The Daily Stoic - When Good People Lose Themselves to Tyrants | James Romm (PT. 1)

Episode Date: August 13, 2025

What makes smart, principled people work for the worst leaders? In this conversation, historian and author James Romm and Ryan dig into the timeless trap that’s snared some of history’s greatest minds, from Plato and Seneca to modern politics. They talk about the seduction of access, the slow erosion of integrity, and why walking away from a tyrant’s court is so much harder than it looks.James Romm is an author, reviewer, and a Professor of Classics at Bard College in Annandale, NY. He specializes in ancient Greek and Roman culture and civilization. His reviews and essays have appeared in the New Yorker, the Wall Street Journal, the London Review of Books, the Daily Beast, and other venues. He has held the Guggenheim Fellowship (1999-2000), the Birkelund Fellowship at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars at the New York Public Library (2010-11), and a Biography Fellowship at the Leon Levy Center of the City University of New York (2014-15).Follow James on Instagram @James.Romm and check out more of his work at his website, www.jamesromm.com 📚 Get signed copies of James' latest book Plato and the Tyrant, and his other books Dying Every Day, How To Die, and How To Give, at The Painted Porch | https://www.thepaintedporch.com/🎙️ Listen to James Romm’s first episode on The Daily Stoic Podcast:  https://dailystoic.com/romm/📖 Preorder the final book in Ryan Holiday's The Stoic Virtues Series: "Wisdom Takes Work": https://store.dailystoic.com/pages/wisdom-takes-work🎙️ Follow The Daily Stoic Podcast on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast🎥 Watch top moments from The Daily Stoic Podcast on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@dailystoicpodcast✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Get Stoic inspired books, medallions, and prints to remember these lessons at the Daily Stoic Store: https://store.dailystoic.com/📱 Follow us:  Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Searching for a romantic summer getaway. Escape with Rich Girl Summer, the new audible original from Lily Chew. The exquisitely talented Philippa Sue, returning to narrate her fifth Lily Chew title. This time, Philippa is joined by her real-life husband, Stephen Pasquale, set in Toronto's wealthy cottage country, aka the Hamptons of Canada. Rich Girl Summer follows the story of Valerie, a down-on-her-luck event planner, posing as a socialite's long-lost daughter, while piecing together the secrets surrounding a mysterious family,

and falling deeper and deeper in love with the impossibly hard to read and infuriatingly handsome family assistant, Nico. Caught between pretending to belong and unexpectedly finding where she truly fits in, Valerie learns her summer is about to get far more complicated than she ever planned. She's in over her head and head over heels.

Listen to Rich Girl Summer now on Audible. Go to audible.com slash rich girl summer. Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, a short passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength and insight here in everyday life. And on Wednesdays, we talk to some of our fellow students of ancient philosophy, well-known and obscure, fascinating, and powerful. With them, we discuss the strategies and habits that have helped them become who they are, and also to find peace and wisdom in their lives.

Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic podcast. I want to take you way back. This would have been... 2015, I think, 2014. I don't know. The collapse of American Apparel. I've just put out the obstacles away, just finished the book tour, and then American Apparel implodes. The board fires Dev Charnie. I was involved in some of that, and then I got called back as a consultant as they tried to sort of salvage the company that had been essentially run into the ground.

I'm in L.A. and I'm walking up, is it Vermont? I'm walking up the street in Los Files. near where Robert Green lives. I pass Skylight Bookstore, which is one of my favorites. And I see in the window a book with a statue of Seneca on the cover. Oh, that's interesting. It's a new book.

What is that? And it's this book called Dying Every Day by James Rom. And it's about Seneca in the court of Nero. That is the subtitle. I think it was close. I have to come back the next day. I grab it and I read it. It sort of blows my mind.

