Behind the Bastards - Part One: How The Roman Republic Became a Police State

Episode Date: August 16, 2022

Robert is joined by Andrew Ti to discuss The Roman Republic. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's warming my globe? I'm Robert Evans. My air conditioning is not currently functioning. So I'm hiding in my basement, which I think, this is a historic moment, everybody, marks the first time a human being has experienced the consequences of climate change. That's me right now. Number one.

It is 74 degrees maybe in my basement, upwards of 73 degrees. So yeah, suffering, suffering here. Still, I mean, that in a basement is, that's a pretty, that's pretty warm dog. It's pretty, it's pretty warm for the basement. It might be more like 70 degrees. I don't know what temperatures are and I'm drinking coffee. Andrew T. How are you doing today? Hi, what's up? How's it going? I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I, this is the, honestly, probably the first or second week that me, long time shorts denier is wearing shorts. Wow. I've never seen you wear shorts. Yeah, I'm not a short person. I wore, I wore black jeans to a Dodger game two years ago when it was like 110 outside.

And I did almost pass out, but I, I was pretty committed. And now I'm, now I'm wearing shorts. I have also purchased a pair of shorts recently. Can we not just take this evidence to any climate change and I and be like, Andrew T. We're shorts now. I know. That's your, that's the proof. Yeah. Climate change is a real problem. This is the first evidence anyone has of it. Andrew, it's good to have you back. You are having me. Sophie and I is one of our very, very, very favorite people to have on the show. You have been doing a lot of Holly. We call you Mr. Hollywood in our private conversations because you're such a big Hollywood guy.

But you know what other kind of guy you are, Andrew is a very funny guy who we like to have on every now and again to talk about bits of history. You and I have talked about King Leopold of Belgium. We've talked about the Andaman Islands. We've had all sorts of history conversations. Andrew, how do you, how do you feel about the Roman Empire? Oh, I probably, I, as far as like contemporary Americans go, I probably took more Latin than. Oh, I think most people, like that was my primary. That too, Andrew, corn. Yeah, quote unquote, foreign language in high same. Yeah. So I, and ultimately all of that is useless years Roman propaganda. Yeah. So yeah, I probably, to the extent that I know anything, I probably, I'm like more aware of a sort of sugar coated version of whatever, whatever the fuck is happening here.

Yeah, we are. Today we're going to tell the story about how the Roman Republic became a police state, which did, which is quite a tale. I have, you know, we've, we've, we haven't done a lot of ancient history stuff on this podcast for good reasons, among other things. It's kind of hard to like get good details about people who died 2000 years ago that aren't just like nonsense propaganda, right? Because it's usually just like, yeah, some like poem about some king. History is written by the winners, especially, yeah, when it's like fucking epigrams, like leftover from the Romans. But also, I, I feel like there, there, the, the, the, the worry is the sliding scale of bastard them through history is. Yes. I would imagine the trickiest part, because it's like, there's sort of like no amount of fascism and or, you know, brutality that doesn't eventually get justified by everyone else was doing it.

Yeah. What's interesting about the roof. Yeah. I mean, if that's like, it's, are you going to call like Genghis Khan a bastard? Okay. Well, then like, what, like, sure. But, but what is I, it seems like kind of pointless to be like, and this guy was a king who murdered people when it's like, well, yeah, they all were like, why is that? Like, nobody's like really going other than some people were better at it. It's not that interesting to talk about them being like shitty. That's not the case. One of the cool things about the Roman Republic is number one, we've a lot of detail on these guys and all that's bad, right? All of our historians are propagandists, but at least there's more than one of them.

So you get like the, this dude rocked and like this dude was terrible story usually. And number two, they're basically exactly the same as modern Americans politically. So you get really modern, like political dick moves from, from, from, from terrible people in a way that's like very familiar. And in fact, like, so we're talking about a lot of the things that led up to the fall of the Roman Republic and like the end of, of, you know, the kind of democratic experiment that had existed there for a few centuries. And this is something that like, people are talking about a lot right now. So when, when you get like history nerds talking about how fucked up politics are in America, they're either going to go back to Weimar Germany, which we've already done. They're going to talk about the fall of the Roman Republic, which is why there's like three, three books out, right? There's like three or four books that have come out in the last year that are like, here's what the fall of the Roman Republic can teach us about the fall of American or like what's happening in American democracy.

Most of these books are stupid. There is one really good book by podcaster Mike Duncan, who does the revolutions podcast called the storm before the storm. That's the one I would recommend if you want to read a book like that. We're not going to mainly be telling that story. Instead, we're going to talk about how Rome invented militarized policing and the first police state and kind of the first FBI because that's not a history. And I think most people know and it's pretty cool. But first, we're going to talk about, well, some guys, well, we're going to talk about a lot of shit. We're going to have to cover quite a bit of ground today.

This is one of the reasons we don't do so many ancient history ones because it's like, all right, well, if you want to tell this story, you have to go through like a thousand years of shit. Yeah, yeah. Well, also because the audience is like, like me, probably is like not just a thousand years of shit, but so much backstory and context. So I don't envy you. You have to explain a lot, but thankfully the Romans were pretty entertaining sons of bitches. Not if they were killing or enslaving you, but like sometimes if they were enslaving you, there were some Greeks who had fun with that. So the city of Rome, Andrew, founded on April 21st, 753 BC by two brothers who were nursed by a wolf. If you believe the myths that a lot of Romans didn't believe, right?

Yeah. These are like the things that we tell about. And then this is what the Romans thought. Like most of them are like, I don't ever seen a wolf nurse, two babies. That statue of like two two infants sucking on a wolf's breasts is. You're talking about the statue in my living room, right? Yeah, yeah. I have that instead of a television.

Yeah, yeah, I made it out of macaroni. Just harrowing stuff if you think about it. It's just so gross. Yeah, bad for the wolf, bad for the babies. It's not good for anyone. But yeah, this is Romulus and Remus, right? Like that's the that's the legend. There's a good line in, I think it's the movie Spartacus where Julius Caesar and I believe it would have been Pompey are like walking around and talking about like they're walking past like a temple.

And Caesar asked a question like, don't you venerate the gods and Pompey's like, well, publicly, sure, but privately, I don't believe in any of them. And that's probably how it was for a lot of Romans. Like everyone's like people aren't lockstep believing these silly ass myths. But this is the myth, April 21st, 7th through 53 BC, which is absolutely not when Rome was founded. Archaeologists know that people have been living in that spot for about 14,000 years. Because very rarely do just there's just like a bunch of people suddenly arrive at a chunk of land and be like, and now it's a city. City time. You just have like groups of people farming like Rome has a bunch of hills.

So you could set up shop on a hill. It's a good place to grow food. You can beat up people if they try to like come on to your property and stuff because hills are easy to defend. You know, it's just a good place for people to exist up until the present day where it's about to die because there's no water. But for a while, it was a good place to be a person until we invented the car. Yeah, we're changing. We're changing the good places to be a person. Yeah, everybody's going to have to go.

Yeah, there's not going to be so many Italians in the future. I was just, I was just, yeah, right. I guess peninsula life is about to be island life is about to be Atlantis life. Yeah. I was just in Minneapolis and there was a real palpable sense of like, we're going to be the new Miami soon. Yeah. Yeah. Minneapolis is going to be dealing with those 110 degree days.

Time to get your beach body on Midwesterners or whatever part of the country. Minneapolis is lakes, fucking lakes. So even ancient Romans had a lot of competing stories about the founding of the city. Probably most likely, like most of them tended to think that it had been basically like a Greek colonial offshoot. Later when Rome becomes an empire, there's this state propaganda line that had been founded by a bunch of Trojan war refugees and a Trojan king named Aeneas. None of that's true either. And it doesn't really matter. What we definitely know is that sometime around the 700s BC, there's this city state called Rome that kind of comes together probably from a bunch of different like communities in the area.

