Timeless Lessons from Ancient Greece and Rome 🏛️🏺📜 🏹⚔️🦅⚖️

I’m excited to share with you one of my favorite podcasts that I’ve recorded! 🎧🥇

I hope you enjoy it and will ➡️ subscribe to ‘Cost of Glory’ ⬅️ (listen on: Spotify or Apple Podcast) and follow Alex’s explorations of the greatest stories from Roman and Greek antiquity.

It’s like a time machine for the mind, and might inspire you to read some of the great books we recommend near the end of the podcast!

In this episode, Alex and I discuss why the Romans and Greeks of Antiquity were 𝕤𝕠 𝕒𝕨𝕖𝕤𝕠𝕞𝕖 and his journey following in Plutarch’s footsteps — telling stories of real heroes and learning from their lives. Except Alex does it with a podcast instead of with a reed pen (I had to look up what they used to write in antiquity…)

There’s a lot to love about this one. One of my favorite parts is when we do a lightning-round through a bunch of big names from the era, and Alex gives a highlight on each. We discuss people like Alexander the Great, Sulla, Hannibal, Scipio, Julius Caesar, Pompey, Cato the Elder and Cato the Younger, Xenophon, etc.

It gave me a lot of context about names I recognized but didn’t know much about — I feel better equipped to dig deeper! I hope it’ll do the same for you.

Enjoy! 💚 🥃

If you prefer to listen on Spotify, here’s the feed:

Here’s the podcast feed on Apple Podcasts:

🛎️ Note that I will be traveling to the U.S. all of next week — seeing Alex Petkas in person for the first time! — so there won’t be new Editions of the newsletter. If you miss me, you can catch up on past Editions & Podcasts that you haven’t had time to dive in yet! 📬

• 🎧 Jim O’Shaughnessy: Origin Story, Career in Finance, Groundbreaking Books, and Future with OSV 👶 🕵️‍♂️ 🏦 ✍️📚 🚀

• 🎧 Kevin Kelly: Excellent Advice for Living 💡🤖 📚

• 🎧 The Last of Us: Going Deep on HBO’s Amazing Show with Matt Reustle and Tinkered Thinking 🍄

• 🎧 David Senra and Jimmy Soni: ‘The Founders’ Book Club on the PayPal Mafia 📖

• 🎧 David Senra on Deadwood (also: founders, entrepreneurs, civilization, Henry Singleton, Walt Disney, David Ogilvy, etc)

• 🎧 Meta Platforms & Mark Zuckerberg: Going Deep with Mostly Borrowed Ideas (MBI)! 🕵️‍♂️🩻

• 🎧 Microsoft: Going Deep with Mostly Borrowed Ideas (MBI) 🕵️‍♂️🩻

• 🎧 Going deep on Payments with Mostly Borrowed Ideas (MBI): Adyen, PayPal, Stripe, Square, Amazon, Apple Pay, Google Pay, Visa, Mastercard!

• 🎧 Going deep on Constellation Software with Mostly Borrowed Ideas (MBI)

• 🎧 Claude Shannon fan club with Jimmy Soni and David Senra 📖

• 🎧 Podcast #6: Jimmy Soni on the PayPal Mafia (Musk, Thiel, Levchin, etc), startups, tech, the research process, and much more

• 🎧 David Senra of Founders Podcast (Podcast #11)

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Liberty: I never know how to start these things. I guess that’s the downside of not having like a song or a catchphrase, but I’m going to start here anyway. Like today I’m talking to my friend Alex Petkas, a very creative person, very entrepreneurial, very generative to use the terminology of the day. and we’re working together on various projects, including his excellent Cost of Glory, which you must check out, OSV’s Infinite Media as partner with Cost of Glory, and other stuff that’s not quite public yet, but what you need to understand is I’m not saying nice things about him because we’re working together.

We’re working together because I think he’s doing great things, right? The order matters here. so I was missing podcasting. It’s been a while and who better to podcast with than one of my favorite podcasters. thank you for joining me, Alex.

Alex Petkas: Great to be here, Liberty. Yeah. been really fun working together great things on the horizon, I think.

Liberty: Indeed. Indeed. want to jump right into it because there’s so much to talk about. And I’m kind fascinated by your origin story as a classicist, right? Like I was just reading in Lessons of History, the Will and Ariel Durant books about how like nations die, but civilization can be immortal.

And now like Homer has more readers today than his own day and land and all that kind of stuff, right? But how did you get into this? How did you become interested in antiquity? How did, this start?

Alex Petkas: I think that I was kind of an odd kid. And older I got, the more I felt like I didn’t understand why we did things. And I didn’t understand why society was ordered the way that it was. And so I’ve always been kind of curious. And science and technology were always easy for me to understand.

I was always tinkering with stuff. I was pretty good at math, but the whole human sphere of things, like, what is a law? Why do we have laws? well, what is religion? Why do we have this sort of thing? I think that is the fascination that eventually led me into the study of, the ancients.

And I, I didn’t really get into it until college. I, um, I studied Latin. I was a terrible student in high school. I slept through and failed. Many

classes including

Liberty: Sounds familiar

Alex Petkas: Yeah Including amazing like history and literature, you know of all things that you know that I would end up Being a kind of professional and I hated them in school.

And so got into I did some Latin in high school. Didn’t think much of it, even though it was fun, but I I took a course on ancient Greek almost by accident when I was in college. I was a junior in college. I had been studying music and communications, not really knowing what I was doing with my life.

But soon as I found ancient Greek, something kind of clicked in me. I have some Greek background, but we’re very much Americans and it’s only a quarter of my ancestry. and even that has been in the United States since before World War I. So I never knew much Greek as a kid. I could, I knew a couple of words, you know, I was raised sort of loosely in the church, where you hear Greek, but don’t know what it means.

Well, I always thought it’d be cool to learn Greek and finally I realized I could do that maybe in college, but they didn’t have modern Greek. They just had ancient Greek. I was like, all right, fine. And, uh, maybe,

Liberty: Good thing they didn’t have modern Greek, right? Where would you be today?

Alex Petkas: I know. Yeah, no, it would have been a tour guide.

I don’t know. So, um, that first semester I had this brilliant teacher, and this is one of the things that I’ve noticed going into classics professionally is how many. really, really smart people are attracted to this field for a lot of the same reasons, I think. and this teacher of mine I mean, he’s like 10 years older than me, and kind of discovered classics late himself.

I think a lot of people are these days, even though it used to be the, backbone of the Western education system. don’t really teach the Greeks and Romans very, very much. well or deeply or effectively in most K 12 schools or even college. So he kind of discovered it on his own late and just got really into it.

and he like unlocked all the mysteries of the universe for me. where the idea of philosophy comes from, where the idea of the law in the West comes from So many things kind of clicked for me once I just learned a basic smattering of classical Greek. And I was like, all right, I got to do this for the next decade, at least if I can.

so that was, that’s sort of what, what led me on that track. And there was an ethical aspect too. I think I discovered Stoic philosophy, when I was, 17 or so went through a rough patch in high school and was looking for wisdom and how to like live my life better and stop making stupid mistakes.

chanced upon Marcus Aurelius on our bookshelf and read some of it. I was like, all right, there actually is really useful wisdom in ancient books. So that, sort of made me disposed to study Plato and Aristotle as well, and the other philosophers. So that, general curiosity combined with a kind of practical need to find good patterns and good role models was what did it for me.

Liberty: you were in academia for a while. I think you, you have a PhD, right?

Alex Petkas: Yes.

Liberty: So I’m curious, now that you are out of academia, what were the pros and cons of it? How was it to be inside of the system, and what made you decide, like, okay, this is not the place for me, I need to do my own thing outside of it?

Alex Petkas: one of the things that me about academia was the idea that I could you know, do a PhD and have the university pay for it. Like they, they cover your degree and they give you a stipend if you go to a good program. And I got into a pretty good one at Princeton. And the pros I would say are all of the fascinating, brilliant people that you can meet at some of our great, I think there’s still glimmers of greatness, even though the university system is, you know, experiencing a rough patch in the past few years, but there’s so many smart people from so many different fields that you can meet on a daily basis, especially at a kind of a small place like Princeton is just not as big as a Harvard or even a Yale, physically.

And I loved that there was just this rewarding of genuine curiosity that I think is becoming rarer as the career pressures are building on grad programs and on grad students. but, at its best, I think allowing serious people to pursue serious intellectual interests without necessarily asking them, how are you going to make money with that?

for at least, you know, a year or two having that freedom really led me on a, course of discovery that, I couldn’t have anticipated was going to be as fruitful as I I’m hoping it, it is. those are all pros. I learned Greek and Latin a lot better, mostly because of the free time I had.

I’d say the cons for me personally were, so I always hated school. The older I got, until I hit a tipping point around basically going to college. But even from age 12, I was always sort of resentful at the presumption of teachers giving me homework and imposing upon my time and telling me what I should learn rather than me just learning what I wanted to learn.

And that’s just a kind of a disagreeableness personally. But the American university system is largely modeled off of the German enlightenment university system, which was hatched in the late 18th century, late 1700s on this enlightenment ideal. from that Genesis point, the universities have, in the German model, at least, this, Dual function.

They have this ideal of, producing new ideas, producing new knowledge, generating research. The German Research University is like, I guess what you call it. And they came up with this new concept, doctorate, the PhD, which means not only do you master a subject like you in a master’s degree, but you go really deep on one thing and you produce new knowledge by specialization.

And, uh, that’s very, uh, kind of pro science perspective

Liberty: Sounds great in theory, right?

Alex Petkas: yeah, it sounds great in theory. and it is the theory, but what ends up doing in practice and how Humboldt kind of sold this to the Prussian authorities is, all right, we’re going to have all these researchers producing all this new knowledge for humanity, but we’re also going to train a very useful class of people who are going to be the doctors, the lawyers, the engineers, the functionaries of, modern institutions.

The promise you make the ruler who’s going to help finance this and find you the building and the land and the prestige is, hey, we’re going to give you a useful class of talented bureaucrats. So universities from the get go, even though the PhD and doctoral knowledge producing wing of it, the theoretical side, would teach you to think otherwise, in practice, actually, they’re training for high intelligence conformism.

That’s what you need in a bureaucrat. And that’s a very useful thing for running a lot of modern institutions. And like, that’s not bad to have that kind of goal to have, you know, competent, let’s call them the intelligentsia. but I think that that, aspect of academia can get out of control sometimes.

