Classics Scholar Shadi Bartsch on What Ancient Texts Reveal About Modern Life | This Is Making You Who You Are

Ryan read today’s meditation and talks to Classics scholar and professor Shadi Bartsch about Seneca’s contradictory service to the emperor Nero, why the classics are still relevant and important in modern society, how to use ancient texts as a way to reflect and think critically about oneself, culture, and politics, her translation of Virgil's The Aeneid, and more. Shadi Bartsch-Zimmer is the Helen A. Regenstein Professor at the University of Chicago. She works on Roman imperial literature, the history of rhetoric and philosophy, and on the reception of the western classical tradition in contemporary China. She is the author of 5 books on the ancient novel, Neronian literature, political theatricality, and Stoic philosophy,Go Macro is a family-owned maker of some of the finest protein bars around. They're vegan, non-GMO, and they come in a bunch of delicious flavors. Visit gomacro.com and use promo code STOIC for 30% off your order plus free shipping on all orders over $50. Athletic Greens is a custom formulation of 75 vitamins, minerals, and other whole-food sourced ingredients that make it easier for you to maintain nutrition in just a single scoop. Visit athleticgreens.com/stoic to get a FREE year supply of Liquid Vitamin D + 5 FREE Travel Packs with subscription. The Jordan Harbinger Show is one of the most interesting podcasts on the web, with guests like Kobe Bryant, Mark Manson, Eric Schmidt, and more. Listen to one of Ryan's episodes right now (1, 2), and subscribe to the Jordan Harbinger Show today. Talkspace is an online and mobile therapy company. Talkspace lets you send and receive unlimited messages with your dedicated therapist in the Talkspace platform 24/7. To match with a licensed therapist today, go to Talkspace.com or download the app. Make sure to use the code STOIC to get $100 off of your first month and show your support for the show. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/signupFollow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and FacebookFollow Shadi Bartsch: Twitter, HomepageSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info. 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

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

• 0:04Ryan Holiday?

  Bienvenidos al Daily Stoic Podcast, donde cada miércoles te traemos una meditación inspirada por los antiguos estoicos, un corto pasaje de sabiduría antigua diseñado para ayudarte a encontrar fuerza y perspectiva aquí en la vida cotidiana. Y los miércoles hablamos con algunos de nuestros compañeros estudiantes de filosofía antigua, conocidos y obscuros, fascinantes y poderosos. Con ellos discutimos las estrategias y hábitos que han ayudado a que se conviertan en quienes son, y también para encontrar paz y sabiduría en sus vidas reales. Pero primero tenemos un mensaje rápido de uno de nuestros sponsors.

• 0:44Ryan Holiday?

  Esto te está haciendo quien eres. Has sido golpeado duro, tus planes se desaparecieron, el otro lado no está jugando por las reglas. Bueno, eso es lo que Jaco Willink dice. Bueno, esta es una oportunidad. También es un ensayo que te hará más fuerte. Quien ha ganado sin gloria, ¿quién ha ganado sin peligro? Seneca escribiría. Musias fue probado por fuego, Fabricus por pobreza, Rutilius por exilio, Socrates por veneno, Cato por muerte. Uno no puede encontrar grandes ejemplares excepto en la desgracia. Para los estoicos, una vida sin adversidad fue una vida sin virtud. La virtud necesita la lucha, quiere el desafío, se eleva a ello.

• 1:28Ryan Holiday?

  Así que sí, las cosas han sido duros. Sí, has sido golpeado duro, pero bueno. Esto te está haciendo mejor, te está haciendo en algo más fuerte, más sabio, más resistente, lo que es por lo que no estás reclamando. No, estás agradecido. Amor Fati. Amor Fati es esta idea increíblemente poderosa que viene de Nícha, pero se refleja más maravillosamente por los estoicos. Me fue introducido en el concepto a través de Robert Greene, quien tiene un capítulo sobre Amor Fati en su libro "La ley de la 50ª". Robert y yo colaboramos en nuestro medallón de Amor Fati, y luego también hay un anuncio. Creo que es solo una de las ideas más poderosas en el mundo. Amor Fati, puedes verlo en el store Daily Stoic.

• 2:10Ryan Holiday?

  Lo llevo conmigo dondequiera que vaya, lo tengo sentado en mi escritorio también. Amor Fati, no es solo soportar tu destino, sino amarlo, abrazarlo, hacer el mayor de ello. Amor Fati.

• 2:23Ryan Holiday?

  Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. This week was crazy for me. I've told you I've been working on this bookstore for, you know, the last 15 months. It's been crazy with the pandemic. One side of it is the bookstore. The other side is a record store. The record store, Astro Records, is a great little record store, small town. They were hosting a benefit for CASA, which is a charity for abused children. And so we had them across those buildings. We did this, this charity benefit. And, you know, all these dark months of whether it would work, whether the store would ever open, whether it was, you know, it cost me a fortune and I was going to barely get out

• 3:05Ryan Holiday?

  alive. You know, having the bookstore open was one thing. And then having this event, you know, which you could safely do because of vaccines. And I just, I felt it was just incredible. But a friend of mine came and he walked in, he sort of had known that I hadn't known that I was opening the store. He didn't know anything about what we were doing. He just showed up. And, you know, he walks in and he's just like his jaws on the floor. Adrian Grenier, who lives in town, is there at the event. Paul Oakenfeld, the DJ, is doing the music. Erica, if you, if you don't follow Texas Beekeeper on TikTok, she's like got millions and millions of followers. She does beekeeping. There's

• 3:47Ryan Holiday?

  just all these cool people there. Young people, people that you wouldn't expect at an event in a small town in Texas at a bookstore and a vintage record store. And it was just, I don't want to say it made all the hard work worth it, but it was just like the first real significant statement that like, hey, this wasn't the world's worst idea. And just maybe we're going to pull it off. And it was so, it was just this cool experience that I don't get outside of my books very often. Because, you know, a book is a project you work on for years and years. People doubt it. You doubt yourself all these times. And

• 4:29Ryan Holiday?

  then at some point, you have this moment, whether you see it in a store, you see someone writing it, reading it on the subway, or, you know, some basketball player tweets about it or whatever. You get those moments. But this is one of the first times I got it sort of totally outside that context. And this thing that we took this massive risk on. And, you know, really sort of faced so many obstacles on. So it was just this awesome experience. I wanted to tell you about it, just give you a little insight into my life, what's been going on with me. I think this bookstore is ultimately going to be one of the things that I'm most proud of. It's, you know, it's cool that these people from town, just like, thank you for doing this. We always wanted a bookstore in town. You know what I feel like when I walk through the bookstore? I feel like I'm proudest

• 5:12Ryan Holiday?

  of it because I know that if I hadn't done it, it wouldn't have been done. And to me, that's a good rule for the projects to work on in life. Like, you know, if you're going to be the 5,000th venture capitalist, or the 300th Wall Street analyst, or the, you know, if you didn't do it, you would just be easily replaced. That's probably a sign that it's not something to spend your life on. And when I think about the books that I write, I want to write books that should exist but don't, and that if I don't write them, they won't get written. And this bookstore, you know, I don't know what would have been in this space, but it was vacant for a long time before we took it over. And I don't think that another bookstore would have just magically taken the shop, or spent the

• 5:53Ryan Holiday?

  time, or energy, or money, or care that we spent. Anyways, it was great. Onto today's guest, who I'm very happy to have on. I heard her on Tyler Cowen's podcast, and she just blew me away. Her energy, her passion, her counterintuitive takes on the classics, particularly the Stoics. I was just riveted by, I asked Tyler for an introduction, and I'm just finishing her translation of Virgil's The Aniad. I'm talking about Shadi Barch. She is a classicist at the University of Chicago. She's a Guggenheim laureate. She's been a professor of classics for nearly three decades. She's published more than 12 books, including

• 6:38Ryan Holiday?

