Munitions, Immigration and Greek Lyric Poetry

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Hello, and welcome to the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

Victor is the Martin and Ely 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.

This is our Saturday edition and we will look at Greek lyric poetry and it follows on Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, so the epic poems.

So we will engage in that in our second segment of this.

But first, we'll look at some news and we have U.S.

munitions shortages on deck and also immigration and the immigration issue.

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

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Welcome back to Victor Davis Hansen's show.

You can find Victor at his website, victorhanson.com, and you can come join us for $5 a month or $50 a year.

And we welcome one and all to the Blade of Perseus is the name of the website.

Well, Victor, I was reading about the munition shortages in the United States due to the fact that we're giving so much, so many arms out for the war in Ukraine and aiding Israel with Gaza to some extent.

I know that Israel's relatively independent.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, it's not.

70%

of its

munitions have to come from the United States.

Why?

Because they have become very, very...

not that they are not sophisticated in their own domestic production, but the Iron Dome is a joint project and much of the resupply of the missiles come from the United States.

Almost all of their fighters now come from the United States.

The parts,

everything.

artillery shell, all of that comes from it.

Because

they're facing a worldwide,

I don't know what, the arms people are not willing to sell to them on a strictly free market basis, and they're very expensive.

And the United States gives them over two or three billion dollars in arms sales and basically aid a year, so they need us.

Yeah.

Well, the article went further than just that.

And they were looking at China and China's

provocations with Taiwan, with elections coming up in Taiwan, and that Xi has

promised reunification, which is no promise at all.

But the article looked at China's control of 65% of rare earth minerals that are used in munitions.

And I thought that was kind of interesting, that the United States needs to be very careful because the Chinese are well endowed for making munitions, whereas the United States is not quite so well endowed.

So we need to focus on our ability to assume those munitions.

And I was wondering your thoughts on that predicament.

Well,

I'm sorry, I assume the rare earth materials is what we need to be focused on, not the munitions.

Well, to make the munitions, but go ahead.

I mean,

I don't know all the names of them.

I remember Scandium and Lanthanai.

lanthanides and things like that and

yttrium.

But the point is that all of these things, if we had a Marshall plan to scour them out, and some of them we know exist, lithium and all that stuff, in huge amounts of the United States.

I mean, the area of the United States is roughly equivalent to China's, but

we're not looking.

This administration is not trying.

It finally has broken down, I think, and admitted that for EV batteries are willing to look at lithium and stuff.

But we have those materials here.

And the second thing is

most of these weapons systems,

whether it's sophisticated tanks or missiles, or ships, the designs, the technology, they started in Europe or the United States or Japan.

And so it's a Western monopoly.

What I'm getting at is we have the ability.

We have the technology.

We have the supremacy and design.

We have the wherewithal as far as labor.

We have everything, but we don't have the willpower.

And then we do certain things that are so stupid and we just think we're the United States that it won't hurt us, such as leaving behind $50 billion,

maybe it's more of weapons in Afghanistan, small arms, machine guns, drones, everything.

We just left it there.

And then

we look at this defense budget and you look at the $700 billion and you look at overhead pensions, DEI programs.

How many artillery shells could you get for firing all the DEI woke overseers in the Pentagon?

A lot.

So it's not that we don't have the money and it's not that we don't have the minerals, and it's not we don't have the know-how.

We have all of that.

We just don't have

willpower.

Part of it's a left.

They feel that we shouldn't be producing weapons except for

Ukraine.

As I said before, one of the funniest things I used to ride my bike around the Stanford campus,

right, even as a way of getting over long COVID.

And I just remember all the signs that during the George Floyd said, this house does not support racism.

All of a sudden it was a Ukrainian flag.

We may be left-wing, and we may root out all hatred, and we're trying to war against the mega-extremists, but you've got to get a lot more Patriot batteries and shells and get them over to Ukraine so they can kill those damn Ruskies.

And that was the attitude.

And so...

I think maybe the left wants us to rearm a little bit to help Ukraine.

But other than that, they've been against rearming.

It's a very dangerous world now, and I think everybody should realize that, as I said in the last podcast, deterrence will prevent war.

So what we need to do is have more ships

and more planes and more drones and more munitions than any other country in the world by far.

And just sit there and say, don't screw with us, and we won't have a war.

But when we start poking our nose all over the world and lecturing people and flying pride flags on our embassy and Afghanistan as we flee, are giving lectures about the spring offensive is going to go on to Moscow when you know it can't,

or

you start telling Israel not to do this and not to do that,

or you send these two big carriers in the Mediterranean the moment one starts to leave, Iran just sneaks in and says, you know, it's our Mediterranean, then you've got real problems.

We've lost deterrence.

We're short military personnel in all branches of the service.

We've got enormous overhead of audit, administration, DEI, all of that.

We've alienated from service those who did not get vaccinated that were fired.

We basically told those who died at 75%

in Iraq and Afghanistan that you're were guilty of white rage and white supremacy and we don't want you.

And now we learn that when Mark Milley and Lloyd Austin went to Congress two years and said, we're going to find, I'm going to understand Professor Kendi, I've got to understand him.

Well, there was nothing to understand, Mark Milley.

He just said that you can be a racist, it's okay to stop racism, meaning me and

Ibrahim Kendi can call people white blank, blank, blank because they're racist.

That's all it was, was a binary.

But nevertheless, he said he was going to study it and they were going to run an investigation.

Guess what?

This month they had the investigation conclusion.

They couldn't find any cabal, conspiracy, corps,

militia groups inside the military.

They didn't exist.

So did they issue an apology and say, we're sorry, we defamed all the white working class males?

No.

But they did lose them.

And if you talk, as I keep saying, you talk to military people of a high rank, oh no, Victor,

that's just a right-wing talking point.

Our boys are too fat.

They're covered with tats.

