When many of us think "Ancient Rome," we think of the Empire and the Caesars. But the Empire was preceded by the Roman Republic, which flourished for a full five centuries. Why, after such a long and prosperous run, would an essentially democratic form of government change -- largely with the consent of its citizens -- into an autocracy? That's the question I discuss with today's guest, historian Edward Watts. It's a fascinating story with many contemporary resonances, especially how reformers navigated the choices between working within the system to overthrowing it entirely. Lessons for modern politics are left for listeners to draw for themselves.
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Edward Watts received his Ph.D. in history from Yale University. He is presently the Vassiliadis Professor of Byzantine Greek History at UC San Diego, where he was formerly Co-Director of the Center for Hellenistic Studies. He is the author of several books on ancient history, the most recent of which is Mortal Republic: How Rome Fell Into Tyranny.
Click to Show Episode Transcript
0:00:00 Sean Carroll: Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll, and you might notice I'm still in that mode where my voice is not 100%. Sorry about that. The times when you listen to the podcasts are not obviously correlated with the times when I'm recording the intros to the podcasts, which are obviously not correlated to the times when I record the main part of the podcast. This is a spread out over time kind of operation we have here at Mindscape. So, sorry about that, but hopefully I'm understandable, because I wanna talk about a little bit different thing for the podcast today. We're gonna dive into history. Everyone knows that it's important to try to learn lessons from history. We have things going on right now. We live in a time here in the United States and in the world where history is happening all around us.
0:00:47 SC: It's interesting to go to look into the past to try to learn lessons for what we should be doing now, but it's easy to be too superficial about that. It's easy to point to the Nazis and compare everything to the Nazis. And I'm sure back, way back in the day, they compared everything to the Mongols and Genghis Khan and worried about the Mongols. There's lots of things that happened in history and all of them can teach us something, but in subtly different ways. So today, we're going to examine a crucial time in history and tease out some of the possible implications for the present, but we're gonna try not to be too simplistic. We're gonna leave most of the implications to your minds.
0:01:24 SC: Today's guest is Edward Watts, who is a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian at UC San Diego. His work focuses on the Roman Empire and times and places around that. But what we're gonna talk about today is actually the decline of the Roman Republic, the transitional period that ended the Republic and led in to the Roman Empire. The Roman Empire looms large in our cultural background, but the Roman Republic that preceded it lasted for 500 years, and was very successful. It was a wonderful example of a long-lasting, stable democracy/republic, and then it changed. It went into an empire, and the Empire had various good qualities. But still, you don't get to vote. The people don't have a voice in an empire system like they do in a republic system. So what happened?
0:02:14 SC: Of course, being that it's the Roman Empire, we know a lot. There were people writing about what was happening, and they're not always reliable, we have to extrapolate and use our wits a little bit, but there's a whole bunch of stories about what happened in those last 100, 150 years before the fall of the Republic. I'm particularly fond of the story of the Gracchi brothers. I didn't know about this, probably to some of the history buffs in the audience, this is old news, but there are two politicians in the late Roman Republic, who on the one hand, you can argue, were trying to do good things for the people of Rome, broadly construed, for the people of the Republic. On the other hand, they had a tendency to violate the norms by which the government was running and the Republic was operating. So there's a debate, right? When do you violate the norms? When is it sufficiently bad, the conditions that are going on around you, that you need to take dramatic action?
0:03:08 SC: It's easy to make an argument that the norms just benefit the well-off, right? However, their norm violation, one can also argue, led to the normalization of the use of violence to achieve political ends, which then contributed to the decline and fall of the Republic and replaced by a monarchy. So what lessons we wanna draw from that, it's never easy. I'm not gonna be actually telling you what the right lessons are. I do think, though, that the more we know and understand history, the more informed our choices will be going forward. So let's go.
[music]
0:03:56 SC: Edward Watts, welcome to the Mindscape podcast.
0:03:58 Edward Watts: Thank you. I'm glad to be here.
0:04:00 SC: So I think it'll come as no surprise that I'm not a professional historian. In fact, I think it's safe to say most of my knowledge of the history of Rome comes from Shakespeare plays. And I think I can even go further and say that I'm probably not that atypical to think that when people say Ancient Rome, I think of the empire, basically that's what I think of as the cool, interesting part of the history of Rome, but there was a republic for hundreds of years before that, and there was even a kingdom before that. So we're interested in the Republic and especially its latter days, but let's set up how we got to the Republic, 'cause even the kingdom was kind of interesting. It wasn't a hereditary crown like we think of it now.
0:04:37 EW: Right. Yeah, I think that thinking about Roman history across its full scope is really intriguing, because the Roman state, such as it is, is there for 2,200 years. It starts with the Roman kingdom and it ends with cannons and the fall of Constantinople in 1453. And there's very, very few things in history where you have that much continuity, but seeing how it starts, in some ways it looks radically different from how it ends, but in other ways, the continuity is very easy to see. So the Roman state when it starts up is a monarchy, as best we can tell, but it's a monarchy in which the king is dependent on, and interacting with, this group of hereditary aristocracy that the king generally belongs to.
0:05:25 EW: And so, the monarchy is something in which the king is chosen from among this group of Patricians. The king is accountable to this group of Patricians, and when the king dies, power goes back to the group of Patricians, and each of the leading members of each family take a turn auditioning as king and after a year passes, one of them is chosen and he's king for the rest of his life, and at the end of that, power goes back to the Patricians. What happens towards the end of the monarchy is there is a, what I suppose we would call almost a class revolt, where the nature of power in the Roman state has begun to shift, and you have an imbalance between the people who belong to the hereditary aristocracy, and the people who are becoming wealthy. And then there are people outside of this aristocracy who start becoming wealthy, and you have a king who seizes power on the basis of appealing to these newly wealthy, but politically, not completely disenfranchised, but largely disenfranchised people.
0:06:28 SC: The nouveau riche, yeah.
0:06:29 EW: Right, right. And what ends up happening is the Patricians lose control of this accountability that they've had, that have governed their interactions with the king. Now, the king is accountable to other people. What the Republic represents is the Patrician counter-revolution, where these kings who are loyal to this new class-based structure are now not listening to Patricians in a way that really discourages Patricians, and Patricians overthrow this new kingship structure and create something that starts out as the Patricians running things without a king at all. And this is how the Republic starts. It's an incredibly conservative move. And the idea of the Republic appealed to these Patricians, in large part, because the Roman Republic, like a modern republic, is a state in which everybody has a voice, but the voice is not allocated equally. Some people have more of a voice. And when the Republic starts, Patricians have much more of a voice than anybody else.
0:07:36 SC: I should say, for listeners at home, if you hear little bits of moaning and squealing in the background, that's our local dog, Juno. She has opinions and she'll cheap trip in; that's perfectly fine. So the Patricians... So in the early days of the Republic it wasn't, everyone gets a vote, right? The Patricians... And who chooses the Patricians? How do you get to be a Patrician?
0:07:56 EW: So you're a Patrician simply because you belong to a family that is Patrician. There are cases where people get moved into this order. And this is the thing that's really challenging for us. We've been trained to think of societies that are hierarchical, mainly organized on class, and in the Roman Republic, it's not. The Patrician order has nothing to do with how wealthy you are, and part of the challenge that the Roman Republic faces is there are non-Patricians, which the Romans called Plebeians, who were wealthier than some Patricians.
0:08:28 EW: And the Republic struggled for about 200 years to figure out how you balance the authority that rich Plebeians can claim in the rest of society, with the authority that Patricians have arrogated to themselves in the Republic. And eventually what they come up with is a series of messy compromises, where Plebeians are able to hold assemblies and vote on laws without Patricians being involved, but the laws are supposed to actually bind everybody in the state, including Patricians.
0:09:00 EW: And the series of compromises that unfold are deliberately messy, and there's ambiguity that is left where Plebeians have authority, that if they exercised it to its fullest extent, could be used to do really horrible things to Patricians, and they choose not to. I mean, Patricians have ways to block Plebeians from doing these things as well, and they choose not to. And instead, you have this very elegant system where the laws provide certain ways to exercise power, but there are understandings, unwritten understandings, but deeply understood ideas about what is not acceptable. You can't push your powers to the fullest extent imaginable.
0:09:43 SC: Some things just aren't done. It was understood.
0:09:45 EW: It's destabilizing.
0:09:46 SC: Yeah, right.
0:09:47 EW: And it's in no one's interest to do that. If you're a Patrician, destabilization leads to violence, and probably that's going to end badly for you.
0:09:55 SC: And one thing I noticed that there was this, I don't even think of it, but there were votes, there were ballots, but they were public. Like when you voted, people know who you voted for, right? And the innovation of a secret ballet was a big deal.
[laughter]
0:10:08 SC: We're laughing at Juno. She does not like secret ballots, but that's okay. We'll go along with it.
0:10:13 EW: For the first 350 years of the Republic, your ballot was something that actually was spoken. It was obvious who you were voting for. And the idea there was, you were accountable. And the other idea there that was buried beneath this is if somebody paid you for your vote, which was illegal, but was done and done pretty regularly, they could tell whether the payment actually worked. When you moved to secret ballots, the initial secret balloting consists of a piece of paper and you would walk down a plank and then you would drop this into a basket. But people could stand there and see what was on the piece of paper.
0:10:53 SC: See what was on it, yeah.
