November 21, 2023 • 41 mins
Robert and Mia are joined by History of Rome's Mike Duncan to discuss Mike Johnson's recent claim that Rome was destroyed by queerness and how the right projects their politics onto Roman history
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media. Ah, welcome back to it could happen here,
a podcast that is now happening here. I could have
done something with ear, but we'll do that next time.
Just forget that I said that, and welcome Mia to
(00:22):
the program. Mia, how are you doing today?
Speaker 2 (00:26):
Not bad?
Speaker 3 (00:26):
Not bad?
Speaker 2 (00:27):
I'm excited to be here.
Speaker 1 (00:28):
Yeah. Yeah. We're going to be talking about a subject
that's near and dear to all of our hearts, by
which I mean the Roman Empire with a guest who
is near and dear to our hearts, Mike Duncan. Mike,
how are you doing?
Speaker 3 (00:42):
Hello? Thank you for having me.
Speaker 1 (00:44):
It is wonderful to have you.
Speaker 3 (00:46):
Mike.
Speaker 1 (00:47):
You're a podcaster. You are kind of like the history
podcaster as far as a lot of folks are concerned,
including me and you. Also, you've had some intro interactions
online with people as regards the Roman Empire recently.
Speaker 3 (01:05):
Yeah. Well, anytime the Roman Empire shows up on the
cultural radar, I am tagged into it by roughly ten
thousand people, yea. And then I come in and I
do my bits or if you know, if something comes through,
you know, it gets shared at me, you know, not
shared with me, but shared it at me and then
and then I take a look at it, and I
get aggravated, and then, you know, fire off a few
(01:28):
salvos and retreat back out of the social media ecosystem,
which is kind of the strategy these days. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (01:36):
Yeah, we all have to like fight like an insurgent
when it comes to that sort of thing, because the
alternative is to just get constantly stuck in this escalating
world of beats with strangers on the internet who are
making money off of the beef.
Speaker 3 (01:51):
Yeah if but yeah, but there are certain things that
will get me to come out of my little hibernation,
which I think we're about to talk about. Yeah, yeah, me.
Speaker 1 (01:59):
Do you want to you want to take it away?
Speaker 2 (02:01):
Yeah. So one of the things that's been happening recently
is that so on October twenty fifth, the Republicans finally,
after an enormous amount of time, finally managed to electric Speaker.
Speaker 3 (02:12):
Of the House.
Speaker 2 (02:13):
And they picked this fairly unknown ret named Mike Johnson.
Who's this guy from Louisiana. And they picked him effectively
because nobody knew who he was. Yeah, and so they
picked this guy and they're like okay, and Mike Johnson
gets elected and Immediately everyone starts trying to figure out
who this guy is, and they very quickly realize this
guy is just a absolute incredible Christian fundamentalist weirdo. He
(02:39):
doesn't have a bank account, which is like wild.
Speaker 1 (02:44):
That's classic fundamentalism too, that's some of that old school stuff.
Speaker 3 (02:49):
Yeah, to see it, it's really soty.
Speaker 2 (02:51):
I mean, he's really sort of like he's like, he's
really a blast in the past of the Christian fundamentalist.
I mean he he he was a lawyer that represented
like a bunch of Young earthationist museums. He's really going
into that old school stuff. And one of the other
things that some people dug up is a podcast interview
where he is talking about how gay people cause the
(03:12):
fall of Rome. So, Mike Duncan, I want to ask
you the question that I think all of our listeners
are wondering. Can we, as queer people take responsibility? Can
we take any credit for the fall of Rome? Or
are we stealing visigof valor? If we do that, you're
stealing valor here. But but I do I do agree
(03:33):
that several of the gays in my life are like,
don't take this from us. It's one of our proudest accomplishments.
We brought down the Roman Empire. And I was like,
but unfortunately, it's just it's not the case. It's not
even close to the case. It's you know, you could
you could draw random words out of a hat and
produce a sentence that was literally nonsensical, and that would
(03:54):
be a better read of the end of the Roman
Empire than saying gay people or homosexual like, because it's
all wrapped up in this sort of like it was
decadence that caused the fall of the Roman Empire. They
were too like, you know, they were just too.
Speaker 3 (04:08):
Licentious, and they just throw up some vocabulary words and
it just it just doesn't land at all. It doesn't
land on the specifics, it doesn't land on the general
it doesn't land chronologically, it doesn't land in any way,
shape or form. It's just something they've decided is true
and repeat to each other. And that's the whole. That's
the long and short of it. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (04:29):
Yeah, I think there's some interesting stuff there too, of
like the stuff people talk about when they when they
like I remember I was reading someone like writing about
this and they started talking about Nero and I was like,
do you know, like in what century the Roman Empire
like collapse, Like, why are you talking about Nero? I
don't know, it seems like there's this real I don't know,
(04:51):
it seems like, you know, the the fall of Rome
is one of these things that's become central to a
lot of very weird writing politics. I remember, like a
few years ago, the big thing was so like the
Rome was caught, the fall of Rome was caused by immigration, yeah,
which and that's also current as well. Yeah yeah, And
so I don't know, what is it about like Rome
with these people, the fall of Rome. These people are
(05:12):
like so drawn to in a way that causes them
not to think about what actually happened at all.
Speaker 3 (05:17):
I mean, well, I mean, just to go back a second,
It's like Rome in general, in their heads, is not
a sort of temporarily dependent series of events that unfolded
over a thousand years. It's just this kind of like
one eternal place that's like a pastiche in their minds.
(05:38):
So like Nero can exist alongside Attila, can exist alongside
you know, Scipio Africanus, and all of these people and
events like just sort of are near each other in
time the same way that they believe that, like you know,
dinosaurs and humans cohabitated the earth, like it's that kind
of same thing. And so if they think about somebody
like Caligula or Nero running this, like running these courts
(06:03):
of decadence, like, it doesn't click to them that this
is like in the first century, and that the Roman
Empire doesn't fall for four hundred years, five hundred years,
and then the East keeps going for another thousand years.
That's a huge part of it.
Speaker 1 (06:16):
It is interesting to me you kind of made the
statement there about in these guys' heads Rome being this
kind of eternal, like continuing thing, And that's interesting to
me because that conception of Rome goes back so far,
I mean very famously, Like when Russia became like an
organized political entity, there was this widespread attitude that it
(06:37):
was the Third Rome, right, Like that still plays into
a lot of Russian imperial politics to this day. So
it is it is kind of fascinating how far that
idea goes back, Like it says something about the success
of Roman propaganda that it still has this place in
so many people's minds.
Speaker 3 (06:58):
Yeah, and I mean it has a place in my mind.
I don't I don't think of that. Yeah, so do
I so to many of us. And I don't think
that the crime here is thinking about the fall of
the Roman Empire or the trand or as you know,
we would more properly call it the transition from late
(07:19):
Antiquity to the eartal Medieval period, which is, you know,
unfolded and that didn't have a cataclysm, and you shouldn't
necessarily be thought of as as an inherently negative thing,
et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But organizing your worldview
around utterly historically illiterate version of the Roman Empire that
(07:40):
is really just a vehicle for your own special bigotry.
That's where they're really running a foul of me and
my temper.
Speaker 1 (07:52):
Yeah, and there's there's a lot that's really interesting about
how they sort of choose to interpret like the causes
of the fall. I think probably the least, the least
sensible argument they have is this idea that it had
something to do with like degeneracy. But yeah, it's like
you can find Romans in like the the Middle Republic
(08:15):
period saying the same thing that like we've become too degenerate,
too lazy, because of like all of the you know,
slaves automating, you know, the ruling classes, tasks people have.
You know, Romans are not like the Romans of our
forefathers and stuff anymore. And like you know, the empire
continue or the republic and then the empire still had
(08:35):
centuries in the tank at that.
Speaker 3 (08:37):
Yeah, very very famously, the Romans started complaining about how
it's not like the good old days round about the
second century b c. Which is like three hundred years
before they hit what we all acknowledged to be the
peak of Roman civilization. And this is like, this is
when Cato the Elder gets into it and the big
(08:57):
thing that those guys were griping about at the time,
and there are there are little, you know, little connections
here just doesn't none of it shapes up. Is that
what Cato the Elder and people like him were complaining
about way back in the second century was this is
when the Romans come in contact with the Greeks, and
there was there was a kind of like a split
between traditional Latin romanness and then this like new Eastern greaceness,
(09:22):
which like they've got new ideas and like they sounds
like they have sex with each other all the time.
You know, they don't care if they're men or women,
and so that's what they were pushing back against, and
so that kind of language does. This is where it
kind of distills over the centuries and then over the
millennia into this idea that the Roman Empire collapsed and
(09:43):
was ruined by this kind of degeneracy without being able
to really define what degeneracy means or how it could
possibly impact the long term health of a of a
large empire, you know, or the fact that, very bluntly,
right when you're saying this in one eighty six BC,
you can't say that contact with Greek ideas brought the
(10:06):
Roman Empire down. You just can't, because it just didn't
get crushed by this, It didn't fall apart. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (10:14):
I mean, if I have to make an argument as
to like, what thing that I can connect to modernity
killed the modern Empire, I tend to claim that it's
the concept of a reboot, right, because no sooner than
did Augustus have Virgil reboot the story of the Trojan War,
than the inevitable path to the collapse of the Roman
Empire began.
