The Pete Quiñones Show - Episode 1127: Political and Electoral Parallels With the Roman Republic w/ Alex Petkas

Episode Date: October 31, 2024

90 MinutesPG-13Alex Petkas is a former academic and host of the Cost of Glory podcast.Alex joins Pete to go over some examples of political and electoral issues in the Roman Republic that correspond to today's political environment.Alex's Website Alex's Authoritative Speaker's GuidePete and Thomas777 'At the Movies'Support Pete on His WebsitePete's PatreonPete's Substack Pete's SubscribestarPete's VenmoPete's Buy Me a CoffeePete on FacebookPete on TwitterBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-pete-quinones-show--6071361/support.

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with vouchers from Trump Dunebag. Search Trump-Ireland gift vouchers. Trump on Doonbiog, Kush Faragea. If you want to support the show and get the episodes early and ad-free, head on over to freeman Beyond the Wall.com forward slash support. I want to explain something right now if you support me through Substack or Patreon. You have access to an RSS feed that you can plug into any podcatcher, including Apple, and you'll be able to listen to the episodes through there.

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So thank you for the support. Head on over to freeman beyond the wall.com forward slash support and do it there. Thank you. I want to welcome everyone back to the Pekingiena show. By popular demand, Alex Petka says back. How are you done, Alex? I'm doing great Pete. yourself good good and i think that i'm not lying about that i think that you told me that after your

first appearance on the show a lot of people reached out to you and they um as some kind words yeah um you've got a great audience and uh you know i think uh talking about these issues about you know the corruption of academia and ancient heroes seems seems to hit a key and uh so it's a pleasure to be back and to dive a little deeper in the some of the stuff we talked about. All right, let's do it. We were trying to come up with subjects, and we are literally seven days away from the most important election in our lifetime trademark.

So you had the idea that you were looking at elections in the past, and especially in the Roman Empire, and you came upon pretty much one period. And I think that once I was reading what you wrote, this thread that you did on Twitter, it looks like it'd be perfect to start talking about this subject of elections and how often in history when you looked at elections, there was the same kind of blankety blank stuff happening that caused people to go, what the hell's going on here and to cause real problems. Start wherever you want. Go ahead. Yeah, the thread was on yesterday, Monday.

In the late Roman Republic, legal tampering with voting rolls caused the great first civil war. This happened by sudden massive additions of new citizens by legislative fiat. And people seem to relate to that a little bit. This is not a popular take on the origins of the first Roman civil war. You kind of wonder why that is. I think this is a story that is told from this perspective of a clash of two personalities more often, Gaius Marius and Lucius Cornelius Sulla. But even so, it's not really taken as, it's not taken in the context of our political situation today.

So much a lot of people are interested in this idea of, you know, is Trump Caesar and blah, blah, blah. But I think that the earlier periods of the breakdown of the Republic, beginning with the Gracky and the 120s and 130s BC leading up to, especially Gaius Marius. I think Gaius Marius, the populist politician, too. There are a lot more parallels to today than in the time of Julius Caesar, in my opinion. So yeah, well, maybe it makes sense to kind of start from the bigger context. I was thinking of dive into the gracchi a little bit and the problems that Rome is facing that I think are interesting for us to reflect on today. And then we can see where things lead to hopefully build up to the first Roman civil war,

which happened in the 80s, BC. Sure. Go right ahead. So the, so here's an interesting point of comparison with today. I, there's this passage from the life of Tiberius Krakis by Plutarch. it kind of sets the stage of Tiberius Gracchus is this populist politician who realizes there's massive discontent, there's great wealth and equality, and he wants to do something about it. And so I'll read you this passage from Plutarch's life of Gracchus and that we could talk about who Grackus is in the background of it. But so here's Plutarch talking. He says, of the territory which the Romans won in war from their neighbors, a part they sold and a part they made common land. is Agar Publicus in Latin, and they assigned it for occupation of the poor and indigent among the

citizens on payment of a small rent into the public treasury. And when the rich began to offer larger rents and drove out the poor, a law was enacted forbidding the holding by one person of more than 500 acres of land. For a short time, this enactment gave a check to the rapacity of the rich and was of assistance to the poor who remained in their places on the land, which they had rented and occupied. the allotment which each held from the outset. But later on, the neighboring rich men, I'll summarize here, they're inventing fictitious personages.

They're, you know, at first having this legal ruse so they can capture public land, and then they eventually just drop the ruse and say, we own this land. And then the poor get ejected from their land, continuing on with Plutarch here, no longer did they show themselves eager for military service and neglected the bruce of bringing up of children so that soon all Italy was conscious of a dearth of free men and was filled with gangs of foreign slaves. By whose aid the rich cultivated their estates from which they had driven away the free citizens. There are various attempts to solve this problem, including those of Gracchus that Plutarch

mentions here. But here he quotes Tiberius Gracchus's brother, Gaius Grascus, who's a little young And he says, but his brother, Gaius in a certain pamphlet has written that as Tiberius was passing through Tuscany on his way to Numantia, on his way to Spain, and observed the earth of inhabitants in the country, and that those who tilled its soil or tended its flocks there were barbarian slaves, he then first conceived the public policy, which was the cause of so many of countless ills to the brothers. And so what do you have in this?

What are we looking at here? The year is like 134 BC. And Rome has been conquering most of the Mediterranean in the past century. In the two 20s, two teens, two aughts, they were fighting this great long war with Hannibal, the Carthaginians. the Punic War is the second Punic War, which once they defeated Hannibal finally, and there was a lot of warring in Italy, they had a lot of Italian allies turn on them. They finally defeat Hannibal. They start to control directly, Africa, which is the state, Tunisia and Algeria, sort of the northern coast of Africa. And they already control Sicily only for a couple of decades at that point in Spain. So then over the course of the first half of the second century, BC, the 190s through 140s, they conquer the rest of a lot of the Eastern Mediterranean.

Greece, Macedonia, they win these great wars against Antiochus of the king of Syria, Greek king of Syria. And so you have the situation where Rome is increasingly fighting these foreign overseas wars. Their military system was not really designed for this. It's sort of built around this idea of the citizen soldier who goes and fights a campaign during the summer and then he goes back home to his fields in the winter to do what he needs to do, sharpen his sides and that kind of thing. Sickles. And then you've got, so you see, soldiers are away from their farms now.

They're peasants for the most part. They're living away for like up to six years, just really abandoning their life and their farms. They're becoming a professional soldiery. It's taking a lot of toll on the middle classes, the kind of peasant yeoman farmers. And Rome is also drawing more and more heavily on its allies. You catch them in the corner of your eye. Distinctive, by design.

