Speaker 1: Meaning a man like this man letting butterfly flapping his wing.
Dig down in the forest.
Speaker 2: Man, it gonna cause a tree fall, letting five thousand
miles away. Man, nobody seen, nobody.
Speaker 1: See. You don't need to know.
Speaker 3: Man. He like you followed a little story and he
got directed like that.
Speaker 1: That's the way man.
Speaker 2: Lactly dang on the panel, Man, Man, Man.
Speaker 1: All right, Alex Petkis, welcome back to the Jay Burton Show.
How you doing Man, Great to be here, Jay. It's
it's always a pleasure.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I was.
Speaker 1: I was speaking, uh to a sort of online friend
of mine, and he just sent me a message and said, hey,
you know, what are you ever considering, you know, talking
to this cost of Glory guy.
Speaker 2: It's like, yeah, I have.
Speaker 1: I just talked to him, and then when I scrolled
back through, I really it's been almost two years since
you and I have spoken, and so I'm really glad
to have you back on particularly you have been doing
a really masterful series on the life of Caesar. I
cannot recommend it enough. Obviously, we're going to cover some
of the same material, but look, man, Part one is
almost two hours long, very very entertaining, very well produced,
So I highly recommend that, and obviously I assume at
least most people are vaguely familiar. But let's just jump
into it, right, let's jump into the life of Caesar. So,
just to sort of frame this discussion, most of what
you hear about Caesar is from the conquest of gaul On, right,
that this great military victory, returning to Rome, the birth
of the empire, right, his dramatic assassination. The stuff that
you know, obviously is sort of the crescendo of his life.
But his early life before that is in my mind
equally fascinating and under discussed. So I guess as a
way to begin this conversation, Alex, there's a lot of
Roman politics in the generation immediately before Caesar, including you know,
his own family that's relevant to this discussion, that is
relevant to the end of the republic. And I realized,
asking where do we need to just to start in
a conversation about history. It's like you can keep pulling
the thread forever.
Speaker 3: Yes, well, you know a Nias was a famous mythic
Trojan hero. Now anyway, you always.
Speaker 1: But when we're discussing Caesar, like, where do we have
to start at least in approximate sense.
Speaker 3: Yeah, no, And I definitely relate about the the opaqueness
of Caesar's early days. You know, when I was a
kid in high school ed Caesar's Gollic War commentaries and
it was cool and you know, action and slashing, and
you don't realize how he was not at all Julius
Caesar as we know when he began that campaign. And
I think it's not even studied that intensely in classics departments.
You know, from my experience being an academic, it wasn't
really on my radar. And doing the biographies of the
men before him was really helpful for me. Marius and Salah,
notorious and pompy. But so I think that the best
way to frame it is probably like looking at Caesar's
immediate childhood and the environment he grows up in. So
he's born in one hundred BC, and that year there
was some tumults in Rome in the forum. There were
some populists who tried to push through some controversial laws
and they got lynched basically by the optimates, by the
conservative or the oligarchy. Let's say Saturn Ninus was one
of the ringleaders. He was I believe he was a
tribune at the time, but he was like a kind
of protege or or at least associate, not a protege
an associate of this this famous populist general Gaius Marius,
who was holding his sixth consulship at the time, and
they arrested him and they locked him in the Senate
house overnight, and some people snuck in, ripped off the
roof and threw tiles down, you know, these terra cotta tiles,
and basically murdered him from above in that year. So
Rome has been going through civic violence since the days
of the Grachy, which was about thirty years earlier. Really
shocked people when the Grachy were both in sequence between,
you know, separated by eight or so years, murdered in
in the effectively in the city with limits of Rome.
And you know, there are lots of reasons why the
populace and the optimates quarreled. But in Caesar's day, like
when he's growing up, he grows up in a sort
of populist family. He is from a very noble line
that does actually trace its lineage back to Aeneas, the
mythic founder of Troy, which becomes important. On his father's side,
the Julians are descendant of the son of Aeneas Eulus,
and his mom's side is the Marquius Rex family, and
they're descendant from one of the ancient kings of Rome,
Ancus Marqius, very blue blood. However, you know he's not
from his family, isn't like in the power elite. The
power elite would consist of people like the Cornelius clan,
the Mettelli, the Scipio's or branch of the Cornelius klan,
and you know, you could keep naming names, but the
Caesars are not or the Julius Caesars are not really
in that. But his father does seem to be a
promising politician, dies when Caesar was a teenager. But before that,
Caesar's aunt Mary's the guy just mentioned Gaius Marius, who
is this outsider from our penum, which is, you know,
a city that enjoys Roman citizenship, but it's like halfway
to Naples, and Cicero's actually from there, and he was
the first new man in the Senate, or yeah, like
the first at least the first person become a consul
who wasn't from a consular family. Who didn't have console
descendants in I think decades. I mean, it's very rare
by this time for newman.
Speaker 2: To come about.
Speaker 3: And he built his reputation by challenging the establishment, but
kind of became part of it as a populist. And
you know he was he got rich sort of late
in life from his provincial governorships. He got famous from
just you know, conquering you Girtha and the Kimbrian the
Gauls up on the northern border. But he got respectable
by marrying into Caesar's family, poor but great name. And
so Caesar grows up with Guius Marius as his uncle
and as a further testament to his populist credentials. When
he's a teenager, he this is very young for Romany.
