Tiberius Gracchus and the fall of the Roman Republic illustrate how wealth disparity and populist land reforms shattered political norms, leading to the first state-sanctioned violence in 133 BCE. As tribunes bypassed the Senate and armed mobs assassinated reformers, the Republic's stability crumbled within two generations, mirroring modern anxieties about military-industrial complexes and economic inequality. Ultimately, this transition from a citizen-soldier society to a police state warns that ignoring systemic dispossession invites civil war and authoritarian collapse. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
|
Time
Text
Trust Your Girlfriends00:02:11
This is an iHeart podcast.
Guaranteed human.
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He is not going to get away with this.
He's going to get what he deserves.
We always say that: trust your girlfriends.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I got you, I got you.
10-10 shots five, city hall building.
How could this ever happen in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that, Jeffrey Woods.
A shocking public murder.
This is one of the most dramatic events that really ever happened in New York City politics.
They screamed, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
A tragedy that's now forgotten.
And a mystery that may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Laurie Siegel, and this is Mostly Human, a tech podcast through a human lens.
This week, an interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to the products we put out in the world.
An in-depth conversation with a man who's shaping our future.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, it's Nora Jones, and my podcast, Playing Along, is back with more of my favorite musicians.
Check out my newest episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Shar each day with me each night, each morning.
Listen to Nora Jones' Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
A Thousand Years of Shit00:15:31
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ago Mode.
My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
He goes, just give it a shot.
But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hanging in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of life.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's warming my globe?
I'm Robert Evans.
My air conditioning is not currently functioning.
So I'm hiding in my basement, which I think this is a historic moment, everybody.
Marks the first time a human being has experienced the consequences of climate change.
That's me right now.
Number one.
It is 74 degrees, maybe in my basement.
Upwards of 73 degrees.
So yeah, suffering.
Suffering here.
Still, I mean, that in a basement is, that's a pretty, that's pretty warm, dog.
It's pretty, it's pretty warm for the basement.
It might be more like 70 degrees.
I don't know what temperatures are.
And I'm drinking coffee.
Andrew T. How are you doing today?
Hi.
What's up?
How's it going?
I'm, I'm, um, I'm, I, this is the, honestly, probably the first or second week that me, longtime shorts denier, is wearing shorts.
Wow.
I'm not in a short person.
You are shorts.
Yeah, I'm not a shorts person.
I wore black jeans to a Dodger game two years ago when it was like 110 outside, and I did almost pass out.
But I was pretty committed and now I'm wearing shorts.
I have also purchased a pair of shorts recently.
You may not just take this evidence to any climate change tenier and be like, Andrew, too, wear shorts now.
I know.
That's the proof.
Yeah, climate change is a real problem.
This is the first evidence anyone has of it.
Andrew, it's good to have you back.
You are having me.
Sophie and I is one of our very, very, very favorite people to have on the show.
You have been doing a lot of Hollywood.
We call you Mr. Hollywood in our private conversations because you're such a big Hollywood guy.
But you know what other kind of guy you are, Andrew?
He's a very funny guy who we like to have on every now and again to talk about bits of history.
You and I have talked about King Leopold of Belgium.
We've talked about the Andaman Islands.
We've had all sorts of fun history conversations.
Andrew, how do you feel about the Roman Empire?
Oh, I probably, as far as like contemporary Americans go, I probably took more Latin than I think most people, like that was my primary corn, yeah, quote-unquote foreign language in high semester.
So I, and ultimately all of three useless years.
Roman propaganda, yeah.
So I probably, to the extent that I know anything, I probably am like more aware of a sort of sugar-coated version of whatever, whatever the fuck is happening here.
Yeah, we are, we are today.
We're going to tell the story about how the Roman Republic became a police state, which it did, which is quite a tale.
I have, you know, we haven't done a lot of ancient history stuff on this podcast for good reasons.
Among other things, it's kind of hard to like get good details about people who died 2,000 years ago that aren't just like nonsense propaganda, right?
Because it's usually just like, yeah, some like poem about some king.
History is written by the winners, especially, yeah, when it's like fucking epigrams like leftover from the Roman.
But also, I, I feel like they're, they're, the, the, the, the worry is the sliding scale of bastardom through history.
Yes.
I would imagine the trickiest part because it's like, there's sort of like no amount of fascism and or, you know, brutality that doesn't eventually get justified by everyone else was doing it.
Yeah.
Don't that's far enough?
Yeah.
I mean, that's like, it's, are you going to call like Genghis Khan a bastard?
Okay.
Well, then like, what, like, sure, but, but what is, it seems like kind of pointless to be like, and this guy was a king who murdered people.
When it's like, well, yeah, they all were.
Like, why is that?
Like, nobody's like really going other than some people were better at it.
It's not that interesting to talk about them being like shitty.
That's not the case.
One of the cool things about the Roman Republic is, number one, we've a lot of detail on these guys and all that's bad, right?
All of our historians are propagandists, but at least there's more than one of them.
So you get like the, this dude rocked and like this dude was terrible story usually.
And number two, they're basically exactly the same as modern Americans politically.
So you get really modern, like political dick moves from terrible people in a way that's like very familiar.
And in fact, like, so we're talking about a lot of the things that led up to the fall of the Roman Republic and like the end of, you know, the kind of democratic experiment that had existed there for a few centuries.
And this is something that, like, people are talking about a lot right now.
So, when you get like history nerds talking about how fucked up politics are in America, they're either going to go back to Weimar, Germany, which we've already done, or they're going to talk about the fall of the Roman Republic, which is why there's like three books out.
There's like three or four books that have come out in the last year that are like, here's what the fall of the Roman Republic can teach us about the fall of American or like what's happening in American democracy.
Most of these books are stupid.
There is one really good book by podcaster Mike Duncan, who does the Revolutions podcast called The Storm Before the Storm.
That's the one I would recommend if you want to read a book like that.
We're not going to mainly be telling that story.
Instead, we're going to talk about how Rome invented militarized policing and the first police state and kind of the first FBI.
Because that's not a history I think most people know, and it's pretty cool.
But first, we're going to talk about, well, some guys, well, we're going to talk about a lot of shit.
We're going to have to cover quite a bit of ground today.
This is one of the reasons we don't do so many ancient history ones because it's like, all right, well, if you want to tell this story, you have to go through like a thousand years of shit.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, also because the audience is like, like me, probably is like, not just a thousand years of shit, but so much backstory and context.
So I don't envy you.
You have to explain a lot, but thankfully the Romans were pretty entertaining, sons of bitches.
Not if they were killing or enslaving you, but like sometimes if they were enslaving you.
There were some Greeks who had fun with that.
So the city of Rome, Andrew, founded on April 21st, 753 BC by two brothers who were nursed by a wolf.
If you believe the myths that a lot of Romans didn't believe, right?
Like these are like the things that we tell about then.
This is what the Romans thought.
Like most of them were like, I don't, I've never seen a wolf nurse two babies.
Like I don't think that statue of like two infants sucking on a wolf's breasts is or utterly.
You're talking about the statue in my living room, right?
Yeah, yeah.
I have that instead of a television.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I made it out of a out of macaroni.
Yes.
Just harrowing stuff if you think about it.
Like just so gross.
Yeah, bad for the wolf, bad for the babies.
This isn't good for anyone.
But yeah, this is Romulus and Remus, right?
Like that's the legend.
There's a good line in, I think it's the movie Spartacus, where Julius Caesar and I believe it would have been Pompey are like walking around and talking about like, they're walking past like a temple.
And Caesar asks a question like, don't you venerate the gods?
And Pompey's like, well, publicly, sure, but privately, I don't believe in any of them.
And that's probably how it was for a lot of Romans.
Like everyone's like, people aren't locked up believing these silly ass myths.
But this is the myth, April 21st, 753 BC, which is absolutely not when Rome was founded.
Archaeologists know that people have been living in that spot for about 14,000 years.
Because very rarely do just does just like a bunch of people suddenly arrive at a chunk of land and be like, and now it's a city.
You just have like groups of people farming.
Like Rome has a bunch of hills.
So you could set up a shop on a hill.
It's a good place to grow food.
You can beat up people if they try to like come onto your property and stuff because hills are easy to defend.
You know, it's just a good place for people to exist up until the present day where it's about to die because there's no water.
But for a while, it was a good place to be a person until we invented the car.
Yeah, we're changing, we're changing the good places to be a person.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Everybody's going to have to go, yeah, there's not going to be so many Italians in the future.
I was just, I was just in.
Yeah, right.
I guess peninsula life is about to be island life, is about to be Atlantis life.
Yeah.
I was just in Minneapolis and there was a real palpable sense of like, we're going to be the new Miami soon.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Minneapolis is going to be dealing with those 110 degree days.
Time to get your beach body on Midwesterners or whatever part of the country Minneapolis is.
