Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, designed to help bring those four key Stoic virtues, courage, discipline, justice, and wisdom into the real world. Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. To me, the miracle that any of these books from antiquity survive.
Like, how? How do we have Mark Sreos' meditations? How do we have these books that 2,000 years ago, 2,500 years ago, somebody wrote down on a scroll or on a waxen tablet, and then it was preserved? It was preserved not just against the elements, but against censors who wanted to destroy them, against book burnings.
It's just a miracle. That's why one of my favorite books is this book, The Swerve, How the World Became Modern, by Stephen Greenblatt. He's a Shakespearean scholar, but The Swerve is this thing he talks about when some of these ancient texts were rediscovered in the medieval era leading to the Renaissance. It's like an incredible book.
I've raved about it for years. I love it. I'm a huge fan of his work. I've been dying to get him on the podcast for a very long time, and I think you're really going to like this episode.
He's a professor of the humanities at Harvard. He's written extensively about the English Renaissance. He's the general editor of the Norton Anthology of English Literature and the Norton Shakespeare. I not only loved his book, The Swerve, which won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, very much deserved, but he also wrote Will in the World, which is a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize biography of Shakespeare.
I also like his little book, Tyrant, which is about the sort of tyrannical, demagogic characters in Shakespeare's plays. I also like his book about Adam Neve. I'm just a huge fan of this person, and it was an absolute treat to have him on the podcast. I'm just going to get into the episode.
We're talking about likable geniuses, abrasive and dangerous ones, how Shakespeare subtweets in his plays, and plays as rehearsals for moral and political crises. We're talking about Euripides and his play, The Children of Hercules, and then, of course, the idea of The Swerve, and then how Marcus really has wielded power without becoming a monster. You're going to love this episode. You can grab copies of The Swerve and Tyrant at The Painted Porch.
You can check out his latest book, Dark Renaissance. Let's just get into this episode. You're in Austin, right? Yeah, right outside Austin.
I've been to Austin on a number of different occasions, but not for very recently, but I'll see if I can make it there again. Please come out. We have a little bookstore here that carries most of your books. Please hear it.
Yeah, let's see. What do I have here? I have Tyrant, which I loved. I have A Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve.
I have The Swerve, and then here's the new one as well. Oh, I'm glad you have that. I'm very happy about that. I didn't know if you would have it.
I have Will in the World, which I also loved, but I couldn't find it on my shelf. I've been thinking a lot lately. I know he's not exactly your area of expertise, but I've been thinking a lot lately about how relevant Montaigne is to this world that we live in. Yeah.
Montaigne is really one of my favorite writers in the world. I sometimes think, who would I want to be in that game that one always plays? Who would you like to sit in the same room with? Who would you like to meet and talk with?
And people say, whatever. I mean, Jesus or Socrates. And Montaigne is probably at the very top of my list. Yeah, I think he would be a fascinating dinner companion.
I would like to just watch him work in that library, sort of going from book to book, talking out loud, meditating on things. He's not just modern in the sense of how he thinks. I've recommended this book so much. Actually, we bought so many copies.
We brought it back out that the publisher was thinking of discontinuing it. But Stefan Zweig wrote this little biography of Montaigne. In, you know, like 42 or 43, when he was fleeing the Nazis in South America. And there's something very haunting about a man in exile, writing about a man who was sort of pursuing his own self-imposed exile in the midst of the excesses and horrors of his time.
I don't know this book, Ryan, but I'm going to make a note of it and read it. That sounds wonderful. I read Stefan Zweig's, I think it's Stefan Zweig's, he wrote a biography of that interesting theologian named Castillo from the same period. And I thought it was wonderful.
And he has a book on Erasmus too. So he's interested in intolerance, intolerant people. Yes, that's exactly right. His biography of Montaigne is, I think, fundamentally about how one remains tolerant in fundamentally intolerant times.
Yeah, that's a wonderful way of putting it. And I think that is part of what makes Montaigne so appealing, so relevant. Yes. He was surrounded by people who were fanatics in one cause or another.
And he was determined not to be. He wasn't by temperament anyway, but he was determined to survive, which is a very important part of this. But also to figure out how, while surviving, how he wouldn't join one party or another. Yeah, it's like weirdos are always, always have a target on their back.
And he was certainly weird. And then he wasn't a fundamentalist. He might have had some Jewish blood. And he's also rich.
He has a big fancy estate that I'm sure people have their eyes on. You know, he must have been a target in so many different ways. And he just sort of retreats to his library and decides that if this is how the world is going to be, and yeah, I guess to be celebrating intellectual humility and curiosity in a time of certainty and closed-mindedness is very interesting to me. It is interesting.
