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- [00:03]
Whatifalth
Welcome to History 102, where YouTube creator Whatifalth hist, Rudyard lynch and Austin Padgett dive into critical moments in history and tease out patterns to help us predict the future. Let's jump right in.
- [00:16]
Rudyard Lynch
Welcome to the Pox Romana and this is a new episode with our co host Austin Padgett. And hello to get started. The Pax Romana, or in Latin for the Roman peace, is the most lengthy period of continental scale peace that I know of in human history. You have a few other long pieces, but we're covering the time period from the reign of emperor Augustus around 40 BC until the death of Marcus Aurelius, a little before 200 AD. So it's an over 200 year period where the entire Mediterranean basin in the neighboring regions were largely at peace. And Edward Gibbon, author of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which he wrote at the time of the American Revolution, who is largely responsible for the creation of the modern field of history, at least a big part of it. And he said that the period under the Antonine emperors or in the second century A.D. he called it the happiest period mankind has ever known, where continental scale peace, a standard of living higher in a lot of cases than what Europe would achieve until the, until over a thousand years later. And then stuff like universal bathing in the cities, incredible architecture like the aqueducts, and just a universally high level of civilization with a relatively humane and tolerant governmental system. And so for thousands of years afterwards, people looked back on the Pax Romana as this golden age of civilization that would not be paralleled for a very long time.
- [02:14]
Austin Padgett
Interesting. And that's an interesting period to focus on 400 to 240 because it's kind of post Augustus. Is it like, is that the corollary time period to the US starting now or the last 200 years?
- [02:35]
Rudyard Lynch
So in the historic cycles I use, and this is pulling from the, the Spengler, Philippe Fabry Amaury Durian corps system, which is the only big civilizational cycle system because you have multiple historic cycles. The big one I know of is the 2000 year cycle, which interestingly lines up with the astrological cycles. And in that correlative system, America now is roughly right before the start of the fall of the Roman Republic period. So we're operating at a later, over a century from now. So in this parallel, the period we're talking about would be like the middle of the 22nd century, where.
- [03:21]
Austin Padgett
Okay, perfect. That clarifies it.
- [03:23]
Rudyard Lynch
Rome and America both conquered our empires during the Republican Period. And at the start of this time period, Rome had conquered the vast majority of the empire and they only added a few other territories like Britain and Thrace and Dacia under the empire itself. So Rome used the social cohesion from the Republic to conquer it. Then they used the unified singular leadership to maintain the empire. And what happened is that Augustus made a decision that he didn't want to expand beyond the current boundaries, that being the Sahara to the south, the Rhine to the north, the Danube to the north. He briefly tried to conquer across the Rhine but failed, and then Persia to the east. And the thing with what happened, effectively, if want to judge in the civilizational cycles, is that the entire 21st century will be consumed by a lengthy series of American civil wars between the republicans and the democrats. What happens with Augustus is that Augustus is a fascinating figure. He was part of the populares. And I'm not going to get into the fall of the Roman Republic because it's its own topic and we have a lot to talk about where 200 years is pretty long, as is throwing in the previous century where the Roman civil wars were multi stage, starting under Marius vs. Sulla. Then you had the Julius Caesar against the Republic and Julius Caesar beat the Republic. Where to zoom back a little, you had the optimates and the populares, which is republicans versus Democrats, popular as crushed. The Optima says what happens then is that the democracy is that the final elements of the Republic or the old aristocracy were crushed by the popular under Julius Caesar, who were the one surviving party then Julius Caesar. After his death, his henchmen fought over his inheritance. So Augustus, also known as Octavian, fought against Mark Antony, seizing control of the empire. And Mark Anthony was allied with Cleopatra. They had this huge battle off the west coast of Greece called Actium. And what I'll say is that Octavian was the best option for the Roman Empire. If you look at any given player in this equation, they got the best option with Octavian.
- [05:59]
Austin Padgett
Right. I'm trying to avoid saying anything other than a baron trump meme, but it's all that's popping into my head.
- [06:07]
Rudyard Lynch
To say more about Octavian. He was my age when he got power. He was a distant relative of of Julius Caesar. And Julius Caesar really saw potential in him because he was an aide in his camp. And when he was 19, Julius Caesar gave him his entire inheritance. And Julius Caesar is one of the wealthiest men in Rome. And so getting his inheritance was a truly important thing because in the fall of the Roman Republic you had the highest levels of inequality Ever in human history, where singular men had fortunes that were greater than countries. And so for example, the lead, the, the tycoon Crassus, funded an entire army to invade Persia just single handedly out of his own profits. And Julius Caesar conquered Gaul or modern France for the goal of raiding Gaul for his own personal pocketbook. Because he was broke when he invaded Gaul and then when he was finished conquering Gaul, he was one of the wealthiest men in Rome because Gaul or modern France had more people than Italy did at the time. And, and it was nearly as wealthy as Italy. And Octavian was really young and he was able to control the various coalitions very well. Where he was a, he wasn't a great military commander, but his right hand man, Agrippa was a genius at that. And he, it's really touching. He and Agrippa were childhood friends from the small town outside Rome. They were from. And as childhood friends they rose together to become the most powerful duo in Roman politics. Where Octavian kept Agrippa as his ally and right hand man till the very end. And Octavian was a small town conservative, he was on the center right. And Rome had really gotten tired of a century of degeneracy and degeneracy and social chaos because Rome experienced all of the social issues we have now. Between skyrocketing inequality, moral degeneracy, hypergamy, feminism, breakdown in family structure, divorce issues, elites importing immigrants to replace the local population, breakdown of social trust, elites betraying the public. They had all the same issues. And the empire was a conservative reaction to the, I don't want to use the word term liberal in the ancient world, it's a completely different context. But the liberalism of the late republican period, where the Roman nobility, who had been the main social group that got the empire or conquered the known world, they had grown completely degenerate. And so Octavian, this guy from a rural town outside Rome, he rose to power and used the equestrians or the lesser nobility of Italy as the new ruling class. And because the social structure of Rome had degenerated so much, they had kind of lost the social technologies to maintain a democracy. And so they became a monarchy. But Octavian, who named himself Augustus or honored one as his title, he, he was very cunning at getting rid of the republic while at the same time doing so in a very subtle way where he didn't change practically any elements of the Roman constitution, where the Romans had a constitution much like America's, which they took great pride in and was highly complex and designed to support a Monarchy where Octavian called himself the speaker, like the Aztecs or dictator. And he created this parallel system where the Senate didn't really have a desire to govern. There were several times, even under the reign of Tiberius or under Augustus, because we think Augustus was probably a republican who was sympathetic to the Republic. He didn't want to be dictator. His final line was, I hope I wore the mask fate gave me well enough. And so the Senate was still technically in charge of Rome. On paper, Rome was a republic and Augustus was very careful to not tamper with any of that. However, the reality is, because he had the loyalty from the military which he had gotten from Julius Caesar, he had the real power. Well, it was a despotism that was highly enlightened and, and highly enlightened and highly subtle, where it was a historic golden age where even today Augustus is considered one of the greatest leaders in world history ever. And he was worshipped as a God in a lot of the eastern part of the empire where they'd have shrines to Augustus.
- [11:10]
Austin Padgett
Right. It kind of reminds you of the. How the systems die before they fully go away.
- [11:19]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah.
- [11:19]
Austin Padgett
Because people were clinging on to the constitutional Roman Republic, but that system had already been eaten out from the inside by the time we get to Augustus. And then in this next 200 year period, the Roman Empire turns, slowly transforms into a feudal structure before the empire is actually gone.
- [11:45]
Rudyard Lynch
Yes.
- [11:46]
Austin Padgett
So people get the, they anticipate the, the future structure, but don't realize that that's going to happen within the context of the empire because you're not going to be able to separate to the next stage until you've aligned the incentives so that, for example, in later Rome, the security was guaranteed more locally and that set up the feudal structure. But it was like that increasingly for hundreds of years. So it's the same thing with the constitutional order before the, the change happens. Before the change.
- [12:20]
Rudyard Lynch
That's a very good point.
- [12:23]
Whatifalth
We'll get back to the conversation in a moment after a word from our sponsors.
- [12:27]
Rudyard Lynch
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- [12:57]
Whatifalth
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- [15:13]
Rudyard Lynch
The best author on the classical world, Fustel de Coulange was a 19th century French thinker. Damn, I read a lot of 19th century French thinkers. I have like a dozen that I love. And Fustel the Coulange wrote the best book on ancient religious and political structures which we'll get into later. But one of the Points he makes is he said the Roman Empire wasn't held together mostly by the legions. Yes, Rome had the best military one that they had spent centuries cultivating to, to be one of the best ever in human history. But he said the faith and the spirit of the Roman state is what kept the empire together. Where across the empire you had the shrines to the Emperor. And when you look at the ancient world and you'll wonder why were they worshiping the Emperor? It's because they were honest about invisibles. What that means is that invisibles are things you can't touch, that you need. And our society has this weird religious obsession with removing all the invisibles. So we're, we are an experiment of can we remove all abstract concepts from society and still have a functioning social structure? And the short answer is no. Which is why our elite says good and evil doesn't exist. Why there's no why a quote, why everyone's equal and there's no difference in quality. It's why they say that you can't define things, because we've reached this very strange psychological state where we refuse to acknowledge that anything exists that you can't touch. But the reality is that when you reach that point, you've effectively autism yourself out of human life, because the reality is that things you can't touch determine your entire lived experience. Love, happiness, pride, self respect. And so when you remove those things, you've made life needlessly complicated for no reason. And in the ancient world, because their neurology works differently than us, they would just take those concepts, turn them into gods, and then talk to them to make dialogues or worship them as a sign of respect. So with the worship of the Emperor, their idea is that, and this is one of the things one of my libertarian friends likes to say, that the state is almost like a God. You can't touch the state. There's no physical place where the state exists. The state is a collective illusion we all agree on. We will stop believing in the state, the state stops existing. And so if you don't want, you can use the same logic to say God doesn't exist, say the state doesn't exist. And so when they were thinking of this is one of those weird things about explaining completely different civilizations where I can explain how they thought a certain idea is, but I also have to explain why it was hypocritical and contradictory, because humans have to be hypocritical and contradictory by our nature. Where their idea is, the Emperor is the embodiment of the spirit of The Roman nation that manifests from all of us. But at the same time, the emperors did actually take themselves to be gods and they went crazy, which we'll get to with the next few emperors after Augustus.