0:10:54 EW: And a series of reforms in the 130s get you from, you have to announce your vote loud and clear so everybody can hear it, to a very narrow walkway, where no one can actually observe what you've written on the piece of paper.
0:11:06 SC: So it was more really secret.
0:11:07 EW: It was really secret at that point.
0:11:09 SC: And that annoyed some people. They didn't like it.
0:11:11 EW: It annoyed a lot of people.
0:11:13 SC: How can I bribe people if they won't stay bribed, if I don't know who they're voting for.
0:11:16 EW: And the interesting thing is it's quite possible that you could then take multiple bribes. And this was in some ways, something that was supposed to discourage political malfeasance, because you didn't actually know if you got what you paid for. And you didn't actually know whether this person just took money from six different people and voted for two of them and what could you do?
0:11:38 SC: Okay, but that is a relatively late thing. I do wanna just sort of put ourselves in the mindset of understanding the Roman Republic. I mean, it wasn't the first exercise in democracy in the ancient world, it came after Athenian democracy. But was it the first republic, was the idea of a republic around? I mean, how... I guess, in the United States or in the French Revolution, we think about being influenced by philosophers, right, by Locke and Rousseau and Hobbes. Was there an explicit idea? Was there some philosophical justification for doing things one way rather than another?
0:12:09 EW: Well, so, when we compare the Roman Republic to Athenian democracy, I think it's important to say that Romans would have found Athenian-style democracy absolutely abhorrent. There wasn't any assembly that was based on that principle, where a majority would just...
0:12:27 SC: Vote.
0:12:27 EW: Would vote and then that would decide it.
0:12:29 SC: Like a democracy, yeah.
0:12:30 EW: And if it's 50% plus 1, that decided it. What the Roman assemblies tended to do is, they grouped people together in certain ways and the votes would be counted in the context of a voting tribe or a voting century and whatever that tribe's majority was would count as one vote towards whatever decision was being made. So your vote was always channeled through some other structure. And the Romans felt that this was ideal. They never in any sense wanted this to be a situation where people just could carry an idea on the basis of having 50 plus 1.
0:13:13 SC: So it was almost like government by deliberation and consensus rather than just majority rules.
0:13:17 EW: Exactly. The basic idea that governed what Romans were doing was a principle of it's better to do nothing than to do the wrong thing, and it's better to do nothing than to do something that a very narrow majority of the population supports. And the idea behind that... And they don't articulate this in the way that a Greek political thinker would articulate this. But the idea behind that was once you make a decision that a large number of people in this state have signed on to, they own it. And it's very hard then to step back and say, "This was terrible. We need to turn around."
0:13:54 SC: You can't just blame the other party, right?
0:13:55 EW: And Athenian democracy did that all the time. The case of Alcibiades is the greatest example of this, where they send him out to command a fleet and three days later they send another ship saying, "No, wait, you need to come back." [laughter] The Roman Republic didn't work that way, and it was by design. There was no interest on the part of Romans in empowering the people to the point where you could have these radical changes in policy. Instead, what was supposed to happen, and a lot of times did happen, most of the time did happen, was all of the stakeholders would come together and propose an idea and try to make that idea workable to the broadest group of people in the Roman state, so you could get this consensus.
0:14:39 SC: And it was pretty successful, right? I mean, Rome both flourished internally and expanded a great deal in this time. Like, when is the beginning to end of the Roman Republic?
0:14:49 EW: So conventionally the Roman Republic starts in 509 BC. There is some debate about that date, but I think generally speaking, it's a good starting point. It ends effectively somewhere between 30 and 27 BC.
0:15:04 SC: Okay, yeah.
0:15:06 EW: You have...
0:15:07 SC: Almost 500 years.
0:15:08 EW: Almost 500 years. But if you were to ask the Emperor Augustus, "What sort of state do you live under," he would say, "It's a republic."
0:15:14 SC: Right.
[laughter]
0:15:15 EW: You have people who claim that there are still elements of the Republic that are still sort of percolating through Roman life into the Augustine period, and even past Augustus. But I think if you asked any Roman who was gonna answer honestly, they would say the Republic ended around 27 BC.
0:15:34 SC: Okay, but it did flourish over those 500 years?
0:15:37 EW: Yeah. Yeah, and for the first almost 400 of it, the Republic was remarkably successful in doing more or less what it was charged to do, creating an entity that prevented anybody from assuming power by themselves and creating a political process that governed the rights and prevented violent exercises and violent conflict that dominated the political life. And what the Republic did was it promised effectively peace and freedom from tyranny.
0:16:13 SC: And who were the stakeholders? I mean, who got a vote in some sense?
0:16:17 EW: Every citizen had a vote.
0:16:18 SC: And what does it mean to be a citizen of Rome?
0:16:21 EW: So the other genius that the Romans had, and this made them almost entirely unique in the ancient world, the Romans extended citizenship quite widely. So, the City of Rome, of course, when it's founded, this is the core of Roman citizenship. But as the City of Rome conquered more territories, Romans awarded citizenship to people that they conquered, not everybody and not all the time, but in large enough quantities that you reach a point by the end of the second century BC where there were millions of people who exercised some form of Roman citizenship. And as the Republic expands, the number of places that enjoy Roman citizenship expands as well. So by 88 BC, all of Italy is... Holds Roman citizenship, and by 212 AD, everybody in the Roman Empire, from Britain to Sudan, from Iraq to Morocco holds Roman citizenship.
0:17:18 SC: To be fair, we have to mention slaves did not get to vote.
[chuckle]
0:17:21 EW: Well, and women didn't get to vote.
0:17:22 SC: And women didn't get to vote. Were there races that didn't get to vote, even... They just weren't given Roman citizenship?
0:17:28 EW: No...
0:17:28 SC: It's not a concept that didn't exist then back then.
0:17:31 EW: There are concepts like that. But generally speaking, Romans didn't feel that there's any... They saw racial differences and they saw ethnic differences, and they saw geographic differences. But they didn't see racial differences in the way that, say, someone in the 19th century in the United States would see racial differences. And they didn't feel that anybody of a certain racial background or geographic background should be excluded from citizenship just because this is their background.
0:17:58 SC: And so there were people in North Africa, for example, who would get a vote in the Roman Republic?
0:18:04 EW: Not in the Roman Republic... Well, there are some, there are some, not many. Citizenship really comes to North Africa in large quantities in the late second and early third centuries.
0:18:14 SC: But it was a time of expansion for Rome, right, even before the Empire, the Republic kept getting more and more territory under its purview?
0:18:21 EW: Yes, yeah, and what the Republic is able to do, and what leaders of the Republic are able to do is they recognize that even in this period, I mean, it's really a future of the Empire that Rome starts incorporating large numbers of people from places like Greece and North Africa. But even in the Republic, there was an idea that extending citizenship to individuals who are useful, prominent people, government people. This was something, you know, that made some sense. I mean, Caesar would do this in Gaul, for example, where prominent Gallic chieftains would get Roman citizenship and they would take a Roman name.
0:19:00 EW: And so, you have these family inscriptions in Gaul where you have somebody who has a crazy Gallic name and then their son is Julius Caesar crazy Gallic name, and then the son of that person is just a nice Roman name and the inscription's in Latin, and it commemorates this transition from completely not Roman to Roman citizen to somebody who doesn't really see much difference between himself and somebody living in the City of Rome.
0:19:27 SC: So they were very good assimilators, that was part of their genius.
0:19:29 EW: They're very good at this, yeah.
0:19:30 SC: Yeah. And okay, so a couple of hundred years of successful life as a Republic in Rome and part of it was the sort of gradual, deliberate consensus-based approach. I mean, there's a lot more inertia built into the system intentionally in the Roman Republic, than versus Athenian democracy, as you say. But then we hit a trouble spot around 130 BC, with the story of the Gracchis. And yeah, I'll confess, I had never heard the story before starting reading your book and then digging into the details, but it's such a fascinating story. Why don't you tell us about these two brothers, starting with Tiberius, I guess, was the first one, right?
0:20:06 EW: Yeah, so these are two brothers, Tiberius Gracchus and then his brother, Gaius Gracchus. And Tiberius is the older brother by quite a bit. And Tiberius comes from a family that is in essence if the Kennedys married the Bushes. This is the blue-est blood, most sought after...
0:20:25 SC: He's not a rabble rouser from the streets.
[chuckle]
0:20:27 EW: No, no. He's somebody who's well-placed to do really well in political life, and he's incredibly skilled. A wonderful orator, someone who is very good at building personal relationships and also somebody with a distinguished military career.
0:20:41 SC: I remember there was a line in your book that... I didn't actually bring a copy of the book, so I can't quote it, but I loved it, because it reminds us this is ancient Rome, not modern United States. He came from this incredibly establishment family, and he was trained in philosophy and oratory to succeed in politics. But that's not what we do these days with our politicians.
