In this episode, I talk with Alex Petkas, host of the Cost of Glory podcast. He's also a former professor with a Princeton PhD in Classical Literature. His podcast is a dramatic retelling of Plutarch's Lives, which is one of the most influential books in human history. We'll discuss why Christians can benefit from Plutarch.
We talk about why there are so few great men today, why rhetoric is important for leadership, and how Alex once interacted with Elon Musk on Twitter/X about Sulla. Speaking of which, why did Sulla execute his political rivals?
Check out Alex's work.
You can also check out his Substack (referenced in the show).
Sign up for the New Christendom Press Conference in June 2024.
Join the Patreon exclusive membership.
10 Ways to Make Money with Your MAXX-D Trailer.
Alpine Gold Exchange Website: alpinegoldogden.com
Set Up a Meeting: https://calendly.com/alpinegold/alpine-gold-consultation
Talk to Joe Garrisi about managing your wealth with Backwards Planning Financial.
Sign up for Barbell Logic.
Check out Premier Body Armor.
Place your meat order with Salt & Strings.
Contact Private Family Banking Partner at banking@privatefamilybanking.com to set up a free private consultation and get started building wealth now and unto future generations. "For a free copy of a new book "Protect Your Money Now! How to Build Multi-Generational Wealth Outside of Wall Street and Avoid the Coming Banking Meltdown" by Private Family Banking Partner, Chuck DeLadurantey, go to www.protectyourmoneynow.net
In this episode, I talk with Alex Petkas, host of the Cost of Glory podcast. He's also a former professor with a Princeton PhD in Classical Literature. His podcast is a dramatic retelling of Plutarch's Lives, which is one of the most influential books in human history. We'll discuss why Christians can benefit from Plutarch.
We talk about why there are so few great men today, why rhetoric is important for leadership, and how Alex once interacted with Elon Musk on Twitter/X about Sulla. Speaking of which, why did Sulla execute his political rivals?
Check out Alex's work.
You can also check out his Substack (referenced in the show).
Sign up for the New Christendom Press Conference in June 2024.
Join the Patreon exclusive membership.
10 Ways to Make Money with Your MAXX-D Trailer.
Alpine Gold Exchange Website: alpinegoldogden.com
Set Up a Meeting: https://calendly.com/alpinegold/alpine-gold-consultation
Talk to Joe Garrisi about managing your wealth with Backwards Planning Financial.
Sign up for Barbell Logic.
Check out Premier Body Armor.
Place your meat order with Salt & Strings.
Contact Private Family Banking Partner at banking@privatefamilybanking.com to set up a free private consultation and get started building wealth now and unto future generations. "For a free copy of a new book "Protect Your Money Now! How to Build Multi-Generational Wealth Outside of Wall Street and Avoid the Coming Banking Meltdown" by Private Family Banking Partner, Chuck DeLadurantey, go to www.protectyourmoneynow.net
This episode of the Hardman Podcast is brought to you by our friends at Alpine Gold, by Joe Garrisy, with Backwards Planning Financial, by Premier Body Armor, private Family Banking and finally, by Max D Trailers. Welcome to this episode of the Hardman Podcast. I'm your host, eric Kahn, and very excited in this episode to have on the show Mr Alex Petkus. He is a Princeton PhD. He hosts the Cost of Glory podcast, which is all about Plutarch, the dramatic retelling of so many fantastic stories from history, from Plutarch's lives. This book has shaped so many people around the world, including the founding fathers, shakespeare, dante and more, so he really helps bring this back to life today. We're going to talk about that in this episode of the podcast. And we're going to talk about a couple other things, including how exactly his path crossed with Elon Musk on Twitter. They were talking about Sulla, and who is Sulla? Did he really have his political enemies all waxed? Well, we're going to find out in this episode. Speaking of leadership, sulla, of course you're talking about the Roman Empire, but what about leadership and rhetoric? How does this play into being a great leader? Today, we're going to talk about it in this episode. By the way, I know this is the time of year when everybody is thinking about New Year's resolutions, you're thinking about okay, this is the year I really need to do it. This episode will be great for that, obviously on the moral, philosophical, character side of things. But I also want to encourage you to check out Barbell Logic.
Speaker 1:I'm still working out with Matt Reynolds. That's been absolutely phenomenal. One of the things I find it's most helpful for is accountability. Even over the holidays you're having Christmas dinner and Thanksgiving dinner and you're having people over and sometimes you feel like you're going to fall off the wagon. It's just so helpful knowing that your coach is going to be like hey man, what about that workout? It's a good piece of accountability. So you stay with the workouts.
Speaker 1:I had some sickness, was able to really have workouts tailored by Matt to help me get through and around those things, just so that you don't give up but just keep working hard. Yeah, it's been great keeping things real with deadlifts still around. I think the last set we were doing one by three at 360. That's pretty good. And Bench Press 240. I had kind of gone down busy season and still the coaching is really, really helpful and tailored to you. Check that out, barbaraologiccom, if you're looking to get strong this year, this is the year to do it. You can find that link in the show notes. And now, without further ado, I want to jump into the interview with Alex Petkes, again from the Cost of Glory podcast. Be sure to check that out as well You'll find that link in the show notes as well and enjoy this conversation. Welcome to the Hardman podcast. I'm your host, eric Kahn, and joined today by Mr Alex Petkes. He's got the Cost of Glory podcast. Alex, thanks so much for joining me for this episode of the podcast.