Lakes, fucking lakes.
So even ancient Romans had a lot of competing stories about the founding of the city.
Probably most likely, like most of them tended to think that it had been basically like a Greek colonial offshoot.
Later when Rome becomes an empire, there's this state propaganda line that it had been founded by a bunch of Trojan war refugees and a Trojan king named Aeneas.
None of that's true either.
And it doesn't really matter.
What we definitely know is that sometime around the 700s BC, there's this city-state called Rome that kind of comes together, probably from a bunch of different like communities in the area, gradually sort of, you know, merging.
And it starts to gain power and influence in central Italy.
Now, like most places, it's ruled by kings.
And over time, the Latins, who are like a tribe, right?
The Latins are a tribe in Italy, and it's because they speak Latin.
That's true.
Yeah.
Or vice versa, but yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
At this point, they're just like primitive tribesmen wandering around Italy.
They don't even know that in a couple of thousand years, you and I will be learning their language badly.
Ecca Romani and whatnot.
Yeah.
Because we, because we got scared by French and didn't want to have to, the pressure of learning a real language.
I honestly, I cannot get back into the mindset of the bozo.
I must have made the decision in middle school to just be like, you know what? Latin.
I think I was intimidated by like, oh no, I don't want to have to, because the thing they promised us is you don't have to do like pronunciation tests because nobody knows how a lot of Latin was spoken.
I did.
Actually, my senior year of high school, they let me go to the university and take Italian.
Ooh.
Which Latin spicy Latin did not help me out very much for her.
I have, so my family is incredibly fucking, like my dad is first generation, like American.
Like that's how Italian my family is.
And we had some relatives when I was a kid come over who spoke only Italian and because they were old Catholics, Latin.
And so when they were in town, my dad, who was also an old Catholic, had to like translate for them.
So they would speak in Latin and then my dad would translate to the rest of the family.
Damn, dude.
Yeah.
Which I think makes this crazy.
Well, that was.
You're Romulus' heir, basically.
That's what everybody says.
I mean, that was one of the benefits of the fact that like all church services in the Catholic Church took place in Latin is that like you could have people from like England and Spain and fucking Portugal all in the same room and they might not speak each other's languages, but they all know Latin, right?
Because they have to do the Jesus stuff.
So anyway, so yeah, you get these Latins hanging around and these are the people who are going to become the Romans, but at the time, they're just like some other group of assholes in Italy.
And these dudes called the Etruscans are much more powerful.
And there's this Etruscan dynasty that comes to be the kings of Rome, known as the Great House of Tarquin.
But that's just kind of like what more modern people call them.
They were not a great house.
This is not Game of Thrones shit.
These guys are like petty chiefs.
These are like dudes with like sharpened sticks beating anybody who like the Tarquins are the guys who have the most muscly friends with sharpened sticks and are the best at stabbing people who don't pay protection money, right?
Think of them more as like street thugs than the Always, it's always like, yeah, it's organized crime until it's taxes.
Yeah, exactly.
And like, so they in the 700s, they kind of start to make the jump from organized crime to taxes, but it's still more organized crime than anything.
So for a while, Rome is like pretty much every other city in the Mediterranean.
And then in the 500s, shit changes.
The last king of Rome is a guy named Lucius Tarquinus Superbus, which is where we get the word superb, although that's like, anyway, that's the nickname people gave him.
And it's kind of Romans have like a history of like, this guy's an asshole.
Let's call him great or like superb or like awesome or something.
So he gets to power in like 534 BC.
He has a pretty good reign for a while.
He wins a bunch of wars.
He signs the city's first treaty with Carthage.
He builds a big ass temple.
And yeah, he enslaves a bunch of people to make the first sewers and drainage systems in Rome.
So he's definitely like, you know, that's solid king stuff.
He's made a step beyond gang leader.
When you're making sewage, you've made a move past past gang shit.
And then according to myth, his son rapes a Roman noblewoman named Lucretia.
And this becomes a problem for him.
Here's how the Getty summarizes what's said to have happened.
The tragedy of Lucretia began when Sextus, son of the tyrannical Etruscan king of Rome and member of the Tarquin family, raped her.
For the ancient Romans, a woman who was raped was guilty of adultery, a crime punishable by death, even though she had not given herself willingly.
After she was raped, Lucretia made her husband and father swear an oath of vengeance against the Tarquins and then killed herself in shame.
Enraged by her death, Junius Brutus led a victorious rebellion against the Etruscan king.
So, couple of things there.
Couple of things there.
Number one, look, obviously you should be angry at the guy who did the rape, but also most of your anger might be at like the social custom that says that she has to kill herself after this.
Lucretia's Vengeance Oath00:04:47
Like that might, that might be the thing to be angrier at, but people don't think that way, I guess.
It really is like this, this like it's it's spoken so matter-of-factly, and this is where like the context of it makes it so hard to figure out what the what the approach to this is.
I mean, look, the entire misogynist society, like every misogynist society, this one, you know, worse by modern standards, but this is pretty normal at the time.
Yeah, but yeah, and then you're just like, you know, you're the family members watching this happen, enraged that this had to happen, but not because of the like the society.
Like it, it's sort of like this classic, everyone is always mad at the wrong thing through history.
It is, it's also, though, I think if you get yourself in a different mind state, you can really feel this because like this is a stupid rule that's like cruel and evil and makes like a bad situation even more horrifying.
And like we can look at that as like, oh, look at these fucked up people and their fucked up rules.
But also the story you get is that like all of the Romans are pissed at this and Lucretia is a sympathetic figure in their history.
And think about all of the different times in recent past when like everyone in America has been like, wait, that's the law?
That's the way it works?
That's stupid as shit.
Why the hell are we doing it this way?
But then the stupid thing happens that's fucked up because like can't change the law.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
Or we're not going to.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, you can't just change laws.
And you get the feeling that's kind of the attitude people have.
It's like, well, this is all like stupid and fucked up.
But at the end of the day, the only person we can really take our anger out on is the Tarquin families.
Let's get them kings out of here.
Which they do.
And it's also worth noting the guy who leads the rebellion, Junius Brutus.
That name Brutus should be familiar, right?
That's the guy who kills Caesar.
Well, the guy who kills Caesar is this kid's descendant, you know, hundreds and hundreds of years down the line.
That's part of why he kills Caesars.
His family's got this reputation of like, when people try to do king stuff, we murder them.
Anyway, to be fair, pretty good family tradition.
It's a cool family tradition.
It does.
So Junius Brutus is one of like 40 guys that all have the same name.
So one of the cool things in Roman history, and by cool, I mean very frustrating, is that if there's ever a guy who does anything worth noting, there will be three other guys who are also really important with the exact same name because that's how the Romans did things.
So he'd be like, yeah, Scipio Africanus.
Well, which one?
The one from like the 160s or the one from like the, yeah, or like the 200s or the one from the 150s?
And like, yeah, it's, it's very frustrating, but that's starting out.
If you're early on in Western civilization, how many names?
You can't have that many.
Yeah, there's like seven names.
Come on, dog.
There's like seven names.
So the details of obviously the Lucretia story are almost certainly not exact, but there's a pretty decent chance that it broadly is accurate as to what caused the insurrection against Etruscan power.
Most people probably heard of the right of prima nocta, right?
Which you see in Braveheart, you know, this right that like nobles supposedly had to have sex with a woman the first night after a marriage and stuff that like in Braveheart, this is depicted as like what sparks the Scottish rebellion.
That's not a real thing.
It never, it was not a thing in any medieval law.
It didn't happen.
It certainly had nothing to do with fucking William Wallace.
There were some similar rules in history.
The Epic of Gilgamesh references customs that are similar to that, as do Herodotus' histories.
And we know that around this same period, at least one other Italian city revolted from Etruscan control because their women were abused.
You know, you often don't get a lot of detail about this.
Just somebody notes that like they were angry about something the Etruscans had done to their women.
And so like there's a war and they win.
Right.
Right.
Yeah.
Right.
And it is, yeah, that's history.
I mean, it's often angry that they're doing the thing because you were supposed to be doing the thing.
Yeah.
Well, it's just like, you know, military occupations haven't changed.
You can, there's a long, ugly history of like when the U.S. occupied Japan, you know, rapes by U.S. service members and stuff that caused a lot of problems.
And that's, it's a thing everywhere.
It's a thing in Iraq.
It's a thing all throughout history.
So whatever the excesses of Rome's last king, they kick out that last dude, Tarquin, and a republic is founded in 509 BCE.
And it was not a super different government in a lot of ways from the ones that our quote-unquote founding fathers established.
And what I mean by that is that only the very wealthiest people could actually hold office.
Obsidian Bat Weapons00:03:24
Now, one thing that's interesting is that like pretty much everyone could vote, though.
So they didn't have that difference.
Like when the United States is established, you have to be like a property owning white male in order to vote.
