The Art of Manliness - #74： Roman Honor With Carlin Barton

00:00:00.000 Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.

00:00:19.940 So a few years ago on the website, we did an in-depth series about the history of traditional

00:00:25.420 male honor. Honor is a big part of the male identity throughout cultures, throughout time.

00:00:32.440 And it's just a fascinating subject because the way we think of it, think of honor today in the 21st

00:00:37.640 century is completely different from what the way men thought of honor a hundred years ago and a

00:00:43.720 thousand years ago and 2000 years ago, going on and on. After we finished the series, I discovered

00:00:48.720 this book called Roman Honor, The Fire in the Bones. It was written by a classics professor at the

00:00:54.660 University of Massachusetts. Her name is Carlin Barton. And it literally is one of the best books

00:00:59.620 I read in 2013. It's all about how the ancient Romans perceived honor and how honor just dictated

00:01:08.440 how they interacted with one another and how they thought of themselves. Completely, completely

00:01:12.680 fascinating book. So after I read it, I had to get her on the podcast and that's what we're doing

00:01:17.180 today. We're going to talk to Carlin Barton and we're going to talk about ancient Roman honor.

00:01:21.220 We're going to discuss what the Romans thought of honor, what it meant to them. We'll also talk

00:01:26.080 about how honor changed throughout Roman history, particularly during the civil wars and the rise

00:01:32.080 of the Roman empire. There was a decline in honor and sort of the traditional sense of honor and this

00:01:38.440 rise of more cosmopolitan philosophies like cynicism and stoicism and Epicureanism. And we're going to talk

00:01:45.700 about why that is. So it's a fascinating discussion. It's a long one, but if you listen to it all,

00:01:50.660 you're going to be well rewarded. So stay tuned.

00:02:01.800 Carlin Barton, welcome to the show.

00:02:03.760 Thank you.

00:02:05.040 Okay. So your book is Roman honor, the fire in the bones, which is, I think is a great title that

00:02:10.860 fire in the bones. And it's about the Roman concept, the ancient Roman concept of honor.

00:02:16.340 So the first question I have is the most obvious is what is honor for the ancient Romans? Because

00:02:22.780 for us moderns, honor is something akin to personal integrity, you know, living true to

00:02:29.840 your own standards. But for the ancient Romans, it was something different. What did honor mean

00:02:34.420 for them?

00:02:34.860 Well, our modern conception of honor is to have a fixed set of laws or principles to which one

00:02:45.440 has committed himself or herself, either laws or principles either accepted on external authority,

00:02:55.240 the law of France, the honor code of the Marines, the honor code of the University of Massachusetts,

00:03:00.780 etc. Or some code or principles asserted on one's own authority, like vegetarianism or a diet or an

00:03:11.720 exercise routine. And our notion of honor is to be consistent and rigorous in carrying out the

00:03:20.800 demands of this code. In our code, to break the law or the code is dishonorable. It's shameful.

00:03:30.780 For us, shame and honor are opposites. Either you are honorable or you are shameful. For the ancient

00:03:40.100 Roman notion of honor, overlapped in some ways our notions of honor, but are very different in other

00:03:49.020 ways. A word honor comes directly from Latin. It's a Latin word. But our notions of honor have been

00:03:57.720 filtered through 2,000 years of Christianity, so they've changed a great deal. Honor or honores in the plural

00:04:06.540 in Latin were mostly signs or recognition of that one was honorable. Praise, deference, respect, crowns,

00:04:20.040 torques, etc. All the things that other people give you in recognition that you have some kind of

00:04:29.360 quality, again, which we call honor. That was the word we use. But in Latin, it's mostly used for these

00:04:41.500 signs of recognition. And the word that they would have used for the sense of honor was the word

00:04:48.220 Pudor, P-U-D-O-R. And that was very different than our sense of honor. It's basically, you might call it

00:04:56.280 the sense of shame, which was their sense of honor. The sense of, it embraced both our honor and our shame,

00:05:06.820 both our pride and our dishonor. It embraced both sides of that equation. It was not based on a notion

00:05:17.340 of principle or law. It did not come from scrupulously abiding by a code or law. There are exceptions to this

00:05:29.360 case, but generally, it was different from our notion of honor in that way. Rather, it was an acute

00:05:36.380 sensitivity to the sensitivity to the eyes and opinions of others. It was this very delicate sensitivity

00:05:46.000 to the eyes and opinions of others, sort of inner navigational instrument, kind of inner governing

00:05:53.520 mechanism. It was, you might say, an acute social sense that one could detect by one's

00:06:05.960 ability to blush. It was the ability to blush, that physical sense of being very liable to be

00:06:19.140 influenced by the eyes and opinions of others. It was the product, basically, of small face-to-face

00:06:27.040 cultures, this kind of honor. It's the product of small face-to-face cultures that did not rely on fixed

00:06:35.280 floor, but on sort of the generalized pressure of being in each other's eyes.

00:06:42.260 All right. Interesting. So it was more about reputation, I guess. I mean, sort of your standing

00:06:45.780 within that, a small group, then...

00:06:48.440 Oh, yes.

00:06:49.500 Okay.

00:06:50.200 Exactly. And so it was not a matter of obedience, and I'll come back to that. It was a matter of this

00:07:00.140 kind of delicate negotiation with other human beings in one's small group.

00:07:08.120 Okay. That's fascinating. So here's another question that I had. As I was reading your book,

00:07:14.840 it seems like, based on my research on the topic of sort of classical or this traditional honor,

00:07:21.840 whatever you want to call it, that past honor cultures basically assumed that everyone knew what

00:07:27.740 honor meant, you know, or a sense of honor meant. And they rarely took the time to explicitly explain

00:07:33.280 it. So there's very few times where there's texts like, here's what honor means. This is how you're

00:07:38.540 supposed to react. So which makes it hard for us to kind of get at and understand it. How did you

00:07:45.940 decipher what honor meant and the role it played in the lives of Romans?

00:07:50.900 It's a great question. And I have to say, the Romans, especially the Romans of the Republic,

00:07:57.840 are very difficult to understand because they're so... they have thought patterns that are very

00:08:05.900 unlike our own. And precisely because, at least until the period of tremendous imperial expansion

00:08:12.860 in the second century before the common era, their culture was relatively homogenous and, again,

00:08:21.380 small and face-to-face. Few people who knew the names of every Roman. So they were not

00:08:29.760 self-conscious in a way. And they didn't pride themselves on being self-conscious in a way

00:08:35.980 that we do. And I'll explain how this works. For the Romans of the Republic, again, relying on

00:08:45.820 for their government, there was almost no kind of official government. It was a little amateur

00:08:53.360 government and it didn't reach very far. And it was so minimal. But mostly, it was a government

00:09:00.180 government of shame. And it relied on a fear, in a way, of acute self-consciousness. The punishment

00:09:07.380 for misbehaving, for acting shamefully was conscientious. The word we get are our word conscience and

00:09:19.520 self-consciousness. Conscientious was a tormenting self-awareness. That's like when one...

00:09:28.180 All the people in one group looked at you with that, you know, hard stare. That suddenly you become

00:09:36.060 super self-conscious. And that those looks could kill and those looks could set you apart and make you

00:09:45.600 feel frozen with self-awareness. And conscientious generally in Latin was very negative. Again, it was

00:09:57.500 a sense of guilt. It was a tormenting sense. But because we rely on sort of the eye of God,

00:10:06.440 or that kind of internalization of an authoritative eye, a surveilling eye, that consciousness

00:10:17.980 became a positive and kind of eternal thing. It should always be self-conscious.

00:10:25.780 This consciousness becomes a kind of Jiminy Cricket or this guardian of your morality. And that

00:10:33.380 conscientia, that's why we think of it as positive conscience. But that consciousness meant that you

00:10:43.480 were separated out from everyone else always. That you were both integrated into larger, more complex

00:10:51.680 groups through this kind of hierarchical system with its god or its king at the top. But it also

00:10:59.320 separated you out into this permanent self-criticism, this permanent eye on yourself, which is often,

00:11:08.800 in fact, usually this kind of imaginary eye of God or the community that you've internalized,

00:11:16.600 looks at you constantly. Okay, how that relates to your question is, in the relative homogeneity of early

00:11:24.140 Roman culture, in the period before the expansions and the great century of civil wars, this kind of

00:11:33.600 homogenous culture allowed for a language in which the words were undefined and ambiguous, often paradoxical.

00:11:42.920 And the same word, anyone who's studied Latin knows that the same word can stand for many, often many, many

00:11:50.140 things, and often they're to us contradictory, paradoxical. The word, again, the word pudor meant, we have

00:12:00.600 divided it into two words, honor and shame. Sacher, sacred, was both cursed and blessed. Religio, from which we get

00:12:09.320 our word, religion, also meant, could be cursed or transgression or, you know, inhibition or reverence.

