Hello, welcome to Western Sieve and today in an awesome author interview, I am sitting down with historian Edward Watts, and we are talking about his most recent book, The Romans, a two thousand year History. Well you can just tell from the title that we're going to have fun with this one, and by the length of the episode you can tell that we did. Now, there is absolutely no way to cover everything in this incredible volume in an hour,
and we didn't. Really We're going to be discussing the Late Republic because as you probably know, that's one of
my favorite periods of Roman history. Really talking about the time period from the death of Julius Caesar until the rise of Augustus circa thirty one thirty BCE, so a time period of about fifteen years or so, but a time period within which the history of the Western world changed dramatically, and it's important to bear that in mind, and we talk about all the reasons that this time period still matters, as well as maybe some ways in which history, as they say, doesn't repeat, but it kind
of rhymes.
Now.
The book is out today, so if you'd like to go ahead and pick up a copy, you can click the link in the show notes, or you can just go to whatever bookseller you want to. It's available there. I've got all the biographical information for the author and everything that you might need to locate it. It is a phenomenal book and anyone who loves Roman history, or ancient history, or just history in general will love this book book, so I highly recommend you pick up a copy.
And without further ado, after some quick messages here, we're going to get the interview with historian Edward Watts and his new book, The Romans. All right, welcome back. As I mentioned moments ago, I'm sitting down today very excited to talk to historian Edward Watts. We're talking about his most recent book, The Romans, a two thousand year history, which is an undertaking. Okay, that's quite a lot, but fans of the show will know I'll never get tired
of talking about the Romans. Now, I'll tell you we were not going to have time to cover two thousand years of history here today, but and if you want to cover the whole thing, you should just click the link in the show notes and buy the book right now, which I recommend either way. But I'm going to start us off here by talking about a period that's of intense interest to me, which is the Late Republic. Let's flash back to mid March. Let's say March sixteenth March
seventeenth forty four BCE. All right, so we are to ground our listeners. We are right after the assassination now of Julius Caesar, and so I wanted to start to ask you what was the mood in Rome like at that moment. This seems like a massive turning point in world history. You know, what was the intention of the conspirators, the Brutius Bruces, the Cassius Is And why how did Rome react to such an apocalyptic event?
They don't know how. They're terrified, you know. I think this is the thing that we have to sort of put put in our framework. They don't know what to think about this, because what Caesar had represented was a stabilizing force in the Republic, and this was something the Republic desperately needed and had needed since, you know, at
least since fifty two BC. And Pompey was brought in as a sole consul to calm street violence that had prevented a consular election, which you know, would be the equivalent of preventing a presidential election until after the new term started. So Rome had this need for you know, the better part of a decade, for at least this perceived need for a strong man to come in and calm things. And Caesar understood this. What the conspirators didn't
understand was there needed to be somebody controlling things. And so what Brutus and Cassius thought they were doing was getting rid of a tyrant. What Caesar thought he was doing was providing a kind of a lid on the tensions and passions and violence in the republic in a fashion that allowed most of the republic to function as it had before, just with somebody controlling the sort of things that were disrupting it. And so when Brutus and
Cassius destroyed that lid, nobody knew what this meant. So, you know, we have this wonderful, terrifying scene in the
Senate where Brutus is a platonic philosopher. Brutus, you know, wrote a really wonderful speech that he hopes to deliver about the liberation of Rome from tyranny in the Senate house, and you know, Caesar's done to death, and Brutus gets ready to give his speech, and everybody runs away because everybody but Brutus understood that what you have, what you have right now is you know, anarchy, And they leave.
And the Senate was meeting in the Theater of Pompey, and right, you know, right near to this is a space where gladiators are getting ready to perform. They see the senators running, the gladiators start running. Everybody then sees senators and gladiators running, and everybody starts panicking, and so on the fifteenth nobody knows what to make of this,
even Mark Antony, who's generally a pretty brave guy. He runs to his house and hides, and then Brutus and Cassie has go climb up the capitol one him and get gladiators to defend themselves because they don't know what to do either. So on the sixteenth, the seventeenth, the eighteenth, all the way probably through the twentieth, all of these figures are getting their bearings and trying to figure out
what comes next. You know. So Anthony has a play Lepidus, who has has control of the only military force in the city of Rome. He seizes the forum with his military force, Brutus and Cassius have to look down from the Capitol line hill on this military force in the middle of the forum. And over those few days you have negotiations where each person is trying to figure out, now that Caesar's gone, how does this work? You know, is there still a republic? Is Caesar a tyrant? Is
Caesar a hero? Are the things that Caesar did legal? Are they illegal? If they're illegal, what does that mean? Because everybody in Rome has offices that they got through Caesar, so the government would effectively be illegal even if you get rid of Caesar. And this all has to play out very quickly, in real time in a city of a million people, where everybody is totally scared about what's
going to come next. So this is a moment. You have your finger on, a moment in Roman history that is super significant and also I think terrifying because it could go in any direction.
Yeah, and there's a couple of things to talk about here. But before we get into sort of the aftermath of this a little bit further, I think, especially for today and for anyone who's listening to this years from now. We are recording this in early October of twenty twenty five, there has been a fairly dramatic uptick of political violence, particularly in the United States where I am recording this. You know, Charlie Kirk was assassinated, was murdered, whichever phrase
you want to use, you know, several weeks ago. That has changed a lot of the way we think about this. Why Why was that strong necessary? Why was that Caesar so necessary to keep that lid on that pot? Why had political violence become so endemic in particularly in the city of Rome, right, Like what was going on that had led to that necessity that Brutus didn't understand?
