The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Evil Roman Emperors: The Shocking History of Ancient Rome’s Most Wicked Rulers from Caligula to Nero and More by Phillip Barlag

Episode Date: July 2, 2021

Evil Roman Emperors: The Shocking History of Ancient Rome's Most Wicked Rulers from Caligula to Nero and More by Phillip Barlag Nero fiddled while Rome burned. As catchy as that aphorism is, it’s sadly untrue, even if it has a nice ring to it. The one thing Nero is well-known for is the one thing he actually didn’t do. But fear not, the truth of his life, his rule and what he did with unrestrained power, is plenty weird, salacious and horrifying. And he is not alone. Roman history, from the very foundation of the city, is replete with people and stories that shock our modern sensibilities. Evil Roman Emperors puts the worst of Rome’s rulers in one place and offers a review of their lives and a historical context for what made them into what they became. It concludes by ranking them, counting down to the worst ruler in Rome’s long history. Lucius Tarquinius Suburbus called peace conferences with warring states, only to slaughter foreign leaders; Commodus sold offices of the empire to the highest bidder; Caligula demanded to be worshipped as a god, and marched troops all the way to the ocean simply to collect seashells as “proof” of their conquest; even the Roman Senate itself was made up of oppressors, exploiters, and murderers of all stripes. Author Phillip Barlag profiles a host of evil Roman rulers across the history of their empire, along with the faceless governing bodies that condoned and even carried out heinous acts. Roman history, deviant or otherwise, is a subject of endless fascination. What’s never been done before is to look at the worst of the worst at the same time, comparing them side by side, and ranking them against one another. Until now.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain now here's your host chris voss hi folks this is voss here for the chris voss show.com the chris voss show.com hey we're coming here in a great podcast we certainly appreciate you guys tuning in thanks for coming by we've got a most excellent author that's going to be on the show today and We've got a most excellent author that's going

to be on the show today, and you want to check into what he's going to be delivering and sharing with us. Your mind is going to be expanded, blown, and you're going to learn so many new things. It'll improve probably your skin and your sex life. So it might or it might not. I'm just saying the attorneys say we can suggest that it might, but I'm not sure that it will or not. Anyway, guys, go to YouTube.com. It says Chris Voss. Hit the bell notification button. Go to Goodreads.com for it says Chris Voss. Follow us over there on what we're reading or reviewing.

Go to all of our groups on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and all those different places. Check them all out. Today, amazing author we have on the show, Philip Barleg. He is the author of the newest book that he's just put out june 14 2021 that's not the title that's the date that it came out the book is called evil roman emperors the shocking history of ancient rome's most wicked rulers from caligula to nero and more i feel like i should have read that in that movie guy's voice. He was in a world gone mad.

Evil Roman empires, the shocking history of ancient Rome's most wicked rule. Anyway, I'm sorry. I'm butchering your title, Philip. So let's talk about Philip and find out more about him. He's an interesting gentleman. He's an executive director at World 50, which initiates and facilitates the most interesting and influential business conversations in the world. See, what I tell you is interesting. In addition to Evil Roman Emperors, he's the author of The History of Rome in Twelve Buildings and the acclaimed

leadership genius of Julius Caesar. He lives in Atlanta, Georgia area with his wife and three children. Welcome to the show, Philip. How are you? I am great, Chris. Thank you for the opportunity to be here. There you go. And sorry for butchering the title of your book with that bad improv reading from some sort of movie theater. It's okay.

Can I confess something about the book title? Sure. I hate it. It's one of those things where the publisher was like, this is the title you're going with. Yes. And I wanted to call the book Murderers, Tyrants, and Lunatics. And the publisher rightly suggested that if I didn't tell people right in the title what it was all about, so maybe the title is more accurate. My bruised, sad ego still holds on to, but I wanted to call it something else. But nevertheless, I do like it, but don't tell them that.

There you go. Give us your plugs, Philip, on where people can find you on the interwebs and learn more about you. Yeah, so I slapped together a little author site at philipbarlag.com. Two L's in Philip, the proper way. Thank you. B-A-R-L-A-G, philipbarlag.com. Amazon is king. It's the best place to find the book, to buy it if you like the idea

or the subject matter intrigues you. So my name, a search on either the title, even Evil Roman Emperors, or my name will bring that book up. And that's the best way to find me. I'm not, I guess I have an author page on Facebook at Philip Barlag. So I'm there too.

