Interview: Eric Adler on Plutarch's Life of Romulus

Welcome back to the New Thinkery. My name is David Barn with me as always is my good friend, Alex, pretty how are you, Alex? Do I do how are you? I'm pretty good.

So who's the other person on our podcast? Eric Adler. Eric Adler, how are you, Eric? It's wonderful to be here with the two of you.

Yeah, yeah. And Eric was recently appointed chair of classics at the University of Maryland. He's a personal friend of mine, the two of Alex's good friend also. And his most recent book is the Battle of the Classics, How a 19th Century Debate can save the humanities today.

But that's out two years ago from Oxford University Press, a paperback is forthcoming. Yeah, Greg's not here today. He contracted a bacterial infection. He claims from a toilet seat, but they said they've only seen this on certain cheeses from the boot of Italy.

So I maintained it's a different origin story. And we are talking about origin stories today. So Greg, the rest in peace. Alex, you realize we just lost two listeners because there are two listeners who are just here for the Greg content.

So you better come clean. For your pastor, don't worry. This is not a Greg episode again. Just like Greg was with Greg.

Greg is always a film. I'm a pastor. One and then I'd say my mom, but it's not my she doesn't listen. Yeah, my father is he was listening.

And then I noticed that I stopped making comments about the show. I just stopped listening. Even to episodes that I'm interested in. But how are you Greg?

I'm doing great. I'm excited for the show. I confess to you guys. I've been teaching a lot lately.

We have this high school cat. And so I'm not, you know, I read it through. I don't really think I had a really good grasp of what's going on in this particular life. So I'm thrilled that we have Eric here to help sort of play out what's going on in this text.

Because I'm graciously accepted our invitation to provide commentary on all of the talk and various jazz albums since he's a jazzist. We know right now. Right. Yeah, I look forward to those episodes.

Yeah. So thank you so much for having me on. I really appreciate it guys. And it's great to see you guys go through all of these lives.

So I guess I should start by saying a few things about Romulus himself and what we know and what we don't know about Romulus. And I guess we can take it from there. The first thing I suppose we should say is that Romulus is a legendary mythological figure. This is not a person who really existed.

There was nobody by this name. There must have been somebody who was the first king of Rome. That's certainly the case. It's not named Romulus and it tells you a certain amount about Roman history and Roman historiography that this tale gets told about Romulus to begin with.

So first off, his name means little Rome. Ulyss and Latin is diminutive. So you can already tell there's something kind of fishy about this that a guy gets the name Little Rome and then later on in life ends up founding Rome. That's sort of not the way things work.

It's almost like his name is like like seedling of Rome or something like that. Yeah, that sort of thing. Yeah. So it doesn't fit.

And he's an essentially invented figure. There's a reason for this, which is that according to the traditional date for the foundation of Rome, which Plutarch talks about, that's supposed to be April 21st, 753 BC. And despite the precision of that, that date is invented to or largely made up. So it's found out by Marcus Torenti's Varro, a scholar from the first century BC.

Plutarch talks about that as well. But it's essentially a guest of it. And we know actually from archeologists that Rome was more than sparsely populated beginning around 900 BC. So they seem to be about 150 years off or thereabouts with when the foundation date was.

Now, the reason for that, I suppose, is that the foundation date for Roman historiography, when it was that Romans first began to write history is around 200 BC, a guy named Quintus Fabius Pictor, who was also mentioned in this biography by Plutarch, is the first historian of Rome. And he was someone who fought in the Second Punic War as a general and then wrote a history of Rome, actually in Greek, even though he was Roman. And so this great expanse of time had already elapsed between the foundation of Rome itself and the writing of Roman history, which I mean, 500, 600, 700 years have gone past between those. And so as a result, the Romans knew almost nothing about their foundation.

Eric, it was really quick. I apologize. No, this wasn't preserved in an oral tradition first. Yes.

So this is how they get it. So what they get largely is seemingly oral tradition, ballad songs, perhaps, stories that were passed on and so forth. So they have this kind of legendary character associated with it, which you can tell from all kinds of things in the biography of Romulus by Plutarch that there's the suckling of she-wolves and this kind of stuff that isn't scarcely believable. And Plutarch himself is very open about this as well.

He knows that this is, there's a fantastical element of this as well. In general, Plutarch is quite open about the fact that we know very little that's genuinely historical about Romulus himself. Now, that doesn't mean that we can't tell some things about early Rome from the life of Plutarch by, pardon me, the life of Romulus by Plutarch or our other sources, but this sort of simple correspondence that Romulus was our first king. This can't be right.

So really quick. I have a question for Eric. How much, when they started writing history, how cognizant, how much of this was an attempt to write over and against or a superior, more ennobling kind of history than that of the Greeks? That's a great question, David.

And we know that the Romans were highly, highly influenced by the Greeks when they first began to write history because they did so about 300 years after the Greeks started. So if Herodotus is the father of history, he seems to be writing around the late-the-century BC, the anthropographers are writing around that time too. The Greeks had a head start. And so the Romans didn't write until afterwards, much afterwards, hundreds of years later, and they seem to have been primarily, in fact, almost fully influenced by Greek historiography when they began to write.

The fact that Quintus Fabius-Pichor, who's a Roman, decided to write the first history of Rome by a Roman in Greek, shows you that there was an interest in trying to show the Greek world, that the Rome's accomplishments were worthy of this kind of treatment. And I'm sure, especially given the fact that the Romans had defeated the Carthaginians in the Second Punic War and therefore had become by 202 BC, really the masters of the Western Mediterranean, that the desire to write a history, to show the Greeks they were worthy of a history, shows you the kinds of authors that they were. And so the Romans themselves, all of the conventions virtually, virtually all the conventions of Roman historiography originally come from the Greek. It's sort of interesting the way you describe it, it's almost like history begins to be written.

This isn't sufficient, but I think this is necessary. History begins to be written when the city or community has achieved some level of greatness, right? Greatness, but also I think another condition that's necessary is some sort of inclination toward the arts, right? Or literature and things like that.

And so it's almost like, it's a creature of a community's success, which would go hand in hand with trying to write down these mythic origin stories, right? And the count of how we became what we are, let me tell you how we became what we are, some guys' mom slept with a ghost fellas, like that appeared on the hearth, right? And so you come up with... Same more?

