118 - Is Julius Caesar in Heaven?

If Caesar with all his genius could not find a way out, who will find one now? Those are the ominous words of Gaius Matius, who was, I don't know who he is really, but he is. Some Roman writing to his friend, though, Cicero. Matius was a friend of Caesar, I should mention that, but it's less than a month after the Ides of March. As with the death of the dictator, Rome was plunged into another 13 more years of civil war, just as Caesar foretold, and Matius is sort of seeing this starting to happen. In this war, series of wars lasted all the way up to 31 BC, when Octavian finally defeated Antony of the Battle of Actium. That's a story that we're going to cover in the lives of several more men, later on the show. But Gaius Julius Caesar died 2,070 years ago, and this story seems somehow like it still matters very much. In this episode, I have some thoughts on Caesar's unique strengths and peculiar challenges, as well as some considerations which I haven't heard anyone else mention about how Caesar explains our current moment. So that in this episode also, but with Caesar's approximate net worth at the time of his death, and finally, is it possible to love both Caesar and, say, Christ, or Moses, or America, or democracy, or whatever? These are kind of versions of the same question. In other words, what should our moral attitude be to the man? Well, let's get to it. This is Alex Petkis, your listening to the cost of glory, etc. But before we get started, I want to shout out to a very well-known and accomplished author, who recently took the time to have lunch with me and some friends in Austin, Ward Farmsworth. Mr. Farmsworth is the author of many books relevant to our purposes here, and I've used several of them, notably the practicing stoic and Farmsworth's classical English rhetoric. His books are generally amazing collections that give you a ton of primary sources selected to the purpose. He's a practitioner of philosophy in rhetoric, too. He's been a law professor at UT Austin for many years, and he's also just a very generous man and a fun guy. So thank you, Ward. Also a big quick thank you to our sponsors who help keep the lights on here. First, shock works, the unique AI transformation company working with middle-market enterprise level clients, committed to building an age of renewed Western flourishing. I think AI is here to stay, whether you like it or not. It's good to know that there are high-level people out there who are committed to seeing this transition through with the virtues of classical statesmanship. So thanks, shock works, and a big thanks also to Dr. Richard Johnson, Caesar's Top Guy. Now I like to cite my sources for these series as a whole, and so I'm going to do that real quick for you. To be exhaustive would be exhausting for you, but here are some of the books and writings that have been most important to me in putting together this whole series. So the single best thing to read about Caesar, as always, is Plutarch's biography of the man, which strongly influenced every modern reader really, and Shakespeare especially. And besides Caesar, there's also the lives of other guys that Plutarch covers, you know, Sala, Pompey, Crassus, Cato, Cicero, Brutus, Antony. And of course I use Plutarch extensively. Plutarch was able to both appreciate Caesar's unique, demonic greatness and make the case that he had serious flaws. Maybe more serious than I've given time for in this series, but you know, I felt that plenty of people have already done that whole, you know, Caesar's flaws thing, and it's a little harder now to give Caesar a truly sympathetic read today, which is what I always try to do with these characters. And still, of course, you should make up your own mind. But Plutarch paired Caesar, of course, with Alexander the Great, who I'm actually going to cover soon on the show. I've been reading a lot about Alexander. And it's a shame that Plutarch though didn't write a biography of Philip of Macedon, whose Alexander's father, because in many ways I think he'd be a better fit for Caesar as to pair. The guy who started from very little, built a great constituency. He sees his power. He's a military genius and an innovator. He gets assassinated, you know, before a great Persian expedition. His work was continued by a successor. Will hit Philip sometime for sure. So there's Plutarch for you. There's also among the sources, Suetonius' gossipy, cynical, and uneven biography of Caesar, which nonetheless is invaluable for people trying to understand the man, because he's got a lot of anecdotes and facts that we don't get anywhere else. There are also Caesar's brilliant commentaries. The landmark edition is great for this. Also many speeches of Cicero are crucial for me. And they offer so much genuine color. Cicero was kind of an all of Caesar who's charmed at times, suspicious at other times, maddened and furious. But Cicero never underestimated Caesar. All right. And then Cassius Diode is also a good source. He offers the main continuous narrative of Caesar's times. It's interesting and important. Cassius Diode is somewhat positive, somewhat hostile, depending on the extent to which the source that he's drawing on is either of those things. There are also a lot of very lengthy, almost completely made-up speeches in Cassius Diode. Some of them are not all that interesting. Some of them are very worth considering. And also Appian's Civil War is an important continuous narrative, but Cassius Diode goes into a lot more detail. And he's like a better historian. For secondary sources, the best scholarly biography that I've read is Matthias Gelser's Caesar politician and statesman. It's got almost all the necessary ancient sources in these copious footnotes. The footnotes contain many quotes in Greek and Latin. It's a hugely insightful work. I think it's probably useful for a non-specialist. It's largely sympathetic to, and it's tragic even in a pleasing way. Adrian Goldsworthy's Caesar life of a colossus highly recommend. And I found that he follows Gelser pretty closely in most places, with a bit more coverage of the battles. It's more readable than Gelser probably. It's very fair and balanced. Then James Anthony Froode, F-R-U-U-D-E, Caesar a sketch. It's very worth reading. Less serious on the scholarship end, but he's a great Victorian writer with a flair for the grand narrative. Froode was a friend of Thomas Carlisle, the great man history guy. They seem to have had a little bit of a falling out later in life. I look up the story. But Froode is definitely a Caesar appreciator in the way that a man can appreciate a lion without any pretense of portraying it as a nice animal. So Froode is a good read. And Friedrich Gundolf's mantle of Caesar is one of the most penetrating minds that I've read on Caesar. He's an early 20th century German