I haven't read, as I said, I haven't read the Sussman's book. Recent biographers of Montaigne have said that, yes, of course, he was in that wonderful study and had been retreat, but he came out of the retreat quite often. Yes. And he was the kind of person whom even very powerful people involved in very complicated matters wanted to talk to, including the king.
So even though he was also not participating, he also did actually find a way to, well, I don't know about influence, but anyway, to make his views shared, known to powerful people. Yes. Yes. He managed to, by nature of his sort of self-effacing style and his obvious genius, managed to not create the enemies that you might expect.
Yeah. You're right. And there's a kind of, there's a form of retreat in which you really do disappear. Yeah.
But that wasn't his mode. He found a way of going into what he called his aria boutique, his little back room, but he also came out of that room. I admire that in him. I mean, I understand the impulse in really rotten times to disappear.
Yes. And of course, there are moments in which it's necessary to disappear for survival, but he was powerful enough and had connections enough, so that wasn't his principal concern. Yeah. There's something interesting about Montaigne that you can maybe say of Ben Franklin and then you can't say of a lot of the people who were at one time or another, maybe one of the smartest people alive, is that he seemed genuinely likable and agreeable and good at making allies and not enemies.
Yes. You're right. I mean, this is one of the reasons that if I'm listing people, I'd like to sit down with the sheer pleasantness of the conversation, as well as the genius of him. If we're lucky, if we live a long life, we all have encountered remarkable people, geniuses, but they're not always very agreeable.
And Montaigne really was just, appears to have been incredibly appealing. Years ago, now he's gone, alas, but I knew the Irish poet Seamus Heaney. And he was just a fantastically nice, agreeable person to be with, as well as startlingly intelligent and creative and gifted. But it is, it's not, it's not always the case.
Yeah. I think about that line, I think it was Macaulay who said about Socrates, that the more he reads about Socrates, the more he understands why they killed him. And Montaigne is very likable. Like the more I read about Cicero, the less I like Cicero.
And the more I am certain that I would have found him quite obnoxious. Yeah. There's a, as you probably know, they're wonderful letters that Petrarch in the 14th century, who discovered a lot of Cicero's letters that had been saved in Montessori, but hadn't been circulated. But he was very excited.
He read those letters. He was quite upset. Yeah. Because Cicero was a culture hero of his, but then he read the letters and he thought, oh, I'm not so happy about this.
Maybe you just get used to pontificating or something and you become slowly but surely insufferable. Yeah. Well, let's hope it doesn't happen to any of us. Talking about Montaigne and the time in which he lived, I was so struck by your book on Shakespeare.
And I've been thinking about this because I was just in Greece. We tend to think of these periods that we like, particularly if you're a scholar or you're just a fan, you can glamorize the world that they lived in, right? Because that was when Shakespeare lived. What a wonderful time it would have been to live when Shakespeare was alive.
Or Socrates in Athens, what must it have looked like when the Acropolis was shiny and gold? The more you start to see them as actual people who lived in what they understood to be the present moment or even, you know, the most advanced time in human history, you realize that all was not well. And in fact, they were as stressed out and worried about what was happening around them as anyone else. I was very struck by the argument you make at the beginning of Tyrant, which is that Shakespeare overtly mentions politics like one time in his plays.
And he basically almost lost his life over it and then realizes, oh, if I want to comment on what's happening now, I have to be much more subtle about it, which I think is a statement about how violent and uncertain the world he lived in was. Absolutely. That's the premise, the guiding premise of the book that's about to come out that we mentioned a second ago, Dark Renaissance. It's very important to understand that the late, if you want to understand this period at all, you want to understand Shakespeare or the English Renaissance, that it's much more like North Korea than North Carolina.
Or perhaps it is very much like contemporary Iran. It's full of interesting people, but it's also extremely dangerous. And there's no such thing as, in this case, there's no such thing as a public sphere where you're allowed to say things that to voice your views about people in power without running fantastic or religious issues or any of the things that people argued about in the period without running tremendous risks. And Shakespeare was a genius for many reasons, but like Montaigne, as we were talking, Shakespeare managed to stay, as far as we know, to stay out of prison his whole life.
Montaigne said somewhere that he loves liberty so much that if anyone so much is threatening his little finger, he would like to, he would move, try to move somewhere else. Yeah. I mean, these are people with that similar sensibility, Montaigne and Shakespeare that way. Shakespeare didn't have a fancy family and lots of wealth the way Montaigne did.
But the person I've just written about, Christopher Marlowe, was exactly the opposite, was an unbelievable risk taker right at the edge, but he manages to make it only to the age of 29 before he's murdered. Yeah. And I think he knew that he was running, I know he knew that he was running that kind of risk, but he did it. I mean, here I am, an old man in a sweet barn in rural Vermont.
