Lore of the Founding- Julius Caesar

A republic can look stable right up until the moment it isn’t. We sit down with Joanna Kenti to trace how Julius Caesar rises through Roman politics, builds personal loyalty through war, and finally dares the republic to stop him. Along the way, we unpack the real-world pressures behind the legend: dispossessed farmers, bitter factional conflict, escalating political violence, and the way “temporary” exceptions to the rules start to feel normal.

We walk through the First Triumvirate, the Gallic Wars, and why Caesar’s own storytelling mattered almost as much as his battlefield success. Then comes the hinge of history: the Rubicon boundary, the civil war with Pompey, and the eerie tension of Caesar’s pardons, his expanding authority, and the public fear of a crown. The Ides of March lands not as a neat ending, but as proof that killing one man doesn’t automatically restore a broken constitutional order.

Finally, we connect Rome directly to the US founding. Hamilton reads Caesar as the demagogue who weaponizes “zeal for the rights of the people,” while Anti Federalists writing as Brutus and Cato fear a presidency that attracts ambitious schemers and turns elections into a formality. If you’ve ever wondered why executive power, checks and balances, the Bill of Rights, and even phrases like “Sik Semper Tyrannis” carry such weight in American political culture, this story is a big part of the reason.

Subscribe for the next chapter of the series, share this with a friend who loves history and politics, and leave a review. What do you think is the bigger threat to a republic: unchecked ambition or everyone else looking away?

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:02

Welcome back to Civic Center. We are on our journey, the lore of the founding, with Joanna Kenti. And today we're talking about Julius Caesar and the fall of the Republic. Joanna, welcome back. Thank you. Why are we talking about Julius Caesar and the fall of the Republic? How does that connect with our founding?

SPEAKER_00 0:24

Well, I get the sense that when the founders are reading about the Roman Republic as a model of self-government for them to learn from, they're kind of learning what to do and what not to do, and kind of cautionary tales of what to avoid when they're building a republic that they want to last. And so looking at the fall of the republic is

Why Caesar Matters To America

SPEAKER_00 0:48

very instructive. Like, how do you prevent that from happening? Because, you know, most governments don't last forever. You want them to last and be stable as long as possible. So this is this is a pretty much the biggest cautionary tale of what they're trying to avoid is Julius Caesar. This is one of my favorite topics. So I'm really excited for this one.

SPEAKER_01 1:09

I am excited. But before we start, I know that we have talked about this before. We've talked about these, you know, figures in Rome and they always have three names. And I had not on record in one of our like side chats asked the question like, is this like first, middle, last name like ours? And it's not. So can you give us a little insight into why these Romans have three names and what like what they mean?

SPEAKER_00 1:35

Yeah. So it's mostly the like famous Romans who have three names. So we know Julius Caesar as he is called, you know, in the Shakespeare play. His name is Gaius Julius Caesar. And so of those three names, the middle one is your family name. So it kind of corresponds to our last name. So the Julius

How Roman Names Really Work

SPEAKER_00 1:56

family is one of the oldest patrician families in Rome. They claim descent from Romulus and Aeneas. So actually, also two gods, Venus and Mars. Very distinguished family. I'm gonna refer a little bit to my personal favorite Roman, Marcus Tullius Cicero. In this episode, uh Tullius is his family name. The first name, so like if we're talking about Gaius Julius Caesar, Gaius is the first name. That's really a name your very close friends and family might use to distinguish you from your siblings, but it's not like part of your public name particular, particularly. It's usually abbreviated, so it'll be abbreviated with a G or a C. And then Caesar, that third name, it can be a nickname. It can be kind of like a branch of the family, which Caesar is. Uh, he's not the only Caesar in his family. Cicero initially was a nickname and refers to like a birthmark shaped like a chickpea, according to legend. We've talked about Brutus before. So Lucius Junius Brutus. Junius was his family name. We're gonna meet his descendant in this episode, as probably everyone knows. And then Brutus was a nickname because he pretended to be stupid. He pretended to be a dumb brute to avoid the king's attention and jealousy. You can also get that third name by conquering a place, and then you get named after that place. So, like Africanus means you won a battle in Africa or a war. There are lots of different ways to get that third name. And you can't actually pile up additional ones, but but most of them have three.

