Transcript

HH Addendum EP2 Rome Through Duncan's Eyes

From Dan Carlin · Episode page · Watch on YouTube

· 1 h 8 min · 12,891 words · 74 timestamped sections

This is the full, timestamped transcript of "HH Addendum EP2 Rome Through Duncan's Eyes", an episode of Dan Carlin published March 8, 2018 (1 h 8 min, about 12,891 words). It mentions 21 people, works and ideas, including Mike Duncan, Rome, The Storm Before the Storm, Sulla, Julius Caesar.

What this episode is about

The discussion focuses on the significance of history podcasts, particularly highlighting Mike Duncan's acclaimed work with "The History of Rome" and "Revolutions." The conversation centers around Duncan's new book, "The Storm Before the Storm," which delves into the complexities of the Roman Republic's decline, showcasing the enduring appeal of Roman history in the podcasting landscape.

Key takeaways

  • The podcasting landscape has exploded—over 500,000 shows! Are we drowning in content or swimming in creativity?
  • Focusing on the Roman Republic's collapse is like spotting an iceberg before Titanic—essential context often overlooked.
  • People flock to Caesar's story, but why not explore what made the Titanic so unsinkable before the crash?
  • Rome's allure is timeless; its saga serves as a cautionary tale for modern societies teetering on the brink.
  • Understanding Rome enriches our grasp of civilization itself—who wouldn't be intrigued by humanity's greatest hits and misses?

Who speaks in this episode?

What is discussed, and when

  1. – 10:00: Mike Duncan, Julius Caesar, Cleopatra, The Storm Before the Storm
  2. – 20:00: Rome, The Punic Wars, Carthage, The American Revolution
  3. – 30:00: Tiberius Gracchus, Caius Gracchus, Julius Caesar, Cato the Elder
  4. – 40:00: Cato the Elder, Julius Caesar, The Punic Wars, Carthage
  5. – 50:00: Sulla, Caesar Augustus, Hannibal, Numidia
  6. – 1:00:00: Julius Caesar, Rome, Sulla, The Storm Before the Storm
  7. – 1:08:25: Mike Duncan, The Storm Before the Storm, Tiberius Gracchus, Caesar Augustus

Notable quotes from "HH Addendum EP2 Rome Through Duncan's Eyes"

  • Sort of makes him the audio the modern audio equivalent of Edward Gibbon where he goes like the length and breadth of the entire Roman experience to the fall of the Western…
    about The History of Rome · at
  • Lots of stuff out there but I have a feeling most of you are already gonna know a ton of this stuff because Rome is wildly popular which is one of the first questions I ask my…
    about Rome · at
  • To focus on you know this is the Titanic story the actual sinking of the ship but Mike your new book the storm before the storm is about the iceberg and the striking of the…
    about Mike Duncan · at
  • This is that Rome conquers Carthage for the last time their great rival I mean Hannibal during the Second Punic War that's that's about 50 years or so in the past but they're…
    about The Punic Wars · at
  • A novice some of these reformers look more real than others do you have a feeling I mean like Caius and Tiberius Crocky I mean to me those seem people always like to compare them to the Kennedy brothers that's ridiculous but at.
    about Tiberius Gracchus · at
  • Mean there's always comparisons you know when you look at the solos and the Maurya TSA's and Cato the Elder and all those folks do you have any analogies that you often think…
    about Cato the Elder · at
  • Blueprint for how you can achieve power by completely disregarding just anything but brute force so sulla is going to he loses a political confrontation Salah losing he had…
    about Sulla · at
  • Once sulla did that and then ultimately he emerges victorious from everything that is the point that men like Julius Caesar and men like Pompey who was an early partisan of…
    about Pompey · at

Who and what is mentioned in this episode?

People

  • Mike Duncan — Person · Main guest · 6 mentions · first at
    Interview subject discussing his book on the late Roman Republic and his work as a major history podcaster (History of Rome, Revolutions).
  • Sulla — Person · Key historical figure (book endpoint) · 4 mentions · first at
    Central to the episode’s argument about norms collapsing into brute force; his march on Rome and proscriptions are discussed as a tipping point.
  • Julius Caesar — Person · Referenced historical figure · 8 mentions · first at
    Used as the familiar '3rd act' entry point to the Republic’s collapse; Duncan’s book focuses on the earlier causes leading up to Caesar.
    Octavian comes along before Antony and Cleopatra are around to start looking as you say it the things that led up to the collapse of the Roman Republic rather than just jumping…
  • Tiberius Gracchus — Person · Referenced reformer (early crisis figure) · 5 mentions · first at
    Discussed as an emblematic 'popular' reformer tied to land/veteran issues and the breakdown of elite consensus politics.
  • Caesar Augustus — Person · Referenced historical figure (reformer endpoint) · 5 mentions · first at
    Appears as the later stabilizer whose reforms address problems discussed in the book’s earlier period; also referenced via 'Octavian'.
    The actual sinking of the ship yeah the way that I put it you so my book is the storm before the storm the beginning of the end of the Roman Republic and it covers the period…
  • Cato the Elder — Person · Referenced moralist / exemplar · 4 mentions · first at
    Invoked in discussion of Roman values, wealth influx after conquest, and elite critiques of moral/economic change.
  • Caius Gracchus — Person · Referenced reformer (paired with Tiberius) · 2 mentions · first at
    Discussed as part of the Gracchi reform movement and as a lens on sincerity vs demagoguery in popular politics.
    A novice some of these reformers look more real than others do you have a feeling I mean like Caius and Tiberius Crocky I mean to me those seem people always like to compare them to the Kennedy brothers that's ridiculous but at.
  • Pompey — Person · Referenced historical figure (later blueprint follower) · 2 mentions · first at
    Mentioned as a later figure influenced by Sulla’s precedent and as part of the late-Republic warlord dynamic.
  • Cleopatra — Person · Referenced historical figure (narrative anchor) · 3 mentions · first at
    Used as an example of how popular late-Republic stories require deep backstory; her era is contrasted with Duncan’s earlier focus.
    Questions I ask my history podcast colleague the great Mike Duncan once upon a time I wanted to do a podcast on Cleopatra and I sat down decided it ordered a bunch of books and…
  • Hannibal — Person · Referenced historical figure (context for 146 BC) · 2 mentions · first at
    Used to situate Rome’s post-Punic War dominance; referenced as the earlier Carthaginian threat preceding Rome’s triumph.
    This is that Rome conquers Carthage for the last time their great rival I mean Hannibal during the Second Punic War that's that's about 50 years or so in the past but they're…
  • Edward Gibbon — Person · Referenced expert / comparator · 1 mention · first at
    Used as a prestige comparison: Duncan is called a 'modern audio equivalent' of Gibbon for covering Rome’s long arc.
    Sort of makes him the audio the modern audio equivalent of Edward Gibbon where he goes like the length and breadth of the entire Roman experience to the fall of the Western…

Books & papers

  • The Storm Before the Storm — Book · Primary recommendation · 5 mentions · first at
    Mike Duncan's book discussing the early stages of the Roman Republic's decline, a main topic of the podcast.
    That most people don't know as well as the actual sinking of the ship yeah the way that I put it you so my book is the storm before the storm the beginning of the end of the…
  • The History of Rome — Book · Referenced work · 2 mentions · first at
    Mike Duncan's podcast turned book, referenced as a comprehensive history of Rome.

