Part One: Spartacus and the Thurii Commune: How a Slave Rebellion in Ancient Rome Reimagined Society
December 15, 2025 • 50 mins
Margaret talks to Katy Stoll about the leaderless society that almost overthrew Rome.
Sources:
Radical Antiquity, Christopher B. Zeichmann
https://www.worldhistory.org/Ostracism/
https://web.archive.org/web/20170719062739/http://www.livius.org/li-ln/livy/periochae/periochae091.html#95
https://web.archive.org/web/20160326113007/http://www.livius.org/so-st/spartacus/spartacus.html
https://web.archive.org/web/20160304220855/http://www.livius.org/so-st/spartacus/spartacus2.html
https://web.archive.org/web/20110805121329/http://www.ancientlibrary.com/smith-dgra/0581.html
https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Appian/Civil_Wars/1*.html#116
https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Plutarch/Lives/Crassus*.html#9
http://www.fsmitha.com/h1/ch18.htm
https://www.historyextra.com/period/roman/roman-republic-guide-how-senate-plebeians-citizenship-women-democratic-fall-end/
https://www.thecollector.com/first-servile-war-revolt-shook-rome/
https://www.thecollector.com/second-servile-war-slave-rebellion/
https://www.rfmwilliams.com/the-sicilian-slave-revolts-of-ancient-rome/
https://warflute.org/armies/sicilian_slave_revolts_135-132_104-103_bc_polemicus_army_t3.html
http://societasviaromana.net/Collegium_Religionis/human_sacrifice.php
https://www.history.co.uk/articles/gladiatorial-games-in-ancient-rome
https://pressbooks.claremont.edu/clas112pomonavalentine/chapter/why-are-we-so-uncomfortable-the-confusing-taboo-of-menstruation-in-ancient-rome-and-modern-america/
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zon Media.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Hello, and welcome to cool people who did cool stuff.
You're a weekly reminder that when bad things happen, there's
people who do good things in response, and sometimes over
throw governments or at least come very close. I'm your host,
Margaret Kiljoy, and with me today is my guest Katie Stole. Hi.
Speaker 3 (00:20):
Hi, how are you very happy to be back? I'm good,
I'm fine. I'm alive.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
That's better than well, everyone listening can probably say, except
less you're an AI scraping this, in which case I
can't blame you. You're not alive, but I blame you
ever made you.
Speaker 3 (00:37):
Yeah, I definitely blame them. It's not your fault.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
That's true. Katie. I was like, what do I credit
you as? And I just wrote of the news shows?
Because you have all of the news shows, and they're all.
Speaker 3 (00:48):
You have all the news shows.
Speaker 2 (00:49):
What are some of your news shows?
Speaker 3 (00:51):
Well, we've got some more news, and we've got even
more news, and then the other version of even more news.
We've got three shows week, folks over at some more
news channel, YouTube and podcasts and other things cooking.
Speaker 2 (01:07):
See. I'm very grateful you keep up with actual news
for a living and that is great, and I don't
know how I would handle that.
Speaker 3 (01:15):
Yeah, the jury's still out on how I'm handling it. Yeah,
it's a lot. Sometimes I'm also very lucky. Anytime I
start to feel like my head's gonna fall off my
body from stress or you know, just overloaded with news,
I remember that I work with some of my favorite
people and we record podcasts and there's this huge community
(01:36):
of people that listen and interact and I'm very grateful
for it. But yeah, it's a lot, and you have
to be very mindful, or I do. I don't know
how other people handle it. I look at other comparable
shows or people over the Majority Report who are live
streaming every day, and they're so on top of every
single piece. And no, it's too much, because I need
(01:57):
to create space. I live in the mountain. I go
outside and try to just forget about everything when I
can for an hour or two.
Speaker 2 (02:08):
That actually, that seems like how I would do it.
I mean, I also live in the mountains, so this
is a very relatable thing. Have I ever explained to
you the drudgery pyramid of job complaining? No, but please do, Okay.
I discovered this pyramid when someone I was talking to
was complaining about the book that they were writing, and
their name was on the book and they got paid
a decent living wage to write this book. And at
(02:29):
the time, I was getting paid five thousand dollars to
ghost write a trashy heterosexual romance and I was living
in a pond house where I paid like fifty dollars
a month rent, and that's how I afforded to live
off of this terrible salary writing trashy romance novels about sportsmen.
And so I didn't want to hear this person complain
to me about their job. And then I would go downstairs.
(02:53):
I'd make myself my like vegan mac and cheese and
sit in front of the TV, and you know, think
about how hard my job was. And I would try
to complain about it to my roommate who was waiting
to go to the graveyard shift at sheets, and I
was like, yeah, oh, you can only complain laterally or
(03:14):
up in the hierarchy of drudgery.
Speaker 3 (03:17):
It's true, I think, I mean, I like the phrase,
I like thinking about it in that way and then
just throwne mental health and satisfaction in life. I think
it's important to acknowledge the way that something sucks in
the way that you want it to change, but also
the ways so but it's both of It's like, oh,
(03:38):
I get to complain about it the news fucking.
Speaker 2 (03:40):
So we get to complain to each other. We have
the same job. Only the thing that I'm going to
say is that I live in the radical history as
entertainment minds and not the news minds. So I don't
have the first clue about the real world, which is
why I'm going to explain to you that we're gonna
be talking about some shift from two thousand years ago. Again,
that's the kick I'm on right now. We are going
(04:02):
to be talking about the BCEE, the before career common era.
I don't even know or care.
Speaker 3 (04:09):
Well, guess what, I know nothing about this, Sarah. So
I'm like a brand new babe for you to give
the information too.
Speaker 2 (04:18):
This is like when I come on your news show,
I'm like, I don't know, man, I think fascism is bad,
and You're like, here's the ins and outs of it,
and I'm like, that sounds terrible. We should do something
about that.
Speaker 3 (04:27):
Yeah, But what makes you so good in that format is,
first off, you do know enough about what's going on,
but then you give perspectives. That's always really important, right.
It's a good yin yang thing.
Speaker 2 (04:39):
And what's so interesting is that all of this shit
I've been studying about the ancient world for these past
couple months of podcasts, it's just all a series of
nothing ever changes.
Speaker 3 (04:49):
That's what I predict from this episode is that I'm
going to be like yep, and so it goes and
so it goes again. It's the first thing I learned
in poly sci in college.
Speaker 2 (04:58):
Yep who. It got into my head about three months
ago that I wanted to research the druids. That's not
today's topic. That was my topic a couple months ago,
the ancient folks of Celtic Western Europe. I wanted to
do it as the Halloween episode, but then I started
learning more about all the people fucking up the Roman Empire,
and I wanted to know more about Roman Greece and
(05:20):
all that ancient shit so they could read more about
people fucking them up. And now I am so deep
in this rabbit hole and I don't want to come
out because the regular world is full of fascism and
so is this world. But this week we're going to
talk about a guy. We're actually not gonna talk about
this guy very much, but he's like the touchstone. He's
going to be in the title of the episode. A
(05:40):
guy whose name has rung out through the millennia, A
guy who we know very little about. His name is Spartacus.
Speaker 3 (05:49):
Spartacuss you heard about Spartacus. I am Spartakiss Right, there's that.
Speaker 2 (05:55):
So I haven't actually watched I was like thinking about
watching the movie, but I did not actually watch the
movie prep for this. But Okay, that idea, which I
again haven't seen, the idea of everyone being like, no,
I'm this guy is actually pretty fitting because one of
the big things that's going to come up is that
the Roman historians from roughly this era two thousand years
ago are all in on the big Man of history theory,
(06:18):
and so they're like, Spartacus did this, and Spartacus did that,
And I suspect Spartacus would have been the first person
to tell you being like, I didn't do that shit.
I was just a general like we did this, We
made all this stuff happen. Right, You heard much about Spartacus.
Speaker 3 (06:36):
Literally, nothing I was going to say, do I interject
and say, I don't know, honestly, just the fact that
you're saying people were claiming I did this, misattributing things
to him potentially, or I have no idea, no information
at all, except for the phrase I am Spartacus from
a movie I haven't seen.
Speaker 2 (06:55):
Yeah, there was a guy named Spartacus, and he was
an enslaved glade and ancient Italy and the Roman era
of Italy during the tail end of the Roman Republic
a couple of decades before became the Roman Empires. This
is all going to happen in like seventy BCE. And
(07:15):
he was part of this big slave uprising. He wasn't
even the general of it. He was one of five
generals of it. And this is one of the largest
slave uprisings I've ever read about that either had seventy
thousand people or half a million people in open revolt.
Speaker 3 (07:30):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (07:31):
And big differences between those numbers.
Speaker 3 (07:34):
Big differences between those numbers. But those are also both
big numbers, Yeah, they absolutely are, but big discrepancy.
Speaker 2 (07:40):
Yeah, Yeah, especially like it's a thing that's come up
on a couple of these episodes in the past. There's
like awful shit in history where like one hundred thousand
people die or get murdered or whatever. And you're like,
but that's that's a huge chunk of the people in
the world. But you're talking about a world in which
there's I don't have the numbers in front of me,
there's like three hundred four hundred million people in the
entire world.
Speaker 3 (08:00):
A really interesting point that I'd never thought of it. Yeah,
you have to account for that significant percentage of the population.
Speaker 2 (08:08):
The entire world had the population of the United States currently.
You know. Wow, And so half a million people in
open revolt.
Speaker 3 (08:16):
Is a lot of people.
Speaker 2 (08:18):
Big thing.
Speaker 3 (08:19):
Yeah, big deal.
Speaker 2 (08:20):
He was just one of the military leaders of this rebellion,
and he's the one that historians stuck all the credit
to because Roman historians were into this great man of
history theory. I always knew I was going to do
a Spartacus episode, but I didn't know the angle because
I was like, yeah, no, another guy who did a
war whatever. And I'm a bit interested in him, but
I'm much more interested. I'm interested in the little outlaw
(08:42):
republic that sprung up during the rebellion that tens or
hundreds of thousands of people lived in for years they
collectively created a society without political authority, without money, and
without sexual violence.
Speaker 3 (08:58):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (08:59):
Those were like the three things about them.
Speaker 3 (09:01):
The utopia existed.
Speaker 2 (09:03):
Yeah, there's still like some fucked up stuff.
Speaker 3 (09:06):
I'm sure there were things, of course there were.
Speaker 2 (09:08):
We are humans, yeah, probably we're doing human sacrifice. But
everyone was in the time.
Speaker 3 (09:13):
You know, it was in vogue. You can't judge by
today's standard.
Speaker 2 (09:19):
Yeah, it's like a real it's a real one of
those moments.
Speaker 3 (09:22):
Yeah. Sure, but also you really can't judge by today's standards.
Speaker 1 (09:27):
It was.
Speaker 2 (09:27):
No, it just doesn't make any sense if you try to.
It's just like nothing thousands of years. Yeah. And this
was during what was called the Third Servile War in Rome,
which I had never heard of because I am absolutely
not one of those girls who thinks about the Roman
Empire once a week.
Speaker 3 (09:45):
This kind of same. Your Roman Empire is the Roman Empire.
Speaker 2 (09:48):
No, my Roman Empire is the Spanish Civil War or
maybe the Pairs Commune.
Speaker 3 (09:52):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (09:53):
I have avoided learning about this time period because I
hate the people who are really into this time period,
except you, dear listener, I love you. And the Third
Servile War was from seventy three to seventy BCE. Most
historians will say that this uprising failed dramatically, and it's true,
this is like practically a free space for cool people
(10:15):
bingo as everyone dies. But I declare that they won.
