Cynicism: the Roman Novel and Modern Politicking

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Hello, everybody.

This is the Victor Davis Hansen Show and this is our Saturday edition.

And we do something unusual on Saturdays.

We talk a little bit about the news stories that we didn't get to in the news roundup.

And then we go into a literature section.

So today will be Roman novels.

So stay with us for that in the second segment.

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Welcome back to the Saturday edition or the weekend edition.

Victor, there's still a lot of news stories we didn't get to on Friday.

The first one is there's a new whistleblower from Boeing and he's saying that they cut corners on that Dreamliner, I think it's the 777.

But we've also had a new incident with a Boeing 737 engine shell just unraveling in flight,

exposing the engine underneath it.

And I was wondering if you had any more reflections on that dangerous world of airlines.

Yeah, every time that I say something about Boeing or United, I get an angry letter,

an angry letter from listeners or readers who suggest that I'm disparaging DEI.

But I think we've had about eight of these now, and they seem to be, not all of them, there was a Southwest airliner that basically, this was the one where the cowling came off.

This is the second one they've had, then the Alaskan airline.

But it seems that Boeing is inordinately represented.

And the reason it's fair to question whether DEI has a role in all of this is that you just go to their website or their past websites and see what they're saying.

And the same thing is true with Majersk, I think that's how you pronounce it, the Danish shipping company that

was the owner or at least the operator of the huge container ship that hit the Francis Scott Key Bridge, which, by the way, is now under pressure to have its name changed when it's rebuilt.

But the point I'm making is if you go to their website, it's all about diversity, equity, inclusion.

And the same, the Boeing CEO said that he was going to ensure not on the front end, but on the back end, that 50% of his pilot training graduates would be DEI.

As soon as you do anything like that and you mandate

the person's race or gender, then you end up with a clotting gay at Harvard who's a plagiarist, or you end up with a complete incompetent like Kamala Harris.

Both those jobs were basically specified by race and gender.

And so if you're going to do that, that's fine, but then you have to explain to the public that uses your product that these,

what do you want to call it, near-misses, incidents, failures of maintenance.

or failures of construction or outsourcing on the Boeing part.

Then United or Boeing should just tell us, look, the people who worked on this or the people who were responsible for the maintenance on this had nothing to do with DEI.

They were long-time employees.

They were certified.

They were not hired on the basis of anything other than their merit.

And it was just a mistake.

Or this system is flawed.

But they don't do that to reassure the public.

It's the same cynicism that comes from when you see all of these people knocked out in New York, these young women,

and you see

a young woman.

You see a young guy yesterday, a tiny little 14-year-old, his girlfriend calls him from the mall in Casper, Wyoming, and said, two people with

hoodies are following me, and he's just a little scrawny kid.

He goes to help her, and

they kill him.

Two 15-year-olds killed him, stabbed him to death.

And they release the victim's picture, but they don't release the attackers.

And now, why is that?

And I don't know who they are, but the cynicism is such that when they

advertise diversity and they showcase diversity, and then they're selective about not being disinterested, not just saying, you know what?

If somebody happens to be

Latino, a Latino woman or a black male and they're one of the best pilots, great.

Tell us that if you want.

But on the other hand, if there is a problem and somebody did it, then see if it was because of the hiring.

And the same thing is true about our crime statistics.

So then what you do is you just create this utter cynicism.

So when this Wyoming story came out, all you got to do is look at the news accounts and jump down to the letters and they're so cynical.

In other words,

the news accounts are hyper-left wing and the comments are hyper-right-wing.

The comments are saying, they don't show the pictures, but I can tell by the name, and we know who did it.

And so that's what the left is doing.

And we're going to have more of these near-misses until somebody just says no one is a mechanic, a maintenance supervisor, a pilot, a crew member at United,

unless they have a qualified background and they meet the qualifying test or exams.

And I think you wouldn't have any skepticism, but they won't do that.

They do just the opposite.

They brag about their DEI.

And then they say it has...

See, my problem is this.

There's an inherent paradox in it.

They brag that it has no relationship with merit,

with destroying merit.

It has no relationship

DEI does with qualifications.

If that's true, then why do it?

Just say, you know what, it's open to anybody.

and it's going to be racially and gender and sexually orientation blind.

And then we'll have a natural diversity.

But they never do that.

All you have to say is that we're an equal opportunity employer and we punish severely people who use racial or gender bias, whether it's pro or con.

And so then they would have the public trust, but they can't do that.

They say, you know what?

It's sort of like these universities.

We're going to let in 20% white people and it has nothing to do with merit and we have the same SAT standards to the extent they still exist and the same everything.

But we know that's not true.

And so they are adjusting and using other factors other than merit.

And then you turn around and they have a task force at Stanford to make sure people can pass introductory science courses that are part of the GE courses.

And then you talk to faculty and it's again

lower the grading standards, lowering the work requirement, bring in new courses.

Why would you have to do that if DEI has nothing to do with the diminishment of merit?

So this is why everybody's scared about the airlines, because they have a sneaking suspicion the left feels their collateral damage, that for the greater principle, the greater principle of the progressive project, they are willing to take hits.

And we see it all across the line.

Yeah.

Same thing with Lake and Riley.

For them, it was like Kate Steinley.

Things happen, but the greater project of getting 10 million illegals in here is worth it.

That's their attitude.

If I were Donald Trump, I feel like I would say right now, lies, lies, lies.

And since you brought up the budget of statistics, Biden's lie has recently been lying about inflation statistics, saying he brought it down from 9% when he came into office.

And the second lies, lies, lies story is the FBI crime statistics.

I've been reading a lot of stories that they're very unreliable because

I said that on a recent podcast.

Of course, they are.

They're either incomplete or they're outdated

or they're selective.

And we know why.

Because somebody in the Department of Justice tells the FBI director, I do not want up-to-date, accurate, disinterested

statistics on interracial crime, hate crime, murders, violent crime.

I don't want it.

And they don't get it.

And everybody knows that.

And so

there's cynicism.