They're drug addicts.

We have to compete against the private sector with three important.

No, no, no, no, no.

You start winning again.

You have a competent military.

You reward battlefield efficacy and competency.

And you are racially blind and gender blind.

You don't start this war.

You'll get them to come back.

Well, let's turn then to immigration.

And just it seems like there's the migrant wars going on.

We have on the one hand Corrine Jean-Pierre saying that it's shameful that Texas is sending migrants to northern cities.

She seems a day late and a dollar short with that assessment, but she recently said that.

And

a Democratic mayor in New Jersey who has sent a bus full of asylum seekers back to the Texas border.

And the left is

really got

in its migrant wars, illegal immigrants.

It's really funny because

when Texas started sending busloads of illegal immigrants into big northern cities or Florida or whatever particular red state, they started getting so angry and they said, this is illegal, as if letting them in on the border was fine as long as they stayed down there.

So for me, it was very hard to understand the left-wing Blue City, Eric Adams type of mayor's calculus that was fine with open borders.

And remember the first boat, the very first bus load, he met it, met them.

As they got off the bus, he handed them a little bottle of water.

Happy to be here.

We're a sanctuary city.

That lasted about two bus loads.

But what was the attitude about?

I guess the attitude was one

of two things, or both.

The first one was,

well, we don't like red states, so we're just going to let 11, 10 million, we're going to let them in and let them deal with it, right?

Yeah.

And we're just going to let them deal with it.

We think this is great.

And

two,

I guess they thought, we're for this and

we're for this in theory, but we don't like these people, so we don't want them here.

So we want to punish the Red States with more costs for anybody, but we particularly don't want anybody from the south of the border coming.

So what else could it be that they were so angry that when people south of the border started to leave Red States, was it because they thought, wow, we didn't raise taxes enough, we didn't break their budgets enough, we didn't get them angry enough, or was it, oh my God,

all these brown people are coming to Martha's vineyard and they're going to crap on my lawn and they're going to sleep out in the street, they're going to smoke dope, they're going to oogle and whistle at my daughter.

We can't have these people here.

I don't know what it was, but it was one of those two.

It's hard to make a choice.

Well,

by the way, I was walking this morning, my little illegal immigration.

It's Christmas.

So, what was I expecting to see?

I thought, hmm, on my my morning walk around the farm, it's Christmas,

and I expect to see somebody throw their Christmas tree out in the almond orchard.

And I was exactly so happy when I saw one.

And it was frosted too.

It had frosting on it, white frosting.

They just said, you know what?

There's a stupid old white guy out there who's old and should go find someplace and die.

But until he does, I'm going to take my Christmas tree out of my living room.

I'm not going to cut it up and put it in a trash can or take it to the dump.

I'm just going to go put it in the car and go out and maybe, I don't know, late in the afternoon, just dump it.

And that's what they did.

And they have a lot of trash around it.

Being Sherlock Holmes, I went out and looked at the trash.

And I did not find, guess what, one incriminating address, not one Power Bill, not one phone bill, not one advertising, but I did find

almost everything in Spanish.

Wow.

So that's what I said.

I brought that up in connection with illegal immigration.

And by the way, it's not people here who are second and third generation Mexican-American people are doing that.

It's people coming right across the border.

And when I drive down, if I go one quarter from my house and I make a left or right turn down, I won't mention the boulevard.

It looks like a trash heap.

I grew up with that boulevard, avenue, whatever we call it, my entire life.

I used to walk down, I used to ride it by.

It was never like this.

No sooner do the farmers clear out the crap that within hours, I'm not kidding you, hours, there are washing machines, beds, mattresses, car seats, junk, every

weight.

I saw a workout platform there,

you know.

Yeah.

And they just throw them out there, and no one says a word.

Well, Victor,

the last thing I want to talk about before we turn to Greek lyric poets is that in USA Today, which is a fairly left-wing publication, they had a story about how blacks, Hispanics, and young voters are abandoning Biden.

And their poll was the Roper Center poll.

And it showed that black support dropped from 87% in 2020 to 63%

today.

And Hispanics prefer Trump to Biden 39 percent to 34, and young voters, again,

37 to 33.

But I thought what was even more interesting in that article was that the happy columnist says that much has gone to the third-party candidates, and he mentioned in particular R.F.

K.

Jr., who has got lots of those votes.

At least that was the suggestion.

He didn't say exactly what he

was very hard to know whether, I guess he was let on the Utah ballot lately, but they're going to try to keep him off.

They're going to try to keep Jill Stein off.

They're going to try to keep Representative Phillips off.

They're going to try to keep Cornell West off.

Add them all up, one here, two there, three there, percent, and you may get up to 15 percent, and you can be in Ross Perot territory.

What happened to George H.W.

Bush, and we know just what Ralph Nader did to Al Gore in Florida in 2000.

So they are paranoid about

third-party candidates.

And so that's one

thing to remember.

But I just don't believe those polls.

Yeah, you do.

Because

if Trump got 35% of the black vote, or he got 50% of the Hispanic vote, it wouldn't just be a tsunami that would wipe out Joe Biden, but you wouldn't get any House member in any purple state or senator elected because the down ballot.

I just don't believe that's going to happen.

I don't think the

I was wrong in the midterms.

I thought the Republicans would pick up 20 seats and they might pick up the Senate.

And then the abortion thing happened after I said that.

But I just don't think they're going to...

I would like them to pick up 40 seats, and I would like them to pick up 10 Senate seats.

And to do that, those numbers would ensure that if they're accurate.

But I don't think they are.

I just don't think so.

And what are we talking about?

What's the subtext of this whole conversation?

That anything,

as far as the African-American vote, anything over 12 to 15%,

in the case of Latino, which is now a larger vote, anything over 45%?

It's history for the Democratic candidate because they have completely turned off the white working class, and that's 33%

of the population.