It's true that tens of thousands of them died in battle,
and that six thousand of them wound up crucified along
the highway. Yeah, the ancient world was a nightmare. Yeah,
but they accomplished three specific things. One, pretty much any
(10:37):
one of them who wanted to escape back home to
wherever they'd been captured from had the chance. Two, they
laid the foundations for a free society that lasted at
least a decade longer than the rebellion. And three And
I can't prove cause and effect here, but I can
tell you that in the wake of this uprising, the
(10:58):
entire agricultural of Rome shifted away from slave labor and
towards tenant farming.
Speaker 3 (11:04):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (11:05):
And that also like kind of creates world peace in
a way. But we'll get to all that. So they
didn't burn Rome to the ground, they didn't successfully abolish
all slavery in the known world, but they did free
themselves and leave a lasting legacy that freed uncountable others.
And so I'm going to say that they won.
Speaker 3 (11:28):
I will go along with you on that. Yeah, I mean,
they did win if you give it the right parameters,
right exactly.
Speaker 2 (11:35):
You know, I'm all about change the wind conditions to
include what you're doing, you know.
Speaker 3 (11:40):
Yeah. But also it made significant change. We can point
to it, you can see success in it, whether or
not it was lasting or you know, exactly what was
intended as a different conversation totally.
Speaker 2 (11:54):
It also echoed out throughout millennia. It's also very likely
that they called the political system of what they built anarchia. Wait,
it's very likely. It's very likely. And I'm going to
talk about why.
Speaker 3 (12:09):
That's pretty cool.
Speaker 2 (12:12):
Yeah, and so yeah, I want to talk about them.
But first, even before context ads come. That is the context. Yeah,
the context in which we work.
Speaker 3 (12:24):
That's great. We love them, we love to see it.
Speaker 2 (12:26):
They're all great, except online gambling that's bad. But all
the rest of them are good. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (12:32):
I won't even question that.
Speaker 2 (12:37):
And we're back. We're back, Okay. So I was at
a bookstore the other day and I saw an intriguing
book in the history section, and it was a new
book out from Pluto Press. It's called Radical Antiquity, and
it's by a scholar named Christopher B. Zeichman. And this
book is like anyone can read it, you know, pop anthropology, whatever,
(13:00):
pop history. All of this guy's other books. Just to
give you this guy's cred, I'm going to read you
the name of his other books because I think it
gives us cred. We've got recovering an undomesticated apostle essays
on the legacy of Paul. Oh, We've got Queer Readings
of the Centurion at Capernam, which I don't know it is.
Speaker 3 (13:18):
Well, I don't know what that is.
Speaker 2 (13:19):
We've got the Database of military inscriptions and papyri of
early Roman Palestine.
Speaker 3 (13:25):
Oh, these are page turners.
Speaker 2 (13:27):
Oh yeah, absolutely. And we've got the Roman army in
the New Testament. So this is a scholar's scholar. That's
my like interesting defense of my It's not the only source.
That's one of a bunch, but yeah, this guy.
Speaker 3 (13:40):
Knows what they're doing and wrote a more accessible book
that we are going to benefit from. My going to imagine.
Speaker 2 (13:48):
Yeah, no, I'm so excited about this book. I saw
this book and I was like, was this made just
for me. It was made for you. Yeah, And I
was reading this week and I came across something that
kind of blew my mind about the history of the
word anarchy or in this case, anarchia. I have talked
(14:09):
a lot about the history of anarchism on the show.
I've probably subjected you to the history of anarchism on
this show. I can't remember, and usually I'm tracing it
back to about the nineteenth century, or I'm talking about
how ancient and non Western societies had similar ideas, like
non state, non capitalist methods of organizing, right. But I'd
(14:29):
never given too much thought to what connotations people had
of the etymological root of the word anarchy, anarchist anarchism,
because in the like early modern world, the one that
the anarchists that I know of today that they come from,
the first people to call themselves anarchists were kind of
being edgy. They were like basically being like, I'm a
(14:50):
fucking terrorist. You got a fucking problem with that? You know,
it was like I want to tear it all down, like,
and they did believe in organization, and they believed in
these like constructive and socialistics, and it was a you know,
whatever I've talked about this a million times in the show,
but I just assumed that the word had its negative
connotations going all the way back, and I knew that
(15:11):
it derived from the Greek word an archia. But nope,
I mean it did derive from anarchia, the connotations of
that word in ancient Greece, and I'm inferring rome, but
I can't tell you as certainly is much more like
how someone might use it in a non negative sense today,
(15:31):
not necessarily a positive sense, but just a non negative sense.
Speaker 3 (15:34):
Neutral.
Speaker 2 (15:35):
Yeah, because anarchia meant without leaders in a very literal way,
and Arkon, and Arkon was like the leader of Athens
during the democratic periods, and so it was understood as
kind of a radical form of democracy. Our man Aristotle,
when Athens didn't elect its Arkon for the year it's magistrate,
(15:55):
he called that year anarchy. And then Herodotus, who was
hanging out in the fucking fifth century BCE, described it
as anarchy when one cavalry unit lost their commander but
then kept on doing just fine leaderless for a while,
like working collectively as one unit.
Speaker 3 (16:12):
It wasn't like total chaos. Anarchy. It's literally a term
for without a leader.
Speaker 2 (16:19):
Yeah, and so they didn't have a leader and they
continued to do things. It was anarchy, and so this
is really fascinating to me. And so I want to
talk really quickly about democracy in the ancient world, or
I guess specifically in Athens, because again, I like didn't
know this stuff, and so I'm not going to assume
(16:39):
that the listener or you knows this stuff. I knew
that like Athens is where they had democracy. That was
kind of what I had, you know. Yeah, which is
funny because I've like been to those fucking places. When
I showed up in Greece, I was like, I want
to go see the Parthenon and shit, and like the
Greek anarchists I was hanging out with, We're like, man,
fuck that tourist shit, We're not going with you. And
(17:02):
I was like, then I'm going alone. Later the coliseum
is going to come up. It was the same deal.
I was like there with a bunch of Italian anarchists
and I was like, I'm going to the coliseum, and
of my two hosts, one was like, man, I'm not
going anywhere near that shit, and the other one guy
was like.
Speaker 3 (17:15):
Wow, that's like when people come to LA and they're like,
I want to see Hollywood Boulevard and I'm like, no.
Speaker 2 (17:20):
You don't yet, totally you you don't.
Speaker 3 (17:22):
And they're like, I don't care if it's touristy, I
just need to see it. All right, that's your day lost.
But still even hearing that, I would also want to
go to those places to see it.
Speaker 2 (17:34):
No, totally, and like, you know, go spit on the
Donald Trump Star, like yeah, drive down the Vegas Strip
listening to Dystopia, like whatever you need to do. So
when we're talking about ancient Greece, we're not talking about
Greece like a country. We're talking about city states that
(17:54):
go to war with each other and have temporary empires
and shit, and different ethnic groups and different cities are
like more in power at different times. Athens in particular,
like to do democracy every now and then in between
this or that dictatorship. Democracy gets sort of scare quotes
here because only citizens were involved in it, and in
(18:15):
order to be a citizen, you couldn't be an immigrant,
and you had to be a man, and you couldn't
be enslaved. About one in six adults in the city
were likely to be citizens at any given point. But
then that democracy within that fairly big, like they had
a slave empire thing, you know, if you exclude the
(18:36):
patriarchy and the slavery, it was oddly democratic. It was
more democratic than what we live in now. Specifically, they
used direct democracy. The popular assembly was any citizen who
felt like showing up to the acropolis. Now granted, this
is in the middle of the city, so rich people
had like more free time and lived closer to it.
(18:56):
So this de facto favored the wealthy because they could
show up to participate in the democratic process more easily
than like a farmer who has to bring the crops in.
So when new proposals for laws come down, the first
thing that happens is that they try to reach consensus.
Someone makes a proposal, people talk about it, suggest alternatives,
(19:17):
and they try for consensus. Only when that doesn't work
do they do majority voting, which they do by blind ballot.
And the way that they picked their magistrates. The people
who would like run shit, I'm actually like sold on
some of the shit that they did, and they're okay.
They picked their magistrates at random. Oh just okay, literally
(19:37):
at random. It's a one year.
Speaker 3 (19:39):
Service like jury duty or something.
Speaker 2 (19:42):
Yeah, exactly, it's civic service. Yeah, and so no one's campaigning,
no one's building political parties. And then okay, this is
the part that I still think I believe in, but
it's sketchy. If someone seemed like a real threat to democracy,
if people like someone a lot, if you got about
one fifth of the citizens of Athens to agree, they
(20:06):
would be banished for ten years.
Speaker 3 (20:08):
Ooh, I mean it's dangerous, but I just can't help.
But think of all the people i'd put on that list.
Speaker 2 (20:15):
I know, no trial, no appeals.
Speaker 3 (20:18):
Okay, that's intense.
Speaker 2 (20:20):
One fifth of the people, six thousand people out of
the thirty thousands.
Speaker 3 (20:24):
So you could just be disliked totally. You could not
smell very good, and a lot of people agree with that.
Speaker 1 (20:29):
I know.
Speaker 2 (20:29):
But then you'd have to be like so famous that
everyone knows you.
Speaker 3 (20:32):
Smell bad, right, or so smelly?
Speaker 2 (20:35):
That's true. That's a good point.
Speaker 3 (20:38):
Anyway, something to think about.
Speaker 2 (20:39):
Yeah, and if you come back early, they kill you.
But when you come back after ten years, there's no stigma.
None of your property is confiscated, which in some cases
is bad because that property is often people, and like
there's no stigma about it.
Speaker 3 (20:59):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (21:00):
It was a way to prevent people from getting too
big for their bridges, and not too many people were
ever ostracized. They did this for about one hundred years
or so, and like thirty ish people werever ostracized this way.
The first couple were the only ones I read about.
They were people who are seen as like traders, who
were opposed to democracy or were supporting like geopolitical enemies,
like if you supported Persia, they'd maybe ostracize you. Okay,
(21:24):
this is where we get the word ostracization from. That's
what's so funny about fucking around in like the ancient past,
Like this is you're like, oh, this is literally what
the word ostracize means. Because the little ceramic tokens that
they used to count these votes were called the ostra khon.
Speaker 3 (21:43):
Really yeah, wow, fascinating the ostra khon? Yeah wow, what
has that got its root? And so how did they
name that?
Speaker 2 (21:55):
I don't know the etymology behind that. I'm not actually sure.
Speaker 3 (21:58):
Literally ostracize is that's yeah, that's crazy.
Speaker 2 (22:01):
Yeah, enough people cast the vote to kick you out,
and like, just think about how different our political system
would be, because there's never been a president. You couldn't
get a fifth of the population to agree shouldn't be president.
Speaker 3 (22:15):
Everybody would be out.
Speaker 2 (22:16):
That seems fine by me.
Speaker 3 (22:19):
No presidents, that's fine anarchia.
Speaker 2 (22:23):
Yeah, and it's possible that other cities did this thing too,
but we have less specific evidence of it. And originally
I assume that this whole system of democracy was just
a thing for rich guys, because it's kind of in
some way seems sort of comparable to the US South
before the Civil War, you know, is like rich people
sitting around being like, Oh, we're so fancy, we own people.
(22:44):
And it was just a thing for non immigrant, non
enslaved men, and many of them were slavers. But it
was also like a thing for the poor, working fore men.
