Welcome Caribbean rhythms episode 176 this is weekend before election 2024 America. This show I am releasing Sunday New York time and I hear already so there are rumors spreading through wide through the five boroughs that two columns of Czech and Slovenian and Austrian athletes athletes from Carniola oiled in 100% organic Croatian olive oil who have been called upon by Melania Trump and are led by me. And we have currently crossed the taconic state parkway lines in New York State, New York State under the banner of the black flag, converging on polling places also further south we go down Appalachian Corridor to Atlanta, and then on to Pittsburgh, Detroit, many other place in American hinterland swing states to secure these provinces for Hegemon Trump,

who has been anointed as God's hammer of destruction in our time. I have mobilized these Slavic male models on Melania's command, two to three thousand vigorous checks. They're congregating now as we speak, congregating shirtless upon polling places, Brooklyn, New York City, holding batons of disciplines. Some are grabbing their big cocks in menacing fashion, but this show on the ancient equivalent of all this on Sparta and the Spartan spirit on ancient Greeks who were unlike what you might think, the Greeks were actually revolutionary people, not what you might expect, but that's for next segment. I will talk the life of Agisilaus, who was basically the last notable king of Sparta, the last king of Sparta as a sovereign and powerful state in charge of its own destiny.

There were kings after that, but they were very much kinglets. Isn't that? And look, without that, without full ability to determine your own future, full sovereignty, you are nothing. Without being in charge of your own future, I've come to understand the fears of the European right wing a bit better over the last few years regarding Russia, for example, especially of the fears of the Scandinavians, who Russia tries to bully from time to time. They are paranoid. They are jealous of their own independence. small European nations, and no amount of asides about, you can tell that yes, your leftist leadership is importing foreigners and low IQ retards and trying to replace you in your own countries. They know that, but they fight against it.

And for them to be, for example, saved so-called by Russia from that fate is not something you'd want from their point of view, because once you lose your independence, really you are no matter how good the day-to-day things may become it's it's not worth it they think right it's much easier to fix a problem against your local left wing and even arguably to fight if fighting needs be against the far away America that's exerting influence on your government then it would be to fight over an empire that has reduced you formally to an appendage to a province appendage where you no longer literally no longer can control your own destiny and you've become and I say this because in ancient Greece you see this happen you know they had a lot of problems of course chief among this

you can say it's internecine constant wars among the Greeks themselves the ancient Greeks constant bloody wars and yet after Greece loses its independence to Macedon even though in some sense it its stature in the world is even improved it becomes the cultural leader of a world state its language its culture spreading everywhere and the local wars for the most part stop, but Greece itself becomes a kind of husk, a backwater, right? And that's the whole, to be a backwater, you're not only not in charge of your own destiny and you're dependent on others politically, but also then in the sense of culture and intellect. Greece from this point actually stops being nearly as productive and vital in a philosophical,

Artistic intellectual senses it had been before of course there were notable Greeks even after this one of them I talked about on this show plutarch, but they much fewer much fewer than before right okay? So now in Russia if you want to go to do anything you go to Moscow Nothing is going to happen in Lesgin autonomous Republic of megadog estan or something like this in France Also, you go to Paris in other words in most countries nothing happens really in provinces. But if you are not just a province, but you are, let's say, a foreign province, you're reduced as a corner in somebody else's empire, what then? You don't really have any options. You have to basically leave then unless, you know, you can go to the capital, I say, maybe in Kowtow, or you have to emigrate the way

Joseph Conrad emigrate from Poland to England. You know, so you see what I say intellectual life after this in Greece continues, but at a much reduced. So it's a fine balance in what I'm saying, you know, because on one hand, politically, it's true that eras of political weakness can be culturally and intellectually times of great flowering. Nietzsche says this, for example, in reference to 19th century France versus 19th century Germany. Again, this is more like, think the 1850s and after, which from our point of view, and We live in an intellectual desert, but from our point of view, that time had high culture, but actually compared to the decades and centuries before, and even the late 19th century, but

let's say especially the period 1860 to 1890, especially in Germany, was not what it had been. It was felt by Nietzsche and others very badly that it was dreaded, the 1870s and 1880s especially seemed dire at the time. And this point is the efforts and energies required for national unification and empire and all the spiritual energy goes into the stem and into the political yes the stem grows big but the flower is lacking and he makes the same point. You can make it with Rome versus Greece. You can make it also with Venice which was a strong and stable state versus Florence a politically brittle and volatile fiery state, a weak state maybe. But this is the only, this is true only in the sense that the people put its energies

maybe in such times in intellect and spirit rather than in politics. If it has a period of political weakness or malaise, it puts its energies into spirit rather than war and conquest and commerce and so forth. But that's not true in the sense that you become subservient and comfortable backwater in somebody else's empire where nothing ever happens again. Really kills a culture, it kills the mind as well. I think this is probably true within normal states, in other words I'm saying between the lines do not go to the countryside please, do not retreat into the countryside and live in a hovel. Do not grow mushrooms with a wife in a goddamn hovel like some right-wing influencer dissidents are saying, right?

should grow, move to Alaska and grow red peppers unless you want to feel like you blow your brains out in a cabin there, you know, so, look, I got carried away, I meant to say something here about Singapore, that's what this preamble is about. Singapore is like this too, it's a reflection of this human drive for ownership over one's destiny, over one's own destiny, for the independence of a people, I mean. In this case, Singapore was founded as the expression of the self-determination of the overseas Chinese in that location. The Hokkien, the Teochao, other Chinese groups, mostly they originated in South China, the Cantonese part of China, or in Fujian part of China, those regions, and they had immigrated

to Southeast Asia, and in some cases for centuries they had been doing this, looking for commercial opportunities and so on. But when the time came for Malaysia to get its independence from Britain, they said no. In 1960, we don't want to live under the alien rule of others. We want to be in charge of our own future. And you might have heard me say negative things about Han Chinese on this show and in my book, but I do have a soft spot for the overseas Chinese who, by the way, they don't like it when China claims them as co-nationals. They say, fuck you, we're culturally Chinese. We share a history with you and we'll even now these days we'll adopt Mandarin and we'll teach our kids Mandarin instead of Hokken and Hakka and our traditional dialects now

that China's becoming a greater regional power and so on, but we are distinct and we're not an extension of you. And you know that seems so natural to me that I don't understand why whole world doesn't want this kind of local self-rule. The Greeks certainly wanted this. It defined them politically, I think. So they would say, yes, thank you very much. I know you are Greek too, and you speak the same language, and we recognize ties of blood and language and culture and religion with you. And we'll attend the same festivals and the Olympics and the other games and so on. We'll stop wars for those times. Only Greeks are welcome, but we're not actually interested in you telling us how to live and where we can colonize or who to go to war or who to make peace with just because you

are the same people as we are in a huge crisis situation, will band together against Persians or Carthaginians or such, but overall they wanted to live their own paths and really their own paths in the sense that way of life could be radically different in, say, Sparta versus Athens. So you can say in another sense this was part of their weakness also, you'll see on this episode later because it was left then to another nation and not them to conquer Asia in the Greek name, which this had long been a Greek ambition to take over Asia from Persia. But on the other hand, I do think it's a natural human drive, stronger in some peoples than others I suppose, to want to be free in your own state, in charge of your own sovereignty.

It's not actually clear why the people of Los Angeles should listen to the people of Washington D.C. or the people of Austin, Texas or Dallas or whatever should listen to what people in Washington and New York decide why in terms of their day-to-day life, I mean. I myself have always deeply felt this need. What I mention in the book about ownership of spaces related to this, but before I could even think well about anything serious, as As a small boy, I was plotting to try to form a secret society for these reasons, you know, so why I'm saying all this? I wrote an article, which I won't describe here in detail, you should read it, please. I've posted it on my Twitter account and it's my first substack article, substank, Race

in America and the Dork Right is the title, which I wrote against the so-called IQ faction of the right, HBD faction so-called of the right. But the people who fetishize IQ, IQ scores and tests in particular, and who see it as an all-important in a political sense, and there were many good responses to this article. I think, though, that some missed my point, because I wasn't just saying that by going down the IQ nationalism or IQ-centric path that you would probably miss a society geared around what's spiritually or creatively great that way, that you'd miss that opportunity or let's say a society like ancient Athens that you couldn't create that. Although by far smarter, you know, you could say Athens was far smarter by any standards than any

of the societies around at the time for sure and any modern society also. It's estimated by Galton, he is a great eugenicist and statistician thinker on things like IQ and such, but it was estimated by Galton, I think, to have an average IQ of around 130 or 140, something ridiculous like that, if I remember right, about ancient Athens, but it wasn't really based around examination scores or fundamentally based on rewarding IQ or even intelligence narrowly defined as such. It was based on very different other things, I'm saying ancient Athens, which you might for example, if you want to know what these things are, you read Thucydides' speeches, pick up Thucydides' book and whenever the speaker speaks of Athens as do certain Spartans

at the beginning, when they are contrasting the Spartan way of life with the Athenian, and counseling not to go to war with Athens, or Pericles' funeral oration, very famous. You see what the Athenians value. They did not look like an oriental Mandarin examination society or a technocratic society of managers that administers IQ tests and science positions based on this. Well, I keep going on many asides, but you see what I mean. I wasn't just saying that a society based on IQ reward is not sexy or glamorous or such things. The points I wanted to emphasize in this article was less that, for example, the European versus Asian differences in creativity, science, et cetera, let alone their differences in

spirituality or artistic creation. I'm saying I did not want to emphasize this. People are focusing on this, but this was not my point. And also, Les, I wanted to focus on whether India or China as such are the future. I didn't want to make contrast between spiritless technician society and the noble warrior one. I mentioned these things, but many commenters focused on this because I guess it's catchy. Some of these ideas like the creativity differences point between Europeans and Asians have been made before by others. Other of these points are disputable and others can maybe be waved away as a matter of preference. I've said some of these before too, I don't like to repeat myself. I guess people chose to read

