Podcast #1,035: A Bible for Heroes — The Influential Book Read By History’s Eminent Men

Podcast Archives | The Art of Manliness

In 18th century America, this book was second in popularity only to the Bible.

It was a favorite of many thinkers and leaders throughout history, including Emerson, Napoleon, Machiavelli, Nietzsche, and even President Truman.

Yet, you probably haven’t read it.

It’s Plutarch’s Parallel Lives.

If you’re not familiar with Plutarch’s Lives, you’re in for a treat, as today’s episode offers a great intro. My guest, Alex Petkas, found that even though he’s a former classicist and professor, Plutarch’s Lives is still a tough read, which is why he started a podcast, The Cost of Glory, to make it more accessible to people. He does the same thing on today’s episode, sharing the background on Plutarch’s set of biographies and its major themes. Alex explains why Plutarch thought that biography was a powerful way to transmit morals and how the Homeric virtue he had in mind differed from that of just having good, upstanding character. Alex then gives us a taste of Plutarch as we discuss the lives of two obscure Greek and Roman figures. We end our conversation with how to get started studying Plutarch yourself.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• Cost of Glory website
• Alex’s resource on how to read Plutarch’s Lives, with links to the mentioned Penguin editions
• Alex’s recommended episodes of the Cost of Glory podcast:
  • Pompey I: Kid Butcher
  • Crassus I: Richest Man in Rome
• AoM Article: An Intro to Envy
• AoM Article: Envy, Ressentiment, and the Inversion of Values
• AoM Podcast #949: Unpacking The Emotion No One Likes to Talk About
• Sulla
• Eumenes
• Sertorius
• Blood and Thunder: The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the Conquest of the American West by Hampton Sides + AoM podcast episode about the book

Connect with Alex Petkas

• Alex on LinkedIn
• Alex on X
• Alex on IG

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Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. In 18th century America, this book was second in popularity only to the Bible. It was a favorite of many thinkers and leaders throughout history, including Emerson, Napoleon, Machiavelli, Nietzsche, and even President Truman. Yet you probably haven’t read it. It’s Plutarch’s Parallel Lives. If you’re not familiar with Plutarch’s Lives, you’re in for a treat as today’s episode offers a great intro. My guest, Alex Petkas, found that even though he’s a former classicist and professor, Plutarch’s life is still a tough read, which is why he started a podcast, The Cost of Glory, to make it more accessible to people. He does the same thing on today’s episode, sharing the background on Plutarch’s set of biographies and its major themes. Alex explains why Plutarch thought that biography was a powerful way to transmit morals and how the Homeric virtue he had in mind differed from that of just having good, upstanding character. Alex then gives us a taste of Plutarch as we discuss the lives of two obscure Greek and Roman figures. We end our conversation with how to get started studying Plutarch yourself. After the show is over, check out our show notes at aom.is/plutarch.

All right, Alex Petkas, welcome to the show.

Alex Petkas: Great to be here, Brett. Thanks for having me.

Brett McKay: So you are the host of a podcast called The Cost of Glory, which takes listeners through the Greek historian and philosopher Plutarch’s work, Parallel Lives. For those who aren’t familiar with Plutarch, can you give us a thumbnail biographical sketch of this guy?

Alex Petkas: Yeah. So if you’ve ever been to Athens, there is a monument there that overlooks the Acropolis and the Pnyx. It’s called the Philopappos Monument. And so this was built in the second century AD in honor of one of Plutarch’s friends and clients, who he actually addresses a treatise to. So Plutarch is a philosopher, historian, he’s thought of as a historian today that was living around the time of Seneca, Epictetus. His grandson was a teacher, tutor to Marcus Aurelius. So he’s kind of in that era around St. Paul, first and second century AD. And Plutarch was a local politician, a local kind of leader from Boeotia near Thebes, a little town called Chaeronea. And he lived most of his life there. He visited Rome. This is the period that we’re in is when Rome rules all the Mediterranean, including Greece. So he’s a Greco-Roman, but he’s a Greek speaker. And he was in later life made a priest of Delphi. So he’s a kind of a religious figure too. But what I think is really, he’s famous for is writing this biography that you mentioned, The Parallel Lives. It’s a biography collection. And it’s one of the most famous works of antiquity. And in various periods of history, it was probably the most popular of all the books from the Greco-Roman period in the 18th century in America. Plutarch’s lives, The Parallel Lives, was more popular than Homer or Plato or Cicero. It was just second only to the Bible among ancient works.

So it’s an incredibly popular book. And he wrote these biographies out of a general conviction that this was an effective way to transmit virtue. So he wrote a bunch of other moral essays, but the biographies were kind of the centerpiece of this. And they were written for people like his friend, Philopappos, who was actually a client king of the Romans. He was from Syria and was visiting Athens because I think he was in political exile from his homeland. So it’s kind of written for leaders of society. And those are like Plutarch’s clients, as it were, the people that he taught, that he instructed in philosophy that he’s trying to add value to in his life. But that’s him in a nutshell.

Brett McKay: So yeah, he’s first a philosopher. We think of him as a historian today. And I think most people, when they think about history, they think history is a science where the goal is to create as accurate a description of the past as possible. And Plutarch, he sought for accuracy in his works. But as you said, his primary goal with biography and history wasn’t fact. His main telos was teaching, virtue, morality. So why did he think biography was the most effective way to teach morals?

