Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: The Storm Before the Storm
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.revolutionspodcast.com/
CITY: Madison
STATE: WI
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
http://thestormbeforethestorm.com/contact/; http://thestormbeforethestorm.com/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
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| LCCN Permalink: | https://lccn.loc.gov/n90685344 |
| HEADING: | Duncan, Mike |
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| 670 | __ |a His Reach your goals in spite of the old boy network, c1990: |b t.p. (Mike Duncan) p. 191, etc. (B.S., Morgan State Univ.; est. pub. business in Harford County, Md.; M.E. Duncan and Company, Edgewood, Md.) |
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PERSONAL
Married; children: two.
EDUCATION:Western Washington University, graduated; attended Texas State University Morgan State University, B.S.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, historian, and podcaster. Creator of the podcast, The History of Rome, 2007-12; creator of the podcast, Revolutions, 2013—. M.E. Duncan and Company (publisher), Edgewood, MD, founder. Previously, worked as a fishmonger.
WRITINGS
Contributor (with Jason Novak) of cartoons to publications, including the Paris Review, New Yorker, Awl, and the Morning News.
SIDELIGHTS
Mike Duncan is perhaps best known for his popular podcast, The History of Rome. It debuted in 2007 and ran until 2012. In an interview with a contributor to the Daily Stoic website, Duncan shared how he came to create the podcast. He stated: “I have always read voraciously and had a passion for history. Around 2006, I fell in love with the ancient histories written by Livy, Polybius, Thucydides et al and devoured everything I could get my hands on. Shortly thereafter I discovered podcasts, but when I went looking for a Roman history podcast, no such thing existed.” Duncan continued: “So with a love of writing and storytelling in my blood, a pile of amazing material buried in the ancient histories, and a new medium that offered no barriers to entry, it all just came together. I released my first episode of The History of Rome in July 2007 expecting it to be not much more than a hobby—I certainly had no idea it would become so popular and that I was actually embarking on a career.” After ending The History of Rome, Duncan took a year off before launching his next podcast, Revolutions. He explained his interest in that topic in an interview with Matthew Yglesias, writer on the Vox website, stating: “When I was really getting into history when I was a teenager, the American Revolution was my favorite period of American history. I spent a whole period of time being really into the Russian Revolution. I was hoping my level of interest in these periods would be enough to carry people along with me. Of course, when I started I had no idea whether this was actually going to work or if this was just some crazy idea that was going to fall flat on its face.”
In 2017, Duncan released The Storm Before the Storm: The Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic. In the same interview with the contributor to the Daily Stoic website, Duncan discussed the connection between The History of Rome podcast and his book. He stated: “There are a couple of big lessons that I took out of The History of Rome that have been reinforced by researching the book. The first is that Rome was always at it’s best when it opened its political system to men of merit, rather than jealously hoarding power in the hands of a small clique of well connected elites.” Duncan added: “The second point is related. The only reason Rome endured for a thousand years (two thousand counting the Byzantines) is that they integrated new groups, cultures, ethnicities, and religions with relative ease. It was one of the great hallmarks of their civilization.” In the book, Duncan focuses on the years 146-78 BC, a time during which, he argues, the cracks in the Roman Empire’s foundation became significant. He connects events from those times to events happening in the present day.
A Kirkus Reviews critic remarked: “The huge cast of characters, likely to be unfamiliar to all but specialist readers, at times overwhelms the narrative, while the maps and timeline at the beginning are helpful.” Writing on the Wall Street Journal website, Peter Stothard commented on Duncan’s writing style, suggesting: “He is a story–teller, and a story alone never can give an answer. His style is more folksy than forensic.” Stothard continued: “More on language and less on war would have better advanced Mr. Duncan’s argument.” Jerry Lenaburg, reviewer on the New York Journal of Books website, described The Storm Before the Storm as “a highly enjoyable historical narrative that reads almost like a modern political thriller.” Lenaburg concluded: “For new or even well-read students of Roman history, this book does indeed fill a critical gap in understanding how the greatest Republic of the ancient world became first a hegemon, then a dictatorship, and finally an empire that ruled the Western world for nearly 500 years.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, September 1, 2017, review of The Storm Before the Storm: The Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic.
ONLINE
Daily Beast, https://www.thedailybeast.com/ (November 11, 2017), Ronald K. Fried, author interview.
Daily Stoic, https://dailystoic.com/ (April 24, 2018), author interview.
New York Journal of Books, https://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/ (April 24, 2018), Jerry Lenaburg, review of The Storm Before the Storm.
Revolutions Podcast Website, http://thehistoryofrome.typepad.com/ (April 30, 2018), author profile.
Storm Before the Storm Website, http://thestormbeforethestorm.com (April 30, 2018), author profile.
Vox, https://www.vox.com/ (November 9, 2015), Matthew Yglesias, author interview.
Wall Street Journal Online, https://www.wsj.com/ (October 23, 2017), Peter Stothard, review of The Storm Before the Storm.
ike Duncan is one of the foremost history podcasters in the world. His award winning series "The History of Rome" chronologically narrated the entire history of the Roman Empire over 189 weekly episodes. Running from 2007-2012, "The History of Rome" has generated more than 65 million downloads and remains one of the most popular history podcasts on the internet. The enduring popularity of "The History of Rome" earned it aniTunes Best of 2015 award and forms the basis for his forthcoming book “The Storm Before The Storm: The Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic” (Public Affairs Press). Duncan has continued this success with his ongoing series "Revolutions" — which so far has explored the English, American, French, and Haitian Revolutions. Since debuting in September 2013, "Revolutions" has generated more than 18 million downloads. Thanks to the worldwide popularity of his podcasts, Duncan has led fans on a number of sold-out guided tours of Italy, England and France to visit historic sites from Ancient Rome to the French Revolution. Duncan also collaborates with illustrator Jason Novak on informative cartoons that humorously explain the historical context for current events. Their work has been featured in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Awl, and The Morning News. He lives in Madison, Wisconsin.
About Me
Mike Duncan grew up outside of Seattle, WA and has a degree in Political Science from Western Washington University. After completing The History of Rome podcast he studied Public History at Texas State University but dropped everything to move to Madison WI where he now changes diapers, writes short cartoon histories and produces the Revolutions Podcast.
The Author
Mike Duncan is one of the foremost history podcasters in the world. His award-winning series The History of Rome set the gold standard for episodic narrative history and inspired a generation of listeners.