[laughter]
0:21:00 EW: No, no, and it is something that is a useful tool. And even in the Roman Republic, there are people who did this and people who didn't. But what Tiberius Gracchus understood was, these are tools that can be deployed in certain contexts and be deployed very usefully. And he understood not only how to use rhetoric, but when to use rhetoric. And so, he is a person who is on the fast track to being a really prominent Roman politician, but a really prominent establishment Roman politician. And in the course of one of his junior offices, he is holding a position more or less managing the books in a campaign in Spain. And the campaign goes drastically wrong, and the army ends up captured. And Tiberius Gracchus negotiates the surrender agreement and the liberation of the Roman captives. But when they come back to the City of Rome, there's people on the other side of the political divide who start demagoguing this and saying that, "Well, Romans don't surrender and Romans don't negotiate, and if you surrender your life is forfeit." And this is a principle that Romans abstractly believe, but it's not one that Romans really like to put to the test.
0:22:13 SC: From an objective point of view, it seems that the negotiation that Tiberius did was actually pretty successful.
0:22:20 EW: It was quite successful.
0:22:20 SC: Yeah.
[chuckle]
0:22:21 EW: Yeah. He got the entire army out and in return he had to agree basically to a peace treaty that was not favorable to Rome. But he saved tens of thousands of lives.
0:22:32 SC: They gave back some of the loot that they had plundered, right?
0:22:34 EW: Yeah.
0:22:34 SC: Okay, so, let's just do that and save the lives of...
0:22:35 EW: Yeah. And so, he comes home and people in the Senate who are conservative and are looking for an issue to really attack not even Tiberius, but the commander who was responsible for this, say that this can't be done. You know, we're Romans, we can't negotiate, we can't give...
0:22:53 SC: Right. Don't negotiate with terrorists.
0:22:55 EW: Yeah. We can't make this kind of concession to people who are less than us. And Tiberius gets kind of caught in the middle. It's not really about him. But the families of the soldiers that Tiberius managed to liberate rally around him, and the effort to completely undo this peace agreement falters, because there's so much popular pressure, that in the end they send the commander back and they let the army stay. But everybody remembered what Tiberius had done, that Tiberius had shown up this establishment push to punish what seemed like a completely anti-Roman type of behavior. And so, this is remembered and Tiberius understands this.
0:23:42 SC: This is remembered by people in political power who have control in some sense over his future political career?
0:23:47 EW: Yeah, this is remembered by the establishment.
0:23:49 SC: Yeah.
0:23:49 EW: And Tiberius' first act was as an establishment figure. He's not one anymore. And so, what Tiberius realizes is if he wants to have a future political career... And he had done well, but he hadn't done as well as his family expected and he hadn't done as well as previous generations had. And that's a problem in a Roman context. You know, if you don't do as well politically as your father did, you've failed, I mean, you have failed. And it looks badly for you, it looks badly for your children. And so, Tiberius has to make a decision of... About whether he's going to step back and potentially not advance any further politically, or if he's going to, in a sense, lean in to this populist persona that he's fallen into by accident.
0:24:35 SC: Right. So he has the support of all these families who are not highly politically connected, but that wasn't his constituency, but those are the people who are on his side right now.
0:24:44 EW: And they're very enthusiastic. And then the soldiers whose lives he saved, they're back in Rome, they're citizens, and they can vote, they're very enthusiastic as well. And so, he leans into this and he begins crafting a second act that is as a populist. And there's a lot of things for him to run on. What had happened after Hannibal's invasion of Italy and the Roman victory in the second Punic War, was a massive rebuilding of Italy that benefited everybody. But in the context of this, there's a financial revolution that grows out of the massive amount of government contracts that are now coming into being. People have to bid in advance for these, and if the contracts are for things like mineral extraction, you bid... You pay in advance and then you go and extract the minerals and if you can get more, that's your profit, and if you get less, too bad for you.
0:25:39 EW: Nobody has that kind of money. And so, what ends up happening very quickly is people take out loans who want to work on these contracts, and Romans realized that you could figure out the likelihood that that loan is gonna be repaid, the percentage that's likely to be repaid and the amount of profit that's likely to come in. And that meant the loan had value. If you could figure out the likelihood this is going to be repaid you can assess the value and then you can sell it.
0:26:06 SC: This is very modern, all this conception. Long before Adam Smith, but it was very capitalist and financial...
0:26:10 EW: Exactly. Exactly. And if you sell it, then you can re-capitalize and you can do it again.
0:26:15 SC: Right. Derivative trading.
0:26:17 EW: Yeah. And so, for the first 50 years or so of the second century, you have a situation where everybody's boats are floating. Everybody's tide is rising. Poor people are rebuilding Italy. Rich people are developing these mechanisms to generate wealth very, very quickly. But around 140 it slows down for poor people, but it doesn't slow down for rich people. And what Tiberius Gracchus realizes is there's a perception problem here. Poor people are not becoming ridiculously poor, but they're not gonna do as well as their parents did. Rich people continue to get richer and richer and richer. And Tiberius Gracchus runs for the Office of Tribune of the Plebs, which is an election... An elected office that allows you to propose laws to Plebeians. But Tribunes tend to be more, I suppose, radical, they can be more radical than people who are elected to offices that will put them in the Senate.
0:27:16 EW: And what Tiberius realizes is he could run as Tribune of the Plebs and he could propose economic reforms, and there will be a constituency for this. There are people who really feel that the situation is imbalanced, the Republic is not doing enough to fix this and Tiberius has space to use the popular following he has to propose some solutions to this. Initially he wins election and initially he proposes a law that's very similar to a law that had been proposed before. And senatorial forces and conservative forces and rich people say, "This isn't good enough for us." He wants to redistribute a certain amount of land and compensate the people who were renting this public land. He wasn't taking any private land at all.
0:28:00 SC: Yeah, wasn't there even... There was already a law saying this should happen and he was kind of the one to enforce it, or is that a bit too strong?
0:28:05 EW: Yeah, so there's a tremendous amount of public land that the Roman Republic had taken from cities that had rebelled under Hannibal. And it just... They didn't know what to do with it; some of it, they gave to Roman citizens, but some of it they leased out to landholders, many of them Italian, and so therefore they don't have a say in what's going on in Roman politics. But there was supposed to be a limit...
0:28:29 SC: It's not because of how much you could handle.
0:28:31 EW: Yeah.
0:28:31 SC: Like a wealth cap, which these days would not even be discussed in...
[overlapping conversation]
0:28:36 EW: Yeah, I mean, it would be like if you had restrictions on the amount of land that you could graze in Nevada.
0:28:42 SC: Per person, yeah.
0:28:43 EW: And everybody could only graze 300 acres of land, and somebody starts grazing 600 acres. You can either enforce it or you can decide it's not worth enforcing. And for much of the second century, Romans decided this isn't really worth enforcing. What was proposed by an earlier politician and sort of rejuvenated by Tiberius Gracchus was to take people who had land in excess of the limit and just take away the excess land that was public, that they didn't own, and compensate them for the loss of this land that they had been leasing, and then give that land to people who were Roman who didn't have lands to farm. And this is a pretty moderate proposal, but it's not something that there could yet be a consensus around. And so, what Tiberius Gracchus...
0:29:32 SC: And to remind ourselves, the whole point of the Republic and how it worked is that you move slowly, right, and you build consensus, and the ship of state is very stately.
0:29:41 EW: Yeah. You don't wanna do anything that's going to upset a large number of people. And even if it is something that benefits a lot of people, if there's not enough support for it that you can build enough of a consensus that people will allow it to go through, it probably ought not to go through, because people will resist it. And normally, if you have a proposal and you can't build a consensus for it, you either try to negotiate a compromise, or you let it drop. In the earlier proposal like this, the person who proposed it decided to let it drop. He couldn't build a consensus, he couldn't find any compromises that would work, so he let it drop. Tiberius Gracchus decides not to let it drop.
0:30:24 SC: Right.
0:30:25 EW: Instead he realizes that he has this rhetorical ability that's incredible, he has this fervent support among certain parts of the population, and he's not gonna waste that. And so, what he does is he pushes into this space, this ambiguous space between what you traditionally did and what you could do. And he starts doing everything that he could do.
0:30:52 SC: So there wasn't a law against what he was doing, but people hadn't done it, you're not supposed to do it, and he said, "Well, stop me."
[chuckle]
0:30:58 EW: He said, "Yeah, so make it stop." So he proposes the law and each of the Tribunes when a law is proposed have a veto over this. One of them who is working with the Senate exercises his veto. This is perfectly proper. Because the way that informally the Senate and the Patricians influenced what happened in a Plebeian assembly was, they had a Tribune who they would communicate with and say, "This isn't gonna fly." The Senate will take an opinion on one of these laws, and usually that's enough. But if the Senate says, "We don't think this is a good law," and someone wants to push it forward, a Tribune who will work with the Senate will veto it and that will end it.
0:31:36 SC: Right.
0:31:36 EW: So Tiberius' law is vetoed and Tiberius brings his mob of supporters and deposes the Tribune who vetoed it. And the mob of supporters is not violent, but they are threatening and they're loud.
0:31:49 SC: Yeah, that sounds a little extra-procedural there, right?
[chuckle]
0:31:52 EW: Yeah, it's... What he did is not illegal.
0:31:55 SC: Yeah.
0:31:55 EW: But it was done under conditions that seemed intimidating.
0:32:00 SC: Even the mob deposing the guy is not illegal?
0:32:02 EW: Tiberius' idea, which again, probably is influenced to some degree by what he had read in Greek philosophy, his idea was that the people are the ultimate empowering agent. And so, all legitimacy in the Roman state resides with the people. And if the people decide they want to depose a magistrate, they're exercising legitimate political power. And this is an idea that no one in Rome had ever endorsed. This is Athenian democracy channeled through the structures of the Roman Republic. And Romans did not like that, and Romans generally would have resisted that, except it's really scary. [laughter] You know, you come into this assembly and it's really scary.
