The Culturalist: Finding Ancient Greece's Homer and Tragedians

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.

Welcome to the Victor Davis Hansen Show, The Culturalist, with Victor Davis Hansen, the Martin and Ellie Anderson Senior Fellow in Classics and Military History at the Hoover Institution,

and the Wayne and Marcia Busk Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

I am the co-host, Sammy Wink.

The Culturalist is a new podcast on the relevance of history to modern culture.

We often hear it said that the past repeats itself.

Here we look at those patterns in history.

Or some of you have read Thucydides'

History of the Peloponnesian War, and he says in that it's a blueprint for all time.

And with

idea that

there are certain constants in human nature and human society.

Today in this episode, Victor talks about lessons from ancient Greek civilization found in the Odyssey and in Greek tragedy.

Now, first let's turn then to Victor,

the Odyssey and Homer, who was entertaining young Greeks and teaching them about their mythology.

But the the ideas of the Odyssey run deeper than myth and an entertaining tale of a journey homeward.

And we would like to discuss those other things, those long-term things with you.

Okay, well, thank you, Sammy.

So what is Homer?

Homer is just a name.

There's no first name, there's no last name, there's just Homer or Homeros in Greek.

And

We associate him with two monumental poems.

Monumental means they're long and they're written or composed orally in a dactylic hexameter meter.

Long, short, short, long, short, short, six time.

Okay, so we have the Iliad or about the last year of the war, a multi-week incident, the wrath of Achilles.

And then we have one other poem, The Odyssey, and how one of the heroes of the many heroes, how they struggle to get back home.

In this case, Odysseus, how he came

back to Ithaca after 10 years fighting at Troy and another 10 years wandering the Aegean and the Mediterranean, encountering various monsters.

Now, it doesn't mean there wasn't a lot of other Homeric poems.

There were dozens of them by Homer and his associates.

Oral bards in the so-called Dark Ages between 1200 and 700 BC

that composed tales of monumental heroes, monumental places, monumental events before their time.

And they passed that down to a guild

of illiterates.

The writing, as we know it, the Phoenician and then the Greek alphabet, did not yet exist when they composed, at least until maybe Homer's last poem or two.

So what are the Odyssey and the Iliad, though?

I'd like to do a little bit different take.

And one of them is: are they historical?

Are they accurate?

Was there an Ithaca?

Was there

a Mycenae?

Was there a Troy?

And the first thing to remember is

that there was a monumental civilization in Greece.

We call it the Mycenaeans.

And the last stage was the most

impressive, about 1600 to 1200, 1250 BC.

And the name comes from the greatest citadel at Mycenae.

And it was Near Eastern or Egyptian or non-Greek, at least we thought, in its organization.

It was monumental.

It was

on a a hill or a rise in the lowlands where a king or a Wanox, an Anox, and his royal court distributed power,

money, authority to people who surrounded them, and they brought their wares, their agricultural produce mostly, but also metals up into the royal storehouses.

So it was not communistic, but it was very highly hierarchical, ranked society.

And it fell apart, crashed, burned.

We don't know why.

We don't know whether it was too

intensively controlled by the apparat at Mycenae or Tirins or Thebes or Glaw, and then they were knocked out suddenly and decapitated.

Or we don't know whether sea peoples or the Dorians or somebody from the north came and knocked them out, but they were destroyed.

And when they were destroyed, they lost, they being Greeks, lost about 90% of their population.

So in the detreatis that followed for five centuries, just imagine the United States being nuked, if you will, a very complex society being nuked.

And we have all these movies about survival on the beach or water world or all of these post-apocalyptic, Book of Eli, something like that in the Dark Ages.

And there were probably Mycenaean lords by the name of Ajax or Achilles or Odysseus.

And Over the centuries, as this impoverished society recovered slowly, they started telling stories about this last generation or last few generations of the Mycenaeans.

And they exaggerated them.

And they became almost divine.

And they stumbled into Mycenaean tombs, Mycenaean walls, and they said, Who built these?

Who built these incredible things?

We couldn't get near doing them now.

And so they call them the Cyclops or the sons of Heracles or Heracles.

So, in that process of exaggeration, we came up with, we had the

sack of Troy and the expedition to Troy, and I don't, that was probably a Mycenaean raid of some sort into Anatolia from Greece.

And then we had the wanderings of one Mycenaean lord, and that became exaggerated into fairyland, so to speak, over four or five centuries.