His current series Revolutions explores the great political revolutions of history and is one of the most popular history podcasts in the world. Born and raised in the Pacific Northwest, he now lives in Madison, Wisconsin with his family.
Mike Duncan Made Ancient Rome Into a Podcast Obsession
Millions of listeners have downloaded the popular historian’s narrative-driven podcasts about revolutions and the collapse of ancient Rome. Now he’s a bestselling author, too.
Ronald K. Fried
11.11.17 12:00 AM ET
Is it true, I ask Mike Duncan, that his 189-part podcast chronicling the history of Ancient Rome has been downloaded 56 million times?
“No, it’s more than that,” Duncan says with the erudite, cool-guy delivery that’s helped make his The History of Rome podcast a stunning success and turned Duncan into a kind of hipster Edward Gibbons. In fact, together with Duncan’s ongoing Revolutions series, which narrates the stories of the English, French, American, and Haitian revolutions, Duncan’s podcasts have been downloaded over 100 million times.
That’s a lot of downloads, and it drew the attention of a literary agent and a publisher who clearly know a platform when they see one.
This brings us to The Storm Before the Storm: The Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic, which debuts this week as number eight on The New York Times nonfiction bestseller list. Duncan’s new book chronicles the violent upheavals in the half-century before the celebrated ancients Caesar, Pompey, and Mark Antony bloodied the Mediterranean soil working out their political and personal beefs.
“People are quite familiar with that period,” Duncan says of Caesar and company. “But if you’re jumping into that story, you’re jumping into the movie in the third act. There was an entire generation or two before Caesar comes along that sets up everything that went wrong in the generation of Julius Caesar.”
The Storm Before the Storm is set between 133 and 80 BC. Rome, having won its war with Carthage, was struggling to manage a vast military empire. On the domestic front, Rome was coping with economic inequality, an influx of immigrants that challenged Roman ideas of citizenship, and a breakdown of political norms that resulted in vicious political disputes and political paralysis.
Sound familiar?
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Yet at a moment when it’s commonplace to say that the American empire is well on its way to an inevitable decline, Duncan is reluctant to draw exact parallels between Ancient Rome and America today.
“Despite what some hysterical commentators may claim,” he writes in the book’s introduction, “the (American) Republic has not collapsed and been taken over by a dictator. That hasn’t happened yet.”
The parallels, however, do mount up. And it’s hard not to think of Donald Trump when Duncan writes about “a time when a lie was not a lie if a man had the audacity to keep asserting the lie was true.”
Rome got into trouble, Duncan says, when the elites began to concentrate on short-term political victories. “They were really focused on making sure that their political rivals didn’t get a win,” he says. It was this political gamesmanship—so eerily familiar to Americans today—which, in Duncan’s view, “really led to the long-term destruction of the Empire because they were ignoring real socio-economic problems.”
Roman social woes certainly do sound oddly contemporary.
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“There was the massive influx of new wealth,” Duncan says, which was concentrated in the hands of Rome’s wealthiest citizens. “We’re talking about literal wagon trains filled with gold brought back and deposited in Rome and being distributed among these patrician and senatorial elites.”
The new wealth came from the spoils of war. But the men doing the fighting weren’t getting their fair share of the plunder.
“The people who were privates in the army, the lower-class Romans came back from these wars not richer than ever, but poorer than ever,” Duncan says. “So this new wealth created, I wouldn’t say, skyrocketing inequality, but it had a noticeable impact.”
He sees a parallel here with America at the end of the Cold War. Once the Romans had defeated their key military rivals, their leaders began to attack one another rather than their foreign enemies.
“You start to turn your ambition against your domestic political rivals instead of against a foreign enemy,” Duncan says, “and then that leads to collapse of norms of behavior.”
The dramatis personae struggling with these upheavals in Roman society were a lot nastier than the likes of Steve Bannon.
There’s the Gracchi brothers, doomed agrarian reformers; the great general Marius, whose life contains enough hair-raising adventures for a dozen gruesome action movies; and the military and political mastermind Sulla, who used his own army to march on Rome long before Caesar crossed the Rubicon.
“For whatever reason, the popular press or historians in general have neglected this period,” Duncan says. “The Gracchi, Sulla, Marius, these are towering figures. These are life-and-death struggles. There’s civil war. The Republic almost falls. All on its own, this period is fascinating and exciting. And to my astonishment and good luck, nobody had really tackled it before.”
Duncan is something of an entertainer as well as an historian, and he doesn’t skimp on the bloody details as the bodies pile up or are dumped unceremoniously into the Tiber. And if Donald Trump thinks his tweeting and name calling makes him a tough guy, he should consider what Roman pols did to their rivals.
“What I’m doing is using all of that knowledge that professional historians have unearthed, and I’m weaving it together into stories so that people can know what happened.”
Take the fate of politicos such as the reform-minded Gracchi brothers. Gaius, the younger of the brothers, died after his rival Optimius placed a bounty of gold on Gaius’ head. The amount of gold to be paid, Optimus announced, would be determined by the actual weight of the severed head. Soon Gaius’ enemies cornered him on the outskirts of Rome. Duncan presents the gruesome details, quoting from historical sources:
“Handing a dagger to his slave, Gaius exposed his neck and ordered the slave to plunge the dagger into his throat. The slave obliged… After his body was found, Gaius’ head was duly cut off and secured by a savvy former supporter. The erstwhile Gracchan carried the head home and ‘bored a hole in the neck, and drawing out the brain, poured in molten lead in its place.’ Then he carefully, ‘stuck the head of Gaius on a spear and brought it to Optimus, and when it was placed in a balance it weighed seventeen pounds and two thirds.’ Optimus paid him in full.”
“Wasn’t that great?” Duncan says with a laugh when I mention the fate of Gaius Gracchus. “There is something macabre about it for sure,” he concedes. “It’s probably the same way that watching violent movies has a certain appeal. Roman history is very NC-17.”
It’s no surprise, then, that judging from his fan mail and the book store crowds on his current promotional tour, his audience turns out to be primarily male.
Asked to explain how he managed to turn his podcast into a business, Duncan shrugs. “You got me,” he says.
It all started in 2007 when Duncan Googled “How to do a podcast.” He posted his work on iTunes and did nothing to promote it. After a few years, Audible came on as a sponsor, and what started as a hobby began to turn into Duncan’s career.
