The Pete Quiñones Show - Great Men of the Past and Roman Parallels w/ Alex Petkas

Episode Date: July 29, 2026

2 Hours and 33 MinutesPG-13Alex Petkas is a former academic and host of the Cost of Glory podcast.Alex joined Pete to go over some examples of political and electoral issues in the Roman Republic that correspond to today's political environment and to talk about great men of the past. These are episodes 1109 and 1127Alex'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.

I want to welcome everyone back to the Pekanino show. First time, Alex Petkus. How are you doing, Alex? Good. Great to be here, peace. Thanks for having me. No problem. Tell everybody a little bit about yourself, please.

So I am an ex-academic. I grew up. My career was in classics. I did a PhD in classics, and I focused on the late antique world, especially the Greek philosophers of the late Roman world. and got a tenure track job. I used to teach rhetoric and philosophy.

I taught at a couple of institutions in California. And I left in 2020 for maybe reasons that we'll get into later on. But I've since leaving. I've worked a couple of interesting jobs. But now I have the luxury of pursuing my mission full time, which is trying to bring. back the classics to the West in the way that I think that they should be taught. And I run a podcast called The Cost of Glory, where I've been doing that for about three years, where I just

retell, mainly focus on retelling the biographies of the great leaders of the Greek and Roman world, especially those featured in Plutarch's lives. So I do these kind of long-form biographies with that spirit of like emulation that the Plutarch illustrates so nicely. And I also sort of active on Twitter, but I teach some public speaking rhetoric classes on the side. But that's what I'm up to these days. You got out of academia in 2020, even before 2020 thing. Academia had to be hell. So, you know, what was it like?

And what finally drove you out? Yeah, I, so I got when I was in starting off in my PhD program and I decided to make that decision to go into grad school. I knew that it was going to be so I wasn't really, I wouldn't have really considered myself a conservative per se. But I knew that it was going to be a hostile environment because I was a Christian. So I was prepared for classics being a kind of bad environment for for that. And I wasn't too worried about it, but I wasn't really prepared for this thing that I slowly came to realize is that the discipline of the people who are dedicated to studying the Greeks and the Romans are kind of committed to its destruction or at least the eradication

of anything that a young man such as myself would have been interested in. you know, anything heroic or manly or kind of impressive, daring, that is all being kind of filed away. And that kind of came as a shock to me, honestly. And I slowly woke up to the fact as I, as I progressed through it and I kind of realized what the Greeks and the Romans were about, really. So for the longest time, I thought I could try to do my part and reform it from the inside, which is why I kept applying for jobs and I finally landed this tenure track position, you know, after working 10 or 15 years to finally get into a position where I could get that kind of a job and have some job security, whatever.

The thing that you're supposed to want is an academic, right? But, and I liked my colleagues at the place where I was. They were exceptions to the rule. They were really cool. And I felt really bad to leave. I, once I, like things just kept getting worse, especially around, they started to get worse around 2016. Like, there was a long intellectual history of, you know, left wing cultural Marxist kind of inching

their way through critical theory and other ways into the leadership of the discipline. But, you know, like in 2016, it was like all the sleeper cells woke up and we had the woke movement and it just started to become very conformist very quickly. I think classics kind of dodged the culture wars of the 80s and 90s and early 2000s more than the discipline like English literature for some reason, probably because we were already kind of small and irrelevant. But, you know, for example, shortly after I left classics and last year there was a kind of a glowing puff piece about a former colleague of mine at Princeton. And the headline is, this is in New York Times, he wants to save classics from whiteness.

And this was, he joined the faculty. I won't name names, but you can look up the article. And this particular individual joined the faculty right after I left. And that was like, that was the first. face that my the leadership of my discipline you know the ivy league classicists tend to be the kind of gatekeepers of the discipline this was the kind of face that not just my colleagues at princeton but everybody across the kind of top programs that they wanted to have the world see classics too white classics too patriarchal classics must die as if anybody even cared about

classics at this point in our culture i mean it's almost like so narcissistic that you can't see how irrelevant you've already become. And I was, I was really getting frustrated. I already left at that point. But, you know, I, the writing was on the wall and that was already the vibe in the late 20 teens. So I was getting really despondent. You know, at some point I decided I probably couldn't reform the discipline from the inside. I probably, there was probably nothing I could do. The ship was sinking. You know, it's like, It's like you're on a ship and you're rowing hard and the captain is just like getting smashed at the helm and saying, yeah, it would be better if the ship sank anyway. That was really frustrating to me.

And I got despondent, but I finally realized that, you know, in a way, I was sitting on the greatest medicine for this kind of situation ever made, which is Homer and Plutarch. in like the heroic tradition of extremely high agency men who don't tolerate crap. And I thought, well, you know, they're saying something to me. I don't have to tolerate this crap if I'm willing to tolerate a little bit of risk. And so I left for that reason on principle, move the family back to my native Texas where I grew up. And so that's where I am now. And I've never ever regretted it. and it's been hard, but I'm very encouraged by, well, by the collapse of the universities that they,

I mean, they're going to be a long time dying, but the craziness that we see today is, it's not fixable in our generation. And I think that there's a lot of hope for people who want to build other things and channel the energy and the wisdom and the knowledge that you used to be able to get in universities. You probably can't even get anymore in those places, even if you wanted to. You have to seek them outside of the institutional framework. So I'm just trying to help. I'm one of many people trying to offer the best parts of my discipline online.

And I draw a lot of energy from that. I think they could be fixed. As I said this morning on Twitter, that when we found out University of Alabama, Birmingham, I've gotten like $200,000 to study like the menstrual cycle of trans women, you seized their endowments. You take every dollar that they have. I think Harvard is up into the 20 to 30 billion dollars in endowments. You just take them and then see what happens. I mean, it would do a lot less damage to the economy than, you know,

unrealized capital gains taxes, that kind of stuff. I think a lot of people, would cheer you on. Yeah. When I asked this question, I just thought of this one, did, how does your, did your Greek heritage have anything to do with you wanting it to get into philosophy and class of? Yeah, it's, it's funny. So I was raised in the Greek Orthodox Church. It didn't have a huge, well, it was a kind of quiet moral compass.

