When Good People Lose Themselves to Tyrants | James Romm (PT. 2)

History has a way of looking calmer than it really was. In this PT. 2 episode, Ryan sits down with historian and author James Romm to talk about the messy, dangerous, and often absurd reality of life in ancient Greece and Rome, especially for the philosophers who tried to “advise” the powerful. From Plato’s naïve trips to Syracuse, to Seneca’s complicated dance with Nero, to Marcus Aurelius resisting the pull of corruption, they discuss the timeless tension between access and integrity. James Romm is an author, reviewer, and a Professor of Classics at Bard College in Annandale, NY. He specializes in ancient Greek and Roman culture and civilization. His reviews and essays have appeared in the New Yorker, the Wall Street Journal, the London Review of Books, the Daily Beast, and other venues. He has held the Guggenheim Fellowship (1999-2000), the Birkelund Fellowship at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars at the New York Public Library (2010-11), and a Biography Fellowship at the Leon Levy Center of the City University of New York (2014-15). Follow James on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/james.romm/?locale=putih%2Bslot%E3%80%90777ONE. IN%E3%80%91.hqny&hl=en @James. Romm https://www.instagram.com/james.romm/?locale=putih%2Bslot%E3%80%90777ONE. IN%E3%80%91.hqny&hl=enand check out more of his work at his website, www.jamesromm.com https://www.jamesromm.com/about 📚 Get signed copies of James' latest book Plato and the Tyrant https://www.thepaintedporch.com/products/plato-and-the-tyrant-the-fall-of-greeces-greatest-dynasty-and-the-making-of-a-philosophic-masterpiece?_pos=2&_sid=dced56267&_ss=r, and his other books Dying Every Day https://www.thepaintedporch.com/products/dying-every-day-seneca-at-the-court-of-nero-signed-by-author?_pos=3&_sid=dced56267&_ss=r, How To Die https://www.thepaintedporch.com/products/how-to-die-an-ancient-guide-to-the-end-of-life?_pos=4&_sid=dced56267&_ss=r, and How To Give https://www.thepaintedporch.com/products/how-to-give-an-ancient-guide-to-giving-and-receiving-ancient-wisdom-for-modern-readers?_pos=7&_sid=dced56267&_ss=r, at The Painted Porch | https://www.thepaintedporch.com/ https://www.thepaintedporch.com/search?type=product&q=james+romm* 📚 View the full list of books mentioned in this episode here: https://www.thepaintedporch.com/collections/james-romm 🎥 Head to Ryan Holiday’s YouTube Channel https://www.youtube.com/@RyanHolidayOfficialto watch him give James Romm book recommendations at The Painted Porch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUuxMfJRc2c 🎙️ Listen to James Romm’s first episode on https://dailystoic.com/romm/ The Daily Stoic Podcast: https://dailystoic.com/romm/ 📖 Preorder the final book in Ryan Holiday's The Stoic Virtues Series: "Wisdom Takes Work":https://store.dailystoic.com/pages/wisdom-takes-work 🎙️ Follow The Daily Stoic Podcast on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast/?hl=en: https://www.instagram.com/dailystoicpodcast 🎥 Watch top moments from The Daily Stoic Podcast https://www.youtube.com/@dailystoicpodcast on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@dailystoicpodcast: https://www.youtube.com/@dailystoicpodcast ✉️ Want Stoic wisdom delivered to your inbox daily? Sign up for the FREE Daily Stoic email at https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail 🏛 Get Stoic inspired books, medallions, and prints to remember these lessons at the Daily Stoic Store: https://store.dailystoic.com/ 📱 Follow us: Instagram https://www.instagram.com/dailystoic/,Twitter https://twitter.com/dailystoic,YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@DailyStoic,TikTok https://www.tiktok.com/@daily_stoic?lang=en, andFacebook https://www.facebook.com/dailystoic See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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

• 0:03Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic. Each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something to help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. And then here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers. We explore at length how these Stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time. Here on the weekend, when you have a little bit more space, when things have slowed down, be sure to take some time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with your journal,

• 0:46Ryan Holiday?

  and most importantly, to prepare for what the week ahead may bring.

• 0:54Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. So I was in Athens a couple of months ago now. I guess a month and a half ago now that you're listening to this. And every morning, I would try to go for a long run to see something that I knew only pretty much I would be interested in. And my family would be like, well, cool. So, you know, I ran out and saw the Lyceum, which is where Aristotle taught. I went up to all these different hills around Athens. My little kids wouldn't have to hike all the way up, or I wouldn't have to carry them all the way up. I saw that thing that we call Socrates' jail. No, he wasn't actually jailed there. And one of the things I also went to see, which was a decently long run from where I was staying in Plaka,

• 1:39Ryan Holiday?

  which is right under the Acropolis, I went to see Plato's Academy. And I remember looking it up. I asked Donald Robertson beforehand. And he's like, oh, yeah, it's right over here. He told me where it was. I looked it up on Google Maps. And I'm like checking the hours, you know, the Lyceum, for instance, you have to pay an entrance fee. You know, the Olympic Stadium, there's an entrance fee. The Acropolis is so busy, there's a fee. It's like a timed entry. But Plato's Academy was just like in the middle of a park. It's set open 24 hours a day. I said, well, this can't be right. One of the most famous sites in all of the world. It's a direct line from Socrates to Plato to Aristotle, Alexander to Zeno, Marcus, all the way down to where we are today. Surely this must be in a protected park. It must be an archaeological museum.

• 2:23Ryan Holiday?

  It must be a world heritage site. No, it's just a park. And it's like a hole in the ground. You, you run all the way to this park. It's not in a particularly nice area. You get in this park and it's just this kind of hole in the ground. The signs are all like, you know, the script is off the signs. If you didn't know anything, you'd think it's just a pile of rocks. And I just thought, on the one hand, this is terribly sad. On the other hand, it's a statement to the embarrassment of riches that Greece has. Like here, they have to choose between this site and that site. And Plato's Academy hasn't been reconstructed. It was funny, a couple of weeks later, I was in Philadelphia and my son, as I've said, is obsessed with Hamilton. We go and see Benjamin Franklin's house, which had been torn down,

• 3:06Ryan Holiday?

  but they like built like a scaffold that they kind of built. It's like a ghost version of the house. You can imagine what the house looked like, sort of cool sculpture. And I just think Benjamin Franklin's house is preserved in this way. And yet, a few weeks before, I was standing in the place where it all happened, where it all began. And I'm left to my imagination to even conceive of what Plato's Academy looked like. I was thinking a lot about Plato while I was there, of course, because he's the guy that it all began with in a sense, but also because I just had a really fascinating conversation about Plato with James Rahm for the podcast. Let me read you this paragraph from his book, Plato and the Tyrant: The Fall of Greece's Greatest Dynasty

