Stuff You Should Know - How Transcendentalism Works

Episode Date: August 5, 2021

Every teenager in America knows the transcendentalists were a handful of goofy 19th century philosophers who were into walking in the woods, but they were also so much more. Anyone who focuses on the beauty and the good in the world can’t be too wrong. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey everybody, when you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place be an Airbnb? And if it could, what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lauren in Nova Scotia who realized she could Airbnb her cozy backyard treehouse and the extra income helps cover her bills and pays for her travel. So yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too. Find out what your place could be earning at Airbnb.ca slash host.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Find the Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever

you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant and Jerry Jerome Rowland is here with us somehow some way. And this is Stuff You Should Know. Transcendentalism. Man, were you into transcendentalism when you were a teenager?

It seems about when you did it. Of course I was. Yeah. In college mainly as an English major is when I kind of got into it. Okay. I discovered these guys at age like 14 and was super into them for a while. Couldn't make heads or tails of a lot of the stuff they were talking about, but I just, something about it just hit me just right.

I think I caught like the ethos of it, but not necessarily the intellectual aspect of it. But I was into them big time. They actually led me away from church. Oh, yeah. That's good. I met the transcendentalist and that was it for me in church. I started going to the woods on Sunday mornings instead.

Yeah. I mean, this is one that hits home for me because as everyone knows, I love being in the woods and I love camping and I love my camp. By the way, we got a bear. Did I see any of the picture? No. You got a bear? Do you have one like chained up at your campground or something?

No. I have a trail cam set up, which is a motion activated camera that you just strap to a tree and hunters use them a lot and stuff. But I got one and pointed it towards my, like my camp area and we've been calling it crow cam because we've gotten 400 pictures of crows since I set it up. And every once in a while, I'll get a picture come through at night the next morning and I'll be really excited because it's like maybe a fox or a raccoon, never anything. And the other morning I woke up and it gives a little thumbnail and I saw a little thumbnail.

I saw a large creature and I freaked out to like rush to the app to un- to embiggen it. And it's a bear, dude. Pretty neat. A little blackie. I'm going to text it to you right now. Okay, please do. I was wandering through the camp and there was something about it that just thrilled me to know and to know that I'm sharing the woods with this squeezy little bear.

That's pretty cool, Chuck. And he's not going to attack me. Don't worry, people. He is, uh, urchie. There's never been a bear fatality in Georgia and I think only two in the history of the southeastern United States. Oh, that's great. That's a cute.

It looks like you could take that bear anyway if you wanted to. Do you see him? Yeah. That's a cute bear. Isn't that crazy? Yeah. It's a picnic basket. I guess so.

Um, but long way of saying that I love the woods and so is transcendentalism and college is something that kind of hit home. And then for a little while I was kind of like, but wait a minute. Yeah. Is this just a bunch of lazy people and a bunch of, I hate to say mental masturbation, but like, what do they actually do? But then this made me feel a lot better about it because the transcendentalists led to a lot of great progressive reforms.

Yeah, totally. Yeah. That's definitely phase two of being into transcendentalism is hating the transcendentalists and like, I think so. Really resenting them for who they were and all that. But this brought me back to it for sure as well. I'm a big time friend of Thoreau's now again. I used to think he was just a complete useless waste who just dropped out and probably lived

off his parents' money or something like that and did what did his own thing. It was not like that at all. And I think we owe Thoreau an episode, frankly. I think he's a pretty cool dude. Yeah. A lot of myths and legends around Thoreau and real quick, before we dive in, I did post that picture on my Instagram at Chuck the Podcaster. Very nice.

Shout out. That was some good social media promotions. All right. So we're talking about the mid-1830s and this idea that these people came forward with very anti-establishment ideas where they basically said, everybody has the light of the divine truth and we should all be self-reliant. We should all look within ourselves to find that light. And we should be self-reliant in many ways, spiritually self-reliant or maybe you want

to go out to the woods and live and be self-reliant on yourself. So basically, everyone is entitled to freedom in this country or back then supposedly and still the case supposedly. But it led to a lot of great things later on with these progressive movements. But initially and throughout the sort of the heyday of transcendentalism, it was just a lot of thought in talking about and writing about these thoughts. Yeah. It was a philosophical movement.

