the senators, who immediately sent
Speaker 1: a mob of armed slaves and supporters to attack Tiberius
Speaker 1: and his followers. So what follows is a fucking massacre. Um.
Speaker 1: You have this group of political this political group who
Speaker 1: have come together to like reform the political system of
Speaker 1: the entire government in order to make it fairer for
Speaker 1: poor people and the rich. Send an army into the
Speaker 1: city of slaves primarily and massacre them. They killed the
Speaker 1: ship out of Tiberius and like two or three hundred
Speaker 1: of his followers. Like it's just this bloody nightmare. They're
Speaker 1: like throwing people's corpses in the river, like all sorts
Speaker 1: of fucked up ship. Um. Now, after they massacre all
Speaker 1: these people, they pass most of the reforms that he
Speaker 1: had suggested, which is another thing that happens repeatedly in
Speaker 1: Roman history, Like they'll have like they'll have a civil war,
Speaker 1: and they'll massacre the other side, and then they'll do
Speaker 1: what they asked for anyway, because it's a good idea. Um.
Speaker 1: So a lot of his reforms happen. But by killing
Speaker 1: him and all of his followers in the middle of town,
Speaker 1: a seal has been broken, right, and the republic is
Speaker 1: never the same after this. I'm gonna quote from a
Speaker 1: write up in the New York Times here. Over the
Speaker 1: next years, it quickly became normal for populist politicians to
Speaker 1: set aside longstanding norms to accomplish their goals, for military
Speaker 1: commanders to bind the Senate to their will by threatening
Speaker 1: to occupy Rome, and for rival generals to wage war
Speaker 1: on one another. Within a generation of the first political
Speaker 1: assassination in Rome, politicians had begun to arm their supporters
Speaker 1: and use the threat of violence to influence the votes
Speaker 1: of assemblies and the election of magistrates. Within two generations,
Speaker 1: Rome fell into civil war. So that's good, and yeah,
Speaker 1: that's I mean, don't especially want to think about I
Speaker 1: guess that. I mean that is also just the American
Speaker 1: thing of like, look, if not that the artificial like
Speaker 1: armed services are not just basically malicious for the powerful,
Speaker 1: but codifying it that way, it feels like, hey, you
Speaker 1: you learned where this is going because in part two.
Speaker 1: Part one is about how the Romans, how Roman politics
Speaker 1: turned from this like cordial thing where violence was not
Speaker 1: common too, we will murder anybody who tries to funk
Speaker 1: with the money, um and part two is about how
Speaker 1: they create the FBI. Yeah, cat fucking wait, grim as
Speaker 1: fucking usual things. Andrew, you got anything to plug before
Speaker 1: we roll out of here? Yes? Actually, this Saturday, um
Speaker 1: my podcast yoss Racist is doing a show in Austin, Texas.
Speaker 1: So if you're in Austin, please come out. Um, but yeah,
Speaker 1: find me RSS racist. I'm Andrew t Uh. Well, you
Speaker 1: know it's funny because because you your podcast is eos
Speaker 1: this racist. But we're talking about the Romans, and racism
Speaker 1: didn't exist yet. They didn't have they did like they
Speaker 1: literally hadn't figured out how to be racist yet. That
Speaker 1: hadn't been invented because we also had not invented British people, right,
Speaker 1: and they also had a lot of a lot of
Speaker 1: other ship to fight about. Apparently they shared it. They
Speaker 1: shared it. Um yeah, but but but not racist woke kings,
Speaker 1: the Roman woke woke Uh I here no woke proconsoles.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, all right, Well until next time up yours
Speaker 1: Woke Moralists Behind the Bastards is a production of cool
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