And it's not until later that every guy gets the vote.
Basically, every free man has a vote in the Roman Republic, but it also doesn't really work that way because so the Romans have this system, the client system, where every rich guy just over the course of their life picks up hundreds or even thousands or tens of thousands of like clients.
And these are like dudes who he has to give them money and or food or something on a pretty regular basis.
It's kind of like their social welfare program.
Like this rich guy has to take care of you a little bit, but you have to do what he says when it's time to vote.
Right.
And this is kind of what they have instead of political parties is these coalitions of rich guys and their clients who are like, well, like, this is the guy that like my family, we all go and he gives us bread every couple of weeks and we vote for it, right?
I guess it is.
It is just the like local, local gang leader, the local.
It's a little different from that yet at this point in that there's not really violent coercion holding that together at this point.
It's more like an extingent of like the way familial units and tribes and stuff would have worked.
And in fact, a lot of it kind of is based on tribal stuff, you know, from a bit earlier.
Probably likely, well, probably not.
I make that point because these are going to turn into street gangs.
This absolutely ends with street gangs of people murdering each other.
But it doesn't even mean that.
Yeah, it was like, it's almost, it's like the same as the electoral college or like, you know, it's exactly like the electoral college.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And we in America need to get to the point where our electoral college is just several hundred people beating each other to death with saps in the street.
We're getting closer every time.
I know.
I know.
I'm waiting for it.
I got a fucking baseball bat with a nail through it.
I'm, I'm down.
Let's, let's, let's become electors.
Did you put the nail like a big nail through when you're making a spiked bat?
You got a couple of options.
So, I mean, I think you just, one of the better ways is you just kind of like hammer the nail in through the edges and stuff.
So you get a couple of different nails poking out.
Another thing you could do, you can actually like get long screws and just like screw with like a like a drill through a couple of areas of the bat.
And then put them in.
And that'll help you.
Like that's a little bit easier.
You know, a fun thing to do is you get some like JB weld or epoxy or something.
You cut little runnels in the sides of the bat.
You jam razor blades in there.
And then you're kind of making like a maquahital.
Anyway.
I think I know what that is.
Is that the stick with the?
It's like what the Aztecs used.
It's like the stick with all the obsidian, but instead using dollar store razor blades on a baseball bat.
Yeah.
All right.
All right.
Anyway, I'm just, I'm not, I'm not as crafty, but I just got an electric drill.
So I'm like, you know, maybe I can do this.
Sorry to interrupt.
Go just the spark in your eye when I asked you how to make a spike bat is a little much.
I knew you were.
One of these days.
Yeah.
One of these days, we'll get back to the roots of Western democracy and I'll be able to have a street fight with my homemade razor bat.
Debt Is Forever00:06:44
So yeah, you got all these, so the Roman Republic, yeah, 509 BC.
And, you know, we don't exactly know what all of the rules were at the start of the Republic because they were unwritten.
So their constitution is like, it's not put down anywhere.
It exists only in the memories of the oldest rich people.
So it's kind of like all of the rules are like whatever the old people say they are.
So again, very similar to our current system in a lot of ways.
Yeah.
What did Jefferson?
What did Jefferson think?
Yeah, what did Thomas Jefferson think?
Oh, now the Senate parliamentarian is a thing that matters.
Like nobody thought about this before, but suddenly it's a huge problem.
So this caused problems over time, which I know will surprise you because those patricians and patricians are like, they're basically nobility.
At the start of the Roman Empire, they're all of the rich people whose like families have been powerful for a long time.
And yeah, they are the ones who kind of get to tell everyone what the Constitution says effectively.
And people say that.
That is very American.
Yeah, it's extremely American.
These are the most American.
The Roman Republic is the most American thing that ever existed.
So the poor, the plebes, the poor people, or at least you could call them the regular people, start to be like, well, this doesn't seem like a very good system.
Like if we're supposed to be a republic, it kind of seems like this, this is a bad way to do things.
And yeah, it also over time as the Republic goes on, it starts to change like the wealth situation.
So the patricians are like noble because of their birth, but they're not necessarily rich.
Because number one, they have all these obligations.
So they have all these clients that they have to like pay and feed.
And they have all these, like when they get political office, that often means they have to throw parties for everybody in the city or like big religious festivals.
So a lot of them are fucking broke all of the time.
And this class of merchants rises up who aren't noble, but they have a bunch of money.
And they're like, well, we're the ones paying for everything now, like one way or the other.
And we're like buying these patricians and having them do stuff.
Why don't we get to like hold political office or have any kind of power?
And part of like what's fucking these patricians over is that the only way that they can acceptably make money is like either going to war and conquering shit or like agriculture.
It's kind of considered gross for them to be in business.
So anyway, shit starts to change in Rome and you get this like wealthy class of people who are like plebeian but but have money.
And over time, like the folks who are not patrician get increasingly angry and you know, you get your riots and you get people threatening each other in the streets.
And then in 451 BC, they force the patricians to commission a series to actually write out a constitution where they're like, okay, we're going to actually like lay out what the rules are in a way that people can see as opposed to us just being like, oh yeah, I remember the way it's all, it's supposed to be.
I remember how the law works.
So because it's the past, they just like hammer a bunch of rules into big bronze tablets, 12 of them, and stick them in the center of town.
So that if you want to know what the law is, you just like walk up to the bronze tablets and read them.
Which is, which is a fun way to do it.
Now, like all democratic compromises, the new written constitution codified extraordinary powers for the wealthy.
Most of it dealt with debts and debtors and noted that in the event that a debtor was ruled to have failed to like pay a debt, he would have to be basically on the after three days or so, he would either be executed or sold into slavery.
So like debt's a serious thing.
And this is on a separate point, something that like Corey Doctorow and a couple other people will make a point of is that like the Romans were the first people to be like, debt is a thing that exists forever for you and eventually like your family, as opposed to like every 20 years we have a jubilee and there's no more debt.
The Romans, because they have this entrenched power structure that actually holds, you don't have like a king who might be like, well, every 20 years or so, I'm going to do a jubilee because then people get their debts cleared and they like the king more.
Now the people running it are like all of the rich people and they're like, well, no, we're never going to wipe people's debts.
Why the fuck would we do that shit?
And so that's where that whole process starts in history.
That's just fun.
That's the source of our power.
Right.
Yeah.
Right.
As opposed, yeah, when it switched from largesse to money.
You know what?
Making me miss kings, Robert.
Yeah, well, it's not entirely a good thing that they get rid of theirs, I guess.
The Constitution also enshrined incredible powers for Roman men.
The paterfamilius, or the head of each family, was essentially a little dictator.
So we don't have a king, but like if you're the daddy, you have the absolute power of life and death.
So number one, deformed children have to be killed immediately.
That's one of their, that's like their, that's like their first amendment in ancient Rome, which, you know, it's the past.
And fathers have the power of life and death over their children and their wife.
So you can, as the father, execute your kids or other members of your family anytime you want to.
The classic law of I brought you into this world, I can take you out.
Yeah.
Which honestly.
It's the most important societal bedrock.
Look, if that was the rule, I would have kids.
I'd have a fuckload of kids and they'd be doing a lot of work for me.
So there are some like more sensible rules though that kind of limit.
So among other things, if you're a dad and you sell your kid into slavery three times, then your son no longer has to do what you say.
I don't know why three times is the rule, but like you have to pick a number, I guess, where it's like genie shit.
What is fucking happening here?
It's cool.
So yeah, it's good stuff.
It's this weird mix of like nightmare social laws and then like broadly reasonable stuff like, yeah, if a child's born within 10 months of the father's death, they get some of the inheritance, you know, like stuff like that.
Where it's like, well, that's just like a pretty reasonable solution to a problem.
Now, the 12 tables also note that women are always legally children.
They always have to have a guardian.
This is because of quote their levity of mind.
And the only exception to this are the Vestal Virgins, which are basically older, like OG nuns, but they're much cooler than the nuns.
And a lot more weird sex stuff going on, allegedly.
Women As Legal Children00:05:15
And you know who else is allegedly engaging in a lot of weird sex shit, Andrew?
Yo, hit me.
The products and services that support this podcast.
Right.
They never stop fucking.
Not, not, not once.
And that shit, I was going to say is not in the Bible, but it very much is in the Bible.
What they're doing.
Most of what they're doing is in the Bible, but they go off the map every now and then.
You know, it's going to enter any situation it goes into cock first, and you don't know what's going to happen.
Like, they're just, they're just going to, they live to penetrate.
That's actually the corporate motto.
We live to penetrate.
Honestly.
I was going to ask you which sponsor you were specifically referring to, and then I realized that you already had one in mind.
And that sorry, Chris.
Good luck with that bleep.
I know you love it.
I would love a Bible that has like a map of the Bible parts, the parts of the Bible story, like any edition of Lord of the Rings or whatever, just like a little map of the front page.
