March 10, 2019 • 44 mins
Roman politician, military general and historian who was at the helm of the rise of the Roman Empire and the demise of the Roman Republic. What can we learn from Caesar? Part of the Immortals leadership series.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi, This is newt Twenty twenty is going to be
one of the most extraordinary election years of our lifetime.
I want to invite you to join my Inner Circle
as we discuss each twist and turn in the presidential race.
In my members only Inner Circle Club, you'll receive special
flash briefings, online events, and members only audio reports from
(00:21):
me and my team. Here is a special offer for
my podcast listeners. Join my Inner Circle today at Newtcentercircle
dot com slash podcast, and if you sign up for
a one or two year membership, you'll get ten percent
off your membership price and a VIP fast pass to
my live events. Join My Inner Circle today at Newtcenter
(00:42):
Circle dot com slash podcast use the Code podcast at checkout.
Sign up today at Newtcenter Circle dot com slash podcast
and use the Code podcast hurry this Offtway spires February fourteenth,
(01:04):
on this episode of Newts World, The IDEs of March
is a day on the Roman calendar that corresponds to
March fifteenth. In forty four b C. March fifteenth became
notorious as the date of the assassination of Julius Caesar,
which made the IDEs of March a turning point in
Roman history. So on this episode, I'm telling the story
(01:26):
of Julius Caesar's remarkable life and death. If you doubt
Caesar's impact on all our lives, have a look at
a calendar. There's a month called July. That month was
named for Julius Caesar. The following month is August, named
after Caesar's nephew, the first Roman emperor, Augustus. The calendar
(01:47):
we used today was named after these two men who
lived two thousand years ago. The modern calendar is actually
Caesar's calendar. He added the number of days necessary to
actually fit how often the Earth goes around the sun,
and the three hundred and sixty five day calendar, including
adjusting it every four years for leap year, is Caesar's inventution.
(02:09):
So Caesar's in your life, whether you know it or not.
He's in your life every year, and he's part of
the calendar by which you live. The very term Caesar,
(02:33):
which became in German Kaiser for kaiser Wilhelm, became in
Russian czar, is today still a term that describes a
centralized dictatorial power, two thousand years after he died. So
we're dealing with somebody whose impact shook our part of
the world, the Western world, so profoundly that even to
(02:56):
this day he is in many ways an unknown and unstudied,
but very real presence. If you look at Latin, you'll
find that among the most elegant books ever written in
Latin was Caesar's Gallic Wars and Caesar's Civil Wars. Because
Caesar was not just a great military general an amazing politician,
(03:20):
he was also a remarkable good writer and a remarkably
good orator. His reputation for using language brilliantly made him
one of the leading people in Rome for much of
his life, just because of his sheer talent. The Roman
Republic got too big, too militaristic, was too much the
(03:40):
center of power, and as a result, money poured in
from all over to corrupt the Roman system. So if
you were in Greece, or you were in Spain, or
you were in North Africa and you wanted to get goodies,
the most efficient way to get goodies was to have
a lobbyist in Rome bribe somebody. And there are a
lot of lessons to be learned by what happens when
(04:03):
your system gets to be bigger than you can maintain
and when the breakdown of the traditional order leads to
the rise of tyrants, and that's literally what was happening
in Caesar's lifetime. If you don't understand the rome of
his time, you can't understand him. Caesar's uncle, Marius, is
around one hundred BC, and he's the best general of
(04:25):
his generation, but he is politically on the losing side
of a power struggle, and so he's sort of pushed
off to one side and he's not very important. And
all of a sudden, this huge Germanic tribe comes rolling
down the Rhone River valley, and the Roman people get
scared because they think this huge tribe is going to
(04:45):
break through into Italy, and so they call him back
and give him an army, and he goes north and
he wipes out the German tribe and they now like
Marius briefly, and then he is deposed and exiled, and
he is sent to place that we don't think of
as a desert, but in his time, Sicily was considered
a desert. It was not very heavily occupied, and as
(05:08):
he recounts late in his life, he survives only by
imagining what he's going to do to his enemies. When
he gets back, he does get back, and then he
does what he said he would do. Now, why does
this matter, Because what's beginning to happen. The politics of
personality and philosophy and policy are beginning to be replaced
(05:30):
by violence, by poisonings, by assassinations, by crowds in the street,
and by intimidation. And in many ways marriage is the
beginning of that breakthrough. Now, in that period, the secondary
of Sola, who is a great general, and Sala becomes
(05:51):
the great competitor to Marris, and between them they just
start wiping people out. So if you're in Sola side,
you're in danger of marry Is killing you. If you're
in married society or in danger of Salar killing you.
One of the ways they finance what they're doing is
they look at the richest guys and they just steal
their property and they say, you know, lucky you you
get to be exiled degrees and I want all your money,
(06:13):
or you could stay here, I'll kill you and then
I'll take all your money. Which one do you like better?
And a substantial number of Romans ended up going to
Greece for long periods just in order to avoid being
killed in that process. In that period, Julius Caesar doesn't
really exist yet, he's a kid. His family is very old.
In fact, they are among the oldest families Julie I
(06:35):
are among the oldest families in Roman history. They go
all the way back in theory a prince from Troy,
and in fact they trace their mythical background to the
goddess of Venus. So Caesar at one level is born
into a family which says to him, you are the
direct descendant of a god. And Caesar had the kind
of personality that made sense to him, and so his
(06:59):
whole life he has this kind of inner arrogance and
inner certainty that you probably have to be a descendant
of the god to have. I mean, it's a little
hard to imagine how any normal person could have been
like Caesar. But he has no money and his father
dies when he's young. His mother actually takes the families
relatively smallholdings and vests it in a high rise which
(07:20):
back then in six or eight story apartment building in Subura,
which was a working class neighborhood, and so she and
the family live on the top floor, which is also
the healthiest and the cleanest, and they read all the
rest of the floors, which means that in his early
twelve to sixteen years of age period, Caesar's wandering around
(07:42):
among working class people, learning working class Latin, understanding how
they think, what they do, how they negotiate. And he
is stunningly smart season maybe much like Napoleon, one of
the smartest people ever to live, and so he could
absorb information, He could learn things at enormous speed. Caesar
(08:10):
was ravenously ambitious. He thought he was descended from the gods.
He thought he was descended from a family which had
been cheated and which was socially worthy of dramatically greater
assets than they actually had. From the earliest time we
encounter him, he is unendingly ambitious, and he understands that
in the Roman world, if you're going to be ambitious,
(08:32):
you've got to be physically capable of being a warrior,
because otherwise you can't earn the level of respect that
essentially to watch Cicero, for example, who is probably Caesar's
equal as an orator and as a writer, is not
a great warrior, and it cripples his career because everybody
knows it. But Caesar is somebody who could fight his
way out of a room, could fight his way in
(08:54):
a battle, could lead an army in the army felt
honored to follow him. And I think he acquired that.
My guess is he acquired the corner that one he
was like thirteen or fourteen or fifteen years old, because
he looked around and said, I'm Caesar. Caesar goes on
to marry somebody who Sala doesn't like, goes she belongs
politically to the wrong side, and Sala who's a dictator?
(09:17):
And who is and he's really He and Marrits are
really the beginning of the total breakdown of the republic
as a system, because now you have dictators, you have
people who have real power, and they're prepared to kill
you if you don't do what they want, and sometimes
they'll kill you even if you do do what they
want because they need your money. And so Sala basically
says to him, you have to divorce your wife, and
(09:38):
Caesar says, no, It's truly one of those things where
you have to believe you have some kind of divine
destiny or you're just nuts. Because Caesar's standing there as
a very young man facing this dictator who's a great
general who's a huge force surrounding, is capable of killing
(09:58):
Caesar on the spot. He says, I'm not doing it,
and so Salah says, okay, well, then get out of town.
You know, I'm not going to For some reason, he
decided not to kill Caesar. And it may have been
again this magic touch that Caesar had, that he could
manipulate people at levels that are just astonishing, and so
the dictator said, Okay, I'm really really mad at you,
(10:21):
but I'm not going to kill you right now. So
Caesar goes up in the Apennine mountains for three years
hides because he knows that on a bad weekend, Sala
could wake up and decide, you know, Caesar doesn't amuse
me that much, let's kill him. Eventually, he joins the
army to get away from Rome because he wants to
get far enough away that Sala can easily kill him,
(10:45):
and he doesn't want to remind Sala that he's around.
So he wanders off and the great actionary at that
time for the army is over in what they would
have considered the East, which is along what we now
would say is the Turkish and Syrian coast. They were
constantly fighting with both pirates and with the local governments.