Liberty: Yeah, there’s a tension there, and when one side takes over, kind of lose the balance, and doesn’t work anymore.

Alex Petkas: Yeah. And also the idea of producing new knowledge. It’s funny, you might think that, the ancient subjects are particularly intractable from this perspective, because, you know, what new can you discover about the Greeks or the Romans that we’ve known about for 2, 500, 2, 000 years? but funny enough, classical philology, which is Greek and Latin language and literature.

Was the paradigmatic science for the German research University. This was the highest prestige discipline, amazingly, for a while, more so than philosophy, more so even than physics. they wanted to scientize the study of the ancient Greeks and Romans, if you don’t know the history, you’d be like, why, what on earth, why would they do that with the Greeks and the Romans?

But it has to do with the fact that from the Renaissance onward, the basic formation for leaders in the West, Look at a guy like Machiavelli, look at a guy like Napoleon, a little bit after this, but everybody in between. The basic formation for leaders is study the greats of Greece and Rome. Not just the books but like the men themselves their ideas their speeches especially it’s it’s a rhetorical formation It’s a learning of how to become an orator becoming a statesman to address crowds and move great masses of people armies, so classics was already like De facto and by classics really they were talking about the Greeks and the Romans.

They were not talking about Dante You know, they were not talking about Thomas Mores, there was just the Greeks and the Romans. This was the western tradition of greatness they kind turned that into the prestige discipline in the modern research university and in a way that didn’t quite fit, I think, the idea of zeroing in, producing new knowledge around, say, a three year within the Peloponnesian War.

is to say the least a little bit in tension with the idea of producing statesmen, you know, like through this knowledge. It’s a very different kind of mental process. I felt that tension rise and rise. And, uh, it was one of the reasons I felt like there was a between the subject matter that I was so passionate about, about the Greeks and the Romans and what I thought was the real value in it for society.

And what the kind of channels that I felt academia sort of pushes you into as a scholar and as a professor. the whole idea of teaching and making new high conformity high intelligence people is just, I don’t feel like that’s where my skillset is necessarily.

Liberty: Yeah, it sounds like the system is designed to kind of miss the forest for the trees oh, I’m going to study this tiny twig over here or this branch for 15 years produce the paper on that twig, but as a person who, has to live in the world and wants to benefit, I’m not sure the twig is enough, right?

Yeah, I think you probably need more, of a broader view and

Alex Petkas: Yeah, and and don’t get me wrong, in making The Cost of Glory and in retelling these biographies, draw on that scholarly work frequently, I appreciate it. I’m not saying it shouldn’t be done, but taken a long time. complete hold of the reigns of the whole discipline. And it, I think we do miss the forest for the trees.

And so that’s one of the things I’m trying to kind of push back against, or at least, you know, offer an alternative, in my own way. And other people are doing similarly spirited projects, I think too popular book writers and a lot of people within academia. You know, this is just my own kind of contribution in, um, the Cost of Glory podcast.

Liberty: And speaking of the forest, and you’ve kind of alluded to this, right? What you found that helped you personally, but what do you think modern people can learn from studying these long dead and dusty people? Like, it can sound very distant from us. Is this just entertainment because of the great battles and the, like, everything sounds way more epic when Caesar does it, right?

I think the Stoics have been, been all this resurgence recently, right? I think Ryan Holiday has done a great job of popularizing them. Do you think that the same thing can be done for other people, other periods, other eras, and very practically, which of those have influenced your life?

How do you feel you’re different today because you’re, studying and applying these?

Alex Petkas: Yeah. I, Love and benefit a lot from the stoic turn. I’ve read, I think, almost all of Ryan’s books. he’s such a talented communicator. Obviously people are getting a lot out of The Stoics and the life lessons of, you know, focusing on what you can control, emotional control, living according to nature, the virtues, all good.

the reason that people, the reason that men think about the Roman Empire more than they think about sex,

Liberty: Yeah, be honest. Did you start that meme?

Alex Petkas: I wish I could take credit for that one. Um, so I, run these leadership retreats where we learn the ancient art of public speaking. And I had a young guy who works in tech.

Tell me, I asked everybody this, like, how did you get into, the cost of glory or, cause they’re for my podcast listeners. How did you get into the ancients? And he said, uh, you know, I just discovered late in my twenties and I got kind of annoyed about it that nobody had told me, but I realized that the Greeks and the Romans were the greatest men who ever lived. And, uh, he’s like, why didn’t nobody tell me this? But I think that that’s what. Machiavelli was looking for in the Greeks and Romans. That’s what Renaissance painters are looking at that’s what a guy like Napoleon is looking at for Caesar and Alexander there is a sort of Just larger than life monumental greatness about cultures of the ancient world, the intellectual achievements of Greece, the political achievements and military achievements of Greece as well. Let’s not forget those. Those are significant. defeating the Persians, Alexander conquering the Persian Empire, the Romans conquering the Mediterranean. I mean, just the scale of it. And also the that they were doing this with limited technology, communications, much more rampant disease.

I mean, it just took a strength of character and a strength of, well, Rousseau calls it strength of soul, to accomplish so much of what they accomplished and, uh, rare qualities in any era. and there’s such a concentration of these kind of, you know, these great figures. I think it has a lot to do, not just with the civilization as an abstract concept, but with the individual lives.

the reason we look back to antiquity has a lot to do with what Plutarch is doing, which is focusing on the character of these men and what they did and the decisions they made and the, speeches and like the force of character that it took I mentioned Rousseau and I had a long conversation on my show with Jonathan Bi.

Alex Petkas: I think back to that conversation a lot, uh, everybody should check it out. Jonathan’s got a great project that he’s working on, on the great books of, uh, with the Western Canon, So essentially Rousseau, the, early 18th century Swiss French philosopher says that heroes have this really, really important paradigmatic function in human society.

what it is, is by, being kind of extra firing on more cylinders than some of us even have, They give us a paradigm of what people can achieve and, they kind of elevate our souls by their example, you know, our spirits, let’s say. inspiration is really, is really real and it’s, it’s entertaining to listen to their stories, but we also, in Rousseau’s mind, we, kind of depend on those stories to bring out the best in ourselves.

and if you look at, uh, the way that a lot, so many ancient cultures, preserve memories. Look at the epic bards of Greece. Look at the Vedic priests, in India. lots of traditions do this sort of thing. Oral traditions so often expend incredible amounts of cognitive fuel. The Druids of Gaul, which I just covered in Caesar series, memorizing heroic stories, memorizing a certain kind of story that is retold and passed down.

The Homeric epics are probably the best example of this, people need stories of heroes. I think men especially. There’s something biologically where we, kind of look more to heroes. That we need those to like, Find the courage that we need to face the problems that we need to face, whether they be technological or business or, I mean, it’s not necessarily about learning specific practical tip.

You know, Caesar’s not going to tell you how to build a space laser, but the kind of character that it takes to dare to build a space laser when nobody’s built a space laser before, you know,

that’s something you can get from Caesar. Yeah, there’s a lot of transferable stuff that that goes to different domains and I think that that’s one of the big things that the West has always gotten from the heroic tradition of Greece and Rome and Plutarch is kind of like, I think, the most paradigmatic example of that as a biographer of these great heroes.

Liberty: Yeah. I was trying to think about why is antiquity so full of these heroic figures? Right. And like, I’m looking around today. I’m like, where are all these people? And the best I could come up with, and let me know if you have a theory on this, is that at the time society was a lot less fragmented, right?

There was a few things you could do. You could be like a farmer or peasant, you could be in the military, you could be in politics, and that’s basically it. So all of the high quality, high caliber, talented. Intelligent people were kind of funneled into a few things. And so they all end up there, right?

While today someone could be, you know, an entrepreneur, it could be in tech, could be working in some very specific, like mittelstand business in Germany, making screws for this type of laser, right? And then spend all that life specialized there. are so many different directions that talented people could go.

I think we kind of like spread them thin around society a little bit, but also we’re compressing centuries of history. I guess if we compress the past 300 years of modern history too, we’d find a lot of interesting people. So that’s as close as I could come. But do you think that time produced more heroes or more great figures than today?

Or is it kind of like a, kind of what I said, right? It’s kind of a different sample I don’t know what to think about it, but I, I kind of wish we had all these great towering figures around us. And I think we have too few.

Alex Petkas: Yeah, I get that sense as well. It’s interesting what you said. Because, you know, antiquity I mean, I took some classes with a guy named Peter Brown. He’s a great historian of late antique Rome. He wrote a great book on Augustine, uh, 4th, 5th century, 6th century A. D. And he always used to say, antiquity is a very old world, you know, it’s older than you think.

And, you know, like Xenophon is going, in the Anabasis, he’s going through, Babylonia and seeing these ruined cities of the Assyrians.

And he’s going through a land that has had civilizations in it. Sumerians, the Hittites for a while, the Akkadians, etc. He’s going through a land that is, older, that goes further back from him than he goes back from us, you know?

Antiquity is such a along an old world already, especially in the Near East. So I think that’s part of it is, you get this kind of selection of, the greats who have withstood the test of time, who are most worth remembering. And Plutarch’s biographies, there’s 48 of them and they go from, kind of the mythical founders, 8th century BC to Julius Caesar.

So it’s like eight centuries, you know, it’s about, what is that, five guys on average, a century.

Liberty: If you had to cherry pick the best, the most interesting five people from the last

Alex Petkas: Yeah.

Liberty: you could probably do pretty well.

Alex Petkas: You probably could,

Liberty: Though the population of the planet was much smaller than two, right? And

everything was so, like, he was only looking at things around him. He wasn’t probably looking at, like, what’s going on in China.

He didn’t even know about many of these places.

Alex Petkas: Mm hmm. Yeah. and he does talk about Alexander interacting with the Indian wise men. He calls them the gymnosophists, the naked sophists. Um, so there is some, romance in there, but. Yeah. well, what, one of the things you said is, you know, they don’t have, tech startups, they don’t have a real highly developed scientific culture.

Although in Plutarch’s lives, you do meet a guy like Archimedes in the life of Marcellus, and that’s a fascinating story, but, That means that so many of these high agency, incredibly talented people are, in a way, historical peers of each other. They’re all doing politics, war, law. Caesar can see Alexander as a peer, and so can Pompey, and they can all see Themistocles as a peer.

They’re all in the same field, in a way, of like, statesmanship. which, you know, selects for certain kind of qualities that include bravery, that include charisma, that field in particular selects for story worthiness, you know?

you have to have courage to have a great story told about you, I think. like, it really helps to be witty, and so many of these guys are incredibly witty, and they have these amazing one liners.