  Three translations of Seneca's tragedies, which if you haven't read, you should. She's translated Thiestes, Medea, and Phaedra. In a field of a lot of old, boring, white guys, she is a breath of fresh air. She's half Swedish, half Iranian. And I think, you know, I'd read Robert Fagel's translation of the Antioch many years ago. And what I particularly liked about her, and she talks about this in our interview, is that because of her background, because of her perspective, she's able to see this ancient poem with a fresh set of eyes. And I think it opens up new avenues, new perspectives, new questions, really,

• 7:21Ryan Holiday?

  that allow you to get more out of the text. Just a joy of a conversation. We really nerd out about Stoicism. And I just, I had a lot of fun doing it. So here is my interview with Shadi Bartsch. You can follow her on Twitter at @ShadiBartsch. That's S-H-A-D-I-B-A-R-T-S-C-H. And you can get her new book, The Translation of the Antioch, anywhere books are sold, including my bookstore, The Painted Porch, here in Bastrop, Texas, which you're welcome to come to, or just go to thepaintedporch.com.

• 8:03Ryan Holiday?

  So I wanted to start with a person we have some mutual affinity for slash perhaps disapproval of. Talk to me, talk to me about your relationship with the one and only Seneca.

• 8:16Speaker 01

  Ah, my relationship with Seneca is deep and complicated and goes years back. And in fact, he's, for me, a figure that poses a very important question in the world of ethics, which is, what do you do if somebody suggests an ethical system for life? But is unable to live by it, him or herself. And if you think about it, all of our great heroes in the West, from Socrates to Jesus Christ, have actually lived out the life that they urge other people to live. And Seneca was unable to. So should we throw out his writings with the bathwater, as it is? Or can we excuse him on certain grounds?

• 9:00Speaker 01

  Or can we even perhaps say that to live a life of moral complication and moral failure while writing a guide on the right life might make that guide even more worthwhile? You know, maybe it's precisely a good reason not to throw it out. This person struggled.

• 9:18Ryan Holiday?

  So how hypocritical do you think he actually was? Because sometimes when I, it sort of depends on my mood. Sometimes I go, this is, this guy was the world's biggest hypocrite. And on the other hand, I think maybe he was actually not hypocritical, but in fact quite heroic. He would have liked to live this quiet philosophical life where he didn't have to wrestle with any of these difficult questions. And then suddenly is forced into a role that he, the only way out is suicide. And so he sort of selflessly takes it upon himself to constrain Nero, to be the insider who tries to steer Nero.

• 9:59Ryan Holiday?

  I mean, where do you come down on the extent of Seneca's hypocrisy?

• 10:05Speaker 01

  Ryan, I think it's so difficult to come up with one motivation for a person's actions. So I suspect that for him, it was a combination of many things. So as you know, he was called back to be Nero's tutor before Nero came to the throne. And he'd been in exile. And all of a sudden, he's offered what looks like, you know, a plum job, right? Close to power, influence the future ruler, be back in Rome, get paid, be part of the court, and court life. And at the same time, I'm sure he's hoping that he can teach the young Nero to think about life in a more stoic way. And ultimately, Seneca fails, right?

• 10:50Speaker 01

  And he finds himself trapped. And he realizes that he's not having enough influence at court once he becomes Nero's actual advisor, when Nero is the emperor. And a couple of years before his death, according to Tacitus, he goes to Nero and very politely says, "Oh, you've done so much for Nero and I'm really gratified, but I think I just want to retire now." And Nero says, "Nonsense, I couldn't possibly let you retire. That would reflect badly on me. People would say, how could he treat his old teacher like this?" So Seneca was stuck. And as you say, he did have to commit suicide. But I think it was a mixture of hope, greed,

• 11:33Speaker 01

  and idealism that drove him to take up that role in the first place, that role so close to an emperor who would turn out to be one of the worst ones Rome had.

• 11:46Ryan Holiday?

  It's funny, I was, I've been, I do all my research on note cards. And so I write down these note cards. And it's a pretty good system, except for every once in a while, I'll lose a note card and I won't be able to find it. And I know it exists, but I can't Google for it because it's on, you know, it's not digital. And I just found it yesterday. And to me, as you were talking, as you were just saying that, it struck me that it perfectly encapsures Seneca's trajectory. And these are supposedly Pompey's last words, quoting Sophocles. He says, "Whoever makes his journey to a tyrant's court becomes his slave, although he went there a free man." To me, that's the arc of Seneca's life, is it not?

• 12:28Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And I don't know if you've seen the movie The Last King of Scotland?

• 12:32Ryan Holiday?

  No.

• 12:33Speaker 01

  About a doctor, it's about a Western doctor from Scotland who decides to go help Idi Amin set up a medical system in Uganda. And of course, the Scottish doctor is sucked in deeper and deeper until he is complicit in Idi Amin's crimes. And, you know, and he realizes all of a sudden, he's gone from being the good guy to being the bad guy. And it started out voluntarily and now he, like Seneca, is trapped.

• 12:59Ryan Holiday?

  And I had General H.R. McMaster on the podcast and I felt like I really wanted to ask him this because I feel like, you know, he's both a student of Stoic philosophy, as is General Mattis, and then found their way into, let's not quite call it a tyrant's court, but let's say one of the more controversial American political courts, where the disposition and the predilections of the Seneca versus the Nero are about as far apart as they could be. You know, you have a thoughtful sort of philosopher warrior like General Mattis or General McMaster, and then you have, you know, you have a Donald Trump. And I tried

• 13:39Ryan Holiday?

  to get from them, like, how does that happen? Do you tell yourself that, and I suspect this is a big part of it, I think you're telling yourself, if I don't do it, someone worse will be doing it. And to a certain degree, that's what happens when Seneca does leave, right? It's not like, it's not like the departure of Seneca brings about Nero's end. In fact, it quickly devolves into a much worse scenario than it was when he was there. But that's also a great rationalization for complicity.

• 14:13Speaker 01

  Yes. And so, again, maybe that's one of those binaries we have to crack apart, innocence versus complicity. But there's something really interesting about Seneca that not that many people have observed, which is that although he spends his life at court, in his letters, that famous corpus, and in all the dialogues except for the on anger and on clemency, he pretends he has nothing to do with power or the Roman court. He doesn't mention his daily life there. He doesn't talk about Nero. He makes no references

• 14:51Speaker 01

  to huge crises or huge developments in the Roman Empire at that period. He's only writing to Asylus or to his friends, and it's always about Stoicism, not about his own life.

