Part Two: How The Roman Republic Became a Police State

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

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
M oh America. All right, I started the episode, Sylvie.

Speaker 2 (00:08):
I mean.

Speaker 3 (00:10):
You could have done worse.

Speaker 1 (00:11):
Yeah, yeah, America.

Speaker 3 (00:13):
I've heard you start. I've heard.

Speaker 1 (00:16):
We all love America and so let's celebrate it. Andrew,
of all of all of all of the countries that
are America, which one is your favorite? And why is
it ancient Rome?

Speaker 2 (00:30):
Wait?

Speaker 4 (00:30):
I I there was a babble, just a tidy bubble
in your audio, so I'm I missed the middle of it.

Speaker 2 (00:37):
Wait what is he said?

Speaker 3 (00:39):
Of all the countries that are America, which which is?

Speaker 1 (00:45):
Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Speaker 4 (00:47):
I think it's I mean, honestly, so far, it's gotta
be just the sword control bills.

Speaker 1 (00:55):
I do love the sword control bills. Yeah it is.
It is very funny.

Speaker 4 (01:04):
I guess it is a little tricky too, because living
at a time if you go back to par one
when it's like weapons of war are banned, but weapons
of war includes things like horses.

Speaker 1 (01:14):
Yeah, well yeah, a weapon of war is like a
sharp piece of metal in this period of time and
not really much deadlier than like a big heavy stick, right,
like it's yeah, it is, it is different. Like again,
these are You can also find fun articles about people
talking about ancient Roman like weapons limitation laws and people

(01:35):
trying to make comparisons to assault weapons, and it's like, well,
it doesn't really work very Among other things. Number one,
people support assault weapons bands in the United States generally
because of like massacres of schools and malls and stuff.
And the Romans supported a ban on the carrying of
weapons within the Pomerium because they were trying to stop
armed mobs from taking political right. It's not about stop

(01:58):
Roman Ancient Romans did literally nothing to stop murders. There
were not police. You did not like if you committed
a murder, there was no like unless you killed a
famous rich person, there was nobody to like do like,
they didn't give a shit. Again, people died constantly, right,
Like we just talked about that lady wed twelve kids
and three of them made it to adulthood like they
they did. They would not have banned us. They would

(02:20):
not have banned assault weapons if the worry were that
civilians were getting murdered. They carrying because they didn't want
people to take over the governments.

Speaker 2 (02:31):
This sort of yeah, almost exact opposite.

Speaker 1 (02:34):
Yeah, it's it's literally like the opposite reasoning. It was
not to protect life. Yeah, that was absolutely no one's
concern and ancient Rome. So after the assassination of Tiberius Gracus,
things got worse very quickly for our Roman friends. Now,
Tiberius was not yet thirty when he died. I think
he might have been in the twenties. He might have

(02:55):
been like Kobain, you know, Yeah, yeah, Kurt Cobain and
Tiberius Gracus to socialist kings.

Speaker 4 (03:02):
By the time, by the time you're in your thirties,
you should have been assassinated.

Speaker 1 (03:07):
Assassinated Bill, Yeah, yes, Now Tiberius, yeah, so's he's a
young and he's got this younger brother we talked about
a little bit in the first episode, Gaias, who's like
just starting to be an adult when his older brother
gets murdered. Now, you can find a bunch of writing
from historians at the time about Gaius, and it's all

(03:28):
the same sort of like hagiographic shit about how cool
he was and how like he loved his soldiers. When
he becomes a tribute, he becomes like the equivalent of
like a lieutenant or something when he's like seventeen, like
all of these people do, and he's he's supposed to
be good at that, and eventually he winds up getting
elected tribune like his brother had been. He has to
break his law to get break the law to get elected.

(03:50):
He has to like actually desert the army, but he
talks his way out of getting in trouble for it,
because again, a lot of Roman law is just like, well,
we're pretty sure our ancestors wouldn't have liked it if
this happened, But he cocks his way out of it. So,
his brother's reforms had been passed after he was murdered,
but they'd been kind of kneecapped by patricians. So they

(04:10):
pass a land reform bill, and then they spend the
next couple of years like taking back everything that they'd
given to poor people pretty much. So Gaias starts pushing
for a bunch of like really pretty radical reforms at
the time. He wants to give more public land to
the poor. He wants to hand out free grain. He
wants to set up a state dole so that the

(04:31):
poor aren't reliant upon like rich people as clients who
can then tell them who to vote in order to
like survive. He wants to provide public funding for military equipment,
so that poor people can be in the army. He
wants to raise the draft age, and he wants to
make everyone in Italy a Roman citizen, which really pisses
off the rich and powerful people in Rome. And he's

(04:54):
he's politically successful in a lot of this. He actually
gets the Senate to send money back to ankered nations
because he thinks that like Rome's being unfair to the
places they conquer, which is like kind of a wild
thing to succeed at getting the Senate to do so.
This makes him as popular among the people who had
murdered his brother as you might expect now. Plutarch describes

(05:16):
the changes Gaius is trying to push in the Roman
government as changing it from aristocratical to democratical. And perhaps
he would have succeeded given time, But he made the
mistake of leaving Rome to found a colony in Libya,
which gives his enemies the opportunity to slander him devoters.
And when he returns, he gets attacked in the street
by a mob and the majority of people fail to

(05:37):
come to his aid, like nobody comes to protect him
when this group of like hired thugs comes to murder him,
and he gets beaten to death and his head is
stuck on a spear and brought to the Senate. They
throw his corpse into a river. They love throwing corpses
in rivers the Romans, which is a bad idea, by
the way, if you're going to kill, if you're gonna
if your political movement is going to massacre a bunch

(05:59):
of people, don't throw their bodies in the river. You
need that water.

Speaker 4 (06:02):
Yeah, especially you know in pre pre water treatment plant times.

Speaker 1 (06:08):
Yeah, if you want to my famous favorite meme, the
one from Predator with the two the black guy and
the white guy like clasping hands, it's gonna be like
ancient Rome, the Aztec's throwing all of their corpses in
the river. So, whether or not you want to see
the Brothers Gracky as they become known to the ages

(06:30):
as the first socialists or as precursors to Donald Trump,
this brief period of time in the spotlight they have
makes one thing very clear. The ruling class in Rome
is willing to break any rule and violate any norm
to keep the money flowing and maintain their shocking rate
of wealth accumulation. From this point on in the Republic's history,
the rich only get richer, and the poor tend to
get poorer. But once it becomes clear that it's okay

(06:52):
to murder political rabble rousers and their supporters to keep
them from redistributing land, it becomes increasingly hard to argue
that there aren't a lot of other politic things that
are worth doing a murder over. And so people start
murdering over everything. And while Roman politics is getting a
lot more murdery. And one thirteen BC, this huge migration
of barbarians. They're generally called Germans, but like they're not

(07:15):
actually Germans, but whatever, they're the Germans. They sweep down
from central Ish Europe and they start invading Italy. Now
the Romans do what they always do, which is they
put together this army twenty thousand men, and they march
out to stop them. And you know, Nancy Pelosi's in
charge again. So the army gets wiped out, just absolutely massacred.

(07:36):
So the Roman state, which had never meaningfully reformed public
lands or fixed the problems the Grachy had railed against,
can't really replace the lost men. But thankfully they have
a guy on hand, a military leader, a dude named
Gaius Marius who he's been elected consul a couple of
times at this point, and he's co leading a military
campaign elsewhere in the empire, and it just so happens

(07:57):
to this guy. Marius is like, you know, like top
ten military minds in like all of history, Like if
if you're ranking like all of the like, he's up
there with like Subatai and shit. Like he's he's very
very good at being a military leader. And he's going
to be the guy who reforms the Roman military. So
the Roman army that you've seen in any movie with
like Romans where they all have that like segmented armor

(08:19):
and like you know, you've got the lesions with the
big shields and the swords and the hat. He invents
that before him. It's a very different looking army. They
have like different classes that they have got guys spirits.
It's very different military.