SPEAKER_01 3:46

To me, that's just so interesting because I hear three names and I just think, oh, first metal, last, and it is not that way. So Gaius Julius Caesar is who we're chatting about today. So can you tell us a little bit how Rome kind of transitions from this republic to essentially an autocracy?

SPEAKER_00 4:06

Yeah. Yeah, it's a long transition. And like from the first time I started studying Roman history in college, I thought this was the most fascinating period of history because it's this huge historical milestone. It's the end of the republic and the rise of the emperors. Some people call Julius Caesar the first emperor, which is a little complicated because the Romans didn't have a title of emperor. There's also a ton of literary evidence for this period that's preserved, much of it by Cicero. We have his political speeches, but also his personal letters.

A Slow Slide Into Autocracy

SPEAKER_00 4:44

So we know a lot about what was going on in this period. They don't know they're living through this historical turning point. Like they don't know the big arc of what's happening. And I find that really interesting. Uh, they certainly know that things are not as they should be. A lot of differing opinions about how and why. But yeah, a lot of drama and a lot of personal evidence. So we know how people felt about what was happening. And it's really interesting.

SPEAKER_01 5:16

So yeah, go ahead. I no, I was just it, it is so again, it's so interesting to me when we talk about these people about, you know, they don't know they're living through history, they don't know that they're living through something that's going to, you know, influence the founding of a whole other government. Right. Like to me, that's just it's wild years later. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely wild. So how does like how does Caesar to power?

SPEAKER_00 5:48

So we have a biography of Caesar by Plutarch. Plutarch's writing in Greek a few hundred years later. So he's not, he's never met Caesar or anything. And he tells a lot of wild stories about Caesar as a as a young person. I'm not gonna get into that too much, but that biography, very influential ever since the Renaissance. That's like Shakespeare's main source. I'm so we've talked about his family, he's from this very distinguished family, not a lot of like recent ancestors, or you know, his father and grandfather not very prominent in politics. So, in some way, he's kind of making his own way. So he becomes consul. He attains the highest office

Populism Land And The Triumvirate

SPEAKER_00 6:30

in the republic in 59 BCE. So that that's the time period we're talking about, the first century BC. As a candidate and then as a consul, he is connected with kind of an emerging tradition of populist leaders in Rome, and they are responding to a pretty big economic shift. In the early days of Rome, the citizens are all farmers, pretty close to the city. So everybody has their own land. They also show up to fight in wars during some seasons of the year, not during the winter. And then they would go home and keep farming. As we get further on in the history of the republic, those small farmers are getting dispossessed from their land or displaced. And the senators, for the most part, are accruing more and more land in bigger and bigger estates. That leaves these farmers with no form of subsistence. So they, a lot of them come into the city of Rome looking for work, looking for opportunities to make money. And it's really a struggle, and that makes politics a lot more volatile. So these populists step up, starting with two brothers named the Gracchi, and say, like, we need to give people land to stabilize our political system, but also to help these people sustain themselves and their families. They also want to redistribute money and to make grain or food either heavily subsidized or free to hand out to people. There is a lot of resistance to that, and that resistance gets very violent. So, like violence in the streets and political assassinations, including of those two Gracchi brothers, becomes more and more common. There's also a civil war at this period. It's a pretty violent period of Rome's history. Caesar is connecting himself to this kind of populist mentality. On the other side are more traditionalists, like Cicero is our main voice for these. And they accuse these populists, they say, you don't really care about helping the people. All you want to do is make them indebted to you so that they will vote for you and let you do anything you want. So it's really a manipulative pandering to get yourself into a position of power. So there's these two kind of competing arguments for what's wrong with our society and how we should fix it. Both agree that, you know, we talked about the checks and balances and the mixed constitution of Rome. They both sides agree that it's out of whack, but they don't agree what's wrong with it and how to fix it. Caesar, as consul, completely rides Roughshad over his co-consul and just kind of has his own way. He's partially in power because he has made this kind of backroom deal with two other people. And the three of them form what we know as the first triumvirate. The two others are Pompey the Great, Pompeius Magnus. He's a war hero from his early days. And then the third one is Marcus Licinius Crassus, who is the richest man in Rome. And so he's the money in this equivalent. They agree on a lot of things. They agree Pompey and Crassus are going to be consuls in 55, and they're going to kind of bribe their way to that. And they decide Caesar, once he's done being consul, he's going to go be the governor of Gaul, which is roughly modern-day France, in the following year. And they end up keeping him in power there as governor for 10 years. And Gaul at this point is not a settled Roman province. It is a province that Caesar is going out and conquering in a way that some people have described as genocide. He also makes his way into parts of Germany and Britain very briefly. While he is doing that, he is writing his own history called the commentaries of his campaigns in Gaul. And he is

