The Auron MacIntyre Show - The Making of a Caesar ｜ Guest： Furius Pertinax ｜ 5⧸3⧸23

00:00:00.000 We hope you're enjoying your Air Canada flight.

00:00:02.320 Rocky's Vacation, here we come.

00:00:05.060 Whoa, is this economy?

00:00:07.180 Free beer, wine, and snacks.

00:00:09.620 Sweet! 0.95

00:00:10.720 Fast-free Wi-Fi means I can make dinner reservations before we land.

00:00:14.760 And with live TV, I'm not missing the game.

00:00:17.800 It's kind of like, I'm already on vacation.

00:00:20.980 Nice! 0.94

00:00:22.240 On behalf of Air Canada, nice travels.

00:00:25.260 Wi-Fi available to Airplane members on Equipped Flight.

00:00:27.200 Sponsored by Bell. Conditions apply.

00:00:28.720 CRCanada.com.

00:00:30.000 Hey everybody, how's it going?

00:00:32.060 Thanks for joining me this afternoon.

00:00:34.280 I've got a great stream with a great guest that I think you're really going to enjoy.

00:00:40.120 So, Caesarism is something that always comes up when we're kind of looking at the cycles of history.

00:00:46.720 It's a phenomenon that is recurring over and over again in civilizations.

00:00:51.620 Many people are captivated by it.

00:00:53.780 And it is something that I think is relevant today because somebody who's talked a lot about Caesarism,

00:00:59.220 Oswald Spangler, said that we might be in the times of it or we might be approaching that season in our civilization.

00:01:06.300 So, I thought it would be important to go back and look at the historical roots of Caesarism.

00:01:11.300 Of course, who is Julius Caesar first?

00:01:13.660 So, getting that historical context?

00:01:15.520 And then what does the term mean?

00:01:18.000 What can we look at and how it applies to kind of the world around us today?

00:01:22.460 So, joining me today to talk about all of that is Furious Pertinax.

00:01:26.020 Thank you so much for joining me, man.

00:01:27.800 Good morning, everyone.

00:01:28.740 It was nice to get to this conversation.

00:01:32.120 And I know we've been sort of talking about it back and forth for a couple of weeks.

00:01:35.380 But, and you're quite right, you know, it's such a fundamental part of people sort of now around the politics to discuss, you know,

00:01:42.660 the idea of Caesar and Caesarism.

00:01:45.420 And, of course, for those who are familiar with Spangler, you know, it's a theme that is quite obvious in his writing.

00:01:51.180 But, sometimes it is the historical context of Caesar himself is a bit lost.

00:01:57.100 And 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.

00:02:04.000 Unless 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.

00:02:16.520 And 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,

00:02:22.100 but where does Caesarism sit contextually within, you know, in terms of the historicity of the subject.

00:02:29.000 Yeah.

00:02:29.460 And so we're going to try to do a little zooming in and zooming out.

00:02:32.200 We'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,

00:02:38.980 what kind of made the original Caesar a Caesar.

00:02:41.800 But 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,

00:02:49.760 how these forces can appear not just in ancient Rome, but other places, and what kind of conclusions we can draw from that today.

00:02:57.660 But before we dive into all that, guys, let's go ahead and hear from today's sponsor.

00:03:02.800 This episode is brought to you by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute.

00:03:05.640 The Intercollegiate Studies Institute is a conservative nonprofit dedicated to educating the next great American.

00:03:12.740 ISI understands that conservatives and right-of-center students feel isolated on college campuses

00:03:18.000 and compelled to defend their reputation and dignity while seeking to carve out a brighter future.

00:03:24.640 ISI has a variety of different content, events, internships, and fellowships geared towards helping students and opening up career opportunities.

00:03:32.720 ISI offers graduate students and entry-level journalists the opportunity to receive fellowships and secure internships.

00:03:39.780 Nate Hockman, who's been a guest on this show multiple times, got his start at National Review through ISI.

00:03:45.760 He's been one of many journalists and academics who were able to start their career with the help of ISI.

00:03:51.480 And in the fall, everyone's favorite, Tucker Carlson, will be giving the keynote address at ISI's annual gala.

00:03:57.580 On all issues, both economic and cultural, ISI wants their students to know that they aren't shying away from the problems facing our country,

00:04:06.220 because letting the left win is a pathetic way to watch civilization die.

00:04:11.420 To learn more, check out ISI.org.

00:04:14.460 That's ISI.org.

00:04:16.440 You can follow the link down in the description of the video.

00:04:19.120 All right, so as we go ahead and get started, the first thing we want to do is put this in context.

00:04:27.720 We want to put this in historical context.

00:04:29.720 Before Julius Caesar is even born, obviously, the world around him is shaping the kind of situation he's going to be in.

00:04:38.800 A lot of people, of course, look at Julius Caesar and his rise as the downfall of the Roman Republic.

00:04:45.480 But I think for people who are more familiar with Roman history, they understand that this was going for a long time,

00:04:53.560 that Julius Caesar was really more of the end of a process than the beginning.

00:04:57.960 Some people look at the Gracchi.

00:04:59.680 Some people look at Marius and Sulla.

00:05:02.500 But, Furius, can you give us a little bit of context?

00:05:05.700 What 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?

00:05:15.480 Yeah, 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.

00:05:28.540 They are merely a very, rather, a very important hinge pin in the trajectory of how this sort of goes about.

00:05:35.240 But, you know, if you actually look at this sort of historical path of the Roman Republic, particularly after,

00:05:40.620 it's worth noting that there's sort of a delineation between, say, Rome prior to the Punic Wars,

00:05:45.480 or certainly the second Punic War, and then Rome after the second Punic War,

00:05:48.680 which becomes, you sort of have this nascent Roman city-state that spends 300 years

00:05:56.020 becoming the hegemon of the Italian peninsula over its Latin and Oscan neighbors, 1.00

00:06:03.480 the Etruscans to the north, the Umbrians, and to the south, the Samnites, 0.60

00:06:07.280 and these other sort of tribes who share, in a broad sense, sort of like an Italic identity with Rome.

00:06:14.360 Their languages aren't always identical, but they're usually similar.

00:06:16.820 But they, you know, they share, you might say, an ethnos with the Latins, which the Romans are.

00:06:25.100 In fact, Rome's first alliance is called the Latin League,

00:06:27.900 which is shared with its immediate Latin neighbors, for instance.

00:06:30.940 And that process takes centuries.

00:06:32.960 It takes, you know, 300, 400 years for it to sort of become a regional power and to sort of accrue

00:06:37.920 its sort of position as the hegemon of Italy, as we would sort of understand Italy today.

00:06:43.740 And then it engages in these two very enduring savage wars with Carthage,

00:06:50.340 Carthage being Rome's great power across the sea in North Africa.

00:06:54.300 Modern-day Tunis is the location of where the city of Carthage was.

00:06:57.980 And these are people who are of a Phoenician extraction from the great trading cities of Tyre,

00:07:03.420 Sidon, Byblos in the Near East.

00:07:07.140 And then once Rome crushes them in the Third Punic War, they actually destroy Carthage.

00:07:11.140 They quite literally tear the city down brick by brick.

00:07:14.280 Rome in itself, you know, it becomes a power of the Western Mediterranean.

00:07:18.500 It sort of starts to attain this size and stature,

00:07:25.800 which then compares it to the great kingdoms of the East.

00:07:28.440 These remnant powers, which are the successive states of Alexander,

00:07:32.520 the Greeks call them the Diadochi.

00:07:34.780 This is the Kingdom of Macedon.

00:07:36.280 This is Ptolemaic Egypt.

00:07:37.480 And this is, you know, the powers in the East, the Seleucid Empire. 0.77

00:07:41.400 And Rome then engages sort of because as happens with friction and power and expansion,

00:07:46.160 Rome comes to blows with them.

00:07:48.520 And then sort of Rome then expands.

00:07:50.400 And, you know, in two or three wars, it conquers Macedon.

00:07:53.560 And the conquest of Macedon trebles the size of the Roman treasury, for instance.

00:07:58.100 Rome then engages in the succession of wars, you know, throughout the Mediterranean just expands.

00:08:02.820 And what was this sort of nascent city-state that could govern, you know,

00:08:06.260 a couple of provinces in Italy that could actually govern Italy as a sort of a nation-state,

00:08:11.740 as we might conceptualise it today.

00:08:13.460 It's still trying to utilise this aristocratic republican system to govern what is very rapidly becoming an empire.

00:08:19.980 You know, there's a very good piece that was mentioned by, he's one of my favourite historians on the subject,

00:08:27.260 Professor Keith Hopkins.

00:08:28.540 He was of Cambridge University.

00:08:29.960 He's now deceased.

00:08:31.120 But he said that following the Second Punic War, the Romans celebrated 70 triumphs within 200 years.

00:08:38.640 And a triumph was never issued to a general unless they were killed, a minimum of 5,000 of the enemy in any given battle.

00:08:45.800 So it wasn't just thrown around willy-nilly, like triumphs were earned by their generals.

00:08:49.980 And this demonstrates the scale of Roman expansion and the rapidness of it.

00:08:55.360 And by Rome gaining all this territory, yes, it becomes powerful.

00:08:58.880 But a couple of things happen.

00:09:00.260 Is that one, there's a gradual but dramatic attrition of its, because prior to Marius,

00:09:08.940 Geis Marius, Rome isn't sort of like a professionalised army with volunteers and recruits.

00:09:15.760 Rome is essentially a levy-based, semi-professional militia.

00:09:19.720 It just so happens that it's very well-trained and it's very strong and well-equipped by the state.

00:09:25.740 But actually, technically, they had their own arms and armour, but like the state did, you know, provide other things.

00:09:31.400 But it was constantly fighting and expanding.

00:09:36.160 And so it would deploy these armies.

00:09:38.080 But there was always attrition.

00:09:40.100 I mean, if you look at the Second Punic War, Rome suffers a horrendous degree of military attrition against the Carthaginians.

00:09:47.420 Take the Battle of Cannae, most people are familiar with it.

00:09:49.740 Rome loses 65,000 men in an afternoon of fighting against Hannibal.

00:09:54.640 And this sort of happens generation over generation over generation.

00:09:58.080 And so these sort of essentially fathers and sons and brothers of landed Romans, who were the recruitment base for the army, are becoming depleted.

00:10:07.660 And so what happens?

00:10:09.660 Eventually, 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.

00:10:20.340 They make their way to the Italian peninsula via the river Rhine Valley and into the Alps.

00:10:27.600 And they defeat two or three Roman armies across southern Gaul and the Alps.