Speaker 3 (10:34):
Right.
Speaker 1 (10:34):
The real sign that we're heading towards collapse is all
these movie reboots.
Speaker 3 (10:39):
Okay, great, Well the rule is, whatever your modern preoccupation is,
that's what you use to explain the fall of the
Roman Empire. So of course I have my preoccupations, and
that's what I say caused the fall of the Roman Empire,
which is that the Roman Empire in fact never fell,
and we're all living in a hologram and we and
(11:03):
we know this because if a woman visits me and
brings me and brings me groceries and she's wearing a
Jesus fish necklace, it can pop into my brain and
I can know that we're living in.
Speaker 1 (11:11):
We're still We're still in the Roman Empire. Yeah, the
empire never ended, folks. Yeah, yeah, every politician is still cato.
Speaker 3 (11:19):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (11:20):
I mean, look, they you can also tell this because
you know, it's like, in the same way that everything
tastes like chicken. They haven't invented a new moral panic
in two thousand years, so pretty clearly we're just we're
just we're just recycling through exactly the same content over
and over again.
Speaker 1 (11:36):
It does all of the the kind of similarities you
can find, or at least seeming similarities you can find
between stuff that different Roman politicians were complaining about, you know,
two thousand years ago and stuff that's in our media today.
I think does suggest part of why it's almost impossible
to not keep bringing Rome up, which is that like
(11:59):
there are and I think that it's a mix of
like there are some legitimate similarities between our cultures, and
also our concept of Rome, which is often a historical
but is based on generations of misconceptions, makes it seem
even closer.
Speaker 3 (12:16):
Yeah, and we are a post Roman society and they
are our forebears, whether we like it or not. Like
any civilization that exists today that went through the Mediterranean world,
you know, it had a Roman period, and the Romans
made a strong imprint on all of us in terms
of like our laws and how we think about money,
(12:37):
and how we think about family relationships, like all of
these things are you know, we're living in a post
Roman world, and that's why it's important to study the
Roman Empire as an entity, but do it with some
degree of rigor rather than just using it as a
prop in the culture wars. Yeah, that was a great
(12:58):
That was a great point I just made, and so
it absolutely brought the conversation to a complete stance. So
as everybody said, just chewed on this nugget wisdom that
I have brought to the table.
Speaker 1 (13:20):
I do kind of think it behooves people. Part of
why it's valuable to do things like listen to the
Revolutions podcast by Mike Duncan is that you're this Rome
isn't going to stop being brought up by these people
and increasingly unhinged and inaccurate ways. And it's it's just like,
it's helpful to have an actual understanding of who the
(13:40):
Spartans were and what they did and did not do
for the sake of these arguments. It's helpful to have
a meaningful understanding of the Roman Empire. And I'm kind
of wondering, like when you when you come into misconceptions
about Rome, what are some of the top ones on
your list that uh that that your brain just forces
you to co and incorrect.
Speaker 3 (14:01):
Well, I mean this is a big one, because this one,
I feel like is deeply homophobic and principally used to
attack the queer community rather than anything else is And
just to give your listeners like some specifics here, it's like,
you know, sexuality in the Roman world was very different
than it was today, and there weren't even you know,
(14:24):
the kind of binary conceptions of gender sexual relations that
we have today. A lot of these things are very
modern inventions. I'm sure a lot of people know this.
But we can also point very specifically to like, you know, Hadrian,
who is broadly considered and cited to be one of
the greatest of the emperors who lived at the height
of the Golden Age, was gay. Like that's like, that's
(14:45):
a full stop thing, and so it's just like there's
no compatibility between these two ideas or really anyway, if
you ask them to take this argument more than twenty
five words d they're not going to have a way
to explain how it is that somebody engaged in gay
sex in the four hundreds could have possibly been the
(15:07):
reason why the Goths won a certain battle, or why
Attila the Hunt was able to do what he did.
All of it is just complete, an utter ahistorical nonsense,
and so I consider it I consider it my duty
as some kind of voice of authority on Roman history
to not let people get away with this. The last
the last time I saw this pop up was actually
(15:28):
uh Ben Carson, which is a little bit of a
blast from the past at this point. But he he
he wrote a book at one point where he dropped
this stuff in there, and the way they always couch
it to is like, as we all know, you know,
it was homosexuality that really led to the generacy of
the like I'm so sick of you people. But the other,
(15:49):
the other big one that really grinds my gears that
really emerged. This this was not a preconception that I
had going into doing the history of realme, but something
that I came away from after doing it and studying,
you know, the year by year history of the Empire,
is that this notion that like sort of the Romans
were this like like a like a like a nationality
(16:12):
that then went forth and conquered the Mediterranean, that Romans
were Romans as like an ethnic stock thing, and that
it was when these other ethnicities started sort of pressing
at the empire's borders, or as we said a little
bit earlier, that it was immigration right that destroys the
Roman Empire, that there was this kind of like pure
noble Roman thing. This is essentially functioning as the white
(16:36):
person in the ancient world, Like this is how we're
connecting these things. The British did this, the French did this,
Americans now do this today. That like the Romans are
our stand in as sort of the white people, and
the white people are civilized, and all of these other
like mongrel races are are uncivilized. And they were raither
civilized by the Remans, that they were killed by the
Romans or enslaved by the Romans. But this is all
for the good, because the Romans themselves were were like
(16:59):
this this superior stock of DNA somehow. And really, when
you go through the empire, the history of the Roman Empire,
you find that there is that kind of conservative strain
inside of like the patrician class and inside of the
senatorial class, that they're like, we want this to be
a closely held thing. Like the original republic was a
(17:20):
closely held oligarchy of Latin families who lived on the
Palatine Hill, and that's what they wanted for themselves. And
so when other people tried to push into the republic,
they tried to resist it. And so that is a
running conflict that happens in Roman history. But any time
that that tendency is overcome and a second prevailing force
(17:42):
that says like, actually, Romanness is just an idea. Romanness
is just a set of beliefs and practices and sort
of daily habits of life and ideology that can really
be held by anybody at any time. And if we
let in say non Roman Italians, which is the first
people who were considered non Roman who then came into
the Empire, which then we look back and we're like,
(18:03):
there was a time that Romans didn't think that people
from what is today like Florence or Milan were not
Italian or not Roman. Yeah, yeah, they were not considered
Roman until you know, the very late stages of the Republic.
I mean, I wrote a book about the later stage
of the Republican. The Social War is when this gets
wrapped up after hundreds of years of being treated as
(18:23):
second class citizens. There was a civil war that nearly
destroyed the Republic before Caesar even came along. That was
resolved by giving citizenship to the Italians, making them full
members of the polity, and then having that just be
a boon to Rome's fortunes. This happens in Gaul, this
happens in Spain, This happens in Illyria. This happens in
the far East that these people who the Romans encounter
(18:46):
and yes, do conquer, because it's a very violent world
of conquest and mutual conquest. That Romans in Gaul were
as much Romans as Romans in Rome. And anytime I
find Roman leaders resisting that idea, I find the empire
starting to falter and commit missteps. And anytime they're like, nah,
(19:09):
let's just throw it open. You know, if you're good,
if you're dedicated, if you're loyal, you can be a
part of this project that we have. Then I find
the Romans doing very very well. And I'm about to
start not to just monologue here, but I'm about to
start working on another book that is about the Crisis
of the third century. And by this time, we have
emperors who are coming from North Africa. We have emperors
(19:31):
who are tagged as being Arabian. We have the set
of emperors who really help Rome emerge from this thing
that is called the Crisis of the third century when
the empire very nearly collapsed in the mid two hundreds.
Is a bunch of guys from Alyria, which is today
the Balkans. I mean, we're talking about guys who are
coming from like Serbia and Croatia, or the emperors who
(19:52):
are continuing the Roman legacy and keeping the empire intact.
So this notion that like the Roman a wasn't a
multicultural empire, or that the arrival of new peoples was
somehow bad for them is just disproven over and over
and over again by the realities of Roman history. So
that's the other one, is this immigration caused the fall
of the Roman Empire is just flat out and correct.
Speaker 1 (20:15):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (20:16):
One of the arguments that I've heard sort of against that,
and I want to ask how true this is. But
one of the things that I hear people sort of
responding to this with is this argument that like, part
of what causes like the sack of Rome is that
the Romans get into one of these nphobic streaks and
they don't want to sort of try to observe the Visigoths. Okay,
so that that is that's a that's essentially my position.
