Hi everybody, welcome back to The New Thinkery. If you hear my voice, that means David Barr is once again stuck to, not in, but to the toilet. Have you ever heard of these people who sit on the toilet for so long that their skin becomes fused with a Seacregg? I have heard of it.
It's a tell of such thing. Yeah, it's very rare. I didn't think it was real until he sent us that picture. Yeah.
So he's watching there with a screwdriver trying to remove the seat from the toilet and then the... I didn't see a screwdriver. Yeah. I'm just trusting that there was one in there.
Yeah, it was a funny shaped screwdriver. Okay. So in his place we have the great scion of Mortimer and Steve, Eric Adler. Thank you so much, Alex.
It's wonderful to be with you. I'm very sorry that David can't join us. It only adds to my fears of abandonment after he left Kensington for the greener pastures of North Carolina and now he has abandoned me yet again. Yet again.
But he introduced you to us. We have to think for that at least. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. And I mean, Greg, it was very nice that Greg invited you out to speak. Have we had you on since then? No, this is the first time.
Thanks. Yes. I was born in Ashland, which means that I'm the only other person, I guess, on the podcast currently, who has in fact been to grandpa's Cheeseborn. That's right.
That's right. And I have to say after Greg has made umpit mentions of it on the podcast, that it was a little different from what I had anticipated in some shows. Oh. You know, the way he portrays it on the podcast, you think that it's going to be this cavernous barn filled with hay and maybe every half mile you would find some guy in overalls next to a goat who would sort of cut you a little bit of, you know, a lemon star or something like that.
And it's not really that. There's a little bit of down home. there's a kind of, I don't know, an upper middle class sort of vibe to the place to, you know, with crudeté and you know, Dr. Oz would not be unhappy there.
It has a little bit of a feeling of fancy mustards and olives and so forth. And so it has a little bit of that sort of avocado toast crowd that's there. It's not quite as down home as he makes it up here. Boogey Greg, no.
That's horrible. Yeah, I thought it was gonna be like some like one tooth yolkle, you know, milking a joke, you know, you know, squirting something to the local cat that's like sitting off to the in the corner. But yeah, I mean, there's a little bit of that. I wouldn't say that it's, you know, ready for New York City, precisely.
I mean, there's an homage guy outside making bastards and so forth. And now there's a there's a down home quality to it as well. But it's a little more lulu lemon than I had in. I was wearing lulu lemon last time.
We went to work out together. But I brought that, I bring this up to just a point. Greg is known, Eric, what, all of six months of the year, whatever, whatever you were, you're here first, immediately gets an invitation out to speak. I heard, you know, tens of thousands of dollars, right?
Spent Oh, yeah, nearly on your airfare. Right? Yeah. Yeah.
But me, nothing, not even like an invitation to teach one stupid class, which I would decline immediately. Right. I know this guy decades so I don't. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. No, that's why you're not invited. Because he'll decline.
Is that the idea? Because because kill corrupt, I've known him for 20 years, he's a terrible influence on the young. Great influence. Wonderful influence.
Yeah, I trust you to keep your mouth clean. Right. Let's let's get down to what are we doing? Good point.
Business is business. Camilla's who talks like a computer. This is a companion to our very disorder. We're doing Kamala Harris.
Oh, crap. I read the wrong thing. Have you seen people going after her for Kwanzaa stuff? I didn't know that.
Apparently, she claims to have celebrated Kwanzaa youth, even though it was like before it was invented or something. Oh, geez. I don't know. Anyways, I don't want to go into the apocalypse.
Right. So, Camilla's what are we doing here? Why are we doing it first? I don't.
I mean, you guys should probably answer why you're doing it. I mean, you're selected it. I don't know. We want to do all of Plutarch and we've done Themistically with B.J.
Dopski and we go, Hey, why are they? I'm not gonna lie. Not as bad as when we did. What was the one with the poltergeist pecker?
Oh, Romeo. That was mostly you, Alex. Mostly mostly. The whole time trying to think of, we want to do all of Plutarch.
And so, unfortunately, we have to cover such boring folks as Camilla. So I think Camilla's is interesting and is boring this in a way, right? Yes, I think so. I think so.
And I think it will bring out, especially because I did get to hear an advanced version of the Themistically episode last night. And Dr. Dopski made some sort of disparaging remarks about glasses. I remember.
And then Alex referred to me as a self-loathing plasticist. So there was okay that he made such remarks. So, you know, we've really set this up to be quite an episode, I think, under the circumstances. I think Camilla is a really interesting guy in some respects.
Although, I guess the fact that Plutarch is so largely positive about him, maybe makes him a little bit less interesting than some of the other more flawed characters, but he's not entirely fantastic from Plutarch's side, but mostly. So, first, I guess the question is, who was Camilla's? And why did Plutarch write a biography of him as part of his parallel lives? Well, Marcus Ferrias Camilla's was a Roman general and politician from a patrician family who lived during the second half of the 5th century BC and into the first half of the 4th century BC.