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Savour sumptuous farm-fresh dining. Relax in our exquisite accommodations. Step outside and be captivated by the wild Atlantic surrounds. Your five-star getaway, where every detail is designed with you in mind. Give the gift of a unique experience this Christmas with vouchers from Trump. Dunebeg, search Trump-Ireland gift vouchers. Trump on Dunebiog, Kush Farage. So throughout Italy, Rome has allies. They call them the Soki-E. It's the Latin word for allies. And over the course of previous centuries, they conquered Italy. It's brought a lot of these people

into subjection, you know, people in Tuscany and, you know, Pisina, Umbria. and to the south in Campania, Lucania, Samnium, all these regions are filled with different Italian cultures. Some of them are close to the Romans. The Tuscans speak a different language that's completely unrelated to Latin. Some of them are kind of Latin-oid, Italic languages. But most of them are not citizens. Most of them are kind of confederates of the Romans. They'll fight in their wars, and they get some of the plunder, but most of the plunder in these wars is going to the hands of the rich, of the commanders and of the, also the businessmen who are winning these lucrative contracts to build ships, to supply weapons, to supply forage and, you know, all the gear, winning mining

concessions, you know, if the Romans conquer land in Spain, there's a lot of silver mines there that are very lucrative to, um, to, you know, to exploit. And, uh,

you know, wealth is getting concentrated. Capital is flowing in. Also in the form of slaves. And so you have a situation where the elites are getting richer. And Rome has this policy of, that Plutarch mentions of, after you win a war or you conquer some territory, some of that territory you designate as

possession of the Roman people, Agar publicus, public land. And what that's supposed to do is be a bank out of which you can reward loyal service of soldiers by giving them land. There's a couple of ways that they do this, Plutarch refers to one here, which is basically you, the state kind of retains title to the land and they just rent it out. So you get a kind of more or less permanent tendency that you can pass on to your children and you give the state some nominal sum, the Vectagal, which is like a land tax. And then the rest of it you keep for yourself. So it's a it's kind of like ownership. In some cases, they just give you outright ownership. It just depends on the local situation and whatever land commissioner that's there on the spot decides to do.

But in agriculture, in ancient agriculture especially, there's a really big difference between subsistence farming and cash crop farming and kind of farming or rather agricultural activity for profit. And, you know, the economic difference there is really interesting. But before we get to that, the symbolic significance of owning land is just hard to underestimate for the Romans. You know, this is how you really know yourself to be a free man, that you have land that is yours, that your ancestral tombs are on, that there's an emotional. connection to land in a way that it's just hard to imagine. Like there's the family, we have this notion, I think, in the West now of a family business that you might pass on to your kids, but, you know, land is just so much more symbolically significant, like biologically significant as kind of giving you an identity and a standing in society and freedom and kind of self-reliance.

So the people that own this land are supposed to be, you know, country gents doing a combination of subsistence agriculture and maybe a bit of profit, you know, that they can buy their wife nice things or have a few kids, whatever the case may be. But since so much capital is flowing in, I think this is where it gets really interesting. You've got all these slaves coming in from, you know, they're the part of the booty of war and there's piracy escalating in the Mediterranean at this time so the pirates are capturing slaves and selling them to these hungry Roman slave markets and it's becoming cheaper to buy slaves and there's a lot of capital among the rich from for the reasons we discussed and so the rich are

able to to basically either buy this ager publicus or you know acquire it through sometimes legal sometimes illegal means there's a scholar that talks about a really interesting quote that I'll that I'll give you here one scholar describes a situation in southern Italy as wild west cattle barons and armed slaves armed slave hands, raiding herds and homesteads in the true spirit of Texas and Colorado. We have evidence of this from a speech of Cicero that this is kind of what's going on in some of these places. They're ranchers that are, you know, it's very lawless in some of these areas. It's kind of the strong man wins.

And not only are they strong and that they're able to capture lands through sometimes underhanded means, but they have the capital to turn these lands into cash crops. So investing in olive presses and storage and buying slaves so you can work this land. And the profiteering of this, the countryside is becoming more and more pronounced. And so the poor are kind of getting either shoved out or bought out. and this is a problem that a lot of people have heard of this idea of the Latifundia. He's like wide, vast land holdings of the Roman elite. Probably in this period, it's not necessarily huge consolidated landholdings

because economies of scale don't necessarily, they hit a cap pretty quickly in pre-modern agriculture. But, you know, they have landholdings scattered across Italy. And it's more an issue of like they have the capital because they're the rich living in Rome. and they can afford to hire, you know, slave masters and professional farm managers and all this stuff. And they can afford to ride out a bad year and they have access to credit that just a subsistence farmer has no chance against these guys, right? I think that this is really an underappreciated aspect of the decline of the republic. So all this money's coming in, right?

And it's coming in unequally. But it's also incentivizing certain behaviors that used to not be so incentivized by the Roman political system. To wit, merchandising, like becoming, you know, businessmen instead of military commanders or statesmen. like the elites are suddenly faced with this prospect of making huge profits and something you know they're inclined to see that justify that in terms of well this is what it takes to get ahead in politics in rome rome their moral system does not incentivize business businessmen like there's a kind of a prejudice against money-making as such like the senate for example members of the senator are not supposed to be lending money interest it's seen as dirty but you

know you can find a guy that is maybe not a senator he's an equestrian you know you give him and trust him with some money and he'll lend it out for you there's ways to get around the rules because it's just very profitable and you know what what is really honorable in rome is war in politics is lawmaking and statesmanship and and leading armies. But in the face of all these opportunities, we start to see a kind of merchantification of the wealthy really in the second century. And it kind of accelerates, I think, toward the end of the century. It's hard to quantify this. But like anecdotally, this is an impression that you get when you get to the life of Gaius Marius that we'll get to in a second. So there's another challenge

that the state is facing that Plutarch mentions here is they're having trouble recruiting soldiers, right? These soldiers are getting these long tours of duty. They're not able to have children as effectively. They're not able to kind of have a family heart like to produce the soldiers that are going to fight the wars, these increasingly far away foreign long-term wars. These you could call them forever wars, you know, because there's people that profit whether you win or lose or whether it takes one year or 10 years. They're going to profit more if it takes 10 years if you're selling them the ships and the and the armor and so forth. So Rome is having trouble recruiting soldiers for its armies. And so Tiberius Gracchus kind of comes into this

situation. He sees an opportunity. And I can pause for questions just interrupt me if any of that, if you have any reflection on that. You catch them in the corner of your eye. Distinctive. by design, they move you even before you drive. The new Kupra plug-in hybrid range for Mentor, Leon and Terramar. Now with flexible PCP finance and trade-in boosters of up to 2000 euro. Search Kupra and discover our latest offers. Kupra. Design that moves.

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I will. I will keep going. I made some notes, but not ready yet. So here's where Gracus comes in. Tiberius Gracus, he's one of two brothers, the Gracchi brothers, the famous Gracie. Gaius is the younger one. They are top aristocrats. They're blue-blooded nobles. Tiberius Gracchus's father of the same name was consuled twice. He was the censor, which is the highest, most dignified office in the state.

