Toxic Males, American Exceptionalism and Papyrus Scrolls

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Hello, ladies.

Hello, gentlemen.

This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

I am Jack Fowler, the host.

You're here to listen to the star and namesake Victor Davis Hansen, who is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

He has an official website.

It's called The Blade of Perseus.

Its web address is victorhanson.com.

And I'll tell you later in this episode why you should go there and why you should even subscribe.

We are recording this episode in late June.

And this is one of four episodes I'm recording with Victor for when he will be away

on the Hillsdale cruise in mid to late July.

And these questions have been submitted by you, the listeners.

Thank you for responding to our request for them.

And we will get three or four questions in here today for Richter.

And we'll start off with something about James Carville

and his criticism of the Democratic Party, believe it or not, right after these important messages.

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We're back with the Victor Davis Hansen show.

Victor, this is going to be a little lengthy here, which is going to

pee off some listeners, but this is, I think, a really interesting

quote discussion, and your views on what he has to say, I think many of our listeners would want to hear.

So, Carville was at some,

I have this Aspen Institute

kind of event.

He was talking to that guy, Jonathan K.

Part, who's on MSNBC all the time.

They're having an interview.

And

here's what Carville says.

If you start speaking like NPR,

you're going to lose votes.

I just don't like the term communities of color.

I live in New Orleans.

They got three guys on the street corner.

Hey, fellas, how are things in the communities of color today?

They said, What is this son of a bitch talking about, jibe ass bastard out there?

We started on this coded language and we let it get away from us.

Guess where our young male number is going in the toilet because Democrat messaging is too feminine.

It just is.

Then Carville asked, K-part asked Carville about his line that Democrat culture has too many preachy females, too much, don't eat hamburgers, don't eat, watch football, wear a condom.

This cursing, I'm not going to curse, but

anyway, there's much more here.

But Carville has, he is, he has said it, and he's repeating it, not backing down, that the

feminization of the rhetoric, and maybe the feminization is just more than rhetoric.

Maybe it's about into the ideology of the Democratic Party and its

consequences with voters, including white men who don't want to hear this crap bowler.

Victor, your thoughts on what he has to say?

And then if you have any thoughts on James Carville, too, I'm sure our listeners would appreciate hearing them.

You know,

James Carville has got to be, what, 78, 79, 80, somewhere in there.

And

he was very obscure because the Democratic Party left him behind.

He was, remember, the guru behind Bill Clinton.

The economy's stupid.

What?

Yes, the economy's stupid.

And he was sort of, there was the George Stephanopoulos wing, the hard left, the Hillary Clinton people, and then there was a Carville pragmatist.

And

he fashioned himself.

I think his dad was, he grew up in a base or his dad owned a store.

And he was a blue-collar guy from, I guess, from Louisiana.

And

he married, remember that was kind of very strange.

He married Mary Matlin, who was

a blue-collar woman herself, came out of, I guess, Chicago or Midwest.

She had worked for the Bushes.

So the Bush-Clinton rivalry ended that one of the chief campaign strategists for each campaign, Matlin and Carville, married.

And then she moved toward the center and he supposedly moved toward the center.

And they were in their 50s and 60s.

That would be, you know, around the millennium and 2010, et cetera.

They were very, they were on TV all the time as

disinterested pundits.

In other words, you could believe what they said because they had this marriage that had bridged the political gulf and they were moderate.

I think she's not even a Republican anymore.

She's either an independent or libertarian, and he's a Democrat.

But he lost his voice during the Obama years.

And

he's just a straight-ticket Democrat.

He'll vote for any Democrat.

But the Democratic Party left him behind.

And by that, I mean he was the

voice, the Dick Morris voice into Bill Clinton's ear to be pregnant.

100,000 police officers, school uniforms, balanced budget, all of that stuff.

And that's a taboo now.

But now that the left got what they wanted,

and they used this veneer, this old Joe Biden veneer and the Faustian bargain that Jill got her glory and Joe got the office and Hunter was in the White House.

And then in exchange for that, they outsourced the presidency.

I don't know who's running it, but they should tell us after that debate who's running the country, because it's surely not Joe Biden.

Maybe it's Michelle.

Maybe it's Hillary.

I don't know who it is.

It's the left wing of the Democratic Party, though.

