The Daily Stoic - Josiah Osgood on Cicero and the Fall of Rome | Store This Up Inside You

Episode Date: May 11, 2022

Ryan reads today’s daily meditation and talks to Josiah Osgood about his new book “How to Stop a Conspiracy: An Ancient Guide to Saving a Republic,” the complicated life of Cicero, what we can learn from the decline of the Roman Empire, and more.Get a copy of “Frederick” and “The Boy Who Would Be King” at The Painted Porch.Josiah Osgood is Professor of Classics at Georgetown University. His teaching and research cover many areas of Roman history and Latin literature, with a special focus on the fall of the Roman Republic. Josiah’s interest in the fall of the Roman empire began in high school Latin class, where he read Cicero’s speeches against Catiline. He found Cicero’s rhetoric so powerful that he became enthralled by Roman politics and has been studying the subject compulsively for twenty years since. He is the author of several books, including a translated edition of Suetonius, entitled How To Be A Bad Emperor, which looks at some of the worst Roman Emperors, and his most recent translation of Sallust’s The War with Catiline―a brief, powerful book that has influenced how generations of readers, including America’s founders, have thought about coups and political conspiracies.InsideTracker provides you with a personalized plan to improve your metabolism, reduce stress, improve sleep, and optimize your health for the long haul. For a limited time, get 20% off the entire InsideTracker store. Just go to insidetracker.com/STOIC to claim this deal.The Jordan Harbinger Show is one of the most interesting podcasts on the web, with guests like Kobe Bryant, Mark Manson, Eric Schmidt, and more. Listen to one of Ryan's episodes right now (1, 2), and subscribe to the Jordan Harbinger Show today.KiwiCo is a subscription service that delivers everything your kids will need to make, create and play. Get 50% off your first month plus FREE shipping on ANY crate line with code STOIC at kiwico.com.Stamps.com makes it easy to mail and ship right from your computer. Use our promo code STOIC to get a special offer that includes a 4-week trial PLUS free postage and a digital scale. Go to Stamps.com, click on the microphone at the TOP of the homepage and type in STOIC.Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemailCheck out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more.Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hey, prime members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic Podcast early and add free on Amazon music. Download the app today. Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast where each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, a short passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength and insight here in everyday life. And on Wednesdays, we talk to some of our fellow students of ancient philosophy, well-known and obscure, fascinating and powerful. With them, we discuss the strategies and habits that have helped them become who they are, and also to find peace and wisdom in their actual lives. But first, we've got a quick message from one of our sponsors. Look, the Stilx practice the art of momentum. And more, they know that life is short and unpredictable.

But that doesn't mean they're trying to die faster, right? Mark's really says a doctor. He wants to live as long as that's possible, as long as that's within his control. And if you're looking for ways to extend your lifespan or slow down the aging process, the key to that is, is in your blood. And that's why today's sponsor, Inside Tracker, provides you with a personal plan to improve your metabolism, reduce stress, improve sleep, and optimize your health for long haul. Created by leading scientists and aging, genetics, and biometrics inside tracker, analyzes

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life. And I'm excited to see what you all come up with by trying inside tracker and inside tracker.com. Slash Stoic, you can get 20% off using that landing page. Store this up inside you. The world is a dark place as the last few months and years have reminded us. Now, as in Marcus' time, there are wars and plagues in natural disasters. There is death and loss and frustration and pain. There are long, dark winters, and time spent indoors convolessing or waiting for delayed

travel arrangements. Have you read the delightful children's book, Frederick? I love this book, we carry it at the painting porch, you can check it out. But it tells the story of a group of mice furiously preparing for the upcoming cold. As they scrambled the store-up food and supplies, Frederick instead soaks in the sights and sounds around him. It first the mice resent him, but in the end, at the depths of their isolation and doldrums, his beautiful poetry about the natural world warms their hearts and souls.

It's clear that Marcus Arelius also stored up such poetry. Meditations is filled with it. Observations about stocks of wheat and the furrowed brows of the lions. He talks about the way that bread breaks open. He talks of the beautiful ways that human beings can, though often don't fit together like fingers on a hand. He imagines himself running alongside the stars as if it were possible to be up there with the constellations. Why did he do this? To draw on it just like Frederick did. When the world fell apart during

the Antonine plague, these were the thoughts that soothed him. When people acted their worst, he took solace in the memory of Antoninus. He held within his inner citadel not just arms and perseverance, but also awe and wonder and beauty on demand. The future may be bright, but it will have its own dark and depressing days. Be sure you've collected more than just fortitude to draw on when that happens. I'll link to Frederick, the kids book, in the show notes. You can pick it up at thepainterportch.com or swing by the Painted Port.

If you happen to be in Central Texas, it's a wonderful book. And I also, I try to tell this story about trying to find that goodness and that peace and that stuff in your soul in the boy who would be king. Those marks for me, this is beautiful observations about nature from the Gregory Hayes translations. I sort of put my own spin on it there in the boy who would be king, which you can check out in the daily stokes store.

We have signed copies here at the Payton Port, as well. But anyways, I think there's something really powerful about kids books to remind us of these really core lessons, and that was just one I wanted to share today. Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic podcast. I am just packing up right now. I'm heading to the Naval Academy tomorrow to give a talk to what is, I guess, the freshman class of mid-chipin at the US Naval Academy as part of a fellowship put on by the Stockdale Institute that I'm very excited about.

And it sort of brings it full circle to me because I believe the very last talk that I gave before the pandemic basically turned in-person events upside down and canceled them was, was at the Naval Academy also as part of the Stockdale Center and I think a chunk of the speech is up on YouTube will uh we'll link to it in the in the show notes but I'm off to give that talk at the Naval Academy. It has been a busy April, I will tell you. It feels a little bit like what April was two, three years ago. I don't know how much I like it. So I think part of what this is gonna be for all of us

is calibrating. You know, we talk about things going back to normal and that there is this, you know, looming possibility of another wave. So I don't wanna be premature about it. But as we talk about normal, one of the things that we should, you know, looming possibility of another wave. So I don't want to be premature about it. But as we talk about normal, one of the things that we should, I think, take out of the pandemic is what we want normal to be. It doesn't have to be the way things were.