Speaker 3 (20:40):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (20:41):
I was just going to bring up a guy who
a historian who has to come up anytime you talk
about the way the right likes to use the image
of Rome, particularly the collapse of Rome, Victor Davis Hansen. Yeah, yeah,
he is. He is a guy you're going, I mean
he was. He's my dad's favorite historian from a very
conservative family. And he wrote a book not all that
(21:04):
long ago. No, actually it was twenty ten. Sorry, that's
still like five years ago to me. But it's not
five years ago. It's much further away, called Why did
Rome Fall? And Why does It Matter Now? And there's
a quote I found from a little article he wrote
plugging it that I want to bring up here so
we can chew over in short, what ruined Rome in
(21:25):
the West. Lots of things, but clearly the pernicious effects
of affluence and laxity warped Roman sensibility and created a
culture of entitlement that was not justified by revenues or
the creation of actual commensurate wealth, and the resulting debits, inflation,
debased currency, and gradual state impoverishment gave the far more
vulnerable Western Empire far less margin when the barbarians arrived.
Speaker 3 (21:47):
It's all bullshit. I know, it's so fresh. So it's
so frustrating because this culture of dependence that can I
swear on this podcast, Oh, absucking lutely for sure, this
fucking these motherfuckers, this entitled this entitlement thing that they
have because they don't like welfare because they're pricks, you know.
(22:08):
And you know Victor Davis Hansen, you know, this is
a guy who wrote a book called Like Mexifornia, which
is like, oh my god, yeah, absolutely, this is where
it comes from the nineties where he's like, he's like,
California is going to be destroyed by all these Hispanic people.
Like it's just loathsome shit that he writes. Anyway, this
culture of entitlement, right, like oh, it was just bread
and circuses, and like the empire had to give all
(22:30):
this money to like how many Like okay, great, the
Roman Rome the city was like a million people, yeah right,
and there were a couple of large urban hubs that
did have like grain doles because you needed to be
able to feed the people in these cities. And this
is you know, smart policy by the emperors. It's actually
not bad on a humanitarian level. And then they also
(22:50):
through games, because this is what people do. Rich people
throw parties to make themselves love Like this is a
very This happens today. This happens all the time. This
happened during the medieval period. It happens all the time.
The number of people who are like benefiting from this
like imperial largess, who have this like entitlement mentality is
such a fraction, such a fraction of the total number
(23:13):
of people who live in this empire where we're talking
about sixty sixty five million people may maybe give or
take a little bit. Not that many people were on
the dole in Rome. It was usually just the male
head of the household got some grain. It was like
it was a little bit of supplemental It's basically the
(23:35):
equivalent of like supplemental income. It was absolutely not just
they're rolling out banquets for these people every single day.
Nor is it the case that that entitlement of Romans
living in Rome in the two hundreds AD or something
is like the reason why they couldn't sustain their border defenses. Right.
This is the same arguments we get when it's like,
(23:57):
you know, we can't afford social security because the you know,
the National Endowment for the Sciences paid somebody two hundred
and fifty thousand dollars UH to look into the you know,
be keeping habits. Like it's like people just don't have
a way to compare a million dollars to a billion
(24:20):
dollars to a trillion dollars because it's just a lot
of money in our heads. So like this, none of
none of that is true, none of that that's true.
Speaker 1 (24:29):
It's it's it's fascinating to me, especially when you hear like, uh,
this is like really popular amongst the Joe Rogan set,
this idea that like, oh, you know, when an empire
is at the end, that's when you get all the
bread and circuses to distract people. And man, when the empire,
like the Roman Empire, the entire period during which it
was expanding like wildfire, was doing nothing but throwing giant
(24:53):
fucking parties in the caps all they did, Like that's
all they did. You could be in politics without going
broke throwing parties like that was That's why a lot
of the conquest happened, is because you have to throw
these parties when you were earlier up on the on
the curses and orm and then you would have to
like go conquer some place to pay for it, yep.
Speaker 3 (25:10):
And that was why actually, when you get right down
to it, you know, one of my you know, side
opinions is that if you were a provincial inside of
these conquests, you know, conquered lands. Life was much better
under the Empire than it was under the Republic because
there actually was some tightening and normalization of the bureaucratic
(25:32):
regime under the Empire, like after Augustus comes along, rather
than what was going on in the Republic, which is
every single year a province was getting a new governor
who was there to extract as much money for himself
as possible because he had taken out tons and tons
of loans to throw the biggest games that he possibly could,
to build the biggest act, to build the biggest thing. Now,
when you get into the later Empire, like are their
(25:54):
financial difficulties? Of course, right, you don't get the kind
of monument building and even aqueduct building and in the
structure projects you get in the later Empire. But like,
there are larger economic and structural reasons why they were
suffering financial difficulties at the end of the Empire that
have nothing to do with these couple of grain doles
(26:15):
that were going to a few major urban areas. Most
of the population is rural subsistence peasants, like those people
were not feeling entitled to.
Speaker 2 (26:22):
Shit, which which I think is really funny because if
you look at like, I am very confident if you
actually did the bath, US spends more money agricultural subsidies
every year than like than the Romans did, like on
the entire grain dole.
Speaker 1 (26:36):
I mean, there's also the math is true, like yeah,
like we I mean but in part not just like
because who knows what the Romans would have done with
a higher level of technology. Just wasn't possible to do
that kind of thing outside of the major urban hubs,
Like you can't.
Speaker 3 (26:50):
Also, you can't you couldn't do it. That's the thing. Yeah,
this is the same thing where you get into like
when people like to slip in the whole, like oh,
there was lead in the in the in the pipes,
and like there was lead in the pipes, and you know,
maybe some of the leadership was a bit over let exposed,
like who knows, like maybe maybe maybe, but like the
vast majority of the population is not living in downtown
(27:12):
Rome where this might be a problem, or in you know,
one of the other you know, regional capitals that's just
not where any of this is taking place.
Speaker 1 (27:21):
Well, people love to talk about stuff like that. It
is like, you know the fact that they're one of
their major sweeteners, included a lot of letters. Is always
like interesting to bring up. But the thing that I mean,
and this was this is also pure speculation, but that
I always wonder more about, not just with Rome, but
with like most postmodern societies and even like early modern societies,
(27:42):
is like, what about like mild head injuries, because we
know so much more now about how a bunch of
little head injuries can permanently alter your behavior, and like,
like that's a big thing when I think about when
I think about like the World War one generation, is
you've got millions of men who wind up becoming very
influential in politics, who are under artillery barrages, and who
are there's almost no way they're not walking away with
(28:05):
some kind of cte based on what we know now
about what being near artillery does to your brain. You
know what does that do to Yeah, the ancient world
was full of trauma and that's and that's a real thing.
All of these guys were deeply, deeply traumatized. But like
one of the other points about the whole like bread
doll thing is this gets back to this is sneaky
(28:26):
backdoor racism because the argument the argument is that Rome
was great when it was the Romans doing it like
these actual like Latins who were coming from the environs
of Rome in particular, and that it all started to
go bad ones non Romans were in charge of things
because the Romans themselves had had decayed into this like,
oh well, we just want our bread and circuses and
(28:47):
we're not going to join the legions. We'll just have
Germans do our fighting for us, or Goths do our
fighting for us. Which that is that is simply sneaky
backdoor racism, because it's a way of saying that it
was the reason why the Roman Empire was successful was
because of this small population group, and once they go away,
other groups, these mongrel races, will never be able to
(29:10):
live up to or sustain civilization in the way that
Romans did. The pure Romans did. And so that's also
a big reason why we need to push back on
these things, is because the Roman Empire was not just
sustained but thrived and expanded by people who were not Romans.
And the idea that you know, their civilization required this
like little tiny speck of a DNA spark to keep
(29:33):
it going is just you know, this is the kind
of person who finishes writing that book and then immediately
turns their attention to modern California politics and says, the
big problem here is Hispanics. Yeah, which is also not true,
by the way, I need to put that up. Yeah,
the big problem with California politics is California politicians. Right,
(29:53):
It's not Latinos, you know, it certainly not Latinos.
Speaker 2 (30:08):
You know.
Speaker 4 (30:08):
I wanted to sort of circle back around to the
script of degenerousy stuff because I think there's an interesting
through line there too, with with not just sort of
modern politics, but the politics of the period of the
original rise of fascism, because you know, you look at
these arguments and they're like, well, okay, it was like
cultural decadence, and then they started talking about degeneracy and
(30:29):
how homosexuality was this like degenerate thing that brought down.
Speaker 2 (30:31):
The empire, and like you go back and you like
read the Nazis and they are also absolutely obsessed with, like,
you know, with this notion of like degenerate art and
like cultural degeneracy is this force that's this internal force
that subverting the empire, and you know, and like this
is also I think another like reason to be reason
(30:54):
to be interested in a better way about Rome was
also the way that like the original Italian fascists art,
I mean, like the word fascism is like derived you know,
like from from Roman symbol symbols, right, and like you know,
this is like Mussolini's entire thing is about turning the
Veti trade into the Roman lake.
Speaker 1 (31:12):
Blah blah blah blah.
Speaker 3 (31:13):
So the fascist is great. Not to get you know,
not to derail your point, keep talking, Just gonna cut
that line out of the podcast. Mike Duncan says, fascist.
It's great. The fascist is great. It's a great symbol.
Go go, Like a lot of people don't actually even
notice this. Maybe they do at this point this is
no longer a fun fact, but you go, you go
(31:35):
to the link. No, well, I mean not just Congress,
but go to Lincoln Memorial. Look at the Lincoln Memorial.