Gaul Conquest And Self Made Myth

SPEAKER_00 10:50

probably, we think, sending a year's report back to Rome to say, this is what I've been up to. This is all the great stuff I've been doing for my country. Aren't I fantastic? So, you know, while these people don't know that they are living through a historical milestone, Caesar is and Cicero are doing their best to say, like, this is how I am a hero of my own history that I am writing. So they very much are trying to control how they'll be remembered. And he is, he does continue to be very popular while he's doing this. So, like, he's been out there for 10 years. He's conquered a huge amount of territory, which includes taking a huge amount of war spoils and money, which he is distributing and sharing with his army. His tenures are up. He has to come home. And he has gotten word that his political enemies are waiting to charge him with bribery and a lot of other malfeasance from back when he was consul. And he's like, that doesn't sound like a good time. And you know, prevent that is if I were consul again. The problem is that you can't run for consul if you're not in the city. And if he's in the city, he has to give up his army, and that will expose him to all of these prosecutions. So he sends a message to his friend Pompey. I'd like to run for consul in absentia. And if you could just make that happen, never happened before in Roman history, no precedent. But if you could just pass a law to let me do that, that would be great. The triumvirate is not holding together real well. Crassus has actually died in the meantime. He was fighting the Parthians out in Turkey. They are an empire centered in Iran, and he was killed. He was taken prisoner and killed. So we're down one member of the Triumvirate. And Pompey, pressured by a lot of senators, is like, I just this is too much. Can't do it. What if we both give up our armies? And Caesar is like, no, I don't think so. Caesar is writing commentaries about this also. And so his version of events is that he summons all of his armies together and he says, We've been fighting together for 10 years. I've been sharing

Rubicon And The Civil War Choice

SPEAKER_00 13:26

the spoils of war with you. We've been doing great things. The Senate has now insulted my honor. Will you help me defend it? And they say, you know, name the time and place. We're there. Let's do it. So they cross the Rubicon River, which is the boundary between Gaul and Italy. It's in what is now northern Italy. So northern Italy back then was part of Gaul. It was called Cisalpine Gaul, which is Gaul on this side of the Alps. The rest of Gaul, which is France, is Trans-Alpine Gaul, which is Gaul on the other side of the Alps. And so this crossing of the Rubicon River, the Rubicon River is actually not very big, but it is a symbolic boundary. Okay. And once he crosses it, he's now invading his own home country. So now we we say crossing the Rubicon to mean like passing the point of no return or like crossing a red line. He marches his army to Rome. Pompey and the Senate know he's coming. And Pompey thinks to himself, well, I have a lot of legions who could fight Caesar, but they are not here. They are in Greece and they are in Spain. And so he runs away. And a lot of the Senate follows it. This doesn't turn out to be a great strategic decision and is the first of many bad strategic decisions. Cicero's letters are describing all of this. And so Caesar marches into the the city pretty much unopposed. And he says, Well, there are some elections that need to happen. So if you just elect me dictator, you remainders of the Senate who are still here, I'll just I'll just take care of those elections real quick. And so they do. And then he he takes care of the elections, he goes off to Greece, he ends up fighting a battle against Pompey. Uh I'll pause here to say, like, it's wild to read Cicero's letters about all this. It's so chaotic. Cicero is not in the city for various reasons. So he's kind of observing all this from outside and is just horrified at what Caesar is doing, how Pompey is handling it. He's like, you know, nobody's standing up for the republic in this moment particularly well. He thinks in general, he supports the rule of law, and the rule of law is symbolized by the Senate. And so, like, wherever the Senate goes, that's sort of where the republic should go. But he says, you know, in a military if if this is going to be a civil war, I'm pretty sure Caesar's gonna win. He has been out there with these soldiers for 10 years fighting a pretty formidable adversary. So I would like Pompey to win, but I do not think he will. Cicero tries to remain neutral, but eventually Caesar kind of forces him to pick a side. And so he goes and joins Pompey. Pompey loses the decisive battle. He runs off to Egypt and is actually murdered by an Egyptian who is hoping that Caesar will show special favor to him in recompense. A very few senators who are led by Cato the Younger, that's Marcus Portius Cato. We'll talk about him next time. He goes off and continues leading a resistance to Caesar in North Africa, which is not successful. But for the most part, most of the senators, after this one decisive battle at Pharsalis, they say, like, enough is enough. We're done. Most of them surrender to Caesar. And he is so happy to see them alive and says, Oh, I'm so glad we can be friends again.

