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

-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

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Every now and then, someone would die.

• 0:03Speaker 01

  Risk. True stories, no holding back.

• 0:06Speaker 02

  He comes up behind me and whispers right in my ear. Nobody knows where you are, and nobody can hear you scream.

• 0:13Speaker 01

  Some of these stories will make you laugh till you're crying.

• 0:16Speaker 03

  And then I realize, I'm unconscious.

• 0:21Speaker 01

  Some will stick with you for life.

• 0:23Speaker 04

  They catch my mom poisoning my sister. My brother, he died at the hands of my mother.

• 0:28Speaker 05

  I said, Mike, don't make me shoot you, please. But he did.

• 0:31Speaker 01

  People say Risk makes them feel less alone and more alive.

• 0:36Speaker 05

  During my time in prison, I discovered a podcast called Risk. That podcast saved my life so many times.

• 0:44AJ Gentile?

  Live your authentic truth, because you never know who may come to your funeral and turn that bitch out.

• 0:51Speaker 01

  Risk, the show where people tell true stories they never thought they'd dare to share. Wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:00AJ Gentile?

  Today, I'm talking with Alex Petkas. 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.

• 1:08Speaker 07

  Top monk on EverQuest? I was once a level sixty dominatrix on a Turkish gambling server. I respect the grind.

• 1:16AJ Gentile?

  Now, he hosts Cost of Glory, where he retells the lives of Plutarch's heroes. He sold the family business to go all in. Today, we're covering how Plato got played by a tyrant in Sicily, a coup and ancient thieves pulled off by men in dresses.

• 1:28Speaker 07

  Men in dresses pulled off a coup? Did I ever tell you a story when Uncle Sal tried that at Thanksgiving? We refer to it as the incident, and I got him a lawyer.

• 1:38AJ Gentile?

  And the Roman Library, a volcano buried 2,000 years ago. AI just read one of its scrolls, start to finish. Alex helped produce the documentary about it with 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.

• 1:56Speaker 07

  Yeah, just one time.

• 1:58AJ Gentile?

  Would you please let me get through? It's the middle of the night. Will you let me?

• 2:01Speaker 07

  Sorry, sorry. I forgot you get chills over a guy who doesn't even clock his own murderer sitting right there. Yeah, but yeah.

• 2:09AJ Gentile?

  After our conversation, I'll come back and break down the talk. Let's go down to the basement.

• 2:22AJ Gentile?

  Thank you for being here, sir.

• 2:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:24AJ Gentile?

  Alex Petkas, Cost of Glory. I love your podcast. I'm obsessed with it, which is why today's gonna be, it's gonna be hectic. So there's gonna be a lot of rifling through papers. It's so much to cover. I'm hoping you'll come back and we can drill down to specific stories. Like, we can, I've got Catiline here for 18 minutes. That's not fair.

• 2:47AJ Gentile?

  So we're just gonna have to muscle through it.

• 2:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:50AJ Gentile?

  What I'd like to start with.

• 2:51Speaker 03

  Honored, by the way.

• 2:52AJ Gentile?

  Stop.

• 2:52Speaker 03

  I love your work.

• 2:53AJ Gentile?

  Get out of here. I won't accept it.

• 2:57AJ Gentile?

  I appreciate that. Thank you. It was a lot of luck and accident.

• 3:00Speaker 03

  I was a little afraid, because I know you do really good research. And look, look at that stack of papers.

• 3:06AJ Gentile?

  Why afraid? I've never hurt anyone's feelings. I've only made six grown men cry. That's not.

• 3:12Speaker 03

  Fair.

• 3:13AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 3:13Speaker 03

  Well.

• 3:14AJ Gentile?

  Are you feeling emotionally open today?

• 3:16Speaker 03

  I am feeling quite emotionally open. Yeah.

• 3:19AJ Gentile?

  Okay, I noticed the posture change when I asked. That's interesting.

• 3:24AJ Gentile?

  I want to learn about you, but I pride myself on, on being novel and asking questions and that those, that the guest doesn't expect, that are fun for you, that people won't hear on the circuit, because everybody does the circuit. But before we do that, if just maybe a five-minute retelling of Caesar and the statue.

• 3:49Speaker 03

  Hmm. 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.

• 4:13AJ Gentile?

  Paper, paper pusher?

• 4:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, you know, the, the, the document guy.

• 4:17AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 4:17Speaker 03

  The, the gopher. And he is, you know, they're doing the whole Asizes 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 the, you know, they converted it to a temple to Hercules, Hercules is Melkart. And, and in this temple, as, as one does, you know, they've, they've put a lot of art, statues and paintings. And there's a statue. Caesar's going through there with his friends. It's kind of like a museum, and they're kind of appreciating the art. Maybe toss a little incense on the pyre.

• 4:59Speaker 03

  And his friends, at some point, they've kind of moving along from statue to statue, and they look back and they see Caesar is not with them. He's standing in front of a statue of Alexander the Great. And, and they're like, Caesar, are you coming? Wait a second. Are you crying? And, and he looks at them, and sure enough, he is. He's got tears in his eyes. And he says, do you not think it is a matter for weeping that when Alexander was my age, he was king of so many 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.

• 5:42AJ Gentile?

  No. Disagree.

• 5:44Speaker 03

  I, I disagree. I think you don't, there's two, there's two moments where Caesar cries, you know, that's one of them. And the other is when he's presented with the head of Pompey the Great.

• 5:52AJ Gentile?

  Mm-hmm.

• 5:53Speaker 03

  And, but I, so he's not, he's not a big crier. But I think that to get a man like that to cry, it's not, it's not that he's a kind of spoiled child sad that he doesn't have his, his toy that he thinks he deserves. It's about this sudden realization of who he is. And almost like, I mean, kind of controversial to say, it's like who he's called to be, you know? What, what he sees in Alexander is, is a kind of, it's, it's, it's convicting. It's like, okay, he's, he's a, he's a pretty flashy, he's like pretty well-known around Rome.

• 6:37Speaker 03

  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, he's realizing the path that lies before him.

• 6:47AJ Gentile?

  This is like a middle-aged crisis.

• 6:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. And I have to get, I have to get serious now. And Aristotle has a word for that emotion. Zeal.

• 7:00AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 7:01Speaker 03

  Zelos, which we usually translate as emulation. The Greek word is zelos in, this is in the rhetoric where he has this catalog of the basic emotions of politics. I think there's 13 of them, anger and friendship and pity. And, but zelos is one of them. And it's the pain you feel when you see, present in someone who's like you by nature, things good and honorable, which you yourself are capable of attaining. So it's a kind of sting.

• 7:34Speaker 03

  And it's not envy. It's different from envy. Aristotle says, I think he's right, envy is a different emotion. It's the, it's the pain you feel when you see somebody succeeding that, that makes you want to see them fail, suffer.

• 7:50AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 7:51Speaker 03

  It's the tall poppy emotion. And it's not productive. It's, it's, it's basically a form of malice. But, and it's characteristic of, of, of bad men in Aristotle's book. But zeal is characteristic of, of good men, 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, it's basically the emotion of aspiration, and it hurts. And, and I think that's really instructive for thinking about like, how, how you find who you are. You know, you discover who you're supposed to be, not by gazing at your navel or like trying to like listen to these whisperings of your soul necessarily. That's, that can be important.

• 8:36Speaker 03

  But fundamentally, I think we're designed such that we learn who we are by focusing intently on other people.

• 8:46AJ Gentile?

  Mimesis.

• 8:46Speaker 03

  Mimesis, yes, exactly. And, you know, being a student of Plato, he's, he's, he's, he's gone through the whole philosophy of mimesis, which you see in The Republic. It's, it's kind of this ordering principle of the universe, the higher, the, the lower imitates the higher, the forms appear. And I, I think that that's, that's how Plato saw the world structured. That's how I think Aristotle sees the world structured. 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 not that 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?

• 9:31AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 9:31Speaker 03

  Because everything kind of imitates that, drawn toward it. So I, deep stuff, I think.

• 9:38AJ Gentile?

  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.

• 9:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, it was, it was The Seven Habits.

• 9:50AJ Gentile?

  Seven Habits.

• 9:51Speaker 03

  Seven Habits book.

• 9:51AJ Gentile?

  What was going on with you?

• 9:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, I, I decided at one point that I needed to kind of get my act together.

• 10:04Speaker 03

  You know, there was a girl. She was too good for me. And I realized.

• 10:09AJ Gentile?

  I married that girl.

• 10:09Speaker 03

  I could fix that.

• 10:10AJ Gentile?

  Yeah. You had a statue moment.

• 10:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think so. I had a, I had a kind of statue moment like, I want to be like, at the very least, like the men described in this book, or like a Marcus Aurelius, or like, like somebody.

• 10:27AJ Gentile?

  So meditations is what you grabbed?

• 10:29Speaker 03

  I did grab meditations. I can't say that I got that far. I won't. But I did, for some reason, the, you know, as a 17 year old who was not used to reading a lot of ancients, well, I, okay, I took Latin, but it was, again, the sleeping through the class thing.

• 10:44Speaker 03

  It was, it was just this seven habits self-help book where, you know, Covey describes,

• 10:53Speaker 03

  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, 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 packaged in a way.

• 11:14AJ Gentile?

  I keep meditations and the Bible on my nightstand at all times, and a sci-fi book.

• 11:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 11:18AJ Gentile?

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• 12:02AJ Gentile?

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• 12:45AJ Gentile?

  Because it's, whatever you need is in there.

• 12:48Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 12:48AJ Gentile?

  The lesson is in there, or it's in one of the Godfather movies.

• 12:53Speaker 03

  Yeah. Another great classic of power and, and virtue.

• 13:00AJ Gentile?

  What did you take from meditations that turned you around?

• 13:02Speaker 03

  I think that the, the idea that

• 13:08Speaker 03

  things that more is in your, your control than you think.

• 13:14Speaker 03

  It's up to you. And, and that's what you should put your focus on, rather than things that are outside your power, like whether or not I end up getting 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, it was, it was really empowering. And I, 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 to myself and sleeping and, you know, reading my sci-fi books.

• 13:59AJ Gentile?

  Big move.

• 13:59Speaker 03

  It was huge. It was huge. And, and I had also kind of gravitated towards some old friends of mine from middle school. And, you know, bless them, they, they were getting into the things that kids get into in high school, drugs and stuff. And, and I, 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.

• 14:31AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 14:33Speaker 03

  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. And I, that was, that was another kind of moment for me where I realized I needed real wisdom. And I wasn't going to get it from just talking to my peers. And.

• 14:56AJ Gentile?

  How do you make the jump from substances to seeking wisdom?

• 15:01AJ Gentile?

  I mean, were you using drugs to explore consciousness, or you just smoking weed with the guys?

• 15:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, I felt like I was, I was looking for answers, actually, funny enough. And I think that that's probably not so uncommon.

• 15:13AJ Gentile?

  Nope.

• 15:14Speaker 03

  I mean, you know, ayahuasca clinics today, it's,

• 15:19Speaker 03

  and there's,

• 15:21Speaker 03

  there's decent reasons for that. I was, you know, going on forums on the internet and hearing about people's transformative experiences. And I, I had this transformative experience with this very legal substance, morning glory seeds, which is basically like a LSD kind of.

• 15:39AJ Gentile?

  Really?

• 15:43Speaker 03

  Maybe, maybe people shouldn't know that. No, morning glory seeds don't work. Anyway, I had like a psychedelic experience, and then it like turned really bad. And I realized

• 15:56Speaker 03

  the answer that I got from this kind of mild psychedelic experience was, this is not where the answers are. Go to church.

• 16:07AJ Gentile?

  Wow.

• 16:07Speaker 03

  Yeah. I'd been raised in the Greek Orthodox Church and hadn't taken it all that seriously. But it seemed very clear to me that that was a, that was a source of wisdom, that there was a tradition there, that there was like, good counsel. It was, it was like a stable rock for me that, that I, you know, as I'm, you know, reading self-help books and Stoicism, I'm also like, looking back at this tradition I grew up in, I'm like, oh, this is what this is for.

• 16:42Speaker 03

  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.

• 16:51AJ Gentile?

  I think that's true.

• 16:54AJ Gentile?

  So you finally make your way to college. You still play jazz guitar?

• 17:00Speaker 03

  I haven't.

• 17:01AJ Gentile?

  What?

• 17:01Speaker 03

  In a while. I still play the guitar.

• 17:03AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 17:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, you know, I don'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 then come back to it.

• 17:17AJ Gentile?

  You're a music major, yeah?

• 17:18Speaker 03

  I was a music major for a while. Yeah, I studied, I got really into music theory. I thought if I just studied music, practiced guitar, maybe I'd become a rock star someday or something.

• 17:34Speaker 03

  And really enjoyed it.

• 17:39Speaker 03

  But what ended up kind of tanking my jazz guitar career was ancient Greek.

• 17:45AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, what the hell is Attic Greek?

• 17:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, that was what I was wondering when I was looking at it on the course catalog.

• 17:51AJ Gentile?

  Did you sign up by accident?

• 17:53Speaker 03

  I, it was the only Greek course they taught.

• 17:56AJ Gentile?

  Well, I mean, what made, why did you want a Greek course?

• 17:59Speaker 03

  Well, I, I had gotten interested in

• 18:03Speaker 03

  the history of the early church.

• 18:06AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 18:07Speaker 03

  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 the, 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

• 18:47Speaker 03

  these things that they would, that, you know, some of my Protestant friends, and not just Calvinists, but like evangelicals would question, like, why do you need the bishops and the liturgy and, and all this stuff? And so.

• 18:57AJ Gentile?

  But even your dad's interest in Byzantium plays in here as well.

• 19:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, definitely. It, like, I knew where to, where to go start looking, like, picking books off of his shelf. And Yaroslav Pelikan and Brunson and, you know, some, some great, great books have been written about. The Byzantine Church, the early church.

• 19:17AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 19:18Speaker 03

  I got into that stuff. And, 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'd 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.

• 19:53AJ Gentile?

  So for people who don't know, what is Attic Greek?

• 19:55Speaker 03

  Yes, Attic Greek, it's funny that they called it that in the course catalog because it's so kind of niche. Why don't you just call it Ancient Greek? Anyway.

• 20:03AJ Gentile?

  But wasn't it a specific Athenian dialect?

• 20:05Speaker 03

  So the, the, 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, than Modern English is to Middle English. Or it's, it's like comparable. It's, it's, it's one of the, it's the longest continually documented living languages in the West. And it, 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.

• 20:47Speaker 03

  But Attic Greek is, is essentially the language of like Plato and Thucydides and Aristotle and high, and Greek tragedy too.

• 20:56AJ Gentile?

  Mm hmm.

• 20:57Speaker 03

  And they usually start with that because that became the sort of canonical language. It became the like standard official dialect of Greek in, in the Roman Empire later and in the Hellenistic period. I mean, the Bible is, they call it Coinae Greek, but it's, 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, you can read, you know, Plutarch, you could read the, you know, the New Testament.

• 21:29AJ Gentile?

  But hold on, Attic Greek is very, this is, you got three genders, words are different based on singular, plural, or dual.

• 21:38Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 21:39AJ Gentile?

  Inflectionism. This is a hard thing to just jump into. So, but you're just saying like, I did this. You learned Attic Greek?

• 21:46Speaker 03

  I got obsessed. I, I, I was the kid in the music theory class who was always asking these like rusher shake questions about, you know, why parallel fifths? Why don't we do that? Like Bach counterpoint? I found it fascinating.