And then the last...

The last generation of this guild, that is Homer, he was fortunate that he coincided with the rise of the new city-state.

In other words, civilization rebounded, but on very different premises.

It was no longer Mycenaean, it was no longer a dark age.

The Greek language is still spoken, but a new alphabet allowed it to be literary.

And the city-state arose, and Greek religion was codified, and we started to have epic poems and lyric poems, Hesiod, Works and Days, Hesiod's Theogony, Presocratic Philosophy.

And that last version of that oral saga was canonized or institutionalized or codified, codified, but it was probably written down and that's why we have it.

So to answer our question, what is in the Odyssey?

The answer is it's like a sandwich, an onion.

One layer, a very small layer, goes back five centuries to the Mycenaean world and there's things in there, certain words of places that no longer existed 500 years when Homer composed it, and yet they're in the Odyssey and the Iliad.

There's a boar,

think of it, a tooth of a boar helmet that nobody had ever seen in Greece in 700, and yet it's mentioned in the Iliad.

So obviously the poem was handed down father to son or guild partner to guild partner,

and they included material objects, they included place names, they included words, they included dialects that nobody knew what they meant.

They just knew that it was essential to the archaic flavor of the story.

So we can go back and look at those and say, look, there's a Mycenaean boar's tooth helmet, and yet we've dug up one near Argos and we've seen it, so it's historical.

But that's very, it's very few.

So the poem then, the next layer was the Dark Ages.

And you can take, they're nomadic people, they're horse people,

they tend to be aristocratic, tribal, and all of those elements of guest friendship, as Moses Finley, the great classicist, pointed out in the world of Odysseus, they're all in there too.

So the second layer of the Iliad or the Odyssey, they give us a glimpse into what Greece was like after the apocalypse in the Dark Age.

But

the final layer is contemporary with the rise of the city-state.

And that's why in the Odyssey and in the Iliad, there are references to city-states, there's references to writing, there is references to intensive farming, there is references to cities and places that we know existed fairly recently before the poems were composed around 750 to 700.

And I think you could argue that the manner of fighting, it's a very controversial question, in phalanxes or phalanges,

ranks,

represents 750.

So what I'm getting at is most of the poems represent Greece at the dawn of Western civilization around 750.

albeit you have to pick and choose parts, artifacts of the Mycenaean world in the Dark Ages.

This is very windy, windy, but I'll give you an example of

what I mean by this.

In the 24th book, after Odysseus kills all the suitors, and after they're reconciled, the family is reconstituted, and Penelope and Odysseus are back,

they want to know where Laertes, the father of Odysseus, is.

And there's a description of his farm.

And it's not like a Mycenaean palace, and it's not like a Dark Age horse lord.

It's an intensive farmed place in Ithaca.

And he has

a variety of crops, mostly as most people did at that time, the Mediterranean triad of vines and olives and

grains.

It's away from town.

People started to live out on their farms so they could intensively farm it more effectively.

There seems to be a slave that's attached to Laertes, and we know that chattel slavery was not as it was in Rome.

Large gangs are in the plantation south, but there was a member of the family that I guess you could the Doulos was more of a household servant even though he was on free.

Remember slavery in the ancient world has nothing to do with race at all.

It's usually the unfortunate circumstances of losing a war.

But what I'm getting at is if you look at that farm very carefully, and that's not the purposes of the the poet Homer.

He doesn't really want to be a historian.

He's just saying, you know, he's going to go up to Laertes and he's going to be on a farm and my gosh, I'll just describe a farm I see in my own time and call it Laertes but for the historian it becomes fascinating as a fascinating glimpse of what agriculture and intensive agrarianism was around 750 and 700 and then you can take that description in Homer and compare it with archaeological finds or survey field surveys and get archaeological evidence and material evidence to to confirm what you see in the poem.

So just to finish,

the Iliad and the Odyssey are historical documents.

The trick is

which period, 1600 to 1200, 1200 to 750, or 750 onward to, say, 700, you plug in?

And the answer is they're all there, and it becomes sort of a sleuth game to...

to decipher and uncover a particular incident at a particular time.

But

that's not the purpose of what we study Homer for.

We study it for literary purposes mostly, not historical.

And within this poem,

there are certain, the poems being the Odyssey and the Iliad, there are certain tragic heroes.

And we'll get to those in a second.