Speaker 2:Great to be here, Eric. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1:Well, Alex, one of the things I want to talk about today is something that you've covered quite extensively in the podcast, which is Plutarch, and then the connection for especially for Christians, like why would they care about this? Of course, Plutarch has been something that a lot of people have paid attention to, from Shakespeare, Beethoven, Emerson, others. It's been a he's been very influential. So, just to start me off with that, why is Plutarch such a subjective interest to you?
Speaker 2:I left academia a few years ago and I had this strong sense that the material that I was studying the classics I was a classics professor left a tenure track job et cetera, et cetera. And I got into classics because I was interested in early Christianity and, sort of following the thread, learned Greek and then got into the Greeks who were so influential on the language, at least in the New Testament, and so I always had this kind of moral mission, if you want to say it as a classicist, that these great texts can really be impactful on your life and can bring about positive change. And I think even for today, for just the kind of unwashed you know nothings of the world, it can be a kind of gateway toward Christianity for people. And so one of the reasons I left academia is I felt like that mission was sort of becoming more and more impossible to fulfill there. And so Plutarch was an author that I landed on and he's the basis really of the cost of glory.
Speaker 2:I'm kind of trying to revive Plutarch for modern times because I think he really nailed it in a lot of ways in a way that's really been. He's a timely author at all times, especially in hard times, he writes these great, concise, vivid, dramatic biographies of great men, all of the greatest figures from the basically before Christ. There's 48 or so of them are covered by Plutarch, julius Caesar, alexander, and. But Plutarch did it not just with the idea of I'm going to tell you what happened. I'm going to tell you the story. He's not just a historian, he's really, first and foremost, he calls himself a philosopher, he considers himself like a moralist and he's doing this to instruct and to improve, because he's got something that he thinks this will be of high value to my audience. It'll help them succeed in life, it'll help them become better men.
Speaker 2:And so I think he writes really well, but also with that kind of moral purpose in the background that it's not like they're morality tales by any means. He tells you the true story and what happened, but he's interested in evaluating virtue and vice and what were the good choices that were made and the bad choices that were made by all these great figures that everybody admires. And so I felt like we today are in a deficit of heroism, especially like manly heroes. We're not allowed to have manly heroes in our culture anymore. I really felt that strongly, being in the longhouse of academia, if you'll excuse the phrase. So yeah, that's what really gets me going about Plutarch and it's kind of what I'm trying to project into the world today with the podcast.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's so helpful and I was thinking about this especially. You know, I have young sons and they're at a classical academy and one of the things that intrigues me about Plutarch is when they read through it. These stories have a way of just sticking with them and it's you know, we're not just brains on a stick and we don't just receive data points. But a particular interest to me was this sort of biography that Plutarch had developed and why that was so effective, for, you know, imparting virtue, as you said. And then you look at the early church fathers you know Clement of Alexandria, guys like this, who were pointed to this and saying this is really useful. Of course, cotton Mather, you've pointed out, was also really into Plutarch. So I guess speak a little bit about that, that form of biography that was being used and why that was so important for teaching virtue.
Speaker 2:Biography, it's funny enough, was actually invented by philosophers in the fourth century BC as a kind of tool of moral instruction. The first biography that we have is Isocrates is a vaguerus. It's kind of a funeral oration, a eulogy of a great man who's a king, and the better known one is probably like 10 years after that one. But in the same spirit is by another guy who called himself a philosopher, xenophon, who's probably better known to people. You know, the author of the Anabasis, a great man of action himself. He wrote this biography of the Spartan king, g Cileus, who had just died. It became a tool of moral instruction for philosophers who, as Aristotle observed.
Speaker 2:You know, character is like virtue. In order to be real it has to kind of sink into your character over time. And the way that you illustrate character and the way that you really display characters, almost character is almost like an epiphenomenon. That is the sum of your actions. So you know, you can't really see character except in action. I think that's such an important part of moral transmission for humans. You know, we really learn how to be great and virtuous by watching other people do it. We're highly mimetic Aristotle talks about man is the most imitative. Mimetic means imitative, from the Greek. We're the most mimetic of all creatures, you know, and so that's part of our power as humans. It's the way God created us, and this is how, say God decided.
Speaker 2:Say, the early Christians decided to convey the gospel when Christ came to earth.
Speaker 2:You know, they chose the biography genre.
Speaker 2:Right, the gospels are basically Greek biographies, and I think it's really interesting to note that not every culture produces biographies. Yeah, it's like a certain literary tool that we take for granted today, but somebody had to come up with this idea that like, okay, we're going to tell a story of a great, notable figure and we're going to select for certain events and we're going to tell it in a certain sequence and we're going to tell certain kinds of anecdotes that reveal the character, especially that great man, so that you can emulate him, you know, to distill the essence of what this guy was all about in a 30 to 50 page text, which is what Plutarch does and it's what the evangelists do. So I think that the genre of biography, I never really was that into it when I was younger, because they always just seemed so thick and boring. You know, like so many biographies are door stops and they won't ever count every event and it's like do I but the great thing about ancient biographies? It's very concise actually, so I try to stick to that spirit.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's really helpful. One of the quotes and we'll share a link to your sub-stack article here. What I love was you said reading Thucydides is a little like slunking raw eggs. Undeniably it fortifies you, but it makes some get woozy and throw up. The first time I can, definitely. The first time I slunked raw eggs I was like this is absolutely disgusting. But you're right, I think just having this form to be able to digest so much of what was written before. I think there's also Greg, maybe if I'm wrong, but I think in the sort of the guys who are interested in masculinity, there seems to be a resurgence in the classics and what I find interesting about it is we're trying to, you know, recover things like manliness, masculinity, and then you read these guys and you're like this actually isn't new at all. They put a lot of thought into this. So I wonder why do you think the resurgence? Plutarch and other just classic Greek works.