• 22:00AJ Gentile?

  I do too.

• 22:01Speaker 03

  Learning these, the, the system and.

• 22:04AJ Gentile?

  The math of music.

• 22:04Speaker 03

  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 I, so I, like, when I started taking Attic 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.

• 22:37AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 22:38Speaker 03

  Learn music theory.

• 22:39AJ Gentile?

  Question mark, right.

• 22:40Speaker 03

  Rock star. And, and with Greek, you know, there, 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 acid way. Bless my Latin teacher, great guy. That, but I kind of realized this in college, like there's a lot of cultural prestige to classics, or there was in the past at least.

• 23:03AJ Gentile?

  There was. There was.

• 23:05Speaker 03

  There was.

• 23:06AJ Gentile?

  I don't think it's there anymore.

• 23:10Speaker 03

  There.

• 23:10AJ Gentile?

  It went through dark.

• 23:11Speaker 03

  I, I, I think it might be coming back, but it's not there yet. And there's, there's, there's a potential there. But because it's, I think it's kind of inescapable, the fact that our civilization is so much founded on this stuff. But, but the, it was definitely not obvious in a public high school in Houston, Texas, that the classics were some source of prestige that like, you know, but somebody, you know, I, I 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 was way cooler than I thought.

• 23:54Speaker 03

  And like the military history, like Salamis and.

• 23:57AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 23:58Speaker 03

  Thermopylae and, and, and then somebody said, you know, you could, if you could go do a PhD at one of these fancy schools. I was at a good school, but not a fancy school.

• 24:11AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 24:12Speaker 03

  In Texas. And so I had this kind of, there was enough of a kind of reason to think there's something behind that question mark between studying classics and like having a respectable job. So I got super into Ancient Greek and it's very difficult. It's, the way we teach it makes it harder, learning all the grammar. You never speak it. It's always translating.

• 24:35AJ Gentile?

  You never speak it?

• 24:37Speaker 03

  Well, that's changing somewhat now, but it's, 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.

• 24:52AJ Gentile?

  No. Absolutely not.

• 24:54Speaker 03

  That's how we learn our mother tongues. It's like, you learn by mimisus, 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, I was learning Modern Greek and I was driving along in, I think it was in Argos. It was somewhere, some small town. And, and this driver, like, he's like signaling to me, my wife's in the, in the car and he's signaling to me, rolls down the window. He's like, inemonodromos.

• 25:34Speaker 03

  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, the grammar is very complicated.

• 25:45AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 25:46Speaker 03

  So, but I loved that part of it. And, and that, that was, you know, the rest of its history. I picked up Latin again, of course, and went on to PhD and so forth.

• 25:56AJ Gentile?

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• 26:39AJ Gentile?

  is based on what I've actually eaten and liked, which is why nothing goes bad in my fridge and my future tastes better than any tarot eating. Explore my digital cookbook on Hungry Root today and find recipes that are right for you. Go to hungryroot.com/the basement to access my cookbook, Gertie's Hump Day Recipes. You're, you were on a tenure track job at Fresno.

• 27:01Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 27:02AJ Gentile?

  And a student writes an essay that floored you. What was that essay about?

• 27:07Speaker 03

  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, last, proper, like academic appointment. And I was, I was doing a, it was like a survey course, one of these Gen Ed, check the box, the Greeks, you know? And I, 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

• 27:51Speaker 03

  blase-ness about, anyway.

• 27:54AJ Gentile?

  Wait, what do you mean?

• 27:55Speaker 03

  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, and so I had this student, I, we, we did some myth and whatever. One of the texts was Plato's Republic.

• 28:34AJ Gentile?

  Mm hmm.

• 28:35Speaker 03

  And I had this student, and at Fresno, a lot of the students are, you know, coming back to school, doing it part-time. They're, they're like older and they, they've made choices. Some of them good, some of them bad.

• 28:46AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 28:47Speaker 03

  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, 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.

• 29:15AJ Gentile?

  This was in the essay?

• 29:16Speaker 03

  In the essay. I was like, oh my God. That's awesome. That's.

• 29:21AJ Gentile?

  It is.

• 29:22Speaker 03

  That's really heavy. That was a moment where I, I felt, man, this is what this is for, you know, this, that's what I care about with all this. That's why I was drawn to it because it, it can profoundly change the course of any individual's life. It can, you know, and, and depending on how many employees or, or voters or, or how many soldiers such an individual is in charge of, dramatically affects the course of history and whether people live or die, whether they're miserable or, or happy. And I, I just think that the

• 30:03Speaker 03

  way that we arrange our, our, our curricula often just kind of pretends like that's beside the point. That's nice if that happens for you. Let's, let's get back to, you know, the argument here, or let's get back to the, the scholarship on this question. So that really bothered, it was encouraging and kind of disturbing at the same time.

• 30:28AJ Gentile?

  Well, that essay was validation, like someone gets it.

• 30:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. It's like, this guy was a classics major. He wasn't trying to, you know, get me to write a rec for him. He was just like, this really mattered. And yeah.

• 30:47Speaker 03

  It was, um, it was, it was confirmation that there's, there's gold here that hasn't really been, that's being kind of buried under something else.

• 30:55AJ Gentile?

  Totally agree. Um, I've heard you give four reasons for leaving academia. Angry at institutions, uh, wanting to know more and because sort of being stuck,

• 31:08AJ Gentile?

  wanting your dad to retire with dignity.

• 31:09Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 31:10AJ Gentile?

  I believe all those reasons, but the day that you decided what was, what was the one driver? When you said, okay, that's it.

• 31:24Speaker 03

  Well, I've been toying with the idea for a while.

• 31:29Speaker 03

  Um, as, as you learn studying history, so, so often events are multi-causal, over-determined.

• 31:40Speaker 03

  I think, uh,

• 31:44Speaker 03

  well,

• 31:48Speaker 03

  one of the things that really made me, um,

• 31:53Speaker 03

  say now's the time was, uh, we'd just come back from, uh, from, it was, it was like Christmas break, living in California.

• 32:07Speaker 03

  My wife and I come back to spend some time with our folks and, uh, if she doesn't mind me saying this, but like, she had a miscarriage.

• 32:18AJ Gentile?

  Oh, wow.

• 32:19Speaker 03

  Yeah. And, uh,

• 32:23Speaker 03

  and it just like, something like, something tragic like that happens. We have, we have three beautiful children now.

• 32:30Speaker 03

  Something like that happens, we were around family. I think, I think we realized, um, I realized, I guess, how much I was, I was giving up by sticking in it, in, in this, you know, foreign land of,

• 32:46Speaker 03

  and I, I liked Fresno a lot. I liked my colleagues a lot, you know? They were great people. We were close to, you know, all the, some of the most beautiful places in America. Redwoods, Sequoias, Yosemite, Bay Area, all this stuff. But, um, but really the reason I was there was kind of for my career.

• 33:08Speaker 03

  And

• 33:11Speaker 03

  where was that career pointed? Even if, even if somebody kind of like let me pass the filters that I could, and you know, when I got this job, this is, it's bothered me. It's like, oh, it's a good starter job, Alex. Like, man,

• 33:29Speaker 03

  I don't like, I don't like the idea of treating any job as a starter job. Like, I want to join a team and I want to like stick with that team and like, let's go, let's, let's, let's build the, the skyscraper. Let's, let's, uh, you know, defend the fatherland, whatever it is. I don't know, the, 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, a lot of people are kind of like lonely and demoralized. They don't really have, they don't like embrace this, this calling.

• 34:12Speaker 03

  They don't, you know, see it as a calling necessarily. Not everybody, but like, a lot of people you meet in, in the higher echelons of, of academia and like, famous scholars you might know, they're, you know,

• 34:27Speaker 03

  you go to dinner with them, they talk about, you know, their kids, uh, what, whatever. We went on this trip and

• 34:38Speaker 03

  the pasta sucked.

• 34:41Speaker 03

  It's just like, these are just normal folks.

• 34:43AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 34:44Speaker 03

  There's not like a mission here.

• 34:45AJ Gentile?

  There's no zeal.

• 34:46Speaker 03

  There's no zeal. And I, I think kind of getting past the veil of being 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? Or like, there, there was some kind of pull, I think, when you get older, like you want to, you look for permanence. Like, what is going to be permanent about this? Some, some book that I write that nobody reads?

• 35:15AJ Gentile?

  I think, I think working for your dad had a lot to do with this because you, you had to learn the hustle and the sales and the energy. And it's binary. It's, he says yes or no, and I gotta work it. And then you're in academia and it's like, just floating.

• 35:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 35:31AJ Gentile?

  And you're not made for it.

• 35:33Speaker 03

  Did you close the sale?

• 35:34AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 35:35Speaker 03

  No. F.

• 35:37AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 35:37Speaker 03

  You know, there's no kind of like, there's no grade inflation.

• 35:41AJ Gentile?

  No, no.

• 35:42Speaker 03

  Selling paint.

• 35:44AJ Gentile?

  But there's something pure and, and noble about that. There's no shame in that.

• 35:48Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 35:49AJ Gentile?

  And you learn great lessons doing that.

• 35:50Speaker 03

  You do. And I, I, I would wish that upon, with benevolence upon the worst of my enemies, that they would, that they would get some contact with, with the real world.

• 36:00AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 36:01Speaker 03

  I think that's what'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, a man of action himself.

• 36:11AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 36:12Speaker 03

  Thucydides is like a general, like, Plato himself, I mean, Plato was not an academic, you know? Risk taker. Sometimes it went really bad for Plato, but he took some real risks and, uh, was around men of violence and power and prestige and, and virtue. So I wanted, I just wanted some more realism in my life, maybe. And so I, suddenly I, I realized how grateful I should be that my dad was, you know, ran this kind of blue collar-ish industry business. And I was like, here, I can, I can get, get in the ring and somebody can just kick my ass. I needed that.

• 36:48AJ Gentile?

  Everyone needs it.

• 36:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 36:50AJ Gentile?

  A lot of those academics never got that.

• 36:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 36:53AJ Gentile?

  You, I mean, that's why it wasn't going to work for you. And that's why your podcast empire is growing so fast.

• 37:00AJ Gentile?

  Your first published essay after you left, April 2021, Homer on Prey on Paying Attention. And there's a line in there where you said, you learn from your own mistakes. And I think you were talking to Chris about that, but you never said what the mistakes were.

• 37:18AJ Gentile?

  What mistakes did you make and you learn from?

• 37:22Speaker 03

  Yeah. I guess in that essay, I, I was, um,

• 37:27Speaker 03

  looking, looking at the, the story of Odysseus. There's so much that I think is an unlock for you when you realize that the story is for you, that like Homer, even, even if you just kind of take it as an article of faith, that Homer's trying to like, teach you, he's trying to help you grapple with your own problems. And, uh, there's this moment in the Odyssey where Odysseus just left the island of Calypso. And he, she gives him this, well, she helps him build his own raft a little. She gives him some tools. And then he, he goes and he's sailing off, hopefully to Ithaca, who knows? And then Poseidon has other ideas.

• 38:12AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 38:13Speaker 03

  Smashes the ship and, um, and like,

• 38:19Speaker 03

  Odysseus kind of gets,

• 38:22Speaker 03

  he gets approached by the sea goddess, Eno.

• 38:26Speaker 03

  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, um,

• 38:40Speaker 03

  and swim. Stop trying to hold on to the, to the boards of this raft that's just been smashed. Like, land is way over there. It's going to take you a while. You got to swim or you're going to sink. And she gives him this, uh, this like ribbon, it's like a,

• 38:57Speaker 03

  what's it called? Uh, Kratomnon. And it's, um, you know, hold on to this until you get to shore. And he, and he like ties it around himself. And I, I think that so much of like, it, 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, put all your effort in and, and then, um, maybe it'll work. That ribbon kind of symbolizes that for him. And he, he gets to shore finally and he takes it off and throws it back in the sea, gives it back to her. But a lot of the Odyssey is about resisting temptation, the distractions of the sirens.

• 39:36AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 39:36Speaker 03

  The distractions of, uh, you know, and, and he fails often, like, you know, raiding, making a little money, clobbering these Thracians, the Secundians.

• 39:49Speaker 03

  I think, I think I, I have, I have had to learn a lot from, as, as somebody who's got this,

• 40:01Speaker 03

  kind of cosmic curiosity, like it's really easy for me to get fascinated and obsessed with something. Just give me the littlest excuse, like ancient Greek, you know? Sometimes that can be very good, but, um, but there are, um, there are so many distractions that assail you. If you're, if you're that kind of person, really anybody, different kinds of distractions. For me, they're, 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.

• 40:39AJ Gentile?

  I don't like an idea guy. I like an action guy.

• 40:42Speaker 03

  Yeah. And, and, and that's learnable.

• 40:44AJ Gentile?

  Mm hmm.

• 40:45Speaker 03

  Or, uh,

• 40:47AJ Gentile?

  I learned it after lots of failures.

• 40:49Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, same.

• 40:51AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 40:51Speaker 03

  In so many ways.

• 40:53AJ Gentile?

  Speaking of the Odyssey, uh, so the sirens, they're on the island. They have their knowledge of everything, right?

• 40:59Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 40:59AJ Gentile?

  Is the cost of glory, your show, is that the island or is that the mast?

• 41:05Speaker 03

  Hmm. We're going deep here, AJ.

• 41:08AJ Gentile?

  We don't have to.

• 41:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 41:10AJ Gentile?

  I just.

• 41:12Speaker 03

  I, I, I like to think of it as, as the mast, you know? Um,

• 41:21Speaker 03

  It's, it's interesting how, I mean, Odysseus, he, he gets his comrades to tie them to the mast and they all plug their ears with the wax. And, but, but he wants to listen to the sirens and he tells his crew, Cersei warned me about the sirens. So here's what we gotta do. You plug your ears, tie me to the mast. The sirens are gonna, no matter how much I scream, don't, don't untie me. She told me that I need to listen to them.

• 41:50AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 41:51Speaker 03

  But if you go back and look, no, she actually didn't.

• 41:54AJ Gentile?

  She didn't?

• 41:54Speaker 03

  She didn't tell him to listen. He decided to listen.

• 41:59AJ Gentile?

  Oh.

• 41:59Speaker 03

  Of his own accord. He wanted to know and he kinda made up this thing. It has to be this way, guys.

• 42:07AJ Gentile?

  But he didn't know what they knew, right? He just knew they knew stuff.

• 42:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, right. And, and it turns out when, like, maybe they were just gonna, you know, tell him some sexy song, you know, titillate, who knows what it was gonna be?

• 42:26AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 42:27Speaker 03

  Maybe he kind of, um, maybe he kind of guessed that this was something worth knowing. Cause, cause when they're singing to him in the, in that scene, they're promising him all the knowledge. I take it to be all the knowledge of the universe, everything, uh, tate sumana proteonta, like the things that were before, the things that are coming, everything that happened to Troy.

• 42:49AJ Gentile?

  Right. Don't they tell him, you wanna know what really happened to Troy?

• 42:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. You know, we wanna really why you won?

• 42:55AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 42:58Speaker 03

  Was I, was I as great as I thought I was? I mean, fill in, fill in what that means. Um, it's, it's, um,

• 43:07Speaker 03

  and, and so I think, you know, Cost of Glory is about,

• 43:14Speaker 03

  I get distracted sometimes, I admit, uh, but, you know, basically the mission is, retell the stories of the greatest ancient heroes. Plutarch's heroes, forty-eight, fifty of them, depending on how you count. And, um, and, and present them to people and like help people to understand who Caesar was, uh, 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.