- [18:32]
Austin Padgett
And was that unnatural for the Roman emperors to try and start conceiving themselves as God? Because in most monarchical situations you need kind of, you need the mandate of heaven to make it work. But maybe that wasn't culturally a natural hat for them to put on since they came from a republic environment.
- [18:52]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah.
- [18:53]
Austin Padgett
So is that maybe did that drive some of the Roman emperors more insane trying to like think of themselves as gods when it wasn't culturally kind of part of their traditional.
- [19:05]
Rudyard Lynch
Yes, that's true. You summarize that. Well, where the Greeks and the Romans had a concept of equality, and that screwed them over in the same concept that screwed us over where European peoples develop equality because we're fundamentally war banned cultures. The democracy is a war band in that every man who fights gets to vote. And in the ancient world, your rank in the military and, and your degree of armor determined how much of a vote you had. And so the Greeks and the Romans also went through their versions of socialism and the welfare state, which brightened circuses, which we'll get to later. And so the fall of the Roman Republic as well as the fall of the Greek city states, they struggled very deeply with socialism, inequality. And a big reason, the founding fathers, if you read their writings, they were obsessed with stopping equality and socialism is that they studied the classical precedent and they said equality and socialism and welfare are always the things that kill republics, because that's what had killed republics in the Greek and the Roman world. And so the classical authors in their summarizations for why republics had failed, their answer was always equality. And they said, you need to stamp out equality as soon as possible. And so the other side of this is that when the republics failed, and this is a trend that all the older histories get to, where for most of the last few centuries, Western civilization has been significantly more interested in the Greeks and the Romans than today, especially so in the 19th and 18th centuries. And they would talk about the orientalization of Greco Roman civilization, which they said killed it. Where for the, for both the Romans and the Greeks, this was part of conquering the near east and the Middle east, which was a wealthier, older, more developed society. And so they took on their cultural attributes because they had certain elements of higher culture that they needed to emulate. But then in the process of doing that, these European societies developed God king structures. The Population was pushed into subjected status. You saw growths in inequality, the lack of a desire for progress or growth or constant change. And so over the course of this time period, you see the Roman emperor change from a figure who was unwilling to claim that he was an emperor to the time period of, let's say the third century, where the Romans would have to kneel and prostrate themselves before the emperor, which they refused to do before, to do beforehand because it was seen as a sign of Oriental despotism. When Alexander the Great, a few centuries before this, conquered the Persian Empire, he tried to make himself a God emperor and. And the Macedonians basically refused to do that. And he died soon after. And so this was. When we talk about the ancient world, we get stuck on the timescale of centuries where this seems like an obvious trend. But at the time this was something that was brutally fought against. The gradual centripetal force of descent into oriental society, including the integration of an oriental religion into Europe, that being Christianity. And once you get to the Byzantine Empire. Spengler says that the Byzantine Empire is an extension of a Middle Eastern civilization. I don't fully believe it, but in the Byzantine Empire you had full God emperor status. And to answer your other question, every functioning society has to integrate divinity into their concept of governance. It's just how. Because. And we don't like that today, but I think it's. It's necessary to create some kind of justification. And also a government with no connection to the divine spirals into insanity and tyranny pretty quickly. You need a connection in your society's moral standards and the governance. How you do that is very tricky. In each method you end up with different issues where basically every single government thinks they're God's chosen people because they've designed their religion around that culture. And so the thing with the God King structure is that this is a society where a creek or a mountain can be divine. So to say that. And there. So their concept of divine is power. So the emperor has enough power. They've entered onto a kind of divine threshold. But then the thing from that is that they took that to mean infallibility, which drove said people crazy.
- [23:49]
Austin Padgett
Right. Which you could. The reason I brought up the craziness is because when you're not culturally used to this tradition of seeing yourself as a God, then you don't have the moderating forces. When you find if you actually convince yourself to believe it, that's when you're going to be craziest about it.
- [24:03]
Rudyard Lynch
Yes.
- [24:05]
Austin Padgett
And you mentioned the invisibles, not being able to see the invisibles. That kind of relates to our modern uncomfortability with tying some sort of spiritual value to governance. And like you said earlier, there's always a spiritual value to governance. So if you're, if you think you're not setting one, there's one operating which is why you know, we say people worship the government. And the left would view Fauci as a priest class a representation for science, which was an abstracted concept. So like yeah, you, you form these kind of, that's how governments and humans work. There's a lot of ways humans work with unseens, like you said with, with dating that apply to regular life. Like basically being able to operate in any uncertain circumstance, which is almost all of your actions require acknowledging and are incorporating unseens. So it's kind of funny that we even want to hide from that reality because it seems so like impractical and be like, yeah, pretending water didn't exist or something.
- [25:19]
Rudyard Lynch
Two different points. The first is this is a really interesting book, the Sorrows of the Ancient Romans by Carlin Barton. And it's a psychological examination of Rome, of Roman society. He goes through why the Roman emperors went crazy and also why the Romans took such joy in the gladiatorial games. And his analysis for why the emperors go crazy. And as we'll see, Tiberius and Caligula and Nero are, I wouldn't say wonderful examples. They're prescient examples is because these were people who had zero restrictions on their actions, with constant scheming about every single thing they said, with no concept of who they could actually trust and with unlimited responsibility and power. It's too many different variables stacking up that the normal human brain kind of short circuits, especially once you're not taking someone like Augustus who grew up in like a normal upper middle class family in a small town outside Rome. Augustus had a frame of reality of what normal reality was like the his descendants did not. And so what they talk about as an example is that the Roman emperors had these various bizarre sexual practices. These videos aren't monetized, so I can just say it like Emperor Tiberius would have underaged boys swim around in a pond with him and he would have intercourse with them like 10 year old boys and he called them his little minnows. Or Caligula turned the Roman, turned the Roman palace, the Palatinate, into a brothel where he forced the children of Roman nobility to be prostitutes for common Romans. And he would also have sexual relations with his sister who he married. So the reasoning that they got that bad is that. Is that this was a society where all upper class Romans basically had unlimited access to infinite female sex slaves. So their baseline for sexuality was so satiated that they got bored really quickly. And what the book talks about is that they would. They would have bizarre, horrifying things like killing people or torturing or all those sorts of things, because in a world where everything was illusion, where they could have anything they wanted, the only thing that was real was pain.
- [28:19]
Austin Padgett
So it's like a. Let me feel something. Turn on a horror movie just. Just so I can feel. Yeah, I forgot what I was going to say, but go on.
- [28:32]
Rudyard Lynch
So the thing with the gladiatorial games and the Roman gladiatorial games were no joke, if you want to go off. Matthew white they killed 2 million people over the course of centuries where every major Roman city, even in the colonies, had the Coliseums. And they would bring. They drove several animals extinct, like the North African elephant or the Asian elephant or a lot of the European bears, or there used to be lions in France and Spain and Greece and Italy. There were lions in South Europe which the Romans drove extinct. And they would get these exotic peoples from around the empires and pit them in battle. And this was the Roman equivalent of tv. And the Romans liked it because they thought they were getting soft due to the wealth of the empire. So seeing people get murdered was a way to keep them hard. It was seen as a nigh moral thing. And a lot of Rome's philosophers, like Seneca or the Christians, were vociferously against the gladiatorial games. They thought it was evil. So there was a moral sentiment that it was wrong. And this was really big. It was their equivalent to tv. And they just have slaves kill each other. And the reason for it is that at least the author gives, is that the gladiatorial games were not big in the Republican period, but they skyrocketed at the end of the Republic into the empire. And he said that seeing this was sort of psychological release valve for the Romans, who were themselves a free people, who were forced into subjugation under an emperor. And so seeing the release of tension as the Romans had become civilized and domesticated themselves, it was a sort of reminder that although they had. They themselves had lost their freedom and they were forced to live in this highly civilized society, that there were people still beneath them.
- [30:33]
Austin Padgett
And that brings up an interesting question, because I know in Ephesus they told me that you can estimate the size of an ancient city by the number of people the Coliseum held because on average 10% of the city would be wealthy enough to attend the Coliseum. But I always got this kind of image in Rome of it being more of a populous thing.
- [30:53]
Rudyard Lynch
Oh, they subsidized it.
- [30:54]
Austin Padgett
So was it Rome? Maybe that was a special situation in Rome where it was so wealthy and so large that actually a larger percent of the city could attend these games. Like normally throughout antiquity, these games were reserved for the top 10%.