Gradually sort of, you know, merging and it starts to gain power and influence in central Italy. Now, like most places it's ruled by kings and over time the Latins who are like a tribe, right? The Latins are a tribe in Italy and it's because they speak Latin. That's pretty cool. Yeah. Or vice versa, but yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

These, at this point, they're just like primitive tribesmen wandering around Italy. I don't even know that in a couple of thousand years, you and I will be learning their language. Yeah. Badly. Echa Romani and whatnot. Yeah. Because we got scared by French and didn't want to have to, the pressure of learning a real language. I honestly, I cannot get back into the mindset of the bozo.

I must have made the decision in middle school to just be like, you know what, Latin. I think I was intimidated by like, oh no, I don't want to have to, because the thing they promised us is you don't have to do like pronunciation tests because nobody knows how a lot of Latin was spoken. I did. Actually, my senior year of high school, they let me go to the university and take Italian. Oh. Which Latin? Spicy Latin.

Yeah. Did not help me out very much for her. I have, so my family is incredibly fucking, like my dad is first generation, like American. Like, that's how Italian my family is. And we had some relatives when I was a kid come over who spoke only Italian and because they were old Catholics, Latin. And so when they were in town, my dad, who was also an old Catholic, had to like translate for them so they would speak in Latin and then my dad would translate to the rest of the family. Damn, dude.

Yeah. Which I think makes this, yeah. Crazy. Well, that was also. Yeah, you're Romulus's heir, basically. Yeah. That's what everybody says. I mean, that was one of the benefits of the fact that like all church services in the Catholic Church took place in Latin.

Is that like, you could have people from like England and Spain and fucking Portugal all in the same room and they might not speak each other's languages, but they all know Latin, right? Because they have to. Right. Do the Jesus stuff. So anyway, so yeah, you get these Latins hanging around and, you know, these are the people who are going to become the Romans. But at the time, they're just like some other group of assholes in Italy. And these dudes called the Etruscans are much more powerful.

And there's this Etruscan dynasty that comes to be the Kings of Rome known as the Great House of Tarquin. But that's just kind of like what more modern people call them. They were not a great house. This is not Game of Thrones shit. These guys are like, like petty, petty chiefs. These are like dudes with like sharpened sticks beating anybody who like. Yeah. The Tarquins are the guys who have the most muscley friends with sharpened sticks and are the best at stabbing people who don't pay protection money.

Right. Think of them more as like street thugs than the. Yeah, yeah. It's always, it's always like, yeah, it's organized crime until it's taxes. Yeah, exactly. And like the so they in the 700s, they kind of start to make the jump from organized crime to taxes, but it's still more organized crime than anything. So for a while, Rome is like pretty much every other city in the Mediterranean.

And then in the 500s, shit changes. The last King of Rome is a guy named Lucius Tarquinas Superbus, which is where we get the word superb. Although that's like, anyway, that's the nickname people gave him. And it's kind of Romans have like a history of like this guy's an asshole. Let's let's call him great or like an awesome or something. So he gets to power like 534 BC. He has a pretty good reign for a while. He wins a bunch of wars.

He signs the city's first treaty with Carthage. He builds a big-ass temple. And yeah, he enslaves a bunch of people to make the first sewers and drainage systems in Rome. So he's definitely like, you know, that's solid King stuff. He's made a step beyond gang leader. When you're making sewage, you've made a move past gang shit. And then according to myth, his son rapes a Roman noble woman named Lucretia. And this this becomes a problem for him.

Here's how the Getty summarizes what said to have happened. The tragedy of Lucretia began when Sextus, son of the tyrannical Etruscan King of Rome and member of the Tarquin family, raped her. For the ancient Romans, a woman who was raped was guilty of adultery, a crime punishable by death, even though she had not given herself willingly. After she was raped, Lucretia made her husband and father swear an oath of vengeance against the Tarquins and then killed herself in shame. Enraged by her death, Junius Brutus led a victorious rebellion against the Etruscan king. So a couple of things there. A couple of things there.

Number one, look, obviously you should be angry at the guy who did the rape, but also most of your anger might be at like the social custom that says that she has to kill herself after this. Like that might that might be the thing to be angry at. But people don't think that way, I guess. It really is like this. Like it's it's spoken so matter of fact. And this is where like the context of it makes it so hard to figure out what the what the approach to this is. Because I mean, look, the entire misogynist society, like every misogynist society, this one, you know, worse by modern standards.

But, you know, this is pretty normal at the time. Yeah, but yeah, and then you're just like, you know, you're the family members watching this happen. Enraged that this had to happen. But not not because of the like the society. Like it's sort of like this classic everyone is always mad at the wrong thing through history. It is. It's also though, I think if you get yourself in a different mind state, you can really feel this because like this is a stupid rule. That's like cruel and evil and is it makes like a bad situation even more horrifying.

And like we can look at that as like, oh, look at these fucked up people and their fucked up rules. But also the story you get is that like all of the Romans are pissed at this and Lucretia is a sympathetic figure in their history. And think about all of the different times in recent past when like everyone in America has been like, wait, that's the law. That's the way it works. That's stupid as shit. Why the hell are we doing it this way? But then the stupid thing happens that's fucked up because like can't change the law or we're not going to. Oh, I mean, you can't just change laws.

And you get the feeling that's kind of the attitude. People have us like, well, this is all like stupid and fucked up. But at the end of the day, the only person we can really take our anger out on is the Tarquin families. Let's get them kings out of here, which they do. And it's also worth noting the guy who leads the rebellion, Junius Brutus, that name Brutus should be familiar, right? That's the guy who kills. Well, the guy who kills Caesar is this kid's descendant, you know, hundreds and hundreds of years down the line. That's part of why he kills Caesars.

His family's got this reputation of like, when people try to do king stuff, we murder them. Anyway, to be fair, pretty good family tradition. It's a cool family tradition. It does. So Junius Brutus is one of like 40 guys that all have the same name. So one of the cool things in Roman history and by cool, I mean, very frustrating is that if there's ever a guy who does anything worth noting, there will be three other guys who are also really important with the exact same name because that's how the Romans did things. So you'd be like, yes, Gipio Africanus.

Well, which one? The one from like the 160s or the one from like the 200s or the one from the 150s? And like, yeah, it's very frustrating, but that's the way Roman history works. If you're early on in Western civilization, how many names? You can't have that many names. Yeah, there's like seven names. Come on, dog. There's like seven names. So the details of obviously the Lucretia story are almost certainly not exact, but there's a pretty decent chance that it broadly is accurate as to what caused the insurrection against Eutrescan power. Most people probably heard of the right of prima nocta, right, which you see in Braveheart, you know, this right that like nobles supposedly had to have sex with a woman the first night after a marriage and stuff that like,

in Braveheart, this is depicted as like what sparks the Scottish, but it's not a real thing. It was not a thing in any medieval law. It didn't happen. It certainly had nothing to do with fucking William Wallace. There were some similar rules in history, the Epic of Gilgamesh references customs that are similar to that as do Herodotus's histories. And we know that around this same period, at least one other Italian city revolted from Eutrescan control because their women were abused. You know, you often don't get a lot of detail about this. Just so many notes that like they were angry about something the Eutrescans had done to their women.

And so like there's a war and they win. Right. Right. Right. And it is. The history. I mean, it's yeah, I mean, often angry that they're doing the thing because you were supposed to be doing the thing. But yeah, well, it's just like it, you know, military occupations haven't changed.

You can there's a long, ugly history of like when the U.S. occupied Japan, you know, rapes by U.S. service members and stuff that caused a lot of problems. And that's it's a thing everywhere. It's a thing in Iraq. It's a thing all throughout history. Yeah. So whatever the excesses of Rome's last king, they kick out that last dude, Tarquin, and a republic is founded in 509 BCE.

And it was it was not a super different government in a lot of ways from the ones that are quote unquote founding fathers established. And what I mean by that is that only the very wealthiest people could actually hold office. Right. Now, one thing that's interesting is that like pretty much everyone could vote though. So they they didn't have that difference. Like when the United States is established, you have to be like a property owning white male in order to vote. And it's not until later that every guy gets the vote. Basically, every free man has a vote in the Roman Republic, but it also doesn't really work that way because so the Romans have this the system, the client system where every rich guy just over the course of their life picks up hundreds or even thousands or tens of thousands of like clients.