So I'm definitely on the Montaigne-Shakespeare side of this equation. There wasn't much room for transgressive, upsetting art the way we might understand the role of the artist today. They actually figured out the interesting thing about Montaigne, too, although Montaigne's a special case. But the interesting thing about Shakespeare is that he did figure out how to voice what he needed to voice.
That was actually part of his brilliance. Christopher Marlowe did as well, but Marlowe paid the price for it. He couldn't figure out actually how to do it, you know, in that sense, how to do it self-protectively. But after all, Shakespeare is someone who has a character say, it's a heretic that makes the fire, not she the person.
If you said that in public and openly, as you're voicing your opinion in the late 16th, early 17th century, you'd be executed. But he has a character say this in a play, or he has a character say, a dog's obeyed in office. But he figures out how to do this. That's King Lear when he's mad.
And the other character is a sort of witch-like Paulina, strange Paulina in The Winter Sale. The interesting thing, Ryan, is that in the 16th century, as now, even in very contested times, actually Iran is a perfect example, very repressive societies tend to allow escape vows. Something can be articulated. Sure.
I say that about Iran, not because I know it, not at all, but I'm impressed by Iranian movies. Although many of those movies are not shown in Iran, so that's probably not a good example. But in Shakespeare's world, you could actually say things only in this special sphere. Maybe you've been hearing the buzz about live shopping lately.
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Take Cheers restore after your last drink or before you go to bed and wake up feeling at least 50% better or your money back. For a limited time, our listeners are getting 20% off their entire order at cheershealth.com slash stoic. It makes me think that in the same way that the, and actually I think it was Cleanthes, the stoic, he said something about how the point of poetry is that the constraints are what bring out the artistry, right? If you could obviously free versus the thing, but the rhyme structure and the shortness, this is what creates the beauty.
In the same way he says, you know, music is, you know, air is pushed through the flute, and it comes out in an interesting way. Without the constraints, you don't have anything. And in a way, that's the constraint of the medium that a Shakespeare or a Montaigne is dealing with, but it's life or death, right? It's like, hey, if you get this right, it'll be clever and interesting and profound, and there'll be an edge to it.
But if you get it wrong, you're not going to be canceled in the way we talk about cancel culture today. You're going to be drawn and quartered. You're going to end up in a musty, you know, stone prison somewhere. Not help us bear us those constraints, even if they produce great art.
I mean, that was obviously true. One of the novels in the, from the 20th century that I most admire is a novel by someone named Vasily Grossman called Life and Fate. It's a fabulous novel. He wrote it in Stalin's Russia, and he managed to survive, remarkably enough, but that's largely because it wasn't published.
He managed to sneak the novel out of Russia. It was published after, I think, after his death. He begged Stalin directly to let him publish it, which probably would have resulted in his death. Exactly.
And then, in fact, they sent the NKVD to his house or his apartment, and they seized whatever they could, all the papers. I think they took the typewriter ribbons away from him. I mean, this was definitely, he was crazy to think that they would publish such a thing. It's a weird book, right?
Because he, as a journalist, was one of the first people to discover the death camps when he was with, because he was embedded with the Russian army. It was a weird book. I only read it somewhat recently. I'd never really heard the Russian perspective on the Holocaust in that way.
It was a surreal book, and then you get, oh, Stalin doesn't want this published because he's perpetrating his own Holocaust at that very moment. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Grossman was very lucky to have survived.
that so many people didn't survive. But it is said, and I think it's probably true, that part of the greatness of the Russian literature of the 20th century, Pasenak and the rest of them was that they were so, they were living in the world you just described for Shakespeare or Montaigne and that the constraint was somehow liberating imaginatively. But I'd rather live in a messier world in which you didn't produce such great art, but there weren't so many risky constraints. Well, it's sort of, it's adaptive for some of the greats and then it's also eliminating wide swaths of other great art that is just never even attempted out of fear.
Yes, I think it's true. I mean, the interesting thing is that even in the most miserable times, it seems like certain numbers, small numbers of human beings just need to do it anyway. Yes. They have to find some way to do it the way the grass needs to grow in the cracks of the sidewalk or in the way that Midas' wife needed to say, he has, his ears are weird, even though it's incredibly risky to do it.
I guess this goes to my point, which is, you know, when you think of Da Vinci, you think of someone as like this incredibly free-spirited, you know, exploratory artist. And I just read an interesting book, I'm forgetting what it's called, but it has a scene in it that made me think I want to write a book just about that. There's this scene where Da Vinci and Machiavelli are like trapped in a small castle that this psychopath might kill them, you know, and not kill them like the goons would come for them, but like he might kill them with his bare hands, you know, like it's this time of these brilliant artists and thinkers and then these just complete maniacs. Yes, yes, it's true that there's a remarkable book called The Lives of the Milanese Tyrants about the Sforza.
