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

Episode Date: August 18, 2022

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

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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. Oh, America. All right, I started the episode. I mean, you could have done worse. Yeah, yeah, America. I've heard you start.

We all love America. And so let's celebrate it. Of all of the countries that are America, which one is your favorite and why is it ancient Rome? Wait, I there was a bobble, just a tiny bubble in your audio. So I missed the middle of it. Wait, what is he said? Of all the countries that are America, which is my favorite and why is it ancient Rome? Yeah, yeah, exactly.

I think it's I mean, honestly, so far, it's got to be just the sword control bills. I do. I do love the sword control bills. Yeah, it is. It's very funny. I guess it is a little tricky to because living at a time if you go back to part one when it's like weapons of war are banned, but weapons of war includes things like horses. Well, yeah, a weapon of war is like a sharp piece of metal in this period of time and not really much deadlier than like a big heavy stick, right? Like it's yeah, it is it is different. Like again, these are you can also find fun articles about people talking about ancient Roman like weapons limitation laws and people trying to make comparisons to assault weapons.

And it's like, well, it doesn't really work very far among other things. Number one, people support assault weapons bans in the United States generally because of like massacres of schools and malls and stuff. And the Romans supported a ban on the carrying of weapons within the panmarium because they were trying to stop armed mobs from taking political. Right. It's not about stop. Ancient Romans did literally nothing to stop murders. There were not police. You did not like if you committed a murder, there was like unless you killed a famous rich person, there was nobody to like do like they didn't give a shit. Again, people died constantly.

Right. Like you we just talked about that lady went 12 kids and three of them made it to adulthood. Like they did. They would not have banned us. They would not have banned assault weapons if the worry were that civilians were getting murdered. They were carrying because they didn't want people to take over the government. It's sort of, yeah, they're almost exact opposite. Yeah.

It's literally like the opposite reasoning. It was not to protect life. Yeah. That was absolutely no one's concern in Ancient Rome. So after the assassination of Tiberius Gracchus, things got worse very quickly for our Roman friends. Now, Tiberius was not yet 30 when he died. I think he might have been in the 20. You might have been like Cobain, you know.

Damn. Yeah. Cobain and Tiberius Gracchus, two socialist kings. Yeah. By the time you're in your 30s, you should have been assassinated for politics or culture at least once. Yeah. Yes. Now, Tiberius, yeah, so he's a young, and he's got this younger brother who we talked about a little bit in the first episode, Gaius,

who's like just starting to be an adult when his older brother gets murdered. Now, you can find a bunch of writing from historians at the time about Gaius, and it's all the same sort of like hagiographic shit about how cool he was and how like he loved his soldiers when he becomes a tri... He becomes like the equivalent of like a lieutenant or something when he's like 17, like all of these people do. Right. And he's supposed to be good at that. And eventually he winds up getting elected tribune. Like his brother had been.

He has to break his law to get elected. He has to like actually desert the army. And he talks his way out of getting in trouble for it because again, a lot of Roman law is just like, well, we're pretty sure our ancestors wouldn't have liked it if this happened, but he talks his way out of it. So his brother's reforms had been passed after he was murdered, but they'd been kind of knee capped by patricians. So they pass a land reform bill and then they spend the next couple of years like taking back everything that they'd given to poor people pretty much. So Gaius starts pushing for a bunch of like really pretty radical reforms at the time. He wants to give more public land to the poor.

He wants to hand out free grain. He wants to set up a state dole so that the poor aren't reliant upon like rich people as clients who can then tell them who to vote in order to like survive. He wants to provide public funding for military equipment so that poor people can be in the army. He wants to raise the draft age and he wants to make everyone in Italy a Roman citizen, which really pisses off the rich and powerful people in Rome. And he's politically successful in a lot of this. He actually gets the Senate to send money back to conquered nations because he thinks that like Rome's being unfair to the places they conquer, which is like kind of a wild thing to succeed at getting the Senate to do. So this makes him as popular among the people who had murdered his brother, as you might expect.

Now, Plutarch describes the changes Gaius is trying to push in the Roman government as changing it from aristocratical to democratic. And perhaps he would have succeeded given time, but he made the mistake of leaving Rome to found a colony in Libya, which gives his enemies the opportunity to slander him to voters. And when he returns, he gets attacked in the street by a mob and the majority of people fail to come to his aid like nobody comes to protect him. When this group of like hired thugs comes to murder him and he gets beaten to death and his head is stuck on a spear and brought to the Senate. They throw his corpse into a river. They love throwing corpses in rivers, the Romans, which is a bad idea. By the way, if you're going to kill, if you're gonna, if your political movement is going to massacre a bunch of people, don't throw their bodies in the river. Don't throw their bodies in that water.

Yeah, especially, you know, in pre pre water treatment plant times. Yeah, if you want to, my famous favorite meme, the one from Predator with the two, the black guy and the white guy like clasping hands. It's gonna be like ancient Rome, the Aztecs throwing all of their corpses into the river. So whether or not you want to see the Brothers Gracchi as they become known to the ages as the first socialists or as precursors to Donald Trump, this brief period of time in the spotlight they have makes one thing very clear. The ruling class in Rome is willing to break any rule and violate any norm to keep the money flowing and maintain their shocking rate of wealth accumulation. From this point on in the Republic's history, the rich only get richer and the poor tend to get poorer. But once it becomes clear that it's okay to murder political rabble rousers and their supporters to keep them from redistributing land,

it becomes increasingly hard to argue that there aren't a lot of other political things that are worth doing a murder over. And so people start murdering over everything. And while Rome and politics is getting a lot more murdery in 113 BC, this huge migration of barbarians, they're generally called Germans, but like they're not actually Germans, but whatever, they're the Germans. They sweep down from central-ish Europe and they start invading Italy. Now the Romans do what they always do, which is they put together this army, 20,000 men, and they march out to stop them. And Nancy Pelosi's in charge again, so the army gets wiped out. Just absolutely massacred. So the Roman state, which had never meaningfully reformed public lands or fixed the problems that Gracchi had railed against,

they can't really replace the lost men, but thankfully they have a guy on hand, a military leader, a dude named Gaius Marius, who he's been elected consul a couple of times at this point, and he's co-leading a military campaign elsewhere in the empire. And it just so happens this guy, Marius, is like, you know, like top 10 military minds in like all of history. Like if you're ranking like all of the, like he's up there with like subatai and shit, like he's very, very good at being a military leader. He's going to be the guy who reforms the Roman military. So the Roman army that you've seen in any movie with like Romans, where they all have like segmented armor and like, you know, you've got the legions with the big shields and the swords and the hat, he invents that before him.