And these are like dudes who he has to give them money and or food or something on a pretty regular basis. It's kind of like their social welfare program. Like this rich guy has to take care of you a little bit, but you have to do what he says when it's time to vote. Right. And this is kind of what they have instead of political parties is these coalitions of rich guys and their clients who are like, well, like this is the guy that like my family, we all go and he gives us bread every couple of weeks and we vote for it. Right. It is the like local local gang leader, the local. Yeah, it's a little different from that yet at this point in that there's not really violent coercion holding that together at this point.

It's more like an extension of like the way familial units and tribes and stuff would have worked. In fact, a lot of it kind of is based on tribal stuff, you know, I guess they're probably likely. I'm well, probably. I make that point because these are going to turn into street gangs. This absolutely ends with street gangs of people murdering each other, but it doesn't really start. It's like the same as the Electoral College or like, you know, it's exactly like the Electoral College. Yeah. And we in America need to get to the point where our Electoral College is just several hundred people beating each other to death with saps in the street.

We're getting closer every day. I know, I know. I'm waiting for it. I got a fucking baseball bat with a nail through it. I'm down. Let's let's let's become electors. Do you put the nail like a big nail through when you're making a spiked bat? You got a couple of options.

So yeah, I mean, I think you just one of the better ways is you just kind of like hammer the nail in through the edges and stuff. So you get a couple of different nails poking out. Another thing you could do, you can actually like get long screws and just like screw with like a like a drill through a couple of areas of the bat. And then put them. Yeah, I see. That'll help you. Like that's a little bit easier. You know, a fun thing to do is you get some like JB willed or epoxy or something. You cut little runnels in the sides of the bat.

You jam razor blades in there. And yeah, you're kind of making like a Makwahedle. Anyway, I think I know what that is. Stick with like the the it's like what the Aztecs used. It's like the stick with all the obsidian, but using dollar store razor blades on a baseball bat. Yeah. All right. Yeah.

Anyway, I guess I'm just I'm not I'm not as crafty, but I just got an electric drill. So I'm like, you know, maybe this. Sorry to interrupt. Go just to spark in your eye when I asked you how to make a spike bat. It's a little little much. I knew you. One of these days. Yeah.

One of these days that's that's what we'll get back to the roots of Western democracy. And I'll be able to have a street fight with my homemade razor bat. So, yeah, you got all these. So the Roman Republic, yeah, 509 BC. And, you know, we don't exactly know what all of the rules were at the start of the Republic because they were unwritten. So their constitution is like, it's not put down anywhere. It exists only in the memories of the oldest rich people. So it's kind of like all of the rules are like whatever the old people say they are.

So again, very similar to our current system in a lot of ways. Yeah. What did Thomas Jefferson think? Yeah. What did Thomas Jefferson think? Oh, now the Senate parliamentarian is a thing that matters. Like nobody thought about this before, but suddenly it's a huge problem. So this caused problems over time, which I know will surprise you because those patricians and patricians are like,

they're basically nobility at the start of the Roman Empire. They're all of the rich people who's like families have been powerful for a long time. And yeah, they are the ones who kind of get to tell everyone what the constitution says effectively. And people start to feel like... That is very American. Yeah, it's extremely American. These are the most American, but the Roman Republic is the most American thing that ever existed. So the plebes, the poor people, or at least you could call them the regular people start to be like,

well, this doesn't seem like a very good system. Like if we're supposed to be a republic, it kind of seems like this is a bad way to do things. And yeah, it also over time as the republic goes on, it starts to change like the wealth situation. So the patricians are like noble because of their birth, but they're not necessarily rich. Because number one, they have all these obligations. So they have all these clients that they have to like pay and feed. And they have all these like when they get political office that often means they have to throw parties for everybody in the city or like big religious festivals. So a lot of them are fucking broke all of the time.

And this class of merchants rises up who aren't noble, but they have a bunch of money. And they're like, well, we're the ones paying for everything now, like one way or the other. Like buying these patricians and having them do stuff. Why don't we get to like hold political office or have any kind of power? And part of like what's fucking these patricians over is that the only way that they can acceptably make money is like either going to war and conquering shit or like agriculture. It's kind of considered gross for them to be in business. So anyway, shit starts to change in Rome and you get this like wealthy class of people who are like plebeian but have money. And over time, like the folks who are not patrician get increasingly angry and, you know, you get your riots and you get people threatening each other in the streets.

And then in 451 BC, they force the patricians to commission a series to actually write out a constitution where they're like, OK, we're going to actually like lay out what the rules are in a way that people can see as opposed to us just being like, oh, yeah, I remember the way it's always supposed to be. I remember how the law works. So because it's the past, they just like hammer a bunch of rules into big bronze tablets, 12 of them and stick them in the center of town. So that if you want to know what the law is, you just like walk up to the bronze tablets and read them, which is which is a fun way to do it. Now, like all democratic compromises, the new written constitution codified extraordinary powers for the wealthy. Most of it dealt with debts and debtors and noted that in the event that a debtor was ruled to have failed to like pay a debt. He would have to be basically on the after three days or so, he would either be executed or sold into slavery. So like, debt's a serious thing.

And this is on a separate point, something that like a Cory Doctorow and a couple other people will make a point of is that like the Romans were the first people to be like, debt is a thing that exists forever for you. And eventually like your family as opposed to like every 20 years we have a jubilee and there's no more debt. The Romans, because they have this entrenched power structure that actually holds, you don't have like a king who might be like, well, every 20 years or so I'm going to do a jubilee because then people get their debts cleared and they like the king more. Now the people running it are like all of the rich people and they're like, well, no, we're never going to wipe people's debts. Why the fuck would we do that shit? And so that's where that whole process starts in history. That's that's the source of our power. Right.

Yeah. As opposed. Yeah. It's funny. You know what? Making me miss kings, Robert. Yeah. Well, it's not entirely a good thing that they get rid of theirs, I guess.

The Constitution also enshrined incredible powers for Roman men. The Paterfamilius or the head of each family was essentially a little dictator. So we don't have a king, but like if you're the daddy, you have the absolute power of life and death. So number one, deformed children have to be killed immediately. That's like their first amendment in ancient Rome, which, you know, it's the past. And fathers have the power of life and death over their children and their wife. So you can, as the father, execute your kids or other members of your family anytime you want to. The classic law of I brought you into this world, I can take you out.

Yeah. Which honestly. The most important societal bedrock. Look, if that was the rule, I would have kids. I'd have a buckload of kids and they'd be they'd be doing a lot of work for me. So there are some like more sensible rules, though, that kind of limit. So among other things, if you're a dad and you sell your kid into slavery three times, then your son no longer has to do what you say.

I don't know why three times is the rule, but like you have to pick a number, I guess. It's just like genie shit. What is fucking happening here? It's cool. So, yeah, it's good stuff. It's this weird mix of like nightmare social laws and then like broadly reasonable stuff. Like, yeah, if a child's born within 10 months of the father's death, they get some of the inheritance, you know, like stuff like that.

Well, that's just like a pretty reasonable solution to a problem. Now, the 12 tables also note that women are always legally children. They always have to have a guardian. This is because of, quote, their levity of mind. And the only exception to this are the Vestal Virgins, which are basically older, like, OG nuns, but they're much cooler than the nuns and a lot more weird sex stuff going on, allegedly. And you know who else is allegedly engaging in a lot of weird sex shit, Andrew? Yo, hit me.

The products and services that support this podcast. That's right. They never stop fucking, not, not, not once. And that shit, I was going to say, is not in the Bible, but it very much is in the Bible, what they're doing. Most of what they're doing is in the Bible, but they go off the map every now and then, you know. It's going to enter any situation it goes into. Cock first, and you don't know what's going to happen. Like, they're just, they're just going to, they live to penetrate.

That's actually the corporate motto. We live to penetrate. Honestly, I was going to ask you which sponsor you were specifically referring to, and then I realized that you already had one in mind. And that, sorry, Chris, good luck with that bleep. I know you love it. I would love, I would love a Bible that has like a, there's like a map of, you know, the Bible parts, the parts of the Bible story, like, like, like any edition of Lord of the Rings or whatever,

like a little map of the front page. Yeah. They should do that. They probably do. We've tracked down exclusive historical records. We're also bringing you cinematic, historical recreations of moments left out of your history books. I'm Smedley Butler, and I got a lot to say. For one, my personal history is raw, inspiring, and mind-blowing.

