Ann Wroe On The Real Story Of Pontius Pilate, And His Connection To Stoicism

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1:45Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, a short passage of ancient wisdom designed to help you find strength and insight here in everyday life. And on Wednesdays, we talk to some of our fellow students of ancient philosophy, well-known and obscure, fascinating and powerful. With them, we discuss the strategies and habits that have helped them become who they are, and also to find peace and wisdom in their actual lives. But first, we've got a quick message from one of our sponsors.

2:35Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast. Sometimes I read a book and I'm just like, wow, where did this come from? This is just an amazing work of art. It's just masterful in every sense. And I don't know why I ended up reading this biography of Pontius Pilate, but man, it was so good. I could only read a couple pages at a time and I needed to stop and just think. I just needed to take a minute and think about it. That's how good this book was. and man, seriously, I have not read a book this good in a very long time. So I just had to have the author on the podcast, Anne Rowe.

3:18She's an author and an editor. She's been at The Economist since 1976 where she was the books editor and then the US editor and since 2003, she's been the obituaries editor. She typically does one obituary in each print issue. She's written hundreds of obituaries, Hunter S. Thompson, Arthur Miller, Prince, Paul Newman, Osama Bin Laden. But this book she wrote on Poncha's pilot, I am telling you, it is unreal good. Like, well, as I'm saying, one of the best books I have ever read. We're carrying it now at the Painted Porch. You've got to get it. Tragically, it is not nearly as popular as it should be.

3:56We recommended it in a reading list email a couple months ago. And like, it sold so many copies, the publisher had to reprint more. But we've got them at the Painted Porch. You're going to love this interview. I will apologize. There was a little bit of like, she was using a mic that sort of came over off the side of her face, and I had her fix it once. I may have made it worse. I care more about audio quality these days than I did early days in the podcast. So you might notice that slight problem, but trust me, this interview is worth listening to, and I was so grateful for Anne to come on the podcast.

4:28We had a great conversation. and Pontius Pilate, who you know from the story of the crucifixion of Christ, might not seem like it would intersect with the Stoics much, might not seem like a book like that would talk about Seneca and Marcus Aurelius, but the introduction itself mentions Marcus. So lots of ties to Stoicism in this interview as well, and I think you'll like my conversation with Anne Rowe.

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5:57Plans required$12 per month equivalent. Taxes and fees extra. Initial plan term only. Greater than 35 gigabytes a day slow when network is busy. Capable device required. Availability speed and coverage very easy at MintMobile.com. I got an amazing night sleep last night. One, because my six-year-old fell asleep in the car at like six o 'clock and he transferred him from the car seat to the bed and it stuck, which is just magic. So he's in bed way earlier than normal. But I sleep really well every night because I have a eight sleep Sleep Pod 5 Ultra, which is 8 Sleep's best product. I've used 8 Sleep for many years now, and it's just totally transformed how I sleep, made me sleep better, made my wife sleep better.

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7:37So I have a funny story about your obituaries book, which I loved. Somebody gave me this as a gift. It says, Ryan, out of all the books I've read, this is the only one I've wanted to give to you. I suggest you keep it in your bathroom. It's a great way to start the day.

7:59Of course, that book wasn't entirely me. I know. I know. But this is the actual story. I didn't keep it in my bathroom. I had it on a low shelf in my office. and my son, when he was young, he was maybe like two years old, he walked into my office one day and he started playing with the books. And I went in the other room for a second and I came back and I have this photo of him, which I think about all the time, but he's sitting down pretending to read this book. And the juxtaposition of youth and life and this book all about death, it stuck with me. And I think about that photo all the time. It's true because it is all about life.

8:39in fact, rather than death, isn't it? I don't think we even mention what people die of most of the time. It's just about what they've done. That's a very good point. Yeah, an obituary is not usually about the circumstances of your unusual or premature or long awaited death. It's all about what you did with the time that you had. And if you didn't do anything, you're probably not going to appear in the economist obituary section. That's true. But in fact, when I say we never mention the cause of death, sometimes there's a really good reason to mention it. There was a crocodile hunter I did once who was eaten by a crocodile.

9:20That sort of thing, you know, it has to be done. There was a man who used to chase after tornadoes who in the end was killed by a tornado. Sometimes, or people die really prematurely and you want to say why. But it is rare all the same. Most people who die, I mean, they're getting increasingly old, actually. More and more hundred-year candidates there, hundred-year plus. There is something morbid. Whenever I read an obituary, I do want to, or I hear someone died, especially if they're young, there is part of me that wants to know why. Like, I want the gruesome, interesting, gossipy details for some reason.

10:00Well, I agree with you that if they're young, you ought to know how and why. But often if it's a suicide, it's just not known enough. By the time I write, nobody is quite sure what happened or why they did it or whether it was an accident. And that's the trouble. You can't really write the life if you don't know whether this awful thing was hanging over them through it or not. Yeah, there's a lot of euphemisms, right? It's like passed away suddenly, passed away unexpectedly, which either means something random and accidental happened or something quite deliberate and tragic happened. Yes, and sometimes you never do know.

10:41You never hear the answer. So I tend to steer away from those. You know, they're still under police investigation often anyway, but it's more, as I say, it's the shadow it throws across the life. You've got to interpret the life in one way or another according to how it ended in that case. What does writing obituaries do to a person? I don't know whether it does anything to me. I just enjoy them totally. I mean, I think of death as just another stage of life. We carry on in my philosophy and a lot of other people's philosophy too. So to me, it's not a sad thing at all. It's just we finish this stage.