It blows my mind because, Hello, wife. I'm in the middle of recording an intro, but I can hit stop here. Sorry about that, everyone. My wife decided to come into my office, and I guess I had to talk to her. No, we actually just had a lovely meeting with our podcast producer. Okay, back to what I was saying. Claire, don't cut any of that out. I'm sure it's riveting for everyone. You were in the meeting. You know how important it was. Okay, so I'm reading this book about Seneca being Nero's advisor. Now, I vaguely knew this from my reading of Seneca then, but, you know, I'm still. relatively early in my journey into the history and the larger context of Stoicism. And so I'm reading

this sort of mortification and horrification. Seneca is more than just like a guy that knew Nero that was giving him advice and Nero wasn't listening. He was intimately involved. He was complicit. He was an enabler. There's a very long Greek word that James Romm has in this book that they often used to describe Seneca in Rome at that time. the word vaguely translates to tyrant teacher. Now, this is all fascinating to me as a student in the philosophy, but it's all the more fascinating to me as I'm sitting there in the wreckage of American Apparel. And this person that I had advised, that I had admired, that I was learning from, I would say, he was primarily a mentor to me, not me a mentor to him. I'm talking here,

the founder of American Apparel. I am feeling something close to, I don't know, deja vu. It's hitting very, very close to home. There's a quote from Seneca in one of his plays where he talks about how crimes return upon their teachers. And I'm watching, you know, this man destroy the company that he built. He's coming after me personally. We were worried my car was bugged. I was getting death threats. It was this crazy, very, very ancient thing. It was like a deposed king trying to to rule his kingdom from afar. And as I went through all this here, I am reading about Seneca. So I've always had a profound relationship to this work and this interpretation of Seneca.

And I first talked to James back in July 2020, back during the early days of the pandemic, we're in the middle of the first Trump presidency. And I had a bunch of questions about Seneca that I'd always wanted to ask. So it was one of my favorite interviews that we've done. And I wanted to have him back on the podcast because that book has not only stayed with me, but he has a new really interesting book that's actually quite similar as far as its subject matter. It's called Plato and the Tyrant, the fall of Greece's greatest dynasty in the making of a philosophical masterpiece. This is about Plato's relationship with a tyrant of his time.

So James came out to the studio. We did this in person because there is no longer a pandemic in between us. And we had this wonderful conversation, which I am very excited to bring to you. We're talking in this episode about why philosophers shouldn't just be writers. They should be doers. And yet the tension of being a doer in an imperfect world. We talk about Seneca's letters and Plato's letters and many more things. And I'm excited to bring you this episode. James is a author and a professor of classics at Bard University. He specializes in ancient Greek and Roman culture. His reviews and essays have appeared in the New Yorker in the Wall Street Journal in the London Review of Books, The Daily Boost, and other venues. He's won a Guggenheim Fellowship. He was a scholar at the New York Public Library, among many other things. He is also a translator of Seneca.

You can read his edition of Seneca called How to Die and his other one, How to Live. He signed copies of the Plato and the Thailand dying every day and how to die and how to give. When he was here, you can follow him on Instagram at james.com, and you can go to his website, james rom.com. Enjoy. I've been saying in some of my talks, I think when we think of antiquity, we think of the past, we think of it as kind of stable or even peaceful. Like we think of Socrates in the golden age of Athens or whatever. And then you go, well, actually Socrates, lived in the middle of a great power conflict through essentially a world war. Then in the time of

the 30 tyrants, Plato lives through not just a good chunk of that, but also, as you talk about in the new book, sort of tyrants all over. You know, Seneca lives in the time of Nero. The sort of peacefulness of it is an illusion. They would have lived in what they thought were scary, unstable times. Yeah, very much so. And that's really what the Republic is all about, trying to stop things from changing. Yes. From going downhill. Yeah. And they would have gotten together and been like, can you believe what so and so, like they would have been doing the same sort of political gossip that we do, or they would have had the concern and the anxiety that we have, this sort of same, the same human phenomenon of like, this is crazy, what are we doing? We've been there in the ancient world too.

Yeah, absolutely. For a lot of people, life was very precarious. The loss in combat could mean your cities wiped off the map. I mean, yeah, you could be sold into slavery. Yeah. I mean, the chances of total disaster were very high. Yes. For a lot of people.

