The Why Files: Operation Podcast - The Basement: Alex Petkas | Julius Caesar's Final 24 Hours

Episode Date: September 28, 2026

-Get 25% Off Cowboy Colostrum with code WHYFILES at https://cowboycolostrum.com/whyfiles -Get 40% off your first Hungryroot delivery and free veggies for life at https://www.hungryroot.com/basement. Explore my Hungryroot Digital Cookbook "Gertie's Hump Day Recipes" at https://hungryroot.com/THEBASEMENT Dr. Alex Petkas spent years learning dead languages so he could tell you what the greatest men who ever lived were actually like. This one goes everywhere — a library buried by Vesuvius, a coup that broke Sparta, philosophers who got way too close to power, and why Julius Caesar wept in front of a statue. There are hundreds of scrolls under that villa that no living person has read. That's about to change. PETKAS LINKS Website: https://costofglory.com Join: https://theclassicalsociety.com/ Podcast: Cost of Glory YouTube: @costofglory X: @costofglory Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today I'm talking with Alex Pekas. He has a PhD in classics from Princeton, and he failed history in high school. He was busy being the top monk on his EverQuest server. Top monk on Everquest. I was once a level 60 dominatrix on a Turkish gambling server. I respect the grind. Now he hosts Cost of Glory,

where he retells the lives of Plutarch's heroes. He sold the family business to go all in. Today, we're covering out Plato got played by a tyrant in Sicily, a coup in ancient thieves pulled off by men and dresses. Men and dresses pulled off a coup. did I ever tell your story when Uncle Sal tried that at Thanksgiving? We referred to it as the incident and got him a lawyer. And the Roman Library of Volcano Buried 2,000 years ago.

AI just read one of its scrolls start to finish. Alex helped produce the documentary about it with Gridley Scott's Company. And the night before Caesar was murdered, he asked the dinner table what the best way to die would be. One of his killers was sitting right there. That one gave me chills. Yeah, this one time. Would you please let me get...

It's the middle of the night. Will you let me... Sorry, sorry. I forgot you get chills over a guy. Who do you need to clock his own murder is sitting right there? Yeah, but you. After our conversation, I'll come back and break down the talk. Let's go down to the basement. Thank you for being here, sir. Yeah.

Alex Fetcher's cost of glory. I love your podcast. I'm obsessed with it. Which is why today's going to be, it's going to be hectic. So there's going to be a lot of rifling through papers. it's so much to cover. I'm hoping you'll come back and we can drill down to specific stories.

Like, I've got Catalan here for 18 minutes. That's not fair. So we're just going to have to muscle through it. Yeah. What I'd like to start with. Honored, by the way. Stop. I love your work.

Get out of here. I won't accept it. I appreciate that, thank you. It was a lot of luck in accident. I was a little afraid because I know you do really good research and look at that. stack of papers. Why afraid? I've never heard anyone's feelings. I've only made six grown men cry. That's not fair. Okay. Well, are you feeling emotionally open today? I am feeling quite emotionally

open. Okay. Okay. I noticed the posture change when I ask. Interesting. Um, I want to learn about you, but I pride myself on being novel and asking questions and that the host, that the guests, doesn't expect, that are fun for you, that people won't hear on the circuit because everybody does the circuit. But before we do that, just maybe a five-minute retelling of Caesar and the statue. Yeah, this is one of my favorite episodes, and I think that people don't read it right. They don't interpret it the way that I do, at least. So famous story, people might have heard of it. Julius Caesar is 32. He's a quester in Spain, chief of staff for some, you know, provincial governor.

Paper, paper, for sure. Yeah, you know, the document guy, the gopher. And he is, you know, they're doing the whole Assizes tour, probably, you know, they're in Cadiz or Cadiz in Spain, which is an old Phoenician city. And there's a temple there that was probably a temple to Melkart, but they converted it to a temple to Hercules. Hercules is Melchart. And in this temple, as one does, they've put a lot of art,

statues and paintings, and there's a statue. Caesar's going through there with his friends. It's kind of like a museum, and they're kind of appreciating the art, maybe toss a little incense on the pyre. And his friends at some point, they've kind of moving along from statue to statue. they look back and they see Caesar is not with them. He's standing in front of a statue of Alexander the Great. And they're like, Caesar, are you coming? Wait a sec. Are you crying? And he looks at them. And sure

enough, he is, he's got tears in his eyes. And he says, do you not think it is a matter for weeping that when Alexander was my age, he was king of so many peoples. And yet I have done nothing worthy of renown. And that moment for me, a lot of people look at that and they're like, look at this just megalomaniac. No. Disagree.

I disagree. I think you don't, there's two moments where Caesar cries. You know, that's one of them and the other is when he's presented with the head of Pompey the Great. And, but I, so he's not a big crier. But I think that to get a man like that to cry, It's not that he's a kind of spoiled child, sad that he doesn't have his toy that he thinks he deserves.

It's about this sudden realization of who he is and almost like, I mean, kind of controversial to say it's like who he's called to be, you know? What he sees in Alexander is a kind of, it's convicting. It's like, okay, he's a pretty flashy. He's like pretty well known around Rome, but he hasn't accomplished a whole lot compared to Alexander for sure. He's just a quester. He's just chief of staff. And he's realizing the path that lies before him.

This is like a middle-aged crisis. Yeah, yeah. And I have to get serious now. And Aristotle has a word for that emotion. zeal zealos which we usually translate as emulation the Greek word is zealos

in this is in the rhetoric where he has his catalog of the basic emotions of politics I think there's 13 of them anger and friendship and pity but zealos is one of them and it's the pain you feel when you see present in someone who's like you

by nature things good and honorable, which you yourself are capable of attaining. So it's a kind of sting. And it's not envy. It's different from envy. Aristotle says, I think he's right. Envy is a different emotion. It's the pain you feel when you see somebody succeeding that makes you want to see them fail, suffer. Yes. It's the tall poppy emotion. And it's not productive. It's basically a form of Alice. But, and it's characteristic of bad men in Aristotle's book, but zeal is characteristic of Goodman of the youth. You can, you can have, I mean, it can be a counterproductive emotion if it leads you to the wrong thing, but it's basically the emotion of aspiration. And it hurts.

And I think that's really instructive for thinking about, like, how you find who you are. You know, you discover who you're supposed to be, not by gazing at your navel or, like, trying to, like, listen to these whispers of your soul necessarily. That can be important. But fundamentally, I think, we're designed such that we learn who we are by focusing intently on other people. Mimesis. Mimesis, yes, exactly. And, you know, being a student of Plato, he's gone. through the whole philosophy of my misis which you see in the Republic it's it's

kind of this ordering principle of the universe the higher the lower imitates the higher the forms up here and I think that that's that's how Plato saw the world structured that's how I think Aristotle sees the world structure the prime mover is is is is the cause of everything in the universe but it's it's a final cause if you know Aristotle's causality it's it's it's not that there God, if you want to call the prime mover God, it's not that he's pushing, it's that he's pulling, you know? Yes.

Because everything kind of imitates that, it's drawn toward it. So, deep stuff, I think. I remember you saying that you were going through a rough patch when you were 17, there were two books on the shelf, it was Marcus Aurelius, and then I think it was like ways to influence people? Yeah, it was a seven habits. Seven habits. Seven habits.

What was going on with you? Yeah, I, uh, I decided at one point that I needed to kind of get my act together. You know, there was a girl. She was too good for me. And I realized. I married that girl. I could fix that.

Yeah. You had a statue moment. Yeah. I think so. I had a kind of statue moment. Like, I want to be like, at the very least, like the men described in this book or like a Marcus Aurelius or like somebody of character. So meditations is what you grabbed?

I did grab meditations. I can't say that I got that far. I won't, but I did for some reason, as a 17-year-old who was not used to reading a lot of ancients, well, I took Latin, but it was, again, the sleeping through the class thing. It was just a seven habits, self-help book where, you know, Covey describes, I think he tells stories,

I think he tells stories in the course of this book, the kinds of people that take up these habits. And, you know, later I realized that a lot of the wisdom of self-help books is stuff that you can pluck right out of Stoic philosophy or platonic philosophy or the Bible, but kind of package in a way. I keep meditations and the Bible on my nightstand at all times and a sci-fi book. Yeah. Mixing this since my morning coffee is about as simple as habits get.

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Another great classic of power and virtue. What did you take for meditations that turned you around? I think that the idea that things, that more is in your control than you think, it's up to you and that's what you should put your focus on rather than things that are outside your power like whether or not I end up getting this girl didn't and that was good

but you know I can definitely become the sort of man who's worthy of you know a girlfriend that was that was one of my primary concerns as a 16, 17-year-old, it was really empowering. And I started exercising, I started dieting, and I lost a lot of weight. And, you know, started trying to, like, socialize with people instead of keeping myself and sleeping and, you know, reading my sci-fi books.

Big move. It was huge. It was huge. And I had also kind of gravitated toward some old friends of mine from middle school and, you know, bless them. They were getting into the things that kids get into in high school, drugs and stuff. And I dabbled. And I at some point felt like this, like, you know, cool, cool people are doing this.

They're going to parties. I mean, I think going to parties and drinking would probably be better than what a lot of kids are doing in high school now. Yeah. Well, that's another discussion. But I don't know. I kind of, I got obsessive. It was like experimenting with a lot of substances. That was another kind of moment for me

where I realized I needed real wisdom. And I wasn't going to get it from just talking to my peers. How do you make the jump from substances to seeking wisdom? I mean, were you using drugs to explore consciousness? Or were you just smoking weed with the guys? Yeah, I felt like I was looking, for answers actually funny enough I think that that's probably not so uncommon no I mean you know ayahuasca clinics today it's and there's there's decent reasons for that I was

you know going on forums on the internet and hearing about people's transformative experiences and I had this transformative experience with this very legal substance morning glory seeds which is basically like a LSD kind of really um Maybe people shouldn't know that. No, morning glory seats don't work. Anyway, I had like a psychedelic experience and then it like turned really bad. And I realized the answer that I got from

this kind of mild psychedelic experience was this is not where the answers are. Go to church. Wow. Yeah. I've been raised in Greek Orthodox Church and hadn't taken it all that seriously. But it seemed very clear to me that that was a source of wisdom, that there was a tradition there, that there was like good counsel.

It was like a stable rock for me that I, you know, as I'm reading self-help books and stoicism, I'm also like looking back at this tradition I grew up in. I'm like, oh, this is what this is for. So I think you know you have to you have to suffer a little bit sometimes before you can realize how much you need Wisdom good counsel I think that's true So you finally Make your way to college you still play jazz guitar? I haven't What? In a while I still play the guitar okay You know I don't have people to play with and it's hard

And I didn't have people to play with and it's hard and I didn't get like super good that I could kind of drop it for many many years during grad school and come back to it. You're a music major, yeah? I was a music major for a while. Yeah, I studied, I got really into music theory. I thought if I just studied music, practice the guitar, maybe I'd become a rock star someday or something, and really enjoyed it.

what ended up kind of tanking my jazz guitar career was ancient Greek. Yeah, what the hell is Attic Greek? Yeah, that was what I was wondering when I was looking at it on the course catalog. Did you sign up by accident? It was the only Greek course they taught. Well, I mean, why did you want a Greek course? Well, I had gotten interested in the history of the early church. Okay.

So, you know, like, because I had, I was going, I was back at church, you know, the Orthodox church locally, and then I had all these friends who were, like, Presbyterians, like, and you know, the Presbyterians are, they have, like, a pretty serious intellectual tradition. They were, like, really into arguments and proving the five points, the tulip of Calvinism. And, like, what do I really, like, what are my arguments for why I am in this tradition and not theirs. And so that kind of drove my interest in church history going back to like, well, what was it from the beginning? Reading the Bible more seriously and then looking at kind of these things that they would, you know, some of my Protestant friends, and not just Calvinist, but

like evangelicals would question. Like, why do you need the bishops and the liturgy and all this stuff? And so. But even your dad's interest in Byzantium plays in here as well. Yeah, definitely like I knew where to go start looking. Like picking books on. off of his shelf and Yaroslav Pelican and Brunsomen and, you know, some great, great books have been written about the Byzantine church, the early church. I got into that stuff. And I kind of thought also, maybe I'll spend a year or two doing youth ministry or something while I'm figuring out what's next after college.

Well, I better learn Greek. I was, you know, I'm like fourth generation and only like part Greek. And I've been surrounded by it and never knew hardly a word of it. Like, well, why don't I learn some Greek on the side as I'm doing my jazz guitar thing or whatever? And I just, that was all they had.

Attic Greek. So for people who don't know, what is Attic Greek? Yes, Attic Greek, it's funny that they called it that in the course catalog because it's so kind of niche. Why don't you just call it ancient Greek? But wasn't a specific Athenian dialect? So the standard way you teach ancient Greek. There's a lot of phases of the Greek language.

And I think a lot of people don't realize. Modern Greek is way closer to Attic Greek than modern English is to Middle English. Or it's like comparable. It's one of the, it's the longest continually continually documented living languages in the West. And it, because, I think to a large extent, because of the church, because of the Bible,

the Bible is basically written in ancient Greek. There's a lot of continuity. But added Greek is essentially the language of like Plato and Thucydides and Aristotle and high, and Greek tragedy too. And they usually start with that because that became, the sort of canonical language. It became the like standard official dialect of Greek in the Roman Empire later and in the Hellenistic period.

