The Gracchi - the Conquered and the Proud 6

[@WagesOfDestruction]

I remember reading about how the gradual decline of peasant farmers and the rise of large estates caused similar problems in troops for the Eastern Roman Empire much later in history.

[@Tivo53]

Kinda what’s happening today.

[@luitbaishya1581]

praeto principle leads to accumulation of wealth n power and breakdown of community n community spirit, making the State weak. that leads to foreign power crushing that State. and process restarts.

[@WagesOfDestruction]

​@luitbaishya1581 praeto leads to stable societies, it when it breaks down like in the eastern Roman empire problems develop.

[@luitbaishya1581]

@@WagesOfDestruction for short time sure. but seems over 200 yrs it leads to wealth and power gap, which no society has been able to overcome smoothly.

[@WagesOfDestruction]

@@luitbaishya1581 The Pareto principle holds true in many human societies across various systems, including socialist, capitalist, religious, and military structures. It produces relatively stable societies. When the Pareto distribution remains within acceptable bounds, it has been shown to contribute to societal stability. Most individuals can maintain a reasonable standard of living, even if resources are not distributed equally while incentivising people's productivity and innovation. However, problems arise when this principle breaks down, as many have pointed out in societies like Stalin's Russia and Mao's China. These exemplify the consequences of an utter breakdown of the Pareto principle. The ruling elite's monopolization of resources and power reached such severe levels that it ultimately undermined the economic stability of their societies. What brought these regimes to an end was the economic stagnation.

[@kawadashogo8258]

Pretty good video, you were a lot fairer to the Gracchi than I expected. Still, I think there's kind of an aspect of presenting it as being solely a clash within the political elite, between the persons of the Gracchi themselves and their political opponents among the tribunes and the senate, without quite enough credit to the huge numbers of people in the background, who weren't necessarily just passive in all this. The fact is, the Gracchi were addressing real societal problems, and if they hadn't come along, if they'd never been born, someone else would have done it sooner or later. The issue of land distribution was inevitably going to come to a head. And once it did, it's hard to see how anyone could do anything up against such powerful vested interests without bending some "rules". We should keep in mind that the "rules" of the Roman system were formulated by and in the interests of an aristocratic landholding oligarchy. Anyone who wants to make such a system more democratic is inevitably going to run up against established political practice. You can't change the world by just playing according to the rules made by people who have a vested interest in keeping the world the way it is. There's too much blame, I don't necessarily mean by you, but by a lot of historians and history buffs, on the Gracchi for all the "disruption" they supposedly caused. Without enough acknowledgement, again I don't mean on your part but on the parts of a lot of people who talk about this, of the way the big landowners and reactionaries made it so difficult, if not impossible, to reform the system in a way that benefits the "lower" classes of society without shaking things up. Also, the way people talk about how, oh, in Rome they didn't have political parties, it wasn't about policy, it was all about personal ambition and personal conflict... Like yeah they didn't have formal parties and there was that personal element, but at the same time people had their own opinions about the way things should be, about policy. And if your policy goes against the vested interests of a powerful group of people, it's going to piss them off whether you break the rules or not, and they'll do anything they can to stop you, including breaking the rules themselves, and suffering fewer or no consequences for it because the rules are in place to begin with to protect them, they're the ones who wrote the rules. Throughout the history of reform and reaction in the Roman Republic, there's a common trend that among the "rulebreakers", it's the ones who tried to democratize things that suffered most of the consequences (usually being murdered), whereas those who broke the rules to defend the status quo and murder anyone who wanted to change things were largely let off the hook. And isn't it interesting that anyone who wants to go up against these vested interests and do something that benefits the poorer masses of the people is automatically assumed to be grasping for absolute power themselves, or at least portrayed as such, whether their accusers actually believed that or just wanted to discredit them. As Michael Parenti has said, maybe they (reformers and revolutionaries in general through history, not just the Gracchi, although Parenti has specifically talked about them) didn't hunger for power, but just wanted/needed the power to end hunger.

