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Speaker 2: Thank you.
Speaker 1: I want to welcome everyone back to the Pekinganas Show
by popular demand. Alex Petkas is back. How are you doing, Alex?
I'm doing great, pete yourself. Good good, And I think
that I'm not lying about that. I think that you
told me that after your first appearance on the show,
a lot of people reached out to you when they
has some kind words.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you've got a great audience. And uh, you know,
I think talking about these issues about you know, the
corruption of academia and ancient heroes seems seems to hit
a key. And so it's it's a pleasure to be
back and to dive a little deeper into some of
the stuff we talked about.
Speaker 1: All right, let's do it. You know, we were trying
to come up with subjects and we are literally seven
days away from the most important election in our lifetime trademark.
So you had the you had the idea that you
were looking at elections in the past and especially in
the Roman Empire, and you came upon pretty much one period.
And I think that once I was reading what you
wrote this thread that you that you did on Twister
or it looks like it'd be perfect to start talking
about this subject of elections and how often in history
when you looked at elections there was the same kind
of blankety blank stuff happening that caused people to go
what the hell's going on here and to cause real problems,
So start wherever you want.
Speaker 2: Go ahead, Yeah it was. The thread was on yesterday Monday.
In the late Roman Republic, legal tampering with voting roles
caused the Great First Civil War. This happened by sudden
massive additions of new citizens by legislative fiat, and people
seem to relate to that a little bit. This is
not a popular take on the origins of the First
Roman Civil War. It's you kind of wonder why that is.
I think this is a story that is told from
this perspective of a clash of two personalities, more often
Guius Marius and just Cornelius Solla. But even so it's
not really taken as it's not taken in the context
of our political situation today so much. A lot of
people are interested in this idea of you know, is
Trump Caesar and blah blah blah. But I think that
the earlier periods of the breakdown of the Republic, beginning
with the Grachy and the one twenties and one thirties BC,
leading up to especially Guius Marius. I think Guius Marius,
the populist politician too. They're a lot more parallels to
today than in the time of Julius Caesar in my opinion.
So yeah, well, maybe it makes sense to kind of
start from the bigger context if that, Like I was
thinking of diving into the Grachy a little bit and
the problems that Rome was facing that I think are
interesting for us to reflect on today, and then we
can see where things lead to hopefully build up to
the First Roman Civil War, which happened in the eighties
bcure ahead. So the so here's an interesting point of
comparison with with today. I there's this passage from the
Life of Tiberius Gracus by Plutarch. It kind of sets
the stage of Tiberius Gracus is this populist politician who
realizes there's massive discontent, there's great wealth and equality, and
he wants to do something about it. And I'll read
you this passage from Plutarch's Life of Gracus, and that
we could talk about who Gracus is in the background
of it. But so here's Plutarch talking. He says of
the territory which the Romans won in war from their neighbors,
a part they sold and a part they made common
land is ager publicus in Latin, and they assigned it
to for occupation of the poor and indigen among the citizens,
on payment of a small rent into the public treasury.
And when the rich began to offer larger rents and
drove out the poor, a law was enacted forbidden forbidding
the holding by one person of more than five hundred
acres of land for a short time. This enactment gave
a check to the rapacity of the rich and was
of assistance to the poor, who remained in their places
on the land which they had rented and occupied the
allotment which each held from the outset. But later on
the neighboring rich men on summarise here they're inventing fictitious personages. They're,
you know, at first having this legal ruse so they
can capture public land. And then they eventually just dropped
the ruse and say we own this land, and then
the poor get ejected from their land. Continuing on with
Plutarch here no longer they did. They show themselves eager
for military service and neglected the bringing up of children,
so that soon all Italy was conscious of a dearth
of free men and was filled with gangs of foreign
slaves by whose aid the rich cultivated their estates, from
which they had driven away the free citizens. There are
various attempts to solve this problem, including those of Gracchus
that Plutarch mentions here. But here he quotes Gracchus's Tiberius,
Gracchus's brother Guius, Gracchus who's a little younger, and he says,
but his brother Guius, And a certain pamphlet has written
that as Tiberius was passing through Tuscany on his way
to Numantia, on his way to Spain, and observed the
earth of inhabitants in the country, and that those who
tilted soil or tendant's flocks there were barbarian slaves. He
then first conceived the public policy, which was the cause
of so many of countless ills to the brothers, And
so what do you have in this what are we
looking at? Here? The year is like one thirty four BC,
and Rome has been conquering most of the Mediterranean in
the past century, and the two twenties, two teens, two
oughts they were fighting this great long war with Hannibal,
the Carthaginians, the Punic Wars, a second Punic War, which
once they defeated Hannibal finally, and there was a lot
of warring in Italy. They had a lot of Italian
allies turn on them. They finally defeat Hannibal, they start
to control directly Africa, which is the state Tunisia and Algeria,
sort of the northern coast of Africa. And they already
controlled Sicily only for a couple of decades at that point,
and Spain. So then over the course of the first
half of the second century BC, the one nineties through
one forties, they conquer the rest of a lot of
the Eastern Mediterranean, Greece, Macedonia, they win these great wars
against Antiochus of of the King of Syria, Greek King
of Syria, and so you have the situation where Rome
is increasingly fighting these foreign overseas wars. Their military system
was not really designed for this. It's sort of built
around this idea of the citizen soldier who goes and
fights a campaign during the summer, and then he goes
back home to his fields in the winter to do
what he needs to do, sharpen his sides, and that
kind of thing sickles, and then you've got to see
soldiers are away from their farms now their peasants. For
the most part, they're living away for like up to
six years, just really abandoning their life and their farms.
They're becoming a professional soldiery. It's taking a lot of
toll on the middle classes, the kind of peasant, yeoman farmers.
And Rome is alllo so drawing more and more heavily
on its allies. So throughout Italy, Rome has allies. They
call them the soki e it's the Latin word for allies.
And over the course of previous entries they conquered Italy
brought a lot of these people into subjection. You know
people in Tuscany, and you know Picena, Umbria and to
the south and Campania, Leucania, Samnium. All these regions are
filled with different Italian cultures. Some of them are close
to the Romans. The Tuscans speak a different language that's
completely unrelated to Latin. Some of them are kind of
latin Oid Italic languages, but most of them are not citizens.
Most of them are kind of confederates of the Romans.
They'll fight in their wars and they get some of
the plunder, but most of the plunder in these wars
is going to the hands of the rich, of the commanders,
and of the also the businessmen who are winning these
lucrative contracts to build ships, to supply weapons, to supply forage,
and you know all the gear, winning mining concessions. You know,
if the Romans conquer land in Spain, there's a lot
of silver minds there that are very lucrative to to,
you know, to exploit. And you know, wealth is getting concentrated.