Yeah, So I think there's a couple of really interesting works that Cicero writes in the period between like fifty four and fifty one BC. So one of them is on the Republic, which is a very famous work that unfortunately we know primarily through quotations of like Augustine. We don't have the full thing, but the quotations are really
robust and really important and really really interesting. And then he also writes a defense of Milo, who is a political basically a political figure who also has a street gang, and the defense of Milo is a defense for Milo's assassination of another politician named Clodius, where Cicero says, in essence, Clodius is so violent and so out of control that the state, the state can't do anything to regulate his behavior,
and so Milo assassinated him. Good for Milo, right, Milo is a hero because he did what the state couldn't do. In on the Republic, though, what Cicero says is, you know, a republic that's governed by violence, it never actually can
be a republic. And so and so he actually speaks in both he's in a sense, speaking two sides of the same argument in the Milo text and on the Republic, and in both of those he's talking about this moment where Pompey is brought in to serve as that sole consul to regulate the violence that unfolded after the Clodius and Milo fighting. And what Cicero says, and I just reread this a couple of days ago, what Cicero says in those texts that I've never realized before is ultimately
what's going on is everybody is afraid. So if you read the pro miilone, what Cicero is saying. He begins by saying, although I I'm afraid, and then throughout this speech is this whole sort of legacy, this whole sort of story of everybody from Cicero to regular people to Pompey, all being afraid. And I think this is where the moment worry in right now resonates so clearly with what's going on in Rome in that period from fifty two to forty four. They're afraid. And when you're afraid, you
don't think rationally. You can't think rationally because what you're doing is you're sort of engaged in this decade of fight or flight where you're just looking for something that's going to stabilize your reality and make you feel comfortable. And you know, until really the Kirk assassination, I never understood that. I never read Sister that way. But I think that this is what Brutus didn't understand. Right. Brutus, I think, did not feel that fear. What Brutus felt
was something very different. You know, we have these accounts written by the Great or an Appian who talks about how Brutus is a descendant of, you know, the Brutus who founded the Republic. He's also a descendant of a man named Ahala who had massacre, had killed somebody who was trying to seize power in the Republic in the fifth century BC, and Brutus's political brand is both Brutus the founder of the Republic and Ahala, the assassin who
saved it. And so what Brutus thinks he's doing is is performing a kind of obligation that he has as a member of this family to preserve freedom, to preserve liberty. Brutus doesn't understand that for most Romans, freedom and liberty in forty four BC means terror, it means fear. And I think that's the thing that you know, I've been reading these texts forever. This is something that really clicked for me only in the last few weeks. Yeah.
One of the things that I think is so interesting about this and I don't want to, you know, Pote point blame, you know, to a civilization that you know, the Republic, but you know, about two thousand years ago at this point, we're getting close to I suppose an actual anniversary.
But the.
I'm always pretty critical of the Roman government during this time period. It seems to me that in particular, the Senate is just woefully not up to the challenge of the changes that have happened in the Republic, you know, you know, really since the Second Punic War, right, that it is in so many ways a backward looking institution, and that that institution has failed to change in the way that might have prevented so many of these things
from happening. I don't know what do you think about that, because I'm not a historian, but that's always been my perspective.
Yeah, I mean my sense in writing this book, what I realized is you have like, in a way, the greatest generation of Romans, right, all of the guys that you think of as like in the pantheon of the most famous Romans of all time, Caesar, Cicero, Pompey, Cato, Crassis. They're all basically the same age, right, They're all born within ten years of each other, and they all were basically young adults beginning their political career during this civil
war that erupts in Rome in the eighties BC. And all of them were affected in different ways by this civil war. Caesar was very badly affected, you know, he was asked by a dictator to divorce his wife, his dad's property was confiscated. Even Pompey, who fought for Sola in the civil war who fought for the winning side. Pompey is also very badly affected because he's you know, forced to do things like commit massacres and kill people. And he gets the nickname the adolescent Butcher because of
his violence as a servant of Sola. And so all of these people come out of the Sivian experience thinking that the worst thing that could happen is to go back to that, but totally disagreeing with each other about how you prevent your how you prevent the state from going back to that. And none of them, and I think this is the crucial thing. All of them don't want civil war, but none of them trust the republic
to be strong enough to prevent it. And so every single one of them is thinking, you know, when push comes to shove, the state cannot protect me, and so I need to take care of myself and my interests. And I want a republic. I don't want a civil war. I don't want a dictatorship. I don't want to repeat what Sola did. But I don't believe that the state's strong enough to keep me safe, and so I got to look out for me. And if it comes down to the best interests of the state or looking out
for me. I'm going to look out for me. And this is how I think it all unfolds. None of these people wanted civil war, but their own lack and their own inability to have faith in the institutions of the state. And I think it's a reasonable you know, it's a reasonable fear they have, but their inability to have faith in the institutions of the state undermine that state to such a degree that they end up falling
into civil war even though they don't want it. And so I think when you look at what the Senate is doing, the Senate is engaging in this very complicated process of trying to figure out, like how can we work within the confines of the state but also not give up so much that we personally are exposed. And I don't think any political system can really work that way.
You know, in a sense, what you're doing is you're sort of lying to each other that you believe the political system is strong enough to survive, when in reality, you're just going through the motions of sort of following the rules until those rules look like they might undercut your ability to look out for your own interests. And
then you disregard those rules. And so I think this is why the Senate has that very real sense of disconnection from the real problems it needs to solve, because in a way, they don't believe the Senate is capable of solving those problems in a way that's finding in a way that's going to actually restrain enemies from doing things to them.