• 15:06Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 15:07Speaker 01

  And the reason I think that's important, or that we need to think about that, is that I think he was actively abjuring his life as a model, saying, my life, it can't be a model because it ended up being too corrupted. You have to look at my writings. There is where you can learn something. That's why he never mentions the court. And there's an interesting passage in Tacitus' Annals where he's describing Seneca's death. And according to Tacitus, Seneca has cut his wrists and his ankles and he's dying slowly. And there are his acolytes around him. And he says to them, "The only thing I want you to remember is," in Latin, "the imago,

• 15:51Speaker 01

  the image of my life." And what he means by that, I think, is not my life as I lived it, but the image that I've left behind me and all this written material. And so that, for me, makes Seneca a little less complicit, the fact that he knew and he didn't try to excuse what was happening at court.

• 16:17Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, is Seneca the first sort of Straussian philosopher, where he's sort of saying one thing, but there's a deeper meaning that you have to sort of get that he's intimating at?

• 16:28Speaker 01

  Ah, that's a very interesting question.

• 16:32Ryan Holiday?

  Especially his plays, right? Like, his plays are, I think, quite clearly a commentary on his political life.

• 16:39Speaker 01

  I so agree. The only thing is, I wouldn't call it Straussian, and we can come back to Strauss if you like, but I wouldn't call the plays Straussian because I don't think the message is particularly hidden in the plays.

• 16:50Ryan Holiday?

  Sure, right.

• 16:51Speaker 01

  You look at, especially the Thiestes, right? I mean, I read the Thiestes as being all about Stoicism. Here's this guy in exile, just like Seneca. He's in the woods with his kids, and he keeps saying things like, "I'm so happy. It's so wonderful to eat acorns and not to worry about being poisoned. It's so wonderful not to drink from a gold goblet and worry about what's inside it. You know, my head is resting on sticks, not cushions, but it's much better." And he goes on and on and on like this. And then his brother, Atrius, offers him a position back at court. He says, "Come back, we'll share power." Right? And of course, a good Stoic would say, you know, "Power is an indifferent, right?

• 17:35Speaker 01

  And I don't want it. It's not a path to happiness." And that's kind of what Theistes starts out saying, but he fails, as he's thinking about it, he has a change of heart, he fails as a Stoic and he returns to court and he ends up having to eat his children for his failure in judgment. But the failure in judgment is this, he's saying, "I'm not going back," and then his kids start tugging on his hands and saying, "Daddy, daddy, we want to go back." And that's when he breaks. And I think that's a beautiful allegory for how Stoicism in the end can't work in some cases. It can't work with people you love deeply

• 18:16Speaker 01

  and want the best for. You can't just treat them as if time loaned them to you, as Seneca suggests. The demands of the family, of love, of emotional bonds will eventually triumph over the Stoic, I think. And as somebody who tried to be a Stoic, that's certainly what happened to me, so.

• 18:35Ryan Holiday?

  No, that's a fascinating reading that I hadn't quite thought of, because yeah, in Theistes, he says something like, "It's a vast kingdom to be able to cope without having a kingdom."

• 18:43Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 18:44Ryan Holiday?

  But he can't do it, right? He can't, you'd think that as a Stoic, Seneca should be able to stay in exile, as Epictetus does, or some of the other Stoics, Musonius, that he should have been able to endure, in fact, it's more conducive to the philosophical life, but he actually can't resist the draw to be at the center of things. Although, you know, to be charitable to Seneca, you know, perhaps it's that the Stoic is, in fact, obligated to participate and be at the center of things, and that you don't have the luxury of being a remote academic, you know, sort of observer of life. You have to accept the lure to contribute to the state.

• 19:31Speaker 01

  Now, that's very interesting, and I know where you're getting that view of Stoicism from. It's not an uncommon interpretation. It goes back all the way to Christopas and some of the things he said. And Seneca and his writings sometimes suggests that participation is necessary. Sometimes he adds the caveat, if the government is good. And sometimes he just says, um, that no, the Stoic will want his distance. So it's very hard to read it. But we know that the letters were written late. And one of the later letters, he actually says something like, well, um, you know, maybe I tried and maybe I failed. And that's really all he says.

• 20:13Speaker 01

  And it's very hard not to read that as looking back on his time at court. So I wonder if in the end, he would have decided that you can't, in fact, um, go back in without losing something important of yourself. At the beginning, though, he certainly did believe that you could, uh, be at court and do, do some good.

• 20:33Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, it's, it's, it's ironic that, you know, there's this sort of tension in Stoicism between being the pen and ink philosopher and the sort of political philosopher. And where do you make the most difference? The irony is that almost all of Seneca's political contributions were sort of rendered meaningless and if not a mark against him, but that it's his letters and his writings that helped the most people for the longest amount of time. So it's almost also an argument for there's different ways to contribute. And it's not always about making yourself the center of things or wielding power. Perhaps some, you know, sometimes the pen is mightier than the sword. And Seneca's real influence comes from his writings,

• 21:19Ryan Holiday?

  not from his political maneuverings and all the Machiavellian things that he has to do.

• 21:25Speaker 01

  Yes, and you know, we can draw a sharp contrast between Seneca, as we've described him, and some of the other political Stoics of his own day, who in a scholarship have often been called the Stoic Opposition.

• 21:40Ryan Holiday?

  Uh huh.

• 21:41Speaker 01

  So, figures like Thersia Petus, or Rubellius Plodus, or Boreas Serenus, who were all exiled or executed by Nero for fighting back as they could, which was this very low key business of not attending the meetings of the Senate, not voting in favor of honors to Papaya, Nero's wife, and stuff like that. And these guys paid with their lives for their beliefs, or for their unwillingness to countenance an autocratic emperor. Yet what have we really learned from them, poor souls? They, you know, they died for the cause.

• 22:24Speaker 01

  But Seneca, who hung out with Nero, and who was the richest man in Rome, did not die for his cause, and yet, I think, arguably, were much more influenced by him.

• 22:34Ryan Holiday?

  Got a quick message from one of our sponsors here, and then we'll get right back to the show. Stay tuned. I've had this surreal sort of pleasure and experience of meeting with a group of US senators a handful of times in Washington, who have sort of come to Stoicism through my books, and were sort of curious about, you know, what it teaches, and that, as it happens, they're sort of all Republican. And with a handful of exceptions in some key moments, it's been interesting to watch them sort of do exactly what you're talking about, like, the opposition is at best low key. And if you said, "Well, hey, why, you know, why didn't you say anything when there's this sort of slow-moving coup attempted?

• 23:18Ryan Holiday?