Alex Petkas: Yeah, well, and I do wanna defend him, and you gave him credit. He is a serious historian, like he does sift through sources, and he tries to discern fact from fiction. But he distinguishes his project from history in, for example, the introduction to the life of Alexander the Great, one of his characters. And he says, I’m not writing history, so my audience will have to excuse me if I do not recount every single battle and every deed done publicly by Alexander, because I’m writing lives and not histories. And a chance remark said at a dinner party or a joke made among friends might do more to elucidate character than battles in which thousands died. And so his goal in writing these biographies, which we could call, we sort of think of as histories, is really to portray the essence of a man, the character, not just what they did, but more importantly, who they were.

And for that reason, he sees his mission as much as anything, one of selection finding the most illustrative examples from the life. So he’ll tell you the narrative of the life of a man, but he’ll try to get the best quotes, the best illustrative anecdotes. He’s a great storyteller. So there’s all these kind of Hollywood scenes, but he tries to stay concise. And the longest of his biographies is less than 100 pages in modern editions, and a lot of them are 30 to 60 pages. But like you said, it was because he thought biography was not just interesting and entertaining, but contained this really powerful moral juice that he wanted his readers to get. It’s why he chose this genre.

Brett McKay: And the way he did it, the book is called Parallel Lives, is he would find someone from Greek history and someone from Roman history and do a compare and contrast between the two.

Alex Petkas: That’s right. Yeah. So, for example. Julius Caesar and Alexander, the greatest all-around figures of either culture, and Demosthenes and Cicero, the greatest orators of the Greeks and Romans. And one of his missions is kind of cultural. He’s writing for Roman readers who know Greek, Greeks who live under the Roman Empire. And he’s kind of trying to help Greeks and Romans appreciate each other. That’s like a kind of side mission of his. And because I think he recognizes this thing that Rousseau would talk about, that heroes are, in a lot of ways, the embodiment of a culture, that they’re the sort of, the way that a culture becomes one is by having the same heroes. And so he wanted people to share their heroes in his sort of meeting of two cultures world that he lived in. The reason that I think this is important, this is this genre of biography is because, and the way that you appreciate heroes in general is by wanting to be like them. This is how they structure society and how they have this impact on your life by producing this emotion that Aristotle talks about called zeal.

Brett McKay: Yeah. Tell us more about Zelos. Is that how you pronounce it in the Greek?

Alex Petkas: Yeah. Zelos, Zelos or Zelos. It’s an eta in Greek. So it kind of depends on your pronunciation. So Aristotle defines zeal as an emotion felt when a man sees present among others who are like him by nature, things good and honorable, which he himself is capable of attaining. And Plutarch talks a lot about zeal in the biographies. We might translate zeal, Zelos, as emulation today, although that’s not like a word that a lot of people know the definition of very well. It is where we get the word zeal in English, actually, but it’s that feeling that you feel when you see somebody doing something great, and it inspires you to imitate, basically. And so Plutarch talks about how other deeds or other achievements of men will maybe fill you with admiration. Like if you see a great statue or a well-crafted building, it’ll fill you with admiration, but it won’t necessarily make you wanna go and make a statue or go and build a building. But achievements of virtue, of excellence, like the kind that he depicts in the biographies, that these will have a sort of natural, almost magnetic effect and make you wanna imitate them somehow. And he recognizes this thing that, he’s a student in his philosophical views of the philosopher Plato, who lived four centuries earlier.

And he also quotes Aristotle a lot. And Plato talked about the power of stories, mostly in a bad sense in the Republic, the power of bad stories to shape a bad character. Aristotle was a little bit more optimistic about the power of story, but they both kind of recognize that stories that you tend to gravitate in your own character towards the people that you admire in a story. And so I think Plutarch is kind of basing his whole literary biographical project on that premise that you depict the best people and you’ll make great citizens as a result.

Brett McKay: So it sounds like zeal is kind of the opposite of envy a little bit.

Alex Petkas: That’s how I’d say it. It works. And that’s how Aristotle sees it. And so Aristotle defines envy as if zeal is a pain that makes you want to do great things when you see them being done or being achieved. Envy is the pain that at the fact that other people have achieved great things. So it’s a kind of a negative passive response for Aristotle. The Greek word is thanos which just sounds bad to me but at thanos is always bad in Greek and it’s the emotion that makes you want to see the mighty fall purely for the fact that they are mighty and it’s what Nietzsche would define as uses this French word when he talks about a ressentiment like resentment it’s a passive destructive emotion it’s the tall poppy syndrome emotion that all people will feel the pain of, will feel the results of when they achieve greatness. There’s always gonna be envious people around you trying to bring you down. So for Aristotle and for Plutarch, zeal is productive and creative and envy is destructive.

Brett McKay: So zeal says, you did that so I can do it too. Envy is like, you did that, I can’t do that. So I’m gonna take it away from you somehow.

Alex Petkas: Yeah, exactly. And both are divinities in Hesiod and the kind of early Greek mythology. They like to personify these natural forces. And zeal is one that Zeus uses to conquer the older order of wicked gods and titans. And envy has all kinds of destructive power, causes wars and so on.

Brett McKay: So you mentioned Plutarch wrote these with the goal of helping leaders lead well. What influence did Parallel Lives have on great leaders throughout Western history?