He had two triumphs, like, you know, military glory triumphs, the highest honor that any Roman can ever hope to attain. He's widely respected. Tiberius Gracchus marries the daughter of, this is a sign of his status, of Scipio Africanus, the elder, the guy who defeated Hannibal, like the most noble of the noble aristocrats of his day. Tiberius Gracchus marries his daughter, the famous Cornelia of the Gracchi, who's a fascinating woman worth studying in her own right. She has 13 kids and only three survive, you know, gives you

a taste of how tough it was to be a woman in those days. And their sister, you know, two brothers and the sister survived to adulthood. Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus' sister marries Scipio Emilianus, Scipio Afrikanus the Younger, who is the guy who conquered, finally conquered Carthage, sacked Carthage in 146. So these are super, super elite guys. And so Tiberius Gracus is one of the nobles. And so he sees this discontent as an operas

opportunity to build a different kind of career. And he's credited with being one of the most creative, well, I would credit him with being one of the most creative statesmen. Certainly, his, his innovation in populism was very decisive in Roman history. So what he figured out was, there's this office of the Tribune of the Plex, excuse me, in the Roman, in the Roman constitution, that is a kind of there it's a legal office primary it's a civil office that there's 10 of them every year depending on the period that you're looking at and the Tribune has this right to call a popular assembly and to propose laws to this popular assembly there's there's a couple of ways that you can pass a law at Rome. One of them is through a kind of wealth and status ranked voting system.

I believe it's called the Centuriate Assembly, where the rich people's votes count for more, basically. But another way is through the Tribune at Assembly, through the, it's called the Conchalium Plibes, the Council of the Pledbs of the People of Rome, which is not weighted by wealth. It's just anybody can vote. And if you get a majority, your law passes. You're supposed to refer your legislation to present it to the Senate as an advisory body to kind of get their approval. Because if you don't, even though it's legal, you can face massive political retribution. They can end your career. You know, the Senate is an informal body of the most powerful men of the city, and they can make your life really miserable. So there's strong incentives not to go against the Senate because Tribune's only served for a year at a time.

But Gracchus is so elite and so well connected that he sees, well, if I build up enough political capital, I can resist the Senate. And this needs to be done because our people are suffering. one of the consequences of the increasing dispossession of the land by the elites and the rich in Italy is a lot of these people are coming to Rome looking for jobs, having nothing to do, getting recruited into armed gangs, you know, there's a lot of volatility. So if I can solve this problem, even against the Senate's wishes, I'll be considered a great statesman and I'll do something great for Rome. And certainly it'll help me in my political career.

You know, this guy wants to be consul one day. He wants to be censor like his dad. He wants to lead armies. He's a very competent soldier. He wins some decorated honors in war. He's a great ambassador. But I think he's around 30 years old when he becomes Tribune of the PLEBS and with this radical agenda to solve this problem of wealth and equality.

And the way that he does it is he proposes an agrarian law that essentially is to set up a commission of a few select men to go around throughout Italy, figuring out who's dispossessed locals of public land illegally. You know, they have this law on the books that you're not supposed to own more than 300 Uyghura, which is about 300 Uyghura, which is about 300 acres of land. Nobody's supposed to own more than that much of the public land that was distributed as a part of the war booty. So he's going to go and try to clean up the land register of Rome and redistribute it to deserving men. And to get some of these volatile young men out of the streets of Rome and get them back on the farms and get them making families and stuff. and what ends up happening, long story short, well, I'll tell the story. So basically he manages to pass his agrarian legislation, but the closer he gets to it,

the Senate throws up more and more resistance. One of the interesting things that they do is they put forth a series of kind of anti-populist tribunes. So, you know, anybody can any, any, any, um, not anybody, but most of the nobility are eligible to run for the office of tribune of the plebs. There's patrician families that are technically disallowed from this and they're super elites, but they can find a guy. So basically the, the Senate will put forward their own, well, I call, I say the Senate, but let's let's call them the, the establishment, because there's, there's dissidents in the Senate. The establishment could put forward a candidate like the guy's name is Octavius. And Octavius,

it was a friend of Gracus actually, but the Senate kind of got to him and they're like, we need somebody to stop Gracchus because a lot of these guys are in on it, right? Like they, a lot of the Senate are the very men who own some of these wide swaths of Agar Publicas who are profiting off of the inequality. And they're going to get, they're going to lose out. They're going to have their land dispossessed or maybe they'll be forced to sell it at a bad price. And so they try to stop him through this guy, Octavius, who tries to veto his laws and

propose countermeasures. And eventually, Grackus manages to get him stripped of his tribunate by a tribunary law. I should say that when he passed his agrarian law, he did it against the Senate's wishes, right? Like he proposed it to the Senate. They're like, hell no. And he says, I'm going to propose it anyway. He gets the votes that he needs. There's scuffles in the forum.

It's kind of ugly, but he manages to get it done. And then he, long story short, he strips Octavius of his office. and he's running for a re-election as Tribune, both to continue his legislative program and put a few more nails in the edifice, when he unfortunately loses his election as Tribune because Roman voting practices involved, you have to be present in Rome to,

to like vote. You can't, there's no absentee voting, right? And a lot of these guys that he's championing are too busy out in the field. It's summertime, you know, they're not rich men and they don't have the leisure to come to Rome. And so a lot of his base isn't actually able to vote. He loses on the office of the tribunate. And so he's trying to pass some emergency legislation before his term expires. And things are just like heating up and heating up.

in Rome and in this one moment the one day there's all these omens that Plutarch recounts but the the Senate is is sort of ready for him and they have armed their slaves with weapons under their cloaks under their togas and he senses they sense like you know he is a he had sense that there's going to be some hit on him probably. So they arm themselves too. And they're kind of getting ready for a face off in the forum. And in this key moment,

he's communicating the way the story goes with somebody who is, across the mob and can't hear his voice. And so he makes this gesture that I'm arming myself because there's a danger against my life. and he points to his head, which is I guess it's sort of like the gesture of, you know, we run our finger across our necks, like I'm about to, you know, get executed or something, cut off my head. But in the way it, when the Roman gesture is like you point at the top of your head. And then somebody shouts, he's, he's asking for a crown. He wants to become tyrant. And this message is immediately passed to the Senate. And they're like, all right, that's it. That's all we

needed that's all we needed to see this guy is clearly a demagogue trying to become a tyrant this is and you know that's the message that they get out it's like a fake news message right like typical kind of elite tactics you just spin the story in completely the opposite direction you know very fine people and so and so the Senate marches out they they vote the Sanatas Consultum ultim the the declaration of martial law they order the count the consulses to not let any damage come to the state. This is the kind of formula for a declaration of martial law.

