hello everyone and welcome back to conversations with tyler today my guest is shoddy bartsch who is a professor of classics at the university of chicago she has written very well-known books on seneca on lucan and perseus and her latest work is a wonderful translation of virgil's the ayanid and she has another book coming out on political thought about the classics in china shoddy welcome thank you so much tyler
i'm excited to be here now when i read virgil i see so many visual representations of history right there's the temple of juno there's palace's belt the ivory gates of the underworld the natalist relief the shields in the alienate how do visual representations differ from literary representations of history that's an excellent question but before i try to answer it i'll just quickly say that the usual pronunciation is anaed
rather than a anid okay so one of the interesting things about all the visual representations of history that are described in the poem is that they all have viewers and the viewers consistently misunderstand what's going on in the picture that they see and so there is a tension between the forward-driving apparently pro-empire vision of the anaed although my own perspective is that it's not what it has taken taken
to be there's a tension between that and the confoundment of its protagonists as they look at the history in front of them i'll give you a few examples when aeneas lands in carthage which is an area hostile to the trojans he sees on the walls of juno's temple a a big freeze of the trojan war and he sees the trojans getting whacked as they did during the trojan war and instead of saying oh my god here we are getting defeated this is terrible
what kind of a person would put this on their temple he turns to his companion and he says look they love us we're here already you know i think we found safety whereas the correct response would be to say i think we have a little problem here um another example is when anaes himself picks up the ginormous shield that has been made for him by his stepfather vulcan that contains the whole history of rome past and present
and future virgil tells us that he looks at it and picks it up but he has no idea what it means and then in other parts of the poem where we're shown historical events for example in the conversation aeneas has in the underworld with his father we're given a very particular view of roman history one that for example leaves out such important events as the fratricide that started the um the city of rome romulus killed remus when remus tried to
jump over his city boundaries and mock them so um either folks don't understand or they're seeing something that's very altered from historical reality and this all goes back i think to show us that poetry itself as a form of art is not to be taken as reflecting history or trying to say something true about the political situation of the day so is the ultimate vision of the work one of a forward moving history or that we're doomed to a kind of
cyclical repetition definitely a forward moving history so um what virgil does under augustus is instead of write an epic about augustus which would be seen as political pandering he goes back and he writes an epic based in the distant past about augustus's putative ancestor aeneas and he shows aneas leaving troy and having many adventures and finally landing in italy uh killing a lot of native italians and setting up
the the city that eventually will be rome people have taken this to be a pro-imperial forward movement of a group coming in from the inside and taking control of somebody else's land however this forward-looking movement is radically undermined by the poet himself who does things like instead of showing us one version of history or one aeneas shows us the many different stories about aeneas that existed before virgil wrote his version
virgil's version became canonical but if you know anything about his picking and choosing you know that he's consciously marking his own path through different traditions and showing that his own work is one out of many possibilities for the depiction of rome's growth so it's not really ideological it's more saying hey um the story the victors tell is always made out of a selection of options right and even though i'm selecting some
of these options you know calling aeneas a good guy when he used to be a bad guy for example i'm also showing you the negative options so that you can see for yourselves how history is constructed the ideological methods through which a positive history of an event is constructed was t.s eliot correct that this poem was the first one sympathetic to the christian mind as he put it or is that just nonsense
um that i'm afraid is more or less nonsense so ts eliot was writing his his two essays about the unaided and the christian world after the end of world war ii when there was a real sense that um the civilized world which he equated with christianity and obviously did not equate with the nazis or the japanese the civilized world had triumphed and that its values could be traced back to the aeneid even though that was the pre-christian
text those values could be traced to that poem for two reasons one because on the surface aeneas is called a pious hero he gives up his own personal desires to follow the destiny that the gods have mandated for him so he's selfless in a sense right and this resonated with some ideas about christianity the second reason is that virgil also wrote a poem called the fourth eclog in which he speaks very mysteriously
about a child that will be born who will start a golden age and um will change the world from a world of war to a world of peace and all the early christians left on this and said that virgil had had a premonition of christianity and that this was the christ child coming from a half iranian background how do you feel that leads you to read the classics differently that's also a great question so i'm half iranian and half swedish and
um uh my one of my first languages was in fact farsi and then i became fascinated with the classics i ended up doing an undergraduate classics major the faculty all said oh go to grad school i went to grad school at that point you're stuck you have to become a classics professor um and it was very weird because i knew a little bit about the greeks from the persian perspective and now i was reading about the persons from the greek
perspective and they're both treating each other as barbarians you know um the barbarians are fighting us they want to destroy our empire which represents civilization at its peak is the same thing you hear on both sides and i think that made me very aware of the fact that most most political parties most ideologies most governments use very similar rhetoric to represent utterly different situations but that's because there's basically an
