Ancient Tragedians and Modern Agonistes

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Hello, everyone.

This is the Victor Davis Hanson Show and the weekend edition.

We will look at a few news stories, and there's been lots of news stories thanks to us living in a democracy.

It tends to be a good week usually for news.

And then we will be looking at tragedians, ancient Greek tragedians today, Sophocles and Aeschylus.

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

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So, Victor, we've got lots on the agenda today.

I was thinking that first we would start off with the recent Biden speech.

He came out because Alexei

Navaldny

has been,

I want to say he's been killed, probably because he was only 47 years old, and probably something to do with Putin.

But

strange thing in that speech, he also blamed Trump for Russia because he said Trump's recent idea on NATO is that if Europeans don't pay up, unleashing Russia is just retribution for

whatever.

So, you know, all of his supporters, of course, know that he's exaggerating to make a point.

But what were your thoughts on Biden's speech?

Well, I'd just like to say that Navalny was a very courageous guy.

I mean,

he had run for mayor when he was told he couldn't.

He was a dissident.

I don't even remember.

There was that story just three years ago.

He was on a flight, and all of a sudden he just collapsed.

And they had given him tea and poisoned him.

And so my point is that he knew they were going to kill him.

And he didn't cease.

He still kept

as much as you can in Moscow or in Russia in general, oppose Putin.

Then they locked him up.

I think they sentenced him for 19 years.

And then when people were distracted elsewhere, they killed him.

And I mean, they killed him.

They obviously did.

So Biden came out and gave a speech, which is fine.

I mean, that's what American presidents do to show solidarity.

He had a little glitch because he had warned Putin that there would be serious consequences if Navalny died.

And of course, he was in no position to do much,

but he got out of that by saying that our supply that happened independently of Navalny's fate, of being in prison,

constituted our reaction to Navalny.

It didn't.

Our reaction was predicated on helping Ukraine stop the aggression from Putin, but he

bootstrapped that on to saying, well, see, look, Putin suffered because of me.

That was a little weird,

but

he did.

The thing about Biden is that he is in a

lie doom loop.

The more he lies, the more people expect him to lie.

The more the lies are refuted, the more he lies.

So one of the things that I thought was really outrageous, when Trump did that troll or that silly thing, he said, you know, I tried to make NATO pay what they owed.

Some people who wouldn't pay what they owed said, what are you going to do?

Would you not defend us?

He said, I not only would not defend you, if you let, I'd tell Russia to do what the hell they want, and everybody got angry.

And of course,

the context was Trump was bragging about his unorthodox methodology that made more NATO people pay up.

Should he have said it?

No.

But if you look at the record of the number of nations who had met their commitments under Obama during the eight years or onto Trump, much more money was invested in defense in just the four years under Trump.

So that was the reality.

So what did he say in his press conference?

He said that Donald Trump's statement, which was made just recently at a campaign,

had

caused Putin to go into

Ukraine.

In other words, that Trump was responsible for the Putin invasion of Ukraine and that his reckless mention of NATO was indicative of or or responsible for that.

That was just insane.

Donald Trump was president from 2017 to January 2021.

We know one fact about his presidency.

Vladimir Putin invaded of the four last presidents.

He invaded another

neighbor's territory.

in three of those four presidents.

In 2008, he went into Georgia and stole parts of Ossatia.

In 2014, he went into Crimea and Donbas.

In 2022, he tried to invade Ukraine proper.

Now, who were presidents during that?

George Bush, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and there's a hiatus of four years.

So

how can the fact that he did not go

into Ukraine only during Trump's tenure prove that he's responsible Trump for the fact that he went in in Biden's tenure.

It's just surreal.

And

it makes no sense.

And we know why he went in during Biden's tenure.

He went in during Biden's tenure for three reasons.

Number one, when he

confronted

Putin about his serial hacking of American institutions, he said, would would you please put these things off limits?

He didn't say, don't do it.

He didn't say, we're going to raise hell with you.

You're going to pay.

We're going to have a counter-cyber response.

He said, please put those off.

In addition,

he said

during the first days of the invasion, if Zelensky wanted to get out, he would

fly Zelensky out.

That just encouraged them to think that they could have a full-fledged invasion.

But even worse,

third, when he was asked about, do you think that Putin is going to invade and what would be the American reaction?

He said it depends on whether it's a minor or major invasion.

If you take those statements and you superimpose them on the reality that just a year earlier, he was responsible for the greatest military humiliation in 50 years since the helicopters on the 1975 Saigon Embassy, in which we left 50 billion plus in munitions.

13 brave Americans were trying to secure an unsecurable place and were blown up.

We left a billion-dollar embassy and a half billion dollar refitted Bagram Air Force Base, and we just skedaddled.

And we'd lost all deterrence.

And this is really disturbing, Sammy, because he is doing this more and more and more.

He's not telling the truth.

And he did it in his press conference.

In the last seven days, when we're speaking on a Friday,

eight days after his press conference, he just has gone crazy.

He said in his press conference, how the hell dare he raise my son's death?

No, Joe, he didn't.

The special counsel didn't raise your son.

You did.

You said, as a referent, that was when, Beau, I read the report.

You raised it.

You raised it.

And you always raise it.

And you always lie about it.

You always say that we lost him in Iraq.

You didn't.

Six years after he left Iraq, he died as a civilian tragically from a glioblastoma in Walter Reed Hospital.

Then he lied more.

He said that the special counsel saw that he did not take out classified marked documents.

They were marked and they are marked right now.

That was a complete lie.

He lied a third time.

He said he was exonerated.

No, he wasn't.

The special counsel said at the outset there's two reasons why he was not indicted.

The Department of Justice has a policy not to indict a sitting president.

A

and B,

the special counsel, I think quite improperly superimposed its own judgment onto the jury as a potential or putative jury and said no jury was going to convict him because he would pity his way into acquittal because he was so compromised cognitively that no one wanted to put an old

demented man in jail.

