Modern Wisdom: w/ Alex Petkas – The Rise of History’s Greatest Emperor (Transcript)

And he’s going in there, they’re touring the museum as it were, Caesar and his buddies, and his buddies kind of keep moving on and they realize, they look back, Caesar is not with them.

And he’s standing in front of a statue of Alexander the Great in this Temple of Hercules. And they’re like, “Caesar, are you coming? Wait a sec. Are you crying?” Because he’s weeping in front of the statue of Alexander the Great. And he looks to them and he says, “Do you not think it is a matter for tears that when Alexander was my age, he was the ruler of so many great peoples, and yet I have done nothing worthy of great renown?”

And this is only one of two instances that we know of where Julius Caesar cried. The Romans weren’t really into crying as much as the Greeks. I think they were a little bit more open. They were about like us. The Greeks are crying all the time. I mean, if you read Homer, Achilles is bawling and throwing ash on himself when his buddy Patroclus dies in the Trojan War. And in the Odyssey, it’s like every single time somebody mentions the word Troy, everybody just bursts out in tears. His family’s always crying for him because they don’t know where he is. And Odysseus is always crying about everything. But the Romans were a little bit more restrained.

So I think for Julius Caesar to cry there, something happened that was really significant for him. And how I read that is, Caesar, he’s already had a pretty promising career so far. Some great stories already have happened from early in his youth. He’s a quaestor, which is not nothing. He’s got the Roman Medal of Honor equivalent, the civic crown for risking his life to save a fellow citizen. But he’s kind of looking back on his 20s and he’s thinking, “I’ve just been screwing around the whole time. This is what I have to do.” He’s realizing in this moment what his destiny is, or, if you want to not use the word destiny, he’s realizing what he should be doing. And that’s the moment where it kind of hits him.

It’s painful to realize that you haven’t been living the life to the full extent of what you should be doing and are capable of doing. And I think that’s a really powerful moment. It kind of encapsulates why I think it resonates with me so much.

That’s how we need to be approaching history. That’s how we need to be approaching the greats. You need to be looking for that moment of resonance with somebody that just cracks you open and you realize it. Now personally, I don’t have that with Julius Caesar himself. I’m not trying to do the Julius Caesar thing. And it’s not every Roman who’s great who had that kind of thing with Alexander the Great. I mean, that says a lot about a man that he really sees himself as somebody who needs to emulate Alexander.

But you can definitely learn from that lesson of trying to find that unique resonance with somebody who kind of tells you what you’re supposed to be like. And I think that Caesar had this depth to him that illustrates that also.

Caesar’s Ambition

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What does that tell us about Caesar’s ambition, level of ambition?

Caesar’s Early Life and Family Background

ALEX PETKAS: Yeah, well, off the charts for sure. But I think that you can also understand a lot about Caesar’s ambition from looking earlier in his childhood. And there’s a great story on this, but I kind of give the context, like laying out Caesar’s world.

So he grows up in Rome, and he’s from this great family, on the one hand. On his mom’s side, the Anchi Marci go back to King Ancus Marcius. It’s the Marci family that go back to King Ancus Marcius. It’s a quasi-mythical Roman king from the 6th century BC. 500 years of history on his mom’s side. And then on his dad’s side, they’re the Julius clan and they go all the way back to the mythic founder of Rome, Aeneas, who is the son of Venus and a mortal. So they’ve got 1,200 years on that side.

So they’ve got some real blue blood, but they haven’t really accomplished a lot in the past few generations. They’re not one of the power elite families, like the Metelli or the Corneli. There are other families that are a lot more prominent than the Julius family. And they live in a kind of seedy part of Rome, the Subura. He grows up in this kind of dirty part of town.

I know you worked in the event and nightclub world. Caesar would’ve been like a kid hanging out in the street, playing dice with his buddies outside of a bar. The Subura was the kind of place that you didn’t really want to live if you had a better option. But every young aristocrat on a summer night liked to go visit. There are brothels, and so he’s in contact with the underbelly of Rome.

Caesar’s Political Connections

His family is aligned on what you call the Roman left of politics. There are two main — you can call them factions or kind of political styles — two main poles in Roman politics. On the one hand, there are the optimates, the kind of oligarchic or aristocratic faction who stand for the ancient prerogatives of the Senate and tradition. They tend to monopolize the priesthoods. They’re all about what family are you from, who are you marrying, and “My grandfather was a consul. Who are you?” That whole attitude. They’re very much for the status quo.

And on the other hand, you have the populists who are about things like land reform, redistributing public lands. They’re really into merit and promoting talented outsiders. And Caesar has really strong connections there, because his aunt is married to one of the greatest populist figureheads in Roman history, this guy Gaius Marius, who was an outsider himself to the Roman power elite, but kind of forced his way in by talent. He wins a number of wars for them. And so Caesar grows up with Gaius Marius as his uncle.

Marius made a big fortune in his career, starting very low, and then he kind of married into respectability, which Caesar’s family represents — kind of poor respectability. And then Caesar loses his dad when he’s a teenager. His dad drops dead tying his shoes one day, kind of a freak thing. Maybe he had a heart attack. Caesar’s probably in his early teens at that point. His dad actually looked like he was on a good track. He’d been a praetor, hadn’t been consul. Praetor’s the second highest office, consul’s the highest, and he died just before he got a shot to run for consul. So Caesar had a father figure but lost him.

I imagine Gaius Marius might’ve been kind of like a father figure to Julius Caesar. We don’t know a lot about that, but what ended up happening is Caesar, a promising young man at 16 years old, gets a great opportunity to marry the daughter of one of the most powerful men at Rome, who is Marius’s colleague, his associate, this guy Cinna, who runs for consul — he’s consul for about 3 years — and also a populist, also kind of against the oligarchic establishment.

The Civil War and Sulla’s Reign of Terror

Right around the time that this is happening, this incredibly bloody civil war breaks out between the optimates and the populists. It’s very complicated. We could go into the details if you want, but essentially Marius dies toward the beginning of the war, Cinna dies a little further in, and the optimates, led by a man named Lucius Cornelius Sulla, win this war. Just blood running through the whole — like every valley in Italy. Tens of thousands, maybe more than 100,000 Roman citizens and Roman allies killed. It’s just horrific, and it’s probably worse than the civil war that Caesar ends up fighting later in his life.

So Caesar is married to Cinna’s daughter. And when Sulla marches into Rome after winning the civil war — he came, like, invaded Italy from a foreign campaign — he comes into Rome and gets elected dictator. He kind of forces himself to be elected dictator, which is a temporary office at Rome. And he’s mopping up. He does, famously, this campaign called the proscriptions, which is basically a purge of all of his enemies. It’s never been done in Roman history. They’d never had a civil war before. For 400 years, they’d had more or less civic concord.

Sulla posts the names of all the people from the leadership classes of Rome — some of the richest men, the most influential, well-connected, grand-family men from the populist faction that he blames for picking this fight and starting the war. And if your name is on that list in the proscriptions — posted in the Senate — you have a bounty on your head and your entire estate is confiscated as state property. There are more than 1,000 names that end up getting put up in those proscription lists. So heads roll. People are tossing heads in front of the feet of Sulla as he’s sitting in his consular throne, collecting their reward. It’s just this reign of terror for a few months.

Sulla is also rewriting the constitution as a dictator. He’s trying to make sure that the populace could just keep their head underwater for generations, that nothing like this war could ever happen again, because his enemies and the principles that they represent will just be so hamstrung and handcuffed.

Caesar Defies the Dictator

But one of the things that he does is he approaches younger men at Rome and kind of tests their loyalty by making them get divorces. Pompey is another promising young man around this time who ends up being Caesar’s friend and rival. He’s a few years older. Sulla goes to Pompey and says, “Pompey, you’ve been a loyal servant. You brought me a legion in the Civil War. You sided with me early. I’m very grateful for that. But you’re married to the wrong woman. I have a better one for you.” And Pompey says, “Yes, sir.” And he divorces his former wife and marries whoever Sulla picks for him.

And then, remember — a subordinate of Sulla, a friend of his, wanted to run for consul after Sulla becomes dictator. There are still elections going on, still offices that need filling. This guy comes to Sulla and says, “Hey Sulla, we won the war. I want to run for consul.” And Sulla says, “You haven’t even been praetor. This would be a bad look. I don’t think this is your year. You should stand down.” The guy says, “Thank you for your advice. I’m going to run anyway.”

And so one day, Sulla is sitting in one of his curule chairs in one of the public buildings, looking out over the forum, and watches as the men that he ordered to do the deed go up to this guy and murder him in broad daylight in the forum — because he defied Sulla and tried to run for office when Sulla said no. So this is the kind of guy you’re dealing with.

Now Sulla comes to Caesar. Caesar’s 18 years old, and he says, “Caesar, you’re married to the daughter of one of my late worst enemies, Cinna.” And you can understand his perspective — Cinna was a symbol of everything that Sulla wanted to crush. And he says, “You need to divorce her.” And Caesar says, “Thank you very much for your advice” — and tells him to go screw himself. And he skips town. He says no.

So Caesar is running through the mountains of central Italy. He’s on the run. Sulla’s got guys hunting him down. This goes on for several weeks. Caesar gets dysentery — Oregon Trail style. He gets caught, and manages to bribe the people who catch him to not bring him back to Sulla, but to bring him back to his family, to his relatives and friends. And then they go and plead with the dictator Sulla: “This was really out of line on the part of Caesar. He’s a young hothead, you understand. He’ll be good. We’ll make sure that he behaves himself. He’s only a kid. Please, can you spare him?” Because Sulla wants to execute him, obviously. He’s got an image to uphold.

