Table Talk

Flu season is here and COVID cases are still climbing across the country.

When people start getting sick, medications disappear fast.

And that's why we trust All Family Pharmacy.

They help you prepare before it's too late.

Right now, they've dropped prices on ivermectin and mabenzazole by 25%.

Plus, you can save an extra 10% with the code VICTR10.

You'll also get 10% off antibiotics, antivirals, hydroxychloroquine, and more of the medications you actually want on hand.

Whether you're fighting off a cold, protecting your family from flu season, or staying ready in case COVID makes its way into your home, having a few months' supply brings peace of mind and control.

They work with licensed doctors who review your order online, write the prescriptions, and ship your meds straight to your door.

Go to allfamilypharmacy.com/slash Victor and use the code Victor10 today.

Hello, and welcome to the Victor Davis Hansen Show.

This is the Saturday edition or the weekend edition, and we usually look at something a little bit different on Saturdays so you guys can be entertained by something often historical, but sometimes modern.

And today we're going to have a discussion on Plutarch and Plutarch's world and look at how Plutarch's views and ideas about leadership, perhaps in particular, but maybe other things in culture parallel in our own world, or maybe what Plutarch's views might be if he looked at modern leadership today.

So, I hope Victor is up for that.

We'll ask him after we have a short break from our sponsors.

If you're a homeowner, you need to listen to this.

In today's AI and cyber world, scammers are stealing your home titles, and your equity is the target.

Here's how it works: criminals forge your signature on one document, use a fake notary stamp, pay a small fee with your county, and just like that, your home title has been transferred out of your name.

Then they take out loans using your equity and even sell your property, and you won't even know what's happened until you get a collection or foreclosure notice.

So, when was the last time you checked on your home title?

If your answer is never, you need to do something about it right now.

And that's why we've partnered with Home Title Lock so you can find out today if you're already a victim.

Go to hometitalock.com/slash victor to get a free title history report and a free trial of their million-dollar triple arc protection.

That's 24-7 monitoring of your title, urgent alerts to any changes, and if fraud does happen, they'll spend up to $1 million to fix it.

Please, please don't be a victim.

Protect your equity today.

That's home titlelock.com slash Victor.

Welcome back.

And Victor, are you ready for the show today?

Yes, I am.

Is Plutarch one of your favorite writers?

Can I just ask you that quickly?

He is.

He was very popular in the medieval, but especially the Renaissance.

So yeah, he is.

Okay, all right.

And so today I was hoping that we could talk a little bit about who Plutarch is and then also about his works, the Moralia and his parallel lives, and maybe take that in as a paradigm and see what we can say about modern leadership today.

So let's go ahead and just give us a start.

Would you like to add, you know, to our understanding of Plutarch?

I mean, he's a Greek historian and sometimes referred to as a philosopher, born in Chaeronea,

and is well known today in classics for his two works that we have.

And I think, is table talk a separate work from the Moralia or is it part of the Morale?

No, no, he has two main bodies of work.

So what plutarch wrote were what he called comparative lives parallel lives and he picked a greek and he's greek remember but he's writing in the period oh he's most active from 70 ad to 120 over a long 50 year period

and he's trying to compare the roman empire of his age and its luminaries of the earlier republic and match them with Greeks.

And the idea is, as a proud Roman citizen of Greek heritage, he wants to show there's a continuum.

And what makes Rome great in his lifetime was its Greek inheritance.

So for every Alexander the Great, there is a Caesar successor.

For every Cicero, a master of eloquence, there's a Demosthenes prequel, a Greek.

And then at the end, he has something called, you know, the comparison.

He tries to compare the two.

And so the first body of work is then these parallel lives.

And we have, you know, we have dozens of them that have survived.

Not all of them have survived.

And we have some of the comparisons.

I think we have about 18 or 19 of the little comparative of the match set.

And

what are they about?

They're a biography.

That's just a word in Greek means graphene beyond, to write to life.

But he has this ancient idea, and it's ubiquitous in the ancient world, that character, remember character means a stamp.

It's what you stamp coins with.

People are stamped with certain natural tendencies and they come out before you're civilized or trained.

And so the childhood of a Caesar or Alexander or an Aristides is very important because you see the natural propensities for evil or good.

And then the training starts.

So he's going to show you their education and whether they and there are certain vices and virtues.

And we all know what they are in the ancient world.

Do they sleep too much?

Or they sleep six or seven hours?

Were they fat and gluttonous?

Or were they of average or even thinner?

And their body, people's bodies reflect, do they have a scowl on their face that's permanent?

Do they frown?

Are they misshapen because of lack of exercise?

Are they well-proportioned, smart?

So your physical.

body then reflects this.

And then he goes through their adult lives and tries to show you whether whether they reflected their natural endowments or they gave in to their appetites.

And he doesn't say we're predetermined.

He doesn't say just because you're a brilliant Alexander, you know, you wrote Bucephalus or you were very courageous when you were 12, doesn't mean you're going to be conquer the world.

But he tries to say, what did you do with those attributes?

Did you enhance them through education and training?

or did you detract from them?

And the one virtue that overrides all of them i guess i would call it moderation the golden mean and that is to what degree physically spiritually morally intellectually were you able to find the middle path and that usually if you could find that you would avoid what the greeks called eubris and then what brought on divine retribution nemesis so they're fascinating because There's large chunks of Greek and Roman history where we don't have an extant history.

We have Herodotus roughly from the the Persian Wars that ends around the 479.

And then we don't have a continuous history until Thucydides picks up with some flashbacks of after the Persian Wars, but gaps in the 460s.

And then he ends in 411, Xenophon takes over, but then it starts to get sparse.

So what classicists and historians do, they take these dozens of lives.

And remember, he's writing around 100 AD.

So what he's doing is using historians at the library in Athens.

And then he's filling in the blanks, so to speak.

But we don't have those historians.

We don't have Ephorus.

We don't have Plotarchus.

We don't have Athos.

And so Androsia, we have parts of his Athos.

But so he has all of those things that we don't have.

And he puts them in these lives.

And because they're so riveting,

they were very popular in Rome.

So it was kind of like Book of the Month Club.