And I'm talking about margins of 70, 75% vote against the left.

And so they need these minority votes at astronomical, asymmetrical majorities.

And if they don't get them, they're done.

So I just don't think that's going to happen.

I really don't.

And this is all before the campaign.

So remember what's going to happen come January, February, March, April when the Republican

nominee is finalized.

If it's Trump, and it looks like it probably will be, they're going to unleash lawfare

round two.

And they're going to have leaks from the judge, the prosecutor, he's going really guilty of this, he said this.

Just they're going to saturate the media with it.

They're going to tie him up in court.

They're going to give him gag orders.

And then they're going to unleash their

Zuckerberg bucks, Zukbucks, or whatever we want to to call it.

Hundreds of millions of dollars on voting protocols.

But more, they're going to unleash publicity.

They're going to run on three things.

Abortion.

Donald Trump is Donald Trump.

Satanic, Hitlerite.

And insurrection, insurrection, MAGA, super MAGA, hyper-mega, insurrection.

That's all they're going to run.

They're not going to mention a word.

They'll talk about Bidenomics, but they won't talk about it in the election cycle.

Not unless

there's a huge deflation and we somehow get back to 2021 prices when he came into office.

He's raised them by 30% on things that count.

And they're not going to talk about the border, and they're not going to talk about crime, and they're not going to talk about foreign policy.

And they're not going to talk about energy.

That's a lot of not talks about.

They're going to talk about

insurrection January 6th, insurrection January 6th.

Trump did this, Trump said this, Trump tweeted this, Trump's this, Trump's this, right?

Yeah.

And they're going to talk about they want to kill you.

They want to make sure that, you know,

you're...

Every single woman is going to be pregnant in the United States, and she's going to be told if she doesn't get an abortion, she'll die tomorrow.

And yet they killed her.

That's how it'll be framed.

And the Republicans walked right into it.

They really did.

They weren't smart about abortion.

Well, Victor, let's take a break and then come back and talk about Greek lyric poets.

Stay with us, and we'll be back.

We're back.

This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show, and this is the Saturday edition.

So, we look at something cultural.

And following the epic poems of Homer are the Greek lyric poets, many of whom lived in the 6th century BC, and so a little bit before the classical era of ancient Athens.

So

an older poetry, but definitely no less rich in its discussion of

human affairs and the human condition.

So, Victor, I'm anxious to hear about these lyric poets.

Go ahead.

Well, we talked about so far Homer, who wrote around 700, composed, I should say, the Odyssey and the Iliad.

Those are epic poems.

They're written around 12,000 lines.

They're very long poems.

They're written in dactylic hexameter.

And that's like your dactyl, your finger, long, short, short, long, short, short, six times.

They have a beat.

Menene de dada polymetis Odysseus or something like that.

But this is different.

And Hesiod was wrote in hexameter.

These are lyric poems.

They're...

designed to be accompanied by the lyre, L-Y-R-E.

It's sort of like a harp.

And they have a very different meter.

They're light.

They're usually an iambic, iambic, short-long, short-long, short-long, short, long, short, long.

And these are beats, da-da-da-da-da-da, five times.

Or they can be in L-A-J couplets or trochies or anapet.

We don't need to get into those, but they have a different sound to them.

And the topic is different.

It's not about war.

It's not about monsters.

It's not about heroism.

It's about life.

Wine, women, sex, beauty, the ocean, flowers.

It's like modern poetry.

And they're short, very short.

And so sometime right at the end of the epic cycle, there was a new genre that coincided with the rise of the city-state.

And we started to see, especially off the coast of Asia Minor and the islands, Chios, Lesbos,

and in Ionia itself, poets, along with the pre-Socratic philosophers, which we're going to talk about maybe next time,

a whole body of

lyric

poetry by

people who wrote in very short poems about a very different topic and very different sounding

to us, meters.

And I'll give you an example.

One is a very famous one, Archilicus.

It's so neat.

You know, one line.

I think all of you know it.

The fox knows many many tricks, the hedgehog only one, one good one.

I think the Greek says one big one.

And that was famous for Isaiah Berlin's idea of two types of knowledge or freedom.

And we know it is the hedgehog is the guy who knows everything.

And

excuse me, the fox knows everything a little bit, and the hedgehog knows

one thing, but he knows a lot.

And it's that old idea of generic versus specialized knowledge or specialized expertise or skills versus being broadly educated.

And

Archillax, you know,

there's also an attack on wealthy people, the establishment.

In the Iliad and the Odyssey, you have Agamemnon and Menelaus, and you have Achilles criticize it, but he's an aristocrat himself.

In Hesiod, you have the first bit of a farmer who's attacking the bribe-swallowing establishment.

But lyric is anti-wealth.

I mean, in one of

Archillicus' poem, he says, Nothing to me, the life of Gyges.

Gyges was a proverbial Lydian that was very, and his glut of gold.

I neither envy nor admire him as I watch his life and what he does.

I want no pride of tyranny.

It lies far off from where I look.

Sort of a

reaffirmation of the new city-state and the idea of freedom

and consensual government.

Minermas was a different poem.

He had, listen to this one.

What then is life if love the golden is gone?

What is pleasure better to die when the thought of these is lost from my heart?

I mean, if you get old and you're not,

your testosterone level goes down, then it's bad.

Because the best thing about being young is, I guess, love and sex.

I can remember this poem.

I remember I had a course when I was 18, and we were

tested on whether you could recite it by memory in Greek.

So what then is life of love?

The golden is gone.

What is pleasure?

Tiste bios, tiste terpton, a ter cruz se saphro dites.

What good, what is life?

What is pleasure?

Terpnon without golden Aphrodite, which is the manifestation of sex.

So we have all of these poems.

