Greece Vs Rome - governance and thought (Af5K9DW3-HE)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=Af5K9DW3-HE

All right, here we are. And today I have something special. I have a friend of mine from Discord named Adam, who knows a lot about interesting parts of history that I know much less about. And he brought up something very interesting a few days ago in the Discord on the Bridges of Meaning Discord chat. And we were talking about sort of the tension, the difference between, we’ll say, the Roman way of rule and the Roman way of empire versus the Greek way of rule or governance and empire. And I thought that was an interesting topic. So I wanted to cover that. And Adam and I have had many, many an interesting history discussion and he’s hangs out on the Bridges of Meaning Discord quite a bit. And so Adam, why don’t you tell us a bit about whatever you wanna tell the crowd. Well, hi, I’m Adam. I’m a dude on the internet who happens to have a pretty deep interest in history, particularly ancient history. I mean, currently what am I doing with my life? I’m a research master’s student at the moment, but history is kind of a nice pastime. And yeah, I just wanna talk to Dave about that sort of depth of history that really I acquired sort of talking to my dad over a long period of time and having that sort of those oral interactions kind of built up a story that I don’t mind. I like telling, so yeah. Well, that’s great. Yeah, so we’re gonna talk about this tension between this Greece way of governance and rule and empire and the Roman way of governance and rule and empire. And hopefully from this dialectic we’ll spring a nice, beautiful theologos. [“Pomp and Circumstance”] All right, so I think we should set the stage by talking maybe first about Rome because it’s sort of better known. And then, yeah, and I wanna mention, so I’ve been watching it. You sent me a couple of videos, good videos on Roman history and Roman governance and things like that. But I saw something the other day that was very interesting in one video that I saw as a result of watching some of this stuff, the YouTube algorithm pops up stuff. And one of the things that it said, which I found utterly fascinating, was that basically Rome loved Greece and they never wanted to conquer Greece. And what happened was the Greek city states were battling too much and they had to step in. And it happened a couple of different times, but eventually they had to step in, which I just found utterly fascinating. I was like, oh, wow, they never wanted to step in, but they had to because the city states just couldn’t hold it together. So that kind of highlights, oh, well, there’s definitely a difference in governance and rulership. But they seem to have a mutual respect, sort of backwards from what one might even expect to some extent. And I know that Rome was very big on going into a new area and adopting whatever good stuff they had. And then installing the Roman plan, the Roman way, without imposing it. It was more like, oh, we’re gonna take over this place. It might even be a new place that nobody had occupied before or had a city in before. And then they start putting in the baths, the Coliseum-like things, whatever entertainment. They’d start putting in the buildings for administration. They’d start installing those things after the fact. So yeah, do you wanna highlight what the differences is or just the Roman? We’ll do the Roman outline first and we’ll do the Greek outline. How’s that? Sure, yeah. So yeah, well, what is the sort of Roman way of governance as distinct from the Greek one? One thing you can decide to sort of know straight off the bat is that the Roman one is a lot more constant. It’s more consistent. Greece allows a lot more variety in terms of how things are played out. So you have a range of ways of governing from the Athenian democracy, which is the landed men, men who own land of a certain property requirement voting in the assembly. And then you will go all the way to the Alexandrian empire that conquers much of the Near East. And then you have on top of that, then the Spartans. And so Greece has this much more variety, a larger variety, whereas the Roman government is quite consistent and it sort of prides itself on being, yeah, kind of stabilizing influence. And it has this ability to take in those who are outside of itself a lot easier, possibly because I would say the Roman conception of ethnos is a lot different from the Greek one. I mean, they may have the same one, but they regard it in different ways. So that the Romans, for instance, one big part of the early Roman, this is struck throughout Roman history, but to give an idea of how early this pattern shows itself, and Rome was founded by Romulus, King Romulus, and he kills his brother Remus. So, but what did they do pretty much, a month or two afterwards, after they found the cities, they go off and they get women. And that’s kind of because Rome has an origin as a kind of band of criminals really as a city. So there’s something going on there as well. But more importantly, they go to these towns from the neighboring tribes called the Sabines, and they take their women. And okay, yeah, it’s called the rape of the Sabine women. And this is attested by quite a few Roman historians. And so they take the women and they take them as brides, and then a bit of time passes, and their men then come out and there’s a fight. Obviously a fight breaks out, right? And so what the Romans do is they go out to fight the Sabine men. But by that time, the Roman men have already had children with the Sabine women. And so there’s this really kind of stark scene where the Romans and the Sabine men, they’re coming together, and then the women come out in the middle, and it’s like, stop, you’re killing our sons and grandsons, and you’re gonna kill our, to the husbands they say, you’re gonna kill our fathers and our brothers. And I think that shows quite starkly the Roman conception of how they view going out into the world, how they view sort of the expansion of what they are. Yeah. Yeah, and so the Greeks from my, from what limited knowledge I have about this is, they’re very experimental. Yes. It’s a very like ultra freedom, like, oh, do you want Sparta? And we’re Athens, we’ll do what we want. And then when we need to get together because the largest empire known to history at that point, at least in the West, Persia is coming after us, and so we’re gonna get our act together, right? And then all, because all the Greek city states, like people don’t realize, all the Greek city states were warring all the time. Yes. Constantly. There were always wars, not all war, there were always multiple wars between multiple city states just going on 24 seven. It was just insane. And then, you know, it wasn’t until like the Delian League and things like that, things get together, but it’s a big melting pot. My buddy, Jack, Landry Jack, Dr. Landry Jack, my ancient philologist friend was saying that basically, according to him, there was something like a thousand different forms of government tried in Greece, in ancient Greece. And so this is all before the classical period and everything, right? Before the golden age, they had already tried all this stuff. And it seems to me that, you know, in the story like the Trojan War, you have something like, here’s the way it works. When we win, we win. Like we wipe you out, we don’t take the best of what you have, we just burn the city to the ground and it’s all over. And in contrast, was it Pliny the Younger and Carthage must be destroyed? And he said that after every- Cato. Or whatever. And that took a long time. Like Rome would not acquiesce, you know, to the idea of raising Carthage to the ground because it wasn’t within their ethos, to your point, right? It just wasn’t something that they did until they did it. But it was a big deal. Whereas in Greece, it seems like, oh, we’re just gonna burn Athens down if we get there, which kind of happened, right? Persia did that. That was sort of the way of the, I guess we’ll call it more the Middle Eastern way, right? Greece is right in that, it’s right in that cradle. It’s too close to the Middle East. It’s not close enough to what we’re now call the West, right? Yeah. It’s, yeah, it’s not close to the East, right? There’s still trade, but it’s a very different, it’s a different ethos for sure. And they seem to develop their own, right? They seem to have hard-scrabbled their own sort of bare bones existence, right? Like literally sort of grabbed from the scrabbly rocks of the islands onto which they clung. Yes. Something. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and the Greeks, another thing about the Greeks is, yeah, they are like, for instance, right? Just to give you an example, Alexander the Great burns Thebes to the ground. Burns it to complete, yeah, right, exactly. And that was, and this was the, even at the time, the sort of nominal, I am the protector of the Greeks, the Hellenes, and I’m gonna go out and fight the Persians. It should be interesting to note at this point that there is, I think, a good reason for this difference. And it’s a difference that shows itself consistently and it has its origins in, as you pointed out, the Trojan War. The Romans are the descendants of the Trojans. And that’s, so where is obviously the Greeks, the descendants of the Greeks who raised the city to the ground? If you’ve ever heard of the Aeneid, the part that was mentioned in the Iliad, Aeneas, is this character who flees Troy and goes and wanders and goes kind of to Carthage as well, but then eventually ends up in Italy. And he founds he’s the ancestor of Romulus and Remus. And so even from the get-go, the Greeks and the Romans, the Romans kind of recognized that they have some relation to the Greeks, but it’s not a cordial relation. They kind of, in their own, in both of their original conception of things, they start off at odds. And to the point as the Romans were, kind of didn’t want to burn stuff down, I guess you may say there’s a cultural memory of, well, we don’t like when our cities burned down, but that happens again to Rome, from the Gauls very early on in their Republic. And that, and the point being is that sort of, Rome’s decadence is quite different from Greek’s decadence because Rome doesn’t just bowl over. Whereas when the Greeks get decadent, right? When they sort of are so busy fighting with each other, barely 150 years after Alexander conquers most of the known world, and the Romans come in and just take them over. Like they were, it was maybe a, what, a conquest period of maybe 70 years at the most. And then eventually they had the Greeks subdued. Whereas the Romans sort of conception is this more slower degradation that kind of, when does it peter out exactly? You know? Right. It’s harder to get rid of because it’s a template to follow. Yeah. And I think, you know, to tie this together, like, what are you doing talking about ancient history? You’re too lunatics, right? What’s wrong with you? Really, really the reason why the original conversations sprang up was this tension, this difference between, we’ll call it sort of, there’s three spheres in the West, right? There’s the European continental sphere. Then there’s the UK, right? The English sphere, roughly speaking, but it’s really the UK, because Ireland and Scotland, right? And the rest of the little countries have a big impact on how England does things from that point forward. Right. And you can say, oh, well, it’s English sensibilities. Well, but yeah, but they’re informed by the interactions with the other nations, right? And so that’s sort of the intermediary on the step, if you want to call it that, and maybe that’s unfair, but there is a line, right? There is a line from continental European sort of way of governance to the sort of English, UK way of governance, right? And to the US way of governance, right? Because it came directly from the English traditions. And by way of the enlightenment, and you may say, well, what difference does that make? That’s English, it’s not, it’s Scottish and Irish. It’s not, it’s not English, it’s an enhancement. And that’s why I said, it’s the UK, it’s not English. The England cradled it, and the Magna Carta and all that, right? But really what formalized it and made it something that could be developed and attached to and pointed at by the US, by the founders of the American system was the enlightenment. Like the enlightenment is the sort of the drawing out and explication of the values. And so they seem to, the founders of the US seem to really take seriously, not only