Rome Wants Elbow Room

Welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything along the way. I’m Emily Maxson here with Greg Uttinger and Rachel Voytek, and we are continuing our march through ancient Rome, as it were. We left off at the end of the Punic Wars last time.

We saw that after the Punic Wars, Rome…the phrase ‘elbow room’ seems appropriate here. For those who know the history of World War II, that means something.

I’m thinking of that kids’ song, something about needing a little elbow room. The kids at Cornerstone did it at one point.

That was about Manifest Destiny.

Yes, continentalism and all that. That was from what I knew as Schoolhouse Rock.

Rome was just this big hulking thing, and nations next door had a habit of looking at them askance and saying, “We’re sure you’re up to no good. We must attack you now,” and Rome would say, “Oh no, please don’t,” and then would respond. “We’re not interfering. We’re just taking over,” to borrow a line from Star Trek, and again would continue to cut its handcrafted deals with each new nation. And so it moved into Macedonia and the areas around Greece and eventually into Asia Minor, so that’s kind of where we are in this time.

The Bible does foretell the coming of Rome but not by that name, since by the time the Old Testament closes Rome is still barely a thing. There’s Italy but, really, no. So it has to speak indirectly, but the indirect prophecies go all the way back to the book of Numbers, the time of Moses and the prophecy of Balaam.

Balaam, having failed to curse Israel but rather having blessed them, now turns to his host Balak and says, “Let me tell you what God’s people will do to you in the latter days.” Latter days is the future but specifically the Messianic age that’s coming, and he says this along the way –

I shall see him, but not now: I shall behold him, but not nigh: there shall come a Star out of Jacob, and a Scepter shall rise out of Israel and shall smite the corners of Moab and destroy all the children of Sheth. And Edom shall be a possession, Seir also shall be a possession for his enemies; and Israel shall do valiantly. Out of Jacob shall come he that shall have dominion and shall destroy him that remaineth of the city.

And when he looked on Amalek he took up his parable and said, Amalek was the first of the nations; but his latter end shall be that he perish forever. And he looked on the Kenites and took up his parable and said, Strong is thy dwelling place, and thou puttest thy nest in a rock. Nevertheless the Kenite shall be wasted, until Asshur [Assyria]. And he took up his parable and said, Alas, who shall live when God doeth this! And ships shall come from the coast of Chittim [Cyprus] and shall afflict Asshur [Assyria] and shall afflict Eber [God’s people], and he also shall perish forever.

Assyria would be the land between the two rivers, so Assyria and Babylon, so we’re looking forward to that. That area is going to hold predominance until the ships come from Chittim. These ships are the Roman ships that were stationed there, and there’s another reference to them much, much later, as we come to the end of the Old Testament.

Daniel is being told the future of the world and when he comes to talk about Antiochus Epiphanes, the Syrian king who defiles the temple and sets up the abomination that makes desolate, it says this –

At the time appointed he shall return [this is Antiochus Epiphanes] and come toward the south [that is, invade Egypt]; but it shall not be as the former or as the latter. [He’s tried this before and he’s going to try it again.]

For the ships of Chittim shall come against him: therefore he shall be grieved, and return, and have indignation against the holy covenant: so shall he do; he shall even return, and have intelligence with them that forsake the holy covenant. And arms shall stand on his part, and they shall pollute the sanctuary of strength, and shall take away the daily sacrifice, and they shall place the abomination that maketh desolate.

But we’re told that there will be some resistance, which is the Maccabean revolt. So here the same phrase – the revealing angel is quoting from Balaam’s prophecy, because the words are the same, because even in Daniel’s time Rome wasn’t really a thing yet. Rome existed as a city but it wasn’t making itself felt, and wouldn’t really until this thing that’s described.

Roman expansion ends up placing ships in Cyprus, but still no one’s paying that much attention because the Hellenistic kingdoms are fighting amongst themselves, and particularly Syria, under the Seleucid kings, all of whom mostly were named Antiochus of some number, and the Egyptians kings, all of whom were named Ptolemy of some number – and Israel is right between these two kingdoms. Sometimes they get along but mostly they’re fighting, and Israel is kind of the football that’s being tossed back and forth between them, so this is important to God’s people.