It was a philosophical movement associated with action and doing things as much as it was about sitting down and writing things out and figuring out arguments and theories to root these things to. And actually that's where the transcendentalists tripped themselves up is they took something that was very pure and didn't really need any rooting in theory. It could just be like walking through the woods is good in and of itself. It doesn't need a theory that explains why it's good in and of itself. And so when they did try to do that, they actually kind of shot themselves in the foot

because they couldn't do it. And that's one reason why you start to hate the transcendentalists after you really start liking them because a lot of it is just kind of who we when they tried to explain it because it didn't need explaining. I saw somebody describe it that it didn't need theory any more than an airplane needs wires to hold it up. And yet they tried that because I think they wanted to explain it and they wanted to be taken seriously.

Emerson definitely considered himself a philosopher, whether he was or not. I think a lot of people consider him a philosopher. But when they tried to ground it in philosophy, it kind of got screwed up like trying to nail Jello to the wall or something like that. It has been called the first sort of distinctive American philosophy, like truly American philosophy. And it was influenced by a lot of things though, like kind of any movement. And this one starts out with the Puritans who came over who said that they were very much individualists.

And it's sort of that root of individualism that helped sort of inform the early transcendentalist thoughts. Yeah, the Puritans took, I guess, we actually kind of talked a little bit about it, that Protestant work ethic. They also brought within the idea of self-reliance, of like being able to make your own way in the world. And it took shape for them in the form of religion, where there is this idea that if you were a good Christian and studied your Bible religiously, you could be as close to

God as if you were some Catholic in Italy who had to go through a priest and a cardinal and a bishop and the Pope to get to God, that that's not how it worked. The individual was able to connect with God as well. And that was a big difference in Puritan thought. And that was one of the big things that grew out of it when they arrived here in America was the idea of self-reliance in the individual. And that very much influenced the transcendentalists. Yeah, European Romanticism certainly played a part too.

That was sort of the first emo movement where feelings, feelings mattered basically and emotion mattered. It wasn't all about reason and order like it was in the Enlightenment. And things really took a turn after the Paris Peace Treaty of 1815, because previous to that, during the American Revolution and the War of 1812 and Napoleonic Wars, you couldn't really go to America, I'm sorry, Americans really couldn't go to Europe and didn't even have a lot of great access to the literature of Europe. But after that Paris Treaty in 1815, the travel floodgates opened and a lot of sort of scholarly

literary types went over to Europe and started studying Goethe and Byron and Shelley and Wordsworth and it became, it was like lighting a fire basically. Yeah, which I mean like they missed out on the beginning of Romanticism, which was a big response to like the French Revolution, which is a larger way of response to the Enlightenment because the Enlightenment changed everything. We had a really good episode about that if I do say so ourselves. It placed an emphasis on reason and rationality and facts and then the French Revolution came along and the people took control and they weren't able to uphold the ideas or the ideals

of the Enlightenment of things like free speech and freedom of thought and instead turned into like bloody fascists who killed 40,000 people in a year or two. And so that led to this recoiling being repulsed by the idea of just cold rationalism and adherence to facts and instead it turned into that Romanticism that basically said, imagination, beauty, goodness, these are the important things. These are the true things that are the eternal truths of the universe that bring you to godliness. But facts, facts are stupid basically. Yeah I find myself, the more we've done the show, become really interested in like what

causes movements to happen, whether it's a philosophical movement or nose to the grindstone, get out and do something movement. I just think it's really interesting because it's about a bunch of like-minded people coming together in a very specific time and place or it could fall apart very easily. And in the mid-1830s in Boston, Massachusetts, a minister named George Ripley got some people together who were thinking along the same lines as him, who were inspired by these same literary greats of Europe and the Romantics and formed the Transcendental Club and they eventually started publishing a three-time annually literary paper called The Dial.

I think they had about 300 subscribers at its peak. It cost $3 and they published it in four volumes for about four years and this had poetry and prose and literary and music criticism and it was, you know, it was a literary magazine like we think about today but it was happening way back then in Boston. Yeah, and it kind of was focused on beauty and imagination and transcendental ideals, which was basically that, that if you had imagination, that that was the thing that kind of brought you to like a communion with the universe or God or the divine, whatever higher experience you were looking for, it was going to be through imagination.

