Furious Pertinax joins me to talk about Julius Caesar and Caesarism, and why it's important to understand the historical context of the term Caesarism and how it applies to the world around us today.
00:01:45.420And, of course, for those who are familiar with Spangler, you know, it's a theme that is quite obvious in his writing.
00:01:51.180But, sometimes it is the historical context of Caesar himself is a bit lost.
00:01:57.100And I think often, and we all are guilty of it, I've probably done it as well, is we throw around that phraseology a lot.
00:02:04.000Unless someone is intimately, you know, knowledgeable of the subject, his context historically and the pathway of his life and what sort of defines Caesar is a bit lost in the wash.
00:02:16.520And I think it's a really good conversation to have to actually get into the sort of nitty-gritty of not just Julius Caesar the man,
00:02:22.100but where does Caesarism sit contextually within, you know, in terms of the historicity of the subject.
00:02:29.460And so we're going to try to do a little zooming in and zooming out.
00:02:32.200We're going to be focusing again on who Julius Caesar was, what kind of forces shaped him, what kind of world he was born into,
00:02:38.980what kind of made the original Caesar a Caesar.
00:02:41.800But then we'll also go ahead and zoom up and out and look at the wider context of kind of how this cycle of history occurs,
00:02:49.760how these forces can appear not just in ancient Rome, but other places, and what kind of conclusions we can draw from that today.
00:02:57.660But before we dive into all that, guys, let's go ahead and hear from today's sponsor.
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00:04:06.220because letting the left win is a pathetic way to watch civilization die.
00:05:02.500But, Furius, can you give us a little bit of context?
00:05:05.700What are kind of the key events that we need to understand as we look at the world that Julius Caesar was kind of stepping into?
00:05:15.480Yeah, so you mentioned Marius and Sulla, who are, they, this era that we're discussing of destabilization and sort of tumult within Rome doesn't begin with Marius and Sulla.
00:05:28.540They are merely a very, rather, a very important hinge pin in the trajectory of how this sort of goes about.
00:05:35.240But, you know, if you actually look at this sort of historical path of the Roman Republic, particularly after,
00:05:40.620it's worth noting that there's sort of a delineation between, say, Rome prior to the Punic Wars,
00:05:45.480or certainly the second Punic War, and then Rome after the second Punic War,
00:05:48.680which becomes, you sort of have this nascent Roman city-state that spends 300 years
00:05:56.020becoming the hegemon of the Italian peninsula over its Latin and Oscan neighbors,
00:06:03.480the Etruscans to the north, the Umbrians, and to the south, the Samnites,
00:06:07.280and these other sort of tribes who share, in a broad sense, sort of like an Italic identity with Rome.
00:06:14.360Their languages aren't always identical, but they're usually similar.
00:06:16.820But they, you know, they share, you might say, an ethnos with the Latins, which the Romans are.
00:06:25.100In fact, Rome's first alliance is called the Latin League,
00:06:27.900which is shared with its immediate Latin neighbors, for instance.
00:09:40.100I mean, if you look at the Second Punic War, Rome suffers a horrendous degree of military attrition against the Carthaginians.
00:09:47.420Take the Battle of Cannae, most people are familiar with it.
00:09:49.740Rome loses 65,000 men in an afternoon of fighting against Hannibal.
00:09:54.640And this sort of happens generation over generation over generation.
00:09:58.080And so these sort of essentially fathers and sons and brothers of landed Romans, who were the recruitment base for the army, are becoming depleted.
00:10:09.660Eventually, by the time that we get to Geis Marius, we have the so-called Cimbrian Wars, which is this massive migration of Germans from basically modern-day Denmark and northern Germany.
00:10:20.340They make their way to the Italian peninsula via the river Rhine Valley and into the Alps.
00:10:27.600And they defeat two or three Roman armies across southern Gaul and the Alps.
00:10:33.140And meanwhile, Marius himself is in Africa fighting the Jugurthine War against the Numidians.
00:10:39.080And Rome is basically tapped out of manpower.
00:10:42.200So Marius is brought back to Rome after he wraps up the Numidian conflict.
00:10:45.500In fact, the Roman state basically say he's voted consul, which makes him one of the two leaders of Rome for that year.
00:10:52.660And they say they give Marius carte blanche to basically build a new army.
00:10:56.440So basically, Marius attends to the idea of utilising the so-called headcount, which is the sort of freed man population of Rome that aren't tied to land.
00:11:06.940They're not descendants of, you know, of landowners and of the traditional basis of Roman manpower.
00:11:13.980And of course, people flock to the army in order to gain, you might say, a living and a salary and the promise of citizenship and land as was offered to them at this point.
00:11:24.140And Marius creates this new army and he defeats the Kimbrie and their allies in a couple of battles, culminating in the Battle of the Catli, which is fought on the foothills of the Alps on the Italian side.
00:11:36.420And then we're sort of presented with, you know, the Sulla Baria stuff, which I know you've talked about before.
00:11:41.560But the reason I mentioned about the army and the expansion is because it has killed successful generations of brothers and sons and fathers who would have tended to land and would have maintained this, you might say, this strata of probably people, if we could use a modern analogy, would have been kulaks.
00:12:00.240They were, you know, land-tending farmer types, you know, you know how we sort of joke about the US armies made up of corn-fed Iowa, Missouri boys and Texas boys, you know, that idea.
00:12:09.560That's the people who were in the Roman legions prior to Marius and Sulla.
00:12:15.180But a lot of them have died over centuries and centuries of fighting over many, many generations.
00:12:20.180And so what's happened is that Rome, by winning spoils and winning war, has brought in a lot of gold into Rome.
00:12:25.680Like I said, when they next Macedon, the Antigonid kingdom of Macedon, Rome trebled the size of its treasury in one campaign.
00:12:34.380And, of course, with victory, become slaves.
00:12:37.800The Romans accrued a huge number of slaves over its two or three centuries of fighting after the Carthaginian Wars.
00:12:44.480And a lot of slaves were brought to Italy.
00:12:45.880And a lot of the – and this is the class element that starts to get interesting is that a lot of slaves come into Rome who can afford slaves en masse.
00:12:55.660It's the sort of merchant classes and their sort of alliance, you know, with the aristocrats who actually have money in Rome.
00:13:02.540And then at the same time, because these agricultural areas become bereft of the young men who would otherwise inherit these properties off their fathers or grandfathers, are simply not there to do so.
00:13:13.400So many aristocrats start accumulating vast swaths of land in Italy, and they create what we say we call in Latin latifundia, which are basically – the Spanish have a similar term.
