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Crack-Sucking Togas
22 Plays18 hours ago
Sarah gives Helen a lesson in Ancient Roman history and the two of them learn that some ideas, like "women be shopping" and "women be a foreign invasion that must be subjugated at all costs" have surprisingly deep roots.
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Transcript
Humorous Openings and Absurd Scenarios
00:00:01
Speaker
There's really nothing real. There is no real. And that's what's called the postmodern mentality. I couldn't receive the word racist remark. The adventure of life justifies its suffering. don't want to see him having political succubus with goblins. Do it live. Is Trump to have babies with a goblin? Do it live! And turn against us like Darth Vader.
00:00:20
Speaker
Do it live! Now listen, you... You're right, calling name....suck you in your goddamn face. You'll stay plastered. I was going to have a guest speaker, but the person I had invited in died.
Podcast Creation and Challenges of Hosting
00:00:32
Speaker
level of masochism how are you doing this week I'm doing pretty well. I've been playing the Slay the Spirit board game with my girlfriend. It's really fun.
00:00:44
Speaker
Amazing. And how are you doing? I'm doing all right. My students have a week, no classes, and I'm not allowed to give them any assignments. I kind of have a week off from having to like continue to make content, although I should be using this week to also finish writing the final, et cetera, et cetera.
00:00:59
Speaker
So instead you're choosing to use it to make podcast content? Oh yeah, absolutely. Of course. You've really got a grind set. Yeah. Okay.
00:01:10
Speaker
So who is our odious guest this week? Well, that's a little difficult to say. We'll see why as we go ahead.
Introduction to the Oppian Law
00:01:18
Speaker
This is episode three. We've just started to figure out this whole like editing the podcast thing. So of course, introducing a confusing ambiguous element into our format is exactly what we want to do right now.
00:01:31
Speaker
We should start with some table setting. And this is going to come from Livy's History of Rome. And we're going to open sort of media res in 195 BC in the Roman Republic.
00:01:43
Speaker
While the state was preoccupied by serious wars, some hardly yet over and others threatening, an incident occurred which, though unimportant in itself, resulted in a violent party conflict.
00:01:55
Speaker
Two of the tribunes of the plebs, M. Fundanius and L. Valerius, had brought in a proposal to repeal the Opian Law. This law had been made on the motion of M. Opius, a tribune of the plebs, during the consulship of Fabius and Tiberius Sempronius, when the strain of the Punic War was most severely felt.
00:02:16
Speaker
It forbade any woman to have in her possession more than half an ounce of gold, to wear a dress of various colors, or to ride in a two-horsed vehicle within a mile of the city or of any Roman town unless she was going to take part in some religious function.
00:02:31
Speaker
Okay, so today's topic is this attempt to repeal the Oppian Law.
Oppian Law: Early Feminism and Societal Restrictions
00:02:37
Speaker
Sometimes this attempt is described in the literature as an early example of militant feminism. Here's another excerpt, more from Livy, that'll kind of indicate why.
00:02:50
Speaker
The two Brutuses, M. Junius and T. Junius, both tribunes of the plebs, defended the law and declared that they would not allow for it to be repealed. Many of the nobility came forward to speak in favor of the repeal or against it.
00:03:04
Speaker
The capital was crowded with supporters and opponents of the proposal. The matrons could not be kept indoors either by the authority of the magistrates or the orders of their husbands or their own sense of propriety.
00:03:15
Speaker
They filled all the streets and blocked the approaches to the forum. They implored the men who were on their way thither to allow the women to resume their former adornments now that the Commonwealth was flourishing and private fortunes increasing every day.
00:03:29
Speaker
Their numbers were daily augmented by those who came up from the country towns. Okay, so obvious... situation here that somehow the emergency situation of being at war allowed this kind of anti-feminist law to be passed and now the war is over but of course those sort of reactionary components in society are like okay but we shouldn't give women more rights like rights should only be taken away Right, right, exactly.
00:04:00
Speaker
Like once we've imposed these restrictions, it just doesn't make sense on some unspoken intuitive level to remove them. Of course. The reaction to the women taking this collective action is extremely normal.
00:04:14
Speaker
And we're going to look at that a little bit. But here's the structure today. So first, I want to talk about the cultural background of the law. As you were saying, there was this sort of cultural and military crisis leading up to this. But that's understating things.
00:04:29
Speaker
And a lot of the stuff in the background is going to come out in the arguments for and against. Okay. Then we'll look at the two speeches we have on the record, one for retaining law, and more briefly, we'll talk about one against retaining law. and then finally, we'll have a little bit of a twist about all this when we talk about later developments after the repeal attempt.
00:04:53
Speaker
Okay. So for the cultural background, I have to talk at you about the history of the Roman Republic for any of this to make sense.
Roman Republic: From Kingdom to Expansion
00:05:00
Speaker
And some of it might seem like a big detour at first, but it's all going to come back.
00:05:04
Speaker
Okay. Do you know what the Roman Republic is? Let's pretend I don't. Let's help our listeners who have no idea what the Roman Republic is. Exactly why I asked. The roman Roman Republic is the predecessor to the extremely famous Roman Empire, which I think we can assume people know about.
00:05:20
Speaker
Way, way back in about 500 BC, Rome was a kingdom and nobody really knows what happened, but they overthrew their monarchy and established a republic which was steeped in anti-monarchical principles.
00:05:34
Speaker
The Roman Republic continues from there until about 27 BC, where there's a civil war. That's the one that Julius Caesar famously wins, and he becomes emperor. And from then on out, you've got the Roman Empire.
00:05:46
Speaker
We think of the Roman Empire as hegemonic. For most of its existence, the Republic wasn't. They were constantly expanding and struggling against other city-states that were legitimate rivals, real dangerous to them.
00:06:03
Speaker
and they would generally win. But they would do it through incredible industriousness and the ability to get their armies like wiped out repeatedly, and then still somehow summon another massive army.
00:06:17
Speaker
This happens again and again in war after war, and the Punic Wars were perfect illustration of this. You'll remember... that the Oppian law is passed in the middle of the Punic Wars, according to what we read previously. Punic is the Roman word for Carthaginian.
00:06:36
Speaker
ah For Carthaginian, Carthage was a merchant city in the north of Africa, which was similarly expansionist. They've got kind of a culture that's now a staple of fantasy and science fiction.
00:06:51
Speaker
where the ruling class is determined by your wealth. They hire mercenaries and they solve problems with money. Just a kind of pure, pre-capitalist wealth society.
00:07:05
Speaker
If you look at a map, Rome in Italy and Carthage in northern Africa, almost like staring at each other across the Mediterranean. And right on either side of the sight lines are the big Italian islands like Sicily.
00:07:19
Speaker
It's kind of maybe not so surprising that they went to war over Sicily and other outlying territories and what's called the First Punic War. Carthage lost, and Rome extracted really big payments from them.
00:07:32
Speaker
After that, relations are good on paper, but Carthaginian culture gets really into the idea of revenge on Rome. And one of their foremost generals makes his nine-year-old son Hannibal swear an oath to take revenge on Rome.
00:07:48
Speaker
He grows up to become a general himself, and he starts the Second Punic War by attacking a Roman ally city in Spain. The Romans feel pretty safe from this because in between Italy and Spain are the Alps.
00:08:02
Speaker
Hannibal famously just leads his entire army over the Alps into Italy, and once he's in Italy, Hannibal proceeds to march around absolutely wiping the floor with the Romans.
00:08:16
Speaker
So the Romans try to fight him with armies twice as large, three times as large, and they lose every time. There's always like some trick or tactic he has in store.
00:08:26
Speaker
They get overconfident and somehow he reads their overconfidence perfectly. Like at one point he wakes them up in the morning with a fake attack and then retreat. And the Romans give chase through a freezing river and Hannibal's actual army turns out to be on the other side of the river. They've been up for hours and they're in exactly position for the fight that happens. And it's a wipe.
00:08:47
Speaker
And this sort of thing like happens repeatedly. And they're getting their ass kicked so badly that for a year, they just give up fighting Hannibal. And they just sort of try to shadow him around Italy, trying to keep him from converting their allies or sacking their
Hannibal's Impact on Rome
00:09:02
Speaker
allied cities. Then a new commander takes over. He's very into just getting this done.
00:09:08
Speaker
He tries to fight Hannibal at Cannae in 216 BC. and the Romans experienced the worst military defeat in their entire history, the absolute low end of estimates is that Hannibal kills 50,000 Romans in a single day.
00:09:24
Speaker
The army was so completely wiped out and so many nobles were killed that this single battle created a new level of class mobility in Rome. Wow. There's a famous sculpture of Hannibal counting the rings of Roman nobles he's killed at Cannae. I'm going to send that to you. Okay.
00:09:42
Speaker
Interesting. I wouldn't have recognized this guy as Hannibal, but obviously this guy is Hannibal from from being told this, is standing there holding the what are they called?
00:09:54
Speaker
Like a Roman standard, like a staff with this symbol of the Roman Empire. so not Not Roman Empire, the Roman Republic. The symbol of the Roman Republic. upside down.
00:10:04
Speaker
He's standing on top of, I can't quite make out what that is. So I think he's literally standing on top of an eagle and also a pile of scrolls and probably a shield.
00:10:15
Speaker
Okay. That makes sense. So he's standing on top of these symbols of the Roman Republic. It's very clear, even if you didn't know that this was Hannibal and had heard this whole story, it's very clear this is a conqueror. He has destroyed this society.
00:10:32
Speaker
Right. And he's got a huge vase at one hand. You can only see what's overflowing out of the top of the vase, but it looks like a bunch of rings. Oh, okay. i didn't I couldn't quite tell what that detailing was. Yeah, so those are those are the rings of the dead Roman nobles.
