#299： What the Ancient Greeks and Romans Thought About Manliness
Episode Stats
Summary
Well, if you were to ask a man living in 1920 what manliness meant, he'd probably give you roughly the same answer as a Greek or Roman man living 2,000 years ago. My guest on the show today is a classical scholar who has spent time thinking and writing about Greek and Roman notions of manliness. His name is Ted Linden, and he's the author of the book Soldiers and Ghosts about the history of battle and classical antiquity in Greece and Rome.
Transcript
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brett mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast well ancient
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greece and rome have a heavy influence on the idea of manhood we promote on the art of manliness
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in fact this classical conception of manliness was how much of the west defined manhood up until
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about the middle of the 20th century for example if you were to ask a man living in 1920 what
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manliness meant he'd probably give you roughly the same answer as a greek or roman man living 2 000
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years ago my guest on the podcast today is a classical scholar who has spent time thinking
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and writing about greek and roman notions of manliness his name is ted linden i had ted on
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the podcast a while back ago discuss his book soldiers and ghosts which is about battle and
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antiquity that was episode number 231 if you want to check that out well today on the show ted goes
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into detail how the greeks and the romans defined manliness we begin with the greeks and how the
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homeric epics particularly the iliad served as their bible on how to be a man and how achilles
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and odysseus were held as differing models of manhood ted then explains how the athenian
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philosophers like plato and aristotle tried to tame the bronze age notion of manliness by making
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self-control an important element of being a man we then shift gears to the romans and discuss how
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they borrowed elements of greek manliness to shape their own culture of manhood as well as how roman
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ideas and manliness differed from the greeks and we end our conversation talking about why the virtue
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of self-control pops up in definitions of manliness not just in the west but also eastern cultures like
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in japan or china and also how we're living in an age of self-control if you want to check out the
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show notes after the show's over where you find links to resources you can delve deeper in this
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topic just go to aom.is slash virtus it's v-i-r-t-u-s it's manliness in latin
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ted linden welcome back to the show delighted to be here so we had you on the show about i think a
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year ago to talk about your book soldiers and ghosts about the history of battle and classical
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antiquity and greece and rome and when we were talking after the show was over we were talking
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about the website the art of manliness and kind of what the idea of manliness that we're promoting
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i mentioned you know i studied classics in college and that the idea of manliness i'm kind of tapping
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into is a bit of the ancient roman idea and then you said well that's i study that that's kind of
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that's my i do that that's what i think about and i write about and research about so i after i heard
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that i said i gotta have you back on so we can dig deeper into classical notions of manliness so i
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think it'd be good to start off with the ancient greeks because they were before the romans how did
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the ancient greeks think of manliness what what did they think made a man a manly man
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well um the first time we see the greeks of course is in the iliad and the odyssey and already there
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you have at least two conflicting definitions what you could call the achilles ethos and the
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odysseus or ulysses ethos of course the term we're looking at arete is the term which will in
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later greeks become the the word they use for virtue in homeric greek it tends to mean something
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more like excellence or competitive excellence and of course homeric heroes are always competing with
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each other to be the best on both sides competing mostly with their the people on their side not
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actually with the enemy and you have on the one hand achilles whose particular excellence is in
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actual fighting he is a tremendous warrior he is the strongest the swiftest the most accurate
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thrower of spears the most accurate stabber with swords that sort of thing on the one hand and of
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course he is the hill the hero of the iliad and then you have the hero of the odyssey odysseus
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whose particular arete whose particular excellence is cunning the greek word metis being a sort of
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type of cunning intelligence which is at the same time competitive so you are competing with everyone
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else in being more cunning than them in war this is manifested by things like organizing ambushes or
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or effective deployments in if you're trying to make your way home like odysseus it's tricking
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cyclopses and telling lies and things of that nature to advance your case or to advance your progress
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these two different conceptions are as i say already present in the homeric poems although
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i think it's fair to say that the odysseus ethos might have been regarded if we if we assume the