And they march out, bust up the benches in the Senate House, and make clubs out of them. And they basically mob Grakus and his men, and they beat them to death. And they kill many of his supporters. There's blood running through the forum. They throw his body in the tiber. And so that's the end of Grakus. You catch them in the corner of your eye.

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The Lidl New Bridge Warehouse Sale, 28th to 30 November. Lidl, more to value. And now this is over the next to the hamsterer. It's leargoal to the GUE and notar the Gereena in Aundun, and lehands to Gaela to Gaelan. In Ergird, we're talking in one-voonah with funnive-vin-vunah. It's a lot of doing to do you have to do on the Englishmen on as good

time with all the town of Gnallow and people tariffaugh and people tariffo in Tashdie. There's air of cooctuaghan. Full of nis more on Ergaret Ponga I. Sounds just as bad as January 6th. Right?

Yeah. Just a a patriotic demonstration, right? So I think that this is a really interesting instance of something that's Friedrich Gundal talks about in his biography of Caesar, the mantle of Caesar. I could read a quick couple of sentences passage here.

So he says, the worst anger of the Juncker's, you know, the kind of the nobles, is aroused less by the mob and its tribunes who thunder or mutter among them than by the traitorous son of their own race, who veils himself of the masses, through pride or intellect to achieve a higher level than that of the great or who frees the masses through a sense of justice.

And I think this is really, you know, very... And Plutarch even says that a lot of the violence was motivated less by Gracchus' policies than by a personal hatred of the man. And Gundolph kind of nails it there. It's the Trump phenomenon. It's the RFK phenomenon. Like the person from your class who betrays you to champion the people is the most hated of all.

He's the enemy within. And you see this really like in spades with Tiberius Gracchus. There was a lot there. Yeah, one of the things that you mentioned there talking about people having property and having the tombs of their ancestors there reminded me of the book, the ancient city and how I covered that book on my podcast and I have people contact me and go that's not real history and it's like I don't know it's it seems like the more you read yeah the more that uh that it actually was yeah yeah Fustilda Kulange classic classic work I never try to pronounce that name because I'm gonna screw that up so bad

Yeah, no, it's very similar, seminal work and still quoted kind of in the footnotes sometimes as a novelty by classicists today, but brilliant work of synthesis. So when you take into consideration that people can be awarded land, and it sounded like more of, I don't know if you're familiar with the concept of Eusefruct, but it doesn't. almost seems like that that would be even closer to, Yusufruct is actually still on the books in Louisiana, strangely enough. The, it seems like being awarded land would be something that obviously would be something that would motivate the citizen. But it would seem to me like the more you had people coming in, especially for service, the more you had people coming in from the outside, and you allow them to serve and get all the

benefits of a native-born Roman, you're going to have the same problems. You're going to have worse problems than you have now, because now not only are they in your land, but now they're also tied to your land. So did they allow people like Merks, who came in from other places if they served would they allow them to have the same benefit? Yeah, this is something that seems to be happening that it's not just the Roman citizen oligarchs who are taking this land kind of by Yusufrk, you know, they're just occupying it and starting to invest in it and, you know, put, family tombs on it and just sort of, you know, act like it's their own such that if you were to challenge them on it, they could say, hey, look,

I spent $100,000 on this new barn. How can you say this isn't my land? There's my grandfather lying in the field there. How can you say this is not my land? A lot of that's going on. But it's also going on with local Italian elites. A lot of the merchant classes that are profiteering, it's not just Romans.

There's ways for non-Roman citizen, but it's well-connected enterprising Italian. to take a lot of this land. And that's another source of resentment, too, for the kind of Roman citizen mob that is increasingly coming to Rome, hat in hand, looking, you know, complaining about being edged out of their property. So it's a big issue. And it's really thorny to undo a lot of this stuff.

Once it happens, you know, it's like some of these people, either it's true or they're just claiming it. But, you know, it's like, I, I, I inherited this land from my father. This is my patrimony. How can you say that this isn't my land? Because it's been going on for generations, right? So it's quite a thorny problem that, you know,

Gracchus maybe underestimated how difficult it would be to do. And yet, after he is killed, the land commission goes on. And his brother serves on it. And they do some of this work for sure. Yeah, fascinating problem. Well, just on a macro scale, a lot of the things that you mentioned, it just seems to be a problem of empire. Yeah. Throughout history.

I mean, we're going through it now. I mean, anybody who wants to say we're not an empire is out of their mind, military bases in how many countries. But, yeah, it seems that once you get to, like, monarchies, one part. one-man rule, you seem to avoid some of this because it's very hard for one-man rule to actually become an empire. I mean, we see that later. We see where Spanish Empire, obviously, British Empire, now ours. And it just seems like if you want to know where your problems are going to happen, all you have to do is look at the past. There's no solving. If you're going to repeat, these problems, you can't be so filled with hubris to think that you can somehow get past them.

And it seems like it's just making the same mistakes over and over. Well, you know, and the American Empire as it grew in the 20th century offered a lot of similar incentives, you know, like the, there's a ton of money to be made in foreign contracts. when you topple a state who who gets to come in and do the development work and sell them the cranes and the steam shovels and on and on and you know oil and gas contracts people have definitely commented that on this kind of merchantification of the American elite through the American Empire the kind of profiteering occupational class right? And it's, I think there's a really interesting parallel too with anxieties that we have today about, say, you know, BlackRock going and buying up single family homes. And, you know, when you have access to capital, when the elites have access to a lot of capital low interest rates because you're kind of able to print money because you have the standard fiat currency that's used around the globe.

It gives you this incredible power of capital that the people who are well connected and know how to use it will use and they end up driving up housing prices or at least accelerating something that is happening through regular market forces because of the availability of capital. So, you know, there are some really striking resemblances with. with particularly on the on the issue of like can people afford their own house can people afford their own land their own kind of symbolic place in the world to say this is mine and uh this is where i'm going to raise my family and this is where we're going to have kind of our identity based you know it's it's incredibly powerful it's incredibly powerful politically you know um and so uh i think that we're seeing some of that today Perhaps. We'll see what happens in seven days, but this is a problem that seems to really

to really activate ambitious young men, you know, or young men feeling like they're missing out on opportunities because I think having land is a status symbol much more for a man than for a woman, even though it is that. So, you know, what I just saw, 39% down from 48% percent. 49% young men declaring Republican. And just since 2020, I think. It's like a landslide of young men. I think this is possibly connected to that. I don't remember if you went over this, but who could vote?

Right. Male citizens, which would have been, I'm not sure at this time if that's a minority of the men living in Rome. It's certainly a minority of the people, right? But the way that they, so you have like anybody can vote in a tribunary, a popular assembly. Certain offices are elected in that way, like the Tribune of the Plebs is elected and it kind of everybody gets to vote. And I think they, the way that they do it is they like once they reach a majority, the voting stops. And so if the people that are voting, like the order that you vote in matters a lot in Rome. So the tribunary popular assemblies, the more democratic body, let's say, those tribes, the kind of units that vote together, I believe that they're assigned by lot.

