The Culturalist: Victory and Complexity

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Welcome to our listeners of the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

This is The Culturalist and we like to explore events and people past and present to assess how the culture has arrived at where we are today and the things that we value.

And today we have on deck Clemenceau and then the Antigone.

So we're going to have a look at Clemenceau's record and his actions as Prime Minister of France.

Victor is a classicist, a philologist, a military historian, and a historian and just a pundit of the modern world.

So we'd like to hear his reflections.

He has a lot of supporters that we read their comments after our shows sometimes, but he also has critics and a really interesting series of letters, I would call them, from his critics and then his replies to him.

We call it the angry reader, and they often are very angry.

And they're on his website, victorhanson.com.

But we're going to turn to Clemenceau and Antigny after this break.

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Welcome back.

This is the Victor Davis-Hanson Show.

Victor, how are you doing today?

Very good.

All right.

We're on the Saturday edition.

So.

Wait, wait, wait, wait.

You called me a pundit.

Oh,

okay.

Should I not?

Is that no?

I am a pundit of sorts, but it's usually used in the pejorative context, Sammy.

It's called a loud-mouthed, know-nothing, narcissist, egomaniac.

Yes, but you're our lovable pundit.

How about that?

I hope not.

All right.

Well, Victor, before we move on to Clemenceau and some of the things that we want to explore about his life, I just want to remind people that you are the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow in Military History and Classics at the Hoover Institution and the Wayne and Marcia Busk, a distinguished fellow in history at Hillsdale College.

And

so, Clement Saux today, he's one of my favorite figures in French history, mostly because he had so many concerns at the end of World War I and at the treaty talks on the Treaty of Versailles.

He, since northern France was just torn to pieces, he didn't have the luxury of being an idealist like Wilson.

And his most famous quote is, Wilson bores me with his 14 points, why God Almighty only had 10.

And his concerns, and if you look into his career, his concerns at that point were very serious, that I've got a northern France that's been torn apart.

I've got Germany right on my eastern border and they weren't friendly.

I don't see them being friendly again and we need to deal with them harshly in reparations, in transference of colonies, the prevention of rearming and the restitution.

And when it all was said and done after the Versailles Treaty, he remarked that this is not a peace.

It is an armistice for 20 years.

And he was more or less right.

Yes, he was resonating what Marshal Folch said.

We'll be at war in 20 years.

Yeah.

So I find him an interesting historical figure.

And I was wondering what your reflections on Clement Sea were.

Well, there's four or five things about him.

And he's famous because of World War I.

And remember that he was born 1840, 41.

So when he came into control as Prime Minister of France, he was 77 years old.

And he came in right during the crisis of what was going to be the hope that the United States would send troops, but they hadn't got there yet.

And Germany had knocked out Imperial Russia in late 1917.

And so the idea was they were going to transfer 100 divisions and they were going to get to the coast and split the British from the French and destroy the Allied in their March 1918 offensive.

And then even if the Americans came, it'd be too late and then they wouldn't be able to land.

That was the whole strategy of Germany.

They could have pulled it off if they hadn't have left

over a million men

greedily as occupation forces to gobble up Western Russia.

Okay, so that's what we consider.

This 77-year-old man came in, and he had been very prominent during the war in a variety of cabinet roles.

But what was interesting, when things got very depressing, he was Churchillian.

I should say that Churchill was Clemenceauian because many of the things Churchill said, we will fight on the beaches, we will fight here, we will fight here.

Will you ask me what I want?

Victory, victory, victory.

All of those ideas, you know, war is too important to be left from general, all of those adaptations from Churchill, maybe they were more eloquently expressed in English, but they all came from Clemenceau.

And so he was a very familiar figure in France.

He'd had a long career.

He was 77.

Most people would be dead or retired.

And then he takes control and he holds together France.

He turns things over to Foch, who's of all the generals by far the best in World War I.

And they hold on.

And they defeat the spring offensive.

The Americans come in.

There's over a million on the battlefield.

There'll be two million by 1919.

And they win.

And then what do they do?

And he's famous for saying, you know, there were a lot of people, Foch, Poincaré, and all those other people said, you've got to go into Germany.

They invaded us.

They occupied 80 miles inward from our border.

They

inflicted billions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of deaths on it.

They started the war and now their territory is untouched.

If you don't go into Germany and occupy it, they will say within a year, we didn't lose.

We surrendered in France.

Not one foreign soldier ever put his foot on German soil.

So we were stabbed in the back by Jews and communists.

And so they saw that.

And they looked at that Versailles, just as you said.