00:10:33.140 And meanwhile, Marius himself is in Africa fighting the Jugurthine War against the Numidians.

00:10:39.080 And Rome is basically tapped out of manpower.

00:10:42.200 So Marius is brought back to Rome after he wraps up the Numidian conflict.

00:10:45.500 In fact, the Roman state basically say he's voted consul, which makes him one of the two leaders of Rome for that year.

00:10:52.660 And they say they give Marius carte blanche to basically build a new army.

00:10:56.440 So 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.

00:11:06.940 They're not descendants of, you know, of landowners and of the traditional basis of Roman manpower.

00:11:13.980 And 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.

00:11:24.140 And 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.

00:11:36.420 And then we're sort of presented with, you know, the Sulla Baria stuff, which I know you've talked about before.

00:11:41.560 But 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.

00:12:00.240 They 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.

00:12:09.560 That's the people who were in the Roman legions prior to Marius and Sulla.

00:12:15.180 But a lot of them have died over centuries and centuries of fighting over many, many generations.

00:12:20.180 And so what's happened is that Rome, by winning spoils and winning war, has brought in a lot of gold into Rome.

00:12:25.680 Like I said, when they next Macedon, the Antigonid kingdom of Macedon, Rome trebled the size of its treasury in one campaign.

00:12:34.380 And, of course, with victory, become slaves.

00:12:37.800 The Romans accrued a huge number of slaves over its two or three centuries of fighting after the Carthaginian Wars.

00:12:44.480 And a lot of slaves were brought to Italy.

00:12:45.880 And 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.

00:12:53.480 It's the aristocrats.

00:12:54.520 It's the money classes.

00:12:55.660 It's the sort of merchant classes and their sort of alliance, you know, with the aristocrats who actually have money in Rome.

00:13:02.540 And 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.

00:13:13.400 So 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.

00:13:26.220 They call them haciendas, which is sort of a similar idea, but these vast agricultural estates around like a big villa.

00:13:31.680 And rather than being attempted by freed people or by indentured servants, it would be slaves.

00:13:36.480 They'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. 0.69

00:13:44.380 It's a very different structure to what the Romans had as a smaller city-state.

00:13:48.260 So 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.

00:13:53.900 But I think it's really important to note some of these structural shifts and these social shifts.

00:13:58.880 So like you said, originally you've got obviously a city-state.

00:14:02.660 This is kind of the standard formation of governance and kind of civilization at that time.

00:14:08.620 But the constant expansion is creating a very different situation.

00:14:12.760 We're looking at the fact that first the type of government that used to govern this, kind of the republic,

00:14:20.060 which was really based on this kind of more enclosed local version of governance,

00:14:28.740 something that is very specific to the people inside of the city-state, is now becoming insufficient.

00:14:36.160 Yeah, absolutely.

00:14:37.840 And at the same time, we're also seeing a shift in the economy and military structure.

00:14:44.160 Because if I remember correctly, like even some of the names for Roman classes came from their ability,

00:14:51.340 like their financial ability to purchase their own arms.

00:14:54.500 Like if you could afford a horse, you were part of a different class, right?

00:14:58.180 Equites is what they were called, which becomes, it's where we get equine for horses from.

00:15:01.900 It's from a class of men who rode horses in the Roman army, exactly.

00:15:04.960 Precisely, yeah.

00:15:05.580 So 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.

00:15:15.780 And so at this point, Rome, you know, originally Rome has kind of more of that standard understanding of its polity.

00:15:23.640 It has a, it only includes those in the city-state.

00:15:27.280 This citizenship is particularly guarded.

00:15:29.280 And 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.

00:15:41.220 It'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.

00:15:47.900 But 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.

00:15:56.160 And so now not only do you not have that base of the military, you didn't even have that base of land-owning labor.

00:16:05.320 And 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,

00:16:14.740 where 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.

00:16:26.800 And 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.

00:16:50.080 Precisely. 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,

00:17:10.420 we start to see this breakdown coming at play because that also happens with this enriching of this aristocratic class.

00:17:17.760 And there's quite the deviation sort of occurs. And I mean, before the show, we mentioned the brothers, Gracchi, et cetera.

00:17:23.680 And 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,

00:17:32.960 but 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.

00:17:42.560 But, 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,

00:17:49.700 what actually is the driving factors to these two forces coalescing in Roman politics.

00:17:54.720 Um, 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.

00:18:06.420 Uh, 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,

00:18:16.180 as 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.

00:18:23.320 It 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.

00:18:29.960 And 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.

00:18:42.840 And 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,

00:18:50.880 which is the delineation between Italy and the Salpine Gaul. They can't do so at the head of an army.

00:18:56.080 So 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.

00:19:02.880 And 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.

00:19:17.880 Cause 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.

00:19:24.160 It'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.

00:19:30.560 And 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.

00:19:38.520 Yeah. 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.

00:19:58.300 And 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.

00:20:08.840 These 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.

00:20:21.060 And the, the spoils that could be offered by the generals becomes a big driving point.

00:20:25.920 And 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.

00:20:37.400 You're not really joining Rome.

00:20:38.920 You're joining the general's force for the things that can be delivered to you.

00:20:43.520 And that creates a relationship that is very different.

00:20:46.580 You're no longer in the military of Rome.

00:20:49.340 You're no longer loyal to Rome.

00:20:52.120 You're loyal to the specific man who's taking you into battle.

00:20:56.920 Exactly right.

00:20:57.900 Because it's, it's the success of the failure of that general, which then determines the fate of those soldiers.

00:21:03.540 And 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.

00:21:10.240 You 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,

00:21:19.200 which 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.

00:21:29.580 Like, 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.

00:21:38.700 If you get my drift, um, we, we see this across history and this is one example where it actually does happen.

00:21:43.420 Uh, 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.

00:21:54.920 Um, 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.

00:22:04.080 And so, um, I suppose we'll just speed run it really quickly, that sort of.

00:22:09.500 When does fast grocery delivery through Instacart matter most?

00:22:13.140 When your famous grainy mustard potato salad isn't so famous without the grainy mustard.

00:22:18.000 When the barbecue's lit, but there's nothing to grill.

00:22:20.680 When the in-laws decide that, actually, they will stay for dinner.

00:22:24.400 Instacart has all your groceries covered this summer.

00:22:26.960 So download the app and get delivery in as fast as 60 minutes.

00:22:30.280 Plus enjoy $0 delivery fees on your first three orders.

00:22:34.080 Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply.

00:22:36.540 Instacart.

00:22:37.400 Groceries that over-deliver.

00:22:39.700 Sulla was, was initially a subordinate of Marius.

00:22:42.960 And then Marius, you know, he, he has a success against the Kimbrie.

00:22:46.800 He's, I think he's voted consul, like, I think eight or ten times.

00:22:51.080 Like, it's actually on an unprecedented degree to which he's voted consul.

00:22:55.180 Meanwhile, Cornelius Sulla, Lucius Cornelius Sulla, is fighting in the East against what we call the, in the Mithridatic Wars,

00:23:00.660 which is sort of modern day northern, northeastern Turkey, is sort of where we're talking, just on a map.

00:23:07.360 And then sort of it comes to a head.

00:23:10.680 Sulla marches on Rome.

00:23:12.120 He eviscerates the popularis.

00:23:14.180 And this is kind of important because this also plays into Caesar.

00:23:16.160 So Caesar is born in 100 BC, and these events are taking place in sort of 90 and 80 BC.

00:23:22.660 Actually, just before the Eastern campaigns, we obviously have the Social War, which we've mentioned at the very start of the stream.

00:23:26.980 And 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,

00:23:40.200 its Italian allies, and I mentioned them before, you know, the Umbrians, the Samnites, the Lucanians, these other Italic peoples, shall I say,

00:23:47.980 who populate Italy, who share an ethnos and a kinship with Rome, but they're not Romans, right?

00:23:52.320 They are different.

00:23:54.280 You might say they're people with a different identity, but share the Roman ethnos.

00:24:00.860 So that's the simplest way to put it.

00:24:03.880 They eventually, because they're considered a different level of class than, say, what native Romans are they?

00:24:09.640 Rebel.

00:24:09.980 And although the rebellion is actually suppressed, of which I believe Caesar's uncle actually is a general in this war,

00:24:17.040 and Sulla actually ironically serves under him as well, the Romans suppressed this social war.

00:24:22.640 But they, because the sort of, it's a difficult situation for Rome itself because of its manpower situation,

00:24:28.620 and just not wanting to plummet Italy into more chaos, because Italy is the, it's the heart of the Republic.

00:24:36.440 It is the commercial heart, the economic heart, the agricultural heart of the Republic.

00:24:40.860 They can't afford turmoil at home.

00:24:42.360 So they basically, they suppress the revolt, but they grant the wishes of the rebellion,

00:24:46.520 and that is the extension of citizenship to all the Italian peoples of Italy, all the Italics, right?

00:24:52.920 And so you already have great civil disturbance within Rome itself.

00:24:58.460 Sulla fights in the east against Mithridates of Pontus.

00:25:00.980 He comes back with his army.

00:25:02.120 Him and Morris come to a head, and obviously Sulla takes Rome.

00:25:06.660 He sets himself up as a dictator of Rome.

00:25:08.960 He engages in the first prescriptions, which Geist truly sees that the man who's the center point of this discussion survives the prescription.

00:25:19.820 Although he...

00:25:21.100 Let's be clear for people who may not be familiar what a prescription is.

00:25:23.780 Yes, yes.

00:25:24.680 Okay, 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.

00:25:35.740 And I might touch on the dictator thing perhaps at the end of the stream, because I've got a little bone to pick there.

00:25:41.160 But nonetheless, yes, a prescription is essentially a hit list of people who are either executed or exiled, often without trial.

00:25:48.300 So it's a very...

00:25:50.200 It's sort of like almost the equivalent of a Soviet purge, I suppose, is a good modern comparison to use. 0.98

00:25:55.920 And also very importantly, your land and possessions are seized.

00:26:01.240 And 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.

00:26:20.860 Or 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.

00:26:27.100 And 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.

00:26:34.480 Exactly.

00:26:35.240 That's a different hero.

00:26:36.440 But anyway, this is a good example of it.

00:26:38.240 But yes, so what actually occurs here is that at this point, Caesar escapes the prescriptions by joining the army in Asia.

00:26:48.020 And 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.

00:26:55.700 It's one of the oldest aristocratic families in Rome, sort of alongside the Fabii and the Livii and the Brutii,

00:27:02.900 these 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.

00:27:11.680 But the family itself has been on the wane.

