The Art of Manliness - #299： What the Ancient Greeks and Romans Thought About Manliness

00:00:00.000 brett mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast well ancient

00:00:18.660 greece and rome have a heavy influence on the idea of manhood we promote on the art of manliness

00:00:23.240 in fact this classical conception of manliness was how much of the west defined manhood up until

00:00:27.800 about the middle of the 20th century for example if you were to ask a man living in 1920 what

00:00:32.300 manliness meant he'd probably give you roughly the same answer as a greek or roman man living 2 000

00:00:37.320 years ago my guest on the podcast today is a classical scholar who has spent time thinking

00:00:41.240 and writing about greek and roman notions of manliness his name is ted linden i had ted on

00:00:45.520 the podcast a while back ago discuss his book soldiers and ghosts which is about battle and

00:00:49.440 antiquity that was episode number 231 if you want to check that out well today on the show ted goes

00:00:53.800 into detail how the greeks and the romans defined manliness we begin with the greeks and how the

00:00:58.460 homeric epics particularly the iliad served as their bible on how to be a man and how achilles

00:01:02.940 and odysseus were held as differing models of manhood ted then explains how the athenian

00:01:06.980 philosophers like plato and aristotle tried to tame the bronze age notion of manliness by making

00:01:11.960 self-control an important element of being a man we then shift gears to the romans and discuss how

00:01:16.500 they borrowed elements of greek manliness to shape their own culture of manhood as well as how roman

00:01:21.060 ideas and manliness differed from the greeks and we end our conversation talking about why the virtue

00:01:25.280 of self-control pops up in definitions of manliness not just in the west but also eastern cultures like

00:01:30.520 in japan or china and also how we're living in an age of self-control if you want to check out the

00:01:35.680 show notes after the show's over where you find links to resources you can delve deeper in this

00:01:38.560 topic just go to aom.is slash virtus it's v-i-r-t-u-s it's manliness in latin

00:01:44.920 ted linden welcome back to the show delighted to be here so we had you on the show about i think a

00:01:55.080 year ago to talk about your book soldiers and ghosts about the history of battle and classical

00:02:00.760 antiquity and greece and rome and when we were talking after the show was over we were talking

00:02:06.480 about the website the art of manliness and kind of what the idea of manliness that we're promoting

00:02:10.560 i mentioned you know i studied classics in college and that the idea of manliness i'm kind of tapping

00:02:15.920 into is a bit of the ancient roman idea and then you said well that's i study that that's kind of

00:02:21.340 that's my i do that that's what i think about and i write about and research about so i after i heard

00:02:26.220 that i said i gotta have you back on so we can dig deeper into classical notions of manliness so i

00:02:33.700 think it'd be good to start off with the ancient greeks because they were before the romans how did

00:02:39.060 the ancient greeks think of manliness what what did they think made a man a manly man

00:02:45.960 well um the first time we see the greeks of course is in the iliad and the odyssey and already there

00:02:55.440 you have at least two conflicting definitions what you could call the achilles ethos and the

00:03:04.060 odysseus or ulysses ethos of course the term we're looking at arete is the term which will in

00:03:12.680 later greeks become the the word they use for virtue in homeric greek it tends to mean something

00:03:18.560 more like excellence or competitive excellence and of course homeric heroes are always competing with 1.00

00:03:24.900 each other to be the best on both sides competing mostly with their the people on their side not

00:03:31.240 actually with the enemy and you have on the one hand achilles whose particular excellence is in

00:03:38.240 actual fighting he is a tremendous warrior he is the strongest the swiftest the most accurate

00:03:45.020 thrower of spears the most accurate stabber with swords that sort of thing on the one hand and of

00:03:51.940 course he is the hill the hero of the iliad and then you have the hero of the odyssey odysseus

00:03:58.620 whose particular arete whose particular excellence is cunning the greek word metis being a sort of

00:04:05.560 type of cunning intelligence which is at the same time competitive so you are competing with everyone