That is saying the earlier period of the Roman Republic during the so-called conflict of the orders, which we can talk about later. He's depicted in Roman tradition as the most consequential and talented statesman of his day. A number of things are attributed to him that's very clear from the longest life of Camilla's. Among other things most consequently are the Roman siege of the Etruscan city of Vaiy, which supposedly happened in 396 BC, and then also the revenge on the Galak tribe, whom Plutarch calls kel'toi, so they're from a Celtic extraction, who had previously sacked Rome in supposedly 390 BC or thereabouts, when Camilla's was supposedly an exile and Camilla's comes back, according to Plutarch and also according to Livy, and gets revenge on them for having done so, having committed this sack in 390.
Camilla's must have really existed. This is a real person who did some things, important things during the early period of the Republic, at least some of the things that are attributed to him by our tradition, but a great deal of legendary information has accrued surrounding Camilla's. We talked about in our discussion of the life of Romulus before, and actually during Alex's discussion of many different synonyms for Venus, we talked about the fact that the start date of Romans writing Roman history is around 200 BC, and consequently figures who lived well before that time, there's going to be a lot of legendary information that accrues to them as a result. This is most prominent with someone like Romulus who didn't really exist, he's an invented character, but this also affects the life of Camilla's to some extent, in which there's a number of fashionable or kind of, I don't know, legendary, almost mythological kinds of qualities associated with him.
Less mythological, I think, from Camilla's, more on Romulus's side, but more legendary. And so a couple of small examples of this before we move on, the siege of A, which I think we can talk about later, really is made to resemble the Greek sack of Troy in 118 BC. It's a 10-year siege, and Camilla's, in some respects, plays a role that's somewhat similar to Achilles. Not really necessarily in the siege, but also in regard to the sacking of the city of Rome itself.
And in fact, Plutarch mentions specifically a reference to Achilles in the biography as well. So there's a fanciful element about that. He certainly was besieged successfully by the Romans, did successfully attack the city, but whether it happened in 10 years and precisely the way it's suggested in Plutarch's biography is not fully clear. And another example of this is the revenge that Camilla supposedly gets on the goals who had sacked the city of Rome around 390 BC.
This is rather obviously an attempt to sue the egos of the Romans who were very embarrassed about the fact that the city had been successfully sacked. Something that would not happen in Roman history until 410 AD under Alaric in the Visigoth. So this, you know, a foreign, successful, foreign invasion of Rome was very dark for the Romans themselves. And they obviously kind of invented a tradition where Camilla's gets there one up one up some, and also I think, invents this tradition surrounding his exile to explain why he wasn't there, which allows the sack actually to take place.
And then finally, before we move on, I would say that Plutarch composed a biography of Camilla's as part of his parallel lives, which largely follows the contours of our other major sorts of information on Camilla's. And that's living. We have some minor sources, but our chief major ones are Livy and Plutarch with some different emphases. And Plutarch juxtaposes this biography of Camilla's with that of the fifth century Athenian statesman, phemystically, which you've already dedicated an episode to.
And so although this is an kind of embellished biography, I would say that Plutarch's biography of Camilla's gives us a sense of what the Romans and maybe Plutarch himself as a kind of Romanized Greek, a valued in a statesman. Because Camilla's is, and this maybe gets at what Alex said about the sort of boringness of him. He's portrayed as, I wouldn't say perfect, he makes some mistakes during the course of his life, including one rather major one. But he's pretty great.
And so I do get a sense that he's fairly close to a kind of ideal statesman for Plutarch and for the Romans as well. Yeah, I think and Madhivelli backs that up too, Greg and the discourses briefly. Yeah. What I was saying is I kind of found it helpful to compare Camilla's with the mystically but maybe by way of Coriolanus, right?
Both are dealing with an increasingly, the increasing influence of the Plubian class, right, on the politics. And whereas Coriolanus bristles and therefore turns against Rome, Camilla's also bristles leaves or self-imposed exile, but then ultimately comes back and he seems always willing to sort of work with the people. He has to deal with their influence and he doesn't want them to subvert good politics. So there's often very, very prudent statecraft, but he seems to accept, and I think he's not much later than Coriolanus.
And so he seems to accept the sort of new status quo. And in a way, makes him look prudent, but in a way also boring, Coriolanus is this larger than life figure who seems unable to be contained by the city, refuses to be contained. Emptemistically, he seems to love victory so much that he's so ambitious that he really wants to harness this power towards his own ends. Camilla's in a way has that kind of commitment to the city, but without the desire to sort of self-aggrandize himself in the way that the mystically does, nor the desire to sort of reject it in the way Coriolanus does.
And so it makes him great, but in a way, his greatness is not inconspicuous because he was elected to so many officers and he had some sort of staying power, but it is more inconspicuous that it might have been had he really gone whole hog and done what the people accused him and tried to replace Romulus and be this great sort of second or new founder of Rome or something like that. Yeah, I think that's right. I would suggest that, although I don't think Lutarckesis so uses this term or in Greek, Camilla's is really a kind of model of self-restraint, and in that respect, he's very different, I think, from Achilles. We otherwise is somewhat modeled on as a very talented general and fighter overall.
