Part Two: How The Roman Republic Became a Police State

is my favorite? Yeah? Yeah, exactly, I think it's I mean, honestly, so far it's got to be. Um just the sword control bills, and I do I do love the sword control bills. Uh, yeah it is. It is very funny. I guess it is a little tricky too, because living at a time if you go back to part one, when it's like weapons of war are banned, but weapons

of war includes things like horses. Yeah, well yeah, a weapon of war is like a sharp piece of metal in this period of time and not really much deadlier than like a big heavy stick, right, like it's yeah, it is, it is different. Like again, these are You can also find fun articles about people talking about ancient Roman like weapons limitation laws and people trying to make comparisons to assault weapons, and it's like, well, it doesn't

really work very among other things. Number One, people support assault weapons bands in the United States generally because of like massacres of schools and malls and stuff. And the Romans supported a ban on the carrying of weapons within the pamarium because they were trying to stop armed mobs from taking political It's not about stop Roman. Ancient Romans did literally nothing to stop murders. There were not police.

You did not like if you committed a murder, there was like unless you killed a famous rich person, there was nobody to like do like they didn't give a ship. Um again, people died constantly, right like you we just talked about that lady had twelve kids and three of them made it to adulthood, like they didn't. They would not have banned us. They would not have banned assault weapons if the worry were that civilians were getting murdered. They scarrying because they didn't want people to take over

the government. Um sort of. Yeah, the almost exact opposite. Yeah, it's it's literally like the opposite reasoning. It was not to protect life. That was absolutely no one's concerned Rome. So after the assassination of Tiberius Gracis, things got worse very quickly for our Roman friends. Now, Tiberius was not yet thirty when he died. I think he might have been in the twenty. He might have been like Cobain, you know, yeah, um, Kurt Cobain in Tiberius Gracchus to

socialist kings. By the time, by the time you're in your thirties, you should have been assassinated, assassinated, yeah, um, yes, um. Now Tiberius, yes, So he's he's young, and he's got this younger brother who we talked about a little bit in the first episode, Gaius, who's like just starting to

be an adult when his older brother gets murdered. Now, you can find a bunch of writing from historians at the time about Gaius, and it's all the same sort of like Haggia graphic shit about how cool he was and how like he loved his soldiers. When he becomes a trip, he becomes like a the equivalent of like a lieutenant or something when he's like seventeen, like all of these people do, and he's he's supposed to be good at that, and eventually he winds up getting elected

tribune like his brother had been. Um, he has to break his law to get elected. The break the law to get elected. He has to like actually desert the army, but he talks his way out of getting in trouble for it, because again, a lot of Roman law is just like, well, we're pretty sure our ancestors wouldn't have liked it if this happened. But he cocks his way out of it. Um. So, his brother's reforms had been passed after he was murdered, but they've been kind of

kneecapped by patricians. So they pass a land reform bill, and then they spend the next couple of years like taking back everything that they've given to poor people pretty much. So Guias starts pushing for a bunch of like really pretty radical reforms at the time. He wants to give more public land to the poor. He wants to hand out free grain. He wants to set up a state dole so that the poor aren't reliant upon like rich people as clients who can then tell them who to

vote in order to like survive. Um. He wants to provide public funding for military equipment so that poor people can be in the army. Um. He wants to raise the draft age, and he wants to make everyone in Italy a Roman citizen, which really pisss off the rich and powerful people in Rome. Um and he's he's politically

successful in a lot of this. He actually gets the Senate to send money back to conquered nations because he thinks that like Romes being unfair to the places they conquer, which is kind of a wild thing to succeed at getting the Senate to do so. This makes him as popular among the people who had murdered his brother as you might expect now. Plutarch describes the changes Gaius is trying to push in the Roman government as changing it

from aristocratical to democratical. And perhaps he would have succeeded given time, But he made the mistake of leaving Rome to found a colony in Libya, which gives his enemies the opportunity to slander him devoters. And when he returns, he gets attacked in the street by a mob and the majority of people fail to come to his aid, like nobody comes to protect him. When this group of like hired thugs comes to murder him, and he gets beaten to death and his head is stuck on a

spear and brought to the Senate. They throw his corpse into a river. They love throwing corpses and rivers the romans Um, which is a bad idea, by the way, if you're going to kill, if you're gonna if your political movement is going to massacre a bunch of people, don't throw their bodies in the river. You need that water, especially,

you know in pre pre water treatment plant times. Yeah, if you wanna my my famous favorite meme, the one from Predator with the two the black guy in the and the white guy like clasping hands, it's gonna be like ancient Rome, the Aztecs throwing all of their corpses in the river um. So, whether or not you want to see the Brothers gracky as they've become known to the ages as the first socialists or is precursors to Donald Trump, this brief period of time in the spotlight

they have makes one thing very clear. The ruling class in Rome is willing to break any rule and violate any norm to keep the money flowing and maintain their shocking rate of wealth accumulation. From this point on in the Republic's history, the rich only get richer and the

poor tend to get poorer. But once it becomes clear that it's okay to murder political rabble rousers and their supporters to keep them from redistributing land, it becomes increasingly hard to argue that there aren't a lot of other politics, cool things that are worth doing a murder over, And so people start murdering over everything. Um and while Roman politics is getting a lot more murdery. And one BC

this huge migration of barbarians. They're generally called Germans, but like they're not actually Germans, but whatever they're they're they sweep down from central central Ish Europe and they start invading Italy. Now the Romans do what they always do, which is they put together this this army twenty men, and they march out to stop them. And you know, Nancy Pelosi's in charge again. So the army gets wiped out,

just just absolutely massacred. So the Roman state, which had never meaningfully reformed public lands or fixed the problems that Gracky had railed against, can't really replace the lost men. But thankfully they have a guy on hand, a military leader, a dude named Gaius Marius who he's been elected consul a couple of times at this point, and he's co leading a military campaign elsewhere in the empire, and it

just so happens. This guy Marius is like like top ten military minds and like all of history, like if you're if you're ranking like all of the like, he's up there with like Subatie and ship like. He's he's very very good at being a military leader. And he's going to be the guy who reforms the Roman military. So the Roman army that you've seen in any movie with like Romans where they all have segmented armor and like you know, you've got the lesions of the big

shields and the swords and the hat. He invents that before him. It's a very different looking army. They have like different classes that they've got the guy's spirit. It's it's very different military. I mean it's it's like everyone because everyone bought their own ship. So it's right exactly exactly. Um, So he reforms the military, and he also he basically succeeds in making the state pay for it. So for the first time, Um, you've got regular people. They're called

the proletarii proletari yeah, proletaria something like that. Um, the poorest people are in the military, and he started it's very controversial what he's doing, but there's a di aster happening at the time. They're getting their asses kicked by these these barbarians. So he's like, look, we have to we have to recruit from poor people and arm them at the state's expense. UM. And this works out really really well. UM. And Marius is as as he's a

brilliant military leader, he's also a really good politician. He's good at winning elections and and exercising power and building coalitions. But he's also he's not really a patrician. He's he's a rich guy, but he's kind of a rich country guy. So everyone could all of the patricians. He's a redneck, right. He doesn't speak Greek, right, he can't even speak Greek.

