From Republic to Oligarchy to Empire

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 the decline and fall of the Roman republic. We’ve not reached the empire, but we’ve passed the founding of Rome.

We’ve gone from kingdom to republic to oligarchy, still pretending to be a republic, to the beginnings of an empire pretending to be an oligarchy pretending to be a republic.

That’s pretty layered. I don’t know if I can track with this.

We left off last time with Pompey and Crassus. They forced the Senate to make them consuls. How did they do that? Should I ask?

They had just put down Spartacus’s slave revolt. They had crucified how many slaves was it, 6,000, along the Appian Way from Capua to Rome, and they had an army.

It’s funny how senators will change their minds and their policies when a general with an army is nearby, especially when that general has just been very successful and is loved by the people for being successful. Force is not so much putting a sword to the throat as it is saying, “You know who we are. You know what we’ve done. You know our army. Let’s talk about the political realities here. Here’s what we want.”

“Yes, sir. Whatever you say, sir. We couldn’t do this without you, sir.”

So from here on out these two men begin to wheel and deal. Pompey gets the job of suppressing piracy through the Mediterranean, which he does quite admirably as it turns out. He also pursues battles in Asia Minor (Turkey) and on into Syria, which is north of Israel, and then down toward Palestine. Along the way he founds 39 cities, so we’ve got a guy here who is a brilliant successful general. He puts down slaves, he builds cities, he conquers our enemies, he makes the world safe from pirates – what a guy!

It's about this point in Israel, which was a thing now – the Maccabean revolt having been successful – that two of the brothers from the Hasmonean family have a quarrel over who should be the next priest/king, and rather than let everything descend into total civil war, someone has the bright idea, “I know, let’s ask General Pompey. He’s next door conquering people.” You know, they got what they deserved on this one. So Pompey agrees to come in and sort things out and decide who should have lawful succession. He looks to the weaker brother and says, “Well, it’s obviously you” – the weaker brother, an easy prey. The other brother runs off and tries to stage a coup and a comeback, and that doesn’t work.

Eventually Judea/Israel falls under control of Rome, which is why when we open the New Testament suddenly this guy named Caesar Augustus is on the throne and Rome is everyplace. The Jewish state just sort of gave up its freedom by asking the beast to come in and solve the problems.

While this is going on there is one man we should mention in passing, simply because of his legal and philosophical importance. Literary importance is something else and I’m not qualified to speak about Roman literature. The man is Cicero. He is considered, by those who know such things, the greatest orator of all time, certainly the greatest orator of the Roman age. He not only recorded his own orations, but he wrote books on how to speak good and all that stuff.

He was fiercely loyal to the republic and managed to uncover conspiracies against the city, the most famous being the conspiracy of Catiline, who under the pretense of abolishing debts, which in itself was not really a great thing to be pretending or doing, he was trying to overthrow the existing government, put his own in place, and Cicero was able to expose him. So for the moment Cicero is riding high. He’s this great orator. He’s the son of the republic. He’s our hero in our hour of need and he doesn’t even want to rule or do anything.

In passing though, amongst his many orations he writes a great deal about law because in those days orators were generally lawyers. I mean why do you learn to speak well? So that you can convince government agencies or senates or whatever to do the thing that you want them to do. This is where Socrates got his start and the Sophists in Greece and continues to be a thing. Augustine becomes an orator so he can be a lawyer so he can convince governments to do things.

Along the way he writes a treatise – a number of them actually – but this from one. He says, “True law is right reason in agreement with Nature; it is of universal application, unchanging and everlasting.” So man applies his disciplined reason, his rationale governed by the laws of logic, to the natural world as it appears to him, and out of that he deduces the moral law that should govern people, states, nations, whatever. There is no divine revelation here. The gods do not speak. There are no oracles from beyond. There is man facing the universe with his reason, and from it deducing a law that is universal.

The Stoics had already wandered over this way, and we’ll talk about them probably next time, this idea that there is a law inherent in nature that reason can find. We have words for this. It’s called natural law theory, and Cicero was key in honing it, fashioning it, passing it on, and making it look pretty cool.

He writes, “The state then is the incarnation of reason and of law and it ought to be the chief end of all men” – hear that phrase? the chief end of man – “…it ought to be the chief end of all men to make the interest of each individual and of the whole body politic identical.”

