Part One: How The Roman Republic Became a Police State

Robert is joined by Andrew Ti to discuss The Roman Republic. 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
What's warming my my globe. I'm Robert Evans. My air
conditioning is not currently functioning, so I'm hiding in my basement,
which I think this is a historic moment everybody marks
the first time a human being has experienced the consequences
of climate change. That's that's me right now. Number one.

(00:22):
It is seventy four degrees maybe in my basement upwards
of seventy three degrees. So yeah, suffering, suffering.

Speaker 2 (00:31):
Here still, I mean that in a basement. Is that's
a pretty That's pretty warm, dog.

Speaker 1 (00:37):
It's pretty. It's pretty warm for the basement. It might
be more like seventy degrees. I don't know what temperatures are.
And I'm drinking coffee. Andrew Te how are you doing today?

Speaker 2 (00:46):
Hi? What's up? How's it going? I'm I'm I'm I.
This is the honestly, probably the first or second week
that me longtime shorts Denier is wearing short Wow, I'm
not in short. Yeah, I'm not a short person. I
wore I wore black jeans to a Dodger game two

(01:08):
years ago when it was like one hundred and ten outside,
and I did almost pass out, but I was pretty committed.
And now I'm now I'm wearing shorts.

Speaker 1 (01:18):
I have also purchased a pair of shorts recently. I
may not just take this evidence to any climate change
and I and be like Andrew, T wear shorts now,
I know that's that's the proof. Yeah, climate change is
a real problem. This is the first evidence anyone has
of it.

Speaker 2 (01:36):
Andrew.

Speaker 1 (01:37):
It's good to have you back. You are having me,
Sophie and I is one of our very, very very
favorite people to have on the show. You have been
doing a lot of Holly. We call you mister Hollywood
a private conversations, such a big Hollywood guy. But you
know what other kind of guy you are. Andrew is
a very funny guy who we like to have on

(01:59):
every now and again to talk about bits of history.
You and I have talked about King Leopold of Belgium.
We've talked about the Andaman Islands. We've had all sorts
of fun history conversations. Andrew, how do you How do
you feel about the Roman Empire?

Speaker 2 (02:14):
Oh? I probably as far as like contemporary Americans go,
I probably took more Latin than I think most people like.
That was my primary at two. Andrew, yea quote unquote
foreign language in Issa. Yeah so I and ultimately all

(02:37):
of three useless years Roman propaganda. Yeah so yeah, I
probably to the extent that I know anything, I probably
I'm like more aware of a sort of sugar coated
version of whatever whatever the fuck is happening here.

Speaker 1 (02:55):
Yeah, we're we're today. We're going to tell the story
about how the Roman Republic became a police day, which
it did, which is quite a tale I have. You know,
we've we've at we haven't done a lot of ancient
history stuff on this podcast for good reasons. Among other things,
it's kind of hard to like get good details about
people who died two thousand years ago that aren't just

(03:16):
like nonsense propaganda, right, because it's usually just like, yeah, yeah,
some like poem about some gig.

Speaker 2 (03:22):
History is written by the winners, especially yeah, when it's
like fucking epigrams, like leftover from the Roman But also
I I feel like they're they're the the The worry
is the sliding scale of bastardom through history is Yes,
I would imagine the trickiest part because it's like there's

(03:44):
sort of like no amount of fascism and or you know,
brutality that doesn't eventually get justified by everyone else was
doing it.

Speaker 1 (03:55):
Yeah, the yeah, I mean that that's like it's are
you gonna call like Genghis Khana bastard? Okay, well then
like what like sure, but but what is I It
seems like kind of pointless to be like and this
guy was a king who murdered people when it's like, well, yeah,
they all wear like yeah.

Speaker 2 (04:12):
Why is that?

Speaker 1 (04:13):
Like nobody's like really going other than some people were
better at it. It's not that interesting to talk about
them being like shitty, that's not the One of the
cool things about the Roman Republic is Number one, we
have a lot of de tail on these guys and
all that's bad, Right, all of our historians are propagandists,
but at least there's more than one of them. So
you get like that this dude rocked and like this

(04:34):
dude was terrible. Story usually, And number two, they're basically
exactly the same as modern Americans politically, So you get
really modern like political dick moves from from from from
terrible people in a way that's like very familiar and
in fact, like so we're talking about a lot of

(04:55):
the things that led up to the fall of the
Roman Republic. And like the end of of you know, know,
the kind of democratic experiment that had existed there for
a few centuries. And this is something that like people
are talking about a lot right now. So when when
you get like history nerds talking about how fucked up
politics are in America, they're either going to go back
to Weimar Germany, which we've already done, or they're going

(05:15):
to talk about the fall of the Roman Republic, which
is why there's like three books out There's like three
or four books that have come out in the last
year that are like, here's what the Fall of the
Roman Republic can teach us about the fall of American
or like what's happening in American democracy. Most of these
books are stupid. There is one really good book by
podcaster Mike Duncan who does the Revolutions podcast, called The

(05:37):
Storm Before the Storm. That's the one I would recommend
if you want to read a book like that. We're
not going to mainly be telling that story. Instead, we're
going to talk about how Rome invented militarized policing in
the first police state and kind of the first FBI,
because that's not a history I think most people know
and it's pretty cool. But first we're going to talk

(05:57):
about well some guys, well we're gonna talk about a
lot of shit. We're gonna we're gonna have to cover
quite a bit of ground today. This is one of
the reasons we don't do so many ancient history ones
because it's like, all right, well, if you want to
tell this story, you have to go through like a
thousand years of shit.

Speaker 2 (06:13):
Yeah yeah, Well, also because the audience is like, like me,
probably is like not just a thousand years of shit,
but so much backstory in context. Yeah, I don't envy you.

Speaker 1 (06:25):
You have to explain a lot. But thankfully, the Romans
were pretty entertaining sons of bitches, not if they were
killing or enslaving you, but like sometimes if they were
enslaving you. There were some Greeks who had fun with that.
So the city of Rome andrew founded on April twenty first,
seven fifty three BC by two brothers who were nursed
by a wolf. If you believe the myths that a

(06:48):
lot of Romans didn't believe, right, like, yeah, these are
like the things that we tell about LinkedIn this is
what the Romans thought, Like most of them are like
I don't. I've never seen a wolf nurse to babies, Like,
I don't.

Speaker 2 (06:58):
Think statue of of the of like two infants sucking
on a wolf's yeah breasts is or.

Speaker 1 (07:07):
You're talking about the statue in my living room, right, yeah,
yeah you know I have that instead of a television.
Yeah yeah, I made it out of a out of macaroni.

Speaker 2 (07:15):
Yes, just harrowing stuff if you think about it, like
it's just so gross.

Speaker 1 (07:20):
Yeah, bad for the wolf, bad for the babies, is
good for anyone. But yeah, this is Romulus and Remus, right,
Like that's the that's the legend. There's a good line
in I think it's the movie Spartacus where Julius Caesar
and I believe it would have been Pompy or like
walking around and talking about like they're walking past like
a temple, and Caesar asked a question like don't you

(07:43):
venerate the gods? And Pompy's like, well, publicly sure, but
privately I don't believe in any of them. And that's
probably how it was for a lot of Romans. Like yeah,
I think everyone's like people aren't lockstep believing these silly
ass myths, but this is the myth. April twenty first
seven through fifty three BC, which is absolutely not when
Rome was founded. Archaeologists know that people have been living
in that spot for about fourteen thousand years, because very

(08:08):
rarely do there's just like a bunch of people suddenly
arrive at a chunk of land and be like and
now it's a city.

Speaker 2 (08:14):
That's not.

Speaker 1 (08:15):
Yeah, you just have like groups of people farming. Like
Rome has a bunch of hills, so you could set
up shop on a hill. It's a good place to
grow food. You can beat up people if they try
to like come onto your property and stuff because hills
are easy to defend.

Speaker 2 (08:29):
You know.

Speaker 1 (08:30):
It's just a good place for people to exist up
until the present day, where it's about to die because
there's no water. But for a while it was a
good place to be a person until we invented the car.
Yeah we're changing, we're changing.

Speaker 2 (08:43):
The good places to be a person. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (08:45):
Yeah, everybody's gonna have to go. Yeah, there's not going
to be so many Italians in the future.

Speaker 2 (08:50):
I was just I was just in Yeah, right, I
guess Peninsula life is about to be Island life is
about to be Atlanta's life. Yeah, it was just in Minneapolis,
and there was a real palpable sense of like, we're
going to be the new Miami suit.

Speaker 1 (09:08):
Yeah, yeah, Minneapolis is going to be dealing with those
one hundred and ten degree days. Time to get your
beach body on, Midwesterners or whatever part of the country.
Minneapolis's lakes fucking lakes. So even ancient Romans had a
lot of competing stories about the founding of the city.
Probably most likely, like most of them, tended to think

(09:30):
that it had been basically like a Greek colonial offshoot.

Speaker 2 (09:33):
There.

Speaker 1 (09:33):
Later, when Rome becomes an empire, there's this state propaganda
line that it had been founded by a bunch of
Trojan war refugees and a Trojan king named Aeneis. None
of that's true either, and it doesn't really matter. What
we definitely know is that sometime around the seven hundred SPC,
there's this city state called Rome that kind of comes together,

(09:53):
probably from a bunch of different communities in the area,
gradually sort of you know, merging, and it starts to
gain power and influence in central Italy. Now, like most places,
it's ruled by kings, and over time, the Latins, who
were like a tribe, right, the Latins are a tribe
in Italy and it's because they speak Latin, that's.