00:04:12.720 else in being more cunning than them in war this is manifested by things like organizing ambushes or

00:04:20.940 or effective deployments in if you're trying to make your way home like odysseus it's tricking

00:04:28.300 cyclopses and telling lies and things of that nature to advance your case or to advance your progress

00:04:35.140 these two different conceptions are as i say already present in the homeric poems although

00:04:42.640 i think it's fair to say that the odysseus ethos might have been regarded if we if we assume the

00:04:50.400 homeric poems are historical which is which of course they're not the odysseus ethos is sort of a

00:04:55.660 special case most homeric heroes compete with and in the fashion of achilles who bravery and and

00:05:02.620 six and and talent in combat rather than with odysseus in cunning and public speaking which are

00:05:09.660 his particular things so we have the dichotomy of cunning and i guess achilles represents andrea

00:05:16.460 is that the word courage the greek word for courage it is but what's confusing is andrea is a later word

00:05:22.460 so in the homeric lexicon you would simply refer to what these guys have as arete and the basic

00:05:30.600 meaning of arete is courage or success in battle but then you can also say and there are other

00:05:37.240 aretai like those which odysseus has cunning wisdom and counsel and things like that subsequently greek

00:05:46.360 will sort out this confusion and will say okay aretai are any excellences and we're going to use

00:05:54.560 the word andrea which means literally manliness for the for what achilles was particularly good at

00:06:02.340 that is to say a bravery and strength in battle so the language and the same will later be true in

00:06:08.540 latin and the language permits of a large degree of ambiguity for some time but then kills off that

00:06:14.860 ambiguity by introducing a new word for one particular form of excellent and and that would

00:06:22.000 be andrea as you say which just comes from an air so it's just the quality of being a man but the

00:06:28.220 quality of being a man for these purposes is defined in in military terms basically means courage and

00:06:34.580 what about hector because he's another character in the iliad that displays you could say some notion

00:06:39.120 of manliness did the greeks look to him as sort of an exemplar or was he sort of ignored because he was a

00:06:43.840 trojan no well of course the trojans are um they are there's not a lot of imagination of other

00:06:52.980 cultures in the in the iliad the trojans are ethically identical to or very similar to the greeks to the

00:07:00.820 achaeans and some hector is the chief person on the trojan side who competes in the same way that

00:07:08.340 achilles does that is to say he is incredibly courageous and and so forth so he has that

00:07:15.920 particular arete as it would be described in in his period later he would be said to be the the

00:07:22.060 trojan champion of andrea now he has and this has always been there are a series of cross-cutting

00:07:30.160 qualities um which he has which makes which make him very attractive to us he loves his wife he loves

00:07:36.960 his son he feels a tremendous degree of actual responsibility to his family to his nation these

00:07:45.080 are various things these are qualities that are quite rare on the achaean side so he's to us he's much

00:07:51.960 more human but none of those qualities would be described as andrea they might or might not interfere

00:08:00.500 with andrea but they're certainly they're certainly not part of in that period they're certainly not

00:08:07.600 part of manliness although in later greek times when the when the definition of arete widens much much

00:08:14.900 further they could certainly be included okay and so let's say so this idea of manliness evolved a bit

00:08:21.620 because they got more specific because they had words that came up with it to describe it more specifically

00:08:25.600 they had arete sort of describe excellence you know in totality right there's a general term i'm

00:08:31.120 curious how did the greek notion of manliness change say during i guess would be the axial age like i'm

00:08:38.080 thinking like plato the golden age of you know greek philosophy did they change how the greeks thought

00:08:44.620 of manliness did they take that homeric ideal and tamp it down or try to downplay it or transform it in 0.94

00:08:51.120 some way they include it in a bigger system and the bigger system is if going to be if immense

00:08:59.740 historical significance and we see this again beginning in the pre-socratics and then formulated

00:09:05.540 in one form in plato and formulated in another form in aristotle by which it's pretty well mature and