Maybe some of you heard Sappho, where the word lesbian comes from the island of Lesbos, where

she reportedly came, because she has a whole series of poems

about sex and desire, both male and female, but she was sexually...

What's the word, non-binary?

Yes.

And so,

and then Alcaeus, he also came

from Lesbos.

It's a beautiful island if you go there, but

Simonides is probably the most famous of all the poets.

And Go Tell the Spartans that here we lie, obedient to their words.

That is the monument of the 300 that died at Thermopylae.

And you can go there today, and the Greek government has that Simonides line there, that little couplet.

And I think there was a movie with Burt Lancaster, Go Tell the Spartans.

Go tell it.

And so the dead, and that happens in Greek epigrams, and a lot of the epigrams are in elegiac couplets.

They're lyric poems themselves.

Go tell the Spartans, so the dead Spartans who are the 300 are there under the ground, and as you walk by, their little plaque or their monument says, Go tell everybody

300 miles to the south that we're still here.

They told us no retreat, where we're still here obedient to their remasa, their remasa, remasi, excuse me, to their words, their remata in the Veda plural.

And so

what does lyric poetry do?

It's the poetry of

commemoration of the dead.

It's taking off

a critique of the seriousness of epic poetry.

It's mostly about food and sex.

And we have, oh, the names of maybe 100 lyric poets.

And we have sizable corpuses from maybe 15.

And there's there's Simonides, there's Theognes, there's Archaeus, there's

Archilicus.

There's Solon, the lawgiver, the seven ages of man.

He tells us that the average or ideal age to live and die is

one year.

You're born one to ten, ten to twenty, twenty to thirty, thirty, forty, forty, fifty, and then you're done.

At 70, I'd be done.

Wow.

But in each age, there's a fitting way to look at the world, and your activity is based on the

maturity of your mind and the resilience of your body.

And then at 70, your mind and your body go,

it's time to leave.

But

it's a very different genre.

The problem we have with it is that,

and we have this with all Greek literature, is remember that these were written on papyrus paper.

And it's an oral I think the poets may have written them down after the 700s.

They're no longer the oral tradition.

But they were read out loud, and when people heard them, they wanted to read them.

What I'm trying to stumble at is that nobody

bought a papyrus roll at a bookseller, say in a basket in the Agora at Athens, and came home and like we read by himself.

They were very expensive to copy, and the paper was not that durable.

So you would buy a corpus of Archillicus' poems, and then you would invite people over to a symposium,

a drinking together banquet.

You would all recline, you'd eat dinner, and then someone would recite by memory or read a poem.

And same thing with Herodotus or a history.

And so what happened was that those had to be copied every couple of hundred years at least, the papyrus paper, and it's not indigenous to Greece, it has to come from Egypt.

It's sort of a reed-like plant.

And you know, to make it, you have to on, you know, you take the reed and you put them,

you cut it and then you smash it, and then you smash a lot of them together and you force them into sort of a

paper-like quality.

And it, it,

the ones that last are places that in Alexandria are parts of the Roman Empire where it was dry and arid and they did not deteriorate.

And if they're not copied, then there's going to be a winnowing-out process.

And then sometime in the Roman period, in that transitional point period, there was a development of parchment, parchment, skins, paper.

And that was more durable and gave you three or four hundred years.

But what were the

the criteria that made some copied and some not?

Why was Homer's two poems copied, at least in number, and not the Cypriot itself?

Why is Hesiod

the only other person that we know at the time whose work

written in hexameters around 700 survived?

Or why did we have more poems of Sappho

but not Archilicus?

Part of it's the age, the era.

If you're writing in 700, there's less chance it's going to be copied if you're writing in 450 or 430 when the city-state's in full flourishing.

But there is also popularity.

And that means whether you like it or not, or whether people like it or not, or whether it's popular.

And then when you get into the 5th century AD, 6th century, and these parchments,

manuscripts have to be copied every 300 or 400 years,

then you start to have a new set of criteria.

The Dark Ages are there.

Roman civilization has collapsed.

Most of the cities

don't have libraries anymore, like at Alexandria or Pergamum, and the receptacles of learning are church-related.

Sometimes

the existence of a manuscript that is contrary to the tenets of Catholicism means it won't be copied in the same amount.

If you look at Petronius the Satyricon, a very ribald novel written around, I don't know, 60 AD in Latin, I think we only have parts of the 14th, 15th, and 16th book, and people have suggested that was the middle of a 24-book novel, and maybe

they hid it somewhere, or the first part and the last part were, and just one or two copies is all we had, the original, and it kind of rotted away and the middle stayed.

People have all sorts of theories why we have just the middle of the novel, and a few fragments elsewhere.

The other way you can transmit classical literature is

on quotations.

So if you're reading Plato's Laws or Republic, Socrates will say, just as

Archillochus says, and then he will quote something, or Plutarch

100 AD will quote people.

Sometimes they quote them quite accurately, from what we can tell.

And then we have, so we have the manuscript tradition that goes from papyrus to parchment.

And then it has to make its way all the way to 1500 essentially, when you have Gutenberg and books.

If you make it to books,

then 95% of classical literature that we have today, they had about 1500, with one exception.

There was also a different tradition of survival in the Roman Empire in papyrus.

That means that if you were at Oxyrhynchus, to take one example, a village

along the Nile,

I think Oxyrhynchus means sharp-nosed fish.

That's the name of the village.

But there was a dump there of people who had old books, papyrus books.

They wrote shopping lists on it in the back.

They used them just like we do today.

And because of the climate and the sand, we have direct

text that don't depend on being copied every 200 or 300 years, don't depend on having to make it to parchment, don't depend on having to survive during the Dark Ages or early medieval period, don't have to depend on making it to

the onset of books and movable type.

They survive as they were written, often in very early, the 2nd century BC or 3rd century BC.

And sometimes we have enormous discoveries.