• 3:50Ryan Holiday?

  and the Making of a Philosophical Masterpiece. Did Plato, while extolling the good as the source of transcendent joy, end up collaborating with evil? Has he sought benevolent ends by unsavory means? How far had he bent the noble ideas of republic, its unwavering commitment to justice, when he'd entered a world where injustice prevailed? Was it thinkable, the most troubling question of all, that he'd written republic in part to explain his missteps in Syracuse? Or to obscure them. I raved in part one of this episode about James Rahm's book, Dying Every Day, which is about Seneca in the court of Nero. His book Plato and the Tyrant is about Plato's similar,

• 4:33Ryan Holiday?

  complicated, complex, inexplicable, confusing, and yet all too relatable time in the court of another tyrant. Seneca and Plato agree that the philosopher has to be a doer. And the problem is that to be a doer in the world, particularly the political world, means imperfection, means contradictions, means complexity, means making hard decisions. Did Seneca always get it right? No, of course not. That's what Dying Every Day is about. And did Plato always get it right? No. And that's what we talk about in today's episode. The manipulation that charismatic or demagogic leaders can rely on

• 5:17Ryan Holiday?

  to bend us to their will. We talk about Seneca's hypocrisy. We talk about Plato's hypocrisy. We talk about their gullibility. Talk about their savior complexes. We talk about what's missing in today's world that was present in ancient Greece and Rome and vice versa. And then at the end, I walk him through the painted porch and we pick out some books. It was a lovely conversation. I am a big fan of Professor Rahm. He teaches classics at Bard College. He's the author of many books, won a Guggenheim Fellowship. He's translated Seneca. His edition, Dying Every Day, is one of my favorites. His book, How to Die, which is a collection of Seneca's thoughts on death, is one of my all time favorites. We have signed copies of that. He signed them while he was here. He also signed Plato and the Tyrant, Dying Every Day,

• 6:00Ryan Holiday?

  and his translation of Seneca, How to Give. All in all, great thinker, great writer, someone who has influenced and shaped me quite a bit. This is his second time on the podcast. Early in the week was part one. This is part two. But he was back on the podcast in July of 2020. So you can go back and listen to that. You can follow James on Instagram, at james.rahm, and check out his work, jamesromm.com. I think you will really like this interview. Thanks.

• 6:29Ryan Holiday?

  I read Dying Every Day when I was at American Apparel. I had come back, they'd fired the CEO and they were, we were trying to save the company. And I was sort of wrestling with more minor version of the same sort of temptations. And I was, it was thinking back to how had this person who was sort of unstable and reckless and made all these terrible decisions, how at every step of the way had he managed to convince the smartest people to give him more and more money? I think it's fascinating that sort of after everything, Trump managed to go to Silicon Valley and convince these people who are primarily a venture capitalist, your job is, most of the ideas turn out to not be good. Your job is to bet on founder.

• 7:13Ryan Holiday?

  Like their job is to read people and see which person is worth giving millions and millions of dollars to and can successfully build and run a company. And Trump manages to convince them that he's not what he obviously is. And then promptly, you know, tanks the economy, doing exactly what he said he was going to do. And these same people are like, we didn't think he would actually do it. Right? And I think that's the timelessness of the seduction, which is like, over here, I'm saying and showing you this. And then over here, I'm saying something different. And the human capacity to hear which one of those we want to hear.

• 7:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. And for Plato to have gone back to the court of Dionysius a second, a second time.

• 8:05Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 8:06Speaker 01

  Five years after departing in a terrible debacle the first time and having caused a rift in the royal family that resulted in his protege Dion getting exiled. That is really, it's another stunning example of self-deception.

• 8:24Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, the mental gymnastics that humans are capable of will never cease to surprise you.

• 8:30Speaker 01

  That's right. And Plato says that he devised a test, you know, this is really a testament to his naivete. He devised a test to see whether Dionysius was a suitable student, that he was going to tell him exactly how hard it was going to be to become a philosopher. And probably he had in mind. Years and years of study, starting with geometry and astronomy and higher math, and going up to dialectic, and he was gonna see whether, how he would react. So he lands in Syracuse for the second time, well, the third time, but the second time under Dionysius the Younger, and presents him with this scenario.

• 9:14Speaker 01

  And Dionysius says, "Oh, well, I already know all this stuff, because other people have told it to me." And at that point Plato is sort of done.

• 9:21Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 9:22Speaker 01

  But the fact that, after having lived with him five years earlier for months and months, and seen exactly what kind of person he was, you know, a drunk, a libertine, unstable emotional figure, that he still thought, "Well, you know, maybe he'll pass the test, and I'll have a true student on my hands."

• 9:44Ryan Holiday?

  Yes. I imagine Seneca, you know, he's somewhere in one of his villas, and the messenger rushes in, you know, "We have news that Nero's tried to kill his mother." And Seneca's grabbing his toga, you know, and rushing over to the palace. "I'm gonna tell him this time, you know, it's, this has to end, you can't do this. Like, I'm really gonna confront him, this is it." You know, it's like, we're gonna have the come-to-Jesus conversation, which maybe he literally could have, he could have used that expression.

• 10:15Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 10:16Ryan Holiday?

  Jesus having overlapped with Seneca. But, but, you know, we're gonna have it. And he's walking there, "I'm gonna confront him, I'm laying on the line, I'm giving him the ultimatum." And then by the end of it, you know, Nero has talked himself out of it, right? And then soon enough, he does kill his mother, and does, crosses the next red line, and crosses the next red line. And, and the real skill of the Neros, of the, of the tyrants, of the Trumps, etc., is their ability to read those people, and to know what they have to say to them, and what their levers are, and how to manipulate them.

• 10:56Ryan Holiday?

  That at, at some level, they see through them, and they, they know how to get them in their pocket.

• 11:03Speaker 01

  Hmm. Yeah. There's a great phrase that James Comey used in the, in the first Trump administration, "He eats your soul in little bites."

• 11:11Ryan Holiday?

  Oh.

• 11:13Speaker 01

  That was a description of what he saw going on in those closed rooms.

• 11:18Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 11:18Speaker 01

  Where people were, you know, huddled with the decision maker.

• 11:23Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, because didn't he say, like, the first day, they all get called into his office and Trump basically forces them to all say that it was the biggest inauguration crowd they'd ever seen?

• 11:36Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 11:36Ryan Holiday?