00:13:26.220They call them haciendas, which is sort of a similar idea, but these vast agricultural estates around like a big villa.
00:13:31.680And rather than being attempted by freed people or by indentured servants, it would be slaves.
00:13:36.480They'll just be put on these farms, and, you know, it would be a large plot of land owned by one person who would then buy a lot of slaves who then attend to the land.
00:13:44.380It's a very different structure to what the Romans had as a smaller city-state.
00:13:48.260So if we could just stop there for a second, I want to go ahead and investigate a little bit of that because there's a lot of ground.
00:13:53.900But I think it's really important to note some of these structural shifts and these social shifts.
00:13:58.880So like you said, originally you've got obviously a city-state.
00:14:02.660This is kind of the standard formation of governance and kind of civilization at that time.
00:14:08.620But the constant expansion is creating a very different situation.
00:14:12.760We're looking at the fact that first the type of government that used to govern this, kind of the republic,
00:14:20.060which was really based on this kind of more enclosed local version of governance,
00:14:28.740something that is very specific to the people inside of the city-state, is now becoming insufficient.
00:15:05.580So even our own words today are impacted, our own language today are impacted by kind of the social and military structure that was kind of baked in.
00:15:15.780And so at this point, Rome, you know, originally Rome has kind of more of that standard understanding of its polity.
00:15:23.640It has a, it only includes those in the city-state.
00:15:27.280This citizenship is particularly guarded.
00:15:29.280And the military force isn't, well, perhaps volunteer is the wrong word, but it's understood as the duty of free men who own land, citizens.
00:15:41.220It's something that would be a position of honor and something that you would do because you could afford it and because it was your duty.
00:15:47.900But like you said, there are so many of these wars of conquest that it's hollowed out the middle, what we might think of as a middle class.
00:15:56.160And so now not only do you not have that base of the military, you didn't even have that base of land-owning labor.
00:16:05.320And so we're seeing a transformation, not just of the military, not just of the government, but the population and the economic situation as well,
00:16:14.740where we get what you might say mass immigration of a sort into the area in order to fill in that middle class deficit that's been brought by wars of expansion.
00:16:26.800And this creates a big class division between those who perhaps at one time would have held land, would have had the middle class existence, would have had that free farmer type existence now being displaced by large amounts of slaves and the wealthy people who were able to kind of accumulate these vast estates under which they were.
00:16:50.080Precisely. That's exactly right. And those two sort of phenomena happen in unison is that once that, once there's a sort of gradual hollowing out of that strata of that class, as we might call them, you know, the Roman equivalent of the cool acts, you know, once they sort of hollowed out and made almost a non-existent entity within the Roman system,
00:17:10.420we start to see this breakdown coming at play because that also happens with this enriching of this aristocratic class.
00:17:17.760And there's quite the deviation sort of occurs. And I mean, before the show, we mentioned the brothers, Gracchi, et cetera.
00:17:23.680And there's this major deviation of Roman politics between as we, and it reaches this apex, certainly under Caesar and once he engages in the civil war, which comes a little bit later,
00:17:32.960but you have the populares and the optimates, basically the populists and the aristocrats, the optimates, the higher ups, as they, as I would call themselves.
00:17:42.560But, but, and this is why I think this conversation is so important, because we're sort of getting into the genesis of, of how these two factions come into being,
00:17:49.700what actually is the driving factors to these two forces coalescing in Roman politics.
00:17:54.720Um, and so, and exactly. So when Morris reforms this army, he transforms it into a, into a, uh, a volunteer slash recruitment system that's entirely professionalized.
00:18:06.420Uh, the Romans, the actual Roman state itself creates all the equipment. They, they manufacture the Roman helmets and the Roman shields and the Roman, um, you know, armor and arms,
00:18:16.180as we sort of imagine them, um, that didn't use the plates back then, you know, like the, the chain mail and the big Roman helmets and stuff that we can imagine from TV.
00:18:23.320It was sort of more or less that. And each room was sort of uniformly equipped, um, in a, in a very specific and standardized fashion.
00:18:29.960And that army sort of set up become successful. But the problem is that, um, rather than the Senate themselves appointing generals who will then, you know, command a consular army.
00:18:42.840And then once that war is fought, they sort of come back home. Um, and, and as we know, then the, so important talking about Caesars, they can't technically cross the Rubicon,
00:18:50.880which is the delineation between Italy and the Salpine Gaul. They can't do so at the head of an army.
00:18:56.080So they'll separate the army from the commander. The commander goes to Rome, the army's kind of like disbanded, but then they sort of make their way back home afterwards.
00:19:02.880And the system worked where sort of after Marius, what happens is these, these volunteers who aren't necessarily fulfilling a patriotic duty in the same way that a, a land-based sort of, uh, you know, uh, militia is probably not right.
00:19:17.880Cause it's not really a militia, but for, I suppose it works like a militia, how these militiamen embraced by the state, they fight their battle, they go home.
00:19:24.160It's a very sort of patriotic duty where so volunteers is more, you know, you join for the, for the glory and for the spoils.
00:19:30.560And if a general throws you a few crumbs, you actually have more loyalty to the general than to the state or to the Senate, which becomes the perennial problem in Rome.
00:19:38.520Yeah. I think it's really important to notice that one right here is that shift between the loyalty, you know, average guy, middle-class guy, freed guy with some land, uh, uh, you know, the, and these are the guys who are constructing your force.
00:19:58.300And then that shift to the volunteers, these are no longer average people called up expecting to go do their tour and then come back home and farm.
00:20:08.840These are specifically people who are looking to make this in many ways, a job or to acquire social, uh, to climb socially, to get material gain.
00:20:21.060And the, the spoils that could be offered by the generals becomes a big driving point.
00:20:25.920And once the general raising a legion is able to offer that legion specific things based on their ability to win battles or something, then it matters what legion you're joining.
00:20:57.900Because it's, it's the success of the failure of that general, which then determines the fate of those soldiers.
00:21:03.540And it could be just a humble, you know, an entrant man who might not even be middle-class, could even be low-class, could even be a freed slave.
00:21:10.240You got to think the legion was open to almost anyone in some instances, uh, in, in the rarest of instances, say, for example, even preparing for this, the war against the Kimbrie,
00:21:19.200which Rome was, it was a hair's breadth away from losing one way or the other, um, because of the manpower situation in Rome, um, they were even offering clemency to criminals at this point.
00:21:29.580Like, it was a bit like, you know, um, we're sort of seeing in, in, in, in, in, in our current day, you know, prisoners being armed and equipped to, to volunteer to fight because to preserve the state.