Alex Petkas: Well, He’s popular all throughout antiquity, and he gets rediscovered in the West in the Renaissance. And so a guy like Machiavelli is reading a lot of Plutarch. A lot of the examples that he cites from the prints are from Plutarch. Plutarch, I think Emerson put it best. He was a great devotee of Plutarch. He calls Plutarch a Bible for heroes. Plutarch is in a way like an encyclopedia of great figures from antiquity. And he served that role as a sort of gateway drug for people to get enthusiastic about ancient greatness ever since the Renaissance and even before that in antiquity. And so in the 18th century, I already mentioned his popularity among in the Americas. Another figure that was really influenced by Plutarch is Rousseau, who talked about getting his spirit of liberty from three sources, mainly his father, his country, and Plutarch. And so, Rousseau was reading Plutarch as a young boy and just obsessed with the heroes of antiquity. Whatever you think of Rousseau’s influence on politics.

I think he’s a more interesting figure than a lot of people get him credit for. Alexander Hamilton is another great devotee of Plutarch in the winter of 1777, I think it is, at Valley Forge. He’s a 25-year-old aide-de-camp for George Washington. And during the day, he’s conducting the business of the general. He’s trying to get money from the Continental Congress ’cause they’re starving out there at Valley Forge. But by night, he’s staying up in his tent late reading Plutarch’s lives.

He’s reading the lives of Solon and Lycurgus, these great state founders of Greece and Romulus of Rome. And he’s taking notes in his paybook. We actually have his paybook. He took like 50 pages of notes that winter. And the list, you could go on and on multiplying examples. Napoleon’s supposed to have had a copy of Plutarch often by his bed, and he would reread the life of Caesar before famous battles. And I think the most interesting modern political figure who’s a great devotee of Plutarch is Harry Truman, who was our last self-educated president, didn’t have a BA. And he encountered Plutarch as a young man. And he speaks about in a biography that interview series that was done of him later in his life, he speaks about returning to Plutarch again and again as he was going through his political career. And he kind of used Plutarch as like a library of character, like when he would meet somebody that he couldn’t quite figure out or he’s trying to decide as the executive, this comes up a lot, like who to put in charge of what and who to trust with what sort of duties.

He would go back to his bookshelf and open up Plutarch and kind of thumb through and try to think of who am I dealing with now? Is this like an Alcibiades character? Is this a Cato kind of character? And he would often be able to nail somebody’s personality by consulting Plutarch, who according to him, knew more about politics than any of the books that he’d ever read. So I think Truman’s a really great figure that illustrates how Plutarch is great for self-educated people and kind of lifelong learners.

Brett McKay: No, I like that a lot. And then another big influence. Plutarch had on Western culture, Shakespeare. Shakespeare’s plays like Julius Caesar based on Plutarch.

Alex Petkas: Absolutely. His play Coriolanus is based on Plutarch’s Coriolanus, Antony and Cleopatra on Mark Antony. The Life of Alcibiades contains a character, Timon, the misanthrope, so Shakespeare’s Timon. Yeah, that’s probably the most influential Plutarch reader of modern literary history, for sure.

Brett McKay: And yeah, it’s crazy. Such a big influence on Western culture, but I reckon a lot of people haven’t read any Plutarch.

Alex Petkas: Yeah, it’s funny because I think that for all that he was incredibly popular for the 15th, 16th, 17th, 18th centuries, he kind of went out of fashion in the 19th century. Although even in Lincoln’s day Lincoln was, there was an article written about Lincoln one time where the journalist said, ah, a great devotee of Plutarch is Abraham Lincoln. And Lincoln actually wrote to him and said, as a matter of fact, I never have read Plutarch, but since you published that article, I decided to make up the deficit. And so he’s, acquired a copy of Plutarch and started reading it. It’s enjoying it. So he was so popular that it was just assumed that a leader would have been familiar with him. But he went out of fashion in the 19th century when, kind of like you alluded to at the beginning our education in history started this idea that history should be a science, became more popular, that history was about discerning facts and assembling a kind of true account of things. And even though Plutarch is a pretty good historian, he became sidelined because the whole project that he represented of history as self-help, in a way, history as moral formation in philosophy, just went out of fashion. It was seen as sort of not objective. And I don’t know. I think that our kind of modern sort of bureaucratized academic culture just doesn’t really have a lot of room for the high agency men that Plutarch depicts and just kind of unproblematic admiration of them.

Brett McKay: Yeah. I think we’re poor for it.

Alex Petkas: Yeah, for sure.

Brett McKay: So when you take a look at Plutarch’s work as a whole, are there themes that you see that he returns to again and again?

Alex Petkas: Yeah. Well, many. The envy of the kind of challengers in the political sphere as a man rises through the ranks in politics, the importance of honesty and justice in one’s dealings. You see so many themes across the board with the wages of vice are often… Like often it’s through a leader’s vice that somebody’s able to affect their downfall by tempting them with, whether it’s wine or women or riches. So yeah, Plutarch is a moralist at heart, but he doesn’t let his moralism cloud his judgment of people. I think that’s one of his great virtues. He doesn’t make saints out of anybody and he doesn’t make villains out of his main characters either, even though he sometimes strongly disapproves of them. And so it’s just a whole kind of library of morals.

Brett McKay: So one theme that I’ve seen that I’m particularly interested in that Plutarch tries to figure out. Is sussing out whether outcomes, whether it’s a war, someone’s rise or fall, whether that’s dependent on virtue or fate. I’ll do some definitions, like what did Plutarch mean by virtue?