In the way that we think like, this could lead to a recession, they're thinking, oh, it could lead to all the men in our society being murdered. Exactly, right. Yes, that happened on many occasions. Yes. And they were as powerless to do that much about it as we are. You know what I mean? Like it's this sort of existential dread and terror that must just be part of this human condition. Well, at the same time, they had a lot more control, I guess you could say, in that, you know, if you fielded a strong army or if you had strong fortifications or if your community was really unified.

I just mean the average citizen. The average citizen. Just the average person is, I hope we get it together, otherwise it's going to be bad for me. You know, that sort of thing that we're all thinking now. Yeah. Just that like you can do your part, you can vote, you can have your opinions, you can know what you'd be. But will society get its act together and stave off disaster is sort of a just a timeless part of human society? Yeah, questions we're facing right now.

as you say. Yeah. And by the way, I very much admire your own stand in the recent dustup with the Naval Academy and all that. And your, you know, communications about it. We have to stand up. We do. Well, you know, I was thinking one of the indictments you could say about modern society is that like when was it Domitian, he bans all the philosophers, right? There was this point where philosophy was transgressive and largely at odds with the powers that be. This is why Epictetus is banished. Philosophy is controversial. And I was thinking that it says something about us today that I'm not sure they're exactly

coming for the philosophers anymore because they don't have that much influence. And then I read another op-ed after mine where Graham Parsons, who's a professor at West Point, resigned. He's a philosophy professor, and he resigned and then was condemned by the Secretary of Defense. And obviously that's not good, but on the other hand, it is good to see philosophy in the mix. Like, it should be in the mix, and it should be sort of debating and challenging the powers that be. Otherwise, what good is it? It's just sort of debating abstractions.

Exactly, which is exactly what Plato was afraid of, that if he didn't go to Syracuse, didn't try to influence an actual regime in power, that he would be accused of being all talk and no action. And that was one of his main motives for making the first journey and the two subsequent journeys. Yeah, it's like a good intention that leads to a bad spot. Yeah, exactly. The road to hell. Yes, right, because philosophers shouldn't be just writers, they should be doers. And maybe this is what leads Seneca astray too, is he wants to be in the room where it happens and loses his bearings as to when one should leave the room where it's happening. Yes, I know that you have the two books there.

You can see, I took a few notes on this one. Yeah, they're very parallel stories. Yes. And it's a fine line, I guess, between wanting to be a doer and not just a talker, and then when is your ego leading you into a bad place. That's right. And when do things get so messy that you have to extricate yourself? Seneca tried to extricate himself, but failed.

Yes. And Plato succeeded, but then had to answer all kinds of questions about what went wrong, why did he bail, and the disaster that he left behind became much worse after his departure. So, yeah, things got very sticky. Well, I have this quote that I think it sort of, it strikes me as maybe the sort of through line of both your books, but I had this on my desk. I don't know when or why I wrote it down. But Pompey's last words, you quote Sophocles, he says, whoever, makes his journey to a tyrant's court becomes his slave, although he went there a free man. And so you think you're going to do good work for a flawed person or that you're going to be

above the industry that you're working in, right? Because most of us aren't going to go work for actual emperors or kings. But you think you can go into that place and not get your hands dirty. But you can't. Right. Exactly. The philosopher has ideal notions of what politics is about as the republic i mean the republican shrines those ideals in the highest way and then when you hit the ground hit the ground splattering as it were uh things don't work out so neatly so for seneca it's it's fascinating to me because obviously nero doesn't start out as a tyrant right right his mother is obviously flawed and maybe you could have said he could have seen it coming But with Seneca, it seems much more like a frog in a pot.

The heat is slowly being turned up. And then he is in that space where they say it's very hard to see something that your salary depends on you not seeing. And he can't get out. Yeah, Nero started off a relatively good path. The first five years of rain were later referred to as the Quinquenium Neuron is the best time of the. the Roman Empire, it wasn't until he became a 20 or he approached his 20s and had the, actually no, he was well into his 20s after five years and more gumption, more autonomy and took the reins into his own hands more and then things started to really crash.

