One of the big themes of the fall of the Roman Republic was that many leaders faced a dilemma: stay in office or face dire legal consequences. Julius Ceasar had to make sure he held office continuously for decades or else he would have been dragged through the courts.
If you asked me 15 years ago, I would have naively said that modern governments do not have this problem. But one look at Trump or Netanyahyu and the logic is clear: do everything to stay in power, because if you fail you get life in prison.
While I like the comparison between Trump’s legal troubles and Julius Caesar’s, my inner pedant needs to point out that Caesar was not part of the fall of the Roman Empire. Depending on how you break up the timeline, Caesar was the beginning of the end for the Roman Republic and his heir Augustus was the beginning of the Empire.
My inner pedant needs to respond and point out that I said “the fall of the Roman Republic”.
So we are in pedantic agreement.
Lol, I swear I can read
Now kiss.
It’s funny - Caesar (and many other populare politicians) faced state repression from proclamations which suspended the normal functioning of the law and government (Senatus consultum ultimum). Nowadays the goal is to avoid state repression from the normal functioning of the law.
It’s arguable he crossed the Rubicon with his armies against Rome specifically to avoid the legal consequences of losing power. Cato was living his life to ensure Ceaser would eventually face the courts. Cato would kill himself after that was made unattainable by Caesar’s own coup.
“Caesar was reported to be marching against the city with an army, then all eyes were turned upon Cato, both those of the common people and those of Pompey as well; they realised that he alone had from the outset foreseen, and first openly foretold, the designs of Caesar. 2 Cato therefore said: ‘Nay, men, if any of you had heeded what I was ever foretelling and advising, ye would now neither be fearing a single man nor putting your hopes in a single man.’”-Plutarch (Life of Cato)
Cato was living his life to ensure Ceaser would eventually face the courts.
‘The courts’ here meaning ‘a kangaroo court by Cato and his fellow ultraconservatives in the Senate’.
Julius Ceasar had to make sure he held office continuously for decades or else he would have been dragged through the courts.
I believe Julie C’s rein came to an extrajudicial end.
If you asked me 15 years ago, I would have naively said that modern governments do not have this problem.
If you consider Trump’s current legal situation, I’d argue we absolutely still are. The political upper crust can be in contempt of court every day of the week for a month and suffer no more than a few fines they will refuse to pay. That’s assuming they’ve pissed off someone powerful enough to actually drop the hammer and aren’t pure teflon, a la Ken Paxton or Rick Scott.
So much of the current political moment is highlighted by how utterly untouchable the major party leadership demonstrates itself to be. From Nixon to Cheney to Trump, there’s no agent within the system willing to level any kind of punishment.
This leads to increasingly bold actions by people grasping for that next brash ring. Greg Abbott can throw barbed wire into the Rio Grande. Ron DeSantis can ship buses full of migrants into downtown NYC and Chicago in what amounts to a kidnapping attempt. Police in Columbia and UCLA and Austin can round up college students as trespassers within their own campuses. Etc, etc.
Just increasingly illegal and corrupt activities by tin-pot dictators who no longer fear a democratic process that’s been caged and disenfranchised into obsolescence.
You’re not wrong, our current oligarchs can get away with almost anything. The only time they face serious consequences is when there is a coalition of other oligarchs who want to punish them.
Which is why I believe Trump and Netanyahu fall into this political trap of “win or prison”. They both have many politically powerful enemies.
Maybe I’m being optimistic, I dont want to come off as a shitlib who’s thinking “Mueller is really gonna get Drumpf this time!”, but I think its very likely hes going to prison if hes unable to pardon himself.
Maybe I’m being optimistic, I dont want to come off as a shitlib who’s thinking “Mueller is really gonna get Drumpf this time!”, but I think its very likely hes going to prison if hes unable to pardon himself.
Maybe. But I think there’s a very good chance he wins in November. And rather than confront that possibility, we’re seeing a lot of bureaucrats try to slow roll the process so as not to have to deal with the possibility of answering what you do with a President Elect who has been sentenced to a jail term.
Yeah but to be fair the Romans didn’t have Hummers and F150’s doing 55 down their roads.
They would have realized those were designed to go off-road and not wasted their time on the roads with them.
What makes you think Roman citizens were smarter than us?
What makes you think I was serious?
You weren’t serious when you were talking about Romans going off road in a hummer? /s
lead
We copied the Romans there. Lead water pipes are all over the place across America.
Someone actually complained to me (at random, I just happened to be nearby) that their new roommate was running up the water bill because he took a shower every day. That someone would actually bathe daily was a completely foreign concept to them.