Yeah.
They should do that.
They probably do.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one: never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two: never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends, oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modern.
My next guest, you know, from Stepbrothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanks Stat on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
Some like the greatest disinfectant.
They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Gillespie and Michael Marancini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trap.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news out of Maricopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots fired, City Hall building.
A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios, this is Rorschach, murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that.
Jeffrey Hood did it.
July 2003, Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
Everybody in the chamber's ducks.
A shocking public murder.
I scream, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots.
Get down.
Losing All to Win Wars00:15:54
A charismatic politician.
You know, he just bent the rules all the time, man.
I still have a weapon and I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He alleged he was a victim of flat down.
That may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app.
Apple Podcasts are wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Laurie Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
From power to parenthood.
Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
From addiction to acceleration.
The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop, even if you did a lot of redistribution.
You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
And it's a multiplayer game.
What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
Find out on Mostly Human.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
So there's this broad understanding that political violence is undesirable.
And there's actually not, as far as we can tell, it doesn't seem to have been a thing that happened very often in the early Republic, right?
Like when people had political disputes, they didn't murder each other generally, which is a big thing, right?
In this period of time, if you've like gotten to that point in your society, that's pretty cool.
We have trouble with that today.
Yeah, we don't do that at all.
Yeah, and one of the reasons for this, so the Romans have this written constitution kind of thing now.
They also have this thing called the Mos Maorum, which is, it just literally means way of the ancestors.
And it's another unwritten legal code kind of.
And it's basically just a bunch of like, you don't murder people who are elected leaders.
You know, you don't like bribe people in order to make them vote the way you want.
You don't do this.
You don't do that.
And there's a couple of different things in there, including there's a rule that you don't carry weapons inside the city.
Now, this ban gets misinterpreted a lot of times.
You might think of it as the ancient equivalent of an assault weapons ban, right?
So they're not banning all weapons because spoilers, everybody still has weapons, but they don't have military weapons.
So they're not supposed, it's like you can get executed and shit if you're caught carrying a sword or like a dagger within the, what's called the pomerium, which is this like kind of sacred quasi-ethereal boundary that like is the supposed to be the actual like boundary of Rome.
Now, obviously, so again, this just refers to like military weapons.
So when people do have fights and stuff, they'll usually have like chair legs that they'll stick sharp things into or they'll they'll make saps or brass knuckles are super popular.
The Romans have their own kind of brass knuckle thing.
Yeah, yeah, they call it a look to cestis.
Yeah, it's basically brass knuckles or like punch daggers.
They're like really nasty fighting weapons, right?
So you don't have swords and stuff.
So people are just like clawing at and beating the shit out of each other with like stuff they make in their fucking garages, which is pretty cool.
It's like the warriors stuff, right?
Like that's very, very, yeah.
Spike bat is just too big.
Yeah.
What's the fucking Millwall thing where you make it with just like a bunch of editions of like the like the Daily Mirror or whatever?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
There's some fucking, it's basically the Jason Bourne shit where he fights a dude with a newspaper with a magazine or whatever.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, the coolest thing that the fucking Romans had was this thing called a cestis or castis or whatever.
And it was basically, it was like a boxing glove that was covered in iron balls.
So that like when you like, so it's like this combination boxing gloves slash brass knuckles.
And yeah, you could eat.
Yeah.
So they had plenty of weapons.
They just did not allow military weapons.
And you're not allowed to bring soldiers into the city of Rome.
Nobody can take an army into Rome.
They have to camp outside of the city if you've got an army nearby.
Because again, they recognize pretty early on that like, well, if we want to have a republic, it's probably a bad idea to let people march their army into the city.
That could end badly.
That might not go well.
But most of this stuff is just like, it's not written law.
It's everybody knows that you're not supposed to do these things, right?
Right.
A wonderful way to run a government.
Yes.
A norm, right?
These are their norms, you know?
Yeah.
The other thing, too, is like the army thing is like, I think it's, I mean, obviously, just because I'm a soft child of the 20th century, but it is like wild to kind of remember how threatening a parade really should be.
Yeah, a parade.
I mean, historically, the Romans are kind of one of the first groups of people to try to stop a parade from being a threat because they have these things called triumphs.
And so, if you win a military victory that's big enough, the Senate will vote you a triumph.
And you basically are king of the city for a day.
And you get to take your army and march them through the city with all your captives, and everybody pretty much worships you.
But the whole time you're doing it, number one, it's just for a day.
And the whole time you're doing it, there's a guy whose only job is to like walk behind you and be like, Hey, bro, you're going to die one of these days.
Hey, bro, like you're still fucked.
Like, everybody's fucked.
Nobody lives forever.
Like, you're not actually a king or a god.
You're going to die, dude.
Like, which is kind of neat.
I think it's one of my favorite parts of Roman history.
Yeah.
Definitely the best job in civic life.
This, these were the first, like, nowadays, anybody can like go on Twitter and ratio a political leader.
Um, yeah, if they're if they're good enough at trolling, this was the this was that job in the ancient world.
It's like the dude who follows the Imperator around being like, Hey, bro, you kind of suck actually.
Yeah, still seeing you in hell, bro.
Yeah, exactly.
Oh, my God.
Rome would have adopted Twitter immediately.
Like, they basically had like their Roman graffiti is a whole other story, but like they had Twitter, they had their own Twitter.
Um, I think my favorite piece of Roman graffiti that was like found in fucking Pompeii is this guy being like, All of the women in Rome or all of the women in the empire should weep because I'm just fucking dudes now.
Like, I'm, I'm, I'm so tired of fucking ladies, I'm gonna, I'm, I'm, my dick's for nothing but men now.
That's pretty peak Twitter.
It is incredibly peak Twitter.
Amazing Twitter.
And how do you how does what does it is it just like paint and brush, I guess?
Yeah, yeah, they're just like paint and shit.
Yeah, they've got paint, like they're just like painting stuff on walls and whatnot.
Yeah, um, I guess I was just thinking like the advent of spray paint for graffiti.
It's like, what a again, they would have taken to spray paint immediately.
You show like literally any Roman citizen spray paint, and they're like, oh, fuck, I'm gonna be able to yell at like my neighbor so much more efficiently.
Um, you could probably make a primitive airbrush, yeah.
So, the Roman system is it's it's a little bit wacky, but it works really well.
And for most of like 300 years, they get by without any massive internal political violence.
Now, a big part of this is that for these first couple of hundred years, Rome is nearly destroyed like every 30 years or so.
Like every couple of decades, somebody will invade Italy and almost wipe them out.
And usually, the way it goes is the Romans, there's an invasion, the Romans get together a massive army and they send it to fight the invasion, and they all get wiped out because some idiot makes a stupid mistake on the Roman side.
And then the Romans somehow put together another army and eventually win the war.
And this is like how every war works out for Rome.
They take these, like the thing that distinguishes Romans as a military power is they're able to like lose all of their guys and then win the war anyway, which is like a mixed sort of reputation to have militarily.
A good example of this would be the Pyrrhic War from 280 to 275 BC.
The gist of it is that the Romans go to war with a bunch of Greek cities in southern Italy, and those Greek cities are like, hey, we need help.
And they call to this Greek king over in Greece called Pyrrhus, and he invades Italy to like fuck up the Romans.
And Pyrrhus is a scary old son of a bitch.
He's got a big army, a bunch of war elephants, and he just shatters the Roman military in this series of horrible grinding, thousands and thousands of people massacred.
But also, every battle is so ugly that like he loses most of his army fighting it.
So, kind of at the end of this series of battles, the Romans can't continue to prosecute the war.
But Pyrrhus doesn't really want to keep fighting either because he doesn't have much of an army left.
And this is where we get the term Pyrrhic victory, right?
So he like goes to Rome and he's like, hey, guys, y'all are fucked.
Let's do a peace deal.
And he offers them pretty good terms.
And I'm going to quote what comes next from a write-up in the New York Times.
When the Senate convened to debate the offer, an old blind senator named Appius Claudius was carried into the Senate house by his sons.
As the chamber fell silent, he stood to chastise his colleagues.
I have, he said, long thought of the unfortunate state of my eyes as an affliction.
But now that I hear you debate shameful resolutions which would diminish the glory of Rome, I wish that I were not only blind, but also deaf.
By giving in to Pyrrhus, Claudius warned.
The Roman Republic would only invite more outside powers to mess with it.
Low as the odds of victory might be, Rome had no choice but to keep fighting.
And they actually somehow win.
Pyrus, like, yeah, it's it's it's the whole thing.
Um, he tries to bribe a bunch of his way out of like fighting them more, but it doesn't work.
Um, and yeah, this is like this is a somewhat idolized version of events of how like Warm beats pyramid, uh, Rome beats uh Pyrrhus.
