Mike Duncan, "The Storm Before The Storm"

Wow there's a lot of you all right hi everyone my name is Lazar lip I'm part of the event staff and I would like to welcome you all this wonderful Saturday afternoon to politics and prose tonight or this afternoon we're gonna hear Mike Duncan talk about his new book the storm before the storm the beginning of the end of the Roman Republic the storm before the storm looks at the years preceding the fall of the Roman Republic and asks questions like did it have to fall could Rome not have reformed and regained its former strength among many others Kirkus Reviews said of the book this is a book that delineates the crucial decades in a history of the ancient world most vividly rendered feel like I probably don't have to give Mike much of an introduction for you but I'm gonna anyway he is the host and writer of the history of Rome podcast which was named the best educational podcast at the 2010 podcast Awards he's also the author of the history of Rome the Republic please help me welcome him to politics and prose hello oh and welcome to this book event everybody can hear me okay perfect I can't really hear any speaker at all just sounds like I'm speaking normally thank you all very much for coming this is pretty overwhelming this has been all in all of these events in Boston in New York and Philadelphia it's been kind of the same thing I've just been cruising down and being frankly overwhelmed by by everybody's enthusiasm and I appreciate you probably even more than you appreciate me trust me on that believe me I get to do what I've always wanted to do for a living which is just sit and read books about history and then write about it and it's thanks to you guys that I get to do that being writing this book is really it's it's been a dream come true for me quite quite literally um you know when I was a kid when I was 10 11 years old you'd do that thing you know what do you what do you want to be when you grow up and I would say I want to be a writer like what is that even like just a writer what is it what am I even gonna write so when I was 11 I was I would think I was planning on writing like knock off red wall books if anybody out there knows the red wall books I had this whole series about talking mice but they flew in airplanes they were it wasn't medieval so it was different I was also I was also watching a lot of tailspin at the time so obviously I'm just you know it's peanut butter and jelly talking mice and n airplanes and then when I when I went off to college the plan was really to be like the next philip k dick that's what I wanted to be I wanted her to do like science fiction satirical philosophical stuff be the next the Vonnegut or have somebody be like always the poor man's Vonnegut that would have been cool too but then my life took like a really pretty strange turn when I just started one day in 2007 putting out episodes of this complete narrative history of the Roman Empire I was going to podcast because that's of course that's kind of thing one might do and so ever since then I've writing I mean I write every day I write every week I write you know these episodes each one of them is about 5,000 words long is what I have to knock out every week and I've written you know well over a million and a half words between revolutions in the history of Rome but all of that never got me to what was supposed to be the dream when I was 11 years old which is to have a physical book that have my name on it and everything so here we are it's just like I imagined it it's a physical book and it has my name on it so this is this is a dream come true honestly and then also being here at politics and prose is another dream come true because I am a huge nerd and I grew up watching book notes on c-span and the number of events that I would watch that are here at politics and prose like when they said hey do you want to do a book tour I said yeah can I go to politics and prose I can do the thing where the you know okay so now I'm here and it's fantastic they couldn't be nicer about everything so that's enough preliminary sentimentality that's enough preliminary sentimentality so I don't want to do a reading from the book I don't want to like read from chapter 4 chapter 5 or anything I don't want to do spoil I mean we don't kind of know how it turns out but it's not good but there's specific people that you don't know when they die even though we know that everybody dies it's like oh is he gonna die on this page or the next page it's usually that page um so rather than do that though I want to read from the author's note because the author's note will kind of put into perspective why the book exists in the first place and then it'll give me an opportunity to sort of talk around the book rather than just going through you know like the plot of the book so I will read from the author's note and in so in case you thought you were going to get away with skipping the author's notes you are sorely mistaken okay where is it okay author's note no period in history has been more thoroughly studied than the fall of the Roman Republic the names Caesar Pompey Cicero Octavian Mark and Cleopatra are among the most well known names not just in Roman history but in human history each year we are treated to a new book movie or TV show depicting the lives of this vaunted last generation of the Roman Republic there are good reasons for their continued predominance it is a period alive with fascinating personalities and earth-shattering events it is especially riveting for those of us in the modern world who suspecting the fragility of our own Republican institutions look to the rise of the Caesars as a cautionary tale a Ben Franklin's famous remark that the Constitutional Convention had produced a republic if you can keep it rings all these generations later as a warning bell and we all remember that from revolutions episode 2 points 16 right we covered that in revolutions podcast episode 2 point 16 just recycling material right okay so surprisingly there has been much less written about how the Roman Republic came to the brink of disaster in the first place a question that is perhaps more relevant today than ever a raging fire naturally commands attention but to prevent future fires one must ask how the fire started no revolution Springs out of thin air right we know that no revolution spree there's always like six to eight episodes of background there's budgetary meetings there's discussions of what the interest rates are on government bonds before we can actually get to the heads being chopped off so the political system that Julius Caesar destroyed through sheer force of ambition certainly was not healthy to begin with much of the fuel that ignited in the 40s and 30s BC had been poured a century earlier the critical generation that preceded that of cicero caesar and antony that of the revolutionary grok eye brothers the stubbornly ambitious marius and the infamously brash sulla is neglected we have long been denied a story that is as equally thrilling chaotic frightening hilarious and riveting as