So harmonize the one and the many.

Exactly, you’ve got it. That’s exactly what he’s saying – not by force but by a rational perception of the way the universe actually works. The universe is designed to be that. If only we could see it, and if we keep disciplining our minds to think it through in light of what we see in the natural order, we’ll come up with this universal law that will bind everyone, and everyone will be happy. Wouldn’t that be great?

It’s so funny because, yes, the world does work that way, where you have to try to figure out the one and the many. There’s a reason the universe works this way.

I’m sure he believed there was a reason it worked that way, it just had nothing to do with the triune God.

We finally find someone who admits to knowing Jewish friends, knowing the Torah, having read it and having rejected it. “Oh, that’s fascinating. That gives me an idea or two, but overall no. Transcendent God and creation? No, we’re going my way. You’re a nice guy but that’s a little too much, isn’t it.”

I’ll add one more thing about Cicero, a little fun fact. The first published work of John Calvin was a commentary on Cicero after he was either finishing or had finished law school, so he also was connecting with this. As that was being published, we don’t know exactly when, but John Calvin was converted and so the next thing he wrote after commenting on Cicero was his first version of the Institutes. I think they follow three or four years apart. It's interesting to see before his conversion this is what appealed to John Calvin, and then afterward you see him move to a very rigorous and well thought-out explanation of the faith instead.

His epistemology shifts radically. Open the first chapter of the Institutes and start reading, but when he gets to the doctrine of the state he’s a little vague-ish. You can still see a few echoes. Some of them are almost ironic. When Calvin argues that the state should enforce both tables of the Mosaic law – how many Calvinists want to do that today – part of his argument is, “Even the pagans know that you should enforce laws that defend the sanctity of the gods. Are we more profane than they are?” That’s kind of a good argument but kind of not. It just depends on how serious you were and what you meant by that.

Yes, what does enforcement mean?

With civil punishments. Calvin’s commentaries on Deuteronomy and some of his more mature thought does lean toward a more theocratic approach to civil government, but the Institutes are still kind of vague in the area of, “Well, there’s this common law of nations…” and he goes from there.

Calvin had more pressing concerns. Europe already was the child of the hybridization of Roman law and Christian law under Justinian, so it wasn’t like today in America where we have no concept of right and wrong. Europe pretty much shared a concept. It was easy to say, “This is the common law of nations. Every nation I go to believes this.”

Because they were all western Christian nations.

Exactly, and thus Calvin had better things to do than worry about the fine points of law and such. His introduction to foundations, to epistemology, to how do we know that we know are incredible. And that he should go from trusting Cicero about such things to trusting God as the starting point of all things is a testimony to God’s incredible grace unto man. So that’s Cicero, for those of you who have never met him.

Taylor Caldwell was a Roman Catholic author back in the ‘50s and ‘60s and she wrote a number of semi-religious barely historical novels, but novels set in the context of more or less historical characters. I believe her book on Cicero was called Pillar of Iron. She wrote one about Luke, Dear Glorious Physician and some others you would recognize if I could come up with them right now. So if you’re interested in Cicero that might be a way to go. More probably pick up a book written by Cicero and start reading and you’ll get some useful information.

While this is going on, a young man from a well-off somewhat powerful but not supremely powerful household pushes himself forward. His short name is Gaius Julius Caesar. They all had more names. He’s young, he’s brash, he’s bold, he’s intelligent, he’s charismatic, he’s unclear about his sexual preferences, he can write well, and he manages to worm his way into the ground on which Crassus and Pompey stand.

A word about Crassus. Crassus is rich, the richest man in Rome I believe is his title. He’s not well-respected, he’s not charismatic, and no one likes him a whole lot, so really early on the idea is that Pompey is going to clean up the seas and go on being the great general he is. They have some plans for Julius Caesar.

Crassus says, “I know what I need to do. I need to go to the far corners of the empire, those nasty Parthians over there in the northeast who are constantly at our heels and on our borders. I’m going to go there and I’m going to make my name as a great general, because I know I can do that.” That doesn’t go well at all, and we’ll come back to that. So that’s going on.