Aristotle wrote over 150 constitutions.

political essays on constitutions.

We only have one, the Constitution of Athens.

We have the titles of others, but that survived in papyrus.

It was not copied down through the manuscript tradition.

It didn't survive that way.

That was lost.

And then somebody in the early 20th, late 19th century found it.

Constitution of Athens in a papyrus.

Same thing with a long,

very

explicit sex poem by Archilicus.

That survived in papyrus.

And every year they find scraps.

There's a whole collection of Oxyrhynchus papyrus, but they find scraps, they put together, and they can assemble new poems and stuff.

Will we ever find something that didn't survive in the manuscript?

There's only two chances.

One is a large number, a new find of papyrus, where it's intact,

you know, it can be tucked in a pot or some type of box that was buried.

Or we have something called palinsets, palinsets, and those are manuscripts that are written on top of each other, or they were erased, and then they wrote on top of the other ones.

So you've got a book, very expensive to get parchment paper, say 800 or 900 or 1,000 or 100.

And so people often just scraped off what they bought and then they wrote, they copied another author maybe.

Or the author's publisher used

paper.

And with sophisticated techniques of x-ray, you can see a text underneath that one.

And so sometimes we get entire new

views.

And then every once in a while you see something

like Pompeii or Herculaneum, where a rich Roman

entire house was consumed in a matter of seconds by volcanic ash.

He had a library.

The library had some pots or

vegetables that would preserve his library.

He maybe stuck three papyrus rolls inside a clay jar, put the lid on, and we have

Stoic philosopher

that we didn't know about.

And that happens a lot, once in a while.

I shouldn't say a lot, but it's happened.

And so I think that if we looked at the corpus of all Greek literature, say, in

1850, we've added 2% or 3% to it since then.

But some of them have been very dramatic.

And everybody wants, of course, you know what they want.

There's only seven plays of Aeschylus.

He wrote over 90.

There's only seven plays of Sophocles.

He probably wrote even more, 110 or 20.

We only have 19 plays of Euripides.

We know he wrote over 100.

We have 11 plays of Aristophanes.

He wrote probably 100 comedies.

We have all of Thucydides, but he finished in mid-sentence at 411.

He never finished the history.

I don't think we'll find that.

I think he never completed it.

We have all of Herodotus.

We have all Xenophon.

But we're missing a lot of Aristotle, unfortunately.

And we're missing

most of, I think, the corpus of Greek lyric poetry.

And maybe we'll find something.

There's a whole...

We have the names of probably over a thousand Greek authors, poets, historians, philosophers, rhetoricians.

We know their names.

They're referenced in other literature.

We have fragments of their work.

We have a whole compendia of 19th century scholarship, early 20th century, fragments of Greek history, fragments of Greek comedy, where scholars spent their whole life

collating every reference to a lost author in someone else's extant work or every scrap of papyrus, and then they've been able to reconstruct who the person was and what the

the general topos or theme was of their work.

Well,

can we go back to some of the authors?

I understand that Pendar was probably one of the greatest of the lyric authors, and I was wondering

what you knew on his work.

He's one of the most

difficult authors to read in Greek.

And he has a pandaric meter that's very difficult.

But he was an Epanician author, and that meant he wrote by commission

odes or triumphalist celebrations of the winners of the Pan-Hellenic Games.

So remember how those work?

There were two, there was a Super Bowl at Olympia every four years.

And there was a playoff bowl, if I'm just being facetious, at Delphi for the Delphic Games for Apollo, in honor of Apollo at Delphi, and then Olympian Zeus at Olympia.

But there were also, I guess you would call minor,

not minor, but there were other, there were Isthmian games to Poseidon at Isthmus, that's at the Isthmus, and Isthmia is not very far from Corinth.

And there was another Panhellenic game for Nemean Zeus at Nimea, not too far from Corinth.

And so when you put those four Panhellenic sanctuaries and their games on a calendar, it was you go to Olympia and then you go to Nemia.

And then you, second year, you get to go to Delphi, And then the third year you go to Isthmia.

And then it's Olympia again.

So

each year there was a Panhellenic festival and games.

And people

who won the chariot race, who won the wrestling, then would commission a poem in honor of him to celebrate sort of like you win the Olympics day and you get media coverage.

And Pindar was one of these authors.

Not all of his work, but he wrote about Nimian and Olympian victors and how strong they were, beautiful, excellent, something.

They're very, very hard to read.

But he's considered, of all of the lyric poets, probably the master of meter, style, imagery, vocabulary.

But he's also the most difficult.

I think if you were going to start to read them in English, it would be the easiest are Simonides and Archilicus.

If you want to read Tarteus, he's a Spartan war poet, and he's very valuable.

He wrote two long poems and we know a lot of information about hoplites that is infantrymen how they fought from his language because they're odes to spartan courage he was in laconian

and we have alkman who wrote a lot about bridal songs

virgin songs about the virgin brides he wrote

and anacreon wrote about drinking and so there there's a whole corpus of them and

I I think everybody would enjoy reading them.

Next time we come at the same time, remember we're still in the early city-state.

City-state were these 1500, what we call polises, or polis in Greek, that sprouted up after the Dark Ages that gave us Western civilization.

This is the beginning.

It wasn't in the Dark Ages.

It wasn't during the Mycenaean period.

It wasn't during the Minoan period.

It was only around 700 that suddenly the Dark Ages ended.

You started to get constitutional government.

Writing reappeared, but with a Phoenician alpha, beta, gamma alphabet.

You started to get panhellenic sanctuaries, monumental temple building, Western civilization at the beginning, and that's when literature really starts.

And it starts to be written down.

And then the two first genres are lyric poetry and pre-Socratic philosophy before Socrates.

And it's not about ethics or human interaction, but about cosmology and natural science.

So, we'll talk a little bit next time about Empedocles or Naximander or Thales and what they did.