And one of the ways I saw it put Chuck was not that they didn't like facts, they were kind of slaves to facts because the fact was there's badness in the world, there's badness in the universe and they just couldn't account for that, like they just couldn't make heads or tails of it because they were so focused on good but they preferred imagination over facts because they considered imagination, the imagination of the individual to be more powerful than facts. Like facts were that Plato died a couple thousand years ago and you'll never get to meet him because you're separated by time and space.

Imagination is that you can go wrestle, have a tickle fight in a meadow with Plato if you want and that can make you happy. You can go experience that if your imagination is fine tuned enough and then doing that, that kind of starts to make you question reality, like just how real or unreal was that tickle fight you just had with Plato and your imagination is what took you to overcome those facts. So to them, society was becoming increasingly industrialized and preoccupied with money and economy and stuff like that and it was losing its way, it was losing its imagination and this was a big response to that and that was a huge ideal of the transcendentalists

that it was the imagination of the individual that could make you a happier person, more attuned to beauty and goodness and that if you were off doing that, you're going to connect more fully with other people and if enough people did that, then you would have a much better society. That was ultimately the first goal of transcendentalism, the earliest kind of goal of the movement was that. That's right and little known fact, Plato's tickle spot was his thigh, inner thigh, upper inner thigh.

That thigh, like a horse eating corn? Yep, exactly, there's a birthmark there to guide the way even. All right, let's take a break and we'll talk a little bit about Waldenpond and Thoreau and whether or not he was who we think he was right after this. Hey everybody, when you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place be an Airbnb and if it could, what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lauren and Nova Scotia who realized she could Airbnb her cozy backyard treehouse and the extra income helps cover her bills and pays for

her travel. So yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb too. Find out what your place could be earning at airbnb.ca. Slash host Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new I heart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help this.

I promise you. Oh God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh man. And so my husband, Michael, um, hey, that's me. Yeah, we know that Michael and a different hot sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step.

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All right, Henry David Thoreau, one of the, one of the all stars of the transcendentalist movement. Chin beard enthusiast. He's a, he was a chin beater. He was one of these guys. He went to Walton, to Walden to live deliberately, went to the woods to live deliberately, as he said in 1845 and built a cottage on Walden pond near conquered mass for a couple of years. And this is one of those where if you have someone who doesn't like Thoreau, they will

be very quick to point out a lot of things like, you know, he was only a half a mile from the main road and he went into town all the time and he was less than two miles from his main house and he ate dinner Emerson's all the time and his mother and his sister would bring him baked goods and donuts every weekend. And those are all true things. So I think it bears saying that over the years, the idea that Thoreau was this Luddite who just went to live completely by his own resources, all alone in the woods. Like the great history channel survival competition show.

And that is not true. And I don't think he ever purported that to be true. He wrote about the interesting aspects of being out there alone in his thoughts and his books. And I think people got that confused and just said, Oh, well, that's all he did out there. And he never saw people. He had parties and there were people everywhere. He walked into town just about every day.

That wasn't the whole point of it all was that he was going to go be self-reliant and as a survivalist or antisocial. He wasn't like turning his back on society. No. And he liked some technologies too. So Thoreau was misunderstood and I think not because of his own hand in writings. I think because people have romanticized this idea of this like hermit basically. And this is not the case.

Yeah. No. I mean, the facts are this. Bill himself, a one room house on some of Emerson's property right alongside on the shores of Walden Pond, he spent his time writing, reading everything from the Greek philosophers to religious texts, whatever he could get his hands on. And then more than anything, walking in the woods, like spending his time out in nature and just enjoying it on its face, like finding the beauty in nature and seeing it absolutely

everywhere and letting it like increase the, his spirit and lift his spirits that that's all he wanted to do in life. And then when he needed money, he would go work as a surveyor or maybe make some pencils in his family's pencil factory. Apparently they made the finest in the country at the time. And then he would make that money and then go back and go, go live by doing what he wanted to do. It wasn't necessarily to tell people how to live.

That's how he wanted to live. And he went and did it. And however you feel about Thoreau, man, I mean, like just the fact that he did that, how many people do that, you know, and do it not because the CIA's after them or the government's listening in on their affairs or trying to keep them off of the pastor land. This guy did it for his own purposes. He wanted to let go live a life that he found fulfilling like that. And he went and did it.