Caesar has sort of a similar perspective on things. He has all the things I said but he doesn’t have much of a reputation. He doesn’t have much personal wealth and he doesn’t have an army. He does not have a track record of winning wars and he’s younger than the other two. He agrees with the other guys, and they don’t completely trust him, so putting him far afield seems safe – little did they know. And from his point of view, “Yeah, let me go conquer some nations and I’ll get a name, a reputation, money, power, and loyal followers,” so they assign him to Gaul. Gaul is what we call France. There are Celtic peoples there and Gallic peoples, some on this side of the Alps, some on the other side – Cisalpine, Transalpine – so Caesar arranges for an army and goes off and starts conquering.

There was a time when probably anybody who was educated in the west could tell you the history of the Gallic Wars. I’m not. I don’t care and I don’t know the details, which betrays my horrible ignorance compared to other generations. There was a time at least when all high school students in America who were expected to excel at all got to reading Caesar.

Did either of you ever act in Our Town?

No.

No.

Thornton Wilder has the girl Emily coming home from high school complaining about having to read Caesar. “That Caesar is awful hard. I don’t know why we have to learn a thing like that.” That was the ultimate test of your education – could you actually read Caesar in the original Latin – but every student who at least tried knew the first line.

“All Gaul is divided into three parts.”

“Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres.” They knew that, didn’t know anything else, neither do I, don’t care. Historically I’m sure it’s significant, and if you’re French it matters a lot, I should think, but for us maybe not so much except for this. The commentaries on the history of the Gallic Wars were a collected batch of the letters that Julius Caesar wrote back to Rome as he pursued his conquering.

Why do we care that all Gaul is divided into three parts? Because he’s going to go to each part and try to conquer it, so basically he’s being a foreign war correspondent, as well as the general who carries on the battles. He wants to make sure he gets good press, that he’s the hero of every story, and that no one suspects him of cowardice or failure or incompetence, so he’s sending these letters home and stirring the hearts and imaginations of the Roman people. He’s making himself a hero while he continues to conquer.

His main failure is he tried to conquer Britain twice, and by the way it’s Britain, not England. There is no England. That comes later.

An odd thing – Britain supposedly is named after one of the surviving generals of the Trojan War, a man named Brutus, and we’re going to run into a Brutus or two in this story. In Latin it just means brute. Also in The Rape of Lucretia by Shakespeare he’s telling how the kings got kicked out of Rome, and one of the heroes there is a man named Brutus, which is a nickname because he’s in on the conspiracy and he knows these guys have got to go. Everyone knows he’s a powerful warrior so he has to play stupid, so they call him Brutus, stupid, animal, beast, and he has to play along with that. History is littered with Brutuses.

It's funny that no one names their child that anymore. I think it has more to do with Popeye. Do you remember Popeye the Sailor Man? Did you watch that cartoon?

I do. I don’t remember a Brutus in it, though. Is he the rival?

Yes. In the earlier version he was called Bluto. Does that help? Big guy, big muscles, beard, mustache, the perpetual rival. I remember as a small child a particular episode of Popeye. Popeye for some reason is sent back to school to get his diploma and he keeps failing every grade and they keep sending him back until he gets all the way to kindergarten or first grade.

The teacher asks him, “Mr. Popeye, I have a very simple question for you. Where was Caesar when Brutus killed him?”

“Uh…uh….” and then somebody hands Popeye his spinach and he’s able to charge ahead with the answer. What confused me as a child a little bit was Brutus. “But Brutus is that character who’s not in this one. What’s he got to do with anything?”

So that’s going on and Pompey is getting nervous. Crassus goes over against the Parthians and thinks he’s all that and a bag of a chips. He tells them, “Look, I’ve got this great army and these great plans. You have no chance against me. You just want to surrender. Why don’t you come and talk to us and we will settle this peacefully. Wouldn’t that be peachy keen?”

“Yes, I will come and all will be well and the world will tremble at my grave.”

He comes and they kill him and cut off his head and throw it back at them. It does not go well. He dies and he’s out of the picture. So much for him. So much for the Triumvirate.

Pompey now is getting nervous of Caesar because, unlike Crassus, Caesar is being really successful.

Caesar tried to take Britain twice and it didn’t work. Britain is going to have to wait until another day to be conquered. So having failed that, Caesar decides that maybe going back to Rome isn’t such a bad deal. Meanwhile Pompey is saying, “I don’t trust this guy,” and he goes before the Senate and says, “Caesar is a danger to the Republic. We need to brand him a public enemy and tell him that he needs to yield up his command.”

