Revolutions - Politics & Prose Oct 28: The Storm Before the Storm Book Event

Episode Date: October 30, 2017

Enjoy! Unless you plan on coming to a future event, in which case you should probably stop listening right now!

And welcome to the storm before the storm. Well, I am back now from the tour, and it went better than I think I could have expected, even in a best-case scenario. Every place was packed. We all had a great time, and it meant a lot to me to get to meet everyone. I want to thank the Harvard Bookstore, Book Culture, Powerhouse Arena, the Writtenhouse Square Barnes & Noble, and politics and prose for hosting my events. I also want to remind you that I have the following events lined up.

November the 4th at 1030 a.m. at the Wisconsin Historical Museum, that is this upcoming Saturday morning. Then Thursday, November the 9th at 7 p.m. at Boswell Books in Milwaukee. That's Boswell Books in Milwaukee. And then after that, I have a doubleheader in Chicago. November the 16th at 7 p.m. at the Skokie Barnes & Noble, the Old Orchard 1. And then November the 17th at Seminary Co-op. That one starts a little earlier. It starts at 6 p.m. That is 6 p.m. November the 17th at Seminary Co-op, and if you plan to come, they would appreciate an RSVP. The word on the street is now officially come down early, so I do look forward to seeing everyone. Now, if you are not able to come to an event, I do have a recording of the event at Politics and Pros from last Saturday, and I want to share it with you now. If I'm not coming to your city or you can't make it, you'll at least be able to get to hear what I talk about.

but I will warn those of you who are planning on coming to an event down the line, even as far down the road as the December West Coast events, I'm probably going to tinker with my presentation but not change it too much. So fair warning, if you listen to this, you will be getting spoiler alerts for most of the material that I'll be giving you at the later events. So if you don't want spoilers, just stop this right now and walk away. But if you don't mind, or you're not going to be able to hear it, let's just keep going. I have thrown up some pictures from the various events so you can get a feeling for what it was like,

but the scene now is 1 p.m. Saturday, October the 28th at Politics and Prose in Washington, D.C. Wow, there's a lot of you. All right. Hi, everyone. My name's Liz Arlip. I'm part of the event staff, and I would like to welcome you all this wonderful Saturday afternoon to politics and prose. Tonight, or this afternoon, we're going to hear Mike Duncan talk about his new book, The Storm Before the Storm, the beginning of the end of the Roman Republic. The storm before the storm looks at the years preceding the fall of the Roman Republic and asks questions like, did it have to fall?

Could Rome not have reformed and regained its former strength, among many others? Kirkus Review said of the book, this is a book that delineates the crucial decades in the history of the ancient world, most vividly rendered. I feel like I probably don't have to give Mike much of an introduction for you, but I'm going to anyway.

He is the host and writer of the History of Rome podcast, which was named the best educational podcast at the 2010 podcast awards. He's also the author of The History of Rome, the Republic. Please help me welcome him to Politics and Prose. Hello. Oh, and welcome to this book event. Everybody can hear me okay? Perfect.

I can't really hear any speaker at all. It just sounds like I'm speaking normally. Thank you all very much for coming. This is pretty overwhelming. this has been all and all of these events in Boston and New York and Philadelphia, it's been kind of the same thing. I've just been cruising down and being frankly overwhelmed by everybody's enthusiasm. And I appreciate you probably even more than you appreciate me. Trust me on that. Believe me, I get to do what I've always wanted to do for a living, which is just sit and read books about history and then write about it.

And it's thanks to you guys that I get to do that. Um, being, writing this book is really, it's, it's been a dream come true for me. Um, quite, quite literally. Um, you know, when I was a kid, when I was 10, 11 years old, you'd do that thing. You know, what do you, what do you want to be when you grow up? And I would say, I want to be a writer. Like, what is that even? Like, just a writer. What is, what, what am I even going to write? So when I was 11, uh, I was, I would think I was planning on writing like knock off redwall books. if anybody out there knows the Redwall Books. I had this whole series about

talking mice, but they flew in airplanes. It wasn't medieval, so it was different. I was also watching a lot of tailspin at the time. So obviously, it's peanut butter and jelly talking mice and airplanes. And then when I went off to college,

the plan was really to be like the next Philip K. Dick. That's what I wanted to be. I wanted to do like science fiction, satirical, philosophical stuff, be the next Vonnegut or have somebody be like, oh, he's the poor man's Vonnegut. That would have been cool, too. But then my life took like a really pretty strange turn when I just started one day in 2007, putting out episodes of this complete narrative history of the Roman Empire. I was going to podcast

because, of course, that's the kind of thing one might do. And so ever since then, I've been writing. I mean, I write every day. I write every week. I write, you know, these episodes. Each one of them is about 5,000 words long is what I have to knock out every week. And I've written well over a million and a half words between revolutions in the history of Rome. But all of that never got me to what was supposed to be the dream when I was 11 years old, which is to have a physical book to have my name on it and everything. So here we are. It's just like I imagined it. It's a physical book and it has my name on it. So this is a dream come true, honestly. And then also being here at politics and prose is another dream come true because I am a huge nerd. And I grew up watching

booknotes on C-SPAN and the number of events that I would watch that are here at politics and pros. Like when they said, hey, do you want to do a book tour? I said, yeah, can I go to politics and pros? I can do the thing. We're the, you know, okay. So now I'm here and it's fantastic. They couldn't be nicer about everything. So that's enough preliminary sentimentality. That's enough preliminary sentimentality. So I don't want to do a reading from the book. I don't want to read from chapter four, chapter five or anything. I don't want to do spoil.

