A Bible for Heroes — The Influential Book Read By History's Eminent Men
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Summary
In 18th century America, this book was second in popularity only to the Bible. It was a favorite of thinkers and leaders throughout history, including Emerson, Machiavelli, and even President Truman. Yet, you probably haven t read it. And if you re not familiar with Plutarch's Lives, you re in for a treat as today s episode offers a great intro.
Transcript
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brett mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast
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in 18th century america this book was second in popularity only to the bible it was a favorite of
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many thinkers and leaders throughout history including emerson napoleon machiavelli nietzsche
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and even president truman yet you probably haven't read it it's plutarch's parallel lives
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if you're not familiar with plutarch's lives you're in for a treat as today's episode offers
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a great intro my guest alex petkus found that even though he's a former classicist and professor
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plutarch's lives is still a tough read which is why he started a podcast the cost of glory
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to make it more accessible to people he does the same thing on today's episode sharing the
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background on plutarch's set of biographies and its major themes alex explains why plutarch thought
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that biography was a powerful way to transmit morals and how the homeric virtue he had in mind
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different from that of just having good upstanding character alex then gives us a taste of plutarch
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as we discuss the lives of two obscure greek and roman figures we end our conversation with how to
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get started studying plutarch yourself after the show's over check out our show notes at awim.is
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all right alex petkus welcome to the show great to be here brett thanks for having me so you are
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the host of a podcast called the cost of glory which takes listeners through the greek historian
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and philosopher plutarch's work parallel lives for those who aren't familiar with plutarch can you give
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us a thumbnail biographical sketch of this guy yeah so if you've ever been to athens there is a monument
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there that overlooks the acropolis and the pnyx it's called the philopapus monument and so this was
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built in the second century a.d in honor of one of plutarch's friends and clients who he actually
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addresses a treatise to so plutarch is a philosopher historian he's thought of as a historian today that
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was living around the time of seneca epictetus his grandson was a teacher tutor to marcus aurelius
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so he's kind of in that era around saint paul first and second century a.d and plutarch was a local
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politician a local kind of leader from boeotia near thebes a little town called kyreneia and he
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lived most of his life there he visited rome this is the the period that we're in is the when rome rules
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all the mediterranean including greece so he's a greco-roman but you know he's a greek speaker
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and he was in later life made a priest of delphi so he's a kind of a religious figure too but what i
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think is really he's famous for is writing this biography that you mentioned the parallel lives
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or it's a biography collection and it's one of the most famous works of antiquity and in various
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periods of history it was probably the most popular of all the books from the greco-roman period
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in the 18th century in america plutarch's lives the parallel lives was more popular than homer or
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plato or cicero it was just second only to the bible among ancient works so it's an incredibly popular
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book and he he wrote these biographies out of a a general conviction that this was a an effective way
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to transmit virtue so he wrote a bunch of other moral essays but but the biographies were kind of
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the the centerpiece of this and they were written for people like his friend philo pappas who was
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actually a client king of the romans he was from syria and was visiting athens because i think he was in
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political exile from his homeland so it's kind of written for leaders of society and those are like
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plutarch's you know clients as it were the people that he taught he did he instructed in philosophy
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that he's trying to add value to in his life but that's him in a nutshell so yeah he he's first a
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philosopher we think of him as a historian today and i think most people when they think about history
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they think you know history is a science where the goal is to create as accurate a description of
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the past as possible and plutarch he sought for accuracy in his in his works but as you said his
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primary goal with biography and history wasn't fact his main telos was teaching virtue morality so why
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did he think biography was the most effective way to to teach morals yeah well and i i will i do want
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to defend him and you know you gave him credit he is a serious historian like he does sift through
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sources and he tries to discern fact from fiction but he distinguishes his project from history in
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for example the introduction to the life of alexander the great one of his characters and he says i'm not
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writing history so my audience will have to excuse me if i do not recount every single battle and every
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you know deed done publicly by alexander because i'm writing lives and not histories and a chance
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remark said at a dinner party or a joke made among friends might do more to elucidate character than
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battles in which thousands died and so his goal in writing these biographies which we could call we
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sort of think of as histories is really to portray the essence of a man of the character not just what
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they did but more importantly who they were and for that reason he sees his mission as as much as