Yeah, and is it mental illness or is it what power, is it that power is itself kind of a mental illness. In his case, very much so. The freedom to do anything, to have whatever pleasures he wanted, to kill his mother or whoever else he wanted, have the Praetorian Guard at his beck and call, those would drive many human beings into delusions and insanity. And in his case, he was already a little shaky to begin with, so it just sort of exaggerated his natural flaws.

This is an ad by BetterHelp. I have a therapy appointment in two days. It's from 10 to 11. I do it remotely. So it takes from 10 to 11. I don't have to drive. I don't have to find parking. I don't have to worry about traffic.

And I think this is really great because when we can have excuses or when there are impediments, or friction to taking care of ourselves, we sometimes take the excuse to not take care of ourselves. And that's why I do online therapy. And that's where today's sponsor comes in with over 30,000 therapists. BetterHelp is the world's largest online therapy platform. Having served over 5 million people globally, you join a session with a therapist at the click of a button. That helps you fit therapy into your busy life. Plus, you can switch therapists at any time. As the

largest online therapy provider in the world. BetterHelp can provide access to mental health professionals with a diverse variety of expertise. Talk it out with BetterHelp. Our listeners get 10% off their first month at betterhelp.com slash daily stoic pod. That's betterhELP.com slash daily stoic pot. I don't know how many times I've gotten blood drawn over the years, gone to different doctors, had different tests. And I don't really know where this information is. Maybe my health insurance provider has it. Maybe they don't. I don't. I know I don't have it and I sometimes worry like what if there is a trend in there? What if there's something that these different specialists aren't looking for because they're only looking for

what they're a specialist in? Well, that's where today's sponsor comes in. Function is an app that consolidates all the blood work and scans that you've gotten and looks for new or interesting information about your health. Function is the only health platform that gives you access to the kind of data most people will never see. And then insights to actually take action. You can test over 160 biomarkers from heart to hormones to toxins, inflammation, and stress. You can also access MRI and CT scans all in one secure place over time. It's basically an enhanced view of everything that's happening in your body. And it's why lots of different top health leaders are all behind function health. Lab visits are fast and convenient at 2,000 locations across the U.S. And the good news is

function isn't going to push supplements or pharmaceuticals. It's just powerful, unbiased health data designed to help you own your health. And you can learn more by using the link. I'll put that in today's show notes. And the first 1,000 people will get a $100 credit towards their membership. You just visit functionhealth.com slash daily stoic 100 or use code daily stoic 100 at sign up to own your health. I think there's an interesting contrast, right? Because so both Marcus Aurelius and Nero are not born to be emperor. Through an odd series of machinations get chosen for it, both get introduced to philosophy and philosophers pretty early.

There is this sense that the job will be hard and that they need to be philosophical. So they're both trained in stoic philosophy, Marcus Aurelius, by June. Neosurro by Seneca himself, and it goes in very different directions. Yes, Marcus Aurelius is the anti-Nero in any ways. What's ironic is that his teachers had all learned from Epictetus, who had been present at the court of Nero and had probably seen the disaster with Seneca. So there is a direct line of transmission, really, from Seneca to Marcus. But the two of them are very distinct. And, of course, Nero and Marcus are just antithetical, the one man who clung to his moral principles.

Yes. Even in spite of immense duress, immense pressure. And the other who collapsed, really, as soon as the opportunity for wrongdoing came around. And I wonder how much the swing vote is their mother. Because what does he say about his mother? Marcus' description of his mother is her reverence for the divine, her generosity, her inability not only to not do wrong, but to even conceive of doing it in the simple way she lived, not in the least like the rich. That's basically the opposite of Nero's mother. Yes, right.