And Sulla relents and says, “Very well, but you are fools if you don’t see many a Marius in that boy.” And so Caesar gets off.

What Caesar’s Defiance Reveals About His Ambitions

Now, why did he do that? What does that say about him and what he’s got in mind for his future?

One explanation is that Caesar’s a showman. He’s a natural showman. He knows if he can defy the dictator and get away with it, people are going to be talking about this for his entire life. They’re going to talk about it all around town. And sure enough, we’re still talking about it today. It worked as a kind of PR stunt.

On the other hand, he knows that this girl is a symbol of all of his populist connections that have mostly been decapitated. Like everything that Caesar had aspired to — think, as a teenager, you’ve got a great career ahead of you, the top guys in this party, the trajectory’s clear — and it’s all just been liquidated, turned to blood. And she’s like one of the last living symbols of that.

He’s kind of calling his shot in a way. He’s seeing a career for himself on the populist side, on the revolutionary, if you will, side of Roman politics. And he’s building that career with this clairvoyance about where he’s headed for the rest of his life, already there at age 18.

And I think one final piece of this is it had a lot to do with just family, and who he was. He didn’t want to be pushed around by anybody, and he was willing to die rather than to let that happen.

One of the final things that this illustrates about Caesar is that, for all that you could criticize about the guy, he was incredibly loyal to the people that were close to him, to his friends — loyal to a fault. And he was loyal to this wife Cornelia all the way up to her death. I can’t prove this and I wouldn’t even try, but Caesar was famously good with the ladies and slept with a lot of senators’ wives and had a lot of girlfriends on the side. But we don’t know of any specific cases where he did that while he was married to his first wife, Cornelia. She ends up being the mother of his only daughter, his only child up until the very end, Julia.

I think it was something about proving loyalty to that woman. But I think you see in that — to answer your question about what his ambitions are like — they’re grand already. You can see that in him as a young man. He knows he’s destined for something big. He’s smart, talented, handsome, and so forth. And he was just going to ride that horse as long as he could.

Caesar’s Rise to Power

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What was that story about Caesar and the pirates? That was when he was young, right?

ALEX PETKAS: Yeah, that’s another great story. Another kind of flash of his brilliance. So he’s off cavorting in Asia Minor as a young man, and this is before Pompey cleans up the seas from the pirates. And so he gets captured by pirates, as one does during those times. He’s on a study trip actually at the time. He’s very young, like 20, 23.

And the pirates want to ransom him. And Caesar says, “What you’re asking is insulting. You’re asking 20 million sesterces, you need to double it. You don’t know what you’ve got on your hands here.” Partly to troll them, partly because he knows that if he gets ransomed for more money, it’s going to make a better story and people are going to think more of him.

Because the Greek word for honor is timē. It means price. It’s literally the price that your comrades would be willing to ransom you for if you got captured. It’s quantifiable. In Homer, we think of honor as this abstract thing, but it’s like, how much are you really worth? You could put a number on that. So Caesar kind of gets that.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: He basically bids on his own auction.

ALEX PETKAS: Yeah, right. And the funny thing about that story — well, there’s a lot of funny things — but while he’s there with the pirates, Plutarch, who’s his greatest biographer, says Caesar would joke around with them. He would write compositions, rocking around in the hold there writing speeches, and he would declaim them in front of the pirates and he’d make them laugh and cry. And then he would just say, “You people have no taste. I can’t believe that I’m hanging out with you.” And they would say, “Oh, Caesar.” And then he said, “You know, someday I’m going to come back after you ransom me and I’m going to execute every single one of you.” And they said, “Ah, see this kid, we love this kid. Pour him another drink.”

And then that’s exactly what he does. He gets ransomed, and the local governor responsible for that part of the sea is sort of dawdling. He doesn’t really have a great plan for these pirates. So Caesar raises a fleet with his own funds, goes and finds their little cove, captures the pirates, and brings them to the governor. And since the governor has no plan, Caesar goes and crucifies all of them to make a statement.

But because they were such kindly hosts to him, he does them the courtesy of having their throats slit before they get crucified, so they don’t have to be there in agony for several days dying. He gives them a short death.

It’s a perfect combination of his winning charm, his deep sense for the political stakes of every single thing that he does — raising his price, making a scene, and making a statement by fulfilling his promise in the most cold-blooded way possible.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Why did he become so popular? What were the levers that he was pulling on?

Caesar’s Popularity and Political Instincts

ALEX PETKAS: Well, before he becomes a commander, at least, Caesar is just a really stylish guy. He has a flair for fashion. He wears his toga a little differently than everybody else. It’s a little looser. You know, it’s kind of like when I was in high school, a lot of kids would let their pants sag down — it was the cool look. Well, Caesar’s doing that. Let the toga sag a little bit. It was stylish and classy, and the older men at Rome would say, “Oh, that’s effeminate.” But Caesar knew that it would draw attention, that he could pull it off.

One of the ways that he attracts attention is by prosecuting corrupt governors when he’s just in his 20s. He does these sort of publicity stunt prosecutions, like a young DA prosecuting the city councilman. He loses most of these, I think, but he makes a statement of what he stands for.

I think he knows from a very early age that he’s kind of an anti-establishment figure. Sulla dies soon after he becomes a dictator, and in Caesar’s youth, Sulla had firmly established the optimate oligarchy. Everybody in power in Rome was a buddy of Sulla’s, and they had no serious challengers. They were corrupt, fat, slow, plundering the provincials, and Caesar kind of takes a stand for justice throughout his early career.

One of these cases is particularly funny. There was a riot 30 years earlier, and some populist leaders — people from Caesar’s faction — got murdered. Saturninus was the most well-known. There was a riot in the forum, they arrested the guys, put them in the Senate House, and then people snuck up to the roof in the night, removed the roof tiles, and hurled them down on Saturninus and his buddies and killed them.

So Caesar picks one of the last surviving men vaguely implicated in this riot — a man with blood on his hands metaphorically for the death of Saturninus and his associates. The man is this emaciated old gentleman, Rabirius. And Caesar says, “We’re going to hold you responsible for your crimes 30 years ago. Rome is a place of justice.”

Long story short, they get him convicted in a special court, and the punishment is crucifixion. They’re going to publicly execute this 80-year-old man who probably doesn’t even know what day it is. And there’s some last-minute political shenanigans by Rabirius’s friends — they raise a flag, invoke bad omens, and it calls off the whole thing. Caesar, I think, kind of expected them to do that. But the point was the statement — that oligarchs and aristocrats from the establishment can’t get away with murder anymore. Not in this town.

I think that was a big piece of why he was popular before he ever led an army. Now, when he started leading armies, that’s a whole different story. He was a master at winning the respect of his soldiers. He was always fighting in the front lines. There are many stories about the incredible loyalty that his soldiers had for him.

But he was kind of a playboy in his youth, and he was just a fun guy to be around. He’s always giving gifts, he’s in debt all the time up to his ears, and he somehow always finds a way to pay off his creditors. He was just a really magnetic guy to be around.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What was the loyalty that he generated? Just how loyal were his followers?

Caesar’s Loyalty and Leadership

ALEX PETKAS: Well, one instance of this in the Civil War that illustrates this is this guy, Granius Petro — a guy we wouldn’t know his name otherwise, but he’s a questor in Caesar’s army. He gets his ship captured by Caesar’s enemies in the civil war. And so he’s brought aboard the ship with his fellow sailors, and the enemy commander, the Optimate commander says, “Granius Petro, we’re going to be nice to you guys. Now, normally since you all are traitors, what we should do is slit your throats and throw you overboard. But we’re going to be very kind. We know Caesar’s the enemy of the state and tyrant and lawless, but we’re going to not let him morally outclass us. We’re just going to sell you in the slave market, all of you. And hopefully you’ll get ransomed, maybe. But Granius Petro, you, however, may go free. He’s their leader. But you have to go and tell Caesar what we did here and tell him that his war effort is futile, that he should surrender to the lawful government of the Republic.”

And Granius Petro says, “It is the custom of Caesar’s soldiers to give mercy, but not to receive it.” And then he pulls out a dagger and he stabs himself to death right in front of the enemy consul. That’s the kind of loyalty that Caesar had. This guy would rather die than be ashamed by letting his enemy spare him.

Another great instance — Caesar’s soldiers had this incredible endurance throughout all of his campaigns. They’re willing to fight for him to the death. Stories about soldiers getting shot in the eye, shot in the arm, shot in the leg, taking hundreds of blows, and then they don’t leave the fight. They just have to be dragged away by their companions.

One instance, again, later from Caesar’s career, he’s fighting this great kind of trench war, siege war with Pompey. There’s like a 17-mile wall that he’s built around Pompey’s camp to wall him into the coast in Greece, and Pompey’s built another counter wall. So it’s this dragging, long siege warfare, and the supplies are getting choked. Caesar cuts off the water to Pompey. The animals are starving and dying in Pompey’s camp, but Caesar is even in worse straits because he’s got 20,000, 30,000 men. They’re eating all the food in the area. They’re running out of food and they’re having to go and collect weeds and bake them into these horrible, disgusting cakes and just eat them.

At some point, Pompey’s guys have enough food and water personally, even though the animals are dying. They call over to Caesar’s men across the wall. They say, “Hey Roman, getting hungry over there?” And Caesar’s soldiers catapult over some of these horrible loaves of nasty food that they’re eating, just to show what they’re willing to eat. They’re willing to starve to death before giving up the fight. And one of these cakes — imagine like a cow patty — one of these cakes is brought to Pompey, his enemy commander, and he says, “Good God, we are fighting with beasts.” And they go to Caesar and they say, “We would rather eat tree bark than surrender.”