Right and rich and educated folks actually hated demandmocracy because
it let poor men in. It let poor people be
(23:05):
their equals. Plato, who's this classic right wing dickhead, was
always complaining about how it let mob rule take control
or whatever. And to be clear, Athens didn't invent using
popular assemblies or direct democracy. It's that this is kind
of what people when they were like, We've talked about
this a bunch on the show but a lot of
(23:26):
ancient societies of all over the world will like do
things like popular assemblies because there's not really an assumption
that one person like gets to be in charge. Like
imagine think about the UN. Right in the UN, theoretically
every nation's equal. Obviously this isn't the case. But like,
(23:46):
if you're a country, you're not really supposed to be
able to tell another country what to do. Sure, yeah,
people do it through war and the diplomacy and blackmail
and economic pressure and all this shit. Right, we've got
that on full display right now. But yes, and so
in some ways this democracy is like that. It's everyone's
(24:09):
ostensibly autonomous. And in this case it's like you have
all these little sovereigns at the head of their various households,
and you know, you can't let immigrants join in the
decision making though, would be just terrible. Oh No, So
that's Greek democracy. And I know it's a little bit
we're actually talking about Rome, but I just I think
that showing how a lot of people coming into this
(24:30):
situation come from backgrounds where like actually they should be
able to have a say in what they do, you know,
I think it helps us understand why people are trying
to build a free society when they get the chance. Yeah,
so now we're gonna talk about what everyone loves, talking
about Rome and Roman slavery. Aren't you excited?
Speaker 3 (24:50):
Oh yes, I'm excited. I am excited.
Speaker 2 (24:54):
It's really I love that this show is just about
bad people. But in Rever there's no other show that's
about bad people. That'd be a weird show, know, and
would listen to that?
Speaker 3 (25:03):
That would be weird? Who would want to listen to that?
Speaker 2 (25:05):
No, I couldn't tell you. Don't look at my most
listened to podcasts of the year.
Speaker 3 (25:09):
That would stay out of my app But that's fine.
Speaker 2 (25:11):
Yeah. So Rome had a republic for a few hundred
years in the BCE. It is not a democracy, it's
a republic. It starts off kind of like how medieval
Europe started in on the republic thing. The rich people,
the aristocrats, wanted to be in charge, so they overthrew
the king. This surprised me when I first started reading
(25:32):
more history, but like this is medieval and like Late
and Renaissance whatever. History is like all of these like
revolutions where they're like, oh, we're not a monarchy anymore,
We're a republic or democracy. It's like, ah, the rich
people wanted to be in charge instead of the nobility, Like.
Speaker 3 (25:46):
Pretty much the same thing for most people.
Speaker 2 (25:49):
Yeah, this is a very nothing ever changes kind of thing.
In five h nine BCE, they created basically an oligarchy
with democratic trappings called the Roman Republic. You have the
patricians who are the oligarchy, and they make up the Senate,
which elects two consuls who are like co presidents. You
could say this is all men, of course.
Speaker 3 (26:11):
Oh yeah.
Speaker 2 (26:12):
And then there's the plebeians, who are the non enslaved
working people who have basically no rights. Well, they have
some rights, and they have little democratic bodies that have
very little power. It's like student government. You're like, oh,
look you're voting, you're in charge of the school dance.
Speaker 3 (26:28):
You guys managed it really well. Yeah, yeah, it's very
important what you're doing over there.
Speaker 2 (26:33):
Yeah, only you never get to grow up. You're always
a plebeian. And this entire republic is built on what
I think it was anthropologist David Graber who called the
military coinage slavery complex?
Speaker 3 (26:48):
What military coinage slavery complex?
Speaker 2 (26:52):
Okay, these are the foundations of this empire. I would, sadly,
after my reading, say that you would want to add
the word rape to the end of that phrase. Oh,
because the entire system was built on sexual violence through
the military, and coinage and slavery. All four of those
things are deeply related in a way that surprised me,
(27:14):
because you know, coinage seems like the odd one in there,
but it's not. It is completely not because the Roman
army at this point wasn't actually like a single army
under control of the Roman state. It was a bunch
of different armies controlled by different aristocrats, kind of like
you pay attention to news. You remember in twenty thirty
(27:37):
four CE there was that big war between musk who
controlled all those mercenaries, and the troops that were still
loyal to Melanie Milani Trump whatever fucking Trump after Donald
S goes.
Speaker 3 (27:47):
By Melanie or Melli Milania. Yeah, I do remember, I
do remember that.
Speaker 2 (27:52):
Yeah, just like in twenty thirty four, what these aristocrats
did in Rome is borrow a ton of This is
gonna be really funny when people are listening to this
in twenty thirty six and they're like, fuck, how did Margaret.
Speaker 3 (28:04):
Know she fucking called dude?
Speaker 2 (28:06):
Yeah, what these aristocrats did is they borrowed a ton
of money to raise these armies. And how did they
pay back their debts well through slavery and coinage. Basically,
you get a big fucking army and you just go
and the spread of empire is literally just organized banditry.
(28:26):
You get a big army and you rob the shit
out of everywhere you go. You sell all the people
you can, and then all the precious metals and jewelry
and all that shit you find, you melt the fuck
down and stamp your own fucking face onto Oh wow.
And like, coins are new at this point, and that's
(28:48):
not neutral. Currency and war go hand in hand, and
they literally always have, I always have. The very oldest
coins in history were mint in Persia and they were
for pain mercenaries. The Greeks did the same, and the
Romans actually just started using Greek coins for a while
until they started making their own coins just so that
(29:10):
they could pay for this nightmare machine.
Speaker 3 (29:12):
That's fascinating. It gets deeper, not surprising, I know.
Speaker 2 (29:16):
It is one of those things where I was like
I did not know this, but I'm like, oh, yeah, no,
that makes sense.
Speaker 3 (29:22):
Yeah yeah.
Speaker 2 (29:24):
It took hundreds of years, even in the Roman Empire
to get people to actually start using coins. People did
not like hard currency because they made the rich people richer.
And people aren't They're not dumb, right, They're like, oh,
this thing happened, and now the rich people are even
more powerful. That seems like it's bad. It wasn't like
(29:44):
it was communism. Before coins. People preferred a combination of
mutual aid and iouse. Okay, if you're like a small farmer,
you're kind of growing most of what you need, but
you're not growing everything you need, so you're like trading
some stuff, or you're like, hey, I swear i'll hit
you back, or people being like, ah, I know you
need a thing. Here's the thing, and people take care
of each other, and you know.
Speaker 3 (30:04):
Right, And I guess at periods of time you've been
able to pay for things with grains or you know, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2 (30:14):
There's this whole thing that blew my mind that one
day I'll probably cover, even if it's unrelated to anything
I've wanted to cover on the show. I have to
find the right angle. There's this whole thing where people
paid all of their rented medieval England with eels.
Speaker 3 (30:26):
Eels yeah, okay.
Speaker 2 (30:30):
Eels, because that's what people. They needed, all the shit
that they grew. But they were like, all right, the landlord,
who's usually the church, but maybe a noble needs their due.
I better go get together a like thing at eels.
Speaker 3 (30:44):
That's wild. Where does okay? Well that's a whole.
Speaker 2 (30:48):
There was an eel historian on Twitter for a while
whose whole thing was this. This was my men'swear guy.
I also like the men'swear. This is your men's were guy. Yeah,
that's really the men's were. Guy's also my men'swear.
Speaker 1 (30:58):
Guy.
Speaker 2 (30:59):
It's almost enough to make me want menswear.
Speaker 3 (31:01):
I love that there's something for everybody, you know an
eel historian, Sure, why not? We need someone to study that.
Speaker 2 (31:09):
And so in the ancient world, you have a lot
of people paying their landlords if they have landlords, which
is a shame, but it's you know, not perfect society.
They're paying with grain and stuff, and when you pay
with food that spoils. You actually can't centralize political power
as well, because if you transport food, you have to
(31:30):
feed the animals that carry it, and so taxing the
hinter lens is kind of a net loss. Exerting political
power over a wide area was generally not worth trouble,
which is partly why they would just show up and
like rob everything you've ever owned and kill you rather
than like rule you. And so they're going around and
they're being like, all right, not only are we in charge,
(31:51):
you gotta start paying taxes. You got to use this
fucking shit called coins. Sorry, we don't make the rules.
We just make the rules, you know. And and this
war and so they would they would go and spread
all over the world. And this war involved essentially institutionalized
sexual violence, and it was against women and men, particularly
(32:16):
young men in air quotes, I don't actually know where
that cuts off. It was against women and young men alike,
and children. And it was also matched with often they're
going to kill you also and or in Slavian which
means I guess to do the thing that seems like
I would really be excited about it, but I'm actually not.
Where I get to talk about homosexuality in the ancient world.
Speaker 3 (32:38):
Oh okay, she's got a grin, but it's a forced grin.
Speaker 2 (32:42):
Yeah, because it's about pederasty. We get to talk about
pederasty now again. Okay, this is like whenever I cover
shit about like early feminism or birth control. And then
I'm like, and now we have to talk about eugenics,
and I have the same forced smile on my face.
Speaker 3 (32:55):
Great, here we go again. Yeah, okay, it's okay, you
could do this, This too shall pass.
Speaker 2 (33:00):
Yeah, as we talked about I think last week, when
we talked about diogenies, it wasn't considered adultery for married
men to fuck young men and boys, at least in Greece. Okay,
and there wasn't really, as far as I can understand,
any conception of homosexuality of two men or two women
(33:22):
loving each other as peers. But honestly, by this standard,
there's also not a conception of heterosexual love either, of
the idea that a man and a woman love each
other as peers. Sex was something that you do to
someone that you control.
Speaker 3 (33:39):
Man, it sounds really bad to be a woman.
Speaker 2 (33:42):
It's really bad, Yeah.
Speaker 3 (33:43):
Really really really bad to be a woman in this era.
Speaker 2 (33:46):
It's really bad. Yeah, although the only defense you have
is that they sexually assault young men just as you do.
Speaker 3 (33:53):
But yeah, I'm like, what, there's just no options here for.
Speaker 2 (33:57):
No, women don't get to grow out of it. Yeah, no,
it's bad. Yeah, and it well, And what's interesting about
this about how everything gets back to misogyny. I don't
know if you've heard this. When the Bible talks about
man shall not lie with man as he does with woman,
that is an abomination or whatever the fuck. That's like
the main quote people use to use the Bible to
defend homophobia. They're not talking in that Bible verse about
(34:21):
the idea that being gay is bad, right, They're talking
about how you shouldn't subject men to the same violation
that you subject women to.
Speaker 3 (34:31):
Great, great, great, great cool.
Speaker 2 (34:34):
So what's being institutionalized is not homophobia but patriarchy and misogyny,
which isn't better, No, it isn't.
Speaker 3 (34:43):
But they manage to preach the misogyny and the control
of women and also misinterpret that to suggest that being
gay is bad. So I don't know, they're just getting
it wrong across the board. But whatever.
Speaker 2 (34:59):
But do you know what has never gotten anything wrong?
Speaker 1 (35:01):
You?
Speaker 2 (35:02):
That's right? And my ad transitions, each one of them,
immaculately crafted, impeccable.
Speaker 3 (35:07):
I've never heard a better ad transmit.
Speaker 2 (35:09):
No, the ads themselves are some of them are fine.
I don't know, but.
Speaker 3 (35:12):
Yeah, probably, yeah, I mean, they can't possibly be bad.
Speaker 2 (35:15):
Yeah, but there's actually every now and then there's ones
like when I listen to Coolson podcasts, I get a
lot of like, hey, maybe consider prep and like, I
don't know it, depending on your lifestyle, maybe consider prep.
I don't know, whatever do you want?
Speaker 4 (35:26):
Some ads aren't bad, yeah, And here they are.
Speaker 2 (35:33):
And we're back. And so that's where states come from.
