The Daily Stoic - When Good People Lose Themselves to Tyrants | James Romm (PT. 2)

Episode Date: August 16, 2025

History has a way of looking calmer than it really was. In this PT. 2 episode, Ryan sits down with historian and author James Romm to talk about the messy, dangerous, and often absurd reality of life in ancient Greece and Rome, especially for the philosophers who tried to “advise” the powerful. From Plato’s naïve trips to Syracuse, to Seneca’s complicated dance with Nero, to Marcus Aurelius resisting the pull of corruption, they discuss the timeless tension between access and integrity. 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.

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Listen to Rich Girl Summer now on Audible. Go to audible.com slash rich girl summer. Welcome to the weekend. of the Daily Stoic. Each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something to help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. And then here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers.

We explore at length how these Stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time. Here on the weekend, when you have a little bit more space, when things have slowed down, be sure to take some time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with your journal, and most importantly, to prepare for what the week ahead may bring. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. So I was in Athens a couple months ago now, I guess a month and a half ago now that you're listening to this. And every morning I would try to go for a long run to see something that I knew only pretty much I would be interested in. And my family would be like, well, cool. So, you know, I ran out and saw the Lyceum, which is where

Aristotle taught. I went up to all these different hills around Athens. My little kids wouldn't have to hike all the way up or I wouldn't have to carry them all the way up. I saw that thing that we call Socrates's jail. No, he wasn't actually jailed there. And one of the things I also went to see, which was a decently long run from where I was staying in Placa, which is right under the Acropolis, I went to see Plato's Academy. And I remember looking it up and asked Donald Robertson beforehand. He's like, oh, yeah, it's right over here. He told me where it was. I look it up on Google maps. And I'm like checking the hours. You know, the Lyceum, for instance, you have to pay an entrance fee. You know, the Olympic Stadium, there's an entrance fee. The Acropolis is so busy, there's a fee. It's

timed entry. But Plato's Academy was just like in the middle of a park. It said open 24 hours a day. I said, well, this can't be right. One of the most famous sites in all of the world. It's a direct line from Socrates to Plato to Aristotle, Alexander, to Zeno, Marcus, all the way down to where we are today. Surely this must be in a protected park. It must be an archaeological museum. It must be a world heritage site. No, it's just a park. And it's like a hole in the ground. You run all the way to this park. It's not in a particularly nice area. You get in this park and it's just this kind of hole in the ground. The signs are all like, you know, all the script is off the signs. If you didn't know anything, you'd think it's just a pile of rocks. And I just thought, on the one hand, this is terribly sad.

On the other hand, it's a statement to the embarrassment of riches that Greece has. Like, here they have to choose between this site and that site, and Plato's Academy hasn't been reconstructed. It was funny, a couple weeks later, I was in Philadelphia, and my son, as I said, who's obsessed with Hamilton, we'd go and see Benjamin Franklin's house, which had been torn down, but they'd like built, like a scaffold that they kind of built, it's like a ghost version of the house, so you can imagine what the house looked like, sort of cool sculpture. And I just think, Benjamin Franklin's house is preserved in this way. And yet a few weeks before, I was standing in the place where it all happened, where it all began. And I'm left in my imagination to even conceive of what

Plato's Academy looked like. I was thinking a lot about Plato while I was there, of course, because he's the guy that it all began with in a sense, but also because I just had a really fascinating conversation about Plato with James Rom for the podcast. Let me read you this paragraph from his book Plato and the Tyrant, the fall of Greek's greatest dynasty and the making of a philosophical masterpiece. Did Plato while extolling the good as the source of transcendent joy end up collaborating with evil? Has he sought benevolent ends by unsavory means? How far had he bent the noble ideas of Republic its unwavering commitment to justice when he'd entered a world where injustice prevailed? Was it thinkable, the most troubling question of all,

that he'd written Republic in part to explain his missteps in Syracuse, or to obscure them? I raved in part one of this episode about James Rahm's book, Dying Every Day, which is about Seneca in the Court of Nero. His book, Plato and the Tyrant, is about Plato's similar, complicated, complex, inexplicable, confusing, and yet all too relatable time in the court of another tyrant. Seneca and Plato agree that the philosopher has to be a doer. and the problem is that to be a doer in the world, particularly the political world, means imperfection, means contradictions, means complexity, means making hard decisions. Did Seneca always get it right? No, of course not. That's what dying every day is about. And did Plato always get it right? No. And that's what we talk about in today's episode. The manipulation that charismatic

or demagogic leaders can rely on to bend us to their will. We talk about Seneca's hypocrisy. We talk about Plato's hypocrisy. We talk about their gullibility. Talk about their savior complexes. We talk about what's missing in today's world that was present in ancient Greece and vice versa. And then at the end, I walk him through the painted porch and we pick out some books.