  That that's really the test is like, can I get you to accept an absurd premise? And if I can, then what you have told me is, I think people think it's about loyalty, but it's more about you have shown me a glimpse into your soul, which is that you want the job more than you care about your principles or notions like the truth and honesty, et cetera. And if I, if I can get you to make that little compromise, or if I can get you to show me that that's who you are, then this is going to go well.

• 12:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, very true. And Nero had a similar test with the murder of his mother, that he put out a story that his mother had been conspiring against the regime.

• 12:25Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 12:26Speaker 01

  And was an enemy to the regime and had to be eliminated on that grounds. And Seneca wrote the letter in which that was put forward to the Senate. And Tacitus says, no one blamed Nero because they knew he was a rotten apple, but everyone thought Seneca had just gone to the dogs.

• 12:45Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, so then later, when Seneca says, I'll give you all my money, I want to leave. Nero goes, no, you don't. Like Nero knows, Nero knows, not only has he actually compromised him, and he knows where the bodies are buried, literally, but, but he knows that Seneca is corruptible and...

• 13:05Ryan Holiday?

  Ambitious above anything else.

• 13:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I mean, we should give Seneca at least the credit for saying he wanted to leave.

• 13:13Ryan Holiday?

  Sure, that was courageous.

• 13:15Speaker 01

  And then withdrawing from the court into a kind of private, you know, his private chambers, pretending to be sick, according to Tacitus, and not going out in public with the emperor. So he at least had enough self-respect to distance himself.

• 13:33Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 13:33Speaker 01

  If not, remove himself.

• 13:35Ryan Holiday?

  It's too, it's too little, too late, but it still happened and it didn't happen for everyone.

• 13:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. And I think we'll see the same.

• 13:43Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 13:43Speaker 01

  In, in our current band of followers, you know, there will be some who will eventually say, you know, I can't go on with this. It's too much.

• 13:52Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 13:52Speaker 01

  And we'll have to, well, Mike Pence.

• 13:56Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 13:56Speaker 01

  Take the example of Mike Pence, you know, went along, went along, went along. Finally, it was a bridge too far.

• 14:02Ryan Holiday?

  Literal insurrection.

• 14:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, right.

• 14:05Ryan Holiday?

  That's where I draw the line.

• 14:06Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, and now, you know, we hail him as a hero of conscience, or some do.

• 14:24Ryan Holiday?

  Well, Nero does that test multiple times, right? Cheats his way into the Olympics and, you know, I think some people think it must have been absurd vanity. And I think at some level, there is some kind of intuitive understanding of like, what can I get people to accept, you know? And then he does this, doesn't he, he like murders his wife and then he says like, no, my boyfriend is my wife, right? This, this is her all along. Thrasia, basically Seneca's opposite in every way as a Stoic goes, no, like, he just refuses to, he refuses to, to say what is demonstrably untrue, you know, like he just refuses to rubber stamp an outright farce, which again, doesn't seem like much, but

• 15:09Ryan Holiday?

  most of the Senate goes along with it. And so it's this kind of moment, how can I get you to slowly compromise yourself? So then you are too compromised to challenge me when it matters.

• 15:21Speaker 01

  Right. You can't pull out because that would be admitting that everything you've done up till now has been a mistake.

• 15:27Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, like I interviewed Adam Kinzinger here and for him to take that stand on the second impeachment, he has to look in the mirror and go, why didn't I, why didn't I do it the first time? It's always hard to admit you were wrong. It's very hard to admit you were wrong when you would have to accept guilt and shame for things that you were then complicit in or responsible for.

• 15:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:56Ryan Holiday?

  And that's a, that's a, that's a bridge too far for a lot of people.

• 16:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, right. It's very difficult. It's a terrible dynamic that the sunk costs, as we say, you know, that you've invested too much to ever admit that you were wrong.

• 16:12Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 16:13Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so we continue to spiral.

• 16:15Ryan Holiday?

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

• 16:47Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 16:48Ryan Holiday?

  Or to turn.

• 16:49Speaker 01

  That's right. And the ancient world had the same problem. You know, you, you read about changes of regime, changes of government in Athens.

• 16:58Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 16:59Speaker 01

  You know, flip flopping between oligarchy and democracy. And each side that took power booted out the leaders of the other side or even executed them.

• 17:09Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 17:09Speaker 01

  Right? It was not possible to have a climb down to say, you know, okay, you were wrong. We accept you. There, there's no truth and reconciliation commissions. It's all about just destroying the other side as soon as you get power. And so Plato was very aware of that problem in Syracuse and that that was probably what was going to happen. And he tried to prevent it in his letters. And it's very, very moving actually to see him struggling against the prevailing Greek tendency to destroy your opponent.

• 17:45Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I mean, for Seneca, that decision to go to Nero and go, I'll give you all the money back. Just let me leave. And then he goes, yeah, it doesn't work that way. You can't leave. That's the predicament that I think most people who, however aware they should have been earlier, and however sooner we would have liked it to happen. What they're wrestling with is the incentives and the reality of like, no one's looking at Mike Pence and going, it worked out well for him. You know, like, he lost his political position and then he's rejected by his own party. And then it's not like the other parties are, we begrudgingly respect and appreciate the decision,

• 18:28Ryan Holiday?

  but we're not like coming to our tent, you know? No, so you're, you essentially make yourself an island and nobody wants to be an island.

• 18:37Speaker 01

  Yeah. And what's interesting about Seneca is that in spite of him, his voluminous writings, he wrote probably, I don't know, we have maybe half a million words preserved and there are other things that were lost. And even in his letters to Lucilius, when he's already separated himself from Nero, he never uses his pen to critique the regime.

• 19:02Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 19:03Speaker 01

  He only says very obliquely, these letters are like a salve, like a skin cream that I use to alleviate my rash.

• 19:14Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 19:15Speaker 01

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

• 19:42Ryan Holiday?

  Do you think he planned to do it later? Like, because he does write that searing critique of Claudius.

• 19:48Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 19:48Ryan Holiday?

  And he does this safely after Claudius's death. So maybe he planned to, but it's not like the Romans had free speech in that sense.

• 20:00Speaker 01

  Right.

• 20:01Ryan Holiday?

  So. You know, today you can write your tell-all memoir and you can piss off the president and maybe they can come after you for some unrelated things, but they can't, they can't get you for just saying what's true.

• 20:13Speaker 01

  Yes. Well, we know that Seneca was dictating a philosophical treatise as he was dying on the orders of Nero, and presumably he had freedom of speech there. Tacitus doesn't tell us what was in it. He says, this is well-known to everyone, but unfortunately it wasn't preserved. So maybe there, he said something more direct.