And they tended to be on the coast of Turkey, the Ionian philosophers.

Yeah.

Well, Victor, let's go ahead and take a break and come back and talk a little bit about the Supreme Court of the United States.

Stay with us, and we'll be back.

We're back.

Victor's

podcast is presented by John Solomon's Just the News.

So we highly recommend John Solomon.

He is an investigative reporter, and Just the News is his website with all the news on it.

So it's a great source to go to for current events and things that have had investigation.

So Victor, I was just looking at a article by one of your colleagues, not at the Hoover, but at American Greatness, Julie Kelly, or she was a colleague at American Greatness.

She now writes on Substack, Julie Kelly, and she was reviewing all of the cases that had to do with the election before the Supreme Court of the United States.

And she came to the conclusion looking at all that Jack Smith and the other prosecutors have put up and that needs to be addressed by the Supreme Court.

Presidential immunity, which Donald Trump is,

you know, I don't want to say claiming, but he's using as part of his defense.

Charges against the January 6th people.

Colorado taking Trump off the ballot.

So those are some of the cases that the Supreme Court is going to weigh in on.

And she came to the conclusion that she thinks the Supreme Court, I think there were about six different issues they would have to, would be try to be impartial and would give Trump some opinions, would go Trump's way, and some opinions would go in the direction of the prosecutors.

But my understanding of those cases and the issues that she brought forward are just how bogus they are against Trump.

So I thought that was an interesting take on the Supreme Court.

Do you think that they would try to appear impartial, or are they going to try to do justice?

Let's start with

a one-unifying theme that ties these disparate cases of Alvin Bragg in New York,

Fannie Willis in Atlanta, Jack Smith, southern Florida, and Letita James in Washington.

None of them would have been lodged against Donald Trump as if, say, in January of 2021 he said, you know what?

I'm 74 years old.

I'm just not going to run again.

They wouldn't have been there, number Number one.

Number two,

every single one of these indictments, whether it was presidential papers or whether it was saying, you know,

protest at the Capitol, even though he said to do it peacefully, compare that with what Kamala Harris said, say, in June of 2020, these demonstrations, they were violent, right?

I know the fact-checkers, left-wing, say, well, she wasn't referring to the violent members, but they were all violent, basically.

But these are not going to end.

They're not going to end.

They should not end.

They're going to go on, I warn you, all the way

bailing out people.

Okay.

So my point is, they're all applicable.

If you think that Mar-Lago is a sloppy place for a president who has a right to declassify them, had he done it formally, versus Joe Biden's Corvette garage when he's vice president with no such authority and he kept papers out.

And like Claudine Gay, he was reactive.

He never told us until he sicked Merrile Garland, sick the FBI, and Donald Trump.

And somebody said, hey, wait a minute.

How about Joe?

Don't you remember those papers he had in his office at University of Penn when he got that bogus, huge salary for doing nothing?

Maybe he had some at home.

Check.

Oh my God, he's checked.

Call the FBI.

And they did.

And then they said, call CNN and say, unlike Donald Trump, Joe Biden warned everybody in Proactive that he might be in violation.

He only did it because he'd already gone after Trump and he was afraid of the hypocrisy if they found out that he'd taken out far more.

So my point is this,

that there was exposure on every single one of these things.

Election denialism, we've gone through that, what Hillary said and what

Stacey Abrams said and what Barbara Boxer said.

We know what they've said and what they've done.

We've known about presidential papers.

We've known about non-disclosure campaign finance.

They just said to Sam Bankman Freed,

We're going to drop six major felony counts about

campaign finance violations.

This is the guy that was the second largest contributor to the party that is now running the DOJ.

You think

after you do that, that Alvin Bragg has any credibility by saying a non-disclosure form with a stripper named Stormy Daniels is a violation of campaign finance reform.

So my point is that they're all bogus.

They would never have been applied to Trump had he just not run for president.

They would have never been applied to people who have similar or more egregious exposure if they were on the Democratic side.

Okay, Sammy, what are they?

They are purely political.

And because they're political, they depend on politics.

And because they depend on politics,

they depend on the mood of the country.

And what the left does not understand

is that inch by inch,

foot by foot, they are walking into an abyss.

Because when you start

indicting him for crimes that everybody knows are political, and are not applicable to people with just as much criminal exposure, and then you go beyond that and you start trying to get him off the ballot in Colorado, or you try to remove the leading primary and general election candidate off the ballot on the premise that he is guilty of a crime which you have never charged him with, much less has he ever been convicted under a statute that was applied apparently not to a president but other offices, and more importantly, had a specific Civil War context to it.

If you're that that desperate, you're starting to, in a political sense, turn off independents and some Democrats.

And some, you mentioned earlier that African Americans and Hispanics were starting to pull maybe somewhat sympathetic in a way not true of 2020 to Donald Trump.

Part of that is not just the economy, but they're tired of this.

Everybody is.

And so the more that they do this, then what do they

what else do they do?

They start attacking Donald Trump as a dictator who will have one last election and that's it.

In other words, they're projecting upon him what they would do if they were Donald Trump and they had suffered what they have inflicted on him, then they would do certain things.

But there's no evidence that Trump would do it.

But my point is that they're getting people angry.

And now it's a political arena.

And if Donald Trump is ahead of Joe Biden and he's way ahead on the issues and these are political

machinations, then the public either will do one of two things.

If the jury even in these left-wing cities are made up out of these people and there's one or two in these criminal cases that say, nope, I'm just not going to vote guilty,

then they will be hung juries.

Or, more importantly,

if

it's sort of like

what Coling Gay did to the presidency of Harvard.

You think from now on, if somebody is on Face the Nation or Meet the Press or Sunday Talk, no, hello, I'm Jim Smith, president of Harvard, doesn't mean anything anymore, does it?