It's a very different looking army. They have like different classes. They have guys, it's very different military. I mean, it's like everyone, because everyone bought their own shit. Right. Exactly. Exactly. So he reforms the military and he also, he basically succeeds in making the state pay for it. So for the first time, you've got regular people. They're called the proletari, proletari. Yeah, proletari, something like that.

The poorest people are in the military and he started, it's very controversial what he's doing, but there's a disaster happening at the time. They're getting their asses kicked by these barbarians. So he's like, look, we have to, we have to recruit from poor people and arm them at the state's expense. And this works out really, really well. And Marius is, as he's a brilliant military leader, he's also a really good politician. He's good at winning elections and exercising power and building coalitions. But he's also, he's not really a patrician.

He's a rich guy, but he's kind of a rich country guy. So everyone, all of the patricians, he's a redneck, right? He doesn't speak Greek, right? He can't even fucking speak Greek. So they like, they hate his ass. Like there's a little bit, actually a little bit of their reaction to him that is kind of Trumpy and that like you've got this like entrenched political class who just doesn't like the way he talks. I think it's kind of gross. But also he's super popular among regular people because number one,

he's like massively improving their lives because along with letting them be in the army, he makes it so that if you're in the army, you get a bunch of land after you retire, right? Like you get this land that we're conquering, we're going to give it to soldiers. So instead of coming home to a farm that has been taken from you, you come home and you get given a farm by the state farm, you know, and that's like a pretty cool deal for the time. So to make a long story short, he wins this war and he becomes such a hero that he has styled the third founder of Rome.

Like if you want to talk about the degree to which he wins this war against these barbarians, if I'm remembering properly, they basically create a new god of death that's made in his image because of how many of them he kills. It's like that kind of war. So he becomes like known as the third founder of Rome, which is, you know, most like he's a big part of who's like pushing that title for himself, right? Because he's, you know, it's good branding. And he's absolutely a populist.

And in fact, he draws a movement towards to him who become known as the populars, which is, I think it's pretty obvious what that means. And they're opposed by the optimists who are like the rich people who want to reduce the political power of the plebs. Eventually, all of this leads to a nasty civil war between Marius and his old lieutenant, a patrician politician named Sulla. Now, Sulla is like the number one, it has to be said, he is like the queerest dude in ancient Rome and very open about it.

He's a fun fucking guy. Like Sulla is a neat character. And he is just like this very, like some people will say sadistic, definitely mass murderer, very, very good general. And he and fucking Marius have this like series of horrific battles. They have this massive civil war. It wipes out like a generation of Italian men because they're both really good. Neither of them are Pelosi types.

They're both actually good at having armies. So they just massacre each other. Now, Marius loses at first and he has to flee to Africa, but then he reinvades Italy and he conquers Rome and he massacres all of Sulla's followers in the city. But then he dies because he's like Joe Biden age. And so Sulla comes back and he kills all of Marius's followers, including like there's like 8000 Italians, members of this tribe

elsewhere in Italy who Marius was trying to give political rights to because there's this big fight over whether or not Italian should be Roman citizens. And he just genocide. Sulla just does a genocide on these people. He stabs 8000 people to death, which is a lot of people to stab to death when you think about it. Very rarely do that many people get stabbed to death in the short period of time. It really is that like, you know, it's so, I know that obviously our brains are numb to like the numbers of war

and like what like automatic weapons and like, you know, modern bombs can do. Yeah. And it is really like swords. This is swords. This is swords. It is it is swords and sharpen sticks and like arrows, which are basically sharpen sticks. So Sulla just kills fucking everybody. He can get his hands on who are his enemy. And then he's dictator. He makes himself dictator, which is a political position in Rome, right?

Yeah. The dictator previously is like, it's a job you have for like six months a year. He makes himself dictator for however long he wants to be. But after a while, he gives up the job and he retires to his mansion to fuck a bunch of hot dudes. So that's a pretty fun character. I mean, as far as like, I'm the dictator, but you know what? I'm like, I'm tired. I'm tired. We're tired from dictator is like a pretty amazing.

That's like, no one does that. Like he's a monster. These guys are all monsters, but he's a pretty entertaining monster. So there's a number of cool side effects to Sulla massacring all of Marius's guys. Number one, all of the people who were like popularies who are like populists, plebeian supporting like folks who are on Marius aside, they either get murdered or they have to flee the city. And one of these people who has to flee Rome and like hide somewhere else is a dude

you might have heard of named Julius Caesar, right? He's one of Marius's buds. So another thing that happens is that under Sulla, the plebes are stripped of all political power that like position Tribune of the plebes that caused so much trouble with the group. That doesn't exist anymore for a while. It comes back. They regain the power pretty a lot of the power they'd had in like the decades after Sulla leaves.

But they lose basically all political power for a while. And the last thing that happens is that all of the people Sulla murders have there. And he's like he's he's like a Stalin type figure with his murdering. He makes a list like there's like a list and you get a bounty. If you like kill or bring in somebody who's like on his list, you get like a chunk of their stuff. And so some people get really good at murdering or tracking down or are hiring people to murder folks on that list.

And so they get a bunch of their stuff. And he's like so again, if you help him kill his political enemies, he'll give you their shit. And by hooker by Crip, a lot of the property of people who had been supporters of Marius winds up in the hands of a guy named Marcus Licinius Crassus, who is the Elon Musk of ancient Rome, the wealthiest man in the world. And he's also not he's like Musk, not just because he's the richest guy in the world, but he's also a some would say a trailblazing innovator.

Right now, Musk's great innovations are PayPal, which is banking but slightly less regulated and in that car company. Crassus's innovation is he starts the first firefighting brigade in Roman history, right? People have been obviously fighting fires for forever because it's a horrible problem, right? Like a terrible, terrible problem in ancient Rome. But he's the first guy who builds like an actual professional fire brigade. Now these guys are all slaves and the fire brigade is a for-profit endeavor. So what happens is when your house is on fire,

Crassus's guys will show up and be like, that seems like a real problem you got. Sell us your house for like basically nothing and we'll put the fire out. So he gets real rich doing this, right? He makes so much fucking money. It is hard to convert old Roman currency to modern dollars, but he's like a billionaire, right? He's a multi-billionaire for all intents and purposes. He's got like Elon Musk money, right?

Right. He is so rich that a few decades later, he's going to buy an army of 40,000 men to invade Iran. It doesn't work out for him. It is really badly, but he's part of this like tradition of like, now rich guys can buy an army if they want. Right, right, right. Yeah.

Because basically what they're doing is like, I'm going to donate this money to the state in order to buy this army because I think we need to be a war with these people. In Crassus's case, they get their asses kicked very badly and he gets killed by having molten gold poured out his throat, which is pretty sweet. Oh, shit. Yeah.