that of the final generation of the Republic and this book tells that story but this book does not serve simply as a way to fill in a hole in our knowledge of Roman history while producing the history of Rome I was asked the same set of questions over and over again and over and over and over again is America Rome is the United States face is the United States following a similar historical trajectory if so where does the United States stand on the Roman timeline now attempting to make a direct comparison between Rome and the United States is always fraught with danger but that does not mean there is no value to entertaining the question it at least be Hooves us to identify where in the thousand year history of the Roman Empire we might find an analogous historical setting so in that vein let's explore this we are not in the origin phase where a collection of exiles dissidents and vagabonds migrate to a new territory and establish a permanent settlement that would correspond if anything to the early colonial days nor are we in the Revolutionary phase where a group of disgruntled aristocrats overthrow the monarchy and create a republic that would correspond to the days of the founding fathers and we aren't in the global conquest phase where a series of wars against other great powers establishes international military political and economic agenda that would be the 20th century global conflicts of world war one world war two and the Cold War finally despite what some hysterical commentators may claim the Republic has not collapsed and it has not been taken over by a dictator that has not happened yet that hasn't happened yet that means that if the United States is anywhere on the Roman timeline it must be somewhere between the great wars of conquest and the rise of the Caesars further investigation into this period reveals an earful of historical echoes that will sound eerily familiar to the modern reader the final victory over Carthage in the Punic Wars led to rising economic inequality dislocation of traditional ways of life increasing political polarization the breakdown of unspoken rules of political conduct the privatization of the military rampant corruption endemic social and ethnic prejudice battles over citizenship and voting rights ongoing military Quagmire's the introduction of violence as a political tool and a set of elite so obsessed with their own privileges that they refuse to reform the system in time to save it now these echoes could be mere coincidence but the great Greek biographer Plutarch certainly believed it possible that if on the other hand there is a limited number of elements from which events are interwoven the same things must happen many times being brought to pass by the same agencies so if history is to have any active meaning there must be a place for identifying those interwoven elements studying the recurring agencies and learning from those who came before us the Roman Empire has always been and will always be fascinating in its own right and this book is most especially a narrative history of a particular epoch of Roman history but if our own age carries with it many of those limited number of elements being brought to pass by the same agencies then this particular period of Roman history is well worth deep investigation contemplation and reflection so the author's notes lays out really the two reasons why this book exists the first of course is that it is a weirdly under covered period in Roman history this age that covering just the grok I and Marius and sulla the fact that people don't care more about it or investigate it further or there aren't a plethora of books about it has always been something of a mystery to me and when we were preparing with my agent to pitch the book to various publishers one of the things you do is you go back and look at what other books it might compare to what other books might be in competition with and we couldn't find any book that covers this particular 50 or 60 year period in Roman history like on its own merits we've found one back in about 1908 it was written by a guy and it was the it was very creatively titled the grok eye Marius and sulla and we figured it's been a hundred years it's probably about time to do we can probably do an update on whatever that dead guy did so this period and you'll read in the book I mean some of you've had it for a little while you've you've maybe started reading it or if you're about to read it um what you will find is that this period has towering historical figures I mean Marius and sulla are two of the most important leaders in the history of not just the Roman Republic but the Roman Empire these are life and death rivalries that are driving that are going to be driving events there are huge climactic battles there are deep social and political and economic problems that they are grappling with and then the whole thing culminates the whole back third of the book starting around Chapter nine is an enormous civil war that almost destroys the Republic right then in their like it almost collapsed and not just it wasn't just the Republic that almost fell apart it would have been the entire Roman system very possibly would have been destroyed right there in the 80s BC and the fact that it didn't is something of a minor miracle so having this period be ignored even on its own merits is pretty bad Faline there is though a whole nother reason why it's baffling why we don't have a tendency to investigate this period and that's because as eventful and impactful and important as it is it's even more important because it's the direct precursor for what is arguably one of the most famous moments not just in Roman history but in human history which is the arrival of Julius Caesar the great civil wars that destroy the Republic and the transition of Rome from a republic to an empire this book is the prequel to all of that stuff and it's something that it would this was not ancient history to Julius Caesar and to Pompey I mean Pompey shows up at the end of the book he's 20 years old he's okay what's not talking about mommy uh so Pompey shows up at the end of the book Julius Caesar will show up at the end of the book Crassus shows up at the end of the book this is their lived experience and for us to know so much about how the collapse happens is really a lot like jumping into a movie in the third act where everything is really exciting everybody seems to care really deeply about what they're trying to do everybody's running around and fighting with each other but you don't quite know where it all came from like why any of this originated how it got to this point in the first place so we know so much now about the end that we should probably at some point just just to understand Roman history go back and study the beginning of the end of the Roman Republic no longer forthcoming from public affairs breasts October 24th 2017 it's out guys all did your part so that's just that's just the first reason it exists it's because this is a this is a fascinating and important period just in Roman history but there is this other