And for another, do we get the mattresses after we do the ads, or do we just have to do the ads? From iHeart Podcast and School of Humans, this is Let's Start a Coup. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart.

And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday.

I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. So there's this broad understanding that political violence is undesirable and there's actually not. As far as we can tell, it doesn't seem to have been a thing that happened very often in the early Republic, right? Like when people had political disputes, they didn't murder each other generally, which is a big thing, right? In this period of time, if you've gotten to that point in your society, that's pretty cool. But we have trouble with that today.

Yeah, we don't do that at all. Yeah, and one of the reasons for this, so the Romans have this written constitution kind of thing now. They also have this thing called the mosmeorum, which literally means way of the ancestors. And it's another unwritten legal code, and it's basically just a bunch of like, you don't murder people who are elected leaders. You don't bribe people in order to make them vote the way you want. You don't do this, you don't do that. And there's a couple of different things in there, including there's a rule that you don't carry weapons inside the city. Now, this ban gets misinterpreted a lot of times.

You might think of it as the ancient equivalent of an assault weapons ban, right? So they're not banning all weapons because of spoilers. Everybody still has weapons, but they don't have military weapons. So they're not supposed you're it's like you can get executed and shit if you're caught carrying a sword or like a dagger within the what's called the pomerium, which is this like kind of sacred quasi ethereal boundary that like is the supposed to be the actual like boundary of Rome. Now, obviously, so again, this just refers to like military weapons. So when people do have fights and stuff, they'll usually have like chair legs that they'll stick sharp things into or they'll they'll make saps or brass knuckles are super popular. The Romans have their own kind of style knuckle thing.

Yeah, yeah, they call it a look. Cestus. Yeah, it's basically brass knuckles or like punch daggers that like really nasty fighting weapons. Right. So you don't have swords and stuff. So people are just like clawing at and beating the shit out of each other with like stuff they make in their fucking garages, which is pretty cool. It's like the warrior stuff, right? Like that. Right.

Yeah. Spike bad is just too big. Yeah. What's the what's the what's the fucking Millwall thing where you make it with just like a bunch of additions of like the like the daily mirror or whatever. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's some fucking. It's basically the Jason Bourne shit where he fights a dude with a magazine or whatever. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, the coolest thing that the fucking Romans had was this thing called a Cestus or Cestus or whatever. And it was basically it was like a boxing glove that had was covered in iron balls. So that like when you like so it's like this combination boxing gloves slash brass knuckles. And yeah, you can eat. Yeah, so they had plenty of weapons. They just did not allow military weapons and you're not allowed to bring soldiers into the city of Rome. Nobody can take an army into Rome. They have to camp outside of the city if you've got an army nearby. Because again, they recognize pretty early on that like, well, if we want to have a republic, it's probably a bad idea to let people march their army into the city.

That could end badly. That might not go well. But most of this stuff is just like it's not written law. It's everybody knows that you're not supposed to do these things, right? Right. A wonderful way to run a government. Yes, a norm, right? These are their norms, you know? Yeah. The other thing too is like the army thing is like, I think it's I mean, obviously just because I'm a soft child of the 20th century.

But it is like wild to kind of remember how threatening a parade really should be. Yeah, a parade. I mean, historically, the Romans are kind of one of the first groups of people to try to stop a parade from being a threat because they have these things called triumphs. And so if you win a military victory that's big enough, the Senate will vote you a triumph. And you basically are king of the city for a day and you get to take your army and march them through the city with all your captives and everybody pretty much worships you. But the whole time you're doing it, number one, it's just for a day. And the whole time you're doing it, there's a guy whose only job is to like walk behind you and be like, hey, bro, you're going to die one of these days. Hey, bro, like you're still fucked. Like everybody's fucked.

Nobody lives forever. Like you're not actually a king or a god. You're going to die, dude. Like, which is kind of neat. I think it's one of my favorite parts of Roman history. Yeah. Definitely the best job in civic life. These were the first, like nowadays, anybody can like go on Twitter and ratio a political leader if they're good enough at trolling.

This was that job in the ancient world. It's like the dude who follows the imperator around being like, hey, bro, you kind of suck actually. Still seeing you in hell, bro. Yeah, exactly. My god, Rome would have adopted Twitter immediately. Basically, they had like their Roman graffiti is a whole other story, but like they had Twitter. They had their own Twitter. I think my favorite piece of Roman graffiti that was like found in fucking Pompeii is this guy being like all of the women in Rome or all of the women in the empire should wheat because I'm just fucking dudes now.

Like I'm so tired of fucking ladies. I'm going to my dicks for nothing but men now. That's pretty. That is peak Twitter. That is incredibly peak Twitter. Amazing. How does what? Does it just like paint and brush?

Yeah, they're just like painting shit. Yeah, they've got paint like they're just like painting stuff on walls and whatnot. Yeah, I guess I was just thinking like the advent of spray paint for graffiti. Like what a again, they would have taken to spray paint immediately. You show like literally any Roman citizen spray paint and they're like, oh fuck, I'm going to be able to yell it like my neighbor so much more efficiently. You probably make a primitive airbrush. Yeah. So the Roman system is it's it's a little bit wacky, but it works really well.

And for most of like 300 years, they get by without any massive internal political violence. Now, a big part of this is that for these first couple of hundred years, Rome is nearly destroyed like every 30 years or so. Like every couple of decades, somebody will invade Italy and almost wipe them out. And usually the way it goes is the Romans, there's an invasion. The Romans get together a massive army and they send it to fight the invasion and they all get wiped out because some idiot makes a stupid mistake on the Roman side. And then the Romans somehow put together another army and eventually win the war. And this is like how every war works out for Rome. They take these like the thing that distinguishes Romans as a military power is they're able to like lose all of their guys and then win the war anyway, which is like a mixed sort of reputation to have militarily.

A good example of this would be the Piric War from 280 to 275 BC. The gist of it is that the Romans go to war with a bunch of Greek cities in southern Italy and those Greek cities are like, hey, we need help. And they call to this Greek king over in Greece called Pyrus and he invades Italy to like fuck up the Romans. And Pyrus is a scary old son of a bitch. He's got a big army, a bunch of war elephants, and he just shatters the Roman military in this series of horrible grinding thousands and thousands of people massacred. But also every battle is so ugly that like he loses most of his army fighting it. So kind of at the end of this series of battles, the Romans can't continue to prosecute the war. But Pyrus doesn't really want to keep fighting either because he doesn't have much of an army left.

And this is where we get the term Pyrrhic victory, right? So he like goes to Rome and he's like, hey, guys, y'all are fucked. Let's do a peace deal. And he offers them pretty good terms and I'm going to quote what comes next from a write up in the New York Times. When the Senate convened to debate the offer, an old blind senator named Appius Claudius was carried into the Senate House by his sons. As the chamber fell silent, he stood to chastise his colleagues. I have, he said, long thought of the unfortunate state of my eyes as an affliction. But now that I hear you debate shameful resolutions which would diminish the glory of Rome, I wish that I were not only blind but also deaf. By giving in to Pyrrhus, Claudius warned, the Roman Republic would only invite more outside powers to mess with it.

Low as the odds of victory might be, Rome had no choice but to keep fighting. And they they actually somehow win. Pyrrhus like, yeah, it's it's it's a whole thing. He tries to bribe a bunch of his way out of like fighting them more, but it doesn't work. And yeah, this is like this is a somewhat idolized version of events of how like warm beats Rome beats Pyrrhus. And it's based on the writings of a guy named Edward J. Watts, who is one of these historians who's written a book about the Roman Republic to talk about the collapse of the United States. Yeah, but as kind of biased as his take on things is, it is worth noting that like what they build really works like as flawed as we're going to talk about all of the flaws as it is. The Romans create this political structure that's able to like repeatedly almost get wiped out in disastrous military defeats and not lose wars. And part of it is because everybody's got skin in the game.

