Speaker 1: This Christmas on Sky you can turn a silent knife
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Speaker 3: His favor, said Ulivai Marta Vallei exula I couldn' should
their father staffer to tom his fader larene trogi too,
will you rudder organ will blow along when you need
the two bought, couldn't the ta contorto Marvin twik toman
Fi passionery augustiniml not to tour court at rsa punkai.
Speaker 2: Meaning alight.
Speaker 4: Man like this man you letting butterfly flapping his wing,
dig down in the forest. Man, it gonna cause the
tree fall, letting five thousand miles away.
Speaker 5: Man, nobody seen, nobody.
Speaker 4: See.
Speaker 2: You don't need to know. Man, you don't like You
followed a little story and you got back that man. Man,
don't black a dang on pan over man, Man.
Speaker 4: You don't don't matter, man, know sure everything such a
funny cold open, all right, and instead now we just
have a confusing one. Uh duo Stalty Titus. How are
you guys doing?
Speaker 5: Don't care?
Speaker 4: Yeah, you show up, You're ruined the cold open. Now
you're talking over each other?
Speaker 5: What is this? This is twelve thirty in the morning,
when neither of us record. We other record very very late,
or at like nine in the morning, So this is
exactly a time when neither of us are actually on.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we're I mean, I have my drum students are
all on vacation for today, so I've got a totally
free day and I don't know what to do with myself.
I don't have days off.
Speaker 4: Yeah, well, I mean, as a professional in the podcasting space,
I both don't have a real job and don't have
days off. So I certainly know what you mean. Although
I will say the two of you have the most
busted recording schedules. I've been been trying to get these
two guys audience, like, well, we can do it at
nine to thirty on a Friday or at seven in
the morning, And I'm like, okay, guys, like, is there
literally anything other than those two options, and so we're
recording at noon on a Saturday.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's more of my fault. Dune works at nine
to five, but I as a drum teacher, I work
from like, you know, two thirty PM to nine or ten,
depending on when I've got lessons booked, so I don't
really get the luxury of a nine to five.
Speaker 5: Well, so, unlike most people, my job actually gets more
intense around the Christmas season because I work with a
lot of municipalities and they all do their reorganizations in January.
So for the last month, I've been getting home at
like eight thirty at night pretty much every other day
of the week. So, yeah, our recording schedule was completely busted.
Speaker 2: It's a really good thing that we were somewhat on
top of things, because it would be such a disaster
if it wasn't.
Speaker 5: But yeah, I mean we do a lot of planning.
I think our Google doc is about two three months
in advance, and we sit down and always have like
a very long conversation. I don't do this much planning
for my actual job. Like, it's just our schedules are
so busted. We need to and because we're doing like
in depth historical stuff and having to read first hand
a talent like, all right, who can read three hundred
pages of for copious over the next week.
Speaker 2: Yeah, which that'll that'll be our life for the next
two months.
Speaker 4: So that actually brings us to an important point. Uh,
what do you guys do on your podcast? And what
is your podcast? A professional would have would have started
with that, but as evidenced by my inability to schedule
a stupid video call, I am not a professional.
Speaker 2: Uh, I'll take this one. We cover also. I mean
this started as an extension of late night conversations Dan
and I would have after our weekly D and D games,
where you would sit on discord for several hours and
talk about history. And this is actually I mean, we've
been talking about history for probably about a year year
and a half now, maybe, but since we were in
the D and D thing, we were just talking more
and more and Dune is like, all right, time to
make a podcast about this. So it's an exten our
ramblings and we've kind of put together a basic schedule
of topic categories that we follow, but it mainly centers
around ancient and medieval history. Neither of us are super
interested in modern history.
Speaker 5: Yeah, we also feel like there's a lot of podcasts
to kind of fill that in, Like you, I mean,
it's been said a dozen times, but Thamas sudden. So
I'm just just basically a college course in World War
two and World War One and all before that, and
that's face taken off by a lot of right wingers,
and we were just we were talking about ancient history
to the point where like there's no really it's not
really anyone in this sphere that's kind of doing what
we're doing, Like the rest of history is the big
kind of ancient history podcast. A lot of not state
history if people listen to Tristan Hughes has one, but
they're all very lib coded, and I like to think
when we're looking at history, it's not necessarily from a
political lens, but we give a lot more credence to
the ancient authors and when people that a miracle happened,
when we want to actually dove that and other things,
like there's a lot of moderns will say that the Vikings,
if they made it to America, they only made it
to like New Finland. But we did a whole episode
and how they almost certainly got to Peru because of
based on certain genetics in the area, based on a
dog devil dogs. Yeah, it's uh. The podcast is basically,
it's sort of a It should sound like two of
your autistic friends late at night at a bar, just
rambling about some topic they've been researching.
Speaker 2: And unfortunately that's gotten us from you know, based well
fortunately and unfortunately, but it's gotten us from like fun
basic topic ideas to deep breakdowns of Justinian and having
to go like looking through some of our.