Same more? Yes, same more. I'll let Eric do you go over here, tell us about the ghost fellas. It's such a great question.

My wife gave me a similar tall tale about where my first child came from. I was like, we don't even have a hearth, honey. Look at the townhouse, there's no ghost fellas coming to our townhouse. That portrait of Alex's home life is really the kind of reason why a lot of people tune into this podcast and I can certainly understand that.

Yes, it is certainly the case that I think that the Romans were, to some degree, embarrassed by the fact that they had grown so powerful and yet that they had no histories of their own state. And I do think that this may also suggest one of the reasons why there's a kind of mythological element to the biography of Plutarch that Romulus and Remus's father could be Mars, something that actually Plutarch downplays. But this is important because Mars is the Roman god of war and he's a very important god in the Roman pantheon. And to suggest that Romulus may be the son of Mars is saying something about the Roman people more generally.

So yes, I agree that there's an idea that the Romans wanted to kind of brag about their early history. Now, unfortunately, Quintus Fabius Picker, the father of Roman history, his history is lost. We only have small fragments, but it's been presumed by a number of modern scholars that he was especially nationalistic and pro-Roman. And again, this gets up what Alex is talking about.

The Romans are great enough to tell their own story and therefore they deserve that kind of treatment. But Plutarch's after it. So then what's Plutarch after and then we'll jump into the life. I apologize.

What game is Plutarch after? I should add here, I just got a text from my wife saying she was a curbing the other way. I'm saying, were you talking about me on the podcast? I'm gonna be hot water.

Maybe there's another listener. Yeah, don't worry. It's just a ghost fella. It's nothing to worry about at all.

Yeah, so David. Yes, Eric, why don't he could presumably, Plutarch could have, why did he write these comparative lives that forces us? And so he goes life, Greek life, Roman life, comparison, he doesn't do a comparison of all them. But the very fact that he decided to include a parallel Greek history, he could have done, he didn't have to do that.

And so the reader is saying, well, the Greeks have some contrast to all unlike Ergus. People start sorting themselves out in one camp or the other. What was Plutarch's game in this, and why not just write a straight Roman, byographical history? It's a great question.

And I think it's also something that we may return to when we talk about the biography because I think that this may color what he's doing in the life of Romulus as well. So Plutarch lived from the first into the second century AD. He was a Greek but he lived under Roman rule. He ultimately became a Roman citizen, but he was a Greek from Kaira Nia.

And he lived during a period, kind of earlier period of what's called the Second Sophistic. He was a Roman citizen ultimately, but he was a Greek origin, his first language was Greek obviously. This was a period of heightened nationalism among learned Greeks in his era. And there was an interest in trying to write like Greeks of old from the classical period.

And there was an interest in trying to give speeches like the classical Greeks and so forth. So it's a kind of nostalgic period, but it's also a period in which there was an intense interest in a kind of Greek nationalism from people like Plutarch who were actually subjects of the Roman world. So this is related also to the parallel lives in a real important way, which is that there's a kind of hutzpie, if you will, on the part of Plutarch to write Greek lives that he pairs with Roman lives. Because if you think about it, the lives he's writing in this series of parallel lives, these are political and military figures.

Now the Romans, I think, were at least many learned Romans would have been well aware that when it came to culture, poetry, literature, and so forth, the Greeks had a head start. They were the masters and sports and the Romans. There were some great Roman writers, obviously great Roman poets, but they had borrowed so much from the Greeks beforehand. But when it came to military matters, the Romans didn't have a great deal of respect for most Greeks.

They had defeated the Greek world in 146 BC pretty easily. I don't think that they thought that the Greeks were necessarily great fighters, and they certainly didn't think that the Greeks had accomplished anything on the kind of political and military stage like the Romans had. So for Plutarch to suggest that there's a kind of comparison, one to one between Greek figures on the one hand and Roman figures on the other hand, is to suggest that the Greeks deserve that kind of comparison, that they've accomplished something in some ways comparable to what Rome has accomplished. That's not something I think that a lot of Romans would have necessarily felt fully comfortable with, but does fit the second sophistication.

There's also a sort of, we've talked about this a bit when we head on to discuss Shakespeare's Coriolanus about how, I think we talked about briefly Plutarch on Elsobites versus Coriolanus, these models are ambitious people, but often the parallels are interesting, but also the differences are really revealing of the distinctions between Greece and Rome. And so you get, so he made the point that the noble for the Greeks is very different from the noble for the Romans. The noble for the Romans is a kind of military excellence and discipline, and it culminates in suicide if you lose. And then for the Greeks, it's closer to beauty, and nobility of action or something like that.

And anyways, yeah, I just want to throw that in there because it's interesting because it seems like it's a helpful way for a Roman, like we talked to arrive at self-knowledge, right? By giving these comparison, sorry, Greg, I jumped up before you. No, my question, I mean, it's just a small one. Eric, do you know the status of philosophy was at Rome at this time that he's writing in the first place?

Oh, yeah, that's a small question, Greg. Well, I mean, just the legal status. I don't mean what's like, because I know there were periods during Roman history when I was outlawed. The reason I asked if, just to give you a little bit of reading room here was, I'm using the low edition, by the way, I'm on page 121.

You mentioned this Varro who had talked about Rome history as well. And Plutarch notes that he was also a philosopher. So I just have this, I mean, Alex and David have heard me trot this period before, but that some Romans may have done philosophy under the guise of history or something like this. They used these historical, you know, at various times I don't think this is true of Plutarch, but maybe it's true of a task, for example, that there was a time when philosophy was in very big dispute, and so they would continue to do philosophy or something like philosophy, maybe just under a different guise.

Are you asking, Greg, if there's a kind of a useful esoteric, kind of a philosophizing under the surface? Yeah, let me try that. I mean, you mentioned very early on, which is really helpful that this is not probably historically accurate, that Rome was probably was an entirely fictional character, is a mythological person. And I mean, it's sort of easy to look back and I mentioned most readers of Plutarch, I assume that he naively just thinks, well, of course, there was this guy, Romulus, but I mean, I at least sensed from the reading that he was aware that that's probably not in fact the case.