Yeah, and I think, you know, when when I think about this era, I'm always I always have to remind myself that the members of the Senate and the aristocracy, you know, they they had been hit very hard by the civil wars between Marius and Sola, and particularly the proscriptions. You know, there weren't you know, they weren't going after the plebs, and in the proscription lists, you know, that
was very targeted. So I can understand to a large extent why the Senate would feel the need to be defensive, right for themselves and for their for the really their almost their lives, right, certainly their lives and their property.
Maybe in a secondary standpoint, but then of course you have this, you know the curses, right, you have this this ladder that young Romans are supposed to climb and it's it's intended to be so competitive, and you're intended to attack your your enemies, and that has worked to a large extent with the Romans, but then it works till it doesn't, right, and now we're in a situation where reform just doesn't seem to be a possibility anymore. And that gets us then to forty four BCE, right,
And I just can't understand. Maybe there is no answer to this, but I can't understand what was not honestly going through the minds of Brutus and Cassius, because it seems to me that they didn't have a plan for what the next step was going to be, you know, or maybe it was just going to reset. I mean, what were they thinking was going to happen to the extent that we know it after the assassination of Caesar.
Yeah, I mean, to me, Cassius is something of a mystery. I don't I don't feel I understand what's driving Cassius. With Brutus. I think I do understand what's going on, you know. I think with Brutus there is this this very theoretical sense of obligation, and there's actually a quote where I think it's Cato says that, you know, Brutus lives. Brutus lives in the Republic of Plato, but cannot bring himself to understand he actually lives, in reality, in the
Republic of Romulus. Right, I butchered that quote, But that's the idea. Right, Brutus lives in this theoretical world where liberty is a thing, it's a concept, is a concept that you can bring to bear in the real world.
And in the lead up to Caesar's assassination, Appian tells us that we have all of this graffiti that starts appearing around the city saying things like, you know, on a statue of the ancestor Brutus, your progeny is not living up to your legacy, and on the statue of Brutal and on monuments associated with Brutus the assassin, and stuff like, you're not connected to the things that you
said you ought to connect to. And so Brutus feels a lot of pressure, both because he has this legacy to uphold, but also because Brutus thinks in this sort of theoretical sense where liberty is good, right, liberty is what we want. His first induction to Roman political life is a series of coins he issues in fifty four BC, and one of them, on the front has Lady Liberty and it says libertos and on the back is Brutus with his lictors right, the ancestor Brutus. And so Brutus
very much believes in this concept of liberty. It's in
a census personal brand, but it's also his conviction. And I think the problem with Brutus is there isn't this understanding that you know, what the real world is messy, it's not Plato's, it's not a Platonic form, and you need to understand that liberty means different things to different people in different contexts, and what you claim you're doing, it's going to resonate differently to everybody who's not you, because everybody who's not you lives in the real world
and you live in this sort of nice, platonic, sort of conceptual world. And so I think that's the issue with Brutus. With Cassius again, like I find Cassius a difficult person to under stands, and I can't claim that I really get what's going on there. But with Brutus, I think, you know, I think he just doesn't know that the concept that he embraces so firmly, it's too abstract, and nobody understands what he actually means in reality when he's saying those things.
Yeah, I think sometimes when I when I think about Brutus, I'm a little bit reminded, maybe even in contemporary times in the United States, of some decisions I'll read recently from from the Supreme Court, which are incredibly high flown and incredibly legalistic, but seem at times to just ignore the obvious practical implications of what is actually going on. So if we're looking at like modern parallels, sometimes I look at some of those decisions and I say, like, well,
Brutus could have written that. I mean, like, that's that's that's something you write as the ship is going down. But and I don't think it is, by the way, and we can go into that. But so that's one half, right, One half is you know, Brutus and Cassius and the conspirators. But then we got the other half. We've got the Caesareans. Okay, we've got the people who had, as you pointed out,
benefited from Julius Caesar from the dictatorship. And we're going to talk about some of them talking about Mark Antony and so on and so forth. So where are they at immediately after this assassination?
So okay, So I think that the issue that we have is that for a lot of these Romans there's this sense a different sense of what freedom represents and what a republic represents. And so for Brutus, freedom is
basically a binary. You're either free or you're not. For Caesar, I think a way to understand it is Caesar would say that freedom is in a sense something that exists on a spectrum in the way that we have kind of a modern way of measuring democracy, where you don't have any pure democracy and you don't have any pure authoritarian state. You just have a spectrum that runs kind of from like North Korea to Sweden, and you know, and your state can become more or less free in
that context, and those choices are made for reasons. And I think what Caesar believed is the republic as it existed in the fifties didn't function, and so Caesar undertakes a lot of significant reforms in the period after the Battle of Farceless and forty eight, you know, and through the fighting in near like forty six and forty five. But what Caesar is trying to do is serve as
that lid that controls passions and fear. And then because these passions and fears are controlled, you can start rebuilding elements of the republic to make it function better. And so it's less free. It's moved towards less free on the spectrum, but it is still a republic. Citizen rights still matter. They're brought responsibility citizens have to the state,
and the obligation of the state has the citizens. Those things still exist, and what Caesar wants to do is to make sure that some of the stuff that had gotten gummed up for the last hundred years starts happening again. You know, colonies in places like Corinth and Carthage that should have cities, but the Romans destroyed them one hundred years before. You know, things like the codification of laws and the sort of regulation and rationalization of the law
system that Caesar never finished but started to undertake. The calendar reforms that Caesar did. All of these things are about making this this state more functional. Even though you're training some of the liberty right, you're moving towards authoritarinessm
on that spectrum. You haven't become North Korea even in a sense maybe made the sort of move that we're seeing in places like the United States or Turkey, you know, Mexico, where the states are moving to be less democratic, but they're not dictatorships, they're just they're just moving on the spectrum. And you know, and so I think what Brutus doesn't yet is that there is a spectrum. What Caesar doesn't get is how powerfully this idea of a binary still
affects certain people. And I think that's the tension in forty four.