And it's, again, that's this left-wing idea that we are in control of the institutions in the deep state and we can do whatever we want because we're more moral than the rest of the country and they're stupid.

And, And,

you know, and, you know, the Washington Post used to keep a little running tab of, I don't know what they said, 20,000 Trump lies.

Most of them were exaggeration.

Do we have that now?

No.

Do all these renowned fact-checkers every day, you wake up and they say Joe Biden said that when he came in, inflation was very high.

It was 1.4%.

And he got it up to 9%.

And so he just lied about that.

Nobody said a word.

Nobody said a word.

Nobody fact-checked him.

He said that he was the first person to go to college.

His grandfather went to Santa Clara.

He had another parent.

I think his father attended college for a while.

He wasn't the first person.

He just runs this old story that he's a working-class, good old Joe

that saw

America from the bottom up, got his hands dirty, was a truck driver, was an all-star football player that had to compete against Roger Stahlbach.

All that was lies.

Yeah, I think they would have a dementia index instead of the fact checkers, the dementia.

Well, I was wanted one more thing on this world of covering up.

Recently, an NPR official came out as a one of the higher up in the NPR as talking to, I think it was the free press, Barry Weiss.

And he said that they were covering up for Hunter's laptop and the lab origin of COVID and other things that the Democrats need zealously, like not just incidentally, but they were right in there in the program.

And NPR chief news exec Edith Chapin came out and said, defended NPR's journalism as, quote, diverse and exceptional.

And I was wondering your thoughts on that story.

Well, I mean, it was was as late as 2023 that

this was after intelligence agencies said that the Wuhan lab was the culprit.

This was after we had

redacted but released email and communications between Fauci and Collins and the rest of them.

This was after the testimonies and

op-eds by Redfield.

This was, I mean, the whole community either willingly admitted that the Wuhan lab was the almost certain

birther, if I could say that, or the embryo of the virus.

This was after the people who tried to hide it could no longer hide it.

We had Stephen Quay went through in detail the genetic sequence of the virus.

And what was the NPR doing?

In 2023, they said, still looks like a penguin, pangolin, or a bat to us.

Oh, Oh, my God.

They were wedded.

And why were they wedded to that?

They were wedded to it for two or three reasons.

One, Donald Trump had said China virus.

Oh, if Trump thinks it was from the lab, it can't be.

We're going to get that out.

Number two, this is racist.

So the Chinese Communist Party used this myth that they were victimized by Western racism.

So of course, NPR ate that like a ribeye steak.

They love that.

And then number three,

they liked the idea of the right and middle America falling for conspiracy theories, and they just loved that.

And so they ran with it and ran with it and ran with it.

And

the interesting thing about the whistleblower was

they didn't deny that the editorial room, did he say it was 75 or up, 82 people were Democratic registered?

Oh, I didn't know.

And there was zero,

maybe one or maybe it was zero conservative Republicans in the editorial decision staff.

I'm sure that's right.

And they didn't.

They just said that

we have a diversity of opinion.

So the only way to do that, if you're going to save, I don't know why we have a public

broadcasting.

I really don't.

But if you want to save it, then you have to recalibrate it.

So one of the things that Donald Trump should do, should he be elected, is get somebody like, I don't know, Vivek Ramaswamy.

He's really articulate.

And he would go in there and mandate that it had to be 50-50.

And it might actually,

it's going way down NPR, its viewership.

It might recover its viewership.

But when you have, for example, on PBS the evening left-right, and David Brooks is your conservative and Cape Inhart, whatever his name is, is your leftist, you've taken the whole spectrum way to the left.

So your house conservative is your house liberal, and your house liberal is your house maniac progressive.

And they know that, and they know they're doing that.

And

they're just shameless about it.

It's taxpayers' money.

We pay for it.

And so, you know,

if they're not going to do it, they should just defund it.

And last time Trump tried it, and when George Bush tried it, They just go crazy on Capitol Hill.

They say you're trying to politicize it.

Remember what the left does.

They take an institution, they take it over, they politicize it, they weaponize it, and then when you try to react to that, you're overtly political.

Yes, because you're covertly political.

And that's what happens all the time.

They take over every institution, then when you push back, you're weaponizing, you're politicizing it.

And people are going to have to just say, you know, I don't care what you say.

You know,

we know who you are.

We know what you're doing.

You have the leftist playbook of the last 2,500 years.

We know how you operate.

And you're going to have to be called to account.

I want to say something that I think maybe you won't like and maybe your listeners won't like, so I apologize.

But it seems in the last days, maybe even the weeks, we've been looking at all of these things that the Democrats do to rein in their power.

And if you ask me, on all the angles that they have us, whether it's voting or all of these media industries, they really do have it tied up.

And I just can't see Donald Trump winning.

And I'm very sorry about that.

Donald Trump, I wish he would win.

It's going to be very hard to break through.

It is.

If you take the combined audience, ABC, CBS, NBC, all left-wing.

MS, NBC, crazy left-wing.

CNN, no audience, but crazy left-wing.

PBS, NPR.

For their news hours, primetime news hours, you've got about 25 to 30 million people.

If you take the hated Fox, they hate Fox,

you've got about 2.5 million.

That's not counting when you go on your computer and you do a Google search and the results are just so warped, the order in which the results appear based on ideological grounds.

If you look at social media, the people that are running Facebook and censored are the types.

Remember the old Twitter when they had Christmas, they would never do anything that was religious or about Christmas when they put their little advertisements on a holiday.

If Halloween got a bigger banner on the top of your social media than Christmas did, they just do it in an insidious way.

They'll do it the same thing with AI.

So, yeah, they run social media, they run internet, they run

television, traditional,

they run print newspapers.

So, who are the biggest newspapers in the United States?

New York Times,

Chicago Tribune, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times.

They're all left-wing.

I mean, really left-wing to the point where they're destroying themselves.

Epoch Times, Epoch Times.

It's growing.

It's a national newspaper, but it's just small compared to the resources they have.

And that's the true.