00:09:11.240 doesn't change much thereafter the greeks come up with a series of virtues which they consider to be

00:09:18.320 the most important ones and one of these is andrea military courage and excellence that is still

00:09:26.780 allowed its place but it's very definitely over time and particularly to philosophers it becomes a

00:09:34.560 junior partner and they are particularly interested in phrenesis or sophros or sorry phrenesis or sophia

00:09:43.980 which we might describe as intellectual wisdom or intelligence they are interested in sophros

00:09:53.440 which is the competitive virtue of self-control or the wisdom of self-control and they're interested

00:10:03.440 in justness dikayosune you can call it justice but that steals from the fact that it is a competitive

00:10:10.480 quality everyone is competing to be more just than everybody else so justness is probably a better

00:10:17.400 term than justice because the philosophers are inhabiting a primarily civilian world and trying

00:10:25.920 to offer advice to people who live in primarily civilian circumstances the result is that they formulate

00:10:32.400 the system of these are the so-called canonical virtues or cardinal virtues which emphasize

00:10:39.220 things that you need in civilian life but we have to understand and expect that a much more homeric 0.98

00:10:47.180 system continues to operate beside this and if rather than talking to plato we were to talk to an

00:10:54.400 athenian general contemporary to plato and we were to ask him about arete he might not give us those

00:11:01.800 four canonical elements but he might say something very much closer to uh what was this case in homer well

00:11:09.680 courage is number one he would say and then you know the cunning intelligence which is almost completely

00:11:15.460 left out of the philosophical system is also important of those four the one which makes of the four

00:11:25.140 canonical philosophical virtues the one which makes most inroads in actual life of non-philosophers escapes

00:11:34.220 as it were from the world of intellectuals is to our sense surprisingly sofrasune the self-control

00:11:42.500 and that manifests itself if you remember in the iliad and the odyssey people are very people cry a lot

00:11:49.860 there's a great deal of sort of overt and open emotion while in classical times in the axial age if you

00:11:57.440 like there a tremendous emphasis is placed on the suppression of emotion always appearing absolutely

00:12:03.720 calm that's one of the reasons that you will never see a greek statue from that period with anything

00:12:10.520 that we would describe as an expression on its face they all look calm because they're trying to

00:12:15.760 demonstrate their sofrasune and so that makes an impact on real people's sense of what manliness is

00:12:25.080 and i think the great the great thing one has to track when one is looking at ancient conceptions of

00:12:31.240 manliness is the motion from the highly emotional sort of violence-based homeric conception to this

00:12:41.860 everyday living in the city conception which is not the full philosophical uh cardinal virtues

00:12:49.600 but is heavily inflected with sofrasune and you know children are brought up and told push and

00:12:57.760 gentlemen do not show emotion to show emotion is womanly when people die you know women tear their 0.99

00:13:03.580 hair out and they shriek and they generally carry on that's not how we behave and so then you start

00:13:09.280 developing heroes again surprising to us who enact or demonstrate this particular quality most famous

00:13:17.200 in athenian history is pericles who we are told never even wept at his son's funerals except at the

00:13:25.020 last one when he then had no more legitimate heirs who would never go to drinking parties because it was

00:13:31.760 impossible to maintain an adequate reserve and we must imagine him as being an exceptionally sort of

00:13:39.040 marmorial person never showing any emotion never smiling never frowning this is the and again this is

00:13:47.460 also reflected in the art of the time this is what you are trying to be so what we have is this

00:13:53.620 this this transformation of manliness from primarily military to primarily a question of

00:14:02.240 personal deportment and particularly as sofrasune becomes even in the philosophers the supreme virtue

00:14:11.280 and it's weird to us because why would self-control of all things become so important and it's a great

00:14:20.220 pity people have traced this motion people have traced this increasing emphasis on sofrasune as the most

00:14:28.020 important thing you can be but no one has ever really explained it and i guess if i were a marxist which

