Roman Historians and Easter Tradition

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Hello, and welcome to the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

This is our weekend edition where we look at a few more news stories that we didn't get to on Friday and then we will have a middle section where Victor talks about a historical and well in this case literary

topic and it will be Roman historians.

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Welcome back to the weekend edition.

Victor is the Martin and Ily Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marsha Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

You can find him at his website, victorhanson.com.

The name of the website is Blade of Perseus.

Please come join us for a free subscription, lots of free things on the website, or a $5 a month or $50 a year

subscription where you can read the VDA VDH Ultra articles.

So Victor, we got still some more news that

we wanted to talk about.

And I'm looking for the first one,

which is

RFK Jr.

has a vice presidential candidate, Nicole Shanahan.

And I was wondering your ideas about this pick as a vice presidential candidate.

Well, she was married, I think, to Sergi Bryn.

Bryn, is that right?

I'll trust you on that.

I didn't check on that.

Yeah, I think

she's

through marriage, she's one of the wealthiest women in the United States, sort of analogous, although not quite of the same magnitude as Jeff Bezos' wife.

I was kind of surprised because he's packaging himself as on the fence between left-wing and right-wing populism.

And so he attracts a lot of people about, he's for closed borders, he's skeptical about

overreach of government during quarantine, skeptical about the mRNA vaccination.

And so the conventional wisdom was he was going to attract equally Trump and Biden voters.

But with this vice presidential selection, I think he thinks that she's got a lot of money or she has entree to a lot of money that can help him in fundraising.

That he's kind of tilted a little bit more to the left, and that explains why today the Democratic pros and handlers are

very angry about it, because they feel now he's shown his true self.

Some people on the right who have donated to Trump are donating to him, and they feel that he's a stalking horse for Trump.

I don't think he is, but when you look at all of the potential third candidates, whether it's Dennis Kucinich

or Jill Stein or Cornell West

or Robert Kennedy, they're going to take more from Biden than they are Trump.

And in some of these king states where the Electoral College tally will be decided by anywhere from 30 to 100,000 votes, it can make a big difference.

So,

bottom line, expect them to demonize, get the whole Kennedy clan out like they have before, to disown him, say he's horrible, he's a renegade, he's awful, and they will try to destroy him.

Yeah.

The way they do everyone that they find is a threat to their hold on power.

Aaron Powell.

Yeah, you know, I noticed in the New York Post today that they also had a story about how Nicole Shanahan had

helped to route millions to pro-migrant anti-cop groups.

And so I think she's not going to resonate well with very many people on the right.

So do you think that this will take more away from Joe Biden's voters than?

Absolutely.

And I think that was the purpose of it.

Oh, really?

Yeah, I do.

I think he's trying to tell people that

he gets a lot more press.

He gets a lot more anger.

He gets a lot more out of it

when they're angry.

And he can't say when this blows up and it's going to blow up that he was pro-Trump.

He's going to say, well, look, you guys weren't pure enough for me.

I was

the true progressive populist, not you.

Whereas if he had drifted into Trump land, I think they would have said, you sold out and worked for Trump.

Yeah, but.

And they wouldn't have made the distinction, Sammy.

They said, well, you sold out for Trump, but at least you took more votes away from Trump than you did from Biden.

Therefore, we like you.

They don't think that way.

Oh, okay.

That's what I was like.

Yeah, they're just emotional.

Because his candidacy will definitely drive Biden's win to even lower and lower possibility, with Trump's win being a greater possibility.

So wouldn't he want to be...

I mean, maybe he wants Trump to win or something.

I don't know.

It's very strange.

It's just if Donald Trump can control himself, and it's hard to do when you're being smeared and slandered

in these court proceedings, and not attack the daughter of the judge who's looking at the Alvin Bragg case, which he did, but which she's a political on the left.

So her dad is a political on the left, is blatantly political, but somehow he's going to have to moderate his speech.

He could get sympathy, he could get out of these things, and he could be the beneficiary of all these third-party candidates.

And he may even be able to be financially okay when it's okay over.

And he could take the Senate.

enlarge his House margin and get the White House back.

If that were to happen,

it would be a historic development given where he was after January 6th of 2021.

Yeah.

Well, I was looking at a poll by Politico and Ipsos,

and

they were generally, the way they asked questions sort of

required the response to be mostly pro what the left would like.

So most of the questions I did not like, but they did ask one.

One-third of independents said they would not vote Trump if if convicted in trials.

And I thought that

that sounds like the Democrats are succeeding in what they're doing, because that's all that matters is these independents.

One-third is all?

Yeah, but that.

That means two-thirds of independents would not mind if he had pinstripes and he was talking through jailbars.

Yes, you just excited the dogs.

Yes.

That's a pretty amazing statistic.

You think that's good on the side of Trump, I guess.

Yeah, I do.

I really do.

Because

if he can win, all he has to do is run even with independents.

Because the Democratic registration in most states is now almost where

that matter, where the Republican is.

And if it's true that he's picking up 20% of the black vote, 45% of the Latino vote, I don't believe he's ahead, as some people suggest.

He will win.

He will win.

And if he monitors the mail-in balloting, that's a big if.

But things are going in his way.

All he has to do is be very careful about what he says.

Yeah.

Well, apparently

he's not too worried about the women's vote, which he, I don't know, he's got a long way to go with that if he even tries.

Well, then, let's look at Zuckerberg is going to limit access to political content on Instagram.

So

he's just out and out saying what he's going to censor this time around and probably put a lot more money into getting

important people elected in specific districts that need to be won.

But I was wondering your thoughts on that.

I don't quite understand him.

He's one of the most disliked people in the United States because he's arrogant.

He's building his whatever, $80 million bomb-proof shelter in Hawaii and building a wall around what was once accessible pathways to the beach.

He gave $419 million to absorb the work of registrars in the 2020.

You'd think he would just say, you know what?

I probably did more than anybody.

See Molly Ball's article in the Time of 2021, Time magazine in February.

And it was controversial.

And I have no business trying to create

a quasi-government shadow bureaucracy to enhance mail-in balloting with my $419 million.

So I'm just going to keep out of it.

I can't do that.

I'm not going to censor it.

I'm not going to work with the FBI.

I'm not going to go in there and try to modulate news content like I did with Twitter in 2020.

These people can't quit.

They don't understand.

And I have a feeling he's one of the most unpopular people in the United States.

I really do.

And he's, I don't know why he wouldn't just keep out of it.

Every time he testifies before

Congress, he looks like some kind of weird, arrogant nerd that's on the spectrum.

