The Daily Stoic - Adam Nicolson On The Rule Of Philosophy & Greek Mythology

Episode Date: January 27, 2024

On this episode of the Daily Stoic Podcast, Ryan talks with English author Adam Nicolson on greek mythology, real meaning of the oceans, travel, the grand question about philosophy, that what really matters more? to understand the higher things above you, or the material actualities, along with his new book How To Be: Life Lessons from the Early Greeks Adam is an English author who has written about history, landscape, great literature and the sea. He is noted for his books Sea Room, God’s Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible, The Mighty Dead, and Life between the Tides. He is also the winner of the Somerset Maugham Award, the W. H. Heinemann Award, and the Ondaatje Prize.✉️ Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemail🏛 Check out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more.📱 Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Welcome to the weekend edition of The Daily Stoic. Each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something to help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, temperance, and wisdom. And then here on the weekend we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers. We explore at length how these Stoic ideas can be applied to our actual lives and the challenging issues of our time. Here on the weekend, when you have a little bit more space, when things have slowed down, be sure to take some time to think, to go for a walk, to sit with your journal,

and most importantly, to prepare for what the week ahead may bring. Hey, it's Ryan. Welcome to another episode of The Daily Stoke Podcast. Had a bit of a crazy experience on the way to recording today's interview. We got the kids in the car. It's absolutely freezing here in Austin. We're preparing slash prepared for a very big freeze. Everyone in Texas has a little bit of PTSD because two,

three years ago, the whole state's power grid basically failed and we were trapped in our houses. And here at the painted porch, the roof had so much snow and ice on it, it's partially caved in, pipes froze. Even just a year ago, we had a freeze and some pipes froze. So we all have a bit sensitive here to it in Texas. Anyways, we're driving down the dirt road where we live. We see these two deer standing out in a field.

We point them out to the kids who roll their eyes. They're not interested in deer at all anymore. And then my wife goes, stop the car, stop the car. And she's like, pull up to the side, don't let the kids see. And there's this deer that's caught its leg in my neighbor's fence. And it was really caught. We rush out there.

We, there's no easy way to get it unwedged. Like it's basically broken its leg around this thing. So I have to hop the fence. Thankfully it was a panel fence, like a wire panel fence. If you know your fences, not barbed wire. So I could climb and easily jump over and I have to sort of grab the deer as it's, you know,

scared and whatever, flip it up over the fence and then get it over the other side to unlock it. And tragically, it, both its legs were clearly broken. They were rubbed raw. And I think it had dislocated slash severely broken both hips. So it was not surviving the experience. So I had to drive the kids back home

and then I won't get into the details, but I had to dispatch the poor little thing and then a circle of life. I text two of my neighbors because I had to run here to record this. I'm flying out tonight. And I said, hey, look, there's a deer caught in the fence. I had to put it out of its misery, but do you want it?

And literally two of my neighbors, this is what it's like living in the country, two of my neighbors could not respond fast enough. One of them ended up coming and getting it before the other one texted me, hey, where's this deer? So it did not go to waste and did not suffer either. But that was my experience, that's my life, I guess sort of a timeless thing,

a circle of, I guess, I wouldn't, I don't know if I wanna say exactly timeless because the problem here is the metal fences, but hunting neighbors, all these things, these are themes in the Odyssey, uh, hunting neighbors, all these things. These are themes in the Odyssey, which we're reading as a family at my house. And that's why I wanted to have a conversation with today's guest, Adam Nicholson,

who was quite sick. I've had some unique experiences with guests over the years from hotel rooms, I'm in hotel rooms, tech difficulties, whatever. I don't know if I've ever had anyone literally do it from bed, but that's what Adam was doing. So I appreciate him soldiering through. He's, he toughed it out.

You can't tell from the audio. I don't think he sounded fine, but I could, I could see on the video, which I won't be posting that, that he was not well, but he struggled through. And we had an amazing conversation about this fantastic new book. He has how to be life lessons from the early Greeks.

Adam is a award winning English author. He writes about history and landscape and great literature in the sea. He wrote a fascinating book about the making of the King James Bible. He's the winner of the Somerset Mom Award, the A.G. Heinemann Award, the Onda Chi Prize. And we just had a great conversation about the Greeks,

about the ocean, about travel, and the Odyssey, as I said, which we're reading as a family. And then some of the early Greek Stoics as well. And the role of philosophy in our actual lives, which as you know, is one of my favorite topics. So here's my conversation with Adam Nicholson. Thank you for pushing through, Adam, and thank you all for listening. I remember very specifically I rented an Airbnb in Santa Barbara.

I was driving from San Francisco to Los Angeles. I just sold my first book and I've been working on it and I just needed a break. I needed to get away and I needed to have some quiet time to write. And that was one of the first Airbnb's I ever started with. And then when the book came out and did well, I bought my first house. I would rent that house out during South by Southwest and F1 and other events in Austin. Maybe you've been in a similar place. You've stayed in an Airbnb and you thought to yourself, this actually seems pretty doable.