It was a lovely conversation. I am a big fan of Professor Rom. He teaches classics at Bard College. is the author of many books on a Guggenheim Fellowship. He's translated Seneca. His edition Dying Every Day is one of my favorites. His book How to Die, which is a collection of Seneca's thoughts on death is one of my all-time favorites. We have signed copies of that. He signed them while he was here. He also signed Plato and the Tyrant, dying every day, and his translation of Seneca How to Give, all in all, great thinker, great writer, someone who has influenced and

shaped me quite a bit. This is his second time on the podcast. Early in the week was part one. This is part two, but he was back on the podcast in July of 2020. So you can go back and listen to that. You can follow James on Instagram at james.rom and check out his work, jamesrom.com. I think you will really like this interview. Thanks. I read Dying Every Day when I was at American Apparel. I had come back. They'd fired the CEO and they were trying to save the company. And I'm sort of wrestling with more minor version of the same sort of temptations. And I was, it was thinking back to how had this person who was sort of unstable and reckless and made all these terrible decisions, how at every step of the way he managed

to convince the smartest people to give him more and more money. I think it's fascinating that sort of after everything, Trump managed to go to Silicon Valley and convince these people who are primarily a venture capitalist. Your job is, most of the ideas turn out to not be good. Your job is to bet on founder. Like, their job is to read people and see which person is worth giving millions and millions of dollars to and can successfully build and run a company. And Trump manages to convince them that he's not what he obviously is. And then promptly, you know, tanks the economy doing exactly what he said he was going to do.

And these same people are like, we didn't think he would actually do it. Right. And I think that's the timelessness of the seduction, which is like, over here I'm saying and showing you this. And then over here, I'm saying something different and the human capacity to hear which one of those we want to hear. Yeah. And for Plato to have gone back to the court of Dionysius a second time, five years after departing in a, a terrible debacle the first time, and having caused a rift in the royal family that resulted in his protege, Dion, getting exiled. That is really, it's another stunning example

of self-deception. Yeah, the mental gymnastics that humans are capable of will never cease to surprise you. That's right. And Blito says that he devised a test. You know, this is really a testament to his naivete, he devised a test to see whether Dionysius was a suitable student that he was going to tell him exactly how hard it was going to be to become a philosopher. And probably he had in mind years and years of study, starting with geometry and astronomy and higher math and going up to dialectic. And he was going to see how he would react. So he lands in Syracuse for the second time, well, the third time, but the second time under Dionysius the Younger and presents him with this scenario.

And Dionysius says, oh, well, I already know all this stuff because other people have told it to me. And at that point, Plato is sort of done. Yeah. But the fact that after having lived with him five years earlier for months and months and seeing exactly what kind of person he was, you know, a drunk, a libertine. an unstable emotional figure that he still thought, well, you know, maybe he'll pass the test and I'll have a true student on my hands. I imagine Seneca, you know, he's somewhere in one of his villas and the messenger rushes in, you know, we have news that, you know, Nero's tried to kill his mother and Seneca's grabbing

his toga, you know, and rushing over to the palace. I'm going to tell him this time, you know, it's, this has to end. can't do this. Like, I'm really going to confront him. This is it. You know, it's like we're going to have the come to Jesus conversation, which maybe he literally could have, he could have used that expression. That's true. Jesus having, uh, overlapped with Seneca. But, but, you know, we're going to have it. And he's walking there. I'm going to confront him. I'm laying on the line. I'm giving him the ultimatum. And then by the end of it, you know, Nero has talked himself out of it, right? And then soon enough, he does kill his mother and does,

crosses the next red line and crosses the next red line. And the real skill of the Nero's of the of the tyrants of the Trumps, et cetera, is their ability to read those people and to know what they have to say to them and what their levers are and how to manipulate them. That at some level they see through them and they know how to get them in their pocket. Yeah. There's a great phrase that James Comey used in the first Trump administration. He eats your soul in little bites. Oh. That was a description of what he saw going on in those closed rooms where people were, you know, huddled with the decision maker.

Yeah, because didn't he say like the first day they all get called into his office and Trump basically forces them to all say that it was the best. biggest inauguration crowd they've ever seen, that that's really the test is like, can I get you to accept an absurd premise? And if I can, then what you have told me is, I think people think it's about loyalty, but it's more about you have shown me a glimpse into your soul, which is that you want the job more than you care about your principles or notions like the truth and honesty, etc. And if I can get you to make that little compromise or if I can get you to show me that that's who you are, then this is going to go well. Yeah, very true. And Nero had a similar test with the murder of his mother that he put out a story that his mother had been conspiring

against the regime. Yeah. It was an enemy to the regime and had to be eliminated on that grounds. And Seneca wrote the letter in which that was put forward to the Senate. And Tacitus says, no one blamed Nero because they knew he was a rotten apple. But everyone thought Seneca had just gone to the dogs. Yeah. So then later when Seneca says, I'll give you all my money, I want to leave. Nero goes, no, you don't. Like Nero knows. Nero knows, not only has he actually compromised him. And he knows where the bodies are buried, literally. But, but he knows. that Seneca is corruptible and ambitious above anything else. Yeah.

Well, I mean, we should give Seneca at least the credit for saying he wanted to leave. Sure. That was courageous. And then withdrawing from the court into a kind of private, you know, his private chambers pretending to be sick, according to Tassadus, and not going out in public with the emperor. So he at least had enough. self-respect to distance himself, if not remove himself.