Capital is flowing in also in the form of slaves,
and so you have a situation where the elites are
getting richer. And Rome has this policy of that Plutarch
mentions of after you win a war or you conquer
some territory, some of that territory you designate as a
possession of the Roman people ager publicus public land. And
what that's supposed to do is be a bank out
of which you can reward loyal service of soldiers by
giving them land. There's a couple of ways that they
do this. Plutarch refers to one here, which is basically
the state kind of retains tidal to the land and
they just rent it out, so you get a kind
of more or less permanent tendency that you can pass
on to your children, and you give the state some
nominal sum the vectigaal, which is like a land tax,
and then the rest of it you keep for yourself.
So it's kind of like ownership. In some cases they
just give you outright ownership. It just depends on the
local situation and whatever land commissioner that's there on the
spot decides to do. But in agriculture, and ancient agriculture especially,
there's a really big difference between subsistence farming and cash
crop farming and kind of farming or rather agricultural activity
for for profit and and the you know, the economic
difference there is really interesting. But before we get to that,
the symbolic significance of owning land it's just hard to underestimate.
For the Romans, you know, this is how you really
know yourself to be a free man, that you have
land that is yours, that your ancestral tombs are on,
that there's an emotional connection to land in a way
that it's just hard to imagine. Like there's the family.
We have this notion I think in the West now
of a family business that you might pass on to
your kids, but you know, land is just so much
more symbolically significant, like biologically significant, as kind of giving
you an identity and a standing in society and freedom
and kind of self reliance. So the people that own
this land are supposed to be you know, country gents
doing a combination of subsistence agriculture and maybe a bit
of profit. You know that they can buy their wife
nice things or have a few kids, whatever the case
may be. But since so much capital is flowing in,
I think this is where it gets really interesting. You've
got all these slaves coming in from from you know,
they're the part of the booty of war, and there's
piracy escalating in the Mediterranean at this time. So the
pirates are just capturing slaves and selling them to these
hungry Roman slave markets. And it's because coming cheaper to
buy slaves, and there's a lot of capital among the
rich from for the reasons we discussed, and so the
rich are able to to basically either buy this agri
publicus or you know, acquire it through sometimes legal sometimes
illegal means. There's a there's a scholar that talks about
a really interesting quote that I'll I'll give you here.
One scholar describes a situation in southern Italy as wild
West cattle barons and armed slaves, armed slaved hands raiding
herds and homesteads in the true spirit of Texas and Colorado.
We have evidence of this from a speech of Cicero.
This is kind of what's going on in some of
these places. They're ranchers that are you know, it's it's
very lawless in some of these areas. It's kind of
the strong man wins. And not only are they strong
and that they're able to capture lands through sometimes underhanded means,
but they have the capital to turn these lands into
cash crops, so you know, investing in all of presses
and storage and buying slaves so you can work this land.
And the profiteering of this the countryside is becoming more
and more pronounced, and so the poor kind of getting
either shoved out or bought out. And this is a
problem that a lot of people have heard of. This
idea of the Latin fundia, these like wide vast landholdings
of the Roman elite. Probably in this period. It's not
necessarily huge consolidated landholdings because economies of scale don't necessarily
they hit a cap pretty quickly in pre modern agriculture.
But you know, they have landholdings scattered across Italy, and
it's more an issue of like, they have the capital
because they're the rich living in Rome, and they can
afford to hire you know, slave masters and professional farm
managers and all this stuff, and then they can afford
to ride out a bad year and they have access
to credit that just a subsistence farmer has no chance
against these guys, right, I think that this is really
an underappreciated aspect of the decline of the republic. So
all this money is coming in, right, and it's coming
in unequally, but it's also incentivizing certain behaviors that used
to not be so incentivized by the Roman political system,
to wit merchandising merchant like becoming you know, businessmen instead
of military commanders or statesmen. Like the elites are suddenly
faced with this prospect of making huge profits and something
you know, they're they're inclined to see that justify that
in terms of well, this is what it takes to
get ahead in politics in Rome. Rome their moral system
does not incentivize business businessman like, there's a kind of
a prejudice against money making as such like the Senate,
for example, members of the Senator are not supposed to
be lending money interest. It's seen as dirty. But you know,
you can find a guy that is maybe not a senator,
he's an equestrian. You know, you give him and trust
him with some money and he'll he'll lend it out
for you. There's ways to get around the rules because
it's just very profitable. And you know what, it's really
honorable in Rome is war, in politics is lawmaking and
statesmanship and leading armies. But in in the face of
all these opportunities, we start to see a kind of
merchantification of the wealthy really in the second century, and
it kind of accelerates, i think toward the end of
the century. It's hard to quantify this, but like anecdotally,
this is an impression that you get when you get
to the life of Gaius Marius, and we'll get to
in a second. So there's another challenge that the state
is facing that Plutarch mentions here is they're having trouble
recruiting soldiers. Right these soldiers are getting these long tours
of duty, they're not able to have children as effectively,
they're not able to kind of have a family hearth
like to produce the soldiers that are going to fight
the wars, these increasingly far away foreign long term wars.
These you could call them forever wars, you know, because
there's people that profit whether you win or lose, or
whether it takes one year or ten years. They're going
to profit more if it takes ten years, if you're
if you're selling them the ships and the and the
armor and so forth. So uh Rome is having trouble
recruiting soldiers for its armies, and so Tiberius Gracchus kind
of comes into this situation. He sees an opportunity and
I can pause for questions. Just interrupt me if if
if any of that, if you have any reflections on that.
Speaker 1: I will I will keep going. I made some notes,
but not ready yet.
Speaker 2: So here's where Gracus comes in. Tiberius Gracchus, he's one
of two brothers, the Gracchi brothers. The famous Grachy Guias
is the younger one. They are top aristocrats. They're blue
blooded nobles. Tiberius Gracchus's father of the same name was
consul twice. He was a censor, which is the highest,
most dignified office in the state. He had two triumphs
like you know, military glory triumphs and the highest honor
that any Roman can hope to attain. He's widely respected.
Tiberius Gracchus marries the daughter of This is a sign
of his status of Scipio Africanus the elder, the guy
who defeated Hannibal, like the most kind of noble of
the noble aristocrats of his day. Tiberius Gracchus marries his daughter,
the famous Cornelia of the Gracchi, who's a fascinating woman
worth studying in her own right. She has thirteen kids
and only three survive, you know, gives you a taste
of how tough it was to be a woman in
those days. And their sister that you know, two brothers
and the sister survived to adulthood. Tiberius and Guius Gracus's
sister marries Skippio Emilianus. Skippio Africanus the Younger, who is
the guy who conquered, finally conquered Carthage, sacked Carthage in
one forty six. So these are super super elite guys,
and so Tiberius gracus Is is one of the nobles
and so he sees this, this discontent as an opportunity
to build a different kind of career. And he's credited
with being one of the most creative well, I would
credit him with being one of the most creative statesmen. Certainly,
his his innovation and populism was very decisive in Roman history.
So what he figured out was, there's this office of
the Tribune of the plebs excuse me in Roman, in
the Roman constitution, that is a kind of a it's
a legal office primary, it's a civil office that there's
ten of them every year, depending on the period that
you're looking at. And the tribune has this ight to
call a popular assembly and to propose laws to this
popular assembly. There's there's a couple of ways that you
can pass a law at Rome. One of them is
through a kind of wealth and status ranked voting system.