I mean, the Bible is, they call it Koine Greek, but it's like a simple register of standard Attic Greek. It's not that different. And like if you learn Attic Greek, then you can read, you know, Plutarch, you could read the New Testament. But hold on, Attic Greek is very, very, You got three genders. Words are different based on singular, plural, or dual.

Inflectionism. This is a hard thing to just jump into. But you're just saying like, yeah, I did this. You learned out of Greek? I got obsessed. I was the kid in the music theory class who was always asking these like rescher shay questions about, you know, why parallel fifths?

Why don't we do that? Like, Bach counterpoint. I found it fascinating. I do too. learning the system and the math of music. That was what was really interesting about jazz. There's this great book that I poured over, I think it's called the jazz language.

But so I, like, when I started taking out of Greek, I was like, oh, another system, another abstract system I can drill into. And it seems to promise, sort of vaguely promise these rewards. You know, music theory, there's the vague promise that you'll be a rock star. okay, it's kind of like the underpants gnomes. Like steal the underpants, question mark, money.

Right. Learn music theory. Question, right. Rock star. And with Greek, you know, there is this, as I kind of like, I didn't really realize this when I was doing Latin in high school in my half-assad way. Bless my Latin teacher, great guy.

But I kind of realized this in college. Like, there's a lot of cultural. prestige to classics, or there was in the past at least. There was. There was. There was. I don't think it's there anymore. There.

It went through dark days. I think it might be coming back, but it's not there yet. There's a potential there. But because I think it's kind of inescapable, the fact that our civilization is so much founded on this stuff. But it was definitely not obvious in, a public high school in Houston, Texas, that the classics were some source of prestige.

That, like, you know, but somebody, you know, I got reasonably good at this stuff within a semester, I realized this is really fun and really, like, illuminating on how society is structured and these, you know, Plato's way cooler than I thought. And, like, the military history, like Salamis and Thermopy and then somebody said, you could go to a PhD

at one of these fancy schools. I was at a good school, but not a fancy school in Texas. And so I had this kind of, there was enough of a kind of reason to think that there was something behind that question mark between studying classics and having a respectable job.

So I got super into ancient Greek and it's very difficult. The way we teach, it makes it harder learning all the grammar. You never speak it. It's always translating. You never speak it? Well, that's changing somewhat now, but it's, you know, you don't approach it like a living language. And your brain is actually not good. Most people's brains are not good at learning language like an abstract system. No. Absolutely not. That's how we learn our mother tongues. It's like you learn by mymesis really. You learn by and your your brain is like a

language learning machine. But if you put give it the right input, if you you know messages, talking to people, understanding things, having real situations where like when I was in Greece a while back I was learning modern Greek and I was driving along in I think it was an Argos. It was somewhere some small town and and and this driver, he's like, signaling to me, my wife's in the car, and he's signaling to me, rolls down the window, he's like, In a monodromos.

He's like, it's one way, and I was driving the wrong way. Never forgot that word. But that's not how you learn classical languages typically. And the grammar is very complicated. Yes. But I love that part of it. And that was, you know, the rest of was history. I picked up Latin again, of course,

and went on to PhD and so forth. worth. Psychics swear they can predict your future for 50 bucks a session. I've never seen one nail it. But Hungry Roots SmartCart predicts my dinner for free, and it's right more often than any medium I've fact-checked. That's why I built my own digital cookbook, Gertie's Hump Day recipes, proof that an algorithm beats a crystal ball every single Wednesday. Inside, SmartCart keeps stacking my cart with a 15-minute garlic shrimp stir fry, a black bean turkey chili, roasted salmon with lemon greens, and their black bean brownie batter for dessert

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Explore my digital cookbook on Hungry Root today and find recipes that are right. for you. Go to hungry root.com slash the basement to access my cookbook Gertie's Hump Day recipes. You were on a tenure track job at Fresno. And a student

writes an essay that floored you. What was that essay about? Yeah. Yeah. I first, I had been teaching for a couple of years as a lecturer temporary job in San Diego. It was a lot of fun. This is my first

like at last proper academic appointment and I was doing a it was like a survey course one of these gen ed check the box the Greeks you know

and I packed the syllabus with stuff I thought would be fun for me and also like helpful for people potentially and you never know you usually assume that it doesn't matter I think that's

there's a kind of um blaziness about anyway uh wait what do you mean well i think i think a lot of academic a lot of people who teach these great texts sadly it's not by no means the all of them and there are a lot of really good people they don't really take seriously how profoundly impactful something like plato can be not just on you know expanding your mind and making you want to study more but like wow i'm not living the kind of life I should live. It's like me with Marcus Aurelius when I was, when I was in my late teens.

And so I had this student, we did some myth and whatever. One of the texts was Plato's Republic. And I had the student, and at Fresno, a lot of the students are, you know, coming back to school, doing it part-time. They're like older and they've made choices. Some of them good, some of them bad.

And I had one student, write this essay for his final paper on Plato's Republic basically like telling explaining how Plato had made him realize that injustice

that being a dishonest person was bad for his soul and bad for his life and was making him unhappy and so he had decided to stop cheating on his wife this was in the essay in the essay I was like Oh my God. That's awesome.

It is. That's really heavy. That was a moment where I felt, man, this is what this is for. That's what I care about with all this. That's why I was drawn to it because it can profoundly change the course of any individual's life. And depending on how many employees or voters or, or how many soldiers such an individual is in charge of, dramatically affect the course of history

and whether people live or die, whether they're miserable or happy. And I just think that the way that we arrange our curricula often just kind of pretends like that's beside the point. That's nice if that happens for you. Let's get back to, you know, the argument. argument here, or let's get back to the scholarship on this question. So that really bothered.

It was encouraging and kind of disturbing at the same time. Well, that essay was validation. Like, someone gets it. Yeah, yeah. And it's like this guy was a classics major. It wasn't trying to get me to write a wreck for him. He was just like, this really mattered. And yeah.

It was confirmation that there's gold here that hasn't really been, this being kind of buried under something else. Totally agree. I've heard you give four reasons for leaving academia. Angred institutions, wanting to know more and sort of being stuck, wanting your dad to retire with dignity. I believe all those reasons. But the day that you decided what was the one,

driver when you said, okay, that's it. Well, I've been toying with the idea for a while. As you learn studying history so often, events are multi-causal, overdetermined. I think, well, one of the things that really made me say now's the time was we'd just come back from from it was like Christmas break

living in California my wife had to come back to spend some time with our folks and she doesn't mind me saying this but like she had a miscarriage oh wow yeah and

And it just like something like something tragic like that happens. We have three beautiful children now. Something like that happens. We were around family. I think we realized, I realized I guess, how much I was I was giving up by sticking in it in this, you know, foreign land of. I liked Fresno a lot. I liked my colleagues a lot. You know, they were great people.

We were close to, you know, some of the most beautiful places in America, Redwoods, Sequoias, Yosemite, the Bay Area, all this stuff. But really the reason I was there was kind of for my career. And where was that career pointed? Even if, even if somebody kind of like let me pass the filters that I could, you know, when I got this, job. It's bothered me. It's like, oh, it's a good starter job, Alex. Like, man, I don't like,

I don't like the idea of treating any job as a starter job. Like, I want to join a team and I want to like stick with that team and like, let's go. Let's, let's build the skyscraper. Let's, let's, you know, defend the fatherland, whatever it is.

I don't know, the professionalism, the careerism, like, even if they let me, kind of ride that horse up to go back to a place like Princeton or something, I kind of realized like, wow, even at the top, I think a lot of people are kind of like lonely and demoralized. They don't really have, they don't like embrace this, this calling.

They don't, you know, see it as a calling necessarily. Not everybody, but like a lot of people you meet at the higher echelons of academia. Like famous scholars you might know. You know, you go to dinner with them. They talk about, you know, their kids, whatever. We went on this trip and the pasta sucked. It's just like these are just normal folks. There's not like a mission here.

There's no zeal. There's no zeal. And I think kind of getting past the veil of being a, a grad student to being a professional academic just for, you know, a year or two. I don't know. It's like, why am I doing this rather than like building a legacy or something? Like there was some kind of pull, I think, when you get older. Like you want to, you look for permanent.

Like, what is going to be permanent about this? Some book that I write that nobody reads? I think working for your dad had a lot to do with this because you had to learn the hustle and the sales and the energy and it's binary. He says yes or no, and I got to work it. And then you're in academia and it's like just floating. Yeah. And you're not made for it.

Did you close the sale? Right. No. F. Right. You know, there's no kind of like, there's no great inflation. No. And selling paint.

But there's something pure and noble about that. There's no shame in that. Yeah. And you learn great lessons doing that. You do, and I would wish that upon, with benevolence upon the worst of my enemies, that they would get some contact with the real world. Yes. I think that's one of the big things that's lacking with practitioners of history.

And it didn't used to be like that. I mean, look at Polybius. I mean, Plutarch's a man of action himself. Cucydides is like a general, like Plato himself. I mean, Plato was not an academic, you know? Risk taker. Sometimes it went really bad for playoffs, but he took some real risks and was around men of violence and power

and prestige and virtue. So I wanted, I just wanted some more realism in my life maybe. And so I suddenly I realized how grateful I should be that my dad was, you know, ran this kind of blue collarish industry business. And I was like,

here, I can get in the ring and just like somebody can just kick my ass. I needed that. Everyone needs it. Yeah. A lot of those academics never got that. I mean, that's why it wasn't going to work for you, and that's why your podcast empire is growing so fast.

Your first published essay after you left, April 2021, Homer on paying attention. And there's a line in there where you said, you learned from your own mistakes. And I think you were talking to Chris about that, but you never said what the mistakes were. What mistakes did you make that you learned from? Yeah, I guess in that essay, I was looking at the story of Odysseus, there's so much that I think is an unlock for you when you realize that the story is for you.

That like Homer, even if you just kind of take it as an article of faith, that Homer's trying to like teach you, he's trying to help you grapple with your own problems. And there's this moment in the Odyssey where Odysseus just left the island of Calypso. And she gives him this, well, she helps him build his own raft a little. She gives him some tools. And then he goes, he's sailing off hopefully to Ithaca, who knows. And then Poseidon has other ideas. Smashes the ship. And like Odysseus kind of gets.

he gets approached by the sea goddess Eno and she says Odysseus you have to take off that gaudy crap that Calypso gave you to wear she gave him perfumed robes and you strip off all of your clothing and and swim

stop trying to hold on to the boards of this raft that's just been smashed like land is way over there it's going to take you a while you got to swim or you're going to sink and she gives him this this like ribbon it's like a what's it called a kratimnon and it's you know hold on to this until you get to shore and he like ties it around himself and I think

that so much of like it takes a lot of concentration that ribbon is a kind of like symbol of his trusting the god to to get him through get put all your effort in and And then maybe it'll work. That Rubin kind of symbolizes that for him. And he gets to shore finally, and he takes it off and throws it back into the sea, gives it back to her. But a lot of the odysseys about resisting temptation, the distractions of the sirens, the distractions of, you know,

and he fails often, like, you know, raiding, making a little money, clobbering these Thracians, the Saconians. I think I think I have had to learn a lot from as as somebody who's got this kind of cosmic curiosity like it's really easy for me to get fascinated and obsessed with something just give me the littlest excuse like ancient Greek you know sometimes that can be very good but but there are there are so many distractions that is assail you, if you're that kind of person, really anybody, different kinds of distractions. For me, they're intellectual distractions often. I have great, great ideas. Let me tell you how many great ideas I have. And, you know, if you have one good idea and you stick with it, it could work. But if you have five good ideas and you do all of them, none of them are going to work. I don't like an idea guy. I like an action guy. Yeah. And that's learnable.

I learned it after lots of failures. Yeah. Well, same in so many ways. Speaking of the Odyssey, so the sirens, they're on the island, they have knowledge of everything, right? Is the cost of glory your show, is that the island or is that the mast? We're going deep here, AJ. We don't have to.

I just... I like... think of it as as the mast. You know, um, it's, it's interesting how, uh, I mean,

Odysseus, he, uh, he gets his comrades to tie him to the mast and they, they all plug their ears with the wax. And, uh, but he wants to listen to the sirens and he tells his crew,

Circe warned me about the sirens. So here's what we got to do. You plug your ears, tie me to the mask. The sirens are going to, no matter how much I screw, scream, don't untie me. She told me that I need to listen to them. Right.

But if you go back and look, no, she actually didn't. She didn't. She didn't tell him to listen. He decided to listen. Oh. Of his own accord. He wanted to know. And he kind of made up this thing.

It has to be this way, guys. But he didn't know what they knew, right? He just knew they knew stuff. Yeah. Right. And it turns out when, like maybe they were just going to, you know, tell him some sexy song, you know, titillate. Who knows what it was going to be? Right. Maybe he kind of, maybe he kind of guessed that this was something worth knowing.

Because when they're singing to him in that scene, they're promising him all the knowledge. I take it to be all the knowledge of the universe. everything, Tatas Somania proteont, like the things that were before, the things that are coming, everything that happened to Troy. Right, don't they tell him

you want to know what really happen to Troy? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, you know what we want to really why you won? Right. Was I as great as I thought I was? Mm-hmm. I mean, fill in what that means.

It's, it's, and so I think, you know, cost of glory is about, I get distracted sometimes. admit, but, you know, basically the mission is retell the stories of the greatest ancient heroes, Plutarch's heroes, 48, 50 of them, depending on how you count. And present them to people and like help people to understand who Caesar was, to the best of my abilities. To understand why people admired this person,

what you can learn from him, and then to go and do the same for his mortal enemy, Cato or Pompey, present them one at a time as I think Plutarch does, concisely. And to get you like serially invested in these people who might actually be, you know, irreconcilable.