How Caesar Inspired His Men

How was he able to generate that? He fights in the front lines with them all the time. He risks his life right up there with the centurions. He knows all the centurions in his army by name. There’s like one centurion for every 80 men, and he’s got an army of 30,000. He remembers their names. He takes the time to do that.

He’s also very generous with gifts. What he’ll do is eat the same food that they eat. I don’t know if he ate those cow patties, but I imagine he did, because he had this habit of — if the olive oil was rancid and there was good olive oil but the troops were eating the bad olive oil, he would eat the bad olive oil. If his troops are sleeping on the ground, if his officer corps — he’s always going around at lightning speed, blitzing around the campaigns, and often they have to stay in weird places — if his officers are sleeping on the ground, he’ll sleep on the ground. He’ll give a good bed to the weakest of us, which is not me, you know? So he’s always there with them.

But he’s also very lavish with these guys too. He does amass a lot of money when he’s conquering Gaul, for example, but it’s always only to give it to his friends, to give it to the people of Rome, to do something with it. He always sees money as a tool, and riches as a tool, and gifts as a tool to win, to bind people closer to himself. Because this is where his real power lies. And this is where I think, in general, real power lies.

The First Triumvirate: Caesar, Pompey, and Crassus

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What was the relationship between him and Pompey? Because you said previously they were sort of loosely affiliated and then they do the triumvirate. So instead of trying to beat them, he actually decides to do that thing with Crassus and Pompey. What’s the arc of his big enemies across his life?

ALEX PETKAS: Yeah. So Pompey — they’re friendly for most of their career. And Pompey is a kind of moderate populist. In his early career, he fights for Sulla, but soon after Sulla dies, Pompey doesn’t get into politics that much. He mostly wants to just get himself sent off as commander of Rome’s armies to fight all kinds of wars, because I think that’s his happy place.

Pompey is an excellent administrator. He’s great at logistics. He’s kind of a big guy too. Caesar helps him a lot in his early career to get these extraordinary commands, as they call them. Pompey doesn’t hold office until he’s 35, and usually to become consul — which is what he becomes — you would have to have a whole sequence of offices. But Pompey’s just the golden boy. He’s got this combination of charm and he’s got this boyish look. He’s got this little quiff in his hair. He kind of looks like Alexander, and he kind of models himself off of Alexander the Great. Caesar and Pompey both are like Alexander stands. But he’s also got this ruthlessness to him too. They called him the Kid Butcher when he was younger. And the Romans just love this combination of cold-blooded forcefulness, brutality even in a controlled way, and then boyish charm, which Pompey had.

The way that they really get into cahoots in the First Triumvirate is — even though Caesar’s kind of friendly with Pompey and helps him out here and there, he’s not really tight with Pompey. Who he is tight with is Crassus, the richest man in Rome — another fascinating figure that I did a biography on, on the Cost of Glory. Crassus finances Caesar’s career. He’s basically the one holding the note for all of Caesar’s colossal political debts.

There comes a point when Caesar is ready to run for consul that Crassus has a problem and Pompey has a lot of problems that they can’t get solved in the Senate and in politics. Pompey’s just come back from this glorious eastern campaign. He’s defeated this general Mithridates. He’s essentially conquered Judea, and he’s defiled the temple in Jerusalem. But he’s come back glorious with a bunch of soldiers that need rewards. He wants to settle his soldiers. He wants the Senate to ratify all of the arrangements, the treaties that he made — appointing a client king here, getting a city constitution ratified there. He’s got a lot of material interest in that, like people sending him money and promising to support him in war or politics. So Pompey has a lot of needs, and it’s all getting blocked by the Senate. He’s just not that great at the political game.

By this point, Pompey is sort of an outsider from the Optimates, from the kind of establishment conservatives who are blocking Pompey. They think he’s getting too powerful. Caesar is nobody at this point — yeah, he’s a promising young politician, but he’s not a powerful man. So we talk about the triumvirate, but it’s Caesar brokering a deal with Pompey. And then Crassus, on the other hand, has some tax breaks he wants for his portfolio companies, who are equestrian tax collectors. And they can’t get it through the Senate.

Both Pompey and Crassus are outsiders to the Optimate establishment. The main guy who’s the kind of figurehead of the conservatives is this young guy, Cato, who becomes — who’s a Stoic — famously becomes Caesar’s worst nemesis.

And Caesar basically comes to these two big shots, the two big fish in Rome — Pompey and Crassus, richest man and the most glorious general — and he says, “You guys hate each other. You’ve hated each other for a long time. You’ve always been trying to smile in public when you’re next to each other, but then stab each other in the back behind the scenes. But look, you both have needs. I can fix them. I can get your legislation passed, Pompey. I can get your legislation passed, Crassus. Support me in the consulship and I’m going to ask for a favor down the line, but let’s not worry about that right now.” And they say, “All right.”

So the triumvirate is basically Caesar brokering this deal between these two top guys, which is a great strategy. If you’re down here and there are men up here that have a need, find the way to help them out. And the biggest thing that’s blocking each of them really is each other. Crassus is pushing the Senate to not ratify Pompey’s legislation. Pompey is going to use his clients to push against Crassus. So making peace between the two of them.

And it was a pretty good relationship for a long time. Once Caesar gets elected consul, his dear daughter Julia — his one child up to that point — he marries her off to Pompey the Great, and he becomes Pompey’s father-in-law, even though he’s a younger man somewhat. And by all accounts, that marriage was not just a political marriage, but became a very loving relationship. So they had this long connection long before the civil war that made them mortal enemies of each other, which I think is what makes it kind of even more tragic and bitter.

The Road to Civil War

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: And then how do Pompey and Caesar end up at war?

The Fall of the Republic: Caesar, Pompey, and the Civil War

ALEX PETKAS: Well, that’s a long story, I guess. But in sum, when Caesar finishes his consulship, he gets Pompey and Crassus to support him, to have himself sent off to Gaul. So far, Caesar hasn’t had his Alexander moment. This is his chance to do some real world-changing conquest. And he spends the years — ’59 is the first triumvirate, so he spends the years ’58 through ’52 conquering Gaul.

Rome controls a little strip along the coast. Gaul is France, of course. But the Gauls, the Celts, is the other name for them. They are not just a kind of peaceable farmer, unsuspecting society of, you know, we just want to live our peaceful lives. Why are these Romans coming and conquering us? I mean, this is a confederation of incredibly warlike tribes who have threatened Rome on many occasions. And just in the previous generation, there was a great Gallic invasion that was stopped by Gaius Marius. And several centuries earlier, the Gauls actually sacked the city of Rome, taken it — the only time that ever happened up to that point. So there’s a real threat there, arguably.

We could get into how Caesar conquered Gaul, but how Pompey and Caesar fell out with each other is a long story that basically, while Caesar’s away, he is absent from the city of Rome and from Italy for 7 years. Well, really 8 years. Before the conflict between them breaks out.

And while he’s away, Crassus dies. Crassus was a kind of fulcrum balancing out Caesar and Pompey. He dies on this great Persian expedition, this campaign to invade not Iran but Iraq, where the Persians were in charge. When you have 3 men, they can kind of balance each other out. But when it becomes 2 men, there’s a polarity there that can really be inflamed.

And this is exactly what the establishment people see. People like Cato see Caesar has always been a revolutionary in their opinion. He’s always been trying to make a grab at supreme power. They had their eye on him since he was a young man. Sulla was right about this kid. There is many Mariuses in him.

And Pompey has been an outsider, but they see, sort of late in the game after Crassus dies, that if they can court Pompey into the establishment — he’s always wanted their approval. Pompey has always just wanted to be this glorious general welcomed by the blue bloods, the great families, and he’s never really had it.

So they see their chance, Cato and company — let’s make Pompey a respectable man. Let’s make him our shield against Caesar, because Caesar is going to come back at some point and he’s going to come back richer and more powerful and more glorious than ever. And he’s going to just push us around in politics and maybe he’s going to try to take over the thing and make himself a monarch, which I think was a self-fulfilling prophecy. That wasn’t really his intent at that point.

But basically, it’s like 51 BC at this point. Caesar’s been in Gaul for 8 years. He’s got so many well-trained legions. And basically his enemies are saying, we’re not going to let you come back except under circumstances where you will face accountability, prosecution potentially, for all of the bad things you did in your earlier career, including when you were consul.

Long story short, they kind of play Pompey, and they especially get into Pompey’s head and play him off of Caesar in this gradual shift of alliances. And importantly, Caesar’s daughter Julia, Pompey’s — the love of Pompey’s life by all accounts — she dies in childbirth in 54, and that was like the link that held them together. The final tether. And after that, the civil war begins.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Because otherwise there would have been some leverage over Caesar.

ALEX PETKAS: Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: We have your daughter.

ALEX PETKAS: Oh yeah, I hadn’t thought about that. But I think they couldn’t have gotten into Pompey’s head because, you know, they would’ve had a Caesar’s grandson. Pompey’s son would’ve bound them together. It was a boy that was born that died soon after his mother died. So I think that it wasn’t an obvious fit for Pompey to be their shield, their man. He had always been an outsider, and Caesar could’ve kind of kept him loyal.

It’s very hard when you’re in France and this is all happening in Rome, but Caesar has a lot of lieutenants, men of letters, trying to kind of keep the peace and keep up his contacts in Rome. But if he had been able to be there in person, he believed he could have settled the seas and won Pompey back over. And this is one of the things after the war broke out that he kept trying over and over again — “Let’s just meet, Pompey.” The Civil War? Yeah, the Civil War. “Let’s just meet. Let’s work this all out.”