I believe it's called the Centurion Assembly, where you know,
the rich people's votes count for more basically. But another
way is through the tribune assembly, through the it's called
the Conchillean Plebis, the Council of the Plubs of the
people of Rome, which is not weighted by wealth. It's
just anybody can vote and if you get a majority
your law passes, you're supposed to refer your legislation to
present it to the Senate as an advisory body, to
kind of get their approval, because if you don't, even
though it's legal, you can face assive political retribution. They
can end your career. You know. The Senate is an
informal body of the most powerful men of the city,
and they can make your life really miserable. So there's
there's strong incentives not to go against the Senate because
tribunes only serve for a year at a time. But
Gracchus is so elite and so well connected that he
sees well if I build up enough political capital, I
can resist the Senates. And this needs to be done
because our people are suffering. One of the consequences of
the increasing dispossession of the land by the elites and
the rich in Italy is a lot of these people
are coming to Rome looking for jobs, having nothing to do,
getting recruited into armed gangs. You know, there's a lot
of volatility. So if I can solve this problem, even
against the Senate's wishes, I'll be considered a great statesman
and I'll do something great for Rome, and certainly it'll
help me in my political career. You know, this guy
wants to be consul one day. He wants to be
a censor like his dad. He wants to lead armies.
He's a very competent soldier. He wins some decorated honors
in war. He's a great ambassador. But I think he's
around thirty years old when he becomes Tribune of the
Plubs and with this radical agenda to solve this problem
of wealth and equality. And the way that he does
it is he proposes an agrarian law that essentially is
to set up a commission of a few select men
to go around throughout Italy figuring out who's dispossessed locals
of public land illegally. You know, they have this law
on the books that you're not supposed to own more
than three hundred yugura, which is about five hundred ugura,
which is about three hundred acres of land. Nobody's supposed
to own more than that much of the public land
that was distributed as a part of the war booty.
So he's going to go and try to clean up
these the Land Register of Rome and redistribute it to
you know, deserving men and to get some of these
these you know, volatile young men out of the streets
of Rome and get them back on the farms and
get them making families and stuff. And what ends up happening.
Long story short, Well, I'll tell the story. So basically,
he he manages to pass his his agrarian legislation, but
the closer he gets to it, the Senate throws up
more and more resistance. They one of the interesting things
that they do is they put forth a series of
kind of anti populist tribunes. So you know, anybody can
any any not anybody, but most of the nobility are
eligible to run for the office of tribune of the plubs.
There's patrician families that are technically disallowed from this and
they're super elites, but they can find a guy. So basically,
the Senate will put forward their own well I call
I say, the Senate, but let's let's call them the
the the establishment. Because there's there's dissidence in the Senate.
The establishment can put forward a candidate, like the guy's
name is Octavius, and Octavius was a friend of Gracis actually,
but the Senate kind of got to him and they're like,
we need somebody to stop Gracis because a lot of
these guys are are in on it, right, like they
a lot of the Senate are the very men who
own some of these wide swaths of augur publicus, who
are profiting off of the inequality, and they're gonna they're
gonna get they're gonna lose out, they're gonna have their
land dispossessed, or you know, maybe they'll be forced to
sell it at a at a bad price. And so
they try to stop him through this guy Octavius, who
tries to veto his laws and propose countermeasures, and eventually
Gracchus manages to get him stripped of his tribunet by
a tribunary law. I should say that, you know, when
he passed his agrarian law, he did it against the
Senate's wishes, right like he proposed it to the Senate.
They're like, hell no, and he says, I'm going to
propose it anyway. He gets the votes that he needs.
There's scuffles in the forum. It's kind of ugly, but
he manages to get it done and then he you know,
long story short, he strips Octavius of his office, and
he's running for a re election is tribune, both to
continue his legislative program and put a few more nails
in the edifice when he unfortunately loses his election as tribune.
Because Roman law, Roman voting practice is involved, you have
to be present in Rome to to like vote. You can't.
There's no absentee voting right. And a lot of these
guys that he's championing are too busy out in the field.
It's summertime, you know, they're they're they're not rich men,
and they don't have the leisure to come to Rome,
and so a lot of his base isn't actually able
to vote. He loses on the office of the Tribune
itt and so he's trying to pass some emergency legislation
before his term expires, and things are just like heating
up and heating up in Rome. And in this one moment,
the one day, there's all these omens that Plutarch recounts,
but the Senate is is sort of ready for him,
and they have armed their slaves with weapons under their cloaks,
under their togas, and he senses they sense a you know,
he in his associates sense that there's gonna be some
hit on him, probably, so they arm themselves too, and
there's they're kind of getting ready for a face off
in the forum, and in this key moment he's communicating
is the way the story goes with somebody who is,
you know, across the mob and can't hear his voice,
and so he makes this gesture that I'm I'm arming
myself because there's a danger against my life and he
points to his head, which I guess is sort of
like the gesture of you know, we we run our
finger across our necks like I'm about to you know,
get executed or something cut off my head, but in
the way in the Roman gesture is like you point
at the top of your head. And then somebody shouts
he's he's asking for a crown. He wants to become tyrant.
And this message is immediately passed to the Senate and
they're like, all right, that's it. That's all we needed,
that's all we needed to see. This guy is clearly
a demagogue trying to become a tyrant. This is and
that's the message that they get out. It's like a
fake news message, right, like typical kind of elite tactics
you just spend the story in completely the opposite direction,
you know, very fine people, and so and so the
Senate marches out. They they they vote the sinatas consultant
ultimum the the declaration of martial law. They order the
count the consoles to not let any damage come to
the state. This is the kind of formula for the
declaration of martial law. And they march out, bust up
the benches in the Senate House, they make clubs out
of them, and they basically mob Gracchus and his men
and they beat them to death. And it's they many
of his supporters. There's blood running through the forum. They
throw his body in the Tiber and and so that's
the end of Gracus. Sound sounds just as bad as
January sixth, right, Yeah, just to just a patriotic demonstration. Right. So,
I think that this is a really interesting instance of
something that's Friedrich gundolfh talks about in his biography of Caesar,
The Mantle of Caesar. That could read a quick couple
of sentences passage here. So he says, the worst anger
of the yunkers, you know, the the kind of the nobles,
is aroused less by the mob and its tribunes who
thunder or mutter among them, than by the traitorous son
of their own race, who veils himself of the masses
through pride or intellect to achieve a higher level than
that of the great or who frees the masses through
a sense of justice. And I think this is really
you know, very and Plutarch even says that a lot
of the violence was motivated less by Gracchus's policies than
by a personal hatred of the man, and Goodolf kind
of nails it there. It's it's the trump phenomenon. It's
the RFK phenomenon. Like the person from your class who
betrays you to champion the people is the most hated
of all. He's the enemy within. And you see this
really like in spades with with Tiberius Gracus.
