Gregory Aldrete
speaker
587 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2024
last heard Sep 2024
Gregory Aldrete’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Enormous success on the surface, you end up with this boiling pot of resentment and unhappiness. Let's break this down. Who's unhappy? Well, The people fighting Rome's wars, the common farmers who went off to fight, they joined the army. They went and fought. They've come back. They've seen Rome get wealthy. They've seen their generals get wealthy. They've conquered all these areas.
All this money and stuff is flowing back to Rome. But when they're discharged from the army, they don't get that much. So they feel like, I spent the best years of my life fighting for my country. I deserve a reward. I haven't gotten it. So you have a lot of veterans who are now unemployed or underemployed.
Many of them have sold their small family farms when they went off to join the army, and now they don't have them. So that group's unhappy, the veterans. You have the aristocrats, who on the surface, the ones who are doing well, they're the politicians and the generals.
But as time goes on, the ones who get the plum appointments, who get the good generalships, starts coming from a smaller and smaller subset of the aristocrats. The Scipios and their friends start to dominate. So you end up where most of the aristocratic class is feeling, hey, I'm left out. I didn't get what I deserved.
What about the half-citizens and the allies, the Italians, who have fought for Rome, who stayed loyal when Hannibal invaded? They didn't go over to his side. Well, they feel, rightfully, we stayed loyal to Rome. We fought for them. We deserve our reward. We should be full citizens. But the Romans are traditional. They're conservative. They don't like change. They don't give them that.
What about all the slaves? Well, they've conquered all these foreigners. They've sold them. Now many of them are working these plantations, big plantations owned by rich people that used to be little family farms. The slaves are obviously unhappy. So you end up with a society where it's incredibly successful by about 100 BC.
But almost every group that composes it feels like I haven't shared in the benefits of what's happened or I've been exploited by it. So they all end up intensely unhappy. And the next 100-year period from 133 to 31 BC is called the Late Roman Republic. And it's a time of nearly constant internal strife, ultimately culminating in multiple rounds of civil war.
So Roman society literally breaks apart, turns on itself, and goes to war with itself over not equitably sharing the benefits of conquest and of empire. So it's a lesson about not sharing the benefits of something in a society but concentrating it in one little group. And the other thing that happens is among the aristocrats, they start to get more and more ambitious.
So in the past, there was a lot of ideology of the state is more important than the person. If you were a little Roman kid, you would have been told these stories of Roman heroes, and they're all about self-sacrifice, putting the state before you, about modesty, about these sort of values. Well, by the late Republic, you have a succession of strongmen. And it is a chain.
So it goes, you know, Marius, Sully, Pompey, Julius Caesar, where each one pushes the boundaries of the Roman Republic a little bit, pushes at the structures of the institutions of the republic, and they're motivated by personal gain. They're putting themselves above the state.
So at the same time, you have lots of groups unhappy in society and you get these strong men who are now undermining the institutions, chipping away at the things that have been shared, things holding the state together. And in the end, they just become so ambitious. They're like, I don't care about the state. I'm going to try and make myself ruler of Rome.
So, I mean, this is going to culminate, obviously, in Julius Caesar, who does succeed in making himself dictator for life of the Roman Republic, which is tantamount to king, and he gets assassinated for it. But he's the endpoint of this progression of people who really undermine the institutions of the Republic through their own personal greed.
And they exploit it. They're demagogues. Yeah.
Well, I mean, it's a love-hate because Caesar is very successful at playing to the Roman people. So he becomes their hero where he says, you know, I'll be your champion against the state who doesn't care about you. You know, so Caesar will do things where he'll put on big shows for the people. And it's cynical. I mean, he's doing this to further his own political power.
But he's presenting himself as a populist in essence. Yeah. even though he aspires to be a dictator, right? But it's a way of winning the people's support because that's a tool for him and his struggle with other aristocrats.
Other times he'll play to the aristocracy.
That's an interesting moment because all these things have been leading up to Caesar, and it really is a chain of men. So it starts with this guy, Marius, who is one of the first to start making armies loyal to him rather than to the state. That's a step in the wrong direction, right? The army should be loyal to the state, not to an individual general. They shouldn't look for him to reward.
Marius kind of breaks that, makes a precedent. One of his protégés is a guy named Sulla. Sulla comes along, and he ends up marching on Rome with his army and taking it over. And he says, well, I'm just doing it for the good of the state. But that's another precedent. Now you've had someone attacking their own capital city, even if they say they're doing it for the right reasons.
Then Pompey comes along, and Pompey just breaks all kinds of things. He starts holding offices when he's too young to do so. He raises personal armies from his own wealth. He disobeys commands. He manipulates commands. He does all kinds of stuff. But in the end, he sides with the Senate when sort of forced. And finally, Caesar comes along, and Caesar's just shamelessly, no, it's about me.
I'm going to push it. And he is the one who wins a civil war against the state and Pompey, takes over Rome and says, now I'm going to be dictator. And dictator is a traditional office in the Roman state, but dictators were limited to no more than six months in power. And Caesar says, well, I'll be dictator for life, which of course is king. He gets killed for it. So Caesar
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