And people made many copies.

So in the great transition from papyrus to books in the third and fourth century AD, they survived.

And once they survived into the age of printing, they were pretty much destined.

You know, so we do have the main ones.

Everybody wanted to read about Caesar.

Everybody wanted to read about Alexander.

Everybody wanted to read about Aristotes the Just or Themistocles or Pericles.

So we are Anthony.

So we have the main lives.

The other ones are a little bit harder and some of them were lost.

But and then that was the first thing.

And the second half was the moralia.

And that's just a, I don't know what we would call it, an inclusive word for reflections on manners, on the sayings of Spartan women, almost anything he wanted to collect, table talk, he put within that category.

And there's a lot of stuff in there that's very valuable because it comes, again, from historians that are no longer extant.

And so you can read things and find fascinating detail about historical figures that are not in histories.

When I first went to Greece in 1973, I was 19.

And the first thing I did after I had a weekend, the first free weekend, I took the bus from Athens and it's about 50 miles.

In those days, you went to Thebes, classical Thebes, and then you could take a little regional bus to Chaeronea.

Modern Greek, it's Haronia.

Horonia.

And you go to this little town, and there's three things to see there.

The first thing I did was walk out to the battlefield of Chaeronea, where in 338,

the Macedonians with 21-year-old Alexander the Great and his father Philip crushed the resistance of the Thebans and the Athenians and destroyed the sacred band.

And at that point, Greece was no longer free, became a Macedonian province.

Oh, maybe a mile from that in the town of Chaeronea, there's something called the Lion of Chaeronea.

And it's a beautiful lion that, and there's a big controversy where it sits over the 300 dead, a sacred band, or the Macedonian dead.

And people are arguing back and forth.

There's also a tomb on the field, and they don't know which is which, but it's pretty clear to me that the lion of Chaeronea marks with a sacred band were killed.

And then there's a third thing to see, and that's a statue of Plutarch, and he had a schoolhouse there.

So imagine him around 100 AD, wealthy family in a little nowhere Podunk podunk town, writing these magnificent lives of contemporary

Greece, which is under Roman control, and then walking the 55 miles to Athens, occasionally to go to the great libraries there and do research and have access to these papyrus roles.

It was quite fascinating what he did.

And he was very lucky in another sense that he was...

I think he was born in the mid-40s, 46 or something.

So he bypassed the terrible civil wars of the late Republic, the assassins of Caesar versus Anthony and Augustus.

Then he missed the second round of it with Anthony and Cleopatra against Augustus.

And then he missed

most of the terrible period that we would call Claudius was okay, but Caligula and Nero.

And he was too young.

And then when he came of age, he was writing.

He was writing under Vespasian, Titus.

Domitian was there, that's true.

But other than Domitian, then he was Nerva

and Trajan, Hadrian and Trajan.

And so that was the beginning of what, as you remember, Edward Gibbon called the finest period in human history, where that great five emperors of Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antonius, Pius, Marcus Aurelius.

And so there was no strife.

It was a wonderful time to be alive.

We know there was no banditry.

And he walks out in the Boeotian countryside.

He sees these monuments that are everywhere, temples.

And he said, this was a great place.

And I want people in Rome to realize that even though we lost our freedom to them,

and that even though they gave us security and aqueducts and roads, they took our culture.

And that's what made them great.

So it's kind of a chauvinistic effort.

And it had a lot of effect on people in the Renaissance.

Shakespeare's, all of Shakespeare's classical plays are based on Plutarch's lives, whether it's Caesar or Coriolanus or or any of them.

They come out of information and Plutarch's lives.

How does Suetonius's lives measure up to this?

You always think of both these guys about the same period writing.

And

are they similar?

Was Suetonius the better historian?

Did he have more access to

materials?

So I don't know if you have any thoughts on that.

Well, I do.

I mean, Suetonius is a little younger, but he, as I remember, he only, Plutarch lived lived to be about 74, and Suetonius was only about 53, but they were writing in the same period, at the latter period of Suetonius.

The difference is that as a Roman, Suetonius, you know, he wrote in Latin and he was tied into the,

I guess you'd call it the Roman establishment.

He was really close to Pliny and he was well connected.

So what I'm getting at is that he wrote under Hadrian and Trajan, so he too could say what he wanted.

And remember, it was in everybody's interest to blame all of the bad things that were going on at Rome under certain notorious people, i.e.

Caligula, one,

two, Nero, then the year of the four emperors, Gaba, Otho, etc., and then especially Domitian.

And then the good period came with Vespasian, although his son was Domitian.

So there was Domitian, the bad guy, but then earlier the father Vespasian and the son Tita, the good son, then the bad Domitian, then there it was.

It was Nerva, as I said, and Trajan, Hadrian, Antonius Pisis, Marcus Rulus.

So he was a contemporary of Plutarch, but it was quite different because he had access to

imperial diaries, notes, gossip in Rome.

and even though he was stationed a lot in Asia Minor.

And so he wrote this thing called The Life of the Twelve Caesars, and it starts with Julius.

And as I remember, it ends with Domitian.

And at that point, those who claimed that they had direct relations by blood to either Julius Caesar or what they call the Claudians, and that was through

Livia, Augustus's wife, whose son Tiberius was a Claudian.

And so they either were related to Augustus or Livia or both.

And that was extinguished with the end of Domitian.

But those 12 Caesars then are a little different because, and I should say he was a rhetorician, so he has these.

I've read some of them.

They're very brief.

They're very esoteric, but he wrote a treatise on grammar.

He wrote a treatise on poets.

He wrote a treatise on historians.

But he's most famous for this gossipy inside story.

It's kind of like Procopius' secret history of the rule of the court of Justinian and Theodora, but it's racy.

And so it survived for different reasons.

Plutarch doesn't have very much sex violence in it.

He's not interested in that.

I mean, sometimes he says there's sort of a divine, if you're Sulla, worms eat out your belly, maybe, you know.

But what we're talking, when you read about Nero or all of these terrible things about Tiberius or the things that Hollywood picked up, the orgies, all of that stuff, the violence, pulling the wings off flies or Tiberius, you know, swimming in and nude and then having little children fillate him and thing, all that horrible stuff comes out of Suetonius.