Concepts & topics

  • The Punic Wars — Concept · Core topic · 2 mentions · first at
    Series of wars between Rome and Carthage, pivotal in Rome's rise to dominance.

Places & events

  • Rome — Place · Setting · 2 mentions · first at
    Central historical location discussed throughout the podcast, focusing on its political and social dynamics during the Republic era.
  • Carthage — Place · Setting · 3 mentions · first at
    Rome's great rival, mentioned in the context of the Punic Wars and its conquest by Rome.
    This is that Rome conquers Carthage for the last time their great rival I mean Hannibal during the Second Punic War that's that's about 50 years or so in the past but they're…
  • Numidia — Place · Setting · 1 mention · first at
    Mentioned in the context of its king, Jugurtha, and his interactions with Rome.
    Had existed before in the context of my book the great example of this in my book is jag Arthas conduct in Numidia where he is you know one of the kings of Numidia after his I…
  • The Civil War — Event · Referenced event · 2 mentions · first at
    Mentioned in the context of discussing historical conflicts and their impacts.
    Political things then we're starting to move a little bit well I mean yeah like if we actually have like a mass migrating population that has like an entire impure entire armed force they can go toe-to-toe with the US Army then I guess.
  • The American Revolution — Event · Referenced event · 1 mention · first at
    Mentioned in comparison to the Roman Republic's founding and political dynamics.
    Like no that would be if anything that's that's you know that's the founding fathers that's the American Revolution then what Rome does is it emerges as a new republic in over…
  • The Cold War — Event · Referenced event · 1 mention · first at
    Mentioned briefly in the context of global power dynamics.
    Because we did all of that we are one of the acknowledged great powers and especially after the Cold War I mean in the 1990s you know we're describing the United States as a hyper power almost now I think that's been tempered quite a bit.
  • Great Depression — Event · Referenced event · 1 mention · first at
    Mentioned in passing during a discussion about economic crises.
    Get out while you can then watch it all go to ruin so yeah it really does and the bonus marchers are a good example of this which happened right before you know right in the…

Full transcript with timestamps

it's hardcore history attention I've been podcasting since like the Stone Age 2005 and way back then and for a long time afterwards I kind of considered all the other people who were podcasting as my colleagues we're not really in the sort of industry where you say yes my colleagues and we published papers or whatever the normal idea of what you might consider a colleague to be but it really felt the same right you're struggling through the same things learning the same things running into each other in places either in person or digitally these days of course it's a lot harder to call every podcaster your colleague when I think I saw a number recently that it's north of 500,000 podcasts or something but the person I'm about to talk to is undoubtedly my podcast colleague because well heck he's a history podcaster so right there we're in a pretty pretty small gene pool and he is one of the

great podcasters ever his the history of Rome podcast is legendary in my mind and sort of makes him the audio the modern audio equivalent of Edward Gibbon where he he goes like the length and breadth of the entire Roman experience to the fall of the Western Empire it's hugely popular in one of those podcast that should be in some section of the Hall of Fame some day his other one is an amazingly ambitious project which he pulls off wonderfully and judging from the success everyone seems to like revolutions where he looks at different revolutions so it'll be very interesting to talk to Mike Duncan today about his new book the storm before the storm and if you don't know enough about this his book will educate you wonderfully his show of course is available out there we did a the longest series we ever did was on this period of Roman history the death throes of the Republic so there's lots of stuff out there but I have a

feeling most of you are already gonna know a ton of this stuff because Rome is wildly popular which is one of the first questions I ask my history podcast colleague the great Mike Duncan once upon a time I wanted to do a podcast on Cleopatra and I sat down decided it ordered a bunch of books and then tried to figure out where you should start the story of Cleopatra and every time I would go backwards I would find a domino connected to another Domino and another Domino long story short that show I wanted to do Cleopatra about or the show I wanted to do about Cleopatra turned into the longest series we've ever done because you have to go all the way back to a long way in Roman history for the dynamics to become you know even remotely clear and people tend to focus on you know this is the Titanic story the actual sinking of the ship but Mike your new book the storm before the storm is about the iceberg and the

striking of the iceberg you know tell us a little bit about you know this story that most people don't know as well as the actual sinking of the ship yeah the way that I put it you so my book is the storm before the storm the beginning of the end of the Roman Republic and it covers the period from 146 BC around there to about 78 BC which is the death of sulla and it covers the couple of generations before Julius Caesar comes along before Octavian comes along before Antony and Cleopatra are around to start looking as you say it the things that led up to the collapse of the Roman Republic rather than just jumping right into it and you say it's you know people like to focus on the sinking of the ship and I say that the jumping into Caesar is like jumping into a movie at the 3rd act at the beginning of the third act where you you know everything is you know loud and crazy and people are fighting with each

other and obviously people are really passionately committed to this that or the other thing but you don't know how it got to this point you don't know what were the what were the problems that led the Republic to be so brittle that it could be blown apart a couple of generations later and that's what I hope that the book is able to explore and then when you read it and you have completed with it then you'll have a much richer understanding of why we why what with Caesar happens let's talk about why we even care what happens to Caesar I'm a little amazed at the not just modern but ongoing public interest and remember a public that is generally not thought to be all that history knowledgeable or even care that much about it and yet we can continually publish books and make movies and have discussions that that draw comparisons to this Republic from more than 2,000 years ago what do you think accounts for the enduring interest

on the part of even lay people to this place where if you think about it no one should even be this shouldn't be in the front of anyone's mind fifteen hundred two thousand years ago it's it's a good question I mean like for people like us you know it's just it's so inherently interesting that it's almost weird to step back and say like why would anybody be interested in Rome because Rome is at least to me so inherently interesting I think what it gets to is that people have it people know that Rome was this ancient powerful civilization and it almost is the epitome of what imperial power is what civilizational power is we know that it lasted for a thousand years or more if you include the Byzantines so I think it's I think Rome just is always gonna have a place in the collective imagination as you go okay what if you're at all interested in history at all let's go to sort of the big and

important parts of history and you're always gonna then wind up in Rome and specifically where people are gonna wind up is that is that era between let's say the arrival of Julius Caesar and like the death of Nero right the death of the Giulio Claudian dynasty that particular era of Roman history in part because it's so well documented and we know so much about it is always going to be the place where people go to if they become interested in Rome that's where they're gonna wind up and it's a lot the same way that I think that no matter what like the Napoleonic age is gonna be permanently something that people keep going back to and back to even 2,000 years later when you're like wow this is just like some obscure you know kind of temporary French Empire there there is there is something about the force of the personalities and the force of the political power that is being expressed that's always going to

draw people's attention you know III see that with Napoleon just like I see that with a Hitler or or even a jenga's Khan but but to me the difference is the length of that you know it's instead of one supreme figure that that is searing across the pages of the history book and they're in innately interesting you have numerous figures I mean just going through your book it's one fascinating individual that seems to be almost I mean I mean when you think about what the quota of great men should be in any given civilization during any given time the period discussed in your book seems to be an era where Humanity in that place and that time is exceeding its normal quota of fascinating August human beings I would say so and it's always been a bit surprising to me you know having gone through the history of Rome and you know gone through the entire history of Rome in pretty minut detail that that particular period between the

