A Citations Needed Live Show Beg-a-Thon: Ancient Rome and the False Histories Inspiring Musk & the MAGA World
Citations Needed | March 5, 2025 | Transcript
[Music]
Intro: This is Citations Needed with Nima Shirazi and Adam Johnson.
Nima: Welcome to the Citations Needed live show Beg-a-Thon. Citations Needed is, of course, a podcast on the media, power, PR, and the history of bullshit. As I said, this is one of our periodic Beg-a-Thons, our virtual live show fundraisers. And we’re so glad that you are joining us tonight. Thank you, everyone. I am Nima Shirazi.
Adam: I’m Adam Johnson.
Nima: It’s great to have you all here with us. Of course, you can follow the show on Twitter and Bluesky @citationspod, Facebook Citations Needed, and become a supporter of the show if you’re not already, and this is a Beg-a-Thon, so we obviously would really like you to become a supporter, through Patreon.com/CitationsNeededPodcast. All your support through Patreon is so incredibly appreciated as we are 100% listener funded.
Adam: Yes, and if you become a supporter on Patreon, which, again, is ostensibly the purpose of this Beg-a-Thon, in addition to delightful conversation, edifying everyone, you get access to over 160 News Briefs, show notes and more fun stuff, special episodes, little things we do here and there, live shows, live chats, etc. But most importantly, you get to put your head on the pillow at night and go to sleep knowing that you supported our humble podcast.
Nima: That’s right. And tonight, on Citations Needed, we will be talking about how Elon Musk and his MAGA incel army have appropriated the cultural imagery and aesthetics of Ancient Rome, while obviously neither knowing or understanding anything about the ancient world beyond what maybe they’ve seen in Gladiator or 300.
Adam: To just sort of orient the audience, Trump World, and now increasingly, Elon Musk is effectively the co-vice president, are obsessed with evoking Roman symbols, iconography, to advance a fascist political agenda. I think it’s fair to use the F-word, fascist. We’re going to use that. I know some people dispute that, but I think I don’t really know what else to call it at this point. White nationalist, at the very least. And they present Rome and view Rome, either in meme format or explicitly, there’s even kind of a cottage industry of pseudo-intellectual scholars we can kind of get into as well who pander to these people, YouTubers, etc. They present it as a kind of the platonic ideal of a quote-unquote “Western civilization.” Everyone has their place. There’s a, you know, the kind of Nietzschean values of conquest and domination, how they view the world as being about, you know, rewarding the people with the most merit and the most honor, blah, blah, blah. And we covered this back in 2019 with today’s special guest. And there’s obviously been a lot of that, has gotten charged and heightened lately. And so we wanted to kind of bring her back also, because she has a wonderful book out that I have read. You should definitely read it too. It is excellent.
Nima: It is so good, and we’re going to be promoting it all night. So who are we talking about, Adam? We’re talking about our guest tonight, Dr. Sarah E. bond, Associate Professor in the Classics at the University of Iowa. Hey, Sarah, good to see you. Sarah joins us again after about five and a half years, she was on Episode 82, way back in July of 2019, in the before times, for our show, which was entitled “‘Western Civilization’ and White Supremacy: The Right-Wing Co-option of Antiquity.” So it is amazing to have you back. You, Sarah, are the author, as we said, of the new book Strike: Labor, Unions, and Resistance in the Roman Empire, which is out now from Yale University Press. I’m so excited to get to our conversation with you, Sarah.
But before we do that, we just want to note why we’re doing this tonight, this Beg-a-Thon, this kind of fundraiser that we do periodically. Citations Needed takes a team to make and it takes a ton of work to do each episode. Not many shows do the research that we do at the pace we do it, and since we started the show back in July of 2017, we’ve released well over 200 episodes, more than 160 News Briefs. We’ve welcomed more than 300 guests. We love doing this. We are grateful for each and every listener, every download, every like, every share, tens of thousands of you wonderful people listen to the show every week, and we cannot thank you enough for that. It is amazing. But only a tiny fraction of you actually support the show and our team through Patreon, which is the way that we’re able to keep doing this. And so that is why we are holding this Beg-a-Thon, as we call it, tonight.
Adam: So that was the good cop. I’m gonna do the bad cop. Listen, you mooches. No, I’m just kidding. I’m not gonna neg you, except to say that we are 100% user supported. We get no corporate sponsorships. We get no foundations. I’ll spare you the sanctimonious spiel, but you get the general idea. So if you do listen and you do like it, it actually is very, very helpful if you actually do support it, because, you know, there’s just not a lot of, of the people who listen, just not a high percentage do, and listen consistently. And yes, we have the data, and we’ve geolocated you. We know who you are.
Nima: [Laughs] That’s right. So tonight, we’re asking, if you are able, to please go to our Patreon page. We’ll put the link up there, but it’s very easy to find. It’s Patreon.com/CitationsNeededPodcast. Go help us out there. All right, enough of this garbage. Adam, let’s get to the show.
Adam: Yeah. Let’s get to the show itself. So tonight we are focusing on, again, we are using as a framing device the popularity of our new South African co-president Elon Musk and his minions and his incel army, with Roman iconography and alleged history as a gateway to talk about what is a far richer, more interesting vision of Rome that you’ve written, this excellent book you’ve written, which we’ll get into. So we’re going to start with that hook, and then kind of get into what you wrote about, which is obviously meant to, in some ways, kind of be a counter to that cheesy narrative, which I’m sure we can talk about. So we’re just going to give a little bit of background, Nima.
Nima: Yeah, sure.
Adam: If you want to sort of take over that part, because I know you had the unfortunate task of gathering that background information unfortunately.
Nima: So you know this idea of fascistic elements, neo-Nazis, in the US, namely their collective, now chief avatar, effective President of the United States, Elon Musk, the richest man in the world. They’ve been adopting and co-opting and misunderstanding the aesthetics of Ancient Rome, kind of as a rule, but as a distinct part of their fascistic political project. And one of the most prominent examples of this occurred after Elon Musk himself did a very clear Sieg Heil gesture three times during the inauguration of Donald Trump in January of 2025. Now Musk’s ally, Andrea Stroppa, who lives in Italy and claims to have an advisory role in some of Musk’s companies, posited that’s Musk Sieg Heil was was merely a Roman salute. Stroppa wrote in a now-deleted Tweet, quote, “Roman Empire is back, starting from Roman salute.”
Adam: Now, this was far from the first time that Musk had cited Rome to justify his reactionary ideology and paranoid xenophobia and deeply, deeply unfunny jokes. The guy’s constitutionally incapable of being funny, which is quite a feat. At least Trump’s funny, I guess. Now our guest, Dr. Bond, wrote for the arts news and analysis site Hyperallergic, we’re sorry, we’re going to quote you back at you. It’s one of the ultimate sins of podcasting, but we’re going to do it. Quote,
Musk has a long history of referencing the Roman Empire. His brand of technocratic despotism and its social media iconography has roots in the work of 20th-century European fascists, who were themselves fixated on Ancient Rome. He has long been obsessed with the late Roman Republic dictator Sulla and in December even changed his X avatar to “Kekius Maximus” — a Romanized version of Pepe the Frog dressed in military garb similar to that of Maximus in the film Gladiator (2000). Like Italian dictator Benito Mussolini and Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, the billionaire has frequently expressed admiration for the Roman Empire, posting AI pictures of himself cosplaying as a Roman soldier…
God, that’s sad. You didn’t write that, that’s me, sorry.
…and cooking up theories about why Ancient Rome fell (answer: severe decline in birth rate). He thinks about it every day.
End quote. So let’s begin. I want to sort of bring in Sarah here.
Nima: Yeah, let’s do it.
Adam: We’ve set the table. Before we get into the questions about the actual book you wrote, forgive us, I want you to sort of comment on this piece, what you think superficially people find attractive. I know the elements are kind of obvious, but I want you to kind of dive into why you wrote this piece, why you think it’s important to engage as a historian of Rome with this seemingly popular current on the Nazi, or Nazi-adjacent Right.
Sarah E. Bond: Right, so the piece that I wrote for Hyperallergic, I wrote with Stephanie Wong, who is also a professor of history. She just graduated from Brown. And we write a lot together, because I think that our perspectives are very aligned, and we’re good at writing together, but we had been for years now, because we’ve been, gosh, we’ve been writing and collaborating for six years together, and so we decided that we were going to just collect all the things that he said since about 2020, about Ancient Rome, because I have just a gigantic digital folder of references to Ancient Rome that politicians have made over the years. And many of us who do a lot of reception history, which is just a fancy word for saying how things are repackaged and reused from the ancient world. We had been keeping track of it, and we had written an article together for MSNBC a few years, let’s see, a year and a half ago, on that meme about why people think about the Roman Empire.
And the person that Elon Musk thinks about the most seems to be Sulla, who was a dictator in the middle and early first century BCE. And Sulla eventually does give up power and is not assassinated. He eventually gives it up and retires and hands what’s left of the Republic over to Crassus and Cicero, I’m sorry, Crassus and Pompey, essentially, as the next consoles. But he’s obsessed with Sulla, and that really set off alarm bells in my head, because Sulla wiped out all of his political enemies by the hundreds. And this is something called the proscriptions, and Julius Caesar refuses to do the proscriptions when he becomes dictātor, or dictator, but it is picked back up again as a practice by Octavian Augustus. And so this idea that you can just wipe out all of your enemies and kill them and give people free rein to kill them is something that he’s idealizing, and it seems to be that he’s fixating a lot on. And especially with the purge of the federal government that’s been going on for the past, guys, can you believe that Trump has been president for a month, exactly, almost? It feels like it’s been five years.
Nima: It feels like it’s been 2,000 years.
Sarah E. Bond: It has been four weeks of nonstop layoffs and nonstop purging of the federal government. And I don’t think that’s the same in any way as killing people via the proscriptions, but I do think that Elon Musk likes to make people vulnerable to attack.
Adam: Yeah. Unless you fly a plane. Or rather fly on a plane, I should say.
Sarah E. Bond: I should just say with Elon Musk that we’re talking about aesthetics and idealizing. But I just want to point out something really huge here that was covered by Maya Pontone on Hyperallergic as well, with background from many researchers, myself included, is that Elon Musk has started to give money specifically to archeological projects and projects focused on the ancient world, and that there is a pipeline that is being created from the world of classics into, directly, the world of Elon Musk and this DOGE palace that he’s creating for himself, that we can’t just say that this is a fantasy that he’s playing out, that he gave over $2 million to the Vesuvius Challenge, which decoded a small amount of the papyri from Herculaneum and gave prize money to a young AI engineer named Luke Farritor. And Luke Farritor now works with DOGE and was one of the six engineers that originally went in with Musk a few weeks ago. So it’s not as though we can say, in the world of classics, Oh, we’re just, you know, he idealizes us, but we’re mutually exclusive. We’re in a bubble out here. What can we do about it? It’s like, No, we have people who are taking the money of Musk, the Vesuvius Challenge, as well as, there’s another called the AIRC in Rome, who has also taken money from Musk, and so he’s funding cultural heritage and AI as a way of accessing people that are involved with the ancient world. And you know, it matters who we take money from. It very much matters.
Adam: There’s a risk there, because, again, he did this. He’s obviously done this for years with STEM, where he throws so much money around that your favorite science channel will do these sycophantic reports on him. Science media will do sycophantic reports on him. They’ll get an interview with him and gush over him, even this is, like, sort of post-overt Nazi stuff. And so, yeah, I mean, when you have, again, $400 billion in debt worth, obviously, it’s not totally liquid, but it’s, you know, he could, he could take a loan against it anytime he wants. And, you know, controlling the past is, is because not to be too sort of, you know, I don’t want to be too overly precious–
Nima: You can rage against the machine. It’s okay.
Adam: Well. I mean, you know, He who controls the present controls the past. He who controls the past controls the future. I do think it matters, because then we’re going to be curated. It’s going to be curated, presented in a way that flatters his ideological dispositions.
Sarah E. Bond: Yeah, and we’re already seeing that. We have Trump firing the archivist of the United States after she had already deleted and moved around parts of an exhibit that was within the National Archives. And he still fired her. But she had gone in and edited parts of history that were negative, right? And so the presentation of history and the people that are in control of it is what he wants access to, and he wants good press for sure, and he’s trying to buy himself a connection to antiquity in order to conjure legitimacy that we’ve already seen. This is the same MO that Mussolini took to legitimize his power and his rise within fascist Italy.
Adam: He’s basically–
Sarah E. Bond: All you have to do, yeah, you just rebuild the Ara Pacis, right? Rebuild the Res Gestae Divi Augusti, which is exactly what Mussolini does, is invest so many thousands and millions of dollars into the rebuilding of the Roman Forum and the rebuilding of the Roman senate house. This is a playbook we’ve already seen before, because he has no legitimate status within the federal government. So he’s clinging to what he perceives as the only legitimacy that he cares about, which is power from the ancient world.
Nima: Talking about preserving the past and also, you know, as we’re going to get into kind of who is allowed to control our understanding of the past. And we’re going to get into this, this idea of, you know, whether from imperial historians kind of empowered and sponsored to tell the official history of Rome, to this kind of idea of history from below, which you tell through your work, Sarah. I’d love to kind of discuss the overall thesis of your book, which really shows how class conflict and the organized withholding of labor was a consistent feature of Roman life, as were slave revolts, military strikes, other forms of resistance, much of which has been erased or at least reduced to individual stories of heroism in kind of broader ancient, historical retellings, and certainly in the popular mind. How those who don’t study this so closely kind of understand the ancient world, and then certainly Ancient Rome. So what compelled you to write this new book Strike, and what broad image of Rome, both in our pop culture and in kind of more historical consensus, were you attempting to illuminate and edify for us?
Sarah E. Bond: I was going back and re-reading an economic history of Rome from a guy named Tenney Frank, and he was a racist from the turn of the 20th century, like into the 20th century. And, I think it’s 1920, he writes an economic history of Rome, and he thinks that strikes cannot happen because of the number of enslaved people within the Roman Empire. And we do know that within the Italic peninsula, for instance, up to 25% of the population, especially during the the period of the High Roman Empire, so the first two centuries CE, have a large number of enslaved people. And even prior to that, there was a large number. And so he thought that because there were enslaved people, there could never be strikes, because every time you would have artisans going on strike, why wouldn’t you just replace them with other enslaved persons? And that really discounted the professionalization of enslaved people as potters, as weavers, as textile workers, as carpenters, as tavern workers and owners. And his belief that there weren’t strikes kind of infuriated me, and led me to read more about what people thought about strikes, about withholding labor, and what it might have been called in the ancient world.
And it was surprising to me that there just had been so little written on collective action and the withholding of labor in the ancient world, because many people, both Marxists and non-Marxists, had thought that there really weren’t a lot of instances of it. And so in the 19th century, Marx and Engels had believed that the first strikes ever had been the plebeians during what we call the Struggle of the Orders, which really starts in 495 BCE. And if we’re trying to place that, that’s about 15 years after the start of the Roman Republic. So 509, the Roman Republic starts. The last king of Rome is ousted, and we have the start of something we call the res publica, or the republic. And a few years after that, we have the plebeians and the patricians fighting against each other because the patricians are extremely wealthy and they have a lot of power, but also they have a lot of both soft and hard power, in that they monopolize all the magistracies, the consulship, the pontifical colleges, all of the major magistracies, the patricians are, are really dominating.
And so I looked at the Struggle of the Orders, but thought to myself, I think there has to be many more instances of this happening. And so starting to look through things that really didn’t make it into the traditional literary historical record, like papyri and inscriptions, really was the access point to find out that, especially in the Greek world, and going all the way back to the Egyptian world, this had been happening for many thousands of years. And so I started tracing backwards and forwards and finding that there were a lot more instances, because a strike by any other name is still a strike. And so even though the word is not coined until the 18th century in England, because it’s referring to the striking of the top sails of merchant ships in the 18th century, even though that word does not exist in Ancient Rome, that you still have the withholding of labor and the boycotting of certain assigned things like the military levy through calling it a secessio, where we get, for instance, the word secession from. But then when you look in the Greek papyri, they’re calling it an anachoresis, which just means a withdrawal. And for many hundreds and thousands of years, we’ve had workers, especially in Egypt, refusing to work unless they were given emmer and wheat and the right amount of staples to keep working. Sometimes they would just go sit in the back of a temple.
And so for me, it was saying modern people think that strikes are a development of the progressive modern Western civilization post-Industrial Revolution, and as is my wont, I usually like to say to most things, Well, that sounds like bullshit, that that we have created this idea of progressive structure to get to the period that we are now, even though it does not feel that we are in a progressive moment in the least, and to try and unpack why we think that unions and strikes and labor withdrawals, that all of these things are a much more modern development in order to really make us feel a little bit more successful as individuals. And I think we just have to give more credit to the Romans.
Nima: Yeah, I love the idea that, like, a strike by any other name is still a strike that, even if they don’t use that term, because, you know, you actually start your book by talking about how the term was coined, the striking of sails in a British port. But then going back to Deir el-Medina, the strike in Egypt, and then kind of tracing that up through history is just, I think, really, really fascinating to see how, in a world that is built on the on the backs of laborers, the power that is held through withholding labor, has been recognized, not just, you know, since the Industrial Revolution, but you know, for thousands and thousands of years.
Adam: On some level, the idea that people around the world would withhold labor is, it does seem sort of self-evidently obvious, because what other leverage do you have as a laborer? And 99% of humans throughout history have been laborers, typically exploited in any kind of semi-developed sense that would be exploited by some rich asshole who lived on the hill. It doesn’t. It’s not a huge leap to say that this is a kind of universal, that there’s an evolutionary convergence to land on some form of strike, right? And what you argue is that while that is true, there was also more sophisticated antecedents that made these more coordinated, more and more sophisticated than we maybe thought.
And one of the things we talk about is these associations, which were both kind of, which were not these kind of perfect Marxist organizations, in the sense that they were oftentimes kind of business trade groups. They didn’t fit along these kind of perfectly, you know, Maoist lines, but in many ways they what you do argue is that they could be instrumentalized to carry out something we would recognize as a labor strike, and that because of the way history is written, you specifically talk about Levy and others, because of the inherently elite nature of reading and writing and how history is created, the first draft, second draft, third draft, that those stories get flattened or obscured.
And you even have this great section, I won’t read it back to you, because I’d like you to talk about it, about the ways in which mob violence is flattened. When you say that oftentimes, as a class dimension, that is fairly obvious, but in the history books, it’s kind of written off as just mob violence. And you even draw some parallels to current examples, when mass unrest is sort of stripped of its ideology, which I thought was a really fascinating, really interesting part of the book. Can you talk about the ways in which–
Nima: Cicero was just doing what the New York Times does now.
Adam: Well, yeah, by the way, I found out he did, The the shrimp store called and they’re running out of you, The jerk store called, where he would, I didn’t realize this until I read Mary Beard’s book, that he would write what he said on the Senate floor later on, which seems like cheating. And then people presented it as like, He’s this great orator, and it’s like, You just got to go back and rewrite it. Anyway. Talk, if you could, about the these associations, how they provided the kind of framework to make a more sophisticated form of labor unrest, and if you could also talk about the ways in which historians, for obvious reasons, who were wealthy or patrician or what have you, decided to kind of say, Oh, that was just mindless, ideology-free violence.
Sarah E. Bond: I think when we create homogenous groups, when we call everybody a mob, that’s already a pejorative, it’s already casting them into negative rhetoric. And the Romans are no different. They like to use very large, amalgamous nouns, a turba, a multitudo, that is to just say, a gigantic negative word for a crowd, right? And when you just say crowd, you aren’t allowing for organization, you aren’t allowing for hierarchy, you aren’t allowing for structure. And although we don’t get a ton of anatomies of crowds from the ancient world, we can see, especially in the late Republic, that a lot of groups that are coming together, what we call collegia, and that’s where we get the modern word college from. A collegium, in the singular, is just a group of people. In Roman law, you have to be three or more people to be considered a collegium. And we have about 3,200 inscriptions in papyri that give reference to these various groups that really grow in number in the early Hellenistic period forward.
So from the death of Alexander the Great forward, people increasingly are creating groups for various reasons. So you could have a group that is focused on Dionysus, because who doesn’t want to get together and drink some wine and have a nice bacchanalia? But you could also form a group, if you were merchants or trades people living on the island of Delos, and you’re human traffickers, and you need to have a workflow, essentially, that moves people throughout the Mediterranean. You can move bread through it, in terms of wheat and flour, you may need to have a supply chain to give you precious jewels, pepper, cinnamon, lots of things that you might want to trade, or you might just be a carpenter and want to have other carpenters that you work with.
And so these collegia are proliferating, especially into the period of the Republic. Many of them don’t have enough money to meet in a proper schola, which is a clubhouse. And so lots of them do what many confraternities have always done, and that is meet in a public house, called a pub. And so you go to a tavern, the tavern keeper allows you to sit there and to congregate. And when we try and understand the movements within the late Republic, one of the things that I think is important to see is that these groups are coming together extremely quickly, in a very organized manner, in order to hear public speeches called contiones. And so my question is, Okay, we have rhetoricians like Cicero, who’s calling them just a gigantic mob, but in reality, he’s giving us clues that say that they’re starting in a specific sector that artisans are known to live within, and that the tavern keepers are involved in it. And to me, trying to reconstruct the underlying structure is very important, because a lot of that gets erased in the name of marginalizing them. And marginalizing vocabulary is something that we’ve seen, especially since 2020. When you marginalize a crowd, we saw this even with Occupy Wall Street as well, is that, yes, Occupy Wall Street actually was quite organized, even though, yes, they were very against hierarchy and a lot of the traditional leadership structures, but we really see that it’s elite people who tend to call crowds mobs.
So whether it’s Black Lives Matter, whether it’s any other social movement, it deprives them and really robs them of their peaceful protest and of their organization. And I think that this is something that always has happened, is that really wealthy people, if you want to completely marginalize a movement, you just simply call them a mob. And that just is an unjust way to label many groups, not all groups, but I think a lot of groups have been robbed of their legitimacy by being called a mob, because immediately you think of violence and criminality and also anti-patriotism, and that’s something that with unions, for instance, if we go back to Garfield, President Garfield, not the cat. I mean, I like the cat, too.
Adam: No relation.
Sarah E. Bond: No, no relation. President Garfield, he hated unions, and he thought they were unpatriotic, and he thought of them as just individuals who incited mob violence. And so it’s not hard to trace and to track down the ways in which we marginalize groups of people, individually, but also groups that are coming together in order to fight for their rights.
Nima: But it’s not just in rhetoric, right, Sarah? I mean, because also then the discourse and the language and the denigration also turns into policy or legislation, and we see that now, you know, with anti-protest legislation across the country, whether that is, you know, from campus protests against genocide in Palestine or, you know, long before, anti-assembly legislation. But you also talked about this in your book Strike, about how the elites and the wealthy call associations or call, you know, regular people getting together, not only a mob, but then they kind of legislate against it. Talk about where that came from, and some of the parallels there.
Sarah E. Bond: I think we’re all thinking about anti-assembly legislation, especially since October 7, and thinking about groups coming together and protesting against the treatment of Palestinians especially. I visited the groups that were on the quad at the University of Chicago. We had a very small group at the University of Iowa, for instance, and many campuses across the country were. Pushing them off of public property. Now, the University of Chicago is a private school. That’s a little bit different, but we even saw this at public schools that people were getting arrested, that they were not allowed to assemble, even when they were just peaceably in their tents and just sitting there.
So I think that we’ve been thinking about freedom of assembly and whether that is a civil right and to what extent it should be protected. And when we go back to the ancient world, we see that freedom of assembly was something that very wealthy elite people like senators and the emperor were very, very anxious about. And it’s not something that is new, that, especially for instance, Julius Caesar and Octavian moved to make legislation very soon into their periods of rule that say, Okay, well, you know, collegia, maybe they can, they can meet at certain times, but predominantly we’re going to have them disband unless they’re the oldest collegia that have ever been established, and if they have a public utility, right?
And this idea of the civic good that a collegium has to serve the civic good, it’s tying into this idea of patriotism, again, is that freedom of assembly is only extended if it is for the good of the res publica, but when you get into the Empire, the res publica does not really exist anymore. It’s a false reconstruction that Augustus has made, right? He calls it the reconstruction of the res publica, but come on, it’s an empire. It is the empire that he is building, and he is the imperator. And so what he’s really saying when he disbands collegia and when he begins to threaten freedom of assembly more and more, is that I don’t want myself threatened by this, and I don’t want any public discord that might turn into resistance against me.
And the smothering of resistance before it can really ever get a lot of steam is just something that is quite common within the Roman Empire. People think that they’re, Oh, you know, the Roman Empire was so good to live in that there was just no resistance, right? Like after Spartacus, we have, Oh, very little, except for maybe the Jewish Wars that are in Judea. And that’s just not true, because everyday resistance, the act of forming a union, the act of engaging in a labor strike, right, the act of pushing against this revoking of freedom of assembly, everyday resistance, is just as important as these gigantic rebellions. They don’t just formulate out of nothing. And so I think that freedom of assembly has always been revoked and questioned and placed as something unpatriotic, because those in power have always known that when people get together, they have more power collectively than they do apart, and that’s why the motto of the United States is E Pluribus Unum, one out of many. And right now, we’re seeing a shift to just the unum part, but not really the people as much a part of it. So that’s something that is really scary to see Trump tweet out, “LONG LIVE THE KING!” It was something that gave me chills, because I immediately thought of the late Roman Republic.
Adam: So I want to sort of back up here a little bit and sort of maybe circle back with what we talked about with your book, with the sort of more topical themes about the rightwing fascination with Rome. And it’s superficial, albeit superficial, which is, I mean, look. Rome as a sort of idea is the way we sort of perceive the West, right? You know, it wasn’t till the late ’90s that to graduate from Oxford, you had to know Latin. It is, it is the way in which academics and intellectuals and scientists talk to each other, up until, again, whatever, the 1800s. Rome, obviously, is kind of what we what, what is viewed as, as Europe, as a sort of, for want of a better term, white civilization, despite the fact that it, of course, wasn’t one in any meaningful sense. But that’s certainly how it’s been idealized as it’s gone through its various white supremacist historical laundromats throughout the decades. And so it kind of makes sense why people who are kind of adrift, or don’t really have any firm, who aren’t very firmly committed into any kind of ideology, would be drawn to it because of its proximity to, it’s sort of a more politically correct form of white nationalist sort of mythmaking.
And so, in some sense, does it make sense why a sort of mediocre, you know, internet-addled dope like Musk would would, again, superficially be into it. He sort of praised Mike Duncan’s podcast, much to Mike Duncan’s chagrin. It all kind of makes sense, because it is this sort of idealized, white, sort of heroic version of themselves and in a weird way, I know I mentioned her book before, but Mary beard’s book SPQR, at the very end, she has this line that’s clearly in dialogue with that, where she says, I get asked a lot, you know, basically been working on this book for 50 years, I get asked a lot, What do we have to learn from modern society in Rome? And I’m paraphrasing here, forgive me if I’m misrepresenting this. But she kind of says, Basically nothing. And I don’t think she meant that, like in a non-, in a sort of anti-intellectual way. I think she was, it appeared to be in the context it was written to be responding to these people constantly saying we’re at the end of the Roman Empire, because it’s so cliche, right? Isaac Newton said it. I mean, every 10 years we’re, you know, we’re in the end. Everyone likes to talk about the fall of the Roman Empire, because what are you criticizing? Homophobia, right? You sort of, you’re trafficking the idea of, we’re becoming effeminate, we’re becoming weak. Blah, blah, blah, the meme Strong Men Create Good Times, Good Times Create Weak Men.
Sarah E. Bond: A lot of immigration. They really like to harp on immigration.
Nima: That’s right. The barbarians are coming.
Sarah E. Bond: Right. The barbarians at the gates. Yes.
Adam: So if you could, if you would comment a bit about or rather, it’s a little bit open-ended, but I want you to talk about why you think that the mythology, the white supremacist mythology of Rome, appears to be increasing, but has kind of survived and what you think, to what extent do you feel like some, you know, I don’t want you to name names necessarily, but what extent pop history movies have really contributed to that, where they do have this very one-note kind of vision of what, not to sort of blame them for it necessarily, one-note vision of Rome?
Sarah E. Bond: Yeah, I did review Gladiator, too. So we just, I mean, I reviewed it for Hyperallergic and I think a lot of the misconceptions about Rome are very entertaining. That when it goes on film, who doesn’t like watching the first Gladiator in the year 2000? And all of the things that are being picked up on and received, right as it’s being filmed at the end of the Clinton administration, is talking about, We can bring Rome back. We can bring the Republic back. Now that’s absolute bullshit, because Marcus Aurelius, in no way ever wants to bring back the Republic. There is no hint of evidence. He had always set Commodus as being the one that was going to be his successor. But this idea that the Republic could come back, that was a romantic idea of the year 2000 that then resurfaces this year with the latest Gladiator, 25 years later, really, 24 years later, coming to the surface, this idea that the Republic could come back. So I think that there are some people who really want to see a genuine resurfacing of proper governance, or some sort of governance that people influence in some way. And so I’m not saying that Gladiator II is completely innocuous, because there are a lot of things wrong with that movie, but they are entertaining. Whether there were sharks in the amphitheater or not, and there were not sharks in the amphitheater, sorry.
Adam: Aw, boo. Sarah! Let me live the lie.
Sarah E. Bond: You could fill the Colosseum with water. It was watertight. So that’s true, you can have a sea battle in the Colosseum, but there were not sharks.
Adam: They got a little greedy with the sharks. They got a little greedy.
Sarah E. Bond: Yeah, the CGI was just too far. So there are innocuous things, I think, like sharks in the Colosseum, that I’m really fine with. It’s just that this love affair with the fall of Rome is this idea that, especially conservatives, but we also have liberals who have written horrendously facile op-eds about the fall of Rome as well, that they can be the prognosticators using history. So they’re not only making themselves look extremely cerebral and extremely knowledgeable about quote-unquote, “Western Civ,” they’re also telling the future, and that gives them a level of power within the public sphere, and what they perceive of as the intellectual community, that gives them some sort of currency that they’ve read Gibbon. Well, who hasn’t read Gibbon? There are a lot of people that have read Gibbon. He published a two-volume set in 1776, guys, okay? There are no spoilers here. Everybody kind of knows what Gibbon has said.
But Gibbon is also speaking about the late 18th century. Everybody who is writing history, including myself, is thinking about the time period that they are living in. And I just think that, going back to this idea of the fall of Rome, is not only regurgitating and recycling Gibbon, which it clearly is, but it’s trying to send out a message that I am the truth teller, so please put your trust in me, and that’s essentially what op-eds are supposed to do anyways, right? Like I’m an opinion writer, I have a thousand words, I’m going to sway you that what I’m telling you is significant. It’s just that they get the history so wrong, especially, I would say when it comes to talking about religion and talking about, also, immigration, and talking about what really brought down different component parts of Rome, because Rome doesn’t fall monolithically together as one. That we have fracturing, that we have going in different directions, that many areas like North Africa stay extremely strong up to the Vandal invasion and things like this. So I mean, it’s just this idea that they can read the tea leaves through their historical abilities. And it’s just very wrong.
Adam: Yeah, and I’m going to read here from the Nixon tapes. He was obsessed with this idea. He ranted about it a lot. Quote,
You ever see what happened, you know what happened to the Greeks? Homosexuality destroyed them. Aristotle was a homo, we all know that. So was Socrates… Do you know what happened to the Romans? The last six Roman emperors were fags.
He concludes by saying,
You see, homosexuality, dope, immorality in general, these are the enemies of strong societies. That’s why the communists and the left-wingers are pushing the stuff: they’re trying to destroy us.
To be fair, I do do that. He’s got me there. But this is, again, this is so cliche. This has been done a billion times. The idea that, so much of the Roman, and you know, people would say, generally, corruption is what they’re really kind of referencing. But really it’s this idea of, again, Musk is obsessed with this idea of feminization. Again, he’s into weird kind of Silicon Valley natalist cults. He’s apparently doing some kind of panspermia experiment to half of California right now. I guess he’s on his 13th kid. And so it’s like this, this idea of, again, immigration, lack of white fertility, homosexuality, is like they all, they want to see it in Rome in a way that, of course, is not there, but that, of course, doesn’t really matter.
Nima: Well, I think what’s interesting also is, is, you know, the obsession with the kind of emperor or or even patrician class from some of the wealthiest people on the planet kind of makes sense, right? There’s a corollary there. It’s not just Musk. Also Mark Zuckerberg names his kids after, you know, Roman emperors. There’s a whole thing, weird thing going on. But, Sarah, I’d love for you to talk about how, how it’s not just, you know, the wealthy that kind of see themselves as part of that tradition, and kind of wanting to bring that back, that kind of makes sense, right? Like the people in charge want to be like the people in charge, but it’s for the workers and the people who glom on to this aesthetic as well, who all see themselves as warriors, not as other kinds of workers, right? I mean, we’re seeing farmers in the United States right now gutted by the cuts that have just been made to USAID. You know, hit hardest. You know, American farmers. That is not the kind of imagination that people storming the Capitol, or people excited about, you know, stanning for Musk on Twitter, like, they’re not seeing themselves as the people. They’re seeing themselves as these kind of like delayed warriors with the, you know, with the helmets and the crest and the Gladius by their side. Like, you know, where do you think that kind of comes from and how, how is that shaped by how we understand history, which I think your book starts to really unpack, like, who the people really are, and how we hear their stories, the kind of people’s history, not only of Rome, but of ourselves.
Sarah E. Bond: I think the idea of the American Dream is that we can always pull ourselves up from our bootstraps and be Musk, I mean, to be the richest man in the world. A lot of people imagine that they are capable of that, and we know that a very small number of people are ever able to ascend from poverty into the very wealthy 1%. And Musk isn’t even somebody, I mean, he comes from a family of emerald mine owners in South Africa. Trump comes from money. These are all nepo babies, okay, but this idea of the American Dream is that if you work hard enough, you can ascend. But part of that also is this idea of masculinity that is inextricably linked to Roman soldiers. And so if we go back to January 6 and the storming of the Capitol, there were people with signs where Trump was dressed like Maximus. Maximus, again, is not a historical figure there. It’s not real. Russell Crowe is playing a fictional character. But they are imagining themselves to be the highest order of masculinity. And the visualization of that, the kind of allegory that we have assigned to masculinity is the Roman centurion. And so, you know, just yesterday, I was looking at the new picture of Odysseus that was released for Christopher Nolan’s new version of The Odyssey. I want to see it. I’m going to see it, right? But Matt Damon has a crested helmet on that is very much not exactly what would have been worn in the Trojan War, but it is a crested helmet that is kind of very much emblematic of later soldiers that that are fighting, because the Greek phalanx and Sparta, etc., also is a symbol of masculinity.
And so when you try and question those constructions, people get very upset, because especially white men, tend to idealize both Spartan soldiers and also Roman centurions and soldiers as their everyday lives, like, This is how I should go through life. And these are people that don’t quite realize that if they were transported back to the ancient world, the vast chances are that they would be an enslaved person or a farmer or perhaps an artisan or a potter that’s making ceramics, and many of those also fought as soldiers in the earlier period of The Republic, when we have citizen armies. Enslaved persons usually did not but they were incorporated into the military in other ways. But yeah, I really think that it’s, it’s tied up in aesthetics of masculinity.
And I love that Adam said earlier that this is history laundering instead of money laundering, because that’s just exactly what it is. All of the actual, real colors of history have bled out, right? They’ve faded. They’ve been laundered to death, and now it just doesn’t even look like it actually was. It is a meme, and that’s exactly how memetic things work, is just continue to be recycled until they don’t really resemble the past in any real way. So the book is, in large part, trying to bring back the voices of just regular enslaved peoples, freed people, that is to say people who are manumitted, which is also a large part of the population, and they may not seem as sexy as a centurion, but we have the ability to redefine what sexy is. And I think that merchants who form a collegium and go on strike or sexier to me than a centurion that is running into battle. But yeah, I think there’s many books that are incorporated into this and that have been written and will be written on the reception of Roman history and white supremacy, but I think it all comes down to this feeling that, that this is the ultimate, this is the epitome of what it means to be a man.
Nima: Right. I mean, it’s really interesting that you mentioned, you know, that Russell Crowe is, you know, just an actor. Maximus doesn’t, doesn’t really exist. And in your book, you note that actors actually may have been the first in Ancient Rome to form what could be deemed like a proto-union, right? So, like, again, who is the everyday person, who are the people that are really organizing? Who is afforded the protections? Is it the you know, emperors, or is it the artisans?
Adam: I don’t want to let you go without asking about the viral popularity from 2016, then 2019, then it was huge during COVID, of Marcus Aurelius meditations and like Stoicism as this kind of masculine ideal. Ryan Holiday is kind of a hack writer, wrote a book about it, has a podcast about it.
Sarah E. Bond: We call that Broicism, by the way.
Adam: Broicism, sorry, and this is, apparently, it was, it’s been all the rage, and there was a viral lecture on it that was very sort of rah-rah that went viral during COVID. Again, on some level, one can see I actually read it. It was beyond tedious. But I stuck it out. I definitely don’t meet the the platonic ideal of a Stoic. As those listening to the show may be aware, I sometimes complain. And so I want you, I want to ask a little bit about, again, the sort of cartoon version versus the kind of real version. And it mean, again, these book sales, these podcasts are popular, these TikToks are very popular. This is, this is legitimately popular, and this is the primary entry point into Roman history for a lot of people. So talk, if you could, about the rise of Broicism and how, I don’t know if you, if you engage with this with a lot of undergrads or whatever, and talk about where you see it happen.
Sarah E. Bond: Yeah, I want to say, if you’re going to buy a translation of Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, my professor, whose name is Gregory Hays, I believe, wrote the best translation. So if we’re going to give actual money to anybody for buying Stoicism, and please don’t do those Instagrams that are like Stoicism Every Day, I’m going to send Stoicism and witticisms to your inbox, which half the time they’re fake. They’re fake quotes from Seneca. They’re fake quotes from Cicero. They’re fake quotes from Marcus Aurelius, etc. In any case, translations, who you choose to translate your words are extremely important. So yes, pick your translator carefully, number one. Number two, I think that if we think about technocrats and why this philosophy is extremely alluring to them, we can think about the fact that when you are a Stoic, you have to be happy with your lot in life, and it really behooves technocrats to have coders, to have people that are working within their companies, have a philosophy where they come to work and they’re like, You know, Gosh, darn. I’m just happy to be here. I’m going to be the best coder that I could be, right? And when we read things like Epictetus, then we think, Oh, I will be the best enslaved person that I could possibly be. But let’s face it, when you write the Meditations as Marcus Aurelius, and you say, I’m happy with my lot in life, well, you fucking should be. You are the emperor! You are the emperor! And so Elon Musk adopting Stoicism, which he really is not a Stoic in any stretch of the imagination.
Adam: No, I don’t think Stoics would post 50 tweets a day. Yeah.
Sarah E. Bond: No, no, no. This is not a man that I associate with Stoicism. But many technocrats within the area of the Silicon Valley have begun to glom on to this idea, because it is an opiate of the masses, essentially, as a philosophy. If everybody actually adopted it, then you would have people who aren’t trying to buck the system, that they are not trying to rebel, that they are not trying to modify the system in any way. They are trying individually to work internally on being the best person that they can be, but to reinforce the social hierarchy that already exists. I mean, this is not about transforming the society. It’s about reinforcing the status quo. And right now, the amount of social inequality that we have very much benefits extremely wealthy people. These are just wealthy people that want to maintain their wealth to an even higher degree, and Stoicism is a philosophy that supports their thesis, which is, I am awesome and have a lot of money that I wish to keep. And so they’ve only adopted the philosophy post-thesis.
Nima: And everyone else needs to be cool with that, too.
Sarah E. Bond: Yeah, get with it! Come on, guys! This is part of the world that we live in, so just pacify yourself. Go forward and come to the office. Do not stay at home and do not work from home. We want you in an office. We want you doing the tasks that we are asking you to do. And please don’t question it, because questioning leads to disruption, and they don’t want disruption. They simply want to rule. And so yeah, I think Stoicism as a philosophy is very attractive to them and also to people who would like to be wealthy. And as we’ve already kind of talked about, this idea of the American Dream makes people believe that they, too, could be this technocrat in the future. So get with it. But yeah, I don’t think it’s very, I’m much more Epicurean. I know you could probably guess that.
Adam: Yeah. We did a whole episode on the kind of David Goggins, self-help, Tiktok world and again, on some some level, I’m sympathetic, because if there is a drudgery in your job, which, again, I know, I’m sure all of us have here had a drudgery job, you have to hold on to something to sort of make it make sense. But again, there’s a reason why your boss wants you to read Marcus Aurelius, and rather than a union organizer, he’s like, Wait. It’s basically the Mike Rowe sweat pledge. So I want to ask one more question before we go, because we’d be remiss if we didn’t talk about the GOAT, Spartacus, and the Servile Wars and obviously, revolts by enslaved people in general, which, of course, there was quite a few of them. Can we talk a little bit about because again, that would be like the sort of entry point into a discussion about labor that is broadly popular, you know, Kirk Douglas with his shirt off.
Nima: Tony Curtis.
Adam: Sorry, with all due respect to Tony Curtis. Talk about that, the sort of popularity of that narrative, again, it’s reduced to this kind of heroic narrative. But like, where did that, where was that oriented into this broader associations framework, and how people kind of mimic these structures, and what lessons can be drawn from that that are not this kind of cartoon, you know, Marcus Aurelius sitting here telling you how to, you know, how to eat shit and suck it up?
Sarah E. Bond: Well, I think Spartacus as a folk hero does not really gain a lot of steam until around the period of the French Revolution and a little bit before. So in terms of his revival, up until that point, people knew who Spartacus was, of course, he is written about by people like Appian and Plutarch, etc. That we have three Servile Wars. The first one is in Sicily in the end of the second century BCE, then we have another one that formulates out of Sicily a few years later. Spartacus himself is a few decades after that, and he’s not on Sicily. He is breaking out of a gladiatorial school in the area of Southern Italy, and Spartacus is seen by the contemporary sources and the sources that are not long thereafter as a rebel and a rabble-rouser. And of course, they’re not going on strike. They fully want freedom and never to come back to their jobs again. They do not want to return to being gladiators, so they’re not leveraging their labor in any way. They want to go free. And my belief is that they really should have, when they got towards the Alps, to continue going, but they circle back and they come back into the Italic peninsula, and I always want to yell like, Keep going, Spartacus! Keep going! But he’s not a hero in his own day. He may have been with enslaved persons. We don’t have a lot of their narratives or reactions to him, but during the period of the French Revolution, into later political campaigns in the 18th and then 19th and then 20th century, Spartacus gains more and more as a folk hero of freedom and rebellion against tyranny, whether it was in Prussia, where he was extremely popular. He became very popular in France and in the United States, and especially during the Haitian Revolution, where Toussaint Louverture takes the name of Black Spartacus. He’s given that name, but he is seen as, you know, this Haitian revolutionary leading enslaved persons to fight against enslavement within the island of Haiti, right? So all of these things build Spartacus’s hero worship, but the movie in 1960 really is what does it to the highest degree,
Adam: Written by a communist. No shocker there. Written by Dalton Trumbo.
Sarah E. Bond: Exactly. And it’s during the period of the blacklist. You know, they’re blacklisting communists after McCarthyism. That Spartacus is really about fighting against The Man. And I see Spartacus absolutely as the GOAT and a hero that should be celebrated. But we have to also remember that he was working within a gladiatorial troupe, and that gladiatorial troupe lives within the gladiatorial school, and they coordinate together. Spartacus has lieutenants that he works with, but he has a group of people that are very close to him that mobilize in a very planned rebellion in the gladiatorial school. They go to the kitchen, and they grab utensils and knives and break out of the gladiatorial school. And then, as they are moving through Italy, whether to Vesuvius, or whether going north, etc, they are gaining more and more enslaved persons in a very organized manner, up to about 100,000 people.
And this is during a period when Roman slavery had been growing so quickly. Over the past 200 years, Roman slavery had expanded to a level that that had never seen before, and the number of enslaved people was so high within the Italic peninsula. So, I mean, I think Spartacus deserves all of those kudos, but we also have to ask ourselves about other enslaved people into the period of the Empire, and part of that is looking at enslaved people that rebel against Rome, whether they’re mint workers, whether they’re charioteers, whether they’re bear trainers, that we never have a slave revolt that is to the level of Spartacus that we know of within the Roman Empire for the rest of its existence, there’s never a rebellion that is to the degree that Spartacus inspired and carried out, but that there are still enslaved people that went on strike and that engaged in joining collegia.
And so circling back to that first thesis that I was talking about, just because enslaved people exist within a society does not mean that there cannot be labor organization and that there cannot be people working together for a higher purpose, right? And so sometimes that purpose is manumission, and sometimes that purpose is to get higher wages. But just because they’re enslaved does not mean that they’re completely impotent or without any power within this labor economy.
Nima: Well, I think that is a perfect place to leave it. Sarah, this has been so wonderful, and thank you, everyone, for joining us on this Citations Needed livestream Beg-a-Thon. It has been truly wonderful to talk to you, Sarah. We have been speaking with Dr. Sarah E. Bond, Associate Professor in the Classics at the University of Iowa. You do have, like, a longer title: Erling B. “Jack” Holtsmark?
Sarah E. Bond: I’m an endowed chair in the history, I’m technically in the History Department with an appointment in Classics. I have a chair. It does not matter.
Nima: I feel like I need to read that title. It’s very prestigious.
Sarah E. Bond: It doesn’t, well, it doesn’t mean that much, except for, you know, that I feel very lucky to have the job that I do, that this is my job, that I get to do all day. So that’s good enough.
Nima: Yeah, that’s very Stoic of you.
Sarah E. Bond: I see what you did there. I see what you did there.
Adam: She’s the emperor, though. That’s objectively a great job.
Nima: Sarah, of course, is the author of the incredible new book. Adam and I both read it.
Adam: We actually read it. We didn’t fake-read it. We actually read it.
Nima: Man, is it fucking great. So please pick it up. The book is, of course, Strike: Labor, Unions, and Resistance in the Roman Empire, out now from Yale University Press. But Sarah, thank you so much for joining us today on Citations Needed. It has been amazing to have you.
Sarah E. Bond: Thank you for having me. Hopefully, I’ll see you again.
Nima: Indeed.
Sarah E. Bond: Maybe in five years, but hopefully sooner.
Nima: Hopefully much sooner. But that will do it for this Citations Needed livestream Beg-a-Thon, thank you all for listening. Of course, you can follow the show on Twitter and Bluesky @citationspod, Facebook Citations Needed. If you have not, please do consider signing up to support the show through Patreon.com/CitationsNeededPodcast. All your support through Patreon is so incredibly appreciated, as we are 100% listener funded, but that will do it. Stay tuned for more full-length episodes and News Briefs from Citations Needed. Plenty to discuss. So more coming your way, but until then, thank you all for listening. Of course, I am Nima Shirazi.
Adam: I’m Adam Johnson.
Nima: Citations Needed’s senior producer is Florence Barrau-Adams. Our producer is Julianne Tveten. Production assistant is Trendel Lightburn. The newsletter is by Marco Cartolano. The music is by Grandaddy. Thanks again, everyone. Have a wonderful night. We’ll catch you next time.
[Music]
This Citations Needed live Beg-a-Thon was recorded with a virtual audience on Wednesday, February 19, 2025, and released on Wednesday, March 5, 2025.