And then when you put it in this echo chamber of academia, and you look at the college presidents, college administrators, and then you look at the corporate target, corporate world target, Disney, United Airlines, Anheuser-Busch,

and then you look at

national entertainment or sports.

What is the Super Bowl halftime show?

It's all left-wing.

And all the Hollywood sitcoms are left-wing.

New York sitcoms, wherever they're filmed.

The movies are, nobody's going to the movies because they're just, who cares about some courageous trans person or this or that?

They're all based on DEI.

There's no...

Every time they make an old-fashioned movie like Tom Cruise, Top Gun, the sequel, it just goes ballistic.

Everybody wants to see it because they're starved for just apolitical entertainment.

So, yeah, you're saying that Trump can't break through that and you would say, well, if he had the money, but he doesn't have the money, he's going to be outspent three or four times to one.

He doesn't have Michael Bloomberg, who spent

$65 million in

direct help to candidates on the left.

And we're not talking about, he spent over a billion dollars on Packing himself.

And you have Mark Zuckerberg, forget what he gave to the candidates.

He gave 419 to really warp and change the way people voted.

And then you have Sam Bankman-Free.

He got basically a pass for all the skullduggery he was engaged in because he was just salting all these candidates

and Biden.

And the same thing is true of George Soros.

He changed America more than any human being by funding all of these obscure

district attorney races in big cities.

They were all under the radar, and he changed the way that he just, he ended up directly responsible for a lot of people getting killed and injured because of career felons that were let out.

And he did it on purpose.

He did it by design.

So how do you go against all that?

And so if your point is that come

July, August, if it's neck and neck, they will do something to make sure that Robert F.

Kennedy, Cornell West, and Jill Stein are not on the ballot because that that cost them two to three points.

They will make sure that in Pennsylvania,

Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada, that people

only 30%

of the balloting takes place on Election Day with IDs.

It'll be all mail and 70% or more.

They will make sure of that.

They will make sure that Joe Biden has four or five times the money for ads.

So you're going to see abortion, abortion, abortion, abortion, abortion, pictures of January 6th, January 6th, Trump, Trump, Trump in jail, Trump this, Trump that, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump.

And that's it.

They're not going to run on,

you know,

great border policy, great inflation fighting policy, great foreign policy,

help recalibrate the military, stop crime.

No, none of that.

None of that.

We talked about that last time.

I hope that

Laura Trump is, Laura Trump is able to

go up against it and in those six states get out the vote and start to register people that are

in places that are predominantly Republican because the Democrats are definitely get out the vote in all those places.

And they, again, we talked about it yesterday, but they do it through state financing and private institutions.

They're starting to get people registered in Pennsylvania that are conservative as Republicans or independents they think are conservative.

She's much better than Rona McDaniel.

Yeah.

And she's got a whole fresh approach.

And there's people that she can tap.

Cleta Mitchell, I know very well.

She's a brilliant lawyer.

People have demonized her, tried to

denigrate her, tried to do anything to shut her up because she was one of the first people to say, listen, Republicans, it doesn't matter

if you have the better

agenda.

It doesn't matter if you've got clever ads.

But if you turn over the balloting process to these people with drop boxes and ballot curing and ballot harvesting and mailing and you and all of these blue states and blue cities and the swing, the blue cities and the swing states, and you have left-wing people counting the ballots.

It's not going to work.

And so she's been,

she's been a voice in the wilderness.

And I hope that they listen to people like Clito.

Yeah.

All right, Victor, let's go for a break and then we'll come back and talk a little bit about Iran and then maybe Germany.

Oh, sorry.

No, this is our middle section.

You're going to talk about Roman literature and I think the Roman novel is on deck.

So stay with us and we'll be right back.

We're back.

So Victor, I don't know a whole lot about the Roman novel.

I do know two that you would like a lot, and I hope to learn more about the golden ass and

not just dinner at Trimachio, but Petronius's work.

But go ahead.

You know, I was going to talk about skepticism and Stoicism and Epicureanism, because they tend to be Hellenistic and Roman philosophies, but I'll do that next time.

And, you know, there's not a word for novel in the ancient world, either in Greek or Latin.

Novel comes from the Latin nous, and it's you that term comes up in the, I think, the 16th century,

where you have a

fiction that's not in meter, so it's prose fiction, and the word is new.

It's something new, a new story.

Fabula maybe

would be the close in Latin to the word.

But

there are no novels that we know of in classical Greek literature.

And it's fair to say the Romans developed the the novel.

Quintilian said, you know, that they invented it, Quintilian, the history of scholarship and literature,

who was a Roman literary critic, grammarian, etc., etc.

But his point was that even the novels that are written in Greek, and we have a lot of those names, Xenophon of, I think it's Xenophon of Ephesus, Heliodorus, Ethiopica, I've read that.

It's very interesting.

Achilles, Tatius.

These Roman citizens throughout the empire wrote in Greek.

And they're all the same genre.

It established, and these are in the middle to late empire, the 170s to 400.

But it's always the same genre.

It's about two, a couple in love, usually in the 15th, 16th corner, Romeo and Juliet.

They're separated.

They are captured by pirates.

They end up in Egypt or somewhere along the Mediterranean coast.

They're saved.

Or it's about a rogue who travels throughout the empire and he commits adultery and he gets away with it, or he encounters witches or supernatural things.

But there's two novels

that are very famous.

And one is Petronius's Satyricon, and that was written in the age of Nero, probably by Petronius Arbiter.

He was a Roman noble of some stature.

Probably around 65, 60 to 70.

He committed suicide because people have suggested that the novel was really

a character of the Emperor Nero and he cut his veins.

We have a very moving account of his suicide.

He talked with his friends, opened his veins up, shut them down, had some more to eat, opened them up.

according to the historian Tacitus.

But satiricon just means

satyr-like things.

Satyrs, you remember, were these mythological creatures that had huge phalluses and they ran around with a big rear end and they poked things and they drank.

Sometimes they even have

pan-like hooves or they're ugly old men.

It's the idea that ugly old men have supernatural sexual powers that make them grotesque in the mythological sense, and they usually attack

attack young girls.