It's too little, too late, but it still happened, and it didn't happen for everyone. Yeah, exactly. And I think we'll see the same in our current band of followers. You know, there will be some who will eventually say, you know, I can't go on with this. It's too much. And we'll have to, well, Mike Pence. Yeah. Take the example of Mike Pence.

You know, went along, went along, went along. along. Finally, it was a bridge too far. And of course... Literal insurrection. Yeah, right. That's where I draw the line. Yeah. And now, you know, we hail him as a hero of conscience, or some do. 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

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And this sale ends on 831. The other day after we dropped our kids off at camp, my wife and I realized we had a little more time for you to be at the office. So we took a nice hike through one of my favorite parks, McKinney Falls, here in Austin. And when you live in active life like that, you got to take care of yourself. You got to make sure you're getting nutrients if you want to go on adventures. And Kachava's whole body meal shakes help you do just that. You mix it up with your favorite alternative milk or water and you're ready to go. You can throw in a little fruit or nut butter if you want to turn it in kind of a

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Cheats his way into the Olympics. And, you know, I think some people think it must have been absurd vanity. And I think at some level there is some kind of intuitive understanding of like, what can I get people to accept, you know? And then he does this, doesn't he, he, like, murders his wife? And then he says, like, no, my boyfriend is my wife, right? This is her all along. Thrasia, basically, Seneca's opposite in every way as a Stoic goes, no.

Like, he just refuses to, he refuses to say what is demonstrably untrue. You know, like he just refuses to rubber stamp an outright farce, which, again, doesn't seem like much, but most of the Senate goes along with it. And so it's this kind of moment, how can I get you to slowly compromise yourself so then you are too compromised to challenge me when it matters? Right. You can't pull out because that would be admitting that everything you've done up till now has been a mistake. Yeah, like I interviewed Adam Kinsinger here. And for him to take that stand on the second impeachment, he has to look in the mirror and go, why didn't I, why didn't I do it the first time? It's always hard to admit you or wrong. It's very hard to admit you are wrong when you would have to accept guilt and shame for things that you were then complicit in or responsible for. Yeah.

And that's a, that's a, that's a bridge too far for a lot of people. Yeah. Right. It's very difficult. It's a terrible dynamic that the sunk costs, as we say. Yeah. You know, that you've invested too much to ever admit that you were wrong. Yeah.

Yeah. And so we continue to spiral. Yeah, that's one thing we haven't figured out as a society, which is how do you give people a soft landing? Some Roman strategists, I'm forgetting who it was, said that you should pave your enemy a road of gold behind them to retreat. You know, that like when you force someone into a corner, they fight it. out to the end and that we're so quick to indict and criticize and paint someone as all this or all that, that we make it hard for them to jump ship. Yes.

Or to turn. That's right. And the ancient world had the same problem. You know, you read about changes of regime, changes of government in Athens, you know, flip-flopping between oligarchy and democracy, and each side that took power booted out. the leaders of the other side or even executed them. It was not possible to have a climb down to say, you know, okay, you were wrong, we accept you.

There's no truth and reconciliation commissions. It's all about just destroying the other side as soon as you get power. And so Plato was very aware of that problem in Syracuse and that that was probably what was going to happen and he tried to prevent it in his letters. And it's very, very moving, actually, to see him struggling against the prevailing Greek tendency to destroy your opponents. Yeah, I mean, for Seneca, that decision to go in your own goal, I'll give you all the money back, just let me leave. And then he goes, yeah, it doesn't work that way. You can't leave.

That's the predicament that I think most people who, however aware they should have been earlier and however sooner we would have liked it to happen, what they're wrestling with is, the incentives and the reality of like, no one's looking at Mike Pence and going to get worked out well for him, you know, like he lost his political position. And then he's rejected by his own party. And then it's not like the other parties are, we begrudgingly respect and appreciate the decision, but we're not like coming to our tent, you know? So you're, you essentially make yourself an island and nobody. wants to be an island. Yeah.

And what's interesting about Seneca is that in spite of him, his voluminous writings, he wrote probably, I don't know, we have maybe half a million words preserved, and there are other things that were lost. And even in his letters to Lusilius, when he's already separated himself from Nero, he never uses his pen to critique the regime. Yeah. He only says very obliquely, these letters are like a salve, like a skin cream that I use to alleviate my rash. Yes.

But I can't ever cure it. And that, I think, is an oblique reference to his own pangs of conscience over the collusion of the last 15 years. But he never openly attacks Nero. He never discusses the fire of Rome, which was the... the hugest event of his times, but reflected badly on Nero was thought to be Nero's fault. So he just keeps it out of his writings. Do you think he planned to do it later? Like, because he does write the searing critique of Claudius.

Yes. And he does this safely after Claudius's death. So maybe he planned to. But it's not like the Romans had free speech in that sense. Right. So, you know, today you can write your tell-all memoir and you can piss off the president and maybe they can come after you for some unrelated things, but they can't get you for just saying what's true. Yes. Well, we know that Seneca was dictating a philosophical treatise as he was dying on the orders of Nero, and presumably he had freedom of speech there.