[@AdrianGoldsworthytheAuthor]

These talks began life deaces ago as a course for students who were not specialists in History at all, let alone Anicent History. After the talk, I would run a seminar and try to get the students to think in this way about the motivations of all involved and the consequences of their actions. In the talks - as in the original lectures - the aim is to ecnourage people to reach their own conclusions rather than make them share mine. One theme we will raise again in future talks is the consequence of breaking conventions. To my mind the biggest rupture with the past was not so much the Gracchi as the response to them - in particular the belief that one group's fears about Tiberius justified riot and murder. Next this was dressed up as a senatorial decree. Once you think that it is OK to suspend all law and process to kill opponents, then the political system is in a bad way. Anyway, thanks for the comment. I am similarly inclined to see Tiberius in particular as convinced (probably rightly) that he was acting for the commom good, but it is impossible to prove the inner motivations of a politican one way or another - especially when they don't live to show their longer term ambitions.

[@Troy-Weight]

@@AdrianGoldsworthytheAuthor Yes - a really excellent video! My very specific criticism is not to the effort by AG - but rather to modern academic life in general. The Roman Republic had three clear phases of coin issue 1) copper mono-metallism 2) Silver/copper bimetallism 3) Silver mono-metallism - which began EXACTLY at the murder of Tiberius These are very hard facts - not the potentially politically tainted conclusion of ancient nor modern authors. It is 50 years since I despaired of historians and turned to coins as giving an objective commentary on political affairs. Watching AG very carefully pick through the ancient sources, it seemed to me that his problem was not political bias in the ancient sources - it was a profound bias in his own (like virtually every modern author) tacit misunderstanding of basic economic matters. As copper coin disappeared, so would free markets. Shops selling on credit at supernormal prices would inevitably displace them, (as they did in England in the later 18th century). Probably the Roman authors said little about this - But so what? - Even Adam Smith kept shtum on the matter in 1776 ………….. I judge Petronius was spot on - the Roman Republic ate itself - in a maelstrom of debt. But alive long after the rectification of the currency by Augustus even he probably did not see into the roots of the matter. 4th century Roman matters took all this to a new level - but that is a different story That’s my ha’penneth anyhow……………. Robert Tye

[@danielating1316]

​@@Troy-Weightcan you explain those basic economic issues in detail?

[@MvRcscIsM]

Never been a better time to release this good sir.

[@aunch3]

“Any system that tries to regulate itself purely on rules and laws tends to fail in the long run.” You hit the nail on the head with that one modern society is ruining itself for that reason

[@ajahlaabib8972]

Thanks for making these videos, I really appreciate hearing your insight and looking forward to your next book. cheers.

[@dezukaful]

I was just waiting for this ep

[@happycats685]

Yes this is really good.

[@TheDavid2222]

This was a magnificent, informative, lecture! Thank you!

[@Tassadar4Ever]

Thanks for all of these videos!!

[@happycats685]

Thank you so much for this!! Honestly, you are a great man for giving this to the public.

[@QuantumHistorian]

Maybe it's because this series has its origins decades ago, but I'm surprised that Nathan Rosenstein's work isn't explicitly mentioned in the first half of the video. His study of Roman family patterns and demographics have been hugely influential for the last 20 years or so. Not everyone agrees with his conclusions fully, but it has shifted the debate considerably. Essentially, Roman men married late. Very late, 25+ or even 30+ was common (though their wives were in the late teens or very early 20s). This has many implications (like why so many Romans lose their elderly fathers before they are fully grown up), but the main one is that Roman men start having kids and their own household *after* they've completed military service. It's almost never dad going away to war. It's the late-teenage, unmarried sons. Now in most small-holder agriculture, there is more labour available in the family than there is land to fully utilise that labour. So by sending off their grown sons to war, families were having one less very hungry mouth to fill, without significantly affecting their ability to produce food. In other words, the levies *relieve* economic pressure on the typical family rather than causing it. It's this family pattern, along with socio-political factors, that enabled Rome to draw on such enormous manpower during the early and middle republic. So why does it go wrong in the late 2nd Century BC? The argument is not that too many farmers were going off and dying in war, leaving there family destitute, but *too few.* Because the population of the allies and the Soci is so large, and because Rome's enemies at that point are less formidable, Roman soldiers are coming home in greater numbers than before. And that creates a sort of Melthusian problem of land getting divided into a growing population until plots become too small to be viable. Essentially, Roman family patterns had adapted to centuries of fratricidal inter-Italian warfare causing a very high morality rate. Pyrrhus and the Punic wars keep that up during the 3rd Century. But in the late 2nd, that stops and so the population grows beyond what Italian farmland can support. This population might not be recorded in the census because they are too poor, or is deliberately under-reporting because of disillusionment with the state, but it is note worthy just how little land the various land commissions end up redistributing. The influx of slave worked latifundia is also surely important, but archaeology strongly pushes that back well into the 1st Century BC. The evidence is clearly laid out in Rosenstein's _Rome at War_ and the academic literate that has discussed it ever since. Sorry for the accidental essay, but I think it's interesting to see how modern scholarship is evolving on these age old questions.

