Marsha from Saga here. Welcome back to the Realignment.

Hey everyone, welcome back to the biweekly Realignment Supercask. Ask me anything slash discussion episode.

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Okay, I wanted to kick off this episode before getting into a bit of discussion on the Ben Smith episode.

We did yesterday by reading a listener comment about a previous. Ask me anything discussion we had.

If you are not a full subscriber, the quick summary of the discussion was Saga and I were talking about ancient Roman and Greek history

and we're very, very dismissive of the topic. We're not particularly well read on the period and we said that listeners should really focus on

18th century, 19th century, 20th century history instead.

One of our listeners said, Jaha actually wrote a great response in and this sort of sets the standard for audience response.

So I want to read this response and it also kind of inspires me to a better job of not just dismissing things casually on a podcast.

So here is the comment.

Disagree with the comments on the AMA on Roman history and found it uncharacteristically reductive.

There's definitely a cringe Ryan Holiday type person that's weirdly only into Roman history at the expense of a broader syllabus.

However, the reason we have to look past that cringiness is that every influential person involved in the creation of the systems of democratic government

since the fall of the Roman Republic has used the events involving Caesar, Cato, Cisro, Augustus, Cleopatra as a framework to thinking about restraints on the executive and legislative branches of government, not limited to the United States.

Saga mentioned reading about the birth of the French and American nations instead.

The Federalist papers are written under very pseudonyms that are from the cast of characters of the fall of the Roman Republic.

That's not just a historical nod for centuries.

The Roman story was very much top of mind for the founding fathers as it relates to the rise of well-meaning tyrants and the arming of other parts of the government with the tools necessary to contain them.

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