He's married like at age sixteen, very precocious, and he
gets married to the daughter of Guius Marius is like
right hand man or his closest associate in politics, Sinna,
who is a consul at the time. And this is
in the period of where well probably need to back
up a little bit to explain who Senna is. But
so Caesar grows up in this sort of rundown neighborhood
the Suburah, and there's brothels and kind of c D
nightlife in the Suburah. It's not a nice place to be.
It's an old neighborhood. And so he kind of grows
up with this deeper familiarity with the fringes and the
underbelly of Roman society than you normally would get in
a noble household. And I think that probably goes into
his consciousness some degree. But you know, when the populists
and the optimates first clashed, we could just keep going
back and back and back, but it was around eighty
eight BC.
Speaker 2: Caesar's Twelve Guias.
Speaker 3: Marius provokes Solah, the Optimate leader, who is about to
lead an army off to the east and against Mithridates
and Marius finnagels, you know, bi legal chick caanery, to
have the command transferred to himself rather than Slah, who
is the consul at the time. And you know, long story,
short war breaks out. Solah marches on Rome and expels
Marius as an enemy of the state, has a dozen
or so of his associates executed, and kind of patches
things up and then goes off east to fight Mithridates,
and you know thinks that it's the situation settled, but
it's only just begin begun and and and it's it's
when Marius gets exiled or in eighty eight that Senna
takes over as consul.
Speaker 2: Marius has gone.
Speaker 3: Senna is consul for three years in Rome and basically
running a populist regime in Saula's absence. And that's when
Caesar gets me to send his daughter. So Slah comes
back in in eighty four, I believe he lands in Italy.
Incredibly bloody civil war breaks out, I mean one hundred
thousand Romans dead, and eventually he wins, and Senna gets
assassinated sometime and you know, right before Sola arrives in Italy.
And then Slah comes and marches into Rome after his victory,
and he starts the proscriptions, you know, the famous campaign
of listing your enemies on a placard in the forum
and you know, putting a bounty on their heads and
having their properties confiscated, and he's also calling other shots.
He gets elected dictator, revives this old office very importantly
that was defunct since the Punic Wars about one hundred
and twenty years earlier to legal Roman office, but he
also starts ordering people to do other stuff. Like Pompey,
for example, is five years or so older than Caesar
seven years and Pompy is a young, precocious son of
a consul who brought Salah about a legion's worth of
soldiers during the Civil War. Early on it was like
kind of important to Sulla's victory, five thousand men or so.
And after the victory, Salah says, Pompey, you need to
change wives. I've got a better woman for you. You're
married to the wrong woman. And Pompey says, yes, sir,
And then he does this with a couple of other
promising young men. Caesar, lucky for him, was too young
to have fought on the side that he would have
chosen in the Civil War, which you know, if you
were like five years older, he probably would have been
either killed or exiled or proscribed. And he Slah goes
to Caesar and says, Caesar, you're married to the wrong woman.
You're married to the daughter of my greatest enemy, the
man that I blame for the whole civil war breaking out. Sinna,
you know, in conjunction with Marius, was responsible. And Caesar
says basically, screw you, and he quits town, goes into
that the mountains. He's running away from Salah's henchman. Eventually
gets dysentery, caught, bribes the guard who who caught him.
They bring him back to his family, and his family
tries to intercede for Caesar. Salah, you know, I know
that you ordered Julius Caesar to divorce his wife and
marry another woman.
Speaker 2: But he's just a kid. He didn't know what he
was doing.
Speaker 3: We promise he's not going to cause you any trouble.
Can you please just not execute this young man? And
Sullah says, very well, famously, very well, but your fools
if you do not see many of Marius in this boy.
And I think that that incident shows a lot about
Caesar's character, that he is, he knows kind of where
he stands in politics, like his family has great populist credentials.
His dad got to the praadership, probably would have been
if he had been still alive during the war. Died
kind of tragically. I think he was tying his shoe
and so he dies before this all breaks out. If
he had been alive, he would have been either killed
or proscribed by Sulah, and the sons of proscribed men
were barred from politics for the rest of their lives
under Sullah's new regime. So Caesar would have been basically
that would have been the end of his story if
his father had actually been alive. Kind of like cruel
but benevolent twist of fortune maybe in his favor. And
so he knows if he stands up to Sullah, he's
going to if he survives, which is very much not guaranteed,
he's going to be the talk of the town. This
is the kid that stood up to Salah. This is
They're going to be talking about this for the rest
of his life. And sure enough, you know, we know
the story. Still it worked. But and so I think
he already kind of has that taste for how to
get people talking about him. But I think he also
probably just liked the girl, and he was faithful to
that wife, I mean, didn't divorce her, at least until
she died many years later. He has his first and
only daughter with her, Cornelia, And I think he just
didn't like taking orders from people, you know, But he's
kind of already picked his side very importantly in that
in that story, and and sla ends up essentially rewriting
the Constitution to resemble something like what he thought it
had been, or what he he believed it should have
been in the generations before. He takes the powers away
from the Tribune of the Plubs, which was an important
instrument in the hands of a populist that he kind
of blamed for sparking off the war. And most importantly,
you know, he's either murdered or made permanently or exiled
or made permanently irrelevant in politics. All of his enemies
and everybody kind of left in place are his loyalists.
