Stephen Greenblatt: Why “This Time Is Different” Is Always Wrong

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3:21Ryan Holiday: Hey, it's Ryan Holiday. Welcome to another episode of the Daily Soic Podcast. To me, the miracle that any of these books from antiquity survive, like how? How do we have Marcus Reus' meditations? How do we have these books that 2 ,000 years ago, 2 ,500 years ago, Somebody wrote down on a scroll or on a waxen tablet, and then it was preserved. It was preserved not just against the elements, but against censors who wanted to destroy them, against book burnings. It's just, it's a miracle. This is why one of my favorite books is this book, The Swerve, How the World Became Modern. It's by Stephen Greenblatt.

4:01Ryan Holiday: He's a Shakespearean scholar. but the swerve is this thing he talks about when when some of these ancient texts were rediscovered in the medieval era leading to the renaissance it's like an incredible book i've raved about it for years i love it i'm a huge fan of his work i've been dying to get him on the podcast for a very long time and uh i think you're really going to like this episode he's a professor of the humanities at harvard he's written extensively about the english renaissance he's the general editor of the Norton Anthology of English Literature and the Norton Shakespeare. I not only loved his book, The Swerve, which won the Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award, very much deserved, but he also wrote Will in the World, which is a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

4:45Ryan Holiday: It's a biography of Shakespeare. I also like his little book, Tyrant, which is about the sort of tyrannical demagogic characters in Shakespeare's plays. I also like his book about Adam and Eve. I'm just a huge fan of this person. And it was a absolute treat to have him on the podcast. I'm just going to get into the episode. We're talking about likable geniuses, abrasive and dangerous ones, how Shakespeare subtweets in his plays, ancient plays as rehearsals for moral and political crises. We're talking about Euripides and his play, The Children of Hercules, and then, of course, the idea of the swerve, and then how Marcus Aurelius wielded power without becoming a monster.

5:30Ryan Holiday: You're going to love this episode. You can grab copies of The Swerve and Tyrant at The Painted Porch. You can check out his latest book, Dark Renaissance. Let's just get into this episode.

5:42Stephen Greenblatt: You're in Austin, right? Yeah, right outside Austin. I've been to Austin on a number of different occasions, but not very recently, but I'll see if I can make it there again.

5:51Ryan Holiday: Please come out. We have a little bookstore here that carries most of your books. Pleased to hear it. Yeah. Let's see. What do I have here? I have Tyrant, which I loved. I have A Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve. I have The Swerve. And then here's the new one as well. Oh, I'm glad you have that. I'm very happy about that. I didn't know if you would have it. I have Will in the World, which I also loved, but I couldn't find it on my shelf. I've been thinking a lot lately. I know he's not exactly your area of expertise, but I've been thinking a lot lately about how relevant Montaigne is to this world that we live in.

6:31Stephen Greenblatt: Yeah. Montaigne is really one of my favorite writers in the world. I sometimes think of, who would I want? I mean, that game that one always plays, who would you like to sit in the same room with? Who would you like to meet, talk with? And people say, whatever. I mean, Jesus or Socrates. And Montaigne is probably at the right top of my list.

6:53Ryan Holiday: Yeah, I think he would be a fascinating dinner companion. I would like to just watch him work in that library, sort of, you know, going from book to book, talking out loud, meditating on things. He's not just modern in the sense of how he thinks. I've recommended this book so much. Actually, we bought so many copies, we brought it back. The publisher was thinking of discontinuing it. But Stefan Zweig wrote this little biography of Montaigne in like 42 or 43 when he was fleeing the Nazis in South America. And there's something very haunting about a man in exile writing about a man who was sort of pursuing his own self-imposed exile in the midst of the excesses and horrors of his time.

7:47Stephen Greenblatt: I don't know this book, Ryan, but I meant to make a note of it and read it. I read, that sounds wonderful. I read Stefan Zweig's, I think it's Stefan Zweig. He wrote a biography of that interesting theologian named Castillo from the same period. Yes. And I thought it was wonderful. And he has a book on Erasmus too.

8:06Ryan Holiday: So he's interested in intolerance, intolerant people. Yes, that's exactly right. His biography of Montaigne is, I think, fundamentally about how one remains tolerant in fundamentally intolerant times.

8:21Stephen Greenblatt: Yeah, that's a wonderful way of putting it. And I think that is part of what makes Montaigne so appealing, so relevant.

8:30Ryan Holiday: Yes.

8:30Stephen Greenblatt: He was surrounded by people who were fanatics in one cause or another. And he was determined not to be. Yes. He wasn't by temperament anyway, but he was determined to survive, which is a very important part of this. But also to figure out how, while surviving, how he wouldn't join one party or another.

8:51Ryan Holiday: Yeah, it's like weirdos always have a target on their back. And he was certainly weird. And then he wasn't a fundamentalist. He might have had some Jewish blood. And he's also rich. He has a big fancy estate that I'm sure people have their eyes on. You know, he must have been a target in so many different ways. And he just sort of retreats to his library and decides that if this is how the world is going to be, then I'm not going to participate. And yeah, I guess to be celebrating intellectual humility and curiosity in a time of certainty and closed mindedness is very interesting to me. It is interesting.