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homeric poems are historical which is which of course they're not the odysseus ethos is sort of a
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special case most homeric heroes compete with and in the fashion of achilles who bravery and and
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six and and talent in combat rather than with odysseus in cunning and public speaking which are
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his particular things so we have the dichotomy of cunning and i guess achilles represents andrea
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is that the word courage the greek word for courage it is but what's confusing is andrea is a later word
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so in the homeric lexicon you would simply refer to what these guys have as arete and the basic
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meaning of arete is courage or success in battle but then you can also say and there are other
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aretai like those which odysseus has cunning wisdom and counsel and things like that subsequently greek
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will sort out this confusion and will say okay aretai are any excellences and we're going to use
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the word andrea which means literally manliness for the for what achilles was particularly good at
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that is to say a bravery and strength in battle so the language and the same will later be true in
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latin and the language permits of a large degree of ambiguity for some time but then kills off that
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ambiguity by introducing a new word for one particular form of excellent and and that would
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be andrea as you say which just comes from an air so it's just the quality of being a man but the
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quality of being a man for these purposes is defined in in military terms basically means courage and
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what about hector because he's another character in the iliad that displays you could say some notion
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of manliness did the greeks look to him as sort of an exemplar or was he sort of ignored because he was a
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trojan no well of course the trojans are um they are there's not a lot of imagination of other
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cultures in the in the iliad the trojans are ethically identical to or very similar to the greeks to the
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achaeans and some hector is the chief person on the trojan side who competes in the same way that
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achilles does that is to say he is incredibly courageous and and so forth so he has that
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particular arete as it would be described in in his period later he would be said to be the the
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trojan champion of andrea now he has and this has always been there are a series of cross-cutting
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qualities um which he has which makes which make him very attractive to us he loves his wife he loves
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his son he feels a tremendous degree of actual responsibility to his family to his nation these
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are various things these are qualities that are quite rare on the achaean side so he's to us he's much
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more human but none of those qualities would be described as andrea they might or might not interfere
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with andrea but they're certainly they're certainly not part of in that period they're certainly not
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part of manliness although in later greek times when the when the definition of arete widens much much
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further they could certainly be included okay and so let's say so this idea of manliness evolved a bit
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because they got more specific because they had words that came up with it to describe it more specifically
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they had arete sort of describe excellence you know in totality right there's a general term i'm
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curious how did the greek notion of manliness change say during i guess would be the axial age like i'm
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thinking like plato the golden age of you know greek philosophy did they change how the greeks thought
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of manliness did they take that homeric ideal and tamp it down or try to downplay it or transform it in
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some way they include it in a bigger system and the bigger system is if going to be if immense
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historical significance and we see this again beginning in the pre-socratics and then formulated
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in one form in plato and formulated in another form in aristotle by which it's pretty well mature and
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doesn't change much thereafter the greeks come up with a series of virtues which they consider to be
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the most important ones and one of these is andrea military courage and excellence that is still
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allowed its place but it's very definitely over time and particularly to philosophers it becomes a
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junior partner and they are particularly interested in phrenesis or sophros or sorry phrenesis or sophia
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which we might describe as intellectual wisdom or intelligence they are interested in sophros
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which is the competitive virtue of self-control or the wisdom of self-control and they're interested
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in justness dikayosune you can call it justice but that steals from the fact that it is a competitive
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quality everyone is competing to be more just than everybody else so justness is probably a better
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term than justice because the philosophers are inhabiting a primarily civilian world and trying
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to offer advice to people who live in primarily civilian circumstances the result is that they formulate
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the system of these are the so-called canonical virtues or cardinal virtues which emphasize