Alex Petkas: This is a really interesting question that I thought a lot about because… So Plutarch is admired by a guy like Machiavelli and a guy like Nietzsche who… You know, Machiavelli defines virtue as something like… Well, virtu is what he calls it. Something like prowess or just competence in politics and war. I wouldn’t say that it’s amoral, but it’s definitely not the virtue of virtue signaling. It’s definitely… Like it’s something a little different from being an upstanding citizen, right?

Brett McKay: It’s like skill.

Alex Petkas: Right. Right. And this idea is sort of intention with maybe what you would see represented as a virtue in an author like Seneca or Marcus Aurelius, like the stoics. So Plutarch is also a moralist and his definition of virtue as a philosopher would be some kind of harmony of the four cardinal virtues, maybe like justice, temperance, wisdom and courage. Something like close to good citizenship, close to the philosophical idea you find in Plato and Socrates. But he also, I think as an artist, he’s dealing with these men who really exhibit this kind of earlier almost Homeric sense of virtue. Like in Homer, arete, the Greek word for… Well, what gets translated as virtue a lot. Arete is really prowess. It’s really skill, a competence. And it’s a form of sort of manly overwhelming excellence.

It actually derives from the Greek word for man, aren, just like virtu derives from the word vir in Latin for man. So they both kind of mean manliness etymologically in both languages. And Plutarch has these figures that he depicts fairly and sympathetically who really exhibit that frightening virtue. Like a guy like Alexander or especially a guy like Caesar conquering all of Gaul, outsmarting all of his enemies. Themistocles, another great example of outsmarting your enemies. So for Plutarch virtue, I think as a philosopher, he would define it as something more like being an upstanding citizen, a harmony of soul. But as an artist, he has this earlier kind of primal sense of manliness, which is one of the reasons why he’s been so appealing to people like Napoleon who kind of are looking more for that than for the good citizenship version of virtue.

Brett McKay: Yeah. It’s this idea that you can conquer fate through your greatness basically.

Alex Petkas: Absolutely. Yeah.

Brett McKay: I mean… Yeah. What did Plutarch have to say about that? What did he have to say about the intersection between this prowess and luck or fate in life?

Alex Petkas: Well, I do like this formulation that the harder you work, the luckier you get. You can kind of increase your surface area for being struck by good luck if you’re a hardworking, virtuous person. I think Plutarch would agree with that in general. There are some interesting figures that bring out this tension. I think that… I look at a guy like Sulla, who I recently did a series on in my podcast. Sulla was an incredibly competent in the old sense of virtue, the virtu politician in the generation before Julius Caesar at Rome. And he was kind of a problematic figure for Plutarch because he’s a sexual omnivore. He indulges in drinking parties after he wins a civil war that he largely provoked. He slaughters all of his enemies in a great political purge.

And yet Sulla was… After he won the Roman… The first Roman civil war, he renamed himself the lucky. And he liked, even though he was incredibly competent, he liked to speak of how the best decisions that he made, for example, were not the ones that he arrived at by calculation or forethought, but that he just kind of intuited and just took on a whim as if he were blessed by the gods. And I think for a guy like Sulla, the more you believe in yourself, the more kind of faith you have both in yourself and in the gods, the luckier you get. There’s something kind of almost mystical about a guy like Sulla. So even though he’s… We don’t normally associate a Machiavellian, if you were conqueror figure like that with great piety. Sulla was quite pious actually. He would thumb his amulet of Venus before battles.

He’s always talking about having dreams in which the gods speak to him. And he’s a lavish dedicator of votive offerings to the gods. So this is kind of… He has this very public piety and I think he really believed it. And so on the other hand, for a guy like Plutarch who’s a philosopher, a lot of what philosophy is supposed to give you, and I think you see this a lot in the stoics too, is this kind of fortification against fate that really the reward of virtue, the greatest reward of virtue is not having success in life. It’s the kind of peace and contentment of mind that you get from cultivating excellence.

Like virtue is its own reward for Plutarch. And he has a whole essay on this, on tranquility of mind that is… That’s one of the upshots of that treatise. Like even if you get exiled, even if you’re being tortured, like there is some solace, the greatest solace of all perhaps in having a good character. And often like that means that some of the best figures, some of the most compelling figures of Plutarch end up dying these tragic deaths. But you can sort of pronounce at the end of the day that they lived a good life nonetheless.

Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. Okay. So let’s give our listeners a taste of Plutarch’s lives and then what you’re doing with it on your podcast. So two lives that you cover in your show that I found particularly interesting were those of the Greek Eumenes and the Roman Sertorius. So start with Eumenes first. This guy’s really interesting. Can you give us like a thumbnail biographical sketch of this guy?

Alex Petkas: Yeah. Eumenes of Cardia, a town that nobody has ever heard of today and barely anybody had heard of in antiquity. He’s from this backwater at the fringe of the Greek world. But he ends up becoming the royal secretary of the Macedonian King, Philip II. And then after Philip is assassinated, he becomes the royal secretary to Philip’s son, Alexander the Great and follows Alexander the Great on his campaigns, conquering the Persian empire. He goes all the way to India with him. And Eumenes becomes this figure since the fourth century BC and he’s Greek and not a Macedonian, which is important for his story, but he becomes this after Alexander dies sort of tragically very young without designating a successor, Eumenes becomes one of the most important people in the conflicts that arise shortly after. There’s these great wars of succession that go on right after Alexander dies.