You know what I mean?

It's just he's he's not in touch with his emotions or his analysis.

And

remember he turned around and said, I apologize to people in the chamber?

Yeah.

And then he's got these

he went to Meta and it's alternate reality and all of this stuff that he's into.

And

I don't know.

I I would doubt within 10 years, even though he buys up companies like crazy.

He's like Google, he buys 200 or 300 companies up

a year to eliminate the competition, that he's not a major player.

Because I don't think Facebook is going to continue the way it used to be.

Yeah.

Well, I'm sure the new generation doesn't even really know Facebook.

It's all TikTok.

Well, he buys these up as they appear on the market.

I mean, he tries to

cash them out and take hold.

He's like an octopus.

He's like what Frank Norris wrote about and the octopus, a conglomerate.

Yeah.

Well, another topic in the news is the U.S.

nuclear ability.

And in the case of power line, which I got the story from, they call a U.S.

nuclear deficit, that France has over 50 nuclear plants that it uses, and it's got plenty of electricity, of course.

But the U.S.

in the same time period built almost none.

And I thought that that was an interesting contrast.

What happened there?

Why is that France so into it and we are so far away?

Well, I mean,

we had Three Mile Island, and Chernobyl was a long way from France, I suppose.

And they realized that they don't want to burn coal.

That was always

they had a lot of coal.

And so when they went nuclear, they were right next to Germany as well.

And so they realized that they could sell really high-priced electricity to Germany, who was

the Germans were completely unhinged on power.

They shut down not only just their coal plants, which they're reopening, by the way, and their oil Fed, which they're reopening, but their natural gas plants.

And they went solar and wind.

And anybody's been to

Germany in this summer that's very

cold.

And

there's no sun.

It's not always out windy.

It's just so it was crazy what they did.

They self-destructed.

It was collective suicide.

And France is selling them electricity.

They're going to continue to do it.

And I suppose when we get to these many fusion plants they're talking about that are, you know, this provide electricity, say, for communities of 5,000, and they're the size of, I don't know, a barn or something, and they don't pollute in the sense of radioactive material, that we'll be behind on that, too.

Aaron Powell, apparently they are, you know, I confess I was listening to that crazy Joe Rogan

for a while.

They were talking about they're going to get

nuclear generation so small that they can generate clocks and things.

Like they'll have their own independent nuclear generation.

I think that's true.

I don't think the United States is at the cutting edge of any of this stuff as far as policy.

Because the DEI, when I mean DEI, I don't mean just race.

I'm talking about DEI, ESG, all of these

impediments that are ideologically based, that are not founded on market reality or logic.

So if you have your major companies and they are guiding their investments on basis of

environmental or diversity or social equity and not market realities, or you're hiring and promoting on race or sexual orientation or

gender, then

in a very competitive world, you're not going to be competitive.

And

when you let 10 million people in from the poorest areas of the world in just three years,

you're not going to be able to take hundreds of millions of dollars and invest it in research and development.

And when you take your universities and you have your faculty going to workshops, I had to go to, I think it was three hours, to do this crazy harassment this and diversity that.

and you have all these people that are non-productive, and yet they run the admissions and the promotions with veto power, then you're going to lose your edge.

And it's already happening.

And it's happening, and we talked about that last time, whether it's United pilots or Boeing planes or Anheuser-Bier or the Pentagon getting troops.

DEI is just, it's insidious.

It's everywhere.

But we just have this nice euphemism, DEI.

We've known it before.

It was aristocratic prejudice or

restriction of participation to only the wealthy or the Middle East idea you only hire your first cousin or the Maoist idea that you have a cultural revolution to destroy people based on their perceived counter-revolutionary ideas.

But whatever it is, Jacobism, Stalinism, it harms and wars with productivity and modernism and advance.

So,

I mean, it's very sad as an American to say that Airbus is pulling ahead of Boeing and that, I don't know, Air France, we used to, when I was a student, we called that Air Chance.

Really?

Yeah.

And it's pulling ahead of United and American Airlines.

And

it's just, it's, and these are socialist, stagnant countries that are ossified.

But my God, I don't know what we're doing.

We're just

going backwards.

We're going backwards.

This bridge will never be rebuilt, the Francis Scott Key, as it was, and it will probably not be built for years.

And I don't even know if we have the technology to do it.

I'm just speaking as they've still shut down five

roads, five parallel roads in my vicinity because of a high-speed rail project.

10 years, not a foot of rail laid.

And now 41, the main avenue from the Central Valley to the coast, they're going to shut down 17 miles to widen it.

We never did that in our entire life when we were young.

These people look like giants compared to us.

It's really this snotty, snarky, self-satisfied, pampered, baby boomer generation that's ruined all these institutions they inherited, the media, the the universities.

Gosh, I always thought John Chancellor and Walter Cronkite and

you know, were people like that were prejudiced and biased and too left-wing, but they look like saints today compared to this, you know.

Group.

Well, speaking of that,

I just remembered you wanted to say something more from the Friday episode on Ronna McDaniel and the NS NBC

being hired and fired within within a day.

Yeah, they fired her within a day.

And what I didn't understand about it, we talked about how it was asymmetrical that

Fox hires Jessica Tarkoff or Juan Williams and others and

they can't handle that.

But

what I was curious about is

when they're doing that,

They obviously do not want, why don't they want her there?

Do you really believe it's because they think she lied?

No.

No.

It's because when they have a discussion and Joy Reed is going, you know, on and on and on and says, don't you think that Fannie Willis or Alvin Bragg have the goods?

What do you think, Rona?

They're afraid.

She said, no.

No.

No, here's why.

And they can't handle that.

They cannot handle any dissent whatsoever.

It's like Pravda.

They cannot have any dissenting voice.

And so

when you think about it,

where do you get your information?

The only place you get your information that's not part of the Borg

is on internet sites, podcasts, Fox News.

Where else do you get it?

Is there any newspaper except for the Epoch Times that you can get an honest appraisal?

No.

And

is there any public vehicle?

PBS, NPR?

No.

Is there a network news?

No.

Is there cable, Fox, maybe News Max?

That's it.

And so

they don't want any dissenting voice.

They still believe that they got away with Russian collusion and laptop

disinformation and the ping-ping story and the sucker story and the pee-pee tape.

For them and the lab, it was, you know, it was a pangolin bat or something.

They got away with all of that.

They don't ever want anybody to question it.

Yeah.

Well, one more thing just before we go.

Did you notice that Jon Stewart was being criticized since he said, oh, look at Trump.

