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