And it's hats off to anybody who does that. Yeah. And if you're, I don't know, if you're maybe a little bit younger as a listener and you think, well, that didn't sound that radical and there are plenty of people who do that kind of thing today, it's true. But that's not how it worked in 1845. Like if you were a grown, able-bodied man, like you were expected to have a job and contribute to society and work, you didn't spend time reading and writing and taking walks in the

woods for pleasure. It just, that's just not how things were back then. So it was a very radical thing back then to do. It was also very radical to say, you know what, I don't want to pay my taxes because you enslave people here in the United States and we're in a very awful war against Mexico. And so, you know what? I'm not going to fund this stuff anymore with my, what little money I make. So you can stick that in your pipe and smoke at US government.

They came after them, they arrested them, spent a night in jail. Someone paid off his debt. Do you remember who that was? No. He still didn't, he never knew. It was an anonymous relative and he was not very happy about that at all. Right, because he didn't want to like just have someone pay it. That was the whole point, right?

Yeah. And they forced him out of jail the next day and he was like, no, like I'm trying to do something here. It didn't work. Right. But his very famous essay, Civil Disobedience, kind of grew from this experience and he has a really great quote here that kind of hits home to me and anyone who thinks they might can change things or can't, let every man make known what kind of government would command

his respect and that will be one step toward obtaining it. Again, just not necessarily a blueprint for an action, although there was plenty of action later, but just sort of a thought, like something to ponder. Yeah. And on that poll tax, or I think it was a head tax, which I think is the same thing. Yeah, and he hadn't paid it for years. He was inspired by another transcendentalist, Amos Alcott, Louis Amay's father, who was a big transcendentalist thinker.

And he hadn't paid poll taxes for several years because of slavery as well. But then with the Mexican-American War of I think 1836, when Thoreau started organizing protests against it and calling for other people to not pay their tax, that's when he was finally arrested, sought out and arrested. And I was reading a little bit about that war and why he and others protested against it. It was apparently an extraordinarily unjust and unprovoked war where a lot of American volunteers went down and committed war crimes and atrocities against Mexican civilians for

basically unprovoked. And there was a lot of reason for people to oppose it, but that didn't mean that there was a lot of people opposing it. It's just that you can really kind of look back historically and find yourself siding with the people who protested against that war. But at the time, it was pretty radical to protest against it. It was a fairly popular war until the press started reporting from the front lines and people started finding out what was going on down there.

People in America were whipped up into this anti-Mexican fervor at the time. And we invaded Mexico at the behest of the public. So to stand in the way of that was a very brave thing to do, and that's pretty typical of what Thoreau and the transcendentalists were into. They would look at something and say, this is morally wrong. This is not okay. I'm going to stand up against it. Maybe it'll inspire other people to do that, but at the very least, I will have done what

I think is moral. And I found another quote, Chuck, from Civil Disobedience that I thought kind of got that point across really well too. It said that Thoreau believed, it is not a man's duty as a matter of course to devote himself to the eradication of any, even the most enormous wrong. He may still properly have other concerns to engage him, but it is his duty at least to wash his hands of it and not give it practically as support. So in that sense, he was like, I'm at the very least not going to pay taxes to support

this. If I, I might not be able to keep the US out of the war, but I'm not going to give you money to go fight that war. I don't want to pay taxes anymore either. You know, I mean, it goes to a lot of unsavory stuff. So there you go. If only it were that easy. Maybe some benefactor would pay my fine.

Right. Right. But then that's supposed to tick you off because that means that they didn't get your point. No, that'd be fine with me. All right. I guess we should talk a little bit about some of the activism that sprung from this movement because all these cool hippie-dippy philosophical thoughts and musings are great, but action

is what is really interesting to me. And that's something, like again, that's something that I don't think we talked a lot about in college. It was more just sort of an English class type of thing. They should not just be taught in English class or even just philosophy class. Like they should be taught in civics and history. Yeah. I feel like that that really does them in disservice and I never put my finger on it until you

just said that. So thank you. Thank you. Sure. I'm going to change the educational system and that's where they started to. The transcendentalists knew the education was the key. They thought it should be free. They thought anyone should be able to go.

Any race, any creed. That's radical at the time. It was very radical. A lot of them were teachers and quite a few of them even founded their own like really forward thinking progressive schools, I think, including Peabody and Thoreau and Bronson Alcott. Yeah. I think that was Amos.

