Part Two: How The Roman Republic Became a Police State

Robert is joined again by Andrew Ti to continue to discuss The Roman Republic. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Oh America. Alright, I started the episode, so they I
mean you could have done worse. Yeah, yeah, I America.
I've heard you start. We all love America and so
let's celebrate it. Andrew, of all of all of all

(00:22):
of the countries that are America, which one is your favorite?
And why is it ancient Rome? Wait? I I there
was a bubble, just a tidy bubble in your audio,
so i' I missed the middle of it. Wait what
is he said? All the countries that are America? Which

(00:42):
is my favorite? Yeah? Yeah, exactly, I think it's I mean, honestly,
so far it's got to be. Um just the sword
control bills, and I do I do love the sword
control bills. Uh, yeah it is. It is very funny.

(01:04):
I guess it is a little tricky too, because living
at a time if you go back to part one,
when it's like weapons of war are banned, but weapons
of war includes things like horses. Yeah, well yeah, a
weapon of war is like a sharp piece of metal
in this period of time and not really much deadlier
than like a big heavy stick, right, like it's yeah,

(01:26):
it is, it is different. Like again, these are You
can also find fun articles about people talking about ancient
Roman like weapons limitation laws and people trying to make
comparisons to assault weapons, and it's like, well, it doesn't
really work very among other things. Number One, people support
assault weapons bands in the United States generally because of
like massacres of schools and malls and stuff. And the

(01:49):
Romans supported a ban on the carrying of weapons within
the pamarium because they were trying to stop armed mobs
from taking political It's not about stop Roman. Ancient Romans
did literally nothing to stop murders. There were not police.
You did not like if you committed a murder, there
was like unless you killed a famous rich person, there
was nobody to like do like they didn't give a ship.

(02:10):
Um again, people died constantly, right like you we just
talked about that lady had twelve kids and three of
them made it to adulthood, like they didn't. They would
not have banned us. They would not have banned assault
weapons if the worry were that civilians were getting murdered.
They scarrying because they didn't want people to take over
the government. Um sort of. Yeah, the almost exact opposite. Yeah,

(02:34):
it's it's literally like the opposite reasoning. It was not
to protect life. That was absolutely no one's concerned Rome.
So after the assassination of Tiberius Gracis, things got worse
very quickly for our Roman friends. Now, Tiberius was not
yet thirty when he died. I think he might have
been in the twenty. He might have been like Cobain,

(02:56):
you know, yeah, um, Kurt Cobain in Tiberius Gracchus to
socialist kings. By the time, by the time you're in
your thirties, you should have been assassinated, assassinated, yeah, um, yes, um.
Now Tiberius, yes, So he's he's young, and he's got

(03:17):
this younger brother who we talked about a little bit
in the first episode, Gaius, who's like just starting to
be an adult when his older brother gets murdered. Now,
you can find a bunch of writing from historians at
the time about Gaius, and it's all the same sort
of like Haggia graphic shit about how cool he was
and how like he loved his soldiers. When he becomes
a trip, he becomes like a the equivalent of like

(03:37):
a lieutenant or something when he's like seventeen, like all
of these people do, and he's he's supposed to be
good at that, and eventually he winds up getting elected
tribune like his brother had been. Um, he has to
break his law to get elected. The break the law
to get elected. He has to like actually desert the army,
but he talks his way out of getting in trouble
for it, because again, a lot of Roman law is
just like, well, we're pretty sure our ancestors wouldn't have

(04:00):
liked it if this happened. But he cocks his way
out of it. Um. So, his brother's reforms had been
passed after he was murdered, but they've been kind of
kneecapped by patricians. So they pass a land reform bill,
and then they spend the next couple of years like
taking back everything that they've given to poor people pretty much.
So Guias starts pushing for a bunch of like really

(04:22):
pretty radical reforms at the time. He wants to give
more public land to the poor. He wants to hand
out free grain. He wants to set up a state
dole so that the poor aren't reliant upon like rich
people as clients who can then tell them who to
vote in order to like survive. Um. He wants to
provide public funding for military equipment so that poor people
can be in the army. Um. He wants to raise

(04:45):
the draft age, and he wants to make everyone in
Italy a Roman citizen, which really pisss off the rich
and powerful people in Rome. Um and he's he's politically
successful in a lot of this. He actually gets the
Senate to send money back to conquered nations because he
thinks that like Romes being unfair to the places they conquer,
which is kind of a wild thing to succeed at

(05:07):
getting the Senate to do so. This makes him as
popular among the people who had murdered his brother as
you might expect now. Plutarch describes the changes Gaius is
trying to push in the Roman government as changing it
from aristocratical to democratical. And perhaps he would have succeeded
given time, But he made the mistake of leaving Rome
to found a colony in Libya, which gives his enemies

(05:30):
the opportunity to slander him devoters. And when he returns,
he gets attacked in the street by a mob and
the majority of people fail to come to his aid,
like nobody comes to protect him. When this group of
like hired thugs comes to murder him, and he gets
beaten to death and his head is stuck on a
spear and brought to the Senate. They throw his corpse
into a river. They love throwing corpses and rivers the

(05:51):
romans Um, which is a bad idea, by the way,
if you're going to kill, if you're gonna if your
political movement is going to massacre a bunch of people,
don't throw their bodies in the river. You need that water, especially,
you know in pre pre water treatment plant times. Yeah,
if you wanna my my famous favorite meme, the one

(06:11):
from Predator with the two the black guy in the
and the white guy like clasping hands, it's gonna be
like ancient Rome, the Aztecs throwing all of their corpses
in the river um. So, whether or not you want
to see the Brothers gracky as they've become known to
the ages as the first socialists or is precursors to

(06:32):
Donald Trump, this brief period of time in the spotlight
they have makes one thing very clear. The ruling class
in Rome is willing to break any rule and violate
any norm to keep the money flowing and maintain their
shocking rate of wealth accumulation. From this point on in
the Republic's history, the rich only get richer and the
poor tend to get poorer. But once it becomes clear
that it's okay to murder political rabble rousers and their

(06:54):
supporters to keep them from redistributing land, it becomes increasingly
hard to argue that there aren't a lot of other politics,
cool things that are worth doing a murder over, And
so people start murdering over everything. Um and while Roman
politics is getting a lot more murdery. And one BC
this huge migration of barbarians. They're generally called Germans, but

(07:14):
like they're not actually Germans, but whatever they're they're they
sweep down from central central Ish Europe and they start
invading Italy. Now the Romans do what they always do,
which is they put together this this army twenty men,
and they march out to stop them. And you know,
Nancy Pelosi's in charge again. So the army gets wiped out,
just just absolutely massacred. So the Roman state, which had

(07:38):
never meaningfully reformed public lands or fixed the problems that
Gracky had railed against, can't really replace the lost men.
But thankfully they have a guy on hand, a military leader,
a dude named Gaius Marius who he's been elected consul
a couple of times at this point, and he's co
leading a military campaign elsewhere in the empire, and it
just so happens. This guy Marius is like like top

(08:00):
ten military minds and like all of history, like if
you're if you're ranking like all of the like, he's
up there with like Subatie and ship like. He's he's
very very good at being a military leader. And he's
going to be the guy who reforms the Roman military.
So the Roman army that you've seen in any movie
with like Romans where they all have segmented armor and
like you know, you've got the lesions of the big

(08:22):
shields and the swords and the hat. He invents that
before him. It's a very different looking army. They have
like different classes that they've got the guy's spirit. It's
it's very different military. I mean it's it's like everyone
because everyone bought their own ship. So it's right exactly exactly. Um,
So he reforms the military, and he also he basically
succeeds in making the state pay for it. So for

(08:44):
the first time, Um, you've got regular people. They're called
the proletarii proletari yeah, proletaria something like that. Um, the
poorest people are in the military, and he started it's
very controversial what he's doing, but there's a di aster
happening at the time. They're getting their asses kicked by
these these barbarians. So he's like, look, we have to

(09:05):
we have to recruit from poor people and arm them
at the state's expense. UM. And this works out really
really well. UM. And Marius is as as he's a
brilliant military leader, he's also a really good politician. He's
good at winning elections and and exercising power and building coalitions.
But he's also he's not really a patrician. He's he's

(09:26):
a rich guy, but he's kind of a rich country guy.
So everyone could all of the patricians. He's a redneck, right.
He doesn't speak Greek, right, he can't even speak Greek.
So they're like they hate his ass. Like there's a
little bit, actually a little bit of their reaction to
him that is kind of trumpy, and that like you've
got this like entrenched political class who just doesn't like
the way he talks. But I think it's kind of gross.