I wasn't like that into it until, I went through a rough patch in high school and I don't know, typical kind of divorced parents, you know, big school, doing drugs, playing video games, screwing around kind of story. I was really overweight too. And I kind of wanted to turn my life around my junior year of high school. And I came back to Christianity for that reason. They were also in our house for whatever reason we had, not that my liberal parents were all

that into this stuff, but we had Marcus Aurelius. on the shelf. We had somehow somebody had given me a copy of the seven habits of highly affected people when I was younger. I was like, maybe I'll read this. Maybe there's some answers in books. So I got back into Christianity kind of and, you know, the seven habits is draws on a lot of classical philosophy as I discovered, but in sort of self-improvement with the great books around that time. And I actually got into, I'd taken Latin in a very half-assed way. throughout high school. Like I did everything half-assively in high school until my senior year. Failed history class, which is really funny. But in algebra, too, even though I was good at math.

So I wanted when I was in college to, on the side of whatever I was doing, I realized you could kind of explore intellectual passions in college and like get your parents to pay for it. If you just did a little convincing. So I decided to take ancient Greek my junior year. And I, you know, having, even though I was grew up in the Greek Orthodox Church, the liturgy's in basically ancient Greek, little did I know that, anything about the difference between modern and ancient Greek at the time. I mean, my parents, my Greek part of my family had been in the U.S. for like a century. So we weren't that Greek. But I wanted to know, I was, sort of my curiosity was was stoked and so yeah i i wanted to learn modern greek actually because i

thought i might i don't know i might go into youth ministry for a while on the on the way to have more serious career and but they we didn't have modern greek we just had addict greek what the hell is attic greek i had no idea so anyway i got into it that way my junior year and um once i had a taste of it i had this very charismatic teacher like probably the smartest professor the whole campus And he, you know, painted all the connections between the Greek language and Western intellectual history and the logos and philosophy and the news. I mean, just everything, you know, Homeric Arete versus modern virtue. I was hooked. And I turned out I was pretty good at the language part. And so that the language in particular was part of my wanting to explore my own cultural heritage.

But I think what kept me there, what made me see, oh, this is not just a hobby, but something that you could pursue as a serious calling in life, was realizing how the Greek language was important, not just to this little ethnocentric world that I interacted with on Sundays and maybe Christmas and Easter, but like the foundation of the entire conceptual edifice that my country stood on and things like that. And that's why I ended up chasing it all the way to grad school against my better judgment. So before we get into what we were going to talk about, let me ask you this question, because this is one that comes up a lot. Does Aristotle necessarily and logically lead to fascism? Well, it's been remarked that Athenian democracy would be called fascists by today's left. For all that, for all that, you know, the founding fathers thought that was a crazy mob rule, you know, inferno of a constitution, you know. It would still be fascist by modern Democrat standards. So, so just, it just might actually, Pete. All right. You mentioned Plutarch's lives. And it's a gigantic work. talking about different figures from history, some we know, some we don't know, that we've never heard of. What can we learn from them? When you read them, what are you looking for?

I started reading Plutarch's lives in serious, in earnest, as I sort of knew I was leaving academia. I had, I think, a lot of classicists today. So it's funny, Plutarch's lives used to be by far the most popular classical texts of all more popular than Homer. There's more popular than Homer, Plato, Cicero, Ducydides, and you go down the list of even less plausible candidates, but in the 18th century in the American colonies, Plutarch's lives are the second most likely ancient text to be on your shelf besides the Bible.

And it's, I think it's a very telling sign that he's not in fashion among today's classicists, and I think we could probably get into the reasons going on further in the conversation. So most classicists will, you know, assign Plutarch's Life of Caesar or Alexander for some history survey class that they're teaching. They won't really get into the whole lives as a collection or even consider it as a morally serious project. But so what it is, what Plutarch's lives is, you know, biography collection. It's about 48 biographies. They're called the parallel lives because it's 48 Greeks and 48 Romans that he compares. He pairs them all together, you know, Alexander and Caesar, Cicero and Demosthenes, the great orators. A lot of men in there

that you would have heard of, Pericles, Themistocles, Fabius Maximus, Romulus. A lot of men you wouldn't have heard of. Eumenes of Cardia, Sertorius. But they're all amazing. Very ways. And when I was, so I was leaving academia and I kind of had this sense that this is the text, this is a text that like, you know, this is the text that Harry Truman read. He's like our last self-educated, non-college education president. Whatever you think of the man as a political figure. I mean, he was a formidable self-educated man. This is the text that, you know, Frederick Douglas and Alexander Hamilton and Napoleon just read in their free time. I had this sense that like, men of action should read Plutarch. And I had read some of the books. I was like, this stuff

is really good. So I was working my way through it. I was looking kind of for inspiration, honestly, because I wanted to go to the world of entrepreneurship and business, risk taking, you know, reading people's character. What kind of traits does it take to lead people to, to exert your will over people, trickiness, political trickiness, all kinds of stuff you can learn from Plutarch's lives. So now when I do my long-form biographies of

the man in Plutarch, and he's my main source and inspiration, I'm looking for character. I'm looking for virtues and vices. I'm looking for drama too, because he's one of the greatest, one of the reasons he's so popular is he's such a good, storyteller. He's got these like Hollywood scenes and these just like banger quotes every other page.

And and that's, you know, Emerson calls him a Bible for heroes. Nietzsche says to the young men and his untimely meditations on the uses and abuses of history. He says, satisfy your souls on Plutarch, a hundred such men educated in this way against the modern fashion who could, who've grown accustomed to the heroic and and learns to appreciate the heroic within themselves, learn to believe in themselves, that they could silence now and forever, the whole noisy pseudo-education of our day. He's writing that in the 1870s or so. So Plutarch is kind of like this kind of, I mean, he's, he's the, the original heroic author in a lot of ways for for Western statesmen. So I look for a lot in there,

but mostly it's just entertaining as hell. If that's being suppressed, it's not being taught. I mean, it's not being suppressed. You can get really good copies for very inexpensively on eBay. I mean, it's just, it's not suppressed. It's just ignored. And if you're not promoting something, it's not going to be popular. So why do you think this suppression, this just they want people to ignore it? And would you say, you mentioned that Truman was like, would be the last president? And that just goes right to what we call the Nuremberg regime, that everything after World War II, that is, call it right wing, but just call it what was normal. before the French Revolution, you know, that that needs to be suppressed. So what do you think about that?