They said, well, it's very easy for Woodrow Wilson to talk, talk, talk, talk, talk about magnanimity, reconciliation,

and we're all going to join the League of Nations, kumbaya, but they don't live next to Germany.

And we went through this in 1870, 71.

We went through it in 1914, 1918.

Unless we do something, we're going to do it again.

And they were called warmongers.

So Clemenceau is also famous, not just for coming to his country's rescue at an advanced age, but winning the war with superb diplomacy and military judgment, and then in a very far-sighted manner.

And he wasn't quite like Foch.

He didn't just say, go in there.

He said, when you occupy the Rhineland or the Saar, you have to do it under the auspices of an allied command.

Of course, the Americans, we kind of skedaddled.

By the time of Versailles, I think we'd had about 70% of our troops were home or on their way home.

So that was very famous and of course he was right because

germany invaded france in may 1940 and overran it in six weeks so he was absolutely right the other thing about him is it's very hard to think of a person that was a more of a renaissance man he was a physician he lived in america i think from 1865 to 1869.

He married an American.

He was a married student.

He'd be put in jail for that today, I suppose.

But he was a journalist.

He was a friend of people like Zola.

He was a progressive liberal person, but not an extremist, communist, or socialist.

So he spent most of his time trying to force the old regime that survived after the Bourbons and was remanifested with the Napoleonic imperialists.

He tried to say to them, I represent the left.

I'm not the communist or socialist.

And he tried to tell the communists and socialists.

He was a bridge, but a bridge from the left.

But he was a nationalist.

He was a nationalist.

That's very important.

He did not believe in international communism.

He believed in France first.

You know, just as.

Can I just ask something?

He was also one of the first French political leaders that was not also a general, right?

No, he was not a general.

He wasn't even in.

Was he not in the military?

I think he wasn't even.

Yeah.

He wasn't even in the military.

He was a journalist and he was an expert dueler.

Oh, yeah yeah and that's what kept him alive i think he died at 88.

he was very tough guy i mean philanderer and when his wife duplicated his behavior he sent her back to america and stripped her of her citizenship but the thing about him and i think it's i might note of france in general we had this idea you know during the Gulf War, the second Gulf War of 2003, and the French didn't participate.

And

we had all of these French theatrics at the UN and everything.

We made these jokes about French cowardice.

You know, their tanks only have one gear, reverse, you know, we're going to rename French fries to Freedom Fies.

Okay.

But when you actually look at French history, what stands out is when you see French bravery, it's superior.

So they don't.

produce the best generals and Napoleon was pretty good.

But when they do, they're better than anybody.

And when the French want to fight, they're the the best fighters.

They can be the best fighters in the world.

So you take World War II

and everybody says they collapsed in six to eight weeks.

They did, but they knocked out about half of French tanks.

They even with the decrepit Air Force, they had good planes, but they didn't have good operational capabilities.

They knocked out about 20% of the Luftwaffe.

And they killed about 25,000 Germans.

So when they started the Blitz, they being the Germans, they were not in good shape.

They'd lost transport planes to fuel their fields in France.

They'd lost a lot of fighter aircraft.

And so they did a lot that we don't give them credit for.

But more importantly, you know, once we got into the war and we had all of this material and we decided to invade North Africa, then there was all this talent that had no mechanism of expression because they were of a younger generation and they had Jell Malin and Pataon and all these World War I relics that basically had either been incompetent or joined the Vichies or were the Vichies.

But once we came in and the British started, there were all these talented people.

And you look at their records in that brief war, Leclerc or Tazignay or Juin, they were very talented.

And so once we started to equip them and they started to appear in Italy, but especially...

after Normandy in 1944 and 45, when you look at Leclerc and the Division Leclerc or Tazigne, or you look at what Juan did, they were brilliant guys.

And then after the war, they all had kind of tragic fates.

Tazigne died in Vietnam.

I think his plane crashed.

And Juan only had, I think, one arm.

And he died very early.

And then, excuse me, Leclerc died in Vietnam.

And Tazigne lived.

but he didn't live very long.

He lived, I think he died in his 60s.

But what I'm saying is their kids were killed either in, Zhu'en's kids were killed in World War I, I think both of them, and Tazik Nei's kid was killed in Vietnam.

And so what I'm getting at is they suffered enormous amount of carnage.

If you take this period of 1870-71, 1914, 1918, 1939, 1945, and then you add the disasters in Vietnam and Algeria and the Middle East.

There was a small proportion, but a large number of Frenchmen that were fighting the entire time.

And they didn't have a lot of equipment and they didn't have a lot of moral and political support and yet they were very good.