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: But he didn’t want to.

ALEX PETKAS: Yeah, Pompey didn’t want to at that point. He’d already hardened his heart.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Pompey was supposed to be one of the greatest generals ever, right? And did he not outnumber Caesar as well?

ALEX PETKAS: Yeah, he greatly did. Pompey was brilliant. He defeated Sertorius. He conquered the pirates in like 3 months earlier in his career. I mean, he’s a brilliant administrator. Some people think he’s overrated as a general. I mean, he was really good, but I think Caesar was a better general. But Pompey had —

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Evidently.

ALEX PETKAS: Evidently. But he definitely had, by the look of it, all the advantages. When Caesar invades Italy, crosses the Rubicon, Pompey has a lot of legions on paper, but they’re fresh recruits.

Crossing the Rubicon

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What’s the story of crossing the Rubicon?

ALEX PETKAS: Yeah, so there’s a kind of complicated buildup, a standoff. Everybody’s always kind of ratcheting up their demands. Caesar’s like, “I want to come back to Rome without prosecution.” And the Senate’s like, “Over our dead bodies.” Concessions going back and forth, being rejected. And so as this is all going on, Caesar’s getting his armies ready. He doesn’t want to fight a civil war. I think he always said that, and I think it’s right.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Because he’s just come back from Gaul.

ALEX PETKAS: Yeah, he’s just come back from Gaul. He’s —

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: 7-year campaign, 8-year campaign, straight into a civil war.

ALEX PETKAS: Basically, he’s at war from 58 BC until 45 BC, almost constantly. I mean, the energy of the man.

He’s got two advantages. He’s got, I think, 10 legions at this point, something like 40,000 men, but they’re all kind of strung out over Gaul and forts. They’re not close. He’s got one legion with him on the border.

The legal border between Italy and basically northern Italy — what we call northern Italy today — was what they would call Cisalpine Gaul. It’s not like Italy proper. And if you lead an army into Italy without disbanding it, it’s technically an act of war. Consuls are supposed to disband their armies before they reenter Italy. And so the border between Cisalpine Gaul and Italy proper is the Rubicon River. It’s this insignificant stream near Ravenna in northern Italy on the Adriatic coast.

So Caesar’s camped at Ravenna and he is negotiating with the Senate, envoys going back and forth, back and forth. It’s not looking good. Caesar doesn’t want to fight a war, but he’s going to be ready. He’s not about to pretend like this couldn’t happen. I think Pompey wasn’t really ready for it.

So he’s got one legion there with him at Ravenna. Not a lot of men, 4,500 men or so. And at this final moment, the negotiations break down and the Senate declares him a public enemy. They say Caesar is not responding to our demands. We’ve had enough. And they officially basically declare war on him.

The moment he gets that advice, the very next day — actually he knew what he was going to do the next day, but he pretends like nothing’s happening on that day. He’s just going to go about his business in Ravenna. He goes to the gladiatorial shows, he inspects his troops, he has dinner with his friends. It’s just a normal day, no big deal. But he secretly sends the order out to his troops to muster, and he finds his way to the Rubicon. He apparently gets lost in the woods because it’s dark. I mean, there’s all these kind of elaborate tales about this.

One of the ancient sources — not Plutarch, who’s a little bit more sober — one of the ancient sources, Suetonius, I think it is, says that as he stood there before the Rubicon, he saw a great winged figure blowing a trumpet. It’s like the gods are calling him to war. It’s like the Valkyries or something.

But what he says is, he’s there with his officers and he knows if he crosses that river, he’s declaring war back on the Senate. And so he says, “Let the die be cast.” The famous words — it’s actually a quote from one of his favorite dramas or a comedy from Menander — “Let the die be cast, as one does when one is entering upon a highly risky thing with uncertain results,” as Plutarch says.

And so he crosses the Rubicon very quickly, and within a day he has just blitzed down and captured a city in Italy proper. One of his advantages, as I was saying, is he loves to be underestimated and he’s really good at getting himself underestimated. They didn’t think he would do it. And he only goes into Italy with one legion. The Senate has like 10 legions in Italy. I mean, he’s vastly outnumbered, but everybody else arrives really quickly.

The other advantage is he’s really fast. And so he blitzes through Italy and pretty soon Pompey and the Senate decide they’ve got to get out of there. They’ve got to rethink their grand strategy. And they go to Greece to basically muster up and collect a bunch of ships and a bunch of troops in the east to come back and reinvade Italy and destroy Caesar. But it doesn’t work out that way.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Why?

Caesar and Cleopatra

ALEX PETKAS: Well, they were hoping— they knew that Caesar didn’t have any ships, basically. He doesn’t have troop transports, so he’s not able to cross over and catch them and take the war to Greece. He’s not able to draw on his great advantage, which is speed. And they’re hoping to essentially kind of blockade Italy and starve them out.

Rome, if you blockade Rome, the people will starve quickly because they’re getting the majority of their grain from places like Sicily, North Africa, not yet Egypt, but it’s the biggest city in the world at that point, at least in the West, a million people maybe. And you can’t get that much grain in from the countryside on carts. So they bring it in on ships. So they’re hoping to basically starve the people of Rome and make Caesar really unpopular.

And so he doesn’t have ships, he can’t go catch them. There’s also Pompey’s got guys in Spain that start up, holding out against Caesar. And Caesar only controls Italy and Gaul. And so he has to go fight a war in Spain first before he can go catch Pompey in Greece.

Basically, by leaving Italy rather than settling it then and there, his enemies are essentially saying they’re willing to make this a world war, which is exactly what happens. There’s a war fought in Spain first. Caesar comes and he defeats them in Greece. Then he goes to Egypt. There’s another war there. Then there’s another war in Asia Minor. Then there’s a war in North Africa. And then there’s the final kind of embers of the war in Spain. I mean, he visits every single province in the Roman Empire and carries war to almost all of them.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Wow. Yeah. You mentioned Egypt there. What’s the story of Caesar and Cleopatra?

The Death of Pompey

ALEX PETKAS: Yeah. Well, so fast forward, Caesar’s first campaign is in Spain. His second campaign in the civil war is in Greece where he defeats Pompey at the Battle of Pharsalus, which really should have been the last battle, should have been the decisive battle. And Pompey flees and makes his way to Egypt. They don’t know where he went for a while, but Caesar finally figures out he’s gone to Egypt because Pompey has friends there.

As soon as he gets on shore — actually doesn’t ever reach the shore — he basically comes up with his warships and the Egyptians say, “Oh yes, we’re really glad to see you, Pompey. Come ashore. We’ve got the whole reception ready for you. Just get in this little boat. And there are reefs that a big ship like yours would probably founder on. So just trust us. We’re going to get you in this little boat and take you to shore.”

Pompey gets on the boat. He probably knows what’s going to happen, but he has no hope at this point. He’s just crestfallen. He’s dispirited. He thought he was going to win against Caesar. It was an upset victory at Pharsalus, and I think it just kind of shattered him. And I think — I’m trying to remember exactly how they frame it — there’s a moment where the boat captain is like, “Come on, Pompey. There’s nothing to be worried about. You can trust us.” And Pompey said, “If I were worried about my life, I would not get in this boat.” I think he knew, because on that boat they murdered him in front of the eyes of his son, in front of the eyes of his wife, in front of the eyes of all of his friends. Once they get a little away from the warship, he never makes it to shore. They murder him.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Who’s they?

Egypt’s Civil War and the Ptolemies

ALEX PETKAS: The Egyptians. So what’s going on in Egypt right now is there’s a civil war happening. Egypt is ruled, at this point, by the Ptolemies, who are a Greco-Macedonian ruling class. Their capital is Alexandria, which is a great Greek city founded by Alexander the Great. He’s everywhere, isn’t he?

And so there’s a conflict going on between these two siblings — one is a teenager, one’s a 20-year-old — of the pharaoh who died. It’s funny to think of these Greeks as pharaohs, but that’s what they would’ve called them in Egypt. And Pompey was hoping that all the favors he did for them earlier would ingratiate him to the Egyptian regime. But they basically saw Caesar won at Pharsalus. He’s probably going to be the winner in this war, even though it might go on for a while. What would make Caesar really happy is if we just killed Pompey and presented Caesar with Pompey’s head and said, “Hey, we did you a favor.” And if we let Pompey live, he’s probably going to try to raise an army and try to use Egypt as a base and drag on the war, and we’re going to have Roman troops just ripping this place apart.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: In the middle of our own war.

ALEX PETKAS: In the middle of our own war. It’s going to be just a total mess. So they kind of nip it in the bud. And I think what would’ve made more sense is for them to just arrest Pompey because Caesar wanted Pompey alive.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Actually, he kept on pardoning his enemies during the Civil War.

Caesar’s Clemency

ALEX PETKAS: Yes. Yes. He wanted to pardon Pompey. He pardoned enemy after enemy. Domitius, Petreius — I mean, you could list names and names. He’s always sparing his enemies. Some would say that he was too kind to his enemies, because they end up assassinating him, which we’ll get to that maybe.

And Caesar also knows that if he captures Pompey and spares him, if he could just get in the same room face-to-face with this man that he hasn’t seen the better part of 10 years, that they could work something out. He could convince Pompey to get the troops to stand down, to get everybody to stand down. There’s no way that this war could carry on if Pompey and Caesar come to an agreement finally. That’s what he really wanted. He wanted to make peace. He didn’t want to fight this war, but he was willing to fight it if they wanted to fight it with him.