Caesar turns out to be an amazingly courageous soldier. He
(11:09):
wins the Oak Leaves, which is the highest sort of
the equivalent of our Congressional Medal of Honor. There are
many ways in which you can have authority or fame.
You know, you can be rich, you can be from
a good family, you can hold a high office. If
you've done something so heroic that you're allowed to wear
(11:29):
the oak wreath, you're now in a unique category because
no one can challenge your courage, and so it puts
you in a very small league, as it says, first
of all, you've been in combat, you've done it so
heroically that your peers awarded you this highest and then
the Congressional Medal of Honor is the only thing that's comparable.
(11:50):
And if you've ever been in military environments, people walk
in wearing the Congressional Medal of Honor are by definition
in a different league because it's something they earned. So
I think in that sense, it was one of the
things early on that marked him off, and that sort
of said this guy's special. He ought to take him seriously,
and he's going to become somebody. The concept of wearing
(12:13):
a wreath, which the Etruscans had done with gold wreaths
for their kings, and in Greek mythology, Apollo represents power
and wears a laurel wreath on his head. So in
Caesar's mind, wearing the oak wreath would be a signal
of his uniqueness, in his near godlike importance. Again, it
(12:34):
was an age when people started earlier because they died younger,
but still that this is a guy who's working really
hard to rise as fast as he can. So Caesar,
as a very young guy, is working his way into
being seen as a great soldier, a great general, a
great orator, very very clever politician. Caesar at one point
(12:55):
gets captured by pirates. Now, the pirates had operated off
the coat of Syria and Turkey because they had found
places where they could go in where the passageways were
so complicated that no one could find them. And what
they didn't realize was that Caesar had almost a perfect memory.
So two things start out of this particular experience. One is,
(13:18):
here's Caesar by himself, surrounded by pirates who are pretty
tough people, and they want twenty units of silver for him,
and he says, that's really stupid. You know, I'm a
famous guy. I mean, you got to go for fifty.
If you don't mean, if you don't go for fifty,
I will feel so insulted. And if you go for fifty,
they'll pay you. And by the way, after they pay
(13:39):
you and you release me, I'm going to come back
and kill you. The pirates all think this is just great.
Here's this guy. He's not physically dominant. He's fairly slender,
very muscled, but very slender. And he doesn't look like
he's a guy who's going to come back and kill
all the pirates. And so they laugh at I think
he's just terrific. He's very personality. I've chatting with him,
(14:00):
you know. So they get they asked for fifty because
he told him too. They get fifty, they're release him.
He organizes an army. He remembered exactly how to find them.
He goes back. He crucifies all of them, but because
he liked them, he cut their throats first. And there's
a brief note tremor about the Romans. Crucifixion in the
Roman model is designed to be really painful. It's not
(14:25):
what we see in the Christian image of Christ on
the cross and the Roman model. You are tied up
and you are hanging from a wooden cross, and the
goal is to allow you to hang there until the
point where birds, for example, will come and pack your
eyes out and you will eventually die of dehydration. When
(14:50):
the Romans put nails through Christ and pokemon the side
with a spear, these are actually considered acts of kindness
because they accelerate the rate of which you die. So
I understand the Roman world, you have to start with
the very simple model. These were really tough, ruthless people.
(15:12):
For example, when Spartacus rebels, one of the great moments
in Roman history, Spartacus has about twenty thousand followers, and
he really scares the Romans because the idea of a
slave rebellion would be genuinely frightening if you were a
Roman aristocratic. So when they finally defeat him, they crucify
somebody about every two hundred feet for seventy miles. So
(15:35):
from Naples to Rome you are riding down a road
that has people crucified the entire distance. And their goal
was to sort of say the people. We're really sincere
and we want you to know you do this kind
of stuff, we will relentlessly come and get you. But
this is also a country. Remember this before Caesar just
to give you his flavor, And it often hits me
(15:56):
as I walk around Rome, looking at the city and
looking at the wall. It's a city which had during
the Punic Wars with Carthage. Hannibal is in Italy for
seventeen years and they can't beat him, but he can't
break through the city walls, and so for seventeen years
(16:17):
they just slug it out and the Romans at one
point lose an entire army at a battle called Kena,
to which their attitude is, I guess we have better
get another army. They decided to beat the Carthaginians, they
have to go to sea and build a navy, which
they had not done up to them. They build an
entire navy. It goes to see there's a huge hurricane.
The navy sinks, and the Roman responses, I guess we
(16:39):
need a new navy, and they build another navy. I mean,
these are just relently this is the world. I'm giving
this his background because to understand Caesar you have to
understand this was accepted as normal. This level of toughness
was where they started. It wasn't what they got to.
And so Caesar comes along, and Caesar is of anything, smarter,
(17:01):
more personable, more ruthless, and tougher than anybody else. Somebody
once said that in the Great Fight between Pompey and Caesar,
the equivalent of two pirates mean that they were both
trying to win control of the Empire of the Republic,
which became the Empire, and that it wasn't like there
was a good guy and a bad guy. These are
guys just slugging it out for power. And if they
(17:23):
happen to kill you on the way through tough break
because what they were doing is important to them. So
here's Caesar comes back home, enters politics, becomes the high
priest of the Roman religion, which gives them another source
of authority, and it becomes an elected official. And the
Roman system is very complicated, and there's a hierarchy. You
(17:44):
get into, you gradually rise in importance. It's all designed
to minimize the ability of any one person to be
a dictator. It's it's what Marius and Salah have broken
out of but after Saulah's death, it begins to revert
back towards the traditions and the goal again a little
bit like the American Constitution. The goal is to not
have anybody concentrate power enough to be in charge the
(18:08):
whole thing. So they have two consoles. Every year, the
two consoles can veto each other. They have people who
elected to lower office. They have various powers, and Caesar's
gradually climbing this chain of authority, and at the same
time he is becoming one of the most popular people
in Rome, and it's really interesting to watch. Caesar is
(18:28):
instinctively what I would call a populist, in the sense
that having grown up in Sabora and having understood the
working class Romans, he had concluded that the future of
Rome was absorbing more and more people. So part of
his career will be extending citizenship to more and more
and more people, which builds a huge force of followers
(18:52):
because they see Caesar as protecting them and as being
their guy. Caesar ultimately is given authority to go to Gaul.
Now he's already led several armies in Spain. He's let
armies over in the east of what we would call
Turkey or Assyria. But now he has the big moment
of his career, and what people tend to forget is
(19:14):
Caesar's gone for seven years. There are about three million
men in Gaul when he arrives. One estimate is by
a Roman historian Suetonius, that he killed a million, sold
a million into slavery, and there were a million left
by the time he was done. He destroyed probably Suetonius
said he destroyed eight hundred towns. At one point, he
(19:38):
fights a particular tribe and they finally surrender. He surrounds
their fort, they finally surrender. Instead of killing them, he
cuts off their right hands, so that there are five
thousand men wandering around Gaul with one hand, because he
wants to send a signal that you oppose me, and
it is going to be really bad for you. Finally,
(20:00):
the tribes get together, they all rebel simultaneously. He is
in the fight of his life, and in about a
six month period he organizes his army how maneuvers them
and wins. Now, the Roman army's great strength is engineering
and logistics. They know how to have a siege, They
know how to build a fort to protect themselves. They
(20:23):
know how to sustain their army in the field with supplies.
It is a very well thought out army, in an
army which has been practicing war for several hundred years.
One one, the Gauls were probably as good or better
than the Romans. The Germans were probably as good or
better than the Romans. The problem was an in fight
one on one, and Roman armies were very, very good armies.
(20:45):
Caesar has a tremendous instrument which he uses brilliantly, and
he uses it for seven years. And s important to
understand this because when you watch what's about to happen
when he goes back to Rome, there's only one person
who as the level of military springs in the entire
Roman world and that season, and he knows how to move,
(21:05):
he knows how to organize. Nobody else is in his league.
After the break, Caesar returns to Rome and establishes his
role as leader of the Roman Republic. Caesar returns to
(21:31):
Rome after seven years at war in Gaul and he
faces a problem. He's got to cross the Rubicon River,
which is the boundary of Rome at the time. Caesar
builds a whole series of signal fires and he has
his legions leaning forward. He comes down without his legions
because he wants to be peaceful. He wants to send
(21:52):
a signal. He's written the Gallic Wars, which are well
worth reading and which essentially are he wrote vall every
year and the essentially or here's how Caesar went and
capture Gaul and turned all these slaves into money, and
why you should love Caesar because look what he's done
for Rome. He also founds a daily newspaper to remind
(22:12):
you that Caesar loves you. Caesar does good things for you.