Maybe my place could be an Airbnb. You could rent a spare bedroom. You could rent your whole place when you're away. Maybe you're planning a ski getaway this winter or you're planning on going somewhere warmer. While you're away, you could Airbnb your home and make some extra money towards the trip. Whether you use the extra money to cover some bills

or for something a little more fun, your home could be worth more than you think. Find out how much at airbnb.ca slash host. Well, I love the book. I'm really excited to talk. It's fitting. I'm in the middle. Now I was seven year old and he has become obsessed with the Odyssey and Greek myths. I don't think it had anything to do with me. I actually don't know where he got into. I think maybe video games introduced some of the characters

and then he wanted to know more about them. But I just, I've been, every time he asks me questions about it, we read it, he found these songs, he likes about the Odyssey. It's just so mind-blowing to me to think how long people have been interacting with and talking about these same stories, what a grand tradition it is. Yes. Well, they do say that there are only two stories, didn't they? Either a stranger

arrives, that's one story, or I go somewhere else. That's another story. Obviously, the Odyssey is about the encounter of the self and world, isn't it? You know, that is really the heart of that, that you expose a sensibility to the set of circumstances and see what happens. And that's always going to be exciting, isn't it? It's almost like cooking or something or chemistry experiments, you know, you take a nodule of something and put it in conditions it's not used to. And things will fees, won't they? And I think that that's essentially the oddity in a word. Well, the oddities are...

With a key difference, that the little nodule, the little nodule of chemical substance, nose, nose and sinks and feels and also resists and acts to be a kind of coherent actor in the world. And so I think that's that's what's thrilling that you you take this vulnerable substance of the person and you put them in a whole series of terrifying, brutal, stripping conditions and he survives. And it's just, it's beautiful that, isn't it? The survival of the Odyssey. Well, I was going to say, what's interesting about the Odyssey, you said there's only two stories. The Odyssey is sort of both of those stories, right? It's this man traveling, and then he arrives at home as a stranger, right? And so it's sort of, it's all of it in one,

and perhaps that's why it's so endured. I'm sure that's right, and everyone always forgets that Odysseus actually gets home to Ithaca almost exactly halfway through the Odyssey. The whole half, second half of that poem is about him at home. That's right. That's right. Yeah. And what strikes me about it too, when I'm watching, because I'm getting to experience it through new eyes, because I'm watching this seven-year-old sort of take it in, and that the jokes still land. I've talked about this before. He loves the joke about, you know, who put out my eye, no man put out my eye. And just the idea that somebody came up with that

at some point and we're still laughing at it thousands of years later. Well, the joke when Odysseus says nobody, the Greek for nobody, you know what the Greek for nobody is? Utes, Utes. And it's like saying Odysseus, Utes. It's like a kind of mumbled version of his own name. That he actually is nobody. He really is nobody. He's everybody and nobody. You know, there's a wonderful English poet, a modern English poet, Alice Oswald, and she wrote a kind of a long poem that took off the Odyssey,

which she called nobody for that very reason. That's, it's really a story about in a way someone who has no substance. It's why he's so slippery, but he isn't the kind of stiff rigid item at this point. He is this slippery half present substance and that is his strength, is his paradoxical strength. So he's funny, but it's also fabulously philosophical, isn't it? To think that actually the greatest strength of the man that a navigator, a sailor, or adventurer could have is not really to have any stiff stuff about him. That he is almost a liquid presence in a liquid world.

One of the things you pointed out in the book that I didn't think about as I'm reading this story to my son is you're saying that Telemachus is learning that life is brutal and cruel and that to protect what is his, he has to be cunning and deceitful and ultimately violent. You know, he has to deceive, which his father's not there yet, but he is watching his mother do that very thing. Yeah, and the great guide,

the great kind of sponsor for both of them is Athenae. So she is both the goddess of wisdom and the goddess of war, and that she is both utterly deceitful and is always appearing when she appears first as this pirate king you know she turns up in it again tells Tulemikus how to behave as a pirate and he gets all his lessons from this pirate king all his lessons from this power of king. And only after he's left, she's left when Tulemicus is feeling kind of oddly good about life, you know, like someone who at last has got over the flu. It's really, he suddenly thinks, heavens, that was Athene, wasn't it? And so, you know, she's so deceitful that you only ever half meet her, you know, that the goddess of wisdom and violence is so wise because she's not there, you know.

I mean, I think home is absolutely brilliant for these sort of half statement of things, you know. It's so unblocky. And this world where the gods are not only among you, but are among you and not telling you that they're among you, is an interesting, I think, very different conception of religion than we have today, or even how we conceive of how they conceived of the gods. Yeah, I think that's right that I think that only the kind of... In Homer, only the kind of worldly powerful ever get to see that the gods

are gods. Most people, nearly everyone, I mean Homer obviously knows everything because Homer is the kind of source of all wisdom. That is the poem knows what's going on. But the people in the poem kind of sense the divine, whatever, you know, bit of the divine, whatever name you want to attach to that bit of the drawing as a kind of almost like a kind of an aura, you know, it's almost like, or almost like a kind of a sense of being alive, you know, it's kind of, it's very interestingly transitional between exterior and interior. So it's, it's, it is as you say, you know, like it's another psychology that actually, you know, when you feel really good, perhaps you are encountering the divine. I mean, that's a really interesting idea, isn't it? That the divine is in fact a kind of well-being that is almost self-generated, or that there's

no boundary between you and the world, and that the divine can completely infuse you and then leave again. A momentary experience of the divine and epiphany is what people call it now. Epiphanos means an appearing on the world or in the world. And I think that's an incredibly helpful idea, isn't it, about one's relationship to the metaphysical. Well, I think I feel it is that actually, if you feel great, oh my God, maybe that is godliness that you've got for a minute.