• 43:55Speaker 03

  Like, present them one at a time, as I think Plutarch does, um, concisely. And, uh, and to get, get you like serially invested in these people who might actually be, you know, irreconcilable. They were definitely irreconcilable in a lot of ways. Mortal enemies. I have to take their side. But I, I think that where, why I would argue that Cost of Glory is the mass, kind of holding you in place, is that heroes are, I think, a guide for life that, and they're, and they're really about,

• 44:35Speaker 03

  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, a series of a couple of weeks, maybe, at the very end. But he's telling you the most important thing.

• 45:03Speaker 03

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• 45:57Speaker 03

  That's the job of the bard in, in Homer, in, in the Odyssey. The, the bard's job and the Odyssey has a lot of scenes where you see the bards in action. Themius and Demodocus and Odysseus himself. They're telling you the most important part of the story.

• 46:14AJ Gentile?

  And it wasn't written down for hundreds of years, right? It was orally for hundreds of years.

• 46:18Speaker 03

  Hundreds, thousands, maybe. These traditions go back to the Indo-Europeans. You can see the, um, traces of the, the same formula that you find in Homer and like Sanskrit poetry.

• 46:33AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 46:35Speaker 03

  The, uh, the Vedic hymns, old Irish poetry. I mean, it's all over the place.

• 46:42AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 46:43Speaker 03

  There's this great tradition of, of heroic storytelling.

• 46:46AJ Gentile?

  Gilgamesh.

• 46:47Speaker 03

  Gilgamesh is, I mean, that's a great comparison with the Odyssey. There's like something there connecting these things. And, uh, and, you know, Gilgamesh is, is, I think it's Sumerian originally, but like, these people were in contact with Indo-European invaders or, or vice versa. And somehow the most important stories kind of filter, filter down and get passed on. And, uh, it's, you know, you could read the whole Iliad in maybe two days. That's what they did. At Athens, they had, uh, poetic competitions. The Odyssey took two days, the Iliad took three days. They would have people recite the whole damn thing from memory.

• 47:29Speaker 03

  And you can do it if you, people could still do this if we, if we put our mind to it.

• 47:33AJ Gentile?

  I guess.

• 47:34Speaker 03

  You'd have to probably live on an island. There are no cell phones. But, um, but that's, that's actually not, that's not that long. That's not that much time in the grand scheme of things, a day or two.

• 47:45AJ Gentile?

  No.

• 47:46Speaker 03

  It's, it's about getting the most important thing that you need to know.

• 47:50AJ Gentile?

  I think that's why the bard tradition is so important is because you get the distillation over the years. Throw that out, throw that out. This is what people care about.

• 47:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. Stand-up comics today.

• 48:00AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 48:01Speaker 03

  Like, the jokes that aren't funny.

• 48:02AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 48:03Speaker 03

  You figure that out real quick.

• 48:05AJ Gentile?

  Real quick.

• 48:07AJ Gentile?

  I think that's true. Um, that's you. I wanna take a quick break and we'll finally get into some, some of the old shit. I specifically wanna talk about conspiracies and your, did your dissertation on Sinis, uh, Sinis? You did?

• 48:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 48:24AJ Gentile?

  So, uh,

• 48:25Speaker 03

  Sinestius of Cyrene.

• 48:26AJ Gentile?

  Sinestius.

• 48:26Speaker 03

  Sinestius, Sinestius, yeah.

• 48:28AJ Gentile?

  And Hypatia.

• 48:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 48:29AJ Gentile?

  All right, be right back.

• 48:30Speaker 03

  All right.

• 48:31AJ Gentile?

  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, cause most of us haven't. Start with one guy and what, what was it Tuesday like for maybe one of those guys?

• 48:47Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, uh, one of these guys that you've never heard of, I'm sure, although he's in a movie. Wait a sec. Sinestius of Cyrene. It's the guy I wrote my dissertation on. He's a student of,

• 48:59AJ Gentile?

  Cyrene? How we're going with that?

• 49:01Speaker 03

  Yes. I say Cyrene, Cyrene, you could say Cyrene.

• 49:05AJ Gentile?

  You won't, you won't mock me if I say Cyrene.

• 49:07Speaker 03

  I won't, I won't. Uh, uh, it's, it's a long E in Greek, but you know, we'll forgive it. So, um, uh, you might be familiar with Simon of Cyrene or Cyrene in the New Testament. I think he carries the cross for Christ. Cyrene is, or Cyrenaica is that eastern part of Libya today. Not a place that you're, that you would wanna visit, I, I'm told now.

• 49:33Speaker 03

  But anyway, it, it was a beautiful, uh, verdant area. It snows sometimes in the winter, North Africa, in that part of North Africa. And it's a very ancient, uh, Greek area, eastern Libya. In the west, western Libya, like, um, Tripolitania is more Latin in the late. So this, we're talking late fourth century AD.

• 49:57AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 49:58Speaker 03

  Is this period. I was really interested in this kind of, it's kind of a, an axial age of, of sorts for, um, for Christendom. Because a lot of, a lot of the, the culture is forged there, you know? After Constantine takes over and, uh, legalizes Christianity. So this is like two generations after Constantine. But you still have a lot of pagans and a lot of the upper classes of the Roman Empire.

• 50:29Speaker 03

  Very educated people converting to Christianity. So Sinestius is from one of these, um, grand old families of Cyrenaica who, uh, and you see this a lot in, in the late Roman Empire. People like to trace their lineages back like eight hundred, a thousand years. And so he traced his ancestors back to the original founders of the colony of Cyrenaica, which is, uh, Batus was this, um, Spartan.

• 50:56Speaker 03

  They were from, uh, Sparta first, then Santorini, Thera, and then they, they moved from there to Cyrenaica, which Herodotus tells the story, the, the horse lords of Cyrene. So, um, yeah, he was from one of these, these noble families and he, um,

• 51:15Speaker 03

  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 that Rachel Weisz was Hypatia in this movie Agora 2009. It's a good movie. Senesius doesn't come off very well. Senesius, I think that's what how they say it in the movie.

• 51:36AJ Gentile?

  That's how I say it, but I don't want to get in trouble.

• 51:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. That's how I used to say it, but it's a short E. Anyway, pedophaging academics.

• 51:47AJ Gentile?

  Pedophaging.

• 51:47Speaker 03

  So don't, don't take that movie's word for the kind of guy Senesius was. He was a Christian, but a kind of classical man, like a neat. He was a neo Platonist 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, Senesius himself.

• 52:13AJ Gentile?

  Is that Lysistrata?

• 52:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, Lysistrata.

• 52:16AJ Gentile?

  It's pretty raunchy.

• 52:17Speaker 03

  Assemblywomen, yeah. Lot of great jokes.

• 52:20AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 52:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, frogs, clouds.

• 52:25Speaker 03

  And, 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, of students and have a philosophical school.

• 52:40AJ Gentile?

  Is she a feminist icon? Is she a martyr? Who is she?

• 52:43Speaker 03

  She, well, she has been made into a feminist icon. 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.

• 53:19Speaker 03

  You have the Greeks who run the city ever since Alexander founded it in 328 or whatever B.C. And then you have the Egyptians, the kind of locals, the, the Philaeen types. And you have like, there's Syrians, there's a lot of Jews there, Christians and pagans. So it's a, it's a, it's a, you know, boiling kettle. And Hypatia is, is from the nobility, from the Greek nobility. And, and the, 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.

• 54:01AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 54:02Speaker 03

  But they're also Christian conservatives. And, and one of these dividing points is like, where does spiritual authority lay? And right around this time is when you, when you're getting the rise of the Desert Fathers. You know, these monks going out into the cave and they're like tying a cucumber up, hanging it from their cell and like staring at it until they don't want it anymore. So they can keep fasting for days on end. It's a wacky world, fascinating place. And they're saying, you don't need all this Plato and Aristotle stuff. You don't need Iamblichus on the mysteries. You don't, you don't need Homer and his myths. You just need to like pray in your cell, memorize the Bible, pray.

• 54:46Speaker 03

  And it kind of undermines the authority of philosophy. Because, 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 Senesius, so Hypatia is kind of like helping Christians like Senesius to become cultivated, become, get the kind of polished they need to, to step into that role of leadership in society, to talk to people like imperial governors, to get an audience with the emperor, which Senesius did. And, and Senesius is one of these Christians who's like, no, we do need Homer. We do need Plato.

• 55:27Speaker 03

  These monks, fine, you know, there's something really special about them, but they're kind of taking a shortcut. And the shortcut doesn't work for everybody. We can't, like, you can't run a society on a shortcut. And, you know, the classics represent this common ground of culture that the pagans can buy into, the Jews can buy into, the Christians can buy into. It kind of, it's a way of keeping the peace and keeping a common political language, a set of symbols and myths. And, you know, they saw it, I think, as really important to the structure of society.

• 56:03Speaker 03

  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.

• 56:20AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 56:20Speaker 03

  It's, it's switched, I think, a little bit today. But yeah, no, this, I, I, that was what was really driving my interest is how philosophers got close to power. Because this is, this is what Plato did. You see this in, from the beginnings of philosophy. Socrates is, he's got among his students Alcibiades, you know, top Athenian playboy politician. Gets the Athenians into a lot of trouble. He's got Critias among his students, who's

• 56:53AJ Gentile?

  The infamous.

• 56:54Speaker 03

  The infamous kind of, the Hitler of, of the fourth century, the kind of like, he, he, his name must not be mentioned. I think in Plato's era, because he was this, you know, brutal tyrant, turned out. And, and like Pericles in the generation before with Anaxagoras. It's like, it's so many of the philosophers that we know were really close to rulers. I was fascinated by this pattern. And you could debate whether that was a good influence or a bad influence. I mean, people debated about that with, in the case of Socrates. They, the reason Socrates was executed was because he was too close to some of the scapegoats of the new regime.

• 57:40Speaker 03

  Once it had been reestablished after the, the 30 tyrants, they said, ah, you're, it was your fault that Alcibiades led us astray. It's your fault that Critias got so powerful. And, you know, his students, I think correctly, were trying to distance Socrates from these people, you know? They went astray when they stopped listening to Socrates. But Plato caused a lot of trouble in Sicily. Aristotle was Alexander's tutor, probably taught him some restraint and asceticism as a young man. And maybe when he got further and further away from Aristotle, he, he kind of came off the rails.

• 58:21Speaker 03

  But it's, it's a pattern that, I mean, you can kind of trace it all the way to the effective altruism people and the AI frontier labs. So that, that was what really kind of got my attention about this period.

• 58:35AJ Gentile?

  So all those philosophers that were close to power like Aristotle, did any of those philosophers actually take power?

• 58:44Speaker 03

  Good question.

• 58:47Speaker 03

  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, he's a marriage connection of one of the most famous and colorful tyrants of antiquity, Dionysius of Syracuse.

• 59:29Speaker 03

  Who, you know, seizes power and has all these mercenaries and kind of flashy guy. No friends, all power, all, all force and no, and no, 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, 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.

• 1:00:12Speaker 03

  Dionysius, the tyrant, dies 367. So 20 years later, after Dion and Plato meet, they, 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, Dionysius the younger succeeds him, succeeds the tyrant. And Dion's like, hey, Plato, he writes to Plato, we got a shot here.

• 1:00:41AJ Gentile?

  We got a shot.

• 1:00:42Speaker 03

  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 Dionysius the younger is late twenties. So, I mean, people are still impressionable in their late twenties, but, you know, it's not like they have a 15 year old that they can just, soft clay they can mold, but it's worth a try.

• 1:01:28Speaker 03

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

• 1:02:16Speaker 03

  He's really just trying to kind of use Plato as leverage to to kind of win power for himself. He wants to displace the people who were loyal supporters of your father. He felt, you know, he 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 in the Sicilian expedition that Thucydides tells, Alcibiades' idea, went terribly. The Athenians came with their fleets. And how many thousands of lives did we have to spend to defeat the Athenians? And now this one guru is going to come and conquer Syracuse in the name of Athens, and Dion is the broker. Are you going to let this happen?

• 1:03:01Speaker 03

  Dion the Younger, Dionysius the Younger is like, yeah, yeah, you're right. And so, you know, 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 Syracusean nobleman. He's part of the aristocracy. And

• 1:03:30AJ Gentile?

  How is Plato received by the court?

• 1:03:34Speaker 03

  Well, they hate him.

• 1:03:35AJ Gentile?

  They hate him?

• 1:03:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:03:36AJ Gentile?

  Because of the invasion?

• 1:03:37Speaker 03

  Basically, they're like, Dionysius the Younger is listening to this interloper who's trying to kind of cut our banquet budgets. You know, they have, 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's what they were saying.

• 1:04:15AJ Gentile?

  You can read Plutarch or the New York Times. They're telling the same stories.

• 1:04:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:04:18AJ Gentile?

  Nothing's changed.

• 1:04:18Speaker 03

  Yeah. Intrigues and influence. And so, you know, eventually Dionysius the Younger, the new young tyrant, he's like, he kind of takes Plato aside, I paraphrase, but he's like, hey, why do we need Dion?

• 1:04:38AJ Gentile?

  Oh, no.

• 1:04:39Speaker 03

  Like, you and me, tell me, like, tell me about this philosophy of yours. And so they develop their own relationship. And eventually Dionysius exiles Dion. Like, and he kind of tells Plato, hey, I sent Dion away.

• 1:04:55AJ Gentile?

  So Plato's still in Syracuse?

• 1:04:56Speaker 03

  And Plato's still in Syracuse. And he's like, oh, well, you know, and Plato's kind of Dionysius's like hostage at some point, you know, the gifts of a tyrant are hard to resist, as Plato says.

• 1:05:19AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 1:05:20Speaker 03

  And eventually Plato kind of extricates himself and says, you know, please just bring Dion back. He tries to reconcile them. It doesn't work. And the tyrant kind of promises, yeah, I'll bring Dion back. We'll reconcile things. And so Plato leaves. And then, and then there is no reconciliation. Dion's just living in exile. He's made a citizen of Sparta. He's hanging out at Plato's academy. And

• 1:05:51AJ Gentile?

  Oh, he goes to Greece?

• 1:05:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, he goes to 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.

• 1:06:15AJ Gentile?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:06:17Speaker 03

  And Dionysius 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, I really want to bring him back, but you know, he doesn't want to talk to me. Maybe you can, that's the kind of angle. And he brings Plato back. And it's, it's just a ruse. He's trying to, he's trying to kind of win Plato, who's famous by this point.

• 1:06:43AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 1:06:44Speaker 03

  To kind of boost the moral credibility of the regime, which is kind of had not, not changed that much. 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, and Plato figures out pretty quickly that he's, he's just a pawn, he's a showpiece. And there's no, there's going to be no reconciliation. And with great difficulty, he manages to extricate himself one more time. And he's an old man at this point. He's like 75. And he goes back to Greece and Dion's still there. And Dion's like, well, did you have a good

• 1:07:25Speaker 03

  time? And, you know, but eventually, the younger tyrant, he's got Dion's family, he's got his wife. Basically, he makes, he makes Dion's wife, his uncle's wife, marry another man, who's one of his own lackeys. And for Dion, that is the last straw, you know?

• 1:07:46AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 1:07:47Speaker 03

  And he's like,

• 1:07:47Speaker 04

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• 1:08:40Speaker 03

  Or visit 1-800-GOT-JUNK.com. 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.

• 1:08:58AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:08:59Speaker 03

  And so he, you know, long story short, Dion goes back and

• 1:09:04AJ Gentile?