But in the satiricon things, it would be things that are risque, things that are sexy.

And this book was probably 24

chapters, almost like a mock odyssey of 24 books.

The Iliad and the Odyssey are 24 books.

So it was a deliberate imitation of that.

And it's a odyssey in the sense of

there's three people, Eumopus and Ascletos and a little

effeminate kid named Gaeton, and they travel around Italy and most of the episodes take place around the Bay of Naples, especially Pompeii and Herculaneum, we think.

There are items in the novel, Mosaic Kawe Connum, for example, Beware of the Dog, that was a mosaic entry in one of the surviving houses at Pompeii.

So we know that the novel itself contains factual things in the description of what life was like around 60 AD before the eruption.

And

it's funny.

What is the theme of the novel?

That

with the advent of the Julio-Claudians and the end of the empire, and excuse me, the end of the Republic and the creation of the empire, there's not really politics anymore.

If you read Suetonius' 12th Caesar,

Caesars or Tacitus' Annals, I'm talking about the period of Augustus, Tiberius, Claudius, Nero,

and then the year of the four,

Caligula, then Nero, then the year of the four emperors,

and on into the Flavians.

There's not a lot, and then on into the Great Period, what Gibbon called the most tranquil period in the history of civilization, the best time to be alive.

Basically, the reigns of Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antonius, Pius, and Marcus Aurelius, about 100 years.

But in this period,

the limits of the empire were established: the Danube,

the Rhine, halfway

up to Scotland, Hadrian's Wall, and then where the Atlas Mountains are, North Africa, the entire coast, all the way, including what is today

Tunisia, Libya, and

Lower Egypt by the Delta, and then

the so-called Holy Land and extending all the way to essentially the Persian Gulf, and then coming back through what we would call all of Asia Minor and the Balkans.

And that period of seven, this period of tranquility of 70 million people, a million square miles,

life turned to

excess.

The system was working with aqueducts, roads, habeas corpus, Roman law.

And these novels started to appear.

about the good life.

And one of the first was this Satyricon.

And these three guys wander around.

and what do they do?

They eat, eat, eat, eat, eat.

And they have sex, sex, sex, sex, sex.

And they trick each other and they rob each other.

And it's a caricature of this noble author, member of the aristocracy, is laughing at what the empire has done.

And one of the themes is people who are not Italian

not Italian, but part of the 70 million new citizens of the Roman Empire.

They're very vibrant and dynamic people, and he feels they're crude and they're decadent.

And there's the center of the novel, and we only have two or three books.

And I don't know why that is.

People have suggested, well, when

the papyrus scrolls were transferred into parchment, into book form, maybe in the third or fourth, fifth century AD,

people in the monasteries hid them and the front rotted and the back rotted in the middle of the book that was protected, and that's the Cana Tromalchionis, or the dinner of Tromalchio.

It's an extended feast where the R3

anti-heroes come in and say, Oh my God, listen to this guy.

And it's a big, obese man who's become what we would call a billionaire.

And he pontificates at this dinner, and he hosts it.

And they're, you know, they're eating sparrows and stuffed quail and eel, all of this decadent food.

They have a lot of homosexual entertainment, they have bisexual entertainment, they have nudity, they have fornication.

And then he talks and he thinks he knows something.

All of his mythology is wrong.

But the point is, these people are the new aristocracy and it's not based on birth.

It's based on money.

Money.

It's a much more equal opportunity aristocracies because it's somewhat merucratic and there's exaggeration about how he did it.

But

there's there's a great scene where all the freedmen, that is, people who had started slaves, became billionaires.

And they, you know, sometimes they had sex with their master or their mistress and connived that way.

Some ways they got a chance to start a business, but they all became very, very wealthy.

And they're complaining about inflation and they're complaining, just what is today.

But what's very funny, and I'll just very briefly,

the symptomology of what the author feels is decadent is very similar to our own.

It's too much money, too much leisure, too much emphasis on clothes, too much emphasis on food, too much emphasis on money, too much emphasis on status.

And that manifests itself in hyper-promiscuity,

gender confusion, effeminacy.

There's a legionnaire that comes in, they make fun of him.

It's really funny, and I'll have to be very careful how I say this, but Gaitan himself,

you could argue, is transgendered.

He's a boy, and he has sex with boys and men,

but he's so effeminate that he almost looks like a woman.

And at one point, all three of them are dressed up with wigs as if they're

women.

And they're polymorphous in the sense of polyamorous.

They have no

consistent sexual identity.

They're bisexual.

They believe there's no such thing in this novel about the age of consent.

Young children have sex, old, ugly women have sex, old, ugly men have sex.

And

it shows what happens when you have an empire that has sort of trans

I don't know what, transcended war, famine, all of the elemental challenges to a society, and now it has the leisure and the money to experiment with the appetites.

And it's a ringing coning assault

or commendation.

I don't know what I would say it is.

It's a satire, but it's a biting satire.

It's a writ of complaints.

It's a damnation, condemning of Roman society and its excesses, Epicureanism, etc.

There's one other one that we have, and this is a fragmentary, the satiricon, but about a hundred years later we had another novel called The Golden Ass, or The Metamorphosis, or The Golden Ass, the subtitle,

by a Roman

intellectual, maybe even a part-time philosopher, Apuleius.

And it's about just what I talked about, a young man who travels around and he's interested in witchcraft.

And he employed, this is very popular in these novels, witchcraft and foreign cults, because the Roman Empire is incorporating what we would call today the Middle East and North Africa.

And ISIS is very popular as a cult here, a new religious cult in the West.

But in any case, he ends up enlisting his services with a witch, as I remember, and she makes a mistake and turns him into a donkey.

And then he's got these long ears so he can hear everything.

So he travels through the empire and he's sold, he's stolen, he's captured, he's had, they're going to force him to have sex with animals or people.

And he hears everything, so you get a commentary, kind of like a stealthy commentary on what Roman society is like.

And again, the themes are the same.

Everybody is

trying to make money.