Speaker 4 (08:31):
I mean, it's it's like everyone because everyone bought their
own ship. So it's right exactly exactly. So he reforms
the military, and he also he basically succeeds in making
the state pay for it. So for the first time
you've got regular people. They're called the proletary eye a proletari. Yeah,

(08:52):
proletaria something like that, the poorest people are in the military,
and he started it's very controversial what he's doing, but
there's a disaster happening at the time. They're getting their
asses kicked by these barbarians. So he's like, look, we
have to we have to recruit from poor people and
arm them at the state's expense. And this works out really,

(09:13):
really well. And Marius is as he's a brilliant military leader.
He's also a really good politician. He's good at winning
elections and exercising power and building coalitions. But he's also
he's not really a patrician. He's he's a rich guy,
but he's kind of a rich country guy. So everyone,
all of the patricians, he's a redneck, right. He doesn't
speak Greek, right, he can't even fucking speak Greek. So

(09:35):
they hate his ass.

Speaker 1 (09:37):
Like there's a little bit, actually a little bit of
their reaction to him that is kind of trumpy, and
that like you've got this like entrenched political class who
just doesn't like the way he talks, right, they think
it's kind of gross. But also he's super popular among
regular people because number one, he's like massively improving their
lives because along with letting them be in the army,
he makes it so that if you're in the army,

(09:58):
you get a bunch of land after you retire, right, Like,
you get this land that we're conquering, we're going to
give it to soldiers. So instead of coming home to
a farm that has been taken from you, you come
home and you get given a farm by the state,
you know, and that's like a pretty cool deal for
the time. So, to make a long story short, he
wins this war and he becomes such a hero that

(10:19):
he has styled the third Founder of Rome. Like to
if you want to talk about the degree to which
he wins this war against these barbarians, if I'm remembering properly,
they basically create a new god of death that's made
in him his image because of how many of them
he killed. It's that, it's he's like that, it's like
that kind of war. So he becomes like known as

(10:41):
the third Founder of Rome, which is you know, most
like he's he's a big part of who's like pushing
that title for himself, right because he's you know, it's
good good branding. Yeah, And he's absolutely a populist and
In fact, he draws a movement towards to him, who
become known as the popular Rays, which is I think
it's pretty obvious what that means. And they're the Optimists
who are like the rich people who want to reduce

(11:03):
the political power of the plebs. Eventually, all of this
leads to a nasty civil war between Marius and his
old lieutenant, a patrician politician named Sola. Now Sula is
like the number one, it has to be said. He
is like the queerest dude in ancient Rome, and very
open about it. He is a fun fucking guy. Like

(11:24):
read it like Sola is a is a neat character
and he is just like this, like very like some
people will say sadistic, definitely mass murderer, very very good general.
And he and fucking Marius have this like series of
horrific battles. They have this massive civil warrior bleed. It
wipes out like a generation of Italian because they're both

(11:46):
really good. Neither of them are Pelosi types. They're both
actually good at having armies, so they just massacre each other. Now,
Marius loses at first and he has to flee to Africa,
but then he reinvades Italy, and he conquers Rome and
he massacres all of Sola's followers in the city. But
then he dies because he's like Joe biden Age. And
so Sola comes back and he kills all of Marius's followers,

(12:08):
including like there's like eight thousand Italians members of this
tribe elsewhere in Italy who Marius was trying to give
political rights to because there's this big fight over whether
or not Italian should be Roman citizens. And he just genocides.
Solo just does a genocide on these He stabs eight
thousand people to death, right, which is a lot of
people to stab to death when you think about it,

(12:29):
very rarely do that many people get stabbed to death
in this short period.

Speaker 4 (12:33):
It really is that, like you know, it's so I
know that obviously our brains are numb to like the
numbers of war and like what like automatic weapons and
like you know modern bombs can do.

Speaker 1 (12:45):
Yeah, And it is really like sorts. This is sorts.
This is sorts. It is it is swords and sharpened
sticks and like arrows, which are basically sharpened sticks. So
Sola just kills fucking everybody and get his hands on
who are his enemy, and then he's dictator. He makes
himself dictator, which is a political position in Rome, right.

(13:08):
Dictator previously is like it's a you have, it's a
job you have for like six months a year. He
makes himself dictator for however long he wants to be.
But after a while he gives up the job and
he retires to his mansion to fuck a bunch of
hot dudes. Sola is that's a pretty fun character.

Speaker 4 (13:23):
I mean as far as like I'm the dictator, but
you know what I'm like, i'mired first from dictator is
like a pretty amazing that's like no one does that.

Speaker 1 (13:34):
Like he's a monster. These guys are all monsters, but
he's a pretty entertaining monster. So there's a number of
cool side effects to Sola massacring all of Marius's guys.
Number one, all of the people who were like popularies
who are like populists, Plebeian supporting like folks who are
on Marius's side. They either get murdered or they have
to flee the city. And one of these people who

(13:55):
has to flee Rome and like hide somewhere else is
a dude you might have heard of named Julius Caesar right,
he's one of Marius's buds. So another thing that happens
is that under Sola, the Plebes are stripped of all
political power. That like position tribune of the Plebes that
have caused so much trouble with the grid, that doesn't
exist anymore for a while. It comes back. They regain

(14:16):
the power pretty a lot of the power they'd had
and like the decades after Sola leaves, but they lose
basically all political power for a while. And the last
thing that happens is that all of the people Sola
murders have there and he's like, he's he's like a
Stalin type figure with his murdering. He makes a list,
like there's like a list, and you get a bounty

(14:37):
if you like kill or bring in somebody who's like
on his list. You get like a chunk of their stuff.
And so some people get really good at murdering or
tracking down or are hiring people to murder folks on
that list, and so they get a bunch of their stuff.
And he's like, so again, if you help him kill
his political enemies, he'll give you their shit. And by

(14:58):
hooker by cripp a lot of the property of people
who had been supporters of Marius winds up in the
hands of a guy named Marcus Licinius Crassus, who is
the Elon Musk of ancient Rome, the wealthiest man in
the world, and he's also not He's like Musk, not
just because he's the richest guy in the world, but
he's also a some would say a trailblazing innovator. Right now,

(15:19):
Musk's great innovations are PayPal, which is banking but slightly
less regulated in that car company. Crass Is His innovation
is he starts the first firefighting brigade in Roman history.

Speaker 2 (15:31):
Right.

Speaker 1 (15:32):
People have been obviously fighting fires for forever because it's
a horrible problem, right, like a terrible, terrible problem in
ancient Rome. But he's the first guy who builds like
an actual professional fire brigade. Now, these guys are all slaves,
and the fire brigade is a for profit endeavor. So
what happens is when your house is on fire, Crassus's
guys will show up and be like, that seems like

(15:52):
a real problem. You got sell us your house for
like basically nothing, and we'll put the fire out. So
he gets rich doing this, right, He makes so much
fucking money. It is hard to convert old Roman currency
to modern dollars. But he's like a billionaire, right, He's
a multi billionaire for all intents and purposes. He's got
like Elon Musk money, right, right. He is so rich

(16:15):
that a few decades later he's going to buy an
army of forty thousand men to invade Iran. It doesn't
work out for him, it is really badly, but he's
part of this tradition of like, now, rich guys can
buy an army if they want, right, right, yeah, because
they basically what they're do is like, I'm going to
donate this money to the state in order to buy
this army because I think we need to be a
war with these people in Crass is his case. They

(16:38):
get their asses kicked very badly, and he gets killed
by having molten gold throat poured out his throat, which
is pretty shit.

Speaker 2 (16:45):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (16:45):
No, it's a dope. It's a dope punishment because the Parthians,
who are like basically Iranian, are like, hey, you're the
richest man in the world. You know what would be
a fun way to murder you is to make you
drown in your own molten gold. We're gonna like melt
down your money and kill you with it, which is
rad and should be done more often in history. Yeah,

(17:07):
like today for example.

Speaker 2 (17:10):
Now it's just pouring molten NFTs down their throat.