They're the kind of posts sola oligarchy, mostly old families
who sided with him, the conservatives, some new people that
kind of you know, become pillars of the establishments. And
so that's kind of the regime that Caesar grows up under,
this like cracked down a reactionary optimate oligarchy, and it's
also the regime that he dedicates the rest of his
life to overturning, and he eventually does.
Speaker 1: So there are several things there that I want to
talk about, particularly with the prescriptions, which is one obviously
you've just kind of cataloged the political consequences, you know,
the degree to which Sela was able to remake sort
of the apparatus of power in his own image. But
one of the I guess we could say kind of
recurring traits of Caesar is obviously his clemency, but also
his willingness to sacrifice immediate gain for political alliances, for friendships.
So one of the things that I'm interested in, and
I realized this is speculative. But to what degree do
you think that that attitude was a reaction to the
character of Celah And also to what degree did the
prescriptions are seizing property sort of reinforce the pre existing
oligarch right if you have gotten rich by taking other
people's stuff, that creates a vested interest at least I
would imagine in keeping that system around.
Speaker 2: Yeah, one hundred percent.
Speaker 3: And well, to take the last part first, Socrates, when
the thirty tyrants of Athens were doing something similar, executing
and confiscating properties. The thirty, as he says in Plato's Apology,
they were trying to get respectable men to share.
Speaker 2: In the crimes.
Speaker 3: They're trying to implicate them, you know, they try to
get Socrates to go and summon some prominent citizen, you know,
so that he would effectively have blood on his hands.
And Salah knew this principle. Caesar later cited this very
principle in his speech in the Calinarian Orations, like this
is kind of what you do if you're establishing a
regime on you know, blood and what people would normally
call injustice. And uh, you know Crassus, the richest man
in Rome in Caesar's youth, that's how he made a
lot of his fortune. He's buying up these estates of
proscribed men pennies on the dollar or asses on the
talent maybe in Roman terms, and then reselling them at
a huge profit. And he just he's flipping houses. Basically,
he's a house flipper, and he makes it, makes a
big nest egg that way. Catiline was also implicated crass
has got the worst of it reputation wise, but you
know it did, it did definitely, Like there were lots
of people who who had profited from the system. And
actually Caesar later is in is I think this is
in the early sixties, he collaborated with Cato funny Enough,
his Future and Nemesis on digging up crimes from the
times of the proscriptions and prosecuting men for say, informing
against an innocent man who had then got executed, and
then they profited from their estate, and there was a
lot of band aid ripping off, and you know, injustice
to hunt out two decades later. But it worked for
a while at least. And I think that Caesar's incredible daring,
which you see again and again from his youth up
to his well, his very last day on earth, I
think has a lot to do with that sense of
he was spared by fortune, you know, like he had
already tested himself young, he had taken like the ultimate risk,
like he was very close to being executed, and so
everything else was just like he had destiny on side,
like he had already kind of put the ultimate short
term gain up for sacrifice to get the long term gain.
And it's you know, it's a pattern that started very
young for him.
Speaker 2: And you know, he goes on to.
Speaker 3: Win the Roman equivalent of the Medal of Honor as
a young soldier in his early twenties, saving a citizen
I think, in the Siege of Middelini. And but he
does importantly, as I think you allude to, he I
think that that is a big part of his clemency,
about his mercy towards his enemies. He's everybody remembers Sulah.
If they don't personally, if they weren't personally there, their
dads told him about him. And so he's trying to
make himself the Unsola for the rest of his life.
He's he's going against the sla establishment in his political
career and in his actions in the Civil War. He
is very ostentatiously sparing people, you know, every now and
then to his to his great detriments in the in
the very end, but I think that's what he felt
like he had to do, and for the most part,
it set him apart. And it was definitely not what
his enemies were doing in the Civil War either. You know,
Pompey and his friends are talking about Saula did it,
why can't we? And they're talking about, you know, rounding
up the not even just their enemies, but even the
lukewarm and the Civil War cause. And this this actually
works very strongly against them. Like lots of people go
over to Caesar because they know that he's gonna he's
going to be easy on people who change sides. And
it allows him to have enough credibility to like refound
the state or put some stable things in place before
he's assassinated.
Speaker 1: So one of the things that I I learned from
your video I thought was particularly interesting is, and this
is kind of a stupid way to say it, but
it's like Caesar's first job, right, his first position of note.
And so I'm curious, could you explain that first role
and then the sort of bizarre situation that allows him
to enter politics after initially being barred from it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you mean like his first military duties or.
Speaker 1: No, no, no, as a as a priest.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, this is hilarious. So he gets.
Speaker 3: I think this is probably I'm not sure when this
relates to his marriage, but.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he gets.
Speaker 3: He gets picked for a priesthood, and and it's a
special kind of priesthood.
Speaker 2: He's d what's the name of it.