So they're like they hate his ass. Like there's a little bit, actually a little bit of their reaction to him that is kind of trumpy, and that like you've got this like entrenched political class who just doesn't like the way he talks. But I think it's kind of gross.

But also he's super popular among regular people because number one, he's like massively improving their lives because along with letting them be in the army, he makes it so that if you're in the army, you get a bunch of land after you retire, right Like, you get this land that we're conquering, we're going to give it to soldiers. So instead of coming home to a farm that has been taken from you, you come home and you get given a farm by the farm, you know, And that's

like a pretty cool deal um for the time. So, to make a long story short, he he wins this war um, and he becomes such a hero that he has styled the third Founder of Rome um. Like to if you want to talk about the degree to which he wins this war against these barbarians, if I'm remembering properly, they basically create a new god of death that's made in him his image because of how many of them he kills. It's that it's he's like that, it's like

that kind of war um. So he becomes like known as the third Founder of Rome, which is you know, most like he's he's a big part of who's like pushing that title for himself, right, because he's yeah, it's good, good branding, um. And he's absolutely a populist, and in fact, he draws a movement towards to him, who become known as the popular as Um, which is I think it's pretty obvious what that means. And they're they're as is by the optimates, who are like the rich people who

want to reduce the political power of the police Um. Eventually, all of this leads to a nasty civil war between Marius and his old lieutenant, a patrician politician named Sola. Now Slah is like the number one, it has to be said. He is like the queerest dude in ancient rome Um and very open about it. He's a fun fucking guy, like real it was like Sola is a is a neat character um and he he is just like this, like very like some people will say, sadistic,

definitely mass murderer, very very good general. And he and fucking Marius have this like series of horrific battles. They have this massive civil war and just bleed it wipes out like a generation of Italian because they're both really good. Neither of them are Pelosi types. They're both actually good at having armies. Um, so they just massacre each other. Now, Marius loses at first, and he asked to flee to Africa, but then he reinvades Italy and he conquers Rome and

he massacres all of Sola's followers in the city. But then he dies because he's like Joe biden Age. And so Sola comes back and he kills all of marius Is followers, including like there's like eight thousand Italians members of this tribe elsewhere in Italy who Marius was trying to give political rights to because there's this big fight over whether or not Italian should be Roman citizens, and he just genocides Sola just does a genocide on this.

He stabs eight thousand people to death, which is a lot of people to stab to death when you think about it, um, very rarely do that many people get stabbed to death in the short period. It really is that, like you know, it's so I know that obviously our brains are numbed to like the numbers of war and like what what like automatic weapons and like you know, modern bombs can do. And it is really like swords,

This is swords. This is sorts. It is. It is swords and sharpened sticks and like arrows which are basically sharpened sticks. Um. So Sola just kills fucking everybody he get his hands on, um who are his enemy. And then he's dictator. He makes himself dictator, which is a political position in Rome, right. Dictator previously is like it's a you have, it's a job you have for like six months a year. He makes himself dictator for however

long he wants to be. But after a while he gives up the job and he retires to his mansion to funk a bunch of hot dudes. So that's a pretty fun character. I mean as far as like I'm the dictator, but you know what I'm like from dictator is like a pretty amazing that's like no one does that. Like he's a monster. These guys are all monsters, but he's a pretty entertaining monster. So there's a number of cool side effects to Solo massacring all of Marius's guys.

Number one, all of the people who were like popularites, who are like populists, Plebeian supporting like folks who are on Marius side. They either get murdered or they have to flee the city. And one of these people who has to flee Rome and like hide somewhere else is a dude you might have heard of named Julius Caesar, right,

he's one of Marius his butts. So another thing that happens is that under Solo, the plebs are stripped of all political power that like position tribune of the pleas that have caused so much trouble with the they that that doesn't exist anymore for a while. It comes back. They regain the power pretty a lot of the power they've had in like the decades after Solo leaves, um,

but they lose basically all political power for a while. UM. And the last thing that happens is that all of the people's sullen murders have there and he's like he's he's like a Stalin type figure with his murdering. He makes a list, like there's like a list, and you get a bounty if you like kill or bring in somebody who's like on his list. You get like a chunk of their stuff. Um. And so some people get really good at murdering or tracking down or are hiring

people to murder folks on that list. And so they get a bunch of their stuff. Um, and he's like, so again, if you help him kill his political enemies, he'll give you their ship. And by hooker by crypt, a lot of the property of people who had been supporters of Marius winds up in the hands of a guy named Marcus Licinius Crassis, who is the Elon Musk

of ancient Rome, the wealthiest man in the world. Um, and he's also not He's like Musk, not just because he's the richest guy in the world, but he's also a some would say a trailblazing innovator. Right now, Musk's great innovations are PayPal, which is banking but slightly less regulated, and uh in that car company. Crosses. His innovation is he starts the first firefighting brigade in Roman history. Right.

People have been obviously fighting fires for forever because it's a horrible problem, right, like a terrible, terrible problem in ancient Rome. Um. But he's the first guy who builds like an actual professional fire brigade. Now, these guys are all slaves, um, and the fire brigade is a for profit endeavor. So what happens is when your house is on fire, Crosses his guys will show up and be like that seems like a real problem. You got sell us your house for like basically nothing and we'll put

the fire out. Um. So he gets real rich doing this, right, he makes so much fucking money. Um, it is hard to convert old Roman currency to modern dollars. But he's like a billionaire, right, He's a multibillionaire for all intents and purposes. He's got like Elon Musk money. Right. Um. He is so rich that a few decades later he's going to buy an army of forty men to invade Iran. Um.

It doesn't work out for him. Uh, it's really badly, but he's part of this like tradition of like now rich guys can buy an army if they were Yeah, because they basically what they're doing, like, I'm going to donate this money to the state in order to buy this army because I think we need to be a war with these people. Um and crasses his case, they get their asses kicked very badly, and he gets killed by having molten gold throat poured out his throat, which

is yeah, no, it's a dope. It's a dope punishment because the Parthians who are like basically Iranian Um are like, uh, hey, you're the richest man in the world. You know, it would be a fun way to murder you is to make you drown in your own moulten gold. We're gonna like melt down your money and kill you with it, which is rad and should be done more often in history like today for example. Um now, it's just pooring n f t s down there, That's right. They do

not have the same panash so crass. This is one of these Roman politicians that most people have probably heard about. He's famously he's part of this triumvirate that runs things for a while at the tail end of the republic. The other two guys in the transvirate are Julius Caesar, who everybody knows, and the Nias Pompeius Magnus or or simply Pompy the Great. Um now, I'm not going to First off, I should note he's called Pompy the Great

because that is the nickname he gives himself. He basically he's like Pompy's whole strategy was he would go Rome would be at a war somewhere, and some political guy who was good at fighting the war would almost win it, and then Pompy, because he was good at politics and rich, would like buy his way into taking over the army, and then he'd finish the war and then he'd be like, look at this big victory. I want to guess I get another big fancy day marching through the city. And um.