Liberty: Especially with the media. I’m making quote marks here. The media of the time, right? you don’t see Caesar on TV. his stories, his accomplishments need to be very memorable and very easy to retell and kind of spread through the population. And a different type of filter than we have today.

Alex Petkas: yeah, I think another factor that makes Antiquity so, such a, kiln for hardening. Tough guys is, uh, well, in the Greek world, there’s, there’s all this political disunity and they’re constantly warring with each other. This is Greek city states. And even in Rome, you know, for most of the history of Rome, they’re fighting with their neighbors, they’re warring with the Gauls, the Samnites, the Celts, the, who are the Gauls, I guess, the Sicilians, and the Carthaginians, and on and on.

Yeah, war, really, This is what the Romans believed at least that this is kind of like the crucible of excellence and the Greeks even more so that, um, I mean, if they didn’t have massive wars going on, they threw themselves all the more intensely into these pan Hellenic games like the Olympics, games, the Delphic games, and they’re constantly competing with each other and like sharpening themselves against each other.

it’s a, it’s very much a culture of like high testosterone, like, like even the poets are like battling and rap battles sort of things with each other. And the, sophists are all kind of these macho guys trying to outdo each other in wittiness. so it’s, it’s fascinating from that perspective too.

Liberty: Your point about the prevalence of war is a good one because if we look at modern era, many of the statesmen are remembered, that are the top of podium or whatever, are wartime people, right?

It’s like Churchill and Eisenhower and all these guys. So imagine 20th century, instead of having two world wars, we added that like.

It’s like 12 or 18 or something maybe that would produce more of these people that seem memorable because of context in which they operated. But we saw Churchill after the war was not quite the same, right? You have people that, are the right person for that moment. But in a different moment, they may not work at all.

Alex Petkas: Yeah. like look at a guy like ese, who. Essentially, the way that Plutarch puts it, so the Peloponnesian War started 431 B. C. Then there was the Peace of Nicias in 424, so the war ended. Maybe six or seven years. And it might’ve just ended with a peace between Athens and Sparta.

But saw, he didn’t want Nicias to get the credit for being like the great peacemaker. And he saw, you know, if there was a war, he would have a lot more opportunity to distinguish himself. And so he found a way to start the war back up, just so he could have something to do. It’s,

Liberty: It’s like in Hamilton, right? Wishing for a war for a

way to

Alex Petkas: yes,

Liberty: That’s the way to rise up. Uh, I’m gonna have that stuck in my head. have kind of a talk show host question for you, but I think it’s a fun one. Like if you have the time machine and you could go back and witness an event, and it can be a long event or whatever, but if you could be there and kind of safe, right, not on the front line, maybe, but what’s the one thing that you’re like, ah, like, I wish I could see the real thing.

Like maybe some of these things, we have partial knowledge of them, but there are big open questions. There are like controversies or something, but like I could be there and know sure what happened, which one jumps to mind.

Alex Petkas: well there’s so many. if you look at, uh, the murder of Caesar, that’s, that’s actually, it’s pretty understandable, like, why they did it. I think I, I think I kind of get why they murdered him, and I, I think the story is pretty plausible, you know, where they did it, how the conspiracy all worked.

But, if you look at the death of Alexander the Great,

Liberty: Hmm.

Alex Petkas: is

I’m contrasting Ceasar. I think it’s Alexander’s death that I’d like to be a fly on the wall at, both because it’s kind of strange.

Liberty: So for those of us not familiar with the story, how would

Alex Petkas: yeah.

Liberty: what happened? What, what do

Alex Petkas: So I tell this in the life of Eumenes of Cardia, second part biography I did, but essentially Alexander conquers much of the known world toward the east.

Liberty: And he wept looking at the sea.

Alex Petkas: Yes, yes. only just gotten started. Um, he’s 33 or so, he returns finally back to Babylon, and he gets a fever, And he’s sick for like 13 days. We actually have the, the breakdown of his day by day decline because Eumenes of Chardia, his secretary was keeping the Babylonian, royal records day by day, and he gets sicker and sicker and people come to visit him and eventually he’s sort of. isn’t communicative very well. He’s like, doesn’t have the energy to speak. And over the course of about 13 days, he just, he dies and they keep asking him, Alexander, what if, Zeus willing, you’re going to get better, but what if, you know, can you at least designate a successor and they never get him to designate a successor.

Liberty: Hmm.

he was 33 when he

Alex Petkas: uh huh. Yeah. so there’s all these conspiracy theories about, was he poisoned? if he was poisoned, who would have done it? Would it have been, you know, Cassander, would it, et cetera, et cetera. People who wanted him dead, but, it might’ve just been that he got sick. would like to know if he just got sick or if he was poisoned, of course.

But I don’t know if you could know that by

just looking at Do you think there’s also a chance that he named a successor, but the people in the room disagreed and just never reported it?

Also possible. Also very possible. story is that after much begging on the part of his friends, at some point somebody exasperates and says, Alexander, to whom will you give your kingdom? And he says, to the strongest.

Liberty: ha ha.

Badass until the end.

Alex Petkas: Yeah, yeah, because I foresee that upon my death, a great funeral games will begin.

So essentially he, he committed his generals to warring, to fighting it out amongst themselves. And so on started the war of successors. And, uh, went on for, with some significant pauses in there for 40 years or so of carving up the kingdom, first fighting, who should rule the whole, then realizing nobody’s going to rule the whole, we’re going to kind of divide it up, then fighting it amongst themselves.

And then, you know, the wars, the Hellenistic Kings are kind of always, warring, you know, the Ptolemy in Egypt is kind of grabbing Judea from Antiochus and, you know, on and on and on. He could have had the greatest empire that had ever existed. so why did he do it? if he did say that, A, I’d like to know if he said that.

But if he did say that, why did he do it? was it that kind of spirit that you see in that quote of like, He came to some realization that men cannot be great except in war or something. Something kind of disturbing like that. or was it that, he just couldn’t pick? Or who did he really want? His sort of incompetent, half brother to rule? I don’t know. It’s, endlessly fascinating. I think we’ll never know the answer.

But this was the that Eumenes of Cardea had to deal with as his secretary, trying to keep the kingdom together.

It’s a fascinating, sad story.

Liberty: all the alternate histories here are also fascinating, right? The path dependency of like, literally like my kingdom for antibiotics, right? Like, cause you never know. Like maybe he just cut himself and got an infection, but he was 33. What if he had lived to be 80? Like whole modern world could be.

Organized differently, nation states and borders and everything, the empire had stayed around longer, right? They never last forever, but way they go impacts what comes afterwards. like, accidents of history, we’re living in them today.

Alex Petkas: Yeah, and, uh, some writers say, you know, the Romans are lucky that Alexander died young, because, you know, in 323 BC, you know, they wouldn’t have been so, formidable a match for a great Macedonian conqueror. Maybe he could have taken Italy, too. Uh, he was, he was apparently turning his sights west, to Carthage and to Rome and to Sicily and who knows.

Thanks.

Liberty: That would make for a. Interesting, like HBO

prestige TV show, alternate history, like the man in the high castle, but antiquity, right?

Alex Petkas: Yeah. Oh, we gotta make that.

Liberty: another thing I’m curious about, as a kind of newbie and tourist to the space myself, I’m trying to learn, right. But there’s so much, and What are the common misconceptions you see about antiquity, about ancient Greece and Rome, and like that many people believe but it’s just plain wrong, or part of the story, or like do you see most commonly that’s like, nah, it’s not like that.

Alex Petkas: One of the things that I think about often is there’s this conception of the Romans as these kind of gruff, no nonsense, militaristic, power politics guys. And the Greeks as these sort of softer, intellectual poet types. But the Romans actually have this amazing literary tradition, and they have this great tradition of wit, and I think they’re in a lot of ways funnier than the Greeks.

so Cicero is a great example. I mean in some of his speeches he’s like a stand up comedian. It’s just, it’ll have you crying, like the speech, on behalf of Caelius. he’s making fun of this Kylius’s girlfriend. He’s, he’s like dating this older woman

who then, yeah.

Liberty: change.

Alex Petkas: Yeah. And she ended up accusing him of trying to murder her and Cicero hates that woman too, because she insulted his wife. There’s all these kind of personal dynamics and I, recommend that speech. I’d like to do it on my show at some point. but you know, you get great poets like Catal and Horace and Virgil, I mean, world class poets artists of, the written and the spoken word.

the Roman poets in a lot of ways are much more kind of. refined and learned than a lot of the early Greek poets. So that idea of the Romans is sort of not intellectuals. I mean, the Romans have this, Katarina Volk has a whole book on this and Jonathan Bi interviewed her for his show.

But basically, like, you look at the Roman culture of the late Republic, Caesar, Cicero, Cato, Brutus, Cassius, all these guys are not just politicians. They are international, literary figures. They’re, well, not international, they’re, writing poems and philosophical treatises and having these debates about the nature of language.

I mean, Caesar writes this treatise on grammar and Amidst the flying spears as one of the Roman authors puts it while he’s fighting this campaign in Gaul He’s weighing in on kind of cultural matters. He’s like a literary critic while he’s a great warlord So the Romans have this super intense Kind of gentlemanly politely competitive, but very serious intellectual culture in the late Republic They have all these philosophers around that are Mostly Greeks that are sort of interlocutors and they’re always sharpening themselves and their wits and their minds.

I think that’s Something you got to keep in mind to just to really understand the Roman mindset of like why would a guy like Julius Caesar? Write the Gallic Wars Commentaries that I’m going over in the show right now. Like why would he do that? It’s not just about recording his deeds It’s like got an image to uphold as a talented literary author.

Somebody worth reading. And this is part of their media strategy too, right? Like, do you want to be the sort of person that people are always talking about? Your latest weigh in on some issue or like what you said about that poet. Everybody’s going to talk about it. It’s part of your kind of like, But it’s not just instrumental, they clearly enjoy doing this too, and they’re good at it, they’re really good at it.

so that’s an interesting misconception, I think, about the Romans, this is sort of only And on the other hand, the Greeks a lot of people, when they think about the Greeks, may, probably if you’ve read A fair bit of Greek history, you won’t have this misconception, but you know, a lot of people, when they think of the Greeks, they think of Socrates, that all the Greeks are these kind of, you know, theoreticians, and you think of Archimedes, and these people that are just so far removed from reality, and they’re tracing triangles in the sand as the siege of Syracuse is going on.

but the Greeks have this amazing, Warlike tradition too, that was much more the norm. Socrates is really the exception. and I think that looking at a guy like Pericles or Themistocles or Lysander of Sparta, Geseleus of Sparta, they have every bit as much machismo and military, prowess, statesmanship, as the Romans do.