So just it kind of random who votes first. But in the centuriate assemblies, there's a fixed order. like the first class citizens vote first always and those are your membership in those tribes is largely determined by your wealth class though some you can inherit your slot in the voting rolls from your father so it's it's a little bit more complicated than that but yeah so voting is okay so it's those that's the basic structure but again you know some of these people live in you know, Naples or Luca or, you know, way outside of Rome. And it's kind of, it's not guaranteed that they're going to show up for an election, right? Especially if they don't care about the candidate.

It's the time of harvest. So it's really biased toward, toward really wealthy people and the city mob who are just there. Yeah. Same. Same now. Everybody who piles into the city. Yeah. Yeah. Who could serve? Yeah, interesting question. This takes us a little bit ahead into the life of Gaius Marius, but basically there is a wealth qualification for being able to enroll in the army. In the early republic, it was seen as a privilege. You were expected to supply your own armor,

supply your own horse if you're an equestrian, supply your own, much of your own equipment. I think that the state would pay for your food. but maybe, you know, if you wanted to have a nice tent, I think you'd be expected to supply that. There's all kinds of ways in which the army is, you know, the soldiers self-financed. And so there's a real, and for that reason, or it's based on this assumption, rather that, you know, if you win a war, you get honor and you get some of them share in the plunder. And you get you get paid for being a soldier 450 Sistercies a year. You know, that's that's a living wage and then some for sure.

So so but this changes actually as a result of the increasing difficulties of recruiting troops for massive foreign wars and it's Gaius Marius in the next generation after the Gracie who changes that who makes it who opens it up to to basically anybody who could rule. Well, theoretically, any citizen can run for any office as today. But this is why I think the nobles have some kind of justification for their profiteering because it's incredibly expensive to mount a successful campaign, especially for the higher offices.

You've got to put on dinners for your supporters. You've got to pay all these people to go around and say, vote for Tiberius. You've got to pay people to go out into the country to gin up supporters. You might have to pay people to come into Rome to offer to pay their expenses if they'll show up to vote. Some of this is of dubious legality. There's constantly prosecutions for bribery. And it's really the line between bribery and legitimate election expenses is very gray. And you're not supposed to pay people directly in cash to vote for you.

But there's all kinds of ways to do this in a soft manner. And essentially, you know, if you're not going to put on nice dinners for people, the other candidate certainly will. And he'll beat you for that reason. right so it in practice the only way to the consulship the highest office is just massive expenditures and if there there is a way if you don't have the cash there's a there's a credit market in rome you know the senators they have a lot of liquid capital guy like crassus a couple generations later you know he made a lot of his political um network and

his power base, not to say his wealth, through essentially financing promising young candidates. And the way that this works is you go into massive, massive debts to win, hopefully, an office like the Prytor ship or the consulship. Those are the two lucrative offices. you spend all this money to get put in office. But then after your year of office, you get assigned a governorship or a military command. Governors are basically military governors. And there's always some kind of problem going on, some local flare-up, some peasants rebellion or some local banditry to take care of.

And you go, so you can do that when you're out in the provinces. and plunder those people, sell them as slaves, take their stuff, or you can just take bribes to judge cases in a certain manner. There's ways to win back that money, usually through unsavory means once you're a provincial governor. This is one of the real problems that the republic has. It's not really a system designed to, you know, produce a happy and content, imperial provincial base. You know, it's very exploitative because you spend all this money or you borrow all this money becoming an officer. And then once you're, once you're in the position of being a governor, you only have one, two, maybe three years to essentially plunder it all back and try to get a

return on your investment. Well, then what would be the point? I mean, are you, yeah, it's not like politicians now that they get elected and then, you know, when they retire, especially if they're in there for more than 10 years, they're 30 times their net worth when going in. It doesn't seem like that was that was even possible at that time. Sure, you might, you might break even or even be a little bit ahead. I mean, is it purely for just the position, just the, um, the honor just so that your name lives on? That's a big factor for sure. all of these Roman nobles are bred to see status as the main game that they're playing. The honor game is the main game that they're playing.

And there are ways, you know, if you're savvy, you know, having, say, you go to Spain, Gaius Marius does this, you go to Spain. And while you're there, perhaps knocking around some local bandits or, you know, there's just opportunities for patronage and business doing so like you can buy a mine you can you know there's ways that you can set up kind of permanent income streams for yourself um if you're savvy and if you have connections and a lot of these somebody asked me this recently like wasn't wasn't commerce frowned upon by the roman elites yes but um a lot of them had to be very good at it a guy like Marius or Crassus they're good at making money they just don't see

wealth as the ultimate prize you know that it's the thing that you um that you spend in order to get the ultimate prize which is honor which is status which is glory that you pass on to your kids which is you know statues of yourself in the forum that's the game that is most attractive to at least to the people who make it to the top A lot of families are just content to break even, maybe increase their patrimony a little bit, but have their name on a law or on an aqueduct or something. And they, you know, I think that that's a real, that spirit does remain even in the late republic, not among all the families, but certainly among a guy like Pompey or Caesar.

I mean, they're not, they do become fabulously wealthy in the process, but, you know, winning a triumph is just it gives you this kind of status, this charisma in town, and it's just much more satisfying to be yourself around Rome if you're a conquer than if you're a rich person. There's so many obscure rich people, Cicero's friend Atticus famously praises the life of the kind of lying in the chat, what they call it, Epicurus. He was a devotee of Epicurean philosophy, Epicurus advised to students to escape notice in your life. Lathé bios. So Cicero called it kind of shady, a philosopher, a philosophy of the shade, you know,

you're not going out and getting tanned on military campaigns. You're kind of lying in the shadows, building wealth and not giving offense to anybody and not taking not taking punches in the political arena. But to most Romans, that's kind of, I don't know, it's kind of dishonorable. or just not ambitious. It's not impressive. So one of the choices you make. So is that, was that just instilled throughout the culture, even with the, even with common people, people who would have farms, people who would live in the city, but not be nobleman?