00:12:18.460 It had, all Roman words had this very complex range of meanings. You can't get to that. And the more

00:12:27.240 complex a culture becomes, the more difficult it is for people to grasp the context, all those words had to be

00:12:39.360 contextualized. And that's when you get the Romans begin to define words. So only in the Civil War period and the period of

00:12:48.320 imperial expansion, when it gets to be a huge, complex, heterogeneous society, that you see people begin to try to pin down

00:12:57.460 words. So often, you get words first defined at the, after 500 years of, in the Republic, at the end of the Republic, in the

00:13:09.420 Civil War period. Cicero is the first one to say, religio is the cult of the gods. And he's actually changing the word

00:13:17.280 radically. When you get, beginning to get words defined, you usually know that you're in a

00:13:24.220 conflictual situation in which this meaning of the words is not any longer sort of taken for granted and

00:13:33.220 contextualized. But if someone is fixing it as they would the law or the code, it's becoming something that

00:13:42.060 then is being standardized often from the top down. Does that make any sense?

00:13:48.040 Yeah, it makes perfect sense. Because, yeah, so in the beginning, when it was more homogenous, smaller,

00:13:53.460 there was no need to explicitly define it because everyone's sort of had an understanding. But as you get bigger,

00:13:59.340 you have to specialize and contextualize so everyone's on the same page.

00:14:03.140 Exactly. It's like laying down the law. You know, Cicero in the Civil War period says, what we need are fixed laws. And we need

00:14:11.940 heaven, and we need hell, and we need, you know, a system of punishments and rewards so that things will be set, and they

00:14:18.720 will be fixed, and they will be defined, because he's reacting to a century of chaos.

00:14:24.840 Interesting. And we're going to talk more about the chaos and sort of the change and shift later on with the Stoics and Cynics.

00:14:31.180 But it's very fascinating stuff. And that's one of the great insights I got from your book.

00:14:36.240 You quote Cicero in your book saying, the whole glory of virtue resides in activity. And one of the big things I got

00:14:44.760 from your book is that the Romans were very big on demonstrating their will and their energy through

00:14:51.400 strenuous challenges and contests. Tell me more about the philosophy behind this behavior, and what sort of

00:14:58.160 outlets for the energy they sought? Okay, the Romans, like almost every people, have some notion of soul or

00:15:06.060 spirit. But their notion of what your soul and your spirit was very different from our own. Their spirit was

00:15:16.500 their animus. The word from which we get words like animate or inanimate or animal. Your animus was your

00:15:26.260 will, your vigor, your vitality, your energy, your ability to act, your ability to move.

00:15:36.000 That's also why the Romans valued emotions so much, because they're the moving forces. They're the motive

00:15:44.160 forces. So the feeling of having spirit was the feeling of having vigor, of dynamism, of courage.

00:15:54.480 Their word, it's very interesting, their word for cowardice is their word for lack of movement. Inertia,

00:16:02.440 which is a word we still have in English. Inertia was both sitting still and cowardice, you know,

00:16:10.200 being still, having no movement. Okay, we can spend all our days sitting on the couch eating

00:16:17.560 Cheetos and watching television and still have a soul. Because we think of it, you know, it's just like a deposit

00:16:24.320 in us that doesn't depend on us, and we don't make it. It's made for us and put inside of us. But the Romans

00:16:33.640 had the notion that the animus was something that only existed in its, what, in its manifestations.

00:16:43.300 You had to demonstrate to yourself and to others that you had energy, vigor, vitality. Hence, the importance

00:16:56.340 of the role of labor, you know, demonstrating that vigor. That's why the Romans made roads of stone

00:17:10.240 and aqueducts that would last for thousands of years. And every night, the soldiers on their

00:17:16.340 marches would build a whole fort. And then they not only had their rucksack filled with heavy

00:17:21.420 equipment and their armor, they carried those beams, those poles that every night they could

00:17:27.060 construct a fort. Other people looked at them like they were crazy. But this, this, to us,

00:17:34.980 this endless, endless demonstration of vitality was also the feeling of the fullness of being.

00:17:46.320 So they'll take almost every opportunity they can to show that will. That's also, again, something that's

00:17:55.980 originating in your mind. It's a power that originates from inside, rather than something

00:18:03.780 that you get by hooking gears with the powerful. Like our notion of power is a combination of this

00:18:12.000 internalized source of power. And then sort of getting or grasping power that can be obtained

00:18:20.840 from outside by hooking gears with it. I mean, the Romans had both those ideas, too. But the balance

00:18:26.260 in Roman thought is more to taking as much as possible of this, getting as much as possible of

00:18:36.460 your power from this inner source of energy. So, yeah, that makes sense. So it's, uh, their soul was

00:18:45.820 displayed through action, or even was just alive through action. If they didn't have a...

00:18:49.320 Exactly. You have no... You are inert. You have no soul.

00:18:54.060 Interesting. So did they have, like, a place for leisure in their life, or...

00:18:59.460 Yes.

00:18:59.940 Yeah, they did.

00:19:00.660 Um, they do. I think that there's a kind of... And this is, again, related to their notions of honor,

00:19:08.740 and that we have kind of this idea that, you know, the auto-go-man is like Cal Ripken. You always

00:19:14.960 show up to the game. Yeah. Um, that you're consistent, and you follow the same rules all

00:19:20.500 with time. But the Romans, as many ancient cultures, it's kind of a... Like, the boundary

00:19:26.160 is in... Is at the middle, rather than at the edges. And you're always transgressing, and

00:19:32.020 withdrawing, and transgressing, and expiating, and stuff. So that, you know, there's a effort,

00:19:37.140 and then there's a relaxation. There's an effort and relaxation. It's never full speed ahead.

00:19:42.820 Um, it's... And this may sound like a contradiction, because they loved energy. They loved to demonstrate

00:19:50.060 energy, but they're also extremely cautious in ways that we aren't about the direction

00:19:57.080 your energy should take. So their notion of religio, for instance, their notion from which

00:20:04.600 we get our word religion, has nothing to do necessarily with the gods. It's that hesitation,

00:20:09.920 stopping and thinking before you act. It's a kind of... You're taking responsibility for

00:20:16.980 the direction in which your energies go. So there's... Also, it's just a kind of different

00:20:24.060 equation than we're used to. We're used to loving everything in extremes, but not actually

00:20:30.180 thinking very much about the direction our energies go in. Romans, because, again, they

00:20:36.340 don't have much of a government, especially in the Republic. They're much more deliberative

00:20:42.620 about the ways in which they apply their energy. I'm not sure if that answers your question.

00:20:50.000 Yeah. No, that makes sense. That makes sense. So here's a question that sort of relates to

00:20:54.400 the art of manliness, I guess. So you... It's about the Roman conception of being a man. So you wrote

00:21:02.640 that the Roman was born a male, which is, I guess, pronounced mas in Latin? Mas, right. Or a human,

00:21:08.740 which is homo. But made oneself a man. Yeah. Weir, right? Is my Latin right? Weir. V-I-R. Weir.

00:21:16.760 Weir. A weir is not a natural being. So how did the Romans understand the designator weir? So it's like

00:21:25.180 man, right? And what qualities did a man need to show himself a weir?

00:21:31.280 Okay. Great question. In our culture, generally, boys just sort of slip into manhood. You know,

00:21:40.220 there's no initiation, no dividing line. There's nothing except getting older, which makes you

00:21:47.500 a man. You know, I sort of honorifically call my teenage boys men, you know, in my classes

00:21:54.800 and things like that. But there's no, as in so many cultures, special tests or qualifications

00:22:02.820 for being a man. But for the Romans, and I believe that in the very early period, they did have

00:22:10.580 a kind of initiation. But in the period, the historical period, it was some demonstration

00:22:17.380 of courage, energy, vigor, was what changed a mas into a weir. And where truth, which is

00:22:28.080 often translated as manliness, B-I-R-T-U-S, was, becomes, again, in the Roman imperial period

00:22:37.000 and in Christianity, basically obedience to law or authority, again, it's related to our

00:22:41.680 notions of honor as being consistently committed to a code, etc. But for the Romans, weir

00:22:50.860 tooth was, and again, someone ascribing weir tooth to a male would mean that we recognize

00:23:01.800 your courage, your energy, your honor. It's all kind of an honorific title. It's sort

00:23:08.520 of like when we, in English, we'll say someone is a real man. We don't have just these

00:23:15.300 distinguishing, we don't say someone's a male, we say they're a man. But the Romans would

00:23:21.480 distinguish the male from the weir. The weir, like the weirah, weirah is an ancient word

00:23:32.340 for woman, were both ancient kind of honorary titles for a male or female in their prime.

00:23:42.960 And it's related to the word weir, which was a word for strength, and also veriditas, greenness,

00:23:54.600 the greenness, the sap of youth, the vigor of youth. And so that it was, it was this vigor,

00:24:03.400 again, this kind of dynamism that was rewarded with the title weir.