I love that. Right, instead of this conception of God being above or apart, that it's woven into your daily life and that you don't know. Like, did you just fall in love with this person or were you visited by a God? Did you just have a great idea or did a God give it to you? You know, I mean, not to overstate this, you know, there is a whole, you know, Mount Olympus apparatus, you know.state this, there is a whole Mount Olympus apparatus. And there are images and statues and obviously temples and everything. And so I think that it would be wrong to say that this is the only Homeric idea of what

godliness is because there is definitely a sort of massive celestial psychodrama going on, which they joke about. As you say, Homer is funny. He has funny when gods have sex with each other. It's just hilarious, clumsy, great pensioners fumbling with each other in the clouds. One of the things you talk about in the book that I thought was interesting is the sort of geography of it, that it's this sort of series of harbors and ports. And they're kind of travel, like the thinking of, we think of Greece as this place that was a long time ago, instead of what it actually was, was a series of places.

And you're kind of constantly traveling between them, and they all had their different cultures and idiosyncrasies. The idea of the traveler between the cities is somehow seems central to the understanding of the Greek mind. Well, I do think it is very interesting that this book I've written is, it's not essentially about the mythology, the beginnings of Greek mythology,

which are probably earlier than the period I was dealing with, but this period, which is the early Iron Age, like about 700, 750 BC, is a moment when Greekness begins to emerge as a kind of power really in the eastern Mediterranean. They have these wonderful cities and temples and athletic games and coinage and all the rest of it. Law codes, they were not the first cities obviously enough. There have been hugely powerful urban civilizations in Egypt, in Mesopotamia, running over to the Indus, you know, in the whole of West Asia, China, there had been enormously instituted urban worlds, powerful urban worlds, rich and highly literate with the literatures of their own, not only sort of bureaucracies and the key differences that

all of those predecessor Bronze Age civilizations have been hugely centralized with very powerful God, Kings, Pharaohs, Vass, Priestley, and scholarly bureaucracies all completely dominated by this idea that the center where the King and the God and power all resided was the core of all meaning. And those civilizations, for whatever reason, no one's ever really worked out why, all quite suddenly collapsed at the end of the Bronze Age in about 1100 BC and that's Mediterranean and West Asian worlds entered a sort of dark age literacy, dropped away many places, empires collapsed, all the rest of it. And then out of the ruins of that world emerged these independent Greek cities, both Phoenician in what's now western Turkey, these independent mercantile commercial

sea connected cities. And so none of them were these kind of great monarchical centers. In fact, they all hated the idea of kings. In fact, many of them hated the idea of them being a kind of a divine king, a Zeus even. And instead, like the idea, as you say, that meaning is generated by a kind of bubbling independence of life and mind. And so, in those earlier civilizations, all the intellectuals had really been priests or palace scholars transcribing the orthodoxies that they'd received from the past. In these Greek cities for the first time, the thinkers were independent forces. They weren't allied to the great power structures.

It was a world in which people could think for themselves for the first time. It's what it's so exciting about. There's this kind of extraordinary emergence like mushrooms all over the eastern Mediterranean or the eastern Aegean and then in southern Italy. People starting to think things quite like what we think for the first time. I mean, how amazing is that? Actually to think of souls or to think of what the substance of the world is or, you

know, I mean, all kind of what the just society is or what the coherent self is, all those kinds of things or what the kind of vivid, fulfilled self is, all of those things appear in these cities then. Yeah, it's interesting that you bring that up, right? Because the role of a priest is such a central part of the human concept of humanity that it goes back further than we know. We don't know when the first priests to whatever primitive

early religions originated. But what is remarkable is that we do know when philosopher, thinker, originated. And originated, right? Like, that there was a point, I mean, you call them and people refer to them as the pre-socratic philosophers. But kind of before the pre-socratic philosophers, there was just no such thing as philosopher or philosophy. And so the idea that we vaguely know the period in which this kind of central self-redefining concept originates is really remarkable.