City states are like, why don't we just raised an
army and then force everyone to do coins with slavery
and sexual assault and we just murder everyone. And you've
got this statue from the first century CE about Rome
conquering Britain. We did a whole series of episodes about
(35:56):
the people who fought against Rome conquering Britain. And this
has Emper Claudius standing over a woman whose clothes have
been ripped away, and her name is Britannia and she
represents you know, Britain, and he's about to kill her
and he has just sexually assaulted her. And this wasn't
made as an anti Roman piece of art, was it.
This was a pro Roman. They were like, look how
(36:19):
powerful we are. We just go around and violate and
destroy and this is not the only artistic representation of
this idea. So that's part of it. Now let's talk
about the slavery part. Yay, this is the problem with
when the first half of the show's context. But I
think it's really useful because the people that we're going
(36:42):
to talk to fight all of this really successfully, and like,
this is why I really intentionally want to tie together
coinage and sexual assault and slavery, because these are all
things that they're fighting against as one. We talked about
this a bunch last week about how the ancient world
is all in on slavery, including Greece and Rome, and
I grew up presented with a sort of sanitized idea
(37:06):
of slavery in the ancient world, and I got presented
with this for a couple contradictory reasons. I think both
the right and the left have done some sanitization of
this because first and foremost, there's this I would say
right wing whitewashing that happens because Western civilization is really
into imagining itself in the legacy of Greece and then Rome,
(37:28):
so it wants to present a cleaned up version of
those societies, and they're like, you know, oh, everything was
kind of fine there, when in fact we are based
on those societies in a lot of ways, for all
the bad reasons. You can imagine the American South before
the Civil Wars pretty well following in the legacy of Rome,
(37:48):
all these plantation owners. There's literally a plantation system there,
imagining themselves as little kings, all coming together to have
a democracy and live the genteel life while the people
that they own toil and suffer and die at their hands.
A lot of modern translations of ancient Greek and presumably
Roman texts I've only read about the Greek text if
I'm inferring the Roman part intentionally strips away the language
(38:12):
of slavery. So if you're reading some like Roman story
and it's like, ah, the handmaidens and the servants and
the workers, these are probably.
Speaker 4 (38:23):
Enslaved people, right, the workers, right, yeah, And like on
some level there are some free workers, but like this
economy is run on slavery most of the time.
Speaker 2 (38:35):
It ebbs and flows.
Speaker 3 (38:36):
And even if you are just a worker, or you
are a worker not a slave, is it that far
different from slavery? What a machined I mean, right, there's
so many parallels between every version of society from that
but all the way up till now. But you're like, yeah,
it same thing, different accoutrement, but yeah, there's still slaves anyway.
Speaker 2 (38:59):
No. No, it's like, oh, I have no control over
my life and if I don't do this work, they'll die.
Like yeah, it's not a freeway to live.
Speaker 3 (39:05):
No.
Speaker 2 (39:05):
Yeah, And on the other side, you'll run across people,
including me. Sometimes people really want to present the way
in which slavery in the United States, in the US
South was uniquely bad. And this is something I've done
myself because it was uniquely bad, particularly in the way
(39:26):
that it was racialized. Yeah, it was unique and fucking evil.
But that doesn't make the other forms of slavery good
or sanitized.
Speaker 3 (39:37):
I think you've summarized it. It's like both things can
be true. And also, I don't think that we have
to quantify which version is the worst to make a
point about how bad it is. They're just slightly different versions.
Speaker 2 (39:53):
So yeah, no one wins the Oppression Olympics, like there
is no goal, there's no point. Intersectionality teaches that we
should understand the different ways that we suffer and oppressed
and all of these things without trying to be like, ah,
but I like add up to more points than you
and so you know, like.
Speaker 3 (40:09):
And it goes both ways to hear some people say like, ah, well,
it's not like we invented slavery United States. I'm like, okay,
it's just as bad. It's bad. It's all bad.
Speaker 2 (40:19):
Yeah anyway, yeah, no, totally. It'd be like, all right,
like I didn't invent murdering a guy. That doesn't make
it okay for me to murder a guy, like.
Speaker 3 (40:26):
Right, Like, okay, and your point is literally so we
should have known better. What you're saying is that we
should have known better.
Speaker 2 (40:35):
Yeah, okay, it's like that meme that's like, how are
you all failing this fascism thing? It's an open note test.
And I've read so many things that talk about Greek
and Roman slavery that emphasize how many of the enslaved
people lived somewhat normal lives and eventually found themselves freed
one way or the other, like this has happened when
I've tried to deep dive this on the show before,
(40:57):
where people will be like, hey, you know a lot
of people would even sell themselves into slavery to like
have a place to live for a little while and
then they'd be free again. And okay, there's some of this,
especially for educated enslave people, but no, the ancient Greek
economy and the Roman economy was based on slave labor
from agriculture to mining, and those people did not have
(41:20):
it nice. They were one percent treated as machines to
be run down and killed.
Speaker 3 (41:26):
Doesn't change anything that some people decided to go into it.
It's still a part of a broken system that is
abusing people.
Speaker 2 (41:37):
Most of the enslaved people were captured by pirates in
this or that war, and the capture of people to
enslave was one of the main purposes of war and
colonial expansion. And this slavery was also hereditary. If your
mother was enslaved, you were born enslaved. Italy's whole economy
was run on slavery. By the end of the Roman Republic,
at the tail end of the two hundreds BCE, you've
got what's called the Second Punic War against Carthage and
(42:01):
was now Tunisia northern Africa. And as the Roman Empire
started having wars further and further from home, all these
citizen soldiers would go off to war and be gone
for a long time, so all the small farmers would leave,
and then they would come back and their farm would
be broke because they were gone the whole time. So
they would sell their farm and they'd move into the city.
(42:23):
No more small farms. Now, big plantations take up all
of the land. These are worked by enslaved people. As
the ancient Roman historian Apian put it quote, the rich
used persuasion or force to buy or seize property which
adjoined their own or any other small holdings belonging to
poor men, and came to operate great ranches instead of
(42:46):
single farms. They employed slave hands and shepherds on these
estates to avoid having free men dragged off the land
to serve in the army, and they derived great profit
from this form of ownership too, as the slaves had
many children and no liability to met military service, and
their numbers increased greatly. For these reasons, the powerful war
becoming extremely rich, for the number of slaves in the
(43:07):
country was reaching large proportions, while the Italian people were
suffering from depopulation and shortage of men, worn down as
they were by poverty and taxes and military service. Wow
and so yeah. By the time you hit like zero
and the BCE becomes the CE. About two million out
of eight million people in Italy were enslaved.
Speaker 3 (43:27):
WHOA, yeah, that's a huge number.
Speaker 2 (43:32):
And people just they didn't want to be enslaved, so
they did something about it, and you get what are
called the servile wars.
Speaker 3 (43:42):
Oh, we're back to the servile wars.
Speaker 2 (43:44):
War against the servile And as for that, there's three
of them. But the third one is the one we're
excited about. We're going to talk about it on Wednesday.
Speaker 3 (43:53):
Oh, we're going to talk about what a cliffhanger.
Speaker 2 (43:55):
I know, I know it accidentally became a formula, but
this is.
Speaker 3 (43:58):
All important context for the next part of the conversation.
I'm going to guess.
Speaker 2 (44:04):
Yeah, And it's a combination of like, I think this
context is super it's really useful because like, yes, you
can just say slaves revolted, and that is inherently always good, right,
Like if someone owns you and you're like, nah, you
don't own me anymore, that is always a leveling. That
is always a positive thing.
Speaker 3 (44:24):
Absolutely.
Speaker 2 (44:25):
But I think to understand how they conceptualize, or how
they likely conceptualize, what they were doing, because they didn't
write their own history. I think it's really useful to
understand this like wild combination of free and unfree. You
have all of these ideas, you know, all these ideas
of like how do we get by as equals? And
(44:47):
they're like, I mean, except for the people we own,
fuck them, you know, Like, right.
Speaker 3 (44:53):
It is weird to hear. I mean, we started with
this conversation and I'll just nothing changes. Everything is hauntingly familiar,
you know, everything you say, like, oh, we've been doing
it since then.
Speaker 2 (45:06):
Huh yeah, yeah, these democracies fall into dictatorships. But also
the people trying to do really amazing shit have always
been there.
Speaker 3 (45:16):
Too, right, And I'll end on this thought, which is
this has been going on forever, and I imagine there
will always be elements of this happening, these kinds of
dynamics and us fighting the good fight. However, for how
bad things are, it's a lot better for us now
than it was then, and for a lot of people,
(45:40):
not for everybody, certainly, right, and because there are good people,
because there are the helpers, Because even if it doesn't
feel like it in the moment, we are inching our
way forward towards a better and more just society towards
more equality. And it is infuriating that we have so
much work left to do, but it is helpful to
(46:01):
understand that, well, one in six people could vote in
that version of democracy, so.
Speaker 2 (46:08):
Right, you know, No, it's a good point when I
think about slavery. I fortunately grew up learning that slavery
was bad in America and none of this like weird
horrible stuff about like oh it was fine or whatever. Yeah,
but like I really only learned about American slavery, and
I didn't learn about this long, long history where most
(46:33):
cultures in the world, not all, there were many very
explicitly anti slavery cultures and non slavery cultures, but most
cultures across the world thought it was totally fine to
own a guy. And like most people I would guess
in the world currently do not think it's okay to
(46:54):
own a guy anymore. There's still all kinds of slavery
in the modern world. In the United States, of course,
there's still legal slavery, like literally the Fourteenth Amendment outlawed
slavery and accepting cases of punishment for crime, you know,
and so like prison labor is legally slavery, and it's bad, right,
but like it is, one of the more dramatic things
(47:16):
I think we've done as a human society is change
the way that we think about slavery.
Speaker 3 (47:25):
Think about that, and think about each other. And it's
hard because I know people listening to this are almost
certainly more politically aligned with us. And it's hard to
say these things because I know, I know, I know,
we're all feeling outraged all the time right now. Yeah,
there is still slavery, it looks different. Yeah, these injustices
(47:48):
do still happen. Yeah, there are idiots out here saying
that women shouldn't have the right to vote. All of
this is true, and we still look down on people,
We still other people, all of that, But we have
fundamentally changed the way we think about people inherently, at
(48:10):
least culturally. We're supposed to be whether or not people
are hiding secret thoughts, but you don't think of people
as being as disposable as we used to in general. Again,
I know that people are, but yeah.
Speaker 2 (48:26):
No, no, I think that this is overall true. I
do think though, that there's this interesting thing where because
so much of the modern world has its roots in exactly.
This area, like currently the Middle East and the Mediterranean
area broadly, is where so many of the ideas that
(48:48):
later colonize the world come from. Right that I think
we can kind of accidentally, I know, I just said
that most cultures practice slavery, but like I would guess
based on what I've read and what's available, which isn't
all that much, that like the people of Britain before
Roman invasion were substantially more egalitarian, were substantially and probably
(49:13):
more galitarian than we are today. On the other hand,
they still also probably owned people every now and then. Right,
when you compare to like the Mediterranean societies, to like
Rome and Greece and some of these other cultures you're
looking at like, oh my god, the past is a
complete nightmare. Right, Yeah, And we've made some progress, but
I think it's a little bit of like win, some
(49:34):
lose some when we compare ourselves to like especially cultures
here in North America, but also the two cultures I
know more about because of who I am, is like
indigenous North Americans and like pre civilized quote unquote Europe. Right,
But I don't know, but I do think that there
are gains that we make that are like large and subsubstantive,
and I think that they're going to come from people
(49:57):
like the hundreds of thousands of people who rose up
against Rome.
Speaker 3 (50:00):
Exactly who we're going to talk about on Wednesday.