But that's very different from Coriolanus, who's really hot headed and gets angry with the city of Rome for his treatment. Well, Camilla's isn't happy with his treatment either, but he's really rule-following and law-abiding. And this is a general sense you get about Camilla's is he's really reluctant. He's not interested in self-puffery, so in this he seems to be rather different from themistically as he's portrayed by Lutarckes, so that's one difference.
But the second is he really doesn't try to take advantage of any of the kind of posts that he receives over the course of his career. And in fact, later on in his career, he's a kind of reluctant commander. He doesn't want to fight on behalf of Rome. He thinks he's too old, someone else should do this, but he goes along with it because this is what the people want.
And so although Camilla's is portrayed as a kind of staunch patrician-tradition-list, I suppose, who is opposed to a variety of things that the masses or the plebeians actually want to do. At the same time, he's a very self-restrained character, and he's able to kind of recover from the maltreatment he receives from the people as well. So in that way, he's very different, I think, from both Coriolanus and Thymisto. But you can yourself acknowledge that there's one exception to this.
And this maybe gets at is the most revealing thing about Camilla's. It's sort of so exceptional that makes you say, oh, this isn't really Camilla's, but there's a whole bit with the white courses. You want to explain to the folks at home what happened here? Yes, yes.
So that seems to be something that doesn't really fit with a lot else that appears in the biography. This is also in Livy, so it's not something that's invented by Lutarch or comes only from him. But after the successful siege of the city of Vaidi, supposedly in 396 BC, Camilla, who had been the dictator, constitutional office in Rome, for the period of the actual successful sack, is granted a triumph, which is Senate during the Republican granted triumph. And for reasons that are not fully made clear, he decides that he's going to have a chariot with four white horses that are going to bring him in this triumphal celebration.
And that this was seen as problematic on the part of the Romans for a variety of reasons. And I think Lutarch is at least mildly sympathetic to this, even though he really does see Camilla's as a very positive figure. One, this is perceived to be sacrilegious, the idea being that only Jupiter, the king of the gods, should be brought in four white horses and a chariot in this way, so that there's a sense in which Camilla's may be suggesting there's a kind of godlike quality to himself. And second, this seems unrepublican, so fancy pants, I suppose, that it seems as if Camilla's is putting himself on a pedestal above his fellow citizens.
And this doesn't, I think Alex is correct, doesn't really fit with much else that we understand from the life of Camilla's because otherwise he's exceedingly attuned to the necessities of Roman religion and very concerned about its upkeep. So this is not really in keeping with his personality overall, but it does get the ball rolling. And as far as the story is concerned of the kind of popular backlash against Camilla's. It's not the only reason for this backlash, but it seems to be a major aspect of backlash.
And I do think that this is the chief part of the biography in which Lutarch is condemning of a decision that Camilla's made. He doesn't think this is a good idea. So now I wonder, this was early in his career, right? I was trying to find a, yeah, where's the chapter where he brings this up?
This is chapter seven. I'll just read it real quick, just so you guys can ponder for a moment. Chapter seven, whether it was due, I'm reading, I'm using the, I know that Alex really wants to post him, I know what translation we're using, I'm using the lobe. Me too.
I just discovered that Bernadotte Perrin was a man. I thought having used the biographies that using the lobe for 20 years, the Bernadotte must be a woman's name, but I looked him up. Bernadotte, it's a guy. It's a woman.
She started alongside Steve Martin in the jerk. Oh, I see, I see. I see. And corrected.
That's Bernadotte Peters. All right. Well, you guys really got a youth demographic. Really cornered with these fancy references.
My God. 1979 my God. Bernadotte. No, it's a seven whether it was due to the magnitude that was exploited and taking a city which could buy with Rome and do a seat of 10 years, or to the congratulations, choured upon him.
Camilla's was lifted up to vanity. Cherished thoughts far from becoming to a civil magistrate subject to the law and celebrated a triumph with great pump. He actually had four white horses harnessed to a chariot on which he mounted and drove through Rome, a thing which no commander had ever done before or afterwards did, or they thought that such a car sacred and devoted to the king and father of the gods. In this way, he incurred the enmity of the citizens who were not accustomed to want mixed dragons.
I think that's probably good enough. That's where we had mine. Yeah, yeah. Now a little earlier in chapter five, we talk to the following story, which I thought was also kind of possibly impious, but it looks more plies.
He says, at any rate, the city was taken by storm and the Romans were pillaging and pluttering its downness wealth when Camilla's seeing from the citadel what was going on at first burst into tears as he stood. And then being congratulated by the bystanders, lifted up his hands to the gods and praise, saying, Oh, greatest Jupiter and he got to see and judge men's good and evil deeds, he surely know that it is not unjustly but of necessity. And itself depends that we Romans have visited its iniquity upon the city of hostile and lawless men. But if as counterboys to this, our present success, some retribution is due to come upon us, spare, I beseech you the city and the army of the Romans, let it fall upon my own head, though with his little harness may be with these words, as the Romans custom his after prayer and adoration, he wheeled himself about to the right, but stumbled and fell as he turned.