what I had said previously into what I wrote now. But no, what I wanted to emphasise instead was who these people were, right? Who are the IQ right people? Not by name but who they are as character and the fact that they have stupid 4chan meme motives for their fixations. You know, a black guy calls you pussy on the street and you hurry home and write 40,000 pages about IQ scores and how you need to revamp society to have absolute monarchic control given to nerds who otherwise did not feel safe on the screets, you know, this and it's a 4chan meme, right? And that all of this leads necessarily to a very bad positive vision that these people carry an unstated moral and political program and I wanted to show what this program is with an emphasis on

its tyrannical and even its usurping aspects. I mean the prospect of a a technological, managerial, and actually mostly foreign elite of various nationalities equipped with authoritarian power to fight against so-called black savagery, a state geared around that. That isn't just, for example, boring or spiritless or whatever. I think the effects would be atrocious, actively atrocious. It's a result that would be both, on one hand, a kind of cruel slave driver society. having a Nikki Haley with a Chinese accent as your boss whipping you. Many of these historical priest-clerk societies have been cruel in this way, and also brittle and weak. Clerk societies are both cruel and weak. And although some of the people making these IQ, let's say IQ supremacy, IQ nationalism,

whatever you want to call it, IQ right argument, again they frame things in this binary way between the black savages on one hand and dutiful, multicoloured professionals on the other, law-abiding and so that, and clean streets. And some of them may actually have good intentions, especially the ex-libertarian, the techno-libertarian bros who are just natural contrarians. And my point is they may think that by driving things in this direction they are supporting what they see as a well-run Singapore, because that's their idea, right? Singapore as the cure to modern problems cities that have homeless or cities with dumb shiboons being right you're forced to hire this dumb shiboon and meanwhile a guy who invents who lands rockets has to be nationally shamed because he was

Pictured on TV wearing anime titties on his shirt that actually happened if you remember there was a nerd He was wearing a shirt with with anime girls or and it offended women and there was a national scandal about it and you know a normal society should applaud I think they landed I think NASA landed some some small module on a moving asteroid or something it was a nice achievement Elon has done better since but it was worthy of commendation and this man shouldn't have been attacked and forced to nationally apologize like that that's obviously unjust and stupid right but by the way what does any of that have to do with IQ that that was women it was cuts in the ghost is rising up a scandal about that.

So there are men who see that and become outraged and they see a place like Singapore where that generally does not happen and they say, well, we want this, we want this kind of society that Singapore has. And so with these kinds of IQ right arguments, you can call them merit IQ society, they may think that they are driving for a Singapore, but what they miss about Singapore is that the majority of its citizens are overseas Chinese still today, something like 70 to 80 percent. I think it's closer to 70 percent. It's basically their Israel. That's why I think also the percentage of Jews in Israel is something like 72 percent, something like that. But the IQ or the human inequality arguments that Lee Kuan Yew invoked to support the creation

of this new state Singapore, these were a kind of after-the-fact justification for the independence and self-rule of his own people. That was the real motivation. The fact that Singapore publicly eschews ethnic chauvinism and welcomes foreign residents of high ability or income is par for the course for any great commercial port and it doesn't contradict any of what I'm saying. Athens, by the way, also had a large population of foreign professionals and medics and foreign residents and merchants. And even though it was Greek and extremely being Greek, it was very jealous and paranoid even about its citizen roles, frankly often xenophobic. Any great city, any great empire, also for different reasons. But yes, any great commercial city will have many foreigners. That doesn't contradict

the fact that Singapore, its being, its foundation, is as a self-expression of the freedom and independence of the overseas Chinese, and a situation like this, like Singapore, analogous to Singapore I'm saying, is not what's being argued for in the United States or even Europe by tech bros or by the people making the kind of IQ and human biodiversity arguments against The results, rather, in this case, in Europe or America, because they are not focusing on that human aspect on which Singapore was founded, but on this other IQ aspect, so what would result would be a motley foreign elite of professionals, and again that's not what Singapore is. I claim that if it were that, it would be a nightmare. Singapore, even so, already has significant bad points, but without that human element

where it's a political union for the sovereignty of certain people in that area. If it was really just a platform for any professional from whatever origin of high IQ, it would be the horrid bloodless tyranny and I don't think it would last very long either. Singapore has actually very strong nationalist military, universal military service and this kind of thing and you can't maintain that kind of loyalty and fervor even though I think Singapore is declining in our own day but in its heyday you could not maintain that type of thing with just let's say as a platform for an IQ tech elite or whatever so anyway that was mostly my point in the article I hope you read it many have enjoyed it there was also another article published

this week about my book in a new French magazine called Rage. I think it's called Rage. I posted a partial translation but I'll ask friends to make a complete one. It's a very interesting article trying to make the case that much exists in common between the things I say and the desires and aspirations, the thoughts of the Neo Reaction group. I think this is true. I've always been friends with the Neo Reaction people and this essay is nice. It try to relate my thought first to that of Deleuze and others. I don't like Deleuze, but Nick Land likes him and others like him. But what I found striking in this article, the reason I mention it now, is the suggestion the author makes that the ancient Greeks had

their own notion of progress. Very different from modern progress, but they had their own kind of unusual vision of progress and that this separation or opposition that's often assume to exist by many commentators between a techno or a tech-grown, neo-reactionary futurist right on one hand and on the other hand the aesthetic traditionalist reactionary right, often they are religious, but that division is not necessarily so, it doesn't need to be so, this opposition doesn't need to exist and I think this writer correctly observes it doesn't exist in my book. My book isn't traditionalist, okay? And in the concern over eugenics and nature and breeding and the ancient Greeks' own discovery of nature as opposed to convention and tradition, there is actually a lot there that is revolutionary.

And in a different sense of the word progressive, not in the left-wing sense or even the modern liberal direction of history sense, but having to do with a revolutionary willingness to experiment with various forms of state, various... and it is this aspect maybe that you'll see I emphasize on this next part of the episode, where I will talk the life of Agisilaus, the great king of Sparta, which was itself such an experimental revolutionary state, I believe. And I want to, yes, emphasize this aspect of Greek times, the revolutionary age, let's say the Greek age from 800 B.C. to 400 or 300 B.C., those 500 years, the revolutionary age. I will be right back. Elon, get those rocket ships going. We want to reach Mars. Get ships going. We want to reach Mars. Get ships going.

We want to reach Mars. I was talking to a bureaucrat the other day and I will say something now that my unscrupulous haters are welcome to take out of context, try to use for PR against me, but consider question of mass migration for a moment, for a long time. I've said that mass migration is the defining political matter of our time and while I have my own unusual racial reasons to believe that. I'm aware that the majority of Americans and Europeans, they wouldn't like those reasons. Maybe they have other reasons and can be convinced in other ways. But it's gotten so bad this time under Biden that, yes, I remember it was 2015. I was supporting Trump from time he came on escalator. And I met a Republican Chad he was an old friend of mine an ex-Marine captain he had been in

firefights and such a good friend I admired him but unfortunately he supported Kasich because he believed Trump would start wars you know and this kind of nonsense and so I don't know I haven't spoken to him for years since I assume that now he's for Trump finally a lot of these guys have come around but I But I remember telling him, you know, Merkel just busted up her own country, and let him floodgate refugees, and you're seeing now Hillary Clinton is planning to do the same thing to America. You must vote for Trump to stop this. It doesn't matter if you think he's a bit vulgar or whatever. He's not, you know, and he said, well, no way, I don't believe it. He would not believe it. Why would they do that? And I said, well, she said she'd do it.

said that Merkel is a role model and she said the age of mass migrations here and so did Marco Rubio at that time by the way but this guy he would not believe and he said I don't trust Trump and so I said get get over it get you get over your wife doesn't like that he said poopy or whatever get over this and just make sure to vote for you know Trump to stop this insanity of mass human columns coming in, they'll do to you what Merkel did to Germany and make the youth of America a minority in their own country. But as it happened, Trump stopped it when he got in office. He stopped refugee flows. He cut down on so-called legal immigration, too, of which there's too much. But he stopped all of the NGO refugee organizations. They went out of business or were much reduced.

Saddam Hussein had to close offices, and then they cancelled the election in 2020 and installed Biden and they did under him what they were planning to do under Hillary, so much so that even a Reddit-tier liberal like Elon, he has come to recognize it. Yes, I know he was upset by his son being truned out, but on this he recognizes that it's leftist demographic political warfare, a mass importation from the latrines of the world to change the electorate and now many people see this, everyone see and this has long been my only political matter, the only thing that matters to me because other bad things are all reversible. This one is also reversible but much more difficultly and so I'm very glad it's become defining matter of this election in large part also because of efforts of frogs, my

friends like Martin who actually spoke to people in those towns that were being flooded by Haitian cat diddlers, and it catapulted it into national discourse again in a central way. So by way of this preamble, I said all of this to remind you the stakes of this election and my own political stance on this thing for many years, but now I'll say something else that may be the opposite, and not as advocacy for which I don't have the power to anyway, but to show you something deep dysfunctional about America and Europe, meaning Meaning that they go well beyond the matter of just mass migration. Because I think if you did flood America with cheap labor, it could lead to significant increase. If things were neutral, I mean if that's all that, if it was a neutral base of a country

where you imported mass amount of cheap labor, it might lead actually to significant increase in birth rate for the only people who matter, smarter and more beautiful and such people. Because one of the principal disincentives to have children for, say, middle class and higher in America, in Europe, is the prospect of increased house chores, chaotic domestic life. For a man in particular, this is a serious obstacle. You know, it is so because a lot of feminist effort goes into solving just this problem. That aware of it, it's a big obstacle to family formation, which is why feminist lobbies in Scandinavian states and I think in Spain too of all places in Spain there are laws now mandating that the man must do equal house chores, equal child caretaking as the wife

which you know is typical euro-cock European Union busybody state nanny state insanity and impossible to enforce. Well maybe they can selectively enforce it you know against men they don't like that's what usually happens but I think if you look in your own life and that of your friends And I can tell you for me, for example, this would be a major obstacle unless baby mama decides to, yes, let's agree to nannies and such, or she moved to Colombia. But when you look at among the ultra-rich, the birth rate is not nearly so bad, you know, which tells you everything you need to know. Many ultra-rich women are actually sluts, by the way, and I say that in a good way. I'm saying this as a counterargument to religious people and trads who, excuse me, not religious

people are okay, I mean religious commentators. You know, the type of religious commentator who, the so-called trads, who say that, oh, young people are too busy fucking around and going to nightclub and carousing and this why they are not having children, but no, the upper class girls, they carouse much more and they have quite intense nightclub here, actually, and then they end up having more children than others. They have as many children often by different men, but they have many children because they can afford many nannies. It's not a burden on them and then, you know, extremely poor people do the same because they're negligent, right? But in America, it's generally only the ultra-rich who can afford nannies in any force and I

say in any significant force because it's not like it makes a difference if you can hire a teen girl for one or two hours, you pay a girl to take care of kid after school. That's not what I mean. In particular, you need someone to cover the early years of child reading almost completely. That's where the real obstacle is, especially for men. And you need basically around the clock nannies. And what current arrangement does is it weeds out, selects out of child making, I guess, a large portion of very good men who can't or don't want to go through that. And historically, that was not the case. The man didn't take care of the kid or, you know, when an infant or such. Men are not generally equipped psychologically or anything else to do that.