Pardons Dictatorship And A Crown Test

SPEAKER_00 17:15

He pardons them. He's so delighted. Let's all go back and be friends. This is surprising for one thing. Like common practice would be like full-on purge of political enemies. So it's strange. It's also kind of insulting that they're like, oh, he's so excited to be friends with us, and we've been fighting a civil war because he's invaded his own country and violated whatever we think of as our constitution and maybe destroyed the republic. Like, this is not a comfortable position to be in. This doesn't feel like you know, peace and reconciliation so much as tyranny, only with a nicer face put on it. You can kind of see this. Cicero gives a speech for Marcellus, where he talks about this behavior from Caesar as conquering victory itself. And it's very effusive, like you've conquered the whole known world. It would take, you know, hours for me to list all the battles that you've won. But really, your greatest victory is conquering victory itself by being so magnanimous and forgiving. And it's just like really uncomfortable to read. It's all wrong. Everything feels all wrong. And so Caesar comes back to Rome, he stops in Egypt for a little while, has like a little thing with Cleopatra, wins some other wars on his way. And he gets back to Rome and he is re-elected dictator first for 10 years. And then in perpetuity, so for life. We've talked about dictators before with Cincinnatus, like the period, the term of a dictatorship. It is a normal office for like a martial law emergency situation, but it is a six-month term. And Cincinnati is famous for giving it up after like 11 days. I say like elected dictator and accepted because technically the Senate is voting for this. Like they're voting for him to be dictator for life. But we should remember that many senators died in the Civil War, and so Caesar like appointed their replacements. So technically they are voting for this. Caesar's co-consul and right-hand man, Marcus Antonius, who we know as Mark Antony, he's conducting this ritual on the forum, the Lupercalia. And as part of that ritual, he runs up to Caesar and offers him a crown or a diadem. We are told, mostly by Cicero, that the whole crowd of onlookers like groans in horror. So remember, like when Brutus founded the Republic, they all swore an oath never to have a king again. And now Antony is trying to give a crown to Caesar. So Caesar pushes him away and says no three times. But it is interpreted by many people as like testing the waters. Like, are they gonna let me wear a crown and just maybe be a king at this point? And so it's a month later on the Ides of March in 44. That's beware of the Ides of March. The Eyes of March are coming. Marcus Junius Brutus, the descendant of Lucius Brutus, who expelled the last king, and his co-conspirators assassinate Caesar in a meeting of the Senate. And they declare that by doing this, they have restored the Republic and freed the Republic from tyranny. In one version, Brutus yells, Sik Semper Tyrannis, roughly translated, that's how you treat a tyrant. And that becomes the state motto of Virginia, and is also what John Wilkes Booth is supposed to have yelled when he assassinates Abraham Lincoln. So Sick Semper Tyrannis, that's where that comes from.

Ides Of March And Founding Echoes

SPEAKER_00 21:37

I also want to mention Brutus' wife is the daughter of Cato, who's leading that resistance in North Africa. Her name is Portia. She's like a very prominent part of Plutarch's biography of Brutus. She's really intent. She likes knows Brutus is up to something. And she gives this speech to him where she's like, I'm not just. You know, a concubine. I'm not just a silent woman in your household. I am Cato's daughter. And I deserve to know what's going on. I deserve to be a full partner with you. I want to know everything about what's bothering you. And I want to help you through it. Abigail Adams in 1775 starts signing her letters to John down in Philadelphia Continental Congress as Portia. And so, like, he's Brutus getting rid of a monarch and she's Portia. I mean, she's writing about, you know, being under the tyrant George III during the blockade of Boston. So, like, yeah, it's a very kind of resonant moment. Unfortunately, when she tells John, remember the ladies, and like include women in the work of self-government in the new constitution, um, he does not take her very seriously or as seriously as he should have. But yeah, so Caesar becomes a very popular like touchstone and reference for the founders.