And it's based on the writings of a guy named Edward J. Watts, who's one of these historians who's written a book about the Roman Republic to talk about the collapse of the United States.
Um, yeah, but as kind of biased as his take on things is, it is worth noting that like what they build really works.
Like, as flawed as we're going to talk about all of the flaws as it is, the Romans create this political structure that's able to like repeatedly almost get wiped out in disastrous military defeats and not lose wars.
Um, and part of it is because everybody's got skin in the game, the entire ruling class is out there fighting whenever there's a war, along with like all of the and in fact, most of the people fighting are people with like property.
The Roman army, you have to pay for your own weapons, so poor people are not fighting.
It's basically like the middle class and the rich people who are actually like going to war.
And one of the downsides is that all of their armies are led by the equivalent of like Nancy Pelosi, which goes really badly sometimes, right?
Because you'll have like this 80-year-old career politician trying to like lead an army of 70,000 guys and he doesn't know what the fuck he's doing.
Probably there's some argument that that is sort of why the first crack at our first draft at any given Roman army is sort of just the shit that needs to be exactly.
It's the guys who suck the most.
And you get like 10 crews out there and you just need to get rid of them.
Anyone who survives that first one plus the fresh recruits is probably the way to go.
Yeah, we got to burn off an army before we can get anything done.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's like making, it's like making pancakes.
The first one's just for the trash.
If we had invaded Afghanistan by sending all of Congress in first, I think the United States and Afghanistan would be in a state of perfect peace with each other and there would be no more problems in the world.
I mean, truly, this, like, you know, that is the least American thing about this is about this particular iteration of Rome is putting middle class nobles on the line at all.
Yeah.
If only, if only.
But all of these nobles, they have fucking so like one of the things, Pyrrhus tries to bribe a bunch of guys and he can't bribe them because they're like, well, no, this is like my whole family's fighting.
Like this is what we do.
We have this like system and we're kind of all in it together.
And one of the reasons this works is that there's not a massive, like there's rich people and there's poor people, but within all of the people who, the free men who have property, there's not a massive disparity in wealth, right?
The rich are not very rich because like it's Rome's just kind of this scrappy little city in the middle of Italy, right?
It's not like this super powerful force.
But as time goes on, they keep winning these wars.
And so they wind up in control of more and more and more of Italy.
And they get all of this land and all of this money starts coming in.
And that's when things start to go awry, right?
So after Rome beats Pyrrhus and conquers most of southern Italy, they settle into what's going to be 200 straight years of unbroken victories in foreign wars.
Rome's military record here, basically, they spend the length of the time that the United States has existed as a country winning every fight they get into.
Which is like a pretty solid record.
Now, they lose battles constantly.
Like with Dev in the First Punic War, which starts in 264 BC, this is with Carthage.
It lasts 20 years.
Like to tell you how silly some of their wars go.
So this war starts with Rome going to Sicily to fight Carthage and they win there.
They invade North Africa and they win what might be the largest naval battle in all history still to this day.
Like if you listen to the historians, then it was like 300,000 people or so all fighting in boats.
And again, this is like 2,300 years ago.
It's fucking wild how like many people that they could put together at this point.
But they win this series of battles.
They win these naval battles.
Carthage sues for peace and Rome refuses to like have peace.
So Carthage keeps fighting and then beats them and like shatters a Roman army.
So Rome has to send a fleet to evacuate the remains of this army that's gotten that's ass kicked in Africa.
And then the entire fleet and 100,000 men all die in a storm, like heading back to Italy.
That kind of shit happens constantly to the Romans and it just never stops them.
Then you've got the Second Punic War, which starts in 218 BC.
It also lasts like 20 fucking years.
And there's like, we've talked about the Battle of Canai, which is one of the most famous battles in history.
Hannibal, you know, the elephant guy encircles their army and kills 50,000 Romans in a day.
It's like 10% of the male population of the Republic.
He like wipes out it, including like eight senators, like a bunch, a significant percentage of the Roman.
It's like if, it's like if the United States had like 10% of its male population and half of its political class wiped out in a battle in fucking Afghanistan.
Like it's pretty, it's a bad day for them.
And they just do the same thing they always do.
They make more guys senators, they make more guys soldiers, and they send them back out to fight, right?
Killing The Middle Class00:10:23
And it's fine.
But while these wars are going on, and they win these wars, they win the First Punic War, they win the Second Punic War, they get control of Sicily, they get a bunch of influence and power in Northern Africa.
They take control of all of Spain in the Second Punic War.
Like Rome is now running Iberia.
While all this is going on, a couple of other things are happening.
One is that a lot of Roman soldiers are dying, right?
Like shitload, because Nancy Pelosi is very often the battlefield commander and she's not very good at that.
And since these guys, these are like the Roman middle class, right?
Most of them are small independent farmers.
They have enough money to buy their own weapons and armor and stuff and sometimes even horses.
And so the system that they set up works really well when war means you have to like walk two days to like fuck with this town across like the river from you.
But when you're going to war for 20 years and your army is all of the guys who make your food, then it becomes a problem, right?
Are you seeing like the flaw in the Roman social system?
Also, it's like, I mean, and this, I guess, is the thing that's like distressing is like, you'd hope what this would do is lead towards like more measured wars and like, you know, with the- Oh, no, no, no, no.
It's simply the opposite.
It's we will, I mean, you're, well, we're seeing it, obviously, in our time also.
It's like, we will simply let society crumble rather than that's what happens.
Because here's the thing.
If you were to have less wars, well, the only ways that the nobility can make money is war or taking a bunch of farming land, right?
Because they're not allowed to have businesses.
They're not allowed to be merchants.
And if they don't get to have more wars and massacre more generations of Roman boys, then the merchants who aren't nobles will have more money than them and nicer houses.
Do you see why this is a problem, Andrew?
Right.
I know.
It's so just like, but like, instead of being like, the custom is weird and we could just diversify our ruling class's economy.
Look, at the same point, nope, I'm currently going to kill all the farmers.
I'm all for restricting our ruling class's economic sources of income.
So what do I do?
It is interesting that if you look at the two longest-lived republics in history, which is the Roman Republic and now us, in both of them, you have this group, this hereditary nobility who are like, well, if we're going to stay rich, we're going to have to kill the middle class.
We're going to have to get rid of those people.
So yeah, you start to get these serious problems where like these farmers' soldiers are spending like five years at a time out on campaigns in like fucking Africa or Spain, which is quite a distance from Italy when you have to walk it, right?
Like they are far as fuck away.
And a lot of people listening probably are not farmers.
I'll let you in on a secret about farming.
If you don't do anything to your farm for five years, it is no longer a farm.
It's just the woods.
And that causes an issue.
So these soldiers are spending like half a decade at a time, you know, in addition to like whatever injuries and trauma they suffer, they come home and their farms are ruined and they can't afford to like put them back into shape.
So again, as you noted, a reasonable country might go like, well, clearly we need farmers and we need people to become soldiers.
So it's in our best interest to like figure out a way to deal with this.
That is not.
And was this a conscript?
Was this a volunteer army?
It wasn't, right?
Yeah.
Well, they do have conscriptions, like especially during emergencies, they have conscriptions and stuff.
So it's more, it's kind of like a draft a lot of the time with these wars.
So yeah, it's generally sort of a you get called up, your number gets called up effectively and like it's time for you to go serve.
They do have a lot of like there are volunteer.
Yeah.
Anyway, whatever.
It's a whole thing.
We don't have the time to get into that today.
But it's worth noting that like the money that they are making by conquering everything around Rome is plenty of money to take care of these farmers.
And I want to quote now from a Marxist account of Roman history written by Alan Woods.
Quote, after the Second Punic War ended in 202 BC, the economy of Italy endured a massive upheaval.
The legions that conquered Spain, Greece, and North Africa returned home with riches on an unprecedented scale.
A pro-consul, that's like a mix between the president and a general, returned from campaign in the east bearing 137,000 pounds of raw silver, 600,000 silver pieces, and 140,000 gold pieces.
So like, the nobles are getting fucking rich and all of this money stays in the hands of these, the patricians and this new class of people called the equites, who are like rich businessmen, right?
Because the trade is a lot, the more you conquer, the better trade gets for you if you're a fucking Roman businessman.
So they're making fucking bank.
Now, all of the land that the Roman army captures during this conquest of Italy, they go over becomes state-owned land, which seems fair, right?
They call it the Aegi Republicus Populi Romani, which means the public land of the Roman people.
And over time, the Senate votes to allow people to own parcels of this public land in perpetuity as long as they work it, right?
So that's how initially soldiers get rewarded: you get some of this public land and you can start a farm on it.
And that will allow you to have like a degree of economic independence.
But, and I'm going to quote here from a write-up in the Anthropology Review: quote, the problem was that if the land was left uncultivated, it could be taken over by someone who could work it.
So, soldiers who were out of the country fighting for the glory of Rome came back to find themselves dispossessed.