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

Like today, for example. Now it's just pouring molten NFTs down their throat or whatever. That's right, that's right. They do not have the same panache. So Crassus is one of these Roman politicians that most people have probably heard about. He's famously, he's part of this triumvirate that runs things for a while at the tail end of the Republic.

The other two guys in the triumvirate are Julius Caesar, who everybody knows, and the Nias Pompeius Magnus, or simply Pompey the Great. Now, I'm not going to, first off, I should note, he's called Pompey the Great because that is the nickname he gives himself. Basically, he's like, Pompey's whole strategy was he would go, Rome would be at a war somewhere, and some political guy who was good at fighting the war would almost win it.

And then Pompey, because he was good at politics and rich, would like buy his way into taking over the army, and then he'd finish the war and then he'd be like, look at this big victory I won. I guess I get another big fancy day marching through the city. And so like he gets that he gets voted the name Pompey the Great effectively because like the other senators are making fun of him because they're like, it's like kind of a mocking nickname to most people

because we all know you're kind of full of shit. He's like an executive producer of the wars. Exactly, exactly. Yeah, he's an EP. He actually kind of is like, I mean, in a number of ways. He's like the Weinstein of military history, right? Yeah, Julius Caesar's the Ben Affleck. I'm not going to explain it.

So I'm not going to like rehash all of this period in Roman history. Save to say that like the fact that three guys wind up basically in charge of all government policy is not a good step towards like a more Republican form of government, right? So what doesn't talk and get talked about enough, because this is the thing everybody talks about is like the Triumvirate and Pompey and Caesar and Crassus and stuff. This is like most of what people know about the Roman Republic

is this tail end period. What doesn't get talked about enough is how shit actually got done on the ground. Because in the 80 or so years since the Brothers Gracchi, Roman politics had turned into a constant low level gang war. And again, you've got these big mobs of clients. So like after it becomes common to kill people for political purposes, senators and elected officials won't travel through town without like a bunch of their guys with them, right?

So part of your job as clients, like at least, you know, the chunk of clients you have who are like veterans, who are like big tough guys, you get your vets and your boxes and stuff. And anytime you go through town to take care of business, you have like 50 or 100 guys with weapons, like your guys following you to watch your back, right? Because now people get murdered all the time because they propose bills. And one of the things this means is that pretty regularly,

you'll get these groups of like senators and elected officials and like their goons and they'll just murder each other in the street. These gang wars between like members of Congress. It is it's literally like a fucking like Mitch McConnell and Nancy Pelosi and like bands of men with like sharpened sticks wailing at each other in like Washington, which would be a better system than we have now. Don't get me wrong.

Now it's like a Cold War version of that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So like and a lot of one of the actually the most popular weapons is like ceiling tiles. Like that's if you really want to kill somebody, you get some dudes up on a roof to just start hooking ceiling tiles down on them, that'll kill a motherfucker fast.

Oh, yeah. Yeah, so. That makes sense. Yeah. I mean, that's how it's a good way to kill people. So the most successful of these gangsters, because another thing that happens is that like, yeah, senator, you've got like your mobs of clients, but like a guy who's professionally building a mob of armed people

to get into street fights is always going to be better than just some politician who has his like, toadies following him. So you get these professional gangsters who build political mobs to street fight on behalf of different sides of the big Roman political divide. Right. And the most successful of these gangsters is a guy named Claudius. Now, Claudius is another rich kid.

His family had sided with Sola during the last Civil War, which is like, you know, that's the aristocracy side. But Claudius didn't follow in the footsteps of his father who'd been elected consul. Instead, he starts to develop a reputation as the kind of guy who can get things done in a dark alley. In 63 BC, a senator named Catelyn tries to overthrow the government and massacre all of the elected leaders of Rome and assume control in a coup. Kind of tries to make himself dictator again like Sola had.

And while this is all going on, this is a complicated story, but while there's this like coup attempt, Claudius, because he's kind of a young strapping dude, he volunteers to act as bodyguard for the consuls, for the elected leaders Catelyn is trying to kill. And when all the dust has settled, he's become one of the guys you go to in Rome when you need a gang of thugs to protect you or somebody else, right? He kind of like, he's kind of like building a private security firm.

Like that's literally like really what this is. It's like, you can hire Claudius and he's got like fucking goons who will watch your fucking back and they're good at it. Yeah. Blackwater. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Now, there's a lot of ground to cover here. And I'm not going to give Claudius his due because he's a fascinating guy, but I would be doing everyone a disservice if I didn't read you this one excerpt from his backstory. And I'm going to, this is coming from a write up in headstuff.org. Quote, The cult of Bonadia, the good goddess, is somewhat of an anomaly in classical Rome. Rather than the standard gods with a priesthood and open worship,

the good goddess was worshiped in a less formal fashion, similar to the Greek mystery cults. The celebrations of Bonadia were not of the city's normal ecclesiastical rights. And in fact, they predated the earliest recorded history of the city. Even her name was a secret, known only to women and never recorded. She did have a temple where only women were permitted entry. And every year on the first day of May, they would hold a sacred celebration in this temple.

This was one of two such celebrations held throughout the year, but the second in December was not held in the temple. Instead, it was hosted by the wife of the chief magistrate with the aid of Rome's sacred Vestal virgins. The year the chief magistrate was Rome's high priest, Gaius Julius Caesar. Quite why Claudius decided to infiltrate the Bonadia festivities in 62 BC is a mystery. The main rumor at the time was that he did it in an attempt to seduce the hostess,

Caesar's wife Pompeia. The more likely reason is that he did it in an attempt to win some credit with Rome's Bohemian set and set himself up as an iconoclast. Whatever it was, he disguised himself as a woman and slipped into the house. Unfortunately for him, Caesar's mother Aurelia was there, determined to make sure that things went smoothly. He immediately noticed this unusually tall and heavily cloaked woman. The rite of Bonadia was such a rare opportunity for Roman women

to throw off the shackles of propriety and ask such masking-ear identity like that was very unusual. Aurelia had a servant girl follow Claudius, and she immediately noticed when he let his voice slip. She called him out on it, and he fled the scene. Though he was not definitively identified, everyone knew it was Claudius. The public outrage in his conduct, stoked by his brother-in-law, led him to be formally charged with the sacrilege the following year.

The punishment for a man who witnessed the mysteries of the good goddess was to be blinded. Just cloud-show shit. It is, and it's, as a fun note, Caesar divorces his wife after this, not because she'd done anything, but because the fact that this guy was maybe trying to fuck her means that people might suspect she'd done something, and Caesar's wife has to be above suspicion. Oh, my God.