What are his hands resting on to a couple of fascists.
It just is because you know what, a bundle of
sticks is stronger together, and that is a symbol of solidarity,
and it is a symbol of group action being superior
to individual attempts to do anything, and that the one,
the one Boo is going to break. But all of
them together is good. Like none of this is like
(31:56):
inherently bad. It's just a bunch of fascists claimed it
for their own.
Speaker 2 (32:01):
Yeah. Well, and my memory of this is that I'm
pretty sure there was a group of people who were
like calling themselves fascis, like in in early like late
eighteen hundreds, early nineteen hundred Italy, who weren't fascists, who
were like so like basically left wingers, and and then like, well, sorry.
Speaker 3 (32:17):
Not the Nazis. Well I don't know if you know this,
but Nazis are actually socialists. They're national socialists, and and
so a lot of people think that their right wing,
but actually their left wing. And that's what it is.
Hitler was. It was an Oberlin grad.
Speaker 1 (32:31):
This is where we q my thirty minute digression about
stress rism.
Speaker 3 (32:36):
Oh god, but I think to you, I think to
the point that you were trying to make, or that
you were making there though, is that they were, you know,
the Nazis did. And then we hear this repeated today
that like that degeneracy is like a thing that is
a force, like a physical force that can maybe even
be measured, and if you don't have enough of it,
(32:57):
or if you have too much of it, then your
society is going to to break apart or decay. Like
it's just an idea, that's it. It's just sort of
a way of thinking about something or a way of
describing something. It's not actually a really real thing that
is out there in the world. Like if you have
a society that suddenly can't grow grain and you have
a famine, like that's a real thing that will actually
(33:19):
affect your society and bring it down. You have this
other thing that is just like moral degeneracy. This is
just like you listing things you don't like and saying
that this is the reason why things are falling apart,
because degeneracy can be anything to anybody. But really, you know,
like people smoking cigarettes at four o'clock in the morning
because they've been up all night, you know, doing drugs,
(33:41):
Like that's what kids do, what people have that people
are always going to do this. This is always on
the backgrounds and margins of any society. So like and
rich people like they've always partied, they always will party.
Like those kinds of things you can't really then say like, oh, well,
we've accumulated too much degeneracy. Now ournciety is going to
start to break apart, and this, you know, the things
(34:03):
that we see today in terms of our own sort
of faltering democratic republic. This is not because of degeneracy.
This isn't because the kids are doing too many drugs,
or like we legalize gay marriage, Like, that's not That's
not why any of this is happening. It's happening for
other reasons. It's happening because of greed, it's happening because
of a sociopathic indifference to other people's lives. Those are
(34:25):
the things that actually matter, not whether you stayed up
all night drinking and partying.
Speaker 1 (34:31):
No, no, it's yeah, it's it's it's the kind like
I tend to think, like talking about the Lata fundia
is a lot more relevant to talking about like what
happened to the elites under Rome and what's happened in
our own society than bringing up like the parties and shit.
Speaker 3 (34:47):
Yeah, it's this exactly.
Speaker 1 (34:48):
The centralization of wealth and power in a tinier and
tinier number of men was responsible for a number of
the problems that Rome encountered as it aged, and they
don't want to have that conversation out, so they want
us to have other conversation which flatters their bigotry.
Speaker 4 (35:03):
M hm.
Speaker 2 (35:04):
Well, and this I think comes back to the thing
you were you know, the joke you're making about like
all of these these are all the same people who
are like, oh, well, the Nazis were socialists. It's like, yeah,
you know, like the point of like these arguments is
so that you don't go back into the historical record
and realize how much all the things are saying are
wrong and how much they're making precisely the same arguments
(35:25):
that you know, the Nazis were making, or that all
of these sort of like you know, all all of
the sort of past people who broadly is acknowledged did
a bunch of terrible stuff had the same opinions that
they do.
Speaker 3 (35:39):
Mm hmm.
Speaker 1 (35:41):
Yeah, well, I don't know. I think that's what I've
got to talk about today. I mean, this is like
we could go on to to the way in which
like Sparta gets remembered and stuff and the cultural like
right wing, but I think that's kind of moving sort
(36:03):
of far afield. Although there's there's similarities, right, there's always
this idea that like, at this certain point, when everybody
looked the same, Like, that's when this historic empire was
at their best. And when you know, degeneracy got entered
into it, when immigrants got entered into it, that's when
it sort of fell apart. I guess some of that's
(36:23):
mixed in with sort of like Frank Miller as opposed
to any sort of real history. But that's always the case, right,
I think a lot.
Speaker 3 (36:30):
Of yeah, I mean, and Frank Miller's working in a
tradition that is very standard, you know, the you know,
the kind of racist oriolentizing, orientalizing of you know, of
anybody from the East, like that was all current, Like
you know, the Romans had those ideas. I mean, we
get the word barb like the word like one of
the points that I'm going to make probably in my
(36:50):
book is like, so the word barbarian just means non Greek,
Like that's it, because the Greeks had a you know,
a very sort of self centered view of the world,
as we all do. But that meant that the Romans
are barbarians, you know, when that word is coined and
we're thinking about who the Romans are, like they were
the civilized ones, and then and then there are all
these barbarians who are bad. But like from the Greek perspective,
(37:12):
the Romans were as barbaric as you know, the Scythians were,
and you know, probably and certainly less civilized than the
Persians were when the Romans. When the Romans first appeared
on the scene in Greece, they were like, who are they?
These are just a bunch of guys who are obsessed
with war, and they have no culture, They have no
ideas of their own. They just march around in squares
and kill people like That's that was their interpretation of
(37:34):
what the Romans were originally, which is not a you know,
terrible interpretation of really Roman history. But yeah, this just
this sort of dividing between civilized peoples and barbaric peoples
is something that then has been around for thousands of
years and we're still doing it today. Like everything that
we're seeing, you know, and I look at Israel and Palestine,
(37:57):
there's a lot of this mapping of civilized versus uncivilized
people onto This conflict that I see is is rooted
in a lot in these sort of Western traditions that
informed nineteenth century racist ideas about how things you know
about how societies organize themselves, all of which needs to
be deconstructed and thrown away.
Speaker 1 (38:19):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I always love it when people
try to bring up like these sort of racial theories
within the context of the Roman Empire, who had absolutely
nothing that would be considered like a modern understanding of
whiteness or race like was was completely absent.
Speaker 3 (38:36):
No, they they all had they all had group identity.
Speaker 1 (38:40):
No yet they wereists, but yeah, different era, Yeah, exactly right.
Speaker 3 (38:44):
It was there's us and then there's everybody else. Yeah,
and you know, the Romans differentiated a little bit between
like there were Egyptians, and you know, they were kind
of you know, they were they were curious about how
how the Jews worked because the Jews were very old civilization,
and so the Romans kind of took special note of that,
and they really admired the Greeks, and so there are
(39:06):
these like sort of like groupings that they all understood,
but it's all just sort of that very self centered.
You know, if you go through anthropological history of any
group of people, their word for themselves is just the
word for person. You know, we find this a lot,
and the Romans were that way too, but not not
in this way, not not sitting down and making like
hierarchies of you know, who can, uh, you know, who
(39:28):
can do what and who should be on top and
who should be on bottom, because you know, if you're
a traditional ancient choveness, you're like, well, my people should
be on top, and that, you know, is self explanatory,
and then we will we will fight for that. That's
not because of yeah, these these racial hierarchies.
Speaker 1 (39:43):
Yeah, well, I think that's about all I had to
get into, Mia, You have anything else you wanted to
sort of touch on today, I.
Speaker 2 (39:53):
Think I think I think we've about we think we've
about covered it.
Speaker 3 (39:56):
Well, we got it. We have we've established that it's
wrong to think that gays made the Roman Empire fall.
Speaker 1 (40:02):
No, No, although you can, Yeah, there's a million more
things to say about that, but yeah, I think we've
hit on the basics.
Speaker 3 (40:14):
Mike.
Speaker 1 (40:15):
You are a podcaster. Your Revolutions podcast is one of
the best things on the internet. You are also an author.
I give a whole bunch of books, The Storm Before
the Storm, which is about a lot of the stuff
we've been talking about today, Hero of Two Worlds, the
History of Rome. Yeah, Mike, you have anything else you
want to plug.
Speaker 3 (40:36):
Well, I am just about, as I said earlier, about
to start work on a third book, which will be
the Crisis of the Third Century. So if anybody out
there who's listening to this has been like I wonder
if Mike's ever going to write a book about the
Crisis of the third Century, I will and I am excellent.
Speaker 1 (40:52):
Well, thank you for being on the show, Mike, and
yeah listeners until next time. If somebody brings up the
Roman Empire in an attempt to attack various special interests
in our modern political system by a Gladias, you know
that still works the same way it did in the past.
Just start swinging a Gladius. Remember it's God but blade
(41:14):
on both sides, so you got to be you gotta
be careful when you swing a Gladias. Easy to satire
satire leg not actionable satire.
Speaker 3 (41:26):
It could happen here as a production of cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
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iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
You can find sources for It could happen here. Updated
monthly at cool zonemedia dot com Slash Sources thanks for listening.