Well, I know that you like to go kind of deep in your show. So if I could, I think it's worth telling the story a little bit of the Western, the modern Western University and the classics role within it, just like in a nutshell, very broad brushstrokes. Good. But so basically preface this by saying, I think Plutarch, and it's not just Plutarch as an author, it's kind of what he stands for, but he's the most representative example of this, I think. I think that's what Nietzsche saw and Emerson saw and Napoleon, many others saw in Plutarch, the most representative example of essentially classics as, and that's specifically the Greek and Roman classics, as Western. civilizations, the kind of backbone of our process of inculturating men. This is like the top of the pyramid or the foundation of the pyramid, however you want to, you know, jigger the metaphor.

Classics are the kind of backbone of Western manliness. And Plutarch really exemplifies that. But how, what was the process? Okay. So if you look at the way that education worked for, let's call them the elites, the statesmanship class of the West, of the nobles, the aristocrats. You see this in the Renaissance, very big, big letters with a guy like Machiavelli. It is basically a great man focused education.

You encounter these great men studying the classics, the Greek and Roman heroes, in particular the pre-Christian ones, through, books almost incidentally. And the tenor of the education is not knowledge production or knowledge acquisition. It's character acquisition. It's skill acquisition. Particularly, it's a rhetorical education. It's an

education of how to become a great orator, a great persuader through studying the great persuaders and the great stories and like assimilating their character. It's explicitly and rigorously an education focused on emulation, on becoming like these people, doing everything you can to become like these people. Machiavelli takes off his dusty boots after a busy day's work and statesmanship and he retires into the halls of the great men.

He would apparently he would set a table sometimes when he wanted to read a book of like Cicero or Caesar. He would set a table for two and he would dress up in like a toga and then like read a book and like imagine that the book, the guy who wrote the book he was reading or the guy he wrote the book about was like sitting across the room from him and he was having a conversation with him. So there's a very much like imaginative, emulative aspect to this. So any of that's and that's I say it's the Renaissance model.

Let's call it the Renaissance model. But this is really what the Romans did. two with the Greeks. This is what the Greeks did with Achilles. This is what like alcibiades and Pericles are doing with Achilles, more or less. There's a rhetorical, emulative tenor to it. It's about emulating the great people. So it's a canon of great men more than of great books. All right. So, and that's the model basically of education through the Renaissance and through, well, this is the model that the, you know, the founding fathers of the U.S. had very much what Hamilton and Franklin are doing and Napoleon is doing. It's just like the basic model of, you know, Western elite education

until, until what? So a guy comes along in the late 18th century, Wilhelm von Humboldt. Maybe you've heard of him. Humboldt University in Berlin is named after him. He found the modern enlightenment education system, the modern enlightenment university, the research university in Germany, which, of course, at that time is not unified. There's all these little principalities, republics. But he founds basically the education system of Prussia, the strongest of the states. And it's on this principle of we're going to have a higher education. system based on the principles of the Enlightenment, producing knowledge, adding new knowledge

for a great future for mankind. And the point of that university system is to, not just to produce knowledge, but to produce a certain kind of person, which is an expert. It's designed to produce experts, doctors, lawyers, maybe engineers. Okay, they have the Prussian military academy that's separate for, you know, for generals and stuff. It's actually a different track. But, you know, for like civil experts, you have the modern university system. And, you know, in other words, not just like, you know, doctors and lawyers, but especially the bureaucrats that are going to run the great enlightened institutions, the rational institutions that the modern state needs to progress. So the university basically exists to produce bureaucrats. And they have this particular

advantage over the old system, which is the PhD. They invent this idea of the doctorate. And so now, you know, well, you just have a master's degree. Well, in Germany, we have doctorates. what does this have to do with America? So like in the 19th century, America is becoming more self-confidence, industrial production is increasing, wealth is increasing. And American educators are starting to look to, you know, we're making more universities, or let's say institutions of higher education. And so American educators start looking to Europe to see what's the best paradigm. And I mean, I grossly oversimplifying this, but they see, well, you know, at Oxford or Cambridge, you can get a master's degree, but, you know, the humble universities, you can get a doctorate. So clearly, these people have figured something extra out.

And that kind of becomes the model for the American university system, this Enlightenment German university where it's all about producing knowledge on the kind of intellectual level, but on the practical level. look at the results. It's about producing bureaucrats, about producing experts. And an interesting side note here, what do you think the kind of flagship discipline was, the flagship model of the new science of the universities? What do you think it was? Just take a guess. Psychology? You might think it's psychology. You'd be wrong. You might think it's philosophy, which has a long history. I was going to say philosophy, but it's not philosophy. You might think it's physics. No. It's classics of all things. It's classical philology. It's actually the study of Greek and Latin, language in particular, scientifically, that is the kind of like, that is like the most, the highest

prestige discipline, which is kind of crucial. crazy to think about it, but if you think about where Western education came from, it makes sense that, you know, this was the study of the classics was the, you know, the study of the great men of the past. Reading their actual words was really important in the Renaissance. So you're learning the actual language, Greek and Latin. So they kind of change a lot about the university. They kind of keep this as the prestige subject. But that shift from emulation and and producing statesmen that you have in the Renaissance model to the model of knowledge production that you have in the modern Enlightenment University. It's just, you know, as you can guess, it profoundly changes the priorities in education. You know, the expert kind of, it's kind of depersonalized. The expert has a PhD in the certified subject. And it doesn't matter who he is.

But as long as he has a PhD, you can trust that he has expertise in the knowledge. And it's really the knowledge, the rational knowledge that's going to ensure the institutions run the way they're supposed to run and so on and so on. And this is kind of what happens in, we import this into America. And maybe I should pause for discussion and comments before we continue the story on. Do you have any thoughts? No, I'm pretty familiar with how things were brought in from Prussia to a certain point. And yeah, I could go off on that for hours. but let's uh please please go on yeah and you know i'm not saying it was all bad or that it was what i was

that that's what that's how i'd go off for hours is you know when i was a libertarian they talk about oh my goodness the prussian schooling system and they did in this and that and everything and i'm like yeah that doesn't work in a multicultural society it only works at a monoculture interesting yeah yeah i think i think we need have a lot of these conversations now as we're reevaluating what the university's about to understand the history of it Because like so many of so many people like, you know, I think what Chris Rufo's done has been amazing and the kind of exposure of the corruption, nepotism, and just incompetence that our highest institutions is wonderful. There's a lot of room for reform.

