37 | Edward Watts on the End of the Roman Republic and Lessons for Democracy

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

Sean Carroll

Physics, Science

4.7 • 4.7K Ratings

🗓️ 11 March 2019

⏱️ 91 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

When many of us think "Ancient Rome," we think of the Empire and the Caesars. But the Empire was preceded by the Roman Republic, which flourished for a full five centuries. Why, after such a long and prosperous run, would an essentially democratic form of government change — with a good deal of approval from its citizens — into an autocracy? That's the question I discuss with today's guest, historian Edward Watts. It's a fascinating story with many contemporary resonances, especially how reformers choose to balance working within the system to overthrowing it entirely. Lessons for modern politics are left largely for listeners to draw for themselves. Support Mindscape on Patreon or Paypal. Edward Watts received his Ph.D. in history from Yale University. He is presently the Vassiliadis Professor of Byzantine Greek History at UC San Diego, where he was formerly Co-Director of the Center for Hellenistic Studies. He is the author of several books on ancient history, the most recent of which is Mortal Republic: How Rome Fell Into Tyranny. UC San Diego Web Page Center for Hellenistic Studies Page Mortal Republic on Amazon Academia.edu page

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello everyone and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast.
0:03.2	I'm your host Sean Carroll and you might notice I'm still in that mode where my voice is
0:07.8	not 100% sorry about that.
0:10.2	You know, the times when you listen to the podcasts are not obviously correlated with the
0:14.9	times when I'm recording the intros to the podcasts which are obviously not correlated
0:19.8	to the times when I record the main part of the podcast.
0:23.1	This is a spread out over time kind of operation we have here at Mindscape.
0:27.1	So sorry about that but hopefully I'm understandable because I want to talk about a little bit
0:32.8	different thing for the podcast today.
0:34.8	We're going to dive into history.
0:37.2	Everyone knows that it's important to try to learn lessons from history, right?
0:40.7	We have things going on right now.
0:42.1	We live in a time here in the United States and in the world where history is happening
0:46.3	all around us.
0:47.8	It's interesting to go to look into the past to try to learn lessons for what we should
0:51.8	be doing now.
0:53.2	But it's easy to be too superficial about that, right?
0:56.2	It's easy to point to the Nazis and compare everything to the Nazis and I'm sure back
1:00.4	way back in the day they compared everything to the Mongols and Genghis Khan and worried
1:04.3	about the Mongols.
1:06.0	There's lots of things that happened in history and all of them can teach us something
1:10.2	but in subtly different ways.
	...

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