(09:48):
But also he's super popular among regular people because number one,
he's like massively improving their lives because along with letting
them be in the army, he makes it so that
if you're in the army, you get a bunch of
land after you retire, right Like, you get this land
that we're conquering, we're going to give it to soldiers.
So instead of coming home to a farm that has
been taken from you, you come home and you get
given a farm by the farm, you know, And that's

(10:10):
like a pretty cool deal um for the time. So,
to make a long story short, he he wins this
war um, and he becomes such a hero that he
has styled the third Founder of Rome um. Like to
if you want to talk about the degree to which
he wins this war against these barbarians, if I'm remembering properly,
they basically create a new god of death that's made

(10:32):
in him his image because of how many of them
he kills. It's that it's he's like that, it's like
that kind of war um. So he becomes like known
as the third Founder of Rome, which is you know,
most like he's he's a big part of who's like
pushing that title for himself, right, because he's yeah, it's good,
good branding, um. And he's absolutely a populist, and in fact,

(10:52):
he draws a movement towards to him, who become known
as the popular as Um, which is I think it's
pretty obvious what that means. And they're they're as is
by the optimates, who are like the rich people who
want to reduce the political power of the police Um. Eventually,
all of this leads to a nasty civil war between
Marius and his old lieutenant, a patrician politician named Sola.
Now Slah is like the number one, it has to

(11:17):
be said. He is like the queerest dude in ancient
rome Um and very open about it. He's a fun
fucking guy, like real it was like Sola is a
is a neat character um and he he is just
like this, like very like some people will say, sadistic,
definitely mass murderer, very very good general. And he and

(11:37):
fucking Marius have this like series of horrific battles. They
have this massive civil war and just bleed it wipes
out like a generation of Italian because they're both really good.
Neither of them are Pelosi types. They're both actually good
at having armies. Um, so they just massacre each other. Now,
Marius loses at first, and he asked to flee to Africa,
but then he reinvades Italy and he conquers Rome and

(11:59):
he massacres all of Sola's followers in the city. But
then he dies because he's like Joe biden Age. And
so Sola comes back and he kills all of marius
Is followers, including like there's like eight thousand Italians members
of this tribe elsewhere in Italy who Marius was trying
to give political rights to because there's this big fight
over whether or not Italian should be Roman citizens, and
he just genocides Sola just does a genocide on this.

(12:22):
He stabs eight thousand people to death, which is a
lot of people to stab to death when you think
about it, um, very rarely do that many people get
stabbed to death in the short period. It really is that,
like you know, it's so I know that obviously our
brains are numbed to like the numbers of war and
like what what like automatic weapons and like you know,

(12:43):
modern bombs can do. And it is really like swords,
This is swords. This is sorts. It is. It is
swords and sharpened sticks and like arrows which are basically
sharpened sticks. Um. So Sola just kills fucking everybody he
get his hands on, um who are his enemy. And

(13:03):
then he's dictator. He makes himself dictator, which is a
political position in Rome, right. Dictator previously is like it's
a you have, it's a job you have for like
six months a year. He makes himself dictator for however
long he wants to be. But after a while he
gives up the job and he retires to his mansion
to funk a bunch of hot dudes. So that's a
pretty fun character. I mean as far as like I'm

(13:24):
the dictator, but you know what I'm like from dictator
is like a pretty amazing that's like no one does that.
Like he's a monster. These guys are all monsters, but
he's a pretty entertaining monster. So there's a number of
cool side effects to Solo massacring all of Marius's guys.
Number one, all of the people who were like popularites,

(13:47):
who are like populists, Plebeian supporting like folks who are
on Marius side. They either get murdered or they have
to flee the city. And one of these people who
has to flee Rome and like hide somewhere else is
a dude you might have heard of named Julius Caesar, right,
he's one of Marius his butts. So another thing that
happens is that under Solo, the plebs are stripped of

(14:08):
all political power that like position tribune of the pleas
that have caused so much trouble with the they that
that doesn't exist anymore for a while. It comes back.
They regain the power pretty a lot of the power
they've had in like the decades after Solo leaves, um,
but they lose basically all political power for a while. UM.
And the last thing that happens is that all of

(14:28):
the people's sullen murders have there and he's like he's
he's like a Stalin type figure with his murdering. He
makes a list, like there's like a list, and you
get a bounty if you like kill or bring in
somebody who's like on his list. You get like a
chunk of their stuff. Um. And so some people get
really good at murdering or tracking down or are hiring
people to murder folks on that list. And so they

(14:51):
get a bunch of their stuff. Um, and he's like,
so again, if you help him kill his political enemies,
he'll give you their ship. And by hooker by crypt,
a lot of the property of people who had been
supporters of Marius winds up in the hands of a
guy named Marcus Licinius Crassis, who is the Elon Musk
of ancient Rome, the wealthiest man in the world. Um,

(15:11):
and he's also not He's like Musk, not just because
he's the richest guy in the world, but he's also
a some would say a trailblazing innovator. Right now, Musk's
great innovations are PayPal, which is banking but slightly less regulated,
and uh in that car company. Crosses. His innovation is
he starts the first firefighting brigade in Roman history. Right.

(15:32):
People have been obviously fighting fires for forever because it's
a horrible problem, right, like a terrible, terrible problem in
ancient Rome. Um. But he's the first guy who builds
like an actual professional fire brigade. Now, these guys are
all slaves, um, and the fire brigade is a for
profit endeavor. So what happens is when your house is
on fire, Crosses his guys will show up and be
like that seems like a real problem. You got sell

(15:54):
us your house for like basically nothing and we'll put
the fire out. Um. So he gets real rich doing this, right,
he makes so much fucking money. Um, it is hard
to convert old Roman currency to modern dollars. But he's
like a billionaire, right, He's a multibillionaire for all intents
and purposes. He's got like Elon Musk money. Right. Um.