First thing people are going to say, well, do you plagiarize?

Did you ever write a book?

Do you allow people to go push Jews on campus or call them, you know, that you want to kill them all?

Do you do that?

That's what these trials have done.

So if Donald, everybody thinks, and I thought this too, and I've said this on this podcast, I don't know how he's going to get out of it.

But I don't know if he needs to get out of it.

In other words, if he's convicted by these people, it's not going to mean anything.

It's just going to be, well, oh, he has a felony, so what?

Does it ever say that a felon can't be president?

Maybe he can run the presidents out of Leavenworth.

Who knows?

No, I'm serious.

I know you are.

So there's nothing in the Constitution that's, you know, you've got to be 35, you've got to be

a native-born citizen, you've got to be in the United States, I think, the last 15 years before you run.

That's about it.

It doesn't say anything you can't be a felon.

And does it mean that it's shameful?

As all these left-wing op-eds, they all write this.

Once he's convicted, it's just so shameful he'll be done.

Well, no, you're shameful for doing it.

You're the ones that the shame is starting to boomerang back on, not Trump.

He's going up in the polls the more you do it.

You're making him into sort of a martyr.

And he will relish that role, believe me, because almost every day he says, this isn't about me, it's about you, meaning my people that you're going after.

So I think he's going to be tied up.

I don't think they have a strategy to deal with the time and money that will be lost.

The Trump people are not sure what's going to happen.

But I think they're increasingly confident

that the Democrats have so much legal exposure with the Biden corrupt syndicate

and

so much political fallout because of the unpopular agenda

and so much anger at Joe Biden's cognitive state and what they passed off on us as a president who was just a facsimile or a puppet for these Obama puppeteers,

that it's not going to matter.

They're just going to say, you know what?

I don't care anymore.

If you think, oh, we can't have a president that was convicted of a felony, then people are going to say, well, we can't have a country where you indict the person on an ancient statute without ever charging him with a crime that you're disqualing them from the ballot.

I don't think they understand what they're doing to the country and to themselves.

They're destroying every standard, and they are going to need those standards to retain credibility and to protect themselves.

It's like the third book of Thucydides' history about the stasis at Corsaira.

When the left went after the right, the oligarchs went after the Democrats, and in the process, they destroyed the idea: you don't kill your opposition, you don't use a law, make a law against somebody, you don't harm their family.

And all of a sudden, they destroyed that.

And then he makes a very brilliant comment.

He said,

in this hyper-polarized

climate, people did not understand that when they destroyed the institutional protections of the citizen, that they themselves, the perpetrators, might have a need to have a refuge or sanctuary within them.

And that's what the left doesn't understand.

Once you set the precedent that you can take a candidate off the ballot, well, then Joe Biden may be taken off of, I don't know, Mississippi or Idaho because he has failed to enforce the laws on the border, or he's a crook.

You don't have to

and you're going to say, Sammy.

Sammy's going to say, well, how do you know he's a crook?

I know he's a crook as much as I know that Donald Trump is guilty of insurrection.

He's never been charged with it.

No, formally.

And he's never been convicted.

And guess what?

You don't have to be anymore in the new Biden world.

And that's what they've done.

They've destroyed our reputation as a country.

They've destroyed our moral high ground to lecture other countries.

And they're going to find that all the things that they have done, first-term impeachment, impeachment without a special counsel's report,

collusion

22 months of a hoax to destroy a president, hiring a foreign national to compile lies about your political opponent

in a

presidential election, impeaching somebody by leaking a phone call that was supposed to be confidential from the national security staff

over

a request that you not have bribery as a condition to get expedited foreign aid, not canceling it, just we're going to hold off until you prove you're not crooked anymore.

All of those things.

51 intelligence authorities who lied and said this information on a laptop is Russian, all of that comes back at them.

They have no moral credibility.

And so they think that, oh, wow, we're going to embarrass the right, right, we're going to do all this to Donald Trump.

All they're doing is destroying the institutions.

And they're discrediting the institutions.

They're discrediting themselves.

They're discrediting the country.

And there's a huge

crash coming.

I think a lot of it is.

This is a very controversial statement.

When you said earlier that you quoted a 65% only Biden margin among African Americans.

Yes.

63%

for Biden.

I think a lot of that is the economy and things.

And I think Trump's, they look back as everybody does and looks at Trump.

But I think there's a lot of people in the black community that they look at Fannie Willis in Georgia and they look at Alvin Bragg in New York and they look at Letita James.

and they look at all of these prosecutors who are black women in these cities

and they say, you know what, that's not us.

We don't do that.

These people have gone completely crazy.

They're going after Donald Trump.

And he did more for our community than Biden's done.

And you're going after him, and you're representing us, supposedly, because you keep saying that he's racist.

And yet you're attacking somebody on something that's entirely political.

And

we're not going to have any solidarity with you.

And when you add in the whole idea of Trump as a victim and the mugshot and all that stuff, I don't think they understand what they're doing.

You know what I mean?

It's sort of the same, it's parallel or it's a mirror image of the white community when you're a white working class person and you see on TV all of these elites and they get on TV and they're in universities and they tis tisk and they give all these lectures and then people say white privilege and white and you think wait a minute those people don't represent me

I'm a working class guy I don't have anything to do with these academics or these techies or these Hollywood people or these foundational people or anybody that's in these entertainment late-night comedy I don't have I don't like those people and just because we look the same doesn't mean they speak in fact that makes you angrier and you say I don't want to whoever whatever they're for I'm against I think there's some people in the black community that are that have the the same idea, that these people keep saying they're black or they're calling people racist, and they think, you know what?

You don't speak for me.

I don't find him racist.

I find him on inflation and jobs and crime pretty good.

As far as I was concerned, that's what they think.

And they say, yeah, they think I don't have the money as Manal Sharpton, or I don't have the prestige of

Clauding,

or I don't have the security of Oprah or the Obamas.