grok I and then Marius and sulla was always was always a period that I wanted to come back to like III kind of had put a pin in it very early on and was like you know this is this is an era that's gonna be a lot where there's gonna be worth coming back to and to have nobody really have written the book that I wrote which is let's just focus on this 50 or 60 year period all on its own I won't make this the first couple of chapters in a larger book about the fall of the Republic I won't make it one chapter in a larger history about you know just Roman civilization but to really like hone in on this particular period you know I would always kind of I would watch the book lists with one eye like is somebody gonna finally discover that this is a great untapped like wealth of material and nobody nobody quite put it together so I was able to step in and and now I hope deliver a book that will explain why I think when

people end the book they're gonna be like why hasn't this been covered in more detail I think that'll be one of the big questions coming out of it for people yeah love your subtitle the beginning of the end of the roman republic it sounds Churchillian but you know maybe could have called it also you know the era when things broke because that way that really is kind of what it was and you can see like you were talking about in the book they the Romans didn't have this written constitution they had sort of a set of conduct rules that were just innately understood by everyone in customs and when they broke that it's like okay there's no written constitution so once someone violates the way we do things right the way of the elders all bets are off right it seemed that way where there was that there was this thing like but when Rome triumphs and what happens in 146 BC for people that aren't like caught up with

this is that Rome conquers Carthage for the last time their great rival I mean Hannibal during the Second Punic War that's that's about 50 years or so in the past but they're they're great rivalry with Carthage is now over and Rome has emerged victorious they also decide to just outright conquer and annex Greece into the Roman state so at this point in 146 BC Rome is without question the strongest power in the Mediterranean world and nobody is going to be able to challenge them there is something this triumph actually opens up a whole host of new problems for the Republican for the leadership of the problem that they just sort of start to fail to address and fail to deal with and it creates a powerfully new like confrontational style of domestic politics that had never really existed before the Roman Senate and the Roman elites had always been pretty club' with each other they had always been like oh there

are some you know will ultimately make compromises with each other or you know if we don't all agree on something we'll just we'll just put it to bed and what happens after 146 is you start having these leaders start to break away and start to tap into new energies that are floating around out there and with this new confrontational style of Roman politics yeah people start abandoning those old unwritten norms and unspoken modes of behavior and once you start down that road I mean you can pry you can pull out of it what what happened to the Romans is that they were not able pull out of it and if you start going down this road you ultimately discover that even written laws even following written laws is merely a custom it's merely a norm there's no there's nothing about a piece of paper with laws written on it that compels me to do anything to follow that law I'm just simply I'm giving it power with my own because

that's how we do things but if somebody say has a you know an army or a gun or a baseball bat you know that actually is the ultimate definer of power it's just brute force so once you start giving up on sort of what you would call o mine er unspoken rules you eventually will get to the point where everybody has to admit that only brute force is really what's at play you know I love that line whether it was really said or not that you know history doesn't repeat but it sometimes rhymes and I look at the Roman Republic I think like everyone does and you know it's hard not to see patterns and and similar dynamics and I think if for no other reason than because it's another commercial Republic that's large and imperial and right there you're gonna have some things that look similar and we all understand that if you look a little beneath the surface there's a ton of things that are different

I mean slavery outright slavery for example but you point out in your book and I thought it was interesting you were you were drawing comparisons to if the US and the Roman Republic are following a similar charted course for lack of a better word where would we be now in terms of where the Romans were can you talk a little about that cuz I thought that was I mean if you look at the Punic Wars as like the world wars and whatnot I think it's a fascinating way to come up to a conclusion saying oK we've done this we've done this we've done this we haven't done this yet so where do you put us in the book compared to Roman history in a similar place right so all all caveats aside that all caveat this is not actually the way that history works we're not like in some repeating that's right we're speculating wildly any response and absolute so that's what I do Mike welcome to my show okay so let's say that the Roman Empire

out there and there's like a thousand years worth of history and and we're sitting here in the United States or in the West generally at the beginning of the 21st century you want to say like well what what is there that we can look to in Roman history is is there a period in time that we can look to that is more analogous to our own situation than another and it's really it's a lot by process of elimination where you know are we a brand-new little city-state that has just recently been colonized or founded by you know a group of dissidents and vagabonds and escaped slaves like know that that happened 400 years ago in our own history that would be you know the early days of the colonization of North America are we at a stage where a group of disgruntled aristocrats overthrows a king and establishes a new kingless Republic that is more or less an elite led oligarchy like no that would be if anything that's

that's you know that's the founding fathers that's the American Revolution then what Rome does is is it emerges as a new republic in over the next couple of hundred years it starts to expand slowly across Italy in a series of in a series of Wars they're collectively dubbed the Samnite wars that wind up with Rome being the most dominant power in the Italian peninsula on the Italian peninsula so is the United States a recently emerged regional power I again I don't think that anybody would describe the United States as a recently emerged regional power and all of that probably corresponds to you know our slow and steady conquest of North America and everything that we did to the American Indians battling with Mexico and taking their the entire north half of their country and then you even get later on and you say well after that Rome goes to war with Carthage goes to war with Greece goes to war in Spain and

they emerge as this dominant what you might call a global power at least in the context of the Mediterranean and again the United States isn't even there because we did all of that we are one of the acknowledged great powers and especially after the Cold War I mean in the 1990s you know we're describing the United States as a hyper power almost now I think that's been tempered quite a bit in the last few years but certainly we're not finding our footing for the first time as a global power we've been dealing with those issues you know since the end of World War two and all through the Cold War so then you push for it a little bit more and you say okay well has the Republic you know have we collapsed into a you know a generations-long civil war where a warlord has in effect emerged victorious from and set himself up as a dictator no that hasn't happened yet so if we haven't gotten to that point yet if the

Republic has not yet collapsed and I certainly don't believe that the Republic has collapsed then you say okay well maybe the United States is kind of now roughly in this same setting where after Rome had emerged as a global power but before the Republic collapsed let's let's take a look at this era it's the beginning of the end of the Republic which is right after this period 146 BC which as we said earlier in the show very earlier in this interview was it's already a period that is like inherently fascinating in its own right and as it turns out I think that they were dealing with a number of issues that you could say the United States is dealing with right now and so it's worth going through what the Romans went through and how they responded to it and maybe it could maybe could influence how we decide to deal with our own problems today I was playing a silly game while I was really you know reading your book is

to remind me of a bunch of things that I haven't I haven't looked at in a while and and the battles over public land and the distribution of land to veterans and all that stuff and the problem that the Romans were having keeping armies in the field when they were essentially you know conscripts is not really the right word but farmer armies that had to go home and tend to their home we're now on long service a thousand miles away from home and the farms going to heck and how long can you maintain and I thought you know if we tried to run our current foreign policy in the United States with a military that was operating with the draft situation that we had say in the 1950s I don't know if we could do it how much does the dynamic of having you know a bunch of veterans coming home from these wars and having you know real gripes about the the situation that they find them selves in the fact that they might have