Speaker 5: Oh hold on, that's not fair, that's not a fair screed.
Let's not forget. So the first episode started because there's
there's this professor Christopher Beckwith who has a series of
books and one of them is called The Skiddian Empire,
and it's about how the Indian civilization, of the Persian civilization,
the Greek civilization of the Chinese are all actually descendant
of this super Scithian Empire. We were talking about this
after like one of our game sessions. It was like, yeah,
that sounds stupid, that's not real. It's like, okay, well,
we're gonna start a podcast. So I got the book
and I just highlighted quotes on quotes on whats it
just went back through this pretty complexet and logical book
and just basically definitively proves that the Scythians are the
birth of all modern civilization. Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, well, it's interesting you bring up you bring up
primary sources, because you know, that's always the thing that
I found interesting is the relative disdain for both primary
sources and the people who read them. I don't know
if you guys saw this, but there was a you know,
interaction on X going around with you know, I think
it's like Roman Helmet guy.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, I think I did a tweet about this
where he was like, I only read primary sources entirely
uncritically or something like that and take them at their word.
And I think I can't remember if i'd sent the tweet,
but I basically went, he's not wrong. But also because
it's Roman Helmet guy saying this, he's wrong because he's
just so stupid that he's not of a high enough
IQ to do that, whereas Dune is and I'm kind
of there.
Speaker 4: That's a respectable position being just sudden like the break
even point of like the minimum viable. Like you, it's
sort of where I find myself in many places in
life history notwithstanding, so I sort of it was primarily
introduced to your guide's work on the TL Halloween Special,
where you guys did it did an appearance there, I believe,
going over some some ancient literature. Is that correct?
Speaker 2: Yeah, high class The Golden Ass.
Speaker 5: Yeah, so it was this. We did part of the
Halloween special on this book called The Golden Ass by Apollonius,
and it's the only extant Roman kind of fiction book.
I guess you would say it's a pulp novella. Yeah,
it's not written in verse. It's extremely well. Okay, so
Titus and Ira of different opinions, he thinks it's extremely crass.
I think it's very intentionally so outwardly, but is very
much more so a articulation of a certain mystery school
that's developing in Rome at the time, which is the
cult of Isis, which is derived from the Egyptian version,
because the Romans loved just traveling around and integrating all
sorts of different gods. But yes, so that book is
it is deeply fascinating, and to what you're speaking about,
with primary sources, going back and being able to read
you get an idea of how different in my opinion,
you get an idea of how different these people were,
what their conception of entertainment was, or all the different
aspects of life. And we just did a whole big
question and answer episode and part of that was addressing
whether or not like these ancient people are really the
same as the moderns. And I think the answer that
question you need to go back and read the read
the primary sources, and a lot of them aren't super
difficult to access or read. Yeah, you get complex, well,
you get complex books like the obviously the Iliad I
know as much before, but that you need to like
you need to analyze, or things like Thukiddittis where he
walks through very very detailed the Peloponnesian War. But there's
also like tastics Is Germania is like eighty pages and
it's very easy to read. It's the big text. You
understand it. He explains everything that's going on. It's the
same thing with like Herodotus is the best of these
primary tech Stop me if I'm going on, because I
could just ray able about the glory of these but
like of this, reading him as a primary text is
great because the entire first three books are him just
giving ethnographic histories of different parts of the world, and
even if they're not entirely accurate, which I tend to
think they mostly are, you get an idea of like, okay, well,
humans back then thought that to identify, like the interesting
thing about the Egyptians was that they had flying snakes
and that they worship bulls, And you're like, well, that's
not quite accurate. But it's just I think it's fascinating
to pick out what people are identifiing in their world
as important and then looking to today and saying, well,
how are we different? Will is our emphasis today different
a good thing? Usually not? So? Yeah? I love the
primary sources of going back and the podcast lets me
just r able the Titus about them.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And it's inspired me to do a lot more
primary source reading, which is something I didn't do nearly
as much before we started the podcast. And now I've
got the gallak Ores, I've got some other stuff, and
you know, I'm reading through Procopius right now. But one
thing that's also I think we do a good job
of is taking the primary sources, because I think there
is a middle ground. There is the modern concept of
reading the primary sources and assuming that most of it's false.
There is the right wing reactionary way of every single
thing written down is exactly true here, and not only
is it true, but it fits my particular worldview. I
think that the middle is you have to take these
as more true than not, but then kind of look
at it and go, well, what could this mean if
it wasn't true without having to immediately dismiss it. And
I think we do a pretty good job of that.
I mean, we did that whole thing on the Trojan
War and the c people's and stuff like that, and
that's what a lot of it was, is taking it
and then starting to read it a little more in
depth and trying to pick out the symbolism behind certain
things without giving some lib tard explanation.