Yeah, I think when you look at polling now, you look at you know, there's always sort of this tension between security and freedom right, and we can use those two values differently, and certain people will define those values differently. Of course, within any system it doesn't particularly matter, but they're always intension to some extent. And it does seem to me right now the world is trending towards we care more about maybe security than we do about freedom.
It's particularly in the West, and it's not like we haven't done that before. So I'm not this isn't coming out of the blue right. It's not like space Aliens landed, and now we have this situation right like it's happened before. And I'm always amazed at how quickly people forget the past. Maybe that's one of the problems when we don't have you know, as many history majors anymore people doing those things, because there's no there's no ROI for studying the Romans.
I think there is personally, but and I think the people, the Americans in the nineteen fifties thought there was an ROI on those sorts of things. And maybe we should look at our greatest generation and wonder what they know that we didn't that we don't. But that diatribe aside. Let's let's get back to our cast of characters, right because after the assassination of Caesar, the question becomes, all right, well, who's going to lead this faction? And there's really two
candidates start to emerge right away. You know, you have mark Antony, but then Caesar doesn't have a son. Well he does, I mean, I think I think we can say he does, all right, he does by Cleopatra, who is in Rome at the time that this happens, by the way, and don't forget that, you know, she is in Rome when this happens, and kind of has to pretty quickly pack her bags and get out of town
because she's not super popular, right. And his son is that by Cleopatra is not considered legitimate as you as you point out, and so that means that the mantle could fall to someone else, because he's got a nephew, right, a nephew who we don't know much about yet in history, but who we're going to know a lot about later. And his name is Octavian, and I find him one of the most fascinating people in the history of the world,
full stop. So as the dust is settling, how are Mark, Antony and Octavian starting to look over, you know, the survey the land and decide what should our next steps be?
Yeah, so I think we have to go back to those five days that you talked about, right March fifteenth to the twentieth. What Antony realizes, what Anthony believes is Brutus is not going to get his liberation. Nobody wants that, right. Brutist cannot like convince people that see as there was
a tyrant and this was an active liberation. But also nobody's going to totally want to go back to a system where there's someone who is a perpetual dictator who's in charge, because that was something only Caesar had the charisma and skill to pull off. And so there's going to have to be a compromise, you know, the compromise is going to have to be, Yes, we recognize that Caesar did really good things, and yet also we can't punish the people who killed Caesar because well, we're compromising.
And so Antony doesn't understand that there is this other figure, right he doesn't under he doesn't know about Octavian. He doesn't know Octavian is named in the will, and so Antony believes that the sort of universe of possible people contesting for the legacy of Caesar are the people in
Rome right now. And so when anti makes this compromise to say, well, we're not going to punish the assassins, but we're going to acknowledge that Caesar was a god, not just a great man, not just like a legitimate fovereign, but he's a god and all of his acts are you know, legal, Antony believes that what he he's done is he's actually kind of secured the legacy of Caesar, and it's not pure because you did have to make this compromise about him not going to avenge Caesar's death.
But there's nobody who has any kind of legitimate power base who's going to be able to challenge you from the Cesarean side. Any crazy stuff happened that, you know, people claim that they're, you know, going to take that legacy up, but they're not serious challengers. And then in April of forty four, Octavian shows up. And Octavian is
at this point, he's eighteen years old. He's you know, not a figure anybody in Rome really knows, but it's clear that this is a figure who is supremely intelligent, also you know, borderline sociopathic, I mean, willing to do anything that he can, using people as sort of tools and objects. And he is very very strategic about how
he does this. And Caesar had been training him in the political affairs of Rome, and Octavian had actually been in Apollonia and what's now Albania with Caesar's army that Caesar was preparing to lead to attack the Parthians, and so Actavian is very very well positioned as the heir of Caesar. But he has none of this sort of
dirt of compromising with the assassins. And so when he shows up in Rome as the heir of Caesar, the person named as Caesar's air in his will, Antony realizes that he's been kind of outflanked, and he starts doing all kinds of things to try to undercut Octavian, thinking, you know, this guy's eighteen years old, what does he know.
And Octavian sort of carries every single jab you know, Anthony tries to use bureaucratic delays to prevent the adoption of Octavian, the possumous adoption of Octavian by Julius Caesar, and Octavian then just sort of says to the people like this is violating, you know, the terms of the gods will and you know, any blocks money that Octavian is supposed to give out to to run people based on Caesar's will. And Octavian says, okay, well, I'm going to take my own private money and give this out
because Antony is blocking me. And so Octavian manages to establish himself as you know, in a sense of the pure champion of Caesar and Antony, who believed that he had won this whole sort of conflict between March fifteenth and March twentieth. By the end of the year forty four, he's totally on the outs with just about everybody. And Octavian, despite being so young that he's not able to even hold office, somehow has command of an army. He has
a legitimate position. He's seen sort of widely by the people who are most loyal to Caesar as Caesar's air and you know, and everybody is really surprised that somebody with so little experience is smart enough to do all of this, and so this is kind of how that side is playing out, and that the core of that year.