(16:14):
He is so rich that a few decades later he's
going to buy an army of forty men to invade Iran. Um.
It doesn't work out for him. Uh, it's really badly,
but he's part of this like tradition of like now
rich guys can buy an army if they were Yeah,
because they basically what they're doing, like, I'm going to
donate this money to the state in order to buy
this army because I think we need to be a

(16:35):
war with these people. Um and crasses his case, they
get their asses kicked very badly, and he gets killed
by having molten gold throat poured out his throat, which
is yeah, no, it's a dope. It's a dope punishment
because the Parthians who are like basically Iranian Um are like, uh, hey,
you're the richest man in the world. You know, it

(16:56):
would be a fun way to murder you is to
make you drown in your own moulten gold. We're gonna
like melt down your money and kill you with it,
which is rad and should be done more often in
history like today for example. Um now, it's just pooring
n f t s down there, That's right. They do
not have the same panash so crass. This is one

(17:19):
of these Roman politicians that most people have probably heard about.
He's famously he's part of this triumvirate that runs things
for a while at the tail end of the republic.
The other two guys in the transvirate are Julius Caesar,
who everybody knows, and the Nias Pompeius Magnus or or
simply Pompy the Great. Um now, I'm not going to
First off, I should note he's called Pompy the Great
because that is the nickname he gives himself. He basically

(17:42):
he's like Pompy's whole strategy was he would go Rome
would be at a war somewhere, and some political guy
who was good at fighting the war would almost win it,
and then Pompy, because he was good at politics and rich,
would like buy his way into taking over the army,
and then he'd finish the war and then he'd be like,
look at this big victory. I want to guess I
get another big fancy day marching through the city. And um.

(18:06):
So like he gets that, he gets voted the name
Pompy the Great effectively because like the other senators are
making fun of him because they're like like like like
it's like it's a it's a it's like kind of
a mocking nickname to most people because you all know
you're kind of full of ship. He's like an executive
producer exactly exactly. He's he's an ep um. He he

(18:26):
actually kind of is like I mean, in a number
of ways, he's like that, he's like the the Weinstein
of history. Right, Um yeah, um, Julius Caesar has been affleck.
I'm not going to explain it, so I'm not going
to like rehash all of this period in Roman history,

(18:47):
save to say that like the fact that three guys
wind up basically in charge of all government policy is
not a good step and towards like a more republican
form of government, right, So doesn't talk and get talked
about enough, because this is the thing everybody talks about,
is like the Triumvirate and Pompey and Caesar and Crassis
and stuff. This is like most of what people know

(19:08):
about the Roman Republic is this tail end period. What
doesn't get talked about enough is how sh it actually
got done on the ground. Because in the eighty or
so years since the Brothers Gracky, Roman politics had turned
into a constant, low level gang war. And again you've
got these big mobs of clients. So like after it
becomes common to kill people for political purposes, senators and

(19:29):
elected officials won't travel through town without like a bunch
of their guys with them, right. That so part of
your job as clients, like at least you know the
chunk of clients you have were like veterans who are
like big tough guys. You get your vets and your
boxers and stuff. And anytime you go through town to
take care of business, you have like fifty or a
hundred guys with weapons like your guys following. You like

(19:50):
to watch your back, right, because now people get murdered
all the time because they propose bills. Um. And one
of the things this means is that pretty regularly you'll
get these groups of like senators and elected officials and
like their goons, and they'll just murder each other in
the street. There will be these gang wars between like
members of Congress. It is. It's literally like if fucking

(20:11):
like Mitch McConnell and Nancy Pelosi and like bands of
men with like sharpened sticks wailing in each other in
like Washington, um, which would be a better system than
we have now. Don't get me wrong. Now it's like
a cold war ver yeah yeah, yeah, so like and
a lot of one of the actually the most popular
weapons is like ceiling tiles. Like that's if you really

(20:33):
want to kill somebody, you get some dudes up on
a roof to just start hooking ceiling tiles down on them.
That will kill the motherfucker fast. Um yeah. So yeah,
I mean that's how it's a good way to kill people. Um.
So the most successful of these gangsters. Because another thing
that happens is that like, yes, senator, you've got like
your mobs of clients, but like a guy who's professionally

(20:54):
building a mob of armed people to get into street fights.
It is always going to be better than some politician
who has his like his like Toady's following him. So
you get these professional gangsters who build political mobs to
street fight on behalf of different sides of the big
Roman political divide, right, and the most successful of these

(21:14):
gangsters is a guy named Claudius. Now, Claudius is another
rich kid. His family had sided with Sola during the
last civil war, which is like, you know, that's the
aristocracy side, But Claudius didn't follow in the footsteps of
his father, who had been elected consul. Instead, he starts
to develop a reputation is the kind of guy who
can get things done in a dark alley. And sixty
three b C. A senator named Cataline tries to overthrow

(21:37):
the government and massacre all of the elected leaders of
Rome and assumed control in a coup kind of tries
to make himself dictator again like Selah had. And while
this is all going on, this is a complicated story.
But while there's this like coup attempt, Claudius, because he's
kind of a young, strapping dude, he volunteers to act
as bodyguard for the consoles for the elected leaders Catalan

(21:57):
is trying to kill and when all the dust is settled,
he's become one of the guys you go to in
Rome when you need a gang of thugs to protect
you or somebody else. Right, he kind of like he's
kind of like building a private security firm. Like that's literally,
like really what this is is like you can hire
Claudius and he's got like fucking goons who will watch
your fucking back and they're good at it. Um. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

(22:21):
Now there's a lot of ground to cover here. And
I'm not going to give Claudius his due because he's
a fascinating guy, but I would be doing everyone a
disservice if I didn't read you this one excerpt from
his back story, and I'm gonna this is coming from
a write up and headstuff dot org quote. The cult
of Bonadea, the Good Goddess, is somewhat of an anomaly
in classical Rome. Rather than the standard gods with the
priesthood and open worship, the Good Goddess was worshiped in

(22:44):
a less formal fashion, similar to the Greek mystery colts.
The celebrations of Bonaday were not of the city's normal
ecclesiastical rights, and in fact they predated the earliest recorded
history of the city. Even her name was a secret,
known only to women and never recorded. She to have
a temple where only women were permitted entry, and every
year on the first day of May they would hold

(23:05):
a sacred celebration in this temple. This was one of
two such celebrations held throughout the year, but the second
in December was not held in the temple, instead was
hosted by the wife of the chief magistrate, with the
aid of Rome's sacred vestal virgins. The year, the chief
magistrate was Rome's high priest Caius Julius Caesar. Quite why
Claudius decided to infiltrate the Bonnadea festivities in sixty two

(23:27):
BCS a mystery. The main rumor at the time was
that he did it in an attempt to seduce the hostess,
Caesar's wife, Pompeia. The more likely reason is that he
did it in an attempt to win some credit with
Rome's bohemian set and set himself up as an iconoclast.
Whoever it was, he disguised himself as a woman and
slipped into the house. Unfortunately for him, Caesar's mother, Aurelia,
was there determined to make sure that things went smoothly,

(23:48):
and she immediately noticed this unusually tall and heavily cloaked women.
The right of Bonnadea was such a rare opportunity for
Roman women to throw off the chackles of propriety, and
as such, masking your identity like that was very unusual. Really,
had a servant girl follow Claudius, and she immediately noticed
when he let his voice slip. She called him out
on it, and he fled the scene. Though he was
not definitively identified, everyone knew it was Claudius. A public

(24:12):
outrage in his conduct, stoked by his brother in law,
led him to be formally charged with the sacrilege the
following year. The punishment for a man who witnessed the
mysteries of the Good Goddess was to be blinded. Just
cloud show ship and it's as a fun note, Caesar
divorces his wife after this, not because she'd done anything,

(24:32):
but because the fact that this guy was maybe trying
to fuck her means that people might suspect she'd done something,
and Caesar's wife has to be above suspicion. Oh my god,
he just wanted a divorce. Like these guys are all Again,
the cool thing about ancient Romans is like you could
among number one, you can make an incredible fucking like
uh like soap opera show that's just about the lives

