When Rules Erode And Armies Obey Men, Republics Learn To Love Kings

What makes a people trade a messy republic for the promise of a single, steady hand? We take you inside Rome’s long unraveling—where unwritten rules cracked, armies switched their loyalties from the state to ambitious men, and everyday citizens learned to equate strong leadership with survival.

Starting with mos maiorum, the “way we do things,” we unpack how norms sustained Rome when laws fell short—and how prosperity after the Punic Wars quietly hollowed out the citizen-farmer base. The Gracchi brothers tried to fix real economic pain by routing around the Senate, proving that breaking precedent delivers results and bloodshed. From there, the incentives changed: Marius opened the legions to the landless, tying soldier futures to commanders. Sulla crossed the final line by marching on Rome, posting proscriptions, and using legal dictatorship to “restore” order. He retired a hero to tradition, but the damage was done. Once politics becomes a contest of armies, you can’t pretend it’s only a contest of speeches.

We connect those choices to the psychology of a public living through repeated crises. After a century of civil wars, most Romans no longer remembered a functioning republic; they remembered insecurity. That’s when a single ruler starts to look less like tyranny and more like peace. We explore the tension between reformers and traditionalists without forcing modern labels, and we land on a durable lesson: healthy systems need both the discipline of law and the creativity of prophets. All discipline withers without renewal; all creativity destroys without form.

If you’re curious about the stepping stones that led from the Gracchi to Caesar to Augustus—and the modern signals that warn when a republic is thinning its own oxygen—this conversation offers clear waypoints and practical takeaways. For further reading and listening, we shout out Dan Carlin’s Death Throes of the Republic and more. Enjoy the dive, share it with a friend, and if it sparked new questions, leave a review and tell us what guardrail you’d fight to protect.

Check out Dan Carlin's Hardcore History for a More In-Depth Look https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/dan-carlins-hardcore-history/id173001861

©NoahHeldmanMusic

https://livingoncommonground.buzzsprout.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Does it feel like every part of your life is divided? Every scenario, every environment, your church, your school, your work, your friends, left, right, conservative, liberal, religious, secular. It seems you always have to take a side. This is a conversation between a progressive Christian and a conservative atheist who happen to be great friends. Welcome to Living on Common Ground. Do you think if we met today, we would still be friends? I don't know.

SPEAKER_03 0:35

But we're friends now.

SPEAKER_05 0:38

A mom is known as a mom because they are living in a good dog. Man, so well, we want a few games. Y'all fools think that's something? Man, that ain't nothing, y'all. And you know what else? We ain't nothing either. Yeah, we came together in camp. Cool. But then we're right back here, and the world tells us that they don't want us to be together. We fall apart like we ain't a damn bit of nothing, man.

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SPEAKER_04 1:16

All right. So today we're gonna talk about Rome's transition from a republic to an empire.

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SPEAKER_02 1:24

That's what we're gonna talk about. Did we write that down?

SPEAKER_04 1:26

I did. Yeah. All right. Uh in fact, I shared with you an entire document on Google Drive, and I saw that you haven't looked at it yet.

SPEAKER_02 1:31

No, I looked at it once. Did you? I did look at it. Oh, you didn't do anything. I didn't I didn't change it.

SPEAKER_04 1:35

You didn't edit it. That's why it still said my name. I haven't changed anything on it. Yeah, you didn't even fix my typo. I had to go back and fix the typo. I'm not gonna fix your typo. You should have. Instead of instead of uh hanging out uh for one of our topics, I put hanging hour.

SPEAKER_02 1:52

Yeah. Well, maybe that's what I thought it should be.

SPEAKER_04 1:56

I'm not what we're hanging hour what. Okay. All right. What do you want to what do you want to know? So here's what I want to know. How the hell did it happen? Right? I mean, I okay, I know the popular story. So uh because I did watch the HBO mini-series Rome. Uh-huh. So obviously I know everything about it. That's great. That's a great series, though. I thought it was a good series. I re what I really liked about it was that it was from the perspective of um centurions. Sure. A couple. I mean a couple. Yeah, yeah. Right.

SPEAKER_02 2:24

And um Yeah, that was an interesting perspective.