Speaker 1 (17:13):
That's right, that's right. They do not have the same panache.
So Crassus is one of these Roman politicians that most
people have probably heard about. He's famously he's part of
this triumvirate that runs things for a while at the
tail end of the republic. The other two guys in
the triumvirate are Julius Caesar, who everybody knows, and then
Nias Pompeius Magnus, or simply Pompy the Great. Now I'm

(17:35):
not going to First off, I should note he's called
Pompey the Great because that is the nickname he gives himself.
But he basically he's like Pompey's whole strategy was he
would go Rome would be at a war somewhere, and
some political guy who was good at fighting the war
would almost win it, and then Pompy, because he was
good at politics and rich, would like buy his way

(17:56):
into taking over the army, and then he'd finish the
war and then he'd be like, look at this big victory.
I want to guess I get another big fancy day
marching through the city. And so like he gets that,
he gets voted the name Pompy the Great effectively because
like the other senators are making fun of him because
they're like like like it's like it's a it's a
it's like kind of a mocking nickname to most people

(18:17):
because you'll know you're kind of full of ship.

Speaker 2 (18:19):
He's like an executive producer of the Wars.

Speaker 1 (18:22):
Exactly, exactly, Yeah, he's an EP. He actually kind of
is like I mean, in a number of ways, he's
like that. He's like the the the Weinstein of military history. Right, yeah,
Julius Caesar's the ben Affleck. I'm not going to explain it.

(18:43):
So I'm not going to like rehash all of this
period in Roman history save to say that like the
fact that three guys wind up basically in charge of
all government policy is not a good step towards like
a more republican form of government. Right, So doesn't talk
and get talked about enough, because this is the thing
everybody talks about, is like the Triumvirate and Pompey and

(19:05):
Caesar and crasses and stuff. This is like most of
what people know about the Roman Republic is this tail
end period. What doesn't get talked about enough is how
shit actually got done on the ground because in the
eighty or so years since the Brothers Gracky, Roman politics
had turned into a constant, low level gang war. And
again you've got these big mobs of clients. So like

(19:25):
after it becomes common to kill people for political purposes,
senators and elected officials won't travel through town without like
a bunch of their guys with them, right, So part
of your job is clients, Like at least you know
the chunk of clients you have are like veterans who
are like big tough guys. You get your vets and
your boxers and stuff. And anytime you go through town
to take care of business, you have like fifty or

(19:46):
one hundred guys with weapon like your guys following. You'd
like to watch your back, right, because now people get
murdered all the time because they propose bills. And one
of the things this means is that pretty regularly you'll
get these groups of like senators and elected officials and
like their goons, and they'll just murder each other in
the street. There will be these gang wars between like

(20:08):
members of Congress.

Speaker 2 (20:09):
It is.

Speaker 1 (20:09):
It's literally like if fucking like Mitch McConnell and Nancy Pelosi, right,
and like bands of men with like sharpened sticks whaling
on each other in like Washington, which would be a
better system than we have now. Don't get me wrong.

Speaker 4 (20:23):
Now it's like a Cold war versus yeah yeah, oh yeah,
so like and a lot one of the actually the
most popular weapons is like ceiling tiles, Like that's if
you really want to kill somebody, you get some dudes
up on a roof to just start hucking ceiling tiles
down on them.

Speaker 1 (20:37):
That'll kill the motherfucker fast. Oh yeah, yeah, so yeah,
I mean that's how it's a good way to kill people.
So the most successful of these gangsters because another thing
that happens is that, like yeh, Senator, you've got like
your mobs of clients, But like a guy who's professionally
building a mob of armed people to get into street fights,

(20:58):
there's always going to be better than some politician who
has his like his like toadies following him. So you
get these professional gangsters who build political mobs to street
fight on behalf of different sides of the big Roman
political divide, right, and the most successful of these gangsters
is a guy named Claudius. Now, Claudius is another rich kid.

(21:19):
His family had sided with Sola during the last civil war,
which is like, you know, it's the aristocracy side, But
Claudius didn't follow in the footsteps of his father, who'd
been elected consul. Instead, he starts to develop a reputation
as the kind of guy who can get things done
in a dark alley. In sixty three BC, a senator
named Cataline tries to overthrow the government and massacre all
of the elected leaders of Rome and assume control in

(21:41):
a coup kind of tries to make himself dictator again
like Sola had. And while this is all going on,
this is a complicated story. But while there's this like
coup attempt, Claudius, because he's kind of a young, strapping dude,
he volunteers to act as bodyguard for the consuls for
the elected leaders Cataline is trying to kill, and when
all the dust has settled, he's become one of the
guys you go to in Rome when you need a

(22:03):
gang of thugs to protect you. Or somebody else, right,
Like he's kind of like building a private security firm.
Like that's literally, like really what this is. It's like
you can hire Claudius and he's got like fucking goons
who will watch your fucking back and they're good at it. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Now there's a lot of ground to cover here. And

(22:23):
I'm not going to give Claudius his due because he's
a fascinating guy. But I would be doing everyone a
disservice if I didn't read you this one excerpt from
his backstory, and I'm gonna this is coming from a
write up and headstuff dot org quote. The cult of Bonadea,
the Good Goddess, is somewhat of an anomaly in classical Rome.
Rather than the standard gods with a priesthood and open worship,
the Good Goddess was worshiped in a less formal fashion,

(22:45):
similar to the Greek mystery cults. The celebrations of Bonadet
were not of the city's normal ecclesiastical rights, and in
fact they predated the earliest recorded history of the city.
Even her name was a secret known only to women
and never recorded. Shed they'd have a temple where only
women were permitted entry, and every year on the first
day of May, they would hold a sacred celebration in

(23:06):
this temple. This was one of two such celebrations held
throughout the year, but the second in December, was not
held in the temple. Instead, it was hosted by the
wife of the chief magistrate, with the aid of Rome's
sacred vestal virgins. The year, the chief magistrate was Rome's
high priest, Gaius Julius Caesar. Quite why Claudius decided to
infiltrate the Bonnadea festivities in sixty two BC is a mystery.

(23:28):
The main rumor at the time was that he did
it in an attempt to seduce the hostess, Caesar's wife, Pompeia.
The more likely reason is that he did it in
an attempt to win some credit with Rome's bohemian set
and set himself up as an iconoclast. Wherever it was,
he disguised himself as a woman and slipped into the house.
Unfortunately for him, Caesar's mother Aurelia, was there, determined to
make sure that things went smoothly, and she immediately noticed

(23:50):
this unusually tall and heavily cloaked women. The right of
Bonnadaea was such a rare opportunity for Roman women to
throw off the shackles of propriety, and as such, masking
your identity like that was very unusual. Really had a
servant girl follow Claudius, and she immediately noticed when he
let his voice slip. She called him out on it,
and he fled the scene. Though he was not definitively identified,
everyone knew it was Claudius. A public outrage at his conduct,

(24:13):
stoked by his brother in law, led him to be
formally charged with this sacrilege the following year. The punishment
for a man who witnessed the mysteries of the Good
Goddess was to be blinded.

Speaker 2 (24:24):
Just cloud show shit it is, and it's.

Speaker 1 (24:27):
As a fun note, Caesar divorces his wife after this,
not because she'd done anything, but because the fact that
this guy was maybe trying to fuck her means that
people might suspect she'd done something, and Caesar's wife has
to be above suspicion. Oh my god, he just wanted
a divorce, like these guys are all Again, the cool
thing about ancient Romans is like you could number one,

(24:49):
You can make an incredible fucking like like soap opera
show that's just about the lives of all these people.
They are like the just all very every one of
these fucking people that we've talked about would have had
a reality show if TV, right, Like Caesar. Caesar almost
basically did kind of have the equivalent of the reality show.