It was the wife and her relatives or servants who did that and this is not to throw shade at men who like doing that or are good at it. Many can, but there are also many other good ones who can't at all. By the way, the ones who can, I think it's unfair also what happens to them because many Many have difficult, good jobs, and often their wives do not, and still they have to share full household chores and such. But many can't take that at all, that it's elected out of the enterprise of having a family unless they're willing to father with single mothers or donate sperm ores or such. It's not solvable in America or Europe unless you're ultra-rich, so it's a serious obstacle, Whereas you could think if you flooded the country really with cheap labor and turned

it into a Colombia or Brazil, well that would solve this. And then you ask, but would it really solve it? Because leaving aside the fact that there is a welfare state and that many of such migrants would make more doing nothing and getting welfare than working for small pay as a nanny, And many of them are putting words into my mouth that are inappropriate. Many of them would qualify eligible for affirmative action. But quite aside from these things, reliable help in people is the problem. isn't enough, you need help that does not abuse or that you are not afraid to leave with baby. I mean, can you imagine leaving a baby in America now with a shiboon the way they are now in the United States and this is the biggest objection I hear from friends or in France

if you left them with, you know, there are such ethnic tensions sometimes with North North Africans especially, you know, can you do that, can you leave with, you know, they've imported some especially feral Congolese to Paris, they look like orc, I don't know, would you do that? You know, I have friends with children, some have very high pay, white collar job, but they cannot find, they say they're afraid to, they cannot find anyone who they would trust to leave small kids with, you know, and if you go to Rio on the other hand, or any other part of Latin America, but let's say you go to Rio de Janeiro and it's all Aunt Jemima's on the street carting around the blonde kids and toddlers, you know, and they just let them, the parents let them do that. Why? Nothing ever happens to them.

How does that kind of trust exist? And I think, well, think through, think through what would happen to one of those Aunt Jemima's if instead she decided to embody a shibun and do something bad to a kid under her care And think what would happen to that person in a place like Brazil with off-duty cops and this and what might even happen to her family. So you know, on the basis of that, a certain trust can form and even sympathy and friendliness after that, but that you could not do that in America even though an underclass exists and you couldn't do it probably the way things are now, even if you flooded the countries with armies of cheap labor rights from more pliable nations. But you couldn't do that. And why can't you do that?

Because a whole complex of grievance exists to stoke up these people's anger and envy and to rile them up. And then if they do anything, then retaliation becomes so complicated that it's not enough of a deterrent. And so parents in America and Europe then don't have the conditions to trust the cheap labor that is there. And at the moment, there isn't really enough of it to make a difference in day to day life in this sense. They can't take advantage of what's there anyway because state, society, everything arrayed against them makes it unusable. But this shows you just what a pathological place America and Europe are, right? Because you go Hong Kong and Singapore and Dubai and they import Filipino and many other

caretakers and it's not so bad as it's not pure evil slavery as I hear there is in Kuwait where you go to Star Cox and the people who work there are Filipinos or whatever and they look just absolutely depressed and broken. No one wants to see that. That's real slavery in Kuwait. These places are milder, but although I should tell you the vast majority, for example in Hong Kong or Singapore, the vast majority of their own citizens can't afford either. I mean, not to take care of toddlers in that sense I've been talking about. They can have a maid once a week for an hour or something and they can't do what I'm talking about. If you're an engineer on the other hand in Venezuela, you can have three or four nannies, but please don't bring up kindergarten.

Parents won't and shouldn't leave their kids in care of the state in a place like United States and like Europe is becoming. Forgive if I repeat myself. My parents tried to send me to kindergarten when I was a small boy and that was very common in communist state. All the kids did it. They attacked my throat. I was four or five. I wouldn't have it though. This was communist kindergarten. All the kids went. It was very safe, very clean, but I wouldn't have it and I ended up getting very depressed and they saw this. I would be in the park alone and I wouldn't be talking to anyone because I got depressed of kindergarten. got me a nanny, who actually ended up being a monarchist woman. After the fall of communism,

she ran the retiree's monarchist union asking for the return of the king. Sorry if I've said this before and I repeat myself, I like this woman. I remained lifelong friends with her. She died, maybe they poisoned her, but before the war she had come from an aristo-family and considered my parents losers because they were professionals, which is a word she used as a slur. But even so, that was very uncommon for people to have more than one child under communism at that time. That was considered very unusual. And in my case, a nanny, an effort was made for that. I was already four or five anyway, but an effort was made because I was too sensitive, I guess, to attend kindergarten. But that was unusual. So yes, no kindergarten. You need this. You need nannies.

It's better than foisting a kid on an extended family, I think, by the way. Please don't start with, oh, the brown nanny will instill the wrong values. I've seen right-wing girls say things like that. Please. The reason parents are afraid to leave kids with Shanika or even Consuela is that without referrals showing that this person is 100% reliable, again, the pathologies of America can Europe now reveal that these people are not really there to provide cheap labor, as is alleged. They do no such service. They are there simply because the leaders of these countries hate you. If they didn't, again I'm not advocating, but if they didn't, parents, normal parents could at least also derive benefit from a rival of such and I suspect that whatever

way you solve this problem, if you can solve it, I have friends now into artificial intelligence And he thinks that, I have a bet with him, he thinks there will be robots, humanoid robots in the next year or two years that can do this, that can take care of household chores. But I don't know, even if these are proven to be safe and reliable and it will take some time for people to trust robots, but would you leave them, would you leave small kid with a robot? maybe my friend Loki Julianus would, but would you? Maybe I would, but would you? I don't know. I think if you leave your kid with Aunt Jemima, there is now, you know, it's a proven practice. There has been hundreds of years that that's been done in the

colonial Western world. Kid doesn't turn out bad. You take care of their education when you have time, and after they reach the age of five or six, more intensively, and they turn out fine but you know I don't know I don't know aside from that however you choose to solve this problem I think if you did have something like robots or some some other way whether you can you know the birth rate would shoot very much up if you can relieve parents of this fear and problem of chores in this crucial first few years of infant and such but yes this aside maybe is more of a thought experiment to show you why Trump and others not just Trump but But in Europe, too, the migration restriction parties, why migration restriction is in itself

felt as necessary because of the pathological conditions of grievance, the grievance complex that exists, right, otherwise it could be more of, it wouldn't be as bad, it would be more of a Dubai situation. But that's the big reason why it's necessary, how the attitude is, how dare you exploit with these fine people sir, instead we should let out red carpet you evil exploiter and that kind of thing. But otherwise maybe having slaves would be a good thing. What do you think? I think maybe having slaves is good. I will now talk about some of the best societies ever had slaves and I will talk next ancient Greek which is a slave society very much for sure through and through in which the noble Greek man, the free Greek man understood himself

and his qualities and character in distinction to the slave. I will be right back. Yes, I am back and I have to tell you that I hear voices of kind of like a humanoid dog head type people in this corridor underground. I don't know why, as I was smoking now before I record this segment, this image that came to mind of a kind of underground wind tunnel, I don't know if that's the name, it's a tunnel with wind in it, and humanoid dog voices echoing in my brain as I'm about to record this, excuse. I'm about to read to you something, but I think that Isidas, and that's not Isildur, Isidas, but I think that Isidas, the son of Poibidas, must have been a strange and marvelous sight, not only to his fellow-citizens, but also to his enemies.

He was of conspicuous beauty and stature, and at an age when the human flower has the greatest charm, as the boy merges into the man, naked as he was, naked as he was, without either defensive armor or clothing, for he had just anointed his body with oil. He took a spear in one hand and a sword in the other, leaped forth from his house and after pushing his way through the midst of the combatants, ranged up and down among the enemy, smiting and laying low all who encountered him. And no man gave him a wound, whether it was that a god shielded him on account of his valor or that the enemy thought him taller and mightier than a mere man could be. For this exploit it is said that the Ephors put a garland on his head and then fined him

a thousand drachmas because he had dared to hazard his life without armor in battle yes do you like this this is handsome thursday indeed but i didn't write it is from plutarch life of agassilaus and while this might have happened around 362 361 bc or so it is a i think a living line a living tradition of a naked berserk type warrior style that you find in all aryan societies and that would have been especially preserved in a fossil state like Sparta that preserved some very ancient things. The shedding of your armor and fighting shirtless in battle as you became a wolf is an old, it even appears, it's very old, it appears in Assyrian reliefs where the Assyrian king had hired mercenaries from the north and they are depicted in these Assyrian reliefs as

tall, peer shirtless, mad shirtless fighters. It's a very old tradition. You read an article, if you're interested, by one, Speidel. That's the author's name, Speidel. Berzerks, a history of Indo-European mad warriors, an academic article from 2002, I think. But similar traditions existed among Vedic knights and Indo-Iranian tribes and Celts And famously, of course, the Vikings. And as for similar chimp-outs, like you just heard, although they were not done shirtless, but such things happened from time to time in Spartan history. Very famous in the telling of Herodotus in his history, there is a man, Aristodemus, who survived the stand of the 300 at Thermopylae, and therefore because he survived he was held

under dishonor until he went berserk style and redeemed itself at the bigger battle at that the Greeks won, where they kicked the Persians out of mainland Greece, and he fought with great valor. He didn't take his armor off, but he did berserk style, and he was still rebuked, though, for breaking formation, because that's what was prized at Sparta by classical times. When you broke that, you were fined or rebuked. But I went on this tangent not just because it's colorful and fun, but it illustrates such thing the Spartan spirit, what they try to be, how they appear to foreigners and to us today especially, they appear as maybe hyper-disciplined group unit, but in reality they were never fully tamed, they were never fully disciplined in this manner.