And this is what the Romans really admired in the early Greeks. And this whole idea of the Greeks as kind of soft pedophagers comes from the late Republican period after the Romans had, you know, basically had Greece conquered under their thumb for about a century. And so of course they’re going to, you know, the kind of conqueror spirit is going to be not so easy to find in the days of Cicero and Caesar, when they, you know, they conquered Greece.

And, um, second century BC, several generations earlier. So I think, you know, you get, it’s easy to kind of pigeonhole either one of them, but there’s a lot to learn on both ends from both civilizations.

Liberty: that’s a service. I think that your podcast other sources and writers are doing is like fighting those caricatures, right? It’s too easy to look back and reduce a very rich civilization that’s multifaceted into like, if today we’re looking around, it’s like, Oh, the US is like Big Macs and UK is tea and Russia is vodka.

And like, there’s way more in there. Right. that’s part of the fun of discovering it’s a whole world into itself. Yeah. And unlike the modern world, like people obsessed with modern history, right? we don’t know how it’s going to end, but with antiquity, we can look at the full experiment.

We can see like, happened over a hundred years of this type of policy or this type of structure of organization for society, or what happens during long wars, or like, almost like a, lab experiment that was run fully. And now we can look at it. Unfortunately, we don’t have the full picture because not everything survived and the people who wrote what we’re reading add their own point of view, their own like biases, whatever. But, what’s there is like a very long run experiment.

Alex Petkas: Yeah, this is one of the reasons why I think that the, for example, the U. S. founders and, European political thought in general looked so frequently to the ancients, in the art of statecraft is because, the Greeks in particular, had a ton of iteration on the problem of how do you organize a state.

I mean, there’s hundreds of them around the Greek world, independent city states, they’re all experimenting with different versions of constitutions. And, you know, you look at a place like Sparta versus a place like Athens, and a lot of the differences between their success in, you know, Politics and like, you know, how wealthy the state is can be boiled down to the Constitution.

I mean, it’s the same kind of people, they’re speaking the same language, they have the same poets, more or less, with some minor variations. But, Sparta is an oligarchy. a military aristocracy. they breed their Warriors in a certain way. Athens is different. And so I think the Greeks were always fascinated with this issue.

It’s, and they knew they felt that it was the most important issue. And so when Aristotle writes his politics. in, the 330s or something BC. He first has, himself and his students compile just an exhaustive list of all of these constitutions of various city states. Okay, how do they do voting?

How do they do elected offices? How do they pick their generals? How do they educate their young? And he had apparently just like hundreds of these constitutions and we only have, the constitution of Athens left over. So many of these are lost in the sands of time and, you know, maybe we’ll discover some of these when we, uh, finally excavate and, decode the Herculaneum scrolls.

but this is, one of the reasons why The constitutional founders of America went back to Aristotle and they looked at Polybius is another great example of a historian who’s just a brilliant political thinker. They get to see results of the experiments, you know,

Liberty: Yeah.

And lots of A, B testing,

Alex Petkas: you know, because Polybius can see the Spartan state has failed by his day.

sort of a non entity in the mid second century BC. And it was already declining in the days of Aristotle, but it, you know, A couple hundred years earlier, you would have thought these guys are going to be great forever. So I think that’s another fascinating part of it.

Liberty: changing gears a little bit. I’m also curious about your journey as a online creator, right? Because academia, that’s over now. I got to do my own thing. What have you learned about making a great podcast? What have you learned about? Communicating this stuff to people who haven’t read the original in Greek or Latin, right?

Alex Petkas: Well, my kind generative idea of it early 2021 was I want to, teach people about antiquity. I want to find people who are into this stuff and help them learn it and help them just appreciate what I appreciate in it. And so I picked Plutarch as a model, the great biographer, partly because he’s Lindy.

he was the most popular, second most popular after the Bible of all ancient texts in the 18th century in America. He’s a Bible for heroes, as Emerson puts it. He’s a handbook for revolutionaries, as George Bernard Shaw puts it. And I think in the online world, my thesis was volume of content is increasing logarithmically You want to go for something that has been proven to work and that will probably withstand the test of time.

Kind of like that quote that you began with Will and Ariel Durant and more people are reading Homer now than ever did in antiquity. I think more people are going to read Plutarch now than than ever did in the 18th century of America because he’s really timely and he’s a great storyteller. So that’s another thing that I have learned about content creation over the That, just learning the art of storytelling and improving on that, it’s just like, you can never be satisfied.

You can always get better. It appeals to me. and if you emulate a great storyteller in your own content production, if you say, I’m, I’m going to do what he did. That’s what I decided to do. And I, so I get to learn from one of the great masters as I go along, right?

How does Plutarch arrange this narrative? How does he tell the story? How does he set the scene? Why did he choose that word? Or why did he choose that perspective? teaches me a ton about like how to keep people’s attention and how to, Paint meaning and character and arcs over long content.

I’ve enjoyed a lot about that process. It’s, and you know, people seem to be resonating with it, as I go. And I think I’ve improved a lot.

Liberty: Yeah. That’s something I, I frequently listen to your podcast. And as soon as I start thinking, okay, that’s enough. it stops there and you move on to something else, right? I think I mentioned to you the example where, right. Caesar is having a bridge built over a river.

And like, Caesar is very proud of his bridge. You could tell, because there’s all kinds of description of the details. And so you give just enough detail that I can paint the scene in my head. Right. But as soon as I’m starting to think, okay, that’s a bit much detail. Like you move on to something else.

So you seem to have good storytelling instincts for like, what’s enough. also don’t want to be too like, Oh, here’s a bunch of bullet points on what happened, right? You don’t want to do the first paragraph on Wikipedia for every one of those stories, cause that’s kind of boring.

That’s not, giving you enough. So how do you balance what’s enough entertainment. What’s enough, vegetable for the mind, so to speak. what is enough historical accuracy? Cause you want to be accurate, but also like, there’s some stuff you can skip over, right?

that one of the big challenges of, when you’re, building an episode? It sounds like it must be very hard to find the right balance there.

Alex Petkas: Yeah, I take, again, Plutarch as a model is somebody I learned a lot from in his biography of Alexander. He’s kind of faced with a similar problem. there’s tomes and tomes already in his day in the first century A. D. written about Alexander, his conquests and all the wars and all the battles. And Plutarch says, well, you’ll have to excuse me because he wants to write a biography that’s You know, in most modern editions, not more than 80 or 90 pages.

Liberty: Hmm.

Alex Petkas: like the longest one that he ever did, I think too. So most of them are more like 40 pages, 50 pages.

So, so he’s

Liberty: would make add filler so it’s 300 pages.

Alex Petkas: right. Yeah. How are we going to sell a book at 90 pages? And it just wasn’t an issue for him. And so I’ll pull up the quote here. he talks about precisely this problem. His life of Alexander the King and of Caesar who overthrew Pompey that I’m writing in this book, so it’s a pair.

And the multitude of deeds to be treated is so great that I shall make no other preface than to entreat my readers in case I do not tell of all the famous actions of these men, nor even speak exhaustively at all in each particular case, but in epitome for the part. Not to complain, for it is not histories that I’m writing, but lives, but biographies.

in the most illustrious deeds, there is not always a manifestation of virtue or vice. Nay, a slight thing like a phrase or a jest often makes a greater revelation of character than battles when thousands fall or the greatest armaments or sieges of cities.

Liberty: this is so cool. So an aside, I’m grinning like an idiot because I had never seen the Cost of Glory narrative voice live like this. And it’s

Alex Petkas: Ha ha ha ha

ha

ha

ha

Liberty: Very cool.

Alex Petkas: yeah, well, uh, there you go. So, you know, I’m writing lives too. I’m, I’m trying to convey character. And so what I’m doing is very different from Dan Carlin or Daryl Cooper. I love and respect what they do, but I, I try to like keep that in mind that, We’re trying to illustrate something about lessons we can learn from these men.

so I just try to explain enough history that you can get the context and get into the story as quickly as possible and start the arc of the journey that they’re on and the, and I also like Nietzsche’s dictum, you know, when he says tell us not about so and so and his times, tell us rather how so and so stood against his times, you know, it’s not about.

Trying to use a character to illustrate a time period. There are some great biographies, like modern biographies that do that. But really I’m trying to illustrate these characters as such.

Liberty: right. It’s the people and the story more than like this happened then. And then the year later and then after this and one thing after the other or whatever the phrase goes, right? that, that’s a, different thing, a valuable thing too,

but

your focus on people and stories and. Inspiration, I think, I listen to and I’m pumped. I mostly listen to your podcast, like pumping weight in my basement gym, right? Cause I feel like I got to get better. I got to, yeah.

to be better. Makes me want to improve myself. And I think that’s, very valuable in this world where everybody is so cynical.

Everything is kind of dystopian and dark and people think that they have no agency, that they can’t control their lives. It’s all external factors. And I don’t know, it feels like it’s going against the grain in a direction I like. That’s needed.

Alex Petkas: Yeah, maybe I should start, uh, yelling into the mic. You’re fat! You’re lazy! Get out there! Come on! I think a lot of my listeners would appreciate that, because a lot of them are at the gym listening to this. Um,

Liberty: like protein supplement ads in there. That’s

Alex Petkas: yeah, right. So, but just to, go on that point I think this is one of the geniuses of Plutarch again, and why, Emerson recommended the reading of Plutarch so strongly, Ralph Waldo Emerson, for all the people associate him with this, um, essay self reliance, you know, you don’t, need to kind of burden yourself with the tradition, you know, you just look, look inside.

if you read that text carefully, he’s not saying unmoor yourself from tradition, he’s saying unmoor yourself from conformism, which is very different, actually. And he modeled his career. after Plutarch. he was a Plutarch nut, a total Plutarch nut, and he loved Antiquity. and I think is similar with Nietzsche, but the reason that he sends, that he like exhorts people to Plutarch is he says, well this is kind of like the way to find your way through Antiquity as a new discoverer.

to really, you. be invested enough in the Greeks and the Romans to read a book like Thucydides or Tacitus. you probably need to be emotionally committed on some level. And that happens through connecting with people. That happens through connecting with biographies. And if you know the principal characters that kind of like scaffold the era.