Speaker 2 (10:13):
Yeah, or vice versa.

Speaker 1 (10:15):
But yeah, yeah, yeah, these these at this point, they're
just like primitive tribesmen wandering around Italy. They don't even
know that in a couple of thousand years you and
I will be learning their language.

Speaker 2 (10:27):
Yeah, badly Ecca Romani and whatnot.

Speaker 1 (10:31):
Yeah, because we because we got scared by French and
didn't want to have to the pressure of learning a
real language.

Speaker 2 (10:37):
I honestly, I cannot get back into the mindset of
the bozo. I mustn't made the decision in middle school
to just be like, you know what Latin.

Speaker 1 (10:47):
I think I was intimidated by like, oh no, I
don't want to have to because the thing they promised
us is you don't have to do like pronunciation tests
because nobody knows how a lot of Latin was spoken.

Speaker 2 (10:58):
I did. Actually my senior year of high school, they
let me go to the university and take Italian, oh,
which Latin, spicy Latina did not help me out very much.

Speaker 1 (11:11):
I have so my family is incredibly fucking like my
dad is first generation like American, Like that's how Italian
my family is, and We had some relatives when I
was a kid come over who spoke only Italian, and
because they were old Catholics, Latin and so when they
were in town, my dad, who was also an old Catholic,
had to like translate for them, so they would speak

(11:31):
in Latin and then my dad would translate to the
rest of the family. Damn dude, Yeah, which I think
makes this yeah raazy.

Speaker 2 (11:42):
Well that was your your Romulus's air, basically.

Speaker 1 (11:45):
That's what everybody says. I mean, that was one of
the benefits of the fact that like all church services
in the Catholic Church took place in Latin. Is that
like you could have people from like England and Spain
and fucking Portugal all in the same room and they
might not speak each other's naeguages, but they all know
Latin right because they have to it ready to do
the Jesus stuff. So anyway, uh so, yeah, you get

(12:08):
these Latins hanging around, and you know, these are the
people who are going to become the Romans, but at
the time they're just like some other group of assholes
in Italy. And these dudes called the Etruscans are much
more powerful. And there's this Eutruscan dynasty that comes to
be the Kings of Rome, known as the Great House
of Tarquin. But that's just kind of like what more
modern people call them. They were not a great house.

(12:29):
This is not game of throne shit. These guys are
like petty petty chiefs. These are like dudes with like
sharpened sticks beating anybody who like. The Tarquins are the
guys who have the most muscly friends with sharpened sticks
and are the best at stabbing people who don't pay
protection money.

Speaker 2 (12:46):
Right. Think of them more as like street thugs than
the you know, it's always it's always like, uh, yeah,
it's organized crime until it's taxes.

Speaker 1 (12:58):
Yeah, exactly, And like the so they in the seven
hundreds they kind of start to make the jump from
organized crime to taxes, but it's still more organized crime
than anything. So for a while Rome is like pretty
much every other city in the Mediterranean, and then in
the five hundreds, shit changes. The last king of Rome
is a guy named Lucius tarquinas Superbus, which is where

(13:21):
we get the word superb, although that's like anyway, that's
the nickname people gave him, and it's kind of Romans
have like a history of Like this guy's an asshole.
Let's let's call him great or like superb or like
an awesome or something. So he's he gets to power
like five point thirty four BC. He has a pretty
good reign for a while. He wins a bunch of wars,

(13:41):
he signs the city's first treaty with Carthage, he builds
a big ass temple, and yeah, he enslaves a bunch
of people to make the first sewers and drainage systems
in Rome. So he's he's definitely like, you know, that's
solid king stuff. He's he's made a step beyond gang leader.
When you're making sewage, you've made a move, have passed
past gang shit. And then, according to myth, his son

(14:04):
rapes a Roman noble woman named Lucretia, and this this
becomes a problem for him. Here's how the Getty summarizes
what's said to have happened. The tragedy of Lucretia began
when Sextust, son of the tyrannical Eutruscan king of Rome
and member of the Tarquin family, raped her. For the
ancient Romans, a woman who was raped was guilty of adultery,
a crime punishable by death, even though she had not

(14:25):
given herself willingly. After she was raped, Lucretia made her
husband and father swear an oath of vengeance against the Tarquins,
and then killed herself in shame. Enraged by her death,
Junius Brutus led a victorious rebellion against the Etruscan king.
So a couple of things there. A couple of things there.
Number one looked, obviously you should be angry at the

(14:45):
guy who did the rape, but also most of your
anger might be at like the social custom that says
that she has to kill herself after this, Like that
that might be the thing to be angrier yet, but
people don't think that way.

Speaker 2 (14:56):
I guess it really is like this, this like it's
it's spoken so matter of factly, and this is where
like the context of it makes it so hard to
figure out what the what the approatate this is because
the I mean, look, the entire misogynist society, like every
missogyst society, this one, you know, worse by modern standards,

(15:18):
but you know this is pretty normal behind them. Yeah,
but yeah, and then you're just like you know, you're
the family members watching this happen, enraged that this had
to happen. Yeah, but not not because of the like
the society. Like it's sort of like this classic everyone
is always mad at the wrong thing through it is.

Speaker 1 (15:42):
It's also, though, I think if you get yourself in
a different mind state, you can really feel this because
like this is a stupid rule that's like cruel and
evil and is it makes like a bad situation even
more horrifying, and like we can look at that as like, oh,
look at these fucked up people in their up rules.
But also the story you get is that like all

(16:03):
of the Romans are pissed at this, and Lucretia is
a sympathetic figure in their history. And think about all
of the different times in recent past when like everyone
in America has been like, wait, that's the law, that's
the way it works. That's stupid as shit, Why the
hell are we doing it this way? But then the
stupid thing happens. That's fucked up because like can't change
the law, yeah, or.

Speaker 2 (16:23):
We're not going to oh yeah, I mean you can't
just change laws.

Speaker 1 (16:28):
And you get the feeling that's kind of the attitude
people have us, like, well, this is all like stupid
and fucked up but at the end of the day,
the only person we can really take our anger out
on is the Tarquin families. Let's get them kings out
of here, which they do. And it's also worth noting
the guy who leads the rebellion, Junius Brutus. That name
Brutus should be familiar, right, that's the guy who kills he. Well,
that the guy who kills Caesar is this kid's descendant,

(16:52):
you know, hundreds and hundreds of years down the line.
That's part of why he kills Caesar's his family's got
this reputation of like when people try to do king stuff,
we murder them anyway.

Speaker 2 (17:02):
To be fair, pretty good family tradition. It's a cool
family tradition. It does.

Speaker 1 (17:08):
So Junius Brutus is one of like forty guys that
all have the same name. So one of the cool
things in Roman history, and by cool, I mean very frustrating,
is that if there's ever a guy who does anything
worth noting, there will be three other guys who are
also really important, with the exact same name, because that's
how the Romans did things. So you'd be like, yes,
Scipio Africanus, Well, which one the one from like the

(17:28):
one sixties or the one from like the yeah, or
like the two hundreds and the one from the one
fifties and like yeah, it's it's very frustrating, but that's.

Speaker 2 (17:36):
You know, if you're if you're you're early on in
Western civilization, how many names you can't have that.

Speaker 1 (17:43):
It's like seven names. Yeah, there's like seven names. So
the details of obviously the the Lucretia story are almost
certainly not exact, but there's a pretty decent chance that
it broadly is accurate as to what caused the insurrection
against Etruscan power. Most people probably heard of the right
of primn nocta right which you see in Braveheart. You

(18:05):
know this this right that like nobles supposedly had to
have sex with a woman the first night after a
marriage and stuff that. Like in Brave Heart, this is
depicted as like what sparks the Scottish. But that's not
a real thing. It never it was not a thing
in any medieval law. It didn't happen. It certainly had
nothing to do with fucking William Wallace. There were some

(18:26):
similar rules in history. The Epic of Gilgamesh references customs
that are similar to that, as do Herodotus's histories, and
we know that around this same period at least one
other Italian city revolted from Eutruscan control because their women
were abused. You know, you often don't get a lot
of detail about this, just somebody notes that, like they
were angry about something the Etruscans had done to their women,

(18:47):
and so like there's a war and they win, right right, yeah.

Speaker 2 (18:51):
Right, and it is yeah, that's a history. I mean
it's yeah, I mean often angry that they're doing the
thing because you were supposed to be doing the thing.

Speaker 1 (18:59):
But yeah, well it's just like you know, military occupations
haven't changed. You can there's a long ugly history of
like when the US occupied Japan, you know, rapes by
US service members and stuff that caused a lot of problems.
And that's it's a thing everywhere. It's a thing in Iraq,
it's a thing all throughout history. So whatever the excesses
of Rome's last king, they kick out that last dude,

(19:22):
Tarquin and a republic is founded in five oh nine BCE,
and it was it was not a super different government
in a lot of ways from the ones that are
quote unquote founding fathers established and what I mean by
that is that only the very wealthiest people could actually
hold office right now. One thing that's interesting is that

(19:42):
like pretty much everyone could vote though, so they they
didn't have that difference like when when the United States
is established, you have to be like a property owning
white male in order to vote, and it's not until
later that every guy gets the vote. Basically, every free
man has a vote in the Roman Republic. But it
also doesn't really work that way because so the Romans

(20:04):
have this this system, the client system, where every rich
guy just over the course of their life picks up
hundreds or even thousands or tens of thousands of like clients.
And these are like dudes who he has to give
them money or food or something on a pretty regular basis.
It's kind of like their social welfare program. Like this
rich guy has to take care of you a little bit,

(20:25):
but you have to do what he says when it's
time to vote, right, And this is kind of what
they have instead of political parties is these coalitions of
rich guys and their clients who are like, well, like
this is the guy that like my family, we all
go and he gives us bread. Every couple of weeks
and we vote for right, I guess it is the.