SPEAKER_04 2:28

Yeah. Yeah, because you always get like the emperor and you always get like that, the um what what do you call that? The aristocracy. Yeah, the patricians. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 2:38

All the patricians, the senators and stuff.

SPEAKER_04 2:40

Right. Okay. So I'm so, but anyway, uh, you know, I am um I am uh aware of Caesar, um, Julius Caesar and you know, Brutus and and and uh um, you know, and all the stuff that plays out around that. Also because I just finished reading Lives of the Stoics. Yeah. And so that like they talked about Brutus being a stoic and um and then his wife being a stoic and connecting that to her father and all that kind of stuff.

SPEAKER_03 3:10

Okay.

SPEAKER_04 3:11

All right, so I'm familiar with that. But what I want to know is like what's interesting to me. How do I want to Okay, so I can it makes sense to me that if I am in a position of authority like a Caesar and I have the opportunity to to take um complete authority, I can see that that would be something that a person would want. Right. And so so that's not the question. The question is like it but uh but as a as a society, as a as a republic, it doesn't just happen overnight. There has to be things that have contributed to the to to where the society, the the government, um, the people have reached a point where they're actually it seems to me, while yes, there are some in the Senate that still oppose it, obviously he gets assassinated and all that. Um but when they're done, they don't go back to a republic, they just replace it with a new form of empire. And the so the people, the people, the populace seems to want an empire or an emperor. It's the it's the Senate and that class that doesn't. So how does how does the society get to the point where they actually want a uh a ruler rather than a republic? Yeah. And and I I find that very curious, and um, and so I'm kind of looking at the history of Rome. And you are my um you are my go-to when it comes to this particular uh well, with a lot of history, you're my go-to. Um but uh I mean you could really be filling me with a bunch of BS and I'd be like, wow, that's that's fascinating, Lucas. Um but I trust you enough to to believe that what you tell me um has merit. So I want to know. Give it, give it to me. Like, how does this happen? Um and what would have been in the signs that that people could have could I mean again, I read the book and I know that there are certain signs that this that in history, as they're going back and writing about stoicism in particular, that they see. But what are signs? Like, what are things that people, if they had been they had been paying attention, would have known that this was gonna possibly be the outcome? Big question, I think. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 5:50

Well, so okay, so first off, um, the quick answer to that last question is I don't think that you can ever know. I I don't think anybody would ever know. I don't think anybody I don't think anybody in any of the periods of um the the end of the republic and the beginning of the Imperium had any idea at all that that's what they were living through at all. They would not have told you that. Um uh and so as a preamble here, um you know, there are podcasts that do a fantastic job, historians that do a fantastic job of um talking about the um the end of the republic. Um Carlin's uh hardcore history. I know we don't promote other um podcasts on this show.

SPEAKER_04 6:38

If we did I mean, where did we get our information? Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 6:41

Uh his hardcore history has a um uh a series called uh Death Thres of the Republic. It's very good. And I feel like it it does take you back to kind of where the where you can start to see the beginnings. So that's good.

SPEAKER_04 6:55

Um and then um uh what about Tom Holland and Dominic Um Sandbrook?

SPEAKER_02 7:03

Yeah, they do What's the name of that one again? That's the rest is history.

SPEAKER_04 7:06

Yeah, I've stopped listening to that one for some reason.

SPEAKER_02 7:09

I just I've just been listening to it again. Uh there uh I listened to their entire French Revolution um series, which they're not done with. They have another whole section that they're gonna be able to do that.

SPEAKER_04 7:19

It's not the first time they've covered that.

SPEAKER_02 7:21

Yeah, they did they've done like sections of it.

SPEAKER_04 7:23

Because I remember listening to some of it.

SPEAKER_02 7:25

Yeah, but they they cover it. Um they they talk about it a lot, but I don't know that they have a real series on it. But um uh Republican and uh certainly early Imperium Rome um are um Tom Holland's specialty. And then Christian Rome definitely is is some of his specialty as well. Anyway, so my point in doing that preamble is to say, um, I can talk about this, but there's gonna be a ton I'll leave out because there's there's just so much.

SPEAKER_04 7:59

Yeah, if you want, if you want more detail, if you want to learn more detail, these are people that you can go and listen to or read.