They have side scams.

there's no such thing as fidelity, there's no such thing as promiscuity, it's just anything goes, it's like a 60s bacchanalia.

One of the things that's interesting in these novels, there's something called, and I'll just finish with this,

a Milesian tale.

A little tiny story that's inserted to break the narrative of the novel that comes from the coast of Asia Minor around the city of Miletus.

And they always have a weird little twist to them.

And we don't have time to go to the Milesian tales that

Chaucer has a lot of them that he incorporated from the Satyricon and these other Greek

novels written in Greek that I mentioned.

But

there's two famous ones.

One is The Widow of Ephesus.

That's in the Satyricon, and it's just perfect in its cynicism about human nature.

So in The Widow of Ephesus, a young woman's husband has died, and she wants to be the paragon of grieving virtue.

So she's going to starve herself.

She goes into an underground vault.

She has the dead husband displayed on a table, and she's crying and weeping.

And everybody in the town sees the little light at night down there in the vault.

And they say, oh my God, she's starving.

She is so pure and virtuous.

She doesn't want to remarry.

And there is a Roman soldier by, and they've had crucifixions.

And his job is to

do what?

Guard the body so the families don't sneak in and take down the body or alive or dead.

You can't do that.

It has to be,

the victim has to be on the cross and suffer.

And then when he dies, he has to rot and show everybody the wages of supposed criminality.

He sees that little light.

So he looks around, there's nobody out at night.

I'm guarding a dead person.

So he sneaks down into the thing and he tempts her, and they have sex.

Well, it turns out in the Milesian tale, it's always a reversal of Rose.

She likes it more than he does.

So she goes, come back, come.

And they keep doing it.

And in the process,

the family sneaks in and takes the body off the cross because he's been derelict.

And so you know what's going to happen to him.

So he comes back and says, I can't see you anymore.

I'm going to be executed.

And she said, I'd rather have

a live lover than a dead husband.

So they take the dead husband's body and put him up on the cross so that everybody thinks, wow, I thought there was nobody on the cross.

How did he get back up there?

So he gets off and they can continue.

The other very quickly is called the Pergamum Boy.

Same idea, and it's a reflection of the ancient world's sophistication, cynicism, and decadence.

And so there is a tutor, and remember, we're talking about pretty awful things in the ancient world.

Pederistry are the pedophilia.

And in the ancient world, it was considered tolerable among the aristocratic classes that young men would be tutored by older men.

And in that process, there might be a passive, active sexual.

Well, I found it shocking as a kid from the countryside when I first encountered that, reading them in Latin and Greek.

But in any case,

a young boy is being tutored.

And this takes place again.

Milesian tales are all stories

around the coast of Asia Minor, modern-day Turkey, the most vibrant, risque,

no-holes-barred area of the empire.

And this tutor keeps saying, you know, you've got to make sure you get, if you're going to tutor somebody, you've got to make sure they have morals.

They just have to be interested in...

math and science and literature.

And I'm the kind of guy that can watch

your little son.

And so they go, and the father goes, wow, this is great.

He's a tutor with morals.

So I'm sure he can.

And the son is probably 12 or 13.

And so they happen to be adjoining rooms.

So the guy sneaks in at night and he whispers to what he thinks is the sleeping boy, if he would let me have sex with him,

I will give him a present.

It's a very small, like a pigeon or something.

I can't remember all the presents.

So the boy is actually listening.

And so he, I guess he would penetrate him.

It's pretty disgusting.

And then the next day the boy gets the gift.

And

the tutor says, oh, this is so great.

I've got this young boy.

And the tutor is supposedly fat and ugly and old.

And he does it the next night.

He says, if he does this, and the boy doesn't seem to respond, but I will give him a bigger gift.

And so finally he does this.

And then the

third time he says, I'm going to give, I think it's a horse.

And the boy says, well, where's my horse?

The next morning.

And he didn't get it, of course.

And he says, well, it's one thing to give him a small one, but I'm not going to give him a big gift.

So the boy shuts the door.

And then the tutor sneaks back in.

And he

says, well, bygones begon.

I'll do it.

I'll give the gift.

So the boy allows him to do that.

And then he's old.

And then after the act is over, the boy says, Do you want to do it again?

He goes, My God, do it again.

So he does it again.

And then he's almost dead now.

And then the boy says, Do you want to do it a third time?

And he says,

shut up, or I'm going to tell your father.

And so, again, what is the cynical take on these novels?

Whether it's the widow of Ephesus or the Pergam Boy, the people who profess virtue are,

and the people who seem cynical, they're the same.

The widow of Ephesus is not virtuous.

She's practical.

And she outdoes the soldier in cynicism and will do anything to continue this relationship.

And the same thing, you think the boy is a little victim and

the doy is actually more duplicitous and more sex crazed than the tutor.

And I know that when you listen to this, a modern American gets really outraged, I thought.

I remember I said that when I was in graduate school in a seminar, I said, well, we're talking about pedophilia here.

This is sick.

And

Very.

Yes, and I said that as an undergraduate, too.

I remember the professor said,

Yes, but this is, we have to approach the novel on the novel's own terms.

So I thought it was

the sickness of

sexual assault or battery on someone underage transcended time and space.

But anyway, that's what these novels are about: cynical

sexual relations, adultery, promiscuity,

travel through the Mediterranean, witchcraft, pirates, and it's usually a couple or threesome or one or two people traveling around.

And they're fascinating

for this reason.

It's not the author's intent to give you a travel log, but he has to do it to further the plot.

And so if you're a historian, like I am, cultural historian, economic historian, you can go into these novels and you can get very explicit descriptions about what kind of boats they're using.

You can see what viticulture, the names of the crops they're growing, you can see the types of legionary costumes or clothing they have on.

You can see the type of food and

what would be necessary to produce it.

When they talk of stories, you can see about travel time from one place to another.

So

they're rich repositories of life in the ancient world, and that's very valuable.

Aaron Powell,

do you think that the novels have a moral universe and that maybe for the author, he's trying to show that that pederism is wrong and evil?

Or no?