- [31:09]
Rudyard Lynch
So only the Romans did the gladiatorial games. It was just their practice. And it was subsidized and a public thing across the empire. I've one of my favorite cities in the world was the old Narbonne in the south of France. It has a beautiful Roman Colosseum and you can see it in any given European country. And the Romans had a specific practice called panam at Kirkos or the country in the Hunger Games. Pan Am is named after this bread and circuses, where they would subsidize entertainment to keep the population entertained. They wouldn't cause issues. And this was biggest in Rome, where Rome is a weird empire, where it turned out as a city state. And then over time it incorporated all of Italy so that all Italians were Romani toss. And then after that, the Romani toss label spread from Britain to Syria, with it becoming this multinational identity. But you still have this core thing where the Roman state was still predicated upon giving lots of special rights to just the city of Rome. So the Roman emperors would just constantly spoil the Roman mob to. So that the Roman mob wouldn't cause issues. Because very frequently in Roman politics, much like the Parisian mob, the Roman mob would cause, would just cause riots or it would place emperors. So the Roman mob became incredibly spoiled. And the emperors would spend enormous sums of money on these huge games, often lasting for very long periods. Like the Emperor Commodus, the degenerate son of Marcus Aurelius, spent most of the back, most of the money his father saved up on these sorts of gladiatorial games. And they would also have welfare. And welfare in Rome backfired as well, where classical authors were not happy about it for the same reason conservative authors aren't happy today. That created a class of dependence where you had these disaffected urban proletariats in the Roman Empire who frequently lived in horrible poverty. A lot of they lived in these ghettos and these tenements called insula or these huge apartment complexes. And you'll see lots of very modern stuff in Rome between urban proletariat, where they didn't cook, they would eat out at local fast food joints. You saw a good degree of women's liberation. Women got legal independence except for the right to vote with men in the fall of the Roman Republic. And then Augustus took away a lot of women's rights. You had welfare. And so you had this huge disaffected urban population that was dependent on the state who basically degraded into these. Into these dependents who lost any degree of pride. And the government used welfare as a tool to basically bribe the population to feel less bad about losing their freedom.
- [34:17]
Austin Padgett
Right. Which is a really interesting point because they were not happy. And it's the very obvious corollary to if you start an empire, you will become the dictrist of the world and lose your own soul. And so the corollary to the US is very obvious where the expansion of the foreign policy apparatus has led to a reduction of domestic freedom. And then suddenly we have to live under the same kind of structure as a lot of these non free countries that were fighting with. And we're not really comfortable with it. It's not part of our culture. But in order to run a giant empire you need a certain command structure.
- [35:01]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah.
- [35:02]
Austin Padgett
And so we talk about welfare and stuff being bad. A lot of times we talk about it from as if we are the classical authors or the cl, like in the classical liberal period, like the founding fathers. But we're dealing with a very different problem because we have a welfare state already. So getting managing dependency and getting rid of dependency is a whole different question than whether we should start a welfare state. And it's the same for the empire and central banking. So yes, we've certainly got a big challenge on our hands.
- [35:33]
Rudyard Lynch
I'm going to throw this in all of the historic outtakes from the classical world, which was a previous civilization that had a very similar lifecycle to ours, were authors who have opinions that would be considered very conservative today. So after studying centuries of the classical world, the authors for millennia afterwards ended up with takes that policies that are very comparable to what progressives do today ultimately horrifically backfire.
- [36:02]
Whatifalth
We'll get back to the conversation in a moment after a word from our sponsors.
- [36:06]
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- [37:13]
Rudyard Lynch
To get back to Augustus Augustus unified the empire and he split it between the central provinces inhabited by peoples the Romans considered to be civilized, like the Greeks, which were governed by the Senate and their own independent forms, and then the external provinces which were governed by the military, which he controlled. So Augustus used the military as a way to hold hold power against the Senate. Well, the Senate had lost any interest in actually governing. So there was a huge problem with attendance issues in the fall of the in the Roman in the Roman Empire, because the Senate was useless and Augustus made all the decisions. But at the same time he needed the Senate as this propaganda tool to say that Rome was still a republic because the senators had too much degeneracy to do, while at the same time they knew there wasn't any real power. Augustus had to constantly bully and penalize the senators to just show up at the Senate building and even when they did, they'd sleep because they knew it was a useless role. So it was really this moment where everyone involved knew that Rome had become a monarchy, but it was still a useful illusion to believe that it hadn't.
- [38:34]
Austin Padgett
That's so funny. I was literally thinking about the futility of being a congressman today because even if you're one of the good congressmen, there's nothing you can do to whip up a vote because the Congress, they didn't have a Trumpian figure at every state level GOP to break up established infrastructure.
- [38:51]
Rudyard Lynch
Yes.
- [38:52]
Austin Padgett
All the opportunities and the Trump administration and people you have to talk about how Congress is bad because you want to improve the elections next time. But like there's a lot of false wasted energy focusing on Congress because nothing ever is going to come out of there. And thankfully there's a lot of opportunity to do things from the executive level that are actually, you know, constitutional and kind of a reduction of bureaucracy. So it's not like a, you know, totalitarian dynamic. It's not like you only have a totalitarian option outside of Congress. But they are completely sidelined.
- [39:32]
Rudyard Lynch
Congress hasn't really done anything in 40 years.
- [39:35]
Austin Padgett
Exactly.
- [39:36]
Rudyard Lynch
And the reason Rome switched from a public to an empire is that in conquering the empire, they had to maintain an incentive structure for the men to fight, which is a republic. Republican republics are the endpoint of societies that have a draft where every man is expected to fight. Thus they have a vote. What happened once they conquered the empire and Italians became a significant minority of the total empire's population is they switched to governance of a single man. Because in military or highly complex command structures, you default onto authoritarianism. Because rule by group, basically the logic becomes complex and distant enough that you need the will of a single man. Because if you operate on the group level, things are going to fall apart.
- [40:25]
Austin Padgett
Exactly. That's why negotiating tariffs doesn't make sense with a body of like 300 congressmen when it's a. Yeah, 500 was a big issue. Like you.
- [40:38]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah.
- [40:39]
Austin Padgett
You can't, you can't run a company with a 12 man board making all the decisions, let alone a 300 man, you know, board of people who are largely corrupt. And like you said, Congress already abdicated its responsibility because it was never meant to have so much responsibility. So when the federal government started centrally planning the economy through a large regulatory bureaucracy, obviously Congress can't manage that. So that, that goes to, you know, a department that's ultimately controlled by a single figure. So it's, that's, it's an organizational principle. Yeah. If you want to make the, the government large and a big part of your society, it has to be, it can only operate in a certain way. So it's like that was the warning of the, the classical liberals. That's why we're in this situation.
- [41:30]
Rudyard Lynch
We are now interestingly, Rome also experienced gradual social economic socialism. And this is one of the things my friend Philippe Fabry. Merch. Show them. Merch. That's a mug. We have History 102 merch. It's very good. You should buy some. We have lots of merch. Okay, great. So Philippe Fabry wrote a book, Libertarian to Socialist, where Rome under the Republic had a laissez faire classical liberal economic system. Then over the course of the empire, by the time you get to the third century, it was completely communist. Where Rome was a command economy, they would turn to the economy into hereditary castes where you had to work the same job as your father. Everyone was a dependent on the state, where the state would give craftsmen quotas of how Much they'd have to make every day where it was this very tyrannical system. And it was as the Roman elites leadership structure change, where you went from rule by the aristocracy to under the equestrians in the Augustan period, then under the Antonines around 2nd century A.D. it was the military from places like Spain or Italy. Then it devolved into internal barbarian militaries like the Balkan warlords in the third century. Then it was the Germanic barbarians which resulted in the empire's fall in the 5th century. But what the consistent thread was is that the military were the people who were able to provide leadership for Rome, where it moved from the nobility to the military. And these military guys had zero investment in the actual economics of the empire. They had investment in their armies getting paid. And over this period the Praetorians or the guard of the emperor and the army gained deciding power. Where Caligula and Nero and Caligula and Nero, they were displaced and put into power by the praetorians or the guard, frequently Germans, who existed explicitly to protect the emperor. But they chose who the emperor was. And then later on, whoever had control of the military determined who was emperor. So you saw the gradual spoiling of the military where these generals or various leaders would give the military very high wages, very good conditions and the military would like them. And over time the military lost any genuine loyalty to the Roman people and they were just acting out of their own interest. So by the time you get to the empires, the, the full decline of the empire. In the third century, Rome had expanded both its bureaucracy and its military by a factor of over 10. And that was partly due to technological advance on the part of the Germans, which made it a more difficult frontier to maintain. But it was also complete institutional capture where over the course of this period, Rome became completely weighed down by big government. So much so that Rome and Europe's population started to decline from the period of Marcus Aurelius onwards. And it wouldn't recover for the next thousand years, years, because people had no incentive to have children because there was no capitalism which was taken by the state. And it was such an extractive system that the extra resources that would be put into children or different projects or that stuff was instead put into supporting the regime.
- [45:07]
Austin Padgett
Right. And then inflation was getting worse throughout this period. This is like the period of Rome where there was inflation, I think from 40 AD to 250 AD. It was devalued by 50% by that, by that point. And then it accelerated higher. So you can kind of track this Consistent decline. And why was Aurelius not able to stop it? Because, you know, he's a famous, well respected guy.