And so maybe that's the swing vote. That could be, yes, the parentage. And, of course, Nero also lacked a father. But so did Marcus. Well, Marcus was adopted and had a very positive role model to look up. up to in Antoninus, but the problem of Nero being fatherless for really his first 13 years, and then having Seneca as a surrogate father, who at that point was already, you know, almost two generations older and not a very paternal type, I don't think, never had children

of his own. So, yeah, parenting was a big dividing line for those two. Yeah, that's interesting because Marcus is attached to Antoninus. And Hadrian probably thinks he's going to live for a few more years, and he lives for like 20 years. And Marcus actually takes to this apprenticeship and decides, like, yeah, I don't want to be emperor right away. I'm fine being the number two. And Nero is basically, that's what Seneca is set up to be, although he's not made emperor himself. And Nero listens to him for a little bit and then stops.

I always come back to that famous Barone statue of Seneca and Nero sitting together and obviously it's not of the time, but you can see in Nero's body language some sense of what it would actually be like to have access to potentially the wisest man of your time and think you know more or not be interested in hearing from them. Yes. Or to actively reject what he's telling you the problem of Nero's love life right from the get-go divided Seneca, Nero, because Seneca wanted to defend the legitimate wife, Octavia, who represented the stability of the empire, the future dynasty, and the union of the two branches of the royal family, and Nero didn't want anything to do with that. Yes.

He wanted the haughty. Yeah, it's at some level no one can tell the emperor what to do, but Marcus Aurelius is bound by some sense of tradition or honor or norms. And then I would say the philosophy itself, like the philosophy is telling him, like Epictetus is telling Marcus what to do in that he has sort of laid down these precepts or these sort of ideals to aspire to. And Nero has none of that. And one of them spins off the plan.

and the other doesn't. Yeah, it's a fascinating study. The place of Stoicism in the heart of the Roman Empire in the palace, and the fact that it later got banished from the palace as a threat to imperial power, that too is part of the story. You mentioned Domitian and the exile of the philosophers from the royal court. At that point, it had been determined that Stoicism could not get along, could not be incorporated into the power structure. That time of Nero is so interesting because you have all these different kind of stoic characters.

And they each sort of show us a different way that you respond to tyranny or dysfunction or corruption. So you have someone like a Griponist who's kind of this like marches to the beat of his own drummer. He says, I want to be the red thread in the, in the, in the, white sweater. Then you have Epictetus, you're sort of powerless inside of it and just trying to focus internally, you know, just how do I find freedom within myself when I am literally, you know, in chains. Then you have Seneca, who's the collaborator, you know, it's sort of mitigator, martyr type. And then you have a thracet. You have these other ones who are sort of more aggressively rebellious and revolutionary, I guess.

And, I mean, they all end up effectively in the same place. I guess the Stoics would say it doesn't bat. Like, they all end up not making it out alive. But there's this sort of different paths that you can follow. And then it's sort of left to us all these thousands of years later to say, like, which role do you want to play? Yes, very true. And it's interesting that Marcus has become sort of our primary touchstone for Roman Stoicism. and by far more popular, more widely read than either Seneca or Epictetus, and certainly more so than the other minor figures.

You know, Marcus has really gripped the imagination. I think in part because of his royal power, because he was able to resist the pull into hedonism, into vice, into family murder, of course, He did some bad things. Yeah. Let's not, let's not sugar. We still grade him on a curve, though. We grade him on a curve, yes, very much so. And compared to the things he could have done.

Yes. And that Nero did, he comes out looking pretty good. Yeah, yeah. It's weird to give him credit for not murdering his mother. Yes. But that was, or I think there's that scene where Hadrian gets mad at a secretary, and he stabs him in the eye with a stylus. Mm-hmm.

And this is just like. oh, that's what happens when the emperor gets mad. And so it's almost incomprehensible to go like, okay, that's the world that Marcus lived in. That's how he could have acted. That's how he saw his predecessor act. And then so you have to go, wow, it's pretty remarkable that you were not anywhere close to as monstrous. Yes, I mean, on the column of Marcus Aurelius in Rome, you see butchery of the, the highest caliber, you know, people presenting severed heads to Marcus as trophies.

And, you know, that was the reality of the war he was conducting against the Markomani at the time he was writing the meditations. Yes. So we have to hold those two things together somehow in our minds. But nevertheless, the meditations remains a hugely inspiring work. And I think it's partly because of its internal quality. the fact that he's addressing these thoughts to himself. Yeah.