SPEAKER_02 8:04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 8:04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 8:05

Um and I'm blanking on the other guy's name that uh is the godfather of history podcasts. He did the first one, the history of Rome, and then he did revolutions, but he wrote a book called Um The Storm Before the Storm, which is about the first civil war. And that is really where uh the first Roman Civil War, and that is really where um I I think it's it's fair to say nobody would no no historian is gonna say that the republic is over at the end of this that civil war, but I think it's over. I think it's done. I don't think you're I think um you're not coming back. You're you're not going backwards, you would be going forward into something different.

SPEAKER_04 8:44

And that would have been the parents of the people that were participating in the Julius Caesar stuff.

SPEAKER_02 8:50

Yeah. So um, so to answer one of your last questions that I I think I can answer pretty directly, how does a people get to the point where they want a Caesar, a strong man? Um Rome had lived through by the time um uh Octavian, uh Octavius Augustus um finally wins the final civil war. By that point, Rome had been living through about a hundred years of constant civil war. So you think about a generation being somewhere around 25 years, you could think maybe three or four generations where it's brief periods of everything's kind of calmed down. It's not stable, but just kind of calmed down, and then it we're right back into civil war again. And so I really think you get to the you you get to that point, and number one, nobody is around, nobody is alive that remembers what it was like, yeah, right. Like just like today, nobody's alive that can remember what it was like living as a 20-something in 1948 in the United States, right? I mean, there's really nobody, yeah. You might be able to talk to one of your grandparents that's maybe a hundred years old at this point. What can you get from them? But they're the last, right? Um so you have that, and then you also have the fact that um that I just think when you have instability for so long, um people people want that stability. There's also this phrase that the Romans used called mos mayorum, which I think is very, very important. And mos mayorum is just a um a term that means essentially means the way we do things. This is the way it's done, right? And um so during the generation prior to Julius Caesar, and then and well, and very, very early on, um a lot of what led to the first civil war, in my in my estimation, is an eroding of Mos Mayorum. So really quickly, you get done with the Punic Wars, Rome is ascendant, they win. That's years and years of war, but Rome wins. And a lot of what comes with that is vast new territories and an enormous number of slaves. That's a big part of the story. So um Rome had always been a uh citizen-soldier army where um the citizens uh there was there was actually even like um uh minimum levels of wealth that you had to have in order to be a soldier, right? And so uh, or you know, land ownership. And so land ownership, ownership over um over yourself, all you know, um you you have small family farms. This was like core to early, early Roman Republic. After the Punic Wars, and you get this influx of slaves, along with a lot of other things. Um, there's consolidations that happen of um farms and businesses and that kind of thing. But what ends up happening is you have um a lot of these soldiers that owned their property, they would have to go off to war. Their family farm would fall into ruin. Larger uh landowners would come in and purchase those and put them together, and now they've got huge amounts of land and they'd work them with slaves. And so now you have large groups of Roman citizens. They're still citizens, but they're they they're not landowning anymore. Um, they're they they don't have work. They don't even have a lot of um, a lot of the time they didn't even have day labor um available to them. So one of the very first parts of this is um this guy named Tiberius Gracchus, who is a patrician. He's a upper class. Um he says that he's riding through the countryside and he sees vast tracts of land being worked by non-Romans. And then he goes to Rome, then he's in the city and he sees the, you know, the wretched poor and they're all citizens. And he thinks it's terrible. And so one of the first things he tries to do is he wants to push through land reform to start. Um, and there's a lot of detail here of people using public land in ways that they weren't supposed to, and like there's a lot of other detail. But basically, he wants to do read some redistribution of wealth. He says the the Roman citizens used to have this land, they should have it. And so what I want to do is I want to take that from these senatorial class people and give it to the the pe the the Roman citizens. Fast forward, he tries to he tries to get it through the Senate. Obviously, they're not having it because I mean, like they're gonna vote to get rid of their own wealth. That's that's not gonna happen. But Rome has this system where they've got kind of two houses. They've got the Senate that really is the one in charge, but they also have the tribunes, the tribunes of the plebs. And that's a whole nother story, how they came up with this position. And the tribune has a lot of power to veto um the tribunate itself has to, you know, uh laws have to be passed through there in in particular ways in order to be able to be passed. So they they actually have a lot of power. Um and the tribune of the plebs um has a lot of power himself. However, they're really not supposed to pass laws with what they're supposed to do if they have laws that they want to pass, they have bills, they're supposed to um get it, send it through the Senate. It has to be approved through the Senate. Well, Tiberius goes, I'm just not gonna do that. There's not that's the way it's supposed to be done, but there's no law to says that. That's mas mayorum. So he goes, How about I just don't do that? And by the way, he's a patrician, so he's not supposed to be a tribune uh tribune of the clubs. This happens over and over again, too, where patricians start to give up their um their social status as a patrician so that they can take on this, it's like a loophole in the system. They can take on this really powerful position of tribune. Anyway, he tries to get his land reform uh passed and he just passes it. And of course the clubs think it's great, you know, so they so he gets it passed. Um but he gets killed. So at the end of it, um, he gets killed by the Senate. Um and I won't take you through the whole string because it's there's a string of these um upper class uh patricians who are shirking the quote the mos mayorum in order to in in order to bring about um legal and social change in Rome, that you know, uh there's a strong argument that this was needed. Okay, the a lot of this stuff was a r was a real problem. These were real problems. Um and so you know, his brother, Gaius Gracchus, kind of takes up the mantle like 20 years later, um he gets killed. Um and then there's there's a like I said, there's several of them that I um I can't I'm not even gonna be able to get off the top of my head, but there's several of them that this process keeps happening. And and also another um issue that's funny about it, is every time, almost every time, there's some sort of proposal that that these kind of populists, that's what you can call them. You can call them populists. In fact, at some point they they start to be called um the populare. So there's the optimates and the populare. And the populare are the ones for the people. What is it? The optimates are the elite. Um this is this is kind of the like the senate would be that.