00:24:13.960 You talk quite a bit about this in your book, but this idea of expendability, or being willing

00:24:19.500 to just die, what role did that play in the title of weir?

00:24:25.080 Oh, that's, that's another great question. This notion of honor and also will, was, will

00:24:33.620 was demonstrated above all in acts that were self, could harm the self or even kill the

00:24:45.040 self. And this sounds very contradictory to us. But part of our notions of, let's say, the

00:24:50.520 chosen death are that it's, one does not belong to oneself, so one has no right to take one's

00:24:59.660 own life. But for the Romans, you're the ultimate, in some ways often the ultimate act or expression

00:25:10.560 of will was being expendable. And, and the males in the culture, unlike the

00:25:20.400 females who were, you know, had to take care of the children and reproduce, were always

00:25:27.120 the, the most expendable ones for the culture. But for themselves, of course, everyone is just

00:25:35.420 as valuable as every, you know, everyone is the center of the universe. But many of the

00:25:41.500 Roman stories focus on the, the male or female who was out of a choice, and it always has to be out of a

00:25:52.880 choice and out of their will, prepared to die. So that, for instance, our, and I don't understand this,

00:26:04.420 and you may be able to, to explain this to me. But I, I like to watch what are the key and central

00:26:13.000 stories that are told over and over and over and over again in a culture. And I know in our culture,

00:26:19.980 it's always stories about triumphing against impossible odds. You know, we like to get to the top

00:26:26.540 of, against impossible odds. And, you know, if you look at any of our movies, Gravity, Captain

00:26:31.160 Phillips, Slumdog, Mayonnaise, we like that, even though it's Indian, all is lost. Um, I can tell you

00:26:37.680 how many stories and movies are the same story. There's someone, against all odds, they managed to

00:26:46.340 survive, or they managed to conquer, or they managed to get to the top of the hill, despite having both

00:26:51.600 their legs blown off, you know. They, they do something impossible. But almost all riveting

00:26:59.580 Roman stories are about, um, the loss of honor, the loss of honor, some humiliation, they're

00:27:08.400 captured. They're, like a creature, they're raped, they're violated. There's some sort of way in

00:27:15.080 which they're horribly humiliated. Then the Romans really watch. It's like all their attention and

00:27:22.440 all their focus and all their interest in the retention of lost honor. That to them is the most

00:27:31.120 compelling story. That's one of the things they loved about the gladiatorial arena, about the way

00:27:36.900 in which the gladiator, the, the pervictus, the lost soul, recovers his honor. So stories, like their

00:27:46.980 favorite stories, Lucretia, Musa Skyrula, Regulus, they're all stories of people who had been captured

00:27:54.580 in the case of Regulus, who, and, and Marcus, I mean, I'm sorry, Musa Skyrula, and Lucretia had been

00:28:03.660 raped and violated. And they were all people who said, basically, look at me, everybody look at me,

00:28:14.280 and look at what I'm going to do now. So Musa Skyrula, Skyrula, when he's caught by, um, the Etruscans,

00:28:23.480 when he crossed over into the Etruscan lines to assassinate the Etruscan king, and he's caught,

00:28:28.960 and he's brought before Loras Porcena, and he's threatened with torture by fire, and they

00:28:37.160 build this ring around the fire, around him, in order to get him to confess his evil plot. I mean,

00:28:45.580 he takes his right hand, and he thrusts it in the, the blazing blazer, and he lets his hand burn

00:28:53.100 halfway staring, you know, Porcena in the eye. And he says, you know, to him, I am as prepared to die

00:29:00.560 as to kill, and, you know, you can't threaten me. My name is Musa. I am a Roman. There's nothing you

00:29:08.200 can do to me that I won't do worse to myself. So there's no threat. You cannot threaten a Roman.

00:29:15.900 And so in the story, in Livy's version of the story, um, Loras Porcena raises the seeds of Rome,

00:29:23.060 and he makes an alliance with the Romans, because he knows they're in, you know, you can't defeat

00:29:27.660 these people, because they can't be frightened. So the Romans loved our story. Lucretia, after she's

00:29:34.220 raped, calls home the menfolk. They say, it's not your fault, Lucretia. And she then says,

00:29:40.040 I don't want to be a bad example for other women, and I'll show you that though, you know,

00:29:44.340 my body has been violated, my spirit is intact, and she shoves that, she shoves that knife into

00:29:51.500 her heart. And that's like the whole beginning of the Republic. I mean, these stories about

00:29:58.020 will, and the, the, and the self, the deliberate, very magical destruction of the self can often

00:30:06.880 be meant to show that, to show how much will I still possessed. So for us, suicide is basically,

00:30:16.400 you know, jumping ship, um, um, not being able to stand suffering, you know, we should be able to

00:30:22.760 endure suffering. But, um, for the Romans, at particular times, and they also had content for

00:30:28.880 people who, who, who killed themselves to escape suffering. But when that was enabled you,

00:30:36.140 especially in where there was no other way to show how much will you still possessed, um, that,

00:30:45.560 that, um, those behaviors would become not only positive, but emulated, um, and deeply admired.

00:30:57.580 So it was a very complex, um, what was a very complex game in which your death could mean a

00:31:07.280 thousand things. But in particular circumstances, when you had lost honor, your death could actually

00:31:13.540 be your means of restoring honor. Interesting.

00:31:17.760 That's why the gladiators, for instance, even if they lost their, uh, even if they lost and were to be

00:31:25.580 executed, they'd bare their throats to show that as an act of will. I mean, to be, if you, if you could

00:31:34.440 do nothing else at the, for the very last act to like, you know, sweep your hair away from your neck and

00:31:41.900 bare that neck to show that your death was your will, um, that enabled you to redeem your honor.

00:31:51.740 Cicero, when he finally chased down it, put to, about to be put to death by Anthony Stuggs in the

00:31:58.840 Civil War period, bares his throat like a brave gladiator to show that his final act was an, a voluntary

00:32:07.280 act of will. That is really fascinating. And what I, especially about the gladiators, um, um, exposing

00:32:18.420 their throat willingly. And I didn't think about it that way. It was a way to redeem themselves because

00:32:22.640 typically the gladiators were prisoners or, you know, people, you know, who got captured or were

00:32:29.880 slaves. Um, you know, they were in the beginning by the Augustine period, about half of them are

00:32:35.720 volunteers. Really? And they come from every class, um, from the highest class, um, on, and

00:32:43.480 especially the very highly trained ones were mostly, they're sort of gladiators we hear about

00:32:49.940 in the text were all very highly trained. And those were mostly volunteers. And they went into the arena

00:32:56.020 to redeem their honor. That's interesting. Very fascinating. And it would, the, this whole

00:33:02.000 expendability or harming yourself to show, I guess, your sincerity of will or that you have will

00:33:08.080 didn't, wasn't just self-inflicted. Um, you talk about generals who would, or fathers who would kill

00:33:15.020 their sons, um, or let their sons die, um, to show, I don't know, to, to redeem their honor because

00:33:23.480 maybe their son did something that was dishonorable and to show that they were, you know, uh, with the

00:33:31.160 cause, like they would say, yeah, execute my son. And they would do it stoically without shedding a

00:33:35.400 tear. They'd just be like, you know, publicly, they would display that saying that, yes, um, I, my honor,

00:33:42.100 I, I, I have redeemed myself. Is that, did I read that right?

00:33:46.080 Well, they're killing the kids is always the most dramatic act in any culture to slay your own children.

00:33:56.400 Um, um, or to let them be slain. Now, um, there are stories in the, in the Roman canon of great

00:34:09.340 stories, and they taught by stories. That was their exempla, examples, the, all these great heroic

00:34:15.060 stories were the way they taught the next generation. Um, there are stories of honor killings,

00:34:22.840 for instance, um, um, the plebeian, um, Virginia, um, killed his daughter, Virginia, Virginia,

00:34:33.200 because she was going to be enslaved by, and used as basically, um, a sexual slave by a patrician.

00:34:44.400 And in order to prevent her from being enslaved, he killed her. Um, and this is a tremendously dramatic

00:34:51.860 act. All these, all these, it brings down, it brings down the government, the, the plebeian

00:34:57.600 government of the Decem Wiri, which is complicated to explain, but of course, another revolution in

00:35:03.760 this slaying. And he does it not because he doesn't love her, but it's, it's because he loves her very

00:35:11.340 much. And that's a given within the story that she has done nothing wrong. She's in fact, very,

00:35:17.660 she, she's pure and she tastes and she's good. And he just won't let her be enslaved by this monster,

00:35:24.820 Claudius, this patrician monster. Um, so he kills her. But other stories, for instance, famous story

00:35:32.140 that starts, um, the revolution of, that brings down the ancient monarchy and creates the Republic

00:35:40.100 of, like, was Brutus' slaying of his sons. Now, in that case, um, you have the beginnings of,

00:35:51.380 of, in some ways, our modern values. Like, we don't let, we don't slay our children, but we let the

00:35:58.540 state slay our children. You know, modern, the modern nation state, the language of sacrifices,

00:36:05.300 you know, giving your sons, giving your lives for the state, et cetera. And this was the first case

00:36:12.300 in Roman, in Roman stories of, of father slaying his, or letting his sons be slaying, um, for the sake

00:36:24.680 of the Republic. He's brought down the monarchy. He's created this new aristocratic, um, um,

00:36:33.540 government of the Republic. And his sons are trying to bring back the old monarchy. Um, they're,

00:36:40.760 they're caught, and they're, he has them publicly executed in front of his own eyes.