And

he's trying to tell the emperors, just give me the information and I'll show you how awful your predecessors were and how much of a difference you are and how you brought this wonderful period in Roman history.

And so, there's no censorship.

In fact, he's encouraged to be deprecatory as long as they have both of them have to follow one tenet, and that is there's a Roman code or there's a Roman norm.

And when you're criticizing and

really trashing somebody like Nero or Caligio, you're doing it in the sense that they deviated from what was normal.

And what was normal was good for mankind.

And that normal is is now enshrined in their own lives.

But

they're not easy to read.

I mean, Plutarch writes in, I guess you'd call it Roman Greek.

It's a later Greek.

It's a little bit more difficult than classical.

Suetonius's Latin is accessible, but it's not that easy.

This is also a period of what I'd call pessimistic literature.

So you have Petronius's Satyricon, which we've talked about earlier, that was written somewhere around in the 60s AD.

And then 80s, 90s, 100, you have Suetonia's Lives of the Twelve Caesars, and then you have Tacitus's Annals and Histories, which are damning.

And then you have Plutarch.

So all of this great period of literature, except for Petronius, who was probably killed for his novel, are written about an earlier period that's considered by all to be decadent and aberration, but quite interesting.

I think people should realize that we don't have necessarily the same mindset as the ancients do about who was great and who wasn't.

I'll give you one example.

If you ask a Roman, say 50 BC, who was the greatest man the ancient world produced, we would probably say, ah,

it has to be Alexander the Great.

Or, you know, maybe it was the elder Cato or Scipio on the Greek side, Themistocles, Pericles.

But

as Cicero said, Princeps Greciae, the first man of Greece, was this, we talked about him before, this Theban Apaminondas.

And we don't really, this is kind of the quirks of history, we don't appreciate him because of two things.

One, the period in which he lived was written by Xenophon, and Xenophon hated Thebans in particular, but maybe Pythagoreans and Apaminondas, people like that in general.

So he was absolutely ignored by Xenophon's history, even to the extent when he writes about the Battle of Leuctra, and we know that he was probably on a hill watching the battle.

He can't even mention the name of Apaminondas who won the battle.

We get it from another source, two more sources.

So that was one strike about against Apaminondas.

And then apparently, from what we know,

Plutarch wrote a brilliant life.

It was the most popular probably in the Renaissance, the life of Apaminondas.

And we know a little bit from his partner, Pelopidas.

The life of Pelopidas, for some reason, survives.

He was the lesser of the two great Thebans that created democracy at Thebes and

new battle tactics, liberated the Messenians, built Megalopolis, Mantinea, Messenia, all that.

But that life vanished.

It vanished sometimes before the age of printing.

So probably around

1000 to 12 or 1350, 1400, even maybe

early 1400s.

And when that vanished, we sort of lost our appreciation of Apaminondas.

And now people, I think in the last, I don't know, 40 years have re-examined his life.

But

that's kind of a quirk of history.

If you didn't make it into Plutarch's life or you made it and the life was lost, then you didn't get historical credit in the Western canon.

Yeah, yeah.

You know, you answered a little bit actually about Suetonius that I was wondering, you know, did modern movies take much from Suetonius?

Did they take much from Plutarch or what is the legacy of Plutarch in the modern world?

Well,

most of the English playwrights, Ben Jonson, or the English literature in Shakespeare's time, so I mentioned all of Shakespeare's tragedies that have anything to do

with the classical Greek and Roman world come only from Plutarch.

And that's because there was an early translation in the Renaissance of Plutarch into Latin.

It's written in Greek, even though he's a Roman citizen, he writes it in Greek.

And then that was translated.

And then I think there was an early translation by,

I don't know if it was Lord North or something, but there were early translations into English from the Latin, not from the Greek.

Very few British people knew Greek at all of the intellectual academic class until, you know, about 1600, 1550.

And so they were learning about greek you know from latin and uh part of that was that great renaissance happened as constantinople was threatened in the 1500s and people understood it was probably going to fall

hundreds of greek scholars came westward and they went to Oxford and Cambridge, the University of Pisa, Turin, all of these centers of learning, and they brought these manuscripts with them.

And then it took about a couple hundred hundred years to digest them and incorporate Greek texts within the Western Roman Latin tradition.

But you say that Ben Johnson was influenced by some.

Was Shakespeare like his play, Julius Caesar?

Did he take much from Plutarch?

Yes, almost all of it.

All of it came from Plutarch and through an English translation of the time.

So there's, you know, if you think, I think he had, I'm just, you know, I know that my listeners are more erudite, but I think there was Corleanus, Titus Andronicus,

Julius Caesar, and then, yeah, there was Anthony and Cleopatra.

And those four plays are based on certain lives that are found in Plutarch or topics that are mentioned within a life of not that title.

So he was the go-to source, common man.

not the blue guy to Greece, that's Pausanias, but you could call him Cliff Notes to the ancient world.

And they're fascinating to read.

And he's got the tragic sense of the Platonic school.

So it's sort of: this is who he was.

He starts out well.

He had these propensities.

He had good tutors, and then he gave in to his appetites, and then he became this, and then he became, and then he ended up befitting his excesses.

Or, you know, Aristides is just

more moral than a person could be.

The Themistocles, he's born crafty, and his big great test or challenge: well, to what degree will he put that craftiness to the greater good of Greece, or will he eventually be corrupt and be exiled?

And he does both.

And then Pericles is majestic.

And

if you read Plutarch's life of Pericles, it's almost as if his tragedy is that he's so exalted and noble and aristocratic and temperate that

the Athenian people don't deserve him.

And

he's sort of at the end, he's he dies of the plague and he's sort of superstitious in a way that he never was when he was healthy and young.

They read like Greek plays and they're fascinating.

I think everybody has come across them, even if they don't know they've come across them, because most of the popular stuff we hear about Greek famous Greeks and Romans ultimately can be traced to Plutarch's lives.

The Moralia, that's a different story.

They're anecdotes.

And so they're things like Spartan mother says, gives a shield, either come home with it or on it.