Also media. Ah, welcome back to it could happen here,
a podcast that is now happening here. I could have
done something with ear, but we'll do that next time.
Just forget that I said that, and welcome Mia to
(00:22):
the program. Mia, how are you doing today?
Speaker 2 (00:26):
Not bad?
Speaker 3 (00:26):
Not bad?
Speaker 2 (00:27):
I'm excited to be here.
Speaker 1 (00:28):
Yeah. Yeah. We're going to be talking about a subject
that's near and dear to all of our hearts, by
which I mean the Roman Empire with a guest who
is near and dear to our hearts, Mike Duncan. Mike,
how are you doing?
Speaker 3 (00:42):
Hello? Thank you for having me.
Speaker 1 (00:44):
It is wonderful to have you.
Speaker 3 (00:46):
Mike.
Speaker 1 (00:47):
You're a podcaster. You are kind of like the history
podcaster as far as a lot of folks are concerned,
including me and you. Also, you've had some intro interactions
online with people as regards the Roman Empire recently.
Speaker 3 (01:05):
Yeah. Well, anytime the Roman Empire shows up on the
cultural radar, I am tagged into it by roughly ten
thousand people, yea. And then I come in and I
do my bits or if you know, if something comes through,
you know, it gets shared at me, you know, not
shared with me, but shared it at me and then
and then I take a look at it, and I
get aggravated, and then, you know, fire off a few
(01:28):
salvos and retreat back out of the social media ecosystem,
which is kind of the strategy these days. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (01:36):
Yeah, we all have to like fight like an insurgent
when it comes to that sort of thing, because the
alternative is to just get constantly stuck in this escalating
world of beats with strangers on the internet who are
making money off of the beef.
Speaker 3 (01:51):
Yeah if but yeah, but there are certain things that
will get me to come out of my little hibernation,
which I think we're about to talk about. Yeah, yeah, me.
Speaker 1 (01:59):
Do you want to you want to take it away?
Speaker 2 (02:01):
Yeah. So one of the things that's been happening recently
is that so on October twenty fifth, the Republicans finally,
after an enormous amount of time, finally managed to electric Speaker.
Speaker 3 (02:12):
Of the House.
Speaker 2 (02:13):
And they picked this fairly unknown ret named Mike Johnson.
Who's this guy from Louisiana. And they picked him effectively
because nobody knew who he was. Yeah, and so they
picked this guy and they're like okay, and Mike Johnson
gets elected and Immediately everyone starts trying to figure out
who this guy is, and they very quickly realize this
guy is just a absolute incredible Christian fundamentalist weirdo. He
(02:39):
doesn't have a bank account, which is like wild.
Speaker 1 (02:44):
That's classic fundamentalism too, that's some of that old school stuff.
Speaker 3 (02:49):
Yeah, to see it, it's really soty.
Speaker 2 (02:51):
I mean, he's really sort of like he's like, he's
really a blast in the past of the Christian fundamentalist.
I mean he he he was a lawyer that represented
like a bunch of Young earthationist museums. He's really going
into that old school stuff. And one of the other
things that some people dug up is a podcast interview
where he is talking about how gay people cause the
(03:12):
fall of Rome. So, Mike Duncan, I want to ask
you the question that I think all of our listeners
are wondering. Can we, as queer people take responsibility? Can
we take any credit for the fall of Rome? Or
are we stealing visigof valor? If we do that, you're
stealing valor here. But but I do I do agree
(03:33):
that several of the gays in my life are like,
don't take this from us. It's one of our proudest accomplishments.
We brought down the Roman Empire. And I was like,
but unfortunately, it's just it's not the case. It's not
even close to the case. It's you know, you could
you could draw random words out of a hat and
produce a sentence that was literally nonsensical, and that would
(03:54):
be a better read of the end of the Roman
Empire than saying gay people or homosexual like, because it's
all wrapped up in this sort of like it was
decadence that caused the fall of the Roman Empire. They
were too like, you know, they were just too.
Speaker 3 (04:08):
Licentious, and they just throw up some vocabulary words and
it just it just doesn't land at all. It doesn't
land on the specifics, it doesn't land on the general
it doesn't land chronologically, it doesn't land in any way,
shape or form. It's just something they've decided is true
and repeat to each other. And that's the whole. That's
the long and short of it. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (04:29):
Yeah, I think there's some interesting stuff there too, of
like the stuff people talk about when they when they
like I remember I was reading someone like writing about
this and they started talking about Nero and I was like,
do you know, like in what century the Roman Empire
like collapse, Like, why are you talking about Nero? I
don't know, it seems like there's this real I don't know,
(04:51):
it seems like, you know, the the fall of Rome
is one of these things that's become central to a
lot of very weird writing politics. I remember, like a
few years ago, the big thing was so like the
Rome was caught, the fall of Rome was caused by immigration, yeah,
which and that's also current as well. Yeah yeah, And
so I don't know, what is it about like Rome
with these people, the fall of Rome. These people are
(05:12):
like so drawn to in a way that causes them
not to think about what actually happened at all.
Speaker 3 (05:17):
I mean, well, I mean, just to go back a second,
It's like Rome in general, in their heads, is not
a sort of temporarily dependent series of events that unfolded
over a thousand years. It's just this kind of like
one eternal place that's like a pastiche in their minds.
(05:38):
So like Nero can exist alongside Attila, can exist alongside
you know, Scipio Africanus, and all of these people and
events like just sort of are near each other in
time the same way that they believe that, like you know,
dinosaurs and humans cohabitated the earth, like it's that kind
of same thing. And so if they think about somebody
like Caligula or Nero running this, like running these courts
(06:03):
of decadence, like, it doesn't click to them that this
is like in the first century, and that the Roman
Empire doesn't fall for four hundred years, five hundred years,
and then the East keeps going for another thousand years.
That's a huge part of it.
Speaker 1 (06:16):
It is interesting to me you kind of made the
statement there about in these guys' heads Rome being this
kind of eternal, like continuing thing, And that's interesting to
me because that conception of Rome goes back so far,
I mean very famously, Like when Russia became like an
organized political entity, there was this widespread attitude that it
(06:37):
was the Third Rome, right, Like that still plays into
a lot of Russian imperial politics to this day. So
it is it is kind of fascinating how far that
idea goes back, Like it says something about the success
of Roman propaganda that it still has this place in
so many people's minds.
Speaker 3 (06:58):
Yeah, and I mean it has a place in my mind.
I don't I don't think of that. Yeah, so do
I so to many of us. And I don't think
that the crime here is thinking about the fall of
the Roman Empire or the trand or as you know,
we would more properly call it the transition from late
(07:19):
Antiquity to the eartal Medieval period, which is, you know,
unfolded and that didn't have a cataclysm, and you shouldn't
necessarily be thought of as as an inherently negative thing,
et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But organizing your worldview
around utterly historically illiterate version of the Roman Empire that
(07:40):
is really just a vehicle for your own special bigotry.
That's where they're really running a foul of me and
my temper.
Speaker 1 (07:52):
Yeah, and there's there's a lot that's really interesting about
how they sort of choose to interpret like the causes
of the fall. I think probably the least, the least
sensible argument they have is this idea that it had
something to do with like degeneracy. But yeah, it's like
you can find Romans in like the the Middle Republic
(08:15):
period saying the same thing that like we've become too degenerate,
too lazy, because of like all of the you know,
slaves automating, you know, the ruling classes, tasks people have.
You know, Romans are not like the Romans of our
forefathers and stuff anymore. And like you know, the empire
continue or the republic and then the empire still had
(08:35):
centuries in the tank at that.
Speaker 3 (08:37):
Yeah, very very famously, the Romans started complaining about how
it's not like the good old days round about the
second century b c. Which is like three hundred years
before they hit what we all acknowledged to be the
peak of Roman civilization. And this is like, this is
when Cato the Elder gets into it and the big
(08:57):
thing that those guys were griping about at the time,
and there are there are little, you know, little connections
here just doesn't none of it shapes up. Is that
what Cato the Elder and people like him were complaining
about way back in the second century was this is
when the Romans come in contact with the Greeks, and
there was there was a kind of like a split
between traditional Latin romanness and then this like new Eastern greaceness,
(09:22):
which like they've got new ideas and like they sounds
like they have sex with each other all the time.
You know, they don't care if they're men or women,
and so that's what they were pushing back against, and
so that kind of language does. This is where it
kind of distills over the centuries and then over the
millennia into this idea that the Roman Empire collapsed and
(09:43):
was ruined by this kind of degeneracy without being able
to really define what degeneracy means or how it could
possibly impact the long term health of a of a
large empire, you know, or the fact that, very bluntly,
right when you're saying this in one eighty six BC,
you can't say that contact with Greek ideas brought the
(10:06):
Roman Empire down. You just can't, because it just didn't
get crushed by this, It didn't fall apart. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (10:14):
I mean, if I have to make an argument as
to like, what thing that I can connect to modernity
killed the modern Empire, I tend to claim that it's
the concept of a reboot, right, because no sooner than
did Augustus have Virgil reboot the story of the Trojan War,
than the inevitable path to the collapse of the Roman
Empire began.