writer. Gundolf is really good. He's more of an artist than a historian. I mean, he has the historian's skill set, but he's kind of like a prose poem in a lot of ways. But he sketches a few brilliant contours of the real man in the early chapter of the book. Then he moves on for most of the book to the effect that Caesar, you know, his shadow cast upon later centuries of history. But Gundolf's definitely worth reading. At least the first part, if you want to kind of get something different about the man. And finally, Barry Strauss's death of Caesar is very recent. It's a great engaging, finely examined look at Caesar's final year or so. And then, you know, his death, the conspirators who pulled it off, their motives, their methods, and their fates in the days that followed. So much for sources. And thank you to all the other minor sources that I didn't mention here, which would be exhausting. Okay, now then. So I've been revisiting Napoleon's life recently, together with some other gentleman of the classical society, on which more in a moment. And Napoleon, as you may know, greatly looked up to Caesar. And one thing that they famously had in common was their speed. And I want to talk about this. So Caesar is very obviously a fast operator, personally. He's got a quick mind. He makes quick decisions. He's efficient and so on. But the kind of speed that he was able to muster had a lot more to do with his ability to impart that speed to others, like say a whole army or the administrative organizational structure that he built to run that army and then largely run the state independent of the normal Republican governmental structures. And Napoleon once said, this is very interesting. The first qualification of a soldier is fortitude under fatigue and privation. Courage is only the second. How about that? You know, you normally think of courage being the foundational virtue of military life. But Napoleon says, winning a war is more about fortitude under fatigue and privation. Why does he say that? I think it's because this is one of the secrets to speed. That is to say, speed is more about endurance than haste or quickness. It's about your ability to keep going when the others expect you to be resting. Think of Caesar's forced marches, showing up when his enemy thought he was days away. Think about his men outpacing Pompey the Great in Greece by pulling multiple all-nighters, like ravenous wolves. And this reminds me of Stonewall Jackson's legendary Stonewall Brigade in the Civil War. These weren't beefy sprinters. They looked more like emaciated barefoot, scragally bearded marathon runner ragdolls. But the Stonewall Brigade won and won and won because they could show up when and where the enemy least expected them. I think Caesar's soldiers probably looked like that too for a lot of the time. But this applies to so much of life. Often what looks like speed is endurance. It affects your ability to outpace your rivals. Stay alive and escape when death or failure are closing in on you. It's good to find ways to practice squeezing out those few extra minutes. The marathon, not a sprint, for the most part. And to get other people to do that means motivating them constantly. Whether it's regular guys or officers, you may have to motivate them with the hopes of riches and honor, or maybe it's a bigger transcendent vision of the historical stakes. Their role in the grand story. Men of France. But you're always motivating them not to march another 50 miles, but rather another one mile, and then another one mile, and on and on. So you kind of have to keep at it. And remember that your job as a leader is in part to constantly tell people to keep at it. The speed doesn't solve all problems. Caesar was under intense pressure in the final weeks of his life, and he was racing to get out of there to his party and campaign when they assassinated him. And we'll talk more about the motivations of the conspirators when we do the life of Brutus coming soon. But when the assassins raised their bloody daggers, and later their war banners, they were talking about restoring the Republic and Liberty and these kind of things. But there are two further issues to consider that we haven't talked about yet in this series. So first of all, Matthias Geltzer points out the following when he's talking about Caesar's amazing ability to push a revolutionary agenda, to always occupy the moral high ground, and always, always, just to be so damn likeable. Geltzer says, "Cintillating in many sited, his genius was thus displayed to his politically involved contemporaries, and there was something uncanny in his manner, which made his enemy suspicious of any overture from him, and on the other hand, impeded genuine friendship." End quote. So what he's saying in other words, and I think this is really interesting, is that there was a way in which Caesar's genius worked against him. He was so good at always getting what he wanted, even getting people to unwillingly participate in his success, and no matter how patriotic or even unselfish he genuinely seemed, he always seemed to win. And this made it difficult for him to have any trusted peer friendships, and he's one of the factors. The only people who seemed to be his genuine friends at times were Crasas and Pompi, who were superiors and powered at various times to him, though perhaps inferior in ability, but these were kind of his only peers. All of Caesar's most loyal supporters were younger men or lower status, who were willing and eager to help, but the men of similar rank and age, even if they would ally with him, they were always wondering, "What's his angle?" And part of this is because, despite being such a voluminous writer and a ready speaker, he never fully showed his cards. Caesar always kept silent about his ultimate plans for Rome, and he left it to his partisans, to hope for what that was, or to his enemies to speculate at what that was, he's always kind of giving himself the option of deniability. "No, I don't want a revolution. No, I don't want to be king. No, I'm not a god, just Caesar." And yet, you can say that he did do all of those things. A revolution would become a king, become a god, and so on. And so I think that Caesar's contemporaries and all the observers who have lived after him, up to our present day, were all kind of left guessing, "What did he really aim to do when did he start aiming at it?" Exactly. What were his true motives? He never fully came out and said it explicitly. He had reasons not to, of course, but this is one of the reasons that he was so polarizing, because you could look at the same evidence and plausibly believe he was a megalomaniacal revolutionary, like Kato did, or that he was just a patriot trying to do the right thing, like Hershius or Opius or Gaius Matius or like Augustus later claimed that he was. Everyone was divided then