The entire ruling class is out there fighting whenever there's a war, along with like all of the and in fact, most of the people fighting are people with like property. The Roman army, you have to pay for your own weapons. So poor people are not fighting. It's basically like the middle class and the rich people who are actually like going to war. And one of the downsides is that all of their armies are led by the equivalent of like Nancy Pelosi, which goes really badly sometimes, right? Because you'll have like this 80 year old career politician trying to like lead an army of 70,000 guys and he doesn't know what the fuck he's doing. Probably there's some argument that that is sort of why the first the first crack at our first draft at any given Roman army is sort of just the shit that needs to be told. Exactly. It's the guys who suck the most.

And then you get like 10 crews out there and you just need to get rid of them. Anyone who survives that first one, plus the fresh recruits is probably the way to go. Yeah, we got to burn off an army before we can get anything done. Yeah. It's like making pancakes. The first one's just for the trash. If we had invaded Afghanistan by sending all of Congress in first, I think the United States and Afghanistan would be in a state of war. The United States and Afghanistan would be in a state of perfect peace with each other.

And there would be no more problems in the world. I mean, truly, this like, you know, that is the least American thing about this is about this particular iteration of Rome is putting middle class nobles on the line at all. Yeah, if only, if only. All of these nobles, they have fucking so like one of the things Pyrrhus tries to bribe a bunch of guys and he can't bribe them because they're like, well, no, this is like my whole family's fighting. Like this is what we do. We have this like system and we're kind of all in it together. And one of the reasons this works is that there's not a massive like there's rich people and there's poor people. But within all of the people, the free men who have property, there's not a massive disparity in wealth, right?

The rich are not very rich. Because like it's Rome's just kind of this scrappy little city in the middle of Italy, right? It's not like this super powerful force. But as time goes on, they keep winning these wars. And so they wind up in control of more and more and more of Italy and they get all of this land and all of this money starts coming in. And that's when things start to go awry, right? So after Rome beats Pyrrhus and conquers most of southern Italy, they settle into what's what's going to be 200 straight years of unbroken victories and foreign wars. Rome's military record here.

Basically, they spend the length of the time that the United States has existed as a country winning every fight they get into. Right. Which is like a pretty solid record. Now they lose battles constantly. Like in the first Punic War, which starts in 264 BC, this is with Carthage. It lasts 20 years. Like to tell you how silly some of their wars go. So this war starts with Rome going to Sicily to fight Carthage and they win there.

They invade North Africa and they win what's probably what might be the largest naval battle in all history still to this day. Like if you listen to the historians, then it was like 300,000 people or so all fighting in boats. And again, this is like 2300 years ago, fucking wild how like many people that they could put together at this point. But they win this series of battles. They win these naval battles, Carthage sues for peace and Rome refuses to like have peace. So Carthage keeps fighting and then beats them and like shatters a Roman army. So Rome has to send a fleet to evacuate the remains of this army that's gotten its ass kicked in Africa. And then the entire fleet and 100,000 men all die in a storm like heading back to Italy.

That kind of shit happens constantly to the Romans and it just never stops them. Then you've got the Second Punip War, which starts in 218 B.C. It also lasts like 20 fucking years. And there's like we've talked about the Battle of Cani, which is one of the most famous battles in history. Hannibal, you know, the elephant guy encircles their army and kills 50,000 Romans in a day. It's like 10 percent of the male population of the Republic. He like wipes out including like eight senators, like a bunch, a significant percentage of the Roman. It's like if it's like if the United States had like 10 percent of its male population

and half of its political class wiped out in a battle in fucking Afghanistan. Like it's pretty, it's a bad day for them and they just do the same thing they always do. They make more guys senators, they make more guys soldiers and they send them back out to fight, right? Yeah. And it's fine. But while these wars are going on and they win these wars, they win the First Punip War, they win the Second Punip War, they get control of Sicily, they get a bunch of influence and power in Northern, in Northern Africa, they take control of all of Spain in the Second Punip War.

Like Rome is now running Iberia. While all this is going on, a couple of other things are happening. One is that a lot of Roman soldiers are dying, right? Like shitload because Nancy Pelosi is very often the battlefield commander and she's not very good at that. And since these guys, these are like the Roman middle class, right? Most of them are small independent farmers, they have enough money to buy their own weapons and armor and stuff and sometimes even horses. And so the system that they set up works really well when war means you have to like walk two days

to like fuck with this town across like the river from you. But when you're going to war for 20 years and your army is all of the guys who make your food, then it becomes a problem, right? Are you seeing like the flaw in the Roman social system? Also, it's like, I mean, and this I guess is the thing that's like distressing is like, you'd hope what this would do is lead towards like more measured wars that like, you know, it's simply the opposite. I mean, we're seeing it obviously in our time also.

We will simply let society crumble rather than we are wrong. And that's what happens because here's the thing. If you were to make have less wars while the only ways that the nobility can make money is war or taking a bunch of farming land, right? Because they're not allowed to have businesses. They're not allowed to be merchants. And if they don't get to have more wars and massacre more generations of Roman boys, then the merchants who aren't nobles will have more money than them and nicer houses.

Do you see why this is a problem? Right. I know. It's so just like, but like instead of being like the custom is weird and we could just diversify our ruling classes economy. Look, at the same point. Nope. I'm going to kill all the farmers.

I'm all for restricting our ruling classes, economic sources of income. So it is interesting that if you look at the two longest lived republics in history, which is the Roman Republic and now us, and both of them, you have this group, this hereditary nobility who are like, well, if we're going to stay rich, we're going to have to kill the middle class. We're going to have to, we're going to have to get rid of those people. So yeah, you start to get these serious problems where like these farmer soldiers are spending like five years at a time out on campaigns in like fucking Africa or Spain, which is quite a distance from Italy when you have to walk it, right?

Like they are far as fuck away. And a lot of people listening probably are not farmers. I'll let you in on a secret about farming. If you don't do anything to your farm for five years, it is no longer a farm. It's, it's just the woods. Yeah. And that's, that, that, that causes an issue. So these soldiers are spending like half a decade at a time, you know, in addition to

whatever injuries and trauma they suffer, they come home and their farms are ruined and they can't afford to like put them back into shape. So again, as you noted, a reasonable country might go like, well, clearly we need farmers and we need people to become soldiers. So it's in our best interest to like figure out a way to deal with this. That is not. And was this a conscript? Was this a volunteer army?

It wasn't, right? Yeah. They have conscriptions, like especially during emergencies, they have conscriptions and stuff. So it's more, it's kind of like a draft. A lot of the time with these wars. So yeah, it's generally sort of a, you get called up, your number gets called up effectively and like it's time for you to go serve there. They do have a lot of, like there are volunteer.

Yeah. Anyway, whatever. It's a whole thing. We don't have the time to get into that today, but it's worth noting that like the money that they are making by conquering everything around Rome is plenty of money to take care of these farmers. And I want to quote now from a Marxist account of Roman history written by Alan Woods, quote, after the second Punic War ended in 202 BC, the economy of Italy endured a massive upheaval.

The legions that conquered Spain, Greece and North Africa returned home with riches on an unprecedented scale. A pro-console, that's like a mix between the president and a general returned from campaign in the East bearing 137,000 pounds of raw silver, 600,000 silver pieces and 140,000 gold pieces. So like the nobles are getting fucking rich and all of this money stays in the hands of these, the patricians and this new class of people called the equities who are like rich businessmen, right? Because the trade is a lot.

The more you conquer, the better trade gets for you if you're a fucking Roman businessman. So they're making fucking bank. Now all of the land that the Roman army captures during this conquest of Italy, they go over, becomes state owned land, which seems fair, right? They call it the the Ager publicus populi romani, which means the public land of the Roman people. And over time, the Senate votes to allow people to own parcels of this public land and perpetuity as long as they work it, right? So that's how initially like soldiers get rewarded as you get some of this public land and you

can start a farm on it and that will allow you to have like a degree of economic independence. But, and I'm going to quote here from a write up in the anthropology review, quote, the problem was that if the land was left uncultivated, it could be taken over by someone who could work it. So soldiers who were out of the country fighting for the glory of Rome came back to find themselves dispossessed. Vast stretches of land were taken over by rich and powerful Romans who used slaves who were not called for military service and thus were always present to plow the fields and tend

to the crops and livestock. This meant that peasants and returning soldiers had not only lost their land, but also the possibility of finding decently paid work with which to support their family because it was impossible to compete with slaves who had to work for free. So that's, that's a bad way to have the situation work, right? I'm just like, it is. Yeah, it's, I guess it's like, like all things that's just cobbled together from like tradition and like this is what happened last time.