- [45:37]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah. So the end of this period, Marcus Aurelius was the Emperor of Rome. And he, he is widely respected even today. He was really inspirational to me as a teenager when I read his book. And he was a Stoic philosopher where he also fought against the Marcomanni Germans on the Danube border, beating them in a very difficult war. And he was just considered a great man in any conceivable way, whether as a leader or morally or philosophically. And he was the last emperor before the flood. And his son Commodus was a complete degenerate. It's sad to see that. And there are theories that Marcus Aurelius was cucked and Commodus isn't actually his genetic son, which part of me wants to believe, because if this same bloodline can produce these two people, that that's kind of, I, I guess free will exists, that's all.
- [46:31]
Austin Padgett
Well, he could be this the spoiled son and have different conditions so that it makes sense. But this reminds me, he did try to make Russell Crowe the Emperor and it failed. And that's what went wrong. Okay, I got.
- [46:43]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah, that's not historic. I'm going to pause you. It's a good joke. It's not historic. The audience won't be able to tell the difference. And so Commodus just had various gladiatorial games that spent. That spent the entire backlogged treasury. He gave the Roman people a lot of grain and he started purging the Roman nobility, which is the consistent theme over this time period. And then people who realized they were on the next list to get murdered, they were horrified. And then they bribed one of his favorite gladiators to strangle him in his bathtub. And that's how Commodus died. And there was no clear source of leadership after Commodus. And what happened is that Marcus Aurelius had held back a historic tide that probably no man could have stopped. Where Rome experienced a secular cycle, which is what we're facing now, where Rome saw really high inequality, Rome saw overpopulation and just devaluation of the social structure. Where people give all these reasons for why the Roman Empire fell. The shortest I can give is the Romans just burned through all of their social capital where they didn't have, they just didn't have the social capital to maintain their empire because they had lost faith in Rome as a country. They had lost genuine belief in their religion. They had burned through Their social trust, their entire elites had become degenerate. And so you saw the complete breakdown of Rome in the crisis of the third century, which I talk about in the Fall of Rome video, where Rome experienced over a century of near constant civil wars, barbarian invasions and plagues which lessened the Roman Empire's population by a third. So the Roman Empire is in between the secular cycle that occurred at the fall of the Roman Republic from 100 B.C. to 40 B.C. and then the crisis of the third century, which was 180 A.D. some people push it out to 230s under the severance who pulled power together briefly, or not briefly. The severance pulled power back together and then 180 to 330 under Constantine. So the 200 years of peace in between is the period we're talking about.
- [49:12]
Austin Padgett
Right? The Pax Romana.
- [49:13]
Rudyard Lynch
Yes.
- [49:15]
Austin Padgett
And so there were no civil wars during the Pax Romana.
- [49:20]
Rudyard Lynch
Not really. You had external wars. It was a period of remarkable peace where the Romans became domesticated so they couldn't fight off the Germans. Later where Rome conquered Britain under Emperor Claudius. And Claudius, that's a. That's a Derek Jacoby reference. Where Claudius conquered Britain because he had been placed in power under the Praetorians. No one expected him to be emperor. He was a cripple of the imperial family where he survived the constant intrigue because people underestimated him, because he was a cripple with a. What's that thing? A stammer?
- [49:59]
Austin Padgett
Stutter.
- [50:00]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah. And he conquered Britain just to show that he was a real ruler. And Britain was the poorest province in the least important of the Roman Empire. It was an underdeveloped area under Celtic governance. But the Romans held Britain for 400 years and they pushed the empire up to central Scotland at the Antonine Wall and then they finally stabilized their border, Hadrian's Wall, where they built most of important cities in England like London or York or Bath. And they nearly got pushed out in the beginning by Boadicea's revolt, which was the revolt of a local Iceni princess who she and her daughter had been raped by the Romans and their land was taken illegally and the Romans seized control of Britain. They. They had to destroy the native Druidic religion where there were two. There were three religions that the Romans persecuted. The Druids, the Celtic Druids, who did practice human sacrifice, which was. No, for the Romans you had the Jews and the Christians. So you had the conquest of Britain. And Britain took a lot of effort to hold it had three legions while Spain had something like four, four times the population. It only had one legion to hold it. Then you had the war with the Dacians, who were an urban society in the mountains of Transylvania in modern Romania. And interestingly, they had developed their own monotheistic religion about attaining heaven based around their prophet Zalmoxis, which Mircea Eliade, who's a Romanian religious writer, talks a lot about. And the Dacians fought really hard. It was genuinely difficult for the Romans to conquer them. But the Romans genocided the Dacians. And the reason it's called Romania today is the Romans brought in settlers from Italy to repopulate the genocided Dacia, who are still the majority population of Romania today. It's why Romania speaks a Romance language where no one else in Eastern Europe does. Then you have the. You have the. The Jewish wars, where this was the bloodiest war of the Pax Romana period and possibly a majority of deaths and war over the whole period. This was in the first century where Judea had been conquered under Pompey in the late Republican period. What happens then is that it had been under a Vichy ruler with Herod, and after Herod it was turned to a Roman province. The Jews were the most religious population in the Roman Empire and they were fanatical. They were equivalent to the Taliban today in a mostly secularized world. And they kept rebelling because they kept on having dreams that their Messiah would come and that with their Messiah they would be able to conquer the Romans and liberate themselves, which was true indirectly, but not how they thought. So they kept launching revolts because they thought God would intervene to get them to win. What happened instead was the Romans kept crushing them. And the Romans eventually, after several wars, got tired and mass expelled most of Judea's Jewish population, turning it from Judea to Palestine as they migrated across the Mediterranean, establishing the Jewish diaspora as far west as France and Spain. And finally, the last major war that I'm going to talk about of the Pax Romana period was the invasion of Persia, where several. Persia had their own parallel civilization which had gone back thousands of years, which the Romans never conquered, based out of the Iranian plateau. And several. There were multiple wars with Persia, most of which were in this sort of boring Cold war where the Romans held forts in Syria and the Persians based out of Iraq and they'd trade some forts, they'd fight back and forth. But I believe Emperor Trajan conquered Iraq or Mesopotamia, where his goal was to conquer across Persia towards India. And he was briefly able to also Conquer Armenia. Then what happened is that he lost energy from a certain point. And then the Romans could no longer hold Mesopotamia.
- [54:30]
Austin Padgett
Right. And some of those wars were the Silk Wars. Right. I guess that's partly why Crassus was out there. That's how he got killed. And the brief rise of, what was it? The Acadians, is that their name?
- [54:43]
Rudyard Lynch
No, I don't know.
- [54:44]
Austin Padgett
The horse. Whatever the horse people who you said were European and smoked weed.
- [54:49]
Rudyard Lynch
So that's the Scythians.
- [54:51]
Austin Padgett
Okay, not the Scythians. Yeah, but anyways, one of those horse guys that, that they were horse archers and they held a little monopoly on the trade in that area. And for the Romans to take out.
- [55:01]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah, it's the Parthians.
- [55:04]
Austin Padgett
Got it. So that's kind of stopped their only avenue of expansion around that time. So the Pax Romana is almost like. It's like the. When you throw a ball up in the air, how it suspends at the top. It was like the, the expansion of their empire kind of hit its. Yeah, its limits. And then you had like a 200 year period within that, those borders and then it came back down.
- [55:29]
Rudyard Lynch
Yes, that's a good point. That's what I was thinking when I said that, that the Roman world hit its natural boundaries where in classical thinking you had the Mediterranean or the Oikome or the civilized world. And beyond that, exponentially, once you get further away from Mediterranean, things get more deranged and civilized and barbaric. The monsters get more hideous, the people get more savage. In an example of one of the wars, I forgot one of the points where Emperor Augustus genuinely tried to conquer outside of his natural borders the Roman Empire was the invasion of Germania, where the Romans, around the time of the birth of Christ held Germany west of the Elbe river. And they tried to turn Germany into a colony. And it nearly worked. But Germany was an infinite forest where the Romans had to walk across this very sparsely populated area and one of their allied chieftains, because the Romans always used allied nations inside the empire to solidify their power. Arminius, he guided a Roman army into the forest south of Denmark and then had an entire Roman field army butchered at the battle of Teutoburg or Wald in the forest. And this horrified Augustus, where he was known to. To scream for days afterwards in the palace, Varus, give me back my legions. Because Varus was the general and he knew that the Romans wouldn't hold Germania. And interestingly, the loss of Teutoberger Walled caused a panic in the city of Rome that the Germans were to attack Rome. And I always think of this example as an example of how hysterical the mob can be because of course the Romans aren't going to take Rome. You are fighting up by Denmark. This small tribal chieftain who wasn't able to unify Germany is not about to launch an attack on the city of Rome. And I just think of this when I see the headlines where I'm thinking you people are completely hysterical.
- [57:23]
Austin Padgett
Right. To be fair, look at how we reacted to the Chinese weather balloon.
- [57:28]
Rudyard Lynch
9 11.
- [57:30]
Austin Padgett
Right, that's. That's at least. That was a real one.
- [57:33]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah. I mean I grew up in the aftermath of 911 and people just massively overreacted. It was 4,000 deaths. 4,000 deaths is 30 seconds. The battle of the Somme.
- [57:44]
Austin Padgett
Yeah, it's. I mean obviously there's reasons to be. So you react differently to deaths that are like baked in like disease and car accidents because they're expectation and it's all. You react to things that are outside of your expectation. So there's a logic to it in that sense. But yeah, absolutely. We completely lost our mind in a very predictable way allowing the unveiling of pre existing plans. So yes, yeah, that's where we do that.