And so when he lands ashore, they present him with the signet ring of Pompey. I think it had a lion on it. It was unmistakable. And then they give him the head of Pompey.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Just in case you weren’t sure.

ALEX PETKAS: Here you are.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Just in case you weren’t sure whose ring that is. Yeah.

ALEX PETKAS: Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Came from the hand of the head.

ALEX PETKAS: You know whose ring that is?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah.

ALEX PETKAS: Oh, do you know? Do you want to guess?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: There it is.

ALEX PETKAS: And that’s the second time that he’s said to have cried.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Why do you—

Caesar’s Grief Over Pompey

ALEX PETKAS: He was Consul of Rome. I think he cried because this was his friend. It really was his friend. The cynics will say that they were crocodile tears, that Caesar was secretly happy. But I think that’s totally false. He really wanted Pompey alive. And I think he did still kind of hold out hope that they would be able to come to an agreement. Of course, Caesar would be the big man now and Pompey would be kind of — his career would be over, let’s be frank, after losing a civil war. Maybe he could go into a dignified exile, but this was the father of his son before his son died. This was the man who took care of his daughter. They had this really personal relationship.

And so Caesar was actually quite pissed, and he ended up killing all the men who called the hit on Pompey. No way. Yeah, because they were basically — the sibling of the rival Ptolemies that’s controlling Alexandria is this kid Ptolemy, Ptolemy XIII. I think he’s like 15. He’s kind of being ruled by this general that he has and this court eunuch, as one has in Egypt. One needs eunuchs to do things, and one of them was the kind of chamberlain and was kind of pushing the kid around and calling the shots.

Cleopatra and the Politics of Alexandria

And so the way that the war goes, basically, Ptolemy and Cleopatra are — Cleopatra is the other sibling. I forgot to mention that. She’s off in the wilderness. Who knows where she is when Caesar arrives. Caesar is welcomed with kind of fake smiles by the Egyptians who just want the Romans gone. Egypt is not a Roman province — it’s important to understand. It’s a Roman client kingdom. They’re independent. They have their own tradition. They want to keep it that way.

Alexandria is the most glorious city in the Mediterranean. Rome might be bigger, but it’s a dirty place. Alexandria is a city of marble and culture. They’ve got the library. They’ve got Alexander’s tomb there. And they just want the Romans to kind of leave them to their own devices, maybe be allies, but basically they want Caesar gone as soon as possible.

And Ptolemy represents the kind of more Egyptian independence party in Egypt and Alexandria. He’s loved by the people, actually. Cleopatra’s actually the unpopular one. And that’s exactly the kind of person that Caesar likes to support, because the story is he’s been there for a couple of weeks.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: This is after he went to go and find Pompey.

ALEX PETKAS: Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Roman’s head and hand.

ALEX PETKAS: Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: And sticks about.

ALEX PETKAS: Yeah, he’s sticking around in Egypt, in Alexandria, trying to figure out what he’s going to do. There’s a war going on there, and anytime the Romans see a war amongst people on the fringes, they see an opportunity to come in and intervene. And that’s a way to kind of extend your power and maybe end up controlling the place directly. Egypt is by far the richest kingdom, land area in all of the Mediterranean.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Why? What have they got?

The Wealth of Egypt

ALEX PETKAS: So for one thing, they’ve got the Nile, which — you can like eat an apple and spit the seeds on the ground and just get wonderful fruit. I mean, it’s incredibly fertile because of the flooding of the Nile. They’ve also got very, very rich mines, like mineral resources in the Eastern Desert especially. So exotic marble, porphyry, gems, agate, amethyst, emerald — I don’t know what the difference between any of these things is, frankly — and they’ve got a lot of gold too in those mines. There’s still gold in Egypt. They’re still mining gold there. So it’s incredibly rich. Alexandria is a city of marble and gold, and it ends up later becoming Rome’s breadbasket. You could feed a lot of people from the Nile.

And Romans have kind of wanted — Pompey wanted to intervene in Egypt. There was another conflict with the fat king that died, the father of Cleopatra and Ptolemy. And people were hoping to pluck that cherry, but it just never worked out. It’s kind of incredible that Egypt was still independent at that point, because the greedy Roman governors had just been circling it like vultures, and they just hadn’t had their chance yet. Now Caesar has the chance. But they don’t want that to happen.

Cleopatra’s Entrance

So Cleopatra enters the story at this point. Caesar’s in the royal palace. And I don’t know if you’ve seen that movie with Elizabeth Taylor, the Cleopatra movie? So the way that they portray it in the movie is not that far off, but basically Caesar’s there in a study in the library, or in the palace. And a servant comes in with a rug and he’s like, “Caesar, we have a gift for you.” And he says, “All right, well, what’s in the rug?” And he tries to, threatens to poke at it. But basically Cleopatra sneaks herself in on a little raft and is carried in as though she’s a mattress — as like a rolled-up mattress is what Plutarch says.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Like someone’s got a yoga mat and they’re on, but it’s secretly Cleopatra.

ALEX PETKAS: Yeah, yeah. And then it’s presented to Caesar as a gift.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Jared, ChatGPT this image. I want to see what it looks like.

ALEX PETKAS: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s a great scene from the Cleopatra. It’s a rug in the movie, which is a great movie and the most expensive movie ever when it was made.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: No way.

ALEX PETKAS: Actually, yeah.

Caesar and Cleopatra

ALEX PETKAS: So she gets carried in and she knows how to make an entrance too. From that moment, Caesar sees like, all right, this is another show person like myself. She’s 20 years old. So she’s the oldest of the siblings. Speaks all kinds of languages. Obviously she knows, she’s a native Greek speaker. She speaks Egyptian and Latin and Syrian and on and on. She’s very, very charming and clever. She might not have led with her looks, but you’ll hear stories that Cleopatra was actually kind of ugly and she was more of a great conversation partner. But she was beautiful. Maybe she wasn’t like a 10, but she was an 8 at least.

Yeah, that’s a great image. See if you can do Cleopatra Elizabeth Taylor rug scene. See if that turns up some results. And she had a knack for power. She knows how to play the heartstrings of a man. She’s got— she knows Caesar’s weakness. Caesar has his weakness for smart, high-status women. He’s on his third wife now, but she’s back in Rome. Yeah, you want to play it?

VIDEO CLIP BEGINS:

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah, yeah.

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: The rug is such a delicate weave. If I may untie it for you. Turn it over first.

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: But the rug is now right side up.

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: I understand, but I want it the wrong side up. Or should I flip it over with my sword?

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: No, no, no. I find one can tell more about the quality of merchandise by examining the backside first.

UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: All hail Cleopatra, kindred of Horus and Ra, beloved of the moon son and son, daughter to Isis and of Upper and Lower Egypt, Queen.

VIDEO CLIP ENDS:

ALEX PETKAS: A damsel. Thank you. So yeah, she knows how to make an entrance, right? It was something like that. It’s not far off. And she also knows how to play the kind of wound. I mean, I think Elizabeth Taylor does that really well. Oh, my back. Oh, oh, let me help you up, madam.

So basically Cleopatra wins him over very quickly. And because she does this, she’s sort of on the losing side of the war currently. But Caesar says, “We can reconcile you guys. I’ll be your mediator.” And Ptolemy hates this idea, or rather his eunuch and his general hate this idea because they know— it’s nice that the eunuch has got such say here.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Hey, let’s listen to the guy that chopped his dick off.

ALEX PETKAS: Yeah. Well, he’s a very learned man. He has other talents.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Well, he’s got nothing else to do, right?

ALEX PETKAS: I don’t know how they did this in Egypt, but often it would be the parents that did it, like it’s an offering. Promote the kid.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: And yeah, there’s something really— you got to do it with the second one. If you do it with the first one, you’re like, if we don’t have another one, that’s the end of the bloodline.

ALEX PETKAS: Yeah. But if he does well, he could do great things for his nephews at least.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

ALEX PETKAS: There’s no way to make that a good deal. So anyway, Caesar basically offers to moderate between them and the offer is rejected. And long story short, he ends up picking Cleopatra and Ptolemy ends up—

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Who’s the younger brother?

ALEX PETKAS: The younger brother. Yeah, he ends up sort of getting his hand forced by his general Achillas and the eunuch, and they try to have another coup attempt against Caesar. Caesar defeats them, and the boy is apparently drowned in the Nile in a boating—

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: The younger brother.

ALEX PETKAS: Yeah, yeah. Not like he’s murdered, but there was a battle and he was just not found, probably drowned in the Nile. It was unfortunate.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Tight family with the Ptolemies then.

ALEX PETKAS: I mean, they are always trying to murder each other and one-up each other. And sure enough, Cleopatra has this younger sister too, Arsinoe, and she tries to revolt and Caesar crushes her as well and actually captures her and takes her back to Rome and marches her in the triumph.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Was there any suggestion that Cleopatra and Caesar got it on?

Caesar and Cleopatra’s Affair

ALEX PETKAS: Oh, more than a suggestion. They become lovers, for real. And they have a kid too, which is fascinating to think about the ramifications of this. But so yeah, basically Caesar’s never going to turn down a good offer from a high-status woman. And she’s a living goddess by Egyptian tradition. She is daughter of Isis. Not just daughter of Isis, but living embodiment of Isis. Just like she said, there’s a kind of fully God, fully human sort of thing going on with the pharaohs, son and kind of divine avatar of Amun-Ra, or is it Osiris? It’s Osiris with the pharaohs.