thing where if you do if you kind of pull back unfocus your eyes and don't care too much about the granular details the period after the great imperial conquests that the republic achieved in around 146 BC in the middle of the second century but before the great civil wars that destroyed the Republic there are there are a lot of similarities and a lot of things that the Romans were dealing with that I think that we were dealing with and I we all know how it turned out for the Romans and if history is to have some kind of active meaning as I said in the author's note we should take a look at what they did well not much what they did wrong quite a bit and see if we can't learn from their mistakes so what I want to spend the rest of the time doing now sort of exploring some of the similarities talk about what it was that the Romans were facing here in the 130s and 120s the beginning of the end of the Roman Republic so that maybe we can avoid getting to the end of the end of the Roman Republic which I don't think anybody wants that it was a very bloody and it was a very bad time to be alive if nothing else so the earth the the Republic at its first once it emerges from its worse with Carthage the the single most destabilizing element that introduces itself early is skyrocketing economic inequality this is something that is going to disrupt their economic their economic modes and this is something is going to disrupt their political system because what happens is the legions go out a conquering they go to Greece they go to North Africa they go to Spain they're discovering silver mines they come back they're bringing back the wealth of the Mediterranean literally in baggage trains we're talking about hundreds of thousands of pounds of silver this guy this guy this consul goes out he comes back for his triumph with 80,000 pounds of raw silver this guy goes out he comes back with 300 thousand gold coins and 200 thousand silver coins I mean we're talking about literally the species of the entire Mediterranean world is now like being pointed all at Rome that is to say nothing then of their military conquest making Rome without question the most important city in the Mediterranean world it went from you know most cities in the in the Mediterranean world were you know 10,000 and 15,000 maybe 20,000 if it was really big Rome is eventually going to move into the hundreds of thousands and then at the peak of the Imperial age it's gonna it's gonna tip up over a million that makes it the center of a Mediterranean wide trading network where ever it becomes the hub so we have more wealth cycling through more wealth cycling through just on top of the spoils of war you just have them making money pretty much hand over fist from that point on the problem is that all of this wealth is being accumulated in the hands of just the rich senatorial nobility they are the consuls they are the generals they are the Senators the Senate is who is in control of the temple of Saturn which is the state treasury so all of this just unimaginable wealth I mean wealth that a hundred years earlier their ancestors their grandfathers and great-grandfather's would have never been able to Contin imagine how much wealth their grandsons now controlled and it was being controlled by a very small number of families this period of imperial conquest then great for Rome great for those that small clique of senatorial families quite bad for all of the lower-class Romans so this isn't just a matter of the rich getting richer it is also a matter of the poor are getting poorer military service which had been premise on the the the Roman legions in the early days we're almost a glorified citizen militia where you would get up you would come together in the spring you would go fight some skirmishes you would go fight some battles if if harvest time came everybody would quit the field and go back and harvest there there go back and harvest their their crops because even your enemies were working on the same agrarian economic system that you were so everybody would like we call a truce we'd go break we'd all go back we'd harvest our farms and then come back and maybe fight it out some more winner everybody takes it off by the time you get to these large imperial conquests you're sending people you're sending men abroad four three four five six years at a time you're sending them to Spain you're sending them to Greece you're sending them to North Africa and in that time their land their little small plot of land is often falling into disrepair they're not able to maintain it their their service itself is not particularly lucrative it's not like they are coming back with with wagon loads of gold for themselves so they come back and they find their farms mostly in much worse shape than when they left this runs them into all of the senatorial families who have massive amounts of wealth the Romans they they don't they're not the Romans were not scrooge mcduck right they didn't want to necessarily sit on a pile of gold and go swimming in it I was already my second Disney Afternoon reference of the day I just realized that I don't know why that gold and silver were not the true measures of wealth right the true measure of wealth was land right so they wanted to take all that money and they wanted to invest in land so at the same moment that the poorer citizen farmers the the lower-class guys are facing ruin along comes a rich neighbor who says hey I would like to buy your plot of land and I have some gold that will allow me to do that and so you sell the land sell land over here you sell the land over there those estates start growing and growing and this is the beginning of about a hundred year long process where Italy transforms from a patchwork network of small farms into these big sprawling commercially oriented they're called lotta fun do where you're producing olives you're producing grapes you're producing grain over here a small farmer simply cannot compete with that operation there's no way to do it so the rich are getting richer the poor are getting poorer they're being dispossessed of their land the rural peasants are being dispossessed of their land so now they're like okay I can either be stay here as a tenant farmer or I can move to the city in search of wage labor or day laborer this runs them into the other thing that the Romans are now able to invest their wealth in which is slaves right so this is also the beginning of a process where Rome transforms from a society that has slaves to a slave Society right where most of the economic most of the baseline labor in the Roman economy is now going to be done by slaves they're going to be the ones working in the fields if they are incredibly unlucky they will be sent to work in the mines which is a terrible which is a a one of worst existences I've ever come across in all of my all of my historical settings it's a sugar plantations in the Caribbean and slaves in the state minds in Roman and during the Republican era both of those are just horrendous they are also if you're a skilled artisan you're being brought into Rome