SPEAKER_03 17:39

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 17:40

But there are populare who start to become uh from the Senate. So the Senate starts to have these kind of groupings of populare. Julius Caesar ends up being associated with the populare. Um and so so you start to see this kind of this this kind of division. Um, but they're all populists. Okay. So they're they're basically they're saying like, we've got these problems, we know they're these problems, we have these laws and these these um methods that we've always followed. The Senate insists that we follow them, but it means that we're never gonna get anything solved, right? And we've heard this in our growing up, right? Government never solves anything. Congress just never does anything. Why can't we get the government to do something? Well, tell you what, when you get someone in there who can get stuff done, that can be a real problem for the it's a trade-off, right? It's a trade-off because it's a real problem for stability a lot of times. So um, anyway, so these these people keep coming in and um and breaking the rules in order to do what they think needs to be done. Oh, that's what I was gonna get at almost every time. They will they will propose something, they'll try to get it through, they'll get killed. Okay, that's that's happened con over and over again until they started being um if you were gonna be one of these people, you would you would keep an armed gang with you. Sure. And then it would be an armed militia, like an army. And that becomes important later. But they would they would get killed, and then the Senate would do it anyway. They would end up like, they'd go, okay, I guess we can we can give you this a little bit like where they could have done it and they could have done it initially and it wouldn't have killed a guy. Maybe not have resulted in the bloodshed. In fact, it um there was one there was one guy, um, and I I can't remember his name, um, but he's the same thing, populist guy. He is he is gonna um you know push for all this populist reform. The uh the Senate, so the so the Senate has um elects two consuls, that's the leader. Kind of think of him as president, like dual president, but it's not exactly more like prime minister kind of, but they're the head generals also. So the Senate um elects uh one of their consuls. Um was it that? Oh no, I think he was running, I think that's what it was. The populace was running for that's what it was. The populace was running for consul. And the the Senate ran a guy up um against him. And their strategy was everything he promises to the people, you promise double. That's all. You just you say, well, if he's gonna give you two acres, we're gonna give you four. That guy doesn't even that he doesn't care about the people like I do. And of course he won. And then they were like, I'm not doing that. That was just campaign promises, right? It's a great strategy, actually. Um, so so all of that's happening. There's also the issue of um of citizenship. So that's an issue in Italy, uh in the Italian peninsula, because you could be part of the Roman Empire, you could speak the same language, look exactly like them, have been part of the Roman Empire for 300 years, but you're not a citizen because you're a Sam knight or you're whatever. And citizenship was important because it carried with it um, you know, uh autonomy and power, and you couldn't vote if you weren't a citizen, and you know. Um, and in fact, there's a war that happens during this time called the Social War, which is all of the allies, the Italian allies, fighting against the fighting against Rome because they want citizenship. Um so that all really kind of culminates with the with the big civil war that happens. Um, and what ends up again, this is this is a huge section in here that I'm skipping, which is Marius, who's a consul. Okay, so he's part of the elite. He gets voted consul, so he's the the general, defeating um these uh Celtic groups that just appeared right in the middle of this whole thing that they're dealing with. Now all of a sudden there's these Celtic groups of people that are, I mean, like hundreds of thousands of people with huge very good armies that just appeared on their border and demolished army after army that Rome sent to fight them. Marius reorders the entire army. This is important as well. He reorders the entire army instead of he just um eliminates the landownership requirement. So they had been reducing the landownership requirement over um over the course of decades because they weren't getting enough, you know, people had less and less land than an army.