And I think he feels an opening now that they got what they wanted.

They destroyed the border.

They destroyed deterrence.

The crime is soaring.

It's what I warned you people about.

There are two sexes, not three.

And you people are skulls.

You're

Jimmy Carter on steroids.

And he's saying, don't tell the working classes of which my wife and I came from what to do.

Are you going to destroy the party?

Well,

it's destroyed.

And I think he thinks now that it's destroyed, its only chance to have a Phoenix-like rebirth is to go back to Clintonism, of which he was an architect.

So he's got renewed

prominence in these podcasts.

And that's why we're starting to hear more and more of him.

And he was one of the early people, along with Nate Silver, the pollster,

and a few others that were calling for Joe Biden to step down as a pragmatist.

And I think the Biden family, as we're speaking today on Sunday, is meeting.

I think he will step down, but I'm not sure that's going to happen.

But I do still think it's more likely than not.

Yeah.

Do you think, I mean, his point is about rhetoric.

But as we saw, Victor, in these protests on the campuses,

we talked about about this a little.

A lot of the leadership

has been women.

It just happened.

And

I'm no psychiatrist.

I'm no biologist or any, I don't know what the hell I am.

But

there is some kind of feminism, even a harshness.

Well, I mean, you saw the college presidents from MIT, Penn, and Harvard.

They were all women.

And when you this is a big myth that everybody should, this idea that women are underrepresented in academics, that's not true.

About almost 60% now

of

undergraduates are women.

And you're starting to see it equal out in graduate school, especially in the humanities and social sciences, that the PhDs and masters are going more to women than to men.

And that's certainly true when you look at hiring the last 15 years.

I have maybe one letter every two months from some, it goes like this, Jack.

Hello, Professor Hansen.

My name is Joe Blow, and I just got my PhD, blank, blank, and it's usually in classics, history, military history.

I've applied for 29 jobs.

I didn't get an interview.

I was told discreetly that I'm a white male and I'm not.

My thesis is on blank blank, which no one likes, meaning it was on, you know, the Athenian Empire's inscriptions or

the

strategy of the Battle of Okinawa, something like that.

Is there any chance that you could write a recommendation for me, serve on my thesis committee, write on my behalf?

Okay.

I have never, ever, ever got a letter from a woman requesting the same type of help.

And there's a lot of conservative women in academia, not a lot, but some.

So it's

he's right about that, that there's a feminization of academia, there's a feminization of Hollywood, there's a feminization of our institutions, and

the rhetoric hasn't caught up with that.

The rhetoric of women are minority like blacks and Latinos, they're underrepresented,

they're being oppressed, they don't make as much as men.

That myth has been exploded when you look at all the factors involved in the calculus of compensation.

So I think that's part of what he's saying, that people just want to be left alone and they don't want to be told every single day that they're destroying the planet.

They're destroying this particular gender.

They don't want to hear it anymore.

And it plays right into Donald Trump's hands.

Yeah.

Well, it's a back against a backdrop also, Victor, of

a war on boys, which we

see

in our schools and

boys, boys, and then, of course, young men.

So this is all take all the time.

I saw this 30 years.

You're absolutely right.

I saw it 40 years ago when I began teaching, more than 40 years ago, that

if I had bright students and they

wanted careers that hinged on further education beyond the baccalaureate, it was much easier to help them if they were minorities and particularly women.

But when you got a brilliant white male at Cal State Fresno in the middle of the San Joaquin Valley, and you wanted to help that kid get to a good business school, law school, PhD, it was very difficult.

Not because the person wasn't brilliant and had done brilliant work, but because of the stereotype.

And then, of course, the schools of education represent that.

So the teachers look at masculinity, and we have that adjective that's inseparable now, toxic masculinity.

I guess toxic masculinity means flying a B-17 without fighter escort during a daylight bombing of Schweinfurt in 1943,

toxic.

Or, I don't know,

something like that, flying a B-29 over Tokyo or maybe landing on Omaha Beach in the first wave, that's toxic.

Or going to Fallujah or Mosul, that's toxic.

When you get rid of the toxic mails, you've got a, and we've got 45,000 toxic mails short in the military.

And I hope somebody, I hope the LGBTQ community steps up and makes up the 45,000 shortfall, because as I've said so many times, the demographics are pretty clear who is not joining for a variety of reasons I won't get into.