are you being brought into one of the other cities and now you're doing the skilled arts and crafts work so this is running these lower-class Romans these these poor peasants in these urban plebs it's creating a lot of resentment it's creating a lot of anger they know that life used to be a certain way and that they used to have security and that they used to have a way of life and all of it is now changing under their feet and they're starting to get very resentful and they're starting to get very bitter this creates an opportunity for a new mode of Roman politics a new style of Roman politics to enter the picture which is to take all of that resentful energy and try to mobilize it because of these people could vote you could if you could mobilize these people and you could get them to vote you could send them down to the assembly and you could start to do things with that energy that's just one thing that's going on this is for lack of a you know a more complicated way of putting it this is the difference between the rich and the poor in Rome there is however a completely parallel power that is growing which is the conflict between the Romans the Roman citizens proper and non Roman Italians I will discuss this in Chapter two of the storm before the storm the beginning of the end of the Roman Republic win win Rome conquered Italy they did not simply annex the territory they had conquered into into the Roman state and make the new conquered the new conquered people equal citizens equals not even really subjects and it would not even be appropriate to call them second-class citizens because they weren't citizens at all they were allies what Rome did was they would sign a Treaty of Peace between Rome and whatever the city is in Korea or in Umbria or down south with the Greeks where the only obligation really that one of the cities would have is to provide troops for the legions whenever the Romans came around asking for troops for the legions they didn't really pay much in taxes I mean there might have been a couple of consumption taxes that they wound up getting sucked into but there was no direct tax from Rome Rome was not sending prefix in to rule them directly the local the local elites were allowed to govern their cities as they saw fit and for about two hundred years this was a this was a pretty good deal for the non Roman Italians it's one of the big reasons why they were able to survive the second Punic War right I mean this is a big question when Hannibal comes down and he's running around and he's trying to tell all the Italians hey Rome conquered you and I'm here to liberate you they're like I don't know it's not that bad what I like what are you gonna do where you're gonna tax us and he's you know probably I mean that way you're supposed to do you supposed to tax you're supposed to tax your subjects so this is a pretty good deal for about two hundred years but again by this period of Rome's great triumphal Imperial conquests the costs of not being a Roman citizen begin to outweigh the benefits of not being a Roman citizen because for example if you take like the lower class the lower class non Roman Italians no less than their Roman cousins they were facing the same problems they had been hauled off to worse they've the Italians fault filled up two thirds of the Roman legions they too would go off in conquer they would they would spill their blood they would come back their farms would be ruined they would get bought out by rich neighbors but they had no recourse they didn't even have the right they couldn't run for office to to fight for themselves they couldn't they couldn't vote for somebody who was promising to fight for them so that also begins to create a lot of friction and a lot of resentful energy and what is interesting what happens at least to me it's interesting hopefully it's interesting to you too is that when the Italians would start to agitate for citizenship which really starts getting going during the age of the grok I Tiberius Krakus is the first to broach the idea that maybe we should treat the Italians the same way that we treat Romans and then Gaius caucus Oh embraces the cause of Italian citizenship and he goes around promising Italian citizenship this is going to be the thing that actually binds rich Romans and poor Romans together so where there is this cleavage there is this tension and there is this confrontation and conflict between rich Romans and poor Romans they would get together anytime the Italian question came up and were uniformly opposed to the idea of letting the Italians into the state even though the Italians were in every way equal participants in what you would call it quote unquote Roman society and the reason why is because obviously the senatorial elite they don't want to let anybody into the system they they're quite happy with their with their little pocket of privilege and power if you were a lower-class Roman though if we start to get to a point where somebody comes along and says hey I'm gonna take land from the rich and I'm gonna give it to the poor if you're a poor Roman you're saying that's great I can't wait for my whatever thirty acres but if it also is available to Italians that just increases the number of people I'm in competition with for my land so there's a very real economic incentive for the lower-class Romans to resist the idea of bringing in the Italians this however does create everywhere I mean not to get not to get like weirdly like metaphysical about it but there was this resentful energy that was now percolating through the system there was anger people had legitimate grievances they wanted addressed and they didn't feel like they were being addressed so along comes this new popular a tradition in Roman politics which is again as I said is really going to these people and saying I'm gonna solve your problems I have I have a plan the grok I had a plan to redistribute land from the rich to the poor Gaius Krakus has a whole slate of reforms that he plans on introducing late is going to help these people there's going to solve these people's problems so they come they'll come flooding into Rome to vote for this the democratic assemblies were still quite a pot what a powerful institution we talk a lot about the Republic being like this oligarchy where the Senate controlled everything in the Senate had the final say and everything if you could pack a voting if you could pack the voting stalls at one of the popular assemblies you could over whatever the considered consensus opinion of the Senate was so you start getting these popular a agitators who break into really two categories after having researched this book to death I think that the grok I do fall into a category that you would call a genuine reformer there's no there's no there's no altruism at work here right this isn't this isn't altruism they were not let's do this because it will simply be good they were political leaders they wanted political power they could see how much they could harness the resentment of the urban plans the resentment of the rural poor and use that as a