Always look on the gloomy side of life

0:00If we want to be happy in life, we should just stay at home. That's what the ancient Greek playwright Sophocles reckoned. Now, that doesn't sound like a particularly inspiring bit of advice, but as my guest in this episode of Life Lessons from History, from History Extra explains, this is all about mental fortitude and basically boils down to the idea that if you can prepare well for gloom, you can enjoy the sunshine more readily. My expert in this episode is Peter Rom, and he's a master of classical philosophy. I think he makes the case for following Sophocles' wisdom quite compellingly in our chat.

0:36My name's Dave Musgrove and the concept of this podcast is simple. I find great historians and archaeologists and ask them to propose a lesson from history that might help us live happier, healthier, better or more productive lives today. And then we chat about it. It's the history, wellbeing crossover that you didn't know you needed, but hopefully you might enjoy.

0:58I am delighted to be joined by Professor James Rohn, who is Professor of Classics at Bard College, New York, and author of the fascinating new book, Since You're Mortal, Life Lessons from the Lost Greek Plays. James, welcome to the podcast. How are you? Very well. Thank you. Thank you for having me on. It's a pleasure. And I very much enjoyed the book. We will talk about that in just a second. But The life lesson you proposed is basically a quote from an ancient author, and we will explain where we're going to with this. But the quote is, the truly happy man ought to never leave home. And that was from Sophocles.

1:36He was a Greek tragic playwright of the 5th century BC. He was one of the three great tragic playwrights of ancient Greece, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides. and then there's a fourth great playwright who's more of a comic author menander and so these four playwrights are what we consider the canon of greek drama okay and the period he was living in what was ancient greece like at this at this time he was a citizen of athens athens of course the founding democracy of the Western world, famously liberal and literate society, immensely productive of great poetry and drama. The fifth century is considered its golden age.

2:26So Sophocles is right at the heart of that period. And he exemplifies the spirit of ancient Athens, its love of myth, literature, and poetry. Okay. And how much of the canon that he himself produced survives to us to this day? A very small percentage, less than 5%. He is said to have written over 100 plays. He lived a very long life, was still writing plays in his 90s. But of those 100 plus dramas, we have only seven. The seven that were selected by medieval scribes and monks as the sort of greatest hits of his corpus, and therefore they were recopied more frequently and eventually made their way from papyrus scrolls into the modern books, the codexes of the Middle Ages, and therefore they survive into the present day.

3:26Okay, so we're missing a fair bit of his material, which is obviously a great shame, particularly for someone like you, who I imagine would want to know what the rest of it was like. But that does allow us to get into the book that you've just written, because I guess that allows us to talk about the kind of the key figure in your book, Stobaeus. Tell us about him. Stobaeus was a Greek of the 5th century AD, so he was a full millennium past the time of Sophocles. in the very late ancient world, the time when the Roman Empire was virtually collapsing in the West. But in the Greek East, what became the Byzantine Empire, the life of the pagan world was still thriving.

4:14Stobaeus was a pagan, it seems, and very interested in the literature of the classical age, the time of millennium before his own. and he selected from the texts of that time the quotes and passages that he thought were the most instructive and compiled them in a work that he wanted to present to his son. So like any good dad he wanted his son to lead a good life and he thought that reading ancient literature passages from the great works of the ancients was the best way for him to educate that boy. And do we know where he was getting his sources from? Presumably there was some sort of library extant in the 5th century where he was for him to be able to access this material.

5:02That's right. All these texts were available in libraries and private collections. He may have owned many of these texts on papyrus scrolls. Probably they had not yet made it into the book, which was just coming out of the scene at the time that he lived. Okay. And do you want to tell us a little bit about what you've done in your book, which is building on Stobias' work? I found it fascinating that Stobias preserved little nuggets of wisdom, you might say the most quotable lines, from the plays of these great tragedians, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and also the comic writers Menander and others of his ilk.

5:46The plays that he quoted from mostly became lost a short while later. So these quotes from his work that he compiled for his son are the last remains of these plays by the greatest playwrights of antiquity. We call them fragments in my field. The scholars who study them call them the fragments of Greek tragedy. they're fascinating both because they're from plays that we no longer have and because they're quoted by Stobayus and he had a good eye for the most pithy and most evocative sentiments from these plays. So what I did is to distill them even further. He had taken the best quotes from the dramas that he knew.

6:39And I took the best of his quotes. So they're doubly reduced, you might say, to give the reader the most pithy, the most evocative, the most memorable of these lines from these lost plays. Yeah. And there are some really memorable, very quotable lines, as you say. And you've kind of, you've organized it under various topics, and then you basically just got some really good one line or one paragraphs bracketed together under specific topics. So a really interesting little insight into the ancient Athenian mind, I guess. Yes, and I'm following Stobaeus in that organization. He also has chapters based on moral topics, you know, virtue, justice, wealth, marriage.