(24:54):
of all these people they are like, uh, the just
just all very every one of these fucking people that
we've talked about would have had a reality show if TV.
Like Caesar. Caesar almost basically did kind of have the
equivalent of the reality show. So one of the things
that he's doing, he and he kind of comes to
power later in life. He doesn't have a lot of money, um,

(25:16):
so he has to work with crosses and stuff. But
when he gets his military command of gall number one,
it's kind of because he's so old and hasn't really
distinguished himself politically. It's kind of like if Pete Boudagedge
suddenly got elected Supreme Commander of the of the U.
S Military and then and then conquered the entire Middle
East in five years, right like if like that, it's

(25:39):
kind of because that's what Caesar does, is he like
he's kind of a joke. He's this like silly asshole
that everybody's like laughing at and then he conquers all
of Western Europe like it is he's got not to
compare them, because Pete Boudage is useless and Julius Caesar
is very smart. But one of the things Caesar does
while he is conquer again all the fucking Europe, like

(26:02):
he like he's his in his minnor. He forces are
regularly outnumbered four and five to one by some accounts,
even more than that, Like he's an incredibly competent military leader.
While he's doing this, he's writing every day about what
he's doing and then sending his diary back to Rome
to be published and read out to people in the city.
So he's turning his life into the equivalent at the

(26:24):
time of a reality show to build a legend around
himself and to make himself into a popular figure. Like
he's kind of doing the Trump thing too, where it's like, yeah,
I've got this, I've got the most popular show in town.
Everybody shows up to listen to the latest pages of
Caesar's diary being read. I mean, how he's got to
do both, I guess, but yeah, he's very very Yeah

(26:46):
military victory. So Claudius goes to trial as to whether
or not he's gonna get blinded for like sneaking into
these these women's rights. Um. And he he doesn't get blinded, um,
but only because Caesar and Crasses back him and they
bribe the jury to acquit him. Prior to this, he'd
kind of been on the optimate side of things politically,
but he's now like a popular because Caesar and Crassis,

(27:09):
you know. Um. And this is kind of the start
of his his life as a creature of Caesar and
Crassus uh. Inft b C. He runs for election as
tribune of the police. Now, as we've talked about, this
is the veto job and it's very important. But also
it's a tribune of the police. You can't have this
job if you're a patrician, which Claudius is. So he

(27:30):
pays a guy who is four years younger than him
to adopt him as his son, like he pays a
poor man who's younger than him to adopt him as
his son and make him a plebeian. And then he
changes his name from c l a U d i
U S to c l O d i U S.
I mean, it's slightly different in Latin, but like he

(27:51):
basically changes it to a different spelling of Claudius to
symbolize that, like now I'm a commoner. Um. But the
been the main benefit. Number One, he can veto ship,
which since the grack eye, that's become like the thing
you do if you get a tribune on your side,
you can just stonewall everything. It's like the filibuster, right,
like you can stop anything from happening. You can just yeah, yeah,

(28:14):
that's ultimate he makes. He makes himself into the Joe Mansion.
But the other thing is that, like, because all of
Roman politics is determined via street fights, if you kill
the tribune of the Polabs any like tribunes are sacra
sank their sacred when they're holding office, so if you
kill one, you are immediately put to death. So he
basically gains like a force field for himself in the

(28:36):
street So he's like Joe Mansion that he can shut
down politics. But also now he's got like that if
you touch me in a street fight, you get murdered,
Like it's a force field. Um. Again, they it's a
better system than we have, I think. So eventually the
Optimates get their own street fighter, UM, who is even
better than Claudius at building a gang of violent people

(28:57):
to murder folks for political purposes. And this is this
gangster named Milo, who is also pretty fucking rad. Um.
Milo is a is a hoot. So these two send
their goons to beat and murder people organizing for the
other sides. Assassinations and street fights grow to become like
a daily occurrence. There's basically a low level gang war
at all times all throughout the city of Rome, and

(29:19):
you never know if you're gonna get caught up in
between these mobs of like armed young thugs just like
murdering people in the streets. Um. Now, these two street
gangs each kind of like represent a different political block,
but they also represent there's two angry young dudes who
hate each other in charge of them. So it's it's
very much both like a political proxy fight and also

(29:40):
just a street fight between two games that hate each other. Yeah,
it all comes to a head in fifty two BC
when Milo murders Claudius after beating him in a street fight.
And this is a real problem. Um Now, I bet
some people are wondering at this point as we talk
about all of this going on, where the funk are
the police in the right, because at this point in

(30:04):
Roman history there's like a million. There's close to a
million people in the city of Rome. It doesn't really
hit a million until I guess the first century a d.
But there's like probably six seven thousand or more people
living in the city at this point, which is there
will be no city in Eurasia with a population that's
similar in size until the eighteen hundreds, right, And this
is like fifty BC, you know. Um, So Rome is

(30:25):
able to get that big because it's very modern in
a lot of ways. There's sewers, a lot of homes
have central heating, um, they have running water, um. But
one hallmark of modern life that roam lacked was anything
that vaguely resembled law enforcement. And I want to quote
from a writeup from Dr Linda Ellis here. Though the
government could usually cope with major disorders, personal violence plagued

(30:46):
the city under the Republic. The police powers of the
government were rudimentary, with few officials and limited staff trying
to maintain some semblance of order. So if you committed
a crime in Rome, like treason or fucking in the
money with the money that was serious, you would get
punished right, some high up elected official would like send
guys after you, right. Usually these were like guys known
as lictors, who are like basically, if you have political

(31:09):
office that comes with any kind of power, you get
these dudes who hang around you and they carry these
things called fascis, which are like a bundle of sticks
with an axe side to them, which is where we
get the word fascism, and you can send them to
do things and they basically have can speak with like
the power that you have. It's it's a way of
being like, well, you know, if I'm actually running this empire,

(31:29):
I might need to be making things happen in more
than one place. Service was a little more proactive kind
of but instead of like protecting you, their job is
mainly to go and like tell people to do things
on your behalf. So you can if like somebody does
some serious treason, there's the ability to kind of enforce
the law against them, but there's not cops. And so

(31:50):
like if if a popular or a wealthy guy like
murders somebody, they're not going to get punished in less
like the person they murder has more money than them.
And like friends who like range a mob to like
go and fight his supporters. UM and property crime is
not really a crime, it's a civil matter. As Dr
Linda Ellis writes, quote, when the average citizen of Rome
became a victim of crime, he had to rely on

(32:11):
his neighbors and relatives for help. Roman nobility could also
call up a mob of clients to do battle for them.
In rural areas of Italy, the situation was worse, and
landowners hired armed bands to protect themselves and intimidate their enemies.
There were even a few private armies of thugs at Rome.
Self help was always the main way to deal with
criminals in ancient Rome, and there was no concept of
public prosecution, so victims of crime or their families had

(32:33):
to organize and manage the prosecution themselves. So it's kind
of everybody doing the gang ship at this point, which is,
you know, we'll talk about how it works, because in
some ways it works better than what's gonna come next,
in some ways it doesn't. But this again, it is
worth noting that like this is the system that like
a million people live under in the densest city in

(32:55):
the modern world. UM, and they mostly figure their ship
out now as we know in forty nine BC, the
tensions between the optimates and the popularities that have been
settled in the streets turned into open war. Right, you
get you get your Caesar. He crosses the Rubicon, which
is a river. He fights this big war with his
old friend Pompey, and Caesar wins, right, uh, And then

(33:15):
he gets the ship stabbed out of him. And then
there's another horrible civil war between the people who had
killed Caesar and this kid who's related to him, who
he kind of like makes his inheritor named Augustus, and
Augustus wins this civil war and he winds up as
the emperor. Right, this is the history everybody knows. This
is like the most famous period of all of Roman history.
Cleopatra's in the mix for a while, then she's not, Yeah,