I think that's true of France in general, that when you see, if you're on the conservative side, I know that they're mostly a left-wing country and left-wing intelligentsia, but when you start to see intellectuals on the conservative side, even moderate intellectuals like Camus, And you start to see them, they're the best in the world, the most courageous people in the world.

Maybe that has something to do with their education system.

It is a rigorous education system and they don't seem to compromise anytime you see a new system.

More than a seven that's been

used, our K through 12 was exactly that way.

Yeah.

And they don't tend to compromise hierarchy in their institutions either.

Even kind of a wet noodle or wishy-washy guy like Macron said that we're not going to be woke here.

We're not going to tear down statues.

We're not going to name names.

And I think he called it the American infection or something, which, as I said earlier,

was ironic since they gave us Dairy Doll a con

and

Foucault, yeah.

Yeah.

So back to Clemenceau, though, he seems to have had strangely a stellar career or at least making all the right decisions at the right times.

I mean, even with Zola's Jaku cues, which was the indictment of corruption and the arrest of Dreyfus of the government's corruption, he was on the side of Zola as

I think he claimed.

I think he claimed that he gave Zola that title of J.

Accus.

Yeah.

But he was kind of a narcissist, so he took credit for everything.

But he was very, very skilled.

And, you know, they called him Le Tigre, the tiger.

And what they meant by that was that he was indomitable.

And when people were, were, he was kind of like U.S.

Grant, when everybody came to Grant, you know, in that terrible summer of 1864, General Grant, General Grant, Lee's here, Lee's there.

Don't worry about what Lee's going to do to us.

Worry about what we're going to do to Lee.

And that's what he did.

He kept the country together in late 1917 and 1918 and said.

his message to French forces and the French people, yes, they are 80 miles in there.

Yes, they're going to get even further as they pour troops in from the Eastern Front.

Yes, the Americans are not here, but we will hold.

And when we will hold, it'll be like a big slingshot because once they get to their maximum area, we're going to let it go.

And we're going to the British and the French and the Americans, we're going to push them all the way back to the border.

And that's exactly what happened.

And then at Versailles, he was,

you can have your League of Nations, yes.

but we are going to take the Rhineland back.

It's ours.

And they did.

And we are going to make sure that Germany follows the conditions of the Versailles Treaty.

And of course, when Germany immediately, not immediately, but very soon created a Luftwaffe, illegal, built an army over 100,000 men, illegal.

and then went into the Anschluss and the Rhine.

That was all illegal.

But I mean, legality as defined by who's, what do you care?

Who's going to stop us?

So the Versailles Treaty was basically worthless because, as Clemenceau saw, the worst thing you can do in international diplomacy is to humiliate a power that you have no ability to constrain or to deter.

So what he was saying is, you're putting all the war guilt on Germany, and that's deserve it.

But once you do that, I want to warn you that you have to make sure they can't reorganize.

And you're not allowing us any mechanism to constrain.

You have no enforcement capacity.

And then, of course, Germany began paying off war reparations with funny money and inflated their economy.

And

basically, their attitude was, well, if we have to pay you billions of dollars, we're going to break our own economy, but we're going to break yours too.

Yeah, we seem to be breaking our economy in a similar fashion.

Yeah, we are.

We haven't got wheelbarrows yet, but we're going to get there.

We're close.

Yeah.

Well, it seems to me that the history books haven't quite been as generous to Clement.

So not that they are bad or anything.

They just don't really quite write about him like I feel he should be.

And even if you go to France, one time I was in France, and

I was talking to a French person, and they wanted to

connect with me.

So they said, Well, you know, it's like Napoleon.

And I was sitting there thinking, Well, that was more than 200 years ago.

Don't you have somebody else who's great in your country?

I know.

You go in the hall of mirrors at Versailles and you look at all the battles, and then you start to think, wait a minute there's no victories after 1815.

You know what I mean?

There's all these glorious Napoleonic victories, there's these Bourbon victories, Hundred Years' War, all this stuff, and then there's nothing else.

And you think, well, 1870, 71, zilch, you know, and then you go into World War I, Verdun, they shall not pass and all that stuff.

But

we always associate France with after Napoleon not having a glorious military tradition, but yet there were people that ensured that the German problem did not swallow France.

The German problem being the largest country in the center of Europe with a very skilled, aggressive population that had a Prussian tradition of aggrandizement was deterred.

And people like Clemenceau,

who was a polymath.

He was a scientist, he was a doctor, he was an intellectual, he was a journalist.

And he, you know, he wrote, I think

he was an art critic.

He was a friend of Monet and he collected Japanese pottery.

He did almost everything.

So he was a very unusual figure, as a lot of these very gifted French people are.

Yeah.

Okay.

So we probably should turn then to the Antigone.