  Why didn't you say anything when, you know, this abuse of power, that abuse of power? Why didn't you vote to impeach?" And, you know, the reason is usually like, "Well, if I did that, I would lose my job." Even though they have, you know... Pretty decent job security, but but there's this place you get to and it takes us right back to Seneca, right back to Seneca, which is like, if I drew the line here, I would be replaced in short order with someone who would not draw any lines. And so, so you have this sort of generation of leaders or this group of leaders who are sort of going like, I'm here, I'm going to stay under the radar, but I'm going to step in when it gets

• 24:02Ryan Holiday?

  really bad, when it gets really serious, then I'm going to do something. And that's, that's also what Seneca says, but he never does. You know, Seneca never steps in.

• 24:12Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I think that's a really good analogy. And I was almost softening towards those guys for a second. And then I thought of a difference, which is that there were many of them, there could have been a whole group of Republicans who decided to say, this is not okay. Right. And if there had been a majority, they would have been fine, or even if there had been a large minority, right. But Seneca was only one person. So I'm, I still blame, I think, people who should have known better for going along with the Trump regime.

• 24:45Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, that, that's the, that's something you brought up to me, which is like, does Stoicism and its focus on the individual make it a philosophy ill suited for collective action problems? And in a way, Trump is a collective action problem. One senator, one congressman can't really do anything, can't enforce, you know, just even your sort of typical Republican beliefs. But a group of them certainly could, right? And, and I think people have this view, somewhat deservedly, somewhat undeservedly, that the Stoics are so focused on what's in your control, what you can do, that I, I wonder if it.

• 25:25Ryan Holiday?

  Holds us back as far as getting a group of people together to solve a difficult problem.

• 25:31Speaker 01

  You know, I think it does. You will find people who argue that no, Stoicism makes room for including people outside the family as part of one giant family, and you can extend your ethical concerns for them and so forth. And, fine, yes, there's a little bit of that in there. But what there is so much more of is, as you said, this idea about keeping the self in a state of equilibrium, not feeling anger, or grief, or desire, or any of the things that will knock you off your pedestal where you're standing and breathing well

• 26:10Speaker 01

  and feeling like you're okay. And most of the exercises and precepts that we find in the Stoics whose writings we have, the Roman Stoics, in which I'm including Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus, as well as Seneca, even though they wrote in Greek, most of their precepts and exercises are about that, right? Are about making sure that when you come face to face with something that could knock you off balance, you won't be knocked off balance, you won't feel that rage or that grief. And you can make it work for an individual

• 26:51Speaker 01

  under certain circumstances, I think, but, you know, the question of how do you make that work as a philosophy for action and change in the world is a very difficult question.

• 27:02Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, if you sort of think of the Greek and Roman Stoics as like, they inherited this system, and it's just like, how do I, how do I fit into it as an individual? Whether it's Seneca, or, and I want to talk about Athenodorus and Ariestidimus, you know, they're like, hey, Rome is not a republic anymore, it's an autocracy, I gotta figure it out, right? It's not really until you get maybe all the way to like 1776 that you get these founders who are

• 27:32Ryan Holiday?

  Influenced by the Stoics that you get the sense that like, oh, you could use Stoic principles to create something new, to come together and do something that didn't exist. There's, there's, there is this sense in the Roman system especially of like, the status quo is the status quo and an individual cannot change it.

• 27:52Speaker 01

  Yes, definitely so. Definitely so. And you know, all the Stoics give us such wonderful ways of dealing with the world around us. And I think a lot of those ways are effective. But if you change the scale, if you scale up from person to society, then, then you have this difficulty. It's a little bit like the different kinds of physics, you know, for a while, everybody thought Newtonian physics was simply the physics of the way the world worked. And then they discovered that Einsteinian physics was actually not compatible with Newtonian

• 28:34Speaker 01

  physics, you know, that at a certain scale, Newtonian physics simply wouldn't work. So then we had two forms. And now we have quantum theory, and that's yet another kind of, what's the word I'm looking for, dimension in which the other two physics don't work. So I'm a really strong believer in the idea that both science and humanistic approaches to the world are suited to particular contexts, but there are other contexts in which they simply won't work, whether you're scaling up or down or sideways. And you have to be aware of that, otherwise you're not going to be a very good person who, who's doing what they're doing, right?

• 29:16Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 29:17Speaker 01

  You'll get stuck at some point.

• 29:18Ryan Holiday?

  Well, the, the two Stoics that I mentioned earlier, who honestly, I didn't even know about till I was writing Lives of the Stoics, but they're closer to Augustus, who obviously is sort of tangentially related to Virgil and the Aeneid, who, which you translated. But Athenodorus and Ariesthemus, what I found so fascinating about them, you know, for people who don't, who haven't read Lives of the Stoics, they're the two Stoic tutors slash teachers of the young. Future Emperor Octavian, I thought it's like you have Cato, who like would literally disembowel himself rather than serve under Julius Caesar. And then like five minutes later, these other two Stoics are like, okay, the king is dead.

• 30:02Ryan Holiday?

  Long live the king. We're going to be tutors to the emperor. I was, I was both surprised and kind of disappointed, but I guess also it makes sense at how, how quickly the Stoics accommodated themselves to the new Rome. There's a, there's a Avicii-France-ness to how quickly they, they worked themselves into the court.

• 30:26Speaker 01

  Yes. So again, a slight difference, which may help us understand this, this apparently different morality of these two Stoic guys. They're both Greeks or from, or, or I think Arius is from Alexandria. And, and so they're not already embedded in the Roman value system and still. And so I think, you know, Arius even told Augustus to kill off Julius Caesar's son with Cleopatra, Caesarian.

• 30:57Ryan Holiday?

  There cannot be too many Caesars, he jokes.

• 30:59Speaker 01

  There cannot be too many Caesars, exactly. And, um, you know, tell me that that sounds like a Stoic thing to say.

• 31:07Speaker 01

  Right? So these guys are, are in a different pot. They are, I, I think of them as kind of more cynical professional philosophers, rounding out the emperor's education, rather than people who lived and breathed the, the things they were expounding.

• 31:23Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, that's right. I guess there's a line in Meditations that I think about. I think it's illustrated what Marcus says, um, you know, he says, don't go around expecting Plato's Republic. I think it's interesting that he, he doesn't say, don't go expecting Xeno's Republic, because he would have actually been able to read it. But, but I, I think it's interesting that there is a pragmatic streak to the Stoics that perhaps Seneca embodies most of all, but Athenodorus and Arius do, which is like governance is a complicated thing. And like, what are you supposed to do if you become emperor? You've just fought this bloody civil war. You become emperor and there's a there's a rival heir. You know, there really can't be too many Caesars.

• 32:08Ryan Holiday?

  So what is one to do? I think that philosophy in general struggles, I think, to solve like the real world problems of power and governance.

• 32:22Speaker 01

  Absolutely. That's why Plato's attempts to intervene in Sicily failed. That's why his own republic is based upon not only the philosophers being in charge, which is something to think about indeed, but it's also based on people believing a huge lie about the social order in order to keep them quiet. Right? Plato's noble lie. So even Plato has to make some serious compromises before he can create an imaginary city in which philosophers actually make a difference or have power. And I think at this point, we could bring in Strauss again if you want, because Strauss's

• 33:05Speaker 01

  whole view, and I'm not a Straussian, and I don't think his readings of the Republic or Maimonides or any one of the other ones are necessarily correct. But he does hold this very basic, strong view that reappears in all his writing, which is that philosophy is dangerous to the state as well as the state being dangerous to the philosopher. Right? We know why the state is dangerous to the philosopher. It's because it can throw him under the guillotine.