• 20:36Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 20:36Speaker 01

  We know that Petronius, who went down in the same purge as Seneca, did use his last moments, his last hours, to dictate a list of Nero's sexual crimes.

• 20:49Ryan Holiday?

  Wow.

• 20:50Speaker 01

  To embarrass him.

• 20:51Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 20:52Speaker 01

  And tell the public exactly what had been going on in the palace.

• 20:55Ryan Holiday?

  My favorite sort of last words related to Nero is, who was, there was some soldier or someone who's sentenced to death, and he's looking out over the grave right before he's about to be thrown into it, and he says, even this is not up to code.

• 21:09Speaker 01

  Yes, marvelous, hard-nosed old soldier.

• 21:15Ryan Holiday?

  We tend to think of these regimes as brutally efficient, but actually they're mostly, their hallmark is their incompetence.

• 21:23Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm. Yes. Very true.

• 21:25Ryan Holiday?

  Like, that's the, the fire isn't probably his fault, certainly how it was handled was.

• 21:31Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm. And his construction of the golden house on the ruins, his own enormously expensive pleasure palace.

• 21:38Ryan Holiday?

  Well, the tension I've been thinking about, like, Seneca embodies this, but I guess Plato does too, is like, it is true that somebody does have to be there to mitigate. Someone, it is someone's unfortunate and terrible job, because we don't.

• 21:57Ryan Holiday?

  Singularly decide who our leaders are. There is always someone whose job is to mitigate, "Hey, sir, I think that's a bad idea." And they do tend to be men, so I'm not being sexist there, unfortunately. "Sir, this is a bad idea. Here's all the problems with what you're about to do." Or, "Hey, call me if the president is about to, starts talking about nuclear weapons, so I can intervene." Right? You do need that person. And to get to that place, you have to make some compromises and not always say what you think, right? Like, at some level, for Mike Pence to be where he was on January 6th,

• 22:37Ryan Holiday?

  Mike Pence had to degrade and compromise himself in all those other ways, right?

• 22:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:43Ryan Holiday?

  And so, that does need to happen. That is true. And yet, you're probably not that person.

• 22:51Speaker 01

  Right.

• 22:51Ryan Holiday?

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

• 23:34Ryan Holiday?

  all these great philosophers, get themselves into trouble, which is that, instead of doing and saying what was obviously right in the moment, they were telling themselves it was more important that they save themselves for some later moment.

• 23:47Speaker 01

  Hmm. Well, Plato, I think, was pretty forthright. And he does say that he sugarcoated it a bit.

• 23:55Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 23:56Speaker 01

  When talking to Dionysius, telling him he needs to sober up, because Dionysius was a bad drinker, and he needs to reform his lifestyle. He needs to find friends who...

• 24:09Speaker 01

  Are reliable because they're devoted to moral virtue.

• 24:12Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 24:13Speaker 01

  Not because they're getting free food and handouts from the regime.

• 24:19Ryan Holiday?

  But just go back. I mean, it's mean like it's this tension between access and.

• 24:25Speaker 01

  Integrity.

• 24:25Ryan Holiday?

  And integrity. Yes. And I gotta preserve my access. Even though I'm slowly compromising my integrity. That's the tension.

• 24:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:35Ryan Holiday?

  Obviously, they they all fail that test at some level.

• 24:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Of course, what's missing from our society, which is present in both Greek and Roman picture, is that a philosopher who's widely respected, as both Plato and Seneca were, has automatic access because the ruler needs that legitimacy. He needs.

• 24:59Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 24:59Speaker 01

  A philosopher, an esteemed philosopher at his court.

• 25:04Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 25:04Speaker 01

  In order to appear to be an enlightened person.

• 25:07Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 25:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, we have lost that.

• 25:10Ryan Holiday?

  Also, like, for them, politely declining is not so much an option, right? The specter of death and real danger. You know, now it's I don't want to lose my access. It's like, OK, so you don't get reelected and then you go make millions of dollars as a lobbyist or a consultant. Like, you're not actually, the downside is so much lower in today's political environment.

• 25:32Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 25:33Ryan Holiday?

  And so it is much, it's even more about ego than than this sort of calculated, you know, balance between all the different factors.

• 25:42Speaker 01

  Mm hmm. Another element that we haven't talked about is the the coterie of flattery.

• 25:49Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 25:49Speaker 01

  The role of flattery in an imperial court.

• 25:52Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 25:52Speaker 01

  Plato talks about this in his letter to Dionysius. He says, I've become aware that a person of great wealth and power will tend to attract flatterers and toadies.

• 26:04Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 26:05Speaker 01

  And that will inevitably corrupt his regime.

• 26:09Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 26:09Speaker 01

  And Dionysius surrounded himself with such people. There was even a Greek term for them, the Dionysio flatterers.

• 26:17Ryan Holiday?

  Wow.

• 26:19Speaker 01

  That they were a kind of a motley crew of toadies and suckups. And there's stories told about them that just blow the mind as to how low people were willing to go. Some of them, because Dionysius was nearsighted and apparently felt diminished by that. They would pretend to be blind and they'd grope around at the table for their food. So that he would have to take their hand and put it to their place.

• 26:47Ryan Holiday?

  So he could feel good about him?

• 26:48Speaker 01

  So he would feel better about himself. Exactly.

• 26:51Ryan Holiday?

  See, I'm a good person. I help blind people.

• 26:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, and they have it worse than I do, so I'm not really suffering so badly.

• 26:58Ryan Holiday?

  Wow.

• 26:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, that's just so indicative. Probably it's apocryphal.

• 27:04Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 27:04Speaker 01

  But it still points to the dynamic that the desire to inflate the ego.

• 27:11Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 27:12Speaker 01

  Of the tyrant and the rewards that you get for doing it was a huge part of the composition of these courts.

• 27:18Ryan Holiday?

  Well, the narcissism required to think I deserve to be the most powerful person.

• 27:23Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 27:24Ryan Holiday?

  Is the sort of secret weapon and then also the inevitable undoing of those people and most leaders. Right? Because first off, if you don't think you deserve to be the king or the president or the richest person. You're probably not going to arbitrarily find yourself in that position. It's like, it's the thing that draws you to go do the things that would put you in that position. And then, how are you, once you're there, though, how are you going to get the information that you need? To maintain even a tenuous connection to reality so you don't blow it all up? I mean, like, that's what's so striking about Biden's debate appearance.

• 28:08Ryan Holiday?

  Is that up until it happened, and then even after, like, he seemed to think that it would go well and that it did go well. Because who is going to tell the most powerful person in the world that they're no longer? Or seemingly appear to be no longer qualified to be that person?

