TEASER: The Care and Feeding of a Republic
Angry Planet
Matthew Gault
4.3 • 882 Ratings
🗓️ 13 October 2020
⏱️ 8 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Nations rise and nations fall, as do their governments. Today, some people say the United States and its treasured republican virtues stand at a crossroads.
But how can you tell? Are we dealing with the mere panic of the moment, or something worth panicking about?
To help us get a grip on what’s going on, we’re going to reach into the past, today, to see if history is repeating or just rhyming.
Joining us to help us get a grip—and we could probably all use to get grip right about now—is Patrick Wyman.
Wyman is the host of the Tides of History podcast, which looks at moments when the world changed, including recent examinations of the world’s first farmers and the effects of plague on the Roman world.
- Recorded on 10/2/20
- What defines a Republic anyway?
- The Res publica
- “Don’t quote laws to men with swords”
- How the Roman republic worked
- A contract with the gods
- How the grain dole worked
- The private sector
- Why it’s so hard to maintain a Republic
- How cynicism degrades the political system
Angry Planet has a substack! Join the Information War to get weekly insights into our angry planet and hear more conversations about a world in conflict.
https://angryplanet.substack.com/subscribe
You can listen to Angry Planet on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. Our website is angryplanetpod.com. You can reach us on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/angryplanetpodcast/; and on Twitter: @angryplanetpod.
Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Love this podcast support this show through the a cast supporter feature |
| 0:05.1 | It's up to you how much you give and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. Retaining a republic is hard. It's hard to do because you've got to maintain a really delicate series of intentionally designed |
| 0:26.1 | institutions while the underlying demographic, economic, and political circumstances change. |
| 0:34.0 | So you have to find ways of marrying your institutional design to the broader changes that are |
| 0:40.0 | happening through your society, that are happening in the world around you, shifts in technology and media, |
| 0:44.5 | you have to find some way of making it so that you're not stuck with this |
| 0:49.3 | sclerotic, unworkable, ossified system. |
| 0:53.0 | Roman cities, these kind of mega cities of the ancient world, were artificial constructions. |
| 0:57.0 | There is no hinterland big enough in the immediate vicinity of Rome to feed that many people. You're talking about probably a million people by the end of the republic living in that city. Think about the amount of food that's going to |
| 1:12.8 | and the in the ancient world there are not market mechanisms to do that. |
| 1:16.9 | There is probably at that point some kind of regional like regionally |
| 1:21.4 | integrated market in grain but you're just never going to be able to incentivize the quote-unquote private sector enough to bring enough food to feed that place on a regular basis. |
| 1:30.1 | The mechanisms in the ancient world are just too screwed up to do that. |
| 1:33.1 | They don't exist on that scale. |
| 1:35.2 | One of the things as part of this reciprocal relationship between elites and the people of Rome |
| 1:40.4 | is that you create the grain dool. |
| 1:42.0 | It's called the Anona. And yeah, and the deal there is that you've got city officials whose job it is to make sure that the grain keeps coming and to make sure that every Roman, no matter how rich or how poor, gets their grain dull. |
| 1:54.4 | Every citizen gets their chit. |
| 1:56.4 | They go and they take their bull. |
| 1:57.8 | And there's funny stories about senators who were going to pick up their grain dull. |
| 2:02.4 | That they're like, I'm paying for it, I'm going to pick up their grain dole. |
| 2:02.5 | That they're like, I'm paying for it, I'm going to get it. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Matthew Gault, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Matthew Gault and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2025.