I did a post on this a while back How to read all of Plutarch’s lives. It’s on Substack. I think it’s

on my website too.

you can see that Plutarch actually kind of the whole of the importance of pre AD antiquity through these biographies. So you can kind of know, all right, that was around the time when Marcellus was living, Cato the Elder.

This was around like the mystic, like you can kind of personalize. And I think that’s how humans are naturally wired to think of chronology. Like, before you have ADBC and this absolute chronology, Greeks would name years by the archons, like the archon of the year. The Romans would name the years by the consuls of the year. In the medieval period, you’re often, like, naming. periods by the king who reigned and in a way that’s like, that’s like the natural, you know, in the days of Charles IV and things like that, it means more than saying the early 1400s because it brings together this whole string of a cast of characters and the important issues at the time,

Liberty: you said resonated, and reminded me of a discussion I had this podcast with my friend Cedric Chin about how people learn and how expertise is transferred and tacit knowledge and all that. And he talked about how, like, when you listen to people like Buffett and Munger, when they tell you about something, it’s not like bullet points on the PowerPoint slide, it’s like, you need integrity, you need this.

It’s like a story about this guy who had a shoe factory and then he, and, and, Partly it’s because our brains are made to remember stories and people, and so you remember better the lessons that way than like in the abstract, but also it’s because you don’t know in advance which parts of the story are going to be important later, which part you’re going to learn from, right?

So the details matter. if you abstract it all into like a few big things and then later on, your pattern matching may not trigger because too abstract, parts are missing. Well, if you think about, Oh, this man was jealous and this and that, and that’s something that you can recognize in your life or around you way more than some abstract situation.

And I feel like this is a lot of what Plutarch did there. by telling it as stories, it’s, it’s something memorable. It’s like having watched a film versus having read a, some psychology textbook, right?

Alex Petkas: yeah, that’s the power of stories again. You know, I, and I often, I’m finding new lessons from them as I go along and retell them. it’s how we’re wired, right? Like you said, and it kind of goes back to the whole epic tradition of the lessons that you, pass down from generation to generation, you encode them in stories.

Stories are entertaining for a reason. Our brains are wired to find them entertaining because they’re actually useful. And you need some kind of like desire in there to dispose you to, absorbing information that way. I think that’s why they’re entertaining. So like the fact that something is entertaining is a, good clue.

Often, not always. Okay. I’m not saying doom scrolling is, uh, is that

Liberty: No, but to go back to what you said, It wasn’t entertaining to you in school to be forced to read the history and all that. But when you do it by yourself, because of an intrinsic motivation, now it’s entertaining and now you get something out of it. And now it sticks, right? Like if someone is reading a bunch of stuff that they find super boring, they can read all of them, like mechanically turn the pages and have their eyes look at them.

But what’s going to be left afterwards, while if someone is fascinated by your stuff and then enjoying it. I, I, I Probably they’re much more likely to integrate it, to remember it, to go back to it, to think again about it, right? Because every time you think about something, it’s like refreshing that memory, remaking those, neural patterns or whatever.

So part of making it interesting and fun is also a service to the reader. It’s, making it more effective. It’s not just more fun. It’s it’s all intertwined and it’s hard to separate.

Alex Petkas: Yeah, definitely take that as a North Star, for sure. been in that mindset of like, education is eating your vegetables only, but,

Liberty: put some salt on those vegetables or

something.

Alex Petkas: Some soy sauce.

Liberty: Speaking stories, back to your story of creating the podcast and the newsletter and everything else. Are there any like best and worst moments when you think about the journey so far, right? Any low points when you were like, screw this, I’m giving up or like this is not working or feedback from your audience that was very memorable or touching or I’m curious about some of those stories of making this.

Alex Petkas: Yeah, well there’s definitely been moments where I’ve felt completely alone, like nobody’s listening, even though the data is telling me otherwise. It’s just like, I think, you know, if you don’t hear from anybody for a few days and you’re just kind of working at it. But, uh, I think the moments that are most encouraging for me are often a listener will write in and say how much, listening to the life of Pyrrhus or, um, or just like help them get through something, you know, and, um, I take a whole lot of encouragement from that.

And I try to, never forget those moments. I mean, um, it’s often lonely content, creating, writing, especially in a podcast where now that I’m, More active on YouTube There are a lot of comments that come in below the video, but you know on Apple podcast or Spotify unless you’re like a certain critical mass on Spotify I think they don’t open up comments until you’re at a certain level or like selectively. anyway, I don’t know how much people even use that function on Spotify,

but yeah, I didn’t either until I saw a couple of shows. So, but all this to say, it’s a very one way medium, as opposed to Twitter or YouTube.

And I think that’s part of the what’s brilliant about it is because it sort of filters away a lot of what’s maybe not necessary about the whole listening and. learning experience, but on the other hand, you do kind of miss that interaction and it can be kind of lonely, which is one of the reasons why I think I was so motivated to start, the Cost of Glory Retreats and we’re starting an online course.

Offering of courses, for some of the leadership lessons, especially the art of oratory, which is in a lot of ways, my study of ancient rhetoric and rhetorical tradition and the way that the ancients would have trained their own leaders. That was part of what inspired me to start the cost of glory and have this particular sense of like, all right, here’s how it’s going to work.

so I’m trying to share some of those lessons and I think it’s a lot of it is, it’s not just, I’m trying to build a business, but I am, but I also think it’s very fulfilling to have those relationships develop that it’s not just one way. And just like meet the people that are attracted to this stuff.

It’s like kind of like the point of it all me was just to meet other people who love this stuff and to do stuff together.

Liberty: yeah.

it’s hard to beat the value of meeting people in person and spending time, right? something I’m looking forward to next month when we meet each other in person for the first time. But, I’ve worked at a company where people are all around the world, and once a year we all come together and spend a few days together.

that is the highlight of my year. It is extremely valuable for months after. It’s like the mental model that you have of those people gets updated in higher resolution. You feel you know them better. You can communicate better. And so I can totally imagine these retreats to be as valuable to you as to the people who attend and creating I don’t know, lifelong friendships.

that’s very, very cool. I hope, to be able to attend someday if I can figure out the childcare and all that situation.

Alex Petkas: Yeah, yeah, find a way to make it happen, I’m sure.

Liberty: One thing, I’m curious about, and this is another kind of talk show host question, but if you had to cover non classic figures, like, can’t go back to that, well, you have to do something else, like, who are you most excited about outside of antiquity, Napoleon and Roosevelt, or you go, like, more businessmen or statesmen or military figures, I mean, I’m curious, where are your other interests with biography and history?

Alex Petkas: Yeah, I think as much as I’d like to say that it’s the renaissance princes, think honestly I you know, I asked myself, what would Julius Caesar have done today? What would, uh, Alexander have done today? I think a lot of them would have been, you know, startup founders. because the American, uh, Industrial culture in particular, but in general, just entrepreneurship now in the West tends to attract really, really smart, competent, high agency people.

those are the guys that fascinate me at like, I think what’s fascinating about these figures is so often they’re thinking outside the box. why not just build a bridge across the Rhine? Nobody’s done it before. and I think that I would probably look at, the industrialists of the 19th century or, or even just the mid 20th century, like guys like Bob Noyce and, the post World War II, generation of, scientists working in the West, it’s like a fascinating period of, entrepreneurship and, innovation.

And also as somebody trying to build a business myself a lot of my motivation for a cost of glory is not so much to have like a huge, uh, revenue number, but to, create really an alternative institution, whether you think of it as a nonprofit or a, a startup.

What I was really motivated by in leaving academia was the possibility to create something that was not just different, but better. And This was sort of the problem that I left trying to solve. And I was inspired in a lot of ways by Plato because Plato was, I think the greatest educational entrepreneur that ever lived.

he founded a school that a recognizably similar form continued for about a millennium. until at least the 6th century AD, the Platonic school, it became the most widespread and important philosophy in whole ancient world. got Christianized eventually. it was way more popular than Stoicism, Aristotelianism, and it kind of integrated those other philosophies.

And I think the Platonic spirit is, you know, a lot of ways what gave us the sort of spirit of Western science, is another story, but it all started with him taking risks and trying to think outside the box of how you could get media to work for you. He was a brilliant manipulator of media.

He wrote these dialogues that are not just educational treatises. They’re often kind of subtle seductions to come and visit him in Athens. He used letters in very creative ways, private letters that were intended to be leaked, that would put his own spin on events, in the way that he wanted them to be presented.

So yeah, I just wanted to, um, I think when I see people today doing that or in our recent times, I want to learn from them, you know, like I love the Founders Podcast.

Liberty: Yeah. David’s great.

Alex Petkas: Yeah, I love his show. I love how to take over the world. Ben does some ancients, but he also does a lot of modern business figures.

those are some of my favorites, how to take over the world episodes. So, uh, yeah, I’d probably be like a barbell strategy of study, study the ancients really intensely within study the, very moderns really intensely. And that’s kind of the right medium for me.

Liberty: Yeah. Following Plutarch making pairs. but no, I love it. It’s so on brand for you to be like, who inspired you to like, start up my thing. Oh, Plato. Right. very

very cool. And I think you’re absolutely right. Most of the time, if some institution is getting ineffective or kind of corrupted or just too bureaucratic and slow moving, it’s very, very hard to reform from the inside.

You’re much better going outside and starting something new and something better that eventually replaces it or supplants it or, or whatever. it’s very rare to see institution like fully reformed from the inside. I’m sure it’s happened, but that’s not best strategy, probably. So. I’d love to talk about, I think you’re the best person to give the listener some context here about Vesuvius scroll project and what are these scrolls that everyone’s talking about and that AI and particle accelerators are involved with and like that, lots of very, very cool stuff happening there.

So I, love a bit of context on what’s happening. And then maybe we can talk about like, what are we actually likely to find there? Like, what’s your dream discoveries that we could find there, right? Well,

Alex Petkas: Yeah.

Liberty: to dream, like what’s the best thing that could come out of this?

Alex Petkas: Yeah. When I first saw the announcement, on Twitter in February or, I like my head exploded. I mean, the idea, so, you know, Mount Vesuvius, the eruption that buried Pompeii also buried Herculaneum and it buried this villa that had a bunch of scrolls in it, maybe thousands, certainly hundreds have been found already.

