The Rest Is History - 134. Crossing the Rubicon: The rise of Julius Caesar

Episode Date: January 10, 2022

Julius Caesar crossed the banks of the Rubicon river with his legion on this day (maybe) over 2000 years ago. In the first of a two-parter, Tom explains how Caesar rose to become powerful enough to take the decision that would eventually lead to him becoming the sole 'dictator' of Rome. If you can't wait to find out how the story ends, sign up for the Rest Is History Club to access the full epsiode, more bonus content, ad-free listening and much more. www.restishistorypod.com *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club of Rome, the 49th before the birth of Christ. The sun had long set behind the Apennine mountains. Lined up in full marching order, soldiers from the 13th Legion stood massed in the dark. Bitter the night may have been, but they were well used to extremes. For eight years they had been following the governor of Gaul on campaign after bloody campaign, through snow, through summer heat,

to the margins of the world. And now, returned from the barbarous wilds of the north, they found themselves poised on a very different frontier. Ahead of them flowed a narrow stream. And Tom Holland, if that very purple prose hasn't sent you to sleep, what was the name of that stream, pray tell? Dominic, the name of that narrow stream was the Rubicon. And who wrote those extraordinary lines, Tom? Dominic, t name of that narrow stream was the Rubicon. And who wrote those extraordinary lines, Tom? Dominic, it was I. It was.

So that's the beginning of Tom's book, Rubicon. So that's the book that launched you as a historian, isn't it? Yes, it's the first work of history that I wrote. So in a way, my career as a historian. Oh, is everything to those lines. Begins with those lines. With those lines. Extraordinarily, you're still working in history. And here we are.

Astonishing. Here we are going back to it. And so we did the 12 days of Christmas over the festive season. And we were talking about anniversaries. And this is another anniversary, isn't it? Because January the 10th. Did it really happen on January the 10th, Tom? Well, as with everything in ancient history, it's complex. I mean, this is the traditional date.

It may have been a couple of days later. And it's further complicated by the incredible difficulty of mapping the Republican era dates onto our contemporary calendar. So by some reckonings, it may have been in late November, which really, but let's just scrub that. So the 10th of January, Julius Caesar crosses the Rubicon. And it is, I think, one of the great moments in world history. It's a moment of incredible drama.

And the measure of that is that really, I think ever since 17th century, maybe even 16th century, in English, the phrase to cross the Rubicon has meant to take an irreversible decision. And the reason that it has that resonance is that Caesar standing on the Rubicon is facing what the Romans called a discremen. It's a moment of excruciating tension that is also a kind of dividing line in his career, because what he essentially has to decide is, does he stand down his command? He's been governor of Gaul for almost 10 years. Does he have to lay down his command,

go back to Rome and risk prosecution, potentially the ruin of his career? Or does he stay at the head of his legions and cross the Rubicon, which is the river marks the boundary between his provinces of Gaul and Italy itself. And for him to cross that river, let alone at the head of his legions, is essentially to declare civil war. So the decision could not be more massive. So before we get into the decision, set the scene for us very, very broadly.

We're in the Roman Republic in the first century BC. So Rome is not yet an empire in name, but it kind of is an empire in fact, isn't it? I mean, it's acquired all this territory in sort of Asia and North Africa and so on. And the republican system, so the picture you paint in your book, which has so many kind of contemporary resonances, doesn't it, with the kind of the American Republic and so on, that the picture you paint in your book is of this extraordinary city, kind of smoky, brick, disputatious, crowded, slum infested city that has risen through military might to become the master of the Mediterranean. And it's sending out generals to the provinces and to the frontiers, commanding these armies who are increasingly unwilling to basically obey the conventions of the political. Is that a fair summary?

Essentially, yes. Essentially. I mean, the essence of the Republican system in Rome, it's founded, again, a bit like the American Republic. It's founded with the expulsion of the monarchy. And so the ideal in the Roman Republic, and Republic comes from res publica, it's the public affair. So the idea that every, well, it's male citizen has a stake in the affairs of the running of the city. And the ideal essentially is that the Republic should give free reign to the talents of its people and above all, their yearning for individual honour.