00:14:36.580 i'm not i would probably look to the existence of a slave society in which you have particularly

00:14:46.320 if you're an important person an enormous amount of completely ungovernable power over other people

00:14:52.240 and because your power in law over these other people your slaves is so absolute but everyone in

00:15:00.060 society understands that you should not like get mad at them and murder them which did occasionally

00:15:06.540 happen because the power of individual persons of high status was so extraordinary in by our standards

00:15:16.580 it made sense for them to develop a cult of self-control of controlling themselves now that's an appealing

00:15:24.180 theory the problem with the theory is that other societies have also developed very similar conceptions

00:15:31.420 such as for example the spanish in the period spanish nobility in the period of the spanish armada

00:15:37.220 also they developed this sort of habit of impassivity the samurai of the edo period the tokugawa shogunate

00:15:44.620 similarly even though they were highly emotional but in in in earlier works of japanese literature they

00:15:51.980 also develop this sense that you show your rank by being absolutely impassive so this seems to sort

00:15:58.980 of exist across the world in unconnected societies and is therefore to me absolutely fascinating another

00:16:06.280 theory might simply be that it is a way in which you can show social distinction which requires a lot of

00:16:13.660 expensive or at least time consuming training you're not sure in this but at least if you're brought up

00:16:20.200 in a good family you're expected to sort of pick this sort of thing up and it's a social distinction

00:16:24.940 which people who do not have that kind of upbringing have a great deal of difficulty imitating so you can

00:16:30.740 look at in the greek and roman case you can look at as maybe a question of slavery or in the broader sense

00:16:36.200 a question of looking for a form of social distinction i'm not very convinced by any of these things but it is

00:16:42.380 nevertheless the case that this is how the definition of manliness in greek antiquity evolves

00:16:48.240 so that by the time of 400 by the time of lucidities plato and so forth that you are primarily thinking

00:16:55.840 in terms of self-control and no longer primarily thinking in terms of excellence in combat well so

00:17:03.440 that raises an interesting point so around that same time the axial age around aristotle's time alexander the

00:17:08.440 great came to power he was actually tutored by aristotle but alexander the great was captivated

00:17:15.040 by this homeric notion of manliness like achilles like he worshipped he wanted to be the next achilles

00:17:21.060 so was there a synthesis in alexander of sort of this self-control aristotelian platonic idea of

00:17:29.120 manliness with that more homeric idea i think in i think aristotle would have liked there to be

00:17:36.760 some synthesis but i think in fact alexander is a genuine throwback and he comes of course from

00:17:45.400 macedonia which was a very old-fashioned monarchy where many of the old homeric values were still 0.97

00:17:52.520 very much alive they did not live in the city-state the assumption has always been that there's some

00:17:57.420 connection between sophra sunae self-control and living in the city-state if you're a king you

00:18:02.620 don't really have to be self-controlled in this way so he really is much more homeric what's funny 0.96

00:18:09.880 about alexander is of course that the people who write about him subsequently and particularly plutarch

00:18:16.420 are very anxious to make him self-controlled because that is the supreme virtue and so plutarch's

00:18:25.520 life of alexander is basically a series of attempts to show how self-controlled he was and it's such a

00:18:33.460 flop because he was not actually self-controlled at all not only did he kill a number of friends

00:18:41.460 some of them in he would get drunk and and kill people but he was also clearly very fond of the

00:18:48.020 bottle or i guess they didn't have bottles but of wine which is another thing that the properly

00:18:52.820 self-controlled person is not supposed to be so his being self-controlled is a product of the

00:19:00.420 historians after him who think that as the greatest of the greeks he has to have been self-controlled

00:19:06.980 but the real guy was pretty pretty solidly homeric and not self-controlled at all that's really

00:19:15.980 interesting well let's shift gears a bit to the romans absolutely so what was their notion of

00:19:21.640 manliness did they borrow anything from the greeks or did they sort of start their own idea of manliness