So that is not

an exoneration.

He lied again.

He said that he had all of the documents secure.

He had a safe.

Well, one thing the counsel did, special counsel did, he included, if anybody read that 350-page, he had pictures.

Did you see the pictures of the files?

They were in these torn cardboard boxes sloppily.

The whole garage looked like a mess.

I mean, I'm not necessarily analytive, but my barn or shed looks like, I don't know, a hospital compared to that.

It was just a complete mess.

And that was another lie.

Then he lied again.

Just yesterday, he said that Donald Trump was responsible for the open border.

Donald Trump closed the open border.

It took him three and a half years, given lawsuits and congressional opposition and the whole force of the administrative state that tried to stop him and and his own homeland security people that were one of them, Anonymous, was bragging about that they counteracted every one of his executive orders.

That being said, he did close the border.

And now Biden is blaming Donald Trump.

It's so weird.

For eight years, he bragged about, you know, he said,

as a candidate, surge the border.

Surge the border.

He got what he wanted.

He never complained at all.

Not in 2021, 22, 23, no problem.

24, all of a sudden they come to him and they say, hey, Joe, this little minor issue, when we got to 8 million, it became the most important issue in

a lot of the precincts of the United States.

It looks bad.

Okay, what do you want me to do?

Well, we've got to try to at least act like we're closing the border and blame Trump.

Okay, and that's what he did.

And so he's a serial

prevaricator.

He's a pathological liar.

He is.

Yeah, but I hate to be glib, but it doesn't matter to them.

They don't care whether it's a lie or the truth.

They care whether 50, the Democrats, the Biden entourage,

they care whether they can convince 51% of the people.

And that's it.

And if they can get enough of the lie out there, then the lie becomes the truth for a lot of people.

Aaron Powell, so what you're saying is that

the downside that when people

get outraged, that he's flat-out lying, is far less, and the number of people outraged is far fewer than the naïve who gulp down, swallow the lies, and therefore feel that Donald Trump was actually responsible for Putin going in in 2022.

That's your point?

Bingo.

Yes, absolutely.

I can't say that I disagree.

I wish I could disagree.

I wish we could disagree.

But let's turn to Fanny Willis, who is after Donald Trump.

But right now, she is the one that's getting wagged on the tail.

Is that the cliche?

Anyway, Fanny's testimony,

I listen to it, and as a non-lawyer, I look at it and go, what are they actually trying to prove?

And you can tell me whether I'm wrong or not here.

They're trying to prove that, or she's trying to defend herself, that she did not get payments from Mr.

Wade

as sort of recompense for getting him a job, number one, or that she didn't hire him inappropriately when he was already her boyfriend.

Are those the two charges that she's trying to defend herself against?

Ethics, the ethical charges?

Well, they're not more, they're not just ethical.

They constitute two vast areas of legal exposure.

One,

she and he have sworn that they did not have a sexual relationship until she reported him.

And I want to say right now, I'm not sure

why that distinction is important.

So you want to appoint somebody

to a state board who's

just openly unqualified.

He's never tried a felony case.

He's never

tried a racketeering case.

He's never filed a criminal case.

And you put him on your staff and you pay him more than the other attorneys.

Okay.

Does it really matter that

you put him on and then you agree that you,

once you put him on, you had sexual intercourse and he was your boyfriend?

Does it really matter whether you technically had sexual intercourse with him the day before, a month before you appointed him or only after you appointed him?

Either way,

he's getting money from the state under your auspices, and you are going with him, admittedly, on vacations with sexual intercourse taking place.

And now you're saying it's okay because,

hmm,

I like that guy.

I'm talking to him.

I'm going to appoint him and then screw him as soon as he's appointed.

Or I screwed him last night, now I'm going to appoint him.

I don't see the difference myself.

So the first thing is she appointed someone who was unqualified that she had a conflict of interest with.

Now that's probably an administrative statute violation, except she has lied about that, according to a material witness who got up and said, No, she didn't, she's had a relationship since at least,

what, five years earlier, 2019.

And that woman has no reason to lie.

Fanny Willis does,

and Nathan Wade does, but she doesn't.

So she's got contradictions.

And then

the whole testimonies of Wade and her revolved around cash.

And he put things on his credit card,

apparently so that she wouldn't, and he paid cash as well, but he put things on his credit card that apparently show that the trips were paid for by him.

Probably, and the implication is the $650,000 largesse that he got

from this extra.

But then he just incriminated himself.

He said, people come come in his office all the time and pay cash.

Cash is no big deal.

And so

when Fanny gave me all this cash, thousands of dollars, really, $2,500, $3,000, I wasn't surprised.

I deal in cash.

And then I thought,

okay,

you're pretty arrogant.

You just assume that Mr.

IRS nerd who's listening to this is not going to check you out and see what would be a logical income given your expense and your trips, and then see if it squares with your reported income because you're a black male who's out to get Donald Trump.

That's what you're saying to us, that you're exempt.

Because he said something that was very self-incriminating.

And then she says that her, and by the way, I'm so tired of the race card as a black woman.

I'm not going to emasculate a black man.

My dad said that black women, I just get, why don't you just get rid of it?

I mean,

can I just make one excursus before I finish?

Absolutely.

I was a professor for 21 years.

I never got in trouble.

I mean, I've been a professor a lot longer, 50 years,

but I was a Cal State tenured professor, and I did nothing else.

And I only got one reprimand in 21 years from a dean whom I worship, Luis Costa.

And I had a student in my class in Western humanities, history of humanities, and every time I would say something, she'd interrupt.

And she'd say,

Homer, Hesiod, right?

Greek lyric poetry.

Let's lead Simonides, all in translation.

And then we were reading Thucydides, and then we used to have 10 authors.

And she'd say, Professor Hansen, as a Latina, I don't see the relevance of this.

Next question.