as now for almost the exact same reasons, and it always will be. But I think that there's a more general universal issue at stake, too. This is point two that I mentioned before, in Caesar's murder. And that relates to our days. So today, a lot of people feel like they've come to this realization that the world maybe doesn't work the way that they thought it did or that they were told that it did, that they live in a political system which claims to be, say, a democracy, but it kind of isn't, or a capitalist system in which success is based on merit, and maybe it kind of isn't. There are many aspects of what has been called the meaning crisis today, but that is one of them. There's other things like the collapse of religion and traditional family structures and bowling alleys and whatnot. And think about being Desimus Brutus again for a moment. This is again the less famous Brutus, but I think the more important person to look at in the story of his assassins. Desimus is one of Caesar's top lieutenants. He's loyal throughout the Gallic Wars and the Civil Wars. He's been raised to define success in a certain way. All of his Roman noble family programming in his career leading up to Caesar's final victory, you know, it all aims at winning honor in the Republican system. And that means running for office, however rigged the game may be against outsiders, it's still a meaningful game. Because the rigging is built into the rules of the game at this point. You know, this is the stuff that Kato would call "bribing voters," but it still makes sense as a game to people who play it. And Desimus has positioned himself perfectly for the past 40 odd years, winning the pretership and the consulship or the victories that he's ready to pounce on. That's how he defines liberty. That's how he defines being a free man. But now that game has completely changed. It does not exist anymore. The game is now about winning favor by personal service and loyalty to one man. And sure Caesar might argue that service to him is service to the republic. And really, you know, I think it was. At least it was service to Rome. This kind of rhetoric might work on most citizens. A plenty of the talented and powerful men around Caesar are obviously satisfied with this arrangement. But for the sensitive young man working in the system, it can't be explained away so easily. This change. They feel it in their bones. They now have to look to one man for their honor and their shame. And that's exactly how they define tyranny. There's not a serious conceptual distinction between a benevolent kingship and a tyranny in the Roman republican mind. Kings are for benign barbarians. The most important job of a statesman, Aristotle pointed out, is arranging the proper distribution of honors. That is, engineering the incentives of the state. And here's a good example that also shows it's also possibly the statesman's hardest job, especially in a major transition like this, really a transition totally unprecedented in scale in the West. The incentives of honor are a lot harder to engineer than financial incentives. They're harder to quantify. They depend on things like symbols and relationships, not just equity stakes and payouts and these kind of things. But these incentives, the incentives of honor, are much more important to the power structure, the stability of a state, even the stability of the infrastructure that holds up a free economy. So could Caesar have left elections open and still accomplish his goals? Did he feel that too much was at stake? Did he realize this problem? Maybe he just felt too much was at stake. Maybe he did realize the problem. And he just thought it would take a lot of time, as it surely would. But maybe sometimes these things just require some version of violence, whether it's firing people or exiling them, or, well, we'll get to the life of Augustus soon enough to see his solution. But Caesar didn't want to do those things. He wanted to spare these people, that use of force. And I think the practical conclusion that you could draw is that he would rather die than do those things. As Julius Evella said, "The supreme nobility of a Roman Emperor does not consist in being a master of slaves, but in being a lord of free men, who loves freedom even in those who serve him. And maybe he was just too early to be that kind of emperor." Yet maybe knowing that aftermath, the aftermath in which Octavian, that is Augustus, brought about the consolidation of the Republic into a monarchy, grounded on Caesar's name, which ended up being a sort of holy name, Caesar would have been happy with his choice. You know, he didn't have to do that dirty work that Octavian did with more war, more proscriptions. Caesar's ghost might have looked on it all and decided, "Hey, that was actually a pretty good way to go." Well let's turn now to a more concrete question. What did Caesar actually pass on to his legal heirs? What was the size of his fortune? Because I think the way that a man distributes his wealth tells a lot about his character. Well, unfortunately, it's impossible to rigorously quantify the full extent of Caesar's material estate. First of all, we don't have a copy of that list. We just have reference to his will and various clauses in it. We know, for example, that his will earmarked a bequest of 300 cistercies, which is close to about a year's worth of subsistence-level living expenses, forehead of household, with a wife and two kids. 300 cistercies for every single Roman. We can get a good guess of how many those people were that got 300 cistercies. It seems that he probably meant the recipients to be the urban poor living in the city, and probably those who were eligible for the grain dole. That was a pretty objective way of going about this for his executors, and that would be about 150,000 people, which adds up to about 45 million cistercies total. But then, when Octavian finally got in firm control of Caesar's estate, which is another long story, he interpreted that number to be much higher, maybe up to 300,000 people. You can imagine a more general list of the residents of Rome, maybe, or citizens living out in the provinces. You could, you know, there's a way to get up to that number. And Octavian's reason for doing that was he was trying to build up some popular favor and credibility with the Romans. And so if you use that number that Octavian used, it meant that there was close to 90 million cistercies of cash available in Caesar's estate to pay out his bequests. And keep in mind Caesar has already paid out of his own fortune, a gift of 400 cistercies to all citizens. That was something he did after his quadruple triumph in 46. So that was probably to around 320,000 Romans who he promised the gift to at the beginning of the Civil War when he first visited Rome, probably to all the free grain recipients before