So anyway, she’s worshiped as a divinity while she’s alive. Great reliefs. She gets portrayed as a Greek to her Greek subjects, as the Ptolemies do, looks like a normal human kind of classical statue face. And then there are reliefs of her portrayed as like an Egyptian hieroglyphic lady too. Might be worth pulling up.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Jared, I want to say this Cleopatra Egyptian relief, something like that.

ALEX PETKAS: Really interesting place. Ptolemaic Alexandria.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It’s blending two things together. It feels like the phasing out of the old world and the phasing in of what would sort of become this, what then would be more cosmopolitan, what then would be built more around rhetoric, philosophy, what then would have been seen as modern and sort of this sort of passing off of— but you’ve got both of them happening at the same time.

ALEX PETKAS: I guess it— there you go. That’s her and I think that’s her and her brother. Oh, that’s her son. Caesarion. So there’s Cleopatra on the left. And the other one is the son of Julius Caesar. That’s their kid.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: No way. That image on the left. Open that up, Jared.

ALEX PETKAS: So there you go.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Wow. Yeah, so that’s proper 3000 BC looking, right?

ALEX PETKAS: Like that, you could— that could be like scratched into a pyramid.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah.

ALEX PETKAS: You wouldn’t know the difference.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh God, and there’s a guy in the bottom corner. Look at how huge that is.

ALEX PETKAS: Really big.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Holy sh. And that’s the son.

ALEX PETKAS: That’s the illegitimate son of Cleopatra and Julius Caesar.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Not that illegitimate. I mean, he’s 15 feet tall.

ALEX PETKAS: Looks pretty legit to me.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah, exactly. What was he called?

ALEX PETKAS: Caesarion was his nickname. Little Caesar. Yes, he started a great pizza chain and it didn’t go so well.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: And then he became a pizza magnate.

ALEX PETKAS: Saw where the real money was.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

ALEX PETKAS: His official name was, I think, like Ptolemy XIV, you know, like every single fricking person in that dynasty is named Ptolemy if they’re a boy, or either Cleopatra or Arsinoe. There’s not a lot of names. I think that might have something to do with this idea that you continue to be the embodiment of the same god through the generations.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah.

ALEX PETKAS: So you have to take on that dynastic name.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: You know Dali’s story? Salvador Dali?

ALEX PETKAS: I don’t know if I do.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: So his parents had a son about a year and a half before Dali was born— no, sorry, 2 years before Dali was born, who was also called Salvador. And that son died, and then they had another son and called him the same name. And when he was age 2, took him to his dead brother’s grave and said, “This is who you are. This is you. You are the reincarnation of your dead brother.”

ALEX PETKAS: Wow.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I mean, it’s just you. It’s you again. So that was the start of his life. Dali’s f*ing fascinating. But yeah, that was how he was sort of brought into the world as this weird recreation of a dead baby.

ALEX PETKAS: That is amazing.

The Final Days of Caesar

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah, cool, eh? All right, so what was Caesar’s last night like? You mentioned he’s accumulated a bunch of enemies, but maybe not shaken the Etch-a-Sketch enough to actually get rid of them all, keeps pardoning them. He’s maybe erroneously deciding to be forgiving. What does the final day of Caesar’s life look like?

ALEX PETKAS: So the lead-up to this is important because Caesar knows that there are assassination plots. There were even assassination plots 18 months earlier when he got back to Rome finally from the African campaign where he defeated Cato and friends. And Cicero mentions this in a speech. He gives a speech in front of Caesar. He’s like, “Caesar, I have heard, it has been said that you tell people, ‘I have lived long enough either for nature or for glory.'” Because he knows about assassination attempts and he dismisses them. He says, “You know what, if they want to kill me, I’ve had a good run.”

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: How old is he at this point?

The Last Days of Caesar

ALEX PETKAS: He is, so this is 46 when he gets back, so he would be 54, born in 100 BC, and 44 is the Ides of March when he dies. So that’s how old he ends up being. But I mean, that’s pretty old for a Roman. He’s had a pretty good run so far.

But he dismisses these plots. And the information just keeps coming in, sure and sure. People are trying to kill you, Caesar. Can you please up your security detail? Can you please give yourself a bodyguard? We’re begging you. His friends are begging him and he says, not going to do that. That’s what tyrants do.

And sure enough, this is the kind of classic mold of how tyrants seize power. Peisistratus at Athens. I mean, you can multiply a lot of examples. You get a bodyguard first. You say, “Oh no, there’s threats against my life. I need a bodyguard, citizens. I just want to be your servant.” And then that’s how you seize power. And Caesar knows that that’s the pattern. He’s not going to do it.

And it comes to the point where people are continuing to bring in names of potential conspirators. And Caesar says, “I’ve had it. Anybody bringing me more talk about an assassination plot is going to face consequences.” He’s like, you’re going to get fired if I hear another about you bringing me an assassination plot. He doesn’t want to hear it.

I think that’s because he didn’t want to rule over a subjugated, cowed populace. He wanted to rule over free Romans. And he didn’t want a police state. He wanted people to feel free to say whatever they wanted to say. This is clearly demonstrated by a lot of his actions. People are criticizing him. They’re making jokes at Caesar’s expense. There are certain lines that you don’t cross. But he doesn’t want to up his security detail.

The Night Before the Ides of March

The very last night, the 14th of March, it’s a normal day of business, a busy day at work, and he’s got this incredible crushing burden of cases to hear and petitions and laws needing passing. He’s also preparing for this great expedition to Parthia. He’s going to avenge Crassus. Crassus was killed by the Parthians. They captured Roman eagles about 10 years earlier. So he’s just trying to get through the next 3 days to get out of town and go back to — I mean, Caesar was good at politics, but I think —

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Better at war.

ALEX PETKAS: I think he’s better at war.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah.

ALEX PETKAS: Or he’s equally as good at war. It’s probably a happier place for him.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Even in BC times, people were still drowning in admin, is what you’re saying?

ALEX PETKAS: Oh yeah. I mean, the load that he’s carrying. Yeah, it’s a universal problem. Once they invent writing, it’s over.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: F*ing game over. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s the email inbox of ancient Rome.

ALEX PETKAS: Yeah. And it’s funny you should mention email. So, on the last night, Caesar is having dinner. As you know, he has a formal dinner every night. There’s like 9 seats at a typical Roman feast. You circle around on couches around a central table and everybody kind of lies down. It’s weird, but that’s how they did it. And horrible for the digestion. But one advantage is everybody has to have the same conversation because you’re all pointed toward the center of the circle.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah. As opposed to an elongated table.

ALEX PETKAS: Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: So this group over there is speaking like that and this group — that’s interesting. I remember, was it — who was it that suggested that the size of glasses of wine were getting too big around the table? Was it maybe Aristotle? And he made a special kind of cup. And if you overfilled the cup, the entire thing drained.

ALEX PETKAS: Oh yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Basically his problem was that he wanted to have these really interesting conversations at dinner and people were just getting too drunk. This is before coffee came around. And there’s this interesting story which you —

ALEX PETKAS: Before Nutonic and —

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Before Nutonic. I mean, they should have had the nootropic toothpicks. Yeah. There’s that big transition, was it in sort of the Middle Ages in the UK where Britain started to go from just having ale houses to having coffee shops as well. And this is a boon in innovation. Because people aren’t just pissed all the time. They’re just not drunk as much. They’re stimulated and they’re going and getting stuff done.

Anyway, I think it’s Aristotle that had this issue. And his problem was, I want to go to dinner and have all of these interesting conversations, but everybody drinks their wine so fast that the conversation degenerates into nothingness. So his suggestion was to his host to make the cups smaller. He says people will drink the same number, but they’ll not realize that they’re having less.

And there’s supposed to be, I think it’s like an Aristotelian cup. Jared, do a ChatGPT search. What was the ancient cup that was made to ensure people didn’t overfill it? Maybe Aristotle. And it’s this interesting point that, okay, well, if we reduce it down, it means that the conversational quality will be a bit better. But I suppose if you’re sat in a — you’re probably thinking of the Pythagorean cup.

ALEX PETKAS: Pythagoras.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah, also called the cup of greed or greedy cup. It’s a special drinking cup from ancient Greece designed so that if you fill it past a certain level, it empties completely.

ALEX PETKAS: Hmm.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Isn’t that cool?

ALEX PETKAS: That’s brilliant. Oh, it’s because it’s a siphon.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah, that’s right. It’s got a hidden siphon inside the central column. If you pour wine below the marked line, the cup works normally. If you pour above the line, the siphon activates and the entire cup drains out through the bottom of the stem. For someone who tries to take more than their fair share, they end up with nothing. Legend says Pythagoras used it to teach moderation and fairness among workers or students, and the lesson is greed causes you to lose everything. Isn’t that f*ing cool?

ALEX PETKAS: So Greek.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Isn’t that sick?

ALEX PETKAS: Moderation.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yep.

Caesar’s Final Dinner

ALEX PETKAS: Wise man, Pythagoras. Well, it’s funny because in Plato’s Symposium they decide to pour the wine — they pour water in the wine often for moderation so that you drink less. But they wanted to pour the wine really, really light that night because they all got smashed the night before and they want to have a chill conversation that night. But Cato, Caesar’s nemesis, was actually known to be a bit of a tippler. He would often show up to the Senate kind of smelling of wine.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yep.