“The thing that I had going for me is that when I went looking for a Roman history podcast, none existed. And I was like, ‘Whoa, I think I can actually put something together here.”
The podcasts themselves are anything but flashy.
“It’s me talking fairly sedately into a microphone for 25 to 30 minutes and then doing it again and again and again,” Duncan says. Plus there are always “a few snarky comments” thrown in.
“There’s not a lot of whiz bang. It’s the same thing with the book. The material itself is so compelling that all I’m trying to do is get out of the way of it. I don’t need to be Shakespeare to make this great. I just need to write clear sentences and let the story tell itself.”
Duncan, 37, grew up outside of Seattle and earned a degree in political science from Western Washington University. He left a program in public history at Texas State University to follow his wife, a graphic designer, to Madison, Wisconsin, where he worked as a “fishmonger,” as he puts it, cutting and selling fish for supermarkets. On the weekends, he’d do his podcast. These days, he’s something of a stay-at-home dad, helping to raise the couple’s two children.
“I’m officially a grad school dropout which I shall remain forever,” Duncan says with some pride. He calls himself a “narrative historian” as opposed to an academic historian.
“What I’m doing is using all of that knowledge that professional historians have unearthed, and I’m weaving it together into stories so that people can know what happened. I’m obviously a popularizer of history. I’ve had a lot of success telling people the who, what, when, where, and why of history which, as a genre of history, has really fallen off the map.”
While Duncan maintains that “history’s natural state is a chronological narrative,” he doesn’t ignore deeper matters. So if The Storm Before the Storm is a cautionary tale, what are the major lessons for America today?
Duncan points to the way that Rome’s leaders ignored the anger that was rising up in the society—which, of course, brings to mind the rancor that played a part in the election of our current president.
“There was a lot of basically revolutionary energy that was created, the resentment of the rural peasants, the resentment of the urban poor, the resentment of the non-Roman Italians. All this was growing and growing,” Duncan says. “There’s so much pressure and energy that is being built up.”
And when resentment is left to fester, it’s vulnerable to manipulation by “cynical demagogues who don’t really care about the long-term health of the state,” he says. “They don’t care about improving anybody’s lives. They just want to take that energy and use it to blast their enemies. That’s the demagogic model: use populist resentment against your enemy and then you emerge victorious at the top.”
QUOTED: "When I was really getting into history when I was a teenager, the American Revolution was my favorite period of American history. I spent a whole period of time being really into the Russian Revolution. I was hoping my level of interest in these periods would be enough to carry people along with me. Of course, when I started I had no idea whether this was actually going to work or if this was just some crazy idea that was going to fall flat on its face."
How Mike Duncan turned a passion for history into a podcasting career
By Matthew Yglesias@mattyglesiasmatt@vox.com Nov 9, 2015, 10:00am EST
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John Greim/LightRocket via Getty Images
With no graduate training in history and no background in broadcasting, Mike Duncan might seem like an unlikely candidate for the role of professional history podcaster. Indeed, the idea that one might make a living as a professional history podcaster at all is pretty unlikely. But Duncan's done it. Many of us at Vox are fans of his shows — The History of Rome, which covers, well, the history of Rome, and Revolutions, whose first three seasons depict the English Civil War, the American War of Independence, and the French Revolution, with a fourth season on the Haitian Revolution coming soon — but the more I listened, the more I also became fascinated by the underlying business. How do you go from being a fishmonger recording yourself talking about Roman history to a businessman with sponsors, superior sound quality, and a fan base eagerly awaiting the release of the next season?
To find out, I spoke with Duncan by phone during the hiatus between seasons three and four to help people understand how to turn a hobby into a vocation. Below you'll find a transcript of our conversation, lightly edited for length and clarity.
Matthew Yglesias: Is your career something you came to with a plan? You decided, "I'm going to tackle the history podcast industry, disrupt it, and make fun, fame, and fortune?"
Mike Duncan: No, I started History of Rome in 2007 as a hobby. Podcasting had been around for a while, and I felt at the time I was actually a little late getting into it. Now people think I was at the very beginning. I'd heard some podcasts that were really great, and I heard a few that were really not very great, and I just said, "Hey, I'm looking for some kind of outlet." I was reading a ton of Roman history at the time, so I thought maybe I'll just start a podcast, because apparently you can do that.
Then I just did it for two years without really making any money at all; there was no advertising at the time. I didn't even have a link on my website for people to donate to me. I think I was in the show for two years before I even put up a link to allow people to give me money.
MY: What was your real job at the time?
MD: For most of the time that I was doing The History of Rome, I was fishmonger. I cut and sold fish for high-end retail supermarkets. Then on the weekends I would write my "history of Rome."
MY: Did you have a formal background in Roman history?
MD: No, my background is in political science. That is what I studied in school. Then my concentration was in political theory, but I had really fallen into reading the old Latin historians, the old Greek historians just for fun. I sort of stumbled into it, so I was reading a ton of Livy at the time, and a ton of Suetonius, and then I had just gotten into Tacitus. There were all of these stories that were buried inside this really, really dry text. Nobody likes to sit and just read Polybius for fun, because it's very, very dry.
But I was reading it for fun; it was like everything that everybody knows about Roman history basically runs from about 50 BC, which is when Caesar shows up, to about 70 AD, which is when Nero dies. There's about a century in there where that's kind of everything that everybody knows about Roman history. If you'd ask them, "What do you know about Roman history?" the answers would come from that 100-year span. Stuff that was going on like the Samnite Wars is fascinating. The Punic Wars are fascinating. It was a way to get these stories out there into the world. That was really where it came from. I didn't do Roman history in college except to study there for political theory, for which I had a professor to tell me that their political theory was building roads and having a good inventory.
MY: Were there similar podcasts out there that you liked that inspired you?
MD: One that I listened to that really knocked my socks off was 12 Byzantine Rulers by Lars Brownworth. I was like, this is fantastic; this is all new information to me. That was the one that really got the wheels churning. I was listening to 12 Byzantine Rulers and reading these old history texts and thought it would be so easy to write these up and record them and put them out there.
MY: What kind of set up did you have early on?
MD: Early on, it was me, an iMac, GarageBand, and then the microphone that is built into iMac. Just that crappy external mic that sits on top of the monitor. That's what I was using for the first 10 episodes. Then I went ahead and got a decent microphone. All I have used ever since is a MacBook, a USB mic and GarageBand.