He just wanted a divorce. Like, these guys are all... The cool thing about Ancient Romans is, like, you could, number one, you could make an incredible fucking, like, soap opera show that's just about the lives of all these people. They are, like, just all very... Every one of these fucking people that we've talked about would have had a reality show if TV was not... Right, right, right.

Like, Caesar basically did kind of have the equivalent of the reality show. So one of the things that he's doing, and he kind of comes to power later in life, he doesn't have a lot of money, so he has to work with Crassus and stuff, but when he gets his military command of Gaul, number one, it's kind of because he's so old and hasn't really distinguished himself politically, it's kind of like if Pete Buttigieg suddenly got elected

Supreme Commander of the U.S. military, and then conquered the entire Middle East in five years. Right, right, right. Because that's what Caesar does, is he like... He's kind of a joke, he's this, like, silly asshole that everybody's, like, laughing at, and then he conquers all of Western Europe. Robert, I feel so funny!

He's fucking crying! It is! I mean, he's not to compare them because Pete Buttigieg is useless, and Julius Caesar was very smart, but one of the things Caesar does while he is conquering, again, all of fucking Europe. Like, he's... Forces are regularly outnumbered, four and five to one,

by some accounts even more than that. Like, he's an incredibly competent military leader. While he's doing this, he's writing every day about what he's doing and then sending his diary back to Rome to be published and read out to people in the city. So he's turning his life into the equivalent at the time of a reality show to build a legend around himself and to make himself into a popular figure.

Like, he's kind of doing the Trump thing, too, where it's like, yeah, I've got this, I've got the most popular show in town. And he comes up to listen to the latest pages of Caesar's diary being read. Yeah, he's tween... I mean, in hell, you got to do both, I guess. Yeah, he's capitalizing on all this military victory.

So, Claudius goes to trial as to whether or not he's going to get blinded for sneaking into these women's rights. And he doesn't get blinded, but only because Caesar and Crassus back him and they bribed the jury to acquit him. And prior to this, he'd kind of been at the top of his populist side of things politically, but he's now like a popular array,

because Caesar and Crassus, you know? And this is kind of the start of his life as a creature of Caesar and Crassus. In 59 BC, he runs for election as Tribune of the Plebes. Now, as we've talked about, this is the veto job, and it's very important, but also it's a Tribune of the Plebes. You can't have this job if you're a patrician, which Claudius is.

So, he pays a guy who is four years younger than him to adopt him as his son. Like, he pays a poor man who's younger than him to adopt him as his son and make him a plebeian. And then he changes his name from C-L-A-U-D-I-U-S to C-L-O-D-I-U-S. I mean, it's slightly different in Latin, but like, he basically changes it to a different spelling of Claudius

to symbolize that like, now I'm a commoner. But the main benefit, number one, he can veto shit, which since the Gracchi, that's become like the thing you do. If you get a Tribune on your side, you can just stonewall everything. It's like the filibuster, right? Like, you can stop anything from happening.

You can just, yeah. Yeah, that's ultimate power. He makes himself into the Joe Mansion, but the other thing is that like, because all of Roman politics is determined via street fights, if you kill the Tribune of the Plebes, like Tribunes are sacrosanct. They're sacred when they're holding office.

If you kill one, you are immediately put to death. So he basically gains like a force field for himself in the street. So he's like Joe Mansion in that he can shut down politics, but also now he's got like the, if you touch me in a street fight, you get murdered. Like it's a force field. Again, they, it's a better system than we have.

So eventually the optimists get their own street fighter, who is even better than Claudius at building a gang of violent people and murder folks for political purposes. And this is this gangster named Milo, who is also pretty fucking rad. Milo is a hoot. So these two send their goons to beat

and murder people organizing for the other sides. Assassinations and street fights grow to become like a daily occurrence. There's basically a low level gang war at all times, all throughout the city of Rome. And you never know if you're going to get caught up in between these mobs of like armed young thugs, just like murdering people in the streets.

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

It all comes to a head in 52 BC, when Milo murders Claudius after beating him in a street fight. And this is a real problem. Now, I bet some people are wondering at this point, as we talk about all of this going on, where the fuck are the police in this, right? Cause at this point in Roman history,

there's like a million, there's close to a million people in the city of Rome. It doesn't really hit a million until, I guess, the first century AD, but there's like probably six, 700,000 or more people living in the city at this point, which is there will be no city in Eurasia with a population that's similar in size until the 1800s.

Right? And this is like 50 BC, you know? So Rome is able to get that big because it's very modern in a lot of ways. There's sewers, a lot of homes have central heating. They have running water, but one hallmark of modern life that Rome lacked was anything that vaguely resembled law enforcement.

And I want to quote from a write-up from Dr. Linda Ellis here. Though the government can usually cope with major disorders, personal violence plagued the city. Under the Republic, the police powers of the government were rudimentary, with few officials and limited staff trying to maintain some semblance of order. So if you committed a crime in Rome,

like treason or fucking with the money that was serious, you would get punished, right? Some high-up elected official would like send guys after you, right? Usually these were guys known as lictors who are like... Basically, if you have political office that comes with any kind of power, you get these dudes who hang around you and they carry these things called fascist,

which are like a bundle of sticks with an axe tied to them, which is where we get the word fascism. And you can send them to do things that can speak with the power that you have. It's a way of being like, well, if I'm actually running this empire, I might need to be making things happen in more than one place. Secret service was a little more proactive.

Kind of, but instead of protecting you, their job is mainly to go and tell people to do things on your behalf. So you can... If somebody does some serious treason, there's the ability to enforce the law against them, but there's not cops. And so if a popular or a wealthy guy murders somebody,

they're not going to get punished unless the person they murder has more money than them and friends who arrange a mob to go and fight his supporters. And property crime is not really a crime. It's a civil matter. As Dr. Linda Ellis writes, when the average citizen of Rome became a victim of crime, he had to rely on his neighbors and relatives for help.

Roman nobility could also call up a mob of clients to do battle for them. In rural areas of Italy, the situation was worse and landowners hired armed bands to protect themselves and intimidate their enemies. There were even a few private armies of thugs at Rome. Self-help was always the main way to deal with criminals in ancient Rome and there was no concept of public prosecution.

So victims of crime or their families had to organize and manage the prosecution themselves. So it's kind of everybody doing the gang shit at this point, which is, you know, we'll talk about how it works because in some ways it works better than what's going to come next and in some ways it doesn't. But this, again, it is worth noting that, like,

this is the system that, like, a million people live under in the densest city in the modern world. And they mostly figure their shit out. Now, as we know in 49 BCE, the tensions between the optimists and the popularies that had been settled in the streets turn into open war, right? You get your Caesar. He crosses the Rubicon, which is a river.