You know, you don't ever throw it away.

You either have to come home with it alive.

And if you're dead, they'll carry you home on the shield.

That kind of anecdote, the sayings of the Spartans, that's the stuff that survives in Plutarch.

Yeah.

So I would like to remind everybody that you are the Martin and Nealey Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution, Louayne and Marcia Busky Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

That your website is victorhanson.com, and that you're available on many social media from Facebook to Twitter to Gitter to MeWe, and you're starting an Instagram page as well.

So people can find you on those social media.

And then I want to ask you the last question.

How do you think Plutarch might assess our own leadership, our own society, given what you've read from Plutarch?

Well, let's take two people and take Donald Trump.

And he would probably show us that from an early age, he was indulged, but that he had grandiose ambitions or that when he was in 20s for all of his marriages or girlfriends or notoriety, that he, you know, he built the skating rink when the city couldn't do it or he built a a big, so he was, he had a grand ambition.

But they would probably, he would say as he got older, he lost control of his appetites.

He was intemperate, he got heavy, and that was the latent liability he had.

And then he would assess whether what he did.

So I think he'd probably be pretty favorable of, he would look at concrete things.

They don't talk necessarily,

you know, that he brought us together or he was unpopular.

He does talk about that, but it was what did he build?

So he would say to Trump, he, and Donald Trump increased oil production or he

closed the border and built a massive wall, but they had, they had to have concrete manifestations of its success.

In case of Biden, I think he would spend an inordinate amount of time talking about his forgetfulness, his inability to talk.

This is very important, his appearance and the lack of any Biden wall or Biden oil field or anything like that.

And so a man is measured, you know, by

the sum total of the physical concrete things he does.

and not necessarily by the rhetoric and by his principle.

And there's the tragic view in all of Plutarch's life, as there is in most of Greek literature, and that is for a person to be moral or ethical, they're either going to die young and often violently so, or they're going to be unhappy.

Because

Plutarch, like Plato, has a pessimistic view of human nature.

People being what they are, they're animal-like.

And if they see somebody extraordinary or illustrious in their midst, their first propensity is to level that and to bring them down to their level, not to aspire to be like them.

Or as we said earlier, they're captives of Hesiod's bad envy.

I can't be Pericles, so I'm going to try to destroy him rather than I can't be Pericles, but if I just watch him and see what he does, I can be something almost like him by improving myself.

And that's a theme as well, that the people, he picks that up from Thucydides, that the people are capable of anything at any time, anywhere.

What would you think of our, I want to call them robber barons, but our big tech magnets, like, well, not even just tech, maybe like Elon Musk making all of those teslas or you know perhaps zuckerberg and facebook i think it's very important they did not like avarice they did not like people who hoarded money they did not have people who were vindictive so they looked at people who did big things so i'm not a big fan of jeff bezos okay

But when I see that he actually has warehouses and he changed the way people shop, it's a different type of physical concrete manifestation than Mark Zuckerberg's online Facebook or Google searches.

I'm not saying they're not as they're, the texts are not important.

I use them every day.

But for Plutarch, it was more

what is the concrete manifestation.

So you mentioned Elon Musk.

So they would say, and he built, he would have a paragraph on his rockets, and then he would have a paragraph on his Tesla, and then he would have a paragraph on his fabrication plans or space separate.

So, in his way, he liked polymath people that were that excelled in different fields and left concrete manifestations of their talent rather than people in the shadows or people who were doing things.

And there was this idea that you were a megalosukos.

That comes from Aristotle.

You were a great soul person.

So, what is that archetype of a Plutarchian

hero?

That's he says a lot: Cicero is a hero,

Cato is a hero.

Pericles is a hero.

As I said earlier, Aristides is a hero.

Nicias is weak, but he likes his morality.

Who's not a hero?

Alcibiades is reckless.

Anthony is reckless.

Now, what's the difference between being reckless and a hero?

A reckless is a person who just checks off the boxes.

He dresses too ostentatiously.

He's greedy.

He drinks.

He's a womanizer.

He sleeps too much.

He eats too much.

He is indiscriminate in his language.

He always has to be the center of the tension.

And yet he'll admit that he is that way because he has outsized talents.

So the point is, everybody in this selection of parallel lives has outsized talent.

But when you look at Aristides and you look at Pericles

and you look at Cato, they are very careful in what they say.

They're very careful in their public behavior.

They're restrained.

They kind of have an arrogance about them in the sense that they just know that they're not going to share the common pathologies of the mob, and they're exalted.

They exercise the golden mean, would you say, that whole

element of moderation.

And they're not superstitious.

They're philosophical minds.

So, I mean, they don't, he says that Pericles puts an amulet around his neck, I guess, because he didn't want to, he wanted to cure the plague, but that was a deviation from a scientific rational mind he's an empiricist so he says there's progress not that he's not very religious but he's saying that religion leaves avenues for exploration and empiricism and inquiry and rationalism by that i mean

the way you get a temple is not going out and just praying to zeus you master engineering and pulleys and weights and the calibration of ropes and and lifting devices.

And he honors people who can do that.

And then in Plutarch's eyes, a temple falls down because of an earthquake that's caused by some kind of scientific phenomenon, but not because Poseidon hit the earth with his trident.

And so for any given period, what's happened now is, because of modern taste in America, they were sequential and they were written in parallels.

But what happens is a lot of translators will say the rise and fall of Athens, just to take one example, and they will have a life of Miltiades and then a life of Aristides and then a life of Themistocles and then a life of Pericles and then a life of Nicias and then a life of Alcibiades.

And they'll put them all together covering 100 years.

And even though that was not the intent of Plutarch, by re translating him and repositioning him, they can say, this was the first generation.

And they were very poor Athenians, and they had very simple lives, and they were very noble.

Now, here's the second generation, the Periclean and the late Themistoclean.

They had money, they had visions, they inherited a lot.

They didn't have to fight in the case of Pericles at Plataea or Salamis, but...

They still had that dignity.

They still had that work ethic.

Then the third generation inherited all the affluence and freedom, but none of the discipline and hard work and poverty.

And these are people like Alcibiades.

And so it's a rise and fall.