We kind of glance over it, but when these guys, and they're mostly men, when they emerge onto the scene, it must have been so strange that they're... I think they are very alarming. They are clearly excited by their own world. They're inventing lyric poetry. They're inventing a coinage. They're inventing the idea of the kind of well-organized city. They're inventing the idea of a city which is drawing its life entirely, as you said earlier, from its connections across the sea. They very much say that harbour cities is. We do have to be a bit careful You know, there are earlier thinkers. It's not as if thinking emerged then. In India, in China, in Babylon, in the kind of summa in Egypt, people had thought about things. And they, in Mesopotamia had invented mathematics, Chinese, on mathematics, they were observing

the patterns of the heavens. It wasn't if suddenly the Greeks sort of acquired another half of the brain or something. It wasn't that. It was that, I think it's about this independence of mind It's instead of it being Power-related which all of those previous civilizations thought and power were absolutely intimate with each other for these Greeks Not actually unlike the Hebrew prophets

not actually unlike the Hebrew prophets, powerful thinking was often opposed to worldly power. You know, if you think of the way in which those those Old Testament prophets were hammering away at the kings and all kind of the idiots that they were surrounded by and the self-intelligent, in some ways these Greek philosophers are very like them. And the other thing to say about them is that they're not sort of cool-minded rationalists either. You know, they're set the boundary between sage and mage and prophet and philosopher and poet even, is very, very hazy. In fact, there is no boundary between those things. All of these people are a kind of a Malcolm of that sort of figure. This podcast is brought to you in part by Audible.

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Well, I guess maybe in the analog, it's like obviously there's always been musicians and there was even really famous musicians, you've Beethoven, you've Bach, et cetera. But, you know, with the invention of jazz, which is not that long ago, and then the invention of rock and roll, what it means to be a musician and the role that musicians play in society,

that's an invention. I mean, that transforms society, it transforms culture, and it's something new. And I think your point about it feeling like alive is exactly it. There's something exciting and generative and almost like destabilizing a revolutionary about the invention of this sort of modern

Western philosopher, which I mean, when you read it in a book, it feels like it's all happening one right after another. Of course, this is elapsing over quite a long period of time, but you get the sense by the time Socrates comes around that this is groundbreaking, revolutionary, invigorating stuff. It really is. So the first Greek thinkers came from a city, one of these trading cities, three kathinkas came from a city, one of these trading cities called Miletus on the west coast of Turkey now. And the three of them emerged, maybe one was a pupil of the other and so

on, or maybe some how related to each other anyway, called Thales Anaximander and Anaximonies. And it's exactly right what you say that their theories of the nature of being were incredibly radical. Thales and also so radical they sound crazy now. So Thales decided he was not a kind of mad man. He was a very articulate, he'd written a book about navigation and other one about astronomy. He knew how to measure buildings. He was a businessman. He'd made a corner in olive oil one year and all that kind of things. He'd written a law code for his city and other cities and so on.

And so he was a completely coherent citizen of his world. But Thales decided that when it was boiled down, when he really got down to the roots of the question, his question was, what is the world made of? And his answer was water. You know, it's absolutely right. I mean, clearly, clearly the world is not made of water. But his follower, Anaximander, said, no, no, no, no, no, it's not made of water. It's made of something he called the undefined, the apperron, which is the kind of the condition of existence when things do not yet have an identity. And so in the undefined,

out of the undefined everything emerges, and then in the end, back into the undefined everything emerges and then in the end back into the undefined everything returns and then Aleximini says no no no it's not the undefined it's far far subtler than that it's the whole of the cosmos is filled with a breath the great cosmic breath and everything that lives or is just for a moment absorbs their own bit of that cosmic breath and as it comes to life it breathes in that cosmic breath and for its lifetime breathes it and then as it dies, exhales it, and that breath returns to the whole kind of grand fluid structure of the cosmos as a whole.

And so you can see that these are not exactly, you know, they're not exactly building Tesla's these people, are they? I mean, it's not quite down that street. But it's absolute, to me, it's absolutely visionary. And interestingly, it's not unlike the kind of Buddhist ideas that are emerging in India at the same time about the cosmic breath, you know, those things are also alive in India. But it's a very great vision because, just as we were saying earlier, that this world is not dependent on grand central fixity. This is not about building pyramids. But on recognizing that meaning is in exchange and in fluidity, that actually you kind of

derive sense from a connectedness between things, that everything that is, is not a kind of definable, reducible, solid object like a billion bull, but simply part of the kind of the grand flowing of everything into everything, which is in fact the modern recognition, isn't it? It's the modern recognition of the universe that we are all just in process, the stuff of which you're made came from a star, from a star, from from exploding star, and will of course return to an exploding star. And so I think that this kind of absolutely radical understanding that stuff is fluid is one of the great understandings that human beings have ever come to. Doesn't Thales also do that experiment?

Doesn't he corner the oil market, as you said, because he was trying to make the point that a philosopher doesn't just have to be a sort of academic theoretical thinker, but could be successful and entrepreneurial and financially independent. That there wasn't a contradiction between being a person of ideas and a person of the world.