He fights this big war with his old friend Pompey and Caesar wins, right? And then he gets the shit stabbed out of him. And then there's another horrible civil war between the people who had killed Caesar and this kid who's related to him, who he kind of, like, makes his inheritor named Augustus. And Augustus wins this civil war

and he winds up as the emperor, right? This is the history everybody knows. This is, like, the most famous period of all of Roman history. Cleopatra's in the mix for a while, then she's not. Yeah. These are the characters I've heard of, yes. Yeah, we are now at the point in history everyone knows about and we're going to talk about what Augustus does

to deal with the fact that, like, with his power, everyone has just gone through, like, 150 straight years of constant assassinations and, like, street fights and three different civil wars that had all killed significant fractions of the male populace of the Roman Empire. And they're kind of tired of it. People, like, are not happy with the status quo.

They're like, you know what? We're okay not having any political power if you can stop everyone from murdering everyone all the time. So that's what Augustus comes to power with, right? And speaking of murdering everyone, you know who's going to murder you? The sponsors of our podcast. Oh, yeah.

They'll kill your ass. That's true. They will, Sophie. They'll kill your ass. That's their promise. No. I didn't see that in ad copy or the promo codes. Okay. Well, promo code, a man is coming to attack you in the night

with a knife. No. Yeah, well, it sounds like a difference of opinion. 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 Bullock. 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 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. We're back. I want to note one thing real quick here. So we're recording this like the day after the FBI raided Trump's house, which is a very funny moment.

Everybody's still enjoying it. You will be listening to this in the future when the entirety... Who knows what's going to happen next? Yeah, Gettysburg 2 and 3 have already happened by the time you've heard this. Yes, there are no people left in Virginia. Yeah, it's a nightmare. But anyway, so right after that happened, you get all these right-wing media leaders and thought leaders

start to say and shit about, like, now the war's on. Get ready to fight fucking Stephen Crowder being like, tomorrow we go to war. My favorite quote that one of these shitheads put out is this guy, Jesse Kelly, who is, according to his Twitter, host of the nationally syndicated Jesse Kelly show, host of I'm Right. And yeah, he's...

That's true, I guess. Sort of anti-communist piece of shit. He's got like half a million followers on Twitter. Yeah, I think he's a Fox News guy. Yeah, that seems right. So his post when everybody's like fed posting on Maine after Trump gets raided is, do not quote laws to min with swords attributed to Pompey Magnus.

Now, he likes this because, number one, they all fetishize weapons as doing things that weapons don't, which is provide on their own some sort of autonomy. Weapons are useless without organization as anything, but like tools of either personal violence or bullshittery. But the other thing that he's doing is like, this is like that you can't govern us because we're armed, right?

Like that's the thing that he's saying here. The funny thing about this, number one, Pompey Magnus, as we've just covered, was a gigantic fraud. Like, literally like bullshat his way into like repeated military commands and stuff. He's the same as like, I don't know, those Republicans who get up on stage and do a bunch of push-ups to show that they're big men.

Pose with a gun and whatever. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's like that sort of bullshit. But the other thing that's funny about this is that during the Civil War with Caesar, Pompey gets his ass kicked because again, Caesar's really good at fighting wars and Pompey is a gigantic fraud.

And he gets captured by Ptolemy, who's the leader of Egypt at the time, who's like allied with Caesar. And while he's being sent like as a prisoner to Caesar, Ptolemy has, by some accounts, a 15-year-old boy stab him to death and cut his head off. And then they stick it on a spear and parade it through town.

So Jesse Kelly, that may not be the guy to hark to as like your hero of like militant resistance. It kind of is. That's like the appropriate right-wing politician. Yeah, giant fraud who starts a fight and then gets murdered. Very funny. So Augustus is the emperor, right? And everyone is very tired of political violence

because it has just gone on way too fucking long, right? And this is, again, actually, it's not entirely wrong to kind of think about the political power that has kind of been gained. Not that these are too similar, but like the political power that has accrued, especially in the last few years, around gun control as a result of like exhaustion

at the constant spread of massacres. It's not entirely different because these people in Rome, they've had most of them have lost family in these fucking fights. It's this constant drumbeat of violence and these constant series of civil wars and they're just like fucking exhausted. And so one of the reasons Augustus is able to take

and hold power is that he promises and delivers, I'm going to put a stop to that shit, right? You're not going to have to deal with this anymore. And that is a pretty enticing thing for people at this point in Roman history. Now, different leaders had attempted to deal with Roman mob violence prior to Augustus. When Pompey took over the city during the Civil War,

he had brought his armed soldiers into Rome, crossing the Pomeranian illegally in order to restore order and put an end to lawlessness. And while Pompey had let his soldiers violate sacred law by taking weapons into the city, he had banned the private ownership of weaponry within the city, which happens several times in Roman history and never actually happens, right?

Again, it's pretty easy. You could just like take a chair leg, right? It's not like the weapons we're talking about. You can't really ban because people are just like making like sharp and shit, you know? You need knives to fuck shit, yeah. Yeah, and people are going to have roof tiles that you can hook and fuck, you know?

Slings are not hard to make. A leather glove with like metal... Anyway, it's not hard. So when Augustus takes power, though, he expands the ban on private ownership of weaponry. He bans the carrying of arms during assemblies or judicial proceedings. And eventually he passes a law known as the Lex Julia de Vie.

Which makes it illegal to carry weapons for any reason in the empire outside of hunting or personal protection when you're traveling between cities, right? So in addition to this, he establishes the first police force. The first police force of any kind anywhere in the western world. Now, different regimes had all had ways of like dealing with dissent or cracking down on stuff. There had been stuff that was kind of police-y.

The Spartans have essentially their version of like a fugitive slave patrol and stuff. But what Augustus builds is very different. Among other things, it is a permanent armed force in the city of Rome itself, which had never happened before, right? And so this is part of one of the things that makes Rome has always kind of been ungovernable. And so this is as ugly as it gets.

It's also a check to the power of the aristocracy because they can never hold too much power. Because at any moment, the Bob could get angry and just murder everyone because there's way too many of them. And there's no army in Rome to stop them, right? So it's just like, how big are your gangs? Are they bigger than everyone else in the city? No, they're not.

So you can't do certain things. Now, because the police force he builds, their primary job is not stopping crime or investigating murders. They're riot cops, right? That's what he puts into the city. He calls them urban cohorts because like cohort is a military unit, right? Kind of broadly equivalent to like, I don't know, a battalion almost in modern military terms.