I said, okay, Herlinda.

Next question.

Next author.

Well, you're just talking about stuff that is of no interest to me because these are people who are white.

I don't have any interest.

As a Latina, and she did that like the whole semester.

She self-identified.

So I finally said,

okay,

I kind of resent you self-identifying, and I'm your professor, and I'm supposed to be acting in a professional fashion.

But if you do it one more time, I'm going to self-identify.

And so she did it again.

near the end of the semester and I said, as a white male, I just come from a different world than you do, and I can't answer your question.

I can't address it.

You're just completely foreign, your way of thinking to me, because I'm a white male, and I don't believe, apparently, in the transcendence of common humanity, and I'm just a prisoner of my white maleness.

I was being facetious.

So she went and told the dean, and he was a wonderful man.

And he called me up, Victor, Victor, Victor, what the hell did you do?

I said, what did I do?

And he said, I got a student here who just left, and she said that you were bragging that you were a white male.

I said, no, I was saying that I was a victim of being a white male, and I was confined to my gender and race, and I was not able to look at the world in an on-blinker, disinterested fashion.

And the point was to show her how ridiculous that was, so that I didn't want her to close off her imagination by identifying by her race and gender.

And that worked.

That worked so well that she's in my office on a campus that is Hispanic dominated.

And weren't you the guy who claimed that when you wrote Mexiforna, your face was in a telescopic sight in the voice of Otsalon magazine?

I said, Yes, yes.

Okay, just wanted to let you know.

I said, What are you going to do to me?

And he said, I'm going to laugh a little bit and then think that was stupid, what you said,

and go back and teach your class.

He was a great guy, but my point is, you can't self-identify like Fannie Willis did, black, black, black.

And so that was bad.

The other point of legal exposure is very quickly,

she hired somebody that you could make the argument, as I said, was unqualified.

He had no experience in what he was doing.

He's in charge of a very esoteric use of the RICO Act, Racketeering Act.

It's never been used in this fashion.

It's usually used against mafiosos and cartels.

He doesn't know the first thing about it.

So the implication is that she gave undue preference for someone.

And then, second, as I said, she profited from that by going on vacations.

And

put it this way, Sammy, if you were sleeping with someone who you had appointed as head prosecutor to go after the president, the leading presidential candidate and an ex-president, and probably one of the most important criminal cases in history,

wouldn't you, or wouldn't, where was the people,

where was the governor, where were all these people in

Georgia?

Why couldn't they say, Fanny, let's have a big meeting and we need to get the best prosecutors we possibly can?

But they didn't.

They let her do this.

And then once she does it, you would think, huh,

according to her, I'm going to sleep with him.

And people might think that because I had the hots for him when I appointed him, and now that I'm sleeping with him, and I'm going to various places and cruises, and he's paying for it,

I better reimburse him so they don't make the connection.

And to have a reimbursement, I have to do one or two things.

I must write him a check, and I must use a credit card.

So when these right-wing MAGA people try to go after me, I can say, hmm, look, here's the receipts.

I paid him back.

But why would you pay him cash if for only one reason, right?

If not for only one reason, that you were trying to hide it.

So you were trying to say, you know what?

I never went on any trip.

There's no check.

There's no thing.

And she started to say that.

She goes, I can't really remember.

Maybe one night here and one night there.

And, you know, it was just...

And then she got combative.

And I want to just finish this because I want to get back on topic.

The judge was, I I thought, outrageous.

He lost control of the courtroom.

He hounded the Trump defendant lawyers.

He allowed her as the district attorney to go off and on, to insult people.

That's a lie.

I'm not.

Don't interrupt me.

Witnesses don't do that.

And then, because she was so outrageous, he attacked the lawyers and said, make your question in terms of yes or no.

Well, they did.

She just wouldn't answer yes or no.

So he was either terrified of her or terrified of the greater Atlantic.

I don't know why,

but it's getting very tiresome because when you look at the Eugene Carroll judge, Judge Kaplan,

and Judge Kaplan, as I said earlier, when he was asked about the nature of the charges, he was convicted in a civil suit, civil suit.

of alleged

sexual assault, but not of rape.

And

the judge mentioned rape, and he said, well, it's essentially the same thing.

No, it's not.

You have no business saying that.

Then we have judges at Erdogan, in Goron, in Goron.

So

he's the

judge in the Letita James case.

And he's just outrageous.

He's making all sorts of,

he takes his picture,

he lets everybody know he's left wing.

And

it's,

and with this judge who I think will be hearing the entire case how can he possibly be a judge or how can she possibly then say okay

I testified now we're going to go back as she said on the stand you people are on trial not me which has no credibility

and she

you would not want Fannie Willis as

any type of legal counsel.

You wouldn't hire her.

She's so outrageous.

She's so untrained.

She's so

chip on her shoulder, combative.

She's so racially obsessed.

And then she is going to prosecute with the power of the state behind her, the ex-president.

I thought it was just a disaster.

And I didn't know who was worse.

Fanny Willis or the judge.

And you know what?

One last thing.

I kind of liked.

Her boyfriend.

Yeah, he was kind of sympathetic on that.

He kind of looked like things were going going on around him he wasn't quite in control of.

I like the idea

when all of these lawyers very

carefully tiptoing around a powerful black woman and a black man, and they did not want to say sex, romantic relationship.

And he said, you mean sexual intercourse?

Yeah, I did.

And then they said,

and did you go to, he said he'd been to numerous cabins, cabins.

Yeah.

And they said, did you go to a cabin with

a Fannie Will?

And it was

quiet for what, 20 seconds?

And his mind is going, now, let me think.

Did we have any?

Did we register?

Is there any evidence that shows she was with me?

And then he just got, he smiled and he was sweating so much,

he toweled off his head and his hands.

And he was, I liked him.

I really did.

I thought he was funny.

I thought he was,

he knew that what he had to do.

Yeah.