Well, you know, the other Thales story, which is the great story of Thales is that he's walking around the beautiful marble streets of Miletus late at night. And he's walking around the beautiful marble streets of Miletus late at night and He's looking at the stars And as he's looking at the stars He takes a step back to just get a better view of the constellation past one of the buildings And as he steps backwards he trips over

The a well a well head and falls into the well bottom first gets stuck in there. And as he falls in standing next to the well, this is a story told by Socrates. As he falls into the well, there's a person that that Socrates or Plato describes as a beautiful witty Thracian girl. Thracian girl is a Greek shorthand for a slave girl from Thracia, North of the Aegean. These are, perhaps we might talk about it in a minute, but these are slave-only cultures. And the beautiful witty Thracian girl says to Thales as he falls into the well, what is the point of looking at the heavens when you can't even see what exists at your feet? Okay, so this is in a way, as you say, the grand question about philosophy, way, as you say, the grand question about philosophy, that, you know, what really matters more? Does it matter to understand the higher things like that, the things above you, the sort

of immaterial otherworldly things among the stars or should you really attend to things as they are, the material actualities, what matters more, high-mindedness or doing the laundry, or what with a word, where the significance actually lie. And of course, that story has often been told admiringly of, Plato tells it admiringly of Socrates. Socrates tells it admiringly of Thales as that somehow to be removed from worrying about everyday realities is itself a sign of high civilization. But it's been interpreted differently that you know maybe you could say that the only reason that Thales can look at the stars is that he has the Thracian slave girl doing his laundry for him or getting water

from the well for him. And so this picture of a kind of a hierarchy of significance that is more important that Thaddeus looks at the stars than that the Thracian girl gets the water is itself a symptom of a radically polarizing, often actually anti-female society in which philosophers are male and water gatherers are female slaves. And that this in fact is a story about everything that's wrong with philosophy. The philosophy is a kind of awful male delusion about importance, the importance of the high when whereas as you say, you know, we've got to get on with the actual and also maybe know, we've got to get on with the actual and also maybe have a society in which some people, even the witty, beautiful people are not condemned to gathering water late at night for their masters. So it's incredibly rich and suggestive thing now. And worrying about

philosophy, you know, that philosophers do tend to sort of congratulate themselves on how removed they are and how stupid the rest of us are. I can't bear that. There's a story a couple of centuries later in Athens with Cleantheis, one of the early Stoics, who has this job watering the gardens. He's basically a manual laborer. And they, I think a king offers him a lot of money or asks him why is he sort of demeaning

or debasing himself with this manual labor. And he basically says something like, is that all that I do water the gardens or dig in the dirt? Well, I think his point was that there was something actually philosophical about the labor, about the simplicity of his life, and that there really isn't a world

in which one detaches from these things to contemplate the heavens, that you can sort of be philosophical and in fact must be philosophical, whoever you are, whatever you do. It's a different conception of philosophy. And it's interesting that they were, we've been wrestling with that for thousands of years

and we think about it even now. Is it, is a university professor, a philosopher, or is there something inherently hollow about sort of doing it from your ivory tower? Yes. I think, well, that's it. I mean, all of that is very vividly alive in this, you know, pre-thocratic world too that so there's a one of them is a man called Xenophonies who lived in one of these harbour cities here at Colophon and Notion, a kind of double city, a colophon, a notion, a kind of double city, incredibly beautiful place. And he is the first person to say that there is nothing more wicked in the world than the idea of dominant gods, that God, these are the dreadfulful gods, this Olympian crew, are themselves the sort of

horrible model and that he can't bear the idea that Homer, especially the Iliad, is repeated endlessly at dinner parties and drink parties and symposia in the city because it's leading people to an absolutely false idea of what the good is. And the modern form of that that he particularly despises is athletics. How horrible that we have to watch some people winning and some people losing. What could be more destructive of communal well-being than elevating winners to be this kind of lorded beef cakes parading through the streets of the city? What we really want, I mean it's fantastically

so what we think of as middle-aged, middle-class idea, what we really want is courtesy. We would just want to be kind of nice and gentle with each other and tell each other nice stories and learn civility by coexistence. And so this, this, the sort of drift towards hierarchy that is in, in human society is itself for xenophonies, completely destructive. And actually the drift towards hierarchy, which, you know, the professor or the champion athlete or whatever is the beneficiary of, needs in fact to be banished from the good city.

Hierarchy is punishment, in a way. Hierarchy destroys a sense of well-being in those who don't win or those who don't dominate. And so, you know, that's what is so interesting because those Miletus philosophers have these very, very radical and erosive ideas about anything that means is essentially fluid. And yet Xenophonies and others are at the same time cultivating the idea that a kind of stability and easy coexistence is really the root of meaning probably. So it's nice, isn't it, that even early on in this whole process, there is no kind of resolution. It's not as if they began with one set of ideas which they then abandoned. What, and originating at this same time, or not originating, but being codified, is this idea that some people should be able to own and dominate and control the labor of other people?