00:10:48
Speaker
His brother goes and dumps these rings on the floor of the Carthaginian Council to show how well the war is going. Can I ask, do you know what year this sculpture was made? This is actually from the
Hannibal's Legacy in Modern Ideologies
00:10:59
Speaker
1700s.
00:10:59
Speaker
Okay, that was one thing I kind of wanted to just ping here, is it's funny, you know, on the one hand, you were like, okay, this is going to seem like a huge digression, and already... This is constantly in the dialogue and like the, not necessarily like the historical knowledge of what happened, but these figures of Hannibal are so present in so much manosphere discourse.
00:11:21
Speaker
You're constantly seeing Hannibal being mentioned. Yeah. It wouldn't be at all surprising to see based account with this sculpture as its face. Of course, even more across the political spectrum.
00:11:36
Speaker
If you've seen that account that was on Twitter and now on Blue Sky, that ends every tweet with, moreover, ice must be destroyed. Right, right. Like this is a reference to the Punic Wars. Yeah, absolutely. We're going hear from that guy later.
00:11:48
Speaker
Didn't she transition? Sorry, sorry, not the poster. The person who said Carthage must be destroyed. Oh, yeah. okay Edit that out. It's fascinating how long this figure has loomed in people's minds.
00:12:01
Speaker
Well, it's a little bit facile to just like compare casualty counts, but I don't think it's totally ridiculous to talk about this as if it were Osama bin Laden doing like 25 9-11s in a single day. And like an actual seemingly invincible Al-Qaeda army marching around the U.S. s That doesn't seem like an unreasonable mindset for the Romans to be in at this point.
00:12:26
Speaker
Yeah, I just think it's interesting how much the Roman Republic is also a figure in a lot of conservative circles. I've definitely heard, i don't know if you've heard this talking point.
00:12:37
Speaker
People have talked about, oh, America is not a democracy, we're a republic, and they're nodding towards this history of the Roman Republic, and they're trying to eke out this kind of militarized society as being the real true thing that we are, not like those gay Greeks. But anyway, that's kind of a whole other side tangent.
00:12:55
Speaker
Back when I was a centrist in, say, 2016 or so, that was something i said.
Shifts in Centrist Views, 2016
00:13:01
Speaker
And it was an argument in favor of stability, in favor of going with the no one, in favor of incrementalism.
00:13:08
Speaker
Now it's, in disguise, far-right accelerationist argument. Yeah, absolutely. It's something which it doesn't have a very clear content in itself.
00:13:19
Speaker
And so it's kind of a perfect MacGuffin to just paper over some actual secret political content. Yeah, it's very easy to project onto ancient societies, whatever understanding of society you wish to idealize.
00:13:34
Speaker
I also have at least one ancient history episode in the works. So I think this is a theme we're going to be coming back to. on with the history lesson. There's this one really big defeat, but also in the previous three years, he's killed, again, this is a low-end estimate. The numbers I've cited are low-ends. He's killed about 120,000 Romans.
00:13:53
Speaker
And the Romans, culturally, they just, they go berserk. If we're going to go with like the Assamben-Lan comparison, like Freedom Fries do not compare to this. In Rome, you're not allowed to mourn for more than 30 days.
00:14:06
Speaker
You're not allowed to say the word peace in public. You're not allowed to cry in public. There are some survivors, thousands somehow, and the Senate refuses to ransom them, which is not the usual practice.
00:14:19
Speaker
Interesting. The Oppian law passes in the aftermath of candy. Did we get any POW MIA shit at the time? like I'm imagining an ancient Roman flag. It's like...
00:14:31
Speaker
No, not really. Actually, what happened is Hannibal eventually just kind of released the hostages because he wasn't getting anything for them, I suppose. Rome was so ashamed of them that they sent them off to fight in Spain and they weren't allowed back in the capital until they had regained their honor, which meant fighting until the end of this war.
00:14:57
Speaker
And the war is going to go on for another 14 years of serious fighting after this point. So they're out there for a long time. wow Now we're ready for the speeches. The first speech is by Cato the Elder.
00:15:09
Speaker
He's called the Elder because later in sort of like the Julius Caesar period, there's going to be a Cato the Younger. Cato the Elder is the one who ends all his speeches by saying, furthermore, Carthage must be destroyed.
00:15:21
Speaker
At the point we're at during the repeal effort, he hasn't started saying that yet. So I'm sorry, but we're not going to get the catchphrase. Citizens of Rome, if each one of us had set himself to retain the rights and the dignity of a husband over his own wife, we should have less trouble with women as a whole sex.
00:15:40
Speaker
As things are, our liberty, overthrown in the home by female indiscipline, is now being crushed and trodden underfoot here too in the Forum.
00:15:51
Speaker
It is because we have not kept them under control individually that we are now terrorized by them collectively. I really used to think it a fable, a piece of fiction, that story of the destruction, root and branch of all the men on that island by a conspiracy of the women.
00:16:09
Speaker
But in fact, there is the greatest danger from any class of people once you allow meetings and conferences and secret consultations. Very interesting. A lot to unpick here.
00:16:22
Speaker
You know, we didn't really go into the details of the earlier excerpts beyond just scene setting, but there was this line about... You know, the women couldn't be stopped from speaking, even by the law, even by their husbands, or even by their own propriety, right? Like there was this feeling of, oh, there's sort of three failures here. There's the failure of the law to keep women in check.
00:16:45
Speaker
There's the failure of husbands to keep their wives in check. And there's a failure of the propriety of the women to keep themselves in check. And you absolutely see this perspective here. And it's fascinating to see how little things have changed, I guess.
Cato's Speech on Gender Roles
00:16:59
Speaker
This is something right out of what we talked about last episode. This idea of women are not being kept in control by their husbands, and that's leading to the downfall of society. In fact, I guess more Leacock than Peck, because he's not saying anything about women's happiness.
00:17:18
Speaker
Interesting how similar this is to Leacock's writing about women thousands of years later. It's also a peculiarly Roman way of talking about the destruction of society, to talk about meetings and conferences and secret consultations.
00:17:34
Speaker
In other words, conspiracies. The reference to the island where the women destroyed the men rootin' branches, it turns out to be pretty interesting. He's talking about an island called Lemnos, which became famous in Greek mythology, because the women there...
00:17:54
Speaker
killed all the men because the men were cheating with mainlanders over time any crime of horrible revenge became known as a lemnian crime because of this i think this island shows up at least in some versions of the jason and the argan yes it does i was going to mention that is it Hercules who has to go and help?
00:18:17
Speaker
No, no. Okay, okay. I know the story. I'll tell it. Which hero is Okay, okay. Just a quick recap of the whole idea of Jason and the Argonauts is you have a band of young heroes who are drawn together and they go out on their boat and they're trying to retrieve an artifact called the Golden Fleece.
00:18:37
Speaker
One of them is Hercules. There's all these like name heroes and they show up with their like little crew of orbiters. Their first stop out on this epic quest is actually the island of Lemnos.
00:18:48
Speaker
They get there. This post-murder. So there's no men on the island. The women are all like, oh, hello. They all hang out with the women all day and feast.
00:18:59
Speaker
And then at night, they they go home with them and they have a good time. And then what happens the next day is the exact same thing. And then the day after that,
00:19:12
Speaker
And the day after that, the only one who has not gone out to hang out with the women is Hercules, who I guess is like too much of a Chad. There's an interesting dynamic here. And I'm trying to remember because one of the things about this myth is that it's retold so many different times. And there's a bunch of different written versions.
00:19:28
Speaker
It differs from a lot of like we only have one version of like one classical version of the Odyssey. And then we have people talking about it later. This one, there's three or four, as far as I remember.
00:19:41
Speaker
i guess there are other myths of Troy, so it's more complicated than I'm saying. But in definitely some of the versions, you can absolutely read it as Hercules is kind of gay. Yeah, I got that sense, too. The reason Hercules doesn't go hang out, Hercules is there with his friend, who I'm totally b blanking on his name. Like, I didn't prep any of this in advance, obviously.
00:20:02
Speaker
And the friend dies at some point, and it's this huge tragic moment. And it kind of, i mean, in a little bit mirrors, at least in the Apollonius of Rhodes version, it mirrors like Achilles mourning for Patroclus.
00:20:17
Speaker
But there's this sense of, oh, he isn't interested in these women because he's already got his companion here. And it is interesting. in some sense textually, like he's too much of a Chad, but it is exactly that that moment of,
00:20:35
Speaker
he's too masculine to hang out with a bunch of women, right? It's gay to be with women. Right. It's cool to be with men. It is. Well, when I said, when I said Hercules was the only one who stays behind on the boat, I meant Hercules and his orbiters.
00:20:47
Speaker
So yeah. Yeah. It's kind of ambiguous. It read as gay to me too, but Hercules is the one who summons them all together after they've been there, like day after day after day.
00:20:59
Speaker
And he's like, Hey, I thought this was going to be a heroic adventure, and this is not very heroic so far, and it definitely isn't helping us get the golden fleece. And from that point of view, it's kind of a grind set thing.
Modern Conservative Parallels to Cato's Views
00:21:13
Speaker
yeah There's intersection there with the obviously too chad to be heterosexual element. Okay, let's move on to the next excerpt from Cato. For myself, it was with something like a blush of shame that I made my way just now to the forum through the midst of an army of women.
00:21:31
Speaker
Had I not been restrained by my respect for the dignity and modesty of some individual women, rather than that of the female sex as a whole? If I had not feared that it might appear that such women had been rebuked by a consul, I should have said, what sort of behavior is this?
00:21:51
Speaker
Are you in the habit of running out into the streets, blocking the roads, and addressing other women's husbands? Couldn't you have made the very same request of your own husbands at home? Or are you more alluring in the street than in the home, more attractive to other women's husbands than to your own?