The bystanders were confounded, but he picked himself up again from his fall and said, my prayer is granted, a slight fall is my twin for the greatest good fortune. There's two ways to take that. I'm being super pious or it's a joke. And so I suspect that perhaps in his youth, in these early chapters, Camillus is a bit more playful and irreverent with respect to the gods and that the white horse is saying, especially teachers have that's a bad idea.
And in a way, it kind of haunts him because people continue to suspect him later in his career. And so even when he's demuring later in experiencing, I don't want to get into, I don't want to rule, I wonder whether that's to sort of allay these sort of accusations ahead of time. And then when they compelled to do it, he's got this sort of, you asked me to, I didn't want to, right? And so he's able to further his influence and further his reputation through a kind of subtle demuring and sort of faux deference to the people, which he recognizes is necessary for his own well-being, especially his exile, I suspect, taught himself.
Yeah, I mean, I agree with that. I wonder at the same time whether we read that differently from the way Blue Tark might have read that same passage. No, I don't know. First of all, Blue Tark doesn't include any passage in which he said, you know, Camille has learned from this experience and decided as a result to be more pious.
So we don't know. We don't know whether the ancient belief in character development in the same way that we do and so forth. And I would also note that Blue Tark, and I think this is very clear in a number of his lives, but this includes the life of Camille. He's very concerned about poor tents, the weather, religious observances and so forth.
Blue Tark was someone who spent a number of years in his later life as a priest at Delphi. So he's very concerned about religious matters. And so there is a certain comical nature. I think when you read out that passage, Alex, I wonder whether Blue Tark would have seen it as as comical as we do.
He actually includes a passage somewhere in the biography where he talks about, well, with these kinds of things, you shouldn't be too credulous, but you shouldn't be too condemning either some sort of middle of it. It's a golden mean kind of to these kinds of things. I do think he takes a number of these things rather seriously, but I do think it's true that there's a kind of transgression and an important transgression on the part of canoes. And he does not appear to make that mistake again.
So that may reinforce your reading of that passage. So that passage comes right after that in chapter six. I actually do want to read this because I think it's really significant. But one of the themes throughout this more so than in other lives is miracle.
So Marvel's as I put him, right? I think it's probably not something like that. But he says, those who insist upon and defend the Marvel, this is about what is it a goddess, the statue of painting, an image that talks apparently, a Tim. Those who insist upon and defend the Marvel have a most powerful advocate for their contention in the fortune of the city, which from its small and despised beginning could never have come to such a pinnacle of glory and power had got not dwelt with her and made many great manifestations of himself from time to time, moreover, they had to use other occurrences of a kindred sort such a statue often dripping with sweat, images uttering audible groans when Greg tells a joke, turning away their faces and closing their eyes as not a few historians in the past have written.
And we ourselves might make men chin of many astonishing things which we have heard from men of our own time, things not lately to be despised. But in such matters, eager credulity and excessive incredulity are like dangerous, because of the weakness of our human nature, which sets no limits and has no mastery over itself, but is carried away now into being superstition and now into contemptuous neglect of the gods, caution is best and to go to no extremes. So he has a kind of religious kind of skepticism there. I wonder whether that's a kind of statement of Camillis's view that he comes to over disdain and a need to sort of be more moderate.
And I wonder whether he's putting Camillis's view in his own mouth right there, but that's just mine. I have two small points on this, just not substantive at all, but you're asking what the Marvel is there in chapter by chapter six, section two, I think it is. It's paradox, actually. There's the word Marvel.
It's translated as Marvel there. And human nature, at the end of the quote that you read, nature is not in the text. I only point that up. It's later on.
He does talk about nature. It is in the text. So I do wonder if, you know, does he have some conception of nature, which would sort of cut against the idea of these marbles or something like that. But it's not here I can try and find the passage later.
We does talk about nature. I think it's where he's talking about the days of the week and days of the days of the month, which is a chapter I definitely wanted to get your thoughts on as my neurological fantasies and flights of fancy. Like chapter 19 where he's going on like the 22nd is a good day for this, but the third is a bad day for this. And I'm like, anyway, I also wonder, getting back to what Alex said as well, is whether Plutarch's criticisms of this are really religious or are they historical?
That is to say, is he critical of the stories and whether those are actually true as opposed to whether he's critical of whether events like that, if they happen really mean what they're supposed to mean. And I think that with the biography of Romulus and also with Numa, there's a long discussion in Plutarch about, well, there's a lot of stories that accrue to these guys and we can't really be sure of all this stuff. It's really the miss of time and all these stories have kind of accrued about them that are legendary and mythological. And so I'm just going to tell you about them and sort of, I think there's maybe an element to that because I do think that Plutarch takes poor tents like that seriously elsewhere.