We've gotten in, I had nausea before, got into them, but somebody's going to have to make up that.

Maybe it'll be women, maybe it'll be LGBTQ, maybe it'll be Latinos and blacks, but most of of the people in those groups are joining up consistent with their past demographics, but one group is not.

And I don't know how you're going to get them back, but until you do get them back, the other groups will have to step up to make up the shortfall.

Yeah.

Well, if they do step up, Victor, we're just going to have less

drag time children's hours at local libraries.

Are you suggesting they won't be as eager to go to, I don't know, Taji,

Fallujah.

They won't be willing to go to Helmand Province.

They won't be willing to guard people at the Kabul airport, in which Joe Biden says no one was killed.

I guess.

I don't know.

Well, those are some fighters.

I tell you, I've been embedded twice in Iraq, and whether it was on a Black Hawk helicopter with those guys at night

or

in a Humvee going into a

Haji,

There's no better fighter in the world than those guys.

Well, Victor, we're going to, despite some of these gloomy thoughts, we're going to get your views on American exceptionalism.

And we're going to do that when we come back from these important messages.

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And we thank the good people at Sol Air for sponsoring the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

We're back with the Victor Davis-Hanson Show recording in late June.

We are happy to have received many listener

questions.

And these podcasts that Victor and I are recording now are to fill in the gaps when he will be sailing on the Hillsdale cruise.

So we thank those folks who have sent questions in.

And here one has come in from Joseph in Connecticut.

And he writes,

what is the origin of the concept of American exceptionalism?

How is America exceptional?

Why is America exceptional?

And what are we to make of politicians such as Barack Obama who discounted the value of American exceptionalism?

Victor, I think American exceptionalism is a

very real thing.

Joseph breaks it down in a few ways.

And to get it wiped on by Barack Obama a few years ago

was a telling moment in American politics.

But what are your thoughts, Victor?

Yeah, that was very famous when he was asked about that.

He said, we're exceptional in the way the British think they're exceptional.

and the Greeks think they're exceptional.

Everybody thinks they're exceptional.

We can break it down two ways.

One, are we exceptional?

And B, where did the idea come from that we are exceptional?

If we break it down

empirically and not just rah, rah, rah, chauvinistically, well, let's look at it.

There's 7 billion people on the planet, and we make up 340 million.

And we have the largest economy.

It's well over $23, $24 trillion

GDP annual.

And

China is two-thirds, but when you think about it, China has 140,

1.4 billion people.

We have 340 million.

So four and a half times, so an American, one American is producing 25% more goods and services than our three of his counterparts in communist China, to be a rough calculus.

So economically, we are preeminent.

How's that possible given our population?

If you look at our military, I know we don't lose wars anymore, but if you look at our nuclear force, our submarines, our carriers, we still, even in our decline, are preeminent.

I think the universities are in crisis, and

it's a real question whether the humanities and social science are going to make it.

But that being said, the contamination of the woke virus hasn't fully, fully, it's there, but it hasn't fully infected and destroyed physics, computer engineering, coding,

law, medical school, business school.

It's there.

But these universities still attract most of the world's would-be

graduate students.

I think they still are the, given, if you look at ratings by Japan or Britain and they rate universities, they usually out of the top 25 have 20 American universities.

California's got five of them.

You know, Caltech, Berkeley, Stanford, UCLA, USC.

On education, if you look at food, I don't know if we produce any more in aggregate amounts as China, but I think in value,

American agriculture is number one in the terms of the value and the diversity of the products that they produce.

So if you look at the government,

I'm no more critic of the administrative state and the warping of our system by the the left, but still we're 233 years into it, and we have the longest constitutional system.

So I think it is exceptional.

We're the only multiracial society that has ever worked in a democratic environment.

Brazil is trying it.

India is trying it.

It doesn't work as well as it does here, at least until recently.

Where did the idea come from?

I think it comes from John Winthrop's City on the Hill.

We're a City on a Hill.

I think that was in...

I I used to teach the New Testament in Greek, and I think that's from Matthew.

And

it's in the Sermon on the Mount when he says the city on the hill can't be hidden.

In other words, the Christian community is a beacon of light that everybody sees.