Speaker 1: Oh, there was a lot there.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: One of the things that you mentioned, they're talking about
people having property and having their the tombs of their
ancestors there reminded me of the book The Ancient City and.
Speaker 2: How I.
Speaker 1: Covered that buck on my podcast. And I have people
contact me and go, that's not real history, and it's like,
I don't know, it's it seems like the more you
read yeah, the more that uh that it actually was.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, who stilled the Kulange classic classic work.
Speaker 1: I never try to pronounce that name because I'm gonna
screw that up so bad.
Speaker 2: Yeah. No, it it's very similar seminal work and still
quoted kind of in the footnotes sometimes as a as
a novelty by classes is today. But the brilliant work
of synthesis.
Speaker 1: So when you take into consideration that people can be
awarded land, and it sounded like more of I don't
know if you're familiar with the concept of usafruct, but
it almost seems like that that that would be even
closer to use offer is actually still on the books
in Louisiana. Strangely enough, it seems like being awarded land
would be something that obviously would be something that would
motivate the citizen. But it would seem to me like
the more you had people coming in, especially for service,
the more you had people coming in from the outside
and you allow them to serve and get all the
benefits of a native born Roman, you're gonna have the
same problems. You're gonna have worse problems than you have
now because now not only are they in your land,
but now they're also tied to your land? So did
they allow did they allow people like merks who came
in from other places if they served, would they allow
them to have the same benefit.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is something that seems to be happening that
it's not just the Roman citizen oligarchs who are taking
this land kind of by use of you know, they're
just occupying it and starting to invest in it and
you know, put put family tombs on it and just
sort of, you know, act like it's their own such
that if you were to challenge them on it, they
could say, hey, look we I spent you know, one
hundred thousand dollars on this new barn. How can you
say this isn't my land? You know here there's my
grandfather lying in the field there. How can you say
this is not my land? A lot of that's going on,
But it's also going on with with the local Italian elites.
You know a lot of the merchant classes that are profiteering.
It's not just Romans, like there's ways for non citizen,
non Roman citizen, but it's like well connected, enterprising Italians
to take a lot of this land and that's another
source of resentment too, for for the kind of Roman
citizen mob that is increasingly coming to Rome hat in
hand looking, you know, complaining about being edged out of
their property. So it's a big issue and it's really
thorny to undo a lot of this stuff once it happens.
You know, it's like some of these people either it's
true or they're just claiming it. But you know it's
like I inherited this land from my father, this is
my patrimony. How can you say that this isn't my land?
Because it has been going on for generations, right, So
it's quite a thorny problem that you know, Gracis may
maybe underestimated how difficult it would be to do. And
yet after he is killed, the Land Commission goes on
and his brother serves on it, and they do they
do some of this work for sure. Yeah, fascinating problem.
Speaker 1: Well, just on a macro scale, a lot of the
things that you mentioned. It just seems to be a
problem of empire. Yeah, throughout history. I mean we're going
through it now. I mean, anybody who wants to say
we're not an empire is out of their mind. Military
bases in how many countries. But yeah, it seems that
once you get to like monarchy's one man rule, you
seem to avoid some of this because it's very hard
for one man rule to actually become an empire. I mean,
we see that later, we see where Spanish Empire obviously
British Empire now ours. And it just seems like if
you want to know where your problems are going to happen,
all you have to do is look at the past.
There's no there's no solving if you're going to repeat
these problems, you can't can't be so filled with hubris
to think that you you can somehow get past them.
And it seems like it's just making the same mistakes
over and over.
Speaker 2: Well, you know, and the American Empire as it grew
in the twentieth century offered a lot of similar incentives,
you know, like the there's a ton of money to
be made in foreign contracts. You topple a state, who
who gets to come in and do the development work
and sell them the cranes and the steam shovels, and
and on and on, and you know, oil and gas contracts.
People have definitely commented on this kind of mergentification of
the American elite through the American Empire, the kind of
profiteering occupational class, right, and it's I think there's a
really interesting parallel too with anxieties that we have today
about you know, black rock going and buying up single
family homes and and you know, when you have access
to capital, when the elites have access to a lot
of capital, low interest rates because you're kind of able
to print money because you have the standard fiat currency
that's used around the globe, it gives you this incredible
power of capital that the people who are well connected
and know how to use it will use and they
end up driving up housing prices or at least accelerating
something that is happening through regular market forces because of
the availability of capital. So, you know, there are some
really striking resemblances with particularly on the on the issue
of like can people afford their own house, can people
afford their own land, their own kind of symbolic place
in the world to say this is mine and this
is where I'm going to raise my family, and this
is where we're going to have kind of our identity
based you know, it's it's incredibly powerful, and it's incredibly
powerful politically, you know, and so I think that we're
seeing some of that today. Perhaps, I mean, we'll see
what happens in seven days. But this is a problem
that seems to really to really activate ambitious young men,
you know, or young men feeling like they're they're missing
out on opportunities because I think having land is a
status symbol much more for a man than for a woman,
even though it is that it's in it. So, you
know what, I just saw thirty nine percent down from
forty eight percent, forty nine percent young men declaring Republican
in just just since twenty twenty. I think it's like
it's like a landslide of young men. I think this
is possibly connected to that.
Speaker 1: I don't I don't remember if you went over this,
but who could.
Speaker 2: Vote, right, male citizens, which would have been I'm not
sure at this time if that's a minority of the
men living in Rome. It's certainly a minority of the people, right.
But the way that they so you have, like anybody
can vote in a tribunary popular assembly, certain offices are
elected in that way, like the Tribune of the plubs
is elected in a kind of everybody gets to vote,
and I think they The way that they do it
is they like, once they reach a majority, the voting stops.
And so if if the people that are voting, like,
the order that you vote in matters a lot. In
so the tribunary popular assemblies the more democratic body. Let's
say those tribes the kind of units that vote together.
I believe that they're assigned by lot, so just it
kind of random who who votes first. But in the
centurion assemblies, there's a there's a fixed order, like the
first class citizens vote first always, and those are your
membership in those tribes is largely determined by your wealth
class tho'se some you can inherit your slot in the
voting roles from your father, so it's it's a little
bit more complicated than that. But yeah, so voting is okay.
So it's those that's the basic structure. But again, you
know some of these people live in you know, Naples
or Luca or you know, way outside of Rome, and
it's it's kind of it's not guarantee that they're going
to show up for an election, right, especially if they
don't care about the candidate. It's the time of harvest,
so it's really biased toward toward really wealthy people and
the city mob. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Sam, Now everybody who piles into the city, Yeah, who
could serve?
Speaker 2: Yeah, interesting question. This takes us a little bit ahead
into the life of Guias Marius. But basically, there is
a wealth qualification for being able to enroll in the army.
You know, it was seen in the early Republic. It
was seen as a privilege. You were expected to supply
your own armor, supply your own horse, if you're an equestrian,
supply your own much of your own equipment. I think
that they would. The state would pay for your food.
But maybe you know, if you wanted to have a
nice tent, I think you'd be expected to supply that.