Good old Amos Alcott. Oh, was that his first name or something? Yeah. I think Bronson, that was his nickname because he was so tough. Hey, come here, Bronson. So yeah, they identified education as most social movements do is like a key and they definitely went after that. But I think also, like you said, it was in part because that was their background.

They saw, they had seen firsthand what needed, how much improving it needed. And one of the things, Chuck, is like what you just described that what they thought the education system would be, pretty closely resembles what we have today. And when you see this stuff and you just take for granted what the transcendentalists were for, it really gets across like how successful they were over the course of a couple centuries because these were the first people who were agitating for this stuff in America. Yeah. You know, they were the first ones to kind of wake up and say, wait, wait, wait, a lot

of this stuff is going wrong. This could be better this way. This could be better that way. And they ultimately far past the times when they died were successful in that. I think that's a great time for a break. You set us up nicely. Thank you. Thank you.

All right. We'll talk about more activism right after this. Hey friends, when you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place be an Airbnb? And if it could, what could it earn? So I was pretty surprised to hear about Lisa in Manitoba, who got the idea to Airbnb the backyard guest house over childhood home. Now the extra income helps pay her mortgage.

So yeah, you might not realize it, but you might have an Airbnb to find out what your place could be earning at airbnb.ca slash host. So one of the big ones that the transcendentalists were involved in from the outset was abolition of slavery. Yes. They were fervent anti-slave activists and not just like writing lectures and sermons and letters and speaking out against slavery. And again, this is the 1830s, maybe the 1840s.

This is not like, there were a lot of people who were still totally cool with slavery in the United States at the time. These were some of the first people speaking out about it. But these people also put their money where their mouths were in a lot of ways, including Thoreau, who was, if you were whole home about Thoreau before, was it personally a conductor on the Underground Railroad? That's right. He got in there, got his hands dirty.

A lot of the anti-enslavement movement were women of the transcendentalist movement. One of the rock stars of the transcendentalist movement was a woman named Margaret Fuller, who she was never apparently super comfortable being sort of tagged as a transcendentalist. She hung out in that crowd, but she was not religious. She was, by all accounts, probably agnostic, maybe even atheist, sort of danced on the fringes of the Unitarian Church, but religion, it was not a part of her sort of mindset. So that's where she kind of differed some from the standard transcendentalist. But for a little while, I think for two of the three years, she was the editor, two of

the four years of the dial, a big friend of Emerson. She wrote a book in 1845 called Woman in the Nineteenth Century, and it was really one of the first sort of proto-feminist tomes, and she was way ahead of her time. She went to women's prisons to interview them. She was a literary critic and an editor and a writer and advocated for women to have not just jobs, but any job. She was like, go out and be a ship captain if you want to. Really forward-thinking woman was Margaret Fuller.

Yeah. She started, I think, at age 29, these things called The Conversations, which was a series of discussions and talks that were super feminist, which was, again, really radical at the time, because we're talking the 1830s. Really like Thoreau, she actually died young. She died at age 40. We remember Margaret Fuller. Did you see how she died?

Yes. It was astounding. Margaret Fuller went to Italy to become part of the Italian Revolution. This is how she spent her last couple of years. The Revolution fell, it wasn't successful, but she fell in love with a younger revolutionary, had a child, and they sailed back to America, and then Fire Island struck. Just all the way back to America. They had a shipwreck, I think, about 50 yards from shore and died.

Some people were like, apparently the rescue attempt, even though they were so close to shore, was just not strong. I don't know why. I'd like to look a little bit more into it, but apparently Thoreau grabbed Emerson and they were like, I don't know how much longer it was after the shipwreck, but let's go try and find her at least body. I'm not sure if they ever recovered her, but very tragic death. She, her son, and her husband all drowned.

I know. Again, she was age 40. It's pretty astounding and remarkable that we remember her because her productive years were just an 11-year period from age 29 to age 40, but it just goes to show you what a powerhouse she was. I mean, she went and fought in the Italian Revolution. That's just super BA. Yeah, and it seemed like any job that she had, she just did great.

Emerson, when the dial was founded, that was the first person he thought of. He was like, well, I need to go get fuller on this because she's a crack writer and editor. I think she was supposed to make $200 a year doing that, but never got paid a dime. The dial was not a big moneymaker. I don't think they even paid the contributor, so it didn't last that long, but very forward-thinking literary magazine and Margaret Fuller was a big reason why it happened to begin with. So obviously, feminism and women's suffrage and equal rights for women were huge parts of the transcendental movement, as was abolition.