And he was just, I think he was a, he might have been the private secretary to Sforza, one of the tyrannical rulers of Milan. And you realize you're dealing with an unbelievably powerful, very dangerous, actually rather brilliant, but a psychopath on whom there's virtually no constraint whatsoever. So yeah, you had to figure out how to deal with that if you wanted to be anywhere near it. What would be an example?
It'd be like if, if Picasso was attached to like the Gambino crime family or something, you know, like you have this brilliant person and then their patron is a murderer who is both very educated, but also, yeah, will tear you apart limb from limb if they're displeased. What's unusual, I think, about the model, the examples that you give, I mean, Machiavellian is a fascinating one, a complicated one, but what's remarkable is that most of the, if we think of Hitler or Stalin and we can then, we can think of less ghastly, but not completely incomparable figures as well, mostly they're surrounded by mediocrities. Yes. Because you're, otherwise you're too frightened.
I mean, you know, they killed off the really smart ones or the smart ones just go away. But what was unusual about the people we're talking about is that they're extremely, some very, very powerful people are surrounded by quite brilliant people and the brilliant people have to figure out how to survive them. You probably know, since you seem to read everything, I mean, you know the Sandal novel, The Charter House of Parma. I don't.
It's a wonderful novel about very sophisticated, very bright people who are in the circle in Parma of an all-powerful ruler. I mean, one of the reasons, one of the things that obviously has worked in America until recently, the big question that hovers over all of us is whether or not continue to work, is the cunning with which the 18th century creators of our system figured out that they, you would have to create multiple focuses of power to try to keep the executive from excessive control and likewise to keep the others from excessive control. So, I mean, the brilliance of the 18th century American constitution was to try to break up that concentration of power, moment in which all, you know, the court and the Congress and the executive are all more or less on the same page and that's frightening. Well, this goes, I guess, to the ideas in the swerve which is those Enlightenment thinkers were just so familiar, like they were on a first name basis with these classical figures, right?
So, like even when they're picking the names in the Federalist papers, you know, they're picking these pseudonyms as if they're Publius or whatever, but, you know, they would make these references, I guess it's largely from Plutarch, but, you know, they're calling this person a Catiline. They're familiar with these Greek and Roman tyrants and demagogues in a way that almost was more real to them than the kings and queens of English history which a lot of them had been removed from for such a long period of time and so, yeah, there was this kind of this fear and this familiarity with those characters and they were developing a system that was supposed to assert a bunch of different checks and balances and prerogatives to prevent that from happening. Perfect example in the way of that is, I mean, as you know, Machiavelli worked out his quite astonishing and quite radical political ideas by thinking about Libby. I mean, of course, he could also look around him and see in his own world lots of things and he does reflect on things in his own world and the prince and elsewhere, but it's really thinking about the ancient example and thinking hard about what that world 1,500 years before him or longer.
I mean, we're not under such constraints, thank God, but I still think predictably and maybe you think predictably as well because that's after all what your podcast is about, that actually getting out of your particular time and place and into what seems like a totally different world actually is liberating intellectually and politically. Somehow you can think about things. It's risky as well, but again, I have my own current book in my head. Christopher Marlowe is a complicated example of this because he went to a, he was from a very poor family, managed to get into, for reasons we don't understand very well, he managed to make it into this very fancy grammar school and then into university where the education is entirely in Latin or Latin and Greek and he reads, as he would never have read if he had stayed in the Kabbalah's shop that his father ran, he reads Ovid and he reads Catullus and he reads the Greek and Roman classics and he explodes with radical thinking.
He sees as almost none of his contemporaries do how dangerous this stuff is, how much it cuts against the official orthodoxy of his time and he can't control himself really. I mean, somehow his imagination gets on fire when he reads Virgil or he reads Ovid and he goes in places that actually were extremely dangerous for him to go. So it's not always that going out into the past is a secure way of... No, I mean, I just had this experience, so I read Euripides' play The Children of Hercules, which I didn't know anything about.
All of a sudden, I'm in the middle of this incredibly transgressive play about what obligations a country owes to refugees that show up and supplicate them. So the premise of the play is that Hercules' children are being hounded by this jealous king from the country they're from and they flee to Marathon and throw themselves at the Temple of Apollo saying, hey, we are refugees, protect us. And they're being attended by a former aide to Hercules. And the king sends his goons to chase them down to this temple.
And what ensues is this confrontation. They say, hand us over these refugees, we want to kill them. And the Athenians are saying, these are defenseless, vulnerable people who put themselves at the mercy of the gods. What do we owe them?
And this war ensues. But, you know, in the way that the Greek plays are often these sort of just dialogue back and forth as opposed to much action. But they're just discussing, it was remarkable to me to be reading something that's 2,500 years old. Sounds amazing.