Is it, is it an honor culture? Is it a culture where, above all else? Is that why so many people are, you know, so many men? especially in a time when honor is a punchline that they're so attracted to looking at Rome, especially the Republic. Yeah, I really think that's true. You know, what we have direct evidence for, especially in the late Republic when we don't have so much kind of granular evidence of graffiti in Pompeii. That's from 100 years later when it's already a monarchy. But you know, you look at the the heroes of the republic i do think that the public man the the the statesman

the nobles set the moral tone of society and and so you you know reading the golic war commentaries of caesar which i just finished a series on on the cost of glory it's it's um you know he singles out these centurians for special honor in his in his Golic war commentaries and it's clear that they you know these people have a real strong honor culture in the soldiery like that having your name remembered by your commander getting a shout out by by one of the nobles is like one of the highest things that a lot of these guys can aspire to but you know one of the ways that the Romans instill that honor culture is they have you know they have the

wax masks of their ancestors in this niche in every noble Roman villa. And their death masks of your, you know, your great, great, great, grandfather, uncle who is a consul or a censor or triumphed over the barbarians. And, you know, he's just staring at you as you burn incense before him. And when any member of your family dies, there's an elaborate funeral procession where all the young men in the family will put on these masks of the ancestors and they process in state through the streets of Rome to a great ceremony in the forum and one of them makes a speech in honor of the dead man while the kind of symbolic the ancestors are symbolically looking upon you

and looking upon this man and judging his life. So there are all these rituals that instill this kind of intense pressure and ambition in the aristocrats. I think that that really does trickle down. That's kind of, that's how Rousseau describes the effect of heroes on a, on a society. You know, the hero, not everybody can like be the hero, but everybody kind of looks to the hero as a model for how they're supposed to live their life. You know, the, the hero is what produced, good hero is what produces good citizens, even though the hero is sort of like larger than life. He's like, he adds another dimension that, that the citizens just don't have and probably shouldn't have this this may seem completely off the wall but um i'll ask it anyway

uh when it comes to desiring honor when it comes to desiring riches or maybe not even really knowing why he's doing it where do you put trump in that yeah i think um you know i look at trump and um it really seems that whether it was, you know, going down the golden escalator in 2015, I don't know if it was there then, but, you know, you look at him rising up after being shot in the ear at that rally and the misery that they've put him through with all of the lawfare. And he seems to have kind of been transported, you know, to this new level of it's, it's, it's. It's clearly not about profiteering at this point. Like, the man is motivated by a lot more than just money.

I mean, I think he's, to some extent, he's always been kind of motivated by the sense of glory and honor. Even though those are, people will laugh, you know, if you use those terms in the same sentence as Trump, I think. But there's a real sense in which he's able, been able to channel something that is, that is that is greater than himself and he wouldn't be able to do what he's doing if he wasn't somehow channeling that that energy and you know when you're when you're playing a game with that big like the stakes really are this you know you're you're the memory that people have of

you after you die I think this is a very heroic kind of mindset of um it would be better to die gloriously doing this than to live safely and comfortably and he's already done enough that his children will be set for life but I think that that's one of the things that distinguishes a great statesman from a mediocre functionaries they're motivated by leaving a legacy that will outlast them and and by the glory that they can win. I mean, some people might have to forgive me for talking in these grand terms, but I see a lot of that really in the spirit of the Trump campaign that you definitely don't see on the other side of the aisle, right?

And that's probably a lot of his appeal is just the sense of a grand historic struggle that like you're witnessing history, you're kind of participating it. as like shot after shot just whizzes past his head or I find it incredibly compelling as a story and just fascinating to watch it's just just hard to hard to pull your eyes away from the spectacle that's going on and uh you get the sense that a lot of these romans were living in similar dimensions certainly a guy like pompey or caesar or marius you know the desire to be the first man in rome and trump's clearly desire to be the first man in America, which is very different, I think, from being a monarch. You know,

you don't have to be a monarch. You don't have to want to be a monarch to want to be the first man. Sulla wanted to be the first man in Rome. He didn't want to be a monarch. Caesar, I'm not sure. Caesar might have been, you know, of the sort of historical imagination to really to really conceive of a different future for Rome. But a lot of these guys that rose to supreme prominence, they're just trying to be the first man in their city. And that's a prize enough for them. Would you say that because we haven't seen something like that in so long, that's why so many people are attracted to Trump and that, you know, especially young people, young men. And it's also why you have a class of people who, things like honor,

and loyalty have become a punchline. Yeah. That that's why he's so reviled by them because he, even if he doesn't, even if he isn't that symbol himself, even if he doesn't look at himself that way, other people are projecting that on to him. And I think that that says something about the people

who are projecting it onto him, but it also has a lot to say about the people who revile him. that we haven't had a desire like this for somebody like this in a very long time. And these are people who will do anything, will kill him to stop that, even the idea of that happening at this time. Yeah. Well, it'd be hard to look.

look at your average Washington or globalist corporate elite, you know, Larry Fink or whatever, and say, this man desires honor or this woman desires honor. This woman or this man is chasing after a glory that will outlive them. It's seen as very distasteful, right? And so what do you have? What is the alternative? Some kind of smarmy servant leader. you know, oh, I'm just serving the people. I'm not here for my own, this and that. And I get that. You know, if you're if you're a Christian, it's easy to be duped by that. But I think it's just a kind of lack of imagination often. And what it ends up being so often is just this kind of shallow veil drawn over kind of base careerism or profiteering and, you know, insider trading.

and lucrative contracts with, you know, the military industrial complex after you leave your tour of duty. It's all just kind of, I'm sure they have a comfortable life, more comfortable than mine, but it's kind of contemptible. Like in, like, I think that we are naturally, well, this is what Rousseau says. And I think for all that he's seen as this kind of instigator of the French Revolution, He was a man that was obsessed with Plutarch's heroes and

He understood I think he really understood what heroism was and how it was both Necessary and good and also dangerous But you know the hero is if they they're not there to serve the people They're there to build some grand legacy that for a modern bureaucrat looks like megalomania this is a this is a this is a a different moral universe they inhabited a a different like metaphysical reality they're not trying to you know just have a have their own private share of the pie they're they're after some kind of immortality you know and and we're so uncomfortable talking about that especially since you know 1945. It's just it's our whole ideological apparatus now in a way that the Romans ideological

apparatus was sort of designed to prevent the rise of a monarch. You know our ideological apparatus is designed to prevent the rise of a great man. There's a there's a kind of politics of envy that goes under different names. But you can just tell the way that they handle any kind of visionary drive. It's megalomania, it's problematic, it's creepy, it's toxic, whatever the case may be. It's very just a feminized and frankly boring. And this is why I think Trump is so interesting because he's like putting on a show that we're not used to seeing in real history. You're not supposed to make history anymore. People aren't

supposed to want to make history because that's how we got into the world wars is people wanting to make history, you know, young men wanting to do great things, like the root of all evil to the post-war consensus. And it's just so refreshing to see somebody who flies in the face of that to me. And so I'm definitely along for the ride and it will be very interesting. No matter what happens, I think it's going to be interesting in 10 days, right? Or eight days. Well, it's contemptible to appeal to the masses. But what they do is they have to keep this alive somehow, so they completely pervert it.