He undervalued for tax purposes and overvalued for asset purposes.

And his own house was undervalued at

$1.8 million for tax purposes.

And then he sold it $17.2, of course.

Yeah, John, we'll do the ratio and see if you were any worse than what Trump did.

And so

the fact of the matter is that

the state is years behind in assessing property values.

At least they were until they were broke.

Now they're getting on it really quickly, but nobody knows what the volatile stock market value is on any given month.

And that was Trump's point.

He said, well, if it was $17 million, that's why I'd pay taxes on it.

They'd have no idea what year that applied to or anything.

They have no idea what's going on in Palm Beach.

And the market is what you can get for it.

Yeah.

So, and the thing is, he sold that for, what, $17, $18 million?

Yes,

his whole house.

Yeah, and the guy who bought it then tried to sell it and lost $4 or $5 million.

Is that

six or seven years later?

So the point was that,

and nobody's going to prosecute him for deliberately

understating

for tax purposes and overstating, I guess, for market realities.

All these people do that, and everybody knows that.

This whole thing is just so absurd about the Letita James case.

You know, I farmed for a number of years.

I bought homes.

And

when you think of it, you know, I've gone to the Federal Land Bank to get loans on, and they would say, Victor,

what do you think that Thompson vineyard's worth?

There's a guy that won't mention his name.

I kind of admired him.

He was like a cranky.

You're not going to make a man.

If you want to keep farming, if I were you, I'd rent it out.

Just rent it out.

You can do a lot of things, but one thing you can't do is farm.

And everybody I know who's going to survive the big crash of the 80s will be the guy who doesn't farm.

If you want to lose your place, farm it.

That was his attitude.

And he was kind of right.

I wrote about him in Field Saw Dreams.

But I'd go in there, I'd say, well.

I think for our loan, I think the vineyard's worth $5,000.

You couldn't get $3,500 for it.

I said, but look in the paper.

They're selling Thompson Vineyard for $5,500.

Yeah, and who's buying it?

Tell me who's buying it.

They'll be up there for a month.

I'm going to give you $3,500.

That's the only value.

And I said, okay, but the point is, if I went in there and said there was $5,500,

as Trump went on there and said Mar-Lago is worth half a billion, it didn't matter.

It's the guy with the money who tells you what the value of your property is.

And he had auditors, and he pulled out a bunch of papers and he said, here's the average price of Thompson Vineyard sold in Fresno County the last two months.

They know everything.

So it was just absurd

what they did.

Everybody knows that, too.

And that was what's so funny.

And

there's so many things about this case you cannot talk about either.

I mean,

when you had

deliberately, these juries were in blue jurisdictions, and then

there was almost a racist component to the way that Letita James and Fannie Willis and Alvin Bragg campaigned for office.

You know, we're going to get Donald Trump and we're going to get him.

And it became kind of a black thing.

You know what I mean?

Nobody wants to talk about it.

But it was like we're

the patois, the dialect, the whole idea was we're...

We've got street cred.

We're going to get this big old white guy and we're going to really immumiliate him.

And nobody could talk about that except Trump.

Remember, Trump kept saying it was racist.

They were picking him out.

But my point is this.

Does Fanny Willis think

right now,

and does Alvin Bragg think right now, and does Letita James think right now

that

if there was a major candidate running for office like Barack Obama, and he was a black man, and there was a white redneck

prosecutor in Georgia, and he said something like

well he got a

he got a deal with Tony Resco Tony he wanted to expand his backyard

and Tony Resco

got a favorable vote from him in the legislature and he

paid half of market value and he didn't list that as a gift that's tax fraud and that's we're going to go after him if he was just a minor prosecutor from another state and kind of turned it into a federal, you know, bootstrapped it into some type of federal RICO charge or something, because that's what she's doing.

Yeah.

Or saying, you know, he has a bank account in my jurisdiction, something like that.

They would go nuts.

They would say he's a racist.

He's a white prosecutor going after a proud black man.

That's what they would do.

And so

it's

there's something going on, you know, when you have all of these prosecutors Bragg and Letita James and Fannie Willis.

It's not me who's talking about race.

It's they are.

Just take her trial, for example.

You know, she said, they asked her about Nick.

I'm not going to talk about a proud black man.

I'm not going to talk about him.

Remember when they were trying to say

about him and then she said, you don't understand about cash.

It's a black thing.

Black people keep...

That was her father, I think, said it.

No, she said it too.

Did she say it too?

Her father came and then he reiterated it.

I thought, well, wait a minute.

I know a lot of black people.

I've never heard them say that their attitude toward cash was any different than anybody else.

But again, it was that retreat to race.

And the same thing

with Fannie Willis when she was campaigning.

And the same thing with Eric Adams.

Remember,

he campaigned and when he was being criticized because of his

pathetic administration, he turned and he said to the cameras, this is a chocolate city.

Look at them.

You see any white people when he said that?

Yeah.

He pointed all this chocolate city and he ran on, you know,

I was the guy that went after the crackers.

And

what I'm getting at is that no one wants to talk about this.

But we need to get back to the content of your character, but there's a racial element of just furor here.

And I don't, I don't,

it's not,

there's left-wing bias.

We saw that with Ingaran,

and we'll see it with Jack Smith, but there's also a sense that this inner city culture

resents Donald Trump and especially it's being guided by the bicostal left-wing elite and they're going to go after him in a way that is gloating.

We've never seen anybody like Letita James.

We've never really seen this before where

these prosecutors like Fannie Wills go into a church, a black church, and then announce that she's a victim of racism because she's light under oath or she's

in a very dishonest fashion that is

it's just not appropriate to hire her paramour and then to pay him this money and then to claim that she didn't really get anything free from him because she'd paid him back in cash, but whoops, she didn't have any money.

And then to go into church and say, anybody who questions my word is a racist.

That's what she did.

So they bring up race all the time.

And then you think, well, is this a motivating factor?

And it,

you know.

It's not good for civilization.

Not when you go

to multi-ethnic.

It's not when you have three black

prosecutors who are, and most of all the prosecutors now in the major cities and the mayors are black, which is fine.

That's a democratic.

But we don't go by proportional representation.

We always say, you know,

the

official has to look like America.

We don't, we

always say that, we thought.

And then repertory omissions or whatever

appointments or profiles came in to favor.

So all of a sudden,

you know, there's not enough black coaches.

They have to match the demography.

But if the NBA or the NFL is overwhelmingly black, it's okay because of the historic, what, discrimination against blacks.

That means they're exempt as a group.