They were definitely irreconcilable in a lot of ways. Mortal enemies. I have to take their side. But I think that why I would argue that cost of glory is the mass kind of holding you in place is that heroes are,

I think, a guide for life that, and they're really about the reason that we have hero stories is the reason that we, that the Iliad or the Odyssey is appealing to us is not pure curiosity. It's not about knowing everything that happened to Troy. Homer doesn't tell you everything that happened to Troy, right?

The Iliad is a series of a couple of weeks, maybe, at the very end. But he's telling you the most important thing. That's the job of the bard in Homer, in the Odyssey. The Bard's job and the Odyssey has a lot of scenes where you see the bards in action, Femius and Demodicus and Odysseus and Odysseus, They're telling you the most important part of the story. And it wasn't written down for hundreds of years, right?

It was orally for hundreds of years. Hundreds of thousands maybe. Right. These traditions go back to the Indo-Europeans. You can see the traces of the same formula that you find in Homer in like Sanskrit poetry. Sure. The Vedic hymns. Old Irish poetry.

I mean, it's all over the place. Sure. There's this great tradition of heroic storytelling. Gilgamesh. Gilgamesh is, I mean, that's a great comparison with the Odyssey. There's like something there connecting these things. And, you know, Gilgamesh is, I think it's Sumerian originally, but like these people were in contact with Indo-European invaders or vice versa.

And somehow the most important stories kind of filter. filter down and get passed on. And it's, you know, you could read the whole Iliad in maybe two days. That's what they did it. At Athens, they had poetic competitions. The Odyssey took two days. The Iliad took three days. They would have people recite the whole damn thing from memory.

And you can do it if you, people could still do this if we put our mind to it. I guess. You'd have to probably live on an island. There are no cell phones. but that's actually not that's not that long that's not that much time in the grand scheme of things a day or two no it's it's about getting the most important thing that you need to know I think that's why the bar tradition is so important is because you get the distillation yeah over the years throw that out throw that out this is what people care about yeah yeah

stand-up comics today yeah like the jokes that aren't funny yep you figure out real quick I think that's true That's you I want to take a quick break And we'll finally get into some Somebody old shit I specifically want to talk about conspiracies And did your dissertation on

Seneas? You did? Yeah So Senesius of Syrenees Sinus Seneas Yeah All right back

All right All right So your dissertation was about Philosophers Working the Emperor's Court. Private letters, back channels, men whispering to power. Assume nobody here has heard those names because most of us haven't. Start with one guy and what

was a Tuesday like for maybe one of those guys? Yeah, well, one of these guys that you've never heard of, I'm sure. Although he's in a movie, we'll get to that a sec. Senesius of Cyrene. It's the guy I wrote my dissertation on. He's a student of... Syrenees? How we're going with that? Yes. I say Cyrene.

Syrene, you could say Cyrene. You won't mock me if I say Cyrene. I won't. I won't. It's a long E in Greek, but we'll forgive it. So you might be familiar with Simon of Cyrene or Cyrene in the New Testament. I think he carries the cross for Christ. Cyrenee is, or Sireneica, is that eastern part of Libya today. Not a place that you would want to visit, I'm told now.

but anyway, it was a beautiful, verdant area. It snows sometimes in the winter in that part of North Africa and it's a very ancient Greek area, eastern Libya. In the West, Western Libya, like Tripolitania is more Latin in the late...

So this, we're talking late 4th century AD is this period. I was really interested in this kind of It's kind of an axial age of sorts for Christendom. Right. Because a lot of the culture is forged there, you know, after Constantine takes over and legalizes Christianity. So this is like two generations after Constantine. But you still have a lot of pagans and a lot of the upper classes of the Roman Empire,

very educated people converting to Christian. Christianity. Sinestius is from one of these grand old families of Sirenica who, and you see this a lot in the late Roman Empire. People like to trace their lineages back like 800,000 years. And so he traced his ancestors back to the original founders of the colony of Cyreneica, which is Batus, was this Spartan. They were from Sparta first, then Santorini, Thira. And then the They moved from there to Sirenica, which Herodotus tells the story. Yep. The horse lords of Sirene. So, yeah, he was from one of these noble families, and he goes to study at Alexandria with somebody who's probably more famous today, if you're into ancient stuff, is Hypatia. And this is a movie occasion. Rachel Weiss was Hypatia in this movie, Agarra, 2009.

It's a good movie. Senesius doesn't come off very well. Senesius, I think this is how they say it in the movie. That's how I say it, but I don't want to get in trouble. Yeah. That's how I used to say it, but it's a short E. Anyway, pedophogging academics. Petty fogging.

So don't take that movie's word for the kind of guy, Senesius was. He was a Christian, but a kind of classical man. He was a neoplatanist philosophically. He's a great admirer of Homer. He's also a great admirer of Aristophanes, who's this raunchy, Athenian comic poet. And he's very funny, Asinicius himself.

Is that Lysistrata? Yeah, yeah, Lysistrata. It's pretty much. Assembly women. Yeah, a lot of great jokes. Yes. Yeah, frogs, clouds. And so he studies with Hypatia,

who is one of the premier philosophers in Alexandria. Very rare, but not impossible, that a woman could become a convener of students and have a philosophical school. Is she a feminist icon? Is she a martyr? Who is she? Well, she has been made into a feminist icon.

She has. There was a feminist journal that I don't know if they're defunct, but named after Hypatia, you know, symbol of women's liberation. Well, in fact, Hypatia was, was kind of a conservative if you just zoom out

to what late antique Alexandria was like. Very gigantic city, incredibly diverse, ethnically, religiously. You have the Greeks who run the city ever since Alexander founded it in 328 or whatever, BC. and then you have the Egyptians, the kind of locals, the Felaheen types. Then you have, like, there's Syrians, there's a lot of Jews there, Christians and pagan.

So it's a, it's a, you know, boiling kettle. And Hypatia is from the nobility, from the Greek nobility. And if you look at who are the conservatives and who are the radicals, well, the radicals in late antique Alexandria are the Christians. Or Christians are the radicals. But they're also Christian conservatives. And one of these dividing points is like, where does spiritual authority lay? And right around this time is when you're getting the rise of the desert fathers.

You know, these monks going out into the cave and they're like tying a cucumber up, hanging it from their cell and like staring at it until they don't want it anymore so they can keep fasting for days on the end. Yep. It's a wacky world, fascinating place. And they're saying, you don't need all this Plato and Aristotle stuff. You don't need iamblicus on the mysteries. You don't need Homer and his myths. You just need to like pray in your cell. Memorize the Bible, pray.

And it kind of undermines the authority of philosophy. And a lot of the monks call themselves philosophers, even though they're not going to school with somebody like Plato or Hypatia. and so hypatia is kind of like helping Christians like Senecius to become cultivated, become, get the kind of polished they need to

step into that role of leadership in society, to talk to people like imperial governors, to get an audience with the emperor, which Senecius did. And Senecius is one of these Christians who's like, no, we do need Homer. We do need Plato. These monks, fine.

You know, there's something really special about them, but they're kind of taking a shortcut, and the shortcut doesn't work for everybody. You can't, like, you can't run a society on a shortcut. And, you know, the classics represent this common ground of culture that the pagans can buy into, the Jews can buy into, the Christians can buy into. It's a way of keeping the peace and keeping a common political language,

a set of symbols and myths. And, you know, they saw it, I think, is really important to the structure of society. But that was the kind of Christian conservative. The Christian conservatives were really into kind of Homer and the classics. And they didn't want to, you know, burn down pagan temples. This is, you know, high art. Like, why would you do that? Where the radicals are the kind of fundamentalists.

Sure. It's switched, I think, a little bit today. But yeah, no, that was what was really driving my interest is how philosophers got close to power. Because this is what Plato did. You see this from the beginnings of philosophy. Socrates is he's got among his students, Alcibiades,

top Athenian playboy politician gets the Athenians into a lot of trouble. He's got Critias among his students. The infamous. The infamous kind of the Hitler of the fourth century, he whose name must not be mentioned, I think, in Plato's era, because he was this brutal tyrant, it turned out. And like Pericles in the generation before with Anaxagoras,

it's like so many of the philosophers that we know were really close to rulers. I was fascinated by this pattern. And you could debate whether that was a good influence or a bad influence. I mean, people debated about that in the case of Socrates. The reason Socrates was executed was because he was too close to some of the scapegoats of the new regime. Once it had been reestablished after the 30 tyrants, they said, ah, it was your fault that Alcibiades led us astray.

It was your fault that Critias got so powerful. And, you know, his students, I think, correctly were trying to distance Socrates from these people. You know, they went astray when they stopped listening to Socrates. But Plato caused a lot of trouble in Sicily. Aristotle was Alexander's tutor. Probably taught him some restraint and asceticism as a young man. And maybe when he got further and further away from Aristotle, he kind of came off the rails. But it's a pattern, I mean, you can kind of trace it all the way to the effect of altruism people and the AI frontier labs.

So that was what really kind of got my attention about this period. So all those philosophers that were close to power like Aristotle, did any of those philosophers actually take power? Good question. the well one of the closest you come is Dion of Syracuse who I think is one of the most interesting men in Plutarch's lives Plutarch has a whole biography on Dion

not a household name today but you know like all of these guys he was a household name in the 18th century in America and Plutarch was the most popular classical book and this was just like everybody knew these guys Dion is cousin of the tyrant. Well, he's a marriage connection of one of the most famous and colorful tyrants of antiquity, Deonisius of Syracuse, who sees his power and has all these mercenaries and kind of flashy guy, no friends, all power, all force and no persuasion is how.

you know, he was characterized. Dion meets Plato when Plato visits Syracuse on a tour in the 380s, and they become friends. And Dion becomes a devotee of Plato. Like they hit it off really well, and Dion is studying Plato's philosophy. He's probably reading a copy of Plato's Republic at some point. De Anisius, the tyrant, dies 366. So 20 years later after Dion and Plato meet, you know, they've been exchanging letters.

And he's becoming a kind of correspondent school member of Plato's Academy. He, you know, Dionysius's son, Deanesis the younger, succeeds him, succeeds the tyrant. And Dion's like, hey, Plato, he writes to Plato, we got a shot here. We got a shot. We got a shot. You've written about how. woes will never cease for mankind until philosophers take power or the people in power learn to love wisdom, you know, become philosophers. Well, we got a youngish impressionable new tyrant who's wanting to kind of strike on in a different direction.

He's Dion's nephew. And so Plato's like, all right, seems like there's something here. And he comes to Syracuse. and Deanecius the younger is late 20s. So people are still impressionable in their late 20s, but, you know, it's not like they have a 15-year-old that they can just soft clay they can mold, but it's worth to try.

And Plato comes and he's just feted and, you know, there's a, the air is thick with the dust from the geometers diagrams like Deonisius. is bringing in all these intellectuals and, you know, it's going to be a new era for Syracuse. No more the kind of backroom intrigue and the flatterers and the plundering of our allies. We're going to found a new regime on justice. And Deenis, the younger, he's very receptive to Plato. But then people start whispering in his ear, the usual suspects.

We're like, you know, Dionysius, your uncle there, Dian. He's really just trying to kind of use Plato as leverage to kind of win power for himself. He wants to displace the people who were loyal supporters of your father. He felt, you know, he was motivated by envy. He's attacking us. And look at this guru that he's brought from Athens. The Athenians came 40 years ago. and the Sicilian expedition

that Thucydides tells Alcibiades' idea and went terribly. The Athenians came with their fleets and how many thousands of lives did we have to spend to defeat the Athenians? And now this one guru

is going to come and conquer Syracuse in the name of Athens and Dion is the broker. Are you going to let this happen? Dionysius the Younger's like, yeah, yeah, you're right. And so they kind of get that wedge in between the uncle and the nephew.

And Plato is this kind of game piece. He becomes this sort of like, you know, he's Dion's good friend. The true lover of philosophy is Dion. And Dion, by the way, is a Syracusan nobleman. He's part of the aristocracy. And then... How is Plato received by the court? Well, they hate him.

They hate him. Yeah. Because of the ination. Basically, they're like... De Anisius the Younger is listening to this interloper who's trying to kind of cut our banquet budgets. You know, they've grown accustomed to a certain lifestyle as flatterers of the tyrant, of the tyrant's deceased father. And, you know, is it about resisting Athenian influence or is it really just about, you know,

keeping the status quo? I think it's more about that. and the whole kind of second Athenian invasion narrative. Plutarch tells this whole story that that's what they were saying. You can read Plutarch or the New York Times. They're telling the same stories. Yeah. Nothing changed.

Yeah. Intrigues and influence. So, you know, eventually Deionisius, the younger, the new young tyrant, he's like, he kind of takes play to a side. I paraphrase, but he's like, hey, why do we need Dionne? Oh no. Like you and me. Tell me about this philosophy of yours.

And so they developed their own relationship. And eventually Deonisius exiles Dionne. And he kind of tells Plato, hey, I sent Dion away. So Plato's still in Syracuse? And Plato's still in Syracuse. And he's like, oh. Well, you know. And and and

Plato's kind of Deanecius's, like, hostage at some point. You know, the gift of a tyrant are hard to resist, as Plato says. Yes. And eventually Plato kind of extricates himself and says, you know, please just bring Dion back. He tries to reconcile them. It doesn't worry. And the tyrant kind of promises, yeah, I'll be. bring Dion back. We'll reconcile things. And so Plato leaves. And then there is no reconciliation.