Yes. This is a very important and disturbing point, that all of these cities that all of these cities, setting up their colonies all around the northern Aegean and up into the Black Sea and on the shores of what's now northern Turkey, Crimea, southern Russia, all of them were slave trading cities. And with designated areas of their own ports for the kind of processing of the slaves, which they were then exporting largely to the big urban civilizations to the east in Mesopotamia, and Persia and Egypt. And so there is a problem that this thing, this thing that the Thales stories brings to mind, is sort of terrible that philosophy, the idea that there are higher things to think about. Come to the time just when chattel slavery, tradeable human beings, takes off as a business. In fact, these cities are reliant on that business. For the profits which allows these people, these philosophers to exist and to be paid to exist. philosophers to exist and to be paid to exist. And so what can we say about that? Does the fact that slavery emerges just as philosophy emerges actually devalue philosophy as an

enterprise? Does it mean that philosophy is fatally tainted with slavery, with enslavement, and in some ways I think it does. I think, you know, just as you're saying that in fact perhaps the real civilization should banish philosophy because only by getting rid of philosophy and the idea that are higher things or pure ways of thinking things will you then be able to achieve a kind of fair just as i think. Yes it's a really terrifying radical idea that so i think i should not have written this book no one should read it. So I should not have written this book. No one should read it. It's absolutely the thing not to do. Happening now at Mademy Homes, the Now's Your Time event, offering limited time savings

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The years Naomi had to fight to be treated fairly in an industry that was overwhelmingly white. That drive saw her break down barriers and reached the pinnacle of high fashion. But it also got her into some dangerous situations when it spilled over into an anger she couldn't control. In our new season, Naomi Campbell's model behaviour, we tell the story of how a young girl from South London became a trailblazing black icon but had some very public falls, of how she stood up to the British tabloids and won and the lengths she had to go to to

be the first black woman in history to make the cover of French Vogue. But she risks losing it all when her explosive behaviour lands her in court. Follow Terribly Famous Wherever You Listen To Podcasts or listen early and add free on Wondery Plus on Apple Podcasts or the Wondery App. Hello I'm Alice Levine and I am one of the hosts of British Scandal. So I want you to imagine that you're being offered 500,000 pounds to introduce someone to your ex. I mean the answer is still no. So you shake hands and agree to do it. But it's all about to get a hell of a lot more complicated because the

you in this story is Fergie, the Duchess of York, ex-wife of Prince Andrew and the person who's offered you half a million pounds is an undercover tabloid reporter who's recorded the whole conversation. Oh, and just one more thing, promise last one, it's all about to appear on the front page of the news of the world. In the later season of British Scandal, we take you inside the story of the so-called fake shake, the investigative journalist Mazem Amoud, and the series of explosive sting operations he used to con public figures. From Fergie to singer Telysa and former England football coach Sven Gorin Erickson.

Follow British Scandal wherever you listen to podcasts or listen early and ad-free on Wondry Plus, on Apple Podcasts or the Wondry app. Honestly, a million pounds, and I still wouldn't introduce you to him. And that's for your sake. a million pounds and I still wouldn't introduce you to him. And that's for your sake. It's interesting, like, you know, the military culture of Sparta is a culture that's only possible, right? Because it's supported, it's built on the back of this whole race of people that they own and control

and brutally suppress and murder to keep in a place of submission. And you could argue, you know, a lot of philosophers in Greece and Rome would talk about whether philosophies should be commercial, whether the philosopher should have a job, whether they should, and all of these discussions, the sort of the ideal of the philosopher sitting in the countryside contemplating ideas, writing

these books, whatever, it is facilitated by the fact that they inherited some sort of large slave plantation from their family. So it is kind of inextricable the relationship between philosophy and some sort of exploitative, you know, exploitative system. Although, you know, Stoicism interestingly enough is founded, you know, Zeno washes up in Athens penniless, but before he was a philosopher, he was a a merchant of Phoenician merchant of Tyrion purple, which is one of the most brutal slave produced products you could possibly imagine. Yeah, yeah. It doesn't entirely embrace the question. I mean, I think in a way the great

dominant figure of these pre-socratics and the most sort of everlastingly suggestive of them is Heraclitus. And Heraclitus who came from one of these slaving cities from Ephesus, the richest even, the most incredibly indulgent and sort of luxurious of cities, with many, many Phoenician connections by the way. And Heraclitus will not play with power or dominance, but he is from a family who has a hereditary right to the kingship of Ephesus and he rejects it. They ask him, he's a brilliantly wise man to write a law code, he refuses, he says that the citizens of Ephesus are not good enough for any law code that he might write for them. He doesn't hang out in the kind of drawing rooms and salons of episodes. He hangs out in people's kitchens weirdly, is the story of him hanging out in the kitchen by the oven. And he spends his time with beggars and children playing knuckle bones, you know, like the kind of dice

on the steps of the the great temple in Ephesus. And so it is not unlike Christ, say, it's an absolute rejection of, or maybe socrates, it's an absolute rejection of power and dominance as a root to significance. And it's so, and that's everything, all of these thinkers only survive in the most fragile fragments. And actually, this story differs when we get to Italy later on, but for Heraclitus, his philosophy is kind of so... It disowns this power notion so fiercely that, you know, that of course is the famous thing about not stepping, you can never step into the same river twice, is itself kind of restatement of the kind of fluidity of things that every, every identity is only the shape that the wave has for the moment that you perceive it and that and that. But he also, in his remarks about kind of social structure, he says, for example, in the most concentrated form that strife is justice.