He's not writing to a public the way that Seneca is or preaching the way that Epictetus is. He's really recording these thoughts for his own internal spiritual exercise. Yeah. And that's very much what a lot of people are doing with Stoicism today. And, you know, a lot of your work, the Daily Stoic and so on, is giving people tools to do that, to develop their core. It's probably unique amongst philosophical texts, certainly all books, in that it wasn't written for publication.

And so there's no performative element in it. Right. Where, and your book sort of pierces that bubble, it's hard to read Seneca the same way once you read your book and once you know the context and once you realize, oh, this is him wanting to be seen as Stoic. What's so remarkable about Marcus Reelis in meditations is that he'd probably be mortified that we're reading it. And so that it comes off as stoic there is really a clue that he must have been that way

internally. And we're just getting, it's like we're catching him singing in the shower. And it turns out he's got a beautiful voice. Yes, that's a good analogy. Of course, one could be a cynic and say he presented it in the guise of a diary or a, personal journal, but it really was not. But I take him at his word that the title is sometimes given to himself. Yes. The title Meditations is a modern invention. So, yeah, I believe in that. I suspect at some level there was a little bit of a, well, I hope, you know, maybe someone will see this

someday because the writing is so beautiful. You know, it is, again, in the masterwork of prose, which makes it all the more impressive if it wasn't written for publication. The same time, if it was for publication, you'd think there'd be a little, you wouldn't start so many sentences in the middle of a sentence. You know, like, there's an oddness to it that it's extra masterful if there's this meta level of, I'm intending this for publication, but I want it to be seen as a private diary. That almost makes it more impressive that he could pull it off for 2,000 years. Yes, and that's a very unlikely scenario. Yeah. And that actually corresponds fairly closely to

my argument for accepting the letters of Plato in my book, Plato and the Tyrant, as legitimate writings of Plato, even though some scholars dismiss them as fakes, that you have to assume if it were a fake, that someone with incredible literary talent and a genius for impersonation and no discernible motive except to deceive people created them. And that is just an unlikely scenario, it's much, much more credible to think that they are the writings of Plato and thus I use them as my evidence in the book. How long have I been a Thrive Market customer? I think literally since they opened.

And I invested in Thrive Market a couple of years after that, just got home from a trip and you know what was sitting in the garage? our Thrive Market Box, because we have it on subscription. And so all the stuff I need to make my kids' school lunches is in there, plus the snacks that I like. It all showed up fast, and I saved up to 25% while restocking. Thrive has been a lifesaver and a mainstay for our family, as I said, for many years. You can shop by diet, values, even food phases, because, you know, your kids' tastes change weekly. If you've got a busy schedule and you want clean, quality, options. This is the time. New members to Thrive get 30% off their order and a free gift. You just got to go to thrivemarket.com slash daily stoic to start saving today. And this sale ends on 831. I don't know how many times I've gotten blood drawn over the years, gone to different doctors, had different tests. And I don't really know where this information is. Maybe my health insurance provider has it. Maybe they don't. I know I don't have it. And I sometimes worry,

like, what if there is a trend in there? What if there's something that these different specialists are looking for because they're only looking for what they're a specialist in? Well, that's where today's sponsor comes in. Function consolidates all the blood work and scans that you've gotten and looks for new or interesting information about your health. Function is the only health platform that gives you access to the kind of data most people will never see.

And then insights to actually take action. You can test over 160 biomarkers from heart to hormones to toxins, inflammation, and stress. You can also access MRI and CT scans all in one secure place over time. It's basically an enhanced view of everything that's happening in your body, and it's why lots of different top health leaders are all behind function health. Lab visits are fast and convenient at 2,000 locations across the U.S. And the good news is function isn't going to push supplements or pharmaceuticals. It's just powerful, unbiased health data designed to help you own your health.

