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