agreed on rhetoric of what it's good to claim you stand for everybody wants to stand for progress goodness fairness or if not fairness at least correct hierarchies doing good for the people etc nobody stands up and says hey i'm so-and-so i'm a tyrant i kill small children for fun and i toss them in the kuiper river so um the sameness of those claims following very different governments became to me something a fascination and it's also
something you can see in the cities where um in book three section 82 he talks a lot about how language changes in war and how um certain terms are used that sound good but really cover up unpleasant realities it's a very old theme in book six why is virgil's underworld so much busier and more bustling than homer's you have a literal parade right yeah the problems feel so empty and lonely in the odyssey
well homer's underworld is a place where the um the heroes who have died in the trojan war are flittering about wishing they were still alive it's definitely a gloomy lonely situation virgil's underworld at least the part of it that is elysium where aeneas's father is currently living is a place where souls are put into bodies and then sent back up to the real world to be figures in history so virgil's uh anaes's father says
things like oh look it's poppy he's going to go up and he's going to be a great general oh look it's um scipio africanus he will defeat so-and-so oh my goodness here's marcellus so yes it's very crowded and it's um supposedly a view of all the great heroes who will come after aeneas but as with everything in virgil there are problems in the text that completely undermine what is going on so just one example in this highly
ideological forward-looking passage in the underworld ankisis tells his son aeneas that the romans will be descended from aeneas's son sylvius his second son in book one when jupiter is making predictions about the future of rome and jupiter is after all a big god he says the romans will be descended not from sylvius but from anaes's first son euless okay who cares right the romans are coming they're from euless or they're from
sylvias well actually it's a huge deal in virgil's own day because julius caesar and his uh adopted son augustus traced their heritage back to um uh aeneas and behind him to venus through euless right euless julius
that that uh similarity of names is part of the evidence on which their claim to go back to venus lies however if all the romans come from silvias right that's nothing that goes julius caesar silvius aeneas because it has to be euless for
euless so in fact the epic presents two completely competing but equally authoritative claims for whether or not julius caesar does go back to aeneas and venus was in kaiser's correct to predict that the romans would not be so very good at art you do ask good questions um yes and no he was correct in that the romans never wanted to characterize themselves as being good at art that was a fancy greek thing you know like literature
like astronomy all those greek arts the romans were going to be good at war and at settling down customs in new countries and of course at building um aqueducts and things like that however virtual's own poem is a account of counter evidence for that in that um as an object of art itself um it has been taken up and treated as a masterpiece for thousands of years and also in that virgil shows us sometimes in the poem
that ignoring art or not knowing much about art can be detrimental for example rhetoric is an art and the trojans swallow everything that the greek liars tell them because they're not well versed in these arts so for their own sake they had to become better is virgil in fact the greatest political philosopher of ancient rome i will pause for a second over that one so you're leaving out the greeks which helps me answer the question
um [Music] i have a feeling i'm gonna get a lot of flack on this but i would say i would say yes um because um like aristotle he understands that sometimes poetry is truer than truth and also because he manages both to represent a political ideology and to show how a political ideology is created at the same time thereby undermining what he's shown us how to do and i think that is very interesting he also lets us see how um
possibly at augustus's insistence um the figure of aeneas the hero is changed from somebody who was did not have a good reputation in fact in some of the earlier stories he was the traitor who betrayed troy to the greeks he shows us how this figure is transformed in his own poem to a heroic figure so it's just as if we were to say um gosh you know um let's think of mussolini you know the fastest fascist mussolini with a dubious history
suddenly uh becomes in power and at that point all the stories being told about mussolini are stories of victory and goodness and the triumph of the second coming of rome and so forth and then once he's gone that all becomes critical again so the discourse is always uh dependent on who's got the microphone at the moment as it were now you may not agree with this but many readers i speak with tend to think that
homer is somehow deeper more mystical or just more fun to read than virgil what accounts for that perception and how might you challenge it i think they think that because both of homer's epics are not per se about politics or governments they don't offer etiologies of a state they don't talk about history they are stories in the true sense and they're about heroes in the true sense not about some guy who's pushed around the world by the gods
constantly getting into trouble crying um wishing he didn't have to go found rome etc so you know achilles figure larger than life his pride is everything to him he stops fighting in the trojan war because he's been insulted and the drama is what compels him to go back into battle after the insult odysseus a fairy tale of a man wandering from island to island meeting ever stranger creatures but eventually making it back home it's
it's a great yarn um you don't have to learn history to read these you get involved in the psychology of the characters their tragedies and their triumphs um nobody is really interested in getting involved in the psychology of the state and its triumphs so on the one hand you've got a poem that's an etiology for a particular government and on the other hand you have two amazing stories and i can see how reading the innate would be considered
duller for some now at least superficially it feels like quite a masculine work but if you look at the recent reinterpreters there's your new translation which i thought was wonderful sarah rudens which is quite good margaret drabble covers virgil right uh a.s byatt ursula le guin writes the tale of lavinia why is it women who are redefining the apparently masculine virgil well that's not very hard to answer um