It may be more that he's critical of whether these stories are really accurate reflections of what's happened or whether they're kind of invented stories about what's happened. But I do take your point, Alex, that there's a sense in which the story ends up being really key to what happens afterwards. And so there is this kind of concern about whether these events really tell us what the events supposedly tell us. And that is a more religious point of it.
And I think there are those two purposes actually coalesce, right? It's obviously a historiographical remark, like a methodological remark on the one hand. On the other hand, the life of Camillus is apparently the appropriate place to make this remark given the sort of religion, the role of religion in this and specifically in relation to the mythicies. Now, we don't have a comparison chapter.
I don't know if it's just non-survives or he never wrote one, but we don't have a comparison chapter as a matter of fact. But when you compare Camillus to the mystically on the question of religion, I think that's a major point of departure, right? Camillus was able, at least after these moments, to appear much more pious, right? Much more religious whereas what the mystically did was manipulate oracles.
And in a ways, and we talked about this domestically, but it only started Athens down this path of increasing impiety, increasing self-reliance, and therefore a kind of moral realism or reality that led to the dissolution of the more fabric of Athens. I wonder whether Camillus, in a way, is more attuned to this issue and therefore able to sort of... But that means that you never know what to make of the religious aspect of the story, whether it's contemptuous manipulation or whether it's genuine, precisely because he's so good at it, right? Or he might just be action-pies.
It's very difficult to tell it. Yeah, that's a good point. And I don't think that Blue Tark really necessarily stresses this overtly in a way. It's sort of more implicit.
You have to try to figure this out for yourself. One quality that comes across about Camillus, I think, in Blue Tark's biography is that Camillus is a real traditionalist who really cares about the Roman state. And the Romans conceived that their religion was intricately tied to the fortunes of the state itself. So in that regard, Camillus ought to be very concerned about the state of Roman religion, because according to the Romans, if the state of Roman religion isn't good, then the state isn't going to fare well.
So that would suggest, given the other characteristics that Camillus has, he's very dedicated to tradition. The way of the ancestors, he doesn't like change very much. He vehemently opposes the proposal to leave Rome after the sack and go to vey instead. He really cares about Rome in this particular way.
And I think for a Roman statesman, you can't do that without being genuinely concerned about religion as well. So that would suggest a greater concern for piety. At the same time, if you take that too far, then you can't really explain the white horses. And you can't explain some of these other things where there are other some other instances about dividing the booty and getting a certain amount of money to delphi and so forth that don't actually fully fit with what's going on.
I recognize that I just said booty, and this is going to lead to, thank God, David, what's the word booty? So I just dividing the booty. Can I just real quick circle back? This is all important points.
He needs a bar where you need it. Right. I hate to do this silly business. I'm talking about his booty.
I think it's the answer. Hey, that's good. This is in chapter 19. He mentions Hesiod and then talked about the nature of a day.
So days have nature. So that strikes me as, I mean, this is a related to our discussion about religiosity. And then he also says in chapter 20, this looks like section two, he speaks about the first cause of all things, fires and like this. So there is some weird sort of, I don't know what pre-ecocratic or philosophical kinds of stuff going on in the background in the end.
And he apparently wrote a book even, Plutarch did called On Days, which I assume a quick Google search tells me we don't possess. We don't possess it. Okay. So I mean, I'm just wondering if, I mean, who we're not the experts on this at all, but I do wonder if there isn't a more rationalist undertone to what's going on here in Plutarch than might appear on the surface.
Yeah. I mean, we talked about this like it just throwing, when we did Alcibiades, and I've talked about a couple of times since, but there, I mean, I think there's always like a philosophical figure or a philosophical undercurrent in each of these, like both pronounced in the life of Alcibiades and maybe the life of Lycurgus, because they're, Swarda is compared to the best cities of the Republic and other figures, right? Well, and domestically as begins and ends with an allusion to philosophy. Yeah.
And there's often a wise man or philosophic figure operating in these lives. And I think that would be one of the interesting examples right there where, so Hesiod, just to sort of film this this in a bit, right? He sees it ends the works and days by going through the days of Zeus, which day of the month, and this is every month apparently, apparently, is good for this, they're good for that or bad for this, bad for that, neutral, whatever, right? If you want to cult, born, it should be on the 17th or something like that.
And obviously he's picking up off of that in this story. The Heraclitus fragment that he's referring to is really interesting because he says, he says the teacher of, this is, I think, almost a direct quote, the teacher of most is Hesiod, for he teaches the most things or something like that, right? Most men believe him to know. So what Hesiod does is he goes through the seasons of the year, the solstice, the equinox, right?
He's dividing day and nights. Daytime is when you work. Nighttime is when you rest and only marauders and apparently poets go out at night. Hesiod says this.
And so there's Heraclitus is taking up the task, getting at the unity of night and day, which is a thing called day, but also I think paying deference to Hesiod. So I wonder, bringing up the relationship between Heraclitus and Hesiod on this specific point, he's pointing, I think, subtly to the fact that Hesiod, while he gives you advice of what to do during the day, he is a poet who met the music at night, and there's a kind of deeper relationship between these poets and philosophers. Why that comes up in Camillus has to do with his disposition, I think, towards religion. That's got this sort of similar to the poet Hesiod.