00:36:48.320 So this is like a choice he's making, which is always a very big choice in the Romans between,

00:36:54.540 never settled, by the way, between their family and the state. There's always tremendous,

00:36:59.540 tremendous, tremendous tension between one's loyalty to one's family and one's loyalty to the

00:37:05.160 states, never clearly established in the ancient, ancient Roman world. And here's the case of a

00:37:11.680 father putting the, the race publica, the new state above his family. And it's meant to be a model

00:37:18.620 for, um, for subsequent generations that the state should come first. Now there were, again,

00:37:28.600 there are only a handful of stories about slaying the children, all of, of Roman history. They're very

00:37:36.280 small. Usually it's, um, there are one or two cases of a father, let's saying a son,

00:37:44.600 slaying a son because he joined the culinary conspiracy against the state or, um, um, ran away from,

00:37:53.320 um, um, um, what deserted the army or something like that. Usually they're, they're models of

00:38:03.000 putting the state before the family. And a few cases, as in the case of Virginia, he's putting his

00:38:09.900 family ahead of the state, um, and slaying his child. Usually you've, usually the tension was that

00:38:18.680 you won't slay your child for God or the state. Okay. Gotcha. And there's always that tremendous

00:38:25.740 tension. Okay. Um, so we've been kind of talking about this throughout and you've kind of alluded

00:38:31.940 to it, but how did the Romans handle defeat? And I'm not just talking defeat in battle, but

00:38:37.100 sort of like status defeat. Um, you know, and how does the way that we handle it, you know,

00:38:44.180 status defeat different from them? I think again, that what the Romans will look for is some kind

00:38:52.880 of opportunity to show tremendous energy. So for instance, the soldiers who survived the battle of

00:39:01.120 Cannae and were disgraced for surviving, um, were sent to serve without pay in Sicily. And it was those

00:39:11.340 soldiers who under Scipio Africanus volunteered to invade Africa, even while Hannibal was still in

00:39:21.200 Italy to take the war to Africa. And it was those volunteer soldiers fiercely trained by Scipio

00:39:29.440 Africanus who defeated Hannibal at Zama. Um, it, they have to do something to, to show even more energy

00:39:40.640 than would normally be expected. So the soldiers, for instance, who were captured at the Caudine

00:39:47.060 forks, um, um, was it 321? I can't remember exactly. Um, and were horribly disgraced and considered

00:39:57.000 disgraced and considered themselves as dead, um, for having survived defeat. Again, that was,

00:40:02.820 there was no, um, positive way to survive a defeat. Um, then volunteer, become the soldiers that the

00:40:12.240 next year, um, go out and destroy the Samnites. I mean, you had to somehow, if you had to show

00:40:20.860 ordinarily, you had to show energy to redeem your honor. You had to show much more energy,

00:40:26.860 like an extraordinary amount of courage. Um, and you felt that everyone was watching and you had to

00:40:36.240 say, okay, now watch me. Um, so it was a little like, you know, Rocky, the first Rocky, well,

00:40:45.680 I only saw the first Rocky movie. I know there were 15 of them, but you know, when you just keep

00:40:50.280 getting up after you're knocked down and then you fight harder after you're knocked down and then you get

00:40:55.040 up and you fight harder after you're knocked down. Um, we had this sort of illusion about the Romans

00:41:00.500 that they always won. No, they mostly lost. Um, but they would just, just always come back at you

00:41:08.240 next time more ferociously. They would come back with more, this tenacity. And it's every soldier

00:41:17.460 and the group of them together that create this, this kind of ferocity. Um,

00:41:25.020 um, um, um, individually it would be a version of the same thing, you know, just, um, getting up one

00:41:36.360 more down and being even more, um, um, what vigorous and energetic than you were before. It's hard.

00:41:46.080 It was, I know it was much harder to restore your honor.

00:41:50.780 Yeah. It seems like when I was reading that, that the Romans made, I guess they, they provided

00:41:56.740 there was room for people to fail or, you know, it was expected that, you know, if you, if you didn't

00:42:03.280 have the capability of blushing, um, or experiencing shame, then something was wrong with you.

00:42:09.940 Yeah. And they, they allowed you to redeem yourself, um, in some way there was like, they had some,

00:42:14.920 like a, a social mores in place that allowed people to redeem themselves. That's just part of their

00:42:20.880 culture. I feel like today, um, it's when you, if you disgrace yourself, it's like annihilation of

00:42:28.820 yourself. Like there's no, there's, it's very hard to redeem yourself. Um, because we don't, we don't,

00:42:33.040 we, we don't allow that. I feel like we don't allow people to fail. You either have to, you have to be like

00:42:37.520 Cal Ripken. You got to show up consistently.

00:42:39.260 Right, right, right, right. That's our idea. Yeah, it's true. It's true. There's total consistency.

00:42:46.000 It's true in many ways, as few says the Roman way of conceiving the world seems, it was in many

00:42:54.240 ways a much more flexible system than our own. Again, you know, the state, once the state takes

00:43:02.100 over, it starts lurking more and more like our own. Um, you know, again, the more you move into the

00:43:08.820 world of, let's say, the army, it's a world that looks very much like our own with this fierce code

00:43:14.880 and obedience. And, um, it's really the model, because the ancient state was modeled on the

00:43:20.380 ancient, ancient warfare, which was, and then Christianity took up the model of the ancient

00:43:26.300 state and of warfare and create a certain kind of vision of honor based on, um, obedience to

00:43:35.840 authority. And it's all very complex, but regular trajectory. But the most ancient, the most ancient

00:43:46.840 kind of way of operating the world of the Romans that you see among small, generally among, um,

00:43:55.060 not among hunter, Roman hunter-gatherers, because we don't have any record of Roman hunter-gatherers,

00:43:59.840 you know, there was such a thing, but among hunter-gatherers in general and in small agricultural

00:44:06.020 cultures and face-to-face cultures tends to be harder in other ways, harder to, um, escape,

00:44:17.060 let's say, from this constant, um, general surveillance of other people. But it's also tends to be more

00:44:27.620 a kind of bargaining system or a balancing system. Um, their whole way of relating to the universe,

00:44:35.960 to the powers that be, do utes, I give you this so you'll give me this, I'll give you this so you

00:44:41.500 stay away. Um, it's kind of endlessly, again, not a fixed or rigid system of code or laws, but a general

00:44:51.560 also orienting oneself into the social situation, into discerning at every moment where the powers

00:44:59.580 are and, and kind of negotiating with them so that every, from the most ancient layers of Roman

00:45:09.280 culture, you can see this endless transgression and expiation. You go out to come in, you go over

00:45:16.200 the boundary to come back, this endless, um, tension and relaxation. Like the Romans, we value it's

00:45:24.300 either tremendous, fierce activity or total collapse, you know, in our culture. And you're either sitting

00:45:30.460 in front of the coach and you're running a hundred miles. Um, but the Romans, it's much more of

00:45:35.900 constant rhythms of, of advance and retreat, um, tension, relaxation. Um, they're much more

00:45:44.720 generally tense than we are, but they also kind of have many more ways of, um, expiating crimes,

00:45:56.960 getting rid of tension than we do. So in a way, I think of them as the relationship between animals

00:46:06.140 who are, um, prey and animals who are predators. If you watch prey animals, if you watch a squirrel

00:46:14.700 squirrel or a bird, you know, they're always on alert, right? They're looking in every direction

00:46:19.280 and they're generally quite nervous. Um, um, they're, they're kind of constant low level

00:46:26.660 nervous tension. Um, but then you watch prey animals. I watch my cat when she sometimes acts

00:46:35.860 like a prey animal, she's a little nervous thing, but then when she sees a mouse, all her energies

00:46:40.440 are focused and she'll stand there perfectly still and then she'll bounce with this ferocious

00:46:45.460 energy, you know, we're much more, we, and it, this happens in complex cultures as you get

00:46:53.520 this huge hierarchical systems develop, which can really be colossal war machines that you

00:46:59.800 tend to be. And soldiers are always thinking about that. Either you're doing nothing or you're

00:47:03.720 exercising this tremendous energy. Um, you know, you can, you can, you can capture and direct this

00:47:11.620 huge amount of energy and most humans prefer, I mean, one of the ways you can do that is because

00:47:18.820 they prefer feeling like predators than prey. You know, that loss, you know, that, that, that sense

00:47:27.500 of, um, um, even if someone else is directing your energies of like having this enormous energy,

00:47:35.260 even though it's not being really being generated totally from within, um, you can feel like a

00:47:42.880 predator. The, the ancient farmer and, and, um, peasant had much more combination of predator

00:47:55.500 and prey behaviors. They're more like my pussycat. You know, when they're on the land, you know,

00:48:01.180 farmers are, farmers are prey animals per excellence. They're like fish in a barrel,

00:48:06.180 every group of brigands, every, you know, army that walks through, they're subject to every kind

00:48:11.500 of disease and bad weather. And there has to be, the attention has to be everywhere. So there's a more

00:48:18.820 low level and constant tension, but they tend not to be divided between this kind of total

00:48:27.080 passivity and furious activity. They tend to be much more rhythmic in their behaviors. And again,

00:48:37.300 their, let's take their relationship to the powers they'd be, they make a thousand, thousand gods.