But let me just introduce part two by saying that Aristotle, who looked at Greek tragedy, but also was

cognizant of epic, Homeric epics.

What is a tragic hero?

It's usually somebody

that

you excites your pity or your empathy because they're larger than life.

This seems very familiar, doesn't it, to contemporary heroes that we have.

And you know that they can do things that other people cannot do.

And you know they want to do things for the betterment of people other than themselves, like the city or the civilization or the state.

But you are aware that they have a tragic flaw.

And that tragic flaw, unfortunately, will come out at the most inopportune times.

And the tragic flaw is usually one of narcissism or arrogance because they're so capable.

And that will start to undo them.

And that will destroy them, even though it doesn't usually destroy the state at large, but it very well can destroy anybody that comes in contact with them.

And with that, we'll go to Greek tragedy.

How's that, Sammy?

Yeah, that sounds good.

Can I ask you one thing, though, that might be a little bit of a digression?

But you said Homer saw things, and described things that he saw and I was wondering if you because I've often heard that Homer was blind yes or so

I don't want to say saw I don't yeah I don't want to say saw literally but remember when we say Homer we think that there was a single person who composed the two epics and maybe others.

I mean, we have things called the sack of Troy, the Little Iliad, the Nostoy, the returns.

There wasn't just the Odyssey.

There was probably the returns of Agamemnon or Ajax or Menelaus.

And all of these poems together were the product of people that had enormous skills of recitation.

And Millman Perry, the great classicist in the 19, I think it was the 1920s and late 20s and 30s, went to what is now Yugoslavia and found poems of the same length and skill composed by in Cerbo-Croatian by oral bards.

Not all of them were blind.

The point is that in tradition, Homer was blind.

It doesn't mean all of the bards were blind.

They may have been, but the idea is that in a very physical society when people had disabilities and could not be productive, how did they support themselves?

And one suggestion is that people who were blind cultivated the powers of memory, especially, and they became a guild, and it was a way for people who were blind as bards bards to make a living.

But when I say saw,

he was aware or the people around him were aware of the material conditions because he has vivid imagery of metaphors of sunlight, of rivers, of farms.

And the suggestion is either he or somebody

could see those in their own contemporary time.

Yeah.

Okay, thank you.

So let's move on then to Greek tragedy.

And again, I think we all know that the Greek theater entertained and informed Athenians, much like our television or maybe live streaming today to be current.

It was a medium in which they debated political issues and asked questions about the human condition.

And this time, you intimated that you'll talk to us a little bit about the tragic hero and its relevance to even our culture.

Yes.

And

if anybody's interested in the abstract description of a tragic hero, it's all found in Aristotle's Poetics,

a fourth-century abstract but fascinating analysis of why people feel the way they do when they watch a Greek play, specifically one of the three great tragedians, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides.

We have seven of over a hundred plays of Aeschylus, seven of over a hundred plays of Sophocles, and for a variety of reasons I can't get into, 19 of Euripides.

And in these plays, the trick is

that

they have a set of themes from epic mythology, which again follows that same pattern.

Mycenaean, probably foundations, exaggeration in the dark ages, codification with the rise of the city-state about people and gods that could do things,

superhuman things, that people in their own time could not.

But these were composed in the age of rationalism,

between

455, 460, and 400 in the great age of tragedy.

And so they take these stock characters.

They can't change the story.

I mean, they can't change the outlong, but each playwright can have a particular take.

It's kind of like the old, like a Star Trek TV show.

If you take the first Star Trek, which is my generation, you can't kill.

Spock, you can't kill Captain Kirk.

So you know that these people are going to be alive at the end of

the hour, but you can make new incidents or stories or outlines within those parameters.

And that's what they do.

By that, I mean that they take

a character like Heracles or a character like Antigone,

and they can't keep her alive because the myth says she's going to die, but each playwright will have a different take

on one aspect.

If you're an Aeschylian

fan and you look at Prometheus bound, or you look at

the Oristia, there's a sense that these great men of the city-state and Aeschylus' first generation,

they had certain cosmic issues.

And that is, in the case of Prometheus, how can you help mankind and bring fire to him and yet disobey the rule of the gods?

And I don't want to be too technical, but in the city-state, how can people of that aristocratic class still keep customs alive and yet function in a more egalitarian democracy that's more practical and utilitarian?