Vast stretches of land were taken over by rich and powerful Romans who used slaves who were not called for military service and thus were always present to plow the fields and tend to the crops and livestock.
This meant that peasants and returning soldiers had not only lost their land, but also the possibility of finding decently paid work with which to support their family because it was impossible to compete with slaves who had to work for free.
So that's that's a bad way to have the situation work, right?
So it's like it is, yeah, it's, I guess it's like all things that's just cobbled together from like tradition and like, this is what happened last time.
Just like the fact that, well, I want to be rich.
I want to be richer.
Nothing really matters more to me than personally being richer.
So let's do whatever gets me the most money in the short term.
And I will never back down.
This system can't change because it absolutely cannot work for us.
And again, people at the time note that this is like bad.
Like there's a decent number of people in the Roman political structure who are like, hey, guys, this is going to be a problem.
As we have in the United States, who are consistently being like, this is not a good way to do things.
Because they're noticing that all of these formerly independent freemen, the veterans who had like conquered the world for Rome, are winding up as almost like homeless in the city of Rome itself.
Like they have no work, no way to make money, and they just kind of swell the city because the state will give them food when they're in the city, kind of.
Like it's the only thing they can do is kind of become clients to some fucking rich guy or whatever.
And, you know, basically exist to provide a vote for a rich man and live marginally on the edges of society.
So as you can imagine, the fact that like the only way for a lot of these poor people to get any kind of support at all is to like vote for whatever guy has the most money and thus can give them food.
It makes this political system twist even more in favor of the wealthy, right?
Inequality becomes a serious problem in the Roman Republic.
Now, again, a lot of people recognize this as an issue.
And in his wonderful book, The Storm Before the Storm, Mike Duncan writes, quote, as early as 195, Cato the Elder warned his colleagues, We have crossed into Greece and Asia, places filled with all the allurements of vice, and we are handling the treasures of kings.
I fear that these things will capture us rather than we them.
Every few years, the Senate would attempt to rein in the ostentatious displays of wealth, but the resulting limitations inevitably went unheeded and unenforced.
By fatal coincidence, the Roman people at the same moment both acquired a taste for vice and obtained a license for gratifying it.
Yeah, it's the way it always goes, right?
They're no different from us.
Oh, God.
Yeah.
They just, we just have phones.
Yeah.
And it's interesting.
Karl Marx, when he writes Capital, is specifically looking at this period in Roman history.
He bases a lot of his conclusions off of like what the history that he's like reading about what happens in the Roman Republic.
And he writes in Capital, quote, it requires but a slight acquaintance with the history of the Roman Republic to be aware that its secret history is the history of its landed property.
Right.
That, like, and I essentially what he's saying is that, like, you have this vision of what the Roman Republic was that, like, dudes like our quote-unquote founding fathers have, where they're just like masturbating over these like austere figures.
And then you have the reality, which is that, yeah, this venal, corrupt, landholding class is choking out the middle class and the poor in order to make their already vast fortunes even larger.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And destroying the entire state as they do it because they care about nothing but increasing the amount of wealth that they have.
It is like parasites on every level, obviously.
Yeah, it's good stuff.
Yeah.
You know who else is a parasite on every level, Andrew?
I've got to find out.
The sponsors of this podcast, absolutely blood-sucking ticks, just guzzling the life out of your veins.
Sophie, is that a good way to lead ads?
Is that going to make them happy?
That's the only way you can lead into ads, my friend.
Excellent.
Excellent.
Parasites On Every Level00:04:38
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one: never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two: never mess with her friends either.
We always say, Trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends, oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, Oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's gonna get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ago Modern.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, And Dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through, and I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, If it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, But there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, Just give it a shot.
He goes, But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be right.
It wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Yeah.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant.
They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Gillespie and Michael Marancini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trap.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news at Americopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
Listen to Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots fired in the city hall building.
A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios, this is Rorschach, murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that.
Jeffrey Hood did.
July 2003.
Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
Everybody in the chamber's ducks.
A shocking public murder.
I screamed, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots.
Get down.
A charismatic politician.
You know, he just bent the rules all the time.
I still have a weapon.
And I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He alleged he was a victim of flat down.
That may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Negotiating A Surrender00:15:44
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Sherry, stay with me each night, each morning.
Say you love me.
You know I.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Oh, we're back.
So this all brings us to the story of a guy who, depending on who you ask, is either the first socialist in history or the sinister populist precursor to Donald Trump.
There are think pieces that will say both things.
They're all pretty silly because he's his own person and this is a long time ago.
So stop.
Stop it.
But this guy's name is Tiberius Sympronius Gracchus.
And he's born in either 163 or 162 BC.
And he comes into being as like the bluest blood motherfucker it is possible to be.
His father had served as consul, which is kind of like a, again, it's like a mix between president and general.
Like if you're consulating, which makes sense if the senators are also leading our right, yeah, exactly.
It should be the same job.
You get like voted to get a military command, effectively.
So, and his dad like celebrates two triumphs for military victories as like a young man.
His mother is like the daughter of this great Roman war hero.
Now, everybody's main source on Tiberius Gracis' life is a guy named Plutarch, who is a Greek historian who writes about him like 100 years after he died.
And it's worth knowing what Plutarch says because Plutarch's working from like sources that were written by people at the time when Gracch was alive.
But like most Roman history, we still, you're still just like, most of Plutarch's history is like, well, a guy told me this.
Like I heard this from like a dude who was like, and his grandpa was around and like, you know, he was reading this thing.
I heard this.
I heard the idea.
Yeah, a lot of it's like.
I guess that's all history anyway, but Jesus.
Yeah.
Like after this, after what happens with this guy happens, his like brother writes a pamphlet that he hands out.
And like a lot of Plutarch is based on like what people remember from being in the pamphlet, but I don't think we have the pamphlet still.
So it's like, it's like if somebody, it's like if somebody wrote a history of the fucking 2020 George Floyd protests based on like a conversation with someone who remembered some zines about them.
Right, right, right.
Where it's like, yeah, like you're probably not going to get all of the facts.
History is, yeah.
But yeah.
History is fucking crazy.
Yeah, it's good stuff.
There's a story that Plutarch tells that like when Tiberius's dad is a kid, he goes to a soothsayer, you know, basically a fucking, you know, a fortune teller.
And she's like, you're going to have to either like I'll just read the quote because it's kind of weird.
We are told, moreover, that he once caught a pair of serpents on his bed and that the soothsayers, after considering the prodigy, forbade him to kill both serpents or to let both go, but to decide the fate of one or the other of them, declaring that also the male serpent, if killed, would bring death to Tiberius and the female to Cornelia.
That's his wife.
So Tiberius, accordingly, who loved his wife and thought that she was still young and he was older and it was more fitting that he should die, killed the male serpent, but let the female go.
A short time afterwards, as the story goes, he died.
So that's what happens with this guy's dad.
Like his dad supposedly dies because he kills the snake that represents him to let his wife live.
He leaves her with 12 children, three of which survive to adulthood.
Just like, what a bonker's day at the fortune telling office.
What a weird day the fortune tellers do.
Check this out.
I'm going to tell him if he kills the male snake, he's going to die.
Yeah.
First of all, I'm going to tell him, kill one snake only.
Yeah, only one snake.
Let the other go.
They had to just be.
I assume the fortune teller colleagues are just all, you know, fucking with you.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, they're fucking high as shit.
They are unbearably lit.
So Cornelia takes charge of the children and the estate.
You know, she's good enough at being a mom that like a solid 25% of her children live to adulthood.
And two of those kids are the brothers Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus.
Now, both of them are like, again, fancy boys.
They hold a bunch of public offices that young patrician kids are expected to hold as they climb up the political ladder.
At age 17, Tiberius goes to Africa to fight, you know, in the last big war against Carthage.
And he's supposed to be the first man over the walls of Carthage during that final siege.
After that, he goes to another war.
So by the time, you know, he comes around in the 100s, like-ish BC, Rome is kind of locked into this Afghanistan-style situation in Spain where they have conquered Spain, but like it's kind of hard to hold on to Spain.
Like if you're anyone, there's a reason why Spain has mostly belonged to Spain throughout history.
It's not all that, it's not always all that easy for Spain to be in charge of Spain.
Yeah.
So they're fighting this like endless series of like brushfire rebellions against, and it is, it's like Afghanistan that you've got like this, this Roman military that's very organized and fairly modern in like its command structure.
And then there's these guys who are just like throwing rocks at them from the bushes and then running away.
And it works pretty well for the fucking Spanish.
So Tiberius Gracchus goes to go fight in northern Spain against these city called Nermintia.
And the war does not go very well.
And the guy who's in charge of the Roman army gets his ass kicked.
And so they have to negotiate a surrender.
Now, the Numentines knew Tiberius because his dad had beaten them in a war like 20 years ago.