Is it completely nothing like a Christian moral universe?

No, I think their

sense of morality is excess.

And so the story of the Pergamboy is excess.

and

deceit, and that's wrong, according to their their value system.

And the widow of Ephesus is hypocrisy and virtue signaling and performance art grieving, which is false, and that's wrong.

And adultery is wrong.

But as far as the type of sex,

it's given that people like to have sexual relations.

and they're going to have sexual relations.

And it's a male-dominated world.

So if a man has sexual relations with women while he's married, that's permissible.

As long as it's not humiliating to his wife.

But the novel would see that as banal.

So, what is the novel's interest is the wife does that.

That's what gets the reader's attention.

And all these novels, the wives and the women are more promiscuous than the men.

And then, the second,

it's

just very briefly, as far as homosexuality or male-on-male sexuality, it's scripted, it's a ritualistic.

So if a male is 40 and he's never married and had children and he's married, so-called to another male, that's unheard of.

And biologically, too, maybe 2% or 3% of the population is primarily biologically homosexual.

And we have descriptions in pseudo-Aristotle that it can manifest itself with a limp wrist to a

lisp or the way people walk or the way their eyes look.

I mean, it's pretty graphic.

I'm not suggesting that it's scientifically always accurate, but they were aware of that.

But nevertheless,

even if you were not primarily or at all interested in males, there was a period in your life where when you were coming into puberty, it would be permissible if you had a male relationship with either an older person, but it had to be in the context of gift giving or education transmitted to you, and in exchange for that, you allowed the older man to use you, or two younger men in a society where it was forbidden to have premarital sex.

Virginity was highly praised and valued and essential.

Partly it was because, as Aristotle talked, is that when

the ancient world is very, they're just blunt, they don't have Christian morality yet.

And so in their way of thinking, you cannot have a stable society when a baby is born if the baby is not 100%

assured that the baby is the child of the father.

Because the father, if he sees the baby and the baby does not look like him or if he doubts that it's his, he will not be a good father.

And that's just practical.

That's the way the ancient world looks at that.

It's much more pragmatic.

And what Christianity introduces is this idea

it's somewhat neoplatonic.

There are elements of pagan religion that are adapted into the formalities of the emerging church, but they do, it is different that

you

are here for a brief period.

You're born, you have a soul which is separate than your body, and the degree to which your soul can resist the appetites of the body that are sinful, then it has everlasting life.

And to the degree which you surrender to the body, I don't just mean sex, I mean greed and duplicity and wealth and murder and rape and

all of the things that bodies do, then you're going to be internally damned.

And that's it.

They have a moral code in the Olympian religions, and there is a Hades and there is a hell.

But

as you see

in a lot of the myths about the underworld, it's usually for

excess that people are down there because they lied or blasphemy, they insulted the Olympian gods, or they were arrogant and they were guilty of hubris,

or they tried to, or they committed murder, all of those things.

But

you don't really see them as

committing adultery, or fornication,

or

nudity, all the things that Christianity tries to bring in and sanctify the relationship between a man and a woman, exclusively so under Christian dogma.

It's not there in the ancient world.

That's why the 60s were such a...

And I went to UC Santa Cruz in 71, and the professors were products of the 60s.

So when I read Greek literature with these wonderful professors that were great Greek scholars and Latin scholars, nevertheless, the exegesis of the text,

the analysis of the Satyricon or Euripides, Bacchae, or

Homer, when you're reading the Odyssey and Odysseus is having relations with Calypso or Circe, where poor Penelope is so loyal and waiting at home.

It was all in this is normative.

This is the way it should be.

This is a wonderful pre-Christian world without guilt.

It bases on shame.

The only moral travesty is incurring disrespect to your family or your reputation by excess,

excess, or making a fool out of yourself, like Alcibiades, for example.

but not in the in particular types of behavior that Christianity would call sinful.

So we thought that was, I didn't, but I mean, that was, I came from a very rural conservative.

My parents were Democrats, but they were very, very conservative socially, culturally.

Yeah.

Do you think that in the third and fourth century, people were drawn to the Christian moral schema in reaction to what was going on in Rome as far as the excesses that we see in these novels at all?

Is there evidence of that?

Yes, there is.

But there's X, it's even more damning because there's a competition

between Christianity and Eastern cults, for example.

Isis is another, I mentioned that because the traditional Greco-Roman gods were, I mean, they were just big people that don't die, and they're powerful, and

they have all the petty

neuroses that people do.

So if you, you know, you make fun of Zeus, or Aphrodite is a flirt, or

know, Hades has to have his territory, and Poseidon has his reputation.

So they're just big people that, and a lot of people in the 60s, they said, this is great, see?

We don't have to make false gods of moral superior beings.

They're just like us.

Then I would always say, well, why would you worship us?

It's narcissism to worship gods that are just like yourself.

And there were creation myths, but there's something wanting there.

People,

as the affluence grew and the decadence started to arise, I think people wanted a sense of transcendence, and they found it in Christianity.

And especially the New Testament, but also the Old Testament started to,

Christianity spread the Old Testament in a way that would have been impossible just by traditional Judaism, which was not a

it was a, it's very similar, of course, as Christianity, but it didn't have the evangelical energy

because it was a religion of Jews, and it didn't have the Sermon on the Mount ideology that would appeal to the poor people.

So when you read the Gospels and you see that it's easier for a rich man to go through the eye of a needle, or camel, excuse me, it's easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than a rich man to go to heaven.

That's a very radical idea.

The Sermon on the Mount, Blessed Are the Meek, that's very radical.

Turn the other cheek, that's just antithetical to all traditional

pagan morality.

Hurt your enemies and reward your friends.

That's what the morality is.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, oh, go ahead.

That's what the appeal of Christianity.

And then there was a class element.

Christianity was a revolutionary idea.

It was very energetic and dynamic because it told people that were poor

that

when you say blessed are the meek and blessed are the poor they were telling people that all of this stuff that is so oppressive on this world is not the end of it in fact

the poor poor have an easier chance to go to heaven and have eternal life than the wealthy do not all of the poor obviously but they're saying it's an equal opportunity chance to save your soul and that was an appeal to the majority of the population were poor.