And I think John Winthrop and some of the early pilgrims and later the founders had the idea that the United States would be so exceptional and that and they defined that exceptionalism as a place of freedom to worship and religious tolerance,

that it would be unmistakably a beacon, as Jesus mentioned in his Beatitudes in the Sermon on the Mount.

I've been reading Tocqueville.

I'm writing an article for the New Criterion, but Tocqueville talks about, I think, one of the first people that says that

whatever these Americans are doing is a French aristocrat who visited in the early 1830s.

He said it's a very exceptional place because

they may suffer the excesses of the mob, the oclocracy, but for now, they have actually given power to a middle class of independent, autonomous,

mostly landowning small farmers, and they run the government, not the elite, not the aristocracy, not the monarchy, and not the mob, the subsidized poor.

And he was very impressed by that.

He thought that was quite unusual.

Kennedy talked about us being exceptional.

It's kind of funny that the two most popular presidencies, presidents, oh, in the last 80 years have probably been John F.

Kennedy's brief tenure and Ronald Reagan.

They both talked about an exceptional America.

Right.

So I hope that answers the question.

Yeah, you know, Lookville, I'm so glad you mentioned that, Victor, and recommend to our listeners, if they haven't yet, find his Democracy in America.

Because, yeah, I think he gets to the heart of it.

If there was a problem in Europe, what did the European do?

He turned to

the king, to the prince, to the government.

If there was a problem in America in 1830, what did Americans do?

They banded together and formed voluntary associations to fix this problem, build this hospital, build this orphanage.

So there was something truly unique about...

He did.

And he lived and survived the French Revolution.

He was

in its aftermath in Napoleon.

So he felt that the revolution against monarchy had progressed better in the United States than it had in his own country because we had not turned into kind of a guillotine Jacobin moment as they had in France.

And he was very suspicious of pure Jacobin democracy.

That is what 51%, Athenian democracy, what 51%

can do on any one day without constitutional guardrails.

and it would just end in chaos.

So he was, and he felt that the reason it had, and it was a very Aristotelian point of view, that if you had an autonomous, free, land-owning population that was the majority, then they would bring a degree of stability to the system.

Right.

Yeah.

I don't think we have that anymore, and that's why the system's under stress.

That's right, yeah.

The last great hope of earth,

as Lincoln called it, it's we have to recognize that.

Hey, Victor,

I have an ensuing question from a listener, and I'll get to it after a break that relates to classics.

But you've mentioned this before,

maybe once or twice, and you just mention it now, that you taught the New Testament in Greek.

Did you, I mean, you weren't teaching it to be a religion teacher.

You're teaching it as part of

the language,

of course, I have to assume.

Is that your idea to teach that course?

I had a very wonderful teacher.

I learned Greek.

I was a freshman

at the University of California, Santa Cruz, right after it opened, and I had not taken Greek and Latin in my entire life.

And I wanted to be a classics major.

And I went to the advisor, who was a brilliant guy, the late John Lynch.

I really loved the guy.

He was wonderful.

And he said, you know, You need three years of Latin or Greek to go to graduate school.

And do you want to hang out?

And I said, no, I want to go to Greece one year.

So he said, then you're only going to have three years.

So you better go to the Yale-intensive Greek.

And I went there and there was a wonderful teacher, John Madden, he taught.

And I was like 18.

Everybody was in their mid-20s or graduate students in other fields.

But we read the New Testament.

We had eight weeks of Greek grammar, I think, and then we read the New Testament, John.

So I always adopted that.

The last at Cal State, I would teach Chase and Phillips' New Introduction to Greek.

It's two 15-week week semesters, so around week 25, I started introducing the New Testament, and then sometimes I would offer the New Testament as the introductory second year.

Turns out that

John probably was not a native Greek speaker.

He might have been Aramaic.

And

that

John, which is the, it's different than the four, you know, the Lagos, it's very different than the other three gospels as far as its philosophical approach and religious doctrine, etc.

In the beginning was the Word and the Word was God, but

the vocabulary is much more limited.

The syntax is,

you know, subject, verb, predicate.

There's not a lot of subordinate clauses.

The octative mood's not used.

So it's very easy to read for beginning Greek.

So I would read that and then I'd give independent studies

to students reading Luke and Matthew as well.