11:24This is what we did in the time we had here. There's something else coming. We don't know what exactly, but that's the reason that it doesn't depress me at all. But I must say, when I mention it at parties and people say, what do you do? And I say, I write documentaries. It's as if I've said I'm an accountant. You know, immediately the face goes into a mask and they look for someone else to talk to. Yeah, that's a very stoic idea. I think in meditations, Mark really says something about how everything in life comes from change. change and death is either the cessation of change or it is a change into a thing that we do not yet understand.

12:05Exactly. Well, I would say it's the latter. And if it's the cessation, I think it's Socrates who said, you know, if it's just a matter of going to sleep forever, that's fine. But if I get, you know, if I wake and see all my friends around me, that's even better. But I'm happy for either thing to happen. It is interesting. I mean, you write by nature of it being in The Economist, you write pretty much only about notable, in some cases, extremely famous people, heads of state, heads of large companies, celebrities, et cetera. But there is something equalizing about the obituary. I mean, I noticed they're all, I don't know if there's a single one in this book that's more than four columns or two pages.

12:44Interesting thought that I would tell you, the only ones we've done two that were more than a page one of them was david bowie because the editor was a great fan of david bowie so he had to have more on the page and the other one was muhammad ali because the writer was again a huge fan and then i said enough death is the great equalizer yes everybody gets a page whether it's the pope or you know the guy who sells vegetables down the street. They all deserve a page. And when you say it's celebrities, I really try and keep away from them. I think you'll find there are a lot scattered through there that are not celebrities at all, that are people that were largely unknown.

13:28And they're the ones actually that I like to do best and readers like to read best. Isn't there a line from the poet Juvenal, He says something like, in life, the entire world was not big enough for Alexander, but in death, a coffin was sufficient. And there's something about the incredible ambition and success and power that these people had. And in the end, they all fit in the same two pages. That's right. They do. They fit in the same six foot coffin. That's absolutely right. Right. It's true. It's true. But as I say, I do try and keep away from the famous folk. My heart always sinks when I have to do somebody famous.

14:12I mean, there has been a real procession of famous people dying in recent weeks. I mean, they're not huge, huge, huge famous, but, you know, people like Tina Turner, I guess she is famous, you know, huge famous in a way. But you can't avoid them. and then Cormac McCarthy, who actually I didn't have, he had to be done in another place. But there was a sudden succession of people. And I would far rather they were people that no one else had heard of. I've done, you know, a guy who used to escape from chains when he was thrown in the river in India, I've done. Another chap who was the last person to know how to sail across the Pacific without a map.

14:53But they're not known these people. and they have great stories to tell. So why the aversion to eulogizing? I guess that's not quite the right word, but why the disinterest in famous people? Just because there's been so much about them usually. And my arbitrary comes a bit late because something digital, you know, we'll put a digital news story up, but the print edition obviously has to wait, you know, for a few days before it gets out there. By which time, the broadsheets will be absolutely full of this person. Everyone will have read it over the weekend. They'll be absolutely filled up with the subject.

15:32So you've got to produce something else, something quite different. It's a bit of a challenge. I don't mind having the challenge, but that's the problem. I see. It's saying something new. It's saying something that other people haven't read yet. No, that's such an interesting way to think about it. But your instinct to take a unique view on things, I think, is why I like the Pontius Pilot book so much. I just thought it was absolutely incredible. I know I came to it quite late, but I never thought I would be interested in this person. And I guess I'm not even sure I thought it would be possible to write an interesting book about this person.

16:09I so loved writing that book. You know, the great thing about him was that he's a character that no one knows very much about. So they've had to invent him all through the centuries. And they've made him as they want him to be. So he's totally invented. And yet, oddly, there's a sort of hologram that forms from all these different Pontius Pilates. And you get an impression of one character. And in the end, that was what I thought was so amazing. Now, I loved him. And after that, I looked around quite hard to try and find other people who were similar, who'd been similarly treated. And I really couldn't find any.

16:46I wrote about Orpheus, for example. He's a little bit the same because he still has some sort of purchase and clout in the modern world. People have heard of him and people know the legend the same way that they know about pilot washing his hands. The lovely way we still talk about politicians washing their hands. This is a character that's lived all the time. He's still with us. That's why I liked him so much. I think the main thing that struck me out of the book that I thought was so compelling and fascinating about it is like I just came away with this sort of sense that Pilot was a guy with a shitty job and a shitty boss stuck in a shitty situation trying to – I don't want to say do the best he could, but trying not to screw it up.

17:37Trying not to screw it up. And does in fact screw it up. Yeah, because if you screw it up, you're dead. It's a simple story in a way. He's just got to keep on the right side of Tiberius. He's got this horrible boss. He doesn't really know what he's doing in Judea. He's got rival powers. He's got the Jewish authorities as well. He doesn't have any sympathy for Jews. The Romans didn't. So he just doesn't quite know how he can hack it, actually. He's a soldier. He's not a diplomat. I think that's really important, that basic thing. And he's not a philosopher either. And just to think, I mean, I've read Seneca's letters many, many times, and I never stopped to think, like, basically, Lucilius, as you say in the book, Lucilius, Seneca's friend, and Pilate have, like, the same job or close to this.