Speaker 2 (50:03):
That's right. You got anything you want to plug, you.
Speaker 3 (50:05):
Know, go check out our show. Some more news on
YouTube or podcasts if you prefer to listen and not watch.
Got a couple of different shows on there. We've got
a Patreon and the new year, we're going to start
live streaming. I don't know how often, but we're excited
about well, I don't know excited is the right word.
Speaker 2 (50:24):
It'll be fun, willing to yeah, okay too, it'll be
something different.
Speaker 3 (50:28):
We want to do something different. So anyway, that's me,
that's us.
Speaker 2 (50:33):
Check it out, all right, Well, I'll see you on Wednesday.
Speaker 1 (50:40):
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production cool
Zone Media. For more podcasts and cool Zone Media, visit
our website Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on iHeartRadio, app,
app a podcasts, or
Speaker 3 (50:51):
Wherever you get your podcasts
Cool Zon Media.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Hello, and welcome to cool people who did cool stuff.
You're a weekly reminder that when bad things happen, there's
people who do good things in response, and sometimes over
throw governments or at least come very close. I'm your host,
Margaret Kiljoy, and with me today is my guest Katie Stole. Hi.
Speaker 3 (00:20):
Hi, how are you very happy to be back? I'm good,
I'm fine. I'm alive.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
That's better than well, everyone listening can probably say, except
less you're an AI scraping this, in which case I
can't blame you. You're not alive, but I blame you
ever made you.
Speaker 3 (00:37):
Yeah, I definitely blame them. It's not your fault.
Speaker 2 (00:40):
That's true. Katie. I was like, what do I credit
you as? And I just wrote of the news shows?
Because you have all of the news shows, and they're all.
Speaker 3 (00:48):
You have all the news shows.
Speaker 2 (00:49):
What are some of your news shows?
Speaker 3 (00:51):
Well, we've got some more news, and we've got even
more news, and then the other version of even more news.
We've got three shows week, folks over at some more
news channel, YouTube and podcasts and other things cooking.
Speaker 2 (01:07):
See. I'm very grateful you keep up with actual news
for a living and that is great, and I don't
know how I would handle that.
Speaker 3 (01:15):
Yeah, the jury's still out on how I'm handling it. Yeah,
it's a lot. Sometimes I'm also very lucky. Anytime I
start to feel like my head's gonna fall off my
body from stress or you know, just overloaded with news,
I remember that I work with some of my favorite
people and we record podcasts and there's this huge community
(01:36):
of people that listen and interact and I'm very grateful
for it. But yeah, it's a lot, and you have
to be very mindful, or I do. I don't know
how other people handle it. I look at other comparable
shows or people over the Majority Report who are live
streaming every day, and they're so on top of every
single piece. And no, it's too much, because I need
(01:57):
to create space. I live in the mountain. I go
outside and try to just forget about everything when I
can for an hour or two.
Speaker 2 (02:08):
That actually, that seems like how I would do it.
I mean, I also live in the mountains, so this
is a very relatable thing. Have I ever explained to
you the drudgery pyramid of job complaining? No, but please do, Okay.
I discovered this pyramid when someone I was talking to
was complaining about the book that they were writing, and
their name was on the book and they got paid
a decent living wage to write this book. And at
(02:29):
the time, I was getting paid five thousand dollars to
ghost write a trashy heterosexual romance and I was living
in a pond house where I paid like fifty dollars
a month rent, and that's how I afforded to live
off of this terrible salary writing trashy romance novels about sportsmen.
And so I didn't want to hear this person complain
to me about their job. And then I would go downstairs.
(02:53):
I'd make myself my like vegan mac and cheese and
sit in front of the TV, and you know, think
about how hard my job was. And I would try
to complain about it to my roommate who was waiting
to go to the graveyard shift at sheets, and I
was like, yeah, oh, you can only complain laterally or
(03:14):
up in the hierarchy of drudgery.
Speaker 3 (03:17):
It's true, I think, I mean, I like the phrase,
I like thinking about it in that way and then
just throwne mental health and satisfaction in life. I think
it's important to acknowledge the way that something sucks in
the way that you want it to change, but also
the ways so but it's both of It's like, oh,
(03:38):
I get to complain about it the news fucking.
Speaker 2 (03:40):
So we get to complain to each other. We have
the same job. Only the thing that I'm going to
say is that I live in the radical history as
entertainment minds and not the news minds. So I don't
have the first clue about the real world, which is
why I'm going to explain to you that we're gonna
be talking about some shift from two thousand years ago. Again,
that's the kick I'm on right now. We are going
(04:02):
to be talking about the BCEE, the before career common era.
I don't even know or care.
Speaker 3 (04:09):
Well, guess what, I know nothing about this, Sarah. So
I'm like a brand new babe for you to give
the information too.
Speaker 2 (04:18):
This is like when I come on your news show,
I'm like, I don't know, man, I think fascism is bad,
and You're like, here's the ins and outs of it,
and I'm like, that sounds terrible. We should do something
about that.
Speaker 3 (04:27):
Yeah, But what makes you so good in that format is,
first off, you do know enough about what's going on,
but then you give perspectives. That's always really important, right.
It's a good yin yang thing.
Speaker 2 (04:39):
And what's so interesting is that all of this shit
I've been studying about the ancient world for these past
couple months of podcasts, it's just all a series of
nothing ever changes.
Speaker 3 (04:49):
That's what I predict from this episode is that I'm
going to be like yep, and so it goes and
so it goes again. It's the first thing I learned
in poly sci in college.
Speaker 2 (04:58):
Yep who. It got into my head about three months
ago that I wanted to research the druids. That's not
today's topic. That was my topic a couple months ago,
the ancient folks of Celtic Western Europe. I wanted to
do it as the Halloween episode, but then I started
learning more about all the people fucking up the Roman Empire,
and I wanted to know more about Roman Greece and
(05:20):
all that ancient shit so they could read more about
people fucking them up. And now I am so deep
in this rabbit hole and I don't want to come
out because the regular world is full of fascism and
so is this world. But this week we're going to
talk about a guy. We're actually not gonna talk about
this guy very much, but he's like the touchstone. He's
going to be in the title of the episode. A
(05:40):
guy whose name has rung out through the millennia, A
guy who we know very little about. His name is Spartacus.
Speaker 3 (05:49):
Spartacuss you heard about Spartacus. I am Spartakiss Right, there's that.
Speaker 2 (05:55):
So I haven't actually watched I was like thinking about
watching the movie, but I did not actually watch the
movie prep for this. But Okay, that idea, which I
again haven't seen, the idea of everyone being like, no,
I'm this guy is actually pretty fitting because one of
the big things that's going to come up is that
the Roman historians from roughly this era two thousand years
ago are all in on the big Man of history theory,
(06:18):
and so they're like, Spartacus did this, and Spartacus did that,
And I suspect Spartacus would have been the first person
to tell you being like, I didn't do that shit.
I was just a general like we did this, We
made all this stuff happen. Right, You heard much about Spartacus.
Speaker 3 (06:36):
Literally, nothing I was going to say, do I interject
and say, I don't know, honestly, just the fact that
you're saying people were claiming I did this, misattributing things
to him potentially, or I have no idea, no information
at all, except for the phrase I am Spartacus from
a movie I haven't seen.
Speaker 2 (06:55):
Yeah, there was a guy named Spartacus, and he was
an enslaved glade and ancient Italy and the Roman era
of Italy during the tail end of the Roman Republic
a couple of decades before became the Roman Empires. This
is all going to happen in like seventy BCE. And
(07:15):
he was part of this big slave uprising. He wasn't
even the general of it. He was one of five
generals of it. And this is one of the largest
slave uprisings I've ever read about that either had seventy
thousand people or half a million people in open revolt.
Speaker 3 (07:30):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (07:31):
And big differences between those numbers.
Speaker 3 (07:34):
Big differences between those numbers. But those are also both
big numbers, Yeah, they absolutely are, but big discrepancy.
Speaker 2 (07:40):
Yeah, Yeah, especially like it's a thing that's come up
on a couple of these episodes in the past. There's
like awful shit in history where like one hundred thousand
people die or get murdered or whatever. And you're like,
but that's that's a huge chunk of the people in
the world. But you're talking about a world in which
there's I don't have the numbers in front of me,
there's like three hundred four hundred million people in the
entire world.
Speaker 3 (08:00):
A really interesting point that I'd never thought of it. Yeah,
you have to account for that significant percentage of the population.
Speaker 2 (08:08):
The entire world had the population of the United States currently.
You know. Wow, And so half a million people in
open revolt.
Speaker 3 (08:16):
Is a lot of people.
Speaker 2 (08:18):
Big thing.
Speaker 3 (08:19):
Yeah, big deal.
Speaker 2 (08:20):
He was just one of the military leaders of this rebellion,
and he's the one that historians stuck all the credit
to because Roman historians were into this great man of
history theory. I always knew I was going to do
a Spartacus episode, but I didn't know the angle because
I was like, yeah, no, another guy who did a
war whatever. And I'm a bit interested in him, but
I'm much more interested. I'm interested in the little outlaw
(08:42):
republic that sprung up during the rebellion that tens or
hundreds of thousands of people lived in for years they
collectively created a society without political authority, without money, and
without sexual violence.
Speaker 3 (08:58):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (08:59):
Those were like the three things about them.
Speaker 3 (09:01):
The utopia existed.
Speaker 2 (09:03):
Yeah, there's still like some fucked up stuff.
Speaker 3 (09:06):
I'm sure there were things, of course there were.
Speaker 2 (09:08):
We are humans, yeah, probably we're doing human sacrifice. But
everyone was in the time.
Speaker 3 (09:13):
You know, it was in vogue. You can't judge by
today's standard.
Speaker 2 (09:19):
Yeah, it's like a real it's a real one of
those moments.
Speaker 3 (09:22):
Yeah. Sure, but also you really can't judge by today's standards.
Speaker 1 (09:27):
It was.
Speaker 2 (09:27):
No, it just doesn't make any sense if you try to.
It's just like nothing thousands of years. Yeah. And this
was during what was called the Third Servile War in Rome,
which I had never heard of because I am absolutely
not one of those girls who thinks about the Roman
Empire once a week.
Speaker 3 (09:45):
This kind of same. Your Roman Empire is the Roman Empire.
Speaker 2 (09:48):
No, my Roman Empire is the Spanish Civil War or
maybe the Pairs Commune.
Speaker 3 (09:52):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (09:53):
I have avoided learning about this time period because I
hate the people who are really into this time period,
except you, dear listener, I love you. And the Third
Servile War was from seventy three to seventy BCE. Most
historians will say that this uprising failed dramatically, and it's true,
this is like practically a free space for cool people
(10:15):
bingo as everyone dies. But I declare that they won.
It's true that tens of thousands of them died in battle,
and that six thousand of them wound up crucified along
the highway. Yeah, the ancient world was a nightmare. Yeah,
but they accomplished three specific things. One, pretty much any
(10:37):
one of them who wanted to escape back home to
wherever they'd been captured from had the chance. Two, they
laid the foundations for a free society that lasted at
least a decade longer than the rebellion. And three And
I can't prove cause and effect here, but I can
tell you that in the wake of this uprising, the
(10:58):
entire agricultural of Rome shifted away from slave labor and
towards tenant farming.
Speaker 3 (11:04):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (11:05):
And that also like kind of creates world peace in
a way. But we'll get to all that. So they
didn't burn Rome to the ground, they didn't successfully abolish
all slavery in the known world, but they did free
themselves and leave a lasting legacy that freed uncountable others.
And so I'm going to say that they won.
Speaker 3 (11:28):
I will go along with you on that. Yeah, I mean,
they did win if you give it the right parameters,
right exactly.
