What it Takes to Rule the World | Ep. 26

today i want to tell you a story and it starts with a passage from homer's heliad [Music] it's the first one we ever did back in episode one we read the iliad of homer remember this is an epic poem and it's a passage from book 20 and this is poseidon the god of the sea and of earthquakes speaking poseidon says now i tell you my heart aches for great aeneas he'll go down to the house of death this instant overwhelmed by achilles all because he trusted the distant deadly archers urgings poor fool as if apollo would lift a hand to save him now from death grim death aeneas the innocent why should aeneas suffer here for no good reason embroiled in the quarrels of others not his own he always gave us gifts to warm our hearts gifts for the gods who rule the vaulting skies so come let us rescue him from death ourselves for fear the son of cronus might just tower in rage if achilles kills this man he is destined to survive yes so the generation of dardeness will not perish obliterated without an heir without a trace dardanes dearest to zeus of all the sons that mortal women bought brought to birth for father now he has come to hate the generation of priam and now aeneas will rule the men of troy in power his sons sons and the sons born in future years so this is the story of aeneas and this passage and the iliad itself is basically the oldest set of stories that we have about aeneas because of course this is the first work of greek literature that comes down to us and today the story that i want to tell isn't just the story of how aeneas founded rome in the great myths he's the mythical founder of this of the civilization that would eventually become rome and i want to tell that story but i also want to tell the story about how this kind of b-list character in the iliad became the official great founder of the roman state and the roman empire it's a really interesting story it's about literature and politics and history and how these things all kind of come together and and what they mean what it means for today the thing that i want to draw out of this that we'll get to as we go is for for our present moment is that the way you think about your founding your distant past the first moment that your nation was formed the way you think about that and the stories you tell about it are are central to the way the present is gonna go you have to respect and love your founding or your nation is going to fall apart that's the argument that i'm going to make but i'm also going to tell you the story of aeneas and how he became the founder of of rome basically the point of all this is the 1619 project right you guys know i've talked about this before on the on the podcast this is this new york times extravaganza i mean at this point it's not even it's just a series of essays it's a curriculum that they teach in schools it's been awarded the pulitzer prize the the founder of it or kind of the architect of it nicole hannah jones has become this major public figure and the whole point of the 1619 project is that our founding america's founding was not just flawed but sort of evil in itself that that racism runs in the dna of america and the way that hannah jones does this this is crucial and people don't pay enough attention to it is not by telling you facts about history because she doesn't know any facts about history as she i mean her own fact-checkers have come out and said that you know that this that the 1619 project is deeply flawed historically but what she is is a master storyteller she's an artist she's an artist of the founding and she's trying to take the stories that we tell she said this especially the stories that we tell about our founding fathers about the men who the pilgrims who knew you know came to this country originally and then the founding fathers themselves who rebelled against england and and created our constitution those people you should try to portray them not as virtuous heroes as kind of actors within this providential story but as rapists and slavers and liars and thieves that's kind of the whole point of the 1619 project and it's at the root of why we're at each other's throats right now why where there are these riots in the streets why people fear civil unrest so much it's because we're being taught to hate the story of the founding we're being told a false story that teaches us to hate the present america america as it is now because the way that you think about the origins of a thing shapes entirely the way that you think about the thing now and so we can get into this story about rome by thinking first of all about our own problems with our founding and thinking about just what the founding of a nation means to the people currently living in the nation because if the very beginnings of the thing that you're doing are wrong then no matter how far you travel from then they're always it's always just going to be growing out of evil basically but if the beginnings are are good and true then you can look back at the founding and say yes this is us and this aeneas became that guy for the romans he became the person that they would point to and say this is the very very first seed out of which sprang the entire tree of our greatness and so in order to understand the aeneid and people don't maybe get this when they first come to this text they think well it's just a big poem kind of like the iliad you know it's an epic poem it's in latin rather than greek but you know it has a lot of similarities to homer it kind of calls back to homer but what people don't maybe get at first before they start cracking the cover of cracking the spine of this thing is that this you have to understand where rome was when this poem was composed so so let's back up and talk about what we know about roman history already from this show and kind of catch ourselves up to the moment when the enid was composed this this is a poem by the way i'll note by by publius virgilius or uh where guilius morrow uh or virgil obviously right virgil's an ego you've probably i'm sure if you've heard about it it's one of the big ones right and so let's kind of think back now to to kind of where we left rome when we talked about the rocky and the battle of actium do you you may remember or you may not maybe you haven't listened to these episodes i recommend them but if not let me just recap right so the cracky we had this story in the 130s and 120s bc rome had these populist uprisings based on the fact of a number of things that their territory had expanded but the middle class had languished right that the sort of senate and the patricians and these very very wealthy people had become decadent had stopped caring about the vigor of rome and instead had been importing foreign labor and basically letting slaves work the land that the middle class should have been able to own and so these it's very similar to our period we have these this class of self-serving elites that kind of they hog up all the power and all the land and then you have this huge tension of just simmering kind of angst from people that feel they've been cheated out of their birthright and this is kind of you know when people start to rally behind things like ubi it's you know universal basic incomes because they feel like they don't have anywhere to go and all these people come out and you know this is where you get demagogues and and populist leaders is that they come forth and they basically say oh all of this anger that you're feeling i can harness it and i can lead this uprising and a crucial thing to remember about that kind of moment which is our kind of moment as well as the roman moment of 133 bc the crucial thing to remember is that that energy can actually be directed in a million different ways some good some bad some kind of in between right because it's not actually in itself a virtuous or an evil energy it's just a response to what's going on which is this kind of decay into oligarchy this decay and to the people who are supposed to be the elites who are supposed to kind of genuinely have merit and rise to the top of society because they are you know extremely wise or extremely cunning and powerful or i mean these these virtues that they're supposed to have these abilities to lead become just kind of naked power they can become power without justification and so when that happens you get a ton people get pissed right and that's what was going on in this moment and and everybody was kind of competing to lead that energy toward their own for their own movement just like right now bernie sanders wants to lead all of the popular unrest just as donald trump actually is is offering something that he hopes can answer the popular anguish about uh immigration and globalism and shipping jobs overseas all that stuff right this this kind of shrieking middle class everybody's competing to lead that and this was happening in rome too and so you had these two brothers tiberius and sampronius gracchus and you know i've told the story