I encourage people not to make a huge monetary investment. If you are just starting a podcast there's no reason for you to get a soundproof room, a mixing board, or all these high-end microphones. You can do that down the road, but there is a lot of leeway with how great the sound is. I've done the entire show with a USB mic and a laptop and have never needed anything more.
MY: How did you find an audience initially?
MD: I think part of it is I got lucky. I never did anything to promote the show besides just posting it on iTunes and having it go out into various podcast cache systems. I don't know anything about search engine optimization. I don't have a marketing budget. Mostly, I think, what got me an audience to begin with was there was a persistent audience for Roman history. A thousand years from now people are still going to be interested in Roman history. People are interested in it today. So people went looking for a podcast about Roman history the same way I did, but instead of finding nothing they found my show. Ever since then it's just been word of mouth. I've just been hanging on the quality of the show, and having friends tell other friends tell other friends.
MY: How did you move into selling sponsorships?
MD: There is great a hosting site I use to this day called Libsyn. There is a guy who works at Libsyn who also does broker ads, and at some point in the spring of 2009 — about two years into the show — he wrote me an email. He probably saw the traffic the show was doing. He said, "Hey, look, would you be interested in doing ads for the show?" At the time I was pretty reticent about doing it.
I didn't want ads to wreck the integrity of the content. I didn't want it to be Mike's Plumbing or Crazy Al's Used Car Lot suddenly having ads tacked onto the front of the show. But the people selling the podcast ads are pretty bright. So for me, it was all Audible initially. This is a service that is very close to what I'm doing anyway. Then they have you do the host read ads. That's the standard now for podcasts — you have the host actually read the ad copy. Which is great. That's really how you want to do it, rather than slapping on somebody else's idea of what an ad is.
So they came to me and said, "Would you like to do this?" For the rest of The History of Rome, I had two episodes a month sponsored by Audible, and that plus the donations (eventually I put up a donation button) was enough to let me cut down to part time at my job. So the rest of The History of Rome, I was doing the podcast part time and working part time.
MY: By the time you ended The History of Rome and wanted to launch something new, were you thinking more with a professional lens on what you were going to tackle next?
MD: I ended The History of Rome because it had run its course, and then my son was born within a couple of weeks of The History of Rome ending. My plan was then to go to grad school and get a graduate degree in history and try to pivot that into some kind of professional job.
I took a year off, and I went to grad school in Texas; I was living in Austin at the time. My plan was to get the grad degree and then go looking for a job. Instead, what happened was my wife got an awesome job in Madison, Wisconsin. I left school and came up here. Part of the deal with that move was that instead of looking for a job I was going to try to make podcasting my full-time job.
By the time I wrapped up The History of Rome, I knew that if I did another show it would be this show about various great political revolutions. And since that launched, I have been trying to pay a lot more attention to how to make money being a podcaster as opposed to just doing it and not really caring. Now I have a second kid, so I have to.
One of the things about leaving The History of Rome that was really scary is that I had built up this whole audience, and, like I said, a lot of that is because people were just naturally interested in Roman history. It was nerve-racking whether anybody was going to follow me to a new show, whether or not ... they would go, "Oh well I loved The History of Rome, but this new thing is just stupid."
MY: Why revolutions?
MD: A big part of it is that was another great love of mine. When I was really getting into history when I was a teenager, the American Revolution was my favorite period of American history. I spent a whole period of time being really into the Russian Revolution. I was hoping my level of interest in these periods would be enough to carry people along with me. Of course, when I started I had no idea whether this was actually going to work or if this was just some crazy idea that was going to fall flat on its face.
MY: So what you've done so far is English Civil War, the American Revolution, and the French Revolution.
MD: I started with the English Revolution, which is a period in history I think I'm probably the person who is the most interested in that period. The American Revolution ... there would be interest in a show on the American Revolution.
MY: Did the success with the English Revolution series teach you anything about what topics you can move on to next?
MD: One of the things when I was thinking about a new show, I had different ideas about where I could go. One of them that was fairly close to happening would have been the Peloponnesian War. But I didn't want to get pigeonholed as just the ancient history guy. So I did actively look for something that was not in the ancient world. I figured if I could make that successful, then from here on out I could do whatever I want. Hopefully that will be the case.
MY: What's next?
MD: The plan for Revolutions is really to run it. I got five or six more that I want to do. We are about to do the Haitian Revolution. I am about to do the Mexican Revolution and the Russian Revolution. I would probably now do the Iranian Revolution because I think that is probably important now to explain that to people — what exactly happened and why. I got revolutions for two or three more years. I don't know what comes after this, except my great history and political parties, which I would like to do at some point.
MY: So you might take a break from Revolutions?
MD: I would take a break when I am done with Revolutions. It's so far out there. I am going to be doing Revolutions for years, it looks like.
MY: One thing you don't really talk about the Revolution series, but that happens to be the subject of a class I took in college, is this question of what constitutes a revolution, as opposed to a revolt or a civil war. Do you have an opinion on that?
MD: It's not super significant to me. I have a very broad definition of what constitutes a revolution. I called it the English Revolution, and I'm happy to call it the English Revolution. Most scholars in the period these days after the revisionism of the '60s and '70s now just want to call it a civil war. But you do have the king ultimately being overthrown, beheaded. Britain becomes a republic for 10 years. I think as long as a couple of factors are met, it’s okay to call it a revolution.
MY: As we get through the French Revolution series, we hear some very detectable skepticism in your tone about the general revolutionary enterprise.
MD: I've become significantly less revolution-minded both as I've gotten older and as I've studied them in depth, for sure.
MY: What would you say to someone who is a fan of your shows and is thinking to himself, "This is a subject I am passionate about; I would like to record a podcast."
MD: It is a weird place right now. When I got into it, podcasts were not a known quantity. Really, podcasts have not even been a mainstream thing until last year. Whatever went on with Serial really pushed podcasts into the mainstream in a way they had never been before. But there are still no barriers to entry, and I feel like the quality of your product is really what determines whether your podcasts succeeds or fails. There's now money and corporate umbrellas out there that are going to take up a lot of the market, but there's still room for independent podcasters who put out a good show, who know their stuff, are passionate about it, and put it out every week or whenever you say you are going to do it. I still think there is room for people to get into it, for sure.