  With an army?

• 1:09:05Speaker 03

  With an army, a small army. He's got some mercenaries who are loyal to him. And of the thousands of Syracuseans in exile, he can only get like 200 of them to join because they're like, are you insane? Like, the armies, the ships, the tyrant's wealth, you have no chance. And you should replay Plutarch's life of Dion. I'll do an episode on him on Costa of Glory at some point. But they managed to catch the Syracuse at a moment when Dionysius the Younger's away. They sort of sneak, storm in by surprise, and they seize back the city. They, and like, basically Dion takes power. And it is a long kind

• 1:09:48Speaker 03

  of series of events, you know, complicated kind of power struggles. And the tyrant comes back, and they have a citadel on Ortigia that he recaptures. And there's, you know, old friends or associates of Dion kind of betray him and

• 1:10:04AJ Gentile?

  But this only works if the people want some change, right? Because

• 1:10:08Speaker 03

  Yeah. The people massively want change.

• 1:10:11AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:10:11Speaker 03

  And, and, you know, you could look at that whole scenario. Plato's famous for the Republic saying, you know, you need, the ideal state is one where you have philosopher kings ruling. And he kind of tones this down later in the laws. Okay, maybe, maybe it would be best to have philosophers ruling, but maybe that's not really possible. After all. But at least you have, you should have rulers who like, respect philosophy.

• 1:10:40AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:10:41Speaker 03

  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, 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, we could call it philosopher king if you like.

• 1:11:10AJ Gentile?

  But he turned into a tyrant as well?

• 1:11:12Speaker 03

  So he doesn't.

• 1:11:13AJ Gentile?

  He doesn't?

• 1:11:13Speaker 03

  He doesn't. He resists the temptation to do that.

• 1:11:17AJ Gentile?

  Because the flatterers are still flattering, right?

• 1:11:19Speaker 03

  They are. Well, he kills a lot of them.

• 1:11:21AJ Gentile?

  Okay, that's helpful.

• 1:11:23Speaker 03

  Sends them off and they go join Dionysius the Younger in exile. And he, but he, 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, Heracles, who's popular with the commons, and he's a kind of a demagogue. But the sailors really like him. Dion needs the navy. And it's like, Heracles is kind of, he's like, a fair weather friend. And whenever Dion's away, he starts like whispering, you know, speaking against him in the assembly, kind

• 1:12:05Speaker 03

  of undermining him. And Dion had many chances to say, Heracles, that was treachery execution. But he spares him because no, the nobler thing to do would be to forgive. I have learned at the academy that vengeance is not the province of a wise man, and things like this. And Heracles 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, how much of a philosopher you are by sparing me. And, you know, he gets in Dion's head. He should have just

• 1:12:47AJ Gentile?

  Of course.

• 1:12:48Speaker 03

  The first, like

• 1:12:49AJ Gentile?

  Of course.

• 1:12:50Speaker 03

  One strike, you're out at that, when the stakes are like that, I think. But eventually, you know, Dion kind of gets perceived as weak, and he's eventually assassinated. And the really disturbing thing here is, the man who assassinates Dion is a fellow student of Plato.

• 1:13:10AJ Gentile?

  No.

• 1:13:10Speaker 03

  From the academy.

• 1:13:11AJ Gentile?

  From the academy?

• 1:13:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:13:13AJ Gentile?

  Why did he do that?

• 1:13:16Speaker 03

  Well, I think he saw Dion's weak.

• 1:13:22Speaker 03

  And I want power. I think it was arguably that simple. Plato tries to distance himself later in the seventh letter from, from this guy, Calypus, saying he wasn't a real devotee. He just hung around and kind of used the Academy as a networking hub.

• 1:13:42AJ Gentile?

  Because Plato's like, I'm raising tyrants over here.

• 1:13:45Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, it's extremely bad for the brand.

• 1:13:48AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 1:13:48Speaker 03

  You can imagine, like catastrophic for the brand.

• 1:13:54Speaker 03

  But, but Calypus, I think, you know, saw Dion was vulnerable, and indeed he was. And, uh, and just kind of launched a little plot and murdered him. It was horrific.

• 1:14:07AJ Gentile?

  What about Dionysius? Does he ever come back?

• 1:14:09Speaker 03

  Um, he never comes back. He ends up ending his days in Corinth. The story is that, uh, that he, um, that he, he was like a kind of mid, mid-tier rhetoric teacher in Corinth. You know, and you could go visit Dionysius, the younger, you know, this fallen tyrant hanging out in Corinth.

• 1:14:36AJ Gentile?

  I mean, it's so funny that you could, you're a king one day and then you're a substitute teacher.

• 1:14:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. He's like a substitute teacher.

• 1:14:42AJ Gentile?

  That's what happens.

• 1:14:43Speaker 03

  Yeah. Amazing story.

• 1:14:46AJ Gentile?

  I love that story.

• 1:14:46Speaker 03

  It doesn't always go well when philosophers actually get in charge.

• 1:14:49AJ Gentile?

  I have never heard that story. I love it.

• 1:14:51Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:14:52AJ Gentile?

  I don't know if I have it on my list, because before we get to Caesar, I wanted to ask you about it.

• 1:15:01AJ Gentile?

  I think it was, it was a Pythagorean city that was basically ruled by a secret society.

• 1:15:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, Torrentum, I think.

• 1:15:12AJ Gentile?

  Do you know that story? Could you tell it?

• 1:15:13Speaker 03

  Well, let's see.

• 1:15:15AJ Gentile?

  I, I, I just know the bullet points and it ends badly.

• 1:15:21AJ Gentile?

  And I think a lot of secret societies are based on this city.

• 1:15:24Speaker 03

  Mm hmm. So there's Torrentum, there's Locris. There's a number. So the Pythagoreans are a really interesting bunch.

• 1:15:35AJ Gentile?

  What, what, what's distinctive about Pythagoreans?

• 1:15:38Speaker 03

  Well, Pythagoras is, uh, in different accounts, I think he's one of, considered one of the seven sages. So he's, he's before the Persian Wars. This is like archaic Greece.

• 1:15:54Speaker 03

  Seventh, sixth century. The details are hazy for me. I need to revisit this. But basically, Pythagoras was, um, the, the guy who kind of pioneered the idea that a secret society, a philosophical brotherhood could, um, could be, you know, a route to ruling your city or maybe the world.

• 1:16:22AJ Gentile?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:16:24Speaker 03

  At least for the Greeks, he was this. And, uh, you know, he, he was from Samos and he got chased out of Samos. Why? I think it was, uh, it was maybe Polycrates of Samos, the tyrant, who was like, this guy's a problem, like.

• 1:16:40AJ Gentile?

  Is that what he went to Egypt?

• 1:16:41Speaker 03

  That's, uh, I think he went to Egypt on his way to southern Greece and learning some of these mysteries.

• 1:16:48AJ Gentile?

  Yeah. Learn a little math and triangle stuff.

• 1:16:50Speaker 03

  Mm hmm. Mm hmm. And, um, and he had, there, there was a lot of numerology and their interest in the triangles and the tetrahtus and, uh, uh, Iamblichus had, the Neoplatonist has a, a life of Pythagoras that tells a lot of the stuff. And, you know, it's doubted by mainstream historians. Who knows? But what Pythagoras did was he established these, these brotherhoods in Magna Greca, you know, southern Italy, Locris, Torrentum, and so forth. And, um, in some cases, they seized power. In some cases, they, um, you know,

• 1:17:31Speaker 03

  the people in power said, no, and, uh, you know, rounded them up and murdered them. Happened a lot. But in, in Plato's era, one of the, the reason that he goes to Syracuse in the first place is because he wants to kind of, um, meet some of these descendants of the Pythagorean communities, because a lot of these guys are still there. One of them is Archides of Torrentum, who is the closest thing you ever really get to a philosopher king in, uh, in Greece at least. He is a sort of first among equals, kind of like Thucydides describes Pericles, you know, Athens is a democracy in name, but in fact, rule of the

• 1:18:15Speaker 03

  first citizen, which is Pericles. So that's kind of Archides's role at Torrentum. And we have fragments, at least of treatises by Archides, and he was a, Plato became friends with him. And, and when Plato's over there in, um, in, in southern Greece, Magna Greca, Sicily, is where he comes, that's where a lot of scholars date some of his, um, the doctrines that you see in the middle dialogues, like Symposium, Phidrus, 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

• 1:18:57Speaker 03

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

• 1:19:15AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 1:19:15Speaker 03

  Do not eat beans. Why? Nobody really knows for sure. You can come up with some ideas. Um, do they have souls in them? Is there some kind of vaporous, is there evidence that, you know? Gas. But, uh, you're supposed to never leave an impression of your body on a bed. Like you have to smooth out your bed. And there's these, all these kind of ritual things that they do to create this religious feel of a mystery brotherhood.

• 1:19:47AJ Gentile?

  Even the secret handshakes, yes?

• 1:19:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. They definitely, yeah. I'm sure they knew the Atlantean handshake.

• 1:19:52AJ Gentile?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:19:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. Um, and Plato brings a lot of this back to the Academy. And, and, and there's also, um, the coup that happens at Thebes in 378 was kind of pioneered by Pythagoreans.

• 1:20:08AJ Gentile?

  Well, you have to, you have to tell us. That's a good story. I have to tell that one now.

• 1:20:10Speaker 03

  Yeah. All right. So this is between Plato's first and second visit to Syracuse. So you can see why you get the idea that philosophy could be this revolutionary force.

• 1:20:27Speaker 03

  Plutarch again tells the story in the life of, uh, Pelopidas of Thebes and, um, this text, De Degenio Socrate, on the, on the genius of Socrates, the, the, the sort of divine spirit, the daimonion that Socrates has, tells the whole story of the coup. So basically, Sparta is at the height of its power in 382. They defeated the Athenians in the Peloponnesian War. They had this empire. Uh, you know, it takes a few hits, but basically they've got, they, they remain the most influential city, um, for several decades. At some, in

• 1:21:06Speaker 03

  382, Thebes, which is near Athens, you know, central Greece, it's, um, it's a democracy. And it's, um, uh, it's some Spartan commander is on his way up to northern Greece to, uh, put down some rebellion in Thrace. And while he's like camped outside of Thebes, some of the, the aristocrats, the oligarchs of Thebes, who are sick of these demagogues, they're sick of all the people having the power. This isn't the way it should be. The

• 1:21:46Speaker 03

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

• 1:22:17AJ Gentile?

  Nope.

• 1:22:18Speaker 03

  If, if the gates are swung open.

• 1:22:19AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:22:20Speaker 03

  And, uh, the Spartans capture the citadel, you know, like the Acropolis of Thebes, the academia. And basically drive out, they like round up the democrats or the, you know, the populists. A lot of them escaped to Athens. Um, some of them are put on show trial, kangaroo courts, executed as menias. And they, they basically make it, um, they go from being a kind of, uh, independent power to being, um, you know, spark, pro Sparta, um, oligarchic tyranny. And this shocks Greece because it's like, whoa, we were, we had a treatise, a

• 1:23:04Speaker 03

  treaty with, with Sparta, you know, Thebes had a treaty with Sparta. Um, this is, this is unjust. This is, you know, naked imperial aggression, uh, by the part of the Spartans. Everybody's pissed, but the Spartans are like, all right, what are you going to do about it?

• 1:23:18AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:23:19Speaker 03

  You know, we, we have the citadel. And, and so, um, while, while that's going on in Sparta, the exiles are gathering in Athens. Pelopidas is, is one of the leaders. And they're young men, you know, mid twenties, early thirties, probably. Top, like from noble families, but of populist bent. And they start meeting in Athens for philosophical conversations. And, uh, you know, they're talking about the nature of the soul. Meanwhile, similar kind of meetings are happening in Thebes because they had happened before the,

• 1:24:04Speaker 03

  the coup, before the lockdown. Thebes, there's a lot of students of Socrates that are still there in Thebes and they, they believe in this philosophy thing. Let's talk about, you know, whether the soul is immortal and what, what we should do about that. And discussing the mysteries of harmony and so forth.

• 1:24:23AJ Gentile?

  Do they have to meet in secret in Thebes?

• 1:24:25Speaker 03

  Well, that's the interesting thing. They're meeting in, you know, somebody's house. And on a couple of occasions, there's two, uh, kind of chief oligarchs.

• 1:24:37Speaker 03

  I forget their names, but they'll come back to me. Basically, 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 Arceus 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 after a couple of wines. And, you know, it's a sign to the oligarchs. Nothing weird going on here. We're just a bunch of nerds. But that gives them the license to

• 1:25:17Speaker 03

  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 in their hunts, going into the city, just finishing up the hunt.

• 1:25:48AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 1:25:49Speaker 03

  Unassuming. And of course, it's Polopetus and his buddies from the, they're the Athenian exiles, who had escaped murder in the street. Like, the tyrants of Thebes thought, the guys in Athens, they're dangerous. Like, Polopetus is dangerous. So they tried to kill some, 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 Arceus and the top guys of the pro Sparta oligarchy. And they're saying, Arceus, we're gonna have a great party. There's gonna be some ladies showing up a little later. It's gonna be

• 1:26:34Speaker 03

  a good show. I think you want to be at this one. And so they, they have this party, it goes on into the night, they get drinking and drinking. And at some point, you know, a knock comes at the door. And

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• 1:28:15Speaker 03

  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 Arceus now. It's 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, you know, he lets the messenger in.

• 1:28:43AJ Gentile?

  This is in the middle of a dinner party?

• 1:28:45Speaker 03

  In the middle of a dinner party. I mean, there are a few bowls of wine in. And Arceus is there on the couch. And the messenger's like, this is, contains extremely important. It says, very serious things in this letter. You must read this now. And Arceus is like, serious things for tomorrow. Es avion tas budea. It's the Greek. This is a phrase now in Greek. And so he dismisses it. And he doesn't read it, you know. So, so good. And then, at some point, another knock at the door comes in. And the host, of course, he's in on the conspiracy. Ah, these are the people he's expecting. They're maidens. Or are they?

• 1:29:21AJ Gentile?

  Right, right.

• 1:29:23Speaker 03

  You know, Polopetus is, you know, he and his buddies are like 25, very, very, very clean shaven, wigs on, they've got like veils, so.

• 1:29:31AJ Gentile?

  Soft features.

• 1:29:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, soft features. And of course, they've got breastplates under.

• 1:29:36AJ Gentile?

  Of course.

• 1:29:36Speaker 03

  And, and they come in, well, they tell the host, oh, you know, this is a, this is a private show, only for the important people. Can you dismiss the bodyguards? And Arceus is like, yeah, yeah, yeah, send them next door. Yeah, bring the girls in.

• 1:29:52AJ Gentile?

  It's perfect.

• 1:29:52Speaker 03

  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 into the streets. The tyrants are dead.

• 1:30:05AJ Gentile?

  Are they still in dragon at this point?

• 1:30:08Speaker 03

  Big question. Plutarch doesn't specify, but it would be a better story if it were.

• 1:30:12AJ Gentile?

  That's how I see it, like a Monty Python.

• 1:30:17Speaker 03

  Are we gonna let ladies lead this coup? So they, you know, they arm the citizens and they surround the citadel. And the Spartans leave under truce. But

• 1:30:28AJ Gentile?

  They leave under truce?

• 1:30:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. They let the Spartans go.

• 1:30:32AJ Gentile?

  Wow.