Caesar hears this and says, “Let’s compromise. That’s a bit extreme. I’m not a bad guy. I mean well.”

The Senate refuses any compromise and they make Pompey the effective dictator of Rome (this sounds like a Greek story) and commission him to destroy Caesar however, so word goes to Caesar, “Come back but leave your army behind.” In another words, walk into the trap, surrender yourself, and once we’ve killed you we’ll talk about whether or not other deals are possible.

Caesar comes as far as the River Rubicon on his way south – the border between Cisalpine and Italy – and he spends a night walking back and forth and thinking really hard. This is the point where Christians would be praying. “Do I go on without my army and try to make peace, try to sweet talk myself out of this? Or do I take my army across the river and they declare me a traitor and civil war starts and then I have to win it?”

He decides to go on. He crosses the Rubicon, from whence in colloquial English the phrase “to cross the Rubicon” means to make an irrevocable decision. He says those immortal words, “The die is cast.”

And that’s what we named our media group after.

The funny thing is, “the die is cast” can mean two different things at least. I remember trying to look this up once. Are you casting a die to print things or are you throwing a random number generator on the ground to see if it’s 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, or 6? I think it’s the latter, from what I can tell. It’s English, it’s just very, very vague. Anyway, it’s a thing that’s passed as an idiom into English to make a final irrevocable decision.

So he crosses the Rubicon, heads for Rome, Pompey flees and goes to find his armies and collect them. Caesar goes to Rome unopposed, assumes control of the city, and then stabilizes his control there. He has control of Sicily and Spain. He meets with Pompey’s armies in Thessaly, and Pompey flees. The empire is large now. Egypt is at its feet, not quite under its control yet, so Egypt is a good place to go. Pompey flees to Egypt.

The Pharoah on the throne once again is a very young man and he has a very pretty sister, or at least a very sexually interesting one. There are debates as to how pretty she actually was. Her name is Cleopatra and, despite what everyone thinks, she’s not Egyptian. She and her brothers are rulers of Egypt, but they’re descendants of Alexander’s general Ptolemy so they are Macedonian and Greek by descent. Their first language would be Greek, and the literature they read would be Greek, and they would look like Greeks, if that matters to anybody about anything.

Pompey tries to hook up with the boy king and apparently he and Cleopatra don’t get along very well. But before anything really can happen, as Ptolemy comes to shore trying to get help from the king, someone kills him. He dies and then Caesar shows up. “Oh wow, there’s Pompey. I was going to come and kill him. Well, okay. All right. Oh, hi. Who are you? Wow, you’re beautiful and useful so let’s go talk in the corner.” So Caesar meets Cleopatra, they like each other, and it turns into an affair that sets the ancient world on fire.

But her younger brother doesn’t like this and his advisors tell him, “She’s always been against you. Get rid of her,” so he drives her from the throne. Caesar joins with her and there’s civil war and Caesar defeats the armies of her older brother, and Cleopatra is now queen of Egypt and a client of Rome, so Rome sort of controls Egypt. It’s not as complete as some other arrangements but Cleopatra is the reigning queen and she’s literally in bed with Caesar, so close enough is close enough, right? A year later a child is born to Cleopatra, who she calls Caesarion because…

She wants it to be very clear that this is Caesar’s son.

Exactly because she knows that’s where the future goes. Speaking of the future, this is a huge thing and a number of biblical passages play into this. To this point Egypt has been in some measure a major power in the Mediterranean world and in the Middle East. From the time of Moses on, even after it got smushed, it made a real comeback and the question now is here’s this new upstart empire called Rome, but Egypt is so much more ancient and hoary with tradition.

The gods have smiled on it for centuries. Wouldn’t it be natural if we fused these two powers for Egypt to eventually be the lead? If this boy child grows up as the son of a Roman general and the Egyptian queen, won’t this carry the course of empire back to Egypt, and Egypt will again be the center of everything? As a secular historian you can just say, “Well, that’s interesting. It doesn’t matter one way or another to us, except we know what happened,” but from a biblical point of view there’s a couple things going on here.