And same thing with, if you look at the mayors of, say, the largest 20

towns, you know, or I should say cities in America.

They tend to be mostly black.

I understand their populations are minority majorities, but still, and the same thing with prosecutors.

And this was George Soros, who deliberately found radical prosecutors to run and then to fund fund them with one in two million.

We had the same thing with the DA in Chicago that let

Jesse Smollett off and he was communicating with

people she was that were

connected with Juicy Smollett and

Michelle Obama of all things.

So this is something that we don't talk about but everybody is I think upset about.

that

these prosecutors are very racialized,

not because of the color of of their skin, but because culturally they feel that

there's a racial edge to their prosecution.

Again, that's not me saying it.

It's Fanny Willis playing the race guard again and again and again.

It's Eric Adams as the mayor bringing race to the fore anytime he's criticized and bragging that there is no white people on his council.

It's Letita James campaigning in a way to black audiences that she's going to get this guy and then she's going to gloat about how she's done it and

it's not healthy.

No, not at all.

Well, Victor, let's take a break and then come back and look at our Roman historians.

Stay with us and we'll be back.

We're back.

So Victor, the Roman historians, Livy, Tacitus, Polybius, and

well, Plutarch, actually Plutarch and Polybius were both Greek, I believe.

That's a good point because

when you talk about Roman history, you assume that people wrote in Latin, but really the first extant historian we have is Libby.

And he was writing, oh,

in the period of about 10 to 10 10 BC to 10 or 15 AD.

And so what I'm getting at is most of them wrote in Greek.

They were Greeks who were Romanized.

And the most famous, of course, was Polybius.

He was born around 200, lived probably, he was somebody who lived probably 80s, 70s, late,

you know, he lived all the way up to well past the end of the

Third Punic War.

But he was the most gifted of all of them.

He was from a town called Megalopolis, the big city.

You can go there today.

It's a Hellenistic city in the Peloponnese, and you can still still see the theater.

And he was born there.

There's a monument to him.

But he's famous because he's the only historian, along with Tacitus, who is considered Thucydidean.

That is,

he approaches history

as if he's a physician.

These are the symptoms.

I'm going to make a diagnosis.

This would be the therapy if they were to be corrected, but this is the prognosis if they continue on as they are.

And his main theme, he wrote a history of basically from the beginning

around

265, 264, roughly contemporaneous with the First Punic War, the war with Athens, Carthage against Rome, down to the end of the Third Punic War in 146.

And he wants to prove or show

why it was that this little Italian peninsula, where Rome was just one of many city-states,

in a very rapid fashion unified the Italian peninsula and then grew beyond its borders to encompass most of southern Europe and then destroyed the Carthaginian Empire over a century.

of three wars and got control of the entire western Mediterranean and then turned its attention

to the Macedonians,

Epirites that were controlling Greece and the Near East, and then

were able

to expand the Roman Empire all the way into

what had been Hellenistic Alexander the Great's territory and the successors.

And by the time of

Augustus,

or I should say,

he didn't know that, of course.

He finished writing somewhere around 130s, 120s, and his

history stops in 146.

But he presaged or he predicted that it would take over the entire world, and he was right.

And so,

why was that?

And he

comes to the point

in, I think it's book six, he has an editorial.

editorialization.

Why did this happen?

Why did they beat the Macedonians?

Why did they beat the Carthaginians?

Why, why, why?

And the answer is they had a mixed constitution.

And he defines that in two manners.

And one is that they had politically an executive branch, two councils, not one, two, that could check each other's power and were annually elected.

Then they had a legislative body to check the councils, and they had a and that was of course the powerful Senate, but they also had tribal assemblies that and they had

as well a judicial branch.

And they were various censors and auditors that enforced the laws from a judicial point of view.

And he said that meant that power was not hoarded or conglomerated into too few hands.

There were no dictators.

Or if there was a dictator, as in the Second Punic War for a while, they were carefully guarded and controlled by the Senate, their terms.

And as long as you had that balance of power, then there was no political revolutions or upheavals or constant periods of

self-destruction, as there were when it broke down after his death in the late Republic and as it did in the Imperial.

And the other definition of a mixed society, within that political framework that checked power, there was

a concordance of the orders.

So there were the wealthy aristocratic class, and

they controlled the Senate.

And then there was the tribunal assemblies and the tribuneship.

And they were from the lower classes.

And they had veto power, in many cases, over senatorial decrees.

And many of them called a nois homo, a new man,

Cicero was a new man.

who could come out of the provinces, become,

by his merit, a successful orator, barrister, lawyer, and end up as a senator.

And then there were the poor people that there were certain

people had to defer to

the people who control the inner cities, for example.

Later it would be called bread and circuses.

But what I'm getting at is this constitutional system divided

the rule of power between legislatures,

executives, and judges.

And it did in the same fashion, it was able to incorporate the poor, the middle, and the wealthy.

And so he concludes that it's a more stable system than anyone else.

And that allowed it to unite the people.

Grow and prosper.

And grow and prosper.

And that's really the theme of his history that centers on the three Punic Wars.

Most of the Third Punic War is lost.

For that, we have to find things in Libby and Plutarch.

The next historian, though, that's remarkable is Livy, and he's really the first extant,

I mean extant in the sense that his history is complete and large fashion.

It's not complete, there's a lot of books, he wrote 142 books, and it's called Ab

Urbe Condita, from the founding of Rome in the 8th century all the way to

his his period.

And he draws on a lot of lost historians, obviously.

But he's a guy who was born around 59, 60 B.C.

And as I said, he died around 17.

So he's writing somewhere in his prime around the time of Christ.

And he's going back through earlier sources and trying to talk about what Rome was like in

the 750s B.C.

So all these famous stories that we have, Cincinnatus at the Bridge

and

the Rape of Lucretia.

The rape of Lucretia, they all come from Livy, book 1 to 5.

The mythologies,

Remus and the Woof being nurtured by the Wolf, all of those foundational myths are found in Livy, even though he voted a very late period.

And he's not a Polybius or Tacitus.

He's more Herodotian.

In other words, he says, they say, this is what I heard.

These are alternate accounts, rather than

does this account make sense?

Does this account, is it widely accepted?

Does this account adequately explain something in the way that Thucydides does?

Remember, all of these historians use speeches, and they don't mean they heard

a Scipio speak.

themselves or they heard Caesar speak themselves, but they follow the Thucydidean model that

I put words into the mouth of characters to reflect

what should have been said if it wasn't said.

In other words, I tried to have people in my history

speak the things that I wrote down, or I heard was written down, or I know what's happening.