So like he gets that, he gets voted the name Pompy the Great effectively because like the other senators are making fun of him because they're like like like like it's like it's a it's a it's like kind of a mocking nickname to most people because you all know you're kind of full of ship. He's like an executive producer exactly exactly. He's he's an ep um. He he actually kind of is like I mean, in a number of ways, he's like that, he's like the the Weinstein

of history. Right, Um yeah, um, Julius Caesar has been affleck. I'm not going to explain it, so I'm not going to like rehash all of this period in Roman history, save to say that like the fact that three guys wind up basically in charge of all government policy is not a good step and towards like a more republican form of government, right, So doesn't talk and get talked about enough, because this is the thing everybody talks about, is like the Triumvirate and Pompey and Caesar and Crassis

and stuff. This is like most of what people know about the Roman Republic is this tail end period. What doesn't get talked about enough is how sh it actually got done on the ground. Because in the eighty or so years since the Brothers Gracky, Roman politics had turned into a constant, low level gang war. And again you've

got these big mobs of clients. So like after it becomes common to kill people for political purposes, senators and elected officials won't travel through town without like a bunch of their guys with them, right. That so part of your job as clients, like at least you know the chunk of clients you have were like veterans who are like big tough guys. You get your vets and your boxers and stuff. And anytime you go through town to take care of business, you have like fifty or a

hundred guys with weapons like your guys following. You like to watch your back, right, because now people get murdered all the time because they propose bills. Um. And one of the things this means is that pretty regularly you'll get these groups of like senators and elected officials and like their goons, and they'll just murder each other in the street. There will be these gang wars between like

members of Congress. It is. It's literally like if fucking like Mitch McConnell and Nancy Pelosi and like bands of men with like sharpened sticks wailing in each other in like Washington, um, which would be a better system than we have now. Don't get me wrong. Now it's like a cold war ver yeah yeah, yeah, so like and a lot of one of the actually the most popular

weapons is like ceiling tiles. Like that's if you really want to kill somebody, you get some dudes up on a roof to just start hooking ceiling tiles down on them. That will kill the motherfucker fast. Um yeah. So yeah, I mean that's how it's a good way to kill people. Um.

So the most successful of these gangsters. Because another thing that happens is that like, yes, senator, you've got like your mobs of clients, but like a guy who's professionally building a mob of armed people to get into street fights. It is always going to be better than some politician

who has his like his like Toady's following him. So you get these professional gangsters who build political mobs to street fight on behalf of different sides of the big Roman political divide, right, and the most successful of these gangsters is a guy named Claudius. Now, Claudius is another rich kid. His family had sided with Sola during the last civil war, which is like, you know, that's the aristocracy side, But Claudius didn't follow in the footsteps of

his father, who had been elected consul. Instead, he starts to develop a reputation is the kind of guy who can get things done in a dark alley. And sixty three b C. A senator named Cataline tries to overthrow the government and massacre all of the elected leaders of Rome and assumed control in a coup kind of tries to make himself dictator again like Selah had. And while this is all going on, this is a complicated story.

But while there's this like coup attempt, Claudius, because he's kind of a young, strapping dude, he volunteers to act as bodyguard for the consoles for the elected leaders Catalan is trying to kill and when all the dust is settled, he's become one of the guys you go to in Rome when you need a gang of thugs to protect you or somebody else. Right, he kind of like he's

kind of like building a private security firm. Like that's literally, like really what this is is like you can hire Claudius and he's got like fucking goons who will watch your fucking back and they're good at it. Um. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now there's a lot of ground to cover here. And I'm not going to give Claudius his due because he's a fascinating guy, but I would be doing everyone a disservice if I didn't read you this one excerpt from his back story, and I'm gonna this is coming from

a write up and headstuff dot org quote. The cult of Bonadea, the Good Goddess, is somewhat of an anomaly in classical Rome. Rather than the standard gods with the priesthood and open worship, the Good Goddess was worshiped in a less formal fashion, similar to the Greek mystery colts. The celebrations of Bonaday were not of the city's normal ecclesiastical rights, and in fact they predated the earliest recorded history of the city. Even her name was a secret,

known only to women and never recorded. She to have a temple where only women were permitted entry, and every year on the first day of May they would hold a sacred celebration in this temple. This was one of two such celebrations held throughout the year, but the second in December was not held in the temple, instead was hosted by the wife of the chief magistrate, with the aid of Rome's sacred vestal virgins. The year, the chief

magistrate was Rome's high priest Caius Julius Caesar. Quite why Claudius decided to infiltrate the Bonnadea festivities in sixty two BCS a mystery. The main rumor at the time was that he did it in an attempt to seduce the hostess, Caesar's wife, Pompeia. The more likely reason is that he did it in an attempt to win some credit with Rome's bohemian set and set himself up as an iconoclast. Whoever it was, he disguised himself as a woman and

slipped into the house. Unfortunately for him, Caesar's mother, Aurelia, was there determined to make sure that things went smoothly, and she immediately noticed this unusually tall and heavily cloaked women. The right of Bonnadea was such a rare opportunity for Roman women to throw off the chackles of propriety, and as such, masking your identity like that was very unusual. Really, had a servant girl follow Claudius, and she immediately noticed when he let his voice slip. She called him out

on it, and he fled the scene. Though he was not definitively identified, everyone knew it was Claudius. A public outrage in his conduct, stoked by his brother in law, led him to be formally charged with the sacrilege the following year. The punishment for a man who witnessed the

mysteries of the Good Goddess was to be blinded. Just cloud show ship and it's as a fun note, Caesar divorces his wife after this, not because she'd done anything, but because the fact that this guy was maybe trying to fuck her means that people might suspect she'd done something, and Caesar's wife has to be above suspicion. Oh my god,

he just wanted a divorce. Like these guys are all Again, the cool thing about ancient Romans is like you could among number one, you can make an incredible fucking like uh like soap opera show that's just about the lives of all these people they are like, uh, the just just all very every one of these fucking people that we've talked about would have had a reality show if TV. Like Caesar. Caesar almost basically did kind of have the

equivalent of the reality show. So one of the things that he's doing, he and he kind of comes to power later in life. He doesn't have a lot of money, um, so he has to work with crosses and stuff. But when he gets his military command of gall number one, it's kind of because he's so old and hasn't really

distinguished himself politically. It's kind of like if Pete Boudagedge suddenly got elected Supreme Commander of the of the U. S Military and then and then conquered the entire Middle East in five years, right like if like that, it's kind of because that's what Caesar does, is he like

he's kind of a joke. He's this like silly asshole that everybody's like laughing at and then he conquers all of Western Europe like it is he's got not to compare them, because Pete Boudage is useless and Julius Caesar is very smart. But one of the things Caesar does while he is conquer again all the fucking Europe, like he like he's his in his minnor. He forces are regularly outnumbered four and five to one by some accounts, even more than that, Like he's an incredibly competent military leader.