• 1:30:33Speaker 03

  Because, you know, it would, okay, you know, getting rid of a couple of oligarchs at a party is one thing, but getting rid of a couple hundred of, you know, Spartan-led, battle hardened, you know, veterans, better to just like, let them go.

• 1:30:49AJ Gentile?

  Well, yeah. But how do you convince a garrison to abandon its post?

• 1:30:52Speaker 03

  Well, they siege them for a while. And I think they cut off communications in the fog of war, like, don't let them talk to, 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 garrison guys, the leaders of the garrison just realize, this, this would go very bad. It'd be very bloody. We've, we've already kind of broken the rules. Like, they kind of did it without the authorization of the Spartan authorities. But with the, with the kind of tacit approval of the king of Sparta,

• 1:31:35Speaker 03

  Agisileus. I tell some of the story in the life of Agisileus. 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.

• 1:31:50AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:50Speaker 03

  If, so, let's, let's not make this worse for ourselves. And so they leave under the truce. And this, and, you know, the Thebans take back the city. A pammonondas is a Pythagorean. This is very important. Can I get to the point? He's a close friend of Polopetus. 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 Pammonondas 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

• 1:32:33Speaker 03

  a pammonondas, 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, but the whole of Biocia 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

• 1:33:03AJ Gentile?

  And this begins the decline of Spartan power, yeah?

• 1:33:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, basically, the, that's the first strike against Sparta in 379. The, the counter coup, that's called the solstice revolution, which I love. And then

• 1:33:16AJ Gentile?

  That's a great one.

• 1:33:17Speaker 03

  Yeah. And then, and then only eight years later, the Thebans defeat Sparta's best in a pitched land battle. Nobody's ever done this. Like, Sparta, its full force, at the Battle of Luctra. A pammonondas, 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 at the Battle of Luctra in 371. They kill the king. Well, there's two kings.

• 1:33:47AJ Gentile?

  Did they expect to win that battle?

• 1:33:50Speaker 03

  I mean,

• 1:33:51AJ Gentile?

  That's pretty ballsy.

• 1:33:52Speaker 03

  I think, I think, I think a pammonondas felt like he had a good shot, like he had a, this kind of wedge strategy where you kind of, you know, the, you kind of hit the, 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.

• 1:34:14AJ Gentile?

  So he had strategies.

• 1:34:15Speaker 03

  He had a strategy.

• 1:34:16AJ Gentile?

  But a pammonondas, he's the type of personality that men will die for him. I think you'd need that.

• 1:34:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:34:22AJ Gentile?

  It's like, we're going up against Sparta, but I'll do it for you.

• 1:34:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, lead from the front.

• 1:34:26AJ Gentile?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:34:28Speaker 03

  As all the great commanders do. I mean, Caesar does this.

• 1:34:30AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 1:34:32Speaker 03

  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 Thebes, but this whole coalition. And he ends up going, marching into Sparta after this defeat at Luctra, sieging the city. Never has, has this happened before. Enemies like right there. Like, Sparta is, is like, the whole Palpanese is Sparta's fortress. Like, you do not get much past Corinth without the Spartans saying, what are you up to?

• 1:35:07AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:35:08Speaker 03

  But a pammonondas pushes all the way to Sparta. And they eventually decide not to like, try to sack the city. They give it back off.

• 1:35:16AJ Gentile?

  Doesn't he pick up some Athenians along the way?

• 1:35:20Speaker 03

  Well, yeah, he, so let's, in the, it eventually comes, it kind of comes around where

• 1:35:31Speaker 03

  I think, I'm not, did they join with the Athenians after Luke? 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.

• 1:35:49AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 1:35:50Speaker 03

  But the Spartans are really cool and noble and the Thebans are these like gross rustic pig farmers.

• 1:35:59AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:35:59Speaker 03

  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, the like horrific dysfunction of Thebes. I mean, Oedipus.

• 1:36:19AJ Gentile?

  Yep. Right. Right.

• 1:36:22Speaker 03

  You know, Antigone, the Phoenician women, there's so many examples of Athens just looking at Thebes like, at least we're not like those guys.

• 1:36:30AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:36:33AJ Gentile?

  That's a great story.

• 1:36:34Speaker 03

  So eventually Athens kind of comes to the side of Sparta in the Battle of Second Mantena in 362. But, but, but, but before that, Apanonadus ravages through the Peloponnesian, he liberates the Helots, who are these, you know, hereditary slave class of Spartans.

• 1:36:49AJ Gentile?

  Right, the Spartans.

• 1:36:49Speaker 03

  He builds this amazing city that you can still visit the ruins today. It's beautiful. It's, uh, Messine. Messinia was a region, but there was no city Messine. But Apanonadus founded this city and he built big ass walls. The Spartans hate walls. They think walls make you weak. Sparta doesn't have walls. The walls are its men. And they, they tear down the walls in any city that they ally with. Cause you're like, that's gonna, that's gonna give the, the demagogues an in. Because then, you know, it's the blacks, it's the like tavern keepers who are gonna hold sway. If you have no walls, then the warriors have the most power.

• 1:37:33AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:33Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:37:42AJ Gentile?

  There is a real logic to that.

• 1:37:43Speaker 03

  There is, there's a very real logic to that. And, uh, but Apanonadus builds Messine. 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, the liberatory spirit of this Pythagorean of Apanonadus,

• 1:38:05Speaker 03

  who stuck it to the Spartans like nobody did before and nobody did since.

• 1:38:10AJ Gentile?

  I love that story. We'll be there in a couple of weeks. I'll make sure to stop by the ruins.

• 1:38:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, you should.

• 1:38:15AJ Gentile?

  You want to talk about Caesar a little bit?

• 1:38:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:38:19AJ Gentile?

  Catiline?

• 1:38:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:38:20AJ Gentile?

  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.

• 1:38:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:38:30AJ Gentile?

  Well, how do we, how do we do the primer from Rubicon or do we go?

• 1:38:37Speaker 03

  Well, most people know that Caesar, maybe we start with, uh, um, the more, the more famous conspiracy.

• 1:38:47AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 1:38:49Speaker 03

  The conspirators who murdered Julius Caesar on the Ides of March 44.

• 1:38:55Speaker 03

  People are probably familiar with that story.

• 1:38:59Speaker 03

  I think it's interesting that in the, 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, these rumors coming to him. Caesar, there's a plot against you. I think the guy's got an incredible workload. You know, I'm sure there's always been like assassination threats.

• 1:39:25AJ Gentile?

  Of course.

• 1:39:25Speaker 03

  Like, you know, how do you, how do you separate the wheat from the chaff, the noise from the signal? But I think he, he, he knew that there was really credible reason for, to suspect a plot. And, uh,

• 1:39:38AJ Gentile?

  Cause he wanted to stay home that day, didn't he?

• 1:39:40Speaker 03

  He did, yeah. Like a rare case of him kind of listening to the omens at first. Like he, Caesar doesn't care about omens. It's, it's a perfunctory thing, but he got bad omens. Calpurnia, his wife, had a bad dream. It's well attested, you know, uh, bad dream. Listen to my Caesar episode for the full details.

• 1:40:02AJ Gentile?

  Sure. But it's just dismissed as a bad, a woman's bad dream.

• 1:40:05Speaker 03

  Yeah. And, and then, but then like, you know, he keeps getting these bad omens, like this, um, this guy, um, what's his name? The, the soothsayer that Shakespeare has. Beware the Ides of March. Oh, the Ides of March have come, ah, but they have not left. That, that is recorded in, in Plutarch. And, uh, so, but that, he met that, that soothsayer when he was doing a routine sacrifice at a buddy's house that morning. And he's like, you know, I wasn't gonna take the, the dream seriously. The omens just keep coming in. I'm just, I'm just not feeling right. And he just decides to stay home.

• 1:40:42Speaker 03

  The man who persuades him to go to the Senate house that day is Decimus Brutus, who's not even hardly a character in Shakespeare. Decius Brutus is,

• 1:40:56AJ Gentile?

  Plutarch got this wrong, didn't he?

• 1:40:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:40:58AJ Gentile?

  The wrong Brutus?

• 1:40:59Speaker 03

  Well, he, he's got, yeah. Plutarch lays way, a lot of emphasis on Marcus Junius Brutus.

• 1:41:06AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 1:41:07Speaker 03

  The famous Brutus.

• 1:41:09AJ Gentile?

  But Decimus was much closer.

• 1:41:10Speaker 03

  But Decimus was, was Caesar's, like one of his body men practically. He was a brilliant military commander, defeated the Veneti in the Gallic wars. He, uh, was responsible for the siege of Marseille and, um, in the civil wars. And he's a, he's one of Caesar's top guys. And, and then, and I forgot to mention this, the night before, I love this story. It's so, just gives you goosebumps. The night before Caesar's last night on earth, he's having dinner with,

• 1:41:45Speaker 03

  you know, at a friend's house. And one of the people there is Decimus Brutus.

• 1:41:51Speaker 03

  One of the conspirators. And, um, and Caesar proposes himself the topic. As, as usual, you know, one of these dinners, you have philosophical conversation.

• 1:42:03Speaker 03

  Caesar asks the group, what is the best way to die?

• 1:42:09Speaker 03

  And everybody's, you know, proposes their answers. And Caesar says, I think the best way to die would be, uh, swift and unexpected, you know?

• 1:42:21AJ Gentile?

  Okay, what does Decimus face it like at that moment?

• 1:42:23Speaker 03

  Yeah. You gotta wonder.

• 1:42:27AJ Gentile?

  Why did he turn?

• 1:42:28Speaker 03

  How did he keep a straight face?

• 1:42:29AJ Gentile?

  How do you do it?

• 1:42:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:42:30AJ Gentile?

  A lot of wine.

• 1:42:33AJ Gentile?

  Well, let's take a sidetrack for a second.

• 1:42:35Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:42:35AJ Gentile?

  Cause you have a society where guys just tell stories and problems. What's your society about?

• 1:42:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, I started a, a community with my friend Ben Wilson of How to Take It for the World. We have, um, it's called the Classical Society. And we, uh, essentially it's a, it's kind of a peer network of, you know, accomplished men who like history. And I think for, um, for, for, for us moderns today, the relation between being obsessed with history and, uh, being obsessed with achievement is not so obvious. You know, how school marmified history teaching gets.

• 1:43:21AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 1:43:22Speaker 03

  But I, I thought my hunch was that there's a big correlation. So we started a, it's kind of a business network, kind of a, kind of a cultural organization. And we do retreats and, uh, we have, uh, 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?

• 1:43:53Speaker 03

  We like to read the classics together. I wanted to gather a group of people who were, a group of men who were, you know, men don't have like serious camaraderie as much these days as they used to. It used to be the norm. Toastmasters used to be single gender. Uh, 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 is just an excuse to get together.

• 1:44:23AJ Gentile?

  Absolutely is.

• 1:44:24Speaker 03

  And, uh, there are other great excuses to get together. Like, as you see in, in the case of Caesar, philosophy or discussing history.

• 1:44:34Speaker 03

  It's a way to build camaraderie and kind of reflect. So, so we do retreats and domestically and internationally. And it's, it's been a lot of fun. I mean, I'm trying to learn a little bit of, of lessons from, from what I see working for, for people in our recent past in, in the US and, and in antiquity as well. I think this is a great tradition of like men's fellowship, serious fellowship that, that we've lost from, for a variety of reasons, many of which I'm sure, uh, people have their own opinions on why that happened.

• 1:45:05AJ Gentile?

  They do.

• 1:45:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:45:06AJ Gentile?

  I have mine as well. Is it true that you do spontaneous toasts and things?

• 1:45:12Speaker 03

  Yeah. Extemporaneous speeches and toasts.

• 1:45:18AJ Gentile?

  Again, you have a floor.

• 1:45:20Speaker 03

  I just would like to raise my glass to, uh, to a man who,

• 1:45:30Speaker 03

  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, never was Eumenes outsmarted, except, except

• 1:46:11Speaker 03

  for one time, when it counted. But a man that I think we would, we would be remiss if we did not remember more, to Eumenes.

• 1:46:23AJ Gentile?

  Eumenes.

• 1:46:23Speaker 03

  Cheers.

• 1:46:24AJ Gentile?

  Cheers.

• 1:46:27AJ Gentile?

  You stumbled across him by accident with Plutarch, yeah?

• 1:46:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:46:30AJ Gentile?

  And you're like, who the hell is this guy?

• 1:46:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:46:32AJ Gentile?

  And became obsessed? What is it about Eumenes?

• 1:46:34Speaker 03

  I think Eumenes is, what, what that proved to me, while we're on this tangent, is 48 lives in Plutarch's biographies. I read a couple for, you know, teaching a class on Roman history, the Gracchi. I knew about, about the Gracchi. I knew about Marius. I knew about so many of these guys. But I decided at one point, Plutarch is really good. I should read all of this. And I'm just kind of working my way through and I get to a couple of them and I'm like, Sertorius, Eumenes. Oh, I guess I gotta eat my vegetables.

• 1:47:13AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 1:47:14Speaker 03

  Who has, who has heard of Eumenes of Cardia, Alexander the Great's secretary? Who has heard of Sertorius, the greatest Roman rebel, it turns out?

• 1:47:22AJ Gentile?

  Alexander fans have. I have a Eumenes coin around my neck right now.

• 1:47:25Speaker 03

  Is that right?

• 1:47:26AJ Gentile?

  No way. Yeah, a single Drachma, minted in Alexander's honor.

• 1:47:31Speaker 03

  Oh, my God.

• 1:47:32AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, my wife got it for me. Crazy.

• 1:47:34Speaker 03

  You're gonna have to show me. I'm gonna take a picture of that later. I, to me, that, 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, he's sort of a foreigner among the Macedonian military brass, becomes a warlord.

• 1:48:00AJ Gentile?

  Isn't he, isn't he sort of plucked by Philip?

• 1:48:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:48:04AJ Gentile?

  Out of obscurity?

• 1:48:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, he's like doing MMA, they're doing Pankration. He's an 18-year-old and Philip's visiting one of his many tiny provincial backwaters in his, in his backwater of a kingdom. And he's, he's watching the, the athletic contests, as one does. And something about the way that Eumenes, like through his opponent, or was, was wrestling, he's like, this kid's special. And, and he, he meets Eumenes's dad and, you know, finds out that Eumenes is, he can, he can write well, and he can read well. He's like, I could use a secretary. Let's bring him, bring him into the entourage. Probably, I mean,

• 1:48:48Speaker 03

  it's not like he promoted him to be the, the top secretary at that point, but he worked his way up quickly. He showed, you know, he had an incredible facility with people. He was, he's able to win people's trust and, and worked his way up to be one of Philip's most trusted guys in the paper department.

• 1:49:08AJ Gentile?

  So Alexander grows up with him?

• 1:49:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, Alexander, he's like a couple, just a couple of years older than Alexander. He might have been at those, at those philosophical tutoring sessions with Aristotle. He was probably sitting there like, taking notes for Alexander.

• 1:49:21AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:21Speaker 03

  You know?

• 1:49:22AJ Gentile?

  Imagine.

• 1:49:25Speaker 03

  Alexander Ptolemy, the, the future king of, of Egypt, was there.

• 1:49:31AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 1:49:31Speaker 03

  A few other guys. So just, I mean, incredible to think of like, the concentration of, of people in some of those, those rooms. Eumenes was really good with Alexander's mom, Olympius, which is really hard to do.

• 1:49:47AJ Gentile?

  Oh, she was difficult.

• 1:49:48Speaker 03

  To be on good terms with both Philip and Olympius, like stormy, storm, like very high tea woman.