Speaker 2 (20:42):
Local gang leader, the local Yeah.

Speaker 1 (20:45):
It's a little different from that yet at this point
in that there's not really violent coercion holding that together.
At this point, it's more like an extingent of like
the way familial units and tribes and stuff would have worked.
In fact, a lot of it kind of is based
on tribal stuff, you know, from a.

Speaker 2 (21:04):
Probably likely I'm well probably.

Speaker 1 (21:08):
I make that point because these are going to turn
into street gangs. This absolutely ends with street gangs and
people murdering each other.

Speaker 2 (21:16):
But it doesn't mean yeah, it was like it's almost
it's like the same as the electoral college, or like
you know, it's exactly like the electoral college.

Speaker 1 (21:24):
Yeah, and we in America need to get to the
point where our electoral college is just several hundred people
beating each other to death with SAPs in the street.

Speaker 2 (21:33):
We're getting closer every everything.

Speaker 1 (21:35):
I know. I'm waiting for it. I got a fucking
baseball bat with a nail through it. I'm I'm down.
Let's let's let's become electors. Do you put the nail,
like a big nail through making like you got a
couple of options. So yeah, I mean I think you
just one of the better ways is you just kind
of like hammer the nail in through the edges and stuff,
so you get a couple of different nails poking out.

(21:57):
Another thing you could do you can actually like get
long screws and just like screw with like a like
a drill through a.

Speaker 2 (22:03):
Couple of areas of the bat.

Speaker 1 (22:06):
That'll that'll help you. Like that's a little bit easier,
you know. A fun thing to do is, uh, you
get some like Jbwild or apoxy or something. You cut
little runnels in the sides of the bat. You jam
razor blades in there and kind of you're kind of
making like a maquaheetl Anyway.

Speaker 2 (22:23):
I think I know what that is, a stick with.

Speaker 1 (22:26):
The It's like what the Aztecs used. It's like the
stick with all the obsidian. But yeah, using dollar store
razor blades on a baseball bat. Yeah, all right, right, anyway,
I get I'm just.

Speaker 2 (22:37):
I'm not I'm not as crafty, but I just got
an electric drill, so I'm like, you know, maybe, yeah,
anywhere to interrupt the spark in your eye when I
asked you how to make a spike bat. It's a
little little much.

Speaker 1 (22:52):
One of these days, Yeah, one of these days, that's
that's what We'll get back to the roots of Western
democracy and I'll be able to have a street fight
with my home made razor bat. So, yeah, you got
all these So the Roman Republic, yeah, five oh nine BC.
And you know, we don't exactly know what all of

(23:13):
the rules were at the start of the republic because
they were unwritten. So their constitution is like it's not
put down anywhere, it exists only in the memories of
the oldest rich people. So it's kind of like all
of the rules are like whatever the old people say.
They are, so again, very similar to our current system.

Speaker 2 (23:31):
In a lot of ways.

Speaker 1 (23:32):
Yeah, and this causes problems. Yeah, what did Thomas Jefferson think? Oh,
now the Senate parliamentarian is a thing that matters, Like
nobody thought about this before, but suddenly it's a huge problem.
So this caused problems over time, which I know will
surprise you because those patricians and patricians are like they're

(23:56):
basically nobility at the start of the Roman Empire. They're
all of the rich people whose like families have been
powerful for a long time, and yeah, they are the
ones who kind of get to tell everyone what the
constitution says effectively, and people s very American. Yeah, it's
extremely American. These are the most American, but the Roman

(24:17):
Republic is the most American thing that ever existed. So
the pleads the poor people, you know, or at least
you could call them the regular people, start to be like, well,
this doesn't seem like a very good system, Like if
we're supposed to be a republic, it kind of seems
like this this is a bad way to do things.

(24:40):
And yeah, it also over time, as the republic goes on,
it starts to change, like the wealth situation. So the
patricians are like noble because of their birth, but they're
not necessarily rich because number one, they have all these obligations.
So they have all these clients that they have to
like pay and feed, and they have all these like

(25:00):
when they get political office, that often means they have
to throw parties for everybody in the city or like
big religious festivals. So a lot of them are fucking
broke all of the time. And this class of merchants
rises up who aren't noble, but they have a bunch
of money and they're like, well, we're the ones paying
for everything now, like one way or the other, and
we're like buying these patricians and having them do stuff.
Why don't we get to like hold political office or

(25:21):
have any kind of power. And part of like what's
fucking these patricians over is that the only way that
they can acceptably make money is like either going to
war and conquering shit or like agriculture. It's kind of
considered gross for them to be in business. So anyway,
shit starts to change in Rome and you get this
like wealthy class of people who are like plebeian but

(25:45):
have money, and over time, like the folks who are
not patrician get increasingly angry, and you know, you get
your riots and you get people threatening each other in
the streets. And then in four point fifty one BC,
they force the patricians to commission a series to actually
write out a constitution where they're like, okay, we're going
to actually like lay out what the rules are in

(26:05):
a way that people can see as opposed to us
just being like, oh yeah, I remember the way it's
always supposed to be. I remember how the law works.
So because it's the past they just like hammer a
bunch of rules into big bronze tablets, twelve of them
and stick them in the center of town, so that
if you want to know what the law is, you
just like walk up to the bronze tablets and read them,

(26:27):
which is which is a fun way to do it. Now,
Like all democratic compromises, the new written Constitution codified extraordinary
powers for the wealthy. Most of it dealt with debts
and debtors, and noted that in the event that a
debtor was ruled to have failed to like pay a debt,
he would have to be basically on the after three
days or so, he would either be executed or sold

(26:49):
into slavery. So, like, debt's a serious thing. And this
is on a separate point. Something that like Cory Doctoro
and a couple other people will make a point of
is that like the Romans were the first people to
be like, debt is a thing that exists forever for
you and eventually like your family, as opposed to like
every twenty years we have a jubilee and there's no

(27:09):
more debt. The Romans, because they have this entrenched power
structure that actually holds you don't have like a king
who might be like, well, every twenty years or so,
I'm going to do a jubilee because then people get
their debts cleared and they like the king more. Now
the people running it are like all of the rich people,
and they're like, well, no, we're never going to white
people's debts. Where the fuck would we do that shit?

(27:29):
And so that's where that whole process starts in history.

Speaker 2 (27:32):
That's just fun. That's the source of our power, right, yeah, right,
as opposed to yeah, when it switched from large s
to money, you know what, making me miss kings, Robert.

Speaker 1 (27:43):
Yeah, well, it's not entirely a good thing that they
get rid of theirs, I guess. The Constitution also enshrined
incredible powers for Roman men. The patter familius, or the
head of each family, was essentially a little dictator. So
we don't have a king, but like, if you're the
dam you have the absolute power of life and death.

(28:03):
So number one, deformed children have to be killed immediately.
That's one of their that's like their that's like their
first amendment in ancient Rome, which you know it's the past,
and fathers have the power of life and death over
their children and their wife. So you can, as the father,
execute your kids or other members of your family anytime

(28:26):
you want to.

Speaker 2 (28:27):
Yeah, the classic law of I brought you into this world,
I can take you out. Yeah, which one is the
most important societal bedrock?

Speaker 1 (28:37):
Look, if that was the rule, I would have kids.
I'd have a fuckload of kids, and they'd be they'd
be doing a lot of work for me. So there
are some like more sensible rules though, that kind of limit. So,
among other things, if you're a dad and you sell
your kid into slavery three times, then your son no
longer has to do what you say. I don't know

(28:57):
why three times is the rule, but like you have
to pick a number.

Speaker 2 (29:01):
I guess where. It's like Genie, Shit, what is fucking
happening here?

Speaker 1 (29:08):
It's cool? So, yeah, it's good stuff. It's this weird
mix of like nightmare social laws and then like broadly
reasonable stuff like yeah, if a child's born within ten
months of the father's death, they get some of the inheritance,
you know, like stuff like that. It's like, well, that's
just like a pretty reasonable solution to a problem.

Speaker 2 (29:28):
Now.

Speaker 1 (29:28):
The twelve Tables also note that women are always legally children.
They always have to have a guardian. This is because
of quote, their levity of mind. And the only exception
to this are the Vestal virgins, which are basically older
like og nuns, but they're much cooler than the nuns.
And a lot more weird sex stuff going on allegedly.

(29:50):
And you know who else is allegedly engaging in a
lot of weird sex shit. Andrew Yo hit me the
products and services that support this podcast, right, they never
stop fucking, not not not once.

Speaker 2 (30:04):
And that ship, I was gonna say, is not in
the Bible, but it very much is in the Bible.
But what they're.