I mean, we all kind of know how it turns out, but it's not good. But there's specific people that you don't know when they die, even though we know that everybody dies. It's like, oh, is he going to die on this page or the next page? It's usually that page. So rather than do that, though, I want to. read from the author's note because the author's note will kind of put into perspective why the book exists in the first place and then it'll give me an opportunity to sort of talk around the book rather

than just going through you know like the plot of the book so I will read from the author's note and so in case you thought you were going to get away with skipping the author's notes you are sorely mistaken okay where is it okay author's note no period in history has been more thoroughly studied than the fall of the Roman Republic. The names Caesar, Pompey, Cicero, Octavian, Mark Antony, and Cleopatra are among the most well-known names not just in Roman history, but in human history. Each year we are treated to a new book, movie, or TV show, depicting the lives of this vaunted last generation of the Roman Republic.

There are good reasons for their continued predominance. It is a period alive with fascinating personality, and earth-shattering events. It is especially riveting for those of us in the modern world who, suspecting the fragility of our own Republican institutions, look to the rise of the Caesars as a cautionary tale. Ben Franklin's famous remark that the Constitutional Convention had produced a republic, if you can keep it,

rings all these generations later as a warning bell. And we all remember that from Revolution's episode 2.16, right? We covered that in Revolution's podcast, episode 2.16. Just recycling material, right? Okay. So surprisingly, there has been much less written about how the Roman Republic came to the brink of disaster in the first place, a question that is perhaps more relevant today than ever. A raging fire naturally commands attention, but to prevent future fires, one must ask how the fire started. No revolution springs out of thin air, right? I mean, we know that. No revolution. There's always like six to

episodes of background. There's budgetary meetings, there's discussions of what the interest rates are on government bonds before we can actually get to the heads being chopped off. So the political system that Julius Caesar destroyed through sheer force of ambition certainly was not healthy to begin with. Much of the fuel that ignited in the 40s and 30s BC had been poured a century earlier. the critical generation that preceded that of Cicero, Caesar, and Antony, that of the revolutionary Grockye brothers, the stubbornly ambitious Marius, and the infamously brash Sulla is neglected. We have long been denied a story that is as equally thrilling, chaotic, frightening, hilarious, and riveting as that of the final generation of the Republic. And this book tells that story.

But this book does not serve simply as a way to fill in a hole in our knowledge of Roman history. history. While producing the history of Rome, I was asked the same set of questions over and over again, and over and over again. Is America Rome? Is the United States following a similar historical trajectory? If so, where does the United States stand on the Roman timeline? Now, attempting to make a direct comparison between Rome and the United States is always fraught with danger. But that does not mean there is no value to entertaining the question. It at least, least behooves us to identify where in the thousand-year history of the Roman Empire we might find an analogous historical setting. So in that vein, let's explore this. We are not in the origin phase where a collection of exiles, dissidents, and vagabonds migrate to a new territory and

establish a permanent settlement. That would correspond, if anything, to the early colonial days. Nor are we in the revolutionary phase where a group of disgruntled aristocrats overthrow the monarchy and create a republic. That would correspond to the days of the founding fathers. And we are in the global conquest phase where a series of wars against other great powers establishes international, military, political, and economic hegemony. That would be the 20th century global conflicts of World War I, World War II, and the Cold War. Finally, despite what some hysterical commentators may claim, the republic has not collapsed and it has not been taken over by a dictator. That has not happened yet. That means that if the United States is anywhere on the Roman timeline,

it must be somewhere between the Great Wars of Conquest and the rise of the Caesars. Further investigation into this period reveals an era full of historical echoes that will sound eerily familiar to the modern reader. The final victory over Carthage in the Punic Wars led to rising economic inequality, dislocation of traditional ways of life, increasing political polarization, the breakdown of unspoken rules of political conduct, the privatization of the military, rampant corruption, endemic social and ethnic prejudice, battles over citizenship and voting rights, ongoing military quagmires, the introduction of violence as a political tool, and a set of elites so obsessed with their own privileges that they refuse to reform

the system in time to save it. Now, these echoes could be mere coincidence, but the great Greek biographer Plutarch certainly believed it possible that if, on the other hand, there is a limited number of elements from which events are interwoven. The same things must happen many times, being brought to pass by the same agencies. So if history is to have any active meaning, there must be a place for identifying those interwoven elements, studying the recurring agencies, and learning from those who came before us. The Roman Empire has always been and will always be fascinating in its own right. And this book is most especially a narrative history of a particular epoch of Roman history. But if our own age carries with it many of those limited number of

elements being brought to pass by the same agencies, then this particular period of Roman history is well worth deep investigation, contemplation, and reflection. So the author's notes lays out really the two reasons why this book exists. The first, of course, is that it is a weirdly undercover period in Roman history. This age covering just the Grocki and Marius and Sulla, the fact that people don't care more about it or investigate it further or there aren't a plethora of books about it has always been something of a mystery to me. And when we were preparing with my agent to pitch the book to various publishers, one of the things you do is you go back can look at what other books it might compare to, what other books might be in competition with.

And we couldn't find any book that covers this particular 50 or 60 year period in Roman history like on its own merits. We've found one back in about 1908. It was written by a guy. And it was very creatively titled The Greckeye, Marius, and Sulla. And we figured it's been 100 years. It's probably about time to do. We can probably do an update on whatever.

that dead guy did. So this period, and you'll read in the book, I mean, some of you've had it for a little while, you've maybe started reading it, or if you're about to read it, what you will find is that this period has towering historical figures. I mean, Marius and Sella are two of the most important leaders in the history of not just the Roman Republic, but the Roman Empire.