They were very much the wild wolves of the wolf worker Lycurgus, the founder of their city Lycurgus, literally mean wolf worker. They were the men of Apollo, the wolf god. And there are many instances in Spartan history of this same double spirit where it's all devotion to the city and discipline, and on the other hand, wild, wolfish individualism. I think both qualities are reflected in the life of Agisilaus, its greatest and last king. Not literally Sparta's last king, but he was, you could say, the king of Sparta at its height. And after his reign Sparta was never again a preeminent state in Greece or anywhere else. It sunk into more or less obscurity. But that's still a good run if you say that Sparta ended with the absorption into the Macedonian dominion.

It was still a kind of quaint tourist site in Roman times. But by the, of course, absorption into Macedon, if you count that as the end, that is still a good 500 years or so of existence that's both independent and all its own characteristic independence. Not just independence but going its own way which is much better than you can say for modern states. I guess you could say the British state is over a thousand years old if you count the last serious change being William the Conqueror. But anyway, Agasilaus ruled from 400 to 360 BC, and throughout that life he had endless adventures. Both Xenophon and Plutarch have biographies of him, a kind of image of singular men, a kind of which there is no other, they emphasize this, but who display some of Sparta's best and worst traits in himself.

And it is the question of character and the quality of the man that interests these ancient authors the most. I think they're right to do this because history, what interests modern audiences is history, but history is a confused mess with no meaning. But in the life of one man, you find a lot of meaning, a lot to admire or even practically to see what there is to emulate and not emulate. But a man's life can be a work of art. History is no such thing as art. But do you like this idea of a man's whole life as a work of art? associated with something Japanese, where on the reflection of the evanescence of existence and the need to give the right end to life as a form of character expression, to have that life tell a coherent story.

But it's ancient Greek idea too, when Xenophon praises Agisilaus' great piety and religiosity, the one thing he mentions, the one thing he uses to illustrate Agisilaus' religiosity is that he was ever God-fearing, believing that they who are living life well are not yet happy, but only they who have died gloriously are blessed. Do you like this? Yes, if you think it through, it's a very different image of what's pious and right than what the moderns have. The everlasting glory of your example flowing on the mouths of men for all time, because Your life was like a symphony or a work of art with a proper bang out end, a symphony with an end. If you remember Solon's story is that he tells King Croesus in Herodotus. He says the same thing.

King Croesus is showing off his wealth, his power, and Solon tells him, no, not really. Only the man who ends his life well is actually happy and he tells him the story of the kuroi, which I mentioned in my own book about dying at your apex. That is true happiness. The same thing, same story exact that Xenophon says about Agasilau was the same attitude. It's always been very important to me this ancient Greek vision and it's reflected I think in their why they were so passionate about biography and why they wanted to make the characters of their personages so vivid because they cared about history more as a way to illustrate this and the timeless possibilities of human nature than about history's actual course and events and so on, which aren't so important in the end.

You know, it's a kind of tedious, oh this personage in history is important because you as the connection between this age and that age, well who cares really? But this is a very different vision of progress than ours, which is based on belief that time must unfold toward a specific end or type of place. But that doesn't mean they didn't have a kind of... Look, I'm telling you what I say on this episode, ancient Greece was a mad and revolutionary time. Classical Greece, I mean, the period of their greatness, let's say 600s to end of 300 BC. I'll get to this in a moment. But for my preamble here, why did I get into this? Because the Greek view of history and character versus the modern, yes, because a modern audience wants historical significance.

So then I'll give it to you in this way for a modern audience and distill Agassiz Lao's life in the sense of telling you that he was a kind of proto Alexander the Great and that he could have probably achieved what Alexander had achieved some decades before. And this was, you know, a source of great sadness for later Greeks, that Alexander got to ruling the world before they did. And Plutarch even mentions this attitude among the Greeks of his own time, Plutarch is writing centuries later. But he says, there is this other historian who mentioned how happy the Greeks of later times must have been to have seen Alexander as the ruler of Asia and on the Persian throne. And Plutarch say, well that guy doesn't know what he's talking about, we would have much

rather seen a Greek general, a Greek leader on the Persian throne than Alexander. It's actually a cause of great grief for us that it had to be just the kind of Macedonian who's a kind of a sort of Greek, you know? So, but yes, in some sense, Sagesilaus stood at the precipice of world conqueror himself. Otherwise, if you want to talk about his role as a historical actor rather than what he represents as a man in himself. But as a historical actor, he oversaw the decline of Sparta just as the Athenian leader of roughly the same time, a generation later. But Phocion, who I talked about a couple of episodes back, he oversaw the decline of Athens. But in both cases, you know, Plutarch maybe didn't see it that It didn't really matter.

You can still have life as a work of art and the emanation of a great man from the ground of being of nature, like Agisilaus and Phocion, even in an age of decline, even if they oversee the decline of their own states as leaders. But in any case, can you say that Agisilaus could be blamed for that decline? He came into power at Sparta, at its height, and left it low. But I don't know if you can blame him for that in the same way that I don't know if you can blame Phocaeon for Athens' decline. I don't know if it's fair to do this. Yes, Agisilaus was king, but the kings in Sparta had very limited power. And as Plutarch and Xenophon never stopped showing, Sparta actually had many different factions. And it was often that Agisilaus didn't come out in the politicking, he didn't come out

on top in the politicking struggles. So he didn't necessarily end up making many of the decisions that led to Sparta's decline. In particular, he was almost always undefeated on the battlefield and he was not responsible, at least not directly in the military sense, responsible for Sparta's catastrophic military losses during this time. For example, at the Battle of Leuctra, you may have heard of this in 371 BC, this was the battle that Sparta lost against Thebes and it never recovered after this. But this contentiousness, this inner strife between factions and powerful personalities that existed in Sparta, as much as it existed in any Greek city, it was the engine of the Greek state, the Agon, the contest.

There's a beautiful passage in Plutarch's biography of Agisilaus about this, I will read it. Natural philosophers are of the opinion that, if strife and discord should be banished from the universe, the heavenly bodies would stand still, and all generation and motion would cease in consequence of the general harmony. And so the Spartan lawgiver seems to have introduced the spirit of ambition and contention into his civil polity as an incentive to virtue, desiring that good citizens should always be somewhat at variance and in conflict with one another, and deeming that complaisance which weakly yields without debate, which knows no effort and no struggle, to be wrongly called Concord. And some think that Homer also was clearly of this mind, for he would have not represented

Agamemnon as pleased when Odysseus and Achilles were carried away into abuse of one another with frightful words, if he had not sought the general interests likely to profit by the mutual rivalry and quarrelling of the chieftains. This principle, however, must not be accepted without some reservations, for excessive rivalry are injurious to states and productive of great perils. So this is very much similar to the metaphysical vision of the universe of Heraclitus. The cosmos is fundamentally an agonistic lawful wrestling between opposites. And it's interesting that Plutarch makes this long aside in the context of explaining that the efforts laid fines on Agisilaus early in his life because he was undermining this

agonistic principle of the state by being too nice, too generous and magnanimous to others, thereby making them his own allies and friends. There was not enough fighting. He threatened to end the contest on which the state ran. What a wonderful society of wolves do you like this? But yes, I guess Illaus was born maybe in the year 440 BC, so maybe a few years before that and he became king in 400 BC at 40 or 40 something years of age. Xenophon his friend and associate says in his eulogy that he became king when quote-unquote still a young man And this is interesting 40 years or older, but xenophon says became king as young men I'm wondering if this is more correct than when a few episodes back on folkion

I said he was no longer young at the age of 26, but maybe Greeks had a different view of these things You know most upper-class Greeks lived very long lives by the way Socrates was executed I think at 70 years old or was he older and I guess he Laos died on campaign in Africa at 80 something years of age but he had a whole life full of adventure even though by Spartan standards he was not big or strong he was a manlet and he was also born disabled born lame somehow that's the word at least in translation it's called lame but it's probably something like club footing and he always for bad statues of himself to be made but he had lot of inborn charm and grace to make up for this and to make up for it a lot of you say inner fire

love of combat he had not been born as the heir apparent to the spartan throne he had an older brother who was an heir he was the second born son so i guess he allows because he was not the heir he went through the very rough kind of spartan education that was given to all the citizen boys, you know, where they got taken from their parents and put into their brutal military boarding school at six or seven years old. All male citizens had to do this except the heirs to the throne. I say heirs because there were two kings. And because of this he was respected and loved by the Spartan citizens more than a normal Spartan king would be because he had done, you know, you can say, the enlisted course. I've heard this from friends in military.