So they become the hero to what they become the hero to what they, see as the marginalized, the trans, the gay people, people coming over the border, people like, they're not allowed to appeal to, they're not allowed to appeal to, I mean, it seems like, what historically you would look at as normal people, straight men, white men, white men, Europeans. You're not allowed to do that. But no, we still need that spirit, but we're going to apply it to what many without brainwashing would see as, I mean, really the degenerate class of society. And the, I'm looking for the proper word. I don't want to be, I'm not trying to be insulting by saying this. I'm trying to make a point is the

the true like minority, but these little minority niche groups, but these groups have to in some way represent a rebellion against normalcy, against what normal culture, what normal behavior, what would be. And I think that's fascinating. That they think that they are these great men and women by championing small groups that you'd put 120 years ago to be, sadly say, in a circus side show. Yeah, like the only kind of people that the public school education allows to be glorified are like activists, freedom activists or I don't know.

1960s civil rights activist types. Yeah. I met I was on some trip when I was younger. And I met this guy that was like a college student trip from, you know, the guy from a different school. And he was like, what are you planning to be? I'm going to be an activist. Oh, what kind of things are you going to be? You know, what's your, what, what charge are you are taking on? What's your, what your cause? Oh, it doesn't really matter, you know, just activism. You know, it's like, it's like a category of its own.

this are like a real um what's the word it's like a a a perversion of this idea of you know paul newman in that movie saying you know or is it marlin brando you know rebel what's your cause what do you got but it's not rebellious it's conformist you know it's just this is just the kind of the only ideal that we've allowed to be glorious in our school system. And I always found that just to be so boring, honestly. And I think a lot of young men find it to be boring. But that's that's kind of the people that have been allowed to make it to the top for the most part in democratic politics and Republican politics until very recently. People are willing to kind of bow to that. that ideal that the only good is like championing some marginal people. That that's what justice is. That it's all about making some marginal group lorded over the majority.

Yeah. I mean, you're not even, their lives are, the lives of the marginalized that they're advocating for are never improved by them. Yeah. They're never improved. It's just, it's literally to be used. as a weapon against, you know, Greg Hood had this tweet a couple years ago that said, the consequences of the Civil Rights Act are you basically trying to make enough money to the Civil Rights Act is basically you trying to make enough money to escape the consequences

of the Civil Rights Act and hide what you're doing. Right. Yeah. Hide while you're doing it. Yeah, it was like, well, why are you doing this well? I can't tell you. It's a and it's very self-aggrandizing to the, in a petty way, I think, to the to the leaders of that type. And it's very different from Roman populism too. It should be noted. So, you know, a lot of left-wing people have seen in Hiberius Gracchus, a kind of hero. You know, Marx was very interested in the, or at least Marxist historians, very interested in the gracchi and the idea of land redistribution. But, you know, it's not about in making the poorest of the poor

on a level with the nobles. It's about rewarding citizen soldiers, you know? It's about empowering like the middle classes that are, you know, the backbone of a society. And I don't know if we have time, but it might be worth just in brief connecting the circle of how this gets to the problem of packing voter rolls and citizenship. So I'll be brief here. I've covered this at greater length in the biography of Gaius Marius on my podcast.

It's one of my earlier biographies. If you start there, I do think I've gotten better. But it is a good story and he's a fascinating figure. And I go into a lot of detail in that life. But essentially, so Marius is from the next generation of the Gracchi. He's a little bit younger, but he sees this all happening. And what he does is Gaius Gracus, by the way, Tiberius' brother, tries to start another populist.

A legislative plan about 10 years later and also gets lynched by the Senate in very similar circumstances. Sad story. But Marius is, he rises on this promise of fixing elite incompetence, which is starting to be a real problem for the Roman state. It's starting to be kind of like a threat to the security of the city because they've got a forever war going on in North Africa. people have criticized me for using that term, but essentially they can't manage to defeat Uyghurtha, who is this sly, crafty Numidian, who's bribing the elites. He says everything is for sale in Rome,

and the Romans send general after general to try to defeat him. And granted, you know, there are guerrilla tactics that he's using, the land is difficult, but general after general, general is just getting bribed by Uyghurtha. And he knows how to get these people off his back. And so the rich are basically profiteering off of this war in various ways, especially the commanders are getting bribed. Marius becomes consul on a promise to put the war to an end because he's,

he's one of their most competent generals. And he manages through a tribunary law, actually. He's kind of early in his career. He's using this power of the plebs in the council. basically he becomes consul by normal means but then there's a problem there's like a legal technicality that he can't get command of the war because the Senate has already assigned it to this other guy Mattelis who's a political rival of his and so he gets the tribune like a tribune friend of his to propose a law that the command of the war be assigned

to Marius to basically control foreign policy which has never been done before it's very creative and this succeeds and what Marius does Senate it's like, all right, well, you can fight this war, but we control the finances and we control recruitment. So good luck raising an army. You're going to need more forces to really defeat Uyghurtha. And so what Marius does is he has another law pass where he recruit, he makes it, breaks precedent and recruits large forces of the urban poor of Rome, who would fall well below the property qualification. And so he essentially, in a, inaugurates this new process by which generals can amass an army that is loyal to them,

that they're kind of on the hook for eventually paying for the war in some way and rewarding their troops by land grants to come after the hopefully successful war. But he manages to basically pull off this incredible quick victory against Uyghurtha by raising these, you know, mass recruits of the urban poor. And then he turns around and Rome has another long war that's been going terribly in France, in Gaul, which they don't control yet against the Kimbrey and the Teutonese, another barbarian invader from the north who have defeated commander after commander and Marius promises to get the war won.

And he does using similar methods. He's just, he's incredibly efficient general. and he stands out in a way that maybe he wouldn't have 50 or 100 years earlier when Rome had all these competent commanders. And now so many of them have turned to merchandising and profiteering. And they've gotten blue-blooded and, you know, resting on their laurels. And they've lost a lot of that Roman toughness. So a guy like him, who knows how to get the job done, I think this is very Trumpian, actually.

He knows how to like make a deal, get the job done, recruit the people, that he needs. He's a good enough speaker. He fights alongside the troops. He's an outsider politically, too. He managed to build a huge following. He becomes consul six times, almost in a row, and is like credited with being, well, credited by the Romans of his day, by a vote of the people, as being worthy of the title of the third founder of Rome. So Gaias Mari is unquestionably first man in Rome by 100 BC. And the way that this kind of caches out into the voter issue that I think is this unseen cause of the first civil war is, it'll take just a sec to explain.

I could pause for questions if you've got any. Go ahead, keep going. So Marius is not just a... a champion of the Roman poor, but he recruits a lot of Italians who are not citizens into his armies with the promise of enfranchising them or at least rewarding them with land. And as Marius becomes victorious with these men and they become more Romanized, they're going back to their communities in Italy, often with nice land grants from Marius. but they're seeing themselves more and more as essential members of the Roman state.