These are life and death rivalries that are going to be driving events. There are huge climactic battles. there are deep social and political and economic problems that they are grappling with. And then the whole thing culminates, the whole back third of the book, starting around chapter nine, is an enormous civil war that almost destroys the Republic right then and there. Like it almost collapsed and not just, it wasn't just the republic that almost fell apart. It would have been the entire Roman system, very possibly would have been destroyed right there in the 80s BC. And the fact that it didn't is something of a minor miracle. So having this period.

be ignored, even on its own merits, is pretty baffling. There is, though, a whole other reason why it's baffling, why we don't have a tendency to investigate this period. And that's because as eventful and impactful and important as it is, it's even more important because it's the direct precursor for what is arguably one of the most famous moments, not just in Roman history, but in human history, which is the arrival of Julius Caesar, the great civil wars that destroy the Republic and the transition of Rome from a republic to an empire. This book is the prequel to all of that stuff. And it's something that this was not ancient history to Julius Caesar and to Pompey. I mean, Pompey shows up at the end of the book. He's 20 years old. He's, okay, I'm not talking about

Pompey. So Pompey shows up at the end of the book. Julius Caesar will show up at the end of the book. Crassus shows up at the end of the book. This is their lived experience. And for us to know, so much about how the collapse happens is really a lot like jumping into a movie in the third act, where everything is really exciting. Everybody seems to care really deeply about what they're trying to do. Everybody's running around and fighting with each other, but you don't quite know where it all came from, like why any of this originated, how it got to this point in the first place. So we know so much now about the end that we should probably at some point, just to understand Roman history, go back and study the beginning of the end.

of the Roman Republic. No longer forthcoming from Public Affairs Press, October 24th, 2017. It's out. You guys all did your part. So that's just the first reason it exists. It's because this is a fascinating and important period just in Roman history.

But there is this other thing where if you do, if you kind of pull back, unfocus your eyes and don't care too much about the granular details, the period after the great imperial conquest that the Republic achieved in around 146 BC in the middle of the second century, but before the great civil wars that destroyed the Republic, there are a lot of similarities and a lot of things that the Romans were dealing with that I think that we were dealing with. And we all know how it turned out for the Romans. And if history is to have some kind of active meaning, as I said, in the author's note, we should take a look at what they did well, not much, what they did wrong, quite a bit,

and see if we can't learn from their mistakes. So what I want to spend the rest of the time doing now, sort of exploring some of the similarities, talk about what it was that the Romans were facing here in the 130s and 120s, the beginning of the end of the Roman Republic, so that maybe we can avoid getting to the end of the end of the Roman Republic, which I don't think anybody wants that. It was a very bloody and it was a very bad time to be alive, if nothing else. So the Republic at its first, once it emerges from its wars with Carthage, the single most destabilizing element that introduces itself early is skyrocketing economic inequality. This is something that is going to disrupt their economic modes and this is something that's going to disrupt their political system.

because what happens is the legions go out a conquerant. They go to Greece, they go to North Africa, they go to Spain, they're discovering silver mines. They come back, they're bringing back the wealth of the Mediterranean, literally in baggage trains. We're talking about hundreds of thousands of pounds of silver. This guy, this console goes out, he comes back for his triumph with 80,000 pounds of raw silver. This guy goes out, he comes back with 300,000 gold coins and 200,000 silver coins. I mean, we're talking about literally the species of the entire Mediterranean world is now like being pointed all at Rome. That is to say nothing then of their military conquest making Rome without question the most important city in the Mediterranean world.

It went from, you know, most cities in the Mediterranean world were, you know, 10,000, 15,000, maybe 20,000, if it was really big. Rome is eventually going to move into the hundreds of thousands. and then at the peak of the imperial age, it's going to tip up over a million. That makes it the center of a Mediterranean-wide trading network where it becomes the hub. So we have more wealth cycling through, more wealth cycling through, just on top of the spoils of war, you just have them making money pretty much hand over fist from that point on. The problem is that all of this wealth is being accumulated in the hands of just, just the rich senatorial nobility. They are the consuls. They are the generals. They are the

senators. The Senate is who is in control of the Temple of Saturn, which is the state treasury. So all of this just unimaginable wealth. I mean, wealth that a hundred years earlier, their ancestors, their grandfathers and great-grandfathers, would have never been able to even imagine how much wealth their grandsons now controlled. And it was being controlled by a very small number of families. this period of imperial conquest then great for rome great for those that small click of senatorial families quite bad for all of the lower class romans so this isn't just a matter of the rich getting richer it is also a matter of the poor are getting poorer um military service which had been premised on on it's almost the roman legions in the early days were almost a glorified

citizen militia where you would get up, you would come together in the spring, you would go fight some skirmishes, you would go fight some battles. If harvest time came, everybody would quit the field and go back and harvest their, go back and harvest their crops because even your enemies were working on the same agrarian economic system that you were. So everybody would like, we'd call a truce, we'd go break, we'd all go back, we'd harvest our farms, and then come back and maybe fight it out some more. Winner, everybody takes it off. By the time you get to these large imperial conquests, you're sending people, you're sending men abroad for three, four, five, six years at a time. You're sending

them to Spain. You're sending them to Greece. You're sending them to North Africa. And in that time, their land, their little small plot of land is often falling into disrepair. They're not able to maintain it. Their service itself is not particularly lucrative. It's not like they are coming back with wagon loads of gold for themselves. So they come back and they find their farms mostly in much worse shape than when they left. This runs them into all of the senatorial families who have massive amounts of wealth. The Romans, they're not,

the Romans were not Scrooge McDuck, right? They didn't want to necessarily sit on a pile of gold and go swimming in it. That is already my second Disney afternoon reference of the day. I just realized that. I don't know why. Gold and silver were not the true measures of wealth, Right? The true measure of wealth was land.

Right. So they wanted to take all that money and they wanted to invest in land. So at the same moment that the poorer citizen farmers, the lower class guys, are facing ruin. Along comes a rich neighbor who says, hey, I would like to buy your plot of land. And I have some gold that will allow me to do that. And so you sell the land. You sell the land over here. You sell the land over there. Those estates start growing and growing.