00:22:08
Speaker
And yet, even at home, if modesty restrained matrons within the limits of their own rights, it would not become you to be concerned about the question of what laws should be passed or repealed in this place.
00:22:24
Speaker
Jesus Christ. Oh my God. What a fucking dick. This is so pathetic.
00:22:32
Speaker
I know that it's actually also, it's not pathetic in this way because he has the power to do this and he is in this position of power, but it's so, this procession of ideas from, first of all,
00:22:48
Speaker
it made me feel ashamed seeing all these women. They should feel ashamed. Followed by, i would have yelled at them, but that would have been beneath my dignity. No, no. It's not so much that it would have been beneath his dignity as it would have been beneath the dignity of the women around him. His powerful masculine position imposes a standard of behavior on him in which he he's not allowed to inflict the kind of rhetoric he wants to unleash on the weak.
00:23:18
Speaker
And yet here he is saying it in the Senate. So he's not. Okay, wait, this this is this reminds me of a tweet that I saw just the other day. You probably saw it also. And can I just send it to you and have you read it?
00:23:34
Speaker
Today, my family went on a family trip to Flagstaff. We walked into a quaint sandwich shop and a young woman approached to take our order. She was wearing a sports bra and crack sucking leggings.
00:23:50
Speaker
It was the kind of outfit our grandmothers would see as lingerie. Had I not been with my family, i would have said something like, ma'am, do you not know how inappropriate your outfit is? Are you not ashamed to be wearing that in public?
00:24:05
Speaker
So when I got home, I wrote the owner. This won't change until we make it change, make sin shameful again. Remember, shame pushes people to see their need for forgiveness in Christ.
00:24:19
Speaker
Okay, skipping past the obvious what the fuck, how this is deranged. I do love, there is a certain wordsmith genius to the phrase crack sucking leggings. I'm huge fan. Because of course, you smoke crack, you don't suck crack. The thing you suck is cock.
00:24:40
Speaker
So this is actually a portmanteau of crack smoking and cock sucking that he's cleverly conjured up with crack sucking. Beautiful. Isn't that kind of amazing? I don't even think he realized he was doing that. No. But that's the power of language. Beautiful.
00:24:57
Speaker
A single tweet from a far right pastor in the modern day would instantly kill an ancient Roman.
00:25:05
Speaker
This is exactly the same attitude. You know, something else that's identical about it. He says, oh, when I got home, i wrote the owner. i subtextually i spent some time on the computer thinking about this by myself you know there's definitely like an element of lust to the whole thing absolutely and this guy turned out to have a leggings fetish that his wife wrote about in an article 10 years ago wait this guy who wrote yes i'm completely serious oh my god i know right
00:25:42
Speaker
That's so amazing. Okay, so if we read Cato in the light of that...
00:25:48
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I was going to point out, i think the other common, much more common variety of posts or a complaint where you see people writing articles about how they've been silenced.
00:25:59
Speaker
He's not saying he's silenced here. He's saying his own sense of propriety stopped him from rebuking these women because of the potential for, right, there's the there's the specter of the more respectable women. In this tweet, it's the wife and daughter. And in the and the other thing, it's the thought that there are more respectable women around.
00:26:17
Speaker
that they shouldn't have to be subject to his rebuke to these sinful women. But there's this sense of, oh, i'm I'm not able to say something, right? i'm My voice isn't heard. And the complaint is in part this thing that I wanted to say I wasn't able to say.
00:26:34
Speaker
But then he's saying it to this big platform. And you see that all the time. An article about how you've been silenced doesn't make any sense because how did you get the article? if you're published in the New York Times, you've not been silenced. You are in fact a New York Times published author.
00:26:50
Speaker
Anyway, this really makes me think of something I think I talked about on some of our planning calls, but I haven't really brought up on the pod before. But especially as I've thought about ancient history and sort of older texts that I want to prep, there's a really good book that I want to basically say a lot of my analysis or some of my analysis are going to be just from having read this. And I recommend it if you are interested in these sorts of things.
00:27:19
Speaker
It's called The Once and Future Sex by Eleanor Janaga. And it in this book, she wants to analyze the place of women in medieval society. One of her claims is, in fact, medieval society has opinions on women that were based on writings of the ancients, both ancient Greek and ancient Roman writers. There's some stuff about Hippocrates in there.
00:27:42
Speaker
But one of the things she wants to pay particular attention to is what is the same and what is different? That a lot of people today, we think... Oh, back in the medieval times, they had kind of the same opinions about women, but more extreme. And now women are better off because we have feminism.
00:27:59
Speaker
Linear conception of progress shit. Yeah. And part of it is if we don't understand that actually many of the specific ways that women were conceived of are different, then we think there's actually some natural thing that is creating this imbalance, creating this inequality.
00:28:15
Speaker
That actually feminism is really overcoming some natural deficiency of women.
Conservative Views on Women's Public Presence
00:28:21
Speaker
I think maybe we should also mention, are you more luring in the street than the home, more attractive to other women's husbands than your own?
00:28:29
Speaker
as if any woman in a public place is trying to attract other people's men. This is one of the things that's interesting and part of what I was saying about similarities, but also differences. Both of these, both this tweet and this speech are about the way women are in public and both do have this element of...
00:28:48
Speaker
it's inappropriately sexual for this woman to be in public. There's this sort of different perspective where our lovely far-right Twitter user is saying, oh, she wasn't covering up enough, and that's what made it sexual.
00:29:02
Speaker
Kato kind of isn't saying that. There's no reference to the way they're dressed. It's just the fact of them being in public at all. In both, though, there's this implication that the real respectful thing, the real respectful place for women is to not be involved in this conversation. Because he, not only is there that moment of, oh, why are you out in public?
00:29:23
Speaker
The point of that that, he's trying to get to, at least textually, is, shouldn't you be making this appeal to your husband at home? And then he finishes it off with, well, it's also slutty and whorish for you to make this appeal at home.
00:29:36
Speaker
If you actually had modesty, you would know that it's unbecoming for you to make this appeal at home to your husband. Okay. The next excerpt. Our ancestors refused to allow any woman to transact even private business without a guardian to represent her.
00:29:53
Speaker
Women had to be under the control of fathers, brothers, or husbands, but we, heaven preserve us, are now allowing them even to take part in politics.
00:30:05
Speaker
and actually to appear in the forum and to be present at our meetings and assemblies. What are they now doing in the streets and at the street corners? Are they not simply canvassing for the proposal of the tribunes and voting for the repeal of the law?
00:30:22
Speaker
Give a free rein to their undisciplined nature to this untamed animal and then expect them to set a limit to their own license. Unless you impose that limit, this is the least of the restraints imposed on women by custom or by law which they resent.
00:30:38
Speaker
What they are longing for is complete liberty, or rather, if we want to speak the truth, complete license. Indeed, if they carry this point, what will they not attempt? Run over all the laws relating to women whereby your ancestors curbed their license and brought them into subjection to their husbands.
00:30:58
Speaker
Even with all these bonds, you can scarcely restrain them. And what will happen if you allow them to seize these bonds, to wrest them from your hands one by one, and finally to attain equality with their husbands?
00:31:09
Speaker
Do you imagine that you will find them endurable? The very moment they begin to be your equals, they will be your superiors. Wow. There's certainly an element of the husband slaves whispering to each other in the club here, don't you think?
00:31:26
Speaker
I think so. and I think, interestingly, more than that, there's an echo of the earlier Leacock leeak hawk about women's suffrage.
00:31:40
Speaker
I think what really strikes out to me here is, as I was finishing reading it, even my immediate thought was, this is a political speech that can only be made in a context where women are not enfranchised.
00:31:54
Speaker
He is not making any attempt to hide the fact he wants the subjection of women or subjugation of women. He is saying the ultimate specter, the thing which motivates his whole speech is the possibility that women might become free and equal to men.
00:32:17
Speaker
This is the ultimate tragedy because it will end the subjugation of women to their husbands and that cannot be allowed to pass. And so he's directly appealing to the misogynist voting block.
00:32:31
Speaker
He doesn't give a shit what the women think of what he's saying. This is a speech to men because men are the ones who are going to be voting on this. And it's really interesting to see. This is exactly the sort of thing i in a very oversimplified way, referred to in the last episode as the divide between slave and master morality.
00:32:52
Speaker
There's no attempt to present the subjugation of a marginalized group and as anything but what it is.
00:33:06
Speaker
Today, we really expect people to make some sort of argument that this sort of thing is in some way a necessity for the good of that marginalized group.
00:33:16
Speaker
Just some lip service to the idea that the oppressors are not intrinsically noble, but rather intrinsically despicable. This is the least of the restraints imposed on women by customer by law, which they resent.
00:33:29
Speaker
He knows the women hate the law. And he's not even talking about... these women who are gathered, he's talking about women as a class. He's saying, I know women hate this and they're right to hate it because it's subjugating them and we need it to subjugate them. So why should we get rid of it? In fact, we can't get rid of it. We need it.
00:33:48
Speaker
Wow. We, the oppressors are the future slaves. There's also an interesting resonance with Leacock's vision of the primitive woman who was happier, but who we can't we can't allow that society to take over, you know, with massive ambiguity about who he's even talking about and what that society even he's referring to is.
00:34:11
Speaker
With this idea of the ancestors that curbed their license and brought them into subjection to their husbands, there's this... notion of a natural state in which women are unendurable.
00:34:24
Speaker
And this feels a little different than the stuff we've read, the more contemporary stuff we've read, because he is saying, actually, in a way, he's not making any appeal to naturality here. He's not saying in the natural order of things, men are in charge. He's saying, no, we created this order and we have to keep it.
00:34:40
Speaker
And so I think it's an important... Interesting distinction to make between how people talk about these things today with this kind of natural, and it's exactly what I was getting at with this reference to to medievalism. and then Yeah, to him, theres there's nothing built into nature about this order necessarily.