And you can learn more by using the link. I'll put that in today's show notes. And the first 1,000 people will get a $100 credit towards their membership. You just visit functionhealth.com slash daily stoic 100 or use code daily stoic 100 at sign up to own your health. Well, you know what's an interesting modern analog to this. And this is funny. So this is this was Joan Diddy. table. Really? Yes. And the chairs, too. And so I don't know if you saw this new book that they just

published. So her estate published, they found after her death a stack of papers bound in an envelope or in a manila folder next to her desk that were the notes that she had typed up every week after her appointments with her therapist. And they were addressed to John, her husband. and they were, she was dealing with her own issues, but she was primarily dealing with her daughter's dissent into alcoholism and the family's struggle to try to keep her safe and keep her sober and not be codependent and not, you know, just all the, all the horrendous vexing decisions that you would make as a parent of an adult child who's struggling. And so she, there's these typewritten notes set, you know, in a folder next her desk, addressed to her husband, and they've just

published them. And there's this debate about whether she would want them to be published, whether she wrote them with an eye to them being published, which I think is interesting. And then if you read them, it's riveting and beautiful and almost like an epistolary novel. And I think that's partly because someone that talented can't, I'm sure her to-do list was well written. You know, like she's just so good at it, but even if it was privately written for her husband and she never wanted it to be read, I think there must have been some other part of her that is inherently a performer and an artist and is trying to do it well. And then, you know, I'm sure as you were getting up in age and you'd be cognizant of what you were leaving in an envelope next to your desk where you did your

your work. But it is interesting to have this glimpse into someone's unaffected private struggle. And I think that's what Meditations is. Because we also don't know how it was organized. We don't know if there was stuff excised in or out of it. We don't know if it was like, is this work he did over 20 years? Is this two months? You know, that would change how you think about it too, right? Was this him editing and rewriting or was this just what he was, is this just what he needed over a two-month period of his life? Mm-hmm. And then with the last meditation being effectively him saying goodbye to life, is he writing it like as he's dying of the plague or did he write it years before and then someone put it there? It just, it's infinitely fascinating just as a literary, you know, device.

Yeah, to try to reconstruct the circumstances. And the same is true of the letters of Plato, which are also first-person documents that Plato probably never imagined would be read many centuries after his death. And in one case, a private letter that he didn't imagine would be read by anyone except the recipient. And by some miracle, we have them today. And they give us insight into Plato that we don't get from his dialogues. We don't ever hear him speaking in a first-person voice. And is that very different than Seneca's letters? Very different.

Seneca's letters, although they're addressed to Lusilius, theoretically they're a private communique. They undoubtedly were written with the public in mind and widely circulated. And many people feel it was a fiction that there was even a communication with Lusilius, that there was no two-way exchange of letters. It was just Seneca creating a fiction of a correspondence. Interesting. And he is trying to teach the audience. Is he trying to, is he like a modern writer writing to educate an audience or is he more like a propagandist trying to portray something about himself? I think it's a mixture of the two, but I would put the emphasis on the, on the ladder that he's at the end of his life.

He's been, well, he doesn't know yet that it's the end of his life. But he's in his 60s. He's been serving Nero for 15 years. and things have been going steadily downhill, and he's aware that his reputation is badly sullied. At the same time, he's trying to extricate himself from politics. So this is sort of his apologia pro-wita-sua, right? He wants his life to be seen in a certain perspective, a positive one, and so he creates this philosophical self-portrait at the end of his life.

This is a Kissinger type, writing books about history or whatever to sort of launder the reputation. Launder and also present the best side of himself where a lot of Rome had seen a worse side. Yeah. And unlike a sort of a modern, like today, if you served a corrupt or corrosive regime, you would write a tell-all where you act as if you've been opposed to this all along and you made it less bad. and you would spill all the secrets. You do a confessional sort of memoir or tell-all, but Seneca can't do that. That's right. That's right. So he chooses the letter genre, which is exactly what Plato did as well, because 12 of

his 13 letters, well, one we know is a fake, but the majority of his 13 letters are public letters, written for public consumption and widely circulated. And those two, especially the seventh letter, which is by far the bill. biggest and longest are efforts at spin control. Yes. So again, the timelessness of like, we think some of these things are just kind of modern inventions of media culture, but like people have been doing it for 2,000 years. Exactly.