I'm a pretty low profile guy, sadly. And that's why I'm extremely grateful to be here and to talk to you and to all your audience. Awesome, sadly. And that's why I'm extremely grateful to be here and to talk to you and to all your audience. Awesome sauce. It's wonderful to have you. So what motivated you to want to write this book? I love this book. It's a weird little book. It's not that little, but strangely, I think the answer is the movie Gladiator. I saw the movie, okay, as most people have. And the bad guys, of course, Commodus. The problem with the movie okay as most people have and the bad guys of course comedus the problem with the movie gladiator among many it's a great movie historically they did a really good job of

trying to nail some very key parts about how rome worked about how the army worked etc but they made comedus way too smart way too cunning way too calculating and weirdly not cruel enough. And great movie. Then you learn a little bit more about the true nature of the subject and you realize there's a gap and that gap is entertaining. And that's what I wanted to tell, not just him, but historically who these people were, what made them what they were, and what has come down through the collective consciousness of certain people and what a version of that reality might look like and how those things would contrast with one another. And everyone knows Nero. Most people know Caligula. There's a range of opinions about how accurate those collective opinions of these people that

have been formed really are. But there's some really interesting stories about Rome, about Romans, about power, about the nature of power. Some of them are people that are well known and others really deserve their moment in the sun. And that's the idea is try to take the worst of Rome's emperors, rulers, kings, tyrants, put them all in one place, compare them all across one another, and then rank them down 10 to 1. There you go. Give us an overall arcing view of the book, like some of the details that you have inside it and stuff like that. Yeah. Roman history is a reasonably decent guess at a certain period of time and is almost entirely myth in other periods of time. And it's long, complicated,

and twisted. And what I've tried to do is go from the founding of the city to the collapse of the Western Empire. The founding of the city is entirely mythical, but we have to treat it as fact because we have no version of reality to contradict it. So starting in the entirely fabricated date of 753 BCE, all the way to the collapse of the Roman Empire in 476. Those dates are arbitrary again, of course, but the idea is there's a lot of really weird stuff that happened along the way and only some of it got attention. So I'll give you the example. Rome is the myth founded by twin brothers, Romulus and Remus, and they had their own epic life even before the founding of the city. They had an argument over which of the seven hills should be the center. They got into an argument. Romulus kills Remus, thus the name

Rome for Romulus. And then the city is up and running. So the city itself was founded in blood. It doesn't matter that didn't happen. What matters is that the Romans themselves came to understand that as part of their core identity and that violence is enshrined in the very foundation of the city. And it is justified as an exertion of power. And that justified exertion of power in the mind of the rulers comes up over and over. And so much of these awful deeds are cloaked under this veil of patriotism and homage to the founding ethos of the city. And you have the city. These people kill each other. One rules, the other dies. Now you have Rome. You have kingship established. You get this really

awful guy who was so bad that he was banished as the last king of Rome and it transitions to a different system of government. They do such a bad job that they get run out of town and power gets consolidated in the hands of one person under a different government. So all these big swings in the different epochs of Roman history are really predicated by terrible people abusing power, whether it's one person, a collective group of people, an institution of people. And so much of the story of Rome is really about how terrible leadership and terrible people and acts of unspeakable cruelty made things so bad that the system itself lurched into a different form of governance. And that is sort of the untold, dark, shadowy side of Roman history. And I think it is one that's fun to learn about.

Yeah. It's interesting, the parallels to our current day politics and world, isn't it? It is. Although here's funny. I mentioned my sort of half-hearted attempt at an author page on Facebook. And I, you know, it's really me there. I don't have this like legion of marketers that are out there that are managing content for me. So I put a post out and people like it and they comment on it, then great.

And my most recent post, one person goes, sounds just like the Biden administration. And the next person's like, no, you idiot. It sounds like the Trump administration. I'm not telling you, I am not going to go near the whole, compare the modern world to the ancient one for a couple of reasons. One, if the moment I declare any political allegiance in the book, I've turned off half of the audience and I already need everybody that might be interested to, for the love of God, buy the book. And so if I piss off half the people that might, they're gone. But the other reason is that it's completely apples and oranges. There is no contemporary American politician, none, zero, that would warrant consideration for a revised version of this book.