SPEAKER_04 22:52

So they're consolidating and making better. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 22:54

That's right. Um and so Marius just eliminates it. And he says, instead, what's gonna happen is um you're gonna fight for me for for Rome. He's gonna say, you're gonna fight for Rome. When we win, you'll get your spoils. That's how this is gonna work, right? And so um that's important because that starts a trend of armies fighting for their leader instead of fighting for Rome necessarily, because their leader is what's going to give them the payoff at the end. Um, so that was an important part of that as well. But anyway, so this all happens, and then um you've got this guy, Sola, who gets he gets elected um consul as well. He gets sent off to the east to um to fight the big war that everyone wants to fight against Mithridates. Everyone wants to fight it because it's going to be very, very profitable. But Sola is a con he's a I almost I almost said Sola's a conservative. He's uh he's a traditionalist. That's what he is. That would be a conservative. Yeah, he thinks but I the reason I hesitate is because I don't want to relate it to modern day terms. You know what I mean? Um, but he's he thinks that we should have a Senate. We should not be putting so much power into one person. Um these these uh patricians who keep, you know, uh renouncing their their title in order to exploit this loophole, it's causing it's causing havoc in our society. And um we gotta put a stop to this and we gotta go back to the way I mean, r the republic made us great. It made us, it made us the dominant, you know, force and um, and we're giving up all of this. We're just pushing Moss Mayorm right out the window. He gets sent off to the um to the east to fight this war. By the time he gets out there, Marius, who is kind of the anti-Sola, and again, there's a big story behind that. Don't worry about that. Marius and Sola at this point have grown to really kind of hate each other. Um and and Sola is really, as far as a military leader, Sola is probably the um the only one who's a match for Marius. Marius is very old at this point as well. So anyway, Marius kind of, when Sola goes off, Marius gets the Senate to um to strip him of his of his command in the East. And um so they send out a um uh messenger to tell him. I mean, just think about that that would have been a sucky job to get, I mean, to to get assigned. Like, here's what you need to do. You need to go out to that really, really dangerous guy who has a huge army who is super at this point, super loyal to him. And you got to tell him, actually, uh, you're no longer the general.

SPEAKER_04 26:04

Yeah, this guy over here is gonna be the general, and um, and you need to go back to Rome to it reminds me of the story in uh Chronicles when the messenger comes and tells David how King Saul died. Uh-huh. And then David kills him. Yeah. Yeah. Even though Saul's his enemy.