• 33:33Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah.

• 33:33Speaker 01

  But the reason the philosopher is dangerous to the state is that the philosopher stands outside state ideology. Right? So whatever the ruler is saying to the people to make them happy, the philosopher doesn't believe it. He has an unjonist view of not only history, but metaphorical truths and so forth. I mean, sorry, not metaphorical, metaphysical truths. And that's incompatible with government, with nationalism, with exceptionalism, with all sorts of things. And so the philosopher and the ruler, first Strauss, have to stay apart from each other. They can't talk to each other.

• 34:17Speaker 01

  They're fundamentally different.

• 34:19Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, one of my favorite books, I think it's by William Lee Miller. It's called Lincoln's Virtues. And it basically, the premise is like, Lincoln was a politician. Lincoln didn't have a different job than all the other presidents. He was elected to office, he had to be reelected to office, and he had to manage an unwieldy political apparatus to accomplish a number of goals. Just as FDR was a politician. But we tend to take these, these successful leaders who we admire, especially after they died tragically, and we turn them into these sort of like immortal figures or these myths or legends. But like, he was a politician. And I think that's maybe also a mitigating factor for Seneca.

• 35:03Ryan Holiday?

  Like, Seneca is a politician and Marcus Aurelius is a politician. And they have to figure out how to be both philosophers as far as they can be and also do this job, which requires compromise and backroom deals and sometimes the exercise of violence. You know, Marcus Aurelius probably doesn't want to be fighting a war against, you know, quote unquote barbarians at the border. But he also can't just allow the border to be overrun, right? And, and that's a reality of the job. Just as you can't have too many Caesars is a reality of Augustus and Arius's situation.

• 35:45Speaker 01

  And that tension that you're describing is present today, right? If we, if we generalize it into a kind of tension between, let's say, politics, nationalism, the good of the state, the idea that the state is special and its people are special, we put all that on the one side. And on the other side, we put abstractions such as what is fair, what is just, what is morally good, right? Those two things can't go together. And that's always been a problem, I think, in, in countries' foreign policies. And maybe especially for the foreign policy of a place like the US, where being on the right side morally has always been so great a part of its self-image,

• 36:29Speaker 01

  just like the Romans' self-image. And, you know, it's spreading democracy, which we value as a, as a, um, a good, it's, um, standing up for human rights and so forth. But in practice, what the US ends up doing, like any, any other country, is looking out for its interests abroad and at home. And so there's a little gap there between the political rhetoric of the US and the political actions of the US. I think it's a gap that's present in every country, but not every country runs around saying that they are morally good, quain nation. And I think that's a very difficult thing to say. I mean, I believe, I mean, after World War II, there was a real reason for saying that, but I think that reason is fading with time.

• 37:11Ryan Holiday?

  Got a quick message from one of our sponsors here, and then we'll get right back to the show. Stay tuned.

• 37:19Ryan Holiday?

  Well, yeah, and Biden has, has said this, it's both a blessing and a curse. America's the only country sort of founded around an idea, right? And, and that idea is an animating inspirational principle, but it also, if you go back to Seneca, is a nice noose around your neck as far as hypocrisy goes. Like, I was thinking about this with the vaccines. Like, you know, the morally correct, sort of effective altruistic approach of America should be to give as many vaccines away as possible to the countries that have people that want to take it, instead of trying to get our vaccination rate from 65% to 70%.

• 38:03Ryan Holiday?

  But, you know, Joe Biden wasn't elected by the people of India. And, and they're, they're not going to be able to reward him at the ballot box, you know, in four years for his effective altruism. So there's this tension always between this sort of philosophical good virtue and effective governance and maintaining your power to effectively govern.

• 38:30Speaker 01

  And that's when you're actually aware of what's going on. So you know that there is a problem there. But most of the time, people aren't aware, right? So they don't even ask themselves that question. So look at the Declaration of Independence. You know, we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. And people are writing that in a slave state. There are enslaved people around them. And all they need to do to not twitch at that contradiction is to say, well, slaves aren't fully human. That way, when we say that all humans are created equal, we don't have to worry about what we're doing. And that is ideology for you. Let me look at the way it can blind you even to the most stark

• 39:13Speaker 01

  and grotesque problems with your own moral claims.

• 39:18Ryan Holiday?

  Well, I wrote about this recently. I think it's fascinating. I think it's in Notes from the State of Virginia or something. Jefferson is well acquainted with the brilliance of the Roman slaves. You know, he's like, you know, there's Epictetus and Terence and, and

• 39:34Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 39:35Ryan Holiday?

  Publius Cirrus. And so, you know, and he goes, but so, so what's the difference between their slavery and our slavery? And he, again, as you just said, can't face the inherent contradiction of what he's saying. He has to go, well, our slaves are a lesser form of human. And, and that, that's what cognitive dissonance does. Instead of staring, for the same reason Seneca can't see Nero's full horror, because it would indict himself, Jefferson is unable to see the monstrosity of what he's doing, except for, you know, brief flashes. I think he says something like, when I, when I think that God is just, I shudder, you know, at the thought of what he's going to do to the United States.

• 40:19Ryan Holiday?

  That, that's, that's how complicated human beings are.

• 40:23Speaker 01

  Wow, he said that? I didn't know that.

• 40:25Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, let me, let me look it up. It's a great quote, shudder, Jefferson.

• 40:29Speaker 01

  And specifically, God's shuddering here specifically around slavery?

• 40:33Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, he says, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that his justice cannot sleep forever, that considering numbers, nature, natural means only a revolution of the wheel of fortune in exchange of supernatural is impossible, is among possible events. And yeah, he's, he's referring to slavery. So he, he knows it, but he can't stop himself from.

• 40:58Ryan Holiday?

  You know, participating in the slavery because I think this goes back to Seneca. There's that great quote from Upton Sinclair. It's impossible to get a person to understand what their salary depends on them not understanding. You know, life would have been very different if Thomas Jefferson had to pay the labor on his farm, you know?

• 41:20Speaker 01

  Indeed, the whole South would be very different. This reminds me of something I was thinking about recently, and it's so similar, and it has to do with China and Chinese socialism or communism or whatever you wish to call it. So after the economic reforms put in by Deng Xiaoping, the country thrived and has continued to thrive. And now, in many ways, China is as capitalist as the West, but it still thinks of itself as a socialist and communist country, and it still thinks of its values as largely Confucian,

• 42:01Speaker 01

  emphasizing the group over the individual and thinking about the larger good over, say, individual power or liberty. And I was wondering, so how do you say we're communists and yet have this thriving economic market going on at the same time? And somebody interviewed a number of Chinese salespeople and CEOs and so forth, and they said that, well, there's no contradiction there because those two things are not related, and in any case, it's perfectly okay to use the market and money in order to get to a

• 42:44Speaker 01

  place where all men will be equal and there'll no longer be any poverty in China, right? So what they do is they add this kind of value-laden goal to what they're doing instrumentally, and that explains away the apparent contradiction.