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anything one of selection you know finding the most illustrative examples from the life so he'll tell
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you the narrative of the life of a man but he'll try to get the best quotes the best illustrative
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anecdotes he's a great storyteller so there's all these kind of hollywood scenes but he tries to stay
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concise and the longest of his biographies is less than 100 pages in modern editions and a lot of them
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are 30 to 60 pages but it was like you said it was because he thought biography was not just not just
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interesting and entertaining but contained this really powerful moral juice that he wanted his
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readers to get it's why he chose this genre and the way he did it the book is called parallel lives is he
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would find someone from greek history and someone from roman history and do a compare and contrast between
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the two that's right yeah so for example julius caesar and alexander the greatest sort of all-around
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figures of either culture and demosthenes and cicero the greatest orators of the greeks and romans and
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you know one of his missions is kind of cultural like he's writing for roman readers who know greek
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greeks who live under the roman empire and he's kind of trying to help greeks and romans appreciate each
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other that's like a kind of side mission of his and uh because i think he recognizes this thing that
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rousseau would talk about that heroes are in a lot of ways the embodiment of a culture that they're the
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sort of the way that a culture becomes one is by having the same heroes and so he wanted people to
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share their heroes in his sort of meeting of two cultures world that he lived in the reason that i think
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this is important this is this genre of biography is because and the way that you appreciate heroes
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in general is by like wanting to be like them right like this is how they structure society and and how
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they have this impact on on your life by producing this emotion that aristotle talks about called zeal
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yeah tell us more about zelos right is that pronounced in the greek yeah zelos zelos or zelos it's it's an
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ada in greek so it kind of depends on your pronunciation but so aristotle defines zeal as
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an emotion felt when a man sees present among others who are like him by nature things good and
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honorable which he himself is capable of attaining and plutarch talks a lot about zeal in the biographies
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we might translate zeal zelos as emulation today although that's not like a word that a lot of people
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know the definition of very well it is where we get the word zeal in english actually but it's that
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feeling that you feel when you see somebody doing something great and it inspires you to imitate
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basically and so plutarch talks about how other deeds or other achievements of men will maybe fill
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you with admiration like if you see a great statue or a well-crafted building it'll it'll fill you with
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admiration but it won't necessarily make you want to go and make a statue or go and build a building
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but achievements of virtue of excellence like the kind that he depicts in the biographies that these
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will have a sort of natural almost magnetic effect and make you want to imitate them somehow and he
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recognizes this thing that that you know so he's a student in his philosophical views of the philosopher
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plato who lived four centuries earlier and he also quotes aristotle a lot and plato talked about the
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power of stories mostly in a bad sense in the republic you know the the power of bad stories to
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shape a bad character aristotle was a little bit more optimistic about the power of story but they
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both kind of recognized that stories that you tend to gravitate in your own character towards the people
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that you admire in a story and so i think plutarch is kind of basing his whole literary biographical
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project on that premise that you depict the best people and you'll make great citizens as a result
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so it sounds like zeal is kind of the opposite of envy a little bit that's how i'd say it it works
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and that's how aristotle sees it and so aristotle defines envy as so if zeal is a pain that makes you
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want to do great things when you see them being done or being achieved envy is the pain that at the fact
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that other people have achieved great things so it's it's a kind of a negative passive response for
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aristotle the greek word is thonos which just sounds bad to me but thonos is always bad in in greek and
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it's it's the emotion that makes you want to see the mighty fall purely for the fact that they are
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mighty and it's what nietzsche would define as he uses this french word when he talks about a
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ressentiment like resentment you know it's a passive destructive emotion it's the tall poppy syndrome
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emotion that all people will feel the the pain of will feel the results of when they achieve
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greatness there's always going to be envious people around you trying to bring you down
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so for aristotle and for plutarch zeal is productive and and creative and envy is destructive right so
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zeal says you did that so i can do it too envy is like you did that i can't do that so i'm gonna take
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it away from you somehow yeah exactly and both are are divinities in um he see it in the kind of
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early greek mythology you know they like to personify these these natural forces and zeal is
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one that zeus uses to uh to conquer you know the the older order of sort of wicked gods and titans
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and you know envy has all kinds of destructive power causes wars and so on so you mentioned plutarch