00:34:57
Speaker
Next excerpt. Good heavens, they object to the passing of a new measure against them. They complain that this is not law but rank injustice. In fact, their aim is that you should repeal a law which you have approved and sanctioned by your votes, whose worth you have tested in the practical experience of all these years.
00:35:14
Speaker
They intend, in other words, that by the abolition of this one law, you should weaken the force of all the others. If every individual is to destroy and demolish any law which hinders him in his particular interests, what use will it be for the whole citizen body to pass measures which will soon be repealed by those whom they directed?
00:35:32
Speaker
This is so funny. this is so stupid. It's so like stupid. It's so demeaning to the intelligence of anyone listening, and if he's falling for it himself?
00:35:46
Speaker
This idea that you can't repeal a law because it's a law, and if you repeal this law, what, you're going to repeal another law next? It's so antithetical to the notion of a republic.
00:35:58
Speaker
I got no respect for this guy. i have heard many times, essentially this argument presented against the idea that people in prison should be able to vote.
00:36:09
Speaker
They'll say things like, well, hang on, hang on. But then all the murderers are going to get together and pass a law that says it's legal to murder. It's funny. I think there's different levels of that argument.
00:36:21
Speaker
And there's more sophisticated ones I've definitely heard too, where people talk about, sometimes if you get someone who's really fancy, they'll start talking about the notion of the demos and like citizen and citizenship and, you know, buy into
Historical and Modern Reform Debates
00:36:35
Speaker
society. But it always boils down to that same stupid impulse.
00:36:41
Speaker
No one ever wonders in those situations, if murderers have enough of a voting bloc, that they could legalize murder by law, doesn't that mean your society's kind of fucked anyway?
00:36:56
Speaker
If you genuinely believe that there are enough people who want to legalize murder, that the only thing stopping them from doing it is that they don't have the right to vote, your civilization is already over at that point.
00:37:14
Speaker
Yeah, cooked. You're just cooked. It doesn't matter. Yeah, let's look at the next excerpt. but I should like to be told what it is that has led these matrons to rush out into the streets in a tumult, scarcely refraining from entering the forum and attending a public meeting.
00:37:31
Speaker
Is it to p plead that their fathers, their husbands, their sons, their brothers may be ransomed from Hannibal? Such disaster to our country is far away, and may it always be so.
00:37:43
Speaker
And yet, when that disaster did befall us, then you refused to respond to their prayers inspired by family affection. But the truth is that it was not family affection that brought the women together.
00:37:55
Speaker
It was not their anxiety for their loved ones. What excuse is offered for this present feminine insurrection? We want to gleam with purple and gold, says one of them, and to ride in our carriages on festal days. And on ordinary days, we want to ride through Rome as if in triumph over the law, which has been vanquished and repealed, and over those votes of yours, which we have captured and wrested from you.
00:38:18
Speaker
We want no limit to our spending and our extravagance. Okay, this is exactly the POW MIA shit I was talking about. This, and I guess I should have expected it from Cato the Elder, because to some extent...
00:38:32
Speaker
Have you seen any of the Rambo movies? No, I haven't. Okay, this is my perfect touchstone for understanding this cultural phenomenon. So the first movie is called First Blood, and it's not perfect. It's certainly got flaws, but it's a quite interesting examination of the effects of PTSD on this soldier.
00:38:53
Speaker
So the plot of that movie is that a soldier has come home, you know fought in Vietnam. Now he's home. He doesn't really have anywhere to go. he's sort of a vagrant. He's wandering around. He tries to go visit his former buddy. it turns out that the guy died.
00:39:08
Speaker
He's in this small town. He starts getting harassed by this sheriff. And basically it triggers his PTSD and he wages war on this small town. And it ends like he's this like special ops soldier and his handler has to come and there's this whole big tearful scene where he starts yelling about how no one respects veterans and and no one understands what they sacrificed and this very reactionary thing that was felt by veterans at the time.
00:39:38
Speaker
And then it devolves into this story about incoherently tells about watching his buddy die in war. And so it's this movie about trauma and... it's It's quite well done. The sequel... So the first one was based on a novel. The sequel was like, oh, this first one was really successful. they need to make a sequel.
00:39:58
Speaker
Completely different movie. yeah Written, I think, in part by Sylvester Stallone, who clearly didn't understand what the first movie was about. it opens and he's in prison. So already there's kind of a shift from the first character. It's kind of understood at the end that he's going to be institutionalized because he is...
00:40:14
Speaker
He's had a breakdown. And the second one, he's like in a prison camp. Former handler comes is like, oh, we have this mission for you. going to send you to go rescue hostages.
00:40:26
Speaker
This was one of Ronald Reagan's favorite movies when it came out. It's all about going back and getting the hostages back that that the government was denied, that the Vietnamese government was denying even existed, right? So it's all POW at my A shit.
00:40:38
Speaker
And there's a moment at the beginning where he just like looks direct. He looks at the guy, but then the camera is like him looking directly at the camera and he goes, Do we get to win this time? oh wow. I mean, it's very... Carthage must be destroyed, right? It's very... We lost because these cowards don't have the right appreciation and they're not paying the right respect to the hostages.
00:41:01
Speaker
And I guess this is different because there really were hostages, right? It's not... I mean, the POWMA thing, like part of that was this belief that there were a lot more hostages that were being lied about. So it's not a direct comparison. But...
00:41:13
Speaker
yeah, this, oh, why are you worried about, you know, your place in society? Like, you should be paying even more respect to these hostages of war, and you have these frivolous concerns.
Cato's Critique on Women's Desires and National Issues
00:41:30
Speaker
And it, again, doesn't really make any sense, because it's true. Like, if these things are so frivolous, If it's really just they want to wear purple and gold, why is this the thing which is going to make society collapse if they allow it?
00:41:51
Speaker
It's so frivolous that you need to make this big speech against it. It kind of doesn't make sense on that level. The claim really is that Any concern for the desires of women is both frivolous and dangerous.
00:42:12
Speaker
Whether the women are motivated by the right things is just a smokescreen. For one thing, he's giving the speech in the Senate, right?
00:42:22
Speaker
And it's the Senate that voted not to ransom these people. It's not the women's fault. We ended up not leaving this in the final edit, I think, of the last episode, because I couldn't really make the point coherently. But we see, again, this kind of version of what recognized today as fascist rhetoric of our enemy is both weak and strong, where women are simultaneously these frivolous and unserious beings that are nevertheless a complete threat to our way of life.
00:42:56
Speaker
And especially in of the other stuff we've read, you know, it's interesting to to see the way that they place this in rhetoric at this time, because certainly they had xenophobia and they had this kind of supremacist thinking about their own culture, but they didn't have...
00:43:15
Speaker
the same kind of racism that we have today, because there wasn't the same discourse of like the white race, like that wasn't a concept that was something they understood. So that they did have a concept of their own allergy to foreignness.
00:43:28
Speaker
Exactly. So it's a little bit different, but it it is the same weird mapping of foreign invasion, and women, that women are a kind of foreign invasion. And even here,
00:43:41
Speaker
It starts off with, oh, you should have been more worried about the hostages. And if you didn't, you know, he's saying to the Senate, like, you didn't vote to ransom the hostages, even after women pleaded affection.
00:43:54
Speaker
Or even if the women had pleaded affection, you maybe still wouldn't have done it. Or I don't know exactly what the full context is there. The women come out after Kani and they're like, please ransom our husbands who are under Hannibal's tender care. And Senator's like, no.
00:44:11
Speaker
And what he's saying is you should display that same kind of harshness toward their pleas now. Yeah. But I think it starts there. But then the vision he has of women at the end We want to ride through Rome as if in triumph over the law, which has been vanquished and repealed, and over those votes of yours, which we have captured and wrestled from you. That's an identification of the women with essentially animals conquering our name.
00:44:36
Speaker
Right. It's gone from women should be more focused on the Punic Wars, or women should, we should not be paying attention to women, we should be paying attention to the Punic Wars, to we have to pay attention to this because the threat from women is the same as the threat from the foreign invader.
00:44:49
Speaker
Okay, this is a perfect time to go into the next excerpt. Okay. You have often heard my complaints about the excessive spending of the women and of the men.
00:45:02
Speaker
Women be shopping, Sarah. There's nothing they love more than to go down to the forum and shop. Magistrates as well as private citizens... about the sorry state of our commonwealth because of two opposing vices, avarice and extravagance, plagues which have been the destruction of all great empires.
00:45:24
Speaker
As the fortunes of our commonwealth grows better and happier day by day, and as our empire increases, and already we have crossed into Greece and Asia, regions full of all kinds of sensual allurements, and are even laying hands on the treasures of kings, I am the more alarmed lest these things should capture us instead of our capturing them.
00:45:46
Speaker
those statues brought from Syracuse, believe me, were hostile standards brought against the city. And now I hear far too many people praising the ornaments of Corinth and Athens and jeering at the terracotta antifixes of the Roman gods.
00:46:02
Speaker
For my part, I prefer to have those gods propitious to us as I trust they will be propitious if we allow them to remain in their own abodes. Helen, have you considered that women are Greece?
00:46:14
Speaker
That's so funny. i love... But yeah, this is absolutely the same thing. Women are a foreign invasion, and it always blurs the lines between...
00:46:28
Speaker
you know, Greece is like a woman as well, right? It's not just women or Greece. It's Greece is full of all these sensual allurements, right? Greece is full of all these things which are distracting us, right? Yeah, again, it's this early Roman version of what today would be much more explicitly just racist.
00:46:47
Speaker
I'm thinking of the... controversy in huge air quotes, huge scare quotes over whether, what is it, whether chicken tikka masala is an English dish.
