The Basement: Alex Petkas | Julius Caesar's Final 24 Hours

Today I'm talking with Alex Petkus. He has a PhD in Classics from Princeton, and he failed history in high school. He was busy being the top monk on his EverQuest server. Top monk on EverQuest? I was once a level 60 dominatrix on a Turkish gambling server. I respect the grind. Now he hosts Cost of Glory, where he retells the lives of Plutarch's heroes. He sold the family business to go all in. Today we're covering how Plato got played by a tyrant in Sicily, a coup in ancient Thebes pulled off by men in dresses, men in dresses pulled off a coup. Did I ever tell you a story when Uncle Sal tried that at Thanksgiving? We referred to it as the incident, and I got him a lawyer. And the Roman library a volcano buried 2,000 years ago. AI just read one of its scrolls, start to finish. Alex helped produce the documentary about it with Ridley Scott's company. And the night before Caesar was murdered, he asked the dinner table what the best way to die would be. One of his killers was sitting right there. That one gave me chills. This one died. Would you please let me get, it's the middle of the night, will you let me. Sorry, sorry, I forgot you get chills over a guy who didn't even clock his own murder is sitting right there. Yeah, but yeah. After our conversation, I'll come back and break down the talk. Let's go down to the basement. Thank you for being here, sir. Yeah. Alex Petras, Cost of Glory, I love your podcast. I'm obsessed with it, which is why today's going to be, it's going to be hectic. So there's going to be a lot of rifling through papers. It's so much to cover. I'm hoping you'll come back and we can drill down to specific stories. Like, we can, I've got Catiline here for 18 minutes. That's not fair. So we're just going to have to muscle through it. Yeah. What I'd like to start with. Honored, by the way. Stop. I love your work. Get out of here. I won't accept it. It's a real achievement. I appreciate that. Thank you. It was a lot of luck and accident. I was a little afraid because I know you do really good research. And look at that stack of papers. Why afraid? I've never hurt anyone's feelings. I've only made six grown men cry. That's not. Fair. Okay. Well. Are you feeling emotionally open today? I am feeling quite emotionally open. Yeah. Okay. I noticed the posture change when I asked. That's interesting. I want to learn about you, but. I pride myself on being novel and asking questions that the host, that the guest doesn't expect, that are fun for you, that people won't hear on the circuit because everybody does the circuit. But before we do that, just maybe a five-minute retelling of Caesar and the Statue. Yeah. This is one of my favorite episodes. And I think that people don't read it right. They don't interpret it. Yeah. The way that I do, at least. So, famous story. People might have heard of it. Julius Caesar is 32. He's a questor in Spain. Chief of staff for some, you know, provincial governor. Paper pusher? Yeah. You know, the document guy. The gopher. And he is. You know, they're doing the whole Assizes tour, probably. So, they're in Cadiz. Or Cadiz in Spain, which is an old Phoenician city. And there's a temple there that was probably a temple to Melkart, but the, you know, they converted to a temple to Hercules. Hercules is Melkart and, and, and in this temple, as, as one does, you know, they've, they've put a lot of art, statues and paintings, and there's a statue. Caesar's going through there with his friends. It's kind of like a museum and they're kind of appreciating the art. Maybe toss a little in there. There's a little incense on the pyre and his friends at some point, they've kind of moving along from statue to statue. And they look back and they see Caesar is not with them. He's standing in front of a statue of Alexander the Great. And, and they're like, Caesar, are you coming? Wait a sec. Are you crying? And, and he looks at them and sure enough, he is. He's got tears in his eyes. And he says, do you not think it is a matter for weeping that when Alexander was my age, he was king of so many people? And yet I have done nothing worthy of renown. And that moment for me, a lot of people look at that and they're like, look at this just megalomaniac. No. Disagree. I, I, I disagree. I, I think you don't, there's two, there's two moments where Caesar cries, you know, that's one of them. And the other is when he's presented with the head of Pompey the Great. And, but I, so he's not, he's not a big crier, but. I think that to get a man like that to cry, it's not, it's not that he's a kind of spoiled child, sad that he doesn't have his, his toy that he thinks he deserves. It's about this sudden realization of who he is. And almost like, I mean, kind of controversial to say, it's like who he's called to be, you know, what, what he sees in Alexander is, is a kind of. It's, it's a, it's convicting. It's like, okay, he's, he's a, he's a pretty flashy, he's like pretty well known around Rome, but he hasn't accomplished a whole lot compared to Alexander for sure. He's just a quester. He's just chief of staff. And he, and he's, he's realizing the path that lies before him. This is like a middle-aged crisis. Yeah. Yeah. And I have to get, I have to get serious now. And Aristotle has a word for that emotion. Zeal. Yes. Zelos. Which we usually translate as emulation. The Greek word is zelos in, this is in the rhetoric where he has his catalog of the basic emotions of politics. I think there's 13 of them. Anger and friendship and pity. But zelos is one of them. And it's the pain you feel when you see present in someone who's like you by nature. Things good. And honorable, which you, yourself are capable of attaining. So it's a kind of sting and it's not envy. It's different from envy. Aristotle says, I think he's right. Envy is a different emotion. It's the, it's the pain you feel when you see somebody, uh, succeeding that, that makes you want to see them fail or suffer. Yes. It's the tall poppy emotion. Uh, and it's not productive. It's, it's a, it's, it's basically a form of. Malice. But, um, and it's characteristic of, of, of bad men in Aristotle's book, but zeal is characteristic of, of good men of the youth. Okay. You can, you can have, I mean, it can be a counterproductive emotion if it leads you to the wrong thing, but it's, it's basically the emotion of aspiration and it hurts. And, uh, and I think that's really instructive for thinking about like how, how you find who you are, you know, you discover who you're. You're supposed to be not by gazing at your navel or like trying to like listen to these whisperings of your soul necessarily. That's, that can be important, but fundamentally, I think we're designed such that we learn who we are by focusing intently on other people. Mimesis. Mimesis. Yes, exactly. Uh, and you know, being a student of Plato, he's, he's, he's, he's gone through the whole, um, philosophy. Of Mimesis, which you see in the Republic, it's, it's kind of this ordering principle of the universe, the higher, the, the lower imitates the higher the forms up here. And, um, uh, I, I think that that's, that's how Plato saw the world structured. That's how I think Aristotle sees the world structure. The prime mover is, uh, is, is, is the cause of everything in the universe, but it's, it's a final cause if you know Aristotle's causality. It's, it's not that, that, uh, God, if you want to call it. If you want to call the prime mover God, it's not that he's pushing, it's that he's pulling, you know? Yes. Because everything kind of imitates that, it's drawn toward it. Um, so I, deep stuff, I think. I remember you saying that you, you were going through a rough patch when you were 17, there were two books on the shelf, it was Marcus Aurelius, and then I think it was like Ways to Influence People. Yeah, it was, uh, it was the Seven Habits. Seven Habits. Seven Habits book, yeah. What was going on with you? Yeah, I, uh, I decided at one point that I needed to kind of get my act together. Uh, you know, there was a girl, she was too good for me, and I realized. I married that girl. I could fix that. Yeah. You had a, a statue moment. Yeah, I think so. I had a, I had a kind of statue moment, like, I want to be like, at the very least, like the men described in this book, or like a Marcus Aurelius, or like, like somebody of character. So meditations is what you grabbed? I, I did grab meditations. I, I can't say that I got that far. I won't, but I did, for some reason, the, you know, as a 17 year old who was not used to reading a lot of ancients, well, I, okay, I took Latin, but it was, again, the sleeping through the class thing. Um, it was, um, it was just a. Seven Habits, self-help book where, you know, Covey describes, I think he, he tells stories in the course of this book, the kinds of people that take up these habits and you know later i realized that a lot of a lot of the wisdom of self-help books is stuff that you can pluck right out of stoic philosophy or platonic philosophy or the bible but kind of package in a way i keep meditations and the bible on my nightstand at all times and a sci-fi book yeah mixing this into my morning coffee is about as simple as habits get now with fall here that small habit matters more than you think cold and flu seasons right around the corner and there's nothing quite like walking into a room full of people coughing and sneezing if you want to walk into that room feeling good start with your gut colostrum is the very first milk packed with immune compounds like immunoglobulins and growth factors exactly the kind of support your body can use right now a lot of people think being bloated after every 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it's in one of the godfather movies yeah another classic of power and uh and virtue what did you take from meditations that turned you around i i think that the the idea that um things that more is in your your control than you think it's up to you and um and and that's what you should put your focus on rather than things that are outside your power like whether or not i end up getting out of control i end up getting out of control i end up getting out of control i end up getting this girl didn't um and that was good but you know i can definitely become the sort of man who's worthy of you know a girlfriend that was that was one of my primary concerns as a 16 17 year old it was uh uh it was it was really empowering and uh i i started exercising i started dieting and i lost a lot of weight and you know started trying to like socialize with people and instead of keeping myself and sleeping and you know reading my sci-fi books big move it was huge it was huge and and i i had also kind of gravitated toward some old friends of mine from middle school um and uh you know bless them they they were getting the things that kids get into in high school drugs and stuff and uh and i i dabbled and i i at some point felt like this like you know cool cool people are doing this they're going to play with me and i'm like okay let's do this let's do this let's do this let's do this let's go to parties i mean i think going to parties and drinking would probably be better than what a lot of kids are doing in high school now yeah um well that's another discussion but um i don't know i i kind of i got obsessive uh and it was like experimenting with a lot of substances and i that was um that was another kind of moment for me where i realized i needed real wisdom and i wasn't going to get it from just talking to my peers and how do you make the jump from substances to seeking wisdom uh i mean were you using drugs to explore consciousness or you just smoking weed with the guys yeah i felt like i was i was looking for answers actually funny enough i think that that's probably not so uncommon nope i mean you know ayahuasca clinics today it's and there's there's decent reasons for that i was you know going on forums on the internet and hearing about people's transformative experiences and i i had this transformative experience with this very legal substance uh morning glory seeds which is basically like a lsd kind of really um uh maybe maybe people shouldn't know that no morning glory seeds don't work anyway i i had like a psychedelic experience and then it like turned really bad and i realized the answer that i got from this kind of mild psychedelic experience was this is not where the answers are go to church wow yeah i've been raised in a greek orthodox church and hadn't taken it all that seriously uh but it it seemed very clear to me that that was a that was a a source of wisdom that there was a tradition there that there was like good counsel uh it was it was like a stable rock for me that that i um you know as i'm you know reading self-help books and stoicism i'm also like looking back at this tradition i grew up in i'm like oh this is what this is for um so i think you know you have to you have to suffer a little bit sometimes before you can realize how much you need wisdom good counsel i think that's true um so you've finally make your way to college you still play jazz guitar i haven't what in a while i still play the guitar okay yeah you know i don't have people to play with and it's hard and uh i didn't get like super good that i could kind of drop it for many many years during grad school and come back to it you're a music major yeah i was a music major for a while yeah i studied uh i got really i thought if i just studied music practice the guitar maybe i'd become a rock star someday or something uh and um really enjoyed it but what ended up kind of tanking my jazz guitar career was ancient greek yeah what the hell is attic greek yeah that was what i was wondering when i was looking at it on the course catalog did you sign up by accident i it was the only greek course they taught well i mean what made why did you want a greek course well i i had gotten interested in um the history of the early church okay so um you know like because i had i was going i was back at church the you know the orthodox church locally and then i had all these friends who were like presbyterians like and the presbyterians are they have like a pretty serious tradition they were like really into arguments and proving the five points the the tulip of calvinism and like what do i really like what are my arguments for why i am in this tradition not theirs and so that kind of drove my interest in church history going back to like well what was it from the beginning what reading the bible more seriously and then looking at kind of these things that they would that you know some of my protestant friends and not just calvinists but like evangelicals would question like why do you need the bishops and the liturgy and and all this stuff and so but even your dad's interest in business and byzantium plays in here as well yeah definitely it like i knew where to where to go start writing like picking books off of his shelf and uh yaroslav pelican and um brunciman and you know some some great great books have been written about the byzantine church the early church sure i got into that stuff and um and i kind of thought also maybe i'll see i'll spend a year or two doing youth ministry or something while i'm figuring out what's next after college well i better learn greek i was you know i'm like fourth generation and only like part greek and i've been surrounded by it and never knew hardly a word of it like well why don't i learn some greek on the side as i'm doing my jazz guitar thing or whatever and i just that was all they had added greek all right so for people who don't know about the byzantine church what is attic yes attic greek it's funny that they called it that in the course catalog because it's so kind of niche why don't you just call it ancient greek anyway but wasn't a specific athenian dialect so the the the standard way you teach ancient greek there's a lot of phases of the greek language um and i think a lot of people don't realize modern greek is way closer to attic greek than um than modern english is to middle english or it's it's like comparable it's it's it's one of the it's the longest continually documented living languages in the west and it um because i think to a large extent because of the church because of the bible the bible is basically written in ancient greek there's a lot of continuity but attic greek is is essentially the language of like plato and i and greek tragedy too and they usually start with that because that became the sort of canonical language it became the like standard official dialect of greek in uh in the roman empire later and in the hellenistic period i mean the bible is they call it koine greek um but it's it's like a simple register of standard attic greek it's not that different and it like if you learn attic greek then you can you can read you know plutarch you could read the by you know the new testament but hold on attic greek is very diff this is you got three genders words are different based on singular plural or dual inflectionism this is a hard thing to just jump into so but you're just saying like yeah i did this you learned out of greek i got obsessed i i i was the kid in the music theory class who was always asking these like recherche questions about you know what why parallel fifths why don't we do that like bach counterpoint i said that found it fascinating i do too learning these the the system and the math of music that was what was really interesting about jazz there's this great book that uh that i poured over i think it's called the jazz language um but um i so i like when i started taking out a greek i was like oh another system another abstract system i can like drill into and it seems to promise sort of vaguely these rewards