And he knew that Fanny would go after him if he,

so I thought.

And with some exceptional moments, like the one you just mentioned, he actually answered straight and he was

not a hostile witness like she was, which was so weird.

All right.

Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and then we'll come back and talk about the tragedians, the ancient Greek tragedians.

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

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We're back.

So this is our weekend edition, and we always do something cultural.

And we're moving along in literature and writing, period, right?

So the whole literary world as we move forward in ancient Greece.

And we've got lots in ancient Greece.

We've finished the historians and now we're on to the tragedians.

And I think we want to talk about Sophocles and Aeschylus today.

And I'm wondering what we should appreciate about those two if we do go to their plays to read them.

So we're going to do Greek tragedy.

Remember, everybody, we're in a chronological sequence.

I don't know if it was a wise or stupid idea, but we're going to start with all of Western literature to the contemporary novels, starting with Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, which we've done.

We've talked then about Hesiod's works and days, the Greek lyric poets.

Last session we talked about Xenophon following an earlier session on Thucydides and Herodotus.

Now we're in fifth century Athens and let's be candid, 60 to 70% of all classical extant literature comes from Athens.

It doesn't mean there's not great literature like Hesiod from Oscar in central Greece

or

you know, there's Herodotus originally was from Haliconarsis or the pre-Socratic philosophers, which we also went, and Anaximander and Aximenes were from what is now Turkey and Asia Minor.

We had Pythagoras, who had a colony of Pythagoreans in Sicily.

So there's people all with a Greek word, but they seem to be concentrated in Athens between the period after the Persian Wars, 480, 479, all the way to the end of the Peloponnesian War.

And why was that?

Athens controlled an empire of about 180 city-states city-states and it collected tribute.

It took 1 16th

out of the protection money and used as it saw fit.

And Pericles, who was in the democratic system, elected each year for almost 30 years as first citizen, the head of the democratic council, so to speak in modern English terms.

And he appropriated that money for a variety of cultural things.

And one of them was the great buildings of the Propylaea and the Parthenon on the Acropolis, and then subsequently the Erechtheum,

and even the

beautiful little temple of Athene Nike, and then there was a great building program of the Hephaestion.

These were four Doric temples, Temple of Ophaea,

Temple of Nemesis at Ramneus.

And

so there was money invested in cultural activities and architecture, and one of them were

drama.

And we had both comedea, comedy, and tragedy.

Tragedy just etymologically means a goat song, tragos ode.

We get ode from it, of course.

And originally it was out, apparently shepherds did little skits or something when they were bored tending goats.

Or there were mythological goat creatures that were associated with dance and performance like Pan, etc.

In any case, by the fifth century, when the money poured in and they were at peace, the great 50 years,

and that's what we call the pintacantea,

the 50-year period between 480, 479 and the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War.

And they formalized that and they subsidized tragedies and they had a contest.

The Greeks were very competitive.

Three tragedies and one they called Saturday, or kind of a Saturday,

not comedy, but kind of a farce or a low jingle, whatever you want to call it, a low

drama comedy.

And three great

figures come out of that.

We know the names of 200 playwrights, but three of them seem to have captured the attention and by their skill were the most famous, and they were in chronological sequence.

Aeschylus, writing in the

460s, 450s.

Sophocles, 440s, 430s, 420s.

In fact, he lived 406, the Ortipus of Colonus.

He lived to be 93.

And then Euripides,

the last of the three great ones.

And then when the empire is over, they're exhausted by the Peloponnesian War, tragedy in its classical form exists, but it's not

as renowned.

It doesn't have the levels of genius in the fifth century.

So the first great person is Aeschylus, and he brings a lot of the customs and traditions that we now associate with tragedy.

He originates them.

And what are they?

You take any myth from the Greek past and you put it on stage and you put contemporary issues.

Sort of like a Western or the old Star Trek.

You have to follow the rules.

Just take the old Star Treks, Captain Kirk one and

Spock.

You can't kill Kirk.

Spock can't say he's going to get married and leave the Enterprise.

So you know the myth.

But within it, you can talk about contemporary racial issues in Los Angeles.

You can talk about

anything, drugs, psychedelics, 60s issues, protest, and they're all in those,

all in those Star Trek episodes within the framework of the myth.

So obviously Aeschylus is going to

explore certain themes of interest to the audience.

And what are those?

It's two things.

It is

the transition from a rural segmented

loosely confederated Attica Athens into an imperial federal powerful state and he's very interested in religion and one of the issues is blood guilt and blood feuding.

The individual tit for tat tit for tat becomes part of the state prosecution, trial, punishment.

but it's a monopoly of violence on the part of the Athenians, not in an individual Athenian.

And so in his great, he has seven plays.

He wrote 90, but we only have seven.

The Orestia, that is the things about Orestes, the first famous Agamemnon, libation

bearers and Eumenides or Furies.

And we all know the myth that Agamemnon comes back from the Trojan War.

People are kind of angry that for 10 years they've sent their sons over to fight for whatever, you know, because his son Menelaus got his wife stolen by Paris.

And he has a girlfriend, Cassandra.

That's number one strike against him.

Number two is the daughter of he and his wife Clytemestra, Iphigenina.

He's told he cannot win unless he kills her, sacrifices, human sacrifice in the long Greek Mycenaean free pass, apparently.

And he does.

So they win, and he comes back and his wife is livid.

He's got Cassandra, who can tell the future, but she's cursed that no one will believe her.

That's her fate.

She knows exactly what's going to happen.

She tells people, but no one believes her.

We have that English term,

he or she's a real Cassandra, meaning he knows what's going on, but it's so bizarre, who would ever believe it.

And so she and Agisthos, who has a long, I can't get into it, but a family feud with

Agamemnon, He's related to him.

They kill him

and they kill Cassandra, Clemens, and they get away with it.

And then

Aeschylus is trying to say, well, on the one hand, it's murder, but on the other hand, it's a private feud.