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wrote these with the goal of helping leaders lead well what influence did parallel lives have on great
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leaders throughout western history well he's popular all throughout antiquity and he gets
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rediscovered in the west in the renaissance and so a guy like machiavelli is reading a lot of plutarch
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a lot of the examples that he cites from the prince are from plutarch plutarch i think emerson put it best
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he was a great devotee of plutarch he's he calls plutarch a bible for heroes plutarch is in a way
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like an encyclopedia of great figures from antiquity and he served that role as a sort of as a sort of
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gateway drug for people to get enthusiastic about ancient greatness ever since the renaissance and
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even before that in antiquity and so in the 18th century i already mentioned his popularity among
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you know in the americas another figure that was really influenced by plutarch is rousseau
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who talked about getting his spirit of liberty from three sources mainly his father his country
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and plutarch and so you know rousseau was reading plutarch as a young boy and and just obsessed with
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the heroes of antiquity you know whatever you think of rousseau's influence on politics i think he's a
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more interesting figure than a lot of people get him credit for alexander hamilton is another great
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devotee of plutarch in the winter of 1777 i think it is at valley forge he's a 25 year old aide to camp
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for george washington and you know during the day he's conducting the business of the general he's
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trying to get money from the continental congress because they're starving out there at valley forge
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but by night he's staying up in his tent late reading plutarch's lives he's um reading the lives of
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solon and lycurgus these great state founders of greece and romulus of rome and he's taking notes in
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his paybook we actually have his paybook he took like 50 pages of notes that winter and you know the
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list you could go on and on multiplying examples napoleon's supposed to have had a copy of plutarch
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often by his bed and he would reread the life of caesar before famous battles and i think the most
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interesting modern political figure who's a great devotee of plutarch is harry truman who was our last
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self-educated president didn't have a ba and he encountered plutarch as a young man and he speaks
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about in a biography that interview series that was done of him later in his life he speaks about
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returning to plutarch again and again as he was going through his political career and he kind of
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used plutarch as um like a like a library of character like when he would meet somebody that
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he couldn't quite figure out or he's trying to decide you know as the executive this comes up a
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lot like who to put in charge of what and who to trust with what sort of duties you know he would he
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would go back to his bookshelf and open up plutarch and kind of thumb through and try to think of you
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know who am i dealing with now is this like an alcibiades character is a cato kind of character
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and you know he would often be able to nail somebody's personality by consulting plutarch who
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you know according to him knew more about politics than any of the books that he had ever read
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so i think uh truman's a really great figure that illustrates how plutarch is great for
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self-educated people and kind of lifelong learners no i like that a lot and then another big influence
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plutarch had on western culture shakespeare like shakespeare's plays like julius caesar
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based on plutarch absolutely his his play coriolanus is based on plutarch's coriolanus
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ancy and cleopatra on mark antony the life of alcibiades contains a character time on the
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misanthrope so shakespeare's time on yeah that's probably the most influential plutarch reader of uh
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of modern literary history for sure and yeah it was crazy such a big influence on western culture but i
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reckon a lot of people haven't read any plutarch yeah it's funny because i think that you know
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for all that he was incredibly popular for the 15th 16 17 18 centuries he kind of went out of fashion in
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the 19th century although even in lincoln's day you know lincoln was there was an article written
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about lincoln one time where the the journalist said ah a great devotee of plutarch is abraham lincoln
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and lincoln actually wrote to him and said as a matter of fact i never have read plutarch but
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since you published that article i decided to make up the deficit and so he's he's you know acquired a
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copy of plutarch and started reading it it's enjoying it so you know he was so popular that it
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was just assumed that a leader would have been familiar with him but he went out of fashion in the 19th
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century when kind of like you alluded to at the beginning you know our education in history started
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this idea that history should be a science became more popular that uh that history was about you
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know discerning facts and you know assembling a kind of true account of things and even though plutarch
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is a pretty good historian you know he became sidelined because the whole project that he represented
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of you know history as self-help in a way history as like moral formation in philosophy just went out
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of fashion it was seen as sort of not objective and um and i don't know i think that our kind of modern
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sort of bureaucratized academic culture just doesn't really have a lot of room for the the high agency