00:27:14.500 And even though his uncle, the one who I said fought in the Social War, was governor of Roman Macedonia,

00:27:19.860 and Caesar's father himself was governor of the Roman province of Asia,

00:27:23.280 which corresponds with that western half of modern day Turkey, what we call Anatolia.

00:27:27.280 He was the proprietor of Asia, that the family has not been a success politically.

00:27:34.800 It's not a financial success.

00:27:36.360 The family is actually struggling.

00:27:37.940 And so Caesar's sort of born into this position where the family itself is struggling,

00:27:41.540 but his uncle on his mother's side, who is Marius, has been a successful consul, has fought the Kimberian Wars,

00:27:47.820 is a hero, and is considered a hero by the, as we sort of now come to know them, the popularist faction.

00:27:53.680 So sort of Caesar has this notoriety that on one hand makes him kind of like famous before he's famous himself.

00:28:00.680 But B, he's also got a bit of a tug on the back of his head in terms of how the optimates see him.

00:28:06.960 He's definitely someone to watch out for.

00:28:09.180 So this might also be a good time to kind of explain a little bit of the popularist.

00:28:14.580 And, you know, land reform is a big issue here between these two parties, right?

00:28:18.920 These two factions.

00:28:20.600 Exactly, which is why you have the murders, essentially, of the Brothers Gracchi, who actually want to engage in.

00:28:29.140 Funny how we sort of, actually, kind of unrelated, but I was scrolling through Twitter,

00:28:35.440 and I sort of saw a statement by JFK Jr. about, like, oh, we need a peaceful solution to this.

00:28:41.140 And it's kind of funny how, like, the Brothers Gracchi exemplify that idea of a peaceful political resolution to a problem.

00:28:49.400 And then when there's a political force that denies that peaceful solution from being able to happen,

00:28:55.900 ultimately one faction gives the other faction no other alternative.

00:28:59.980 But you get where I'm going with that.

00:29:02.200 Is that in ancient Rome, this plays out between this increasing degrees of friction between the popularis and the optimatis.

00:29:09.500 And so Caesar being, of many of his family members being a part of the popularis, he flees east.

00:29:17.140 He joins the legions in Asia where his dad was governor.

00:29:20.120 He fights campaigns, gains his military experience at an early age, and he actually wins commendations.

00:29:24.460 Despite being an aristocrat, you know, he's leading a, you know, a century of men.

00:29:30.220 He wins honours and accolades.

00:29:32.760 He, because I think they're sort of engaging in anti-piracy duties in the Aegean.

00:29:36.200 And he already gains, at this point, at a young age, a following of, you know, hard, what we'd call, like, you know, the cadre,

00:29:44.380 the thin edge of the wedge, like these elite men who recognise his talent and follow him.

00:29:48.620 And he gains a notoriety to quite a young age.

00:29:52.320 You're talking like 15, 16, 17.

00:29:54.160 Like, he's literally a high schooler at this point, and he's earning these accolades in the military.

00:29:59.720 And then once Sulla, he dies, you know, and his dictatorship ends in Rome.

00:30:05.880 So he makes his way back to Rome.

00:30:07.660 And then being a man in his 20s, he's obviously an aristocrat.

00:30:12.600 He begins to engage in Roman life in the political sense, which was the, you might say, the birthright of the aristocratic classes.

00:30:19.780 And then that's that story about him going to Rhodes, and he's captured by the pirates.

00:30:23.960 And I kind of want to touch on this slightly.

00:30:25.920 I don't want to get bogged down in it, but it's just about Caesarism and about the kind of personality a Caesar is,

00:30:33.100 is that what is remarkable about this incident where he gets captured, he's on the way to, because he's sent to Rhodes to study.

00:30:39.540 And I always forget that the Greek scholar's name, but he goes to learn oratory and rhetoric, right?

00:30:43.820 And he's captured on the way by these pirates who have this little, you know, cove somewhere in the eastern Aegean,

00:30:48.280 probably on the Asian landmass somewhere, and they capture him.

00:30:51.960 And it's immediate that Caesar already has this supreme self-confidence.

00:30:56.180 You know, when they ask for a ransom of 20 talents, you know, Caesar bursts out laughing, and he says to them, you know,

00:31:01.900 don't you know who I am?

00:31:03.140 My family will volunteer 50 talents.

00:31:05.220 Like, you know, he's already got an extremely high opinion of himself.

00:31:07.800 Well, and yeah, I love the story because, you know, he kind of, in many ways, earns a little bit of the respect of the pirates.

00:31:14.140 He's like running, yeah, he's running races with them.

00:31:17.740 And he, you know, he's like, you know, he's kind of just being a bro with these guys, you know,

00:31:22.080 and they kind of, they kind of take a shining to him in some ways, you know, respect for him in some ways.

00:31:27.340 And so this whole time, you know, but the whole time he's just like, you know,

00:31:31.360 eventually I'm going to come back and crucify all of you for holding me.

00:31:35.600 And they're like, yeah, okay, Caesar, that's great, you know, good, good for you.

00:31:39.180 Yeah, I bet you are, you know.

00:31:40.560 Nice one, plush aristocrat.

00:31:42.560 Like, sure, you don't come and, like, kill us, like hardy pirates who are, you know, cutthroat, whatever.

00:31:47.180 And exactly.

00:31:48.540 And I mean, and this is the thing, too, like, even while he's captive, like, he reads them his poetry and they, you know,

00:31:52.900 because they're not an educated people, they are just, you know, quite, you know, lowly pirates.

00:31:58.100 They don't understand, you know, you know, Aesop's fables or something.

00:32:03.080 And they sort of laugh at him and he castigates them, you know, that he's the captive.

00:32:06.320 But he's actually saying to them, you're stupid, illiterate barbarians.

00:32:08.920 I'm going to come back.

00:32:09.640 I'm going to, I'm going to crucify you.

00:32:11.340 And listen, I'm going to sleep.

00:32:12.900 Keep the noise down.

00:32:13.660 I actually want to sleep tonight.

00:32:14.680 Like, he flips the switch entirely.

00:32:17.600 Like, this is his character.

00:32:18.520 This is his nature as a young man.

00:32:19.820 He's in his early 20s.

00:32:21.720 And then, like you say, the ransom's paid.

00:32:23.880 He leaves the captivity from where he's kept at.

00:32:27.740 And what does he do?

00:32:28.640 Because he fought in Asia, he's familiar with most of the commanders and the disposition of Roman forces in the Aegean.

00:32:34.140 He goes to the nearest naval base that's in the Aegean.

00:32:38.440 I think it might be Lesbos or Samos.

00:32:40.180 I can't remember the Greek island.

00:32:41.080 You know, cobbles together half a dozen Roman ships and, you know, a couple of centuries of Roman troops.

00:32:46.960 And, well, he goes straight back to the island.

00:32:48.260 And he takes the island and he captures the pirates.

00:32:51.240 But because he sort of enjoyed them, he appreciated their company.

00:32:54.400 Rather than actually leaving them to hang on the crucifixes, he actually executes them, you know, as a mercy, shall I say.

00:33:00.780 So Caesar kind of has this really odd idea of mercy, if you get what I mean.

00:33:05.360 But that's the ancient world.

00:33:06.380 Like, they have different morality to what we do today.

00:33:08.580 But that's Caesar as a young man.

00:33:11.820 And 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.

00:33:22.500 Because one thing in ancient Rome you didn't need to progress yourself up the ladder was money.

00:33:26.480 And Caesar, he runs for the election of the office of Pontifex Maximus.

00:33:32.580 Now, for those who are familiar, the Pope, he's titled Pontifex Maximus.

00:33:37.200 The idea of a chief priest in Rome predates St. Paul.

00:33:42.460 It predates the New Testament.

00:33:45.400 These two things actually sort of come together.

00:33:47.040 Caesar himself was a Pontifex Maximus.

00:33:48.520 And he spends stupid amounts of money to win this election, to gain favour.

00:33:53.200 And when he actually departs his home, actually, I should mention, too, at 15, maybe I did mention, whatever, but at 15, his father dies.

00:34:01.480 So he actually becomes the part of Familius, the head of the family at a very, very young age.

00:34:06.780 At a time where a lot of his peers have their fathers and uncles around to nurture them and educate them.

00:34:12.060 Caesar's doing this himself.

00:34:13.020 And so, anyway, he runs for Pontifex Maximus.

00:34:16.020 He borrows up an obscene amount of money, bribes, you know, banquets, cajoling, games, as the Romans loved doing in that time. 1.00

00:34:26.820 I'm trying to think of how Sototius put it.

00:34:28.740 He won, he won, Caesar won the affection of many men and also their wives, I think was how Sototius put it.

00:34:34.960 So, you know, he's already mad about townshall.

00:34:37.180 Well, and I think it's important for people to understand, like, that leveraging of himself, that is very much this kind of all-in bet.

00:34:46.340 Like, Caesar's going to climb, right?

00:34:48.240 He's from a house that's out of favour.

00:34:50.360 He doesn't have personal wealth.

00:34:52.680 He knows what he has to do.

00:34:54.080 So he's gaining, you know, he's gaining a reputation through the military, through his actions, obviously avoiding the prescriptions as well.

00:35:01.900 But he also understands that it's not enough to simply be a military man.

00:35:06.060 And so he's willing to go deeply into debt, to kind of gamble it all on himself.

00:35:11.200 He's also climbing through these social stations.

00:35:14.500 You know, religious positions aren't like we think of today.

00:35:17.680 It's not something that you necessarily dedicated your entire life to.

00:35:21.080 You don't become a separate, you know, priest and forego all-

00:35:24.260 It's almost more bureaucratic in the ancient world.

00:35:26.660 Yeah, it's your curse as honor him, you know, in many ways.

00:35:30.820 And so these are all essential steps to him putting himself in a place where he can ascend to the very highest heights.

00:35:38.680 But at each step, he's kind of taking kind of the maximum risk in all of these situations.

00:35:43.660 Any one of these could have fallen out right from under him.

00:35:47.400 And so we can kind of see in his character what it takes for him to kind of get to where he's going.

00:35:51.640 Yes, he was born of a noble house, an ancient house.

00:35:54.880 But 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.

00:36:06.120 So 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.

00:36:14.160 You know, I think the brothers Gracchi are killed.

00:36:15.660 And although his uncle Morris, his consul, you know, eight or 10 times, the Populares lose the previous round of infighting.

00:36:22.580 So as a son of the Populares faction, he's on the outer in terms of politics.

00:36:27.860 You know, it'd be like sort of, you know, oh, I mean, it's a bit of a fitting comparison.