But a lot of times it's like, are we just trying to rewind the clock back to the 1980s? I mean, a lot of the problems were already built in long before that. So, yeah, the, but I think it's really interesting that from the universities you get this idea, I think it really comes out of the universities of socialism, which is essentially, I mean, yes, it's about kind of redistribution, but in principle, it's like, in practice, it's the rule of the intellectuals. It's like a regime based on experts. Socialism is like, that's the paradigm regime in the 19th century at least. Progressive socialism regime based on enlightened experts, rational principles, a kind of fungibility of leaders. So ideally you don't have to have really excellent character people.

You just have the right system with the right knowledge and even if somebody's kind of like a mediocre human being, as long as they have a PhD, you can trust them to do their job. It's very uninspiring to me. Well, this is what James Burnham wrote in his incredible 1940 book, The Managerial Revolution. As what this is all about, he talked about Stalin, he talked about Hitler, and he talked about FDR, and he said, it's all the same thing. It's all ruled by managers. It's all ruled by experts. Yeah.

And there was, and he said that was the way it was going to be. He made some predictions in there that people like to pull out and say, oh, well, you know, look, he got this wrong. Well, you're going to get wrong. You're going to get things wrong if you make predictions and you put skin in the game. But one thing he did not get wrong is that it was going to become about rule of experts and managerialism. And we are suffering that now because at some point, those managers want to keep their place so they have to put people into space. who aren't good managers, what the blogger Spendrel called biolaninism, where you'd rather put somebody in who was loyal to you than somebody in who could actually

do the job, which is what we were talking about before. We were talking about the term, the competency crisis, and I was saying that I don't think that there wouldn't be a competency crisis if everyone, if there weren't people, you know, certain classes of people who weren't precluded from joining, from being in power. So, yeah. Yeah. And, yeah, I think, so when I read Plato, Plato's Republic, I don't see, I don't see in a lot of the classical political theorists this sense of how an institution can grow so powerful.

that it becomes an organism that with an appetite that just wants to devour and grow and has its own priorities that are independent of a state. The closest I think you could get would be a kind of the two parations of eunuchs in, you know, like what's, here's what's wrong with the Persian empire as the eunuchs run the place and I mean, that's kind of actually starting to get at it. But, you know, it's so foreign to Greek political ideology. That's pretty spot on right there. Well, there are people that don't really care about their own legacy or progeny. They subsume their interests to the interest of this institution.

And they're just kind of in there. They're kind of careerist self-aggrandizing, you know, infertile. It's some interesting parallels. Another discussion at some other time. But to come back to Plato, you know, in a lot of ways, this is people blame Plato for this you know the idea of the rule by intellectuals the philosopher king I think that Plato would have been rolling over in his grave to see you know himself interpreted in that way but yeah so it's it does have a kind of platonic ring to it

that I think is unfair. I had some other point to make on that, but maybe we'll come back to it in a sec. So the problem, okay, this was an issue, growing bureaucracy in Europe. We see the results today, stagnation. It's terrible. Europe has fallen, et cetera. But I think in the 19th century, it wasn't obvious

that this was going and going to kind of progressivize the whole nation. But in America, you didn't have the same kind of checks against progressivism that you did in Europe. And so like the uptake of the university model really becomes, especially after the civil war, the Renaissance model of education of statesmanship and approach to the classics for kind of nobility. That becomes very tied with the antebellum people that we don't like. like anymore. So the reform was kind of quick after the Civil War and the classics was sort of sidelined and thrown out. Part of it was you have these new disciplines on the rise. Like psychology doesn't exist really as a discipline formalized until then, you know, sometime in the

19th century, English literature even is kind of a new discipline, relatively speaking. Like Shakespeare is not in the curriculum in America until I think the first time it happens is like in 1870s. It's not like people weren't reading Shakespeare or that he wasn't great. He's just, he's not the classics. The classics is the, you know, the people that Shakespeare was reading, like Shakespeare reading Plutarch to write Julius Caesar and Coriolanus and all this stuff. So you get these new disciplines, like, which is, I think, another pattern of like bureaucrats inventing new jobs for themselves in a lot of ways. Complet, you know, it kind of comes up in the late 19th century. And one of the ways that the classics get sidelined, you know,

know any good mobster likes to make it look like an accident, right? So Charles Elliott of Harvard, for example, Harvard's longest serving president, 1870 to 190 something, he stages this kind of call it a game where, okay, rather than requiring a certain course of study from our students at Harvard, we're just going to have an elective system and kind of have a Darwinian competition of the disciplines. And so whichever discipline gets the most students is just, you know, it's going to, it's going to be just, you know, rational that that discipline will get the most resources. And so in a way, it's a game that's rigged against a discipline like classics, which is just a lot harder. You have to spend a lot more time learning these hard languages,

the texts are harder, the skills are, you know, more, they require more of you. And so versus something like Comp Lit in a Darwinian competition to see which discipline can attract the most students. I mean, I think you could expect what would happen. And it's in this context, he makes it look like an accident, but this is what the progressive wanted. You know, the traditional disciplines, the Bible, the classics, these were like hard blockers that were in the way on the road that they wanted to build toward the great progressive future. People like Dewey, you know, and we're not talking about like cultural Marxist, hard left progressives in the 19th century, of course. We're talking about like, you know, suffragettes.

But they got what they wanted. And I think they made it look like an accident. And so by the time you get to the 19, well, like 1900, Harvard and Yale, up to that point, required Greek and Latin to be, you know, did you have to take a competence test in Greek and Latin to be even admitted everybody, not just humanities majors, everybody. And they remove that in around 1900. Of course, that's not a cause. That's a symptom, right, of the success of their. of the progressive project to kind of deracinate Western education. And I think, you know, I don't think that the progressives necessarily would have said

that they were charging against the patriarchy and capitalism. But in practice, that's what the cultural Marxists who came later in the 30s would have said they were doing very successfully. And this really ends up kind of unsettling and making us uncertain about what it is to be a man. which I think the way that men inculturate themselves primarily is through imitation, through examples, through paradigms, through heroes, in particular. Heroes like the prime paradigm of inculturating manliness. And they have this kind of North Star function culturally.

And so if you get rid of that, you can do all kinds of stuff because everybody be confused and they won't try to stop you. I think this is what we start to see in the mid-20th century and is in a large, part why we're dealing with this gender crisis today because we've forgotten primarily what it means to be a man because we've forgotten the classics. Well, I think that certainly helps. And then, you know, you do have social engineers out there who are pushing it because it does help their agenda. If you have people who don't have, who have abandoned any hope of identifying with their past or their history, it's much easier to mold them into that.