And so if he used the word mythos several times, right, he's sort of indulging these myths or fables as translated in the in the low, but just what's the purpose of this mythologizing? It does, I mean, I do smell like something much more serious going on than simply the recounting of various stories, if that makes sense. That was a very long question. I apologize.

No, no, no, please. So first off, I would say that although he ultimately was a Roman citizen, I think Lutarch thought of himself first before, must agree. So that's important to a self-conception. The second thing, I think, is that Lutarch was a plate nest.

So he was a moral philosopher. And in fact, one major categories of his writings is called the Moralia, right, which is kind of an unfair because it doesn't fit every one of the writings. But he wrote a number of moral essays on the topic of moral philosophy. And he tried to vouch in some of them for the superiority of Platonism to other schools of philosophy.

So we're not precisely sure when the biography of Romulus by him was written. So we can't say, I mean, we do know that the one of Numa was written before him because he talks about other ones he's already written in the, you know, so it's not the first one he wrote despite the fact that this is the earliest figure in the Roman times that he focuses on. And yet we do know, I think that kind of around his florida, it was a time in which there was a kind of interest in Greek philosophy, including very high up. So toward the end of Lutarch's life, Adrian was an emperor.

He was a real Phil Helen, really interested in Greek philosophy. So no, there are sporadic periods in Roman history in which philosophers are kicked out of the city and so forth. And you sometimes can see attitudes on the part of elite Romans where you can dabble in philosophy, but you shouldn't get too interested in philosophy and so forth. I don't think that's an attitude Lutarch has.

I do think you're right, though, and I think you're on to something important, Greg, when you suggest that this is more than just kind of cobbling together a discussion of variant traditions and so forth. And so I think that's the first thing that I think is by talking about the founder of Rome, versus not the founder of Athens, but certainly a seminal figure in the development of Athens together, he's making this kind of statement about the comparability of these two states. And I think that's kind of interesting also, I think, and we can talk about this later. We can maybe get to the comparison in contrast.

These yes, doesn't come out that bad in the comparison with Romulus. I was going to say, yeah, don't they both come out poorly? This is definitely a question for the end because Plutarch says, both Theseus and Romulus were by nature meant for governors, yet neither lived up to the true character of a king, which to me implied that the true founding of both these great nations happened afterward. And so that they may be first in time, but not perhaps first in importance, if that makes sense.

Yeah, no, I know exactly what you mean. I think it's important that, and something that you recognize, I think is right, is that the biography of Romulus isn't that positive. It's not super negative either, I think, but it's not amazingly positive. In fact, we have three major accounts of Romulus as like Livy, I suppose, as the most famous.

We have Plutarch, and we also have a guy named Dionysia as a palar carnosus who lived around when Livy did in the first century BC into the, well, Livy made it into the first century AD Dionysia seems not to have. And of those three accounts, I think Plutarch is the most negative about Romulus. It's not over the top negative, there's some things he says about Romulus that are strong, but it's not that positive. And I would also say that theseus like this kind of mix, you guys already did an episode on that, but that's also kind of mixed.

That is interesting. I think Plutarch likes Numa, the second king of Rome, more than he likes Romulus, the first king of Rome. Again, kind of interesting because it's really charged when you're talking about the foundation of Rome itself when you're a Greek living under Roman rule. Yeah, it's interesting when it comes to Romulus versus Numa.

That seems to be a very widespread opinion where people, Machiavelli, for example, there's just an emphasis on Numa as a law giver, religious founder over it against. So you got to give the first guy his credit, right? But in a way, the first guy is just, maybe we can jump into the life itself. And I thought I could raise a theme that we talked about.

Can I ask a small question first? You mentioned the etymology of the names. I've often heard also, and I think my Romulus and Plutarch say something along these lines that Romulus also could be derived from the Roma strong, strength. So I mean, I sort of, when I teach the students, and Numa could be derived from Numa's law, right?

So it's like law and order or something like this with the name of the two founders of Rome, right? Like the guy that's the force and the guy that's the law. I mean, it is kind of funny, right? It's like force and law are the two founders of Rome.

Is there anything to that? Vocal emology or is it? Yeah. Yeah.

That's really great. But these really hip references to Tango and our younger listeners are really going to be so impressed by that kind of thing. You know, I mean, just tell us stories about Jack Bar, or I mean, no. Yeah, right.

So anyway, one thing that Plutarch seems really interested in is what we would call folk entomologies. And you actually see them strewn through, especially the earlier lives. You'll see them in Numa. You'll see them in Romulus as well.

A lot of them don't pan out. They're just sort of things that sound somewhat similar and linguists would say, now this doesn't come from this and so forth. It's kind of interesting and kind of correspondence between those things. But we also see, I think, at the beginning of the life of Romulus itself that there's just a million variants.

And so from that, you can sort of say this word sounds a little bit like that word and some people say that and so most of that is actually fanciful. Yeah. So to get into the life of Romulus, yeah, one thing we talked about with easiest was, and this was it was really with easiest, especially I felt, but maybe you guys can weigh in on this. I felt really hard to even figure out what this life was.

So if you take like Kirkus, for example, he's like, look, I'm filling in the gaps, but he gives you a narrative occasionally a couple variations, but you got a narrative. I was reading theses. I was like, I feel like every stage I get a handful of stories and I can't put them together. He doesn't put them together.

So you're just sort of left with that. And one of the things we were sort of reflecting on there is just the difficulty of, and then by the end of theses, it seems like it was purely inventive. Nobody cared when the guy died. He was not this great figure.

It's obviously sort of after the fact sort of invention, which makes you wonder about Romulus where he could not, I think, be as open about his sort of questioning of it. But there is a lot made of all these different origin stories and then a special emphasis on the Phantom Phallus, right, that had come to the heart. And then also the fact- That's twice. That's twice he's brought that up.

We told him three. The sensors, we got to keep that clean rating. So the third one is the limit. What's wrong with the phrase Phantom Phallus?

That's three. But what's wrong with that is the name of the film that Greg starred in. He doesn't like us reminding him of it. But the film he started was called, yeah, I was saying it.