These urban cohorts are military units commanded and organized similarly to the regular military legions, which operate under the military chain of command. They are militarized police and their job is to put down riots, to corral the power of the mob and to make street combat and coups basically impossible. Again, they don't handle petty crime. They don't do anything if your home is invaded

or if like your kids murdered or whatever. So they're the same as cops today, actually. There's a lot of similarities between them. And they're heavily, again, these are militarized police. Now, this is like the urban cohorts are like the daytime cops and then there's nighttime law enforcement, part of what they're doing is law enforcement. They're called card the vigils,

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

on a day-to-day basis is fire. So because like while you're, I'm actually just going to quote from Dr. Linda Ellis here to talk about like how, what these guys do evolves over time. At first, the vigils functioned primarily as a firefighting force since the main threat to cities then and now was destruction by uncontrolled fire. They were equipped with water pumps, buckets and axes

for breaking down the doors of houses on fire or suspected of being a fire risk. Artillery was used to shoot dampening materials onto fires and to create the fire breaks by leveling buildings. The vigils patrolled the city at night and had the right of entry into private homes, which put them in the position of witnessing crime and taking on the role of policemen

from capturing thieves, returning runaway slaves to maintaining public order. So they have the right to go into your home because we have to be able to make sure you're not starting a fire that you can't keep order that like a fire hasn't started, that you haven't fallen asleep or whatever and like your house is burning down. But because of this, now we're allowed to do no-knock raids

on your house if we think it might be a fire. What if we see a crime? We have to have the ability to like prosecute a crime too and so they kind of become cops because they have the ability to bust into anybody's house for any reason. So this is so, it's so interesting that that characteristic begets the job

and not the other way around. It is really interesting, right? Because it's very... Because our police... It's not how I would have assumed that, but it makes sense. It's like that power creates the thugs that become police. And it's interesting because like in our system,

our police who are thugs came out of fugitive slave patrols, which were just a worse kind of thug. In this case, the police came out of an absolutely necessary job. You're going to have a fucking million people in a city in zero-ass BC. You need professional firefighters, right? Otherwise, it's just suicide. But kind of you get how this like evolves

and then they become cops because like, well, this guy's breaking the law. What am I supposed to do? Are we supposed to just let this happen? You know, it's interesting. Yeah, it is really different though from what you would expect. So the birth of this... And this is a fairly advanced law enforcement force, right?

Like if you're thinking about what's around at the time, you've got... These are that... Like at any given time, thousands upon thousands of heavily armed men, like the vigils have artillery. They have catapults and shit, which they use to fight fires,

but which can also be turned to like fight riots, which by the way, I would have loved to watch these guys fight a fire because I want to see people like stop a fire with a fucking catapult. It's pretty cool shit. But so one of the things that this does is you've got this advanced law enforcement force.

You've disarmed the city. The only people with weapons are these cops. One of the things that this makes a hell of a lot easier is the state can enforce unpopular laws. Now you think back to Lucretia, right? Romans get rid of their first or their last king because like there's this stupid ass law and he does...

Like his son does a horrible thing, rapes somebody and the stupid ass law leaves in the even worse situation and everybody's really angry about it. And because the mob is the mob, they're able to like kick the king out and that's how the republic starts. That's not gonna be possible. Nothing like that is anymore

because now you have riot cops in the city. So it's really easy for the state to force people to accept laws that are unpopular. A good example of this. During the reign of Nero, the mayor basically of Rome is murdered by one of his slaves. Now they can't figure out who did it, right?

They don't know which slave. They just know it was one of the people he owns in his household, but he's got hundreds. I think this might have had like a thousand or more, like a shitload of slaves, like a fucking small town worth of slaves. Now under Roman law, if you can't figure out which specific slave did it,

you have to execute the entire household. Every man, woman and child in a lot of these slaves are kids who lives with this guy. Now, everyone in Rome when this happens is fucking horrified by this. And in fact, stuff like this had happened in the past and it had provoked riots, which had often stopped this sort of justice

from being carried out in full, right? Because people, Romans, they don't think slaves are like less human, right? They have less rights due to what they believe is a pretty natural political condition, but they're still horrified at the thought of you're gonna kill like 500 people because like one of them is a murderer

and like you're gonna murder a bunch of kids. Like that's fucked up. My dad was a slave. My grandpa was a slave. Like I don't think this is right. And in the past, Romans attempting to, like Roman leaders attempting to carry out these laws

in order to maintain the status quo would have had to like fuck up a bunch of people to do it and would have been put at risk by doing it. That doesn't happen anymore. By the time Nero was in power, the vigils on the urban cohorts are professionalized. They're very good at stopping dissent. And so a huge show of force is sent out by the police state

as the Romans move in to execute these slaves. As English historian PKB Reynolds wrote an 1828 paper on ancient Roman policing quote, the law was upheld however, on this occasion, but elaborate police precautions were necessary when the sentence was to be carried out. So because they have this powerful police force, the mob cannot act to stop an injustice, right?

Because they just get the shit murdered out of them by the cops. And it's interesting, Reynolds, this is a very fascinating paper. I recommend reading it if you're interested in ancient Rome. Right after talking about how the birth of policing made it possible to massacre all of these kids, he goes on to write that quote,

it is not really going too far to say that in the matter of police services, it was not until the beginning of the 19th century that the cities of Europe regained the standards of civilization which had existed in the Roman Empire 1800 years before. It took us 2,000 years almost to get back to having cops who could make this kind of thing possible. What an achievement.

Yeah, it's the pinnacle. Yeah, I mean, yeah. Yeah, so right. It's like the mob rule or the, not mob rule, but like the ability of mobs to enact like some sort of, or like put it to, you know. To act as a check against like state power and the power of the rich.

Ideally, yeah, that's jury nullification now. Yeah, and again, everybody, especially when you, because I made the probable mistake of like bringing up, you know, guns and assault weapons and that debate in this, whenever we want to like talk about ancient shit and like apply it to a modern terms, there's a desire to have like a simple answer. And there just isn't because like, yeah,

constant mob warfare was really bad. The establishment of a police state was also really bad. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think it is, I think there are things to learn about this, about like the dangers and whatnot of different political things that you can do, but I think it is fundamentally silly

to like try to draw a two direct align. Yeah, yeah. This is 2000 years ago, but it is like, it is worth noting that like, okay, you give up the ability of the people to check the state's power. And then, so the state can enforce much less, and that is something that is worth noting.

Yeah, and that's how constant gang warfare is good either. Yeah, I mean, it is like, this is how apartheid states, like the one we currently live in, that like, you know, we are currently ruled by a racist white nationalist minority. Yeah. And they are able to do,

but, you know, yeah, it's hard to know if the alternative is better. Yeah, it's just worth talking about this history without trying to like, and so this is why you should vote this way on this law 2000 years later. Like let's just talk about, yeah. Again, I am not trying to like,

I'm really not trying to just make like a coy political point. I just think it's actually worth studying this if you want to think about the problems inherent to society. Like, it's just good to know this stuff. So of course, you're not just going to stop people from objecting to tyranny because you have a bunch of armed thugs who can crack heads in the street.