rocket ship to the top of the Roman food chain but they also recognized that if they didn't start solving some of these problems that the Republic itself was endanger things were getting seriously out of whack Gaius caucus in particular could see that there was too much power and too much wealth that was being held by the Senators and it was disrupting the balance of what we talked about in the prologue is the polybius Constitution which is a nice balance between executive power and aristocratic power and democratic power this was all getting out of whack so guys Caracas and his dead brother Tiberius who I guess is already dead at this point um but when he starts introducing these reforms what happens the Senate is intransigent ly opposed to everything that he is doing they are going to do everything in their power to try to fight against Gaius introducing introducing any kinds of reform a land redistribution the urban plebs want want subsidized grain they just want some grain they want food stability they want to know that the price they pay for grain today is gonna be the price they pay tomorrow and Gaius is going to promise them that Gaius is going to he's gonna bring out Road prey Road building programs and colonization projects that are going to give people jobs that are gonna give people a place to live that's gonna give people new land and hope so the Senate opposes all of this now the Senate opposes this for for two reasons one is that the Roman elite and the Romans generally were simply they were small C conservative in their out they wanted yesterday they wanted today to be like yesterday they wanted tomorrow to be like today they just wanted to keep things moving and they wanted they wanted a uniformity to their lives they wanted to live the same way that their fathers did they wanted their sons and daughters to live the same way that they did so that's definitely a part of it right and now it's a pretty powerful force the other problem the other thing that is motivating though and what shows up what showed up again and again and again as I was as I was working through trying to tell this story is that they were opposed to what Gaius Krakus was up to because if Gaius Kroc has succeeded in passing all these popular pieces of reform that Gaius Krakus would be incredibly popular and he would have more power and influence inside the Senate than they would so it became a matter not of denying the reform because you disagree with these with this stuff in principle hell if it was you you might actually be doing this if it wasn't your rival if it wasn't like the grok I who were the ones doing it so the whole point was you had to deny your rival a win almost beyond the merits of the case itself and so that's why they start to any time one of these guys breaks loose this is gonna happen over and over again in the book as we see these sort of poeple are a agitators pop up over and over again the idea is you have to defeat them because if you let them have a win any win at all doesn't matter what it is then they're gonna be more popular and more influential than you so what happens to the Drakh i brothers we know what happens to the crock i brothers they wind up dead so that's not very good right everybody winds up dead this creates an incredibly confrontational new style of politics the Romans had been had had worked very well on on the basis of consensus right they they would get together they would come to a consensus about something and then they would move forward and for a variety of reasons at this point you start having the papillary energy that wants to reform the state and this this intransigent elite that is not going to let this reform happen for often what we're very petty inside baseball reasons nothing is getting done none of the reforms are coming to pass this resentful energy is not going anywhere this resentful energy can still be harnessed and it leaves the field open not too genuine reformers like the grok eye brothers are there there are others that are going to show up it leaves the field open too cynical demagogues and cynical demagogues don't care about solving your problems they don't care about actually following through on land redistribution they care about getting you whipped up into enough of a frenzy that you will come down and vote for them and they will be able to use your passion and your energy to destroy the demagogues opponents so that the demagogue can rise to a position of power inside the state so they get there almost doesn't matter to them whether they follow through on anything this is going to be once we get to Saturn enos and and Claudia and those guys that Marius is gonna this is all in Chapter chapter 8 of the storm before the storm the beginning of the end of the Roman Republic I think it's chapter 8 yeah they don't care they just want power and they're gonna use it they're gonna use this popular energy to get power so now we've got you know there's genuine reformers trying to do good you got cynical demagogues trying to manipulate the mob into driving putting them on a rocket ship now to power and you have the Senate opposing everything at every turn this creates so much tension and so much conflict that you have a real breakdown of what the Romans called most my Oram most my Oram was it roughly translates as the way of the elders which were the unspoken norms the unspoken political norms the the ways that you would behave towards each other the ways that you would behave around each other things that you would not things that you would do things that you would not do because by this point all that matters is defeating your rivals right all the policies as I said almost ceased to matter and there is a quote from solaced our old friend solaced who's always good for a quote he says it is this spirit which has commonly ruined great nations when one party desires to triumph over another by any and every means and to avenge itself the vanquished with excessive cruelty so that level of caring mostly about winning and losing inside the political system as opposed to actually governing the society well leads to a slow breakdown we're in chapter 1 if you guys listen to chapter one you know there's you know we're talking about political maneuverings like Tiberius introduced the lex agraria to the popular assembly without asking the senate permission right without asking what the senate had to say about it because he knew the senate didn't want him to do it so he did an end-run around the senate so the senate what they put out a tribune who's gonna block Tiberius his ability to have this bill be read this in itself is like a crazy breach of most my arm because no Tribune had ever stood before the popular assembly and said hey you guys know this really popular bill that you all cannot wait to vote for and we are supporting like riotously I'm just gonna not let you do it a Tribune is a defender of the people and this opened actually a real constitutional question about whether or not a Tribune who opposed the will of the people could even be considered a Tribune this question leads