to go back in service the fact that their homes are falling apart while they're gone talk to her talk a little about that dynamic reminds me a little like the fry core in Germany or the the bonus marchers in our own history I mean a bunch of long service military veterans angry with nothing to do it sounds like a recipe for political change we'll just say yeah I would I would say so and what what is happening is it's one of these situations where again the the Romans are had been more or less running what you might call a glorified militia where you were you were you would enter into the service you would actually if harvest time came and everybody was still fighting each other like both sides would quit the field and everybody would go home and harvest their fields and these imperial wars of expansion that Rome got caught in yes starts to take the poor the lower-class citizens away from their

farms away from their families for longer and longer periods of time and so this period of triumph is for the for the Roman state for the Republic itself as an entity the the Senate and the people of Rome turns out to be fairly economically disastrous for a lot of these lower-class Roman citizens there they're gonna start to lose their farms they're gonna start to get bought out by wealthy neighbors because you take you know you'd rather take some money and get out while you can then watch it all go to ruin so yeah it really does and the bonus the bonus marchers are a good example of this which happened right before you know right right in the midst of the Great Depression here in the United States is that they they had these grievances they had these legitimate grievances their families had had these farms for you know in perpetuity you know going back into the misty IRA's of the early republic or

even the kingdom days and they've they're now starting to lose all of that and their traditional ways of life are being upset and they are feeling that the Senate and the government of Rome is a they are consolidating all of this massive imperial wealth but none of it seems to be trickling down to the poor farmers to the poorer citizens so you have you have a situation where these new leaders as I was you can you can start to break out and say hey I as a noble leader you can say hey I think that there's an opportunity for me here to get enormous political influence and political power and political popularity by promising these people who have all these grievances I'm gonna I'm gonna solve your problems we're gonna go to the rich we're gonna take their land by basically by force we're gonna chop it up and we're gonna redistribute it to all of you this is an incredibly popular thing that can be

done and this opens the new like popular a style of Roman politics which is instead of this elite noble consensus being the driver of your policies it's directly appealing to the rural peasants in the urban plebs who are feeling negative effects from Rome's Imperial triumphs rather than a bunch of positive effects well and it brings up the age-old question I'd like to get your opinion on it as a guy who's talked about Rome as much or more than anyone I can think of the idea that that these people who appealed to the popular crowd were they really was that was that a real position or was that you know they just had latched on to a political a win they put their finger in the wind find out oh this cause of giving land to the veterans is popular so I'll do that it seems to me that that if I look at it as a novice some of these reformers look more real than others um do you have a feeling I mean like uh Caius and

Tiberius Crocky I mean to me those seem people always like to compare them to the Kennedy brothers that that's ridiculous but at the same time you have two brothers both assassinated both that a lot of people were able to romantically put a lot of hopes in and lionize afterwards I mean do you look at those guys as um as sincere reformers or are they all charlatans work in a political angle well or none of them know I know I have an answer to this because now I've now I've gone through it and this is as you point out this is one of like the great debates in Roman history generally and also just like world history in general is you know are these various popular reformers are they merely cynical demagogues or are they genuinely did in reforming the state and certainly even while the Drakh I were still alive they're there their allies were saying oh they're you know they're driven by lofty ideals and and a genuine regard

for the people and their enemies are producing pamphlets to say oh no they're they're trying to make themselves the new kings of Rome so where I do come down on it about the grok I in particular that I think that they were interested in genuine reform there was no like altruism at work here I mean we're talking about like high Roman politics there's not a lot of altruism going around out there but I think that they saw simultaneously that a path to personal power which is what they were after they were incredibly ambitious could simultaneously solve a lot of the problems that Rome was now dealing with as it transitioned from being merely an Italian city state one one among many to like the rulers of the entire Mediterranean world but they existed on a spectrum where this same you know the same milieu of papillary energy coming out of the rural peasants or the urban plebs even in the lower equestrian

classes that have a lot of wealth but don't have a lot of input politically those can be harnessed by people like the grok I and they can also be harnessed by cynical demagogues who yes are just there to say eh you're angry I know that you're angry I'm gonna help you channel that anger and I'm gonna tell you who's to blame for all of your problems and and then I'm gonna point you at the people who I'm telling you are to blame for it and Oh wouldn't you know it the people who are to blame for it are my personal enemies so you can use that same sort of it becomes it becomes quite a revolutionary energy you can start to use that and manipulate it so I think it's never fair to say that all of them are sincere reformers and or all of them are cynical demagogues it's it's quite a mix of the two and people are gonna land on a spectrum and people say you know people bring up the Kennedy brothers for the grok I which doesn't

really hold a lot of water but if there is anybody in American who does look like the croc I think it's the Roosevelts where what Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin Roosevelt and that the the progressive reforms that they were making both of them were incredibly ambitious both of them wanted to be President both of them kind of wanted to be President forever and they were called traitors to their class yeah and they were of course they were absolutely and so they're very similar to the croc I in that way that they were you know inner inner circle nobility and they're using all of their power and wealth and influence to really disrupt what the elites have going for them so I think if anybody is out there in American history that does look like the croc eye it's probably the Roosevelt well I'm enjoying the analogy comparison too much to stop now so maybe you can give me have you ever thought about some

of these other figures in your book and thought about American examples I mean I can look at like a Huey Long for example and see someone that maybe would have fit back into the Roman things I remember you know it was at Manchester's book I MacArthur an Americans Caesar I mean there's always comparisons you know when you look at the solos and the Maurya TSA's and Cato the Elder and all those folks do you have any analogies that you often think of when you think of some of these major figures well not to you know not to you know rain on anybody's parade but once you get once you get onto that like granular level like like who is you know who would drusus be it does start to get harder to pin people down like was MacArthur was MacArthur and American Caesar I don't know but it seems like probably a good thing that Truman fired him I think it's an insult to Caesar myself but I'm biased yeah okay yeah I would say so I

mean like yeah of all the people that I've ever gone through that you can compare to Julius Caesar I mean like its Napoleon that's who I know exactly yeah nobody else really like measures up to that particular class of you know having the totality of like I'm I can be Jenna Seidel and also like reformed the metric system and I'm a genius yes so if I successfully dodged the question yes I think so I think well done so so okay so then let's talk then a little bit about the dynamics here because you know it's funny because when you look at the Romans it seems to be the wonderful unless you want to go to the Greeks but it's the wonderful example of the class divisions and then the problems inherent with with class warfare and sharing of power I mean if you wanted to describe I mean we're talking about the iceberg that sinks the Titanic here and we can talk about rules shifting and warlords and

everything but but what was it in it that shifted in terms of a public being willing to accept senatorial control by as you pointed out in the book a really small number of people in a fundamental sense and and and be able to push I mean the the Tribune of the plebs was one systemic tool that was introduced to help balance out those powers could you say that that whole era between Tiberius Gracchus and maybe Caesar is an example of class warfare sort of playing out I mean how much of a role would you give to that ambitious men versus class warfare versus cycles and trends it's it's really difficult to to get into because Roman politics did operate differently than modern Western politics like the client system where's it yeah likes yes so the the first and most important thing is to say that these are these are more like clan rivalries than then class warfare where you know Europe a you're a patron you're a leader and

you have this network of clients who are all attached to you and then your political rivals have that same network of clients who are all attached to them so this is really like this is really clans running into each other with with almost like nobles and retainers if you wanted to use like a medieval analogy rather than rather than like oh we're you know we're the lower classes and we are trying to overthrow you guys the upper classes but that said during this era right after after 146 I think you do have a new class style of politics that one of these rival clans can take advantage of right and so hopefully I'm able to paint this correctly so what it is is you have this ability to go out in - just the voting public right because all of these people could vote the rural peasants the urban clubs they could all vote and you could use the popular assemblies to pass legislation to make yourself and your own clan very very