Speaker 2 (11:35):
You know, I'm all about change the wind conditions to
include what you're doing, you know.
Speaker 3 (11:40):
Yeah. But also it made significant change. We can point
to it, you can see success in it, whether or
not it was lasting or you know, exactly what was
intended as a different conversation totally.
Speaker 2 (11:54):
It also echoed out throughout millennia. It's also very likely
that they called the political system of what they built anarchia. Wait,
it's very likely. It's very likely. And I'm going to
talk about why.
Speaker 3 (12:09):
That's pretty cool.
Speaker 2 (12:12):
Yeah, and so yeah, I want to talk about them.
But first, even before context ads come. That is the context. Yeah,
the context in which we work.
Speaker 3 (12:24):
That's great. We love them, we love to see it.
Speaker 2 (12:26):
They're all great, except online gambling that's bad. But all
the rest of them are good. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (12:32):
I won't even question that.
Speaker 2 (12:37):
And we're back. We're back, Okay. So I was at
a bookstore the other day and I saw an intriguing
book in the history section, and it was a new
book out from Pluto Press. It's called Radical Antiquity, and
it's by a scholar named Christopher B. Zeichman. And this
book is like anyone can read it, you know, pop anthropology, whatever,
(13:00):
pop history. All of this guy's other books. Just to
give you this guy's cred, I'm going to read you
the name of his other books because I think it
gives us cred. We've got recovering an undomesticated apostle essays
on the legacy of Paul. Oh, We've got Queer Readings
of the Centurion at Capernam, which I don't know it is.
Speaker 3 (13:18):
Well, I don't know what that is.
Speaker 2 (13:19):
We've got the Database of military inscriptions and papyri of
early Roman Palestine.
Speaker 3 (13:25):
Oh, these are page turners.
Speaker 2 (13:27):
Oh yeah, absolutely. And we've got the Roman army in
the New Testament. So this is a scholar's scholar. That's
my like interesting defense of my It's not the only source.
That's one of a bunch, but yeah, this guy.
Speaker 3 (13:40):
Knows what they're doing and wrote a more accessible book
that we are going to benefit from. My going to imagine.
Speaker 2 (13:48):
Yeah, no, I'm so excited about this book. I saw
this book and I was like, was this made just
for me. It was made for you. Yeah, And I
was reading this week and I came across something that
kind of blew my mind about the history of the
word anarchy or in this case, anarchia. I have talked
(14:09):
a lot about the history of anarchism on the show.
I've probably subjected you to the history of anarchism on
this show. I can't remember, and usually I'm tracing it
back to about the nineteenth century, or I'm talking about
how ancient and non Western societies had similar ideas, like
non state, non capitalist methods of organizing, right. But I'd
(14:29):
never given too much thought to what connotations people had
of the etymological root of the word anarchy, anarchist anarchism,
because in the like early modern world, the one that
the anarchists that I know of today that they come from,
the first people to call themselves anarchists were kind of
being edgy. They were like basically being like, I'm a
(14:50):
fucking terrorist. You got a fucking problem with that? You know,
it was like I want to tear it all down, like,
and they did believe in organization, and they believed in
these like constructive and socialistics, and it was a you know,
whatever I've talked about this a million times in the show,
but I just assumed that the word had its negative
connotations going all the way back, and I knew that
(15:11):
it derived from the Greek word an archia. But nope,
I mean it did derive from anarchia, the connotations of
that word in ancient Greece, and I'm inferring rome, but
I can't tell you as certainly is much more like
how someone might use it in a non negative sense today,
(15:31):
not necessarily a positive sense, but just a non negative sense.
Speaker 3 (15:34):
Neutral.
Speaker 2 (15:35):
Yeah, because anarchia meant without leaders in a very literal way,
and Arkon, and Arkon was like the leader of Athens
during the democratic periods, and so it was understood as
kind of a radical form of democracy. Our man Aristotle,
when Athens didn't elect its Arkon for the year it's magistrate,
(15:55):
he called that year anarchy. And then Herodotus, who was
hanging out in the fucking fifth century BCE, described it
as anarchy when one cavalry unit lost their commander but
then kept on doing just fine leaderless for a while,
like working collectively as one unit.
Speaker 3 (16:12):
It wasn't like total chaos. Anarchy. It's literally a term
for without a leader.
Speaker 2 (16:19):
Yeah, and so they didn't have a leader and they
continued to do things. It was anarchy, and so this
is really fascinating to me. And so I want to
talk really quickly about democracy in the ancient world, or
I guess specifically in Athens, because again, I like didn't
know this stuff, and so I'm not going to assume
(16:39):
that the listener or you knows this stuff. I knew
that like Athens is where they had democracy. That was
kind of what I had, you know. Yeah, which is
funny because I've like been to those fucking places. When
I showed up in Greece, I was like, I want
to go see the Parthenon and shit, and like the
Greek anarchists I was hanging out with, We're like, man,
fuck that tourist shit, We're not going with you. And
(17:02):
I was like, then I'm going alone. Later the coliseum
is going to come up. It was the same deal.
I was like there with a bunch of Italian anarchists
and I was like, I'm going to the coliseum, and
of my two hosts, one was like, man, I'm not
going anywhere near that shit, and the other one guy
was like.
Speaker 3 (17:15):
Wow, that's like when people come to LA and they're like,
I want to see Hollywood Boulevard and I'm like, no.
Speaker 2 (17:20):
You don't yet, totally you you don't.
Speaker 3 (17:22):
And they're like, I don't care if it's touristy, I
just need to see it. All right, that's your day lost.
But still even hearing that, I would also want to
go to those places to see it.
Speaker 2 (17:34):
No, totally, and like, you know, go spit on the
Donald Trump Star, like yeah, drive down the Vegas Strip
listening to Dystopia, like whatever you need to do. So
when we're talking about ancient Greece, we're not talking about
Greece like a country. We're talking about city states that
(17:54):
go to war with each other and have temporary empires
and shit, and different ethnic groups and different cities are
like more in power at different times. Athens in particular,
like to do democracy every now and then in between
this or that dictatorship. Democracy gets sort of scare quotes
here because only citizens were involved in it, and in
(18:15):
order to be a citizen, you couldn't be an immigrant,
and you had to be a man, and you couldn't
be enslaved. About one in six adults in the city
were likely to be citizens at any given point. But
then that democracy within that fairly big, like they had
a slave empire thing, you know, if you exclude the
(18:36):
patriarchy and the slavery, it was oddly democratic. It was
more democratic than what we live in now. Specifically, they
used direct democracy. The popular assembly was any citizen who
felt like showing up to the acropolis. Now granted, this
is in the middle of the city, so rich people
had like more free time and lived closer to it.
(18:56):
So this de facto favored the wealthy because they could
show up to participate in the democratic process more easily
than like a farmer who has to bring the crops in.
So when new proposals for laws come down, the first
thing that happens is that they try to reach consensus.
Someone makes a proposal, people talk about it, suggest alternatives,
(19:17):
and they try for consensus. Only when that doesn't work
do they do majority voting, which they do by blind ballot.
And the way that they picked their magistrates. The people
who would like run shit, I'm actually like sold on
some of the shit that they did, and they're okay.
They picked their magistrates at random. Oh just okay, literally
(19:37):
at random. It's a one year.
Speaker 3 (19:39):
Service like jury duty or something.
Speaker 2 (19:42):
Yeah, exactly, it's civic service. Yeah, and so no one's campaigning,
no one's building political parties. And then okay, this is
the part that I still think I believe in, but
it's sketchy. If someone seemed like a real threat to democracy,
if people like someone a lot, if you got about
one fifth of the citizens of Athens to agree, they
(20:06):
would be banished for ten years.
Speaker 3 (20:08):
Ooh, I mean it's dangerous, but I just can't help.
But think of all the people i'd put on that list.
Speaker 2 (20:15):
I know, no trial, no appeals.
Speaker 3 (20:18):
Okay, that's intense.
Speaker 2 (20:20):
One fifth of the people, six thousand people out of
the thirty thousands.
Speaker 3 (20:24):
So you could just be disliked totally. You could not
smell very good, and a lot of people agree with that.
Speaker 1 (20:29):
I know.
Speaker 2 (20:29):
But then you'd have to be like so famous that
everyone knows you.
Speaker 3 (20:32):
Smell bad, right, or so smelly?
Speaker 2 (20:35):
That's true. That's a good point.
Speaker 3 (20:38):
Anyway, something to think about.
Speaker 2 (20:39):
Yeah, and if you come back early, they kill you.
But when you come back after ten years, there's no stigma.
None of your property is confiscated, which in some cases
is bad because that property is often people, and like
there's no stigma about it.
Speaker 3 (20:59):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (21:00):
It was a way to prevent people from getting too
big for their bridges, and not too many people were
ever ostracized. They did this for about one hundred years
or so, and like thirty ish people werever ostracized this way.
The first couple were the only ones I read about.
They were people who are seen as like traders, who
were opposed to democracy or were supporting like geopolitical enemies,
like if you supported Persia, they'd maybe ostracize you. Okay,
(21:24):
this is where we get the word ostracization from. That's
what's so funny about fucking around in like the ancient past,
Like this is you're like, oh, this is literally what
the word ostracize means. Because the little ceramic tokens that
they used to count these votes were called the ostra khon.
Speaker 3 (21:43):
Really yeah, wow, fascinating the ostra khon? Yeah wow, what
has that got its root? And so how did they
name that?
Speaker 2 (21:55):
I don't know the etymology behind that. I'm not actually sure.
Speaker 3 (21:58):
Literally ostracize is that's yeah, that's crazy.
Speaker 2 (22:01):
Yeah, enough people cast the vote to kick you out,
and like, just think about how different our political system
would be, because there's never been a president. You couldn't
get a fifth of the population to agree shouldn't be president.
Speaker 3 (22:15):
Everybody would be out.
Speaker 2 (22:16):
That seems fine by me.
Speaker 3 (22:19):
No presidents, that's fine anarchia.
Speaker 2 (22:23):
Yeah, and it's possible that other cities did this thing too,
but we have less specific evidence of it. And originally
I assume that this whole system of democracy was just
a thing for rich guys, because it's kind of in
some way seems sort of comparable to the US South
before the Civil War, you know, is like rich people
sitting around being like, Oh, we're so fancy, we own people.
(22:44):
And it was just a thing for non immigrant, non
enslaved men, and many of them were slavers. But it
was also like a thing for the poor, working fore men.
Right and rich and educated folks actually hated demandmocracy because
it let poor men in. It let poor people be
(23:05):
their equals. Plato, who's this classic right wing dickhead, was
always complaining about how it let mob rule take control
or whatever. And to be clear, Athens didn't invent using
popular assemblies or direct democracy. It's that this is kind
of what people when they were like, We've talked about
this a bunch on the show but a lot of
(23:26):
ancient societies of all over the world will like do
things like popular assemblies because there's not really an assumption
that one person like gets to be in charge. Like
imagine think about the UN. Right in the UN, theoretically
every nation's equal. Obviously this isn't the case. But like,
(23:46):
if you're a country, you're not really supposed to be
able to tell another country what to do. Sure, yeah,
people do it through war and the diplomacy and blackmail
and economic pressure and all this shit. Right, we've got
that on full display right now. But yes, and so
in some ways this democracy is like that. It's everyone's
(24:09):
ostensibly autonomous. And in this case it's like you have
all these little sovereigns at the head of their various households,
and you know, you can't let immigrants join in the
decision making though, would be just terrible. Oh No, So
that's Greek democracy. And I know it's a little bit
we're actually talking about Rome, but I just I think
that showing how a lot of people coming into this
(24:30):
situation come from backgrounds where like actually they should be
able to have a say in what they do, you know,
I think it helps us understand why people are trying
to build a free society when they get the chance. Yeah,
so now we're gonna talk about what everyone loves, talking
about Rome and Roman slavery. Aren't you excited?