It doesn't have to be the way things are supposed to be. You can take from this a new normal. And that's what I'm trying to remind myself. And I wrote to my speaking agents, I said, this is as busy as I ever want to be. I don't want to go back to how it was. So calibrating a little bit, but I'm excited to give this talk and I was really excited to talk to today's guest. When I was writing the lives of the Stoics, I really had to dive into Cicero.

Cicero fascinating, if it was one of the first classic writers that I ever read. I really loved Anthony Everett's biography of Cicero. Of course, Plutarch's essay on Cicero's fascinating. But when I was really looking at him through the lens of Stoicism, I struggled with how much he came up short. And how I came to really relate to some of the figures in ancient Rome, who were not just of two minds about Cicero,

but would found him rather obnoxious for varying reasons. And so that's why I was excited to talk to today's guest. He's a professor of classics at Georgetown. His name is just Sia Osgood. And he's an expert on Roman history and Latin literature. his interest in the fall of Rome began in high school in Latin. It was lucky enough to take Latin. But that's where he and so many people through the centuries were introduced to Cicero's epic speech against Cataline. Cataline is this aggrieved, aggressive populist, slash elitist who tries to overthrow the Roman Republic because he loses

an election. And if that's reminding you of current times, well, the stokes would agree that time is a flat circle. As Mark really says, the history is the same thing happening over and over again. Well, Professor Osgood is a translator in a series of books of the classics that I really love by the Princeton University Press. He translated an edition of Sutonius called How to Be a Bat Emperor, which looks at some of the worst Roman emperors and what we can learn from them. And his most recent translation is of Salis, the War of Canaline. It's a book that was supposed to provide lessons and warnings about kuz and political conspiracies. And this new translation, how to stop a conspiracy,

an ancient guide to saving a republic comes out in May. And it is as relevant as ever, and I very much enjoyed this conversation. And I am looking forward to sharing it with all of you. Thanks to Professor Oskoid for coming on the podcast podcast and he will be on again in the fall as we talked about because he has a new book coming out about the clash between Caesar and Kato and I hope you enjoy this conversation. I'll talk to you when I'm back from the Naval Academy. So let's start with the Catalign conspiracy or Catalign conspiracy. How do you pronounce it? I would say Catal conspiracy. How do you pronounce it?

I would say Catalan. All right, so for people who don't know what it is at all, let's tell the story to sort of set the scene of this. Yeah, so the Catalan conspiracy was basically an attempt by a basically in attempt by a disgruntled, disappointed politician in the Roman Republic to basically to take over the state illegally. So I don't know how far back we want to go, but we're in the year 63 BC, and actually Catalan in that year ran for the Office of Council. This is the top office in the Roman Republic. There are two each year. He'd actually already run for the

consulship the year before, in the year 64 BC, and he was defeated in that year. And sort of adding to his humiliation, he was defeated by the new man, Cicero. So a new man with somebody who'd never been in politics before came from a family that was new to this scene and brown. So this really irritated Catalan. And in 63 BC, he ran again for the second time and he lost. So really, already at this point, he's sort of thinking about how can I gain power if things don't go my way in the elections.

And he'd been in touch with sort of an army that was forming in northern Italy and spoke with them. And after he lost the consulship, a little bit afterwards he had up and joined them. And the plan was then to go back and kill Cicero and take over Rome. So that's a very short summary. We can get into some of the specifics. Here, there's a lot going on at the time, of course. Isn't one of the tensions between Cicero and Catalan, how they approach even running for Running for office, right? Sissaro runs an honest campaign, at least by Roman standards. And as I understand it,

Catalan is sort of playing it the way that it was always played back then. Yeah, so Sissaro, I mean, part of what makes this so fascinating is they really are as you suggest kind of very different characters. And it's hard to imagine the whole situation developing without these two personalities.

So just to describe them a little bit, Caroline was a petition. He was born into one of these families that could trace their ancestry back to the foundation of the Republic. You know, it's like a Mayflower family or something in the United States. And he had this sort of tremendous pride, but the family had really fallen on hard times.

They hadn't hit the top office for centuries. So he was determined to recover their fortunes, and he would do whatever he possibly could. And he sort of had an unsavory rise to power in a period of civil war in which he killed several men, confiscated property. This was how he came to power, or was trying to rise up to power. So, Srisaro, right, totally different as we said, he's a new man. So he's from this sort of one of these small towns of Italy and prides himself on his on his virtue. And he rose in politics really by his own hard work and had to make a name for himself literally

had to make a name for himself in the courts. So Sissaro, yeah, very much when he ran for the consulship, he saw it all about calling in favors, reminding the Roman people of various things he'd done for them. One thing he did do, you know, where by our standards, he might seem a little dirty, is he very much sort of smeared Catalan's character. And this was kind of very much in the nature of Roman politics at the time. So Catalan, you know, in the first bid for the consulship he lost, then in 63 he ran again, and he'd been involved with bribery and other illicit plans to gain office.