the Roman way, but also the Greek way. Yes. Right. And try to combine them in a unique sort of a fashion. And so there’s a way in which for me, you can see the Greek ultra freedom, they come up with democracy, this crazy idea that doesn’t work by the way, just to be clear, does not work, has never worked for reasons which are clear, right? It’s just roughly a scaling problem, right? Like people can’t make their own, everybody can’t know enough about politics to make political decisions or diplomatic decisions or however you wanna frame that. And so what happens is you have to follow the smartest guy that you think is the smartest guy. And the only way to make that decision is roughly charisma. There’s a little bit more to it, but roughly. And the Greeks wrote a lot about that. That was the big problem in ancient Athens in particular where they experimented. It wasn’t the only place they experimented with democracy, it’s just the most famous. So there’s a way in which the Romans sort of caught on to this failure. And they developed this queer republic thing that nobody sort of like, what is this republic? This isn’t a king, it’s not a tyrant, right? It doesn’t fall in one of the, what is it? Five Greek categories of governance, really. Because Rome doesn’t, it doesn’t follow the Greek pattern. No. Right, because what do they have? They have kings, tyrants. Oligarchy. Oligarchy, right, because it’s not an oligarchy. Like Rome’s not an oligarchy, right? Democracy, right? It’s not any of those, right? But it doesn’t prevent them per se either. Right. At the same time, right? So it’s something else. It’s not quite one of these, but it doesn’t prevent them because people, right? So there’s that tension though between the total almost anarchic freedom of Greece and the total, no, no, there’s a Roman way, right? And we’re not necessarily gonna force you into the Roman way, but we’re gonna do things the Roman way and it’s gonna work so much better than whatever you’re doing that you’re just gonna end up going along. And I think that’s the fundamental difference. Whereas in Greece, if you didn’t go along, and this is why the city-states would fight, you’re not going along with our way of governance. So we’re gonna, you know, and the difference, I mean, everybody talks about Athens versus Sparta. They ignore all the things in between because there were a bunch of mixtures of both. But the reason why it’s Athens versus Sparta and people don’t sort of realize this because they think, well, Athens had slaves. The slavery in Sparta was next level. I mean, effectively they were breeding an entire country of people. Yeah. Eugenic style to be slaves from birth for them. And they had the problem you’d expect, which is regular revolts from the helots, right? Regular revolts from these people. They were effectively keeping in a controlled breeding program, which I just find amazing. Whereas in Athens, yeah, they were slaves, but you know, one could argue they weren’t of the same type, right? They were slaves either as a result of conquest or the result of debt, right? Which is different because you could get out of, you get out of both forms of slavery too, to be fair. In Sparta, you didn’t, you were a helot and that was the end of that. That was your caste basically. It was a caste system, exactly. In Athens, there was no such caste system. Interestingly in Rome, never. It was never a situation of slavery that you couldn’t be raised out of. Either by the person that owned you, right? Or by your own will. They were both options. They may not all of, always have been options at all times in history, we’ll say, because that’s, you know, a tall high bar, right? For nations or historical events or whatever, timeframes. But those were most often options that were available. And that to me is, you know, a stark difference. It’s a market sort of interesting difference in the two systems. So, and I think people kind of missed that. Like there’s a huge difference between Athens and Sparta. They are almost diametrically opposed in some ways because Athens is much more free and it’s much more intellectual as a result. And Sparta is much less intellectual and much more warlike, I would argue, as a result. And then you have this whole Roman system, which is just more inevitable. And I think, you know, again, to my earlier point, I think, you know, Rome didn’t want to conquer Greece. They really looked up to the Greeks for lots of very good reasons. But to some extent, Roman occupation, Roman systems are inevitable, right? Because they outcompete, they just outcompete everything. And I think that was more the conquest of Rome is outcompete rather than, you know, mere attack and take over and, you know, populate. Cause a lot of the Greek occupation, especially, you know, when they went across the sea, we’ll say off the mainland and away from the islands, you know, across the Mediterranean, that seems to have been based on installing populations. So wiping out populations or settling new areas and installing settlers. Whereas Rome did sort of less of that in some sense. Well, they did in a different way. Okay. So I’m sorry about that. It’s just somebody that popped in. So yeah, yeah, the Roman conception of things when they, so they had colonias or colonies, right? Is the modern, they would have put them in and alongside that. And also the way they brought people in was that they changed their legal status. It’s easy to change somebody from a Roman citizen, right? So, and this is what happened actually. So for instance, say around 300 BC, you know, the only people who are Roman citizens are pretty much the people in Rome and the very close Latin cities, the nearby Latin cities. By the time of Julius Caesar, when he was rather young, the burden of not being a Roman citizen, the extra taxes and whatever, and the fact that they couldn’t actually vote in the elections was pushing Roman society further and further to the brink. So that, for instance, like there were people who were fighting in the Roman armies who were not able to vote. And so they had this thing called the social war where it was basically the Italian allies, right? Of Rome turning in and fighting and being like, look, we’re not taking this anymore. The result of that war was all Roman citizenship was extended to all the cities on the Italian peninsula. And that pattern’s repeated again and again slowly, right? But so for instance, by the time of the emperor, Caracalla, he just says, look, at this point, if you’re within the borders of the Roman empire, you are a Roman citizen. The Greeks couldn’t do that the same way or they did it if they were doing it and if they were mirroring that pattern of expansion, they weren’t doing it the same way. So the rough equivalent to that is Alexander, right? Alexander goes west or goes east and he spreads, let’s say, Greek culture. And so you have, for instance, as far as India, you have this Greco-Bactrian kingdom where they have these, the upper classes, the aristocracy have these, take on these sort of Greek manners and some of them are descendants of Greeks. But as it relates to the lower populations, right? These people are just, they’re pretty much the same as what their fathers were. And the Roman model is different from that because of course what happens is you have Spain, you have modern day Portugal and France speaking basically variants of Latin, right? Which tells you something about Roman governmental structures as opposed to the Greek ones. You look at the old empire of Alexander and Greece isn’t exactly as widely spoken a language anymore. That might be for other reasons, but fundamentally, even at the time you could see the difference. And the Roman governmental structures were not as micromanaging so that if you, they only cared that there was no revolts. Whereas the Greeks, it was a lot more like, yeah, once you’re going outside the system, we have to rein you back in. There’s no sort of allowance of deviation. You need to be on our side or it’s the high, our way or the highway basically. Yeah. And so- It’s less integrative in terms of Greece. Whereas yeah, with Rome, it’s all integration. They’re always stealing the best technologies, the best ideas, the best ways of doing things. And they’re expanding slowly by virtue of citizenship, right? And so they’re expanding by expanding rights for citizens or for people who will become citizens rather than in Greece, a lot of the conquest was slavery. Yeah. And then you could get out of slavery for the most part, but you started out sort of as a slave to expand Greek power and influence. And that’s very different. It’s interesting too, because so when I think about say the European empires, what I see is a very Greek model, right? I see them trying to emulate both in some sense, right? So they’re trying to take sort of the mechanics of Rome, Roman city planning, right? Greeks had no such thing, right? They just didn’t plan anything at that level, right? I see them taking sort of the facade of the Republican structure, right? But they’re using more of the Greek autocratic governmental style when they colonize, right? I think all the European empires seem to have followed that kind of a pattern, right? So you really don’t have an integration because they reject the Republic entirely. I think the European continental philosophy fundamentally rejects the Republic. It seems to adopt something like an oligarchy as the preferred form of government, right? Where the kingship background, just like, well, the oligarchy is kind of the king’s family, roughly speaking. Yeah, yeah. Right, and then they keep that tradition up, right? Because in Europe, with the European empires in particular through time, through the middle ages even, right? All the way up, let’s say from the collapse of Rome onward, are based around this idea of an aristocracy, right? And then a king above the aristocracy. It looks like they’re trying to meld two Greek systems sort of together. And then the idea is that it’s not that education is denied to the lower classes. That’s not entirely fair, even during the feudal period. It’s not fair. Because if you got adopted by a wealthy family, and many people did, this wasn’t an unusual event. Just couldn’t happen very often because there weren’t very many wealthy families. Right. You’ve got a tiny percentage of population that has any wealth at all in modern materialistic form. And maybe that’s a bad measure, but it’s the best measure that we have, right? So they’re adopting kids and those kids are educated. So it has nothing to do with where you were born or how you were born. It’s more like when you’re in a caste, in this case, because it is a caste, what happens to you? It’s like, oh, well, the people on the farm don’t need book learning, as we might call it nowadays. Whereas the people in the aristocracy do, because at any given time, it could be a disaster, things could happen, and your child, no matter how far down in the line of succession they are, could end up either at the top or nearer the top than they are now. That’s not hard because also the king has to pick advisors from somewhere and some of those picks are not really random, but you don’t know how that’s gonna go down. You don’t know at any given time. And so it seems to be that Greek sort of system, facade of Roman sort of, you know, in modern times we might call it a materialistic way of adopting Rome, right? So we’re not taking sort of the values of Rome because look at those decadent crazy emperors, which is totally unfair way to think about it, right? Because that came later. But we’re not gonna take down, we’re not gonna take that part. We’re gonna take all the good stuff, which is the city and the roads and all that. So you get all these planned cities in the medieval period, right, when people wanna start new cities and they know how to do it all of a sudden, and even villages are planned, right? Whereas they weren’t before. Roads are a thing, right? They really weren’t in Greece. Like they didn’t want a road. Very mountainous terrain, yeah. And they were fighting all the time. They didn’t want to have roads between one another. That just helps armies out. And who wants armies? Because that’s bad. Whereas Rome was very much, you know, they talk about the armies. Rome was all about trade. Like Rome didn’t care about the armies. I mean, we did that in the US, right? Oh, they built the highways, the federal highway system in the US was built because of the military. It’s like, well, it was built because of Henry Ford. But it was built with the military also in mind, right? It was justified