The Tale Of Rome

Partial Transcripthttp://www.thetaleofrome.com/rome-011 Hello, this is Abel, in Beijing, China. Welcome to my podcast.The Tale of Rome, Episode 11 — Rome 1 – Athens 0.This episode has a rather soccer-type title name, because the Romans—let me repeat that, the Romans claim that their republic started in the year 509 BC.Personally, I don’t buy it, not even for a minute, but—since all we have are the records written by the Romans themselves, and since we do not have a time machine, we have to stick to their version.Romans didn’t like being second, especially when it came to a little word like DEMOCRACY.Turns out that, in the year 508 BC, and according to some historians—507 BC, something happened in Greece.A man named Kleisthenes, a noble Athenian made significant reforms to the constitution of ancient Athens, and so he set his city on a democratic footing in either 508 or 507 BC.So, then—the reaction of the Romans, actually, the reaction of those who rewrote the hsitory of Rome some centuries later, was to make