The Rise of History’s Greatest Emperor: An Untold Story - Alex Petkas - #1085

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Why is learning about Roman history useful or instructive at helping us in the modern world? Why should anybody care?

**Alex Petkas** (0:07)
I think that, so when I was starting my podcast, I had been doing it for a couple of months with a kind of hunch on this question, and I wasn't really able to articulate it to my satisfaction. But a friend of mine, a few months in, recommended that I read this book by Nietzsche, one of his early books that, and I had read some Nietzsche before. It's called On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life.
Nietzsche talks in there about how history can drain the life out of you and turn you into a crippled shell of a person. It can get you in this state where you question all of your decisions. It can overload you with knowledge and cause you to retreat into the cloister or the library or be a opiate for a life that is not fulfilling. But he says that, and he quotes Goethe at the beginning of that book, that something like Goethe said, I hate all knowledge that does not quicken and enliven me, like away with it. And history can be very quickening and enlivening. And the way that Nietzsche frames it is the most enlivening approach to history is embodied by one of his favorite authors, Plutarch, this great ancient philosopher, who was also one of history's most widely read and entertaining biographers.
And Plutarch embodies this mode of reading history or mode of approaching any number of subjects, really. Not just history, kings and battles, but like art history or like engineering, statuary, and he calls it monumental, the monumental approach to history, where you're looking not so much for precise facts, although the facts kind of matter for the story. You're looking for examples of greatness. And you're looking for those examples. And this is me interpreting Nietzsche a little bit. But I think of history as a kind of source for finding your true self. For like, you're kind of looking for yourself. You're looking for somebody who's trying to do something that represents a version of the greatest thing that you could do with your own life. And so it's about finding resonance for achievement. And I think this is what the greats tend to get out of history. There's a lot of stories of this happening. Julius Caesar and the Statue of Alexander is a famous one. So that's what I look to history for, and it's where I've gotten a lot of my own inspiration.
And I think it's ultimately about emulation, imitation. And there's a lot of philosophy around this that we could dig into a little deeper.

**Chris Williamson** (3:31)
Isn't it crazy that we think about history as being one thing, or at least the uninformed amongst us think about history as being one thing? But I found out recently that ancient Egypt had their own Egyptologists, because Egypt was so old that 2500 BC was studying 5000 BC.

**Alex Petkas** (3:52)
Yeah.

**Chris Williamson** (3:53)
So the same thing that people of history were learning from people from their history.

**Alex Petkas** (3:57)
Yeah. And I studied for a little while with this great scholar when I was in grad school. And he said, he was a specialist in the late Roman world, like fourth century AD. And he would always say, late antiquity is a very old world.
And it is because in the fourth century AD, they're as far away from Homer as we are from Charlemagne. It's crazy to think. The world hasn't changed as much for them as it has for us since that time period. But even Plutarch, who's a kind of model for so many things for me, he's this Greek philosopher in living in the Roman Empire, in the reign of Hadrian, Trajan. So Roman peace about 100 AD is like his apogee.
He's studying and doing the biographies of figures that lived 500, 700, down to 100 to 200 years before him. So it's all really old. They already kind of have this deep conception of what history is, what it's for and a sense of tradition. And I think we can learn a lot from the way that they approach their own history, which is often very different from the way that we approach them or we approach our own history.

**Chris Williamson** (5:18)
What about Julius Caesar? What can we learn about living a good life from him?

**Alex Petkas** (5:22)
Well, to come back to this example, that is probably my favorite story about Caesar and it's a famous story. So people might have heard of it, but maybe they haven't grasped the true meaning of it. So Caesar is a young man in mid-career, early 30s. He's gotten a job as a questor and he gets sent off for his tour of duty one year to Spain, which is a Roman province. And a questor is like a chief of staff, the paper guy for like a Roman governor, consul or proconsul. And one of his leisure moments, Caesar is going around with his friends in a temple. And the temple, it's a temple to Hercules. And a temple in antiquity is kind of like a museum. That's like where you would put great statues and art, and dedications and gold and stuff on the walls. And he's going in there, they're like touring the museum as it were, Caesar and his buddies. And his buddies kind of keep moving on and they realize, they look back, Caesar is not with them. And he's standing in front of a statue of Alexander the Great in this temple of Hercules. And they're like, Caesar, are you coming? What? Wait a sec. Are you crying? Because he's weeping in front of the statue of Alexander the Great. And he looks to them and he says, do you not think it is a matter for tears that when Alexander was my age, he was the ruler of so many great peoples, yet I have done nothing worthy of great renown? And this is only one of two instances that we know of where Julius Caesar cried.