• 43:05Ryan Holiday?

  The ends justify the means.

• 43:08Speaker 01

  The, yeah, I guess, I guess so, as long as the ends are in their eyes morally correct, right?

• 43:14Ryan Holiday?

  Well, and I, I loved your, your Washington Post piece about not surrendering the classics to the alt-right. It, it does strike me as like, to get rid of them is effectively surrendering them to these extreme groups. Because it's not like by not teaching them in college, they become irrelevant and people won't use them anymore. It's, it's, it, it is giving them over to the worst people. I, I, I would be curious, like, what is your perspective as, you know, not an old white guy studying the classics, that you're half Iranian, right? Like, what, what, what unique perspective does that give you on these texts that maybe people are missing?

• 43:49Speaker 01

  Um, well, again, I think professional classics are missing this, classicists are missing this less these days, because there's a, a large number who, we agree, all of us, that there needs to be more about the area beyond the ancient Mediterranean, there needs to be more study of, of underrepresented peoples in the Roman Empire itself, there needs to be less of an emphasis on only mastering the languages, but also learning something about, you know, cultural and anthropological issues.

• 44:29Speaker 01

  And for me, I remember deciding to study ancient Greek and, and Latin, and being very indignant about the Greek representations of the Persians, right?

• 44:40Ryan Holiday?

  Sure, sure.

• 44:41Speaker 01

  Which found its craziest denouement in that film, The Three Hundred, where I think Xerxes is wearing plumes and he's half naked and the Persians all have pedicures or something. And if we would all come to the, the classics multiculturally, we would see that classical culture is one among many, that it is as inhospitable and rude to other countries as all. Um, self-regarding cultures are, you know, no matter where you are, it's always the other guy who's the barbarian, right? The Persians thought of the Greeks as the barbarians, the Greeks thought of the Persians as the barbarians.

• 45:22Speaker 01

  The terminology stays the same, the question of who uses it changes. You know, people always say that the victors write history, but I would like to say that the victor sees the moral vocabulary, right? So they don't only say, "We won because we were stronger," they say, "We won because we were better, better people, and we are the good and you are the bad." And that's how everybody thinks. I mean, even, let's take the Senate. I bet you the Republicans think that they represent the good stuff, and of course, the Democrats think that they represent the good stuff. Everybody grabs the same vocabulary, no matter who they are. It's too bad.

• 46:04Ryan Holiday?

  No, your point about Persian representation is interesting, and I think it's why it requires a deeper dive into the classics, because, you know, to me, like, I love Marcus Aurelius, he's fascinating, I think someone worth studying by all young people as sort of a model of leadership, but Cyrus the Great should be studied right alongside him and is put, you know, up on a pedestal by Xenophon. So it's fascinating how, I think, it's almost, you can only say that the classics are not diverse, that it's only all dead, rich, white guys, if you've never read Epictetus, or as you said, you've never read Sappho, or you've never read about Cyrus the Great.

• 46:47Ryan Holiday?

  It actually is much more diverse than I think people think that it is.

• 46:51Speaker 01

  I would agree. I would agree. There's also pushback from people who think that the classics can only be read in one way, which is in favor of dead white guys. And even if that were true of the text, which it's not, one could still use the classics as a way to reflect and think critically about oneself, one's culture, one's politics, and so forth. And I'm thinking in particular of a really beautiful short article I happened to read earlier today. It was a new reading of the story of Genesis. And in this reading, the author, who is Rabbi Daniel Ruttenberg,

• 47:34Speaker 01

  points out that Eve is the first one to show agency and initiative, that Eve craves knowledge, and that she's willing to do what it takes in order to get it. And then, of course, the patriarchal forces that be, including the God, God, I should say, and Punisher. But you can read even Genesis in this way, right? Like, who had curiosity? Who wanted to do something? Who had agency? Who was curious about knowledge? And of course, this is going against the original thrust of Genesis, I'm sure.

• 48:18Speaker 01

  But you can read against the grain, and you can make people see ancient texts differently, just as this little article that I happened to read this morning made me think about Genesis a little bit differently.

• 48:30Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, and, you know, obviously, as a classicist, you're a tad biased. But like, I feel like it's a shame that I, not only should I think we should not be getting rid of classics departments, I think maybe having them sort of ghettoized in the classics department is the whole problem, right? Like, I didn't study, and I dropped out at the end of my sophomore year. But, so I had to teach myself all these works. But, you know, a kid 100 years ago, maybe even 50 years ago, would have learned Seneca and Cicero and all these things in their, in Latin, right? Like, I learned how to say, "Can I go to the bathroom?" in Spanish, right?

• 49:13Ryan Holiday?

  Instead of memorizing, you know, the epigrams of Cicero because I was taking Greek or Latin in school. I think perhaps the solution is to is to make classics a more pronounced part of our education.

• 49:28Speaker 01

  Well, you won't get a pro test from me on that, obviously. But what you said really struck me as important because I happen to also have another hat I wear, which is I run An institute on the formation of knowledge. And we're very interested in how knowledge comes to be and what shapes, influences and forces it, cultural shapes, political shapes, you name it. But anyhow, the reason I raise it is that one of our mottos essentially is that we are discipline agnostic, which means we're pretty doubtful that the disciplines as they

• 50:12Speaker 01

  currently stand should be reified, right? So we shouldn't have classics, physics, sociology, economics, all in their own boxes because knowledge in real life isn't cut up into little boxes. And by siloing it at the university, we create the illusion that these things have nothing to do with each other, which couldn't be more false. And so I, I think the humanities, and even the distinction between the humanities, the social sciences and the sciences, is ultimately a historical decision. And I haven't really heard good contemporary arguments for why this has to be the case.

• 50:52Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, and I, I think you have done a great service with your translation of the Aeneid. And, and so I think Emily Wilson did an equal service with her great translation of the Odyssey, which is taking the text, making it accessible, and making it readable as a work of art as it was intended for everyday people. Like, these works, these works were as popular as, you know, Breaking Bad or Mad Men were in their own time. This was popular culture. It wasn't just sort of a thing that only the elites knew.

• 51:29Speaker 01

  Absolutely. It was taught in all the schools, and if you weren't lucky enough to go to school, you scribbled badly spelled graffiti, you know, quotations from the Aeneid are all over the place, misspelled in Pompeii on bathroom walls and stuff like that.

• 51:43Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, isn't there a quote from one of Seneca's plays on a wall in Pompeii? Like, that's been entombed in the ash?

• 51:50Speaker 01

  I would not be surprised. There's a lot of literary quotation. There is a lot of mockery of these primary texts. So, you know, there's actually a quotation that says something like, "I'm not going to sing of dogs, of, sorry, of arms and the man. I'm going to sing about the tortoise and the floor," or something. Completely ridiculous nonsense. And you have pictures of Aeneas leading his father out of Rome, but they're wearing dogs on their heads, right? I mean, their heads are dog heads. So, yes, all of this is in circulation in antiquity. I think it's just a part of culture. Highbrow, lowbrow, not necessarily a great distinction.