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men that plutarch depicts and and just kind of unproblematic admiration of them yeah i think we're
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poor for it yeah for sure so when you take a look at plutarch's work as a whole are there themes that
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you see that he returns to again and again yeah well many the envy of the kind of challengers in the
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political sphere as a man rises through the ranks and politics the importance of honesty and justice
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in one's dealings you see so many themes across the board with you know the wages of of of vice are
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often you know like often it's it's through a leader's vice that somebody's able to affect their
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downfall by you know tempting them with whether it's wine or women or riches so yeah plutarch is a
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moralist at heart but he doesn't let his moralism cloud his judgment of people i think that's one of
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his great virtues he doesn't uh make saints out of anybody and he doesn't make villains out of his
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main characters either even though he um he sometimes strongly disapproves of them and so it's just a
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whole kind of library of morals so one theme that i've seen that i'm particularly interested in that
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plutarch tries to figure out is sussing out whether outcomes you know whether it's a war
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someone's rise or fall whether that's dependent on virtue or fate start to do some definitions like
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what did plutarch mean by virtue this is a really interesting question that i thought a lot about
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because so plutarch is is admired by a guy like machiavelli and a guy like nietzsche who you know
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machiavelli defines virtue as something like well virtu is is what he calls it something like
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prowess or you know just competence in politics and war i wouldn't say that it's amoral but it's
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definitely not the virtue of virtue signaling it's definitely like it's something a little different
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from being an upstanding citizen right it's like skill it's right right and this this idea is sort of
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in tension with maybe what you would see represented as a virtue in an author like seneca or marcus
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aurelius like the stoics so plutarch is also a moralist and you know his definition of virtue as a
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philosopher would be some kind of harmony of the four cardinal virtues maybe like justice temperance
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wisdom and courage something like close to good citizenship close to the the philosophical idea you
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do find in plato and socrates but he also i think as an artist he's dealing with these men who really
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exhibit this kind of earlier almost homeric sense of virtue like in homer arete the greek word for
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well what gets translated as virtue a lot arete is really prowess it's really um skill competence
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and it's a form of sort of manly overwhelming excellence it actually derives from the greek word
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for man arein just like virtus derives from the word vir in latin man so they both kind of mean
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manliness etymologically in both languages and plutarch has these figures that he depicts fairly
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and sympathetically who really exhibit that frightening virtue like a guy like alexander or especially a guy like
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caesar you know conquering all of gaul outsmarting all of his enemies themistically is another great
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example of outsmarting your enemies so for plutarch virtue i think as a philosopher he would define it
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as something you know more more like being an upstanding citizen a harmony of soul but as an artist
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he has this earlier kind of primal sense of manliness which is one of the reasons why he's been so appealing
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to people like napoleon who kind of are looking more for that than for the good citizenship version
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of virtue yeah it's this idea that you can conquer fate through your your greatness basically absolutely
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yeah i mean yeah what did plutarch have to say about that like what did he have to say about the
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intersection between this prowess and luck or fate in life well i i do like this formulation that
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the harder you work the the luckier you get you can kind of increase your surface area for being
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struck by good luck if you if you're you know hard-working virtuous person i think plutarch would
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agree with that in general there are some interesting figures that bring out this tension i think that um
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i look at a guy like sulla who i recently did a series on and in my podcast sulla is um was an
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incredibly competent you know in the old sense of virtue the virtu politician in the generation before
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julius caesar at rome and he was he was kind of a problematic figure for plutarch because he's you
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know he's a sexual omnivore he indulges in drinking parties after he wins a civil war that he largely
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provoked he slaughters all of his enemies in a great political purge and yet sulla was after he
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won the roman the first roman civil war he renamed himself the lucky and he he liked even though he
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was incredibly competent he liked to speak of how the best decisions that he made for example were not
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the ones that he arrived at by calculation or forethought but that he just kind of intuited and just took
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on a whim as if he were blessed by the gods and i think for a guy like sulla the the more
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you believe in yourself the more kind of faith you have both in yourself and in the gods the luckier you
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get there's something kind of almost mystical about a guy like sulla he so even though he's we don't
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normally associate a machiavellian if you were conqueror figure like that with great piety sulla was
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quite pious actually he would you know thumb his amulet of venus before battles he's always talking