But those yearnings for individual honour should be subordinated to the honour of the city itself and the Roman people as a collective. And so therefore, there's a kind of ferocious series of constitutional checks and balances that are designed to stop essentially a citizen from becoming overmighty, from making himself the equivalent of a king. And so those would include the division of the king's powers, for instance, between elected officials called consuls who are, you know, there are two of them so that one can always keep an eye on the other. They only serve for two years. This is true of most of the lesser magistracies in the Republic as well. But it's also, it's something that every individual citizen is raised up with a consciousness that kind of king is a dirty word.

The word Rex is a dirty word that properly your personal Rome and the Romans to emerge essentially from being kind of bunch of cattle rustlers camped out on hills above marshes to as you said ruling the whole of the Mediterranean the problem is with this that the more powerful that Rome becomes so the more opportunities there are for its individual citizens themselves to become powerful. And you end up in a situation where certain citizens at the absolute top of the tree of achievement are able to put the whole republic in their shadow. So this brings us to a question that we had from lots of listeners. Roy Neely, for example, example and he says what's basically

what's so special about the rubicon so we're 49 bc caesar takes his troops across the rubicon why is that because he's not the first over mighty individual is he because you've had a civil war between two massive titanic roman figures a generation earlier, Gaius Marius and Lucius Cornelius Sulla. And Sulla had also marched on Rome, hadn't he? So why is that different from Caesar? I mean, it's a good question. Essentially, Roman history in the first century BC is kind of structured around the personal rivalry of kind of charismatic popularists and people who tend to identify themselves with the traditions. So it's this podcast.

It's the balance of this podcast. Yes, it is a few like you are the charismatic populist and I'm the chilly, stiff, cold traditionalist. I wasn't going to say that.ist I wasn't going to say that I absolutely wasn't going to say that I'm sure I definitely thought of it the other way around so so the the last of these obviously is is um Mark Antony against uh Octavian who becomes Augustus then you've got Julius Caesar who's absolute classic populist against Pompey who's also a populist but ends up uh fighting for fighting for the kind of senatorial elite.

And then right at the beginning, you have the, as you say, these two figures, Marius and Sulla. And Marius is a populist. He's a great general. He's not aristocratic. The key thing that he does is that he faces up to the fact that the kind of the traditional days where... So a legion, what does a legion mean? A legion basically is a levy. And the idea is, is that a legio, a levy is simply the Roman people in arms. And so everyone has heard of centurions, centurions command centuries, but centuries are also the voting blocks within the Republic. So there's this idea that the army camp is simply a mirror of the forum, the campus marshes, the plane of Mars, you march out there and you get enrolled in the army and then you go off and fight. Then you come back and you resume civilian life.

And this for centuries has been the way that it should organise. The problem is, again, that Rome has become too powerful, that now if you're being enrolled in a legion, you're being sent to serve in Spain or in Syria or whatever. And so it's impractical to imagine that you can just come back. And so rather than having a single legio, a single levy, you start to get multiple levies, multiple legions. And Marius basically professionalizes it. And he says that it's unfair to expect peasants or whatever to go off and not be paid for this service. And so he, essentially, this kind of idea of a citizen militia, which is what the legio had been, becomes what we now think of as the Roman legions and these become professional entities and this makes

Marius very popular and he becomes consul a record number of times but this generates opposition and envy and the most charismatic figure who is envious of him is this guy called Sulla who is a kind of louche hadn't hadn had a great, you know, hadn't had a meteoric rise, kind of hung out with drag queens and pimps and, you know, in the red light district and all that kind of stuff, but turns out to be a brilliantly successful general and in due course, an absolutely ruthless political operator. And what happens is that there's a kind of war in the East that promises all kinds of loot. It's going to be easy pickings. And Sulla gets the command for that. There are complicated

political shenanigans in Rome that means he gets stripped of that command. Sulla has the legions ready to go. And rather than accept this, he marches on Rome and Marius is forced to flee so if Sulla marches on Rome isn't that a crossing the Rubicon type moment kind of yes it is why don't we remember why doesn't anybody care about that or do they did they care at the time they did care massively it was an absolutely seismic event right a completely seismic event. And it was absolutely felt to be that. Sulla then goes off to the East. He wins his war. Meanwhile, in Rome, there's been not just a civil war, but a war of the Italians in rebellion against the Romans. Sulla comes back. He

embroils himself in that. He crushes the Italians. He crushes his opponents in the Civil War. He establishes himself as the absolute master of Rome. And he dusts down this antique office, which is a very, very ancient one in the Republic. When the Republic is in absolutely desperate straits, you can appoint a single man for a six month term. And the name of this office is dictator. So Sulla is appointed dictator for more than six months because he has the army at his back. He is absolutely ruthless towards his opponents. He has a whole bunch of them massacred in the heart of Rome.