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things that you need in civilian life but we have to understand and expect that a much more homeric
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system continues to operate beside this and if rather than talking to plato we were to talk to an
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athenian general contemporary to plato and we were to ask him about arete he might not give us those
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four canonical elements but he might say something very much closer to uh what was this case in homer well
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courage is number one he would say and then you know the cunning intelligence which is almost completely
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left out of the philosophical system is also important of those four the one which makes of the four
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canonical philosophical virtues the one which makes most inroads in actual life of non-philosophers escapes
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as it were from the world of intellectuals is to our sense surprisingly sofrasune the self-control
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and that manifests itself if you remember in the iliad and the odyssey people are very people cry a lot
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there's a great deal of sort of overt and open emotion while in classical times in the axial age if you
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like there a tremendous emphasis is placed on the suppression of emotion always appearing absolutely
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calm that's one of the reasons that you will never see a greek statue from that period with anything
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that we would describe as an expression on its face they all look calm because they're trying to
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demonstrate their sofrasune and so that makes an impact on real people's sense of what manliness is
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and i think the great the great thing one has to track when one is looking at ancient conceptions of
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manliness is the motion from the highly emotional sort of violence-based homeric conception to this
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everyday living in the city conception which is not the full philosophical uh cardinal virtues
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but is heavily inflected with sofrasune and you know children are brought up and told push and
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gentlemen do not show emotion to show emotion is womanly when people die you know women tear their
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hair out and they shriek and they generally carry on that's not how we behave and so then you start
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developing heroes again surprising to us who enact or demonstrate this particular quality most famous
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in athenian history is pericles who we are told never even wept at his son's funerals except at the
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last one when he then had no more legitimate heirs who would never go to drinking parties because it was
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impossible to maintain an adequate reserve and we must imagine him as being an exceptionally sort of
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marmorial person never showing any emotion never smiling never frowning this is the and again this is
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also reflected in the art of the time this is what you are trying to be so what we have is this
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this this transformation of manliness from primarily military to primarily a question of
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personal deportment and particularly as sofrasune becomes even in the philosophers the supreme virtue
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and it's weird to us because why would self-control of all things become so important and it's a great
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pity people have traced this motion people have traced this increasing emphasis on sofrasune as the most
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important thing you can be but no one has ever really explained it and i guess if i were a marxist which
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i'm not i would probably look to the existence of a slave society in which you have particularly
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if you're an important person an enormous amount of completely ungovernable power over other people
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and because your power in law over these other people your slaves is so absolute but everyone in
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society understands that you should not like get mad at them and murder them which did occasionally
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happen because the power of individual persons of high status was so extraordinary in by our standards
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it made sense for them to develop a cult of self-control of controlling themselves now that's an appealing
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theory the problem with the theory is that other societies have also developed very similar conceptions
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such as for example the spanish in the period spanish nobility in the period of the spanish armada
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also they developed this sort of habit of impassivity the samurai of the edo period the tokugawa shogunate
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similarly even though they were highly emotional but in in in earlier works of japanese literature they
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also develop this sense that you show your rank by being absolutely impassive so this seems to sort
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of exist across the world in unconnected societies and is therefore to me absolutely fascinating another
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theory might simply be that it is a way in which you can show social distinction which requires a lot of
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expensive or at least time consuming training you're not sure in this but at least if you're brought up
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in a good family you're expected to sort of pick this sort of thing up and it's a social distinction
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which people who do not have that kind of upbringing have a great deal of difficulty imitating so you can
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look at in the greek and roman case you can look at as maybe a question of slavery or in the broader sense