00:36:34.000 If you get my point, it's like, oh, this Republican has succeeded in Los Angeles.

00:36:37.780 Like, it's a Democrat stronghold, you know what I mean?

00:36:39.840 Like, it's the opposite of the powers that be, as it were.

00:36:43.740 And so Caesar being Populares, it's difficult for him to gain this traction, but he does.

00:36:47.900 And when he leaves home, when he goes to the forum to attend the ballot for the role of Pontius Maximus,

00:36:54.540 I believe it's Plutarch who basically quotes Caesar.

00:36:57.700 And he turns to his mother, whose name is Aurelio, and he says to his mother,

00:37:01.980 I will come home, either a priest or a pauper. 0.98

00:37:03.860 And it turns out that all of Caesar's hard work and, you know, his massive accruement of debts and paying off and, you know,

00:37:11.760 his rubbing of shoulders with all the right people in the room, he wins.

00:37:15.860 He becomes the Pontius Maximus for that tenure, which I think is, I think, two years or five years.

00:37:22.960 I can't remember the exact, I think it might be two years.

00:37:24.980 After which point, he then gains a provincial governorship in Spain.

00:37:30.340 For those who are familiar with the city of Tarragona, the Romans called Tarraco,

00:37:34.140 but that was the capital of the northern province of Spain.

00:37:37.080 And Caesar sent them, and this is another insight into Caesar in terms of, like,

00:37:40.580 the personality of what comprises Caesar, of a Caesar.

00:37:44.440 In the city of Tarraco is a giant statue of Alexander the Great.

00:37:47.420 And, you know, Caesar, a man of already huge ambition.

00:37:52.300 At this point, he's 31, of huge ambition and, you know, huge drive and a huge burden as well.

00:37:58.280 I think he's been carrying the family from the age of 15.

00:38:01.120 And, you know, he's got these debts and he's playing the political game.

00:38:05.280 Like you say, they're playing it for keeps in ancient Rome.

00:38:08.160 He comes across his statue of Alexander the Great.

00:38:10.180 And, I mean, he's a man who's well-read.

00:38:12.020 Caesar was very much understood his own historical context.

00:38:15.040 And the Romans had a very rich understanding of their own history and that of the Greeks

00:38:19.560 because, you know, you sort of don't have Rome without Greece, if you get my meaning.

00:38:23.460 But he comes across this statue and he just breaks down with frustration and rage that, you know,

00:38:28.580 at 31, Alexander had this empire that stretched from, you know,

00:38:33.120 Western Greece from the Adriatic Sea all the way to the Indus.

00:38:35.900 And he'd conquered everybody, conquered the Egyptians and the Great Persian Empire. 0.98

00:38:39.520 And, you know, he defeated the Indians and, you know, Alexander ruled the world almost as they knew it. 0.95

00:38:45.800 And he sees it in Spain, you know, with a bird feather pen.

00:38:52.800 And he's writing out lists and filing petitions and arranging trade deals and collecting taxes in a city.

00:39:00.360 Like for him, it's just not enough.

00:39:01.400 Like this is pedantry, you know.

00:39:03.480 I'm a nobody.

00:39:04.560 You know, I want to go further.

00:39:07.860 And then eventually, because sort of Caesar's considered this young rising star in Rome,

00:39:13.020 he enters into the first triumvirate, which is between himself, Marcus Crassus,

00:39:17.140 who's the richest Roman essentially in history, and Nice Pompeius,

00:39:21.780 who took over from Sulla in terms of the Eastern campaigns.

00:39:24.900 At this point, Pompey Magnus has incorporated southern,

00:39:29.220 what we sort of understand is southern Turkey today, modern day Syria,

00:39:32.560 down to the Levantine coast.

00:39:34.420 You know, he actually pacifies what we call the Levant and Judea and those provinces

00:39:38.940 and incorporates them into Rome.

00:39:40.840 So he's a celebrated general.

00:39:42.280 He's the man of the hour in a military sense.

00:39:44.640 And these three form a pact.

00:39:46.360 Part of that pact is that Caesar marries off his daughter, Julia,

00:39:49.460 from his first wife to Pompey.

00:39:51.840 And this sort of secures Caesar's arrangement that gives him governorship over three provinces,

00:39:59.220 which are the Salpine Gaul, Transalpine Gaul, and Illyricum.

00:40:05.100 So basically, Croatia, northern Italy, southern France.

00:40:08.320 And each province has two legions.

00:40:09.820 So Caesar has a force of six legions at his disposal.

00:40:12.180 And it's with this army that he actually sort of engages in the Gallic War.

00:40:17.640 He intercepts a tribe we call the Helvetii, which actually is how Switzerland gets its name,

00:40:23.240 you know, Helvetia.

00:40:24.380 The Helvetii might attempt to migrate into Italy.

00:40:27.140 Caesar engages them with his legions.

00:40:29.700 And it's a very heart-fought battle, but the Romans win. 0.96

00:40:32.580 And then Caesar basically initiates a campaign to Gaul without senatorial approval.

00:40:36.240 You might say without congressional approval, to use a modern, you know,

00:40:39.360 reference in the American sense.

00:40:42.220 And as a result of circumstances, and I mean,

00:40:45.220 I won't get into the nitty-gritty of the Gallic War,

00:40:47.000 because we'll be here for five hours.

00:40:48.440 Yeah, yeah, easily.

00:40:49.260 I don't know what I'm like.

00:40:51.000 But I'll say this much, that in, you know, it ends up being a success.

00:40:55.720 And this is where sort of Caesar's nascent military abilities really come to the fore.

00:41:00.900 You know, from 58 BC, he begins his campaign to Gaul.

00:41:05.060 In 55 BC, he's the first man in history to bridge the Rhine River,

00:41:11.200 and he actually engages in a punitive campaign against the Germans who have supported the Gauls.

00:41:15.440 In 54 BC, he leads, he's the first roadman to ever set foot on Britannia.

00:41:20.920 He leads two expeditions to Britannia.

00:41:22.440 And in eight years of hard fighting, of, you know, of dirt roads, bloody battles,

00:41:32.960 sieges, counter-sieges, forced marches, ambushes, you name it.

00:41:39.600 And I recommend anyone should read Caesar's Gallic War commentaries.

00:41:43.520 They're actually a magnificent read, just, you know, by and large.

00:41:46.440 They're just a fantastic read.

00:41:47.460 So in eight years, he defeats all 60 tribes of Gaul and incorporates them into the Roman Republic, into Rome. 0.99

00:41:55.540 But this also, again, exacerbates that problem of now we're sort of introducing,

00:42:00.140 it's not just a case of what's Rome standing amongst its Italian allies, its Italian neighbours.

00:42:05.520 But how does Rome actually incorporate the Greeks of Macedon, the Greeks of Achaia and Aetolia,

00:42:12.560 which have been annexed in previous times?

00:42:14.820 Rome has acquired Asia. 0.97

00:42:16.840 Like I said, between Sulla and Pompeii, they've brought these territories in from the east 1.00

00:42:21.440 that don't share an ethnos with the Romans.

00:42:24.700 They've brought, they've obviously conquered Carthage several generations earlier.

00:42:29.320 They've been conquering in Spain.

00:42:31.460 And now Caesar has conquered the entirety of Gaul within a decade.

00:42:35.020 And so this actually sets off an even greater imbalance, I suppose, of the multicultural nature

00:42:43.400 which Rome is starting to attain that is proving evermore the insufficiency of the Republican system to work.

00:42:50.160 It's probably the shortest way that I can explain that.

00:42:54.500 And then, of course, there's this problem where Caesar has raised legions to fight in the Gallic way.

00:42:58.760 He actually expands, I think he ends up commanding somewhere in the order of 10 or 12 legions in his Gallic campaigns

00:43:03.800 and against the Brithonic tribes.

00:43:07.920 And then he comes back to Rome.

00:43:09.160 Well, not to Rome.

00:43:09.940 He's in Ravenna, which is just north of the Rubicon.

00:43:12.900 And this is where this dilemma exists with the Senate.

00:43:17.160 And I know we talk a lot about, like, oh, crossing the Rubicon and the Rubicon.

00:43:22.200 And even in our modern day, we have this fascination with it.

00:43:25.160 And there's absolutely no, I think people tend to use it in the right context in a meta sense.

00:43:32.480 But there's more nuance involved here is that Caesar basically had two choices.

00:43:37.700 Because, I mean, he didn't actually have the entirety of his army with him.

00:43:40.220 He only had a couple of legions on the Italian side of the Alps.

00:43:42.960 And most of the rest of his forces were still occupying Gaul to sort of keep, you know, order.

00:43:49.180 Because we have to remember that the rebellion of Vercingetorix was a rebellion against Caesar as much as it was Rome.

00:43:55.720 And Caesar had to spend a lot of time suppressing Vercingetorix's rebellion, which culminates in the fantastic Battle of Elysio.

00:44:04.400 It's a fantastic battle that you should absolutely read about.

00:44:07.840 Everybody should study because it's one of the greatest battles of the ancient world.

00:44:11.640 But Caesar basically wins by the skin of his teeth.

00:44:13.740 Let's just say that.

00:44:14.900 But he does prevail.

00:44:16.560 And so he's wintering with a couple of legions on the Italian side of the Alps.

00:44:20.400 And eventually there's this standoff.

00:44:22.380 Caesar and his veterans want land because they fought for the Republic.

00:44:26.760 Caesar's probably annexed the greatest amount of territory in a single campaign that any Roman general has ever fought in.

00:44:32.320 Meanwhile, there are people in Rome who want to prosecute him for his misbehaviors in Italy.

00:44:39.780 Actually, I did actually forget to mention Caesar's consulship because he actually was a consul before he became a provincial governor.

00:44:45.640 That's how he became a provincial governor because he was a consul.

00:44:47.780 Yeah, so before we go through that too quick, it might be worth explaining to people what that means.

00:44:53.340 So what you do basically is Caesar mortgages the current, hoping for the future.

00:45:01.620 And if you can obtain that consulship, then you can get the governorship.

00:45:05.920 And basically the governorship is the payback.

00:45:08.760 So you spend all of this money.

00:45:10.320 You invest everything.

00:45:11.420 You put on the games.

00:45:12.740 You leverage yourself wildly.

00:45:14.020 And then basically kind of after you obtain this highest rank, you're given the governorship.

00:45:19.840 And that lets you kind of fleece your province for profit.

00:45:22.960 And that's what allows the politician to then kind of pay back all of the money that they attained during this time.

00:45:31.500 And so Caesar's using that like most people do.

00:45:35.100 But 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.