But however, in some cases, when that was unpossible, I put words into their mouth that would be likely to have been said, in my opinion.

So that makes it very loose.

But all of these historians have speeches, and Livy's speeches tend to be

a little bit more fabricated or mythical or less factual.

But he's one of the only sources that we have for the Third Punic War.

But most of his work, as I said, is huge and it's lost.

He writes in a, I would call it the Asiatic style.

It's a Latin, it's very verbose.

It has a lot of poetic words in it.

It's easy to read as compared to Tacitus.

And

it's very, very popular with later writers.

For example, a lot of the Roman material that Plutarch will use comes from Libya.

And he's very popular in the Renaissance.

And

it was just, he was the author of Antiquity to Go in the Renaissance.

We have a very different author, and that is Plutarch.

He wrote around 100 AD, and he was a Greek who lived in Chaeronea, about 100 miles from where Polybius was born.

Chaeronea is a little tiny town.

It's modern Heronia in Greece.

It's about, I don't know, 15, 20 miles from Thebes.

Not too far, maybe 10 miles from Lovadia.

You go near it as you go up to Delphi.

Sorry.

Can you do that again, Victor?

It's about Lovadia.

Sorry, Robert caught that out.

Robert.

So

Chaonea is about, well, I don't know, it's 10 or 15 miles, maybe 20 from Thebes, and it's maybe 5 or 6, 10 from the other big city in Boeotia, which is Lavadia.

And

what's interesting about Plutarch, remember he's a Roman citizen that

wrote in Greek.

It's a Greek that's

very polished and erudite, but it's not classical Greek in the sense that it's being written about 450 years after Thucydides and the playwrights, etc.

And he's not born until 46, I think, and he lives a long life, 120 AD, but most of the lives

that he writes about are around 100.

And what did he write about?

We have almost more Plutarch than any other author in Greek.

He's written a huge work called The Moralia, Things on Moral, and it's letters about marriage and comportment and behavior and

ethnic vignettes, the saying of Spartan women.

And it was very popular in the Renaissance, this kind of table talk.

But he's most famous for what we would call the parallel lives.

And it was his vision that he wanted to show his Roman citizenry.

After all, they were running Greece.

And in his time, the city-states, he has some very moving passages in some of the lives that the Greek countryside has been deserted.

It's not vibrant.

There's not the old city-state that there used to be four or five hundred years ago.

It's Latifundia, big corporate agriculture that's monocropped, etc.

But in any case, he wrote something called The Parallel Lives.

And it takes one Greek life and compares it with Roman life

and so and they do it by profession.

So for Caesar there's Alexander.

For Cicero there's Demosthenes.

And we have I think we have about 23 of these that are extant.

That is we have both of the surviving lives and then he had a little short comparison to show you the strengths and weaknesses of each one.

And it's fascinating and much of what we know about

the great men of antiquity comes from Plutarch.

And they're based on, of course,

sources that he had at his disposal that we don't in many cases, because he's writing three, four hundred years after the fact.

Remember, he's writing during the imperial period when there is no such thing as politics.

He's one of these very lucky people who

comes of age during the Flavian

Titus, Vespasian, and then he's going to be alive at the very dawn of the so-called hundred years of good emperorship, the period of

especially Antonius Pius, Hadrian, Trajan, and Marcus Aurelius, and Nerva, of course.

I think one thing, Plutarch is a moralist, so a lot of what

we find in stories

in Shakespeare, for example, there's translations, often from the French, from Greek to French to English.

But a lot of Shakespeare had access to the texts of Plutarch, probably in English, from French, from Greek.

And so a lot of his Shakespearean plays that concern antiquity, like Caesar

or

Livis Andronicus and things like that will come from stories that are in the parallel lives in Moralia.

I think we have time this time around for

one last historian of the

four that are very famous in the Roman period, and that's Tacitus.

He's very different than the other three.

He was born, he's a contemporary of Livy,

maybe born a little bit earlier, 56.

He's like Livy, he had a long life into his 70s, I think, or maybe late 60s, middle 60s, probably died around 120.

And he's famous for

a history which

we call the Annals and then the Histories.

And that is

a period that talks about Augustus

and then the reign of Tiberius, Claudius, and then we get into Caligula, and then we get into the nightmare of

Nero and then the Otho Galba, the

Vitalis, the four emperors in one year, and then we get into the end with Vespasian.

And the earlier period are called the Annals, and the other are the histories.

But in addition to that, he wrote some monographs.

And

I haven't really read in Latin the dialogue on oratory.

I never read that.

I read the histories and the annals.

But two things that I read very carefully were the life of Agricola.

And that was a relative by marriage of his who was a provincial governor.

And he talks about

it's a very good synopsis of what a Roman statesman, what he must be like

when he's abroad.

He's a general and he's actually, I think he's Tacitus' father-in-law.

But it goes through

Agricola was stationed in Britain, and it really is a kind of an ethno-history of what the Romans were trying to do in Britain.

The more famous one, I think one person called it the most dangerous book in antiquity.

I reviewed a book, it was an English book with that title, is the Germania, and that is an ethno-history of the Germans.

Remember, the Germans were on the wrong side of the Danube and the Rhine, so they were never absorbed or integrated into the empire.

And of course, German historians made a lot of that.

Nietzsche, Spingler, Hegel, that they were separate.

They were never contaminated by the corruption of Western culture entirely.

They got the best of the West, but then they had this sort of blood and soil purity.

Hitler played upon it as well.

But he describes all the tribes in Germany, and especially those that he knows the most about, which means closer to the Rhine and Danube.

And the thing about it is

you would think he'd be very critical given these horrific wars they've had with Romans in his time

and earlier, and given the idea they're not civilized in the sense they don't have roads and aqueducts, at least away from the Rhine and Danube.

But he has almost a

kind of a Rousseauian idea they're noble savages, that they haven't been corrupted by urbanism and decadence and money.

And they worship trees and they bathe in cold water, they drink milk, the women are bare-breasted, they're big and strong.

And anyway, that profile of Germany became very popular in a way that suggested that later Goths or Osgoths or Germanic tribes were romanticized in Rome.

That, well, maybe they're taking us over or maybe they're coming in because they didn't suffer from our civilization.

What destroyed us was sloth, leisure.

Well,

they were natural people and they were more hardy and they deserve it.

That kind of naivete was about them.

It's kind of what Western societies feel in general.

You know, that I heard that, remember when George W.

Bush said, I don't know why we don't want closed borders.