(33:38):
so the characters I've heard of, Yes, yeah, we're we're
now at the point in history everyone knows about it.
We're gonna talk about what Augustus does to deal with
the fact that, like when he takes power, everyone has
just gone through like a hundred and fifty straight years
of constant assassinations and like street fights and three different
civil wars that had all killed significant fractions of the

(33:58):
male populace of the Roman empire. Um, and they're kind
of tired of it. People like are not happy with
the status quo. Like, you know what, we're okay not
having any political power if you can stop everyone from
murdering everyone all the time. So that's that's what what
Augustus comes to power with, right. Um. And speaking of

(34:20):
murdering everyone, you know who's gonna murder you the podcast,
the sponsors of our podcast, they'll kill your ass. They will, Sophie,
They'll kill your ass. That's their promise that I know.
I don't. I didn't see that in ad copy or
the promo codes. Okay, well promo code A man is

(34:42):
coming to attack you in the night with a knife. Yeah,
well that sounds like a difference of opinion. Uh, we're back.
I wanna I wanna note one thing real quick here.
So we're we're recording this like the day after the

(35:03):
FBI rated Trump's house, which is a very funny moment.
Everybody's still enjoying it. You will be listening to this
in the future when um, the entirety yeah next yeah,
gettysburg to and three have already happened by the time
you've heard this. Yes, there are no people left in Virginia. Um, yeah,

(35:24):
it's it's a nightmare. But anyway, so that the like
right after that happened, you get all these right wing
like media leaders and thought leaders started like saying ship
about like now the war is on, like get ready
to fight, fucking Stephen Crowder being like tomorrow we go
to war. My favorite quote that one of these ship
heads came put out is this guy Jesse Kelly, who is,

(35:45):
according to his Twitter, host of the nationally syndicated Jesse
Kelly Show, host of I'm Right, Um, and yeah, he's
some sort of anti communist piece of ship. He's got
like half a million followers on Twitters. Yeah, I think
I think he's a Fox News guy. Yeah, that seems right.
So his post when everybody's like fed posting on Maine

(36:05):
after Trump gets rated is do not quote laws to
men with swords attributed to Pompey Magnus. Now he likes
this because number one, they all fetishized weapons as doing
things that weapons don't, which is provide on their own
some sort of autonomy. Weapons are useless without organization, as
anything but like tools of either personal violence or u bullshittery.

(36:31):
But the other thing that he's doing is like this
is like that you can't govern us because we have
we have we're armed, right, Like that's the thing that
he's saying here. The funny thing about this number one
Pompey Magnus, as we've just covered, was a gigantic fraud
like literally like bullshit his way into like repeated military
commands and stuff. He's the same as like, I don't know,
those Republicans that get up on stage to do a

(36:52):
bunch of push ups to show that they're big with
a gun or whatever. Yeah, exactly, exactly, Yeah, it's like
that sort of bullshit. Um. But the other thing that's
funny about this is that during the Civil War with Caesar,
Pompey gets his as kicked because against Caesar is really
good at fighting wars and Pompey is a gigantic fraud um.

(37:13):
And he gets captured by Ptolemy, who's the leader of
Egypt at the time, who's like um allied with Caesar.
And while he's being sent as a prisoner to Caesar,
Ptolemy has by some accounts, a fifteen year old boy
stab him to death and cut his head off and
then they stick it on a spear and parade it
through town. So, Jesse Kelly, that may not be the

(37:36):
guy at a hark to as like your your hero
of like kind of appropriate right wing Yeah, like politician, Yeah,
giant fraud who starts a fight and then gets murdered. Um,
very funny. So Augustus is the emperor, right, um, and
everyone is very tired of political violence because it has

(37:59):
just and on way too fucking long. Right. And this
is again, actually it's not entirely wrong to kind of
think about the political power that has kind of been gained,
not that these are too similar, but like the the
political power that has accrued, especially in the last few
years around gun control, as a result of like exhaustion
at the constant spread of massacres. It's not entirely different.

(38:21):
Because all these people in Rome, they've had a lot,
most of them have lost family in these fucking fights.
It's this constant drumbeat of violence and these constant series
of civil wars, and they're just like fucking exhausted. And
so the one of the reasons Augustus is able to
take and hold power is that he promises and delivers.
I'm going to put a stop to that ship. Right,

(38:41):
We're not gonna have to deal with this anymore. And
that is a pretty enticing thing for people at this
point in Roman history. Um. Now, different leaders had attempted
to deal with Roman mob violence prior to Augustus. When
Pompey took over the city during the Civil War, he
had brought his armed soldiers into Rome, crossing the Pomarium
illegal in order to restore order and put an end

(39:01):
to lawlessness. And while Pompey had let his soldiers violate
sacred law by taking weapons into the city, he had
banned the private ownership of weaponry within the city, which
happens several times in Roman history and never actually happens.
Right again, it's it's pretty you could just like take
a chair leg right like it's it's not like what
the weapons we're talking about. You can't really ban because
people are just like making like sure, yeah, exactly, yeah,

(39:27):
And people are gonna have roof tiles that you can
hocket folks. You know, um, slings are not hard to
make a leather glove glove with like metal anyway, it's
not hard. So when Augustus takes power, though, he expands
the ban on private ownership of weaponry. He bans the
carrying of arms during assemblies or judicial proceedings. Um. And
eventually he passes a law known as the Lex Julia

(39:50):
de v Um, which makes it illegal to carry weapons
for any reason in the Empire outside of hunting or
personal protection when you're traveling between in cities. Right. Um. So,
in addition to this, he establishes the first police force,
the first police force of any kind anywhere in the
Western world. Now, different regimes had all had ways of

(40:12):
like dealing with descent or cracking down on stuff. There
had been stuff that was kind of policy. The Spartans
half essentially their version of like a fugitive slave patrol
and stuff. Um. But what Augustus builds is very different.
Among other things, it is a permanent armed force in
the city of Rome itself, which had never happened before, right,
And so this is part of one of the things
that makes Rome has always kind of been ungovernable. And

(40:34):
so this is as ugly as it gets. It's also
a check to the power of the aristocracy because they
can never hold too much power, because at any moment
the Bob could get angry and just murder everyone because
there's way too many of them and there's no army
in Rome to stop them. Right, So it's just like,
how big are your gangs? Are they bigger than everyone
else in the city? You know they're not, So you

(40:55):
can't do certain things now. He because the police force
he built, their primary job is not stopping crime or
investigating murders. They're riot cops, right, that's what he puts
into the city. He calls them urban cohorts because like
cohort is a military unit, right, kind of broadly equivalent
to like, I don't know, battalion almost um. In modern

(41:17):
military terms, these urban cohorts are military units commanded and
organized similarly to the regular military legions, which operate under
the military chain of command. They are militarized police, and
their job is to put down riots, to corral the
power of the mob, and to make street combat and
coup's basically impossible. Um. Again, they don't handle petty crime.

(41:40):
They don't do anything if your home is invaded or
if like your kids murdered or whatever. So they're they're
the same as cops today. Actually, there's there's a lot
of similarities between them and they're heavily. Again, these are
militarized police. Now this is like the urban cohorts are
like the daytime cops, and then there's nighttime law and
part of what they're doing is law and forcement. Um.