I think there's a penguin, the rise and fall of Athens.

The same thing is true of Rome.

You can put together the Scipios and then you can put in Caesar and then you can end up with Anthony.

And you can show that the classical banes of affluence and leisure slowly squeeze and corrupt a society.

And that's what's so different than all.

We had this idea that if we just eliminated poverty and we just gave people complete free choice, this is the left idea.

You know, if we ever, everybody had a guaranteed income and everybody, no matter how much talented or what they did, they can vote.

It doesn't matter if you have to be a felony and if you don't want to go vote, you can just have it in your house.

No, no, they think that's the opposite.

Too much leisure, too much choice, too much money brings out the worst in people.

So you reward people who do good things and great things, and then you appeal to their private magnanimity and say, you know, you've been very successful, Elon Musk, but we want you to give back to the community rather than you say, now he's got too much money, I'm going to tax him and give it to somebody who wasn't boring with his money or his talents.

So

it's a very different idea.

As I said earlier,

there were elements in the West that really adopted partly the Plutarchian view, the Thucydidean view, the Sophoclean view, the Aeschylian view.

And these were people like, as I said, Frederick Hegel or Nietzsche or Oswald Spingler.

And they said the whole story of Western civilization is decadence.

Or, you know, Jack Barzon's great book, From Dawn to Decadence, about Western civ.

And it's the argument that, boy, you marry market capitalism or private property or profiteering or free choice and economic activity within the realm of a constitutional government that protects individual choice and freedom of speech.

And And you either one of two things happen.

You have a fifth century Athens where people exercise restraint and they build the Parthenon.

You have Socrates, Euripides, Sophocles in the streets talking to people.

You have a beautiful Agora, you have the Ephesians, and you have all this in the

or you eventually lose your custom traditions, religion, and you end up like Alcibiades and you destroy it all.

Yeah.

So you obviously have parallels to the United States.

And everybody listening should ask themselves, what generation are we?

Are we a first generation of impoverished people that are idealistic, that sacrificed for our kids?

Are we a second generation at the zenith of our powers?

Or are we a third generation that gave into our appetites?

I used to teach a class in Plutarch when I was teaching at Cal State.

And I'd always use the simile of farms because I would look around these farms and it was always because everybody was ethnic here.

They're gone now, but they were.

And there would be families from Armenia, families from Greece, families from France that were Basque, families from Portuguese.

And it was always the same story.

They came in the 1880s and 1890s with nothing, nothing.

And they went out there and they picked grapes themselves.

They worked themselves to death.

You could see these little farmhouses.

Some of them are still around.

They were 900 square feet, 800 square feet.

They had an outdoor toilet.

You could still see the shower.

I remember the house next to us on our farm.

They had a shower outside.

The house I'm speaking in had a shower outside.

And when I moved into it in 18, there was no washer and dryer in the house.

You had to go out to some shed and I re-plumbed it and rewired it and moved it in.

But they were hardworking people that were very simple in diet.

They didn't go out very much and they just worked, worked, work.

What he said, work on top of work, on top of work.

And they died in the black, so to speak, not in the red.

They had a surplus ledger.

Their children grew up with that discipline, but they thought, you know, I want to go to college and be cosmopolitan.

Now I have the money to do it.

Well, I want to work from six in the morning to five at night.

I don't want to work from six in the morning till eight at night.

I want to go places.

And so they had a larger world because of the work of the second first generation.

So, you know, My grandfather wore engineering pinstripe railroad bib overhauls and a straw hat.

That's all he he wore.

But the next generation may have had normal clothes and they tucked in their khaki pants into their boots and went to the coffee shop for an hour and talked about farming.

The third generation,

they didn't grow up with the mentorship of the first.

They grew up with the mentorship of the second.

And they didn't grow up in any experience at all with hard work and poverty.

And yet they were told you continue the farm.

And I saw, and they didn't speak Armenian, they they didn't speak Swedish, they didn't speak Spanish, whatever particular ethnic.

And a lot of the times they thought, you know what?

This is my birthright, this big house and this swimming pool and this packing shed and 500 acres.

And it just, I don't have to do anything.

It'll run on autopilot.

And they lost it.

They were the Alcibidean generation.

And they, I mean, I really mean they lost it.

And so kids that I knew that were going to high school with a few of them and these families of big agribusiness traditions, and they were driving to this little rural

small town high school, you know, in Camaros and Firebirds in the 1970s.

And they had parties.

Nobody has swimming pool.

They had swimming pools, my God, 1969.

And

now they're broke.

All that work.

Their children are going to have to either start the cycle again or remain impoverished.

Or sell everything off, right?

Yeah, that was a big thing.

That was a thing about inalienability of land.

That's a big theme in Aristotle and a big theme.

It was so important to the Greeks, they actually had a law that prohibited somebody from being alienated from the land.

That is borrowing money on your land to a lender and then you could lose the land.

And so you had to have other assets.

That was a law that...

Aristotle says was very hard to enforce.

And

modern economists have argued that certain areas are backward economically when they have such restrictions on the flow of capital etc but when i was growing up i think it's gone now there was a censure it was a demerit if anybody lost their farm even though a lot of people had done that in the depression but out once we got out of the depression And I didn't grow up in the Depression.

I was born in 53, but it was my grandfather would go, you see that nice man over there?

I mean, he survived the depression, Victor, and he worked so hard.

And that boy of his,

he inherited 200 acres and then he mortgaged it and he did this and he gave his son the 50 and his son was no good.

And that grandson took all of that work and he lost it.

And so that was the worst thing.

That was the worst mark against somebody that you had inherited land and you lost it.

Well, that three generation pattern then comes from Plutarch, whether we look at the modern especially the Athenian model.

Yeah.

And it wasn't just Plutarch's.

it was that is the subtext of the Thucydidean Xenophon saga.

That when he looks back at the 50 years in the Thucydidean first book, what they call the Pentacante Aetea, he's saying these men built Athens, and it's really a homage to Themistocles and Aristides.

And then he is very impressed with Pericles.

That's his favorite.

But he has a glimpse of who's going to lose the Peloponnesian War, and it's men like Alcibiades and Cleon.