Speaker 3 (10:34):
Right.
Speaker 1 (10:34):
The real sign that we're heading towards collapse is all
these movie reboots.
Speaker 3 (10:39):
Okay, great, Well the rule is, whatever your modern preoccupation is,
that's what you use to explain the fall of the
Roman Empire. So of course I have my preoccupations, and
that's what I say caused the fall of the Roman Empire,
which is that the Roman Empire in fact never fell,
and we're all living in a hologram and we and
(11:03):
we know this because if a woman visits me and
brings me and brings me groceries and she's wearing a
Jesus fish necklace, it can pop into my brain and
I can know that we're living in.
Speaker 1 (11:11):
We're still We're still in the Roman Empire. Yeah, the
empire never ended, folks. Yeah, yeah, every politician is still cato.
Speaker 3 (11:19):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (11:20):
I mean, look, they you can also tell this because
you know, it's like, in the same way that everything
tastes like chicken. They haven't invented a new moral panic
in two thousand years, so pretty clearly we're just we're
just we're just recycling through exactly the same content over
and over again.
Speaker 1 (11:36):
It does all of the the kind of similarities you
can find, or at least seeming similarities you can find
between stuff that different Roman politicians were complaining about, you know,
two thousand years ago and stuff that's in our media today.
I think does suggest part of why it's almost impossible
to not keep bringing Rome up, which is that like
(11:59):
there are and I think that it's a mix of
like there are some legitimate similarities between our cultures, and
also our concept of Rome, which is often a historical
but is based on generations of misconceptions, makes it seem
even closer.
Speaker 3 (12:16):
Yeah, and we are a post Roman society and they
are our forebears, whether we like it or not. Like
any civilization that exists today that went through the Mediterranean world,
you know, it had a Roman period, and the Romans
made a strong imprint on all of us in terms
of like our laws and how we think about money,
(12:37):
and how we think about family relationships, like all of
these things are you know, we're living in a post
Roman world, and that's why it's important to study the
Roman Empire as an entity, but do it with some
degree of rigor rather than just using it as a
prop in the culture wars. Yeah, that was a great
(12:58):
That was a great point I just made, and so
it absolutely brought the conversation to a complete stance. So
as everybody said, just chewed on this nugget wisdom that
I have brought to the table.
Speaker 1 (13:20):
I do kind of think it behooves people. Part of
why it's valuable to do things like listen to the
Revolutions podcast by Mike Duncan is that you're this Rome
isn't going to stop being brought up by these people
and increasingly unhinged and inaccurate ways. And it's it's just like,
it's helpful to have an actual understanding of who the
(13:40):
Spartans were and what they did and did not do
for the sake of these arguments. It's helpful to have
a meaningful understanding of the Roman Empire. And I'm kind
of wondering, like when you when you come into misconceptions
about Rome, what are some of the top ones on
your list that uh that that your brain just forces
you to co and incorrect.
Speaker 3 (14:01):
Well, I mean this is a big one, because this one,
I feel like is deeply homophobic and principally used to
attack the queer community rather than anything else is And
just to give your listeners like some specifics here, it's like,
you know, sexuality in the Roman world was very different
than it was today, and there weren't even you know,
(14:24):
the kind of binary conceptions of gender sexual relations that
we have today. A lot of these things are very
modern inventions. I'm sure a lot of people know this.
But we can also point very specifically to like, you know, Hadrian,
who is broadly considered and cited to be one of
the greatest of the emperors who lived at the height
of the Golden Age, was gay. Like that's like, that's
(14:45):
a full stop thing, and so it's just like there's
no compatibility between these two ideas or really anyway, if
you ask them to take this argument more than twenty
five words d they're not going to have a way
to explain how it is that somebody engaged in gay
sex in the four hundreds could have possibly been the
(15:07):
reason why the Goths won a certain battle, or why
Attila the Hunt was able to do what he did.
All of it is just complete, an utter ahistorical nonsense,
and so I consider it I consider it my duty
as some kind of voice of authority on Roman history
to not let people get away with this. The last
the last time I saw this pop up was actually
(15:28):
uh Ben Carson, which is a little bit of a
blast from the past at this point. But he he
he wrote a book at one point where he dropped
this stuff in there, and the way they always couch
it to is like, as we all know, you know,
it was homosexuality that really led to the generacy of
the like I'm so sick of you people. But the other,
(15:49):
the other big one that really grinds my gears that
really emerged. This this was not a preconception that I
had going into doing the history of realme, but something
that I came away from after doing it and studying,
you know, the year by year history of the Empire,
is that this notion that like sort of the Romans
were this like like a like a like a nationality
(16:12):
that then went forth and conquered the Mediterranean, that Romans
were Romans as like an ethnic stock thing, and that
it was when these other ethnicities started sort of pressing
at the empire's borders, or as we said a little
bit earlier, that it was immigration right that destroys the
Roman Empire, that there was this kind of like pure
noble Roman thing. This is essentially functioning as the white
(16:36):
person in the ancient world, Like this is how we're
connecting these things. The British did this, the French did this,
Americans now do this today. That like the Romans are
our stand in as sort of the white people, and
the white people are civilized, and all of these other
like mongrel races are are uncivilized. And they were raither
civilized by the Remans, that they were killed by the
Romans or enslaved by the Romans. But this is all
for the good, because the Romans themselves were were like
(16:59):
this this superior stock of DNA somehow. And really, when
you go through the empire, the history of the Roman Empire,
you find that there is that kind of conservative strain
inside of like the patrician class and inside of the
senatorial class, that they're like, we want this to be
a closely held thing. Like the original republic was a
(17:20):
closely held oligarchy of Latin families who lived on the
Palatine Hill, and that's what they wanted for themselves. And
so when other people tried to push into the republic,
they tried to resist it. And so that is a
running conflict that happens in Roman history. But any time
that that tendency is overcome and a second prevailing force
(17:42):
that says like, actually, Romanness is just an idea. Romanness
is just a set of beliefs and practices and sort
of daily habits of life and ideology that can really
be held by anybody at any time. And if we
let in say non Roman Italians, which is the first
people who were considered non Roman who then came into
the Empire, which then we look back and we're like,
(18:03):
there was a time that Romans didn't think that people
from what is today like Florence or Milan were not
Italian or not Roman. Yeah, yeah, they were not considered
Roman until you know, the very late stages of the Republic.
I mean, I wrote a book about the later stage
of the Republican. The Social War is when this gets
wrapped up after hundreds of years of being treated as
(18:23):
second class citizens. There was a civil war that nearly
destroyed the Republic before Caesar even came along. That was
resolved by giving citizenship to the Italians, making them full
members of the polity, and then having that just be
a boon to Rome's fortunes. This happens in Gaul, this
happens in Spain, This happens in Illyria. This happens in
the far East that these people who the Romans encounter
(18:46):
and yes, do conquer, because it's a very violent world
of conquest and mutual conquest. That Romans in Gaul were
as much Romans as Romans in Rome. And anytime I
find Roman leaders resisting that idea, I find the empire
starting to falter and commit missteps. And anytime they're like, nah,
(19:09):
let's just throw it open. You know, if you're good,
if you're dedicated, if you're loyal, you can be a
part of this project that we have. Then I find
the Romans doing very very well. And I'm about to
start not to just monologue here, but I'm about to
start working on another book that is about the Crisis
of the third century. And by this time, we have
emperors who are coming from North Africa. We have emperors
(19:31):
who are tagged as being Arabian. We have the set
of emperors who really help Rome emerge from this thing
that is called the Crisis of the third century when
the empire very nearly collapsed in the mid two hundreds.
Is a bunch of guys from Alyria, which is today
the Balkans. I mean, we're talking about guys who are
coming from like Serbia and Croatia, or the emperors who
(19:52):
are continuing the Roman legacy and keeping the empire intact.
So this notion that like the Roman a wasn't a
multicultural empire, or that the arrival of new peoples was
somehow bad for them is just disproven over and over
and over again by the realities of Roman history. So
that's the other one, is this immigration caused the fall
of the Roman Empire is just flat out and correct.
Speaker 1 (20:15):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (20:16):
One of the arguments that I've heard sort of against that,
and I want to ask how true this is. But
one of the things that I hear people sort of
responding to this with is this argument that like, part
of what causes like the sack of Rome is that
the Romans get into one of these nphobic streaks and
they don't want to sort of try to observe the Visigoths. Okay,
so that that is that's a that's essentially my position.
Speaker 3 (20:40):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (20:41):
I was just going to bring up a guy who
a historian who has to come up anytime you talk
about the way the right likes to use the image
of Rome, particularly the collapse of Rome, Victor Davis Hansen. Yeah, yeah,
he is. He is a guy you're going, I mean
he was. He's my dad's favorite historian from a very
conservative family. And he wrote a book not all that
(21:04):
long ago. No, actually it was twenty ten. Sorry, that's
still like five years ago to me. But it's not
five years ago. It's much further away, called Why did
Rome Fall? And Why does It Matter Now? And there's
a quote I found from a little article he wrote
plugging it that I want to bring up here so
we can chew over in short, what ruined Rome in
(21:25):
the West. Lots of things, but clearly the pernicious effects
of affluence and laxity warped Roman sensibility and created a
culture of entitlement that was not justified by revenues or
the creation of actual commensurate wealth, and the resulting debits, inflation,
debased currency, and gradual state impoverishment gave the far more
vulnerable Western Empire far less margin when the barbarians arrived.