Speaker 1 (30:09):
Doing, most of what they're doing is in the Bible.
But they go off the map every now and then.
You know it's going to enter any situation. It goes
into cock first and you don't know what's gonna happen.
Like they're just they're just gonna they live to penetrate.
That's actually the corporate motto, we live to penetrate.

Speaker 2 (30:29):
Honestly, I was gonna ask you which sponsor you were
specifically referring to, and then I realized that you already
had one in mind, and that sorry, good luck with that. Bleep.
I know you love it. I would love a I
would love a Bible that has like a like a
map of uh, you know, the Bible, parts of the
parts of the Bible story like like the like an

(30:50):
edition of Lord of the Rings or whatever, just like
a little map of the front page. Yeah, they should
do that. They probably do.

Speaker 1 (31:05):
So there's this broad understanding that political violence is undesirable,
and there's actually not as far as we can tell.
It doesn't seem to have been a thing that happened
very often in the early Republic, right, Like when people
had political disputes, they didn't murder each other generally, which
is a big thing right in this period of time,

(31:25):
if you've gotten to that point in your society, that's
pretty cool. We have trouble with that today, Yeah, we don't.

Speaker 2 (31:33):
All. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (31:35):
And one of the reasons for this, so the Romans
have this written constitution kind of thing. Now they also
have this thing called the most Mayorum, which is it
just literally means way of the ancestors, and it's it's
another unwritten legal code kind of and it's basically just
a bunch of like, you don't murder people who are
elected leaders, you know, you don't like bribe people in

(31:55):
order to make them vote the way you want. You
don't do this, you don't do that. And there's a
couple of different things in there, including there's a rule
that you don't carry weapons inside the city. Now, this
ban gets misinterpreted a lot of times. You might think
of it as the ancient equivalent of an assault weapons ban, right,
So they're not banning all weapons because spoilers, everybody still

(32:17):
has weapons, but they don't have military weapons, so they're
not support you. It's like you can get executed and
shit if you're caught carrying a sword or like a
dagger within the what's called the Pomerium, which is this
like kind of sacred quasi ethereal boundary that like is
the the supposed to be the actual like boundary of Rome.

(32:39):
Now obviously, so again this just refers to like military weapons.
So when people do have fights and stuff, they'll usually
have like chair legs that they'll stick sharp things into,
or they'll they'll make SAPs or brass knuckles are super popular.
The Romans have their own kind of lenss knuckle thing. Yeah, yeah,
they call it a cast cestus. Yeah, it's basically brass

(33:02):
knuckles or like punch daggers. They're like really nasty fighting weapons, right,
So you don't have swords and stuff, so people are
just like clawing it and beating the shit out of
each other with like stuff they make in their fucking garages,
which is pretty cool. It's like the Warriors stuff, right,
like that's that's yeah, you spike.

Speaker 2 (33:23):
Bat is just too big.

Speaker 3 (33:25):
Yeah, what's the what's the what's the fucking mill wall
thing where you make it with just like a bunch
of editions of like the like the Daily Mirror or whatever. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
there's some fucking it's basically the Jason Bourne show where
he fights a dude with the magazine or whatever.

Speaker 2 (33:44):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (33:45):
Yeah, I mean the coolest thing that the fucking Romans
had was this thing called a cestus or casas or whatever,
and it was basically it was like a boxing glove
that was covered in iron balls, so that like when
you like so it's like this combination box glove slash
brass knuckles and.

Speaker 2 (34:02):
Yeah you can eat. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (34:03):
So they had plenty of weapons, they just did not
allow military weapons and you're not allowed to bring soldiers
into the city of Rome. Nobody can take an army
into Rome. They have to camp outside of the city
if you've got an army nearby, because again they recognize
pretty early on that, like, well, if we want to
have a republic, it's probably a bad idea to let
people march their army into the city. That could end badly,

(34:25):
that might not go well. But most of this stuff
is just like it's not written law. It's everybody knows
that you're not supposed to do these things, right, right,
A wonderful way to run a government. Yes, a norm right,
these are their norms, you know.

Speaker 2 (34:40):
Yeah. The other thing too, is like the army thing
is like I think it's I mean, obviously just because
I'm a soft child of the twentieth century, but it
is like wild to kind of remember how threatening a
parade really should be.

Speaker 1 (34:54):
Yeah, a parade. I mean historically, the Romans are kind
of one of the first groups of people to try
to stop a par raid from being a threat because
they have this these things called triumphs, And so if
you win a military victory that's big enough, the Senate
will vote you a triumph and you basically are king
of the city for a day and you get to

(35:14):
take your army and march them through the city with
all your captives and everybody pretty much worships you. But
the whole time you're doing it. Number one, it's just
for a day. And the whole time you're doing it,
there's a guy whose only job is to like walk
behind you and be like, hey, bro, you're gonna die
one of these days. Hey bro, Like you're still fucked,
Like everybody's fucked. Nobody lives forever, Like you're not actually
a king or a god. You're gonna die, dude, like,

(35:37):
which is kind of neat. I think it's it's one
of my favorite parts from a history.

Speaker 2 (35:43):
Yeah, so the best job in yeah, civic life.

Speaker 1 (35:49):
These were the first. Like nowadays anybody can like go
on Twitter and ratio a political leader, yeah, if they're
good enough at trolling. This was This was that job
in the ancient world, like the dude who follows the
imperador around being like, hey bro, you kind of suck. Actually, yeah, yes, exactly.

(36:14):
Oh my god. Rome would have adopted Twitter immediately, like
they basically they had like like they're Roman graffiti is
a whole other story, but like they had Twitter, they
had their own Twitter. I think my favorite piece of
Roman graffiti that was like found in fucking POMPEII. Is
this guy being like all of the women in Rome
or all of the women in the Empire should weep
because I'm just fucking dudes now, Like I'm I'm so

(36:37):
tired of fucking ladies. I'm gonna i'm my dick's for
nothing but men. Now that's pretty That is It is
incredibly peak twitter and amazing.

Speaker 2 (36:50):
How does what does? Is it just like paint and brush?

Speaker 1 (36:54):
I guess, yeah, they're just like paint and ship. Yeah,
they've got paint like they're just like painting stuff on
walls and and whatnot. Yeah, I guess I was just thinking,
like the advent of spray paint for graffiti, it's like
what a again, they would have taken to spray paint
Immediately you show like literally any Roman citizen spray paint

(37:14):
and they're like, oh fuck, I'm gonna be able to
yell at like my neighbor so much more efficiently.

Speaker 2 (37:21):
You'll probably make a primitive air brush. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (37:25):
So the Roman system is it's it's a little bit wacky,
but it works really well, and for most of like
three hundred years they get by without any massive internal
political violence. Now a big part of this is that
for these first couple of hundred years, Roman is nearly destroyed.
Like every thirty years or so, like every couple of decades,
somebody will invade Italy and almost wipe them out. And

(37:46):
usually the way it goes is the Romans. There's an invasion,
the Romans get together a massive army and they send
it to fight the invasion, and they all get wiped
out because some idiot makes a stupid mistake on the
Roman side. And then the Romans put together another army
and eventually win the war. And this is like how
every war works out for Rome. They take these like

(38:09):
the thing that distinguishes Romans as a military power is
they're able to lose all of their guys and then
win the war anyway, which is like a mixed sort
of reputation to have militarily a good example of this
would be the Pyrrhic War from two eighty to two
seventy five BC. The gist of it is that the
Romans go to war with a bunch of Greek cities

(38:29):
in southern Italy, and those Greek cities are like, hey,
we need help, and they called to this Greek king
over in Greece called Pirus, and he invades Italy to
like fuck up the Romans. And Pirrus is a scary
old son of a bit. He's got a big army,
a bunch of war elephants, and he just shatters the
Roman military. And this series of horrible grinding thousands and
thousands of people massacred. But also every battle is so

(38:53):
ugly that he loses most of his army fighting it,
so kind of at the end of this series of battles,
the Romans can't continue to prosecute the war, but Pirrus
doesn't really want to keep fighting either, because he doesn't
have much of an army left. And this is where
we get the term pyrrhic victory, right. So he goes
to Rome and he's like, hey, guys, you y'all are fucked.

(39:14):
Let's do a peace deal. And he offers them pretty
good terms. And I'm going to quote what comes next
from a write up in the New York Times. When
the Senate convened to debate the offer, an old blind
senator named Appius Claudius was carried into the Senate house
by his sons. As the chamber fell silent, he stood
to chastise his colleagues. I have, he said, long thought
of the unfortunate state of my eyes as an affliction.

(39:35):
But now that I hear you debates shameful resolutions which
would diminish the glory of Rome, I wish that I
were not only blind, but also death. By giving in
to Pirus, Claudius warned the Roman Republic would only invite
more outside powers to mess with it. Lowe is the
odds of victory might be Rome had no choice but
to keep fighting, and they actually somehow win Pirus, Like, yeah,

(39:57):
it's it's a whole thing. He tries to bribe a
bunch of his way out of like fighting them more,
but it doesn't work. And yeah, this is like this
is a somewhat idolized version of events of how like
warm beats Rome beats Pirates. And it's based on the
writings of a guy named Edward J. Watts, who is
one of these historians who's written a book about the

(40:17):
Roman Republic to talk about the collapse of the United States. Yeah,
but as kind of biased is his take on things,
is it is worth noting that like what they build
really works, like as flawed is We're going to talk
about all of the flaws as it is, the Romans
create this political structure that's able to like repeatedly almost
get wiped out in disastrous military defeats and not lose wars.