00:47:00
Speaker
You have the same dynamic with colonialism and the 20th centuries, where you have this expansion, and then on one level, i guess it's a failure of him to understand what the expansion is for. like He just wants map to be bigger. He doesn't understand.
00:47:24
Speaker
So this is a theme with Cato through his whole very long and illustrious career. He's an opponent of what was called Hellenization. I mean, I think he's obviously foolish. I have very much enjoyed my process of Helenization, anyway... It suits you, if I may say so.
00:47:42
Speaker
It's the same impulse of, I want to take over, we want to expand, but we want to realize there's a conflict there between if you expand the Republic, then you've expanded the Republic, and those other people are now in the Republic, and...
00:48:03
Speaker
Yeah. And and so it just doesn't sort of make sense. You know, when we started this podcast, I really wasn't expecting to see this theme of the identification of foreignness and femininity consistently.
00:48:17
Speaker
And it's shown up in all three of our episodes so far. Yeah, I think it's definitely going to be something to pay attention to moving
Impact of Imperial Expansion on Culture
00:48:25
Speaker
forward. It's kind of like in the conception of conservatives, right?
00:48:30
Speaker
the countries they're writing from are constantly being imperial boomeranged by feminization yeah wait maybe we should indicate what the imperial boomerang concept is Oh, okay. I'll let you.
00:48:42
Speaker
Yeah. So the Imperial Boomerang concept is just the idea that when you go out and and behave in imperialist ways, conquer other countries, et cetera, that rebounds on you.
00:48:56
Speaker
The way in which it rebounds on you can vary. It can involve the militarization of your own people. And then they return home. And they enact similar militarization. it can be the building up of oppressive structures.
00:49:14
Speaker
It can happen in a bunch of different ways. But this is a concept that, as I recall, dates from maybe Hannah Arendt had some near predecessors who talked about it, but like around that era.
00:49:28
Speaker
Yeah, and it's sort of related to this other idea of imperial expansion and then being upset when the people you've added to your empire are like, I'm in the empire now.
00:49:39
Speaker
Construction of empire changes society, and then you've changed your society, and there will be consequences to that. And often, the thing the ways in which it changes your society, militarization,
00:49:52
Speaker
the construction of all these technologies of power are sort of confused for more foreigners. Standards of living decline because of all these things. Simultaneously, you get either refugees or immigrants from different places and you the reactionary mind kind of can't pick apart that these are two related phenomenon because they're both downstream of imperial expansion, but you're kind of confusing which one is responsible for your life getting shitty.
00:50:26
Speaker
And so you end up with really stupid things like Brexit. he Yeah, it's interesting because there's a variation here because Cato is recognizing that what's happening is not people's lives getting shittier. It's a massive influx of wealth.
00:50:42
Speaker
Yeah. And so that's the sort of the last point I think I want to make here, which is it's interesting to see that the thing he's objecting to is the analogy for if I'm continuing with this British Empire analogy, he's not angry to see all of these people from various colonized places.
00:50:58
Speaker
He's angry at the British Museum. He's angry at the cultural artifacts being a thing that you'd care about. Right. He's like, what happened to what happened to good old Big Ben? Why are people looking at the Elbe and Marbles?
00:51:11
Speaker
Exactly. And that's the thing that's so fascinating to me about it is that it really feels like he doesn't have a theory, at least, you know, British imperialism, right? There's that line from the Big Lebowski, say what you will about national socialism. At least it's an ethos, right?
00:51:28
Speaker
British imperialism has had all these hateful effects. There's a coherent sense of, okay, we want to go and loot the world for riches and subjugate all these people. And then you're mad that you've got all these subjugated people to deal with who are now rising up and saying, hey, that shit was chill.
00:51:45
Speaker
He doesn't even have a theory of what the expansion the Republic should be for other than just Rome bigger, right? Like all of the direct effects of that, that you would think...
00:51:56
Speaker
Rome bigger would be for, like, looting the wealth of other nations. Actually, that's also part of what's bad. It doesn't make much sense. I think our aftermath segment might eliminate a little bit of this.
00:52:09
Speaker
Okay. For myself, there are some desires for which I can discover not even a cause or an explanation. No doubt it may occasion some natural shame or resentment if what is permitted to another is refused to yourself. Okay.
00:52:23
Speaker
But if that is so, provided that the dress of all is made uniform, how can any one of you be afraid of being conspicuous in any respect? The worst kinds of shame are certainly those due to meanness or poverty, but this law relieves you of both since you do not possess what it forbids you to possess.
00:52:43
Speaker
Ah, yes, says that rich woman over there, it is precisely this uniformity that I am not able to stand. Why am I not conspicuous, distinguished by my purple and gold?
00:52:55
Speaker
Why does the poverty of other women lie hidden under the cover of this law so that it may seem that they would have possessed if the law allowed it what in fact they have not the means to possess? Is your wish, citizens, to start such a competition between your wives that the rich will desire to possess what no other woman can possess, while the poor will stretch themselves beyond their means to avoid being looked down on for their poverty?
00:53:20
Speaker
This is really interesting because this is the moment we're seeing what I said earlier he wasn't doing any of, which is that lip service to slave morality. This is the only place, or this is the first place we've seen so far where he's tried to make some argument from how this would actually be good for women or how this should actually be conceived of in a way as beneficial to women.
00:53:43
Speaker
It's a very common take that poverty, i mean, and it's true that poverty causes violence It feels bad to be poor. That's sort of his starting place. His proposed solution, therefore abolish the concept of poverty by not allowing women to possess anything, doesn't really make sense. Well, I mean, aside from everything else, why does this law only apply to women?
00:54:04
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, that's the thing is, if you wanted to, you could take that and you could say, oh, you know what? You're right. Money causes unhappiness. We should build communism. And no one should have money, right? There's an old...
00:54:18
Speaker
There's an old joke I was thinking of here that's, you know, Stalin is planning the new society. He's asking his economic advisors and suddenly it comes around, you know, they're, they're going through how they're going to plan the economy. And it comes around to this question of how they're going to handle the question of money.
00:54:33
Speaker
And one of his advisors says, well, we need money because there needs to be some unit of exchange because it's impossible for us to distribute everything to everyone perfectly so that everyone has everything what they need. They need to be able to exchange things. And so it's not, you know, we won't have capital. We won't have capitalism, but we need money. And then another advisor says, well, no, that doesn't make any sense because once you have money, the possibility for the accumulation of money occurs, and then you are on your way to building capitalism.
00:55:03
Speaker
And it's a natural force and there's no way to stop it. And so they look at Stalin and they say, what are we going to do? And he says, I propose we have a dialectical synthesis of the two positions. Some people will have money and some people will not.
00:55:15
Speaker
And that's perfect Marxist philosophy. Well, you nailed it, Stalin. Here, he's got this analysis, which again, he he doesn't make any sense.
00:55:27
Speaker
If we were to conclude the things he wants us to conclude here, it would be this kind of, mean, want to be clear, not
Soviet Era Economic Misunderstandings
00:55:35
Speaker
communism. It would be the conservative caricature of what communism is, which is no one has anything. I think you're being too kind to Cato here.
00:55:44
Speaker
So the skeleton key, in my opinion, to this paragraph is that he doesn't give a fuck if women feel bad because of competition. What he cares about societal stability.
00:55:58
Speaker
And to him, this competition between wives is destabilizing. Right. I mean, I think that's definitely a big part of it. I do think there's this moment of like the worst kinds of shame are certainly those to meet due to meanness or poverty. He's trying to pay attention to this shame. And he's also with this line, ah the rich woman over there says, it is precisely this uniformity that I am not able to stand. Why am I not conspicuous, distinguished by purple and gold? Right. He's saying it's not actually...
00:56:29
Speaker
You might feel sympathy for women who don't have anything, but actually it's the rich women, which again, already there's this contradiction here. what do you mean by a rich woman? You just got done saying that the whole beauty of this law is that women can't possess anything. You mean women with rich husbands maybe, but that's different, especially in a world where this level of subjugation is happening.
00:56:50
Speaker
He's saying it is actually the greed of rich women wanting to oppress other women in this competition of women. And so there is something to be like, there is something happening here where he's pointing out this competition between women, but it's, I guess what I'm trying to get up before is he, he's not making any argument about why the same thing shouldn't apply to men.
00:57:11
Speaker
Right. Like if competition between women will destroy society, Doesn't competition between men also dis destroy society in that way? Shouldn't we all? I'm stretching here, but my strong suspicion is that he would actually love to have a law like this for men too.
00:57:25
Speaker
He just thinks he can't. Interesting. Okay. that's That's just my read on the situation. Then he really wants this kind of, I mean, he wants a kind of socialism that's kind of nationalized towards a militarized project. I wonder... That's a novel concept.
00:57:44
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. Okay. the woman who can buy these things with her own money will'll buy them the woman who cannot will entreat her husband to buy them pity the poor husband if he yield pity him if he refuses since what he does not give himself he will see given by another man At the present time, they are making requests of other women's husbands in public.
00:58:13
Speaker
And what is more important, they are asking for legislation and for votes. and some And from some men, they get what they want. Against your own interests and the interests of your property and your children, you, my friend, are open to their entreaties.
00:58:29
Speaker
And when once the law has ceased to put a limit on your wife's spending, you yourself will never do it. Do you imagine, citizens, that things will be the same as they were before the law was passed?
00:58:42
Speaker
It is safer that a villain should escape prosecution than that he should be acquitted. In the same way, extravagance, left untroubled, would have been more tolerable then than it will be now, when it has been like some wild beast, first enraged by the very chains that bound it and then set free.
00:59:01
Speaker
My opinion is that the Oppian law should on no account be repealed, and I pray the blessings of all the gods on your decision. Okay, so that's the end of his speech. Not to just repeat what we've already said.