he cut the lists by more than half. So 320,000 Romans getting 400 cistercies each. That was close to 130 million cistercies that he already spent that wasn't actually in his final estate. And it shows he went on a spending spree before he passed. And this is to say nothing of the 20,000 cistercies he's already paid every legionary who survives from his campaigns after that quadruple triumph. And let's say maybe there were 30,000 men. And then he paid 40,000 every centurion. There are 60 centurions in a legion. Some say 10 legions, 80,000 to every other higher ranked officer. I mean, if you sit down and do the math, allowing for casualties, it's not clear that he paid the same amount to people that had been fighting with him for one year versus 15 years. But let's just give a rough estimate. Again, this is before his will before he died. But that would be something like another 700 million cistercies on top of the 130 million that he's already spent. So for comparison, Crasse's personal fortune, the richest man in Rome of his day, was around 170 million when he set out for his ill-fated part in campaign. I mean, already before he died, he spent five times that almost on his soldiers. So I mean, were these public monies or were they his own private fortune? Well, one scholar, Schmidt Henner, who wrote a whole treatise on Caesar's will, pointed to the fact that Caesar's fortune and the Roman state funds were thoroughly intermingled. And he argued that this was very deliberate. And kind of the way that Caesar deliberately intermingled his own personal power with the power of the Roman Republic. So to get back to the will specifically, Caesar did will, his gardens across the tibre to the Roman people. This is a long strip of lush greenery big enough to host large public banquets. It's got a few temples in it. So those bequests to the citizens, the tibre gardens, this is all over and above what Caesar willed to his direct heirs. Octavian got three quarters of the fortune in his will, and then there are two other distant cousins you've never heard of. They just never show up again, they got the other one quarter together. So what was in that bucket that went to his direct heirs? Well, it seems that when he died, he had set aside perhaps part personally, perhaps part publicly, around 700 million sistercies, another 700 million, for his own great Parthian campaign to avenge Crasse's. This is a later accused Mark Anson of using those funds, the 700 million, to pay off his own personal debts and to fund his own war chest. So 700 million is his war chest that he's taken apart of the, before he gets assassinated. Now, it's impossible to give a modern equivalent here in dollars, but if that's his private estate, we are looking at somewhere anywhere from 10 to 20 billion dollars in today's dollar, roughly, which is pretty staggering. And 700 million sistercies for his war effort is an ambitious war chest for the 16 legions that he was planning to take with him. Legion might cost between two to four million a year each year. So conservatively say it costs around 60 million annually to fund that army. So if he's actually planning to be away for 10 years on that campaign, you get close to that 700 million figure. So let's just say that that was all personal funds. What percentage of Caesar's fortune was 700 million sistercies? Well, I think it's likely that true to character, you know, Caesar really likes to bet on himself and bet big. It wouldn't be unreasonable to think that it was at least half of his liquid fortune. So of course, he's got villas here, foreign clients who owe him money there. Paying regular principal and interest payments most likely. So let's just say that his net worth at the time of his death conservatively was 1.5 billion sistercies. That would be maybe between 20 and 40 billion dollars today, which is respectable, I think. But of course, how can you put a price tag on controlling the Roman state? But that, however, control of the Roman state is not so easy a thing to pass onto one's heirs. There is no legal framework, of course, for bequeathing an unprecedented office, the symbolic loyalty, the friendships and on and on in a republican legal system that has never seen anything remotely like Caesar appear. But what he could pass on was his name. He did that for Gaius Octavius, who became there after Gaius Julius Caesar. And so it was up to the future Augustus to take that name, to seize all that it stood for, by force, where necessary, and to create a new kind of permanent state out of it, on which more of the future. This episode is sponsored, at least in part, by the Classical Society. The Classical Society is an organization for men who have reached a serious stage of leadership in their career, and want to focus on building the skills, knowledge, relationships, and most importantly, character that will enable them to forge a legacy of something bigger and permanent. If you're intrigued, you should know that we base our programming, that is retreats, events, small peer groups, and educational content, all on the wisdom of the greats. I founded it together with Ben Wilson of How to Take Over the World Podcast. Our mission is to transform Western leadership culture to conform to the perennial wisdom of greatness that the classics offer us, in order to build an ambitious future. Classical Society is a Greco-futurist organization. If you feel like you might be a good fit, if you feel called to serve, go to theclassicalsociety.com to inquire, and you can also fill out a form to apply for membership. We have to be selective and membership dues are a same. serious financial commitment, but we are especially interested in finding men who have not just ambition and achievement, but a civilizational vision. Our programming is designed with entrepreneurs and business owners in mind, especially, but that's not a strict requirement. Once again, theclassicalsociety.com, link in the show notes, and back to the show. Now then, what did Caesar's life mean? What does it mean for us? While I was speaking to a group recently who wanted me to address the question of what attitudes should a Christian have towards Caesar? Because this has been debated for a long time. Then I'll share some of the points that I made with you because I think they have a wider application, especially if you buy Tom Holland's line that in the West we are all in some sense Christians and inheritors of the Christian moral framework. But again, it's bigger than that. So why is Caesar's legacy debated? Well, no single Roman politician, besides maybe Constantine, changed the course of Roman history as much as Caesar did. The conquest of Gaul, the civil wars, the shift from a public's empire, and even among his detractors, it's hard to find anyone who says Caesar is overrated. He's beloved by so many. He spared the lives