And this is the beginning of about a hundred year long process where Italy, transforms from a patchwork network of small farms into these big sprawling commercially oriented. They're called Latifundia, where you're producing olives, you're producing grapes, you're producing grain over here.

A small farmer simply cannot compete with that operation. There's no way to do it. So, the rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer. They're being dispossessed of their land. The rural peasants are being dispossessed of their land. So now they're like, okay, I can either be, stay here as a

tenant farmer or I can move to the city in search of wage labor or day labor. This runs them into the other thing that the Romans are now able to invest their wealth in, which is slaves, right? So this is also the beginning of a process where Rome transforms from a society that has slaves to a slave society, right, where most of the economic, most of the baseline labor in the Roman economy is now going to be done by slaves. They're going to be the ones working in the fields. If they are incredibly unlucky, they will be sent to work in the mines, which is one of the worst existences I've ever come across in all of my historical settings.

It's sugar plantations in the Caribbean and slaves in the state mines in Roman and during the Republican era. Both of those are just horrendous. They are also, if you're a skilled artist and you're being brought into Rome or you're being brought into one of the other cities, and now you're doing the skilled arts and crafts work. So this is running these lower class Romans, these poor peasants and these urban plebs. It's creating a lot of resentment. It's creating a lot of anger. They know that life used to be a certain way and that they used to have security and that they used to have a way of life.

And all of it is now changing under their feet. And they're starting to get very resentful and they're starting to get very bitter. this creates an opportunity for a new mode of Roman politics, a new style of Roman politics, to enter the picture, which is to take all of that resentful energy and try to mobilize it because of these people could vote. If you could mobilize these people and you could get them to vote, you could send them down to the assembly, and you could start to do things with that energy. That's just one thing that's going on. This is, for lack of a more complicated way of putting it, this is the difference between the rich and the poor in Rome. There is, however, a completely parallel power that is growing, which is the conflict between the Romans, the Roman citizens proper, and non-Roman Italians. I will discuss this in chapter two of the storm before the storm, the beginning of the end of the Roman Republic.

when when rome conquered italy they did not simply annex the territory they had conquered into into the roman state and make the new conquered uh the new conquered people equal citizens equals not even really subjects and it would not even be appropriate to call them second class citizens because they weren't citizens at all they were allies what rome did was uh they would sign a a treaty of peace between rome and whatever this city is in a at Truria or an umbria or down south with the Greeks, where the only obligation, really, that one of the cities would have is to provide troops for the legions whenever the Romans came around asking for troops for the legions. They didn't really pay much in taxes. I mean, there might have been a couple of consumption taxes that they wound up getting sucked into, but there was no direct tax from Rome. Rome was not sending prefects into rule them directly. The local elites were allowed to govern their cities as they saw fit. And for about 200 years, this was a pretty good deal for the non-Roman Italians. It's one of the big reasons why they were able to survive the Second

Punic War. This is a big question. When Hannibal comes down and he's running around and he's trying to tell all the Italians, hey, Rome conquered you and I'm here to liberate you. They're like, I don't know, it's not that bad. What are you going to do? Are you going to tax us? And he's, you know, probably. I mean, isn't that what you're supposed to do? You're supposed to tax your subjects. So this is a pretty good deal for about 200 years. But again, by this period of Rome's great triumphal imperial conquest, the costs of not being a Roman citizen begin to outweigh the benefits of not being a Roman citizen.

Because, for example, if you take like the lower class, the lower class non-Roman Italians, no less than their Roman cousins, they were facing the same problems. They had been hauled off to wars. The Italians filled up two-thirds of the Roman legions. They too would go off and conquer. They would spill their blood. They would come back. Their farms would be ruined.

They would get bought out by rich neighbors. But they had no recourse. They didn't even have the right. They couldn't run for office to fight for themselves. They couldn't vote for somebody who was promising to fight for them. So that also begins to create a lot of friction and a lot of resentful energy. And what is interesting, what happens, at least to me, it's interesting, hopefully it's interesting to you too, is that when the Italians would start to agitate for citizenship, which really starts getting going during the age of the Grocki. Tiberius Grakis is the first to broach the idea that maybe we should treat the Italians the same way that we treat Romans.

and then Gaius Crockus openly embraces the cause of Italian citizenship, and he goes around promising Italian citizenship. This is going to be the thing that actually binds rich Romans and poor Romans together. So where there is this cleavage, there is this tension, and there is this confrontation and conflict between rich Romans and poor Romans, they would get together any time the Italian question came up and were uniformly opposed to the idea of letting the Italians into the state, even though the Italians were in every way equal participants in what you would call it quote unquote Roman society.

And the reason why is because obviously the senatorial elite, they don't want to let anybody into the system. They're quite happy with their little pocket of privilege and power. If you were a lower class Roman though, if we start to get to a point where somebody comes along and says, hey, I'm going to take land from the rich and I'm going to give it to the poor. If you're a poor Roman, you're saying that's great. I can't wait for my whatever 30 acres. but if it also is available to Italians, that just increases the number of people I'm in competition with for my land.

So there's a very real economic incentive for the lower class Romans to resist the idea of bringing in the Italians. This, however, does create everywhere. I mean, not to get, not to get like weirdly metaphysical about it, but there was this resentful energy that was now percolating through the system. There was anger. People had legitimate grievances. They wanted addressed, and they didn't feel like they were being addressed. So along comes this new populari tradition in Roman politics, which again, as I said, is really going to these people and saying, I'm going to solve your problems.

I have a plan. The Grakai had a plan to redistribute land from the rich to the poor. Gaius Gronkis has a whole slate of reforms that he plans on introducing. It is going to help these people, that is going to solve these people's problems. So they'll come flooding into Rome to vote for this. The Democratic assemblies were still quite a powerful institution. We talk a lot about the republic being like this oligarchy where the Senate controlled everything and the Senate had the final say in everything.