I looked to see how transcendentalism ended, and apparently it was like a sparkler. It burned really bright for a very short amount of time. The whole transcendental movement lasted maybe to the 1850s. One of the big things that took it down was Margaret Fuller and Henry David Thoreau, two of the really big central figures of the whole thing died, fairly young. Thoreau died of tuberculosis in his early 40s. Emerson remained, but again, there was a big problem in getting across what the transcendentalists were all about because they would get tripped up in theory and all that stuff.

Then also, I saw that the scientific method started to gain ground around the 1850s, 1860s, and people turned their attention back to logic and reason and the Enlightenment ideals, which kind of took them away from that romanticism of the transcendentalists. Yeah. And I think my takeaway from this now, restudying it all these years later, is like it's a philosophy that doesn't have to go away completely. And I think a lot of people would argue that it's still very robust in a lot of ways is to sort of morph and take it on different forms.

But you can have transcendentalist feelings and philosophies and also believe in science. And I don't think those things have to be separated out. So while it did burn bright and die out, I think clearly the kids of the 1960s and 70s were inspired by these people and people like you and I and college kids still today that read this stuff for the first time. I think everyone can take a little bit of that with them. If they want or not, but it's certainly not outdated, I don't think. No, it's not.

No, for sure. I think that spirit still continues on today, for sure. Anybody who cares about social justice, environmental justice, those are all very much transcendental ideals. And anybody who stops and appreciates the way sunlight is filtering on a flower or something like that, you're being a transcendentalist right there. It's really easy to over-explain, it's really easy to also just kind of be whatever that transcendentalist ideal was.

But that was it in nutshell, just appreciating the beauty in the world so much that you basically dedicate your life to appreciating it and not taking it for granted. Yeah. And every time I go to the family camp and I have that cooler full of beer and my mini-bike and my solar power lighting up those beautiful string lights through the woods, then I'm burning a fire, then I cut my Bluetooth speaker playing some fleet foxes, and I'm burning that fire from that firewood that was cut by the nice gentleman who delivers it down there and stacks it for me.

I really find myself at one with nature. Very nice, Chuck. You're a transcendentalist, cut and dried. I like camping. This is leaving it at that. I like glamping. Yeah, it's almost glamping. Yeah, sounds like it.

You have me a Bluetooth. You're still sleeping in a tent on the ground, though. That's fine, that's fine. You got anything else? I got nothing else. So look for a Thoreau episode someday, and in the meantime, go out and appreciate the beauty in the world. And since I said appreciate the beauty in the world, it's time for Listener Mail.

I'm going to call this Chickens in Ancient Rome. Remember we talked about that? Which one was that? That there weren't Chickens in Ancient Rome? Superstition, Ancient Superstitions. Right. So this is, and we heard from a few people about this, people that know a lot more about Ancient Rome than we do.

Romans. And this is from Mike. Yeah, exactly. Mike Trina. Hey, guys. My wife, Katura, is a big fan of your podcast. She was listening earlier today and asked me about this. My degrees are both in Greek and Latin language and culture.

Chickens were relatively rare in Ancient Rome, although they did exist. Chicken was a delicacy that only aristocrats would eat, and even then, only on rare occasions, the peasantry would rarely eat meat at all except on festival days. Chickens were, however, prized for their use in divination, like we talked about with the wishbones, and were often carried with armies into battle so that the augers could attempt to determine the auspices of a coming conflict. I recommend the book Handbook to Life in Ancient Rome, Atkins and Atkins. The edition I have is 1994, Oxford University Press, has all sorts of great info about daily

life as an average Roman citizen. That sounds like a cool book. It does. I can't wait to read the chapter on chickens. Yeah, that's from Mike. Thanks a lot, Mike. That's exactly what I was hoping to hear, or the kind of thing I was hoping to hear when I asked for your help.

I agree. Thank you for hearing me. I also blasted you with the ESP plea for a quest, so maybe that's where you really were prompted to respond. Who knows? I wonder if that's an audiobook. I'd like to listen to that one. What's it called?

Chickens in Rome? By Mike? No, it's called Handbook to Life in Ancient Rome. Very nice. Well, and it was Mike who wrote it, right? That was Mike. Yeah. And thank you to your SO for telling you that we needed your help.

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