Tassiz doesn't tell us what was in it. He says this is well known to everyone, but unfortunately it wasn't preserved. So maybe there, he said something more direct. We know that Petronius, who went down in the same purge as Seneca, did use his last moments, his last hours, to dictate a list of Nero's sexual crimes to embarrass him and tell the public exactly what had been going on in the palace. My favorite sort of last words related to Nero is who would. There was some soldier or someone who's sentenced to death, and he's looking out over the grave right before he's about to be thrown into it, and he says, even this is not up to code. Yes, that marvelous, hard-nosed old soldier.

We tend to think of these regimes as brutally efficient, but actually, they're mostly their hallmark is their incompetence. Yes, very true. like that's the wrong the fire isn't probably his fault certainly how it was handled was and his construction of the golden house on the ruins his own enormously expensive pleasure palace well the the tension i've been thinking about like seneca embodies this but i guess plato does too is like it is true that somebody does have to be there to mitigate someone someone it is someone's unfortunate and terrible job because we don't singularly decide who our leaders

are. There is always someone whose job is to mitigate, hey, sir, I think that's a bad idea. And they do tend to be men, so I'm not being sexist there, unfortunately. Sir, this is a bad idea. Here's all the problems with what you're about to do. Or, you know, hey, call me if the president is about to, you know, starts talking about nuclear weapons so I can intervene. Right? You do. need that person and that to get to that place you have to make some compromises and not always say what you think right like at some level for mike pence to be where he was on january 6th mike pence had to degrade and compromise himself in all those other ways right yeah and so that does need to happen that is true and yet you're probably not that person right right so

So like the tension or the struggle, the ego, I guess it's ego that makes us think that we're that person, right? The ego says, okay, yes, I'm fundamentally good inside and I'm saving myself for some moment of significance. And so that's why I'm doing all this stuff that runs contrary to what I actually believe. And it's all leading up to this big historical moment. And it's like, no, chances are you should probably just tell your coworkers that you shouldn't be doing this. You know, like, chances are you should just speak up now, not save it for some future grand moment. And I think that's where Plato and Seneca and Cicero, all these great philosophers get themselves into trouble, which is that instead of doing and saying

what was obviously right in the moment, they were telling themselves it was more important that they saved themselves for some later moment. Well, Plato, I think, was pretty forthright. I He does say that he sugar-coded it a bit when talking to Dionysius, telling him he needs to sober up because Dionysius was a bad drinker, and he needs to reform his lifestyle. He needs to find friends who are reliable because they're devoted to moral virtue, not because they're getting free food and handouts from the regime. But just go back. I mean, it's this tension between access and integrity. And integrity. Yes. And I got to preserve my access, even though I'm slowly compromising my integrity. That's the tension. Yeah. Obviously, they all failed that test at some level. Yeah. Yeah. Of course, what's missing from our society, which is present in both Greek and Roman picture, is that a,

philosopher who's widely respected, as both Plato and Seneca were, has automatic access because the ruler needs that legitimacy. He needs a philosopher, an esteemed philosopher at his court in order to appear to be an enlightened person. Yeah. Yeah. We have lost that. Also, like, for them, politely declining is not so much an option, right?

The specter of death and real danger, you know, Now, I don't want to lose my access. It's like, okay, so you don't get reelected, and then you go make millions of dollars as a lobbyist or a consultant. Like, you're not actually, the downside is so much lower in today's political environment. Mm-hmm. Right. So it is much, it's even more about ego than the sort of calculated, you know, balance between all the different factors. Mm-hmm.

Another element that we haven't talked about is the, um, the coterie of flattery. The role of flattery in an imperial court. Plato talks about this in his letter to Dionysius. He says, I've become aware that a person of great wealth and power will tend to attract flatterers and toadies. Yeah. And that will inevitably corrupt his regime. Yeah. And Dionysius surrounded himself with such people.

There was even a Greek term for them, the Dionysio flatterers. Wow. That they were kind of a motley crew of toadies and suckups. And there's stories told about them that just blow the mind as to how low people were willing to go. Some of them, because Dionysius was near-sighted and apparently felt, you know, diminished by that, they would pretend to be blind. And they'd grope around at the table for their food so that he would have to take their hand and put it to their place. He could feel good about him?

So he would feel better about himself, exactly. See, I'm a good person. I help blind people. Yeah, and they have it worse than I do, so I'm not really suffering so badly. Wow. Yeah. I mean, that's just so indicative. Probably it's apocryphal.