While he's doing this, he's writing every day about what he's doing and then sending his diary back to Rome to be published and read out to people in the city. So he's turning his life into the equivalent at the time of a reality show to build a legend around himself and to make himself into a popular figure. Like he's kind of doing the Trump thing too, where it's like, yeah, I've got this, I've got the most popular show in town. Everybody shows up to listen to the latest pages of

Caesar's diary being read. I mean, how he's got to do both, I guess, but yeah, he's very very Yeah military victory. So Claudius goes to trial as to whether or not he's gonna get blinded for like sneaking into these these women's rights. Um. And he he doesn't get blinded, um, but only because Caesar and Crasses back him and they bribe the jury to acquit him. Prior to this, he'd kind of been on the optimate side of things politically, but he's now like a popular because Caesar and Crassis,

you know. Um. And this is kind of the start of his his life as a creature of Caesar and Crassus uh. Inft b C. He runs for election as tribune of the police. Now, as we've talked about, this is the veto job and it's very important. But also it's a tribune of the police. You can't have this job if you're a patrician, which Claudius is. So he pays a guy who is four years younger than him to adopt him as his son, like he pays a poor man who's younger than him to adopt him as

his son and make him a plebeian. And then he changes his name from c l a U d i U S to c l O d i U S. I mean, it's slightly different in Latin, but like he basically changes it to a different spelling of Claudius to symbolize that, like now I'm a commoner. Um. But the been the main benefit. Number One, he can veto ship, which since the grack eye, that's become like the thing you do if you get a tribune on your side, you can just stonewall everything. It's like the filibuster, right,

like you can stop anything from happening. You can just yeah, yeah, that's ultimate he makes. He makes himself into the Joe Mansion. But the other thing is that, like, because all of Roman politics is determined via street fights, if you kill the tribune of the Polabs any like tribunes are sacra sank their sacred when they're holding office, so if you

kill one, you are immediately put to death. So he basically gains like a force field for himself in the street So he's like Joe Mansion that he can shut down politics. But also now he's got like that if you touch me in a street fight, you get murdered, Like it's a force field. Um. Again, they it's a better system than we have, I think. So eventually the Optimates get their own street fighter, UM, who is even better than Claudius at building a gang of violent people

to murder folks for political purposes. And this is this gangster named Milo, who is also pretty fucking rad. Um. Milo is a is a hoot. So these two send their goons to beat and murder people organizing for the other sides. Assassinations and street fights grow to become like a daily occurrence. There's basically a low level gang war at all times all throughout the city of Rome, and you never know if you're gonna get caught up in between these mobs of like armed young thugs just like

murdering people in the streets. Um. Now, these two street gangs each kind of like represent a different political block, but they also represent there's two angry young dudes who hate each other in charge of them. So it's it's very much both like a political proxy fight and also just a street fight between two games that hate each other. Yeah, it all comes to a head in fifty two BC when Milo murders Claudius after beating him in a street fight.

And this is a real problem. Um Now, I bet some people are wondering at this point as we talk about all of this going on, where the funk are the police in the right, because at this point in Roman history there's like a million. There's close to a

million people in the city of Rome. It doesn't really hit a million until I guess the first century a d. But there's like probably six seven thousand or more people living in the city at this point, which is there will be no city in Eurasia with a population that's similar in size until the eighteen hundreds, right, And this is like fifty BC, you know. Um, So Rome is able to get that big because it's very modern in a lot of ways. There's sewers, a lot of homes

have central heating, um, they have running water, um. But one hallmark of modern life that roam lacked was anything that vaguely resembled law enforcement. And I want to quote from a writeup from Dr Linda Ellis here. Though the government could usually cope with major disorders, personal violence plagued the city under the Republic. The police powers of the government were rudimentary, with few officials and limited staff trying

to maintain some semblance of order. So if you committed a crime in Rome, like treason or fucking in the money with the money that was serious, you would get punished right, some high up elected official would like send

guys after you, right. Usually these were like guys known as lictors, who are like basically, if you have political office that comes with any kind of power, you get these dudes who hang around you and they carry these things called fascis, which are like a bundle of sticks with an axe side to them, which is where we get the word fascism, and you can send them to do things and they basically have can speak with like

the power that you have. It's it's a way of being like, well, you know, if I'm actually running this empire, I might need to be making things happen in more than one place. Service was a little more proactive kind of but instead of like protecting you, their job is mainly to go and like tell people to do things on your behalf. So you can if like somebody does some serious treason, there's the ability to kind of enforce

the law against them, but there's not cops. And so like if if a popular or a wealthy guy like murders somebody, they're not going to get punished in less like the person they murder has more money than them. And like friends who like range a mob to like go and fight his supporters. UM and property crime is not really a crime, it's a civil matter. As Dr Linda Ellis writes, quote, when the average citizen of Rome became a victim of crime, he had to rely on

his neighbors and relatives for help. Roman nobility could also call up a mob of clients to do battle for them. In rural areas of Italy, the situation was worse, and landowners hired armed bands to protect themselves and intimidate their enemies. There were even a few private armies of thugs at Rome. Self help was always the main way to deal with criminals in ancient Rome, and there was no concept of public prosecution, so victims of crime or their families had

to organize and manage the prosecution themselves. So it's kind of everybody doing the gang ship at this point, which is, you know, we'll talk about how it works, because in some ways it works better than what's gonna come next, in some ways it doesn't. But this again, it is worth noting that like this is the system that like a million people live under in the densest city in

the modern world. UM, and they mostly figure their ship out now as we know in forty nine BC, the tensions between the optimates and the popularities that have been settled in the streets turned into open war. Right, you get you get your Caesar. He crosses the Rubicon, which is a river. He fights this big war with his old friend Pompey, and Caesar wins, right, uh, And then

he gets the ship stabbed out of him. And then there's another horrible civil war between the people who had killed Caesar and this kid who's related to him, who he kind of like makes his inheritor named Augustus, and Augustus wins this civil war and he winds up as the emperor. Right, this is the history everybody knows. This is like the most famous period of all of Roman history.