You don't know how much he's in on it, right? Or how much he's a believer, right? He has a kind of strange relationship between him and Zeus about other level of knowledge or intelligence. Yeah, that's interesting.
It also marks the contrast. So there's a lot of interest in religious matters in the parallel lives, which fits very well with the Maralia because religious essays is a major component of the Maralia as they survive. But at the same time, I would suggest that in many cases, blue targets really interested in the education of the individual he's talking about, because he sees a direct link from the sort of education that's received in the sort of life that someone leads. He doesn't say anything really about Camillus's upbringing.
In any way, shape or form, or his education presumably just didn't know anything about it. I mean, we really it's understandable that he went under the circumstances. But there are some more philosophical touches or concerns about intellectual history that don't appear here. And yet I agree that this sort of religious themes, the concern about how seriously religion is taken by Camillus and how seriously religion is taken by the state is really important.
And actually, it's really important to the story itself, right? Because there is a sense in which by maltreating Camillus, Rome suffers as a result of this and they get their come up and so the stories do fit certain religious observances, I think, and Plutarch is right to stress them. But I do think that he's particularly honed in on them in this particular biography. Let me ask you a question just from a historical standpoint.
I mean, this is I think of all the lives. There's obviously serious issues that occur we haven't even talked about the Gallic invasion, but in a way, they make it through. They kind of make it through everything. This is one of my vulnerable stages in its history.
One of the things that's remarkable is you don't see the same kind of political convulsions or transformations that you see in other lives, like with the mysticlies or allspieties, obviously some of the like Caesar, saying nothing of founders like Romulus and Lycurgus and all this sort of stuff. What happens after Camillus? I mean, it seems like Camillus's greatness is precisely in his ability to manage Roman affairs without leading to the convulsions that you would expect given the challenges that they face. What happens immediately after him?
How do things change in his absence? Yes, that's a really good point. And I do think that that fits with a characteristic that Plutarch portrays in Camillus, which is about restraint, such that you don't really have to worry with this guy that if you give him an office, even if it's an office that stretches legality, there's a period in time in which Camillus is given a dictatorship, which is supposed to last only for up to six months as long as the military crisis exists, and they extend it for a year. So we hold it longer than he's supposed to.
And yet this isn't a problem because Camillus is not the sort of person who's going to do anything that's illegal. And accordingly, he ends up being this really great statesman and recovers from the disaster of his own exile, whereas I think the difference is offered in regard to themistically who is more interested in, he's more ambitious, he's more interested in self-puffery, and who doesn't consequently recover from his ostracism. In fact, everything goes kind of as a disaster afterwards. Now, one thing as far as the direct aftermath, and this is also a sign I think of the invention of the tradition of Camillus coming back and giving the one up to the goals and to Brennes and so forth, is that you see very clearly in Plutarch, and you see this in Olivia as well, a number of Rome's neighbors attempt to capitalize on the galaxy and they attack Rome afterwards.
So they recognize Rome as weak under the circumstances and they try to capitalize on it. That's a great sign that Camillus did not in fact go in and beat up on the goals, take their money back and so forth, and all went back to normal. That didn't happen, right? So it would be a generation's later where the Roman state really starts breaking down, I suppose with the Gracai is sort of traditionally when that scene.
But it seems as if Plutarch is suggesting that there's a certain stately character to people like Camillus, and I also I would say from a generation or so before him, Cincinnati, who's not a figure from one of the biographies, but is similarly one of these sort of reluctant warriors. He's on his farm with the plow, he's asked to be dictator, he goes out, he wins his victory, and he goes back to the plow. He doesn't really care about it. This is the kind of character of early Roman statesmen, I think that Plutarch is trying to portray, and this ultimately breaks down and you get a very different sort of character from Romans once you get into the late Roman Republic.
Did those who capitalize on the galaxy sack divide the booty? I'm very glad for that very serious question. I believe that David Barr is the only divider of booty that I'm aware of, but yeah, no, I do think that to get more serious about this, the fact that Rome was attacked by multiple different competitors directly after the galaxy gives the lie to the notion that Camillus had ended the problem and so that Rome was really in serious trouble when this occurred. And in fact, if the goals had decided not to take the bribe and to stay and to kill all that would have been the end of it basically.
We've all be, I don't know, Celtic or something like that, wearing issues, sweaters. So there is a sense in which this was in a specially dark time, which explains, I think, the creation of this idea that Camillus got the better of the goals ultimately, but all so does reinforce. I think you can get this from Plutarch's biography of Camillus overall. Things were really bad for a while there.
There was a decision that the Romans had to make about whether they were going to abandon their city and head elsewhere. That only happens under the most dire of circumstances. And according to Plutarch, it is as a result of Camillus's great statesmanship that the Romans decide to stay and not take the easier option, I suppose, of heading to Vaid and instead of rebuilding their city. So if Plutarch sure lived and aware of this, right?