Speaker 3: It's escaping me for some reason, but essentially as as
a priest of this class. I'll look it up just
so remind myself. You are entrusted with a variety of
sacred rights. But what you can't do is, I mean
you have to, like if you clip your fingernails, you
have to collect your fingernails and bury them. If you
get your hair cut, you have to put the hair
in a special spot and you know, consecrate it, and
essentially gets this job that is like a kind of
golden cage. It's the flomendialis is what it's called. So
he's like a prelative Jupiter, and.
Speaker 2: You had to live.
Speaker 3: You couldn't leave the city under any circumstances. You couldn't
even for two nights, I think. You can't spend time
outside the city. You can't even see men under arms,
and you have to wear a funny hat. So it's
kind of like the people that gave him this priesthood,
we're either trying to keep him out of politics or
they're underestimating his ability. He's basically going to be, you know,
a priestly type, and Rome is not the kind of
place where every priesthood is like this, Right, he ends
up being the pontiffects Maximus and Pompy's an augur CISOs
and augur. So this is a very special, restrictive priesthood,
the flammin dalis. It's very prestigious, but completely politically powerless
and irrelevant.
Speaker 1: And so.
Speaker 3: Somehow I think it's it has to do with the
the laws of Senna being abolished under Sulah. I can't
remember how he gets out of it, but essentially he
sees an opportunity and some laws are overturned and he
gets out of the flammin dialis priesthood early on. But
it kind of sets him apart, and it I think
it kind of gives him this sense like that's how
it's kind of psychologizing, but that he's like different from
other people somehow.
Speaker 1: So perhaps the most we could say sort of famous
episode in Caesar's early life is where he is captured
by pirates. Where does that occur sort of in his
rise to power? And obviously what can we learn from
him from that? I guess from that episode?
Speaker 3: Right, Yeah, Well, in a Roman's twenties, you're kind of
in and out of military service. There's ten years from
age eighteen to twenty eight of Tirocinium. You're a tyro,
a junior officer, you're often in the tent of a
distinguished commander. And so there's various minor campaigns going on
in the Gan like cities that have sided with mithridates
and revolting, or there's a lot of pirates in the
Eastern Mediterranean. So this is before Pompey clears the seas
of pirates in sixty seven. That Caesar is out in
in this kind of wilder circumstance in the Eastern Mediterranean.
He's he's kind of in and out of He goes
to study at Rhodes with the famous rhetorician who Apollonius Molon,
who's also this guy that Caesar that Cicero studied with,
and so he's kind of a student student.
Speaker 2: Soldier, doing a little of this, doing a little of that.
Speaker 3: The pirates themselves are an interesting phenomenon because they are
very much a product of the chaos of the civil
wars and the Mithridateic wars that were started under Sullah.
You know, Roman tax collectors and Roman businessmen and Roman
governors are fanning out to the provinces exploiting the provincials.
Towns that side with Mithridates in the war get extreme punishment,
you know, they get colonized by the Romans. They and
there's all this like disorder and upheaval, and so a
lot of normal respectable people are turning to piracy. It's
a rampant problem and plenty of not so respectable people too.
So that's kind of the time that Caesar is is
about in the eastern Mediterranean, and he at one point
gets captured by these pirates. He's probably twenty three twenty five.
And the famous story goes that Plutarch tells the pirates
were looking for just easy ransoms and they they had
I forget, I forget. If it's like ten talents that
they were going to charge was a huge sum of
money to ransom Julius Caesar, and Caesars says that's too low.
You should double it, and so he kind of taunts
the pirates and raises his price, which is kind of funny,
but it's also like it's it's real, and that the
more you get ransomed for, the more you're valuable, the
more valuable you are. This is how the ancient Greeks
defined honor, like in the Homeric period, in the poems
of Homer, your team a your honor is literally it
literally means price in Greek, and it's it's a metaphor
drawn from drawn from commerce. And if like you can
actually quantify how much honor you have, it's literally how
much you get ransom for so Caesar knows this, you know,
and and he uses it and and the pirates up
their price. Caesar eventually gets ransom, but before that he
is kind of chumming up with them sort of. He
writes these compositions while he's you know, under the deck
in his quarters, and he comes up and he recites
his poems and his speeches to the pirates, and you know,
they laugh and he says, you all have terrible taste.
Someday I'm going to execute every single one of you.
And they say, ah, Caesar, we love this kid. So
he kind of has this rapport with him, and of
course he you know, when Caesar makes a promise, he
intends to actually make good on it. And when he
got ransomed, he hired a boat, got some guys together,
found the pirates where he knew they would be in
their little cove, arrests them, and he takes them back
to the governor of Bethynia, who kind of drags his feet,
and Caesar just kind of unilaterally takes them out of
prison and has them all crucified.
Speaker 2: So, you know, he has to keep good on his word.