you know music theory there's the vague promise that you'll be a rock star okay it's kind of like the underpants gnomes like steal the underpants question mark money right learn music theory question right rock star uh and and with greek you know there is this um as i kind of like dis i didn't really realize this when i was doing latin in high school in my half-ass way bless my latin teacher great guy um that but i kind of realized this in college like there's a lot of cultural prestige to classics or there was in the past there was there was there was i don't think it's there anymore uh fair it went through a dark i i think it might be coming back but it's not there yet and there's there's uh there's a potential there but because it's i think it's kind of inescapable the fact that our civilization is so much founded on this stuff but but um uh the it was definitely not obvious in a public high school in houston texas that the classics were some source of prestige that like you know but somebody you know i i i got reasonably good at this stuff uh within a semester i realized this is really fun and really like illuminating on how uh society is structured and these you know plato is way cooler than i thought and like the military history like salamis and yeah uh thermopylae and um and um and then somebody said you know you could if you could go to a phd at one of these fancy schools um i was at a good school but not a fancy school yeah in texas and so i had this kind of there was enough of a kind of reason to think there's something behind that question mark between studying classics and like having a respectable job so i got super into ancient greek and it's very difficult it's the way we teach it makes it harder learning all the grammar um you never speak it it's always translating uh you never speak it uh well that's changing somewhat now but it's it's um you know you don't approach it like a living language and your brain is actually not good most people's brains are not good at learning language like an abstract system no absolutely not that's how we learn our mother tongues it's like you learn by mimesis really you learn by and your your brain is like a language learning machine but if you put give it the right input if you you know messages talking to people understanding things having real situations where like when i was in greece a while back i was learning modern greek and um i was driving along in i think it was an argos it was somewhere some small town and uh and this driver like he's like signaling to me my wife's in the in the car and he's signaling to me rolls down the window he's like he's like it's one way and i was driving the wrong way never forgot that word but that's not how you learn classical languages typically and the grammar is very complicated yes um so but i love that part of it and and that that was you know the rest was history i picked up latin again of course and went on the phd and so forth psychics where they can predict your future for 50 bucks a session i've never seen one nail it but hungry roots smart card predicts my dinner for free and it's right more often than any medium i've fact-checked that's why i built my own digital cookbook gertie's hump day recipes proof that an algorithm beats a crystal ball every single wednesday inside smart cart keeps stacking my cart with a 15-minute garlic shrimp stir-fry a black bean turkey chili roasted salmon with lemon greens and their black bean brownie batter for dessert i don't feel guilty about also sliding in staples i actually run out of greek yogurt sourdough snack bars because hungry root isn't just a meal kit it's a full grocery store with an ai brain running the register every pick is based on what i've actually eaten and liked which is why nothing goes bad in my fridge and my future tastes better than any tarot reading explore my digital cookbook and i hope you enjoyed this video and i'll see you next time explore my digital cookbook and i'll see you next time explore my digital cookbook on hungry root today and find recipes that are right for you go to hungryroot.com the basement to access my cookbook gurney's hump day recipes you're um you were on a tenure track job at fresno and a student writes an essay that floored you what was that essay about yeah yeah i um first i had been teaching for a couple of years as a lecturer temporary job in san diego diego diego it was a lot of fun this is my first like at it was a lot of fun this is my first like at it was a lot of fun this is my first like at last uh last uh last uh proper like academic appointment and i was i proper like academic appointment and i was i proper like academic appointment and i was i was doing a was doing a was doing a it was like a survey course one of these it was like a survey course one of these it was like a survey course one of these gen ed check the box gen ed check the box gen ed check the box the greeks you know the greeks you know the greeks you know and i i packed the syllabus with stuff i and i packed the syllabus with stuff i it doesn't matter i think that's there's it doesn't matter i think that's there's it doesn't matter i think that's there's a kind of a kind of a kind of um blaséness about anyway um blaséness about anyway um blaséness about anyway uh wait what do you mean well i think i uh wait what do you mean well i think i uh wait what do you mean well i think i think a lot of academic a lot of people think a lot of academic a lot of people think a lot of academic a lot of people who teach these great texts sadly who teach these great texts sadly who teach these great texts sadly it's not by no means the all of them it's not by no means the all of them it's not by no means the all of them and there are a lot of really good and there are a lot of really good and there are a lot of really good people people people they don't really take seriously how they don't really take seriously how they don't really take seriously how profoundly impactful something like profoundly impactful something like profoundly impactful something like plato can be not just on you know plato can be not just on you know plato can be not just on you know expanding your mind and making you want expanding your mind and making you want expanding your mind and making you want to study more but like wow i'm not to study more but like wow i'm not to study more but like wow i'm not living the kind of life i should live living the kind of life i should live living the kind of life i should live it's like me with marcus aurelius when it's like me with marcus aurelius when it's like me with marcus aurelius when i was i was i was when i was in my late teens and um when i was in my late teens and um when i was in my late teens and um and so i had this student i we we did and so i had this student i we we did and so i had this student i we we did some myth and whatever one of the text some myth and whatever one of the text some myth and whatever one of the text was plato's republic was plato's republic was plato's republic and i had the student and at fresno a and i had the student and at fresno a and i had the student and at fresno a lot of the students are you know coming lot of the students are you know coming lot of the students are you know coming back to school back to school back to school doing it part-time they're like older doing it part-time they're like older doing it part-time they're like older and they've they've made choices and they've they've made choices and they've they've made choices some of them good some of them bad and some of them good some of them bad and some of them good some of them bad and i had one student um i had one student um i had one student um write this essay for his final write this essay for his final write this essay for his final paper on plato's republic paper on plato's republic paper on plato's republic basically like telling explaining how basically like telling explaining how basically like telling explaining how plato had made him realize that plato had made him realize that plato had made him realize that injustice to that that being a injustice to that that being a injustice to that that being a dishonest person dishonest person dishonest person was bad for his soul and bad for his was bad for his soul and bad for his life and was making him unhappy and so life and was making him unhappy and so life and was making him unhappy and so he had decided to stop cheating on his he had decided to stop cheating on his he had decided to stop cheating on his wife wife wife this was in the essay in the essay i this was in the essay in the essay i this was in the essay in the essay i was like was like was like oh my god that's awesome that's it is oh my god that's awesome that's it is oh my god that's awesome that's it is that's really heavy uh that's really heavy uh that's really heavy uh that was a moment where i i felt man that was a moment where i i felt man that was a moment where i i felt man this is what this is for you know this this is what this is for you know this this is what this is for you know this that's what i care about with all this that's what i care about with all this that's what i care about with all this that's why i was drawn to it because that's why i was drawn to it because that's why i was drawn to it because it it can profoundly change the course it it can profoundly change the course it it can profoundly change the course of any individual's life it could you of any individual's life it could you of any individual's life it could you know and and depending on how many know and and depending on how many know and and depending on how many employees or or voters or or how many employees or or voters or or how many employees or or voters or or how many soldiers such an individual is in charge soldiers such an individual is in charge soldiers such an individual is in charge of of of dramatically affect the course of dramatically affect the course of history and whether people live or die history and whether people live or die history and whether people live or die whether they're miserable or or happy whether they're miserable or or happy whether they're miserable or or happy and um and um and um i i just think that the way that we i i just think that the way that we i i just think that the way that we arrange our arrange our arrange our our our curricula often just kind of our our curricula often just kind of our our curricula often just kind of pretends like that's pretends like that's pretends like that's beside the point that's nice if that beside the point that's nice if that beside the point that's nice if that happens for you let's let's get back to happens for you let's let's get back to happens for you let's let's get back to you know um the argument here or let's you know um the argument here or let's you know um the argument here or let's get back to the get back to the get back to the the scholarship on this question uh so the scholarship on this question uh so the scholarship on this question uh so that really bothered it it was that really bothered it it was that really bothered it it was encouraging and kind of disturbing at encouraging and kind of disturbing at encouraging and kind of disturbing at the same time well that essay was the same time well that essay was the same time well that essay was validation validation validation like someone gets it yeah yeah like someone gets it yeah yeah like someone gets it yeah yeah it's like this it's like this it's like this guy was a classics major uh he wasn't guy was a classics major uh he wasn't guy was a classics major uh he wasn't trying to you know get me to write a trying to you know get me to write a trying to you know get me to write a wreck for him he was just like this wreck for him he was just like this wreck for him he was just like this really mattered and um really mattered and um really mattered and um yeah it was um it was um it was um it was it was confirmation that there's it was it was confirmation that there's it was it was confirmation that there's there's gold here that there's gold here that there's gold here that hasn't really been that's being kind of hasn't really been that's being kind of hasn't really been that's being kind of buried under something else totally buried under something else totally buried under something else totally agree um i've heard you give four agree um i've heard you give four Four reasons for leaving academia. anemia anger at institutions uh wanting to know more and because sort of being stuck uh wanting your dad to retire with dignity i believe all those reasons but the day that you decided what was what was the one driver when you said okay that's it well i've been toying with the idea for a while as as you learn studying history so so often events are multi-causal overdetermined um i think uh well one of the things that really made me um say now's the time was uh we'd just come back from uh from it was it was like christmas break living in california my wife and i come back to spend some time with our folks and uh she doesn't mind me saying this but like she had a miscarriage oh wow yeah and uh and it just like something like something tragic like that happens we have we have three beautiful children and she's like oh my god i'm we have three beautiful children now um something like that happens we were around family i think i think we realized um i realized i guess how much i was i was giving up by sticking in it in this you know foreign land of and i i liked fresno a lot i liked my colleagues a lot you know they were great people we were close to you know all the some of the most beautiful places in america redwoods sequoias yosemite bay area all this stuff but um but really the reason i was there was kind of for my career and where was that career pointed even if even if somebody kind of like let me pass the filters that i could and you know when i got this job this is it's bothered me it's like oh it's a good starter job alex like man i i don't like i don't like the idea of treating any job as a starter job like i want to join a team and i want to like stick with that team and like let's go let's let's let's build the the skyscraper let's let's uh you know defend the fatherland whatever it is i i don't know that the the professionalism the careerism like even if they let me kind of ride on the road i don't know i don't know i don't know i don't know i don't know how to ride that horse up to go back to a place like princeton or something i kind of realized like wow even at the top i think a lot of a lot of people are kind of like lonely and demoralized they don't really have they don't like embrace this this calling they don't you know see it as a calling necessarily not everybody but like a lot of people you meet at the higher echelons of academia and like famous scholars you might know they're you know you go to dinner with them they talk about you know their kids uh what whatever we went on this trip and the pasta sucked it's just like these are just normal folks yes there's not like a mission here there's no zeal there's no zeal and i think kind of getting past the veil of being a grad student to being a professional academic just for the sake of it i don't know i don't know i don't know i don't know for you know a year or two i don't know it's like why am i doing this rather than like building a legacy or something like there there was some kind of pull i think when you get older like you want to you look for permanence like what is going to be permanent about this some some book that i write that nobody reads i think i think working for your dad had a lot to do with this because you you had to learn the hustle and the sales and the energy and it's binary it's he says yes or no yeah i gotta work it and then you're in academia and it's like just floating yeah and you're not made for it did you close the sale right no f right you know there's no kind of like there's no great inflation no no no selling paint but there's something pure and noble about that there's no shame in that yeah and you learn great lessons doing that you do and i i i would wish that upon it with benevolence upon the worst of my enemies that they would that they would get some contact with with the real world yes um i think that's what's one of the big thing it's lacking with practitioners of history and it didn't used to be like that i mean look at polybius uh i mean plutarch's a a man of action himself yes citities is like a general like plato himself i mean plato was not an academic you know risk taker sometimes it went really bad but he took some real risks and uh was around men of violence and power and prestige and and and virtue so i wanted i just wanted some more realism in my life maybe and so i suddenly i i realized how grateful i should be that my dad was you know ran this kind of blue collar-ish industry business and i was like here i can i can get get in the ring and just like somebody can just kick my ass i needed that everyone needs it yeah a lot of those academics never got that yeah you i mean that's what i'm that's why it wasn't going to work for you and that's why your podcast empire is growing so fast um your first published essay after you left april 2021 omer on praying on paying attention and there's a line in there where you said you learned from your own mistakes and i think you were talking to chris about that but you never said what the mistakes were hmm what mistakes did you make and you learned from yeah i guess in that essay i was um looking looking at the the story of odysseus there's so much that i think is an unlock for you when you realize that the story is for you that like homer even even if you just kind of take it as an article of faith that homer's trying to like teach