They could have joined as officers, but they joined enlisted. Before that, they went through enlisted course because you get more respect from soldiers you will command. The same idea. So in his youth, the famous Spartan general Lysander, this Lysander was the general who destroyed the Athenian navy basically, and he won the decades-long Peloponnesian war for Sparta. But this very brilliant general on who I will do in future very special episode because he's very much a Colonel Kurtz type heart of darkness Lysander. But he one of history most brilliant superman but obscure though there should have been a book or movie about him maybe I'll make it someday. But this general Lysander was I guess his lover in his youth and the Spartans would like this.

about this a bit more in the last segment of the show but in describing this relationship Plutarch goes off about Agassiz Lao's character and I will read it now again because it made a much historical romantic coloring. You get to see what Agassiz Lao's was like, both a contentious man and consummately charming. I read now, while he was among the so-called bands of boys who were reared together, he had as his lover Lysander, who was smitten particularly with his native decorum. For although he was contentious and high-spirited beyond his fellows, wishing to be the first in all things, and having a vehemence and fury which none could contend with or overwhelm, so I interject again, remember, this what I just read is the ideal ancient Greek quality

of character of spirit you can see Nietzsche on the thousand and one tablets where the Greeks what they held highest is to excel over all other men you know short of betrayal of a close friend but this was seen as the way for a man to be in Greece in the same way that for Persians it was to ride well shoot straight and tell the truth or for Hebrews to obey mother and father or for Germans to obey and to command, which was also in some sense the Spartan focus, to obey and to command, but fundamentally they were still Greeks and as you can see, even in Sparta, this inner rivalry and contentious spirit was cultivated, maximally cultivated, but so I continue, yes. On the other hand, he had such a readiness to obey and such gentleness that he did whatever

was enjoined upon him, not at all from a sense of fear, but always from a sense of honour, and was more distressed by censure than he was oppressed by hardships. As for his deformity, the beauty of his person in his youthful prime covered this from sight, while the ease and gaiety with which he bore such a misfortune, being first to jest and joke about himself, went far towards rectifying it. Indeed, his lameness brought his ambition into clearer light, since it led him to decline no hardship and no enterprise whatever. We have no likeness of him, for he himself would not consent to one, and even when he lay dying forbade the making of either statue or picture of his person. But he is said to have been a little man of unimposing presence.

And yet his gaiety and good spirits in every crisis, and his raillery, which was never offensive or harsh, either in word or look, made him more lovable down to his old age than the young and the beautiful. And according to Theophrastus, Archidamus was fined by the ephors for marrying a little woman, for she will bear us, they said, not kings, but kinglets. This refers to Agesilaus' father. His father Archidamus married, you know, he was fined by the ephors of Sparta for marrying a short and ugly woman, which he did because it was a financially useful marriage. But he had the choice to instead marry a beautiful and strong woman for eugenics. And so they say, no, you can't marry for money, or you can, but we'll put a big fine on you.

So you see the extent to which Sparta more than other Greek states made this kind of thing autistic and explicit, the eugenic program, but all the Greek aristocratic states were, or Greek states had aristocracies, and they were all like this, by the way. Sparta, though, you would get fined and they would fill out the form in triplicate if you didn't marry for looks and powers. Speaking of eugenics and breeding, Agisilaus' brother Agis, he had been the older son. He was the heir to the throne and he was king of Sparta before Agisilaus. He was king of Sparta during the time at the end of the Peloponnesian War when Alcibiades came there as an exile, and if you remember, Alcibiades during his time at Sparta seduced and fucked the Spartan king's wife because, as he said it, he wanted his

blood to sit on the Spartan throne. And yes, this was the Spartan king he cucked, Agisilaus' brother who was the king at the time, Agis. So there arose then a belief that the king's son, who was to be his heir, this was Agisilaus' nephew right that the king's son was actually a bastard and not eligible for the throne because he was actually Alcibiades' illegitimate son. This rumor arose apparently that the timing fit Alcibiades as the natural father and not Agis the king, but Agis recognized this as his legitimate son which should have ended the debate but it didn't. So on Agis' death, Lysander, the powerful Spartan general, was more influential maybe than the king because he had won Sparta, the war, and was basically king of all the overseas Greeks now on the islands and in Anatolia.

But out of love for his friend, Agisilaus, he made the Senate and the Spartan government, they set aside the heir as a bastard and chose instead Agisilaus as king. They went for the brother instead of the son, so they were all descendants from Hercules, by the way. That was the title to rule of the Spartan kings, the sons of Hercules. Hercules' great-great-grandson was said to have come down and set up a Spartan dynasty in remote antiquity. Do you like this? It's a charter myth to justify the reign of a later way of Dorian invaders in the Peloponnese, as well as many of the islands, Rhodes, Crete, and so on, during the time of collapse of Bronze Age societies around 1100 to 1000 BC. Anyway, so much for the inner court politically.

After Agisilaus came to power, there followed many crises, Greek history, very volatile, never shortened wars, crises. I will not bore you with all the details, this not book report. This is my own light impressions about life of Agisilaus. Please, you read the texts themselves if you want minute details of it. Again, you read Plutarch, Life of Agisilaus, who he compares actually to Roman general Pompey, and then you read Xenophones, Encomium to Agisilaus, which is a standalone text that is... Look, I don't know if I can actually recommend Xenophones, particular text to a general audience. It can be quite dull. It's full of Xenophones, typically socratic, moralistic pile driving. He goes on for some paragraphs about, and here is how Agesilaus was just, and here is how he was fair,

and here is how he was pious. It can get a bit tedious, this kind of socratic, but he was trying to defend his friend. They were lifelong friends, and Agesilaus was attacked. He was a very controversial figure during his own life, and he was attacked, so Xenophon was trying to, essentially to, it's a kind of apology, apology of I guess Elaus in the form of a eulogy. So anyway, the basic features of his life, I'll just quickly give you the basic features. After he come to power, the Persian king decided that it was time to kick the Spartan hegemony out of Asia. The Persian king wanted to take back Anatolia for the Persian Empire. The western part of it was populated still by Greek cities and the Persians always had considered these Greeks, the Ionians, considered them their own.

I don't know Persia being whitewashed now, somewhat by historians, but Persians were brutal rulers, should always be remembered for what they did to Miletus. I will never forgive, I like somewhat history of Zoroastrian, Aryan, Persian and so on, But even they were very cruel, what they did to Miletus, and this was the leading Ionian city of its day in the 600s BC and so on. It was Miletus, the birthplace of the first philosopher, Thales, and it could have been, it was destined almost inevitably, Miletus would have been a great cultural intellectual center of the ancient world. Who knows how many philosophers and great artists were going to come out of there, not just the first philosopher ever came out of there, but who knows how much more.

The Persians just wiped out that city, you know, committed genocide. This was even before the invasion of Greek mainland described by Herodotus, though, certainly before the events I'm talking now. But anyway, so to stop this Persian resurgence, Agassiz Laos goes to Asia and tries to make a pan-Hellenic alliance to resist Persia. He brought only 30 Spartans, but he brought thousands of allies, Mycenaean freemen, others auxiliaries of the Spartan military and other Greek cities that contributed, but certain Greek cities like Athens refused to join this, though. It's quite nasty. See, the Greeks could have taken over Asia if they had simply banded together, but they just always hated each other much more. But even though the partial Greek alliance

I guess he allows managed through diplomacy and trickery. He ends up becoming ruler basically of the western part of Anatolia Outwitting the Persians politically defeating them on a number of occasions Militarily and he ended up playing off the local sack traps the Persian envoy Governors playing them against one another and he was accompanied in these adventures also in Asia by a Persian renegade general Who had joined him? And again, so you get local color, as well as to understand how Agisilaus operated. It's actually quite a racy passage here. I will read it for you. I read it for shock and entertainment because this is a radio entertainment show. I read now. As for himself, he stationed his army in the province of Farnabazos. This was a Persian satrap in Western Anatolia.

As for himself, he stationed his army in the province of Farnabazos, where he not only lived in universal plenty, but also accumulated much money. He also advanced to the confines of Paphlagonia and brought Kotis, the king of the Paphlagonians, into alliance with him, for his virtues and the confidence which he inspired inclined king to desire his friendship. Spitridates also, from the time when he abandoned Farnabasus and came to Agasilaus, so again a renegade general who joined Agasilaus, a lot of people wanted to join Agasilaus, he was just such a friendly and honest and reliable, so they thought, you know, but charming man. But Spitridates joined him, always accompanied him in his journeys and expeditions.

Spitridates had a son, a very beautiful boy named Megabates, of whom Agassilaus was ardently enamored and a beautiful daughter also, a maiden of marriageable age. This daughter, Agassilaus, persuaded Cotis, this was the king of the Paphlagonians. The Paphlagonians were a local hill tribe that were quite warlike and they were never fully subdued by the Persians. So they had a local king, Cotis, who as you can see was making his own intrigues and alliances with all kinds of local and foreign rulers, in this case the Greek General Agisilaus. And Agisilaus is here marrying him to the daughter of his Persian renegade friend Spitridates. And then receiving from him, so from Cotes, a thousand horsemen and two thousand targeteers,

he retired again into Phrygia and harassed the country of Farnabazos who did not stand his ground nor trust his defenses, but always kept most of his valid and precious things with him, and we grew or fled from one part of the country to another, having no abiding place. At last, Petridates, who had narrowly watched him, in conjunction with Heripidas the Spartan, I believe Heripidas was the leader of what remained of the 10,000 in Xenophon's famous story about the 10,000, the Anabasis, the 10,000 Greek mercenaries who had gone into the heart of Persia and come back, and this is after that, and their leader at this time is Heripidas, also a Spartan. So at last, Petridates, who had narrowly watched this Persian sect-wrap governor who was taking

his treasure and hiding it around, in conjunction with Heripidas, the Spartan mercenary seized his camp, the Persian camp, and made himself master of all his treasures, the local Persian governor. Here, however, Heripidas, who had too sharp an eye to the booty that was stolen, and forced the barbarians to restore it, watching over and enquiring into everything, exasperated Spithridades so that he marched off at once to Sardis with the Paphlagonians. I end reading, but yes, do you like this, yes, a lot of tribe names and leader names, but I don't know how to interpret this, or maybe I do, but it's hard for modern audience to understand, not just the pseudo-gay stuff, but all the political adventurousness of it.

Of course the gays and libtards would like to claim the first part of what I read for you as their own and to say it's their gaze, but it's nothing really like the modern varieties of that. I'll comment more on that later, on the last segment of the show, because I'm not actually just bringing it up to shock or titillate modern audiences, but because it's actually an important part of I guess his life and also of Greek and Spartan life, but especially Spartan and Theban life at this time when Sparta and Thebes were the preeminent Greek states. But this, if you just take a step back and see the passage I read and you look past the kind of antiquated type of grammar as well the unusual erotic practices, but what you

see about this time and what all I think actually real history is, it's bands or gangs of men who are after conquest and plunder and adventure and great things that I just read for you and don't let I think anyone ever tell you that this is childish or that it is you know I think it's the modern world that is a society of coddled children and spiritual females in in just one paragraph of this what I read for you now or a few paragraphs of Herodotus what you get is this constant vying for conquest for political intrigue for the acts of violence in the arts of violence, which actually Xenophon, if you're curious, he goes into some detail in the Hellenica and in his Encomium on Agisilaus even on how the Greeks had thought so deeply

about military science, troop formations, how to march at night, when do you march in the form of a hollow square and these other things thought through in minute detail. But I mean to tell you though that this is real life though, and what you have today is not real life. And I appreciate Trump because in his own way he gives more than men at least a glimmer of what this real life is. But anyway, so this campaign of Agassiz Laos was going well and both Plutarch and Xenophon say that basically Agassiz Laos had plans to take over the Persian throne and make a move on the Persian capital. After his conquests in western Asia and in this part of Anatolia, he apparently had the material capacity to do so, to start planning such things.