And he'd been cool about it, right?
Like he hadn't been a dick about beating them in a war.
So they were like, well, we'll talk with this guy.
We'll negotiate with this guy because if he makes a peace treaty with us, we feel like Rome will stick to it.
So Tiberius works out a truce and a peace treaty and he saves this Roman army.
But when they get back to Rome, all of these politicians who had not left the city and who wanted the war to keep going because there was money in Spain, but didn't actually want to figure out how to fight it are like, how dare you pull out of Spain with this army?
Like, how dare you?
It's a little bit familiar to some things that have happened.
It's like this bad situation.
And the guys back home had like didn't have any idea how to deal with it better than Tiberius did, but they're still angry about it because that's what you do in politics.
I guess it's probably, well, it's only more honest to just have the military industrial complex openly advocating, like, we need this war for money to continue.
Yeah, we need this war for money to continue and for pride.
How fucking dare you?
So Tiberius, he takes a beating from these guys, but they can't punish him because he did just save the entire army's life.
And that kind of makes you popular in a way that's dangerous to fuck with too much.
But they do, his commanding officer who had lost the war, they like strip him naked and chain him up and send him back to the enemy and are like, you guys can have him.
Like we don't want this guy anymore.
Like do whatever you want to him.
Which again, if we'd done that with David Petraeus, would have, I think, been cool.
I think that's what we should have done with David Petraeus.
Just a few more consequences for some of people's command decisions.
That's all.
Fucking strip Dick Cheney naked and just airdrop him into Basra.
Like let and whatever happens, happens, right?
We're not saying what the penalty should be.
It's up to them to figure it out.
So the people vote to clear Tiberius of all charges, yada, yada.
Things go pretty good for him.
And this is like what you might call a pretty decent start in Roman public life.
And as he's, you know, there's a story that later gets told that like while he's kind of going back and forth between Spain and Rome, he's like walking around the countryside and he notices, quote, or he notices basically that like there's nobody here.
There's no Romans here.
It's all slaves.
All of these farms are worked by slaves.
All of the actual free people are like desperately poor because they've all lost their lands.
They're just like huddled in these shanties at the edge of town.
And like, oh, wow, it kind of seems like we've done a terrible thing and destroyed the class of people who have made like our success possible.
This is probably a problem, right?
So again, basic observation.
So he decides to set up this policy to reform the public lands of Rome, to make it impossible for individual rich guys to buy up huge tracts of land and to guarantee that small freeholding farmers will continue to be the core of Roman society.
Now, the way the popular story gets told, it's just Tiberius who like sees these poor farmers who are dispossessed and has this idea to fix everything.
That's not really true.
The reality is that this block of senators had been working for years to figure out a way to reform the land system to fix this problem.
And Tiberius is just kind of like, he's young and he's popular.
And these senators are like, you're the guy to be like the fucking front man, right?
Right.
Which I guess is how a lot of big political reform has to work.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's again, a fairly modern seeming story.
So they come up with this plan where they're going to limit the amount of public land that any individual can have to 330 acres.
Now, this is like too harsh for the rich people.
And so they start howling.
So they kind of like alter it in order to allow like an additional like, I don't know, 100 or so acres or a couple hundred acres if you like already hold the land.
So they put in like some again, they immediately are like, all right, well, look, like we'll work.
Like we understand you're like the rich people and you already have all this land.
So we'll let you have more than we think you should be having just to try to be friendly.
Now, think about modern politics.
When you offer to let rich conservatives like to compromise with them, do they A, compromise or B, go ape shit and declare war on you?
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
It's like exactly.
There's no, we like the lesson that we, I guess, will never learn from is like, don't negotiate with conservative terrorists.
No, no, exactly.
Do not, do not talk with these guys.
They're not, you can't.
They're not trustworthy.
Yeah.
So, you know, they they start Tiberius Grackus and these other senators and stuff start putting together this legislation that they're going to introduce at the forum.
And while they're doing all of this, this horrible war in Spain is raging on because the Senate's rejected the peace deal that Tiberius cooked up, which means they have to raise another army and send it to Spain.
But at this point, they're kind of having trouble finding soldiers, right?
Because nobody has enough money to like buy weapons.
And like it doesn't matter.
Even if you conscript people, they don't have the ability to like arm themselves.
And so there's this rich politician who's very much against land reform, Scipio Aemilianus, who figures out how to fix this problem.
And it's by using his vast personal wealth to recruit and arm an army of his own.
This is the first time this happens in Roman history where just a rich guy buys an army and takes it to war.
This will not be the last time this happens and it will prove to be a serious problem.
He's kind of like, he's kind of like the Roman Eric prince where he's like, well, what if I just buy an army?
Why do we just do it that way?
And then I can take minerals and shit, you know?
So this guy Emilianus is again super against the land reform bill and he's one of the big people organizing against Tiberius and his block.
But once he leaves the city to go fuck with Spain, he can't like do anything politically.
Like there's no sending messages back effectively.
So once he leaves the city with this army he's bought, Tiberius and his rivals take this law that they've built and they put it on the docket and they like, which literally means that it go to the middle of the city and they're like, hey guys, we got a fucking law to vote on.
Everybody show up and let's vote our asses off.
Gather around, gather around, motherfuckers.
Now, since most of the Senate is against land reform, Tiberius and his allies decide to present the bill directly to the assembly, to the voters, without letting the Senate debate it.
Now, this was not illegal.
You did not have to present a law to the Senate first and let them debate it.
But the most majorum, this like unwritten set of agreements, says that you don't propose a law to the public without letting the Senate debate it, right?
So this is the first big break with like political tradition and decorum.
And it's from Tiberius' side.
They're like, well, no, we're fuck the Senate.
Like we're just going to take this one straight to the people.
So the rich people are like, okay, well, I guess fuck all of the things that we used to do.
Like now there's no rules, right?
So we're just going to fucking do it.
Yeah.
You went nuclear and guess what?
Now we're going to do that too, right?
And this is, he does go nuclear because when Tiberius like goes up and he's like, hey, guys, I want to take all of this land that only the rich people have that's supposed to be all of our land and give it to all of you.
And this makes people very excited, right?
It's such a big deal that, like, because basically he gets up and he announces this and says, in like a couple of weeks, we're going to have a vote on it.
And so, all of these poor citizens start flooding out of the city and like finding their relatives who are like living on the outskirts of town or in other towns and bringing them in.
And so, suddenly, thousands and thousands of people start heading into Rome, including Italians, people who are not Roman citizens, but agree with this like land reform bill because fuck the rich people in Rome who like show up and are protesting basically.
They're showing placards, they're like announcing their support for this thing.
Obviously, Rome does not have mass media the way we have it, but they do have this forum, which is like Times Square mixed with C-SPAN and also a 90s-era mall, right?
It's this like big stage with shops around it, and it's not even that big a stage.
And if you're doing politics, you stand up there and you talk to people about like what you're trying to get them to do.
Um, so every day, Tiberius is up there while they're waiting for because they're like, say, we're gonna have the vote in you know X number of days, right?
So, and that's to give everyone time to get into the city because you have to physically be there to vote.
So, while all he's waiting for everyone to get in town, he's like speaking every day.
And I'm going to quote again from Plutarch here about like that's describing one of his speeches: The wild beasts that roam over Italy, he would say, have every one of them a cave or a lair to lurk in.
But the men who fight and die for Italy enjoy the common air and light, indeed, but nothing else.
Houseless and homeless, they wander about with their wives and children.
It is with lying lips that their imperators exhort the soldiers in their battles to defend sepulchers and shrines from the enemy.
For not a man of them has a hereditary altar, not one of these many Romans an ancestral tomb.
But they fight and die to support others in wealth and luxury.
Tribunes And Their Mobs00:10:06
And though they are styled masters of the world, they have not a single clod of earth that is their own.
Pretty good speech.
Yeah.
Yes, pretty good speech.
You put on your speech voice hard for that one, though.
I was noticing.
I might have been doing a little bit of Dan Carl in there.
So this goes really well.
And this is where the Trump comparisons get in, right?
He is the first like populist politician in Roman history.
He's tapping into decades of anger and resentment among the lower classes.
He's promising to take the fight to the elite, which he is clearly a member of, right?
On their behalf.
So you could, you can make some Trump comparisons, but you can also make direct comparisons to Linen and Mao, right?
Lenin and Mao are both upper-class rich people who become these socialist firebrands and ignite uprisings against an entrenched and decadent elite, right?
You can see comparisons to all these guys, right?
You can see him as like this first, like agrarian populist sort of Trumpian figure.
Or you could be like, well, he's the first socialist, you know, rabbit houser.
I mean, I think what it is, though, is it's the like contemporary elision of the word populist with just like a small band of racists.
Yes.
And that's where Trump fits in.
Everyone, the other ones are more truly populist.