And he tries to resolve these issues in the Oristia.

He has one about a historical incident, the Persians and the Suppliants, and especially in the Prometheus Mountain.

But when we get to the

second generation, the Sophoclean tragedies, he's a little different.

He's interested in these monumental heroes of the city-state from that class as they can't adopt to democratic complexity, kind of like a George Patton or Curtis O'May that I've mentioned before.

And so they're going to be tragic.

They're larger than life.

They have super egos, and yet there's no place for a person within egalitarian bureaucratic

democratic society.

And so to take a couple of examples, there's this monumental character, Ajax.

And according to the myth, he's the second greatest warrior at Troy after Achilles.

When Achilles is killed,

then his

divine armor should go to the next best, Ajax.

But it doesn't, because Ajax is a one-dimensional heroic figure who would, as he says in the play, I'd live nobly or nobly die.

And if he can't perform a task according to his heroic code, then there's no reason doing it.

He's not going to change.

He's not going to alter his methodology.

He's simply going to solve the problem, even though the problem can't be solved anymore under the conditions in which he demands, given the changing circumstances around him.

So Odysseus gets the armor because he's smarter in the sense of wilier, more cunning.

And Ajax feels that it's terrible.

So he gets angry.

He rails almost like Donald Trump about the unfairness of society.

And then he commits suicide.

In the case of Antigone, there's a lot of tragic heroes.

She wants to bury her brother who was killed in this civil war.

And yet Creon, the king, says you cannot do that because he was a renegade.

And she said, but the rules of the gods, and she's this,

again, somebody who's aristocratic, overrule those of the city-state.

And he says, no, they don't.

So you know where they're going to collide.

Neither one can give an inch.

Each in their own way

is majestic, but each in their own way is stubborn and will not compromise.

And when they collide, anybody in the immediate vicinity is going to go down with them, as Haman does.

And so

again, throughout the play, people try to caution Antigone to be moderate, and they do the same to Creon.

What's even more fascinating is this third generation tragic hero.

That's Euripides, in one of his 19 plays, the Bacchae, or or the backey women bacchian women a king probably about 15 years old pentheus of thebes

uh

is headstrong and you at the way euripides runs these plays the first six or seven hundred lines that's half of the play you empathize with one character and then on the second half you see the other view from the other characters and the protagonist, the antagonist, and then you change your sympathies as the play matures.

So in the first half, Pentheus is stubborn.

He's a 15-year-old teenager.

He's king, and he wants to stamp out this new cult of Dionysus.

And he says women in the royal house of the Thebes, including his mother, are going up in the mountains and they're having sex and they're drinking.

And it's all under this pretense that Dionysus helps us.

He lets us have the benefit of a new gift, wine.

And Dionysus comes himself in disguise, incognito, and Pentheus encounters him and you think wow what an uptight guy.

I read the play I think when I was 18 in UC Santa Cruz and all the hippie kids in the class said wow man he's uptight he's repressed he's a sex monger but he can't admit it he's got all these dark desires man he's like our parents or grandparents or like society and Dionysus is a hippie man he's got horns or he's got a beard.

He likes to drink and party.

This is a really great play.

And so of course, it seems that way because Dionysus is sort of, you know, calm.

Well, if you want to dress up like one of the women, I can help you go up in the mountains and then you can watch all this bad stuff that's going on.

Yes, yes, yes, I'll do that.

And he kind of hypnotizes him.

The second half, you see Pentheus scouting out the women.

uh who are going in these bacchic rites and they were sort of singing and shouting and drinking probably not having sex with men in

the shadows, as Pentheus thinks.

But Pynthias doesn't know that he's been transmogrified in some dreamlike fantasy into an animal that they're going to kill.

And so in the second half, his own mother kills him and beheads him, thinking that he is part of the rite.

And then things get interesting because

Dionysus becomes sort of the Pied Piper of Hamelin.

Yes, Pentheus was arrogant, and yes, he was

blasphemous, insulting a god, but shouldn't, as one character said, shouldn't gods be better than men?

You have no passion, no compassion.

You have no mercy for poor little teenage Pyntheas.

And so you get the second half, but the point is that in his downfall, it's very tragic because you can see that he meant to do right.

You can't run a city with everybody drinking and going up in the mountains.

It's just that he had these certain forces that he couldn't control that God would manipulate.

On the other hand, you see Dionysus, and

you can't just run a city on pure logic and 24-hour a day work schedule.