in all these epics what you see is um the silencing of women's voices and you don't see it surreptitiously as in women don't appear so you don't think about them you see it explicitly right so um lavinia whom ursula le guin gives a voice to doesn't get to say a single word in the united all she gets to do is blush once right and this is the woman who is going to be uh the mother of the roman people um uh dido gets plenty to say
but aeneas contradicts all of it dido is aeneas's lover and tells her she's making a big fuss over nothing and leaves however if you read the poem carefully what aeneas says to dido the masculine voice reproving the feminine voice is actually incorrect one example he tries to sneak away from carthage without her knowing she finds out she says to him why did you try to sneak away from carthage without my knowing
he says to her are you accusing me of being a sneak i've never lied to you never and i wouldn't ever and the reader says but you just did dude you just did um and there are other instances like that historically speaking the male translators of these epics haven't had a particularly sensitive ear for moments like that right instead it's always dido being hysterical died of being mad because her boyfriend left her
dido being a woman and a north african a a woman from phoenicia and you know those those um those faithless phoenicians there's an expression in rome called punica fides it means uh punic faithlessness essentially
and um for all these reasons it's easy to read dido is kind of a stereotype of the mad eastern woman or cleopatra reborn or what have you but that's not how virgil treats her and even among the gods juno the goddess of marriage says dido
and aeneas are married even if venus says no they're not and so when aeneas says to dido hey i never married you it was just sex okay um and dido says what no we were married which is a conversation that has taken place through all of history probably um they're both right right so an important thing for me was to bring out the the truth telling and the authenticity of these women's voices and even when a woman actually does go
crazy like ahmada um the mother of lavinia virgil shows us the evil forces that come down and penetrate her and make her mad the furies um like snakes slithering through her body so in the end what you see are women being silenced by the gods by the narrator by men but they're still there and it's almost like they're waiting to have their voice given back will newly composed very long poems ever become culturally central again
no why not harry potter books are very long right they're often quite boring people read them avidly they read them madly because they don't think they're boring um i don't read harry potter books um because i think they're great for the imaginations of maybe a younger generation than myself um poetry reading poetry uh is an acquired taste and the way education is heading these days um that kind of patience and that kind
of sympathy for texts written in other registers texts that need translations texts that seem to talk about archaic values or values that have out that are out of date i don't see much patience for those um coming back in the future unless things change radically if you had to learn latin from scratch which method would you use the method i used which is i bought a teach yourself latin textbook and i taught myself latin
finally when i started taking a class it turned out that it went much more slowly than the i was going with a textbook so it was a bit of a disappointment but say you were doing it now i mean would you get online and have zoom calls with monks or or not i would not because um there's not much value for most latinists in latin or spoken ancient greece because greek excuse me because that's not how they're taught there there are a
few people who teach them as spoken languages and i think they are still spoken on some occasions in the vatican but um who would i speak latin too there's nobody around right where oni taught it as a written and spoken language which is why it's so effective to do it with a textbook and you don't need an app on your iphone to do it i did take eight years of mandarin and there i would say do not try to learn mandarin using a
textbook you absolutely must be in a classroom with a native chinese speaker or what comes out of your mouth will not be mandarin it will be something that nobody will understand or worst case scenario it'll actually mean
something but the wrong thing and that happened to me many times before i started classes and i was just teaching myself by reading one of the expressions i thought i had learned was excuse me and when i said it in china people would
jump and look at me suspiciously and it turned out i found out later that i wasn't saying excuse me i was saying please smell me that's the kind of mistake that's possible from reading the romans what why what might we learn about the psychology of power that we don't already know the psychology of power well i think the way the romans brought their religion into the psychology of power um was fascinating and perhaps a bit
alien to us so roman religion religio actually represented a kind of binding contract between the gods and the mortals and it was very much a quid pro quo relationship i'll give you x you'll give me y so i will sacrifice 10 cows for you and take the auspices and um consult with you while i'm doing this about whether or not we should invade um uh spain and um if the the idea is if the sacrifices are done
correctly and the auspices are good what we're doing in invading spain is a just war because the gods have allowed it to happen and they've nodded at it so every time before the romans went to war they would make sure that they were told by the gods that it was a just war so that they could proceed with impunity and if um the omens they got after the sacrifices when they opened the animals up were bad omens instead of saying oops
we better not invade spain after all they um would simply do the procedure again until they got the answer they wanted and i think that's a pretty interesting way of tying religion to your political bandwagon there's also a famous story about a a roman general at a sea battle who had sacred chicken on his boat and um he threw grain to the sacred chicken and how the chicken ate the grain was supposed to be either a good omen or a
bad omen as to the upcoming naval battle but the chickens refused to eat anything so he lost his temper and he shouted if you won't eat then maybe you'll drink and he threw them all overboard and he lost a naval battle of course when reading seneca how is it that brings out something of the performative and perhaps also hypocritical elements in stoicism ah and are those essential to stoicism or is it just that seneca ultimately was