at length already so i won't go too deeply into it here but he basically starts these brothers start offering things a lot like the ubi you know these grain rations to just give people the food that they've been denied and because of elite fear of that populist energy tiberius gracias is killed he dies in 133 bc killed by the elites by the senate led by the pontifex maximus and um and then the gaias his younger brother is forced to commit suicide in 121 so but between you know those years 131 to 121 that rome's sort of simmering tensions erupt into just the worst of the worst and after that like went down so this is when there you know there was a hundred years of violent turmoil that are known to roman historians as being you know some of the darkest times in rome's history and also some of the times that you know they were the beginning of the end 133 was the beginning of the end it was like this moment when you kind of lit this spark and then you couldn't control all this energy once once brother starts fighting against brother then you know that that your civilization has really lost the glue that holds it together the civic friendship is what you might call it uh between citizens has dissolved and so there was a there were there were a number of wars that followed the gracie and so now we're getting into new territory we've we've never covered before and we're gonna kind of come back to some of this later but just to recap so that we know or rather to summarize so that we know going in right there was the social war from 91 to 87 bc and this was a war over whether the italian tribes who were allies of rome but not yet citizens whether they were going to get the citizenship so those uh allies were called sookie in latin uh it means sort of companions or allies in in in battle and also in a sort of civilization building and so they they demanded citizenship and that was a a a terribly bloody war over over that rome basically denied them citizenship and then they they just fought this this incredibly expensive war in terms of blood and treasure and toil and again we're going to come back to all this another episode but so that occurs right and then there followed these power struggles between kind of major military statesmen um you have one very famous one is sula lucas cornelius sula felix there's a name to conjure with right he's this general and statesman and then uh his kind of old commander marius and gaius marius um basically they enter into a power struggle that becomes the first really full-blown civil war in rome and so when sula wins uh which is you know he sort of initiates this dictatorship between 82 and 79 bc um the rome has an office of the dictator in times of crisis they hadn't used it since the second punic war since the second war against carthage but they are now basically thrown into this period where in times of crisis they basically appoint a guy and say all right the state is in your hands fix things and then give the power back to the republican system so that's how that whole thing was supposed to work but in fact what ensued was what's called proscriptions now sula basically just decided he was going to purge his political enemies um and uh and and this had happened before marius had already kind of done political executions and so this was starting now again the cycle of violence right one of the things as a side note as a related side not one of the things that most terrifies me about our moment is that you see people saying after we kick out donald trump we have to have truth and reconciliation commissions david hogg the you know the sort of guy everybody likes to to dunk on but he's a he's a kind of gun control young guy at harvard he was saying something something like this you can find other statements like this on twitter right we need we need to basically have uh a reckoning after trump is out it sounds a lot like this and this is not the only time in history this has happened right that somebody grabs control wins a civil war wins a violent conflict between fellow citizens and then says and now i'm cleaning house i'm kicking everybody out and in terms of soulless prescriptions that meant blood blood and more blood and this is uh plutarch whom we've cited before he's this kind of very vivid historian and biographer of rome he says in his biography of sula he says sula now began to make blood flow and he filled the city with deaths without number or limit sula immediately prescribed 80 persons without communicating with any magistrate so complete unilateral action as this caused a general murmur he let one day pass and then prescribed 220 more and again on the third day as many in a harangue to the people he said with reference to these measures that he had prescribed all he could think of and as to those who now escaped his memory he would prescribe them at some future time there's some tremendous arrogance in that right there's uh yeah i've prescribed everybody it's it i not only not only have i prescribed everybody i can think of but they're probably people have escaped my memory and i'm coming for you so that's from plutarch's life of sula and it tells you what a dark time this was in in roman history and it also tells you that the office of the dictatorship like so many other institutions in rome is now falling apart it's being abused you know every office can be abused every human institution is imperfect and if you don't have people in those institutions occupying the roles with virtue there's no substitute for individual virtue and for people having been trained in the righteous traditions of their polity and of their forefathers so if you don't have that then any institution can be twisted out of whack the senate had already become decadent as i've said now at length the tribunes of the plebs had basically tried to you know lead this giant popular uprising and now we have the dictatorship starting to turn into a tyranny into people grabbing power and using it basically in vindictive and self-serving ways so this is all the lead up to the big honcho the big kahuna right julius caesar because we're now getting up to the period at which and again something that we will cover in much greater detail later right but but he did as as sula himself had done he basically gets the army or as much of the army as he can to obey him rather than the officers of state and not so that so it's not rome anymore that's in charge of the military it's it's julius caesar because they have the the army has loyalty to him and he's this character very charismatic very wise not wise but cunning leader let's say um and his his writing on military tactics are incredibly kind of precise and insightful and he basically becomes the unilateral leader of the military power which is another thing that really gets me antsy is when i start to see military leaders as they often do speaking out you know kind of contentiously contending with one another and speaking out against the executive power you don't want that you don't want a military that is its own kind of operative power because the force when in the last analysis right with where the guns are is where the power is gonna be and and so you know when the military starts to be its own entity then you have a serious potential for uh monarchy empire tyranny and in fact worse and so famously caesar crosses the rubicon in 49 bc as he goes over the river and he takes he basically says he says the die is cast as i am now you know leading my own faction essentially against rome we will cover the period this period in greater detail later but suffice it to say that there follows his great nephew octavian right caesar's great nephew adoptive son and great adopted heir rather and great nephew octavian uh and who will also seize control of both the army and the state so so caesar's assassinated in 44 bc there follows everything that we covered with barry strauss you may recall back in episode three i think it was way back in the day we talked about this this power struggle between the various members of the triumvirates and octavian's eventual victory at the battle of actium over his rivals marc anthony and the famous cleopatra right so that's how rome finally becomes an empire octavian is the rome's first official emperor he becomes augustus and so that's how we usually now know him augustus caesar augustus ruler leader of the state and it's now all pretense has effectively dropped the people who have been vying for complete political control without totally being able to say that are now the one of them has come out on top and he he puts his cards on the table and now this is augustus here is caesar rome is an empire take a breath i will pick up the story in a moment but first i will say as i often do great to be here this is so much fun for me to do thank you for listening i love love love how many people are listening to this show i love hearing from you about the show thanks for making this such a blast because as you can probably tell i love nerding