Tiberius Krakus to de posing that Tribune from office buy it straight majority vote of the assembly that had never been done before so these conflicts start to erode what had been a you know for lack of a better word a more civilized way of conducting politics and you start breaking out into more confrontational styles of politics in Chapter 1 is going to end with Tiberius caucus of course winding up dead and then his brother is gonna wind up dead a few years later and this is just gonna keep on going and going and going throughout the book and you have the Senate are going to they're going to convene special illegal tribunals to punish the followers of the grok I and other of these popular educators violating their rights of passing sentences of death that they actually had no right to pass this is gonna lead even later in the book to then the popul re having their revenge during like the jogger teen war days and convening quasi revolutionary tribunals to identify and purge Nobles that they don't like because there are quasi revolutionary tribunals in the book it's really fun you know I hate I would hate for the revolutions listeners to feel like they're getting out of this book you didn't actually read the history of Rome and then of course you get down to street gangs running into each other and then those Street gangs which were really pretty ad hoc you start getting by the very end they're being organized you have swordsmen on retainer you have you know I give you so much about a month but anytime I need you you're gonna we're gonna go mob to send it together or we're gonna go mob the assemblies and this leads ultimately as I said the whole back third of the book is a giant civil war that almost destroys the Republic so it just kept spiraling out of control and spiraling out of control and the problem with ignoring early on violations of most my Oram and violations of the way that you're sort of supposed to behave around each other and not and sort of accepting defeat instead of trying to think of some extra way that you can kind of like snatch victory from the jaws of defeat by the end you get to the quote from Pompey that I think everybody at this point hopefully knows if you don't it's this Pompey had Pompey was out hunting for the enemies of Celle and had convened a an extra legal tribunal to just identify these guys and kill him by Fiat which he had no right to do because I mean Pompey was like 22 years old he hadn't even been elected to any office yet like he was just he was literally just a private citizen working on sulles behalf and some magistrates come to him and they say hey man this is illegal and Pompey snaps at them cease quoting laws to those of us with swords because at the end of the day a written law having power over you or us deciding that written laws have power over us is itself merely an unspoken custom there is nothing that actually binds us to let's say the written constitution or to some body of law and says hey you're not allowed to do this oh yeah well what if I just simply pull out my sword and run you through and then I can do whatever I want ultimately power does rest on brute force and that is what is exposed every time we start to let our our unspoken norms and our unspoken ways of behavior once we start to let those go we do eventually wind up just facing each other down with swords we go from yelling at each other to literally trying to kill each other which as we know after the course of my book we know what happens we get to the fall of the Republicans a giant Civil War that's the end of the end of the Roman Republic so what I hope you're gonna take out of this book and what I hope you take away from this today is that there are some things that we can do that will prevent us from getting to the end of the end of of any Republic and maybe if the Republican if the Romans had done it they too could have avoided the end of the end of their republic one of them as I just mentioned is prioritizing short-term political advantage short term political maneuverings I'm gonna I'm gonna one-up you right at this moment but I'm not really gonna see beyond that once everybody starts behaving that way that has a cumulative effect and a long-term destructive effect on the legitimacy of the political institutions that you're operating in so that would be that's a big thing I also think that prioritizing partisan advantage over what what they almost all saw as somewhat necessary reforms they there they could see that there were problems brewing out there they did want to let pressure off off the they did want to let pressure out but they simply were so concerned about not letting their political rival get credit for it get the win that they block each other and they just go around mutually blocking each other mutually blocking each other mutually blocking each other and so nothing gets done none of that energy is ever relieved and so by ignoring that by ignoring all of that resentful energy that had been building up among the Italians among the lower classes it as I said left the field open to people who were just planning on using all of that resentful energy to their own ends as a means to power nah they didn't want to promise these people that they were going to that he or she was going to solve all of your problems just because they wanted to solve problems but rather because they wanted to exploit it for their own personal advantage so we should probably not keep our heads in the sand we should probably stop trying to snipe with each other over mere petty little partisan for mere petty little partisan reasons and so I think that we if we are at the beginning of the end of the Roman Republic it would behoove us to try to avoid what the Romans did which was put their heads in the sand and try to pretend like everything was fine and that ultimately led to the end of the end of the Roman Republic and that is where I will end the end of this little talk that I just gave thank you very much so it is Q&A time if anybody would like to ask a question I know that there is a microphone here in front of me there's a microphone over there to my right yes sir so despite the obvious parallels with America today what the political and economic conditions you talked about remind me most of is the British Empire in the 18th and 19th century and yet the British Empire did make the reforms in particular they realized how poisonous slavery was and got rid of it where the Romans didn't so so it sort of is possible to reform yourself I wondered if you had any comment I think it's absolutely possible I don't think that anything is inevitable here you know you bring up the example of the British Empire I think in the course of American history the the 1890s were a particular 1880s and 1890s after the Industrial Revolution comes along they were dealing with many of these same problems I mean you have the the move from agrarian to to really like pretty brutal forms of industrial economics that you know you got five-year-olds working 18 hours a day like all these thing you have rats in the meat there's no