Lessons from Rome

Alex Petkas is the host of Cost of Glory, a podcast that retells Plutarch’s Lives, a series of biographies of ancient Greek and Roman men. He holds a Ph.D. in Classics from Princeton University. He taught at the University of California, San Diego, but quit academia to bring the wisdom of Plutarch to modern audiences.

Why did you choose the book Parallel Lives by Plutarch, usually called Plutarch’s Lives, for the basis of your podcast? As I was leaving academia, I was reading a lot of Plutarch to prepare for working in the business world and private sector. I was telling myself, “Wow, this is energizing and exciting and action-guiding.” There are a lot of lessons there for leaders about taking risks, courage, analyzing people, studying human nature, selling, buying, negotiating. Ever since they were brought back to the West during the Renaissance, these stories have been in the travel satchels of commanders and well-worn copies of them were in the libraries of statesmen.

Plutarch is not just a biographer and a historian. He’s a philosopher, and he believes that studying the lives of great figures of the past, even ones that were maybe not great models of virtue, is essential for the full moral development of character. I wanted to make these stories come alive, and in a sense, translate Plutarch for modern, practical people.

Why did you choose to tell these stories through the medium of podcast? It’s easier to convince people to try out a podcast than it is to get them to buy a book. They’d have to plow through Plutarch’s Lives and look up all the historical references and the footnotes and find a map. Plutarch assumes you know a lot of this context because he’s writing for ancient readers.

We live in an age of rapidly declining attention spans. But people listen to podcasts that are multiple hours long. Why? A good podcast can go deep on something and develop a serious conversation. But it allows you to be doing other things at the same time. People are driving to work or mowing the lawn. Also, there’s a structural consideration. Twitter, for example, is optimized to keep you engaged. It’s going to distract you with other tweets. When you watch a YouTube video, if you don’t maximize the screen, there’s other stuff on the side menu. When you’re in a podcast, you’re kind of locked in. Your hands are busy, and you’re not able to click on other things.

In the past couple of years, media coverage and internet memes have noted men think about the Roman Empire frequently. Why does this time period have a grip on the imaginations of men in the 21st century? Men are always going to be attracted to greatness because, I think, for a man to reach his full potential, he has to strive to form himself. The ancients especially are like our data bank of examples of greatness. It was a time when you had to face war and political enemies in a very tough, militaristic world. It was so much easier to die, so much harder to live, and so much harder to organize without technology. The ancients remind you there’s something deeper in your nature.

Plutarch’s Lives was one of the most popular books in the American colonies. Did it influence the Founders? Massively. Alexander Hamilton was a young aide-de-camp in George Washington’s army. He took dozens of pages of notes on Plutarch’s Lives. In that cold, hard winter at Valley Forge he was reading the lives of some of the great state founders, like Lycurgus, the founder of the Spartan constitution, and Solon of Athens.

Plutarch is often cited without being named by the Founders. John Adams references Cicero, Pelopidas, Cato, or Sulla. If you’re familiar with Plutarch, you can tell where he got a quote, because it’s only in Plutarch. Plutarch is also cited in the Federalist Papers. For the American Founders and several generations after, he was the gateway to antiquity for them. Ralph Waldo Emerson called Plutarch “a Bible for heroes.”

What do you think of the growth in classical education? I knew that there was a classical education movement happening when I was an academic. I felt like most professional classicists were trying to pretend it didn’t exist because they associated it with conservatism and Christianity.

The education system of the ancients had so much to offer in terms of memory training, in terms of studying examples of good and bad character and behavior. It gave people a kind of cultural furniture, a set of references that was shared among all—Westerners, Europeans, Christians and Jews and atheists alike. The collapse of classical education, which started in the late 19th century, is one of the reasons why we have so much division in our society and so much perplexity about who we are, as a people and as humans. We have a chance to reinstate some of that with classical education. There are a lot of different versions of it. We should let 1,000 flowers bloom, as long as they’re classical.

Is there room for improvement in the classical education movement? I’d like to see classical education embrace technology. I’m not saying that classical educators need to use iPads, but they should teach the sort of quantitative and scientific tools that you need to run a large operation. I think most of the power America had in the past and will continue to have in the future is heavily reliant on technological supremacy. It’s important for us to tailor our education system accordingly. Classical educators should prepare people for entrepreneurship, for high-level leadership in technologically advanced corporations, and for innovation. Tinkering and innovating are part of the American spirit. And this is something that you see in many of the great leaders of antiquity. Julius Caesar was a very savvy military engineer. He hired people who specialized in that and let them flourish.

Latin is widely considered an essential part of a classical education. But let’s just say it’s not universally beloved by students. Why is learning classical languages important? If you want to be a master of the English language, you have to know Latin. Around 70% of our vocabulary is based on Latin. Also, for an education to truly be classical, you need to emulate great writers in their own style and connect with their actual words. Language is a powerful vector of mimesis, or imitation. You don’t get that from just a year or two of Latin. You get that from reading Latin works at length. It’s not for everybody, but for people who want to raise their minds to this pinnacle of excellence and get the juice out of the classical texts, you need to master the languages.

That said, the way we teach these languages is often painful. We treat them like mathematical systems, rather than living things to be assimilated. I didn’t get comfortable in Greek until I started speaking it and teaching it as a spoken language and listening to my friends try to make arguments in Greek. We could relieve a lot of the pain if we made the teaching methods better.