out with you guys thanks for listening if you have not already if this is your first episode or you just haven't gotten around to it subscribe to this show wherever you get your podcasts you can do it uh on apple podcast you can do it on google play and stitcher wherever it doesn't matter just you know subscribe so you get new episodes every week right well i'll produce one episode a week and that will be delivered straight to you and then there are some ways that you can really help us this show is growing like wildfire which is awesome and i would love your help in making that happen because it's really a kind of a you know a grassroots movement it's a ground spell right and and i again i so appreciate that if you can leave a five star review on itunes that really helps and then if you can let people know about the show wherever you are on twitter or on facebook and and you know give me a shout out let me let me know that you're listening because i again i really i can't always respond to everybody i love hearing about people watching and listening to the show all right thanks for being here subscribe leave a review let's get back into the story of where rome is at this point so the dust settles right from this from this incredibly tumultuous period that i've just described in a bit of a whirlwind right we've just gone through a hundred years of history of civil unrest in 15 minutes uh which you know that's pretty that's bang for your buck right uh but but okay so now now the dust settles and once once you've done that once you've opened this box of letting civil tensions evolve into physical violence as we are flirting with doing right now i mean we by taking to the streets with weaponry as we are now doing in you know the the riots that followed george floyd's death when you do that you are flirting with a you know with crossing the rubicon to use a cliche right you are flirting with a bridge that you can't go back over it's the point of no return and once that happens then everything changes you know you really have to kind of how do you live together after that is kind of the question that the romans were now faced with right how how do you form something stable because that's all politics is in the end it's how do we live together in a structured way that doesn't lead us to fear constant violence and upheaval how do you create a scenario in which people can build lives that have rules predictable rules to them because the world outside has you know it has the predictable rules of in the sense of the laws of nature but there's no you know that it's human beings who build civilizations and the point of civilizations as as in fact i think machiavelli is kind of good we'll talk later about machiavelli he's good at observing this right the point of of building a government as he said is montenare los tato to keep things in line now augustus was very good at this and this is something because because we're americans and because we hate monarchy as the romans did for a long time right because they kicked their kings out to build their republic we you know we also kicked a king out and we hate monarchy we hate rule by one man and any time anybody starts talking about it an empire we immediately think empire equals bad and i have that intuition as much as the next guy i want to live in a republic that's what i want that's what i think is the best form of government it's the one described in the constitution and i will as they say die on that hill however it's important i think for thinking about the past to let your mind for a second put aside your own native attachments and what i mean by that is it given the period that i am living in and the way that i grew up and the the values that i was taught which i believe to be true and objectively true and universal right given that what i think is that the republic a republic is the best way to govern and that a free people is the people is the kind of populist that you want you have to train that you have to build that up the past is another country and people have lived in a million different ways that are not like ours and actually ours we don't really recognize that anymore ours in america is very rare it's very rare to live the way that we do and in order to really get the wisdom that the past has to offer you have to think your way into the why of of people's motivations and how they how they were looking at the world and so it's important to understand that you know monarchy was not a bad word i mean tyranny had become a bad word and the greeks of course were famous for having the athenians really were famous for having made the the case spectacularly for democracy and and for you know obedience to the law and that is a that is a good thing but there are and this is one of the reasons that we're bad at arguing against tyranny in this country is we've forgotten that there are actually benefits to monarchy monarchy has a lot of a lot of benefits and stability if if you have a monarch who is really in control stability is one of the benefits and i think the romans were starved for stability at this at this point and they there's a lot to be said in this moment for the augustine peace it's called right the peace of augustus and this idea that of competent and clement he was very good at representing himself as kind of merciful by comparison to people like sula right that he was not going to bring fire and sword because he knew that that you know was an unstable way of governing but instead he was going to be clement to his enemies and of course this was in some respect propaganda because he had not you know he had an iron fist on the state but there was a the roman people were at a point where leadership by by an emperor made a lot of sense and was good for a lot of people as in the sense of they they probably you know the people that were on the right side flourished and art flourished this is another thing that is really hard for us to grapple with because we and we actually we have to acknowledge the the temptations that monarchy and and rulership by one person offers in order to argue against it right because what we argue who we who love freedom right we who wish to be self-governed are arguing not that we will always have the most money if we're free or the most you know opulent society if we're free that's not our case for freedom it's not always true monarchy can be very efficient and can be very generative of wealth and it can it can foster a lot of art as we're about to discuss our argument is that freedom is better that we would rather have a scrappy free republic than we would have a sprawling imperial you know dictatorship essentially um and we have to remember that when we're fighting when we're arguing for freedom we're fighting for freedom it may become very important in the years to come having said that the augustine period is famous for a shocking of of art it's really rome's golden age and it's been called that many times it's rome's golden age of culture and it's comparable we've talked about this before it's comparable to greece's victory over persia and the following sort of just bloom of athenian thought and art that happened in this athenian golden age the augustan era is is like that you get rome's really greatest historian livy who chronicles the development of the republic and the you know the out of the monarchy into the republic and the really the vast history of rome you get properties horus ovid virgil these poets yeah and virgil of course is really the most now probably the most famous of them although you've probably heard all of those those names you have these i mean a lot of it happens through patronage which is rather you know a sort of famous way for this sort of thing to to go down um we have discovered you know in archaeological digs we've discovered this villa where a lot of these guys hung out and virgil was was one of the people the the composer the writer of the aeneid virgil is one of the people who would hang out at the the villa of calpurnias piso or paizo you can sometimes depends how you pronounce latin in english but um this this villa it's called the villa of the papyri because it contains this vast library of all this stuff unfortunately it's in herculaneum so it was buried under all this ash uh when vesuvius erupted and a lot but but you know a lot of the books still survive and there's this incredible technological effort going on to uncover them and x-ray them and do all this stuff um if you've ever been to the getty villa out here in california it's modeled after this villa of the papyri and so this is a culture really of you know you wouldn't call it decadent really you would call it luxurious support for the art and it was good for people that that got in the good graces of the emperor and this is you're going to start to see this in the history of rome now after after this it starts to become all about imperial patronage which again is another good argument against this kind of thing is that it doesn't