So he's saying to people, you know, lighten up, take time off, have a drink, but he's also a God, and gods can't be questioned.

And so you see both sides, and the message tends to be that

moderation,

but that we have to respect people

an earlier generation or people who are headstrong or people who are talented, even though we give them,

we can't abide by all of their excesses, we have to understand that we invited them in.

Let me just finish by suggesting the way that this works in modern society, I think would be very valuable if we all took time.

to acknowledge the tragic hero.

We see it in, as I've mentioned a lot of times, in real life.

There was nobody who was more profane, more obnoxious than George S.

Patton,

our great commander of the Third Army, in that wonderful, I shouldn't say wonderful, but amazing romp

from

right outside the Normandy beaches through

France all the way near the Rhine River by September 1st, 1944, 50, 60 miles a day.

Had he been fueled and supplied, he might have been able to leapfrog over the Rhine and help help in the war in 1944.

But he had certain flaws, and the flaws were that he wouldn't listen to his superiors, that he knew he was better educated and had better sense, innate cunning than they did, that when there was all this intrigue about Eisenhower and Bradley and Montgomery and FDR and Churchill, he didn't really care.

He just thought that he would be so much more preeminent and superior in his actual performance on the battlefield.

Everybody would overlook his

supposedly

pearl-handled, or I think they were actually ivory-handled.

There's a big debate over that pistols he wore and his shiny helmet and his

magnificent car.

But beneath all that, he was a very gifted person.

He flew above the battlefield in a private plane, very dangerous.

He exposed himself to

fire by the enemy.

He cared deeply for whether these soldiers of the Third Army, a million people strong, washed their socks so they wouldn't get trench foot.

In other words, he was a general's general.

He was ideal.

He was the GI general, not Omar Bradley.

He was the genius, not Bernard Montgomery.

He was the organizer and visionary, not Dwight Eisenhower.

But he was also uncouth, and he ended up, as you remember, dying in a freak, tragic accident.

And then his

opponents, his rivals, sort of wrote military history of World War II in Europe for for the next 30 years, and he didn't get the do that he was supposed to.

And we could go on the same with Civil War heroes.

William T.

Sherman was uncouth.

He was blunt.

He was an authentic military genius that ended the Civil War in a way that saved hundreds of thousands of lives earlier than it otherwise would have.

Matthew Ridgway was one.

Curtis LeMay, we talked about in the firewalling.

All of them were not recognized for their achievement in a way that was commiserate with fair assessment.

Why?

Well, you don't like some guy with a cigar hanging out of his mouth talking like Ajax, or you don't want somebody like Achilles running wild

in Korea like Matthew Ridgway, who was just an amazing general.

We see it in our own

Westerns, and I mentioned this so many times, I don't want to be repetitive, but there is a commonality between

John Sturge's Magnificent Seven, or Sam Peckenpaugh's The Wild Bunch,

or George Stevens' Shane,

or high noon, and that

society is in an impasse, whether it's the federal rallies have squashed the revolutions and the wild bunch, or whether the townspeople are being ripped off by the bandits and don't know what to do in the Magnificent Seven, or whether Hadleyville can't really deal with three criminals who are coming back

to settle with their sheriff, and they don't want anything to do with violence, and yet they want security.

And you can see these dilemmas.

A good example is the searcher.

Everybody wants Natalie Wood back.

Nobody knows how to get her back except one person, Ethan Edwards.

The problem with Ethan Edwards was he probably rode with Quantrell in the Civil War.

He's a racist.

He's larger than life.

He's stubborn.

and he wants maybe to kill Natalie Wood, his niece, when he retrieves them.

And so all of these characters then are successful successful and they solve the problem.

They get rid of the federales, they get rid of Eli Wallach and the Banditos, they bring Natalie Wood back,

they clean up Hadleyville.

But then what?

Society doesn't want them there.

In the case of George Stevens Shane, Shane kills the three cattle barons, the two cattle barons and their hired gun, Jack Palance.

But then he says, you know,

you can't live with a killing, even if it was a righteous killing, because because that's not how civilization is built.

So he's basically saying at the end of Shane, I gave you society.

I gave it back to you.

I gave back to law, but I had to do it in an unlawful manner.

I had to kill some people.

And you can't live with a killing.

And I'm also sort of a volatile person.