a deviant from his own philosophy so this is such a complicated issue there are some reasons people think seneca was a deviant from his own philosophy um he was extremely rich one of the richest men in rome he practiced in usury and um made tons of money off the british at the time or the island of britain i should say he um was a tutor and then an advisor to the emperor nero until nero advised him to kill himself
in 65 supposedly for participating in a plot against nero which he probably didn't and um and yet he wrote all these works touting the value of not caring about money not caring about politics not caring about influence not caring about your reputation and so forth um what i like about seneca is all these things he writes he never he never says i've accomplished them he says it would be great if we could accomplish this and i'm
trying but he never says i've succeeded so people don't like him because he failed you know if you look at another figure another great moralizing figure if you look at jesus christ for example he lives the life he preaches seneca does not live the life he preaches but some of the things he says are very interesting and valuable nonetheless for example the idea that too much emotional investment in things that aren't worthwhile
are simply damaging to you uh he uh i have a great example for how to think in a in a stoic way that isn't a deep example but it's helpful to show how stoicism can help and i'm not going to talk about the deaths of family or really serious stuff like that but let's say you're driving down the road obeying all the traffic rules and signals and all of a sudden a car comes out of nowhere and it's going a hundred miles an hour
and it almost takes your door off before it screeches into the distance and you're angry or upset this person almost killed you you're shouting you're saying what kind of a maniac did that and then seneca says if you feel like this tell yourself a different story he says wave the wand of hermes actually it's epictetus's phrase but wave the wand of hermes over what just happened in other words recast it so what you do
is you say to yourself in that car there was a very sick child and his frantic father was trying to get him to the er as fast as possible you know weeping half out of his mind and then you don't feel as angry anymore
you don't know if it's true or not but it's a possibility so the other thing i want to say about seneca and stoicism is that in his letters and essays yes he argues for the benefits of stoicism don't invest too much in your loved ones
learn to separate yourself from worldly concerns if you go bankrupt don't be unhappy etc etc in his dramas it's a completely different story he repeatedly for example in the thyestes um shows people who seem to be trying to
be stoic but they all fail for one reason or another and the thyestes thyestes is exiled from power his brother atrius holds the kingdom thyestes is living in the countryside with his children supposedly eating grubs and sticks and
acorns and he keeps saying isn't this wonderful i love this simple life poison is only drunk out of golden cups nobody puts poison and earthenware that kind of thing and then his brother invites him to come back and share power and thyestes isn't that interested you know he's learned to be a good stoic but his kids are like daddy daddy we don't want to eat acorns anymore we want to go back and have a good life so he
gives in out of love for his children he fails in stoicism he goes back and takes up the throne again with atreus on them and on that very same evening he looks around can't find his kids asks his brother over dinner where his kids are and his brother starts cackling and he says they're very close to you and diaste says what do you mean and atheist says ha ha they're in you i just fed you your kids right now that is a pretty grim story and um
the other ones are equally grim people die horribly nobody gets to live the good stoic life in the dramas so was seneca torn between his vision of a peaceful and painless life or did some part of him know that ultimately no human being is strong enough to actually be a stoic why does reading lukan's the civil war make more sense in 2021 than it might have 30 years ago to me it seems remarkably contemporary
more than virgil people are crazy they're at each other's throats right but not really for any good reason ah lucan is um lucan is very much after and in response to virgil and he reads virgil as saying the possibility of the good state the good empire is a real thing and what lucan says is no that is never possible there will always be men grubbing for power and killing each other and civil war is frankly a condition of
life the condition of history and right now i'm writing under nero um who is not a good emperor emperor i'm writing about the events that led to nero coming to power and i hate them they are they're terrible people lied to each other brothers killed brothers um friends slashed each other in the face all for political reasons people use language again incorrectly to distort what they meant and now and that and then here's the rub because
i'm writing under nero and because nero is one of the bad emperors i can't complain about writing under nero i have to praise it otherwise i'll get in trouble so you get this beautiful um juxtaposition of a poet starting out his poem with almost over-the-top praise oh nero you're going to heaven and you're going to be a star in the constellations there's never been anybody so wise as you civil war was worth it if you were
the outcome and then the rest of the poem is this blastering indictment of the present which is the present under nero right so by indicting the present but praising nero he effectively shows us that his praise is false but that false praise is what everybody has to engage in in a world where there's no freedom and maybe that is what seems topical to you or maybe it's just about fake news and you see luken as writing fake news in
the beginning of his epic i think the lack of obvious self-interested motivation for the polarization is what strikes me as so contemporary about lucan so it's not it's not primarily about rent seeking there's simply some logic of escalation that never stops now maybe at the end of the poem there's a return to sanity in some ways but there's still this total immersion in violence and the dynamics of that the non-or non-rationality or
a-rationality it struck me if i had read lucan in 1991 i would have been quite puzzled like this is something of you know antique interest but i read it today i'm not so pessimistic about the western world uh but it seems to hit much closer to home why is that sorry you're supposed to be asking me questions why does it seem to uh strike closer to home to you now there seems to be a logic in contemporary politics