But what he did in 63 was he then sort of very unexpectedly kind of ran on a platform of total debt cancellation. Rome was experiencing a credit crisis at the time and he said, let's just wipe all the debts out. And that was very antithetical to Cicero's ideas of how the Roman state should be run and sort of even his most basic ideas about fairness. Yeah, it seems like there's sort of a mix. Ironically, even though Cicero is the new man, he very much venerates the old system and the old way. And Cataline, who wants power

more than anything, is really willing to claim and do anything and betray the most myorum, however possible to advance himself. Yeah, that's right. But Keneline's not totally alone in this. I mean, another very famous name, obviously, to bring in here would be Julia Caesar, who also came from a Petrician family. So Caesar claims we go back to the goddess Venus and her son, Aineas, the Trojan, the founder of the Roman people, but the family for centuries once again had been pretty obscure. They actually hadn't been the

great, the greatest generation in the fighting in the Punic War and making Rome the powerful empire that it was. So Caesar, Catalan, there's sort of a personality type there that is very, has the sort of sense of grievance. Our families should be in charge and we're not. And then so they'll do what it takes to gain power. And they may very well cultivate, as both of these politicians did, cultivate ordinary Romans in a more radical democratic appeal than somebody like a sister I would have approved. So, so, so, Catalan loses the election and then engages in, I guess, in the angel world, they sort of called it a war. You call it a conspiracy, but there is this attempt to say, no, the election is incorrect. I deserve to be in power.

How far is Catalan willing to go to make this real? Like, how real is the threat to the Roman Republic in your view? Yeah, so this is sort of a controversial question, and part of Boyd's controversial is is sort of at the time, and especially afterwards all these stories came out. Oh, back, you know, a few years earlier, Kettle-Imm was planning to kill the consuls, so there becomes kind of a fog of allegations, but I think it's quite clear, so he lost a second time, he was on the verge of bankruptcy. It was clear that he could not run again. So I think there's really no doubt, certainly no doubt in my mind, that at that point he was prepared to seize power by force.

What his plan was, is the sort of this army gathering in Northern Italy. Ultimately, it was about 10,000 people perhaps. Using the term war is fair in this context. But what Caroline was planning to do was he went to Northern Italy to meet up with these sort of disgruntled farmers who were trying to get their debts forgiven. That's part of why they were up in arms. And he illegally seized the Foscates. This is the bundle of rods that are carried around by the duly elected consuls that are the symbol of their power. We later get the word fascism from the Civil War. It's Mussolini used the ancient Roman bundle of rods as his symbol of power.

ancient Roman bundle of rods as his symbol of power. So, Caroline clearly usurped the top office illegally and was sort of marching around Italy as if he was the consul. And was sort of planning to come back to Rome, and he'd left behind a few supporters. And what they were supposed to do was sort of carry out acts of arson, terrorism, kill, something of the leading politicians, kind of create enough chaos that Catalan could then return with the army and take over politics.

And this culminates in one of the most epic scenes, I guess not just in Roman history, but more directly, I guess you might call it in ancient literature, the Ocataline speech. Do you meet how much longer are you going to continue to abuse us? How much longer will this madness go on? Shame on the age and the principles. So is this Cicero's finest hour? Is this his chrychilians calling out of what's happening? How do you see the speech? What does that speech mean? Yeah, so for Cicero, there was no doubt about it that this was his finest hour, and he maintained that to his dying day. You can read his letters where he talks about the glory of what he did.

So was it his finest hour? He gave these fantastic speeches. Their masterpieces, he published them himself later, another sign of just how proud he was of all of this. Students still learn a lot using these speeches today. They've been an inspiration to orders ever since. You can find US politicians in the Antibellum period, for example, modeling their orations on Cicero. So he was very proud of it, but the catch was, so he gave these great speeches. He basically calls out Catalign,

who's in the audience, right? Yeah, so in the very first speech, yeah, Catalign sort of slunk into the Senate, and this was quite a dramatic one because according to Cicero and all later historians writing about this, actually that morning, probably that very morning, a couple of Catalind's associates had come to Cicero's house and were planning to kill him, and Cicero had been tipped off, so he knew in advance, so he took proper security measures.

So then he went into the Senate and revealed this, right? So this is part of the, the barge of the speech. It's incredibly high drama. Yeah, I mean, you can sort of substitute modern names and imagine the effectiveness, you know, if the speaker of the house showed up in the US Congress and said that a disgruntled candidate for office or whatever was trying to kill her. So it's incredibly dramatic speech. But is it sister of the Winston Churchill right that was the question you asked? Yeah, is it his finest hour so he thinks it is I mean and a few of his friends think it is

But the problem was To do especially with a few of those associates of Cataline Who stayed behind in Rome? So this is after Cataline left, you. The mask dropped. It was totally clear what he was up to. But he'd left behind these associates in Rome. And Cicero carried out this kind of sting to secure written evidence that would prove the guilt of those staying behind in Rome with these plans to torch the city.

And what happened was we can talk more about this, but essentially after they were arrested, the Senate voted to execute five of Catalan associates who were back in Rome, and Cicero carried out the order immediately. The problem was he potentially arguably was in violation of Roman law, which said that all citizens must have a trial before their lives are ever taken.

So this could be used against Cicero and was used against him by his enemies afterwards. And even among the Roman people, right, ordinary citizens, there were doubts about Cicero's leadership that could be stoked. So I think that's why he doesn't quite come out of this as a Winston Churchill or Abraham Lincoln, who also is suppressing insurrection, but Lincoln maintains that strong sense of constitutionality, right? And Cicero doesn't, and he would say, well, you know, we had to take extraordinary measures, but the result was an even kind of crippled, hempholitically later, because he was in fear of what would happen to him as a result.

One thing the Stokes all have in common is that they love to learn. They love to learn from people who had experiences, had insights, had interesting lives. That's one of the things I love about podcasts. It's like an hour or two hours or three hours sometimes right into the brain of a person who thinks very differently or has experienced things, very different from what you've experienced. And that's something I always feel when I listen to my friend Jordan Harbinger's podcast, the Jordan Harbinger Show, which is the sponsor of today's episode. It's show as interviewed basically everywhere. You can listen to his episode with Robert Green on the laws of human nature,

or both my episodes where I talk about solving for what you want in life. I talk about my book, Conspiracy, or Stillnessy's Key. I mean, he's had literally everyone you can imagine on professional art foragers, to billionaire entrepreneurs, to Mafia, Hitmen, to models, to professional athletes. He did this episode about birth control and how it alters the partners we pick and how medicine can affect elements of our personalities. He talks about just everything you can imagine. It's just a great show, recommend it.