Yeah, and that's really interesting because you I love how he does come out of left field in so many ways. I mean, he's eighteen years old. You know, you wouldn't honestly expect someone of that age in this system that valued experience and age in ways that maybe we don't, you know, in the modern American system by example today. And you can talk about whether that's a figure or a bad thing, but we won't necessarily get into that.
But one of the hallmarks I always think of a brilliant of a great leader is the ability to recognize greatness in those around him, and I Octavian's he's a brilliant politician, but he also has two really good friends who are super helpful to him throughout his life. Right, he's got Agrippa, He's got I think it's mass in As or Macinas, you know, whichever way you want to say that with a hard see. Right, those two guys, in my opinion, especially Agrippa, are absolutely crucial to understanding
Octavian's eventual rise to power. What do you think? Am I right? Am I wrong about that?
Yeah? I mean I I think Agrippa. I think you're right that Agrippa is actually the real key because I think Augustus understood how to run public opinion very very well. And I think if he didn't have my chemis there, he still could have done it. Right. This is this is his skill, right, he knows how to do this. He is a terrible military commander, and you know, and Agrippa is the person who wins his battles for him.
And the other thing with Agrippa is Agrippa is the person that Augustus ultimately, you know, lines up to be his successor. He's the one he marries his only daughter too. He's the one who's supposed to be the sort of progenitor of of you know, the line that is the next generation of imperial heirs. I think that Augustus would have been impossible without Agrippa because I think that you
in a way you look at his skills. I mean, one of the ways that I talk about this when I talk about this in my lecture classes is you know, this is like Jedi training, right. It's like like Luke Skywalker got some Jedi training, but you can't get all of it. And so the Jedi training that Augustus got from Caesar was political. The military training was supposed to come.
He never got it. And so what Agrippa does is he supplements that sort of training that Augustus never got with this tremendous skill and tremendous power and a tremendous ability to you know, terrify Augustus's adversaries if they do want to oppose him. And so you're exactly right that without Agrippa there's no Augustus. Yeah, and I.
Think that there's you know, we're we're not going to get this far. But for those who are fans of the of the subject matter. We'll want to read the book. I think there's always a fascinating what if because Agrippa dies not young per se for for that age, but I'll say young ish, certainly significantly before Augustus, even though Augustus is the one who really suffers from ill health throughout his life, and he talked about well, Caesar was
about to give him the military training. I seriously questioned, no matter how much training Octavian got, if he ever would have been Certainly he was never going to be
Alexander of Massadon. That's that's for sure. But you know, maybe he could have been passable someday, But like he did not seem like a skill set that was ever going to be in his wheelhouse politics, Yes, commanding troops on a battlefield and setting out strategy, not necessarily, you know, Grippa's going to have a heavy hand in most of the campaigns, almost all the campaigns that Octavian and then later Augustus after the name change is involved in. But
let's let's talk. I want to talk about at least one battle, Okay, like we need to so eventually, right, the battle lines do get drawn between these two sides. Right, So you've got sort of the Cesareans under Octavian and
mark Antony, who are quasi allied at the time. They're in the west, and then in the east you got Brutus and Cassius, and eventually this all comes to head at the Battle of Philippy, Right, And this is a battle that I think from my readings wasn't a foregone conclusion either way when it starts, and really even you know after maybe we could talk about it, maybe after you know, we have a premature you know, taking of one's own life, before you realize that the game maybe
wasn't actually that over. So set the stage for us what's happening going into this critical Battle of Philippi, which is also fought in Greece, you know, like for Solace, Right, So every major battle seems to get fought in Greece for whatever reason, and there's a reason for that. And then how does that battle?
Yeah, so I think the lead up to that battle is really important because these are two forces that are really these I think probably are one of, if not the largest sort of fixed battle that Romans fight against each other in all of their civil wars. And it's one of the largest battles in all of ancient history.
It's so big that the lines extend so far that the commander that Anthony cannot see Octavian's line, and Brutus cannot see Cassius, right, So they're extended so far, and there's so many troops that did in effect, you have
two battles going on at once. And this had been there had been a lead up for a couple of years where Brutus and Cassius, who are supposedly, you know, the liberators and non tyrants, are going around the Greek world and like looting cities, taking like all of the money in in you know, entire cities across the eastern Mediterranean to buy and equipped troops, huge numbers of troops, and Antony and Octavian are doing something similar in Italy and in the West. And so when these forces meet,
it's a massive battle. And you're exactly right that there is no pre ordering conclusion here. But what ends up happening is, you know, Antony is a very very good commander, so is Cassius. But Antony is a very very good commander, and Antony's troops defeat Cassius's troops, but Octavian was sick, wasn't there ran away? Not totally clear. But Brutus's troops defeat Octavian's troops, and Octavian is, you know, of course,
to flee, but Brutus hears that. So Cassius doesn't know that Brutus has won, and he believes all is lost, and so he commits suicide following the defeat by Anthony because he doesn't want to live under tyranny. And this is something you know, Cato had done something, so when fighting Julius Caesar, right, this is something that people with this particular mindset of like liberty or nothing, you know,
they will do this. He doesn't know that they could have regrouped, they could have actually probably fought again, they had a viable army, but cassius is suicide prompts Brutus to panic. Brutus regroups and then has a sort of second battle much too prematurely, and then is defeated and he ultimately, you know, passes from the scene as well. But I think what you have here is a super remarkable moment where you get kind of the character of
each of these people revealed in this moment. Right Anthony in the forties is an exceptionally good commander. Cassius is a good commander. Is not because Anthony, but the liberators believe fundamentally in this principle, and they also are sort of working from this idea that you know, we have this this great example of a figure like Cato who
commits suicide rather than surrender. And I think that this ultimately creates a kind of I don't know issue that they have about how they proceed after partially losing the first battle at Philippi, and this ultimately leads to the sort of collapse that you know, Brutus's terrible decision making
produces in their military forces. And then in the end, what's remarkable is after those battles conclude, the soldiers that were raised by Brutus and Cassius just joined the armies of Antony and Octavian, and so the scene is set for eventually a conflict between Antony and Octavian that is like buttressed by like large numbers of soldiers. Yeah.