So his enemies, who under Roman rule, if he gives
up his governorship, they can try him. And it's quite
clear given the last forty years of Roman history, if
they trying him, they're going to kill him. And that's
the only way they can contain him. And so he's negotiating, saying, oh,
(22:36):
I want to be peaceful, I really want to work
all this out. I'm down here without my army. You know,
I'm your guy. Can't we get something worked out? Well,
when they finally figure out, now we're not we want
to kill you. We're not going to order something out.
What they hadn't reckoned on was he had already set
his units in motion, and the first legion could get
(22:59):
to the Rubicon and days and they could send signal
fires all the way through Gold. So he's mobilizing a
force very fast. Meanwhile, his major opponent, Pompey, was the
great general before Caesar. Between Soa and Caesar, company is
the dominant figure, very successful, very well organized, but a
(23:20):
little slow and a little insecure. Where Caesar thinks, look,
I'm descended from the gods. I might as well gamble,
because you know the gods will be there for me.
Pompy kind of thinks, you know, I'm descending from normal people,
and this guy Caesar scares me. Nyus Pomparius Magnus, who
we would call Pumpy the Great, came out of a
(23:40):
provincial Italian background. It's an interesting contrast. Very competent man,
very hard working man. He actually cleans up all the
pirates in the eastern Mediterranean and is widely seen as
a tremendous organizer of military forces. But in the end,
he's not descended from the gods. He doesn't represent one
of the oldest families in Rome. He doesn't have this
(24:01):
aristocratic sense of destiny which is at the heart of
what makes Caesar so remarkable, And so Pompey's proud, he's competent,
he's powerful, but he's normal and he's trying to cope
with somebody who's abnormal. Pompey was smart, but Pompey was not.
He didn't have that quickness, that sudden political skill that
(24:26):
Caesar had, and he didn't have the ability to plan
at three or four or five levels simultaneously. And the
result was I think that Caesar always frightened him and
always confused him. Every general I've ever studied, Caesar's on
the shortlist people you cannot give spare time to because
he will use it, and he'll use it better than
(24:46):
you will. So Pompey leaves Italy. Now the reason this
really matters, and this is why when you visit Rome
and you look at the coliseum, and you look at
the forum, and you'll just think to yourself, this was
a city of over a million people at the time
we're talking about. It was the center of the Mediterranean world.
It had the symbolism it's Rome, the guy who gives up.
(25:11):
Rome gives up symbolically all of the emotional and moral power.
And as Caesar walks into Rome. He is acquiring all
of the authority of being in Rome, who is also
the center of money, in the center of commerce. So
Caesar overnight is able to start chasing Pompey's forces everywhere.
(25:31):
And Caesar has better divisions, but he has people who've
been practicing warfare for seven years. They are loyal to him.
Sadly for him, his top lieutenant actually leaves and joins Pompey.
I think Caesar will lose, and thinks that Caesar's breaking
the rules, and that makes Caesar feel bad, but he
sends all of his equipment to him because you know,
in a great seven years, sorry sight of the other guy,
(25:52):
because he's going to lose. And so Caesar wanders around
the Mediterranean defeating the various forces on the other side,
ending up with chasing Pompey all the way to Egypt,
where the Egyptians, having figured out the Pompey is a loser,
decided they will cut off his head and give it
to Caesar, because you know, they want to show Caesar
(26:13):
how much they like it. Well, then thought about the
fact that Pompey was married to Caesar's daughter. Pompey and
Caesar were friends, while they happened to have this little
disagreement which led to a civil war. It's very likely
Caesar would not have killed Pompey, and Caesar was genuinely
deeply offended who they were of civil war in Egypt
(26:34):
between Cleopatra and her brother, and her brother's the one
who cut off Pompey's head, and so he sides with her,
fights a civil war, defeats the Egyptian army, fights a
civil war in Egypt. There's a moment where the Romans
are being besieged in Alexandria, and it's true during the siege,
(26:54):
the act of the Great Library of Alexander's burned down.
Whether by Caesar's people or by the Egyptians, one we
don't a different a size to that story, but the
Great Loss was a huge collection of Greek and Egyptian
works that burned one night. But anyhow, they're there, and
the regular Romans are getting very nervous. They're really worried,
(27:15):
and why is Caesar not worried? And he said, I'm waiting,
and they go, well, what are you waiting for? He said,
I'm waiting for dawn, and they go, well, what happens
at Dawn said, well, the sun was I thought you knew. Well,
what I didn't tell him was that two months earlier
he had ordered his legions to come from Syria, and
(27:38):
he knew that they were a few miles outside of town.
And that's very much like Caesar. You can see Caesar's
ability to play seven games simultaneously, and I'll tell you
about any of them was amazing and it made him
I mean people, I think people at one level were
awe struck by him, and another level that were really
frightened because the essence of the Roman model was to
(28:03):
balance power, so nobody had too much power, and to
have a system in which the very structure of the
system limited the ability to lead to dictatorship. And what
had been happening was through this long hundred year period,
dictators kept killing people and had established a pattern now
that if you were on the losing side, it's not
(28:25):
a huge jump from one to jail to being killed,
and that's what's being to happen to them. And so
you saw this a continuous process. Even the people who
were four Caesar were worried because Caesar ultimately represented the
end of the republic and he represented establishing a new
system of power they had had since the last Setarkian
(28:48):
king was kicked out in four seventy six. The Romans
that had a passion against kingship. I mean a long
stretch there were If anybody thought you were thinking you
were going to become a king, you were gone. And
now all of a sudden, here's the guy who, by
sheer power and sheer brilliance, is clearly the central figure.
He becomes dictator for life, not yet king, doesn't want
(29:11):
to be king, just happy to be dictator. And so
a group of people who begin to really worry that
the system is right at tilt and if they don't
do something that in fact the republic will die. And
that's why you end up with the assassination. In March
(29:31):
of forty four BC, when we come back, Caesar faces
a senate who, jealous and his power, decides to murder him.
An unfairly discharged marine with a dark secret, a brilliant
(29:54):
intelligence officer recovering from tragedy. This unlikely pair are brought
together to stop a deadly I plot against the hearts
of the American System. Number one New York Times bestselling
authors Nuke Ingridge and Pete Early returned with a new
series filled with action and intrigue that captures the tensions
and divides of America and the world today. Collusion, a
(30:15):
novel by Nuke Ingridge, available on Amazon dot Com and
Audible now. One of the fascinating aspects of Caesar's life
was the impact of his death, because it became one
(30:37):
of the most historic moments in all of Western history,
partially because of the brilliant portrait in Shakespeare's play and
the speech by Mark Antony at his funeral. Partially because
Caesar had been such a life force, He had been
(30:58):
so dominant, he strode across the Roman Empire in such
a huge way that his disappearance through death left a
vacuum that would take years to sort out, because there
was no natural ability for anyone to step in and
become Caesar, and so there'd be an entire civil war
(31:20):
before he was replaced by his nephew who had actually
found the empire itself, Octavius, who becomes Augustus, and who's
the second month we name for one of the Caesars.
So he had July and August Caesar himself. In a way,
he had almost set the stage for his own killing.
(31:42):
The Greeks had a concept they called hubris, and hubris
meant that you began to take onto yourself enormous power
and enormous self affection. And as you became more and
more filled with hubris, you began to set yourself up
for what the Greeks called nemesis, and nemesis was the
(32:03):
destruction of the person who had hubris. Well, in a way,
Caesar is the perfect model of what the Greeks were
trying to warn about. The bigger Caesar became, the more
powerful Caesar became, the more people feared him, and the
more people envied him. And remember the core of this
isn't the average Roman. The average Roman thought Caesar was fine.
(32:24):
Caesar fed them, Caesar entertained them, Caesar conquered slaves that
enriched them. So Caesar had a pretty big base among
normal people. But if you're an aristocrat, and you had
a great sense of self worth, and you thought your
family had been around for hundreds of years, and here
suddenly you're in the shadow, no longer an equal, no
(32:45):
longer a fellow aristocrat, no longer a person who could
look upon themselves as significant, But instead you were clearly weaker, lesser, subordinate, smaller.