The podcast covers a lot, but I think the one thing that's constant is that he always pulls useful bits of advice from his guests, and I can say that from experience. I always feel like the interviews I do on the Jordan Harbinger show get something out of me that I didn't talk about the interview I did just a few days earlier. Like, when I would point you to those interviews,

if I would say, hey, someone's like, hey, what's a podcast you were on? I connect you, I might link you to one of my episodes of Jordan, because it would be different from all the other ones. And I think that's all you can really ask for from a podcast. I enjoy it, I recommend it. There's so much there, you can check out

JordanHarbinger.com slash start for episode recommendations. Or just look for the Jordan Harbinger Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Thank you to Jordan for sponsoring this podcast. And I hope you give it a listen. It's, I have this theory about history that like you know, you sort of you get this first view of history It's very simple, right? It's like there was a attempt at conspiracy and Cicero shut it down and it gave this epic speech And that's what we should learn from it

Then you study a little bit more and you're like, ah, it's so much more complicated, you know, was Cicero trumping it up to make it more than it was, so he could be great to violate the Constitution, you know, or the Constitutional norms, you know, et cetera, et cetera. And then it kind of gets, it kind of gets muddled. And then you, then you kind of study it some more, you step back from it and you're like,

well, there was a coup and then she did stand up for it. What else was he supposed to do? Do you know what I mean? It's like, the Civil War was about slavery. And then it's like, well, it was more complicated than that. And then it's like, it really was just about slavery. So I kind of am, depending on the day, I think something very differently of the conspiracy, right? Because it's like, I feel like the first time I heard it,

Cicero's heroic, then I began to study Cicero's character more. And I'm like, I don't trust anything this guy says. He's always trying to make it about him and is so consumed with his legacy. Then, you know, even watching more recent political events, you're sort of like, what else was he supposed to do, right? I don't know. What do you think about it? Yeah, so I think, right, it's so easy for us, you know, sitting in our studies as readers of these events, right, to make judgments on, you know, oh, his sister should have done this, and if only he'd done that. And, you know, I think so,

I've written a translation, a new translation of sort of the classic account of the conspiracy, which is by the historian Salas. And this was kind of written about 20 years later, Salas was sort of making his debut as a history writer. And I think the neat thing about Salas book, right, is he he does sort of get into those complexities, right? Without undermining sort of, as you said, the basic idea that there was a conspiracy was pretty alarming, that this could even take place in Rome, what is this saying about the Roman Republic and its health? So you can have all of that on the one hand, but then if you're an attentive student of history, right, and perhaps a future leader, you know, you can sort of learn a little bit from some of the mistakes that Cicero probably may.

So, but yeah, surely it's so much easier for us in, you know, hindsight to think. And I think Lincoln is a good example here, right, of somebody who, you know, tended to get things a little more right, in my opinion, than Cicero, but certainly had to make very hard decisions that were criticized at the time and have been criticized afterwards. Yeah, you think about Lincoln and Lincoln and Cicero

both being lawyers. You know, I think part of what they may have both been hesitant about or it's this sort of tricky thing that we don't, is like, how do you litigate or do you want to argue the validity of the claims of a person attempting to overthrow the government? Right? Like that was I think Lincoln's trouble at the end of the Civil War, but also throughout the Civil War, it's sort of like there are these accident circumstances. There is this moment moment of life and death and should the leader of the state be held essentially forced to allow the state to tear itself apart or commit suicide or not defend itself because

it's worried, calling them legal proprieties sounds dismissive of their significance. But you wonder if that's what, it's like these people were about to overthrow the government, murder me, and I'm supposed to, you know, not just give them their day in court, but I'm supposed to allow them, I'm supposed to allow their sedition, oxygen, to potentially spread and infect the rest of the republic. I imagine that, you know, as a philosopher and as a leader, which both Lincoln and Cicero were, that must have been an incredibly difficult position to find oneself in. Yeah. Yeah.

And I think that's where I am a bit more sympathetic to Cicero than sometimes later generations have been, you know, who've seen this purely as, well, it goes back to the idea that Cicero was the new man, so, you know, he needed to make a name for himself. So he's sort of almost cooked up this whole thing and invented it, and I think, to me, that just really doesn't work. I think he faced this situation and he had to deal with it. And I mean, Lincoln, right, as well, he was getting into, he was in the New Republican party. It got back into politics, but he didn't know exactly what was going to happen in 1861.

And he has to go and deal with it. And he faces, again, I'm not trying to say Cesar O'Rourke is a Lincoln. I think a lot more highly of Lincoln. But Lincoln faced difficult choices too, right? I mean, he felt he had to keep the border states on his side. And that meant, you know, not doing anything initially about slavery, even though personally, he found that institution important. So these are sort of the, what I would say are kind of, you know, the Machiavellian questions that the leaders faced in the true sense of the word Machiavellian, you know, not just petty

little schemes, right? But how do you run the state? Yeah, and when your state's survival is on the line, right? Where, you know, what is the morality, right? And is, is, do you do what you have to do, or what you think you have to do, to keep your state safe, to allow it to survive? I mean, that's what, you know, Machiavelli is getting at in his philosophy.

And to me, is always sort of made Lincoln kind of a true Machiavellian leader. Yeah, I think what's what's what is impressive about Lincoln is that he is deeply principled and pragmatic, which are two like you might argue, Cicero is almost is is incredibly pragmatic, very rarely principled, although he is, you know, by the standards of his day remarkably uncorrupt, you uncorrupt compared to Catalan, which I think is to his credit.