you he's trying to help you grapple with your own problems um and uh there's this moment in the odyssey where odysseus just left the island of calypso and he she gives him this well she helps him build his own raft a little she gives him some tools and then he he goes and he's sailing off hopefully to ithaca who knows and then poseidon has other ideas right smashes the ship and um and like odysseus kind of gets he gets approached by the sea goddess and she says odysseus you have to take off that gaudy crap that calypso gave you to wear she gave him perfumed robes and strip off all of your clothing and um and swim stop trying to hold on to the to the boards of this raft that's just been smashed like land is way over there it's gonna take you a while you gotta swim or you're gonna sink and she gives him this uh this like ribbon it's like a what's it called uh kratom non and it's um you know hold on to this until you get to shore and he like ties it around himself and i i think that so much of like it takes a lot of concentration that ribbon is a kind of like symbol of his trusting the god to to get him through get put all your effort in and and then um maybe it'll work that ribbon kind of symbolizes that for him and he gets to shore finally and he takes it off and throws it back into the sea gives it back to her but a lot of the odyssey is about resisting temptation the distractions of the sirens the distractions of uh you know and he fails often like you know raiding making a little money clobbering these thracians the siconians um i think i think i i have had to learn a lot from as as somebody who's got this uh kind of cosmic curiosity like it's really easy for me to get fascinated and obsessed with something just give me the littlest excuse like ancient greek you know sometimes that can be very good but um but there are um there are so many distractions that assail you uh if you're if you're that kind of person really anybody different kinds of distractions for me they're intellectual distractions but i think it's it's it's a it's a it's a it's a i have great great ideas let me tell you how many great ideas i have and you know if you have one good idea and you stick with it it could work but if you have five good ideas and you do all of them none of them are going to work i don't like an idea guy i like an action guy yeah and and and that's learnable or uh i learned it after lots of failures yeah well same right in so many ways speaking of the odyssey uh so the sirens they're on the island they have their knowledge of everything right Is the cost of glory your show? Is that the island, or is that the mast? We're going deep here, AJ. We don't have to. I like to think of it as the mast. It's interesting how Odysseus, he gets his comrades to tie him to the mast, and they all plug their ears with the wax. But he wants to listen to the sirens, and he tells his crew, Circe warned me about the sirens, so here's what we've got to do. You plug your ears, tie me to the mast. The sirens are going to, no matter how much I scream, don't untie me. She told me that I need to listen to them. But if you go back and look, no, she actually didn't. She didn't. She didn't tell him to listen. He decided to listen of his own accord. He wanted to know, and he kind of made up this thing. It has to be this way, guys. But he didn't know what they knew, right? He just knew they knew stuff. Yeah, right. And it turns out when, like maybe they were just going to, you know, tell him some. Sexy song, you know, titillate. Who knows what it was going to be? Maybe he kind of, maybe he kind of guessed that this was something worth knowing. Because when they're singing to him in that scene, they are promising him all the knowledge. I take it to be all the knowledge of the universe. Everything, like the things that were before, the things that are coming, everything that happened at Troy. Right. Don't tell him you want to. You know what really happened at Troy? Yeah, yeah, yeah. You want to really why you won? Right. Was I as great as I thought I was? I mean, fill in what that means. It's, and so I think, you know, Cost of Glory is about, I get distracted sometimes, I admit. But, you know, basically the mission is, is to retell the stories of the greatest ancient heroes. Plutarch's heroes. 48, 50 of them, depending on how you count. And, and, and present them to people and like help people to understand who Caesar was to the best of my abilities. To understand why people admired this person. What you can learn from him. And then to go and do the same for his mortal enemy, Cato or Pompey. Like, present them one at a time as I think Plutarch does, concisely. And, and to get, get you like serially invested in these people who might actually be, you know, irreconcilable. They were definitely irreconcilable in a lot of ways. Mortal enemies. I have to take their side. But I, I think that where, why I would argue that the cost of glory is the mass kind of holding you in place is that heroes are, I think, a guide for life. That, and they're, and they're really about the reason that we have hero stories is the reason that we, that the Iliad or the Odyssey is appealing to us is not pure curiosity. It's not about knowing everything that happened to Troy. Homer doesn't tell you everything. Everything that happened to Troy, right? The Iliad is a series of a couple of weeks, maybe, at the very end. But he's telling you the most important thing. That's the job of the bard in, in Homer, in, in the, in the Odyssey. The, the, the bard's job and the Odyssey has a lot of scenes where you see bards in action. Phemius and Demodocus and Odysseus himself. They're telling you the most important part of the story. And it wasn't. It wasn't. It wasn't written down for hundreds of years, right? It was orally for hundreds of years. Hundreds of thousands, maybe. Right. I mean, these, these traditions go back to the Indo-Europeans. You can see the traces of the, the same formula that you find in Homer in like Sanskrit poetry. Sure. The, the Vedic hymns, old Irish poetry. I mean, it's all over the place. Sure. There's this great tradition. There's this great tradition of, of heroic storytelling. Gilgamesh. Gilgamesh is, I mean, that's a great comparison with the Odyssey. There's like something there. Yes. Connecting these things. And, and, you know, Gilgamesh is, is, I think it's Sumerian originally, but like these people were in contact with Indo-European invaders or, or vice versa. And somehow the most important stories kind of filter, filter down and get passed on. And it's, you know, you could read the whole Iliad in maybe two days. That's what they did at, at Athens. They had poetic competitions. The Odyssey took two days. The Iliad took three days. They would have people recite the whole damn thing from memory. And you can do it if you, people could still do this if we, if we put our mind to it. I guess. You'd have to probably live on an island. There were no cell phones. But, but that's, that's actually not, that's not that long. That's not that much time in the grand scheme of things, a day or two. It's, it's about getting the most important thing that you need to know. I think that's why the bar tradition is so important is because you get the distillation over the years. Throw that out, throw that out. This is what people care about. Yeah. Stand up comics today. Yeah. Like the jokes that aren't funny. Yep. You figure that out real quick. Real quick. I think that's true. That's you. I want to take. a quick break and we'll finally get into some somebody old shit i specifically want to talk about conspiracies and your did your dissertation on senese uh senese you did yeah so uh senesius of syria senesius yeah and hypatia yeah all right be right back all right um all right so your dissertation was about philosophers working the emperor's court private letters back channels men whispering to power assume nobody here has heard those names because most of us haven't start with one guy and what what was it tuesday like for maybe one of those guys yeah well uh one of these guys that you've never heard of i'm sure although he's in a movie uh we'll get to that in a sec senesius of syrini it's a guy i wrote my dissertation on he's a student of syrini is how we're going with that yes i say syrini syrine you could say syrine you won't you won't mock me if i say syrini i won't i won't uh uh it's it's a long e in greek but you know we'll forgive it so um uh you might be familiar with simon of syrini or syrine in the new testament i think he carries the cross for christ syrini is or syranaica is that eastern part of libya today not a place that you're that you would want to visit i i'm told now um but anyway it was a beautiful uh verdant area it snows sometimes in the winter north africa in that part of north africa and it's a very ancient uh greek area eastern libya in the west western libya like tripolitania is more latin in the late so this is we're talking late fourth century a.d okay is this period i was really interested in this kind of it's kind of a an axial age of of sorts for um for christendom because a lot of a lot of the the culture is forged there you know um after constantine takes over and uh legalizes christianity so this is like two generations after constantine but you still have a lot of pagans and a lot of the upper classes of the roman empire um very educated people converting to christianity so senesius is from one of these grand old families of syranaica who uh and you see this a lot in the late roman empire people like to trace their lineages back like 800 000 years and so he traced his ancestors back to the original founders of the colony of syranaica which is uh batas was this um spartan they were from uh sparta first then santorini thera and then they they moved from there to syranaica which herodotus tells the story yep the the horse lords of syrini and so um yeah he was from one of these these noble families and he um goes to study at alexandria with somebody who's probably more famous today if you're into ancient stuff is hypatia and this is a movie um occasion that rachel weiss was uh hypatia in this movie agora 2009 it's a good movie senesius doesn't come off very well senesius i think that's what how they say it in the movie that's how i say it but i'm i don't want to get in trouble yeah uh i tell you i don't want to get in trouble i don't want to get in trouble how i used to say it but it's a short e anyway pedophagy academics um eddie fogging so don't don't take that movie's word for the kind of guys senesius was he was um a Christian, but a kind of classical man. He was a Neoplatonist philosophically. He's a great admirer of Homer. He's also a great admirer of Aristophanes, who's this raunchy Athenian comic poet. And he's very funny, Ascensius himself. Is that Lysistrata? Yeah, Lysistrata. It's pretty raunchy. Assemblywomen. Yeah, a lot of great jokes. Yes. Yeah, frogs, clouds. And so he studies with Hypatia, who is one of the premier philosophers in Alexandria. Very rare, but not impossible, that a woman could become a convener of students and have a philosophical school. Is she a feminist icon? Is she a martyr? Who is she? Well, she has been made into a feminist icon. She has? There was a feminist journal that, I don't know if they're defunct, but I don't know. Named after Hypatia. You know, a symbol of women's liberation. Well, in fact, Hypatia was kind of a conservative. If you just zoom out to what late antique Alexandria was like. Very gigantic city. Incredibly diverse ethnically, religiously. You have the Greeks who run the city ever since Alexander found. They did it in 328 or whatever, B.C. And then you have the Egyptians, the kind of locals, the fellaheen types. Then you have, like, there's Syrians. There's a lot of Jews there. Christians and pagans. So it's a, you know, boiling kettle. And Hypatia is from the nobility, from the Greek nobility. And if you look at, who are the conservatives and who are the radicals? Well, the radicals in late antique Alexandria are the Christians. Or Christians are the radicals. But they're also Christian conservatives. And one of these dividing points is, like, where does spiritual authority lay? And right around this time is when you're getting the rise of the Desert Fathers. You know, these monks going out into the cave and they're, like, tying a cucumber up, hanging it from their cell and, like, staring at it until they don't want it anymore so they can keep fasting for days on end. It's a wacky world. Fascinating place. And they're saying, you don't need all this Plato and Aristotle stuff. You don't need Iamblichus on the mysteries. You don't need Homer and his myths. You just need to, like, pray in your cell. Memorize the Bible. Pray. And it kind of undermines the authority of philosophy. And a lot of the monks call themselves philosophers. Even though they're not going to school with somebody like Plato or Hypatia. And so Hypatia is kind of, like, helping Christians like Senecius to become cultivated, become, get the kind of polish they need to step into that role of leadership in society, to talk to people like imperial governors, to get an audience with the emperor, which Senecius did. And Senecius is one of these Christians who's like, no, we do need Homer. We do need Plato. These monks, fine. You know, there's something really special about them, but they're kind of taking a shortcut. And the shortcut doesn't work for everybody. We can't, like, you can't run a society on a shortcut. And, you know, the classics represent this common ground of culture that the pagans can buy into, the Jews can buy into, the Christians can buy into. It kind of, it's a way of keeping the, keeping the peace and keeping a common political language, a set of symbols and myths. And, you know, they saw it, I think, as really important to the structure of society. But that was the kind of Christian conservative. The Christian conservatives were really into kind of Homer and the classics, and they didn't want to, you know, burn down pagan temples. This is, you know, high art. Like, why would you do that? Where the radicals are the kind of fundamentalists. Sure. It's switched, I think, a little bit today. But, yeah, no, this, I, I, I, that was what was really driving my interest is how philosophers got close to power. Because this is, this, this is what Plato did. You see this in, from the beginnings of philosophy. Socrates is, he's got among his students, Alcibiades, you know, top Athenian playboy politician, gets the Athenians into a lot of trouble. He's got Critias. Among his students, it was. The infamous. The infamous kind of, the, the, the Hitler of, of the fourth century. The kind of like, he, he, he whose name must not be mentioned. Right. I think in Plato's era, because he was this, you know, brutal tyrant, it turned out. And, and like Pericles in the generation before with Anaxagoras, it's like, it's so many of the philosophers that we know were really close to rulers. I was fascinated by, by this pattern, and you could debate whether that was a good influence or a bad influence. I mean, people debated about that with, in the case of Socrates. They, the reason Socrates was executed was because he was too close to some of the scapegoats of the new regime. Once it had been reestablished after the, the 30 tyrants. They said, ah, you're, it was your fault that Alcibiades led us astray. It was your fault that Critias got so powerful. And, you know. His students, I think correctly, were trying to distance Socrates from these people. You know, they went astray when they stopped listening to Socrates. But, Plato caused a lot of trouble in Sicily. Aristotle was Alexander's tutor. Probably taught him some restraint and asceticism as a young man. And maybe when he got further and further away from Aristotle, he, he kind of came off the rails. Um, but it's, it's a pattern. I mean, you can kind of trace it all the way to the, um, effective altruism people and then the AI frontier labs. Uh, so that, that was what really kind of got my attention about this period. And so all those philosophers that were close to the power, like Aristotle, did any of those philosophers actually take power? Good question. The, well, one of the closest. You come is, uh, Dion of Syracuse, who I think is one of the most interesting men in Plutarch's lives. Plutarch has a whole biography on Dion, not a household name today, but, you know, like all of these guys, he was a household name in the 18th century in America when Plutarch was the most popular classical book. And this was just like, everybody knew these guys. Dion is, um, cousin of the tyrant. Uh, well, he's a, he's a marriage connection of one of the most famous and colorful tyrants of antiquity. Dionysius of Syracuse, um, you know, sees his power and has all these mercenaries and, uh, kind of flashy guy, no friends, all power, all, all force and no, and no, uh, no persuasion is how, you know, he was characterized. Dion, um. Um, meets Plato when Plato visits Syracuse, um, on a tour in the three eighties and, uh, they become friends and Dion becomes a devotee of Plato. Like he, they, they hit it off really well. And Dion is studying Plato's philosophy. He's probably reading a copy of Plato's Republic at some point. Dionysius, the tyrant dies 367 to 20 years later after Dion and Plato meet, they've, you know, they've been exchanged. They've been exchanging letters and he's becoming a kind of correspondence school member of Plato's Academy. He, uh, you know, Dionysius' son, Dionysius, the younger succeeds him, uh, succeeds the tyrant and, and Dion's like, Hey, Plato, he writes the Plato. We got a shot here. We got a shot. We got a shot. You've written about how woes will never