00:59:13
Speaker
Again, a total disdain for anything women might be asking for. this complete identification of a woman advocating for her own political position, a woman arguing with someone, petitioning for a vote, getting together and discussing any kind of politics is the same as women asking for some bobble.
00:59:39
Speaker
There's no difference between if Someone can go ask another woman's husband to vote for a law. What's next? Is she going to ask for a gold necklace or a purple robe?
00:59:52
Speaker
It's totally nonsense. I think it's put slightly euphemistically, but he is saying that If you refuse to buy your wife fancy things after this law is repealed, she's going to cuck you.
01:00:08
Speaker
Yeah. that There is a heavy sexual undertone, too. She's going to ask another woman's husband to buy her things. It's a very... It's actually kind of a It's a rather fifty s sensibility.
01:00:21
Speaker
to portray women as not only they love to be shopping, but also things they love to be shopping for are trinkets, little nonsense.
01:00:33
Speaker
i Whenever I see like a 50s ad or something for microwave for women or something, If it's targeted specifically at women, then it's often talking about the labor-saving aspects.
01:00:51
Speaker
But if there's at all a mixed audience, I really get the sense that these devices are like toys for the home. These are toys you buy your wife. Absolutely. Okay, so it sounds like you found Kato's speech pretty persuasive.
01:01:04
Speaker
Oh, absolutely. I think we should take the vote away from women. i think women shouldn't be allowed to own anything. Have I got an era for you to live in? I guess the other resonance with today that I want to draw out is this increase in kind of trad wife culture that we've seen.
01:01:19
Speaker
There's this notion here of really women who want to possess all these things. It is for totally frivolous reasons. It's just to make other women look bad. it is show show off play around with other women's husbands.
01:01:36
Speaker
It's also funny to refer to men as other women's husbands constantly. And there's this implication that you should be happy, you're you're taken care of.
01:01:49
Speaker
Women in Cato's conception, it seems like, should be compacted into a single social class. They shouldn't be allowed to have concept and a ranking system of status of their own.
01:02:05
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely.
Trad Wife Culture and Gender Roles
01:02:07
Speaker
There's this pocket of this trad culture, of this trad wife thing, where you see videos of women talking about Here's what I do at home when my husband's away.
01:02:16
Speaker
And it's like locking all the doors and barricading everything and being totally insulated. There's this commonality to this vision of women shouldn't have, women should be compacted into one class. There shouldn't be a ranking system.
01:02:28
Speaker
And in a way that should be realized by not interacting with each other. Right. Going back to the beginning, this idea of the worst things are happening. The society is falling apart.
01:02:39
Speaker
Women are gathering and speaking to each other. That's right. It's conspiracy. Just by virtue of women gathering and speaking, there is a conspiracy. Absolutely. His vision, i think it is something we're seeing a little bit today, is women should be siloed.
01:02:55
Speaker
And because if you're at home, and you're only interacting with your slaves and your children and whatever people come to the home, doesn't make sense to talk about ranking or anything like this of this nature, because how are you comparing, right? There's no there's no interaction there.
01:03:13
Speaker
Anyway, like now we can we can move on and hear the feminist rebuttal. This is given by Valerius.
01:03:21
Speaker
Cato spent more words in chiding the matrons than in speaking against our proposal, and indeed he left it undecided whether the behavior for which he reproved them was spontaneous or instigated by us.
01:03:34
Speaker
I shall defend our action, not ourselves, although the consul laid the blame on us, by verbal innuendo rather than by making a substantial charge. The gathering of women he called sedition, and at times a feminine secession, on the ground that the matrons in the public streets had asked you to repeal in a time of peace when the country is flourishing and prosperous, a law passed against them in the harsh days of war.
01:04:00
Speaker
These and other such allegations are, I know, the kind of impressive phrases that speakers go in search of to add conviction to their argument. And we all know that Marcus Cato, as an orator, is not only powerful, but sometimes even violent, although by nature he is a gentle soul.
01:04:18
Speaker
Now, have the matrons done anything unprecedented, I ask you, in coming out into the streets and crowds to support a cause which is their particular concern? have they never before this occasion appeared in public places?
01:04:32
Speaker
He then goes on to list a bunch of times in Roman history where women have intervened in public affairs to the benefit of Rome. For example, at one time, there was a armed conflict in the Forum,
01:04:50
Speaker
between the Romans and the Sabines and the women ran between the battle lines. This is all essentially mythological since we're talking about back in the kingdom of Rome days, but the women ran between the battle lines and stopped the conflict.
01:05:05
Speaker
And there's actually a bunch of instances like these. or instances where the state was unable or unwilling to pay ransoms and the women of the city gathered together all their wealth. They were allowed to have wealth and ransom the hostages.
01:05:22
Speaker
He also picks out something that we Glazed over, which was right at the start of his speech, Cato suggests that actually the women are being put up to this by the men in the Senate somehow that are putting forward the proposal, that they're the real cause of the protests.
01:05:42
Speaker
Yeah, I took that to be a sort of necessary rhetorical move, given that he really wants to remove any possible real agency from women. And this vision of women as totally frivolous and concerned only with wrapping themselves in fancy cloth to make other women feel bad. Of course, some man has to be behind her political activism. Yeah, it's not quite outside agitators, but it's not far off from it either.
01:06:10
Speaker
So far, a very clear and largely just correct response. He says, look, I'm going to focus on the substance of what Cato said. Quite a lot of what Cato said so far is rhetorical tricks.
01:06:23
Speaker
Cato is very good at rhetorical tricks. We have to actually talk about facts. To which class does this law appear to belong? the law that we are seeking to repeal. Is it ancient? Is it a royal law contemporary with the birth of the city itself?
01:06:37
Speaker
Or what is next in time? Is it one of the laws inscribed by one of the 12 tables by the December is appointed to codify the laws. Is it a law essential in the judgment of our ancestors to the preservation of matronly honor, a law we must fear to repeal lest we abolish along with the law, the modesty and chastity of women.
01:06:56
Speaker
In fact, Everyone knows that this is a recent law passed 20 years ago in the consulate of Quintus Fabius and Tiberius Empronius. Yeah, so interesting. Of course, when we say feminist rebuttal, we're not talking about, oh, he's got some real contemporary materialist feminist analysis and is working to abolish patriarchy or anything like that.
01:07:18
Speaker
Of course, he's still going to make these nods to, we have to maintain the modesty and chastity of our women. But yeah, this is also something we said here, the complete stupidity of saying, oh, you're repealing this law. What's next? You can repeal another law.
01:07:37
Speaker
And he's saying, well, look, there's different kinds of laws. Right. You could make this argument that it's dangerous to repeal a law that its seems necessary in society if the law has been around for a long time and is seems part of our culture. Of course, I don't necessarily know that I personally would agree with that kind of argument, but...
Resistance to Reform: Ancient Rome to Modern Times
01:07:58
Speaker
He's saying this appeal to we need this law because our ancestors used it to help subjugate women. And the law was passed 20 years ago. That's just us.
01:08:09
Speaker
20 years ago. That's just us 20 years ago. so We do see this today with, we talk about situation in the US and the complete blow up of ICE.
01:08:23
Speaker
Exactly the comparison I was going to make. Throughout both of Obama's terms and also Biden's term, we had this, well, ICE is here, we can't get rid of it. We can't get rid of this Department of Homeland Security.
01:08:34
Speaker
There's this feeling that these things are sort of a necessary part of our society, even though they all came in in the 21st century. Yeah, this is something that... This is something that has only existed for barely a majority of my life, but it's immutable. Right. And so saying our, you know, it's the same move of our ancestors founded ICE. Our ancestors opened Guantanamo. what We can't close that. We can't end that. Exactly. And of course you have the same arguments against, which are, that's nuts. These things are brand new.
01:09:07
Speaker
Anyway. Here he's making the most obvious point. And yet it's kind of a breath of fresh air hear him just say it. All other classes in the Commonwealth and people in general will feel the change for the better in the nation.
01:09:20
Speaker
Is it only our wives who will not be reached by the benefits of national peace and tranquility? Are we men to wear purple clad in the toga prae texta when we hold office or exercise a priesthood?
01:09:31
Speaker
Are sons to wear the purple bordered toga? Are magistrates in colonies and municipalities and here in Rome, the district masters, officials of the lowest rank? Are they to have, by our permission, the right to wear the toga prae texta? And are all these not only to enjoy the distinction of this attire during life, but also after death, to have the privilege of being cremated in it?
01:09:51
Speaker
Are we to allow all this? While to women alone we deny the wearing of purple. And while you as a man are allowed to wear purple on your outer garment, are you not going to permit your wife to have a purple cloak?
01:10:04
Speaker
And are the trappings of your horse to be more splendid than the dress of your wife? Yeah, I mean, this is sort of what we were saying when I went on the little tangent about communism, which was maybe a little bit too much of a sidetrack. But there is this argument you could make and say, hey, these kinds of things should be restricted so that we don't have, you know, we should abolish these outward signs of wealth.
01:10:26
Speaker
which is already a pretty weak argument and is less communist than it is, you know, as I was saying, it than it is a sort of complete caricature and misunderstanding of of the fear mongering of, oh, this is what these people want to do.
01:10:37
Speaker
But he's not even saying this. And why should this only apply to women? Right? It's like, it's the most obvious question. You've made this argument. Poverty causes shame and these displays of wealth cause competition and,
01:10:52
Speaker
This is the the tickets decay of society, but no one's talking about restricting men from doing this. So why is the competition of men not also something that the law should talk about?
01:11:04
Speaker
Okay, this is where I reveal that when I describe Valerius as making a feminist speech, I was being a little bit sarcastic. Cato said there would be no rivalry among individuals because no woman would have any of these things.