And Eumenes proves that he wasn’t just a talented administrator, secretary, numbers guy, bureaucrat, but he’s like one of the best generals of his day. And he defeats great generals like Antigonus and Craterus. He like slays some incredibly mighty men in single combat on the battlefield. I mean it’s an incredible sort of rags to riches guy comes out of nowhere story that… It’s one of the reasons I started my podcast, honestly, because he is such an obscure figure. Even classicists today… When I was reading Plutarch’s Lives, I decided to go through it kind of late in my career before I left academia. I stumbled upon Eumenes and I’m like, oh, I should read this biography probably just so I could say I read all of the lives, even though he’s probably not that interesting ’cause obviously I would’ve heard of him if he were that interesting. But he’s one of the most amazing characters of all antiquity to me. And so I was like, Oh. How good are the rest of the lives gonna be if this obscure figure is so compelling?

Brett McKay: Yeah, I mean, I’ve read a lot of biographies about Alexander the Great and Philip, and I’d never heard of this guy until I listened to your podcast and I read the biography and Plutarch. And yeah, what I found so intriguing about this guy, he’s an outsider, right? So he’s Greek, but he somehow is able to work his way up to be like the second in command. And when there was all that turmoil about who was gonna take over the empire after Alexander died, like he had that sort of political instinct where he knew how to navigate things so that he could be considered like, oh yeah, this guy. This guy, we’re gonna make this guy in charge.

Alex Petkas: Yeah. I think that it was a great foresight on his part because the Macedonians are… They like to advertise themselves as Greeks, but it’s kind of like us, like the English and the Scots or like think of if you’ve ever met somebody from Glasgow, like they kind of speak English, but they’re kind of unintelligible depending on if they’re amongst their friends. And that’s what the Macedonians were to the Greeks and vice versa. And so as an outsider Eumenes saw that his weakness could be a strength. That if he rose up through the ranks, nobody would ever suspect him of trying to take over because oh a Greek could never rule over Macedonians. I’m just the secretary. I’m just the guy you can trust with your secrets. And so for that reason, he gets very close to Alexander.

He’s very clever and charismatic. You know, he’s probably there when Alexander’s getting tutored by the philosopher Aristotle. Eumenes is keeping Philip of Macedon’s correspondence. So he’s writing these letters to these Greek cities, like he’s kind of Philip’s ghost writer diplomatically. Eumenes gets very close to Alexander’s mother, the very difficult woman Olympias, which I think is a real probably the best evidence of his incredible people skills, that he’s able to preserve good relationships with Olympias, who was an incredibly difficult person to get along with, especially for Philip. But because of that so when Alexander dies, Eumenes is… There’s this conclave that the generals meet in to try to sort out who’s gonna take over or who’s gonna be regent. Alexander has this newborn son, I think maybe he wasn’t born yet, but he was… His mother was pregnant. And so, no, Alexander’s wife was pregnant that is.

And so Eumenes in this conclave of great generals, he says, I’m just gonna be the note taker, guys. So that means he’s in the room as the most important decision is being made. He knows all of the figures. He’s standing on the sidelines recording everything. He has full intelligence of whatever is going on. He’s very, very, very close to power, but nobody suspects that he’s gonna be a big player. And because the regent that eventually gets chosen, Perdiccas, trusts him the most, he ends up giving Eumenes this important job as the governor or the satrap of Cappadocia, some kind of important province in Asia Minor. And he gives him some money and an army and makes Eumenes a military commander after all. And so it’s because Perdiccas felt like he could trust Eumenes and Eumenes, of all the people left standing when Alexander died, he’s not a Macedonian, so Perdiccas doesn’t see him as a threat. And so that allows him to be in this very strong position when the war begins.

Brett McKay: Okay. So I’m trying to think of some lessons we can extract from that for the modern day. One is if you’re a young person, a young man, and you’re starting off in your job at a company, do not downplay opportunities to be like a scribe or like just sit in on meetings where you don’t actually talk, but you’re there just to observe, maybe take notes for the boss. That can actually be really powerful.

Alex Petkas: Yeah. I think that’s a great lesson. And something that I saw… I talk a little bit about this in the life of Pompey, The Great. When Pompey was making his own rise in the chaos of the civil war, he always… He took pains to be close to the most important person, which is Sulla. And one of the things that I heard a venture capitalist talk about one time on a podcast I thought was really insightful is if you’re at a company, you should try to get really close physically to the people who are the real power in the organization. And if you can manage it, either don’t have an official position, just be the boy, the wonder boy who does all kinds of stuff. And people are like, what is that guy’s role exactly? Or, don’t let yourself be limited by your role.

So Eumenes isn’t just the royal secretary, he develops that relationship with Olympias. He develops the personal touch of being the trusted person. Somebody you can go to with secrets. And that’s a great way to rise through the ranks and kind of pole vault over other people who are just working their way through the proper channels.

Brett McKay: Yeah. Okay. And also people skills. It seems like he had that in spades, so develop those as much as you can.

Alex Petkas: For sure.

Brett McKay: So this guy acquired a lot of power in this sort of power vacuum that existed after Alexander the Great, but eventually he had a downfall. What led to his downfall?