- [58:13]
Rudyard Lynch
I'm going to go through the Roman emperors. So we spoke at Augustus a few times and he unified the empire, became a great man and it's really sad to read it the rest of his life because his wife was just such a terrible person and she ruined the rest of his life. Where one of the best ways to learn about the Roman Empire is to actually read the I Claudius series by Robert Graves. Where Graves was a professional historian who wrote historical fiction and he's pulling on one of the historic threads that I'm inclined to believe but hasn't been proven. Where I think it was Suetonius who wrote the narrative that got into Robert Graves, where Augustus's wife Livia, who he was madly in love with, where he divorced his previous wife, who I think was Mark Antony's sister, causing a civil war to get with Livia. And then what happened is that it just so happened to occur that everyone close to Augustus died especially so everyone who got in the way of Livia's son Tiberius getting power, where Tiberius was Livia's was Augustus's son in law through Livia, although he wasn't the biological father. So Augustus children all died suspiciously. Augustus right hand man Agrippa died and then everyone else in the court died. And this meant. I'm forgetting the exact details this was a horrific fatality rate in the court. And by the time he died, Augustus refused to eat anything besides dates he himself had picked in his garden because he was so terrified of poisoning. But Augustus was too terrified to divorce Livia because he had spent his entire career arguing for family values where the Roman Empire was experiencing a birth rate collapse among its elite. And the Roman nobility preferred to have sex with their German sex slaves rather than their Italian wives because the Italian wives had too high standards. Where it was this whole discourse of in Roman society but how Rome needed to return to patriarchal masculine values. And Rome had become too feminized and, and so Livia was not an uncommon archetype of us, just a completely devouring Roman matron. And Augustus didn't divorce her because he had banned divorce and he had also banned, he put taxes on being a bachelor. If you were a guy and you didn't get married, that was taxed because they were that word of the declining population. And, and Augustus put up this model of being a humble small town Roman guy who didn't care the big stuff. But he had a bunch of mistresses, he had a huge palace, he was constantly scheming. Augustus was great at optics and great at, at the media side of politics where he for example, created these really effective smears against Mark Antony. That Mark Antony was working with his mistress Cleopatra to destroy the Roman Republic and orientalize Rome while Augustus himself was orientalizing Rome. But Augustus, he pushed this social conservatism and that put him in a box where he wasn't able to really deal with his demon of a wife.
- [61:46]
Austin Padgett
Wow. And his demon of a wife, her kid was from another guy. So the emperor after Augustus was not Augustus's son.
- [61:55]
Rudyard Lynch
No, he wasn't.
- [61:57]
Austin Padgett
Wow. So it sounds like, like we always focus on these things like optics or like you said, what was the, the benefit that they gave to, to married men or non single men?
- [62:11]
Rudyard Lynch
They, they taxed bachelors.
- [62:14]
Austin Padgett
Right, right. We're always like playing around with the symptoms and it would, he would have been much better off if he got rid of his crazy wife, didn't have his court killed and maybe like set the Rome on a bureaucracy destroying trend instead of, you know, commit to Oriental orientalism trend.
- [62:34]
Rudyard Lynch
To be fair.
- [62:35]
Austin Padgett
Yeah.
- [62:36]
Rudyard Lynch
Augustus did hack the bureaucracy down where Rome. And this is one of the things I feel bad about not covering enough because when, when you read history you forget how much effort men put into destroying centripetal gradual decay. We're history is the force of entropy. And so many times there is a great man who cleans out all the bullshit, gives his empire another two centuries, but because nothing bad happened, we don't notice. We don't notice when bad things don't happen, but bad things don't happen because people worked hard for them. And so republican Rome was just incredibly corrupt. And especially so you had these various legal issues built around how Roman law did not apply outside Italy. Italy, where the Romans, for example, could just horrifically extort and burn and rape and enslave outside Italy. And the republican governance system created issues with this, where there was a difficulty of creating responsibility. But what Augustus did is he stabilized this, created effective tax systems across the entire empire, which created this huge economic boon concentrated in the eastern part of the empire, which no longer had these predatory Roman systems. And he also completely wiped out all of the old Roman systems of governance, bringing it under his own personal household. And so taxes went down, regulation went down. And also, this is one of the details I wanted to emphasize before I got in, is that the first two Roman emperors were pretty bad guys. The thing we're not seeing is because the Roman Empire was so decentralized in how it was governed, the terrible emperors like Tiberius or Caligula or Nero actually did not have that negative effects on most people in the empire. It was this weird situation where people across the empire would see the degeneracy of the Roman courts. But they were mostly fine because the Romans governed indirectly through local elites who they would socially assimilate into Roman culture. And because there wasn't that much direct authority, if you were a normal person in France or Israel or even Italy, this was an economic golden age of relatively sane governance with insane leaders at the top who are just having constant ego trips. And. And that was due to the brilliant institutional structure that Augustus had set up.
- [65:14]
Austin Padgett
Got it. So he kind of streamlined it and made it so that they could maximize the benefits of the single market, the trade, the currency trade, still a relatively functional currency, not relying on barter like in the later times. And you said the security was kind of mostly done by the. The locals. How in this period did Rome start to transition from, like, security increasingly being a function of local rulers and the spread of, like, the smaller mafias that kind of are the regional mafias, and that. That led into the feudal system because by the end of the Roman Empire, they were. They were already bartering because of inflation and various issues with.
- [66:14]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah, you're confusing two things. So the governance was on a local level. If you went to Britain, most of the nobility or Practically all of the nobility in Britain were ethnic Britons who dressed like Romans, went to Roman baths. The Romans militarily held their empire with the legions who were field armies where the local rulers would have militias, but the real military power were these field armies. And they were concentrated in certain strategic chokepoints like Hadrian's Wall or there were a bunch of legions centered in Trier in Germany with the Rome's biggest frontier was on the north against the Germans on the Danube or the Rhine where the Germans were constantly pushing up against the Romans before ultimately conquering them centuries later. And, and so the, the Roman field armies, they could just crush anything unless you went into a geographic region outside of their core area of strengths, whether that be the, the infinite forests of Germany or the, the deserts of Persia which gave the Persian cavalry where the Romans had such a strong military advantage because the Romans had adopted drilling actually thousands of years before anyone else. When the Europeans reincorporated drill from Roman texts in the 16th century, it caused a military breakthrough. And the Romans had their Rome had the best military in the world. And that was something that they had cultivated over the early republic period where they had a combination of javelins and short swords in these shield formations called legions. And then they had irregular troops where the legions could only be recruited among the ethnic Italians. Then they'd have cavalry regiments from the French or the Germans or the Scythians. They would have archers from Spain or the Balearics. The Thracians were known for being incredibly good just irregular soldiers. And so their military had a lot of flexibility. And the Romans were really good at military intangibles, stuff like they, their men would march 25 miles every single day which gave them an immense military advantage over their opponent, which is something the Napoleonics had. The Romans they every single night and this is so cool. Their legions would build an artificial fort which they would sleep in because each legionnaire had their own little pre appointed task of they're going to build this little part of the fort. So whenever the Romans were sleeping they would always be surrounded by this new fort. They would put up move somewhere else repackage where the Roman skill at fortification and besieging was what they were just so good at. Where the. In the conquest of Britain for example, the Romans had to take hundreds of these Celtic hill forts or castles which normally would have been impossible because the Romans were so good at that siege craft. They were able to do it. And finally the Romans had an incredible ability for hierarchy and maneuverability. Where the Romans leadership structure was so fluid that they could maneuver over a battlefield and maintain a command structure at vastly higher degrees of efficiency than anyone else.
- [69:40]
Austin Padgett
Right. That's just like the French and English war, where the English incorporated some basic tactics with the longbowmen and the knights. And the French were still just like, you gather all the nobles together, they all have their group of horses, and you all just kind of go. Go crazy with it and see glory. And so there was. It's funny how there. There wasn't the organizing principle. And the Romans. Yeah, the intangibles of the way they built the, you know, most famous example of that being the Caesar versus the Celts in that final battle. It reminds me of how, like, little kids will build really, really fast. And Fortnite is like a game where you're shooting each other with guns and that you can build, and some kids just, like, max out the build, and they're just building so fast. They're building, like walls and towers around you when it's supposed to be about guns, which must have been confusing for the Celts. It's like, what, hey, what game are we playing here? What are you guys doing?