9:35Stephen Greenblatt: I haven't read, as I said, I haven't read the Sussman's Reich book. Recent biographers of Montaigne have said that, yes, of course, he was in that wonderful study and had in retreat, but he came out of that retreat quite often. Yes. And he was the kind of person whom even very powerful people involved in very complicated matters wanted to talk to, including the king. So even though he was also not participating, he also did actually find a way to, well, I don't know about influence, but anyway, to make his views shared, known to powerful people. Yes.

10:18Ryan Holiday: Yes. He managed to, by nature of his sort of self-effacing style and his obvious genius, managed to not create the enemies that you might expect.

10:34Stephen Greenblatt: Yeah. And you're right. And there's a kind of there's a form of retreat in which you really do disappear. Yeah. But that wasn't his mode. He found a way of going into what he called his boutique, his little back room. But he also came out of that room. I admire that in him. I mean, I understand the impulse in really rotten times to disappear. Yes. And of course, there are moments at which it's necessary to disappear for survival. But he was powerful enough and had connections enough. So that wasn't his principal concern.

11:10Ryan Holiday: Yeah, there's something interesting about Montaigne that you can maybe say of Ben Franklin, and then you can't say of a lot of the people who were at one time or another, maybe one of the smartest people alive, is that he seemed genuinely likable and agreeable and good at making allies and not enemies.

11:32Stephen Greenblatt: Yes, you're right. I mean, this is one of the reasons that if I'm listing people I'd like to sit down with, the sheer pleasantness of the conversation as well as the genius of him. If we're lucky, if we lived a long life, we all have encountered remarkable people, geniuses. Yes. But they're not always very agreeable. And Montaigne really was just, appears to have been incredibly appealing. Years ago, now he's gone, alas. But I knew the Irish poet Seamus Heaney. And he was just a fantastically nice, agreeable person to be with, as well as startlingly intelligent and creative and gifted. But it's not always the case.

12:16Ryan Holiday: I think about that line, I think it was Macaulay who said about Socrates that the more he reads about Socrates, the more he understands why they killed him. And Montaigne is very likable. Like the more I read about Cicero, the less I like Cicero. And the more I am certain that I would have found him quite obnoxious.

12:38Stephen Greenblatt: Yeah. There's that. There's, as you probably know, they're wonderful letters that Petrarch in the 14th century, who discovered a lot of Cicero's letters that had been saved in monastery, but hadn't been circulated. But he was very excited and he read those letters. He was quite upset. Yes. Because Cicero was a culture hero of his. But then he read the letters and he thought, oh, I'm not so happy about this.

13:03Ryan Holiday: Maybe you just get used to pontificating or something and you become slowly but surely insufferable. Yeah.

13:13Stephen Greenblatt: Well, let's hope it doesn't happen to any of us.

13:16Ryan Holiday: Talking about Montaigne and the time in which he lived, I was so struck by your book on Shakespeare. And I've been thinking about this because I was just in Greece. We tend to think of these periods that we like, particularly if you're a scholar or you're just a fan, you can glamorize the world that they lived in. Right. Because, you know, that was when Shakespeare lived. What a wonderful time it would have been to live when Shakespeare was alive or or, you know, Socrates in Athens. What must it have looked like when the Acropolis was was shiny and gold? the more you start to see them as actual people who lived in what they understood to be the present moment or even, you know, the most advanced time in human history, you realize that all was not well.

14:03Ryan Holiday: And in fact, they were as stressed out and worried about what was happening around them as anyone else. I was very struck by the argument you make at the beginning of Tyrant, which is that Shakespeare overtly mentions politics like one time in his plays. And he basically almost lost his life over it and then realizes, oh, if I want to comment on what's happening now, I have to be much more subtle about it, which I think is a statement about how violent and uncertain the world he lived in was. Absolutely.

14:38Stephen Greenblatt: That's the premise, the guiding premise of the book that's about to come out, that we mentioned a second ago, Dark Renaissance. It's very important to understand that the late, if you want to understand this period at all, you want to understand Shakespeare or the English Renaissance, that it's much more like North Korea than North Carolina. or perhaps it is very much like contemporary Iran. Yes. It's full of interesting people, but it's also extremely dangerous. And there's no such thing as, in this case, there's no such thing as a public sphere where you're allowed to say things that to voice your views about people in power without running fantastic or religious issues or any of the things that people argued about in the period without running tremendous risks.

15:32Stephen Greenblatt: And Shakespeare was a genius for many reasons, but like Montaigne, as we were talking, Shakespeare managed to stay, as far as we know, to stay out of prison his whole life. Montaigne said somewhere that he loves liberty so much that if anyone so much as threatened his little finger, he would try to move somewhere else. Yeah. I mean, these are people with that rather similar sensibility, Montaigne and Shakespeare that way. Shakespeare didn't have a fancy family and lots of wealth the way Montaigne did. But the person I've just written about, Christopher Marlowe, was exactly the opposite, was an unbelievable risk taker right at the edge.

16:12Stephen Greenblatt: But he manages to make it only to the age of 29 before he's murdered. Yeah. And I think he knew that he was running. I know he knew that he was running that kind of risk, but he did it. I mean, here I am, an old man in a sweet barn in rural Vermont. So I'm definitely on the Montaigne Shakespeare side of this equation.

16:34Ryan Holiday: There wasn't much room for transgressive, upsetting art the way we might understand the role of the artist today.