Dion's just living in exile. He's, he's made a citizen of Sparta. He's hanging out at Plato's Academy. And, oh, he goes to Greece. Yeah, he goes through like Greece proper. Syracuse, by the way, Greek city, it's the most powerful and wealthy city in the whole Mediterranean among the Greeks. like it just totally outshines Athens and Sparta. It's the new kind of capital of Greek culture in a lot of ways. So the stakes are really high. And DeNesius eventually invites Plato back. He says, if you come back for a third visit,

maybe you can help me reconcile with my uncle. I really want to bring him back, but he doesn't want to talk to me. maybe you can, that's the kind of angle. And he brings Plato back and it's just a ruse. He's trying to, he's trying to kind of win Plato, who's famous by this point. Sure.

To kind of boost the moral credibility of the regime, which has kind of had not changed that much. You still got the flatterers. You still got the banquets. You still got the mercenaries. You still, the people have no influence. It's a tyranny. And Plato figures out pretty quickly that he's just a pawn.

He's a showpiece. And there's going to be no reconciliation. And with great difficulty, he manages to extricate himself one more time. And he's an old man at this point. He's like 75. And he goes back to Greece and Dion's still there. And Dion's like, well, did you have a good time? And, you know.

But eventually the younger tyrant, He's got Dion's family. He's got his wife. Basically he makes Dion's wife, his uncle's wife, marry another man, who's one of his own lackeys. For Dion, that is the last straw.

You know? Yep. And he's like, something has to be done. We have to go back to Syracuse. I'm going to raise an army, and I'm going to call back all the exiles. And Plato, will you join me?

And Plato's like, I'm too old for this. I don't think this is a good idea Good luck Right And so he You know Long story short

Dian goes back And with an army With an army A small army He's got some mercenaries Who are loyal to him And of the Thousands of Syracusans in exile

He can only get like 200 of them to join Because they're like Are you insane The like The armies The ships The tyrants' wealth

You have no chance And you should read Plutarch's life of Dion. I'll do an episode on him on Cost of Glory at some point, but they managed to catch the Syracuse at a moment when

the Youngers away. They sort of sneak, storm in by surprise, and they seize back the city. Basically, Dion takes power. And it is a long kind of series of events, you know, complicated kind of power struggles and the tyrant comes back, and they have

of a Citadel on Ortegia that he recaptures. And there's, you know, old friends or associates of Dion kind of betray him. But this only works if the people want some change, right? Because... Yeah. The people massively want change. Right. And, you know, you could look at that whole scenario.

Plato's famous for the Republic saying, you know, you need... The ideal state is one where you have philosopher kings ruling. And he kind of tones this down later in the laws. Okay, maybe it would be best to have philosophers ruling, but maybe that's not really possible after all. But at least you should have rulers who like respect philosophy. Right. You can have a mixed constitution where you have, you know,

wise men in charge, a kind of not an oligarchy, but like a nobility that brings the people in through assemblies and, you know, the consent of the governed is really important and justice. So Dion is trying to do, maybe not trying to kind of become a philosopher king himself. That's certainly what his enemies were accusing him of doing.

He's just trying to become a tyrant for himself. And yeah, call it philosopher king if you like. But he turned into a tyrant as well? So he doesn't. He doesn't. He doesn't. He resists the temptation to do that. Because the flatterers are still flattering, right?

They are. Well, he kills a lot of them eventually. Okay. That's helpful. He sends him off and, uh, They go join DeNesius the Younger in exile. But he kind of, one of the things that he does kind of damningly, I think, is there are some bad apples in Dion's retinue. Like this one guy, Heraclydes, who's popular with the commons, and he's kind of a demagogue.

But the sailors really like him. Dion needs the Navy. and it's like, Heraclydeus kind of, he's like a fair weather friend. And whenever, whenever Dion's away, he starts like whispering, you know, speaking against him in the assembly, kind of undermining him. And Dionne had many chances to say Heraclyde's, that was treachery execution. But he spares him because no, the nobler thing to do would be to, to forgive. I have learned at the academy that vengeance is not.

not the province of a wise man and things like this. And Heraclydeus is like, please, you know, I know I betrayed you, but, you know, you be a better man to me than I was to you and show us how much of a philosopher you are by sparing me. And, you know, he gets in Dion's head. You should have just, of course. The first, like, one strike you're out at that. When mistakes are like that, I think.

But eventually, you know, Dian kind of gets perceived as weak, and he's eventually assassinated. And the really disturbing thing here is the man who assassinations Dion is a fellow student of Plato. No. From the academy. Yeah. Why did he do that?

Well, I think he saw Dion's weak, and I want power. I think it was arguably that simple. Plato tries to distance himself later in the seventh letter from this guy, Calippus, saying he wasn't a real devotee. He just hung around and kind of used the academy as a networking hub. Plato's like, I'm raising tyrants over here. Yeah, I mean, it's extremely bad for the brand. Yes.

You can imagine. Like, catastrophic for the brand. but Calipus I think you know saw Dion was vulnerable and indeed he was and just kind of launched a little plot and murdered him

it was horrific De Aneses does he ever come back? He never comes back he ends up ending his days in Corinth the story is that that he um that he

was like a kind of mid tier rhetoric teacher in Corinth you could go visit Dionysius the younger

this fallen tyrant hanging out in Corinth I mean it's so funny that you're a cane one day and then you're a substitute teacher Yeah He's like a substitute teacher That's what happens

Yeah Amazing story I love that story It doesn't always go well When philosophers actually get in charge I have never heard that story I love it.

Yeah. I don't know if I have it on my list, because before we get to Caesar, I wanted to ask you about it. I think it was, it was a Pythagorean city that was basically ruled by a secret society. Yeah, Tarentum, I think.

Do you know that story? Could you tell it? Well, let's see. I just know the bullet points and it ends badly. And I think a lot of secret societies are based on this city. Mm-hmm. So there's Tarentum, there's Lachrys.

There's a number. So the Pythagoreans are a really interesting bunch. What's distinct about Pythagorean's? Well, Pythagoras is, in different accounts, I think he's considered one of the seven sages. So he's before the Persian Wars. This is like archaic Greece. 7th, 6th century.

The details are hazy for me. I need to revisit this. But basically, Pythagoras was the guy who kind of pioneered the idea that a secret society, a philosophical brotherhood, could be a route to ruling your city or maybe the world. At least for the Greeks, he was this. And, you know, he was from Samos, and he got chased out of Samos. Why?

I think it was maybe polychrates of Samos, the tyrant, who was like, this guy's a problem. Is that what he went to Egypt? That's, I think he went to Egypt on his way to southern Greece and, I'm going to learn some of these mysteries. Yeah, learn a little math, some triangle stuff. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. and he had there was a lot of numerology and their interest in the triangles and the tetractus and iamblicus had the neoplatonus has a life of pythagoras that tells a lot of the stuff and you know it's doubted by mainstream historians who knows but what pythagoras did

was he established these these brotherhoods in magna grecia you know southern Italy, Lachrys, Tarentum, and so forth. And in some cases, they seized power. In some cases, they, you know, the people in power said, no. And, you know, rounded them up and murdered them. Happened a lot. But in Plato's era, one of the, the reason that he goes to Syracuse in the first place is because he wants to kind of meet some of these descendants.

of the Pythagorean communities because a lot of these guys are still there. One of them is Architis of Tarentum, who is the closest thing you ever really get to a philosopher king in Greece, at least. He is a sort of first among equals, kind of like Thucydides describes Pericles. Athens is a democracy in name,

but in fact rule of the first citizen, which is Pericles. That's kind of Architis's role at Tarentum. We have fragments, at least, of treatises by Architis, and he was a... Plato became friends with him. And when Plato's over there in southern Greece, Magna Grecia, Sicily, is where he comes...

That's where a lot of scholars date some of his... The doctrines that you see in the middle dialogues, like Symposium, Fidris, Fido, Republic, where he's really interested in the forms as these kind of metaphysical principles that are quasi-mathematical, the interest in the divided line and the idea of the cave.

Pythagoras was really interested in mathematics and like harmony, you know, very mathematical music theory. But he also had these weird prohibitions that kind of created this cult, like, don't eat beans. Yep. Do not eat beans.

Why? Nobody really knows for sure. You can come up with some ideas. Do they have souls in them? Is there some kind of vaporous? Is there evidence that, you know, gas? But you're supposed to never leave an impression

of your body on a bed. Like you have to smooth out your bed. And there's all these kind of ritual things that they do to create this religious feel of a mystery brotherhood. Even secret handshakes, yes? Yeah, yeah. They definitely, yeah.

I'm sure they need the Atlantean handshake. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And Plato brings a lot of this back to the academy. And there's also the coup that happens at Thebes in 378 was kind of pioneered by Pythagoreans. Well, you have to tell that. That's a good story. I have to tell that one now.

Yeah. All right. So this is between Plato's first and second visit to Syracuse. So you can see why. why you get the idea that philosophy could be this revolutionary force. Plutarch again tells the story in the life of Pelopidas of Thebes and this text degenio Socrates on the genius of Socrates, the sort of divine spirit, the Dimonion that Socrates has,

tells the whole story of the coup. So basically, Sparta is at the height of its power in 382. They've defeated the Athenians in the Peloponnesian War. They have this empire. It takes a few hits. But basically, they've got, they remain the most influential city for several decades. At some, in 382, Thieves, which is near Athens, you know, central Greece, it's a democracy. and it's some Spartan commander.

He's on his way up to northern Greece to put down some rebellion in Thrace. And while he's camped outside of Thebes, some of the aristocrats, the oligarchs of Thebes, who are sick of these demagogues, they're sick of all the people having the power, This isn't the way it should be. The best men should rule.

Sparta represents the idea that the best men should rule. They have this tight military aristocracy. So these guys at Thebes invite in the Spartans. It's like the hottest day of the year. The women are up on the citadel doing some religious festival. Everybody's taking their siesta. And while this is, like, they swing open the gates and in marches this Spartan force. Not a huge force, but it doesn't take a lot.

Nope. If the gates are swung open. Right. And the Spartans capture the citadel, you know, like the Acropolis of Thebes, the cadmia, and basically drive out, they like round up the Democrats or the, you know, the populists. A lot of them escape to Athens. Some of them are put on show trial, kangaroo courts, executed as many as, and they, They basically make it, they go from being a kind of independent power to being, you know, pro-Sparta oligarchic tyranny. And it shocks Greece because it's like, whoa, we were, we had a treatise, a treaty with Sparta. The thieves had a treaty with Sparta. This is unjust.

This is, you know, naked imperial aggression. by the part of the Spartans. Everybody's pissed, but the Spartans are like, all right, what are you going to do about it? Right. You know, we have the Citadel. And so while that's going on in Sparta,

the exiles are gathering in Athens. Pelopidas is one of the leaders. And these are young men, you know, mid-20s, early 30s, probably. top, like from noble families, but of populist bent. And they start meeting in Athens for philosophical conversations. And, you know, they're talking about the nature of the soul. Meanwhile, similar kind of meetings are happening in Thebes,

because they had happened before the coup, before the lockdown. Thebes, there's a lot of students of Socrates. that are still there in Thebes, and they believe in this philosophy thing. Let's talk about whether the soul is immortal and what we should do about that and discussing the mysteries of harmony and so forth. Do they have to meet in secret in Thebes? Well, that's the interesting thing. They're meeting in somebody's house, and on a couple of occasions,

there's two kind of chief oligarchs. I forget their names, but they'll come back to me. they invite these guys to come visit their philosophical gatherings on a couple of occasions. They're not meeting in secret, actually. They're just meeting to discuss philosophy. And Archaeus is one of them. I think he's the chief guy. He comes to one of these meetings and he's like, these kids are just, they're having their little book club.

That's cute. Great. All right. See you. A couple of wines. And, you know, it's assigned to the, to the, to the, to the, all, Aligarchs, nothing, nothing weird going on here. We're just a bunch of nerds.

But that gives them the license to keep meeting. And basically that's where they plot the coup. And in 379, on the day of the winter solstice, it's a snowy day. And in Trickle, a number of kind of rustic hunter-looking guys. one at a time. They've got dogs. They've got nets.

They've got, you know, rabbits that they've killed and their hunts going into the city, just finishing up the hunt. Unassuming. And, of course, it's Pelopidas and his buddies from the Athenian exiles who had escaped murder in the street.

Like the tyrants of Thieves thought, the guys in Athens, they're dangerous. Like, Pelopetus is dangerous. So they tried to kill something. They actually murdered one of them in the streets through their agents. So, you know, it was tense. They sneak into the city, meet at the house of one of the conspirators.

And another of the conspirators at his house nearby is arranging a dinner party for Archaeus and the top guys of the pro-Sparta oligarchy. And they're saying, Archaeus, we're going to have a great party. There's going to be some ladies showing up a little later. It's going to be a good show. I think you want to be at this one. And so they have this party. It goes on to the night.

They get drinking and drinking. And at some point, you know, a knock comes at the door. And the master of the house lets the person in. And it's not who he expected. It's somebody from Athens saying, I have a letter that you have to give to Archaeus now. It contains very serious matters for his attention right now. It's basically a warning from Athens.

hey, there's a plot against you afoot. And he lets the messenger in. This is in the middle of a dinner party? In the middle of a dinner party. I mean, there are a few bowls of wine in. And Archaeus is there on the couch. And the messenger's like, this contains extremely important. It says, very serious things in this letter.