And I know that you are obviously an expert of the Antigone and I am not, but I have a favorite passage in the Antigone from the young son of Creon,

who is betrothed to Antigone.

And his father has just told him, I don't think you should marry her.

You end up with an evil woman in your bed and there's no worse fate than that, right?

And so Hyman's in a little bit of a state because he wants to marry Antigone and his father doesn't want him to.

And the people of the city, at least according to Hyman, are behind Antigone.

So he's gone to his father to tell him that

you know i think dad you might want to rethink what you're doing and the people are behind antigone Antigone and it's okay to change your mind, etc.

And so here's just a little bit of his speech and I always love how it starts out anyway.

He says, Father, the gods implant good sense in men, which is the foremost of all their possessions.

In what way you are mistaken in what you say, I neither could say, nor could I even know how to say.

Yet things may come out right in another way.

Whatever it is, my nature to scout out for you everything that someone says and does or finds fault with, since your face is terrifying, is a terrifying thing to the townsmen because the words you are not pleased to hear.

It is possible for me to hear things in the shadows, how the city mourns for this girl, that the most undeserving of all women is perishing in the foulest way for deeds most glorious.

And he goes on, but he has this speech where he's trying very carefully to tell his father, hey, dad, you're rational and I'm out on the streets of the city and I hear people talking and they're behind Antigone.

And as he goes on, he basically tells him, don't worry, you can go ahead and change your mind.

It's okay.

Reasonable people do that.

And this gives this really fine speech for, you know, a young kid who's facing not just his father, but the king as well, and is a little bit

not on solid ground by talking to him about Antigone's.

And obviously, I don't think it has too much effect on what Creon does, but it's an absolutely beautiful speech that he gives.

And I always like that about the Greek plays that they have such fine rhetoric in the speeches, you know, that the playwrights put into these plays.

So I was hoping that we could talk a little bit about the Antigone and the things that you like about them.

I do like the Odyssey.

There is these small pageants to rationalism and reason.

And I think Hyman's speech is one of those things.

Well, it's a very interesting play.

And I was very fortunate.

I was 20 years old in Athens and at a junior year abroad.

And I had the great classicist H.P.

Kiddo.

He wrote the Greeks, and he taught.

uh seven of us this play in greek he was a very tough old guy and you know it was mostly grammar and and syntax.

But I then also had the course from a very brilliant in-Greek professor at UC Santa Cruz, John Lynch.

And then in graduate school, I had it for the third time in Greek by a consortia of professors two or three times.

And then I taught it, I think, twice, three times myself in an advanced Greek class.

So it's a very interesting play.

It's 441 BC.

So it's one of Sophocles' earliest of his 100-plus play.

We have seven that have survived, and it's one of the earliest.

And he's got a lot of issues.

So he starts with this idea that the seven against Thebes, these are the children of Oedipus, they're fighting.

And

the renegade, Polynices, has tried to attack Thebes with the seven and get the city back.

And Etiocles is defending him, supposedly the order.

And Creon is Oedipus's brother-in-law, and he's a regent king after the exile and blinding of Oedipus and the death of Jocasta, as we we know from the Oedipus Rex.

Oh, and one thing, the four children of Oedipus are the children also of Jocasta, who's the mother

bride.

Yes.

So they're the result of incest, which I find interesting.

And that's kind of a subtext of the play that maybe they're a little extreme.

Why would the two boys kill each other?

And then why would the two girls be so radical?

But the point is that then what do you do when it fails and Polyneys dies and the rule for people who are agents of insurrection is they can't be buried.

They're supposed to be, I think the word in Greek is bora, carrion

for birds and dogs.

And then Antigone, the sister of Polynices, says that, you know, I'm at least going to put a ritual bunch of dirt over the body.

and break the law.

And so she does.

And they find out somebody's done that.

And Creon, the king, he's he's an old guy, he comes in, and Haimon, his son, is in love with Antigone.

And so we have this speech that she's going to die.

And Haimon says, you know, you represent order and the law, but you have no idea, as you said, that the popular sentiment is that there's something higher than the law, and that's natural law.

It kind of introduces this idea that's really a hot topic today.

Is American law represent a natural law or is it just a construct?

And conservatives always mention natural law.

Natural law says essentially that whatever a person says or does, there's certain innate values.

And one of the values is you don't desecrate the dead ever.

no matter what anybody says.

And so Antigone is trying to say that the gods are on her side because she's supporting, and that's an issue in Athens in 440 because, you know, Sophocles was a general in the Samian revolt the year before he wrote this, or probably right during he wrote it, or was working on it.

And there was a lot of imperialism, colonialism, violence.

And so Athenians were being very radical.