Yeah, do you think that, because when you talk about Plutarch's biographies, they seem like they're of men that are multi-talented, multi-talented

skills.

And today we're much more specialized.

So when I was asking you to apply it today, I was thinking, well, maybe the military or maybe these

big tech guys or maybe our politicians.

But in some ways, is it hard to do that given that we're so specialized and not quite the same?

Well, I think that's why I mentioned Elon Musk, because he has such an array of interests, whether it's space exploration or universities or

another guy is Peter Till,

because he did PayPal, but he's also funding candidates and wants to has a very view of constitutional America, or he's trying to

create different types of investment or different types of paradigm and he's all over the place.

And I don't mean in a way like George Sorrell is just giving money to get a hard left, but he's trying to build different types of businesses.

And I'm not just talking about finance or investment.

So, yeah, I think that there's, you meet some of these people that have all these multi-talent and they excel in it in a variety of fields.

And, you know, another guy is, you know, we've had people like that.

Usually generals don't make good presidents.

Let's just be, I mean, I know that there's a big reassessment of Grant now, but they usually don't.

But Eisenhower was a good president.

He had certain organizational skills.

He was cool under pressure.

He was a good organizer in World War II, but he made a good president and he had a lot of skills.

I don't think Plutarch would rate him that high because he had a prejudice for people who could speak well and were dynamic and charismatic.

I'm not sure Eisenhower was.

Yeah, no, I don't think we think too much.

So I guess what I'm saying is there's people who, you hear this conversation all the time right now on the Republican side.

They're saying, no problem with the Trump agenda.

No problem.

Energy development, three more million barrels of oil.

That would get us.

That's what Trump did.

Open up Anwar, get more federal leases, more pilot.

That was great.

That wall, he rebuilt all the shoddy wall and he was just starting to do the new wall.

And then he had a vision.

He got to do that.

And no reason why the Ohio Valley or

Southern Michigan, these are areas that can be reindustrialized.

We have good people.

We've got, we used to have inexpensive energy.

And let's bring these jobs home.

And then, why are we dying in Anboro province?

So that agenda everybody agrees with.

And yet, and they're saying, well, yes, but we can get a more sober, judicious, and careful and circumspect leader like a DeSantis or a Pompeo and a Cotton that wouldn't gratuitously aggravate the left or wouldn't bring everybody out of the woodwork or wouldn't drive Mark Zuckerberg crazy to give another 419 million.

I don't believe that, but that's what they think.

But Plutarch would say, yeah, but do you have any larger than life characters that are outsized characters that can do that agenda in a way that defeats his enemies or makes people inspirational.

And I guess in modern terms, can a Tom Cotton or a Pompeo

or a DeSantis, I don't know this answer, so I'm not being rhetorical.

Can they go out to Tucson?

Can they go to Grand Rapids?

Can they go to Logan, Utah and get 50,000 people to go out to a rally like Trump can?

Yeah.

And I don't have that answer.

And that's plutarchian, that they're larger than life.

And that means that they can can do great good that other people can't do, or they can do great damage to a degree worse than other people that are even of dubious character.

So they're excessive.

They're beyond norms.

Yeah, okay.

And can I just ask you about maybe a woman, either Marjorie Taylor Greene or Hillary, like how would Plutarch assess, I'll take either one, or if you think there's another woman that would be more applicable to a Plutarchian analysis.

Well, I mean, he lives in a male-dominated, what we in our modern terminology would call sexist society.

Although I'm very careful to use that in terms of, say, classical Greece, because everybody says, well, only men can vote.

But from what we get in literature, anecdotally, when somebody voted, he sat down and sort of surveilled his larger family.

And a lot of times women had enormous importance.

And that's reflected in public theater and drama.

And you can really see it when you look at the titles of, say, Euripidean drama, you know, Helen

or Sophoclean Antigone or Electra

or Hecaba.

And you can see it with Aristophanes, Lysistrata, you know, they go on a sex strike and shut the whole city down.

because they're smarter than men.

And when you look at a lot of Aristophanes' really venomous comedies, the women are smarter than the men.

So you've got to start with the idea that traditional modes of university sexism are not necessarily applicable to Greece.

And the priestess are women.

And then some of the most powerful women in Greek mythology,

powerful gods or goddesses, Athena, Artemis, Aphrodite.

So what I'm getting at is that when you look at women,

they exercise roles of power, but not necessarily, you know, Artemisia.

She was this great queen of Haliconarsis.

And when you look at the Persian coalition that invaded Greece and Herodotus, she seems that she usually gives the best advice again and again.

And when you look at what the ancients thought, and that's very important when I say that, the ancients, because they had text and materials that we don't have.

So when they thought that Sappho was probably the or one of the best lyric poets, they had all of her work.

And just on the fragments that we have, it's pretty clear that she's probably the preeminent lyric poet.

And so when we say that it's a sexist society, there were a lot of women throughout history that were pretty amazing in that 1500 years from the Roman Republic, from, I could say, the founding of the Greek city-state to the end of the Roman Republic.

Or when you look at the influence of Theodora, the Empress, in Constantinople.

Remember during the so-called Nika riots, Nikki riots in Byzantium when the blues and the greens, they were going to take over and

Justinian was going to flee.

This is before he became the great emperor with the Justinian legal code building Santa Sophia and recovering half of the lost Western Empire.

He's ready to leave and Theodora says, if I can't wear purple, I'd like to be buried in a purple shroud, meaning you're going to leave, leave, but I'm going to stay here.

And people said, well, she was from the carnival and she was a stripper or whatever.

She was supposedly

prostitute, right?

According to Procopius.

But anyway, my point is that that's another sign that she is a tougher, more astute person than her husband, who was supposedly the greatest of all Byzantine emperors.

And so there's avenues for women to succeed and not as there is today.

I think he would, Plutarch would not have a high opinion of Hillary Clinton because she's not authentic.

Hillary Clinton can't go to any audience Hillary Clinton went to, she modulated her behavior and accent.

Remember, I'm so tired.

I've come so long when she's talking to a black audience or when she was running against Obama in 2008.