Speaker 2:That's funny about the slunking raw eggs. I posted that and then a friend of mine wrote me and he said actually literally the last time I tried to read Thucydides I got sick and threw up. I think he got COVID and it's coincided with. So yeah, but Thucydides, of course, is famous, famous and famously hard Greek historian. You know, like eating your raw kale, it's very good for you, but no, I think that the idea of promoting masculinity in the world and kind of reviving masculinity just seems so unnecessary in prior centuries, because you didn't have this whole kind of, let's say, feminization of culture I'm sure you've talked a lot of I mean, I know you've talked a lot about this on your show the ancient word for manliness would have been Andrea, courage.
Speaker 2:It's literally the ancient Greek word is for courage. You know it's manliness. Manliness is really distillable to courage. Another way of saying it in Latin is Virtus. Right Comes from the Latin word Vir, which is man, just like Andrea comes from the word on air, man. So like there is this intimate connection between being a real man, being manly, and just excellence, you know.
Speaker 2:And so I think when we're looking for how do we bring back manliness, we have this gigantic tool set from the tradition. But if we reframe it a little bit, we're looking for virtue we're looking for and virtue. You know, in contemporary terms it's like virtue signaling. Virtue has can be kind of watered down today, but you know the way that the Greeks and Romans talked about it is very intimately bound up with manliness, which has as its basis courage.
Speaker 2:And so I think for me, coming from academia, I think and I came up in it before the whole crisis of masculinity was front and center in pop culture, kind of coming back to the whole tradition of just moral philosophy among the Greeks, also among the church fathers, who are taking up a lot of the same stuff. You know, it really makes so much of moral philosophy that much more interesting and that much more relevant to go back to it with. Oh, they're actually talking about something that we've kind of gutted from our culture. And when you gut manliness from your culture, when you sort of take away healthy masculinity, you actually end up taking away virtue, which I think is one of the reasons why there's so much silliness out there in high places.
Speaker 1:Yeah, definitely, and that's one of the things you talk about is really how hard times require courage, I think, particularly in our era. One of the quotes you share which I really enjoyed. This is Marshall Maurice de Saxe. That's not the French pronunciation of that, by the way, but I love the quote. He says the first of all qualities is courage. Without this, the others are of little value since they cannot be used. So even the idea that courage is this primary virtue, if you will, sort of the, I think CS Lewis said something very similar. I was tying it to something.
Speaker 1:Recently I was reading a Douglas Southall Freeman's biography of Robert E Lee, who was really trained in the Mexican War under Winfield Scott, who was an avid student of Napoleon. And coming out of that war Lee said the number one lesson he learned from military operations was what he called audacity. He said that, you know, you saw it in Napoleon, you saw it in Winfield Scott, and so that would carry over into sort of you know the Civil War and how he would conduct his affairs and a lot of the reason for a success. But as I'm working with young man in the church and outside of it, it's really interesting to me that this seems to be one of the areas where we're most lacking. So I guess, just give me the kind of the summary of why hard times and courage are so important, you know, to capture courage for men in this time and to instill that in them, yeah, and this idea of courage is the foundation of virtues is.
Speaker 2:You know it's an old thought, it occurs in a lot of places, but you know, when it comes from a guy who's, like, led large armies and defeated large armies in battle, you know it's some, somehow it gains a little bit more weight from it. But yeah, so I think, on the hard times point, one of the things that I think is really interesting about Plutarch in particular is his popularity in the 18th century for and like he's such a formative figure for early America, which I mean even before the Revolutionary War. You have the French and Indian War, you have Indians at the on the borders. You know there's this expansionism, you know it's it's a kind of era of troubled times and chaos and risk, and like those are particularly the times when you need this store of courage. And I think one of the ways Plato talks about this in the Republic, one of the ways that you instill courage in yourself and in the society, is by is like what we were just talking about, mimesis by throwing a bunch of examples of real courageous men. Fictional ones can also work, and you kind of get it by Osmosis. You get it by Osmosis through stories. You also get it through practice, of course, by actually putting yourself at risk and facing challenges, physical challenges. But I think that this idea that stories give you courage is brilliantly illustrated by Washington at Valley Forge. So, winter, valley Forge, 1777, eight, he's there. They're low on supplies, it's way colder than it should be. Everybody's miserable, washington, and you know they're. You know the odds are really against them.
Speaker 2:Washington decides to stage at Valley Forge for his army his favorite play, which is Addison's Cato, which is basically based on Plutarch, plutarch's life of Cato, this famous story. He stages this like drama for his men at Valley Forge precisely to give him that courage. And Cato is this great story of a Roman leader who stood up to Julius Caesar in the cause of liberty and republic. You know, and there's this great quote I like from it, somebody who really hates Cato says to another person who also hates Cato you have the most seen Mount Atlas, while storms and tempests, thunder on its brow and oceans cast their billows at its feet, it stands unmoved, such is that haughty man, his towering soul, amidst all the shocks and injuries of fortune, rises superior and towers over Caesar. And so Washington wanted his men to hear those words of like brave men being brave and being kind of Carped at by weaker men, which I think is also part of the drama of instilling courage.
