Voices of Freedom - Interview with Barry Strauss

Episode Date: April 17, 2025

An Interview with Barry Strauss, Esteemed Classicist, Military and Naval Historian, and Best-selling Author Different civilizations, cultures and countries have experienced the rise of remarkable leaders. While these leaders may have ruled under vastly different circumstances, they often share similar characteristics. Many too, have made the same costly mistakes. Our guest on this episode of Voices of Freedom is Barry Strauss, a leading historian who has explored many fascinating leaders, particularly from ancient classical times. He deepens our understanding about the universal qualities of leadership and shares lessons of the ancient world that remain applicable today. Topics Discussed on this Episode: What drew Barry to the study of the ancient world and the leaders who shaped it Universal qualities of a capable and effective leader Common mistakes that great leaders have made and what can be learned from them The ancient leader that fascinates Barry the most Barry’s experiences in promoting free speech within the academy Why free speech has been restricted within higher education What previous civilizations tell us about free speech, including who had the privilege or right to practice it The history of disinformation and how it was used in the ancient world Barry’s process of bringing ancient leaders to life through his writing How to get young people to engage with the classical world Whether the ideals of the Western tradition are at threat of being lost Reaction to winning a Bradley Prize About Barry Strauss Barry Strauss is a bestselling author, and an esteemed military and naval historian.  He is currently the Corliss Page Dean Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and Series Editor of Princeton’s Turning Points in Ancient History. Barry is also the Bryce and Edith M. Bowmar Professor in Humanistic Studies Emeritus at Cornell University, where he was the Chair of the Department of History as well as Professor of History and Classics.    In addition, he is a 2025 Bradley Prize winner. :   

Hello and welcome to Voices of Freedom, a Bradley Foundation podcast. I'm Rick Graber, president and CEO of the Bradley Foundation. On the podcast, we'll explore issues that affect our freedoms with a focus on free enterprise, free speech, and educational freedom. So let's get started. The great empires of the ancient world offer some of the most instructive lessons on leadership, the nature of power, and civilization. You can also tell us a great deal about historical patterns and geopolitical dynamics that are relevant today. Our guest on this episode of Voices of Freedom is renowned for bringing ancient histories' most fascinating figures to life

and imparting the wisdom that can be gleaned from their times. Barry Strauss is a best-selling author, an esteemed military and naval historian, and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. He's also Professor Emeritus in Humanistic Studies at Cornell University. And of course, he's also a 2025 Bradley Prize winner. Welcome and congratulations, Barry. It is wonderful to have you join us. Thank you, Rick. I'm just over the moon at this prize and just fantastic to be here today.

Terrific. Well, let's jump right in. Barry, you're one of the country's leading military and naval historians. What drew you to study the ancient world and the leaders who shaped it? How did this all happen? Well, two things, Hucidides and Vietnam. So I started college in 1970. I was very young, so I wasn't going to be drafted right away.

And as it turned out, the draft was phased out by the time I reached draft age. But the Vietnam War was going on. And as a freshman in college, I read Thucydides, and I thought, good heavens. This man is writing 2,500 years ago, but it's as if he's writing about today. How could he have known this? What know, what kind of wisdom was there in in ancient texts?

So I dove right in there was a program a very niche Honors program in college called the Greek civilization program and I thought that's for me I really want to learn more about this stuff and as I say the rest is history I have to ask what were the parallels with the Vietnam War? more about this stuff. And as I say, the rest is history. I have to ask, what were the parallels with the Vietnam War? There's a famous passage in Thucydides where he says, words lose their meaning and partisan vitriol becomes thought of as normal and the way that people should speak. And I thought, wow, that's where we are today.