At that point Rome was not important to them. India and even Greece, these things were not important. What was important was armies that might be marching through their cities any day now, so that’s where Daniel’s prophecies concentrate. The king of the north (Syria, the Seleucids), the king of the south (the Ptolemies), Egypt – so that’s where this prophecy is centering.

We’re told that in the days of Antiochus Epiphanes – and this puts us at about 168 BC, just to give us some kind of time anchor – Rome was going to interfere with Syria, as Syria is trying to interfere with Egypt. From secular history we have a pretty good idea of what’s going on. The Pharaoh of Egypt has died, and Antiochus, who’s always had his eye there, as the Seleucid kings generally did – there’s Egypt, it’s the plum to be picked – the king is dead, long live the little infant king. What if Antiochus goes down there and plays uncle and godfather and says, “I’ll help the little guy. I’m sure he’ll appreciate it,” and he takes his army to go down there.

What he didn’t quite get was that the previous Pharaoh had bequeathed oversight of his kingdom to this little city on the far end of the Mediterranean called Rome. So as Antiochus moves down with his army, the Roman ambassador, with his navy and army, shows up and confronts Antiochus in the desert and tells him, “Not yours. Go home.”

“But no! But this…but that!”

Finally the Roman ambassador finds a stick and draws a circle around Antiochus and says, “Do not get out of that circle until you’re ready to go home, or you’re going to talk to my army.” Antiochus fusses and fumes and goes home.

That initiates, as the prophecy said, his war against the Jewish people. He’s just frustrated and he’s taking it out on somebody. He’s been trying to bring these Jews along and make them good Greeks, but they’re being slow and stubborn, so he says, “Okay, enough is enough” and says, “Let’s make circumcision and Sabbath-keeping a capital crime. Let’s destroy the copies of scripture. Let’s defile the temple and set up a temple to Zeus,” and that provokes the Maccabean revolt, which ultimately is successful. We’ve talked about that so we won’t belabor it.

What it does do is, after some fighting back and forth, it leaves the Hasmoneans – the Jewish family that normally we call Maccabeans, but that wasn’t their real name; they were Hasmoneans – it leaves them in control, and so as priests and kings of this new state of Israel they continue to reign, establish their borders, and make things good, until two brothers come along who can’t decide who should be in charge.

That’s where we’ll end up eventually because when they can’t figure it out, rather than risk civil war, they turn to this Roman general who’s nearby and say, “Hey, you’re a great general and you’re wise and you have no vested interest in this. Come and tell us who should be king and priest of the city.” And Pompey the Great says, “Sure, no problem,” which explains why we come to the New Testament and Rome is in charge of Israel, but we’ll come back to that.

It reminds me of some brothers who were arguing and they were like, “Jesus, come sort this out,” and he’s like, “Who made me a judge over you?” God Incarnate was like, “Nope, work it out.”

“You figure that out on your own, but beware of covetousness,” and everybody in that particular historical event could use that.

So where we are then is we are coming to the end, and it’s slower. We’re at 168-ish BC, so we’ve got about 90-110 years before the republic really, really stops being a republic. It will carry that name a little bit longer through the career of Julius Caesar to the coming of Augustus. Names were important. Appearance was important.

If you’re familiar with Shakespeare’s play Julius Caesar, we’re told that Caesar was repeatedly offered the crown and repeatedly turned it down. His thinking was simple. “Why? I’ve got everything I need. Why provoke jealousy and resentment by appearing a revolutionary? I will be the friend of the republic rather than the king of a new empire, because it’s not going to change one thing except maybe keep me alive a little bit longer.”

So that’s where we’re going and there’s two things we need to talk about. First, the reasons for the decline, and second, the attempted solution provided by a number of would-be reformers, or that’s what they called themselves, up through and including Julius Caesar, and that reform was socialism.