Who's going to rebuild our city after Katrina?

As if, you know, Joe Biden said that the other day, too.

He said, who's going to build our homes?

As if poor people from Oaxaca, Mexico are the only people who are hardy enough to go up there, and that all

Americans are sitting and playing video games in the basement.

I've had a lot of Mexican-American, I should say illegal people who came illegally here and claimed that their second generation were not hardworking like that, that they had been Americanized.

In other words, they were no longer poor.

That's a typical immigrant complaint, but that idea comes from the Guermania in large part.

Yeah.

Okay.

All right.

Well, Victor, let's go to a break and then come back and talk a little bit.

It is Easter Sunday tomorrow and so that's the resurrection.

So maybe a few topics on that, a current event, and then we'll talk about the resurrection.

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

Welcome back.

Victor, so there was a news article this week, and I was surprised because it was in Newsweek.

It was by Anthony D.

Andreasi, And he was talking about the persecution of Christians in the modern world.

And his number was 340 million Christians live in countries where they are persecuted.

And of course, he talked mostly about Nigeria, where the numbers of Christians versus the numbers of Muslims is more or less even.

And the Christians are often subject to

crimes and being killed.

And I was wondering if you had some thoughts on

that state, because it seems to me that Muslims do not have that same problem when they live in Christian countries, that they are subject either to persecution or something.

Are you suggesting that

Muslims who migrate to, say, Dearborn, Michigan can have mosques and they can worship freely.

But a bunch of fundamentals Christians in Michigan, if they wanted to go over to Saudi Arabia and start a Bible society, or they wanted to proselytize in Gaza, they wouldn't be allowed to?

Yes, or they would have a lot of trouble doing that.

It's called Islamophobia, just so you know.

Oh, I'm in a state, well, if it's the state of truth, I'll accept whatever word you put to it.

More or less true.

When I first went to Istanbul in 1973, It was under a dictatorship, but a secular one.

It was part of the tradition of Ataturk.

Remember, he got rid of the Fez and he used,

he got rid of Arabic script for the Turkish language and started using

European sort of letters and things.

And there were churches everywhere, Greek Orthodox churches.

Not everywhere, but there were Armenian and Greek Orthodox, even Serbian.

Each year that I have gone back, I've been maybe four or five years under Erdogan.

It's worse and worse.

You see the church is shuttered.

And then iconically, it's Hagiosophia, the great cathedral built by Justinian in the 530s, when it was taken over and made into a mosque in 1453 by Mehmet II.

So it was redone and of course they had the minarets that were there.

I think I related the fact that I gave a lecture once there and said

that these minarets were strapped on, or I shouldn't say strapped on, but put on as religious adornments of this beautiful cathedral 50 years after the conquest.

And my minder, the Turkish minder, interrupted me and said, stop,

that's not true and you're not going to be able to continue if you don't speak the truth.

I said, what?

Well,

the whole cathedral was poorly designed and only the minarets keep it up.

And I said, no, it's been there for a thousand years.

So So before you came.

And it's, you know.

So that's, but that shows you that there's a lot of religious intolerance now in Turkey.

And Santa Sofia, Agia Sophia is what now?

It's a mosque again.

It was yanked out of its UN

protected site status as a museum.

or a religious site open to everybody and now it's been Islamicized.

So you go in there and all the work on the restorations of the Greek frescoes and the idea idea that you're going to restore it the way it was built stopped.

And the same is true

if you

go anywhere in Ionia,

Asia Minor, which was Greek for 3,000 years after the destruction of Constantinople as a Greek city.

Of course,

organized Greek Orthodox was destroyed until the 19th century, but then the big idea, the megalide, tried to restore it, but it's gone now.

And

I was talking to a Turkish journalist about three or four years ago in Rhodes, and he was explaining to me as he pointed out.

We were in Halakonarsis, Turkish Bodrum, the ancient city, Greek city of Halakonarsis.

He pointed out at the Greek Dodecanese islands.

There were three of them, I think, we could see.

He said, these are all Turkish.

They'll be Turkish.

They're in our airspace.

They're Turkish.

I said, no, no, no.

They're Greek.

This place we're sitting on was Greek.

You took this from the Greeks.

But

yeah, I think that's true.

That

it's something that everybody's afraid of.

You can make a cartoon,

Charlie Hebrill or whatever it was called, you can make a cartoon and make fun of Jesus.

You can do anything you want.

Not anybody's going to say a word.

You do it against the Prophet, you're going to be in big trouble.

And a lot of people who are critical of you will be Christians.

They'll say to you, what are you doing?

You can't make fun of Islam.

You want to get us killed?

Yeah.

And that's just the way it is.

And Muslims assume that

asymmetry is

inherent in the religion.

I guess it's because it's blessed are the meek and turn the other cheek, the golden rule, the Sermon on the Mount ideology in Christianity.

Yeah.

Well, Christianity has a long, long

literature on whether you can go to war or not go to war.

I mean, the whole idea of fighting a battle, having an army is long debated in the records of the world.

Well, there were people that were seeking.

Remember, there were people on the walls of Constantinople on its last night,

the night before

that sought penance for killing people.

And that's a different incentive when the people below the walls are being promised 72 diversions for each one.

Yeah, and we just recently had the Pope, I think we talked about this, tell the Western powers that they're responsible for destroying their nuclear weapons, I think, or they're getting rid of weapons so that they won't be fighting wars.

It was weird.

Whatever he was saying, he's...

That's always been, I mean, that was Gibbons,

one of Gibbons' themes, that Christianity

had too much territory that was not productive or their priestly class

were not productive.

But he also thought that classical martial virtue was

eroded by turn the other cheek Christianity.

And the enemies of the empire, once it became converted, were under no assumption that they had anything to do with the idea of Christian temperance when it came to war.

Well, let me ask you then just some historical questions about tomorrow.

When this is published, it will be for tomorrow, that

the resurrection,

I have a couple of questions.

One is, why did they need to have a resurrection if the idea behind Jesus was that he came to, as part of our forgiveness for our sins, that through him we could be forgiven?

You know, couldn't he have just died?

I mean, be crucified, suffered and crucified, and then that was the enactment.

Why the resurrection?

And then the second question is, what do historians, from a historian's view, what do we know about the last days of Jesus?

In Christianity, there's a duality.

Maybe it's partly driven by Neoplatonic thought.

But there's a body and a soul, and the soul doesn't die.

It goes back to maybe the Socratic

simile that your soul is a song and your body is an instrument, and just because your violin or lyre doesn't exist doesn't mean the soul can't exist.