Alex Petkas: Well, he finds himself in this position. The wars of succession start getting on and in full swing, Perdiccas gets assassinated and Eumenes ends up sort of, not accidentally, certainly not accidentally, but he finds himself in this coalition of loyalists. So the cause that he kind of represents is securing the legitimate succession of Alexander’s son. This is what Olympias wants. There are other generals that just wanna say, let’s do away with this whole kingdom of Alexander farce and just carve it up and we can all have our own little kingdoms. And Eumenes is leading a coalition of loyalists, and he recognizes the weakness of his position because all of these guys wanna be the CEO and, but he’s the most competent guy on the battlefield. And so he ends up as the de facto general. And one of the ways that he ends up having charge of the whole army is by, he tells the men that he has this dream where Alexander the Great visits him and tells him that if he and the generals will pray for the favor of Alexander, who they kind of regard now, maybe, certainly this was part of Alexander’s myth when he was alive, like maybe he’s the son of Zeus, right?

There’s a kind of divine aura around him. So Alexander visits Eumenes in the dream and says, pray to me and I’ll guide the army. And so Eumenes erects this tent in which the genius of Alexander is supposed to kind of spiritually reside. And he says, well, why don’t we all meet in this tent and burn incense to the genius of Alexander, and he will guide our group decisions. And surprisingly, the generals say okay to this. And so he knows if he gets them alone in a tent, and it’s like a group decision, that he can sort of sway the conversation in the right direction. But he’s dealing with a lot of envy rising as he’s leading this coalition of men, de facto the boss of them.

And he has a few successful battles, and this is happening in the mountains of Iran, amazingly, and there’s elephants involved. It’s just really epic. But what ends up happening is in this battle that he wins tactically, one of his envious subordinates, this guy Peucestas ends up throwing the fight. And in the chaos, even though Eumenes wins the battle, his enemy Antigonus captures the base, the camp, the baggage train, which is a few miles from the battle scene. There’s a big cloud of dust that gets kicked up. They’re like fighting in a big salt flat. And when this happens, essentially Eumenes has this contingent of super elite infantry, the Silver Shields fighting on his side. And these guys are really, really… I mean, they’re very talented like the Navy Seals of the Macedonian army, but they have their wives and children with them.

They’ve sort of been accustomed to getting coddled they’re professional soldiers and since they’re so good, the generals sort of give them a lot of leeway and let them cart around their families with them as they’re fighting, which ends up, I think being a sort of, I mean, it ends up being a great weakness and liability. So Antigonus captures the camp and he captures the wives and children of the Silver Shields, and he’s able to kind of force them against Eumenes once he has these hostages. And they give him up really willingly. These guys just don’t have a lot of principles at this point. They’re old men. And so I think the lesson for me there is Eumenes, I do like to think that he faced his fate willingly, but also he didn’t have subordinates at that point that will really ride or die with him. He was able to command a lot of loyalty through his charisma and his championing of the cause of being loyal to the dead king’s memory. But when you’re the best man on the battlefield and in an organization, sometimes you just can’t trust the people that aren’t ever gonna be able to be committed to that cause as much as you are. And so I think that was part of his downfall.

Brett McKay: All right. Let’s talk about Sertorius. So he’s the Roman in this parallel life. Who was this guy?

Alex Petkas: Sertorius, another obscure figure, but Sertorius, I describe him as the greatest Roman rebel. So Theodor Mommsen, this famous Nobel laureate winner, Roman historian, characterized Sertorius as one of the best of the Romans that ever lived. Perhaps in different circumstances, he could have been a savior of his country, a liberator. But Sertorius ends up on the losing side of the Roman civil war with Sulla. Again, this is the generation right before Julius Caesar. And he ends up retreating to Spain in the end of the civil war in Italy, and holding out for nearly 10 years against general after general that the conservative regime throws at him. And so he’s an incredible inspiring figure of the will to survive and military competence.

Brett McKay: Can you tell us more about what happened when Sertorius got to Spain? Like first, like how did he end up there and how did he manage to build a power base and hold out against Rome for so long?

Alex Petkas: Yeah. So when Sertorius retreats to Spain, basically there’s a incredibly bloody civil war going on, raging in Italy. And Sertorius is on the populist side of the civil war. Sulla is on the optimate conservative side of the civil war, the old aristocracy. Well, one of the last dying things that the populist senate does before Sulla captures the city and has them all executed, is they make Sertorius a governor of Spain. They make him a praetor. And this gives him some legitimate authority. I think they kind of wanted to get rid of him ’cause he was complaining. He’s a sort of junior officer complaining about how incompetently the war effort was being handled. So they’re like, why don’t you just go to Spain? We’ll just give you a job to get rid of you. And they think that he’s not gonna do much good there.

They’re just trying to get him out of their hair. But he manages to win a couple of battles against generals that Sulla sends at him. And he sees an opportunity there because the Romans have, in Spain, by that time, they don’t control the whole of the Iberian Peninsula. They just control the coastline. And mostly they’re kind of exploiting the province for silver mines and plunder. This is just not very scrupulous administration on the part of success of Roman governors. And so Sertorius is like, alright, we’re gonna do this differently. Instead of trying to exploit the natives and extract their silver to try to fund my Roman army so that I can win this civil war, I’m gonna build a bridge with them, and I’m going to recruit them, and I’m gonna not just recruit them to liberate themselves from the Romans, I’m gonna promise them, I’m gonna attract them with the hope of becoming true Romans themselves.