You must read this now. And Archaeus is like, serious things for tomorrow. Es Avriotas T'UDA. It's the Greek. This is a phrase now in Greek. And so he just misses it and he doesn't read it, you know. So, so good. And then at some point, another knock at the door comes.

And the host, of course, he's in on the conspiracy. Ah, these are the people he's expecting. They're maidens. Mm-hmm. Or are they? Right. Right. You know, Pelopidas is, you know, he and his buddies are like 25, very, very, very clean

shaving. Sure. Wigs on. They've got like veils. Soft features. Yeah, soft features. And of course they've got breastplates under. Of course.

And they come in, well, they tell the host, oh, you know, this is a private show only for the important people. Can you dismiss the bodyguards? And Arcus is like, yeah, yeah, send them next door. Yeah, bring the girls in. It's perfect. And as soon as they get in, you know, they draw their swords and off the tyrants. And they rush to the citadel. Well, they rush out in the streets.

The tyrants are dead. Are they still in drag at this point? Big question. Huttark doesn't specify, but it would be a better story if they were. That's how I see it, like a Monty Python's gift. Are we going to let ladies lead the coup? So they arm the citizens and they surround the citadel and the Spartans leave under truce. They leave under truce?

Yeah, yeah. They let the Spartans go. Wow. Because, you know, it would, okay, getting rid of a couple of oligarchs at a party is one thing, but getting rid of a couple hundred of, you know, Spartan-led, battle-hardened, you know, veterans. Better to just, like, let them go. Well, yeah, but how do you convince a garrison to abandon its post? Well, they siege them for a while, and I think they cut off communications.

Of course. You know, fog of war, like, don't let them talk to the authorities at Sparta. and that's a good question like it takes a while like they have to cut off their water and stuff you know but eventually I think the the garrison guys the leaders of the garrison just realize this this would go very bad it would be very bloody we've we've already kind of broken the rules like they kind of did it without the authorization of the Spartan authorities but that with the with the kind of tacit approval of the king of Sparta,

Agiselaus. I tell some of the story in the life of Egeselais. But, you know, so they knew that they were already kind of not supposed to be there legally and that, you know, they could all just probably get executed

as soon as they get back to Sparta. Yeah. So let's not make this worse for ourselves. And so they leave under the truce. And, you know, the Thiebans take back the city. Apamanondas is a Pythagorean. This is very important. Can I get to the point?

He's a close friend of Palopidas. He doesn't participate in the coup because he doesn't want to shed kindred blood. He doesn't want to kill any Thebans. The other Theban conspirators were like, these guys are bad, there are enemies. But Pamanondas is like a man of principle. He's very ascetic.

He doesn't ever take a wife. And, you know, a true devotee, a philosopher general. And a Pamanondas, because he's got such a clean, you know, record, he is just this magnetic leader that is able to unite, not just the Thebans, with the whole of Biotia and this whole coalition that they form, to overthrow the Spartan hegemony in Greece. And he becomes one of the most famous and celebrated generals in antiquity. Sadly, Plutarch's biography of him is lost.

but... And this begins the decline of Spartan power, yes? Yeah, basically that's the first strike against Sparta in 379 the counter coup that's called the Solstice Revolution which I love.

That's a great one. Yeah, and then only eight years later, the Thebans defeat Sparta's best in a pitched land battle. Nobody's ever done this. Like Sparta, it's full force.

at the Battle of Luxtra, a Pamanondas, it takes him that long to train up a kind of shock troop, special force-led, kind of land army, and they defeat the Spartans of the Battle of Luctra in 371. They kill the king.

There's two kings of Spartan. Did they expect to win that battle? I mean, that's pretty bawsy. I think a Pamanondas felt like he had a good shot, like he had this kind of wedge strategy where you kind of, you kind of hit the Spartan line on a diagonal and kind of come at them like on this increasing diagonal

and kind of pull them off to the side and you look for the gap. So he had strategies. He had a strategy. But a Pamanondas, he's the type of personality that men will die for him. I think you need that. Yeah. It's like we're going up against Sparta, but I'll do it for you. Yeah, lead from the front.

Mm-hmm. As all the great commanders do, I mean, Caesar does this. Sure. It's gotten a little bit past, you know, it's out of fashion now, but, but that's, that was, he was that kind of guy and had just, he was a heroic figure for not just thieves, but this whole coalition. And he ends up going, marching into Sparta after this defeat at Lutra, seizing the city, never has this happened before.

Enemies like right there. Like Sparta is like, is like, The whole Paloponnese is Sparta's fortress. Like, you do not get much past Corinth without the Spartan saying, what are you up to? Right. But a Pamanondas pushes all the way to Sparta,

and they eventually decide not to, like, try to sack the city. They give it back off. Doesn't he pick up some Athenians along the way? Well, yeah. So let's, in the... Eventually comes... It kind of comes around where...

I think, I'm not, did they join with the Athenians after Luke? So Athens is like kind of conflicted because, okay, the Spartans are, are kind of ancestral rivals since, you know, the Peloponnesian war, at least a generation or two. Sure. But the Spartans are really cool and noble, and the Thebans are these like gross, rustic pig farmers. Right. And they're way closer to. us too. Like we share a border with Thebes. We don't share a border with Sparta. So Thebes is like, I mean, they're democratic, but they're kind of gauche. And, you know, look at Athenian tragedy.

Like story after story about the like horrific dysfunction of Thebes. I mean, Oedipus. Yeah. Right. Right. You know, Antigone, the Phoenician women. There's so many examples of Athens just looking at Thebes. Like, at least we're not like those. God. That's a great story. So eventually Athens kind of comes to the side of Sparta in the Battle of Second Mantanaean 362. But before that, Pamanodas ravages through the Peloponnese and he liberates the

Helots, who are these, you know, hereditary slave class of Spartans. He builds this amazing city that you can still visit the ruins today. It's beautiful. It's Messini. Messina was a region, but there was no city. Assini, but a Pamanondas founded the city and he built big ass walls. The Spartans hate walls. They think walls make you weak.

Sparta doesn't have walls. The walls are its men. And they tear down the walls in any city that they ally with. Because you're like, that's going to give the demagogues an inn. Because then, you know, it's the blacksmiths. It's the like tavern keepers who are going to hold sway. if you have no walls, then the warriors have the most power.

Whereas if you have, like the more kind of military technology you have, the weaker the people that can man it and can run the state. There's a real logic to that. There's a very real logic to that. And, but Appaminandas builds Messini. It's a beautiful place that,

not a lot of people visit, but it's one of the most kind of impressive, you know, mountains, and it's a wonderful place to go in Greece. And it's a monument to like the liberatory spirit of this Pythagorean of Pamanondas who stuck it to the Spartans like nobody did before and nobody did since. I love that story.

We'll be there in a couple of weeks. I'll make sure to stop by the ruins. Yeah, you should. We want to talk about Caesar a little bit? Yeah. Cataline? Yeah. I think you have a theory that's not so mainstream that Caesar was in on it.

I guess we have to do a primer. Yeah. How do we do the primer from Rubicon, or do we go? Well, most people know that Caesar, maybe we start with the more famous conspiracy. Okay. The conspirators who murdered Julius Caesar on the Ides of Marsh, 4.4. People are probably familiar with that story. I think it's interesting that in the lead up to that,

a lot of people don't realize Caesar really, I think he knew. Something was afoot. He kept getting these rumors coming to him. Caesar, there's a plot against you. I think if guys got an incredible workload. I'm sure there's always been like assassination threats. Of course. Like what else is new?

How do you separate the wheat from the chaff, the noise from the signal? But I think he knew that there was really credible reason to suspect a plot. Because he wanted to stay home that day, didn't he? He did, yeah. Like a rare case of him kind of listening to the omens at first. Like, Caesar doesn't care about omens. It's a perfunctory thing.

But he got bad omens. Calpurnia, his wife had a bad dream. It was well attested. you know, bad dream. Listen to my Caesar episode for the full details. Sure.

But it's just dismissed as a woman's bad dream. Yeah. And then, but then, like, you know, he keeps getting these bad omens. Like,

this, this guy, what's his name? The soothsayer that Shakespeare has. Beware the aides of March. Oh, the aides of March have come. Ah,

but they have not left. That is recorded in Plutarch. And so, But he met that soothsayer when he was doing a routine sacrifice at a buddy's house that morning. And he's like, you know, I wasn't going to take the dream seriously. The homans just keep coming in. I'm just not feeling right. And he just decides to stay home.

The man who persuades him to go to the Senate House that day is Decimus Brutus, who's not even hardly a character in Shakespeare, Dishus Brutus. Right. Plutarch got this wrong, didn't he? Yeah. The wrong, Brutus? Well, he's got... Yeah, Plutarch lays way

a lot of emphasis on Marcus Junius Brutus. Yes. The famous Brutus. But Desmus was much closer. But Desimus was Caesar's, like one of his bodymen, practically. He was a brilliant military commander, defeated the Veneti in the Golic Wars. He was responsible for the siege of Marseille.

and the Civil Wars and he's one of Caesar's top guys and I forgot to mention this the night before I love this story it's so just gives you goosebumps the night before Caesar's last night on earth he's having dinner with

you know at a friend's house and one of the people there is Decimus Brutus one of the conspirators and and Caesar proposes himself the topic. As usually, you know, one of these dinners, you have philosophical conversation. Caesar asks the group, what is the best way to die?

And everybody's, you know, proposes their answers. And Caesar says, I think the best way to die would be swift and unexpected, you know. What does Decimus face it like at that moment? Yeah. you got to wonder. Why did he How did he keep a straight face? How do you do it?

A lot of wine. Well, let's take a sidetrack for a second because you have a society where guys just tell stories and problems. What's your society about? Yeah, I started a community with my friend Ben Wilson of How to Take It for the World.

We have, it's called the classical society. And we essentially, Essentially, it's kind of a peer network of accomplished men who like history. And I think for us moderns today, the relation between being obsessed with history and being obsessed with achievement is not so obvious, you know, how school marmified history teaching gets. But I thought my hunch was that there was a bit. big correlation. So we started a, it's kind of a business network, kind of a cultural organization,

and we do retreats, and we have core groups that meet regularly. And we like to talk about, debate about history, debate about, you know, as the Spartans did, who is the most honorable man living today. We like to read. the classics together. I wanted to gather a group of people who were, a group of men who were, men don't have like serious camaraderie as much these days as they're used to.

It used to be the norm. Toastmasters used to be single gender. And I think that men are kind of starved of, like not just the foot, I mean, I think a lot of times going and watching the game, it's just an excuse to get together. Absolutely is.

And there are other great excuses to get together. Like, as you see in the case of Caesar, philosophy or discussing history, it's a way to build camaraderie and kind of reflect. So we do retreats domestically and internationally. And it's been a lot of fun. I mean, I'm trying to learn a little bit of lessons from what I see working for people in our recent past in the U.S. and in antiquity as well. I think this is a great tradition of like men's fellowship, serious fellowship. that we've lost from, for a variety of reasons,

many of which I'm sure people have their own opinions on why that happened. They do. I have mine as well. Is it true that you do spontaneous toasts and things? Yeah, extemporaneous speeches and toasts. Again, you have the floor. I just would like to raise my glass

to a man who was a servant of a great king and never imagined himself to be more than a servant of a great king, but who when the time came and his king died, he realized that in order to become a servant, he had to become the master. That is Eumenes of Cardia, the secretary of Alexander the Great. not only Alexander's most loyal servant, but his most loyal defender in the king's, after the king's demise,

a paragon of virtue, of loyalty and courage, and also of craftiness. Never was Dumini's outsmarted, except for one time when it counted. But a man that I think we would be remiss if we did not remember more, to Eumenes. Umenes. Cheers. Cheers. You stumbled across him

by accident with Plutarch, yeah? And you're like, who the hell is this guy? Yeah. And became obsessed. What is it about Eumenes? I think Umenis is, what that proved to me, while we're on this tangent, is 48 lives in Plutarch's biographies.

I read a couple for, you know, teaching a class on Roman history, the Gracki. I knew about the Gratian. I knew about Marius, I knew about, so many of these guys. But I decided at one point, Plutarch is really good. I should read all of this. And I'm just kind of working my way through.

And I get to a couple of them and I'm like, Sertorius, Eumenes. I guess I got to eat my vegetables. Sure. Who has heard of Eumenes of Cartia? Alexander the Great Secretary. Who has heard of Sertorius? The greatest Roman rebel, it turns out. Alexander fans have.

I have a Eumenies coin around my neck right. Is that right? No way. Yeah, a single drachma minted in Alexander's honor. Oh my God. Yeah, my wife got it for me. Crazy. You're going to have to show me.

I'm going to take a picture of that later. To me, that was the moment when I realized, reading the life of Eumenes, who was just an incredible man of daring. And totally not one you would expect to rise to power. not a Macedonian, a Greek. You know, he's sort of a foreigner among the Macedonian military brass.

Becomes a warlord. Isn't he sort of plucked by Philip? Yeah. Out of obscurity? Yeah, he's like doing MMA. Yeah. He's like 18-year-old. And Phillips visiting one of his many tiny provincial backwaters

in his backwater of a kingdom. And he's watching the, the athletic contests, as one does. And something about the way that Eumenes, like, through his opponent or was wrestling, he's like, this kid's special. And he meets Eumenes' dad and, you know, finds out that he can write well and he can read well.