SPEAKER_01 23:07

Again, I love all these threads because as soon as you said seek center, Tyrannus, I was like, John Wellsbooth, I know this, right? So, you know, all of this history is really it is again, it's so interesting. How does this influence then our founders? Because as you're saying these names, and again, for our listeners, I'm completely coming in as a learner. I'm not somebody who is up on all of this, which has been fun. But as you're saying, like Cato and Brutus, I'm like, these are the Federalist papers. And now you're talking about, you know, Abigail Adams signing Portia, like there's so much symbolism. So how do how do the founders kind of look at this story?

SPEAKER_00 23:55

So everybody kind of agrees that Caesar is a cautionary tale of some kind, but they don't agree on how. And you see this come out really clearly in those Federalist papers and the anti-federalist papers. Both are accusing the other of Caesarism in some way, but like not the same way. So in Federalist One, so like from the beginning, Alexander Hamilton says Caesar is an example of a populist who, this is kind of like Ciceronian, he's a populist who's actually lying about being a populist. He does not care about the people, he

Hamilton Jefferson And Caesar Accusations

SPEAKER_00 24:35

really just wants power for himself, and he is exploiting what they would have called factionalism, which is kind of like political tribalism and partisan conflict. Like they don't have political parties per se in ancient Rome. They would have called them factions. But he's exploiting factionalism for his own personal gain. So in Federalist One, Hamilton explains a dangerous ambition. Ambition is like the key attribute of Caesar in the Shakespeare play, right? A dangerous ambition more often lurks behind the specious mask of zeal for the rights of the people than under the forbidden appearance of zeal for the firmness and efficiency of government. History will teach us that the former, so kind of false populism, has been found a much more certain road to the introduction of despotism than the latter. Of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their careers by paying an obsequious court to the people, commencing demagogues and ending tyrants. So this is like classic Julius Caesar, commencing demagogue and ending a tyrant. So this is why Hamilton then says we need a strong executive. We need to mitigate the effects of direct democracy to kind of build up guardrails against these populists. And that is how we are gonna prevent despotism and an end to our own republic. Later, Hamilton actually accuses Thomas Jefferson of following this pattern. So he writes a series of letters, 1792, under the pen name Catullus. He spells it Catullus, one of Caesar's opponents in the Senate.

SPEAKER_02 26:24

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 26:24

So he says, we have inferred that Mr. Jefferson's politics, whatever may be the motives of them, tend to national disunion, insignificance, disorder, and discredit, and that the people who support the Democratic Republicans with Jefferson are the Caesars of the community. He says they are leading the dance to the tune of liberty without law and endeavoring to intoxicate the people with delicious but poisonous drafts to render them easier victims of their rapacious ambition. So that's that's Hamilton versus Jefferson. Like if you've uh seen the musical, Hamilton you know that Hamilton and Jefferson really really came to blows. The really funny part is that Jefferson like kind of turned this back on Hamilton also with a Caesar reference. Everyone's accusing somebody else of being Julius Caesar. So he says, he writes a letter after Hamilton has been killed by Aaron Burr. He says, I had Hamilton over to my house once, back when we were, you know, on speaking terms. And he was looking around my room of portraits of remarkable men. And among them are Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, and John Locke. Hamilton does not recognize them. Hamilton, not super well educated, like Jefferson was. And so Jefferson explains, these are the greatest men who ever lived. And he says, Hamilton paused and said, I think the greatest man who ever lived was Julius Caesar. And Jefferson says, That's when I knew that he was going to be a problem. That's when I knew that he believed, he says, Hamilton must have believed in the necessity of either force or corruption to govern men. And so he wasn't really a true Republican in the sense of like wanting popular government.

SPEAKER_01 28:22

That's like that just gave me a chance. That is interesting. So then, you know, we talked about the Federalists. What about the anti-federalists? Because again, they use Brutus and Cato like as their pen names. And they're not like the Federalists are organized, right? They have this, they have their three authors. These anti-federalists, if you will, are not this organized group of people. They are just, you know, people who are asking questions and kind of writing about these things.

