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