It's like ripped from the headlines. Like, you know, what do we owe the people that come here and say that they're seeking asylum? Do we believe them or not? How many of them can we allow in or not?
Well, what if some of them commit crimes? Or, you know, exactly what we are debating now. And then you see who's playing the different roles. Like the fascinating role to me is sort of the king's goons who are coming and trying to pull these people away, you know, which I guess the modern equivalent would be like ice.
And then when they're refused, the country threatens war. And now the Athenians are having to debate how much in the way of resource, like in theory, they're willing to protect, you know, homeless, helpless refugees. But would they fight a war over it? You know, would they sacrifice their children over it?
And then just the utter timelessness of these ideas is the thing that's so fascinating. The Children of Hercules is called. I must read it. I mean, it does sound astonishing.
I mean, it is thrilling. I mean, as you describe it. And of course, we have, this is precisely the experience that keeps me going, that keeps the humanities going in universities. I mean, you know, you read a play, let's say from the late 16th century, Shakespeare's Richard III.
And it's about what happens when a country gets into the hands of a very dangerous and unstable and alarming ruler who's only interested in his own good, has no real interest in the common good. What do you do? What is available to you to do? Or what happens when the king is crazy?
In the case of the winter sale, do you have a rebellion? But when you have a rebellion, more people are likely to die. What happens after the assassination of Julius Caesar? It doesn't fix anything for anyone.
So, I mean, each of these, it's a feature of these, I mean, which is only to say that human beings have been around for a while and have tried out various scenarios and have thought about the consequences of them. And interesting and intelligent people have actually sort of rooted about these and tried to play out. Yes. If we try to figure, and it probably goes all the way back, if we try to figure, what's the evolutionary purpose of fiction?
Why did humans do this at all? It doesn't seem like it would be necessary. I mean, as far as we know, seals don't do this or chimpanzees don't do this. I mean, what's so good about it?
And it must be that people very, very early on, how many have sat around and tried to think of alternative scenarios for things? I mean, that it must be something about our survival skill to try to play something out in one's mind. We've always been unable to address things directly. That too, yeah.
Like, I think about, this is where maybe our worlds intersect a little bit. I've always found Seneca's plays to be so fascinating because the big hole in Seneca's philosophical writings is that he never addresses the fact that he works for Nero. And, you know, the Stoics said previously, you know, going back to Cato, been the sort of Republicans. And here you have the right-hand man, not just to the emperor, but like to the worst emperor.
But then you read Seneca's plays and you go, oh, he's doing the same thing that Shakespeare was doing 1,500 years later, which is he can't directly talk about the madman that he works with, but he can portray maniacs and psychopaths and murderers and broken people in fiction. And so there's something about art that allows us to say what we're all thinking without having to say it. I think you're absolutely right about, I think Seneca's plays are astonishing and in many ways, I mean, of course, it didn't save Seneca from having to let his wrists at the end on the order of the emperor, but he did hold out for, given whose company he was keeping for quite a while. Yes.
But you're absolutely right that the plays, if you actually compare the plays to the Greek originals or Greek myths that they're obviously working off, I think you see exactly what you say, which is they're pushing out to the political edge. Yes. The things that are implicit in the myths, but actually aren't usually explored in the myths. But if you think about what he does with that episode, what he does with Phil and Mellon, I mean, they're usually way out there in the manner of Suetonius, let's say.
So you just, you see how terrifying these people are, how frightening it is to let someone, an unstable desire-driven person get so much power that he can order hideous things to be done because there's always someone willing to do the nasty stuff. The enduringness of that personality type is both depressing and marvelous is the wrong word, but it is kind of remarkable, right? Now, maybe what's allowed in a society might change a little bit, so they're more violent at different times, but the insatiable, you know, the person with a giant hole in the middle of them that they're trying to fill with violence and lust and power and fame and attention, it never seems to go away. No, I mean, one source of it may be, or in any case, I played with the idea when I was writing that book on Adam and Eve, the story of Adam and Eve, I was interested in, Adam and Eve's a perfect example of people sitting around and trying to come up with an account of things that might explain all kinds of other things that follow in our lives.
And I imagine someone incredibly intelligent, imaginative woman around a campfire coming up with this story, but the story that then becomes the truth for millions of people even now, however unbelievable it is with a garden with magical trees and a talking snake and so forth, it's obviously marked out as fiction in its origins and yet it becomes true. Anyway, I was obsessed with that story and with how it happens that such an obviously fictive story becomes the truth for millions of very intelligent people, St. Augustine or St. Thomas Aquinas, the smartest people in the world.