I mean, so what purpose is served by commuting that to some degree? Well, I do think that it serves a kind of emotional purpose for a Roman reader that they don't like the idea that someone got the better of the Romans and that they look so bad during this course of action and so forth. You can almost see a Roman reading this and saying, yeah, good job, Camillus, go get them. And that, you know, Brennus acts really obnoxiously when they're trying to hand out how much gold he's going to get.
They sort of deserve this, right? So I do think there's an emotional appeal to this, even though it's not really true, that would make a Roman reader feel better that even in the sort of dark days, this is what ends up happening to Romans' foes. You know, we did the episode on Themistically, and one of the things we touched on was how the abandoning of the city led to a flourishing of the arts and sciences and other civilizational kind of flourishing. Do you think that Plutarch is trying to point here to the fact that they didn't abandon Rome to show that therefore Rome remained more, what, conservative, traditional, more grounded in its founding and therefore better, while not maybe as, you know, not necessarily as free in the arts and sciences, it's actually much better politically for them?
That's interesting. I hadn't thought about that. I mean, I guess there's a sort of distinction between the abandonment of Athens during the course of the Persian wars versus the potential abandonment of Rome. That's what I was thinking.
And the aftermath of the Gallic sac, because the idea was always, I think, to go back to Athens. So they left because they had to under the circumstances of the invasion, but they were going to head back. Whereas in regard to the Gallic sac, the idea was just, we're just leaving this place, right? We don't want to rebuild this city.
It's easier to go somewhere else under the circumstances. And I think Plutarch sees, and I think Camilla sees this, or his Camilla sees this, Rome has a destiny. And it needs to fulfill that destiny. So if you take this cop out and you decide not to do the hard work of rebuilding your city, you are not going to share in the kind of destiny that Rome ought to have.
So I would say it's maybe less cultural, and more demonstrates a kind of feel to the idea of Rome, and they're concerned for the ancestors, where I think in the Themistically example, they really had for strategic reasons, I had to leave, but they always expected that they were going to go back. Well, I think it was like, the thing was double edged, not domestically, right, which is, we'll pull out. And if we win, we go home. If we don't, you know, we're already on our way, you know, to a good place.
But what's interesting is that I think the thing that the Mythically doesn't realize, or maybe does realize, but doesn't recognize the full effect of, is that when you go back to Athens, it's not the same, right? No. It's not the same. I mean, my impression is that, you know, they defeated, Athens defeated Persia, but Persia defeated Athena, and this has a fundamental, fundamentally transformative effect.
I wonder if Camilla has understood that, that the, it was actually a matter of safety, with safety over piety, right? And also, if you connect this with the cherry business, right, if you get my chronology, right, make sure I'm writing his life, that he, that might have been one of the things I made and recognized how the religious is connected to the place. Sorry. Yeah, absolutely.
It's a local, right? And so, I mean, they thought what, I mean, if you're a believer, and you're, you know, living under this tactic that the mystical is poles and everybody finds out he's going to manipulate the oracles, you're going to say, huh, shouldn't Athena have punished us? Why didn't we survive? Respectly by abandoning?
I mean, the Cropless was destroyed. They had to rebuild it, right? And if I'm, I think I'm right, they started building the walls before they repelked the Cropless. It goes to show that the Athenians are fundamentally transformed in this way, that I think you just kind of, once it becomes more programmatic under paracles, right, where you sacrifice the fields for the sick of the empire, right?
And Athens becomes more and more abstract. It's maybe not as safe a way towards empire as what Camillus was charting, which is, no, you got to stay rooted, defend it, right? Have the sense that, and then you can expand from there. But they ended up, Athens ended up expanding just, I think, out of a kind of necessity, right?
And that, then developed into this, this increasing denigration of the place, right? Until they call themselves masters of the sea. Yeah, I agree with all of that. And I would say that, you know, Camillus never says this in Plutarch, right out, but I think that there's a sense to Camillus.
If we abandoned the city and we had to vey, instead, we're not really Romans anymore. We're not following these traditions any longer. This is a totally different thing at that point. And, you know, I don't know what this says necessarily about the piety of Camillus, but he is really unwilling to do that.
He's completely unwilling to do that, in fact. And so there's a fealty to the Roman tradition that Camillus is portrayed as having that may or certainly has to some degree religious overtones, but that that ends up being really a fundamental sticking point with him. We have to say, we have to take a harder course. That's what our ancestors would do, or would have done.
That's what we have to do as well. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
A small point, by the way, I mean, not knowing Plutarch well, or there's only like 10 or 20 years separating their lives. I mean, this really dies and then Melissa's born in 10, 20 years later, and like that. I was surprised at how remarkably close they were, close contemporaries they were done. Are other lives this contemporary?
Yeah. I mean, I have to think about that and go through, I mean, but I mean, like Romulus and who's wrong as bear with like, or guess Romulus is with theseus, right? So, you know, so it goes way back. So there's some interest in chronology.