00:48:43.300 They can make them on the spirit of the moment. They have Robigus, the god of mildew. They have

00:48:49.380 Sturculus, the god of the dung heap. They have a, you know, Terminus, the god of the boundary line.

00:48:55.460 They have a, they have so many gods you'd never be able to count. Um, and they're constantly

00:49:01.140 negotiation, negotiating with either, all of them. You know, they're so that there's a constant

00:49:07.720 movement of attention everywhere. But there's, um, you know, built into that a kind of, you know,

00:49:18.180 you have your, or you make your festival of Robigus, you make your festival of the mildew

00:49:22.980 in the hope that the mildew won't attack your wheat. And then you have a party. You kill

00:49:27.940 that animal, you slay it, you bring this up to this tremendous tension in the sacrificial system,

00:49:31.740 and then you have a party. You know, there's sort of a kind of endless, endless low level

00:49:39.260 vibration. In, in complex cultures, it tends to be either, either passivity or tremendous activity.

00:49:50.540 Interesting. Very fascinating, um, thing, stuff there. Um, so here's something that, uh, I found

00:49:57.880 fascinating. You wrote this throughout the book, kind of hit on this topic. Um, you write that the

00:50:02.740 Romans, um, that for the Romans, there was no depth without surface. Um, and so like us moderns

00:50:10.460 feel that the idea of caring about your reputation or wearing a mask or playing a role in a social

00:50:18.180 group is, you know, it's false, it's inauthentic. Um, but the Romans, you know, playing a role,

00:50:24.700 wearing a mask, wearing a mask, that was a very positive thing. Um, why is that?

00:50:30.120 Our word person is actually Latin persona, which was a theatrical mask. Um, okay, several things.

00:50:40.700 One, it was that, um, especially again, in smaller face-to-face cultures, um, one was always on

00:50:50.340 display. And the Romans had the notion not of kind of, um, um, internalizing an eye of God,

00:50:58.520 but the eye of your neighbor. So that you acted as if you were always on the stage. In some ways,

00:51:07.300 it's a very theatrical society in that you were always playing a role. But one of the differences

00:51:14.960 was that the Romans always assumed you played many roles so that, um, there would be a shifting

00:51:22.860 your persona, your faces would be changed according to, um, your role at the moment. Now you're

00:51:31.180 a mother, now you're, um, a wife, now you're, uh, an artist or, uh, um, uh, a musician or, you know,

00:51:42.060 you, you had an endless supply of them, just like on the Roman stage. And it also gave you

00:51:48.440 a place for a kind of secret self. Um, that there, they didn't really, they had an idea

00:51:56.280 of exposure, like someone with, someone who felt the fullness of being could stand up straight

00:52:01.940 and look other people straight in the eye. You know, there's a sense of, I, the person

00:52:07.460 who has pudor, who has a sense of shame, um, and who feels a sense of their fullness of

00:52:16.160 being did not bend, did not bow, did not get on their knees. They looked, they were able

00:52:23.180 to stand up straight and say, look at me, take your best shot. So you see Roman portraits,

00:52:29.580 they show the wrinkles, they show the pimples, they, you know, Roman portraits are not like

00:52:33.720 Greek portraits. They absolutely looked to us like anybody you could meet on the street.

00:52:39.960 And this notion of here I am, you can look at me. I'm not afraid to be looked at. I'm not

00:52:47.980 ashamed to be looked at. So like us, they have a value of a public persona and a, and having

00:52:56.320 a secret self. But for them, it was this, the, the stage of life was their government, really.

00:53:04.560 You know, that was how, that was what governed people. Um, but it also meant that, um, a word

00:53:12.740 secret comes from the Latin secerno, which means to set apart. There could also be that inner

00:53:20.680 secret self behind the, the persona. But the notion that one should be transparent. You get

00:53:30.980 that when you get the notion that of the all seeing eye, you know, the big eye, the big

00:53:38.280 eye in the sky, you know, it's like, and that one can hide nothing. So that, um, you know,

00:53:45.660 it's not only an attempt to, it, it, that if you're trying to hide, it means you're a criminal

00:53:51.900 of some kind. If you're trying to hide, it means that you've got, you know, a guilty conscience. It

00:53:58.120 means that you're, um, secretly, um, have things that you would not want God to see. And that notion

00:54:06.980 that one should be transparent is that one, that's the only way to be in right relationship with the big

00:54:12.900 eye. Um, that the persona, the mask was the mask of the hypocrite. Our word hypocrite just means

00:54:18.820 actor. So our word, both our word person and our word hypocrite come from the same notion of the

00:54:25.420 actor becomes negative. It's like it takes this 180 degree term, like the word konskientia, and it

00:54:33.300 becomes, um, negative that one is a hypocrite when one puts on a mask, um, and one can hide

00:54:42.420 from the eye in the sky anyway. Um, but the Romans didn't have that eye in the sky.

00:54:50.300 Interesting. Um, so we've kind of talked about this too before throughout this, um, our conversation,

00:54:57.620 but, uh, as the, the Republic transitioned to an empire, uh, honor and sort of worthy competition

00:55:06.480 eroded and the Romans began turning to the cynics and the Stoics, uh, for a new philosophy to guide

00:55:13.940 their lives. Why were these philosophies appealing in these circumstances? Okay. The first thing

00:55:22.560 to point out is the Romans had a hundred years of civil war as a direct result of their conquest. Um,

00:55:31.860 it, they were not, they did not have any way of adjusting to this very great cosmopolitan world that

00:55:40.600 they suddenly were in charge of. They didn't have anything. They didn't have any, any governmental

00:55:45.600 apparatus. They didn't have any conceptual apparatus. They did not have an ideology of

00:55:51.080 imperialism. They did not have any way to really absorb their conquest. Um, and of course,

00:56:00.100 an occasion, uh, century of increasingly bloody and horrible civil wars. And that totally undermined,

00:56:09.780 I shouldn't say totally, but it largely undermined the government of shame, which relied on really

00:56:15.980 kind of homogenous face-to-face cultures, um, a lot of the village in the community and, and that's

00:56:24.560 gone. It's just gone. And you're killing brothers, you're killing brothers. It's like, there's no

00:56:30.020 rules of the game at all anymore. And this caused, uh, uh, crisis, a tremendous crisis for all Romans.

00:56:41.300 And there, a thousand adjustments that had to be made to live in this great, complex, hierarchical,

00:56:51.700 heterogeneous world, heterogeneous world, ones that we're still making. Um, and some of these, they,

00:56:59.280 they adapt, adopted and adapted from Greek culture because the Greek city state culture of classical

00:57:09.180 Athens and Sparta and Corinth and pieces had also been destroyed and conquered by Alexander and his

00:57:17.040 successes. And that Greeks from living in these small face-to-face cultures were suddenly engulfed

00:57:23.020 by these huge hierarchical, monarchical empires. And they, three centuries before the Romans had to make

00:57:30.540 similar adjustments. So the Romans began watching the Greeks and picking up from them some of these

00:57:37.420 strategies to live in a totally different kind of world. One of them read that, I mean,

00:57:45.840 there's a whole wonderful range of them. There's a whole kaleidoscope of possibilities,

00:57:49.580 but one was, one great strategy was the cynic strategy, which basically says, I'm a citizen in

00:57:58.760 the world. I have, you know, I'm a cousin, I'm the ultimate cosmopolite. So I respect the laws of no

00:58:04.680 culture, no, no group. I'm here alone. I leave my culture. I leave behind my family. I leave behind

00:58:13.600 all my possessions. I go out into the world as close as possible to naked, being naked in the

00:58:21.360 world. And I'm free. There are no laws for me. There's no authorities for me. I speak back to

00:58:30.260 kings, you know. They became very famous. I mean, they're a small minority, a very tiny minority of

00:58:37.180 people who actually adopted the cynic life. But they were also very, what, visible and very exciting.