Speaker 2:But you know it's it's really the times like that that you need those, those those high-minded, powerful stories. And I just think you know a bunch of ragamuffin Colonial soldiers hearing that. It's just so funny and so so foreign to the way that we think about the function of high literature. Right, and we call it high and these, these distinctions are kind of, you know, it's not, they don't necessarily apply across time. So so, a lot of ways, I think that this is one of the things that people got from Plutarch. Plutarch was like the second most likely Book to be on your shelf in the American colonies. They're just kind of like men fortifying themselves with a stories of really courageous men from the past and like there's a lot of flawed characters in Plutarch, but All of them have got this physical care, courage. Nobody becomes great, even greatly bad, without that base virtue of of like physical, daring audacity.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's so interesting. It reminds me was having a conversation recently with Dr Glenn sunshine. We had interviewed him for the Kings Hall podcast talking about Christendom and all this stuff, and we were talking about the founders in America and how steeped in the classics they were, and and something you had said I wanted to ask him was I'm gonna, I'm gonna ask another guy with a PhD and I'm gonna ask him what he thinks about this. I said what were the founders reading? And without hesitation he said oh, plutarch for sure, like that had to be the first thing. So I find that really interesting in how it shapes Great men. And you look at these eras of great men. What do you think about our time? I've often heard this said that our time produces few great men and I wonder if you think that's true and if so, why is that the case?
Speaker 2:and to second that Plutarch thing, I was reminded just also Valley Forge. At that same time Hamilton is there with Washington and he's staying up later than I reading Plutarch, and he took like 50 pages of notes in his paybook on Plutarch's lives while at Valley Forge. So so they're really just pumping themselves full of the stuff. And then Hamilton said you know, a young Statement could do no better than to have the holy writ in one hand and Plutarch in the other. Yeah, I think. I think a lot of it has to do with the gutting of education and the book recently came out, the battle for the American mind, the Hague, seth and Goodwin, I believe. Correct me if I'm wrong, but basically, you know, there there has actually been this long-standing campaign since the late 19th century and it really sped up in in the post-war period and Chris Rufo has also talked about this In his new book on the, you know, the American Cultural Revolution.
Speaker 2:There was an attempt to get on, a successful attempt to get the classics out of Education, to kind of gut the American education system. Take, rewrite history Down with the classics. I saw this very front and center in my own discipline is one of the reasons I left the institutional study of classics. You know, I think that there's a lot of factors, right like there's.
Speaker 2:There's a lot of challenges that men face today, and technology is has its own set of challenges, and so does the fact that we have these big bureaucratic institutions that are unelected, that kind of. But the least you could do is educate your sons right and educate yourself right to fortify yourself and and and see the possibilities that that are In front of you that you're not willing to look at because maybe you don't have the daring to to aspire. I think If there's one lesson from Plutarch, it's that the current, the courageous, right, the rules. You know, if you, if you want to rewrite them, that the number one thing you need is Is the fortitude and the daring, and you get that by Studying other people who've done similar daring things, maybe different daring things, but but but you can kind of get that daring by by osmosis.
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Speaker 1:One of the things you've talked a lot about that fascinates me is zeal and why that's important. I can remember, especially as a young man, it seemed like the older generation. The number one thing that seemed to annoy them was being zealous and passionate for things. But it is also interesting because I think of things like even the apostle Paul says commanding the people in the church who have spiritual gifts. He says those who lead should lead with zeal. So it was really interesting to me that zeal and leadership would be combined, but I wonder if you would start to unpack for us just just what is zeal and why is that so important.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you're speaking in a subject close to my heart. So zeal in English comes from an ancient Greek word that is a little bit obscured in our modern parlance, but the ancient Greek word is zealos or zealos, and Aristotle defines it as a type of pain felt when a man sees presence among others who are like him by nature, things good and honorable which he himself is capable of attaining. So it's a pain that when you see you could achieve something and that motivates you to go and achieve it because you see it in another person. This is really an essential quality of leadership and it's how Plutarch really believes that virtue is produced and transmitted, and this is why he writes his lives. He says over and over again throughout the biographies, like how studying the great lives of the men of the past produces zeal. This is the emotion you're supposed to have toward heroes. It's the emotion that produces new heroes, for Plutarch and for the Greeks alike, and that definition I gave earlier was Aristotle.
Speaker 2:So zeal is really crucial to the moral formation of leader and it has this bad rap, I think, today because it has all these overtones of extremism, zealotry. But zeal is dangerous. Zeal is a threat to the powers that be because when men get excited about achieving something, sometimes that ends up overturning the social order or at least clearing out old leaders to bring in new leaders, and so I think we live in an age where we've been kind of conditioned to not compare yourself to other people, don't be too extreme. Extremism is a bad word, which is crazy when you think about it, that that's a politicized bad word, but I think it goes to show this kind of like more broad phenomenon that I think we're living in a deficit of zeal in our culture today. So I'm trying to bring it back, and I think Plutarch is the perfect vehicle for it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, it's fascinating because I think today to be called a zealot or something like that is generally that's a disparaging remark, generally when people use that. But I also think, even with Christ, you know, quoting from the Old Testament, that you know his work. The zeal of the Lord will do this, and being zealous for the house of the Lord and sorts of you know that's what leads him on this path to glory and to greatness. But it's also interesting to me because when you think about it it seems like so much of you know the 20th century, in particular with education, as you mentioned before, has been sort of this disenchanting. So the whole goal is disenchantment.
Speaker 1:So you read about your heroes and really the story now is well, you thought they were great but they really weren't, and here's why. But that would have a broad impact on society and what people thought about leadership and maybe part of the answer for why people aren't aspiring to greatness, Because we've generally been told it's bad. It also interests me too in Christian circles, Because things like ambition are generally looked down upon or even wanting to win glory, and yet scripture so often says that you know, men are made for glory and it's a hard road, but it's something worth, you know aiming at and achieving, and so I'm curious if you think that's true.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's, it's. I was definitely raised in an environment where ambition was kind of, you know, tacitly frowned upon or praised only in a very qualified way. This has been part of my part of my interest in. Zeal in particular is sort of undoing some of the things I think were wrong about my upbringing. But to bring this home like what I think a church fathers that I've studied would say, is that, hey, we're made in the image of God and so zeal is a way.