QUOTED: "The huge cast of characters, likely to be unfamiliar to all but specialist readers, at times overwhelms the narrative, while the maps and timeline at the beginning are helpful."
Duncan, Mike: THE STORM BEFORE THE STORM
Kirkus Reviews.
(Sept. 1, 2017): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Duncan, Mike THE STORM BEFORE THE STORM PublicAffairs (Adult Nonfiction) $27.00 10, 24 ISBN: 978-1-61039-721-6
Exploring the significant period from 146 to 78 B.C.E., which laid the groundwork for the violent decline and fall of the Roman Empire.Award-winning history podcaster Duncan offers a lively, extremely well-informed chronicle of nearly seven decades of Roman political and social life, less well-known than the age of Caesar, Cleopatra, and Marc Antony that followed. Drawing on ancient sources as well as modern histories, the author reveals chilling parallels to our own time, including "rising economic inequality, dislocation of traditional ways of life, increasing political polarization, the breakdown of unspoken rules of political conduct, the privatization of the military, rampant corruption, endemic social and ethnic prejudice, battles over access to citizenship and voting rights, ongoing military quagmires, the introduction of violence as a political tool, and a set of elites so obsessed with their own privileges that they refused to reform the system in time to save it." Duncan's fast-paced narrative covers the rivalries, wars, sieges, massacres, land grabs, political reforms, secret negotiations, triumphs, betrayals, and defeats that characterized life for the powerful, aristocratic patricians and the plebeians and slaves who comprised the rest of society. Rome faced challenges within its borders and beyond, as it expanded into Spain, Gaul, Africa, and Asia. Among the most mysterious was the incursion of the Cimbri, a migrating horde of hundreds of thousands, perhaps from what is now Denmark, "simply looking for an uninhabited territory to live in." Provoked into battle, the Cimbri defeated Rome three times before moving on to Spain. Duncan writes with evident enthusiasm, and his style is accessible and colloquial: a political gambit, he notes, "sent conservatives in the Senate through the roof"; a young patrician caroused with "the bottom feeders of the Roman social order"; one political aspirant was "the perfect guy for the job." The huge cast of characters, likely to be unfamiliar to all but specialist readers, at times overwhelms the narrative, while the maps
1 of 2 4/23/18, 9:44 PM
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
and timeline at the beginning are helpful. Crucial decades in the history of the ancient world vividly rendered.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Duncan, Mike: THE STORM BEFORE THE STORM." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Sept. 2017. Book
Review Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A502192357/GPS?u=schlager& sid=GPS&xid=14e1f538. Accessed 23 Apr. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A502192357
2 of 2 4/23/18, 9:44 PM
QUOTED: "I have always read voraciously and had a passion for history. Around 2006, I fell in love with the ancient histories written by Livy, Polybius, Thucydides et al and devoured everything I could get my hands on. Shortly thereafter I discovered podcasts, but when I went looking for a Roman history podcast, no such thing existed."
"So with a love of writing and storytelling in my blood, a pile of amazing material buried in the ancient histories, and a new medium that offered no barriers to entry, it all just came together. I released my first episode of the History of Rome in July 2007 expecting it to be not much more than a hobby—I certainly had no idea it would become so popular and that I was actually embarking on a career."
"There are a couple of big lessons that I took out of The History of Rome that have been reinforced by researching the book. The first is that Rome was always at it’s best when it opened its political system to men of merit, rather than jealously hoarding power in the hands of a small clique of well connected elites."
"The second point is related. The only reason Rome endured for a thousand years (two thousand counting the Byzantines) is that they integrated new groups, cultures, ethnicities, and religions with relative ease. It was one of the great hallmarks of their civilization."
The Storm Before the Storm: An Interview With Historian and Podcast Superstar Mike Duncan
Mike Duncan couldn’t find a good podcast on the topic of ancient history, a subject he had fallen in love with, so he made his own. That show, The History of Rome, which began as a hobby, would go on to be downloaded more than 100 million times, and is one of the most popular and beloved podcasts of all time. Now, more than ten years after first starting the podcast, Mike has written his first book, The Storm Before the Storm: The Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic, which examines the events that set the stage for Rome’s fall. We invited Mike for an interview to learn more about his perspective on the Stoics (whom he had studied extensively for his episodes), the role of philosophy in turbulent times, recommendations of his favorite history books, how he started the podcast and much more. Enjoy our interview with Mike Duncan below!
***
Your start in podcasting is fascinating. You essentially have no history training, no broadcasting experience, and reading history was a hobby of yours. And you somehow managed to produce one of the most popular and beloved history podcasts out there. Can you tell us how you started, and what were the most important personal lessons that you’ve learned in those 5 years of producing History of Rome and then starting Revolutions?
I have always read voraciously and had a passion for history. Around 2006, I fell in love with the ancient histories written by Livy, Polybius, Thucydides et al and devoured everything I could get my hands on. Shortly thereafter I discovered podcasts, but when I went looking for a Roman history podcast, no such thing existed. So with a love of writing and storytelling in my blood, a pile of amazing material buried in the ancient histories, and a new medium that offered no barriers to entry, it all just came together. I released my first episode of the History of Rome in July 2007 expecting it to be not much more than a hobby—I certainly had no idea it would become so popular and that I was actually embarking on a career.
Probably the most important lesson I’ve learned is that the only way to follow this same kind of path—to go from anonymous nobody to someone answering interview questions because he’s got a book coming out—is that you have to keep plugging away. I’ve had weeks where I couldn’t wait to get to work, but I’ve also had weeks where I didn’t feel like doing anything. I don’t have a boss, and I won’t get “fired” if I don’t put the show out on time. But once you start thinking “I’ll do it later because I don’t have time,” or “I’m busy with something else,” or “I just don’t feel like it today…” that’s when it all falls apart. Long term success as an independent writer, artist, podcaster, or whatever is built on a measure of self-discipline. You have to do the work even though no one is standing over you cracking the whip.
One of the recurring questions that you are asked in the book is a variation of “Is America Rome?” Or, “If America is Rome, where are we in that life cycle?” As you say, there are many interwoven elements between the period that you cover in the book and today, so if you had the opportunity to speak with senators and other political leaders today, what would you warn them about?