SPEAKER_00 28:57

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's easy to forget that the federalist papers are basically just op-eds, right? Like the Constitution's been written. We're through the Constitutional Convention, and now we're sending it out to the states to be ratified. And so the Federalist papers are op-ed saying we should ratify it in New York. The anti-federalist papers are effectively just op-eds contradicting the Federalist papers. So it's a conversation playing out in the newspapers in the day. And yeah, Federalist papers are written under the pseudonym Publius, which refers to one of the founding consuls of the Roman Republic. Some of these anti-federalist op-eds are written by men using the pseudonyms of Brutus and Cato, as you said. So Brutus, in one of these, says, the problem with a federal constitution with a strong executive is that the executive powers of government will be attended with great honor and emolument and always will be in large states, so that they will greatly interest men who are ambitious and designing. So like scheming to get power. So the presidency in a federal constitution, like the one that has been written, is too much power for any one person, and it will attract the worst possible people. So that's one interpretation of kind of like the Caesar problem. And this is written by someone calling themselves Brutus. So like we need to prevent this concentration of power in one man. They're imagining that George Washington is going to end up in the position of Caesar. So like the American Cincinnatus is going to turn into the American Julius Caesar, which is kind of hard to imagine in retrospect, but you know, they didn't know how this was going to turn out. Yes. Cato is a little more, I don't know, bombastic. He writes, For what did you open the veins of your citizens and expend their treasure in the Revolutionary War? For what did you throw off the yoke of Britain and call yourselves independent? Was it from a disposition fond of change or just to procure new masters? And that's the reason why we should not ratify the federal constitution. We should go on being a confederation rather than a federal government. Some of this is coming from John Adams and Abigail Adams' close friend Mercy Otis Warren, too. She's writing like very similar letters in her own name in her observations on the new constitution. So the anti-federalists, the lesson they're taking from Caesar is that once you allow one man to accrue extraordinary power, he will just keep accruing more power until the republic only exists in name. So like all you have is a senate full of yes men voting those powers. So like formally you're still voting, but in reality, you're living under an autocracy. Some of this is resolved by the Bill of Rights, and particularly the 10th Amendment, which says that powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution or prohibited by it to the states are reserved to the states or to the people. So the states and the people retain a fair amount of power under our constitution to decide what they want to do for themselves. And the federal government can only override that in like certain situations. That's one way of kind of limiting the power of the federal government and the executive. But ultimately, I mean, we ratify the federal constitution, we end up with a federal system. So it doesn't completely get resolved by that compromise, but that is one concession to the anti-federalists.

SPEAKER_01 33:09

So then looking at this, what destroys a republic faster? Is it ambition or is it apathy?

SPEAKER_00 33:20

It's I feel like I go back and forth on what led to the fall of the Roman Republic. And there's no one thing, right? Yeah. Caesar comes to power in a period where the republic is already very unstable. Like there's been a lot that has led up to this. So I talked about the GRACI, there was a civil war when Caesar was a young man. Things were already in shambles. And some of it has to do with that dispossession of like a large part of the citizenry. So

Ambition Apathy And Republic Survival

SPEAKER_00 33:55

the economic situation that the republic was founded on isn't there anymore. And things are changing, things are volatile. There are a lot of very unhappy people in the city of Rome who are agitating. There's a lot of political violence. So there's a lot of reasons why the Republic, quote unquote, falls. Brutus thinks he's restored it by assassinating Caesar. That ends up not really being the case. We're going to talk a little bit about some of that next time. Mark Antony kind of ends up in power. And then Caesar's heir, Octavian, will become the Emperor Augustus, and he becomes the first, I would say, emperor under a new system of government. So Caesar's ambition and his just complete disregard for political norms and like decorum, these unwritten laws of how you're supposed to act as a Roman leader, he just doesn't act that way. So it turned those unwritten rules turn out to be a lot more fragile than anyone had really thought. And Cicero is writing about the republic in philosophical works at this point as kind of a past golden age. Like he's like when Polybius was writing about our mixed constitution. It really was this perfect balance. And then it fell out of balance for, you know, whatever reason you want to put forward. And that imbalance allowed a tyrant like Caesar to destroy the social contract that our society was based on. So there's a lot of blame to go around, I think. Maybe that means that you, you know, it's the fatal combination of ambition. And if not apathy, then like corruption and a lack of strength and principle in Rome's leadership from the Senate.

SPEAKER_01 36:03

Jana, thank you so much. I again, I'm just like, I sit here and I'm writing things down because I'm all of these connections are starting to just make more sense for me. And again, I'm excited about our next episode, too. But thank you for your expertise for giving us this kind of just again, the lore of the founding with Julius Caesar.

SPEAKER_00 36:28

Yeah. Thanks for thanks for letting me nerd out one more time.