Barry Strauss

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592 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 18 Jul

Barry Strauss’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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The Daily Stoic · The Fall Of The Roman Republic Was A Warning | Barry Strauss · 18 Jul 2026 podcast

Then they go back to their farm and they would enjoy a middle class existence on a modest sized farm.

And they would also be able to participate in politics.

It wasn't a democracy, but there were elections and ordinary people had a vote.

And it all starts to go sideways as a result of the wars that Rome fought in the third and second centuries, the wars that really, you know, squeeze these people to the pipsqueak.

Many of them die.

Many of them lose their farms.

At the same time, Rome is becoming a major, major slave power, and Italy is becoming a slave society, and the fat cats are grabbing up all the public land that ordinary Romans would need to pasture their herds on.

So we see people moving to the city of Rome because they can't make it on the farm anymore.

We see people losing their farms.

We see people going into debt.

And the net-net, it just really affects the Roman military because the Romans staunchly believed that you could not arm poor people because if you armed poor people, they could turn on you.

And they also thought that poor people were poor.

I mean, unfairly, they thought that poor people were poor because they lacked

virtue and they just didn't have the right stuff.

So suddenly there's not enough people who can meet the military, the property qualification to go into the military.

And two Roman politicians, the Gracchi brothers, try to do something about it by redistributing public land and getting the wealthy to give up this land and to share it with the poor so that you can bring potential Roman soldiers back up to speed where they can meet the property qualification.

In a way, yes, you could say that.

So this leads to a violent opposition.

I mean, literally violent opposition.

And there are lynch squads put together by senators to kill each of these brothers in turn and to make these reforms moribund.

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