It just won't. They're lightweights by comparison. The worst of Rome is infinitely worse than the worst of contemporary American politics. And so I almost like I'm not whether anyone would be, say, Team Biden or Team Trump, no matter what. There's nothing compared to El Gabalus or Caracalla or any of the lunatics out there. And part of that is because the resilience of American institutions are a check on megalomania. We can argue whether or not those institutions have come under duress over a period of time. But the worst of Rome is infinitely worse than the worst of America. The question is whether or not it's a cautionary tale over where the country's going.

And if so, what can we learn along the way? But I don't think that anyone that we would be coming across now would even, it wouldn't raise an eyebrow for anything that happened back then. Yeah. It's give it time. There's still time,

right? Yeah. They had a tooth. They had a 2,000-year run. We're a little earlier in our journey. And we're trying to make it over as quick as possible, evidently, if you watch January 6th. Yeah. It's interesting to me. There's an old saying that I always say, the one thing man can learn from his history, the one thing man can learn from his history is that man never learns from his history. Those two being the key operative words.

He could, but he never will. And thereby, we just keep going in circles. The aphorism attributed to Twain, history doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme. You just feel these patterns. They just keep coming back. Yeah, there's a reason that so much has been written about Roman history and Caesar and Marcus Aurelia. Is it Marcus Aurelia? And all these people, they built an empire.

Over the course of time, we've seen how those empires have fared, whether it's the British empire or our empire is on its stilts or I don't know what you call it. But we see how these leaders fail these empires and then they eventually decay and collapse. Yeah. And the amazing thing about Rome is that for so much of its history, where by all virtue, it shouldn't have survived the cataclysm under which it went. My personal favorite Roman emperor, so on the good side of the ledger, was a guy named Aurelian, who ruled from roughly 270 to 275 AD or CE, depending on your preferred convention. And Aurelian, part of what made him so incredible is that he inherited Rome when it had splintered, had fallen apart, and it was two giant chunks had cleaved off and formed their own breakaway kingdoms. They called themselves Roman. They set up their own Roman institutions.

They had their own Senate, their own emperor, their own coinage, everything, but they were breakaway empires from the core Roman emperor. So beset with internal troubles and just really falling apart at the seams and okay, you know, it had a good run. And Aurelian through his energy, vigor, and martial prowess was able to bring everything back into the fold and recreate the Roman Empire, for which he was given the title Restitutor Orbis or Restorer of the World, because he brought it all back together. And if you've been to Rome and the walls that ring the city, those are the walls of Aurelian. He was the emperor that commissioned the building of those

walls. Sadly, he was assassinated before the walls were completed. So the walls that bear his name are a posthumous legacy. And why he was assassinated appears in the book. But it's a sign of an empire in decline that tends to murder its charismatic and energetic leaders. And I don't think that's a terribly controversial statement, but we'll see. Too brutus yeah the you know it's so interesting like i said how much this parallels stuff what's the most do you do what's the most evil roman empire emperor according to your book what's the top of the list you want me to spoil the end hey if you don't want to blow the book last chapter is a countdown

so anyone die in it i'm just wondering uh there are okay so the blow the book, we don't have to. The last chapter is a countdown. Does anyone die in it? I'm just wondering. There are, okay. So the book goes chronological from the founding of the city to collapse of the empire and highlights 10 people along the way. Although the last chapter is actually two because their careers were right on top of each other. And then the final concluding chapter is my attempt to count down from 10. There were emperors who would order the wholesale slaughter of 20, 25,000 people at a time. There were emperors who would, Caligula goes to a wedding just before the

wedding can be celebrated, decides that he wants the bride, shouts, hand off my bride, takes her in the other room, does terrible things to her, prevents her from marrying her betrothed, keeps her essentially in seclusion, then exiles her, but orders her never to have contact with the intended groom just as a sheer, disgusting exercise of power.