Speaker 3: And I think you see this often and great men
of history and especially the Romans and Greeks. They're often
like they do some savage act of cruelty in their youth,
and they have that reputation of being extremely terrifying that
they can kind of be nice for the rest of
their career. And Caesar wasn't always nice, but he tried
to be. But that was one instance where he proved
that he was He was youth to be feared. And
of course he mercifully slit their throats before he actually
crucified them, so they actually got a quick death, but
the symbolic crucifixion was was gruesome and reserved for slaves
in the Roman period. So I think it gives you
a little flash of a lot of aspects of Julius Caesar.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a great it's a great story. I mean,
there are several things to it. Which is one, there's
sort of always an open discussion, right, how how alien
are the Romans, right when we peer back two thousand years,
how similar or different? And obviously, you know, human nature
being what it is, there are certain constants. But you know,
it is sort of interesting right that from our perspective,
is moderns crucifying a corpse is sort of like well,
what's the point, right, Okay, I guess it's sort of disrespectful,
but we don't have the same kind of emotional attachment
in that way, right, it doesn't. Obviously it's it's grizzly,
but it's nowhere near as significant. And also sidebar, I
do think it is kind of funny that Caesar's great
Mercy is like, oh, well, I am still going to
kill you, but you know, at least I'll slit your throat.
You know I'm no monster, right, I will still be
crucifying your corpse, but you know, I'm a magnetimous man.
Speaker 2: And one of the.
Speaker 1: Themes throughout this part of the story, it is the
sort of ineffectual and corrupt nature of the oligarchy. Right
in this specific instance, you see both the fact that
the local governor is way more worried about these prisoners' money,
right what he can get out of it than actually
ending the problem and the problem of piracy how that
will be solved is something else we see this oligarchy
sort of wrestle with. So if you could, could you
speak about, you know, as you mentioned earlier, how the
seas are made safe and how the oligarchy sort of
sought to keep that from happening.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's it's really interesting, and it does bring at
that point because well, the guy who does it, as
I mentioned earlier, is Pompy, who's already Pompy the Great
by that point. I think it's an epithet Salah gave him,
and it's basically pirates are raving, raging, ranging all over
the eastern Mediterranean and all over the Western Mediterranean too.
Speaker 2: They at some point.
Speaker 3: Capture the Consoles children from I think maybe they like
a consul like I, actually capture Roman magistrates in ransom
them from Italy. They burn the harbor at Ostia. I mean,
these guys are really out of control. And Pompy is
you know, you think of him in the later story
of Caesar as as his enemy and as the kind
of bastion of the oligarchy of the optimist, but at
that point in his career he's more of a populist.
He's like a moderate populist and kind of an opportunists.
He's always trying to get himself these great, glorious commands.
And so in sixty seven they're friends, Caesar and Pompey,
or at least on the same side against the establishment.
And the way that Pompey does the Pirate war is
he has to get himself voted this extraordinary bundle of
powers by a tribunary vote. And actually Pompey and Crassus
and the consulship of seventy renewed the office and the
powers of the tribunet which had been you know, hamstrung
by Sola, and exactly to open up the opportunity for
this kind of thing to happen again. And it was,
you could say, it was that they wanted some tool
by which they could aggrandize themselves. But clearly the republican
system was not working because essentially the pirates are all
over the Mediterranean, and any given Roman magistrate has only
a province, a provincia, like a sphere of duty that
is defined by a geographical unit, like you know, Italy
or Northern Italyst. Cisalpine, Gaul or Greece or Tunisia. And
they could the pirates who just like go to a
different place if a consul is sailing ships around the coastline,
and and so what Pompey has to do, or his
his plan at least was to get himself voted first
of all, massive financial powers. You know, he just has
like unlimited money to do whatever he needs. And he
has a remit of the entire sea and the coastline
up to I think fifty miles inland, which is you know,
most of the Roman Empire, most of the territory, because
all the interesting cities and all the wealthy places and
the civilized places are close enough to the coast. And
so nobody had ever had that much power in the
Republic before, even though it was there was a term
limit on it.
Speaker 2: I think he had three years.
Speaker 3: But with that power, he's able to clean up the
problem in three months, like it wasn't actually that crazy
heart of a problem. To solve you had to lock
down a number of bases and have both had this
kind of like amphibious capability where you have a huge fleet,
but you can also stay in armies to capture their
strongholds and smoke them out. And he also is very
merciful to a lot of the pirates. He resettles them
because he realized a lot of these people are sort
of respectable people who had nothing better, no better option.
But it goes to show that, I mean, the level
of intransigence from the optimim establishment resisting this kind of thing,
which was kind of kind of obviously what needed to
be done, I think was staggering. And there was a
like a riot breaks out in the Senate House when
they're proposing this policy, and somebody almost gets killed in
the Senate House because everybody's like, oh, this is going
to make Pompy a monarch, this is too much power. No,
this is against tradition, and you know, they're jealous among
other things. Maybe there's some legitimate concerns, but there's also
this powerful force of envy.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 3: The oligarchy, like any oligarchy, they are elitist in one
sense that they're you know, better than the common rabble,
but in another sense they're highly egalitarian and that they
they they there's a kind of tall poppy syndrome within
any oligarchy that they don't want anybody rising to too
high to kind of rule over them. And so that
spirit is definitely at play, you know, throughout the period
of Caesar's life, and especially like in this particular incident,
and Caesar is one of the few voices that speaks
up in favor in the Senate of Pompey's policy. It's
it's actually quite unpopular and they have to ram it
through the Popular Assembly and basically ignore the Senate, which
is legal, but you know, politically dangerous. The Senate can't
actually it's limited in its ability to actually veto policies.