Well, just like the fact that, well, I want to be rich. I want to be rich. Yeah, yeah. Nothing, nothing really matters more to me than personally being richer. So let's do whatever gets me the most money in the short term. And I will never back down. This, this system can't change because this is how it's always worked for us. Yeah.

And again, people at the time noted, note that this is like bad. Like there's a decent number of people in the Roman political structure who are like, yes, this is going to be a problem as, as, as we have in the United States who are consistently being like, this is not a good way to do things because they're noticing that all of these formerly independent freemen, the veterans who had like conquered the world for Rome are winding up as almost like homeless in the city of Rome itself. Like they have no work, no way to make money and they just kind of swell the city because the state will give them food when they're in the city kind of like it's the only thing

they can do is kind of become clients to some fucking rich guy or whatever. And, you know, basically exist to provide a vote for a rich man and live marginally on the, the, the edges of society. So as you can imagine, the fact that like the only way for a lot of these poor people to get any kind of support at all is to like vote for whatever guy has the most money and give them food. It makes this political system twist even more in favor of the wealthy, right? Inequality becomes a serious problem in the Roman Republic.

Now again, a lot of people recognize this as an issue. And in his wonderful book, The Storm Before the Storm, Mike Duncan writes, quote, As early as 195, Cato the Elder warned his colleagues, we have crossed into Greece and Asia, places filled with all the allurements of vice and we are handling the treasures of kings. I fear that these things will capture us rather than we them. Every few years, the Senate would attempt to rein in the ostentatious displays of wealth, but the resulting limitations inevitably went unheeded and unenforced by fatal coincidence,

the Roman people at the same moment, both acquired a taste for vice and obtained a license for gratifying it. Yeah, it's the way it always goes, right? They're no different from us. Oh, God. Yeah, they just, we just have phones. Yeah. It's interesting.

Karl Marx, when he writes capital, is specifically looking at this period in Roman history. He bases a lot of his conclusions off of, like, what the history that he's, like, reading about what, like, what happens in the Roman Republic. And he writes in capital, quote, it requires but a slight acquaintance with the history of the Roman Republic to be aware that its secret history is the history of its landed property, right? And essentially, what he's saying is that, like, you have this vision of what the Roman Republic was that, like, dudes like our, quote, unquote, founding fathers have, where they're

just, like, masturbating over these, like, austere figures. And then you have the reality, which is that, yeah, this venal, corrupt, land-holding class is choking out the middle class and the poor in order to make their already vast fortunes even larger. Yeah. And destroying the entire state as they do it, because they care about nothing but the amount of wealth that they have. It is, like, parasites on every level, obviously.

Yeah. Yeah, it's good stuff. Yeah. You know who else is a parasite on every level, Andrew? I'm going to find out. The sponsors of this podcast. Absolutely. Blood-sucking tics, just guzzling the life out of your veins.

Sophie, is that a good way to lead dads? Is that going to make them happy? That's the only way you can lead into ads, my friend. Excellent. Excellent. What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism.

I'm Ben Bullitt. And I'm Alex French. In our newest show, we take a darkly comedic. And occasionally ridiculous. Deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly a century. We've tracked down exclusive historical records. We've interviewed the world's foremost experts. We're also bringing you cinematic, historical recreations of moments left out of your history books.

I'm Smedley Butler, and I got a lot to say. For one, my personal history is raw, inspiring, and mind-blowing. And for another, do we get the mattresses after we do the ads, or do we just have to do the ads? From iHeart Podcast and School of Humans, this is Let's Start a Coup. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories.

But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price.

Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Oh, we're back. So this all brings us to the story of a guy who, depending on who you ask, is either the first socialist in history or the sinister populist precursor to Donald Trump. There are think pieces that will say both things. They're all pretty silly because he's his own person. And this is a long time ago.

So stop it. But this guy's name is Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus. And he's born in either 163 or 162 BC. And he comes into into being as like the bluest blood motherfucker it is possible to be. His father had served as consul, which is kind of like, again, it's like a mix between president and general. Which makes sense if the senators are also leading arms. Right. Exactly. It should be the same job.

You get like voted to get a military command effectively. So in his dad like celebrates two triumphs for military victories is like a young man. His mother is like the daughter of this great Roman war hero. Now, everybody's main source on Tiberius Gracchus's life is a guy named Plutarch, who is a Greek historian who writes about him like 100 years after he died. And it's worth knowing what Plutarch says because Plutarch's working from like sources that were written by people at the time when Gracchus was alive. But like most Roman history, we still you're still just like most of Plutarch's history is like, well, a guy told me this. Like, I heard this from like a dude who was like, it is grandpa was around and like, you know, I heard this. I heard the.

Yeah, a lot of it's like, I guess that's all history anyway. But Jesus, yeah, like after this, after what happens with this guy happens is like brother writes a pamphlet that he hands out and like a lot of Plutarch is based on like what people remember from being in the pamphlet. But I don't think we have the pamphlet still. It's like it's like if somebody if it's like if somebody wrote a history of the of the fucking 2020 George Floyd protests based on like a conversation with someone who remembered some zines about them. Right, right, right. Where it's like, yeah, like you're you're probably not going to get all of the facts. Yeah, yeah. History is fucking crazy.

Yeah. Yeah, it's good stuff. There's a story that Plutarch tells that like when Tiberius's dad is a kid, he goes to a soothsayer, you know, basically a fucking, you know, a fortune teller. And she's like, you're going to have to either like, I'll just read the quote because it's kind of weird. We're told moreover that he once caught a pair of serpents on his bed and that the soothsayers after considering the prodigy forbade him to kill both serpents or to let both go but to decide the fate of one or the other of them. The claring that also the male serpent if killed would bring death to Tiberius and the female to Cornelia. That's his wife. So Tiberius, accordingly, who loved his wife and thought that she was still young and he was older and it was more fitting that he should die killed the male serpent but let the female go.

Short time afterwards, as the story goes, he died. So that's what happens with this guy's dad. Like his dad supposedly dies because he he kills the snake that represents him to let his wife live. He leaves her with 12 children, three of which survived to adulthood. Just like what a bonkers day at the fortune teller's office. It's a weird day at the fortune teller's house. Check this out. I would tell him if he kills the male snake, he's going to die.

Yeah, first of all, I'm going to tell him kill one snake only. Yeah, only one snake. Let the other go. They had to just be. I assume the fortune teller colleagues are just all, you know, fucking with each other. Oh, yeah. I mean, they're fucking high as shit. They are unbearably lit.

So Cornelia takes charge of the children in the estate. She, you know, she's good enough at being a mom that like a solid 25% of her children live to adulthood. And two of those kids are the brothers, Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus. Now, both of them are like, again, fancy boys. They hold a bunch of public offices that young patrician kids are expected to hold as they climb up the political ladder. At age 17, Tiberius goes to Africa to fight, you know, in the last big war against Carthage. And he's supposed to be the first man over the walls of Carthage during that final siege. After that, he goes to another war.

So by the time, you know, he comes around in, you know, the, the 100s, like, like ish B.C. Rome is kind of locked into this Afghanistan style situation in Spain where they have conquered Spain. But like, it's kind of hard to hold on to Spain. Like if you're anyone, there's a reason why Spain has mostly belonged to Spain throughout history. It's not all the, it's not always all that easy for Spain to be in charge of Spain. So they're fighting this like endless series of like brush fire rebellions against. And it is, it's like Afghanistan that you've got like this, this Roman military that's very organized and fairly modern in like its, its command structure. And then there's these guys who are just like throwing rocks at them from the bushes and then running away.