Because

after all, Agamemnon did cheat on her and bring his girlfriend back in front of her, and he killed their daughter, but on the other hand, she slaughtered him when he wasn't looking with her boyfriend and she was committing adultery.

So it's a tangled mess.

And then the second part of the trilogy, the so-called

libation

bearers in English, is the two children, Electra and Orestes, say this is not going to stand.

And so they have to conspire and figure out a plot.

to pay back their mother and Augustus, her boyfriend, and they kill them.

And that then sends the humenides.

These are the furies who don't really care about the individual circumstances of a crime.

They just look at if you, patricide or matricide is a criminal lethal punishment offense.

So if you kill your mother and father, the furies come out of nowhere and they hound you.

And it doesn't do any good to say it was justified or not justified.

And so they hound them.

And then the third part, there's the humanities, they're renamed the good thinkers or, you know, human.

It's the good thought.

They are rebranded and Athena comes in and they have a trial.

And it's close and then Athena breaks a tie and she says, you can't do this, just chase people for blood guilt, or you can't individually tit for tat.

We have to institutionalize the criminal justice system.

So I'm going to make a court, but I don't want you to fade away, so you're going to be part of it, and you're going to be called the good mind people, and you're going to be part of the Areop.

And so there's a resolution.

That's very Aeschylian.

And of the seven plays,

Prometheus bound, we don't have the Onbound or the other parts of the trilogy.

But In that play, it's the same thing.

There's the will of Zeus.

He gave fire,

and he gave it to man contrary to divine rules.

So he has to be pinned on a rock and have his liver eaten out.

And then he's freed and then the justice of Zeus sees that and there's a reconciliation.

So in the Aeschylian world he's trying to say

religion in the old sense is very, very important,

but we're now in a sophisticated city-state and there is a way to reconcile them by making religious order complementary with sophisticated democratic rule.

In the euphoria that

follows from the defeat of the Persians, I might add that he fought at the Battle of Marathon, and ten years later he fought at the Battle of Salamis in Plataea.

His brother's hand was cut off and bled, one of his brothers

at Marathon.

His other brother fought with him at Salamis, and his monument did not say Aeschylus, the greatest playwright of his age.

It said

the Mede knew him well, meaning he knew what he was like in battle.

That was what he wanted.

And then very quickly, the next generation, roughly the 440s and 430s, is very different.

This is the high point now of Periclean Athens.

And the tribute is really roaring in, and the Parthenon is being built, and the Propylaea is being built.

And you've got people in Athens like comedian Aristophanes, Pericles the statesman, you've got Actinus and

you've got Democritus the Atomus philosopher.

You've got Thucydides.

It's just a cauldron of talent.

It's kind of like the United States, you know, in the 1930s, even though it was during the Depression.

But at one time you could say that

Writing novels, that was our genre.

Theirs was tragedy at the epic.

But think about all the people who were writing in roughly that 20 to 30 year period from

1920 to 1940.

You had Hemingway, you had Steinbeck, you had Thomas Wolfe, you had John Des Passos, you had F.

Scott Fitzgerald.

You had all of the greatest novelists in American history, and they were all writing and trying to outdo each other.

And, you know, some of them were writing for Hollywood, these novels.

I mean, think of the novels.

You can't go home again, look homeward angel, sun also rises.

Gosh, it was Tender as the Night, The Great Gatsby,

of Mice and Min,

East of Eden.

I mean, it was really a wonderful time in American letters.

And it was the same thing in Athens.

And Sophocles is considered the greatest because he wrote 120 plays, we only have seven.

And he has two great themes that he puts into these myths.

Remember, the myths are there.

That's the clay that these artists work with.

And

his point is that Athens is now becoming more and more radical.

And the more radical it is, it is contrary to the old

aristocratic ethos that your birth, your money, your family's name, your conduct, your bearing is more important than anything, your reputation.

But this is the period of the demagogues,

and he doesn't know how quite to talk about it.

So he does,

he has one great theme in those seven extant plays.

And they're called the Theban plays, three of them.

The most famous of all Greek plays, Oedipus at the Oedipus Rex,

and then there's the Antigone, and Antigone is actually the first one written.

And then, of course, Oedipus at Colonus.

That's a long play, 1,900 lines.

It's kind of hard to read.

It's not one of my big favorites.

I used to teach at Sophocles in Greek.

And in any case, his theme is we have to admire these people that don't fit into democracy.

And I'll take this old myth, and here's Antigone.

And

she's not supposed to bury her revolutionary insurgent brother Polynices, who's killed his brother Atocles, and Atocyles has obeyed the rules of Thebes.

And that is, when the seven against Thebes attacked and they were defeated,

none of them deserved burial.

And so she looks and says,

Well, my brothers are dead, and

why the one is being

rotting and the other one.

So she tells Creon, we need to bury him.

They said, no.

So she secretly buries him, and she won't yield.

And she gets all sorts of chances to repent and to, and no, I am right and you're wrong.

Same thing with Oedipus.

Oedipus is this great man.

He's the only person who could solve the riddle.

And he solves the riddle of the Sphinx.

He stops the plague.

A man, very rudely, Elias, is coming by, hits him at the crossroad.

They get in a fight.

He kills him.

Doesn't make much of it.

He marries Jocasta, Elias' beautiful wife.

He's the king of Thebes.

He's got a beautiful wife.

And then

what happens?

People, there's the old code.

The man he killed was his father,

and he had been put out as a child out on a hillside to be killed in Corinth.

Oedipus, oedopus, means swollen foot.

They had put, he was either defective or something, and they may have put a spike in his ankle so he couldn't, and they exposed him, and a shepherd found him.

And that was the fatal flaw.

They took him and raised him out of compassion.

As a young man, he goes, doesn't even know he's from Thebes.

Sees a guy, doesn't even know he's his son.

He's not culpable at all.