where people take opposite sides of an issue because other people have taken aside they don't necessarily care anymore what it's about uh this may have moderated in the last few months but there was a sense you know if trump tweeted some view about turkey some people would agree and other people would take the other side whether or not they had opinions about turkey absolutely the polarization of political
views that is completely in lucan everything is binary right both sides are at each other's throats the problem is neither side is good they're just both opinionated and um yes he constantly shows us horrible meaningless scenes of butchery which um will never lead to anything meaningful and i think in that sense yes it's an interesting comparison to what happens today another interesting thing that he does is that even though
um everything has been boiled down into them versus us or actually them versus thumb because there's nobody good in the epic except for cato who ends up dying [Music] even as he takes on so serious a subject he refuses to partake of its seriousness in a way and what i mean by that is that his battle scenes are ridiculous they're not realistic um here's an example you're fighting for julius caesar and you're on a boat and you're trying to
get onto a boat that belongs to pompey so you grab it with one arm as it goes comes by but the people in poppy's book chop off your arm so then you grab it with your other arm and then they chop that arm off so then you've got no arms so what do you do well lucan says you just log yourself onto the boat armlessly and hope that you can make a difference that way there's arms and legs flying everywhere and it's you know in
in virtual or homers somebody stabs you you groan blood comes out you die in luke and you just bop around like a puppet losing limbs and legs so that's very strange and how do lukan's book six underworld scenes revise those uh virgil's book six underworld scenes right that's surely not a coincidence uh not a coincidence but he makes it grotesque instead of uh anaes going down to consult his father you have pompey's son going down
to the underworld to consult a witch ericto and she asks one of the dead to speak but before the dead will speak she has to feed it blood and then what it says is completely unintelligible and then it it heals over again and dies again um so um it's a scene of um what's the word it's a scene of the grotesque it's a grotesque reading of the underworld that refuses to put truth value prophecy or anything in there except for decaying bodies
now if we try to map out roman political thought in our mind you have a view of virgil how lucan relates to virgil but ovid had the metamorphoses how does that complete the picture put those pieces together for us this is really difficult homework i'm getting this morning put the pieces together okay virgil who very carefully writes an epic that seems to be supportive of power but actually isn't lucan who writes an epic that's more obviously
not in sort and support of power and who ends up along with seneca having to kill himself order to you by nero right either nero didn't like the epic so much or he wasn't happy that lucan was conspiring against him as the story goes avid between virgil and lucan um avid just wants to have fun right so he's not talking about politics unlike the other two he's talking about love but i don't mean romantic gooey
love he's talking about roman love so he talks about in the metamorphoses um gods uh raping woman or changing them into trees or cows or what have you he's very irreverent which is one of the reasons he gets exiled by a justice and never gets to come back there is one thing he does that might be relevant in this particular conversation which is that he takes up in books um 13 and 14 of the metamorphoses and also in heroic seven which is a poem
shaped like a letter written by dido to anaes he takes up virgil's treatment of the dido aeneas legend and of ineus himself and he pushes back against it he refers to the tradition in which aeneas is actually a traitor of rome and he suggests um that dido was right to be angry at aeneas and that she wasn't crazy she was in fact a very nice woman to whom terrible things were done so he's already pushing back against
augustine propaganda in various ways and then all his books about how to seduce women or people having sex or whatever all of that goes against the um the new um ethical standards that augustus was trying to establish with his marriage legislation legislation so um avid does not toe the line and he doesn't talk about politics he talks about sex he talks about violence um he overturns kind of vergilian piety and
audi goes off to thomas on the black sea never to be seen again okay are you ready for the easy questions yes we call these overrated versus underrated here's the first one the food of fiji overrated or underrated well i don't like lobster and shellfish so i would have to say overrated do you like coconut milk it's fattening etruscan civilization overrated or underrated ah underrated we don't know enough about it it seems to be fascinating
the romans probably got their skills of augury um telling the future by you know by looking into animals or observing the flight of birds from the equestrians and a lot more but there's so little left of the etruscans henry purcell the english composer overrated or underrated ah i will say underrated only because i obsessively listened to dido's lament from dido and enes and every time i get to the line
remember me but ah forget my fate i burst into tears which i'm about to do now so yeah that's a very moving um uh aria for me i'm not sure of the pronunciation here but aconcagua um it's near mendoza argentina right mendoza and wine is excellent so um my acacia story is that um after i climbed kilimanjaro i was thinking of doing the seven summits when i was a little younger and aconcagua is the second mountain after kilimanjaro that you
climb a few during the seven summits it's a lot harder than kilimanjaro it's 23 000 feet no oxygen sometimes it gets technical the wind is coming in off the pacific at 50 miles an hour and it's freezing and it's very very hard to do so um when i was younger i was all gung-ho to do it and i trained for a year to prepare and then a friend of ours had a child whose kidney suddenly went out of whack and that the child had a uh very
complicated blood type and some um antibodies and so forth and i was of course the only match as it turned out after they tested 100 people so i didn't go to aconcagua i ended up not giving the kidney because
the poor young man developed another antibody the day before surgery and so they booted me out of the hospital because that was no longer a match but somehow after that i never went back to planning to climb acapula except about six months ago