(42:01):
They're called card the Vigils, which is where we get
the word vigilante, even though they're not really vigilantes um.
And the Vigils are initially just a fire brigade. They're
made up of freedmen who knew how to fight fires,
and their job is to like be distributed through the
cities that when a fire starts, you can get a
team of guys there to try to stop it, right
because again, the biggest thing that Romans have to worry

(42:21):
with on a day to day basis is fire. Um.
So because like while you're I'm actually just gonna quote
from Dr Linda Ellis here to talk about like how
what these guys do evolves over time. At first, the
Vigils functioned primarily as a firefighting force, since the main
threat to cities then and now was destructioned by uncontrolled fire.
They were equipped with water pumps, buckets, and axes for

(42:43):
breaking down the doors of houses on fire or suspected
of being a fire risk. Artillery was used to shoot
dampening materials onto fires and to create the fire breaks
by leveling buildings. The vigils patrolled the city at night
and had the right of entry into private homes, which
put them in the position of witnessing crime and taking
on the role of policemen, from capturing thieves, returning runaway
slaves to maintaining public order. So they have the right

(43:07):
to go into your home because we have to be
able to make sure you're not starting a fire that
you can't keep more that like a fire is and started,
that you haven't fallen asleep or whatever, and like your
your house is burning down. But because of this, now
we're allowed to do no knock raids on your house
if we think it might be a fire. What if
we see a crime, we have to have the ability
to like prosecute a crime too, And so they kind

(43:27):
of become cops because they have the ability to bust
into anybody's house for any reason. Um. So this is
so it's so interesting that that like that characteristic begets
the job and not the other way around. It is
really interesting, right because it's very because our policy It's
not how I would have assumed that, but it makes sense.
It's like that power creates the become police. And it's

(43:51):
interesting because like in in our system, our police, who
are thugs came out of fugitive slave patrols, which were
just a worse kind of thug. In this case, the
polace come out of an absolutely necessary job. You're gonna
have a fucking million people in a city in zero
a SBC, you need professional firefighter's right underwise it's just suicide.
But kind of you get how this like evolves and

(44:14):
then they become cops because like, well, like this guy's
breaking the low? What am I supposed to Are we
supposed to just let this happen? Um? You know, it's interesting. Yeah,
it is really different though from what you would expect. Um.
So the birth of this and this is this is
a fairly advanced law enforcement force. Right, Like, if you're
thinking about what's around at the time, you've got these

(44:34):
are that like at any given time, thousands upon thousands
of heavily armed men, like the Vigils have artillery. They
have catapults and ship which they used to fight fires,
but which can also be turned to like fight riots. Which,
by the way, I would have loved to watch these
guys fight a fire because I want to see people
like stop a fire with a fucking catapult. Um, it's
pretty cool. Ship. But so, one of the things that

(44:57):
this does is you've got this advance law enforcement force.
You've disarmed the city. The only people with weapons are
these cops. One of the things that this makes a
hell of a lot easier is the state can enforce
on popular laws. Now you think back to Lucretia, right,
Romans get rid of their first or their last king

(45:17):
because like there's this stupid ass law and he does,
like his son does a horrible thing rape somebody in
the stupid ass law leaves in the even worst situation,
and everybody's really angry about it. And because the mob
is the mob, they are able to like kick the
king out, and that's how the republic starts. That's not
gonna be possible. Nothing like that is anymore, um, because

(45:38):
now you have riot cops in the city. Um. So
it's really easy for the state to force people to
accept laws that are unpopular. A good example of this
during the reign of Nero, the mayor basically of Rome
is murdered by one of his slaves. Now they can't
figure out who did it, right, they don't know which
slave there's no is one of the people he owns
in his household, but he's got hunt ruds. I think

(46:00):
this might might have had like like a thousand or more,
like a shipload of slaves, like a fucking small town
worth of slaves. Now, under Roman law, if you can't
figure out which specific slave did it, you have to
execute the entire household, every man, woman and child in
a lot of these slaves or kids who lives with
this guy. Um. Now, everyone in Rome when this happens

(46:22):
is fucking horrified by this, And in fact, stuff like
this had happened in the past, and it had provoked
riots which had often stopped this sort of justice from
being carried out in full right because people Romans, they
don't think slaves are like less human right, they have
less rights due to what they believe is a pretty
natural political condition. But they're still horrified at the thought
if you're gonna kill like five people because like one
of them is a murderer, and like you're gonna murder

(46:44):
a bunch of kids, Like that's fucked up My dad
was a slave by Grandpa was a slave. Like. I
don't think this is right. And in the past Romans
attempting to like Roman leaders attempting to carry out these
laws in order to maintain the status quo, would have
had to like funk up a bunch of people to
do it, um, and would have been put at risk
by doing it. That doesn't happen anymore. Um. By the

(47:05):
time Nero was empowered, the vigils on the oven urban
cohorts are professionalized. They're very good at stopping descent, and
so a huge show of force is sent out by
the police state as the Romans move in to execute
these slaves. As English historian P. KB. Reynolds wrote in
his nineteen paper on Ancient Roman policing quote, the law
was upheld, however on this occasion, but elaborate police precautions

(47:27):
were necessary when the sentence was to be carried out.
So because they have this powerful police force, the mob
cannot act to stop an injustice, right because they just
get the ship murdered out of them by the cops. Um.
And it's interesting, Reynolds, this is a very fascinating paper.
I recommend reading it if you're interested. In ancient Rome,
right after talking about how the birth of policing made

(47:49):
it possible to massacre all of these kids. Uh, he
goes on to write that quote, it is not really
going too far to say that in the medal of
matter of police services, it was not until the beginning
of the nineteenth century that the cities of Europe regained
the standards of civilization which had existed in the Roman
Empire years before. It took us two thousand years almost
to get back to having cops who can make this

(48:10):
kind of thing possible. What an achievement. Yeah, that's the pinnacle. Yeah,
I mean yeah, yeah, so right, it's like like the
mob rule or the not mob rule, but like the
ability of mobs to enact like some sort of or
like put it to you know, to act as a

(48:30):
check against like state power and the power of the rich. Ideally, Yeah,
that's jury nullification now. But yeah, and again everybody, especially
when you because I I made the probable mistake of
like bringing up you know, guns and assault weapons and
and and that debate in this whenever we want to
like talk about ancient ship and like apply it to
modern terms, there's a desire to have like a simple answer,

(48:53):
and there just isn't because like, yeah, constant mob warfare
was really bad. The establishment of a police state was
also really bad. Yeah, and I think it is. I
think there are things to learn about this, about like
the dangers and whatnot of different political things that you
can do. But I think it is fundamentally silly to
like try to run to direct aligned. This is two

(49:14):
thousand years ago. But it is like it is worth
noting that, like, okay, you give up the ability of
the people to check the state's power and then so
the state can enforce much less and that is something
that is worth noting. Yeah, and that that's constant gang
warfare is good either. Yeah, I mean it is like
like this is how apartheid states like the ones we

(49:35):
currently live in. Yet like you know, we are currently
ruled by a racist, white nationalist minority and they are
able to do but you know, yeah, it's hard to
know if the alternative is better. Yeah, it's just it's
it's just worth talking about this history without trying to
like and so this is why you should vote this
way on this lot two thousand years later, let's just

(49:57):
talk about Yeah, um again, I am not try ang
to Like, I'm really not trying to just make like
a coy political point. I just think it's actually worth
studying this if you want to think about the problems
inherent to uh society. Like it's just good to know
this stuff. So, of course, you're not just gonna stop
people from objecting to tyranny because you have a bunch

(50:17):
of armed thugs who can crack heads in the street.
You're going to also need a secret police force, right
obviously you know Um and Augustus actually established two secret
police forces. Now, one is kind of informal basically, because
you have this pretty big empire and you have all
these military units spread around, you have like a supply service, right,

(50:37):
who needs to like take messages from like oh, these
guys up in fucking France or these guys all the
way down in Jerusalem have like you know, they need
more of spears, they need more shields, and like, I've
got to take that information. I gotta get it to
this guy. I gotta get You have like supply runners,
and they're literally like riding horses and like physically moving
around cities to carry messages. And so naturally he turns

(50:59):
these guys who are called frumentary I into a secret
service right into like his his spies because they're traveling
everywhere and nobody pays much attention to them. Um, so
they're a pretty good pick to act as like your Hey,
you can keep an eye on things. Tell me if
like unrest is boiling up, you can be a spy
basically because you have the ability to go anywhere you

(51:20):
know um Reynolds rights quote. The Emperor Hadrian, we are told,
knew all secrets through the frumentary I. And as the
Empire became more despotic, so the activities of the frumentary
I multiplied, and the persecutions of the Christians. It was
the frumentary I who searched men out and who affected arrests.
Probably to the soldier who guarded St. Paul was a frumentarius.