00:21:38.700If you get my drift, um, we, we see this across history and this is one example where it actually does happen.
00:21:43.420Uh, and so men, especially the lower you go in, in class strata, the more dependent they become on the fate of, of, of their general, whether he succeeds or fails on the battlefield for, for Rome, shall I say.
00:21:54.920Um, and, and this is also where it's sort of important too, that this, you have this sort of break or this sort of genesis of the optimates and, and, uh, the, the, the popularis.
00:22:04.080And so, um, I suppose we'll just speed run it really quickly, that sort of.
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00:23:14.180And this is kind of important because this also plays into Caesar.
00:23:16.160So Caesar is born in 100 BC, and these events are taking place in sort of 90 and 80 BC.
00:23:22.660Actually, just before the Eastern campaigns, we obviously have the Social War, which we've mentioned at the very start of the stream.
00:23:26.980And this is when the Italian allies, who have been almost bled dry from Rome, in the same way that Rome has sort of denuded its own rural military classes through centuries of fighting,
00:23:40.200its Italian allies, and I mentioned them before, you know, the Umbrians, the Samnites, the Lucanians, these other Italic peoples, shall I say,
00:23:47.980who populate Italy, who share an ethnos and a kinship with Rome, but they're not Romans, right?
00:25:02.120Him and Morris come to a head, and obviously Sulla takes Rome.
00:25:06.660He sets himself up as a dictator of Rome.
00:25:08.960He engages in the first prescriptions, which Geist truly sees that the man who's the center point of this discussion survives the prescription.
00:25:24.680Okay, a prescription is basically like a hit list of people who are considered enemies of the state by either the ruling elite or by a dictator who's raised to ultimate power in Rome.
00:25:35.740And I might touch on the dictator thing perhaps at the end of the stream, because I've got a little bone to pick there.
00:25:41.160But nonetheless, yes, a prescription is essentially a hit list of people who are either executed or exiled, often without trial.
00:25:50.200It's sort of like almost the equivalent of a Soviet purge, I suppose, is a good modern comparison to use.
00:25:55.920And also very importantly, your land and possessions are seized.
00:26:01.240And so it's a way not only to get rid of political enemies, but also to create wealth, to increase your treasury, or to benefit your friends by getting rid of some wealthy people and then redistributing their wealth to maybe some troops that you promised farmland to or something like that.
00:26:20.860Or if you have a pole fish that comes on side, you reward them at the cost of your enemies, sort of if you're playing favorites, et cetera.
00:26:27.100And you sort of see that much later, say, with the second triumvirate of Octavian and Anthony, that's sort of like payoff lepidus in that sort of same way.
00:26:36.440But anyway, this is a good example of it.
00:26:38.240But yes, so what actually occurs here is that at this point, Caesar escapes the prescriptions by joining the army in Asia.
00:26:48.020And that's kind of important because a lot of people don't realize that the Julii, the Gens Julii, which Caesar belongs to, is an old family.
00:26:55.700It's one of the oldest aristocratic families in Rome, sort of alongside the Fabii and the Livii and the Brutii,
00:27:02.900these old families that sort of trace their lineage back to the foundation of the Republic when they kicked out the Etruscan kings in like 500 BC.
00:27:11.680But the family itself has been on the wane.
00:27:14.500And even though his uncle, the one who I said fought in the Social War, was governor of Roman Macedonia,
00:27:19.860and Caesar's father himself was governor of the Roman province of Asia,
00:27:23.280which corresponds with that western half of modern day Turkey, what we call Anatolia.
00:27:27.280He was the proprietor of Asia, that the family has not been a success politically.
00:33:11.820And another interesting point to touch on his life is that after this event and he participates in politics, he actually attains sort of several positions.
00:33:22.500Because one thing in ancient Rome you didn't need to progress yourself up the ladder was money.
00:33:26.480And Caesar, he runs for the election of the office of Pontifex Maximus.
00:33:32.580Now, for those who are familiar, the Pope, he's titled Pontifex Maximus.
00:33:37.200The idea of a chief priest in Rome predates St. Paul.
00:34:54.080So he's gaining, you know, he's gaining a reputation through the military, through his actions, obviously avoiding the prescriptions as well.
00:35:01.900But he also understands that it's not enough to simply be a military man.
00:35:06.060And so he's willing to go deeply into debt, to kind of gamble it all on himself.
00:35:11.200He's also climbing through these social stations.
00:35:14.500You know, religious positions aren't like we think of today.
00:35:17.680It's not something that you necessarily dedicated your entire life to.
00:35:21.080You don't become a separate, you know, priest and forego all-
00:35:24.260It's almost more bureaucratic in the ancient world.
00:35:26.660Yeah, it's your curse as honor him, you know, in many ways.
00:35:30.820And so these are all essential steps to him putting himself in a place where he can ascend to the very highest heights.
00:35:38.680But at each step, he's kind of taking kind of the maximum risk in all of these situations.
00:35:43.660Any one of these could have fallen out right from under him.
00:35:47.400And so we can kind of see in his character what it takes for him to kind of get to where he's going.
00:35:51.640Yes, he was born of a noble house, an ancient house.
00:35:54.880But he had to be a very driven man, a man willing to take on massive risks and had to excel pretty much across the board in order to put himself in the position he ended up in.
00:36:06.120So precisely, and just on that sort of basis, just we have to also conceptualize it in the sort of previous round of fighting of civil infighting.
00:36:14.160You know, I think the brothers Gracchi are killed.
00:36:15.660And although his uncle Morris, his consul, you know, eight or 10 times, the Populares lose the previous round of infighting.
00:36:22.580So as a son of the Populares faction, he's on the outer in terms of politics.
00:36:27.860You know, it'd be like sort of, you know, oh, I mean, it's a bit of a fitting comparison.
00:36:34.000If you get my point, it's like, oh, this Republican has succeeded in Los Angeles.
00:36:37.780Like, it's a Democrat stronghold, you know what I mean?
00:36:39.840Like, it's the opposite of the powers that be, as it were.
00:36:43.740And so Caesar being Populares, it's difficult for him to gain this traction, but he does.
00:36:47.900And when he leaves home, when he goes to the forum to attend the ballot for the role of Pontius Maximus,
00:36:54.540I believe it's Plutarch who basically quotes Caesar.
00:36:57.700And he turns to his mother, whose name is Aurelio, and he says to his mother,
00:37:01.980I will come home, either a priest or a pauper.
00:37:03.860And it turns out that all of Caesar's hard work and, you know, his massive accruement of debts and paying off and, you know,
00:37:11.760his rubbing of shoulders with all the right people in the room, he wins.