Wow. By the way, you need everything about stories like that require an asterisk because the chroniclers are very hostile to certain people. And in some accounts, their chronicles are the only things that survive. And so there might not be evidence to the contrary. And there's a big qualifier, which is this is a version of a story. There

might be other versions of the story, some of which have been told, some of which have been not. And there's a deliberate choice in the book to pick the most salacious details and put them together and present it as the version of history, when in reality, there's multiple versions of history and a lot of room is ultimately unknowable. But it is perfectly consistent with the character of someone like Caligula to rape a bride on her wedding day and prevent her from marrying her intended husband, because he had this disgusting need to exercise dominance over the aristocracy. And that was just the kind of thing that he did. One of the challenges in writing this book is not to get too gross with some of these things, because they're really gross stories, and not to make the book just a laundry list of really terrible, unspeakable deeds, because then it gets depressing as you go and you just that almost the book would have otherwise been desensitized to things you got to you know

i tried real hard not to just wallow in gore but also tell a story along the way and hopefully i have a copy but readers will have to be the the judge maybe you got a slasher movie there when they turn it into a movie. Yeah, I think so. Those guys don't sound like nice people at all. No. It's the title, correct? Yeah. Some of them are just downright

weird. Were there any nice ones? Like just nice guys or did they all get wiped off the map probably? So there were, I can't remember the count something like 96 98 western or emperors until the from the first emperor which is augustus and so the found to the collapse of the western empire there were some incredible people of talent and merit every single one of them would have made decisions that would have shocked modern sensibilities

there's just it was a different world. Life was cheap. Life was violent. Power was exercised through violence that didn't make them incompetent administrators. And it didn't mean that they didn't have their own sense of justice. Nero, as an example, who's always held up as the example of the worst of them, and he's probably the one who suffered the most from posthumous character assassination, had this incredible sense of chivalry

and really genuinely cared about making sure that women were respected and well-treated and had these weird conventions. I shouldn't say weird, but like atypical for his time, respect for women. Again, I want to be careful to say that's not weird. It was different for his time and for his position. And that gets lost in the whole arc of some of the weird story. The story's about

some of the worst of what he did. His character was probably a bit more nuanced. So even the worst probably had some elements that made him not so bad. And there were some incredibly talented rulers, people of genuine sense of justice, very vigorous, very competent. Augustus was brilliant. Trajan was brilliant. Hadrian was brilliant. Trajan was brilliant. Hadrian was brilliant. Constantine was brilliant, but they were also prone to megalomania. And sometimes that showed up too. So the ones where there's a mixed reputation don't really appear in the book. The ones who were genuinely, there's a historical consensus over their awfulness are what you find in there. Wow. Wow. Anything else you want to tease out on

the book that people might entice people to buy it even more? Sure. Roman history is, it can be somewhat inaccessible. It's long, it covers a wide period of time. I mentioned that there's a 12, 1300 year span from the founding of the city to the class of the Western empire. And what's sort of hiding inside the book is a single volume history of Rome. Oh, wow. And it gives you, these are the big epochal moments. These are the different systems of governance. These are the key people that define Roman history for what it is.

And so if you really want to approach Roman history, one of the intentions of the book is to help tie together the entirety of its history in a single volume, in a way that makes sense, in a way that's accessible, in a way that people will enjoy. So if you're after a little bit more of the detailed stories of some of the, if you're a Roman geek and you already know who Elagabal is, if someone's listening and you know who Elagabal is, this is a book for you. If you're listening and you have no idea what the difference is between the kings, the Senate, and the empire, this is also the book for you. And so I'm really trying to make sure that wherever someone falls on their continuum

of Roman history, there's something in there for them. And in particular, what's hiding, I think, is a fairly succinct single volume history of Rome from its founding to its fall. There you go. There you go. That sounds like a great book, a great read. And do you hope people learn something from this and apply it to today's society and different things? Sure. I think there is a numerous need for learning what I would call lessons in the negative, i.e. don't do this. And there are some pretty consistent patterns to how people were able to accumulate and then abuse their power. There are also lessons about the people that enabled such things to happen and what they did

and how they did. I'm sure in your career, you've seen people who derive some measure of pleasure by trying to control access to there's a plenty of those types of people inside Roman history that you start to see, okay, this is how people accumulate power. Yes. But here's how people control access to the powerful as a proxy for their own power. And there's all sorts of lessons about that. The first book I wrote the book about Julius Caesar is entirely cast in what I would say are leadership lessons in the positive, not don't do this, but more here's some things that you can emulate from the life and career of Julius Caesar that makes sense in a modern leadership context. So I think in a weird way, the books are a nice compliment to one another, but I guess