But but Caesar is like one of the Loan supporters,
you know, early on allying with Pompey in a very
strong way because he wants he wants to kind of
break up this this stranglehold on politics that the that
the oligarchs have.
Speaker 1: So this will be a slightly cercuitous question, but I
probably I promise it actually ties in. So last week
I got stuck in an absolutely horrible airline situation. My
viewers have heard me complain about it a number of times.
I won't go into it. The point is I was
in desperate straits and so stuck on an airplane. What
do you do?
Speaker 2: Well?
Speaker 1: You watch the second Gladiator film, which is not very good,
although it is actually kind of an interesting film, not
at all for the reasons it's intended to be. But
one of the the interesting features of it is it's
sort of shot through with shoddy sort of a historical
republican propaganda. Yeah, and of course I don't mean like
Mitch McConnell. But the whole thing you know that this,
you know, this this character is is fighting for is
the dream of Rome, right, and the dream of Rome
is basically kind of like the European Union, you know,
this sort of like vaguely defined supernatural super national excuse me,
although that's probably a better term for it. Democracy. And
so I'm curious, right, to what degree do the sort
of closing years of the republic, to what degree is
it recognizable to us as a republic as some form
of representative democracy quote unquote, because you know, maybe in
a slightly more academic than you you will oftentimes see
sort of attacks on Caesar from sort of like the
Catonian perspective, right, the idea that you know, this, this
brute came in and and you know, blew up our
perfect democracy, blew up this system that was you know,
full of unique civic virtues. And in my mind, whatever
virtues that the Republic may have had at a previous
era were largely absent by this time. It had become,
as you know, most systems tend to effectively an out
and out oligarchy. So not to poison the well, Alex,
but I'm curious to get your thoughts.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so let's see.
Speaker 3: One of the ways that the oligarchy that the republic
functioned was there are magistracies that are elected for a
year long term, right Consul Preet Quester, Eedel and by
Caesar's day, they are extremely difficult, I mean really impossible
for outsiders to cash in on, especially Preet and Consul.
You can't really get elected unless you're from one of
the great families. Cicero was a rare exception, a new man.
I don't know if there's any new men between Marius
and Cicero. Cicero was Consulate sixty three and he only
got it because there was a kind of crisis of
the state and the Optimists saw him as the better
candidate than than Catalan.
Speaker 1: And so.
Speaker 3: The reason is so hard is because it's incredibly expensive.
Speaker 2: There are.
Speaker 3: Bribes to pay to voters, their bribes to pay to
political fixers.
Speaker 2: There are.
Speaker 3: You know, the oligarchs, these great families in the power
lead control huge swaths of voters as their clients, and
you know they they'll have their pound of flesh to extract,
and so it's it's it's corrupt in that sense though
there's a kind of there's a kind of like symbiotic
relationship between the rich, the bribing class, and the poor
bribed class because they actually like to get bribes. This
is like when they get to feel relevant to the
political system by you know, selling their votes essentially. And
so a guy like Cato, who is a Republican stalwart,
and it's kind of a rare case of the moral
compass figure among the oligarchy at that time, he's always
railing against some of these problems, you know, bribery and
in elections, he's always trying to go on anti bribery
crusades with limited success, and eventually he caves, which we
can talk about in a moment for on behalf of
somebody else. But like the reason that what makes the
bribery system work, Like why are they paying so much
for these offices? What's the ROI? Is it just prestige?
Sadly no, you are, especially as praetor and consul the
higher office holders. After your term as a city magistrate,
you were sent out to the provinces to be a
governor and a pro consul or appropriator and those are
where those opportunities one, two, three years is where you're
supposed to make all of your money back, and then
some by you know milking, bilking. You know, the provincials
take bribes to rule on cases in a certain direction.
Maybe there are some local discontents that you can you know,
smash and plunder or claim that there are local discontents
so you can just march your troops in and take
all their stuff, and these all kinds of ways that
you can make money. There's a few legal ways, but
it's mostly just you know, exploitation, and this is how
so much of the wealth of Empire comes into Rome
itself from these provincial governors making back their money, often
taking out gigantic loans from the money lenders that they
need to pay back. So, you know, that's great for
the city of Rome and its inhabitants, but they've got
tens of millions of people that are their subjects that
they've claimed that they're going to be benevolent justice, bringing rulers,
they are going to bring security and Roman law and stuff.
But it's a thin fig lea for what's really going
on in the eyes of many provincials, and certainly many
Romans themselves, and certainly it's not for the most part
the populace, the poor or they're middle class benefiting from
these provincial exploitations. It's just rich guys getting richer and
building bigger villas and having fish ponds and moving mountains
so they can have a little waterfall and their property
in Naples. And so these are, you know, the Republican system.
There's not even the pretense that it represents the provincials.
There is the pretense that it represents the Roman citizens,
you know, and that these people have voted for these
these figures. But it's mainly, you know, they're going to
do what they want to do, and they'll they'll serve
your interest in so far as they need to lock
you in for a vote, but Briber usually handles that,
and so it's it's not a very meritorious place. That's
one of the things that Caesar eventually becomes very recognized
for promoting talented outsiders. Look at his officer corps and gaul.