(40:42):
And part of it is because everybody's got skin in
the game. The entire ruling class is out there fighting
whenever there's a war, along with like all of the
and in fact, most of the people fighting are people
with like property. The Roman army, you have to pay
for your own weapons, so poor people are not fighting.
It's basically like the middle class and the rich people
who are actually like going to war. And one of

(41:03):
the downsides is that all of their armies are led
by the equivalent of like Nancy Pelosi, which goes really
badly sometimes right because you'll have like this eighty year
old career politician trying to like lead an army of
seventy thousand guys and he doesn't know what the fuck
he's doing.

Speaker 2 (41:19):
Probably there's some argument that that is sort of why
the first the first crack at our first draft at
Eddie Gibbet, Roman Army is sort of just the shit
that needs to be exactly.

Speaker 1 (41:32):
It's the guys who suck the most, and you get
like Ted Cruz out there, and you just need to
get rid of him.

Speaker 2 (41:37):
Anyone who survives that first one. Plus yeah, the fresh
recruits is probably the way to go.

Speaker 1 (41:43):
Yeah, we got to burn off an army before we
can get anything done.

Speaker 2 (41:47):
Yeah. Yeah, it's like select making pancakes. The first one's
just for the trash.

Speaker 1 (41:51):
If we had invaded Afghanistan by sending all of Congress
in first, I think the United States and Afghanistan would
be in a state of perfect peace with each other
and there would be no more problems in the world.

Speaker 2 (42:04):
I mean truly this, Like you know, that is the
least American thing about this is about this particular iteration
of Rome is putting middle class and nobles on the
line at all.

Speaker 1 (42:20):
Yeah, if only, if only, But all of these nobles
they have fucking so like one of the things, Pirates
tries to bribe a bunch of guys and he can't
bribe them because they're like, well, no, this is like
my whole family's fighting, Like this is what we do.
We have this like system and we're kind of all
in it together. And one of the reasons this works
is that there's not a massive like there's rich people

(42:41):
and there's poor people. But within all of the people
who the freemen who have property, there's not a massive
disparity in wealth. Right, The rich are not very rich because,
like it's Rome's just kind of this scrappy little city
in the middle of Italy. Right, It's not like this
super powerful force. But as time goes on, they keep
winning these wars, and so they wind up in control

(43:02):
of more and more and more of Italy, and they
get all of this land, and all of this money
starts coming in, and that's when things start to go awry. Right,
So after Rome beats Peerists and conquers most of southern Italy,
they settle into what's what's going to be two hundred
straight years of unbroken victories and foreign wars. Rome's military
record here basically they spend the length of the time

(43:24):
that the United States has existed as a country winning
every fight they get into, which is like a pretty
solid record. Now, they lose battles constantly, like with dev
in the First Punic War, which starts in two sixty
four BC. This is with Carthage. It lasts twenty years.
Like to tell you how silly some of their wars go.

(43:44):
So this war starts with Rome going to Sicily to
fight Carthage and they win there. They invade North Africa
and they win what's probably what might be the largest
naval battle in all history still to this day, Like
if you listen to the historians, then it's like three
hundred thousand people or all fighting in boats. And again
this is like twenty three hundred years ago. It's fucking wild,

(44:06):
how like many people that they could put together at
this point. But they win this series of battles. They
win these naval battles. Carthage sues for peace and Rome
refuses to like have peace, so Carthage keeps fighting and
then beats them and like shatters a Roman army. So
Rome has to send a fleet to evacuate the remains
of this army that's gotten, that's askicked in Africa, and

(44:28):
then the entire fleet and one hundred thousand men all
die in a.

Speaker 2 (44:31):
Storm like heading back to Italy.

Speaker 1 (44:33):
That kind of shit happens constantly to the Romans and
it just never stops them. Then you've got the Second
Punic War, which starts in two eighteen BC. It also
lasts like twenty fucking years, and there's like We've talked
about the Battle of Cane, which is one of the
most famous battles in history. Hannibal, you know, the elephant
guy encircles their army and kills fifty thousand Romans in

(44:55):
a day. It's like ten percent of the male population
of the Republic. He like wipes out, including like eight senators,
like a bunch of a significant percentage of the Roman
It's like if it's like if the United States had
like ten percent of its male population and half of
its political class wiped out in a battle in fucking Afghanistan.

(45:16):
Like it's pretty it's it's a bad day for them,
and they just do the same thing they always do.
They make more guys senators, they make more guys soldiers,
and they send them back out to fight, right, and
it's it's fine. But while these wars are going on,
and they win these wars. They win the first Punic War,
they win the Second Punic War, they get control of Sicily,
they get a bunch of influence and power in Northern

(45:38):
uh in Northern Africa. They take control of all of
Spain in the Second Punic War. Like Rome is now
running Iberia. While all this is going on, a couple
of other things are happening. One is that a lot
of Roman soldiers are dying right, like shitload, because Nancy
Pelosi's very often the battlefield commander and she's not very
good at that. And since these guys, these are like

(46:01):
the Roman middle class, right, most of them are small
independent farmers. They have enough money to buy their own
weapons and armor and stuff and sometimes even horses. And
so the system that they set up works really well
when war means you have to like walk two days
to like fuck with this town across like the river

(46:21):
from you. But when you're going to war for twenty
years and your army is all of the guys who
make your food, then it becomes a problem. Right, are
you seeing like the flaw and the Roman social system.

Speaker 2 (46:35):
Also, it's it's like, I mean, and this, I guess
is the thing that's like distressing is like you'd hope
what this would do is lead towards like more measured wars,
and like you know, oh no, no, no, it's simply
the opposite, is we will I mean, you're well, we're
seeing it obviously in our time. Also, we will simply

(46:55):
let society crumble rather than we.

Speaker 1 (46:57):
And that's what happens, because here's the thing. If you
were to make have less wars, well, the only ways
that the nobility can make money is war or taking
a bunch of farming land, right, because they're not allowed
to have businesses, they're not allowed to be merchants. And
if they don't get to have more wars and massacre

(47:19):
more generations of Roman boys, then the merchants who aren't
nobles will have more money than them and nicer houses.
Do you see why this is a problem, man?

Speaker 2 (47:27):
Right? I know it's so just like but like, instead
of being like the custom is weird, and we could
just diversify our ruling class as economy look at the
same point. Nope, I'm creat to all the farmers. I'm
all for restricting our ruling classes economic sources of income.

Speaker 1 (47:48):
So it is interesting that if you look at the
two longest lived republics in history, which is the Roman
Republic and now US, and both of them you have
this group, this hereditary nobility, who are like, well, if
we're going to stay rich, we're gonna have to kill
the middle class. We're gonna have to We're gonna have
to get rid of those people. So yeah, this is

(48:14):
you start to get these serious problems where like these
farmers soldiers are spending like five years at a time
out on campaigns in like fucking Africa or Spain, which
is quite a distance from Italy when you have to
walk it right, like, they are far as fuck away,
and a lot of people listening probably are not farmers.
I'll let you in on a secret about farming. If

(48:35):
you don't do anything to your farm for five years,
it is no longer a farm. It's it's just the woods.
And that's that that causes an issue. These soldiers are
spending like half a decade at a time, you know,
in addition to like whatever injuries and trauma they suffer,
they come home and their farms are ruined and they
can't afford to like put them back into shape. So again, Andrew,

(48:58):
as you noted, a reasonable country might go like, well, clearly,
we need farmers and we need people to become soldiers,
so it's in our best interest to like figure out
a way to deal with this.

Speaker 2 (49:10):
That is not and a con was this a volunteer army?
It wasn't, right, Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 (49:15):
Well, they do have conscriptions, like, especially during emergencies, they
have conscriptions and stuff. So it's more it's kind of
like a draft a lot of the time with these wars.
So yeah, it's generally sort of a you get called up,
your number gets called up effectively, and like it's time
for you to go serve. They do have a lot
of like there are volunteer Yeah, anyway, whatever, it's a
whole thing. We don't have the time to get into

(49:38):
that today, but it's worth noting that, like the money
that they are making by conquering everything around Rome is
plenty of money to take care of these farmers. And
I want to quote now from a Marxist account of
Roman history written by Alan Woods. Quote, after the Second
Punic War ended in two two b C, the economy
of Italy endured a massive upheaval. The legions that conquered Spain,

(50:00):
Greece and North Africa returned home with riches on an
unprecedented scale. A pro consul that's like the mix between
the president and a general returned from campaign in the East,
bearing one hundred and thirty seven thousand pounds of raw silver,
six hundred thousand silver pieces and one hundred and forty
thousand gold pieces.

Speaker 2 (50:18):
It's like.