0:32:42 SC: Right.
0:32:44 EW: And so, Tiberius deposes the Tribune and Tiberius gets his law passed. The Senate objects to this, but the law is binding on everybody. So then the Senate has the power to not fund the law, because the one power that the Senate indisputably has is allocating money for things, and to do this kind of land reform, you need surveyors, and you need people who will provide equipment to the new farmers and you need all sorts of things to make this happen. And the Senate controls all of the money that can make all of those things possible.
0:33:17 SC: This part I thought was hilarious. "We'll let you have your law and your commission, but you have no money to do anything with it."
0:33:22 EW: Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's... And we see things like this in our government as well.
0:33:25 SC: It's very [0:33:25] ____. I love it.
0:33:27 EW: Yeah. [chuckle] And so, Tiberius then has this tremendous act of fortune, because the king who is in charge of a kingdom in what's now Turkey dies, and in his will he leaves the entire kingdom to the Roman people. Now, the Senate... Another thing that it controls, another one of the few things that it controls is foreign affairs. And so, this is seen as a foreign action, giving his kingdom to the Roman people, that's something the Senate should deal with. Tiberius says, "Well, wait a second. [chuckle] The voice of the people is now channeled through all these agencies and the voice of the people matters. And so you can't just say, 'Oh, we're the Senate, we represent Rome.' That will says the Roman people, the Roman people will speak." And so, he brings forward a motion saying, "All of the money in this kingdom's treasury should go to fund the land commission." And there are people in the Concilium Plebis, they vote for this.
0:34:24 SC: They love it, yeah.
0:34:25 EW: And Tiberius gets his money for his land commission. And again, it's not illegal what he did, but it's not done either.
0:34:34 SC: Hasn't been done, yeah.
0:34:35 EW: And then Tiberius decides he's not really finished, there's probably going to be some problems for him when he leaves office. He doesn't have any prospects to run for higher office quite yet. And so he decides to stand again for the Office of Tribune of the Plebs. This again is not illegal, but it wasn't done. And so, when the voting starts up, Tiberius has his mob of supporters who are intimidating people and threatening people, and Senators who are opposed to him have had enough. Now, Tiberius has never used violence and this is, I think, an important thing.
0:35:12 EW: He is not the one who brings violence, like actual physical violence into the Roman political arena, but he's used intimidation quite a bit, and so when he's standing for re-election, opponents bring in a mob and then the mob actually uses physical violence and kills Tiberius Gracchus. That's the first incident, the first violent incident in more than 300 years in Rome's [0:35:36] ____.
0:35:36 SC: And it was technically the Senate, or the Senate was...
0:35:38 EW: Yeah, it was completely... The actual physical violence came from Tiberius' opponents and he's a victim of it. But the conditions that established, the things that made it possible to imagine that this would be necessary were conditions that Tiberius had set.
0:35:55 SC: Can we judge his personal sincerity and his reform efforts? Was he really devoted to the people or did he think that that was a politically expedient tack to take?
0:36:03 EW: I think it's both. I think he's devoted to the people, but I think he's also very aware that this is useful to him.
0:36:13 SC: Right. It's a complicated legacy because he's a reformer, he's some kind of socialist, democrat, whatever, trying to give land back to the people, which maybe that's a good thing, but like you say, maybe the most important part of his legacy is that he violated these norms, and that shook down through the years.
0:36:32 EW: Yeah, I think the important thing to keep in mind when we're talking about this reform. And Tiberius Gracchus has this historical legacy where a lot of people, especially on the left, feel he's a proto-Marxist or a proto-leftist hero. If that reform had gone through and he had redistributed all of the land, it's estimated he probably would have settled about 26,000 families. And the population in Italy at this time is about 4 million. It's not insignificant, but it's not gonna solve the problem, it's not a radical solution. And it's public property that he's giving, so he's not redistributing wealth in any meaningful way, he's not taking private property in any meaningful way. He's not doing anything to attack these people who are the new 1% that are generating all of this money really fast. This is a modest reform. And what's radical is just the way he pushed it.
0:37:28 SC: And I do want to... Maybe this should be for later, but we don't wanna say that any norm-breaking is bad. Like in some sense, the American Revolution, the French Revolution, we took up arms against a monarchy, and we think the American Revolution, in any case, worked out pretty well, but you would like to make the argument that this was not the time or place to violate those norms of governance.
0:37:52 EW: Yeah, I think the Republic would have gotten where he wanted them to get. It wasn't that big a thing. And he didn't invent this idea. It would have gotten there, but his name wouldn't have been attached to it, and I think the big problem for Tiberius Gracchus is he wanted his name attached to it; he wanted the policy, but he wanted his name attached to it as well.
0:38:14 SC: Well, there's a selection effect. Successful politicians are ambitious by construction. And then he had a younger brother who in some sense tried to follow in his footsteps.
0:38:22 EW: His younger brother, I think, is one of the true genuine heroes of this whole period, because he knew what he was getting into.
0:38:29 SC: This is Gaius.
0:38:30 EW: This is Gaius. He knew he would die, he knew that what happened to Tiberius would happen to him.
0:38:35 SC: Yeah, we should remember the stakes were pretty high here. People died when the things went wrong.
0:38:39 EW: Yeah, and he knew that he couldn't use intimidation and threats in the way his brother did, because immediately, the reaction would be he should die. Gaius, we're told, has a dream before he even goes into politics. He has a dream that he will die, he's going to pursue his legacy and he will die.
0:39:00 SC: And they believed in prophesies at that time, right?
0:39:01 EW: And he did, yeah.
0:39:02 SC: And that one came true.
0:39:03 EW: So what he does is he thinks out or he imagines a reform program that will genuinely make a difference. It's a reform program that includes giving subsidized food to the population in the City of Rome, it includes establishing colonies in places like the City of Carthage that Rome had destroyed in 146 BC, but is a really, really good location. And he proposed again land redistributions and reactivating the commission that his brother had set up, and in a way that foresaw the future, he proposed the extensionings of citizenships to everybody in Italy. And he genuinely wanted these things to happen.
0:39:47 SC: And that last move is an important one, I think, if we do wanna draw parallels to today, because in some sense, they're populists, the Gracchi brothers, they're getting their support from a wide base. But Gaius wanted to expand who counts as Roman, which is a sort of anti-typical populist move.
0:40:07 EW: Yeah, and there was a lot of pushback. The reason that Gaius wanted to do this is because this economic and wealth inequality in Italy wasn't just felt by Romans, it was also felt by Italians, and a lot of the people who were in the lower classes, and were feeling like they didn't have opportunities to have as, say, a big a farm as their parents, they started coming to the cities, and especially to the City of Rome. And so the City of Rome, that was probably a little more than 100,000 people in 200 BC. By the time of Augustus it's a million. And a lot of these people came, starting in the middle part of the second century, and a lot of them were Roman citizens, which meant they could be in the City of Rome, but a lot of them weren't Roman citizens, a lot of them were Italians who moved to the City of Rome without citizenship status, and were working there.
0:41:00 EW: And about three years before Gaius Gracchus holds office, politicians in Rome stage an arrest and deportation of these Italians who don't belong in the City of Rome. It's the first time this was done, it's not the last time it would be done. And so what Gaius actually saw was a policy that was a good policy; politically not so good a policy. The non-Roman citizens can't vote for him, so it's not gonna get him any votes immediately. Now, if they become citizens, they could vote for him. But in the short term, this isn't a winning policy for him, but it's a problem that needs to be solved. And his policy was a problem-solving solution that in many ways foresaw that this was only going to get worse.
0:41:47 SC: Right, but it did not work out well for Gaius.
0:41:49 EW: No, no. Gaius I think understood full well, what this would mean. And because Gaius really did play by the rules, he didn't do the sorts of shenanigans his brother did. The first year that Gaius is in office is really successful, because no one really thinks... No one can block him, there's consensus around his ideas, and there's a general sense that he's genuine in pursuing these things. And so he's not looking to potentially take over the state or some of the things that people feared Tiberius was doing. He's solving problems, and so he runs for re-election, and the second term that he has, his opponents make the interesting decision to in effect outbid him. And so he proposes citizenship for Italians; they propose more. He proposes a colony; they propose more colonies. And they eat away at his support by, in a modern context or a modern sense, moving to the left of him. And he then becomes not radical enough in his solutions...
0:42:53 SC: Outflanking him from the left.
0:42:54 EW: Yeah, and it's genius, because he ends up losing support. And then they stage an outbreak of violence and he's wrapped up in it and he's assassinated. And none of the other reforms that were trying to outflank him to the left ever come to anything. They were just political tactics. And so Gaius is I think one of the few, I think, unmitigated and unquestionable heroes in the late Republican period, because he knew exactly what he was getting into. He knew how this would end.
0:43:24 SC: And... But still, it was 100 years before the Republic actually went away. It wasn't as if the next day it collapsed. So how do you... Is it fair to trace these moves by the Gracchi brothers to the ultimate decline of the Republic?