And it works pretty well for the fucking Spanish. So Tiberius Gracus goes to go fight in northern Spain against these, the city called Nermintia. And the war does not go very well. And the guy who's in charge of the Roman army gets his ass kicked. And so they have to negotiate a surrender. Now the Nermintians knew Tiberius because his dad had beaten them in a war like 20 years ago. And he'd been cool about it, right? Like he hadn't been a dick about beating them in a war.

So they were like, well, we'll let, we'll talk with this guy. We'll negotiate with this guy because if he makes a peace treaty with us, we feel like Rome will stick to it. So Tiberius works out a truce and a peace treaty and he saves this Roman army. But when they get back to Rome, all of these politicians who had not left the city and who wanted the war to keep going because there was money in Spain but didn't actually want to figure out how to fight it are like, how dare you pull out of Spain with this army? Like how dare you?

It's a little bit familiar to some things that have happened. It's like this bad situation. And the guys back home had like, didn't have any idea how to deal with it better than Tiberius did. But they're still angry about it because that's what you do in politics. I guess it's probably, well, it's only more honest to just have the military industrial complex openly advocating like we need this war for money to continue. We need this war for money to continue. And for pride, how fucking dare you?

So Tiberius, he takes a beating from these guys, but they can't punish him because he did just save the entire army's life. And that kind of makes you popular in a way that's dangerous to fuck with too much. But they do his commanding officer who had lost the war. They like strip him naked and chain him up and send him back to the enemy and are like, you guys can have him. Like we don't want this guy anymore. Like do whatever you want to him.

Which again, if we'd done that with David Petraeus, would have I think been cool. I think that's what we should have done with David Petraeus. I just have a few more consequences for some of people's command decisions. Fucking strip Dick Cheney naked and just air drop him into Basra. And whatever happens happens, right? We're not saying what the penalty should be. It's up to them to figure it out. So the people vote to clear Tiberius of all charges, yada, yada.

Things go pretty good for him. And this is like what you might call a pretty decent start in Roman public life. And as he's, you know, there's a story that later gets told that like while he's kind of going back and forth between Spain and Rome, he's like walking around the countryside and he notices quote or he notices basically that like there's nobody here. There's no Romans here. It's all slaves. All of these farms are worked by slaves. All of the actual free people are like desperately poor because they've all lost their lands.

They're just like huddled in these shanties at the edge of town. And like, oh, wow, it kind of seems like we've done a terrible thing and destroyed the class of people who have made like our success possible. This is probably a problem, right? So again, basic observation. So he decides to set up this policy to reform the public lands of Rome to make it impossible for individual rich guys to buy up huge tracts of land and to guarantee that small freeholding farmers will continue to be the core of Roman society. Now, the way the popular story gets told, it's just Tiberius who like sees these poor farmers who are dispossessed and has this idea to fix everything. That's not really true.

The reality is that this block of senators had been working for years to figure out a way to reform the land system to fix this problem. And Tiberius is just kind of like he's young and he's popular and these senators are like, you're the guy to be like the fucking frontman, right? Which I guess is how a lot of big political reform has to work. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's again, a fairly modern seeming story. So they come up with this plan where they're going to limit the amount of public land that any individual can have to 330 acres. Now, this is like too harsh for the rich people. And so they start howling. So they kind of like alter it in order to allow like an additional like, I don't know, 100 or so acres or a couple hundred acres if you like already hold the land.

So they put in like some again, they immediately are like, all right, we'll look like we'll work. We like we understand like the rich people and you already have this land. So we'll let you have more than we think that you should be having just to try to be friendly. Now, think about modern politics when you offer to let rich conservatives like to compromise with them. Do they a compromise or B go apeshit and declare war on you? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's like exactly. So no, we like the lesson that we I guess will never learn from is like, don't negotiate with conservative terrorists. No, no, exactly. Do not do not talk with these guys. They're not you can't.

They're not trustworthy. Yeah. So, you know, they they start Tiberius, Gracas and these other senators and stuff start putting together this legislation that they're going to introduce at the forum. And while they're doing all of this, this horrible war in Spain is raging on because the Senate's rejected the peace deal that Tiberius cooked up, which means they have to raise another army and send it to Spain. But at this point, they're kind of having trouble finding soldiers, right, because nobody has enough money to like buy weapons. And like, it doesn't matter, even if you conscript people, they don't have the ability to like arm themselves. And so there's this rich politician who's very much against land reform, Scipio Emilianus, who figures out how to fix this problem. And it's by using his vast personal wealth to recruit and arm an army of his own. This is the first time this happens in Roman history. We're just a rich guy buys an army and takes it to war.

This will not be the last time this happens and it will prove to be a serious problem. He's kind of like he's kind of like the Roman Eric Prince where he's like, well, what if I just buy an army? Why don't we just do it that way? And then I can take minerals and shit, you know. So this guy Emilianus is, again, super against the land reform bill and he's one of the big people organizing against Tiberius and his block. But once he leaves the city to go fuck with Spain, he can't like do anything politically. Like there's no sending messages back effectively. So once he leaves the city with this army he's bought, Tiberius and his rivals take this law that they've built and they put it on the docket. Which literally means that they go to the middle of the city and they're like, hey guys, we got a fucking law to vote on everybody show up and let's vote our asses off.

Gather round, gather round motherfuckers. Now, since most of the Senate is against land reform, Tiberius and his allies decide to present the bill directly to the assembly to the voters without letting the Senate debate it. Now, this was not illegal. You did not have to present a law to the Senate first and let them debate it. But the most myorum, this like unwritten set of agreements says that you don't propose a law to the public without letting the Senate debate it, right? So this is the first big break with like political tradition in decorum and it's from Tiberius aside. They're like, well, now we're fucked the Senate. Like we're just going to take this one straight to the people.

So the rich people are like, OK, well, I guess fuck all of the things that we used to do. Now now now there's no rules, right? So so we're just going to fucking do it. Yeah, you went you went nuclear. Yeah, what type now we're going to do that too, right? And this is he does go nuclear because when Tiberius like goes up and he's like, hey, guys, I want to take all of this land that only the rich people have that's supposed to be all of our land and give it to all of you. And this makes people very excited, right? It's it's such a big deal that like because basically he gets up and he announces this and says in like a couple of weeks, we're going to have a vote on it. And so all of these poor citizens start flooding out of the city and like finding their relatives who are like living on the outskirts of town or in other towns and bringing them in.

And so suddenly thousands and thousands of people start heading into Rome, including Italians, people who are not Roman citizens, but agree with this like land reform bill because fuck the rich people in Rome who like show up and like are protesting. Basically they're showing placards. They're like announcing their support for this thing. Obviously Rome does not have mass media the way we have it, but they do have this forum, which is like Times Square mixed with C span and also a 90s era mall. Right. It's this like big stage with shops around it. And it's not it's not even that big a stage. And if you're doing politics, you stand up there and you talk to people about like what you're trying to get them to do.

So every day Tiberius is up there while they're waiting for because they're like say we're going to have the vote and you know X number of days, right. So and that's to give everyone time to get into the city because you have to physically be there to vote. So while all he's waiting for everyone to get in town, he's like speaking every day and I'm going to quote again from Plutarch here about like that's describing one of his speeches. The wild beasts that roam over Italy, he would say, have every one of them a cave or a layer to lurk in. But the men who fight and die for Italy enjoy the common air and light indeed, but nothing else. Houseless and homeless, they wander about with their wives and children. It is with lying lips that their imperators exhort the soldiers in their battles to defend sepulchres and shrines from the enemy. For not a man of them has a hereditary altar, not one of these many Romans an ancestral tomb, but they fight and die to support others in wealth and luxury. And though they are styled masters of the world, they have not a single clot of earth that is their own.

Pretty good speech. Yeah. Yes, pretty good speech. You put on your speech voice hard for that one though, I was noticing. Yeah, I might have been doing a little bit of Dan Carlin there. So this goes really well, and this is where the Trump comparisons get in, right? He is the first like populist politician in Roman history. He's tapping into decades of anger and resentment among the lower classes.