You know what I was going to say. I mean, just for a Phantom Phallus seems like a pain. Sorry. All things.

That's four. That's four. We're out. Jake.

Anyway, I just brought up for the folks at home and I'm reading this. I want to let you know. I wrote it in my notes. I'll make it up as this.

I don't know how he's shot every time he doesn't. I'll call it the Poltergeist Venus. So Poltergeist Venus shows up on the horny heart. I thought you'd go at disappearing, never mind.

So anyways, I was thinking about this. I was trying to think, okay, what's really going on here? It seems like at a minimum what's factual or what could be factual is Ronless was born of some maid servant. And he grew up was ambitious, killed his brother, killed his adoptive father, maybe his actual father, who knows, and his uncle was killed in the battle surrounding the foundation of Rome.

And I was thinking about it. I was like, this is like a Greek tragedy. But the mythic, as we're doing the way that the mythics use cleans up the tragedy. So it's almost like, okay, Edipus kills his father, Mary's his mother.

What if Edipus is a god? He disappears at the end of the tragedy. Then all of a sudden it's wonderful. Gets rid of the old guy who can't solve the problem.

And he has a child and there's this divine origin. It's almost like the divine origin hides the ugliness, the tragic origins of the founding, and creates a sort of divine root in it. And I thought that the image of a, I'm not allowed to say that phrase, which I said. Well, cock.

What's that? The, can't think of anything. What's another word for ghost? Specter, ghost, actor, ghost.

Apparition? Yeah. I don't know. Isn't there, you must be the Yiddish word for penis.

Doesn't it start with an S? Shmush. Meckel? Yeah.

Smeckel? Yeah. Yeah. The specter, the spectral specter.

Yeah. We could do this all night. Yeah. Yeah.

Anyways. You're writing a great beer. It seems to me like, like a ghost dick is what you need to sort of, it's in a way a fitting metaphor for foundings, right? The origins are quite ugly.

We just need a caucus ex knock and that's just fixed all of that. Really. It's so hard to take up after such a brilliant question. One thing I would agree with you, and I'll be interesting to see what Greg and David have to say about this as well, is that I don't think the biography really imbues Romeo's with that much of a personality.

It's so scattered in some ways and so interested in, I read this and this guy says that and so that at the end, you're not really that sure what this guy was really like. I mean, there are some characteristics. He's obviously very strong and he's courageous and so forth. He becomes, Lutarck says, toward the end, more autocratic, which is sort of interesting in the way that he talks about this and could be a comment on contemporary Rome that he's offering at that point too.

But I don't think when you read the biography afterwards, you know really what this guy was like. In a sense, you might say, well, it's because it's so early and this guy is so little known and so forth, but numerous might be made up too. And yet I think at the end of the numalike, you get the sense this was a really pious person, a pious, peaceful person who thought religion was so important to the founding of Rome that he set up the kind of religious paraphernalia for the state. Romeo's isn't given that kind of personality.

And so at the end, I felt you weren't really left with a strong sense of why he was really like. So I think psychologically, maybe I'll just pitch it to Greg since it's psychologically, what effect does that have on the reader? What do you think the intended effect is that you just move past Raniu as quickly? I don't know.

I think that in some ways, he's interested in other things. You see this in the life of Newman as well. He's aware that he has very little information, but he needs to write a biography of a certain length. So there's a certain amount of padding.

There's digressions and maybe this word comes from that word and this person says this and so there's a lot of that in the life of Raniu as at the same time, to be fair to Plutarck, he may just have no real sense of what this guy was really like other than that he was a kind of brawny guy who did some important things. One thing that's kind of interesting if you look at the more garril as a count of Heli Kranosus offers about Romulus is that he talks a great length about what a wonderful law giver and Constitution builder Romulus was. You see virtually none of that in the biography of Plutarck. So he could have gone in different directions and he chose to give this account.

I wouldn't say it's a colorless, but at the same time, the impression I get is that he also doesn't know too much about what this guy was really like. That sounds like this for Greg's mill about the force thing, right? It's almost like he reduces into sheer brawn and force, right? The law comes later.

Can I leave this divine origins part? There was a passage that I thought was really important on this point. This is, I guess, chapter 28, section 437, some page 181 to Loeb if you want to look it up. He says, I'll probably bear it, Plutarck's name.

But it said also that the body of alchemy knee disappeared as they were carrying her force for burial and stone was seen lying on the beer instead. In short, many such fables, the Greek as myths, people do a lot of mythologizing. The writers do who probably ascribed divinity to the mortal features in human nature as well as to the divine. But then he says, but to reject entirely the divinity of human nature is impious and base.

So I don't know exactly what I want to do. But first is, of course, just, I mean, one of the reasons I think we first turned to Plutarck was Machiavelli in this idea about these mythical council founders and somehow they always get to scribe these divine origins. But I just wonder what his take on this was because immediately after saying, well, they all do this, then he says, it would be kind of impious to the night. But I mean, it seems that he's presented this as highly unlikely for its work.

That was a digression to where we were. No, I think that's important. And I can read the next line after that quote Greg, he's important. But to mix heaven with earth is foolish.

And then if you're inclined to ask the terrorists in the next sentence. That is therefore take the safe course. Thank you. That our bodies almost follow death's supreme behest.

But something living still survives an image of life that is a lot of comes from the gods. And then equal terraclytis and improved the idea that the solos and mortal means you're the Heraclitus here. Right? Does that sound right to you?

How is that? It's a human solos and mortal? No, it's okay. What do you think of this?

So what he's talking about there is just a dry solos best. It's about drinking. But you know, it's, it's, but it's this moment jumps out to me as it's somewhat like we can choose two paths, right? Human virtue has a connection to the divine or a kind of materialism, you know, right?

Yeah. Yeah. And therefore that's, does that help us understand it all his purpose here? He's trying to keep alive or revive the notion, however, fantastic or mythical that does virtue need this sort of quasi mythical bounding?

Is that, is that the, I mean, what is his interest in this? I guess that's my question. Does that makes, I mean, I saw that in the context of a discussion of the two possibilities for, for amulis is death. So the two main possibilities are one, he was actually sent up to heaven.