First, the reasons for decline. We’ve talked before about God’s common grace, which is to say that he is good to all sorts of people. He’s good to all of mankind. The sun shines, the rain comes, but particularly at some times, some people just are outwardly a bit more moral than other people, and usually it’s because of some overflow of special revelation. They hear the word of God. They hear the gospel. They hear about the God of Israel. They hear about Jesus, and something begins to happen.

We don’t know the history of Rome well enough. The ancient world is still largely a closed book for the simple reason that people who did run into the God of Israel rarely embraced him publicly. Even if they cribbed some ideas from the Old Testament, they never published footnotes and said, “By the way, see Moses, the Torah, published 1445 BC by Jerusalem Publishing.” They didn’t do that, so it’s hard to know when, for instance in this case, biblical thinking actually influenced Rome.

It seems to have, because we’ve looked at the 12 tables and say that some of the Roman laws are pretty much copied directly from the laws of Moses. Of course, secular historians will say, “No, no, it’s the other way around because Moses’ books really weren’t written until after the time of Ezra and…”

No, we’re not going there. The Bible was written when it says it was, so it’s the original and other people copied it, as people continue to copy it without credit and invent entire religions like Islam or Mormonism.

Whatever the source was, we are now very far removed from it, and the Roman philosophers – there weren’t many because they didn’t stress philosophy…

Philosophy is not what the Romans are known for or disposed toward.

It’s more people like Cicero who were actually legal philosophers, I suppose – lawyers and historians and some writers and such.

There’s a theory that there’s a linguistic element to that difference, because Latin of course does not have a definite article. They don’t have the word ‘the.’ Greek does, so they can talk about ‘the good.’ It’s a theory.

You’re right. Latin doesn’t have a definite article in that sense. It has things that can substitute but it wouldn’t come across like that. It would sound rather awkward.

So we have these people like Cicero and others who are looking back to the good old days when we had family values and kids obeyed their parents and the marriages were intact. Oh, that we could only go back to that. On through Julius Caesar and on into Augustus there’s a constant harping back to the old days and the old values and the need to strengthen our families and our marriages and all of that, but no basis beyond the world would be better if we did, and that’s not enough to compel moral change. So what they end up doing is a lot of quick-fix socialist things that looked good on paper but just made things a whole lot worse.

So do we see that some of that decline with the family is because of the way that Rome spread out, where initially it had some more family orientation as a core glue that held it together, but as they expanded they lost that? Is there any clear reason why that started declining at the time?

I have not heard anyone discuss it as such, but I think you’re onto something. There’s a couple obvious things that would suggest it. First, as Rome expanded, its soldiers, who were Roman citizens – that is, they actually came from the city of Rome initially – were taken further and further afield for longer and longer times. They weren’t home to be fathers and to be husbands.

They were removed from their families.

And they weren’t being farmers and working at home anymore. Their job was somewhere else so they didn’t have a sense of the land mattering in the same way?

That’s where that goes, yes. What also happens as the empire expands – well, we’re getting an empire. Call it a republic if you will, but it now is embracing a good part of the Mediterranean world with all of the bureaucracy and the loss of “we are Romans together” and more of, “I wasn’t even born in Rome. I was born in Macedonia, or I’m a slave from Carthage.” We’re losing that, and as a result we’re losing our focus on being Romans who are farmers and soldiers living and dying for Rome. Our future is out there someplace. When you get that kind of thing you begin to play the political games. “How do I succeed?”

It used to be you plant a better crop this year. You sweat a little more. You get your sons out there to help you. You have more sons so they can be out there to help you. Now it’s who do you know? Who can you bribe? Who can you marry to advance your career?

By the time we’re through with this, more and more marriage and divorce are becoming political tools that allow people to advance. There’s no concept of love, romance, commitment, we’re in this together forever and for the sake of Rome. It’s what can I get out of this and who can I use? In those such things, women feel left behind. They dabble in affairs. Children are a luxury that no one really cares about anymore. The whole thing is beginning to fall apart.