- [70:37]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah, The Romans were. The Roman Empire was largely a period of technological and cultural stagnation, which is something we've forgotten. We tend to see the Romans as this hyper advanced, educated society. But when you look at the high point of Roman literature, very little good literature is written after the fall of the Republican period. You have a few authors like Pliny or Tacitus, but most of it was beforehand. The Romans had practically no technological innovations where medieval Europe saw vastly more technological, scientific, philosophic innovations than Rome did. Although we see the Middle Ages as a backwater. And Carol Quigley talks about this a lot. Where the Romans had the steam engine, they had computing technology, they had clockwork, but they never used it because they. They didn't have the capitalist incentive structures, they didn't have a culture that valued it, and they also didn't have slavery made labor so cheap. And on top of it, the Romans had all of the technologies to have the agricultural revolution that the British and the Dutch did in the early modern period, and they didn't use it. Where the Romans were a period of technological and social stagnation. And it was when Europe could have become China, because Europe back then is paralleled very closely to what China's trajectory were. Where there are these. They were formed around roughly similar times. Greco Roman and classical civilization of similar. They have very paralleled histories as well, with similar philosophic or political Breakthroughs occurring at the same time. But what happened in China is that unlike everyone else, their classical civilization survived and formed a unified nation state. And what happened in Rome was that that broke apart and it formed the European countries out of the rubble or the different Roman provinces became different ethnicities and nations. And there's a. Tom Holland is the best author on the Roman Empire. If you're interested in this topic, you should read him because he blows all the other authors out of the water. Where there's something in his book Pax on the Pax Romana that's just stuck in my head that there was this philosopher from Bithynia or Greek speaking Turkey, where the Greeks were more culturally important in the Roman Empire than the Romans were, especially in the eastern half of the empire. And the Romans were dependent on the Greeks to carry out their empire in the least in the east, where this Greek philosopher, he made this social model that every person in a society has moral duties to everyone else. And society works best when everyone's in this cooperative system where everyone performs their duty. And I thought, wait, this is white people. Confucius. And I find it interesting, he has the exact same philosophy as Confucius, just as a Greek thinker. And he was very popular at the time. And what I find shocking about that is that in the European context, this is an author that me as a historian, I only learned about him a few months ago. He was a minor, he was an important philosopher in his specific era. And then largely not afterwards. And then this same philosophy became the, it became the Christianity of the Orient, it became the Islam of the Orient. So it's interesting that you'll frequently see similar philosophies in different historic contexts where every era of philosophic creativity has the same philosophies. Nihilism, materialism, idealism, mysticism, individualism, authoritarianism. But it's fascinating to see in different civilizational and historic contexts which of these philosophic seeds sprouts to become that society's religion.
- [74:42]
Austin Padgett
Right? And it's not necessarily that that's going to be the. It's like what is, what seed is the ground fertile for? Possibly, but it's also just. You don't have to put a. You don't have to explain why. It's just the fact that all these thoughts exist at all times is partly what's interesting. Because we think an idea wasn't discovered or like all these ideas have been discovered over and over again and they've existed in the minds of people throughout every society, but they don't always get featured.
- [75:16]
Rudyard Lynch
Yes. And I think it was ultimately good that the Roman Empire fell. And this is something a lot everyone in the science of history agrees with. Where people like to say that if Rome never fell we would have experienced science and the Industrial Revolution, all of these things early. Because people tend to see history as a straight line. Well in reality it's a bunch of curves that are complex and constantly fighting. And the thing that results in Europe's immense Blake breakthrough in everything over the modern period, it was caused by the constant infighting of the European states as well as Christianity and the philosophic innovations that came with the fall of Rome. Where the reason the Orient stagnated like India or China, where they, their social structures barely changed in the 2000 years after the birth of Christ, before European colonialism, is that their civilizations never collapsed and had to restart. And I know that if the Greco Roman civilization survived, where if there was a China sized country stretching from England to Libya today, that it would be China. It would be this centralized, sclerotic bureaucratic state that hadn't seen real change in thousands of years.
- [76:34]
Austin Padgett
Yes, it's like the point is not to fight for, for the Rome or it's the law is supposed to serve you. You're not supposed to serve the law. If you're just trying to preserve the idea of Rome past a certain point, then the only way to do it is likely to be something that completely betrays the, the spirit of Rome. And like you said, turn in like that philosopher that had the Confucian style, like that would have been the only thing that probably kept it going. But it wouldn't have been in a good way. And your mention of the field armies versus the local ethnic, you know, defense and rulers is a good context for showing how the structure of the Roman Empire shifted slowly into feudalism. Because it would have been like the, the less you depended on the field armies and the more dependent you dependent on local security. That was like the, the transition to the point where at the end of the Roman Empire the field armies are not what's practically providing that service. So like in the context of the US and federalism, if you get rid of federal regulatory bureaucracy, then you'll see that will be taken up by the states or if you get rid of like welfare, that will be taken up by the states or, or different things. And so you'll have the transition to a decentralized system happening within the context of, of the U.S. empire. And anyone who's attached to that goal thinks that they have to get rid of the US Empire. They don't understand that like the best way to return to a constitutional and post constitutional order is through the system.
- [78:23]
Rudyard Lynch
I'm going to fact check you there because this is my specific era of history and this is an academic debate of which I have stick staked a significant amount of effort into. Feudalism is an outgrowth of the fall of the Carolingian Empire, not the fall of Rome where. So Rome fell. And as the Roman Empire fell, you saw the gradual replacement of slavery with serfdom. Because as the population of the empire decreased, you had to treat human life with more value. But what happened afterwards? You saw the breakdown of serfdom over the Dark Age period, where in the 10th century the average West European was a free farmer. So under Charlemagne and during the Dark Age period, the average, the period where the average European from skeletons was tallest and healthiest was the Dark Ages and the Roman period. And the medieval and early modern period was actually less healthy for the average person because you saw the growth of these large state bureaucratic, these large state structures that predated off the individual farmer. And what happened around 1000 AD is you saw the rise of a second serfdom due to the pressures of the Vikings, Magyars and Arabs on Western Europe. This was coordinated with knight, with, with the knight structure. And then the, then that structure colonized Western Europe with the spread of knights, whether with the Norman Conquest or the Teutonic Crusades or cultural transmission. So you have Roman serfdom that was state based, that collapsed. You saw a period of free farmers over the Dark Age. And there was a second form of serfdom that was based around loyalty to knights in the early medieval period, around 1000 AD.
- [80:13]
Austin Padgett
Right. So my use of the term feudal is like maybe semantically incorrect there. But you, you get into that more localized environment.
- [80:25]
Rudyard Lynch
Yes, you had governance by the German Manerbund. German is. Manerbund is a German word for, for war band, bund band, manner men. And so you had these German style war bands based around the feasting hall and then that moved over to the knight structure. But you are correct, whereas the Roman Empire fell, local wealthy people moved out to the countryside, established themselves as new nobility and they evolved into being tribal chieftains. So as the empire fell, there was this process of decivilization where people who used to be urban elites, where the Roman culture was entirely urban, wealthy people would live in the city and then have tenant farmers outside it. And then to a society where the wealthy bill moved out to the countryside. And became tribal chieftains. I keep on getting derailed from actually going through the chronology of the emperors. So after Augustus's death was Tiberius. And people will want to say Tiberius was just, just a degenerate. But I think he's actually a more complex character than that where he was actually a moral figure and he cared about the good of the Roman people. Or when he first got into power, he begged the Senate to take power back. And there's this weird, this is almost like a shame based culture thing where there had been this whole social tradition of the Senate saying I, the Emperor saying I give away power to the Senate. The Senate says no thank you, give us power. This time it lasted for several hours because Tiberius actually wanted to give away power and the Senate realized they couldn't actually hold power. So for a two to three hour period they just went back and forth saying, no, you get to take power. No, you get to take power. And Tiberius just hated the Roman elite. So he moved down to Naples and lived on the island of Capri where he engaged in various forms of degeneracy. Because the Roman elite, culture, life, they were a bunch of petty bitches. And this is one of things Augustus talked about where Augustus got very powerful and popular by playing the, I'm just a rural schmuck against these elite Roman douches. And so Augustus was not popular among the Roman elite, but the Roman elite itself was not that powerful where the average person of the emperor was like, yay, we got a small town conservative in charge. And the early emperors, most of their purges under people like Caligula and Tiberius and Nero were purging the localized Roman elite because these were people who had the potential to launch coups or power grabs but were powerless now. So the emperors had every incentive to kill them. But this was an intro Roman process. While there weren't, this wasn't a totalitarian state where they were arresting people in France. And Tiberius, he actually governed the empire really well. He was one of the best emperors because he had had a background as commander in Germany. So he had experience in barbarians and fighting and that stuff. After Tiberius came Caligula. And Caligula's term is little boot because he was with Tiberius's army in Germany and he was affectionately loved by, by the, by the soldiers out on the frontier when he was a child. But then he is unilaterally one of the worst emperors ever, not even just in Roman history, in world history. And I got into some of his degeneracies before, but he also did Things like he named his horse a powerful cabinet. He gave his horse a powerful cabinet position. He, like, fought a war with the ocean, which he said he won. I don't know how the ocean would verify that.
- [84:35]
Austin Padgett
He just never beat the ocean.
- [84:37]
Rudyard Lynch
His entire reign was just weird performance art to, I don't know, man. But he killed too many people, caused too much insanity, caused too much degeneracy, that he was murdered by the Praetorians and Claudius was installed in power. And as I said before, Claudius escaped the constant murderings by Livia and the Praetorians by being a cripple. And Claudius hobby was a historian. The Robert Grace book is very endearing where they say Claudius wanted to be emperor so that someone would read his history books. And I don't know if that's true, but it's a nice sentiment. There's lots of things in history that might be true, might not. They're in like an Overton Window, where I'll say them as a sort of anecdotal story to give it character. This is what ancient authors did and they just pretended it was true.
- [85:34]
Austin Padgett
And to remind you that people think that way. There's other things that we don't normally. Intangibles. Yeah. What's your motivation?