This is the beginning, the Socratic movement, the Periclean Athens, the Sophist idea that there is no natural law.

So they're discussing this.

And he's a conservative Sophocles.

He's trying to say there is such a thing.

Antigone is the emblem of that.

So that's one great issue.

And that's outlined in that speech.

The other great issue is that the traditional, this is very strange for an aristocrat like Sophocles, but the traditional foci

of wisdom are basically males and elderly male, what we call in Roman the senators or the gerusia at Sparta.

And in this play, the people who were the least enlightened, the least aware, the more incompetent is an older male.

That is Creon, the king.

And who were the champions?

His son, Haman, is basically saying, you know, I'm a young guy and I don't have your wisdom.

And Antigone is young as well and she's idealistic, but she's also a woman.

And so, you know, she rails against the unfairness that she's not taken seriously.

But here's a male author suggesting that she's the moral giant of the play.

And that's very common.

not just in Sophocles drama, but despite the ancient slurs against Euripides that he was a misogynist, you can see it in a lot of Euripidean plays as well.

These strong, and Aristophanes with Lysistrata, etc.

So that's another issue that in Athens, maybe the hierarchy doesn't have a monopoly on wisdom.

And then there's every Greek play, there's a tragic hero.

These are people who are

confined by the roles they have to play, are confined by the rules of society, and they're good people.

But because of the conventions, they end up badly because they're not able to break out of their malu or their environment.

So Creon really takes serious the idea that there's been civil discord at Thebes, that they, after the Oedipus disasters and the seven against Thebes and the return of the successors, all of that mess, they need a sober, tough guy to follow the law.

And if he just allows Polynices to be honored or to be deified or be martyred, then people are going to take up that cudgel against the state.

So he's going to enforce it, whether he likes it or not.

And he says in that speech that you have to have honor, right before this speech, you have to have rules.

And younger people don't understand that.

And yet, by doing so, he's going to offend the gods.

Triresius will warn him, I think, in the play and say, you know, you're on the wrong side of the gods, and you will pay for your sacrilege because there's a higher law than what you think.

And you better change.

And of course, the sacrilege will be manifested in Nemesis because of his arrogance.

And that'll mean that Haimon will be, not only will Antigone be put in a cave to starve to death, but Haimon will kill himself, and then his own wife will kill herself.

And he loses his wife and son.

I think his earlier son was killed.

So at the end of the play, he's got nothing.

But he still believes and he becomes wise.

I think the chorus at the end says it's tragic, the punishments the gods dish out, but with them comes wisdom.

And so all of those themes are in the play, that that wisdom can come from the most unlikely people, young people and women that are not bound or tied or constrained by conventions that sometimes the elderly and the male are.

And there's a natural law that transcends what humans call law.

And then these are the old nomoi, the nomoi that we're here that they receive.

There's a great speech about that.

And they're older and they're more revered than what the Athenian democracy of Sophocles' times thinks is the law.

There's another thing, and that is that Sophocles was an aristocrat and of the old guard that came after the Persian War and came of age in the 470s, 460s.

And they represented this sort of birth mattered, wealth mattered, landed property mattered.

And then as democracy started to radicalize, and here at the very beginning, now he's going to write for another 34 years.

We got the Oedipus at Colonus that's produced, I think, in 406 in his 90s after his his death.

He's got 34 years to go.

And we have the titles of some, as I said, 100-plus plays.

But in all of these plays that are extant, Oedipus, especially Philoctetes and Ajax, but Antigone too, there's this idea that there's a bunch of aristocratic people, and I think she's one, so is Ajax, so is Philoctetes, that they just don't want to play by the rule.

And they think, you know what?

I don't like what's going on.

I don't like humans making these laws that disrespect gods or this code.

And I'm going to live in another world, an older world, a better world.

And I've mentioned this before because, as Bernard Knox said in the Heroic Temper, this Sophoclean hero is very influential in later artistic expression,

novels, fiction, and in Westerns.

John Ford, although he didn't read Sophocles, was aware of the Sophoclean typology when he, you know, he made something like the searchers, to take an example, the man who shot liberty balance these john wayne characters that are very very uh frightening very adept but they're not cut out for the world that asked them to help them in other words they'll do it their way and they'll get results but once they get results the beneficiaries want nothing to do with them and that's a tragic situation so antigone yes she's going to get the body of Polyneys buried and he he will go to the underworld and not you know be a shapeless, random soul wandering the eons.

But she's going to pay a high price for that.

And in that code, I think there's a line in the Ajax, which says, live nobly or nobly die.

And I think I did put that on my father's tombstone.

He was kind of a Sophoclean character.