I'm here at the bowling alley having a Boilermaker.

Wellesley girl.

And, you know, she was inauthentic and

she had a mean streak and she was vindictive and she had no moral compass.

She's capable.

Look at the rosion.

If historians are going to ask themselves 50 years from now, how did a society lose its collective mind and believe this crazy faker called Christopher Steele has been washed up spy, hadn't been to Russia in years, concocted this stupid little secret dollar?

I looked at it on the internet the day it came out.

It was posted.

And I said, this reminds me of a 12-year-old on the internet who wants to act neat.

And he's looked at some intelligence document.

You know, they had capital letters and, you know, the way they formatted it, it was in Scarer quote.

It was really, it was, but you could see, and I don't, I'm not a Russian expert, you could see immediately there are three or four lies in there.

And yet.

that thing set the country mad.

And so what I'm getting at, Sammy, is who created it?

Well, she did.

You know, there were some, you know, there were some people at, I guess, the Washington Examiner that were using it as OPP using him.

But then when she got a hold of him after Trump got the nomination, she got the DNC,

give them money to whom?

To Perkins Coe law firm, to whom?

to Simpson, Glenn Simpson at Fusion GPS, to Christopher Steele.

And that was one track.

And then she called all her chips in and said, hey, you people at the doj you people in the state department spread this thing around get it in the cia get it in the fbi and so she was the one that concocted that and then she is she is crafty there must be some somewhere in lady

of her for craftiness she's lady she's a lady macbeth

that's true and she's she's kind of like reminds me the closest thing i can think in greek tragedies is a medea

and she's very self-destructive, though, as well.

And so then when she does all of that, she runs for office and she does all.

She gets this Robbie Mook, this incompetent guy who I guess she keeps saying that she's got the first gay campaign manager.

And so what does she do at a time when all she had to do was keep the blue wall blue, stay in Michigan, stay in Wisconsin, stay in Pennsylvania, stay in Ohio in 2016, talk about jobs, jobs, jobs, affordability, bringing jobs home.

What does she do?

She goes down to Georgia, Arizona, you know, and she's going to get a mandate and she's going to get a landslide.

So she's campaigning.

She's campaigning in the wrong places, what she's doing.

She's arrogant.

She had megalomania.

I was at a dinner once, and one of the more famous statesmen in the United States was talking to one of the more famous tech gurus.

And the statesman turned to me, and I won't mention his name and said, well, you kind of should be ashamed of yourself.

I had respect for you, but now you're a Trump,

you know, how could you vote for this ogre?

And he's, and this was like September 2016.

He said, he's going to get slaughtered, and slaughtered he deserves to get.

And then what's going to happen?

He's going to destroy the Republican.

This person was a Republican.

He said, and, you know, you should listen to the never Trump people, Bill Crystal and David.

These people are sober, and they know they could teach you something, Victor.

I'm very disappointed, but I'm most disappointed because you know nothing about tech.

Tech, tech.

This is the new age.

This guy knew nothing about it, but he was telling me this.

He was an icon of American diplomacy.

So I didn't say anything, but a tech guru was there, a billionaire from Silicon Valley, and he turned to him and said, Mr.

Tech billionaire, but he knew him much better than I did.

And he said, well, just confirm to Victor that this election is over with because Donald Trump still is in the Neanderthal age and Hillary has hired every

Facebook, Twitter, Apple, Google, brilliant guy.

And they're all, and he said they have, they have, but again, they're down in Georgia and Arizona.

And the election is going to be won in five states.

And he said, yes, but he's.

They've got them all on a computer.

He didn't know that.

He's just saying that.

And the person said, no, Donald Trump doesn't have nearly enough money, but give the guy credit he knows every voter who did not vote in 2008 and 2012 who would have voted republican but they were turned off by mccain and romney and they are going to vote this time and this person just looked astonished because he wanted reaffirmation and he said well how can that be and the guy said because they have teams that are on computers all day long they've identified those voters they're getting text messages they're getting email messages they've got profiles on computers there and he goes how would you know he was so mad he said because they work for me

said my team is there my down there and he said oh my god you're for drum he said yes of course i am they work for me and i'm ahead of my competitors yeah and he turned to me and he smiled And then I said, I didn't know that.

And it's that arrogance that, gosh, and that's what, that's what did in Hillary.

Because he was saying, well, I talked to Hillary the other day and I talked to some of the people in the campaign.

And John Kerry gave me a call.

And, you know, I've talked to Mitt Romney too.

And they just said, this is a disaster for the Republican Party.

We got the Yahoos and all this.

And the George W.

and, you know, the father.

And this guy just sat there listening to him.

He said, you know, I'm Silicon Valley and Apple and all, I know all these people.

And they were just pouring money into Hillary.

She's going to outspend him.

And this guy just kind of said,

yeah, but they don't know what they're doing.

And

I'm going to win five states.

And he said, well, he's not going to win the popular vote.

And this tech baron said, I don't think the popular vote matters according to the Constitution.

All it matters is the Electoral College.

He turned to me and he said, I've got a formula that we're going to win these five states and destroy the blue wall.

And he's going to be elected president and lose the popular vote.

And I thought that was absolutely brilliant.

He's a very Plutarchian figure, this guy was.

Yeah.

And the statesman appears to have missed the golden mean as the rule

lesson from.

Disappointed.

I felt like I was, he talked to me like I was a two-year-old, you know.

Yeah.

This was just five years ago.

So I was 63 years old sitting there at this table at this dinner.

And he was dressing me down as if

I had disappointed him.

I was a boy who came home from school and, you know, ate too much chocolate.

That was what voting for Trump was going to be like.

You seem to have survived it.

And we're coming closer to the end.

And so we need to give a moment for our sponsors and then we'll be right back to talk a little bit about a few more books of yours.

Welcome back.

And with that discussion of Plutarch, I wanted to turn then to your own books.

And the first one that in our chronological order that we've been going in is The Makers of Ancient Strategy, where you were an editor.

If you would like to talk a little bit about the compilation of that work.

Well, there was a great volume.

put together by a professor of German history, Gordon Craig, as I remember, called Makers of the Modern Strategy.