You're going to also need a secret police force, right? Obviously, you know? Right. And Augustus actually established two secret police forces. Now, one is kind of informal. Basically, because you have this pretty big empire and you have all these military units spread around, you have like a supply service, right?

Who needs to like take messages from like, oh, these guys up in fucking France or these guys all the way down in Jerusalem have like, you know, they need more spears, they need more shields and like, I've got to take that information. I got to get it to this guy. I got to get, you have like supply runners and they're literally like riding horses

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

tell me if like unrest is boiling up, you can be a spy basically because you have the ability to go anywhere, you know? Reynolds writes, quote, the Emperor Hadrian, we are told, knew all secrets through the Frumentarii and as the empire became more despotic, so the activities of the Frumentarii multiplied

in the persecutions of the Christians. It was the Frumentarii who searched men out and who affected arrests. Probably too, the soldier who guarded St. Paul was a Frumentarius. And if the emperor desired the speedy removal of a prominent noble against whom it might be dangerous to proceed openly,

the Frumentarii were employed to carry out the deed. In fact, they performed all the dirty work that has always fallen to the lot of the secret police in an absolute despotism. They were so efficient in their work that they incurred universal hatred and historian of the third century complains that they tyrannized over us

and later writer bitterly calls them a pestilent crew. And in another passage, the plague of the Roman world. In response to this general odium, the emperor Diocletian disbanded them at the end of the third century, but their duties were far too important for the emperors to be able to dispense with their services

and a new core was soon enrolled, especially designed as a secret police. This new force bore the curious title of agents for affairs, which was sufficiently vague and full of activities. But the agents were soon no better than their predecessors and as early as the middle of the fourth century,

the emperor Julian had had to reprove their corruption and soon they had just as bad a name as the Frumentarii. So, that's pretty cool. That's a pretty cool bit of history right there. There's just no way. I guess the lesson, of course, is that kind of power necessarily creates

these fucking evil people. Yeah, only bad people want that job and they do bad things when they get it. It's also worth, again, you go back to the Gracchi when some rich people want to kill a guy. They just have to fucking hire a button and murder him in the street and everybody knows what's happened.

It's real fucking clear what goes down and because of how much they've pissed people off, they have to give people a bunch of what they had asked for and stuff even though they murdered the guy. Now, you just have one of these fucking spooks kill him. Now you've got the emperor's fucking spooks, he can kill him and nobody's allowed

to talk about it or ask about it. It's not obvious what's happened, you know? So the last and most powerful police agency in ancient Rome were the Praetorian Guard. In some way, these guys are the evolution of mobs of armed supporters who tried to protect Tiberius Gracchus and the gangs run by Milo and Claudius.

You know, during the Civil Wars, all of these guys who are fighting each other had like units of bodyguards that are like the toughest soldiers they've got and Augustus had formed his into an elite military unit which started at like 5,000 men and eventually becomes like 9,000 guys.

And these were during the Civil War just like his shock troops, right? But they become his like elite riot force, right? Because the urban cohorts are just 3,000 men and the legions are rarely in Italy. So the Praetorians are always the strongest armed force near the center of power. So Augustus keeps like two-thirds of them

in the city of Rome ready to crack heads when heads need cracking. And he sends a third of them elsewhere in the Italian peninsula to like garrison different hotspots and they basically act as like secret police, like reporting back to him, making sure no one in the mill... Some of them take up jobs in the military and stuff

in order to like be able to report back on what's going on. And then the words of historian Guy de Betier quote, minimize the impression that he depended on them. Instead, the guard depended on Augustus. No emperor meant no jobs and no special status. Because these guys get a shitload of extra money for doing what they're doing, right?

They're paid very, very well in order to keep the emperor in power. So guard officers also occupied roles in the urban cohorts and undercover Praetorians could pop up anywhere. So they're like a mix between the FBI and the Secret Service. It could also be used to assassinate political rivals.

But as Guy points out, quote, this state of affairs was reliant upon the emperor having enough prestige and power to contain the guard. Augustus had created potentially the most dangerous institution the Roman world had ever seen. In his monumental The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon described this

brilliantly. By thus introducing the Praetorian guards, as it were, into the palace and the senate, the emperors taught them to perceive their own strength and the weakness of the civil government, to view the vices of their masters with familiar contempt, and to lay aside that reverential awe, which distance only and mystery can preserve

towards an imaginary power. And this luxurious idleness of an opulent city, their pride was nourished by the sense of their irresistible weight. Nor was it possible to conceal from them that the person of the sovereign, the authority of the senate, the public treasure, and the seat of empire were all in their hands. So

eventually, these guys start to come out as like, I serve at the like, I'm here to protect the emperor, I only have my position because of him. They realize, eventually, like, well, a lot of these emperors are incompetent. The senate's a bunch of corrupt rich lazy assholes. We have the only weapons, right? We have the capital

and the only weapons. Why don't we just run things, right? Um, yeah. So as time goes on, all the different law enforcement arms of Roman society kind of realize that their powers have made them unstoppable

bandits, and that's what they become. As Dr. Ellis writes, quote, the Roman police and military forces often abuse their power and status, such as property seizure, without compensation and physical violence to civilians. The axes used by the vigils and other troops were used to break down doors

and abuse people both in the street and in their own houses. The Roman offer juvenile provided a dark picture of police soldier-civilian relations in Rome. If a civilian was beaten up by the soldiers slash police, he was better off forgetting about it, because if he complained, there would be a trial under a centurion and in front of a

jury of soldiers. No witnesses would dare come forward, otherwise they would have other soldiers exact retribution. Epictus, a Greek philosopher at the time, advised that if a soldier wanted a mule, it was best to give it to him, because if not given, the person would have lost it anyway and would have been beaten up in the process.

Now, we could talk about civil asset forfeiture, Andrew. We could talk about how often cops particularly take cars from people. We're back. We're back to America. Yeah, they did it first, baby. Yeah.

It is like truly shocking how many things that are horrible that we are absolutely no better than. No, it's all the same shit, right? And it's all the same shit because when you say we are building a separate class of people who

will be able to live very comfortably in order to, as long as they stop the poor from fucking with the rich and also they're the only people who have the right to use force in our society, they always turn out to be assholes, right? Because only assholes

want that job, you know? Um, okay. Speaking of things only assholes want, the products and services that support our podcast. Backed. For most 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 I Heart 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 I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast

or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. You bunch of pricks. Sorry. What's up? What do you mean? What's up pricks? They deserve it.