It comes to life when it has a body or it's manifested.

And so the idea is that you have everlasting life

when your corporal existence disintegrates.

And that is emblemized by

the murder of Jesus Christ and the burial of Jesus Christ and then the rebirth or resurrection.

the anastasis, I think it is in the Gospels, the re-standing up or the rebirth of Christ

in a divine form that will ascend to heaven.

And he will then

he went through this process to allow Gentiles, people who are not Jewish, and the expansion of the Old Testament idea that anyone who accepted the doctrine as found in the Gospels then could be,

because of the sacrifice of Christ, it would be emblematic that you would die too,

but just as he has been resurrected and gone to heaven, and because he's divine, he is going to do it in corporal form, you too will be rewarded by going to heaven, and then you will be,

what's the word, you are going to be

marblized or you'll be put in suspended animation till the last day.

And then during the end of all, the end of days, then you will be resurrected as well.

And supposedly,

there's differences about what that final days will be.

All of these Jewish sects at the time had different ideas about what happens after death.

I think, and I'm not a theologian at any means, but I think

the Christian

take on it is more like the Pharisees' idea.

that

some of them think that you'll live just spiritually or you'll have a divine body, but I think the Pharisees is you die, your body disintegrates, your soul is eternal, and depending on how it was manifested when it was in this body and subject to temptations, that is recorded.

And then when you die, your soul then goes up.

What was different about Christianity is

that

he was willing to go through this torture unfairly, and then he dies for your sins.

So there's no absolute judge.

So

in theory, if you're a Christian and you've led a life of sin on the last day on earth, if you confess your sins and you accept Christ as your personal Savior,

and depending on whether you're Catholic or Protestant, if you're Catholic, there's...

There's iterations of the process to be saved.

So you just don't get a blank check.

I don't think limbo is as popular as part of canon now, but purgatory, etc.

But the idea is of forgiveness so that anybody can, if he or she believes in Christ,

doesn't fear death because

their soul will be everlasting and it will, if you lived a Christian life, be rewarded in heaven.

And that

is possible because Jesus was willing to be

unfairly unfairly tortured and killed and sacrificed for our sins.

And once he did that, then

that allowed all of us to have a chance at redemption and resurrection.

So it's also a metaphorical idea that the Son of God came to earth.

The earth did not accept him.

They killed him.

He was sacrificed.

He forgave all of them for what they did to him.

He reascended to heaven.

and therefore

he's in all of our lives, and he gives us the same chance that we have a second chance.

And we can accept Christianity regardless of our knowledge or ignorance about its Jewish

roots or foundations.

We don't have to be Jewish in the sense of the Jewish, the Old Testament or the Torah.

And where is it in the Bible?

It's referred to,

as I remember, in all four gospels.

There's

Mary Magdalene, and there's the two angels that see that the tomb is empty on the third day.

And I think in one gospel says, go to Galilee where he is, and there's the 40 days where he's with.

It's not a major part of the Gospels, but the point is there's

the scene where the burial tomb is empty.

People record they've seen him.

four different accounts of this.

And then

people are directed where you can see him and they and the disciples go to him and then he they are told that their duty is to to spread the word of Christ.

As far as the actual,

well, he's dead and this is why he had to die and this is what the resurrection means

and this is what happens to you when you die and this is

your sins are forgiven by the resurrection.

That comes from Paul's letters, I remember.

It's not in the four Gospels, the exegesis, the explanation of the whole process and what it means.

It's just a narrative account of seeing him alive, and people are shocked.

Do historians have any

evidence from the period of the last days, anything that's in Tacitus.

Oh, really?

Tacitus writes about it.

Yeah, Christus, I think they're called Christus,

the Anointed One.

And

he remarks

at this period that there's an uprising,

and then Christus is one of the people who was crucified over it.

It's in, there's four or five classical secular authors where he's mentioned.

So it has,

I mean, there's...

There's three types of evidence.

There's contemporary inscriptions that are not all

ecclesiastical.

There's also some secular ones by Roman that he was there or there was a problem.

And then there,

in the Jewish tradition, contemporary monuments or stone

inscriptions, and then there's archaeological evidence of churches, and

right after his death,

monuments, etc., his portraiture.

I think that's later, though.

It takes a while.

And then there's historians, you know,

and

after his death, they start to be

religious, or they're not secular anymore.

But Tacitus meant there's another couple more

authorities

that are not

Christian apologists, this is what the word is.

For what we consider a landmark event in our lives in the West, the birth and especially the death of Christ, you would think in a very well-documented society there'd be more.

But as I remember, there's Tacitus, as I mentioned earlier, about the mention of Christus dying, and then there's a lot in Josephus' history of the Jewish people, and then

there's a little bit in Lucian as well.

And

part of the

the immediacy of his death is that crucifixion, remember, in the ancient world was considered the most horrific of all punishments.

It was the most painful.

It lasted for days.

So the idea that Jesus was crucified was especially poignant because it showed that

he was willing to, and he knew what was going to happen to him.

He was willing to go under the most painful, torturous type of death.

But otherwise, you would think that there would be more literature, perhaps, or more secular literature, but there's just really three or four mentions outside of Josephus.

And then of course there's the four gospels about the life of Jesus and the death.

And they range, you know, from 30, 40, 50 years to 100 and more years after his death, depending on which particular gospel you...

And there were other gospels that were not canonized.

Elaine Pagel's Gnostic Gospels and things like that.

And we have imagery of frescoes of what he looked like

in the second generation, I think, after his death.

Wow.

So do you think that the Hollywood-created versions of Jesus are anywhere near what these

images of Jesus were in the media aftermath?

Well, I mean, if you collate Mark, Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John, and you collate Josephus and Tacitus,

and

you have some knowledge of the geography and the archaeology of Jerusalem and the environs around it, Galilee,

if you have all of that, Nazarene, Bethlehem,

and you look at imperial inscriptions and things following it,

then yeah, I think that

you've got a pretty good

pictorial,

epigraphical, literary, historical accounts of who he was

and

there was a guy named Mortimer Smith.

He was a Columbia historian.

Maybe I'm wrong.

I'm doing this by memory, so I apologize to everybody.

But he wrote a book called Jesus the Magician.

And he actually came Cal State President.

I had a colleague, Stephen Binko, who was an expert on the

Christian writer Epiphanius and the heresies of women and things that Epiphanius wrote about.

At the time, I translated it for him.

I was a young part-time lecturer, and he was a senior professor in the history department.

And he said, You know,

I'll support your candidacy sometime, but you've got to help me translate this.