Speaker 2:Ambition, rightly understood and rightly oriented yes, it can. You can be ambitious for, for, for stupid things like getting really rich, or for for just like temporal fame. But ambition rightly understood and really oriented, is about fulfilling your nature. It's about becoming the fullest version that God created you to, of the thing that God created you to be, and you're not going to do that if you don't challenge yourself and strive. And and I think that the way that the Greeks talk about ambition is interesting because it is for the ancient Greeks it's the love of honor, philotemia, and they they saw it as a potentially problematic thing, because if you love honor too much that you're willing to do anything at all to get it, you can.
Speaker 2:You can end up destroying a city. This is the classic myth of the seven against thebes, the sons of edipus quarreling with each other, atiocles and polynytesis, and they rip the state apart because they can't tolerate any rivals. And at the same time, it's mostly a good thing for a Greek from the perspective of a classic city state, because honor is not just, is not something abstract for the Greeks, it's very concrete. It is the reward that a city gives to its leading members for contributing. So if you are a wealthy Athenian, you are not, you don't, you don't just pay taxes. That the way that the rich don't just have like a higher tax burden than the poor. They're asked to do specific things, such as fund a ship, pay for a tragic, tragic competition to a chorus at a festival, fix a building they're called liturgies and in return, the city honors you. They put your name on a plaque, you get to put your name on the boat and everybody knows that your you know demon acts did the ship and you're the Navar, and so there is a kind of. The city needs people who love honor in order to function, because that's how it rewards its members.
Speaker 2:I think that that ambition, in that sense, if you understand it is the love of honor, which is a fundamentally like a constructive social virtue that has ways that it goes off the rails, but it's ultimately about building communities and building healthy societies. That ambition is like basically good, but also has the potential to be fallen and to kind of get get go off the rails. And, you know, it's got to be mixed with virtue. It's got to be mixed with with courage, but also with restraint, with wisdom and just. It's not like it's not like a single solution to all of our problems, but it's certainly we could use more of it always and it is really what what motivates most people to be their best self, even in Christ, I think. So I think that that's the way that you could kind of theologize. It is an expression of the image of God and yourself and it's basically good.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's really helpful. One of the things I want to ask you about I've been following this. If people follow along, of course, we'll have links for this for the cost of glory. I encourage our listeners to check out your Twitter feed, but one of the things that interested me was your recent interaction over the Spartans and in particular, I believe it's. Brett Devereux has an article that was titled Spartans were losers, and I immediately was triggered and offended and all sorts of things, and you know, many of us would say, look, yeah, not everything about the culture was great, and those are the things everybody wants to point to. But you were responded to this and so I just want to ask you that question, alex were Spartans really losers? Have I been wrong all this time?
Speaker 2:It's been really popular among classes to dog the Spartans, the point of fact that they had a slave society and yes, they did actually have a lot of slaves, but and and that they they weren't as great as you thought they were. And I think a lot of this kind of comes from resentment at the fact that people, that people are willing to idolize the Spartans from Thermopylae without taking a whole course on the Spartans and learning all of the facts and details about Spartan life. You know that that we kind of lion eyes, great deeds Well, so I tried to write a response to the Devereux piece and he intentionally put it it provocatively. But you know, I think fundamentally the Spartans are are interesting to me For a lot of similar ways that they were interesting to Plato and other state builders of the past, because they achieved an incredible feat by a rigorous engineering of society around producing excellence, around producing individual excellence. So they have this very difficult and elaborate education system to train their warrior elites, and it doesn't just train them in physical courage, which it does, but also trains them in cleverness, and it trains them also, I think, interestingly, to be obedient both to the laws and to their commanders. So they, the Spartans were all of their. Their, their whole state is about producing individual excellence.
Speaker 2:But there's a kind of collectivism there and people like to blame the Spartans for being the first totalitarian state. And you know I get that criticism. But I think if you look at what they were able to achieve, they defeated the Athenian Empire in the Peloponnesian War, the famous clash that Thucydides talks about, not just because they were the better fighters, because if you actually look at the Spartan war machine, it's mostly not Spartans, it's mostly allies that love the Spartan way of life, that admire Spartaf and admire the Spartans for their virtue. Just the Spartan, actual Spartan nobility might be a 10th of any given army. They're the cutting edge of it. Maybe and there's this kind of conflict going on in the history of Sparta that they stand for kind of a political ideal. There's an aesthetic to the Spartans that is the best men ruling a society Now, whereas the Athenians are kind of more democratic and some would say demagogic and a lot of most kind of upper class Greeks, most Greek writers that we have, really admire the achievement of classical Athens on the one hand but also felt that it was the exception to that prove the rule that democracy is mostly bad, but it can be good in some cases and it all depends on who are the people leading the democracy really.
Speaker 2:So I think the Spartans are still very admirable and maybe someday I'll write a book about them. But in the meantime I've done two podcast series on two of the greatest Spartans from around this period Gisa Leis, who is the guy that Xenophon wrote that biography of that I mentioned earlier, the great king of Sparta, long ruling at the time, during the time that Plato lived. And Lysander, who is sort of a little bit older than a Gisa Leis and was really the Spartan commander who engineered the destruction of Athens at this famous great battle of Aegos. Potomy, another really fascinating, really outside the box thinker, super clever, just terrifying man to his enemies and an object of great devotion to his friends. So I think the Spartans still have a lot to teach us today.