00:37:15.860He becomes the Pontius Maximus for that tenure, which I think is, I think, two years or five years.
00:37:22.960I can't remember the exact, I think it might be two years.
00:37:24.980After which point, he then gains a provincial governorship in Spain.
00:37:30.340For those who are familiar with the city of Tarragona, the Romans called Tarraco,
00:37:34.140but that was the capital of the northern province of Spain.
00:37:37.080And Caesar sent them, and this is another insight into Caesar in terms of, like,
00:37:40.580the personality of what comprises Caesar, of a Caesar.
00:37:44.440In the city of Tarraco is a giant statue of Alexander the Great.
00:37:47.420And, you know, Caesar, a man of already huge ambition.
00:37:52.300At this point, he's 31, of huge ambition and, you know, huge drive and a huge burden as well.
00:37:58.280I think he's been carrying the family from the age of 15.
00:38:01.120And, you know, he's got these debts and he's playing the political game.
00:38:05.280Like you say, they're playing it for keeps in ancient Rome.
00:38:08.160He comes across his statue of Alexander the Great.
00:38:10.180And, I mean, he's a man who's well-read.
00:38:12.020Caesar was very much understood his own historical context.
00:38:15.040And the Romans had a very rich understanding of their own history and that of the Greeks
00:38:19.560because, you know, you sort of don't have Rome without Greece, if you get my meaning.
00:38:23.460But he comes across this statue and he just breaks down with frustration and rage that, you know,
00:38:28.580at 31, Alexander had this empire that stretched from, you know,
00:38:33.120Western Greece from the Adriatic Sea all the way to the Indus.
00:38:35.900And he'd conquered everybody, conquered the Egyptians and the Great Persian Empire.
00:38:39.520And, you know, he defeated the Indians and, you know, Alexander ruled the world almost as they knew it.
00:38:45.800And he sees it in Spain, you know, with a bird feather pen.
00:38:52.800And he's writing out lists and filing petitions and arranging trade deals and collecting taxes in a city.
00:45:14.020And then basically kind of after you obtain this highest rank, you're given the governorship.
00:45:19.840And that lets you kind of fleece your province for profit.
00:45:22.960And that's what allows the politician to then kind of pay back all of the money that they attained during this time.
00:45:31.500And so Caesar's using that like most people do.
00:45:35.100But he's also in the situation where he's on kind of like he said, he's got all of these troops who want want land and all of this land is locked up by these aristocrats who have in many ways replaced what would be these farmers with the slaves and where the slaves coming from.
00:45:54.340Well, funny enough, from conquests like the one in Gaul.
00:45:57.160And so the very people purchasing the slaves to work the land that otherwise would have been owned by Romans are being funded by this expansion.
00:46:07.220The people who are funding this expansion by going to war and acquiring these slaves want to come back and get this land.
00:46:13.280But they can't have the land because the land is owned by the aristocrats who are locking these farms down in these massive kind of villas, these massive plantations.
00:46:23.240And working it with the very slaves that have been secured by these soldiers in the first place.
00:46:30.320Just to touch on the Caesar being consul things, it's probably important is that in terms of why people were prosecuting him.
00:46:38.720See, when he was consul, he because, like I said, Caesar had this sort of nascent band of followers and people who were really enthusiastic and did support him.
00:46:46.020And you might say saw potential in Caesar.
00:46:51.240I actually can't remember what year it was.
00:46:52.380I want to say it was 61 BC, but I could be wrong, 62, 61 BC maybe, because you couldn't be a consul prior to the age of 42.
00:47:00.460That was a Roman law in the Republican days.
00:47:03.720Caesar's co-consul Bibulus was basically constantly harassed by Caesar's, you might say, his altars, like his hooligans.
00:47:11.920And there were times where Bibulus simply couldn't walk out of his front door because he'd be pelted with just dung, you know, and he'd be spat on and castigated.
00:47:20.220So Caesar was the one consul attending Senate, would pass bills, essentially.
00:47:25.320So he kind of, you might say, cheated a bit as consul.
00:47:28.060And his peers, particularly those on the opposite side, the optimates, who you might say held a more purist interpretation of Roman law and of the state, saw this as egregious.
00:47:41.900And to some degree, I think they were right to think that because these were men who considered their participation in politics as their cultural and political birthright, which Caesar kind of circumvented.
00:47:52.260His attitude's probably being, well, you prescribed half of my family and most of their friends, so let's play dirty.
00:47:58.640I suppose it would have been Caesar's mentality, right, if you get my drift.
00:48:01.100So anyway, if we fast forward to him being in Ravenna with these couple of legions, and let's not forget, the Gaulic wars were very hard fought.
00:48:10.860Many of these legions, none of them are full strength.
00:48:12.860Many of them are even partial strength, half strength.
00:48:15.200They're weakened legions, you know, to use a line out of HBO's Rome when the character playing Pompey mentions that he's got one mutinous skeleton of a legion.
00:48:24.840And he dares dictate terms to me, like that's exactly the position Caesar found himself in.
00:48:29.780But in some ways, this is sort of Caesar also playing games, like he's got these other troops, he just doesn't have them on hand.
00:48:34.800He wants to, in some ways, portray weakness, you know, to use that sort of Sun Tzu's principle, when you're strong, feign weakness, if you're weak, feign strength, you know.
00:48:44.700And just to give a little context there, because I think you skipped over a little bit, he has been threatened multiple times by the Senate.
00:48:51.100That he needs to return for trial, and he just keeps ignoring it and conquering more and more.
00:49:00.160And so he's in a situation where basically he had to win these wars just to keep from being returned.
00:49:08.280And if he goes back, he knows he's against the wall, because the very people who he would return to are politically motivated to make sure that this guy who is promising a lot of people land, that they don't want to give up, to people who were bringing in all the slaves that they needed in the first place, they're really motivated to bury this guy.
00:49:29.360Whether he should have been, you know, tried and found guilty for all these violations or not, either way, he is already...
00:49:38.080They're already heavily incentivized to kind of get rid of this guy who is causing a lot of social problems for them, political problems for them at home.
00:49:46.640Even though he's winning glory abroad.
00:49:48.360But precisely, and the thing is, his victories in Gaul made not only the Roman state wealthy itself.
00:49:54.600I mean, and this is where this starts to touch a sensitive nerve in, you might say, the morality of modern people.
00:50:01.780I mean, Caesar and his troops are probably responsible for the death of a million Gauls.
00:50:07.420And they would place anywhere from one and a half to two million Gauls, further Gauls, into captivity and slavery.
00:50:14.080So, it's quite the disaster that befalls Gaul.