You hated every minute of it, and you thought, who
this guy Caesar, That he's flaunting his power, he's flaunting
(33:08):
his role in history, because there was a sense that
the bigger Caesar got, the smaller the aristocrats got. So
part of just pure old fashioned jealousy, Well, Caesar had
now accumulated a very substantial number of aristocrats who just
loathed him. They couldn't say that to his face because
they were terrified of him, because he'd kill him. So
(33:29):
they talked to each other, and quiet they met together,
they began conspiring. There was a secondary part of this.
There was a legitimate, honest, deep fear of kingship. It's
important to remember that Rome really becomes Rome in four
seventy six BC when they get rid of the last king,
the last Tarkeean king is replaced, and the Romans acquire
(33:53):
this deep passionate opposition to having a king. That's why
the republic is so stable for such a long period,
because in their mind the alternative is to go back
to kingship. Well, now here's Caesar who says every day, oh,
I don't really want to be a king. But in
the last days before the Eyes of March. He and
(34:13):
Mark Anthony begin to play a game in which Mark Anthony,
who's his chief subordinate, starts to say, oh, well, wouldn't
you consider being a king? And Caesar says no, no, no, no,
nothing's further from my mind. I really I can't imagine
why you had mentioned the word king and Julius Caesar
in the same sentence. Well, the other nobles know this
is the beginning of a setup, and that at some
(34:36):
point that summer that Caesar is very likely going to say, well,
all right, if you really want me to be king,
how can I turn you down? So you have both
this fear that Caesar represents the end of the republic
and the death of a system which was almost five
hundred years old by that stage, and you had this
(34:57):
personal level of just really deeply disliking Caesar because he's
too big, too powerful, too arrogant, too smart, and they
just want to get rid of him. Conspiracy begins to grow,
and ironically, the Roman Senate itself was being refitted, and
so they had to move the meeting place. They chose
(35:20):
Pompey's Theater, remembering, of course that Pompey was the great
Leader who Caesar had defeated in the earlier Civil war.
So now they're going down to Poppey's Theater, which was
a quite spectacular place, and they're going to meet. The
rumor comes supposedly from a soothsayer who could see the future,
the Caesar should be where the eyes of march. It
(35:41):
was apparently real enough that his wife begged him not
to go to that meeting of the Senate that day.
And this apparently is not just a fiction of Shakespeare's making,
but actually at the time was a real event. Caesar,
of course, I think, had two different things he going on.
One he was very skeptical of these kind of things.
(36:03):
He didn't particularly worry about soothsayers telling whom he's going
to win or lose anything. But the other was I
think that he had this sense of destiny. If it
was his destiny to be killed, then he would become
a martyr for Rome. If it was his destiny to
stay alive, then he would continue to be the leader
who had become dictator, which was a step below kingship,
(36:25):
and he would continue simply to run Rome. And I
think he sort of thought in that sense, there's a
fatalism in Caesar that runs through his entire life, and
you can see it over and over again, where he
risked death and he risked defeat because he just believes
you have to roll the dice and see what's going
to happen. For verst his entire life, he'd rolled the
dice and he'd won. So he goes to Pompey's theater
(36:49):
that day and there may have been up to sixty
nobles who had gotten together, although the number who actually
attacked him is a much smaller number. He knew that
a number of him disliked him, but part of the
reason they disliked him was he had contempt for them.
So since he had contempt for them, he wasn't going
to be afraid of them. And he deliberately dismisses his
(37:10):
security force because he wants to communicate I'm not afraid
of you guys. I don't need to be surrounded by
police to protect me because none of you guys have
the guts to do anything anyway. Well, that particular day,
he was wrong. When he goes in, the senators who
hated him surround him. Supposedly Civilius Casca hits the strikes
(37:31):
the first blow, hitting him in the neck and drawing blood.
Other senators join in and he is a hit again
and again and again around the head in the neck.
Marcus Brutus apparently wounds him in the groin, at least
that's the traditional legend, and Caesar said to us said
to him, you too, my child, or at too brute,
as it became translated in later years. There was a rumor,
(37:55):
which probably wasn't true, but it was a really delicious rumor,
that Brutus in fact was his illegitimate son. He certainly
had had a long relationship with Buddhist's mother, but given
the relative ages, it's unlikely that Buddhist is really his son.
But it's clear that Buddhists really disliked Caesar, probably in
part because he objected to Caesar sleeping with his mother,
(38:16):
and that was the habit of Caesar had with a
substantial number of women around the Roman aristocracy, which probably
further led to people being willing to kill him. So
Caesar dies and it's as though a great force has
left the world. And I think at one level they're
all staring at each other going, oh my god, we
(38:37):
really did it. And then they're faced with, so how
do we deal with the Roman crowd? Because the Roman
crowd initially was very pro Caesar. Caesar had been very
good to them, and he had improved their lives. He
paid attention to them, He was a popularis, he was
interested in the people rather than the aristocracy. So they said, basically,
(39:00):
we saved Rome from dictatorship. Mark Anthony, speaking at the funeral,
gives an oration. It's pretty clear that when the assassins
were done speaking, they were in pretty good shape. By
the time Mark Anthony was done speaking, they're all sneaking
out of town because the mob has turned, and the
(39:23):
mob clearly now will tear them apart. And this is
apparently really an actual fact of that particular day that
in one oration, Mark Anthony, who had been Caesar's deputy,
is able to convince people, Oh, I could never speak
well of Caesar, because we've all been told, be these
honorable men, how evil Caesar is, and we know these
(39:44):
are honorable men, and therefore I can't say anything good
about Caesar. And so I'm not even sure I should
read you Caesar's will, which Caesar, who loved you so much,
has written, but it would be wrong of me to
read this will in which Caesar do so much, because
we've all been told how evil Caesar is by these
honorable men. And this goes on and on a crowd
(40:07):
after a little while, the crowdbeans to go, we'll read
the will. We want to hear the will. Well, of
course the will is a perfectly political document, and which
Caesar has basically said, I love Rome so much that
everything I have goes to you, the people of Rome.
And then Anthony has to say, well, now, we can't
be grateful to Caesar for having loved us so much,
(40:29):
because we've all been told by these honorable men that
he was a tyrant, that he was a bad person.
So I'm sure none of you would want us to
execute his will and give everybody all the things Caesar
wants you to have, because would be so wrong to
do that when these honorable men have told you that
Caesar was bad. And of course by this point you're
(40:50):
a combination of emotion and greed and memory. And frankly,
the aristocrats are not very not very nice people. And
the average person in Rome knew that harrish person all
knew that the number one reason the aristocrats didn't like
Caesar was because they're aristocrats. And by the way, the
aristocrats weren't going to be nice to the people either.
And it apparently is true historically that by the end
(41:12):
of Anthony's speaking the aristocrats who killed Caesar had left
Rome to get away before the crowd attacked him. It's
truly a remarkable moment. And in that process, Caesar had
set the stage by his death and by his will,
by Anthony, who understood him, and by his young nephew Octavius,
(41:35):
who had been an apprentice to Caesar. Caesar had brought
him in, Caesar had him travel with him, Caesar had
taken him on the wars, and Octavius learned an immense amount.
Where Caesar shatters and ends the republic, he doesn't actually
create a stable system, and that's part of why he
gets killed. But his nephew. Now, his nephew will come along,
(41:59):
take over the family business, take over Caesar's name, and
in the process establish an empire which will last for
four hundred years. And it's truly remarkable because nobody on
the day Caesar was killed could have picked Octavius out
as the long term winner. He was totally underestimated by
everyone and yet he had learned so much from his uncle,
(42:22):
and he knew how to play. Being the nephew, the
only person who could claim to be Julius Caesar's heir
was Octavius, and that may have been what, ultimately, after death,
was Caesar's last great contribution to the history of Rome
and the history of the Western world. If you'd like
(42:43):
to know more about Julius Caesar, We've created a show
page or some of my favorite books, plays, and movies
about him at newtsworld dot com. Newtsworld is produced by
Westwood One. The executive producer is Debbie Myers. Our producer
is Garnsey Slum. Our editor is Robert Barrowsky. Our researcher
is Rachel Peterson. The artwork for the show was created
(43:05):
by Steve Penley. The music was composed by Joey Salvia.
Special thanks to the team at Gingwich three sixty and
Westwood Ones, Tim Sabian and Robert Mathers. Please subscribe to
Newsworld on Apple podcast, Spotify, Google Play, or wherever you
get entertaining podcasts. On the next episode of Newsworld, five
(43:27):
G technology is going to fundamentally change the way we
live our lives find out why it's referred to as
the next Industrial Revolution. I'm Newt Gingrich. This is News World,
(44:07):
the Westwood one podcast network. Everyone's listening.
Hi, This is newt Twenty twenty is going to be
one of the most extraordinary election years of our lifetime.