18:30Like, it's not only a job, but it's a job that lots of people in the Roman Empire had in different places. And that was how I had to research it because Pliny the Younger as well, he's a governor. So you've got these people who are governors. So you know what their daily duties were, for example. It's just frustrating that Pilate every day would have had to send reports back to Rome. And imagine his report of the trial of Jesus, for example. But they've all gone. They've just disappeared. So we don't know what he thought about the job or anything about it. But you can look at Pliny's letters and see what the frustrations were, which is mostly missing Rome.

19:14And civilized life, as they saw it, they really thought they were in the outback. And Pliny was in quite a good place. Yeah, and Asilius too. But he's a thinker, isn't he? He's interested in what Seneca's got to say. I can't imagine Pilate in that situation. I don't think he'd ask questions. When he says that famous question at Jesus' trial, what is truth? He's not saying it as a philosopher would really wanting to know the answer. He's saying, go on, you tell me what truth is. And then he walks out and he doesn't hear the answer. That's actually the crucial thing, that he doesn't care. Yeah, I mean, one thing that's always struck me when I read biblical texts versus when I read things like Seneca's letters or any of the sort of Roman texts is I don't know if this is how it's taught or we teach them like they're in separate universes, but I don't think the average person gets the sense that these things are happening at the same time.

20:13You know, that Pilate is the contemporary of philosophers who are also household names. And like, so what's so remarkable, you know, you read the Bible, Jesus is speaking in these parables And then the disciples are sort of credulously, you know, speaking about these miracles and whatever. And then you pick up a Marcus Aurelius or a Seneca or a Cicero. And you're like, wait, there's not the same amount of mysticism and sort of vagueness. When I read Seneca, I feel like you are hearing a man on earth. And then when you are reading the Bible, it is, I think, by deliberate, it is supernatural and mystical and all these things.

21:03But they're happening at the same time. Yes, exactly. As the thinkers today, the logical thinkers, the Dawkinses and the Bernard Henry Levy and all these people are at the same time as the mystical teachers in India, for example, the gurus there. It's the same difference in a sense. I mean, the Romans, I don't think, made head or tail of anything Jesus was saying if they picked it up. And the letters you get, of course, after the death of Jesus, when the Christians begin to do things, and you've got plenty of opinion of them as being crazy. Because I've done this, I've written an email about this before, where I said something like, okay, it's a philosopher born around the turn of the millennia.

21:51They're born in a province of the Roman Empire. They become wildly famous in their own lifetime. They talk about how not judging others when you yourself are covered in sores. They talk about forgiveness. They talk about love. And then at the end, they are sentenced to death by the power of the Roman state quite gruesomely, right? Am I talking about Seneca or am I talking about Jesus, right? They have essentially the same arc, the same story. Their philosophies are both popular 2000 years later. But when you sit down and read Jesus versus read Seneca, you know, you're on different planets. Yes, you are.

22:32Yes. But all these things we know can coexist. They coexist now, but they coexisted then as well. I mean, the problem, the major problem with Jesus for the Romans, I think, wasn't his mysticism. Because things like Mithraism begin to get a little bit like it. It's more that Jesus said he was a king. It's more that he's setting himself up as one of these sort of barbarian rulers, if you like. They've got no time for because they think they're primitive and they also think they're a threat to the stability and honor of the republic, if you like. This is a political judgment, but it's his kingship that seems to worry, certainly worries Pilate more than anything else.

23:12You so beautifully contrast, I thought it was a great connection. You talk about sort of the British bafflement with Gandhi. Oh, I loved it. Yes, that was exactly, and then it's in the 1920s, for heaven's sake. You know, it's not back all those millennia. But how do you cope with this person? There's the famous scene from John's Gospel, I mean, we don't know, maybe holy apocryphal, where Pilate takes him into the praetorium and actually just they sit down and have a conversation. I guess it's possible it might have been in Greek or something, that they could have talked to each other directly.

23:45I still find that a little bit strange. But anyway, he asks some interesting questions there. He gets really worried when he asks Jesus, where are you from? And Jesus doesn't answer him. That drives him mad because the gods come down from heaven and they take weird forms. And if the god can come down and become sort of intoxicated with backing rights and things, then maybe this weird individual can be a god as well. Yeah. And there's a quote I found from Churchill where he says, it's alarming and nauseating to see Mr. Gandhi, a sedacious middle temple lawyer now posing as a faker of a type well known in the East, striding half naked up the steps of the vice regal palace while he is still organizing and conducting a campaign of civil disobedience to parlay on equal terms with the representative of the emperor king.

24:42And I felt like that so perfectly captures the Roman disgust, anger and confusion when this guy is brought before Pilate. Yes, completely. It really does. That is a great quote, isn't it? Gosh, I sometimes think if it hadn't been for the Second World War, we'd really be dismissing Churchill as a horrible right wing bigot, which he was when he first was in Parliament. He had some weird mental block when it came to India. He could not conceive of a world in which Indians and India deserve to be anything other than a possession of the empire, I guess. It seemed so. Yeah. Yeah, it did. It was a nice – I was very pleased to find that because it was a nice direct parallel, I felt.

25:35Well, and you can imagine, you know, that's Churchill. Churchill is smart and generally capable of understanding other people's perspective and he's a good diplomat. But not mysticism. But you imagine if that's the bafflement at the top from the smart people, as it goes down in the hierarchy and those people are capable of even less nuance, they're just following orders, that's where you get horrendous, heinous policy. And so you imagine Tiberius operating at one level, who is a flawed individual, and then you have his emissary, Pilate, way down the chain, who's even less qualified to be there.