One thing that's always been a swing vote for me here is, at least in that particular sort of, should the executions or the legal, not legal, is Cicero Power Mad. Is Kato signs off on them? And Kato seems to have almost always be virtuous to a fault in the sense of like sticks with precedent, procedure, the old way of doing things. I don't get much of a sense of any other of the examples that we hear about from Kato. Kato almost never says anything Machiavelling, never says anything where the ends justify the means. And he gives Cicero the green light to proceed. So that does make me think that the facts on the ground were perhaps more conducive to Cicero's

point of view than we might hear after the fact. Yeah, that's such a great point. And, you know, Kato appropriately for us here on the Daily Stoic, right? Kato is one of the heroes. And in fact, I mean, Cicero is sort of disappointed a little bit afterwards because he felt Kato's part was sort of almost overinflated.

And, you know, this ended up robbing Cicero of some of the credit that he deserved, right? But in all seriousness, yeah, so the Senate is sort of meeting on December 5th of the year 63, and these guys have been caught right handed, the ones in Rome. I mean there there is evidence. It's as I say in the book, you know, it's a bit like the the smoking gun tape and the watergate scandal. I mean there's just no doubt about it about what they're up to really. So but the the Senate is cautious and sort of wavering a little bit. What are we going to do? And, and Kato just towards the end of the debate came in and gave the speech of his life, everyone said this afterwards and said, you know,

in Roman private law, if you catch a, somebody in the middle of a crime, you killed them with impunity. Now, these are Roman standards and they're not going to map perfectly onto our own sense of due process and presumption of innocence. Romans didn't really have a penal system as we think about it, even high profile criminals or those going on trial didn't have to, they weren't detained, right? So part of the situation here is there weren't necessarily great options. But yeah, but Kato came in and gave the speech saying, you know, this is what we need to do. This will nip everything in the bud. And Kato was proven right, essentially. I mean, the afterward reached this army in northern Italy that was growing, you know, that the Senate had taken a hard

line. Many of the supporters of Catalan vanish, they peeled off. So it sort of melt back into the fold. Right. Right. But yeah, it's not so afterwards it's really not that anybody ever could come to the defense of the conspirators so much is that that Cicero could be for political reasons could be attacked as the console who had carried out the the sentence of execution, which was of concern to ordinary citizens, right? Who didn't necessarily have lots of wealth in Rome, but they prided themselves on the right that they had to be tried before they ever lost their lives. Well, in one of the complicating factors I have to imagine, as we're talking about how the history of something gets written, is Cicero's enormous ego, right?

And his just general, unlikeability. I, I, when, because I wrote about this in, in, in lives of the Stoics, I, I love this quote from Plutarch. He talks about Cicero's sort of celebration of himself. And he says, one couldn't attend a, a, a Senate or public meeting, or any session of the courts without having to listen to the endless repetition. This unpleasing habit of his clung to him like fate. That he just, you know, he even, he's even writing to other historians of the time like

post-Adonian. He's like, here's my notes. You know, here's what happened. We have this idea that the history is written by the victors. It's almost as if, and doesn't church you'll say, I intend to write it of history, but it's like Cicero tried to... This story will be kind to me, because I intend to write it. Yeah, it's like Cicero is so ham-fisted about it, and over the top about it

that it almost creates a backlash in which the rest of Rome has to downplay the significance of the event. So it's just not to have to make Cicero so insufferable. Yeah. Yeah, no, I think you have a good point and I like the bit of Plutarch and there are other Examples maybe it's Sena Ka can't remember Think Sena ko says right that Cicero praised himself not without reason, but But without and you know, so it's like okay, Cicero. You're allowed to Take sure, you a victory lap? But yeah, but this is again the Lincoln.

I mean, think of the second inaugural. That's not a victory lap for Lincoln. I mean, it's very different. There's a humility and a grace to it that sister great place to it that Cicero seemed to laugh. Yeah, and so ancient politicians are different. They have to promote their names. I mean, modern ones do, of course, but the ethics were different. Yeah, but you never get the sense of sort of the magnet

and emitting of Cicero, right? Which is what you see with I think Lincoln and Churchill at the end of World War II since we mentioned him. The victor should be magnanimous. There's that term, like, greatness of soul. I forget what it is. But it felt like like greatness of soul, I forget what it is, but it felt like at the Cicero was a small man pretending to be great rather than a great man meeting a great moment. You know what, there's kind of a play-acting-ness to it. And to me, the thing about Cicero that I've always, it's always struck me about the Catalan conspiracy that makes me think of it, again, like you're sort of going back and forth, but it's like, it's almost as if he wases himself on this crisis, right? And although I guess you could argue Cicero or Churchill has the same tendency,

but then, you know, when the actual coup happens, when the Republic is being overthrown by Caesar, happens when the Republic is being overthrown by Caesar, Cicero sort of like out of gas. He's like eating up all his credibility. The man in the moment should meet, but the man, you know, the man is used up everyone's patience and he can't do it. Yeah. And I think, you know, this is a great point, and I think it's even especially through, sort of, in the immediate aftermath when Caesar is just starting to rise to power and, you know, Cicero wanted to take a stand, but that's when he's sort of fearful about

what's going to happen to me and he sort of had counteracted his own influence. But I will say in Cicero's defense, right? The old man did have one fight left in him. And of course, in after Cicero's death, he comes back out and sticks his neck out again. And that's part of why I think, you know, you can take sister of bashing too far because in the year 44,

I mean, his critical say he was so vain, he needed that one last chance to kind of, yeah, you know, restore his reputation. But I think it's really just the opposite. You know, in in 44, he could have stated his bill as he had a nice thing going on there, writing his philosophy and he said, no, I'm going to come back out and give this one,

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your first month plus free shipping on any.com promo code Stoic. Yeah, he's just such a complicated figure. And he, it's like he's right in theory, but then it's sort of kind of out of character. And then when it isn't character, people doubt it. but then it's sort of kind of out of character. And then when it isn't character, people doubt it. I think, you know, ambitious ambition is this thing where we admire people who are ambitious, but they can't be too ambitious. They need to be able to make it look kind of effortless.