• 52:35Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, it's weird that we have sort of elevated what was common art to be inaccessible to people. Just in, you know, Shakespeare's plays, you could watch, the poorest person in England could sit and watch a Shakespeare play. They might not understand everything that's happening, but he was such a, he was so brilliant that it could operate on multiple levels.

• 53:00Speaker 01

  Right, right. And we know that the common people went to hear his plays. There's evidence. So, even that medium, which is so rarefied for contemporary English speakers, even that at its time was something for everybody.

• 53:17Ryan Holiday?

  Do you have any advice for someone? Like, let's say they're not, you know, studying the classics, but they do want to integrate these, you know, these works of art into their life. They want to have a background in it. They want to read Herodotus, or they want to read Thiestes, or they want to read, they want to read Virgil. How do you suggest, like, tackling an intimidating text like this? Ideally, you know, in English.

• 53:45Speaker 01

  Hmm. And then, and what person, what kind of imaginary person are we talking about?

• 53:50Ryan Holiday?

  Just like someone listening to this podcast that goes, you know, I've heard of Virgil, but I've never actually read it. I'm going to pick up your translation, but it's, you know, it, it isn't as simple as getting a James Patterson novel that you can just read from cover to cover, you know?

• 54:04Speaker 01

  It's not. Well, I guess I would say, um, pick up a copy that comes with a really good introduction and has really good notes that explain the historical and political circumstances of the time when this was written and that makes clear what references in the texts are when you as a modern reader wouldn't necessarily get what's going on, right? Because you can't just read it through, um, as a story, you, uh, because there's too much you'll miss, right? So you need some kind of entry into that world. And I think, um, often it's the editor or the translator's responsibility to provide that kind of entry or that kind

• 54:48Speaker 01

  of context around the work.

• 54:50Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, that, that's something I recommend is like, go to Wikipedia and figure out what the hell happens. Like, familiarize yourself with the plot of the whole thing first, ruin the ending. It's not a movie that you need to be surprised by. So then you can understand, like, what the hell is happening as it's happening.

• 55:08Speaker 01

  Absolutely. You know, people always ask about, um, like, for example, ancient Greek theater. Well, they knew the story already, right? They knew that Oedipus was going to blind himself after sleeping with his mom. So why did they go see the play? And the answer is just what you said. It's not like a modern movie where you go to, you know, clutch at the edge of your seat and then go wow at the ending. You're there to see what kind of variations the playwright has made on the traditional story. And it's those variations that have meaning. But if you're not aware of the context, you'll never understand what the variation is, right? So you do have to know what's going on to, to really appreciate these works.

• 55:50Ryan Holiday?

  Well, and that is something I think it, you miss, uh, if you're not sort of well versed in the context, which is like, They were kind of repeating the same plots over and over again. Even Shakespeare is just ripping off Plutarch, who himself is just ripping off old myths and ideas that may or may not be true. It was much more about what they did within the constraints of the story that was interesting. But you vaguely knew what was happening. It was just the characters that were surprising you and what they said.

• 56:21Speaker 01

  Absolutely, and what they did. And there was a lot of variance in that. And in fact, you know, one of the things that I myself didn't realize about the whole Aeneid story until I was already a PhD student and maybe even already a professor, is that the Aeneas we see in Virgil, even though he's become the Aeneas that everybody knows, who's a classicist, is a huge innovation. Because prior to Virgil, the bulk of the tradition said that Aeneas was a traitor who turned Troy over to the Greeks, right? So if you know that story and you read Virgil's Aeneid, you can see all along what Virgil is doing,

• 57:06Speaker 01

  how he changes the story very carefully to show that he's improved Aeneas, but how he also lets you see that he knows the prior version. So that what he ends up doing is something very, very interesting. He says, it's like he's telling us, "I, Virgil, am writing this epic so that you will forget about the previous Aeneases and you will only remember this good one, because I want you to think he's a model or a copy of the Emperor Augustus in some way, and I'm really praising Augustus by praising Aeneas. But, readers, even though I'm doing this, I know you remember the other stories, and I'm going to refer to them occasionally to keep you on your toes and to make sure you understand..."

• 57:51Speaker 01

  That this is just another version of one of the multiple myths, right? And of course, it becomes authoritative and it helps Augustus and it becomes part of the rhetoric of his empire. And I also believe that this inadvertent outcome was why Virgil asked for the Aeneid to be burnt when he was on his deathbed. I think he saw that he'd been a little bit too subtle and that nobody was going to see the signs that his Aeneas was problematic in any way. They just thought he was a good dude, if slightly boring, which is the general take on Aeneas.

• 58:27Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, it's sort of like how, you know, Frasier is a spin off of Cheers and Better Call Saul is a spin off of Breaking Bad. It's like what the ancient Greeks and Romans would do is like take some side character from one epic and spin them off into getting their own epic.

• 58:47Speaker 01

  That is a great analogy. And yes, now that you put it that way, I see it because Aeneas was a very minor character in the Iliad. And in fact, in the Iliad, he's not the greatest warrior and he has to be rescued by his mom a couple of times. Which, you know, I expect if you are an Iliadic warrior, getting rescued by your mom is pretty much as embarrassing as it gets.

• 59:07Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 59:09Speaker 01

  But there you go. Virgil picks him up and makes him a household word, almost, in my household.

• 59:16Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, no, no, he does. He spins him off into his own thing and it's so good that it's on par with the other great classics. And that was the last thing I was going to talk to you about, what I think so interesting, I'm sitting down, I'm working on my next book right now. And it's like, it's easy to forget that, you know, Virgil or, you know, maybe not Homer, but these playwrights were people and that the process of sitting down and writing this thing was not that different than you sitting down to translate it or me sitting down to write one of my books or Taylor Swift sitting down to write, you know, one of her songs, which people might be listening to a thousand years from now.

• 59:58Ryan Holiday?

  Like, it's always sort of humbling and inspiring to me to like, kind of relate to the creative process that.

• 1:00:07Ryan Holiday?

  All of these figures thousands of years ago were sitting down and engaging in. When you, when you read Thucydides, you know, he goes like, I am trying to make a work that will last forever. And you're just like, people are still doing that. I just find that so cool.

• 1:00:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, isn't that the coolest? I mean, in antiquity especially, everybody is obsessed with surviving, their name surviving history, either through deeds or through writing, which is how they put it. And yep, these guys all, all chose writing or, or song, I guess. Although I think I would be surprised if people are listening to Taylor Swift in a thousand years, possibly because I don't think I've ever heard Taylor Swift myself and we're contemporaries.

• 1:00:48Ryan Holiday?

  Wow, that's, that's, that's surprising. I'm surprised to hear that.

• 1:00:52Speaker 01

  I think that may say something very strange about me.

• 1:00:55Ryan Holiday?

  No, I, I mean, I guess that also goes to the point though of like, these things weren't necessarily the most pretentious forms of art when they came out. They were, they were popular culture and, and then it's only with time that they take on this sort of sheen of being something elite.