Another thing that contributes to all of this is Rome had conquered Greece, but the Romans were not deep thinkers. They didn’t trust philosophy. Durant in his book says that they distrusted philosophy as a devilish dissolver of doctrines or something.

I think on two occasions the Roman Senate banned all Greek philosophers and kicked them out of Rome. “We will have no philosophers here,” as some nations would later ban lawyers. It was just like, “These people are troublemakers,” but they kept coming back. And the Roman people, not being great literary artists or playwrights, borrowed Greek stuff, and sometimes they just borrowed it and translated it because Romans didn’t generally speak Greek at this point.

The few Roman playwrights who came along looking for sources of inspiration would turn to the Greeks, so Roman literature and even Roman mythology and plays and all of that begins to take on a Greek cast, but this is Greek in its decline. This is the Hellenistic age. They’re taking Greece as it’s falling apart and dissolving and getting lost in a sea of despair, and they’re enshrining that as the stuff that’s influencing them.

Here's a quote from my syllabus: “Greek literature questioned the reality of the gods and reduced them to comic figures. On the other hand, it introduced larger than life heroes who followed their own will and vision rather than the traditions of the past. Greek politics modeled autocracy and tyranny as effective and profitable means of government, and Greek philosophy taught the Romans individualism and skepticism.”

Individualism and skepticism – you don’t run a family in terms of that. This is all part of the package.

When is Marcus Aurelius? Because he comes to be associated with stoicism.

Stoicism lingered in Rome. He’s one of the later Roman emperors and a persecutor of Christians. I forget which number persecution he is, but we’ll get to him eventually.

I believe he was in charge from about 160 AD to 180 AD roughly. He’s considered the end of the Pax Romana.

But stoicism lingered. We’ll probably get to talking about stoicism, epicureanism, cynicism, and skepticism probably next time or the time after, depending how long these things take us, because it is worth stopping and looking at the philosophies that dominated the world when Jesus came. They were birthed in the early Hellenistic age, but they survived into the Roman empire, because again Rome was not terribly creative.

You read quotes from Marcus Aurelius and you say, “Wow, that sounds like a great thing you put on a refrigerator magnet, but it really doesn’t help with living.”

I know a young pastor – at least he was a young pastor, I’m not sure what he’s doing now, but I see his posts on LinkedIn now and then, and for a while – and this is a pastor – what he would put up would be quotes from Marcus Aurelius. I’m thinking, “What are you doing? If you’re going to put anything up, how about scripture? Augustine? Calvin? The creeds of the church? The confessions? The catechisms? The Bible? Why in the world are you putting up Marcus Aurelius, who killed your brothers and sisters in Christ?”

“Well, he sounds cool. It goes well on a meme.” Again, because Rome was not terribly creative and this is where we begin to see it.

Again, Durant says the Romans were not even creative enough to develop their own mythology. They basically took Greek mythology, changed the names from the Greek gods to the gods they knew and called it a day. “We now have our own mythology that’s pretty much what the Greeks came up with, because we don’t have time or inclination to invent our own.”

They were a very practical people, to be sure. And without the moral strengths of the earlier age, that practicality did what practicality usually does. “How can I get power? How can I get rich? What are the most effective tools and the fastest way to get there?” That’s what’s bringing us to Julius Caesar and Pompey and Crassus.

But in between there there’s at least one other thing about the decline of the republic, slaves. We’ve talked about slaves before. One thing that happened as the Roman armies were out there conquering, when you conquered a people you didn’t slaughter them all, because why? Most of them were just fighting because they were told to. They weren’t out to get you, unless maybe they were Carthage. And Rome was good at cutting deals anyhow, so you have all these people and what do you do with them? Well, you can just send them home, but you also can enslave them because your wife needs a nanny or a nursemaid, and you need some farmhands and whatever.