popular so this is almost something that like you would be sitting around with your senatorial family or you're an ambitious senatorial family and you're like how are we gonna get power of that appeal to the populace is an available method of doing it so your ginning up class interests and you're pointing them at often - usually you're pointing it at the corrupt Senate and saying like we're gonna you know we are gonna deliver to you what the corrupt Senate has been denying you but five years later or 10 years later maybe your rival has decided to to try to adopt one of these popular a platforms and use that well now you suddenly become the defender of old senatorial interests because your rival was the one who's now doing the popular program and so it was it was a lot of like taking on and putting off of hats where you were tempered you might temporarily be the leader of a popular movement and then 10 years later you

might be standing in lockstep with the Senate so it was very it was it was a lot more fluid I think than than anything that would be going on say like you know with with battles between unions battles between like socialists and capitalists in the modern era where there's really class interests involved and you really had also like lower-class leaders doing the leading in that sense which you don't really get that in Roman history no and it was interesting because you had included in the book something I think was Cato the Elder had talked about and we're getting back here to the changes in Rome because of the Punic Wars on the various conquest about the amount of wealth that was being dragged back to Rome by some of these people you know because most of the people don't benefit from these conquest but some of these commanders and whatnot would come back you were talking about 40,000 pounds of silver and things like

that talk a little about how and this is this is such a Roman moralizer point of view right about how the nouveau riche Romans are forgetting their values but you included it in the book how much did the did the Roman system change because all of a sudden it went from 8 well at least the poor trails of it make it sound like more Spartan more old values too you know Cato the Elder looking at the nice figs and saying Carthage must be destroyed I I think that the role of this new wealth there's a couple of things that all of this new wealth does does bring into play right like the the Cato the Elder style critique which is that all of this wealth degraded the morality of the upper class or degraded the morality of the Romans I think is less important i I don't think that that is is a huge driver of of what the problem was I don't think it was that the wealth degraded their morals I think it was that it created skyrocketing

economic in equality right word there had always been rich and poor in realm right that that is gonna be true going all the way back what was happening is that as as you just mentioned and I read about this in the book that you have these legions going out there going out to Greece Macedonia they're going to North Africa and they're bringing back three hundred thousand gold coins they're bringing back 80 thousand pounds of raw silver I mean literally like the the species of the available species of the Mediterranean is being thrown into Roman wagons and hauled back to Rome all of which is being controlled mostly by that upper class senatorial elite or the the the richer equestrian classes right the sort of the sub Senate the the people who are one step below the senators these guys are the ones who can are controlling all of this wealth and I do think that far from degrading the morality of the thing it does degrade

the socio-economic system where what are they going to do with all this gold the Romans did not they did not sit around counting counting their gold pieces like Scrooge and you know in in a Christmas Carol they want to invest their gold into things and most especially they want to invest it in land so their their ability to now command this huge huge amount of wealth they're pouring it into trying to buy up as much land as they possibly can and this does lead to the further dispossession of all of those poorer Roman farmers we talked about a couple of minutes ago so that there's that process that isn't unfolding that wealth being controlled by a few rich families is leading those rich families to expand their own land holdings across Italy and that's just gonna disrupt the entire socio-economic a system at that had been in existence for hundreds of years and that's just the one thing that they're investing all

their money and and the other thing that they're investing all their money in is slaves so they're now able to the richer Romans are now able to bring slaves into the system on again an unprecedented scale the Romans had always had slaves those slaves had always been around but now you really have the slaves beginning to do most of the at least commercial labor of this of Roman society they're out there they're picking they're doing work in the grape fields they're you know they're doing the olives they are if they're skilled right if you if you get captured you're like hey I can you know make tables then you're gonna be put to work making tables for your owner or if you're really unlucky you're gonna be sent off to work in one of the mines and that's again that's just gonna be producing more and more wealth for the senatorial aristocracy so that combination of of massive amounts of wealth massive amounts of slaves but

always really to the benefit of a very small elite inside of Rome creates I think the the the fundamentally destabilizing energy that is gonna allow some of these be they genuine reformers all the way too cynical demagogues or all the way you know ultimately culminating with julius caesar who is the popluar a you know reformer slash super ambitious noble par excellence it's all gonna culminate with him and the slaves to me is the ultimate different variable when they do the comparisons between say the u.s. now and the roman republic because even if you wanted to argue about you know slave labor being equivalent to low income labor from over the border or whatever I don't I don't see the similarity and it would be if you wanted to make an analogy with what the Romans did or what a lot of people's did in earlier history would be like we went into the Middle East toppled Saddam Hussein and brought

thousands of Iraqis back to the United States to serve us sounds like an inherent the unstable situation to begin with I found it interesting when you were talking about who had power in Rome and you talked about Assemblies and that the average Joe on the street had more but I would say both more and less power maybe than one thought but you're lying about being able to control maybe you would I think in England they called it King mob at one point the ability to control the political heart of Rome as as the population gave a certain amount of power in the city it always amazed me that that in that kind of a situation that you never had a French Revolution kind of thing when when it's so much a large percentage of the population being balanced out by such a small class but it's that client relationship that sort of weaves the threads of connections isn't it through the rich the poor in the middle classes and could you talk a

minute about the equestrian class maybe and a connection to what today we would call you know corporations and and and the fact that because the Roman senators were not supposed to involve themselves in business it sort of left a loophole for these other people to come in and create what I think today we would call corporations you think that's a fair term yeah I think that they were corporations they were they were stock you you would actually buy stock in these things okay so that's fair right yeah in a rudimentary way that yeah so there was there was this prohibition on the Senators like somebody who was in the Senate and you're talking about you know maybe 300 350 men and their families are prohibited from conducting commercial transactions and of course just the caveat to this is that all of them did it they all had they all had fronts they all had clients that they would use were like oh this is my guy

you know Publius he just he's somebody who just so happens to own a large amount of commercial real estate and I just happen to know him and it's like it was all a front so the most senators were able to dodge this quite easily but the Roman state itself didn't perform any of their own logistical enterprises right like even right down to right right down to tax collection right the the Romans did not have like state employees who were tax collectors they didn't have state employees who made uniforms for the legions and shipped them off to the legions this was all done by groups of wealthy individuals who were not in the Senate because because you we want to be able to get around that you know the commercial the commercial prohibitions so you have these very wealthy families in Rome who are not a part of the Senate who are actually the ones who are now handling the wealth of the society the

the large-scale transactions there there what they would do is they would come together say that the tax collectors if you want one of these tax farming contracts and you would say okay here's how much we're gonna bid to get this contract and then the the sensor once every five years what award would award a contract and let's say your company won the bid then you would now have the right to go to some province or go to some area and be in charge of the tax collection where any amount of money that you that you made out collecting taxes above what you had bid was gonna be your profit that model of extracting taxes from provincials left itself open to like wild corruption and abuse where if if your profit margin is simply however much you can get out of these people it's gonna lead you to strong-arm people it's gonna lead you to demand more than they actually owed in taxes and the Roman government the Roman