7:26I haven't given the reader any of his thoughts on marriage because he was a terrible misogynist. But his other thoughts about things like wealth, virtue, happiness, old age are, I think, still incredibly relevant for modern readers. Okay, so most things have stood the test of time, aside, obviously, from misogyny, which is probably wise to have missed that bit out. Okay, so let's get to this life lesson then. So the truly happy man ought to never leave home. Now, on a superficial read, that doesn't sound terribly inspiring. We should just stay at home. I assume you want us to take a little deeper insight than that.

8:10Yes. Well, it's a very pithy quote because it forces you to think a little bit. Why would the truly happy man never leave home? According to Sophocles, if you're really doing well, something bad probably awaits you in the world at large. As soon as you step out the door, you might be hit by a falling brick or you might get into a car crash. Something that is going to diminish your happiness is right around the corner. Now, that's a tragic view of life. Things inevitably go bad. And it's not a view that most people in my country and probably in the UK as well would willingly embrace. We like to believe that things are going to get better and we're on an upward slope, not a downward one.

9:07But life teaches us that in the end, things never work out, right? We're all destined for decline in death, and the ending is not a happy one. So the tragic view that Sophocles embraces, I think, is a useful corrective to the tendency to the Pollyanna-ish tone of much of modern life. Trying to be a bit more mindful of things you buy? For you and your family? Well, when it comes to laundry, choose All Free Clear. 100 % free from dyes and perfumes. All Free Clear uses only essential ingredients that tackle tough stains and odors. And it's gentle on the skin. It's a powerful clean you can feel good about.

9:59So go on, pick up a bottle of All Free Clear for your next laundry day. Now, I'm going to have to pick you up here and say that, you know, here in Britain, in the UK, we are a gloomy bunch. We revel. We revel in our bad weather and we enjoy the tragedy of it much more so than you joyful bunch in the States. So maybe we're much closer to Sophocles and Outlook. But look, this is a bit of a gloomy, pessimistic approach to life, though. This isn't a very optimistic life lesson to just expect the worst and then things will get better because they can't be any worse that you imagine. Surely there's a bit more positivity here that we can take.

10:43Well, in fact, I think that the view that this quote embodies is a recipe for a happier life. It's the people who expect everything to go well that are crushed by reverses and downturns. It's those who are anticipating the downturns that can enjoy the upswings more fully. One could use the analogy of the stock market. those who invest thinking that things are always going to go up will get decimated, will get wiped out by a bear market or a severe correction, or will panic because they didn't think such a thing was possible and sell at the worst moment. It's the investor who is expecting those kind of downturns and preparing for them that will end up the happiest with their returns.

11:51So quotes like this, and I don't mean to suggest that my volume is filled with doom and gloom. There are many quotes that are much brighter and funnier than this one. I selected maybe a particularly gloomy one. But as I say, it's those who are prepared for gloom that can enjoy the sunshine more fully. I'm going to embarrass myself now with my incorrect knowledge of stoicism. Stoicism is later than this, I think. But is it reasonable to say that this is a kind of a stoic attitude? There is a lot in common with stoicism. The stoics, of course, famously practiced what we call prime meditatio malorum, the pre-preparation for evils, for bad things, and imagining them in the mind so that when they come, one is prepared.

12:49And if they don't come, one is more fully content. Can we know whether this sort of view was a prevailing view in fifth century Athens? Was everybody sort of following this line of thought, or do we simply not have enough information to be able to make generalizations like that? Well, of course, we only have the literary texts preserved from the great authors of the time. We don't know what the man in the street might have been thinking. But it is fascinating that this one century, the 5th century BC, produced a flowering of tragic drama. And tragedy, of course, assumes that things ultimately are not going to work out, that there's downturns awaiting us.

13:41And these tragedies were attended by a huge percentage of the Athenian population. nothing like what a modern drama might attract. A modern play or even a popular TV series might be seen by 10 % of the population at most. Here we have a city where allegedly the jails were opened so that prisoners could attend the tragic performance. It was central to the life of the city. So therefore, I think, yes, the average person might have been thinking along these lines. And that does bring me to a question, which I, this is a very simplistic question, and I hope you might have a good answer for me. But it's quite easy to imagine on the streets of ancient Athens, when you read things like your book, and you get these great little pithy one-liner quotes that everybody is kind of wandering around, uttering philosophical deep comments all the time.

14:38Presumably that's not the case. But was this a time when people were generally more invested in philosophy? Can we assume that the man in the street would have been more in tune with these sorts of thoughts? Well, they were certainly in tune with the tragic performances, the dramas from which I mostly quote. We know that the average Athenian citizens who were captured in Sicily after the Athenians tried to invade that island and were enslaved were set free because they were able to sing the odes from a drama of Euripides. That's a marvelous vignette told by Thucydides that suggests that even seeing these dramas once, the average person could recite lines from them and even sing some of the musical odes.