There's all kinds of ways in which the army is,
you know, the soldier's self finance, and so there's there's
a real and for that reason or or or it's
based on this assumption rather that you know, if you
win a war, you get honor, and you get some
of sharing the plunder, and you get you get paid
for being a soldier. Four hundred and fifty sister ses
a year. You know, that's that's a living wage, and
then some for sure, So so but this change is
actually as a result of the increasing difficulties of recruiting
troops for massive foreign wars. And it's Gaius Marius in
the next generation after the Gracchi who who changes that,
who makes it? Who opens it up to basically anybody
who could roll Well, theoretically any citizen can run for
any office as today. But this is why I think
the nobles have some kind of justification for their profiteering,
because it's incredibly expensive to mount a successful campaign, especially
for the higher offices. You know, you've got to you've
got to put on dinners for your supporters. You've got
to pay all these people to go around and say
vote for Tiberius. You've got to pay people to go
out into the country to gin up supporters. You know,
you might have to pay people to come into Rome
to offer to pay their expenses if they'll show up
to vote. Some of this is sub dubious legality. There's
constantly prosecutions for bribery, and it's really the line between
bribery and legitimate election expenses is very gray, and there's
there's you know, you're not supposed to pay people directly
in cash to vote for you. But there's all kinds
of ways to do this in a soft manner. And essentially,
you know, if you're not gonna put on nice dinners
for people, the other candidates certainly will and he'll beat
you for that reason. Right, So it in practice the
only way to the consulship, the highest office, is just
massive expenditures. And if there is a way, if you
don't have a cash, there's a there's a credit market
in Rome. You know, the senators they have a lot
of liquid capital. Guy like Crassus a couple of generations later,
you know, he made a lot of his political network
and his power base, not to say his wealth through
essentially financing promising young candidates. And and the way that
this works is you go into massive, massive debts to
win hopefully an office like the prime tourship or the consulship,
those are the two lucrative offices. Spend all this money
to get put in office. But then after your year
of office, you get assigned a governorship or a military command.
Governors are basically military governors, and there's always some kind
of problem going on, some local flare up, some peasants rebellion,
or some local banditry to take care of and you go.
So you can do that when you're out in the
provinces and plunder those people, sell them as slaves, take
their stuff, or you can just take bribes to judge
cases in a certain manner. There's ways to win back
that money, usually through unsavory means once you're a provincial governor.
This is one of the real problems that the Republic has.
It's not really a system designed to you know, produce
a happy and content imperial provincial base. You know, it's
it's very exploitative because you spend all this money or
you borrow this money becoming an officer, and then once
you're once you're in the position to being a governor,
you only have one two, maybe three years to essentially
plunder it all back and try to get a return
on your investment.
Speaker 1: Well, then what would be the point, I mean, are
you it's not like politicians now that they get elected
and then you know, when they retire, especially if they're
in there for more than ten years, they're thirty times
there are net worth when going in. It doesn't seem
like that was that was even possible at that time. Sure,
you might break break even or even be a little
bit ahead.
Speaker 2: I mean, is it.
Speaker 1: Purely for just the position, just the the honor, just
so that your name lives on.
Speaker 2: That's a big factor for sure. All of these Roman
nobles are bred to to see status as the main
game that they're playing. The honor game is the main
game that they're playing. And there are ways, you know,
if you're savvy, you know, having say you go to Spain,
Gaius Marius does this. You go to Spain and while
you're there, perhaps knocking around some local bandits or you know,
there's also just opportunities for patronage and business doing so,
like you can buy a mine, you can you know,
there's ways that you can set up kind of permanent
income streams for yourself if you're savvy and if you
have connections and a lot of these. Somebody asked me
this recently, like it wasn't wasn't commerce frowned upon by
the Roman elites. Yes, but a lot of them had
to be very good at it. A guy like Marius
or Crassus, they're good at making money. They just don't
see wealth as the ultimate prize. You know that it's
the thing that you that you spend in order to
get the ultimate prize, which is honor, which is status,
which is glory that you pass on to your kids,
which is you know, statues of yourself in the forum.
That's the game that is most attractive to at least
to the people who make it to the top. A
lot of families are just content to break even, maybe
increase their patrimony a little bit, but you know, have
their name on a law or on an aqueduct or something,
and they you know, I think that that's a real
that that spirit does remain even in the Late Republic,
not among all the families, but certainly among a guy
like Pompey or Caesar. I mean that they're not they
do become fabulously wealthy in the process. But you know,
winning a triumph is is just it gives you this
kind of status, this charisma in town, and it's just
much more satisfying to be yourself around Rome if you
are a conqueror. Then if you're a rich person, there's
so many obscure rich people. Cicero's friend Atticus famously praises
the life of the kind of lying in the shadow,
what they call it Epicurus. He was a devotee of
Epicurean philosophy. Epicurus advised his students to escape notice in
your life. You know, lathe Bo sas so Ciso called
it kind of shady a philosopher, a philosophy of the shade.
You know, you're not going out and getting tanned on
military campaigns. He's kind of lying in the shadows, building
wealth and not not giving offense to anybody and not
taking not taking punches in the political arena. But to
most Romans that's kind of I don't know, it's kind
of dishonorable or or just not ambitious. It's not impressive.
So one of the choices you make.
Speaker 1: So is that was that just instilled throughout the culture,
even with the even with common people, people who would
have farms, people who would live in the city, but
not being noblemen. Is it is Is it an honor culture?
Is it a culture where above all else? Is that
why so many people are you know, so many men,
especially at a time when honor is a punchline, that
they're so attracted to. Looking at Rome, especially the Republic, Yeah,
I really.
Speaker 2: Think that's true. You know, the we what we have
direct evidence for, especially in the late Republic, when we
don't have so much kind of granular evidence of like
graffiti and Pompeii that's from one hundred years later when
it's already a monarchy. But you know, you look at
the heroes of the Republic. I do think that the
public man, the statesman, the nobles set the moral tone
of society. And and so you know, reading the Golic
War commentaries of Caesar, which I just finished series on
on the Cost of Glory, it's it's you know, he
singles out these centurions for special honor in his in
his Glic War commentaries, and it's clear that the you know,
these people have a real strong honor culture in the soldiery,
like that having your name remembered by your commander, getting
a shout out by by one of the nobles is
like one of the highest things that a lot of
these guys can aspire to. But you know, one of
the ways that the Romans instill that honor culture is
they have, you know, they have the wax masks of
ancestors and this niche in every noble Roman villa, and
they're death masks of your you know, your great great
great grandfather uncle who is a consul or a censor
a triumphed over the barbarians, and you know he's just
staring at you as you burn incense before him. And
when any member of your family dies, there's an elaborate
funeral procession where all the young men in the family
will put on these masks of the ancestors, and they
process in state through the streets of Rome to a
great ceremony in the forum, and one of them makes
a speech in honor of the dead man. While the
kind of symbolic the ancestors are symbolical looking upon you
and looking upon this man and like judging his life.