Ezekiel had prophesied that once Egypt got smushed in the days of Assyria and Babylon, it was never making a comeback. Furthermore, there is a pattern that the later Enlightenment philosophers perceived of God pushing the course of empire westward. We go from Babylon to Medo-Persia to Greece to Rome, and if we ever get that far in our study of history, we’ll talk about what people did with that and what they thought might come next.

To a point, that is something going on, and the prophecies of Daniel, as they point to the fourth empire that will prove the guardian and the enemy of God’s people, it’s clearly not Egypt. It’s something else. It’s a wild beast with iron teeth and iron claws that stamps and crushes and destroys. That’s not Egypt.

So we’re standing on what’s going to be a key moment. Will Egypt rise up and be the power again right at the footstep of God’s people? Will it again become the dragon, the oppressor, the danger? Or is it going to vanish politically speaking into the ashcan of history? It’s a crucial moment. Rome? What? Where?

So Caesar is sleeping with Cleopatra and they have a son. He actually brings Cleopatra back to Rome and shows her off. The Roman people are not impressed. She’s “one of those people,” a girl from another nation, another culture, the east. We don’t trust the east anyway, all that oriental mystery and teachery and backstabbing. They didn’t like her, so in due time she flees back to Egypt as it being a much safer place, while Julius Caesar takes control of Rome and does not establish an empire. In fact, he so does not establish an empire that some people are kind of annoyed because they want a reason to kill him. In fact, they make up stuff.

The truth is that he is able to accumulate enough power to accomplish pretty much everything he wants to, without having to lay claim to being a king or having a kingdom, let alone an emperor and an empire. So when the conspirators try to eliminate him their claim is he was ambitious and wanted to be a king, and Mark Antony’s comeback is going to be, “No.”

We can read between the lines, at least as Shakespeare wrote them, and say, “Okay, what you’re really saying is he had everything he needed and didn’t want the title, but was he ambitious?”

And Brutus is an honorable man.

Brutus, as all of you know, is an honorable man.

Caesar had time to make some reforms. Some of them weren’t so bad. Some of them were just a return to socialism. He enlarged the Senate to 900 and included new members from Italy and the provinces. In other words, he watered it down in his favor, but it was becoming an empire. It doesn’t hurt to have people who are being ruled by you actually yield to some of your opinions.

He distributed land to his veterans and the poor, and founded 40 new colonies including Carthage. “Remember when we sowed that with salt and put a curse on it and it was never going to be rebuilt? Never mind.”

He did establish Corinth – yes, that Corinth, the one to which Corinthians was written, so that’s important from a biblical point of view because that’s going to give Paul a chance to write lots of cool things in two letters to a city. We wouldn’t have a discussion of speaking in tongues, the resurrection, or men who live in incest with their stepmothers if we didn’t have Corinthians and Corinth.

He extended citizenship liberally to physicians and teachers, many of whom had been slaves. The logic here is sensible. He’s looking at, “Alright, who’s actually valuable? Whose vote should count? Who do we want to exalt and move in? I don’t care about where they came from or about their past. What can they do for us? What can they do for me now? So if there are those kinds of people, let’s make them citizens and get them involved in the process, and if we’re the ones who make them citizens then they’re going to kind of be loyal to us.” So particularly ex-slaves who might have been physicians or teachers or otherwise educated like lawyers – and there were such – they got the first bite at being citizens.

He cut by half the number of people eligible for free grain (welfare) and established bankruptcy laws that set the pattern for ours, and a gold-based currency. I’ve always meant to check that out and find out what happened there, but it’s a good idea on principle, to be sure.

He tried to encourage Romans to begin having large families again, three children or more, because that was large in those days. Remember that in the latter days of the Republic marriage was falling apart and children were not being born. “We need more Romans.”

He ordered the Roman calendar revised on Egyptian models. The Egyptians had a fair understanding of astronomy, a good deal of which they inherited from Babylon. The Romans had picked up on that and Caesar had seen it in action during his time in Egypt and said, “So you’re saying 365 ¼ days? Tell me again about this leap year thing.”

The fundamental calendar that most people are aware of, to the degree that they’re aware of our fundamental calendar, is the Julian calendar. The problem will come later in the Middle Ages when we find out it’s not exactly 365 ¼. That’s off a little and it will be up to Pope Gregory to come up with a final fix so that we now observe a Gregorian calendar, which gets altered slightly – is it every time that there’s double 0’s in the date?