There are a couple of big lessons that I took out of The History of Rome that have been reinforced by researching the book. The first is that Rome was always at it’s best when it opened its political system to men of merit, rather than jealously hoarding power in the hands of a small clique of well connected elites. The Romans usually succeeded when the consul or Emperor won the job thanks to his talent, ability, and intelligence and usually failed when the consul or Emperor won the job thanks to mere blood-ties or family inheritance. So we should always be looking to elevate talent and avoid handing someone a job just because of their name or what school they went to.
The second point is related. The only reason Rome endured for a thousand years (two thousand counting the Byzantines) is that they integrated new groups, cultures, ethnicities, and religions with relative ease. It was one of the great hallmarks of their civilization. The Roman worldview and way of life turned out to be extraordinarily adaptable—and by the height of the Empire there were Roman Spaniards, Gauls, Britons, North Africans, Greeks, Illyrians, Syrians, and Egyptians. If the old ethnically Italian Romans had acted like it was not possible to integrate “foreigners” then there is no way the Empire persists. I see a similar dynamic at work with the “American way of life” which for more than 200 years has successfully integrated immigrants from literally every country on earth. The American way of life is idea that we have proven over and over again can be universally adopted by any ethnicity, class, or religious group. Our long term survival likely rests on embracing that reality not denying it.
But if that is what the Romans did well, what the Senatorial elite did poorly during the late Republic was initiate political and economic reform. They were never quite able to get out ahead of problems before those problems got out of control. Either through short sighted selfishness, or a desire to deny political rivals the ability to take credit for reform, the Senate stubbornly refused to change with the times and wound up driving the Republic to ruin. There is an old saying that you can get a lot done in Washington DC if you don’t care about getting credit. There are issues that need addressing, issues that are creating an increasingly fractious, contentious, and confrontational environment. But everyone seems more concerned about partisan point scoring or protecting their own privileges than heading off what could be an existential disaster for the American Republic.
One of the big themes in your book in the lead up the events that would end the Roman Republican is the collapse of the mos maiorum. The old traditions fell apart, old courtesies, old norms, even old moral standards were no longer followed. Why is that so important? Does it matter just politically or also in individual life? Do similar collapses stand out to you today?
Yes the Romans were guided by unspoken traditions and norms because they did not have a written constitution or extensive body of written law—certainly nothing like the array of laws we have today. But what the Romans of the late Republic discovered was there was no real binding force holding an ambitious leader in check aside from mere social custom and a willingness to submit to “rules of fair play.” Once the unspoken rules of mos maiorum started to fall away, and men profited from ignoring the old rules, it was just a matter of time before politics devolved into a violent struggle for power.
All of this is important today because even though we have a constitution, it is not some giant document that outlines every contingency and point of order. No one wants to live in a hyper-totalitarian dystopia where every minute detail of life is codified and whatever is not forbidden is compulsory. That is not how humans are meant to live. So at a certain point you do have to say “I’m not going to cheat or steal or tell bald faced lies” because otherwise THAT will create it’s own dystopian nightmare where goodwill and trust have vanished. People need to choose to behave well. We can’t justify bad behavior by saying “well technically it’s not against the law.” Because you can never make laws to cover everything. There has to be a middle ground between a rigidly controlled dystopia and the brutal law of the jungle. And that is where unspoken rules of behavior get you if you respect them.
You’ve covered Marcus Aurelius on your podcast back in 2010, and we’d be curious to hear your assessment of his rule in the grand scheme of things. He is of course known as one of the “Five Good Emperors” but we’d love to hear from you on this. What of his philosophy do you find most fascinating?
Marcus Aurelius is justifiably considered one of the greatest Emperors of all time. He is obviously most famous today because the Meditations have become one of the great entries into the Stoic tradition. He is among the very few political leaders whose ideas are taught in philosophy class.
But Aurelius’s status as one of the best Emperors doesn’t come from his after-hours musings, but rather from the vigorous competence with which he approached his job. You might think a philosopher would care more about esoteric theory than the nuts and bolts of running an empire, But that was not the case for Marcus Aurelius. The Roman Empire was a formidable entity to administer even in the best of times, and by Aurelius’s day it was no longer the best of times. Among other problems, powerful Germanic tribes were combining into large confederations that for the first time could rival the legions in battle. But during his 20 years on the throne Marcus Aurelius proved himself to be a competent, honest, conscientious, and diligent administrator and, if not a military genius in the mold of Caesar or Napoleon, certainly a General who knew enough about strategy, tactics, and logistics that the legions always performed well on campaign. So his reign could only be considered a success.
His only great failure was passing the throne to his son, Commodus. But I think he gets a bit of a bad rap for this. There is a myth that the Imperial Golden Age was made possible by wise Emperors passing the throne to adopted men of worth (an example of the meritocracy I mentioned earlier). But while this is true, the unmentioned cause of these adoptions was that none of them had a son. Trajan adopted Hadrian who adopted Antonius Pius who adopted Marcus Aurelius because there was not a single living son between them—the had to adopt an heir! So these Emperors deserve credit for making good choices, but my suspicion is any one of them would have gladly passed the throne to a son had they had one. Besides that, criticisms of handing the throne to Commodus usually ignore the fact that passing over a first born son for some “worthy adopted heir” was nothing less than an invitation to civil war. Ambitious families out of favor with the new regime would have naturally rallied to the banner of Commodus, and claimed him to be the “real” Emperor. So I’m probably more sympathetic than most to Aurelius’s “mistake” of passing the throne to Commodus (though it did in fact turn out to be a HUGE mistake).
Obviously most of the more famous Roman Stoics fall outside the timeline of The Storm Before The Storm, but it would be fascinating if you could provide any insight into what the philosophers were thinking and saying as they watched their country torn to pieces, as they saw the Gracchi pander to the masses, Marius and Sulla fight for power and so on.
Typically if you had philosophical training or tendencies of any kind you were a part of the upper class optimate establishment and were mortified by the collapse of morality. They all lamented the deplorable state the Rome was falling into: disorder, vice, corruption, violence, disrespect, immorality all seemed visibly and nauseatingly ascendant. So they were not fans of what was happening.