So there are all these rituals that instill this kind
of intense pressure and ambition in the aristocrats. I think
that that really does trickle down, that kind of That's
how Rousseau describes the effect of heroes on a society.
You know, the hero. Not everybody can like be the hero,
but everybody kind of looks to the hero as a
model for how they're supposed to live their life. You know,
the hero is what produced a good hero is what
produces good citizens. Even though the hero is sort of
like larger than life, he's like he adds another dimension
that the citizens just don't have and probably shouldn't have.
Speaker 1: This may seem completely off the wall, but I'll ask
it anyway. When it comes to desiring honor, when it
comes to desiring riches or maybe not even really knowing
why he's doing it, where do you put Trump in that?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think, you know, I look at Trump and
it really seems that whether it was you know, going
down the Golden escalator in twenty fifteen, I don't know
if it was there then, but you know, you look
at him rising up after being shot in the ear
at that rally and the misery that they've put him
through with all of the law fair and he seems
to have kind of been transported, you know, to this
new level of it's clearly not about profiteering at this point.
Like the man is motivated by a lot more than
just money. You know, he's I mean, I think he's
to some extent, he's always been kind of motivated by
the sense of glory and honor, even though those are
people will laugh, you know if you use those terms
in the same sentence as Trump, I think, but there's
a real sense in which he's he's able been able
to chant something that is that is that is greater
than himself. And uh, he wouldn't be able to do
what he's doing if he wasn't somehow channeling that that energy.
And uh, you know when you're when you're playing a
game with that big, like the stakes really are this.
You know, you're you're the memory that people have of
you after you die. I think that's a very heroic
kind of mindset of it would be better to die
gloriously doing this than to live safely and comfortably. And
he's already done enough that his children will be set
for life. But I think I think that that's one
of the things that distinguishes a great statesman from a
mediocre functionary's they're motivated by leaving a legacy that will
outlast them and and by the glory that they can win.
I mean, some people might have to forgive me for
talking these grand terms, but I see a lot of
that really in the spirit of the Trump campaign that
you definitely don't see on the other side of the aisle, right,
And that's probably a lot of his appeal is just
a sense of a grand historic struggle that like you're
witnessing history and you're kind of participating it. As like
shot after shot just whizzes past his head or I
find it incredibly compelling as a story and just fascinating
to watch. It's just just hard to pull your eyes
away from the spectacle that's going on. And you get
the sense that a lot of these Romans were living
in similar dimensions. Certainly a guy like Pompey or Caesar
or Marius, you know, the desire to be the first
man in Rome, and Trump's clearly desires to be the
first man in America, which is very different, I think
from being a you know, you don't have to be
a monarch, you don't have to want to be a
monarch to want to be the first man. Sulah wanted
to be the first man in Rome. He didn't want
to be a monarch. Caesar, I'm not sure Caesar might
might have been, you know, of the sort of historical
imagination to really to really conceive of a different future
for Rome. But a lot of these guys that rose
to supreme prominence, they're just trying to be the first
man in their city, and that's that's a prize enough
for them.
Speaker 1: Would you say that, because we haven't seen something like that,
and so long that's why so many people are attracted
to Trump, and that, you know, especially young people, young men.
And it's also why you have a class of people
who things like honor and loyalty have come a punchline. Yeah,
that that's why he's so he's so reviled by them,
because he even if he doesn't, even if he isn't
that symbol himself, even if he doesn't look at him
himself that way, other people are projecting that onto him.
And I think that that says something about the people
who are projecting it on to him, but it also
has a lot to say about the people who revile
him that they that we haven't had a desire like
this for somebody like this in a very long time.
And these are people who you know, will do anything,
will will kill him to stop, to stop that even
the idea of that happening.
Speaker 2: At this time. Yeah, well you it'd be hard to
look at your average Washington or globalist corporate elite, you know,
Larry Fink or whatever, and say, this man desires honor, or,
this woman desires honor. This woman or this man is
chasing after a glory that will outlive them. Like it's
seen as very distasteful, right, And so what do you have?
What is the alternative? Some kind of smarmy servant leadership.
You know, oh, I'm just serving the people. I'm not
here for my own this and that. And I get that,
you know, if you're if you're a Christian, it's easy
to be duped by that. But I think it's just
a kind of lack of imagination often and or and
what it ends up being so often is just this
kind of a shallow veil drawn over kind of base
careerism or profiteering and you know, insider trading and nucrative
contracts with you know, the military industrial complex after you
leave your tour of duty. It's it's all just kind
of I'm sure they have a comfortable life, more comfortable
than mine, but it's kind of contemptible, like in like
I think that we are naturally well. This is what
Russeau says. And I think, for all that he's seen
as this kind of instigator of the French Revolution, he
was a man that was obsessed with Plutarch's heroes and
he understood I think he really understood what heroism was
and how it was both necessary and good and also dangerous.
But you know, the hero is if they they're not
there to serve the people. They're there to build some
grand legacy that for a modern bureaucrat looks like megalomania.
This is a this is a different moral unit. They
inhabited a different like metaphysical reality. They're not trying to
you know, just have a have their own private share
of the pie. They're they're after some kind of immortality,
you know. And and we're so uncomfortable talking about that,
especially since you know, nineteen forty five. It's just it's
our whole ideological apparatus now in a way that the
Romans ideological apparatus was sort of designed to prevent the
rise of a monarch. You know, our ideological apparatus is
designed to prevent the rise of a great man. There's
a there's a kind of politics of envy that goes
under different names. But you know, you can just help
tell the way that they handle, you know, any kind
of visionary drive. You know, it's megalomania. It's problematic, it's creepy,
it's toxic, whatever the case may be. It's very just
effeminized and frankly boring. And this is why I think
Trump is so interesting because he's like putting on a
show that we're not used as seeing in real history.
You're not supposed to make history anymore. People aren't supposed
to want to make history, because that's how we got
into the World wars as people wanting to make history,
you know, young men wanting to do great things like
The Root of All Evil to the post war and census.
And it's just so refreshing to see somebody who flies
in the face of that to me, and so I'm
definitely along for the ride, and it will be it
will be very interesting no matter what happens. I think
it's going to be interesting in ten days, right or
eight days.
Speaker 1: Well, it's contemptible to appeal to the masses, but what
they do is they they have to keep this alive somehow,
so they completely pervert it. So they become the they
become the hero to what they see as the marginalized,
the trends, the gay, gay people, people coming over the border,
people like they they're not allowed to appeal to. They're
not allowed to appeal to. I mean it seems like
really like the no what what historically you would look
at as normal people, straight, straight men, white men Europeans,
you're not allowed to do that. But no, we still
need that spirit, but we're going to apply it to
what many without brainwashing would see as I mean, really
the degenerate class of society and the the I'm looking
for the proper word. I don't want to be I'm
not trying to be insulting by saying this. I'm trying
to make a point. Is the the true like minority,
but these little minority Nietzsch groups, But these groups have
to in some way represent a rebellion against normalcy, against
what what normal culture, what normal behavior?
Speaker 2: What would be?