26:19You get the conflict that can't be resolved. Yes, you do. Exactly. Exactly. Mind you, I mean, you talk about this gruesomeness. I mean, crucifixion was very gruesome, but it was also incredibly common. That's the thing. I mean, Pilate's successor crucified 200 people at one time. So we mustn't begin to think really that he was particularly gunning for Jesus. He was just putting him up like a common criminal. That's the thing. Yes, yes. And his job is to do that. His job is to sentence the people to death. Yes. I mean, I was quite proud of my line, I think, at the end of the trial scene, which is, and then he went to lunch.

27:05because, you know, it's just another day, another mad Jewish guy. Great. Another obstacle to, you present him repeatedly as this kind of guy who just wants to go back to his life. He wants to not be bothered. He wants things to be peaceful and calm. And, you know, the people are the impediment to that happening. Yes, yes, definitely. I just felt he was uncomfortable all the time he was there. And of course, it ends so unhappily as well for him, really. And he just, well, who knows quite what he does at the end? It's all very mysterious. but it's it was somehow suspected that he committed suicide because he left in disgrace and if you leave in disgrace then then you do kill yourself because it's better for your family if you just kill yourself and don't don't try to hang about and and i guess to be to be fair to pilot though your point not only did he do this a lot but i think better people in less difficult situations did just as badly.

28:16I'm thinking in my book, Lives of the Stoics, I talk about the trial of Justin or Justin Martyr. The judge in that case is Rusticus, who's Marcus Aurelius' philosophy teacher, this brilliant, wise man that Marcus writes in meditations about how thoughtful and loving and kind he is. And then you have him bringing down the full power of the Roman state on this guy who's basically brought up on sort of not just trumped up charges, but also kind of pointless charges. Like the offense was so much more minor than, say, Jesus's offense. Yes. And, you know, it ends in the same gruesome way. Yeah, but they're dangerous, these people.

29:03That's the trouble. And also when you look at the structure of Pilate's trial, it does go through the proper procedures. He does call witnesses and he does try and question the accused as he ought to. It's not quite a kangaroo court. No, I felt like with Rusticus and with Pilate, they were trying to let the person off, and they were not being met halfway. No, this is the problem. They were trying, but it didn't quite work. We don't really know how hard Pilate tried, because it's been written afterwards. And certainly the writers of the Gospels were trying to exonerate the Romans and put the blame on the Jews.

29:54So they wanted Pilate to be more reluctant than he probably was.

30:08You probably heard the headlines about all the different cuts to foreign aid and food benefits. This is having a profound impact on the world's poorest people and the world's poorest communities. But, you know, just hearing about that, that's not what stoicism is about. Stoicism is, to me, what you're going to do about it. And that's where GiveWell comes in. GiveWell is trusted by tens of thousands of donors each year because they provide free and independent research that helps you understand how to have a big impact. GiveWell has spent the last 18 years researching global health and poverty alleviation, and they direct funding to the highest impact opportunities.

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32:10although you know if the idea of sowing the the the blood of the martyrs to create the seed of the truth there is this sense also like with socrates that they didn't want to be let off they wanted to be let off you're quite right now socrates positively downed that hemlock they they don't want to be that they're sort of fired up with the cause Yeah. So you're dealing with that as well as somebody who's trying to be a judge. Yes. And it's true now. You look at some of the judges of people like the followers of Charles Manson, for example, and how crazy they were in the dog. It was obviously they weren't going to change their opinions just because they were in a court of law.

32:53Yeah, they didn't have the equivalent of letting someone off for not being fit to stand trial. No, they didn't have that. And even if they did, I'm not sure if Jesus or Seneca or Justin would have allowed that defense to be argued on their behalf. That is the tricky nature of the whole conflict. Yeah, I think you're right. They were not wanting to be let off at that point. And you get this too in the various, you know, in the English wars of religion, we didn't quite have wars. But anyway, one king or queen would put a lot of Catholics to death, another would put a lot of Protestants to death.

33:37And among all those martyrs, there were lots who didn't want to be exonerated or didn't want to have a pardon. Yeah. I can imagine Pilate saying, help me help you, help me help you. I can't. I think that sounds a bit sort of help me help you. What does it sound like? A bit sort of, it sounds American, actually. But you do make the point, I mean, as much as we want to say, oh, they're trapped by it, or oh, Like one of the most fundamental parts of the Roman system was the idea, I mean, Seneca writes a whole essay on it, the idea of clemency or mercy. They had a certain amount of discretion. And in fact - Well, that's how the Operabbas thing comes in.

34:26Yes. Yeah. There are these celebrated Roman examples of the person tries to assassinate the emperor and the emperor lets them go. And that mercy was so fundamentally lacking in these cases. Yes, though not in, as I say, not quite in the case of Pilate. He did try to release Barabbas. And that was part of the tradition that, in fact, he had introduced of letting free a prisoner at the Passover because it was a great Jewish feast. And it was the Feast of Liberation, if you like, for the Jews. So he would free the prisoner they wanted. So there's a bit of clemency that he had introduced. So he does occasionally try, but then he really screws it up by doing something like putting all the Roman banners on the praetorium.

35:16Or using all the money from the temple to build an aqueduct. He just absolutely cloth-eared when it comes to Jewish sensibilities. He just doesn't think about them. You get the sense as you portray him in the book, there are natural politicians, there are people with a deafness for public opinion, and you really get a sense of the absence of it in someone like Pilot, just how ill-suited he was for the demands of the job. Yeah. I mean, I can't stress enough that he's a soldier because it's not really stressed in all the portrayals of him. He's always the judge in his judge's robes. But in the one inscription we've got of the stone he put up to honor Tiberius, he calls himself a praefectus.