He's promising to take the fight to the elite, which he is clearly a member of, right, on their behalf. So you could, you can make some Trump comparisons, but you can also make direct comparisons to Lenin and Mao, right? Lenin and Mao are both upper class, rich people who become these socialist firebrands and ignite uprising against an entrenched and decadent elite, right? You can see comparisons to all these guys, right? You can see him as like this first, like agrarian populist sort of Trumpian figure. Or you could be like, well, he's the first socialist, you know? Yeah. I mean, I think what it is, though, it's the like contemporary elision of the word populist with just like a small band of racists.

Yes. And that's where Trump fits in. The other ones are more truly populist. Yeah, because he's, this is a real problem he's trying to solve. Yeah. It's supposed to like howling about, again. And like calling calling Trump like a populist is such like a New York Times thing because the only population that matters to them is like racist in Ohio. Well, and also like, yeah, it is weird to call him a populist because he's never got close to a popular vote.

Like it's literally not most people. Whereas most people are really on board with what Tiberius is saying because most people are fucking poor as shit, right? Yeah. And they're like, yeah, this sounds great. So the rich people, they know they have to be careful because he has this huge mob of people who are like on his side and it would be really easy for them to just murder anybody who tries to stop him from passing this law. So they bribe a tribune and tribunes are like, it's this political office that the main thing the tribunes can do is they can veto any law that anyone makes, right? The tribunes, their primary power is that they can just say no and nothing can be done, right? It's just like there's two guys who get that job and that's like a thing that they can do.

Supreme Court type shit. Yeah, it is a little bit Supreme Court-y. Although it's more of a populist position because one of the tribunes, the Tribune of the Plebes, can only be a poor person, right? Or they're not actually poor people but can only be a non-noble. Yeah, probably a rich non-noble. There is a cool thing in this which is that like, well, the poor people should have a representative who can just say no to everybody, right? But in this case, the tribune gets bribed and so he says, hey, you can't vote on this bill, period. So now Tiberius has to take action.

So Tiberius is like, because Tiberius is also a tribune, right? So you've got one tribune who's like, I'm not going to let anyone vote on this fucking land reform bill. So Tiberius is like, all right, well then I won't let anyone vote on fucking anything and I won't let anyone spend the state's money. And he locks the treasury. Like he physically locks the Roman treasury and says like the government just, he does a government shutdown, right? Like that's what happens. Like no one can do anything now. So while all this is happening, this is becoming like a show.

So like people are flooding into the forum to watch. Most, a lot of the people who are like in the streets arguing and debating and like watching this political drama unfold are like veterans. They're like former farmers and sons of farmers and all this shit. And they start talking about violence. And Tiberius starts stoking this talk of violence by telling everyone he gets up on stage and he says, hey, I have evidence that my enemies are planning to assassinate me. And he starts carrying a dagger under his cloak, which is technically illegal. But he'll like pull it out during speeches and be like, shit's so serious that I got to keep a knife on me. You know, I got to be ready to cut a bitch.

He's like 50-50 cent with the bullets too fast. Yeah, he's exactly like 50 cent. So the Tribune who'd been bribed, this guy Octavius, decides at this point to let the people vote about, he's not going to let them vote on the land bill. But he'll be like, all right, look, if you guys are so unhappy with what I'm doing, you can vote about whether or not to strip me of like my office. So this had never happened before. And this starts to scare Tiberius because he's like, shit, we're now kind of like way off the beaten path of like what politics is supposed to be. And I'm kind of worried that the wheels, that there's no brakes on this thing. Because it gets scary to everyone when all of the social and political mores stop start crumbling at once.

But this vote happens. Octavius gets stripped out of his office. He only survives the mob like murdering him because his friends like push their way through a crowd to get him away. And Tiberius gets to have a vote on his law and it passes like resoundingly passes. Now, when the law passes, they have to set up a state commission to like redistribute this public land. And so his enemies, these rich people are like, well, we won't vote to actually pay any funds for the commission to redistribute public land. So you can't afford to do anything with this new law. And right as this happens, as they're like, fuck you, Tiberius, a rich king dies and this king for completely separate reasons wants to fuck over his dumb shit kids.

So he leaves all of his money to the Roman people, right? So Tiberius is like, all right, you're not going to fund me. Well, this guy left his money to the Roman people. So I'm just going to use his money to fund this land reform commission. And this is a problem for a bunch of reasons, but basically the rich people are number one angry that they're not going to get that gold. And number two, they're like, well, you're not supposed to have the power to decide how state money gets spent. So now you've number one, you're deciding what what can get voted on. You've stripped this other tribune of his power.

You're now like exercising power of the purse and like what the state can be spent on. Like you're getting kind of close to becoming a king, right, which is not entirely like wrong. Like they're like, wow, this you are exercising more power than a single person is supposed to have in our system. So they get really they decide like some shit needs to get done. And I'm going to quote from anthropology review here. At the time, tribunes were considered inviolable. So Tiberius was encouraged to run for a third term to retain the protection that the position bestowed to bolster his popularity with the citizens and increases chances of being elected. He proposed several new populist measures that further enraged his enemies.

These included proposals to reduce the mandatory term of military service as well as change the balance of power in the Senate by increasing the number of equities to match that of the senators. The night before the vote, Tiberius implored the citizens to vote for him because he feared for his life and the life of his family. His plea was so compelling that many people guarded his house all night to make sure he was safe. The next day, Tiberius went to the capital where he was surrounded by a crowd of people who wanted to protect him. Plutarch says that one of the senators, Flavius Flaccus, warned Tiberius that the wealthy Romans had resolved to assassinate him. Tiberius pointed at his head to indicate to his supporters that his life was in danger. This was interpreted by the spy sent from the Senate as a request for a crown, a claim they raced to relay to the senators who immediately sent a mob of armed slaves and supporters to attack Tiberius and his followers. So what follows is a fucking massacre.

You have this political group who have come together to reform the political system of the entire government in order to make it fairer for poor people. And the rich send an army into the city of slaves primarily and massacre them. They kill the shit out of Tiberius and two or three hundred of his followers. It's just this bloody nightmare. They're throwing people's corpses in the river, all sorts of fucked up shit. Now, after they massacre all these people, they pass most of the reforms that he had suggested, which is another thing that happens repeatedly in Roman history. Like they'll have like they'll have a civil war and they'll massacre the other side and then they'll do what they asked for anyway, because it's a good idea. So a lot of his reforms happen, but by killing him and all of his followers in the middle of town, a seal has been broken.

Right? And the Republic is never the same after this. I'm going to quote from a write up in the New York Times here. Over the next years, it quickly became normal for populist politicians to set aside longstanding norms to accomplish their goals for military commanders to bend the Senate to their will by threatening to occupy Rome and for rival generals to wage war on one another. Within a generation of the first political assassination in Rome, politicians had began to arm their supporters and use the threat of violence to influence the votes of assemblies and the election of magistrates. Within two generations, Rome fell into civil war. So that's good. Yeah, yeah. That's, I mean, don't especially want to think about I guess that I mean that is also just the American thing of like, look,

if not that our official like armed services are not just basically militias for the powerful, but codify it that way, feels like. Hey, you, you learned where this is going because in part two, part one is about how the Romans, how Roman politics turned from this like cordial thing where violence was not common to we will murder anybody who tries to fuck with the money. And part two is about how they create the FBI. Can't fucking wait. Grim is fucking usual. Thanks. Andrew, you got anything to plug before we roll out of here? Yes, actually this Saturday, the 20th, my podcast, Yozus racist is doing a show in Austin, Texas.

So if you're in Austin, please come out. But yeah, find me Yozus racist. I'm Andrew T. Well, you know, it's funny because you your podcast is Yo is this racist, but we're talking about the Romans and racism didn't exist yet. They didn't have it. They did. Like they literally hadn't figured out how to be racist yet. That hadn't been invented because we also had not invented British people.

Right. And they also had a lot of other shit to find about apparently. They sure did. They sure did. Yeah, but but but not racist. Woke Kings, the Roman Republic. Woke. Woke.

No. Woke Proconcils. Yeah, yeah. All right. Well, until next time, up yours, Woke Moralists. Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com. Or check us out on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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