And it said to them, There's nothing wrong with being poor.

You're not poor because you did anything wrong.

In fact,

you have a very rare chance to

be shielded from the types of temptations that will damn your soul forever.

That was a very revolutionary idea.

The one big wanting in Christianity that a lot of people still argue over when it started to come into full force between 100 and 200 AD

and then it became the national religion under Constantine, there was no prohibition of slavery.

And people said, well,

why is that?

And the answer is that slavery wasn't predicated on race or pseudoscience of genetic inferiority.

It was an equal opportunity in slavery.

So, you know, you're on a ship and you're a wealthy aristocrat and it, I don't know, it gets overtaken by pirates, you get enslaved.

And then they take you somewhere and you're a tutor to somebody and you're smarter than the master.

And the master says, wow, you're the best geometry tutor my kids had, slave.

But

that doesn't mean you call into question slavery, unfortunately.

It's not like chattel slavery, which was based on the lie of genetic inferiority.

So somebody says, well, I'm a better...

I'm smarter and I'm a better accountant, a better mathematician than you are, yet I'm a slave.

That's unfair.

And the master says to him, no,

it's unlucky.

You were unlucky.

It doesn't mean you're not the better person.

I don't care if you're the better person.

You're a slave because you screwed up and got caught or were in a city that got, you know, or were born to a slave.

And I'm not.

But I don't care whether you're smarter than I am.

And that doesn't call into question the morality of slavery.

Christianity has one blind spot there.

They accept the world under Caesar.

It's not just taxes,

it's the social system.

Well Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and then come back and talk a little bit about more about the news, Iran and Germany, and stay with us and we'll be right back.

Welcome back.

For new people, I'd like to let you know that Victor is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne Marshabuski Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

He is available at his website, The Blade of Perseus.

That is URL Victorhanson.com.

And please come join us there for $5 a month or $50 a year.

And there's lots of free things on it, so just come have a look at it.

Victor, so I've been looking at some of the news about Iran, and it seems like there's a lot of suggestions as it's always moving closer to nukes, But I think it's more interesting now or threatening now because they are threatening Israel after the death or the killing of one of its generals.

So Iran is out there in the news.

And I was wondering

your thoughts.

There was also the testimony by a Biden administration official, Mr.

Adiyemo, I hope I pronounced that right, on the banking committee, and John Kennedy was questioning him and making the point that they were making funds available to Iran in various ways.

And the Biden administration official, of course, said, quote, none of the money has gone directly to Iran, but as though that is

what they're doing is when they're lifting sanctions, they put money, they either allow the money to be put into accounts

and the future of that count will be determined.

So, for example, I think South Korea owed them a lot of money, and then they say, well, we didn't pay for it.

And then, given changing circumstances, a billion point two for a hostage, you allow that money to be released in exchange for concessions.

But you're still dealing with Iran.

And so, that was very, I saw that testimony, and it was very disingenuous, because it was almost as if

the Treasury

representative kept saying it was 2018, 2018.

Well, the Trump administration allowed Iraq to pay.

They didn't want the grid to collapse, and they had no money, and Iran was

providing them with expertise, and I think fuel as well.

I don't know how that would be possible since

Iraq is so rich in fossil fuels, but they were saying for this grid to continue,

you can give money.

in a particular account and then we will see if we can get it to Iran.

But

this was all a preliminary to the

shutdown of the Iranian economy.

So for that guy to sit up there under oath and try to make the moral equivalence of the Trump administration and the Biden administration when Trump did not pay money for hostages to Iran.

Trump cost them $90 billion in sanctions.

Trump got out of the crazy Iranian deal.

Trump cut off their satellites in Gaza and the West Bank through the UN Relief Slush Fund.

Trump declared the Houthis a terrorist organization.

Trump killed the arch-terrorist Soleimani, General Soleimani, and Trump told them that if you continue to do this, this is what's going to happen.

And the result was that when he left, the Iranian economy was in bad shape and its surrogates did not have the necessary funds to wage a successful war against Israel, and it was an international pariah.

And now under the Biden administration, the Iranian economy is rich with petrodollars.

It's got a lucrative relationship with Russia, supplying it with munitions in the Ukraine war.

The Houthis have shut down the Red Sea.

Hezbollah is on the verge of going to war with Israel, so is Iran.

We know about Hamas.

Just a different situation.

So to stand up there and say that is a complete lie, that the Trump policies toward Iran were the cause of

Iran getting some sanction money.

It's just farcical, and that's

what this administration keeps doing.

I don't know why they just don't defend what they do.

They should say, he should have said, you're damn right, we lifted sanctions.

We like Iran.

And that's why the Houthis get a second break.

We don't think they're terrorist.

And we like Hamas.

We want to get that money back to them.

And the same thing with the Palestinian Authority.

And we want to get back in that Iran deal.

It was a way to stop the bomb, we thought.

And we don't go kill people like Soleimani.

We don't do that.

Why don't they just defend it?

I don't understand it.

When they say, you know, this is a border.

We want an open border.

That's why we stopped the wall.

Why do you think we stopped catch and release?

There is a reason why, if you're a refugee claimant, that you can come here first and become refugee status later.

And we like Obador.

He's a good socialist.

So yeah, 10 million people, more the merrier, come in.

I don't understand why they don't do that.

That's what they're doing.

But they do it, and then they deny they're doing it, or they blame what they're doing on Trump.

It's just amazing.

You didn't sign comprehensive immigration reform, therefore you opened the border.

No, we're not stupid enough that when you got caught doing all this and the polls looked bad on this particular issue, you were able to round up some naive, stupid Republicans that would sign on to this to limit 12 or 15,000 down to five and then give you the powers of amnesty to the chief executive.

We're not going to do that.

And

that's what they are.

They do it, and then they're not proud of what they're doing.

Why isn't Joe Biden saying,

wow, you guys, California, you got $6

a gallon?