He then puts the price on people's heads. He posts prescription lists in the forum. People are paid if they bring him his enemies' heads. And it's an absolute rule of terror. And he uses his position of power essentially essentially, to enshrine the senatorial elite back in their kind of traditional role as arbiters of the state. So the Senate is, it literally means a kind of assembly of old men, you know, the elders, the betters, the bonnie, they call themselves, the good guys. This is how they see themselves and when Sala does this and the enemy the people that he's targeting he's targeting the populists and so that's why there are kind of so populares and I think populist would be a legitimate way to describe it the the difference between them isn't so much about policy as it would be today but about style yeah and I think and I think you

absolutely see that that's something that over the past few decades, you know, the past few years, perhaps much more than when I wrote this, which was in the kind of first years of the 21st century, that sense of how differences in style can kind of bleed into politics and generate incredible divisions seems much clearer. And one of the populists, and he's very, very young at this point,

is Julius Caesar, and he flees into exile. And for Caesar, that experience of having to hide out in barns, of being hunted across Italy, of knowing that there are people who will be paid if they can get his head. And he's, what is that? Because he's very young though, Tom. He's very, very young. Why has he been identified as a target by Sulla?

Well, he's related by marriage. So his family have married into Marius's family. So he's very much on the kind of the Marian side. He's very much on the populist side. And he identifies with that kind of side in this terrible schism. He survives it. And Caesar will express astonishment at this later in his career. Sulla lays down his powers. He retires to the Bay of Naples. He know, he's basically kind of, he's recalibrated the Republic, the functioning, the plumbing of the Republic, so that basically his guys, his class of person will be in power. And then he retires.

But he then lays it down. So Caesar is able to come back as an enthusiast for the Republican ideal of citizenship, that anyone could have done what Sulla did. He's offended. He's appalled by it. The irony. So right the way through his career, Caesar will be renowned for his clementia his his his mercy and there's something aristocratic about that it's humiliating for a roman to be shown clementia by by another citizen but there is another way of seeing that which is that um

it's an expression of caesar's feeling that there should properly be a kind of civic commonality yeah and that to offend against that, ultimately is to offend against the deepest ideals of the Roman Republic. So he thinks that politics has limits, basically. I think so, yes. I think so. I mean, so he's a very, very, very complex figure.

But I think that you could say that through his career, he's motivated by two great ideals. One is that his own genius should have free reign. And that's a crucial part of it. You know, he absolutely feels that no limits should be set on his ability to achieve great things, both for himself, but also for Rome. But he does also have an incredibly strong sense of loyalty towards those of his fellow citizens who back him. And that in due course is why he will become a great military leader and why he will win the love of his soldiers. So that sets up who Julius Caesar was and we will crack on with the story,

Tom Holland, after a very quick break in which advertisers will promote Roman themed goods. See you in a minute. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip. And on our Q&A, we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works.

We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestis of the entertainment.com that's the rest is entertainment.com welcome back to the rest is history now i don't know about you but um i was delighted with the hall that father christmas brought to our household and chief among the things things that he brought was a board game for my son called Herd Mentality. And the reason I really enjoy playing that board game is because so much of my time I spend on the Internet reading a publication that pushes back against herd mentality.

Tom Holland, do you know what that publication is? Would it be unheard.com? U-N-H-E-R-D. U-N-H-E-R-D. Exactly. And they very much encourage independent thinking they've got an excellent article at the moment i understand by somebody called peter franklin he's got an article do you know what the title is no it's restorations always fail whether it's old labor the monarchy or

america after trump history shows that there is no going back very apt tom for a podcast about the fall of the roman republic don't you think is there is there a reference perhaps to roman republican history he says while firmly restoring the old order sulla made a mistake he allowed the son-in-law of sinner the defeated populist leader to escape with his life the name of that young man albert einstein diana spencer no gaius julius caesar the lesson here says peter franklin is simple just because you defeated one populist it doesn't mean that another more capable one isn't waiting for you down the line who's he thinking of do you reckon no idea don. Oh, goodness. I don't think so. That's a chilling thought.