And the analogy he uses is either the bow or the liar. And both the bow and the liar, which are incidentally the kind of instruments of Apollo, the great God of wisdom and refinement. Both the bow and the liar consist of a frame that pulls in one direction and a string or strings that pull in the other. And that only And only because the, those two necessary elements of the bow are pulling against each other, does the bow even exist. And if you broke the string of the bow, cut it, or if you broke the arms of the actual frame, then the bow would no longer exist. And so only in strife, only in argument is the coherence. And so only when opposites are taught are seen to be talkedly connected to each other. So, you know, he famously says the road up is the road down. Well, of course, the road up is the road down. But that is a kind of statement

about the essential nature of things. And the essential nature of things is inherently self contradictory. I mean, a lot of people have a lot of trouble with this later on. But the essential identity of something is not only what it is, but also what it is not. Then that itself is highly erosive of a kind of, you know, dominant exploitative power. And I think it's a very, very, very beautiful and helpful idea that a city could only be just if it allows absolutely in the top level of its existence, right in the surface of its existence, a kind of argument. And these are not democratic cities. These are not places where everybody has access to power in any way, but they're there, they're

there merchant oligarchies, but leaving that aside and they're slave only merchant oligarchies. So if one can for a minute set that aside, then this is a vision of a sort of permanently dynamic, tense, rather exciting coherence. Coherence is not that being nice to everyone at the dinner party. It's actually having a really blazing row in Congress. That's what beauty is really. I always thought it was interesting to go back to the slave idea that even hundreds of years later when you get some of the great slave philosophers or philosopher slaves, whether you're talking about Cirrus or Epictetus or Terence, none of them even question the institution of slavery. They see philosophy as a means of coping with and surviving and thriving inside slavery, but they don't seem to question

the fundamental injustice of being owned and exploited by another person or perhaps this part of their work is suppressed and it doesn't survive to us. But I always thought it was interesting that... And what don't you think, Ryan, that we're guilty of the same thing. I mean, I know that we don't largely have slavery now, but we have appallingly and radically polarized lives and benefits from lives. So that to a huge extent, there are large sections of the population in your country,

in mine, in the world as a whole, where people don't have access to this kind of conversation even that you and I are having now, do they? And so, and we, we don't get up in the morning and think, oh, that's terrible, isn't it? Do we? Or do you? No, but if I was working in a sweatshop, I think I would conceive of that sweatshop as being exploitative and evil and unjust. Do you get what I'm saying? Epictetus, the slave is saying nothing about slavery.

I do see that as extraordinary. But the human capacity for forgetting, it could never be underestimated. Can it? Sure. That we, you know, we all of us, all of us like to ignore what would be painful to consider. But also I think it goes to your point that there is a sort of an irony or a paradox in the idea that even as these people were saying

that everything was fluid, that everything is in flux, that everything was fluid, that everything is in flux, that everything is changing. There was also this sort of remarkably stratified society that they lived in, that they took for granted, institutions, hierarchies. He doesn't. That's the point. He doesn't. That he knows there is strife. He knows there is a kind of a clamour for power significance, well-being, wealth, you know, happiness or whatever, which another group would deny.

And that only by allowing that strife, can you even hope for justice, that tyranny is stable, tyranny is calm. And that actually it's the denial of tyranny that is beautiful. You could think of that as an aesthetic statement as much as a political, social one. That only when things are tense is something actually vitalised. And I think that that is a recognition by him that all of this, you know, we could call it an irony or a hypocrisy maybe.

I mean, I think it's more like a hypocrisy than an irony. Well, I think that says something about where we are now too, right? A lot of economists and theorists talk about how what a society needs is dynamism and change and disruption and that things like income inequality or stasis, things staying the same, that's the problem that you need. You need flux and change. And this desire to keep things as they are is the form of injustice because you're preventing things from being

invented, you're preventing revolutions from occurring, you're preventing change from happening, which might preserve what you have, but it fundamentally keeps other people stuck where they are, which might not be as good of a position. That's exactly right. And I think that the, you know, we have it in Europe and you have it in your country, this nostalgia, sort of political nostalgia for an era where apparently what I was like invented era, where things were not tense with competitive sense. It is an aspect of that. It's why that vision is tyrannical. That because it does not allow the bow or the string to pull the bow, you know, it's just I can and so it ends up with a sort of death, actually, it's the death of society. But I mean, this is such an interesting area, this and so

I, you know, if you if you can kind of connect that to those thoughts of the Thales an aximander an aximonies thing, that actually maybe and some of the later pre-socratics do talk about this, that I'm telling you, he was in Sicily 100 years later or so, that the world consisted of these four elements of earth, water and fire. And those are the four ingredients. And the two active principles in combining and separating those elements are love and strife. And so love is obviously a kind of a glutinating ease. The force that brings things together and strife is the one that blows them apart. And that actually the nature of things,

to use the word, the nature of things is to kind of roll through a sequence of conditions in which sometimes things are totally apart and sometimes when strife dominates and sometimes of coherence togetherness when love dominates and it is a necessary kind of role and that even to arrive at a fixed condition of hieroglyphs and strife filled justice is itself a form of stasis. So even that condition, he was just describing where you can, you know, we were just talking about where forces in society are pulling against each other, that itself can become a kind of fixity. That itself maybe has to roll.