Speaker 1:Yeah, just curious, in terms of virtues or things, that we look to them and say like I think they've left quite a legacy for particularly Western civilization. What sorts of things stand out?
Speaker 2:One of the books that I recommend when people if people want to get into the Spartans without going down to taking a history class. Besides my podcast, I really like Steven Pressfield's Gates of Fire. Yeah, it's fantastic. I got to meet him a couple of weeks ago in person at an event. He's a really nice guy.
Speaker 2:But so some of the things that we can take away from the Spartans are just a devotion to virtue, and I think the Spartans, above all, were obsessed with the way that they raised their children. This just comes very clear in Plutarch Roto-Biography of Lycurgus, who's this kind of mythical founding figure of Sparta, and half of the time he's talking about the system that Lycurgus instituted to make sure that the citizens were trained in virtue that the paying attention to the way that they eat their meals, paying attention to the way that the older boys relate to the younger boys Of course they have gender segregated education back then Paying attention to the way that money is treated in society. The Spartans didn't have money. They didn't have coins. They had these awkward iron spits that they had to trade, that were completely useless. You couldn't even. You could maybe grill meat with them, but that's about it, Because he didn't want Spartans to be traders, he wanted them to be warriors.
Speaker 2:Now maybe we wouldn't take that particular application of that principle. The principle itself is really interesting that all of our life, the way that we order it, affects our ability to be excellent and to win. And I think the Sparta is just the epitome of that consciousness of how can we order our lives mindfully around the principles that we want to live on. And I think that, as we're maybe living in a world as Christians where it's increasingly hostile it's the negative world as Aaron Wren has been writing about we need to think a lot about how we arrange our communities, how we arrange our schools. There's classical school movement happening my daughter's in one and I think schools can a lot of times be the kernel of new communities forming and new in-person communities. It's so important to get to know each other in person. So I think that we have a lot to learn from the Spartans as kind of institution builders around a kind of virtuous ideal.
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Speaker 1:I even thinking in raising boys and a lot of young men dealing with discipleship and young men in the church I think it was in the gates of fire.
Speaker 1:But Pressfield makes this kind of comment about how you know like a boy at some point would be separated from his father and mentored by another man, and part of the reason for that, you know he goes kind of through it, I guess, the psychology of it, you know, being that you know a father will sometimes have blind spots for his own son. His son won't tell him the truth because he wants to please him. And you know, even that has been formative in the way that I think about discipleship, because it is true, it's like you know, it's great to you know, obviously, mentor and disciple your sons, but you also need other men in the community with whom they can be honest and kind of get different perspectives. But it really comes back to that idea of you know raising up other, you know, just whole generations of men, particularly, as you said, in our context when there's quite a bit of hostility.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and they need to be let off to or kicked out of the house for a period. There's Spartans have this rite of passage in the Agogay, where you have to go and like, live in outdoors with a single cloak for a whole season and hunt and steal your food. I'm not suggesting that we should have our sons steal food, but, you know, getting them outside of the house at an early age and in the company of mentors is really important, something that you know. We I think we tend to be coddled, you know, even when we go to college. College is not a rite of passage in the way that that term was sort of used and that institution had such purchase over human culture for so many centuries. You know we need more of those kind of getting out from under the thumb of the house really Working sooner.
Speaker 2:I think that's another reason that we don't see greatness as much today is because we just we put off that whole becoming a man and becoming a provider until you're 23, 24. Like that's like the normal given track, which is kind of crazy. You know, like I've been listening, I really like this podcast founders. I try to model myself in part off of founders and hardcore history. So you get the drama with Dan Carlin, you get the practical application with like founders, and founders is all about. You know the biographies of entrepreneurs and so many of these guys. They're working by the time they're 16 and they're learning. They're learning some hard skills and out in the world and having to fend for themselves and I think I think we do it just to service by not at least setting up some opportunities for our young men to do that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's absolutely right. But one of the other places I've really benefited it seems like there's an uptick in this as well, but sort of like the Stoic philosophy you got Ryan Holiday and people like this, but a lot of it has been really helpful. So I want to ask you just a little bit about that, the interesting thing I find about it the more I've read like Seneca and some of the other Stoic stuff, the more I see it in the apostle Paul. So when you read like the letter to the Philippian church, I'm like this guy is clearly well versed in Stoic philosophy and a lot of people would think Stoicism is joylessness, which is not true. It's really about, I guess, like an emotional self-discipline, being able to process events, and really kind of an understanding of the way Providence works. And when bad things happen you're like, well, is this expected? That bad things happen? Well, yeah, so why are you so upset? You know that sort of mental training and self-discipline, but what, I guess? Why do you think that is resurging? And then what's the importance of it?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think Stoicism is a great positive trend and I've certainly benefited a lot from it myself. So the pillars of Stoicism to me are focusing on what is in your control and not getting upset about what's not in your control, and being very careful about where you draw that line, because it can be both a lot more in your control than you realize and at the same time you stress a lot about the things that you can't control. And this is just very much a translatable into Christian doctrine God will provide for the things for tomorrow. No need to worry about tomorrow. See the lilies of the field.