Anyway, because I have a friend at Harvard who runs a research station in Western Uganda that works on chimpanzees, I went and observed the chimpanzees, thanks to his invitation, and lo and behold, you know, the alpha male of the chimpanzees is exactly the figure you described. Yes. This enormously violent, often quite smart, interesting, politically smart, but dangerous, super dangerous figure who wants to dominate, who wants to have all the females, who wants to push around all the males, he's constantly doing that and you know, you look around and you think, yeah, I get it, I get humans, especially human males derive that personality type. When that desire for retribution or subjugation, this is, we've been talking rather highbrow, I go lowbrow, but I don't know if you've ever seen the movie Tombstone, but in the end, Wyatt Earp is talking to Doc Holliday and he has to kill this gunfighter and he goes, he's like, I don't know what makes a man like that tick and Doc Holliday says he wants revenge and Wyatt Earp says revenge for what?
And Doc Holliday says for being born. There's some people that just sort of come out or maybe shortly thereafter experience a number of things that make them need to dominate, control, or even destroy the world and that is the figure in so many of Shakespeare's plays and the Greek plays and then also the worst things that have happened in history. Now you've given me another recommendation, I don't think I've seen that movie Tombstone. It's one of the great westerns, yeah.
Tombstone and the Sheffernsweig biography of Montaigne now will be on my list and the children of the movies. They're a pretty big special. That's good, but I do think that the philosophical schools in which we're interested, the Stoics, the Epicureans, were precisely trying to figure out taking this into focus. What do you do?
How do you deal with this? I mean, they're not the only ones and both schools are writing, how should we say, countercultural narratives, ways of trying to figure out how do you either withdraw or deal with these people, find some way to deal with the impulse on yourself, which is first and foremost, because we talk about it as if these are alien creatures, but I know that some part of me also is there. Well, that's why I think Marcus Relius' Meditations is such a fascinating book because you have the guy in the same job as these other monsters that we're talking about trying to be a little less monstrous. Yes, I see that.
We tend to talk about it at the scale of a Napoleon or a Hitler or whatever, but I'm sure you've met some department heads that have similar tendencies. It's true. They don't even have to be department heads, but yeah, it's absolutely true. Often people at the DMV or...
Yes, yeah, the head of the local school board or whatever it is. There is that, and that's probably the chimpanzee in us. that we're talking about, whether it's Marcus Aurelius or Epictetus or Lucretius. They're written by men largely for men, although to give the Epicureans credit, they allowed women into the school.
But there is an interesting gender question about this. I do like Portia Cable. a great deal. I like Portia Cato better than I like Brutus.
Yes, we're identifying qualities. They're not, I don't think they're unique to men. No. But they're familiar from, largely familiar from testosterone bearing.
Yes, they're not unique to men, but they've certainly been encouraged and enabled and celebrated in men for a longer period of time. We are talking about qualities that are not only destructive, but potentially world building or creative. Or one of my favorite books is Gilgamesh, the earliest piece of fiction that we know. And it's exactly about all of these things.
I mean, the interesting thing, as we keep saying, is that this stuff goes way the hell back. Yeah. I mean, so Gilgamesh, which is 5,000 years old, is just all about this kind of personality. Yeah.
What to do with it, how he can deal with it, with the impulses that are in him. What makes the great literature is that every generation or every different person sees something, sees it differently, right? And so, like you said, you take something like the Odyssey, which my nine-year-old's obsessed with. So we've been just listening to it and listening to songs and finding poems, and then we had to go to Greece.
But what's so fascinating to me about the Odyssey is that when I was younger and when I first read it, Odysseus is the hero. And then you read something like Tennyson's poem about Odysseus, and you go, oh no, Odysseus is a cursed, tragic figure who wants desperately to come home, but can't actually be home. And that you wouldn't want to be Odysseus just like you wouldn't want to be Elon Musk. It's actually miserable and awful.
I mean, Dante thought the same thing about Odysseus, as you know, even though Dante hadn't read Homer, but he understood already from the story that there's something wrong with something fermented about this figure. I mean, you might not want to be Odysseus, but you also, the question is, Odysseus is the only survivor of all the people who leave. Everyone in his ambit dies in the course of his attempt to get back to Ithaca. One thing to say, I suppose, about all of this is that, and that again, obsesses people like us, is that there's no progress in all of this, which is very strange.
I mean, you'd think, because we're talking about things that were written a very long time ago, and if we think that they're really intelligent, as we do, and deeply perceptive, as we do, the question is, why does it have to keep getting repeated over and over again? Why does it have to, why does it never seem to catch fully? Yeah. Why does it have to keep getting reinvented?
I mean, I don't have the answer to it. One of the great experiences of my whole life was when I was quite young in my early 20s. I went to southern France and went to one of those caves, Fontegome, I think it was called, that have Paleolithic paintings on the walls. Right.