He's like, I could use a secretary. Let's bring him into the entourage. Probably, I mean, it's not like he promoted him to be the top secretary at that point. he worked his way up quickly, he showed he had an incredible facility with people. He's able to win people's trust and

worked his way up to be one of Phillips most trusted guys in the paper department. So Alexander grows up with him. Yeah, Alexander, he's like just a couple of years older than Alexander. He might have been at those philosophical tutoring sessions with Aristotle. He was probably sitting there, like, taking notes for Alexander.

Yeah. You know? Imagine. Alexander Tolami, the future king of Egypt, was there. Yep. A few other guys. So just, I mean, incredible to think of, like, the concentration of people in some of those rooms. Jimenez was really good with Alexander's mom, Olympias, which is really hard to do.

Oh, she was difficult. To be on good terms with both Philip and Olympias, like, stormy, storm, like very high tea woman. So does Alexander take Beniz with him on his tour? Yeah. He's, he's there for all the campaigns. And he,

toward the end, like in India, is like an India or back to, you know, Central Asia. At some point, they're kind of short of commanders. And Alexander's like, I need some guys to take some, take some cavalry. I need somebody.

And you mean he's like, if you need somebody to run a cavalry contingent to, you know, show some muscle to this town, maybe I could do that. And Alexander's, all right, Eumenes, you know, let's give it a shot. And he does well.

But, you know, you don't get much of a hint that he was a man of the kind of capability that he was until Alexander dies. and, you know, at the beginning, Huminies is basically just the note taker for this meeting of Alexander's generals in Babylon to try to decide, like, how are we going to run things in Alexander's absence?

Right. And Huminies is just like, I'll just take the minutes, gentlemen, don't mind me, but that means he knows everything that's going on. Of course. You know? And they all trust him. These people that hate each other, like, oh, at least, yeah, you're fine.

he's not a threat you know he understood that position very very well of not being a threat and he eventually goes on to lead armies in the name of

of Alexander's family but it's only because he always is saying I don't want to be king I think he was I think he was serious I don't look at is a Greek

going to rule over Macedonians come on I'm just trying to make sure that Alexander's son inherits the throne when he comes of age. I'm trying to make sure the empire stays together and these, these, you know, narcissistic, strong men don't win. And that, that constant, like, saying, I'm not the guy. I know I'm not the guy. I'm just trying to do the right thing here. It just, it's disarming. It wins people's trust. And I think it was sincere. I think so, too. Yeah. If I didn't know about Eumenes, and he's that impressive, like, imagine what the rest of Plutarch's lives contains.

So many. It's like Emerson called it a Bible for heroes. Yes. Oh, that's a great description. Yeah. So we'll come back. We'll get back to Caesar. But the last thing is,

do you have a theory on what happened to Alexander's remains? I haven't pried into it. The standard story is that the body was being carried in this kind of like, it was like a juggernaut, like this giant flow. from Babylon to Macedonia and that Ptolemy kind of seized it and derailed it to Alexandria. The Emperor Augustus is supposed to have seen the body of Alexander

took a piece of it in Alexandria. Right, that's right. Yeah. So I don't know what happened. One moment. I haven't followed up on this, but the one anecdote I'll share is I was in Macedonia, Greece, Greek-Greek-Mascar. Macedonia, Macedonia, like leading a tour 10 years ago.

And we're, we're, we go to Vergina, which is an amazing site. You know, it's got probably Phillips body there in the tumulus. Wow. Northern Greece, Macedonian gold, another place you should visit. But we're staying in this little town outside of Regina, maybe it's a very little place. And we have the place to ourselves. And I'm talking with the host of.

It's like a family-run hotel, if you can even call it that. Really, really nice people, super hospitable. I'm talking to this woman in my broken Greek, and she's saying, Alex, Alexandria, where do you think Alexander's body is? Like, oh, ma'am, I have not given the matter much study. I have to confess. She's like, I'm a mother. I know he's here.

I know that his mother would never let his body stay. I hope she's right. I think he was probably washed away in the flood of Alexandria, but I hope she's right. I hope we'll find him. Maybe we have already. Maybe we have. How do you join the classic society?

Is there an initiation? Yeah, well, it's, um, we learn this from Catalina. The best way to get loyalty is to, uh, make people drink wine mixed with human blood. Now, I don't think, that's just a,

didn't Plutarch say that's a rumor? Yeah, yeah. But there was something about eating a human being, right? There's a little cannibalism there. Yeah, yeah. Well, this is the sort of thing that you want to discredit people with if you want. Drink of blood. Yeah.

I'm assuming you don't have to do that. The classical society.com. We have an application form and process. But yeah, it's by application. And, you know, we're looking for an honest man. I might apply for it. I'll drink the blood. I don't care.

It's a way to keep the... It's just a teaspoon or two. You got to keep the vegans out somehow. They're just not going to work there. All right, I promise to get you out of here on time. But now we're on the record that you're going to come back for like it will do a day of Caesar. That's rock. I would love to do it for his early years.

Someone asked me in a live stream not too long ago, if I can go anywhere in history, where and when. And that's one of those questions that you're like, oh, I don't know. and I was just like, late Republic, I want to Sulla right up to Augustus. I want to see all that. That's my favorite. So I'd love to have you back to talk about it. It's where everything happens, yeah.

Yeah, the drama. I just love it. On the 13th of May, you published an essay called Stoicism isn't going to get us out of this. Six weeks later, just a few weeks ago, the Vesuvius Challenge

finishes decoding the first Herculaneum scroll from an epicurean private library and it's a stoic text. Mm-hmm. What did you think when you got that email? Well. Well. Any press is good press. Right.

Yeah. Tell us a little bit about that project because it's fascinating. Yeah. So this is something that I was familiar with. I mean, anybody who studies classics seriously is like heard of the Vesuvius. scrolls, right? Mount Vesuvius buries Pompeii in 79 AD, this famous eruption, also buries Herculaneum. And at Herculaneum, which is closer to the mountains, right at the foot, right on the shore. And I think in Pompeii is like pumice stones and buildings collapsing,

but at Herculaneum, it was a pyroclastic mud flow. A lot of people got out, not everybody did. But it buried this villa. Man, what an interesting place this villa was. But it, with this pyroclastic mud, it kind of, it wasn't hot lava, right? So it doesn't burn everything. It just kind of, in case it, bakes it a little bit. Right. It's about 500 degrees. Yeah. And just the right temperature to carbonize papyrus schools, but not incinerate them. And so in 1752, These guys are digging a well in, you know, what turns out was Herculaneum. I don't know if it was called that in those days. They might not have known it was there then.

I don't think they did. I don't think so. I mean, it's like, how would you know? Right. I don't think Pompeii, they didn't know was there yet either. Right. Yeah. How would you know?

And it's like under dozens of feet. I don't know. Maybe it's like 200 feet at some places. It's really, really thick. I mean, imagine the amount of, I mean, and you look at Vesuvia. now. It's like, you can see where all that mask came from, right? But, um, so they find these, uh, this villa, where they, they find, you know, some

antiquities and pretty soon they find these like little charcoal looking things. And a couple of the workers apparently, like, use these charcoal logs to boil their pasta or whatever. Turns out there, they're actually ancient scrolls, priceless. Priceless. Ancient scrolls, texts that have never been seen since antiquity from this library in this villa that, because most of ancient scrolls, most ancient books are lost, maybe we have 2%, maybe less. They get eaten by worms.

They turn into dirt. You have to copy them over and over. So we have all of these scrolls that were discovered, you know, since 1752 from this villa. Thousands of fragments, more than 400 complete scrolls intact. And the problem is when you try to open them, you, like the better preserved ones, they had some, you know, methods developed this guy, Pagio, I think was his name, or Piagio. Anyway, he developed this machine with catgut and pig bladder or something to slowly unroll these scrolls. But it ends up kind of ravaging them. And there's way more destructive.

Like Humphrey Davy, the great famous chemist, like dunked them in Mercury. It's like, this is going to, like, it's going to see it. I think research has destroyed more than anybody else, just trying to figure out. Way more than those workers cooking their pasta. Yes. Yeah, so Mercury definitely does not work. But so we knew about them. The fragments that we were able to read indicated that this was.

a philosophical library. But how do you read them? Well, chunks have fallen off and you can kind of see there's Greek texts on some of them and the parts that have been unrolled are cut open, you can kind of piece together that these are Greek texts.

But for the most part, if you try to unroll them, you destroy them. And so at some point people decide, the authorities decided, all right, nobody's allowed to touch these things until we can figure out how to read them some better science comes along. And it was always the hope.

Some, some, you know, new innovation's going to come along. It's going to unroll these things. Well, Brent Seals of the University of Kentucky, has become a friend. He's an awesome guy. Had this idea that you could scan these things using basically a CT scan. And he's a computer scientist, 3D imaging. And the technology is called tomography. but basically he had this idea

that you use really, really high-powered CT scans to build a 3D model of the scroll and then unwrap the 3D model digitally, which is incredible. And the Herculaneum scrolls, so some ancient ink has iron in it. And you could just kind of like do a chromatography. You could actually just pull out the iron

from a, in the ink, from a proper scan with whatever, chromatography, I'm not a chemist, anyway. But the Herculaneum scrolls, unfortunately, the ink that's used on them is all pure carbon-based. So it's chemically indistinguishable from the scroll. Right, everything's carbon. So what you have to do is, is you get a scan that is so high-res

that you can actually determine the ink from geometry, from like lumps of ink on papyrus. So this is like super hard mode, right? Yep. And what they've done, and it took, so I'm working on a documentary about this. Are you consulting with Ridley Scott?

Yes, actually. Just going to throw that in there. You're going to mention that? Well, maybe I would have gotten to it. I'm just so excited about these scrolls. But yeah, we, we pitch, it to Ridley Scott too and Scott Free came on board. O'Shaughnessy Ventures was Infinite Films as the

kind of foundational producer and we brought in Scott Free and his team when we told him about this and they're like, this is really cool. And so I think it's going to be the definitive storytelling of this event. It's not a science documentary. I mean, we go into some of the science,

but it's a really compelling human story too. When does it come out? I can't wait for it. Soonish. Stay tuned. Yeah. Sooner than your book, I hope. It's sooner than my book.

Yes. Fortunately, unfortunately. But it's done, basically. And we're going to do some private screenings in the coming weeks and months. But essentially, it's amazing story of like resilient. Because not only is the technological piece hard, but like the kind of government agencies and quasi-government agencies that control these things. and the scholarly infighting.

Sure. It took years, like the technology was there for the most part for the past couple of decades. But what the real hack, the real kind of unlock was, Brent Seals and his team, they took these scrolls to get scanned at the diamond light source in Oxford, which is this, basically it's a particle accelerator.

It's like six soccer fields. It's gigantic, you know, like a Hadron Collider kind of scale thing. And the reason you have to do that is to get these 3D images so high-res that, and like these files are like, you know, petabyte. Yeah, I can't imagine. Enormous files.

The resolution is particle resolution. That's crazy. Yeah. It's like, you know, molecules. Mm-hmm. So. But once you have that document, like how do you, you how do you determine where the page breaks are like where the the kind of spaces between

the scrolls layers are then how do you determine where the where the ink is and is an incredibly laborious process unless you use machine learning yeah they've unlocked this and accelerated it through AI and it actually it was catalyzed by the guy, Nat Friedman, who's a very prominent Silicon Valley guy, GitHub CEO. And he's awesome. Very high agency. He gets obsessed with this during COVID. And he's like, how has this problem not been solved?

This is fascinating. He gets nerd snibed by it. And so, you know, collaborating with Brent Seals and his team. And like they come up with the idea to do an open contest to see. who can essentially come up with programs to hack various parts of this problem of turning this ginormous 3D file into readable text. And they finally read a complete scroll just a couple of months ago.

It's a triumph of the will. It will. It is. But it is, you know. And it's only the beginning because now we can read those 400 scrolls. Why is that cool? Well, okay, it's an Epicurean library for the most part. Not only that.

What is Epicurean versus Stoicism? And why is this such a weird find? Well, so the Epicureans are another Hellenistic philosophy that comes online, like right after Aristotle. And the Epicureans, so there's a great story about this from the life of Pyrus, Plutarch's like of Puris. So Puris is the King Puris, the first guy to take elephants to Italy under arms

before Hannibal. Gave Hannibal the idea. Wow. He studied Puris. Wow. Yeah. When asked to name who he thought were the greatest generals, Hannibal named Puris among them, he's a cousin, a younger cousin of Alexander the Great.

Wow. Invades southern Italy on behalf of the Tarantines, you know, you know, descendants of architis and gang. And they're given the Romans trouble, Puris. He's very good at what he does. I mean, he's utterly devoted his entire life to warfare. And the Romans are, you know, this guy's serious.

There's a conference between, after one of these victories, Pyrrhus has a bunch of Roman captives. And Roman's still kind of scrappy at this point? Yeah, they control. They're the main power in Central Italy. Right. But Etruscans are still around? Yeah, the Etruscans are still around.

They're kind of getting subdued. But southern Italy is, you know, there's the Samnites, the Greeks along the coast, there's the Lucanians, the Brutians. There's all these tribes that are not like, you know, under the Roman sway. Right. Including Sicily. But Pyrrhus wins a battle and a Puric victory. is a very costly defeat,

but he manages to win, and he has Roman captives, and Fabricius, his Roman ambassador comes to kind of entreat for the captives. And they're at dinner, as one does, like gentlemen, and discussing various matters, and Pyrrhus' his, like, advisors, military advisor, Keneas is his name.