Well, again, I wouldn't, yes. I think it's harsh on Caesar to compare him to Trump, but we've already discussed that. But yeah, no, it's an excellent point and an excellent illusion. Well, for excellent points and illusions, you should go to unheard.com more often. Yeah.

And isn't it wonderful that 2 000 years and more after caesar's assassination he's still being mentioned in online publications yes and push back against her mentality what caesar caesar was of course you will know caesar was in debt wasn't he in his career so financial prudence mattered to him enormously yes it did so he would have been very keen on special offers and unheard you know i don't think he would So he would have been very keen on special offers. And Unheard.com. Do you know, I don't think he would. Do you? No. You're spoiling my brilliant link.

No, he would have rejected that offer because he would have probably spent double. He would have paid more for it. But for most people who aren't Julius Caesar. Yeah, what a fool. Dominic, you're about to say there's a splendid offer, isn't there? There is. There's a splendid offer for Rest is History listeners. So don't be like Julius Caesar.

No, don't. Go to Unheard.com slash rest that's u-n-a-t-r-d you'll get your first three month subscription free because i think the moral of this podcast if it has a moral is having people like julius around isn't always good news it's very bad news yeah so save the republic take up this special offer. Welcome back to The Rest Is History. Now, Tom, before we get back to Julius Caesar, can we just paint in a little bit more of the sort of surrounding picture? Sulla retires, and then Rome doesn't slip fully into dictatorship, does it? They basically go back to the old system. I mean i mean it's weakened but they're

they're they carry on as though it hadn't happened and the the big new sort of the vunderkind the young meteor is pompey who's the the sort of baby-faced um ruthless butcher he's called teenage butcher you called him that didn't you or was that... No, that's it. That's the name that he's given. So he'd been one of Sulla's hitmen, basically, had he? Is that fair? Yeah. So he's a kind of a local bigwig in Eastern Italy. And he raises a private army, as does also uh big hitter called Crassus yeah and

Pompey and Crassus both have meteoric careers in the wake of of Sulla so they're kind of Sulla's boys basically they're Sulla's boys and uh basically you know Sulla has has weighted it so that um people who backed him are kind of in pole position to win advancement. Most of them do it in the traditional way, going up through the magistracies. Crassus does it by, he becomes incredibly wealthy. So one of his wheezes is that he employs Rome's only fire service. And he will then, you know, he'll of wait for for buildings to be on fire and then charge the uh the kind of hapless people money to put it out and he'll then buy it up and build

new blocks of flats everywhere that's very dare i say it's quite trumpian behavior it's very very trumpian but but crassus is a much kind of chillier more controlled more ruthless more intelligent figure right then say trump okay pompey is so he models himself on alexander the great yeah um he has the quiff of alexander the great um he he ends up sourcing what he claims is the cloak of alexander the great obviously some guy in some eastern bazaar has vlogged it to him um but the um and alexander the great is a kind of very ambivalent figure in rome because he's a king uh and he's a conqueror and he's seen as being a tyrant so pompey's identification with him isn't entirely positive and it's reflective of the fact that that there are very kind of strict age thresholds in the Republic for when you can

hold a magistracy. So most of the Romans absolutely adore middle age. So you become 40, you can run for consul. So it's great. I mean, you know, we become 40 and it's, oh God, I'm middle aged. I'm so depressed, midlife crisis, get a motorbike. There you go. Brilliant. Now I can run for the consulship, which is why if you look at the portrait busts of Romans from the Republican era, they all look incredibly old. Kind of crow's feet and baggy eyes and all that kind of stuff. But Pompey ignores that and he just kind of gets as many commands as he can. And he ends up through a kind of complicated process being given command of basically the whole of the east and the east is an absolute mess the romans haven't wanted to run it equally they haven't wanted to allow anyone

um to uh any of the kind of local kings or rulers to have any position of authority so basically it's all just collapsed into um anarchy so pompey goes over there and he conquers the whole lot. And when he comes back to Rome, he brings kings in his wake. He's stupefyingly rich. He has all the plunder of these. He has this incredible triumph where in his triumph, they carry an enormous kind of bust of him, complete with quiff, entirely modelled out of pearls. And it's kind of borne aloft so that everyone can see it