actually lead to universal flourishing it leads to flourishing for the guys that the empire likes for the guys that the you know for the guys that the people in charge don't like eg for example cicero it doesn't turn out so well but you know that's a story for another day i've told that story actually already on this podcast once or twice um augustus was not in favor of what you would call free speech in any meaningful sense of the term and that's another thing again that those of us who love freedom will be sad to hear right he um he one thing that he was famous for having done is exiling off it uh ovid was this great poet of kind of sex and and mythology and and he wrote the metamorphosis which these stories of transformation but also the ars amatoria the art of love and it was it was said it's a little unclear what the circumstances were around of its exile but he says it's because of a poem and a mistake um and so he we sort of think it's because he was basically too sexy for the augustine rain which was one of known for sort of encouraging moral probity and that was part of the kind of orderedness of the reign and it's thought that perhaps ovid slept around with members of augustus family it's also thought of course the you know that this the sauciness of his poetry was too much for this regime to handle and so you know it's not this is not an era where you can say anything that you want and that's going to be important to figure into our discussion of virgil and of the aeneid but what's true is that augustus was wise when it came to art he was shrewd about its role in civilization this is something that conservatives are constantly lamenting they didn't figure out in time the way the cultural power that art has and of course there's a bit of greek wisdom really plato knew that the people that the poets were able to shape the hearts and souls of the citizenry in ways that logic and reason never could because much of poetry much of art is pre-rational or sub-rational it's got this way of infiltrating itself into your into your soul that you know even if you don't agree with the values of a hollywood movie you might still go right and not only will you still go but when you go it'll you'll be shaped in a certain direction because certain things will be portrayed as beautiful and certain things will be portrayed as ugly and that will teach your heart to love and and uh and to hate certain things and augustus knew this he understood it um and he had this kind of cultural minister mycenas that's you know that's a bit of an anachronism to call him that but he he was the guy that augustus trusted to foster artistic talent and therefore win it over to the augustine regime um and what's intriguing is that some of these guys virgil for example seems to have hung out with with epicureans and there's some sense that you know people have tried to argue that maybe epicureanism was a philosophy behind the aeneid i think that there's some argument to be made for that but one one thing to note is that epicurus was famous for having deplored teaching through poetry and wanting to kind of exile homer from the schools and all this stuff but augustus was not like that he was more shrewd and and he you know he got mycenus to befriend both virgil and horus um which is two of the leading literary lights of the day really the two you know the ones who would become greatest in posterity and and that's the context in which the aeneid is written so now we have enough understanding of kind of what's going on to see what virgil's doing with the aeneid right it's it's written bits of it were probably read aloud to augustus um he he it was the great masterwork of virgil's life he wrote many other poems that we still have the george x for example um but but he probably i mean he left it at least a little bit unfinished the aeneid um in 19 bc when he virgil died there were at least lines of verse that weren't complete and and we'll talk in a bit about the question whether the whole poem is is actually unfinished and complete but the the key thing really to know is that that you have two different operators here you have augustus and you have virgil and their goals are there's like a venn diagram where their goals overlap but they're not necessarily the same virgil is a poet right he's he wants to make his name as an artist he wants to create great works especially i think you know he has a fair amount of ambition to outdo homer as we'll discuss further but he's not the same guy as augustus whose job is to keep order who wants to maintain his own power and also the peace of rome for virgil the challenge is write a roman epic for this moment right write something that can do for rome what homer eventually did for athens and for greece more generally this panhellenic you know artifact of cultural triumph that when you have that you know that's a source of great cultural pride you know um and and and and the romans were often kind of looking back they hit at this point they had conquered corinth and the you know many of the greek city states had kind of come under their sway um but there is this let's say conflict in the roman heart between really admiring everything that greece had achieved in terms of philosophy and poetry and art right and also fearing a certain kind of luxuriousness that these greeks were these boy lovers and we talked about this plato's symposium these things are these boy lovers who you know they they had let themselves grow soft and all this art and what's this all about you know and there is a strain a very strong strain of kind of roman traditionalism which rejects that as as corruption kind of um as as this thing that comes across the sea and will soften the manly heart of the roman soldier and the roman farmer because this idea of rome having grown out of these you know huts and people people working the land and they eventually became this great military power that idea is very is very powerful and important for the story of rome and to think of themselves basically as the heirs of that tradition is very important and so there's there's a certain wariness of greek artistic achievement but then there's also this you know this hellenism this love i mean cicero is a good example of somebody that was fascinated by by plato and and the the greek philosophers and really you know everyone in in greece he he writes in cicero writes in his tuscaloon disputations this is book one chapter three he says in in learning indeed and all kinds of literature greece did excel us and it was easy to do so where there was no competition for while among the greeks the poets were the most ancient species of learned men since homer and he had lived before the foundation of rome and archilocus was a contemporary of romulus romulus is another kind of founding figure after comes after ines right we received poetry much later so they think of themselves as having come late to the party basically and horus famously in his epistles this is book two epistle number one uh horace says that that greece conquered captured her savage conqueror that once the romans started taking over greek city-states they became captivated by basically greek culture and life and rome became helena so virgil is kind of looking at greece and trying to figure out what to do with the desire both to outdo greece but also to be uniquely roman specific to this kind of uh again this spare hearty virtue uh you know and rome is trying to recover that because they've just had this seismic transformation right that they've they've gone through this terrible bloodshed and they're they're now an empire they're not a republic anymore and they have this one leader and they they have to find some way of thinking about themselves as still the same guys right it's still the same guys that their forefathers were and and really you know once you've had that kind of struggle over over your how your republic or how your civilization is going to continue uh you're sort of asking well what what even are we and are we any good right and this is why that question of the founding becomes so important right are we are we good can we like what we're doing here and endorse the roman project and so you know this is where augustus and virgil overlap because virgil you know again wants rome to have a great cultural achievement he wants to be the great culture hero of of rome and augustus wants a way of telling the story of rome that will be consistent from the very first days of you know as under the monarchy and then you know triumphing and becoming this kind of republic now up to this augustine moment augustus wants that story a way to tell that story and so aeneas i really think aeneas is like the answer to that question he's the perfect guy to slot into well how are we going to look back on our history and think of our founding and ourselves as good why well i told you the story at the very beginning of this episode about who aeneas was in the iliad he's kind of a second string fighter for