Yeah, because he's, this is a real problem he's trying to solve as opposed to like howling about all again.
And like calling Trump like a populist is such like a New York Times thing because the only population that matters to them is like racists in Ohio.
Well, and also like, yeah, it is weird to call him a populist because he's never got a popular vote.
Like it's literally not most people.
Whereas most people are really on board with what Tiberius is saying because most people are fucking poor as shit, right?
Yeah.
And they're like, yeah, this sounds great.
So the rich people, they know they have to be careful because he has this huge mob of people who are like on his side.
And it would be really easy for them to just murder anybody who tries to stop him from passing this law.
So they bribe a tribune and tribunes are like, it's this political office that the main thing the tribunes can do is they can veto any law that anyone makes, right?
The tribunes, their primary power is that they can just say no and nothing can be done, right?
It's just like there's two guys who get that job, and that's like a thing that they can do.
Supreme Court type shit.
Yeah, it is a little bit supreme courty, although it's more of a populist position because one of the tribunes, the tribune of the plebs, oh, yeah, right, can only be a poor person, right?
Or if they're not actually poor people, but like can only be a non-noble.
Um, probably a rich non-noble.
It's there is like there is a cool thing in this, which is that, like, well, the poor people should have a representative who can just say no to everybody, right?
But in this case, the tribune gets bribed.
Um, and so he says, Hey, you can't vote on this bill, period.
So now Tiberius has to take action.
So Tiberius is like, because Tiberius is also a tribune, right?
So you've got one tribune who's like, I'm not going to let anyone vote on this fucking land reform bill.
So Tiberius is like, all right, well, then I won't let anyone vote on fucking anything.
And I won't let anyone spend the state's money.
And he locks the treasury.
Like he physically locks the Roman treasury and says, like, the government just, he does a government shutdown, right?
Like, that's what happens.
Like, no one can do anything now.
So while all this is happening, this is becoming like a show.
So like people are flooding into the forum to watch.
Most a lot of the people who are like in the streets arguing and debating and like watching this political drama unfold are like veterans.
They're like former farmers and sons of farmers and all this shit.
And they start talking about violence.
And Tiberius starts stoking this talk of violence by telling everyone he gets up on stage and he says, Hey, I have evidence that my enemies are planning to assassinate me.
And he starts carrying a dagger under his cloak, which is technically illegal, but he'll like pull it out during speeches and be like, shit, so serious that I got to keep a knife on me.
You know, I got to be ready to cut a bitch.
He's like 50 cent with the bullets too fast.
He's exactly like 50 cent.
So the tribune who'd been bribed, this guy Octavius decides at this point to let the people vote about, he's not going to let them vote on the land bill, but he'll be like, all right, look, if you guys are so unhappy with what I'm doing, you can vote about whether or not to strip me of like my office.
So this had never happened before.
And this starts to scare Tiberius because he's like, shit, we're now kind of like way off the beaten path of like what politics is supposed to be.
And I'm kind of worried that the wheels that there's no brakes on this thing.
Because it gets scary to everyone when all of the social and political mores stop start crumbling at once.
But this vote happens.
Octavius gets stripped out of his office.
He only survives the mob like murdering him because his friends like push their way through a crowd to get him away.
And Tiberius gets to have a vote on his law and it passes, like resoundingly passes.
Now, when the law passes, they have to set up a state commission to like redistribute this public land.
And so his enemies, these rich people, are like, well, we won't vote to actually pay any funds for the commission to redistribute public land.
So you can't afford to do anything with this new law.
And right as this happens, as they're like, fuck you, Tiberius, a rich king dies.
And this king, for completely separate reasons, wants to fuck over his dumb shit kids.
So he leaves all of his money to the Roman people, right?
So Tiberius is like, all right, you're not going to fund me.
Well, this guy left his money to the Roman people.
So I'm just going to use his money to fund this land reform commission.
And this is a problem for a bunch of reasons, but basically the rich people are number one, angry that they're not going to get that gold.
And number two, they're like, well, you're not supposed to have the power to decide how state money gets spent.
So now you've, number one, you're deciding what can get voted on.
You've stripped this other tribune of his power.
You're now like exercising power of the purse and like what the state can be spent on.
Like you're getting kind of close to becoming a king, right?
Which is not entirely like wrong.
Like they're like, wow, this, you are exercising more power than a single person is supposed to have in our system.
So they get really, they decide like some shit needs to get done.
And I'm going to quote from Anthropology Review here.
At the time, tribunes were considered inviolable.
So, Tiberius was encouraged to run for a third term to retain the protection that the position bestowed.
To bolster his popularity with the citizens and increase his chances of being elected, he proposed several new populist measures that further enraged his enemies.
These included proposals to reduce the mandatory term of military service, as well as change the balance of power in the Senate by increasing the number of equités to match that of the senators.
The night before the vote, Tiberius implored the citizens to vote for him because he feared for his life and the life of his family.
His plea was so compelling that many people guarded his house all night to make sure he was safe.
The next day, Tiberius went to the capital where he was surrounded by a crowd of people who wanted to protect him.
Plutarch says that one of the senators, Flavius Flaccus, warned Tiberius that the wealthy Romans had resolved to assassinate him.
Tiberius pointed at his head to indicate to his supporters that his life was in danger.
This was interpreted by the spies sent from the Senate as a request for a crown, a claim they raced to relay to the senators, who immediately sent a mob of armed slaves and supporters to attack Tiberius and his followers.
So, what follows is a fucking massacre.
You have this group of political, this political group who have come together to like reform the political system of the entire government in order to make it fairer for poor people.
And the rich send an army into the city of slaves primarily and massacre them.
They kill the shit out of Tiberius and like two or three hundred of his followers.
Like, it's just this bloody nightmare.
They're like throwing people's corpses in the river, like all sorts of fucked up shit.
Um, now, after they massacre all these people, they pass most of the reforms that he had suggested, which is another thing that happens repeatedly in Roman history.
Like, they'll have like they'll have a civil war and they'll massacre the other side, and then they'll do what they asked for anyway, because it's a good idea.
Um, so a lot of his reforms happen, but by killing him and all of his followers in the middle of town, a seal has been broken, right?
And the Republic is never the same after this.
I'm going to quote from a write-up in the New York Times here.
Over the next years, it quickly became normal for populist politicians to set aside long-standing norms to accomplish their goals, for military commanders to bend the Senate to their will by threatening to occupy Rome, and for rival generals to wage war on one another.
Within a generation of the first political assassination in Rome, politicians had begun to arm their supporters and use the threat of violence to influence the votes of assemblies and the election of magistrates.
Within two generations, Rome fell into civil war.
So that's good.
And yeah.
Yeah.
That's, I mean, oh, don't especially want to think about.
I guess that, I mean, that is also just the American thing: look, if not that our official like armed services are not just basically militias for the powerful, but codifying it that way, feels like.
Hey, you learned where this is going.
Because in part two, part one is about how the Romans, how Roman politics turned from this like cordial thing where violence was not common to we will murder anybody who tries to fuck with the money.
And part two is about how they create the FBI.
Hell yeah.
Can't fucking wait.
Grim as fucking usual.
Thanks.
Andrew, you got anything to plug before we roll out of here?
Yes, actually, this Saturday, the 20th, my podcast, Yo, Sus Racist, is doing a show in Austin, Texas.
So if you're in Austin, please come out.
But yeah, find me, Yo is this racist.
I'm Andrew T.
Well, you know, it's funny because your podcast is Yo is this racist, but we're talking about the Romans and racism didn't exist yet.
Creating The FBI00:03:38
They didn't have it.
They did like they literally hadn't figured out how to be racist yet.
That hadn't been invented because we also had not invented British people.
Right.
They also had a lot of other shit to fight about, apparently.
They sure did.
They sure did.
Yeah, but not racist.
Woke Kings, the Roman Republic.
Woke.
Woke Imperial.
No, woke proconsuls.
Yeah, yeah.
All right.
Well, until next time, up yours, woke moralists.
Behind the Bastards is a production of CoolZone Media.
For more from CoolZone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He is not going to get away with this.
He's going to get what he deserves.
We always say that, trust your girlfriends.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots fired in the City Hall building.
How could this ever happen in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that.
A shocking public murder.
This is one of the most dramatic events that really ever happened in New York City politics.
They screamed, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
A tragedy that's now forgotten.
And a mystery that may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, Murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Lori Siegel, and this is Mostly Human, a tech podcast through a human lens.
This week, an interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to the products we put out in the world.
An in-depth conversation with a man who's shaping our future.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, it's Nora Jones, and my podcast, Playing Along, is back with more of my favorite musicians.
Check out my newest episode with Josh Groban.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Share with me each night, each morning.
Listen to Nora Jones is playing along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Mode of my next guest.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
He goes, just give it a shot.
But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hanging in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of life.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.