when i decided i could do it and i wrote to alpine ascents and i'm like hi um i'm shotty barged i climbed kilimanjaro ten years ago and now i'm ready to do aconcagua and they wrote back and they said lady lady you are nowhere uh near ready to climb makankagwa um instead of signing your death warrant with alpine ascents why don't you go climb some smaller things you know bye so that was my yakakawa experience recently what is the best abba song oh
gosh i love abba um [Music] waterloo just because you can dance around your room and shout how has it influenced your thought being the daughter of a u.n economist not just a uneconomist um are you an economist who travel to a new country every two years whose specific specialty was in third world labor economics and who never made much money because of where and how he worked but who did a lot of good for the countries he
visited iran indonesia the fiji islands large parts of melanesia um it felt um i was proud of him for doing that um it was really hard moving every two years and always being the outsider and it was a little bit hard also going back and forth from geneva which is the un's headquarters to places like um suva in fiji or jakarta in indonesia where um it was like going to a different world i mean you can imagine a
pretty little town in switzerland where they sell watches and all the stores and everybody eats chocolate and it's heavenly and you go skiing and then you can imagine um an entirely different world much more crowded um people's standards of living is much lower you are exposed to poverty of course on a level you are not in europe and it's a real wake-up call about what the majority of the world looks like so that was my i think that was my main
takeaway just gosh you know the world is not switzerland does it make the ancient world seem less strange to you or more familiar no because the parts of the ancient world i study which is basically what we have of the ancient world unless you're an archaeologist or unless you specialize in um trying to find non-elite information which again is mostly archaeological all of that is is written by the the most educated
men of their generation of their time right and so uh they're not worrying about poverty that much they're not worrying about the food supply they're not worrying about how their slaves are doing they're not worried about where their next meal is coming from they're not worried about disease etc so no not at all in fact i would say do you think we will still discover significant new manuscripts from the ancient world
yes i think we will because not only are we continuing to dig and to explore in many places where we know that manuscripts continue to exist but have not been found but also the technologies for reading these papyri has gotten so amazing so now you can take a burnt rolled up papyrus that you cannot unroll without it just breaking and even though it's pitch black and fragile you can actually read it layer by layer which is amazing and i'm
very excited i know you're going to ask me next what text do i hope we will recover of course which is the one caesar's autobiography lost volumes from libby or tacitus augustus's autobiography would be a very interesting text that's lost augustus autobiography he defends himself for a lot of things in his later res guest die that's more of a political document he um he doesn't bother defending himself because all he tells us is the
good stuff but in the autobiography apparently he was admitting some of the things he did and before he became augustus he was apparently a very brutal uh a very brutal general killed a lot of senators oh but did i answer i guess i answered i said augustus's autobiography i'd also like to have um enius one of the earliest roman poets but apart from that maybe a few tragedies from the greeks what has survived how representative do
you think it is um i think probably that's a good question i'd say we have a good chunk of what was most popular as decided by the ancients themselves for example the alexandrian alexandrian critiques of the 3rd century bc and then the works that were effectively made canonical by being taught in the schools um hard to say how much we've lost maybe we have i really actually don't know i don't know the answer to that question
i would i would hazard a guest and i'd say maybe we have uh a fifth of it but that that's just a completely crazy guess why aren't there novels from ancient rome that people still care about reading today there are and they do but who reads them i mean people read virgil homer cicero to some extent but novels you've never read petronius as satiricon that's hilarious i've read does that count as a novel to me it's a kind of novella and short
stories spilling over onto each other they called it a novel and ditto for um epileus's golden ass in which a guy gets turned into a donkey and goes wandering around um uh greater grease getting into all sorts of trouble until he's finally returned back into a human it's a it's a hilarious it's a great novel i really recommend it and then there are the greek novels and for some reason those are all romances
so they're always the story of a young man and a young woman who gets separated by fate and eventually get back together that's kind of a classic novella situation now you have another book coming out soon called plato goes to china when is that due out yeah isn't that a silly title no it's a great title that's due out in um i think autumn of next year or autumn of this year sorry no wait spring of next year there
i got it spring of next year why are so many chinese intellectuals straussian aha not so many it's a very specific group of chinese intellectuals and they self-identify as such and then they have followers most of whom they've taught themselves they identify as straussian because strauss is extremely useful to them for several reasons one is that they like strauss's emphasis on the value of classical texts because they think
um what it means to some degree is that both confusion texts both ancient chinese texts and ancient western texts are to be treated as valuable then the next step they make is these ancient texts are more valuable than modern texts and they argue strauss would have said that himself then they like the fact that if they read as straussians they can essentially read for the hidden message which nobody can find except for them so they can say what
they want to say about ancient texts and if other people don't agree they can say well you don't know how to read as estraosian so effectively they have the power to read western classical antiquity as they would like and this particular group reads it very much as in support of the kind of discipline order hierarchy and some other values that the chinese state apparatus definitely is in favor of did they read rome as a