Look at the men that were his right hand people
when he returned from the Civil War. A lot of
them are not from great families. Maybe they're damaged goods.
There was some scandal in their youth, and they fell
from grace from the aristocracy. But for the most part,
Caesar was indifferent to your family name and your background
and how many consuls and praetors you have in your ancestry.
And this speaks really powerfully to a lot of people
that feel like a republican system should be one in
which the best men rise to the top and rule
of state, the most patriotic and so forth, rather than
just the richest and most opportunistic. And because of the
I think it's also a feature that we can relate
to today. Because so much of the attention of the
oligarchs is based on this year long cycle of elections,
it's not really easy to have long term vision in
solving these difficult problems like provincial exploitation or you know,
electoral reform. I mean, there's not really a stable class.
The Senate is supposed to be the balance against that
that that the Senate has some kind of like permanence.
If you if you could become a quester in Rome,
you you enter the Senate for the rest of your life.
But they don't have They have a lot of influence,
like soft influence, but not a lot of like real
constitutional power. And anyway, if you if you get into
the Senate, I mean, it's just like our Senate today,
Like there are senators and then there are senators, Like
some senators are more equal than others, and the power
brokers are going to make sure that the system stays
in place.
Speaker 2: They don't want their client networks disrupted.
Speaker 3: They don't want you know, the money lenders getting losing
out on.
Speaker 2: Their their their their bribe payouts.
Speaker 3: There's just so much inertia in the system, and there's
so many ways that the Senate that people, individuals in
the Senate can kind of fill a buster and gridlock
politics to make sure that nothing ever changes. And sometimes
it requires a man of cunning and force like Julius
Caesar to overturn that system.
Speaker 1: So I realized this is a very it's a big question.
So if it's overly vague, forgive me, But how do
we go from Caesar as sort of this you know,
up and comer in politics. Right obviously, you know he
has this sort of famous oration given at the death
of his is it his mother or his aunt?
Speaker 2: I think he did he did one for his mom too,
But we know more about the one about his aunt.
Speaker 1: Yeah, where he's sort of rehabilitating his his own family, right,
figures that were sort of controversial being brought back into
the light. And well, how do we go from there?
Where he's sort of up and comer obviously, you know
he's collaborating with with Cato. You know, he's both making
friends and enemies with his his prosecutions too, you know, uh,
conquering all of France, right, that's a big jump. So
how do we get there?
Speaker 3: Well, I think it I trace it back to this
moment that people might have heard of, probably have that.
I think I take it in a different way. So
this famous incident, he's a questered when he's thirty two
thirty three in Spain. So he's a chief of staff
or something for a provincial governor, papers guy, and he's
off duty touring around an ancient temple of Hercules at
Kadi's and ancient temples were kind of like museums. There's
a lot of artwork there. They're kind of enjoying the sites.
Maybe they burn a little incense to Hercules. But then
he's with his buddies and they move on and Caesar
kind of gets stuck in front of the statue of
Alexander the Great, which is, there's a statue of Alexander
the Great in there, who knows and his friends look
back and they say, Caesar, what are you crying? And
he says, do you think it's not a matter for
crying that? When Alexander was the king of so many
people's at my age, I yet have done no brilliant deed.
And Caesar, this is only one of two instances we
know that he cried. The other was when he was
presented with the head of Pompey after the Battle of
Farcelus in Egypt. But you know, a god, I don't
think that he's crying there because he's like jealous or something.
It's often taken in that direction, like it's a revelation
of his towering ambition. Maybe, But I think actually he's
probably having a moment where he realizes what he has
to do, like what he's supposed to do that even
though all of his career up to that point has
been very promising, Metal of honor, the Pirate incident, He's
prosecuted a lot of corrupt people in Rome. Already in
his twenties, he's made a name for himself. He has
just been screwing around his whole life. You know, it's like,
what have I even done? I gotta get serious, And
so I see that as a kind of realization. He
comes back early from from his tour of duty as
a quester to run for another office, and basically to
kind of fast forward how he really gets in a
position where it starts to work for him is he
gets elected to the preadership as early as he can,
which is thirty six, thirty eight, it's sixty three, and
he's kind of coming out into politics in a really
really public way, kind of putting his flag in the dirt.
Is in the Catalinarian conspiracy, this is you know, I
did a whole series on this, but you know.
Speaker 2: There was essentially a.
Speaker 3: Coup plan underway by this disgraced senator Cataline, the conspirators.
Cataline flees the city after Cicero presents him with damning
evidence in the Senate, and he goes and joins an
army that they're planning to march on Rome with. And
they have guys in the city that are going to
throw up in the gates and set fire to a
bunch of buildings and murder a bunch of senators, and
Cicero again he's console. He manages to round up the conspirators,
present them too with damning evidence, and they confess to
their crimes in the Senate, and the decision is now
put before the Senate should the consul execute these men
without trial? The case that Cato makes is who who's quester?
Speaker 2: At that point?
Speaker 3: The case of Cato makes he's a tribune anyway, is
that he is that the state is a great risk.
We don't know how many other conspirators there are. There's
an army, we've we've just been told a day's journey away.