00:58:44.180 People loved and hated the cynics because they would say anything. They would do anything. They

00:58:49.860 would fornicate in the streets. They would defecate in the porticoast. They would, they were just

00:58:54.700 outrageous, as outrageous as they could possibly be. And they were also envied. You know, we have

00:59:02.100 a famous apocryphal story of Alexander, you know, wanting to meet Diogenes the cynic. And,

00:59:11.780 you know, coming to Diogenes, Diogenes laying in his, his old pot in the cemetery. And, and

00:59:20.860 Alexander calls out to Diogenes and Diogenes laid there and, you know, says, yes. And Alexander

00:59:28.780 says, I will give you anything you want. And he says, get out of my son, get out of my

00:59:33.500 sunlight. And Alexander goes off saying, if I were not Alexander, I would be Diogenes, you

00:59:40.600 know. But this total freedom, you know, was envied by the king, you know. So that was one

00:59:50.220 strategy. The Stoics, they were sort of would-be cynics who wanted to hold on to their families,

00:59:56.780 wanting to hold on to their positions, wanting to keep their house and car and job. Yeah. And

01:00:04.280 they would say things like, you can have all these things, but just not be attached to them.

01:00:09.520 You know, you can have all these things, but don't love them. You know, don't love them.

01:00:14.960 They're just to you on loan. Your life is given to you on loan. Your spirit comes from outside

01:00:21.160 and it's just given to you on loan. Everything is on loan to you. Nothing belongs to you. And

01:00:27.900 the way you get along in the world is by assuming that you can hook gears with the powers that

01:00:36.880 be. The powers that be are bigger than you. Power comes basically from outside of you and

01:00:42.980 you get it by swimming downstream rather than swimming upstream. When I was a graduate student

01:00:49.820 at the University of Oregon, we used to swim in the Willamette River. And if you jumped

01:00:54.600 in upstream and swam downstream, you felt so powerful. But if you turned around and tried

01:01:00.360 to swim upstream, you'd make no progress at all. So we'd get up, walk upstream, and then

01:01:07.280 swim downstream again. And it was that idea of like swimming downstream, going with the flow,

01:01:13.020 hitching gears with the powerful. Then there were the Epicureans, who I love. The Epicureans

01:01:21.960 are really wonderful. They said, well, yes, things are all out of our control. God's made

01:01:26.700 the world and then they just left it. Left it here. And so you can't control anything. Give

01:01:32.640 up all control and just live in the moment. Live for today. And then live for pleasure. Either,

01:01:40.680 you know, you drink and be merry like Horace or think of it as the absence of pain as the

01:01:46.140 highest pleasure. But it was a kind of surrender. It's like getting on the jet plane and strapping

01:01:52.860 yourself in and say, pull on my hands. I give them all the power. I don't keep any of the

01:02:00.880 power in myself. I get on the plane, strap myself in and just say, you know, we've got a benevolent

01:02:06.540 pilot. He's not crazy. He's not drunk. He's not insane. He can land us in a pickup. Giving

01:02:15.120 the power away. So this is only, these are only three of the many kind of ways of kind

01:02:25.700 of coping with the loss of that kind of face-to-face culture, which in some ways gave you the burden,

01:02:35.480 but also the freedom to constantly assess your own capacities and what you could do in the

01:02:43.940 world. We are much more confused about that because we get out of a jet plane when we're

01:02:50.300 totally, look, we can make a, there's a group, look, we can make a jet plane, but individually

01:02:55.360 you're powerless on that jet plane. Even if you're, you know, a rocket scientist, you're equally

01:03:03.280 powerless on that jet plane. But then you have to get into your old Volkswagen and drive

01:03:07.440 yourself home, in which case you've got to be back, you know, you're a squirrel again,

01:03:11.540 watching everything, having to be, you know, drive defensively, et cetera.

01:03:15.140 So it's, you never quite get out of that world where you are the prey. I mean, we all have

01:03:29.560 to on our daily, everyday life live like a squirrel or a bird or some degree, but we all have those

01:03:37.280 experiences, either being a soldier in the army, you know, that kind of ferocious energy you get

01:03:44.180 from being, um, um, rooting for your team, you know, being part of a team. Um, um, we know

01:03:52.040 what it's like to have that, you know, um, um, predator energy, but it comes at the price

01:03:59.100 of usually obedience, submission, um, that ferocious sense of power often comes with another kind

01:04:07.360 of powerlessness. You get so, but you miss animus. You get, you lose, you lose your animus. Um,

01:04:14.280 there's always these trade-offs. The more independence, like I'm totally loved to be a

01:04:20.220 squirrel or a bird, you know, it's like, I'm so used to being this little nervous creature,

01:04:24.640 but it means that I try to live my life in this very quiet way where I can maximize my personal

01:04:32.500 autonomy and independence. But it means like always being on the alert. Um, you know, I don't like

01:04:42.380 to be on the jet plane. I don't like, I don't really like, you know, being in a club or joining

01:04:48.460 a group or joining a team. I like to maximize my independence, but I know that comes with the

01:04:55.400 course of almost never feeling tremendously powerful. Hmm. Very interesting. Um, because

01:05:04.560 yeah, I, I, yeah, I feel like today in our culture, um, and it's interesting. I don't know

01:05:10.480 if you've noticed this, but, um, stoicism as a philosophy is very, it's getting more and more

01:05:16.460 popular, particularly amongst entrepreneurs and these Silicon Valley types. Um, because I think

01:05:24.080 they see it as, you know, in their field of business, everything's constantly changing.

01:05:28.320 Um, and they really don't have any control over whether their startup will succeed or not.

01:05:34.900 Um, and so stoicism, they, they turned to stoicism as it, well, you know, at least I can have,

01:05:41.040 form this inner citadel as Marcus Aurelius said that, you know, yeah, yeah, I'm a rock.

01:05:45.460 I'm a stone. You can't hurt me. Yeah. And it's, it's, it's very interesting that you're

01:05:49.080 seeing that you're seeing more and more like stoicism become more and more popular again.

01:05:54.080 Um, today. That, you know, it's so interesting that you said, I didn't know anything about,

01:06:01.680 um, startup, um, um, companies in Silicon Valley, but I remember when I was in, in college,

01:06:09.740 there was this, um, man, Jack Rosenberg, who took, what was the name he took again? He took,

01:06:18.340 he wanted to sound like a German psychologist. So we took the name, um, Erhardt, Werner Erhardt.

01:06:25.380 Okay. Yeah.

01:06:25.940 And he introduced Werner Erhardt seminars all over the country. Um, and it was pure stoicism. Not only was

01:06:33.580 it, you know, it's like, I knew some people who spent a fortune on this and I said, you know,

01:06:39.120 he's giving you directly, you know, he's just giving you the text of Epictetus and Seneca and

01:06:45.620 Mark Serious. That's all it was. And they said, I can give you those for free. Um, but they were

01:06:50.180 learning not to be victims in the world. Um, they were not letting go, you know, um, and if you saw

01:06:56.900 that someone beating their dog, just let it go, you know, and there's this whole thing with going

01:07:02.540 with the flow, you know, and, and hooking gears with the powerful. And yes, it's in fact, most of

01:07:11.240 these strategies, although they took a kind of intellectualized, idealized forms, you don't

01:07:20.400 have to learn them. They're like part of all of our, and part of all of our possibilities

01:07:29.320 that really they're, how should I say, they, you don't know, no one has to teach you them.

01:07:35.980 You know, it's like the idea that when you're fired, you say, you can't find me. I quit.

01:07:40.420 Yeah. I mean, the way I sometimes explain it to my students is that if there's an apple,

01:07:47.760 if you're hungry and there's an apple on the tree and you can just reach up and get

01:07:51.480 it, you, you, you just reach up and get it. And the little higher up on the tree, you use

01:07:57.200 a tool, a stick or a ladder or, you know, you try to knock it down. You try to use some

01:08:02.820 sort of extra, you get a little extra help. When it's way up on the tree, then you pray

01:08:07.440 for it, right? When it's something you can't figure out how to get yourself, then you say,

01:08:13.600 oh, please, please get it for me. That's where, you know, you call on power.

01:08:17.760 So it's outside of yourself. When it's all the way up at the top of the tree and you

01:08:23.020 can't get it, your prayers don't up. Then you say, I never wanted it anyway.

01:08:28.120 Yeah, the sour grapes.

01:08:29.620 So like the Romans who were extremely, for instance, devoted to their families and children.

01:08:35.420 In the imperial period, they adopt this philosophy of stoicism, which says, you know, I don't

01:08:40.920 really care if they live or die. You know, they're just unknown to me. It doesn't really

01:08:44.960 matter to me. It's also a kind of way of stoning one's inner self so one really doesn't care

01:08:52.640 what happens. You know, one can say, it's out of my control, therefore, I don't really

01:08:59.920 care about it.