I want to invite you to join my Inner Circle
as we discuss each twist and turn in the presidential race.
In my members only Inner Circle Club, you'll receive special
flash briefings, online events, and members only audio reports from
(00:21):
me and my team. Here is a special offer for
my podcast listeners. Join my Inner Circle today at Newtcentercircle
dot com slash podcast, and if you sign up for
a one or two year membership, you'll get ten percent
off your membership price and a VIP fast pass to
my live events. Join My Inner Circle today at Newtcenter
(00:42):
Circle dot com slash podcast use the Code podcast at checkout.
Sign up today at Newtcenter Circle dot com slash podcast
and use the Code podcast hurry this Offtway spires February fourteenth,
(01:04):
on this episode of Newts World, The IDEs of March
is a day on the Roman calendar that corresponds to
March fifteenth. In forty four b C. March fifteenth became
notorious as the date of the assassination of Julius Caesar,
which made the IDEs of March a turning point in
Roman history. So on this episode, I'm telling the story
(01:26):
of Julius Caesar's remarkable life and death. If you doubt
Caesar's impact on all our lives, have a look at
a calendar. There's a month called July. That month was
named for Julius Caesar. The following month is August, named
after Caesar's nephew, the first Roman emperor, Augustus. The calendar
(01:47):
we used today was named after these two men who
lived two thousand years ago. The modern calendar is actually
Caesar's calendar. He added the number of days necessary to
actually fit how often the Earth goes around the sun,
and the three hundred and sixty five day calendar, including
adjusting it every four years for leap year, is Caesar's inventution.
(02:09):
So Caesar's in your life, whether you know it or not.
He's in your life every year, and he's part of
the calendar by which you live. The very term Caesar,
(02:33):
which became in German Kaiser for kaiser Wilhelm, became in
Russian czar, is today still a term that describes a
centralized dictatorial power, two thousand years after he died. So
we're dealing with somebody whose impact shook our part of
the world, the Western world, so profoundly that even to
(02:56):
this day he is in many ways an unknown and unstudied,
but very real presence. If you look at Latin, you'll
find that among the most elegant books ever written in
Latin was Caesar's Gallic Wars and Caesar's Civil Wars. Because
Caesar was not just a great military general an amazing politician,
(03:20):
he was also a remarkable good writer and a remarkably
good orator. His reputation for using language brilliantly made him
one of the leading people in Rome for much of
his life, just because of his sheer talent. The Roman
Republic got too big, too militaristic, was too much the
(03:40):
center of power, and as a result, money poured in
from all over to corrupt the Roman system. So if
you were in Greece, or you were in Spain, or
you were in North Africa and you wanted to get goodies,
the most efficient way to get goodies was to have
a lobbyist in Rome bribe somebody. And there are a
lot of lessons to be learned by what happens when
(04:03):
your system gets to be bigger than you can maintain
and when the breakdown of the traditional order leads to
the rise of tyrants, and that's literally what was happening
in Caesar's lifetime. If you don't understand the rome of
his time, you can't understand him. Caesar's uncle, Marius, is
around one hundred BC, and he's the best general of
(04:25):
his generation, but he is politically on the losing side
of a power struggle, and so he's sort of pushed
off to one side and he's not very important. And
all of a sudden, this huge Germanic tribe comes rolling
down the Rhone River valley, and the Roman people get
scared because they think this huge tribe is going to
(04:45):
break through into Italy, and so they call him back
and give him an army, and he goes north and
he wipes out the German tribe and they now like
Marius briefly, and then he is deposed and exiled, and
he is sent to place that we don't think of
as a desert, but in his time, Sicily was considered
a desert. It was not very heavily occupied, and as
(05:08):
he recounts late in his life, he survives only by
imagining what he's going to do to his enemies. When
he gets back, he does get back, and then he
does what he said he would do. Now, why does
this matter, Because what's beginning to happen. The politics of
personality and philosophy and policy are beginning to be replaced
(05:30):
by violence, by poisonings, by assassinations, by crowds in the street,
and by intimidation. And in many ways marriage is the
beginning of that breakthrough. Now, in that period, the secondary
of Sola, who is a great general, and Sala becomes
(05:51):
the great competitor to Marris, and between them they just
start wiping people out. So if you're in Sola side,
you're in danger of marry Is killing you. If you're
in married society or in danger of Salar killing you.
One of the ways they finance what they're doing is
they look at the richest guys and they just steal
their property and they say, you know, lucky you you
get to be exiled degrees and I want all your money,
(06:13):
or you could stay here, I'll kill you and then
I'll take all your money. Which one do you like better?
And a substantial number of Romans ended up going to
Greece for long periods just in order to avoid being
killed in that process. In that period, Julius Caesar doesn't
really exist yet, he's a kid. His family is very old.
In fact, they are among the oldest families Julie I
(06:35):
are among the oldest families in Roman history. They go
all the way back in theory a prince from Troy,
and in fact they trace their mythical background to the
goddess of Venus. So Caesar at one level is born
into a family which says to him, you are the
direct descendant of a god. And Caesar had the kind
of personality that made sense to him, and so his
(06:59):
whole life he has this kind of inner arrogance and
inner certainty that you probably have to be a descendant
of the god to have. I mean, it's a little
hard to imagine how any normal person could have been
like Caesar. But he has no money and his father
dies when he's young. His mother actually takes the families
relatively smallholdings and vests it in a high rise which
(07:20):
back then in six or eight story apartment building in Subura,
which was a working class neighborhood, and so she and
the family live on the top floor, which is also
the healthiest and the cleanest, and they read all the
rest of the floors, which means that in his early
twelve to sixteen years of age period, Caesar's wandering around
(07:42):
among working class people, learning working class Latin, understanding how
they think, what they do, how they negotiate. And he
is stunningly smart season maybe much like Napoleon, one of
the smartest people ever to live, and so he could
absorb information, He could learn things at enormous speed. Caesar
(08:10):
was ravenously ambitious. He thought he was descended from the gods.
He thought he was descended from a family which had
been cheated and which was socially worthy of dramatically greater
assets than they actually had. From the earliest time we
encounter him, he is unendingly ambitious, and he understands that
in the Roman world, if you're going to be ambitious,
(08:32):
you've got to be physically capable of being a warrior,
because otherwise you can't earn the level of respect that
essentially to watch Cicero, for example, who is probably Caesar's
equal as an orator and as a writer, is not
a great warrior, and it cripples his career because everybody
knows it. But Caesar is somebody who could fight his
way out of a room, could fight his way in
(08:54):
a battle, could lead an army in the army felt
honored to follow him. And I think he acquired that.
My guess is he acquired the corner that one he
was like thirteen or fourteen or fifteen years old, because
he looked around and said, I'm Caesar. Caesar goes on
to marry somebody who Sala doesn't like, goes she belongs
politically to the wrong side, and Sala who's a dictator?
(09:17):
And who is and he's really He and Marrits are
really the beginning of the total breakdown of the republic
as a system, because now you have dictators, you have
people who have real power, and they're prepared to kill
you if you don't do what they want, and sometimes
they'll kill you even if you do do what they
want because they need your money. And so Sala basically
says to him, you have to divorce your wife, and
(09:38):
Caesar says, no, It's truly one of those things where
you have to believe you have some kind of divine
destiny or you're just nuts. Because Caesar's standing there as
a very young man facing this dictator who's a great
general who's a huge force surrounding, is capable of killing
(09:58):
Caesar on the spot. He says, I'm not doing it,
and so Salah says, okay, well, then get out of town.
You know, I'm not going to For some reason, he
decided not to kill Caesar. And it may have been
again this magic touch that Caesar had, that he could
manipulate people at levels that are just astonishing, and so
the dictator said, Okay, I'm really really mad at you,
(10:21):
but I'm not going to kill you right now. So
Caesar goes up in the Apennine mountains for three years
hides because he knows that on a bad weekend, Sala
could wake up and decide, you know, Caesar doesn't amuse
me that much, let's kill him. Eventually, he joins the
army to get away from Rome because he wants to
get far enough away that Sala can easily kill him,
(10:45):
and he doesn't want to remind Sala that he's around.
So he wanders off and the great actionary at that
time for the army is over in what they would
have considered the East, which is along what we now
would say is the Turkish and Syrian coast. They were
constantly fighting with both pirates and with the local governments.
Caesar turns out to be an amazingly courageous soldier. He
(11:09):
wins the Oak Leaves, which is the highest sort of
the equivalent of our Congressional Medal of Honor. There are
many ways in which you can have authority or fame.