16:43Stephen Greenblatt: They actually figured out the interesting thing about Montaigne, too, although Montaigne's a special case. But the interesting thing about Shakespeare is that he did figure out how to voice what he needed to voice. That was actually part of his brilliance. Christopher Marlowe did as well, but Marlowe paid the price for it. He couldn't figure out actually how to do it, you know, in that sense, how to do it self-protectively. But after all, Shakespeare is someone who has a character say, it's a heretic that makes the fire, not she that burns. And if you said that in public, openly, as you're voicing your opinion in the late 16th or early 17th century, you'd be executed.

17:27Stephen Greenblatt: But he has a character say this in a play, or he has a character say, a dog's obeyed an office. But he figures out how to do this. That's King Lear when he's mad. And the other character is this sort of witch-like Paulina, strange Paulina in The Winter's Tale. The interesting thing, Ryan, is that in the 16th century as now, even in very contested times, actually Iran is a perfect example, very repressive societies tend to allow escape valves. Something can be articulated. Sure. And I say that about Iran, not because I know, not at all, but I'm impressed by Iranian movies, although many of those movies are not shown in Iran.

18:07Stephen Greenblatt: So that's probably not a good example. But in Shakespeare's world, you could actually say things only in this special sphere.

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20:56Ryan Holiday: It makes me think that in the same way that the, and actually, I think it was Cleanthes, the Stoic, he said something about how the point of poetry is that the constraints are what bring out the artistry, right? If you could, obviously, free versus a thing, but the rhyme structure and the shortness, this is what creates the beauty in the same way he says, you know, music is, you know, air is pushed through the flute and it comes out in an interesting way. Without the constraints, you don't have anything. And in a way, that's the constraint of the medium that a Shakespeare or a Montaigne is dealing with, but it's life or death, right?

21:33Ryan Holiday: It's like, hey, if you get this right, it'll be clever and interesting and profound, and there'll be an edge to it. But if you get it wrong, you're not going to be canceled in the way we talk about cancel culture today. You're going to be drawn and quartered or you're going to end up in a musty stone prison somewhere.

21:54Stephen Greenblatt: God help us, spare us those constraints, even if they produce great art. I mean, that was obviously true. One of the novels from the 20th century that I most admire is a novel by someone named Vasily Grossman called Life and Fate. It's a fabulous novel. He wrote it in Stalin's Russia, and he managed to survive, remarkably enough, but that's largely because it wasn't published. He managed to sneak the novel out of Russia, and it was published after, I think, after his death.

22:24Ryan Holiday: He begged Stalin directly to let him publish it, which probably would have resulted in his death.

22:30Stephen Greenblatt: Exactly. And then, in fact, they sent the NKVD to his house or his apartment, and they seized whatever they could, all the papers. I think they took the typewriter ribbons away from him. I mean, this was definitely, he was crazy to think that they would publish such a thing.

22:46Ryan Holiday: It's a weird book, right? Because he, as a journalist, was one of the first people to discover the death camps when he was with, because he was embedded with the Russian army. It was a weird book. I only read it somewhat recently. I'd never really heard the Russian perspective on the Holocaust in that way. It's a surreal book. And then you get, oh, Stalin doesn't want this published because he is perpetrating his own Holocaust at that very moment.

23:13Stephen Greenblatt: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. The Grossman was very lucky to have survived. So many people didn't survive. But it is said, and I think it's probably true, that part of the greatness of the Russian literature of the 20th century, Passagnac, and the rest of them was that they were living in the world you just described for Shakespeare or Montaigne, and that the constraint was somehow liberating imaginatively. But I'd rather live in a messier world in which you didn't produce such great art, but there weren't so many risky constraints.

23:48Ryan Holiday: Well, it's adaptive for some of the greats, and then it's also eliminating wide swaths of other great art that is just never even attempted out of fear.

24:01Stephen Greenblatt: Yes, I think it's true. I mean, the interesting thing is that even in the most miserable times, it seems like certain numbers, small numbers of human beings just need to do it anyway. Yes. They have to find some way to do it the way the grass needs to grow in the cracks of the sidewalk or in the way that Midas' wife needed to say, he has, his ears are weird, even though it's incredibly risky to do it.

24:27Ryan Holiday: I guess this goes to my point, which is, you know, when you think of Da Vinci, you think of someone as like this incredibly free-spirited, you know, exploratory artist. And I just read an interesting book, I'm forgetting what it's called, but it has this scene in it that made me think I want to write a book just about that. There's this scene where Da Vinci and Machiavelli are like trapped in a in a small castle with Caesar Borgia working on these projects. And you go here, you have these incredibly brilliant classic thinkers and artists. And and they must have just been shitting themselves every day that this psychopath might kill them, you know, and not kill them like the goons would come for them.

25:13Ryan Holiday: But like he might kill them with his bare hands, you know, like it's this time of these brilliant artists and thinkers and then these just complete maniacs. Yes.

25:24Stephen Greenblatt: Yes, it's true that there's a remarkable book called The Lives of the Milanese Tyrants about the Sforza. And he was just, I think he was a, he might have been the private secretary to Sforza, one of the tyrannical rulers of Milan. And you realize you're dealing with an unbelievably powerful, very dangerous, actually rather brilliant, but a psychopath on whom there's virtually no constraint whatsoever. Right. So, yeah, you had to figure out how to deal with that world if you wanted to be anywhere near it.