I think a couple of things about this, And I'm glad you brought up the fact that the soldiers from Brutus and Cassius aside with little to know prompting to join the other side, stressing the fact that for most
Romans probably this wasn't an ideological conflict. This wasn't you know, This wasn't you know You've got the Russians of the Second World War on the Nazis on the other side, Like that's it's not that kind of a scenario here for the vast majority of the people who are engaged in the battle, you know, this this is another fight
between two aristocrats. You know, this is another you know, they had just done this with Caesar and Pompey, you know, and the Romans, you want to back it up, they almost got all the way to doing it between Marius and Sullah, not for the fact that Marius dies, right, and so you know, a lot of these sorts of things are for them. I think for the Romans there must have been this feeling of exhaustion at some point
that I feel setting in. And I also I really get the sense going into that battle of PHILIPI that this is this is Brutus's he this is going to be his pen his final scene. He he goes into this with like I'm not going to do what Pompey did. If if we lose. This is it. I'm not, you know, and you just get the incredible sense from everything that's written about the battle that retreat surrender is not an option for him under these circumstances. You know, this is
we win or I die. One of the two things is going to happen, you know. So and then that, you know, gets us to the next stage of this, you know, this play that's getting itself out. So now we've got Okay, so we've got Octavian. Now we've got Mark Antony, and they didn't particularly like each other, right, and now we all say, and we've got Lepidis he's he's still there. And I'm not even going to get
into sexist Pompey. He sexist Pompey's out there too. You know, go back and listen to the episodes on him if you want to get really into that. But here's an example of why civil war is bad, right, because Mark Anthony's going to go out east and crap, like I have to reorganize provinces that you have been stripped bare by a civil war, right, and I have an enemy on my flank.
Right.
So we've got these two sides who are all most immediately looking to continue this civil war. It seems inevitable to me that this is going to result in another battle. Okay, but what does what does Antony find really when he gets to the east.
Yeah, well, I think, you know, there's another element of this that I think is really it's fascinating to me because these soldiers, you're right, are not loyal to an ideology right now. No one is like, I'm a liberator, right They're they're like, okay, cool, right now, now I joined Brituses, or now I joined Anthony's army, but Antony, but they are loyal to their commanders if their commanders
are good, and Antony and Octavian. When they do fall out, and they fall out pretty quickly, they do try to get their armies to fight each other, and the armies ultimately say, look, we're Cesareans. What are you doing? Right? And so the legacy of Caesar is still really really powerful as you come out of the forties into the early thirties, so powerful that you know, it's it's more
powerful that these soldiers see themselves as Cesarians. They see them se dis loyal to Anthony or Octavian, and so what happens in the thirties, is Antony and Octavian are both going to work to undo that by rotating guys out, by you know, creating sort of propaganda that delegitimizes the other, and you know, and doing doing the sorts of things that diminish that legacy of Caesar and people's minds so that now you can be Antonian or you can be Octavian's,
you know people. And so I think when you get into you know, what Antony finds when he goes east is he's got to figure out some way to incentivize these soldiers and also build enough of a power base that he can overcome what Octavian may well be able to salvage in the west. I mean, Octavian's position in the West is terrible because all of these soldiers who are cesarean soldiers that now want to retire. He's got to find some land, and he's got to find supports
or may to provide for their retirement. And he does things like sees tie like eighteen total towns, like all the towns and all the property in Italy, and you know, in these eighteen towns distribute them to his soldiers. And so he has problems in the West, but if he figures those problems out, he's going to be able to sort of overwhelm Antony with Roman troops coming from the west.
And so Antony needs to make ultimately an alliance with the only really significant independent kingdom remaining in the eastern Mediterranean, which is Cleopatra's Egypt. And so this is the sort of way that he deals with this problem he finds
in the East. But the attachment to Cleopatra becomes something that starts as a political alliance and becomes a real sort of lot more than that, a romantic attachment, and then ultimately an attachment that becomes so great that he starts, at least in the propaganda of Octavian not paying attention to his duties as a Roman, and so he embarks
an a Parthyan campaign. Late it's not particularly successful. This story starts circulating that you know, he really just wanted to be in Alexandria in Egypt because it's a nicer place and Cleopatra's there, and so the efforts that he makes in the East are reasonable efforts, but ultimately they get spun in such a way that they totally discredit him, and so Octavian has in a sense set up for what we will ultimately see, I mean, if we're going to jump ahead, what we ultimately will see in uh,
you know, the ultimately concluding battle between the two of them where he forces Anthony to make a decision about am I pro my troops or am I pro my wife?
Yeah, and you know, there's so many things going in here, and obviously again read the book. We can't go through every single thing that we're talking about, but you know, it is worth noting that, you know, neither one of these two characters were in a positive situation coming out of the Civil War. They weren't. You know, they both
had enormous problems that they had to deal with. And you know, Anthony gets a lot of criticism for the way that he behaves and certainly for the donations of Alexandria that get really spun into major propaganda later on.