SPEAKER_02 26:21

Uh-huh. Yeah. Yeah. It's um it it well, and it went just about as well. You know, um, he uh basically he the solo just looked at his troops and he said, Um, they say that we're no longer I'm no longer your general. What do you think? And they went, like, screw him, you know, like and um and so they wrap he wraps up the the war that he's been fighting there. He kind of kind of brings Methodides to the table and says, like, hey, let's just it's one of the very few times that Rome goes, we'll let you, we're gonna walk away from this, because he's got to go take care of Rome. And he marches his people, his army back to Rome. And every as soon as the word comes back that Sola has started his march back to Rome, I mean, Rome goes into bedlam. Everyone is freaked out. Because here's the other part. While he's been gone, he's getting all these reports of all of his friends, his allies, his fan, all of that. They're being killed. They're being prescripted, right? The prescriptions start at this time. All their homes are being burned down. A lot of them are escaping and coming to him, right? At one point, there's a there's a bunch of um senators, because there's senator senatorial class as well. A lot of the senators are fleeing because they're being targeted because they were on his side. They're fleeing out to him. And at one point he says, I have so many senators here, I have my own senate. Like we've got enough, we got a quorum.

SPEAKER_03 27:57

You know?

SPEAKER_02 27:58

Anyway, so he he starts back and they just they everyone freaks out because they know he's coming back. And he does. So he comes, he comes in and um kind of lets his army off the leash for a little bit, um, and then and then regains order and basically says, like, um, okay, here's how it's gonna go. Uh, everyone who any anybody who was um part of the Marian um side, they're going on a list. And if you think that there are people that should be on that list that aren't that on that list, you let me know. That list is going up. All of their property is forfeit, and and you get a reward if you bring me their head. Um and and so and he and so those are the prescriptions. And so that he just cleared it all out. And um, and then but then he did all these reforms. So for instance, he did he did reforms to cut the uh legs out from underneath the tribune of the plebs. So no more, no more just like you can just get that position and you can command the Senate, right? Because this whole thing is we're going back to the way that it was. The Senate needs to be in charge. We need to follow these rules. Um, there are other things like you're supposed to go from position to position within the Senate. Um uh it's called the cursus on honorum. It's like these these steps that you should take and um have position after position after position until you were, it kind of would, it would take about a good 25, 30 years or so to go through that. So that the people who were running for console were like in their 40s and they had had all this experience and all that kind of stuff. Well, people were just skipping it, you know. They would just, they would just run for adial and they were like 22 years old or whatever, you know. So you put an end to all that. You have minimum amounts of time, you have to be in all these. So he he tried to put it all back. Then he leaves and they he goes, Okay, these are all the rules. We're gonna have elections, consuls. His guy that he puts up for consul, one of them gets elected, one of them doesn't. So he goes, See, I'm fair. Like I'm gonna I'm gonna stand by the actual principles, right? And um then he leaves because he goes, I still have this war in the east, I gotta go fight, you know? He leaves and they start doing the same thing again. They kill all of his friends, they they go, all of those reforms, forget it. So he turns around, he comes back, he wipes them all out again, he does it the second time. And that's that's when you get the uh the great story of um of a very young Pompey, thank you, who would uh later on be called uh Pompey the Great, but uh he's one of the triumvirate with Julius Caesar and um and uh Crassus.

SPEAKER_03 31:25

That's when he's an adult.

SPEAKER_02 31:26

When he's a young adult, um 20, you know, mid-20s, something like that. Um he's he's sitting uh in front of a tribunal. He's running a tribunal, trying people coming in for prescription. You know, people dragging this person in saying they were part of the Marian side or whatever, you know. And he says, guilty, kill them, take all their stuff. It's ours now, you know. And someone, someone says, What you're doing is against the law. We have laws in this country. And he said, Would you please stop quoting laws to those of us who have swords?

SPEAKER_04 32:03

I've heard that, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 32:04

And that's that's the the time. And then he grows, he grows up. So, but then what so Sulla does all of this. And he cut he comes back and he wipes everyone out again. And he says, nope, we have these. And he he takes the position of dictator, which was a position that Rome had. That was a legitimate position. So it wasn't, he was not a populist. He was not like, I'm taking this role and I'm just gonna do what I he was um obeying the old rules. Um, dictator was a position you could be given for emergencies. Sure. Like if you if Rome was actually gonna be invaded or something, whatever.

SPEAKER_04 32:49

Do we have something similar?