25:58Ryan Holiday: What would be an example? It'd be like if if Picasso was attached to like the Gambino crime family or something, you know, like you have this brilliant person and then their patron is a murderer who is both very educated, but also, yeah, will tear you apart limb from limb if they're displeased.

26:21Stephen Greenblatt: What's unusual, I think, about the model, the examples that you give, I mean, Machiavelli is a fascinating one, a complicated one. But what's remarkable is that most of the, if we think of Hitler or Stalin, and we can think of less ghastly, but not completely incomparable figures as well, mostly they're surrounded by mediocrities. Yes. because you're otherwise you're too frightened. I mean, you know, they've killed off the really smart ones or the smart ones just go away. But what was unusual about the people we're talking about is that that they're extremely some very, very powerful people are surrounded by quite brilliant people.

27:03Stephen Greenblatt: And the brilliant people have to figure out how to survive them. You probably know, since you seem to have read everything, I mean, you know, the Sandal novel, the Charterhouse of Parma. I don't. It's a wonderful novel about very sophisticated, very bright people who are in the circle in Parma of an all-powerful ruler. I mean, one of the reasons, one of the things that obviously has worked in America until recently, the big question that hovers over all of us is whether it'll continue to work, is the cunning with which the 18th century creators of our system figured out that they you would have to create multiple focuses of power to try to keep the executive from excessive control and likewise to keep the others from excessive control.

27:56Stephen Greenblatt: So the, I mean, the brilliance of the 18th century American constitution was to try to break up that concentration of power, moment in which all, you know, the court and the Congress and the executive are all more or less on the same page. And that's frightening.

28:15Ryan Holiday: Well, and this goes, I guess, to the ideas in the swerve, which is those Enlightenment thinkers were just so familiar, like they were on a first name basis with these classical figures, right? So like even when they're picking the names in the Federalist papers, you know, they're picking these pseudonyms as if they're Publius or whatever. But, you know, they would make these references. I guess it's largely from Plutarch, but, you know, they're calling this person a Catiline. They're familiar with these Greek and Roman tyrants and demagogues in a way that almost was more real to them than the kings and queens of English history, which a lot of them had been removed from for such a long period of time.

29:05Ryan Holiday: And so, yeah, there was this kind of this fear and this familiarity with those characters and they were developing a system that was supposed to assert a bunch of different checks and balances and prerogatives to prevent that from happening.

29:22Stephen Greenblatt: A perfect example in a way of that is, I mean, as you know, Machiavelli worked out his quite astonishing and quite radical political ideas by thinking about Livy.

29:33Ryan Holiday: Yes.

29:33Stephen Greenblatt: I mean, of course, he could also look around him and see in his own world lots of things. And he does reflect on things in his own world and the prince and elsewhere. But it's really thinking about the ancient example and thinking hard about what that world 1 ,500 years before him or longer. I mean, we're not under such constraints, thank God. But I still think predictably, and maybe you think predictably as well, because that's after all what your podcast is about, that actually getting out of your particular time and place and into what seems like a totally different world actually is liberating intellectually and politically.

30:14Stephen Greenblatt: Somehow you can think about things. It's risky as well. But again, I have my own current book in my head. Christopher Marlowe is a complicated example of this because he went to a, he was from a very poor family, managed to get into, for reasons we don't understand very well, he managed to make it into this very fancy grammar school and then into university where the education is entirely in Latin or Latin and Greek. And he reads, as he would never have read if he had stayed in the cobbler's shop that his father ran, he reads Ovid and he reads Catullus and he reads the Greek and Roman classics.

30:53Stephen Greenblatt: And he explodes with radical thinking. He sees, as almost none of his contemporaries do, how dangerous this stuff is. How much it cuts against the official orthodoxy of his time. And he can't control himself, really. I mean, somehow his imagination gets on fire when he reads Virgil or he reads Ovid, and he goes in places that actually were extremely dangerous for him to go. So it's not always that going out into the past is a secure way of...

31:26Ryan Holiday: No. I mean, I just had this experience. So I read Euripides' play, The Children of Hercules, which I didn't know anything about. All of a sudden, I'm in the middle of this incredibly transgressive play about what obligations a country owes to refugees that show up and supplicate them. So the premise of the play is that Hercules' children are being hounded by this jealous king from the country they're from, and they flee to Marathon and throw themselves at the temple of Apollo saying, hey, we are refugees, protect us. And they're being attended by a former aide to Hercules. And the king sends his goons to chase them down to this temple.

32:17Ryan Holiday: And what ensues is this confrontation. They say, you know, hand us over these refugees, we want to kill them. And the Athenians are saying, these are defenseless, vulnerable people have put themselves at the mercy of the gods, what do we owe them? And this war ensues. But in the way that the Greek plays are often these sort of just dialogue back and forth as opposed to much action. But they're just discussing. It was remarkable to me to be reading something that's 2 ,500 years old. Sounds amazing. It's like ripped from the headlines. What do we owe the people that come here and say that they're seeking asylum?

32:54Ryan Holiday: Do we believe them or not? How many of them can we allow in or not? Well, what if some of them commit crimes or, you know, exactly what we are baiting now. And then you see who's playing the different roles. Like the fascinating role to me is that is sort of the king's goons who are coming and trying to pull these people away, you know, which would, I guess, the modern equivalent would be like ice. And then when they're refused, the country threatens war. And now the Athenians are having to debate how much in the way of resource, like in theory, they're willing to protect, you know, homeless, helpless refugees.