Wow, interesting. Let's draw on your research and study. What are some university qualities of an effective leader? Well, I like to think that the qualities that an effective leader needs come in three buckets. One is the noble arts, and these would be things like courage, ambition, dignity, sense of justice, moderation, wisdom, and vision. And the second bucket would be practical skills like people skills, oratorical ability, decisiveness, agility, the ability to delegate. These would be the practical skills. And then the third bucket, the dark arts, cunning, the ability to recognize that sometimes fear is a more effective motivator than love

and the willingness to dissimulate from time to time in in service of a good cause. So I would say those are the skills of an effective leader. You're really talking about character, aren't you, in many respects? Yes, yes. I mean, to be an effective leader, you have to have most of these skills already. Some of them you can learn on the job, and effective leaders will learn on the job, they'll become better, but you've got to have a certain character to do it in the first place. And that ambition and that drive, if you don't have that, then all the rest isn't going to work.

I'm reading a book now about Churchill. Yeah. He had a lot of those traits, did he not? He did. He really did. Courage, ambition, enormous work ethic. I could add that to the mix. A multi-talented person really.

And vision. He could see what was going to happen. Also in his case, he'd studied history and he imbibed the lessons of history. So important for him to see the road ahead. Yes. Do you think we can probably learn as much from failure as we can learn from success? Indeed. Do you agree? Yeah, absolutely. What are some of the common mistakes that well-known leaders in the past have made and what do they tell us about human nature or the civilizations that they led. Yeah, well leaders do make mistakes and great leaders know how to overcome them,

but some of them would be arrogance, believing one's own propaganda, one's own publicity and not recognizing one's own limits. Another one would be mirror imaging, thinking that other people think exactly the same way you do, in particular that your rivals or enemies think the same way you do. Another mistake is fighting a war or engaging in a campaign according to the ways you are your comfort zone, but rather than what is needed on a particular occasion. Those are some of the mistakes that leaders make. Underestimating the enemy is a very common mistake that leaders make. Of course you can see I'm thinking from a military point of view. But yes, those are all rather big ones. Do you think being in the job too

long sometimes leads to mistakes? You acquire, as you say, almost an arrogance of being invincible and it's really not the case at all I agree and it also makes you underestimate young people So I've been in the business all my life of working with young people and I've learned that although you know Us old colleges can run certain circles around them. We shouldn't underestimate young people. They have a lot of skills So that's another mistake that a teacher can make and maybe leaders can make as well. Maybe the founders were right in, or not necessarily the founders, but ultimately having term limits. Franklin Roosevelt did some pretty arrogant

things, particularly in court packing and so forth, that might have been the product of just being there too long. I think so, yeah. I mean, I think the term limits, by and large, are a very good thing. Yes. So out of all the leaders you've studied, name one that continues to fascinate you. It's got to be Caesar.

Caesar had a triple crown, So he was a great general. He was a great statesman. And he was also a great writer. And as a historian, I just find him fascinating. His ability to communicate, but also his ability to work behind the scenes, his vision of what he wanted for Rome and where he wanted to go, and then his skill as a general,

his skill on the battlefield. All of these are enormously impressive. I'm hastened to add there's another side of Caesar. Caesar could be a monster. He bragged that he had killed a million people in Gaul, in conquering Gaul, and enslaved a million others. This is not a role model. Also, the hero of all his writings

is a certain Julius Caesar. It's all written about him as if he's the center of everything and he was a man who didn't know how to stop. He didn't know his limits. So and of course in the end he really underestimated his enemy and he over rationalized. He thought that he was a very rational person. So no rational person could consider assassinating him because that would plunge Rome back into civil war. Rome had just had a civil war. But alas for him, he underestimated or overestimated the people he was dealing with. He didn't hesitate to do that.

So maybe one of those characteristics of a strong leader would be a certain self-awareness and you're suggesting that perhaps Caesar didn't have that self-awareness. He didn't have it enough. He didn't have it in the right places. You know, Caesar had always depended on a number two, like any good leader. I mean, you had to delegate. Unfortunately, Caesar had a way of crushing his the egos of his number two and closing off their paths ahead. He always had to be the first.

And so various number twos just left him. They went over to the other side. And it's an interesting fact, an appalling fact that many of the assassins were his colleagues. They weren't on the other side in the Civil War. They'd fought with him on the Civil War, but they saw their road ahead being blocked by a Caesar who'd moved on and had no use for them anymore. Very dangerous. And if Caesar had been able to trust them, there would have been a different outcome for the Ides of March. A friend of mine was in the British military, and when I described one of his key assassins, he said, ah, that was Caesar's chief of security.