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about having dreams and in which the gods speak to him and he's a lavish dedicator of votive offerings
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to the gods so this is kind of he has this very public piety and i think he really believed it
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and so on the other hand you know for for a guy like plutarch who's a philosopher a lot of what
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philosophy is supposed to give you and i think you see this a lot in the stoics too is this kind
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of fortification against fate that really the reward of virtue the greatest reward of virtue is
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not having success in life it's the kind of peace and contentment of mind that you get from
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from cultivating excellence like virtue is its own reward for for plutarch and he has a whole essay on
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this on tranquility of mind that is that's one of the upshots of that treatise like even if you get
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exiled even if you're being tortured like there is some solace the greatest solace of all perhaps
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in having a good character and often like that means that some of the best figures some of the most
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compelling figures of plutarch end up dying these tragic deaths but you can sort of pronounce at the
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end of the day that they lived a good life nonetheless we're gonna take a quick break for a word from our
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sponsors and now back to the show okay so let's give our listeners a taste of plutarch's lives and
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then what you're doing with it on your podcast so two lives that you cover in your show that i found
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particularly interesting were those of the greek eumenes and the roman sertorius so start with eumenes
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first this guy's really interesting can you give us like a thumbnail biographical sketch of this guy
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yeah uh eumenes of cardia a town that nobody has ever heard of today and barely anybody had heard of
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in antiquity he's from this backwater at the fringe of the greek world but he ends up becoming the royal
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secretary of the macedonian king philip the second and then after philip is assassinated he becomes the
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royal secretary to philip's son alexander the great and follows alexander the great on his campaigns
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conquering the persian empire it goes all the way to india with him and eumenes becomes this figure
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since the fourth century bc in he's greek and not a macedonian which is important for his story
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but he he becomes this after alexander dies sort of tragically very young without
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designating a successor eumenes becomes one of the most important people in the conflicts that
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arise shortly after there's these great wars of succession that go on right after alexander dies
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and eumenes proves that he wasn't just a talented administrator secretary numbers guy bureaucrat but
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he's like one of the best generals of his day and he defeats great generals like antigonus and
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craterus he like slays some incredibly mighty men in single combat on the battlefield it's it's an
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incredible sort of rags to riches guy comes out of nowhere story that um it's one of the reasons i
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started my podcast honestly because he's such an obscure figure even classicists today you know when i
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was reading plutarch's lives i decided to to go through it kind of late in my career before i left
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academia i stumbled upon eumenes and i'm like i should i should read this biography probably just
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so i could say i read all of the lives even though he's probably not that interesting because obviously
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i would have heard of him if he were that interesting but you know he's one of the most
00:27:01.960
amazing characters of all antiquity to me and so i was like oh how good are the rest of the lives
00:27:07.100
going to be if if this obscure figure is so compelling yeah i mean i've read a lot of biographies
00:27:11.340
about alexander the great and philip and i never heard of this guy until i listened to your podcast
00:27:17.420
and i read the the biography in in plutarch yeah what i found so intriguing about this guy
00:27:22.340
he's an outsider right so he's greek but he somehow is able to work his way up to be like the second in
00:27:29.460
command and when there's all that turmoil about who was going to take over the empire after
00:27:33.740
alexander died like he had that sort of political instinct where he knew how to navigate things so that
00:27:41.660
he could be considered like oh yeah this guy this guy we're gonna make this guy in charge
00:27:46.400
yeah i think that that it was a great foresight on his part because um you know the macedonians are
00:27:54.400
they they like to advertise themselves as greeks but it's kind of like us like the english and the
00:28:01.100
scots or like think of if you've ever met somebody from glasgow like they kind of speak english but
00:28:07.000
they're kind of unintelligible depending on if they're amongst their friends and that's what the
00:28:11.260
macedonians were to the greeks and vice versa and so you know as an outsider you know you many saw that
00:28:18.500
his weakness could be a strength that if he rose up through the ranks nobody would ever suspect him
00:28:25.700
of trying to take over because oh you know a greek could never rule over macedonians i'm just the
00:28:32.060
secretary i'm just the guy you can trust with your secrets and so for that reason he gets very close
00:28:37.260
to alexander he's very clever and charismatic you know he's probably there when alexander's getting
00:28:44.360
tutored by the philosopher aristotle eumenes is keeping philip of macedon's correspondence so he's
00:28:50.400
writing these letters to these greek cities like he's kind of philip's ghost writer diplomatically
00:28:55.680
eumenes gets very close to alexander's mother the very difficult woman olympius which i think is a
00:29:02.240
a real you know probably the best evidence of his incredible people skills that he's able to preserve
00:29:08.060
good relationships with olympius who was an incredibly difficult person to get along with
00:29:12.700
especially for philip but because of that you know so when alexander dies eumenes is there's this
00:29:20.180
conclave that the generals meet in to try to sort out who's gonna take over or who's gonna be regent
00:29:26.740
you know alexander has this newborn son i think maybe wasn't born yet but he was he was you know
00:29:32.500
his mother was pregnant and so uh you know alexander's wife's was pregnant that is and so
00:29:39.440
eumenes in this conclave of great generals he says i'm just going to be the note taker guys
00:29:44.800
so that means he's in the room as the most important decision is being made he knows all of the figures
00:29:52.880