And, there’s a lot left in that villa that hasn’t been excavated. So I think a lot of scholars believe this, I think it’s seems plausible to me that we could find twice as many scrolls as we already have. If we keep digging,

Liberty: And by, as we have, you mean for all of antiquity, for all of that era?

Alex Petkas: Well, that we’ve recovered so far from the volcano, but, the amount of text that has made it to us from before that is really meager.

And, um, I haven’t done the math recently, but, you know, The amount of scrolls that we’ve already uncovered is substantial in proportion to what we already have passed down through. The way that most texts reach us from antiquity is by being copied over and over. by scribes in the Middle Ages, because these things just decay, but you know, the volcano preserved these papyrus scrolls.

Not perfectly, it’s very difficult to extract text from them, but now that we’ve got Brent Searles and Nat Friedman teaming up for this Vesuvius challenge, and this is the that has been talked about in classics for, you know, Centuries, literally centuries. Because they were discovered in the late 18th century.

I always thought it’d be cool if they did it. Maybe it won’t happen in my lifetime. Maybe it will, but it’s happening as we speak, we’re finally able to. use the particle accelerator and extremely high resolution scanning technology and build models and digitally unwrap them.

And it’s it’s mind blowing. It’s awesome. So here’s what I think is really cool about what could be on the horizon. that villa belonged to the father in law of Julius Caesar.

Liberty: Hmm.

Alex Petkas: And the reason that there’s a library there is because that family patronized philosophers intensely. Kind of like what we were talking about earlier. Caesar and Cicero having philosophers around. The particular philosopher that they patronized was this guy Philodemus.

He was an Epicurean philosopher. they’re materialists, they’re, uh, Hedonists. Both of those need to be qualified, but, um, you know, essentially you had this intellectual Philodemus. They import him sort of from, from Greece and he brings the whole library of the Epicurean school at Athens to the Bay of Naples, to this beautiful villa.

And the Bay of Naples itself is an area right around the late Republic that becomes a sort of Holiday getaway for the Roman elite, but also it’s a place where you go and you kind of keep your family philosopher or poet. You just give him a nice room to stay in and he can compose his books there and you go in Rome and you do your business and then you come visit him in the summer and, you know, have intellectual discourse.

So this is like the place where that Romans would go. to do philosophy and to do poetry. They go to their villa on the Bay of Naples. So that’s why this all sort of starts to make sense. And it’s actually true that the poet Virgil was friends with Philodemus and probably visited that villa. that villa was probably walked through by Virgil himself, the

Liberty: Wow.

Alex Petkas: poet.

Liberty: Everything is lined up he had access to other philosophers, it could have copied scrolls from other people. Like seems like such a central point in the network,

Alex Petkas: Yeah.

Liberty: Repository of text. Yeah.

Alex Petkas: Yes. And so we’ve discovered a lot of philosophical treatises that are epicurean and kind of, um, kind of niche . I think Epicureanism is interesting and deserves more attention itself, but there are literally hundreds of scrolls that we have, had for decades. Centuries, and not been able to read.

what we think that we have is now. mainly a representation of the philosophical library of the villa. we have Philodemus’s own writings. but he also might’ve had copies of Lost Dialogues of Aristotle. It’s very plausible. He might’ve had Posidonius’s great work, the Stoic writer’s great, ethnographic work.

Writings on Gaul and Judea. I mean, we could learn about the early Jews. if we find the literary library, which is likely that Villa had not just a philosophical library, but a literary library. We could find lost plays of Sophocles, lost dialogues of Plato.

So. Lost books of all kinds of historians. There’s so much we’d love to know about the Hellenistic world around, you know, the intellectual life of the courts of Ptolemy that did so much to solidify the canon of classical Greek literature. the, the volcano erupts in 79 AD.

This is actually about a hundred years after Philodemus, so that the library would have been building more and more to its collections, presumably. might be references to early Christianity, In the generation before this, Nero is burning Christians at the stake, and in Rome as scapegoats.

So there’s a lot going on that would be of interest to, the entire globe. and it’s just a matter of doing the work little by little and getting these scrolls unwrapped. But I also, I kind of hold out hope that we might find Lost treatises of Julius Caesar, There are a lot of writings that Caesar put out that don’t survive And there’s some Latin left that has come down to us from this library And I mean he had a family connection there so we could discover more about Caesar and his circle Augustus and his circle.

I mean The amount of knowledge that we could come up, not just in general knowledge of antiquity, but specific connections to incredibly powerful, influential men like Caesar, Cicero, Augustus, Virgil, It’s unbelievable. So I’m thrilled and I, we talk a lot about this between us and, I’m getting involved in various ways and we’re hoping to have something that we can share more publicly soon,

Liberty: Yeah, stay tuned.

Alex Petkas: to, to push this forward on our end with my show and, OSV is getting very interested as well, so,

Liberty: One thing I’m curious about this project, and maybe it’s, not the right analogy, but I’m thinking of the human genome project where

it took years and years and years to do like the first 1%. And at some point, because of breakthroughs, because of efficiency and all that, you do a lot more of it. last year, I don’t know if you did 50 percent or whatever, but it accelerated, right?

Is there a possibility that it’s going to be similar here where it’s, it takes forever, to do the first scroll, but once you have the techniques, the technology, you can prove it, you have the software to virtually unroll it and figure out what’s the ink and like almost atom by atom, you have to figure it out.

Could this be accelerated to a point where within a few years or a decade or something, like actually can scan through the whole thing and interpret it or is this going to take Decades and decades and decades. And I know, I know we can’t know for sure, but I’m curious what you’re feeling about how this could go.

Alex Petkas: So one of the bottlenecks for this thing is they have to, until now, they’ve had to rent out time at this, incredibly huge particle accelerator in Oxford. that’s the size of a large shopping center. and it’s, expensive and hard to do, but they’re looking at more modular, smaller scanning devices where they can get something approximating that resolution, to make the scans.

So that would speed things up substantially. I know that they’ve found some really promising routes. they’re also using machine learning to, speed up the process of recognizing the letters. And, uh, another main bottleneck is segmentation, basically figuring out on your 3d model where one sheet of papyrus begins and another ends,

Liberty: Right.

Alex Petkas: it’s like turning it into an actual unwrappable scroll.

That’s very laborious and time consuming, but they’re speeding up on that.

Liberty: just for the listener, just so mental picture is correct, it’s not, it doesn’t look like paper anymore, right? It

Alex Petkas: Right.

Liberty: like a cylinder of like carbon. They’ve been carbonized. would look like clay.

Alex Petkas: logs. the first people who found them had no idea what they were. It’s these little, odd, was this firewood or something? Yeah.

Liberty: were destroyed

Alex Petkas: Oh,

Liberty: by accident?

Alex Petkas: And I did an interview with Nat Friedman on The Cost of Glory that everybody should check out that goes through a lot of these details.

Liberty: It’s great I’ll link it.

Alex Petkas: the way that they organized the contest was also fascinating. We talked about that on the show and, how Nat thinks about open source and, uh, thinking through incentives and having it, Open enough to attract people, but, protecting knowledge enough to make it a meaningful competition.

Very, very interesting stuff. so yeah, they’ve got the right people in the right seats now. And Brent Searles is also an amazing guy at the University of Kentucky. uh, I’ve talked with him a few times. Hope to get him on the show as well soon, sometime. The whole thing

Liberty: thing is like a mix of Indiana Jones and like Edison or something. it’s

the intersection of all the things that I nerd out about like technology and history and Like high agency entrepreneurs who figure it out, right? love this stuff.

I hope the project, goes well. And I can, start getting some, juicy new antiquity texts soon. And have you interpret them for me because I’ll need the context. thought we could do like one more talk show host y kind of thing, love to do a kind of lightning round of some names That you’ve done episodes on or I’m curious about or whatever.

what comes to mind first when you hear that name? What’s the most notable thing about it? Like go in whatever direction you want. I trust your judgment, but I’m just curious what you think about some of

Alex Petkas: Let’s rock.

Liberty: I’ll start with Sertorius.

Alex Petkas: Sertorius is the greatest Roman rebel. The thing that always comes to mind for me is what the great Nobel Prize winning historian Theodor Mommsen said, that Sertorius was one of the greats, perhaps the greatest, that Rome produced and in another era he could have been the savior of his fatherland.

But instead, the story is tragically he became Rome’s public enemy number one. He’s the guy I started with and for me, the most inspiring people of all Plutarch’s lives. A guy you’ve probably never heard of

Liberty: hadn’t heard about him before you, so

Next one, and then we’ve talked about him, but let’s dig a bit deeper into Plutarch.

Alex Petkas: Plutarch for me is, is a great example of how a kind of, uh, quasi autistic brainiac with an incredible memory for facts, an incredible potential to, just deluge you with boring details because he had them all on the tip of his fingers. Through moral conviction and discipline, learn to become one of history’s greatest most compelling storytellers.

Liberty: Hmm, that’s an arc

Alex Petkas: I find that really fascinating about Plutarch. Read his book on Isis and Osiris, and if you can get through it, you’ll just be amazed that that guy could come to write the Parallel Lives. It is just so dense and unreadable.

Liberty: Okay.

And was that literally one of his first? Can we tell the chronology like that? Or did he have these two parallel lives where he’s writing for the public and he’s writing his own nerdy stuff that he doesn’t expect to be told at plaza?

Alex Petkas: Yeah, a little bit of both. We don’t have a chronology for all of the lives or all of the treatises. I think that would still go into kind of a, Spurg mode as they would say on Twitter now and then with his buddies. But, you know, the lives are remarkably readable, a man with that kind of talent.

Thanks.

Liberty: How about Sulla?

Alex Petkas: I regard Sulla as Rome’s greatest dictator. he’s Elon Musk’s favorite dictator. Elon Musk

has posted something about Sulla. Yeah, Momsen also compared him to Washington. that why, so Caesar is also a dictator of Rome, but he only became dictator because Sulla revived the office. And I think Sulla’s greatest claim on being a dictator Rome’s greatest dictator was Dictators, of course, an office of like kind of temporary martial law supreme authority that’s supposed to be laid down after six months Of all the dictators besides Caesar, of all the dictators that came before him for sure Sulla had the strongest mandate to Basically continue his dictator for life.

Like nobody would have questioned him. He had kill all of his enemies and city was packed with his soldiers and the people that, would have, kept him in place. But he laid down the office of supreme power because at heart he was a republican and not a monarchist.

Liberty: Hmm.

Alex Petkas: he’s Rome’s greatest dictator. another fascinating character.