(25:10):
So one of the things that he's doing, he and
he kind of comes to power later in life. He
doesn't have a lot of money, so he has to
work with Crassus and stuff. But when he gets his
military command of gall number one, it's kind of because
he's so old and hasn't really distinguished himself politically. It's
kind of like if Pete Budhajeg suddenly got elected Supreme

(25:31):
Commander of the of the US military and then and
then conquered the entire Middle East in five years, right
like if like that, it's kind of because that's what
Caesar does, is he like he's kind of a joke.
He's this like silly asshole that everybody's like laughing at,
and then he conquers all of Western Europe. Like it

(25:51):
is he's got not to compare them, because Pete Buddhage
is useless and Julius Caesar is very smart. But one
of the things Caesar does while he is conquer again
all of fucking Europe, like he like he's his in
his manner. His forces are regularly outnumbered four and five
to one by some accounts even more than that, Like
he's an incredibly competent military leader. While he's doing this,

(26:13):
he's writing every day about what he's doing and then
sending his diary back to Rome to be published and
read out to people in the city.

Speaker 2 (26:21):
So he is.

Speaker 1 (26:22):
Turning his life into the equivalent at the time of
reality show to build a legend around himself and to
make himself into a popular figure. Like he's kind of
doing the Trump thing too, where it's like, yeah, I've
got this, I've got the most popular show in town.
Everybody shows up to listen to the latest pages of
Caesar's diary being ready.

Speaker 2 (26:40):
I mean, hell, he's.

Speaker 4 (26:41):
Got to do both, I guess, but yeah, yeah, he's
very military.

Speaker 1 (26:48):
So Claudius goes to trial as to whether or not
he's going to get blinded for like sneaking into these
women's rights, and he doesn't get blinded, but only because
Caesar and Crassis back him and they bribe the jury
to acquit him. Prior to this, he'd kind of been
on the optimate side of things politically, but he's now
like a popularra because Caesar and Crasis, you know, and

(27:11):
this is kind of the start of his life as
a creature of Caesar and Crassus. In fifty nine BC,
he runs for election as Tribune of the Polebes. Now,
as we've talked about, this is the veto job, and
it's very important, but also it's a tribune of the plebes.
You can't have this job if you're a patrician, which
Claudius is. So he pays a guy who is four

(27:32):
years younger than him to adopt him as his son,
Like he pays a poor man who's younger than him
to adopt him as his son and make him a plebeian.
And then he changes his name from c l a
U d i u S to CLO d i U S.
I mean, it's slightly different in Latin, but like he
basically changes it to a different spelling of Claudius to

(27:54):
symbolize that, like now I'm a commoner. But the the
main benefit, number one, he can veto shit, which since
the gracky that's become like the thing you do if
you get a tribune on your side, you can just
stonewall everything. It's like the filibuster, right, yeah, like you
can stop anything from happening. You can just yeah, yeah,

(28:15):
makes he makes himself into the Joe Mansion. But the
other thing is that, like, because all of Roman politics
is determined via street fights, if you kill the tribune
of the polebes any, Like, tribunes are sacrasyanc they're sacred
when they're holding office, so if you kill one, you
are immediately put to death. So he basically gains like
a force field for himself in the street. So he's

(28:37):
like Joe Mansion and that he can shut down politics.
But also now he's got like the if you touch
me in a street fight, you get murdered.

Speaker 2 (28:44):
Like it's a force field.

Speaker 1 (28:46):
Again, they it's a better system than we have, I think.
So eventually the Optimists get their own street fighter who
is even better than Claudius at building a gang of
violent people to murder folks for political purposes. And this
is this gangster named Milo, who is also pretty fucking rad.
Milo is a is a hoot. So these two send

(29:08):
their goons to beat and murder people organizing for the
other sides, assassinations and street fights grow to become like
a daily occurrence. There's basically a low level gang war
at all times all throughout the city of Rome, and
you never know if you're gonna get caught up in
between these mobs of like armed young thugs just like
murdering people in the streets. Now, these two street gangs

(29:29):
each kind of like represent a different political block, but
they also represent there's two angry young dudes who hate
each other in charge of them. So it's it's very
much both like a political proxy fight and also just
a street fight between.

Speaker 2 (29:41):
Two gangs each other.

Speaker 1 (29:43):
Yeah, it all comes to a head in fifty two
BC when Milo murders Claudius after beating him in a
street fight. And this is a real problem.

Speaker 2 (29:53):
Now.

Speaker 1 (29:53):
I bet some people are wondering at this point, as
we talk about all of this going on, where the
fuck are the police in the right Because at this
point in Roman history, there's like a million there's close
to a million people in the city of Rome. It
doesn't really hit a million until I guess the first
century AD, but there's like probably six seven hundred thousand
or more people living in the city at this point.

(30:13):
Which is there will be no city in Eurasia with
a population that's similar in size until the eighteen hundreds, right, right,
and this is like fifty BC, you know. So Rome
is able to get that big because it's very modern
in a lot of ways. There's sewers, a lot of
homes have central heating, they have running water. But one

(30:34):
hallmark of modern life that Rome lacked was anything that
vaguely resembled law enforcement. And I want to quote from
a write up from doctor Linda Ellis here. Though the
government could usually cope with major disorders, personal violence plagued
the city. Under the Republic. The police powers of the
government were rudimentary, with few officials in limited staff trying
to maintain some semblance of order. So if you committed

(30:55):
a crime in Rome, like treason or fucking in the
money with the money that was serious, you would get punished, right,
some high appelected official would like send guys after you, right,
Usually these guys known as licktors, who are like basically,
if you have political office that comes with any kind
of power, you get these dudes who hang around you
and they carry these things called fascis, which are like

(31:15):
a bundle of sticks with an axe eye to them,
which is where we get the word fascism. And you
can send them to do things and they basically can
speak with like the power that you have. It's a
way of being like, well, you know, if I'm actually
running this empire, I might need to be making things
happen in more than one place. Like the guys.

Speaker 2 (31:33):
Service was a little more proactive.

Speaker 1 (31:36):
Kind of but instead of like protecting you, their job
is mainly to go and like tell people to do
things on your behalf. So you can if like somebody
does some serious treason, there's the ability to kind of
enforce the law against them, but there's not cops. And
so like if a popular or a wealthy guy like
murders somebody, they're not going to get punished unless like

(31:56):
the person they murder has more money than them. And
like friends who like range a mob to like go
and fight his supporters and property crime is not really
a crime, it's a civil matter. As doctor Linda Ellis writes, quote,
when the average citizen of Rome became a victim of crime,
he had to rely on his neighbors and relatives for help.
Roman nobility could also call up a mob of clients
to do battle for them. In rural areas of Italy,

(32:18):
the situation was worse, and landowners hired armed bands to
protect themselves and intimidate their enemies. There were even a
few private armies of thugs at Rome. Self help was
always the main way to deal with criminals in ancient Rome,
and there was no concept of public prosecution, so victims
of crime or their families had to organize and manage
the prosecution themselves. So it's kind of everybody doing the
gang shit at this point, which is you know, we'll

(32:42):
talk about how it works, because in some ways it
works better than what's going to come next, and in
some ways it doesn't. But this again, it is worth
noting that this is the system that like a million
people live under in the densist city in the modern world,
and they mostly figure their shit out now, as we know.
In forty nine BCE, the tensions between the optimates and

(33:03):
the popularies that had been settled in the streets turned
into open war. Right, you get your Caesar, he crosses
the Rubicon, which is a river. He fights this big
war with his old friend Pompey, and Caesar wins, right,
and then he gets the shit stabbed out of him.
And then there's another horrible civil war between the people
who had killed Caesar and this kid who's related to him,
who he kin like makes his inheritor named Augustus, and

(33:26):
Augustus wins the civil war and he winds up as
the emperor. Right, this is the history everybody knows. This
is like the most famous period of all of Roman history.
Cleopatra's in the mix for a while, then she's not. Yeah,
so the characters I've heard of, Yes, yeah, we are
now at the point in history everyone knows about, and
we're going to talk about what Augustus does to deal
with the fact that, like when he takes power, everyone

(33:47):
has just gone through like one hundred and fifty straight
years of constant assassinations and like street fights and three
different civil wars that had all killed significant fractions of
the male populace of the Roman Empire, and they're kinda
tired of it. People like are not happy with the status. Quote,
You're like, you know what, We're okay not having any

(34:08):
political power if you can stop everyone from murdering everyone
all the time. So that's that's what what Augustus comes
to power with, Right, and speaking of murdering everyone, you
know who's going to murder you the podcast, the sponsors
of our podcast. Oh yeah, they'll kill your ass. They will, Sophie,

(34:31):
They'll kill your ass. That's their promise that I know.