00:45:54.340 Well, funny enough, from conquests like the one in Gaul.

00:45:57.160 And 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.

00:46:07.220 The people who are funding this expansion by going to war and acquiring these slaves want to come back and get this land. 0.59

00:46:13.280 But 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.

00:46:23.240 And working it with the very slaves that have been secured by these soldiers in the first place.

00:46:28.800 Exactly right.

00:46:30.320 Just to touch on the Caesar being consul things, it's probably important is that in terms of why people were prosecuting him.

00:46:38.720 See, 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.

00:46:46.020 And you might say saw potential in Caesar.

00:46:49.240 He's co-consul for the year.

00:46:51.240 I actually can't remember what year it was.

00:46:52.380 I 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.

00:47:00.460 That was a Roman law in the Republican days.

00:47:03.720 Caesar's co-consul Bibulus was basically constantly harassed by Caesar's, you might say, his altars, like his hooligans.

00:47:11.920 And 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.

00:47:18.780 So Bibulus never went to the Senate.

00:47:20.220 So Caesar was the one consul attending Senate, would pass bills, essentially.

00:47:25.320 So he kind of, you might say, cheated a bit as consul.

00:47:28.060 And 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.

00:47:41.900 And 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.

00:47:52.260 His attitude's probably being, well, you prescribed half of my family and most of their friends, so let's play dirty.

00:47:58.640 I suppose it would have been Caesar's mentality, right, if you get my drift.

00:48:01.100 So 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.

00:48:10.860 Many of these legions, none of them are full strength.

00:48:12.860 Many of them are even partial strength, half strength.

00:48:15.200 They'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.

00:48:24.840 And he dares dictate terms to me, like that's exactly the position Caesar found himself in.

00:48:29.780 But 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.

00:48:34.800 He 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.

00:48:44.700 And 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.

00:48:51.100 That he needs to return for trial, and he just keeps ignoring it and conquering more and more.

00:48:56.780 And so the Senate has...

00:48:58.100 He wants to prosecute him actively.

00:48:59.720 Right.

00:49:00.160 And so he's in a situation where basically he had to win these wars just to keep from being returned.

00:49:08.280 And 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.

00:49:29.360 Whether he should have been, you know, tried and found guilty for all these violations or not, either way, he is already...

00:49:38.080 They'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.

00:49:46.640 Even though he's winning glory abroad.

00:49:48.360 But precisely, and the thing is, his victories in Gaul made not only the Roman state wealthy itself.

00:49:54.600 I mean, and this is where this starts to touch a sensitive nerve in, you might say, the morality of modern people.

00:50:01.780 I mean, Caesar and his troops are probably responsible for the death of a million Gauls.

00:50:07.420 And they would place anywhere from one and a half to two million Gauls, further Gauls, into captivity and slavery.

00:50:14.080 So, it's quite the disaster that befalls Gaul.

00:50:18.620 And 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.

00:50:28.020 And, I mean, the French are kind of like this mix of, you know, Gauls, Roman Latins, Frankish Germans.

00:50:34.020 You know, the French have evolved a lot since this time.

00:50:36.120 But the French today still call it that.

00:50:37.980 They still call it l'aniterribile.

00:50:39.560 It's an interesting sort of insight.

00:50:41.300 But anyway, you're quite right.

00:50:43.360 So, Caesar is left in this position of he goes to Rome.

00:50:47.640 He goes to trial.

00:50:48.920 And it'll be one of the situations where we, you know, if we can draw inverted commas, trial by his peers.

00:50:54.360 But they're all these, they're mostly his ideological enemies.

00:50:56.960 They're sort of Cato.

00:50:57.760 They're Pompey.

00:50:58.860 They're, you know, they're Scipio Metellius.

00:51:02.360 They're all these people that basically want Caesar's head.

00:51:04.520 Cicero to a point as well.

00:51:06.300 People who don't like him and see him as a disruptor to their divine order as the Republic was.

00:51:13.540 And then meanwhile, there's a bit of a push and pull thing which needs to be articulated with Caesar.

00:51:17.180 You mentioned the pull thing.

00:51:18.720 Like Caesar, from a personal standpoint, needs to succeed.

00:51:22.260 If he fails.

00:51:23.000 At the very least, he stands to be exiled and be stripped of everything.

00:51:27.600 At the very worst, he's going to be thrown off the top in rock.

00:51:30.080 He will be executed for his crimes or his alleged crimes by his enemies.

00:51:34.180 Because 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? 0.87

00:51:42.760 So Caesar's, that's Caesar's personal position.

00:51:45.640 And then there's the position of his men who have fought hard for Caesar in the Gallic Wars.

00:51:49.580 They have earned their citizenship.

00:51:52.020 They have earned their rights as retired soldiers.

00:51:55.320 They've earned their right to ask for land because that's what the Roman state promises them when they sign up.

00:52:00.880 So the soldiers are pushing Caesar and he's pulling them along.

00:52:04.140 If you get what I mean, there's this push and pull factor that exists, that coexists with these two principles.

00:52:08.060 And so Caesar basically, why the Rubicon?

00:52:12.660 And I mean, I'm obviously a person who enjoys the personality.

00:52:16.220 Caesar finds him one of the most fascinating people of all history, never mind ancient history.

00:52:19.680 But he conjures up when he's at this point where he must act one way or another.

00:52:25.560 You know, there's a phraseology.

00:52:27.200 People sort of say, oh, humans have fight or flight.

00:52:29.600 There's actually a third response.

00:52:30.920 And this is probably the worst response of all is fight, flight and freeze.

00:52:35.020 At the very least, if you run away, you might fight another day.

00:52:37.420 And if you fight, you might win.

00:52:39.380 But to freeze is to just condemn yourself to, you know, you're going to get shot or something.

00:52:45.260 You're going to get rolled over.

00:52:46.560 Like freeze is the worst thing.

00:52:48.280 And most men, when faced with the ultimate decision, freeze.

00:52:52.520 And rather than freezing, what does Caesar do?

00:52:54.840 He jumps on his horse.

00:52:56.280 He leads his men.

00:52:57.180 He crosses the Rubicon.

00:52:58.200 He commits the most heinous crime in Rome of marching men into Italy.

00:53:02.940 Once Caesar is on the opposite bank of the Rubicon with his weapons and his arms and armor, he is a traitor to the Roman Republic.

00:53:12.280 He is a public enemy.

00:53:14.180 And it would be within the right of any Roman citizen to kill or capture Caesar.

00:53:20.200 And then the state would be within their rights to seize all property.

00:53:23.820 But 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.

00:53:38.020 Not enough time to organize a defense.

00:53:42.360 And funny enough, there's one legion which is loyal to Pompey, which is only a half legion.

00:53:46.560 And then there's another legion in Rome, but it's actually one of Caesar's old legions.

00:53:49.540 And they can't depend on their loyalty because Caesar at this point already has a bit of a cult of personality.

00:53:53.780 His men love him.

00:53:55.000 You actually see it throughout the Gallic Wars.

00:53:56.720 Like his men do extraordinary feats because they follow him.

00:53:59.000 And he does fight alongside his men.

00:54:00.880 He's one of the few generals of, well, not few, many fight alongside the generals.

00:54:04.680 But he places himself in positions of danger and earns the respect of his men.

00:54:08.920 And that's what makes him so well-liked by his followers.

00:54:12.240 And so this legion that has fought under Caesar, it's like, oh, can we depend on them?

00:54:16.760 The Senate, Pompey basically says, no, we can't.

00:54:19.760 So they evacuate Rome and they take the treasury with them and they make their way south.

00:54:24.320 Caesar marches into Rome, you know, without opposition and conquers the city.

00:54:28.280 Now, I'm sure we don't want to get into the nuts and bolts of the Civil War.

00:54:30.740 Again, that would add two hours of the stream.

00:54:32.040 But in a nutshell, Caesar engages the senatorial forces.

00:54:37.920 He has some setbacks in Greece, but eventually the two forces come to face each other at a place called Pharsalus in Greece.

00:54:46.240 And this is arguably probably, if not Elysia, Pharsalus is probably one of Caesar's greatest victories.

00:54:51.700 Because up until this point, Pompey is probably still the greatest general.

00:54:54.680 That's why the Romans call him Pompey Magnus, Pompey the Great.

00:54:57.500 And 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.

00:55:12.740 But Caesar pulls off an astonishing victory with his back to the wall, you know, sends the Pompey and senatorial army to flight.

00:55:21.520 And at this point, a number of senators actually sort of come grovelling back to Caesar.

00:55:24.940 And then the sort of civil war continues.

00:55:27.760 They go to Egypt and North Africa and they go back to Spain.

00:55:31.460 Actually, Caesar starts the civil war in Spain.

00:55:33.100 But anyway, Caesar becomes triumphant in the civil war.

00:55:38.900 And rather than he takes the opposite avenue of or the opposite route of Sulla, he doesn't prescribe his enemies.

00:55:45.360 Actually, he's extremely lenient.

00:55:46.880 He preserves their property.

00:55:48.060 He actually says to anyone who comes over, because after Pharsalus, Brutus comes over, Cicero comes over.

00:55:55.160 And this actually takes some of the, this saps a lot of the fighting strength out of the, and the legitimacy of the Pompeyian cause.

00:56:00.780 It'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.

00:56:07.980 And we have to accommodate ourselves with the new regime, you know, the, the nouvel regime, if I can use the French term.

00:56:14.800 And 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.

00:56:23.680 They want their warm marble seat in the Senate house.

00:56:26.100 Like that's, that's their birthright.

00:56:27.240 That's what they're more worried about, you know, and also their property.

00:56:29.300 It's like, oh, well, I don't want to anger Caesar if I have this chance of clemency.

00:56:31.580 I don't want to piss off Caesar.

00:56:34.020 So, 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.

00:56:39.840 Yeah, I think people are, are probably familiar with, with the assassination.

00:56:43.760 That's, that's the most famous aspect of it.

00:56:45.900 Exactly.

00:56:46.560 That 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.

00:56:56.000 Exactly.

00:56:56.480 And 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.

00:57:14.080 And 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.

00:57:24.460 And, you know, he, he, he never marched around with a bodyguard.

00:57:27.260 He, he, he, you know, he, he, he wasn't a person who sort of put a bridge between himself and the people.

00:57:33.720 Like 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.

00:57:39.760 He's like, in some ways, Caesar's a bit cynical.

00:57:42.040 Yes, 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.

00:57:51.080 There's probably a little bit of both at hand.

00:57:52.720 Yes, 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.

00:58:02.140 But there's also this conviction that Rome has fundamental problems and this side of politics is actually wanting to deal with it.