So slaves began to fill up the Roman market, and when the Roman soldiers did come home they would find that they’d been away a long time and they probably haven’t paid all their taxes on their lands so their farms may have been sold, or they may not have enough money to revive their farm so they go into debt, or they find that they’re in competition with large plantation-like things staffed by slaves from their own conquests. Sometimes it was within Rome or Italy, sometimes in Sicily and other places.

So slavery gutted the market for labor and people were left with not much. A lot of people cashed in their farms and where do you go? You don’t roam the countryside homeless, since it’s not America in the 21st century yet. You go to the cities and look for something. The cities, and Rome particularly, are getting a little nervous because all these people are here. Some have money, some don’t. What are we going to do with that.

That leads us into the next section in the history of the republic in its final decline. The government comes up with a brilliant solution, one word, socialism. One of the Roman writers summed it up as “bread and circus games.”

“Let’s take tax monies and use it to buy food for all of these people in Rome who don’t have jobs, don’t have land, don’t have a future, but they’re still going to be restless so let’s give them something to do, something to occupy their energies and to entertain them.

Circus, of course, was among others the Coliseum. It’s called a circus not because there were clowns, fortunately because that would make it worse.

They were terrifying enough.

I suddenly had an image of a gladiator clown, especially terrifying.

Yes, my wife would agree. Circus is a circle surrounded by walls and seats. They threw people in there and let them fight, either with each other or with wild animals. Eventually it became so sophisticated that the coliseum could actually be flooded enough to provide a little mini-lake, and little Roman ships would go out on this little lake and fight each other, and then the crews would fight each other.

I would watch that.

So this is what’s going on, and yes, it’s bloody entertainment because that’s more and more where the appeal is – but socialism.

One of the things is, and I’ve hinted at this, people got into debt a lot. This had always been a problem, back to the beginning when the plebian and patrician classes were kind of identifying themselves. The plebians were constantly borrowing money because they never had enough. They were poor and the patricians more or less controlled the state monies and such. Again and again the plebians would say, “We have no money to pay our debts. This is unfair. The government needs to fix this.”

This is an ongoing thing in all of Rome’s conquests, which only makes it worse because the soldiers come home and have nothing really. Whatever spoils they got are not enough to turn things around, and they go into debt. Everybody’s going into debt, and the people they’re borrowing from are the upper patrician classes who do somehow seem to have lots of money. Then they turn around and insist that their loans be paid.

Of course we’re talking loans with interest. These are not the kind of charity loans that the Mosaic law prescribed. These are business loans. You’re making money off your brothers, your citizen farmers who’ve gone to war, then they come back and they’re in debt and they can’t get out of debt, so what do you do? You turn to the government and ask the government to do something about it. So we get a series of would-be reformers who come up with ideas like this.

It’s a pattern in ancient history that anytime someone is referred to historically as a reformer, and they’re not talking about the Protestant reformation, it’s socialism. Let me just create that shortcut in your brain for you.

Thank you. That pretty much just summed up what I was going to do, but I think you just did it. Having said that, I was going through LinkedIn or something and I saw a blast from the past. “Maybe you all remember this, but I’m posting it anyway,” one of those things. It was how you classify various economic/political systems in terms of cows.

Oh yes, a classic.

I’ve not seen that.

Oh my goodness, it is a classic of the internet.

I’ve seen it before, but I’ve always had my copy sent to me by red-blooded capitalists so they’d probably been doctored a little bit, but I looked at some them. I think it was “The Nazis will kill you and take your cows,” and I don’t remember everything. They’ve got the capitalists right. “You sell one cow, buy a bull, and start producing.” But when it came to socialism it was, “You have two cows. You share with your neighbor.”

Incorrect.

In what universe and timeline do you live that you would even for a moment think that?

No, it’s that you have two cows and the government takes one of your cows and gives it to your neighbor.

Takes both your cows, probably.

Or it leaves you half a cow, which as we know is useless, because now all you can do is eat it.

It is not half the value of a living cow.

And it gives the other half to some people so they can have lunch, and it keeps the remaining one to pay its officials.