36:06That's a mounted knight. And that's how he sees himself. He doesn't call himself, you know, whatever, Udex or Goubenator or any of these administrative terms. He is a fighting man. And he does take troops into battle occasionally. It's recorded anyway. He's a brute in a job that requires immense deafness and interpersonal skills. Yes. I wouldn't say those are too hot with him. And, you know, I contrast this. I've always found Seneca's brother, who basically finds himself in the same position as Pilate, clearly has some of those skills and deafness. And he figures out what and how to extricate himself from the situation.

37:05Oh, that's clever. Now, is that mentioned in Seneca's letters? Or is it from another source that you know what his brother did? No, no, his brother, his brother Gallio. That's his brother, that's Seneca's brother. Right. And so, you know, he does, you know, you know, speak of sort of brutal colonial examples, in the United States, during the civil rights movement, there were sort of two ways that local governments resisted segregation, right? There's Bull Connor, who was famously - I know all about him. Yeah, he'd walk up to the peaceful protesters and he would react with violence and brutality.

37:48Yeah, and then there were other sheriffs whose names were not immortalized to history who understood, and obviously in both cases, their motives and their cause are morally repugnant, so I should just say that. But there were other mayors and sheriffs who understood that the goal of the civil rights protest was to get arrested, was to provoke the violence and the overreaction of the state to get on television and leverage public opinion. But there were places where Martin Luther King would go and try to stir those things up and be less successful because he was treated gently, respectfully, not with photogenic violence, right?

38:32And when I contrast Pilate and Galio, I go, oh, okay, they're both the colonial power, but one understands, hey, it's actually letting him go is better for law and order than arresting and executing him. That's true. No, absolutely. I remember I did an obituary of one of the sheriffs, the sheriff who attacked the marches on the bridge in Selma. It was a long time ago, because I can't quite remember his name. But he did more for the civil rights movement than than quite a lot of other people because he was so violent that he opened the eyes of a lot of Americans to the injustices that were going on.

39:19And so these people, despite everything they think they stand for, actually promote the cause that they're trying to quell. It's a nice irony, really. But a horrible man. I think it was Jim Clark, the sheriff. It was Jim Clark, Mark, indeed. Thank you. Yeah. Yeah. No, and yeah, that is the irony. Pontius Pilate is more responsible than anyone else for the spread and the flowering of Christianity, you could argue. You could argue that. And in fact, you know, he's a saint in the Coptic church because he witnessed to Christ, which is quite extraordinary. And if it was, in fact, God's will that Jesus die in the manner that he died.

40:05Ah, yeah, this is a really interesting line. To me, Pilate's like a cog in a huge machine. He can't get out of it. If you believe in the redemption story that Adam and Eve sinned, so therefore Christ was sent to redeem mankind, you can't stop it. You mustn't stop it. You must enable it. And that's what Pilate does. And in the medieval mystery place, his wife, who in the Bible tries to save Christ, is a baddie and the harlot of the devil because she actually tries to rescue him. She tries to stop this great plan of redemption. I love this upside down thinking that you get. I think that the stoic metaphor for the logos, you know, the way in the Bible was the idea that we're like dogs tied to a cart.

41:02You know, we can either trot cheerfully alongside or we can be dragged, you know, along the way. But we're heading where the cart is heading either way. And you could see an element of that in Pilate's life, if you believe the story and the arc of it, that he had no way out of it. He had no way out. Exactly. And the same is true for people like Judas and for the Jewish high priest. Everybody who's involved in this story is somehow caught in it, caught like flies. They just can't escape this. So that was one of the things that most intrigued me about the tale, the extent to which. pilot had any free will at all in this.

41:46What I thought was so fascinating about your book, though, I wondered if this was an artistic choice. First off, for a person for whom, which there is basically no historical fact known about, you say at the beginning, there's like three things known for absolute certainty about pilot. You know, you managed to produce so much detail, which is fascinating, but you spend almost no time on the crucifixion itself? No, I think that isn't much. I mean, Pilate wasn't there. So as soon as he's left the room, the next thing he does is he writes the sign that goes over the cross, which is Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews.

42:29And that's a very interesting notice in itself. And the story is the priest came to him, the Jewish high priest, and said, what have you written there? He's not our king. and what is this? And Pilate said, what I've written, I've written. So get lost.

42:51But that's the only part he plays really in the crucifixion. He's off the scene, but he would have seen the earthquake. What I wanted to do was just show Pilate noticing these things that happen in the crucifixion from a distance thinking, that's strange. And then I think one of the most interesting things I found was a decree that came out just after the crucifixion, which says, would everybody please stop moving bodies out of tombs and putting them somewhere else? but it's almost it's almost shakespearean how you do it where you know shakespeare has the all the drama all the the the dialogue and then you know the action the battle or whatever it happens right off screen right it's sort of like no that's right and the crucifixion which is the story that as far as people know pilot goes that like i expected is he going to be walking up the Via Dolorosa, you know, is he carrying the thing?