So, he basically recruits and trains a Roman army out of the natives. He kind of promises to make Romans out of them. He trains their boys in Latin and Greek. So he inspires them with this greater hope of eventually taking back Rome. And he gets very close to doing that, which is a story we’ll get to in a second. But I think that the way that he builds this coalition is by rethinking that these natives are not, they’re not a fertile ground for us to exploit, but rather for us to make allies out of. And this is our most valuable resource, the human resource of these people that live in this province. And he treats them with respect. He has this history of being a spy in the Cimbrian wars. He went undercover under Gaius Marius a few decades earlier and learned the native Gaelic language and went incognito and gathering intelligence. So he’s a very culturally flexible person, like so many of the great British empire heroes. And so that’s really the secret to his power is he kind of goes native.

Brett McKay: Yeah. So he kinda like, he’s a fox. He’s sneaky, wiley.

Alex Petkas: Very much. I compare him to the swamp fox, Francis Marion in the…

Brett McKay: Yeah.

Alex Petkas: In the Revolutionary War because what he ends up doing is he not only… Okay, he makes Roman soldiers out of them, but he adopts a lot of native fighting techniques that they’re very suited for, which is to say guerilla warfare. So he says, here’s what we’re gonna do. They’re gonna have the advantage in these pitched battles that happen in the planes. We’re gonna go to the forest, we’re gonna cut off their supply lines, we’re gonna strike and then just fade into the wilderness, and they’re just not gonna be able to do anything to stop us. And he’s incredibly talented at specifically this kind of sneaky form of guerilla warfare where you’re just everywhere and nowhere whenever you wanna be. And because he does this, he’s able to fight off Metellus Pius, one of the greatest commanders of his day. He cuts Pompey’s story short as a young man. He really like spanks Pompey like a schoolboy with these guerilla techniques that Pompey just has no answer for. It’s an incredible story.

Brett McKay: So what do you think are the takeaways for us living in the 21st century and not fighting in guerilla civil wars?

Alex Petkas: I think Sertorius is, and Eumenes alike, one principle that I see in him is he’s a figure that illustrates how important justice is and legitimacy is when you’re playing in these spaces where there’s not a lot of law and order and there’s chaos. Like in a disruptive startup maybe, or if you’re in a place where civil order is breaking down, those are the places where justice is rare and all the more valuable if you can embody it. And so one of the things that Sertorius does is he says, we’re not gonna, we’re not just a rebel army. We’re the true Rome. And so he has elections. He establishes a rival senate and he appoints officers. He takes the time to really legitimize himself through law and order, through justice. Eumenes has his own version of this as well.

So that’s one takeaway. Another is to fight with the tactics that advantage you, always fight on your own terms. He knows that the Romans have this advantage in full frontal warfare, but that’s not the only way to play. You can be creative and use tactics that say, a big incumbent company is not going to be able to beat a startup on speed and innovation often, right? They’re very set in their ways. They have this kind of slow bureaucracy, even though they have maybe unlimited resources, there’s often a deficit of creativity that allows contenders to get advantages over them and in particular circumstances. I think Sertorius really illustrates that too.

Brett McKay: So this guy, Sertorius, rose to power but eventually had a downfall too. What led to his downfall?

Alex Petkas: I think two things, for Sertorius. One is that it was very difficult. It was easy to train the natives to adopt this mode of guerilla warfare. They’re kind of used to it. They’ve been fighting, freedom fighting rebellious war against the Romans for decades, maybe centuries. But his Roman subordinates don’t like this. And he ends up, he has explicit instructions to his subordinate commanders, do not engage Metellus or Pompey in a head-to-head battle. And two times or more this happens and it’s disastrous. So he has to rely on other people to fight like he does, but he can’t really convince them. They’re kind of set in their ways. And this ends up weakening his position militarily. But what ends up destroying him is a coup among his officers, among some of his most trusted lieutenants who were resentful of him.

Again, I think you can see this with both Eumenes and Sertorius, envy is what ends up bringing them down. People think that they could do it as well as he could. So Sertorius is kind of low born, and he ends up getting undermined and assassinated by a higher born man who back in Rome would’ve outranked him. But now that they’re in Spain, he’s having to take orders from this gruff, Sabine, hill country guy. And Sertorius got intelligence about this man, Perperna. People said, Perperna is plotting something against you. We have evidence. And Sertorius just didn’t want to hear it. He didn’t wanna… He’s an incredibly competent military commander, but I think maybe he was a little bit too trusting in politics. He just didn’t have the stomach for the, for really sleuthing out the conniving wickedness of his subordinates. And so they lured him to a dinner party, started a brawl, and in the chaos, they stab him. It’s very, very unfortunate and kind of unworthy ending for the man.

Brett McKay: So the way these parallel lives work, is like Plutarch will spend some time talking about the Greek, they’ll spend some time talking about the Roman, and then he’ll have an ending piece where he does a kind of compare and contrast. What does Plutarch say about these two guys? Like, does he favor one between the two?

Alex Petkas: Well, I think Plutarch’s very fair handed. He says that Eumenes probably succeeded in more difficult circumstances because Sertorius was a legitimate governor of Spain and he had the legitimacy of the Roman authority behind him. And the natives didn’t really have a better alternative than him. Eumenes, on the other hand had to contend with Macedonian egos, these great egoistic barons that are commanding armies and get them to follow him, which he managed to do. Plutarch says that’s a more remarkable achievement, actually. But he assigns a kind of moral advantage to Sertorius because Sertorius, when he kept getting attacked in Spain by these successive generals that Sulla and the regime after Sulla died, were sending, he offered many times over to lay down arms if they would just let him return and be a private citizen and never seek office again.