So in apotheosis, right? He becomes the God. And the second is he's ripped to shreds by the senators who don't like how autocratic he's been. Ouch.

And it seems as if blue-tark favors the latter story. Yes. The first one is fanciful. And I think he's suggesting, I saw this as platonic, but you guys know way more about that kind of stuff than I do, is that he doesn't think it's reasonable to believe that someone could have just been swept up into the clouds and become a God.

But instead that there's a kind of divine character to human virtue. And so that the soul can be sort of seen and these people's lives can be remembered in those particular ways. But the idea of a kind of simplistic, oh, there was a storm and then Romulus was taken up to the heavens and he's now a God and so forth. He sees this kind of fanciful.

That kind of thing that she's interested in making. Is this fair to say, I've just, I've just, I've just, I've just, I haven't bought it out fully, but we seem to be, we seem to be more inclined to grant mythical origins than mythical deaths. Is that right? I mean, I guess it's not uncommon that there's this, the way a word for it, right?

People are sending it to heaven. So maybe it's not right. But, and if that, like all these kind of things have mythical origins, but Moses doesn't, for example, right? He has a myth origin according to Michael, but not a mythal ending, right?

He just dies. These yes, I don't, yeah, these yes, there is, I guess presented as sort of materialistic or human, right? He's pushed off a cliff, refalls. Cyrus, there's nothing magical about his death, although there are various magical accounts of his origin.

I don't know. Just, just thinking that out. Yeah. I mean, Plutarch does offer a kind of mythological discussion of Romulus and Remus, right?

And that Mars may actually be the father. And there again, he seems, he doesn't outright reject, but he doesn't seem to take it very seriously. He thinks instead, in fact, that Amuleus may actually be the father. So he sort of does the same thing for the birth as he does afterwards.

So I think that there's a kind of interest in trying to make the story that seems so obviously mythological have some sort of concrete historical value. This is what he's come up with under the circumstances. Got it. There are a few striking political lessons.

I mean, Plutarch does speak in his own voice in a few interesting sections. The most interesting, I'm using the Dryden translation, so different pages, is that indeed there was nothing, and indeed there was nothing did more advance the greatness of Rome than that she did always unite and incorporate those whom she conquered into herself. So this is a discussion to context with the state-blind women. And there are a few places sprinkled into this Romulus biography where Plutarch seems to speak, strikingly, in his own voice.

And I don't know if these little nuggets that we have to keep in mind as we work through the rest of the lives, especially as we see the kind of arch of Rome in history through Plutarch. And so that I was just wondering what those kinds of comments we're doing, if you had any ideas about that. Yeah, I think that's actually a really important comment and actually speaks to the comparison and contrast that he's interested in making between specifically Athens and Rome. You guys talked about this in your episode on PCS, in fact, that there's this tradition or myth that the Athenians were autochtumous.

They actually sprang from the ground itself. And so Rome is the exact opposite in a sense, that they're a safe haven from their origins for ne'er-do-wells from the rest of Italy who can come into the city itself. And so this is a sort of major difference between Athens and Rome. And I think in some sense, as it may explain, as far as Plutarch is concerned, Rome's success in comparison with Athens' failure to maintain territory for as long as they did.

Because the Athenians were not open in the way that the Romans were. This actually is really important to Rome's long-term imperial success, that they were necessarily like nothing but sort of diversity czars or something like that. And if you just loved everybody and wanted to bring everybody into Rome and so forth, come on in and so forth, like they work at a university or something like that today. But they are as an imperial strategy comparatively inclusive.

And I think that that does explain Rome's success. But for Plutarch, I think that that's important. If he's attempting to argue that these are as comparable in some way to Romulus, he needs to explain why Rome ended up being so much more successful as a state, as an imperial state than Athens was. In his own voice, I agree, kind of explains that or helps explain others.

I have a question. This is a very specific question. At the very end it says that he died when he was 58 or something like this. He was 54 when he died.

Romulus has said to have been 54 years of age. And in the 38th year of his reign, when he disappeared from among men. Now, my math's not great. He was 16 when he started, when he became the ruler of Rome.

Yeah, so I've seen different numbers from the different historians that 18, something like that. I mean, there's something fishy about all of these numbers. You'll notice there's supposed to be seven kings of Rome. They all last around 30, something years, maybe a bit more servious, until he has last longer.

No one lasts two years and then dies, which given the state of Roman medicine and antiquity would be something that you would expect, there must have been more than seven kings. So there's a sense in which they're just trying to fill up all that time until the Republic starts to put it all together. But yeah, if they're not going to have as long of a life, why not start early, I suppose. And at the same period of time, Romulus is it's suggested by Blue Tark that Romulus is more than human in some ways from the very start, that he's more beautiful and stronger than the typical person.

So why couldn't he as a young person become a king? That doesn't seem necessarily so far-fetched. Interestingly, there seems to be also the ghost fellas. Oh, I'm so glad Alex that's such an important.

I mean, that gives you the force to found. Oh, this man doesn't have an endowed chair at an elite university. It's boggles the mind. Doud.

And so thank you, Alex, yet, yet again. And so I think that there's a sense of the incongruousness. So Greg rightly pointed out that there's a desire to undercut some of the fanciful mythological elements in the life. But at the same time, other ones appear.

So if Mars is not his father, as it appears the Blue Tark is not likely to be, why exactly does this person seem more than human, more beautiful, more courageous, stronger than human? If his mother's a human and his father's a human, that doesn't necessarily fit. So there's, I think he's sort of taking from different historians or different sources and then putting this together and it doesn't necessarily all fit. But no, I don't think the Romans would have been so bothered by someone, a teenager, becoming and this happened also in the Roman Empire, not necessarily a great effect that someone like Nero or Caligula would become a number of other young.

What seems odd though is with all these conflicting historical lines, how much latitude would the Blue Tark have had to create say 50% of his biography out of whole cloth? By his time had some of the Roman historians already been lost to the writing, if those writings had already been lost. I mean, it's like, Voorhest does this all the time in his short story. He just makes up citations as a kind of insight joke.