• 1:49:56AJ Gentile?

  So does Alexander take Eumenes with him on his tour?

• 1:49:59Speaker 03

  Yeah. He's, uh, he's, he's there for all of the campaigns. And he, toward the end, like in India, this is like in India or back, you know, Central Asia, at some point, they're kind of short of commanders. And Alexander's like, I need some guys to take some, take some cavalry. I need somebody. And Eumenes is like, if you need somebody to run a cavalry contingent, to, you know, show some muscle to this town, maybe I could do that. And Alexander's like, all right, Eumenes, you know, let's give it a shot. And he does well.

• 1:50:39AJ Gentile?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:50:39Speaker 03

  But, you know, you don't get much of a hint that, that he was.

• 1:50:46Speaker 04

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• 1:51:17Speaker 03

  A man of the kind of capability that he was until Alexander dies. And, and, you know, at the, at the beginning, Eumenes is basically just the note taker for this meeting of Alexander's generals in Babylon, to try to decide like, how are we gonna run things in Alexander's absence?

• 1:51:36AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:51:37Speaker 03

  And Eumenes is just like, I'll just take the minutes, gentlemen. Don't mind me. But that means he knows everything that's going on.

• 1:51:43AJ Gentile?

  Of course.

• 1:51:43Speaker 03

  You know? And they all trust him. These people that hate each other, like, oh, at least, yeah, you're, you're fine. He's not a threat, you know? He, ah, he understood that position very, very well, of not being a threat. And, and he eventually goes on to lead armies in the name of, of Alexander's family. But it's only because he always is saying, I don't want to be king. I think he was, I think he was serious. I don't, I, what, are you, is a Greek gonna 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

• 1:52:25Speaker 03

  men don't, don't win. And that, that constant, like, saying, I'm not the guy. I know I'm not the guy. I'm just trying to do the right thing here. It just, it's disarming. It wins people's trust. And I think, I think it was, it was sincere.

• 1:52:39AJ Gentile?

  I think so, too.

• 1:52:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:52:43Speaker 03

  If I didn't know about Eumenes, and he's that impressive, like, imagine what the rest of Plutarch's lives contains.

• 1:52:49AJ Gentile?

  So many.

• 1:52:50Speaker 03

  It's, it's like Emerson called it a bible for heroes.

• 1:52:54AJ Gentile?

  Yes. Oh, that's a great description.

• 1:52:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:52:56AJ Gentile?

  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?

• 1:53:06Speaker 03

  I haven't pried into it. The, the standard story is that the body was being carried in this kind of like, it was like a juggernaut, like this giant float from Babylon to Macedonia. And Ptolemy kind of seized it and derailed it to Alexandria.

• 1:53:31AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 1:53:31Speaker 03

  The Emperor Augustus is supposed to have seen the body of Alexander.

• 1:53:36AJ Gentile?

  Took a piece of it.

• 1:53:36Speaker 03

  In Alexandria.

• 1:53:37AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:53:38Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 1:53:39AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:41Speaker 03

  So I don't know what happened.

• 1:53:42AJ Gentile?

  One moment.

• 1:53:42Speaker 03

  I haven't, I haven't like followed up on this, but the one, the one anecdote I'll share is, I was in Macedonia, Greece, Greek, Greek Macedonia, Macedonia, like leading a tour 10 years ago. And we're, we're, you go to Vergina, which is amazing sight. You know, it's got probably Philip's body there in the, the tumulus.

• 1:54:02AJ Gentile?

  Wow.

• 1:54:03Speaker 03

  Northern Greece, Macedonian gold, another place you should visit. But we're staying in this little town outside of Vergina, maybe it's Vergina, it's a small place. And we have the place to ourselves. And I'm talking with the hostess, it's like a family-run hotel, if you can even call it that. Really, really nice people, super hospitable. I'm talking to this woman, my broken Greek, and she's saying, Alex, Alexander, where do you think Alexander's body is? Like, oh, ma'am, I, 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. And.

• 1:54:49AJ Gentile?

  I hope she's right. I think he was probably washed away in that, in the flood of Alexandria, but I hope she's right.

• 1:54:55Speaker 03

  Yeah. I hope we'll find him. We have already.

• 1:55:01AJ Gentile?

  Maybe we have. How do you join the Classical Society? Zero initiation?

• 1:55:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, it's, we learned this from Catalin. The best way to get loyalty is to make people drink wine mixed with human blood.

• 1:55:15AJ Gentile?

  Now, I don't think, that's just, didn't Plutarch say that's a rumor?

• 1:55:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:55:20AJ Gentile?

  But there was something about eating a human, human being, right? There's a little cannibalism there?

• 1:55:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. Well, this is the sort of thing that you want, that you want to, to discredit people with, if you want.

• 1:55:31AJ Gentile?

  Drink the, drink the blood.

• 1:55:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:55:34AJ Gentile?

  I'm assuming you don't have to do that.

• 1:55:36Speaker 03

  Theclassicalsociety.com, we have an application form and process. But yeah, it's by application. And, you know, we, we're looking, we're looking for an honest man.

• 1:55:50AJ Gentile?

  I might apply for it. I'll drink the blood. I don't care.

• 1:55:53Speaker 03

  It's, it's just a teaspoon or two.

• 1:55:56AJ Gentile?

  You gotta keep the vegans out somehow.

• 1:55:58Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 1:55:59AJ Gentile?

  They're just not gonna work there. All right, I promise to get you out of here on time. But now we're on the record that you're gonna come back for, like, we'll do a day of Caesar.

• 1:56:08Speaker 03

  Let's rock.

• 1:56:09AJ Gentile?

  I would love to do it. 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 wanna, Sulla, right up to Augustus. I wanna see all that. That's my favorite. So I'd love to have you back to talk about it.

• 1:56:30Speaker 03

  Where everything happens, yeah.

• 1:56:31AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, the drama. I just love it. On the 13th of May, you published an essay called Stoicism Isn't Gonna Get Us Out of This. Six weeks later, just a few weeks ago, the Vesuvius Challenge finishes decoding the first Herculaneum scroll.

• 1:56:52AJ Gentile?

  From an Epicurean private library, and it's a Stoic text.

• 1:56:56Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 1:56:58AJ Gentile?

  What did you think when you got that email?

• 1:57:01Speaker 03

  Well.

• 1:57:02AJ Gentile?

  Well.

• 1:57:04Speaker 03

  Any press is good press.

• 1:57:05AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 1:57:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:57:07AJ Gentile?

  Tell us a little bit about that project, because it's fascinating.

• 1:57:09Speaker 03

  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?

• 1:57:23Speaker 03

  Mount Vesuvius buries Pompeii in 79 AD, its famous eruption, also buries Herculaneum. And at Herculaneum, which is closer to the mountains, right at the foot, right on the shore.

• 1:57:39Speaker 03

  And I think Pompeii has like pumice stones and buildings collapsing. But at Herculaneum, it was a pyroclastic mud flow. A lot of people got out, not everybody did.

• 1:57:51Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:58:07AJ Gentile?

  Right, it's about 500 degrees.

• 1:58:09Speaker 03

  Yeah. And just the right temperature to carbonize papyrus scrolls, but not incinerate them.

• 1:58:17Speaker 03

  And so in 1752, these guys are digging a well in, you know, what turns out was Herculaneum. I don't even know if it was called that in those days, but.

• 1:58:28AJ Gentile?

  They might not have known it was there then.

• 1:58:29Speaker 03

  I don't think they did.

• 1:58:31AJ Gentile?

  I don't think so.

• 1:58:31Speaker 03

  I mean, it's like, how would you know?

• 1:58:33AJ Gentile?

  Right, I don't think they, Pompeii, they didn't know was there yet either.

• 1:58:36Speaker 03

  Right, yeah.

• 1:58:37AJ Gentile?

  How would you know?

• 1:58:38Speaker 03

  And it's, it's like, under dozens of feet. I don't, maybe it's like 200 feet at some places. It's really, really thick. I mean, imagine the amount of, I mean, and you look at Vesuvius now, it's like, you can see where all that mass came from, right? But, um, so they find these, 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 they're, they're actually ancient scrolls, priceless.

• 1:59:18AJ Gentile?

  Priceless.

• 1:59:19Speaker 03

  Ancient scrolls, texts that have never been seen since antiquity. From this library in this villa that, because most of ancient scrolls, most, 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 from, 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, you, like, the, the better preserved ones, you, they, they had some, you know, methods developed.

• 1:59:59Speaker 03

  This guy, Poggio, I think was his name, or Piaggio, anyway. He developed this machine with cat gut and pig bladder or something to slowly unroll these scrolls. But it ends up really kind of ravaging them. And there's, there's, there's way more destructive, like Humphry Davy, the great famous chemist, like dunked them in mercury. It's like, this is gonna, ugly.

• 2:00:26AJ Gentile?

  I think research is destroyed more than anybody else, just trying to figure it out.

• 2:00:31Speaker 03

  Way more than those workers cooking their pasta.

• 2:00:33AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 2:00:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, so mercury definitely does not work. But, but, so we know, we knew about them and the fragments that we were able to read indicated that this was a philosophical library.

• 2:00:48AJ Gentile?

  But how do you read them?

• 2:00:49Speaker 03

  Well, chunks have fallen off and you can kind of see there's Greek texts on, on some of them. And, you know, the, the parts that have been unrolled or cut open, you can kind of piece together that these are, these are Greek texts. But for the most part, if you try to unroll them, you destroy them. And so at some point, people decided, the authorities decided, all right, you are, nobody's allowed to touch these things until we can figure out how to, 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.

• 2:01:33Speaker 03

  Had this idea that you could scan these things using basically a CT scan. And he, he's a computer scientist, 3D imaging. And the, 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, and the, the Herculaneum scrolls, the, so some ancient ink has iron in it.

• 2:02:05Speaker 03

  And, and you could just kind of like do a, you know, what, a chromatography, like, you could actually just pull out the iron from a, in the ink, from a, from a proper scan with whatever chromatography. I'm not a chemist, anyway.

• 2:02:23Speaker 03

  But the Herculaneum scrolls, unfortunately, the ink that's used on them is, is all pure carbon based. So it's chemically indistinguishable from the scroll itself.

• 2:02:31AJ Gentile?

  Right, everything's carbon.

• 2:02:32Speaker 03

  So what you have to do is, is get a scan that is so high res that you can actually determine the ink from geometry. For like lumps of, of ink on papyrus. So this is like super hard mode, right?

• 2:02:51AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 2:02:51Speaker 03

  And, and what they, what, what they've done, and it took, so I'm working on a documentary about this.

• 2:02:58AJ Gentile?

  Are you consulting with Ridley Scott?

• 2:02:59Speaker 03

  Yes, actually.

• 2:03:01AJ Gentile?

  Let me, what? Just gonna throw that in there. You weren't gonna mention that?

• 2:03:06Speaker 03

  Well, maybe I would have gotten to it. I'm just so excited about these scrolls and it's, but, but yeah, we, we pitched it to Ridley Scott too. And Scott Free came on board. O'Shaughnessy Ventures was, Infinite Films is the, the kind of foundational producer. And we brought in Scott Free and his team, we told them about this and they're like, this is really cool. And so we, I think it's going to be the definitive storytelling of, of this event. It's, it's not a science documentary. I mean, we, we go into some of science, but it's a really compelling human story too.

• 2:03:40AJ Gentile?

  When does it come out? I can't wait for it.

• 2:03:42Speaker 03

  Soonish, stay tuned, yeah.

• 2:03:45AJ Gentile?

  Sooner than your book, I hope.

• 2:03:46Speaker 03

  It's, 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, it's amazing story of, 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.

• 2:04:16AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 2:04:17Speaker 03

  It, it took years, like the technology was there for the most part, for the past couple of decades. But, but the real hat, the real kind of unlock was Brent Seals and his team, they, they took these scrolls to get scanned at the Diamond Light Source in, 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, these 3D images so high res that, and like, these files are like, you know, petabyte.

• 2:04:58AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, I can't imagine.

• 2:04:59Speaker 03

  Enormous files.

• 2:05:01AJ Gentile?

  The resolution is particle resolution, that's crazy.

• 2:05:04Speaker 03

  Yeah. It's like, you know, molecules. So, and, but once you have that document, like, how do you, how do you determine where the page breaks are? Like where the, the, the kind of spaces between the scrolls, layers are? Then how do you determine where the, where the ink is? And it's an incredibly laborious process unless you use machine learning. So they've unlocked this and accelerated it through AI.

• 2:05:39Speaker 03

  And it actually, it was catalyzed by this guy Nat Friedman, who's a very prominent Silicon Valley guy, you know, GitHub CEO. And he, he's, he's awesome, very high agency, gets obsessed with this during COVID. And he's like, how has this problem not been solved?

• 2:06:00AJ Gentile?

  Thank God.

• 2:06:00Speaker 03

  This is fascinating. He gets, he gets nerd sniped by it. And so, you know, collaborating with Brent Seals and his team and like, they, 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, it's a triumph, a triumph of, I won't say a triumph of the will.

• 2:06:35AJ Gentile?

  It is.

• 2:06:36Speaker 03

  But it is, you know? And, and, and it's, it's only the beginning because now we can read those 400 scrolls. Why is that cool? Well, okay, it's an Epicurean library for the most part.

• 2:06:51AJ Gentile?

  So.

• 2:06:51Speaker 03

  Not only that.

• 2:06:52AJ Gentile?

  Well, what is Epicurean versus Stoicism? And why is this such a weird find?

• 2:06:59Speaker 03

  Well, so the Epicureans are another Hellenistic philosophy that comes online, like right after Aristotle. And the Epicureans, so there's, there's a great story about this from the life of Pyrrhus, Plutarch's life of Pyrrhus. So Pyrrhus is the, King Pyrrhus, the first guy to take elephants to Italy under arms before Hannibal. Gave Hannibal the idea. Hannibal studied Pyrrhus.

• 2:07:26AJ Gentile?

  Wow.

• 2:07:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:07:27AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 2:07:27Speaker 03

  When, when asked to name who he thought were the greatest generals, Hannibal named Pyrrhus among them. He's a cousin, a younger cousin of Alexander the Great.

• 2:07:37AJ Gentile?

  Wow.

• 2:07:38Speaker 03

  Invades Southern Italy on behalf of the Tarantines, you know, the, you know, descendants of Archidus and gang. And they're, they're, they're giving the Romans trouble. Pyrrhus is, he's, 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.

• 2:08:00AJ Gentile?

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• 2:08:24Speaker 03

  There's a, there's a conference between, after one of these victories, Pyrrhus has a bunch of Roman captives.

• 2:08:31AJ Gentile?

  And Rome is still kind of scrappy at this point?

• 2:08:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, they control, they're, they're the, the main power in central Italy.

• 2:08:35AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:08:36Speaker 03

  But-

• 2:08:37AJ Gentile?

  Etruscans are still around?

• 2:08:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, the Etruscans are still around. They're, they're kind of getting subdued. But, but southern Italy is, you know, there's the Samnites, the Greeks along the coast. There's the Lucanians, the Brudians, there's all these tribes that are not like, you know, under the Roman sway.

• 2:08:55AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:08:57Speaker 03

  Including Sicily. But Pyrrhus wins a battle and a Pyrrhic 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, for the captives. And they're at dinner, as one does, like gentlemen. And discussing various matters and Pyrrhus's, his like advisor, his military advisor, Canaeus 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.

• 2:09:39AJ Gentile?

  To me, this is, this is very romantic, the way this is all done.