But while we’re on the subject I will mention that one of the preeminent stoics of the late Republic was Publius Rutilius Rufus and he does enter the book. Rutilius was at the center of a major controversy that wound up triggering the Social War. In 94 BC, Rutilius was sent to the province Asia (western Turkey) to help fix the corrupt tax farming system. Incredulous that Rutilius was messing with their profits, the powerful tax farming companies back in Rome conspired to have Rutilius brought up on charges for corruption and extortion. The charges were ludicrous as Rutilius was a model of probity and would later be cited by Cicero as the perfect model of a Roman administrator. In the face of this farce, Rutilius refused to even offer a defense so as not to acknowledge its legitimacy. So he was convicted and exiled. But the location he chose for his exile was Asia, where he lived among the people he had allegedly abused, but who actually loved him because he had stopped the abuse. The unjust prosecution of Rutilius escalated partisan tensions back in Rome that ultimately triggered the great civil wars of the 80s BC.
On that note, it is interesting that Stoicism tends to have these moments of resurgence turning particularly turbulent political moments. Cato standing up to Caesar, Marcus Aurelius in the twilight of the empire, in America we see it pop back up in the Revolution, the Civil War, Vietnam and now today. What do you think the relationship between Stoicism and those trends are?
I’m no expert on the topic, but I think anytime the world starts to feel like it’s being engulfed by entropy, chaos and noisy disunity, the mind naturally seeks out something that offers cohesion, order, and quiet unity. We can get carried away by events and certainly feel our passions leading us into behavior that we might upon reflection regret. Stoicsm offers a solid place to plant your feet and say the winds may howl but I will not be swept away.
History suffers from the same predicament as philosophy as many people have initially experienced it as a very dry and boring subject and cannot imagine themselves studying it as a hobby. Your podcasts can be a great entry point, but if you had to recommend 1-3 fantastic and readable history books to get someone immersed in a particular moment in time, which ones would you recommend?
On of my favorites to recommend is March of Folly by Barbara Tuchman. People have a misconception that the course of history is driven by genius, daring, courage, and brilliance whereas it is in fact driven as much (if not more so) by cowardice, mistakes, stupidity, and miscalculation. I think that insight alone brings history down to a relatable level. There are plenty Presidents, Kings, Generals, and Popes who had no more idea of what they were doing than any of the rest of us. The book begins with the famous quote from a great Swedish diplomat to his son, who was nervous about going off to negotiate the Treaty of Westphalia because he would be among so many great statesman. His father re-assured him by saying: “Do you not know, my son, with how little wisdom the world is governed?” Once you understand that, history is brought down to the human level.
I also honestly think that great historical fiction is a solid point of entry. Books like Colleen McCullough’s Masters of Rome series or Hillary Mantel’s Wolf Hall books, or even something like the Hamilton musical are a wonderful foot in the door. They make history much more human and engaging (even if the facts per se are massaged in the service of a better story or rap battle). Plenty of people have had their love of history sparked by some book, or movie, or comic book which then compels them to go off and the REAL story—and they are usually delighted to discover that the real stories of history are even better than the fiction that got them hooked in the first place.
But the most important recommendation is getting people to choose whatever they think is interesting. If you’re into the history of trains, read about the history of trains. If you are curious about Chinese military history, go read about Chinese military history. The social life of families in Victorian England? Knock yourself out. I don’t care about any of that stuff but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t—and you are far more likely to be engaged with a book if you’re reading it because you’re curious about the topic not because someone said you should be interested. Listen to what the voice of curiosity in your head wants you to learn more about and then LISTEN TO THAT VOICE.
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QUOTED: "a highly enjoyable historical narrative that reads almost like a modern political thriller."
"For new or even well-read students of Roman history, this book does indeed fill a critical gap in understanding how the greatest Republic of the ancient world became first a hegemon, then a dictatorship, and finally an empire that ruled the Western world for nearly 500 years."
The Storm Before the Storm: The Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic
Image of The Storm Before the Storm: The Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic
Author(s):
Mike Duncan
Release Date:
October 23, 2017
Publisher/Imprint:
PublicAffairs
Pages:
352
Buy on Amazon
Reviewed by:
Jerry Lenaburg
“a highly enjoyable historical narrative that reads almost like a modern political thriller . . .”
Power, patronage, propaganda, and politics. These are topics that often consume people these days as seemingly endless political dramas play out on social media and cable news. However, as much as Americans consider our politics to be often unseemly and driven by greed and corruption, we are still rank amateurs compared to our Roman ancestors.
In this fascinating new book, Mike Duncan, creator of one of the most downloaded Internet podcasts on Roman history, has written a timely and very readable book on the final decades of the Roman Republic, describing the political, social, and economic turmoil that ultimately led to the rise of the dictatorship of the Roman Empire.
The book clearly shows the author’s podcasting background and is written in an eminently readable style, particularly welcome for readers who are not steeped in Roman history. For anyone who has tried to understand Polybius, Tacitus, or Plutarch, this book lays out Roman history in a refreshingly simple style that allows the narrative to take over and presents a fascinating glimpse into the issues Rome faced as it became the hegemonic power of the Mediterranean world.
As the story unfolds with its almost soap opera quality, the reader cannot avoid the parallels to current events as Roman politicians, both virtuous and corrupt, deal with income inequality and a rising rural and urban underclass, questions of citizenship and voting rights, and how to sustain a military able to defend and ultimately expand Roman territory and riches. Clearly these are not issues unique to our time or circumstances, and it’s fascinating to read how similar many Roman Senators, tribunes, consuls, and praetors were in their social and political views to current day politicians and bureaucrats.
Roman politics was not for the faint of heart, and although American politics can involve a lot of blame, ad hominem attacks, and vitriol, Roman politics involved actual street fights and political assassinations, where a fall from power not only ended your political career, but probably your life and the lives of hundreds of your supporters as the Romans began to practice the dark art of the political purge during this period.
More importantly for the eventual downfall of the Senate and the Republic, ongoing wars with the Numidians and the Cimbri during this period lead to the introduction of standing professional armies, often privately raised, that were loyal primarily to their leader and patron instead of the Senate. The retention of these professional legions, often comprised of the poorest and most disenfranchised men of Roman society, set a dangerous precedent that would eventually pave the way for Julius Caesar to cross the Rubicon with his own personal legion and eventually become the first Emperor.
In hindsight, all of these issues and political maneuverings paved the way for the eventual downfall of the Republic, and Duncan does a marvelous job of weaving all of these disparate elements together into a highly enjoyable historical narrative that reads almost like a modern political thriller. By the time the final chapter concludes with the well-known tale of the murder of Julius Caesar by the men who sought to prevent the very dictatorship that so many unscrupulous Roman nobles had birthed, it seems almost anti-climactic.