he's standing on the sidelines recording everything he has full intelligence of whatever is going on
00:29:58.020
he's very very very close to power but nobody suspects that he's going to be a big player and
00:30:03.940
because the regent that eventually gets chosen perdikus trusts him the most he ends up giving
00:30:10.140
eumenes this important job as a governor of the satrap of cappadocia some kind of important province
00:30:17.520
in asia minor and he you know he gives him some money in an army and makes eumenes a military
00:30:22.820
commander after all and so it's because perdikus felt like he could trust eumenes and eumenes of all
00:30:29.240
the people left standing when alexander died he's not a macedonian so perdikus doesn't see him as a
00:30:35.500
threat and so that allows him to to be in his very strong position when um when the war begins
00:30:41.760
okay so i'm trying to think of some lessons we can extract from that for the modern day
00:30:45.240
one is if you're a young person a young man and you're starting off in your job at a company
00:30:51.940
do not downplay opportunities to be like a scribe or like you know just sit in on meetings where you
00:30:59.440
don't actually talk but you're there just to observe maybe take notes for the boss that can
00:31:04.900
actually be really powerful yeah i think that's a great lesson and it's something that i saw i talk a
00:31:11.020
little bit about this in the life of pompey the great you know when pompey was making his own rise
00:31:16.040
in the chaos of the civil war he always he took pains to be close to the most important person
00:31:22.300
which is sulla and uh one of the things that i heard a a venture capitalist talk about one time
00:31:27.900
on a podcast i thought was really insightful is if you're at a company you should try to get really
00:31:33.080
close physically to the people who are the real power in the organization and if you can manage it
00:31:39.660
either don't have a an official position just be the boy you know the wonder boy who does all kinds
00:31:45.540
of stuff and people like what is that guy's role exactly or don't let yourself be limited by your role
00:31:51.960
you know so eumenes isn't just the royal secretary he you know he develops that relationship with
00:31:57.760
olympius you know he develops the personal touch of being the trusted person somebody you can go to
00:32:03.400
with secrets and um and that that's a great way to rise through the ranks and kind of pole vault over
00:32:08.500
other people who are just working their way through the the proper channels yeah okay so also people
00:32:14.440
skills it seems like you had that in spades so develop those for sure as much as you can so this guy
00:32:19.500
acquired a lot of power in this sort of power vacuum that existed after alexander the great
00:32:25.020
but eventually he had a downfall what led to his downfall well he finds himself in this position
00:32:30.820
the wars of succession start getting on and in full swing pradikas gets assassinated and eumenes ends up
00:32:38.120
sort of not accidentally certainly not accidentally but uh he finds himself in this coalition of loyalists
00:32:46.200
so the cause that he kind of represents is uh securing the legitimate succession of alexander's son
00:32:53.540
this is what olympius wants there are other generals that just want to say let's do away with this whole
00:32:58.660
kingdom of alexander farce and just carve it up and we can all have our own little kingdoms
00:33:03.200
that eumenes is leading a coalition of loyalists and he recognizes the weakness of of his position
00:33:10.020
because all of these guys want to be the ceo and but he's the most competent guy on the battlefield
00:33:16.160
and so he ends up as the de facto general and one of the ways that he ends up having charge of the
00:33:23.600
whole army is by he he tells the men that he has this dream where alexander the great visits him
00:33:30.880
and tells him that if he and the generals will pray for the favor of alexander who they kind of
00:33:37.900
regard now maybe certainly this was part of alexander's myth when he was alive like maybe he's the son of
00:33:44.100
zeus right there's a kind of divine aura around him so alexander visits eumenes in the dream says
00:33:49.280
pray to me and i will guide the army and so eumenes erects this tent in which the genius of alexander is
00:33:55.360
supposed to kind of spiritually reside and he says well why don't we you know all meet in this tent and
00:34:00.900
burn incense to the genius of alexander and he will guide our our group decisions and surprisingly the
00:34:08.000
the generals say okay to this and so he knows if he gets them alone in a tent and it's like a group
00:34:13.760
decision that he can sort of sway the conversation in the right direction but he's dealing with a lot
00:34:18.920
of envy rising as as he's leading this coalition of men de facto the boss of them and he has a few
00:34:26.540
successful battles and this is happening in the mountains of iran amazingly there's elephants involved
00:34:32.560
it's just really epic but what ends up happening is in this battle that he wins tactically one of his
00:34:41.120
envious subordinates this guy pukestus ends up throwing the fight and in the chaos even though
00:34:48.560
eumenes wins the battle his enemy antigonus captures the base the camp the baggage train which is a few
00:34:55.500
miles from the battle scene there's a big cloud of dust that gets kicked up they're like fighting in a
00:35:01.100
big salt flat and when this happens essentially eumenes has this um this contingent of super elite
00:35:07.680
infantry the silver shields fighting on his side and these guys are are really really i mean they're
00:35:16.140
very talented like the navy seals of the macedonian army but they have their wives and children with
00:35:22.020
them they've sort of been accustomed to getting coddled you know they're professional soldiers and
00:35:26.760
since they're so good the generals sort of give them a lot of leeway and let them cart around their
00:35:31.860
families with them as they're fighting which ends up i think being a sort of i mean it ends up being a
00:35:36.260
great weakness and liability so antigonus captures the camp and he captures the wives and children of
00:35:40.520
the silver shields and he's able to kind of force them against eumenes once he has these hostages and
00:35:47.780
they they give him up really willingly these guys just don't have a lot of principles at this point
00:35:52.400
they're old men and so i think i think the lesson for me there is um you know eumenes i i do like to
00:35:59.040
think that he faced his fate willingly but also you know he didn't have subordinates at that point that
00:36:05.800
were really ride or die with him he was able to command a lot of loyalty through his charisma and
00:36:10.560
his championing of the the cause of being loyal to the dead king's memory but you know when you're the
00:36:16.760
best man on the battlefield and in an organization sometimes you just can't trust the people that
00:36:23.520
aren't ever going to be able to be committed to that cause as much as you are and so i think that
00:36:27.380
was part of his downfall all right let's talk about sertorius so he's the roman in this parallel live
00:36:33.020
who was this guy sertorius you know another obscure figure but sertorius i describe him as the
00:36:40.600
greatest roman rebel so theodore momson this famous nobel laureate winner roman historian
00:36:47.240
characterized sertorius as one of the best of the romans that ever lived perhaps in different
00:36:53.440
circumstances he could have been you know a savior of his country a liberator but sertorius ends up on
00:37:00.140
the losing side of the roman civil war with sulla again this is the generation right before julius
00:37:05.480
caesar and he ends up retreating to spain and in the end of the civil war in italy and holding out
00:37:11.820
for nearly 10 years against general after general that the conservative regime throws at him and so
00:37:19.240
he's an incredible inspiring figure of a will to survive and military competence can you tell us more
00:37:26.420