standards for anything and there was there was a lot of resentment and energy that was building up at that point and then again you know around the era of the Great Depression and I think in the united in the history of the united states I think that the the Progressive Era many of the progressive reforms that that were instituted in the nineteen you know the first decade of the 1900s whatever you call that the Ott's and the 1910s and teens and then you know through the New Deal I think a lot of that blunted some of those effects and presented or prevented the American Republic from collapsing at that point so yeah none of this is nothing is inevitable if you can if you can think with slightly ahead of seventeen seconds from now which is whenever your tweet feed is going to refresh history question would given the wide span of its existence were there any technologies and your opinion had a significant impact on the trajectory or the formation of it be economic social military like technologically yeah it's a it's a weird thing the Romans were not super into technology and it's because it's because of this thing there was like a small C conservative outlook that they had and there's Fame like I don't really know how apocryphal this would like there was a steam engine in the library at Alexandria like somebody had like figured out how it worked and they just um they weren't that interested in finding a better way to do things that wasn't anything that ever drove them you know we have a tendency to think of progress as like an inherently good thing there's a you know there there's a thing that exists and maybe I can maybe I can make it slightly faster I can make it slightly thinner everybody's and make it slightly thinner and then it'll be better but the Romans never really cared that much about it and it's why I think they continued to be just like basically agrarian slave society for for thousands and thousands of years yeah well I mean those are yeah I guess he invented a different kind of spear so we can give him that but though those are reforms but like from a technological standpoint there there were you know subtle differences but it's not like they were they were not looking to build a better mousetrap hello hello so I appreciate that you have a perspective when telling history and and make that very explicit like it's very clear where you're coming from and I I also follow you on Twitter and see you know some of your political perspectives and well let's not talk about that well I happen to agree with you I happen to agree with you on a lot of things do you worry that you're ever a lien aiding people um like so for for the whole course of the show I mean I don't talk about politics in the show at all I don't ever bring anything contemporary into the show I don't think I ever have I think I once provocatively said that Randy Johnson was the greatest left-handed pitcher of all time now as bad as because I got to and I actually had a guy yelling at me about lefty Grove it's I'm not stupid I know who lefty Grove is he's just not as good as Randy Johnson so when this when this election happened I did break a little bit I was writing I was writing this book while producing the revolutions podcast Wow having the 2016 election going on that really scrambled my brain quite a bit I was I was in a weird place at times and I I think that there are things and you know I'll say is what that Donald Trump is doing that I think are quite dangerous that I think are very destructive that I don't think are healthy for the long-term health of the American Republic and so I've been more vocal about saying that in particular than anything else I have lost listeners here and there who are quite surprised that somebody with my historical background could not support Trump in all that he is doing for the United States of America and block hi okay fantastic so I've been listening to you for a decade ish um and each of your podcasts basically consists of the story time of whichever time period and there's humorous quirky bits of history in between there I was wondering what is your favourite bit of quirky Roman history my favourite bit of quirky Roman history sacred chickens sacred chickens is that a good answer that's great everybody does everybody know the story of the sacred Jay okay also real quick it's basically like there were these chickens that were sacred and I'm telling this really well and what a general would do this is during the Second Punic War and what you'd have to do is like have these sacred chickens like you would scatter grain in front of them and if they ate that meant that like it was a good time to have a battle like you guys talking about but so there there's one at one of these Roman generals during the Second Punic War they're on some ships and he they scattered the grain and the chickens don't eat and so his his advisor sort of like hey we can't have a battle and he's like oh well if they're not hungry maybe they're thirsty and he kicks them all overboard they drowned and and then that guy gets is he Wow he gets smashed to pieces he dies and and that's and that's it for him so yeah you don't you don't ignore don't ignore the sacred chickens really okay we thought it was out of softball that you're really setting me up [Laughter] yes sir hi hi um hello hello I guess having read a lot of the book what do you see as the big differences between the American and Roman republics that are important here oh well I think I think one of the big things we actually did just touch on this a little bit that the in the modern age especially coming out of the Enlightenment like we do have this understanding of progress whatever it happens to be whatever whatever your whatever your political stripe is there is a general notion that things are not uniformly perfect right now and that we can make that we we can and should pursue changes to improve things that was something that the Romans really struggled with and I don't want to underplay the idea that part of what the Senate was opposed to when guys like the grok I would come along is the very nature of all of this change in and of itself so I think that that certainly makes us more receptive to trying to head things off than it would for the Romans and then also like we have pants made in Vegas would be another thing and we eat better than they did - hello if I got the chance if you could have any sources that are just missing Oh every every one of them yeah I mean they're like all these guys wrote memoirs right we know that that we know this from the ancient sources I mean sulla wrote a memoir but I the answer to this is that we know that Claudius at the Emperor Claudius right he was he was like just like the sixth guy in the line of succession so he was just gonna be a historian and he just studied things and he wrote a history of the civil wars and the rise of the Giulio Claudian dynasty that was suppressed because it was too accurate and boy would I ever like to get my hands on that thank you yes sir so on behalf of all the revolutions listeners I got to know did you