00:50:18.620And this is even why, like, if you go to France today and study the Gallic Wars, the French call it l'aniterribile, the terrible years.
00:50:28.020And, I mean, the French are kind of like this mix of, you know, Gauls, Roman Latins, Frankish Germans.
00:50:34.020You know, the French have evolved a lot since this time.
00:50:36.120But the French today still call it that.
00:51:23.000At the very least, he stands to be exiled and be stripped of everything.
00:51:27.600At the very worst, he's going to be thrown off the top in rock.
00:51:30.080He will be executed for his crimes or his alleged crimes by his enemies.
00:51:34.180Because there's no Roman general who had ever conquered a province or a territory who didn't sort of commit what we would today call heinous crimes, right?
00:51:42.760So Caesar's, that's Caesar's personal position.
00:51:45.640And then there's the position of his men who have fought hard for Caesar in the Gallic Wars.
00:53:14.180And it would be within the right of any Roman citizen to kill or capture Caesar.
00:53:20.200And then the state would be within their rights to seize all property.
00:53:23.820But Caesar, at the head of a partial legion, beelines it to Rome and doesn't give the Senate time, even with Pompey as sort of the, he sort of becomes this de facto dictator in Rome.
00:53:38.020Not enough time to organize a defense.
00:53:42.360And funny enough, there's one legion which is loyal to Pompey, which is only a half legion.
00:53:46.560And then there's another legion in Rome, but it's actually one of Caesar's old legions.
00:53:49.540And they can't depend on their loyalty because Caesar at this point already has a bit of a cult of personality.
00:54:00.880He's one of the few generals of, well, not few, many fight alongside the generals.
00:54:04.680But he places himself in positions of danger and earns the respect of his men.
00:54:08.920And that's what makes him so well-liked by his followers.
00:54:12.240And so this legion that has fought under Caesar, it's like, oh, can we depend on them?
00:54:16.760The Senate, Pompey basically says, no, we can't.
00:54:19.760So they evacuate Rome and they take the treasury with them and they make their way south.
00:54:24.320Caesar marches into Rome, you know, without opposition and conquers the city.
00:54:28.280Now, I'm sure we don't want to get into the nuts and bolts of the Civil War.
00:54:30.740Again, that would add two hours of the stream.
00:54:32.040But in a nutshell, Caesar engages the senatorial forces.
00:54:37.920He has some setbacks in Greece, but eventually the two forces come to face each other at a place called Pharsalus in Greece.
00:54:46.240And this is arguably probably, if not Elysia, Pharsalus is probably one of Caesar's greatest victories.
00:54:51.700Because up until this point, Pompey is probably still the greatest general.
00:54:54.680That's why the Romans call him Pompey Magnus, Pompey the Great.
00:54:57.500And Caesar's outnumbered by around two to one and Pompey outnumbers him four to one in cavalry, which in ancient warfare to have a cavalry advantage was sort of an advantage in itself, if you get what I mean, you know, mobility and flanking and that sort of stuff.
00:55:12.740But Caesar pulls off an astonishing victory with his back to the wall, you know, sends the Pompey and senatorial army to flight.
00:55:21.520And at this point, a number of senators actually sort of come grovelling back to Caesar.
00:55:24.940And then the sort of civil war continues.
00:55:27.760They go to Egypt and North Africa and they go back to Spain.
00:55:31.460Actually, Caesar starts the civil war in Spain.
00:55:33.100But anyway, Caesar becomes triumphant in the civil war.
00:55:38.900And rather than he takes the opposite avenue of or the opposite route of Sulla, he doesn't prescribe his enemies.
00:55:48.060He actually says to anyone who comes over, because after Pharsalus, Brutus comes over, Cicero comes over.
00:55:55.160And this actually takes some of the, this saps a lot of the fighting strength out of the, and the legitimacy of the Pompeyian cause.
00:56:00.780It's because a lot of the senators who sort of thought, well, we have to preserve the republic by joining Pompey and defeating Caesar, end up sort of thinking, well, Caesar's won.
00:56:07.980And we have to accommodate ourselves with the new regime, you know, the, the nouvel regime, if I can use the French term.
00:56:14.800And it turns out kind of once the wheel turns on, not that many people were actually invested in the republic and they're more than happy to follow whoever's in charge.
00:56:23.680They want their warm marble seat in the Senate house.
00:56:34.020So, I mean, I don't know how much further we want to go into it because I mean, we can always talk about the assassination and this sort of stuff, but.
00:56:39.840Yeah, I think people are, are probably familiar with, with the assassination.
00:56:43.760That's, that's the most famous aspect of it.
00:56:46.560That if, if you've watched the Shakespeare play or anything, you know, if you've watched the movies or anything like that, then you're, you're probably familiar with how that went down.
00:56:56.480And so, and so, you know, let's just say that he's assassinated by his peers, many of whom he offered clemency to, because again, it might be Plutarch who says this, that Caesar quipped that he would rather, he'd rather just die once than to constantly fear death.
00:57:14.080And because Caesar was always a man of the people, like even, you know, in his early days when he was becoming the, the Pontifus Maximus or he's becoming consul and he was as a popular, as you know, his constituency was the people in Rome.
00:57:24.460And, you know, he, he, he never marched around with a bodyguard.
00:57:27.260He, he, he, you know, he, he, he wasn't a person who sort of put a bridge between himself and the people.
00:57:33.720Like he'd shake the commonest hand if they, if he was in the forum, that, you know, go to him and give them his petitions and he'd read them.
00:57:39.760He's like, in some ways, Caesar's a bit cynical.
00:57:42.040Yes, he's a political, you know, he engaged in political maneuver, but there's probably part of him, especially as a result of his youth, who probably actually genuinely believes in this cause.
00:57:51.080There's probably a little bit of both at hand.
00:57:52.720Yes, there's Caesar within the ambition, Caesar, the man who wants success, the man who actually famously says, I'd rather be first in a barbarian village than second in Rome.
00:58:02.140But there's also this conviction that Rome has fundamental problems and this side of politics is actually wanting to deal with it.
00:58:10.760You know, this political system that served Rome as a city state, that served Rome as a regional power in Latium or in Italy or Italia, as the Romans would call it, worked.
00:58:21.460But this pan Mediterranean power where there's legions and governors and there's huge amounts of taxation money coming in and people can engage in corruption and there's legions everywhere and generals can sort of engage in whatever wars of conquest they can.
00:58:34.980And then the generals march home and engage in a civil war like this system doesn't work.
00:59:59.520You can get all of the stuff from the Gallic Wars.
01:00:02.000You can get all the stuff from the Civil Wars.