They may have had better roads, but they couldn’t hold a candle to the spectacle of our many circuses. Id bring up the bread too, but the price gettin a little nutty.
Whereas they gave everyone grain allotments.
Also, I’d say people getting torn up by lions is a much bigger spectacle than whatever Cirque du Soleil is doing lately.
Whereas they gave everyone grain allotments.
Common misconception. Only a specific list of people in the city of Rome received free grain, and it’s generally considered that they were more “Skilled working class” than genuinely impoverished in most cases - the point was to maintain the political stability of the city. This isn’t to say that there wasn’t irregular charity of other forms that got through, or local initiatives, only that the regular grain dole often spoken of isn’t it.
They did subsidize grain, regulate the price and weight of bread, and reward bakers who sold bread under a certain price though. But that’s not so different from today.
Some of their roads are still in use
And they fed their population
Besides the good roads and bath houses what have the Roman’s done for us…
Trump is really more of Elagabalus or maybe Caligula.
It’s like we sped-ran past the “effective but tyrannical” ones a d straight into the comically corrupt.
Imagine how much Trump would be if syphilis was a thing.
Common (stupid) german anti-american proverb:
America from barbary to decadence without the detour through culture.
Hey Elagabalus may have had problems but she was 16 and horny and maybe don’t put a horny 16 year old in charge of an empire.
I mean, but have we tried it yet? Maybe we should try it.
“Vote for a boy crazy 16 year old! It can’t go as poorly here as it did in rome”
Like, listen I’m not saying it wouldn’t solve some of our problems. What I am saying is that if we go with a trans girl from Syria again she won’t live as long as the first one and regardless we’re going to have a lot of new problems
Please let him be Caligula or Nero. I don’t want to live through the Crisis of the Third Century.
Me, a Roman Senator, explaining why we need to upgrade our twelve lane cobblestone to a fourteen lane cobblestone, as the Visgoths bang at my gates.
They did also have leaded water though
Yes, but they weren’t fully aware of the danger like the U.S. government absolutely is.
Water conducted through earthen pipes is more wholesome than that through lead; indeed that conveyed in lead must be injurious, because from it white lead is obtained, and this is said to be injurious to the human system. Hence, if what is generated from it is pernicious, there can be no doubt that itself cannot be a wholesome body. This may be verified by observing the workers in lead, who are of a pallid colour; for in casting lead, the fumes from it fixing on the different members, and daily burning them, destroy the vigour of the blood; water should therefore on no account be conducted in leaden pipes if we are desirous that it should be wholesome.
Vitruvius, 1st century BCE
Damn! Beat me to it.
They also allowed detritus to build up in lead pipes to insulate the water from the lead.
Unfortunately, all these tricks and knowledge didn’t stop them from boiling down grapes into their favorite condiment/syrup specifically in lead vessels because the lead made it taste sweeter.
Stupidity is a human constant.
And I am sure that there were other Romans writing treatises that said that lead was healthy. Because they didn’t have the scientific method or any sort of modern scientific equipment, so expecting them to truly understand the dangers of lead piping compared to today is silly.
Doesn’t take much. Lead is pretty poisonous - people working lead get sick, people who use lead cosmetics too often get sick, people who eat lead-flavored syrup get sick. Eventually even the thickest morons begin to notice a pattern, so long as they don’t have an information box blaring all day telling them not to trust their woke liberal eyes instead of the Job Creators™.
Well, they realize assuming the lead doesn’t get to their brain first.
Actually, I’ve read somewhere that they actually found out and did something for it but somehow the information got lost
They let a sediment coating form on the lead. We do that too, and it’s why the lead removal programs are only a top priority, and not an active emergency.
It actually works, because it’s less a lead pipe, and more a “crusty mineral” pipe, with a lead coating.
Downside being that if you damage that buildup everything goes to shit, hence the decades of working to replace the pipes.
Maybe if Biden killed Trump, who killed Obama, who killed bush, who killed Clinton, and we end up with Barron in charge. And then a foreign mercenary Army who’s been fighting America’s wars cause they got fat and complacent, decided to turn and take over Washington.
I keep saying, we’d also need a Senator who was an actual horse at some point. Mitch McConnell is retiring and if there was a state to elect a horse it would be Kentucky.
I guess you could compare the fact that Rome used “barbarians” to fight their wars on the borders with the US love of proxy wars. But I doubt Israel or Ukraine or Yemen is going to invade the US.
There was a lot that contributed to the downfall of Rome, the constant invasions were a symptom of a bigger problem.
Rome built itself on the back of it’s military with a strong economy, as the economy became stable, the military eventually began to dwindle with it until Rome could no longer defend itself.