Speaker 5: Yeah. I mean, like one of the common ones you'll
come across and you're reading papers on like ancient historical
sources is the reference the Cyrepedia, which is a book
written by Xenophon about Cyrus, the founder of the Persian
documented an empire, and if you read the book, it's
almost completely a historical. We have references from multiple other sources,
from like the inscriptions of where certain doubles were it's
almost completely made up. So if you read it as
a history book, you're like, well, this is completely bullshit.
And that's what the moderns I've done. If you read
a lot of papers to be like, well, you know,
the syrapedia is just a load of crap. It's not useful,
which is just completely untrue. It's very very useful for
understanding how Xenophon was thinking of you know, why is
he writing this, Well, it's to appeal to the Persians
so they don't keep invading Greece or hiring mercenaries and
then chasing them off because some contract went wrong. He's
trying to basically build up relations between this country. Hence,
what we get from Xenophon is probably what the Persian
more accurate, is what the Persians would have told themselves.
So you get a lot of people say, well, we
don't have first hand Persian sources. That's what cyberped is is.
It's a Greek guy, but he's basically telling the Persian stories.
So when you look at these primary sources, you pull
all these interesting things about them, like and we do
just get these missed we otherwise would have missed.
Speaker 2: We did that in our very first worst of History
episode are talking about Xerxes, where my big defense of
him was not that he was good, but his portrayal
as the you know, demonic god king from the East
is really just to help foster Greek ethnogenesis. Right, It's well,
I think what I say, Xerxes was there, George the Third.
You look at George the Third and any source that's
not an American kid learning about the American Revolution in
fourth grade and you go, yeah, he was all right.
I mean he's mediocre, nothing crazy, but he's got to
be are Satan Hitler because that's part of the American
founding myth.
Speaker 4: Well, right, it is, you know almost it becomes a
figure slips from being historical to sort of part of
the civic state religion. And that's sort of the interesting
thing about like the when you look back to kind
of the in the ancient world, is that there's there's
less of a self delusion about having a civic state religion. Yes, obviously,
you know you have you have you know, like the
idiot right, you have you know, literally like a state
sponsored uh you know, explanation as to how Rome exists.
Speaker 2: Yes, you've got to get Romulus and Remus and then
you've got the Iliot in the Odyssey are essentially that.
But for Greece, et cetera, et cetera. I'm sure the
Indians have some sort of thing. In the Chinese, which
are not real, have some other not real source is
that they try to draw on. But because they're animals,
not animals, they're insects. Animals animals has some racial undertones
that I don't want to say, but they are insects.
And we will be discussing this later anyway. Yes, a
lot of ancient cultures had these, you know we it's
civic state religion. Yeah, and I've been calling it like
a founding myth, right they all have are our nation
came to be in this kind of fanciful telling of
something that's not actually true, but it you know, works
and it helps identity. It helps build our identity is
what we are. And I think, what was it?
Speaker 5: What was it?
Speaker 2: Around Thanksgiving? When done?
Speaker 5: You? And I?
Speaker 2: No, No, was before Halloween. We had a really long
conversation about like this founding myth idea because I had
was listening to the Martyr Made series and and he
was talking about how hard it is to build a
nation and that the standard human experience is tribe and
clan and family, and breaking beyond that is way harder
than a lot of people, especially in the West, think.
Speaker 5: I think that's a very modern I don't think that's right.
I think that's a very modern that might be too forcible.
I respectfully disagree with you, my dear co Hos, on that.
I think a nation is a very very natural evolution,
and it's not actually a hard thing to get to.
Maintaining it and keeping it is difficult, but I think
it's the natural evolution. So we brought this up a
lot for it. There's a guy, it's not Heradus himself,
but he cites him in the Peloponnesian War when the
Macedonians are there's a question of whether or not they're
going to help the Greeks fight off the Persians, and
the Macedonians are like, well, we can help you. We're Greeks.
They all fix look at each other and say, no,
you're not Greeks, you're Macedonians, and there's not really They're like, well,
you speak with funny accents, and you descend from different people.
And the way that the guy in histories puts it
is that. Look, a nation consists of shared language, shared culture,
shared religion, and shared blood and you guys don't have that.
I think those for criteria are really good for actually
saying what a nation is, in avoiding the trap of
falling into describing as a nation state referencing it. Yeah,
I think that's too much of a eighteen hundred seventy hundred.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so I should have I should have specified a
more nation state. But even then, I think that you
can still have a national concept. But getting people to
believe in that more than their own personal ties is
pretty difficult. Well, like darylku brings up that old like
talking about like modern Mediterranean countries, like in Italy, corruptions
just rampant because people care about their family and their
clan way more than they care about paying taxes to
the state, which number one based number two kind of
shows that they don't have that loyalty to the idea. No,
And also Italy is a fake nation anyway.