troy i mean he's a great hero i shouldn't downplay him but he's no hector right he's not the center of the focus on the trojan side um remember troy was the sort of uh great civilization in asia minor now turkey that that the achaeans who were eventually the greeks were were fighting against troy to get back helen and the trojans in homer as we discussed are noble right they are not the kind of evil eastern enemy they are these very upright upstanding in many ways kind of more admirable than some of the greeks and so there is this kind of great wealth of storytelling that doesn't just go to the credit of the greeks but is part of the sort of story of the world and aeneas you know in in that moment in book 20 he's saved from being killed by achilles who was a far far superior warrior or two and he is and was ready to kill him but the gods save him because he's destined to keep the line of troy going all that talk about keeping the line of darkness and the line of prime alive right that's the story that we have about him in the iliad and there had been a number of other you know retellings of this he comes up again and again and there are all these these tales that after he flees troy he makes his way to italy so there was already this legend that he would he founded livinium it's called um in a place in a region called latium uh which is where we get things like latin right the word latin comes from leicester um and it's it's in this it's to the south of rome so it's not actually where rome eventually will will be um but he he founds you know the story is that he founds this city of livinium uh and then his son sylvia's found alba longa which is another place another city and then out of alba longa come romulus and remus and romulus and remus are the kind of one of the major uh two of the major founding figures of romulus famously kind of found rome for real and so rome has sort of its own story about romulus and remus but then they also have this um you know this kind of story floating around about aeneas after troy making his way to levine and this connects aeneas first of all to the agrarian roots of rome right it makes him a kind of image of those very very first hardy days back before you know back before the great empire emerged there was still this kind of virtue of aeneas and he's even in that iliad passage but also subsequently he's known for piety he's known for uh respecting the gods and for respecting his family very you know urgently respecting his his family and his and his uh paternal line and that's of course another sort of classic roman virtue and and then of course he's also sort of just greek enough and this is you know something that is very delicate because as i said they have this weird relationship to greece um and they they are now going to be ruling all over the world and so they want a hero who can kind of come out of greece but also represent these uniquely roman dice and there was a story that is told in retail by diocese of halicarnassus for example that that the trojans had originally come from greece and so that basically makes rome greek at a distance right greek has this greek um history behind it and that makes it a good candidate to kind of combine all the best things of the world the kind of greek uh artistic achievement and the roman military might and the the sort of agrarian values and honor that all of those things are sort of combined into rome through aeneas um a central part of the story that long predates virgil is that aeneas when troy was burning went back into the wreckage and dragged his father and his son out and with them the images of his household gods these kind of you know the the gods that watch over this particular house right and so this is this perfect image you can see it on vases from great greek phases you know from from way before uh virgil this image of filial piety and that image is central to the aeneid so let's actually read now some of this this great poem um and and i'm going to read actually a number of different translations because we've i've gotten a lot of questions about translation we've talked a little bit about it beowulf talked about different translations but i'd like you to hear all the various you know ways that you can work with the same text so that you can kind of know what some of the issues are um so the first the first one that i'm going to read actually is this fairly recent translation by david ferry and one of the things about translating ancient poetry is that it can be done by sort of academic classicists but also by poets who you know might have a background in inland ferry is himself a poet um and i think you can hear that in his in his work so so what happens is an aeneas tells to queen dido the queen of carthage and we're going to get to her later he tells he re-narrates that whole story of how he kind of went back and this is again this was a story that existed but but virgil kind of dramatizes in this in this fantastic way and so he tells the story about going back as troy is burning he says in misery i make ready this is ania speaking longing for death to fight again for what was else to do what other chance was left my father did you think that i could ever leave you behind how could a father ever utter such a thought as this if it is what the gods desire that nothing survive of what was troy and if it is your will to add yourself and yours to the sum of ruin the gate is open through which the ruin comes pierce this is the son of achilles who rampages through troy pirus will soon be here with priam's blood still dripping from his sword pierce who butchered the son whose father had to watch it done and then he butchered the father at the altar oh gracious mother was it for this you saved me among the swords among the fires to see the enemy come into my house and see ascanius this is his son and my father and my wife slaughtered here each in each other's blood no the last light remaining to me is a summons though we shall die we shall not die unavenged i took up my sword once more in my right hand once more took up my shield on my left arm and was leaving my house on my way to die in battle but there on the threshold my wife was kneeling before me and holding up little euless another word for ascanius to show him to me if you are going forth to die she cried then take us with you to share what fate might be but if you have some hope in what your weapons can do because of what they have done before then wear your armor to guide to guard this house your home for whom are you abandoning your child and your father and her whom you once called your wife so this tremendous melancholy and drama of you know imagining what it would be like to go back into the city where everything that you ever have known is burning to the ground and salvaging what are you going to salvage right that's what this image is about what are you going to carry forth from the old world into the new and and what aeneas ends up deciding and this is another thing that brilliantly virgil imagines this it's like well he takes his father and his son and his household gods in the story but what about his wife and so crayosa his wife basically ends up letting him go basically ends up saying you know the the most important thing is to carry on this paternal line and my son and that you'll have these three generations and she recedes into the flames and and she basically you know lets him uh calls him to go on and and at the very end of this story he encounters her ghost so i'll read this this passage too he says the flames tower high above the burning house and the heat of the burning pours up into the sky and so i go on and once again i see the palace of priam and the citadel and in the empty courtyard of juno's shrine there's phoenix and dire ulysses right these are the greeks right guarding the treasures taken from everywhere looting the looting troy from the shrines that the greeks had set fire to the golden bowls the holy altar tables the stolen holy vestments boys and trembling matrons stand around i wander in the streets in my desperation calling her name creosa creosa calling cryusa cryusa over and over again and as i went among the ruined buildings and through the streets of the ruined city lo suddenly there rose before my eyes the strange magnified image of my wife i was stupefied my hair stood on end my voice caught in my throat then she spoke to me and said words that altered everything for me beloved husband what use is it for you to persist in this insanity of grief what has happened here has happened not without the will of the gods the high lord of olympus does not permit crayosa to go with you to be with you on your journey where you are going long exile will be yours plowing across vast seas until you come to hesperia where lydian tiber gently flows between rich husbanded fields and where you will be happy a king and wedded to a royal wife so her ghost basically lets him go and one of the part of the genius of this poem is that instead