And I got to, and then I, you know, because a lot of my students were Latino Catholics and I had a lot of people

from the Oklahoma diaspora, you know, the

sort of Merle Haggart type of Bakersfield culture Tulare, that I had a lot of evangelical Protestants, had a lot of Mormon students.

Fresno was a big Mormon enclave because, you know, the IRS branch had come from Ogden, Utah, and brought out a Mormon hierarchy in the early 70s.

So we had a big, we still do have a big Mormon community.

And you put all that together.

So when I would be teaching grammar, questions of biblical exegesis would come up.

And so

I got so I could,

you know, I was familiar with the text.

And

I'm a believer, so I would approach it from a little different direction than they would by trying to explain the phenomenon or the uniqueness of Christianity given what classical

morality was at the time.

A good Greek was somebody who helped his friends and hurt his enemies.

And if you didn't hurt your enemies, it was just as bad as not helping your friends.

But the idea that you're going to turn the other cheek and blessed are the meek,

that was a very radical concept given the prevailing ideologies of the time.

Religious and secular.

Islam is very different Later, you know,

it would borrow from Christianity, but its message is not Sermon on the Mount.

No, no, by no means.

Okay, well, we're going to skip on this particular episode, Victor, to the classical trend.

And we have an interesting question from Scott, and we'll get to that after these important messages.

We're back with the Victor Davis Hanson Show.

I forgot, Victor.

If I've getting old here, maybe I'm getting like

Joey from Delaware, but

you have a website.

VictorHanson.com is the web address, the Blade of Perseus.

And I want to recommend to our listeners, I hope I haven't done this already, and I recommend that you go there regularly and find the links to Victor's articles and essays in American greatness, his syndicated columns, his his various appearances on various podcasts and radio shows, etc.

You'll find plentiful links there, the archives of these podcasts, links to Victor's book, including the current bestseller, The End of Everything.

And then you'll see these other articles called, there'll be a little black label on them called Ultra.

And those are exclusive pieces that Victor writes for The Blade of Perseus.

You have to subscribe in order to be able to read them.

There's two or three a week that Victor writes.

So if you're a fan of his writing, and you should be, do subscribe, five bucks a month, $50 discounted for the full year.

That's the blade of Perseus, VictorHanson.com.

And while I'm mentioning some of these things at VD Hanson, that's Victor's handle on X.

which used to be known as Twitter.

And on Facebook, there's VDH's Morning Cup.

Go sign up for that.

And there's a friendly group, the Victor Davis-Hansen Fan Club, not officially associated, but good people,

about 60,000 members there.

So go check that out.

Victor Scott writes this question.

Please talk about Herculaneum

papyri.

I hope I said that right.

I've been seeing reports

of the limited success researchers are having in recovering text from these scrolls and the promise of the latest techniques to finally reveal a treasure trove of ancient texts.

There are perhaps two main topics of interest.

First, is the technology being used to virtually unscroll the scrolls, including CT scans and AI.

Second, is what may be found over the next decade if efforts are successful and reveal the contents of many scrolls.

Wouldn't it be wonderful if missing chapters of Roman and Greek history or new Greek philosophy texts are found?

It would be a boon to classical studies.

Victor, I just want to add to Scott's question that

given what you

the lay of the land of classical studies now, I have a feeling that had these technological opportunities come 25, 30 years ago, it might have met with a more receptive

researcher class than a much more ideological class that's prevailing in the studies today.

But, Victor, your thoughts on Scott's question: What do you know of this and what opportunities do you see?

Well,

beneath Mount Vesuvius, of course, there's Pompeii and nearby Herculaneum.

And those cities

were

buried quite precipitously over a matter of days, if not weeks,

by an eruption, 79 A.D.

The elder

Pliny, excuse me, the younger Pliny writes about it.

And we know that because of the sulfur, the ash, the volcanic materials, it kind of crystallized life at the moment.

So you have people who are literally suffocated and then the ash and mud that flows down from the volcano seals them.

And so you can actually see their actual con, and then we can make cast as the body dissolve.

You have that molded cast of figures of animals and dogs.

So if you go to Pompeii and Herculaneum, Herculaneum is not, you know, it's a small percentage

has been excavated.

Pompeii more so, but there's still a lot down there.

And these were

the Bay of Naples, very vibrant Roman imperial luxury cities, vacation spots, as they are today in the area.