Cleopatra's in the mix for a while, then she's not, Yeah, so the characters I've heard of, Yes, yeah, we're we're now at the point in history everyone knows about it. We're gonna talk about what Augustus does to deal with the fact that, like when he takes power, everyone has just gone through like a hundred and fifty straight years of constant assassinations and like street fights and three different civil wars that had all killed significant fractions of the

male populace of the Roman empire. Um, and they're kind of tired of it. People like are not happy with the status quo. Like, you know what, we're okay not having any political power if you can stop everyone from murdering everyone all the time. So that's that's what what Augustus comes to power with, right. Um. And speaking of murdering everyone, you know who's gonna murder you the podcast, the sponsors of our podcast, they'll kill your ass. They will, Sophie,

They'll kill your ass. That's their promise that I know. I don't. I didn't see that in ad copy or the promo codes. Okay, well promo code A man is coming to attack you in the night with a knife. Yeah, well that sounds like a difference of opinion. Uh, we're back. I wanna I wanna note one thing real quick here. So we're we're recording this like the day after the FBI rated Trump's house, which is a very funny moment.

Everybody's still enjoying it. You will be listening to this in the future when um, the entirety yeah next yeah, gettysburg to and three have already happened by the time you've heard this. Yes, there are no people left in Virginia. Um, yeah,

it's it's a nightmare. But anyway, so that the like right after that happened, you get all these right wing like media leaders and thought leaders started like saying ship about like now the war is on, like get ready to fight, fucking Stephen Crowder being like tomorrow we go to war. My favorite quote that one of these ship heads came put out is this guy Jesse Kelly, who is, according to his Twitter, host of the nationally syndicated Jesse Kelly Show, host of I'm Right, Um, and yeah, he's

some sort of anti communist piece of ship. He's got like half a million followers on Twitters. Yeah, I think I think he's a Fox News guy. Yeah, that seems right. So his post when everybody's like fed posting on Maine after Trump gets rated is do not quote laws to men with swords attributed to Pompey Magnus. Now he likes this because number one, they all fetishized weapons as doing things that weapons don't, which is provide on their own

some sort of autonomy. Weapons are useless without organization, as anything but like tools of either personal violence or u bullshittery. But the other thing that he's doing is like this is like that you can't govern us because we have we have we're armed, right, Like that's the thing that he's saying here. The funny thing about this number one Pompey Magnus, as we've just covered, was a gigantic fraud like literally like bullshit his way into like repeated military

commands and stuff. He's the same as like, I don't know, those Republicans that get up on stage to do a bunch of push ups to show that they're big with a gun or whatever. Yeah, exactly, exactly, Yeah, it's like that sort of bullshit. Um. But the other thing that's funny about this is that during the Civil War with Caesar, Pompey gets his as kicked because against Caesar is really good at fighting wars and Pompey is a gigantic fraud um.

And he gets captured by Ptolemy, who's the leader of Egypt at the time, who's like um allied with Caesar. And while he's being sent as a prisoner to Caesar, Ptolemy has by some accounts, a fifteen year old boy stab him to death and cut his head off and then they stick it on a spear and parade it through town. So, Jesse Kelly, that may not be the guy at a hark to as like your your hero of like kind of appropriate right wing Yeah, like politician, Yeah,

giant fraud who starts a fight and then gets murdered. Um, very funny. So Augustus is the emperor, right, um, and everyone is very tired of political violence because it has

just and on way too fucking long. Right. And this is again, actually it's not entirely wrong to kind of think about the political power that has kind of been gained, not that these are too similar, but like the the political power that has accrued, especially in the last few years around gun control, as a result of like exhaustion at the constant spread of massacres. It's not entirely different.

Because all these people in Rome, they've had a lot, most of them have lost family in these fucking fights. It's this constant drumbeat of violence and these constant series of civil wars, and they're just like fucking exhausted. And so the one of the reasons Augustus is able to take and hold power is that he promises and delivers. I'm going to put a stop to that ship. Right, We're not gonna have to deal with this anymore. And that is a pretty enticing thing for people at this

point in Roman history. Um. Now, different leaders had attempted to deal with Roman mob violence prior to Augustus. When Pompey took over the city during the Civil War, he had brought his armed soldiers into Rome, crossing the Pomarium illegal in order to restore order and put an end

to lawlessness. And while Pompey had let his soldiers violate sacred law by taking weapons into the city, he had banned the private ownership of weaponry within the city, which happens several times in Roman history and never actually happens. Right again, it's it's pretty you could just like take a chair leg right like it's it's not like what

the weapons we're talking about. You can't really ban because people are just like making like sure, yeah, exactly, yeah, And people are gonna have roof tiles that you can hocket folks. You know, um, slings are not hard to make a leather glove glove with like metal anyway, it's not hard. So when Augustus takes power, though, he expands the ban on private ownership of weaponry. He bans the

carrying of arms during assemblies or judicial proceedings. Um. And eventually he passes a law known as the Lex Julia de v Um, which makes it illegal to carry weapons for any reason in the Empire outside of hunting or personal protection when you're traveling between in cities. Right. Um. So, in addition to this, he establishes the first police force, the first police force of any kind anywhere in the Western world. Now, different regimes had all had ways of

like dealing with descent or cracking down on stuff. There had been stuff that was kind of policy. The Spartans half essentially their version of like a fugitive slave patrol and stuff. Um. But what Augustus builds is very different. Among other things, it is a permanent armed force in the city of Rome itself, which had never happened before, right, And so this is part of one of the things that makes Rome has always kind of been ungovernable. And

so this is as ugly as it gets. It's also a check to the power of the aristocracy because they can never hold too much power, because at any moment the Bob could get angry and just murder everyone because there's way too many of them and there's no army in Rome to stop them. Right, So it's just like, how big are your gangs? Are they bigger than everyone else in the city? You know they're not, So you

can't do certain things now. He because the police force he built, their primary job is not stopping crime or investigating murders. They're riot cops, right, that's what he puts into the city. He calls them urban cohorts because like cohort is a military unit, right, kind of broadly equivalent to like, I don't know, battalion almost um. In modern military terms, these urban cohorts are military units commanded and organized similarly to the regular military legions, which operate under

the military chain of command. They are militarized police, and their job is to put down riots, to corral the power of the mob, and to make street combat and coup's basically impossible. Um. Again, they don't handle petty crime. They don't do anything if your home is invaded or if like your kids murdered or whatever. So they're they're the same as cops today. Actually, there's there's a lot of similarities between them and they're heavily. Again, these are

militarized police. Now this is like the urban cohorts are like the daytime cops, and then there's nighttime law and part of what they're doing is law and forcement. Um. They're called card the Vigils, which is where we get the word vigilante, even though they're not really vigilantes um.