Speaker 5: So okay, this is a misunderstanding. When you're thinking of nation,
you need to think of it as tests as describes it. Okay, right,
so you have you have the German nations. There's different
tribes right, but they all roughly have the shared language,
shared blood, shared culture, and shared religion. Yeah, these guys
might sacrifice goats on a Friday and these guys on
a Sunday, but they're the same nation of people. I
don't think that. Yes, you have clan structures within that,
but I think the nation is a natural abstraction on
top of that. Like, you wouldn't say that, Okay, well,
now this would be accurate. You want to say that
Sicilians are less Italian than people living in law right,
they speak the same language. Well, okay, obviously, yeah, I
would actually argue that, no, the the.
Speaker 2: And this almost counters my own point. And this is
why sometimes building a nation state out of several separate
cultures is kind of a futile thing, because Sicilians would
not see themselves the same as Milanese, and Milanese wouldn't
even see them the Sicilians as human.
Speaker 5: Yeah, well that that's irrelevant to whether or not they
the individual perception is irrelevant to whether or not they
actually are. But they both that's.
Speaker 2: Well, okay, they don't share the same language really, I
mean not really Italians a construct. The Sicilians spoke Sicilian.
The Milanese spoke the the you know the dialect there
they didn't, you know, they were separate things. And I
this is a longer thing. You know, Jay, how many
times do you have people from a podcast come on
and like agree as one united front with me and
Dune We just start arguing. It's great.
Speaker 5: I love it. We were on's podcast.
Speaker 4: The last time I had two co hosts from a
podcast on, they just both teamed up against a missing
member of the podcast and called him gay for like
an hour. And yeah, so I guess you could say
that is unity, right, you know, it just united front
against one of the other guys who's not there. So
if you guys could invent a third co host, uh,
and then we can just like belittle him like sexually
or socially. And that's really the comfortable place for my podcast.
Speaker 2: It's funny you say that because there's a literal, actual,
primary historical source that does that. The Historia Augusta is
this beautiful primary source that is about seventeen percent factual,
and they make they have this other right, it's a
collection of writers, is essentially the very it's it's tl
but for like ancient Rome, and they may they have
this extra writer that they keep dogging on, and we
have no evidence of that writer ever existing, But throughout
the entire book they just go in on the sky.
There's also the thing that it may just all be
written by one author as well. There's like, it's one
of my favorite historical texts ever, and that's one of
the few ones where all to go everything in this
is true because every emperor has an omen. Every emperor
starts out as like, you know, on the eve of
Emperor Maximinus Thracks, you know, ascension, a cow gave birth
to a calf with three heads and green spots, and
you're like, wow, the auspices are great.
Speaker 4: Well, actually that's something I think that I think we
should get back to. It is more Augury.
Speaker 2: I think that you know we have on the show.
Speaker 5: Show you so my previous career before I was an attorney,
I was there. There's an old bit On I hate
to keep referencing them, but old bit On Tlee, which
is uh. They would occasionally bring up bird news. There's
a guy who every day for about a year would
send them bird news collected around the air. Is so
much so he took on the title of Augur and
that that man is myself. I was. I was really
into bird symbology for a while for about three months
of my life, in very early in law school, and
I was like, this is great. I'll send them there.
But I agree with you, we need more. We need
more Augury. I think we should get back to it.
It is. It's very entertaining. I think, I mean, Croesis
of Lydia is the great. Well that's not really Augury.
That's over cool, DELFI. But yeah, I don't have too
many more opinions. I think reading the future is a
good Christian practice. We should continue to do. Yeah.
Speaker 4: Well, and I think that we really need to. We
really need to drill down to you know, the essence
of augury, if you will. Uh, reading entrails cool. Looking
at flocks of birds also cool. And you know, in
this kind of current era of you know, the so
called you know, perversions like science or something like that,
like it's boring. They entertain me, like we really need.
Speaker 2: I would say science is really interesting and honestly a dissection, uh,
like you know the dissections you do in school of
like the frogs that are in the formaldehyde, that's them
trying to bring back augury, but they don't know it
because they're libtards.
Speaker 5: Well, okay, So Genesis eight, the story of the Tower
of Babbel instructs us that man cannot build his way
to heaven, and when he attempts to supplant himself in
the place of God, chaos ensues. Right, it's attempting to
construct the ultimate order leads to the ultimate chaos in
the realm of augury. What this means is the the
scientific detail and break down of intestines and veins and
knowing where everything is and laying it out and drawing
it out on a map. That that is a sin.
It is attempt to reconstruct the Tower of Babel. And
what what real augurs need to do we need to
get back to is none of the scientist craft, which
is actually something I genuinely believe, just pure intuition we need,
like we need just people who have their cow don't
don't none of the scientific study. If you get a disease.
If an FDA inspector gets a diseased cow in front
of him, I don't want him to do any scientific tests.
I want him to tear open the guts with his
bare hands and then just sense sense the disease itself. Yeah.
Speaker 4: See, dude, this is exactly exactly what I was getting.