43:53I thought all that would be in there. No, I'm not going to put it in there. To tell you the truth, shortly after I'd finished Pilot, I thought, who am I going to do now? Oh, perhaps I'll do Jesus. Then I thought, no, don't even think about it. Just don't go there because it's a really dangerous subject, actually. There are just too many people with a vested interest with their own sort of investment in the tale of Jesus, There's all sorts of persuasions of religion, politics, this, that, and the other. I just couldn't go there. But this is Pilate's story, and I don't like, either in my books or in the obits, to really go into other characters at all.

44:33I want to stay with my central character and what he's doing and how he's seeing things from his or her point of view. That, to me, is the most interesting thing. So that's why you haven't got the crucifixion, because you can read so many accounts of it elsewhere, different accounts. You don't need another one. But you do need perhaps a pilot standing at the window or sitting in his bath and the bathwater suddenly trembles with the earthquake. I don't think I did write that, actually, but it's a thought. Speaking of images and perspectives, you want to hear my favorite joke about the Last Supper?

45:12Yes, why not? Okay, so they walk into a restaurant and Jesus says, we'll have a table for 26. And the hostess looks at him and says, but there's only 13 of you. And he says, yeah, but we're all going to sit on the same side. Which is the oddest choice about Da Vinci's Last Supper. Why are they not sitting around the table? Why would they all be on one side of the table? Like they're at a banquet and the audience is looking up at them. I mean, that was the convention at the time. I mean, all the medieval banquet scenes, they're all on one side of the table. Unless, you know, unless the scene is that the servants who come and bring them something, because they didn't have servants in the upper room, one imagines, but the servants who normally came and brought food to banquets would need to have full reach across the table.

46:03So it's just possible that they all sat on one side. I don't know. I don't know. It is funny, though, just that you bring that up, right? It's like the table arrangement and how are they bringing the food in? As different and as strange and surreal as all these stories are, I mean, there's an anecdote in one of Seneca's writings where he's talking about not getting seated at the good table, like at a restaurant or a party. Yes, that's right. This is life, man. Not that much has changed. It is life. I love that. So he wasn't at the good table. I'd have thought Seneca, like a good story, would not mind which table he was at.

46:46I think if I'm remembering the passage correctly, he's arguing with himself why this shouldn't matter to him. But he's still – you know what I mean? He's still a human and it still does bother him. Actually, that makes a lot of sense that he would argue with himself and say, come on, why do you care?

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49:57I was struck by the fact that in the intro to the book, you bring up one of my favorite passages in meditations. Although speaking of tables and feasts, there's this other beautiful passage in meditations where Marcus Aurelius is talking about how what's laid out before him is a dead pig and rotten grapes. He's trying to sort of do what Seneca is doing, which is it doesn't matter. Don't take this seriously. But that sort of ties into a point you made at the beginning of the book, which I actually don't know if I totally agree with. But you say, Marcus Aurelius in his meditations tries to describe at one point the beauty of small, almost unexpected effects in nature.

50:35He wonders at the cracks and the little breaks in the surface of a loaf, figs by which when they are ripe and open and gape, and olives, which when they fall by themselves and are nearly decaying, are particularly pretty to look at. And then you say, this image of putrescence as beauty brought me up short. These were different eyes of looking at the world. Yeah, I really felt that quite strongly. I feel it most strongly, I think. I can't remember whether that's in the introduction. When I look at the paintings on the walls of Pompeii, because in some ways they look almost modern. And in other ways, you see, they really aren't.

51:14They're quite strange and mystical and misty and they're pieces of myth. And I suppose we know some of the myths, we don't know some of the others. But there's scenes that they paint. There's something odd about the sunlight. They see sunlight in a different way. Their scenes aren't lit the way we light them. There's something about the human body too. It's all, you don't see it in the sculpture because the sculpture. It looks like a person. Yes. But the paintings, there's another outlook there, which I mean, all through history, the painter has the outlook of his age somewhat. But I was just fascinated to try and pin down what it was about those Roman paintings.

52:01I've always been struck by that in Homer, where he talks about the wine dark sea. I know. I've never understood that. Why not forget it? I live by the sea. The sea goes every color you can think of, but it does not ever go red or whiny or that color. Every other color almost, yes, it does. But I think it's a strange image that I wonder if it's really a good translation because I'm afraid I really don't know Greek. Well, no, your point is interesting, right? There's sort of a duality to the Romans, right? In the one aspect, Marcus feels so relatable and so human. And then, you know, five passages later, he's like, I'm so proud of myself.

52:45I never raped my slaves. You know, you get this sense that they're like us, and then they're totally not like us at all. I mean, I love the bit in Ovid in the Asamatory where he says, you know, you just take your girlfriend to the games. It's great. And you can put a cushion under her feet and then you'll get a look at her ankle and everything. And then when they start killing the beasts and the men, she can hide her head on your shoulder. And that's such a fantastic dual image of these horribly barbarous games. But quite a modern idea. You take your girl and go in the back row. Yes. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

53:27Or, you know, the beauty in the ordinary, which is what I've always taken the passage you quoted to mean, the way the bread breaks open and blah, blah, blah. You know, that does feel so – you could plug that in. You could plug in other more modern examples and feel like that passage was written in a book today. Yes, you could when you look at Dutch painters and Spanish painters in the 17th century and then, yeah, painters, painters of today or the pre-Raphaelites, everybody who looks at things in detail or not even those particular definite lines. But impressionists too can bring out the beauty in, just in, as you say, in a loaf of bread or in a flour or in a plate.