If I stay on this farm, I might end up.

liking your mother.

He doesn't say that, but that's what George Stevens is suggesting, because I'm just a loner and I have my own code.

It's a heroic code.

It's a noble code, but it's not civilization's civilization's code entirely.

And this all comes, goes back to Greek tragedy in general and Sophocles in particular.

These are Ajax, Antigone characters.

And it's a very fascinating tragedy to watch them because they're saying in our own lives,

when we look at these people,

they do solve problems.

And we were the ones that called them in to help us.

And yet, once the problem starts to be solved, they give us the margin of error to be hypercritical and to second guess and then to blame ourselves for ever bringing in someone.

And I'll just finish with the obvious comparison as I wrote in the case for Trump with Donald Trump.

Donald Trump destroyed the 16-person field in 2015 and 16, the Republican primary.

Nobody thought he could do it.

He did.

Everybody said he was a billionaire, but the fact was he was poorly funded.

He didn't raise a lot of money.

And everybody said he had no chance against Hillary Clinton.

And everybody thought there were certain things that needed to be done.

You needed to close the border, and you needed to take on the so-called swamp, and you needed to restore deterrence vis-a-vis North Korea, or you needed to have an innovative plan in the Middle East, or you needed to break with this crazy idea that the more largesse and concessions you gave to China, the more democratizing they would become.

And yet...

There was stasis.

There was fear.

Everybody said, that's not how we operate.

That's not what the Council on Foreign Relations suggests.

That's not what most Council on Economic Advisors tell us.

That's not what the Brooking Institute advises.

And so we were having these series of mediocrities in both parties, and they were not solving problems.

But the problem with bringing in Donald Trump was

You know, he says things that we recoil at.

He tweets things that seem obnoxious.

He can't just take on the

flawed and kind of disingenuous and actually

not very

helpful.

Dr.

Fauci has to say, have you ever seen Fauci throw a ball?

He throws it funny.

Why say that?

Well, the point is you bought Donald Trump A to Z and you get Donald Trump A to Z.

And part of the package to solve the problem, unfortunately, comes with Achilles or Ajax

or tragic hero excesses.

And those are necessary to cut through the fake news or to take on people

who lie about you.

But in that process, his own supporters, or at least the people that are swing voters, are going to be turned off even as the economy reaches historically robust proportions, that unemployment gets to record lows, that energy production reaches record highs, that the Abrams Accord

creates calm in the Middle East, that the wall and negotiations with Mexico eventually lead to almost no illegal immigration.

And yet after getting all of those beneficia, the voters say, yeah,

but he's not a uniter and he's got certain skills, but those aren't the skills I need any longer because the economy is doing well.

And these problems are solved.

And so that's the plight of the tragic hero.

We need them in times of crisis, but we're not able to appreciate the benefits that accrue to us.

We only concentrate on the downside of their methods.

Victor, thank you for that discussion of the psychology and the social psychology of the tragic hero.

I have a question, though, that is a little bit once again of a digression.

It seems strange to me that when the Greeks had their tragic hero like Pynthias, he's killed by his mother infanticide.

But even the modern cultural parallels you're drawing,

the searchers, John Wayne doesn't actually kill Natalie Wood.

In fact, he embraces her at the end.

And in Shane he rides off into the sunset, which bodes all both of those bode well for Donald Trump.

But why do the Greeks

end their Pynthias in infanticide?

Or what's the difference between the cultures?

I think they were I mean, they're a pre-industrial society, and we are a therapeutic society, and we're American so we want to have happier Indian.

Their tragic heroes suffer from what the Greeks called eubris.

That is Oedipus can't just let it go that he solved the riddle and got rid of the existential threat to Thebes, but he has to tell everybody that and he has to be right all along about his birth and he has to be the sleuth and they say if you keep finding out, if you keep trying to uncover this, essentially you're going to find out you killed your dad and slept with your mom and that's going to cause mayhem for everybody but he won't quit and that eubis then brings in divine nemesis and that's the anger of the gods for being excess in excess acting in excess and then it leads to ate or destruction

and then we have an aeschylian idea of pathé mathos that only through pain you finally learn and oedipus remember has a sequel called oedipus at colonus where he's blind and he understands the full magnitude of moderation.

So in these westerns,

we don't usually lose the tragic hero, although we do a lot in some war movies.

But they don't end up well.

So what is Shane going to do at the end?