having this private road system or public road system publicly funded and not just a private system, because we had a private system prior to that, actually, in a public private system. Justified by military excuse for self-defense, which we never sort of considered before until threat of World War I and World War II came around. So you can see the way in which these things develop. Like Rome cared a lot about trade and they were merchants. So their merchant tendencies sort of took over. That’s what built the roads more than anything else. Whereas the Greeks, they were merchants, but they were all sea merchants. Like they did not do, they weren’t part of the Silk Road, right? They were getting all their Silk Road stuff by boat from the coast, from other places, right? They didn’t have, and there’s no reason to go to Greece. Like it’s kind of out of the way. If you look at it, it’s like, wait a minute, who would go down there? You have to go down and then back up just to get anywhere, right, unless you wanna go across the Mediterranean somehow on a boat. But even then it’s like, well, but there’s Mediterranean up here. Why don’t we launch a boat from here, right? So there’s not a lot of reason to go to Greece and yet they controlled trade through shipping for a long time, right? I mean, there’s still a top shipping, shipping basically empire to some extent, right? If you wanna put it in terms of economics, that’s one of their big businesses still. So you can see the way in which it’s different and the way in which sort of Europe grabbed Greece. Like they really took on the Greek sort of way of governance and sort of tried to combine two Greek systems into one sort of ruling class system for all of Europe. And that happened from the fall of Rome. And I think they misapprehended to some extent what Rome was doing and said, oh, we’re just gonna take like this idea of Rome as, technology, roughly speaking, and apply it. So what do you think of that thesis? I think I wouldn’t be so sure as to what exactly, what particulars of Greece that the continental Europe is mirroring, but that it is on the whole and the old world as a whole mirroring, mirrors Greece to something like America’s Rome because of the fact, I mean, for instance, right? The Greeks are actually an older people, right? I mean, they are a much older people than the Romans. And by the time the Romans are coming to conquer the Greeks, you’re right, there is a respect for the Greek ways. And what the Romans do, what the Romans do to their great credit is they learn from the Greeks. There’s this sort of episode that is related in some of the histories of Cicero, right? Who’s this great kind of Latin auditor, right? He sort of brings the, he elevates the Latin language. He is taught by Greeks. And his tutor, they’re doing their exercises or whatever for rhetoric. And the Greek teacher sort of gets kind of agitated and says, not happy with conquering Greece herself, the land, now you conquer her art forms as well. Basically saying, you’ve learned so well from us. And I think in that sort of environment, you also, so that’s, let’s say, kind of ideal relationship, right? The Greeks should be helping the Romans along, but the Greeks at the same time recognize when they were being conquered by the Romans, these are barbarians. And so there is this sort of looking down upon the Romans that is pretty much mirrored today in the old world to the new world. And to buttress that point, America is very consciously emulating Rome through her founding because, I mean, some of the founding fathers were writing letters to each other under the names like, what was it? Brutus, right? You know, under the pseudonyms Brutus and Cassius and all of that, like, yeah, these were men who were like, they kind of knew what they were doing in some sense. They knew what they were trying to echo. And to that end, I think, Rome, yeah, I mean, America could be sort of looked at as the new Rome. It’s a kind of like a further, if you think about, so the old world, that’s kind of like the sort of side of the Trojan War. And you now have, you know, the sort of a neus of America settling the colonies and so on. So I think there’s something there at least. That’s, yeah, that’s interesting, right? So it is sort of, you know, you can see old world Europe up to modern Europe, I would say, as the experiment in the Greek form of governance. Yeah. Right, sort of combining that oligarchic element with the kingship element. And you can see the experiment of the United States and the founding fathers are very much children of, if not directly forged within the enlightenment, heavily within enlightenment thinking. And, you know, what is, so it’s probably worth stating like, well, what is this enlightenment thing of which you speak, you silly people, there’s no such thing. And I think, you know, you really have to understand the Dark Ages as the Dark Ages. Like they are called the Dark Ages for a reason, because we lost a bunch of technology at the fall of Rome. Yeah. If you need evidence that road building, good evidence, there’s the whole cement, like they had cement, they had underwater setting cement, like underwater setting cement is 80 years old or something. You know, it was gone for thousands of years, right? Right, it’s not about framing. Right, there’s gear making, right? There’s all kinds of technologies that get lost and refound, but Rome kept a bunch of technologies around a lot longer than Greece did, for example. And some of the technologies from ancient Greece were lost too, we know that from the Antikythera machine and things like that. And there was a cup of Lysogea or something. And I don’t know if you’ve seen this, I hadn’t heard of it. And I found it in a software development talk of all the things. But apparently it’s a much like something like the Dark Ages like Damascus steel, which I’m sure you know is made of nanotubes, carbon nanotubes. This cup was made of nanoparticles of gold and silver. And so when you lit it from the outside, it was green. And when you lit it from the inside, it was red. Oh, I see, okay, very good. We lost that technology. That’s like the cup of Lysogea or something. And I had never heard of this. I have to look it up, yeah. This is a specialty of mine. I know all these little stupid trivia lost technology things that I’ve never heard of this one. So yeah, there’s all this lost technology. There’s tons of, and that’s just like how you make it. Like the Damascus steel was lost, right? These are technologies that were lost. You need people to continue that sort of stuff on as well. I mean, there are people at the time who, I mean, the size of the Roman structures, there are people who said, oh yeah, those things that were built by giants, yeah. And that’s not a bad guess if you’re living in buildings that don’t really pass two or three stories maybe. And in a way it’s absolutely true, right? And so we can tie it into sort of some of the John Vervecki work that I am rather fond of, right? This idea of distributed cognition. Well, I mean, if you’re gonna take that seriously, one person can’t carry that on. It’s not possible because technology’s passed a certain point. I know a lot of people make a big deal about this. No one knows how to build a modern mouse. No one person knows all the components to build a modern mouse, that’s true, right? Even though the modern mouse was built in 1950s or 60s or something out of wood and they have it, like they know, right, it’s not that hard to build actually if you know what you’re doing. But a modern one that uses an optical sensor, can’t build that out of wood by yourself. Like it’s not possible, right? Because the optical sensor by itself is four or five different specialized technologies that you need to have, right, in terms of manufacturing and knowledge and tuning and all this other stuff. And then there’s all the electronics to go along with that, right? There’s all these pieces that you need. So in other words, there’s infrastructure required for that thing to be built. So it’s the same thing with everything else, right? It’s the same thing with these magical cups, it’s the same thing with plastic steel, it’s the same thing with roads, right? The infrastructure from the empire falls when the empire falls, right? And some places hold onto it longer than others, granted. But once you don’t have all those supporting structures, the distributed cognition, the giant brain, if you will, can’t manifest because it’s too tied up in day-to-day living, we’ll say. And this pattern’s repeated many, many times, not just since the fall of Rome, but the fall of Rome is the most obvious when they just had things so dialed in, and so well done. And ancient Greece had a similar thing, but they were so specialized, the city states were specialized. Yeah. There was one real place to go for oracles, just one, right? I mean, there were oracles in every city state, for sure. There was one, you know, sort of- Main one, yeah, yeah. Which had a pilgrimage, by the way. Delphi. Right? And then there are things about shipbuilding that Athens had down that they never released, right? And so, right, and because they’re smaller distributed cognitions, they’re smaller, right? They die quicker. Like once that city state gets disrupted or whatever, boom, that’s the end of that. They have to either rediscover or rebuild it. And I think the same goes for Rome, because it’s one big template that gets sort of used everywhere, same template. It’s much easier for them to develop and maintain technologies throughout their sort of empire, right, throughout their history. Because the distributed cognition doesn’t have to worry about a bunch of things. It’s like, oh, it’s taken care of by the template. This is taken care of by the template. This is taken care of by the template. Now we can focus on sort of advancement, right? Or building on those basic level things, whether they’re, you know, the fire technologies used to eat the baths, which is, if you’ve never looked that up. Wow, did they have some cool stuff going on, right? Oh yeah. Without killing a bunch of people, because it’s easy to do if you’re just gonna kill slaves, but actually they didn’t, the people that tended the baths were very valuable. Like they were not, you know, even when they were quote slaves, they were like very valuable slaves. Cause slavery was a very hierarchical thing. We don’t think that that way, but it really was historically in most places. There’s one notable exception, but we won’t go into that. Cause there’s nothing to do with Greece or Rome. Where they had hierarchies of slaves. I saw recently, Mary Beard did a special on Caligula, and which was fascinating. And she was explaining, these are the top tier slaves in Rome. And these are the second tier slaves in Rome. And this guy did the invite list. And you might say, well, why did the emperor do the invite list? He’s like, hey, I want no part of the squabbles as a result of that. I want a scapegoat. So that person who did the invite list for the parties actually had a lot of power, right? So yeah, it was really interesting the way that was set up. And we know this, like this is stuff that’s historically been vetted by historians. You can see the hierarchies written on the walls, literally in some cases, right? And it’s sort of significant that there’s that much difference there. Yeah, it’s interesting. And we don’t think of it that way, but because you have this structure of slavery, although ancient slavery and modern slavery, or our conception of modern slavery, nothing in common, roughly speaking. The class that did the work, which was roughly the middle class, the slaves were middle class people, right? They ate well, they were well taken care of. In most spaces, even when they were taken care of a household, it would be better if they could feed themselves, that’s for sure. So, they had a pretty good life ultimately. And they had quite a bit of freedom, actually. They probably had more freedom than some people have in their modern jobs, roughly speaking. Oh yeah. We tend not to realize that, but because they had this sort of robust, but very tightly controlled template for a middle class, that buttressed all of this technology that was arguably eaten up by the upper class to some extent, but also available to everybody because good roads benefits everybody, right? Ultimately, right? It enables everybody. And you sort of see that because as Europeans sort of follow this kingly oligarchy sort of system through the feudal period, right? They get this down, but they’re using the Roman template. What