01:09:00.900 You know, all humans want as much control as they can get. But you also have to assess,

01:09:10.620 you know, where the power really is. Often you don't know. And you just have to sort of

01:09:17.540 go, try to sort of relax and go with these powers. But to do that, you also have to cut

01:09:25.660 off certain other parts of you. The difference, I can think of it in the story of, in Seneca,

01:09:35.660 who's writing in the period of Nero, and the Seneca, Luke, and Petroni, for all these brilliant

01:09:41.280 Romans, lived intimately with Nero, all of whom were killed by Nero, and lived in the most

01:09:46.920 excruciating insecurity. They were rich, they were powerful, and horribly insecure.

01:09:52.500 So, you know, Seneca, like Marcus Reyes, wanted to be a stoic, oh, let it go, look, you can't

01:09:58.220 control everything, let it go. They're in a world where they feel so fragile, they're so

01:10:08.040 powerful and so fragile. And Seneca wrote a play based on Eurystides called The Trojan

01:10:15.100 Women. This is one of the most powerful things any Roman ever wrote. And in it, this stoic,

01:10:22.500 describes this mother, Andromache, trying to keep her son, Hector's son, a cyanx. Andromache

01:10:29.320 was the wife of Hector. And now Hector's dead, and they're all captives, and they're all going

01:10:33.900 to be taken away by the Achaeans, the Greeks, into slavery, and they're going to kill her

01:10:40.260 child. And it's about her efforts to try in every, every way she can possibly think of.

01:10:46.960 She lies. She threatens. She begs. She shames. She tries every strategy she can. Again, she's not

01:10:55.320 honorable in our sense. She's honorable in, you know, the ancient Roman saying she tries

01:11:01.940 everything she can to save that child. And she fails. She cannot save the child. Nothing she

01:11:10.100 does. They're going to kill it. And in the end, the little boy, this little child, walks

01:11:15.320 to the edge of this tower where they're going to push him down, and he leaps. So that when

01:11:22.100 he is totally cannot do anything to save himself, he shows this last second of power and energy

01:11:29.700 by doing it himself. So, but then, you know, you compare this with, like, um, the way that

01:11:37.520 the story of Abraham works in, uh, both in ancient Hebrew tradition and then later on in Christian

01:11:43.260 and Islamic tradition, where God says, kill your kids. And Abraham says, yes, of course. Um, this

01:11:49.560 idea that, that you'll get your most, you're going to get your most power by this total obedience

01:11:56.460 and surrender. Then, of course, because he was willing to kill his kid, God not only

01:12:03.040 doesn't take his child, but then says, you will prosper and multiply and fill the world

01:12:08.220 with, like the sands of, you know, the grains of sands, um, um, will be your descendants. Um,

01:12:14.660 this idea that the most power you can get is from this total linking gears with the power

01:12:22.200 of the B. You say you want my child, have my child. Um, that there's these tremendous tensions

01:12:30.260 in ancient thought, um, between a world in which you still feel that maybe through your, through

01:12:39.340 your own negotiations and strategizing, you can maximize your own sense of efficacy. You

01:12:46.280 can maximize your own sense of competence. Um, and you'll do it if you can.

01:12:52.200 Like Andronica, she does everything she can to get that apple, ten of the tree. When she

01:13:00.040 can't get it, it's the apple itself, this little boy who just says, you can't find me. I

01:13:05.900 quit. And then he leaves. Um, the, the, in, in the Roman sensibility, even in the early imperial

01:13:13.840 period, they're not really willing, even by a stoic like Seneca, it's not really willing to

01:13:19.960 give up that very ancient notion of maximizing your autonomy. Again, which does not mean

01:13:28.220 obedience. That's the biggest difference in our notion of honor and the ancient notion

01:13:33.600 of honor. Where to, virtue for us is obedience. Where to, was this energy bigger? Um, but we're,

01:13:42.420 they're moving into a world where they're increasingly faced with total powerlessness.

01:13:46.680 You know, and that, that's the hardest thing. And that's the hardest thing for us in our

01:13:51.520 complex culture is that how to feel powerful when we're endlessly faced with a kind of miniaturization,

01:14:01.040 um, lack of competence. We have no, almost no competence. If I didn't have a job as a professor

01:14:07.680 in this big machine called the University of Massachusetts, I'd be, I'd be selling pencils

01:14:13.360 on Avenue A in Turner's Falls and I don't even know how to make a pencil. I have no general

01:14:18.960 competence. I have, you know, this expertise, but that means you put expertise to enable you

01:14:28.260 to feel powerful. You have to have a, a place in the machine. There's got to be, we're always

01:14:33.980 saying to our, you know, students, you'll find your niche. Yeah. Meaning that you're the only

01:14:39.060 place you can hope for a sense of power is when you're part of a big machine. And we're

01:14:46.800 all aware of that. If you don't get a job, you know, you'll just be on the street. And

01:14:52.720 unless you want to be there, like the Phoenix, you'll feel really totally powerless. Um, um,

01:15:01.780 it's a, and that in complex cultures is the most difficult thing to negotiate. And this is where a

01:15:10.460 huge number of complicated strategies come into play to try to somehow adjust to the fact that

01:15:20.200 we're both for all each one of us is the center of our own, the whole universe, right? It comes into

01:15:26.420 being and dies when we die. Um, and this feeling of being absolutely nothing. And that's a huge

01:15:32.220 gap. I think in small face-to-face cultures, like within the family, there's a more of a

01:15:38.860 balancing, you know, you're powerless and you're powerful, you're powerless and powerful. And you're

01:15:44.380 constantly negotiating those like the Roman, the ancient Roman peasant, let's say, had a huge

01:15:50.680 range of competences. They also had a huge, enormous number of

01:15:56.940 diverse powers that they had to cope with endlessly. Many of them, as for us, outside of

01:16:06.100 their control. But we're faith. We have a very little, we have a very little toolkit we're

01:16:11.680 given. And the more education, the smaller the toolkit. Like my toolkit, you know, I have

01:16:17.540 this, it goes deep, you know, my life, love of them. I love the Romans. I couldn't live

01:16:22.940 without them now. But like, that's all I know. Like that's all I know. And it's eternally

01:16:28.680 useless in the big world. When I step outside my classroom and go to the gym, do you think

01:16:35.880 anyone wants to hear about the Romans? Do you think like, I mean, it's like, um, you know,

01:16:42.740 this is an incredible privilege to be able, for me to be able to talk about the Romans.

01:16:47.460 Because mostly, outside of that little tiny space in the machine, all my knowledge is just

01:16:56.040 nothing.

01:16:58.460 So, I mean, I guess that just brings up a question. So how, you kind of answered a little

01:17:02.860 bit, I suppose. But, you know, I'm a big, my, uh, one of my college professors, you know,

01:17:09.980 J. Rufus Fears, he was big on Herodotus' idea that, you know, history is moral instruction

01:17:15.980 or should be moral instruction or whatever. Um, I mean, what, what can we take from the

01:17:21.260 Roman conception of honor? Um, is there something that we can learn from them that we can apply

01:17:27.040 to our own lives that might allow us to navigate, uh, this world that is a complex world that we

01:17:33.620 live in? Or is it completely irrelevant to this time?

01:17:39.760 Well, of course, I always think that you see yourself more clearly when, um, you go far away

01:17:46.500 from yourself. I know it, as my, one of my first classes I ever taught one of the students

01:17:50.440 said, it's hard to see the picture when you're inside the frame. Um, and I think that, first

01:17:56.360 of all, the study of anything and any group of humans or animals, very alien from ourselves

01:18:02.840 always gives you a sense of perspective. But also I think, I don't think studying history

01:18:09.720 ever, what, there's no one-to-one correlation between what you learn from history and what

01:18:17.360 you can apply because there's so infinite number of lessons. Yeah. And you never know which one

01:18:23.660 you're blind. But what it can give you is less of a sense of being alone in your dilemmas and

01:18:30.840 your terrorists. And you, I think that, um, when I studied the ancient Romans, I'm always amazed at

01:18:38.140 both how different and how alike we are. And that the, the, basically the kind of what it means to be

01:18:47.500 a creature, what it means to be a human and what it means to be a creature has not changed. We have the

01:18:53.300 same kind of huge emotional, um, icebergs we live in with just a little tiny bed. Each culture,

01:19:02.660 each culture, I, I ascribe to sort of the iceberg metaphor that like each culture is like an iceberg

01:19:07.520 with this huge emotional underground and just a few things that are articulated. And the more

01:19:15.200 complex culture, the fewer things are articulated. The more complex the culture, the simpler the

01:19:19.660 ideology to hold it together, you know, like a, it's like a structure to hold it together. And

01:19:25.100 usually it's really simple, but every culture you study articulates slightly different things,

01:19:32.340 sometimes very different things. And you can go to another culture or another time

01:19:38.300 and get a, a sense, a different set of things that are clarified and articulated. So that for instance,

01:19:49.180 the Romans, they knew much more about honor than we do. They understood it much more just as they did,

01:19:55.660 um, ideas of, um, um, um, envy. Cause you want to know about envy, go to the ancient Romans.