I was getting towards, uh, the kind of gen Z
framing would be like like vibes based augury, we have
to work on that. You can find something a little
more uh, a little more academic.
Speaker 2: You're area farming.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, And actually I think we should apply this
exact same process to medicine as well. Like you go
into the dentist and it's like, hey, yeah, sorry, I'm
not gonna look at your teeth, but if you want,
I will cut open your stomach, rummage around and see
how I feel. And I think that would really dramatically
cut down on problems like you know, overcrowding in the er.
I think that there's there's legs on this idea, is
what I'm saying.
Speaker 2: I just thought, when you're going with the dentist thing,
I was gonna say, I mean, dentistry really is close
to augury because he's just sticking these fingers in your
mouth and just like messing you up for like half
an hour and going, yeah, your second molar is all
fucked up. It's like thanks buddy, Like you know, and
I wonder that actually dentistry is a truly sadistic profession
as well, because number one, there's some certain demographic and
ethnic compositions of dentists that I don't like.
Speaker 5: And also.
Speaker 2: They talk to you, well, their fingers are in your
mouth and they're asking you questions about your day in
your life. I've had people ask me about relationship advice
or not a relationship advice, but trying to like get
stuff out of me.
Speaker 6: And yeah, and and they're and like this guy's got
his hand his fist in my mouth, like when they
expect you to answer, I just it's it's cruel and unusual.
Speaker 2: And you know, dentistry is a terrible practice that.
Speaker 4: You know, you know who who were meticulous about dental
hygiene The Romans.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, pre Christian Rome was a depraved and degenerate place.
We talk about this a lot on the podcast. I
don't you know, pre Christian Rome they had dentists and
they also sent Christians to die in the coliseum.
Speaker 5: Well, okay, so the reason why the Romans had better
teeth is because of electromagnetism. So we come on. So, uh,
one of the big issues with modern science is that
it tells us there are five senses. This is like
just clearly incorrect. There's sixth sense demonic. No, well, now
I want to I want to go that far. I
think it's just merely this part of science is not
necessarily demonic, just incorrect. We have six senses. We have
electromagnetism as a sense, which sounds very woo woo, but
it's not. Because everything with an electrical charge generates an
electrical field. You as a human being, generate an electrical field. Right,
So what happens is that your teeth are very very
close to your nerves, right they're they're right up but
right up against them. My parents are physicians, so you
can trust me. All my knowledge on this is accurate.
So what happens with modern dentistry is because you're constantly
blasted with ionizing radiation when you go in. It's slowly
and just walking throughout your day because there's so much
more electromagnetic radiation. Is the nerves which are closer to
the skin, especially in your mouth, right where they are
the closest, they slowly start to generate and degrade. So
teeth in the modern area in a first world society
tends to degenerate faster because of this electromagnetic interference with
the nervous system. The Romans obviously do not have this,
and also the toothbrushes, so they actually have pretty good teeth,
which is why when you go back, being completely serious
about this too, which is why when you go back
and you look at Roman teeth, they actually look like
pretty good like we have. There's not like they didn't
have a need to invent braces or like other shit
like we deentitty job. Yeah, they just had in well,
they did have dent adventures. Yeah, they did these like
teeth and stuff like George Washington.
Speaker 2: But didn't George Washington's dentures have like lead in them
or something like that.
Speaker 5: It was a slave teeth, not hell fant some other
animal won't change.
Speaker 4: The horse, wasn't it.
Speaker 2: Yeah it was horse.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean it was a hipopotamous.
Speaker 5: I can't remember hrd African animal. But yeah, go ahead.
Speaker 4: I realized I don't really know enough about either dentistry
or history to continue that line of questioning.
Speaker 2: Uh, yeah, us hit us with another question.
Speaker 4: I had this whole gimmick planned out to give you
guys fun facts about different other places named robe.
Speaker 5: Uh, and have you guess.
Speaker 4: But the problem is there's really only like two and
after that it just gets to like really granular specific
details about like Rome Georgia that just are not at
all amusing.
Speaker 2: Hit us with it. I'm still interested.
Speaker 4: See The point is I was gonna make you guess
which Rome is it. Uh, there's a few around, I
know there there's there's several uh and yeah the uh
but just to go back to the previous point.
Speaker 1: Uh.
Speaker 4: Actually, that's that's sort of one of the the other
kind of like facets of like modern conversation about history.
I think is really interesting. Which is this like and
people call it different things, like I think was it
Chesterton who coined the term presentism or Lewis I can't
remember which, right, Which is this idea that, like everyone before,
like nineteen sixty four was comedically retarded and evil. And
I remember watching this, uh, watching this like documentary in
like grade school or whatever about romans, and it was
basically talking about how like the the optimal like the
there was according to this stupid documentary, right, it was
all about like romans drinking piss to keep their teeth
from rotting out. And I remember, even at like age
like whatever, seven to eight. I was like, I'm gonna
be honest, dude, that seems kind of fake like I
would be. I feel like that's probably not true. Do
you know what I'm talking about? This sort of like
comedic need to make the past like like almost like
over the top any that it's like horrible.