01:11:16
Speaker
But good heavens, there is annoyance and resentment felt by all alike when they see ornaments designed denied to themselves, permitted to wives... of allies of Latin status when they see them conspicuous in gold and purple, when they see them riding through the city while they themselves follow on foot, as if sovereignty resided in the Latin cities and not in Rome.
01:11:35
Speaker
Treatment like this would be enough to wound the feelings of men. What effect do you suppose it to have on the feelings of weak women who are upset even by little things? No magistrates, no priesthoods, no triumphs, no insignia, no rewards or spoils of war can fall to them.
01:11:50
Speaker
Elegance, adornment, dress. These are the insignia of women. In these is their delight and their glory. These are what our ancestors called feminine decoration. Yeah, honestly, I was waiting for this because obviously, like I said with the last chunk, I'm not expecting this guy to be presenting a like materialist, anti-patriarchal feminist argument. Yeah.
01:12:12
Speaker
And so, of course, we're going to come down to and these weak women need to have their fancy baubles because that's the domain of women. Well, well you're a lot more prescient than I was because I was really expecting him to start quoting Judith Butler at the end.
01:12:27
Speaker
yeah Looking at the politics of this a little bit, kind of what he's saying is that if we demean our women by reducing them all to the visual status of peasants, then actually what we're doing is we're failing to assert the supremacy of Rome over our allies.
01:12:46
Speaker
So there's this foreignness angle here, again, but coming from a different direction. Yeah, again, it has to do with this uneasy relationship with your allies and with your expanding republic.
01:13:00
Speaker
Because they can't, because of the way the republic is structured, they can't actually ban women all over the place and then all of their allies from owning these things. Because it's not like a modern day empire.
01:13:12
Speaker
Yeah. Well, like 100 years from now, they're going to be fighting wars over these questions whether people in their ally cities are Romans or not. But right now, those people are distinctly not Romans.
01:13:25
Speaker
Right. They're the allies. They are part of the political force of the Republic, but they're not part of the Republic proper, which I maybe elided over a little bit when I was talking earlier about this issue.
01:13:37
Speaker
analogy with the way British imperialism functioned, although it's closer. Well, okay, we need to get back into that. But yeah, this sort of, there are allies, but we need to, we need to be the first among them. We need to be dominant. And so we need our women to be appropriately dressed.
01:13:54
Speaker
Our men are already tools of aesthetic war and domination. And it's foolish for us to refuse to recruit women into that effort.
01:14:07
Speaker
If you repeal the Appian law, you will, I suppose, have no authority if you wish to forbid any of the luxuries which the law now forbids. Some males will find daughters, wives, even sisters less under their control.
01:14:21
Speaker
But never, while their males are still alive, is female servitude cast off. And the women themselves detest the freedom bestowed by the loss of husbands or fathers.
01:14:32
Speaker
They prefer their finery to be under your authority, not under the law's control." And you ought to keep them under control and guardianship, not in servitude. You should want to be called fathers and husbands rather than masters.
01:14:47
Speaker
The console just now employed words designed to create odium. Oh, air horn. wow point but bla When he spoke of feminine sedition and secession, there is a danger, he suggests, that they will seize the Monsacchar or the Aventine as the angry plebs once did.
01:15:10
Speaker
But in fact, their weakness must put up with whatever you decide. The greater your power, the greater the moderation you should display in its exercise. This is sort of a clever argument from him because as I mentioned at the beginning, Cato's speech is rhetorically aimed squarely at the misogynist voting bloc, which is a dominant political force, especially in this Senate where women were forbidden to participate politically in any way.
01:15:45
Speaker
So here's his appeal to the misogynist voting bloc. He is saying, actually, you want to have control over your wives and daughters. But if there's a law, you're not in control. The law is in control.
01:16:00
Speaker
So there's this interesting thing where, of course, he's not going to make any kind of claim that women should have some kind of political equality, that the subjugation of women should end.
01:16:12
Speaker
But he does have to address this fear raised by Cato of a decrease in control, right? And I think he it's sort of interesting, his tack here, which is no, actually, you'll have more control because it'll be your authority and not under the law's control.
01:16:26
Speaker
Kind of fascinating. I should point out the reference to the angry plebs once seizing the Mons Sucre the Aventine. And I apologize for not actually knowing how to pronounce this correctly.
01:16:38
Speaker
This is a reference to something that happened several times over the course of the Republic, which is what's called the secession of the plebs, which is essentially ah general strike. interesting I don't want to overstate it because I don't know the extent to which this actually affected the situation. But remember, this is 20 years after a massive chunk of the nobility got wiped out at Cannae.
01:16:59
Speaker
And so there has been this unprecedented social mobility in Rome. It's possible that a portion of his audience is not necessarily averse to the idea plebs having some kind of rights.
01:17:11
Speaker
You don't want other people exercising the power what you once exercised or that you currently exercise. Yeah, absolutely. And to be able to point out, hey, look, there are women who are given a kind of liberty when their husbands die, and they actually don't like it.
01:17:28
Speaker
i mean, that's an interesting way to spin life for women is unlivable when their husbands die, because they have no political standing to, even before this law, to manage their own affairs.
01:17:41
Speaker
And so the sort of quiet part that maybe he doesn't even realize, I don't know if know if it's a quiet part he's not saying out loud, or it's just baked into his ideology, this law is not going to change things. Don't worry. Women are still subjugated. And we can see that because they still need their husbands. we've well We will leave intact the material situation that in order to survive, women need to be married.
01:18:04
Speaker
And being able to wear purple and gold isn't going to change that. So don't worry, you'll still have control. Yeah, absolutely. That's hilarious, his speech. I think it's a wonderful expression of why i love male feminists.
01:18:18
Speaker
And i would like to know what you think the outcome of the repeal attempt is. You know, I really could go either way. It's very hard to say. I'm going to guess, although it's really fifty fifty that the law was repealed. Okay, here's what actually happens.
01:18:38
Speaker
After the speeches in support of and against the law, The women poured out into the streets the next day in much greater force and went in a body to the house of the two Brutuses, who were vetoing their colleagues' proposal, and beset all the doors, nor would they desist till their tribunes had abandoned their opposition.
01:18:59
Speaker
There was no doubt now that the tribunes would be unanimous in rescinding the law. It was repealed 20 years after it had been passed. Direct action gets the good of
01:19:12
Speaker
Did these speeches matter at all? Unclear. It's really interesting. I think this is something which shows up politically again and again, which is that in a very real way, none of this shit matters.
01:19:25
Speaker
And yeah, it's always... A group of people demanding the and you know demanding the thing they need that gets it. I'm thinking of... It's kind of funny, I noticed in our last two episodes, we always manage to find a way to talk about trans issues.
01:19:41
Speaker
And I don't want to just always feel like I'm shoehorning things in, but of course it's just stuff that occurs to me. In the last... U.S. presidential election, right, in the Harris-Trump election, there was a huge amount of the campaign on the Trump side was around, oh, Harris, famous ad, right, is Harris was for they, them, Trump is for you.
01:20:01
Speaker
This idea that Harris is obsessed with trans issues. And part of this came out of Harris claiming credit for laws changing in California about trans women being imprisoned in women's versus men's prisons.
01:20:17
Speaker
One of the things that's so maddening about this discourse is that Harris really wanted when it was politically convenient for her to take responsibility and say, look, look at my record. While I was attorney general, this law changed and trans women are now being housed in women's prisons, right? Which is an unambiguously good move.
01:20:37
Speaker
But of course the thing is she was forced into doing that by, she lost a court case. Activists did that. That wasn't something Harris did. And we always remember these stories later as, oh, politicians doing this thing or,
01:20:51
Speaker
making these speeches and directing these things. But of course, yeah, of course, the answer is more women poured out and said, this can't stand and made it impossible for the law to continue. And so then it had to be changed.
01:21:05
Speaker
Yeah. I looked at different sources for this material. A lot of the sources just excerpted the speeches. Okay. After the Opian law was passed, the,
01:21:17
Speaker
there was this cascade of laws targeting consumption. And here's a table I found. It's titled, Sumptuary Regulation in Rome of the Republic and Early Principate.
01:21:33
Speaker
This is by no means a complete list, but this is just dozens of different laws restricting all kinds of things. I see in 182 BC a senatorial decree restricting wild beasts.
01:21:47
Speaker
There's one the next year restricting number of guests you're allowed to have, that sort of thing. Yeah, restrictions on Macedonian gold, restrictions on setting up statues. Yeah, so the Romans, we think of them as kind of decadent and full of luxury. And I think one of the themes that we saw in this discussion is that to some degree, this was also the Romans' self-perception.
01:22:11
Speaker
They saw themselves as falling prey to luxury. Yeah, this is absolutely the vision of Rome and why it maintains such... a hold on these right-wing guys today.
01:22:27
Speaker
Exactly this vision that Cato had of fighting against Hellenization, fighting against the decadence of the Greeks, fighting against this opulent, avaristic worship of beauty.
01:22:41
Speaker
This is really the vision of Rome that I think lives on in these people's minds is fighting a war against... decadences Yeah, against degeneration. And of course, it's all, these are all past during a time of crisis when this expansion was happening that they couldn't afford and they needed to actually fund...
01:23:06
Speaker
you know, war is expensive. And especially if you're losing the war, if you're winning wars, then you can steal the wealth from those places. But especially once your wars start getting more complicated, more difficult, and you start losing. Here's the thing. These are laws restricting consumption. They're ostensibly economic laws.
01:23:25
Speaker
But lot of these really have very little to do with the economics of the state that's spending a lot.
Aesthetics vs. Frugality in War Efforts
01:23:33
Speaker
Like if you restrict women from wearing purple in public,
01:23:37
Speaker
That does not in any meaningful sense help finance a 14-year war against Hannibal. It's the aesthetics of frugality as a substitute for actual frugality.
01:23:48
Speaker
Right. I guess the textual or the implied, so not exactly textual, the implied reasoning is purple cloth is very expensive.