If you could pack the voting stalls at one of the popular assemblies, you could override whatever the considered consensus opinion of the Senate was. So you start getting these popular agitators who break into really two, categories. After having researched this book to death, I think that the Glocki do fall into a category that you would call a genuine reformer. There's no altruism at work here, right? This isn't this is an altruism. They were not, let's do this because it will simply be good. They were political leaders. They wanted political power. They could see how much they could harness the resentment of the urban plebs, the resentment of the rural poor, and use that as a rocket ship to the top of the

Roman food chain. But they also recognized that if they didn't start solving some of these problems, that the Republic itself was in danger. Things were getting seriously out of whack. Gias Crockus in particular could see that there was too much power and too much wealth that was being held by the senators. And it was disrupting the balance of what we talk about in the prologue is the Polybian Constitution, which is a nice balance between executive power and aristocratic power and democratic power.

This was all getting out of whack. So Gaius Gronkis and his dead brother Tiberius, who I guess is already dead at this point. But when he starts introducing these reforms, what happens? The Senate is intransigently opposed to everything that he is doing. They are going to do everything in their power to try to fight against Gaius introducing any kinds of reform, a landry distribution. The urban plebs want subsidized grain. They just want some grain. They want food stability. They want to know that the price they pay for grain today is going to be the price they pay tomorrow. And Gaius is going to promise them that. Gaius is going to, he's going to

bring out road building programs and colonization projects that are going to give people jobs, that are going to give people a place to live that's going to give people new land and hope. So the Senate opposes all of this. Now the Senate opposes this for two reasons. one is that the Roman elite and the Romans generally were simply they were small sea conservative in their outlook they wanted yesterday they wanted today to be like yesterday they wanted tomorrow to be like today they just wanted to keep things moving and they wanted they wanted a uniformity to their lives they wanted to live the same way that their fathers did they wanted their sons and daughters to live the same way that they did so that's definitely a part of it right and now it's a pretty

powerful force. The other thing that is motivating, though, and what showed up again and again and again as I was working through trying to tell this story is that they were opposed to what Gaius was up to because if Gaius Gronkus succeeded in passing all these popular pieces of reform, that Gaius Giacrarchus would be incredibly popular and he would have more power and influence inside the Senate than they would. So it became a matter not of denying the reform because you disagree with this stuff in principle. If it was you, you might actually be doing this if it wasn't your rival, if it wasn't like the Grakai who were the ones doing it. So the whole point was you had to deny your rival a win, almost beyond the merits of the case itself. And so that's why they

start to, any time one of these guys breaks loose, this is going to happen over and over again in the book as we see these sort of popular agitators pop up over and over again. The idea is you have to defeat them because if you let them have a win, any win at all, doesn't matter what it is, then they're going to be more popular and more influential than you. So what happens to the Gronkai brothers. We know what happens to the Glocki brothers. They wind up dead. So that's not very good. Right, everybody winds up dead. This creates an incredibly confrontational new style of politics. The Romans had worked very well on the basis of consensus, right? They would get together.

They would come to a consensus about something, and then they would move forward. And for a variety of reasons, at this point, you start having the popular energy that wants to reform the state and this intransigent elite that is not going to let this reform happen for often what were very petty inside baseball reasons. Nothing is getting done. None of the reforms are coming to pass. this resentful energy is not going anywhere. This resentful energy can still be harnessed. And it leaves the field open not to genuine reformers, like the Grockye brothers.

There are others that are going to show up. It leaves the field open to cynical demagogues. And cynical demagogues don't care about solving your problems. They don't care about actually following through on land redistribution. They care about getting you whipped up into enough of a frenzy that you will come down and vote for them. and they will be able to use your passion and your energy to destroy the demagogues opponents so that the demagogue can rise to a position of power inside the state. So they get there, it almost doesn't matter to them whether they follow through on anything.

This is going to be once we get to Saturninus and Glaucia and those guys that Marius is going to, this is all in chapter, chapter eight of the storm before the storm, the beginning of the end of the Roman Republic. I think it's chapter eight. Yeah, they don't care. just want power and they're going to use it. They're going to use this popular energy to get power. So now we've got, you know, there's genuine reformers trying to do good. You've got cynical demagogues trying to manipulate the mob into driving, putting them on a rocket ship now to power. And you have the Senate opposing everything at every turn. This creates so much tension and so much conflict

that you have a real breakdown of what the Romans called most myorum. Most myorum was, it It roughly translates as the way of the elders, which were the unspoken norms, the unspoken political norms, the ways that you would behave towards each other, the ways that you would behave around each other, things that you would not, things that you would do, things that you would not do. Because by this point, all that matters is defeating your rivals, right? The policies, as I said, almost ceased to matter. And there is a quote from Solist, our old friend Solist, who's always good for a quote.