0:43:44 EW: Yes, for a couple of reasons. I think what Tiberius Gracchus does is he shows that norm-breaking is a political tool. It's a useful political tool, and it's one that if you go too far, you will probably be punished severely, but if you can figure out how to do it so that you get what you want, but you don't alarm people so much that they feel like you have to be killed, it's very useful. The other thing is the use of violence against Gaius also becomes something of a political tool. It's again something where it's becoming normal enough that if you can use violence against people that are opponents you can't otherwise work with and you're not directly involved, it's okay, you know, it's useful.
0:44:34 SC: There was a new norm where a little bit of might makes right baked in.
0:44:37 EW: Yeah, and people begin experimenting with ways to do this so that it works but there's no blow back, because there's tremendous blow back against the people who killed the Gracchi. But by 100, people are figuring out how to do this by, say, arming a mob of supporters all the time, that you can then call out, and they can make demonstrations and they can attack supporters of other people, and you can intimidate politicians without directly attacking politicians. Sometimes it gets out of control, but you enter into this cycle where something explodes. There's an act of violence, everybody says this is horrible, there's a retrenchment, a new status quo is established, it holds for a little while. And Romans begin to think, "Oh, the Republic is back and it's stable and we're past this point where there's so much friction and tension." And then it starts up again.
0:45:33 EW: And I think the story that starts with the Gracchi is the cyclical story of political dysfunction, violence, a settling of... A settling of the system for a little while, maybe a decade, maybe a generation. Everybody kind of gets used to the fact that there are now rules that govern this and they begin to take for granted the fact that the Republic is stable, and people start playing these games again, violating norms to push their own personal agendas and ultimately getting back to another crisis.
0:46:03 SC: And to put ourselves in their shoes, we think of the American Revolution 200 years ago as really long ago, right? And to these Romans, the Republic had been around for 400 years already, which must... Their history was not as good, their record keeping, it just seemed like forever, I presume.
0:46:21 EW: Yeah.
0:46:21 SC: The idea that there wouldn't be a Republic just wouldn't appear to them probably.
0:46:25 EW: And I think the other thing that's important for us to do is to actually live this in their time. A day is a day. And so, if something happened 10 years ago, that seems like a long time ago. And when something is happening in a cycle that repeats every 25 years, say, it's perfectly reasonable to think when you're in the middle of that cycle, if your Republic is 400 years old, "Yeah, okay. It's back to normal. It's okay, it's stable." And you don't realize that this is unfolding not on a timeline of a year or five years, but it's unfolding on a timeline of like a 100 years.
0:47:02 SC: Which is impossible for human beings to really care about.
0:47:05 EW: No, and so your sense of history is what you can remember, in effect. And I think the other thing that's important is when you look at the demographic charts for Romans, it's pretty dire. But if you make it past five years old, you have a very good chance of making it to 50. But then once you get to 50, the cliff really starts appearing.
0:47:29 SC: It's still true today. [chuckle] I'm 50. I'm feeling it, so I get it.
0:47:33 EW: Yeah, so I feel it too. But what that means is if you have a cycle that... The violence is starting when you're in your 20s and then it settles down when you're about 25, and then you have a good 12 or 15 years where, yeah, it looks like you understand how things are happening. It looks like things have settled down. And this would be, say, after Gaius Gracchus, there's this period of retrenchment by a few aristocratic families who then more or less dominate the state for about 15 years. Okay, if you're 25 when Gaius Gracchus dies, you're 40 when that starts breaking down and you're 50 by the time there's another burst of really serious violence, you're dead. The people who were experiencing this... And when violence breaks out again around 100, most of them don't remember the Gracchi. Their political experience is of stability and this general decline. In the same way that millennials who lived through the recent government shutdown don't remember the Gingrich government shutdown, because they were five years old.
0:48:45 SC: But also, this brings up a question I had about where the information and knowledge comes from. I presume that most Romans are not literate, I don't know, it's not newspapers, but do they have books or is it just all oral tradition where they learn about things from the past?
0:49:00 EW: So, the literacy question is a really good one. I think based on what we have in Pompeii, we can say that it's not, certainly not, say, like a modern society where it approaches 100%, but it's not as bad as you would think either. I think what you see in Pompeii is people of all social classes can read, from slaves all the way, and prostitutes all the way up to the most elite people who have libraries. The percentage is really hard to gauge, but functional literacy on some level is probably pushing 50%.
0:49:32 SC: That's pretty impressive.
0:49:33 EW: But reading history is probably 1%.
0:49:37 SC: How was news passed around, were there proclamations in the square or?
0:49:41 EW: There's graffiti, there are laws that are posted, there are inscriptions that dictate ideas or policies. There's a lot of written material all over the place. And I think what's interesting in this context is election campaigns, a lot of the electioneering, there are placards and there are electoral-related graffiti. And we know this mainly from Pompeii. But in Pompeii, even deep in the Empire, Pompeii, the eruption is around 80 AD, so you're already more than 100 years into the Empire. There's still local elections going on in Pompeii and you can see the way campaigning tends to work. And so I think that there is a general sense of what someone stands for when they campaign and how they fit into a larger trajectory. And there's also I think a lived memory of who somebody is and what they represent.
0:50:35 SC: Sure.
0:50:36 EW: But the history, the understanding of the past is really I think going to be something where, what you've lived through is going to feel much more immediate than anything before that. And there is a real challenge in Roman history, especially, you don't really have any kind of narrative histories written by Romans until the time of Hannibal. And so all of this stuff from the early Republic and from the royal period, it's circulating, but it's circulating as stories. And these stories tend to take on the tenor of morality tales. And so when you're understanding contemporary events you are mixing, say, if you're living in the year 100, the Gracchi with these figures from the fifth century and with Roman kings and...
0:51:24 SC: Yeah, Romulus and Remus.
0:51:26 EW: Yeah, and you're importing virtue into... Virtue from these deep traditions into what the Gracchi are doing, and I think that also leads to you missing the real kind of progression that you're living through.
0:51:38 SC: Yeah, and so you make the point about the timescale of eruptions of violence and so forth. But there's also, I don't know whether it's economic or sociopolitical changes, where more and more power in armies was associated with individuals rather than with the state.
0:51:55 EW: Yeah, and this is something that comes out of that period in the 110s where that stability under these elite families, it ends in large part because these elite families become quite corrupt, which is not surprising...
0:52:11 SC: No one's surprised at that.
0:52:13 EW: Yeah. So what ends up happening, is there's a figure who runs against this, a man named Marius, and he does this in the context of a Roman war with a North African kingdom that Rome should have won easily, but was really struggling to fight effectively. And he runs against the commander who belongs to the most elite and most established of these families that had dominated political life for the last decade, and runs against him as corrupt and ineffectual. And neither one of those things was actually true, but it makes for... It's the moment to do that. And so when he wins election, he has to build an army. And everybody feels like Rome is exhausted, and he's not going to find troops. And generally speaking, when Romans raised armies, they tended to only bring people into the army who had property above a certain level.
0:53:05 EW: And what Marius understood was he probably isn't gonna get an army if he has to live within those means. So, what he decides to do is raise an army with any volunteer who's willing to serve. And all of a sudden he gets a very, very enthusiastic and loyal army that he takes to North Africa, they win the war, and then he wins a series of elections to use this and other armies to confront German barbarians to the north.
0:53:32 SC: Because we should say, back in those days, people are enthusiastic. They join the army in part because they thought that was a route to looting and riches, right?
0:53:40 EW: It could be. There's a couple of things you get out of it. One is, if you win the campaign, there's lots of stuff that you can get, lots of loot and riches that you can take home, but there's also a sense that the Republic might reward you. And Marius' soldiers in particular come to believe that they've done such a good job, and they don't have property, so the Republic should provide them with property. And what Marius ends up doing is working with allies to secure a retirement package for his soldiers when his term of office is up, and this is wonderful, but what it means effectively is every other commander now has to do the same thing, and every other commander now has armies that realize that their retirement package, their discharge bonus, basically, is going to depend on the political fortunes of the guy who recruited them.
0:54:34 EW: And so eventually, again, now you have a new variable that is illegal, you can't use your army to march on Rome to get these things, but you can have your army show up and look angry.
0:54:46 SC: And brandish a spear or two.
0:54:48 EW: Yeah, Tiberius Gracchus style, and you can use the threat that they might do this as a political tool. And people start doing this. And in the end, there is a commander in the 80s who feels like... This is the commander Sulla, he feels like he actually needs to make use of the tool. It's not threats, but it's actually marching the army on Rome. And Sulla does this, and the troops are willing to do this because for 15 years, from Marius to Sulla's march on Rome, this has just become part of what troops expect. You're loyal to your commander, you're serving the state but your loyalty is to your commander.
0:55:28 SC: He's one that's gonna provide the goods.
0:55:29 EW: And the minute your commander is not loyal to the state he could ask you to choose. And no one had asked anyone to choose until Sulla, but once Sulla asks them to choose, this again is a political tool, and it's a political tool that lots of people will use.
0:55:45 SC: And so over and over again, you get this thing where there's something that just isn't done, until someone does it because that's what their incentives are and then once it's done, the floodgates are open.
0:55:53 EW: Yeah, but again, the pacing is important. The floodgates are open in that someone else can do this, but they generally don't. They know it's been done, but it's not like, well, Sulla does it and then it's done again, because Sulla provokes a civil war, but after that civil war calms down nobody really does this again. Someone tries it in the 70s, someone tries it in the 60s, but no one actually does it for real until Caesar. And this is in 48.
