Can't judge these guys by modern values like "a bloody reign of mass murder is bad", then how would I fantasize about being the Tough Guy Who's Willing to Do What Needs to be Done in order to save the Republic?
It's funny because just yesterday I was talking to my 8 year old about the Romans and he asked me "So, were the Romans bad?"
And I thought all this stuff about cultural context and modern values and what about their accomplishments?
"Yes. Yeah, actually they sucked."
With the caveat that even guys who suck can do good things, and also no one was really "good" per se, yeah! They were a brutal imperialist slave state! It was bad!
I really thought I was rid of all these guys after going explicitly anti-fascist in one video and pro-gay in the next.
Some people just can’t take the hint I guess!
I'd say "... viewing [...] events [...] too much through a modern lens..." is just code for deviating too far from Gibbon, but that is giving MacNab far too much credit here.
Sorry I don’t have time to watch it, but do you engage with Cicero’s point that Sulla had a case but used his victory cruelly? Morstein Marx uses it as the jumping off point (IIRC) of his 2011 chapter on Cinna’s speech in Appian.
I wish I had - I originally wanted to use Cicero as a barometer for elite opinion on Sulla but unfortunately was too constrained so want to come back to it in a later video that is specifically devoted to how Cicero oscillated between optimates and populares throughout his career