01:00:04.000And, you know, just the stories of Caesar, like quickly building a fleet and chasing Pompey down, even though he's like wildly undermanned.
01:00:35.500No, I love that he like stops in the middle of nowhere and just like we'll have a, you know, an autist moment where he explains exactly how a bridge was constructed.
01:00:43.940He's like, yeah, I'm going to build this bridge.
01:00:45.120Here's everything about how I'm going to sink the pylons.
01:00:47.360But, you know, like, you know, like let's have an engineering moment in the middle of my war, my war diary.
01:00:52.380But but that said, I want to look at kind of the larger meta understanding of Caesarism.
01:00:57.840So Spangler has this morphology of civilizations and inside of it, he has these political epochs.
01:01:05.700And so there's there's this pre-cultural period, which is, you know, what it says here.
01:01:10.840If you guys can see it here, the primitive folk and tribes and chieftains.
01:01:16.120You don't you don't you don't have the state per se.
01:01:18.680And so you don't have our understanding of more complex politics.
01:01:22.940But then you move into what he calls the cultural phase.
01:01:26.020And this is really where he thinks that most civilizations are doing their most impressive work.
01:01:32.300You start with feudalism, where people are still kind of tied to the land, where people still have a very direct existence with, you know, with kind of the work of their hands.
01:01:46.880There's a lot of power tied into the nobility and kind of the areas that they control.
01:01:54.400And it kind of goes through all these different parts of state formation, the kind of kind of how these regional lords maybe lose a little bit of power and it ends up getting consolidated.
01:02:07.660But this civilizational phase, this is the one we're going to focus on because this is where Caesar comes in.
01:02:14.760Now, for Spangler, the civilizational phase is kind of the beginning of the end.
01:02:20.260We think of civilization, of course, as the apex, right?
01:02:25.680This is a state you enter into and this is where you're highly advanced.
01:02:32.280But Spangler sees this as kind of the beginning of the end because during the civilizational phase, this is where the metaphysical animating spirit,
01:02:40.700the kind of the raw energy, the driving force of the ethnos and the belief in religion and all of these things starts to move from the realm of the spiritual and the metaphysical and the divine into the realm of the material.
01:02:55.340And many of the traditions, the animating spirits, the things that were driving your civilization go from being something that is highly religious and believed in in a very authentic way to something that is being acted out by kind of these systems in your civilization.
01:03:13.720Those those those those rites, those rituals, those spiritual things are translated into kind of more something that is built into the system.
01:03:24.060You build institutions that carry this forward rather than it being kind of an organic part of your civilization.
01:03:30.980And when this happens, we see expansion.
01:03:34.980He talks a lot, Spangler, about the need for expansion becoming kind of a integral part of the civilizational space phase.
01:03:45.640Civilizational epochs are kind of defined by the desperate need for expansion.
01:03:51.500And also the that money power becomes a big deal.
01:03:55.980Money with this expansion, money becomes a driving force because material excess exists in a way that it never did before.
01:04:05.340And so we're moving out of kind of that moment where we talked about with with Marius, where that pivot from, OK, our civilization, our service in the military is based on honor and duty tradition.
01:04:19.120I'm a I'm a I'm a free Roman who holds land.
01:04:21.980It's my it is my honor to be part of the military and I I have to provide my own equipment, buy my own horse that puts me in a certain status in society that I'm able to do that.
01:04:33.840It goes from that to being OK, well, we have to have a military because we're going to drive this expansion and the expansion is driving our economic engine.
01:04:42.240And so that has to continue and the economic engine changes the way that our government, you know, operates.
01:04:49.380And from that, money power starts to dominate everything.
01:04:52.560And this is where the Caesar figure comes in, because once money power has dominated everything,
01:04:58.940the only thing that can kind of shake things up that can change things is the reintroduction of kind of direct force.
01:05:06.140And so that's kind of where I want to bring you back in furious here and look at Caesarism from this angle,
01:05:12.320Caesarism as kind of a paradigm shift from that money power, early civilizational phase to one in which the Caesar figure comes in and kind of breaks,
01:05:26.460you know, cuts through the Gordian knot to to mix our heroic figures here and and breaks through this problem of money.
01:05:35.400Money and and institutions being kind of corrupt and locked into this expansionist phase and creates something new that kind of makes civilization kind of function again,
01:05:46.220but in a way that is still tied to what existed before, but is also a fundamental shift.
01:05:52.680Yeah, just to buttress one thing you said there at the end.
01:05:55.840It's also it's also evidence, too, of and one might say it's the adaptability of the Romans,
01:06:02.560because if you actually if a person goes into the early part of Apostolic Majesty's catalog to the very first stream I did with him,
01:06:09.460we actually talked about Gaul and I ran off a whole list of things that the Romans kind of copied off of their neighbors,
01:06:14.940you know, the helmets and the shields and this and that by fighting their enemies.
01:06:17.760The Romans were hugely adaptive people, particularly early in their history.
01:06:21.100And so the Romans were perceptive, you might say, to their own weaknesses to a point.
01:06:26.960And it's what made the Romans, I think, outrageously successful, certainly in the first half of the civilization of Rome.
01:06:32.540If you're talking in the classical Latin context, I'm not talking about Byzantium at this point.
01:06:36.800But it's almost in some ways a recognition of the Romans themselves of, OK, and particularly I think Marius gets to the nub of it, of that, OK, there's this system that we've had for centuries.
01:06:48.900And it worked whilst we were regional powers and we had our Latin League allies and we're sort of fighting.
01:06:53.700We're fighting Pyrrhus because he's a Greek person invading Rome or we're fighting the Carthaginians because they're just across the sea.
01:06:58.720You know, this system works in this dimension.
01:07:02.120But then with this sort of pan-Mediterranean sort of empire in all but name, you know, we have these, you know, successive, you know, politician generals and these constant civil wars.
01:07:14.940And about the soldier, the transition of the soldier from that sort of honorable duty and obligation bound service to a monetary incentive volunteer force that becomes a standing professional army,
01:07:26.460which, I mean, you're American, I'm not telling you something you don't know, but, I mean, even the founding fathers to some degree understood.
01:07:32.800And they would have understood this by having knowledge about Rome, that a standing army is something that for people who value freedom in the true sense of the word, a standing army can be a risk.
01:07:44.220Not always, but can be a risk to that.
01:07:46.320And so there's this recognition that by having hollowed out that class, that strata of the citizens, of the land of citizen soldier, the Romans realized, OK, the system doesn't work.
01:07:55.900We've actually, through this expansion, through this desire to expand Rome and to defeat the enemies that have faced us, we've actually gutted ourselves at the same time.