You know, what the, I would say the ideologues want, they're looking for a, you know, the perfect kind of progressive subject to the regime. And then there are others who are just looking for, you know, let's say the pharmaceutical companies are just looking for lifelong, you know, lifelong customers. It's not one. A lot of people say it's one or the other. It's not one or the other. There's many interests out there who have an interest in seeing that men don't live historically and do not have low testosterone. I'm sure you remember that podcast a few years ago where it was like this left podcast

where all the hosts were men and they took testosterone tests and they were like half of what they should be. And you're just like, I'm not shocked by this. I mean, this is, this is what's been bred into us. Yeah, big surprise. NPR has like a fourth of the normal testosterone level. Yeah. So, I mean, how do we, how do we get that back? Yeah, I was talking with, I was going back and forth with a friend of mine today. And we were talking about how when I started out podcasting, I had a mentor. He was talking about how he didn't really realize that he had a mentor when he was, when he started doing what he was doing. And, you know, you think about, you're talking about people who are looking back and they're like, okay, we need to emulate these great men and do what they did and live lives like they lived. And that's gone too. So, you know, how can we bring this forward? How can we look at the, look at these great men and, you know, help the next generation that's coming up. I'm very hopeful for Gen Z and any more information. any way that I can help them, you know, I want to.

Yeah, it's a crucial problem. As you say, there's definitely like a whole coalition of interests that profit from the collapse of manliness. But I think that one of the best ways we can start fighting back is self-educate ourselves. I mean, personally, I didn't really start to connect all the dots. until I was in my early 30s. I had a kid and like I just didn't I didn't I can I didn't all click for me. You know, that I needed to be a man of that I needed to be a certain kind of man.

I didn't click for me that I had not had those role models the way that my grandfather would have had them in the same way. You know, like you don't often realize what you're missing until some, somebody points it out to you. And so I think that that's, you'll realize that if you get into the heroic tradition of historical figures. That's one of the things, I love Homer. I think Achilles really existed, but you know, it is mythology and it's fiction in a way

and an important way. Plutarch is real guys for the most part. I mean, he does talk about Theseus who probably didn't exist, but Romulus, Romulus probably existed, But, you know, obviously Julius Caesar really existed. And most of the characters he's talking about are like real men. And Nietzsche talks about this in uses and abuses of history that, you know, okay, clearly Julius Caesar isn't going to teach you how to build a rocket to Mars. But that's not what you're, you're not trying to do what he did.

You're trying to match that strength of soul. That's what Rousseau would call it, the heroic drive to, um, excellence, strength of soul. You're trying to match that. And I think it starts by studying their lives, studying their stories. Aristotle has this discussion in the rhetoric, book two, which is where he talks about the emotions that are essential for the orator to master, to persuade people and one of the my favorite passage in there is this emotion that he calls zeal zelos it's often translated as emulation is where we get the word zeal so zealot is cognate with this word and he defines zelos or zelos it's an ada he defines it as a type of pain felt when a man

sees present among another man who is like him by nature things good and honorable which he himself is capable of achieving. And we're, we need to, if we don't feel that zeal on a daily basis in our lives, I think we're missing out. And it's good to surround yourself with people that bring that out in you,

if you can. And until you find them, I think you can, you can kind of supplement yourself with, um, just reading or hearing the heroic stories of, start with the Greeks and Romans. I mean,

obviously we've got our own guys. every great nation has its own guys. I think Hamilton is probably on par with a guy like Caesar, tragically died young. But that's one of the things I try to do with my podcast is just tell these stories without a ton of fluff, but in enough detail that you can get a sense of their characters. But you can start by.

Plutarch is pretty accessible. He's hard to listen to, I found. I've talked to several other classics, professors who've had a similar experience like, oh, you just pick up an audio book of Plutarch and prepare for your lecture that way. He's just a little too dense, even for a specialist, I think, for the most part. So I'm trying to tell these stories in a way that's more accessible. But, you know, one way is just retelling the stories.

Now I've got some other ideas, too, that are in development. Well, I think one of the most important things about when you're looking at classic figures is to realize just how many of them weren't only great soldiers or weren't only great philosophers. But something that we really have to think about now is that many of them were great entrepreneurs. That they did things. They made their fortunes. And I think today we believe that, you know, if you want to be an academic, you can't be an entrepreneur. If you want to be a soldier, you can't be an entrepreneur,

but you can be at all. So if you can talk a little bit about that. Yeah, well, like a guy like Solon, the lawgiver of Athens, I mean, part of how he came up with all of his ideas for how to run a state is he spent a lot of time doing Emporia. He was just doing business, which for the Greeks in his time, six century BC is probably a common. of deal making, you know, buying some jewels here, selling them at it up, you know, markup over here, maybe a little bit of piracy, you know. There's all kinds of entrepreneurship that you can get into in the Greek world. But there's so many, one of the things that really attracted me about a lot of these stories is precisely that. Like, so, you know, you could write a whole

richest man in Babylon, ancient Greeks and Romans version. Krasis is. a figure that I've covered in my show, who is the richest man in Rome when he lived. He was the financier of Julius Caesar, actually. So there's the triumvirate, the first triumvirate that Julius Caesar kind of uses to launch his own political career is Pompey and Caesar and Krasis. And really Krasis, it's a duum for it, really. It's Krasis and Pompey and then Caesar's like the tag along and he knows it. That's why he brought them together so that he could leverage their power. But Crassus is this fascinating character. He's a villain in the movie Spartacus with Kirk Douglas. Lawrence Olivier plays him. But he is this survivor figure who,

in the great first Roman Civil War, his dad and his brother were seized by populists, like vengeful populists and executed. And so Crassus, he's like 20. He escaped to Spain. He lives in a cave with a couple of buddies and just in hiding because he knows, you know, the regime guys are looking for him. There's a bounty on his head. So he's out in hiding.

And he's got some money, you know, as a, you know, person whose father was a console. Like, he's a serious player already kind of from a good family. but it comes back when Sala returns from from his journeys in the east, from his conquest in the east. This is the story of the Roman Civil War. It's a longer story. But basically, Krasis raises an army of his own with whatever money he has. He gets like two or three thousand men to come and fight on behalf of Sala, who's on the, the optimist, side of the conflict, the aristocrats. And they end up winning the war and Crassus is in this position where he has all these confiscations of property going on.