54:10Yeah, the artist sigh. Yeah. And then, you know, even with, on the one hand, the sort of the logicness and the realism of the Romans that make it incomprehensible, that make Jesus incomprehensible to them. At the same time, it's not like they didn't believe in a bunch of preposterous myths and believe that God's walked among them. Yeah, I mean, one thing I love about the Romans is they are actually really open to other religions. And there's all sorts of, you know, Egyptian, fine, you know, you can have a baboon-headed god if you like, this sort of thing. It's really pretty tolerant at that level because they think they're all fairly silly, except for, you know, the better of the Greek gods, the more powerful Greek gods.

55:01And then, of course, you've got your emperors becoming gods as well. So there's gods and gods. It's almost as if the Romans were like, look, you can believe whatever you want, but wink, wink, none of us believe in any of this, right? Yes, yes, that's right. And then when the Christians were like, no, no, no, no, we're serious. They didn't know how to handle it. No. Oh, you're right. Yes, it's true. It's because they didn't feel that. When I say they, that's too generalist in a way, because there obviously were Romans who thought pretty deeply about these things. And I must say, when I read Seneca and Marcus Aurelius, I'm always very struck by how close they get to Christian love and that kind of thing.

55:45They don't express it that way. But that, and also to the sort of, almost to Buddhism sometimes in their sense of wanting to go into meditation and know themselves. That's the thing, know thyself. there's always such a strong streak of that coming through the ancient world there's always people practicing that all over the place and yeah well you you you mentioned in the book you have a big passage from cicero that struck me and he's talking about the idea of civic courage right that there's the soldier on the battlefield but then also in moments of leadership or politics you need people who are unafraid to make difficult decisions to handle nuance etc you know again Again, that strikes, it's such an ancient idea.

56:30And then that's like what we're complaining about today with our own politicians. Yeah, absolutely. It's the lack thereof. The lack thereof. Exactly. I feel that America in recent years has got much more interested in Rome, in ancient Rome, whether it's because there's a Senate in both places. It's something about Rome that seems rather familiar. And I think especially when Trump was president, this appalling man at the head of a big nation, throwing his weight about being imperial, in fact, he could have been Tiberius. He didn't have all the sexual peccadillos of Tiberius quite. I see him more as a Cataline or a Catiline.

57:15I forget how you pronounce it. Oh, do you see him as that? Yeah. And I feel like actually if we had – Who's Cicero? If we had the same understanding, if we were as steeped in the classics and in myth, I feel like the founders would have recognized him as a Catalina. They would have been so horrified to think it could even happen in that republic they'd set up so carefully that could you produce a populist like that? And I actually think that's what, in a sense, has made Trump so successful is not the right word. let's say unbeatable, like difficult to do away with, is that we actually don't have, he feels so unprecedented and abnormal when in fact, as far as the classical literature goes, there are a lot more analogs and examples, but we don't have the understanding or the shared language to be able to talk about it.

58:14So it just feels like this kind of totally new, unstoppable force when it really is a very ancient reincarnation of a timeless type of character. Yeah. Yeah, that's true. I was just wondering who the modern Cicero could be. Maybe it's the New York Attorney General. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. I don't know. Maybe that's the problem is we don't have any more Cicero's. Not that Cicero was so perfect, but... Well, no, he wasn't, but still, he's pretty good. Yeah, I think that's right. I think that's really interesting that in a sense, America sees itself as the new Rome, but perhaps the new Rome in too many ways that are not so great.

59:02Yes. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. And I've... This is probably taking it too far, but I think there's a little there's a little Cincinnatus in Biden the sort of old guy gets called back yes the old guy gets called back that's true wasn't there someone else who's called the American Cincinnatus someone who was actually a farmer actually plowing his acre in Illinois it wasn't Lincoln was it no Washington Washington was a farmer and every time he resigned his commission it was to go back to my farm and you know Obviously, he worked his farm about as much as probably the original Cincinnatus did, which is to say that slaves did all the work.

59:46A lot of slaves worked it. Yes, exactly. But no, there was even after the American Revolution, there was a society. It was called the Society of the Cincinnati. And the officers, it was actually quite alarming to the founders. They thought it was this sort of hereditary aristocracy that they were worried about. But it was all the officers and their sons that were veterans in the Revolutionary War were considered sort of members of this society that was modeled after Cincinnatus. Interesting. I had never heard of that. Yeah, it's interesting. There's a book by Tom Ricks that I really like called First Principles, and it's all about the philosophical readings of the founders.

1:00:38Like, what were the founders reading? That is always fascinating to know. Yeah. Yes. It's a really interesting book. Well, I have one last question for you, and it's a bit of a softball, and then we'll leave it there. So what is truth? Oh, God. That is not a softball, Ryan. You know that. Well, I think love is truth. What do you mean? Well, I happen to think that life is love. That's what we're here for. That's how the world works. And that's how the world turns, in fact. Even if it doesn't look like it, it's a sort of scientific principle of attraction and repulsion. And all these scientific laws come down to really sort of electromagnetic fields and so where you get a sense of attraction or repulsion and things.

1:01:39so you know i think when you i feel that when you are in a state of being either in love with the world or in love with someone the way life is enhanced by that the way you can walk in nature and find everything suddenly looking sharp and defined and so on that's about as near as i can get to it that's what i think truth is and and when you think pilot was asking that question i I took it as him almost saying, eh, what is truth? Yes, he is saying, eh, what is truth. I'm sure he is saying that. Yeah, you tell me what truth is. You go on then. I always used to hear a Yorkshire voice, the voice of someone like, I've got Yorkshire relations and farmers and some of them are quite down to earth.