Speaker 2: And killing Youla, making his horse senator or did that
not happen? From what I remember, and it's been a
minute since I walked into.
Speaker 4: It, I'll be really disappointed if it didn't.
Speaker 5: No, I have. So it's not crazy though, because basically
what happens is it's a vote in this It's not
because it's a vote in the Senate to engage in
a military campaign. I think it's in day shit, it's
somewhere in eastern Europe. And basically he doesn't have the
votes for it. And this is a little bit earlier
on in his reign, so everyone's willing to sort of
oppose him. What he does is he's like one vote
shy of Actually he doesn't actually meet the Senate's confirmation,
but you know, just for looks. So what he does
is he appoints his horse as a senator so that
he can get the final vote. The issue is the
horse naize, right, it's who can translate a horse's nee. Well,
of course Colligily can translate the horse's ney, so he
votes with them. So it's not a crazy thing. It's
a little bit weird.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but you know how it's played off, that's what
I'm kind of more going. Yeah, yeah, it's played off
in the same kind of like ha ha, the Caligula
put a horse in the start because you was crazy,
and it's like, well, he was less like crazy and
more just a sadist.
Speaker 5: Well, I mean, it's also like I have very, very
great sympathy for Caligula because especially and you do get
a lot of people in history who do really evil,
really insane shit. But the issue with the modern history
kind of like you're saying, Jays, people will look back
and just see that part, but people don't or forget
to mention the fact that Coligilia is basically raped daily
from the time he's child by Tiberius and this is
on the Isle of Capri. He watches many people get
raped and roof from he himself is raped dozens one
hundred of times. And then you get this guy and
everyone's like, oh, they look at this crazy, crazy emperor guy.
Speaker 2: It's like, we can we can say rape on the
Jay Burton Show, right, we can say rape.
Speaker 4: I mean I'm not going to be bothered to edit
it out, so yes you can.
Speaker 5: Well yeah, but I mean like that figure and then
you're like, okay, well look at Tiberius. Well, Tiberius was
raised in the time where all the other people who
are supposed to be emperor die, so he just kind
of ends up there. He hates it. He hates dealing
with people this whole time, and not to mention that
all his closest ally like his mother's batshit insane, all
of his closest friends are dead, and it's just him
against this group of senators who are hostile against him
because he's you know, like he's the second emperor and
not really sure things are going to go this way.
So it drives him insane and then he becomes a
statistic child rapist. But you know, there's a there's a
story behind why these people become evil, and just painting
them as you know it, just painting them as the
ultimate hitler, is she evil? Is? It's nonsense, and I
think it does a disservice to the evils that these
people actually suffered.
Speaker 4: Well, and I think that's a that's another interesting point.
You guys have mentioned the need for you know, people
like King George to sort of serve as these like,
you know, satanic figures, and you know, I think one
of the most interesting points to discuss when these sort
of satanic figures arise is the like and then for
no reason at all, he went literally insane. Yeah, you know,
like that is that is the narrative which justifies their evil.
You know, it's not like there was a you know,
a predicate. It is simply he was evil and crazy
and horrible, and there's nothing about him that makes any sense.
Speaker 2: Because you can't humanize you know, in a founding myth,
the evil guy cannot be humanized at all because he
is literally meant just as a device to further the
goals of the nation's founding and or you know the
other kind of know what, whatever else is being justified.
So yeah, you're right, you can't humanize it. And it
is very funny that in the kind of libtard frame
of historiography there is an attempt to humanize everyone except
for bad people, well except for people they deem bad.
They'll try to humanize Nero, which I do think they
do a decent job with. They try to humanize you know,
just about anyone and everyone. But if they provide a
useful tool to further the libtard narrative, they will not
be humanized, which is a very obvious thing to say.
You know, I sound like James lindsay here the Woke
in two hundred a d. But I think it's a
thing to just keep in mind when you're reading a
lot of history, especially modern history, because most of it
is done by libtards unfortunately.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and I think that that's it's sort of interesting
to see either this of ideological priors you're sort of
echo through because even if there is sort of no
moment where the mask slips and there's something that is
I guess you'd say, like explicitly political, said, you amost
see it in the framing itself, right where it's like
there's no point where it's like, you know, this person
was bad because they were you know, the Donald Trump
of the third century. Like it's never that cartoonish, no,
but you'll see see the same sort of like ideological framing. Sorry, Titus,
I'll throw it back to you.