01:20:05.020 We don't know anything about envy compared to them. Sometimes another culture understands things

01:20:11.820 and articulates things, gives you words for, gives you stories for, pictures for things that

01:20:17.420 we don't have words or pictures for. So that the, it gives you a kind of, um, emotional toolkit,

01:20:26.900 even if your skills make it inevitable that you'll be, play a small role in a big machine.

01:20:35.020 Nevertheless, you can have this kind of huge emotional and mental toolkit, which will help you

01:20:43.340 navigate the particular situation that you're in better. So my idea of studying history is to make

01:20:50.700 the most complex vision of the world I can possibly hold in my mind, not the simplest, but the most

01:20:57.740 complex. So that I don't feel my goal is not to be surprised by anything humans do.

01:21:08.300 And I don't want to say that, oh, that's ridiculous. Humans don't do that. Or, you know, or think that

01:21:16.220 humans are this or humans are that, you know, that there's some small definition. I want to kind of have

01:21:22.620 the biggest sense of what, as possible of what it means to be a human. And then hold that all in my

01:21:31.420 mind, even as I say, well, here I am, this little white woman who's 65 years old, who is a teacher at

01:21:39.820 the University of Massachusetts and she plays the piano and she gardens a little bit. And even while

01:21:45.580 I had this little circumscribed universe, to have this huge mental universe where I can go where I

01:21:55.900 please and navigate where I please, and where when someone says to me, like, honor is this,

01:22:02.140 or honor is that, the other part of my brain can say, but it could also be this, and it could also

01:22:07.340 be that, and it could also be this. So that in one sense, I'm not as trapped in the ideologies

01:22:15.980 and the religions and quotes and all the sort of structures that your culture gives you, which

01:22:22.220 tend to be ridiculously simplified. You know, carved down, pared down so that almost, you know,

01:22:29.820 the expression of procrastinate, you know, that, that this idea that in the jet plane, when you

01:22:38.940 get on the jet plane, one, um, the only, well, I shouldn't say one, one seat fits all, but you know

01:22:44.540 what I mean? Like you're all forced to, to occupy the same kinds of spaces and suffer the same kind of

01:22:52.940 thing. But that doesn't have to be your, your inner world, your mental world. Um, and I, I trip over a

01:23:05.020 flat sidewalk and, you know, feel cramped in a low, without, in a room without low ceiling. It's like,

01:23:12.060 for me, I know I lead a little life and I do that in some ways by choice, but it's in order to like,

01:23:19.740 have, um, a world with sort of no limits. I mean, one of the things I love about, um,

01:23:27.580 my tiny little job, my little bit of expertise is that, you know, here I am an historian, but like,

01:23:37.660 history is everything that humans have ever done or felt or said. So like, I'm in my little tiny room,

01:23:45.020 which is a library and it's like, so huge. I'm out of that box of time and space. Okay. And to come

01:23:55.180 back to honor, I think that if you think of honor as the fullness of being, um, the, you need strategies

01:24:07.580 to get to that fullness of being. And it has to be more than just what your culture offers you.

01:24:16.220 Okay. I often tell my students that, you know, you, you grow up in this culture and it's like,

01:24:22.060 they give you a menu. These are the things you can have. You can have a job, you can have a family,

01:24:30.060 you can have 2.5 kids, you can have a mortgage, you can have a car, you can have, you know,

01:24:35.740 a retirement fund. You can, you know, play golf in Florida. And it gives you this little tiny menu

01:24:40.860 and says, you choose off of this. And, uh, and I often feel that for many of my students and myself

01:24:48.700 as well, you know, there's nothing on that menu that I want. The menu, what I want, what would give

01:24:57.180 me the fullness of being is not on that menu. Um, and it's not often a culture is so circumscribed in

01:25:06.460 what it can offer that I think that knowing other cultures, knowing other times, knowing

01:25:13.740 other worlds gives you a sense that, okay, what I want is not on that menu. Um, and not to feel like,

01:25:25.660 okay, but I still, this is what I've got to have, you know, this is what I've got to have.

01:25:29.180 This is all that's offered. This is all there is. Um, often you find out that, that there's like,

01:25:37.420 on the other side of the page is like a billion things, you know, a billion things to be. Um,

01:25:46.380 I also think that the more complex the culture, the more goal oriented it is, you know, and more

01:25:55.420 complex cultures, the idea is, you know, humans are domesticated, they're sacralized and set apart,

01:26:01.180 and their energies are built up all so that it can be directed in this direction. So that we're

01:26:05.980 told that meaning is purpose, meaning is goal, meaning is end. And all my students are endlessly,

01:26:11.900 you know, compelled to live in this world of deferred gratification, which makes them drunk

01:26:17.180 all the time, you know, at the end, the plane will land, you know, in Hawaii or something like

01:26:22.780 that. And all you have to do is get on the plane to get on the plane somewhere down the line,

01:26:29.260 you know, you'll be fulfilled. And of course, it's just a joke. It's like a trick. Yeah.

01:26:33.740 Um, plane never lands at a request. Um, whereas meaning can be association, meaning can be gotten,

01:26:43.580 can be given to the world. It's like, um, you know, this idea that students are looking for

01:26:49.420 meaning, like it's out there, it's something, things that can be given to you, you can find it

01:26:55.660 or something. Whereas there's a whole way that I've learned from studying other cultures of meaning

01:27:02.540 is something that can be made, just like you can make gods in other cultures, you can make

01:27:07.180 your meanings. But it has to be with this energy and vigor and vitality to come from within,

01:27:12.540 and that you make your maps and your understanding, you make your world from within through this

01:27:19.180 application of, of your own powers. And this is a kind of other way to a feeling of honor and

01:27:29.420 fullness. Does that make any sense at all?

01:27:32.300 That makes perfect sense. I mean, you can basically take that, that Roman idea of like

01:27:37.180 animus and will and create, uh, a culture that, or an option for you that's not given by the,

01:27:45.100 the wider culture.

01:27:46.060 Exactly. Exactly. Or a set of options.

01:27:49.900 Yeah.

01:27:50.540 And to be able to spot, okay, this is what they're saying are the options, but I know

01:27:58.300 those are not the only options.

01:28:00.700 I love it. Yeah. We, we wrote about that not too long ago. Just, um, in our culture,

01:28:05.500 it's very consumeristic. And so, you know, you're given the illusion of choice, right?

01:28:10.220 You have, you can choose, you know, you have 30 different detergents you can choose from,

01:28:14.860 but it's only, it's only those 30 detergents. Um, but you know, you could choose another one.

01:28:20.700 I mean, it's like, uh, those are, our culture is like a choose your own adventure book. I don't

01:28:24.460 know if you remember those where it's a book where as you read the book, um, it would say,

01:28:30.220 you know, if you know, turn to page 37 or turn to page 76 and you know, the story changed depending

01:28:35.740 on what page, but like the story changed and you had a choice, but like you only were given

01:28:40.140 like a select, there were, there were only three different, three endings.

01:28:43.500 And it's all the same, right? Yeah.

01:28:45.020 Yeah, I know. Oh, that's great. It's like a having a hundred channels on your television set,

01:28:49.740 right? Yeah. And, but yeah, that's, that's all you get. You think you have a choice, but you

01:28:54.460 really don't. I love, yeah, I love that idea of taking animus and will and creating new worlds

01:29:00.620 or new cultures for yourself. That's not available. That's great. Well, Karlyn Barton, we've had a

01:29:06.060 fascinating conversation. I don't want to take much more of your time. Um, well, thank you so much

01:29:10.940 for your time. It's been a pleasure. Our guest today was Karlyn Barton. She's a professor of

01:29:15.180 classical history at the university of Massachusetts. And her book is Roman honor,

01:29:19.020 the fire in the bones. And you can find that on amazon.com. Again, I, you got to go get this book.

01:29:25.500 It's a fascinating read and make sure you read the footnotes in this book, because those are just as

01:29:30.060 interesting as the main text, lots of cool insights. And she's also written another book

01:29:34.300 about Roman gladiators. It's called the sorrows of the ancient Romans, the gladiator and the monster.

01:29:39.580 You can find that on amazon.com as well. Well, that wraps up another edition of the

01:29:46.220 art of manliness podcast. For more manly tips and advice, make sure to check out the art of

01:29:50.140 manliness website. And if you enjoy this podcast, again, I appreciate it. If you go to iTunes or

01:29:54.780 Stitcher or whatever you use to listen to your podcast and give our podcast a review,

01:29:59.260 that will definitely help us out. And until next time, stay manly.

The Art of Manliness - July 31, 2025

#74： Roman Honor With Carlin Barton

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