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a question of looking for a form of social distinction i'm not very convinced by any of these things but it is
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nevertheless the case that this is how the definition of manliness in greek antiquity evolves
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so that by the time of 400 by the time of lucidities plato and so forth that you are primarily thinking
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in terms of self-control and no longer primarily thinking in terms of excellence in combat well so
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that raises an interesting point so around that same time the axial age around aristotle's time alexander the
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great came to power he was actually tutored by aristotle but alexander the great was captivated
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by this homeric notion of manliness like achilles like he worshipped he wanted to be the next achilles
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so was there a synthesis in alexander of sort of this self-control aristotelian platonic idea of
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manliness with that more homeric idea i think in i think aristotle would have liked there to be
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some synthesis but i think in fact alexander is a genuine throwback and he comes of course from
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macedonia which was a very old-fashioned monarchy where many of the old homeric values were still
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very much alive they did not live in the city-state the assumption has always been that there's some
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connection between sophra sunae self-control and living in the city-state if you're a king you
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don't really have to be self-controlled in this way so he really is much more homeric what's funny
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about alexander is of course that the people who write about him subsequently and particularly plutarch
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are very anxious to make him self-controlled because that is the supreme virtue and so plutarch's
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life of alexander is basically a series of attempts to show how self-controlled he was and it's such a
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flop because he was not actually self-controlled at all not only did he kill a number of friends
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some of them in he would get drunk and and kill people but he was also clearly very fond of the
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bottle or i guess they didn't have bottles but of wine which is another thing that the properly
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self-controlled person is not supposed to be so his being self-controlled is a product of the
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historians after him who think that as the greatest of the greeks he has to have been self-controlled
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but the real guy was pretty pretty solidly homeric and not self-controlled at all that's really
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interesting well let's shift gears a bit to the romans absolutely so what was their notion of
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manliness did they borrow anything from the greeks or did they sort of start their own idea of manliness
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from the beginning of there there's a lot of greek influence influence particularly when the romans
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around cicero's day start spending more and more time reading philosophy and one of the things is that
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it's probable that the roman the roman ruling class around cicero's day was the most philosophical
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that is to say they read more philosophy than anyone in the history of the world including the greeks
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before them in greece philosophy had already had always been a relatively minority activity but the
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romans would say around cicero's day their ruling class takes it extremely seriously and we know this
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because of all cicero's letters in which he continuously mentions the philosophical positions of all of his
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correspondence and we keep thinking why is this guy who's not important why does he have a philosophical
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position that cicero could make fun of or can debate but they all do appear to have but if we go back
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to the original early rome which of course you know we don't have good we don't have an alien
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and an odyssey so we're relying on roman traditions for their early period many of them old oral traditions of
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dubious value but those traditions not only told the romans what had happened but were also
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exemplary in the sense that they showed the romans how they should behave if you look back there you
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have a quality which is very very close to the original greek arete which is called virtus or in
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the new pronunciation virtus but i don't like the new pronunciation so particularly if that word so i'm
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going to use the v even though my classical colleagues will make fun of me virtus simply means
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manliness from the roman word for man which is vir or weir and in early times seems to have been
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extremely similar to the particular qualities of achilles not so similar to the odysseus part that is to
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say cunning public speaking and things like that are not quite so important but there are interesting
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sort of roman curiosities attached to this service to the state is much more important of course the
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the greeks in homer don't really have a state even to be served um self-sacrifice obedience to the
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authorities settled over you in a military context if you're a young man something called furor which is a
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kind of berserker rage and we think of course immediately of cleod and minute manion i aid a
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thei begins i think the wrath of achilles and of course homeric heroes have that have that uncontrollable