But once this

story gets out that he may have killed his father, and Tiresias can see it because he's a divine prophet, seer,

then he has this stubborn, like Antigone.

This is the second theme.

There's

a fatal flaw that you're too stubborn.

As Yocasta knows the story, and at some critical point in the play, she says, just stop, stop, stop, stop.

Meaning, I'm even willing to live with, I slept with my son.

But he won't.

And he has to find the answer, and that means he's going to doom everybody.

And he does, and he puts out his eyes, and that's resolved in the Edipus Columns.

Finally, he has a couple of plays, I can't go through all the plays, but he has sort of

two plays, Ajax and Philoctetes,

that

in one way will foreshadow a lot of later

Western literature and civilizational art

and literature in the sense of they become the tragic hero in its most pure form.

And what is a tragic hero?

These are people

who cannot change their

their demeanor, their customs, their tradition, their character.

And they're in the the wrong place at the wrong time.

And they will not change.

However, they have certain skills from an earlier age that the smug, smart, modern mind needs.

And all of its sophistication, these people cut the Guardian knot and you need them.

But if you need them, you have to bring them into your quote-unquote civilization.

Then what do you do with them?

when they solve the problem.

So on the stage, Sophocles, the old aristocrat, wants to explore this.

So he puts Ajax there.

And Ajax, in the myth, remembers the guy in Homer's Iliad that you always count on.

He's compared to a mule, a donkey, a lion.

Achilles goes in and out.

Sometimes Agamemnon is a good fighter, and he fades.

Odysseus has to shoot a bow, not Ajax.

You need somebody to plug the line.

You get old Ajax in there.

He's not necessarily a brilliant guy, but he will fight, fight, fight, and he's good at it.

And then guess what happens?

Achilles dies.

So everybody says the armor goes to Ajax.

No, no, no.

He's from a different age.

He does not lie.

He's not capable of stealth.

He just says, I'm the best guy.

I deserve the stuff.

And Odysseus gets the armor because Odysseus is the modern man, the conniver.

And then he...

He goes and sulks, and he kills himself.

And he says, either live nobly or nobly die.

I put that on my father's epitaph.

You remind me of Ajax.

And

the Philippides is the same thing.

He's needed to win the war, but he has a stinky wound, so they throw him out.

He stinks.

And then they have to bring him back.

And in this take on the tragic hero, he comes back and he helps the Greeks.

But you can see how people like John Ford

or

George Stevens,

directors like that, when they looked at Shane or High Noon or the Wild Bunch or

the Magnificent Seven, they said, there are people, as the West starts to become modern, like Athens is becoming modern,

there is no more open range, there is no more cattle drives, there is no shoot the guy down in Dodge City, it's all over with.

But they have those skills and they cannot adjust.

And they're roaming around, and they're not bad people.

And every once in a while, even though we have a town, we have a law, we have a judge.

Remember the scene in High Noon where the three guys are going to come and kill Will Kaye and Gary Cooper?

And what's the judge do?

I got to get out of here.

Sorry.

I'm out.

And

it's the same thing in the Magnificent Seven, the kind of council of Mexican peasants say, oh,

I can't deal with this.

And it's the same thing with the little

homesteaders, sodbusters, and Shane.

Let's have a little meeting about what to do with the cattle barons who are killing people.

And what do you do with Wilson, Jack Palance?

Well, maybe we could do this and this and this and this.

And Shane just looking at him.

No,

the only thing they understand is a gun.

And there's three of them.

And you need somebody who can kill all three of them.

And he's got to be a great shot.

He's got to be a nihilist.

And I'm the guy.

And I'm willing to go in and do something that you will criticize and say is against your new civilized code, but I will get rid of Jack Palance and the Riker brothers, and then there's no place for me.

Maybe I'll commit suicide like Ajax, but he's going to ride wounded off into the sunset.

And that's kind of

the wild bunch too.

And

it's a very powerful notion of a person that has certain skills that we need at certain times, yet the very use of those skills is antithetical to our pretensions of civilization.

You know, one of the things that got me in big trouble when I wrote the Trump book, I said Trump, in a way, is a tragic hero.

And that was kind of the theme that

we couldn't cut, you know, the Obama this and that, and the apology tour, and all of this.

And

we needed some guy to come in and say, I will close the border.

I will close the border.

I will just drill like hell, drill, baby, drill.

I will get us the biggest,

most beautiful gas and oil project ever.

I will stop crime.

I will tell, you know, I will bomb this shit out of ISIS.

I will kill Soleimani.

You can't do that.

You can't move the.

Are you crazy?

You can't move the embassy to Jerusalem?

You can't say that the Golan Heights are Israel.

You can't cut off the Palestinian.

You're going to cut off Hamas.

You can't declare that the Houthis are terrorists.

You can't get out of the Iran deal.

You can't sanction the Iran.

You can't kill 200 of the Wagner group in Syria.

These are Russians, man.

Yeah, I can.

Watch.

And so he does it, but in the process,

people are so shocked that they brought him in to solve these problems, they want to get rid of him.

And they usually don't want to go.

And then it's, in case, then what follows is Russian collusion, Russian disinformation, impeachments, et cetera.

And then the tragic hero has a fatal flaw, right?

They're excessive and they won't change.

So Trump,

one of the stupidest columns I write, about every year I write a column, just maybe sort of, kind of, that Trump can hang up his Twitter gloves and he's won, no more tweets.

He doesn't have to call Nikki Haley.

He can say Nikki Haley is frustrating rather than dumb bird brain.

It's just fussy.

That's too clear.

Because you know what I mean?

He can't, and that thing about NATO, I wrote another dumb column.

I said, you know, you don't have to say that you don't give a hell what is going to happen.

That's going to be misinterpreted.

Or you don't have to go after, where's Nikki's husband?

Where's Nikki's husband?

She's not here.

It's over.