I mean, what would have prevented Blue Tark from inventing? I mean, he could have accrued more power in an interesting way as a philosopher or historian by injecting his own mythologizing into the life rather than his convoluted tale where he's just bringing out threads that go nowhere. Yeah. I mean, first off, you'll note through the biography, especially toward the beginning, that he mentions all these different writers, most of whom are lost.

And he says this person says that and that person says this and so forth. I think it's an attempt to show the reader, I've done a lot of work before I wrote this and I've read it out of everything I can find. The impression we get from that is not that a lot of things have been lost. In fact, quite the contrary, but that he had lots of sources that we would love to have now but they don't survive.

So if you could have done this. Okay. I mean, some people wouldn't have known, not everyone necessarily would have read this stuff. So some people would read Blue Tark wouldn't necessarily have done the work to find these other texts and so forth.

But we do get a sense because we have two larger biographies of Romulus that we find in history is one of Livy, one of Dionysius. We do get some sense of what their discussion of Romulus is like in comparison with Blue Tark. And the impression we get is that there are different emphases and some of them are importantly different emphases and they take different threads of the story and they focus on different things and they make things their own, have speeches and so forth. But that the general thread of what happened during his life is the same for all three.

So no one invents some different people that he conquered or something like that. No one leaves out the say-bye in women or something like that. So the general contours seem to be kind of well known and he's working within that tradition. Can I, there's a lot of sides to this story of fratricide, and I think Greg wanted to talk about this.

That's okay. I just wanted to know. So I mean, he does all these, he does all these various stories and I'm just, you know, of course my mind goes to the Can and Abel story and Romulus killing his brother, Remus. And so I don't know, this isn't just for you, Eric, but other folks too.

Like what, I sort of imagine that there's a lesson behind these. Like what does it say about someone who wants to kill his father? And what does it, that tells us something in that of us, right? The tyrannical soul or something like this.

Why is fratricide linked with foundings of cities in particular? This is something, I don't know if this is worth reflecting on or if anybody has an answer. I certainly don't put him on the spot, but it seems, it seems a curious coincidence that the founder of Rome and the founder of the first city of the Bible, each kills his brother. And father killing makes a little more sense to me.

It's the brother killing that I don't quite get. One alone is that you just have to be by yourself. I don't quite understand it. And they both then, they both then also pick up subsequent seconds, right?

So there's a minute. So this is where it's helpful to go back to the names of the etymology, right? Like a lot of this means little Rome, but might also be rooted in Rome. Remus means he who gets reamed by his brother is that my lion is kind of weak.

And you, I just want to put this out there. You have it. This isn't just the three of us. We have a distinguished chair of classics.

I took a long back. I've actually stayed in the university. I'm not trying to contribute the best way I can. Eric is laughing, but he's muted.

So this makes me sound like I'm just like. He's actually shaking his head in moral indignation. Oh, no. This is one thing that struck me.

I don't know if this necessarily gets at what Greg is trying to get at, but one thing that strikes me is really important here is that there's a kind of focus on the family. And I think that that's important for monarchy, especially a culture like Rome that it's in a republic. In some sense is the family becomes really important when you have a monarchy as opposed to a republic because the women in the family or others in the family have a kind of power by virtual proximity to the king. And so I think this is another reason why you see that there are a number of powerful female characters and that female is playing an important role in the story as well, despite the fact obviously that this is a male king and so forth.

And so I do think that kind of family dynamics play a kind of important role in this discussion as well. I also think if you look at not just Blue Talk but Livia and Dionysius, one thing that they focus on is that Romulus is stronger and a better natural leader than Remus. And so in some sense as the tale, I think that's told is that Romulus deserves to rule in a way that Remus does not. You'll note in a story that Remus is the one who's captured by Numa towards men, but Romulus is never captured.

So I do think that there's some sense in which Romulus is the rightful king of Rome and Remus is not. But still, the family dynamic ends up being really important because of the kind of government that's established. Makes sense. It even just like the city being sort of requiring you to get outside of the family maybe.

Maybe there's just sort of a really exaggerated way in which it has to show that you're detached from the family in some way. Yeah, very good. Well, maybe that's a good stopping point unless Eric, you had a few more thoughts or? Well, one thing that did strike me about the biography that was really interesting was that, and I think it's been alluded to beforehand is the comparison, the explicit comparison of the other pieces.

Where's the question of monarchy and tyranny that David alluded to earlier? That's great. Yeah, I think we should maybe hit both of those at least. So one of them is that in the biography to the degree that Romulus comes out looking in any particular way, I think he comes across as a martial figure, an important martial figure.

And this is sort of his chief strength. He's a great warrior. He's a great leader and so forth. And then you get to the comparison with Theseus and it's sort of strange that one of the first things he says is that Theseus really accomplished more than Romulus did as far as war is concerned.

He did more. He killed more people and so forth. And he doesn't say Dionysius says that Romulus would have done more, but he was actually killed in the midlife. So he didn't have a chance to do more because he didn't live long enough.

But Blue Talk doesn't talk about that. And then suddenly the good characteristics of Romulus, at least in comparison with Theseus are his treatment of women, which given the rape of the Savine women was not necessarily the first thing you would head to. But in comparison with Theseus, who seems like a serial rapist by comparison, Romulus comes off looking well. So suddenly there's a total switch.

It seems to be one of the other. So the problem with Theseus is that he commits serial rapes, like you mentioned, whereas Romulus only raped once. But he gives various numbers. He doesn't make sure how many of them are.

I'm not saying that great yet. But I feel like he goes through a tonal tone to the mark. But he goes through three different possible numbers of women that Romulus helped rape. But then in the comparison, it's higher than any of the three that he gave in the life of Romulus.

It's like 500, 600, 800. And then in the comparison it's 900. So it's like it grew there. Anyway, so it's one instance, but it's like all of these women.

Right. But I guess he says that he ultimately did this for a decent purpose and so forth. One thing that's sort of interesting, comparison with Livy, is that Livy I think really goes out of his way to try to justify not fully, but some of the bad behavior by Romulus. And this is something that anyone who's going to write a biography.

There's some things that Romulus did that I think all of us maybe even Greg would agree are raw, like the rape of the Savine Women and so forth. And so- So the record, I'm opposed to that. It's not going to be something- I'm glad. Yes, I'm glad.