• 28:26Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 28:26Ryan Holiday?

  You don't do that and keep that job. Like, I've found that with much less, but similar personality. I've worked with similar personality types who are obviously much less powerful. But it's effectively a kamikaze mission. Like, you are to deliver the truth that they desperately need to hear. You are destroying yourself. Because if they hear it, then their power goes away. And if they don't like your message, you go away. And so very few people are going to tell them what they need to hear. Nobody told Putin that invading Ukraine would be a bad idea.

• 29:08Ryan Holiday?

  You know, even though it's a historical axiom that you don't invade Russia in the winter, which he does, you know, he believes Ukraine is part of Russia. It's like the one military strategy we know is that it's going to bog you down and it's going to be a disaster, even if it somehow eke out some victory. It's just not going to go well. Who can tell him that? Because it's a one way ticket to the Gulag.

• 29:33Speaker 01

  Well, the fact that you can compare those two things is very disturbing as to what the presidency has become in this country. The fact that there wasn't an effort to deter Biden from running for a second term. And even after his debate wasn't enough of an effort in his inner circle to get him out of the race. I mean, it astonishes me.

• 29:56Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 29:56Speaker 01

  It truly astonishes me and deeply indicts our whole political system. I think the Democrats, I mean, we don't want to get too much into current politics, but the Democrats really can't move forward as a party until they acknowledge the failings of that moment. And it's only just, the reckoning has barely even begun.

• 30:19Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, and it's obviously there's no moral equivalency there. You know, deciding to run for a second term when you are increasingly old is not the same as invading Ukraine. But the timelessness is emperor, president, CEO, local mayor that ceases to be able to be criticized or get honest feedback or information. That is just a timeless part of the human experience that we, we, we create the bubble that prevents the information that we desperately need from getting in.

• 30:55Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, and you hear a lot of commentators, people that I listen to, asking, especially about current Congress, you know, is this job so irreplaceable?

• 31:10Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 31:11Speaker 01

  Couldn't you do well going back to your law firm?

• 31:14Ryan Holiday?

  Sure.

• 31:15Speaker 01

  Or writing a book, or going on the lecture circuit? Is it so addictive that you can't bear the thought of losing your job? It's astonishing.

• 31:27Ryan Holiday?

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

• 32:10Ryan Holiday?

  We do what Seneca does, is like, I gotta wait, or I gotta, if I do it right now, you know, we just, we come up with reasons to not do what obviously needs to be done, or obviously needs to be said. And then it goes on and on, and then, and then we're, we're shocked and appalled when it all comes out. And then we're very quick to ask why other people in other industries didn't do something sooner about their own version of this same thing.

• 32:40Speaker 01

  There's a wonderful story in Herodotus, to turn things back to the ancient world. The portrait Herodotus paints of Cambyses, the emperor of Persia, is really the first study of tyrants and their courts in the Greek canon. It, about a hundred years before the events of my Plato book, but it's very much a forerunner. And Cambyses has gone Mad, he's, he's become paranoid and murderous. And he's gotten his vizier, a man named Praxasbees, to do some of his dirty work, including killing his brother to prevent him from taking the throne.

• 33:21Speaker 01

  And after Cambyses' death, a usurper comes to power who pretends to be the dead brother and manages to convince people that he's legitimate. And Praxasbees is the only one who knows the truth.

• 33:32Ryan Holiday?

  Because he did it.

• 33:33Speaker 01

  Because he did the murder. And he's gone, you know, really far along with the, the rulers, you know, Cambyses and then his successor. But he finally can't go the last step when the Persians tell him he's got to go up on this tall tower and announce to all the Persians that this is the legitimate ruler. He climbs the tower and instead says, this is a phony. I killed the real, the real successor and you're being ruled by a fake. And then leaps to his death.

• 34:07Ryan Holiday?

  Wow.

• 34:08Speaker 01

  So in the end, he's able to tell the truth, but only at the cost of his own life.

• 34:14Ryan Holiday?

  That that's the line, right? We talked about this earlier, like everyone has the line. It's, it's usually much later than you want it to be.

• 34:23Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 34:23Ryan Holiday?

  Yes. Being asked to murder the king's brother is not the line. Being able to lie about it years later, that's the line.

• 34:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:32Ryan Holiday?

  But it's still immensely courageous, you know? It was courageous for Seneca to ultimately turn on Nero. It was probably courageous even for him to subtly criticize Nero in his plays, you know? And certainly it was courageous how he went out. But that doesn't, it doesn't excuse it, but it, it, it does remind us of the infinite complexity of human beings.

• 34:59Speaker 01

  Mm hmm. I'm glad you mentioned the plays because that's a feature of Seneca that doesn't get a lot of attention. And I think you're right that he used them to express obliquely some of his misgivings and his attacks of conscience. And especially the play Thiestes, which is a study of autocratic cruelty and sadism.

• 35:22Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 35:23Speaker 01

  And it's directed at a man who's portrayed as a Stoic philosopher.

• 35:27Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 35:28Speaker 01

  And that play is, to my mind, autobiographical.

• 35:33Ryan Holiday?

  Totally.

• 35:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. And the fact that we don't know whether the plays were put on, we don't even know if they were circulated. There are some who've even argued that Plato, that Seneca didn't write them because there is no evidence in his prose works that he wrote tragedies. He never talks about it. But to my mind, they're somewhat like the Diary of Marcus Aurelius. They're a personal expression of inner anguish that he may have written mostly just for his own self.

• 36:01Ryan Holiday?

  And he was taking his life in his hands by writing them.

• 36:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:05Ryan Holiday?

  There's not some clear, like, legal line when you're dealing with Nero that says, if you say this, I'll kill you. But if you say it this way, I won't. I mean, he critted, like, the emperors sometimes, there were people who were sent to death for working on biographies of Brutus.

• 36:24Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 36:25Ryan Holiday?

  So even just to talk about someone who generations previous had killed an emperor was enough to get you on the wrong side of the current emperor. So for Seneca to even be fooling with some of this would have been immensely dangerous.

• 36:41Speaker 01

  That's right. You hear under Tiberius that people who wrote tragedies with anti-monarchical themes got into terrible trouble.

• 36:50Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 36:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:02Ryan Holiday?

  There's a line about George Washington that the more you read about him, the more you like him. And Seneca, it's kind of the opposite. And then there's some level where you cross over to the other side and it's just so complex, you just decide, I'm gonna like the things I like and not think about the things I don't like so much. Which is probably what he was doing.

• 37:23Speaker 01

  Exactly so, yeah. Yeah, he had aspirations. He doesn't ever claim to be a sage, to have attained some kind of high plane of Stoic virtue. He says he's a prophetiscans, he's on the road.