And Crassus buys a lot of cheap estates and flips them. And it was a little bit dubious, but he felt probably that he was profiteering off of the misfortune of bad men. But then he ends up building a fortune in Rome by real estate speculation. He's just like the best at it. And he has this whole brigade of firemen and construction slaves. And he's like an incredible, he's got an incredible eye for talent and for training people. He treats slaves like really valuable assets and he takes care to train them well and make sure they're happy and things like this.

And so he ends up, you know, if ever there's a fire that sweeps in to Rome, he can go in and just buy all kinds of properties on the cheap knowing that he can flip them. He can rebuild them with his own guys. And he becomes the richest man in Rome. He becomes a great financier. And one of the most powerful men in Rome through just having a whole lot of liquid wealth. He's a great kind of ends in tragedy because I won't spoil it if you want to go hear the story of crafts. As many of you guys know it, probably.

But I think that, you know, that you can make similar. tell similar stories about a lot of the financial dealings of some of the great men. Like in peacetime, a guy like Gaius Marius, who is Salas opponents in the Civil War, like he's off securing mining concessions in Spain. He's got this network of equestrian businessmen who were tax farmers. I mean, some of the greatest Romans were incredibly talented entrepreneurs. But it's not just that because I think that, when I think about who would Julius Caesar have been today?

Who would Napoleon have been today, even? Would they have gone into politics? Would they have joined the U.S. military now? Probably not, right? This is not where high agency people go. They don't, they don't, you know, they don't go to law school now so much. They go into entrepreneurship. A lot of these guys are in Silicon Valley.

They're getting into tech. They're bringing them out about this American dynamism, I hope, you know, reindustrializing our country. But like, I think that today in America especially, the high agency people are going into entrepreneurship. And it's one of the reasons why Napoleon is so amazingly popular at Caesar, too, I think, and Silicon Valley and how I have, you know, I have a lot of tech bros in my audience. Because like Plutarch's heroes and really, I mean, this is, is why the heroes of antiquity are so appealing is they are like some of the most high agency men that have ever lived. I had, I run these retreats in Rome in the summer. We're going to do Greece

next year because Rome's going to be crowded for the Jubilee year. But, you know, I ask, I asked this guy, he's like working as a, you know, B-to-B SaaS sales guy, late, 20s, I asked him, like, how did he get into, how did he come to my podcast? How did he get into the classics? And he said that he felt that this was a secret that had been kept from him for much of his life. He's like, why did nobody ever tell me that the Greeks and Romans were the greatest men who ever lived? And so I think that that's one of the biggest things you can get from the ancients is this, this like sense of how high agency of a person you can be. And I think that high agency people just devour this stuff. They need those stories.

I mean, Nietzsche talked about this. They like, you just, you just like want to consume this stuff so much. If you, if you're, if you're bent on great things, like you need that energy. It's like fuel for the fire within. And so I mean, I personally, I come from both on my moms and dad's size, like generations of entrepreneurs. As an academic, I was always ashamed. of like that legacy of like not doing that myself and uh that's a good thing that's it to feel you know like to get out there and take some risk and uh um kind of live up to the i mean even if you have a couple of people in your past that you can look up to well you certainly have great ones in your in the history of your people so that's what the classics have been for the west i think for

since they were you know two thousand years is it at this point if they're going to be taught again Is it just going to be people like us who are going to, I'm going to have somebody on like you, who is an expert at this or, you know, your podcast, or it just seems to me that they're, unless there's a radical revamping of education in this, you know, in this society in the West, that it's going to have to be, it's going to have to be people like us. It's going to have to be podcasts. It's got to be live streams.

And there's an entrepreneurial opportunity there for people who know how to do it. You know, I mean, I'm friends with Daryl Cooper, who now is the most infamous podcaster in the whole world. And watching and seeing the amount of, people that have subscribed to his substack and not only subscribe to his substack, but like are paid subscribers is, and when you take into consideration what he does, the long form aspect of what he does, the amount of people who are giving him money, knowing that it'll all be free one day and

they're still giving him is mind boggling. It means that people are, thirsty for this or that people desire this, that people are at the point where they can't live without it. And I think that's the best we can do right now. Yeah, Darrell is amazing. I don't, not that I necessarily know, have an opinion on his latest controversy, but I have a lot of respect for him as a reader and a thinker. And so, yeah, like, this is one of the things that I took great hope from when I was leaving the institutional world of classics. And one of the things that really inspired me, we've talked about Plato and I think a lot of what Plato said was kind of silly or thought experiments, but he in a lot of ways was the person

who inspired me because he was such a man of action, actually. If you look at his biography, I mean, He's taking crazy risks, traveling to the courts of tyrants in Sicily and getting sold into slavery and getting ransom. I mean, trying to build a movement. But one of the things that you read the lives of the early sophists and the early educational entrepreneurs in Athens, like all of the greats of the Western tradition of philosophy, in antiquity at least, they're all. solopreneurs for the most part. You know, Gorgias, proticus, Korax and Tisius, Plato, Isocrates, Aristotle. Aristotle came to Athens. He was selling drugs to pay his way through school and afford, you know, education. I mean, I don't think

Plato charged, but, you know, he had living expenses, the son of a doctor. I mean, like, these guys are scrappy as hell. And they, if there's no, there's no like university that's going to offer them a chair. You know, you have to convince people that what you're doing is important. And you have to be self-sufficient. And it breeds a certain kind of toughness and a certain kind of like, I don't know, like responsiveness to the market and what people actually need and what is actually good for, well, for men especially, what they're going to find useful.

So I really admire that about Plato. I think he did that. I think Socrates too, of course. But that's, you know, I'm friends with, you know, through this journey, I've met a ton of really talented people building their own audiences on the internet. Justin Murphy, Bennett's Philactory. And I mean, I go down the list of cool people that are building their own, like intellectuals, independent intellectuals building their own raw, egg nationalists, building their own kind of businesses and models. and sharing knowledge, sharing a kind of vision of how we should develop our characters, and how we should select the inputs that we put in.

So on the one hand, there is that independent intellectual world that's kind of fermenting and taking off substack Twitter podcasts, which I think is great. There is also a battle that's worth fighting for K to 12 education. And I want to give some credit to a lot of great people that have done a lot of work, you know, the classical education movement. For all that I think, you know, it's really, even though it's been around for a while, it's still in its nascence, you know, but there's a great book. I really thought this book was great.