At the same time, it's sort of harder, I think oftentimes for students of classics to really think of these folks as contemporaries, just different. Our understanding of Camillus is so much hazier than our understanding of themistically is in part because, you know, Herodotus didn't live that far later than themistically is did. And the Greek started writing works of history in the second half of the fifth century, BC. And the Romans didn't write works of history until well later.
So yeah, I think people kind of think Greece came first and then came Rome and so forth. When in fact, you know, with the Indian democracy, you know, in Cleislinese is rather similar in date to the beginning of the Roman Republic. These are not completely analogous forms of government, but there's some similarities. And yet the Romans are sort of culturally behind in a number of respects so that they don't really see them as, I personally am going to be interested in hearing what you have to say about this.
But I don't think the chronological proximity of the two figures is really what Luther King is doing. No, no, I didn't think so either. I mean, it is generally, I mean, I think you're both saying this in a way, but I mean, it is generally, I mean, remarkable how ancient or like, it must have been so like, dinky or like small and, and yet, interesting things are similar in a way to what Thucydides says about, you know, Sparta and Athens, right? You would not tell by the ruins of Sparta how great a city it was, whereas by the ruins of Athens, you'd be like, wow, whatever, you know, Sparta won, right?
And there's something remarkable about the Roman Republic where they have this great virtue yet. It wasn't until Rome as well on its way, you know, to being an empire that you can look back and say, wow, they were really good, right? They were really impressive. Somebody like Camillus was impressive.
Now, obviously, that's going to involve the sort of, uh, Higography that had, uh, Eric has pointed out, but, but in general, I mean, you're right, somebody pointed this out to me once, like how contemporaneously they, they were, right? The Roman Republic and Thucydides and all these figures. And yet, you don't know anything about it. It's sort of makes you wonder how many, how many cases there are like this in history of, of great republics that, that have just come into being a gone away completely anonymous because they never reached this level of sort of later literary lamentation about their lost, you know, you know, excellence.
Well, I mean, I hate to circle back to this, but right? I mean, the, the mystically is abandoning the city and you lead to this flourishing in the arts. So you have this history sort of almost immediately on the heels, whereas the Romans, as Eric is saying, this happens much later. So you get the flourishing in the arts.
I mean, that would be an interesting question too, I mean, really being a complete amateur in these things. I assume you don't start to see the flourishing of Roman arts and literature until, until the empire really, right? I mean, well, you'll later public, I mean, Roman literature, but you don't have much from those earlier days and so forth. But yes, until much later, and then obviously under great Greek influence too.
So that's another major aspect. One thing that Alex and Greg, you had suggested that sort of maybe think about this, I don't know, this is sort of just thrown out there, but there may be a way in which kind of Camilla stands for a more Roman approach to things and thematically stands for at least an Athenian approach. And the Camilla is really concerned as the Romans where he's kind of backward looking, very concerned about tradition, he doesn't like change, he doesn't want major changes and so forth, whereas the mystically seems to be much more will fast and loose with things, much less pious, I think, in some respects too, and much more forward looking, you know, the Navy should change, you know, the composition of it should alter and so forth. So there is a sense in which maybe themistically stands for a kind of characteristically Athenian attitude, and Camilla stands at least ultimately for a more characteristically Roman or stereotypically kind of Roman attitude toward the past, the present in the future.
Yeah, I think that's right. It's great. I think it's a good note to end on. Yeah, we should think Eric again, I know you mentioned just so we can preview for the folks at home, you mentioned wanting to do what was it you wanted to do.
Is this row at some point? Yeah, it's wonderful to do. I mean, I know you guys are going to go through the whole darn thing before this, this is all over. So I mean, we could do a number of others.
It's a great conversation and so forth. This row is very interesting. I like Krasis, Lakhala, Zplampi, you know, Blue Talk was very interested in the very late Republic, and that's a period of time. I'm really interested in doing it.
So really fascinating period. So there's a lot of stuff to choose from. Yeah, we should do the one that's in your wheelhouse, obviously. Yeah, Krasis is paired with Nikius.
I have to do that. But I also want to do obviously, apparently, I don't know how much interest you have in Phoebe as an Axos. Yeah, no, he's very interesting. I mean, obviously, from an earlier period, he's later than Camilla's, but earlier than the world words in the first century BC.
But that's also really interesting. He's a strategically, really interesting character and kind of un-Roman in some respects, but Roman in other respects and so forth. And so he's a fascinating biographer as well. Do we do like Krasis?
We do like Krasis. Do we do Numa? I don't think we do Numa. I don't have to do Numa.
Yeah, we'll do a bunch. It'll be great. Listeners, write us, tweet at us, DM us, send pics about which Plutarch life you'd like to do. And and Eric Eller, thanks for joining us.
Thanks as always, Snakebye. And best wishes to David Barr. Last I heard his wife was hard at work with a spatula, trying to pry him from his toilet seat. We'll see you next week on The New Think.
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