0:56:24 SC: Julius Caesar.
0:56:25 EW: Julius Caesar, yeah. But once it was done, it was in the vocabulary of things you could do, and that meant that there could come a moment where somebody would say, "Let's do it again." It doesn't happen immediately. Again, when you're in this, when you're in this world, most of the time people aren't thinking that this is possible, they know Sulla did it, but they don't think it's possible that it will happen again, because there's no sign for years that anything like this could happen again.
0:56:58 SC: But then once we get to 40 or 50 BC, then we have Caesar and Pompey and others, and they have their armies and they're very ambitious.
0:57:06 EW: Yeah, yeah, and in Caesar's case, the civil war that undoes the Republic for, effectively undoes the Republic, I mean the one that really undoes the Republic is Augustus' war, but... With Caesar and Pompey the situation is one that plays out on a bunch of different levels. Caesar and Pompey had been allies and Caesar had commanded an army and conquered what's now basically France, half of Switzerland, all of Belgium and part of the Netherlands, invaded Britain, and pulled back.
0:57:39 SC: I'll put in a plug by the way, Dan Carlin's Hardcore History, I don't know if you know this podcast, but he does a wonderful podcast, and he has six hours on Caesar's campaigns in Gaul which is was well worth listening to.
0:57:50 EW: Oh, wow. Yeah, and so Caesar does all of this with an army that is a very serious and very powerful army, but the war is probably illegal, and so, Caesar negotiates, for much of the last part of the 50s BC, to try to figure out how he can be re-incorporated into Roman political life, because conquering this much territory means Caesar is incredibly wealthy, he has really, really good troops who are really loyal to him, and he needs to figure out terms under which he can come back into Roman political life and not be punished for this.
0:58:27 SC: He's been a bit naughty, but he's really powerful.
0:58:29 EW: Yeah, and Romans are really scared of him, at least elite Romans are really scared of him; regular Romans are really enthusiastic about him. And so he's not a figure who easily fits in a Republican structure. And Pompey begins working with Caesar's opponents first to try to negotiate something but ultimately as a champion, who could potentially confront Caesar if he needed to. What ends up happening is the negotiations break down, and Caesar realizes that he will probably die if he doesn't attack Rome. The Republic can't protect him and whatever promises anybody is making for legal protections and legal due process and immunity, those can easily be undone and there's no political structure that can prevent that from happening.
0:59:16 SC: So there's a lot of weight that goes on this, so I just wanted to see how certain we are or whether this is the kind of thing Caesar would have said after the fact. He's an incredibly successful campaigner throughout what we call Europe now, so he has a big army, like you say, of really, really good soldiers and the people in power, in Rome itself and the establishment are afraid of him and don't like him, and so what is his evidence that he can't just go back, like that the norms have been so violated or are so fragile that even though he's been very successful, he would be... His life would be in danger if he returned to Rome.
0:59:52 EW: So for Caesar the things that would be reassuring for him. If he could go back to Italy and stand for office while his army is with him, that's okay, because then he's protected. They can't do anything to him because they have to confront his army. That's not allowed, so then he says, "Can I stand for office in absentia," because if he stands for office he can't be prosecuted; if he stands for office in absentia, he can get elected, and he said, "If I get elected, I will come back, and I'll dismiss my army before I go." That's not okay, either. What they want...
1:00:24 SC: He's told that that's not okay.
1:00:26 EW: He's told that's not okay.
1:00:27 SC: And that raises his suspicions, and I think that makes perfect sense.
1:00:29 EW: And so what he then is sort of promised is, well, you can come back and you can stand for office, and it will be... You can stand for office, and if you're elected, it would be like a month before you take office, and that should be okay. But what had happened across the 50s as the elections had been delayed all the time, people had organized violence to prevent elections from happening. And so just because you have an election date that you can stand in doesn't mean that election will actually happen. And so I think Caesar's worry is he would go back, he would be told that he could stand for election, those were the terms the Senate offered, if he released his army and agreed to stand for election, his command over that army would lapse before he actually was elected and before he took office, and then someone would prosecute him.
1:01:17 EW: And so for Caesar, this looks like the Senate is dealing in bad faith. For the Senate, it looks like Caesar is angling to try to be in a position where he can use violence against Rome, if the election doesn't go his way. And so both sides, I think, legitimately have concerns. Neither one of them trusts that the Republic is going to be functional enough to allow a compromise on the terms of law and precedent.
1:01:45 SC: But from that telling it sounds very plausible that Caesar wasn't sort of... He would have been happy perhaps staying within the Republican framework, if he thought that his personal safety and wealth could be guaranteed.
1:01:58 EW: Yeah, I think we go back to this original point of what the Republic is. The Republic is a mechanism that guarantees that political conflict is going to be peaceful and everybody who enters into it, into a political contest, knows what they'll win and what they'll lose. And in the context of Caesar confronting Pompey in the Senate, Caesar would prefer this to be a peaceful political contest. When the civil war starts I think it's not likely that Caesar is going to win, but I think Caesar's calculation is if I don't do this and I march back to Rome, I will be punished for sure. And if I just stay in Gaul and refuse to march back to Rome and refuse to dismiss my army, Pompey will assemble a massive army from all of the other territory Rome controls, and he'll destroy me.
1:02:44 SC: And so in some sense, the legacy of the previous hundred years since the Gracchi brothers, is that when stakes get high if you lose in the political arena, you die.
1:02:54 EW: Yeah, yeah, and this is the lesson that starts with Tiberius Gracchus. The rules for political contests had been set by the Republic for over 300 years. You knew what happened if you won, you knew what happened if you lost. And after Tiberius Gracchus, you didn't really know what would happen if you lost. And you also didn't really know what the rules of the conflict would be, what the rules of the contest would be. Somebody could change them in the middle. And what do you do then? And there's no guarantee at the end that what you thought would be the worst possible outcome is actually the worst possible outcome. Something much worse could happen.
1:03:34 SC: So we had the civil war and Caesar wins...
1:03:36 EW: And Caesar wins.
1:03:37 SC: And what happens?
1:03:39 EW: Caesar has to figure out what he's going to do. And he has a few models. One model is what Sulla had done. Sulla had marched on Rome, he had won a civil war, he had himself proclaimed dictator, but Sulla was very old, and Sulla also understood that probably this wasn't gonna be a sustainable position for him, so Sulla reworked the Roman constitution and then stepped down as dictator and retired, and he died a couple of years later. That wasn't gonna work for Caesar, because Caesar was young. And so when Caesar won the civil war, he couldn't just reform the Republic and step down, he was going to potentially live for another 15 years, and it's quite possible that whatever he set up if he's not there to superintend it could go south and he's still there to be prosecuted or punished or killed. So that wasn't feasible. And he needed to figure out what sort of structure would actually work.
1:04:35 EW: A monarchy wouldn't. Rome had gotten rid of a monarchy, and so Caesar played with that idea a little bit and realized that Romans wouldn't accept that. And so, ultimately, what Caesar comes up with is a structure where he's a dictator forever. And the regular offices of the Republic resume, but Caesar picks all the people who will have these offices. And so at the time of Caesar's assassination there's a list of people who will hold offices for the next few years, and everybody knew where they were on that list. And Caesar's idea was if you have somebody who knows in three years, they're gonna have an office they really want, they won't make trouble.
1:05:10 SC: While they have skin in the game, yeah.
1:05:12 EW: Yeah, and so what ends up happening is Brutus and Cassius end up happening.
1:05:17 SC: But Caesar, it wasn't as if he marched in with his army, and just said, I'm the emperor, right, he did try to gradually work within the remnants of the Republican system.
1:05:29 EW: Yeah. What Caesar was trying to do was in effect make the Republic start up again with Caesar protected as dictator. And one of the things that Caesar realized was there were a lot of reforms that he could institute that would be popular, and so Caesar worked on this high level and then the government officials did more or less what they did. The people who regulated whether the markets were effectively weighing grain fairly, they still did what they did. Caesar didn't do that.
1:06:00 SC: And it was a popular system with the people of Rome. It wasn't as if they were like, "No, no, we don't want a dictator, we're a Republic." And this is another thing where we might draw lessons for modern societies, but the idea of a strong leader taking care of us was something that a lot of people bought into.
1:06:17 EW: Right, and the other thing is there are elections. Caesar's picking who's running, but there are elections. And so you still, still have elections, you still have offices, but Caesar's just there making sure everything is working as it should. And when Caesar wasn't there, things sometimes didn't work like they should, and they would fix, they would sort of right themselves only when Caesar showed up in Rome.
1:06:42 EW: But what was distasteful to people like Brutus and Cassius was an ideal of liberty that they felt like they needed to restore. And what's intriguing about this is, this is Brutus's political brand. Brutus issues coins in 54 BC, that say "Libertas" on them, and they have Lady Liberty, the personification of libertas on the front of the coin and on the back, they say "Brutus," that's his brand. But Brutus's brand in 54 BC was liberty is about following the laws that the people set up. If the people set up and people say that this is what's legal, and this is the policy, then that's the policy. And tyranny is people, or an individual exercising power that is not legal, that the people don't give them.
1:07:39 SC: And do we think that in the... I know it's hard to read people's minds, but do we think that Brutus's motivations are really pretty much idealistic in a sense, even when he's assassinating Caesar?