01:23:59
Speaker
And it's the same kind of argument you see towards the needs of rationing, for example, during World War twoi There is something to be said for the state's limited capacity to produce and the need for that production to be oriented towards the war effort. And
Economic Focus of Roman Expansion
01:24:19
Speaker
you have to, some of these specifically about limiting Macedonian gold, regulating Macedonian gold mines,
01:24:30
Speaker
This has an obvious connection. It's true, like wine, i can't really make out what this says, but something about a sensorial edict towards Greek wine.
01:24:42
Speaker
Right. Greek and aminium wine, maximum price you're allowed to sell it for. So there are some more fuzzy ones, and absolutely it's unclear how much...
01:24:54
Speaker
of the real economy of the time was really oriented towards dyeing cloth purple. I mean, a significant amount because purple is expensive, which is sort of why it became the royal color that it did.
01:25:07
Speaker
But yeah, it's it is hand in hand with this aesthetic idea of, you know, we need to have rationing, we need to have a directed economy towards this 14 year war. But at the same time, need to make it look kosher right we need to make it look like we are paying proper respect to this idea after the second punic war after rome finally ejects hannibal by invading africa essentially the state goes on this big expansion spree
01:25:42
Speaker
For example, at the time of the repeal of the Opian law, Rome is in the middle of essentially conquering large parts of Greece. That's part Cato's concern about, you know,
01:25:54
Speaker
all this shit coming in and Hellenization. And as they do so, power starts to shift away from the state to individuals.
01:26:06
Speaker
And in the Roman imagination, that shift of power is itself framed as to generation decadence and luxury. This shift in power is what lets people start their own private armies, for example, go on their own conquering sprees around the Mediterranean like Pompey will later do.
01:26:26
Speaker
There is an understanding
Livy's Account and Roman Morality
01:26:27
Speaker
in the post-Julius Caesar Roman world that this degeneration into luxury is a big part of what kills the Republic.
01:26:40
Speaker
Slight twist, our only source on the Oppian law is a book called From the Founding of the City bye Livy. He's not exactly the most careful historian.
01:26:51
Speaker
Everything we read might have been fake news. In his portrayal, before about this point in history, Romans are all like Chad, virtuous Republicans. And after this point,
01:27:04
Speaker
They go on this trajectory of self-interest, decadence, moral weakness. Livy himself is invested in portraying the imperial takeover as a culmination of Roman history and as something that is fixing and essentially broken Roman society.
01:27:26
Speaker
In this understanding, his sympathies might be with Cato in the debate. It's entirely possible that he just wrote Cato's speech to represent his own point of view, although I can't say that for sure.
01:27:38
Speaker
Interesting. So that's all we've got on the Oppian law. And now we have the problem of how do we fit this into our FHU rating system?
01:27:48
Speaker
How do we fit it into our FAG rating system? I think the obvious first suggestion is we just rate Cato's speech, especially if we want to talk about this vision of the decay of the Republic as possibly being what Livy is trying to really get at.
01:28:10
Speaker
Maybe it just makes sense to do Cato's speech. Okay, I'm totally down with that. How do we rate his ferocity? we We both rated Leacock a four.
01:28:21
Speaker
rated Peck a three, and you rated Peck a two. I'm not sure I see Cato's vision as all that distinct in Ferocity from Leacock's, to be honest. I kind of agree. I think especially with this parallel of Leacock writing the woman question, sort of about suffrage,
01:28:45
Speaker
And exactly at this other moment of a question over women's political engagement and their political rights.
01:28:59
Speaker
And then following a lot of the same tropes of women are foreign invaders and we can't let things decay back to the way they were before, even though that was a different, they both had very different visions of what that means.
01:29:14
Speaker
But yeah, I think F4. I think in terms of the vision he has, in terms of how much this hatred of foreignness is so mixed up in there.
01:29:27
Speaker
Yeah. His arrogance. He's a five. He's got to be a five for arrogance. Rock solid five. This is the most arrogant motherfucker. Like...
01:29:40
Speaker
If it weren't so early, i would even bump up and say, i don't think we're going to get more arrogant than this. I think we should go to six, but I don't think we're there yet. I think I want to leave room for heights of arrogance that I can't imagine. But as it stands, I can't imagine a more arrogant guy than this.
01:30:01
Speaker
I certainly can't imagine giving him less than a five. It's so... Of course. It's so dripping with just horrendous, horrendous arrogance.
01:30:17
Speaker
And now his gullibility. I think there's think there's insincerity around the edges, but the central thrust of what he's saying, I think he's totally committed to and sincere about.
01:30:34
Speaker
I think he's sincere? But I don't think, for me, it's a weird kind of sincerity where normally I think sincerity would be a sign of gullibility, right? I think normally this is sort of how when we thought about this, the more sincere someone is, the more so sincere they on these beliefs, the more they've fallen for it.
01:30:57
Speaker
And the sort of quintessential
Cato's Character and Hellenization Debate
01:30:58
Speaker
example for that, I mean, i had this thought about it like while prepping for the Peck episode, right? And we both rated Peck's gullibility a five. I don't really see Cato's sincerity as being the same kind of gullibility. I think it is a sincerity mixed with a cynicism. He's willing to admit this is all for the subjugation of women.
01:31:20
Speaker
we need to maintain power over women. i guess the places where I would see him as gullible are places where he just doesn't really have... The place where he speaks more against Hellenization, that kind of thing, where it's like, you've fallen for this anti-foreignness rhetoric.
01:31:39
Speaker
You don't really understand that that's the whole point of expansion, like increasing your networks of trade and increasing your ability to accumulate wealth and capital is the point of all this. so But I really don't think he's that gullible.
01:31:55
Speaker
I think maybe a two. You've actually talked me down a bit. I'm going to go with a three. keeper of the fag flame tell us what's up so that means that i have given him an fag score of 11 and you've given him fag score of 12. so very similar 12 is the highest 12 is the highest one we've seen so far we did 10 and 11 for peck and leecock and we flipped back and forth so
01:32:27
Speaker
Yeah, I think if the soft cap is 15, 12 is pretty bad. You can't be much more of an f FAG than 12. So I'm excited to see... i think some of these are a little bit in opposition, right?
01:32:43
Speaker
Peck's ferocity was kind of low and his gullibility was kind of high. i think it'll be interesting to see, can we see someone who is at that height of ferocity...
01:32:54
Speaker
but also at a height of gullibility. Ferocity and arrogance, you can kind of see those two together. You know what? I believe we will see a 15 within our lifetimes. I think it's going to happen. I think do it.
01:33:06
Speaker
I think we can get a 15. And I think a true 15. Not a 15 because we gave him a 6 on one, and so that's covering up a 4 on the other. I think we can hit the perfect score... And I might know just the guy to do it.
01:33:19
Speaker
Really? oh that is exciting. Yeah. This is a lot of pressure. So, you know, a little peek behind the curtain as we, as we think forward our episodes, I've been thinking, how do we structure the next couple of episodes? I think we both went for this impulse of, okay, let's go to someone who is just remote enough that they're legible to us today.
01:33:39
Speaker
They tell us about stuff today, but a little bit different. So we're not just reading Manosphere content. So that's, you know, early 20th century. I went a little bit later. But now, you know, you went back to ancient Rome.
01:33:51
Speaker
I'm to push us a little forward with the next episode. I don't think the next episode is going to be 15, but I've got some plans. So we'll see. We'll see what happens.
01:34:02
Speaker
This is going to wreck every part of my nervous system.
01:34:07
Speaker
Anyway, i think that's about it for the Oppian Law. I should mention,
Podcast Support and Future Content
01:34:12
Speaker
by the way, that we're recording these significantly in advance. So if you subscribe to the Patreon, which is something we're about to plug, and you don't hear your shout out right away, that's why.
01:34:25
Speaker
Yeah, so we are recording this basically on the day that we are planning to release our previous episode. So it will be two weeks before you are hearing...
01:34:36
Speaker
All right, I guess we end with a Patreon plug. If you liked listening to us talk about just horrible misogynists throughout history, then you can support our efforts by subscribing to our Patreon.
01:34:51
Speaker
Become one of our Odium connoisseurs. That is patreon.com slash odium symposium, patreon.com slash odium symposium. For $5 month, you can become an odium connoisseur. Right now, the only explicit benefit is that you get a shout out in our episode. So thank you to Jen and thank you to Lee for subscribing.
01:35:15
Speaker
If we get enough subscribers, we can also, we have some ideas for bonus content and we can start to make those a reality if we have more resources and more time to devote. But yeah, other than that, see you all next time. Whoa, whoa, whoa, hang on. i have something to say about the Patreon.
01:35:31
Speaker
which is if you're listening and you haven't subbed to the Patreon, I want you to know that I have a circle of candles in my closet and I'm using it to summon the ghost of Hannibal Barca. And he's going to use all his wiles to hunt you down and wreak an absolutely terrible vengeance on you just as he attempted to wreak on Rome.
01:35:49
Speaker
And there's a lot of smoke coming out of my closet. So I really hope you get on that because i don't think this ritual is a great idea. Okay. Well, that would have me convinced.
01:36:00
Speaker
You do not want to be hunted down by the sky. It is not pretty. Anyway, see you all next time. There's really nothing real. There is no real.
01:36:11
Speaker
And that's that's what's called the postmodern mentality. I couldn't receive the word racist remark. The adventure of life justifies its suffering. i don't want to see him having political succubus with goblins. Do it live. Is Trump to have babies with a goblin? Do it live! And turn against us like Darth Vader.
01:36:28
Speaker
Do it live! listen, you write a calling name. I'll in your goddamn face. And you'll stay plastered. I was going to have a guest speaker, but the person I had invited in died.
01:36:40
Speaker
level of masochism.