Quote, he says, it is this spirit which has commonly ruined great nations when one party desires to triumph over another by any and every means and to avenge itself on the vanquished with excessive cruelty. So that level of caring mostly about winning and losing inside the political system as opposed to actually governing the society well leads to a slow breakdown where in chapter one, if you guys listen to chapter one, you know, there's, We're talking about political maneuverings like Tiberius introduced the lexigraria to the popular assembly without asking the Senate permission, right, without asking what the Senate had to say about it because he knew the Senate didn't want him to do it. So he did an end run around the Senate. So the Senate, what? They put out a tribune who's going to block Tiberius's ability to have this bill be read. This in itself is like a crazy breach of most, my arm, because no tribune had ever stood before the popular assembly and said, hey, you guys know this really popular bill that you all cannot wait to. vote for and are supporting riotously, I'm just going to not let you do it. A Tribune is a

defender of the people. And this opened actually a real constitutional question about whether or not a Tribune who opposed the will of the people could even be considered a Tribune. This question leads Tiberius Grakis to deposing that Tribune from office by a straight majority vote of the Assembly. That had never been done before. So these conflicts start to erode what had been a, you know, for lack of a better word, a more civilized way of conducting politics and you start breaking out into more confrontational styles of politics. And chapter one is going to end with Tiberius Grakis, of course, winding up dead. And then his brother is going to wind up dead a few years later. And this is just going to keep on going and going and going

throughout the book. And you have, the Senate are going to, they're going to convene special illegal tribunals to punish the followers of the Grakai and other of these popular agitators violating their rights, passing sentences of death that they actually had no right to pass. This is going to lead even later in the book to then the Populare having their revenge during like the Juggerthine war days and convening quasi-revolutionary tribunals to identify and purge nobles that they don't like because there are quasi-revolutionary tribunals in the book. It's really fun.

You know, I would hate for the revolutions listeners to feel like they're getting left out of this book. You didn't actually read the history of Rome. And then, of course, you get down to street gangs running into each other. And then those street gangs, which were really pretty ad hoc, you start getting by the very end, they're being organized. You have swordsmen on retainer. You have, you know, I give you so much amount a month, but anytime I need you, we're going to, we're going to go mob the Senate together. Or we're going to go mob the assemblies. And this leads, ultimately, as I said, the whole back third of the book is a giant civil war that almost destroys the republic. So it just kept spiraling out of control and spiraling out of control. And the

problem with ignoring early on violations of most myoram and violations of the way that you're sort of supposed to behave around each other and not, and sort of accepting defeat instead of trying to think of some extra way that you can kind of like snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. By the end, you get to the quote from Pompey that I think everybody at this point hopefully knows if you don't. It's this. Pompey was out hunting for the enemies of Sulla and had convened an extra legal tribunal to just identify these guys and kill him by Fiat, which he had no right to do because, I mean, Pompey was like 22 years old. He hadn't even been elected to any office yet. Like he was just, he was literally just a private citizen working on Sulla's behalf.

And some magistrates come to him and they say, hey, man, this is. illegal and Pompey snaps at them cease quoting laws to those of us with swords. Because at the end of the day, a written law having power over you or us deciding that written laws have power over us is itself merely an unspoken custom. There is nothing that actually binds us to, let's say, a written constitution or to some body of law. It says, hey, you're not allowed to do this. Oh, yeah, well, what if I just simply pull out my sword and run you through and then I can do whatever I want? Ultimately, power does rest on brute force, and that is what is exposed every time we start to let our unspoken norms and our unspoken ways of behavior. Once we start to let those go, we do eventually wind up just facing each other down with swords.

we go from yelling at each other to literally trying to kill each other, which as we know, after the course of my book, we know what happens. We get to the fall of the republic. It's a giant civil war. That's the end of the end of the Roman Republic. So what I hope you're going to take out of this book and what I hope you take away from this today is that there are some things that we can do that will prevent us from getting to the end of the end of any republic. And maybe if the Romans had done it, they too could have avoided the end of the end of their republic. One of them, as I just mentioned, is prioritizing short-term political advantage, short-term political maneuverings. I'm going to one-up you right at this moment, but I'm not really

going to see beyond that. Once everybody starts behaving that way, that has a cumulative effect and a long-term destructive effect on the legitimacy of the political institutions that you're operating in. So that would be, that's a big thing. I also think that priority. That's a priority partisan advantage over what they almost all saw as somewhat necessary reforms. They could see that there were problems brewing out there. They did want to let pressure off the, they did want to let pressure out, but they simply were so concerned about not letting their political rival get credit for it, get the win, that they block each other.

And they just go around mutually blocking each other, mutually blocking each other, mutually blocking each other, and so nothing gets done. none of that energy is ever relieved. And so by ignoring that, by ignoring all of that resentful energy that had been building up among the Italians, among the lower classes, it, as I said, left the field open to people who were just planning on using all of that resentful energy to their own ends as a means to power. Now, they didn't want to promise these people that they were going to, he or she was going to solve all of your problems just because they wanted to solve problems, but rather because they wanted to exploit it for their own personal advantage. So we should probably not keep our heads in the sand.

We should probably stop trying to snipe with each other over mere petty little partisan, for mere petty little partisan reasons. And so I think that we, if we are at the beginning of the end of the Roman Republic, it would behoove us to try to avoid what the Romans did, which was put their heads in the sand and try to pretend like everything. was fine and that ultimately led to the end of the end of the Roman Republic. And that is where I will end the end of this little talk that I just gave. Thank you very much.

So it is Q&A time. If anybody would like to ask a question, I know that there is a microphone here in front of me. There is a microphone over there to my right. I'll just make one note. we do only have about 15 minutes for the Q&A, so we won't be able to get to everybody that's getting in line right now, but we'll go through as many as we can. Thank you. And then I'll just all stand, sign books for however long it takes. Yes, sir. So despite the obvious parallels with America today, what the political and economic

conditions you talked about remind me most of is the British Empire in the 18th and 19th century. And yet the British Empire did make the reforms in particular. They realized how poisonous slavery was and got rid of it where the Romans didn't. So it sort of is possible to reform yourself. And I wondered if you had any comment. I think it's absolutely possible. I don't think that anything is inevitable here. You know, you bring up the example of the British Empire.