There’s a little ‘60s classic that is dear to the heart of conspiracy theorists. It’s by Gary Allen and it’s called None Dare Call It Conspiracy. I recommend it with more than a grain of salt because his facts are right but his interpretation – he’s a little paranoid and attributes far too much power to evil. But he’s quoting from well-documented sources in most cases. He’s just not necessarily taking into account things like the sovereignty of God and the power of the gospel.

Lacks a little perspective?

Yes. In one of his early chapters, maybe the first one, he confronts the idea of socialism. He says, “If you ask the average American, will the United States ever be Marxist?” you’ll get, “No. I mean I can see the appeal, but no, it’s too extreme. America would never go that way. It’s not an American thing.”

What if you asked them, “Will America ever turn towards socialism?” “Well, you know, it’s not maybe the best system but it’s kind of the way people are leaning and I can see America adopting socialism because it takes care of the poor and things like that, so yeah, within a generation or so I can see America embracing socialism.”

He said, “Do you understand…”

For those of you who do not know, as Karl Marx laid out his vision for historical dialectical transformation, the next step from capitalism is not communism, it’s socialism. We go from a capitalist society to a socialist society.

He described this as the dictatorship of the proletariat because the proletariat or working class is so oppressed by its capitalist overlords, they will one day rise up and overthrow them and probably kill them all, and they will set up a dictatorship in the name of the people for the sake of the people that will compel everyone to share equally, be nice, and not run with scissors.

Yes, it’s a dictatorship, and yes, people are going to be forced to share, and yes, that does mean people are going to take your stuff away, but that’s okay because all it is is a training ground, because the next step somehow magically – the dialectical process stops and this dictatorship of the proletariat eventually – he does not say how long this takes – will wither away.

All of these in power who’ve had so much power will just one day realize, “I’m not needed anymore. People have learned to share. People now have good hearts. People are no longer entranced with material possessions. My work here is done! I will now go home and be a farmer in the morning, a doctor in the evening, and a poet by night because everybody can do anything they want in this wonderful world where we share. We take from everybody according to his ability and give to everybody according to his need, and Paradise and utopia will reign until the moon falls and the sun grows cold.”

The number of problems with this is astronomical and contrary to everything the Bible tells us about human nature, God’s sovereignty and nature and such.

And everything observable in history, just as the cherry on top.

Yes. I think Chesterton said that the one doctrine in scripture that does have empirical evidence is total depravity. He was onto something there.

Perhaps the most abundant empirical evidence.

First of all, if the world is headed toward Marxism, socialism according to Marx is the next place. It’s not where you simply share your cow. As we said, the government comes and takes your cow and dices and slices it up and you wait in line to get your share of what used to be your cow. You trust the government to somewhere find a bull and mate some cows so there actually are more in the future, but why is it that the party bosses always have steak and I always end up with a few pieces of fat and gristle? That has historically been what has happened.

The idea that these people being in power – first, that they do it because they love us? No. And that someday they will simply surrender this power because we have been forced to give up things for so long that we no longer want them? No.

You can make an argument that the Soviet Union fell because of rock music and blue jeans. The thing the party bosses feared was their people seeing the outside world, seeing the stuff that we had and wanting it. Although they proclaimed that they had created paradise, they still were very afraid that their people, if they saw the wealth of the west, would become so enamored of it that they would cause them a lot of trouble. So they spent a lot of time shutting all gates of information, we’ve talked about this a little bit before, so that people would not know that. And yet somehow blue jeans and Volkswagens and rock music managed to always get across the border to Russian young people.

In fact, there was one young man who financed his journey across the Communist bloc nations by selling old blue jeans. He got in his Volkswagen and drove, and every time he ran out of money he just called some young people and said, “Hey, I’ve got blue jeans. Anyone want to buy them?” and everyone would just give him tons of money, because being like the west was still cool.

The idea that we’re going to give this up and not want stuff – there’s nothing in human nature, in our track record, or in scripture that suggests this would ever happen. People are greedy, covetous, and we want what other cool people have. And unfortunately, cool is defined by “they have stuff we don’t have.”