Speaker 3 (34:36):
I didn't see that an ad copy or the promo codes.

Speaker 1 (34:39):
Okay, well promo code A man is coming to attack
you in the night with a knife. H yep, Well
that sounds like a difference of opinion. H ah, we're back.
I want to I want to note one thing real

(35:00):
quick here. So we're recording this like the day after
the FBI rated Trump's house, which is a very funny moment.
Everybody's still enjoying it. You will be listening to this
in the future when the entirety Yeah, who knows what's
gonna happen next Yeah, Gettysburg two and three have already
happened by the time you've heard this. Yes, there are

(35:21):
no people left in Virginia. Yeah, it's it's a nightmare.
But anyway, so that like right after that happened, you
get all these right wing like media leaders and thought
leaders started like saying shit about like now the war's on,
like get ready to fight fucking Steven Crowder being like
tomorrow we go to war. My favorite quote that one
of these shitheads came put out is this guy Jesse Kelly,

(35:44):
who is, according to his Twitter, host of the nationally
syndicated Jesse Kelly show, host of I'm Right and Yeah,
he's some sort of anti communist piece of shit. He's
got like half a million followers on Twitter, so yeah,
I think I think he's a Fox News. Yeah, that
seems right.

Speaker 2 (36:01):
Sure.

Speaker 1 (36:02):
So his post when everybody's like fed posting on Maine
after Trump gets raided is do not quote laws to
min with swords attributed to Pompy Magnus. Now, he likes
this because number one, they all fetishize weapons as doing
things that weapons don't, which is provide on their own

(36:22):
some sort of autonomy. Weapons are useless without organization as
anything but like tools of either personal violence or bullshittery.
But the other thing that he's doing is like this
is like the you can't govern us because we have
we have we're armed, right, Like that's the thing that
he's saying here. The funny thing about this number one,
Pompy Magnus, as we've just covered, was a gigantic fraud

(36:44):
like literally like bullshat his way into like repeated military
commands and stuff. He's the same as like, I don't know,
those Republicans who get up on stage and do a
bunch of push ups to show that they're big vironment
like pose with a gun or whatever. Yeah, exactly, exactly, Yeah,
it's like that's sort of bullshit. But the other thing
that's funny about this is that during the Civil War

(37:05):
with Caesar, Pompy gets his ass kicked because again, Caesar's
really good at fighting wars and Pompy is a gigantic fraud,
and he gets captured by Ptolemy, who's the leader of
Egypt at the time, who's like allied with Caesar. And
while he's being sent as a prisoner to Caesar, Ptolemy has,
by some accounts, a fifteen year old boy stab him

(37:28):
to death and cut his head off, and then they
stick it on a spear and parade it through town. So,
Jesse Kelly, that may not be the guy to hark
two as like your your hero of like militant resist.

Speaker 2 (37:42):
Right wing yeah, like politician.

Speaker 1 (37:46):
Yeah, giant fraud who starts a fight and then gets murdered.

Speaker 2 (37:51):
Very funny.

Speaker 1 (37:52):
So Augustus is the emperor, right, and everyone is very
tired of political violence because it has just gone on
way too fucking long, right, And this is again, actually
it's not entirely wrong to kind of think about the
political power that has kind of been gained, not that
these are too similar, but like the political power that
has accrued, especially in the last few years around gun

(38:15):
control as a result of like exhaustion at the constant
spread of massacres, it's not entirely different because all these
people in Rome, they've had lot, most of them have
lost family, and these fucking fights. It's this constant drumbeat
of violence and these constant series of civil wars, and
they're just like fucking exhausted. And so one of the
reasons Augustus is able to take and hold power is

(38:38):
that he promises and delivers I'm going to put a
stop to that shit, right, We're not going to have
to deal with this anymore. And that is a pretty
enticing thing for people at this point in Roman history. Now,
different leaders had attempted to deal with Roman mob violence
prior to Augustus. When Pompey took over the city during
the Civil War, he had brought his armed soldiers into Rome,

(38:58):
crossing the Pomerium illegal in order to restore order and
put an end to lawlessness. And while Pompey had led
his soldiers violate sacred law by taking weapons into the city,
he had banned the private ownership of weaponry within the city,
which happens several times in Roman history and never actually happens, right,
because again, it's it's pretty You could just like take
a chair leg right, Like, it's not hard. It's not

(39:18):
like what the weapons we're talking about. You can't really
ban because people are just like making like sure, yeah, exactly, yeah,
And people are gonna have roof tiles that you can hucket.

Speaker 2 (39:29):
Folks.

Speaker 1 (39:30):
You know, slings are not hard to make a leather
glove glove with like metal anyway, it's not hard. So
when Augustus takes power, though, he expands the ban on
private ownership of weaponry, he bans the carrying of arms
during assemblies or judicial proceedings, and eventually he passes a
law known as the Lex Julia de v which makes

(39:52):
it illegal to carry weapons for any reason in the
Empire outside of hunting or personal protection when you're traveling
between cities.

Speaker 2 (40:00):
Right.

Speaker 1 (40:02):
So in addition to this, he establishes the first police force,
the first police force of any kind anywhere in the
Western world. Now, different regimes had all had ways of
like dealing with descent or cracking down on stuff. There
had been stuff that was kind of police y. The
Spartans half essentially their version of like a fugitive slave
patrol and stuff. But what Augustus builds is very different.

(40:23):
Among other things, it is a permanent armed force in
the city of Rome itself, which had never happened before, right,
And so this is part of one of the things
that makes Rome has always kind of been ungovernable. And
so this is as ugly as it gets. It's also
a check to the power of the aristocracy because they
can never hold too much power because at any moment,
the mob could get angry and just murder everyone because

(40:45):
there's way too many of them and there's no army
in Rome to stop them.

Speaker 2 (40:49):
Right.

Speaker 1 (40:49):
So it's just like, how big are your gangs? Are
they bigger than everyone else in the city?

Speaker 2 (40:53):
You know they're not.

Speaker 1 (40:54):
So you can't do certain things now because the police
force he builds, their primary job is not stopping crime
or investigating murders. They're riot cops, right, that's what he
puts into the city. He calls them urban cohorts because
like cohort is a military unit, right, kind of broadly
equivalent to, like, I don't know, a battalion almost in

(41:17):
modern military terms. These urban cohorts are military units commanded
and organized similarly to the regular military allegiance, which operate
under the military chain of command. They are militarized police,
and their job is to put down riots, to corral
the power of the mob, and to make street combat
and coups basically impossible. Again, they don't handle petty crime.

(41:40):
They don't do anything if your home is invaded or
if like your kids murdered or whatever. So they're the
same as cops today. Actually there's a lot of similar
areas between them, and they're heavily mill Again, these are
militarized police. Now, this is like the urban cohorts are
like the daytime cops, and then there's night time law
and part of what they're doing is law enforcement. They're

(42:01):
called card the vigils, which is where we get the
word vigilante, even though they're not really vigilantes. And the
vigils are initially just a fire brigade. They're made up
of freedmen who knew how to fight fires, and their
job is to be distributed through the cities that when
a fire starts, you can get a team of guys
there to try to stop it, right, because again, the
biggest thing that Romans have to worry with on a

(42:21):
day to day basis is fire. So because like while
you're I'm actually just going to quote from doctor Linda
Ellis here to talk about like how what these guys
do evolves over time. At first, the Vigils functioned primarily
as a firefighting force, since the main threat to cities
than in now was destructed by uncontrolled fire. They were
equipped with water pumps, buckets, and axes for breaking down

(42:43):
the doors of houses on fire or suspected of being
a fire risk. Artillery was used to shoot dampening materials
onto fires and to create the fire breaks by leveling buildings.
The Vigils patrolled the city at night and had the
right of entry into private homes, which put them in
the position of witnessing crime and taking on the role
of policemen, from capturing thieves returning runaway slaves to maintaining

(43:04):
public order, So they have the right to go into
your home because we have to be able to make
sure you're not starting a fire that you can't keep
more that like a fire isn't started, that do you
haven't fallen asleep or whatever, and like your your house
is burning down. But because of this, now we're allowed
to do no knock raids on your house if we
think it might be a fire. What if we see
a crime. We have to have the ability to prosecute

(43:26):
a crime too, And so they kind of become cops
because they have the ability to bust into anybody's house
for any reason.