cease for mankind until philosophers. Take power or the people in power learn to love wisdom, you know, become philosophers. Well, uh, we've got a youngish impressionable new tyrant who's wanting to kind of strike on it in a different direction. He's Dion's nephew. And so Plato's like, all right, it seems like there's something here. And he comes to Syracuse and, um, Dionysius, the younger is late twenties. So people are still impressionable in their lives. Late twenties, but you know, it's not like they have a 15 year old that they can just soft clay they can mold, but it's worth a try. And, um, and Plato comes and he's just fetid and, uh, you know, there's a, the, the, the air is thick with the dust from the geometers diagrams. Like Dionysius is bringing in all these intellectuals and, uh, you know, it's going to be a new era for Syracuse. No more. the kind of backroom intrigue and the flatterer. and the plundering of of our um our allies we're gonna we're gonna found a new regime on justice and and and the dionysius the younger he's like very receptive to plato but then people start whispering in his ear the usual suspects were like you know dionysius your uncle there dion he's really just trying to kind of use plato as leverage to to kind of win power for himself he wants to displace the people who were loyal supporters of your father he felt you know he's he was motivated by envy he's attacking us and and look at this this guru that he's brought from athens the athenians came 40 years ago and this is the sicilian expedition that thucydides tells alcibiades his idea went terribly the athenians came with their fleets and how many thousands of lives did we have to spend to defeat the athenians and now this one guru is going to come and conquer syracuse in the name of athens and dion is the broker are you going to let this happen and dion the younger dionysius the younger is like yeah yeah you're right and so you know they kind of get get that wedge in between the uncle and the nephew and plato is this kind of game piece he becomes this sort of like you know he's dion's good friend uh the the true lover of philosophy is dion and dion by the way is a syracusan nobleman he's part of the aristocracy um and uh and how is plato received by the court well they hate him they hate him yeah because of the amnesian basically they're like dynysius the younger is is um is listening to this this interloper who's trying to kind of cut our banquet budgets you know they have they've grown accustomed to it they've grown accustomed to it they've grown accustomed to it they've grown accustomed to a certain lifestyle as flatterers of the tyrant of the tyrant's deceased father and um you know is it about resisting athenian influence or is it really just about you know keeping the status quo i think it's more about that and yes the whole kind of second athenian invasion narrative plutarch tells this whole story that's what they were saying you can read plutarch or the new york times they're telling the same stories yeah nothing's changed yeah intrigues yeah and influence and uh so um you know eventually dynysius the younger the the new young tyrant he's like he kind of takes plato aside i paraphrase but he's like hey why do we need dion you know no like you and me tell me like tell me about this philosophy of yours and so they develop their own relationship and eventually dynysius exiles dion like and and he kind of tells plato hey i sent dion away so plato's still in syracuse and plato's still in syracuse and he's like oh um well um you know and and and plato's kind of dynysius's like hostage at some point you know um the the gifts of a tyrant are hard to resist as plato says yes and eventually plato kind of extricates himself and and um says you know please just bring dion back he tries to reconcile them it doesn't worry and the tyrant kind of promises yeah i'll bring dion back we'll reconcile things and and so plato leaves and then and then there is no reconciliation dion's just living in exile he's he's uh he's made a citizen of sparta he's hanging out at plato's academy and um oh he goes to greece yeah he goes through like greece proper syracuse by the way greek city it's the most powerful and wealthy city in the whole mediterranean among the greeks like it it just totally outshines athens and sparta it's the new kind of capital of of greek culture in a lot of ways so the stakes are really high and dynysius eventually invites plato back to syracuse and he says if you come back for a third visit maybe you can help me reconcile with my uncle i really want to i really want to bring him back but you know he doesn't want to talk to me maybe you can that's the kind of angle and he brings plato back and it's it's just a ruse he's trying to he's trying to kind of win plato who's famous by this point sure to kind of boost the moral credibility of of the regime which is kind of a good thing because he's trying to kind of win plato who's not not changed that much he's still got the flatterers you still got the the banquets you still got the mercenaries you still the people have no influence uh it's a tyranny and um and plato figures out pretty quickly that he's he's just a pawn he's a showpiece and there is no there's going to be no reconciliation and with great difficulty he manages to extricate himself one more time and he's an old man at this point he's like 75 back to greece and dion's still there and dion's like well did you have a good time and you know but um eventually the younger tyrant he's got dion's family he's got his wife basically he he uh makes he makes dion's wife his uncle's wife marry another man who's one of his own lackeys for dion that is the last straw you know yep and he's like something has to be done we have to go back to syracuse i'm gonna raise an army and i'm gonna call back all the exiles and uh plato will you join me and plato's like i'm too old for this i don't think this is a good idea good luck right and so he you know long story short dion goes back and with an army with an army a small army he's got some mercenaries who are loyal to him and and of the thousands of syracusans in exile he can only get like 200 of them to join because they're like are you insane the like the armies the ships the tyrants wealth you have no chance and uh you should replay plutarch's life of dion i'll do an episode on him on cost of glory at some point but they managed to um catch the syracuse at a moment when denis is the younger is away they sort of sneak storm in by surprise and they seize back the city they they and like takes power and it is a long kind of series of events you know complicated kind of power struggles and the tyrant comes back and they have a citadel on ortigia um that he recaptures and there's you know old friends or associates of dion kind of betray him and but this only works if the people want some change right because yeah the people massively want change right and and you know you could look at that whole scenario plato's famous for the republic saying you know you need the ideal state is one where you have philosopher kings ruling and uh he kind of tones this down later in the laws okay maybe maybe it would be best to have philosophers ruling but maybe that's not really possible after all but at least you have you should have rulers who like respect philosophy right you can have a mixed constitution uh where you have you know wise men and wise women and you have rulers who are in charge a kind of not an oligarchy but like a nobility that that brings the people in through assemblies and you know the consent of the governed is really important and justice so dion is is trying to do maybe not trying to kind of become a philosopher king himself that's certainly what his enemies were accusing him of doing he's just trying to become a tyrant for himself and yeah you call it philosopher king if you like but he turned into a tyrant as well so he doesn't he doesn't he doesn't he resists the temptation to do that because the flatterers are still flattering right they are well he kills a lot of them okay that's helpful sends them off and uh they they go join uh uh denisius the younger in exile um and he but he he kind of what one of the things that he does kind of damningly i think is there are some bad apples in dion's retinue like this one guy heraclides who's popular with the the the the commons and he's a kind of a demagogue but the the sailors really like him dion needs the the navy and it's like heraclides kind of he's like a fair weather friend and whenever dion's away he starts like whispering you know speaking against him in the assembly kind of undermining him and there dion had many chances to say heraclides that was treachery execution but he spares him because no the nobler thing to do would be to uh to forgive i have learned at the academy that vengeance is not the province of a wise man and things like this and and heraclides is like please you know i i know i betrayed you but uh you know you be a better man to me than than than i was to you and show us how how much of a philosopher you are by sparing me and you know he gets in dion's head and he's like i'm not going to forgive you i'm not going to forgive and he should have just. - Of course. first of course one strike you're out at that when the stakes are like that i think um but eventually you know dion kind of gets perceived as weak and he's eventually assassinated and the really disturbing thing here is the man who assassinates dion is a fellow student of plato no from the academy from the academy yeah why did he do that well i i think he saw dion's weak and uh i want power i think it was is arguably that simple and plato tries to distance himself later in the seventh letter from from um this guy calippus um saying he wasn't a real devotee he just hung around and kind of used the academy as a networking hub because plato's like i'm raising tyrants over here yeah i mean it's extremely bad for the brand yes you can imagine like catastrophic for the brand um but but calippus i think you know saw dion was vulnerable and indeed he was and uh and just kind of launched a little plot and murdered him it's horrific dionysus does he ever come back um he never comes back he ends up ending his days in corinth the story is that uh that he um that he he was a like a kind of mid mid tier rhetoric teacher in corinth you know and you could go visit dionysus the younger you know this fallen tyrant hanging out in corinth i mean it's so funny that you could you're a king one day and then you're a substitute teacher yeah yeah he's like a substitute right that's what happens yeah um amazing story i love that it doesn't always go well when you're a substitute teacher you're a substitute teacher you're a substitute teacher philosophers actually get in charge i have never heard that story i love it yeah i don't know if i have it on my list because before we get to caesar i wanted to ask you about it i think it was it was a pythagorean city that was basically ruled by a secret society yeah to rent them i think do you know that story could you tell it well let's see i i just know the bullet points and and it ends badly and i think a lot of secret societies are based on this city so there's tarentum there's uh locris there's a number so the pythagoreans are a really interesting bunch what what what's distinctive about pythagoreans well pythagoras is uh in different accounts i think he's one of considered one of the seven sages so he's he's before the persian wars this is like archaic greece um seventh sixth century the details are hazy for me i need to revisit this but basically pythagoras was um the the guy who kind of pioneered the idea that a secret society a philosophical brotherhood could um could be you know a root to ruling your city or maybe the world at least for the greeks he was this and uh you know he he he was from samos and he got chased out of samos why i think it was uh it was maybe polycrates of samos the tyrant who was like this guy's a problem like is that what he went to egypt that's uh i think he went to egypt on his way to southern greece and i'm going to learn some of these mysteries yeah learn a little math some triangle stuff and um and he had there there was a lot of numerology and their interest in the triangles and the tetractys and uh uh iamblichus had the neoplatonist has a a life of pythagoras that tells a lot of the stuff and you know it's doubted by mainstream historians who knows but what pythagoras did was he established these these brotherhoods in uh magna grecia you know southern italy locris tarentum and so forth and um in some cases they seized power in some cases they you know the people in power said no and uh you know rounded them up and murdered them happened a lot but in in plato's era one of the the reason that he goes to syria is because he's in the first place is because he wants to kind of um meet some of these descendants of the pythagorean communities because a lot of these guys are still there one of them is archytas of tarentum who is the closest thing you ever really get to a philosopher king in uh in greece at least he is the sort of first among equals kind of like thucydides describes pericles you know athens is a democracy in name but in fact rule of the first citizen which is pericles so that's kind of archytas's role at tarentum and we have fragments at least of treatises by archytas and he was a plato became friends with him and and when plato's over there in um in in southern greece magna grecia sicily is where he comes that's where a lot of scholars date some of his um the doctrines that you see in the middle dialogues like symposium fedris fido republic where he's really interested in the forms as these kind of metaphysical principles that are quasi-mathematical the interest in the divided line and the idea of the cave pythagoras was um was really interested in the in mathematics as and like harmony you know it's very mathematical music theory but uh he also had these these weird prohibitions that kind of created this cult like don't eat beans yep do not eat beans why nobody really knows for sure you can come up with some ideas um do they have souls in them is there some kind of vaporous is there evidence that you know there could be gas but uh uh you're supposed to never leave an impression of your body on a bed like you have to smooth out your bed and there's these all these kind of rich spiritual things that they do to create this religious feel of a mystery brotherhood even secret handshakes yes yeah yeah they definitely yeah i'm sure they need the atlantean handshake oh yeah yeah um and plato brings a lot of this back to the academy and and and there's also um the coup that happens at thebes in 378 was kind of pioneered by pythagoreans well you have to you have to tell that that's a good story i have to tell that one now yeah all right so this is between plato's first and second visit to syracuse so you can see why you get the idea that philosophy could be this revolutionary force plutarch again tells the story in the life of uh pelopidas of thebes and um this text de de genio socrates on the on the genius of socrates the the the sort of divine spirit the daimonion that socrates has tells the whole story of the coup so basically sparta is at the height of its power in 382 they've defeated the athenians in uh the peloponnesian war they have this empire uh you know it takes a few hits but basically they've got they've they remain the most influential city um for several decades at some in 382 thebes which is near athens you know central greece it's um it's a democracy and it's um uh it's some spartan commander he's on his way up to northern greece to uh put down some rebellion in thrace and while he's like camped outside of thebes some of the the aristocrats the oligarchs of thebes who are sick of these demagogues they're sick of all the people having the power this isn't the way it should be the best men should rule sparta represents the idea that the best men should rule they have this tight military aristocracy so um these guys um at thebes invite in the spartans it's like the hottest day of the year the women are up on the citadel doing some religious festival everybody's taking their siesta and while this is like they swing open the gates and in marches the spartan um force not a huge force but it doesn't take a lot no if if the gates are swung right and uh the spartans capture the citadel you know like the acropolis of thebes the cadmia and basically drive out they like round up the democrats or the you know the populists a lot of them escape to athens um some of them are put on show trial kangaroo courts executed as many as and they they basically make it um they go from being a kind of uh independent power to being um you know pro-sparta um oligarchic tyranny and this shocks greece because it's like whoa we were we had a treatise a treaty with with sparta you know thieves had a treaty with sparta um this is this is unjust this is you know naked imperial aggression uh by the part of the spartans everybody's pissed but the spartans are like all right what are you gonna do about it right you know we we have the citadel and and so um while while that's going on in sparta the exiles are gathering in athens pelopidas is is one of the leaders and these are young men you know mid-20s early 30s probably top like from noble families but of populist bent and they start meeting in athens for philosophical conversations and uh you know they're talking about the nature of the soul meanwhile similar kind of meetings are happening in thebes because they had happened before the the coup before the lockdown thebes there's a lot of students of socrates that are still there in thebes and they they