33:35Ryan Holiday: But would they fight a war over it? You know, would they sacrifice their children over it? And then just the utter timelessness of these ideas is the thing that's so fascinating. The Children of Hercules, it's called.

33:47Stephen Greenblatt: I must read it. I mean, it does sound astonishing. I mean, And it is thrilling, I mean, as you describe it. And of course, we have, this is precisely the experience that keeps me going, that keeps the humanities going in universities. I mean, you know, you read a play, let's say, from the late 16th century, Shakespeare's Richard III. And it's about what happens when a country gets into the hands of a very dangerous and unstable and alarming ruler who's only interested in his own good, has no real interest in the common good, what do you do? What is available to you to do? Or what happens when the king is crazy?

34:30Stephen Greenblatt: In the case of The Winter's Tale, do you have a rebellion? But if you have a rebellion,

34:36Ryan Holiday: more people are likely to die. What happens after the assassination of Julius Caesar? It doesn't fix anything for anyone. Exactly.

34:43Stephen Greenblatt: So, I mean, each of these, it's as if each of these, I mean, which is only to say that human beings have been around for a while and have tried out various scenarios and have thought about the consequences of them. And interesting and intelligent people have actually sort of brooded about these and tried to play out. Yes. If we try to figure, and it probably goes all the way back, if we try to figure what's the evolutionary purpose of fiction, why did humans do this at all? It doesn't seem like it would be necessary. I mean, as far as we know, seals don't do this or chimpanzees don't do this. I mean, so what's so good about it?

35:23Stephen Greenblatt: And it must be that people very, very early on, hominids sat around and tried to think of alternative scenarios for things. I mean, that it must be something about our survival skill to try to play something out in one's mind.

35:38Ryan Holiday: We've always been unable to address things directly.

35:42Stephen Greenblatt: That too, yeah.

35:44Ryan Holiday: Like, I think about, this is where maybe our worlds intersect a little bit. But I've always found Seneca's plays to be so fascinating because the big hole in Seneca's philosophical writings is that he never addresses the fact that he works for Nero. And, you know, the Stoics had previously, you know, going back to Cato, been the sort of Republicans. And here you have the right hand man, not just to the emperor, but like to the worst emperor. But then you read Seneca's plays and you go, oh, he's doing the same thing that Shakespeare was doing 1500 years later, which is he can't directly talk about the madman that he works with, but he can portray maniacs and psychopaths and murderers and broken people in fiction.

36:30Ryan Holiday: And so there's something about art that allows us to say what we're all thinking without having to say it.

36:39Stephen Greenblatt: I think you're absolutely right about, I think Seneca's plays are astonishing. And in many ways, I mean, of course, it didn't save Seneca from having to - No, it didn't work in the end. It lit his wrists at the end on the order of the emperor. But he did hold out for, given whose company he was keeping for quite a while. Yes. But you're absolutely right that the plays, if you actually compare the plays to the Greek originals that there are, or the Greek myths that they're obviously working off, I think you see exactly what you say, which is they're pushing out to the political edge. The things that are implicit in the myths, but actually aren't usually explored in the myths.

37:18Stephen Greenblatt: But if you think about what he does with Oedipus or what he does with Philomel, I mean, they're usually way out there in the manner of Suetonius, let's say. So you just, you see how terrifying these people are, How frightening it is to let someone, an unstable, desire-driven person, get so much power that he can order hideous things to be done because there's always someone willing to do the nasty stuff.

37:45Ryan Holiday: The enduringness of that personality type is both depressing and marvelous is the wrong word, but it is kind of remarkable, right? Now, maybe what's allowed in a society might change a little bit. So they're more violent at different times. but the insatiable, you know, the person with a giant hole in the middle of them that they're trying to fill with violence and lust and power and fame and attention, it never seems to go away.

38:17Stephen Greenblatt: No. I mean, one source of it may be, or in any case, I played with the idea when I was writing that book on Adam and Eve, the story of Adam and Eve, and I was interested in that Adam and Eve is a perfect example of people sitting around and trying to come up with an account of things that might explain all kinds of other things that follow in our lives. And I imagine someone, incredibly intelligent, imaginative woman around a campfire coming up with this story, but the story that then becomes the truth for millions of people even now, however unbelievable it is with a garden with magical trees and a talking snake and all, and so forth.

39:02Stephen Greenblatt: I mean, it's obviously marked out as fiction in its origins, and yet it becomes true. Anyway, I was obsessed with that story and with how it happens that such an obviously fictive story becomes the truth for millions of very intelligent people, St. Augustine or St. Thomas Aquinas, the smartest people in the world. Anyway, because I have a friend at Harvard who runs a research station in Western Uganda, works on chimpanzees, I went and observed the chimpanzees, thanks to his invitation. And lo and behold, you know, the alpha male of the chimpanzees is exactly the figure you described. Yes. This enormously violent, very often quite smart, interesting, politically smart, but dangerous, super dangerous figure who wants to dominate, who wants to have all the females, who wants to push around all the males who are constantly doing that.

39:57Stephen Greenblatt: And, you know, you look around and you think, yeah, I sort of, I get it. I get humans, especially human males derive that personality type.