And If you want to know a little bit about them, you can read Petronius the Satyricon, where most of the plot of the novel takes place somewhere between in Pompeii or Herculaneum.

And

in the early, late 1700s, middle 1700s, when people began to build and reclaim this land, they would burl down for foundations and they would find the

intact remains of this Roman city that had been preserved by this mud and ash.

And they

found a house of the, I guess it's called House of the Herculeum Papyre or the Philosopher, but it was the house of a Roman noble in the first century AD named Philodamus.

And we don't have complete libraries.

I mean, there's the great one at Alexandria that was destroyed, the one at Ephesus, the one at Pergamum, the one at Athens.

But we've never found a complete stack of papyrus.

Remember, the Greeks wrote on papyrus rolls that could be 50, 60, 100 feet long, but it only had a life, that Egyptian reed that they pounded into paper, sort of paper, and they rolled up, only had a life of 200 years.

So each time you had to copy it, you had a loss of, because it's very expensive, a loss of classical authors.

And what today we get out of papyrus are usually dumps, like at Oxyrhynchus in Egypt, where people would buy a book,

want somebody in the the family would just tear it up and then use it to write

shopping list or letters to a friend, and then they would throw it out in the trash.

And that trash heap at Oxyrhynchus in Egypt, because of the climate, preserved that.

And you can find some things that you don't survive through the manuscript tradition.

About 80%

of all classical literature was lost through the papyrus

evolution of being copied every 200.

Each time it had to be copied, something dropped out.

Around 400 AD,

people began to use parchment or vellum.

That would be animal skins.

It's a transition to paper.

And if you made it to that point,

the 20% of classical literature, if you made it to that point, you had another 60 or 70% chance of making it to printing, through paper, and then printing in Gutenberg.

So

we have about 5 or 10% of all

classical literature.

And sometimes, like, we can bypass that manuscript, you know, from papyrus to parchment.

Parchment's just a corruption of the word pergamum, where it started, the use of skins in the fourth century AD.

But my point is that we have Aristotle's Constitution of Athens, and we have a whole poem by Archilicus that survived in papyrus that was not, we don't have, it was lost.

It never made it to paper.

Excuse me, it never made it to parchment, never made it to paper and printing.

Once you get to printing, you're okay.

15th century, 16th century.

But

there are troves of papyrus every once in a while, garbage pits, so to speak.

And when you can, sometimes somebody threw out a book

and they can find it.

Okay.

So this is one of those situations where

the lava and the ash and the mud consumed this philosopher Philodemus' house intact.

And

whatever they are, there's a lot of roles, hundreds of them.

Those roles, for the most part, were not copied.

And they didn't survive the copying.

They didn't get into parchment.

They didn't get into paper and printing.

And what are they?

Well,

it's like taking

a roll of hard toilet paper and rolling it all up and then throwing it in a fire or, you know, just put it in your microwave and it just turns to ash, but it has its shape.

So when you tried to unroll it in the past,

sometimes they could very carefully unroll it and then they could copy it quickly before it dissolved.

And we got some of it.

And it turns out, Jack, that

Philodemus was an Epicurean philosopher.

Remember that there were four schools of philosophical thought in the ancient world.

There was Plato's Academy, there was Aristotle's Lyceum, there was Zeno-Stoa, and there was Epicurean, the Garden of Epicureas.

That's the idea.

It's kind of an atheist, materialistic

philosophy.

It's not just, you know, if it...

tastes good or if it feels good, do it, although that's the caricature, ancient and modern, but it was kind of a don't worry about about death, don't worry about your soul, don't worry about anything.

You're just a combination of atoms that we combined.

It was very popular, you know, in the 60s.

People said, bury me under a tree without a coffin, and then I will just be absorbed by the tree and live forever.

And then I'll be an apple, then a bird will eat an apple.

That kind of stuff.

New age.

Well, anyway, we don't know who this Philodamus was, but it turns out that most of the things that were on roll were Philodamus' Epicurean treatises.

And this created a great controversy whether he was,

he's mentioned, but he's a very obscure person.

And

I guess the two schools of thought were, well, this guy's just a narcissist who just had a house and he self-published all his books.

And so he's overrepresented.

And he was kind of a mediocre philosopher.

So basically, we got most of his work.