He had a certain way of doing things from the Depression and the war.

And when he was a bureaucrat in the junior college, he was an administrator.

He was not cut out for it.

In other words, he did things that he thought were right.

He tried to help people.

And if that came up against Bureaucrates, he resisted.

And I think he paid the consequences for that.

And so, but we admire those people because they have a higher moral duty and they're from a different generation.

And that's kind of what Sophocles is saying.

And he will go in these other plays that surround Antigone.

It's part of the Theban cycle that we have the Oedipus, the Oedipus at Colonus, and Antigone, even though Antigone is the first of the Theban play.

Can I ask you something about Antigone being the wise one for Sophocles?

It seems to me that he's showing something ironic and that,

you know, so it's not so much a respect for a woman's wisdom as a, ha ha, look at this old man so rigid in his ways.

And the woman who, you know, there's not as much respect for is the wise one.

And so it's an aspect of the irony he's using in his play.

And I know that the Greeks invented that, but it seems to me that that motif, I guess you would call it, is interesting in the sense that it does really cut into our traditional, you know, it's a method by which they can cut into the traditional way of thinking of things and see things that are turned upside down that may have some relevance, even if the whole idea was, well, it's a woman, so this is ironic that she knows things and the old man does not, right?

It's a very common theme in tragedy and even comedy that it's very important to have people

on the periphery that look at the system, not as defenders of it or participants or beneficiaries of it, but as critics, whether their criticism is self-interested or because they're disheartened or they feel they got a bad shake or they're limited, but they do offer cogent criticism.

So you see the Lysistrada of Aristophanes, and she's the only one that says, you know, it doesn't make any sense to fight this war.

So we're going to have a sex strike.

Ha ha.

It's funny.

But she has a very compelling critique of the Athenian establishment and perpetuates this 27-year disaster.

And so people like Antigone and Euripides, there's a lot of slaves or poor people.

And the Odyssey even have it earlier.

with shepherds and people like Eumaeus.

And they're trying to say to the establishment, we understand where you're coming from, and you're the pillars of order, and we respect that.

And Haimon is this, you know, young, sort of impulsive guy.

But you know what?

If you take your allegiance to a rigid law without any considerations of whether it has a natural basis to it, you're going to destroy yourself in the city.

Now, you mean well, and we understand that, but you're going to be an agent of destruction.

And that's what's so good about Greek tragedy and classical literature in general, is that it avoids this, that guy's evil, this person's perfect, kind of the modernist idea that we're going to go back in the past and this person is wonderful and this person's evil, because people are complex.

Take a historical figure, how Sophocles would work it.

Take Robert E.

Lee, for example.

Well, we're going to tear down every statue and we're going to rename everything because he fought for slavery.

And when he went into Gettysburg on the retreat, they went horrifically so.

They kidnapped African citizens, not former slaves, and took them back to the South.

He whipped slaves himself, supposedly.

But compared to the people at the time,

he was a better man morally, ethically than, let's say,

Nathan Bedford Forrest, Braxton Bragg, John Bell Hood.

He was more adept in his field.

He had done noble service to the Union before the war.

After the war, he did not encourage guerrilla resistance.

He was magnanimous in a sense that he kind of didn't like slavery, kind of like Jefferson, but he did participate in it.

So what I'm saying is, yes, he was wrong.

He was a flawed individual.

He lacked the strategic acumen of Sherman or the tactical genius of Grant.

But given the tragedy that he was a child of Virginia and he had this estate right next, which is now Arlington Cemetery, right next to the Capitol, and he was trying his whole life to get his failing Lee clan back up to its, you know, its revolutionary era grandeur, that he was kind of a tragic hero that he was he played a role that was a bad role but yet he was kind of a noble person had he been in the north or grown up in the north those innate character traits would have been put to better use and so that's what sophocles is trying to suggest to us that it's very rare for people to be able to get beyond their landscape or environment or innate prejudices to be fully human.

And when people can do it, then

they don't necessarily end up well and Antigone can do it and she doesn't end up well and it's tragic and she has a tragedy but so does Creon hers is the great tragedy the play but Creon is how did a good man that wants to do good end up being an agent of destruction and evil yeah um so you brought me actually to the last thing Sophocles himself and really the charm of his seven plays that we still have extant is that he was able to cast a character in a few words, what would take even as a very complex character, as you're suggesting.

And so I was wondering if you had anything to say about Sophocles as the artist, the playwright.

Well, all of the plays are about 12 to 1700 lines long.

And what they try to do is to show you one aspect of a character or a crisis.

for the first seven or eight hundred lines.

So we're going to see the law, the law, the law, and then we're going to see what happens to the law of the law of the law.