happens? What happens as a result of that? Oh, the middle class comes up, the merchant class, so-called merchant class emerges, and then they become the new force because suddenly, once you have merchants and wealth, you can buy mercenaries. And now all of a sudden the game changes for the aristocracy, especially if they start treating people too badly. So, it’s not so much a slave revolt that they’re worried about, but it’s a merchant class revolt that they’re worried about. So, yeah, you can kind of see sort of the advantages of Rome and the disadvantage of Greece at the same time in the European system. And I would argue that’s why Europe does nothing but war like thereafter, right? It’s just constant war in Europe, constant war in Europe. And then when there’s not a war in Europe, there’s a war in Europe. It’s just, you know, it’s war after war, right? Because again, they’re following the Greek system. Yeah, you have these smaller warring polities, right? I would say that part of that pattern though is a kind of a breakdown of, let’s say, maybe not a previous empire, but like this is the old heartland of Rome. So, they’re really trying to reach back for that. And part of that as well, I mean, part of reaching back for that is actually, I think, an expression of an old Roman sort of virtue, which is this idea of filial piety, right? Which shows itself, I think, more in the Roman model than it does in the Greek model. Because it’s not that they didn’t have, it’s not that Greeks couldn’t be true to their fathers, but because you have these different warring polities, everyone’s kind of at odds. There’s no kind of overall father to be pious to. Whereas with the Romans, right from the beginning, their senators are called conscript fathers, right? And you see the way that, what are the founders of America called? They’re called the founding fathers, right? I don’t think it’s a, you know, these guys knew who they were echoing. And when they were echoing that, it’s like, that’s the sort of relationship you have. And so, when people in Rome are doing great things, they’re doing great things in service of Rome. When people in Greece are doing great things, they’re actually not really doing it necessarily for Greece. Actually, they’re doing it kind of for themselves or for something else maybe, but, you know, an exact, like a particular thing of the Greek system is specialization, and you see that in the individual characters. So Alexander stands out quite a bit on his own. Now, we know people who are around him, but people remember Alexander. People remember Socrates, you know, people remember, let me think of Archimedes, right? And they can remember deeds that they have done. Whereas men like Julius Caesar, here’s some lesser known ones. What’s it? Publius, Decius, Mus, Appius Claudius, Gaius Fabricius, he’s a great character. He’s, talk about sort of the clash of Rome and Greece. Gaius Fabricius, he’s sort of, he’s going up against this Greek king who’s a nephew of Alexander called Pyrrhus. And he, Pyrrhus is like, firstly, Pyrrhus is impressed with the Roman army. He says, this order of the barbarians is completely out of step with what I thought of originally then. He’s basically bringing over an equivalent of Alexander’s army. And, you know, though the armies may not be the biggest parts on the broader scale, they are kind of microcosm of what’s going on. Because the, where we get the notion of a Pyrrhic victory from is from King Pyrrhus coming over. And the reason why it’s called the Pyrrhic victory is Pyrrhus was taking this sort of aristocratic army of maybe a small core of 20 or 30,000 men, well-trained professional soldiers, who’s, you know, that’s it. Their employment is to serve the king. Some of them are levies, right? The lower ranks. He brings them into Italy and he goes up against the Romans and he defeats them once. And he’s like, grand, okay, that’s sort of a, that’s a solid victory in the pot. But the Romans keep on coming back at him. And this is one of the virtues of the Romans is that they’re men, they have great men, but they aren’t of the same mold as the Greeks. I just want to read a small excerpt from this life. This man, Gaius Fabricius. So Pyrrhus has received him with kindness. And it goes like this, this is what Plutarch writes. Pyrrhus received him with much kindness and privately would have persuaded him to accept of his gold, not for any evil purpose, but calling it a mark of respect and hospitable kindness. Upon Fabricius’ refusal, he pressed him no further. But the next day, having a mind to discompose him, as he had never seen an elephant before, he commanded one of the largest, completely armed, to be placed behind the hangings as they were talking together. Which being done, upon a sign given, the hanging was drawn aside and the elephant raising his trunk over the head of Fabricius made a horrid and ugly noise. He, gently turning about and smiling, said to Pyrrhus, neither your money yesterday, nor this beast today makes any impression upon me. And that’s, right. So this is the sort of show of the Roman character versus the Greek. It’s the, and nobody remembers Gaius Fabricius, right? But some people might remember Pyrrhus. People definitely remember Alexander. And Pyrrhus is a leader in the mold of Alexander. Fabricius is a leader in the mold of the Romans. So he is like, you know, it’s, and part of this structure is that filial piety. So you have another person called Decius Moose who, there’s three successive generations have the same name. And every one of them do this practice called devotion, which is where they make a prayer to the gods and sacrifice themselves on the battlefield to win for Rome. To win for Rome, right? You don’t get Greeks doing that. Right. That’s the, it’s, and there’s the, I think that’s the difference is that, and to go back to sort of the modern times and sort of to look through that frame, you know, who’s going to sacrifice themselves, you know, for modern day France? Whereas I think it’s quite clear that even in recent memory, there are plenty of men nameless, though they may be in terms of, we may not know their names. In America, they sacrifice themselves for the, like for the idea of the United States. I mean, even from the founding, right? And that’s the pattern there that, and that’s a really solid pattern because that doesn’t move very much, right? It allows Rome, for instance, to win against the Carthaginians, who are an equally powerful neighboring empire they come to loggerheads. And it’s the Romans that defeat the Carthaginians because they have this kind of grit, you know? And it goes from the top of their society all the way down to the bottom as well. So it kind of turns them in that direction. Whereas the Greeks, they’ll try, but you know, things can go awry up top maybe. It’s interesting too. And we seem to know this. Now, whether or not it’s historically accurate, the point should be made if you watch the movie, The 500, right? What does he say? I am Sparta. He’s not fighting for Sparta, right? They’re fighting for, technically they’re fighting for Athens because presumably the Persians are gonna do what they did last time, which is come in, burn Athens and go home. Yes. Right, they’re probably not gonna try to get all the little craggy, right? Athens is kind of an easy hit geographically. And once you subsume Athens, the largest, right? Then you’re done, right? You’re kind of done. And yet the Spartans, but they’re not sacrificing for Greece. They’re sacrificing for Sparta. No, yeah. It’s real. I mean, you can make lots of great arguments, but wow, Sparta had this kinship and whatever. Sure, they did. Absolutely, that’s why they went, right? But they weren’t sacrificing for this larger container, if you will, like containers, called Greece, right? Whereas the Romans were. And yeah, I mean, look, we have in Arlington Cemetery, Arlington Cemetery, right? With the tomb of the unknown soldier. We have unknown soldier graves all over the place. Like this thing, it’s a very big deal. We have Memorial Day, right? We have these days to celebrate people who’ve been in combat, whether we knew their names or not, right? Whether they fought on our soil, which is like zero, right? Or not, right? And we have that reverence for that larger thing, that larger thing that they’re upholding, whatever you wanna call that in that case. And yeah, I think that’s super important. Yeah. And it is a Roman way of interaction, to your point. Yeah, well. It’s a very Roman style of understanding. It’s not based on the head is the king. The head is the country, in the case of the United States, although maybe it’s a nation or even an empire. It depends on how you think about it. But yeah, it’s not the person, it’s not the president. You’re listening to him, he’s giving you your orders. If you’re in the military, technically he’s giving you your orders. But you’re beholden to the Congress, you’re beholden to the courts, you’re beholden to all these other systems, right? And so you’re beholden to democracy, right? There’s all these pieces that are coming together in this greater whole. And I think Europe doesn’t have that or didn’t have that. Maybe Europe’s trying to develop it now or something. Well, it’s in the middle of crumbling, I would argue. But there’s this way in which, and Europe is very competitive. All the European countries are just, I don’t know, we’re better at climate change. No, we’re less climate changey. It’s like, you’re playing a stupid game, right? Like we’re more free. No, we’re more free. It’s like, oh, come on, stop, just stop. Do something useful. Stop arguing over silly things. And I think that’s the problem is that they’re very Greek city-states. It’s very Greek. No, we’ve got the, you see this during the recent quote pandemic, however you wanna think about that, right? You see this whole thing about, oh, no, we’ve got open trade borders, open trade borders. Nope, Schengen zone. And then even that’s done, just done, just like that. Overnight, nope, not doing it anymore. It’s like, what do you mean you’re not doing it anymore? We’re back to Greek city-state mode. Yeah, yeah, the law isn’t all that important to the Greeks necessarily. The Greeks can kind of, what they can do is they can kind of bend the law and both for the Romans, the law is the law and that’s that. It needs to be enforced as a matter of principle. Whether that actually ends up coming out and of course you can have fights over that, but that’s the axis on which they’re turning. Yeah, and that was a move which I think in Europe, the, you did have something of a semblance of what the US has once upon a time, but unfortunately what happened is, so in the wake of the fall of the Roman empire, there are those who are trying to, I mean, in the West it continues, but it continues kind of breaking up. You have the barbarian kings come in and they nominally say they’re governing in the name of Rome and for a while they do. They apply Roman law to Roman citizens and then they apply their tribal law to the tribal citizens, members of their tribe. But then as time goes on, you get Charlemagne crowned as emperor of the Romans in the West and he’s recognized in the East as well. And so for a while there, you actually do have a sort of, kind of a Western European polity that, I mean, pretty much would be, we would say is kind of like the womb in which something like a modern day US is gestated in, right? But as time goes on and you have fracturings and there are pretty big fact fracturings in the history of Europe. Like a Peloponnesian war is a quite fractious event. And I guess something like that would be, like an equivalent to the Wars of Religion, the 30 years war in Europe, right? Which is just a complete divide almost down the middle. And then you’ve got sort of a little bitty factions on the edge, but that seems to strike as a sort of beginning mark. If you’re applying that sort of frame, applying that sort of rule of thumb, and it would be about the 30 years war that happens for Europe. And of course then at a similar time, you have the ideas that end up being congealed in the US starting at that time. Yeah, yeah, it’s interesting too. So the way that the US handled the pandemic and people are gonna cry foul, but it’s not foul. We never shut down state borders. There was some talk of it. It almost happened a couple of times with a couple of states, but it never happened. And you might say, oh, those are states. It’s like, yeah, look, most of our states are the size of European countries. They just are like geographically, right? And they behave much the