Speaker 3 (21:47):
It's all bullshit. I know, it's so fresh. So it's
so frustrating because this culture of dependence that can I
swear on this podcast, Oh, absucking lutely for sure, this
fucking these motherfuckers, this entitled this entitlement thing that they
have because they don't like welfare because they're pricks, you know.
(22:08):
And you know Victor Davis Hansen, you know, this is
a guy who wrote a book called Like Mexifornia, which
is like, oh my god, yeah, absolutely, this is where
it comes from the nineties where he's like, he's like,
California is going to be destroyed by all these Hispanic people.
Like it's just loathsome shit that he writes. Anyway, this
culture of entitlement, right, like oh, it was just bread
and circuses, and like the empire had to give all
(22:30):
this money to like how many Like okay, great, the
Roman Rome the city was like a million people, yeah right,
and there were a couple of large urban hubs that
did have like grain doles because you needed to be
able to feed the people in these cities. And this
is you know, smart policy by the emperors. It's actually
not bad on a humanitarian level. And then they also
(22:50):
through games, because this is what people do. Rich people
throw parties to make themselves love Like this is a
very This happens today. This happens all the time. This
happened during the medieval period. It happens all the time.
The number of people who are like benefiting from this
like imperial largess, who have this like entitlement mentality is
such a fraction, such a fraction of the total number
(23:13):
of people who live in this empire where we're talking
about sixty sixty five million people may maybe give or
take a little bit. Not that many people were on
the dole in Rome. It was usually just the male
head of the household got some grain. It was like
it was a little bit of supplemental It's basically the
(23:35):
equivalent of like supplemental income. It was absolutely not just
they're rolling out banquets for these people every single day.
Nor is it the case that that entitlement of Romans
living in Rome in the two hundreds AD or something
is like the reason why they couldn't sustain their border defenses. Right.
This is the same arguments we get when it's like,
(23:57):
you know, we can't afford social security because the you know,
the National Endowment for the Sciences paid somebody two hundred
and fifty thousand dollars UH to look into the you know,
be keeping habits. Like it's like people just don't have
a way to compare a million dollars to a billion
(24:20):
dollars to a trillion dollars because it's just a lot
of money in our heads. So like this, none of
none of that is true, none of that that's true.
Speaker 1 (24:29):
It's it's it's fascinating to me, especially when you hear like, uh,
this is like really popular amongst the Joe Rogan set,
this idea that like, oh, you know, when an empire
is at the end, that's when you get all the
bread and circuses to distract people. And man, when the empire,
like the Roman Empire, the entire period during which it
was expanding like wildfire, was doing nothing but throwing giant
(24:53):
fucking parties in the caps all they did, Like that's
all they did. You could be in politics without going
broke throwing parties like that was That's why a lot
of the conquest happened, is because you have to throw
these parties when you were earlier up on the on
the curses and orm and then you would have to
like go conquer some place to pay for it, yep.
Speaker 3 (25:10):
And that was why actually, when you get right down
to it, you know, one of my you know, side
opinions is that if you were a provincial inside of
these conquests, you know, conquered lands. Life was much better
under the Empire than it was under the Republic because
there actually was some tightening and normalization of the bureaucratic
(25:32):
regime under the Empire, like after Augustus comes along, rather
than what was going on in the Republic, which is
every single year a province was getting a new governor
who was there to extract as much money for himself
as possible because he had taken out tons and tons
of loans to throw the biggest games that he possibly could,
to build the biggest act, to build the biggest thing. Now,
when you get into the later Empire, like are their
(25:54):
financial difficulties? Of course, right, you don't get the kind
of monument building and even aqueduct building and in the
structure projects you get in the later Empire. But like,
there are larger economic and structural reasons why they were
suffering financial difficulties at the end of the Empire that
have nothing to do with these couple of grain doles
(26:15):
that were going to a few major urban areas. Most
of the population is rural subsistence peasants, like those people
were not feeling entitled to.
Speaker 2 (26:22):
Shit, which which I think is really funny because if
you look at like, I am very confident if you
actually did the bath, US spends more money agricultural subsidies
every year than like than the Romans did, like on
the entire grain dole.
Speaker 1 (26:36):
I mean, there's also the math is true, like yeah,
like we I mean but in part not just like
because who knows what the Romans would have done with
a higher level of technology. Just wasn't possible to do
that kind of thing outside of the major urban hubs,
Like you can't.
Speaker 3 (26:50):
Also, you can't you couldn't do it. That's the thing. Yeah,
this is the same thing where you get into like
when people like to slip in the whole, like oh,
there was lead in the in the in the pipes,
and like there was lead in the pipes, and you know,
maybe some of the leadership was a bit over let exposed,
like who knows, like maybe maybe maybe, but like the
vast majority of the population is not living in downtown
(27:12):
Rome where this might be a problem, or in you know,
one of the other you know, regional capitals that's just
not where any of this is taking place.
Speaker 1 (27:21):
Well, people love to talk about stuff like that. It
is like, you know the fact that they're one of
their major sweeteners, included a lot of letters. Is always
like interesting to bring up. But the thing that I mean,
and this was this is also pure speculation, but that
I always wonder more about, not just with Rome, but
with like most postmodern societies and even like early modern societies,
(27:42):
is like, what about like mild head injuries, because we
know so much more now about how a bunch of
little head injuries can permanently alter your behavior, and like,
like that's a big thing when I think about when
I think about like the World War one generation, is
you've got millions of men who wind up becoming very
influential in politics, who are under artillery barrages, and who
are there's almost no way they're not walking away with
(28:05):
some kind of cte based on what we know now
about what being near artillery does to your brain. You
know what does that do to Yeah, the ancient world
was full of trauma and that's and that's a real thing.
All of these guys were deeply, deeply traumatized. But like
one of the other points about the whole like bread
doll thing is this gets back to this is sneaky
(28:26):
backdoor racism because the argument the argument is that Rome
was great when it was the Romans doing it like
these actual like Latins who were coming from the environs
of Rome in particular, and that it all started to
go bad ones non Romans were in charge of things
because the Romans themselves had had decayed into this like,
oh well, we just want our bread and circuses and
(28:47):
we're not going to join the legions. We'll just have
Germans do our fighting for us, or Goths do our
fighting for us. Which that is that is simply sneaky
backdoor racism, because it's a way of saying that it
was the reason why the Roman Empire was successful was
because of this small population group, and once they go away,
other groups, these mongrel races, will never be able to
(29:10):
live up to or sustain civilization in the way that
Romans did. The pure Romans did. And so that's also
a big reason why we need to push back on
these things, is because the Roman Empire was not just
sustained but thrived and expanded by people who were not Romans.
And the idea that you know, their civilization required this
like little tiny speck of a DNA spark to keep
(29:33):
it going is just you know, this is the kind
of person who finishes writing that book and then immediately
turns their attention to modern California politics and says, the
big problem here is Hispanics. Yeah, which is also not true,
by the way, I need to put that up. Yeah,
the big problem with California politics is California politicians. Right,
(29:53):
It's not Latinos, you know, it certainly not Latinos.
Speaker 2 (30:08):
You know.
Speaker 4 (30:08):
I wanted to sort of circle back around to the
script of degenerousy stuff because I think there's an interesting
through line there too, with with not just sort of
modern politics, but the politics of the period of the
original rise of fascism, because you know, you look at
these arguments and they're like, well, okay, it was like
cultural decadence, and then they started talking about degeneracy and
(30:29):
how homosexuality was this like degenerate thing that brought down.
Speaker 2 (30:31):
The empire, and like you go back and you like
read the Nazis and they are also absolutely obsessed with, like,
you know, with this notion of like degenerate art and
like cultural degeneracy is this force that's this internal force
that subverting the empire, and you know, and like this
is also I think another like reason to be reason
(30:54):
to be interested in a better way about Rome was
also the way that like the original Italian fascists art,
I mean, like the word fascism is like derived you know,
like from from Roman symbol symbols, right, and like you know,
this is like Mussolini's entire thing is about turning the
Veti trade into the Roman lake.
Speaker 1 (31:12):
Blah blah blah blah.
Speaker 3 (31:13):
So the fascist is great. Not to get you know,
not to derail your point, keep talking, Just gonna cut
that line out of the podcast. Mike Duncan says, fascist.
It's great. The fascist is great. It's a great symbol.
Go go, Like a lot of people don't actually even
notice this. Maybe they do at this point this is
no longer a fun fact, but you go, you go
(31:35):
to the link. No, well, I mean not just Congress,
but go to Lincoln Memorial. Look at the Lincoln Memorial.
What are his hands resting on to a couple of fascists.