believe in this philosophy thing let's talk about you know whether the soul is immortal and what what we should do about that and discussing the mysteries of harmony and so forth do they have to meet in secret in thebes well that's the interesting thing they're meeting in you know somebody's house and on a couple of occasions there's two uh kind of chief oligarchs um uh i forget their names but they'll come back to me basically they they invite these guys to come back and talk about the soul and they talk about the soul and they talk about the soul and they talk about the soul and they talk about the soul and they talk about the soul on a couple of occasions they're not meeting in secret actually they're just meeting to discuss philosophy and uh archius is one of them uh i think he's the chief guy he he comes to one of these meetings and he's like oh these kids are just they're having their little book club that's cute great all right see you after a couple of wines and you know it's it's a sign to the to the to the oligarchs nothing nothing weird going on here we're just a bunch of nerds nerds but that gives them the license to keep meeting and basically that's where they plot the coup and uh in 379 on the day of the winter solstice it's a snowy day and in trickle a number of kind of rustic hunter looking guys one at a time they've got dogs they've got nets they've got you know rabbits that they've killed in their hunts going into the city just finishing up the hunt yep unassuming and of course it's pelopidas and his buddies from the they're the athenian exiles who had who had escaped murder in the street like the the the tyrants of thebes thought the guys in athens they're dangerous like pelopidas is dangerous so they tried to kill something they actually murdered one of them in the streets through their agents so you know it was it was tense they sneak into the city meet at the house of one of the men and they're like oh my god i'm gonna kill you i'm gonna kill you i'm gonna kill you i'm gonna kill you i'm gonna kill you i'm gonna kill you i'm gonna kill you um conspirators and another of the conspirators at his house nearby is arranging a dinner party for archius and the top guys of the pro sparta oligarchy and they're saying archius we're gonna have a great party there's gonna be some ladies showing up a little later it's gonna be a good show i think you want to be at this one and so they they have this party it goes on to the night they get drinking and drinking and at some point you know um a knock comes at the door and uh the master of the house lets the person in and it's not who he expected it's somebody from athens saying i have a letter that you have to give to archius now it contains very serious matters for his attention right now it's basically a warning from from athens hey there there's a plot against you afoot and uh and the um you know he he lets the the messenger in this is in the middle of a dinner party in the middle of a dinner party i mean there are a few bowls of wine in and sure archius is there on the couch and the messenger's like this is contains extremely important it says very serious things in this letter you must read this now and archius is like serious things for tomorrow it's the greek there's a phrase now in greek and so he dismisses it he doesn't read it you know so so good and then uh at some point another knock at the door comes in the host of course he's in on the conspiracy ah these are the people he's expecting they're maidens or are they right right you know you know pelopidas is uh you know he and his buddies are like 25 very very very clean shaven wigs on they've got like veils so soft features yeah soft features and of course they've got breastplates under of course and uh and they come in well they tell the host oh uh you know this is a this is a private show only for for the important people can you dismiss the bodyguards and archius is like yeah yeah send them next door yeah bring the girls in it's perfect and as soon as they get in you know they draw their swords and off the tyrants and they rush to the citadel well they rush out in the streets the tyrants are dead are they still in drag at this point or not good question i don't talk doesn't specify but it would be a better story if they were that's how i see it like a monty python yeah are we gonna let ladies uh so they you know they arm the citizens and they surround the citadel and the spartans leave under truce but they leave under truce yeah yeah they let the spartans go wow because you know it looks like they're the ones who are gonna get away with it and they're gonna be like okay you know getting rid of a couple of oligarchs at a party is one thing but getting rid of a couple hundred of you know spartan-led battle-hardened you know veterans better to just like let them go well yeah but how do you convince a garrison to abandon its post well they they siege them for a while and uh i think they they cut off communications and you know fog of war like don't let them talk to to the authorities at sparta uh and that's a good question like it takes a while like they have to cut off their water and stuff uh you know but eventually i think the the garrison guys the leaders of the garrison just realize this this would go very bad it'd be very bloody we've we've already kind of broken the rules like they kind of did it without the authorization of the spartan authorities but then with the with the kind of tacit um approval uh of the king of sparta a giselaus i tell some of the story in the life of giselaus but you know so they knew that they were already kind of not supposed to be there legally and that you know they could all just probably get executed as soon as they get back to sparta yeah if um so let's let's not make this worse for ourselves and so they leave under the truce and this and you know the thebans take back the city epaminondas is a pythagorean this is very important can i get to the point he's a close friend of pelopidas he doesn't participate in the coup because he doesn't want to shed kindred blood he doesn't want to kill any thebans the other theban uh conspirators were like these guys are bad they're our enemies but epaminondas is like a man of principle he's very ascetic he doesn't ever take a wife um and uh you know a true devotee a philosopher general and epaminondas um because he's got such a clean uh you know record he is just this magnetic leader that is able to unite not just the thebans but the whole of boeotia and this whole coalition that they form to overthrow the spartan hegemony in greece and he becomes one of the most famous and celebrated generals in antiquity sadly plutarch's biography of him is lost but um and this begins the decline of spartan power yeah basically the the that's the first strike against sparta in 379 the the counter coup that it's called the solstice revolution which i love and then great one yeah and then and then only eight years later the thebans defeat sparta's best in a pitched land battle nobody's ever done this like sparta it's full force at the battle of luctra epaminondas it takes him that long to train up a kind of shock troop special force led um kind of land army and they defeat the spartans of the battle of luctra in 371 they kill the king well there's two kings did they expect to win that battle i mean that's pretty ballsy i think i think i think epaminondas felt like he had a good shot like he had a it's this kind of uh wedge strategy where you kind of you know you kind of you know you kind of yeah the you kind of hit those hit the spartan line on a diagonal and kind of come at them like on this increasing diagonal and kind of pull them off to the side and you look for the gap. So he had strategy as well. He had a strategy. But Epaminondas, he's the type of personality that men will die for him. 100%. I think you need that. Yeah. It's like, we're going up against Sparta, but I'll do it for you. Yeah, lead from the front. Mm-hmm. As all the great commanders do. I mean, Caesar does this. Sure. It's gotten a little bit past, you know, it's out of fashion now, but that was, he was that kind of guy and had just, he was a heroic figure for not just Thebes, but this whole coalition. And he ends up going, marching into Sparta after this defeat at Leuctra, sieging the city. Never has this happened before. Enemies like right there, like Sparta is like, the whole Peloponnese is Sparta's fortress. Like you do not get much past Corinth without the Spartans saying, what are you up to? Right. But Epaminondas pushes all the way to Sparta and they eventually decide not to like, try to sack the city. They give it back off. Doesn't he pick up some Athenians along the way? Well, yeah, so let's, in the, it eventually comes, it kind of comes around where, I think, I'm not, did they join with the Athenians after Leuctra? So Athens is like, kind of conflicted Mm-hmm. Because, okay, the Spartans are kind of ancestral rivals since, you know, the Peloponnesian War, at least a generation or two. Sure. But the Spartans are really cool and noble and the Thebans are these like, gross, rustic pig farmers. Right. And they're way closer to us too. Like we share a border with Thebes. We don't share a border with Sparta. So Thebes is like, I mean, they're democratic, but they're kind of gauche. Mm-hmm. And, you know, look at Athenian tragedy, like story after story about the, like, horrific dysfunction of Thebes. I mean, Oedipus. Yeah. Right. Right. You know, Antigone, the Phoenician women, there's so many examples of Athens just looking at Thebes. Like, at least we're not like those guys. Right. That's a great story. So eventually Athens kind of comes to the side of Sparta in the Battle of Second Mantinea in 362. But, but before that, Epaminondas ravages through the Peloponnese and he liberates the Helots, who are these, you know, hereditary slave class of the Spartans. Right, the Spartans. He builds this amazing city that you can still visit the ruins today. It's beautiful. It's Messini. Messinia was a region, but there was no city, Messini. But Epaminondas founded this city and he built big-ass walls. The Spartans hate walls. They think walls make you weak. Sparta doesn't have walls. The walls are its men. And they tear down the walls in any city that they ally with. Because you're like, that's going to give the demagogues an in. Because then, you know, it's the blacksmith, it's the like tavern keepers who are going to hold sway. If you have no walls, then the warriors have the most power. Yeah. Whereas if you have, like the more kind of military technology you have, the weaker the people, that can man it and can run the state. There's a real logic to that. There's a very real logic to that. But Epaminondas builds Messini. It's a beautiful place. Not a lot of people visit, but it's one of the most kind of impressive mountains. It's a wonderful place to go in Greece. And it's a monument to like the liberatory spirit of this Pythagorean Epaminondas who stuck it to the Spartans like nobody did before and nobody did since. I love that story. We'll be there in a couple of weeks. I'll make sure to stop by the ruins. Yeah, you should. You want to talk about Caesar a little bit? Yeah. Catiline? Yeah. I think you have a theory that's not so mainstream that Caesar was in on it. I guess we have to do a primer. Yeah. How do we do the primer? From Rubicon or do we go? Well, most people know that Caesar, maybe we start with the more famous conspiracy. Okay. The conspirators who murdered Julius Caesar on the Ides of Marsh. Okay. People are probably familiar with that story. I think it's interesting that in the lead up to that, a lot of people don't realize Caesar really, I think he knew something was afoot. He kept getting these rumors coming to him. Caesar, there's a plot against you. I mean, the guy's got an incredible workload. I'm sure there's always been assassination threats. Of course. What else is new? How do you separate the wheat from the chaff, the noise from the signal? But I think he knew that there was really credible reason to suspect a plot. Because he wanted to, he wanted to stay home that day, didn't he? He did. Yeah. Like a rare case of him kind of listening to the omens at first. Like he, Caesar doesn't care about omens. It's, it's a perfunctory thing, but he got bad omens. Calpurnia, his wife had a bad dream. It's well attested, you know, bad dream. Listen to my Caesar episode for the full details. Sure. But it's just dismissed as a bad, a woman's bad dream. Yeah. And then, but then like, you know, he keeps getting these bad omens. Like, this, this guy, what's his name? The, the soothsayer that Shakespeare has. Beware the Ides of March. Oh, the Ides of March have come. Oh, but they have not left. That, that is recorded in, in Plutarch. And so, but that, he met that, that soothsayer when he was doing a routine sacrifice at a buddy's house that morning. And he's like, you know, I wasn't going to take the, the dream seriously. The omens just keep coming in. I'm just, I'm just not feeling, I'm not feeling right. And he just decides to stay home. The man who persuades him to go to the Senate house that day is Decimus Brutus, who's not even hardly a character in Shakespeare. Decius Brutus. Right. Plutarch got this wrong, didn't he? Yeah. The wrong Brutus? Well, he, he's got, yeah, Plutarch lays way, a lot of emphasis on Marcus Junius Brutus. Yes. The famous Brutus. But, Decimus was much closer. But Decimus was, was Caesar's, like one of his body men, practically. He was a, a brilliant military commander, defeated the Veneti in the Gallic Wars. He, was responsible for the siege of Marseilles and, and the civil wars. And he's a, he's one of Caesar's top guys. And, and then, and I forgot to mention this. The night before, I love this story. It's so, just gives you goosebumps. The night before, Caesar's last night on earth, he's having dinner with, you know, at a friend's house. And one of the people there is Decimus Brutus, one of the conspirators. And, and Caesar proposes himself the topic. As, as usually, you know, one of these dinners, you have philosophical conversation. Caesar asks the group, what is the best way to die? And everybody's, you know, proposes their answers. And Caesar says, I think the best way to die would be, swift and unexpected, you know? Okay. What is Decimus' face like at that moment? Yeah. You gotta wonder. Why did he turn? How did he keep a straight face? How did he do it? Yeah. A lot of wine. Well, let's take a sidetrack for a second. Yeah. Because you have a society, where guys just, tell stories and, problems. What's your society about? Yeah. I started a, a community with my friend, Ben Wilson, of how to take over the world. We have, it's called the classical society. And, we, essentially, it's a, it's kind of a, peer network of, you know, accomplished men who like history. And, I think for, for, for the, for us moderns today, the relation between being obsessed with history and being obsessed with achievement is not so obvious. You know, how school-marmified history teaching gets. Yep. But I, I thought my hunch was that there's a big correlation. So, we started a, it's kind of a business network, kind of a, kind of a cultural organization. And, we do retreats. And, we have core groups that meet regularly. And, we like to talk about, debate about history, debate about, you know, as the Spartans did, who is the most honorable man living today? We like to read the classics together. I, I wanted to gather a group of people who were, a group of men who were, you know, men don't have like serious camaraderie as much these days as they used to. It used to be the norm. Toastmasters used to be, to be single gender. And I think that men are kind of starved of like not just the foot. I mean, I think a lot of times going and watching the game, it's just an excuse to get together. Absolutely is. And there are other great excuses to get together. Like as you see in the case of Caesar, philosophy or discussing history. It's a way to build camaraderie and kind of reflect. So we do retreats domestically and internationally. And it's been a lot of fun. I'm trying to learn a little bit of lessons from what I see working for people in our recent past in the U.S. and in antiquity as well. I think there's a great tradition of like men's fellowship, serious fellowship that we've lost for a variety of reasons, many of which I'm sure people have their own opinions on why that happened. They do. I have mine as well. Is it true that you do spontaneous toasts and things? Yeah, extemporaneous speeches and toasts. Again, you have the floor. Well, I just would like to raise my glass to a man who was a servant of a great king and never imagined himself to be more than a servant of a great king, but who when the time came, and his king died, he realized that in order to become a servant, he had to become the master. That is Eumenes of Cardia, the secretary of Alexander the Great. Not only Alexander's most loyal servant, but his most loyal defender in the king's, after the king's demise, a paragon of virtue, of loyalty and courage, and also of craftiness. Never was Eumenes outsmarted, except, except for one time, when it counted. But a man that I think we would be remiss if we did not remember more, to Eumenes. Eumenes. Cheers. Cheers. You stumbled across him by accident with Plutarch, yeah? Yeah. And you're like, who the hell is this guy? Yeah. And became obsessed? What is it about Eumenes? I think Eumenes is, what that proved to me, while we're on this tangent, is 48 lives in Plutarch's biographies. I read a couple for, you know, teaching a class on Roman history. The Gracchi. I knew about the Gracchi. I knew about Marius. I knew about so many of these guys. But