same because actually the variance in government between states is roughly the same as the variance in government between European countries. If you actually look at it and you say, oh, you’ve got a federal government. The federal government even at its strongest, which I would argue it is now, or maybe it’s not its absolute strongest, but right, because that would be World War II. That would be FDR for sure. Yes. They did all kinds of wacky things that were only temporary though. And they were designed to only be temporary. Almost all of them got backed out. Now the federal government’s at its strongest, but even now, like they couldn’t do mask mandates. They couldn’t do, right? There’s a bunch of stuff they tried to do and couldn’t do because it’s not tenable to the idea of what is, something like a loosely held container, we’ll say, of the idea of America, of the United States as this Roman sort of conception of the father of all of the distributed cognitions, we’ll call it, of the country, right? Where we can have roads and we can have school systems and we can have federally funded programs to equalize things without sort of losing some of the more important aspects, we’ll say, of what happens when you devolve into the city state program where you’re just like, I am Sparta, I am Athens, I am Thebes, I am whatever. It’s just, right, it gets kind of crazy. You know, we’re Trojans, it’s like, oh, okay, we’ll see how long that lasts, you know? And you’re right, there’s something to that idea. And I think that’s what, I think Plato and Aristotle and such not were on about when they said, look at these Homeric heroes, they’re terrible people. And it’s like, well, yeah, but you know, right? There’s a way in which that’s important and a way in which it’s not because in so far as you need heroes, you need heroes. So you can’t get around that, like you need a template and it needs to be a pretty specific one like a single person that might’ve been caught on to later by a religion or two. But anyway, you know, there’s a way in which that’s true, but also showing their flaws gets them closer to you, right? But then there’s a way in which they’re right, like, oh no, you wanna hold up the principles, the ideals. You don’t wanna hold up the individuals, right? And that’s more a Roman conception is holding up the principle of Rome over the persons that make up Rome because of literally what you’re doing, right? It’s not this guy or that guy or these guys or these set of generals or whatever it is, not that we don’t, you know, cheer them, but they’re cheered as generals. And I think you see this even in Roman history with the cheering of the generals in specific battles as opposed to even when they’re emperors as being emperors, we’ll say, right? So it wasn’t, oh, you know, Julius Caesar was a great emperor. It was, oh, he conquered the Gauls and he did the, right? So they talk about him, they talk about him in different modes. And those are modes of what he was enacting rather than saying, oh, no, no, he’s a great hero who should be emulated on all fronts, which is more what the Greeks, they weren’t really doing that but it’s easy to see why you might wanna shy away from that sort of an attitude. Yeah, yeah, they weren’t making way for Greece whereas the Romans were always making way for Rome. And this is, that’s another good one as well is that there is another episode sort of related to that of Julius Caesar crying in front of the statue of Alexander the Great. And that’s a very poignant image. And it’s like, oh, you know, he said, you know, this man by the time he was 30, he’d conquered half the world and look at what I’ve done and I’m twice his age or something like that, you know? And it’s like, the tragedy of that isn’t, it isn’t that Julius Caesar is not living up to his forebears. It’s that you aren’t in the same sort of realm, you aren’t acting in the same pattern as Alexander. And actually as Romans go, you are the greatest Roman. You are the Roman to anyone who knows anything about Rome. And yeah, that’s the kind of, let’s say the kind of tragedy of the Romans trying to relate too much to the Greeks, right? Because it’s like, you are a kind of separate civilizations and they know that to a certain extent in some way common, but in many ways, another one, another sort of, you know, if you want to contrast sort of Roman filial piety, you also then have the Greek conception of cunning, you know, being a virtue, which the Romans do not like whatsoever, right? They, you know, the Romans aren’t about being clever. They’re about beating you man to man in the field and they consistently show this pattern out. So same Fabricius who I was talking about earlier, the Romans receive a letter from his physician, King Pyrrhus’ physician, this Greek king. And he says, I’ll poison him for you and we can end the war here. And what the Romans do is they send back a letter saying, you should choose your friends better, Pyrrhus. We aren’t going, you know, this man offered to, you know, assassinate you for us, but we’re going to beat you in the field. So see you there, you know, something like, and so, and you see that again later on, when the Romans get ambushed at Tudorburg forest by the Germans, a similar thing happens. They receive a letter and they say, well, you know, the Germans say, well, poison them for you if you want. And Germanicus at the time, right? And this is 300 years after this episode of Fabricius, he’s like, no, we will beat you out in the field. You are going to take back our eagles because that’s how it’s done. And contrasting that on the Greek side, there are plenty of examples of, so a good one is Cassander who was given control over Alexander’s brother and children. At some point he just kills them, even though he’s regent. So in the successor wars in Alexander’s time. And then another one is this guy called Timoleon. The thing is with Greece, of course, you’ve got quite a few different characters and there’s some really great ones in Plutarch’s parallel lives. But this Timoleon, he says, he goes to these people in, he’s trying to get to Sicily, he’s coming from Corinth. So he has to go between, you know, where the boot of Italy joins, just the top tip of Sicily. And he’s crossing there at Regium, and that’s a Greek colony. And so the Carthaginians come up, intercept him saying, look, we got you, dude, you can’t go and help the Greeks over there. And so they hold an assembly saying basically, Timoleon says, look, you got me, fine. Let me just talk to my fellow Greeks here and we’ll go home, right? Just make provisions or whatever. I can’t remember the exact, but they set it up and he says, look, no problem, we’re gonna leave. And then they have this ruse where they make an agreement with the people in the city of Regium to, you know, steal them out. So they’ll bring the Carthaginians there, they wanted the Carthaginians to oversee the assembly. And so all the Carthaginians are there watching it. And then as they’re going through, it’s a rowdy assembly. The Timoleon and his Greeks slip out and they get to the ships and they cross over to Sicily. And once they’re in the other Greek, you know, the other Greek city, that’s fine. And so, you know, it doesn’t matter too much to the Greeks to keep their word necessarily as long as they come out on top. Right, but for the Romans, it matters. And actually it matters to this point as well. There’s a guy called Marcus Atilius Regulus. This is during the Punic Wars against the same enemy. So this is showing you how the Romans and the Greeks treat the same enemy differently. This guy is captured, he’s a consul, which is the highest office that you achieve in Rome, right? So he is, you know, he is representing, he knows he represents Rome. And so he’s captured in battle. And the Carthaginians send him on parole back to Rome to give terms, they want to make peace. And he sends, he goes back, he says to his people, these are the terms. And then he says, well, keep on fighting. Don’t accept these terms. And then what does he do? So the expectation by some people might be, well, he just stayed home, right? Continues on the fight. But the way parole works is that, no, no, no, no, you’re just there to send the message and come back. And so Atilius Regulus is keeping to his word to a T because he’s embodying Rome as well. And so he gets back on a ship and goes back to Carthage, having done all that. And the Carthaginians torture him to death. They put him in a box with nails in it, clamp it shut, he can’t move, he dies basically. And the Carthaginians torture him horribly. Yeah, it’s interesting. So I just finished watching Amazon Prime has a thing called the great Greek myths, which I guess is a French thing. It’s done in cartoon. It’s done in screen. It’s awesome. I think it’s just three seasons. And the first one is a bunch of myths. And they’re told by character, not by story. So they’ll have multiple stories in the telling the character and they fill in things. But then season two, seasons two and three are the Odyssey and the Iliad. So the thing that I noticed throughout this was they really stress the cleverness of the characters. They really talk about that cleverness. And so if you look at the Trojan War, how’s the Trojan War won? In battle? No, it’s run by pure treachery. Pure cleverness. Yeah. Right? And it’s sort of hard to appreciate. It’s not just the Trojan horse and the fact of how the horse is brought into the city. The gate has to be dismantled to bring the horse into the walls. Yeah. That’s an important fact. The other important fact is the slave that’s left behind is a double agent. He’s still working for the Greeks. Yes. He pretends that he was abandoned even though nothing could be further from the truth. And he’s the one that opens the horse because someone’s got to open the horse when the time is right and not before. And to be fair, the Trojans, they’re very suspicious. So what do they do? They stick swords in the horse before they take it in. They jostle it. They try to get people to cry out and no one cries out. So, right? They just, but it’s all treachery. That’s how they won the war. It’s through treachery. And it’s interesting. So in the series at the end, they’re talking about basically, here’s this guy, Odysseus, right? Who is effectively questioning whether or not they need the gods anymore, whether or not the gods are any good. Look, they abandoned us on the battlefield. They said they were gonna help us and they didn’t. And of course the story is much more complicated than that, right? As the myths make clear. But there’s a way in which that level of defiance is the problem, right? He’s too clever for his own good. I won the war. I came up with the way to win the war. Not you guys. Yeah, it wasn’t even Agamemnon and his wonderful armies. It was really my cool idea and the fact that I implemented it. But then you guys made it go too far because we ended up slaughtering everybody in the city, which it’s self-loathing too, right? It’s like, oh, we Greeks murdered all the innocent women and children of Troy. And so on the one hand, they’re saying, we don’t need the gods. And the other hand, they’re saying it’s the gods’ fault. It’s like, what? And not their fault because they made us, their fault because they abandoned us. And it’s like, what a weird argument. It’s not logical at all, right? The rationality is completely gone from this line of reasoning here. It’s just, it’s non-existent. And so there’s a way in which they really, you look at somebody like Socrates, right? What did he do? I mean, a few military engagements, right? That he was part of, but I mean, what’s he known for? Being clever and educating people. And so you can see the sort of the emphasis on education. Even though there was a great deal, as I said before, there’s a great deal of movement from, we’ll say slavery, which might’ve been the lower rung on the totem pole for Greece and the upper class. Sure, there was definitely a lot of movement there. There’s no doubt about that. And that’s fine. That’s good. That’s all well and good and happy and whatnot. But in Rome, there was a lot more freedom. And there was a lot more, we’ll say standardized ways of being, right? Because you could fit in a template at various different levels and no one cared if you rose or fell for that matter. So it wasn’t, you could go from being a wealthy merchant to a farmer and your status in society wasn’t diminished because you were known by your status independent of what you did for a living. And that wasn’t as true in Greece. And Greece also had the city state problem. So it