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wrath but it's not part of arete it's bad while the the equivalent quality at least among younger
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romans younger roman warriors furor was regarded as part of the virtues and was a good thing and rather
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than a bad thing although of course it is in conflict with obedience service to the state
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and things like that in a way they never really managed to to reconcile particularly well the
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romans eventually as i say learn greek philosophy they takes in some aspects of greek conceptions of
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manliness and do not take in others the most famous one they do not take in is getting naked and
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exercising that is to say athletics they are willing to watch greeks do it but they are not willing to
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do it themselves if they are persons of good family you are expected of course if you are a a roman of
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high family to take military training but the idea of getting naked and you know throwing the discus or
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wrestling or things like that they just never do that and what's interesting is that they even when
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they're under profound greek influence in the first second first century a.d first century bc
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first century a.d and so forth and so on this wall never breaks romans never participate in in
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athletics although it had become had become a considerable part of the way in which the greeks would show
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off their manliness and what's weird is that you have these figures who are clearly considered
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emblems of virtus and we can't exactly figure out in what their virtus consisted so for example
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cato the elder cato the elder he's he's incredibly obdurate is that what his his virtus consists of
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he is continuing he is incredibly litigious and is continuously sued by everybody around him
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is that what his virtus consists of he's virtuous in a sort of mean old-fashioned grumpy way
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and says things like well you know you shouldn't keep the old slaves you should sell them off or starve
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them to death and things like that is that what his virtus consists of even the romans don't seem to have
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been exactly clear but you do have this second set of people just like the greeks have their
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odysseuses and their achilleses the romans have mostly roman style achilleses that is to say warriors
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and generals but then they have these then they have these mean guys cato the elder and cato the younger
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and for example has someone like manlius torquatus who executes his own son or attempts to do so
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for a disobedience in war and this becomes a habit in the family so that it's a very dangerous to
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be a manlius torquatus because your father your father's always trying to execute you again these
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are men of virtus who do this but it's not exactly clear that even romans quite understood what this
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virtus consisted of by the time you get down to cicero you have translations of the greek canonical
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virtues and then these are applied to the romans but the translations aren't great and it is never
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clear how although again their philosophy very seriously it's never clear quite the degree to
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which those translations stick and it's never clear the degree to which the four canonical virtues
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which are now roman virtues under their roman names really supersede the old military virtues although
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again there's not a lot of question that at least temperantia which is the roman translation of
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soft well one of the roman translations of sofrasune self-control they can also translate it moderatio
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they got lots of translations for it it's an important concept that doesn't go very well into latin
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that becomes very important to them too and they develop the same habits of ostentatious public
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self-control that the greeks possessed and in fact they may have those quite far back but the rest of
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the system they never really quite figure out what something like justness or intellectual intelligence
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would be they don't really quite count them in their sense of virtue so i guess what i would say is that
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roman virtues remains much more military and the major its major change over time is similar to that of
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the greek one which is taking on an ever stronger sense of self-control but probably that is a little bit
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weaker on the roman side and they never lose the sense that ultimately what a roman should be doing is
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killing people which is why of course they preserve activities like gladiatorial combat which are quite
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idiosyncratic to them because they still admire they say this person may be a miserable slave and
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worthless in every other respect but by god is he brave he has virtues and that's why a roman takes his
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son to watch the gladiatorial combats to see this old-fashioned roman excellence in action
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i mean we of course think of gladiatorial combat as gross and a few highly philosophical romans also
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thought of it as gross but most of them thought of it as a display of their ancient and proper
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excellences which because we now live in the city of a million people we cannot demonstrate every day
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but at least we can go and watch it that's really interesting i think i've read somewhere about