It just is because you know what, a bundle of
sticks is stronger together, and that is a symbol of solidarity,
and it is a symbol of group action being superior
to individual attempts to do anything, and that the one,
the one Boo is going to break. But all of
them together is good. Like none of this is like
(31:56):
inherently bad. It's just a bunch of fascists claimed it
for their own.
Speaker 2 (32:01):
Yeah. Well, and my memory of this is that I'm
pretty sure there was a group of people who were
like calling themselves fascis, like in in early like late
eighteen hundreds, early nineteen hundred Italy, who weren't fascists, who
were like so like basically left wingers, and and then like, well, sorry.
Speaker 3 (32:17):
Not the Nazis. Well I don't know if you know this,
but Nazis are actually socialists. They're national socialists, and and
so a lot of people think that their right wing,
but actually their left wing. And that's what it is.
Hitler was. It was an Oberlin grad.
Speaker 1 (32:31):
This is where we q my thirty minute digression about
stress rism.
Speaker 3 (32:36):
Oh god, but I think to you, I think to
the point that you were trying to make, or that
you were making there though, is that they were, you know,
the Nazis did. And then we hear this repeated today
that like that degeneracy is like a thing that is
a force, like a physical force that can maybe even
be measured, and if you don't have enough of it,
(32:57):
or if you have too much of it, then your
society is going to to break apart or decay. Like
it's just an idea, that's it. It's just sort of
a way of thinking about something or a way of
describing something. It's not actually a really real thing that
is out there in the world. Like if you have
a society that suddenly can't grow grain and you have
a famine, like that's a real thing that will actually
(33:19):
affect your society and bring it down. You have this
other thing that is just like moral degeneracy. This is
just like you listing things you don't like and saying
that this is the reason why things are falling apart,
because degeneracy can be anything to anybody. But really, you know,
like people smoking cigarettes at four o'clock in the morning
because they've been up all night, you know, doing drugs,
(33:41):
Like that's what kids do, what people have that people
are always going to do this. This is always on
the backgrounds and margins of any society. So like and
rich people like they've always partied, they always will party.
Like those kinds of things you can't really then say like, oh, well,
we've accumulated too much degeneracy. Now ournciety is going to
start to break apart, and this, you know, the things
(34:03):
that we see today in terms of our own sort
of faltering democratic republic. This is not because of degeneracy.
This isn't because the kids are doing too many drugs,
or like we legalize gay marriage, Like, that's not That's
not why any of this is happening. It's happening for
other reasons. It's happening because of greed, it's happening because
of a sociopathic indifference to other people's lives. Those are
(34:25):
the things that actually matter, not whether you stayed up
all night drinking and partying.
Speaker 1 (34:31):
No, no, it's yeah, it's it's it's the kind like
I tend to think, like talking about the Lata fundia
is a lot more relevant to talking about like what
happened to the elites under Rome and what's happened in
our own society than bringing up like the parties and shit.
Speaker 3 (34:47):
Yeah, it's this exactly.
Speaker 1 (34:48):
The centralization of wealth and power in a tinier and
tinier number of men was responsible for a number of
the problems that Rome encountered as it aged, and they
don't want to have that conversation out, so they want
us to have other conversation which flatters their bigotry.
Speaker 4 (35:03):
M hm.
Speaker 2 (35:04):
Well, and this I think comes back to the thing
you were you know, the joke you're making about like
all of these these are all the same people who
are like, oh, well, the Nazis were socialists. It's like, yeah,
you know, like the point of like these arguments is
so that you don't go back into the historical record
and realize how much all the things are saying are
wrong and how much they're making precisely the same arguments
(35:25):
that you know, the Nazis were making, or that all
of these sort of like you know, all all of
the sort of past people who broadly is acknowledged did
a bunch of terrible stuff had the same opinions that
they do.
Speaker 3 (35:39):
Mm hmm.
Speaker 1 (35:41):
Yeah, well, I don't know. I think that's what I've
got to talk about today. I mean, this is like
we could go on to to the way in which
like Sparta gets remembered and stuff and the cultural like
right wing, but I think that's kind of moving sort
(36:03):
of far afield. Although there's there's similarities, right, there's always
this idea that like, at this certain point, when everybody
looked the same, Like, that's when this historic empire was
at their best. And when you know, degeneracy got entered
into it, when immigrants got entered into it, that's when
it sort of fell apart. I guess some of that's
(36:23):
mixed in with sort of like Frank Miller as opposed
to any sort of real history. But that's always the case, right,
I think a lot.
Speaker 3 (36:30):
Of yeah, I mean, and Frank Miller's working in a
tradition that is very standard, you know, the you know,
the kind of racist oriolentizing, orientalizing of you know, of
anybody from the East, like that was all current, Like
you know, the Romans had those ideas. I mean, we
get the word barb like the word like one of
the points that I'm going to make probably in my
(36:50):
book is like, so the word barbarian just means non Greek,
Like that's it, because the Greeks had a you know,
a very sort of self centered view of the world,
as we all do. But that meant that the Romans
are barbarians, you know, when that word is coined and
we're thinking about who the Romans are, like they were
the civilized ones, and then and then there are all
these barbarians who are bad. But like from the Greek perspective,
(37:12):
the Romans were as barbaric as you know, the Scythians were,
and you know, probably and certainly less civilized than the
Persians were when the Romans. When the Romans first appeared
on the scene in Greece, they were like, who are they?
These are just a bunch of guys who are obsessed
with war, and they have no culture, They have no
ideas of their own. They just march around in squares
and kill people like That's that was their interpretation of
(37:34):
what the Romans were originally, which is not a you know,
terrible interpretation of really Roman history. But yeah, this just
this sort of dividing between civilized peoples and barbaric peoples
is something that then has been around for thousands of
years and we're still doing it today. Like everything that
we're seeing, you know, and I look at Israel and Palestine,
(37:57):
there's a lot of this mapping of civilized versus uncivilized
people onto This conflict that I see is is rooted
in a lot in these sort of Western traditions that
informed nineteenth century racist ideas about how things you know
about how societies organize themselves, all of which needs to
be deconstructed and thrown away.
Speaker 1 (38:19):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I always love it when people
try to bring up like these sort of racial theories
within the context of the Roman Empire, who had absolutely
nothing that would be considered like a modern understanding of
whiteness or race like was was completely absent.
Speaker 3 (38:36):
No, they they all had they all had group identity.
Speaker 1 (38:40):
No yet they wereists, but yeah, different era, Yeah, exactly right.
Speaker 3 (38:44):
It was there's us and then there's everybody else. Yeah,
and you know, the Romans differentiated a little bit between
like there were Egyptians, and you know, they were kind
of you know, they were they were curious about how
how the Jews worked because the Jews were very old civilization,
and so the Romans kind of took special note of that,
and they really admired the Greeks, and so there are
(39:06):
these like sort of like groupings that they all understood,
but it's all just sort of that very self centered.
You know, if you go through anthropological history of any
group of people, their word for themselves is just the
word for person. You know, we find this a lot,
and the Romans were that way too, but not not
in this way, not not sitting down and making like
hierarchies of you know, who can, uh, you know, who
(39:28):
can do what and who should be on top and
who should be on bottom, because you know, if you're
a traditional ancient choveness, you're like, well, my people should
be on top, and that, you know, is self explanatory,
and then we will we will fight for that. That's
not because of yeah, these these racial hierarchies.
Speaker 1 (39:43):
Yeah, well, I think that's about all I had to
get into, Mia, You have anything else you wanted to
sort of touch on today, I.
Speaker 2 (39:53):
Think I think I think we've about we think we've
about covered it.
Speaker 3 (39:56):
Well, we got it. We have we've established that it's
wrong to think that gays made the Roman Empire fall.
Speaker 1 (40:02):
No, No, although you can, Yeah, there's a million more
things to say about that, but yeah, I think we've
hit on the basics.
Speaker 3 (40:14):
Mike.
Speaker 1 (40:15):
You are a podcaster. Your Revolutions podcast is one of
the best things on the internet. You are also an author.
I give a whole bunch of books, The Storm Before
the Storm, which is about a lot of the stuff
we've been talking about today, Hero of Two Worlds, the
History of Rome. Yeah, Mike, you have anything else you
want to plug.
Speaker 3 (40:36):
Well, I am just about, as I said earlier, about
to start work on a third book, which will be
the Crisis of the Third Century. So if anybody out
there who's listening to this has been like I wonder
if Mike's ever going to write a book about the
Crisis of the third Century, I will and I am excellent.
Speaker 1 (40:52):
Well, thank you for being on the show, Mike, and
yeah listeners until next time. If somebody brings up the
Roman Empire in an attempt to attack various special interests
in our modern political system by a Gladias, you know
that still works the same way it did in the past.
Just start swinging a Gladius. Remember it's God but blade
(41:14):
on both sides, so you got to be you gotta
be careful when you swing a Gladias. Easy to satire
satire leg not actionable satire.
Speaker 3 (41:26):
It could happen here as a production of cool Zone Media.
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It Could Happen Here News
Hosts And Creators
Robert Evans
Garrison Davis
James Stout
Show Links
AboutPopular Podcasts
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