And the Vigils are initially just a fire brigade. They're made up of freedmen who knew how to fight fires, and their job is to like be distributed through the cities that when a fire starts, you can get a team of guys there to try to stop it, right because again, the biggest thing that Romans have to worry with on a day to day basis is fire. Um. So because like while you're I'm actually just gonna quote from Dr Linda Ellis here to talk about like how

what these guys do evolves over time. At first, the Vigils functioned primarily as a firefighting force, since the main threat to cities then and now was destructioned by uncontrolled fire. They were equipped with water pumps, buckets, and axes for breaking down the doors of houses on fire or suspected of being a fire risk. Artillery was used to shoot dampening materials onto fires and to create the fire breaks

by leveling buildings. The vigils patrolled the city at night and had the right of entry into private homes, which put them in the position of witnessing crime and taking on the role of policemen, from capturing thieves, returning runaway

slaves to maintaining public order. So they have the right to go into your home because we have to be able to make sure you're not starting a fire that you can't keep more that like a fire is and started, that you haven't fallen asleep or whatever, and like your your house is burning down. But because of this, now we're allowed to do no knock raids on your house

if we think it might be a fire. What if we see a crime, we have to have the ability to like prosecute a crime too, And so they kind of become cops because they have the ability to bust into anybody's house for any reason. Um. So this is so it's so interesting that that like that characteristic begets the job and not the other way around. It is really interesting, right because it's very because our policy It's not how I would have assumed that, but it makes sense.

It's like that power creates the become police. And it's interesting because like in in our system, our police, who are thugs came out of fugitive slave patrols, which were just a worse kind of thug. In this case, the polace come out of an absolutely necessary job. You're gonna have a fucking million people in a city in zero a SBC, you need professional firefighter's right underwise it's just suicide.

But kind of you get how this like evolves and then they become cops because like, well, like this guy's breaking the low? What am I supposed to Are we supposed to just let this happen? Um? You know, it's interesting. Yeah, it is really different though from what you would expect. Um. So the birth of this and this is this is

a fairly advanced law enforcement force. Right, Like, if you're thinking about what's around at the time, you've got these are that like at any given time, thousands upon thousands of heavily armed men, like the Vigils have artillery. They have catapults and ship which they used to fight fires, but which can also be turned to like fight riots. Which, by the way, I would have loved to watch these guys fight a fire because I want to see people like stop a fire with a fucking catapult. Um, it's

pretty cool. Ship. But so, one of the things that this does is you've got this advance law enforcement force. You've disarmed the city. The only people with weapons are these cops. One of the things that this makes a hell of a lot easier is the state can enforce

on popular laws. Now you think back to Lucretia, right, Romans get rid of their first or their last king because like there's this stupid ass law and he does, like his son does a horrible thing rape somebody in the stupid ass law leaves in the even worst situation, and everybody's really angry about it. And because the mob is the mob, they are able to like kick the king out, and that's how the republic starts. That's not gonna be possible. Nothing like that is anymore, um, because

now you have riot cops in the city. Um. So it's really easy for the state to force people to accept laws that are unpopular. A good example of this during the reign of Nero, the mayor basically of Rome is murdered by one of his slaves. Now they can't figure out who did it, right, they don't know which slave there's no is one of the people he owns

in his household, but he's got hunt ruds. I think this might might have had like like a thousand or more, like a shipload of slaves, like a fucking small town worth of slaves. Now, under Roman law, if you can't figure out which specific slave did it, you have to execute the entire household, every man, woman and child in a lot of these slaves or kids who lives with

this guy. Um. Now, everyone in Rome when this happens is fucking horrified by this, And in fact, stuff like this had happened in the past, and it had provoked riots which had often stopped this sort of justice from being carried out in full right because people Romans, they don't think slaves are like less human right, they have less rights due to what they believe is a pretty

natural political condition. But they're still horrified at the thought if you're gonna kill like five people because like one of them is a murderer, and like you're gonna murder a bunch of kids, Like that's fucked up My dad was a slave by Grandpa was a slave. Like. I

don't think this is right. And in the past Romans attempting to like Roman leaders attempting to carry out these laws in order to maintain the status quo, would have had to like funk up a bunch of people to do it, um, and would have been put at risk by doing it. That doesn't happen anymore. Um. By the time Nero was empowered, the vigils on the oven urban

cohorts are professionalized. They're very good at stopping descent, and so a huge show of force is sent out by the police state as the Romans move in to execute these slaves. As English historian P. KB. Reynolds wrote in his nineteen paper on Ancient Roman policing quote, the law was upheld, however on this occasion, but elaborate police precautions were necessary when the sentence was to be carried out.

So because they have this powerful police force, the mob cannot act to stop an injustice, right because they just get the ship murdered out of them by the cops. Um. And it's interesting, Reynolds, this is a very fascinating paper. I recommend reading it if you're interested. In ancient Rome, right after talking about how the birth of policing made

it possible to massacre all of these kids. Uh, he goes on to write that quote, it is not really going too far to say that in the medal of matter of police services, it was not until the beginning of the nineteenth century that the cities of Europe regained the standards of civilization which had existed in the Roman Empire years before. It took us two thousand years almost to get back to having cops who can make this

kind of thing possible. What an achievement. Yeah, that's the pinnacle. Yeah, I mean yeah, yeah, so right, it's like like the mob rule or the not mob rule, but like the ability of mobs to enact like some sort of or like put it to you know, to act as a check against like state power and the power of the rich. Ideally, Yeah,

that's jury nullification now. But yeah, and again everybody, especially when you because I I made the probable mistake of like bringing up you know, guns and assault weapons and and and that debate in this whenever we want to like talk about ancient ship and like apply it to modern terms, there's a desire to have like a simple answer, and there just isn't because like, yeah, constant mob warfare was really bad. The establishment of a police state was

also really bad. Yeah, and I think it is. I think there are things to learn about this, about like the dangers and whatnot of different political things that you can do. But I think it is fundamentally silly to like try to run to direct aligned. This is two thousand years ago. But it is like it is worth noting that, like, okay, you give up the ability of the people to check the state's power and then so the state can enforce much less and that is something

that is worth noting. Yeah, and that that's constant gang warfare is good either. Yeah, I mean it is like like this is how apartheid states like the ones we currently live in. Yet like you know, we are currently ruled by a racist, white nationalist minority and they are able to do but you know, yeah, it's hard to

know if the alternative is better. Yeah, it's just it's it's just worth talking about this history without trying to like and so this is why you should vote this way on this lot two thousand years later, let's just talk about Yeah, um again, I am not try ang to Like, I'm really not trying to just make like a coy political point. I just think it's actually worth studying this if you want to think about the problems inherent to uh society. Like it's just good to know

this stuff. So, of course, you're not just gonna stop people from objecting to tyranny because you have a bunch of armed thugs who can crack heads in the street. You're going to also need a secret police force, right obviously you know Um and Augustus actually established two secret

police forces. Now, one is kind of informal basically, because you have this pretty big empire and you have all these military units spread around, you have like a supply service, right, who needs to like take messages from like oh, these guys up in fucking France or these guys all the way down in Jerusalem have like you know, they need more of spears, they need more shields, and like, I've got to take that information. I gotta get it to

this guy. I gotta get You have like supply runners, and they're literally like riding horses and like physically moving around cities to carry messages. And so naturally he turns these guys who are called frumentary I into a secret service right into like his his spies because they're traveling everywhere and nobody pays much attention to them. Um, so they're a pretty good pick to act as like your Hey,

you can keep an eye on things. Tell me if like unrest is boiling up, you can be a spy basically because you have the ability to go anywhere you know um Reynolds rights quote. The Emperor Hadrian, we are told, knew all secrets through the frumentary I. And as the Empire became more despotic, so the activities of the frumentary I multiplied, and the persecutions of the Christians. It was the frumentary I who searched men out and who affected arrests.