The economy had been suffering for a while. Overspending on the military and foreign wars was part of it, but not all of it. Taxes were oppressive and got worse the less you made. The gap between the rich and the poor had broadened quite considerably and inflation was running rampant. The wealthy began to retreat to the far frontier and set up independent fiefdoms to avoid paying taxes.
The labor pool had also evaporated. As Rome stopped expanding the ability to replace slaves had vanished and fewer men were willing to fight. This is when they started losing territory, and it was a downward spiral from then on.
Notably, we’re sitting right before that last stage in our little comparison.
Rome built itself on the back of it’s military with a strong economy, as the economy became stable, the military eventually began to dwindle with it until Rome could no longer defend itself.
Other way around. As long as the economy of Rome was stable, the Empire was prosperous. The Empire’s prosperity nosedived because of the constant unrest of the Crisis of the Third Century. Turns out when you spend a great deal of time killing and plundering each other in civil wars, there are less men left over to kill invading barbarians. Who knew!?
The economy had been suffering for a while. Overspending on the military and foreign wars was part of it, but not all of it.
The military and foreign wars were probably the least objectionable thing the treasury went towards. Just about every half-decent Emperor that came in would inevitably look at the extravagant court costs of their not-even-half-decent predecessor and say “Fuck me, is THAT where our money is going?”
The wealthy began to retreat to the far frontier and set up independent fiefdoms to avoid paying taxes.
Not even to the far frontier, or by force, sadly. They just… stopped paying. The political power of the Emperor no longer depended on the loyalty of the class of nationally ambitious politicians, nor on the exceptional loyalty of the (then-conscripted and life-term) military, nor on the Roman people, but on local magnates who were more than happy to leverage both their small size (making the Imperial apparatus crushing them not worth the cost) and their outsized importance for all it was worth.
As Rome stopped expanding the ability to replace slaves had vanished and fewer men were willing to fight.
Gotta point out that those two things aren’t related. The decline of slavery after the peak in the 1st century AD had few serious effects on the Empire. Fewer men were willing to fight because years of constant civil war, the complete breakdown of the society you were supposed to be defending, the propagation of regional loyalties, and then capped with a ‘divine’ autocrat prosecuting sectarian rivals who relies on conscription and lifelong sentences to a much-less professional and meritocratic military is… well, it’s a bit of a downer.
We can’t be close to the fall of Rome, we don’t have a literal horse that has a vote in the Senate… of course with the retirement of Senator Mitch McConnell, Kentucky would be the state most likely to elect a horse as his replacement. So who knows.
If you didn’t know- The horse thing either didn’t happen or was a prank to show the senate Caligula’s contempt for them rather than a crazy man doing something crazy.
The main difference in my opinion is a hostile frontier. You can’t really compare 5th century Germany to Canada or Mexico (even though the right wing would love that to be the case). No hordes either.
There are ways you could compare our problems with the southern border to rome though. The biggest funder of the cartels is us and our government has historically used them as right wing cudgels. And that same militarization of the drugs resulted in refugee crises we created with largely American weapons being used. The legitimacy of the kings of the frontier was totally a roman creation to help in their own backbiting politics.
I was playing Victoria 3 the other day and I wonder what % of the world GDP the US had in its peak, compared to the British or Roman empires.
50% roughly for America, but that’s distorted by being immediately after WWII. In the 60s, it was about 25%. Idk about Britain or Rome though
World GDP 2023 was around 105 Trillion US$, the US were around 27T, so about 25,7%
According to Angus Maddison, world GDP around 14AD was about 250B, the roman empire was about 60B (in 2023 US$) so 24% (Roman GDP rose to 100B$ in 150AD, for which i didn’t find a reference point in world economy - but i’m pretty sure that by 150AD the roman economy was the largest contributor, which would make their share rise up to max. 40% if the world gdp didn’t change much.)
- https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-gdp-over-the-long-run for the 1AD value
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_economy#Estimates_of_national_accounts_and_income_distribution for the roman empire data
- https://imgur.com/gallery/Pz61mnA for the World/US GDP in 2023
I really appreciate that you took time out of your day to answer my random musings. If someone asks if there’s hope for humankind, I’ll point here.
And now I’m wondering how awkward it would be if you’re an AI.
Have an amazing day, friendly stranger.
Your musings made me interested in the answer 😁
No AI here, but it would have involved much less embarrassing use of a calculator if I were one lol
Same to you 🖖
Out of curiosity, there a reason you’re comparing Rome to present day America specifically?
*gesticulates wildly upwards* because of everything?
Aww. Almost a fitting username.