I decided at one point, Plutarch is really good. I should read all of this. And I'm just kind of working my way through. And I get to a couple of them, and I'm like, Sertorius, Eumenes. Oh, I guess I gotta eat my vegetables. Sure. Who has heard of Eumenes of Cardia? Alexander the Great's secretary. Who has heard of Sertorius? The greatest Roman rebel, it turns out. Alexander fans have. I have a Eumenes coin around my neck right now. Is that right? No way. Yeah, a single drachma. Minted in Alexander's honor. Oh my God. Yeah, my wife got it for me. Crazy. You're gonna have to show me. I'm gonna take a picture of that later. To me, that was the moment when I realized, reading the life of Eumenes, who was just an incredible man of daring, and totally not one you would expect to rise to power. Not a Macedonian, a Greek. He's sort of a foreigner among the Macedonian military brass. Becomes a warlord. Isn't he sort of plucked by Philip? Yeah. Out of obscurity? Yeah, he's like doing MMA. They're doing Pankration. He's an 18-year-old, and Philip's like, Philip's visiting one of his many tiny provincial backwaters in his backwater of a kingdom. And he's watching the athletic contests, as one does. And something about the way that Eumenes, like through his opponent, or was wrestling, he's like, this kid's special. And he meets Eumenes' dad, and finds out that Eumenes, he can write well, and he can read well. He's like, I could use a secretary. Let's bring him into the entourage. Probably, I mean, it's not like he promoted him to be the top secretary at that point, but he worked his way up quickly. He showed, you know, he had an incredible facility with people. He's able to win people's trust, and worked his way up to be one of Philip's most trusted guys in the paper department. So Alexander grows up with him. Yeah. Alexander, he's like just a couple of years older than Alexander. He might have been at those philosophical tutoring sessions with Aristotle. He was probably sitting there like taking notes for Alexander. Yeah. You know? Imagine. Alexander, Ptolemy, the future king of Egypt, was there. Yep. A few other guys. So just, I mean, incredible to think of like the concentration of people in some of the, you know, those rooms. Eumenes was really good with Alexander's mom, Olympias, which was really hard to do. Oh, she was difficult. To be on good terms with both Philip and Olympias, like stormy, storm, like very high tea woman. So does Alexander take Eumenes with him on his tour? Yeah. He's, he's, he's there for all the campaigns. And he, toward the end, like in India, this is like in India or back to, you know, Central Asia. At some point, they're kind of short of commanders. And Alexander's like, I need some guys to take some, take some cavalry. I need somebody. And Eumenes is like, I, I, I, I, if you need somebody to run a cavalry contingent to, you know, show some muscle to this town, maybe I could do that. And Alexander's like, all right, Eumenes, you know, let's give it a shot. And he does well. But, you know, you don't get much of a hint that he was a man of the kind of capability that he was until Alexander dies. And, and, you know, at the, at the beginning, Eumenes is basically just the note taker for this meeting of Alexander's generals in Babylon to try to decide, like, how are we going to run things in Alexander's absence? Right. And Eumenes is just like, I'll just take the minutes, gentlemen. Don't mind me. But that means he knows everything that's going on. Of course. You know, and they all trust him. These people that hate each other, like, at least, yeah, you're, you're fine. He's not a threat. You know, he, he understood that position very, very well. Not being a threat. And, and, and he eventually goes on to lead armies in the name of, of Alexander's family. But it's only because he always is saying, I don't want to be king. I think he was, I think he was serious. I don't, I, look. What, are you, is a Greek going to rule over Macedonians? Come on. I'm just trying to make sure that Alexander's son inherits the throne when he comes of age. I'm trying to make sure the empire stays together and these, these, you know, narcissistic strong men don't, don't win. And that, that constant, like, saying, I'm not the guy. I know I'm not the guy. I'm just trying to do the right thing here. It just, it's disarming. It wins people's trust. And I think, I think it was, it was sincere. I think so too. Yeah. If I didn't know about Eumenes, and he's that impressive, like, imagine what the rest of Plutarch's lives contains. So many. It's, it's like Emerson called it a Bible for heroes. Yes. Oh, that's a great description. Yeah. So we'll come back. We'll get back to Caesar. But the last thing is, do you have a theory on what happened to Alexander's remains? I haven't pried into it. The standard story is that the body was being carried in this kind of like, it was like a juggernaut, like this giant float from Babylon to Macedonia. And that Ptolemy kind of seized it and derailed it to Alexandria. Yep. The emperor Augustus is supposed to have seen the body of Alexander. Took a piece of it. In Alexandria. Right. That's right. Yeah. Um, so I don't know what happened. One moment. I haven't, I haven't like followed up on this, but the one, the one anecdote I'll share is I was in Macedonia, Greece, Greek, Greek Macedonia, Macedonia, like leading a tour 10 years ago. And, uh, we're, we're, you go to Virgina, which is amazing site. You know, it's got probably Philip's body there in the, the tumulus. Wow. Northern Greece, uh, Macedonian gold, another place you should visit, but we're still in this little town outside of Virgina. Maybe it's Virgina. It's a small place and we have the place to ourselves. And I'm talking with the hostess. It's like a family run hotel, if you can even call it that. Really, really nice people. Super hospitable. I'm talking to this woman in my broken Greek and she's saying, Alex, Alexandria, where do you think Alexander's body is? Like, oh, uh, ma'am, I, I have not, uh, given the matter. much study I have to confess she's like I'm a mother. I know he's here. I know that his mother would never let his body stay. I hope she's right. I think he was probably washed away in the flood of Alexandria, but I hope she's right. Yeah. I hope we'll find him. Maybe we have already. Maybe we have. How do you join the Classic Society? Is there an initiation? Yeah. Well, we learned this from Catiline. The best way to get loyalty is to make people drink wine mixed with human blood. Now, I don't think – didn't Plutarch say this is a rumor? Yeah, yeah. But there was something about eating a human being, right? There's a little cannibalism there? Yeah, yeah. Well, this is the sort of thing that you want to discredit people with if you want – Drink the blood. Yeah. I'm assuming you don't have to do that. Theclassicalsociety.com. We have an application form. It's a process, but yeah, it's by application, and we're looking for an honest man. I might apply for it. I'll drink the blood. I don't care. It's just a teaspoon or two. You've got to keep the vegans out somehow. That's right. They're just not going to work there. All right. I promise to get you out of here on time, but now we're on the record that you're going to come back for – we'll do a day of Caesar. Let's rock. I would love to do it. His early years. Someone asked me on a live stream not too long ago if I can go anywhere in history where and when, and that's one of those questions that you're like, oh, I don't know, and I was just like, late Republic, I want to – Sulla right up to Augustus. I want to see all that. That's my favorite. So I'd love to have you back to talk about it. It's where everything happens, yeah. Yeah, the drama. I just love it. On the 13th of May, you published an essay called Stoicism Isn't Going to Get Us Out of This. Six weeks later, just a few weeks ago, the Vesuvius Challenge finishes decoding the first Herculaneum scroll from an Epicurean private library, and it's a Stoic text. What did you think when you got that email? Well – Well – Any press is good press. Right. Yeah. Tell us a little bit about that project because it's fascinating. Yeah. So this is something that I was familiar with. I mean, anybody who studies classics seriously has, like, heard of the Vesuvius scrolls, right? Mount Vesuvius buries Pompeii in 79 AD, this famous eruption, also buries Herculaneum. And at Herculaneum, which is closer to the mountains, right at the foot, right on the shore, and I think in Pompeii, there's, like, pumice stones and buildings collapsing. But at Herculaneum, it was a pyroclastic mud flow. A lot of people got out. Not everybody did. But it buried this villa. Man, what an interesting place this villa was. But with this pyroclastic mud, it kind of – It wasn't hot lava, right? So it doesn't burn everything. It just kind of, in case it bakes it a little bit. Right. It's about 500 degrees. Yeah. And just the right temperature to carbonize papyrus skulls but not incinerate them. And so in 1752, these guys are digging a well in, you know, what turns out was Herculaneum. I don't even know if it was called that in those days. They may not have known it was there then. I don't think they did. I don't think so. I mean, it's like, how would you know? Right. I don't think they – Pompeii, they didn't know it was there yet either. Right. Yeah. How would you know? And it's like – Under dozens of feet. I don't – maybe it's like 200 feet at some places. It's really, really thick. I mean, imagine the amount of – I mean, and you look at Vesuvius now. It's like, you can see where all that mass came from, right? But so they find these – this villa where they find, you know, some antiquities. And pretty soon they find these, like, little charcoal-looking things. And a couple of the workers apparently, like – Use these charcoal logs to boil their pasta or whatever. It turns out they're actually ancient scrolls. Right. Priceless. Priceless. Ancient scrolls. Texts that have never been seen since antiquity. From this library in this villa that – because most of the ancient scrolls, most ancient books are lost. Maybe we have 2%, maybe less. They get eaten by worms. They turn into dirt. You have to copy them over and over. So we have all these scrolls from – They were discovered, you know, since 1752 from this villa. Thousands of fragments, more than 400 complete scrolls intact. And the problem is when you try to open them, you – like, the better preserved ones, they had some, you know, methods developed. This guy, Paggio, I think was his name, or Piaggio. Anyway, he developed this machine with catcalls. So we knew about them, and the fragments that we were able to read indicated that this was a philosophical library. But how do you read them? Well, chunks have fallen off, and you can kind of see there's Greek texts on some of them. And, you know, the parts that have been unrolled or cut open, you can kind of piece together that these are Greek texts. But for the most part, if you try to unroll them, you destroy them. And so at some point, people – And so at some point, people decided – the authorities decided, all right, nobody's allowed to touch these things until we can figure out how to read them. Some better science comes along. And it was always the hope. Some, you know, new innovation is going to come along that's going to unroll these things. Well, Brent Seals of the University of Kentucky has become a friend. He's an awesome guy. Had this idea that you could scan these things using basically a CT scan. He's a computer scientist, 3D imaging. And the technology is called tomography. But basically, he had this idea that you use really, really high-powered CT scans to build a 3D model of the scroll and then unwrap the 3D model digitally, which is incredible. And the Herculaneum scrolls – so some ancient ink has iron in it. And you could just kind of like do a – Chromatography, like you could actually just pull out the iron from the ink from a proper scan with whatever chromatography. I'm not a chemist. Anyway, but the Herculaneum scrolls, unfortunately, the ink that's used on them is all pure carbon-based. So it's chemically indistinguishable from the scroll itself. Right, everything's carbon. So what you have to do is get a scan that is so high-res. That you can actually determine the ink from geometry, from like lumps of ink on papyrus. So this is like super hard mode, right? Yep. And what they've done – and it took – so I'm working on a documentary about this. Are you consulting with Ridley Scott? Yes, actually. I'm just going to throw that in there. You're going to mention that? Well, maybe I would have gotten to it. I'm just so excited. I'm going to talk about these scrolls and it's – but yeah, we pitched it to Ridley Scott too and Scott Free came on board. O'Shaughnessy Ventures was – Infinite Films is the kind of foundational producer and we brought in Scott Free and his team. We told them about this and they're like, oh, this is really cool. And so I think it's going to be the definitive storytelling of this event. It's not a science documentary. I mean we go into some of the science, but is it really? It's a compelling human story too. When does it come out? I can't wait for it. Soonish. Stay tuned. Yeah. Sooner than your book, I hope. It's sooner than my book. Yes. Fortunately, unfortunately. But it's done basically and we're going to do some private screenings in the coming weeks and months. But essentially, it's an amazing story of like – because not only is the technological piece hard, but like the – the kind of government agencies and quasi-government agencies that control these things, and the scholarly infighting. Sure. It took years – like the technology was there for the most part for the past couple of decades. But what the real kind of unlock was is Brent Seals and his team, they took these scrolls to get scanned at the Diamond Light Source in Oxford, which is this – particle accelerator. It's like six soccer fields. It's gigantic. you know like a hadron collider kind of scale thing and the reason you have to do that is to get these these 3d images so high res that um and like these files are like you know i can't imagine enormous enormous files the resolution is particle resolution that's crazy yeah uh it's like you know molecules so um and but once you have that document like how do you how do you determine where the page breaks are like where the the the kind of spaces between the scrolls um layers are then how do you determine where the um where the ink is and is an incredibly laborious process unless you use machine learning yeah they've unlocked this and accelerated it through ai and it actually it was catalyzed by um this guy nat friedman who's a very prominent uh silicon valley um guy you know github ceo and he he's he's awesome very high agency he gets obsessed with this during covid and he's like how has this problem not been solved this is fascinating he gets he gets nerd sniped by it and so you know collaborating with brent seals and his team and like they come up with the idea to do an open contest to see who can essentially come up with programs to hack various parts of this problem of turning this ginormous 3d file into readable text and they finally read a complete scroll just a couple months ago it's a it's a triumph a triumph of i won't say a triumph of the will but it is you know and um and and it's it's only the beginning because now we can read those 400 scrolls why is that cool well okay it's an epicurean library for the most part so not only that what is epicurean versus stoicism and why is this such a weird find well so the epicureans are another hellenistic philosophy that comes uh online like right after aristotle and the epicureans so there's a great story about this from the life of puris plutarch's life of puris so puris is the king puris the first guy to take elephants to italy under arms before hannibal gave hannibal the idea hannibal studied puris wow yeah okay when when asked to name who he thought were the greatest generals hannibal named puris among them he's a cousin a younger cousin of alexander the great wow invades uh southern italy on behalf of the tarantines you know the you know descendants of architis yeah and gang and they're um they're they're given the romans trouble purists he's very good at what he does i mean he's utterly devoted his entire life to warfare uh and the romans are you know this guy's serious you there's a conference between after one of these um victories purists has a bunch of roman captives and rome is still kind of scrappy at this point yeah they control they're the they're the the main power in central italy right but etruscans are still around yeah the etruscans are still around they're they're kind of getting subdued yeah but but southern italy is you know there's the sam knights the greeks along the coast um there's the lucanians the broodians there's all these tribes that are not like you know under the roman sway right including sicily but um purists wins a battle and uh a puric victory is a very costly defeat but he manages to win and he has roman captives and fabricius his roman ambassador comes to kind of entreat for the uh for the captives and they're at dinner as one does like gentlemen uh and discussing various matters and purists is um his like uh advisors military advisor kineas is his name he's uh he's a very learned man you see you know pattern continues and he's explaining to fabricius what the epicureans teach to me this is this is very romantic the way this is all done yeah like imagine uh you know trump sitting down with the ayatollah i mean you know anyway they uh so kineas is like explaining the epicurean philosophy to fabricius all right