Probably to the soldier who guarded St. Paul was a frumentarius. And if the Emperor desired the speedy removal of a prominent noble against whom it might be dangerous to proceed openly, the frumentari I were employed to carry out the deed. In fact, they performed all the dirty work that has always fallen to a lot of the secret police and

an absolute despotism. There were so efficient in their work that they incurred universal hatred, and historian of the third century complains that they trannize over us, and later writer bitterly calls them a pestilent crew and in another passage

the plague of the Roman world. In response to this general odium, the Emperor Diocletian disbanded them at the end of the third century, but their duties were far too important for the emperors to be able to dispense with their services, and a new core was soon enrolled, especially designed as a secret police. This new force blue aboard the curious title of Agents for Affairs, which was sufficiently

vague to cover their manifold activities. But the agents were soon no better than their predecessors, and as early as the middle of the fourth century the Emperor Julian had had to reprove their corruption, and soon they had just as bad a name as the frumentary. I so that's pretty cool. That's a pretty cool bit of history right there. There's just no way, right, I guess. The lesson, of course, is like that kind of power necessarily creates, Yeah, these

fucking evil people. Yeah, only bad people want that job, and they do bad ms when they get it. It's also worth like again, go back to the Gracchi. When some rich people want to kill a guy, they just have to fucking hire up and murder him in the street, and everybody knows what's happened, right, It's real fucking clear what goes down. And because of how much they've pissed people off, they have to like give people a bunch of what they had asked for and the stuff, even

though they murdered the guy. Now you just have one of these fucking spooks kill him, right, Like, now you've got like the the Emperor's fucking spooks. You can kill him and nobody's allowed to talk about it or ask about it. It's not obvious what's happened, you know. Um so the last and most powerful police agency in ancient Rome where the Praetorian Guard. In some way, these guys are the evolution of mobs of armed supporters who tried to protect to protect Tiberius, Gracchus and the gangs run

by Milo and Claudius. You know, during the civil wars, all of these guys who are fighting each other had like units of bodyguards that are like the toughest soldiers they've got, and Augustus had formed his into an elite military unit which started like five thousand men and eventually

becomes like nine thousand guys. And these were during the Civil Wars, just like his shock troops, right, but they become his like elite riot force, right because the urban cohorts are just three thousand men um and the legions are rarely in Italy, so the Praetorians are always the

strongest armed force near the center of power. So Augustus keeps like two thirds of them in the city of Rome, ready to crack heads when heads need cracking, and he sends a third of them elsewhere in the Italian peninsula to like garrison different hotspots. Uh. And they basically act as like secret police, referring back to him, making sure no one in the Some of them take up jobs in the in the military and stuff in order to

like be able to report back on what's going on. Uh. And then the words of historian guide de Bellier quote minimize the impression that he depended on them. Instead, the guard depended on Augustus no emperor meant no jobs and no special status. Because these guys get a shipload of extra money for doing what they're doing, right, They're paid very very well in order to keep the emperor in power. So guard officers also occupied roles in the urban cohort.

It's uh and undercover praetorians could pop up anywhere, so they're like the mixed between the FBI and the Secret Service. It could also be used to assassinate political rivals, but as Guy points out quote, this state of affairs was reliant upon the emperor having enough prestige and power to contain the guard. Augustus had created potentially the most dangerous institution the Roman world had ever seen, and his monumental the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. Edward Gibbon

described this brilliantly. By thus introducing the praetorian guards, as it were, into the palace and the Senate. The emperors taught them to perceive their own strength and the weakness of the civil government, to view the vices of their masters with familiar contempt, and to lay aside that reverential awe which distance only and mystery can preserve, towards an imaginary power, and this luxurious idleness of an opulent city.

Their pride was nourished by the sense of their irresistible weight, nor was it possible to conceal from them that the person of the sovereign, the authority of the Senate, the public treasure, and the seat of empire were all in their hands. So eventually these guys start to start to come out as I serve at the like I'm here to protect the Emperor. I only have a position because at him. They realize eventually like, well, a lot of

these emperors are incompetent. The sentence much of corrupt, rich, lazy assholes. We have the only weapons, right, we have the capital and the only weapons. Why don't we just run things right? Um? Yeah, So, as time goes on, all the different law enforcement arms of Roman society kind of realized that their powers have made them unstoppable bandits,

and that's what they become. As Dr Ellis writes, quote, the Roman police and military forces often to abuse their power and status, such as property seizure without compensation and physical violence to civilians. The axes used by the Vigils and other troops were used to break down doors and abuse people both in the street and in their own houses. The Roman offered juvenal provided a dark picture of police soldier civilian relations in Rome. If a civilian was beaten

up by the soldiers slash police. He was better off forgetting about it, because if he complained, there would be a trial under recent Churian and in front of a jury of soldiers. No witnesses would dare come forward, otherwise they would have other soldiers exact retribution. Epichectus, a Greek philosopher at the time, advised that if a soldier wanted a mule, it was best to give it to him, because if not given, the person would have lost it anyway and would have been beaten up in the process.