• 37:40Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 37:41Speaker 01

  Even in his letters to Lucilius, when he's in his 60s, he's still on the road to virtue.

• 37:48Ryan Holiday?

  Which is also what like a pastor who's just been caught having extramarital affairs would say, you know, like, "I too sin." And it's like, okay, but, you know, it's a brilliant device, even though it's true and relatable, we're all on the road, it's also the perfect manipulative thing to say to excuse your abhorrent behavior.

• 38:13Speaker 01

  Yes, right. So there are many ways to look at these people, both Plato and Seneca, and I don't mean my books in any way to be a takedown of either of them. They're just complex. And they present themselves one way in their writings, or in Plato's case, they present philosophy one way in his dialogues, and the life lived is much more complex.

• 38:39Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, Seneca's thing about, "It's okay to be wealthy as a philosopher, provided your money is not stained in blood." Come on!

• 38:47Speaker 01

  Or provided that you don't... Regarded as an essential to your happiness.

• 38:53Ryan Holiday?

  Yes, but I'm just saying, you became rich in neuroservice. What is a better example of money stained in blood? Like, what, is there any more extreme example? Like, I can't think of one. Also, you're writing this on your estate tended by slaves.

• 39:09Speaker 01

  Right.

• 39:09Ryan Holiday?

  You know, there's, there's something, again, we're all flawed individuals. And then there is some level where hypocrisy is so extreme that it becomes disqualifying across the board.

• 39:23Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 39:24Ryan Holiday?

  And he flirts with that.

• 39:25Speaker 01

  He flirts with that, yes, I agree. It would be easy to reject him.

• 39:30Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 39:30Speaker 01

  If one were inclined to do so. And I don't ever do that. I, I still think he's an admirable figure, but deeply flawed.

• 39:40Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 39:40Speaker 01

  And deeply complex.

• 39:41Ryan Holiday?

  As we wrap up, how, one of the things you wrestled with in the book, and I think Tacitus did too, you know, Seneca's death is, in some ways, the perfect embodiment of Stoic philosophy. The goons come to kill him. He faces it bravely. He faces it honorably and goes to the end like a Stoic philosopher, like his hero Cato did. But as always with Seneca, there is this, is it a performance?

• 40:10Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 40:10Ryan Holiday?

  You know, is there something false? Or there's always the one eye to how this is going to be seen by other people.

• 40:18Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 40:19Ryan Holiday?

  That you don't get in Marcus Aurelius. You don't, you get Marcus Aurelius's last words, and you don't get the sense that he is doing that to put a period on the end of meditations.

• 40:29Speaker 01

  That's right. And Seneca has an audience as he's dying.

• 40:32Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 40:32Speaker 01

  He has a circle of friends around him to whom he's addressing himself, speechifying and dictating his, his last treatise. So, yes, he was in the public eye right up to the end.

• 40:47Ryan Holiday?

  And, and Tacitus says he'd been preparing for this moment. But you, you take that to mean not preparing for it as in, we all have to face our death some way. You're, it's like, hey, no, every fireworks show needs a grand finale.

• 41:00Speaker 01

  Yes, and he had stored up a drink of hemlock to die like Socrates.

• 41:06Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 41:07Speaker 01

  He must have anticipated, you know, the end is coming and this is how I want to go. Unfortunately, it had gone bad or something. It had lost its potency and so it didn't finish him off. He had to go to another method. He had to go to Plan C. Well, let's go check out some books. All right. Well, thank you. This has been a wonderful conversation.

• 41:32Ryan Holiday?

  This is my bookstore.

• 41:32Speaker 01

  Oh, it's your book?

• 41:33Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 41:35Ryan Holiday?

  We have a lot of your books, obviously. Peyton, do we have that Joan Didion book, Notes to John?

• 41:42Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 41:43Ryan Holiday?

  Do you know where it is?

• 41:44Speaker 01

  Yes, in the back.

• 41:45Ryan Holiday?

  Can you grab me one?

• 41:46Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 41:48Ryan Holiday?

  I did, I think you told me about this book over here, which I love, Travels with Herodotus. I think you mentioned it in the intro of your Herodotus book.

• 42:00Speaker 01

  Maybe I did. I forgot.

• 42:01Ryan Holiday?

  But I loved it.

• 42:03Speaker 01

  Oh, great.

• 42:03Ryan Holiday?

  I thought it was very good.

• 42:04Speaker 01

  And now there's one called Travels with Epicurus.

• 42:06Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, you read this?

• 42:07Speaker 01

  No, I have not.

• 42:08Ryan Holiday?

  We're going to Greece this summer, but you might like it.

• 42:10Speaker 01

  Oh, really? What parts are you going to?

• 42:12Ryan Holiday?

  We're doing Athens and then we're doing a whole road trip. My son's obsessed with Greek history. And so we're doing the Olympic sites, we're doing Ithaca, going to Thermopylae. Where else are we going? I don't know. It's like a whole road trip and then, and then we're gonna spend some time at the beach after.

• 42:31Speaker 01

  Nice.

• 42:32Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah. Anywhere we should go?

• 42:34Speaker 01

  Well, a site that many tourists miss, but it's, it's really impressive. Messini, not Myceni, but Messini, M-E-S-S. It's on the west coast of the Peloponnese, or not the coast, but the west part of the Peloponnese, like south of Olympia.

• 42:50Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 42:50Speaker 01

  And it's a Hellenistic city. It's incredibly well-preserved.

• 42:56Ryan Holiday?

  Okay.

• 42:56Speaker 01

  So.

• 42:57Ryan Holiday?

  All right.

• 42:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:58Ryan Holiday?

  I'm gonna try to do, my, my goal is to do the, I'm gonna run from Marathon to Athens.

• 43:03Speaker 01

  Are you serious?

• 43:04Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I'm gonna.

• 43:05Speaker 01

  Do the marathon run?

• 43:06Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I'm gonna do the marathon.

• 43:07Speaker 01

  Oh, that's marvelous.

• 43:08Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 43:09Speaker 01

  Is there a path that connects the two?

• 43:11Ryan Holiday?

  Oh, this is the Joan Didion book.

• 43:12Speaker 01

  Oh, wow.

• 43:13Ryan Holiday?

  So it's, it's like each one... Just has January 5th, 2000.

• 43:19Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 43:20Ryan Holiday?

  It's remarkable as notes, but then it, um, it's the fine line, like we're talking about with meditations, it's a fine line between how much of it had an eye towards publication and how much of it didn't, but then also, who would type up, who would type up the notes after the therapy, wouldn't you just tell your spouse about it?