Sort of like the Bacchae, we're going to see of Euripides.

We're going to see Dionysus, the bringer of wine and pleasure and release from toil, so necessary to have that Dionysic aspect.

And then we're going to have the second half as Dionysus, the 60s rebel who destroys everything by excess and kills people and is heartless.

And then you, the audience, are supposed to put the two together and decide what's the real message.

And that's know, these hour-long plays.

That's the trait of them.

But in Sophocles' case,

what he's trying to do is introduce ambiguity.

The first generation, Aeschylus, is trying to show this is Prometheus, and he's got a cosmic mission, and these are the forces, and he's for freedom, and they're not, and they're going to collide, and he's going to suffer.

And it's pretty much cosmic forces, you know, and Agamemnon or the Oristia itself or the Persians.

But there's not necessarily a tragedy.

You don't really get into the personality of the characters.

There's usually only two characters in stage.

But with Sophocles, you start to see the ambiguity, the nuance, and there's no accident that that word in Greek, ironea, starts to appear, that they're ironic, that, and it doesn't quite mean the modern sense, that things that you seem to think are true may not be quite as true, or they may be even the opposite of what you think.

So this man who's very rigorous in his moral code and very upstanding and wants to heal the city and restore order after this Polynices, this firebrand has almost destroyed it, you start to see that he's in a role that does not allow him, apparently, given the conventions and morality of the time, to be fully human.

And so he violates something, and that violation he does willingly.

And even though he's warned by Tiresias, it's going to hurt him.

He either doesn't believe it, but more likely he's willing to undertake that.

doesn't understand what's going to lead to the death of his wife and son.

Whereas when you get to Euripides, much of the Sophoclean irony is not situational.

It's up in a person's mind.

It's up in a person's mind.

So Pynthias, his problem is that he's a 15-year-old punk.

that really has lurid imaginations and Dionysus knows that and brings out those deep-seated repressions and will exploit them.

Or Cadmus and Tiresias or fuddy old duddies that want to, you know, like wear bell bottoms and wire-rimmed glasses in the 60s when they're 80 years old.

There's something weird with them too.

And I could go into Medea,

the same reasons.

And so there's a progression from cosmic forces that build the city and the city has to allot.

areas of respect and worship toward.

And then Sophocles is saying that within this system that's changing, there's going to be a lot of collateral damage because there's a lot of people who came out of a very simplistic law code.

And it's going to have ambiguities when you start to get a complex population, a democratic government, an overseas empire.

And he's going to explore those with the idea that we need an Ajax or we need...

an Oedipus or we need a Philotees or we need an antigone, that rigid morality that says, I don't compromise, but they're going to end up badly.

And so I know it made a big effect on me when I was in my 20s or 30s when I would see somebody in graduate school or in academic life or in farming when I saw somebody that was right and they were going to push this thing to the very end I would say to them and I've done it myself with self-destructive consequences, believe me.

But you keep pushing and you're right, but you understand the whole world's against you and you're going to end up badly.

And you may end up badly.

I know a person, for example, that said, I'm quitting because this is unfair what they did to me.

I said, You're going to quit and you're going to go home and you're going to feel really good about yourself.

And then, what's the next day when you tell your spouse you don't have medical insurance for your kid?

Are you going to go out and get three jobs?

So, we make these little compromises in our lives.

But Sophocles says you shouldn't do that.

But the people who don't do that are very valuable.

And these are people,

you know,

they appear

George Patton, Curtis LeMay, Matthew Ridgway, they do not compromise.

They're wonderful at what they do.

They do great good for us.

They're principled.

But we get uncomfortable with them because they will not change or modulate.

And they don't end up necessarily well in their lifetime.

They're not given a chord for what they accomplish.

And that was what I said.

The Western was really good because they take the same idea that as the fifth century starts to change and become quote-unquote modern and sophisticated and it becomes Aristocratic and Platonic and Euripidean and Periclean, that marathon generation starts to feel out of place.

Because you start giving people without property the vote and then people that only have one parent that's Athenian the vote.

And then you build the walls around Athens and you subject the agricultural population to invasion threats, but while the landless poor snugly inside the walls protected in row in the fleet, et cetera, et cetera.

Well, until the plague shows up.

Yeah, until the plague.

Well, that's another Sophoclean irony, isn't it?

And it's one of the backdrops of the Oedipus Rex.

That plague Oedipus is punished with is the same plague that Sophocles is enduring when he's writing the play in 429.

You know, just to finish, then whether you're George Stevens doing Shane, as I've talked about before, or John Ford doing the searchers of the Man Shot Liberty Balance,

Sturgis doing the Magnificent Seven,

or High Noon, you get these figures of a Gary Cooper or an Alan Ladd or John Wayne or Steve McQueen and Eul Brenner.