And it was all in Greek, and it hadn't been, one of the heresies had not been translated.

But anyway, I got to learn a lot from Stephen Binko about

early Christian writers and documents.

And

there was a lot there.

There's a a lot to know.

So, what I'm getting at is

by the

50 AD to 100 AD, pretty much there were a lot of people writing about Jesus.

But getting back to Mortimer Smith, who Binko invited out,

he gave this talk.

And I'd read his book, he wrote a series of books.

And his argument was there was a

during this apocalyptic period in which the Roman Empire had intruded into the Middle East and had taken Jerusalem and was trying to pacify the one province that didn't accept the divinity of

the Roman Emperor, there was a lot of cataclysmic events.

And there was a

I don't know,

a band, a throng, a brotherhood of magicians, and they toured around claiming that they had divine powers and they performed miracles.

And he goes through and shows you in contemporary literature that turning water to wine or bringing people back from the dead, these were common claims of magical ability.

But it was very unpopular because, of course,

he was,

I don't know what he was, but he must have been an atheist or an agnostic.

Yeah.

Yeah, sure.

He took away the divinity from Jesus.

And he was,

It was a very interesting talk.

And I'm sure

I'm going to be wrong about

the time.

That was, I'm going back now.

It was 1978.

I looked up the book for you, and it's Morton Smith.

Morton.

Morton, yeah.

Yeah, not Mortimer.

Thank you.

And it was, it was it called Jesus the Magician?

Yeah, Jesus the Magician.

Yeah, and it was very controversial, and I think that he was he at Columbia?

Oh,

that I didn't find.

And he came from a whole,

you know, like a, I don't know, a guild.

That was the idea.

Jesus did.

Yes.

And it was very, I mean, it was really something in the

late 70s.

He drew on papyri of, we have all these magic texts, cursed tablets and everything.

I had a colleague who was an expert in cursed tablets and dream books and all this mystical literature, both epigraphic in the sense of contemporary documents.

Whenever you went to a well, you took a little piece of lead and you, if you wanted to curse somebody, you could do it and you put a pin through it and threw it.

And we have those.

And it's kind of like witches.

And there's also witches.

and magic stuff in Petronius's Tatiricon, but especially in Apuleius and the Golden Ass.

But his point was that

he was not coming from knowledge of Christian texts.

He was coming from knowledge, his background was in

secular Greek mystic magic text.

So he was saying, he just kind of, what's the word, cobbled together?

He said, well, I read the Gospels and he did this,

but he didn't really know any of the huge,

it's a whole corpus.

It would take a lifetime of the religious literature written between the life of jesus and say 400 a.d yeah and he knew nothing about that as i remember yeah okay

and uh it wasn't his idea either it was kind of an

it's an origin and antiquity that jesus had magical powers and he might have been one of many

um

anyway

magicians out there yeah all right well thank you victor this has been a wonderful hour and 15 minutes, or a little bit shorter that.

So we appreciate all your wisdom today, and especially given you...

I should say that, you know, I'm not an expert in biblical literature.

I've read the Gospels, I said, and a lot of the letters.

And I've taught a class in early Christianity, but it's been years.

But

it's a very complicated field.

Yeah.

biblical studies and it requires knowledge of Latin, Hebrew, and Greek.

It's very rare to find people that

are so adept in those languages and understand it and yet come from a disinterested angle

and are not just

trying to promote a particular take on a particular religion.

Yeah.

Or against a particular religion.

Or against it, absolutely, or against it.

And academics tend to be more secular than not.

But there was a...

I have a great admiration for biblical scholars.

I've met a lot of them.

Well, I have a

comment from one of your readers on your website.

Victor's Blade of Perseus is the name of the website.

And he does VDH ultra material.

And some of those articles are,

well, sometimes he writes the angry reader.

And so he brings in somebody who has some sort of critique and he responds to it.

And we have a reader from one of of the Angry Readers that writes, and this is anonymous: Dr.

Hansen, you provide me with a ray of hope each and every time I read your articles or listen to your podcast.

The knowledge of history applied to present-day situations make you the most reliable source of potential future outcomes.

I cannot thank you enough for sharing your knowledge and insight with us.

Thank you very much.

And so that was, I thought that was very nice for this weekend episode.

Thanks to all of our listeners.

We're happy that you are with us and we invite you back.

We have four podcasts a week.

Two of them are done by Jack Fowler, who does an excellent job.

He and Victor are experts,

both of them in politics in a way that I am not.

And so I'm usually, and also old Western movies.

So

that's what you can expect on Tuesday, Thursday.

And we're going to have, this is going to,

it's Easter that people are listening to this.

Yeah.

I think Easter is an Anglo-Saxon Germanic word.

Yeah.

From a goddess of the spring.

Yeah.

Is it

a pagan thing?

It's a pagan god in Germanic and British Celtic folklore.

Yeah.

About the god of the spring.

And I guess that comes from the idea of eggs, too, Easter eggs.

Yeah.

That they renewal.

Is that right?

Yeah, that it's associated with the life of Christ, that the egg is a birth, you know, and that you're renewing life again, and that was a pagan ritual.

Yeah.

And you would think that the formal church would not accept taking on a pagan ritual.

I never quite understood that.

Yeah, I don't.

There was one time I knew

why the date of Easter changes.

I know our listeners, but it's something to do between

the first Sunday after the new moon between a date, late date in March, and a late date in April.

And that's how it's adjudicated.

And it's a big fight.

It's the Council of Nicaea.

It was a big fight between what would later become Orthodox and Roman Catholicism, the Gregorian versus the Julian calendar.

Yeah.

Seems really early this year.

It's a movable feast, a movable date.

Yeah.

And it's a spring pagan festivity to mark the end of winter and the idea that birds and animals are now giving birth because the baby can live in temperate weather and thrive.

And it's a renewal.

In Greek mythology, of course, it's Persephone and the kidnap and that

Hades grants that there'll be, she can come part of the year back with her

back to the sunlight and that's spring and then she has to go back into the darkness and but i think christianity took that pagan myth and used and then the angle english speaking word because in in greek i think the word is pascha

and that comes from a hebrew word it's a greek translation transliteration of the passover

but in any case it's uh

i've always wondered about easter eggs and somebody's going to correct me on that as well i think they're a symbol of death and renewal yeah and the the chance of a second life and a birth.

Yeah.

All right.

Well, we wish everybody a wonderful Easter and happy Resurrection Day, too, for you who are Christians.

Thank you, Victor.

Thank you, everybody.

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