That is

exactly what the Obama said,

administration,

their Department of Energy, Stephen Chu, remember him?

Yes, I do.

He said, I want to get gas prices up to European level.

Well, you're almost there.

And that's why we stopped Keystone.

That's why we canceled Anwar.

That's why we cut back on federal leases.

And we don't want to touch anything on that strategic petroleum reserve.

It's dirty.

But that's not what they do.

They do it all, then they say, oh my God,

there's no EV economy.

People are angry.

They can't afford gas.

They're spending $150 to fill up.

Drain that petroleum reserve.

Give some more offshore leases.

Don't tell them we're doing it, but do it.

Beg the Saudis, beg the Iranians, beg the Russians, beg the Venezuelans.

Let's get that oil out.

No attacking refineries in Russia.

Don't dare screw around with Iranian production by attacking the Houthis in the Red Sea.

They never claim it.

And that policy on the oil reserves for the United States, which is for emergencies, is completely irresponsible.

They don't care about that.

It's just

about being elected again and having power.

And then when that, if

they get elected again and Iran attacks Israel or vice versa and we have a huge blow-up in the Middle East and gas goes to, excuse me, oil goes to $150 a barrel and the Ukrainian war keeps going and going and going and gas here in California is $8,

what will they say?

Trump did it.

Trump did it.

He started.

He did it.

That's what they're going to do.

Yeah, it's irresponsible.

And then we also have the whole problem of the China issue.

But let's move to a different state, Germany, and look at

the National Review Online that you used to work with

has a wonderful article on the Germany's headed into economic stagnation due to the greening of Germany a lot, to its policies that have driven much of its industry out, and that's what, not much, but it is driving its industry out.

And Germany is the industrial powerhouse of Europe.

And they are on track to be, and they said, quote, the sick man of Europe.

And so I was wondering your thoughts on the current state of Germany.

Yeah, it's almost as if it's the Ottomans in the late 19th century, the sick man of Europe.

But the difference is in a closely integrated European Union economy, everybody depends on the German economy to create GDP growth in

the whole Union.

And they've done a lot of stuff that's

suicidal.

It was basically

Angela Merkel did it.

Everybody praised her.

She destroyed the

German economy.

She did it by making it almost entirely reliant on Russian gas imports across the Nordstrom pipeline.

And that meant if she had cheap, and it was cheap, natural gas to run German industries and the electrical grid, then she could broadcast her virtue by cutting down on coal plants, nuclear plants, and go and use solar and wind, which was totally unreliable.

That was a fine thing to do, but it meant appeasing the Russians, and that blew up when Putin went into Ukraine.

And Putin thought the Germans won't do a thing because if I cut the gas off, their economy will...

implode.

The second thing was they thought it was really cute under her.

She hated Trump.

And everybody warned her about the Chinese, Chinese, Chinese, Chinese.

And the more that people pulled away from China, the more Germany filled that vacuum.

And now they're almost entirely dependent on exports to China.

And you know how China treats exports, our imports.

They rigged the game.

And so German exports are very dependent on Chinese demand, Chinese regulations, Chinese tariffs, etc.

High-priced energy,

never rearmed, complete dependence on the Russians, shutting down electrical plants that were powered by coal or nuclear or natural gas, and you get what you have today.

The EV, and then finally they had this EV mandate that made, it was way ahead of ours.

So they took the most sophisticated, beautiful internal combustion automobiles in the world, Mercedes, Porsche, BMW, Audi, and what did they do?

They made mandates about EV engines.

And

unfortunately, the Chinese were ahead of them.

So think about that.

They were the world's leader in making clean, efficient, dynamic, stylish gasoline and diesel vehicles.

And they just took that advantage and that head start

and that dominance in the car industry all over Europe.

Even today, if you're in Europe and you can get a Mercedes or a Porsche or an Audi, that's what people want.

And same true in America.

And they destroyed it by mandating EV.

And nobody wants, you don't buy a Mercedes, or you don't buy a BMW to buy an electrical EV to BMW or even a hybrid.

You buy it because you want German craftsmanship.

And

so everything they've done is self-inflicted.

It's just a question of are they going to have another green or left-wing?

Are they going to get a free market person who deregulates and opens a German market up again?

We'll see.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, we're at the end of our podcast, and I would like to read a comment from one of your readers on the website.

He was reading from Rural to Surreal.

You had a four-part series, VDH Ultra material it's part of the subscriber articles and it's called one

rural to sur surreal once once small farming became latifundia and it's part four that he's commenting on he says victor you should be on jeopardy and win thousands so you can retire to florida and help the orange grovers keep them bums off the orchard.

Might be double jeopardy, but you can do it.

I listen to every every podcast.

You're a gift to the sober thinking middle class.

May your tribe increase.

And his name is Steve Peterson.

Thank you, Steve.

Thank you, Steve.

I don't think I, you know, I've watched Jeopardy before, and every time,

put it this way, Steve, how many PhDs do you see that win?

There's very few of them.

They're mostly polymath, working-class people that are autodidacts or something.

That read.

Yeah, that read and have photographic memories.

And I don't want to deprecate my own profession, but

I'm going to deprecate myself.

It's deprecatable.

Yes, I have been around a lot of people in these 70 years.

And when I see people who can take inventory and make a profit out of a 7-Eleven in a bad neighborhood, or I can see a farmer who survived on 400 acres in the shakedown of the 2000s, or I see some of these long-haul truckers that are independent and how they juggle the diesel, the maintenance, the

replacement parts, the haul,

all of those criteria, and they make a profit.

And then I look at PhDs

that have lifetime employment and summers off and they whine in the lounge about how hard they're working.

It's not even close.

All right.

Well, thank you, Victor.

We really enjoyed this this weekend episode, especially the Roman novels.

They seem to be the source of so many movies that we see about Rome, I gotta confess.

Yeah, they are.

They really are, especially the banquet scenes.

Yeah.

And thank you so much.

And thanks to our listeners as well.

Thank you, everybody.

I appreciate it.

This is Sammy Wink and Victor Davis Hansen, and we're signing off.