40:07Ryan Holiday: When that, that desire for retribution or subjugation, this is, we've been talking rather highbrow to go lowbrow, but I don't know if you've ever seen the movie Tombstone, but in, in the end, what Wyatt Earp is talking to Doc Holliday and he has to kill this gunfighter. And he goes, he's like, I got to know what makes a man like that tick. And Doc Holliday says, oh, he wants revenge. And White Earp says, revenge for what? And Doc Holliday says, for being born. You know, there's some people that just sort of come out or maybe shortly thereafter experience a number of things that make them need to dominate, control or even destroy the world.

40:52Ryan Holiday: And that is the figure in so many of Shakespeare's plays and the Greek plays and then also the worst things that have happened in history. Now, you've given me another recommendation.

41:03Stephen Greenblatt: I don't think I've seen that movie Tombstone.

41:05Ryan Holiday: It's one of the great Westerns, yeah.

41:06Stephen Greenblatt: Tombstone and this Schepensweig biography of Montaigne would now be on my list. And the children of Hercules. Yeah, a pretty big spectrum. Yeah, that's good. But I do think that the philosophical schools in which we're interested, the Stoics, the Epicureans, were precisely trying to figure out, taking this into focus, what do you do? how do you deal with this? I mean, they're not the only ones. And they're both schools are writing, how should we say, countercultural narratives, ways of trying to figure out how do you either withdraw or deal with these people, find some way to deal with the impulse in yourself, which is first and foremost, because we talk about it as if these are alien creatures, but I know that some part of me also is there.

42:02Ryan Holiday: Well, that's why I think Marcus Aurelius' Meditations is such a fascinating book, because you have the guy in the same job as these other monsters that we're talking about, trying to be a little less monstrous. Yes, I see that. We tend to talk about it at the scale of a Napoleon or a Hitler or whatever, but I'm sure you've met some department heads that have similar tendencies.

42:28Stephen Greenblatt: It's true. They don't even have to be department heads. But yeah, yeah, it was absolutely true. Often people at the DMV or. Yes. Yeah.

42:36Ryan Holiday: The head of the local school board or whatever it is there. There is that that. And that's probably the chimpanzee in us.

42:45Stephen Greenblatt: Yes. There is an interesting question about the extent to which this is gender specific, because the qualities we are describing, and after all, the texts that we're reading, that we're talking about, whether it's Marcus Aurelius or Epictetus or Lucretius, they're written largely for men. Although, to give the Epicureans credit, they allowed women into the school. But there is an interesting gender question about this.

43:17Ryan Holiday: I do like Portia Cato a great deal. I like Portia Cato better than I like Brutus.

43:22Stephen Greenblatt: Yes, we're identifying qualities. I don't think they're unique to men. No. But they're familiar, largely familiar from testosterone-bearing.

43:34Ryan Holiday: Yes. They're not unique to men, but they have certainly been encouraged and enabled and celebrated in men for a longer period of time.

43:44Stephen Greenblatt: We are talking about qualities that are not only destructive, but potentially world building or creative. One of my favorite books is Gilgamesh, the earliest piece of fiction that we know. And it's exactly about all of these things. So, I mean, the interesting thing, as we keep saying, is that this stuff goes way the hell back. I mean, so Gilgamesh, which is 5 ,000 years old, is just all about this kind of personality. Yeah. What to do with it, how he can deal with it, with the impulses that are in him.

44:19Ryan Holiday: What makes the great literature is that every generation or every different person sees something, sees it differently, right? And so, like you say, you take something like The Odyssey, which my nine-year-old's obsessed with. So we've been just listening to it and listening to songs and finding poems. And then we had to go to Greece. But what's so fascinating to me about The Odyssey is that when I was younger and when I first read it, Odysseus is the hero. and then you read something like Tennyson's poem about Odysseus and you go, oh no, Odysseus is a cursed, tragic figure who wants desperately to come home but can't actually be home.

45:03Ryan Holiday: And that you wouldn't want to be Odysseus just like you wouldn't want to be Elon Musk. It's actually miserable and awful.

45:10Stephen Greenblatt: I mean, Dante thought the same thing about Odysseus, as you know, even though Dante hadn't read Homer, but he understood already from the story that there's something wrong with something tormented about this figure. I mean, you might not want to be Odysseus, but you also, the question is, Odysseus is the only survivor of all the people who leave. So everyone in his ambit dies in the course of his attempt to get back to Ithaca. One thing to say, I suppose, about all of this is that, and that again, obsesses people like us, is that there's no progress in all of this, which is very strange. I mean, you'd think, because we're talking about things that were written a very long time ago, and if we think that they're really intelligent, as we do, and deeply perceptive, as we do, the question is, why does it have to keep getting repeated over and over again?

46:07Stephen Greenblatt: Why does it have to, why does it never seem to catch fully? Yeah. Why does it have to keep getting reinvented? I mean, I don't have the answer to it. One of the great experiences of my whole life was when I was quite young in my early 20s. I went to southern France and went to one of those caves, Font de Gome, I think it was called, that have Paleolithic paintings on the walls. Right. I've never got over it. It must have been in the early 1970s. I never got over the sense that those paintings, there's been no improvement in painting, as it were. There's been an infinite number of fantastically interesting things that are done by Picasso, by Rembrandt, by Vermeer, by Chinese painters and so forth.