of so many of his enemies. He's one of Rome's all-time most skilled legislators. He's a champion of the lower classes and the middle classes. But he's also at least partly responsible for the slaughter of tens of thousands of his own countrymen and the civil wars that he fought against Pompey and the optimists in the Senate. Then he's entirely responsible before that for the deaths of up to 1 million Gauls in the great conquest of that territory from 58 to 52 BC. Later of course, he gets accused of being a tyrant, murdered by some disgruntled senators who claim he was destroying the Republican Constitution. So it's always been a little hard for polite people to embrace Caesar without reserve, all the more for Christians. And I think Caesar fits into a larger philosophical or even theological discussion about what Christians are supposed to do with men of power. Now the easy answer to this question is the negative one. And I think that in the West we've allowed this answer to dominate ever since World War 2 at least. That is Caesar bad, Roman man bad. Under the post-war consensus Caesar is seen through the lens of Benito Mussolini, Emperor Palpatine or worse. And Carlin is called his account of the Gallic campaigns on the hardcore history podcast the Celtic Holocaust. When we think of Caesar, educated people are supposed to shake their heads and say, "Ah, absolute power corrupts absolutely." And all the more, a Christian excited about Caesar can expect to get asked, "Hey, how can you call yourself a Christian if you admire Caesar?" I mean, don't you realize how many respectable Roman wives he seduced? When this Caesar bad attitude runs pretty deep in the Anglo-American tradition, it's not just a post-World War 2 thing, I think Shakespeare himself basically takes this line in his play Julius Caesar. Caesar seems in that play to be a kind of daughtering old man. He's gotten a little soft because he doesn't have any serious challengers anymore. Americans from George Washington onward are expected to see themselves more in the party of Cato and Cicero than Caesar. You can acknowledge Caesar's personal virtue, maybe, like Shakespeare does. But as in Washington's favorite play Cato by Joseph Addison, you're always supposed to remember that the Republicans are somehow on the right side of history, even maybe especially when they lose. And this made sense in the American revolutionary context, throwing off the yoke of the tyrant king George and so on. But we tend to forget that George Washington earlier in his career studied Caesar's commentaries carefully. He even ordered a bust of the man from England. Conveniently for Washington, those busts were on back order at the time, and it was never delivered. It would have been bad if someone found a Caesar bust in his house when he was commander of the Continental Army and later the republic's first president. But we also ignore Hamilton's comment to Jefferson that Julius Caesar was the greatest man who ever lived. Alexander Hamilton loved to troll Thomas Jefferson. But still there are some positive approaches to Caesar, offered through Christians throughout history, and I see three main ones. The first is the unknowing instrument of divine providence model. A man like Caesar, whether good or evil in himself, is in some sense a good thing, or at least it's a good thing that he happened because God used him to launch his master plan. Paul was born a Roman citizen. How? Well, it was because Caesar made one of his ancestors a citizen when he granted the city of Tarsus Roman citizenship for supporting him in the war against Poppy. People often note that the Christian gospel was able to spread more effectively because of the political and relative linguistic unity of the Roman Empire in the mid-first century AD. The fact that these lands were all part of one single empire and not, say, many independent kingdoms and Roman successor states, this says a lot to do with the deliberate policies of Julius Caesar himself. The Pox Romana was not just a byproduct of the transition to an imperial monarchy, but was the very end envisioned by its architect, who was Julius Caesar above all. This unknowing instrument of divine providence model is one possible interpretation of the New Testament's idea of the fullness of time or the chyrros of the coming of Christ. See Galatians 4 where Paul says, "When the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his son, born of a woman, born under the law." Togeia's Julius Caesar was maybe a part of God's master plan. But even if that is so, it doesn't necessarily make Julius Caesar himself worth admiring or emulating because he could be like so many other instruments of providence who appear in the Bible, especially in the Old Testament, like Nebuchadnezzar and the Babylonians. God sent them to chastise the Jews with his righteous justice, but these instruments are still basically bad. The Prophet Jeremiah puts it like this in chapter 25 of Jeremiah, quote, "This whole land shall become a ruin and a waste, and these nations shall serve the king of Babylon seventy years. Then after seventy years are completed, I will punish the king of Babylon and that nation the land of the Caldians for their iniquity declares the Lord, making the land an everlasting waste." And that's how the husbandman casts his worn out tools into the fire. Alright, well, a second perspective is offered by St. Augustine. So Augustine accepts that first idea that the Romans' empire was indeed an instrument of providence. But Augustine also acknowledges that the Romans won their empire through a certain kind of virtue and even deserved the rule that they won. This is from the city of God, book five, quote, "To suppress the grievous evils of many nations, God entrusted this dominion to those men, i.e. the Romans, in preference to all others, who serve their country for the sake of honor, praise, and glory, who looked to find that glory in their country's safety above their own, and who suppressed greed for money and many other faults." But Augustine does add a little later that the Romans did all this in favor of that one fault of theirs, the love of praise, end quote. So Caesar might be said to exemplify that quintessential Roman quality of the love of honor and glory. Augustine observes correctly that the Romans constructed their entire Republican Constitution and culture around this to stoke that love of honor and glory in the youth and in the admin of high ability and to subsume it to the service of the commonwealth. But for Augustine this mode of action falls short of being genuinely praiseworthy because the best thing, after all, is to seek and serve the glory of the one true God. You have to remember that in the city of God he's arguing against contemporary pagans, so he can't afford to give the heroes of the Republic their full due because his