Speaker 3 (24:50):
Oh yes, I'm excited. I am excited.
Speaker 2 (24:54):
It's really I love that this show is just about
bad people. But in Rever there's no other show that's
about bad people. That'd be a weird show, know, and
would listen to that?
Speaker 3 (25:03):
That would be weird? Who would want to listen to that?
Speaker 2 (25:05):
No, I couldn't tell you. Don't look at my most
listened to podcasts of the year.
Speaker 3 (25:09):
That would stay out of my app But that's fine.
Speaker 2 (25:11):
Yeah. So Rome had a republic for a few hundred
years in the BCE. It is not a democracy, it's
a republic. It starts off kind of like how medieval
Europe started in on the republic thing. The rich people,
the aristocrats, wanted to be in charge, so they overthrew
the king. This surprised me when I first started reading
(25:32):
more history, but like this is medieval and like Late
and Renaissance whatever. History is like all of these like
revolutions where they're like, oh, we're not a monarchy anymore,
We're a republic or democracy. It's like, ah, the rich
people wanted to be in charge instead of the nobility, Like.
Speaker 3 (25:46):
Pretty much the same thing for most people.
Speaker 2 (25:49):
Yeah, this is a very nothing ever changes kind of thing.
In five h nine BCE, they created basically an oligarchy
with democratic trappings called the Roman Republic. You have the
patricians who are the oligarchy, and they make up the Senate,
which elects two consuls who are like co presidents. You
could say this is all men, of course.
Speaker 3 (26:11):
Oh yeah.
Speaker 2 (26:12):
And then there's the plebeians, who are the non enslaved
working people who have basically no rights. Well, they have
some rights, and they have little democratic bodies that have
very little power. It's like student government. You're like, oh,
look you're voting, you're in charge of the school dance.
Speaker 3 (26:28):
You guys managed it really well. Yeah, yeah, it's very
important what you're doing over there.
Speaker 2 (26:33):
Yeah, only you never get to grow up. You're always
a plebeian. And this entire republic is built on what
I think it was anthropologist David Graber who called the
military coinage slavery complex?
Speaker 3 (26:48):
What military coinage slavery complex?
Speaker 2 (26:52):
Okay, these are the foundations of this empire. I would, sadly,
after my reading, say that you would want to add
the word rape to the end of that phrase. Oh,
because the entire system was built on sexual violence through
the military, and coinage and slavery. All four of those
things are deeply related in a way that surprised me,
(27:14):
because you know, coinage seems like the odd one in there,
but it's not. It is completely not because the Roman
army at this point wasn't actually like a single army
under control of the Roman state. It was a bunch
of different armies controlled by different aristocrats, kind of like
you pay attention to news. You remember in twenty thirty
(27:37):
four CE there was that big war between musk who
controlled all those mercenaries, and the troops that were still
loyal to Melanie Milani Trump whatever fucking Trump after Donald
S goes.
Speaker 3 (27:47):
By Melanie or Melli Milania. Yeah, I do remember, I
do remember that.
Speaker 2 (27:52):
Yeah, just like in twenty thirty four, what these aristocrats
did in Rome is borrow a ton of This is
gonna be really funny when people are listening to this
in twenty thirty six and they're like, fuck, how did Margaret.
Speaker 3 (28:04):
Know she fucking called dude?
Speaker 2 (28:06):
Yeah, what these aristocrats did is they borrowed a ton
of money to raise these armies. And how did they
pay back their debts well through slavery and coinage. Basically,
you get a big fucking army and you just go
and the spread of empire is literally just organized banditry.
(28:26):
You get a big army and you rob the shit
out of everywhere you go. You sell all the people
you can, and then all the precious metals and jewelry
and all that shit you find, you melt the fuck
down and stamp your own fucking face onto Oh wow.
And like, coins are new at this point, and that's
(28:48):
not neutral. Currency and war go hand in hand, and
they literally always have, I always have. The very oldest
coins in history were mint in Persia and they were
for pain mercenaries. The Greeks did the same, and the
Romans actually just started using Greek coins for a while
until they started making their own coins just so that
(29:10):
they could pay for this nightmare machine.
Speaker 3 (29:12):
That's fascinating. It gets deeper, not surprising, I know.
Speaker 2 (29:16):
It is one of those things where I was like
I did not know this, but I'm like, oh, yeah, no,
that makes sense.
Speaker 3 (29:22):
Yeah yeah.
Speaker 2 (29:24):
It took hundreds of years, even in the Roman Empire
to get people to actually start using coins. People did
not like hard currency because they made the rich people richer.
And people aren't They're not dumb, right, They're like, oh,
this thing happened, and now the rich people are even
more powerful. That seems like it's bad. It wasn't like
(29:44):
it was communism. Before coins. People preferred a combination of
mutual aid and iouse. Okay, if you're like a small farmer,
you're kind of growing most of what you need, but
you're not growing everything you need, so you're like trading
some stuff, or you're like, hey, I swear i'll hit
you back, or people being like, ah, I know you
need a thing. Here's the thing, and people take care
of each other, and you know.
Speaker 3 (30:04):
Right, And I guess at periods of time you've been
able to pay for things with grains or you know, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2 (30:14):
There's this whole thing that blew my mind that one
day I'll probably cover, even if it's unrelated to anything
I've wanted to cover on the show. I have to
find the right angle. There's this whole thing where people
paid all of their rented medieval England with eels.
Speaker 3 (30:26):
Eels yeah, okay.
Speaker 2 (30:30):
Eels, because that's what people. They needed, all the shit
that they grew. But they were like, all right, the landlord,
who's usually the church, but maybe a noble needs their due.
I better go get together a like thing at eels.
Speaker 3 (30:44):
That's wild. Where does okay? Well that's a whole.
Speaker 2 (30:48):
There was an eel historian on Twitter for a while
whose whole thing was this. This was my men'swear guy.
I also like the men'swear. This is your men's were guy. Yeah,
that's really the men's were. Guy's also my men'swear.
Speaker 1 (30:58):
Guy.
Speaker 2 (30:59):
It's almost enough to make me want menswear.
Speaker 3 (31:01):
I love that there's something for everybody, you know an
eel historian, Sure, why not? We need someone to study that.
Speaker 2 (31:09):
And so in the ancient world, you have a lot
of people paying their landlords if they have landlords, which
is a shame, but it's you know, not perfect society.
They're paying with grain and stuff, and when you pay
with food that spoils. You actually can't centralize political power
as well, because if you transport food, you have to
(31:30):
feed the animals that carry it, and so taxing the
hinter lens is kind of a net loss. Exerting political
power over a wide area was generally not worth trouble,
which is partly why they would just show up and
like rob everything you've ever owned and kill you rather
than like rule you. And so they're going around and
they're being like, all right, not only are we in charge,
(31:51):
you gotta start paying taxes. You got to use this
fucking shit called coins. Sorry, we don't make the rules.
We just make the rules, you know. And and this
war and so they would they would go and spread
all over the world. And this war involved essentially institutionalized
sexual violence, and it was against women and men, particularly
(32:16):
young men in air quotes, I don't actually know where
that cuts off. It was against women and young men alike,
and children. And it was also matched with often they're
going to kill you also and or in Slavian which
means I guess to do the thing that seems like
I would really be excited about it, but I'm actually not.
Where I get to talk about homosexuality in the ancient world.
Speaker 3 (32:38):
Oh okay, she's got a grin, but it's a forced grin.
Speaker 2 (32:42):
Yeah, because it's about pederasty. We get to talk about
pederasty now again. Okay, this is like whenever I cover
shit about like early feminism or birth control. And then
I'm like, and now we have to talk about eugenics,
and I have the same forced smile on my face.
Speaker 3 (32:55):
Great, here we go again. Yeah, okay, it's okay, you
could do this, This too shall pass.
Speaker 2 (33:00):
Yeah, as we talked about I think last week, when
we talked about diogenies, it wasn't considered adultery for married
men to fuck young men and boys, at least in Greece. Okay,
and there wasn't really, as far as I can understand,
any conception of homosexuality of two men or two women
(33:22):
loving each other as peers. But honestly, by this standard,
there's also not a conception of heterosexual love either, of
the idea that a man and a woman love each
other as peers. Sex was something that you do to
someone that you control.
Speaker 3 (33:39):
Man, it sounds really bad to be a woman.
Speaker 2 (33:42):
It's really bad, Yeah.
Speaker 3 (33:43):
Really really really bad to be a woman in this era.
Speaker 2 (33:46):
It's really bad. Yeah, although the only defense you have
is that they sexually assault young men just as you do.
Speaker 3 (33:53):
But yeah, I'm like, what, there's just no options here for.
Speaker 2 (33:57):
No, women don't get to grow out of it. Yeah, no,
it's bad. Yeah, and it well, And what's interesting about
this about how everything gets back to misogyny. I don't
know if you've heard this. When the Bible talks about
man shall not lie with man as he does with woman,
that is an abomination or whatever the fuck. That's like
the main quote people use to use the Bible to
defend homophobia. They're not talking in that Bible verse about
(34:21):
the idea that being gay is bad, right, They're talking
about how you shouldn't subject men to the same violation
that you subject women to.
Speaker 3 (34:31):
Great, great, great, great cool.
Speaker 2 (34:34):
So what's being institutionalized is not homophobia but patriarchy and misogyny,
which isn't better, No, it isn't.
Speaker 3 (34:43):
But they manage to preach the misogyny and the control
of women and also misinterpret that to suggest that being
gay is bad. So I don't know, they're just getting
it wrong across the board. But whatever.
Speaker 2 (34:59):
But do you know what has never gotten anything wrong?
Speaker 1 (35:01):
You?
Speaker 2 (35:02):
That's right? And my ad transitions, each one of them,
immaculately crafted, impeccable.
Speaker 3 (35:07):
I've never heard a better ad transmit.
Speaker 2 (35:09):
No, the ads themselves are some of them are fine.
I don't know, but.
Speaker 3 (35:12):
Yeah, probably, yeah, I mean, they can't possibly be bad.
Speaker 2 (35:15):
Yeah, but there's actually every now and then there's ones
like when I listen to Coolson podcasts, I get a
lot of like, hey, maybe consider prep and like, I
don't know it, depending on your lifestyle, maybe consider prep.
I don't know, whatever do you want?
Speaker 4 (35:26):
Some ads aren't bad, yeah, And here they are.
Speaker 2 (35:33):
And we're back. And so that's where states come from.
City states are like, why don't we just raised an
army and then force everyone to do coins with slavery
and sexual assault and we just murder everyone. And you've
got this statue from the first century CE about Rome
conquering Britain. We did a whole series of episodes about
(35:56):
the people who fought against Rome conquering Britain. And this
has Emper Claudius standing over a woman whose clothes have
been ripped away, and her name is Britannia and she
represents you know, Britain, and he's about to kill her
and he has just sexually assaulted her. And this wasn't
made as an anti Roman piece of art, was it.