provincial administrations I mean the people who would actually be out there in nearer Spain or in further Spain actually representing the Roman government as like a state agent I mean you're talking about less than a hundred people you're talking about you know it's the governor his family and maybe a couple other elected officials meanwhile the face of Rome out there the people who are actually running the province is is these are these tax farmers with very little oversight and you could kind of like if you were a tax farmer you could go to a family and say like hey you owe me this in taxes the provincial pays the tax then you come back around six months later and say hey you owe me this tax again and the family could say hey we already paid that tax six months ago and the tax farm would just say why CAIR you pay me and there's no there's no oversight to any of this no real effective oversight anyway and this

creates the same kind of really anger and resentment at a lot at what the Roman administrators were up to amongst the provincials out out there in Spain or in Greece or later in Asia or what is today Western Turkey that in and of itself led to a destabilization of their Imperial hold on things and that doesn't all get straightened out really until Augustus comes along and starts introducing more stable reforms so fleeced by the contractors right very much so very much so so let me let me ask you and this is there's a little bit of storytelling here cuz I think it's horrifying to me the first time I ever read anything in ancient history that reminded me of like George Orwell's 1984 I mean maybe this is just the way my brain connects things but when you read about you know the the Marius and the sulla eras when when prescription lists are going up and people will read about whether or not they're being sentenced

to die I mean that has such a third right kind of Orwellian maybe feel to it can go into that a little bit and talk about um talk about how different that was for Rome to wake up and go see if you're you were on the list to die so at the beginning of the book right we're at there's conflicts between various political rivals various political groups various families and they start maneuvering around each other and they start breaking down these like rules of the most my Orem but it but kind of in the early days it's all very ad-hoc it's all very spontaneous and it's really more about like maneuvering in new ways that hadn't been done before you start plotting along through the book yeah you get to chapter 8 you get to chapter 9 now we're talking about these groups having armed like on retainer armed gangs who are gonna fight for you and by the very end of the book it becomes necessary to not just defeat your rivals

and have them say like oh okay well I lost that vote or I lost that consulship I guess I'll go home now you're operating in a civil war environment where it's no longer enough to just beat your rival so you have to kill you have to kill them and if you don't kill them then they're gonna come back and they're gonna kill you so there's there's a there's a little tight cycle of this where you know when I don't want to do too much in the way of spoilers if you haven't read the book but yeah I mean we we kind of all know it all ends badly for the Romans so it's not too much of a spoiler to say it ends badly for most of these people but sulla goes off to the east to fight his battle hood to fight his war against Mithridates he's had this very intense struggle with Marius and Marius as allies and Marius and his allies wind up coming into Rome and recapturing Rome having been booted out a couple of weeks

earlier and they start killing the Allies of sulla this leads when sulla comes back a couple years later for sulla to reciprocate to to give as good as he gets and start yeah literally putting up named lists right here's a list of names and if you kill one of these people and bring me their head then I will pay you I will pay you money and what is kind of and it also not just Orwellian but also like very Kafka asked right where it's all it all becomes very arbitrary where the whole the whole original point of the prescription list was so that the people who sulla was not planning on killing could rest easy like okay well my name's not on the list so so I'll be fine but every day a new list goes up with new names on it and you start having names being added to the list not because they are enemies of sulla but because they happen to be enemies of maybe one of sulles allies or in the case of Crassus and he is like hey you

own a very rich estate down here in Campania I think I would actually like to own that estate so I think I'm gonna declare you an enemy of sulla and have you killed so those prescriptions that sort of eat up the last last few chapters of the book are all very bloody and they become you know it takes on an absurd level where it doesn't even matter anymore whether you're an enemy of somebody in there there quote from some from some rich equestrian who gets killed and he sees I saw done for because of my Alban farm and then yeah he gets he gets killed in his farm gets confiscated so it moves very quickly from I have to kill my enemies in order to triumph to just like let's just kill everybody and confiscate their stuff and it's a wanted dead or alive kind of approach to getting the enemies isn't it sort of like bring us back the head and we'll pay I mean a little bit different than sending out

your own Gestapo exactly and so you actually started having it became a fairly lucrative profession for for a couple months and even then for a couple years where you would go out and you would be like hey well what will Goodwill almost like bounty hunters right we'll go I'm just gonna say that exactly yeah and and we'll kill them and and then we'll get their stuff and what is you know and I also do mention this in the book is there does come a point where they start to realize it I mean they don't realize the way that we do that there's there are no photographs of anybody there are no pictures of anybody we don't live in a digital age where you have a where sella can hold up a picture and then hold up the head and be like oh yeah you got the right guy and you start having them just grab random dudes off the street kill them chop their head off take it in and say oh this is uh and then they're like kind of scanning the

list oh this is this guy it's Gaius yeah uh pyrius yeah he's yeah definitely this is his head and then you would get your bounty it's a little like this black scalp that I'm giving you with black hair this is an Apache scalp I guarantee it you know yeah give me my - it's all very twisted it's all it's all very it's all quite sadistic to be honest something that comes to my mind and I honestly don't know the answer in the period we're talking about here but but discussing the the attempts by what we would call today foreign powers or foreign entities to influence the politics of a vibrant let's call it on the way to corrupt Republic I just finished a show we did on Caesars conquest of Gaul and it's interesting how the more armed shall we call them civilized or more Romanesque garlic tribes we're basically trying to influence the politics in Rome during the period you're talking about are

there outside forces from other states trying to push their agenda or point of view or the direction they'd like to see Rome move towards where any of the outside entities in in the geopolitical world of the Mediterranean at that time trying to influence Roman politics definitely and this had been true for quite some time where you know going back even before the beginning of the book after Rome defeats Hannibal in the second Punic War there was a there was a good like 50 or 60 year period where Rome was the most powerful state in the Mediterranean but not quite hadn't quite decided they wanted to annex and rule the Mediterranean directly where they almost set themselves up as kind of an arbitrator of last resort for various city-states and kingdoms out there so you would have like a couple of Greek cities who were in having some border dispute or having some like fishing rights dispute and

they would agree to take their case to Rome at any time these em so so Rome became like a hub of international embassies and ambassadors and people constantly end voice coming and going from from really as far away as Syria and Egypt and all of them are bringing with them gifts that you know could only be described as bribes where you are definitely going to try to get what you want from the Senate by making sure that the right senators have received the right gifts and that that's something that had really this was again something that had opened up and and does get to a more corrupt version of the Senate than had existed before in the context of of my book the great example of this in my book is jag Arthas conduct in Numidia where he is you know one of the kings of Numidia after after his I guess adopted father dies along with his two brothers but jag Eartha would prefer to be the sole king of numidia and so he starts

breaking treaties he starts killing his brothers and he wants the Senate to just go along with what he's doing down there rather than sending in legions are trying to stop him so he absolutely quite brazenly and quite naked Lee is sending an voice to the Roman Senate laden with gold and laden with gifts and trying to influence the Senate's conduct and he's quite successful at it for most of the first seven or eight years of jaggers's reign he's definitely able to have more or less paid friends in the Senate direct the Senate away from the notion of ever sending the legions in to confront jagira and it gets quite bad where you do have these senators so like like God I mean this is so brazen like we're at we might actually have to do something about this like you're making us all look bad is there they're sort of chastising their their colleagues in the Senate who are accepting all of jaggerth