• 43:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:39Ryan Holiday?

  You know, um, so I could go like this.

• 43:40Speaker 01

  Wow, that'd be for me to keep?

• 43:42Ryan Holiday?

  Yes, this is the, I, I pick out some books I think you would like.

• 43:45Speaker 01

  Oh, thank you.

• 43:46Ryan Holiday?

  But have you read The Last of the Lion?

• 43:48Speaker 01

  Oh, I've always wanted to read that, that's.

• 43:51Ryan Holiday?

  I had not ever read it and I, I was upset that no one in my life told me that it existed, honestly, but I thought it was beautiful.

• 43:57Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 43:58Ryan Holiday?

  You want this one too?

• 43:59Speaker 01

  Sure, yeah, I'd be happy.

• 44:00Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, my favorite part, at the end, you know, there's this wrestler named Play-Doh that enters their circle.

• 44:06Speaker 01

  Uh huh, that's great, a wrestler, yeah, I was asked about his wrestling at a book event I did with Mary Beard.

• 44:14Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 44:15Speaker 01

  And I was embarrassed that I didn't know the story of his wrestling and so I had to say, where, where is that? Now I know because it was sent to me later.

• 44:24Ryan Holiday?

  That's funny.

• 44:25Speaker 01

  But, um, yeah.

• 44:26Ryan Holiday?

  No, it was, it was really good.

• 44:27Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 44:29Ryan Holiday?

  I didn't know about this one either.

• 44:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:31Ryan Holiday?

  Which ends, ends with Seneca.

• 44:33Speaker 01

  Does it?

• 44:34Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, there's a, let me see if I can find it. So the, the last part is, so obviously Augustus has died.

• 44:40Speaker 01

  Right.

• 44:41Ryan Holiday?

  But the last, it's, it's a, it's a book of like letters and reports, but so the last letter is a letter from someone to Seneca.

• 44:49Speaker 01

  AD 55, so that's just when Europe came.

• 44:54Ryan Holiday?

  So, so this is, I thought this line, it says, "I am only grateful to you for remembering me and for overlooking the fact that I did not speak out on your behalf during the unfortunate time that you were forced to spend on the barren waste of Corsica. You have understood better than most, I suspect, that a poor physician without worldly power nor even a hundred like him could have prevailed against the will of one so erratic as early Emperor Claudius." So it's the same, it's like, I knew I should say something, I wanted to say something and I couldn't, but I, obviously you understand.

• 45:27Speaker 01

  My heart was in the right place.

• 45:28Ryan Holiday?

  Yes, it's a, and on some level Seneca, although it's fictional, could understand because I'm sure there were so many people that he in turn did not speak out for because he was saving his capital with the air.

• 45:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:42Speaker 01

  Is that your cat?

• 45:43Ryan Holiday?

  This is, yes, this is one of the cats. We have two cats in the bookstore.

• 45:46Speaker 01

  Oh, I have a black cat also. They're marvelous.

• 45:49Ryan Holiday?

  They're just hanging around.

• 45:52Speaker 01

  Black cats have a very distinctive character. They're, they're more curious and, and I think they're smarter than other cats.

• 45:59Ryan Holiday?

  Why do you think that is?

• 46:00Speaker 01

  I don't know. There's something about the correlation with the coat.

• 46:04Ryan Holiday?

  They get very spoiled, but then sometimes we, we think they're happy and then every once in a while, someone will come in with a stroller and the cat will jump in the bottom of the stroller and try to sneak.

• 46:15Speaker 01

  They can get away.

• 46:16Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, exactly. Someone came back with the cat one time because they actually do get away.

• 46:22Ryan Holiday?

  Anne Rowe wrote a biography of Pontius Pilate.

• 46:24Speaker 01

  Really?

• 46:25Ryan Holiday?

  And it's fascinating. Oh, here it is. Obviously, there's not much historical basis for it because he's sort of in an England. So it's mostly kind of like a literary biography, but I just...

• 46:36Speaker 01

  It's for the Samuel Johnson Prize. Wow.

• 46:39Ryan Holiday?

  It's one of my favorite books that I've ever read.

• 46:41Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 46:43Ryan Holiday?

  I mean, his boss is Tiberius and so, you know, she's trying to give this sense of what it would have been like to be a sort of periphery member of that administration. And to have someone who's causing trouble for you, as Jesus was, and thinking, well, I don't really care, but this guy doesn't want disruption. And so how do I tamp this down? It's a fascinating book about, yeah, how do you have a job inside of corrupt, dysfunctional, brutal administration?

• 47:23Speaker 01

  Wow, that sounds like a great one.

• 47:25Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I really liked it.

• 47:26Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 47:27Ryan Holiday?

  Will you sign these?

• 47:28Speaker 01

  Yep, absolutely.

• 47:30Ryan Holiday?

  What are you gonna do next? Have you thought about your next book?

• 47:33Speaker 01

  Well, I actually have a project on the Stoics with Norton that... We'll just put together a lot of the more important ancient texts and with annotations and introductions. Kind of a, you know, anthology.

• 47:47Ryan Holiday?

  Like, so Marcus and Eca Epictetus and then the others too?

• 47:53Speaker 01

  And some of the minor figures, yeah.

• 47:54Ryan Holiday?

  Interesting.

• 47:55Speaker 01

  Yeah. You know, their series, the annotated series, Norton annotated, they've done like Ulysses Grant, S. Grant, Virginia Woolf.

• 48:04Ryan Holiday?

  No.

• 48:05Speaker 01

  They've done like just

• 48:06Ryan Holiday?

  Oh, I'd like the Ulysses S. Grant one.

• 48:08Speaker 01

  Thousand and One Nights. They're big, you know, high gloss, lots of illustrations and so on.

• 48:16Ryan Holiday?

  Well, I do love annotated. I just read an annotated hundredth anniversary edition of The Great Gatsby, which is really good.

• 48:24Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 48:25Ryan Holiday?

  And then, you know, Robin Waterfield has an annotated edition of Meditations, which is really good, too.

• 48:29Speaker 01

  Yes, his is very good. I agree.

• 48:32Ryan Holiday?

  So it'll be like one, it'll be a big book or it'll be more like these smaller ones that you've done?

• 48:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, they're big hardcover books. They're like, yeah, they're like this size.

• 48:42Ryan Holiday?

  Okay.

• 48:43Speaker 01

  Even larger.

• 48:44Ryan Holiday?

  That's fun.

• 48:45Speaker 01

  Yeah. But as to what I'll write as an author, I don't know. I've sort of told all the best stories that I know

• 48:53Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 48:54Speaker 01

  in ancient history, the ones that interest me the most. And I might move on to historical fiction, maybe, or, you know, some other genre.