Speaker 1 (50:20):
The nobles are getting fucking rich in all of this
money stays in the hands of these the patricians and
this new class of people called the equities, who are
like rich businessmen, right, because the trade is a lot.
The more you conquer, the better trade gets for you
if you're a fucking Roman businessman. So they're making fucking bank. Now,
all of the land that the Roman army captures during

(50:42):
this conquest of Italy they go over becomes state owned land,
which seems fair, right. They call it the ager publicists
Populi romani, which means the public land of the Roman people.
And over time the Senate votes to allow people to
own parcels of this public land in perpetuity as long
as they work it right. So that's how initially, like
soldiers get rewarded as you get some of this public

(51:04):
land and you can start a farm on it, and
that will allow you to have like a degree of
economic independence. But and I'm going to quote here from
a write up in the Anthropology Review. Quote the problem
was that if the land was left uncultivated, it could
be taken over by someone who could work it. So
soldiers who were out of the country fighting for the
glory of Rome came back to find themselves dispossessed. Vast
stretches of land were taken over by rich and powerful

(51:26):
Romans who used slaves who were not called for military
service and thus were always present to plow the fields
and tend to the crops in livestock. This meant that
peasants and returning soldiers had not only lost their land,
but also the possibility of finding decently paid work with
which to support their family, because it was impossible to
compete with slaves who had to work for free. So

(51:46):
that's that's a bad way to the situation work, right,
So it's like it.

Speaker 2 (51:51):
Is, yeah, it's I guess it's like like all things
that just cobbled together from like tradition, and like this
is what happened last time. Just like the fact that well,
I want to be rich. I want to be rich.

Speaker 1 (52:06):
Nothing really matters more to me than personally being richer.
So let's do whatever gets me the most money in
the short.

Speaker 2 (52:11):
Term, and I will never back down. This system can't
change because it absolutely can work for us.

Speaker 1 (52:19):
And again, people at the time note that this is
like bad, Like there's a decent number of people in
the Roman political structure who are like, hey, guys, this
is going to be a problems as we have in
the United States who are consistently being like this is
not a good way to do things, because they're noticing

(52:40):
that all of these formerly independent freemen, the veterans who
had like conquered the world for Rome, are winding up
as almost like homeless in the city of Rome itself,
Like they have no work, no way to make money,
and they just kind of swell the city because the
state will give them food when they're in the city,
kind of like it's the only thing they can do
is kind of become clients to some fucking rich guy

(53:02):
or whatever, and you know, basically exist to provide a
vote for a rich man and live marginally on the
edges of society. So as you can imagine the fact
that like the only way for a lot of these
poor people to get any kind of support at all
is to like vote for whatever guy has the most

(53:23):
money and thus can give them food, it makes this
political system twist even more in favor of the wealthy. Right,
inequality becomes a serious problem in the Roman Republic. Now again,
a lot of people recognize this as an issue, and
in his wonderful book The Storm Before the Storm, Mike
Duncan writes, quote, as early as one ninety five, Cato
the Elder warned his colleagues, we have crossed into Greece

(53:43):
in Asia, places filled with all the allurements of vice,
and we are handling the treasures of kings. I fear
that these things will capture us rather than we them.
Every few years, the Senate would attempt to rein in
the ostentatious displays of wealth, but the resulting limitations inevitably
went unheeded and unenforced. By coincidence, the Roman people at
the same moment both acquired a taste for vice and

(54:04):
obtained a license for gratifying it. Yeah, it's this, It's
the way it always goes.

Speaker 4 (54:11):
Right.

Speaker 2 (54:11):
They're no different from us. Oh god, yeah, they we
just have phones.

Speaker 1 (54:19):
Yeah, and it's it's interesting. Karl Marx, when he writes
Capital is specifically looking at this period in Roman history.
He bases a lot of his conclusions off of like
what the history that he's like reading about, like what
happens in the Roman Republic, And he writes in Capital, quote,
it requires but a slight acquaintance with the history of
the Roman Republic to be aware that its secret history

(54:41):
is the history of its landed property, right that, like
and I essentially what he's saying is that, like you
have this vision of what the Roman Republic was, that
like dudes like our quote unquote founding fathers have where
they're just like masturbating over these like austere figures. And
then you have the reality, which is that, yeah, this
venal corrupt landholding class is choking out the middle class

(55:04):
and the poor in order to make their already vast
fortunes even larger. Yeah, and destroying the entire state as
they do it because they care about nothing but increasing
the amount of wealth that they have.

Speaker 2 (55:15):
It is like like parasites on every level.

Speaker 1 (55:19):
Obviously, Yeah, it's good stuff. Yeah, you know who else.

Speaker 2 (55:22):
Is a parasite on every level?

Speaker 4 (55:23):
Andrew, I've got to find out the sponsors of this podcast,
absolutely bloodsucking ticks, just just guzzling the life out of
your veins, Sophie, Is that a good wittedly dads?

Speaker 2 (55:40):
Is that gonna make them happy? That's the only way
you can lead into ads, my friend? Excellent?

Speaker 1 (55:44):
Excellent, Oh we're back. So this all brings us to
the story of a guy who, depending on who you ask,
is either the first socialist in history or this sinister
populist precursor to Donald Trump. You there are think pieces
that will say both things. They're all pretty silly because

(56:07):
he's his own person and this is a long time ago,
so stop stop it. But this guy's name is Tiberius
Sempronius Gracchus, and he's born in either one sixty three
or one sixty two BC, and he comes into into
being as like the bluest blood motherfucker it is possible
to be. His father had served as consul, which is

(56:28):
kind of like a Again, it's like a mix between
president in general, like if you're cons which makes sense if.

Speaker 2 (56:35):
The senators are also leading art right, Yeah, exactly, it
should be the same job.

Speaker 1 (56:40):
Get you get like voted to get a military command effectively.
So and his dad like celebrates two triumphs for military
victories as like a young man. His mother is like
the daughter of this great Roman war hero. Now, everybody's
main source on Tiberius Gracchus's life is a guy named Plutarch,

(57:01):
who is a Greek historian who writes about him like
one hundred years after he died. And it's worth knowing
what Plutarch says because Plutarch's working from like sources that
were written by people at the time when Grachus was alive.
But like most Roman history, we still you're still just
like most of Plutarch's history is like, well a guy
told me this, Like I heard this from like a
dude who's like and his grandpa was around, and like, you.

Speaker 2 (57:24):
Know, I heard this, I heard thee a lot of
It's like I guess that's all history anyway, but Jesus, yeah.

Speaker 1 (57:33):
Like after this, after what happens with this guy happens
is like brother writes a pamphlet that he hands out,
and like a lot of Plutarch is based on like
what people remember from being in the pamphlet, but I
don't think we have the pamphlet still. So it's like
it's like if somebody if it's like if somebody wrote
a history of the of the fucking twenty twenty George
Floyd protests based on like a conversation with someone who

(57:55):
remembered some scenes about them right right right where it's
like yeah, like you're you're probably not gonna get all
of the facts.

Speaker 2 (58:04):
Yeah, Yeah, history is fucking crazy.

Speaker 1 (58:07):
Yeah, yeah, it's good stuff. There's a story that Plutarch
tells that, like when Tiberius's dad is a kid, he
goes to a soothsayer, you know, basically a fucking you know,
a fortune teller, and she's like, you're gonna have to either, Like,

(58:27):
I'll just read the quote because it's kind of weird.
We're told moreover that he once caught a pair of
serpents on his bed, and that the soothsayers, after considering
the prodigy forbade him to kill both serpents, or to
let both go, but to decide the fate of one
or the other of them, declaring that also the male serpent,
if killed, would bring death to Tiberius, and the female
to Cornelia that's his wife. So Tiberius, accordingly, who loved

(58:50):
his wife and thought that she was still young and
he was older, and it was more fitting that he
should die, killed the male serpent but let the female go.
A short time afterwards, as the story goes, he died.
So that's what happens with this guy's dad, Like his
dad supposedly dies because he kills the snake that represents
him to let his wife live. He leaves her with

(59:10):
twelve children, three of which survive to adulthoods just like.

Speaker 2 (59:13):
What a bonker's day at the fortune tellers. Check this out.
I wouldn't tell him if he kills the males nake,
he's gonna die. Yeah, I wouldna tell him kill one
snake only yeah, only one snake. Let the other go.
They had to just be I assume the fortune teller

(59:35):
colleagues are just all, you know, fucking with you.

Speaker 1 (59:37):
Oh yeah, I mean they're fucking high as shit. They
are unbearably lit. So Cornelia takes charge of the children
and the estate. She you know, she's good enough at
being a mom that like a solid twenty five percent
of her children live to adulthood. And two of those
kids are the brothers Tiberius and Guias Gracchus. Now both

(59:59):
of them are like again and fancy boys. They hold
a bunch of public offices that young patrician kids are
expected to hold as they climb up the political ladder.
At age seventeen, Tiberius goes to Africa to fight, you know,
in the last big war against Carthage. And he's supposed
to be the first man over the walls of Carthage.
During that final siege. After that he goes to another war.

(01:00:20):
So by the time you know he comes around in
you know, the one hundreds, like ish BC, Rome is
kind of locked into this Afghanistan style situation in Spain
where they have conquered Spain, but like it's kind of
hard to hold on to Spain, Like if you're anyone,
there's a reason why Spain has mostly belonged to Spain

(01:00:42):
throughout history. It's not all that it's not always all
that easy for Spain to be in charge of Spain.
So they're fighting this like endless series of like brushfire
rebellions against and it's like Afghanistan that you've got like
this this Roman military that's very organized and fairly modern
and like its command structure, and then there's these guys

(01:01:03):
who are just like throwing rocks at them from the
bushes and then running away, and it works pretty well
for the fucking Spanish. So Tiberius Gracus goes to go
fight in northern Spain against these the city called Normentia,
and the war does not go very well, and the
guy who's in charge of the Roman army gets his
ass kicked, and so they have to negotiate a surrender. Now,

(01:01:26):
the Newmantines knew Tiberius because his dad had beaten them
in a war like twenty years ago, and he'd been
cool about it, right, Like he hadn't been a dick
about beating them in a war. So they were like, well,
we'll let we'll talk with this guy. We'll negotiate with
this guy, because if he makes a peace treaty with us,
we feel like Rome will stick to it. So Tiberius
works out a truce and a peace treaty, and he
saves this Roman army. But when they get back to Rome,

(01:01:48):
all of these politicians who had not left the city
and who wanted the war to keep going because there
was money in Spain, but didn't actually want to figure
out how to fight it, or like how dare you
pull out of Spain with this army? Like how dare you?
It's a little bit familiar to some things that have happened.
It's like this bad situation and the guys back home

(01:02:10):
had like didn't have any idea how to deal with
it better than Tiberius did. But they're still angry about
it because that's what you do in politics.