You know, you can be rich, you can be from
a good family, you can hold a high office. If
you've done something so heroic that you're allowed to wear
(11:29):
the oak wreath, you're now in a unique category because
no one can challenge your courage, and so it puts
you in a very small league, as it says, first
of all, you've been in combat, you've done it so
heroically that your peers awarded you this highest and then
the Congressional Medal of Honor is the only thing that's comparable.
(11:50):
And if you've ever been in military environments, people walk
in wearing the Congressional Medal of Honor are by definition
in a different league because it's something they earned. So
I think in that sense, it was one of the
things early on that marked him off, and that sort
of said this guy's special. He ought to take him seriously,
and he's going to become somebody. The concept of wearing
(12:13):
a wreath, which the Etruscans had done with gold wreaths
for their kings, and in Greek mythology, Apollo represents power
and wears a laurel wreath on his head. So in
Caesar's mind, wearing the oak wreath would be a signal
of his uniqueness, in his near godlike importance. Again, it
(12:34):
was an age when people started earlier because they died younger,
but still that this is a guy who's working really
hard to rise as fast as he can. So Caesar,
as a very young guy, is working his way into
being seen as a great soldier, a great general, a
great orator, very very clever politician. Caesar at one point
(12:55):
gets captured by pirates. Now, the pirates had operated off
the coat of Syria and Turkey because they had found
places where they could go in where the passageways were
so complicated that no one could find them. And what
they didn't realize was that Caesar had almost a perfect memory.
So two things start out of this particular experience. One is,
(13:18):
here's Caesar by himself, surrounded by pirates who are pretty
tough people, and they want twenty units of silver for him,
and he says, that's really stupid. You know, I'm a
famous guy. I mean, you got to go for fifty.
If you don't mean, if you don't go for fifty,
I will feel so insulted. And if you go for fifty,
they'll pay you. And by the way, after they pay
(13:39):
you and you release me, I'm going to come back
and kill you. The pirates all think this is just great.
Here's this guy. He's not physically dominant. He's fairly slender,
very muscled, but very slender. And he doesn't look like
he's a guy who's going to come back and kill
all the pirates. And so they laugh at I think
he's just terrific. He's very personality. I've chatting with him,
(14:00):
you know. So they get they asked for fifty because
he told him too. They get fifty, they're release him.
He organizes an army. He remembered exactly how to find them.
He goes back. He crucifies all of them, but because
he liked them, he cut their throats first. And there's
a brief note tremor about the Romans. Crucifixion in the
Roman model is designed to be really painful. It's not
(14:25):
what we see in the Christian image of Christ on
the cross and the Roman model. You are tied up
and you are hanging from a wooden cross, and the
goal is to allow you to hang there until the
point where birds, for example, will come and pack your
eyes out and you will eventually die of dehydration. When
(14:50):
the Romans put nails through Christ and pokemon the side
with a spear, these are actually considered acts of kindness
because they accelerate the rate of which you die. So
I understand the Roman world, you have to start with
the very simple model. These were really tough, ruthless people.
(15:12):
For example, when Spartacus rebels, one of the great moments
in Roman history, Spartacus has about twenty thousand followers, and
he really scares the Romans because the idea of a
slave rebellion would be genuinely frightening if you were a
Roman aristocratic. So when they finally defeat him, they crucify
somebody about every two hundred feet for seventy miles. So
(15:35):
from Naples to Rome you are riding down a road
that has people crucified the entire distance. And their goal
was to sort of say the people. We're really sincere
and we want you to know you do this kind
of stuff, we will relentlessly come and get you. But
this is also a country. Remember this before Caesar just
to give you his flavor, And it often hits me
(15:56):
as I walk around Rome, looking at the city and
looking at the wall. It's a city which had during
the Punic Wars with Carthage. Hannibal is in Italy for
seventeen years and they can't beat him, but he can't
break through the city walls, and so for seventeen years
(16:17):
they just slug it out and the Romans at one
point lose an entire army at a battle called Kena,
to which their attitude is, I guess we have better
get another army. They decided to beat the Carthaginians, they
have to go to sea and build a navy, which
they had not done up to them. They build an
entire navy. It goes to see there's a huge hurricane.
The navy sinks, and the Roman responses, I guess we
(16:39):
need a new navy, and they build another navy. I mean,
these are just relently this is the world. I'm giving
this his background because to understand Caesar you have to
understand this was accepted as normal. This level of toughness
was where they started. It wasn't what they got to.
And so Caesar comes along, and Caesar is of anything, smarter,
(17:01):
more personable, more ruthless, and tougher than anybody else. Somebody
once said that in the Great Fight between Pompey and Caesar,
the equivalent of two pirates mean that they were both
trying to win control of the Empire of the Republic,
which became the Empire, and that it wasn't like there
was a good guy and a bad guy. These are
guys just slugging it out for power. And if they
(17:23):
happen to kill you on the way through tough break
because what they were doing is important to them. So
here's Caesar comes back home, enters politics, becomes the high
priest of the Roman religion, which gives them another source
of authority, and it becomes an elected official. And the
Roman system is very complicated, and there's a hierarchy. You
(17:44):
get into, you gradually rise in importance. It's all designed
to minimize the ability of any one person to be
a dictator. It's it's what Marius and Salah have broken
out of but after Saulah's death, it begins to revert
back towards the traditions and the goal again a little
bit like the American Constitution. The goal is to not
have anybody concentrate power enough to be in charge the
(18:08):
whole thing. So they have two consoles. Every year, the
two consoles can veto each other. They have people who
elected to lower office. They have various powers, and Caesar's
gradually climbing this chain of authority, and at the same
time he is becoming one of the most popular people
in Rome, and it's really interesting to watch. Caesar is
(18:28):
instinctively what I would call a populist, in the sense
that having grown up in Sabora and having understood the
working class Romans, he had concluded that the future of
Rome was absorbing more and more people. So part of
his career will be extending citizenship to more and more
and more people, which builds a huge force of followers
(18:52):
because they see Caesar as protecting them and as being
their guy. Caesar ultimately is given authority to go to Gaul.
Now he's already led several armies in Spain. He's let
armies over in the east of what we would call
Turkey or Assyria. But now he has the big moment
of his career, and what people tend to forget is
(19:14):
Caesar's gone for seven years. There are about three million
men in Gaul when he arrives. One estimate is by
a Roman historian Suetonius, that he killed a million, sold
a million into slavery, and there were a million left
by the time he was done. He destroyed probably Suetonius
said he destroyed eight hundred towns. At one point, he
(19:38):
fights a particular tribe and they finally surrender. He surrounds
their fort, they finally surrender. Instead of killing them, he
cuts off their right hands, so that there are five
thousand men wandering around Gaul with one hand, because he
wants to send a signal that you oppose me, and
it is going to be really bad for you. Finally,
(20:00):
the tribes get together, they all rebel simultaneously. He is
in the fight of his life, and in about a
six month period he organizes his army how maneuvers them
and wins. Now, the Roman army's great strength is engineering
and logistics. They know how to have a siege, They
know how to build a fort to protect themselves. They
(20:23):
know how to sustain their army in the field with supplies.
It is a very well thought out army, in an
army which has been practicing war for several hundred years.
One one, the Gauls were probably as good or better
than the Romans. The Germans were probably as good or
better than the Romans. The problem was an in fight
one on one, and Roman armies were very, very good armies.
(20:45):
Caesar has a tremendous instrument which he uses brilliantly, and
he uses it for seven years. And s important to
understand this because when you watch what's about to happen
when he goes back to Rome, there's only one person
who as the level of military springs in the entire
Roman world and that season, and he knows how to move,
(21:05):
he knows how to organize. Nobody else is in his league.
After the break, Caesar returns to Rome and establishes his
role as leader of the Roman Republic. Caesar returns to
(21:31):
Rome after seven years at war in Gaul and he
faces a problem. He's got to cross the Rubicon River,
which is the boundary of Rome at the time. Caesar
builds a whole series of signal fires and he has
his legions leaning forward. He comes down without his legions
because he wants to be peaceful. He wants to send
(21:52):
a signal. He's written the Gallic Wars, which are well
worth reading and which essentially are he wrote vall every
year and the essentially or here's how Caesar went and
capture Gaul and turned all these slaves into money, and
why you should love Caesar because look what he's done
for Rome. He also founds a daily newspaper to remind
(22:12):
you that Caesar loves you. Caesar does good things for you.