15:30Okay. I mean, I suppose a lot of people could sing lyrics from Taylor Swift today. Exactly so, yes. I wonder, right, just, you know, this quote is leading to an understanding of happiness. What do we know about ancient Greek, ancient Athenian attitudes to happiness? Was that something that people were striving for? What's that concept understood in the same way that we might understand it today as something to be trying to achieve? There was a lot of inquiry into what constitutes the good life. This was the era of Socrates, after all, who was walking around Athens and asking people what constitutes a good life, what sort of goals are you pursuing in your life, how are you going to ensure that you end up happy.

16:19He came up with the answers that we see in Plato, that the good man, the person who pursues the good, as Plato defines it, is going to be happy, not the person who pursues wealth, power, pleasure, any of the things that are conventionally thought to be the source of happiness. So yes, there was tremendous inquiry at this time into the good life. Okay. And I feel we're sort of duty-bound in a conversation like this to just mention the place of women in society. You mentioned the misogyny in the quotes you were talking about earlier. Presumably a lot harder for a woman in ancient Athenian society to achieve the source of happiness that we're talking about, given the constraints upon them?

17:07Very much so. They were not considered to be moral agents in the same way as men. philosophers like Plato were talking exclusively to men. And although there were two women who came to study with Plato, we know this, so it wasn't totally exclusive. But by and large, the point of view is that of male patriarchy. We don't know for sure whether women were attending the dramatic performances from which my quotes come. There is some evidence that they were in the theatre, but we can't say for certain. Okay. And obviously the loss of the enslaved people was similarly not good. They would have striven for happiness in a very different way, I'm sure.

17:56Or not striven at all. Yes, that's correct. Yeah. Okay. So one of the other aspects of the quote, is this idea of staying at home here in the UK. An Englishman's home is his castle. So, you know, we're very keen on the concept of a nice home somewhere where we can retire to and enjoy the fruits of our labor. What did ancient Athenians think of home? Did they have a strong concept of a place where there was a domestic space separated off from the rest of society? Yes, indeed. We have the work of Xenophon, the oikonomikos, the management of the household, which gives us our word economy and all the derivatives from that.

18:37Economy means management of the house. So yes, the life of the home is important to one's contentment. We don't see a lot of it in the literature that's preserved. Most of it is about the public space, about governance, about the market, about the life of society and the symposium and so on. We do have this one piece of evidence from Xenophon. All right. To wrap up, James, do you want to just sort of try and summarize and distill the points you've been making about the lesson we should take from this quote, then just try and give us a pithy one line of yourself as to what we should be taking from this moral message.

19:21Well, the quote is, as I say, not entirely representative of the volume. There's lots of good cheer and exhortations to eat, drink and be merry. The exact opposite of this quote, I haven't tried to present a dogmatic point of view because the quotes that Stobias chose from these plays range widely over many different modes of thought. So I've given you a wide array in the book. But this one quote is about the vicissitudes of life, that if you're at your peak, there's a downturn awaiting you. and one can't be confident that things will continue to be good. The philosophy is summed up elsewhere in Greek literature by the famous quotation, count no man happy until he is dead.

20:20That is to say that happiness is not a condition that endures. You're only happy if it continues all the way to the end. And to wrap up, forgive my personal intrusion, but as someone who studied these works, presumably for many years in your career, do you draw inspiration yourself from them in your day to day? Do you approach life following the sort of tenets that we've just been talking about? Well, I'm working right now on a volume of Stoic philosophy, quotes from Stoic philosophy, especially from Seneca, who's been another great study of mine, Seneca the Younger in the Roman world. And yes, Stoicism has a place in my life.

21:09I can't say I'm committed Stoic, but I do subscribe to this attitude of prime meditatio malorum. It's best to anticipate the bad things that are inevitable in human life and to see them as part of a larger plan for the universe. That sounds maybe a bit shallow in coming right at the end of our discussion, but Stoicism has a view that takes the whole cosmos into account in evaluating any one event in human life. And I happen to know that you're hoping to go trout fishing after we've had this conversation. So I assume that you're planning to not catch trout. And then if you do catch trout, you'll be a happy man.

21:58Well, what's more, I have to anticipate that I might hook myself with a barbed hook and have to go to the emergency room, which has happened to me. So yes, anticipation of evils is a useful thing in trout fishing. Sophocles would approve of that. I don't know if he was a big fisherman, but he would approve of the sentiment. James, thank you so much. That's been fascinating. professor james rom and the book since your mortal life lessons from the lost greek plays contains that quote along as you said with lots of others which are some of them more uplifting more positive uh and more joyful so uh it's worth a read thank you very much james thank you for having me i hope you enjoyed this episode do let me know what you think and do check out my sub at historyextralifelessons.substack.com.

22:47And let me know at lifelessonsathistoryextra.com if you have any comments on this life lesson, whether you employ the advice in your day-to-day, and if you have an idea for a future life lesson from history that I could investigate.