00:19:27.340 from the beginning of there there's a lot of greek influence influence particularly when the romans

00:19:32.800 around cicero's day start spending more and more time reading philosophy and one of the things is that

00:19:38.880 it's probable that the roman the roman ruling class around cicero's day was the most philosophical

00:19:48.240 that is to say they read more philosophy than anyone in the history of the world including the greeks

00:19:55.440 before them in greece philosophy had already had always been a relatively minority activity but the

00:20:03.120 romans would say around cicero's day their ruling class takes it extremely seriously and we know this

00:20:09.080 because of all cicero's letters in which he continuously mentions the philosophical positions of all of his

00:20:16.540 correspondence and we keep thinking why is this guy who's not important why does he have a philosophical

00:20:21.780 position that cicero could make fun of or can debate but they all do appear to have but if we go back

00:20:28.980 to the original early rome which of course you know we don't have good we don't have an alien

00:20:34.300 and an odyssey so we're relying on roman traditions for their early period many of them old oral traditions of

00:20:42.580 dubious value but those traditions not only told the romans what had happened but were also

00:20:48.100 exemplary in the sense that they showed the romans how they should behave if you look back there you

00:20:54.440 have a quality which is very very close to the original greek arete which is called virtus or in

00:21:02.360 the new pronunciation virtus but i don't like the new pronunciation so particularly if that word so i'm

00:21:07.760 going to use the v even though my classical colleagues will make fun of me virtus simply means

00:21:12.980 manliness from the roman word for man which is vir or weir and in early times seems to have been

00:21:20.800 extremely similar to the particular qualities of achilles not so similar to the odysseus part that is to

00:21:31.040 say cunning public speaking and things like that are not quite so important but there are interesting

00:21:37.280 sort of roman curiosities attached to this service to the state is much more important of course the

00:21:45.840 the greeks in homer don't really have a state even to be served um self-sacrifice obedience to the

00:21:53.340 authorities settled over you in a military context if you're a young man something called furor which is a

00:22:00.500 kind of berserker rage and we think of course immediately of cleod and minute manion i aid a

00:22:07.780 thei begins i think the wrath of achilles and of course homeric heroes have that have that uncontrollable 0.99

00:22:15.640 wrath but it's not part of arete it's bad while the the equivalent quality at least among younger

00:22:23.280 romans younger roman warriors furor was regarded as part of the virtues and was a good thing and rather 0.91

00:22:30.480 than a bad thing although of course it is in conflict with obedience service to the state

00:22:36.460 and things like that in a way they never really managed to to reconcile particularly well the

00:22:42.300 romans eventually as i say learn greek philosophy they takes in some aspects of greek conceptions of

00:22:51.220 manliness and do not take in others the most famous one they do not take in is getting naked and

00:22:57.180 exercising that is to say athletics they are willing to watch greeks do it but they are not willing to 1.00

00:23:05.420 do it themselves if they are persons of good family you are expected of course if you are a a roman of 0.99

00:23:12.580 high family to take military training but the idea of getting naked and you know throwing the discus or

00:23:19.860 wrestling or things like that they just never do that and what's interesting is that they even when

00:23:25.400 they're under profound greek influence in the first second first century a.d first century bc

00:23:32.000 first century a.d and so forth and so on this wall never breaks romans never participate in in

00:23:39.260 athletics although it had become had become a considerable part of the way in which the greeks would show

00:23:45.580 off their manliness and what's weird is that you have these figures who are clearly considered

00:23:51.540 emblems of virtus and we can't exactly figure out in what their virtus consisted so for example

00:24:01.060 cato the elder cato the elder he's he's incredibly obdurate is that what his his virtus consists of

00:24:09.900 he is continuing he is incredibly litigious and is continuously sued by everybody around him

00:24:16.840 is that what his virtus consists of he's virtuous in a sort of mean old-fashioned grumpy way

00:24:23.900 and says things like well you know you shouldn't keep the old slaves you should sell them off or starve 0.98