So his enemies, who under Roman rule, if he gives
up his governorship, they can try him. And it's quite
clear given the last forty years of Roman history, if
they trying him, they're going to kill him. And that's
the only way they can contain him. And so he's negotiating, saying, oh,
(22:36):
I want to be peaceful, I really want to work
all this out. I'm down here without my army. You know,
I'm your guy. Can't we get something worked out? Well,
when they finally figure out, now we're not we want
to kill you. We're not going to order something out.
What they hadn't reckoned on was he had already set
his units in motion, and the first legion could get
(22:59):
to the Rubicon and days and they could send signal
fires all the way through Gold. So he's mobilizing a
force very fast. Meanwhile, his major opponent, Pompey, was the
great general before Caesar. Between Soa and Caesar, company is
the dominant figure, very successful, very well organized, but a
(23:20):
little slow and a little insecure. Where Caesar thinks, look,
I'm descended from the gods. I might as well gamble,
because you know the gods will be there for me.
Pompy kind of thinks, you know, I'm descending from normal people,
and this guy Caesar scares me. Nyus Pomparius Magnus, who
we would call Pumpy the Great, came out of a
(23:40):
provincial Italian background. It's an interesting contrast. Very competent man,
very hard working man. He actually cleans up all the
pirates in the eastern Mediterranean and is widely seen as
a tremendous organizer of military forces. But in the end,
he's not descended from the gods. He doesn't represent one
of the oldest families in Rome. He doesn't have this
(24:01):
aristocratic sense of destiny which is at the heart of
what makes Caesar so remarkable, And so Pompey's proud, he's competent,
he's powerful, but he's normal and he's trying to cope
with somebody who's abnormal. Pompey was smart, but Pompey was not.
He didn't have that quickness, that sudden political skill that
(24:26):
Caesar had, and he didn't have the ability to plan
at three or four or five levels simultaneously. And the
result was I think that Caesar always frightened him and
always confused him. Every general I've ever studied, Caesar's on
the shortlist people you cannot give spare time to because
he will use it, and he'll use it better than
(24:46):
you will. So Pompey leaves Italy. Now the reason this
really matters, and this is why when you visit Rome
and you look at the coliseum, and you look at
the forum, and you'll just think to yourself, this was
a city of over a million people at the time
we're talking about. It was the center of the Mediterranean world.
It had the symbolism it's Rome, the guy who gives up.
(25:11):
Rome gives up symbolically all of the emotional and moral power.
And as Caesar walks into Rome. He is acquiring all
of the authority of being in Rome, who is also
the center of money, in the center of commerce. So
Caesar overnight is able to start chasing Pompey's forces everywhere.
(25:31):
And Caesar has better divisions, but he has people who've
been practicing warfare for seven years. They are loyal to him.
Sadly for him, his top lieutenant actually leaves and joins Pompey.
I think Caesar will lose, and thinks that Caesar's breaking
the rules, and that makes Caesar feel bad, but he
sends all of his equipment to him because you know,
in a great seven years, sorry sight of the other guy,
(25:52):
because he's going to lose. And so Caesar wanders around
the Mediterranean defeating the various forces on the other side,
ending up with chasing Pompey all the way to Egypt,
where the Egyptians, having figured out the Pompey is a loser,
decided they will cut off his head and give it
to Caesar, because you know, they want to show Caesar
(26:13):
how much they like it. Well, then thought about the
fact that Pompey was married to Caesar's daughter. Pompey and
Caesar were friends, while they happened to have this little
disagreement which led to a civil war. It's very likely
Caesar would not have killed Pompey, and Caesar was genuinely
deeply offended who they were of civil war in Egypt
(26:34):
between Cleopatra and her brother, and her brother's the one
who cut off Pompey's head, and so he sides with her,
fights a civil war, defeats the Egyptian army, fights a
civil war in Egypt. There's a moment where the Romans
are being besieged in Alexandria, and it's true during the siege,
(26:54):
the act of the Great Library of Alexander's burned down.
Whether by Caesar's people or by the Egyptians, one we
don't a different a size to that story, but the
Great Loss was a huge collection of Greek and Egyptian
works that burned one night. But anyhow, they're there, and
the regular Romans are getting very nervous. They're really worried,
(27:15):
and why is Caesar not worried? And he said, I'm waiting,
and they go, well, what are you waiting for? He said,
I'm waiting for dawn, and they go, well, what happens
at Dawn said, well, the sun was I thought you knew. Well,
what I didn't tell him was that two months earlier
he had ordered his legions to come from Syria, and
(27:38):
he knew that they were a few miles outside of town.
And that's very much like Caesar. You can see Caesar's
ability to play seven games simultaneously, and I'll tell you
about any of them was amazing and it made him
I mean people, I think people at one level were
awe struck by him, and another level that were really
frightened because the essence of the Roman model was to
(28:03):
balance power, so nobody had too much power, and to
have a system in which the very structure of the
system limited the ability to lead to dictatorship. And what
had been happening was through this long hundred year period,
dictators kept killing people and had established a pattern now
that if you were on the losing side, it's not
(28:25):
a huge jump from one to jail to being killed,
and that's what's being to happen to them. And so
you saw this a continuous process. Even the people who
were four Caesar were worried because Caesar ultimately represented the
end of the republic and he represented establishing a new
system of power they had had since the last Setarkian
(28:48):
king was kicked out in four seventy six. The Romans
that had a passion against kingship. I mean a long
stretch there were If anybody thought you were thinking you
were going to become a king, you were gone. And
now all of a sudden, here's the guy who, by
sheer power and sheer brilliance, is clearly the central figure.
He becomes dictator for life, not yet king, doesn't want
(29:11):
to be king, just happy to be dictator. And so
a group of people who begin to really worry that
the system is right at tilt and if they don't
do something that in fact the republic will die. And
that's why you end up with the assassination. In March
(29:31):
of forty four BC, when we come back, Caesar faces
a senate who, jealous and his power, decides to murder him.
An unfairly discharged marine with a dark secret, a brilliant
(29:54):
intelligence officer recovering from tragedy. This unlikely pair are brought
together to stop a deadly I plot against the hearts
of the American System. Number one New York Times bestselling
authors Nuke Ingridge and Pete Early returned with a new
series filled with action and intrigue that captures the tensions
and divides of America and the world today. Collusion, a
(30:15):
novel by Nuke Ingridge, available on Amazon dot Com and
Audible now. One of the fascinating aspects of Caesar's life
was the impact of his death, because it became one
(30:37):
of the most historic moments in all of Western history,
partially because of the brilliant portrait in Shakespeare's play and
the speech by Mark Antony at his funeral. Partially because
Caesar had been such a life force, He had been
(30:58):
so dominant, he strode across the Roman Empire in such
a huge way that his disappearance through death left a
vacuum that would take years to sort out, because there
was no natural ability for anyone to step in and
become Caesar, and so there'd be an entire civil war
(31:20):
before he was replaced by his nephew who had actually
found the empire itself, Octavius, who becomes Augustus, and who's
the second month we name for one of the Caesars.
So he had July and August Caesar himself. In a way,
he had almost set the stage for his own killing.
(31:42):
The Greeks had a concept they called hubris, and hubris
meant that you began to take onto yourself enormous power
and enormous self affection. And as you became more and
more filled with hubris, you began to set yourself up
for what the Greeks called nemesis, and nemesis was the
(32:03):
destruction of the person who had hubris. Well, in a way,
Caesar is the perfect model of what the Greeks were
trying to warn about. The bigger Caesar became, the more
powerful Caesar became, the more people feared him, and the
more people envied him. And remember the core of this
isn't the average Roman. The average Roman thought Caesar was fine.
(32:24):
Caesar fed them, Caesar entertained them, Caesar conquered slaves that
enriched them. So Caesar had a pretty big base among
normal people. But if you're an aristocrat, and you had
a great sense of self worth, and you thought your
family had been around for hundreds of years, and here
suddenly you're in the shadow, no longer an equal, no
(32:45):
longer a fellow aristocrat, no longer a person who could
look upon themselves as significant, But instead you were clearly weaker, lesser, subordinate, smaller.
You hated every minute of it, and you thought, who
this guy Caesar, That he's flaunting his power, he's flaunting
(33:08):
his role in history, because there was a sense that
the bigger Caesar got, the smaller the aristocrats got. So
part of just pure old fashioned jealousy, Well, Caesar had
now accumulated a very substantial number of aristocrats who just
loathed him. They couldn't say that to his face because
they were terrified of him, because he'd kill him. So
(33:29):
they talked to each other, and quiet they met together,
they began conspiring. There was a secondary part of this.