tale of the decline of america today um the straussians um not particularly but there are chinese intellectuals who um actually are more interested they do this but they focus on facilities more than they focus on room they focus on facilities writings about classical athens because the city said what happened to athens was at first it was a great democracy and then um demagogues started getting into power and the demagogues
told the people what they wanted to hear as opposed to what they needed to hear so after pericles death they just catered to the athenian democracy with the result that bad decisions were made because they were selfish decisions and eventually the athenian democracy collapsed right so for example about 10 years ago there was a op-ed piece in the um new york times by a chinese businessman who's also uh you know fluent in english and very
well established in the us he's part of the aspen institute and so forth his name is eric lee and he actually borrowed from facilities to say just as thucydides predicted or or saw the fall of athens through demagoguery so too the united states is going to collapse through demagoguery the united states democracy is in fact very very young in fact it really only dates back to the voting act of 1964 if you want to be inclusive
so you know the full democracy is 50 years old and the chinese dynasty has been around for 2000 years and these guys think that they're going to be eternal ha ha that is not going to happen so he's he says he's just waiting for american democracy to go over a cliff now the chinese intellectuals you study what do they think of what we call the thucydides trap the conflict between america and china at least in some views is inevitable
they've talked about it um they see themselves as the aggressed against in that so oddly they see themselves as let's see i better not confuse this i think they think of themselves as athens and they see the us as sparta and sparta is getting anxious because athens is getting stronger and what does sparta wants to do sparta wants to squash athens and they think that the vest the west is very much invested in making sure that
china does not become a global power on a par with the west and which i think is inevitable of course that's going to happen what is it from antiquity that you think the chinese value more highly than we do as say americans or westerners their own tradition we right now we're in the middle of a reevaluation of our greco-roman tradition and when i say r and of course i'm speaking for a narrower group of european or white americans
to whom whose tradition this literally is and people who've grown up in these cultures for whom it has been their tradition but um we find that many of the values of our tradition don't mesh very well with what we value today politically liberally um in terms of struggling against racism or sexism at least that's how a lot of people feel about the value of our greco-roman antiquity the chinese have at this present at this point in
time have no problem with confucian values they like their own tradition there was a brief break with it um after the fall of the qing dynasty in 1912 and of course there was a break with it after mao zedong came to power in 14 1949 but most of the other times they have been very proud to to cite and to abide by the confucian taoist traditions and there was even for a while talk of a confucian economic miracle
where people argued that unlike weber's protestant ethic it was in fact the confucian ethic that made a quick rise in economic prosperity possible for some of the countries of of of um of of the of i'm saying the east which is not a good word but china singapore um vietnam etc etc so you're studying how the chinese intelligentsia interprets western classics what insights have you gleaned about their understanding of our
liberalism by studying how they read the classics excellent question so um we could start out by saying how do they think about democracy right and our democracy and one of the moves they like is to say well american democracy came out of athenian democracy which is a you know really a generalizing incorrect statement and then they say but look at amphibian democracy what a terrible thing they had slaves um they didn't allow
women or foreigners to be citizens they were very xenophobic in a closed society um so that's one argument american democracy is bad because it comes from athenian democracy which is bad another attack is to say america is not the only democracy we are we're a democracy too in fact we are the largest democracy in the world and the reason they say that is because on the um lower tier of voting in uh towns and villages
it is a democracy those leaders are voted democratically and then it becomes more and more of a meritocracy as you go up the system so that's the claim they make or they will say everybody had a city state in antiquity it wasn't just the athenians right so they have nothing to boast about or this is my favorite there is a chinese scholar whose name is hoshin who argues that there was no greco-roman antiquity that in the renaissance the westerners
were so embarrassed about the fact that china had this glorious dynastic past you know it was the middle kingdom um it had all sorts of innovations and technology and civilization that the west didn't have at that time so the west decided to invent classical antiquity so they'd have something to boast about to china so all those texts by you know plato and virgil and ovid that we've been talking about
somebody wrote them in the middle ages and then stuck a date on them you know 12 bc 400 a.d which is one very interesting way of dealing with the western tradition um other ways in which they talk about the west is recently they've been on a the intellectuals have been on a um on a sort of war against the concept of rationality as something that's particularly western and some of its manifestations which sounds like a very odd thing to
claim how can rationality be western and obviously rationality is not per se western but what they do is they focus on the emphasis placed on rational thought in plato and aristotle both of whom claim that you're not fully human unless you're rational and that's why we're better than the animals because we can reason and then they look back at their own confucian tradition which focuses on things like ren which means humaneness to other
people like you have to show ren that's one of the things a good person does and they say well on one side people emphasizing rationality on the other side people thinking about ren and being a good citizen and being a good son and father which of these things will make the better society and they argue that western rationality has become far too instrumental by which they mean signs for science's own sake we don't ask hey is this