And he turned on him. I'm not sure I quite see it that way, but there's an argument to be made for that. So you got to have a trusted number two and you've got to have someone to tell you how things have changed. Interesting. Let's switch gears a little bit and talk about higher education. You've spent your whole career there. And certainly free speech is a major concern on campuses today across the country.

Talk to us about your experiences in promoting free speech within the academy. And I know they've been some difficult experiences, but talk about that a little bit. Sure. Well, at Cornell, two colleagues and I in 2006 decided to start a small program, which we called the Program on Freedom in Free Societies. With help from some seed money from generous donors like the Bradley Foundation, we were able to start this program, and it's still going strong.

We really wanted to do two things. One was simply to bring in voices to campus that were not really being brought in and weren't being heard. And the other was to work with students, undergraduates in particular, but also graduate students, to try to give them support for the things they were doing. It's no secret that in most universities, at least in elite universities, the undergraduates are much more diverse in their political viewpoints than the faculty.

The faculty all lean in one direction. A study showed that in the 1990s, the ratio of Democrats to Republicans in universities was 4.5 to 1. But in this century, it's more like 10 to one, Democrats to Republicans. That's not true of the undergraduates, although they tend to be mostly Democrats. There are a fair number of Republicans.

There are a fair number of conservatives. And they needed support. So we brought in people over the years, some big names like the late Sir Roger Scruton, Max Boot, Ross Duthat, Jonah Goldberg, Victor Davis Hansen, Andrew Roberts, the late Claudia Rosette, Heather MacDonald. I could go on and on. And I think this is very important for the students and for the community because rarely are these people brought to the campus. And so that's what we've been doing, that's what we did. Free speech in the academy, rarely does the administration or the powers that be come out with an edict saying,

thou shall not say. But everybody knows what the no going zones are, everybody knows what the limits are, everybody knows what you can say and what you can't say. It's just not an optimum environment and universities are so important and American universities have been such an ornament to this country, such an achievement that they need help and we need to help them. And your experience at Cornell, did you got a lot of pushback for this effort?

We didn't get a lot of pushback, but we didn't get a lot of support either. We got some lip service from people who said, more power to you. But there was never a sense that this was a priority. In fact, far from it. It was, well, if you have to do it, go ahead. I mean, with one or two exceptions, and there were some pretty high up administrators who were very supportive of the effort in speech, not indeed, but in speech, they were very supportive of the effort. And I do appreciate that. I really do. But a lot of others just, you know,

didn't really want to have anything to do with it. How did we get to this state of affairs where the ratio is 10 to 1 or worse? Well, for one thing very few people really seem to care about it and say what's the problem? They don't they don't see a about it and say what's the problem? They don't see a diversity of opinion. They don't see debate and disagreement as a good in and of itself. For another thing, we are talking about limited resources. Academics come in and they say, gee, I do X. I'd like to get somebody else in who does X or somebody whose field will help me do X. And usually that person is the kind of thing

that usually that person agrees with them politically. So that's one way. Another way has been well documented is that the left progressives basically made an effort. But the end of the 1960s, they realized that that path wasn't going to work anymore. Quote, unquote, revolution wasn't going to work. So instead, they wanted to go into the academy and they did. They're not devoted to freedom of speech. Some of them just don't care. Others think freedom of speech is downright bad. I mean disciples of Marcuse, for instance, would have thought freedom of speech is

a bad thing. It's a dangerous thing. You can't let these ideas percolate, especially among impressionable young people. So we have to move things in a new direction. And there just haven't been that many people to stop them or are willing to stop them. I certainly saw it in my career at Cornell when I first started teaching there in the 90s. It wasn't nearly as one-sided as it became. And by the way, I don't want to demean my colleagues.