00:58:08.820 We can't maintain things as they are.

00:58:10.760 You 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.

00:58:21.460 But 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.

00:58:34.980 And then the generals march home and engage in a civil war like this system doesn't work.

00:58:39.480 It's fundamentally broken.

00:58:40.740 And I think the popularis understand that far more than the optimators do.

00:58:44.920 And so I guess from that point, we're now transitioning the discussion towards what is Caesarism conceptually?

00:58:53.900 And I suppose how in the modern day are we looking for the traits of someone who reflects a Caesar?

00:59:01.360 I suppose is that where you want to steer this or on?

00:59:03.000 Yeah, so I think at this point we've established kind of the world that Caesar was born into and the forces that were impacting him.

00:59:10.320 And then we have the personal history and and Caesar the man.

00:59:14.740 But I wanted to get into because, again, this is somebody who I always find fascinating and I think is well worth looking at real quick.

00:59:22.340 But Oswald Spangler has kind of these has these political epochs that go along with his morphology of civilizations.

00:59:32.720 And I want to zoom out a little.

00:59:34.500 Can I interject briefly?

00:59:36.220 I'm surprised I did that within an hour.

00:59:38.100 Sorry, I actually surprised myself.

00:59:40.140 I did that within an hour.

00:59:41.440 No, yeah.

00:59:42.200 There was definitely a speed run there.

00:59:43.860 You should win some kind of much more impressive than getting through Mario or something.

00:59:47.620 You should you should know that we covered it.

00:59:50.680 And guys, we covered an enormous amount of history there.

00:59:52.960 Like Furious was saying, if you read anything out of this, read the war journals of Caesar.

00:59:58.180 I mean, it's really fascinating.

00:59:59.520 You can get all of the stuff from the Gallic Wars.

01:00:02.000 You can get all the stuff from the Civil Wars.

01:00:04.000 And, you know, just the stories of Caesar, like quickly building a fleet and chasing Pompey down, even though he's like wildly undermanned.

01:00:10.420 Like those are just great stories.

01:00:12.120 You should absolutely read them.

01:00:13.240 They're fascinating, even if you're not a history person.

01:00:15.520 Like just just as as tales of battle.

01:00:19.000 Caesar's anecdotes are wonderful.

01:00:20.820 They really are.

01:00:21.580 And also they're an education in like human behavior as well in psychology.

01:00:24.820 Like when you sort of think about what some of Caesar's followers do for him and the cause is outrageous.

01:00:29.900 But anyway, if you want a question, send us a super chat.

01:00:32.860 We'll answer at the end of the show.

01:00:33.780 But let's push on.

01:00:35.040 Yeah, yeah.

01:00:35.500 No, 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. 0.79

01:00:43.940 He's like, yeah, I'm going to build this bridge.

01:00:45.120 Here's everything about how I'm going to sink the pylons.

01:00:47.360 But, you know, like, you know, like let's have an engineering moment in the middle of my war, my war diary.

01:00:52.380 But but that said, I want to look at kind of the larger meta understanding of Caesarism.

01:00:57.840 So Spangler has this morphology of civilizations and inside of it, he has these political epochs.

01:01:05.700 And so there's there's this pre-cultural period, which is, you know, what it says here.

01:01:10.840 If you guys can see it here, the primitive folk and tribes and chieftains.

01:01:16.120 You don't you don't you don't have the state per se.

01:01:18.680 And so you don't have our understanding of more complex politics.

01:01:22.940 But then you move into what he calls the cultural phase.

01:01:26.020 And this is really where he thinks that most civilizations are doing their most impressive work.

01:01:32.300 You 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.

01:01:44.800 And things are still very regional.

01:01:46.880 There's a lot of power tied into the nobility and kind of the areas that they control.

01:01:54.400 And 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.

01:02:07.660 But this civilizational phase, this is the one we're going to focus on because this is where Caesar comes in.

01:02:14.760 Now, for Spangler, the civilizational phase is kind of the beginning of the end.

01:02:20.260 We think of civilization, of course, as the apex, right?

01:02:24.000 Like, oh, you're civilized.

01:02:25.680 This is a state you enter into and this is where you're highly advanced.

01:02:32.280 But Spangler sees this as kind of the beginning of the end because during the civilizational phase, this is where the metaphysical animating spirit,

01:02:40.700 the 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.

01:02:55.340 And 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.

01:03:13.720 Those those those those rites, those rituals, those spiritual things are translated into kind of more something that is built into the system.

01:03:24.060 You build institutions that carry this forward rather than it being kind of an organic part of your civilization.

01:03:30.980 And when this happens, we see expansion.

01:03:34.980 He talks a lot, Spangler, about the need for expansion becoming kind of a integral part of the civilizational space phase.

01:03:45.640 Civilizational epochs are kind of defined by the desperate need for expansion.

01:03:51.500 And also the that money power becomes a big deal.

01:03:55.980 Money with this expansion, money becomes a driving force because material excess exists in a way that it never did before.

01:04:05.340 And 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.

01:04:19.120 I'm a I'm a I'm a free Roman who holds land.

01:04:21.980 It'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.

01:04:33.840 It 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.

01:04:42.240 And so that has to continue and the economic engine changes the way that our government, you know, operates.

01:04:49.380 And from that, money power starts to dominate everything.

01:04:52.560 And this is where the Caesar figure comes in, because once money power has dominated everything,

01:04:58.940 the only thing that can kind of shake things up that can change things is the reintroduction of kind of direct force.

01:05:06.140 And so that's kind of where I want to bring you back in furious here and look at Caesarism from this angle,

01:05:12.320 Caesarism 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,

01:05:26.460 you know, cuts through the Gordian knot to to mix our heroic figures here and and breaks through this problem of money.

01:05:35.400 Money 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,

01:05:46.220 but in a way that is still tied to what existed before, but is also a fundamental shift.

01:05:52.680 Yeah, just to buttress one thing you said there at the end.

01:05:55.640 Sure.

01:05:55.840 It's also it's also evidence, too, of and one might say it's the adaptability of the Romans,

01:06:02.560 because 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,

01:06:09.460 we actually talked about Gaul and I ran off a whole list of things that the Romans kind of copied off of their neighbors,

01:06:14.940 you know, the helmets and the shields and this and that by fighting their enemies.

01:06:17.760 The Romans were hugely adaptive people, particularly early in their history.

01:06:21.100 And so the Romans were perceptive, you might say, to their own weaknesses to a point.

01:06:26.960 And it's what made the Romans, I think, outrageously successful, certainly in the first half of the civilization of Rome.

01:06:32.540 If you're talking in the classical Latin context, I'm not talking about Byzantium at this point.

01:06:36.800 But 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.

01:06:48.900 And it worked whilst we were regional powers and we had our Latin League allies and we're sort of fighting.

01:06:53.700 We're fighting Pyrrhus because he's a Greek person invading Rome or we're fighting the Carthaginians because they're just across the sea. 0.98

01:06:58.720 You know, this system works in this dimension.

01:07:02.120 But 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.

01:07:11.760 This system isn't working.

01:07:13.140 It is atrophiedness broken down.

01:07:14.940 And 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,

01:07:26.460 which, 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.

01:07:32.800 And 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.

01:07:44.220 Not always, but can be a risk to that.

01:07:46.320 And 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.

01:07:55.900 We'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.

01:08:05.260 We need a new military system.

01:08:07.260 So there's also that consideration as well.

01:08:09.320 I know it's a bit of a divergence, but I figured that was an important point to make.

01:08:12.160 No, it is.

01:08:13.160 And it's, again, I think it's funny.

01:08:15.540 Most people don't understand that America, yeah, had a healthy fear of standing armies.

01:08:20.680 One 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.

01:08:32.080 And the farmers are like, wait, we just fought Britain over taxation.

01:08:36.880 We're just going to go ahead and fight you.

01:08:38.620 And 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.

01:08:48.860 So 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.

01:08:57.200 Yes, exactly.

01:08:58.740 Just briefly, if my aura, they're obviously a bit different because one's a military context, one's an economic context.

01:09:04.320 In terms of like the system cannibalizing itself to survive itself, I consider the Italian, the Italian manpower problem of the Roman army.

01:09:12.680 So 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.

01:09:24.420 They'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. 0.65

01:09:36.920 I sort of keep the illusion alive by gutting itself.

01:09:38.980 That's how kind of America's done, less from a military standpoint, but from more of an economic standpoint.

01:09:43.960 But it's that dynamic between the system will cannibalize and atrophy itself to keep it alive, but it hollows itself out even more.

01:09:51.020 It's this sort of, it's this downward spiral that it can't escape from itself.

01:09:54.860 And I think that's where the comparisons are actually probably most vivid in my mind.

01:09:59.060 Yeah, this is Bertrand de Juvenal's famous high and low versus middle.

01:10:04.000 The 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. 0.62

01:10:18.500 And 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.

01:10:31.540 They're hollowed out.

01:10:32.700 Yeah, 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.

01:10:43.240 Same 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.

01:11:05.340 And the system just keeps cannibalizing itself because the elites aren't going to take a step down in their standard of living.

01:11:11.560 And so they need to strip more and more wealth out of the middle. 0.95

01:11:15.140 And they do that by kind of farming everything out to the periphery.

01:11:19.200 Just in our case, the periphery is expanded to a global empire.

01:11:22.920 And so you can kind of easily see the parallels there.

01:11:27.600 But we have a lot of the Romans.

01:11:29.220 I was just going to say the Romans called offshore their production as well.

01:11:32.100 Like, you know, it's a very different year with different things.

01:11:34.240 Well, they did.

01:11:35.560 So the interesting thing about the Romans is they offshore their food production.

01:11:39.020 Right.

01:11:39.260 So 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. 0.79

01:11:50.160 Right.

01:11:50.600 And I mean, they did it next to Egypt to make it easier.

01:11:53.860 But yes, the analogy does ring true, because for about 50 years, that was the case.

01:11:57.760 They actually had a trade agreement with Egypt specifically for grain.

01:12:00.840 So it's a good point.

01:12:02.580 Yeah.

01:12:02.700 Yeah.

01:12:03.280 So this the dynamic is not as because we don't have the same level of political or, you know, just just logistical interaction.

01:12:15.260 You don't have the same abilities to offshore this stuff.

01:12:17.860 But that dynamic existed even back then.

01:12:20.020 So, again, this is something we see over and over again.

01:12:22.420 Historical cycles that these this metaphysics of power, these mechanics, they are eternal.

01:12:28.520 They apply themselves differently, but they continue.

01:12:32.200 We see their echoes.