So even without Alexander and Philip's kind of military innovations of a generation or two later, I guess it's quite a bit later, it's 60 years later after these events that Alexander embarks on his own world conquest, but maybe I guess he always didn't have Alexander's type of phalanx with the super long pikes and certain other military innovations that That allowed Alexander to take over Asia, the cavalry combined tactics. Although actually, I guess Illaus created his own cavalry force from scratch. When he arrived, the Greeks didn't really have a big cavalry, but he saw on the plains of Asia, I need a cavalry, so he called upon local wealthy men to essentially buy him. He told them you either have to serve as horsemen yourselves or buy horses and get me mercenaries

who can ride them in your stead. And he built a quite powerful cavalry force, whereas before that the Greeks and Sparta didn't really have it, and he used it effectively against the Persians, who were expert horsemen themselves, but also later in Greece against Thessalians, who were among the Greeks the most famed cavalry rider, so I guess he was very proud of this achievement too, but maybe even what I'm saying without Macedonian innovations in the military, I'm saying it's plausible that at least Plutarch and Xenophon, his biographers, think he had a good chance to take over all of Asia, so you know these relevant parts of Asia, the Middle East up to India. So anyway, what happened instead was very sad.

Some of the other Greek cities, they were encouraged in part by Persian money, Persia was seeing what was going on, was freaking out and sent money to the Greeks to declare war on the Spartans. But yes, for that and for their own self-interested reasons, some other Greek cities declared war on Sparta back home, so I guess Illaus and all his new army was called back and here is really the choice of his lifetime and of his age, a characteristic choice and I don't exaggerate with this language that history, in this case, turned on one man's choice and it was determined, of course, by his own character. That's why Plutarch and such's right to pay attention to one great man's character has more historical significance than anything else.

I guess Illaus chose to go back to Sparta and obey the summons to defend his city even though he had locally had the means to advance on Persia, he could have ignored the order, He could have at least carved out for himself a great kingdom in the Middle East. I don't know that I would have done the same as him. I don't know. What would you have done? I don't know. I don't think I would have gone back to Sparta, but other Spartan generals certainly also wouldn't have. Lysander and Brasidas, I'm pretty sure, would have ignored the Spartan call. These were heroes of the Peloponnesian War, and they both at times went rogue and kind of, as I say, Heart of Darkness style. But he did not, but they would have made themselves king in Asia, I have a good feeling they would have.

But you see again why Plutarch's focus on characters of great men makes more sense than modern historians, who are instead apt to emphasize impersonal historical trends and to talk about historical forces, this and that, and to pretend that men's choices are actually no, no, they're entirely constrained by their situation and their environment, again by some hidden hand, the hidden force of history. And in this case, I think, in many other cases, modern times too, but in this case, very clear, it really did come out to one man's pretty much sole decision of what to do. History I think would have been very different if he said, no, I'll stay in Asia. As it was, he went back home by the same path that Xerxes, the Persian emperor, had taken when he invaded Greece in 470 BC or so

and he had in part to fight his way back from Asia because many of the local Greeks were against him. But anyway, I'll be right back to talk more about this and the life of Agesilaus. Agesilaus, such a contradictory man and such colorful life. I think I want to tell you some more unusual details of his life and time. So you can see, for example, in his personal friendships, if you consider this, the story of the man is more ambiguous. Lysander was his lifelong former friend and in his youth was his lover and benefactor by whose efforts he had really become king by Lysander's efforts. And I think he mistreated Lysander's out of jealousy and the desire for himself to be preeminent, because after Agesilaus arrived in Asia on his expedition, he made Ephesus his base.

This is ancient city, right? It's Heraclitus' ancient city on the coast of Asia Minor. But Lysander had a long campaign in the area from the time of the war against Athens, had many more connections and allies, and locally was already treated as a big man even a king and shot caller and so when Agisilaus came there he felt slighted and okay I'm here I'm the king but I'm here going to obviously play second fiddle to Lysander the older general while you know and whatever I end up achieving here Lysander will get the fame and credit for it so then he demoted and mistreated Lysander in various ways that it was in his power as king to do. The Spartan kings most of their role was they would be supreme commanders of military on campaign or in in battle. Domestically they had very

little power and even diplomatically politically in that way they didn't have much power it was mostly running the camp of a expedition campaign but to To get around this problem of Lysander's eminence, he ended up humiliating him, taking his positions, making him a gopher and this kind of thing until Lysander essentially relented his command, relented his authority entirely to Agisilaus. And I think he didn't need to do it quite in that way. I think this was a betrayal of a friend, which also by the way describes how Agisilaus came to power as a king in the first place because, I mean through an act of betrayal, because he was friendly with his nephew, protective and friendly and so on, but ended up betraying

his nephew, smeared him as a bastard, though this is Alcibiades' bastard, so he could be elected king instead. He was a man who both betrayed friends like this and also ended up, let's say, treating friends not only well but covering for their crimes and many parts of his life were determined by the friendships he had and by the erotic and romantic fixations he had. But these two events, this character flaw of betrayal of a friend, these are the faults that Plutarch blames Agisilaus for most of all in his judgment of the man. It seems to me that he emphasizes that even more than the later political and military failures that Agisilaus had against Thebes. This is all the more striking because Plutarch was

himself from Thebes. He loved his own city and Thebes had been Sparta's main antagonist during Agisilaus' reign. Agisilaus hated Thebes. He hated Thebans, he had a lifelong grudge against them, maybe because when he was embarking on his way to Asia and he sacrificed at Aulis, same as Agamemnon had sacrificed at Aulis before the Trojan expedition, Alexander too by the way understood his expedition against Asia as a remaking, a replay of the Trojan adventure which shows you how much these legends, the Trojan War, the voyage of Jason and the Argonauts things like this how much they define the Greeks thought world about How they thought about themselves in the world, but is there anything like this for moderns? In Stendhal's the red and the black the aristo woman in Paris

She basically didn't consider anyone worthwhile unless their ancestors had fought in the Crusades and it seems like for the European Aristo class, at least before the 20th century, they considered whether your family took part in the Crusades. The Crusades had this role that the Trojan War had for the Greeks, maybe. But is there anything like that today? The myths of the contemporary world about World War II, oh, your grandfather fought in this. It's mostly dreary and bleak by comparison. You could even argue it's self-destructive by contrast to, let's say, idolizing the Trojan War or the Crusades. But anyway, I guess he was upset because at Aulis he was going to do the sacrifice and the Themans foiled his attempt to do the sacrifice. They complained that it was not being done right.

So some say that he had a lifelong grudge against them because of that, but I think it was simply just balance of power, jealousy. Themes was obviously a state that was rising and had potential to challenge Sparta where it hurt in military strength and phalanx tactics on land. Athens could have won the Peloponnesian war and many times over those decades held the upper hand but did so mostly through victory at sea, never really defeated Sparta in head to head on land but this is how Thebes ended up winning it won pitched battles against Sparta where no one had ever really done this before and Plutarch has this interesting aside that the Spartan state was aware of the Theban danger from its inception with Lycurgus the founder of

the not Sparta itself but the Spartan state the Spartan constitution Lycurgus warned the Spartans don't campaign too much in Boeotia. That's the part of Greece where Thebes was, don't do that too much because these people have potential and you don't want them waking up too much. You don't want them becoming really adept at military matters and to have too much experience against you. But I guess he allows ignore this, whether foolishly and emotionally or whether he did so out of necessity. And at other times he acted in a rash and vicious way against them. Here I'll give you an example. one of his subgenerals seized during time of peace they were not at war with Thebes at that moment at that point and unprovoked he seized the citadel of Thebes it's Acropolis which was

called the Kadmeia it was named the Kadmeia by the way because the mythical founder of Thebes Cadmus was a Phoenician prince who had brought the Greeks the Phoenician alphabet this is the legend but it's actually probably true and like many Greek heroes yes he was Phoenician but he the Greeks considered him one of their heroes. Like Apollo and many other heroes, he defeats dragon, the dragon Hydra near Thebes, and then he used the dragon teeth, he sewed them into the earth, and from this arose the Theban citizens, sprouted from dragon teeth planted in the ground. It's interesting, this is a real syncretic multiculturalism, you know, Phoenician founder of Greek great city of Thebes, but the Thebans hated the Phoenicians of their own time

as did all the Greeks despite this, it didn't matter anyway. So an associate of Agisilaus seized this fortress of Thebes during peacetime for which the factions that were against Agisilaus at Sparta, they blamed him, they said, hey did you give this guy the order, your guy is breaking the peace for no reason, they are going to bring war on us and this kind of thing. And Agisilaus mismanaged this event and also a similar one where another Spartan tried and actually failed to seize Athens' sport called the Piraeus, also in peacetime by treachery, and Agisilaus mismanaged these events, all of it in order to defend friends even when they had done something wrong. Another quality of the man, to stand by his friends even in their crimes, for which Plutarch

blames him as much as he does his betrayal of his friends when it suited him, an inconstant man. In regards to Thebes, Agisilaus wronged that city many times in this way and sometimes also gratuitously during battles. For example, an example of gratuitous viciousness against Thebes that show you how often Greeks could be just pointlessly vicious against other Greeks. One of Agisilaus' signature military victories was the Battle of Coronea in the 390s BC. This is after he returned from Asia. This was, I think it was 394, 395 BC. This was one of the bloodiest Greek battles in all of Greek hoplite history, even counting the whole of the Peloponnesian War. I'll describe it for a moment, both because it's unusual battle, either Plutarch or Xenophon,