There are people who I disagree with, who I respect, and they're hardworking academics. They're good scholars. They're good teachers. They just tend to come from one side of the aisle and not much care about the other side. Maybe it's human nature. Do you think we're at a point where there might at least be some cause for hope that there might be some change? I've had conversations with my colleague on the board at the Bradley Foundation, Robbie George and others that are somewhat more optimistic these days with the centers that are forming

at places like the University of North Carolina or Tennessee or Ohio State or other Arizona. I agree. There's lots of reason for optimism. There are these great centers that are starting also in Florida, also in Texas. So I think that is a big source for optimism. I think the fact that young people are not so much politically on the left as they were. I think the Trump administration is doing good things in some ways. Maybe they're using a hammer when they should be using a scalpel, but nonetheless I think they are they're doing good things and I think they've put the fear of God into some universities. Also I think

there are administrators out there who really aren't happy with the way things have gone and who recognize that there are problems and who would like to change, they need some support to move in that direction. And so, yes, I think there's reason for optimism, but the fight is by no means over. And I think that's a good thing. I think it's great to have challenges. I think it's great to have to. I think it's great to have to fight politely, but fight firmly with people. I think that makes us better. And I think it will be an education for the country to see this happen. It really will be.

Let's drill down a little bit on something you just said and then put it into a historical context. Without question, censorship is hotly contested and some do argue that speech is an essential freedom. I'd agree with that. Others argue that harmful speech can have a deleterious effect or impact on society. Let's get to the historical context. Public discourse in the ancient world

was entirely different to how it is popularly understood or debated today. But what do previous civilizations tell us about free speech or who had the privilege or right to actually practice it? Yeah, great question. If we look at my friends, the Greeks and Romans, so in Greece, in Athens, which was a democracy, free speech was very strong. The Greeks had two concepts. One was issegoria, which means equality in speech, meaning everybody has a chance to speak.

And the other is parosia, which more or less means we get the word pan in English like pantheism. It means you can speak about anything. That being said, there were limits. It was understood that when you spoke in the assembly, which was the legislature of all adult male citizens, you could say anything. And also people said anything and everything in public, in comedy, in the public square. But there there could be pushback. And the most famous pushback, of course, was against Socrates,

who really made a career of poking the most powerful and important people in his society. And in the end, he was put on trial. And as you know, he refused to apologize. He refused to bow down. And he was punished for it. He paid with his life. He had the chance to escape. He could have escaped into exile but he refused to do so. He said that it was his responsibility as an Athenian citizen to accept the laws of Athens. It's a longer story, more complicated stories, but a lot of respect for free speech but not without limits. The Roman Republic, there was also respect for free speech, but less so. There was less of an ingrained notion that there was a right of free speech. There was an ability to speak freely. It was easier if you came from the elite. Rome was a

very stratified society. So above all in the Senate, with absolutely few most elite men in the society, they had a complete freedom of speech. But elsewhere, yes, there was some freedom, but not as one as much as one might think. Related topic. Disinformation has also been the subject of vigorous debate in recent years. And when you think about it, the word disinformation was not a word you even heard. That's right. Not too many years ago. That's right.

Some have said it's being weaponized to shut down or suppress certain viewpoints. And that was especially true during COVID, during the pandemic. Yeah. You've written about disinformation saying that the facts of it are as old as war itself. Expand on that. They are. So we see disinformation today, for instance, in the war in the Middle East, when reporters accept uncritically the information that Hamas gives out, and it's often false, often completely false. But this is a very old phenomenon. So it's as old as the Trojan horse.

When the Greeks pretended to leave Troy, and they left behind a feigned trader, someone who pretended to have turned trader, who told everyone in Troy, the Greeks are gone. They're not coming back. And you can let this horse into your city. Other occasions in the ancient world, so in the showdown between Octavian and Mark Antony.