01:12:33.120 We see their reputation.

01:12:34.600 And 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.

01:12:44.160 We're looking at the empire having stretched itself far too much for the benefit of the few hollowing out the middle.

01:12:50.160 We see the situation where money power dominates everything.

01:12:53.580 No 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.

01:13:02.640 But again, we saw that Caesar played the game of money power, right?

01:13:06.980 He leveraged himself up to the nines.

01:13:10.260 He 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.

01:13:17.920 But eventually he brings it to very different type of power to the board.

01:13:20.880 And 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.

01:13:39.940 It's hard for us to imagine because we, like the people of Caesar's time, are stuck in this historical cycle.

01:13:46.860 And we can't imagine that things ever change, but they do over and over again in a very similar way.

01:13:52.200 And 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.

01:14:00.800 Like, 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.

01:14:10.040 Yeah, it's parado.

01:14:10.880 Yeah.

01:14:11.520 You know, Caesar's almost a bit of both because on one hand, he plays the political game in Rome.

01:14:16.200 Um, and he, he's, he's more daring than his competitors.

01:14:19.460 He goes no more dare than his competitors.

01:14:21.100 He'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.

01:14:30.200 He 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.

01:14:38.460 He was a centurion.

01:14:39.580 He led troops at a young age and, and when he was then a governor general.

01:14:43.240 And 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.

01:14:52.040 He, he, you know, put up the battle flag and he'd, you know, call out the centurions calling each one by name.

01:14:57.020 And 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.

01:15:02.260 And he's got aspects of both, which I think made him hugely successful.

01:15:07.360 And 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.

01:15:12.600 But I think why we call the Caesarism, the Caesarism and not Alexanderism or Napoleonism or whatever.

01:15:20.380 And I'd have to say, I think if we want to get to analogies a tad later, we can always do so or comparisons.

01:15:25.740 But I think the reasons why it's those compared, well, I mean, Napoleon came a long time after Caesar.

01:15:30.840 So it's kind of neither here nor there, but, but, you know, and also someone mentioned Cyrus the Great.

01:15:35.060 So these are kings who inherit kingdoms off their forebears.

01:15:41.140 They inherit an army.

01:15:42.440 They inherit a bureaucracy.

01:15:44.180 This is true of Philip II and of Cyrus.

01:15:46.920 They engage in wars of, you know, to, to stave off competitors for their throne.

01:15:51.920 And then they engage down with expansion in their respective careers as Alexander and Cyrus did.

01:15:56.500 What 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.

01:16:10.620 He then works his way up at great personal risk, both physical and monetary risk.

01:16:16.420 And 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.

01:16:29.460 And this is one man, not just pitted against another man.

01:16:32.580 It's not just Caesar V Pompey.

01:16:34.160 It's not just Caesar V whatever.

01:16:35.440 It is Caesar versus the Roman state, the Roman Senate, the Roman treasury, all its politicians, all its, you know, its financial might,

01:16:44.420 all of the friends and allies of Pompey and his Eastern, you know, friends, you know, from his conquest days.

01:16:50.540 It's, it's, it's one man against this system that doesn't like him nor what he represents.

01:16:57.800 And 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.

01:17:04.360 This is the point about when we use the phraseology crossing the Rubicon, it's exactly that.

01:17:09.460 And 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.

01:17:20.380 It's just like, yes, that's exactly right.

01:17:21.940 Because, and this is why I think the system detests Caesar.

01:17:25.440 It's why it detests people like Napoleon.

01:17:28.840 It detests people, shall I say, like the big chin man in Italy in the interwar period.

01:17:34.120 But that those that have the capacity and the will to march on that capital city and go against the system, frightens the system.

01:17:45.640 Very fundamentally so.

01:17:47.400 And Caesar's probably the first man in history that does it against the state within which he's a participant of.

01:17:54.320 He then tackles it and prevails against it.

01:17:56.740 And I think that definition of Caesarism matters, if you get my drift.

01:18:00.500 I do.

01:18:01.480 And also, I think it's important that, for instance, Spangler draws a distinction between Napoleon and Caesar or Alexander and Caesar.

01:18:13.480 He sees both Napoleon and Alexander as men of some level of poetry.

01:18:23.860 He said there's still some romance in what they're doing.

01:18:26.720 He sees Caesar as a man of complete shrewd will.

01:18:30.600 And 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.

01:18:50.000 As 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.

01:19:04.840 It's what Spangler calls the second religiousness.

01:19:08.320 That would take us far too much time.

01:19:10.680 We've already run too late.

01:19:11.740 Of course, of course, of course.

01:19:12.740 But just to say, there are similarities, of course, but not every great leader is a Caesar.

01:19:19.440 There's a very specific set of that.

01:19:21.780 And 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.

01:19:33.980 And they are distinct from just someone who is a great military leader or a great conqueror.

01:19:39.780 Exactly.

01:19:40.780 Exactly.

01:19:41.800 And 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.

01:20:00.340 But the way in which they sort of frame these topics brings about something which has occurred to me quite often.

01:20:07.740 And you look at, say, for example, Caesar at the command of his legions.

01:20:11.800 So you sort of see the same of Napoleon gaining notoriety, you know, as an artillery commander of the siege of Toulon.

01:20:17.220 And 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.

01:20:25.820 And 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.

01:20:30.340 He becomes the first consul of France, then becomes emperor of France.

01:20:32.800 We can't go over all of them.

01:20:34.460 No, no, no, no, no.

01:20:36.940 Certainly not.

01:20:37.760 But 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.

01:20:47.460 The Prussian army has a state.

01:20:48.740 And 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.

01:20:58.000 And as we've seen, too, like you don't think in the time that we've been personalities in this sphere.

01:21:03.340 I mean, you predate me by some margin.

01:21:05.720 But, 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.

01:21:17.500 It 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.

01:21:24.980 That 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.

01:21:45.440 It is of an existential danger to the regime.

01:21:48.520 And that's why the regime has actually co-opted those things and integrated it into a system.

01:21:52.760 And 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.

01:22:02.700 It'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.

01:22:09.320 And I think that's an important point.

01:22:10.700 And I guess I'll leave it there because I know you want to move to questions.

01:22:12.740 Yeah, we need to.

01:22:13.960 But, yeah, that is a topic that I've gone into to a good extent with American Ostracon.

01:22:19.480 So if anyone wants to look more into that topic, we have talked about that in depth as well.

01:22:25.600 All right.

01:22:26.000 So let's go ahead and move over here.

01:22:28.480 Actually, 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?

01:22:38.520 Well, I have obviously mentioned Apostolic Majesty.

01:22:40.380 See, that's where I do my majority of my co-hosting.

01:22:45.040 Apostolic Majesty and I basically cover any subject historically from the Bronze Age up until probably the end of the Second World War.

01:22:53.620 We 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.

01:23:02.840 At 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.

01:23:17.600 Today is part one.

01:23:18.540 And because Oron and I already had this planned, I wasn't able to sit on that.

01:23:22.400 But then part two will be, I think, the following week, which I will be on with, and we'll wrap up.

01:23:27.540 So by all means, check out Apostolic Majesty because his channel is fantastic.

01:23:31.120 I don't always stream with him, but we often stream together.

01:23:33.700 And 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.

01:23:45.940 And that's all I really have to shill, Oron, so thank you.

01:23:48.700 And also, I appreciate the chance to talk about this today.

01:23:51.460 As you know, Caesar is one of my favorite subjects from a historical standpoint.

01:23:54.160 So I never had an opportunity to talk about Julius Caesar.

01:23:56.940 No, I appreciate it.

01:23:58.600 It's been fascinating, and everyone should definitely check out the streams with Apostolic Majesty.

01:24:03.840 All right, so let's go to our questions here, guys.

01:24:06.100 First one, Florida Henry for $10.

01:24:08.440 Greetings.

01:24:09.040 Who is more important, Sulla, Caesar, or Augustus?

01:24:12.900 Without Augustus, Caesar would be much less famous.

01:24:16.360 And Caesar basically copied Sulla.

01:24:18.480 Yeah, I mean, obviously, none of these can be seen, I think, as separate entities.

01:24:23.420 Each one feeds into the other, as we obviously established on this stream.

01:24:28.380 You know, Caesar is a man of his time.

01:24:30.520 He's extraordinary, but he's also kind of forced into position.

01:24:34.060 He is, by extraordinary circumstances, one of those things is Sulla, and of course, the

01:24:39.720 situation that was created.

01:24:42.140 But if you had to kind of pick one, who would you think of as kind of the linchpin here?

01:24:50.500 I'll answer it this way.

01:24:51.640 But I think Augustus is the greatest insofar that he then succeeds.

01:24:57.840 He basically achieves what Caesar doesn't and achieves the zenith of what a man can accomplish

01:25:03.260 in an era of tumult and climb to the top and survive and become emperor, which is what

01:25:10.200 Augustus does.

01:25:11.460 But, and I say a big but, I consider Caesar the greatest of the men because Caesar is the

01:25:17.740 man who literally has to cross the Rubicon.

01:25:19.660 He's the man who picks up, if I may use a mythological analogy, Thor's hammer, and he

01:25:26.260 smashes it against the system that is ossified and corrupt, and he irretrievably fractures

01:25:31.480 it.

01:25:32.180 He's the man who is the breaking point of the ossifying system and allows it to transition 0.51

01:25:38.220 to something which, you know, you might say evolves into something new.

01:25:42.280 And you can't, with no Caesar, that process doesn't happen.

01:25:49.160 Certainly not in the way that we know in our present timeline as history transpired.

01:25:53.800 And I think also when you look at the career of Caesar, you look at his inauspicious beginnings,

01:25:58.220 the difficulty of his youth, the fact that he dodged death a number of times very early

01:26:02.660 on, and he's just this precocious, self-confident, self-assured, ambitious, to a degree, almost

01:26:10.740 like disgustingly so.

01:26:13.700 But he climbs to the very top, and he succeeds in almost every dimension.

01:26:18.900 He's a man who fights all these different people and prevails against them.

01:26:23.320 And he leads with such great tenacity and adaptability, and he's a fantastic leader of

01:26:29.500 men, that I actually find him hard to, I almost in some ways, almost consider him greater than

01:26:34.480 Alexander in some respects.

01:26:36.160 I'll leave that for another stream to explain why.

01:26:37.940 Yeah, yeah, that could be a whole other stream for sure.

01:26:39.700 But I think it's worth making that distinction, as in Augustus achieves, well, Caesar doesn't,

01:26:43.380 but Caesar's lifespan and his accomplishments are unparalleled, if that makes sense, if that

01:26:48.320 differentiation makes sense.