kind of mattered where you came from. Yeah, I mean, in some sense made a difference. Yeah, in some sense it’s similar with Rome, but you still have that integration of the lower order. So it’s kind of like the Rome combines all the sort of best parts of Greece, at least in terms of governance. You have the patricians who are basically the descendants of the criminals who could name their fathers. And then the plebeians would be the people who couldn’t. But I think there’s definitely something to be said about the sort of the origins of Rome being in basically a band of thieves and murderers and outcasts, as opposed to the Greeks, which by and large seem to be the descendants of gods or sons of gods or demi gods. At best you’ve got the Spartans who were supposedly these foreign invaders, the Doric Greeks, sorry, but the Spartans are Doric or Dorian Greeks. And they come in and the helots are basically the people who they enslaved when they invaded. But you have that, you’re right, there’s this sort of pedigree that matters a lot more in Greece and in a different way than in Rome, where your pedigree is what sort of person are your ancestors, right? So again, going back to that Publius Decius Moose, he, so his father and his father’s father both did this, this sacrifice their lives for Rome to win it a battle, right, whereas, and that kind of stands on its own. It doesn’t really matter, like he happened to also be a patrician, but really what’s on display there is the character of a man who’s willing to sacrifice for Rome, whereas with the Greeks, it’s basically trying to start a dynasty. It’s trying to be an Alexander or it’s trying to be a Pericles who maybe didn’t find his own dynasty, right, but did very well for Athens, but he only did well for Athens, and so his greatness only goes so far as, right, the container that he’s in, whereas with Rome, it strikes me going back to the Alexander versus Caesar comparison, the Romans are much more willing to defer, let’s say, their personal peak that maybe they could achieve on their own in maybe a small Greek city-state, so that they can build up this wider and bigger container that more people can be part of, and really in which it’s quite an agreeable sort of hierarchy, right, which is, you’re a patrician, sure, but who are, like what sort of man are you? That’s the more important sort of thing, and what are you doing for Rome, exactly? Yeah, yeah, and I think you could earn your way into that through principles in a way that you couldn’t in Greece, so one of the problems in ancient Greece that occurs to me is that you constantly have subjugated colonies of places like Athens and Sparta that are constantly in revolt, so these aren’t, this is distinctly different from city-states fighting city-states or the hell it’s fighting the Spartans, right, those are different situations, right, so you have slave, revolt, uprising, roughly speaking, uprising’s probably a better way to think about it, you have city-states fighting city-states just for the, because we’re bored, roughly speaking, right, where we’re trying to expand our influence even though that’s never gonna work because we have clashing cultures, and then you have conquests and revolts of the conquered, so you have three different distinct types of battles going on in ancient Greek world, whereas I think in Roman society, you just had revolts, that’s all you had, right, and you could say, oh, there was the gladiator stuff, right, the slave, the slave uprising, and which is, I would say, much overplayed, it was one period in history, it sort of tried to emerge a couple of times, right, but roughly the previous attempts and even the final attempt where they actually, Spartacus survived for a while, right, and did all this cool stuff. Rome made changes. Yes. Greece, Athens, Sparta, all these other cities, they never made any changes. They made any changes. They might’ve changed their form of government, but they never changed how they dealt with outside forces, right, the things that they were subjugating, they never made any allowances. Well, when did the Spartacus rebellion happen? It happened at the most turbulent time in Roman political history. You can basically take that as part of a civil war, and it really is like lumped in with that, because when you’ve got this, and the reason why that civil war happened, one of the reasons why that civil war happened was because of the fact that all the senators were buying up all of the land in Italy. So previously you had the old Republican farmer soldier who would do his farm in the planting season, and then he’d take up his arms, which he paid for himself, right, and he’d march off to fight for Rome. And then eventually that goes away, so that the senators get greedy, buy up land, they have loads of slaves from the recent conquests of Rome. That’s gonna, I mean, that’s really kind of pushing Rome to the edge, politically speaking, so yeah. And as it turns out, yeah, the sort of conflicts that Rome has is Rome, anything outside of Rome, and then Rome with itself, but then it congeals back to Rome quite quickly. It’s like Caesar, Caesarian civil war, and then you pretty much bought, within a decade or two you have Augustus, you have then the empire, so you’ve got this new political kind of arrangement that’s rearranged so that things work for quite a while. Yeah, yeah, and it’s worth pointing out that the reason why Caesar was able to do what he did was because everything was already a mess, and the Republic had more or less collapsed to some extent, the public form of government as conceived of by Rome had failed. And I think you see that reflected in the American system, where it’s got this three points of balance, right? Where you’ve got this democracy and the Congress and the courts and the executive branch, right? And then you’ve got this Republic overlaid on top of that in case the democracy goes horribly wrong, like it always did in ancient Greece, always. So you can see that hybrid, you can see that hybrid model, and you can see that the founders are very much taking this seriously and trying to meld these two models, right? Taking sort of the best of each and balance them off one another because they realized to some extent there’s no compromise. In a time of war, you need one leader. You don’t have time for this congressional nonsense because they’re just gonna try and take over the land of the farmers, right? They’re gonna try to use the war, right? Because that’s what happened in ancient Rome, to your point. They’re trying to use the war or a war or the result of a conquest to get ahead as congressmen. And people complain about that in the United States all the time now, they’re very much doing that. And then so you need the counterbalance. Well, you can’t do that in war because it’s the president and he’s only there for so long. And yeah, and you also sort of see the way in which there’s a give and take in the government. And one of the problems with Greece was they would try a form of government, it would collapse. And then they would try a different form of government. And in Rome, you’d have a revolt and they’d adjust. And then maybe you’d have another revolt of similar type but they’d make adjustments. Like they were adjusting the whole time. They’d conquer a new area and that would affect what happened in the city of Rome and all the provinces. Yes, right. Because they’d find something new and say, oh, well, that seems cool. Let’s do that, right? We can do that. And so they’d make changes based on their interactions. Even with, so like when they get out to Spain and stuff, a lot of stuff in Rome changes as a result of Spain. And they weren’t really conquests, right? Because again, it’s not like they’re marching the Roman legions over there and just conquering large swaths of land. I mean, not that they didn’t have Roman legions and not that there weren’t battles but it’s not like they were fighting another country. It wasn’t exactly a country, right? And yeah, I mean, the reason why they couldn’t get Carthage was because roughly speaking, Carthage had the naval skill and Rome never did. And until Rome just kept going with the naval stuff and got to land, that’s where they, the Carthaginians couldn’t deal. They just, there was an imbalance. But they could never go through Spain. Like they just couldn’t do it. It just wasn’t, they tried, they couldn’t do it. Carthage was in Spain though. And even with their inferior forces, right? They still had it. They were, they had Spain and it was enough of a mass that no one could rule it. And they were okay with that. Cause it’s a nice buffer state. Even though it wasn’t a state, it was a nice buffer geographical area with a bunch of wild tribes that couldn’t be tamed, roughly speaking, couldn’t be conquered. And until it was, but that took quite a while. Like that took quite a while. And people don’t sort of see that, but you can see that the sort of melding, whereas again, in Europe, you still have this oligarchy kingship thing. And they’re sort of experimenting with what they think of as Republic, right? But really what they’re doing is they’ve created two oligarchies fighting against, or an oligarchy fighting against the kingship or something, right? Yeah. It’s like, oh, well, you know, the king could do this, the king’s not gonna do this because we’re more numerous. And it’s like, that’s a really unhealthy system. I mean, you saw what happened in France with that, like the whole revolution. They’re on Republic number five now, I believe. Yes. Republic number, Republic. They have to number their Republics. Whereas the American system, as far as I’m aware, goes through iterations and that’s okay. Like it’s just like following the Roman model, you adjust. And that’s the great virtue of the Roman model. And you have episodes throughout Roman history which highlight this. Even from the founding, it was like this as well. So you have this event called the secession of the plebeians. And what that is is basically the plebeians saying, look, you aren’t listening to us, right? The patricians are not listening to us. And at that point, the plebeians had no, it was no representation. I can’t remember the exact sort of way that the Senate was made at that point. But even though they may have elected the senators, the senators weren’t doing what they were supposed to for the plebeians. In fact, I believe one of the things that sparked this was basically a jealous official who liked a plebeian’s daughter and was trying to use the power to get to her. But basically what did the plebeians do? Well, we’re not fighting then. If Rome wants to fight, we’re gonna go, and they go out to this hill and they say, they’re led by a particular guy who knows his name, but, and they say, look, we are not going to continue with this until you start listening to us. And what happens then is you have this creation of a new office called the Tribune of the Plebs. And they’re given a real role in the system, which is they can come into the Senate and whatever bill they have on the floor, they can just veto it and say, no, and it’s a real concession, right? This transforms into a problem maybe 200 or 250 years later, but up until that point, the idea is such that it’s like, so it’s only plebeians vote for the Tribune and they can go in and they can stop any more legislation from coming through. And so that means that the senators now have to listen, at least to that guy, because he can come in and just scupper anything that they’re trying to do. You really don’t have that with Greek kingship. And you see that with Alexander’s empire, what happens after he dies? It collapses. And it follows the same Greek pattern just on a larger scale of vultures fighting over the corpse, tearing bits out of it. Yeah, yeah. Well, it’s sort of like Greeks are all Protestants confirmed and Rome and the Roman church is the Roman church confirmed. I like to see the same sort of patterns playing out historically. But it’s this constant state of revolt, in the case of Greece, because everyone’s an individual and they’re all smart and clever. And then Rome is like, no, no, no, it’s for the Republic. Everything’s for the Republic. It’s not for me. And it doesn’t matter if I’m known throughout history. That’s the story of Achilles. You have two choices, you can die happy, no one’s gonna know your name or your name can be still known, 2000 plus years later, whatever it is. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, and that’s the, yeah. I mean, that’s the, well, the funny thing is as well is that there’s an element in which, so the Roman Catholic Church in the West kind of tries and keeps that legacy. It kind of, it has the kind of bad spirits could come along with that. But yeah, I mean, in the West, well, the West sort of plays on that. And that’s the pattern that I think the West generally follows. Let’s say if you wanna call something the West, it’s more that Roman pattern of look, it’s, yeah, I would like to die happy actually. And that’s a good thing. I don’t, it’s not a vice to live a good life and maybe not be known. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Then that goes back to ethos and maybe the virtues and values that are important. And so you see this pattern in Greece of virtues and values that are important are this individualism, hey, we don’t need no stinking gods, right? We don’t, they’ve done nothing for us, but we’re clever. And so that’s all that matters. Whereas you very much have this Roman idea of, well, what really matters is the historical grounding, right? What are you offering to the society that you’re part of, that you were born into, that sort of made you greater than you would have been without it, which I think is right. That’s the really important part. Like you’re born into this structure and without that structure, man, you’re scrapping for food, kid. I hate to break it to you, but that’s what’s gonna happen. And when you lose that, as one might argue you were doing in the United States right at the very moment, I’m not saying I’m arguing for that, but maybe I am. Then you have lots of problems. You have a lot of resentment and anger and oh, there’s people further up than me, and they’re older too, right? For the most part, right? Or they’ve actually taken control of their lives and actually trying to do something with it, which is more on your own ethos, right? Your own understanding is that you’re clever and so you’re worth more. It’s like, well, yeah, but you’re gonna do it too, right? You can’t just be clever. There’s no such thing as being clever outside of interacting with others and sort of embodying something useful, something lasting, right? Because just being clever, like winning the trivia game is great. I love trivia. I usually win trivia games. Right, but at the end of the day, if you’re not building something lasting, because trivia is by definition not lasting, it’s called trivia for a reason, then you’re not Elon Musk. You didn’t sleep under your desk at work to make sure that the people were doing what they needed to do, or to make sure your code got written or whatever it is, right? And it really is that the only way you could do that, right, as an individual, is to realize that there’s a principle that’s bigger than you, that you are responsible for inhabiting or forwarding or contributing to in a significant fashion. And if you don’t have that sense, then there’s a problem. And I think that’s really what it is when you lose that sense of where you are, of what’s bigger than you and what you’re contributing to and what that contribution does for you. That, I think, is where things sort of break down in terms of forwarding the principles and the virtues and the values and the culture overall. Yeah. And I think, and so far as the sort of Roman conception goes with that, yeah, there is more room for basically just being left alone to live your life and kind of having that container be put forward in time. Yeah. Yeah, I think that’s the real Roman ethos, right, is this whole idea of how do we forward the empire? What can we do as members of Roman society, right? What do we do as members of Rome to give back to the concept of Rome? Not the country of Rome, right, not the empire of Rome, but the concept of Rome that lives on, enabled us to live as well as we did, but also will enable the people that come after us to live perhaps better than we did, but to live at least as well as we did. What are the sorts of ways that we can take that ethos and forward it through time using, we’ll say the distributed cognition that we’ve gained, that we inherited by virtue of our birth within this Roman system? And you don’t see that in Greece, you just see the line of secession, right? The line of, well, my father was this person, right? And I’m clever because of this, and I’m related to this person by virtue of whatever, right? But there’s no sense for the Greek ethos as an ethos per se. Yeah, yeah, as a character that’s actually repeated through time. And that gives it to a civilization. And yeah, it’s a, how should I put it? Yeah, the Greek conception of things, I think there’s a reason for the suspicion that the Romans kind of hold the Greeks in that as well, because it is, if you allow that sort of protest, just identifying, let’s say, against something, or allow that sort of space to open up on a wide scale in the society, that is completely, that’s directly contradictory to the, let’s say, the spirit of the conscript fathers, right? Conscript fathers is really, embodies that quite well, because you’re submitting to pretty much all the structure above you. And it doesn’t necessarily have to be something that’s necessarily just. Even during the Roman civil wars, there were people who were like, they had to be, they had to be, they had some pretty serious problems with the system as well. But they were still there, bothering to participate and put forward something that would be Rome. And there’s a more organic aspect to it as well. The idea of the Greek city-states kind of springing up, collapsing, and then just kind of going from, going from year zero almost, is, yeah, I mean, it’s just not sustainable. Whereas the Roman model is, it grows, and it has a sort of rootedness in where it is. So like, for instance, Roman Gaul can still, it’s still part of the empire, but it’s for the Gaul, it’s for the Gallic territories, it’s for the people there. Like there’s a, it’s not that there’s a Roman aristocracy, it’s a Gallo-Roman aristocracy. It’s not that there’s an aristocracy in Spain of Romans, it’s a Hispano-Roman aristocracy. And that shows unto this day, the sort of the leftovers of what Rome was even now show itself in the fact that these peoples who were not speaking Latin when Rome arrived, they were speaking Latin when Rome, the imperial structure, let’s say, receded away and maybe withered. Right. And what’s the equivalent for Greece? It’s like, well, the Greek thought is still around, but how many people are speaking like a descendant of a Greek language? At best what the Greeks have done is, for instance, the Russian alphabet, which it’s called Cyrillic, but it actually has its origins in the Greek alphabet. Right. And so, and that’s not a bad legacy either, but it’s not a lasting legacy. Right, well, there’s coin A, right? Which is, it’s a flavor of Greek that was used, right? As the sort of the, I mean, that’s where the whole idea of a default diplomatic language or trade language comes from, roughly speaking in modern times, this idea of coin A, which is Greek, a Greek dialogue, roughly speaking. Yeah, yeah. And Rome, again, Rome sees all this, like Rome gets the advantage of understanding the mistakes of Greece to a very large degree and sort of embodies that and sort of takes that on and says, all right, well, what can we do better? Like what are the things that we can do? And then I wanted to tie this back sort of to modern time. So I wanna sort of draw a lot of this. So, and again, the thesis is there’s Europe, which is Greece, right? There’s the UK, right? Not just England, because I think that, you know, particularly because I’m part Irish and you’re Irish, I think Ireland and Scotland had a big influence on how the English developed the UK, right? On that whole development. Throughout time, you know, maybe it wasn’t the UK yet, right? But the needs were there. And then there’s the US, which is this hybrid between Greece and Rome. And so Rome sort of falls, but everyone’s copying Greek governance and Roman structure, right? And then this melding only happens really as a result of the United States, as a result of the American experiment, if you will, right? As a result of this quote revolution, that’s really a sub-war in a much larger war between France and England, roughly speaking, right? And then a bunch of accidents happen, roughly speaking, right? And then who’s in the US? The Scots-Irish, which is a very, we talked about that a couple of times, right? This is a very distinct group of people. They’re neither Scottish nor Irish, actually, right? They’re a little bit of both in some sense, but they’re of the same ethos, roughly speaking. There’s a lot of them in the US, right? There’s the Puritans, you know, that’s a whole segment in New England, where I’m at now, actually, of the US, right, the Scots-Irish are more in the South. There’s Scots-Irish along the Appalachian Trail, which I had the lovely distinction of driving through to get up here on purpose. Very nice. Lovely area. Oh yeah, no, no, you want Scotland? I can show you Scotland in America. I was blown away. Very good. I could not believe, oh, I have a convertible. I keep putting the top up because I go around the corner of this, it’s called the Blue Ridge Parkway, absolutely gorgeous road. Go around the corner and now it’s raining. Oh, yeah. And then you go around the corner and it’s sunny, and it’s like, oh, it’s 87 degrees and sunny, and then it’s raining, and then, oh, I was like, this is just like Scotland. I’ve been to Scotland, just like Scotland. Yeah, yeah. Everyday in Scotland it’s like this. Yeah, yeah, and it was beautiful. I really enjoyed it. But you have this, you know, you have those people with some of that stuff, right? But then you’re inheriting the governance and not the structure initially because the United States is not powerhouse that it became post-industrial and post-war. There’s two sort of changes that happened in the US that take it away from that fully agrarian society that it sort of starts out as, right? But you have that ethos there from the immigrants, from the population that left. So you’ve got this, Puritans are all about the religious freedom, and so that’s sort of the overlay, right? Everything’s about religious freedom. But then you also have that sense of enlightenment values and more of the Greek sort of, right? Because Scottish are a lot like the Greek, right? Yeah. They’re not a unified country, right? Yeah, yeah, oh, yeah. Even now the Northern and Southern Scottish are not the same people in some sense, right? They don’t like each other. They have different accents, completely different accents, right? Oh, yeah, yeah. I’ll tell you actually something that I did find out recently in the old Irish annals. It talks about who some of the major people groups are and where they come from. And one of those groups are called the Scythians, or the Milesians. So these are Scythian sort of step horsemen. But another group is a group of people who are escaped Greek slaves. Yeah. Whoa. Yeah, so part of the Irish sort of founding myth, and to some extent this goes to the Scottish, because some of the Scottish are descended from Irish people who migrated up there, is that sort of like they’re participating in the Greek pattern to some degree. And you can kind of see that in the way, you know, cleverness among Irish people, it is kind of seen as a virtue sometimes. So there are some people who are keeping that pattern going, as it were. So it’s no wonder, I guess, the Scots and the Scots kind of show that as well. That’s fascinating. Yeah, I didn’t know that. That’s super interesting. But you can see in the United States, the foundations with the religious liberty, and then this ethos around. So the Scots-Irish that ended up in the Appalachian Mountains, roughly speaking to this day are anti-government. They’re very independent, super independent. Yeah, you don’t wanna be a government official traveling through certain parts of the US where the mountains are. Irrespective of the mountains, the Ozarks is much the same, right? We’ve got mountain ranges where, yeah, you don’t wanna go up there, right? Even in the, you know, the Rockies even, right? Like there’s definitely, that’s where the freedom people are. And you don’t wanna mess with them with your government rules and regulations. That’s not gonna go over well. Where do they grow all the illegal drugs in the United States and the mountains, right? Roughly speaking, it’s really funny how that works out. But you have this overlay, right? Well, you know, just kind of leave us alone, but we can’t do it with no structure. And then there’s more structured places and less structured places. But you have that overlay of