I think that's a very great perception by impediclies. As we wrap up the question I was going to ask you, I'm starting to get excited about it, is what do you think of the idea of recovering some of the lost works of the Greeks, which they think might start to happen? Some of these things that are entombed at Pompeii and now they can take pictures of them and artificial intelligence can recover what's in there. I know they just found the first fragment and it says like the purple cloak, which as we were talking about brings up the idea of the Phoenicians

and Tyrion purple and the cloak of the emperor. Just this one singular phrase of a couple words could potentially signify so many potentially exciting or invigorating ideas. I remember reading ones that that Chrysippus, one of the Stoics, wrote 700 books and none of them survived. It could be in there, we don't know. I agree with you, it's absolutely thrilling. I don't know what the timetable is on that. Do you know when? I have no idea. I absolutely know. They're sitting like like croissants that have been left too long in the oven aren't they and they whenever I touch them in the past they've crumbled to nothing.

But now AI can read through the layers and distinguish the paper but papers from the from the ink. And if it can you imagine if all these these presecratics suddenly flower into an entire library, it's genuinely thrilling. I want to write that book. I mean, it could totally change what we think about everything because it's remarkable to think, we take it for granted, that this is somehow everything they thought, right? When really this is just a fragment of what they thought, we don't have any conclusive,

we don't have the Bible of Socrates, the Bible of the Stoics, the Bible of Epicurus. We have these fragments from which we have deduced a picture, a sense of what they thought. But they could have said the opposite two pages later or two books later and we have no idea what could be out there. Yeah, and yet it's rather exciting.

I always think it's rather lovely dealing with fragments. I mean, you know, how much easier is it to write a book about the pre-socratic than about Hegel? So, you know, you're only dealing with these little pebbles graphics than about Hegel. You only dealing with these little pebbles who just collected from the beach, you know, you aren't having to kind of address an entire city block. Well, there's a, and there, they weren't all great writers and thinkers, right? There's a joke about Epictetus. He overhears one of his students bragging about having read through the entire

library of Chrysippus. Chrysippus being dense and difficult to get through. Epictetus looks at the student and he says, you know, if Chrysippus had been a better writer, you'd have less to brag about. And the idea is, you know, we have this sense of them being smart and articulate and on it about all these things. Who knows? Maybe they have horrific other books out there that would totally change our perception of them. That's always worth contemplating to. I don't want to demote these people. The person I would really love to read a lot more of is Sappho.

I don't know if you ever read early Greek lyric poetry, but it is completely frustrating the way in which her suggestion just kind of disappears off into into into space, you know if an entire New book of Sappho's poetry emerged. Can you think of that? Well, maybe There was a you know other sapphos. There were other incredible posts just coming out of nowhere like this That'll be that'll be a moment Yeah, there could be more female philosophers. There could be who knows what could be out there. Well, but we don't know where we don't know where the house when it's going to be. I don't think so. I think it's a painstaking

process and it could it could outlast all of us. Who knows? Okay, next life then, when we come back. Yes. Well, but that is an interesting, that's sort of a Heraklitan idea too, I guess, in the sense that here we are thousands of years later and it's still unfolding, still changing. You just think about, you know,

he says we never step in the same river twice. Here you have that text frozen in place 2,000 years ago and how society has changed and remade itself all these different times and then to suddenly be re-exposed to an idea that's been in this time capsule the whole time. What effect would it have? How would we perceive it? How differently would we perceive an idea that we didn't have access to for 2,000 years than an idea that's been evolving with us for 2,000 years?

That's true. What he says in Greek, very beautiful, Avtoisin, and Manusin, hetra, kehetra, idate, peering. On those who step into the same rivers, different and different waters flow. And that is a very, you know, it's better than you never step in the same rivers twice. Because it's always see a kind of act of poetry anyway. But Moisi, Toisin, Toisin and Manus in her Thracetre, Idahte, Birre, is a kind of, you know, I think it could be,

you could have that over the door to your house, couldn't you? I would think that that could be as essential a statement as any that could be imagined. Well, isn't that the essence of the expression you can't go home again, which brings us right back down to Odysseus and the traveler. That's very good. Who said that?

Who said that? I don't know who said it. Isn't it also a Bon Jovi song? I don't know. It's a... It's a... But the idea is, yeah, you're not the same and the place is not the same, even though, of course, they are the same. Yes. Well, we've arrived at a very philosophical place.

Well, I love the book and I love this conversation. I appreciate you powering through and I hope you feel better. Well, thank you so much. I'm sorry powering through and I hope you feel better. Thank you so much. I'm sorry to be ill and groggy, but it's not. No, you could barely tell. It's you. Thank you. It's a pleasure.

A real pleasure for me. 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 it would really help the show Stoic early and add free on Amazon Music, download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and add free with Wondery Plus in Apple Podcasts. Everyone leaves a legacy. For some, the shadow falls across decades, even centuries. But it also changes.

Judgments are revised. Some are redeemed. Others are torn down. From Wondery and Goal Hanger Podcasts, I'm Afwa Hirsh. I'm Peter Frankipan. And this is Legacy. Exploring the lives of the biggest characters in history and asking whether they have the reputation as they deserve. Follow Legacy Now wherever you get your podcasts.