Speaker 4 (43:33):
So this is so it's so interesting that that like
that characteristic begets the job and not the other way around.

Speaker 1 (43:40):
It is really interesting, right because it's very because our police.

Speaker 2 (43:44):
It's not how I would have assumed that, but it
makes sense.

Speaker 4 (43:46):
It's like that power creates the yeah, thugs that become police.

Speaker 1 (43:51):
And it's interesting because like in our system, our police
who are thugs, came out of fugitive slave patrols, which
were just a worse kind of thug. In this case,
the police come out of an absolutely necessary job. You
gonna have a fucking million people in a city in
zero ass BC you need professional firefighters right underwhise it's
just suicide. But kind of you get how this like

(44:14):
evolves and then they become cops because like, well, I
got this guy's breaking the law. What am I supposed
to do? We supposed to just let this happen, you know.
It's interesting. Yeah, it is really different though from what
you would expect. So the birth of this and this
is this is a fairly advanced law enforcement force. Right, Like,
if you're thinking about what's around at the time, you've
got these are that like at any given time, thousands

(44:37):
upon thousands of heavily armed men like the Vigils, have artillery.
They have catapults and shit, which they use to fight fires,
but which can also be turned to like fight riots,
which by the way, I would have loved to watch
these guys fight a fire because I want to see
people like stop a fire with a fucking catapult. It's
pretty cool shit. But so one of the things that

(44:57):
this does is you've got this advance law enforcement force.
You've disarmed the city. The only people with weapons are
these cops. One of the things that this makes a
hell of a lot easier is the state can enforce
on popular laws. Now you think back to Lucretia, right,
Romans get rid of their first or their last king

(45:17):
because like, there's this stupid ass law and he does,
like his son does a horrible thing, rape somebody, and
the stupid ass law leaves to an even worse situation,
and everybody's really angry about it. And because the mob
is the mob, they are able to kick the king out,
and that's how the republic starts. That's not gonna be possible.
Nothing like that is anymore because now you have riot

(45:39):
cops in the city. So it's really easy for the
state to force people to accept laws that are unpopular.
A good example of this during the reign of Nero,
the mayor basically of Rome is murdered by one of
his slaves. Now they can't figure out who did it, right,
they don't know which slave. There's no is one of
the people he owns in his household, but he's got

(46:00):
I think this mg I might have had like a
thousand or more, like a shitload of slaves, like a
fucking small town worth of slaves. Now, under Roman law,
if you can't figure out which specific slave did it,
you have to execute the entire household, every man, woman
and child in a lot of these slaves are kids
who lives with this guy. Now, everyone in Rome when

(46:22):
this happens, is fucking horrified by this. And in fact,
stuff like this had happened in the past, and it
had provoked riots which had often stopped this sort of
justice from being carried out in full right, because people Romans,
they don't think slaves are like less human right, they
have less rights due to what they believe is a
pretty natural political condition. But they're still horrified at the
thought if you're going to kill like five hundred people
because like one of them is a murderer, and like

(46:43):
you're gonna murder a bunch of kids, Like, that's fucked up.
My dad was a slave, my grandpa was a slave. Like,
I don't think this is right. And in the past,
Romans attempting to, like Roman leaders attempting to carry out
these laws in order to maintain the status quo, would
have had to like fuck up a bunch of people
to do it, and would have been put at risk
by doing it. That doesn't happen anymore. By the time

(47:05):
Nero is in power, the vigils and the urban cohorts
are professionalized. They're very good at stopping descent, and so
a huge show of force is sent out by the
police state as the Romans move in to execute these slaves.
As English historian PKB. Reynolds wrote in his nineteen twenty
eight paper on Ancient Roman policing, quote the law was upheld,
however on this occasion, but elaborate police precautions were necessary

(47:28):
when the sentence was to be carried out. So because
they have this powerful police force, the mob cannot act
to stop an injustice, right because they just get the
shit murdered out of them by the cops. And it's interesting, Reynolds,
this is a very fascinating paper. I recommend reading it
if you're interested in ancient Rome. Right after talking about
how the birth of policing made it possible to massacre

(47:50):
all of these kids, he goes on to write that quote,
it is not really going too far to say that
in the matter of police services, it was not until
the beginning of the nineteenth century that the cities of
Europe regained the standards of civilization which had existed in
the Roman Empire eighteen hundred years before. It took us
two thousand years almost to get back to having cops
who can make this kind of thing possible.

Speaker 2 (48:12):
What an achievement. Yeah, that's the pinnacle. Yeah, I mean.

Speaker 4 (48:18):
Yeah, yeah, so right, it's like like the mob rule
or the not mob rule, but like the ability of
mobs to enact like some sort of or like put
it to.

Speaker 1 (48:29):
You know, to act as a check against like state
power and the power of the rich.

Speaker 4 (48:34):
Ideally, Yeah, that's jury nullification now.

Speaker 1 (48:37):
By yeah, and again everybody, especially when you because I
made the probable mistake of like bringing up you know,
guns and assault weapons and that debate in this Whenever
we want to like talk about ancient shit and like
apply it to modern terms, there's a desire to have
like a simple answer, and there just isn't because like, yeah,
constant mob warfare was really bad. Yeah, the establishment of

(48:58):
a police state was also really bad. Yeah yeah, and
I think it is. I think there are things to
learn about this, about like the dangers and whatnot of
different political things that you can do. But I think
it is fundamentally silly to like try to draw too
direct alignments.

Speaker 2 (49:12):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (49:13):
Yeah, this is two thousand years ago, but it is,
like it is worth noting that like, Okay, you give
up the ability of the people to check the state's
power and then so the state can enforce much less
and that is something that is worth noting. Yeah, and
that's the constant gang warfare is good either, Yeah exactly.

Speaker 4 (49:30):
I mean it is like, like this is how apartheid
states like the ones we currently live in. Yet like
you know, we are currently ruled by a racist, white
nationalist minority and they are able to do but you know, yeah,
it's hard to know if the alternative is better.

Speaker 1 (49:48):
Yeah, it's just it's it's just worth talking about this
history without trying to like and so this is why
you should vote this way on this law. Two thousand
years later, let's just talk about Yeah again, I am
not sure to like I'm really not trying to just
make like a KOI political point. I just think it's
actually worth studying this if you want to think about
the problems inherent to society. Like, it's just good to

(50:11):
know this stuff. So, of course you're not just gonna
stop people from objecting to tyranny because you have a
bunch of armed thugs who can crack heads in the street.
You're going to also need a secret police force, right obviously,
you know, and Augustus actually established two secret police forces.
Now one is kind of informal basically, because you have

(50:32):
this pretty big empire and you have all these military
units spread around, you have like a supply service, right,
who needs to like take messages from like oh, these
guys up in fuck in France, or these guys all
the way down and Jerusalem have like you know, they
need more of spears, they need more shields, and like,
I've got to take that information. I got to get
it to this guy. I got to get You have
like supply runners, and they're literally like riding horses and

(50:54):
like physically moving around cities to carry messages. And so
naturally he turns these guys who are called frumentarii into
a secret service, right, into like his spies, because they're
traveling everywhere and nobody pays much attention to them. So
they're a pretty good pick to act as like you're, hey,
you can keep an eye on things. Tell me if

(51:15):
like unrest is boiling up, you can be a spy
basically because you have the ability to go anywhere, you know.
Reynolds writes, quote the Emperor Hadrian, we are told knew
all secrets through the frumentarii, and as the empire became
more despotic, so the activities of the frumentarii multiplied. In
the persecutions of the Christians, it was the frumentarii who
searched men out and who affected arrests. Probably too, the

(51:38):
soldier who guarded Saint Paul was a frumentarius. And if
the emperor desired the speedy removal of a prominent noble
against whom it might be dangerous to proceed openly, the
frumentarii were employed to carry out the deed. In fact,
they performed all the dirty work that has always fallen
to a lot of the secret police in an absolute despotism.
They were so efficient in their work that they incurred
universal hatred, and historian of the third century complains that

(52:00):
they tyrannize over us, and later writer bitterly calls them
a pestilent crew, and in another passage the plague of
the Roman world. In response to this general odium, the
emperor Diocletian disbanded them at the end of the third century,
but their duties were far too important for the emperors
to be able to dispense with their services, and a
new Corps was soon enrolled, especially designed as a secret police.