Or he was somebody who was a lost genius, and he didn't really make it into the manuscript tradition, and therefore it's very valuable.

But everybody concedes that because the original work of Epicurus, unlike Plato or Aristotle, is gone, completely gone.

There are almost no extant treatises by Epicurus.

What we know of Epicurus survives in a weird poem in Latin by Lucretius on the nature of things, De Naturum,

De Rerum Natura, excuse me, and in

Diogenes Laertes and Sexus Empiricus.

So it's second, third, fourth hand.

However, there seems to be some

Epicurean treatises in these papyrus.

But every time you try to unroll them, they just vanish.

So what's happened, a lot of private philanthropists have given awards for the people who can actually unread them.

I mean, read them, unroll them, and then read it and translate them.

And that's starting to happen because of very sophisticated fourth-generation CAT CT technology.

So people have been able to virtually unroll these things through layered photography, computer guided scans, and print the text.

And I think some of them are 30 or 40 feet long or longer.

And while most of them are, again, what earlier scholars found that they were Philodemus' own work, there's some that may be,

if not Epicurus himself, there might be a closer rendition of his philosophy than the Roman era versions of it.

So that's what people are doing now.

They're using these new technologies to get their hands on these precious

papyrus rolls.

If you touch them, they'll fall apart.

If you unroll them, they'll fall apart.

And

unroll them with a computer, so to speak, without damaging them.

And then translate them.

There's a guy who I think is in charge, Richard Yanko.

He's about my age.

He's very famous.

He was sort of a...

When I was in graduate school in my early 20s, in the mid-1970s, he was already in his 20s, a brilliant Homeric scholar.

He was probably one of the best scholars of classical Greek.

He wrote a really great book on Aristotle's lost poetics, where he's almost, through other passages and inferences, he almost reconstructed what he thought would have been the text of Aristotle's lost treatise on comedy.

And he's in charge of it.

So you have one of the world's great philologists

who's in charge of much of the effort to unwind, I guess, conceptually with these computers and sophisticated X-ray machines and then translate it.

Aaron Powell,

Victor, would a young Victor,

not about you personally, but

a young student in the classics,

if the technology existed at the time, a lot of ifs here, but is this the kind of stuff that would have been attractive to a typical classics

student trying to get a doctorate?

This kind of

reading of

these newfound

girls

It is.

There was

fields like this.

Now, one when I was in my 20s, gosh, that was

45 years, was nautical archaeology that with given new sonar and many subs, people were scanning the bottom of the the Mediterranean and finding ships that had, you know, intact wine or grain, pithoi, and they could find out exactly what the composition was.

They found out that, say, gluten, for example, was very

ancient Roman grains had just a fraction of the gluten that we do now.

So people who have gluten sensitivities

should not be pilloried.

and caricature because what they're doing is eating bread that through hybridization of the 20th century has far more proteins and gluten than ancient versions

of wheat did.

Things like that.

And then their epigraphy,

they started using rubber squeezes on the epigraphy is documents on stone that you can't really read because they're, but then they started to use computers

that took account for light and depth and they could reprint the text that you really couldn't see on the stone.

So there were things like that that were going on.

When I was, because I was near Silicon Valley, I remember in 1977, 78,

there was the first few people who were beginning to write their theses on computers, but those big mainframe.

There was a student that wrote his on it.

And then David Packard, the son of the famous Hewitt Packard, he was a classical scholar, and he did something quite amazing for his thesis.

Every author you have to do a concordance for.

That means that any word in the entire corpus of that author, you could identify where it was in the text, like an index, you know, it was more of a concordance.

And he did it with a computer of the entire corpus of Libby.

So if you wanted to say, well, how does Libby think about war, Bellum?

Well, the old days, you'd have to go to some 19th century concordance where some guy spent his entire life taking every word and then correlating that to where it

appeared and reappeared and reappeared a million times.

But you just took his concordance and said, Bellum.

Oh, here's the 185 times that Libby uses it.

And then that led to the Thesaurus.

of Greek literature in which he used that technology and he hired at his own expense the TLG program at the University of California at Irvine, where they took all of Greek literature, typed it into 1980s and 90s computers, and created a corpus of, I think, a 70 million words.