about what happened when sertorius got to spain like first like how did he end up there and how did
00:37:31.120
he manage to build a power base and hold out against rome for so long yeah so when sertorius
00:37:36.980
retreats to spain basically there's a incredibly bloody civil war going on raging in italy and
00:37:44.560
sertorius is on the populist side of the civil war sulla is on the ultimate conservative side of the
00:37:51.040
civil war you know the old aristocracy well one of the last dying things that the populist senate
00:37:57.720
does before sulla captures the city and has them all executed is they make sertorius a governor of
00:38:04.760
spain they make him a praetor and uh this gives him some legitimate authority i think they kind of
00:38:11.480
wanted to get rid of him because he was complaining he's a sort of junior officer complaining about how
00:38:15.580
incompetently the war effort was being handled so they're like why don't you just go to spain we'll
00:38:19.640
just give you a job to get rid of you and they think that he's you know he's not going to do much
00:38:24.380
good there they're just trying to get him out of their hair but he manages to win a couple of
00:38:29.860
battles against generals that sulla sends at him and he sees an opportunity there because the romans
00:38:36.180
have in spain by that time they don't control the whole of the iberian peninsula they just control
00:38:42.460
the coastline and mostly they're they're kind of exploiting the province for silver mines and plunder
00:38:48.600
this is just you know not very scrupulous administration on the part of successive roman
00:38:54.740
governors and so sertorius is like all right we're going to do this differently instead of
00:38:59.020
trying to exploit the natives and extract their silver to try to fund my roman army so that i can
00:39:06.500
win this civil war i'm gonna build a bridge with them and i'm going to recruit them and i'm going to
00:39:13.200
not just recruit them to you know liberate themselves from the romans i'm going to promise
00:39:19.620
them i'm going to attract them with the hope of becoming true romans themselves so he basically
00:39:27.020
recruits and trains a roman army out of the natives he kind of promises to make romans out of them he
00:39:33.360
trains their boys in latin and greek so he he inspires them with this greater hope of eventually
00:39:39.320
taking back rome and he gets very close to doing that which is a story we'll get to in a second but
00:39:45.140
i think that the way that he builds this coalition is by rethinking that these natives are not they're
00:39:51.380
not a fertile ground for us to exploit but rather for us to make allies out of and you know this is
00:39:57.860
our most valuable resource the human resource of these people that live in this province and he like
00:40:01.920
treats them with respect he has this history of being a spy in the cimbrian wars he went undercover
00:40:09.900
under gaius marius a few decades earlier and you know learned the native gallic language and went
00:40:15.700
incognito and gathering intelligence so he's a very culturally flexible person you know like so many of
00:40:21.400
the great british empire heroes and so that's really the secret to his power is he kind of goes native
00:40:27.940
yeah so he's kind of like he's a fox he's sneaky wily very much i i compare him to the swamp fox
00:40:35.840
francis marion in the uh yeah in the revolutionary war because what what he ends up doing is he not
00:40:42.580
only okay he makes roman soldiers out of them but he adopts a lot of native fighting techniques that
00:40:47.840
they're very suited for which is to say guerrilla warfare so he says here's what we're going to do
00:40:51.800
they're they're going to have the advantage in these pitched battles that happen you know in the
00:40:56.880
plains we're gonna we're gonna go to the forest we're gonna cut off their supply lines we're gonna
00:41:01.620
strike and then just fade into the wilderness and they're just not going to be able to do anything
00:41:06.380
to to stop us and and he's incredibly talented at specifically this kind of sneaky form of guerrilla
00:41:13.380
warfare where you where you're just everywhere and nowhere whenever you want to be and uh you know
00:41:19.400
and because he does this he's able to fight off metellus pious one of the greatest commanders of his day
00:41:24.860
he almost uh cuts pompey's story short as a young man he really like spanks pompey like a school boy
00:41:31.800
with these guerrilla techniques that pompey just has no answer for it's it's an incredible story so
00:41:37.980
what do you think are the the takeaways for us living in the 21st century and not fighting in
00:41:43.260
guerrilla civil wars i think sertorius is and eumenes alike one principle that i see in him is he
00:41:50.960
he's a figure that illustrates how important justice is and legitimacy is when you're playing
00:41:57.080
in these spaces where there's not a lot of law and order and there's chaos you know like like in a
00:42:04.000
disruptive startup maybe or if you're in a place where civil order is breaking down those are the
00:42:10.760
places where justice is rare and all the more valuable if you can embody it and so one of the
00:42:17.660
things that sertorius does is he he says we're not gonna we're not just a rebel army we're the true
00:42:23.380
rome and so he has elections he he establishes a rival senate and he appoints officers he takes the
00:42:30.840
time to really legitimize himself through law and order through justice eumenes has his own version of
00:42:36.020
this as well so that's one takeaway another is to fight with the tactics that advantage you always
00:42:42.160
fight on your own terms you know he knows that the romans have this advantage in uh full frontal
00:42:47.060
warfare but that's not the only way to play you know you can be creative and and use tactics that
00:42:52.120
say you know a big incumbent company is not going to be able to beat a startup on speed and innovation
00:42:59.220
often right they they're very set in their ways they have this kind of slow bureaucracy even though
00:43:04.020
they have maybe unlimited resources there's often a deficit of creativity that allows contenders to
00:43:09.540
get advantages over them in particular circumstances so i think sertorius really illustrates that too
00:43:14.100
so this guy sertorius rose to power but eventually had a downfall too what led to his downfall
00:43:20.000
so i think two things for sertorius one is that it was very difficult it was easy to train the natives
00:43:29.680
to adopt this mode of guerrilla warfare they're kind of used to it they've been fighting freedom
00:43:35.300
fighting you know rebellious war against the romans for decades maybe centuries but his roman
00:43:41.840
subordinates don't like this and he ends up you know he has explicit instructions to his subordinate
00:43:48.900
commanders do not engage metellus or pompey in a head-to-head battle and two times or more this
00:43:57.360
happens and it's disastrous so he has to rely on other people to fight like he does but he can't
00:44:04.080
really convince them they're kind of set in their ways and this ends up weakening his position
00:44:08.680
militarily but what ends up destroying him is a coup among his officers among some of his most trusted
00:44:16.060
lieutenants who were resentful of him again i think you can see this with both you many's and sertorius
00:44:21.920
envy is what ends up bringing them down people think that they could do it as well as he could so sertorius
00:44:28.120
is kind of low born and he ends up getting undermined and assassinated by a higher born man who back in
00:44:36.140
rome would have outranked him but now that they're in spain he's having to take orders from this you
00:44:42.800
know gruff sabine hill country guy and sertorius got intelligence about this man perperna there you know
00:44:50.300
people said perperna is plotting something against you we have evidence and sertorius just didn't want to
00:44:55.220
hear it he didn't want to you know he's an incredibly competent military commander but i think maybe he was a
00:45:00.460