1:02:28Yeah, go on, you tell me. I see. I was saying, I don't even think he was saying, you tell me. I think he's saying like, eh, what even is that? Like he's saying it's nothing. Like the truth, there is no truth. He could be saying it that way too. Yeah, I think he's saying it that way too. I mean, you imagine a soldier, just an ordinary GI being asked that question. Yes. And what sort of response would you get? Yeah, he's saying we're in the middle of a battlefield here. Don't talk to me about these high-minded ideals. That's right. That's right. Yeah, it's such a, it's again, it's even if it real or not, someone had, it is so literary and perfect to have these two characters meet each other because it's fantastic.

1:03:21They could never have connected. Yeah, I mean, we just don't know whether they did or not. But that was what made me write the book in the first place, that in Westminster Cathedral, there's a relief by Eric Gill, who's a famous British sculptor. of Jesus and Pilate. And they're on the same level. Their heads are on the same level. And they're looking at each other. And it's such a powerful look. And you can see Pilate thinking, who the heck is this? And Jesus is fixing him with this stare. And they're both in profile. It's so powerful. And I just, when I was there, I thought, well, we have got so much information about Jesus and so much has been written.

1:04:01Has anyone written anything about Pilate? Answer, no. But here, they look equal. Yes. And even if they were standing face to face, there was a million miles. A billion miles. Yes, exactly. That's what's so interesting. Yeah. Even if they were speaking the same language, which they weren't, right? Well, they could just about have managed it possibly. Because Greek was, there's this famous sort of Greek, Greek, which probably they could have managed the same way people can just about manage to speak English to each other now if they don't have a common language. They can try it. But the chasm between them, no language, no words could have possibly bridged because they didn't even live in the same reality.

1:04:54No, exactly. That is just so interesting. That confrontation, I think I say it perhaps in the book, it seemed to me the most momentous in human history. those two men just looking at each other complete complete incomprehension well i i think even on jesus side there's probably a certain amount of incomprehension even if you give him his full divinity he probably couldn't quite get into the mind of a roman but maybe he maybe he could no i was just i was just reading uh this book about the the history of the comanche people in the United States. And they would have these diplomatic sit-downs between a Comanche warrior and some US politician.

1:05:46And you're just like - Oh gosh, I would have liked to bring that in. That would have been fascinating to me. They could have never talked to, I mean, they're negotiating a treaty, but they fundamentally don't even, one believes you can own the land and one believes that you cannot. How do they negotiate? Exactly. How can you? I mean, I expect, like me, you look in wonder at those photographs of the Indian chiefs in the 1850s or whenever they were first taken. They look in those eyes. It's so far away and it's so removed from the man with the camera. And it's looking sort of humiliated and proud at the same time.

1:06:29It's extraordinary. I find them so compelling, those photographs. Yeah, you think about they are part of a tradition that has gone back tens of thousands of years. Like when the Europeans would fight each other over these intractable issues, they were still fundamentally sharing most of the same belief and history, whether they accepted it or not. And then, you know, people came over to the new world, but it wasn't a new world. It was a different world that had existed independently without any overlap for eons. And then they're trying to work out petty differences over, you know, who gets to hunt here or there.

1:07:12I mean, it's just, it's a chasm you can't bridge. No, no, absolutely. Gosh, you wonder what they were thinking, don't you? Those chiefs, when they looked at these little jumped up European creatures in their tall hats with their big bulky cameras. Yeah, awful in some studio or other. And you think that it wasn't that long ago? No, it really wasn't. What, 150 years? I mean, perhaps rather more than that. No, no. I mean, yeah. I mean, these things were still going on in the 1880s, 1890s. Yes, they were, actually. They were, weren't they? It's remarkable. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, at least this was so long ago, right?

1:07:55Like, this is 2 ,000 years ago. I always make sure my subjects are safely dead. You know, I certainly wouldn't write a contemporary biography. I don't think. Too much trouble for my friends of mine who've done it. Yeah, you wait for them to die, And then you sum up their entire life in four columns with complete certainty and control. It's quite a first. Well, I was amazed this morning because I got onto Google or whatever it was to see because I couldn't decide whether to do Stockton Rush of the submersible or not for the obituary. In the end, I thought I wouldn't. But there are already six things that claim to be biographies of him up there on Amazon.

1:08:37Can you imagine? what what to imagine that guy the quote he said you will be remembered for the yes for the mistakes you made pilot is remembered for the mistakes he made and to be i mean it's you couldn't make it up i mean he's like the great grandchild of people who died on the titanic yes human beings just make the same mistakes over and over and over and over again. That's what we do. They do it over and over and over. That's what being human seems to be about. And I guess we do gradually learn as we go through. We all learn a little bit, but there are always people coming up behind you who haven't learned as well.

1:09:22Oh, gosh. Well, thank you so much. This was a true honor. And I've been raving about this book, which is just absolutely incredible. Well, you are very kind, Ryan. I'm delighted that you have been because I'm very fond of it myself, actually, if I say so. You know, of all my books, I think that one, as I say, was the one I most enjoyed doing. And it's... It's a masterpiece, no question. It's been a really interesting conversation. Likewise. You're sending me back to, I'm going to pick up Seneca tonight. I feel I'm a bit rusty on him. Please do. I'll send you my book, The Lives of the Stoics. I think you'll like it.

1:10:04I would love to see that. Will you do that? I will.

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