For new or even well-read students of Roman history, this book does indeed fill a critical gap in understanding how the greatest Republic of the ancient world became first a hegemon, then a dictatorship, and finally an empire that ruled the Western world for nearly 500 years.
QUOTED: "He is a story–teller, and a story alone never can give an answer. His style is more folksy than forensic."
"More on language and less on war would have better advanced Mr. Duncan’s argument."
Review: That’s How You Got Caesar
Tiberius Gracchus was born into a wealthy elite but cemented a bond with the poor plebes who distrusted domination by elites. Sound familiar? Peter Stothard reviews ‘The Storm Before the Storm’ by Mike Duncan.
The death of Tiberius Gracchus.
The death of Tiberius Gracchus. Photo: Bridgeman Images
By Peter Stothard
Oct. 23, 2017 6:46 p.m. ET
64 COMMENTS
Donald Trump has been good for the study of Ancient Rome. Those who see the president as a monster have eagerly likened him to the “bad emperors” (almost any one will do), deploying parallels to Caligula, Nero and Commodus to highlight sins of self-glorification, nepotism, the free use of the lie and playing fast-and-loose with political norms. At the same time, the president’s sympathizers have responded with parallels of their own. Victor Davis Hanson has noted how the “careful and shrewd” elderly emperor Claudius, ruling between the reigns of Caligula and Nero, was hated by the intellectuals of his time, deemed as “sometimes hasty and inconsiderate, occasionally silly and like a crazy man.” “Sound familiar?” asks Mr. Hanson, reminding Mr. Trump’s critics that a president whom they think of as bad may not only be good, but an alternative (or precursor) to someone worse.
Comparing individuals is little more than a game. But it is a simplification of a very old American game. To the Founding Fathers, any Roman emperor, “good” or “bad,” was a warning. A better Republican constitution had existed before them in Rome, and even the best of autocrats was a subversion of it. Benjamin Franklin’s minatory message to his fellow Americans that the constitution’s framers had given them a Republic, if they could keep it, is cited on the opening page of Mike Duncan’s “The Storm Before the Storm: The Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic.” The author is described as “one of the foremost history podcasters in the world” and his book is a retelling for present times of Rome’s history from 146 to 78 B.C., when the seeds of constitutional subversion were sown.
What parallels does Mr. Duncan see to our current age? Noting that the American republic has not collapsed and been taken over by a dictator (“that hasn’t happened yet,” he writes), the author suggests that “if the United States is anywhere on the Roman timeline, it must be somewhere between the great wars of conquest and the rise of the Caesars.” (Carthage and Corinth were destroyed in 146 B.C.; Julius Caesar’s rise began in around 60 B.C.) “If” and “somewhere” are the key vagaries in Mr. Duncan’s assertion, but he cites “rising economic inequality, dislocation of traditional ways of life, increasing political polarization, the breakdown of unspoken rules of political conduct” as well as “a set of elites so obsessed with their own privileges that they refused to reform the system in time to save it.”
The Roman generals who triumphed in 146 B.C. ended the independence of the Republic’s two greatest rivals in north Africa and Greece. At Carthage the glory went to the old aristocrat and aesthete, Scipio Aemilianus ; at Corinth it went to a “new man” (the first senator from his family), Lucius Mummius, an upstart with a cheerful contempt for foreign art. Also at Carthage was Tiberius Gracchus, a young aristocrat who would become a popular radical, demanding a fairer distribution of the spoils of empire and driving what Mr. Duncan sees as the dominant plot line of the period. The reforms he and his brother Gaius attempted to force into effect helped pave the way for the civil wars that make up most of the narrative of “The Storm Before the Storm.”
The book’s final year, 78 B.C., is the date of the death of the dictator Sulla, the most successful leader of the old guard. The most prominent character is Gaius Marius, dominant among the “new men.” In Republican Rome there were no political parties of the modern kind, but the successor to Sulla’s senatorial support was Pompey the Great, while the heir to Marius’s was Julius Caesar. The radical martyrs won some of their aims before everyone fell under the one-man rule of Caesar’s adopted son, the first emperor, Augustus.
Review: That’s How You Got Caesar
The Storm Before the Storm
By Mike Duncan
PublicAffairs, 327 pages, $27
When Mr. Duncan’s tale begins, Rome had what nostalgics would come to see as a constitution of checks and balances: executive consuls served for only one year at a time; a senate of land-owning elders served for life; popular assemblies passed laws and elected peoples’ tribunes. After the death of Sulla, Rome was well on the way to a checked-and-balanced constitution only in name.
How did this happen? Was it inevitable? Was the constitution ever really balanced in the first place, given how easily it gave way? How, in the future, might a country produce a constitution strong enough to withstand the bad rulers who, under any system, must appear from time to time? To most Romans, “democracy” simply meant mob rule, and this was the aim of almost no one except as a means to an end. Liberty, however, was a clarion call always worth answering. How was liberty to be preserved when the virtuous who believed in it were not in control?
Mr. Duncan does not answer such questions. He is a story–teller, and a story alone never can give an answer. His style is more folksy than forensic. “Fate intervened to alter the course of Roman history,” he declares when describing the windfall legacy that King Attalus of Pergamum left to the Republic, and which Tiberius Gracchus hoped would pay for his redistribution of land. “History has a sense of humor,” he adds, which is humorous if not helpful. The author does disentangle well some complex events others neglect: Marius made his name through some massive victories against what the Romans saw as marauding northern tribes, but how the Teutones and the Cimbri saw their own ambitions is wholly unknown. Mr. Duncan gives them due place in his story.
Yet for a professional of the spoken word, he is curiously silent on what is perhaps the greatest parallel between his subjects and President Trump: the use of rhetorical devices to identify the wealthy speaker with the poor, the man born to an elite with those who distrust domination by elites, the educated anti-intellectual with those not much educated at all. It is possible to argue that President Trump brilliantly used the playbook of Marius and Caesar—and that his opponents last year and this have sounded more like the aristocratic old guard. More on language and less on war would have better advanced Mr. Duncan’s argument.
Mr. Stothard is the author of “The Senecans: Four Men and Margaret Thatcher. ”
Appeared in the October 24, 2017, print edition as 'That’s How You Got Caesar.'
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