Sure. But it still points to the dynamic that the desire to inflate the ego of the tyrant and the rewards that you get for doing it was a huge part of the composition of these courts. Well, the narcissism required to think I deserve to be the most powerful person is the sort of secret weapon and then also the inevitable undoing of those people and most leaders, right? Because first off, if you don't think you deserve to be the king or the president or the, you know, richest person, you're probably not going to arbitrarily find yourself in that position. It's like it's the thing that draws you to go do the things that would put you in that position. And then, how are you, once you're there, though, how are you going to get the information that you need to maintain

even a tenuous connection to reality so you don't blow it all up? I mean, like, that's what's so striking about, you know, Biden's debate appearance is that up until it happened. And then even after, like, he seemed to think that it would go well and that it did go well. Because who is going to tell the most powerful person in the world that they're no longer or seemingly appear to be no longer qualified to be that person. You don't do that and keep that job. Like I found that with a much less but similar personality type. I've worked with similar personality types who are obviously much less powerful. But it's effectively a kamikaze mission. Like you are to deliver the truth that they desperately need to hear, you are.

destroying yourself. Because if they hear it, then their power goes away. And if they don't like your message, you go away. And so very few people are going to tell them what they need to hear. Nobody told Putin that invading Ukraine would be a bad idea, you know, even though it's a historical axiom that you don't invade Russia in the winter, which he does. You know, he believes Ukraine is part of Russia. It's like the one military strategy we know is that that is going to bog you down and it's going to be a disaster, even if it somehow eke out some victory, it's just not going to go well. Who can tell him that? Because it's a one-way ticket to the gulag. Well, the fact that you can compare those two things is very disturbing as to what the presidency has

become in this country. The fact that there wasn't an effort to deter Biden from running for a second term. And even after his debate wasn't enough of an effort in his inner circle to get him out of the race, I mean, it astonishes me. Yeah. It truly astonishes me and deeply indites our whole political system. I think the Democrats, I mean, we don't want to get too much into current politics, but the Democrats really can't move forward as a party until they acknowledge the failings of that moment. And it's only just. The reckoning has barely even begun. Yeah, and it's obviously there's no moral equivalency there.

You know, deciding to run for a second term when you are increasingly old is not the same as invading Ukraine. But the timelessness is emperor, president, CEO, local mayor that ceases to be able to be criticized or get honest feedback or information. that is just a timeless part of the human experience, that we create the bubble that prevents the information that we desperately need from getting in. Yeah, yeah. And you hear a lot of commentators, people that I listen to asking,

especially about current Congress, you know, is this job so irreplaceable? Yeah. Couldn't you do well going back? to your law firm or writing a book or going on the lecture circuit, is it so addictive that you can't bear the thought of losing your job? It's astonishing. But what's interesting, and this is where I think it does, it's, this all seems like,

oh, this only pertains to politics or whatever, but it's like how many major figures in media turned out to be like Me Too style monsters that these people knew socially at parties, you know, that these people had run-ins with, you know, whether we're talking about Roger Ailes or Bill O'Reilly or Harvey Weinstein, these people had meetings with those people, or these people had power and could have said something or done something, and they didn't. Because that's what we do. We go, it's somebody else's job to say something. Or they say, I'm not in a position yet.

We do what Seneca does. is like, I got to wait or I got to, if I do it right now, you know, we just, we come up with reasons to not do what obviously needs to be done or obviously needs to be said. And then it goes on and on. And then we're, we're shocked and appalled when it all comes out. And then we're very quick to ask why other people in other industries didn't do something sooner about their own version of this same thing. There's a wonderful story in Herodotus to turn things back to the ancient world. The portrait Herodotus paints of Cambyses, the emperor of Persia, is really the first study of

tyrants in their courts in the Greek canon, about 100 years before the events of my Plato book, but it's very much a forerunner. And Cambyses has gone mad. He's become paranoid and murderous. And he's gotten his vizier, a man named Pryxaspe's, to do some of his dirty work, including killing his brother to prevent him from taking the throne. And after Camp Bisey's death, a usurper comes to power who pretends to be the dead brother and manages to convince people that he's legitimate. And Pryxaspe is the only one who knows the truth because he did it. Because he did the murder.

and he's gone, you know, really far along with the rulers, you know, Cambyses and then his successor. But he finally can't go the last step when the Persians tell him he's got to go up on this tall tower and announce to all the Persians that this is the legitimate ruler. He climbs the tower and instead says, this is a phony. I killed the real successor and you're being ruled by. a fake, and then leaps to his death. Wow. So in the end, he's able to tell the truth, but only at the cost of his own life.

That's the line, right? We talked about this earlier. Like, everyone has the line. It's usually much later than you want it to be. Mm-hmm. Yes. Being asked to murder the King's brothers, not the line. Being able to lie about it years later, that's the line.

Yeah. But it's still immensely courageous. You know, it was courageous for Seneca to ultimately turn on Nero. It was probably courageous even for him to subtly criticize Nero in his plays, you know? And certainly it was courageous how he went out, but that doesn't, it doesn't excuse it, but it does remind us of the infinite complexity of human beings. I'm glad you mentioned the plays because that's a feature of Seneca that doesn't get. a lot of attention. And I think you're right that he used them to express obliquely some of his misgivings and his attacks of conscience. And especially the play Thaises, which is a study of autocratic cruelty

and sadism. Yes. And it's directed at a man who's portrayed as a stoic philosopher. Yeah. And that play is, to my mind, autobiographical. Totally. Yeah. And. And, and And the fact that we don't know whether the plays were put on, we don't even know if they were circulated. There are some who've even argued that Plato, that Seneca didn't write them because there's no evidence in his prose works that he wrote tragedies. He never talks about it. But to my mind, they're somewhat like the Diary of Marcus Aurelius.