He didn’t want to keep fighting. He didn’t want to war, but he was constantly refused. They said, no, you’ll get no corridor. We’re gonna hunt you down till we kill you. And so he says, Sertorius is warlike. But Eumenes on the other hand, really did have an opportunity to recede into private life. He could have gone back to being a secretary or retired to some kind of sinecure minor position of authority and not gone on fighting. But Eumenes unlike Sertorius was not only war-like, he was a lover of war. And I think the Plutarch is kind of right there that somebody like Eumenes really stuck his neck out. He really intentionally put himself into a position where he would be commanding armies and fighting for a cause that he found meaningful. And so Plutarch sort of prefers Sertorius on that count because Plutarch’s a man of peace. He’s a philosopher, right? But I think he portrays both of them pretty fairly.

Brett McKay: Alright, so that’s a taste of what Plutarch does in these lives. How many parallel lives does he do in the complete work?

Alex Petkas: There are a total of, I believe it’s 48 parallel lives. He has a few more biographies, four more that are not part of the parallel structure, but so there’s 24 Greeks and 24 Romans.

Brett McKay: For those who want to dig more into this, do you have a translation that you prefer?

Alex Petkas: I have a rundown on my website on plutarch at costofglory.com. It’s hard to find a single volume with all of the lives in a kind of updated modern translation. There are older translations available. I like the Penguin editions. They tend to group them by time periods, so they’ll group a bunch of Romans around the death of Caesar together, or a bunch of Greeks around the Peloponnesian War together. And I think that’s a pretty effective way of reading. Just, I do like the parallel structure and the idea of comparing these two figures that are comparable, but if you’re just trying to get your head around the history, sometimes it does help to just read a whole series of lives that interconnect very concretely. So Penguin does a pretty good job there.

Brett McKay: I’m curious, do you know of any modern biographers that take a Plutarchian approach to biography?

Alex Petkas: Well, I have to say that I don’t know modern biography quite as well as ancient. I’ve been enjoying Brian Kilmeade’s book on Sam Houston lately. I live in Houston, Texas. So it’s kind of close to home and that is definitely a man straight out of Plutarch’s pages. It’s often not the academic historians who work on historical figures, but journalists tend to have a more free hand in taking a moral kind of self-improvement approach to biography. I think of Robert Greene in a lot of ways as a… Even though he doesn’t do biographies, he relies a lot on the biographical tradition, and he’s a great storyteller. He’s drawing out lessons. 48 Laws of Power is good. I really like his book Mastery. My friend Ben Wilson, How To Take Over The World Podcast does a lot of this kind of thing with historical figures, but I’m always open to suggestions. I love to find new biographies. It’s just, it’s not so much in style right now to give you the kind of Plutarchan snapshot of a person. So many of our biographies, the way that people go about it is they produce these 800, 900-page tomes, which are very informative, but often it’s really hard to make it all the way through, I find.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I think the historians who do more like narrative history, so the one that comes to mind, Hampton Sides, he wrote Blood and Thunders, the biography of Kit Carson, did some stuff about the war, Frozen Chosen in North Korea. He does more of that. Like he’ll tell a great story, it’s really well researched, but then he’s trying… You kind of get glimpses of these people, warts and all, and seeing how their character had an effect on the events. Another one, S. C. Gwynne, he wrote Empire of the Summer Moon about Quanah Parker. I think it’s another, so yeah, like narrative history, I think.

Alex Petkas: Did he do Stonewall Jackson as well?

Brett McKay: Yeah, he did the Stonewall Jackson biography.

Alex Petkas: Yeah.

Brett McKay: Yeah.

Alex Petkas: You’re the second person in this week to recommend Hampton Side’s, Kit Carson. So I guess I gotta get it now.

Brett McKay: It’s a good one. Yeah, we got, we did an episode on that, so we’ll link to that in the show notes. Well, Alex, it’s been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the work you do?

Alex Petkas: Well, costofglory.com is my website. You can find the Cost of Glory Podcast anywhere you get your podcasts, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, all the other players, YouTube. I would suggest if people want to get into the Cost of Glory or Plutarch, try one of the more recent biographies I did, like Crassus, the Richest Man in Rome, or Pompey, the Kid Butcher, Caesar’s Friend and then Enemy. Those are two that I did more recently. I always do them in three parts. So start with part one.

Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Alex Petkas, it’s been a pleasure.

Alex Petkas: It’s been a pleasure myself. Talk to you soon.

Brett McKay: My guest here was Alex Petkas. He’s the host of the podcast, the Cost of Glory. You find it wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also find more information about his work at his website, costofglory.com. Also check out our show notes at aom.is/plutarch, where you can find links to resources as we delve deeper into this topic.

Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. The Art of Manliness website has been around for nearly 17 years now, the podcast for almost 11. And in both I have always had one aim, to help men take action to improve every area of their lives, to become better friends, citizens, husbands, and fathers, better men. If you’ve gotten something out of the AOM Podcast, please consider giving back by leaving a review or sharing the episode with a friend. As always, thank you for the continued support and until next time, this is Brett McKay, reminding you to not only listen to the AOM podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.

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