• 2:09:42Speaker 03

  Yeah. Like, imagine, you know, Trump sitting down with the Ayatollah. I mean, anyway, they, so Canaeus 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.

• 2:10:17Speaker 03

  The gods are models of blessed happiness for us at, at best. And the, the thing that is most worth pursuing in life, the key to the good life, is pleasure.

• 2:10:30Speaker 03

  Of course, you know, maybe he doesn't get to the point where he explains, actually, when they talk about pleasure, they're not talking about just wine and women and, you know, because after you 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, but yeah, Canaeus also explains to Fabricius, well, the wise man will not enter politics because it's too troubling to the soul. It goes against this, this, this value of ataraxia, lack of disturbance that the Epicureans were really valued.

• 2:11:05AJ Gentile?

  Totally agree with that statement.

• 2:11:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, there's a lot of, there's a lot of wisdom there. And, and Fabricius is listening to this, right? Gods don't care about us, pleasure is the highest principle, wise man won't enter politics. And he says, I love this philosophy for you. May, may Pyrrhus and, and our enemies in the Samnites continue to cherish this philosophy as long as they are at war with Rome.

• 2:11:31AJ Gentile?

  Wow.

• 2:11:34Speaker 03

  So, so, you know, you, you read that story and, 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, this high period that you and I both love, Epicureanism, arguably the most popular philosophy with the, with the leadership classes of Rome. Caesar is associated with the Epicureans. Cato kind of accuses him of being an Epicurean at one point in the Catilinearian conspiracy.

• 2:12:07AJ Gentile?

  That's an insult at that time?

• 2:12:08Speaker 03

  Well, I don't think he labels him as an Epicurean, but he says, you know, Caesar doesn't believe in the afterlife. He thinks that's all nonsense. So he's, he's hinting at Caesar's Epicurean sympathies. And it's a bit, it's a bit edgy, I think, to be an Epicurean, but there's something kind of appealing about that kind of bohemian, uh, counterculture aspect. And yet, you know, Caesar's an Epicurean, arguably, he, he reads Lucretius's De Rerum Natura, this great Epicurean epic, while he's in Gaul, like fighting the Gauls. It just came out like right in like 55 B.C.

• 2:12:48Speaker 03

  And Manlius Torquatus is another like prominent general who fights for the Pompeian side in the civil war, an Epicurean buddy of Cicero's. Also Cassius, the conspirator who organized the plot against Caesar, is an Epicurean. So there's all these names that you can find, they're devotees of Epicureanism. And Philodemus is the guy who put this library together. And most of the texts that we discovered in these scrolls are written by Philodemus.

• 2:13:22Speaker 03

  But, uh, so, so Epicureanism is, I think it's an interesting philosophy if, from a historian's perspective, because it kind of gives you this insight into how, um, how the intellectuals were dealing with the Roman power elite. And maybe Epicureanism had something to do with this transition from republic to empire. Cause it's not just Caesar.

• 2:13:47AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:13:48Speaker 03

  Augustus, maybe, I don't know what, Augustus is what, he was maybe not an Epicurean himself, but his, uh, his literary department were heavily influenced by Philodemus personally.

• 2:14:01AJ Gentile?

  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.

• 2:14:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, right. Not clear what Caesar's long-term plans for Rome were.

• 2:14:14AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:14:16Speaker 03

  You know, but, um, so like Augustus, long story. Let's, you know, probably for another day and it's, it's full. Basically, Augustus wins this, another round of civil war, several rounds of civil war. And when he is supreme, finally, around 27 B.C. He, you know, ostentatiously lays down his, um, his powers. And of course, the Senate immediately votes him back, his powers, like it's, but he has this friend Mycenus,

• 2:14:59Speaker 03

  who is, uh, kind of like his chief of staff, uh, top, uh, I don't know, like peacetime negotiator and, and is a great patron of the arts and literature. It's like kind of head of the propaganda department. Mycenus finds Horus, who fought on the wrong side at Philippi against Augustus and Antony, but he gets pardoned. And Horus becomes the loyalist supporter of Augustus's regime. Mycenus brings him in and Horus is a friend of Philodemus. He's a devotee of Epicurean philosophy. Mycenus finds Virgil.

• 2:15:41AJ Gentile?

  Wow.

• 2:15:43Speaker 03

  Virgil, we have letters from Herculaneum, from these scrolls. Philodemus addressing Virgil, my dear friend Virgil. Virgil probably hung out at that villa. To say nothing of the fact that Caesar probably hung out at that villa, because the villa where the scrolls were discovered was owned, probably built by Caesar's father-in-law.

• 2:16:09AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:16:10Speaker 03

  Calpurnia's father, Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caizeninus. It's probably the nicest villa in Herculaneum in its day.

• 2:16:17AJ Gentile?

  And Herculaneum is like this town for the wealthy anyway.

• 2:16:21Speaker 03

  It's like the Hamptons, Martha's Vineyard. Anybody who's anybody in Roman politics has a villa down in the Bay of Naples.

• 2:16:28AJ Gentile?

  Like Pompeii is great, but if you're somebody-

• 2:16:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. Like Herculaneum, uh, Pozzoli maybe, Puteles. This is, there's a fleet there, but Herculaneum is one of the, the primo spots. And, um, so everybody has a vacation home down there.

• 2:16:47Speaker 03

  Piso, Caesar's father-in-law, is a consul in 58, I think, 57. And he, uh, he's the guy who installs Philodemus there. But Philodemus has a long life and he brings a lot of his scrolls from Athens, from the Epicurean school at Athens. And, uh, and, and like houses them in this library, this philosophical library at Herculaneum. And he's, he's writing treatises. He's also got works to consult. He's got the, the complete, you know, he's got the works, the masterwork of Epicurus on, on, you know, Peri Fuceos, like on nature, which now we know from, from what fragments we have of that text,

• 2:17:30Speaker 03

  that Lucretius, if you care about these things, Lucretius's 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 Lucretius because of that, like taking, Epicurus was a boring crappy writer.

• 2:17:55AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:17:56Speaker 03

  Famously, but Lucretius makes this into like a world classic of Latin poetry. So, 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, the, the common man is relieved that civil wars maybe will finally stop. We had Sulla's civil war, we had the Catilinearian conspiracy and there was a, you know, thousands of Romans died for that.

• 2:18:28AJ Gentile?

  Yep.

• 2:18:28Speaker 03

  You know, Caesar's civil wars, Augustus versus Antony, and Augustus and Antony versus the conspirators before that. It's just been war, war, war for the past half a decade.

• 2:18:37AJ Gentile?

  Right, we know about all the great men, but as a matter of, what, what is it like to just be a person?

• 2:18:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:18:42AJ Gentile?

  This is chaos, this is hell.

• 2:18:45Speaker 03

  You, and that's Augustus's big mandate, like peace-

• 2:18:49AJ Gentile?

  Enough.

• 2:18:49Speaker 03

  And prosperity. Like, let's get back to the farms, guys. But he's also got to convince the nobles. He's, 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, in battle, defeating the enemies of the republic, maybe passing some laws in peacetime, doing some reforms, building an aqueduct. But you know, war is really essential to that. And so I think you can see this, especially in Virgil's Georgics where- If you read it in translation, it's just not that obvious, but like it's a, it's a poem, his second work before he writes the Aeneid, the great Roman epic.

• 2:19:32Speaker 03

  It's a poem about agriculture on the surface. But like every single line somehow to me, when I read it, kind of evokes the horrors of civil war and the difficulty of the struggle that, you know, the way that you, uh, sometimes you have to like, cut down the tallest plants.

• 2:19:53AJ Gentile?

  I see.

• 2:19:53Speaker 03

  Mop off their heads and, and bury them in the earth to fertilize the new growth. Like, ah.

• 2:19:59AJ Gentile?

  So something is lost from Latin to English?

• 2:20:02Speaker 03

  A lot is lost.

• 2:20:03AJ Gentile?

  Really?

• 2:20:03Speaker 03

  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, with a poet like Virgil.

• 2:20:19AJ Gentile?

  Sure.

• 2:20:20Speaker 03

  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 in 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. Cause he wants to establish peace and like change the way that they operate, change the software of the Republic that has probably produced the most impressive coterie of killer alpha males that the world has ever seen.

• 2:21:03AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:04Speaker 03

  This incredibly competitive, uh, you know, amazing system that, that pitted virtue against virtue and made it better. Like he's, he's got to totally change that for people. But I think Epicurean philosophy is a big part of that. And, and this is, this is what happened at that villa, you know? This is, I don't know. Philodemus coming to Rome, when he did, Piso setting up that pleasure palace, if you will, a chaste pleasure palace, you know, but you know, maybe not entirely. That's somehow central to the story of like Western civilization. So it's, it's about more than just Epicurean philosophy. It's about more than just the texts that we might discover.

• 2:21:50Speaker 03

  We might discover lost works of Aristotle. We might discover Cicero's Hortensius that converted August, Augustine to, uh, to philosophy. He writes about this in the confessions, all these lost works.

• 2:22:02AJ Gentile?

  What scroll do you give your kidney for?

• 2:22:05Speaker 03

  I would give my kidney for Aristotle's on philosophy. I, I, I think, you know, um, and there's a lot of, I would love to find Aristotle, the second book of Aristotle's Poetics. His Poetics that we have is maybe book one, we talked about tragedy.

• 2:22:23AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:23Speaker 03

  He's supposed to have written another book. He mentions this on comedy, like.

• 2:22:27AJ Gentile?

  That'd be cool to read.

• 2:22:29Speaker 03

  That'd be really cool. Uh, I have, I have a list of dozens of these things that would be just so illuminating. Caesar had, uh, wrote poetry when he was younger. Augustus suppressed it. It's sort of, it's, it was like, Augustus didn't want Caesar to, you know, his dignity to be kind of diminished by this very human character that you can see in Caesar's poetry. Caesar wrote this treatise against Cato, the anti-Cato, after Cato committed suicide.

• 2:23:01AJ Gentile?

  And we don't have that?

• 2:23:01Speaker 03

  We don't have that. And I think, I think Augustus hid it, you know? Did he hide it in that library? We have 400 plus scrolls, but this is the crazy part. That villa is only 10% excavated.

• 2:23:17AJ Gentile?

  Oh my goodness.

• 2:23:18Speaker 03

  There could be hundreds, thousands more of scrolls in that villa. The water table's rising.

• 2:23:25AJ Gentile?

  Oh.

• 2:23:27Speaker 03

  Watch the documentary when it comes out.

• 2:23:29AJ Gentile?

  I can't, I can't wait for it.

• 2:23:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:23:30AJ Gentile?

  So in this pleasure palace, why are we finding a Stoic ethics treatise that maybe is written by Chrysippus himself?

• 2:23:40Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:23:42AJ Gentile?

  What is Stoicism and what, and why is that important?

• 2:23:46Speaker 03

  Well, you know, Stoicism is, uh, I mean, people, people are now familiar with Marcus Aurelius and pop Stoicism these days. And that's, I think that's a very positive development.

• 2:23:58AJ Gentile?

  Yeah. It's a tech bro thing now.

• 2:24:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:24:01AJ Gentile?

  Yeah. It's still cool.

• 2:24:02Speaker 03

  Yeah. So it's a good gateway drug.

• 2:24:04AJ Gentile?

  It is, it was mine.

• 2:24:06Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah, me too. And if it leads you to Plutarch and Plato and the other, the deeper stuff, I'm all for it. Um, Stoicism was most famous, I think for, for, for this idea that you should live according to nature. In antiquity at least, that was a big piece of what Stoic philosophy taught. And, um, and, and, uh, living according to nature for them meant things like realizing that, um, you know, you can only control what's, what's in your own sort of sphere of control and that worrying about, you know, what you read and as you're scrolling through

• 2:24:50Speaker 03

  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.

• 2:25:02AJ Gentile?

  It's a good lesson.

• 2:25:03Speaker 03

  But they also had, uh, 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 in according with logos, the divine, quasi divine reason that orders the universe. And, um, uh, so, you know, a concept I, or at least term that I'd had this resonance when John says, in the beginning, it was the logos in the book, in the gospel of John. So it was, it was definitely around at the time, but I think Philodemus probably would have had Chrysippus in the library just to have, to, to make sure they quoted him right when he refuted him.

• 2:25:45AJ Gentile?

  That's interesting.

• 2:25:46Speaker 03

  So Philodemus, yeah. And the Epicureans, they were very cantankerous, contentious. They're really into arguing facts and logic. They're going to defeat Chrysippus and the Stoics with facts and logic.

• 2:25:59AJ Gentile?

  So where are you on that spectrum?

• 2:26:01Speaker 03

  Um, I, I would probably consider myself an Aristotelian. And that's only kind of recently. I, I loved Plato when I was younger. He's such a, he's such a great artist. He's a poet in prose.

• 2:26:17AJ Gentile?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:26:18Speaker 03

  And he'll, he'll inspire you to pursue wisdom and to think that virtue is, is the, is the, is the root to happiness, which is great. But I think that Aristotle kind of maps it out for you better. And, um, Aristotle's, uh, his, his ethics is not, is not likely to make you more ethical. It, it can, but it's boring. It's, but it is a kind of science of how humans can, like how ethics is, I don't know, how, how, how ethics works, how morals work, you know? He studies vice very carefully.

• 2:27:01Speaker 03

  He studies virtue very carefully and everything in between. I think Aristotle is, is of the philosophers, the one who has the best explanation of why ambition is important. And, um, that's something that I think we've lost today, that.

• 2:27:19AJ Gentile?

  Why ambition is important? So he's definitely taught that to Alexander.

• 2:27:23Speaker 03

  A hundred percent.

• 2:27:24AJ Gentile?

  And we've lost that?

• 2:27:26Speaker 03

  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.

• 2:27:42AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 2:27:42Speaker 03

  You know, Alexander wanted to be like Achilles, probably because Aristotle was like, hey, the person you're trying to be, Homer already described that, it's Achilles. And maybe, maybe Aristotle, if, if Alexander had stuck around or had Aristotle stick around, he would have gotten to the other part of the story, which is like, you know, Achilles kind of took it too far at times. Like the story is, is both about admiring his virtues, but also learning from his vices.

• 2:28:10AJ Gentile?

  A little over the top.

• 2:28:11Speaker 03

  Yeah. I, I think that we have, uh, we've become as a culture much more, we've, we've, we've lurched into the envy territory at scale, much more than, than, we've kind of let the force of, of tall poppy syndrome.

• 2:28:33AJ Gentile?

  At scale, meaning our culture?

• 2:28:35Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:28:36AJ Gentile?

  Or our species?

• 2:28:37Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. Our culture at least.

• 2:28:40AJ Gentile?

  Our culture.

• 2:28:41Speaker 03

  And maybe America isn't as bad in this respect as Britain. I don't know.

• 2:28:46AJ Gentile?

  I don't know.

• 2:28:47Speaker 03

  But, you know, this is a longer discussion.

• 2:28:50AJ Gentile?

  It is, but I, I tend to agree with you because something just feels wrong. And I think that's part of it.

• 2:28:56Speaker 03

  You're not, anybody who's successful is, is like by definition, a criminal.

• 2:29:01AJ Gentile?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:29:02Speaker 03

  You know, anybody who, who builds a great business is by definition, a robber baron. Any great king was probably a pervert. This is the way, this is the lens that a lot of people look at history.

• 2:29:15AJ Gentile?

  Yes.