I've never got over it. It must have been the early 1970s. I never got over the sense that those paintings, there's been no improvement in painting, as it were. There's been an infinite number of fantastically interesting things that are done by Picasso, by Rembrandt, by Vermeer, by Chinese painters, and so forth.
There's a million different ways you can do these things, and great artists keep inventing new ways of doing them. But there's no way that you can say that the paintings on the wall from 30, 28,000, 25,000 years ago, 30,000 years ago, are worse than the paintings that were done by Picasso. So what the hell does that mean? How is it possible?
I mean, because in everything else that we care about that involves thinking hard, I want to, if I have a gallbladder problem, I want someone who was an expert on the gallbladder from late last night. I don't want someone who had the idea of the gallbladder from 500 years ago. God help me. Yeah.
But because there's been progress there. Yeah. But no progress in the things that we most care about, we, about art, about philosophy. How is it possible?
There's a dark energy in human nature that we have not managed to isolate and remove. And every time we think that it's gone is precisely when we're most surprised by it. Well, and the flip side of that is also true, which is that there is a brilliance in human nature and in the capacity to think, in the capacity to represent, that never gets extinguished. Yeah.
That doesn't get better, but it doesn't go away. It keeps, no matter what happens, the flame keeps coming up. Yes. Right.
There is one way you look at it is there is no progress. We're still dealing with the same things. And then you also go, you know, we did, we did mostly eradicate slavery. The society is massively more included.
It can be easy when you read the art because it feels so fundamentally modern to forget how inconceivable most of the things we take for granted would be to a Socrates or a Shakespeare or even a Montaigne. No, you're absolutely right. I mean, the trick about this, Ryan, is I don't have to tell you, but because it's implicit in what we're saying is that we know that in N years, 50, 100, 500, let alone 5,000, they'll think, how did people survive living in 2025? What a hideous world they had.
Well, if human beings are around then, because actually at the moment, it doesn't seem clear to me that humans will be around. Yeah. But if they are, they're going to say, they did that when you had a toothache, let alone they did that when you had cancer or whatever. I mean, that, or they behave that way toward the environment.
I mean, they'll look with astonishment at how fucking stupid we are, how grotesque we are, what idiotic decisions we made, or how astonishingly good we were at surviving intolerable conditions. Because that's what I think when I think about Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, how did they get up in the morning? If you had 10 children, eight of them died. How did they survive that?
Yes, I do not understand. I get it. But of course, that was the world they lived in, so they survived it. And this is the world we live in, so we survived it.
Yeah, the ability to shrug off infant mortality is one, like when they say the past of the foreign country, that's one of the most foreign parts of it to me. Yeah, for me too. If you and I, you and I have children, if anything threatens my beloved children or grandchildren, I'm completely disloved, though, as he tells you, I'm completely wiped out. But they somehow made it through this situation in which we would find psychologically destructive, totally destructive.
And they never talked about it. Like, I've never heard a good explanation of it. Yeah. I mean, they did have depression and misery and so forth.
I mean, it wasn't that they were indifferent. But there's moving essays about grief and loss, even about losing a child. But no one's ever explained to me how Marcus Aurelius lost half his children and he had 11 kids. You know, like, how did he get out of bed in the morning?
It doesn't mean, I've never heard a positive explanation. No, except that we do. We do. As I say, people will say that about us.
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I find your books endlessly fascinating. Maybe talk to me real fast, what is the swerve as you define it? I read the book and I said, oh, I get it. And then every time I tried to be like, I read this book, the swerve, and here's what the swerve is.
They're like, what are you talking about? Well, the swerve in its most immediate literal sense is what Lucretius would have called the klinomen. That is to say, if you think that the world is made up out of an infinite number of atoms, the question is, how does anything ever happen? Because you would think, given what we know about gravity, that everything would just fall straight down and all the infinite number of atoms would keep, even if there were an infinite number of them, they'd keep falling, falling, falling, and nothing would ever happen.
But all you would need, and of course, Lucretius doesn't have a theory about this, and in fact, it's only in the 21st century that we're getting even close to this, but in forms of physics that I don't fully understand. I don't understand it all, but Lucretius says, or Lucretius' great mentor, great intellectual mentor says, all it has to be is one atom that moves slightly off the straight line, that has an inclination or declination, hence the Latin word klinomen, that has a swerve. One atom that swerves, and that bangs into another one, and then they start banging each other. And then if you have an infinite amount of time, because they didn't believe that the world was limited in time, if you have an infinite amount of time, if you have billions of years, not 4,000 years as the Christians believe, then the world can get created, then things can keep mutating.