Speaker 2: No, No, you're you're exactly right there. It's you'll never
see well, I shouldn't say that, because a lot of
times you will nowadays, but you you won't see as
much of the ideological framing. But one of the one
of the examples of you know, LIBTRD framing is over
analyzing romantic and sexual relationships of historical rulers, you know,
even beyond the oh this person was secretly gay or
whatever thing, which one of my more hot takes on
that is, I'm more than willing to believe ex Roman
emperor was gay or transgender, because most of those Roman
empires were terrible degenerates, you know, I'm more than willing to, like,
I don't. I think that there does not need to
be a knee jerk reaction to go Actually, no, Ela
Gabolis was not transgender. Yeah, el Gables was transgender. Ali
Gables was also awful and mentally unwell exactly.
Speaker 4: But it's like, do you really want to own that one?
Speaker 5: You know?
Speaker 2: Yeah, but they do. That's kind of the weird thing
is that they do well.
Speaker 4: And I think that it's it's also and this is
always the case with history and literature that there is
sort of a a stated and revealed purpose of any
work where it's like, well, obviously this is technically a
book or a narrative around X event, but it's it
is sort of touched by like the spirit of the age.
And it's interesting, you know, the a lot of the
discussion around the kind of sexual proclivities of different historic figures,
and you see this even up into modern history. You
know that the most recent uh, you know, Napoleon movie
is sort of an example of this.
Speaker 2: If you're going to talk about the one where it's
Abraham Lincoln is gay and I was like, yes, that
Abraham was gay, Tom Tom Dealer, my My de Lorenzo
book sitting there, real Lincoln vindicated.
Speaker 4: Look, regardless of the historical fact Lincoln was metaph was
gay in a derogatory sense, even if he is not
in a literal sense. Also in a literal sense, Yeah, yeah,
there's a point to be made. But to Napoleon, right,
where the whole focus of that film is effectively on
this like you know, bizarre, you know, humiliating series of
relationships where it seems like this sort of desire to
counter the idea of kind of heroic trans and then
the idea that someone could be more than just you know,
a weird sex pervert, and deep down everyone is that.
And you know, obviously you know we've we've always had
sex perverts and we always will. But I do think
it's interesting this idea to sort of deliberately miss the
point because look, like you know, people aren't interested in,
you know, Alexander the Great because of the sexual history.
People dig into it because he is otherwise notable. But
it's sort of this idea to kind of pull everything
into the kind of like mundane if you see what
I'm getting at there.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I will push back slightly and say, there are
some people that are interested in Asia the Great for
his sexual proclivities in.
Speaker 4: Those are, but I mean, that's not why he is
a notable figure.
Speaker 5: No, but it is.
Speaker 2: But it is a wider symptom of what happens when
you let women and gay people who are also women
in any position and unix of any sort, whether it
be transgender or not, into any sort of position of influence.
One of the big rules that you and I have
on dostalty, that you learned from history is never ever
ever let women or unix run anything, and because gay
people are women, you know it. It's another great example
of that kind of thing is just taking over and
we're going to make this historical figure all about these
weird sexual proclivities, because that's all I can think about
because I just finished the latest book of I got
impregnated by a minotaur and I need to go. And
now all of a sudden, Alexander the Great had you know,
sex with his male best friend or whatever, which I
don't know. Dune, what do you? What's your take on
the Alexander I STM thing.
Speaker 5: I hate. I hate all that. I hate talking about it.
I hate the idea. It's just I don't care like
and it's irrelevant to the story. Like, okay, so they're
out on campaign, they're not women around these two, these
two dudes, one both of whom are Greek, have sex
with each other. It's like, okay, I suppocific all right,
that's a revolutionary historical thing. Wow, I'm so great that
we're spending like books and books discussing who this guy
screwed and not the sheer luck he had or any
capability he had militarily. Yeah, let's focus on who. It's
just someone this stuff is important, Like sometime who people
sleep with is important in history, like for example, Ella Gablos,
it's actually important because the reason he ends up murdered
is because everyone's like this, Sorry, I had to self
censor there. This guy, Uh, this guy is running around
like asking the guards to have sex with him, and
he wants to cut off his his penis to make
a giant like that, Like it's important that we have
that information, you know, why he dies. But yeah, for
things like Alexander, it's just it really does anger me
because I don't want to talk about it. But it's
so it's irrelevant. It's kind of gross. I don't particularly
in my day to day life, and I'm super interested
in who my other friends are sleeping with. Like it's yeah,
I'm utterly uninterested and annoyed at the emphasis on this
kind of crap to the point where I think I've
developed a good, good enough sense orhenever I put on
a historical documentary, you can usually tell in a minute
or two, like, all right, is there going to be
a whole twenty minute section about them as secretly being gay?
So yeah, I hate all this crap and.
Speaker 2: It just shows it kind of ties in with ties
in with what we're talking about, what Jay, what you're
saying with like the comedic comedically bad angle. It's just
this kind of infantilizing veni juvenilization of that's not really
a word, but it's going to be a word today
of history. I don't think a lot of these people
that claim to like history a lot actually want to
gauge with history. They have their own weird perversions and
stuff like that and want to map that onto.
Speaker 5: History.