I think in the course of American history, the 1890s were a particular the 1880s and 1890s after the industrial revolution comes along they were dealing with many of these same problems I mean you have the move from agrarian to to really like pretty brutal forms of industrial economics that you know you got five-year-olds working 18 hours a day like all these that you have rats in the meat there's no standards for anything and there was there was a lot of resentment and energy that was building up at that point and then again you know around the era of the Great Depression and I think that in the in the history of the United States, I think that the progressive era, many of the progressive

reforms that were instituted in the 19, you know, the first decade of the 1900s, whatever you call that, the aughts and the 1910s and teens and then, you know, through the New Deal, I think a lot of that blunted some of those effects and prevented or prevented the American Republic from collapsing at that point. So yeah, none of this is, nothing is inevitable if you can, if you can think with slightly ahead of 17 seconds from now, which is whenever your tweet feed is going to refresh. Yes, sir. This is more a general Roman history question.

Given the wide span of its existence, were there any technologies in your opinion had a significant impact on the trajectory or the formation of it, be economic, social, military? Like technologically? Yeah. It's a weird thing. The Romans were not super into technology. And it's because of this thing. There was like a small C conservative outlook that they had.

And there's family, like I don't really know how apocryphal this, but like there was a steam engine in the library at Alexandria like somebody had like figured out how it worked. And they just, they weren't that interested in finding a better way to do things. That wasn't anything that ever drove them. we have a tendency to think of progress as like an inherently good thing. There's a, you know, there's a thing that exists and maybe I can, maybe I can make it slightly faster. I can make it slightly thinner. Everybody's obsessed to make it slightly thinner. And then it'll be better. But the Romans never really cared that much about it.

And it's why I think they continued to be just like a basically agrarian slave society for thousands and thousands of years. Yeah. Well, I mean, those are, yeah, I guess he invented a different kind of spear. So we can give them that. But those are reforms, but like from a technological standpoint, there were, you know, subtle differences, but it's not like they were, they were not looking to build a better mousetrap. Hello. Hello. So I appreciate that you have a perspective when telling history and, and make that very explicit.

Like, it's very clear where you're coming from. And I also follow you on Twitter and see, you know, some of your political perspectives. Let's not talk about that. While I happen to agree with you. I happen to agree with you on a lot of things. Do you worry that you're ever alienating people? Like, so for the whole course of the show, I mean, I don't talk about politics in the show at all. I don't ever bring anything contemporary into the show.

I don't think I ever have. I think I once provocatively said that Randy Johnson was the greatest left-hand pitcher of all time, and that was about as close I got to. And I actually had a guy yelling at me about Lefty Grove. It's like, dude, I'm not stupid. I know who Lefty Grove is. He's just not as good as Randy Johnson. So when this election happened, I did break a little bit.

I was writing, I was writing this book while producing the Revolutions podcast, while having the 2016 election going on. That really scrambled my brain quite a bit. I was in a weird place at times. And I think that there are things, and I'll say that Donald Trump is doing, that I think are quite dangerous. that I think are very destructive, that I don't think are healthy for the long-term health of the American Republic. And so I've been more vocal about saying that in particular than anything else. I have lost listeners here and there who are quite surprised that somebody with my historical background could not support Trump in all that he is doing for the United States of America.

And block. A far more light-hearted question. Okay, fantastic. So I've been listening to you for a decade-ish. And each of your podcasts basically consists of the story time of whichever time period. And there's humorous quirky bits of history in between there. I was wondering, what is your favorite bit of quirky Roman history? My favorite bit of quirky Roman history.

My favorite bit of quirky Roman history. Sacred chickens. Sacred chickens, is that a good answer? That's great. Does everybody know the story of the sacred? Okay, I'll tell you. Real quick. It's basically like there were these chickens that were sacred.

And I'm telling this really well. And what a general would do, this is during the second punicor. And what you'd have to do is like have these sacred chickens like you would scatter grains. in front of them. And if they ate, that meant that, like, it was a good time to have a battle. Like, what are you guys talking about? But so, there's one of these Roman generals during the Second

Punic War. They're on some ships and they scatter the grain and the chickens don't eat. And so his advisors are like, hey, we can't have a battle. And he's like, oh, well, if they're not hungry, maybe they're thirsty and he kicks them all overboard and they drown. And

then that guy gets he, wow, he gets smashed to pieces. He dies. And that's it for him. So yeah, you don't ignore the sacred chickens. Thank you. And by the way, that's why I was expecting.

Really? Okay. Was that a soft you really sent me up there? Because of that story, I have sent with friends of mine a whole bunch of rubber chickens over to Afghanistan. That totally doesn't make sense, but totally makes sense in context.

Yes, sir. Hi. Hi. Hello. Hello. I guess, having read a lot of the book, what do you see as the big differences between the American and Roman republics that are important here? Oh, well, I think one of the big things, we actually did just touch on this a little bit, that in the modern age, especially coming out of the Enlightenment, like we do have this understanding of progress, whatever it happens to. be whatever whatever your political stripe is. There is a general notion that things are not

uniformly perfect right now and that we can make that we can and should pursue changes to improve things. That was something that the Romans really struggled with. And I don't want to underplay the idea that part of what the Senate was opposed to when guys like the Glocki would come along is the very nature of all of this change in and of itself. So I think that that that certainly makes us more receptive to trying to head things off than it would for the Romans. And then also, like, we have pants and they didn't have pants. I guess it would be another thing. And we eat better than they did, too.

Yeah. Hello. Hi. So I'm here for a friend who's been listening to your podcast for 10 years. And you wanted me to ask you if I got the chance. Okay. If you could have any sources that are just missing that could fill in. Oh, all of them.

Yeah. All of them. All of them. Is there something in particular? Yeah, I mean, like all these guys wrote memoirs, right? We know that, that we know this from the ancient sources. I mean, Sulla wrote a memoir. But the answer to this is that we know that Claudius, the Emperor Claudius, right?

He was just like the sixth guy in the line of succession. So he was just going to be a historian and he just studied things. And he wrote a history of the civil wars and the rise of the Giulio-Claudean dynasty that was suppressed because it was too accurate. And boy, would I ever like to get my hands on that. Fair enough. Thank you. Yes, sir.