and this is magnificent splendid he's the hero of the hour it redounds gloriously to the reputation of rome but it's also deeply deeply offensive to people who see themselves as his peers and one person who really detests it is crassus who has always been Pompey's great rival say Pompey and Crassus for instance between them suppressed the the rebellion of Spartacus the great slave revolt yeah actually it was Crassus who did it but Pompey turns up and nicks the glory which is kind of he's he's a glory hogger so Pompey finds to his fury and disappointment that even though he's he's by far the richest you know he's got this wealth he's got this power he's he's um conquered half the east people who he views as kind of worthless political schemers are getting together and are frustrating

what he wants to do and frustrating what he wants to do. And basically what he wants to do is he wants to provide land for his veterans and he wants his settlement of the East to be ratified. And his enemies in the Senate refuse to do this. And this is classically how the Republic has functioned, is that if you are over, if you are high achieving, then your enemies will gang up and form a consortium and kind of block you out. So Pompey is in a mess. And so he looks around for allies and he comes up with two allies. One of them is astonishing.

One of them is Crassus. So he's an arch enemy. He's an arch enemy. But Crassus basically decides that the pleasure of hating Pompey has to come second to his own ambition. Yeah. So Crassus always puts ambition first. So do you know what this is, Tom? What?

This is 1997. It is John Redwood and Ken Clark teaming up in the Tory leadership contest. That's exactly what it is. Against William Hague. Yeah, that's exactly what it is. I know it's a very niche reference, but about two listeners will be pleased by that. No, that's exactly what it is. I know it's a very niche reference, but about two listeners will be pleased by that. No, that's exactly what it is.

And so they basically, what Crassus and Pompey are both going to do is essentially a kind of criminal operation to force through the measures that they both want that can only be done in a criminal way. And to do that, they need a consul who will force through the measures that they both want that that can only be done in a criminal way and to do that they need a consul who will force through the measures so tame consul basically well kind of a tame consul but a consul who is willing to attract to to to put up with the opprobrium that

that acting as as their kind of agent will bring and there's an obvious person and that who is it julius caesar so julius caesar has compared to crassus and pompey had a had a much less um kind of successful career he again has gone through the hoops he's gone up the steps there's a famous story that that caesar is in in spain and he goes to a temple and sees a statue of Alexander and weeps that Alexander had conquered the world and he has done nothing he should have read my book he should have done he didn't that aspiring last paragraph yeah um so Caesar is very very ambitious he's very very able he's very very popular he spent enormous amounts of money that he doesn't have on basically making himself popular. So he's the first person to stage gladiators dressed entirely in silver armour, for instance.

He's a kind of political showman. That's what he is. So to use another absolutely ridiculous modern comparison, is he sort of slightly Boris Johnson in his have I got news for you? Yes. Yes. So, again, obviously any comparison with Julius Caesar and any political figure on the current British state would be ridiculous. It is ridiculous. But he's a joke.

Well, he's not a joke. No, he's not a joke. He's not a joke. But he's a joke. He's not. Well, he's not a joke. No, he's not a joke. He's not a joke. But he's a crowd pleaser. That's the difference. He's seen as being dangerous. So Sulla, people had gone to him and said, look, pardon Caesar. And Sulla had said there are a lot of Marius's in that young man.

Okay. So people knew he was substantial. Sulla had seen that he was very, very able. And actually he describes him as, as loosely belted. So Caesar wears his toga in a fashionably loose belted way. And he's a dandy.

He does spectacular kind of, he, he borrows enormous amounts of money to, to, to set, to build a villa. He then decides he doesn't like the villa. So he has the villa pulled down.

And this is the kind of stunt that appalls lots of senators, to build a villa. He then decides he doesn't like the villa, so he has the villa pulled down. And this is the kind of stunt that appalls lots of senators, but equally it kind of appeals to lots of voters as well. Well, when we started our podcast, Tom, we had an episode, one of the very first episodes we did was about parallels. We were talking about Donald Trump in historical context. And you compared him to, I mean the the title of the podcast was is Trump Caesar or or isn't that wasn't it is Trump Caesar or Nixon or something and you had this thing about the Romans having this Roman politics

having this role that people played where they deliberately appalled the kind of the bien pensant the great and the good yes in order to win popularity with the crowds and that's what caesar's doing from the start pretty much is it yes so i think i mean i i'm sure i mentioned it this in um in that episode but i'll do it again um i think the closest parallel to what the bonnie that's the the um the kind of classic senatorial elite the people who will loathe and detest Caesar throughout his career. If you think of John McCain's funeral, where all the presidents apart from Trump went and Democrats and Republicans were joined there in the kind of the front row to mourn this great hero. And Trump's comment on McCain was he didn't like losers. He, you know, he liked his war heroes not to be captured,