So, what they think doesn't necessarily represent me.

I think there's a what I'm getting at is: I think there's the DEI is starting to wane, and class is starting to come back.

And a lot of people saying I'm not going to just be expressing solidarity on the basis of race anymore.

It's starting to.

Yeah.

Well, I hope you're right in this election.

I think that the Democrats are banking on they can create enough noise and fanfare with these trials that it will get them the margin.

And I hope that's wrong.

And I hope that your assessment of the polls or the people is much more accurate.

I'm skeptical of polls.

And I, as I said earlier, in an earlier broadcast, I don't believe that there's really 65%

of blacks

are going to vote for Biden and 35% are going to vote for Trump.

But I'm not saying that that doesn't represent a trend.

Yeah.

And the trend, as I said, it could be 15 or 20, which would be enough

to hurt Biden to a degree.

He wouldn't be elected.

But I think there is something going on.

And I think the October 7th was something,

the December 5th testimony of those college presidents, the resignation of Gay at Harvard.

I think the left and the polls of

all the polls show that for all of the

you know what's weird when they say Donald Trump is only I've heard this on TV and i've heard people say it to me donald trump is only ahead by two or three points only ahead by two or three points can you believe it why should i vote for him or he's

he's ahead by two or three points in the context of having the most one-sided vicious media against him than anybody after two impeachments after all of these disinformation, collusion, after all the stories about his family, his wife, himself, Stormy Death, all of that.

How in the world could he be two points ahead of Joe Biden?

And he's more than that in swing states.

I don't know.

We'll see because, you know, I think Haley and DeSantis have viable strategies.

They think, well, you know, we can't really campaign against Trump because we agree with him on almost everything.

And we want him to debate.

That's something they won't debate us.

So that's an issue.

And the other issue is going to be tied up in court.

And that's their strategy, and it may work.

But so far, the poll suggests that each time the left overreaches, there's an advantage to Trump.

We'll see if there's a.

On these podcasts, I've tried to get both sides.

And one side is that finally

the Republican or conservative voter gets in a fetal position, puts his hands over his ears, and says, I can't take it anymore.

I can't take it.

Donald Trump, just, I like him.

I voted for him, but I don't want him because they all all go crazy over him and they put him in jail.

I just don't, I want to get somebody different.

Or

it's, screw you.

Go ahead and do your worst and we'll do our best and may the best person wins.

I hope you try to get him in 20 courts.

It doesn't mean blank to us.

And there's one of defiance and one of weariness.

And I think there's both out there, and I don't know which is going to be the predominant.

feeling among the electorate on the conservative side.

Well, Victor, we're at at a hard end to this show.

I know you have things to do, so we are ending it right here.

We thank all of our listeners.

We appreciate you.

Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

Wait, what?

You didn't ask me the $64,000 question.

Which was, what side are you on?

I know it's on.

No, no, no, no.

What is the status of the Echo Diesel?

Oh, yes.

What is that status?

I have an update.

I have an update every week.

I go from, I'm like the Athenians watching the sea battle at Syracuse, where Thucydides says, they were screaming and yelling and happy, and then they were depressed.

And then they were happy as they saw a trireme either sink or sink someone else.

They were on the shore.

I'm on the shore looking at this.

I got a little email again, and it said, we have approved, again,

your

repurchase of your truck.

And I wrote back and said, but you've said that now three times, and you're turning me over to a repurchasing agent, but I haven't seen the repurchasing agent.

And I haven't seen the certificate you said that I could get a discount because I got a limit that doesn't run.

And then in the midst of that,

after

calling on October 1st, being admitted to the dealer shop mid-October, all of October then, all of November, all of December, I got a call.

Richter, the part is in.

Ta-da!

The part is in.

So now they're going to put the part into the turbo, the hose, little hose.

You could probably use any little hose, but it had to be a turbo hose.

In any case,

they put it in once, and I mean, they put a new turbo in, and it didn't last more than two months.

So I'm hoping that they put the turbo hose, it will last enough so I can pick it up and drive it where?

To meet the mythical repurchasing agent.

And where is their mythical repurchasing agent who's going to write me a check for the lemon truck?

And then the question is, does it say at the dealer?

Do the dealer take possession of it so they can get a repurchase

check?

I don't know.

I know that if I take it home and I'm driving it, They might say, well, you waited.

You've had five months of repair wait and now you have it.

So let's just call it even.

Keep driving it.

No, no, no, no.

And then I'm afraid if I drive it after they fix it and it's broken down twice, it might break down three times.

And then what do I do?

Because it says that the email said the truck must be in

good condition, meaning the parts that you put in that were defective have to be fixed by authorized dealers that you authorize that don't have the parts because you don't have them and therefore they have to be magically fixed and delivered to you.

I don't know.

But my point is,

there is new news.

And new news in this saga is always

no news.

No news at all.

Well, Victor, thank you for that.

I'm very,

what's the word?

Relaxed about it.

New news, no news.

And what I like the most about it, I have learned from our dear listeners everything I want to know about an Echodiesel.

Victor,

here's my take on it.

Here's my experience.

And they're all brilliant guys, and they know ten times more about an ecodiesel than I do.

Yeah.

So it's a good idea.

And maybe then your mechanics do too.

I'm afraid so.

There is one wonderful guy, I won't mention his name there.

He's a really good guy.

He's trying very hard.

He feels terrible about it.

He calls me about every two weeks.

Even though nothing happens, he's concerned that nothing happens.

All right.

Well, Victor, that's the end of the show.

Thank you to our listeners, and thank you to all, especially the discussion of lyric poetry.

I had no idea its importance in Western civilization.

Very important, especially for English lyric poetry.

Yeah.

Well, thank you, and thanks to the listeners.

Thank you, everybody, for listening.

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