Speaker 1: And I think that's that's fascinating that they think that
they are these great men and women by championing small
groups that, yeah, you'd put one hundred and twenty years ago,
be sadly say in a Starker side show.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Like, the only kind of people that the public
school education allows to be glorified are like activists, freedom
activists or I don't know, nineteen sixties civil rights activist types. Yeah.
I met I was on some trip when I was younger,
and I met this guy. It was like a college
student trip from you know, a guy from a different
school and it's like, what are you planning to be?
I'm going to be an activist? Oh, what kind of
things are you gonna be? You know, what's your what?
What charge are you are taking on? What's your what's
your cause? Oh? It doesn't really matter, you know, just activism.
You know, it's like it's like a category of its own.
This like a real what's the word. It's like a
a perversion of this idea of you know, Paul Newman
in that movie saying, you know, is it Marlon Brando?
You know, rebel what's your cause? What do you got?
But it's not rebellious, it's conformist, you know. It's just
this is just the kind of the only ideal that
we've allowed to be glorified in our in our school system.
And I always found that just to be so boring, honestly,
and I think a lot of young men find it
to be boring. But that's that's kind of the people
that have been allowed to make it to the top
for the most part in democratic politics and Republican politics.
Until very recently people are willing to kind of bow
to that the ideal that the only the only good
is like championing some marginal people that that that's that,
that's what justice is. That it's all about making some
marginal group lorded over the majority.
Speaker 1: I mean, you're not even their lives. Are the lives
of the marginalized that they're they're advocating for are never
improved by them, Yeah, they're they're never improved. It's just
is literally to be used as a weapon against you know.
It's Greg Hood had this tweet a couple of years
ago that said, the the consequences of the Civil Rights
Act are you basically trying to make enough money to
us the civil the Civil Rights Act is basically you
trying to make enough money to escape the consequences of
the Civil Rights Act and hide what you're doing. Mm hmm, right, yeah,
hide while you're doing it. Yeah, it's like, well, why
are you doing this? Well, I'm I can't tell you.
Speaker 2: It's uh. And it's very self aggrandizing to the in
a petty way, I think, to the to the leaders
of that type. And it's very different from Roman populism too,
it should be noted. So, you know a lot of
left wing people have seen in Tiberius Gracus a kind
of hero. You know, Marx was very interested in the
or at least Marxist historians are very interested in the
Gracchi and the idea of land redistribution. But you know,
it's not about making the poorest of the poor on
a on a level with the nobles. It's about rewarding
citizen soldiers. You know, it's about it's about empower like
the middle classes that are, you know, the backbone of
a society. And I don't know if we have time,
but it might be worth just in brief connecting the
the circle of how this gets to the problem of
packing voter rolls and and citizenship. So I'll be brief here.
I've covered this at at greater length in the biography
of Guius Marius on my podcast. It's one of my
earlier biographies. I think I've if you if you start there,
I do think I've gotten better, But you know, it
is it is a good story, and he's a fascinating figure,
and I go into a lot of detail in that life.
But essentially so Marius is from the next generation of
the Gracchys. He's a little bit younger, but he sees
this all happening, and what he does is Guias Gracchus
By the way, Tiberius's brother tries to start another popist
legislative plan about ten years later and also gets lynched
by the Senate in very similar circumstances. Sad story, but
Marius is he rises on this promise of fixing elite incompetence,
which is starting to be a real problem for the
Roman state. It's starting to be kind of like a
threat to the security of the of the city because
they've got a forever war going on in North Africa.
People have criticized me for using that term, but essentially
they can't manage to defeat you Gurtha, who is this
sly crafty Numidian who's bribing the elites. He says everything
is for sale in Rome, and the Romans and General
after General to try to defeat him, and granted, you know,
there are gorilla tactics that he's using. The land is difficult,
but General after General is just getting bribed by Ugurtha,
and he knows he knows how to get these people
off his back. And so the rich are basically profiteering
off of this war in various ways, especially the commanders
are getting bribe. Marius becomes console on a promise to
put the war to an end because he's he's one
of the most competent generals, and he manages through a
tribunary law. Actually he's kind of early in his career.
He's using this power of the of the plebs in
the in the council. Basically he becomes Console by normal means.
But then there's a problem. There's like a technic legal
technicality that he can't get command of the war because
the Senator has already assigned it to this other guy,
mat tell Us, who's a political rival of his. And
so he gets the Tribune, like a tribune friend of his,
to propose a law that the command of the war
be assigned to Marius to basically control foreign policy, which
has never been done before. It's very creative and the succeeds.
And what Marius does, Senate's like, all right, well, you
can fight this war, but we control the finances and
we control recruitments, so good luck raising an army. You're
gonna need more forces to really defeat you, Gurtha. And
so what Marius does is he has another law pass
where he recruit he makes it breaks precedent and recruits
large forces of the urban poor of Rome. Who would
fall well below the property qualification, and so he essentially
inaugurates this new process by which generals can amass an
army that is loyal to them, that they're kind of
on the hook for eventually paying for the war in
some way and rewarding their troops by land grants to
come after the hopefully successful war. But he manages to
basically pull off this incredible quick victory against you Girth
by raising these you know, mass recruits of the urban poor.
And then he turns around and Rome has another long
war that's been going terribly in France in Gaul which
they don't control yet, against the Kimbri and the Tuotnes,
another barbarian invader from the north who have defeated commander
after commander, and Marius promises to get the war what won,
and he does using similar methods. He's incredibly efficient general,
and he stands out in a way that maybe he
wouldn't have fifty or one hundred years earlier, when Rome
had all these competent commanders, and now so many of
them have turned to merchandising and profiteering, and they just
they've gotten you know, blue blooded and you know, resting
on their laurels, and they've lost a lot of that
Roman toughness. So a guy like him who knows how
to get the job done, I think this is very trumpy.
And actually he knows how to make a deal, get
the job done with the people that needs He's he's
a good enough speaker, he fights alongside the troops. He's
an outsider politically too. He he manages to build a
huge following. He becomes consoles six times almost in a row,
and uh and is like credited with being well credited
by the Romans of his day, by a vote of
the people, as being worthy of the title of the
third founder of Rome. So guyas Mari is unquestionably first
man in Rome by one. And and the way that
this kind of cashes out into the voter issue that
I think is his unseen cause of the First Civil
War is it'll take just a sec to explain. I
could pause for questions. If you've gotten me, o, God,
keep gone. So Marius is not just a a champion
of the Roman par but he recruits a lot of
Italians who are not citizens into his armies with the
promise of enfranchising them or at least rewarding them with land.
And as Marius becomes victorious with these men and they
become more Romanized, they're going back to their communities in Italy,
often with you know, nice land grants from Marius. But
they're they're seeing themselves more and more as essential members
of the Roman state. And a lot of these guys
are becoming businessmen out in the provinces and they're taking
a great interest in Roman foreign policy and Roman legal systems,
and they start to have a lot more riding on
being able to run for office themselves vote for candidates
that are going to support their interests. There's a lot
of reasons why these men start to want start to
clamor for citizenship, and by the end of the nineties
you have it becomes a really pressing issue, like massive
tribes of Italians are like, we are done fighting these
wars without having political representation, without being eligible to run
for quister tribune, console, pritur and the Senate. I think
does something really interesting. So Marius is a Grackist kind
of figure, like a gracis plus general lissimo military commander,
and he's a populist right, he's kind of prodding the aristocracy.