The hundredth year doesn’t get a leap year, which I don’t remember in the year 2000. Maybe I wasn’t paying attention.

I don’t remember it all, but the details were very precise and Europe slowly adopted this – that is nation by nation over a period of a very long time. So if you are a historian studying in the 1400-1600s and even into the 1700s you may need to remember that something that you’re told by French sources happened on one day, you may be told by English sources happened on another day. They’re not wrong, they’re just using different calendars. When the British Empire finally caved in and went along with this, people in the colonies went to sleep on one day and woke up the next day and it was seven days later, or something like that.

There were some days that didn’t exist in America.

It’s better than giving us Daylight Savings Time.

Don’t get me started.

I was about to say it was better than FDR – work for the unemployed spending huge amounts erecting magnificent public buildings, including a new forum marketplace that he named for himself.

And to deal with the ever-present problem of debt he cancelled all interest that had accumulated since the beginning of the revolution, which he kind of started, and then he made one of the biggest mistakes of his career. It sounds good and it’s the kind of thing that you’d put in a modern movie for the good guys to do – he forgave all of his enemies, the ones that were still alive. The ones that were dead were the crucial ones, though.

He just forgave everyone else, the Roman clementia, forgiveness but without repentance. He did not force them to have a change of heart because, well, you can’t. But he thought it was good publicity and propaganda to formally forgive them all because he felt safe enough that he didn’t think this would ever come back and bite him. He was wrong.

On March 15 it was the Ides of March, and Rachel is going to take over here.

The famous “Beware the Ides of March,” which is March 15 comes from the assassination of Julius Caesar. Most of us know things like Brutus and Cassius or “Et tu, Brute?” but that’s about all we know about his death.

I did a little more digging and discovered the main motivation for the conspiracy is that he offended people. I found an article through the University of Chicago that said he offended the senators because they came and brought him these honors of being the father of the country, and dictator for life, and consul for 10 years. How you can be dictator for life and consul for 10 years, I don’t know, but they made all of these wonderful overtures to him of what they were saying he was, and he was very like, “M-kay. I didn’t really ask for that, but thanks,” and they were offended that he was not more appreciative and exuberant over their honors.

Then there was a debacle of him dismissing some of the tribunes who represented some of the lower class, and they thought that was a violation of the republic, so they determined that was sufficient grounds. Also he was about to head out to avenge Crassus’s death among the Parthians, and they were concerned that that would truly establish him as the great power of all powers, so they had to act quickly and take him out.

They managed to get Brutus on their side because he was known as an honest man, and if he were to be involved then it must be a just cause. So they wait for Caesar at the Curia of Pompey for a gathering that the senators have asked for, and pretty much he comes in, sits down, and is – I wouldn’t say mobbed, but approached by a large group who make it look like, “We have a petition that we need to talk to you about, so we’re going to totally surround you,” with this group of somewhere between 40-60 people. Then they all just start stabbing him.

The first guy goes for his neck and mostly misses, so he gets a slight injury, but the second guy is probably the one that actually gave him the main blow that killed him. He ends up being stabbed 23 times by all this, and the group actually ends up stabbing each other also because they’re in such a mayhem that they’re pretty much all covered in blood by the time that they’re done, and he’s just left laying there.

The regular people don’t rise up and support the conspirators, as they expected that they would. Instead they kind of turn on all the conspirators and actually side with Caesar, who is now dead. So then his nephew is able to take over ruling and go after all the conspirators, and pretty much all of them end up being executed, plus many others. I think the count is that he ends up killing somewhere in the range of 2,000 people over this conspiracy, and actually goes broad and wide to try to find all the people that might have been involved in some way to revenge Julius Caesar.

Trivia – there was another Brutus in the group besides Brutus. I think he was some heir or adopted something. No one cares about him because he was little Brutus and lost in the cracks of history.

Mark Antony, who had been Caesar’s best friend, right-hand man and such, is not there at the time – at least this is Shakespeare’s version – and rushes back, as does Caesar’s nephew, Octavian, his adopted son.

