HeyJaredThe Jeremy Ryan Slate Show
The Jeremy Ryan Slate Show is a bi-weekly investigation into how power really works—across history, empires, and the modern world.Each episode draws on two core lenses:Hidden forces behind history—royal murders, lost colonies, financial systems, modern elites, NGOs,…
- Indexed episodes, last 90 days
- 22
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- Sep 28, 2026
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- Jul 6, 2026
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The Republic Didn't Die From One Man. It Died When Offices Got a Price Tag. (opens the original)
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The Roman Republic didn't collapse because one man grew too powerful. It collapsed because the offices themselves acquired a market price, and everyone kept showing up to work. In this episode we walk the decade between Sulla's abdication and the First Triumvirate: the years Crassus built his fortune out of proscriptions and fire brigades, Pompey extorted a consulship at 35 with no prior office, Cicero prosecuted Verres and learned that you cannot prosecute your way out of a system where the pro
Spartacus: The Slave Revolt That Set Up Rome's Collapse (opens the original)
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Hollywood sold you a hero in chains. Forget it. That's not what broke Rome. What broke Rome was what happened after Rome won. By 73 BC, Rome had stopped running on its citizens. It was running on slaves. Around a fifth of the peninsula was enslaved. In whole districts of Lucania and Apulia, the men working the land outnumbered the men who owned it by margins that should have frightened somebody. So when 78 gladiators broke out of a school in Capua with kitchen knives and made it to Mount Vesuviu
Sulla: The First Man to Break Rome (opens the original)
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Caesar didn't break Rome. 50 years before Caesar ever mattered, Sulla did — and he did it while trying to save the Republic. Rome spent 400 years building constraints to stop a king. Two consuls, not one. One-year terms. Ten tribunes with veto power. No army inside the sacred boundary of the city. No office without a term limit. It worked because everyone agreed to lose — you lost an election, you waited your turn. Sulla broke every one of those constraints in five years. Legions camped inside t
The War Rome Almost Lost to Its Own Allies (opens the original)
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The war that nearly killed Rome wasn't fought against foreigners. It was fought against the men Rome refused to call Romans. For 100 years, Rome took the sons of its Italian allies for its legions, sent them to fight in Roman armies, buried them when it went badly — and denied them citizenship. Rome could see the problem. Reformers proposed fixing it for decades. Every one of them was killed. Then in 91 BC, Marcus Livius Drusus was assassinated at his own front door for putting Italian citizensh
What If Aurelian Never Died? The Rome That Never Fell (opens the original)
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A counterfactual thought experiment — a departure from the usual researched history on this channel. Thanks to subscriber @history1099 for the idea. In the real world, the Emperor Aurelian reunified a collapsing Rome, rebuilt its currency around the Unconquered Sun, and was murdered in 275 AD by his own officers over a forged kill-list — nine years before Diocletian had to redo the whole recovery. But what if the blade had missed? This is the "what if": a Rome that never fell, a world of three e
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