The battle for the American mind, I think it's called Pete Hague Seth and David Goodwin. And I know David Goodwin. He's a great guy. And like they just they, in that book, they kind of cataloged the progressive takeover of and the kind of ejection of the classics from American education and what they proposed to replace it with. But one of the things that they point out in that book is you can actually document an explicit, you know,

public domain, perfectly acknowledged conspiracy, if you will, an open, not secret conspiracy that the Marxists had, the Frankfurt School, to seize the cultural high ground, to take all the pillboxes of, in the American, in the war for the American mind by Columbia Education, what, sorry, sorry, the Columbia School of Education, Columbia Teachers College, I think that's what's called, the foundation of the teachers unions, the politicization of the teachers unions, the Department of Education,

all this stuff, like this was planned. There were a lot of people working hard at this to capture and, you know, dumb down American education. And if it worked for them, it could work to undo it in the other direction. The tactics are going to have to be very different. Ask Chris Rufo how to do that. I have friends who were appointees in Florida, you know, the university system. It's great what's happening.

But it's going to be a lot of work. I think what place we can start is like, you know, kids used to start way earlier on this stuff. right like kids used to be reading plutarch at age nine 10 they used to be reading Caesar when they were 14 we can get back to that but we have to educate ourselves first as as dad I have two two kids and hoping to have more but I think there's great hope that we can educate ourselves now at a really high level with like they mean the amazing quality of stuff that's available for free through podcasts especially especially YouTube to some extent.

I think there's still some interesting stuff on YouTube for sure. And newsletters and then pass it on maybe form our own institutions that are going to withstand whatever's coming. Well, yeah, I appreciate that. Yeah, everybody who's trying to do this work, even the people who are trying to do it in a system within a system that seems to be beyond hope. You got to be hopeful for that.

I do like what Rufo, what Chris Rufo has done. And a lot of the things that he's exposed, they, yeah, that's good work there. Let's cut it here. I'm going to have you do your plugs, and then we'll leave it open for the future. Maybe come back and, you know, you'll be like a Thomas appearance and just come on

and do a lecture on someone from Plutarch's from Plutzark's lives and areas. Yeah. Yeah, happy. We can get in like the Roman Civil War and stuff like that. It's just some fascinating parallels, but it's a longer conversation. Yeah, but tell people where they can find your stuff. Yeah. So costofglory.com is my website.

You can find Cost of Glory on YouTube. It's also on the podcast players, Apple and Spotify, just Cost of Glory. I'm at Cost of Glory on Twitter. If you, so one of the things that we talked about a little bit at the beginning is this connection between the emulation of great men and the rhetorical education, this idea of becoming an orator and a speaker. And I, my business partner and I are starting a set of online offerings for training people in the ancient art of rhetoric, giving you at least a crash course. so you can start practicing on your own. And if you're interested in this connection, I've got something to offer just for free.

I've got an authoritative speaker's guide that's like a little mini course that'll give you kind of the basics that I think will help people get into what makes a podcast like The Cost of Glory or an author like Plutarch Tick and why it's not just interesting and entertaining, but like how it can be useful, how you can help you in your career. So if you want to know more about that, go to costofgloory.com slash gift. and you can find the authoritative speakers guide there.

So tell me what you think. Awesome. I will, I'll check that out myself, and I will include that in the show notes. Alex, I appreciate it. Thank you very much. Thanks for the time, Pete. It's been a great pleasure.

I want to welcome everyone back to the Pekignanaz show. By popular demand, Alex Petcas is 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, as some kind words. Yeah. You've got a great audience. And, you know, I think talking about these issues about, you know, the corruption of academia and ancient heroes seems to hit a key. And so it's a pleasure to be back and to dive a little deeper into 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. So 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 Gracki and the 120s and 1 30s 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 gracky 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 Krakis 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 Gracch 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 assign 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, 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 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, who's a little younger. 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 220s, 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 in 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. So throughout Italy, Rome has allies. They call them 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, you know, to exploit. And, 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 onto 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 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 and 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 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 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 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 agri 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 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.

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, you know, 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 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, these 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 land holdings 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 the, 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 is 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. You know, Rome, their moral system does not incentivize businessmen. There's a kind of a prejudice against moneymaking as such. Like the Senate, for example, members of the Senate are not supposed to be lending money. The interest is 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 is really. honorable in Rome is war in politics, it's lawmaking and statesmanship 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 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.

have any reflections on that. 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 Gracie 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 a 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's 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 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 innovation in populism was very decisive in Roman history. So what he figured out was there's this office of the Tribune of the Plebs,

excuse me, 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 a couple of ways that you can pass a law at Rome one of them is through a kind of a well 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 Conchillium Plebis, the Council of the Plebs 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 There's strong incentives not to go against the Senate because tribunes only serve 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 inequality. And the way that he does it is he proposes an agrarian law that essentially is to set up a commission of, of a few select men to go around throughout Italy,

figuring out who's dispossessed locals of public land illegally. They have this law on the books that you're not supposed to own more than 300 Uyghura, which is about 500 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 these, the land registrants, of Rome and redistributed to you know deserving men and to get some of these these you know 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 a long story short

well I'll tell the story so basically he he manages to pass his his agrarian 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, not anybody, but most of the nobility are eligible to run for the office of the 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 Senate will put forward their own, well, I say the Senate, but let's, let's call them the establishment, because there's dissidents in the Senate. The establishment can put forward a candidate like, the guy's name is Octavius. And Octavius 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, are in on it, right? Like they, a lot of the Senate are the very men who own some of these wide swaths of Agri publicus who are profiting off of the inequality. And they're going to, they're going to get, they're going to lose out. They're going to have their land dispossessed or, you know,

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, Gracus manages to get him stripped of his tribunate by a tribunary law. I should say that, you know, 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 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 of the field at summertime you know they're 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, one day there's all these omens that Plutarch recounts. But the Senate 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, you know, he and his associates 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. is the way the story goes with somebody who is, you know, across the mob and can't hear his voice. And so he makes this gesture that I'm, I'm arming myself because there's a danger against my life. And he points to his head, which I guess is 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, in a Roman gesture is like you point at the top of your head. And then somebody shouts, 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. And 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 The Senate marches out They they vote The Sanatas Consultum ultimatum The Declaration of Martial Law They order the consuls

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 him to death and it's they kill many of his supporters there's blood running through the forum they throw his body in the tiber and and so that's the end of

gracus sounds sounds just as bad as January 6th right yeah just a just a patriotic demonstration right So I think that this is a really interesting instance of something that Friedrich Gundolph 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 yunkers, 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 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 uh gondolph kind of nails it there it's the it's the trump phenomenon it's the rfk phenomenon like the person from your class who betrays you to champion the people is is the most hated of all he's the enemy within and you see this really like in spades with with tiberius gracas oh there was a lot there um yeah one of the things that you mentioned And they're 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 seems like the more you read, yeah, the more that it actually was. Yeah, yeah, Fustel de Koulinge, classic, classic work. I never try to pronounce that name because I'm going to 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 almost seems like that that would be even closer to, Eusefruct 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. land. So did they allow people like Merck's who came in from 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 Yusufufric.