They're a personal expression of inner anguish that he may have written mostly just for his own self. And he was taking his life in his hands by writing them. You know, there's not some clear, like, legal line when you're dealing with Nero that says, if you say this, I'll kill you, but if you say it this way, I won't. I mean, he credit, like, the emperors sometimes, there were people who were sent to death for working on biographies of Brutus. Yes.

So even just to talk about someone who generations previous had killed an emperor was enough to get you on the wrong side of the current emperor. So for Seneca to even be fooling with some of this would have been immensely dangerous. That's right. You hear under Tiberius that people who wrote tragedies with anti-monarchical themes got into terrible trouble. Yeah.

Yeah. I just ran with my buddy on Town Lake Trail here in Austin, did 10 miles in roughly 7. 70 minutes. And then I ran with his brother, his twin brother. This is my best friends from middle school. I ran with his twin brother when I was in Greece. He was there with his wife's family. We ran outside Olympia. And then in between these two runs, I ran the original marathon. I ran from marathon to Athens. And you know what shoes I used? I used today's sponsor, Hoka. They actually have a new shoe, the Rocket X3, which is a race day shoe that's engineered

for speed when every second counts. The Rocket X3 is built to meet the demands of race day. It's lightweight. It's responsive. It's tuned for speed. And it's got this carbon plate in there that enhances stability. And it's got the high rebound Piba foam that cushions you against the road. It's grippy rubber outsole helps ensure a secure connection to the road.

And it helps runners stay fast and focused from start to finish. I think you'll really like these shoes. The carbon fiber plate, seriously, it's something you kind of got to feel to believe, like you go, how could a shoe really make that big of a difference, especially if you've been running a long time, and then you feel the sort of spring of that carbon fiber,

and it is crazy. Try the Rocket X3 for yourself at hoaget.com, and you can check out this cool video I did about the Marathon run, which Hoket is sponsored. I'll link to that in description, or you can just go to dailystilic.com slash marathon. There's a line about George Washington that the more you read about him, the more you like him. And Seneca, it's kind of the opposite.

And then there's some level where you cross over to the other side and it's just so complex. You just decide, I'm going to like the things I like and not think about the things I don't like so much. Just probably what he was doing. Exactly so. Yeah. Yeah. He had aspirations. he doesn't ever claim to be a sage to have attained some kind of high plane of of stoic virtue he says he's a you know he's a prophet his gains he's he's on the road yeah even in his letters to lucilius when he's in his 60s he's still on the road to virtue and which is also what like a pastor who's just been caught having extramarital affairs would say

You know, like, I too sin. You know, and it's like, okay, but, you know, it's a brilliant device also. Even though it's true and relatable, we're all on the road. It's also the perfect manipulative thing to say to excuse your abhorrent behavior. Yes. Right. So there are many ways to look at these people, both Plato and Seneca. And I don't mean my books in any way to be a take down of either of them.

No. They're just complex. Yes. And they present themselves one way in their writings, or in Plato's case, they present philosophy one way in his dialogues, and the life lived is much more complex. Yeah, Seneca's thing about it's okay to be wealthy as a philosopher provided your money is not stained in blood. Mm-hmm. Come on. Or provided that you don't regard it as an essential to your happiness.

Yes. But I'm just saying you became rich in neuroservice. What is a better example of money stained in blood? Like, what is there any more extreme example? Like, I can't think of one. Also, you're writing this on your estate tended by slaves. Right. You know, there's something, again, we're all flawed individuals.

And then there is some level where hypocrisy is so extreme that it becomes disqualifying across the board. And he flirts with that. He flirts with that. Yes, I agree. It would be easy to reject him. Yes. If one were inclined to do so. And I don't ever do that.

I still think he's an admirable figure, but deeply flawed and deeply complex. As we wrap up, how one of the things you wrestled with in the book, and I think Tacitus did to, you know, Seneca's death is, in some ways, the perfect embodiment of Stoic philosophy. The goons come to kill him. He faces it bravely. He faces it honorably and goes to the end like a Stoke philosopher, like his hero, Cato did. But as always with Seneca, there is this, is it a performance? You know, is there something false or there's always the one eye to how this is going to be seen by other people. That's right. That you don't get in Marcus Aurelius. You don't, you get Marcus Aurelius. You don't, you get Marcus Reelius. You don't, you get Marcus Reelius. his last words and you don't get the sense that he is doing that to put a period on the end of meditations. That's right. And Seneca has an audience as he's dying. He has a circle of friends around him to whom he's addressing himself, speechifying, and dictating his last treatise. So yes, he was in the public eye right up to the end. And Tacitus says he'd been preparing for this moment. But you take that to mean not preparing for it as in we all have to face our death some way.