This is no time to dottle and be soft. Let's
execute these guys. And Caesar argues against execution. He says,
it's uh, you know, it's unprecedented to execute a Roman
citizen without trial. There's a due process for these things.
Granted they could confessed, but the better thing to do,
and maybe even the worst punishment, would be to imprison
them in because Romes don't do like long lifetime incarceration,
and you know, send them off to various cities around Italy.
And and Cato eventually wins that argument and they execute
the conspirators are executed. But Caesar has sort of taken
a stand because a lot of the people that a
lot of the Roman people sympathized with the conspirators. Basically,
they were populists who wanted to cancel debts, who wanted
to break up the oligarchy. But Cataline was not a visionary.
He was an opportunist, and he he didn't really have
what it took to make this a good thing instead
of a violent, opportunistic bad thing.
Speaker 2: But he stood for things that people really cared about.
Speaker 3: And so Caesar knows this, and basically from Catiline a
few months later being killed in battle and these conspirators
being executed later that night, he takes on the mantle
of the champion of the people. I think it's a
really important moment for him.
Speaker 2: People thought.
Speaker 3: Cicero said he had evidence that both Caesar and Crassis
were actually in on the plot, but managed to keep
their hands clean. Crosses is Caesar's political patron at this stage,
and Cato made various insinuations in his speech against Caesar.
Caesar is he's working with them. You know, He's not
able to really come out and say it because the
evidence isn't quite there, and he doesn't want to expose himself,
but everybody kind of thinks that Caesar's got something to
do with this whole revolutionary thing, but he always has deniability.
But then on Cato kind of marks Caesar as a
tyrant on the make, as somebody who wants to destroy
the republic, and Caesar just starts pushing harder, and he
goes off to his pleadership in Spain. And we could
get to the triumvir in the SEC. But I think
it's worth contemplating that example. I think it's not a
very well appreciated moment in Caesar's career that he really
was friendly with some some dangerous men already.
Speaker 2: So here's my thought, Alex.
Speaker 1: I normally try to keep these to an hour, and
my general rule of thumb is I'd always rather do
two episodes where we have enough time, then one long
one where we rush at the end. So I'll have
to have you back soon, because I really do want
to discuss the tram for it, right, That's where things
get really fun. If I can offer perhaps a brief suggestion.
I don't know if you have merch, but have you
seen those those yard signs that say, like in this house,
we believe. You know, if you could just you know,
remake one of those and sell it, it just says
like Kato is a nerd. You know, you can kind
of go from there. I would buy it.
Speaker 2: Cato was a cuck, Tompy was a week Wing.
Speaker 1: Just like throw some of the originals on there, like
love is Love, just to keep people get Yeah, this
has been fascinating and like I said, I'll have to
have you on again soon because I have done what
I tend to do, which is bring someone on to
discuss something and then spend so much time talking about
other interesting things we never actually get to it. So man,
where could people find you?
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'd love to come back, and you know, just
wind me up like a doll and I'll just keep
talking about Caesar for you know, so the end of
my days. Cost of Glory is available wherever you get
your podcasts, Spotify, I've published a lot of the full
audio set of the Caesar series is finally done. I've
got one more episode, a kind of reflection episode what
does it mean? That should should be launching soon. But
that's all on like Spotify or Apple podcasts. But I
have started doing videos and kind of getting through the
backlog of the recent episodes so you can find up
to this time of recording.
Speaker 2: Just did.
Speaker 3: Civil War Part two, so I did two biography. I
usually do three biography episodes per figure, and you know
part one, two, three. I did part one and two
of Caesar, and then I did an interlude, a three
part special series on the Civil Wars because he wrote
the most important source on the Civil Wars, his Civil
War commentaries. And then I just returned to part three
of his biography where you know, the IDEs of March happened.
That's all available on Spotify, but it goes up to
part two of the Civil War right now on YouTube
with some maps and some you know, famous paintings and
statues and some some b roll. But yeah, you can
also find me at Cost.
Speaker 2: Of Glory on Twitter x wherever you get your Twitter well.
Speaker 1: And like I said, I cannot recommend that series enough
as someone who knows just a little bit about the classics,
it's always great again have three hours at minimum right
of additional context because again right, like I can read
the primary sources, and in some cases I have, but
you know, the advantage of having someone who knows this
back to front it can't be overstated, so I highly
recommend that you should check it out. As far as
my stuff, The Jay Burton Show available on Apple, Spotify, YouTube,
anywhere you listen to podcasts. This is what I do now,
and if you want to support me, you can throw
me a few bucks a month on Patreon, Substack or
gum road. The advantage there is no ads, right, you
get the episodes early and ad free. The most consistent
feedback I get on this show is wow, those ads
are annoying. Yeah, I know, I get it fair enough,
but I got to pay my mortgage somehow. Alternately, you
can check out our sponsor, Foxinton's Coffee, who makes very
good coffee. I had it this morning and if you
use code Jay Burden, I think it's fifty or no burden.
No Jay on that it is fifteen percent off, so
not a bad deal. You drink coffee anyway, Alex, Again,
this was a ton of fun, man. I'm looking forward
to that next conversation.
Speaker 2: Let's do it. Jay talk soon.
Speaker 1: Everyonet home, keep your head up, good night. What