And from a classic perspective, the swerve is the rediscovery of these old texts, which changes the arc of the Middle Ages. What happens when this idea, which was reviled by much of ancient religion, by the people who worshipped the ancient gods, let alone, of course, reviled by Jews and Christians and Muslims, what happens when this idea comes back into circulation? That's what this swerve is about. It happens when someone went into a medieval library and found a book and opened it up, and suddenly this idea comes back, that the world is made up out of atoms and emptiness and nothing else, that it doesn't require all kinds of demiurges to move things about, that if there's enough time, everything will happen, including things that seem almost impossible to think about.
How does a human eye get created by a set of mutations? This remains a kind of fabulous, I mean, it's implicit in Darwin, but how does that possibly happen, that enough random mutations happen so that we can see? And already Lucretius and Epicurus before him think, yes, that's what must happen, that the mutations don't happen because someone has decided, oh, it would be nice if we could see, the mutations happen randomly. And yet the end result of it is that we can see and therefore we can survive better.
In this case, we can be more successful as creatures because we can find our food. There's a passage from Lucretius, which is in the book, that I think goes to our point about how it's both, how modern this stuff, where he says, you know, you're basically afraid of death because when you get home from a long day at work and you kneel down in the hallway and your child runs into your arms and shouts your name, you're afraid of death because this won't happen again, you know? And then he says, well, you don't need to be afraid because you won't be around to miss it. But just, you know, sometimes poetry or art, it's so flowery and abstract and magical.
And then sometimes, yeah, you're reading a line from a poet 2,000 years ago referencing the work of a poet, a philosopher a couple hundred years before that. And it was like, I did that yesterday, you know, and it captures something so essentially human. And then it does it in so few words. Oh, that's just the best.
The trouble with, I mean, I completely agree with you, Ryan. The trouble with that, the wonderful trouble with that particular example is that as far as I know, no one has ever really been persuaded by that argument, including me. All right, I get that I'll be gone. I mean, you know, the argument is that we're not going to be around, so we won't miss anything after we're gone.
And Cicero said, that's the good news. And I completely agree with him. No one has been persuaded that that's the good news. When we call it the great conversation, that just the beauty of like, he said this, and then he said that, and then Cicero responded to it.
And then here we are talking on a podcast, you know, thousands of miles apart via technology they couldn't have imagined. And yet it's the same conversation. Yeah, it's true. All right.
So last thing, as far as swerves go, one of the few things that gets me very excited, I wouldn't say hopeful, because I don't know what a change is going to happen, but excited intellectually is the idea that there could be a second swerve via this technology that is examining those scrolls in Pompeii and some of the other archaeological sites. Do you ever think about how our understanding of these things could fundamentally change with a lost book from Epicurus or a whole other group of thinkers that we've never even taken seriously? I do think about this, right? I mean, I actually know someone who is developing a technology that now enables them to read in fantastically subtle, to read into now those carbonized scrolls without trying to unroll them.
Right. Yeah, taking pictures and then AI can decode it. Exactly. And since we know that actually quite a bit of Herculaneum particularly has not been excavated, who knows what's down there?
I mean, that they might find out whether it will, how should we say, knock us for a loop, is another question. I mean, I tend to think things, unless we really do decide, as we seem to be in the process at the moment of shutting down scientific research completely in the country, but if we don't make that kind of crazy move, if we continue there, I think that the things that are going to knock us down are going to come out of our laboratories and not out of ancient scrolls. We're going to cover all these scrolls and greet it culturally with a yawn, because we've moved on. Yeah, I mean, we won't greet it, you and I won't greet it with a yawn, we'll be thrilled, but whether it has a kind of earth-shattering effect is another question.
I do think that in some sense, what we're more likely to do is to feel the kind of awe, the catching one's breath, to discover that people have thought about the things we're worrying about for a very long time. I'm sure Poggio Bracolini was not representative of the average person with his excitement about rediscovering these texts. So the swerve was a minority swerve at the time, too, I'm sure. Absolutely.
I mean, and even the few people who, as Poggio Bracolini himself didn't, but even the few people who really got what was at stake, I mean, now we're back to the earlier part of our conversation, they had to be pretty careful, because this stuff was toxic. So it came in one of those metal canisters that has the skull and crossbones on it. You don't want to open it up without special hazmat suits on. Yeah, it's just fascinating, because we have these sort of tantalizing titles of so many lost philosophical works.
I think that was the great torture that Diogenes Laertes inflicted on us, which is, he listed down all the names of the works of these great philosophers, of which like 1% survives, and just the chances that some of those could be sitting there in complete form under layers of ash and lava is just mind-blowingly exciting. It is, I completely agree, and I hope to live long enough to read some of these things. Yes, me too. It's like the greatest time capsule of all time.
Well, I'm a huge fan of your work, and thank you so much for taking the time, and yeah, next time you're in Texas, come sign a bunch of these books. I would love to. Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us, and it would really help the show.
We appreciate it. I'll see you next episode. It's good.