He's a very learned man. You see, you know, pattern continues. And he's explaining to Fabricius what the Epicureans teach. To me, this is very romantic the way this is all done. Yeah. Like, imagine, you know, Trump sitting down with the Ayatollah. I mean, anyway, they, so Caneus is like explaining the Epicurean philosophy to Fabricius. All right, well, so the Epicureans teach that there are gods, but they don't really care about us.

They didn't create the world. The world is composed of atoms. Epicureans were followers of this democracy and idea of randomness, collision of atoms coming together. The gods are models of blessed happiness for us at best. And the thing that is most worth pursuing in life, the key to the good life, is pleasure. Of course, you know, maybe he doesn't get to the point

where he explains, actually, when they talk about pleasure, they're not talking about just wine and women, you know, because after you have a great night drinking, then you have the hangover the next day. And like, on balance, maybe there's more pain than pleasure. So the Epicureans were kind of ascetic and moderate and so forth. But yeah, Cannaeus also explains to Fracius, well, the wise man will not enter politics

because it's too troubling to the soul. It goes against this value of atyroxia, lack of disturbance that the Epicureans were really valued. Totally agree with that statement. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, there's a lot of, there's a lot of wisdom there. And Fabricius is listening to this, right?

Gods don't care about us. Pleasure is the highest principle. Wise man won't inter politics. And he says, I love this philosophy for you. Wow. May Puris and our enemies and the Samnites continue to cherish this philosophy as long as they are at war with Rome. Wow.

So, you know, you read that story and you might think that, you know, Epicureanism was just a mismatch with Rome. But in fact, during the life of Julius Caesar and Augustus, like this high period that you and I both love, Epicureanism arguably the most popular philosophy with the leadership classes of Rome. Caesar is associated with the Epicureans. Cato kind of accuses him of being an Epicurean at one point in the Catalinarian conspiracy. That's an insult at that time? Well, I don't think he labels him as an Epicurean, but he says, you know, Caesar doesn't believe in the afterlife. He thinks that's all nonsense.

So he's hinting at Caesar's Epicurean sympathies. And it's a bit edgy, I think, to be an Epicurean, but there's something kind of appealing about that kind of, bohemian counterculture aspect. And yet, you know, Caesar's an Epicurean, arguably he reads Lucretius's

De Rayram Natura's great Epicurian epic. While he's in Gaul, like fighting the Gauls, it just came out right in like 55 BC. And Manlius Torquatus is another prominent general who fights for the Pompeian side in the Civil War an Epicurean buddy of Ciceroes.

Also, Cassius, the conspirator, who organized the plot against Caesar, is an Epicurean. There's all these names that you can find. They're devotees of Epicureanism. And Philodemus is the guy who put this library together, and most of the text that we've discovered in these scrolls were written by Philodemus.

But so Epicureanism is, I think it's an interesting philosophy from a historian's perspective because it kind of gives you this insight into how the intellectuals were dealing with the Roman power elite

and maybe Epicureanism had something to do with this transition from Republic to Empire because it's not just Caesar Augustus maybe I don't know what Augustus is what he was maybe not an Epicurean himself but

his literary department were heavily influenced by phyloidemus personally why would Epicureanism make the transition to empire i mean i think most people don't know that Caesar was not an emperor augustus was yeah right not clear what Caesar's long-term plans for Rome were right um you know but um so like Augustus long story let's you know probably for another day in its fullness basically augustus wins this another round of civil war several rounds of civil war and when he is supreme finally around 27 bc he you know ostentatiously lays down his his powers and of course the senate immediately votes him back his powers like it's but he has this friend Mycenaeus

who is kind of like his chief of staff top I don't know like peacetime negotiator and as a great patron of the arts and literature it's like an head of the propaganda department Mycenaeus finds Horace who fought on the wrong side at Philippi

against Augustus and he Anthony, but he gets pardoned. Horace becomes the loyalist supporter of Augustus's regime. Mycenae brings him in, and Horace is a friend of Philodemus. He's a devotee of Epicurean philosophy. Mycenae finds Virgil. Wow. Virgil, we have letters from Herculaneum, from these scrolls, phylo demus addressing Virgil. your friend Virgil. Virgil probably hung out at that villa. To say nothing of the fact that Caesar probably hung out at that villa,

because the villa where the scrolls were discovered was owned, probably built by Caesar's father-in-law. Calpurnia's father, Lucius Calpurnius, Pizzo, Kaisaninas. It's probably the nicest villa in Herculaneum in its day. And Herculaneum is like this town for the wealthy anything. It's like the Hamptons, Martha's Vineyard. Anybody who's anybody in Roman politics

has a villa down in the Bay of Naples. Like Pompeii's great, but if you're somebody... Yeah, yeah. Herculaneum. Potswoli, maybe, Putales. There's a fleet there. But Herculaneum is one of the Primo spots.

And so everybody has a vacation home down there. Pizzo, Caesar's father-in-law, is a consul in 58, I think, 57. And he's the guy who installs phyloidemus there. But phyloidemus has a long life. And he brings a lot of his scrolls from Athens,

from the Epicurean school at Athens. And like houses them in this library, this philosophical library at Herculaneum. And he's writing treatises. He's also got works to consult. He's got the complete, you know, he's got the masterwork of Epicurists. on, you know, peri fusaeus, like on nature,

which now we know from, from what the fragments we have of that text, that Lucretius, if you care about these things, Lucretius' amazing Latin poem on Epicurean philosophy is almost like taken, like word for word, at least sentence for sentence from Epicurus's work and then like jammed into Latin poetry. The artistry is incredible in Lucretia. Because of that, like taking, Epicureus was a boring, crappy writer.

Right. Famously. But Lucretius makes this into like a world classic of Latin poetry. So the Epicureans, I think, why this matters for Empire is, you know, when Augustus wins, he's got to get the Romans accustomed to peace. How the common man is relieved that civil wars maybe would. will finally stop. We had Sulla's Civil War. We had the Catalinarian conspiracy, and there was thousands of Romans died for that. You know, Caesar's civil wars, Augustus versus Anthony,

and Augustus and Anthony versus the conspirators before that. It's just been a war, war, war for the past half a decade. Right. We know about all the great men, but because it's matter what does it like to just be a person? Yeah. This is chaos. This is hell. And that's Augustus's big mandate. Like peace and prosperity. Like, let's get back to the farms, guys. But he's also got to convince the nobles. He's got to convince the kind of the ambitious men who would have, you know, in the old Republican mindset,

the way that you rise to prominence is commanding in battle, defeating the enemies of the republic, maybe passing some laws in peacetime, doing some reforms, building an aqueduct. But, you know, war is really essential to that. And so I think you can see this, especially in Virgil's Georgics, where if you read it in translation,

it's just not that obvious, but like it's a poem, his second work before he writes the Aeneid, the great Roman epic. It's a poem about agriculture on the surface. But like every single line somehow, to me when I read it, kind of evokes the horrors of civil war

and the difficulty of the struggle that, you know, the way that you, sometimes you have to like cut down the tallest plants to mop off their heads and bury them in the earth to fertilize the new growth. So something is lost from Latin to English? A lot is lost. Really?

Yeah, especially with Virgil. I mean, yeah, Emerson talks about how Plutarch is one of the great, one of his virtues, is he withstands translation really well. So you get most of Plutarch in translation, but with a poet like Virgil. Sure. and much more than Homer withstands translation a lot better too but Virgil is just so so subtle and so elusive it's but you know Virgil and Epicurean he's like this idea that maybe the highest thing in life is not

leading armies in battle for the glory of the republic that's a very important idea for Augustus to like get into the heads of these rowdy nobles because he wants to establish peace and and change the way that that they operate, change the software of the republic that has probably produced the most impressive coterie of killer alpha males that the world has ever seen. This incredibly competitive, you know, amazing system that pitted virtue against virtue

and made it better. He's got to totally change that for people. But I think Epicurean philosophy is a big part of that. And this is what happened at that villa. You know, this is, I don't know. Phylo Dem is coming to Rome. When he did, Pizzo setting up that pleasure palace, if you will. A chaste pleasure palace, you know, but maybe not entirely.

That's somehow central to the story of like Western civilization. It's about more than just Epicurean philosophy. It's about more than just the texts that we might. discover we might discover lost works of Aristotle we might discover Cicero's Hortensius that converted Augustine to the philosophy he writes about this in the confessions all these lost works what what scroll do you give your kidney for I would give my kidney for Aristotle's on philosophy I I think you know there's a lot of I would love to find Aristotle the second book of Aristotle's poetics is poetics is poetics

that we have is maybe book one. We talked about tragedy. He's supposed to have written another book. He mentions this on comedy. That'd be cool to read. That'd be really cool. I have a list of dozens of these things that would be just so illuminating.

Caesar had wrote poetry when he was younger. Augustus suppressed it. It was like Augustus didn't want Caesar to, you know, his dignity to be kind of. diminished by this very human character that you can see in Caesar's poetry. Caesar wrote this treatise against Cato, the anti-Cato, after Cato committed suicide. And we don't have that? We don't have that.

I think Augustus hit it, you know? Did he hide it in that library? We have 400 plus scrolls, but this is the crazy part. That villa is only 10% excavated. Oh, my goodness. There could be hundreds, thousands more of scrolls in that villa. The water tables rising. Watch the documentary when it comes out.

I can't wait for it. So in this pleasure palace, why are we finding a Stoic Ethics Treatise that maybe is written by Chrysippusimself? What is Stoicism and why is that important? Well, you know, stoicism is, I mean, people are now familiar with Marcus Aurelius and pop stoicism these days. And I think that's very positive development. Yeah, it's a tech bro thing now. Yeah, yeah. It's still cool.

Yeah. So it's a good gateway drug. It is. It was mine. Yeah. Yeah, me too. And if it leads you to Plutarch and Plato and the other, the deeper stuff, I'm all for it. Stoicism was most famous, I think, for this idea that you should live according to nature.

In antiquity, at least. That was a big piece of what Stoic philosophy taught. And living according to nature for them meant things like realizing that, you know, you can only control what's what's in your own sort of sphere of control and that worrying about you know what you read and as you're scrolling through Twitter it's probably not going to make you happy and it's probably not going to make you more effective it's probably not going to increase the chances that you're going to be able to affect those things that are outside your control to just get anxious and obsess over them it's a good lesson but they also had a very developed

metaphysics you know the the logos is this governing principle that orders the universe and it's part of, part of living according to nature is living your life and according with logos, the divine, quasi-divine reason that orders the universe and, you know, a concept, or at least term, that I had this resonance when John says, in the beginning, it was the logos in the book, in the gospel of John. So it was definitely around at the time, but I think phyloedemus probably would have had Chrysippus in the life. just to have, to make sure they quoted him right when he refuted him. That's interesting.

Spilodemus. Yeah, and the Epicureans, they were very cantankerous, contentious. They're really into arguing facts and logic. They're going to defeat Chrysippus and Stoics with facts and logic. So where are you on that spectrum? I would probably consider myself an Aristotelian. And that's only kind of recently. I love Plato when I was younger.

He's such a great artist. He's a poet in prose. He'll inspire you to pursue wisdom and to think that virtue is the root to happiness, which is great. But I think that Aristotle kind of maps it out for you better. And Aristotle's, his ethics is not

likely to make you more ethical it can but it's boring it's but it is a kind of science of how humans like how ethics is I don't know how how ethics works

how morals work you know he studies vice very carefully he studies virtue very carefully and everything in between I think Aristotle is of the philosophers the one who has the best explanation of why ambition is important. And that's something that I think we've lost today.

Why ambition is important? So he's definitely taught that to Alexander. 100%. And we've lost that? Yeah, well, Aristotle gave Alexander a copy of the Iliad, his own personal edited, commented copy that he kept under his pillow or next to his pillow right by his dagger

on all of his campaigns because of zeal. Yeah. You know, Alexander wanted to be like Achilles probably because Aristotle was like, hey, the person you're trying to be, Homer already described that. It's Achilles.

And maybe Aristotle, if Alexander had Alexander stuck around, or had Aristotle stick around, he would have gotten to the other part of the story which is like, you know, Achilles kind of took it too far. far at times. Like the story is both about admiring his virtues, but also learning from his vices. A little over the top.

Yeah. I think that we have, we've become as a culture much more, we've lurched into the envy territory at scale much more than we've kind of let the force of tall poppy syndrome. At scale meaning our culture? Yeah, like our species. Oh, yeah. Our culture, at least. Our culture.

And maybe America isn't as bad in this respect as Britain. I don't know. I don't know. But, you know, this is a longer discussion. It is, but I tend to agree with you because something just feels wrong, and I think that's part of it. You're not, anybody who's successful is, like, by definition, a criminal. No, anybody who builds a great business is, by definition, a robber baron. Any great king was probably a pervert.

This is the lens that a lot of people look at history. It's also the lens that a lot of people look at, you know, entrepreneurs and leaders today. And the problem with that isn't necessarily that we should lionize or make saints out of everybody who achieves greatness. We should not. It's that if you assume, that they're evil, that success is proof of evilness, you will never learn from their mistakes.