Speaker 2 (01:02:17):
It's probably well, it's telling me more honest to just
have the military industrial complex openly advocating like we need
this war for money to continue.

Speaker 1 (01:02:27):
Yeah, we need this war for money to continue and
for pride. How fucking dare you so? Tiberius. He takes
a beating from these guys, but they can't punish him
because he did just save the entire army's life and
that kind of makes you popular in a way that's
dangerous to fuck with too much. But they do his
commanding officer who had lost the war, They like, strip

(01:02:49):
him naked and chain him up and send him back
to the enemy and are like, you guys can have him,
like we don't want this guy anymore, like do whatever you.

Speaker 2 (01:02:56):
Want to him.

Speaker 1 (01:02:57):
Which, again, if we'd done that with David Patro would
have it I think been cool. I think that's what
we should have done with David.

Speaker 2 (01:03:04):
There's a few more consequences for some of people's command that's.

Speaker 1 (01:03:09):
All fucking strip Dick Cheney naked and just air drop
him into Basra like like let and whatever happens happens. Right,
we're not saying what the penalty should be. It's up
to them to figure it out. So the people vote
to clear Tiberius of all charges, YadA YadA. Things go
pretty good for him, and this is like what you

(01:03:31):
might call a pretty decent start in Roman public life.
And as he's you know, there's a story that later
gets told that like, while he's kind of going back
and forth between Spain and Rome, he's like walking around
the countryside and he notices quote or he notices basically
that like there's nobody here, there's no Romans here, it's
all slaves. All of these farms are worked by slaves.

(01:03:54):
All of the actual free people are like desperately poor
because they've all lost their lands. They're just like huddled
in the shanties at the edge of town. And like,
oh wow, it kind of seems like we've done a
terrible thing and destroyed the class of people who have
made like our success possible. This is probably a problem, right,
So again basic observation. So he decides to set up

(01:04:18):
this policy to reform the public lands of Rome, to
make it impossible for individual rich guys to buy up
huge tracts of land, and to guarantee that small freeholding
farmers will continue to be the core of Roman society. Now,
the way the popular story gets told it's just Tiberius
who sees these poor farmers who are dispossessed and has
this idea to fix everything. That's not really true. The

(01:04:40):
reality is that this block of senators had been working
for years to figure out a way to reform the
land system to fix this problem, and Tiberius is just
kind of like he's young and he's popular, and these
senators are like, you're the guy to be like the
fucking front man.

Speaker 2 (01:04:55):
Right, which I guess is how a lot of big
political has to work.

Speaker 1 (01:05:01):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's again a fairly modern seeming story.
So they come up with this plan where they're going
to limit the amount of public land that any individual
can have to three hundred and thirty acres. Now this
is like too harsh for the rich people, and so
they start howling. So they they kind of like alter
it in order to allow like an additional like I

(01:05:24):
don't know, one hundred or so acres or a couple
hundred acres if you like already hold the less. So
they put in like some Again, they immediately are like
all right, well, look like we'll work. We like we
understand you like the rich people, and you already have
on this land, so we'll let you have more than
we think that you should be having, just to try
to be friendly. Now, think about modern politics. When you

(01:05:45):
offer to let rich conservatives like to compromise with them,
do they a compromise or b go ape shit into
Claire war on you?

Speaker 2 (01:05:56):
Yeah exactly. Yeah, it's like, yeah exactly, it says no.
We like. The lesson that we, I guess will never
learn from is like, don't negotiate with conservative terrorists.

Speaker 1 (01:06:08):
No, no, exactly, do not talk with these guys.

Speaker 2 (01:06:12):
You can't, they're not trustworthy.

Speaker 1 (01:06:15):
Yeah. So, you know, they start, Tiberius Gracchus and these
other senators and stuff start putting together this legislation that
they're going to introduce at the Forum. And while they're
doing all of this, this horrible war in Spain is
raging on because the Senates rejected the peace deal that
Tiberius cooked up, which means they have to raise another
army and send it to Spain. But at this point

(01:06:38):
they're kind of having trouble finding soldiers, right because nobody
has enough money to like buy weapons, and like, it
doesn't matter even if you can script people, they don't
have the ability to like arm themselves. And so there's
this rich politician who's very much against land reforms, Scipio Emilianus,
who figures out how to fix this problem, and it's
by using his vast personal wealth to recruit and arm

(01:07:01):
an army of his own. This is the first time
this happens in Roman history. We're just a rich guy
buys an army and takes it to war. This will
not be the last time this happens, and it will
prove to be a serious problem. He's kind of like
he's kind of like the Roman eeric prince, where he's like, well,
what do I just buy an army? Why do we
just do it that way? And then I can take
minerals and shit, you know. So this guy Emilianus is

(01:07:25):
again super against the land reform bill, and he's one
of the big people organizing against Tiberius and his block.
But once he leaves the city to go fuck with Spain,
he can't do anything politically, like there's no sending messages
back effectively. So once he leaves the city with this
army he's bought, Tiberius and his rivals take this law

(01:07:45):
that they've built and they put it on the docket
and they like which literally means that they go to
the middle of the city and they're like, hey, guys,
we got a fucking law to vote on. Everybody show
up and let's vote our asses off. Yeah, around around, motherfuckers. Now,
since most of the Senate is against land reform, Tiberius
and his allies decide to present the bill directly to
the Assembly to the voters without letting the Senate debate it. Now,

(01:08:08):
this was not illegal. You did not have to present
a law to the Senate first and let them debate it.
But the most Mayora, this like unwritten set of agreements,
says that you don't propose a law to the public
without letting the Senate debate it. Right, So this is
the first big break with like political tradition and decorum,
and it's from Tiberia's side. They're like, well, now where

(01:08:28):
fuck the Senate, Like, we're just going to take this
one straight to the people. So the rich people are like, okay, well,
I guess fuck all of the things that we used
to do, like now there's no rules, right, so we're
just going to fucking do it.

Speaker 2 (01:08:43):
Yeah you went nuclear and yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:08:47):
Now we're going to do that too, right, And this
is he does go nuclear because when Tiberius light goes
up and he's like, hey, guys, I want to take
all of this land that only the rich people have,
that's supposed to be all of our land, and give
it to all of you. And this it makes people
very excited, right, It's it's such a big deal that
like because basically he gets up and he announces this
and says, in like a couple of weeks we're gonna

(01:09:07):
have a vote on it. And so all of these
poor citizens start flooding out of the city and like
finding their relatives who are like living on the outskirts
of town or in other towns and bringing them in.
And so suddenly thousands and thousands of people start heading
into Rome, including Italians people who are not Roman citizens
but agree with this like land reform bill because fuck
the rich people in Rome who like show up and

(01:09:29):
like are protesting. Basically, they're showing placards, they're like announcing
their support for this thing. Obviously, Rome does not have
mass media the way we have it, but they do
have this forum, which is like Times Square mixed with
c Span and also a nineties era mall right, it's
this like big stage with shops around it, and it's
not even that big a stage. And if you're doing politics,

(01:09:50):
you stand up there and you talk to people about
like what you're trying to get them to do. So
every day Tiberius is up there while they're waiting for
because they're like, say, we're gonna have the vote in
you know, X num of days, right, So, and that's
to give everyone time to get into the city because
you have to physically be there to vote. So while
all he's waiting for everyone to get in town, he's
like speaking every day. And I'm going to quote again
from Plutarch here about like that's describing one of his speeches.

(01:10:14):
The wild beasts that roam over Italy, he would say,
have every one of them a cave or a layer
to lurkin. But the men who fight and die for
Italy enjoy the common air and light, indeed, but nothing else.
Houseless and homeless, they wander about with their wives and children.
It is with lying lips that their imperators exhort the
soldiers in their battles to defend se polkers and shrines
from the enemy. For not a man of them has

(01:10:36):
a hereditary altar, not one of these many Romans and
ancestral tomb. But they fight and die to support others
in wealth and luxury, and though they are styled masters
of the world, they have not a single clot of
earth that is their own. Pretty good speech, yeah, yes,
pretty speech. You put on your speech voice hard for
that one, though I was I might have been doing

(01:10:58):
a little bit of Dan Carlin there. So this goes
really well. And this is where the Trump comparisons get in. Right,
he is the first like populist politician in Roman history.
He's tapping into decades of anger and resentment among the
lower classes. He's promising to take the fight to the elite,
which he is clearly a member of, right on their behalf.

(01:11:19):
So you could you can make some Trump comparisons, but
you can also make direct comparisons to Lenin and Mao.

Speaker 2 (01:11:25):
Right.