SPEAKER_02 32:51

Yeah, it's like it's like martial law or whatever, you know, whatever. And so he took the position of dictator and he's and he remained in it until he could get all of his reforms done, all the people prescribed that he that he thought needed to be prescribed. And then he retired. And he really retired. He like, he left that position. He gave, he laid down the position of dictator, gave the the rule back to the Senate. Um, and and he said, you know, I've done what needed to be done. I've restored Rome to her republic, the republic to Rome, and I'm done. I'm he I'm Cincinnatus. That's the the first dictator who did the same thing. I'm I'm done. I'm not trying to be king, right?

SPEAKER_04 33:42

George Washington.

SPEAKER_02 33:43

He's George Washington, which George Washington was called Cincinnati, also. That's what Cincinnati comes from. Um and he retires and he, you know, farms and then he dies. But the damage was done. You uh you can't put that genie back in the bottle. Now people knew that not only do we have an entire generation of, well, those ways that we did it, they weren't really constraining us. We only did it like that because that's how we always did it, right? So now people are thinking, well, I we still have to solve these problems. And now we have another problem, which is we all now know in Rome that the way you actually get stuff done is you've got to have an army behind you. You've you have now, now that's very clear. Um and uh, you know, Crassus, Crassus has this great line where he says that Crassus, who was known as the richest man in in Rome, who who made his wealth in really fun ways, like uh he had fire brigade fire brigades who would show up at your at your house if the if your house is on fire, and then um ask you what you wanted to sell it to him for right now, so he could put it out. And then he would go to this house next to you and the property next to them and and say, uh it's not looking good for you. You want to sell it to me for uh 25 cents on the dollar, you know, and made his money in in lots of other ways as well, but that was like one of them. But he said at one point you that he didn't think you could consider yourself rich unless you could afford your own army. And that was that was kind of where the the private armies start in Rome. And then um, you know, by the time Julius Caesar comes around, he grows up. So he grows up, he's a young man. And in fact, um he was on the prescription list. Solo wanted to kill him. And uh many of his friends who were on Sola's side um interceded for him and uh begged for his life. And he they changed Sola's mind. But Sola had this apocryphal, I don't know if he actually said this, but um, he's supposed to have said, uh, fine, we won't kill him. But uh in him goes a hundred Mariuses, or in him I see a thousand Marius, or whatever, you know. And uh I mean he was if he said that he was absolutely right because Julius Caesar grows up as a populare. Um, and uh, you know, he this the the the point to all of this is that all of this started and created, I mean, there's a there's a whole civil war prior to the stuff that we know that we understand that most people know about the end of the Roman Republic. And so that's why I say, like, I really think the Roman Republic started to die once people started to think we don't have to do the things the way we've always done them. If there's a problem that we need to solve, we can just do it.

SPEAKER_04 37:01

Yeah. So it seems to me a couple of things. One, you know, when you talked about you don't want to necessarily use the word uh conservative because it connects too much to today. But an observation would be those that wanted an uh an emperor, by definition, the way I understand it, would have been considered reformers. Right. And so the people that are pushing for the change to how we've always done government are actually the progressive, the reformers. The ones that are saying, no, the way that we've done it is the way that we need to continue to do it, are your uh your conservatives or your traditionalists. All right. Um and then uh another thing that you you mentioned in on this, which by the way, I found it all very fascinating. Another thing, though, you mentioned that it's that the that it was about a hundred years before we uh it actually takes place, the the the full-on empire, emperor rather than you know, uh uh full-fledged Caesar rather than the republic, that maybe it was sort of already kind of not, but with the first civil war. Um and it made me think about our first civil war in 1860, and then in 1860, and then the 1960s. So in the 1860s, we have a civil a re actual civil war. And then in the 1960s, you have a lot of civil reformation taking place, right? The civil rights movements are taking place, which in essence is like a second civil war that and it does become bloody. Like, I mean, it's it's not armies, but it's bloody. Um and so I'm wondering like if if the republic that our founding fathers that we always point to, that what they began, if it actually began to already crumble by 1860s.

SPEAKER_02 38:47

I mean, I think there's a large contingent of historians that would say that the United States is not the same prior to 1860 and and after. And that's not just because slavery is abolished. It's because all of the ideas of what does it mean to be I mean, one of the things, very small, this this might seem small, but I don't think it is actually that um I think Shelby Foote was the first one I ever heard talk about this is that prior to to the Civil War, you would almost invariably hear people talk about these United States. And after the Civil War, it's the United States.