(52:22):
This new Force Blue bore the curious title of Agents
for Affairs, which was sufficiently vague to cover their manifold activities.
But the agents were soon no better than their predecessors,
and as early as the middle of the fourth century
the Emperor Julian had had to reprove their corruption, and
soon they had just as bad an aim as the FRUMENTARII. So, yeah,
that's pretty cool. That's pretty cool bit of history right there.

Speaker 4 (52:45):
There's just no way, right, I guess The lesson, of course,
is like that kind of power necessarily creates Yeah, these
fucking evil people.

Speaker 1 (52:54):
Yeah, only bad people want that job, and they do
bad things when they get it. It's also worth like
again go back to the Graki. When some rich people
want to kill a guy, they just have to fucking
hire and murder him in the street, and everybody knows
what's happened, right, It's real fucking clear what goes down,
And because of how much they've pissed people off, they
have to like give people a bunch of what they
had asked for and stuff, even though they murdered the guy.

(53:17):
Now you just have one of these fucking spooks kill him, right, Like,
now you've got like the Emperor's fucking spooks. He can
kill him, and nobody's allowed to talk about it or
ask about it. It's not obvious what's happened, you know.
So the last and most powerful police agency in ancient
Rome were the Praetorian Guard. In some way, these guys
are the evolution of mobs of armed supporters who tried

(53:39):
to protect to protect Tiberius, Gracchus and the gangs run
by Milo and Claudius. You know, during the Civil Wars,
all of these guys who are fighting each other had
like units of bodyguards that are like the toughest soldiers
they've got. And Augustus had formed his into an elite
military unit which started at like five thousand men and
eventually becomes like nine thousand guys. And these were during

(53:59):
the Civil War just like his shock troops, right, but
they become his like elite riot force, right because the
urban cohorts are just three thousand men and the legions
are rarely in Italy, so the Praetorians are always the
strongest armed force near the center of power. So Augustus
keeps like two thirds of them in the city of Rome,
ready to crack heads when heads need cracking, and he

(54:21):
sends the third of them elsewhere in the Italian peninsula
to like garrison, different hotspots, and they basically act as
like secret police, referring back to him, making sure no
one in Some of them take up jobs in the
military and stuff in order to be able to report
back on what's going on. And then the words of
historian Guy did Beller quote minimize the impression that he

(54:43):
depended on them. Instead, the guard depended on Augustus. No
emperor meant no jobs and no special status. Because these
guys get a shitload of extra money for doing what
they're doing right. They're paid very very well in order
to keep the emperor in power. So guard officers also
occupied roles in the urban cohort worts, and undercover praetorians
could pop up anywhere, so they're like the a mix

(55:04):
between the FBI and the Secret Service. It could also
be used to assassinate political rivals, but as Guy points
out quote, this state of affairs was reliant upon the
emperor having enough prestige and power to contain the guard.
Augustus had created potentially the most dangerous institution the Roman
world had ever seen. In his monumental The Decline and
Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon described this brilliantly

(55:26):
by thus introducing the Praetorian guards, as it were, into
the Palace and the Senate. The emperors taught them to
perceive their own strength and the weakness of the civil government,
to view the vices of their masters with familiar contempt,
and to lay aside that reverential awe which distance only
and mystery can preserve, towards an imaginary power and this
luxurious idleness of an opulent city. Their pride was nourished

(55:46):
by the sense of their irresistible weight. Nor was it
possible to conceal from them that the person of the sovereign,
the authority of the Senate, the public treasure, and the
seat of empire were all in their hands. So eventually
these guys start to start it come out as I
serve at the like I'm here to protect the Emperor.
I only have a position because of him. They realize eventually, like, well,
a lot of these emperors are incompetent. The Senate's a

(56:07):
bunch of corrupt, rich, lazy assholes. We have the only weapons. Right,
we have the capital and the only weapons. Why don't
we just run things right? Yeah? So, as time goes on,
all the different law enforcement arms of Roman society kind
of realize that their powers have made them unstoppable bandits,

(56:30):
and that's what they become. As doctor Ellis writes, quote,
the Roman police and military forces often abuse their power
and status, such as property seizure without compensation and physical
violence to civilians. The axes used by the vigils and
other troops were used to break down doors and abuse people,
both in the street and in their own houses. The
Roman offer Juvenile provided a dark picture of police soldier

(56:51):
civilian relations in Rome. If a civilian was beaten up
by the soldiers slash police, he was better off forgetting
about it, because if he complained there would be a
trial under a and in front of a jury of soldiers.
No witnesses would dare come forward, otherwise they would have
other soldiers exact retribution. Epicectus, a Greek philosopher at the time,
advised that if a soldier wanted a mule, it was
best to give it to him, because if not given,

(57:13):
the person would have lost it anyway, and would have
been beaten up in the process. Now we could talk
about civil asset for for Chuery and Trew. We could
talk about how often cops, particularly take cars from people.

Speaker 2 (57:26):
We're back. We're back to America.

Speaker 1 (57:29):
Yeah they did it first, baby.

Speaker 2 (57:31):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (57:32):
No, it is like truly shocking how many things that
are horrible that we are absolutely no better than.

Speaker 1 (57:39):
No, they it's it's all the same shit, right, And
it's all the same shit because when you say we
are building a separate class of people who will be
able to live very comfortably in order to as long
as they stop the poor from fucking with the rich.
And also they're the only people who have the right
to use force in our society, they always turn out

(58:02):
to be assholes, right, because only assholes want that job,
you know. Yeah, okay, speaking of things, only assholes want
the products and services that support our podcast.

Speaker 2 (58:14):
Fact.

Speaker 1 (58:20):
Ah, we're back, you bunch of pricks. Sorry, what's up?
I'm so mean to our listeners. Yeah, what's up, pricks?
That's right, they deserve it.

Speaker 2 (58:33):
Yeah, all right.

Speaker 1 (58:34):
So we're talking about like the Roman police state here,
which I don't think most people realize. Everyone knows, like, yeah,
Rome that it became an empire, Like you assume that
like it's a brutal, autocratic dictatorship, but like it is
a modern police state, and I want to talk about
how pervasive it truly was. Doctor Ellis gives a really
good job of like laying out the how heavily policed

(58:56):
the city of Rome was. So she points out that
Chicago today and her data is twenty eighteen, is the
third most populous city in the United States with two
point seven million people and thirteen thousand, five hundred cops. Ish, right,
that's Chicago more or less today. Rome at the height
of the empire is a million people. They have a
police force of seven thousand vigils, three thousand urban cohorts,

(59:18):
twelve hundred cavalry attached to the urban cohorts, and roughly
six thousand praetorian guards in the city. So that's about
three times as many police per capita as a heavily
policed city in the United States today.

Speaker 2 (59:32):
Yeah.

Speaker 4 (59:32):
Yeah, I mean, I guess it's a little bit mitigated
by you know, they.