It's like, hey, no, every firework show needs a grand finale. Yes, and he had stored up a drink of hemlock to die like Socrates. He must have anticipated, you know, the end is coming and this is how I want to go. Unfortunately, it had gone bad or something. It had lost his potency. And so it didn't finish him off. You had to go to another method. He had to go to Plan C.

Well, let's go check out some books. All right. Well, thank you. It's been a wonderful conversation. This is my bookstore. Oh, it's your book. Yeah. Okay.

And we have a lot of your books, obviously, is what I know. Peyton, do we have that Joan Didian book, notes to John's? Yes. Do you know where it is? Yeah. Can you grab me one? Yes. I think you told me about this book over here, which I love Travels with Herodotus.

I think you mentioned it in the intro of your Herodotus book. Maybe I did, I forgot. But I loved it. Oh, great. I thought it was very good. And now there's one called Travels with Epicurious. Yeah, have you read this? No, I'd have not.

We're going to Greece this summer, but you might like it. Oh, really? What parts are you going to? We're doing Athens, and then we're doing a whole road trip. My son's obsessed with Greek history, and so we're doing the Olympic sites, we're doing Ithaca, going to Thermopylae, where else we're going. I don't know, it's like a whole road trip, and then we're going to spend some time at the beach after. Nice. Yeah, anywhere we should go?

Well, a site that many tourists miss, but it's really impressive. Messini, not mycini, but Messini, MESS. It's on the west coast of the Peloponnese, or not the coast, but the west part of the Peloponnese, like south of Olympia. Yeah. And it's a Hellenistic city. It's incredibly well-preserved. Okay. All right.

I'm going to try to do, my goal is to do the, I'm going to run from Marathon to Athens. Are you serious? Yeah, I'm going to. Do the marathon run? Yeah, I'm going to do the marathon. Oh, that's marvelous. Yeah. Uh-huh.

Is there a path that connects the two? Oh, this is the Joan Didien book. Oh, wow. So it's like each one just has January 5th, 2000. It's remarkable as notes, but then it's the fine line, like we're talking about with meditations. It's a fine line between how much of it had an eye towards publication and how much of it didn't.

But then also, who would type up, who would type up the notes after the therapy? Wouldn't you just tell your spouse about it? Yeah. You know, so I could go like this. Wow, that means for me to keep. Yes, this is the, I pick out some books I think you would like. Oh, I thank you.

But have you heard the last of the wine? Oh, I've always wanted to read that. That's. I had not ever read it, and I was upset that no one in my life told me that it existed, honestly. But I thought it was beautiful. You want this one too? Sure, yeah, I'd be happy.

Yeah, my favorite part. At the end, you know, there's this wrestler named Plato that enters their circle. Uh-huh, that's great. A wrestler. Yeah, I was asked about his wrestling at a book event I did with Mary Beard and I was embarrassed that I didn't know the story of his wrestling and so I had to say where where is that now I know because it was sent to me

later that's funny yeah no it was it was really good I didn't know about this one either yeah which ends ends with Seneca does it yeah so the last part is so obviously Augustus has died right but the last it's it's a letter It's a book of letters and reports. But so the last letter is a letter from someone to Seneca. Maybe 55, so that's just when Nero came to power. So I thought this line.

He says, I am only grateful to you for remembering me and for overlooking the fact that I did not speak out on your behalf during the unfortunate time that you were forced to spend on the barren waste of Corsica. You have understood better than most, I suspect, that a poor physician without worldly power or even a hundred like them, could have prevailed against the will of one so erratic as our late Emperor Claudius. So it's the same, it's like, I knew I should say something, I wanted to say something, and I couldn't, but I, obviously you understand.

My heart was in the right place. Yes, and on some level Seneca, although it's fictional, could understand, because I'm sure there were so many people that he in turn did not speak out for because he was saving his capital with near. Yeah. Is that your cat? This is, yes. This is one of the cat. We have two cats in the bookstore. Oh, I have a black cat also.

They're marvelous. Yes, your beauty. Black cats have a very distinctive character. They're more curious and I think they're smarter. Why do you think that is? I don't know. There's something about the correlation with the coat. They get very spoiled.

But then sometimes we think they're happy and then every once in someone will come in with a stroller and the cat will jump in the bottom of the stroller and try to sneak. They could get away. Yeah, exactly. Someone came back with the cat in time because they actually did get away. Anne Rowe wrote a biography of Pontchus Pylep. Really?

And it's fascinating. Oh, here it is. Obviously, there's not more historical basis for it because he's sort of in an new one. So it's mostly kind of like a literary biography. But I just... For the Samuel Johnson Prize. Wow. It's one of my favorite books that I've ever read.

Wow. I mean, his boss is Tiberius. And so, you know, she's trying to give this sense of what it would have been like to be a sort of periphery member of that administration. Uh-huh. And to have someone who's causing trouble for you, as Jesus was, and thinking, well, I don't really care, but this guy doesn't want disruption.

And so how do I tamp this down? It's a fascinating book about, yeah, how do you have a job inside of corrupt, dysfunctional, brutal administration. Wow, that sounds like a great one. Yeah, I really liked it. Okay. Will you sign these? Yep, absolutely.