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gladiators that this this admiration and the same time disdain for gladiators and sort of this is
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really kind of schizophrenic in a way that ideal of that that virtus you're talking about that bravery
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i mean even it compelled some free romans to become gladiators themselves they wanted to not just watch
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it vicariously they wanted to experience it firsthand this happened i think later on that's absolutely
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right it's gladiators are such a strange bunch because they are of course legally infamous that
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is to say they are legally defined along with other low persons like actors as as having no shame and
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therefore for example they cannot testify in court and they cannot their various crimes that cannot be
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committed against them because since they have no shame they have no honor and therefore you cannot
00:29:04.680
destroy their honor so you can't really slander a gladiator because well he's said everything you
00:29:10.520
can say against him but you're quite right you get lots of free men who choose to become gladiators
00:29:16.300
for the profit and the glory involved in it but then also aristocrats who choose to become gladiators
00:29:23.080
presumably to demonstrate their old-fashioned excellence gladiators were enormously sexually attractive
00:29:30.700
and this produced a great deal of legislation um when the roman emperors and and and the roman state
00:29:38.360
attempted to bar gladiators from access to freeborn women which they being infamous were not supposed to
00:29:45.440
have but nevertheless they had groupies and what are you going to do if the daughter of a senator is
00:29:50.440
following around a gladiator it's disgraceful but everyone understands that it's kind of expected and
00:29:55.260
normal so yes they are the most remarkable mix of qualities i mean everyone can say well they were
00:30:02.960
admired but they just have this sort of weird legal quality i mean their legal infamy at the same time
00:30:09.760
represents a real social infamy which again very odd to us what can we say we don't understand quite
00:30:16.140
how that would work but the romans quite took it for granted and as i say i mean it's something that
00:30:22.540
the greeks having been shown it this is one of the few things the greeks do take up in the east under
00:30:28.240
roman rule they do start having gladiatorial competitions and things like that of course
00:30:33.080
the great doctor the greatest ancient doctor galen got his early experience as a gladiator doctor
00:30:39.840
which is a great thing because they get a lot more wounds than most people so he was particularly good
00:30:45.000
at general surgery putting people back together but ultimately it is very roman and very idiosyncratic
00:30:51.960
and has a very intimate relationship with roman conceptions of manhood at some level i guess
00:30:58.160
it's the idea that manhood is prior to everything else and that however abject and base you might be
00:31:04.860
a slave a convict because of course you could be sentenced to the gladiatorial schools as a form of
00:31:11.120
capital punishment a slave a convict nevertheless if you had virtus if you have physical courage and
00:31:17.620
strength it does elevate you and make you a hero by some roman definition which they cannot get away
00:31:26.340
from no matter how civilized they get and no matter how reluctant they would individually be
00:31:32.500
to fight either as gladiators or as warriors because of course after the first century bc or after i guess
00:31:40.240
we should say the middle of the first century ad italy is producing very few soldiers for rome
00:31:46.020
almost all roman soldiers who are exemplars of virtus are coming from more recently conquered people
00:31:53.940
the spaniards the gauls and people like that so the italians only contact with virtus is in the
00:32:01.300
gladiatorial arena but they still continue to like it they don't say okay this has nothing to do with us
00:32:08.160
we're this is now a barbarian thing the armies for barbarians were not interested in it no they don't do that
00:32:13.820
they keep watching it and they watch it more and more the number of gladiatorial days of gladiatorial
00:32:20.380
combat in rome increases over time and so there's clearly more and more of a taste for this type of
00:32:26.620
thing as the actual opportunity or expect or expectation of military service for the people of italy declines
00:32:36.540
hmm that's really interesting i'm curious did as the as the romans progressed and kind of went to the
00:32:43.860
empire and this idea of temperance you know self-control took on was that maybe that did that contribute to
00:32:50.440
the rise of stoicism in roman culture stoicism is fascinating and mysterious obviously it is one of
00:33:00.120
the greek philosophical schools and it is it becomes highly popular particularly under the early
00:33:09.160
empire we used to think i mean it's interesting we used to think that it was as it were the major
00:33:14.540
school in the time of cicero and in the in the last years of the republic but people have since gone
00:33:22.100
through cicero's letters again and shown that there's much greater split in philosophical loyalties
00:33:29.020
in that period so for example brutus the brutus who kills julius caesar brutus the tyrannoside turns out
00:33:36.400
to be a platonist which is interesting and weird because we don't run into or we didn't we didn't think we
00:33:42.020
ran into a lot of those but then as you get into the first years of the empire you do get a narrowing
00:33:49.560
an apparent narrowing of philosophical interests and you do get more and more stoicism and then
00:33:57.080
eventually rather surprisingly stoicism becomes the creed of choice for the philosophical opposition
00:34:05.880
to the emperors so that you get men like for say a petis who are stoic and who are regarded as stoic
00:34:11.980
saints because they misbehave to such a degree that the emperors are finally obliged to kill them
00:34:17.840
although of course being killed by nero and was not all that difficult to do what i would say is
00:34:23.840
that stoicism encourages a sort of bland indifference to the outside world which manifests itself very
00:34:33.340
similarly to roman temperance but i'm not quite sure i think they sort of line up kind of accidentally
00:34:41.880
one with another and the existence of temperantia may indeed as an important virtue may indeed make
00:34:49.000
stoicism more popular but stoicism itself the more we learn about stoicism the more peculiar its roman
00:34:58.260
imperial manifestations seem to be because if you go back to as it were real greek stoicism it's all
00:35:04.700
about perfecting your own soul and being completely indifferent to anything that happens outside
00:35:12.000
yourself it's a i guess you could call it a quietest breed it's sort of like quaker it's a sort of the
00:35:18.860