You can think, these guys are weird.

This guy can find Natalie Wood and the searchers.

This guy is the only guy that can kill Lee Marvin in the Man of Shot Liberty Balance.

Gary Cooper can actually deal with these hoodlums that are coming back to kill him and save the town from sinking back into decadence and criminality.

And George Stevens knew that when Shane rides in, he is the guy, as small as he is, that can take on the cattle baron.

However,

there's two corollaries to that that are very Sophoclean.

He will do it.

But by doing it, he violates certain canons of law, and people will not tolerate that.

And so notice in Sophocles' play that she violates the law and buries him and she's a popular hero, but nobody storms the palace, right?

It's not popular uprising that says, we're going to get you, Creon, for doing what you did to Antigone.

No, it's divine and, you know, doesn't do Antigone any good.

She's dead.

And so what I'm getting at is that once they start to adhere to their code that alone will allow the solution of the problem, they they violate the modern sensibility.

That is, you don't bring a gun into Jackson Hole, or you don't shoot up Hadley when it's now a sophisticated city, or, you know, you let bygones buy guygons.

You just don't waste seven years of her life chasing Native Americans so you can find a woman that's probably married with kids now, a so-called white woman.

Or you got to understand that Lee Marvin is a thug and let the law handle him.

And then when they violate those codes and they bring results, then people, if they're the beneficiaries of them, they usually are, then they say, well, let's just wait a little bit.

Oh, wow, the cattle barons are dead.

Ooh, the banditos.

Eli Wallach is gone from our little Mexican village.

Oh, wow.

Lee Marvin's not there to bully us.

I don't like what they did.

I don't like what they did.

Why did our hero have to kill them?

And then you can see what happens.

The tragic hero then, like Antigone or like Ajax or like Philip Tes, has nowhere to go.

They either kill themselves or they're killed or they are ostracized or they're talked down to.

So Shane rides out.

Gary Cooper throws down his badge.

John Wayne's in the house at the end of the searcher.

He walks out that light door and he walks off where to, who knows?

He's all by himself.

He has no family.

He has no friends.

He has no money.

He just, he doesn't care.

He did his job and they don't want him to be around, apparently.

Or in the case of the man who shot Liberty Balance, he burns up his little wedding cottage because he doesn't get Vera Miles, you know.

And the wild bunch is a tragic girl to the nth degree, a bunch of hoodlums that do have a code, but they can't survive when the age of automobiles and machine guns, et cetera.

they're going to go out in a blaze of glory and take a lot of bad people with them.

But when they're gone, people are going to say, I'm kind of glad they're gone.

And then Edmund O'Brien will say to the Mexican Resistance, well, I'll join you now but you couldn't have the wild bunch joining the Mexican resistance because they're just too unruly for anybody yeah so you know it's that great line in the magnificent seven is very Sophoclean where he says well you know we could stay if we want Steve McQueen says and he said yeah and they're going to be even glad they're going to be glad to see us leave

the two of them leave and they were glad to see them the old man says that you know you were like the wind you were like the wind you so that starts with Sophocles he takes elements from the Iliad and the character of Ajax and Homer has elements of that character.

Then he develops it in that play, the Ajax, Antigone, Philiptides.

I urge everybody to read those because sometimes you just read of his plays.

We only read the Oedipus.

I'm not suggesting you read the Oedipus at Colonus.

I think it's 1900 lines of the longest Greek play.

And I was never a big fan of it.

It's one of his last play.

But boy, the Philiptides and the Ajax Antigone are wonderful plays.

Yeah.

All right.

Well, Victor, the time is up, and so we'll have to end it there.

I will remind people that you can find Victor on social media at parlor at Victor Davis Hansen.

On Twitter, his handle is at VD Hansen.

And his Facebook handle is at VD Hansen's Cup.

And he also has a fan club on Facebook.

So you can go to the Victor Davis Hansen Fan Club and they like to collect and put on all sorts of things that Victor has, speeches that victor has given and podcasts and that kind of thing so we'd like to invite everybody there we'd like to thank victor for your reflections on clemenceau and the discussion of the antigone okay thank you for

thank i enjoyed it they're kind of different different topics and they require in the case of clemenceau it'd be better if you were a fluent native french speaker i can read french but i'm not by any means able to speak it so i might be inadequate a little bit although I've read a lot of sources of World War I in French, but not so adept in French culture as you, Sammy, who lived in France.

All right.

So we'll just call it quits there and thank everybody for listening.

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

Bye, everybody.

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