(51:40):
And if the Emperor desired the speedy removal of a
prominent noble against whom it might be dangerous to proceed openly,
the frumentari I were employed to carry out the deed.
In fact, they performed all the dirty work that has
always fallen to a lot of the secret police and
an absolute despotism. There were so efficient in their work
that they incurred universal hatred, and historian of the third
century complains that they trannize over us, and later writer

(52:03):
bitterly calls them a pestilent crew and in another passage
the plague of the Roman world. In response to this
general odium, the Emperor Diocletian disbanded them at the end
of the third century, but their duties were far too
important for the emperors to be able to dispense with
their services, and a new core was soon enrolled, especially
designed as a secret police. This new force blue aboard

(52:24):
the curious title of Agents for Affairs, which was sufficiently
vague to cover their manifold activities. But the agents were
soon no better than their predecessors, and as early as
the middle of the fourth century the Emperor Julian had
had to reprove their corruption, and soon they had just
as bad a name as the frumentary. I so that's
pretty cool. That's a pretty cool bit of history right there.

(52:45):
There's just no way, right, I guess. The lesson, of course,
is like that kind of power necessarily creates, Yeah, these
fucking evil people. Yeah, only bad people want that job,
and they do bad ms when they get it. It's
also worth like again, go back to the Gracchi. When
some rich people want to kill a guy, they just
have to fucking hire up and murder him in the street,

(53:06):
and everybody knows what's happened, right, It's real fucking clear
what goes down. And because of how much they've pissed
people off, they have to like give people a bunch
of what they had asked for and the stuff, even
though they murdered the guy. Now you just have one
of these fucking spooks kill him, right, Like, now you've
got like the the Emperor's fucking spooks. You can kill
him and nobody's allowed to talk about it or ask

(53:26):
about it. It's not obvious what's happened, you know. Um
so the last and most powerful police agency in ancient
Rome where the Praetorian Guard. In some way, these guys
are the evolution of mobs of armed supporters who tried
to protect to protect Tiberius, Gracchus and the gangs run
by Milo and Claudius. You know, during the civil wars,
all of these guys who are fighting each other had

(53:47):
like units of bodyguards that are like the toughest soldiers
they've got, and Augustus had formed his into an elite
military unit which started like five thousand men and eventually
becomes like nine thousand guys. And these were during the
Civil Wars, just like his shock troops, right, but they
become his like elite riot force, right because the urban
cohorts are just three thousand men um and the legions

(54:09):
are rarely in Italy, so the Praetorians are always the
strongest armed force near the center of power. So Augustus
keeps like two thirds of them in the city of Rome,
ready to crack heads when heads need cracking, and he
sends a third of them elsewhere in the Italian peninsula
to like garrison different hotspots. Uh. And they basically act
as like secret police, referring back to him, making sure

(54:31):
no one in the Some of them take up jobs
in the in the military and stuff in order to
like be able to report back on what's going on. Uh.
And then the words of historian guide de Bellier quote
minimize the impression that he depended on them. Instead, the
guard depended on Augustus no emperor meant no jobs and
no special status. Because these guys get a shipload of
extra money for doing what they're doing, right, They're paid

(54:52):
very very well in order to keep the emperor in power.
So guard officers also occupied roles in the urban cohort.
It's uh and undercover praetorians could pop up anywhere, so
they're like the mixed between the FBI and the Secret Service.
It could also be used to assassinate political rivals, but
as Guy points out quote, this state of affairs was
reliant upon the emperor having enough prestige and power to

(55:14):
contain the guard. Augustus had created potentially the most dangerous
institution the Roman world had ever seen, and his monumental
the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. Edward Gibbon
described this brilliantly. By thus introducing the praetorian guards, as
it were, into the palace and the Senate. The emperors
taught them to perceive their own strength and the weakness
of the civil government, to view the vices of their

(55:34):
masters with familiar contempt, and to lay aside that reverential
awe which distance only and mystery can preserve, towards an
imaginary power, and this luxurious idleness of an opulent city.
Their pride was nourished by the sense of their irresistible weight,
nor was it possible to conceal from them that the
person of the sovereign, the authority of the Senate, the
public treasure, and the seat of empire were all in

(55:55):
their hands. So eventually these guys start to start to
come out as I serve at the like I'm here
to protect the Emperor. I only have a position because
at him. They realize eventually like, well, a lot of
these emperors are incompetent. The sentence much of corrupt, rich,
lazy assholes. We have the only weapons, right, we have
the capital and the only weapons. Why don't we just

(56:16):
run things right? Um? Yeah, So, as time goes on,
all the different law enforcement arms of Roman society kind
of realized that their powers have made them unstoppable bandits,
and that's what they become. As Dr Ellis writes, quote,
the Roman police and military forces often to abuse their
power and status, such as property seizure without compensation and

(56:39):
physical violence to civilians. The axes used by the Vigils
and other troops were used to break down doors and
abuse people both in the street and in their own houses.
The Roman offered juvenal provided a dark picture of police
soldier civilian relations in Rome. If a civilian was beaten
up by the soldiers slash police. He was better off
forgetting about it, because if he complained, there would be
a trial under recent Churian and in front of a

(57:01):
jury of soldiers. No witnesses would dare come forward, otherwise
they would have other soldiers exact retribution. Epichectus, a Greek
philosopher at the time, advised that if a soldier wanted
a mule, it was best to give it to him,
because if not given, the person would have lost it
anyway and would have been beaten up in the process.
Now we could talk about civil asset forfeit, cherry and true.