I forget, which says it was unlike any of the other battles of the time, and also because shows you something about Agisilaus I don't know how to judge what he did here the two forces on one side were the Spartans and their allies on the other the Thebans and theirs they were arrayed with the Spartans and the Thebans facing not facing each other but rather being diagonal from each other if you can think it so on opposite sides so the Spartans were on their left flank and The Thebans are also on their own left flank. I think it was left or maybe right, but I think it was left and I think so they were kitty-corner diagonal from each other each of them facing the respective allies of the enemy and the two armies clashed and both the Spartans and the Thebans won on their

respective flanks so decisively that basically they tore through they battled through the side that was facing them and swept past each other and and here again I forget if it was Xenophon who says it but you know the prudent course at this time would have been for I guess Elaus to just call it a day technically you could say he won because the Thebans decided to retreat they just wanted to get back to their own camp after this happened but if he had let them through and harried them from behind that would have been less costly so Xenophon but instead he circled around and wheeled around to block their path and clashed with them again head on to stop them purely out of fury and hatred for the Thebans specifically maybe he was angry having had to return from Asia and missed his chance

to conquer the Persian Empire maybe he blamed the Thebans for stopping that somehow or just He let anger overtake him in the heat of battle, but because of this head-on collision after the battle basically both the Spartans and the Thebans ended up dying in great numbers and By the way, ultimately this was Sparta's undoing not this particular battle because after this it had a good 20 or more years of supremacy in Greece But just repeated costly bloody battles and and few citizens to start with in Sparta means the state ended up with manpower problem. It always had a low birth rate, constant shedding of citizens from the citizen role, so you know a few battles like this even if you win and you you end up with few too few citizens.

Again it was the Battle of Leuctra much later 20 plus years later. Leuctra was what broke Spartan power permanently but it's because of this just too many Many died during this battle in 371 BC at Lautra, where they were defeated by the Thebans and the sacred band of Thebes, but even after that, as Sparta limped on, other later battles even when they won or didn't lose completely, like Mantinea in 361 BC, another famous battle that left all Greece in a kind of stalemate after which Macedon was able to move in and sweep everything up, but that, even though it wasn't a complete Spartan loss, it made Spartan power unviable because they just ran out of men after that. But you see, it was this constant internecine bickering and warfare in which the Greeks spent themselves.

Otherwise, they and not Macedon would have been able to take over the Persian Empire. So anyway, at these repeated battles, Spartan lacking men, it was a phenomenon that other Greek states also experienced but it was called Oligandrea, it had a specific trade name in ancient Greece, literally meaning too few men, same as Elon's concern over depopulation. And Machiavelli says something very pointed about this, he says that both Sparta and Venice were republics that were not organized, not geared for expansion, they were geared for conservation of what they already had. And so they were each undone by one big land defeat like this, just losing too many citizens from which they couldn't recover. Whereas by contrast Rome, which was a republic that was built for expansion unlike these,

it was able to lose many such battles, weathered many catastrophes and always is able to recover during the course of many centuries despite these setbacks. But yes, other notable events of Agesilaus' life were his defense of Sparta, when Epaminondas and the Thebans made a run for the city proper in 361 BC. And it was Agesilaus who, over 80 years old at this time, he organized the resistance. And apparently he did so with actions of great daring and unconventional guerrilla warfare, although it should have never come to that. Spartans had always been proud that their city had never been attacked, because they They were always so badass, you know, but this event, the Siege of Sparta, showed another one of their signature weaknesses.

As Aristotle says in Politics, I think it's Book Two of the Politics, that here the Spartan women showed how useless and retarded they were because they were caused by their panics when the enemy was approaching more confusions than the enemy did during the battle. You know, yes, the feminist Nordic Spartan woman, yes. But anyway, Agisilaus won this siege of Sparta, managed to defend his city at a quite old age. He was a vigorous man into his 80s and after this he embarked on one last mad adventure. I have to think he must have known he would die soon and maybe like Teddy Roosevelt who went off to the Amazon in his old age, Agisilaus thought, okay, I'm going to die soon one last kid's adventure and he went to Egypt to help Egyptian rulers revolt against Persia. He went as a mercenary.

During this time there were various simultaneous revolts also in parts of Asia by local satraps and governors against the Persian crown. So taking advantage of this chaos, Agesilaus went to Egypt on expedition again basically as mercenary. He got Spartan and other soldiers with him, but he was promised supreme command of the rebel forces by the Egyptian rebel king and once he arrived there he felt slighted again because he turned out that the Egyptian king said well no I you actually can't have supreme command you can just be commander of the mercenary forces so as was I guess he allows pattern as sometimes a faith breaker he broke faith with his patron and went to support a rival faction instead. Xenophon defends this by saying that it ended up working. This ploy

actually did separate Egypt from Persia, and Agisilaus ended up choosing the king that would be most friendly to the Greeks, and that's the standard by which Xenophon judges whether the action was right or not. But Plutarch and others say, well, actually this breach of faith ended up hurting Agisilaus' reputation, and even that of the Greeks in the area. But But yes, he went to Egypt on the mercenary adventure, got paid an ungodly sum of money for this service, and he was planning to take this money back to Greece by ship and use it to continue the war against other Greeks. But being old, he ended up dying on the way back while in harbor in present-day Libya. So I think politically a very ambiguous life from point of view of historical effect.

I think from point of view of traditional morality, also ambiguous life, constant betrayal of patrons, of friends and such, but in action and in his own life, a man of adventure and power who you know if you think, would you want this man's life? I mean, technically I wouldn't because I want to have my own chimpouts, historical chimpouts and so on, but yes, despite everything else, he led an enviable and great life. Ultimately, that's the standard I think by which Plutarch more or less ends up judging a man. Did he have an exciting and enviable life, a life as a work of art? One quality that Plutarch attacks, again more than I guess he loves political or military failures is either his constant breach of friendships or on the other hand the inappropriate excusing the crimes of friends.

And if there is one aspect that both the biographers emphasize, Xenophon and Plutarch, quite aside from considering, I guess, Illao's moral virtues and such, but something that recurs throughout the work of Xenophon in general is the obsession with the Greeks taking over Asia and the Greeks uniting and taking over Asia as a project by which they would not only be catapulted to world rule, but through which Greek culture and philosophy would be able to not only spread and rule, but also essay a kind of experiment in the world. One good thing about many of Socrates' students, who I often attack for their excessive focus on moralism, and Plutarch too was a Platonist, he was an often student of Socrates, Plutarch

a Platonist, yes, they are very much moral-centered writing, but one, yes, I attack them for this, but on the other hand, I do think Plato, Xenophon, and Aristotle, they all understood this. They were Greek supremacists in a good way, not in a merely kind of chauvinistic way of oh, we are the best or, you know, nothing wrong with that even when it's just something, but because the Greeks in fact were the best, but also from point of view of here is a people with an amazing intellect, an amazing military ability, and they mostly use it against each other. Wouldn't it be great if they were instead united, instead of killing each other, and if they put these energies into taking over Asia? And here, by the way, you can say is a ready-made philosophical doctrine on the biological unity

of mankind, which can be put forth as a bold experiment for a new kind of empire. As I said just now, a new essay in the world, a new great vision for a Greek future for the world. I think this is undercurrent in Plato, in Xenophon's writing, in Aristotle as well. It is an explicit burning wish of Plutarch that it could have been this way, the idea of a pan-world kingship dominated by Greeks, but run according to the reason of nature. Machiavelli later had similar project about the divided Italians and some say In a different way the Crusades were such a project on the warlike and divided Europeans at the time Wouldn't it be better if they united and fought over there instead of being at each other's others throats at home and such

Some say this I don't know look regardless this a time of bold attempts and great adventures either way And I guess he loves as heralded precursor and possible could have been the champion of this But I will be right back There are some unusual disparate facts about the time and the men's and the time I was just talking the rulers of Thebes During this time were Epaminondas and Pelopidas They had been helped to rebel against Sparta by Athens But on their own they ended up making Thebes the primary power in Greece at the time which really meant in the greater immediate world, right, Rome wasn't as strong and important yet, Persia was on its way down, would soon be taken over, and they ran this state according to

Pythagorean philosophical principles. Being technically radical democrats, yes they were, but they were basically disciples of Pythagoras, the philosopher. I don't know if they went so far to be vegetarian but they believed in most of the rest of his theories and also from him they got this idea about the left-handed valence of the world of fortune which is why they stacked their phalanx 50 men deep on the left hand side always and they didn't just win because of this of course Epaminondas was a military genius from whose innovations Philip of Macedon learned also he He was a hostage in Thebes during some of this time. He also, I mean, Epaminondas radically reorganized the Theban state and lived himself in a Pythagorean manner.

It's interesting that all the great leaders of this time, the Greek leaders, Agisilaus in Sparta, Phocion in Athens, and Epaminondas in Thebes, they lived extremely frugal, almost ascetic lives. They were all famous for affecting this outward, virtuous poverty. Epaminondas himself never married, the other two did, they had children, but he never married. He had a lifelong friendship or companionship with the other Theban general Pelopidas. Plutarch wrote lives of both, but Epaminondas' biography is unusually lost for some reason. That feels strange to me, but it's lost. So anyway, these two men, who I may do show later just on them, Montaigne considered Epaminondas to be one of the most excellent men in all time, along with Homer and Alexander.