There was a legitimate, honest, deep fear of kingship. It's
important to remember that Rome really becomes Rome in four
seventy six BC when they get rid of the last king,
the last Tarkeean king is replaced, and the Romans acquire
(33:53):
this deep passionate opposition to having a king. That's why
the republic is so stable for such a long period,
because in their mind the alternative is to go back
to kingship. Well, now here's Caesar who says every day, oh,
I don't really want to be a king. But in
the last days before the Eyes of March. He and
(34:13):
Mark Anthony begin to play a game in which Mark Anthony,
who's his chief subordinate, starts to say, oh, well, wouldn't
you consider being a king? And Caesar says no, no, no, no,
nothing's further from my mind. I really I can't imagine
why you had mentioned the word king and Julius Caesar
in the same sentence. Well, the other nobles know this
is the beginning of a setup, and that at some
(34:36):
point that summer that Caesar is very likely going to say, well,
all right, if you really want me to be king,
how can I turn you down? So you have both
this fear that Caesar represents the end of the republic
and the death of a system which was almost five
hundred years old by that stage, and you had this
(34:57):
personal level of just really deeply disliking Caesar because he's
too big, too powerful, too arrogant, too smart, and they
just want to get rid of him. Conspiracy begins to grow,
and ironically, the Roman Senate itself was being refitted, and
so they had to move the meeting place. They chose
(35:20):
Pompey's Theater, remembering, of course that Pompey was the great
Leader who Caesar had defeated in the earlier Civil war.
So now they're going down to Poppey's Theater, which was
a quite spectacular place, and they're going to meet. The
rumor comes supposedly from a soothsayer who could see the future,
the Caesar should be where the eyes of march. It
(35:41):
was apparently real enough that his wife begged him not
to go to that meeting of the Senate that day.
And this apparently is not just a fiction of Shakespeare's making,
but actually at the time was a real event. Caesar,
of course, I think, had two different things he going on.
One he was very skeptical of these kind of things.
(36:03):
He didn't particularly worry about soothsayers telling whom he's going
to win or lose anything. But the other was I
think that he had this sense of destiny. If it
was his destiny to be killed, then he would become
a martyr for Rome. If it was his destiny to
stay alive, then he would continue to be the leader
who had become dictator, which was a step below kingship,
(36:25):
and he would continue simply to run Rome. And I
think he sort of thought in that sense, there's a
fatalism in Caesar that runs through his entire life, and
you can see it over and over again, where he
risked death and he risked defeat because he just believes
you have to roll the dice and see what's going
to happen. For verst his entire life, he'd rolled the
dice and he'd won. So he goes to Pompey's theater
(36:49):
that day and there may have been up to sixty
nobles who had gotten together, although the number who actually
attacked him is a much smaller number. He knew that
a number of him disliked him, but part of the
reason they disliked him was he had contempt for them.
So since he had contempt for them, he wasn't going
to be afraid of them. And he deliberately dismisses his
(37:10):
security force because he wants to communicate I'm not afraid
of you guys. I don't need to be surrounded by
police to protect me because none of you guys have
the guts to do anything anyway. Well, that particular day,
he was wrong. When he goes in, the senators who
hated him surround him. Supposedly Civilius Casca hits the strikes
(37:31):
the first blow, hitting him in the neck and drawing blood.
Other senators join in and he is a hit again
and again and again around the head in the neck.
Marcus Brutus apparently wounds him in the groin, at least
that's the traditional legend, and Caesar said to us said
to him, you too, my child, or at too brute,
as it became translated in later years. There was a rumor,
(37:55):
which probably wasn't true, but it was a really delicious rumor,
that Brutus in fact was his illegitimate son. He certainly
had had a long relationship with Buddhist's mother, but given
the relative ages, it's unlikely that Buddhist is really his son.
But it's clear that Buddhists really disliked Caesar, probably in
part because he objected to Caesar sleeping with his mother,
(38:16):
and that was the habit of Caesar had with a
substantial number of women around the Roman aristocracy, which probably
further led to people being willing to kill him. So
Caesar dies and it's as though a great force has
left the world. And I think at one level they're
all staring at each other going, oh my god, we
(38:37):
really did it. And then they're faced with, so how
do we deal with the Roman crowd? Because the Roman
crowd initially was very pro Caesar. Caesar had been very
good to them, and he had improved their lives. He
paid attention to them, He was a popularis, he was
interested in the people rather than the aristocracy. So they said, basically,
(39:00):
we saved Rome from dictatorship. Mark Anthony, speaking at the funeral,
gives an oration. It's pretty clear that when the assassins
were done speaking, they were in pretty good shape. By
the time Mark Anthony was done speaking, they're all sneaking
out of town because the mob has turned, and the
(39:23):
mob clearly now will tear them apart. And this is
apparently really an actual fact of that particular day that
in one oration, Mark Anthony, who had been Caesar's deputy,
is able to convince people, Oh, I could never speak
well of Caesar, because we've all been told, be these
honorable men, how evil Caesar is, and we know these
(39:44):
are honorable men, and therefore I can't say anything good
about Caesar. And so I'm not even sure I should
read you Caesar's will, which Caesar, who loved you so much,
has written, but it would be wrong of me to
read this will in which Caesar do so much, because
we've all been told how evil Caesar is by these
honorable men. And this goes on and on a crowd
(40:07):
after a little while, the crowdbeans to go, we'll read
the will. We want to hear the will. Well, of
course the will is a perfectly political document, and which
Caesar has basically said, I love Rome so much that
everything I have goes to you, the people of Rome.
And then Anthony has to say, well, now, we can't
be grateful to Caesar for having loved us so much,
(40:29):
because we've all been told by these honorable men that
he was a tyrant, that he was a bad person.
So I'm sure none of you would want us to
execute his will and give everybody all the things Caesar
wants you to have, because would be so wrong to
do that when these honorable men have told you that
Caesar was bad. And of course by this point you're
(40:50):
a combination of emotion and greed and memory. And frankly,
the aristocrats are not very not very nice people. And
the average person in Rome knew that harrish person all
knew that the number one reason the aristocrats didn't like
Caesar was because they're aristocrats. And by the way, the
aristocrats weren't going to be nice to the people either.
And it apparently is true historically that by the end
(41:12):
of Anthony's speaking the aristocrats who killed Caesar had left
Rome to get away before the crowd attacked him. It's
truly a remarkable moment. And in that process, Caesar had
set the stage by his death and by his will,
by Anthony, who understood him, and by his young nephew Octavius,
(41:35):
who had been an apprentice to Caesar. Caesar had brought
him in, Caesar had him travel with him, Caesar had
taken him on the wars, and Octavius learned an immense amount.
Where Caesar shatters and ends the republic, he doesn't actually
create a stable system, and that's part of why he
gets killed. But his nephew. Now, his nephew will come along,
(41:59):
take over the family business, take over Caesar's name, and
in the process establish an empire which will last for
four hundred years. And it's truly remarkable because nobody on
the day Caesar was killed could have picked Octavius out
as the long term winner. He was totally underestimated by
everyone and yet he had learned so much from his uncle,
(42:22):
and he knew how to play. Being the nephew, the
only person who could claim to be Julius Caesar's heir
was Octavius, and that may have been what, ultimately, after death,
was Caesar's last great contribution to the history of Rome
and the history of the Western world. If you'd like
(42:43):
to know more about Julius Caesar, We've created a show
page or some of my favorite books, plays, and movies
about him at newtsworld dot com. Newtsworld is produced by
Westwood One. The executive producer is Debbie Myers. Our producer
is Garnsey Slum. Our editor is Robert Barrowsky. Our researcher
is Rachel Peterson. The artwork for the show was created
(43:05):
by Steve Penley. The music was composed by Joey Salvia.
Special thanks to the team at Gingwich three sixty and
Westwood Ones, Tim Sabian and Robert Mathers. Please subscribe to
Newsworld on Apple podcast, Spotify, Google Play, or wherever you
get entertaining podcasts. On the next episode of Newsworld, five
(43:27):
G technology is going to fundamentally change the way we
live our lives find out why it's referred to as
the next Industrial Revolution. I'm Newt Gingrich. This is News World,
(44:07):
the Westwood one podcast network. Everyone's listening.
Popular Podcasts
40s and Free Agents: NFL Draft Season
Daniel Jeremiah of Move the Sticks and Gregg Rosenthal of NFL Daily join forces to break down every team's needs this offseason.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
The Bobby Bones Show
Listen to 'The Bobby Bones Show' by downloading the daily full replay.