I'm glad. So you'll have to kind of get around that. Livy tells a story of Roman ambassadors going to each one of these communities and pleading with them to try to get them to marry Romans so that this can continue. And they insult them and say, no, we're not going to marry you.

Our women are not going to marry your men. You guys are the dragons of the earth and so forth. Try to get Roman readers perhaps mad and maybe more likely to justify what happens afterwards. Lutarch does say that the rape of the Savine Women was necessary.

He does suggest that it was done by compulsion. But he doesn't offer this kind of- the Romans go out and they're insulted and so forth. It's not colored so wonderfully. It doesn't look so great.

So you're not, I think, ready to see Romulus look good in that aspect of his life- comparison. So it is sort of strange. And there's this- and it's two things in that point. There's this long or interesting passage where the men come back to the women at some point much later and women defend it.

They're like, look, you should have done something years ago. Now we're actually quite happy with our children and husbands. And then as- so that's point one. And then secondly, Alex and I were texting about this a little earlier.

I sort of said, comically, I didn't realize is that we get the tradition of carrying your bride through the threshold from carrying these women away against their will. That's kind of comable. But then what Alex said to the serious point there is that he wondered to what extent this rape was somehow symbolic of foundings as such. Like, there is this sort of carrying off of something like that.

I forget what my question was. Sorry. I guess just how it's sanitized, but then also how maybe it's a parallical politics. Yeah.

Well, I mean, the role of women in the state seems really- it seems really important not only for Romulus and the origin, the rape of the same women, but also for the origin of the Republic as well. So the rape of Lucretia ends up being the event that galvanizes various members of the Roman elite to fight against the king and get rid of the monarchy and so forth. So certainly, I think the relationship between the sexes and the proper role of women is something that's really important. And I don't think Plutarch's discussion of this necessarily is very different.

So Livy also talks about the fact that the women go into battle between the two sides and stop them and say, oh, these are our husbands now. Don't fight against them and so on. So it's sort of legitimized throughout the tradition as well. Right.

Yeah. I think that's one of the things that both Theseus and Romulus, the lives bring us to see, right, is that behind any founding is this attempt to make the low high, whether it's rape, whether it's a maid servant, whether it's, you know, great, impious thoughts about Moses and Jesus. Remember that from our Machiavelli episode? I don't remember that.

I don't know if you're talking about it. But you have to do this is why I'm so fixated on this. This is why I'm so fixated on this. The way that we know is that it just seems like you have to, you need in a way this divine mechanism.

You're really reaching around for your metaphors right now, Alex. You're out of the deep. But I mean, seriously, right? You need the load to become high.

So what's the best way to do that? Say it was a phantom insemination of some kind, right? You know, you need some kind of, and so that's just sort of redeems the origins when in reality, it's just this, this brony rapist, right, who just kills and rapes as he needs to get the, the to found his city and then later you can clean it up. That's what poets and historians do.

Yeah. I mean, it seems to me that when we're talking about low to high, that's something you see throughout this biography, right? I mean, so this is somebody who's raised by a swine herd supposedly. Now he's interesting.

There's an interesting little bit where Plutarch says he was educated really well. Rome is got really great education. That was so weird. Yeah.

I think that sort of shows you the Greek touch that he's very interested in their upbringing and so forth there. But at the same time, you know, there's a sense in which these are really lowly figures who end up being really, really important to Rome's history. And I do think that that's a corollary also with this idea of Rome as a safe haven for ne'er-do-wells throughout Italy, that Rome itself sees, or there's a self-conception of kind of an openness to people. They don't come from this kind of fancy pants background.

Well, Romulus does actually come from a fancy pants background. He's from the royal family of Alba Longa, but that's not the kind of life he has really on. What's interesting though to me is that, I mean, Zenithin, of course, I'm very partial. Zenithin, he does a, he writes an account of Cyrus, another one of these mythical founders, but he sanitizes, I mean, he gets rid of all the nasty stories that we've heard basically that's around Cyrus, right?

All the nasty stuff we hear from Horazus and he alludes to it in a few passages. It doesn't, I find it odd that Plutarch sort of does, I mean, they're there. I mean, and as you mentioned, Romulus doesn't really have much of a personality. He's just sort of brute strength.

He had a great education, but he started rolling in 16. I mean, it's all sort of, I don't know, I'm sort of struck by how he does keep these nasty stories. And only once or twice does Zenithin do this with Cyrus. He sort of pretends to be very ashamed even mentioning it.

Well, you know, if you have to, you know, we should mention that some people say he married his aunt, but you know, she would have also probably not. Whereas Plutarch just listened straight off. It may have been an expectation of Roman readers though. I mean, you see this in living, you see in Dionysius.

These are the tales that come down probably as I talked about with David. These are the tales that come to us from the tradition and you kind of have to offer these tales or else you're not writing a biography of Romulus. So he sort of stopped doing that even if he doesn't necessarily want to. Yeah, it's interesting when if you have an unstable founding, I mean, in the historical record, it leaves breathing room for new founders also to kind of take the helm.

I haven't thought this idea out all the way through, but say in the case of the United States, you have a Colossus in the figure of George Washington. You also have Abraham Lincoln. But they're kind of bookends. It's hard to imagine another kind of figure coming to the fore because those myths are so and the true history, of course, are so cemented in our minds with the Romulus, at least the way that Plutarch presents him.

I wonder if an aspiring Roman tyrant would think to himself, well, there's room for another kind of founding that I can accomplish. Does that make sense? Yeah. Well, so one thing I think is important is not from Plutarch's own day.

It's from before his time, but there were comparisons made between Romulus and Augustus, the first emperor of Rome, but he wouldn't have been happy with those kinds of comparisons at least dead out because he was trying to hide the fact that he was actually monarch. But obviously there was a kind of correspondence between Romulus as a founder and Augustus as a kind of refounder, if you will, as a founder of the Roman Empire. So it's possible to get back to that thing we were talking beforehand about monarch, what kind of monarch Romulus was and so forth. There's an interesting bit in which Plutarch suddenly says toward the end of his life, seemingly as a result of overconfidence, I guess, he becomes more openly autocratic.