Therefore, every time this is attempted you always see, as you were saying, censorship. I was thinking of the more modern example in Communist China, where they’re very restrictive in terms of internet and what sites you can find and what you can read. They monitor what people say and they don’t just take it down or cancel people, like they would do here. They actively pursue them, imprison them, kill them, and those sorts of things because if you’re going to make people think you’ve given them a good thing, you have to shut out all the alternatives so they don’t realize, “Oh wait, this is supposed to be paradise on earth and it’s actually a living hell.”

Can I share my favorite example of Chinese censorship?

Go for it.

Xi Jinping resented a comparison between himself and Disney’s Winnie the Pooh at one point, so now Winnie the Pooh is not acceptable in China and it is a sign of being part of the resistance, the underground. It’s a rebellious thing to do to post Winnie the Pooh because we all know it’s Xi Jinping.

Which is hilarious because in looking for baby stuff, Winnie the Pooh is everywhere. I feel like Americans are inadvertently constantly mocking him, just with our babies.

If I put Winnie the Pooh merch on my child, you can be sure that it is out of malice toward Xi Jinping.

Anyway, we get a number of Roman reformers. We have Tiberius Gracchus, who’s the grandson of Scipio, who we’ve seen before. He comes up with some ideas, including proposing a return to older laws that granted each occupant of land only 300 acres, plus 150 acres per child, so now we’re telling you how much land you can have. We’re generous enough to factor in the fact that you may have some boy children and we’ll let you have a little bit for them, but that’s it.

It would encourage having more children if you get 150 acres per child.

This is true. Then the rest of the land is to be divided up and given to the poor people of Rome. Let’s just hand the homeless some land, because of course they’ll know what to do with it.

His brother is named Gaius Gracchus and follows him and he continues his brother’s policies, establishes new trading colonies, subsidizes wheat for the poor, and extends citizenship to more people within Italy, particularly the Latins. However, that doesn’t go over so well and that costs him the support of the Romans, because which ethnic group are you going to favor here to stay in power? Sometimes the call is not what you might think it would be.

Once these two brothers are out of the way we have two other gentleman, Gaius Marius and Lucius Cornelius Sulla, and they fight back and forth for who should be in charge and what reforms they’re going to impose, and it doesn’t work well. The reforms, insofar as they have any, again are fundamentally socialist.

We’re getting really close to Julius Caesar now, and the one thing that most people have heard of is Spartacus, a slave who’s escaped from the gladiatorial games and leads a revolution of 120,000 slaves and it fails. And yet Spartacus’s name comes down through history, mostly due to a movie starring Kirk Douglas called Spartacus, but that’s the one thing that people might know. I will not actually recommend it. I’ve seen a good deal of it and I don’t really like Kirk Douglas as an actor.

It does show some of the evils of slavery, not enough of them but enough to say, “Eww.” And it ends with Spartacus on a cross, with all of his followers lining the Appian Way, dying as failures. It’s not a happy movie.

The two men who crush that revolt – and this transitions us to Julius Caesar and will probably be a good place to stop – were named Crassus and Pompey. These were two patricians who were able to summon political support and eventually military support to step in and be the saviors of Rome at this key moment. And having gained popularity by putting down Spartacus’s slave revolt, they were able to turn around to the Senate and say, “So we’re in charge now, right?” “Uh, yeah, I guess. Yes sir.” So Pompey and Crassus become consuls and set about the work of doing good things for Rome.

Pompey starts suppressing piracy throughout the Mediterranean, and we’ll pick up some of the other things. Crassus had against him that he’d never really won a real military conflict, so eventually he’s going to go off to the Parthians and say, “I’m going to go out there and conquer these people and make myself a name.” That doesn’t work.

In the meantime, this young man named Julius Caesar comes along and worms his way into this fellowship of evil, or liberation, or reform – perspective matters here. Next time we’ll probably pick up with this so-called First Triumvirate – tri (3) vira (men) – the rule of three men. If you know that there’s a First Triumvirate you can guess there’s a second one, and that’s where we’re going.