This was a pro Roman. They were like, look how
(36:19):
powerful we are. We just go around and violate and
destroy and this is not the only artistic representation of
this idea. So that's part of it. Now let's talk
about the slavery part. Yay, this is the problem with
when the first half of the show's context. But I
think it's really useful because the people that we're going
(36:42):
to talk to fight all of this really successfully, and like,
this is why I really intentionally want to tie together
coinage and sexual assault and slavery, because these are all
things that they're fighting against as one. We talked about
this a bunch last week about how the ancient world
is all in on slavery, including Greece and Rome, and
I grew up presented with a sort of sanitized idea
(37:06):
of slavery in the ancient world, and I got presented
with this for a couple contradictory reasons. I think both
the right and the left have done some sanitization of
this because first and foremost, there's this I would say
right wing whitewashing that happens because Western civilization is really
into imagining itself in the legacy of Greece and then Rome,
(37:28):
so it wants to present a cleaned up version of
those societies, and they're like, you know, oh, everything was
kind of fine there, when in fact we are based
on those societies in a lot of ways, for all
the bad reasons. You can imagine the American South before
the Civil Wars pretty well following in the legacy of Rome,
(37:48):
all these plantation owners. There's literally a plantation system there,
imagining themselves as little kings, all coming together to have
a democracy and live the genteel life while the people
that they own toil and suffer and die at their hands.
A lot of modern translations of ancient Greek and presumably
Roman texts I've only read about the Greek text if
I'm inferring the Roman part intentionally strips away the language
(38:12):
of slavery. So if you're reading some like Roman story
and it's like, ah, the handmaidens and the servants and
the workers, these are probably.
Speaker 4 (38:23):
Enslaved people, right, the workers, right, yeah, And like on
some level there are some free workers, but like this
economy is run on slavery most of the time.
Speaker 2 (38:35):
It ebbs and flows.
Speaker 3 (38:36):
And even if you are just a worker, or you
are a worker not a slave, is it that far
different from slavery? What a machined I mean, right, there's
so many parallels between every version of society from that
but all the way up till now. But you're like, yeah,
it same thing, different accoutrement, but yeah, there's still slaves anyway.
Speaker 2 (38:59):
No. No, it's like, oh, I have no control over
my life and if I don't do this work, they'll die.
Like yeah, it's not a freeway to live.
Speaker 3 (39:05):
No.
Speaker 2 (39:05):
Yeah, And on the other side, you'll run across people,
including me. Sometimes people really want to present the way
in which slavery in the United States, in the US
South was uniquely bad. And this is something I've done
myself because it was uniquely bad, particularly in the way
(39:26):
that it was racialized. Yeah, it was unique and fucking evil.
But that doesn't make the other forms of slavery good
or sanitized.
Speaker 3 (39:37):
I think you've summarized it. It's like both things can
be true. And also, I don't think that we have
to quantify which version is the worst to make a
point about how bad it is. They're just slightly different versions.
Speaker 2 (39:53):
So yeah, no one wins the Oppression Olympics, like there
is no goal, there's no point. Intersectionality teaches that we
should understand the different ways that we suffer and oppressed
and all of these things without trying to be like, ah,
but I like add up to more points than you
and so you know, like.
Speaker 3 (40:09):
And it goes both ways to hear some people say like, ah, well,
it's not like we invented slavery United States. I'm like, okay,
it's just as bad. It's bad. It's all bad.
Speaker 2 (40:19):
Yeah anyway, yeah, no, totally. It'd be like, all right,
like I didn't invent murdering a guy. That doesn't make
it okay for me to murder a guy, like.
Speaker 3 (40:26):
Right, Like, okay, and your point is literally so we
should have known better. What you're saying is that we
should have known better.
Speaker 2 (40:35):
Yeah, okay, it's like that meme that's like, how are
you all failing this fascism thing? It's an open note test.
And I've read so many things that talk about Greek
and Roman slavery that emphasize how many of the enslaved
people lived somewhat normal lives and eventually found themselves freed
one way or the other, like this has happened when
I've tried to deep dive this on the show before,
(40:57):
where people will be like, hey, you know a lot
of people would even sell themselves into slavery to like
have a place to live for a little while and
then they'd be free again. And okay, there's some of this,
especially for educated enslave people, but no, the ancient Greek
economy and the Roman economy was based on slave labor
from agriculture to mining, and those people did not have
(41:20):
it nice. They were one percent treated as machines to
be run down and killed.
Speaker 3 (41:26):
Doesn't change anything that some people decided to go into it.
It's still a part of a broken system that is
abusing people.
Speaker 2 (41:37):
Most of the enslaved people were captured by pirates in
this or that war, and the capture of people to
enslave was one of the main purposes of war and
colonial expansion. And this slavery was also hereditary. If your
mother was enslaved, you were born enslaved. Italy's whole economy
was run on slavery. By the end of the Roman Republic,
at the tail end of the two hundreds BCE, you've
got what's called the Second Punic War against Carthage and
(42:01):
was now Tunisia northern Africa. And as the Roman Empire
started having wars further and further from home, all these
citizen soldiers would go off to war and be gone
for a long time, so all the small farmers would leave,
and then they would come back and their farm would
be broke because they were gone the whole time. So
they would sell their farm and they'd move into the city.
(42:23):
No more small farms. Now, big plantations take up all
of the land. These are worked by enslaved people. As
the ancient Roman historian Apian put it quote, the rich
used persuasion or force to buy or seize property which
adjoined their own or any other small holdings belonging to
poor men, and came to operate great ranches instead of
(42:46):
single farms. They employed slave hands and shepherds on these
estates to avoid having free men dragged off the land
to serve in the army, and they derived great profit
from this form of ownership too, as the slaves had
many children and no liability to met military service, and
their numbers increased greatly. For these reasons, the powerful war
becoming extremely rich, for the number of slaves in the
(43:07):
country was reaching large proportions, while the Italian people were
suffering from depopulation and shortage of men, worn down as
they were by poverty and taxes and military service. Wow
and so yeah. By the time you hit like zero
and the BCE becomes the CE. About two million out
of eight million people in Italy were enslaved.
Speaker 3 (43:27):
WHOA, yeah, that's a huge number.
Speaker 2 (43:32):
And people just they didn't want to be enslaved, so
they did something about it, and you get what are
called the servile wars.
Speaker 3 (43:42):
Oh, we're back to the servile wars.
Speaker 2 (43:44):
War against the servile And as for that, there's three
of them. But the third one is the one we're
excited about. We're going to talk about it on Wednesday.
Speaker 3 (43:53):
Oh, we're going to talk about what a cliffhanger.
Speaker 2 (43:55):
I know, I know it accidentally became a formula, but
this is.
Speaker 3 (43:58):
All important context for the next part of the conversation.
I'm going to guess.
Speaker 2 (44:04):
Yeah, And it's a combination of like, I think this
context is super it's really useful because like, yes, you
can just say slaves revolted, and that is inherently always good, right,
Like if someone owns you and you're like, nah, you
don't own me anymore, that is always a leveling. That
is always a positive thing.
Speaker 3 (44:24):
Absolutely.
Speaker 2 (44:25):
But I think to understand how they conceptualize, or how
they likely conceptualize, what they were doing, because they didn't
write their own history. I think it's really useful to
understand this like wild combination of free and unfree. You
have all of these ideas, you know, all these ideas
of like how do we get by as equals? And
(44:47):
they're like, I mean, except for the people we own,
fuck them, you know, Like, right.
Speaker 3 (44:53):
It is weird to hear. I mean, we started with
this conversation and I'll just nothing changes. Everything is hauntingly familiar,
you know, everything you say, like, oh, we've been doing
it since then.
Speaker 2 (45:06):
Huh yeah, yeah, these democracies fall into dictatorships. But also
the people trying to do really amazing shit have always
been there.
Speaker 3 (45:16):
Too, right, And I'll end on this thought, which is
this has been going on forever, and I imagine there
will always be elements of this happening, these kinds of
dynamics and us fighting the good fight. However, for how
bad things are, it's a lot better for us now
than it was then, and for a lot of people,
(45:40):
not for everybody, certainly, right, and because there are good people,
because there are the helpers, Because even if it doesn't
feel like it in the moment, we are inching our
way forward towards a better and more just society towards
more equality. And it is infuriating that we have so
much work left to do, but it is helpful to
(46:01):
understand that, well, one in six people could vote in
that version of democracy, so.
Speaker 2 (46:08):
Right, you know, No, it's a good point when I
think about slavery. I fortunately grew up learning that slavery
was bad in America and none of this like weird
horrible stuff about like oh it was fine or whatever. Yeah,
but like I really only learned about American slavery, and
I didn't learn about this long, long history where most
(46:33):
cultures in the world, not all, there were many very
explicitly anti slavery cultures and non slavery cultures, but most
cultures across the world thought it was totally fine to
own a guy. And like most people I would guess
in the world currently do not think it's okay to
(46:54):
own a guy anymore. There's still all kinds of slavery
in the modern world. In the United States, of course,
there's still legal slavery, like literally the Fourteenth Amendment outlawed
slavery and accepting cases of punishment for crime, you know,
and so like prison labor is legally slavery, and it's bad, right,
but like it is, one of the more dramatic things
(47:16):
I think we've done as a human society is change
the way that we think about slavery.
Speaker 3 (47:25):
Think about that, and think about each other. And it's
hard because I know people listening to this are almost
certainly more politically aligned with us. And it's hard to
say these things because I know, I know, I know,
we're all feeling outraged all the time right now. Yeah,
there is still slavery, it looks different. Yeah, these injustices
(47:48):
do still happen. Yeah, there are idiots out here saying
that women shouldn't have the right to vote. All of
this is true, and we still look down on people,
We still other people, all of that, But we have
fundamentally changed the way we think about people inherently, at
(48:10):
least culturally. We're supposed to be whether or not people
are hiding secret thoughts, but you don't think of people
as being as disposable as we used to in general. Again,
I know that people are, but yeah.
Speaker 2 (48:26):
No, no, I think that this is overall true. I
do think though, that there's this interesting thing where because
so much of the modern world has its roots in exactly.
This area, like currently the Middle East and the Mediterranean
area broadly, is where so many of the ideas that
(48:48):
later colonize the world come from. Right that I think
we can kind of accidentally, I know, I just said
that most cultures practice slavery, but like I would guess
based on what I've read and what's available, which isn't
all that much, that like the people of Britain before
Roman invasion were substantially more egalitarian, were substantially and probably
(49:13):
more galitarian than we are today. On the other hand,
they still also probably owned people every now and then. Right,
when you compare to like the Mediterranean societies, to like
Rome and Greece and some of these other cultures you're
looking at like, oh my god, the past is a
complete nightmare. Right, Yeah, And we've made some progress, but
I think it's a little bit of like win, some
(49:34):
lose some when we compare ourselves to like especially cultures
here in North America, but also the two cultures I
know more about because of who I am, is like
indigenous North Americans and like pre civilized quote unquote Europe. Right,
But I don't know, but I do think that there
are gains that we make that are like large and subsubstantive,
and I think that they're going to come from people
(49:57):
like the hundreds of thousands of people who rose up
against Rome.
Speaker 3 (50:00):
Exactly who we're going to talk about on Wednesday.
Speaker 2 (50:03):
That's right. You got anything you want to plug, you.
Speaker 3 (50:05):
Know, go check out our show. Some more news on
YouTube or podcasts if you prefer to listen and not watch.
Got a couple of different shows on there. We've got
a Patreon and the new year, we're going to start
live streaming. I don't know how often, but we're excited
about well, I don't know excited is the right word.
Speaker 2 (50:24):
It'll be fun, willing to yeah, okay too, it'll be
something different.
Speaker 3 (50:28):
We want to do something different. So anyway, that's me,
that's us.
Speaker 2 (50:33):
Check it out, all right, Well, I'll see you on Wednesday.
Speaker 1 (50:40):
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production cool
Zone Media. For more podcasts and cool Zone Media, visit
our website Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on iHeartRadio, app,
app a podcasts, or
Speaker 3 (50:51):
Wherever you get your podcasts
Host
Margaret Killjoy
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