He's obviously been wounded.

He's got a limp shoulder and he's riding off up into the mountains and the Grand Tetons.

That's not very nice to be by yourself.

So we don't know what will happen to him.

And when they're all celebrating in the searchers, and the

sons of the pioneers, I guess, are playing that wonderful song.

He walks out of that John Ford door with a shadow, and he's walking in a very strange way.

And you know that he's going to be not invited in for a celebratory dinner.

He's gone.

And remember what Yul Brenner says to Steve McQueen, we lose, we always lose.

They'll be glad to see us go.

And there's so what happened to the trap?

They all got killed.

It's just basically

the young follower, he stays in the village and it's Yul Brenner and Steve McQueen, the onlybody left.

Everybody's been liquidated.

The problem is solved, but at great expense.

And they go.

And

a good example is the man who shot Liberty Balance where John Wayne then

he makes sure that Jimmy Stewart gets elected and becomes the man of the future and civilization, which he did.

He ensured because he killed Liberty Balance.

And then what does he do?

In typical Ajaxian suicidal fashion, he becomes a drunk, burns down his marriage, beautiful new home that he thought Vera Miles would flock to and marry him.

And then he ends up kind of forgotten.

Yet he was the key to the whole civilizing pattern that led to irrigation and agriculture and railroad out west.

And so

We are Sophocleans in Hollywood and in our own life and in politics, but we're not, you know, we're not Greeks that demand the actual absolute physical destruction of every

epic and tragic hero.

And

this is an element just to finish that comes.

The tragedians are looking at the epic hero in Homer, especially somebody like Achilles.

And they know that

There's these dilemmas that Homer's outlined and they develop much more further.

The dilemma, remember, in Achilles'

tragic situation is that once he sulks in his tent because he wasn't given enough praise and booty given his battlefield exploits, Patroclus, his friend, goes out to take his place in his armor and gets killed.

And he could have prevented that.

And then he gets angry and he's going to go out and kill Hector, but he is told that he has a choice.

He can live long

or he can live heroically and die young.

And so, when he kills Hector, people say to him, there's going to come a time when Paris is going to kill you.

And yet, he deliberately chooses

a suicidal route, that is, to die heroically.

And all these people know that what they should do.

When I mean, how many people, I think I wrote three columns, but people more influential than I wrote, maybe 20.

Donald Trump, please, please do not tweet anymore.

Do not gratuitously attack somebody.

Do not make fun of somebody the way they look.

Just, I know that none of us could endure the pressures that you're under, but you have a magnificent record and you're doing wonderful things for the country and your enemies are flummocks and yet they're looking for one fatal flaw to exploit.

And why are you doing it?

And his answer is, I do it because I'm Trump.

And Trump does what the hell he wants.

And Trump has a methodology.

And people elected me because I don't put up with the bullshit and crap.

I just get to the quick.

And if you don't like it, it's your fault, not mine.

I'm a tragic hero.

And I'd rather end up badly and be Trump than, you know,

than Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi or even people in my own party, Mitt Romney.

Mitt Romney is not a tragic hero.

Mitt Romney is a cat you drop from the third story of a house and he'll land on his feet.

Don't Trump will splatter.

And then he'll jump off if that's what it takes to solve the problem.

All right.

Well, thank you for those discussions of especially individuals, because I find that our country is built on the idea of individualism, and yet we often in history and in culture lose

that analysis of the individual and the importance of the individual.

So I look forward to future episodes and discussing those types of things.

Yeah, I think we will do that because we are captives, prisoners of Marxian historiography where themes and trends,

class oppression, victims and victimizers, the economy, birth control pills, transistor radios, Silicon Valley make us all

spectators of these historical

developments as if we're impact and we can't do anything about it.

Yet the Greeks thought that individuals, Plutarchian people, could say, take away Winston Churchill and where was Britain in World War II?

Take away FDR,

where is the United States in that war?

So I think next episode of The Culturists, we'll look at some famous people in history that we don't really give enough attention to, and yet we'll try to imagine what would have happened if this person hadn't have been at this place at this particular time, along with events as well that can change history.

Yeah, that sounds good.

And to the listeners, you can find Victor Hansen at victorhanson.com and on Facebook, in Leedy Hansen's Morning Cup and on Twitter as well.

So, all of those places, these episodes will be available and much, much more.

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

Thank you.

Thank you, Sammy.