So now,

if you're writing

going to Greek, because it's Greek, not Latin, but if you're writing a thesis in Greek about the Greek language or something Greek, so I can remember

I was writing about a military, an article in military history,

and there's a word sturax and it means the the bud spike of a spear a hoplite spear it's a very rare word but you just type that in and you can get everywhere it appears anywhere in classical literature from 600

700 bc to 1400 a d

and that's pretty amazing

stuff like that but you see the problem with all this just to finish this conversation was

you're on the technical side or the fringe side, but nobody's going to hire you to do that.

The only way you can be hired at Brown or Tennessee, University of Tennessee, or the University of Georgia or,

you know,

Claremont is in a classics program.

And a classics program must, you must teach to get enough students.

We call it FTE.

full-time enrollment.

And that's how administrators fund programs.

So if you want to teach new technology of reading papyrus to three or four students, then you've got to go out and teach introduction to mythology and get 80 students or be a dynamic in-class teacher

in Latin or Greek where you'll get 30 who will stay the whole semester.

Because usually at the CSU, you had to have four classes and each I had to

average 25 students.

So I had to teach things like introduction to humanities with 90 students with no TA and to correct papers all night.

I was looking at some photos the other day my daughter had, and it's when they were all very small children.

There's not one photo when I'm holding them that I'm not, I don't have a blue book in the other hand.

Everyone.

I would just,

I never had any free time.

And I did that so that I could offer 10 students second year Greek reading Matthew or 10 students in Latin reading, you know, proarcha by Cicero.

But so those people that have those technical skills that are absolutely critical have to be subsidized.

Either somebody has to do the teaching for them, or they've got to go to an institute, or the department chairman has to say, this guy is doing, this woman is doing so many, such fascinating work for the...

for the future or the continuation of classical scholarship that I'm willing to allow him to have five students total work with him.

And that's very rare now.

And you can see what the woke movement did when all of these programs began to say, oh, Greek is too hard.

It discriminates against people.

Why should you, so you can be a classics major without knowing Greek and Latin.

Or maybe you shouldn't have a classic major at all.

Maybe you shouldn't have classics.

It's too discriminatory.

And if you're going to teach things about the ancient world, why don't you teach the real story where slavery and sexual oppression and homophobia and nativism and ethnic and racial chauvinism started?

So if you're a guy, you know, and and you go to Cal State, L.A., and you want to take a class in history of Greece and you want to learn about, you know, you've watched the 300, you want to learn about, you know, Persian War, glory of Athens,

something like that.

And you go walk in the classroom, the teacher says,

well, we're going to talk about how sexism and racism and homoviophomia started among these awful Greek.

Well, why would you want to take that class if the advocate for the ancient world is also also the person discouraging you to study it?

They're toxic.

And that's what destroyed the field.

So that's a long story about why people, so if you're a young 25-year-old or 30-year-old and you're finishing your PhD and you say,

I've spent my four or five years as an undergraduate.

I spent another four to six years of graduate school.

I need a life.

I don't have a home.

I'm not married.

I don't have kids.

I got to get on with my life.

I got to get a job.

It's not going to pay that well.

They're not hiring anybody and what counts.

They don't hire papyrus experts.

They don't hire people who love the Iliad.

They don't hire historians of the Peloponnesians.

They hire people who do race, gender, race, gender, woke, this, woke, that.

So that's what I'm going to write my thesis.

And then I'll get hired.

And then, of course, when you're hired, no one wants to take your class.

Vicious circle.

Well, Victor, we're at the end here.

We've run out the clock.

You've been terrific.

Thanks for that, by the way.

Thanks for everything you've offered today.

Thanks

to our

listeners for A, listening, B, sending in questions, and C, for some of you taking the time to go to Apple, if you listen on Apple, and go to their site and rate the show.

You can do that zero to five stars.

And Victor has an average of 4.9 plus plus from several thousands of people who've

done that.

So

thanks for that.

Some people also

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And here's one I'll read quickly.

It's from Oleg512, who writes, I was recently out of the country for 18 days.

I found that the first podcast I consistently downloaded and listened to while gone was this podcast.

I'm surprised how much I enjoy listening.

Thank you.

Thank you, Oleg512.

Thanks, everybody else, for listening.

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Victor, you've been terrific.

Thanks, everyone.

We will be back soon with another episode of the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

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Thanks again for listening.