Speaker 1 (59:38):
Don't have nearly the kind of technological yeah, right, that
is centralized. You know, their purview ism is wide. You know, yes,
it is worth noting how heavily the city is. They
have gone from at the start of this a city
where nobody gets to have a weapon, a military weapon
in town, to a city that is garrisoned by a
heavy military guard at all times. Now, the first member

(01:00:01):
of the Praetorian Guard to attempt to take total power
for himself was say Hannis, head of the guard under Tiberius,
who ruled from eighty fourteen to thirty seven. Now, say
Hannas was caught before he could carry out his plans
and execute it along with his family, and Tiberius actually
lets the people of Rome riot and murder his family
and supporters just like give him some fun. And the

(01:00:21):
Praetorian Guards. Yeah, this time the Guard stay out of it,
like they don't defend their old leader because they're like,
this isn't going to go well for us. The emperor
is too powerful, steal that's going to change in eighty
forty one when Caligula gets murdered by officers of the
Praetorian Guard for being a fucked up little weirdo. Now,
when Caligula gets murdered by the Praetorian Guard, there's this

(01:00:43):
it's not very old like the empire, and so there's
still strong memories of the republic, and a lot of
people are like, maybe we should go back to having
a republic. Emperors seem like a bad idea, but the
praetorian guard is like, well, you don't need a praetorian
guard if you've got no emperor, So how about we
just force you to accept an emperor of that we've picked,
And they pick a guy named Claudius, who is a

(01:01:05):
pretty interesting character himself. I would like to talk more
about him, but we just don't have the time, so
instead I'm in a quote from Guya Di la Bellier,
who writes Claudius was declared emperor by the praetorians, and
no one, including the Senate, was in any position to
argue that praetorian's jobs were secure. Claudius was a reluctant
emperor and turned out to be a good deal more
competent than his family thought him capable of. It's even

(01:01:26):
possible that Claudius had been in on the plans all along.
Gold and silver coins were issued welcoming the new emperor
and he them, or showing the guard welcoming the new
emperor and he them, and he pays them a bunch
of money. It's it's unclear exactly what has happened. He's
a relatively good emperor, but over time they stop backing
because again, you don't want the emperor to be any good.

(01:01:47):
You want him to be a figurehead for you. And
this all kind of comes to a head in one
ninety three, a d after the murder of Marcus Aurelius's
son Commodus, who is the bad guy in the movie Gladiatory,
So after Russell Crowe kills him, he's actually killed by
the Pretorian Guard. So in previous interregnums, like the death

(01:02:09):
of Nero, the Guard had generally kind of like gone
with whoever has these power and money to be the
next emperor. After Commodis dies, they like go to all
the rich people in Rome and they're like, hey, how
much money you will to pay to be emperor? Like
they literally auction off the throne of the Roman Empire
to the highest bidder, who winds up being some rich
asshole who gets murdered two months later. He gets replaced

(01:02:30):
by another guy, Septimus Severus, who this guy, this fucking
guy fires the Republican or the Praetorian Guard finally, and
he makes a new praetorian guard that he hopes to
be less corrupt, and they immediately grow corrupt and do
the same thing. Over the course of the empire, thirteen
emperors are assassinated by the praetorian guards.

Speaker 4 (01:02:53):
It's really like you let that, you let that tiger
into your house.

Speaker 1 (01:02:58):
Yeah exactly. Yeah, and you know the stuff that was
in your house prior to letting the tiger and wasn't
pleasant either. Whether or not you think this was progress.

Speaker 2 (01:03:08):
I did.

Speaker 4 (01:03:08):
I am glad you brought up a gladiator because I did.
I did want to pitch the idea of a double
feature the Ridley Scott Italians screaming in each other, double
feature of Gladiator at House of Gucci.

Speaker 2 (01:03:25):
Yeah, just Italians yelling.

Speaker 1 (01:03:29):
Italians never change, and neither do cops. That is that
is the message of the show. Italians and police the
same two thousand years ago as they are today. Anyway,
that's the story of how the Romans became a police state, and.

Speaker 2 (01:03:46):
God, that is fucking genuinely very depressing.

Speaker 1 (01:03:49):
It's it's pretty fucked up. You know, we're condensing a
lot of history here, but that's the broad sweep of it.

Speaker 4 (01:03:57):
But yeah, an angle I had never really considered. But yeah,
that's tons of science to Jesus Christ.

Speaker 1 (01:04:03):
Yeah, yeah, you know, you've got this, this situation of
like political violence that makes everybody be like, we'll do
anything to stop it. And then the thing that stops
it is the establishment of a militarized police force who
then take power and spend centuries doing violence to people.
But it also works for a long time. Yeah, I

(01:04:23):
mean it works for a long time.

Speaker 2 (01:04:26):
Yeah, it's never like clear enough, like how bad this is.
And again it's too late.

Speaker 1 (01:04:33):
For this because it would be easy to either be like, well,
this is why no one should ever have cops because
they inherently fuck everything up, or this is why people
shouldn't be allowed to have weapons, because you know that
what happens in the Mormon Republic happens right, right, But
if you're trying to find those either of those easy answers,
either this is why everyone should be armed, This is
why everyone should be disarmed. This is why we should
have cops. This is why we shouldn't have cops. Well,

(01:04:56):
both of these systems lasted like five hundred years and
conquered the entire world.

Speaker 4 (01:05:00):
It's like there's not enough data and the win yeah
is always it's it's just like it's you know, there's
stuff to take out of this for the future, but
don't try not to take too much, because again, both
of these as silly and fucked up as everything is.

Speaker 1 (01:05:13):
Both of these systems on a historic level work really
fucking well, right, like that.

Speaker 2 (01:05:19):
Is kind of being conquered the world.

Speaker 4 (01:05:21):
Yeah, well, I mean probably the main thing is that
just sort of tells you it's just that part of
it is irrelevant.

Speaker 1 (01:05:27):
Yeah, there's other stuff going on, military things and what. Yeah,
I mean maybe not entirely, because, like I guess partly
like the fact that Roman politics is in the Republican
period is so like cutthroat means that a lot of
the people who wind up in charge after a certain
point are like pretty canny sons of bitches. Yeah, but
also some really dumb sons of bitches wind up in

(01:05:49):
power and they fuck everything up and like destroy the
Roman middle class. So yeah, I don't know, there's actually
not as many clear lessons from history as you want
there to be when you look at the history.

Speaker 2 (01:06:00):
Yeah, each one's only been done once. That's the whole
point of history.

Speaker 1 (01:06:04):
Yeah, so yeah, exactly. Anyway, that's that's the story of
how Rome became a police state.

Speaker 3 (01:06:12):
So Andrew, you have any pluggables for us at the end.

Speaker 2 (01:06:15):
Here, Yeah, let's see, I guess mostly.

Speaker 4 (01:06:19):
Yeah, doing two shows with my podcast jos as Racist.
I'm going to be in a place called Austin on
August twentieth, and then Brooklyn on September tenth.

Speaker 2 (01:06:34):
So yeah, I'd love to see folks.

Speaker 4 (01:06:36):
You've if you've enjoyed listening to me be horrified as
Robert tells me stuff, then I will be a little
more proactive on stage.

Speaker 2 (01:06:45):
But I'm going to tell you not that much more proactive.

Speaker 1 (01:06:48):
Excellent, all right, we go find Andrew and Austin and
go find Jesus in your hearts. And by Jesus, I
mean the Jesus Christ of podcast.

Speaker 2 (01:07:02):
You me, yeah, period of your ears. That's right.

Speaker 1 (01:07:06):
Sophie hates it when I compare myself to crucified.

Speaker 3 (01:07:10):
I really hate it.

Speaker 1 (01:07:11):
By yeah, not my favorite thing.

Speaker 3 (01:07:16):
Anyways, see you next.

Speaker 2 (01:07:18):
Week, Bye bye.

Speaker 3 (01:07:22):
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool
Zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio, app,
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