ALEX PETKAS: But that would be because he liked to drink for a long time having philosophical conversations. And it was this kind of conversation that was happening on Caesar’s last night. So Caesar is at the house of Lepidus and he invites a number of people to be among the Nine. Lepidus is a good trusted friend of his, and one of them is Decimus Brutus. This is not the Brutus that appears in Shakespeare’s play Julius Caesar, you know, “And you too, Brutus.” It’s a different Brutus, but actually was a Brutus that was closer to Caesar in point of fact historically, funny enough.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: So does Shakespeare get that confused? Does he amalgamate the two on purpose?

ALEX PETKAS: Plutarch gets it confused. This is like one of the kind of flaws of Plutarch’s biography of Caesar. He thinks that Marcus Brutus, who is actually not — I mean, close to Caesar, he is because he’s the son of Caesar’s favorite girlfriend, Servilia. But Decimus Brutus was a lot closer to him because he was a lieutenant of his in Gaul. I mean, they’re distantly related, these two Brutuses, but they’re not close or anything. But Decimus was like naval commander against the Veneti. He’s been brilliant in the civil war, crucial in the Battle of Marseille. And in fact, Decimus Brutus was in his will as a second.

Decimus is one of the men who stabbed him the very next day. He’s sitting there with him at dinner the night before. They’re sitting there having their conversation as one does. A lot of final night scenes of great Romans and great Greeks are these philosophical conversations. And I think that’s because they had them a lot, actually. It was very normal. And so —

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Like the Last Supper for Jesus. That’s — I mean, there were maybe a few additions, but he was probably speaking like that most of the time.

ALEX PETKAS: Yeah, he was like, “All right, here we go again.” Just a Tuesday. So Caesar is sitting there as the conversation’s going on. I find this really fascinating. He’s clearing his inbox actually, because he’s a busy guy. One has to. And his secretary’s sitting there kind of feeding him letters that need to go out that he needs to sign.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Mm-hmm.

ALEX PETKAS: And so he’s writing sincerely on them, signing his name. But the way you do that in Latin, the custom is you write vale — farewell. So all through the night he’s writing farewell, farewell, farewell on these letters.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: And that’s what you would have done typically?

ALEX PETKAS: That’s what you would have done to say goodbye. But I mean, the fact that he’s filling out letters during dinner — this guy has got a shit ton of work to do. And he’s just trying to get — it’s brainless. He’s just kind of, yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever. Yes. And go on, Cassius. Yes.

I find that striking. But at some point in the night, he proposes a theme for the philosophical conversation that’s going on. Decimus is sitting right there. What is the best kind of death? And the conversation goes this way and that way. Somebody brings up the example of Cyrus the Great, the great King of Persia who founded the Persian Empire. Xenophon says, doesn’t he, that Cyrus made all these arrangements before his death, that he wanted to be buried in this way and this should happen and so forth after he was gone.

And of course Caesar had read this book, Xenophon’s Cyropaedia, and Caesar’s turn comes to him and he says, “That sounds horrible. I don’t want a long, slow death. The best kind of death is one that comes sudden, swift, and unexpected.” You know, what is Decimus thinking at that moment? But that’s well attested that that’s what the conversation was about at some point that night.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Prophetic.

ALEX PETKAS: Yeah, man. And then he goes home late and bad dreams. If you’ve read the Shakespeare play, there’s all these omens. His wife has this dream — she gets him up in the middle of the night, the wind blows open the shutters and he has to get up and shut them and calm down Calpurnia. And she had this dream that she was holding the bloody Caesar and looking at their house as it’s burning and collapsing. And there’s all these birds acting weird. So the story goes.

A lot of these omens typically happen around great events in the ancient sources, but who knows? The murder of a guy like Julius Caesar really is a kind of — if ever a death is a rip in the fabric of reality, that comes pretty close. So that was how he spent his last night. It was a very unsettled night.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: And what about the next day?

The Ides of March: Caesar’s Final Day

ALEX PETKAS: Caesar has a reputation for dismissing omens. He did this when he was consul. His enemies are trying to obstruct him in the assemblies and they’re saying, “Oh, I saw a bird flying the wrong way,” and “I heard thunder.” It’s a blue sky. And he’s like, “I didn’t hear you though. Let’s get on with business.” He just ignores omens for most of his career. Sometimes the omens are bad and he’s like, let’s fight the battle anyway. And he wins.

But his wife is saying, “I had a bad dream. I don’t have a good feeling about this.” Ancient omens, I think, are often kind of a system that’s in place. So before you go into a campaign, or before you go into battle, you sacrifice to the gods, you cut open a piglet or whatever it is, and you read the entrails, or you get the sacred chickens out and you see, all right, do the sacred chickens want to eat their feed or are they staying in their cage? What does this mean? It’s kind of like opening up a space for intuition.

Leaders often have to make decisions that could be the right decision, but to have to explain why you’re making that decision would undermine the project somehow. You want to have a way of explaining intuition. That’s how a lot of anthropologists explain it. I think that’s really compelling.

His wife had a bad feeling. He apparently had a bad feeling at some point as well. He was apparently having stomach issues — it’s unspecified, but he felt out of sorts that morning, and he was supposed to go to the Senate. There was some important business at hand, a dispute between Mark Antony and Dolabella, blah, blah, blah. And he’s like, maybe I don’t want to go to the Senate today. I’m feeling out of sorts. My wife is telling me to stay home.

He goes down the street — he lives in the Forum, the Senate’s meeting about a mile away. He goes down the street to a buddy’s house to say hi, and they do a little sacrifice, and that sacrifice contains bad omens. We don’t know the details, but he decides to just stay home that day.

And who shows up at his door but Decimus Brutus, the guy he was having dinner with last night. He says, “Caesar, I heard you are listening to the ravings of a woman. I’ve never heard Caesar to be bothered by omens in his career. Think of all the battles that we’ve won after bad omens. Come on, Caesar, let’s — the Senate’s counting on you. They all cleared their schedules. They’re busy men. And you’re really trying to make them feel like Rome is the same Rome.”

This is a whole other issue — he is kind of becoming this monarchic figure in Rome. He’s getting accused of wanting to make himself king. He’s getting accused of wanting to make himself a god, which is not entirely off base. We could get to that. But Decimus makes some good arguments. “Come on, soldier up.” He’s a fellow soldier. And so Caesar reluctantly at first allows himself to be persuaded by Decimus.

Whenever Caesar goes anywhere in Rome, the crowds, the throngs, people are saying, “Caesar, kiss my baby,” or “Can you cancel my debt,” blah, blah, blah. But apparently he had a client, a friend of his whose house he had stayed at in Asia once. The young man, the son of the house, was in Rome studying philosophy and was probably connected with the other Brutus, Marcus Brutus, who was one of the ringleaders of the assassination. And this kid — I forget what his name is — comes up to Caesar. Caesar knows him, and he passes a letter to Caesar. He says, “Caesar, you have to read this urgently.”

Caesar’s probably being carried on a litter, but he gets the letter, and apparently Caesar has this in his hand and plans to read it. But this would have been basically the guy trying to tell him about the plot that was very much in action that day.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Underway.

ALEX PETKAS: That was underway, that he was walking right into.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: So Brutus went to try and encourage Caesar to leave the home, to sort of question his agency and sovereignty and belief in himself, to remind him of what he’d done in the past — in an attempt to get him out of the house so that he could be carried through so that he could arrive at the place for the assassination.

The Assassination

ALEX PETKAS: Well put. Yeah. So that was the Senate meeting where they ended up doing the deed, murdering him in the Senate. The two Brutuses — the one that he was having dinner with the night before was the guy who got him to come, the guy that’s in his will. Incredible.

He gets to the Senate House. Once again, the omens are bad, as you always sacrifice and do whatever you do before going into the Senate to inaugurate the meeting. Consuls usually do this. I think Caesar’s consul that year. Omens are bad, but he goes in anyway.

He’s in the Senate House, and his throne as dictator is right under the statue of Pompey the Great. Because the place that they’re actually meeting is not the old Senate House, which burned down a couple of years earlier. It’s this new complex that Pompey built with the spoils of his war in the East. It’s like a room off the complex that Pompey built for the Senate to meet in.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: In the Forum?

ALEX PETKAS: It’s outside the pomerium, it’s in the Campus Martius now. It was an area that wasn’t very built up, so you could plant this massive stone complex with multiple buildings pretty easily in this unclaimed land. So he had to actually walk from the Forum. It’s probably a 20-minute walk. But that is where the Senate is now officially meeting.

And of course there was a statue of Pompey as conqueror in this prominent place in the Senate House. It’s in front of the statue of Pompey the Great that the petitioners come up — or that the assassins come up — pretending to have some urgent business. “Please, my brother is in exile, Caesar. Can you get him pardoned?” “No, this is not the time.” “Please, Caesar.” And Brutus comes up and Decimus comes up, the other Brutus, and Cassius comes up. “Caesar, this is a worthy friend of yours. We beg you, please, you must spare.”

And then that’s when they have him distracted. They grab his robe. And at some point before he actually gets stabbed, he’s like — they’re grabbing him — “What’s going on here? This is violence.” And that’s, I think, when he realizes, at least when the first blow is struck, every man surrounding him — it’s 15 or 20 guys probably. There were more people in on the plot, but some are holding the doors, keeping the perimeter to make sure.

And then they did the deed. After they stab him, there is that moment that is in Plutarch where he turns to Brutus — the more famous one — and remember, he’s the son of Caesar’s top girlfriend, Servilia. He had a relationship with this kid, like he was looking out for his career, he was promoting him. The kid fought on Pompey’s side in the Civil War for some family reasons, but he spared him. So many of these men he spared, and some of them are his trusted, long-term loyalists. It’s not just former enemies that were spared and were resentful. It’s former loyalists.