And he says weirdly that he starts acting like a monarch, which is strange because if he is monarch, he, I think, is like Greek where he uses, which is strange because he's a king from the very beginning. I mean, it's very obvious, but he offers this vision of good governance, I think, in which a king to be a proper king is supposed to go to the elite, in this case, the patrician senators who are as advisors, I guess, and try to get their view of how the state should be run as well. And that the problem with Romulus for the end of his life, and I guess the cost of his life as well, is he just starts to act like a tyrant, not in the sense of tyrant like someone who's a usurper because he's obviously not a usurper. This is his state.

He started it. But instead, someone who doesn't listen to the council of anybody else at all. It's an interesting little remark. And the fact that Newtark was in elite circles, writing in the Roman Empire, there's the possibility that he's interested in offering a kind of message for the emperor, whoever that may be when he's writing it at this particular period of time.

Right. We talked about this a little bit when we did that chapter six of the Prince, Machiavelli's Prince. I thought maybe I could kick this to Greg a little bit because I think we were a little bit, we had a sense of Moses, right? And we also had a little bit of a sense that almost of the easiest, but this came up in the easiest episode.

But did you get us reading through Poutarke, if you have a better understanding of what Machiavelli is talking about, or when he talks about Alba and stuff in chapter six. I'll read it real quick. This is from chapter six of Machiavelli's Prince. It was fitting that Romulus not be received in Alba, that he should have been exposed at birth if he was to become king of Rome and founder of that father land.

I got nothing. Here's one thing I'll say is the others all found people who are already there. Romulus seemed like this is an impression I get. Romulus seems more than any of the other examples Machiavelli gives to be a founder in the highest sense because he actually, like Moses found the people of Israel, they were there already in Egypt.

Cyrus found the Persians' malcontent. Theseus found the Athenians dispersed. Romulus was a founder of the people. There weren't people that he turned into Romans.

They keep brought them there apparently or something like this. Did you do? Maybe the Alba thing is he's of royal stock, but then he's left in the middle of nowhere. And so he has the right stuff, but then he has an empty canvas in a way.

That would make sense why you needed it. Yeah. I don't know if this is fair to say either, but I was a little surprised at how, what, the Theseus, as you said, Eric is kind of mixed. I expected the Romulus to be more patriotic.

And I was surprised when it wasn't, which means I'm a little surprised that Machiavelli chooses Romulus and Theseus as his sort of archetypal founders. It makes me think he's marched in Rome and Athens, then in the actual figures who did the founding, if that makes sense. Do we? I'll just go one step further.

I actually do wonder if Machiavelli doesn't think that these great peoples that get founded, if they don't invent their own founders, just in the way that Plutar seems to be implying about Ron's. Do we get a sense of, pardon my ignorance on this, but obviously Machiavelli read Lythi. Do we get a sense that Machiavelli's account of Romulus is cheap coming from Lythi? So it has the case that it might not be that influenced by Plutar.

Which and Lythi's is, you know, a bit of a mixed bag too, but I think it's more positive than Plutar. So that, hold on, just a great question. One thing that struck me about your discussion of Machiavelli when you were talking in the Theseus episode was about the fact that these founders that He sees as great, Machiavelli sees as great are all legendary mythological figures. That struck me as sort of important, but the best founders are those that are not actually real people in some important sort of ideas or something like that that people have.

Where else would we talk about his first Eric Adler is not a believer. Where else would Machiavelli have gotten his Theseus but Plutar, though, that's right. That seems like a primary source. So that leads me to believe he probably would have had the Plutar for a lot of his stuff.

But we know we had Lythi. We know we had Plutar because of Philip. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. But how much he read one versus the other and so forth and what he was inspired by when he was making that remark and so forth. I suspect it was Cyrus that someone, I forget who the guy was, but help my friend help me to see this, that in the Prince Machiavelli seems to be playing with the sources. And I think leading to believe that all of his accounts of Cyrus are drawn from, excuse me, from Xenophon, but in fact in chapter six, it seems to be the Cyrus drawn from Herodotus.

So I wonder if you would be doing something similar with Romulus that leading us to believe that it's Libby, but then drawing certain facets strictly from Plutar or vice versa. I don't know. That's something that's probably worth thinking about looking into. I think it's a good conclusion, Paine Eric, unless you had any.

Well, one last thing I wanted to say is that there is a connection between Romulus and David Barr. And let me explain. Does that have to do with wolves and how one per years no? No, no, no.

I can see that. Oh my God, Alex has been waiting. I could just see that the little chip monk in his head is just sort of going around. The reflection of his glasses.

I think he's googling synonyms. I spent half the time off the source.com. This is not that many synonyms for ghosts. I'm like Poltergeist.

Anyway, we lost the connection between Romulus and David. We've already talked about the legendary character, Bronulus. My wife and David already knows this, but my wife believes that David Barr does not exist, that he is the figment of my fever and imagination. Let me explain very quickly.

So what this relates to is that David and I hit it off. He emailed me a couple of years ago and we met and so forth. And I said, oh, my wife, I said, oh, I met this guy David Barr. You should meet him.

He's funny. He's over at them. We have a small child to hit kids and they know about schools in the area and so forth. So we should meet him every time I tried to get our families to meet up.

It somehow never worked out. And at some point it got to like we were going to meet in 15 minutes and it never worked out. And so my wife kind of came up with this notion that I had concocted in some desperate attempt to get friends in middle age. This Strowcy and intellectual who happens to live in Kensington, Maryland of all things.

And as a popular podcast, it just seemed far-fetched to her. But there is. It's great. I can tell you story upon story of when we were at St.

John's of awarded meetings with David Barr where he was like, you know, let's meet at the coffee shop and I'd be there. I'd be like, hey, I call him. Hey, why are you? I'm outside.

I'm like, I'm outside the coffee shop. You're not here. 45 minutes later. He's got three kids and you know, and he's moving to a new place and so forth.

You know, it's not, you know, to think of the little people as three kids, but how many years does that mean? That's a good point. I sire them as if I was their progenitor. Maybe there was a phantom.

Well, no, this relates to my final question for Eric Adler, chair of the classics department at the University of Maryland, Duke Classics PhD, also a human being for the next. What was the classics association? What's the main one called? Society for Classical Studies.