Speaker 2:And I think Stoicism was always really good and Cato is the supreme Stoic for the ancients. Stoicism is really good at also living a life according to duty, according to an ideal and being willing to sacrifice for that, and Seneca talks a lot about Cato. And Seneca also talks about zeal and the power of having an image of the great sage or somebody who really lives up to the ideals in your mind constantly, almost like whispering on your shoulder. I've got a couple of busts behind me on my shelf Julius Caesar and Sulla looking over my shoulder, but you know. So there's that pillar, and the other pillar for me is live according to nature which is actually very Christian and maybe we define nature slightly differently but that there is a natural way of doing things, that you need to pay attention to how humans are constituted and created, and that getting emotional about things that aren't in your control is not living according to nature. Actually, you're not created do that way and nature has this human nature mean to say that there is a human nature is to say that there is a better fulfillment of human nature, there's a teleology there, and then there's a worse one, and to recognize the moral law is something that is like part of the created order, part of the way that the universe works, and to not try to fight against it, to just accept it. So I also love that there's so many stoic sayings and I love the one Amor Fati, the love of fate. That's actually it's a Latin phrase, but I think Nietzsche actually formulated that one to just you know, whatever is happening, you just accept it and almost love it. You know this is, this is what God has given me, the gods, if you're Marcus Aurelius, and we should accept it and once you kind of take that step of embracing the things that you can't change, it gets so much easier to solve these problems, right?
Speaker 2:So Plutarch is actually not a stoic. He admires Cato a lot, but he's a. He's a Platonist and he has some some essays kind of criticizing the stoics for various things. But in general I think the differences are at least on the level of moral philosophy are are rather negligible, and one of the things that he took from the stoics was a quotability. They were. Seneca is so quotable, there's so many maxims that you can use. I think that style of popular philosophy is something that the stoics really perfected in a way, even though Plutarch disagrees with them on doctrine, certain kind of you know use of doctrine we don't need to get into. He really he really took up that, that charge of like popular philosophy. Let's make this applicable for people. So that's yeah, the more the merrier.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely, and I think that's that's part of the reason it resonates with men, right, of course, holiday the obstacles, the way for Marcus Aurelius, but you know, you actually do those things kind of stick with you. They can be popularized still very meaningful but it helps you actually apply them in daily life if you can actually remember them. One of the guys you mentioned was Sulla, and we were talking about this before the show started, but it's interesting because even Elon Musk, on your Twitter feed, was responding to something you had said about Sulla. So, for our listeners, who is Sulla, why important and what was the lesson you were trying to, I guess, draw from him in posting about him?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think Sulla is gotten traction a lot lately because he's a he's a great revenge figure. This is you know, elon posted a meme a while back. So Sulla was famous for fighting and winning the first great Roman civil war. This is in the generation before Julius Caesar. He actually met Caesar and almost had him executed and then spared him, famously as a boy. And Sulla was the. He became a dictator after he won the civil war and dictator is this Roman office that he kind of resurrected, had been lying kind of obsolete for a century and a half. And Sulla resurrects the office of dictator and and he brings it back and Julius Caesar ends up using, using that office too. But but he does it in order to reform the Constitution. He wants after the civil war, if this bloody civil war he fought with Maurice, he wants to reform and try to prevent the same, the same, the problems that cause the civil war.
Speaker 2:But I think in one of the ways that he cleared cleared the stage for his reforms, famously was by a massive execution of his political enemies. It was called the proscriptions. So what he did was he. He took the names of 70 or 80 people, I think first and he posted them on a tablet in the forum for everybody to see Everybody's name on that list. There's a bounty on their head. So he kind of he leaves it to the private market and all these guys get either flee or most of them really get captured and executed and he confiscates their property and he's you know, he's got some justice on his side.
Speaker 2:People were blaming those guys for the civil war, but it it ends up he keeps adding names to the list. He keeps people keep reminding him of others who had double crossed them and it ends up being this we laugh and it's this horrible bloodbath of like. It ends up being like a thousand of the richest men in Rome. And so so Elon memed about this. You know, sulla on the one side of the meme, santa Claus on the other. You know he's made a list, he's checked it twice, he knows if you've been naughty or nice. He's also coming to town.
Speaker 2:But but I think it came up for me last summer when, when Elon was, david Sacks posted something about, you know, corruption driving the Ukraine war. And this is just like the Romans, because you know, corruption often drove Roman wars. Roman wars of expansion were often really driven by private interest by the people who would, who would benefit the most from this? Senators or the kind of tax farming businessmen? And so Sulla kind of responded to David Sacks Well, maybe we just need a new Sulla. So always the provocateur.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah yeah, and of course there was a whole barrage of articles, people pulling their hair out. Elon loves the dictators and he wants to clear out our political classes in a bloodbath. But you know, the thing is that I think people actually love Sulla today, not just for doing that, not just as this idea of like wouldn't it be nice to get revenge on my enemies? Yes, you know, in my darker moments I can kind of get excited about that. But interestingly, sulla laid down the office of dictator after he was done reforming the laws. He was just be dictator for life. He had he was voted dictator for life. He wasn't going to. Nobody was going to remove him from office at that point. Nobody had any chance of doing that. But he lays it down after about a year and a half and retires kind of amazingly. And this was so against the mold of what people were expecting. One of the great Roman historians of the late 19th century, theodore Momsen, compares Sulla to George Washington.
Speaker 2:A man of the status stature of George Washington. I think a lot of it had to do with the similar pattern of you know, he had great power and it really was up to him to lay him down because nobody was really in a position to strip him of it and he did it. Sulla also has this famous kind of a Washington at Monmouth moment where he, you know, his troops are all fleeing and he picks up a standard and he charges against the enemy, you know in the opposite direction, and shames them. But I think Sulla is a fascinating figure. I covered him in the cost of glory, even though he sort of has this gruesome side to him. And he was a right wing figure also, not it's worth mentioning that. You know he was on. If there's a right wing and a left wing in Roman politics, you know, populists, men of the people, versus the aristocrats, sulla is on the side of the right wing, the aristocrats. But but you know, one of the things that I think makes him so worth studying is because he is. He has a lot of these virtues. He has a lot of vices, but one of them is physical courage, and you can see this episode after episode the way that he captures Eugirtha.