Is it's interpreted in Rome that will he's bequeathing massive chunks of the empire to his own kids, which you know, I mean, you could, I mean, that's arguable, but you know that's certainly what that's certainly what Octavian would say, right, And so it and then you know, Anthony's supposed to be able to recruit troops in Italy and I Octavian doesn't really let him do that. And so there's this kind of you know, back and forth, and you do
get the sense at one point that okay, Octavian feels ready. Okay, he's he feels ready to have this fight, and that ultimately then takes us to where we'll end today, which is sort of our last And I'm gonna put in an air quotes battle because I go back, I do.
I go back and forth as to whether or not Actium, which is what I'm talking about, a lot of listeners will be aware of that name, whether that's an actual battle or not, or whether that's just sort of a set piece affair that that ends with a whimper rather than this great crescendo and is propped up as a huge battle afterwards by Octavian. I don't know which way
to go on that, But I don't know. Tell me what you think of what happens at Actium and what should we and what should the listeners take away from that?
Yeah, so I think that what the victory there is, it's a military victory, but it's really a political victory. So I mean, so what Octavian had been able to do because of the association of Antony and Cleopatra, is he had been able to build this entire narrative around this is not a civil war, this is a foreign war.
And so what you had talked about with this leaking of a document that says that an and he intends to give Roman territory to his children, which is a huge no go because Rome, to its very end right, I mean, across the entire two thousand years I cover in the book, Rome remains a state that is the property of its citizens. It is not the property of its rulers. They do not they serve in an office.
Even emperors serve in an office. And so when Antony says I'm going to give Roman territory to Cleopatra or to my kids, he's giving territory that belongs to everybody like its territory that belongs to him. This is a huge, huge problem in a Roman mindset. And so Octavian is able to spread all sorts of things that delegitimize Antony as a Roman commander and create this narrative that he's so besoughted with Cleopatra, that it's actually not a civil
war to fight Antony, it's a foreign war. And then Augustus is. Octavian's power in Italy ultimately at that moment comes from something called the Oath of all Italy, where he has people go to every city in Italy and they swear allegiance to him as their defender against common enemies.
That common enemy, of course, is Cleopatra. And so when Actium unfolds, you have this whole political narrative that Antony isn't really Roman, that this isn't really a Roman civil war, that this is a foreign war, that it's actually war against Cleopatra, and Antony is just like her tool. And when the battle is actually joined, Antony ends up fleeing
with Cleopatra to go back to Egypt. And the battle is a naval battle, and so what you had had is a land force, an army that was loyal to Antony, it was actually on land in Greece, and then a naval force that was basically providing the supplies and the reinforcements. And when Octavian's forces defeat the naval force, Cleopatra's fleet sails away and Antony goes with them. The army then basically says, oh my god, Octavian's right, and they surrender.
And when Octavian then shows up in the year thirty BC in Egypt, Anthony tries to call up the only Roman forces that are in that region in Sireni, they defect Octavian. It's clear, you know, what Actium did was Yes, there were people who died, Yes there were ships that sank. But what it actually did is it provided the complete proof that what Octavian had been saying for the last you know, many years was true. This is a foreign war.
We are fighting Cleopatra, and Cleopatra has like intervened in Roman affairs in such a way that she's turned who was once a good man into basically her besotted sort of slave. And he's just doing what she is telling him to do. He's not Roman anymore. And so this victory is a great Roman victory over a foreign adversary.
And so you're right, I think that the real location of Actium is not military so much as it is, you know, a political proof that what Actavian has been saying all along is one hundred percent true.
Well, and listeners the podcast will know that the narrative about Cleopatra just plays into a lot of Roman tropes in stereotypes, and so there's a lot of good reasons that we should question a lot of those things.
You know.
It's it's also like this idea that Antony is totally just going to do whatever Cleopatra says, it really doesn't fit with his character at all up until this point. So it's to me that's always seemed like, yeah, okay, Octavian, sure, whatever you say, Bud, Like I'd like, good job with the propaganda, but that that's that's quite over the top. But I mean, okay, go ahead, Yeah, no, I.
Think it's it's interesting because both of their propaganda is brutal. I mean, the propaganda against Anthony but also the propaganda against Activity is brutal, and you know, and we should take either of it very seriously. Like answer is propagandast that says that the reason Octavian is Caesar's air is because he basically prostituted himself to Caesar. I mean, this
is the level we're at. So so they are they're smacking each other as hard as they possibly can in that propaganda, and you're exactly right, what Octavian says it's not real. But what Antony says about Octavian also not real?
Well, I guess that's the lesson about propaganda, folks, It's usually not real. Okay, So if there's one takeaway from today, that's the takeaway. But I want to end with one last question, because we were talking about this before we cut went on the air, that you know, I'm really interested in in the Late Republic. I mean, that's but there's really two areas of Rome that people want to talk about. Well three, okay, there's there's Late Republic, you know,
Julius Caesar to this. There's a lot of people always still want to talk about Trajan, you know, and sort of the height of the Empire, you know, and and it's fine, we can talk about that. I don't think
it's actually super interesting. But then and then there's the fall, right and most people, I would say, in the past, when when I bring up the Romans, they would want to talk about the fall of the Empire, and you know, maybe we can talk about you know, is does give and just get the credit for that, like is because he wrote you know, the series that you know, that's the way this goes but you were pointing out that there's been a shift recently, and I found that kind
of interesting. So if you could talk about why students are becoming more interested in, at least in your conversations with the late Republic as opposed to the collapse of the When I say the fall, I mean the collapse of the West, by the way, the collapse of the West, Like what's going on there? Because I find that fascinating.
