The Storm Before the Storm The Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic

There is one really good book by podcaster Mike Duncan, who does the Revolutions podcast called The Storm Before the Storm.

As early as 195, Cato the Elder warned his colleagues, 'We have crossed into Greece and Asia, places filled with all the allurements of vice, and we are handling the treasures of kings. I fear that these things will capture us rather than we them.'

Every few years, the Senate would attempt to rein in the ostentatious displays of wealth, but the resulting limitations inevitably went unheeded and unenforced. By fatal coincidence, the Roman people at the same moment both acquired a taste for vice and obtained a license for gratifying it.

There is one really good book by podcaster Mike Duncan, who does the Revolutions podcast called The Storm Before the Storm. That's the one I would recommend if you want to read a book like that.

As early as 195, Cato the Elder warned his colleagues, 'We have crossed into Greece and Asia, places filled with all the allurements of vice, and we are handling the treasures of kings. I fear that these things will capture us rather than we them.'

Every few years, the Senate would attempt to rein in the ostentatious displays of wealth, but the resulting limitations inevitably went unheeded and unenforced. By fatal coincidence, the Roman people at the same moment both acquired a taste for vice and obtained a license for gratifying it.

quote, the Senate met in a furious session to denounce Tiberius as a reckless demagogue aiming to make himself a tyrannical despot, end quote

One of my favorite books is this book called The Storm Before the Storm.

the idea is that we kind of just see Caesar crossing the Rubicon one day as if it just popped into his head, as if there wasn't all this history and all these other events leading up to this other major event.

It's an amazing book. You absolutely have to read it.

He says, look, what Julius Caesar did, what happened in that lifetime is the epilogue to a story that stretches back almost 100 years.

And he looks at the events which lead up to the collapse of the republic, the normalization of mob violence, the normalization of political violence, assassinations, people breaking the rules, people not following the norms, people thinking that they alone were the solution to the republic's problems.

And then also on the other end of the spectrum, people who had their head in the sand and thought that nothing needed to change. Cato being a great example of this and the dysfunction and the gridlock of the Roman system over not in one person's lifetime, but generations lead to a kind of a pent-up energy and a frustration. And then this thing goes very, very quickly.

the first couple of chapters of the book are just extremely relevant to what we're facing right now like as a country.

By the way there are plenty of books at Suckerberg ought to read these days in that vein, including amusing ourselves to death, the storm before the storm, the brass check, the filter bubble and trust me online.

As Mike Duncan writes in his fabulous book The Storm Before The Storm and as we talked about our interview here on The Daily Stoic you can listen to.

when i had one of my favorite books and i'm forgetting the author's name let me just look it up uh what's it called before the storm oh so i interviewed for for the podcast no no not for the podcast this is a written interview but i interviewed this guy mike duncan who wrote a great book called the storm before the storm which is a history of the 100 years of Rome before julia cesar overthrew the republic um and and i was talking to him about what stillex um you know he was interested in he mentioned this guy rutilius rufus who i'd seen mentioned in some usenica's writings but i really knew nothing about him and and and steve who did a lot of the groundwork on lives of the stoics and my job was to sort of write the stories um i said steve i'd love for you to find everything we possibly can about rutilius rufus and he said you know there's really like nothing about him like i'm you know maybe this will fill like a few paragraphs but we we managed to find so much stuff on him that he that he ended up getting his own chapter and it's it's actually one of my favorite chapters in the books um he's this guy for people who haven't read lives of the stoics um rutilius rufus was this was a governor he's a stoic uh philosopher he's a governor of this roman province and he's brought up on false charges um for corruption actually he wasn't corrupt he was brought up he was sort of a trumpian thing where he sort of accused uh his enemies accuse him of exactly the thing he's he's uh that they are guilty of and anyway so he's he's brought up on these false charges and he ends up being exiled but he but he's allowed to choose where he wants to be exiled and he chooses the country that he was chosen of uh that he was fraudulently accused of defrauding and they of course welcomed him with open arms because he was a very honest guy and so it's just a fascinating story and I think really illustrates like you know a stoics are struggling in the in the real world

A while back when we had Mike Duncan on the podcast, whose fantastic book The Storm Before the Storm is a must read for anyone that's trying to understand what's happening in the world today, he said that by looking at the events of the 100 years leading up to the rise of Julius Caesar, we can understand not just what went wrong in Rome, but what's going wrong today in so many modern nations.

Today's episode, I wanted to go back even further to one of my absolute favorite books, a book I've recommended many, many times. I won't get into it because we talked about it in the interview but has totally changed my understanding of what's happening in the world right now. And it did when I first read it in 2017.

The book is The Storm Before the Storm by the great Mike Duncan.

people think that Julius Caesar just happened that he just overthrew the Roman Republic out of you know force of personality or genius or necessity you know sort of depending on where you come down but that it was sort of in he was an aberration that it was a force of nature essentially. But the argument of your book is like no history doesn't just happen 100 years of smaller events contributed to that happening and you have to you don't start at Julius Caesar if you want to understand why the Roman Republic fell you have to look at the generation before and the generation before that and the generation before that and what the storm before the storm does is give you is sets the table to then understand what you heard about from Shakespeare or movies or anything like that.

That's exactly what I was trying to do and that is exactly you know sort of what I discovered for myself when I was writing The History of Rome and going through all those episodes and one of the things that I have said you know coming out of The History of Rome and this remains true is that if you talk to people just out in the general public you know what do they know about Roman history start telling me things about Roman history they will tell you things that are really confined to about a hundred year period of the sort of thousand years that at least the Western Roman Empire existed and it usually starts around Julius Caesar.