Speaker 1 (01:11:25):
Lenin and maw are both upper class, rich people who
become these socialist fire brands and ignite uprisings against an
entrenched in decade in elite. Right, you can see comparisons
to all these guys. Right, you can see him as
like this first uh, like like agrarian populist sort of
Trumpian figure, or you could be like, well, he's the

(01:11:45):
first socialist, you know, raper.

Speaker 2 (01:11:48):
I mean, I think I think what it is though,
it's the like like contemporary illusion of the word populist
with just like a small band of race, yes, and
that's where Trump fits in everyone the other ones are
more truly populist.

Speaker 1 (01:12:06):
Yeah, because he's this is a real problem he's trying
to solve, as opposed to like howling about again and.

Speaker 2 (01:12:14):
Like calling Trump like a populace is such like a
New York Times thing because they think the only population
that matters to them is like racist in Ohio.

Speaker 1 (01:12:21):
Well, and also like, yeah, it is weird to call
him a populist because he's never literally not a popular vote,
Like it's literally not most people, whereas most people are
exactly on board with what Tiberia's is saying because most
people are fucking poor as shit, right, yeah, and they're like, yeah,
this sounds great. So the rich people, they know they
have to be careful because he has this huge mob

(01:12:43):
of people who are like on his side, and it
would be really easy for them to just murder anybody
who tries to stop him from passing this law. So
they bribe a tribune and tribunes are like, it's this
political office that the main thing the tribunes can do
is they can veto any law that anyone may right.
The tribunes, their primary power is that they can just

(01:13:03):
say no and nothing can be done.

Speaker 2 (01:13:05):
Right.

Speaker 1 (01:13:05):
It's just like there's two guys who get that job,
and that's like a thing that they can do. So yeah,
it is a little bit supreme corty, although it's more
of a it's more of a populist position because one
of the tribunes, the Tribune of the police, oh, can
only be a poor person, right, or they're not actually
poor people, but like the only be a non noble or.

Speaker 4 (01:13:27):
So it's.

Speaker 1 (01:13:29):
Like there is a cool thing in this which is
that like, well, the poor people should have a representative
who can just say no to everybody, right. But in
this case, the tribune gets bribed and so he says, hey,
you can't vote on this bill, period. So now Tiberius
has to take action. So Tiberius is like, because Tiberius
is also a tribune, right, So you've got one tribune
who's like, I'm not going to let anyone vote on

(01:13:50):
this fucking land reform bill. So Tiberius is like, all right, well,
then I won't let anyone vote on fucking anything, and
I won't let anyone spend the state's money. And he
locks the treasury, like physically locks the Roman treasury and says,
like the government just he does a government shutdown, right,
Like that's what happens, Like no one can do anything now.
So while all this is happening, this is becoming like

(01:14:12):
a show, so like people are flooding into the forum
to watch. Most a lot of the people who are
like in the streets arguing and debating and like watching
this political drama unfold are like veterans. They're like former
farmers and sons of farmers and all this shit. And
they start talking about violence, and Tiberia starts stoking this
talk of violence by telling everyone. He gets up on
stage and he says, hey, I have evidence that my

(01:14:34):
enemies are planning to assassinate me. And he starts carrying
a dagger under his cloak, which is technically illegal, but
he'll like pull it out during speeches and be like,
shits so serious that I gotta keep a knife on me,
you know, I gotta be ready to cut a bitch.
He's like, yeah, he's exactly like fifty cent. So the
tribune who'd been bribed this guy, Octavius decides at this

(01:14:55):
point to let the people vote about He's not gonna
let them vote on the land bill, but he'll be like,
all right, look, if you guys are so unhappy with
what I'm doing, you can vote about whether or not
to strip me of like my office. So this had
never happened before, and this starts to scare Tiberius because
he's like, shit, we're now kind of like way off
the beaten path of like what politics is supposed to be.

(01:15:16):
And I'm kind of worried that the wheels that there's
no breaks on this thing, because it gets scary to
everyone when all of the social and political mores stop
start crumbling at once. But this vote happens, Octavius gets
stripped out of his office. He only survives the mob
like murdering him because his friends like push their way
through a crowd to get him away. And Tiberius gets

(01:15:38):
to have a vote on his law and it passes
resoundingly passes. Now, when the law passes, they have to
set up a state commission to like redistribute this public land.
And so his enemies. These rich people are like, well,
we won't vote to actually pay any funds for the
Commission to redistribute public lands, so you can't afford to
do anything with this new law. And right as this

(01:15:58):
happens is they're like fuck you. Type a rich king
dies and this king, for completely separate reasons, wants to
fuck over his dumb shit kids, so he leaves all
of his money to the Roman people. Right, So Tiberius
is like, all right, you're not going to fund me. Well,
this guy left his money to the Roman people, so
I'm just going to use his money to fund this
land reform commission. And this is a problem for a

(01:16:20):
bunch of reasons, but basically, the rich people are number
one angry that they're not going to get that gold,
and number two, they're like, well, you're not supposed to
have the power to decide how state money gets spent.
So now you've number one, you're deciding what what can
get voted on. You've stripped this other tribune of his power.
You're now like exercising power of the purse and like
what the state can be spent on, Like you're getting

(01:16:41):
kind of close to becoming a king, right, which is
not entirely like wrong, Like they're like, wow, this you
are exercising more power than a single person is supposed
to have in our system. So they get really they
decide like some shit needs to get done. And I'm
going to quote from Anthropology Review here. At the time,
tribunes were considered invilable, Iberius was encouraged to run for
a third term to retain the protection that the position bestowed.

(01:17:04):
To bolster his popularity with the citizens and increase his
chances of being elected, he proposed several new populist measures
that further enraged his enemies. These included proposals to reduce
the mandatory term of military service, as well as changed
the balance of power in the Senate by increasing the
number of equities to match that of the senators. The
night before the vote, Tiberius implored the citizens to vote

(01:17:25):
for him because he feared for his life in the
life of his family. His plea was so compelling that
many people guarded his house all night to make sure
he was safe. The next day, Tiberius went to the capitol,
where he was surrounded by a crowd of people who
wanted to protect him. Plutarch says that one of the senators,
Flavius Flaccus, warned Tiberius that the wealthy Romans had resolved
to assassinate him. Tiberius pointed at his head to indicate

(01:17:45):
to his supporters that his life was in danger. This
was interpreted by the spy sent from the senate as
a request for a crown, a claim they raced to
relay to the senators, who immediately sent a mob of
armed slaves and supporters to attack Tiberius and his followers.
What follows is a fucking massacre. You have this group
of this political group who have come together to like

(01:18:09):
reform the political system of the entire government in order
to make it fairer for poor people and the rich,
send an army into the city of slaves primarily and
massacre them. They kill the shit out of Tiberius and
like two or three hundred of his followers, like it's
just this bloody nightmare. They're like throwing people's corpses in
the river, like all sorts of fucked up shit. Now,

(01:18:33):
after they massacre all these people, they pass most of
the reforms that he had suggested, which is another thing
that happens repeatedly in Roman history, like they'll have, like,
they'll have a civil war and they'll massacre the other side,
and then they'll do what they asked for anyway, because
it's a good idea. So a lot of his reforms happen.
But by killing him and all of his followers in

(01:18:56):
the middle of town, a seal has been broken, right,
and the Republic is never the same after this, I'm
gonna quote from a write up in the New York
Times here. Over the next years, it quickly became normal
for populist politicians to set aside long standing norms to
accomplish their goals, for military commanders to bin the Senate
to their will by threatening to occupy Rome, and for
rival generals to wage war on one another. Within a

(01:19:18):
generation of the first political assassination in Rome, politicians had
began to arm their supporters and use the threat of
violence to influence the votes of assemblies and the election
of magistrates. Within two generations, Rome fell into civil war.
So that's good and yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:19:36):
That's I mean, H don't especially want to think about
I guess that. I mean that is also just the
American thing of like, look, if not that the art
official like armed services are not just basically militias for
the powerful, but codify it that way feels like.

Speaker 1 (01:19:57):
Hey, you learned where this is going because in part two.
Part one is about how the Romans, how Roman politics
turned from this like cordial thing where violence was not
common to we will murder anybody who tries to fuck
with the money. And part two is about how they
create the FBI.

Speaker 2 (01:20:15):
Oh yeah, I can't fucking wait, grim as fucking usual.

Speaker 1 (01:20:22):
Thanks Andrew, you got anything to plug before we roll
out of here?

Speaker 2 (01:20:27):
Yes? Actually, this Saturday, the twentieth, my podcast yoss Racist
is doing a show in Austin, Texas, So if you're
in Austin, please come out. But yeah, find me Yosa's Racist.
I'm Andrew T.

Speaker 1 (01:20:42):
Well, you know it's funny because because you your podcast
is YOUO is this racist? But we're talking about the Romans,
and racism didn't exist yet. They didn't have they did
like they literally hadn't figured out how to be racist yet.
That hadn't been invented, because we also had not invented
British people, right, and.

Speaker 2 (01:20:58):
They also had a lot of a lot of other
ship to fight about.

Speaker 1 (01:21:01):
Apparently they shared it, they shared it, yeah, but but
but not racist woke kings.

Speaker 2 (01:21:10):
Woke up no woke proconsoles. Yeah yeah, all.

Speaker 1 (01:21:19):
Right, Well, until next time, up Yours Moralists.

Speaker 2 (01:21:25):
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
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