Yeah, I mean, this is something. When I started teaching twenty five years ago in Indiana, I inherited a course sequence that was, you know, a two course, a two semester Roman history sequence. One went up to basically Augustus and then the other was Augustus through more or less like four seventy six ish, right, the fall of the
West and the end of the Western Empire. And what I noticed in that was in the two thousands, students thought the republic was super fascinating but not relevant to them, right, you know, the fall of a republic was a totally abstract thing for them because they lived in America where this was unimaginable. They just took for granted that they
would live in their republic. But they were really really interested in this narrative of military over extension, what happens when a state that is supremely powerful kind of loses that power. And they're doing this in the context of nine to eleven, the Iraq War, the invasion of Afghanistan, and there's a whole series of books that are also building on, you know, stuff like are we Rome and you know, these things that came out at that moment that spoke directly to this question of, you know, the
fall of the empire and what this means for America. Now, around twenty fifteen, I noticed the shift right. The question stopped being about how does Rome relate to us in the second class, and we started being about how does erm relate to us in the first class, you know, the class about the Republic and this, you know, this was like I understood why on one level, but I wanted to ask them, you know, why do you think
this happened? And the students that I have now I asked them this question last year, right before, you know, right before the election, And the students that I have now they said, look like, we don't know, we don't remember that moment of America as the hyper power. We don't remember that, you know, we were barely alive. We were born after nine to eleven. We were born after the Iraq War we started. You know, we are kids of the Obama era and we lived through trump Ism.
Like for us, that's abstract. It's interesting, but it's abstract because it's not our world. You know, we don't live in a hyper power. Instead, the world we live in is a world where we have lots of sort of concerns and conversations about democracy and you know, and what happens in a republic when those norms and those structures are challenged. They said, that's our reality, and so you know, it's it's it is abstract to us to think about something that is as stable as the later Roman Empire
because we don't live in a world like that. And that was really striking to me, you know, to think that just you know, I've been teaching a while, but I haven't been teaching that long, and to just see that the worldview of my students has changed so much. The experience of my students has changed so much, and the way they interact with Rome is in a sense conditioned by those experiences that they have in this world and the kinds of questions that they're trying to understand
in the moment that we're living in right now. They still are using ROME to try to understand and answer those questions, but the questions are so very different than they were twenty or twenty five years ago, and that,
to me is really striking. I'm not sure what we do with that beyond just sort of acknowledge this historical moment is really remarkable, you know, And we can see that flip just in the way that these students conceptualize the world around them and use ROME to help themselves better understand what's going on and what might happen as a result of it.
Yeah, I'm reminded sometimes. I read a book in college when I was doing some medieval history. It's called A Distant Mirror.
I did.
Used to be kind of a classic. I don't know how much people actually read it anymore, but you know that I think that was written in the nineteen sixties or nineteen seventies maybe, And so you think about what was going on in the late nineteen sixties early nineteen seventies and how chaotic it was, and how it might be naturalal to reflect back to you know, a time period when you know with the Black you have the Black Death, you have one hundred years war, you have
all kinds of chaos everywhere. And I do think it's interesting what kids find resonance with I haven't you know, I don't get to teach, you know, classical history, but I'd be really interested to know what my students today think about a figure like Publius Clodius, right, and the
because you look at somebody like that, you think. And I think that's the lesson here today, if we're doing lessons, is in my opinion, there were so many times that the Republic could have reformed, could have put up guardrails, could have stopped someone, and for a variety of reasons, they didn't. And as a consequence, Octavian becomes the first princeps and like no one saw that coming at the
time that they made all those little choices. But the important takeaway, I think from my perspective is those little choices Rome teaches us they do matter, They matter a lot. And you can't see the bay wave coming until it's right up on you, and that is very problematic from my standpoint. At least.
Yeah, I think you're exactly right. You know, I think all of those little choices are little cuts in the structure, you know, little just sort of knife marks on the founder and the like, little knife marks on the infrastructure that keep things going. And when you have enough little cuts, if you push the thing, it will fall. And it falls very quickly. But it falls because those people who have been making those small compromises don't trust it anymore,
and so they're not going to defend it. They're going to look out for themselves in the way that you know, convinced patriots. And I think we have to use that word convinced Republicans like Caesar and Cato and Cicero. I mean, they all did these little side gambits because they just didn't trust the state. They wanted too, but they just didn't. And I think if we look around, you know, we all need to be very aware of making those choices.
And I think we also, I think we need to take really seriously that Ciceronian text that we started with. You know, fear matters, because if you are not afraid, you're more willing to trust that system blindly, you know,
to believe that it's going to be okay. But if you're afraid you're almost you know, working against your very most basic instincts to trust that a system can protect you, and that fear is it's so dangerous, it's so damaging in a representative state, because in a representative state, you are letting people speak for you, right, you are, in a sense in trusting your rights as a citizen to somebody who's going to be acting on them in a
governmental context. And if you don't trust that person because you're afraid the whole thing can't work.
Well, some good takeaways today, But the other takeaway I'll leave the audience with is it's a very large book. We talked about I don't know about maybe maybe ten years of Roman history in this and it's a two thousand year history, folks, so obviously there's a lot more out there. So my recommendation to everyone as if you've enjoyed the conversation, if you like Romans, as I know you do because you're listening to this, pick up the book.
You will not be disappointed. Thanks so much for coming on.
Thanks Adam, This was so fun. I really enjoyed it.