And he says to Brutus, “You too, child.” “Kai su teknon — et tu, Brute,” as Shakespeare says.

And then he bleeds out. Who knows how long it takes, but amazingly, the Senate clears out. Pandemonium. To kill Julius Caesar — this is like a horrifying idea because it really threatens to plunge the Republic back into civil war again.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Mm-hmm.

ALEX PETKAS: He’s the lid holding it all down. This is why Cicero told him that he needs to have a bodyguard because so much is at stake. “If you get killed now, we’re all screwed.” That’s what Cicero was saying 18 months earlier, and he was very much correct.

The Senate House clears out and he’s just there alone on the floor, and nobody wants to approach him and draw close because they’re afraid that one of the assassins will see them and implicate them. Nobody knows the potential risk of tending to Caesar’s body. And so he just lies there for hours.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: That becomes complicit. Yeah.

ALEX PETKAS: Yeah. And then eventually some of Caesar’s slaves go in there. They can only find 3 men.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Men.

ALEX PETKAS: It takes 4 men to hold a litter. They can only find 3 guys to carry Caesar’s body back to his house. And it starts to rain on their way back, and the streets are lined. People see his arm hanging out, and he’s brought back to Calpurnia.

Still gets me. I think that you could say a lot about Caesar, but he managed to identify his own success, his own legacy with what he saw as the flourishing of Rome. It wasn’t just about his own glory — or it was, but to the extent that he felt like he was the man most responsible for whether the state survived and flourished. But that’s not how his enemies saw it, was it?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What convinced them that he needed to go?

The Assassination and the End of the Republic

ALEX PETKAS: Well, they saw that after the Civil War, Caesar was unquestionably not just the first among equals, not just the first man in Rome, but like something was changing. You know, Caesar had fought all of his career to end corruption and the stranglehold of the establishment oligarchy over offices. I mean, there was incredible wealth inequality and there’s this kind of tight clique of people that control everything and they get to abuse the provincials at will.

The typical way that you rise up in Rome is by winning elections and then going out and being governor. And usually it’s very expensive to get elected, and then you have to go into debt and you recoup your money by robbing the Greeks or the Gauls or the Spaniards and taking bribes and stuff. It’s a system that highly incentivizes corruption. And Caesar wanted to change that, among other things.

And I think he eventually decided that this whole game that we’ve been playing at Rome for 450 years since the Republic was founded, since they drove out the kings — you gotta remember the Romans have been inoculated against kings much in the same way we are as Americans. America was founded by us rejecting King George III. Rome was, the Republic rather, was founded by driving out Tarquin the Proud, who was this brutal, corrupt tyrant in their eyes. And then it was a collective government. You have elections for office, you have assemblies to vote on laws and all this stuff. That’s what the Republic is to them. That’s what Rome is to them.

And this is also the game that people like Decimus Brutus, his friend Brutus, the other Brutus, Cassius, basically everybody in the Republic, everybody in the leadership classes had been playing, had been expecting to play for their whole lives, which is, you know, this is how you get honor. You get honor by service to the Republic. You get honor by winning elections. You get honor by winning wars.

But now Caesar is basically trying to kind of transition the political system into something resembling a monarchy. He doesn’t want to call it a kingship. He doesn’t want to call himself king, but he’s really deliberately taking all the authority into himself because I think he sees that his legacy depends on it. If he releases power, he’s kind of a control freak, you might say. If he lets go, then it’s all going to kind of dissolve again, that people are going to undo his legislation and they’re going to go back to revert to the way that things were. And this is one of the reasons why he just feels like he has to hold on to power.

But what it puts him in this uncomfortable position for is every honor in the past used to be given by the Roman people. You used to have supreme responsibility as a consul. If you’re going to command Rome’s armies, you are the guy who wins the victory. If you win the consulship, it’s because the people of Rome elected you consul and so on and so on. Honor is granted by the state.

And now it seems clear Caesar’s been handing out offices basically. Like he’s been picking the consuls, he’s been picking the praetors, he’s been drafting the laws and getting the Senate to rubber stamp them. All the honor flows from this one man. And how is that not slavery in the eyes of a proud Roman?

Honor, Ambition, and the Great-Souled Man

ALEX PETKAS: Aristotle talks about the most difficult thing that a politician has to do, their most important duty of a statesman, is to correctly, wisely distribute honors. Because this is, for a guy like Caesar and for a guy like Decimus, for any of these super Chad Roman statesman aspirants, the thing, the prize that you’re playing for is not wealth, at least it shouldn’t be. It’s not pleasure. It’s not fame as such or status as such. It’s honor.

That’s what Aristotle would say, that the highest form of the statesman, the great-souled man, is one who desires great things, considers himself worthy of them, and is correct in that judgment. And that means being worthy of great things. But what are the greatest things to desire? I mean, this is a question that’s perplexed philosophers. What is a good life? What is worthy of desire? What does it mean to be worthy of something? And Aristotle says the highest thing that you can desire of external goods is honor.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: The price that you would be paid for a ransom note.

ALEX PETKAS: Yeah. Yeah, essentially. And you know, you can desire virtue, you can desire inner peace, you can desire wholeness, you can desire wisdom, but those are all internal goods. But of the things that you can kind of strive for, it’s honor. And so this is the highest prize that an ambitious man could make a career on. Pursue virtue, you need to be virtuous to be really worthy of honor, et cetera. And for a great-souled man, even honor is maybe a small prize because honor can be corrupted, right? Corrupt people get voted honors all the time.

So I don’t think that’s a problem Caesar had solved. He’s a brilliant, brilliant statesman, legislator, politician, brilliant with people. But to get a whole political class of ambitious young men — I mean, all the guys that kill him are like late 30s, early 40s. They’re like in their prime and they still got a lot of gas left — and they’re seeing the whole game has been just screwed. Like, “I was raised to want honor, and honor is what the people of Rome give you. And now I’m supposed to do all of this stuff that I was going to do, command armies, pass laws. I’m going to do it all as Caesar’s employee, right? Never a boss. Never a patron, always a client.” I think that was intolerable for them. It was like a meaning crisis for them.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: But the situation that they did put themselves into is that for the rest of time, they would be seen as an assassin.

ALEX PETKAS: Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I mean, I guess maybe it’s preferable to be a powerful assassin than a peaceful subordinate, maybe in Roman times, or at least in their version of this philosophy.

ALEX PETKAS: Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: You know, it was an interesting blend to think that it would be better to be mutinous and a rebel against somebody that was a great leader, but may have pushed the power too far, compared with being a part of an existing structure that had sort of raised Rome up to be a really great empire.

ALEX PETKAS: Yeah, at the very least, they saw more meaning in that path than the other path at the time.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: There’s more self-determination.

ALEX PETKAS: Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Which is super important.

ALEX PETKAS: They had a lot more agency. I mean, it’s very understandable. Dante still puts them in the 9th circle of hell. Betraying a friend.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: F*.

ALEX PETKAS: Yeah.

Closing and a Gift from History

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Alex, you absolutely rule, dude. This has been so much fun. So great. And there’s, you know, literally 2,000 years of history that we could go through.

ALEX PETKAS: Before we close, I got you a little gift.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Oh, thank you.

ALEX PETKAS: You know, I don’t know how much of a Roman Empire fan you are, Chris, but I’m trying to make you one.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Okay.

ALEX PETKAS: So this is a coin that I got from Kinzer Coins, which I recommend. It’s Hadrian. You’re a Northern Brit, right?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yep. I’ve been to Hadrian’s Wall many a time.

ALEX PETKAS: I figured. And you know, if you look at this, he’s got a nice little beard. I mean, I see a little resemblance there. As a matter of fact, it says on there “Hadrianus Augustus” — Hadrian Augustus. And dude, this is so cool. It says COS on the other side. That means consul. So it was minted when he was a consul.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: And is that, are those stars? I think they’re stars on the, what would be the bottom?

ALEX PETKAS: Yeah, this is a — what is on the back?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: That someone stood in a toga.

ALEX PETKAS: Yeah. I think that this is Roma. Who’s Roma? She’s the goddess that embodies, like, the divine tutelary goddess of Rome.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I can’t believe you got me that.

ALEX PETKAS: Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Dude, that is so f*ing cool.

ALEX PETKAS: Hadrian is the last emperor that Plutarch lived under. He was, so he’s kind of special to me. Not to be emulated in everything, you know, Hadrian did a lot of things Greek style, but he was a great fan of the Greeks, the patron of the Greeks. So this is so good. Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Thank you so much. This honestly is — I could have sat and listened to you for the rest of the month. Where should people go? You’ve got so much stuff going on.

ALEX PETKAS: Yeah. Cost of Glory podcast, wherever you get your podcasts. Spotify. I’m on YouTube too. We’re trying to make more videos to the audio content. And you can go to costofglory.com and I do other stuff beside the podcast.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: You have retreats and stuff, right?

ALEX PETKAS: Yeah, yeah. We run retreats in Greece and Rome.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Do men go and reenact? Is this LARPing? Are they reenacting killing Caesars?

ALEX PETKAS: We haven’t done a LARP battle yet. We’ve gotten some demand from that and we’ve got —

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: You’re really tapping into the men think about the Roman Empire once every 30 minutes thing.

ALEX PETKAS: Yeah, we’re trying to crank that up. It’s not enough.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I want to get it up to every 15.

ALEX PETKAS: Never enough.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah.

ALEX PETKAS: Can you ever forget it?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Oh man, this is so good, dude. Today’s been unreal. I appreciate you. I can’t wait to have you back on.

ALEX PETKAS: Yeah, anytime.

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