1:07:48 EW: For sure. But what's interesting is his idea of libertas has changed. Libertas in 54 was the laws, the laws dictate how society should run. Tyranny is not following the laws. The laws said, Caesar is dictator. The laws said, Caesar has this power. The laws all said that this structure that Caesar put in place was legal. And Brutus then has to say, "Wait, this is one man in charge. And that's tyranny." But that's the opposite of what tyranny was to him in 54. And so, Brutus has to make this jump, that on the one hand, makes complete sense and on the other hand makes no sense. And ideologically, there's an issue with what libertas is to Brutus in '44 and this is an issue that plays out after the assassination of Caesar. Brutus kills Caesar. Brutus expects to immediately be hailed as this champion of liberty who's restored freedom to the Romans. And instead, everybody panics, and the whole city is sort of scared to death of what's gonna come next, and Brutus is shocked. People didn't actually like what Brutus was promising them.
1:09:00 EW: It took an extra day for Brutus to even deliver the speech he planned. In that time, people loyal to Caesar had crafted their own response. So, one of them who was the military commander under Caesar, while Caesar was alive, organizes the military forces just outside of the City of Rome, comes and occupies part of the Forum. Mark Anthony figures out how to work rhetorically to craft a legacy for Caesar that will be popular. And ultimately on the second day after the assassination, the Senate has to agree to ratify all of Caesar's acts when Anthony comes in and says, "You realize if you condemn him as a tyrant like Brutus wants you to, all of these offices that you held under Caesar are illegal and all of these offices Caesar promised to you, that will be cancelled." And so, Caesar's gambit of incorporating these people by giving them stuff secures Caesar's legacy. He can't be attacked as a tyrant. And Brutus agrees to this, because Brutus was one of the people who had benefited from this.
1:10:00 SC: We're deep into Shakespeare play territory now and it makes perfect sense, like when you look at the history, of course Shakespeare would write about this because it's very Shakespearean, as it were. But yeah, and so maybe we know a little bit about how things go. There's a whole bunch of civil wars back and forth, right?
1:10:16 EW: Yeah.
1:10:17 SC: So Anthony gets an alliance. Does he marry Cleopatra? Did they ever get married or live together?
1:10:25 EW: Well, he's married to Octavian's sister. I'm not sure officially in Roman eyes what that relationship is. He has children with her. It's clear that this is the marriage that... This is the relationship that really matters to him, but I don't know for sure whether he divorces Octavia or not and if so when.
1:10:49 SC: Okay, but there was a lot of politicking. Where was Augustus at this time when... Octavian at the time when Caesar's being assassinated?
1:10:58 EW: He is a fascinating figure. He's 19 years old. He appears on the list of people that Caesar was going to give an office in the future. He's in the city of Apollonia, which is in Albania now. It's at the end of the Via Egnatia. So for those of you who are Byzantine history fans, this is the road, this is the main street of the Byzantine empire. It starts in Constantinople and it runs all the way to Apollonia and it's the road that links Thessaloniki and Constantinople. So it's the most important road across the Balkans. And Caesar had planned, once the campaigning season and the sailing season opened, to march out with an army and go and attack what's now Iraq. And so, Octavian is 19 years old waiting for Caesar to learn how to fight a war while Caesar went and attacked what is called Parthia. Caesar never makes it. And so, Octavian gets the news that Caesar has died and that Octavian is Caesar's heir. Anthony had had the will publicly read out, which was a mistake, Anthony thought that he would be Caesar's heir.
1:12:06 SC: [chuckle] Wait, sorry. Did Anthony... He ordered that the will be read out not knowing what was in it. Is that true?
1:12:12 EW: Apparently.
1:12:12 SC: Wow. [chuckle] That's a mistake, yeah.
1:12:14 EW: Anthony's idea was that the way you can get people to fully turn on Brutus was to have a public speech. Shakespeare does this well. To have a public speech in which you talk about what Caesar did, why it matters, and display for them the wounds that were inflicted on Caesar. And Anthony does this in the reading of the will, in which Caesar gives money to every Roman citizen and gives parkland to every Roman citizen and also announces [chuckle] that Octavian is the heir. I think Anthony had a sense of what was in there. I don't know if he knew that Octavian was named, I think he didn't, but this was part of the way that Anthony turned this uncertainty about what the murder of Caesar meant into enthusiastic embracing of Caesar's legacy. But what that meant was Octavian now had the possibility to claim Caesar's legacy because he was Caesar's heir.
1:13:14 SC: And by heir, we don't mean he was the next emperor, 'cause that wasn't a thing, right? But he was the person who inherits Caesar's stuff.
1:13:21 EW: He inherited Caesar's property, but the condition was that he had to take Caesar's name. Now, if Octavian is 30, he could use this and leverage this and build this into a really effective way to confront the opponents of Caesar and Anthony, the allies of Caesar who potentially would be opposed to Octavian. But Octavian is 19, he can't even hold office yet. He's not eligible to be even considered for the leading offices in the Roman state. He has no political experience. He has really not a great deal of personal experience and Anthony's assumption and even Octavian's mother's assumption was probably it's in his best interest to not do this, but if he was gonna do this, he's probably gonna die. He wouldn't last long.
1:14:09 SC: So, by do this we mean?
1:14:11 EW: Claim the legacy.
1:14:11 SC: Claim the legacy.
1:14:12 EW: And go and try to avenge Caesar. What Octavian decides, contrary to everybody's advice, was to go and claim the legacy of Caesar and actually start using the name of Caesar as a way to build a political support structure for himself. And the maneuverings that Octavian is able to do are amazing.
1:14:34 SC: He's a pretty confident guy.
1:14:35 EW: Especially when you consider his age. But I think the other thing that is really shocking about Octavian, Caesar did not want to wage civil war in a way that was vicious. Caesar was particularly interested in pardoning adversaries. He didn't want to take property or lives unless he needed to. He had learned from what had happened in the civil wars in the 80s where he was one of the victims of Sulla. He had learned that this makes it very difficult for the state to come back together. It makes it very difficult for you to exercise authority later and it's much better to wage a civil war in such a way that you rehabilitate as many people as you possibly can. Octavian, I think, had learned from Caesar that that is an excellent way to get yourself killed. I think there's a lot to be said about the desirability of what Caesar was trying to do. Octavian couldn't take that chance and wouldn't take that chance. So Octavian was vicious when he fought civil wars. And I think what we see throughout history is most people who are vicious when they fight civil wars, tend to be vicious after they win as well. What Octavian was able to do was to pivot and create a structure where he was in charge of the state, but the viciousness more or less ended. And part of that is because he killed most of the opponents who mattered.
1:16:01 SC: Yeah, he's a godfather. Yeah.
1:16:02 EW: Yeah, but then part of that is he figured out ways to create a new structure after the civil war is ended, that incorporated all of the people who are meaningful in ways that gave them a stake in the success of his enterprise and made the barriers to opposing him extremely high and made it extremely unlikely that anybody who opposed him would have any kind of positive outcome for themselves at all.
1:16:26 SC: And was there any specific final tipping point where Octavian, then Augustus, became, went from the chief of the Republic to being the emperor?
1:16:36 EW: The process is incredibly fascinating. He starts out as somebody with no army and no office, just a name. He comes to Rome, is able to leverage this into the support of some of Caesar's troops who he hires or he recruits with the idea that they're gonna go and fight Brutus and Cassius. He tries to use them against Anthony, who has now become an enemy, that doesn't work. The troops refuse to fight each other because they both are Caesarean.
1:17:04 SC: Yeah.
1:17:05 EW: He ends up getting those troops enrolled in the Republican Army, that decides to go and confront Anthony after Anthony breaks with the Senate. In the course of that battle, the two commanders the Senate had chosen end up dying. Octavian then is fully in charge of this army, the Senate refuses to acknowledge this. So, Octavian marches the army on Rome and makes an alliance with Anthony. They then defeat Brutus and Cassius and Anthony and Octavian fall out. And over the course of the late 40s and into the 30s, Octavian manages to maneuver things so that his position vis-a-vis Anthony continually gets stronger and Anthony gets increasingly marginalized, until in 31 BC, Octavian forces defeat Anthony's forces. And then in 30, Octavian chases Anthony, invades Egypt, conquers Egypt, Anthony dies, Cleopatra dies and Egypt becomes a Roman territory. The genius that Octavian has when he takes Egypt, the structure in Egypt, going all the way back to the Pharaonic period, was that the sovereign in charge of Egypt had a huge amount of royal land.
1:18:17 EW: This in the Republic would have become public land that belonged to the Republic. But Octavian takes it as his land. And what Octavian then does is he adds that into all of the private property that he had from Caesar's estate and all of the property that he had confiscated from other people and he has an entire separate, entirely separate ledger sheet, and he ensures effectively that the public finances are almost always in deficit. And any time there's a crisis he bails them out using his private resources. Now, his private resources include Egypt, so they're significant. But he makes it very clear every time this happens, that he is stepping in as a private citizen, and bailing out the public when there's a problem. And I think this actually is the unacknowledged tipping point. This is what makes the Empire work. He makes soldiers loyal to him, and makes sure that they are paid in a way that they understand he's paying them.