You will dismiss them and fail to learn the lessons, I think. And that's even more dangerous. And you'll get, you'll get, you know, if only the unscrupulous rise to power, then the scrupulous, the virtuous will sit on the sidelines and we're all worse for it. So that's, that's one of reasons I really want, like, jam, you know, zeal and Aristotelian philosophy. And this is a neglected passage of Aristotle. Like, the academics don't like his passage on greatness of soul that much. They're kind of embarrassed by it. Why?

Well, I mean, he has a frank appreciation of, it's magnanimity is the virtue that he talks about. The great man, or the magnanimous man, desires great things. considers himself worthy of them and is correct in that judgment. Because he's virtuous. It's a capstone of virtue. But that seems, go ahead. I don't think there's anything wrong with that.

I don't either. I think it's great. But this is why you had to get out of academia. Yeah. I felt like it was, like, it wasn't obvious in the early teens to me. Maybe I was just naive. It wasn't obvious, but increasingly, something kind of turned.

I don't know what happened around 2016. Something happened. There was a kind of turn toward really leaning into hostility to greatness, hostility to competence, or at least the idea that that shouldn't be the criterion. You think that's turned around? Because you are correct. I don't, I, it's, I think. More people are aware of it.

And it's more than politics. Yeah. It's cultural. Yeah. And that's what really bothered me is seeing how this makes people miserable, actually. Regular people. It's not about, you know, the great getting more prizes and honors. It's about a kind of disordering of the soul.

If you don't really believe in excellence, you're not going to pursue it in your own life. but that's what makes especially what makes men happy. It is, and some people, most people maybe forget that someone else's excellence benefits them. Yeah. The better your podcast and your media gets, the more I benefit because I learn so much.

So I'm rooting for you and guys like you. I'm not hoping that you fail, but a lot of people hoping that you and I fail. Yeah. I hear from them every day. I'm not going anywhere. You too. Yeah, every day.

But, well, I'm drawn to, and I've said this many times, my audience knows this, talent. I'm fascinated by people who are just good at stuff, who are brilliant, who can drain 10 free throws in a row. I'm fascinated by people who can just do stuff. I don't envy that. I'm amazed by it. I love it. And that's the thing. It's not just about somebody, you know, making some technology, like,

the washing machine, all right, that's an achievement that makes my life easy, but does it make it better? What makes my life better is seeing somebody achieve something through great struggle and zeal to pull it out in my own life. And that's why I think we have history. That's why Plutarch, he says this very explicitly in places. He wanted to bring forth these models of zeal that you can learn for. and there's bad guys in Plutarch's lives. Demetrius, Antony, Caesar is very problematic for Plutarch. I admire of Caesar a little bit more than Plutarch,

but yeah, the guy made mistakes. But if there's just wicked tyrants, if you can't acknowledge that there was some virtue there, you will definitely not learn from their vices. And that's, I think, what Plutarch really cared about is that magnetism of excellence. of excellence, even when it's imperfect. It's always imperfect, except in one or two, one case, I think.

And what is that? Jesus Christ. Amen, I can't argue with that. Do you get any trouble because your group is men only? I think if we continue to grow and get on the radar, we're going to get into more trouble. It seemed, because before I started classical society, we started, we started, classical society. I was already doing men's only retreats for my podcast listeners. And that seemed really edgy in 2022. It was definitely, it was something I had wanted to do since for, you know,

almost a decade. It shouldn't be edgy. Everybody chill out. Yeah, that's what I said. I think people have backed off a little bit on this. You do see even from center left people, Richard Reeves, and articles in the New York Times, like, men are not okay. But there's always these qualifications. So it's still suspect. Even if it's not like immediate grounds for cancellation, there's still something kind of disturbing to the establishment about this,

which is to me evidence that we're on to something good. It is because whatever the politics are of the day, because it's it's so fickle. Human nature is steady. And as a story, you know that. So you can have your male-only group. That might not be cool 10 years ago, but they're there anyway.

We're doing it anyway. The guys are getting together anyway. So are the girls, and it's fine. Yeah. It's okay. Yeah. Everybody chill out. It's okay.

I'm glad you're doing it. Hopefully we'll get to that point where people can just chill out. We'll see. We'll see. and if we have to be, you know, on the front lines, kind of getting shredded by the Overton window as we expand it, we're there for it.

It'll be so embarrassing, though. They sit around and talk philosophy. I know. How dare they? It's a nerdy book club. Come on. That's what they said in Thebes. I'm watching the clock.

before on when you when we reached out you mentioned something that I didn't expect that you called a plot post-war American intelligentsia removing heroes from Western culture I think we're kind of on to that now yeah what did you mean well once again we're fighting human nature here yeah I I studied this a little bit when um when I was looking at the history of the discipline of classics. So classics, as we were talking about earlier, it used to be, this was the education that the British would give to their, you know, the future viceroy of India. Like, he had to be classically trained, you know, they, the soldier scholar, Lawrence of Arabia. I mean, he wasn't a classics major at Oxford, but the guy knew some Greek and Latin. And he, he modeled his

seven, was it, seven pillars of wisdom off of, in some ways off of, in some ways, off of Xenophon's anabasis. I mean, this is like deep in the kind of Western leadership tradition. It starts to change in the 19th century for a lot of reasons. So there's a longer history to this of kind of classics moving away from greatness and becoming a science instead, becoming, going from being the kind of nursery of statesmen, which is very much the way that Hamilton or Jefferson or Washington are looking at at the classics. The Founding Fathers probably read Plutarch

more than anything else except the Bible. Yeah. It's like Plutarch Pilgrim's Progress, I don't know, Black's Law Dictionary, the Bible. They all read them. All. And you don't necessarily know this

reading their papers, but they're talking about Pelopidas, Pamanondas, Rudus, Scipio. It's not like they're saying, as Plutarch says. But that's,

where they're getting it's just obvious right these are the kind of it's the Bible of heroes for them so so the model that was the model of classics up until the 19th century when it the German university system sort of turned history into a science and philology into a science and Friedrich Nietzsche reacts really strongly against this one of his my favorite books of his an early text on the uses and on the on the on the advantage and disadvantage of history for life. And he talks about Plutarch in there in some very interesting ways. Wow.

But, you know, criticizing the site of sort of like academicization of history. Like that's not what it's really for. It's for inspiring action. But I think it's, this is, there's some interesting books that have been written about this, Rusty Reno's, a return of the strong gods is a good. good one. But, you know, after World War II, the intelligentsia, let's say, agreed. And of course, there's a back history to this, but, you know, they kind of, everybody kind of agreed. The number one thing we have to do is prevent there ever being a Hitler or a Mussolini again.

And for that matter, a Patton or, I don't know, a Churchill. There's something about, this culture that produces ambitious men who want to lead the state that is toxic. And you know, it probably, I think you can see it in stern fathers, you know. Stern fathers make stern sons and stern sons are the ones that go on to want to be dictators, aren't they? There was a kind of, I don't know, maybe that it's a conspiracy. I haven't studied, like, you can go really deep on this. Like feminism being pushed by the CIA and the kind of Freudian psychology

being really pumped through from Madison Avenue onward. Like this is seen as a good thing. Get people to, you know, sexual experimentation and what's this with the nuclear family? You know, why do we need fathers? Why can't we just kind of be free and do? A lot, like the sexual revolution

is a sort of engineered... Every commercial for every product. Astro-Turfed. Yes. Every husband is a doofus in every commercial. Yeah. Stop it. Al Bundy.

And for God's sake, Al Bundy, I mean, married with children. That guy is... He owns his own home. He's got two kids. Which is amazing. Yeah. For selling shoes. Yeah.

Yeah. Homer Simpson. You know? Yeah. Like... So I think the attack on like the patriarchy, you have to kind of cut it off at its source. And maybe that work was already done by the scientization of philology where history becomes about just getting objective facts and looking at the subaltern. And, you know, was it really locusts that made possible Caesar's victory?

was it really about the great man? All that stuff kind of feeds in the same direction. But it wasn't just accidental. At the very least, there's plenty of evidence that it wasn't accidental. What do you think the motive is for it? Because again, we're bumping up against human nature. And I'll say something controversial, which isn't, that you can suppress masculinity all you want,

but deep down most women want a cowboy. Yeah. They want a cowboy. They want a man who's going to step up, who's going to take a swing. They do. Yeah. And I think it's about control. You know, if you don't have, if it's peace and everybody has way more food and entertainment than you could possibly want. And there's no apparent danger.

it's just less obvious that you need the manly virtues. But history shows that these things come in cycles. They certainly do. And so, and like if you, you know, if you don't have to rely on a strong man, husband, father, well, maybe the government can step in. And maybe you can vote for the people

who will make sure that, you know, the goods keep flowing to people who don't, need a strong man in their lives connect the dots I think it's clear it's clear it's clear yeah maybe it's changing at the very least culturally I think it's change I mean yeah in the state it's not changing it never will that you know that's sort of welfare state's not going anywhere but culturally I think it's I think it's changed I think it's okay to be a guy again that you can be a woman again. I think we're allowed.

I don't think I'm a... I do-to my wife. You know, my boy is the happiest boy in the world. But I'm still... If someone comes through the door in the middle of the night, I'm the guy that you want. Not, you know, some dude with a beard and a sweater.

It's a great Ernst Junger quote. What does he say? this is the I'm paraphrasing the essence of of civilization maybe he used the word patriarchy

is the father standing at the door axe in hand his son's flanking him yes yes the movie the Patriot Mel Gibson

it's like a seven year old Lord and the rifle that's how it was done and it was fine last thing for you. The show is cost of glory. Everybody needs to listen to. It's amazing.

You sold a family business. You went all in. Yeah. No plan B. No. Die on this hill. Dying on the hill. What does it cost you?

A lot of stress. I'm working harder than I ever have in my life. But feeling more like I'm doing the most meaningful thing that I could where I never felt like that before. I always felt like I should be doing something. This isn't what I'm supposed to be doing. And I think that when you just go all in on something,

you find wells of creativity and resolution and energy that you didn't think you had, especially when you have a few kids, mouths to feed, people depending on you. but I mean I it was the right choice to leave academia that gets more obvious by the day with like AI AI is writing my essays all you know I'm so glad I'm not

I really pity and pray for the people who's still in the system AI that those are the sirens on the island yeah for sure so be careful with it yeah great great tool uh bad God. Great. But I think, I didn't come back to help with my dad's business and eventually kind of run it with the intention of getting out of it and selling it.

It's a small business anyway, but, and, you know, pays for his retirement. But like, it became clear that that was the right thing to do. do and I'm I'm grateful to allow me to move on but I think I think you know carrying on a family legacy and allowing yourself to be determined to some extent by the choices that you know like like the blacksmith's son becomes a blacksmith there's something there's something really grounding about like living the life that you're supposed to live and and accepting the suffering and the struggle that you've been presented with and I hope that I did that uh that you know and this is one of the things I think when when you're in this kind of liquid modernity

and careers you know you see this a lot in academia but in other fields too like people people follow the job you know you're supposed to you know take a high for a job at this other company take the better position kind of leapfraud from from company to company there's there's a sense in which people are told it's the right thing thing to pursue the next great best opportunity and keep ratcheting up your salary or your prestige or is going to look good on your TV, whatever. But there's something really, there's something really grounding and rich about, you know, as, as, as, as, as, as, as, Euripides said one time, you know, rule the Sparta that you were given, you know,

um, it's, sparta is a crappy little, place at one point in its history. And maybe the king of Sparta could have been a greater man if he had lived in another, you know, if he had been at Mycini in the archaic period. But no, rule the Sparta you were given. You don't know how big of a legacy you're building that you might not even see. I think about that a lot. That's very wise. I mean, you've got a career and you've got a vocation, and a vocation comes from the word calling. So that's what you're doing, following your calling. I'm glad you're doing it.

Dr. Alex Petrus was here. What do you want to plug? The Classical Society. I say start with the cost of glory. Okay. Dig into the lives of the great heroes of history. And just, listen, be entertained. Hopefully they're entertaining.

If you don't like cost of glory and you're a reader, read Plutarch's lives. They're pretty accessible. Like, look up a few references and see how you feel after a year of that. And tell me that you weren't affected. Well done. Thanks for coming in. This has been a lot of fun. It's been great fun, AJ.

All right. See you soon. Bye, everybody. That was Alex Petkis. I had a stack of notes this thick, and we got through like half of them. So he's coming back. Start with the dinner party. Alex says the night before Caesar was murdered,

he asked his dinner guests the best way to die, and one of his assassins was at the table. I checked, that's true. It's an Appian, a great historian writing nearly two centuries later, and Caesar's answer was sudden and unexpected. Now, the scrolls. Alex said that the Vesuvius Challenge read a whole Herculaneum scroll for the first time.

That checks out. The University of Kentucky team behind it announced in June that they got 22 columns of Greek off a lump of charcoal nobody was open since the eruption. The stoic part is real, too. I said on Mike it might be Chrysippus himself. The last column names his nephew, and nobody's willing to go further than that,

and neither am I. But it's interesting. Then there's a student in Fresno, the grown man who read Plato's Republican Alex's class, and stopped cheating on his wife. Alex says that's what all of this is for, and I believe him. I'm also applying to the classical society. I'll drink the blood. Probably not.

Cost of Glory is at costofglory.com. it's a super great podcast if you're into this kind of nerdy history stuff. The documentary is called The Vesuvius Challenge. No release date yet, but everything I mentioned is linked below. I'm definitely looking forward to that. Until next time, be safe, be kind, and know that you are appreciated.

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