[@listrahtes]

Great post !

[@elst3v032]

This was quite enjoyable thank you very much sir.

[@dozidac]

I was going to ask you this on a previous video, probably the 2nd video of the Conquered and the proud series, but How important or useful is Archeology for your work or the practice as a whole?

[@AdrianGoldsworthytheAuthor]

It is vital. The type of evidence it offers is different, and sometimes the literary sources are more useful for a particular topic and sometimes it is the archaeology or the epigraphy etc. There are so many gaps in our knowledge of the ancient world that it only sensible to make the very best use of all the information we have. The historian who ignores archaeology - or indeed the archaeologist who ignores history - is making a grave mistake.

[@RickDeckard6531]

I've watched many of your excellent videos now, and it seems to me that the most influential goddess in Rome was the green-eyed one, at least among the elite.

[@ilimperatore5016]

God, I love that intro!!

[@baswar]

Interestingly the drop on small family farms helped contribute to the fall of the Eastern Han a few centuries later. High taxes and conscription let to small farms being sold to large estates (usually officials) and becoming tenants. It collapsed the tax revenue and also shrank the army. So its interesting how elites constantly create drastic inequalities that create the instability of the state. Granted the Grachi at least saw things were unsustainable and tried to fix a big problem. Though suppose they made it worse by their methods

[@GoogleUserOne]

I,Claudius snake intro!! PLEASE. With trumpets.

[@PalleRasmussen]

Now I do not know if Professor Goldsworthy reads comments, I hope so, and I hope for a response- perhaps a later video. John W. Rich argues against the prevailing (and Roman) perception of the manpower shortage in his article of 1983. I am not certain I buy his arguments- whereas I do buy Blunt's who seems to have done a much larger research effort- but I would love to hear you adress the debate. The supposed Roman manpower shortage of the later second century BC JW Rich Historia: Zeitschrift für Alte Geschichte, 287-331

[@AdrianGoldsworthytheAuthor]

If you get a chance, have a look at Nathen Rosenstein's work which deals with the same subject. Sometimes it's more than raw numbers, but about commitment and motivation, and what happens if you take too high a percentage of folk away from other work/occupations. What is certain is that many Romans AT THE TIME believed that there was a serious problem. PS I read the comments as soon as I can. May not get a chance to reply to them all, but will do my best - which may not be quick. As explained elsewhere, I only have a little bit of time to do things for the channel. Hence the off the cuff nature of the talks.

[@PalleRasmussen]

@@AdrianGoldsworthytheAuthor I would tend to agree with you on your interpretation of the problem. Thank you for replying. I shall remember your recommendation. I spend most of the time I use on historical studies on WW2 and the time leading up to it, and the early middle ages, but Rome is a guilty pleasure of mine

[@michaelhoffmann2891]

It could be argued that the blind adherence to the splitting of land in German territories led to the nearly ridiculous fractioning and inability to ever unify, when other European realms did. With effects that would have an impact all the way into the 20th century.

[@natalassblaster]

The horn go me again!!

[@scoon2117]

Please get a new intro song mr goldsworthy 😂