Liberty: series he did on him was great. Really enjoyed it. And another one I didn’t know about when Musk mentioned him, uh, check Wikipedia, get an idea, but then I listened to your series and okay, now I kind of get a, an idea for, for the man and contradictions and the tensions and like, what a life.

Alex Petkas: Yeah. he’s one of my favorites. Again, you know, I, I kind of came to him thinking that he was the villain. And then I kind of saw things from his perspective at least by the time

I ended

Liberty: because they’re real people, there’s rarely a pure hero or a pure villain. people are trying to do their best and from their point of view and from their their own context, people are rarely mustache twirling. I’m gonna do something evil today. How about Pompey?

Alex Petkas: Pompey, the great, in the Bible, there’s that passage where Jesus says, uh, render Caesar, what is Caesar’s and render unto God, what is God’s? Well, if things had gone just a little bit differently, he could have been saying render unto Pompey. What is Pompey’s? Because, it was close, the war between him and Caesar that decided who would be, they were friends.

Tragic story of a breakup.

Liberty: Yeah, quite

Alex Petkas: History’s worst breakup.

Liberty: Yeah, the most collateral for a breakup.

Alex Petkas: But, Pompey was the man who made Judea a Roman. property He was the guy who conquered Judea for the Romans and much of the east, Syria, Armenia, defeating Mithridates. So, he’s a fascinating conqueror and also I think, one of the things that I discovered when I was working on his life was how, He was a kind of a, I don’t know, I wouldn’t say he was a sensitive man, but he was like a, he was a thinker, like he wanted to surround himself with very thoughtful people, like Posidonius the Stoic, this great polymath who advised him on his eastern policy and taught him to kind of judo.

into a victory over the pirates. Like, don’t just try to murder them all. You should just like realize that these men have legitimate problems that they can’t solve, which is, you know, they want to have like an economic future

Liberty: empathy for your enemy.

Alex Petkas: empathy for the enemy. And Pompey managed to kind of defeat a couple in battle.

And then he resettled a lot of them on land and made them a generous offer by realizing these weren’t like brigands by nature, they’re like, talented men who could have been pillars of their society had they been given better opportunities. very smart guy, surrounded himself with smart people too.

Liberty: How about Marius?

Alex Petkas: Marius, a portentous man.

Liberty: What does that mean? I’m not even sure.

Alex Petkas: an ominous, a man whose rise was surrounded by omens. I, you know, he’s like a, a monster. Well, not a monster. That’s not the word in Latin. Monstrum means portent. It means something kind of strange that you point at like, what the heck is that? That’s what a monstrum is in Latin.

Marius is, one of Rome’s greatest generals. great story of a striver who rose from nothing to become consul seven times more than anybody else before him. And the portent at his birth that he used to tell people is his parents saw an eagle giving birth to seven eaglets and that they asked seer locally, what does this mean?

And the seer said, well, he’s destined to be to reach the highest office, the king’s office, you know, the, the royal, bird, eagle is the royal bird. the seer said he’s destined to become like Rome’s greatest man seven times. And so he did. Marius is also the man responsible for the eagles on the Roman standards.

They used to be, you know, there’s the pig and the snake and the dog. He said, no, they’re all going to be eagles now

Liberty: eagle is a better brand than the pig.

Alex Petkas: I think so. I think so.

Liberty: you open a chain of restaurants.

Alex Petkas: Right. Yeah.

Liberty: Very cool. another big caliber, Cicero.

Alex Petkas: Cicero is the hardest working man in antiquity.

Liberty: that’s not nothing, right? That’s a tough comparison.

Alex Petkas: That’s not nothing. Yeah. Well, John Adams, sorry, John Quincy Adams John Adams also admires Cicero, but Quincy Adams, his son, talks about this, that, Cicero had as much natural talent as you could want in an orator. He had all the gifts, but he was also the hardest working man in Rome.

And so that’s how he became who he was. He was not just naturally talented, but incredibly industrious. mean, he was this great statesman and politician, but he also in the last, and it continued on to the very last day, the last two years of his life, he basically invents Roman philosophy.

He writes this deluge of philosophical treatises in Latin, gives the Romans a vocabulary and a framework for doing philosophy in Latin, which they just didn’t do before. They always would

Liberty: Wow.

Alex Petkas: write, in Greek if they wanted to do philosophy. It was a kind of a Greek thing, but Cicero was like, no, we can do this in Latin too.

I’ll show you.

Liberty: one more of these things, like when we talked about Alexander, what if he had lived longer, the whole world could be different, right? What if Cicero had died a few years younger and the whole branch of philosophy may not have been born in. All of the things that come after that, right, that are based on that.

Alex Petkas: Yeah, would we even have had a St. Augustine, it’s mind blowing. So

Liberty: Next one. Let’s go, a bit of a change. A woman. What about Cleopatra,

Alex Petkas: Cleopatra, great character in the life of Caesar, but also especially in the life of Mark Antony. She dated Rome’s greatest man twice in a row. I think for me is a great example of Well, she wasn’t supposed to be naturally that beautiful. She was charming, she was decent looking, but not like She wasn’t a, you know

Liberty: Femme fatale

Alex Petkas: She didn’t lead with that. But she was very much a femme fatale because she made up for it in her Ability to seduce you with other strategies. So this famous scene where, Caesar first meets her. there’s like a bounty on her head. Her brother is the pharaoh, the king, and they’re having a internecine conflict.

Cleopatra gets herself smuggled into the palace where Caesar is staying. In a rug. She gets rolled up in a rug by one of her Yeah, and so like they deliver this rug. Oh, this is a gift from Cleopatra.

Alex Petkas: and out and there she is, you know she knew how to make an impression at an entrance.

She was a brilliant brilliant politician

Liberty: The next one is kind of a a twofer because I don’t know enough about either of them to kind of separate them, right? But Cato the Younger and Cato the Elder —

Because they’re totally different people, but just because the name is the same, my brain hasn’t fully separated them yet.

Alex Petkas: Well, and they’re related to be fair there’s Cato the Elder I think is the great great grandfather Cato the Younger I’m doing Cato the Younger’s life shortly, so Sort that out, but Cato the Elder is sort of like the quintessential country Roman. He’s early century BC Cato the Elder is actually one of the great rivals of Scipio Africanus they quarreled extensively.

Cato the Elder, interestingly, was a populist. He was more of a, he was not from the establishment nobilities, a new man, and he didn’t like philosophy. He didn’t like the Greeks. He thought that this was, corrupting and effeminate. And so it’s interesting that Cato the Younger, who lives, you know, a hundred years or so later in the era of Cicero and Caesar, That he would look to Cato, his great ancestor, and take that sort of quintessential Roman ness of Cato, the countryman who’s not into all this citified Greek luxury and thinks we need to get back to our kind of Farmer virtue.

Cato the Elder wrote a treatise on how to run a farm. that we still have. so Cato the Younger takes that and he blends it with Stoicism. And stoicism is not cool before Cato. It’s unpopular, it’s weird, Cicero makes fun of it. Yeah, I think it was more like, I was one among many options, that the nobles could get into, and certainly, like, did several down the list.

You would much rather go with the Platonist or Epicurean. Epicureanism is much more popular in Cato’s day. But by his personal example, both by his life and by his spectacular death, suicide rather than let Caesar pardon him in the Civil War, Cato creates Roman Stoicism Stoicism was not Roman before Cato.

Liberty: by example, by sheer force of will, he made it happen.

Alex Petkas: yeah, yeah, he combined these two things that a lot of people would thought were contradictory, but he managed to, synthesize it in his own person. He was the ultimate Roman and the ultimate Stoic. that’s why we have people like Seneca and Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius.

That’s why we have modern We sort of owe it to Cato by

Liberty: Wow.

Alex Petkas: and popular. I hope to tell that story give it justice. Jimmy Soni has already done a

Liberty: Yeah.

Alex Petkas: in his book.

Liberty: I’ve got his book. great shame. I haven’t read it yet. I have too many things in my to read list, but yeah, we’ll talk about books soon. Um, looking forward to, your series on Cato because that’s another, sounds like another one of those like pivotal points where this man doesn’t exist in the whole branch of Philosophy and culture maybe doesn’t go that way at all, right? Next one would be Xenophon. Xenophon?

Alex Petkas: Xenophon! Yeah,

Liberty: Yeah, that sounds better that way.

Alex Petkas: Yeah. it’s a X in Greek, but I just say, yeah, everybody says Xenophon, in English, Xenophon is, I did a series on the Anabasis, probably his most popular work, Escape from the Persians. I love Xenophon. He’s a contemporary of Socrates and Plato. Student of Socrates, actually.

I love Xenophon because he gives you a sense of what kind of men Socrates attracted to himself. He was a very highly competent. very ambitious, very like morally grounded person, maybe partly because of his interaction with Socrates. And he, he had this kind of philosophical curiosity, but mainly he just had this incredible adventurer spirit.

and he tells his story really from the third person perspective in the Anabasis, which means the march upland, which is, um, the story of him becoming a mercenary, fighting for this Persian prince, Cyrus the Younger, not the famous Cyrus, but a different, descendant of Cyrus the Great.

and as he discovers going on on this mission, he didn’t realize it when he signed up. But, figured it out as things went on. it was a mission to overthrow the current king of Persia. So they find themselves in this great battle in Babylonia. And, uh, I won’t spoil it, but they have to get, they have to get the hell out of there

Liberty: Don’t spoil it, it’s still in theaters.

Alex Petkas: yeah. Uh, I did a series on the Anabasis a while back. great, great, adventure story.

Liberty: We’re almost done but I kept some of the best for last, like a big calibers, go with Scipio

Alex Petkas: Scipio Africanus, ungrateful Fatherland. You will not even have my bones. Plutarch did a biography on Scipio Africanus. So there there’s actually confusing, there’s two Scipio Africanuses. There’s one who is the guy who defeats Hannibal, that the Battle of Zama around 202. 201 that’s the one that I just quoted.

He was the one who fell afoul of Cato the Elder and ended up being exiled. Well, it wasn’t exactly exile. He, he got prosecuted like crazy in the courts, um, by his political enemies. And he ended up just leaving Rome a frustration. one of these great examples of a, a great city, Persecuting its most talented men, kind of like Athens did with Alcibiades and Socrates.

But the Scipio Africanus that in Cicero’s day would have been more notable is, uh, he also goes by the name Scipio Emilianus, Scipio the Younger. was actually the son this other great Roman statesman general, Aemilius Paulus, who Plutarch did a biography of. But he was by the Scipio family because they didn’t have an heir and they found the most talented young man they could possibly find and adopted him.