01:08:15.540Most people don't understand that America, yeah, had a healthy fear of standing armies.
01:08:20.680One of the things that happened is we got rid of the Articles of Confederation and gained a constitution because the government couldn't put down a rebellion after the government attempted to go back and tax a bunch of farmers.
01:08:32.080And the farmers are like, wait, we just fought Britain over taxation.
01:08:36.880We're just going to go ahead and fight you.
01:08:38.620And America, because it didn't have a standing army, wasn't able to put down the rebellious farmers who didn't want to pay massive amounts of taxes and have their homes seized by banks.
01:08:48.860So funny enough, the constitution is actually a centralization of government power and the creation of the ability of the government to force these people to pay taxes.
01:08:58.740Just briefly, if my aura, they're obviously a bit different because one's a military context, one's an economic context.
01:09:04.320In terms of like the system cannibalizing itself to survive itself, I consider the Italian, the Italian manpower problem of the Roman army.
01:09:12.680So if I can make the equivalent example in America, it'd be like, you know, to sort of keep this American US dollar hegemony project up and running, they've kind of gutted what we call the Rust Belt states.
01:09:24.420They've gutted American industry so that, you know, Americans can have cheap imported consumables and, you know, they can have a service economy that doesn't require massive costs, you know, to build factories and expand factories and man factories.
01:09:36.920I sort of keep the illusion alive by gutting itself.
01:09:38.980That's how kind of America's done, less from a military standpoint, but from more of an economic standpoint.
01:09:43.960But it's that dynamic between the system will cannibalize and atrophy itself to keep it alive, but it hollows itself out even more.
01:09:51.020It's this sort of, it's this downward spiral that it can't escape from itself.
01:09:54.860And I think that's where the comparisons are actually probably most vivid in my mind.
01:09:59.060Yeah, this is Bertrand de Juvenal's famous high and low versus middle.
01:10:04.000The powers that be will hollow out the middle in alliance with outliers, periphery populations in order to undermine the middle so that the top can get stronger.
01:10:18.500And so that's what happened in Rome as the middle, the kind of the freedmen who owned land would have been farmers are sent off to war.
01:10:32.700Yeah, they're hollowed out so that the guys back home can get a bunch of slaves and acquire a bunch of land and become more powerful through this expansion.
01:10:43.240Same thing, like you're saying, you can we can very much see this happening in America where middle America is sacrificed both as fighters in the military and through the offshoring of jobs and the outsourcing of economic and middle class wealth for the elite coastal elites end up becoming fatter and growing fatter on this.
01:11:05.340And the system just keeps cannibalizing itself because the elites aren't going to take a step down in their standard of living.
01:11:11.560And so they need to strip more and more wealth out of the middle.
01:11:15.140And they do that by kind of farming everything out to the periphery.
01:11:19.200Just in our case, the periphery is expanded to a global empire.
01:11:22.920And so you can kind of easily see the parallels there.
01:11:39.260So instead of being able to farm and feed their populace through Roman farms, they ended up having to use Egypt as the breadbasket of the empire.
01:12:34.600And so I think that's why a lot of people see the possibility of Caesar figures now, because we're obviously in a situation where we're looking at that hollowed out, you know, empire.
01:12:44.160We're looking at the empire having stretched itself far too much for the benefit of the few hollowing out the middle.
01:12:50.160We see the situation where money power dominates everything.
01:12:53.580No one can imagine a situation where everyone is not ruled by the dollar, is not ruled by billionaires are the only people who can really contest each other.
01:13:02.640But again, we saw that Caesar played the game of money power, right?
01:13:10.260He put himself in a situation where even though he had to go deeply into debt and put risk at all, he was able to play the money power game for a while.
01:13:17.920But eventually he brings it to very different type of power to the board.
01:13:20.880And so I think when we kind of look at what this might mean for our times now, it's that transition between, yeah, anyone who's going to be a player is going to need the money power, but that transition to a possibility of someone looking to come in and shake up the game is still there.
01:13:39.940It's hard for us to imagine because we, like the people of Caesar's time, are stuck in this historical cycle.
01:13:46.860And we can't imagine that things ever change, but they do over and over again in a very similar way.
01:13:52.200And I think what's unique about Julius Caesar himself in terms of like this power dynamic and, you know, touching on people like the juvenile and Spangler and whatever, and we sort of have these analogies.
01:14:00.800Like, for example, I can't remember, you'd know, or I'm pretty sure, but, you know, the idea of foxes and wolves and the foxes and lions, parados, foxes and lions.
01:14:11.520You know, Caesar's almost a bit of both because on one hand, he plays the political game in Rome.
01:14:16.200Um, and he, he's, he's more daring than his competitors.
01:14:19.460He goes no more dare than his competitors.
01:14:21.100He's willing to literally go all in, you know, to use a poker analogy, go all in on the pot on, on, you know, becoming Pontius Maximus, on becoming consul, on becoming governor.
01:14:30.200He wins each time, you know, he, he does all the, you know, the, the, the smoothing over and the corralling and, you know, the bribing and stuff, but then he's also a soldier.
01:14:39.580He led troops at a young age and, and when he was then a governor general.
01:14:43.240And I mean, I think Plutarch, uh, uh, mentions it quite, uh, vividly when he sort of says, you know, Caesar always had to be the first man, you know, he had to do everything at once.
01:14:52.040He, he, you know, put up the battle flag and he'd, you know, call out the centurions calling each one by name.
01:14:57.020And he'd grab a soul, a shield from a soldier at the back and he'd run to the front and he'd shout encouragement to the men.
01:15:02.260And he's got aspects of both, which I think made him hugely successful.
01:15:07.360And I just want to touch on, I know you want to get to questions or on, so I'll keep this brief, but just cause I think I've seen a bit of this in the chat.
01:15:12.600But I think why we call the Caesarism, the Caesarism and not Alexanderism or Napoleonism or whatever.
01:15:20.380And I'd have to say, I think if we want to get to analogies a tad later, we can always do so or comparisons.
01:15:25.740But I think the reasons why it's those compared, well, I mean, Napoleon came a long time after Caesar.
01:15:30.840So it's kind of neither here nor there, but, but, you know, and also someone mentioned Cyrus the Great.
01:15:35.060So these are kings who inherit kingdoms off their forebears.
01:15:44.180This is true of Philip II and of Cyrus.
01:15:46.920They engage in wars of, you know, to, to stave off competitors for their throne.
01:15:51.920And then they engage down with expansion in their respective careers as Alexander and Cyrus did.