well so the epicureans teach that uh there are gods but they don't really care about us they didn't create the world the world is uh composed of atoms epicureans were followers of this democratian idea of randomness collision of atoms coming together um the gods are models of of of blessed happiness for us at best and uh the the thing that is most worth pursuing in life the key to the good life is pleasure of course you know maybe he doesn't get to the point where he explains actually when they talk about pleasure they're not talking about just wine and women and you know because after you uh have a great night drinking then you have the the hangover the next day and like on balance maybe there's more pain than pleasure so the epicureans were kind of ascetic and moderate and so forth but um but yeah and kineas also explains to fabricius well the wise man will not enter politics because it's too troubling to the soul it goes against this this is this value of ataraxia lack of disturbance that the epicureans were really valued totally agree with that statement yeah yeah well i mean there's a lot of there's a lot of wisdom there and um and fabricius is listening to this right gods don't care about us pleasure is the highest principle wise man won't enter politics and he says i love this philosophy for you may wow may purists and and our enemies in the sam knights continue to cherish this philosophy as long as they are at war with rome wow wow so so you know you you read that story and uh and you might think that um you know epicureanism was just a mismatch with rome but in fact during the life of julius caesar and augustus like this this high period that you and i both love epicureanism arguably the most popular philosophy with the with the leadership classes of rome caesar is associated with the epicureans cato kind of accuses him of being an epicurean at one point in the catalanarian conspiracy that's an insult at that point time well i don't think he labels him as an epicurean but he says you know caesar doesn't believe in the afterlife he thinks that's all nonsense so he's he's hinting at at caesar's epicurean sympathies and it's a bit it's a bit edgy i think to be an epicurean but there's something kind of appealing about that kind of bohemian uh counterculture aspect and yet you know caesar's an epicurean arguably he reads lucretius's um de rerum natura's great epicurean epic while he's in gaul like fighting the gauls it just came out like right in the like 55 bc and uh manlius torquatus is another like prominent general who fights for the pompeian side in the civil war an epicurean buddy of cicero's um also cassius the conspirator who organized the plot against caesar is an epicurean so there's all these names that you can find they're devotees of epicureanism and philodemus is the guy who put this library together and most of the texts that we discovered in these scrolls were written by philodemus um but uh so so epicureanism is i think it's an interesting philosophy if from a historian's perspective because it kind of gives you this insight into how um how the intellectuals were dealing with the roman power elite and maybe epicureanism had something to do with his transition from republic to empire because it's not just caesar right augustus maybe i don't know what augustus is what he was maybe not an epicurean himself but his uh his literary department were heavily influenced by philodemus personally why would epicureanism make the transition to empire i mean i think most people don't know this but i think it's an interesting philosophy because it's um i think it's interesting to know that caesar was not an emperor augustus was yeah right not clear what caesar's long-term plans for rome were right um you know uh but um so like augustus long story let's you know probably for another day it's it's fullness basically augustus wins this another round of civil war several rounds of civil war and when he is um supreme finally around 27 uh bc he you know ostentatiously lays down his um his powers and this of course the senate immediately votes him back his powers like it's but he has this friend mycenaeus who is uh kind of like his chief of staff um top I don't know like peacetime negotiator and and is a great patron of the arts and literature it's like a head of the propaganda department Mycenaeus finds Horus who fought on the wrong side at Philippi against Augustus and Anthony but he gets pardoned and Horus becomes the loyalist supporter of Augustus's regime Mycenaeus brings him in and uh Horus is a friend of Philodemus he's a devotee of uh Epicurean philosophy Mycenaeus finds Virgil wow Virgil we have letters from Herculaneum from these scrolls Philodemus addressing Virgil my dear friend Virgil Virgil probably hung out at that villa to say nothing of the fact that Caesar probably hung out at that villa because the villa where the scrolls were discovered was owned probably built by Caesar's father-in-law right Calpurnia's father Lucius Calpurnia's piso Caesaninus it's probably the nicest villa in Herculaneum in its day and Herculaneum is like this town for the wealthy it's like the Hamptons right uh Martha's Vineyard if anybody who's anybody in Roman politics has a villa down in the Bay of Naples like Pompeii is great but if you're somebody yeah yeah like Herculaneum uh Pozzuoli maybe Puteoli's this is the there's a fleet there but Herculaneum is one of the the primo spots and um so everybody has a vacation home down there Piso uh Caesar's father-in-law is a consul in 58 I think 57 and he uh he's the guy who installs Philodemus there but Philodemus has a long life and he brings a lot of his scrolls from Athens from the Epicurean school in Athens and uh and and like houses them in this library this philosophical library at Herculaneum and he's he's writing treatises he's also got works to consult he's got the the complete you know he's got the works the masterwork of Epicurus uh on on you know Perifuseus like on nature which now we know from from what the fragments we have of that text that Lucretius if you care about the epicurean school of Athens he's got the masterwork of Epicurus on these things Lucretius's amazing latin poem on um epicurean philosophy is almost like taken like word for word at least sentence for sentence from Epicurus's work and then like jammed into latin poetry the artistry is incredible in Lucretius because of that like taking Epicurus was a boring crappy writer right famously but Lucretius makes this into like a world classic of latin poetry so so the epicureans i i think what why this matters for empire is you know when Augustus wins he's got to get the Romans accustomed to peace how the the the common man is relieved that civil wars maybe will finally stop we had Sulla's civil war right the Catilinarian conspiracy and there was a you know thousands of Romans died for that yeah you know Caesar's civil wars Augustus versus Anthony and Augustus and Anthony versus the conspirators before that it's just been war war war for the past half a decade right we know about all the great men but it doesn't matter what what is it like to just be a person yeah this is chaos this is hell you and that's Augustus's big mandate like peace enough and prosperity like let's get back to the farms guys but he's also got to convince the nobles he's got to convince the kind of the ambitious men who would have you know in the old republican mindset the war is going to end and he's got to convince the nobles he's got to convince way that you rise to prominence is commanding in in battle defeating the enemies of the republic maybe passing some laws in peacetime doing some reforms building an aqueduct but you know war is really essential to that and so i think you can see this especially in virgil's georgics where if you read it in translation it's just not that obvious but like it's a it's a poem his second work before he writes the ennead the great roman epic it's a poem about agriculture on the surface but like every single line somehow to me when i read it kind of evokes the horrors of civil war and the difficulty of the struggle that you know the way that you uh sometimes you have to like cut down the tallest plants i just lop off their heads and and and bury them in the earth to fertilize the new growth like oh so something is lost from latin to english a lot is lost really especially with virgil i mean yeah emerson talks about how plutarch is one of the great one of his virtues is he he withstands translation really well so you get most of plutarch in translation but with with a poet like virgil sure and much more than homer withstands translation a lot better too but virgil is just so so subtle and so elusive it's but you know virgil and epicurean he's like this idea that maybe the highest thing in life is not leading armies in battle for the glory of the republic that's a very important idea for augustus to like get into the heads of these rowdy nobles because he wants to establish peace and change the way that they operate change the software of the republic that has probably produced the most impressive coterie of killer alpha males that the world has ever seen yeah this incredibly competitive uh you know amazing system that that pitted virtue against virtue and made it better i think he's he's got to totally change that for people but i think epicurean philosophy is a big part of that and and this is this is what happened at that villa you know this is i don't know philo deem is coming to rome when he did piso setting up that pleasure palace if you will a chaste pleasure palace you know but you know maybe not entirely that's somehow central to the story of like western civilization so it's it's it's about more than just epicurean philosophy it's about more than just the texts that we might discover we might discover lost works of aristotle we might discover cicero's hortensius that converted august august to uh to philosophy he writes about this in the confessions all these lost works what scroll do you give your kidney for i would give my kidney for aristotle's on philosophy i i i think you know um i mean there's a lot of i would love to have to find aristotle the second book of aristotle's poetics his poetics that we have is maybe book one we talked about tragedy yeah he's supposed to have written another book he mentions this on comedy like that'd be cool to read that'd be really cool uh i have i have a list of dozens of these things that would be just so illuminating um caesar had uh wrote poetry when he was younger augustus suppressed it it's sort of it's it was like augustus didn't want caesar to you know his dignity to be kind of diminished by this very human character that you can see in caesar's poetry caesar wrote this treatise against cato the anti-cato after cato committed suicide and we don't have that we don't have that i think i think augustus hid it you know did he hide it in that library we have 400 plus scrolls but this is the crazy part that villa is only 10 excavated oh my goodness there could be hundreds thousands more of scrolls in that villa the water table's rising oh watch the documentary when it comes i can't i can't wait for it yeah so in this pleasure palace why are we finding a stoic ethics treatise that maybe is written by chrysippus himself what is stoicism and what and why is that important well you know stoicism is uh i mean people people are now familiar with marcus aurelius and pop stoicism these days and that's i think that's very positive development yeah it's just a tech bro thing now yeah yeah it's still cool yeah so it's a good gateway drug it is it was mine yeah yeah me too and if it leads you to plutarch and plato and the other the deeper stuff i'm all for it um stoicism was most famous i think for for for this idea that you should live according to nature um in antiquity at least that was a big piece of what stoic philosophy taught and um and and uh living according to nature for them meant things like realizing that um you know you can only control what's what's in your own sort of sphere of control and that worrying about you know what you read and as you're scrolling through twitter it's probably not going to make you happy and it's probably not going to make you more effective it's probably not going to increase the chances that you're going to be able to affect those things that are outside your control to just get anxious and obsess over them it's a good lesson but they also had uh a very developed metaphysics you know The Logos is this governing principle that orders the universe. And it's part of living according to nature is living your life in according with Logos, the divine, quasi-divine reason that orders the universe. And, you know, a concept, or at least a term that had this resonance when John says, in the beginning, it was the Logos in the book, in the Gospel of John. So it was definitely around at the time. But I think Philodemus probably would have had Chrysippus in the library just to have, to make sure they quoted him right when he refuted him. That's interesting. Philodemus, yeah. And the Epicureans, they were very cantankerous, contentious. They're really into arguing facts and logic. They're going to defeat Chrysippus and the Stoics with facts and logic. So where are you on that spectrum? I would probably consider myself an Aristotelian. And that's only kind of recently. I loved Plato when I was younger. He's such a great artist. He's a poet in prose. And he'll inspire you to pursue wisdom and to think that virtue is the root to happiness, which is great. But I think that Aristotle kind of maps it out for you better. Aristotle's, his ethics is not likely to make you more ethical. It can, but it's boring. But it is a kind of science of how humans, like how ethics is, I don't know, how ethics works, how morals work. You know, he studies vice very carefully. He studies virtue very carefully and everything in between. And, um, I think Aristotle is, is of the philosophers, the one who has the best explanation of why ambition is important. And, um, that's something that I think we've lost today. That we have vision is important. So he's definitely taught that to Alexander. A hundred percent. And we've lost that. Yeah. Well, Aristotle gave Alexander a copy of the Iliad, his own personal edited, commented copy. That he kept under his pillow or next to his pillow, right by his dagger on all of his campaigns because of zeal. Yeah. You know, Alexander wanted to be like Achilles, probably because Aristotle was like, Hey, the person you're trying to be Homer already described that it's Achilles. And maybe, maybe Aristotle, if, if Alexander had stuck around or had Aristotle stick around, he would have gotten to the other part of the story, which is like, you know, Achilles kind of took it too far. At times, like the story is, is both about admiring his virtues, but also learning from his vices a little over the top. Yeah. Um, I, I think that we have, uh, we've become as a culture, much more, we've, we've, we've lurched into the envy territory at scale, much more than, than we've kind of let the force of, of tall poppy syndrome. Um, At scale. Meaning? Meaning our culture or our species? Oh, yeah. Our culture, at least. Our culture. And maybe America isn't as bad in this respect as Britain. I don't know. I don't know. But, you know, this is a longer discussion. It is. But I, I tend to agree with you because something just feels wrong. And I think that's part of it. You're not, anybody who's successful is, is like by definition, a criminal. No. Anybody who, who builds a great business is by definition, a robber baron. Any great king was probably a pervert. This is the way, this is the lens that a lot of people look at history. Yes. It's also the lens that a lot of people look at, um, you know, entrepreneurs and leaders today. And the problem with that isn't necessarily that we should lionize or make saints out of everybody who achieves greatness. We should not. It's, it's that if you, if you assume that they're evil, that success is proven. It's, it's that if you, if you assume that they're evil, that success is proof of evilness, you will never learn from their mistakes. You will dismiss them and fail to learn the lessons, I think. And that's even more dangerous. Uh, and you, and you'll get, you'll get, you know, if, if only the unscrupulous rise to power, then the scrupulous, the virtuous will sit on the sidelines and we're all worse for it. So, that's, that's one of the reasons I, I really want to, like, jam, you know, zeal and Aristotelian philosophy. And this is a neglected passage of Aristotle. Like, the academics don't like his passage on greatness of soul that much. They're kind of embarrassed by it. Why? Well, I mean, he has a frank appreciation of, um, it's, it's magnanimity is the virtue that he talks about. Uh, the, the, the great man, or the, the, the magnanimous man. Desires great things, considers himself worthy of them, and is correct in that judgment. Because he's virtuous. It's a capstone of virtue. But that seems, go ahead. I don't think there's anything wrong with that. I don't either. I think it's great. But. This is why you had to get out of academia. Yeah. I felt like it was, uh, like, it wasn't obvious in the early teens. To me, maybe I was just naive. It wasn't obvious. But increasingly, you know, something kind of turned. I don't know what happened around 2016. Something happened. There was a kind of turn toward, um, really leaning into, um, hostility to greatness. Hostility to competence. Or at least the idea that that shouldn't be the criterion. You think that's turned around? I don't know. Because you're, you are correct. I don't, I, I, it's, I think more people are aware of it. And it's more than