of building just a kind of jingoistic purely triumphalist narrative the virgil the way that virgil kind of portrays this is as this wrenching anguished costly thing to found this civilization and why is that so important for this moment in rome well they've just had a wrenching anguish costly 100 years and this picture of this new civilization bought at a terrible cost and and it's it's inspiring because it tells you it you know and this is something that we always get wrong you know we always think that that patriotic literature has to be dumb literature has to be kind of productive and stupid but but no the great patriotic literature all of it if you really go to it it's very weird and melancholy and virgil includes all of the sort of imagery of of melancholy um in this poem and and so you know so here you get a flavor for kind of what he's doing he's he's both acknowledging the pain that aeneas went through to create something great and i think and this is an open question but i believe arguing that it's worth it at the very least he's certainly arguing that it's worth it openly right for for augustus he's arguing yes like you know as far as anyone can tell in the ancient world this is a pro-augustine poem and it's designed to you know uplift the glory of rome now we'll get in a moment to why uh people have thought that maybe that's not the whole picture um but essentially you know what we have here is is this kind of artistic imagining of a mo of what we hope will be the story that basically uh justifies rome in the eye in the eyes of this historical moment so we've talked already a little bit about the kind of relationship with with greece a brief note about the sort of stylistic way that that virgil manages this it's the poem is explicitly a callback to homer and it is part of what will you know what has already become and will then become this great poetic tradition of poets one-upping each other you know you made the iliad in the odyssey each one of them 24 books long well here's the aeneid it's 12 books long and six of them the first six are kind of reminding us of the odyssey these journeys that aeneas has to take to get to where he's going to found to found what will become rome and then the next six are all about war they're about the wars that he has to fight with with tornas and the rutulli um who are his rivals basically for ruling the italian land where he where he ends up and and so there's it's it's a little odyssey and a little iliad and it kind of claims to outdo them both in in some way um it also you know it it it's about as i said it's about half the length so it's it's 9869s 69 lines long total and it has this compactness to it this kind of force and drive which i think is very roman you know the um the greek as a language in and of itself the verb forms kind of sprawl out into these big complicated uh lengthy compounds and and latin is has more of this aspiration artistically to kind of spareness and elegance this kind of um you know only what is necessary trimmed down to this perfect driving war machine essentially the poem gallops along is this war machine the meter is is the same it's dactylic hexameter and it's uh it's dectylic examiner in latin the rules are essentially the same um and as i did this for the uh for the iliad i'll do it also for the aeneid so you can re i'll read it aloud and you can hear a little bit about uh a little bit of what it sounds like in latin and then i'll read the same portion in english this is the opening of of the famous open opening and i'm going to read i'm going to emphasize this is not i don't think quite how you would read it if you were just reading it fluently i'm going to emphasize the rhythm for you so you can hear how this dactylic examiner which remember is duh duh duh duh duh duh duh you have these dactyls and then these spondy's too long da da and you have six of them so it's hoof beats and heartbeats as i always say right so arma wiring so similar rhythm to the homer but different feel right different feel of the language different feel of the of the sort of driving beat here's um our old friend robert fagles who's iliad i read at the beginning and whom i really love he's also done an anion so here's the uh english version of that those first five lines wars and a man i sing an exile driven on by fate he was the first to flee the coast of troy destined to reach slovenian shores and italian soil yet many blows he took on land and sea from the gods above thanks to cruel juno's relentless rage and many losses he bore in battle to before he could found a city bring his gods to lation source of the latin race the albin lords and the high walls of rome tell me muse how it all began so there's you know you could spend of course a whole podcast on just the opening of the thing and you can hear the way that fagles is really focused on retaining some of that rhythm some of those hoof beats and heartbeats whereas fairy's translation is a little bit more naturalistic kind of feels a little bit more like you can just read it aloud um and and you know there's there's lots going on here just in the opening kind of announcing how this poem is going to work one of the key things is that it begins as as you may have heard this phrase before it begins in medias race so you can you can hear first of all the way that the rhythms are similar to those in in greek but that the the latin really kind of drives on a little bit more and has it has i think a really more muscular uh feel to it and then note also that you know there's a there are called there they're both sort of call backs to homer here and then there are ways that it breaks away from homer uh one is that he waits to invoke the muse um and and this the famous sort of um seeing muse maine and naira sing the rage right is sort of the classic homeric opener and this you know virgil kind of waits and he tells you first about the man this is the person the character of this person is the center of the poem um on the other hand it begins in a famously homeric way it begins in medius rest and that's actually horus who kind of comes up with that you may have heard it before begins in the middle of things and the contrast that horus makes and this is kind of interesting we don't note this that much but immediate race is contrasted in horus's rs poetica which is the art of poetry he contrasts it to immediate rest is the opposite of beginning from the egg and and his it's a little joke here on on homer because homer he says horace says homer doesn't begin from the egg which is the egg from which helen emerged she was born out of an egg because her mother lita was basically you know was ravished by zeus in the form of a swan so helen communication it doesn't begin from the egg but of course egg also is sort of this image like the very very beginning um and so in you know in medieval race is the classic homeric way to begin and that is exactly what virgil does he sort of starts us off with the post-trojan war moment and then goes back and the way that he goes back as i've mentioned already is by by telling the story to dido the riveting carthaginian queen she's the one of the most famous characters from this whole spiel right um and and you know she is he basically lands uh desperate and kind of storm tossed he lands in carthage dido picks him up he tells his entire story of the that i've now already narrated a little bit of it of escaping from from troy and they have this uh love affair and and it's basically directed by the gods by weird conspiring so juno is kind of the the great divine antagonist here she's the wife of juno is his hero right the roman name for hira and she's the she's the wife of zeus she's that she hates aeneas because she knows that rome is going to eventually destroy carthage and carthage is this you know civilization that rome had fought dead you know deathly uh painfully with and juno loves carthage presides over it and then and this is something that we haven't talked about but it's very important right aeneas mother is venus venus the goddess of love aphrodite in greek right and one of the reasons that's important is because through aeneas and venus augustus himself can trace his lineage all the way back he traces back through ascanius back to when he is he believes he's descended from or at least he presents himself as being descended from this divine uh lineage and this kind of heroic founding venus and juno team up to cause this love affair between aeneas and dido to happen venus wants aeneas to stay safe so he wants dido to kind of be protective over him and so in love with him and juno of course wants to sort of stop the founding from happening doesn't want the future that she knows is coming to to proceed and and so they they have this kind of clandestine they get married in a cave but like not really there's some question about whether it's official it's kind of it's not totally official it's like hashtag it's complicated between them um and their status on facebook is like