What are you going to do next? Have you thought about your next book? Well, I actually have a project on the Stoics with Norton that we'll just put together a lot of the more important ancient texts and with annotations and introductions, kind of an anthology. So, but... Like of, so Marcus, Seneca, Epictetus, and then the others, too? And some of the minor figures, yeah.

Interesting. Yeah. You know, they're series, the annotated series, Norton annotated. They've done, like, Ulysses Grant, Virginia Woolf. No. They've done, like, just... Oh, I'd like to do Ulysses. 1,001 nights.

Okay. They're big, you know, high gloss, lots of illustrations and so on. Well, I do love annotated. I just read an annotated 100th anniversary edition of the Great Gatsby, which is really good. Oh, yeah. And then, you know, Robin Waterfield has an annotated edition of Meditations, which is really good, too. Yes, his is very good. I agree.

So it'll be, like, one, it'll be a big book, or it would be more like these smaller ones that? They're big hardcover books. They're like this size. Okay. That's fun. Yeah. But as to what I'll write as an author, I don't know. I've sort of told all the best stories that I know in ancient history,

or the ones that interest me the most. And I might move on to historical fiction maybe or some other genre. That would be cool. Yeah. Then you'll like glass of the wine. Maybe it'll inspire something. Well, Mary Annulf does inspire me. I just read Fire from Heaven for the first time this semester.

She has another one that people told me I need to read. I forget what it's called. Another famous one. Well, there's one that concerns the Plato story. What is it called? The Mask of Apollo. Okay. Mask of Apollo tells the same story of Plato and the Tyrant.

Interesting. And makes Gion a very heroic figure. Huh. whereas I tend to see him more. So you said you did an event with Mary Beard. She seems to not like the Stoics at all. Is that right? Yeah.

Well, she doesn't like Plato. She made that clear. She called him, what did she call it? A bad apple or something? No, what was it? So who does she like? I don't know. Now into the Roman emperors, so obviously

she doesn't need to write about people that she admires. Huh, I wonder why that is. So how did you end up in this part of the world, This is a place. Well, we moved, we moved to Austin and we liked it. And then we just decided if we're gonna live in Texas, we should really live in Texas. So we have like a little ranch out here that we live on.

I see. And stage two? Yeah, yeah. All of them that you're willing to do. Well, now my place not go four o'clock. I got plenty of time. We, um, what's the best place just under my name? Yeah, anywhere, yeah.

We sell a lot of this book, because I've been raving about it for a long time. Oh, that's so great. That's so great. And I also love the, the con, contrast here let me grab letters of a stoic um of what letters of a stoke yeah the center but the contrast between what seneca wants you to think he looks like and what he actually looks like yeah right i know they chained and that was discovered fairly recently right um in the

19th century late 19th century yeah yeah yeah got away with it for a while yeah yeah i saw that bust in Berlin last year yeah where was I was in Ireland and I went into the like the Irish like the state building or whatever and they had a huge painting of Seneca that I was very surprised to see oh yeah they had in the Dublin Castle they had they had the death of Seneca is that right yeah I was which I was not expecting whose version of it I don't remember But it was a, you know, like, probably not the original, but maybe it was a British export. Because there's a lot of Renaissance canvases.

Are you going to do any more for the Princeton collection? I do have another one coming out, yeah, How to Live. Oh. They liked the way that How to Die has succeeded. Yes. It's the best-selling one in the whole series. Well, it's got the best title. It's certainly the most arresting title.

The most arresting title. And he's probably the best of the best. writer of them? I think so. I mean, some of the volumes that they've done are kind of hokey, you know, how to drink. Yes. And look, if it wasn't a bunch of poetry, it might have sold that. Like, how to be content is good, but then you have to read a bunch of forest poems, which I found enjoyable, but your average person is probably not going to read. Yeah. Yeah, and also you got the problem that poetry, you lose so much in translation. Yes. My favorite one in the series, other than How to Die, is the How to Be a Leader one of Plutarch,

which we have right there. Just because he was so, that's obviously what Flutarch was trying to teach. He was a biographer, but not in the modern sense of being a biographer, which is like, let me get all the dates and places right. You know, probably wrong as much as he's right, but it's about the sort of more. lesson that you're supposed to take. Right. Yes, he's very much a moralist and also deeply interested in political life. Well, yeah, and actually probably a better lesson than Plato that it is possible to be a writer and in the arena without morally compromising yourself so

embarrassingly. That's right. Of course, he had the advantage of living in a backwater and not having to deal with the central problems of a administration. Yes. So. But maybe that's the point. And Seneca does say something about that, right? That if sort of national politics are corrupt, then you can work locally.

If local politics are corrupt, you can write. You know, that you should find the place where you can contribute. I'm not familiar with that passage, but that sounds like something you would say. Well, of course, he has that dialogue about Oteum, about retirement from politics. there he really can be accused of hypocrisy, that he's urging other people to go into private life and stay out of politics even while he's at the center of it. 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,

and I'll see you next episode. You know, You know,