I think there's plenty to avoid. If you're reading Evil Roman, you're saying, oh, I got to try that. You're probably probably that's not the intention don't do that there's lots of things at home kids yeah there's probably some penalties for that these days although i don't know we got some politicians seem to get away with everything so there you go but we should definitely learn from it if a man doesn't learn from his history he's doomed to repeat it then that seems to be what we're, we like to do, but we seem to hate it at the time, but we're like, this really sucks. Let's not do this again. And then we just do it again. I was, I think I was just watching Jon Stewart talking on

the Stephen Colbert show. And he was talking about how do we still screw up the same sort of pandemic standards a year, a hundred years later? How did we screw that up? But we, we didn't learn anything and we're still trying to get people to wear masks. They were year, a hundred years later. How did we screw that up? We didn't learn anything and we're still trying to get people to wear masks. They were wearing masks a hundred years ago. So what the hell? I hate to plug another author's work, but if you haven't read Michael Lewis's new book, The Premonition, it answers a lot of those questions and it is a brilliant book. I'll check it out. He might be, we might've invited him on. Does it have a cover of a blue mask and it's red in the background?

I think the color is yellow. I don't remember what's on the cover. If one of your dear audience here is debating between helping support me versus Michael Lewis, please help me. The guy sells like 10 million books every time. But if you already bought Evil Roman Emperors in the back catalog of all fine Barlag books, then by all means, please check out The Premonition by Michael Lewis. It's a great, it does actually, I think there were really long way to answering exactly that question. How did we not learn from the pandemic that happened a hundred years earlier?

So first buy your book. And then if you've got spare money in the change door there, buy The Premonition. Actually, we have the book here. I'm not sure if he's on the schedule, but usually if we have the book, he's on the schedule. Let me see if the schedule will pull up. It seems to be taking a while, but evidently the Google servers don't have money, so they're moving slow today. Yeah. Pray for Google.

Pray for Google. Can everyone just say a prayer for Google? I'm not sure if they're going to make it. They've been running Gmail as in beta. My schedule won't come up. It just says calendar, and then it says my account, and then it says blank screen. All right, so I think he's on the thing. So if I see him, I'll tell him you plugged his book and he owes you something or an ad fee or something.

I don't know. He's on the show. He's got to plug your book back. Yeah, there you go. Is that how it works? He's actually smart. No one's ever done this on the show before, Philip. His endorsement of me would go a lot further than my endorsement of him. I can assure you there is a not insignificant gap in stature between us as authors, but I revere him as a writer. He's a, he is exceptional. There you go. Awesome sauce. Give us your plugs, Philip, so people can find you on the interwebs.

Yeah. So philipbarlag.com is my little slapdash. I don't know what I'm doing. Author site. I do have an author page on Facebook. And the best thing to do is to go to amazon.com, throw in my last name, B-A-R-L-A-G, and you'll find me there. And that would be the best way to find me.

There you guys go. Check it out, guys. are lag and you'll find me there and that would be the best way to find me there you guys go check it out guys evil roman emperors the shocking history of ancient robes most rome's did i say robes the shocking history of ancient rome's most wicked rulers from caligula to nero and more by philip barlag philip it's been wonderful on the show. Wonderful to have your insight and everything else. Hopefully everyone reads the book and gets some great entertainment. It becomes a wonderful movie starring, I don't know, whoever the stars in movies that evil murderous people play in these days. I don't know.

It's been a while since I've been to the movies with the COVID and stuff. But yeah, whoever that is. I can see, who's the guy who did Die Hard? Could he be one of these parts in this movie? What's his name? Yeah, I could see Bruce Willis murdering hundreds and thousands of people. Sure. Hey, Bruce, if you're listening, I love you, man.

Die Hard was the first R-rated movie I saw in the theater. Please don't sue me. Also the best Christmas movie ever made. Oh, yeah. It's really weird because it's the most anti-Christmas. It's got murder and people getting shot and falling out of buildings. And you're just like, this is very Santa Claus-y. But still, we love him as an actor in the movie, of course.

So always remember Nakatomi. The Nakatomi. Always remember. Anyway, it's been wonderful having the show, Phillip. But thank you very much for spending some time with us today. We really appreciate it. Truly grateful. Very much appreciate it.

And I hope the folks find me. Let me know what you think. There you go. To my audience, check it out. Order it up. Go to goodreads.com. For just Chris Voss, hit the bell notification button on YouTube at youtube.com. For just Chris Voss, go to our groups on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, all those different places and check them out. Thanks for tuning in. And we'll see you guys next time.