Telling Trump not to do that is like telling Ajax, you know, to be quiet.

Or it's like telling, I don't know, Will Cain not to throw his badge down when he leaves Adleyville.

Or it's kind of like saying to Steve McQueen,

well, you know, You guys can stay another week and if you just behave and not shoot your guns.

Or it's like telling Shane, hey Shane,

we know that you shot a bunch of people and maybe you can come back to town and promise never to use your gun again and apologize and we're going to have to put you on trial for shooting the Riker brothers, but we'll defend you.

And he says, sorry, I can't change.

Count me out.

So

that's something to think about.

And next time we'll do Euripides and his 19 plays, especially Medea and Bacchan.

Two wonderful plays.

So if somebody wanted to master the ancient Greek tragedians, how many plays would they have to read?

Depends on how many you.

I think you could say there's seven, seven, and nineteen.

So 33 plays.

But there are some like the Rhesus

and the Prometheus of Aeschylus that there's a big debate whether it's genuine.

I mean, they really wrote it.

It's attributed to them.

Prometheus is very short.

It's only like a thousand lines.

It's just a different, you know, it's kind of a different play.

And so there's, but it's 32 to 33 plays.

And then we have, of course, we're going to talk about the 19 of Euripides, but there's also 11 extant comedies by Aristophanes.

And he's brilliant.

He's sort of a combination of stand-up Saturday night comic,

the old Saturday Night Live, Mort Saul, all in one.

Bowen and Martin's Laugh and that same type of shtick.

All right.

Well, well let's go ahead and take a break for some messages and then come back and we've got a few more things to talk about on current news.

So stay with us and we'll be back.

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We're back.

You're back.

And we have, I know that you were, we mentioned the Schellenberg binder or the Schellenberg investigation that has revealed that there is a binder.

And he says he's been informed that it's not a national security, but it implicates CIA, FBI, illegal surveillance, and election interference.

And it's gone.

And well, we don't know where it is.

And what is some of the speculation about it?

Have you heard about that, Victor?

Yeah, it's a very murky thing.

Schellenberg,

was it Matt Taibbi too?

Yeah, Taibbi.

And there's a woman.

Yes.

And they've made the argument

that there was concern that Trump had illegally, unlawfully taken a very very important binder out, and that this was

the crown jewel of his

unlawful removal of files.

And this proved that it was so important that it was missing.

And they are alleging, as I understand it,

that that's only half true.

That the file, in fact, has information in it that John Brennan, the CIA director, created a special group of people to defame, investigate, and go after Trump people.

And he used the so-called five-eyes English-speaking world of espionage, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, Great Britain, and us, to be on the lookout for these people in their international train their international travels, as well as Russia, and the whole thing

is prima facie an indictment of the Obama administration, who use the CIA and to a lesser extent the FBI for domestic purposes, which is illegal in the case of the CIA, but to destroy a political campaign.

And

Trump got a hold of that.

And he

may have, I'm being very careful here, taken it to Mar-Lago as insurance because he felt that, and they said

something was missing.

They never told us what or what was in it.

And that's what they're suggesting.

And maybe the Mar-a-Lago raid was

fueled or sparked by a need to get that file back because they were afraid Trump was going to leak it, which he may well have.

Yeah.

If I can turn to our current politics, R.F.

K.

Jr.

wrote an article recently, and he wants to

look for a new system by which this democracy operates in terms of parties.

And he said both parties are causing chaos at the border, erosion of the middle class, and increasing government debt.

And they won't allow in their arcane process other people to come into it.

So a third party needs to needs to be, right?

And

he does

laud Trump for trying to

revamp DC.

And he also says that America needs an outsider, that's for sure.

And I know that Trump always cast himself as an outsider.

But what do you think the possibilities are of a third party as we get moved closer to this election?

And who knows who would be in it?

But RFK certainly is a leading contender.

Well, the problem with a third party party is you're going I know there were multiple parties at our founding, but essentially you're going against some 200 plus years

of a two-party system.

And we have a very complex system compared to the British or French or continental parliamentary system.

When you lose an election, you no longer have a majority of seats in the parliament.

Then the chief executive or the executive branch goes to the coalition that has the most seats that they can hold it together.

We don't do that.

We have a yin and yang between a conservative and a liberal party called the Democrats in the modern age and the Republicans.

So, what it's very hard for a third group to break that tradition,

but more importantly,

we have our right and left side of the brains.

You go back to the French Revolution, the idea of the seats in the French Assembly to the left and to the right.

So, I mean, that's pretty clear that most people are either right or left.

There are gradations.

You can be a MAGA, or you can be a rhino, or you can be part of the squad, or you can be a Blue Dog Democrat, if they still exist.

But

it's hard to carve out something in the middle because it doesn't really have a strong idea, unless it's just on a single issue.

And so we've, and you have to have a dynamic leader.

So when we've seen these third parties, the only one in the modern period was Ross Perot.

He got 19% of the vote against George H.W.

Bush

and Bill Clinton.

He is responsible for George H.W.

Bush losing to Bill Clinton.

Take that away, and most of his votes would have gone to Bush.

And then people forget.

They really do.

And in 1996, he ran again.

And he got 9% of the vote.

And that cost, I think you could make the argument, that I'm not that Bob Dole is going to beat Bill Clinton, but it really hurt Republicans.

And of course, Ralph Nader in 2000 ran, and I think you could make the argument he gave Florida to George W.

Bush.

So what I'm getting at is, except for Perot, and he wasn't going to win.

And even Teddy Roosevelt, who had been

president of the United States, when he formed the Bull Moose Party in 1912, he ran against Wilson and his former friend and successor, William Howard Taft.

He cost Taft or himself, whoever you would say was the proper Republican standard board, the election.

And he gave us eight years of Woodrow Wilson, which I think is the most disastrous presidency in a long, long time.

So when Kennedy says he's going to have a third party, or there's talk now of Joe Manchin, you know, with Mitt Romney running, the no labels third way.