little bit too trusting in politics he just didn't have the stomach for the for really sleuthing out the
00:45:05.680
conniving wickedness of his subordinates and so they lured him to a dinner party started a brawl and in the
00:45:12.500
chaos they stab him it's very very unfortunate and kind of unworthy ending for the man
00:45:18.120
so the way these parallel lives work is like plutarch will spend some time talking about the greek
00:45:23.600
they'll spend some time talking about the roman and then he'll have an ending piece where he does
00:45:28.240
a kind of compare and contrast what does plutarch say about these two guys like does he favor one
00:45:34.460
between the two well i think plutarch's very fair-handed he says that uh eumenes probably
00:45:41.180
succeeded in more difficult circumstances because um sertorius was a legitimate governor of spain
00:45:50.140
and he had you know the legitimacy of uh of the roman roman authority behind him and the natives didn't
00:45:58.780
really have a better alternative than him you many's on the other hand you know had to contend with
00:46:04.180
macedonian egos these great egoistic barons that are commanding armies and get them to follow him
00:46:12.400
which he managed to do plutarch says that's a more remarkable achievement actually but he assigns a
00:46:19.500
kind of moral advantage to sertorius because sertorius when he kept getting attacked in spain
00:46:27.460
by these successive generals that sulla and the regime after sulla died were sending he offered
00:46:32.960
many times over to lay down arms if they would just let him return and be a private citizen and you know
00:46:39.260
never seek office again he he didn't want to keep fighting he didn't want to um to war but he he was
00:46:45.600
constantly refused they said no you'll get no quarter we're gonna hunt you down till we kill you
00:46:50.380
and so he says sertorius is warlike but eumenes on the other hand really did have an opportunity to
00:46:58.460
recede into private life he could have gone back to being a secretary or you know retired to some kind
00:47:05.560
of sinecure minor position of authority and and not gone fighting but eumenes unlike sertorius was not
00:47:12.760
only war like he was a lover of war and i think the plutarch is kind of right there that you know
00:47:18.360
somebody like eumenes really stuck his neck out he really intentionally put himself into a position
00:47:24.080
where he would be commanding armies and and fighting for a cause that he found meaningful and so plutarch
00:47:30.660
sort of prefers sertorius on that count because uh and plutarch's a man of peace he's a philosopher right
00:47:36.980
but he i think he portrays both of them pretty fairly all right so that's that's a taste of what
00:47:41.940
plutarch does in these lives how many parallel lives does he do in the complete work there are
00:47:47.980
a total of i believe it's 48 parallel lives he has a few more biographies four more that are not part
00:47:54.300
of the parallel structure but so there's 24 greeks and 24 romans for those who want to dig more into
00:48:00.760
this do you have a translation that you prefer i have a a rundown on my website on plutarch at
00:48:07.460
costofglory.com it's hard to find a single volume with all of the the lives in a kind of updated
00:48:14.240
modern translation there are older translations available i like the penguin editions they tend to
00:48:19.760
group them by time period so they'll group a bunch of romans around the death of caesar together or a
00:48:25.920
bunch of greeks around the peloponnesian war together i think that's a pretty effective way of reading just
00:48:30.720
you know i do like the parallel structure and the idea of comparing these two figures that are
00:48:36.860
comparable but you know if you're if you're just trying to get your head around the history sometimes
00:48:41.280
it does help to just read a whole series of lives that interconnect very concretely so penguin does a
00:48:48.000
pretty good job there i'm curious do you know of any modern biographers that take a plutarchian
00:48:54.420
approach to biography well i have to say that i i don't know modern biography quite as well as as
00:49:02.380
ancient i've been enjoying brian kilmeade's book on sam houston lately i live in houston texas so
00:49:07.820
you know it's kind of close to home and you know that is definitely a man straight out of plutarch's
00:49:12.940
pages you know it's it's often not the academic historians who work on historical figures but
00:49:19.520
journalists tend to have a more free hand and and taking a a moral kind of self-improvement
00:49:26.380
approach to biography i think of robert green in a lot of ways as a even though he doesn't do
00:49:30.900
biographies he relies a lot on the biographical tradition and he's a great storyteller he's drawing
00:49:35.780
out lessons you know 48 laws of power is good i really like his book mastery my friend ben wilson
00:49:42.060
how to take over the world podcast does a lot of this kind of thing with historical figures but i i'm
00:49:47.940
always open to suggestions i love to find new biographies it's just it's not so much in style
00:49:53.160
right now to to give you the kind of plutarchian snapshot of a person you know so many of our
00:49:58.440
biographies the way that people go about it is they produce these 800 900 page tomes which are um
00:50:04.960
you know very informative but often it's really hard to make it all the way through i find yeah i think
00:50:10.560
the historians who do more like narrative history so i'm the one that comes to mind hampton sides
00:50:16.080
he wrote uh blood and thunder is the biography of kit carson did some stuff about uh the war
00:50:22.500
frozen chosen in north korea he does more of that like he'll tell a great story it's really well
00:50:29.200
researched but then he's trying you kind of get glimpses of these people warts and all and seeing
00:50:35.320
how their character had an effect on the events another one sc gwen he wrote empire the summer moon
00:50:41.720
about kuana parker i think it's another so yeah like narrative history i think did he do stonewall
00:50:46.740
jackson as well yeah he did the stonewall jackson biography yeah yeah you're the second person in
00:50:51.920
this week to recommend uh hampton sides kit carson so i guess i got to get it now it's a good one yeah
00:50:57.240
we got we did an episode on that so uh we'll link to that in the show notes well alex it's been a
00:51:02.160
great conversation where can people go to learn more about the work you do well costofglory.com is my
00:51:08.320
website you can find the cost of glory podcast anywhere you get your podcasts you know spotify
00:51:13.580
apple podcast all the other players youtube i would suggest if people want to get into the
00:51:18.640
the cost of glory or plutarch try one of the more recent biographies i did like uh crassus the
00:51:24.340
richest man in rome or pompey the kid butcher uh caesar's friend and and then enemy those are
00:51:31.740
two that i did more recently i always do them in three parts so start with part one fantastic well
00:51:36.720
alex petkus same time it's been a pleasure it's been a pleasure myself talk to you soon
00:51:41.080
my guest name is alex petkus he's the host of the podcast the cost of glory you find it wherever you
00:51:46.980
listen to podcasts you also find more information about his work at his website costofglory.com
00:51:51.120
also check out our show notes at aom.is slash plutarch where you find links to resources we
00:51:56.660
well that wraps up another edition of the aom podcast the art of manly's website has been around
00:52:07.820
for nearly 17 years now the podcast for almost 11 and they both have always had one aim to help
00:52:13.680
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00:52:18.840
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00:52:23.720
leaving a review or sharing an episode with a friend as always thank you for the continued support
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and until next time's brett mckay reminding you to listen to the podcast but put what you've heard