• 49:05Ryan Holiday?

  That would be cool.

• 49:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:07Ryan Holiday?

  Wouldn't you like Glass of the Wine? Maybe it'll inspire something.

• 49:10Speaker 01

  Well, Mary Nolf does inspire me. I just read Fire from Heaven for the first time this semester.

• 49:17Ryan Holiday?

  She has another one that people told me I need to read. I forget what it's called. Another famous one.

• 49:21Speaker 01

  Well, there's one that concerns the Plato story. What is it called? The Mask of Apollo.

• 49:28Ryan Holiday?

  Okay.

• 49:29Speaker 01

  Mask of Apollo tells the same story as Plato and Attarming.

• 49:32Ryan Holiday?

  Interesting.

• 49:33Speaker 01

  And makes Dion a very heroic figure.

• 49:35Ryan Holiday?

  Huh.

• 49:36Speaker 01

  Whereas I tend to see him more.

• 49:38Ryan Holiday?

  So you said you did an event with Mary Beard. She seems to not like the Stoics at all.

• 49:42Speaker 01

  Is that right?

• 49:44Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 49:45Speaker 01

  Well, she doesn't like Plato. She made that clear. She called him, what did she call him? A bad apple or something? No.

• 49:52Ryan Holiday?

  So who does she like?

• 49:53Speaker 01

  I don't know. Now into the Roman emperors, so obviously she doesn't need to write about people that she admires.

• 50:01Ryan Holiday?

  Huh, I wonder why that is.

• 50:03Speaker 01

  So how did you end up in this part of the world? This is a...

• 50:07Ryan Holiday?

  Well, we moved to Austin and we liked it and then we just decided if we're gonna live in Texas, we should really live in Texas. So we have like a little ranch out here that we live on.

• 50:16Speaker 01

  I see.

• 50:16Ryan Holiday?

  And, um...

• 50:17Speaker 01

  These two?

• 50:18Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, yeah. All of them that you're willing to do will take...

• 50:21Speaker 01

  Okay, yeah, well, now my flight's not till four o'clock. I got plenty of time.

• 50:25Ryan Holiday?

  We, um...

• 50:26Speaker 01

  What's the best place?

• 50:27Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, anywhere, yeah. We sell a lot of this book, because I've been raving about it for a long time.

• 50:32Speaker 01

  Oh, that's so great.

• 50:32Ryan Holiday?

  I love this book.

• 50:33Speaker 01

  That's so great.

• 50:34Ryan Holiday?

  And I also love the contrast, you know, let me grab Letters of the Stoic.

• 50:39Speaker 01

  Of what?

• 50:41Ryan Holiday?

  Letters of the Stoic, yeah, the Seneca. The contrast between what Seneca wants you to think he looks like and what he actually looks like.

• 50:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, right. I know.

• 50:52Ryan Holiday?

  And that was discovered fairly recently, right?

• 50:55Speaker 01

  Um, in the 19th century, late 19th century.

• 50:58Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 50:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:59Ryan Holiday?

  So you got away with it for a while.

• 51:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, I saw that bust in Berlin last year.

• 51:07Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, where was I? I was in Ireland and I went into the, like, the Irish, like, the State Building or whatever, and they had a huge painting of Seneca that I was very surprised to see. Oh, yeah, they had, in the Dublin Castle, they had, they had the death of Seneca.

• 51:26Speaker 01

  Is that right?

• 51:27Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I was, which I was not expecting.

• 51:31Speaker 01

  Whose, uh, whose version of it?

• 51:33Ryan Holiday?

  I don't remember, but it was, uh, you know, like, probably not the original, but maybe it was a British export.

• 51:39Speaker 01

  Because there's a lot of Renaissance canvases.

• 51:44Ryan Holiday?

  Are you gonna do any more for the Princeton collection?

• 51:47Speaker 01

  I do have another one coming out, yeah, How to Live.

• 51:49Ryan Holiday?

  Oh.

• 51:50Speaker 01

  They liked the way that How to Die has succeeded.

• 51:54Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 51:54Speaker 01

  It's the best-selling one in the whole series.

• 51:57Ryan Holiday?

  Well, it's got the best title, certainly the most arresting title.

• 52:00Speaker 01

  The most arresting title.

• 52:01Ryan Holiday?

  And he's probably the best of the best writer of them.

• 52:05Speaker 01

  I think so. I mean, some of the volumes that they've done are kinda hokey, you know, how to drink.

• 52:11Ryan Holiday?

  Yes. And look, if it wasn't a bunch of poetry, it might have sold better. Like, How to be content is good, but then you have to read a bunch of Horace poems, which I found enjoyable, but your average person is probably not going to read.

• 52:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And also, you got the problem that poetry, you lose so much in translation.

• 52:32Ryan Holiday?

  Yes. My favorite one in the series, other than How to Die, is the How to Be a Leader one of Plutarch.

• 52:39Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 52:40Ryan Holiday?

  We have right there.

• 52:41Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 52:42Ryan Holiday?

  Just because he was so... That's obviously what Plutarch was trying to teach.

• 52:47Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 52:48Ryan Holiday?

  Is the lesson, you know, he was a biographer, but not in the modern sense of being a biographer, which is like, let me get all the dates and places right.

• 52:58Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 52:58Ryan Holiday?

  You know, probably wrong as much as he's right, but it's about the sort of moral lesson that you're supposed to take.

• 53:05Speaker 01

  Right. Yes, he's very much a moralist and also deeply interested in political life.

• 53:12Ryan Holiday?

  Well, yeah, and actually probably a better lesson than Plato, that it is possible to be a writer and in the arena without morally compromising yourself so embarrassingly.

• 53:25Speaker 01

  That's right. Of course, he had the advantage of living in a backwater.

• 53:30Ryan Holiday?

  That's true.

• 53:30Speaker 01

  Not having to deal with the central problems of administration.

• 53:34Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 53:35Speaker 01

  So...

• 53:36Ryan Holiday?

  But maybe that's the point, and Seneca does say something about that, right? That if sort of national politics are corrupt, then you can work locally. If local politics are corrupt, you can write, you know, that you should find a place where you can contribute.

• 53:52Speaker 01

  Uh huh. I'm not familiar with that passage, but that sounds like something he would say. Well, of course, he has that dialogue about otium, about retirement from politics.

• 54:04Speaker 01

  There, he really can be accused of hypocrisy, that he's urging other people to go into private life and stay out of politics, even while he's at the center of it.

• 54:20Ryan Holiday?

  Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us and it would really help the show. We appreciate it, and I'll see you next episode.