Octavian declared war, but he didn't dare declare war on Mark Antony because they were both Romans, and Octavian had promised civil wars were over. So instead he made up a story that he was declaring war on Cleopatra, and Cleopatra had unmanned the noble Roman Mark Anthony This was Egypt trying to take over Rome. And so he informed everyone. This is war against Egypt Not many Romans bought it they could see through it But nonetheless, this was the story that he he put out Anthony just to get his own back started spreading the story that Octavian did not come from an elite family. One of his grandfathers had been a baker, he said, another had been a money changer, and then to add a little racism to it he

said that Octavian's family actually really came from Africa. They weren't Roman at all. So each side would weaponize knowingly false information, which is the essence of disinformation, to oppose the other. Very interesting. Barry, you're known for bringing the great leaders of the past to life. Talk to us a little bit about your research and writing process, what you go through. How do you get into the head of Caesar or Alexander the Great? Well, good question. The hard part is that you have to sit in the library a lot, clock a lot of hours in the library reading

a lot of books. I believe it. The fun part is that I've chosen people who lived in beautiful places in ancient times. So you've got to make a lot of trips to the Mediterranean and smell the smells and taste the food and walk the battlefields which I've tried to do as much as possible. That's a big part of the story as well. And archeology, of course, is part of it. You've got to immerse yourself in ancient literature

and see what their values were, at extent. They're similar to ours, except they're different than ours. What made these people tick? How do you think like a Roman? How does a Roman think? It's a great challenge and great fun to do that. And then frankly, you've got to try to know people in your own society, in your own time.

I think I learned a lot about leadership by being chair of my department at Cornell. As small as that may seem, I thought, oh, wow. I didn't know that's what it takes to get people to do. Or, wow, I didn't know that's what it takes to get people to do. Or, wow, I didn't know that people would flatter the leader in the way I'm being flattered. So that's an interesting dimension to all of this that I hadn't seen before. So you do need some life experience to add to the equation. In this age of TikTok and Instagram, in an age where people simply get information in

different ways than when you and I were in college, how can educators get young people to engage with the classical world? Have you found it difficult? No. I mean, great. Instagram and TikTok, in a way, they're made for the classical world because the images are so beautiful and I think that really appeals to people I still think young people think there's just something cool about ancient Greece and Rome and Egypt They want to learn about it

The harder part of course is getting them to do reading, because young people don't want to read anymore. And that's a problem that I and my colleagues everywhere, and not just in the United States, have been found in the last few years. That's a harder thing to do. And you know, you have to make the pitch that this reading will make them better and that they really don't want to depend on AI to do the job for them. And that AI can be a very dangerous tool. If you've done the reading and you know where you're coming from,

then you have a check on AI. Also, I think it's important to get people to see that it's important to read things that are beautiful and that are powerful. Socrates, the Apology of Socrates, is just magnificent oratory. And I think students have to be exposed to that. And in our own tradition, I think there's nothing better for them than to read Lincoln and Lincoln's writings, Lincoln's speeches, other great speeches in American history. Frederick Douglass, fantastic writer, fantastic speaker. They should be reading these speeches.

They should be learning them. They should be memor these speeches. They should be learning them. They should be memorizing parts of them. I'll tell you, one of the most shocking moments I had in my teaching career was some years ago, I was talking to a graduate student, and I said, you know, Pericles-Strein-O-Loration is a lot like Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. Pause and said, you know, I've never read

Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. And I said, are you Canadian? I said, no, I wasn't Canadian. So let me get this straight. Nobody ever told you to read Lincoln's Gettysburg address? No. I said, you know, it would take you about three minutes. So we got to get people to do that.

And we got to tell them these skills are life skills. There's wisdom in them, there's beauty in them, there's power in them and that's what we have to teach them. So, how do you handle that first day of class? Do you say, well, you've signed up for this class and you're going to have to read or do you try to be a little bit more diplomatic than that? Depends. I try to size up the students and tell them that they're going to have to read. Now in the age of AI, in some way, there's nowhere we can stop them. There's no way we can stop them

from cheating other than having them write in class, which I and many of my colleagues now do. We've gone back to an earlier generation where everything was handwritten. But I think you have to make the pitch to them. Back to blue books? Back to blue books. Absolutely. Yes, absolutely back to blue books. Also, the other thing we do is have them do more oral presentations and say, you can't use PowerPoints.