There's that word, spretzittura, right? The sort of effortlessness. And Cicero wanted it so bad and was so naked about it, that I think it made people doubt his motives and it made them sort of look at him suspiciously. And I think it kind of created the backlash with the mischaracterization that he ended up spending having to spend so much time fighting against.

Like they don't invite him into the conspiracy to it Assassinate Caesar because they don't think he can keep a secret and and you know, they're kind of proven right because he ends up Taking credit for it anyway afterwards. Yeah. Yeah. No for for sure. I'm Cicero is I mean some of it, you know, just to sort of give a slightly more sympathetic read, right? Is some of it is that he sort of had to develop those instincts as a new man, right? Who, you know, never should have been elected to the consulship in the first place because the noble families pretty much had a stranglehold on that top office and he, you know, he rose to the top by promoting himself.

He had to, nobody else was going to. And so he, and that makes his early career, I mean, I'm with you. I think he is sort of, fiendishly complicated and that makes him interesting. I think his early career, you know, sort of before Catalan, before the conspiracy is sort of the part that's easiest to be cheering him on for, right? When he's just sort of coming into the courts and sort of figuring out,

well, how do I take on the nobility to make my own name without jeopardizing kind of my chances completely? And he does some better things, some unambiguously good things, I think, or learn his career. Yeah, I mean, the question, if the question is, would Rome have been better with morisiceros or lessiceros, right?

The answer is morisiceros, whereas Rome needed fewer catalyns, right? It's definitely better than the average or the status quo, just like a Shakespearean character, he has these sort of tragic flaws that are so connected to his virtues. That's kind of the irony of it, as you're saying. It's like what made, what allowed him to break through, and be the only one to accomplish,

what is also what, it's not paralyzes him, but it traps him in this kind of cycle where he gets so close, but he never quite gets it. Totally agree. And this is why this period of Roman history after all was one Shakespeare was drawn to. Now, admittedly, his sister was kind of a bit of a wimp and enjoy a Caesar.

But yeah, but Shakespeare sees that these figures, and there are others, Kato's a great example, whom Shakespeare really didn't touch on, right? But whose great virtues end up also being, being their fatal flaws, Caesar, Brutus, right? I mean, you can sort of see it working out for all of them. And this is part of why the Republic would fail, right? Is you don't have, it's hard to find the one

you're sort of totally cheering for who has that sensitive virtue and the Machiavellian kind of pragmatism at the same time. But yeah, we needed more cisteros. If any of them were perfect, they wouldn't have been attracted to politics in the first place. Right. There you go. Yeah, I think what I, have you read Mike Duncan's book, The Storm Before The Storm?

Yeah, actually, I haven't. I had him on the podcast. Have you read Mike Duncan's book, The Storm Before The Storm? Yeah, actually, I have. I had him on the podcast. It's a great book. I really enjoyed it. But basically, what he was talking about, and I think your work is an important part of this theory, is basically, it's like, we see Julius Caesar, the story we've told ourselves as Western civilization, is, you know, Julius Caesar comes and it's this clash, and then the republic is overthrown. It's sort of this one guy, this one event that changes Rome's history.

But he's like, no, the hundred years of history before Julius Caesar is what sowing the seeds or setting the scene for this thing to happen. So like the idea that Julius Caesar would come and do this, it's a lot less shocking if you understand that not that many years previous, Julius Caesar and Cato and Cicero are all battling about someone doing the exact same thing, right? Like that this sense of actually there was a century or so, a generation or so of rising political violence, a fraught political transition, and just a general breakdown of the order and the norms

on both sides that create kind of an escalation that culminate in this event. It's not this one thing coming out of nowhere that changes everything. 100% and I think that is, you know, for us in modern democracies is one of the takeaways of the Roman Republic, right, is political violence, even if any one episode like the Catalonian conspiracy, okay, the Republic went on for some years afterwards, but cumulatively,

cumulatively, yeah, this takes a huge toll. And the problem, one of the problems, right, with political violence is, is as we were saying earlier, that the sort of choices leaders face and putting it down are terrible. And may involve violence on their part. And that creates the kind of spiral that can get you to a full civil war because the government even if it's doing the right thing for survival can lose legitimacy in the process. Yeah, it's like one breaking of the norms seems to necessitate or presents the opportunity for another breaking of norms. So, you know, Catalan, you know, disputes the results of the election, engages in political

violence, he's menacing the Senate, and Cicero responds by suspending the sort of judicial process to put down the threat. And then, you know, it's not like Catalan and his supporters are like, oh, you know, what, we were wrong, slap on the wrist, we're going back to how, right? Then now they have agreements, right? We see this in the US with like Supreme Court justice, you know, a point, it's like it gets more and more extreme and the norms break down more and more because everyone is rooting their norm breaking, or justifying their breaking of norms with the argument that so-and-so did it first.

Totally. And it becomes, you know, the strategies make sense on any one side for the moment, but overall, they end up devastating the political system. The basic idea of shared governance becomes ceases to become possible, peaceful shared governance when each side starts taking these actions. So given the title of the book, how to stop a conspiracy, what lessons do you think are there about how one stops that escalation or that cycle? Like, did sister do it right?