a--'s money and that point the the corruption of the Senate by jaggerth a--'s money does become a flashpoint in Roman politics where again if you go back to some of these popular energies that had been sort of starters had started fomenting that they're saying like you know jagira is brazenly flouting Roman authority and Roman law were telling him to do things and he's ignoring us he's killing Italians he killing Roman citizens and yet we continue to do nothing why is that and it's because Joe Garza has bribed his way into the Senate and so they actually open up they're actually able to open up a sort of like a quasi as like a special tribunal that is going to start to investigate and prosecute those in the Senate who were guilty of being corrupted by jag eartha which gets me to a question of tipping points and points of no return when you look at the you know when people like to look for

examples from the past to try to analyze our own times and you do quite a bit of that in the book and I love it um but when you look at our situation now and the people who founded this country and who wrote the documents that the forum our framework were keen students of the Roman Republic obviously and so they were paying attention to the flaws in their system and how things went wrong and tried to make make changes in their own version obviously so that we wouldn't fall down the same rathole but when do you think it was irreversible in other words when do you think the death spiral had been reached where you can't imagine now where the the the points of no entry and the the ability to compromise had just gone to farming is it when the violence first breaks out or is it after that or is it before that where do you if you had to find a tipping point when the iceberg struck the Titanic maybe is a better way

to put it where is it in your mind well so I'll answer that in a sec I will say that you know one of the reasons we know so much about everything I just said about jag eartha is because the Roman historian solaced elected to write about the Judean war and jaggers's corruption of the Senate and the battles that ensued and solaced was somebody who was writing he was a partisan of Julius Caesar's so he's writing his books right around the 40s and 30s BC so he knows how it all turns out and he's writing you know fairly fairly contemporaneously with events and he wrote about the jogger theme more specifically because he said that was the tipping point right that was and he said that was the first moment that lay no like the old the the corruption of the Senate was first challenged and what led to what became these partisan battles that ultimately destroyed the Senate he he actually identified the juror thene war as as

that tipping point which is why he wrote about it now could the Senate Hatter could could could the Roman Republic have pulled out of it at that point like I think so the the point that I come to is it's it's really it's sulles conduct at the very end what it what becomes the end of the book but sulles conduct during some of his final showdowns is really what sets the final permanent blueprint for how you can achieve power by completely disregarding just anything but brute force so sulla is going to he loses a political confrontation Salah losing he he had command of this eastern army he Marius uses the power of the assembly to strip sulla of his command and send sulla away what Marius thinks he sent so a packing for good and sulla really is faced with this choice of do I accept this defeat do I get stripped of my command do I accept the humiliation that I have just endured at the hands of

my rival Marius or do I go back to my five legions who are loyal to me personally and do I point them at Rome and march on Rome to a victim arias from Rome and reclaim what I think is rightfully mine once once sulla did that and then ultimately he emerges victorious from everything that is the point that men like Julius Caesar and men like Pompey who was an early partisan of Seles are going to be looking at later on down the road and saying well if nothing else like I can do that I mean this is we don't have any I don't think like exact quotes or proof and in the in the in the historical record that julius caesar was was actively thinking about sulla when he crossed the Rubicon but it had to have been on his mind and the proof was in the pudding for Seles conduct if you get a large army keep them loyal to you you can use them to prosecute your own domestic political enemies and emerge victorious and become a dictator for

life so I I sort of put it there I think that sulles Seles decisions in those in those moments in the early days of the civil wars is really what what made it so that the Republic there was no I don't feel like there was any coming back from that you had mentioned when Caius Krakus was was looking at his broad range of reforms you had talked about had they I'm going from memory he'd said if they had been enacted it would have foreseen a lot of the changes that augustus era roman reforms had implemented and obviously a long time ahead of time if something like that had gone forward is that the example of a reformed moment that had it come to pass the inevitable death spiral that happened might have been avoided I think so and it's because there there would not have been quite the energy or the impetus to to just crack the state in half right it you get to a point where if if your governing apparatus like

whatever it happens to be if enough people start to feel like that governing apparatus is not working for them it's not doing anything for me personally why do I owe it as an institution any kind of loyal my loyalty ought to go to the thing or to the people or in the Roman case oftentimes to the general who's going to be guaranteeing me the kind of security that I want in life which is I want a plot of land I want you know decent wages I want I want someplace to be able to settle and retire when I'm done here by the time you get to the later republic that is provided by by warlords which is you know you could absolutely describe Caesar as a warlord once once it starts to become those guys who are delivering on the promises that that are being made rather than the state itself yeah there's what what is it that they had to be loyal to the Senate and people of Rome abstractly for so when you when

you get to these moments when you can make some of these when you can have a little bit of foresight and say to yourself oh is this model working for the entire citizen population or is it just working for a tiny elite you know once you start ignoring the rest of the citizens and say oh it's working for a tiny elite but that's fine they'll just accept it you do create a breach of legitimacy and you do alienate people to the point where they're no no they're no longer loyal to the system at all and that's how you get people just crashing it over and and most people practically not even caring yeah the private military thing which used to be illegal in Rome why did the Romans why did the the citizenry or the Senate put up with the change that I mean if you wanted to put the major thing that the founding fathers of the United States of course tried to do was to to make sure that the citizen leadership controlled the

military so that we had that separation but but they kind of had that separation in Rome once upon a time what made and we'll make this the last question but what made the the the circumstances or public opinion or senatorial opinion I was gonna say change but the word might be put up why did they put up with it the raising of private armies yeah the the reason why they put up with it initially was because Rome was facing an emergency military situation where they were sort of simultaneously or around the age of around Marius right cuz Marius is sort of the greats you know it had been moving in this direction so just to back up in case people don't know this previously to serve in the legions you had to own a certain amount of property you actually had to literally be rich enough to serve in the legions and by the middle of the book by in the middle of the storm before the storm you get

Marius making this fateful request for an exemption from that requirement and just let me enroll any warm body who wants to show up and I'll train them and I'll teach them how to be soldiers that was that that was a fairly momentous change in in how the Romans conducted politics and war and does have a lot to do with that those people who are now going to be loyal more to their general than to the state because it's the general who's going to be providing them and guaranteeing them the the riches and land that they hope to get out of their service so the reason why I think in that moment why the Senate says okay yeah you can you can draft anybody is that they had that an ongoing war in North Africa there was a huge slave rebellion that had consumed that had consumed Sicily and then the Cimbri this this great Germanic a horrid that it was it was just been sort of wandering around Europe for like 15 years would

constantly come back around and the north so the northern border was very insecure so I think it was it was a it was a matter of just like like in this emergency situation we need to raise men and we need to raise a lot of men so yeah just go ahead and do it and I think from that point on they just sort of realized that that this was this was a way to keep up with the manpower needs that their empire now had they were no longer just this little city-state that was occasionally skirmishing with the Samnites down around kapwa this is you know we have we have Garrison's we need to be filling in Spain and North Africa and up in Gaul and as a as they move into Gaul the Macedonian frontier over in Greece they're now they're now in charge of Western Turkey how are we gonna keep the legions filled I think once I think once they made the decision to go over to like let's just drop this property requirement in general I think