And a lot of these guys are becoming businessmen out in the provinces and they're taking a great interest in Roman foreign policy and Roman legal systems. And they start to have a lot more riding on being able to run for office themselves, vote for candidates that are going to support their interests. There's a lot of reasons why these men start to want, start to clamor for citizenship. And by the end of the 90s, you have, it becomes a really pressing issue. Like massive tribes of Italians are like, we are done fighting these wars without having political representation, without being eligible to run for Quister, Tribune, Consul, Pritur. And the Senate, I think, does something really interesting. So Marius is a,

a gracchus kind of figure, like a gracis plus generalissimo military commander. And he's a populist, right? He's kind of prodding the aristocracy. He's standing outside of them on some level. So the nobles see Marius has a shot at essentially if he is able to enfranchise the Italians, he's going to have incredible power because these people are going to be loyal to him politically. And so they keep trying to block him. But then somebody among the Senate has the bright idea.

Well, why don't we be the ones to enfranchise the Italians? Why not have the Senate, the establishment, be the patrons of all these new potential citizens. And so the elite, the establishment, try to co-opt this whole effort of bringing in new citizens, which are going to potentially have. have huge disruptive consequences in the Roman electoral map. And so their candidate, they put forward to do this is this guy, Livius Drusus. Unfortunately, he gets murdered in 91 BC. And partly because it's starting to be, it gets more and more complicated.

I won't go into all the details here. But like if you enfranchise all of these Italians, suddenly the urban poor of Rome are seeing wait a second we're we've been Romans for generations and we haven't gotten all the spoils of empire and now you're gonna enfranchise all these Italians and we're gonna just even pushed lower the down the totem pole and so they're able to a lot of drusus's enemies are able to consolidate support against this measure but it falls through anyway and they end up fighting this great incredibly bloody social war which is partly so terrible because the armies that they're fighting are essentially

Roman armies you know Roman-trained veteran armies that have been fighting in foreign wars and they know all Rome's weaknesses but eventually the citizenship is granted but as a concession to a lot of these Italian tribes to ascend to to, you know, give up the war effort and go loyal to Rome. So it's kind of done by fiat in this chaos, which is a great way to, you know, enact unpopular legislation, if you can argue that the chaos demands it. And, you know, they, you know, in their favor,

they kind of didn't have a choice at that point. They really had to try to take some of the gasoline out of the tanks of the social war. but the way that they did that crucially is they we talked about how roman voting is essentially gerrymandered you know it's it's not technically gerrymandering but it's like it's a ranking system and they they put all the Italians in this one gigantic extremely low rank tribe that would always vote last and basically never be relevant for important elections and votes And so there's another pressure valve that a populist that Gaius Marius sees is here's a potential cause that I can use as political leverage. And so what he does in ADABC is he proposes to a tribune friend of his, right, proposes law. Sulpicius is the guy's name. It might have been Sulpicius's idea, but, you know, whatever, this is what Marius does.

he says, all right, we will enfranchise, or we will put these Italian, new Italian citizens, this giant voting block that is basically politically useless right now. We'll redistribute them into all of the existing tribes on some kind of wealth rank. And so there'll be Italians in the first, second, third, in addition to the 20th and 30th rank of voting tribes. And then they'll be our guys, right? Like we'll have patronage over them for a long time. And Marius adds this rider to that legislation. And basically, he gets all of the Italians that are his sort of friends and patrons,

a lot of veterans from his old wars, gets them to all come to Rome. So they're there, present already voting for their own interest. interests, right? This is like a once in a lifetime opportunity to raise their status for generations and generations. He's got them all in Rome. They're voting in this plebiscite, and he proposes this other bill. Sulla has got command of this army to go fight Mithridates. He's in southern Italy. The Senate has already awarded him the command. This war promises to be fabulously lucrative. Sulla is his political rival. Sulla is an Optimate, an establishment guy, 20 years younger than Marius.

They've been kind of sparring in politics for a number of years. Saul is a former mentee of Marius, so it's personal. And Marius is disgruntled. He thinks he deserves command of the Roman effort against Mithridates. He wants one last hurrah. He's approaching 70. He says, I deserve this command. And so he has another really unprecedented move.

he has a vote passed where to strip Sulla of the command and assign it to himself. And he thinks he's finally kind of got the one up on Sulla. And Sulla, in this extremely unprecedented move, says, that's not how it's going to be. It marches on Rome at the head of 20,000 men and a kind of lightning strike captures the city and drives Marius out as a public enemy. And that is the beginning. That is kind of the spark that starts this amazingly bloody first Roman civil war, which I think is probably bloodier than the one that Julius Caesar and Pompey fought. But it was all because Marius had this political leverage of all these people in town

voting for their own, you know, to increase their own political clout that he was able to use this leverage to do something that would have been, probably. impossible if he hadn't have had all of his clients there for him. But, you know, that was like the greatest evidence of that you, that you could want that controlling a huge block of voters gives you this political wildcard, right? And it's something that I think that we're seeing people try to pull off today to some extent. Yeah. Yeah, it's, you can find that nothing's really original. Everything's been tried before,

especially when it comes to politics. Politics is really simple. It is in many ways. I mean, policy making, not so much, but the structure of politics and how people have tried to move people, to get people to, it's all been done before.

So if you study your history, then you know what works and what doesn't. You also know where the pitfalls can lie too. So this is why Kissinger called Greco-Roman antiquity, the nursery of statesmen, you know, you build up a database of examples. Because you can see these things happening in, you know, in quick succession in antiquity. You see all the patterns happening in the classic democracies, the classic republics, the classic monarchies.

And I think because we are able to zoom out further without like it's not clear which side you're supposed to pick if you're like if I'm a diehard Trumpist or a diehard leftist and I'm looking at Roman history. It's not clear which side I'm on because Marius is a populist, but he's also like a super fascist general. You know, like because of that defamiliarization, I think you're able to take a step back and just see these. patterns for for what they are you know political leverage points you know using the mob against your enemy building coalitions persuading great crowds with appeals to their interests and all these kind of things and the ways you can be undermined by your by your opponents yeah all right well let's wrap up there and um Do you have anything to promote?

I think last time you were on, you had me linked to your authoritative speakers guide. Do you want me to do that again, or do you have something else? That'd be great. If you want, so we're, I'm actually in the process of launching another retreat.

And it's going to happen in, in Texas in January. So if you want to, this will be like an in-person four-day men's leadership retreat where we're going to practice the art of, The Ancient Art of Persuasion, and there'll be a focus on discussing and making speeches and taking insights from the life of Julius Caesar, who is the guy I'm focusing on right now in my podcast. So if you're interested in that, you can sign up for the authoritative speaker's guide or sign up for my email list at cost of glory.com to hear more. But yeah, same old stuff.

I'll link to both of them. Thank you, Alex. Appreciate it. Always. Been a pleasure.