Is there something you should have done differently? Like, how could Rome have pulled itself out of the spiral that ends with Caesar? I love questions like this, you know, because if I truly had the answer, I really should be the president of the United States now or something, right? You know, not a not a classics professor about Salis's book is so he gave a version of Kato's speech. And you've got to take action now, otherwise the republic's fate is in the balance. But the other speech that Salis recreated in the debate was the one of, no,

another of the insious Caesar, right, who also on this occasion, got up and sort of warned the Senate about taking the immediate step of executions. He's the voice of reason unexpectedly. Well, that's the thing. Yeah. And obviously there's some delicious ironies there for the reader, because Salis was writing after the Idz and March, after Caesar's assassination. But there is something to take away from Caesar's speech there, which is respecting that a bad precedent is very likely

to be abused. So you sort of want the Ciceroanian cleverness, right? That the way he patiently gathered the evidence to use against various of the conspirators to make it completely clear what they were doing, right? That's the part of Cicero that one can view sort of positively. But what Cicero might have done better, and in general might have done better is afterwards not to break the law unnecessarily if possible and sort of to return or to offer some more hopeful vision of shared governance. I mean, I think that's kind of what's missing from the year 63

and and became missing from the partisanship of the late Roman Republic. No, you don't have, we go back to him, but you don't have the Gettysburg address or anywhere in these texts, right? And the hard-knosed Machiavellian is to say, well, that's not gonna do much, but I think it's all we have. It is to keep all right out that vision that can try to bring people together

and you have to address real problems and real grievances, too. Who are the disaffected? Why are there thousands of people willing to take up arms? That's the kind of work sister I didn't want to do as much to really address those problems as well. Yeah, it requires both empathy and a savvy, and the Stoics talk about controlling the passions. How does one respond not out of anger or frustration or even punitively, but find a way to like both address the potentially devastating, you know, extra

event and sort of try to ratchet things down a little bit. But I think we're seeing now like it is interesting you study it historically and then you watch what's happening in the world now and you go, is that even possible? Like, I think we're seeing that now where when you realize people might pay lip service to wanting that, but what do you, like, as I was thinking about this, I haven't read a lot about the Civil War.

There's this idea that Lincoln once forgiveness and malice towards then, et cetera. But what if the other side isn't reciprocating that is it receiving the gesture or the grace in good faith? And then the problem just continues, right? And I wonder if, as we look at this happening in the world now, like people say, oh, we just need someone who's calm and brings us together.

Well, what if the other side doesn't want to come together, right? What if they take advantage of the leniency and the mercy, and then you're just back in the same boat. And you miss that window, the window that Cicero has where he puts the thing down for good. What if you miss that window? Again, there's sort of not a simple response to that. I think we sort of goes back to your point though about kind of sort of the simplicity and then the complexities of these great historical events and processes, right? Because we, I mean, the US Civil War ended, but of course, it's very clear, right? That, that, you know, the US South still... And on the end, it ended military experience. Right. Was experiencing black Americans were

experiencing incredible amounts of violence for decades and decades after the US Civil War. So, you know, the idea that any period of Civil War, I think, you know, maybe we can say this positively is sort of going to end, you know, the gun stop and everyone comes back together is probably, probably impossible on some level, but at least being aware of kind of the difficulty of the process is something leaders can deal with, right, and sort of act on. It sort of snuck up on me that I'm like a small business owner or not so small business owner at this point. I have a bookstore at the Painted Porch.

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I mean, to me, this whole period of Roman history is just a sobering reminder of how difficult it is to stop political violence once it's started and that the whole point of the democratic system, all of these things that were first pioneered back then, but gone through all these different iterations, all of it is about stopping political violence. Because the alternative is not like, oh, we are democracy, or we are we more socialist, like the Nordic countries, it's like, you're either a democracy, or you're a fascist state, or it's chaos with political violence. Do you know what I mean? Like all of the systems of government are really about who has the monopoly on violence? And how does one keep violent?

How does one prevent disputes from being settled with violence? And that the election and the different, all of these norms were inventions to to stem violence and that there's always that but that violence is always there just lurking beneath the surface and once it gets out You know it's hard to put it back. Yeah, totally and I think we have to To accept you know, we sort of have the hopeful vision of a peaceful shared governance. And I think democracies can do a better job at their best of addressing different groups

interests and reconciling those. But I think we also have to acknowledge, and this is a takeaway, again, from Roman history, right, that the democratic forms of government can breed violence in their own ways because they're meant to stop it. But people in a democracy and in a republic, they have a sense, for example, that their vote ought to matter. Yes. Right?

Because that's what the system tells them. And this is your one big chance to go change things is to go cast your vote. And then if the vote doesn't go the way you want, or if you feel the vote was stolen, or was fraudulent, right? People will take up arms and or start to move in that direction. And so I think we have to, I'm not saying it with any pleasure obviously, but I think it is something that you kind of can see that's tragic about the rumour of public. Right? As you say, there's sort of these great villains, right? But there's sort of also ways in which the system itself sort of could encourage individuals sometimes to think that violence was acceptable.

It's a perversion, but a perversion of the system, right? Of the rhetoric of liberty or or the ballot box or whatever we want to call it. Or then as now, the mob is this kind of third ray. It's like how you're not allowed to talk about jury and olification in the judicial system that it hinges kind of on this fiction or this story. And the mob is this thing that the most important norm in any democratic system is we don't rile up the mob, right? Like that we don't feed lies to the mob. We don't

weaponize the mob. We don't encourage or foment the mob because the mob is really the ultimate, the ultimate enemy of a democracy. It's not other countries. It's not, but the democracies get destroyed when the mob turns out and tears it down. And I think Cataline was fomenting the mob, the grackess affair, sort of the fomenting of the mob. the the the grackess affair is sort of the fomenting of the mob. And then, you know, the the the 2020 election in January six is what happens when you repeatedly lie to a mob and all of a set like the the mob is acting rationally in if what they're being told is true, right? And it's not, but true, right? And it's not. But if if if what they had been told was true, what happened on January 6th would make more sense, right? And that so it's like that that's that's the thing the one thing beyond the pale has to be the cultivation or the manipulation of the mob. And this is sort of one of the points kind of of Cicero and ancient political theory

more generally, is that concern about sort of preventing the rise of a demagogue. And I think this is where, you know, maybe in the light of events really across the world in democracies and recent years. I'm somebody who maybe 20 years ago is sort of clever graduate student, it was just, I know that WinBag Cicero, but I've come to have a bit more sympathy kind of for his viewpoint about things.