He's standing outside of them on some level. So the
nobles see Marius has a shot at essentially if he
is able to enfranchise the Italians, he's going to have
incredible power because these people are going to be loyal
to him politically, and so they keep try try to
block him. But then somebody among the Senate has the
bright idea, well, why don't we be the ones to
enfranchise the Italians? Why don't why why not have the Senate,
the establishment be the patrons of these all these new
potential citizens. And so the elite the establishment try to
co opt this whole effort of bringing in new citizens
which are going to potentially have huge disruptive consequences in
the Roman electoral map, and so they their candidate they
put forward to do this is this guy, Livius Drusus.
Unfortunately he gets murdered in ninety one BC, and partly
because it's starting to be it gets more and more complicated.
I won't go into all the details here, but like,
if you enfranchise all these Italians, suddenly the urban poor
of Rome are seeing wait a second, we're we've been
Romans for generations and we haven't gotten all the spoils
of empire and now you're gonna enfranchise all these Italians,
and we're gonna just even pushed lower down the totem pole.
And so they're able to a lot of Drusus's enemies
are able to consolidate support against this measure. But it
falls through anyway, and they end up fighting this great,
incredibly bloody social war, which is partly so so terrible
because these the armies that they're fighting are essentially Roman armies,
you know, Roman trained, veteran armies that have been fighting
in foreign wars, and they know all Rome's weaknesses. But
eventually the citizenship is granted, but as a concession to
a lot of these Italian tribes to assent to you know,
give up the war effort and and and go loyal
to Rome. So it's kind of done by fiat in
this chaos, which is a great way to you know,
enact unpopular legislation if you can argue that that the
chaos demands it, and you know, they you know, in
their in their favor, they kind of didn't have a
choice at that point. They really had to try to
take some of the gasoline out of the tanks of
the social war. But the way that they did that
crucially is they we talked about how Roman voting is
essentially jerrymandered. You know, it's it's not technically jerrymandering, but
it's like it's a ranking system, and they put all
the Italians in this one gigantic, extremely low rank tribe
that would always vote last and basically never be relevant
for important elections and votes. And so there's another pressure
valve that a populist that that Guias Marius sees is
here's the potential cause that I can use as political leverage.
And so what he does in Ady ABC is he
proposes to a tribune friend of his right proposest law.
Sulpicius is the guy's name. It might have been Silpicius's idea,
but you know, Mark whatever mar This is what Marius
does is he says, all right, we will enfranchise or
we will we will put these Italian new Italian citizens,
this giant voting block that is basically politically useless right now,
we'll redistribute them into all of the existing tribes on
some kind of wealth rank. And so there'll be Italians
in the first, second third as in addition to the
twentieth and thirtieth rank of voting tribes, and then they'll
be our guys, right, like, we'll have patronage over them
for a long time. And Marius adds this writer to
that legislation, and basically he gets all of the Italians
that are his sort of friends and patrons, a lot
of veterans from his old wars, gets them to all
come to Rome. So they're there present, already voting for
their own interests. Right. This is like once in a
lifetime opportunity to raise their status for generations and generations.
He's got them all in Rome. They're voting in this plebiscite,
and he proposes this other bill. Salah has got command
of this army to go fight Mithridates. He's in southern Italy.
The Senate has already awarded him the command. This war
promises to be fabulously lucrative. Salah is his political rival.
Sala is an optimate establishment guy, twenty years younger than Marius.
They've been kind of sparring in politics for a number
of years. Saula is a former mentee of Marius, so
it's personal, and Marius is disgruntled. He thinks he deserves
command of the Roman effort against mithridates he wants one
last hurrah. He's approaching seventy He says, I deserve this command.
And so he has another really unprecedented move. He has
a vote passed where to strip Saula of the command
and assign it to himself. And he thinks he's finally
kind of got the one up on Sola and Sula
in this extremely unprecedented move says that's not how it's
going to be. He marches on Rome at the head
of twenty thousand men, and a kind of lightning strike
captures the city and drives Marius out as a public enemy.
And that is the beginning. That is kind of the
spark that starts this amazingly bloody first Roman Civil War,
which I think is probably bloodier than the one that
Julius Caesar and pomp Be fought. And but it was
it was all because Marius had this political leverage of
all these people in town voting for their own, you know,
to increase their own political clout, that he was able
to use his leverage to do something that would have
been probably impossible if if he hadn't have had all
of his clients there for him. But you know, that
was like like the greatest evidence of that you that
you could want that controlling a huge block of voters
gives you this political wild card, right and uh, and
it's something that I think that we're seeing people try
to pull off today to some extent.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, it's Uh, you can find that nothing's really original.
Everything's been tried before, especially when it comes to politics.
Politics is really some it is in many ways. I
mean policy policy making not so much, but the structure
of politics and how people, how people have tried to
move people, how to get people. It's all been done before.
So if you study your history, then you know what
works and what doesn't. You also know where the pitfalls
can lie too.
Speaker 2: So this is why Kissinger called Greco Roman antiquity the
nursery of statesmen. You know, you build up a database
of examples because you can see these things happening in
you know, in quick succession in antiquity. You see all
the patterns happening in the classic democracies, the classical republics,
the classic monarchies. And I think because we are able
to zoom out further without like it's not clear which
side you're supposed to pick. If you're like if I'm
a diehard trumpst or a diehard leftist and I'm looking
at Roman history, it's not clear which side I'm on,
because I mean, Marius is a populist, but he's also
like a super fascist general, you know. Like because of
that defamiliarization, I think you're able to take a step
back and just see these patterns for what they are,
you know, political leverage points, you know, using the mob
against your enemy, building coalitions, persuading great crowds with appeals
to their interests, and all these kind of things and
the ways you can be undermined by your opponents.
Speaker 1: Yeah, all right, Well let's wrap up there, and do
you have anything to promote. I think last time you
were on you had me linked to your authoritative speaker's guide.
Do you want me to do that again or do
you have something.
Speaker 2: Else that'd be great if you want so, we're I'm
actually in the process of launching another retreat and it's
going to happen in Texas in January, So if you
want to, this will be like an in person, four
day men's leadership retreat where we're going to practice the
art of oratory, the ancient art of persuasion and Uh,
there'll be a focus on discussing and making speeches and
taking insights from the life of Julius Caesar, who is
a guy I'm focusing on right now in my podcast.
So if you're interested in that, you can sign up
for the Authoritative Speaker's Guide or sign up for my
email list that cost them Glory dot com to hear more.
But yeah, same old stuff I like.
Speaker 1: To both of them. Thank you, Alex, appreciate it's been
a pleasure.