1:19:23 EW: Whenever anything of substance seems to go wrong, he makes sure that he fixes it and he makes sure everybody understands that this comes from his private resources. And so, what he has done is he's left the Republic, the public thing, to function, but he's made it clear that it functions very badly, and for the state to actually work, for Roman lives to actually work, the private resources of Augustus, as he becomes, are essential. You can't have this function in any meaningful way without him present. And this is the genius of how he pivots from this horrible, vicious civil warrior to somebody who creates an enduring political structure that exists for 1500 years.
1:20:11 SC: How long was it between the death of Caesar and Augustus becoming emperor?
1:20:15 EW: Caesar's assassinated in March of 44, Augustus wins the civil war with Anthony in 30 BC, and then comes up with a political settlement...
1:20:24 SC: 16 years.
1:20:26 EW: About 14 years.
1:20:27 SC: 14 years. Counting back, oh, yeah.
1:20:29 EW: Yeah, and then comes up with a political settlement in 27, that will be the basis of what his power is. But the historian Tacitus, who's writing in the second century, sums up, I think, very succinctly, why this all works for so long. Augustus is emperor for 41 years, he's on the political scene for 17 years before that, but he's emperor for 41 years. The average Roman lives for 50 years. Tacitus writes that there wasn't a Roman left who remembers the Republic, and he's right. Augustus dies at 76 years old, he was 19 when he comes on to the political scene. There's nobody left who remembers a functional Republic.
1:21:09 SC: So this idea, because it had previously happened in the times of the Republic that there'd be temporarily a king or a dictator or whatever, right, in times of emergency, or someone would claim that and then get deposed. But now, so the idea that after Augustus we go back to a Republic had sort of dissolved just over time.
1:21:26 EW: Yeah, nobody even remembers... When you think of who's left, maybe 1% of the people are over 76, but they don't... The 60s were an okay time for the Republic. But to actually remember it and understand what was going on, you're probably 20 years old at that point, so you have to be 96 to have any meaningful memory of a Republic that's actually functioning as it should. There's hardly anybody like that. And if you mattered, you were dead. Someone ensured that you were dead somewhere between when you were born and 30.
1:22:03 SC: And also, as we mentioned before with Caesar, Augustus took power with great popular acclaim, there wasn't resistance. He didn't force himself on Rome, maybe he did by machinations, but they certainly went along with it, right?
1:22:18 EW: I think that there's another interesting moment that happens in every imperial reign, there's... Generally speaking, when emperors take power in the Roman period, a lot of them die very quickly. That makes sense, you've taken power, if you don't secure power you die. But if you make it through the first couple of years, many of them then last until about 12 to 15 years in. And then there's another sort of spurt of them getting assassinated and then if they get past that, then they tend to live out a natural life and they reign for a very long time. And I think that... You look at the progression of Augustus, there is a major crisis around 20 BC, when you're... The civil war ended in 31, now you have the generation that remembers the civil war is kind of passing on into more senior positions, but then the people who are rising up don't really remember the civil war as well, and they're willing to challenge him.
1:23:21 EW: And when Augustus manages to beat back this challenge, but then he withdraws from Rome and he stops providing that money and he stops providing that security and he lets things kinda go to hell for a little while, and steps back in when he's asked to, but that's what really secures power for him is this moment where he reminds the next generation of what the Republic is actually like. Do you really want the Republic? 'Cause it means mob violence, it means not enough food, it means disasters that afflict the city that you can't recover from. That's what the Republic is.
1:23:58 SC: He was truly a brilliant politician.
1:24:00 EW: Oh, yeah. And he was willing to do anything that was necessary. But he was also I think enough of a forward thinker, that he could understand how to prevent crises from happening before they did. If they did happen, he was willing to do whatever it took to resolve that crisis in his favor, but he was also very capable of foreseeing what crises might occur, and doing what he could to head them off five years before they might emerge.
1:24:28 SC: And later on, either later in Augustus' reign or after him, were there later flare-ups where people tried to restore the Republic?
1:24:34 EW: No.
1:24:35 SC: No.
1:24:35 EW: Not in a meaningful way.
1:24:36 SC: Because they were basically happy or because it was basically fruitless?
1:24:40 EW: Augustus created a system that worked very, very well, and subsequent emperors used this system and they incorporate increasing numbers of people. And so when you look at the pattern of how power is allocated across the Empire, what you see is that the people empowered by Augustus were the people more or less of families that had gotten citizenship, but had not yet risen to the highest levels of Roman offices and senatorial offices during the Republic. And so Augustus takes people who are powerful, wealthy but to a degree outsiders, and gives them the highest tier of responsibilities. As you move to the next dynasty, what you see is they start expanding and bringing in people from Spain and Northern Italy and Southern France and Greece and building out their loyalists, with the next group of people.
1:25:42 SC: Sort of who works with patronage and loyalty and...
1:25:44 EW: And what you do is you create these people who are incredibly loyal to you at the expense of people whose star has kind of faded, and there's always these moments of tension where you don't quite yet reach the point where those new people are powerful enough to resist and you might die if that happens, but if you get over that hump, you have a very loyal and very powerful base of support.
1:26:05 EW: The next dynasty, the Spaniards become emperors and they start bringing in a lot more people from the Greek world to form this new core aristocracy. The next dynasty is North Africans and Syrians. And so, that what Augustus was able to create was a dynamic structure that if managed well everybody who mattered could be made to have an investment in this being stable. And this is the genius of the Empire, is he creates a structure out of chaos that is stable, it gets people interested in it, it gets people invested in its success, and it becomes self-sustaining, in a way that the Republic never really was.
1:26:52 SC: It is an amazing story in many ways. I'm gonna, I have two questions left, but they're both very big questions, so we can decide how long to go on about them. Could we be in the discussion we've just had accused of buying into a great man theory of history, where we could give a lot of credit to these particular figures, and we've glanced at mentioning, well, there was a growing inequality in Rome, and there was this way of having armies that were loyal to individuals rather than the state, or were there systematic effects that would have had the same effects or the systematic forces that would have led to the dissolution of the Republic, just as well, even for a different cast of individual characters?
1:27:36 EW: I think this is a great question and I suppose what I would say is, if we are to look at big historical cycles, I don't think that there's a great man theory of history, and I don't think there's a great system theory of history, but I think a robust system can restrain any individual, and a capable individual can overthrow a weak system. I think that if Augustus had been born in 263, no, he would not have become emperor, he would have probably become Consul, he would have been very successful in working through republican channels, we might know his name. But really, he would have been a creature of that system, because that system was strong, it was robust, it set rules that really couldn't be broken, and there wouldn't have been any capacity for him to do what he had done. If you took Scipio Africanus out of that robust system of the third century BC and plunked him down in 50 BC, could he have become emperor? I think he probably could have. And I think he might have wanted to be. But the time in which he was living the Republic was robust enough that it set the rules for political activity, and you couldn't challenge them effectively. And no one in their right mind who was capable would have tried.
1:28:56 SC: I think that that does make sense. So my other question then is even way bigger scope. We've told a certain story and there's obvious parallels to present day events but they're not perfect, right? In many ways, they're different. How do we choose which stories to tell about history, like what's in our mind? There is an infinite number of things we could say, and there's many different sources and we highlight this and we emphasize that and we ignore that. How much of it is our perspective that we're bringing to things, how much of it can be universalized or made scientific or something like that?
1:29:31 EW: Wow, that's a wonderful question. I think the short answer to that is to speak on a personal level.
1:29:41 SC: Please.
1:29:41 EW: I am interested in the stories that help me think in a more broad way about the world around me. That doesn't mean that the world around me is the same as the world that I'm describing or I'm working with. It's radically different, as we said at the outset. We don't live in a society with slavery, we don't see human beings in the same way that Romans did. The notion that's so deep in Roman society, that humans are property, is something that is so antithetical to the very core to what our society believes, that these places are radically different from each other, but Roman history gives us tools to think with. There are analogies we can make, but there are also just possibilities that we can entertain and it gives us a set of tools that we can use to imagine what futures might be, what outcomes to events could potentially be, and what kinds of responses make sense or don't make sense to the events around us. History isn't destiny, but history does give us a sense of what could happen and it gives us tools to think with. And it's a lot easier, I think, to grasp the world around us if we just have more information about what possible outcomes might be.
1:30:58 SC: I think that is a beautiful place to end. Edward Watts, thanks so much for being on the Mindscape podcast.
1:31:02 EW: Thank you so much.
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Critical and fascinating period of history, especially in light of our current era. Nice points about the role of memory with regards to normalization of deviance. Look forward to picking up this book.
Good historical perspective into politics, norms and institutions. Rome and later Venice created major institutional innovations that we are still using. Roman republic was not a nation state, it was a citizen state where loyalty was towards institutions.
“Why Nations Fail” (2012) by Acemoglu and Robinson frame the discussion using concepts inclusive institutions and extractive institutions and it’s easy to see the change in Rome. Rome was always under institutions that were partially inclusive and partially extractive, but compared to other large states it was relatively inclusive. Citizen soldier-landowner was important institution and Tiberius Gracchus clearly spotted a real problem and threat to Rome.
It’s amazing how weakly norms and institutions are embedded into the culture. Short discussion with people living in a liberal democracy shows clearly that people have not not internalized the liberal democracy or rules and laws based system. Somehow it has enough inertia to keep going and civil servants and independent judiciary seem to upheld large part of it.