opponents claim people like Caesar as their own supreme exemplars. And for this reason Augustine says that those supposed supreme examples of Roman virtue, like Cincinnati, the ancient Brutus, you know, who drove out the Tarquins, Camilleus, and so on, that these are mainly useful for Christians to shame them into virtue and to prevent us from feeling pride for our own accomplishments. For example, if the original Brutus was willing to execute his own sons for conspiring against the Republic for the sake of the earthly city, the city of man, how can aspiring denizens of the city of God fail to include the poor among our own sons by bequeathing them a portion of our own wealth and inheritance? I mean, after all, sharing your legacy, your inheritance with the poor is a lot easier to do than to kill your children, but you, Christian, fail to do this, or. If you do it, then you take pride in the praise that you win for it. But that's the easier thing to do. Whereas the Roman did the harder thing for a lesser reward, for mere honor rather than the kingdom of God. And so on. There's other arguments in this line. And all due respect to a great man and a great thinker and a saint, St. Augustine, but I think his anxiety about the love of praise is a little excessive and simplistic. It might even be a kind of psychological projection coming from a reformed and repentant showboat order that he was before his conversion. I mean, this was like his own particular vice. But if the men who founded the United States, for example, shared that anxiety to the same degree about, you know, the love of praise and honor, well, I don't think they would have found it the USA. Honor is just the real currency of politics. Not absolute. It's not the highest thing. But even for a Christian, it's a legitimate incentive. Probably a moral legitimate one-then-money, which Christian fans of capitalism don't seem to be too bothered by. It makes as much sense for Christians to say that honor doesn't matter or praise doesn't matter. As it does to say that money doesn't matter. And that is fine to do. But if you adopt that attitude, you remove yourself from the political or the economic equation as many do, and that's fine. But the correct thing to say would be that these things do matter. It's just that other things matter more. But to sum up this Augustinian model, which we could call the shame the Christians to be better by comparison with the inferior model, at least this take is capable of acknowledging some virtue in a great example like Caesar, who gave everything he had and more to his earthly city. I think this approach fails to inspire us to make that deep personal encounter with the man himself. It doesn't allow us to see ourselves in him. And that, according to Plutarch, is where real personal transformation can happen. Plutarch would suggest that we use history as a mirror. To do that, you have to stare so intently at the examples of great figures that you may even come to love them, and through that process of love see their flaws, and accordingly your own as well. But you have to have that personal relationship with Caesar. And even with the spouse or children, those that real, lasting love does not blind you to the faults of another person. But it helps you to understand and explain them in terms of a deeper structure of character. And much of this structure may indeed be changeable, but it's usually very hard, and it may only happen because of the grace of God. Now, there is another third option that is well grounded in Christendom. You could call this the Nine Wirties Model. This pattern first appears in these exact terms in the late medieval period. The Nine Wirties were nine men who were held up as examples of the Chivalric ideal. There were in the Nine Wirties three Christians, King Arthur, Charlemagne, and God free of Boo Young, who is a leader of the first crusade. Then there were three Jews from the Old Testament period. There's Joshua, King David, Judah, Maccabee. And then there were three pagans, Hector, Alexander the Great, and Julius Caesar himself. This starts to happen in the 14th century that we see this kind of discussion going on in literary discussions. There's also a great statuary group that depicts all of the Nine Wirties on the Cologne City Hall building from the 1300s. Go look it up. And these are men that Christian knights and princes of Europe were supposed to measure themselves against. They were not saints, and they weren't even perfect as rulers or statesmen. Maybe David is a saint, but King Arthur's weakness led him to being cuckolded by Gwynne of Year in Lancelot. David fell for Bathsheba, and then he had her husband, Yoraya, killed in battle, and on and on. All the same, these guys were models to match for anyone aspiring to leadership. And Cervantes, for example, portrays Don Quixote, claiming that he outdid all of the Nine Wirties, both individually and collectively. Which is funny, but this only reinforces the fact that the Nine Wirties upheld a standard of excellence in rulership and conduct that was taken seriously. And it was for anyone aspiring to secular responsibility, you know, very important. And this is also maybe the approach to the Nine Wirties framework that Dante takes. When he puts Hawkeye Caesar in limbo, along with Socrates and Plato and Aristotle, Aristotle, the master of the sapient throng. And Dante also puts Caesar's assassins in the lowest, most horrible circle of hell, Brutus and Cassius, the pagan Judas. So to sum up, Christ tells the Pharisees that he expects his followers to render unto Caesar what is Caesar's and unto God what is God's. This side of glory we are always going to have such Caesar's. That is, authorities charged with keeping external foes and internal wickedness at bay. And we should want and demand that they be the best possible version of themselves. And to do this, they have to be good at their job. And for this, the original Caesar can definitely help. Now I call this the Nine Wirties framework, but as you might have guessed, it's basically one Christian version of what is essentially the attitude of Plutarch to great figures of the past. Leave them carefully, emulate their virtues, learn from their vices and mistakes. So why was Guyus Julius Caesar one of the Nine Wirties? Or better yet, why could he be one again for us in our day? Well contrast him with a figure that people now see as less problematic, Marcus Aurelius. Undoubtedly, Emperor Marcus Aurelius was a good man and a good emperor, except arguably for the whole persecuting Christians part. Marcus Aurelius was picked for his role as a young man by Hadrian and he was basically inserted into the top seat of an established imperial system. Of course, he managed it well, but he was spared the struggle even of infiltrating it through any dogged personal agency, much less of