which is an appalling thing to say, particularly since Trump had never served. But it was also kind of darkly funny that the people did find funny because the kind of the shock of offending traditional norms was... Caesar was never... I mean, Caesar was a a great he was incredibly able

he was will turn out to be one of the greatest generals of all time he's a man of incredible ability but he does have a talent for grabbing attention or for winning the popular vote that perhaps there's just a kind of a hint of that there he he runs for consul and he wins it by a kind of massive massive majority and of course he has a colleague a guy called bibulus um who is there to stand up for the the the interests of the bonnie the the classic elite but but caesar just elbows aside. So people follow him around and empty buckets of shit over Bibulus' head. Oh dear, poor Bibulus. And when they try and oppose Caesar's measures that he's ramming through in favour of Pompey and Crassus, they get beaten up and they get forced out of the forum.

And so people say that this is the consulship not of Caesar and Bibulus, but of Julius and Caesar. But at this point, Tom, is he very much the third man in the triumvirate? Yes, he is. When they start out. And at that point, we had a couple of questions from people about Caesar and ambition. So Joshua D. Terry, for example, or Eduard Habsburg,

a man who has given his surname, a little bit about imperial power and the winning and losing of it so they're asking is Caesar even at this stage does he have his eyes on the prize does he see himself as another Sulla as a man who's going to wield supreme power or is he an opportunist seizing chances as they come up and you know is it is it premeditated or not this stage um he i think well i think there are two things going on in caesar's mind i think one is as i said that um he wants to do great things yeah but he wants to do great things for the republic for rome uh and he is frankly frustrated by the little guys who were trying to block him from that.

He has a consciousness of his own genius you to put the Republic in your shadow. And Pompey is on a scale beyond everyone else. I mean, Pompey is, Pompey is criminal in his methods, but conformist in his ambitions. And so there's, I think there's actually a question here from RP. Why did Pompey never do the equivalent of crossing the rubicon when he was at the height of his powers the reason he didn't do that was because ultimately he was in his heart a conservative he'd trampled down convention to get to the top but then having got to the top what he really wanted was the approval of you know the senatorial elite.

Pompey was a bit of a parvenu. He wanted to be accepted by them. Caesar didn't care about that. Caesar claimed a line of descent from Venus. He could trace his ancestry all the way back beyond the beginning of the Rome to Troy. So Caesar had no hang-ups about that. And he wanted that license because he felt that he deserved it, but also because he felt that if he was going to be a great man in the Republic, it was no longer enough just to be a consul. You had to have a record of military success behind you, which would bring you

legions who would be devoted to you. It would bring you the wealth that you could then spend on winning yourself popularity by kind of building spectacular architectural projects in Rome or handing money out to the poor or staging entertainments. And the only way to do that is for Caesar to get a command. Now, one of the things that his enemies had done before he becomes consul is to say, every consul, when he finishes his term of office, gets a kind of a posting. And they say, well, Caesar, as his posting, he can organize stuff in Italy. So basically, it's kind of, you know know he can be the head of um the motorways agency or something like that yeah and so he's not having any of that so so he basically what

Caesar does is he looks north where uh there are various kind of provinces um one on the the uh cis-alpine Gaul on on the Italian side of the Alps the other trans Transalpine Gaul, which is a kind of the south of what's now France. And he says, I'll have those, please. And so he gets given those, and not just for one year, but for five years. And by getting that, he's in pole position to win himself the kind of power and authority and wealth and status that only Pompey has. Okay, very good. So Caesar's career is going from strength to strength. The great kind of dramas and crises, the great showdown with Pompey, they all lie ahead of him. The stage is set, if you will. Not quite at the Rubicon, but we're getting there. And I think we should come back tomorrow to find out what happens next.

Now, dear listener, if you can't wait that long, I hate to tell you, but members of the Rest Is History Club can listen to the full episode already. And if you want to sign up, you go to restishistorypod.com. And if you don't, well, you only have to wait 24 hours, because maybe not even 24 hours, because the rest of the story will be out tomorrow so thank you very much tom holland and we will see you all tomorrow thank you very much goodbye thanks for listening to the rest is history for bonus episodes early access ad-free listening and access to our chat community