46:54Stephen Greenblatt: There's a million different ways you can do these things. And great artists keep inventing new ways of doing them. But there's no way that you can say that the paintings in the wall from 30 ,000, 25 ,000 years ago, 30 ,000 years ago, are worse than the paintings that were done by Picasso. So what the hell does that mean? How is it possible? I mean, because in everything else that we care about that involves thinking hard, I want to, if I have a gallbladder problem, I want someone who was an expert on the gallbladder from late last night. I don't want someone who had the idea of the gallbladder from 500 years ago.

47:34Stephen Greenblatt: God help me. But because there's been progress there. Yeah. But no progress in the things that we most care about. we, about art, about philosophy. How is it possible?

47:48Ryan Holiday: Yeah, there's a dark energy in human nature that we have not managed to isolate and remove. And every time we think that it's gone is precisely when we're most surprised by it.

48:00Stephen Greenblatt: Well, and the flip side of that is also true, which is there is a brilliance in human nature in the capacity to think, in the capacity to represent, that never gets extinguished. Yeah. That doesn't get better, but it doesn't go away. It keeps, no matter what happens, the flame keeps coming up.

48:21Ryan Holiday: Yes. Right. There is, one way you look at it is there's no progress. We're still dealing with the same things. And then you also go, you know, we did mostly eradicate slavery. Society's massively more inclusive. It can be easy when you read the art because it feels so fundamentally modern to forget how inconceivable most of the things we take for granted would be to a Socrates or a Shakespeare or even a Montaigne.

48:53Stephen Greenblatt: No, you're absolutely right. I mean, the trick about this, Ryan, is I don't have to tell you, but because it's implicit in what we're saying, is that we know that in N years, 50, 100, 500, let alone 5 ,000, they'll think, how did people survive living in 2025? What a hideous world they had. or if human beings are around then, because actually at the moment, it doesn't seem clear to me that humans will be around. But if they are, they're going to say, they did that when you had a toothache, let alone they did that when you had cancer or whatever. I mean, or they behaved that way toward the environment.

49:34Stephen Greenblatt: I mean, they will look with astonishment at how fucking, if you'll pardon the expression. No, no, please. How stupid we are, how grotesque we are, What idiotic decisions we made or how astonishingly good we were at surviving intolerable conditions. Because that's what I think when I think about Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe. How did they get up in the morning? If you had 10 children, 80 of them died. How did they survive that? Yes, I do not understand. I don't get it. But of course, that was the world they lived in. So they survived it. And this is the world we live in. So we survive it.

50:10Ryan Holiday: Yeah, the ability to shrug off infant mortality is one, like when they say the past is a foreign country, that's one of the most foreign parts of it to me.

50:22Stephen Greenblatt: Yeah, for me too. If you and I have children, if anything threatens my beloved children or grandchildren, I'm completely distrutto, as the Italians say. I'm completely wiped out. But they somehow made it through this situation in which we would find psychologically destructive. Totally destructive.

50:42Ryan Holiday: And they never talked about it. Like, I've never heard a good explanation of it.

50:46Stephen Greenblatt: Yeah. I mean, they did have depression and misery and so forth. I mean, it wasn't that they were indifferent.

50:53Ryan Holiday: But there's moving essays about grief and loss, even about losing a child. But no one's ever explained to me how Marcus Aurelius lost half his children and he had 11 kids. You know, like, how did he get out of bed in the morning? It doesn't matter. I've never heard a positive explanation.

51:09Stephen Greenblatt: No, except that we do. We do, as I say, people will say that about us.

51:14Ryan Holiday: Yeah.

51:14Stephen Greenblatt: So if we're lucky, as a species, we're lucky, people will say that about us.

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54:19it.

54:20Ryan Holiday: I find your books endlessly fascinating. Maybe talk to me real fast. What is the swerve as you define it? I've tried, I read the book and I was like, oh, I get it. And then every time I've tried to be like, so I read this book, The Swerve, and here's what The Swerve is. They're like, what are you talking about?

54:36Stephen Greenblatt: Well, The Swerve in its most immediate literal sense is what what Lucretius would have called a klinomen. That is to say, if you think that the world is made up out of an infinite number of atoms, the question is, how does anything ever happen? Because you would think, given what we know about gravity, that everything would just fall straight down and all the infinite number of atoms would keep, even if there were an infinite number of them, they'd keep falling, falling, falling, and nothing would ever happen. But all you would need, and of course, lucretius doesn't have a theory about this and in fact it's only in the 21st century that we're getting even close to this but in forms of physics that i don't fully understand don't i should say fully understand i don't understand at all but lucretius says or lucretius is great mentor great intellectual mentor says all there has to be is one atom that moves slightly off the straight line that has an inclination or declination, hence the Latin word clinamen, that has a swerve, one atom that swerves and that bangs into another one and then they start banging into each other.

55:49Stephen Greenblatt: And then if you have an infinite amount of time, because they didn't believe that the world was limited in time, if you have an infinite amount of time, if you have billions of years, not 4 ,000 years as the Christians believed, then the world can get created. then things can keep mutating.

56:07Ryan Holiday: And from a classics perspective, the swerve is the rediscovery of these old texts, which changes the arc of the Middle Ages.

56:16Stephen Greenblatt: What happens when this idea, which was reviled by much of ancient religion, by the people who worshipped the ancient gods, let alone, of course, reviled by Jews and Christians and Muslims, what happens when this idea comes back into circulation? That's what the swerve is about. It happens when someone went into a medieval library and found a book and opened it up, and suddenly this idea comes back. Yeah. That the world is made up out of atoms and emptiness and nothing else. That it doesn't require all kinds of demiurges to move things about. That if there's enough time, everything will happen, including things that seem almost impossible to think about.