It’s the son of Aemilius Paulus, this great consul who conquers Macedonia. And, uh, Scipio Aemilianus is, is really kind of like the model statesman for Cicero. he’s a great orator, but he’s also a great military general, and he keeps philosophers and intellectuals around. He is largely responsible for popularizing, Stoicism and Platonism.

I mean, he’s a big figure in the literary culture of Greeks in Rome. Polybius, The Great Historian is a friend of Scipio, Africanus the Younger, Scipio Emilianus. So, you know, he lives in the, I think he dies in 127 so, BC. So he’s kind of two generations or so after Scipio the first. but, uh, Plutarch, I think he did a biography of both Scipio The elder and Scipio the younger.

cause there’s contradictory references, that, Suggests that he actually wrote a biography of both of these men. lost. And, uh,

Liberty: maybe in the scrolls.

Alex Petkas: yeah, maybe in the scrolls. Well, no, it wouldn’t have been in the scrolls cause,um, cause Plutarch would have written them after probably Vesuvius erupted.

Liberty: Uh,

Alex Petkas: we just have to reconstruct it for ourselves. I’ll have to write it myself and, uh, and do it. Scipio and Epaminondas are the ones that are the great loss of Plutarch’s biographies.

Liberty: learned about Scipio because of his great adversary, Hannibal.

Alex Petkas: Yeah.

Liberty: What’s your take on Hannibal?

Alex Petkas: Hmm. Hannibal is, uh, a guy I haven’t studied as in depth as a lot of these men, but, I will say that, uh, he’s every bit as worth doing. I probably will do him on the show because he’s another one of these examples of, like, a great general who has a certain collegiality to him.

There’s this story of Scipio Africanus actually years after the battle of Zama when he’s defeated Hannibal. He gets invited to a dinner by the king of Syria, Antiochus. And Antiochus invites both Scipio and Hannibal to have dinner with him. I don’t know if he told him ahead of time but, but apparently they have dinner together.

And they, kind of hit it off, you know, um, yeah, it’s not personal. And, Scipio asks Hannibal who he thought the greatest conquerors that ever lived were. And, I think he said Alexander was the first. And the place went to Pyrrhus, King Pyrrhus of Epirus, that I did a show on. And he said, I would have put myself first if I had won the battle of Zama, but, uh,

Liberty: yeah, and these guys, you could imagine that in the same way that today, like, Big tech entrepreneurs feel like few people understand when they went through except like other people in similar like these guys probably understood each other better than anyone else

Alex Petkas: yeah,

Liberty: the time right even though they were enemies History went differently.

They could have been allies, right? Who knows but on the same level.

Alex Petkas: yeah. yeah. Really hard to find peers when you get that high.

Liberty: and speaking of that high the next one alexander The name I gave to my second son

Alex Petkas: yes. I have a soft spot for him myself, of course. I always think of that quote, you know, to the strongest, what I love about Alexander is not just his great great conqueror spirit, but also his curiosity. He’s, uh, he’s a student of Aristotle’s, famously, and he brings a lot of philosophers with him on campaign and has this sort of fascination, not just with, War and politics, but with human culture, he tries to marry, his Macedonian generals off to Persian wives.

He wants to kind of have like a harmonious blending of cultures. he has these conversations with Diogenes the Cynic, famously it’s Corinth where Diogenes Tells him, um, as Alexander says, you know, ask of me anything Diogenes and I will grant it to you. And Diogenes says, could you just move aside a little bit?

You’re in my sun.

Liberty: that’s a classic.

Alex Petkas: Yeah. And Alexander says, uh, if I were not Alexander, I would be Diogenes. And Diogenes says, if I were not Diogenes, I would be Diogenes. Um, it’s kind of mythologized, but it’s so plausible because of who Alexander was. I think he had that kind of greatness of spirit, that curiosity to meet a strange person and to like, take them seriously.

You know, he had an eye for talent. I’m looking forward to doing him eventually.

Alexander was Plutarch’s boyhood hero and that really comes through in Plutarch’s biography of Alexander.

Liberty: had to keep this one for dessert. How about Caesar?

Alex Petkas: one of the things that I am really admiring about Caesar lately is how, good he was at telling other people’s stories.

How good he was at shining the spotlight on people in just the way that he wanted to. Whether that was his, uh, you know, the Gallic chieftains that he’s busy conquering, or Ariovistus the German, or especially the men in his own army that he appreciated, like Labienus or Quintus Cicero.

Caesar is just such a talented storyteller. I think that was one of his superpowers is, His ability to kind of control the narrative because he was such a good writer. this was incredible political talent that Pompey generally outsourced to other people. But Caesar took it on himself to become not just Rome’s greatest conqueror, but first, I think, one of Rome’s greatest storytellers.

that’s really on full display in the Gallic War series, hopefully, that I’m, that I’m doing now.

Liberty: yeah, combining the power of the sword and the power of the pen or the quill or whatever they wrote with at the time.

Very cool. No, this was great. I love this because these bite sized kind of mini biographies provide context, some of those I’m less familiar with and I now feel like, okay, I’ve got a foundation to start exploring and I’m And I hope that the listener, if like me, like a tourist, just getting into the space can get a sense of the variety of characters and great stories and arcs.rivalries s and all that stuff there. Um, As we, get near the end, it would be great to also for the tourists and people want to learn more, right?

They, they, maybe they start with your podcast. They love what they’re hearing there. The next step is probably books. And so I’d love your book recommendations. I can maybe give a list of those that I’ve bought that I haven’t all read yet, but I have bought, if you have thoughts about them, and then maybe some of your recommendations, but on my shelf so far, Of course, I’ve got Plutarch’s Greek Lives and Roman Lives, the Robin Waterfield translation.

I think that’s the one you recommended to me.

Alex Petkas: Yeah, I think that’s maybe the Oxford. Yeah.

Liberty: one of those. I’ve got SPQR by Mary Beard.

Alex Petkas: I haven’t read that one. a talented communicator for sure.

A lot of people like that one. Yeah.

Liberty: Yeah, I think that’s probably the first one I bought. I’ve got Rome’s last season by my friend Jimmy Soni. As I said, I haven’t read it yet. It’s on the list.

Alex Petkas: Love that one.

Liberty: In historical fiction, I’ve got Imperium by Robert Harris.

Alex Petkas: Ugh. I don’t know. Love that series. the audiobook is also very good. It’s a three part series and, It’ll make you love Cicero, for sure. I’ve got

Liberty: Hannibal by Philip Freeman.

Alex Petkas: Mmm.

Haven’t read that one.

Liberty: I’ve got, Scipio by Liddell Hart, who’s himself a military man. And like,

Alex Petkas: Yes.

Liberty: Scipio, Africanus is greater than Napoleon or something. invented clickbait a long time

Alex Petkas: Yes, yes, that one’s on my list. I have that one. So, uh, Little Heart, knew Lawrence of Arabia, I believe. And I think that it Liddell Hart who said Lawrence was a man straight out of Plutarch’s pages.

Yeah.

Liberty: I’ve got Alexander the Great by Robin Lane. got The First Man in Rome by Colleen McCullough.

Alex Petkas: Robin Lane Fox is great. Yeah. Um, Colleen McCullough. Oh yeah, I’ve, read part of the First Man in Rome series. she’s very good. She starts with Sulla wouldn’t agree with her, portrayal of Sulla, but it’s at least. Thoughtful and compelling and interesting.

Liberty: And finally I’ve got Rubicon by Tom Holland.

Alex Petkas: would have said that one if you hadn’t. I love Rubicon. he really gives you big picture. I think both Rubicon and Rome’s Last Citizen, Jimmy, Soni, and Goodman. Those give you a sense of the whole arc. even though Rome’s Last Citizen is focused on Cato, do give you a sense of like Rome as a whole.

So I like that.

Liberty: any others that I’m missing? Any, any things you would recommend to someone like getting started

Alex Petkas: think Plutarch is, I’m just gonna,

Liberty: Hmm.

Alex Petkas: Echo Emerson here. I think it’s good, uh, to read, to engage with some of the primary sources quickly because, they’re quite accessible and they have this kind of enduring power. If you want to get into the Greeks, maybe after Plutarch. I would go to Herodotus.

I really like the landmark Herodotus. It’s a long book, but it’s just endlessly fascinating. And, I think Herodotus even more than Homer will give you a sense of who the Greeks are and what makes them tick. always like the primary source approach. For the Romans, you know, the, I still think Plutarch is probably the best place to start even for the Romans to like, if you want to get into the Roman history.

And Livy is another good one for early Rome. He’s got, there’s a penguin, Livy on early Rome. Read the first book or two of that And then for Hannibal too, Livy’s the place to go. Plutarch talks about Hannibal in the life of Marcellus and in the life of, Fabius Maximus, the delayer. But really you don’t get the full narrative of who Hannibal is and what motivated him except in, I think Livy’s the place to go for that.

Polybius too, I think, has a lot of good stuff on Hannibal.

Liberty: the Lindy sources are

still the best.

Alex Petkas: I mean. That’s the real stuff, I think.

Liberty: Awesome. Thank you so much. Thank you for sharing your, your thoughts and your knowledge about this, your journey. Tons of fun, makes me want to go read some Plutarch this afternoon. So going to put all of your links in the show notes, so it’s all going to be there. But if the listener has to go to one place and do one thing, to follow you, to learn more, what would you have them do?

Alex Petkas: Well, I would go and listen to the biographies, scroll through the Cost of Glory feed and they’re usually labeled one, two, three, start with a one and not a three. maybe Pompey would be a good place to start, maybe Crassus, or you could go all the way to the beginning of the Sertorius.

If there’s a second thing that I would have people do, if you’re interested in this idea of oratory and turning the classics into a training ground, which is one of the things I’m really working on developing with these leadership programs and with our online offerings, I have put together a, an authoritative speakers guide.

So if you want to go to CostOfGlory.com/gift, you can download that. It’s like an email course, just put in your email address and it’s several. series. It kind of takes you through how the classics can make you a better public speaker and sort of implicitly becoming a, you know, a statesman in the classical mold for your own life.

That’s something to check out.

Liberty: Awesome, put that link in the show notes too. Thank you so much.

Alex Petkas: Thanks a lot, Liberty it’s. always a pleasure.

Liberty: Likewise, bye bye.

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