01:15:56.500What is unique about Caesar is that he, he, he, he functions within this polity as a, as a Republic is, and he's actually starts off on the losing side of that being from the popularist faction.
01:16:10.620He then works his way up at great personal risk, both physical and monetary risk.
01:16:16.420And he should have, there's many times that he could have faltered or have been undercut or just lost his life, but he doesn't, he succeeds, he succeeds, he succeeds until that point of the Rubicon.
01:16:29.460And this is one man, not just pitted against another man.
01:16:35.440It is Caesar versus the Roman state, the Roman Senate, the Roman treasury, all its politicians, all its, you know, its financial might,
01:16:44.420all of the friends and allies of Pompey and his Eastern, you know, friends, you know, from his conquest days.
01:16:50.540It's, it's, it's one man against this system that doesn't like him nor what he represents.
01:16:57.800And I think when we were talking in the chat or, you know, lining up the stream in the last couple of weeks, this is actually what I want to get into.
01:17:04.360This is the point about when we use the phraseology crossing the Rubicon, it's exactly that.
01:17:09.460And I think, for example, shall I say, when Trump stepped down at the end of his presidency, if I can keep it in those terms, and people were like, oh, he didn't do a Caesar, whatever.
01:17:20.380It's just like, yes, that's exactly right.
01:17:21.940Because, and this is why I think the system detests Caesar.
01:17:25.440It's why it detests people like Napoleon.
01:17:28.840It detests people, shall I say, like the big chin man in Italy in the interwar period.
01:17:34.120But that those that have the capacity and the will to march on that capital city and go against the system, frightens the system.
01:18:01.480And also, I think it's important that, for instance, Spangler draws a distinction between Napoleon and Caesar or Alexander and Caesar.
01:18:13.480He sees both Napoleon and Alexander as men of some level of poetry.
01:18:23.860He said there's still some romance in what they're doing.
01:18:26.720He sees Caesar as a man of complete shrewd will.
01:18:30.600And so he sees this, the transition between, you know, the difference between someone like Napoleon and Alexander versus someone like Caesar as the kind of Napoleon and Alexander are still animated in some way by myth, by that metaphysical spirit, by at least some level of that echo of romance.
01:18:50.000As where Caesar is, is a true will to power, which in some ways makes him even more ruthless and able to do even more wild things, but also means he's part of a different phase of civilization.
01:19:04.840It's what Spangler calls the second religiousness.
01:19:21.780And that's why I want us to focus on the history around and the forces creating, because there is a very specific way in which a Caesar is born and a time of Caesarism is born.
01:19:33.980And they are distinct from just someone who is a great military leader or a great conqueror.
01:19:41.800And just very briefly, just because it's popped into my head, just before we get to the questions, because the thing is, we have a lot of these writers that talk about the kind of people that we read, you know, Spangler and Juvenal and others, you know, I suppose, Evola, Tony Stent and others.
01:20:00.340But the way in which they sort of frame these topics brings about something which has occurred to me quite often.
01:20:07.740And you look at, say, for example, Caesar at the command of his legions.
01:20:11.800So you sort of see the same of Napoleon gaining notoriety, you know, as an artillery commander of the siege of Toulon.
01:20:17.220And then sort of he's given a ragtag bunch of troops in Italy and partakes in this whole Italian campaign, which both Apostoli, Majesty and I have covered in our streams as well.
01:20:25.820And then he sort of, you know, he's the man of the moment in the same way that sort of Caesar was or in a similar way.
01:20:30.340He becomes the first consul of France, then becomes emperor of France.
01:20:37.760But then, for example, just as another thing is it's worth mentioning Prussia, the kingdom of Prussia, because there's an old saying or reflecting on Prussia that, you know, most states have an army.
01:20:48.740And I think the important thing about the system, as in the one that we live under today, sees that external power base as very much a threat.
01:20:58.000And as we've seen, too, like you don't think in the time that we've been personalities in this sphere.
01:21:03.340I mean, you predate me by some margin.
01:21:05.720But, you know, even the transition of, say, how we imagine the American armed forces under Trump and then how they've rapidly transformed under Biden and how they've almost been co-opted by the regime for its purposes.
01:21:17.500It basically acts as, you know, at home, it keeps it bound together and then it's exported beyond the borders in terms of the ideology as such.
01:21:24.980That they want to keep their power inboard because if it's exported or so if it's outboard and someone like a Caesar or a Napoleon or Frederick the Great, for that matter, can actually harness that discontent and harness that capacity and use it to sort of, dare I say, cross the Rubicon in a hypothetical context.
01:21:45.440It is of an existential danger to the regime.
01:21:48.520And that's why the regime has actually co-opted those things and integrated it into a system.
01:21:52.760And I think that's just a note that's very worth mentioning because I know there are people who, you know, like, oh, you know, we've got to support the cops and, you know, pro blue and, you know, support the boys, support the army and this sort of stuff.
01:22:02.700It's like, well, what matters to people like us is seeing things as they are, not as we imagine them or we wish them to be.
01:22:09.320And I think that's an important point.
01:22:10.700And I guess I'll leave it there because I know you want to move to questions.
01:22:28.480Actually, before we get to the questions of the people at Furious, is there anything that you want to shill, anything you want to let people know that you're working on or that they should check out before we get to the questions of the people?
01:22:38.520Well, I have obviously mentioned Apostolic Majesty.
01:22:40.380See, that's where I do my majority of my co-hosting.
01:22:45.040Apostolic Majesty and I basically cover any subject historically from the Bronze Age up until probably the end of the Second World War.
01:22:53.620We recently did two streams, one about the alternative potential outcomes of World War I, and then the week after we did the inverse of that as well.
01:23:02.840At the moment, when we finish, because our streams with Apostolic Majesty are never short, once we finish here with Oron, please go over to Apostolic Majesty because they asked me about the grand strategy of Stalin.
01:23:18.540And because Oron and I already had this planned, I wasn't able to sit on that.
01:23:22.400But then part two will be, I think, the following week, which I will be on with, and we'll wrap up.
01:23:27.540So by all means, check out Apostolic Majesty because his channel is fantastic.
01:23:31.120I don't always stream with him, but we often stream together.
01:23:33.700And to attain a perspective of history, you might say from our perspective, that is sort of contaminated with a modernist lens, his channel is excellent, and I can only think the highest of it.
01:23:45.940And that's all I really have to shill, Oron, so thank you.
01:23:48.700And also, I appreciate the chance to talk about this today.
01:23:51.460As you know, Caesar is one of my favorite subjects from a historical standpoint.
01:23:54.160So I never had an opportunity to talk about Julius Caesar.