The Romans named their kids after numbers. In theory when they got older you gave them a real name. With child mortality so high, sometimes it was easier just to call them Primus, Secundus, Tertius. We run into this in Paul’s epistles. There’s a Tertius, for instance. Or Quartus or Quintus.

Octavian is from a rare family. He must have had seven siblings. The history of the world remembers him not as Octavian but as Augustus, but he hasn’t got that name yet. So he’s there and he and Antony don’t love each other, but right now they figure, “We were both loyal to Caesar, and these guys who killed him have got to go.”

This is where we insert the marvelous speech from Shakespeare’s play Julius Caesar, and I had a thought that maybe we could read this, but we don’t have enough time.

We can always post a link or something.

We can post a link to Charlton Heston’s version of the play, which would be really good. Everyone knows the beginning of the speech, “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears. I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him. The evil that men do lives after them. The good is often interred with their bones, so let it be with Caesar,” and he goes on. As Rachel was suggesting earlier, he praises Brutus with damning faint praise. “And Brutus says he was ambitious, and lo Brutus is an honorable man.” As Shakespeare paints it, step-by-step Mark Antony, who’s given to speak to defend the conspirators, ends up shredding them.

Between the lines. It’s stellar.

It is incredible. It’s wonderful, telling them what Caesar actually had done for them and what he’s left to them, and how these honorable men have taken it all away from them and him. In the end he stirs up the crowd to mutiny and he goes his way.

Whatever the real historical details were, in the end Octavian and Mark Antony manage to expel the conspirators, or kill them by the hundreds apparently, and then they have to decide what they’re going to do. They take on Brutus and Cassius and their armies, both of whom commit suicide when they know they’re going to lose. Having done that, with all opposition down, Antony and Octavian kind of look each other in the eye and say something to the effect of, “Well, I don’t trust you.”

“And I don’t trust you, but it would be bad for Rome for us start another war.”

“It would.”

“So you go to the right hand and I’ll go to the left hand. You rule over there and I’ll rule over here, and we’ll deal with this later.”

So Antony gets the east and he ends up in Egypt and meets Cleopatra, who of course is still doing her bit of social climbing, so she sets her sights on him and they have their little affair, and Octavian and Roman nobility are unimpressed. So we begin to get this conflict between the two halves and a propaganda war ensues.

There was a third man in this. His name is Lepidus. Nobody knows about him. He gets shoved to the side and becomes the high priest and no one cares.

I remember when I was in some elementary grade and in some sort of round-robin of who knows these obscure things, and the question was, “Who’s the third man in the Triumvirate?” I go, “Mark Antony, Augustus…” and the teacher looks at me, “…Octavian, and, and, I don’t know.” His name is Lepidus and he is completely forgettable.

So the non-kingdom kingdom, the non-empire empire is now divided east and west with Octavian on one side commanding from Rome, and Antony and Cleopatra on the other, commanding from Egypt, and eventually they just say such nasty things about each other in the public press, or the equivalent of that day, that they can’t stand each other anymore and they go to war.

Their armies, or actually navies, meet off the coast of a Greek town called Actium. This is one of those decisive battles in earth’s history. It wasn’t much of a battle. Antony and Cleopatra come in commanding their separate fleets, Egyptian and Roman, and Octavian mostly with ground troops, but he has ships and they go out to meet them, and Cleopatra panics. Antony turns around and sees her rowing off in the opposite direction, fleeing the battle. “My dear! Come out and wait for me. I come with you!” So they abandon the battle and they sail off toward Egypt.

Octavian does not follow by sea. He has armies and he takes them the long way around, the very long way around – up through Greece, Macedonia, across the Dardenelles and Bosporus, and down through Asia Minor, down through Palestine, where he meets an interesting historical character who we’ll talk more about another time. This man’s name is Herod.

Herod had been a supporter of Antony and Cleopatra. He provided supplies and arms and such, but when Octavian comes his way he goes out to meet him boldly, humbly, and does the, “Hi boss, here I am. Sorry about the misunderstanding. I’m going to lose my head next. I am so for you. I’m on your side. What do you want? I can get it for you. I got it for you. I’m your guy. I’m your man, live or die. Good to see you. Welcome here.” Octavian says, “Oh, okay cool.”