- [85:41]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah, History is a human process brought out by the psychologies of everyone involved. And so Caligula, Claudius, he conquered Britain and he established the empire, but he got a young, pretty wife and then she was cheating on him pretty fast, and then she had him murdered, which is sad because he's one of the few good governors. And I believe after Claudius came Nero, or Nero was. Nero was gotten into power by his mother, Agrippina, who was a horrible person. And then Nero had his mother murdered. He tried to have her murdered in a barge accident that failed and Nero got into power. And I don't think Nero was a unilaterally bad emperor. He was a degenerate sociopath, but he wasn't unilaterally bad. And there's the, the wild, there's the. The common story of Nero fiddling as Rome burned, where there's a conspiracy theory, much like the Hawaii fires, that Nero burned down this area of very wealthy real estate because it just so happened afterwards that he built his palace on his new palace on top of the areas that just got burned down, like Hawaii. Exactly as I just said. And he blamed it on the Christians because the Christians were an oppressed minority group. And I'll explain why the Christians were oppressed. It's an interesting story. About Roman society. And the Christians were just a useful scapegoat for the Romans. But then Nero also got killed I believe by the Praetorian Guard after a few years in power where he had a lot of drama with Seneca who was a Stoic philosopher. And Stoicism was the dominant elite philosophy of the Roman Empire. And I think like every Gen Z elite aspirant young right wing man has gone through a Stoicism phase. So have I. I have transcended Stoicism now that I love my feelings rather than try to try to suppress them. I think Stoicism's got a lot of great points. It's about self control and discipline which is necessary if you're in the position of responsibility. But I don't think Stoicism is fully in line with human nature. But it's one of the better belief structures you can pick because there aren't really good belief structures except the ones I believe. And Seneca. I've read all the Stoic books. Seneca's are pretty repetitive if you've read Epictetus or Marcus Aurelius, although he is clearly a smart guy, good guy And Seneca, he was Nero's advisor and while he preached simplicity and that sort of thing he had multiple enormous palaces and he was part of that Roman elite. And Nero demanded that Seneca commit suicide for insulting Nero's honor. And so Seneca did so. And after Nero you saw the military take up Roman politics because the Julio Claudio line or the descendants of Augustus had become so degenerate consistently that Rome had lost faith in a monarchy's ability to self govern. And this is an important fact with Rome. Rome was a monarchy but it also really wasn't. It wasn't like England or France where you have divine right with the pre established legal structure that this is a monarchy based on a certain ancestral line. It was. They were pretending to be a republic with a family who just happened to pass on their power through a genetic line. And what happened after the fall of the Julio Claudios is you saw a series of military dictators. You went from the Principate or the the princeps first citizen to rule by the the Antonines and these various rulers like Titus as an example who got his power from conquering Judea. And this was actually the high point of the Roman Empire. And this was the period that Edward Gibbons said was the best period for humanity as a species. With Marcus Aurelius for example, he was a soldier general who fought up by Germany and you had a lot of rule through adoption where Trajan was another soldier and Trajan adopted Marcus Aurelius. I might be getting the timing slightly wrong, I might be forgetting a link or two, but I think Marcus Aurelius was adopted. And so what would happen is you had a certain leader rise up to the military, like Hadrian or Trajan or the Antonines or Marcus Aurelius, then they would adopt the most competent military leader in their proximity and then they would give them power. The issue with this is it just became rank obvious control by, by the military. And once you removed even the concept of a hereditary line, the military devolved into complete lack of any loyalty to the society itself.
- [90:59]
Austin Padgett
Right. Which makes sense because it just became the naked relationship. Eventually the reality of it just became how they operated. It's interesting to hear about Tiberius. Was he the one trying to pass off responsibility to the Senate? And it just shows, like, leadership isn't all benefits. There's a lot of restraining responsibility that comes with leadership.
- [91:26]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah.
- [91:26]
Austin Padgett
And then Tiberius wanted to do the party thing. So that was kind of the theme of the tension. So I totally amenable to the idea that, that Nero was kind of screwed over a little bit because it's such an obvious. If you're going to try and character assassinate someone, it is the narrative. It is the obvious narrative to embellish. And I'm sure he was, you know, had his own degeneracy, but just the fact that it's so notorious and so extreme and so exaggerated makes me think it's more likely the product of a propaganda campaign than a totally him being so outside of the pattern.
- [92:08]
Rudyard Lynch
So I'm inclined to believe it because there's a consistent pattern here where we know the other ones were actually degenerates. And the thing with the ancient world is you only have a handful of records. So in the medieval world, we know all this stuff because we still have continuity with medieval records where we have near perfect records of medieval Western Europe. Then in the ancient world, like for Caesar's conquest of Gaul, Caesar's one of the very few authors we have, or we know that Jesus Christ existed, but we only have Jesus from the Bible and then a few Roman records and Jewish records, Jesus was called. The other records of Jesus Christ are literally like Joshua ben Nazareth. He was a sorcerer who, like, caused disturbances.
- [92:58]
Austin Padgett
Right, right. That's a really funny little note.
- [93:00]
Whatifalth
Yeah.
- [93:01]
Austin Padgett
It's like, okay, we know who he's talking about.
- [93:03]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah, yeah. And so one of the points before I get to Christianity that I want to cover is that Hadrian was from Spain and So you start to see the spread of this Roman identity outside Italy, especially so to genetically comparable populations to Italians like the South French or the Spanish. And then over time as the Roman grew, it started to mean nothing. Where in the early third century every inhabitant of the Roman Empire became a Roman citizen. And when the title of Roman citizen became everyone, it became no one. Where once you have these Balkan commanders who are seizing control of Rome in the third century, they have no investment in the actual Roman culture which had become so watered down. Where the Romans had built their society in opposition to Christianity, where the Christians, the Christians were seen as this very obvious out group that the Romans could unify against. But the reason the Romans converted to Christianity is that their own imperial culture had become so hollowed out where Rome was a secular society. We forget this, but lots of opinions people would have today, like I don't really believe in God, I just want to enjoy the physical world. I don't want to believe in metaphysical concepts. I just want to believe in practical things. These are things that an educated urban person in the Roman Empire you could get them on board with. We have loads of notes about this or records of people doubting. And genuine religiosity was seen as a form of mental illness. Where the Jews and the Christians were deeply religious and everyone else was perceived them the way we perceive Islamic radicals today. And, and so with the forced Jewish diaspora across the Mediterranean that came with the, that came with the Judean wars, you saw this avenue for Christianity and other mystery religions to spread across the empire really easily. Where because the, the state sanctions religions had failed. It meant that people looked for genuine spiritual connection with these oriental mystic religions. And Christianity was the boss level that consumed all the others. Where lots of modern Christianity has been cannibalized from other mystery religions. But you had Mithraism, which is worshiping the Persian sun God Mithras. That was the most popular one, especially so among the army and the leadership class. They only admitted men. And in order to become a Mithraist, they would stab a bull on top of you and let the bull's blood seep through you. That was the initiation ritual. You had the cult of the Anatolian fertility goddess Cybele. Were to attain the highest level in the cult, you had to have your testicles broken. They had. Yes. Gay, not gay. I don't know, I'm just saying things. Then you had the cult of Isis, the Egyptian fertility goddess. They were seen as. The Romans saw all the Oriental religions as weird and not very trustworthy. The Christians the most. So then you had the Orphic and the Dionysian traditions, which were Greek mystic traditions that stemmed back to early Greece. There were a very strong established part of classical culture and they would consume psychedelics, they would get themselves into a frenzy. We view the Greeks and the Romans as rational, but they really weren't. They would purposely work themselves up into these altered states of consciousness. And every Christmas, Saturnalia, December 25, it was a fool's day where slaves were allowed to act out not being slaves, the nobility, to pretend to be lower class. Where every single year you had a day where you basically said, we know that society is a sort of social construct. Let's wink at it a little to show what happens when you loosen the social bonds.
- [97:21]
Austin Padgett
That sounds exactly like the purge or something. Yeah, yeah. So you become so like, you think of things as a social construct, you lose any association with the meaning and so then you can like play around with it arbitrarily.
- [97:37]
Rudyard Lynch
Yes.
- [97:37]
Austin Padgett
So clearly they're in a, like a discovery phase. And yeah, it's a, it's an interesting place for a society to be at because it's a scary idea, but it's also a sign that like change is required.
- [97:54]
Rudyard Lynch
We are by far the least humble society ever in history. Where in every pre industrial society you have this concept that there's these murky things that we don't really understand. Where there's this like, there's this field of knowledge that we don't know whether that be the spiritual, whether that be the far off lands where Pliny the Elder would talk about these curiosities in Africa or India or China and the idea that their civilization could fall. The Romans thought they would last forever, but they were, they weren't, they weren't like other girls. Most empires had because the Romans were so amazing, they kind of thought they transcended the game. But there was more of a concept in the pre industrial world that the social order we inhabit is fragile and requires eyewear maintenance. But the enormous success of industrial civilization and science has removed our concept that we don't control all of reality, that there are things we don't know and that we're not the end point of humanity where we're a profoundly arrogant and naive society.
- [99:02]
Austin Padgett
Yeah, the end of the end of history attitude. Which is funny because when that collapsed, people started looking more at Rome like oh, okay, what's basically looking not thinking of us as a totally unique, special snowflake at that point and realizing that there's ways it can go wrong.
- [99:22]
Rudyard Lynch
And then yeah.
- [99:22]
Austin Padgett
Being more serious about trying to figure it out.