technology going to be good for us or the planet we're just like this technology is faster better let's do it whereas they claimed that uh in china the kind of rationality that they're more interested in is value rationality where you use a rational means but in order to get to a value that is an ethical thing in and of itself right so you might say we'll use this form of technology to stop malaria in sub-saharan africa and that's two thumbs up
but we're not going to use this kind of technology and this is all theory because of course everybody uses all these kinds of technology but we won't use this technology that simply produces uh more effective gases for warfare right that is the rhetoric i'm certainly not making any claims about what's actually going on either in china or in the u.s around instrumental rationality or um value rationality but this is another
thing that they're now using against the west that we're we're missing some kind of moral compass now right now there are no top chinese economists in china who are recognized as top economists by the rest of the world how far off is the year where you think a significant portion of top classic scholars will be chinese working in china how long how far is that right around the corner or is that decades away um it's already happening there are a
lot of good chinese classicists who work and teach in china they are separate from this group i'm talking about so there's a group of intellectuals who are more public facing they even published in newspapers uh chinese newspapers like you know the um picking daily news um about things like um plato or aristotle um but they are mostly interested in having a conversation with the government and with the people
of china and with saying things that will show both that they are educated and that they are able to read western texts in a way that makes sense for the chinese beliefs around the world then there are a group of dedicated classics who are mostly classics professors in universities and there's a little bit of overlap between these groups but the second group is a number of serious classics professors who read the
language as well who are publishing articles that are read in the u.s and i think this field will continue to grow as curiosity about the past of the west grows um and i think i don't know if the divide between the let's read classics to bolster our sense of chinese identity versus the let's read classics to understand classics groups i don't know if that divide is going to grow disappear or um or stay the way it is now now we close with a
few questions about you you are a kind of classics prodigy your undergraduate thesis was published as a well-reviewed academic book how did you manage that one word i am a nerd there's plenty of nerds what is it you did early on to put you in that position um i don't know i mean like i could hypothesize i i got a lot of my sense of identity even when i was young by reading and writing i was not a popular kid or an athletic kid and my
favorite thing was to hold up in my room and read my parents would do these spot checks at 3am where they burst into my room and they'd find me under the covers with a flashlight you know uh reading latin apparently reading latin no doubt right so um there's that there's all the travel which made me interested in different cultures and different perspectives then there was a really a maniacal work ethic which thank
goodness has calmed down a little bit as i get older um what else um i like writing i just love love writing i love thinking and writing and i had a lot of fun doing the china book who or what was your model for being a classic scholar like how did you see your encounter such a model or mentor at such a young age who is my model but not now then yeah um you know i didn't really have one i know that sounds weird today we're all about mentoring and
models and i myself mentor and and i'm glad to be doing it in those days you know mind you this is quite a while ago i got my undergraduate degree in 87 and my phd in in 92. um there was much less talk of mentoring especially at places like princeton and harvard and i think i was anti-mentored in fact because my undergraduate mentor would mentor me by calling me into her office sticking her cigarette into her cup of
coffee and walking away and i would wait for her to come back and sometimes she would come back and sometimes she wouldn't she's a brilliant woman but she's kind of a um what's the word i'm looking for a quirky mentor and um my phd advisor um when i had finished my phd which also got published of course um wrote to me like the two days before i was due to defend it and said i hate your phd it's all rubbish
so then i had to go get another phd person so that wasn't exactly mentoring either um so i don't know no mentor but you know what i mentor other people now and it's almost good as good as having been mentored it still makes you feel warm and fuzzy and which is the the physical side of antiquity that you have traveled to that made the biggest impression on you when you saw it oh gosh that's so hard i mean of course i've been to rome
and the experience of seeing ruins juxtaposed to i don't know you know ice cream sharks is amazing they live in the ruins of rome the romans do that is amazing and then traveling up through umbria and seeing some of the old roman roads that are still being used um i guess the presentness of the ancient world in contemporary italy is for me magical absolutely magical um [Music] it's yeah i mean other places that have
that kind of patina for me are jerusalem this beautiful city of kind of sand-colored stone um which itself dates back to you know things of the old parts of the old testament relate to jerusalem i don't know i find that um like time traveling so now your translation of virgil is out that's great i loved it plato goes to china is in the works last question what will you do next i don't know it's got to be something though right so
i think i'm going to write to my agent wendy strathman and tell her to tell me what to do because i think i want to do something that's not just for academics but you've already done things that are not just for academics right oh yeah we have many listeners this book is definitely going to be a bestseller plato goes to china although that's not the cover on it you'll be glad to know no if you're readers
of the virgil or if plato goes to china they're already not academics i guess that might be true that might be true but maybe i'll write my next book um around a question that really matters to us today more so than whether or not the the chinese are interested in reading our ancient texts anyway shoddy barge thank you very much it's been a great pleasure thank you tyler those were fantastic questions and i've had so much fun talking to you