00:24:30.720 them to death and things like that is that what his virtus consists of even the romans don't seem to have

00:24:38.280 been exactly clear but you do have this second set of people just like the greeks have their

00:24:44.320 odysseuses and their achilleses the romans have mostly roman style achilleses that is to say warriors

00:24:51.980 and generals but then they have these then they have these mean guys cato the elder and cato the younger

00:24:59.360 and for example has someone like manlius torquatus who executes his own son or attempts to do so

00:25:08.040 for a disobedience in war and this becomes a habit in the family so that it's a very dangerous to

00:25:14.080 be a manlius torquatus because your father your father's always trying to execute you again these

00:25:19.760 are men of virtus who do this but it's not exactly clear that even romans quite understood what this

00:25:26.980 virtus consisted of by the time you get down to cicero you have translations of the greek canonical

00:25:37.080 virtues and then these are applied to the romans but the translations aren't great and it is never

00:25:45.960 clear how although again their philosophy very seriously it's never clear quite the degree to

00:25:53.100 which those translations stick and it's never clear the degree to which the four canonical virtues

00:26:00.020 which are now roman virtues under their roman names really supersede the old military virtues although

00:26:08.020 again there's not a lot of question that at least temperantia which is the roman translation of

00:26:15.880 soft well one of the roman translations of sofrasune self-control they can also translate it moderatio

00:26:21.900 they got lots of translations for it it's an important concept that doesn't go very well into latin

00:26:27.220 that becomes very important to them too and they develop the same habits of ostentatious public

00:26:36.180 self-control that the greeks possessed and in fact they may have those quite far back but the rest of 1.00

00:26:43.440 the system they never really quite figure out what something like justness or intellectual intelligence

00:26:51.580 would be they don't really quite count them in their sense of virtue so i guess what i would say is that

00:26:57.080 roman virtues remains much more military and the major its major change over time is similar to that of

00:27:05.640 the greek one which is taking on an ever stronger sense of self-control but probably that is a little bit

00:27:13.440 weaker on the roman side and they never lose the sense that ultimately what a roman should be doing is

00:27:20.420 killing people which is why of course they preserve activities like gladiatorial combat which are quite

00:27:28.080 idiosyncratic to them because they still admire they say this person may be a miserable slave and 0.98

00:27:33.800 worthless in every other respect but by god is he brave he has virtues and that's why a roman takes his 1.00

00:27:41.720 son to watch the gladiatorial combats to see this old-fashioned roman excellence in action

00:27:49.520 i mean we of course think of gladiatorial combat as gross and a few highly philosophical romans also

00:27:57.580 thought of it as gross but most of them thought of it as a display of their ancient and proper

00:28:03.720 excellences which because we now live in the city of a million people we cannot demonstrate every day

00:28:09.720 but at least we can go and watch it that's really interesting i think i've read somewhere about

00:28:14.440 gladiators that this this admiration and the same time disdain for gladiators and sort of this is

00:28:22.180 really kind of schizophrenic in a way that ideal of that that virtus you're talking about that bravery

00:28:26.980 i mean even it compelled some free romans to become gladiators themselves they wanted to not just watch

00:28:33.020 it vicariously they wanted to experience it firsthand this happened i think later on that's absolutely

00:28:38.460 right it's gladiators are such a strange bunch because they are of course legally infamous that

00:28:45.340 is to say they are legally defined along with other low persons like actors as as having no shame and

00:28:54.900 therefore for example they cannot testify in court and they cannot their various crimes that cannot be

00:29:00.160 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 0.86

00:29:45.440 have but nevertheless they had groupies and what are you going to do if the daughter of a senator is 1.00

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 0.71

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 0.99

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 0.68

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 0.85

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 0.94

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 0.79

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

00:42:16.180 aom.is slash virtus

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

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The Art of Manliness - April 28, 2017

#299： What the Ancient Greeks and Romans Thought About Manliness

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