make the New York Times Book Review list or what I won't know until next Wednesday right there there's there's there's a large accumulation of everything but I will say this I will say this because you guys are here and I do know this because I just swept through the publishers office and they told me this that we were going for 5,000 pre-orders right that's they said if you do that you'll be in pretty good shape and I was like all right so we did 8600 pre-orders so we're very happy so that's that's all I know about that right now yes so Roman politics at this time seems very personality based you know your faction was determined by who the faction yeah I think in contemporary American politics we're seeing a shift away from faith in political parties and towards political leaders whether it's you know you are a fan of Donald Trump not a fan of the Republican establishment or you are a Quinton or Sanders Democrat is there anything we can learn from the what happened in Rome about the results when faith is in individuals rather than ideal like ideas or establishments okay well so there's there's two there's a couple parts of this that I would say one is we are I would I would I would say that the United States right now is actually more party driven than personality driven than at any point in history certainly when it comes to electing you know maybe on a presidential level that's gonna be a little bit different but on the on a basic like electing your local representative or electing a senator it almost doesn't matter who the candidate is I mean if you're especially bad or especially good it might matter but mostly most people are going out there and voting for the red team or for the blue team and that's the way that we have a tendency I think at this point to see politics we see politics through the prism of red and blue so that's that's I think for most elections at the presidential level I don't I just don't feel like like the Bernese it's like the Bernie Sanders thing or even the Obama thing or even the Trump thing has a lot less to do with creating a personality we accuse our enemies of creating a cult of personality and Obama was accused of being the product of a cult of personality Sanders was accused of generating a cult of personality and when I looked through everything I mean I'm an American citizen I keep up with what's going on and I don't feel like that was a cult of personality around some like grizzled old senator from Vermont you know I think that there was I think there was a real thing that there was there were beliefs and there were ideologies that these people wanted to express and needed some candidate to channel it through and I think that that's where somebody like Sanders comes from I think the same was true of Obama I don't think that it was so much that Barack Obama was some Messiah that we were all going to like worship that Shepard Fairey poster I don't think that was really what people what was driving people and even Trump as much I mean he's he's as much a cult of personality leader that we have ever seen and even that he was a conduit for what people were feeling more than people more than people identifying with him in particular so I'm not sure we're at we're at a truly dangerous stage with that level of cult of personality although Trump is you know daily making me probably regret that statement yes just so you know we have time for these last two quest to questions okay hi a long time first time but um perhaps not ten years but still um now when studying history this is a question of kind of the study of history of teleology ontology it's um I guess it's it's useful for telling a story especially in the way that you do it through a podcast but how do you kind of separate kind of the movement of humans through society from kind of these these singular personalities that you tell the store help tell the stories through like the the I'm kind of asking about how do you reckon with the the great man kind of theory of history right so I I have a very middle approach to it's um like in in the grand historiography of the world like you could probably accuse me of being like a neo Whig right but nobody knows what that means which is good thank God nobody's accusing me of being a neo Whig um but I I believe that it is a mix of things right so there are these great economic social forces there's an entire past an entire history that is inescapable for political leaders and even just individuals on us on an individual level who don't have any power at all we can't change where we've arrived at but there is such a thing as individual free will and I think that there is such a thing as people who have power being able to influence events in a certain way I mean I just I just finally thanks to audible.com was able to I did I did warn peace right and Tolstoy is huge on this notion that like Napoleon didn't even matter right it's it is these great you know sweeping forces of history and I think that goes too far because I've seen plenty of times in all of the history that I have studied where miss oftentimes it's mistakes right more than anything else it's it's less it's less the dare it's less like the genius of some great leader but oftentimes individual mistakes do dramatically change the course of history and if they hadn't have made that mistake things would have been different so I was like it's it's it's almost I'm thinking out loud now because I never thought about it this way this cool but it's yeah it's not a great man theory it's almost like a failure man theory we're like who screwed up and because individuals are making decisions you know we I don't think that we are just I don't think that human beings are mere you know puppets driven by some force of history I don't I don't believe that thank you yeah okay is this the last one there's gonna be last one they're all they're all not they're all nodding yes at me so I guess this is last question I London a fun one so we've heard a lot about people debating who's the best Roman Emperor and we've heard a lot about who's the worst who do you think is the best of the worst yeah I yeah it's it's Nero Nero sneer OHS the best of the worst he was the oldest I think of them right which is the thing you don't you don't hand that was the big lesson of the history of Rome is all the worst emperors were like 17 years old so if you don't give power to a 17 year old or two emotionally stunted leaders who haven't matured beyond seventeen years old that would be another thing that we should probably avoid okay that's the that's the end of the questions thank thank you thank you thank you thank you so much for coming out I will sit here and sign books until my hand falls off you

Channel: Politics and Prose

Views: 33,035

Rating: 4.8688526 out of 5

Keywords: P&P TV, Washington DC, Politics and Prose, Authors, Books, Events, Literature, Mike Duncan, The Storm Before The Storm, The History Of Rome, Podcast, Rome, Caesar, Revolutions, Roman Empire

Id: R70eegNOBgc

Length: 60min 3sec (3603 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 09 2017