And the thing about angry crowds too, it doesn't have to be the whole crowd, but sometimes it just takes a few. And then violence can literally spread through crowds. And of course, nowadays, we have the phenomenon of the angry crowd online which is its own very dangerous phenomenon. In ancient Rome obviously it was sort of in the forum and the public spaces of the city. But it's that same problem. If you get a few spreaders of misinformation, a few malicious actors, it can sort of start to take over the whole crowd, or enough people get inside it, that it becomes a problem. When I think Roman history is sort of the story of that figure

believing that they can get the mob to do what they want and then realizing that they're not as in control of the mob as they thought that they were, right? So it's sort of like you're riding the tiger and you think you're in control but you're not. And what happens, it's all bets are off once it gets going. And then we're sort of looking at the wreckage that this angry beast did. That strikes me as like, let's say Catalan had been successful. Where could that have ended?

The idea that he just would have become counsel and ruled any normal politician and things would have settled down, strikes me as a rather naive notion. Yeah, I mean, I would agree. You know, I think he, you know, so there was this debt crisis going on at the time. So, you could say, right, oh, that the most charitable version would have been cataloged, would have come in and made some necessary reforms, helped people out, but I think that's very unlikely. And that's sort of the danger that Cicero and Salist, the historian writing afterwards,

saw is that the character of our leaders really does matter. This is one of the other great insights that we take from classics, right? And you hear it nowadays, right? People say, well, I hate this leader's character or the private life is terrible or whatever, but some of the policies are good and You know, I mean now I'm something a bit more like a sister than a monkey of Ellie here

You know, where is that gonna end up right? Well character is fate as the expression goes like it it Well, yeah, and what I what I think so interesting about about what you're just saying is like So like Catalan I don't think thought about what would happen if he was if he had succeeded He was just thinking about like one little thing after like we just a little bit in front of him And I and we've done a remarkable job not talking about current events So I'm gonna ruin our street right now, but but I think about this with Trump, let's say Trump had somehow managed to flip a key number of people and overturn the election, right?

The result would have still likely been political violence only worse because he would have actually just pulled off a coup, right? So he would have effectively overturned a democratic election, one that he lost the popular and the electoral too, right? And what would the people on the other side have reacted, people who are not in the sway of the demagogue, people who did have objective facts in front of them and had witnessed

this slow moving thing and they were not in the cult of personality, they would have had to choose between accepting a legitimate election being illegitimately or fraudulently overthrown or reacting in either political violence or some mass form of protest, right? So I think what's so tricky about these figures is they're often so motivated by greed or ego or the lust for power and they don't think about what's going to happen when they get, they're not thinking, they're not as strategic as you think they are because they're so blinded by what they want. I just shudder to think, yeah, what would have happened if Catalina succeeded or what

if one or two or I mean, what it needed to be like three or four states, but let's say a slate of electors had been manipulated and the election is thrown to Congress or it's overturned. I mean, we don't just show up on January 7th and live in the same country anymore, right? Like chaos ensues there also. Yeah, yeah, it's a great question. And alarming to think about, but I think anyone can see just how badly it would have ended up. And at the same time, I think we sort of have

not just gasp and relief and say, well, thank God that didn't happen. But sort of think about the damage that was done by getting so close to that point, even in the first place. Well, and then, yeah, I think the other, the note that, you know, just because Catalign didn't succeed, didn't mean that Rome could have rested easy, because as we were talking about, just a few years later, you know, Caesar comes along.

So if you get complacent, if you don't do something about it, it just metastasizes and gets worse. Totally. Well, this was amazing, and I really want to have you back on. Maybe you can tease it, but I know you have a book coming on the, that second conflict, the Cato and the Caesar. I would love to have a conversation with you about that book when it comes out. And the Caesar, I would love to have a conversation with you about that book when it comes out. Yeah, so that's coming out later this year. And it sort of looks at the two of the great.

I think the dominant personality is actually of the late Roman Republic. Cicero looms very large because he produced these magnificent speeches that have been models for orders to follow ever since. But actually, especially after the Cadelinarian conspiracy and sort of the trouble he got into, he ceased to be a dominant figure, really, in politics. And what I'm trying to do in this book is everyone kind of acknowledges what I'm trying to do in this book is everyone kind of acknowledges Caesar's role in what we would call the fall of the Roman Republic. And I'm trying to sort of to trace the story of his rival with Cato. And Cato, I think, was the other great leader of that generation. And I think what I'm trying to do in the book is look at how their partisanship,

goes back to a point I was earlier making, how their partisanship will sort of each act at any one moment made sense for them politically, made sense for their followers, sort of ended up creating a dynamic that really led to the end, the end of the Roman Republic altogether. They were like two planets just sort of orbiting each other and spinning faster and faster and faster until eventually some sort of conflict was inevitable. Yeah, and Kato was an extremely talented politician.

I mean, I think this is one of the things I'm trying to show in the book. I think he was a stoic. That's been doubted sometimes. I think it's clear from very early on in his life, he took stock philosophy seriously, and I think it guided many of his views about how the Roman Empire, as an empire, should be governed, what you owed to those whom you governed, if you were in the ruling class. But I think he was deeply political too at the same time and was a master of stunts and sort of building groups of followers and manipulating procedures. And so that made him a real rival for

Caesar. And the early parts of the story are sort of delicious when they're hurling insults at each other and Kato's sort of outsmarting Caesar. But then it has a tragic ending that really neither of them want it. And that's part of what's so upsetting about the whole story. Yeah, well thanks so much Ryan, it's great to talk with you. All right, I've loved it and we'll talk at the end of the year about the new book. Thank you. the new book. Thank you. Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us and it would really help the show. We appreciate it,

and I'll see you next episode. Hey, Prime Members, you can listen to the Daily Stoic early and ad-free on Amazon Music, download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and ad-free with Wondery Plus in Apple Podcasts. Hey there listeners! While we take a little break here, I want to tell you about another podcast that I think you'll like. It's called How I Built This, where host Guy Razz talks to founders behind some of the

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