establishing it in the first place. Caesar however began his career on the losing side of the first great Roman Civil War. And Caesar's teenage years, Salah vanquished his enemies in a bloody conflict, many of them Caesar's family members and family connections, and then Salah established himself as dictator and built a new Republican oligarchy packed with his own conservative establishment supporters, and then he charged them with the care of a somewhat tweaked, throwback Republican constitution. Caesar from his very youth set himself against this post-Sala oligarchy, which you might characterize as a corrupt kleptocracy crony regime, unable to manage the affairs of a vast sprawl of imperial provinces, unable to resist the repacity of governors or brutally exploitative Roman business interests, a tight-knit regime of great old families hostile to encroachments into high office from anyone outside their ranks. To rise up and challenge this establishment was tremendously difficult. Caesar pulled it off with flair, and legally too, for the most part, if he bent the Constitution at times, he nonetheless made his rise first by mastering its traditions and norms, understanding them, winning offices, priesthoods, doing quality expert politicking, building massive support, both from the populists and many elites. And of course, he also did this through military achievements. In other words, he worked his novel magic in the fashion of a Roman of the Old Stamp. Caesar truly was both a patriot and a great disruptor in an age of political stagnation and corruption and complacency. Now one advantage of the nine were these framework or the Plutarch and framework of admiration and emulation is that we can debate about the relative merits of great figures without having to dismiss them as not ours, just because we object to some of their decisions or we identify some of their vices. For example, you can debate the justice or not of Caesar's conquest in Gaul. I think the criticisms are probably obvious. No question it was basically an aggressive war of imperial domination. But in the war's favor, it's worth pointing out that in living memory the Gauls had assembled massive armies, slayed tens, maybe hundreds of thousands of Roman soldiers, together with many Roman consuls serving as generals, they threatened Italy itself in a generation or two prior. Gaul was not some peaceable, unsuspecting utopia of farmers and traders, but a fierce warlike and huge region constantly a war with itself, with waves of its intrigues and flare-ups constantly lapping at the borders of Italy. And moreover, this was an imperial expansion that history proved brilliantly sustainable for the empire. Unlike Germany or say Mesopotamia, Gaul was right there. It had a natural external border more or less along the Rhine. Once it was conquered, it became more and more integral part of the world. Roman world for more than five centuries, its internal war ceased, became a cultural and economic powerhouse, and then consider concerning Caesar more than any other single pagan in antiquity. His career demonstrates the power of logos as the ordering principle of the universe. His Golic war commentaries are one of the great literary monuments of classical antiquity, even if you make allowances for the fact that they are clearly on some level war propaganda. They still attest to the man's calm truthfulness, his serene mastery of counsel and persuasion, his style and wit. Caesar's success was built even more on force of persuasion than on force of arms. Remember his lively literary correspondences with the most important taste makers and opinion setters in Rome like Cicero. As for the Civil War that he waged with Pompey and the optimates, once again healthy debate is in order, you might argue crossing the Rubicon etc was a disproportionate response. There seems to be no question that his duplicitous and intransigent opponents in the Roman Senate, Pompey and especially Cato were acting with no more real concern for the rule of law than Caesar was, nor with any less consideration of their personal interests in a factional conflict. Caesar was defending his honor, his dignitas, his constitutional right to claim the prizes marred by his achievements on behalf of the Republic. The least of what he was due was surely the right to survive politically and have another fair shot at office at some point in the future, but they didn't want to grant him even this. In all reasonable likelihood, he faced exile or worse if he didn't take up arms and defend his honor. You know it's not just about defending his personal honor, right? When you think about it, the optimates position basically implies that the establishment can strip you of what you're due in politics and in credibility. They can basically cancel you while making up some story about why you deserve it, just because you threaten their prerogatives. I think that's kind of what is at stake. After the war began, Caesar kept suing for peace on fair terms, he was constantly turned down, up until the great slaughter in the fields of Farsalus. When like a great brush-fire, he swept away so much of the aging growth of the Roman elite. Yes, much good, along with the bad. But he had every justification to pronounce rooffully on the day of his sad victory. It was they who chose this, not me. So to come back to an earlier question, what was Caesar's vision for Rome after his victory? When we talk about the transition from Republic to Empire, it's here above all that we have to keep in mind. Rome's challenges were not our own. We should not expect a statesman, even when we might admire very much, to propose modern American or Western solutions, or even early Roman solutions to the problems of the late Roman Republic. On the one hand, I think it's true that Caesar didn't set out to topple the Republican Constitution and set himself up as a monarch. His career at all points up to the Civil War fits into the framework of the classic Roman populists like the Gracchi or Gaius Marius. Men who just wish to claim a victory in the traditional Republican game of honors by offering benefits to a far greater swath of Roman society than the old aristocracy, the optimists ever tended to serve. From the days of the secession of the plebs and the founding of the office of the Tribunes in the 5th century BC, as that stalwart Republican Machiavelli observed, the Roman state thrived on a dynamic tension, a continual clashing between the interests of the rich and the poor, the noble and the base and their respective champions. However, by the time Caesar won the Civil War, he realized, apparently, that the game had changed. Maybe he broke it himself in the process of winning it so decisively. Or maybe it had already been broken by the consolidation of power and wealth by narrow elite passing on the hereditary privileges of