it was fairly wildly successful in terms of their ability to raise the men needed to run their empire and then you know how does how does that move over to the real danger point which is people raising personal armies and I think a lot of this like like a decent-enough analogy like not exactly is like a political party going and looking for a candidate who can self finance their campaign political parties at the state level at the national level always love a candidate who can walk in and say oh by the way like the party doesn't need to give me any money I'll just do I'll just do this all out of my own pocket because I'm you know I'm a hedge fund manager I am a an owner of a business or like Michael Bloomberg is just like whatever it is that he's sitting on top of right like he's like the Democratic Party didn't need to give him any money he could just do it all himself and the same was really true of later of people

like Pompey who could say hey I'm gonna go I can go raise my own army like you don't even you don't even have to worry about it like you elect me console I'll do all the work for you that's a that's a very that's a very immediately attractive proposition for most people especially out there maybe you don't want to go to war but you have a candidate who's like don't worry I'll get my guys myself and you don't have to do it if you don't want to that's where you start getting these personal legions being raised and once those personal legions are being raised again now we're just you know the late Republic is just a clash of warlords and that is really right now where you look at it and you say okay I see some similarities but there are some real big differences and we haven't gotten there yet right sure and I I mean honestly like the military thing you know the United States has gone through a bit of a similar process

after Vietnam where we said we're no longer gonna do this like temporary conscription into an army to go off and fight and instead we're gonna make it all volunteer and an all professional right I mean that's a similarity but there's so much about the institutional what the US Army the US Navy institutionally is does not resemble the personal warlord legions of the late Republic right like the paymaster is not your colonel the paymaster is really it's the United States of America and we can you know our checks don't ever bounce when they go out there to some private or some sergeant or some major so you don't have them being loyal specifically to just one just one commander out there and then I have also heard you know I've had the good fortune to be friends with lots of veterans guys who were in the military now or who have left and are now veterans just back out in the civilian world with the rest of

us that I mean there's enough that goes on with troop rotations right where you're kind of bouncing between units you're never forming one of these like 20-year long bonds where you guys have all been serving together forever so I don't I I don't fear right now like the role of the US Army in some kind of in some kind of war Lord style clash I don't see it happening any time soon one of the great firewalls that's actually working still right listen is there anything Mike that I didn't ask you about that you want to make sure we know about the book or some of the story I specifically focused on the things you know that I was interested in but there's a heck of a lot in this piece what else should the listeners know well I think I think the one thing that we didn't touch on that is a that is a pretty major part of the book that has its similarities to the United States is this issue of the non the non Roman

Italians well sure sure yeah we're just in case you don't know the backstory of this here well do it real quick is that when Rome conquered Italy during the Samnite Wars which is a couple hundred years before you know my book comes along the Romans did not annex these people directly into the Roman state they instead signed these these treaties with a city so a city in a trio or a city in Umbria would then become merely an ally of Rome and whenever the Romans came around to ask for legionaries for the armies the city had to provide them but other than that they were mostly left to their own devices they could govern themselves they weren't really taxed that heavily but what happens is when you get to the period of my book a couple hundred years later these guys had been inside of Roman civilization in every meaningful way for hundreds of years and yet they were still you couldn't even call them second-class

citizens they were not citizens at all and they're facing the same problems the same economic problems that their Roman cousins are except they don't even have the right to vote in an assembly they don't even have the right to send Canada for office and be like well hey what about us so they were on top of everything else they they were facing economic economic problems and also didn't have any kind of political voice at all and so that combines with the sort of the general problems that are created by the skyrocketing economic inequality that leads to a popular a style confrontational style of politics that now defines that now defines the Republic in that entire force of again like energy I guess you could call it the Italian question is what ultimately triggers the great civil wars of Marius and Sylla is the Italians constantly demanding citizenship the Romans constantly saying we're not gonna give

you citizenship and what it finally takes is a massive bloody and destructive civil war where the Italians are not trying to break away from Roman rule they're trying to force their way into Roman rule it was a it's gonna be a war on behalf of political equality rather than a war premise non political independence so that's that's like the other big thing that's floating around out there but other than that you just you just read the book and I'll explain it all to you as one of my professors said every educated person in the Western world should know the story that Mike Duncan catalogues in the storm before the storm the beginning of the end of the Roman Republic Mike thank you for coming on the program I wish you the greatest success thank you very much like I said I think that this is that I think you could not have chosen a better subject and I agree with you it's shocking that this doesn't already have

twenty books on the bookshelf about this considering how awesome and like you I mean it's you know it's hard to initiate enough disclaimers where you tell people okay there's so many different things it's not really like us but look at all these things that are like us you know yeah I figure if you're gonna do it because like one of the things that I always push against is that I don't think that we're anywhere near like the fall of Rome right which is which is something that you hear from people like oh the Syrian refugees are just like the Vandals no not really wait do we start killing each other over political things then we're starting to move a little bit well I mean yeah like if if we actually have like a mass migrating population that has like an entire impure entire armed force they can go toe-to-toe with the US Army then I guess yeah we can start talking about it but I don't think we're anywhere near that I

think you're 300 dead senators with Tiberius Krakus I think that's the moment where the sea change would happen yeah I think I think that that period of the croc eyes is enough that I'm happy to now insert this idea into people's heads and say no like this is the period we need to be paying attention yes it's very important exactly it's not just for interesting per its in that's what my professor was pointing out that if you're an American in this system this is a story that our founding fathers thought was worth knowing probably for an informed citizenry of a modern commercial imperial republic might be a good idea to buy Mike Duncan's book so that's the way I'm gonna phrase it if dude if I can do anything for you I'm here okay great I really appreciate it that was fun my thanks to Mike Duncan it was great to finally digitally interact with him go out and pick up the storm before the storm we will link to it on our website

if you pick it up through Amazon why don't you do so through our search window at Dan Carlin comm and that will help us out - sure the older hardcore history shows can be a bit traumatic with titles like death throes of the Republic judgment at Nineveh and addicted to bondage we just consider that to be truth in advertising no pain no gain is our motto pick up the entire catalog from Dan Carlin com

Questions about this episode

Who speaks in "HH Addendum EP2 Rome Through Duncan's Eyes"?

Dan Carlin (Host), Mike Duncan (Guest).

What is "HH Addendum EP2 Rome Through Duncan's Eyes" about?

The discussion focuses on the significance of history podcasts, particularly highlighting Mike Duncan's acclaimed work with "The History of Rome" and "Revolutions." The conversation centers around Duncan's new book, "The Storm Before the Storm," which delves into the complexities of the Roman Republic's decline, showcasing the enduring appeal of Roman history in the podcasting landscape.

What is mentioned in this Dan Carlin episode?

21 people, works and ideas are mentioned, including Mike Duncan, Rome, The Storm Before the Storm, Sulla, Julius Caesar, The Punic Wars. Each one on this page links to its own page with every episode that mentions it.

How long is "HH Addendum EP2 Rome Through Duncan's Eyes"?

The episode runs 1 h 8 min; the transcript is about 12,891 words in 74 timestamped sections.

More from Dan Carlin

About this transcript: the episode's spoken words as captioned on YouTube, split into timestamped sections. Reclip.Me locates every person, work and idea in the text, keeps the time it is first named, and quotes the words around it verbatim. Last updated January 26, 2026.