we're not quite sure um but so they so they they you know they have this tumultuous passionate love affair dido is a widow before she meets aeneas and is sort of thought she'd never love again but suddenly she recognizes she says i recognize this the footsteps of an old flame i see this coming back to me and so this is all going on and suddenly you know the gods the the sort of you know the gods who are in charge namely zeus at i.e jove in in latin um say this well this can't happen i mean we have a whole program here there's just like something that's got to go on so this intervention of fate uh via by a job and job sends mercury or hermes uh the messenger god to telonius you gotta go man you gotta found this thing and stop like hanging around with this like hot chick um so so that happens and anius goes he he you know follows his destiny is a wrenchingly difficult decision and an extremely beautiful tender tragic moment uh when dido and fury finds aeneas about to leave and makes these accusations against him and so here is um what what she says and this is a you know it must be one of the most famous passages from all of of literature it's inspired a million different uh it's inspired you know opera purcell and we created the opera dido and aeneas and and it's inspired of course you know visual arts just to no end um and so so here's what she said she finds him she assails aeneas this is fagels again she has sales ineus before he said a word so you traitor you really believed you'd keep this a secret this great outrage steal away in silence from my shores can nothing hold you back not our love not the pledge once sealed without right hands not even the thought of dido doomed to a cruel death why labor to rig your fleet when the winter's raw to risk the deep and the north winds closing in you cruel heartless even if you were not pursuing alien fields and unknown homes even if ancient troy were standing still who'd sail for troy across such heaving seas you're running away from me oh i pray you by these tears by the faith in your right hand what else have i left myself in all my pain so this is wrenching because you see the different reasoning that she goes through in each like moment by moment she switches reasons well you can't sail now it's it's winter well you know you you made a promise well you know and and of course this is just this terrible desperation uh in the face of you know inexorable fate and finally all she's left with is her pain she's left with her tears and and here is what aeneas says in response he says i you have done me so many kindnesses and you could count them all i shall never deny what you deserve my queen never regret my memories of dido not while i can recall myself and draw the breath of life i'll state my case in a few words i never dreamed i'd keep my flight a secret don't imagine that nor did i once extend a bridegroom's torch or enter into a marriage pact with you if the fates had left me free to live my life to arrange my own affairs of my own free will troy is the city first of all that i safeguard troy and all that's left of my people whom i cherish the grand palace of prime would stand once more with my own hands i would fortify a second troy to house my trojans and defeat but now apollo's oracle says that i must seize on italy's noble land his lychee and lots say italy there lies my love there lies my homeland now if you a phoenician fix your eyes on carthage a libyan stronghold tell me why do you grudge the trojans their new homes on italian soil what is the crime if we seek far-off kingdoms too so it's it's you know what's really wise and and sort of um powerful about this moment is it's this uniquely human drama between this this woman who's been very wronged and this man who has to make a hard hard choice to do you know at all costs to do what he must even though you know if he had his choices it's not of my will that i head for italy i i you know i would rather not and then you know but of course it's also a drama between two civilizations it's it's rome and carthage standing against one another why do you why do you carthage begrudge us expansion why do you begrudge us more and and so this is where you know this kind of let's say potential immorality right it's it's it you know it's an open question whether what aeneas should do um and and so people have started to look to this into the melancholy of it uh especially in in america really it's really you know in antiquity it was just everybody sort of thought this is a pro augustine poem but in america people started to say well gosh is this some kind of hinting at the the fact that empire is actually bad you know the fact that that this is the rome has essentially betrayed itself and one argument that people make is that dido is basically cleopatra then basically aeneas has a choice whether to be antony whether to act like mark anthony augustus rival who indulged his love for cleopatra and you know loved her till the end till they died or whether he's going to be the ruthless octavian the ruthless augustus who fought against and destroyed who broke the power of anthony and cleopatra and basically aeneas makes the octavian choice he makes the choice of well you know my duty to the gods and my duty to the future is greater than any personal attachment i might have and and we have to sort of we have to kind of wrestle with whether we condone this choice i still believe that we're meant to so what's called the pessimistic reading is that this is a criticism that that many of these things are criticisms of augustus as ruthless as as bloody as the as of empire as this kind of founded on blood basically and i sort of think that what's genius about the poem is that it it acknowledges all of these terrible costs to founding a great civilization at the same time as it says but you know what it's it's worth this is what you have to do and this was i mean as i said this was kind of the reading and antiquity in in modernity because you know we hate empire and because we've seen such terrible in the in the 20th century we saw such terrible excesses of nationalism and patriotism we began to wonder whether it was all worth it and we began to become very angsty about you know there are many passages in the aeneid that just say and especially in book six aeneas goes down to the underworld and sort of sees the future of rome and and the future of augustus is predicted and it just says you know you're going to go for it he's going to go forth and and and crush the proud battle down the proud enemies that he has and subdue the earth and we kind of look at that and we think gosh this can this possibly be an endorsement i think that in the world of antiquity where stability meant so much i you know and and life otherwise was likely to be nasty poor brutish and short i think that there would hardly have been a question for a roman whether that was an object of the utmost importance to achieve this civilizational glory and there is a very very famous passage that i i will now read my own translation just again to give you kind of more comparison there's a very famous passage where where he basically i think says this and this is uh after and caissie's and his father has died he meets him in the underworld and and kaiser says others will hammer breathing bronze more deftly and coax faces out of marble i don't doubt it some will plead course court cases better and trace the movements of the heavens with a pointer predict the rising of the stars but you remember rule the peoples with authority roman these are your arts to impose the ways of peace to spare the conquered and to crush the proud this is what the romans are learning to see themselves as that as they sort of expand outward as they come to as they turn into something new they have to find some way of being proud of themselves and this is you know a pretty fair way for them to do it the virgil is kind of saying be at peace with this yes the greeks better astronomers better philosophers that all of this kind of fancy stuff that other civilizations can do he's saying you romans this is a hard thing it's not a thing that's going to make you you know beloved by all and it's not something that is going to come without terrible personal cost but but you are the civilization builders of the world and this is i think really what virgil is doing here he's basically putting into aeneas all of the pain and all of the glory that comes with rome's current cultural moment now leave aside for a second whether youth you know whatever your opinions are of augustine rome and of the idea of empire right it's it's urgent for a civilization to be at peace with itself it's urgent to have this way of telling your story and and this is why i get so down on the 1619 project right it's not that the thing is about it's not about facts and and again as i said hannah jones has said this she's said you know i'm writing this thing not as a history but she says as an act of journalism i think it's an active narrative