- [99:25]
Rudyard Lynch
The Romans thought that they were the end point of history too. Where if you read the Aeneid, which was. The Aeneid was the great epic composed by Augustus to honor the Romans because the. The. The Greeks had the Iliad, which was. The Iliad was a sort of Bible for the classical world. We see it as like a myth, as a novel, but to them it was a mythological story they would read for religious connotations. And Virgil wrote the Aeneid under Augustus's patronage to show how in the Roman origin myth, they sailed from Troy to Italy around the time of the Bronze Age collapse and they founded the Roman state. And it's this over dramatized, highly propagandistic narrative of Roman history, which is still a really good work of literature. I mean, if you're good at propaganda transcends being propaganda. And the Aeneid's been read for thousands of years afterwards. But the end point of the Aeneid is them saying the order established by Aeneas in Italy was fated by the gods to conquer the entire world and make the eternal empire, which Rome did fall. But at the same time, Rome, the real Rome was in our hearts the whole time. The real Rome was the friends we made along the way. Where European states, through trying to imitate Rome, they made Rome immortal through the idea of Rome as the eternal Empire meant that as future empires tried to imitate Rome, they effectively recreated Rome. But in the process of doing so, they continued to create their own new things. And I think the most precious form, the most precious thing that can happen to you is imitation. If people are imitating you, it means you did the best possible.
- [101:22]
Austin Padgett
Right. And like you said, we used to talk about the Romans a lot more in the 1800s when we were kind of forming our system. It's always a consistent reference point. People talk about the Norman conquest of England bringing a kind of or reinvigorating the Roman structure that was there. That every kind of. Yeah, every kind of government or centralizing force is kind of conceptualized as Rome.
- [101:57]
Rudyard Lynch
Yes, basically, since Rome happened, the Americans tried to imitate Rome, the British tried to imitate Rome, the French did the. The Ottoman Turks call themselves the Empire of Rome or Rome. The Byzantines, of course, the Russians, the Germans called themselves the Caesar, which is the actually correct pronunciation for Caesar. The Spanish imitated the Romans, the Arabs, everyone in the western half of Eurasia and their diasporas tries to imitate Rome because Rome is that cool. And I have two points that I'm Going to finish the first is that when you cover a certain historic topic, we always focus on the failings of that society in a sort of tragic sense. Because every historic period ends and it's very important to figure out why it ends. But at the same time, as I like to say, you're gonna die either way. So it's better to die rich than to die poor. And that's how history works. Your empire has to die. So it's better to have a bigger empire before it dies. It's better to do more to stuff because you're going to die anyway. And when we deal with Rome, we'll talk about their issues. And they had plenty between a system where a quarter to a third of the people were slaves, stagnation in the sciences or culture, moral degeneracy. But the thing with Rome is the question is why did, why did Rome fall? It's why the hell did it last that long? Why did this tiny city state conquer the entire known world and then hold on to most of the known world for 600 years straight? That's the really impressive thing. And it's because the Romans were constantly able to recreate and readapt their civilization with different elites under different garbs, while maintaining their unified structure. Where empires that are not adaptable die when the singular elite in that moment loses their will to fight. Well, great empires are able to mutate through multiple forms before dying.
- [103:59]
Austin Padgett
That's a great point. I was going to say adaptation is the hidden variable we never look at because like you mentioned welfare states and all these, all these things happen and you get like a predictable continuum. But the ability to adapt is the only thing that can basically keep you recycling because there's no like elongated version unless you're doing, you know, a Chinese style system. And the point of me bringing up those dependencies earlier, like you said, like we're all gonna die, make the empire bigger or whatever. Like I'm not, I. Like we talked about it in terms of collapse. I'm not so I'm not so impatient. Like we, we talked about how things transition within the system. So kind of the way I look at it is not like freaking out about the empire getting bigger or smaller, but just trying to look at where it's going and how to facilitate the transition of dependencies in the least volatile way possible, which means being good at adaptation. So I like that focus.
- [105:17]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah. My thing with history is that when you read enough macro political history, you constantly see the crashing and the reformulation of empires and it's easy to get dispirited to see the constant fall of empires, but that's not the right perspective. The right perspective is take Nietzsche's universal recurrence, that there is the continuation of the human character across all of these things. And it's more impressive that the empires formed than they fall in the universal recurrence of the concept. Nietzsche has that over history, in different contexts, you see the re emergence of the human ability to achieve excellence, whether that be the Renaissance, the Roman Golden Ages, the building of the cathedrals, Columbus's discovery of the New World, where it's the human character conquering and achieving under adverse circumstances. And there will come a time when our civilization falls, but then centuries later, our descendants will achieve something completely great.
- [106:22]
Austin Padgett
Right? I guess, yeah. My point is we can enjoy the spoils of the empire while building the next great thing inside of it.
- [106:31]
Rudyard Lynch
Everyone squawks about the degeneracy destroying the civilization, but no one squawks at how fun the degeneracy was in the beginning.
- [106:41]
Austin Padgett
Right. Well, that's like a party. And not just the spoils in terms of the degeneracy, but like it's good that it's not collapsed, even though it's not bad, because it's easier to build local communities when you have infrastructure and power and access to the Internet. So.
- [106:59]
Rudyard Lynch
Exactly. History is an individual process, because the first generation who suffers to get the greatness they deserve, its fruits, then their children have to make the active decision to man up to keep the system going. And if they don't, the empire falls. And so my final point is Rome fell both as a civilization and as a political entity. The political entity fell with the German barbarians, the classical civilization that went back to the Bronze Age collapse in Homer, in the Dorians. That fell as well with Rome, where Rome as a Nation fell in 476 when the empire was finally divided up under the Germanic under the Germanic hay rules. And Rome as a civilization turned Christian in the 3 in 333 under Constantine, which is a social shift of as equip as of equivalent importance, in which you saw a change in the religion from the polytheistic pagan gods to Christianity with one God under the Catholic Church. And this is a shift that you can't overestimate the importance of, because it was a complete psychological break with the old World, where Christianity allowed a foundation for another 2000 years of cultural innovation through new fertile ground where you had basically gone through every single iteration of classical thought. And in the entire next few millennia of World history, basically every single innovation was built upon the underlying assumptions in Christian philosophy. I think it's. I made a video on the rise of Christianity at the start of this series and I think it's beautiful that an unemployed carpenter's son made the biggest religion in history where he was just telling people to love each other and to just to make the world a better place. And it's fascinating because it's a polarity to. The Romans, or the Romans conquered the world through militarism and aggression. But then the slave populations of Rome, the most oppressed population of the Roman Empire, the Jews, they in turn conquered Rome through the opposite methods of meekness, where the Christians were the lower classes, they were women, they were slaves. And they gradually seized control of Rome as the Roman culture became invalidated by the cultural collapses of the third and of the this. Of the third and fourth centuries. And one of the facts, I love to say is that the early Christians were called atheists because their concept of religion was formulated so differently from the previous concepts. So I'd like to compare the Christians to the communists today, where I think communism is a religion. We just don't know how to formulate it in the same way that Christianity was. And the. The reason that the Romans had to persecute the Jews and the Christians, well, they persecuted practically no one else in the empire where Rome was a highly tolerant society, is that in the Roman social religious structure, each city had its own gods. And this is a concept Fustel de Coulange talks about that were passed down through blood. So the system was that you would have a local God who you had sacrificed to, and then that was a corollary to a Roman God. You sacrificed to the Egyptian God Thoth, which is an equivalent to the Roman Mercury. You sacrificed to the Greek Zeus, which is equivalent to the Roman Jupiter. So you develop this complex system of correlations between the local gods that you would sacrifice to one, then there'd be another correlation. And the problem is that because this was a secular society, no one actually believes that. It was this facade. The Jews and the Christians said, psych, our God is better. We don't believe in this. Then this shattered the entire system because the Romans were like, wait, you can't call this bluff. If you call this bluff, the entire social structure falls apart. And Fustel de Coulange, I think it's brilliant where he says, firstly the Stoics and latterly the Christians destroyed the family and civic and religious foundations of the classical world by shattering this concept that Religion and culture was passed through blood to this transnational faith based source of identity stemming from Christianity.
- [111:54]
Austin Padgett
Right. And like we said, there's the, there's the universal through line even though there's a lot of difference and it's kind of hinting at that. And we've talked about how communism is kind of like the shadow of Christianity. So people make a comparison to early Christianity to like antifa or something because when it was adopted by these slave populations without strong cultural foundations or like even their own families, you could see how its expression could be often more in the shadow form where it's like rioting and tearing down the social structure versus like hey, how do we responsibly incorporate this spirit towards the betterment of society or something.
- [112:38]
Rudyard Lynch
I make lots of historic comparisons. That doesn't mean I'm saying they're the same. Where I compare Russia to America a lot because they're both European frontier states that became continental sized powers that turned back into Europe. But I don't think Russia and America are the same countries. I compare Rome and China a lot. I don't think they're the same countries. So I agree. I think, I think communism is an anti church to Christianity, which is what communism would themselves say. It's made in the shadow of Christianity where it takes envy at the foundation of communism is the opposite of Christian love where love is accepting others for their faults. Envy is trying to tear others down for their faults. And I think we did Rome really well. I will catch you soon for the creation of France.
- [113:29]
Austin Padgett
Excellent. Looking forward to it.
- [113:30]
Rudyard Lynch
Bye.
- [113:31]
Whatifalth
Peace History 102 by Rudyard lynch and Austin Padgett is a podcast from Turpentine, the network behind Moment of Zen live players and econ 102. If you like the episode, subscribe, follow on YouTube forward to a friend and let us know what else you want us to cover. Thank you for listening.