ancient quakerism because what you're interested in is is your own spiritual life and you should not be
00:35:27.400
engaged in the search for exterior power glory and so forth so you should not be engaged in warfare
00:35:34.720
collecting money politics and doing all those various other things although of course stoics roman
00:35:41.120
stoics do all those things which is a little confusing to us roman stoicism is i think very much
00:35:49.240
it's right for an interesting restudy because it's so different from greek stoicism
00:35:57.160
and in many ways contradictory to greek stoicism i think that most of us know about roman stoicism
00:36:05.220
and most of us who do know about roman stoicism if we looked at greek stoicism we would think wow
00:36:10.900
that's extremely weird and unattractive because the basic position of greek stoicism is don't worry
00:36:16.620
it's nothing to do with you so you're not supposed to intervene in the world outside yourself if you
00:36:23.140
see an act of cruelty you're supposed to just say my soul is unaffected by that there's a huge set
00:36:29.120
there's set of definitions of things which have an impact on the soul which is a very limited number
00:36:35.460
of things and things which are indifferent that is to say don't they don't matter like wealth political
00:36:41.660
office and things like that and if you follow that list of things that are actually indifferent the
00:36:46.920
romans by and large don't but if you do follow that you kind of stay at home and stare at your
00:36:52.240
belly button all day and so roman stoicism is an oddity very different from greek stoicism and as i
00:37:00.040
say it needs another look interesting i'm curious so do we still see these notions of greek and roman
00:37:07.600
manliness with us today particularly in the west i think there are a number of things obviously one can
00:37:13.880
say we many of us still believe in courage and it is a very good thing because those of us who believe
00:37:21.980
in courage or those who believe in courage go and join the armed forces and and enact this desire for
00:37:28.680
courage the old greek cunning intelligence so important to someone like odysseus it seems to me
00:37:36.620
that that could be usefully compared to the sort of intelligence that you need to do well in wall
00:37:43.620
street and things like that it's a pity we tend not to regard that as a virtue in itself as the
00:37:49.780
greeks would have done but if you look at in greek terms i mean it is admired and it should be admired
00:37:55.400
because it creates wealth for all of us and so i think that there's a nice parallel there but what i
00:38:02.160
guess i would say to you is something that we don't notice which is that since 1600 maybe 1500
00:38:10.200
the west has been an extraordinarily self-controlled place that is we do not men do not cry in public
00:38:21.780
and in fact the accepted shall we say volume of or the accepted range of emotion that men are allowed
00:38:33.240
to display in public is limited and if you go back before that to the middle ages you see kings crying
00:38:40.740
and and and all sorts of things that we would consider quite off color these days and of course there have
00:38:48.600
been periods where of greater emotional openness the 1960s of less emotional openness all this doesn't
00:38:56.420
much matter in in practice since 1500 1600 we have been a society that has defined manliness in large
00:39:06.340
part in terms of self-control to such a degree that we no longer notice we we notice that it's no longer
00:39:14.960
as it were a choice it's no longer something that we we strive for consciously we just take it absolutely
00:39:22.320
for granted and that is not historically inevitable it's true of other societies and it's one of the
00:39:29.780
things that has made it easy for us to get along with a lot of people such as for example with the
00:39:34.900
japanese who developed a very parallel system of emotional restraint in the tokugawa shogunate and keep
00:39:41.960
it to this day but it does seem to me that we truly live in we have been in four centuries of sofra sunae of
00:39:50.500
temperantia and we take it so for granted we don't even notice it but that it is in fact historically
00:39:57.140
exceptional and we should notice it and we should probably in fact realize that it is an aspect an
00:40:06.120
emotional aspect of the renaissance because it comes into europe that that sort of self-restraint
00:40:12.200
comes into europe with the renaissance so it is in fact self in its origins it's a self-conscious
00:40:18.100
revival of greek and roman virtues even though and we keep the habits even now even though we've long
00:40:25.240
forgotten the greek and roman virtues or the fact that it was originally a revival of them so as i say
00:40:31.780
to repeat myself i think we live in a period of the most profound sofra sunae and that is the
00:40:38.840
strongest survival from the ancient conceptions of manliness that a man should not show excessive
00:40:45.560
emotion it's fascinating well ted this has been a great conversation i think i asked you last time
00:40:51.300
is there a place people can go to learn more about your work or just check on amazon well they can check
00:40:56.700
on amazon i publish under j.e lenden had a couple of books there also of course all my articles are to
00:41:03.880
be found on academia.edu which is free all you have to do is sign up a huge number of academics of course
00:41:11.180
have got their stuff up there so if you're interested in particularly in my stuff on things like spartan
00:41:16.240
honor the way in which spartan conceptions of manliness were different from those in the rest of
00:41:21.640
greece in their time that type of material which was published in obscure places is easily found
00:41:27.860
there as amazon's fine for the books but academia.edu for the articles on specific subjects is also
00:41:34.060
strongly recommended fantastic we'll make sure to link to that in the show notes well ted thank you
00:41:39.320
so much for your time it's been an absolute pleasure it's always lovely and i hope you have me back again
00:41:44.140
thank you very much my guest there was ted linden he's a professor of classics at the university of
00:41:48.160
virginia his professional name is j.e linden it's name he writes under so if you're looking for works
00:41:52.760
by him search for j.e linden he's got a book on amazon.com soldiers and ghost is a great one to
00:41:58.000
check out it's all about battle in ancient greece and rome the development of it the philosophy behind
00:42:02.680
it also you can find a full list of his papers that he's published for free on academia.edu search
00:42:07.720
for j.e linden he's got a paper on there about spartan manliness as well as roman honor also you find
00:42:12.580
links to resources we can delve deeper in this topic by going to our show notes and that's at
00:42:18.640
well that wraps up another edition of the art of manliness podcast for more manly tips and advice
00:42:35.380
make sure to check out the art of manliness website at artofmanliness.com and if you enjoy
00:42:38.780
this show and have got something out of it i'd appreciate it if you give us a review on itunes or
00:42:42.080
stitcher just takes a minute helps us out a lot as always thank you for your continued support
00:42:46.000
until next time this is brett mckay telling you to stay manly