Speaker 2:Who's this nemesis of the Roman army? This slippery Numidian African is actually, by physically using himself as bait in a hostage negotiation Incredibly daring guy. He's also a late bloomer. He just spends his 20s carousing and brothels and going to theaters and writing comedies. And he's an incredible general. He's just one of the most greatest commanders, probably like Rome's second greatest commander, but besides Julius Caesar maybe an equal Julius Caesar and he shows a lot of courage fighting against King Mithridates. So I think he's a figure worth reviving, but but I think he'll always be kind of kind of spicy for the reasons we've talked about, and Elon's going to keep shilling him.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah that's great and it makes for interesting conversation. In any event, One of the things too as we're talking about leaders, you can trace this as you've kind of done, but you look at all the leaders and one of the things that they all had is some capacity for rhetoric. So I want to ask you about that. Why is that important for leadership? What is it?
Speaker 2:first of all, yeah, so we talked about this a little bit. One of the things that I realized when I was doing my research on the later Roman Empire and on which is the time when the you could say the Christian classical tradition is created, when Christians decide we're not going to reject the pagan classics, we're going to use them. But the way that classical education whatever the equivalent is back then was packaged is basically men need to speak well in order to lead, and the way to do that is to study the great authors, to emulate them, to learn their language, to learn their examples and to become articulate. Through this process of kind of like zeal in education and rhetoric is what that whole system is called Rhetoric. From Greek it means the speaker's art, and rhetoric of course has all these connotations today about nonsense, but it basically just means the speaker's art, and the speaker is not just a talker, he's not just a talking head, a media person. The person who speaks well is the person who leads the army often, or is leading the state, so it's about preparing yourself for public life. This is what classical education was about for basically, you know Europeans up until the mid 19th century and maybe beyond. This is certainly the way that the colonial Americans thought about what we call the great books today. Yes, there's all this stuff about truth and beauty and improving your mind, but it's really about learning to become a great speaker, to becoming scary in speaking, as the Greeks would say, danos legaine, to be really good at persuading people in all aspects of public life.
Speaker 2:And so I'm trying to revive this a little bit with my podcast. A lot of what we do is looking look at great speeches that these men make. I did a series on Cataline and Cicero's clash with Cataline. This is great conspirator, and my whole attitude toward these great lives is not just what can we learn from them as leaders and better leaders, but also how do we get to speak like them? Somebody like Sulla, incredibly effective speaker. We don't have a lot of his speeches, but certainly the way that Julius Caesar rose to power was because he was Rome's second greatest orator and we have a lot of his texts today.
Speaker 2:So I've actually started a summer retreat, a men's retreat in Rome where we kind of drill into the ancient art of oratory and there are a lot of tactics and there's a system, a framework for how you go about collecting your thoughts and how you go about mining the ancient authors for the most useful bits, and when we go to Rome, we tour the sites, but we also have a lot of focus on practice.
Speaker 2:This is one of the lessons that you see again and again in the rhetoric manuals practice, practice, practice. That's the most important thing. But so part of my mission is really getting this, trying to reorient us as men around, like what is the value of continuing to educate ourselves, as we're talking about probably educating our sons, maybe our daughters? Educating ourselves can really help us advance in our careers. We don't just read books in order to kind of cultivate our minds, but in order to become more effective speakers, and the art of rhetoric for me is how do we approach our reading from this perspective of how can I improve and become more persuasive and more effective and deploy this knowledge that I'm getting as a repertoire, as a kind of ammo for my daily life as a leader and as a business person?
Speaker 1:That's so important. Where can people learn more about that? The Rome.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so CostofGlorycom is my website and if you go to CostofGlorycom it'll tell you about the retreat. So this will be our second summer running and we had a blast last summer and we intend to do it more often.
Speaker 1:Well, it's fascinating too, I think, with rhetoric. One of the things that Paul will say, I think, in Corinthians is I wasn't powerful in speech, or something like this. People are like, oh, he was terrible speaker. And then you read a lot of the speeches that we have, particularly in the book of Acts, and you're like I think this guy had actually mastered rhetoric is what it was.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely yeah, it's the logos, it's the Christ is the greatest order of all time. Right, he's like the most effective speaker that ever lived, and Paul channels a little bit of that. People do think that he was trained in classical rhetoric. I think he sure was. He knows what he's doing, he knows his own style. But man, that guy had a lot of practice too, you can tell.
Speaker 1:Yeah that's excellent. Well, alex, I want to thank you so much for joining me on this episode of the podcast. Of course, we'll point everybody in the show notes where they can check out your Twitter feed. I'll see your website Encourage people to check out the podcast. But again, sir, thank you so much for joining me. Thanks a lot.
Speaker 2:Eric, it's been a pleasure.
Speaker 1:Well, thanks again for listening to this episode of the Hard man podcast. Hopefully it's been beneficial for you. We appreciate all of our Patreon supporters and if you're not yet a supporter of the show, we encourage you to check the link in the show notes. You can join today for as little as $5 a month. That goes a long way to supporting this work and to supporting the work of New Christendom Press. Once again, encourage you to check out newchristendompresscom. Com-see us at our conference in June. That's June 6th through 8th. Host of great speakers, including Dr Joe Rigney. We've got Pastor Joel Webin and a number of great speakers lined up. We're going to have music from Pastor Brian Sauvay as well. It's going to be a great time. Again, that's newchristendompresscom. Come and see us at this year's annual conference in Ogden, Utah. Well, thanks again for listening to this episode of the podcast and until next time, stay frosty. Fight the good fight Act like men.