And it has people like Joe Minnie and Klaus Witz and Liddell Hart.

And it was a classic.

And he had the best scholar in each field of modern strategy, the strategy of deterrence.

Peter Perret, I think, also had

a subsequent volume.

But anyway,

the editor at Princeton University Press that had published this classic, Makers of Modern Strategy, said to me, why don't we do a makers of ancient strategy and you can get together a team of of classicists?

Well, the only problem was that I was a classicist.

I'd written a lot of books, but I'd also wrote a weekly column, one for the Chicago Tribune and one for the National Review.

And I think I could be charitable to myself and say it was mildly conservative, right?

And I was dealing with a field that was 93% left-wing.

And so I said to the editor at Princeton, okay,

but this is the kind of book that I, a letter that I get.

He said, What do you mean?

And I said, I get a letter to me about once a week.

Said, I'm a classicist at blank, blank, blank.

I used to have respect for you at blank, blank, blank, but I took fill in the blank Western way of war or other Greek.

I threw it against the wall because I read that you didn't like Obama.

So I said, How, you know.

I just want to talk.

And he said to me, you know, this was after I'd written a lot of books.

It was in 2008 or nine.

He said, yeah, but you have a more popular audience.

So, I said, it doesn't matter.

I still got to get top-ranked classicists, and they're all left-wing.

And some of them, he said, well, let's try.

So I picked some names, and they were all excellent.

And we wrote aspects of ancient strategy, the strategy of urban fighting, the strategy of naval victory.

mayhan doctrine in the ancient world.

I wrote on the strategy of preemption and what was the difference in the ancient world from a a preventative war versus a preemptory war.

A preemptory war was usually you were afraid the enemy would attack you at any minute.

And so you had justification in your view to be the aggressor and take out that enemy's initiative, such as the Israelis in the 67 war, for example.

A preventative war is usually, there's not really an impending threat, but you just, according to your geostrategic imagination, think it's better to get rid of this as Hitler.

I don't think you can make the argument quite, although it's difficult, saying that the Soviet Union was going to invade and break the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in 1941 in June.

So Hitler, that was a preventive war because he felt

the long-term thing was not going to be good for Germany unless they got oil, etc.

And the same thing with, I think you can say World War I.

There was not a preemptive war.

Maybe the Kaiser claimed there was, but it was a preventive war to make sure the British Empire and Western democracy was not the future of Central and Western Europe.

So I did that and I picked up Pamanondas in the preemptive war.

The Spartans had invaded, invaded four times, but in 370, he said, you know what?

I'm done with that.

And I'm going to preempt the next time they come down here.

They're not going to get down here because I'm going to march in midwinter with 60,000, 70,000 Greeks.

and i'm going to go right into the heart of darkness sparta to their city i'm going to try to cross the erotus and kill those sobs he didn't quite do it but then he said i'm going to go over mount tiegetus and free the messenian helots all 60 70 80 000 of them and the 250 000 person i'm going to build a walled city of Messenia and then they're never going to be able to leave again because they've got a Messenian empowered population right next to them.

And then in my Ada, I'm going to go again and again and again.

And I'm going to put a walled city at Megalopolis and a walled city at Mantinea, and they're going to be democratic, and Sparta is going to be, and that's what he did.

So I wrote about that, about the strategy of people in the ancient world fighting an enemy that they're not yet at war with and whether it works or not.

Because if you don't kill the king, so to speak, you wound him, you're in trouble.

So if you're going to have a preventive war, you've got to take out the apparatus very quickly or you're going to suffer righteous retribution.

Hitler almost pulled it off when he went into the Soviet Union.

He made some key blunders, as we know, when he went into Kiev and he had, you know, seven or 800,000 people encircled.

That was when he thought that was a great victory.

But to pull it off, he had to call Army Group Center under Gwedarian, who was on the way to Moscow.

in late July, early August, and could have taken Moscow and said, would you just make a right turn south?

And then when Army Group South comes up to Kiev, you'll be coming from the east and we'll bag this huge army group.

And it worked.

Everybody was celebrating.

This is the greatest development in military history, but he wasn't in Moscow, was he?

So he had to turn around.

And by the time he turned around, his equipment was worn out.

The men were worn out.

They had to go back the 200 miles, start all over again.

And guess what?

It started raining and got messy and muddy.

And then they slowed down.

It gave time for troops from on the Siberian Railroad from Vladislavic and the west to come.

And by the time he was ready to approach Moscow, it was late November and it was cold, coldest winter in 50 years.

And that's the end of the doesn't really matter that you can see the spires of the Kremlin or get to the first subway station.

They never got to Moscow.

So if you're going to preempt that, he only had enough reserves, fuel, money to do it in the first year.

After that, it was not losing what he'd had, but he was never going to win after the first year.

But in ancient Makers of Ancient Strategy, then you talk about Epaminondas.

Yes.

And in your essay, but there are other essays in that book as well, right?

Yes.

And there was a lot.

Barry Strauss is a Cornell historian, and he was an actual rower.

He rowed himself, you know,

not just kayaks or boats, but all types of watercraft.

And he wrote good essay, as I remember, on sea power.

And we had a guy named John Moss, I think, talked about urban fighting.

And we had another guy write on terrorism versus symmetrical organized warfare.

Oh, wow.

And I tried to do it chronologically.

It was from, you know, the beginning of the city-state to the fall of Rome.

So it was a long period.

And so I had people, I wanted to also have them concentrate on Pericles, Caesar, Augustus, major people.

I had some really good names.

Peter Heather, they wrote about the fall of the Roman Empire, and Donald Kagan about the Peloponnesian War, Ian Worthington on Alexander.

I really admire the work of Adrian Goldsworthy.

So my associate, David Berkey, wrote an essay, and it worked pretty well.

Sold pretty well.

Yeah, nice.

Well, we're up on time.

Can we save your other books for another episode?

I think we should.

All right.

Thank you.

And we'd like to thank the listeners for listening today.

I know it's Saturday and it's a very different topic, but I hope you enjoyed it.

Thank you, everybody, for listening.

All right, this is Victor Davis Hansen and Sammy Wink, and we're signing off.