We're talking about the Roman police state here, which I don't think most people realize. Everyone knows that it became an empire. You assume that it's a brutal autocratic dictatorship, but it is a modern police state. I want to talk about how pervasive

it truly was. Dr. Ellis gives a really good job of laying out what the city of Rome was. She points out that Chicago today and her date is 2018 is the third most populous city in the United States with 2.7 million people

and 13,500 cops. Ish, right? That's Chicago more or less today. Rome at the height of the empire is a million people. They have a police force of 7,000 vigils, 3,000 urban cohorts, 1,200 cavalry attached to the urban cohorts and roughly 6,000

praetorian guards in the city. So that's about three times as many police per capita as a heavily policed city in the United States today. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I guess it's a little bit mitigated by, you know, they don't have nearly the kind of technological

power, right? They're not as centralized. Their purview isn't as wide, but yes, it is worth noting how heavily the city is. They have gone from, at the start of this, nobody gets to have a weapon, a military type weapon in town

to a city that is garrisoned by a heavy military guard at all times. Now, the first member of the praetorian guard to attempt to take total power for himself was Sehanus, head of the guard under Tiberius who ruled from 8014 to 37. Now, Sehanus was caught before he could carry out

his plans and execute it along with his family. And Tiberius actually lets the people of Rome riot and murder his family and supporters just to like give him some fun. And the praetorian guard, yeah, this time the guard stay out of it like they don't defend their old leader because they're like, this isn't going to go well

for us. The emperor is still too powerful still. That's going to change in 8041 when Caligula gets murdered by officers of the praetorian guard for being a fucked up little weirdo. Now, when Caligula gets murdered by the praetorian guard, there's this, it's not very old

like the empire and so there's still strong memories of the Republic and a lot of people are like, maybe we should go back to having a Republic. Imperers seem like a bad idea. But the praetorian guard is like, well, you don't need a praetorian guard if you've got no emperor. So how about we just force you to accept an emperor

of that we've picked. And they pick a guy named Claudius who is a pretty interesting character himself. I would like to talk more about him, but we just don't have the time. So instead I'm going to quote from Guy Adila Betier who writes, Claudius was declared emperor by the praetorians and no

one, including the Senate, was in any position to argue the praetorians jobs were secure. Claudius was a reluctant emperor and turned out to be a good deal more competent than his family thought him capable of. It's even possible that Claudius had been in on the plans all along. Gold and silver coins were issued welcoming the new emperor and he them

or showing the guard welcoming the new emperor and he them. And he like pays them a bunch of money. It's unclear exactly what has happened. He's a relatively good emperor. But over time, they stop backing because again, you don't want the emperor to be any good. You want him to be a figurehead

for you. And this all kind of comes to a head in 193 AD after the murder of Marcus Aurelius his son, Commodus, who is the bad guy in the movie Gladiator. Right. Yes. So after after Russell Crow kills him, he's actually killed by the praetorium

guard. So in previous interregnums like the death of Nero, the guard had generally kind of like gone with whoever has power and money to be the next emperor. After Commodus dies, they like go to all the rich people in Rome and they're like, hey,

how much money you want to pay to be emperor? Like they literally auction off the throne of the Roman Empire to the highest bidder who winds up being some rich asshole who gets murdered two months later. He gets replaced by another guy, Septimus Severus who this guy this fucking guy

fires the republican guard or the praetorian guard finally and he makes a new praetorian guard that he hopes to be less corrupt and they immediately grow corrupt and do the same thing over the course of the empire 13 emperors are assassinated by the praetorian guards.

It's really like you let that you let that tiger into your house. Yeah, exactly. And you know, the stuff that was in your house prior to letting the tiger in wasn't pleasant either. Whether or not you think this was progress.

I'm glad you brought up a gladiator because I did I did want to pitch the idea of a double feature of the Ridley Scott Italians screaming at each other double feature of gladiator and House of Gucci.

Yes, feels like just Italians yelling Italians never change and neither do cops. That is that is the message of the show. Italians and police the same 2000 years ago as they are today. Anyway, that's

the story of how the Romans became a police state. And God, that is fucking genuinely very depressing. It's pretty fucked up. You know, we're condensing a lot of history here, but that's a broad sweep of it.

An angle I had never really considered. But yeah, tons of science. Jesus Christ. Yeah. Well, you've got this this situation of like political violence that makes everybody be like, we'll do anything to stop it. And then the thing that stops it is the establishment of a militarized police

force who then take power and spend centuries doing violence to people. But it also works for a long time. Yeah, I mean, it works for a long time. Yeah, it's never like clear enough like how

bad this shit is until it begins. It's too late for this because it would be easy to either be like, well, this is why no one should ever have cops because they inherently fuck everything up. Or this is why people shouldn't be allowed to have weapons because, you know, what happens in the

Mormon Republic happens, right? But if you're trying to find though either of those easy answers, either this is why everyone should be armed. This is why everyone should be disarmed. This is why we should have cops. This is why we shouldn't have cops. Well, both of these systems are like free.

There's not enough data and the window is always... It's just like, you know, there's stuff to take out of this for the future, but don't try not to take too much because, again, both of these as silly and fucked up as everything is, both of these systems on a historic level work really fucking well, right?

Like that is kind of the... They conquered the world. Yeah. I mean, probably the main thing is that just sort of tells you it's just that part of it is irrelevant. Yeah, there's other stuff going on, military things and whatnot. Yeah. I mean, maybe not entirely because like, I guess

partly like the fact that Roman politics is in the Republican period is so like cutthroat means that a lot of the people who wind up in charge after a certain point are like pretty canny sons of bitches. Yeah. But also some really dumb sons of bitches wind up in power and they fuck everything

up and like destroy the Roman middle class. So, yeah, I don't know. There's actually not as many clear lessons from history as you want there to be when you look at the history. Yeah. So, each one's only been done once. That's the whole point of history. Yeah. So, yeah, exactly.

Anyway, that's the story of how Rome became a police state. So, Andrew, you have any pluggables for us at the end here? Yeah, let's see. I guess mostly, yeah, doing two shows with my podcast, Yo's

is racist. I'm going to be in a place called Austin on August 20th and then Brooklyn on September 10th. So, yeah, I'd love to see folks if you've enjoyed

listening to me be horrified as Robert tells me stuff, then I will be a little more proactive on stage, but I'm going to tell you, not that much more proactive. Excellent. All right. Well, go find Andrew in Austin and go

find Jesus in your hearts. And by Jesus, I mean the Jesus Christ of podcasting. You? Yes, absolutely. Here it is in your ears. That's right. Sophie hates it when I compare myself to Jesus. You're going to be crucified, Sue.

I really hate it. By the frumentaria. It's not my favorite thing. Anyway, see you next week. Bye. Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media,

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