• 1:01:16Speaker 01

  I think what all of those authors wanted and what, what we all want ourselves is probably just this, to have been relevant in some small way in the world.

• 1:01:28Ryan Holiday?

  Yes.

• 1:01:28Speaker 01

  And I think when we read anything, we should look for its relevance still, right? Rather than putting it on a pedestal or throwing it in the garbage.

• 1:01:37Ryan Holiday?

  Although Marcus Aurelius would question why Seneca wanted to be remembered so badly. You know, he's like, you're dead, you're not going to be able to enjoy it. So I think that's the irony of Marcus Aurelius, you know, writes repeatedly about the worthlessness of posthumous fame and he's one of the most famous of all the Romans, all these thousands of years later.

• 1:01:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, that is a huge irony. He shouldn't have written anything if he wanted to be forgotten.

• 1:02:01Ryan Holiday?

  But I don't, I think that's, to me, that's a message as an artist, which is, he wasn't writing for publication, he was writing for himself. And in being so specific and personal, he somehow manages to create something universal.

• 1:02:17Speaker 01

  That is so true and he's so much better liked than Seneca.

• 1:02:21Ryan Holiday?

  Well, Seneca was performing, you know, Seneca, he wasn't really writing letters to Lucilius. Do you know what I mean? He had his other eye on how far and wide these would... He wanted his letters to go viral, to use the modern term.

• 1:02:35Speaker 01

  He did want them to go viral. You know, I'm sure you know this, but it's a mark of Seneca's lack of success in his own day and in the couple of centuries after, that when people talked about Socrates, they said, "Oh, and there was a Roman Socrates too." And I always think, "They must mean Seneca," but they're talking about Musonius Rufus.

• 1:02:58Ryan Holiday?

  Right.

• 1:02:59Speaker 01

  They didn't like Seneca. I mean, Dio Cassius just trashes him.

• 1:03:02Ryan Holiday?

  Yes. And it's weird, because very little of Musonius's writings survive. And I think they're interesting. They don't strike me as particularly, like, sort of Socratic or brilliant. I mean, I like them, but yeah, Seneca clearly put a bad taste in people's mouths. To me, most specifically, that Marcus Aurelius never mentions him. I think he mentions him in one... I had a guest on who corrected me that he mentions him in one of his letters to Fronto, but nowhere else, nowhere in Meditations, does Marcus ever acknowledge Seneca's existence.

• 1:03:36Speaker 01

  Oh, man, he was canceled.

• 1:03:37Ryan Holiday?

  Yes. And perhaps, you know, perhaps rightly so. If you're looking at, you know, if you look at his years of dedicated service to one of the worst rulers of all time, there's naturally going to be some collateral damage from that.

• 1:03:54Speaker 01

  I'm afraid that's gotta be true.

• 1:03:57Ryan Holiday?

  Well, is there anything you feel like we didn't cover?

• 1:04:00Speaker 01

  Um, not in particular. It's been wonderful talking to you, because you're so well-versed in all this material.

• 1:04:08Ryan Holiday?

  Thank you.

• 1:04:09Speaker 01

  So, you know, that's amazing. I'm a little bit sad that we didn't get to talk about how all our problems, or at least many of them, as individuals are based on false judgments, which is a big belief of mine.

• 1:04:24Ryan Holiday?

  Well, let's talk about that. Are you talking about the sort of Stoic idea of, what is it, phantasia? That we have these impressions that are incorrect? Or is it something bigger than that?

• 1:04:32Speaker 01

  No, that's it. And Marcus Aurelius talks about it, too. He talks about it when he's talking about that fish, remember? He's like, "You think this is a high-quality fancy fish, but it's just some flesh and bones and red sauce and so forth."

• 1:04:43Ryan Holiday?

  Strip things of the legend that encrest them, he says.

• 1:04:47Speaker 01

  Exactly, right. And then, so those are false judgments. And then Epictetus has, my favorite one is in Epictetus, where he sees a beautiful woman walking towards him, and he writes down, "Wait a minute, Fontesia," right? Like, hang on, impression. I need to think about this, because I'm pretty sure this is a wrong impression. The impression being that somebody very desirable is approaching him. And so I guess, he doesn't say what his answer was, but my guess is that he would say, "You don't know this woman at all. You're falsely judging her to be a thing of value, but for all you know, she will bring you great unhappiness. You know, her shoe habits, for example, is going to bankrupt you. And

• 1:05:30Speaker 01

  better not, better not make that, that, that judgment. Better instead, stick to judging, judging things based on their intrinsic worth for you as a Stoic," right?

• 1:05:43Ryan Holiday?

  Yeah, I think, you know, Epictetus says something about, like, taking every impression and putting it up to the test. And my favorite, you know, sort of analogy he uses, he talks about how, you know, a dealer of coins can tell from the way you bang a coin on the table, you know, whether it's, it's full metal, or whether it's alloyed with something that, that you developed the ability to sense counterfeits. And, and I think, to me, that's the art of Stoicism, is really the ability to interrogate your own opinions, thoughts, judgments, impressions, rather than accepting the false ones and the true ones as if they're the same.

• 1:06:20Speaker 01

  Exactly. And I think, as one of them said, you know, "When you are angry, every time you are angry, that is actually based on a false impression. Every time you're enraged, that is a false judgment that made you enraged." And that's a great thing to say, to say to yourself when you're angry. You say, "This is a false judgment. Why am I having it? Oh, I'm having it because I didn't know that this person's sister is in the hospital gravely ill, and that's why they snapped at me," or, you know, "I didn't know that this man is driving his sick kid to the hospital, so that's why he almost knocked me off the road." But...

• 1:06:57Speaker 01

  As soon as you start thinking about the different judgments you could apply to it, you realize your judgment is one of many and probably has nothing to do with the right judgment. And you should not be angry.

• 1:07:10Ryan Holiday?

  This is the danger of social media, right? Which is like, you have a thought, please share it with everyone you know indelibly for the public record. And that's not just a real dangerous career strategy, as we're finding, but it encourages you to react emotionally in the moment rather than thinking about it. One of the ones I love from Marcus Realist, he goes, remember, you can always have no opinion. And that's what I go like, I hear about something and I just go, I'm not going to decide one way or another whether this is right or wrong. I'm just going to think nothing about it.

• 1:07:43Speaker 01

  That is great. Yeah, well, I hope you manage to teach that to the people of Twitter.

• 1:07:49Ryan Holiday?

  I think the solution there is just to spend as little time as possible on Twitter.

• 1:07:54Speaker 01

  I'll take that under advisement, for sure.

• 1:07:57Ryan Holiday?

  No, this is truly an honor. I'm so glad that you exist and that you're doing the work you're doing. And I loved your episode with Tyler Cowen. And I'm really glad that we got to talk.

• 1:08:07Speaker 01

  Thanks so much, Ryan, and congratulations on your newest and latest book, which I look forward to.

• 1:08:14Ryan Holiday?

  Thanks so much for listening. If you could leave a review for the podcast, we'd really appreciate it. The reviews make a difference. And of course, every nice review from a nice person helps balance out. The crazy people who get triggered and angry anytime we say something they disagree with. So 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.