Yes. The need to present an image to craft an image, which of course was perfected by Alexander the Great, the generation after Plato, but Plato was already working hard at it in the middle of the 4th century BC. Well, the Kissinger thing is interesting because I was, I'm reading and writing about Vietnam right now. And just that this guy's writing a book about AI, like right before he died, you know, he published a book with, I think, Eric Schmidt or something. And this guy that effectively killed hundreds of thousands of people, treasonously prolonged a war, just like one of the worst of the worst, right?

You know, as time passes, some of that you lose track of. And you're like, well, we wrote some interesting things about, you know, the future of technology. And you just kind of go, oh, that that's, that's a playbook, I guess. Mm-hmm. Yes. With public political figures, you can never draw a fine line between what's their authentic philosophy or their authentic point of view and what is crafted for public consumption. So is that a type you think that gets like does politics turn you into that person or

is it that those people are attracted to politics? You know, that's a great question, especially a pressing question in Plato's case because he had never thought of himself as a political player and he'd never been involved in politics until he went to Syracuse. And he's at great pains to explain his motives for going there as non-political, that he didn't want to meddle in the rulership of Syracuse. He wanted to, A, protect his protege, die on, and B, convince people that he was not all talk and no action, that he had enough conviction in his beliefs to try to act on them. But he went reluctantly, he says, and he, he got out as soon as he could. So I think in Plato's case, it's especially that he was not

naturally interested or certainly adept at politics. And his participation there bears that out because it became a disaster very quickly. Yeah, there's like a sort of, you would think that they would be really good at reading people, but there's kind of a lack of savviness, like an inability to see what is so obviously a flaw in someone's character or approach. Or maybe it's an ability to be persuaded in the room. There's a line in Meditations or Marx's Realist thanks his philosophy teacher for teaching him not to fall for every smooth talker. And then you think Aristotle falls for Alexander, Plato falls, Seneca certainly falls. there is this seduction that happens.

And it's almost not the seduction in the way that those tyrants seduced everyone else, which is I'll make you rich and famous and powerful. It's almost another level of it where it's like, this person's flawed, I can see that. And I'm not going to be one of the enablers. I'm not going to be one of the low. I'm going to be above them using them for my purposes or that I can reform them or I can control and contain them in a way that other people can't. Yeah, right.

And in Plato's case, the seduction was that if he could convert a young man to philosophy, so Dionysius the younger at the time when Plato arrived at his court was only 30. Yeah. Plato was already in his 50s. And if he says in his letter, if I could convince this one man to follow philosophy, that would start a chain reaction that might save the whole human race. Yes. So the grandiosity of that, I mean, it's off the charts. That's what I was going to say. It's this sort of martyrdom grandiosity sort of thing that's

happening, where they, I don't want to do this. It's going to be hard for me to do this. It might end badly for me to do it. But also, I alone can fix it. You know, I am the last line of defense. and it almost never ends well. And in retrospect, is clear that they enabled that person far more than they constrained that person. Yeah, true. Now, in Plato's defense, you could argue that he had seen enough of the disasters of Athens by the time he went to Syracuse that he could legitimately think that democracy was failing, other systems of governance were failing.

Greece was falling apart, was deteriorating rapidly, economic life was going downhill, and something had to be done to stop the slide. Yeah, I mean, Seneca's making the same bet. He idealizes Cato, but he's like, that Rome is gone. We've got an emperor now. It's my job to make the emperor not as bad as they might otherwise be. Exactly. And we've seen this in our own times, you know, people who've attached themselves to recent presidents. and current presidents have thought, you know, I can at least mitigate the harm.

I can snatch papers from the desk. Right, exactly. I can stop the worst things from happening, and that justifies my participation, even though I'll be forced to collude with things I really don't believe in. Yes. Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us, and it would really help the show.

We appreciate it. it and I'll see you next episode.