• 2:29:15Speaker 03

  It's also the lens that a lot of people look at, um, you know, entrepreneurs and leaders today. And the problem with that isn't necessarily that we should lionize or make saints out of everybody who achieves greatness.

• 2:29:28AJ Gentile?

  We should not.

• 2:29:29Speaker 03

  It's, it's that if you, if you assume that they're evil, that success is proof of evilness, you will never learn from their mistakes. You will dismiss them and fail to learn the lessons, I think. And that's even more dangerous. Uh, and you'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 the reasons I really want to like jam, you know, zeal and Aristotelian philosophy. And this is a neglected passage of Aristotle, like the academics don't like his passage on greatness of soul that much. They're kind of embarrassed by it.

• 2:30:11AJ Gentile?

  Why?

• 2:30:12Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, he has a frank appreciation of, um, it's, it's magnanimity is the virtue that he talks about. Uh, the, the, the great man, or the, the magnanimous man desires great things, considers himself worthy of them and is correct in that judgment. Cause he's virtuous. It's a capstone of virtue. But that seems, go ahead.

• 2:30:37AJ Gentile?

  I don't think there's anything wrong with that.

• 2:30:40Speaker 03

  I don't either. I think it's great, but.

• 2:30:43AJ Gentile?

  This is why you had to get out of academia.

• 2:30:45Speaker 03

  Yeah. I felt like it was, uh, like.

• 2:30:52Speaker 03

  It wasn't obvious in the early teens to me. Maybe I was just naive. It wasn't obvious, but increasingly, you know, something kind of turned. I don't know what happened around 2016.

• 2:31:06AJ Gentile?

  Something happened.

• 2:31:07Speaker 03

  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.

• 2:31:22AJ Gentile?

  You think that's turned around?

• 2:31:25AJ Gentile?

  Because you are correct.

• 2:31:28Speaker 03

  I don't, I, it's, I think more people are aware of it.

• 2:31:32AJ Gentile?

  And it's more than politics.

• 2:31:34Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:31:34AJ Gentile?

  It's cultural.

• 2:31:35Speaker 03

  Yeah. And that's what really bothered me is seeing, seeing how this makes people miserable, actually. Regular people.

• 2:31:45Speaker 03

  It's not about, you know, the, the great getting more prizes and honors. It's about a kind of disordering of the soul. If you don't, if you don't really believe in excellence, you're not going to pursue it in your own life. But that's what makes, that's what makes people, that's especially what makes men happy.

• 2:32:04AJ Gentile?

  It is, and I've, some people, most people maybe forget that someone else's excellence benefits them.

• 2:32:09Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:32:10AJ Gentile?

  The better your podcast and your media gets, the more I benefit because it's, because I learned so much. So I'm rooting for you and guys like you. I'm not hoping that you fail, but a lot of people are hoping that you and I fail.

• 2:32:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:32:23AJ Gentile?

  I hear from them every day. I'm not going anywhere.

• 2:32:26Speaker 03

  You too.

• 2:32:27AJ Gentile?

  Yeah, every day. But, well, I, I'm drawn to, and I've said this many times, my audience knows this, talent. I'm fascinated by people who are just good at stuff, who are brilliant, who can drain 10 free throws in a row. I'm fascinated by people who could just do stuff. I don't, I don't envy that. I'm, I'm amazed by it. I love it.

• 2:32:52Speaker 03

  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 doesn't 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 I, 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 from. And there's bad guys in Plutarch's lives.

• 2:33:32Speaker 03

  Demetrius, Antony, Caesar is, is very problematic for Plutarch. I admire Caesar a little bit more than Plutarch, but yeah, the guy made mistakes. But if you, if they're, if they're just wicked tyrants, if, if you can't acknowledge that there was some virtue there, you will definitely not learn from their vices. And that's, that's, I think, what Plutarch really cared about is, is that, that magnetism of excellence, even when it's imperfect, it's always imperfect, except, except in one or two, one case, I think.

• 2:34:04AJ Gentile?

  And who's that?

• 2:34:06Speaker 03

  Jesus Christ.

• 2:34:08AJ Gentile?

  Amen. I can't argue with that. Do you get any trouble because your group is men only?

• 2:34:16Speaker 03

  I think if we continue to, to grow and, and get, get on the radar, we're going to get into more trouble. It seemed, because I, before I started Classical Society, or 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.

• 2:34:44AJ Gentile?

  It shouldn't be edgy. Everybody chill out.

• 2:34:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's what I said. And I think people have backed off a little bit on this. You do see even from center left people, Richard Reeves and, you know, articles in the New York Times, like men are not okay, but there's always these qualifications.

• 2:35:06Speaker 03

  So it's, it's still, 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.

• 2:35:22AJ Gentile?

  It is because whatever the politics are of the day, because it's, it's so fickle, human nature is steady. And as a historian, you know that. So you can have your male only group, that might not be cool 10 years ago, but they're there anyway. We're doing it anyway. The dude, the guys are getting together anyway, so are the girls, and it's fine.

• 2:35:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:35:44AJ Gentile?

  It's okay.

• 2:35:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:35:45AJ Gentile?

  Everybody chill out. It's okay.

• 2:35:49AJ Gentile?

  I'm glad you're doing it.

• 2:35:50Speaker 03

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

• 2:36:08AJ Gentile?

  It'll be so embarrassing, though. They sit around and talk philosophy.

• 2:36:12Speaker 03

  I know.

• 2:36:12AJ Gentile?

  How dare they?

• 2:36:13Speaker 03

  It's a nerdy big club, come on.

• 2:36:15AJ Gentile?

  That's what they said in Thebes.

• 2:36:21AJ Gentile?

  I'm watching the clock.

• 2:36:25AJ Gentile?

  Before, I'm, 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.

• 2:36:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:36:40AJ Gentile?

  What did you mean?

• 2:36:42Speaker 03

  Well.

• 2:36:43AJ Gentile?

  Once again, we're fighting human nature here.

• 2:36:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, I, I studied this a little bit when, 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 Xenophon's and Nabasus. I mean, this is like deep in the kind of Western leadership tradition.

• 2:37:28Speaker 03

  It, it starts to change in the 19th century for a lot of reasons. There's, there's a longer history to this of, of kind of classics moving away from greatness and becoming a science instead, becoming, going from being the kind of nursery of statesmen, which is very much the way that Hamilton or Jefferson or Washington are looking at, at the classics.

• 2:37:55AJ Gentile?

  Well, the founding fathers probably read Plutarch more than anything else except the Bible.

• 2:37:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's like Plutarch Pilgrims Progress, I don't know, Black's Law Dictionary, the Bible.

• 2:38:06AJ Gentile?

  They all read them.

• 2:38:07Speaker 03

  All. And, and you don't necessarily know this, reading their papers, but they're talking about Polopitius, Paminondus, Rudus, Scipio. It's not like they're saying, as Plutarch says, but that's where they're getting it. It's just obvious.

• 2:38:25AJ Gentile?

  Right.

• 2:38:25Speaker 03

  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 is an early text on the uses and, on the, on the advantage and disadvantage of history for life. And he, he talks about Plutarch in there in some very interesting ways.

• 2:39:00AJ Gentile?

  Wow.

• 2:39:01Speaker 03

  But, you know, criticizing the side of sort of like academization of history, like that's not what it's really for. It's for inspiring action. But I think it's, this is, there's some interesting books have been written about this. Rusty Reno's, A Return of the Strong Gods is a good one. But, you know, after World War II.

• 2:39:30Speaker 03

  The intelligentsia, let's say, agreed. And of course, there's a back history to this, but you know, they, they're 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, in stern fathers, you know? Stern fathers make stern sons and stern sons are the ones that go on to wannabe dictators, aren't they?

• 2:40:13Speaker 03

  There was a kind of, I don't know.

• 2:40:18Speaker 03

  Maybe that it's a conspiracy. I haven't, I haven't studied like, you can go really deep on this, like feminism being pushed by the CIA and the kind of Freudian psychology being really pumped through from Madison Avenue onward. Like this is seen as a good thing. Get, get people to, you know, sexual experimentation and what's this with the nuclear fam, you know? Why do we need fathers? Why can't we just kind of be free and do a lot like the, the sexual revolution is a sort of engineered.

• 2:40:57AJ Gentile?

  Every commercial for every product.

• 2:40:59Speaker 03

  Astroturf.

• 2:40:59AJ Gentile?

  Yes. Yeah. Every, every husband is a doofus in every commercial.

• 2:41:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:41:04AJ Gentile?

  Stop it.

• 2:41:05Speaker 03

  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.

• 2:41:16AJ Gentile?

  Yeah. For selling shoes.

• 2:41:18Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah. Homer Simpson.

• 2:41:21AJ Gentile?

  Yeah.

• 2:41:21Speaker 03

  Like, uh, so I think the, the attack on like the patriarchy, you have to kind of cut it off at its source. And maybe that, that work was already done by the scientization of philology where history becomes about just getting objective facts and, and looking at the subaltern and, you know, did, 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, it's, there's plenty of evidence that it wasn't accidental.

• 2:42:06AJ Gentile?

  Why do you think the motive is for it? Cause 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.

• 2:42:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:42:22Speaker 03

  They want a cowboy.

• 2:42:23AJ Gentile?

  They want a man who's going to step up, who's going to take a swing. They do.

• 2:42:29Speaker 03

  Yeah. And I, I think it's about control, you know? If you don't, 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, 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.

• 2:42:56AJ Gentile?

  They certainly do.

• 2:42:58Speaker 03

  And, uh, and so I, and like, if, if you, uh, you know, if you don't have to rely on a strong man, husband, father, well, maybe the government can step in and maybe you can vote for the people who will make sure that, you know, the goods keep flowing to people who don't need a strong man in their lives.

• 2:43:21Speaker 03

  Connect the dots. I think it's clear.

• 2:43:23AJ Gentile?

  It's clear.

• 2:43:24Speaker 03

  Qui bono.

• 2:43:25AJ Gentile?

  It's clear.

• 2:43:25Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:43:28Speaker 03

  Maybe it's changing.

• 2:43:31Speaker 03

  At, at the very least.

• 2:43:33AJ Gentile?

  Culturally, I think it's changed. I mean, in the state, it's not changing. It never will. That, you know, that's sort of welfare state's not going anywhere, but culturally I think it's, I think it's changed. I think it's okay to be a guy again. Women, you can be a woman again. I think, I think we're allowed.

• 2:43:52AJ Gentile?

  I don't think I'm a, I, I don't on my wife. You know, my boy is the happiest boy in the world, but I'm still, if someone comes through the door in the middle of the night, I'm the guy that you want, not, you know, some dude with a beard and a sweater.

• 2:44:09Speaker 03

  It's a great Ernst Junger quote.

• 2:44:15Speaker 03

  What does he say? This is, this is the, I'm paraphrasing, the, the essence of, of civilization, maybe, maybe he's the word patriarchy, is the father standing at the door, axe in hand, his sons flanking him.

• 2:44:34AJ Gentile?

  Yes. Yes.

• 2:44:38AJ Gentile?

  Movie, The Patriot, Mel Gibson.

• 2:44:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:44:40AJ Gentile?

  Right? It's like a seven year old loading 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. It's amazing. You sold a family business. You went all in.

• 2:44:54Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:44:55AJ Gentile?

  No plan B.

• 2:44:57Speaker 03

  No. Die on this hill.

• 2:44:58AJ Gentile?

  Dying on this hill. What, what does it cost you?

• 2:45:04Speaker 03

  A lot of stress.

• 2:45:07Speaker 03

  I'm working harder than I ever have in my life, but feeling more like I'm doing the most meaningful thing that I could, where I, I never felt like that before. I always felt like I should be doing something. This isn't what I'm supposed to be doing. And I think that, um, when you just go all in on something, it, it, you, you find wells of creativity and resolution and energy that you didn't think you had, especially when you have a few kids, the mouths to feed, people depending on you.

• 2:45:43Speaker 03

  But, I mean, I, it was the right choice to leave academia. That's, gets more obvious by the day with like AI. AI is writing my essays all, you know, I'm so glad I'm not, I, I really pity and, and pray for the people who are still in the system, but.

• 2:46:01AJ Gentile?

  AI, that, those are the sirens on the island.

• 2:46:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, for sure.

• 2:46:05AJ Gentile?

  So be careful with it.

• 2:46:06Speaker 03

  Yeah. Great, great tool, uh, bad god.

• 2:46:12AJ Gentile?

  Agreed.

• 2:46:14Speaker 03

  But I think, um, I didn't, I didn't come back to, uh, help and with my, my dad's business and, and eventually kind of run it with the intention of, uh, getting out of it and selling it. It's a small business anyway, but, um, and, uh, you know, pays for his retirement, but like it, it became clear that, that that was the right thing to do. And I'm, I'm grateful it allowed 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

• 2:46:59Speaker 03

  you're supposed to live and, and accepting the suffering and the struggle that you've been presented with. And, um, I, I hope that I did that, uh, that, you know? And this is one of the things I think when, when you're in this kind of liquid modernity careers, you know, it sees 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, a high for a job at this other company, take the better position, kind of leapfrog from, from company to company. There's, there's a sense in which people are told it's the right thing to pursue the

• 2:47:42Speaker 03

  next great best opportunity and keep ratcheting up your salary or your prestige, or this is going to look good on your TV, whatever. But there's something really, uh, there's something really grounding and rich about,

• 2:47:57Speaker 03

  you know?

• 2:48:00Speaker 03

  As, um, as, as Euripides said one time, you know, rule the Sparta that you were given, you know?

• 2:48:10Speaker 03

  It's, Sparta's a crappy little place at one point in its history. And maybe, maybe the king of Sparta could have been a greater man if he had lived in another, you know, if he had been at Mycenae in the archaic period, but no, rule the Sparta you were given. You don't know how big of a legacy you're building that you might not even see.

• 2:48:33Speaker 03

  I think about that a lot.

• 2:48:34AJ Gentile?

  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 Petkas was here. What do you want to plug? The Classical Society?

• 2:48:50Speaker 03

  I say start with the cost of glory.

• 2:48:53AJ Gentile?

  Okay.

• 2:48:55Speaker 03

  Dig into the lives of the great heroes of history. And, uh, 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, uh, and see how, see how you feel after a year of that and, and tell me that you weren't affected.

• 2:49:21AJ Gentile?

  Well done. Thanks for coming in. This has been a lot of fun.

• 2:49:23Speaker 03

  It's been great fun, AJ.

• 2:49:24AJ Gentile?

  All right. See you soon. Bye, everybody. That was Alex Petkas. 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 Greek 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's opened since the eruption. The Stoic part is real too.

• 2:50:08AJ Gentile?

  I said on mic, it might be Crispus himself. The last column names his nephew and nobody's willing to go further than that. And neither have I, but it's interesting. Then there's the student in Fresno, the grown man who read Plato's Republic in Alex's class and stopped cheating on his wife. Alex says that's what all 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.

• 2:51:06Speaker 05

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  So one more love me all through the night.

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  The Mothman sightings and the solar storms still come to have got the secret city underground. Mysterious number stations, planets circle to Project Star Gate. And what the dark watchers found. In a simulation, don't you worry though. The black night satellite told me so. I can't believe I'm dancing with the fish. Head to fish on Thursday nights with AJ2. And one more love me all through the night. All I ever wanted was to just hear the truth.

• 2:53:33Speaker 05

  So one more love me all through the night. Head to fish on Thursday nights with AJ2. And one more love me all through the night. All I ever wanted was to just hear the truth. So one more love me all through the night.

• 2:54:09Speaker 05

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• 2:54:42Speaker 04

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