You're going to have to memorize some things and you're going to be graded on your presentation. Sometimes have them work and to do the reading and comment on the reading and work in groups. That's not foolproof because they can still use AI. I still use AI for that. But try to give them the pitch that these are life skills. It's not just this class. One thing that I've done, I hate to do it, but I've done is I've shortened the readings. So I not expect them to read as much as I used to expect them to read, which is a terrible thing to say. But I find that helps some.

You know, if you focus on the main things and say I'd love you to read the whole thing But if you can't just read these pages these passages And we're gonna look at them very Intensely you really have to you have to meet the students halfway You have to work with them because some of them have had wonderful educations wonderful teachers. There's no problem They're there not all of them though. And with quite a few of them, as I say, you have to meet them halfway, you have to bring them to where you want them to be, and you have to give them arguments and reasons as to why it will help them in their lives and

their careers in various ways. And it works. I think it really works. It works not with all the students, but with enough of them. Big picture question. Many fear that the ideals of the Western tradition are being threatened or even lost. In your view, what are the prospects for defending and strengthening those ideals. Yeah, well I think those ideals are under threat. So the first, you know, Plato taught us that the most important thing is educating the young. That is, if you want to live in a just society, you have to focus on education. And that, after all, is the message of the Bible. The Torah means teaching. And you've got to teach young people. We have to educate people who know about Western civilization,

who believe in it, who believe in its ideals, who understand that it's imperfect, but it is the best we've got. And it's a very good thing indeed. And then you've got to teach it to young people. We know that a lot of the damage is being done in the schools. It's being done in primary school and secondary school. We've got to retake control or retake, have a voice,

have a much bigger voice in primary and secondary education. It's being done in classical academies around the country. They're great things. Unfortunately, they still reach relatively small number of people. But we need to reach a relatively small number of people. But we need to get that vision back into American education. And it needs to be an American higher education as well. We've got to be willing to fight.

We've got to be unapologetic, diplomatic but unapologetic. And we've got to push this as much as possible around the country, because the other side has certainly pushed their vision. As you know, in universities, the problem isn't always the faculty. Sometimes it's not the faculty at all. It's the army of administrators who are, well, they're getting their message across to students,

not in the classroom, but in the dorms and in various programs in various ways. But we've got to push back on that as well. We've got to make educating the young in Western civilization and American ideals a key thing. Another thing I might say is the absorption of immigrants. We've had a lot of debate about immigrants in this country. I'm one of these people who thinks that on the whole immigrants are a very good thing, but I'm very concerned about the lack of absorption. The things that you have to know to become American citizens are really small. They don't ask immigrants a whole lot, and there's nothing like the kind of education that you and I got when we were growing up. There are other countries that pay a lot more

attention to absorbing new citizens, and I think that we in the United States have to do that. We have to educate them in American ideals, in American history, and we have to make sure that they're not getting a warped view of American history. We don't like what happened to my son in his high school where the history text was Howard Zinn. I'm sorry. That's really, we have to do better than that. We have to give a different message to people. And I think that we can. Now, hopefully people like Bill McClay, a co-winner of the Bradley Prize with you,

is making some progress on that. He is. Indeed, indeed. Very last question. What's it mean to you to win a Bradley Prize? Well, it's just a fantastic honor. I mean, it's a lifetime achievement award in a way, but also admission to a group of men and women who

are some of the most the greatest people in our country who've achieved the most, who've done so much in many fields, and particularly in education. I'm just so honored to be part of this group, to be able to contribute in a small way to the cause that we all believe in, the cause of Western civilization, American exceptionalism, American ideals. The Bradley Foundation stands for that, and just so grateful and so honored to be in that group.

I'm so grateful to have celebrated to be in that group. Celebrated with you and your family. Thank you. Just a few short weeks. Thank you. Barry Strauss, thanks so much for your dedication, for your perseverance. Through at times difficult circumstances, you've made a difference,

you continue to make a difference, and for that we say thank you. Thank you, Rick. Thank you very much. And as always, thanks to all of you for joining us on this episode of Voices of Freedom. Join us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts for our next conversation on issues impacting our freedom and America's foundational principles. And make sure to subscribe so you don't miss an episode.

I'm Rick Graber and this is a Bradley Foundation podcast. you