politics. Yeah. It's cultural. Yeah. And that definitely really bothered me, is seeing, seeing how this makes people miserable, actually. Regular people. Um, it's not about, you know, the, the great getting more prizes and honors. It's about a kind of disordering of the soul. If you don't, if you don't really believe in excellence, you're not going to pursue it in your own life. But that's what makes, that's what makes people, that's especially what makes men happy. It is. And I've, some people, most people maybe forget that someone else's excellence benefits them. Yeah. The better your podcast and your media gets, the more I benefit because it's, because I learned so much. So I'm rooting for you and guys like you. Yeah. I'm not hoping that you fail, but a lot of people are hoping that you and I fail. Yeah. I hear from them every day. I'm not going anywhere. You too. Yeah. Every day. But. Well. I, I'm drawn to, and I've said this many times, my audience knows this, talent. I'm fascinated by people who are just good at stuff, who are brilliant, who can drain ten free throws in a row, I'm fascinated by people who can just do stuff. I don't, I don't envy that, I'm, I'm amazed by it, I love it. And that's the thing, it's not just about, you know. It's not just about, you know, somebody, uh, you know, making some technology, like the washing machine. All right, that's an achievement that makes my life easy, but does it make it better? What makes my life better is seeing somebody achieve something through great struggle and zeal to pull it out in my own life. And, uh, I, that's why I think we have history. That's why Plutarch, he says this very explicitly in places. He wanted to. He wanted to bring forth these models of zeal that you can learn from, and there's bad guys in Plutarch's lives, Demetrius, Antony, uh, Caesar is, is very problematic for Plutarch. I admire Caesar a little bit more than Plutarch, but yeah, the guy made mistakes. But if you, if they're, if they're just wicked tyrants, if, if you can't acknowledge that there was some virtue there, you will definitely not learn from their vices. And that's, that's, I think what Plutarch. Really cared about is, is that, that magnetism of, of excellence, even when it's imperfect, it's always imperfect, except, except in one or two, one case, I think. And what is that? Jesus Christ. Amen. I can't argue with that. Do you get any trouble because your group is men only? Uh, I think if we continue to, uh, to grow and, and get, get on the radar, we're going to get into more trouble. It seemed. Because I, I, before I started classical society, but we started classical society, I was already doing men's only retreats for my podcast listeners and, uh, that seemed really edgy in 20, 22. Um, it was definitely, it was something I had wanted to do since for, you know, almost a decade. It shouldn't be edgy. Everybody chill out. Yeah, that's what I said. I think people have backed off a little bit on this. You do. You see, even from center left people, Richard Reeves and, you know, articles in the New York times, like men are not okay, but there's always these qualifications. Um, so it's, it's still. it's still suspect it even if it's not like immediate grounds for cancellation there's still something kind of disturbing to the establishment about this um which is to me evidence that we're on to something good it is because whatever the politics are of the day because it's it's so fickle human nature is steady and as a historian you know that so you can have your male only group that might not be cool 10 years ago but they're there anyway we're doing it anyway to do we're the guys are getting together anyway so are the girls and it's fine yeah it's okay yeah everybody chill out it's okay i'm glad you're doing it hopefully we'll get to that point where where people can just chill out we'll see we'll see and if if we have to be you know uh on the front lines kind of getting shredded by the overton window as we expand it we're there for it it'll be so embarrassing though they sit around and talk philosophy i know how dare they it's a nerdy book club come on that's what they said in thebes um i'm watching the clock before on when you when we reached out you mentioned something that i didn't expect that you called a plot post-war american intelligentsia removing heroes from western culture i think we're kind of onto that now yeah what did you mean well once again we're fighting human nature here yeah i i studied this a little bit when um when i was looking at the history of the discipline of classics so classics uh as we were talking about earlier it used to be this was the education that the uh like he had to be classically trained you know there they um the soldier scholar lawrence of arabia i mean he wasn't a classic major at oxford but the guy knew some greek and latin and he he modeled his uh uh seven was it seven pillars of wisdom off of in some ways off of xenophones and i mean this is like deep in the kind of western leadership tradition it it starts to change in the early years of the early 20th century and i think that's one of the reasons there's this is a longer history to this of of kind of classics moving away from greatness and becoming a science instead becoming going from being the kind of uh a nursery of statesmen which is very much the way that hamilton or um jefferson or washington are looking at at the classics well the founding fathers probably read plutarch more than anything else except the bible yeah it's like plutarch pilgrim's progress i don't know black's law dictionary um the bible they all read them all and and you don't necessarily know this reading their papers but they're talking about pelopidas pamanandus rudas scipio it's not like they're saying as plutarch says but that's where they're getting it's just obvious right these are the kind of it's the bible of heroes for them so so the the model that was the model of classics up until the 19th century um when it the german university system sort of turned history into a science and philology into a science and friedrich nietzsche reacts really strongly against this one of his my favorite books of his is an early text uh on the uses in a on the on the advantage and disadvantage of history for life and he he talks about plutarch in there in some very interesting ways wow but um you know criticizing the side of sort of like academization of history like that's not what it's really for it's for inspiring action but i think it's this is there's some interesting books have been written about this rusty reno's um a return of the strong gods is a good one but you know after world war ii the intelligentsia let's say agreed and of course there's a back history to this but you know they they'll kind of everybody kind of agreed the number one thing we have to do is prevent there ever being a hitler or a mussolini again and uh for that matter a patten or i don't know a churchill there's something about this culture that produces ambitious men who want to lead the state that is toxic and you know it probably i think you can see it in the book i think it's kind of the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the the in uh in stern fathers you know stern fathers make stern sons and stern sons are the ones that go on to want to be dictators aren't they there was a kind of uh i don't know maybe that it's a conspiracy i haven't i haven't studied like you can go really deep on this like feminism being pushed by the cia and uh the the kind of freudian psychology being really pumped through uh from madison avenue onward like this is seen as a good thing get get people to you know sexual experimentation and what's this with the nuclear family you know why do we need fathers why can't we just kind of be free and do a lot like the the sexual revolution is a sort of engineered um every commercial for every product turfed yes yeah every every husband is a doofus in every commercial yeah stop it al bundy and for god's sake al bundy i mean married with children that guy is he owns his own home he's got two kids which is amazing yeah um for selling shoes yeah yeah homer simpson you know like yeah like uh so i i think the attack on like the patriarchy you have to kind of uh cut it off at its source and maybe that that work was already done by the scientization of philology where history becomes about just getting objective facts and and uh looking at the subaltern and you know did was it really locusts that made possible caesar's victory uh was it really about the great man um all that stuff kind of feeds in the same direction but it wasn't just accidental at the very least it's there's plenty of evidence that it wasn't accidental what do you think the motive is for it because again we're bumping up against human nature and i'll say something controversial which isn't that um you can suppress masculinity all you want but deep down most women want a cowboy yeah they want a cowboy they want a man who's going to step up who's going to take a swing mm-hmm they do yeah and uh i i think it's about control you know if you don't if you don't have uh if it's peace and everybody has way more food and entertainment than you could possibly want and there's no there's no apparent danger it's just less obvious that you need the manly virtues um but history shows that these things come in cycles they certainly do um and uh and so i you know and like if if you uh you know if you don't have to rely on a strong man husband father well maybe the government can step in and maybe you can vote for the people who will make sure that you know the goods keep flowing to people who don't need a strong man in their lives connect the dots i think it's clear it's quibo no it's clear yeah maybe it's changing at the very least culturally i think it's changed i mean yeah in the state it's not changing it never will that you know that's sort of welfare state's not going anywhere but culturally i think it's i think it's changed i think it's okay to be a guy again women you can be a woman again i think i think we're allowed um i don't think i'm a i i dote on my wife you know my boy is the happiest boy in the world but i'm still if someone comes through the door in the middle of the night i'm the guy that you want not you know some dude with a beard and a sweater it's a great uh ernst jünger quote um what does he say this is this is the i'm i'm paraphrasing the the essence of of uh civilization maybe maybe he's the word patriarchy is the father standing at the door acts in hand his son's flanking him yes yes the movie the patriot mel gibson yeah right it's like a seven-year-old loading the rifle that's how it was done and it was fine um last thing for you the show is cost of glory everybody needs to listen to it's amazing you sold the family business you went all in yeah no plan b no die on this hill dying on the so what what does it cost you um a lot of stress uh i'm working harder than i ever have in my life but feeling more like i'm doing the most meaningful thing that i could where i i never felt like that before i always felt like i should be doing something this isn't what i'm supposed to be doing and i think that um when you just go all in on something it it you you find wells of creativity and resolution and energy that you didn't think you had especially when you have a few kids to mouths to feed people depending on you um but i mean i it was the right choice to leave academia that's gets more obvious by the day with like ai ai is writing my essays all you know i'm so glad i'm not i i really pity and and pray for the people who's still in the system but ai that those are the sirens on the island yeah for sure so because careful with it yeah great great tool uh bad god agreed um but i think um right i didn't i didn't come back to uh help and with my my dad's business and you know eventually kind of run it with the intention of uh getting out of it and selling it it's a small business anyway but um and uh you know pays for his retirement but like it it became clear that that that was the right thing to do and i'm i'm i'm grateful to allow me to move on but i think i think you know carrying on a family legacy and allowing yourself to be determined to some extent by the choices that you know like like the blacksmith's son becomes a blacksmith there's something there's something really grounding about like living the life that you're supposed to live and and accepting the suffering and the struggle that you've been presented with and um i i hope that i did that uh that you know and this is one of the things i think when when you're in this kind of liquid modernity and careers you know you see this a lot in academia but in other fields too like people people follow the job you know you're supposed to you know take a high for a job at this other company take the better position kind of leapfrog from from company to company there's there's a sense in which people are told it's the right thing to pursue the next great best opportunity and keep ratcheting up your salary or your prestige or this is going to look good on your tv whatever but there's something really uh there's something really grounding and rich about uh you know as um as as Euripides said one time, rule the Sparta that you were given. Sparta's a crappy little place at one point in its history. And maybe the king of Sparta could have been a greater man if he had lived in another, if he had been at Mycenae in the Archaic period. But no, rule the Sparta you were given. You don't know how big of a legacy you're building that you might not even see. I think about that a lot. That's very wise. I mean, you've got a career and you've got a vocation. And a vocation comes from the word calling. So that's what you're doing, following your calling. I'm glad you're doing it. Dr. Alex Petras was here. What do you want to plug? The Classical Society? I say start with the cost of glory. Okay. Dig into the lives of the great heroes of history. And just listen. Be entertained. Hopefully they're entertaining. If you don't like cost of glory and you're a reader, read Plutarch's Lives. They're pretty accessible. Like, look up a few references and see how you feel after a year of that. And tell me that you weren't affected. Well done. Thanks for coming in. This has been a lot of fun. It's been great fun, AJ. All right, see you soon. Bye, everybody. That was Alex Petras. I had a stack of notes this thick and we got through like half of them. So he's coming back. Start with the dinner party. Alex says the night before Caesar was murdered, he asked his dinner guests the best way to die and one of his assassins was at the table. I checked. That's true. It's an Appian, a great historian writing nearly two centuries later. And Caesar's answer was sudden and unexpected. Now, the scrolls. Alex said that the Vesuvius Challenge read a whole Herculaneum scroll for the first time. That checks out. The University of Kentucky team behind it announced in June that they got 22 columns of scrolls of Greek off a lump of charcoal nobody's opened since the eruption. The stoic part is real, too. I said on mic, it might be Chrysippus himself. The last column names his nephew and nobody's willing to go further than that. And neither am I. But it's interesting. Then there's the student in Fresno, the grown man who read Plato's Republic in Alex's class and stopped cheating on his wife. Alex says that's what all of this is for and I believe him. I'm also applying to the classical society. Probably not. Cost of Glory is at costofglory.com. It's a super great podcast if you're into this kind of nerdy history stuff. The documentary's called The Vesuvius Challenge. No release date yet, but everything I mentioned is linked below. I'm definitely looking forward to that. Until next time, be safe, be kind, and know that you are appreciated. ¶¶ ¶¶ No, it never ends I feel the crab cat and I got stuck inside Mel's home With MKUltra being only two away Did Stanley Kubrick fake the moon landing alone On a film set with the shadow people there The Roswell aliens just fought the smiling man I'm told, and his name was cold And I can't believe I'm dancing with the fish And the fish are Thursday nights with AJ2 And the waffles on my feet all through the night All I ever wanted was to just hear the truth So the waffles on my feet all through the night And I can't believe I'm dancing with the fish All I ever wanted was to just hear the truth The Mothman sightings and the solar storm still come To a god, the secret city underground Mysterious number stations playing around And it's Earth-02, Project Stargate And what the Dark Watchers found In a simulation, don't you worry though The Black Knight said a lot, it told me so I can't believe I'm dancing with the fish And the fish are Thursday nights with AJ2 And the waffles on my feet all through the night All I ever wanted was to just hear the truth So the waffles on my feet all through the night Where do you stand? Where do you love to dance? Yeah, where do you love to dance? This episode sponsored by She's Birdie. And maybe one more time. Because even the nicest room can feel unfamiliar at night. That's why She's Birdie created Birdiebox. With She's Birdie, you can bring peace of mind with you. Birdiebox is a portable travel door alarm for hotels, dorms, Airbnbs, and anywhere you want you stay away from home. Just attach it to the doorframe, switch it on, and if someone opens the door, Birdie Box blasts a loud siren and flashing alarm to alert you and everyone nearby. Because the best part of travel isn't worrying, it's sleeping soundly. Birdie Box from She's Birdie. Locking in peace of mind wherever you stay. For safer, more confident travel, visit shesbirdie.com. That's S-H-E-S-B-I-R-D-I-E dot com.