right it's going to take the the american founding which was this providential larger-than-life moment this incredible miracle that these brilliant statesmen founded what would become the freest nation the light of the world really you know the freest nation on earth and she takes that and says well but they it wasn't perfect and there were you know there was slavery which of course was this terrible moral stain on the country and because of that she's telling us the story as if that were the whole story and this is why when people like you know when trump for example does this he has this commission for patriotic education you know that is so crucial that to look back on your founding and in our case it's i have full confidence it's a true story when trump stands in front of mount rushmore for a fourth of july speech and he tells us that this is a great nation that's the truth that's the true story and and it's it's so crucial the reason that we're all at each other's throats right now is because that story is under attack and when that story is under attack it's not just that you you know lose the story that you were told in history class as a kid it's that you lose your sense of yourself as part of a great experiment as part of a great endeavor and and so to the reason that the times and nicole hannah jones are going after the founding is for that reason they know that that's how to unmake the country she said proudly that the riots in the streets are her riots they're the 16 19 riots and so this you know and and i turn to virgil now as a contrast the kind of flip side of that right because what virgil is doing is he's taking that that all of that darkness and pain that is in his all human history is sinful all human history is tragic and flawed and he's saying and yet look what emerged look what came out of it there's a moment at the end that this is the last bit i'll read and i'll read now from a new translation by len chrisseck which is rhyming so it's kind of a different take on the whole thing makes it more of a expressive poem at the end when aeneas had to fight to found his city he has you know he he faces his rival tournaments and turnus begs for mercy and it's unclear whether this is supposed to be the end or not but what happens is aeneas sees the armor that turns right it's kind of a you know a quotation or like a an imitation of the relationship between achilles and patroclus and so aeneas had palace this ward whom he loved whom teres has killed and he sees the armor that ernest is wearing and he says aeneas stands armored fierce with glinting eyes he holds back swayed by turnus more and more moved by the speech he's made till he detects young palace luckless sword belt stone bossed shoulder high on turnus and to all well known so turnus wears the baldrick of his now dead foe the man he wounded drove to earth and there laid low but when his eyes fix on that spoil that memory of cruel grief aeneas burns ferociously shall you escape me in the spoils of someone who was mine it's palace palace sacrificing you with this with your own guilty blood now you will pay and as he speaks he drives his sword in all the way till turner's chill limbs slacking at the lethal blow groaning his bitter soul fled to the shades below virgil leaves us with this and i'm not going to try to resolve whether there was meant to be more and then when he died when virgil died maybe it was you know it was he meant to add more but people have used this to say well this is the shows that empire is evil that it's all just bloodshed i i don't think that's right at all i think that this is that i think that this is a complete picture and it's not pro or anti-augustine exactly it's a complete picture of where of who rome is and where she came from and what it means in a world of bloodshed as the ancient world was what it means what the cost is of making peace that story telling the story of your founding in a way that you can be proud of is the only way that a nation can survive and so it's why conservatives have to pay attention to things like the 1619 project and do everything they can to tell the true the great story of our founding because we're not even thank god we're not even at the point of of rome when it had its empire right we are at still have this fragile this precious republic so few such things have ever existed in the history of mankind and to to pretend that its founding was a work of evil is to try and unmake the greatest thing on earth so i is my firm and passionate wish that we not let that happen all right that's the enid and its relationship to us and to rome let's do the mailbag i have a bunch of great mailbag questions these also often come to me through twitter so that's where i'm going to read them off now if you have medical questions a great way to do it is just to tweet them at me with young heretics and so i would like to answer a question here that i really find interesting that is important for this very topic quattro jones at quattro jones on twitter says how do we reconcile the clear injustices of the feudal system with the amazing works and culture specifically ours that rose out of it so he's talking here about feudalism which is not an ancient thing it's it's a you know just before the really the renaissance you have this long kind of period so throughout the early middle ages and and in some cases you know even on after that in russia for a long time you have you have sort of feudal system which gives you these feudal lords and then these surfs these peasants that work for them and so he's saying look this period produces so much feudalist societies right there's not a period so much as a kind of society and feudalist societies we deplore them but they produce things this is exactly the complexity that i was talking about i was talking you know earlier about the fact that augustine rome was the golden age of rome for art the the reason is that our if if the pitch that we're making for freedom is that it produces stuff that it will give us wealth or it will give us you know good art or it will give us fancy you know i do believe that eventually free societies produce great things and of course america has produced more wealth for more people and more freedom for more people than any other nation in the world but that can't be the reason why this is a crucial distinction there is a you know there are positive byproducts of republics but republics are not the only things that can produce positive byproducts so look you know people are fond of saying that in dictatorships the trains run on time you know and that there are things that are good people that people like let's say about having a kind of big government daddy to take care of them right and this is in the book of exodus when the people say you know they've been freed from slavery by god through moses and they say we wish that we had died in egypt when we were slaves because then at least we had food and drink right so people you know there are there are things that people can get out of even the most corrupt arrangement so our argument for republicanism and freedom can't be that it produces good things there are other ways to produce good things our argument is that freedom is a good per se that the true republican liberty which is liberty under the law is not pure licentiousness not just do whatever you want but a society governed by the rule of law is ennobling and your virtue and your nobility are are allowed to flourish in that society and yes whether you get all the good stuff after absolutely well that will that produce a flourishing of art of course you know there's plenty of great examples of republican society florence is a great example of republican societies that you know that produce great stuff it's not about that it's about the fact that great stuff comes in all you know from all kinds of government but the reason to be free is because it is what you were made to be i hope that answers the question um and i believe it very firmly all right that's the end uh if you like this show as always go ahead and check out the claremont institute where i work they are very very gracious to let me do this passion project and the claremont review of books and the american mind are two wonderful publications that i work for it's a great time to be donating and if you do go to claremont.org donate say in the notes that you found claremont through young heretics that will make me very happy and thanks again so much for being with us we will see you next time for more truth beauty and the stuff that matters you

Channel: Young Heretics

Views: 3,151

Keywords: western literature, western culture, what's so great about the west, podcast, spencer klavan, spencer klavan podcast, young heretics, young heretics podcast, young heretics with spencer klavan, conservative podcast, literature, great books, classic literature, literary studies

Id: mo6lCJYajqI

Length: 75min 29sec (4529 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 11 2020