57:01Stephen Greenblatt: How does the human eye get created by a set of mutations? This remains a kind of fabulous, I mean, it's implicit in Darwin, but how does that possibly happen, that enough random mutations happen so that we can see? And already Lucretius and Epicurus before him think, yes, that's what must happen, that the mutations don't happen. And because someone has decided, oh, it would be nice if we could see, the mutations happen randomly. And yet the end result of it is that we can see and therefore we can survive better. In this case, we can be more successful as creatures because we can find our food.

57:43Ryan Holiday: There's a passage from Lucretius, which is in the book, that I think goes to our point about how it's both, how modern this stuff, where he says, you know, you're basically afraid of death because when you get home from a long day at work and you kneel down in the hallway and your child runs into your arms and shouts your name, you're afraid of death because this won't happen again, you know? And then he says, well, you don't need to be afraid because you won't be around to miss it. But just, you know, sometimes poetry or art, it's so flowery and abstract and magical. And then sometimes, yeah, you're reading a line from a poet 2 ,000 years ago, referencing the work of a poet, a philosopher, a couple hundred years before that.

58:29Ryan Holiday: And you're just like, I did that yesterday. And it captures something so essentially human and does it in so few words. Oh, that's just the best.

58:42Stephen Greenblatt: The trouble with, I mean, I completely agree with you, Ryan. The trouble with that, the wonderful trouble with that particular example is that as far as I know, no one has ever really been persuaded by that argument. No. Including me. All right, I get that I'll be gone. I mean, and already Cicero, whom you spoke disparagingly about, Cicero said, you know, the argument is that we're not going to be around so we won't miss anything after we're gone. and Cicero said, that's the good news. And I completely agree with them. No one has been persuaded that that's the good news.

59:21Ryan Holiday: When we call it the great conversation, just the beauty of like he said this and then he said that and then Cicero responded to it. And then here we are talking on a podcast, thousands of miles apart via technology they couldn't have imagined. And yet it's the same conversation. Yeah, it's true. All right. So last thing, as far as swerves go, one of the few things that gets me very excited, I wouldn't say hopeful because I don't know what a change is going to have, but excited intellectually is the idea that there could be a second swerve via this technology that is examining those scrolls in Pompeii and some of the other archaeological sites.

1:00:03Ryan Holiday: Do you ever think about how our understanding of these things could fundamentally change with a lost book from Epicurus or a whole other group of thinkers that we've never even taken seriously? I do think about this, Ryan.

1:00:18Stephen Greenblatt: I mean, I actually know someone who is developing a technology that now enables them to read in fantastically subtle, to read into now those carbonized scrolls without trying to unroll them. Right.

1:00:34Ryan Holiday: Yeah, they're taking pictures and then AI can decode it, right?

1:00:37Stephen Greenblatt: Exactly. And since we know that actually quite a bit of Herculaneum particularly has not been excavated, who knows what's down there that they might find. Now, whether it will, how should we say, knock us for a loop is another question. I mean, I tend to think things, unless we really do decide, as we seem to be in the process at the moment of shutting down scientific research completely in the country. But if we don't make that kind of crazy move, if we continue there, I think that the things that are going to knock us down are going to come out of our laboratories and not out of ancient scrolls.

1:01:18Ryan Holiday: We could uncover all these scrolls and greet it culturally with a yawn because we've moved on.

1:01:25Stephen Greenblatt: Yeah, I mean, we won't greet it with it. You and I won't greet it with a yawn. We'll be thrilled. But whether it has a kind of earth shattering effect is another question. I do think that in some sense, what we are more likely to do is to feel the kind of awe, the catching one's breath to discover that people have thought about the things we're worrying about for a very long time.

1:01:54Ryan Holiday: I'm sure Poggio Bracolini was not representative of the average person with his excitement about rediscovering these texts. So the swerve was a minority swerve at the time, too, I'm sure. Absolutely.

1:02:08Stephen Greenblatt: I mean, and even the few people who, as Poggio Braccellini himself didn't, but even the few people who really got what was at stake, I mean, now we're back to the earlier part of our conversation. They had to be pretty careful.

1:02:20Ryan Holiday: Yes.

1:02:20Stephen Greenblatt: Because this stuff was toxic. So it came in one of those metal canisters that has the skull and crossbones on it. You didn't want to just take it. You didn't want to open it up without special hazmat suits on.

1:02:34Ryan Holiday: Yeah, it's just fascinating because we have these sort of tantalizing titles of so many lost philosophical works. I think that was the great torture that Diogenes Laertes inflicted on us, which is he listed down all the names of the works of these great philosophers, of which like 1 % survives. And just the chances that some of those could be sitting there in complete form under layers of ash and lava is just mind-blowingly exciting. It is. I completely agree. And I hope to live long enough to read some of these things. Yes, me too. It's like the greatest time capsule of all time. Well, I'm a huge fan of your work and thank you so much for taking the time.

1:03:22Ryan Holiday: Thank you. Yeah, next time you're in Texas, come sign a bunch of these books. I would love to. Thanks so much for listening. If you could rate this podcast and leave a review on iTunes, that would mean so much to us and would really help the show. We appreciate it. And I'll see you next episode.

1:03:57Thank you.