They're just occupying it and starting to invest in it and 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, we, I spent, you know, $100,000 on this new barn. How can you say this isn't my land? You know, there's my grandfather lying in, 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, you know, a lot of the merchant classes that are

profiteering. It's not just Romans. Like there's ways for non-Citist, non-Roman citizen, but it's like well-connected enterprising Italians to take a lot of this land. And that's another source of resentment too for for the kind of Roman citizen mob that is increasingly coming to Rome, uh, hat in hand looking, you know, complaining about being edged out of their property. Uh, so it's, it's a big issue. And it's really thorny to, uh, 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 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 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-man rule, you seem to avoid some of this because it's very hard for 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 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 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, Black Rock 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, particularly 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 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 incredibly powerful. It's incredibly powerful politically, you know. And so I think that we're seeing some of that today, perhaps. I mean, we'll see what happens in seven days, but this is a problem that seems to really activate ambitious young men, you know, or young men feeling like they're missing out on opportunities. communities 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%, 49%, 29% 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 PLEB is elected and it kind of everybody gets to vote. And I think the way that they do it is they like once they reach a majority, the voting stops. And so if 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 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. There's some you can inherit your slot in the voting rolls from your father. So 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 really wealthy people and the city mob. City dwellers. Yeah. Same now. Everybody who piles into the city. 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, the soldiers self-finance and so there's there's a real and for that reason or 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 um 450 sister cistercies a year you know that's um that's a living wage and then some for sure uh 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 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 know, 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 in practice, the only way to the consulship, the highest office is just massive expenditures. And if there is a way, if you don't have a cash, there's a there's a credit market in Rome. You the senators they have a lot of liquid capital guy like Krasas a couple generations later

you know he made a lot of his political network and his power base not to say his wealth through essentially financing promising young candidates and and the the way that this works is you 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, you know, 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, 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 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, 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 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, There's also 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 if you're savvy and if you have connections. And a lot of these, somebody asked me this recently, like, wasn't commerce frowned upon by the Roman elites? yes but 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 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 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, you know, 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. Epacurus advised his students to escape notice in your life, you know, Lathabiosas. 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 the most, 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, 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, you know, a punchline that they're so attracted to looking at Rome, especially the Republic? Yeah, I really think that's true. You know, the, we, what we have direct evidence for, especially in the late Republic when we don't have so much kind of granular evidence of like

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 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, it's, 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 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, 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 like 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 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 hero is what produced, a 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 the citizens just don't have and probably shouldn't have. This may seem completely off the wall, but I'll ask it anyway. 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, you know, I look at Trump and 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 clearly not about profiteering at this point. Like, it, the man is motivated by a lot more than just money. You know, he's, 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 to, 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, the memory that people have of you after you die, I think this is a very heroic kind of mindset of, 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, 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 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 a sense of a grand historic struggle like you're witnessing history. You're kind of participating it as like shot after shot just whizzes past his head. I find it incredibly compelling as a story and just fascinating to watch. It's just hard to pull your eyes away from the spectacle that's going on. And 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 clearly desires 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 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. even if he doesn't look at him 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 you'd be hard to 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 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 leadership, 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. 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 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 different moral universe. They inhabited a different like metaphysical reality. They're not trying to trying to, you know, just have their own private share of the pie. They're after some kind of immortality, you know.

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 kind of politics of envy that goes under different names, but you know, you can just tell the way that they handle, you know, any kind of visionary, drive, you know, it's megalomania, it's problematic, it's creepy, it's toxic, whatever, whatever the case may be. It's very just effeminized and, 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. We'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 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 really like the, what historically you would look at as normal people, straight 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. 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 a 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 it's 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's 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, like a real, what's the word? It's like a, a perversion of this idea of, you know, Paul Newman in that movie saying, you know, or is it Marlon 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 glorified in our, 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, 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. It was like, well, why are you doing this well?

I can't tell you. It's, 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 Tiberius Gracchus a kind of hero. You know, Marx was very interested in the, or at least Marxist historians were very interested in the Gracky 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 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 the circle of how this gets to the problem of of packing voter rolls and and citizenship so I'll be brief here I've covered this at greater length than the biography of Gaius Marius on my podcast. It's one of my earlier biographies. I think 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's brother,

tries to start another populist 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, of the, of the, 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

Uyirtha, 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 used. using, the land is difficult, but general after 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 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'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 recruits, he makes it breaks precedent and recruits large forces of the urban poor of Rome, who would fall well below the property quality. qualification. And so he essentially 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 Eugirtha 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 an 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 manages 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 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 reward. awarding 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 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, Prytor. And the Senate, I think, does something really interesting. So Marius is a Gracchus kind of figure, like a Gracchus 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 don't why not have the Senate the establishment be the patrons of these 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 huge disruptive consequences in the roman electoral map and so they their candidate they put forward to do this is this guy livious 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 these Italians, suddenly the urban poor of Rome are seeing, wait a second, we've been Romans for generations and we haven't gotten all the spoils of empire and now you're going to enfranchise all these Italians and we're going to just even push to lower 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, 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 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 not technically gerrymandering, but it's like, it's a, ranking system. And they put all of the Italians in this one gigantic, extremely low-ranked 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 Maria 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.

All right. Proposus law. Sulpicius is the guy's name. It might have been Sulpicius's idea, but you know, whatever. This is what Marius does as 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 they'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 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

optimist, an establishment guy, 20 years younger than Marius. They've been kind of sparring in politics for a number of years. Sulla 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 the 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 wild card, 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, policy making, not so much, but the structure of politics and how people, how people have tried to move people, to get people, 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.

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 Trump 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, it's 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 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 opponents. Yeah. All right. Well, let's wrap up there. And do you have anything to promote? I think last time you were on, you had me link to your authoritative speaker's 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 oratory, 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. A link to both of them. Thank you, Alex. Appreciate it. Always. Been a pleasure.