01:26:49.740 I think it does.

01:26:50.380 All right, so Daniel Robertson here for 199, the cycle won't repeat due to multipolar Caesarism.

01:26:56.460 Oh, well, that's an interesting thing to say, Daniel.

01:26:58.520 I mean, first, we need multipolarity, which we don't have.

01:27:01.140 We have a unipolar system right now.

01:27:03.240 But should things move to a multipolar situation, it would probably have to be through some level

01:27:09.500 of Caesarism, I would imagine, though it could simply be because, you know, the United States

01:27:14.660 isn't able to keep its position.

01:27:16.520 I mean, if we see the collapse of the petrol dollar, then that could bring upon us a multipolar 1.00

01:27:24.060 moment, and in which then, you know, possibility of Caesar's could rise.

01:27:28.280 But obviously, every historical epoch does have variations.

01:27:32.500 They're not exact photocopies of each other.

01:27:34.820 And so we will not see exactly what has come before.

01:27:37.820 But it is that echoes of the cycle that I think are most important to focus on, because

01:27:42.840 those are really the only things that can help us better understand the context that

01:27:46.960 we're in.

01:27:48.100 Daniel, again, here for 499.

01:27:52.460 Trump naturally fits the Caesar role for the West, but makes RFK Jr.

01:27:55.660 his VP to bring in the few libs who remain lucid and really don't want World War III.

01:28:00.720 I mean, yeah, obviously, many people talked about Trump in this context.

01:28:06.140 I don't think Trump is that person.

01:28:08.660 Trump is the personification of money power.

01:28:11.500 He certainly talks a good game, many good things about Trump.

01:28:14.860 But I do not think that Trump has those inclinations.

01:28:19.060 A lot of people have talked about fishing in the Rubicon, I think was the phrase.

01:28:23.960 I actually don't like that.

01:28:25.320 Yeah, that was, I think, yeah, Curtis Yarvin used that about Trump fishing in the Rubicon.

01:28:30.540 And I think that's what that was, which, you know, is a dangerous place to be.

01:28:36.140 You know, as the Game of Thrones line goes, you know, you play and you win or you die.

01:28:41.840 Those are kind of those are kind of your options.

01:28:44.400 Chase here for $2.

01:28:46.580 Will Tucker become a Caesar?

01:28:48.460 I love Tucker.

01:28:49.560 But again, I don't know that Tucker, Tucker, perhaps a little more aristocratic in many

01:28:53.900 ways than Trump.

01:28:55.640 Trump does come from a family of money.

01:28:58.300 But Tucker feels a little more like he has that, though I will say that Donald Trump

01:29:02.440 does have a, even though he's a bit crass, does have the ability to communicate with

01:29:06.620 the people and interact with higher levels of society.

01:29:09.280 So he's not completely unaristocratic either.

01:29:11.800 But I would, again, love Tucker.

01:29:14.780 But I don't know that I'd put him in the Caesar category.

01:29:17.860 If I may say so, Aura.

01:29:19.380 I think I think the difference is you need someone who is sort of rambunctious and just

01:29:23.660 totally in the same way that sort of Trump is has like a callous skin, like, you know,

01:29:30.160 he'll just attack and attack and attack, attack, as he did, like in the 2016 election and just,

01:29:33.800 you know, rebuff blows.

01:29:35.060 Need someone of that nature who just goes in, you know, edge of the wedge, tip of the spear

01:29:40.340 into the discussion point, irrespective of what people think about him.

01:29:43.560 But at the same time, you do see the deficiencies, you know, yeah, Trump had sort of natural

01:29:47.640 instincts about the economy or about foreign adventures or defense or whatever, which were

01:29:51.500 true.

01:29:52.240 But at the same time, where I sort of see more virtue in someone like Tucker is that he's

01:29:57.520 clearly more erudite, he's clearly more well-read, he clearly thinks about things in a more cerebral

01:30:01.720 way.

01:30:02.140 And what you actually kind of need is to like mash Trupper, you need to mash Tucker and Trump

01:30:08.320 into the one person, because you'd have both of those traits that would serve each other

01:30:12.220 well, because you can definitely see that one without the other is a bit lacking, particularly

01:30:15.820 in Trump's case.

01:30:16.480 It's like, oh, if this man had read, you know, Edward Lutwark or Suetonius or something, he

01:30:20.720 might be more rounded.

01:30:21.740 So that's just how I see it personally.

01:30:23.420 Nope.

01:30:23.600 I think that's fair.

01:30:24.860 All right.

01:30:25.400 So Double Dime here for $5.

01:30:27.440 Awesome, awesome stream gents.

01:30:29.340 Well, thank you very much, sir.

01:30:30.640 I appreciate that.

01:30:31.880 I hope you, hope the rest of you all enjoyed it as well.

01:30:34.280 Yeah, I think, I think it has been good, covered a lot of ground in the amount of time that

01:30:38.660 we had.

01:30:39.080 Very impressive speed run again by, by Furious in the, I surprised myself to be honest with

01:30:44.420 you.

01:30:46.000 Yeah, a lot of condensed history there.

01:30:49.160 Orwell's goon for $9.99.

01:30:51.160 It's clear that the worst, most destructive ideas of history came from the Enlightenment, 0.53

01:30:54.800 namely in France and Germany.

01:30:56.140 There's such a thing as benevolent dictator, just usually not hereditary, hereditarily.

01:31:03.060 Yeah.

01:31:03.520 I mean, obviously there's, we didn't have time.

01:31:06.220 Maybe, maybe we can plan a future stream, Furious, where we can talk about the office

01:31:11.600 of dictator because I know you, yeah, let's do that because I don't, I don't know if you've

01:31:16.480 ever read Schmidt's book about dictatorship.

01:31:19.660 I actually haven't, but if we are planning it in the future, I'll definitely acquire

01:31:23.240 it and read it.

01:31:23.840 Yeah, let's, let's make that a thing.

01:31:25.380 You, you go ahead and grab that book.

01:31:26.860 It's a fascinating look at the power of the Roman dictator and what that means.

01:31:31.600 And then kind of the wider implications of dictators throughout history.

01:31:36.480 And so that, that might be something that we can plan in the future.

01:31:40.500 But thanks, Orwell's goon for your donation and for that idea.

01:31:44.660 I think that could be a fascinating thing.

01:31:47.020 Absolutely.

01:31:47.960 But just to sort of, I'll suppose, get to the nub of that question.

01:31:50.300 I just want to say very quickly that there's two, there's two words that are used in common

01:31:54.680 parlance that absolutely just make me irate.

01:31:58.120 And one is, like, say, for example, if you're watching like a sports team, it's like, you

01:32:00.960 know, all the, you know, the, the Miami Dolphins, like, you know, decimated the, whatever another

01:32:05.800 team is, you know, it's like, no, one in 10 men weren't like killed on the, on the playing

01:32:10.600 field.

01:32:11.000 That's not what decimation means yet.

01:32:12.360 Decimation actually has amazing, you know, decimation has a definition that, you know,

01:32:16.900 exists, you know, there's any, there's any number of words in the English dictionary

01:32:19.880 you could use, you know, they, they annihilated them or they crushed them or whatever.

01:32:22.820 To be fair, that's a, that's a very history geek specific.

01:32:25.600 It is like, I hear you, but exactly, but, but, but the other one is dictator and, you

01:32:32.280 know, you, you watch any number of, of news networks or even discussions amongst intellectuals

01:32:36.600 or even, you know, if you want to even catch parts of bread tube or whatever, I mean, we

01:32:39.700 can have Dave to, to, as, as, as, as our advisor on that one, but he watches so you don't have

01:32:45.320 to, yeah, exactly, exactly.

01:32:46.900 But this usage of the word dictate just really gets, gets up my goat.

01:32:52.300 And as a, someone who studied a lot of Roman history is that like the office of dictator

01:32:56.020 was actually a specific role that served the specific purpose and actually served the Roman

01:33:00.660 state and people very well early in this history.

01:33:03.120 Like, you know, for those who sort of know my screen name, you know, the reason I have

01:33:06.280 Furious in there is because Marcus Furious, um, and this is Marcus Frupernax, Marcus Furious

01:33:11.060 Camillus is one of my, he's sort of almost semi-mythological in the same way that Cincinnati is.

01:33:16.300 But, you know, he's called the second founder of Rome and he's, he's made dictator.

01:33:20.560 And then because of a, of a, of a, of a, you might say a political transition in Rome,

01:33:26.040 he's disempowered and sent to exile.

01:33:27.820 And then when the Romans desperately need him, they call him back out of exile.

01:33:30.780 And he's actually saves Rome from the Senones who were a tribe of the Salpine Gauls. 0.96

01:33:35.160 And like the officer dictator served the Roman Republic well in a, and a number of men were

01:33:40.320 elected dictator by their peers.

01:33:43.720 And, um, it's not what people say it is.

01:33:47.760 It's a deeply misunderstood word that has gained a parlance in modern day that doesn't reflect

01:33:52.360 what it is.

01:33:53.260 Well, that's correct.

01:33:53.820 And I think we will go ahead and just do a whole stream on that.

01:33:56.360 So let's, let's not, uh, but I didn't want to answer that super track.

01:34:00.760 Yeah, no, we'll, we'll get deeper into that.

01:34:04.620 Cause I do think it's a fascinating thing that deserves a far more time.

01:34:08.300 So, so we'll do that.

01:34:09.680 All right, guys.

01:34:10.200 Well, I really appreciate everyone coming by furious again, just an amazing speed run

01:34:15.100 there.

01:34:15.380 I really appreciate your ability to pack all that historical knowledge into a short time.

01:34:20.480 Make sure that you check out his streams with apostolic majesty.

01:34:23.840 And of course, as if it's your first time here, guys, go ahead and subscribe to this channel.

01:34:27.620 If you want to get these broadcasts as podcasts, please go ahead and subscribe to the Orton

01:34:31.760 McIntyre show on all your favorite podcast platforms.

01:34:34.560 And if you do that, a little bit of the old, uh, rating and review just helps out a whole

01:34:39.200 bunch.

01:34:39.480 If you take just a minute or two to do that makes a big difference.

01:34:42.460 So really appreciate it.

01:34:43.560 All right, guys, again, thanks for coming on and, or thanks for being here.

01:34:48.220 Thanks to furious for coming on.

01:34:49.600 And as always, I'll talk to you next time.

The Auron MacIntyre Show - May 03, 2023

The Making of a Caesar ｜ Guest： Furius Pertinax ｜ 5⧸3⧸23

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript