Name: Why Elites in the Roman Empire Literally Had to Fight Their Own Battles
Uploaded: 2025-09-29T15:15:00.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Why Elites in the Roman Empire Literally Had to Fight Their Own Battles' from Theo Von Clips on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-09-29. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Why Elites in the Roman Empire Literally Had to Fight Their Own Battles' from Theo Von Clips on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-09-29. Transcript available.

so the political leaders were often also the leaders on the battlefield they
were wow they
were that's what that's literally what they were there to do wow yeah so that's
as if james carville
would actually would also then have a military he would have to be a politician
or uh fetterman
you know the laid-back uh warriors um but anybody or the casual dressed down friday
warriors
you know which i think would be i'm sure they would love it great they would
love it but those
people also if i love the fact that if they made rules for people they also
would have to get out
on the battlefield and at some way they have to put their money where they're
they have to put their
blood where their mouth is 100 and it actually goes deeper than that so yeah if
if you're running if
you're running for console and you want to be console the thing that you want
for yourself and expect for
yourself is to be the leader of the legion and then go out and defeat something
or someone on behalf of
rome and then come back and have a triumph and the triumph is you getting to
parade through rome and
show off the spoils of your conflict and um sometimes there were actual wars to
fight and
sometimes there's there's this very funny thing it's called triumph hunting
which is when a consul
becomes comes into power and he's like there's nobody to fight and so he'll
just pick some random tribe
and attack them and be like oh i defeated such and such a people so he can have
his triumph
which we still do today in different ways yeah but create enemies i mean yeah
yeah we we do invent enemies and then go fight them don't we um but but there
is but there is a thing
like in in early roman society um really through almost to the end of the
republic there was a
property qualification to serve in the legions because you had to have enough
money you had to
have enough land to participate in the legions their assumption their their
sort of cultural assumption
was that the people who constitute this society that we are in are
fundamentally like
the the landowners and if so if you own a plot of land then you're a part of
the society you're the
people who go and fight for this society and defend this society if you are uh
you know if you're in
poverty if you don't have land you don't qualify for service in the legion
because in their mind
you're not actually really truly a part of this thing that we are trying to
defend right so how can you
put that you're you're all into it if you don't have something you don't have a
vested interest almost
yeah and and then the leaders and then and then yeah the higher you go the more
you are out there
now granted like they're in the command tent uh you know they're you're not
like on a horse like
literally leading the charge but you were expected to be out there and an
active military leader
and everybody who had a stake in that society that meant that you also had to
be there the richest
people in society went off to war the poorest people stayed behind and we have
kind of uh flipped that
yeah god that's fascinating i can't even imagine but it sounds like you know
you always hear like
oh i wish all of these um you know if these politicians had to have their
children go off to
war they would feel totally different sure about the things that they send
children off to war to do
yeah they're called chicken hawks yeah yeah wow i didn't know that that was the
term it is yeah yeah
chicken hawks yeah we've had chicken hawks all throughout history the people
who will
bang the drums of war and then send other people off to die wow a chicken hawk
has go back up to the top
sorry has multiple meanings in bird names it refers to three hawk species coopers
sharp shinned and red
tailed in gay slang it's used to describe an older man who prefers younger
males okay and politically it can
describe someone who supports war but avoids military service ah like draft dodgers
kind of yeah similar
to that yeah and we've had a whole run of them as presidents you know clinton
got out of it bush got
out of it trump got out of it oh yeah um you know obama i don't think had the
opportunity to um but
yeah we certainly have not followed that same steed where the people who are
writing the rules are the
same one who have to go out there and make sure it's not uh make sure it's
their own blood that's
providing the ink yep what did the kings and the royalty live like were they
living was it just like
a what was it like over there could you just knock on the drawbridge how did
you even get over there
well for one thing about the romans is they did not have kings anymore and this
is an important part of
their political ideology once they kick the kings out in the legendary day to
509 bc um there aren't
kings anymore okay and why did they kick the kings out uh the for a variety of
reasons most especially
like it was it was immediately caused by uh the aristocratic the aristocrats
most of the senatorial
class not liking the last king of rome and it's actually a story that he he
raped the daughter of a
prominent senator and so that's what precipitated the overthrow of of of the
last tarquin king um and that
was the from that was in the roman that's how the roman republic started yeah
yeah because like if
you go back like romulus allegedly founds rome 753 and then they're kings of rome
for like 250 years
okay and then around 500 that's when the republic gets going and what started
the republican take me
through that story the like the the legendary story is that there's a last king
who was the the local
senatorial elite in rome did not like him very much what was his name uh tarquin
okay and the tarquin
family comes from yeah yeah tarquin is superbus but they they were in a trurian
family and a truria is
north of rome not roman so it was a foreign it was a foreign monarchy that had
their provincials
uh the romans were being ruled yeah the romans were being ruled by a king who
came from someplace else
that's all it is it's a it's a foreign monarch which got it which is something
that is common
throughout history and so they don't like the foreign monarch and this is all
trying to like
sort of capture how the romans get out from under the cultural hegemony of of
etruria at the time
because the etruscans were quite a bit better at things earlier uh than the romans
were and then
the romans come along and supplant them um but to your question of which is
really like the high
aristocracy the senatorial class and then ultimately the emperors like how are
they living well oh and
wait did we finish the story what happened oh you told us about the story but
what happened with the
with the oh yeah according to according to the story tarquin rapes the daughter
of of a prominent
setter in rome and and that guy goes and he rallies all of his you know his
brothers and his allies
and his friends and they overthrow the king and they kick him out and then they
say we're not doing kings
anymore wow we are going to do a like job rotation system and set up proto-democratic
assemblies and
then that's how they ran themselves for like 500 years and is that how
democracy began well democracy
yeah it's i mean it's one of the places like yeah i mean democracy is coming
from like greece right
they're they're they're they're taking cultural cues from what's happening over
in greece because like
just as and and there there is debate about when the roman republic was
actually founded because you do
get sort of solon coming over to athens and being like the great lawgiver of athens
and sort of the
like i'm going to get this date wrong but it's like around 470 is when he's the
lawgiver of athens and
this is when you start getting sort of like what we think of as democratic
government and it's entirely
possible that later roman historians went and backdated like they retconned
their own history
so that they would come along like 30 years before that because everybody knew
about what was going
on in athens and they were like actually we got there 30 years earlier which is
just them you know
doing a little light revision of their own history in order to make sure that
they were always the
super bus it's like an instagram filter it's like an instagram filter exactly
yeah jakarta yeah but
you know if you're a senator so now we have the republic going on yeah this is
where the republic
of rome this is the second of kind of three of the one this is second of kind
of the three main parts
of rome then we get into the roman empire exactly okay yeah so now we no longer
have kings no longer
have kings kings bad you cannot be a king in fact if anybody tries to be a king
if anybody tries to
become a king any roman citizen can kill that person oh yeah kill the kings oh
yeah no sacramento
there's a there's a reason why the emperors are not kings because kings are
verboten right you are not
ever going to be a king and every roman senator ultimately thought that they
were superior to any
king and there were kings throughout the mediterranean world who would be like
clients of of of the roman
empire and any roman senator considered themselves socially morally politically
above a mere king so you have
the republic now and the the the the the counselors of the republic the rich
guy how are they how were
they living at the time those the the people who were sort of the aristocrats
which is the you know
synonymous with the senatorial class they are the major landowners of rome and
so they do not have
occupations they are living off of the rents of their land they're living off
of the produce of you know the
peasants who are living on their land and then ultimately the slaves who are
living on their land
that's that's where their income is coming from that's where their wealth is
coming from they
themselves don't have to do anything they don't have to have a profession they
don't have to have
a job and in their minds this is what made them the perfect people to lead the
republic because they
were the only people who had the leisure time to like be literate to read
things about history to learn
things about how to actually do statecraft to have the time to engage in all of
those pursuits and that
made them like uniquely able and then but and then if you say like well hey
maybe we should educate
everyone then and then like we can have all these like no no no no no no no you
don't want to go
that far because really they just wanted to be in charge but there but there is
it but there is
sort of a self-justifying um like ideological project there which is which is
like we're the
ones who have the time to do this and so we will be the ones who do it and so
you know they had they
had they would have country villas they would usually have like a place in the
city a lot of them
clustered on the palatine hill that's i mean to this very day you know jockeying
for a house in the
best neighborhood this is i mean this is a tale as old as time right what was
going on on the palatine
hill um you know you wanted to be in a good house in a bigger house um amongst
the other people who are
thinking and making decisions um