They cut some deals and some ideas, and oddly enough Octavian is so impressed that he actually promotes Herod, who had been opposing him, and suggests sending some troops into some of the nearby little kingdoms. “Hey, they’re handy and I’ve got an army,” little kingdoms that had bothered the Jews no end for a very long time…the Edomites, the Moabites, the children of Ammon. So they try to invade them and it doesn’t go so well and Octavian has got better things to do, so he pursues after Antony and Cleopatra, goes on into Egypt, and lo, they are dead, having committed suicide, which seems to be a very common theme in this whole story.

So with the queen of Egypt dead, her consort dead, and Egypt wide open to attack and invasion, Egypt just puts up its hands and says, “Okay, we’re yours. What do you want?” and Octavian now has the best part of what will be the Roman Empire.

He goes home, takes the title Augustus, which means God-like, refuses the title of king or emperor, takes the title of First Citizen, and declares an era of peace, the Pax Romana. The temple of Janus in Rome is closed, the symbol that war is now over, and war will be over for about 80 years until around AD 70, oddly enough, when they almost lose everything, but that’s another story.

So we’re up to AD 29. We still have a little bit to go before Jesus is born. Actium technically marks the end of the Hellenistic Age, but the general influences and such continue. The ages overlap but Rome is now in control. Greek will continue as the language of literature. Greek ideas will continue as the philosophical background, but Roman law, Roman power, Roman armies are going to force everyone to play nice and not run with scissors, and the world finally is going to know peace, and Virgil’s dream of a world of peace, a new world order brought about by Rome, is going to be fulfilled. Sure it is.

And there we must stop.

There we stop, as we come very near the birth of the Messiah.

Shall we close out with some recommendations?

I recommend watching William Shakespeare’s play Julius Caesar.

I did that last time, though.

I’m doing it again because I’m going to be specific. Particularly watch the speech of Mark Antony as he turns on the conspirators ever so subtly, a little bit at a time, you can hardly miss it, because they are such honorable men. He tells us so over and over again. So whether or not it’s actual history, at least it gives you a feel for how sleazy politicians can be and how sometimes there are no good guys.

And it’s the story that we’ve told ourselves collectively over the past 400 years, so it does matter.

My recommendation is going to be a series of comic books called Asterix and Obelix. They’re closely associated with Tintin in my mind, but when you go back and read Tintin it’s like, “Oh, okay. This was better when I was a kid.” Asterix and Obelix ages like fine wine.

It’s originally French. Tintin is Belgian but I think Asterix is French, and when they translate it they have to count the puns in each square to make sure that they’re coming up with equivalents in the target language. There’s one in particular that I actually did not read at any point in my childhood, but we had a VHS cartoon movie adaptation of Asterix in Britain, which was very fun.

The premise is that there’s this one indomitable village in Gaul that has not fallen to Rome because they possess the secret of the magic potion that makes them invincible, so a distant cousin of Asterix comes from Britain. His name is Anticlimax and he comes and enlists Asterix and Obelix’s aid in repelling the Roman troops. So if you want the non-historical version of why Britain did not fall to Rome, it’s a great read.

Okay. Rachel?

Mine again will be very different from the other two. This time I am going to recommend one of my husband’s sermons from this past Sunday, which was September 8. He’s preaching through the book of Mark and he was preaching on Mark 12:18-27, which is the Sadducees’ challenge on the whole idea of the resurrection of the dead and marriage in it. I thought he gave one of the better explanations I’ve heard of Jesus’ response in terms of, “You don’t understand the power of God. You don’t know the scriptures.”

I was very encouraged and learned some new things, so I wanted to put that out there because I appreciated that, but also his emphasis on the beauty and the wonder of the coming resurrection and the new creation was extremely encouraging and really where our focus should be in that passage was wonderful.

You would find it at gracereformedwillows.org under Sermons and you can hear him preach. Obviously all his sermons are there, but that was one that particularly stood out to me as exceptional. There’s my plug for that.

Very cool. Thank you both so much for this conversation. As always it has been a delight. Thanks also to David, our producer and my lawfully wedded husband. Thanks to our transcriptionist who donates her time to make sure that this podcast is available to you in your inbox if you want it. If you would like that, you can subscribe to our Substack called Halting Toward Zion, just like the name of the podcast.

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As I mentioned in passing, this is a production of Diecast Media Group, so cheers. Have a good night.