So on behalf of all the revolutions listeners, I got to know, did you make the New York Times book review list or what? I won't know until next Wednesday. There's a large accumulation of everything. But I will say this. I will say this because you guys are here. And I do know this because I just swept through the publisher's office and they told me this,

that we were going for 5,000 pre-orders, right? They said, if you do that, you'll be in pretty good shape. And I was like, all right. So we did 8,600 pre-orders. Wow. So we're very happy. So that's all I know about that right now. Yes.

So Roman politics at this time seems very personality-based. You know, your faction was determined by who led the faction. Yeah. I think in contemporary American politics, we're seeing a shift away from faith in political parties and towards political leaders, whether it's, you know, you are a fan of Donald Trump, not a fan of the Republican establishment, or you are a Clinton or Sanders Democrat. Is there anything we can learn from the, what happened in Rome about the results when faith is in individuals rather than ideas or establishments?

Okay. Well, so there's two, there's a couple parts of this that I would say one is we are, we are, I would, I would say that the United States right now is actually more party driven than personality driven than at any point in history. Certainly when it comes to electing, maybe on a presidential level, that's going to be a little bit different. But on the, on a, on a basic, like, electing your local representative or electing a senator, it almost doesn't matter who the candidate is. I mean, if you're especially bad or especially good, it might matter. But mostly, most people are going out there and voting for the red team or for the blue team. And that's the way

that we have a tendency, I think, at this point to see politics. We see politics through the prism of red and blue. So that's, that's, I think, for most elections. At the presidential level, I don't, I just don't feel like, like the Bernie Sanders thing, or even the Obama thing, or even the Trump thing, has a lot less to do with creating a personality. We have, We accuse our enemies of creating a cult of personality. You know, Obama was accused of being the product of a cult of personality. Sanders was accused of generating a cult of personality. And when I look through everything, I mean, I'm an American citizen.

I keep up with what's going on. And I don't feel like that was a cult of personality around some like grizzled old senator from Vermont. You know, I think that there was, I think that there was a real thing that there was, there were beliefs and there were ideologies that these people wanted to express and needed some candidate to channel it through. And I think that that's where somebody like Sanders comes from. I think the same was true of Obama. I don't think that it was so much that Barack Obama was some Messiah that we were all going to like worship that Shepard Ferry poster. I don't think that was really what people, what was driving people. And even Trump is much, I mean, he's he's as much a

cult of personality leader that we have ever seen. And even that, he was a conduit for what people were feeling more than people, more than people identifying with him in particular. So I'm not sure we're at, we're at a truly dangerous stage with that level of cult of personality, although Trump is, you know, daily making me probably regret that statement. Yes. Just so you know, we have time for these last two questions. Two questions. Okay. Hi, a long time, first time, but um, perhaps not 10 years, but still. Um, now when studying history, um, this is a question of kind of the study of history of teleology ontology it's um i guess it's it's useful for uh telling a story especially in the way that you do it through a podcast but how do you kind of separate kind of the movement of

humans through society um from kind of these these singular personalities that you tell the store help tell the stories through like the the i'm kind of asking about how do you uh reckon with the uh the great man kind of theory of history right so i i i have a very middle approach to it. Like, in the grand historiography of the world, like you could probably accuse me of being like a neo-wig, right? But nobody knows what that means, which is good.

Thank God, nobody's accusing me of being a neo-wig. But I believe that it is a mix of things, right? So there are these great economic, social forces. There's an entire past, an entire history that is inescapable for political leaders and even just individuals on us on an individual level who don't have any power at all. We can't change where we've arrived at, but there is such a thing as individual free will. And I think that there is such a thing as people who have

power being able to influence events in a certain way. I mean, I just finally, thanks to you, audible.com, was able to, I did war in peace, right? And Tolstoy is huge on this notion that like Napoleon didn't even matter, right? It's it's, it's, it's these great, you know, weeping forces of history. And I think that goes too far because I've seen plenty of times in all of the history that I have studied where, uh, oftentimes it's mistakes, right, more than anything else. It's less, it's less the, it's less like the genius of some great leader. Um, but oftentimes individual mistakes do dramatically change the course of history. And if they hadn't have made that mistake, things would have been different. So it's like it's, it's, it's almost I'm thinking out loud now,

because I never thought about it this way. This is cool. Um, but it's, Yeah, it's not a great man theory. It's almost like a failure man theory where, where like who screwed up. And because individuals are making decisions. You know, I don't think that we are just, I don't think that human beings are mere, you know, puppets driven by some force of history. I don't, I don't believe that. Thank you. Yeah.

Okay. Is this the last one? All right. This is going to be the last one. They're all nodding yes at me. So I guess since this last question, I'll end in a fun one. So we've heard a lot about people debating who's the best Roman emperor. and we've heard a lot about who's the worst,

who do you think is the best of the worst? Yeah, yeah. It's Nero. Nero's the best of the worst. He was the oldest, I think, of them. Right, which is the thing. You don't hand, that was the big lesson of the history of Rome,

is all the worst emperors are like 17 years old. So if you don't give power to a 17-year-old or to emotionally stunted leaders who haven't matured beyond 17 years old, that would be another thing that we should probably avoid. Okay, that's the end of the questions. Thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you so much for coming out.

I will sit here and sign books until my hand falls off. If they have to move us, we'll, I guess, move downstairs, but I don't think we're going to have to worry about that. Is this thing still on? All right, so Ben Wittes is here with us. I'm going to embarrass him just a sec, because he's been

listening to the history of Rome almost from the beginning, and he was very kind enough to blurb the book for me and say very nice things about it and make it seem like the book is good, which I really appreciate him doing.