political network, fast foreign clientele's, domestic clientele's, priestly rank and so on. As a man from an old family and an inheritor of some of those privileges, Caesar understood how profoundly the game was rigged, largely through bribes and favors against all outsiders. And this fact probably explains his immense life-long respect for his oftentimes-opponent, Cicero, one such outsider, who against all odds with incredible talents, and quite a bit of luck, managed to become a new man and win the consulship. But the elites focus on monopolizing offices, honors, general ships, the wealth and political power attended on these things, and tended to direct their attention away from the needs of the denizens of the vast territory that depended on Rome. Again, could a provincial administration staff by one or two year termers, arriving from and quickly hurrying back to Rome, constantly thinking of leveraging their time served and plunder acquired in the provinces into political capital for the honors in the mother city, could that system ever credibly administer justice to the provincials, or claim to be anything more than an extractive regime of masters, lording it over their slaves, however free such slaves might be a name. And so even though some of his admirers in modern times have tried to deny this, I think it's clear that upon its final return from the wars Caesar had landed on a form of monarchy as the solution. He apparently thought that pretending that the old Republican game could still go on functioning as normal in the changed circumstances of their vast empire, especially now that its former players were mostly either dead or discredited, to pretend that it could still serve the needs of the whole. This was just a recipe for more misery, civil strife, war, depredations of the provinces and of Italy itself. And it was then left to Augustus and to his successors to stabilize the Roman peace, but on the model Caesar had laid out, nominally preserving the forms of the old republic through the later imperial centuries, in order to honor the memory of those who had built it in the first place, and to respect the dignity of the living occupants of those antiquated forms, who lent them valuable symbolic prestige, they still have consoles and they still have a senate. And those people are important for stabilizing the empire by their cooperative approval. So they worked out of balance. But so Rome traded, yes, that contentious and violent crucible of supreme excellence the republic for unprecedented stability, for a flourishing of industry as attested by the ancient ice deposits in Greenland, bearing the traces of vast Roman mining operations in the first and second centuries AD, and for a flourishing of the arts too, powered by that industry. So much of the stone, statuary and architecture that we recognize from antiquity actually derives from the period of the Pox Romana, maybe the Roman copies of Greek models. This is most of what we see in museums. If these arts were not the highest arts and the more, at least they were high and respectable arts. And it was left to the imagination of Constantine to re-envision this monarchy as a Christian empire, and so set down a model of an imperial polity based on respect for God and law, which became the envy of Christian Europe and even Islamic rulers for the millennia that followed, up to the fall of the last Caesars, the Tsars, and the Caesars in the early 20th century. I think for us today, Caesars can stand as a model for masterful generation, the concern for the whole, and the cultivation of practical wisdom in statesmanship. But above all, he stands as a supreme example of a capacious political imagination, a sense for what is possible, for men of great talent at the head of a movement of great energy. People who can think past the political categories of their day, brush off the well-articulated complaints of the entrenched establishment. This is very hard to do for a politician, especially in a collective government when the opinions of the establishment figures clearly do matter greatly, though not absolutely. And we need such examples always. But especially now, especially anyone living in a temporarily beleaguered city of man, especially those who are going to enter the public service and take on those perennial worldly tasks of protecting the weak, defending the innocent from unscrupulous aggressors, rooting out corruption in the high places. To do these things well, and effectively, we need that quintessential virtue of public life, articulated first by Aristotle, but later taken up by Christian theorists like Thomas Aquinas, namely Greatness of Soul, Megalope Sejia. This is positive ambition, and it feeds on honor. But Aristotle himself points out that it is best directed at justly mariting the honor of those that we ourselves consider honorable. Then if we can't find many such people flourishing among our contemporaries, we can always look to merit the honor of the heroes who have gone before, or imagine their types looking upon us in the future. "Is it possible through the grace of Christ that there is a viewing stand in heaven, with room for men such as Julius Caesar to look down upon us?" That's a decision to leave with God. But even if he's in the other place alongside other men into whom we owe so much, that maybe he looks on us now, telling us to take heed as in the parable of the rich man in Lazarus. In that case, it might give him a small measure of relief to know that by remembering his name, we might spur ourselves on more energetically to do the good work we are called to do. And this raises perhaps a fourth and final model for approaching Caesar and men like him, that even unknowingly the supreme human specimen testifies to the power of his creator, in whose image he has made. Like the reverence the Athenians devoted to the altar of the unknown God, the Paul encountered at the Aureopagus. The zeal and honor we pay to great figures outside the formal fold of one's church, however imperfect or unsettling they be, can ultimately accrue to the honor of that higher principle, which governs the universe. The study and learn from great specimens, not for most people. It's the business above all of those bent on greatness, or charged with great responsibility. To acquire power and to wield it to good effect, you have to know how it works, and learn from and even imitate at times the strengths of the amoral tiger burning bright, the cunning sliness of the fox, for your enemies will certainly do so. You should put your trust in that higher power above all, but that also means making use of all the tools he's provided you with, some of them frightful ones, which he himself has once wrought mysteriously to his own service. Thanks for listening, stay strong, stay ancient, this is Alex Petkas, until next time. [BLANK_AUDIO]