the Roman sort of format of the Republic where it’s like, oh, we’ll give a little, right? We’ll incorporate you. And that’s why the experiment worked, roughly speaking, so that there were spies from France and from England 50 years after the revolution, 50 years after we quote, gained our independence, you know, writing back, oh no, any day now, this constitution thing is gonna crumble. And they had been, like every five years, they were saying the same stupid thing. Oh, any day now, these states don’t get along at all. They’re gonna be breaking up and you’ll be able to move right in and England won’t see it coming. Or they’ll be breaking up and France won’t see it coming. We’ll be able to move right in. Yeah. You know, I mean, they wrote it just like that. I mean, because they thought it was gonna happen. They thought that crumbling was gonna happen. They really misunderstood what had happened because they didn’t understand the Roman model at all in Europe. I don’t think Europe ever understood even the English, never understood the Roman model. They took the structures for sure, right? And they were trying to enact, say, what they thought made the city of Rome the city of Rome. I would call that a little bit of materialistic view, right? And they weren’t really enacting the values, the real virtues and values that made Rome Rome. And I think that’s the failure. That’s the failure of, we’ll say, Europe to understand America and America to understand Europe. Right, why are these guys worrying all the time? We really look up to them. And I still think to some extent that Europe is trying to follow America is trying to follow Europe and they’re actually just following illusions, right? They’re following projections of what they think the other is. Yeah, yeah. And it’s a difference fundamentally of character in the stage that the old world civilization, European civilization, let’s say is in, is in a decline cycle in that sort of element. I mean, you could say, for instance, that World War II and what happened thereafter was essentially the Macedonian Wars for Europe, right? So that’s the Macedonian Wars are the wars that the Romans come in and they take Greece. And the Greeks initially are, eventually they’re okay with it. But initially they’re like, maybe not so much, but eventually they’re on board with it because it does them better to be in that empire. And ultimately as well, what happens with the Greeks, they’re still around. And the legacy of their civilization is still around in present day Europe and then also in America as well. And some of that, and so if you sort of look at that and you say, okay, well, that’s a half decent way of looking at it, the proper position of Europe is to be educating America as to how to, not in the sense of looking down upon it, but looking down in the same way that Greek rhetoric teacher looked on Cicero, which is, you’re doing too well. But sort of reveling in that as well and be like, good. That would be the ultimate sort of piety that could be given to the Roman roots of Europe. Because I still think without that Roman pattern to have been passed on, I mean, you don’t have that continuation. Without Aeneas escaping Troy, sure, maybe Troy does have to be burned to the ground. If that’s what God wants, so be it. But you’ve got that Aeneas coming out and getting out into Italy and seeding that continuation, what’s it, a sort of friendly, brotherly, almost jostling of a continuation, right? Because not everyone has to get on all the time. But a recognition as to what those differences are and saying that those differences, they have their place. Yeah, yeah, I definitely see more and more parallels the more I learn about this stuff. They just sort of come out. So I think, yeah, the legacy of both Rome and Greece remain intact in some sense. And their rediscovery from the Dark Ages to the Enlightenment, the Enlightenment is the rediscovery. It’s like, oh, here’s all the Roman and Greek texts that we’ve been following the pattern of sort of unconsciously almost, as if you wanna think about distributed cognition or collective intelligence as having an unconscious, just following these patterns. Because a lot of what we do is follow patterns without realizing it. And I think that’s what was happening. And that just became explicit. And now, unfortunately, as a result of the Enlightenment, they think they can tinker with it. And that’s where I start to wonder, like, oh, I heard about some Enlightenment stuff recently. I was like, well, that didn’t go well. So I listened in particular, you sent me that Dan Carlin, Pain for Tainment podcast, that one. He’s got such, I mean, hardcore history is so good. That was so good. So I listened to that while I was driving up to the mountains and up to the Blue Ridge Parkway outside of Asheville, North Carolina. And there was so much there. I was like, oh, I wish he had talked about this, but I wish he had talked about that. And I don’t wanna go down that rabbit hole because that’s a rabbit hole. It was at four hours, three and a half, something crazy. Yeah, it was called podcast going on for ages. Right, that one goes on for ages, but it was quite good. And the thing that I found so interesting about it was I could hear in what he was saying, some of the flavors of what was missing. Right, and bad things, the enlightenment assumed and then changed. And how those changes seem to have turned out worse than anybody would have expected. So that was what was so interesting to me was, there were definitely some problems and differences that came up as a result of the interaction, we’ll say, with enlightenment thinking, because they made some very bad assumptions that they knew or should have known were bad assumptions right from the beginning. And that was, that to me created a bunch of problems, which we’ll say he didn’t even interact with, right? He had, he didn’t talk about them. I was like, well, there’s this and there’s this, there’s these little indications that maybe those changes that we went through were not positive changes. So yeah, so I found that interesting. So you can still see the echoes of some of these ideas and then surfacing them as a result of the enlightenment, which was an emergence from the Dark Ages. If you see it as an emergence from the sort of pattern, like an understanding, the enlightenment is really an understanding of the pattern you were following in the Dark Ages. And then where it goes too far is try to take control of those patterns and reshape them, right? On Rousseauian grounds, roughly speaking, that’s what I heard a lot of anyway. It’s like, Rousseau was wrong. All men are born free and everywhere in chains, that sort of thing. Right, right. Well, we’re pure when we’re not subjected to society, right? And so this is like the society theory, right? It’s like, yeah, but you can’t get around society. It’s like, okay, well, we’ll change society to be better. It’s like, hmm, I wonder where Karl Marx got all this stuff from. Yeah, it’s right there, right? It’s right, that whole concept is right there, but it’s really, it is for the intellectually bankrupt, right, like it doesn’t take long to kind of figure out, you can’t control society. Society is the thing that controls you. That’s what it is definitionally. Yeah. It’s an emergence. It’s not something that you can pull the strings of to any great degree, not that you don’t have influence over it, right? Not that there isn’t some power that you can exert on it, right? Not that there isn’t some control that you have to fight it, but you don’t have control over it or of it. That’s not how that works. So I think that’s really where the idea of these sort of, we’ll call it three experiments, at least in the West, you’ve got sort of the pure Greek experiment in Europe, and then you’ve got the sort of the mixing of the more Roman experiment in the UK, and then you’ve got the real sort of Greek plus Roman new emergence of the United States. So what do you think of that outline? Yeah, no, I think there’s something to that. There is the Germanic element, which is the silent Germanic element, which I’d say sort of drops, sort of complicates things a little bit, but it’s not that that doesn’t take away from it. Actually, it would probably build it up, but yeah, I think that’s largely correct. Yeah, it is that fusion of a more, the more Roman way of doing things and the Greek way of doing things, the UK being a sort of vessel for a Roman way. Yeah, yeah, I’d say so. And yeah, no, that does me. Great, all right, you wanna say anything to wrap up or? Well, what I will say is that ancient history, and it’s particularly talking about the enlightenment, the enlightenment is kind of like the, you have more of these primary texts, right? That people can read. So you will find, I think Livy’s history of Rome was just found in the basement of a monastery somewhere, which is great. If you wanna ever go to a monastery, maybe even if you don’t wanna go there for prayer, which maybe it’s helpful, but dig around to their basements because they’ve got stuff hiding in there probably, especially the ones that aren’t inhabited anymore, which there are quite a few in Ireland. But back to the point to wrap up, these texts are filtered through many modern eyes when they get to a lot of the present day books. And that’s fine if you want a quick narrative history like Tom Holland, I think is good for that. But unfortunately, I actually have some of the books here. Some of the, so you can get the primary sources, but it’s a bit of a slog because a lot of the modern translations, now you can get old translations. I’ll just give you an example, like Plutarch’s Lives, you can get John Dryden’s translation. He’s translating in the 1700s. These primary sources give you a view into the ancient world that helps you to, if you just read them as you, this is somebody talking to you basically across many centuries, and you can avoid some of the pitfalls of that modern framing. And to that end, I think it helps as well because a lot of these people, they strike you as real people. I’ve read the letters of Seneca and I’m reading the letters of Seneca and he strikes you as somebody who is just a genuine person. He’s writing to his friend. He’s writing a letter to his friend and he’s just giving him advice. And so people can get kind of caught up in the abstract nature of it, but fundamentally what I’ve learned from history, what I’ve learned from studying history is not from books. Most of these books have only got, maybe a few weeks ago. It’s by talking about it like we’re doing here. It’s by continuing an oral tradition that can be reinforced and made fuller in the vein of the Enlightenment. The big part of the Enlightenment is you have a lot of these more primary texts. You can build up something much greater through that discussion. And so, yeah, I’d just say, I’ll finish with that and say, books are cool, talking is better. There you go. That’s good. Yeah, and I just wanna pitch, like I haven’t had Adam on the channel before, but we’ve had many discussions. We had a great one about the French Revolution and maybe how it was a misapprehension of what happened in the American Revolution by way of misunderstanding the Enlightenment. And if you want more talks like this, you can comment below and maybe I can convince Adam to give up more of his time and have more of these discussions. I’d love to have that discussion again because that was a lot of fun. I think that’d take us two and a half hours to go through the whole idea of what Napoleon did and how all of that might’ve played out, right? We’re not making statements. We’re not historical experts or anything, but we’re just playing with the ideas and some of the patterns that we see. So Adam, thank you so much for your time and I’m glad that we were able to do this. And look, the Bridge of the Meaning Discord, Adam’s there far too much probably since he should be in the lab doing his research, but we won’t snitch on him too much. We kinda like talking to him. So yeah, join him there. I’m usually there too, usually talking to Adam. Whenever Adam’s on, I actually try to sneak on if I can. That’s how much I like talking to Adam. And plus I get to find out about modern Ireland, right? My quarter part ancestral homeland because I’m part Irish and part Greek. There you are. 50% French Canadians. Those are the good French because they left France the minute it went bad. That’s still my story. So thanks Adam. Thanks for your time. I really appreciate it. And I’ll see you on the Discord soon. Thank you very much. All right, man. Have a great day.