I was going to talk Montaigne on this show, but as you can see, the episode is too long already. I'll just do next one on Montaigne alone. But these two men took thieves to heights of Greek eminence, ended tyranny of Sparta over Greece, freed the local Messenians and Arcadians that had been kept as helots and serves to Sparta or oppressed by them for many centuries and they built a new city for this freed population in the Peloponnese that's called Megalopolis the new city which was to serve as their capital. Megalopolis I think there's a movie about this now incentivized this so it's about the ancient city that Epaminondas founded I think yes I I don't know they also formed the famous a sacred band of Thebes, which was invincible while it lasted. It was formed of 150 pairs

of lovers. I'm sorry to say this, but I must say this, yes, but in any case, this was a revolutionary philosophical regime, I'm saying, based on the cult of Pythagoras. Okay, so you take this example. Next, consider other disparate fact. You take Agathilaus with his world-conquering ambition. He was going to take over all of Asia, right? And then Alexander actually did end up taking over all of Asia and he was Aristotle's student, and again a new revolutionary type of empire where he was going to make Macedonian nobles marry Persian women and so on and many other things. Next you take this other fact, remember Lysander, the general I talked in previous segments, you know who was responsible for winning the Peloponnesian war for Sparta, who was then

the one who made Agisilaus king basically and betrayed by him later. Sorry to recap, just reminding you who I'm talking about. Lysander was the first Greek to be worshipped as a god in various cities. There was actually a code to him in the cities he had liberated from Athens in the various islands and in Asia. And there is this unusual passage in Plutarch about him, very brief. I will read it now. This is again from the life of Agisilaus, it's You know I'm reading Also having Xenophon the philosopher in his following and making much of him He ordered him to send for his sons and rear them at Sparta That they might learn that fairest of all lessons how to obey and how to command Again finding after Lysander's death that the large society was in existence

Which that commander immediately after returning from Asia had formed against him Agasilaus set out to prove what manner of citizen Lysander had been while alive. This is after Lysander died, but I read to you again the last sentence. Finding after Lysander's death that a large society was in existence, in other words a secret society, which that commander immediately after returning from Asia had formed against him, Agasilaus set out to prove blah blah. So after reading a speech which Lysander had left behind him in book form, a speech with which which Cleon of Halicarnassus had composed, but which Lysander had intended to adopt and pronounce before the people in advocacy over revolution and change in the form of government.

Agisilaus wished to publish it, but one of the senators, who had read the speech and feared its ability and power, advised the king not to dig Lysander up again, but rather to bury the speech with him, to which advice Agisilaus listened and held his peace. I stopped reading all but okay look that's like that's the 300 BC man that's like what is that in the 390 or 380 BC listen to what he's saying Lysander had from the secret society to take over Sparta and child change the government in a kind of revolution and he was planning to read a speech a manifesto in front of everyone and he had left then behind this revolutionary manifesto in a book form that was suppressed. The purpose was to change the Spartan state and method of electing kings and so on, but

listen just to how modern, so-called, everything I've told you so far on this segment reads. Everything I've been telling you, plus many other examples I could keep adding, where you had radical experiments in enacting forms of government based on weird philosophical notions. You know, I mentioned before, little talked about, though I think a momentous point in Greek intellectual life and spirit, the 30 tyrants at Athens under Critias, one of Socrates' students, who appeared to have a radically antinomian but right-wing, hierarchical, basically genocidal dictatorship that he attempted before he was overthrown within a year. But there are quite a few other examples, including some that Aristotle attacks, weird

philosophers proposing states, others that are not mentioned by most historians, but for example in a few footnotes by Athenaeus who talks about how some members of Plato's Academy, these were philosophy students who became dictators and they tried again just insane experiments like taking people's wives and giving them to slaves and supposedly he says they learned this from Plato's illegal republic and such. You know, not to speak of Plato's own attempts in Sicily, which are famous his attempts to get involved in political life and associate himself with tyrants. But the point is, I got quite a few other examples. The point is, I give you well, look, I'll give you other example, but with whole judgment

and don't take it the wrong way. In much of this text of I guess he loves his life. There's a lot that Plutarch says about affairs between men, especially when they were young in Sparta. And I think it's misunderstood a lot today, and it's impossible basically to discuss this because the way this matter has been politicized on both sides in our time, people just associate it with things that don't exist anymore, but with things that exist now that have nothing to do with it. But just understand it wasn't, sorry to repeat myself from before, this was not like Arab or this kind of thing you see in some traditional societies of Papua New Guinea or Arab or some in the Amazon, where an older man, a much older man, takes advantage of a 12 or 13 year old boy or even younger or such.

It wasn't like that. It was generally something done between youths in, you know, when they were 17, 18 or something a bit older in military camp or younger men and it's important to know about this because While I was rereading this, and you get sense maybe most of Sparta's political intrigues and political factions and designs, they were based on and partly motivated by these kinds of love affairs. And I mean there's so much about it in Plutarga. Look, I'll give you one example on top of what I've said so far. I'll read for you, okay? For Agassipolis, the other king, remember Sparta always had two kings. And now he's talking about a younger king during Agisilaus' reign. For Agisipolis, the other king, since he was the son of an exile, in years a mere stripling,

and by nature gentle and quiet, took little part in affairs of state. And yet he too was brought under the sway of Agisilaus. For the Spartan kings eat together in the same piditium, or public mess, whenever they are at home. Accordingly, knowing that Agassizpolis was prone to love affairs just as he was himself, Agassilaus would always introduce some discourse about the boys who were of an age to love. He would even lead the young king's fancy toward the object of his own affections and share with him in wooing and loving these Spartan loves having nothing shameful in them but being attended rather with great modesty, high ambition and an ardent desire for excellence as I have written in my life of Lycurgus.

Being thus obtained very great influence in the city, he affected the appointment of Tellutius, his half-brother on his mother's side as admiral. Then he led an army to Corinth, blah, blah, I stop reading now, I'm sorry, trying to do something to my throat, but yes, he goes on to just describe other military campaigns, So anyway, it keeps going, but I'm sorry to go here for those who object to this subject matter. I want again to emphasize it has nothing to do with modern gay anything, but it seems to have been a society run by a choreos or an aryan mannerbund, a society of young warriors where I think almost inevitably such things as I have just read can and do happen, and despite its sort of traditional status in the Greek world and Greek aristocracy in particular,

it wasn't really a traditional thing in the stereotypical way one might think of something that fosters stability and peaceableness, but actually very much the opposite. I think these kinds of affairs and passions contributed to the mad and revolutionary aspect of this era of mankind. I've been telling you in this segment, this insane thing of, yes, let's try this, forming this new kind of state based on this new philosopher's teaching. I mean, all of this in part was also the Spartan state itself. On one hand, you can understand Sparta as a fossil state based on preserving very ancient traditions, Dorian traditions that had also been preserved on Crete for example which was also Dorian you know with all the men the citizen

men being weapons-bearing and eating together in a common mess hall and so on and a kind of idealized form of economic communism mixed with warlike fervor but but what I'm saying listen it wasn't just this Sparta was a reformed state that he formed the revolutionary state in other words like Kyrgyz their founder He wasn't just a guy who had maintained traditions. He had re-imported or re-established these customs, and when he did so, he significantly changed many of them. So it was more like he was a political revolutionary himself, a philosopher or artist, who merely he took inspiration from traditional Greek forms, but he changed them considerably when they were put in force in Sparta. The Spartan way of life was revolutionized by Lycurgus.

This was recognized also at the time in antiquity as Sparta strangeness. It wasn't like, oh yes, they're holding on to older ways. No, it was recognized as this weird revolutionary state, even if it didn't try to export its form of government as such to other states the way a modern revolutionary state would. But that's to point to, if you read Plato or if you read about Sparta or Lycurgus and you get a whiff of science fiction futuristic feel about it, that's not an accident. That is also how it was felt and seen at that time too. So yes, to go back to what I was saying at the beginning of the episode, the Greeks did not have notion of progress in modern sense, the modern academic sense of, oh, they thought

history had a meaning and history had an aim or an end and things that things are moving in that direction and and we have to help things move in that direction or you're on the wrong side of history and this and everyone has to move that together it will be the same or all around the world imagine all the people in this etc etc in that sense no but if on the other hand you're thinking well only modern nations have these special modern features and ferment supposedly where by contrast pre-modern states are understood to be a static model of society and a static order of the world that goes along with that thinking about the universe which may be true for example about China or Egypt or India maybe or the Aztecs, at least what I know about them.

I do think India had some wild experiments at least in philosophy if not government but Mostly, yes, maybe it was like this, but in Greece it was not like this at all. It had, at least in the common everyday sense of these words, its own so-called progress in the real and important sense of just this fascination with foreign peoples and customs and religion, adoption of foreign rights, fascination with foreign unusual stories and arts, a history that was volatile and mad, political violent experiments, trials of different forms of government, you know, just the crazy philosophers running around everywhere, inspiring these bands of young warriors to try this or that unusual new form of government and people's enamored of wild philosophical ideas and experiments with such ideas in the real

world, not just intellectually. All motivated maybe by an understanding that man was not entirely determined by established tribal custom, but by perhaps his innate nature, and that man's nature was something still unknown, undecided, with various minds claiming various things about it. What man's true form, what his final form, yes, assuming his final form, what man's end form was. And let's try this now, and let's try that now, and obviously this is an explosive question that leads to many bouts of productive and destructive trial and error. And I think this aspect of ancient Greek history, which is apparent if you read it yourself, it somewhat damped down or edited out of how it filters to popular sources and even to most academic sources.

A lot of the way in which Greek tradition came down to the modern world mixed in with the Christian religion and various other traditional forms, these aspects I'm talking about were not so emphasized. Although if you read Western authors, older authors, they recognize these aspects in Greek life and Greek thought, even traditionalist Western, modern European, by modern European I mean 1400s, 1500s and after. They recognize these aspects in Greek thought, but the way it's come down to, let's say, the academic popular mind, a lot of what I'm saying got edited out of it. But anyway, from this point of view, you can see the modern conceit with progress is maybe fake and dumb because it depends actually on agreement about

what the nature of man is. There is unspoken, undebated, not disputed agreement and instead what's disputed are just the methods of getting there, which is much lamer. They all agree more or less on what man is. But some of the Greek ferment and wildness in thought does show its face from time to time and I think leads really to almost the only great times of modern life in the Renaissance, in German Hellenism of various kinds, as it existed in 19th and 20th centuries, in French attempts to resurrect the Greeks also, but this spirit of wild youth, of abandon to life as I call it, and it has consistently been smothered by old, the old in spirit, the female and female in spirit, like various kinds of sclerotics and spiritual faggots.

They periodically always smother out these attempts of life to break out again, Greek true life. And whatever happens in day-to-day politics, I hope friends listening to show, even if only two or three among you, but to be animated in future by this Greek madness, by establish this fire also in our near future until next time I will talk then Montaigne back out