Now we could talk about civil asset forfeit, cherry and true. We can talk about how often cops, particularly take cars from people. We're back, We're back to America. Yeah, they did it first, baby. No, it is like truly shocking how many things that are horrible that we are absolutely

no better than they. It's all it's all the same ship, right, And it's all the same ship because when you say we are building a separate class of people who will be able to live very comfortably in order to as long as they stopped the poor from fucking with the rich. And also they're the only people who have the right to to use force in our society, they always turn out to be assholes, right, because only assholes want that job, you know. Um okay, uh speaking of things, only assholes

want products and services that support our podcast. Fact. Ah, we're back. Ye a bunch of pricks. What's up our listeners? Yeah, what's up pricks? That's right, they deserve it. Yeah, all right. So we're talking about like the Roman police state here, which I don't think most people realize. Everyone knows, like, yeah, Rome that it became an empire, Like you assume that, like it's a brutal, autocratic dictatorship, but like it is a modern police state, and I want to talk about

how pervasive it truly was. Dr Ellis gives a really good job of like laying out the how heavily policed the city of Rome was. So she points out that Chicago today and her data is two thousand eighteen, is the third most populous city in the United States, with two point seven million people and five hundred cops. Ish, right, that's Chicago more or less today. Rome, at the height

of the empire, is a million people. They have a police force of seven thousand vigils, three thousand urban cohorts, cavalry attached to the urban cohorts, and roughly six thousand Praetorian guards in the city. So that's about three times as many police per capita as a heavily policed city in the United States today. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I guess it's a little bit mitigated by you know, they don't have nearly the kind of technological centralized their per views and is wide you know it is it is

worth noting how heavily the city is. They have gone from at the start of this a city where nobody gets to have a weapon, a military weapon in town, to a city that is like garrisoned by a heavy military guard at all times. Now, the first member of the Praetorian Guard to attempt to take total power for himself was say Hannus, head of the Guard under Tiberius,

who ruled from a d. Fourteen to thirty seven. Now say Hannus was caught before he could carry out his plans and execute it along with his family, and Tiberius actually lets the people of Rome riot and murder his family and supporters. Um, just like give him some fun, uh. And the Praetorian Guard. Yeah, this time, the Guard stay out of it like they don't defend their old leader because they're like, this isn't gonna go well for us.

The emperor is still too powerful. Still, that's gonna change in a d forty one when Caligula gets murdered by officers of the Praetorian Guard for being a funked up little weirdo. Now, when Caligula gets murdered by the Praetorian Guard, there's this it's not very old like the empire, and so there's still strong memories of the republic, and a lot of people are like, maybe we should go back

to having a republic emperor. Seemed like a bad idea, But the Praetorian Guard is like, well, you don't need a praetorian guard if you've got no emperor. So how about we just force you to accept an emperor of that we've picked um, and they pick a guy named Claudius,

who is a pretty interesting character himself. Um. I would like to talk more about him, but we just don't have the time, so instead I'm in a quote from Guy de la Bellier who writes Claudius was declared emperor by the praetorians and no one including the Senate was in any position to argue the praetorians jobs were secure. Claudius was reluctant emperor and turned out to be a good deal more competent than his family thought him capable of. It's even possible that Claudius had been in on the

plans all along. Gold and silver coins were issued welcoming the new emperor and he them or showing the guard welcoming the new emperor, and he them um and he like pays them a bunch of money. It's it's unclear exactly what has happened. He's a relatively good emperor, but over time they stopped backing because again, you don't want the emperor to be any good. You want him to

be a figurehead for you. And this all kind of comes to a head in one a d after the murder of Marcus Aurelius, his son Commodus, who is the

bad guy in the movie Gladiator. Um yes, so after after Russell Crowe kills him, he's actually killed by the Praetorian Guard um so in in in previous into regnums, like the death of Nero, the guard had generally kind of like gone with whoever has those power and money to be the next emperor after Commodist dies, they like go to all the rich people in Rome and they're like, hey,

how much money you will pay to the emperor. Like they literally auction off the throne of the Roman Empire to the highest bidder, who winds up being some rich asshole who gets murdered. Two months later. He gets replaced by another guy, Septimus Severus, who this guy, uh, this fucking guy. UM fires the republican or the Praetorian Guard finally, and he makes a new Praetorian Guard that he hopes to be less corrupt, and they immediately grow corrupt and

do the same thing. Um. Over the course of the empire, thirteen emperors are assassinated by the Praetorian guards. It's really like you let that you let that tiger into your house. Yeah exactly, Yeah, and you know the stuff that was in your house prior to letting the tiger and wasn't pleasant either, Whether or not do you think this was progress? I did. I'm glad you brought up a gladiator, because I did. I did want to pitch the idea of um a double feature of the Ridley Scott Italian screaming

in each other. Uh double feature of Gladiator and House of Gucci. Yeah, just Italians yelling. Italians never change, and that is that is the message of the show. Italians and police the same two thousand years ago as they are today. Um. Anyway, that's the story of how the Romans became a police state. And God, that is fucking genuinely very depressing. It's it's pretty fucked up. Um, you know we're condensing a lot of history here, but that's the god sweep of it. But yeah, an angle I

had never really considered. But yeah, that tons of science of Jesus Christ. Yeah, yeah, you know, you've got this this situation of like political violence that makes everybody be like will do anything to stop it? And then the thing that stops it is the establishment of a militarized police force who then take power and spend centuries doing violence to people. But it also works for a long time. Yeah, I mean it works for a long time. Yeah, it's never like clear enough like how bad this ship is.

And again it's too late for this because it would be easy to either be like, well, this is why no one should ever have cops, because they inherently funk everything up or this is why people shouldn't be allowed to have weapons, because you know that what happens in the Mormon Republic happens right, right, But if you're trying to find though either of those easy answers, either this is why everyone should be armed, is why everyone should be disarmed. This is why we should have cops. Is

what we shouldn't have cops. Well, both of these systems lasted like five years and conquered the entire world. It's like there we just there's not enough data and it's it's just like it's you know, there's stuff to take out of this for the future, but don't try not to take too much because again, both of these as as silly and funked up as everything is, both of these systems on a historic level work really fucking well, right,

Like that is kind of the conquered the world. Yeah, well, I mean probably the main thing is that just sort

of tells you it's just that part of it is irrelevant. Yeah, there's other stuff going on, military things, and what I mean, maybe not entirely, because like I guess partly like the fact that Roman politics is in the Republican period is so like cutthroat means that a lot of the people who wind up in charge after a certain point are like pretty canny sons of bitches, but also some really dumb sons of bitches wind up in power and they funk everything up and like destroy the Roman middle class.

So yeah, I don't know. There's actually not as many clear lessons from history as you want there to be. When you look at the history up list, each one's only been done once. That's the whole point of history. Yeah, so yeah, exactly. Anyway, that's that's the story of how Rome became a police state. So Andrew, you have any plugables for us at the end here? Uh, yeah, let's see, Um, I guess mostly. Um. Yeah, I'm doing two shows with

my podcast as this Racist. I'm going to be in a place called Austin on August and then Brooklyn on September ten. So yeah, I would love to see folks. If you've if you've enjoyed listening to me be horrified as Robert tells me stuff, then I will be a little more proactive on stage. But I'm gonna tell you not that much more proactive. Excellent, Alright, go find Andrew in Austin, and go find Jesus in your hearts, and by Jesus, I mean the Jesus Christ podcast. Yeah, period

in your ears, that's right. Sophie hates it when I compare myself to you Gonna be you Gonna be crucified suit, I really hate it by the FRUMENTARII yeah, not my favorite thing anyways, See you next week. Bye bye. Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media. For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool zone media dot com, or check us out on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.