(57:22):
We can talk about how often cops, particularly take cars
from people. We're back, We're back to America. Yeah, they
did it first, baby. No, it is like truly shocking
how many things that are horrible that we are absolutely
no better than they. It's all it's all the same ship, right,

(57:42):
And it's all the same ship because when you say
we are building a separate class of people who will
be able to live very comfortably in order to as
long as they stopped the poor from fucking with the rich.
And also they're the only people who have the right
to to use force in our society, they always turn
out to be assholes, right, because only assholes want that job,

(58:05):
you know. Um okay, uh speaking of things, only assholes
want products and services that support our podcast. Fact. Ah,
we're back. Ye a bunch of pricks. What's up our listeners? Yeah,

(58:31):
what's up pricks? That's right, they deserve it. Yeah, all right.
So we're talking about like the Roman police state here,
which I don't think most people realize. Everyone knows, like, yeah,
Rome that it became an empire, Like you assume that,
like it's a brutal, autocratic dictatorship, but like it is
a modern police state, and I want to talk about
how pervasive it truly was. Dr Ellis gives a really

(58:52):
good job of like laying out the how heavily policed
the city of Rome was. So she points out that
Chicago today and her data is two thousand eighteen, is
the third most populous city in the United States, with
two point seven million people and five hundred cops. Ish, right,
that's Chicago more or less today. Rome, at the height

(59:12):
of the empire, is a million people. They have a
police force of seven thousand vigils, three thousand urban cohorts,
cavalry attached to the urban cohorts, and roughly six thousand
Praetorian guards in the city. So that's about three times
as many police per capita as a heavily policed city
in the United States today. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I

(59:34):
guess it's a little bit mitigated by you know, they
don't have nearly the kind of technological centralized their per
views and is wide you know it is it is
worth noting how heavily the city is. They have gone
from at the start of this a city where nobody
gets to have a weapon, a military weapon in town,

(59:55):
to a city that is like garrisoned by a heavy
military guard at all times. Now, the first member of
the Praetorian Guard to attempt to take total power for
himself was say Hannus, head of the Guard under Tiberius,
who ruled from a d. Fourteen to thirty seven. Now
say Hannus was caught before he could carry out his
plans and execute it along with his family, and Tiberius
actually lets the people of Rome riot and murder his

(01:00:17):
family and supporters. Um, just like give him some fun, uh.
And the Praetorian Guard. Yeah, this time, the Guard stay
out of it like they don't defend their old leader
because they're like, this isn't gonna go well for us.
The emperor is still too powerful. Still, that's gonna change
in a d forty one when Caligula gets murdered by
officers of the Praetorian Guard for being a funked up

(01:00:38):
little weirdo. Now, when Caligula gets murdered by the Praetorian Guard,
there's this it's not very old like the empire, and
so there's still strong memories of the republic, and a
lot of people are like, maybe we should go back
to having a republic emperor. Seemed like a bad idea,
But the Praetorian Guard is like, well, you don't need
a praetorian guard if you've got no emperor. So how

(01:00:58):
about we just force you to accept an emperor of
that we've picked um, and they pick a guy named Claudius,
who is a pretty interesting character himself. Um. I would
like to talk more about him, but we just don't
have the time, so instead I'm in a quote from
Guy de la Bellier who writes Claudius was declared emperor
by the praetorians and no one including the Senate was
in any position to argue the praetorians jobs were secure.

(01:01:21):
Claudius was reluctant emperor and turned out to be a
good deal more competent than his family thought him capable of.
It's even possible that Claudius had been in on the
plans all along. Gold and silver coins were issued welcoming
the new emperor and he them or showing the guard
welcoming the new emperor, and he them um and he
like pays them a bunch of money. It's it's unclear
exactly what has happened. He's a relatively good emperor, but

(01:01:42):
over time they stopped backing because again, you don't want
the emperor to be any good. You want him to
be a figurehead for you. And this all kind of
comes to a head in one a d after the
murder of Marcus Aurelius, his son Commodus, who is the
bad guy in the movie Gladiator. Um yes, so after
after Russell Crowe kills him, he's actually killed by the

(01:02:04):
Praetorian Guard um so in in in previous into regnums,
like the death of Nero, the guard had generally kind
of like gone with whoever has those power and money
to be the next emperor after Commodist dies, they like
go to all the rich people in Rome and they're like, hey,
how much money you will pay to the emperor. Like
they literally auction off the throne of the Roman Empire

(01:02:25):
to the highest bidder, who winds up being some rich
asshole who gets murdered. Two months later. He gets replaced
by another guy, Septimus Severus, who this guy, uh, this
fucking guy. UM fires the republican or the Praetorian Guard finally,
and he makes a new Praetorian Guard that he hopes
to be less corrupt, and they immediately grow corrupt and

(01:02:45):
do the same thing. Um. Over the course of the empire,
thirteen emperors are assassinated by the Praetorian guards. It's really
like you let that you let that tiger into your house.
Yeah exactly, Yeah, and you know the stuff that was
in your house prior to letting the tiger and wasn't
pleasant either, Whether or not do you think this was progress?

(01:03:08):
I did. I'm glad you brought up a gladiator, because
I did. I did want to pitch the idea of
um a double feature of the Ridley Scott Italian screaming
in each other. Uh double feature of Gladiator and House
of Gucci. Yeah, just Italians yelling. Italians never change, and

(01:03:32):
that is that is the message of the show. Italians
and police the same two thousand years ago as they
are today. Um. Anyway, that's the story of how the
Romans became a police state. And God, that is fucking
genuinely very depressing. It's it's pretty fucked up. Um, you

(01:03:52):
know we're condensing a lot of history here, but that's
the god sweep of it. But yeah, an angle I
had never really considered. But yeah, that tons of science
of Jesus Christ. Yeah, yeah, you know, you've got this
this situation of like political violence that makes everybody be
like will do anything to stop it? And then the
thing that stops it is the establishment of a militarized

(01:04:14):
police force who then take power and spend centuries doing
violence to people. But it also works for a long time. Yeah,
I mean it works for a long time. Yeah, it's
never like clear enough like how bad this ship is.
And again it's too late for this because it would

(01:04:34):
be easy to either be like, well, this is why
no one should ever have cops, because they inherently funk
everything up or this is why people shouldn't be allowed
to have weapons, because you know that what happens in
the Mormon Republic happens right, right, But if you're trying
to find though either of those easy answers, either this
is why everyone should be armed, is why everyone should
be disarmed. This is why we should have cops. Is
what we shouldn't have cops. Well, both of these systems

(01:04:57):
lasted like five years and conquered the entire world. It's
like there we just there's not enough data and it's
it's just like it's you know, there's stuff to take
out of this for the future, but don't try not
to take too much because again, both of these as
as silly and funked up as everything is, both of
these systems on a historic level work really fucking well, right,

(01:05:18):
Like that is kind of the conquered the world. Yeah, well,
I mean probably the main thing is that just sort
of tells you it's just that part of it is irrelevant. Yeah,
there's other stuff going on, military things, and what I mean,
maybe not entirely, because like I guess partly like the
fact that Roman politics is in the Republican period is

(01:05:39):
so like cutthroat means that a lot of the people
who wind up in charge after a certain point are
like pretty canny sons of bitches, but also some really
dumb sons of bitches wind up in power and they
funk everything up and like destroy the Roman middle class.
So yeah, I don't know. There's actually not as many
clear lessons from history as you want there to be.
When you look at the history up list, each one's

(01:06:01):
only been done once. That's the whole point of history. Yeah,
so yeah, exactly. Anyway, that's that's the story of how
Rome became a police state. So Andrew, you have any
plugables for us at the end here? Uh, yeah, let's see, Um,
I guess mostly. Um. Yeah, I'm doing two shows with

(01:06:21):
my podcast as this Racist. I'm going to be in
a place called Austin on August and then Brooklyn on
September ten. So yeah, I would love to see folks.
If you've if you've enjoyed listening to me be horrified
as Robert tells me stuff, then I will be a

(01:06:43):
little more proactive on stage. But I'm gonna tell you
not that much more proactive. Excellent, Alright, go find Andrew
in Austin, and go find Jesus in your hearts, and
by Jesus, I mean the Jesus Christ podcast. Yeah, period

(01:07:04):
in your ears, that's right. Sophie hates it when I
compare myself to you Gonna be you Gonna be crucified suit,
I really hate it by the FRUMENTARII yeah, not my
favorite thing anyways, See you next week. Bye bye. Behind
the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media. For

(01:07:25):
more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool zone
media dot com, or check us out on the I
Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.