That reminds me of the joke of time travelers being sent back. Say they’ve been sent back to Egypt in the time of the exodus and they say, “Oh, you’ve just had the first of your 10 plagues,” and everybody goes, “The first of what?” So the First Triumvirate is next time.

Shall we have some recommendations to wrap up? I guess I’ll go first. We already mentioned very briefly in passing Shakespeare’s plays Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra. They are not history per se. They are historical plays, but if you read them or watch them – Shakespeare is not meant to be read, it’s meant to be observed – but if you watch them and follow the story, it’s a whole lot better than not knowing anything about these stories.

Again, it’s Shakespeare, this 17th century English playwright. It’s not actually Julius Caesar saying the words. We don’t have the word for word, but it sounds really cool and you’ll remember the story, which is half the battle for learning history, so I recommend Shakespeare.

I’m going to go very uncultured compared to that and recommend a phone app called Seterra. It’s an app where you can practice your geography. It has lots of map quizzes and challenges and you can choose what part of the world you want to practice. I first came across it when I was teaching geography, but it’s just a fun way if you’re sitting at a doctor’s office for 5 minutes to do some review on maps, or maybe learn maps for the first time.

Following kind of up on that, as someone who’s getting older and tries to keep stimulating his rational processes – dementia is scary – there are three games online that I use, and you might find them worth your time.

The first one is called Worldle, which originally was French, and still is actually, but you can find the button to switch it into English. It will show you a map of some country in outline, and then gives you six chances to figure out what it is. Each time that you miss it tells you which direction you need to go from where you picked, and how far you need to go, so you do eventually begin to get a sense of, “Oh, it says I’m 500 miles away from what it actually picked, so I’m real close. It’s probably the nation next door.” When it says 10,000 miles, okay, I’m on the wrong side of the planet.

Which is funny as you start to recognize the coastal patterns. “Oh, different regions of the world have some identifiable differences here.”

I’ve been doing it probably a year now, and I’m beginning to get to the point where I have my favorite countries to start with. I start with Albania or Afghanistan or Ivory Coast, which is a good one for Africa, but lately they’ve been throwing South America at me. There are countries in South America? When did that happen?

About 1800.

And who named them? Some of them have the same name or they sound a lot alike. Anyhow, it can help you begin to recognize boundaries. The funny thing for me was the time they showed me Canada and I didn’t recognize it because Canada should be big and they shrunk it down to the size of what England might look like. I was thinking, “I don’t know any small country that looks like that,” and then oops.

But when you see a boot show up, okay, that’s Italy. Some things you recognize, but all of the landlocked countries in Africa and in Eastern Europe down into Asia, and yes, some Latin American countries – it becomes for me more like, “Okay, what’s next” or I’ll guess one and see how close I am. If nothing else, you end up looking at maps and saying, “Oh, I didn’t know that was there,” so that’s a good thing.

Another one that everyone probably already knows is Wordle. The other one is Connections and I think I may have recommended that before. They give you a bunch of words and you’re supposed to explain to yourself which words are connected with which words, and for what reason.

It may be that they all apply to the same field of human endeavor. “These are all martinis. These are all sports terms. These are all cartoon characters,” or “If you drop the last letter these would all be…” or “If you add a y to all of these they would all be…” or “These are all words that sound like but aren’t…”

You have to be able to look all kinds of directions, and one hopes that it jars your thinking ability and your perception of life and that you begin to keep your mind working. So go play worthwhile games on the internet, if you’re going to play any at all.

I like Sudoku puzzles. At one point I was staying up far too late doing Sudoku puzzles, and I scrolled through a social media platform just as a break and it said, “Girl, stop playing sudoku and go to bed.” It was like, “Thank you, Lord. I didn’t know I was needing a sign but there it is.”

This was the sign from God you were looking for.

Thank you both so much for this conversation. It’s been a delight. Thanks also to David, our producer and my lawfully-wedded husband. A big thank you to our financial supporters who keep the show rolling. We really appreciate you.

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