SPEAKER_04 39:25

Yeah. One last thought, because I want to uh I know you need to roll. Um but so I was I was listening to um one of uh Jordan Peterson's lectures this morning on the Sermon on the Mount. I'm on the third one right now. Okay. And um, by the way, if anyone it it Jordan Peterson, um, I know that a lot of people think of him as a conservative. I think he's a moderate. And if you actually listen to him, a lot of his things are actually quite progressive. They are. Yeah. You know? Uh and so I think that if before anyone judges Jordan Peterson, Take some time to listen to him. Um, I have I have great admiration for the man. Um and not everything he says, I'm like, oh yeah, right. Sure, you're just gonna be. There's things I listen to, and I'm like, I don't know about that. Yeah. But his his work right now and the Sermon on the Mount that I'm listening to, I think it's uh I think it's really um uh what's the word I'm looking for? Innovative the way he looks at it. I think it's and I think it's spectacular because of his background and and psychology. Yeah, yeah. To be able to do that. Okay. So anyway, he talks now, he's talking about when Jesus says, uh, you know, I have come to fulfill the law and the prophets. And, you know, I mean, I know how I've always thought about that. Um, but he takes this idea and he says that the law represents conservative and that the prophets represent progressive. And then he talks about this idea, though, you can also then think about law in terms of discipline and prophets in terms of um creativity.

SPEAKER_02 40:53

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 40:53

And that we actually have to have both. And when both happen is when we can actually begin to make uh um progress. Right. And uh and so anyway, I thought about that. And I thought about um when when we choose one over the other, what we end up with is destruction.

unknown 41:17

Right.

SPEAKER_04 41:17

So if we if we choose that conservative or that we're gonna do this the traditional way, always a traditional way, and this is how it has to be done, we die.

SPEAKER_02 41:30

If we reject anything that seems like it's outside of the orthodoxy. Yep.

SPEAKER_04 41:35

Yes. And also, like we've talked about with the um the gate.

SPEAKER_02 41:40

Yeah, the Chesters' fence, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 41:41

Yeah, the fence. Um, if we just simply are are progressive for progressive sake, we end up dying. And that true creativity uh exists when both are working well together.

SPEAKER_03 41:57

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 41:57

And so I look at I look at Rome and I see it sort of as a cautionary tale. Um and and of course I can I hear all the things, but uh anyway, thanks. That was that was really interesting. And I also then started thinking about um just in general how this happens.

SPEAKER_03 42:16

How do these things how do these things take place? And how are we um so quick? It's not quick.

SPEAKER_04 42:27

We are shaped um over generations to be receptive to then what feels like um an immediate uh change. So all right. I don't know if we have to worry about any common ground today. It was more of just a learning opportunity for me. And um, and I will say this one last thing. The uh the reason I find history so fascinating, well, one, it's just I just do. I don't know. For some reason I'm wired that way.

SPEAKER_03 42:59

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 43:00

Um, but I'm also always listening and reflecting on what can I learn from history for me today, not for us today, because uh I I don't know who said it. I don't know if it's just like a you know, what I don't know how I don't know the term I'm looking for right now. Like apocryphal. Yeah. The um the uh those who fail to study history are doomed to repeat it. And uh and I will say this, even those of us that study history, it's a cycle.

SPEAKER_02 43:32

Are probably doomed to repeat it.

SPEAKER_04 43:34

We're doomed to repeat it. And this thing keeps happening over and over and over again. And so um, if you're wondering what's gonna be the result of the life that you're living in right now, do a little bit of research in history, and it'll almost feel like it's prophetic for you. All right. Anything else you want to add?

SPEAKER_02 43:52

No, I think that's that's good. Um, I I mean, I would definitely recommend anybody who wants to the the the easiest digestible version of that story is the hardcore history, Death Throws the Republic. It's fantastic.

SPEAKER_04 44:05

Death Throes of the Republic.

SPEAKER_02 44:06

It's very great.

SPEAKER_04 44:07

All right, maybe if I'm feeling up to it, I'll put that link in our description. Yeah. All right, thanks, Lucas. Thanks.

SPEAKER_00 44:17

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