The REAL very last episode!
Date: 15 March, 44 BCE.
Location: Rome, Italy.
Event: The assassination of Gaius Julius Caesar, dictator of Rome, brutally stabbed to death by his closest friends and colleagues, including people he had recently forgiven and promoted, including one who he made an heir in his will.
g’day ray and cam
i’m already a monthly contributor to the ceasar,alexander and wwii members podcasts.
as to an augutus podcast….. shit yeah… just transfer my ceasar subscription to octavian’s account it i love what you fellas are doing.
cam, thanks for napoleon 101. loved it.
keep it going
in hope
mike
Don’t worry about it, Mike. You’re covered! Thanks for the support.
Well worth waiting for. The best. Those mfckers deserve all they get and I hope we hear soon what they got. “Noblest Roman of them all”, my ass. Think about planning and executing a man that was the closest thing you had to a father.
PS. Dont call me Cliffy
“Cliff notes” jokes aside, the breadth and depth of this body of work is quite an achievement. However, I plead for one last 2 hour session where you step back and bat around some different theories of how Caesar’s life and role in the end of the republic are viewed.
My thinking about Caesar puts him into one of three possible camps: (a) He was a Washington type of figure, not the best general nor the intellectual equal of some of his peers but a great leader able to keep his coalition together through 15 years of Gallic and civil wars and he wins by being the last left standing. For this you probably discount tales of him running around in his red cape and making critical battle decisions on his own as pure propaganda (as some of your VIP guests have). (b) He was more of a Napoleon/Alexander/Hannibal type – truly a soldier’s soldier and a military genius. This has problems in unlike N & A he did not really come up through the military as they did and only showed the genius after age 40. (c) He was Stalin. After decades of external threats and internal civil unrest he uses the guise of populism to seize power and gradually annihilates all opposition. Any genteel veneer you dismiss as propaganda. Against that you have his failure to eliminate enough opposition, although maybe we look at that through our eyes and at the time maybe it was not as obvious and he had more political constraints.
So in short, was Caesar a Washington, Napoleon or Stalin – discuss.
I thought that moments where you guys stepped back from the narrative and mused about interpretation and plausibility were the best part of the show. The VIP shows did this very well. I suspect one reason the show is so popular is that there are some thoughtful people out there that are secretly worried about the long term viability of Western republicanism (small r) today and there is no better period of history to look at for some clues of what factors may be at work in any eventual demise.