The only thing I can see that's going to happen in the election, if you get Jill Stein out of the basement again, and you get Cornell West,

and you get this Phillips guy, the congressperson, that's three,

and you get RFK, it's four,

and you get a Manchin Romney or something like that, five,

then they're going to, it's like slicing cheese.

They're going to slice one to two percent.

Kennedy could slice five or ten percent, Joe Manchin and Robney could do 5 to 10.

And you have to ask yourself

for whom is the loss greater?

Biden or Trump?

It just seems to me that

RFK, I know that he's sounding as a different Democrat, but it seems to me that he is a Democrat.

And it seems to me that Cornell West is a man of the left and will get the black middle class.

I don't think he'll appeal to the

lower middle class inner city as much as the elite black.

He can get one or two percent.

It seems that Jill Stein will get the same group, socialists, something.

And Phillips will get kind of the old conservative,

traditional Uber.

I mean, you know what I mean?

Just mainstream, maybe a Bill Clinton type of Democrat.

Yeah.

One or two percent.

We're talking about small numbers.

And then if Manchin were to run, maybe, you know, a lot of a few Republicans and Independents

in RFK.

So when you put them all together, I think

these four to five third-party candidates could take 10% of the vote away from Joe Biden.

And he's down right now.

You can see, what am I getting at?

I'm getting at,

as I am speaking and you guys are listening,

24-7, 360 degrees, the left-wing donor class, the Republican political class, the congreg,

all of the officeholders, state, local, federal, they are in a frenzy.

They are working full-time trying to game this out.

They are calling Mark Zuckerberg.

They're calling Bill Gates.

They're calling George Sorrells.

They're calling all these people.

What the F are we going to do?

Can you guys find a way to get RFK out?

Can we legally bar him?

Can we get him off the ballot?

Can somebody buy Jill Steinoff and just give her some money or something?

Can't Cornell West become, I don't know, president of Harvard?

We got to find something.

What are we going to do?

This is in addition to the Joe Biden non-complicementis question in Kamala-Harris.

Third parties are the only way that usually incumbents lose.

I mean, Donald Trump is an exception.

Donald Trump lost.

He lost the popular vote by $7 million, but he lost, I think.

Not as other people allege, that the computers were wired.

He lost because in 10 to 15 states, they changed the rules of the state legislature, I think improperly,

quasi-legally.

And the result was under the pretext of COVID, 70% who usually vote in person and can be verified on Election Day voted absentee mail in early balloting when there was less verification.

That was by design, as we know where Mark Zuckerberg's $419 million.

So that's the worry.

But I think the Republicans are kind of encouraging it.

By the way,

you mentioned it.

Did you see Adam Schiff's ad?

No.

There's a picture of Steve Garvey for the Senate race.

Remember, there's this Porter and then Adam Schiff, and Porter was kind of ahead because Adam Schiff is such an odious creature that nobody, even on the left, wanted him.

And then there's Steve Garvey, the Republican.

Yeah.

And then there's Crazy Barbara Lee.

Oh, I saw that.

Yes.

So they have this, it's paid for, I think, by Adam Schiff.

But it's supposed to be a damning thing of Steve Garvey because the top two will go.

So obviously Adam Schiff,

I think he understands that Steve Garvey has a chance, right?

Yeah.

So obviously he'd want to go against Porter because Barbara Lee doesn't have a chance.

But he can't do that, you know, go after federal liberals.

So he's running ads

against Steve Garvey.

But they're not against Steve Garvey.

You know how usually when you have a picture of a candidate and they look like a vampire or they look like a Wallace or something, they exactly Garvey and he looks great.

He looks great.

It's like the baseball player he was.

They want to libel him and they say, you know, he wants to, he's kind of for Trump and he's kind of conservative.

And yeah.

And so you get the impression that he's running these ads to hurt Porter.

So to build up Steve Garvey, because he would take votes he thinks away from Porter, his Democratic rival.

Well, that's in California, though.

It's very funny, though.

I thought, wow, they're going to go after Steve Garvey.

And I saw the ad.

I thought, hmm, I think I like to vote for him.

Yes, but you, and I don't think very many Californians.

Oh, I think a lot of them.

I don't think he's going to win, but I mean, that ad

is

going to die.

That ad had some ulterior motive.

Yeah.

So anyway.

Well, Victor, we're at the end of the show.

I want to remind everybody that Victor is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marcia Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

And you can

find him at his ex account at VD Hansen.

And then he has on Facebook Hansen's Morning Cup.

So come join him in any of those places.

So thank you very much, Victor.

It's been a great Saturday for everybody, I hope, or maybe even a Sunday.

And we hope you enjoyed it.

We'll be back next weekend with

not Aeschylus, we said Euripides.

So, Euripides.

Yeah.

So, please come join us then.

And, Victor, I understand you have an interview for maybe next week sometime.

You're going to have to.

We're working on Senator Johnson of Wisconsin.

He's requesting an interview, and I'm a big admirer of him.

And I really look forward to that.

We try to have an interview every couple of weeks.

Yeah.

So, I have a lot of people

there on the docket.

Yeah.

All right.

Well, thanks to all of our listeners and all of our supporters.

We do, oh, last thing, we do drink Elevate at this studio.

Yeah, drinking it right now.

It's hydrogen-infused water.

It's pure superwater and functional fuel.

It will give you endurance, focus, energy, increase your metabolism, recovery, and sleep.

So we definitely recommend it.

You know what I always noticed about it was that I always thought, wow, this is the cleanest water I've ever tasted in my entire life.

And I just saw on there that they do 12-stage purification process.

So no wonder, huh?

Something about it, when it gets in your mouth, it feels smooth on your cheeks and tongue.

Yeah.

Even though it's slippery, I like that.

DrinkElevate.com.

DrinkElevate.com.

So

thank you, everybody.

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

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