Speaker 2: And they also think it's It's like George R. Martin,
as much as I love the Song of Ice and Fire,
you know, it's this kind of like everything's gray, everything's
you know, very morally degenerate.
Speaker 5: Oh I can tell this back to history. Yeah, so this,
this is exactly what this is. So in Edward Gibbon
when he's writing The Decline in Fall, there is a
very big debate in the history community whether or not
God is responsible for everything in This is prost and argument,
but whether or not God is responsible for everything in
history in a sort of Presbyterian columnistic sense that everything's predetermined,
or whether or not human being agency like half free
will and actually affect history. This is a really big deal,
to the point where Given actually leaves England because so
many of the people that are like, yeah, God's in
control of everything, and Given, when he's writing Decline and Fall,
he's like, well, I can't just say that, I have
to actually explain, like what's going on. And in all
the other history books about Rome at the time, they
basically say the bad things that have to Rome because
of God's providence, the good things are because of God's profitence.
And it's just this unnecessary insistence on repeatedly bringing up
the divine to explain events, whereas like, if you're a Christian,
you can believe that, but if you're writing a history,
but you don't need to include it in every bloody paragraph.
So Gibvens what he's doing in Decline and Fall is
very much trying to get away from that. I think
that today that's what a lot of the backfitting are,
like the modern weird perversions onto history is is it's
just a it's a very temporal thing that's going to
go away. Then two hundred years are going to look around.
The two hundred years are going to look back on
and say, oh, yeah, they had a very strange historiography
for about sixty eighty years.
Speaker 2: That, yeah, but will it actually go away? Gibbons Gibbons
historiography with the Roman Empire has endured, you know, and
whether or.
Speaker 5: Not that's what that's my point. Given was a good
guy there. He was fighting against the modern I might
not have articulated that super well, but Given was fighting
against the contemporary conception of historiography of the time of
God as the soul mover of history, which is something
I believe is a Presbyterian. But you know, like I
was saying, you don't need to write that in every
history book.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, there's something.
Speaker 5: There's something to that.
Speaker 4: I'm always sort of interested in, you know, as you've said, right,
the the sort of the degree to which you sort
of can't ever get out of like your your own
kind of like cultural waters. You can never fully kind
of remove yourself from that. So I'm curious. So maybe
this is an overally vague question, but when you were
you are reading sort of primary sources, obviously you have
kind of a number of different translations. Do you find
yourself drawn to, you know, one certain era, because obviously
this is sort of something I'm only aware of distantly
but I follow enough classicists to understand that there's sort
of a running gun battle being waged in the translation
of primary sources to sort of conform them with modern sensibilities.
So one, I guess, do you have any particularly translators
you enjoy? And then is there a particular pattern like
are you a fan of the Victorians or older or
newer than that?
Speaker 5: Yes, give me one second, I'll go get my translator.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so while dunes while dunees grabbing stuff, I can
kind of give my take on this, which is one,
I find whatever is easiest for me to find on
online for free, or what's cheapest on Amazon when I'm
buying a book. That's that's my fast and dirty answer.
But I also think that the bigger answer is that
it depends on the text. It depends on is this
something that is going to have a heavy historical Is
this going to have socio political ramifications?
Speaker 5: Right?
Speaker 2: The Iliad and the Odyssey, that's a good example. Right,
there's a whole uproar over the latest translation of the
Alien in the Odyssey because they're terrible, you know, they're
they're they're like millennial slop libtard language, and that's not
how Homer's meant to be read. So in things like
that it's much more important. But I do think that sometimes,
like for example, the book I've got from Michael Selofs,
like talking about Buzantine emperors, I don't really think that
there's a libtard that's going to fuck with that translation
as much. So I also I don't think that one's
I think that one's only been translated like twice, so Dune.
Speaker 5: Okay, So I like. So there's different answers for different
parts of history and different translations. So if you're looking
for things from the Greco Romans a period of about
eighteen fifty to roughly the end of the First World War,
those are by far and away the best of the
Greco Roman translations because they're mostly translated by Brits, and
they're mostly translated by Brits who are learning Greek and
Latin and you know, growing up through school at the time,
which is actually good. So those are really really good
for hard history, like the things we find in loweb classical.
If you're looking at ecclesiastical stuff, like I was saying earlier,
the period from about like sixteen fifty to eighteen hundred,
eighteen fifty. It is in this there's this big debate
in the historiographic community about whether or not you write
that God is continually the first move everything, or humans
have agencies. That era is really good for ecclesiastical history
because everyone's arguing over church stuff and so they want
to be very accurate a translations. So like, for example,
the one book I just ran and got I was
my translation of Josephis. It's from the sixteen eighties by
Guy William Wiston. So I really like that. If you're
going for hard history, I would stick with the Lady
two hundreds. If you're going for ecclesiastical stuff sixteen fifty
to eighteen fifty, and yeah, I mean that's generally what
I stick to. Like Tya said, sometimes you just got
to go online, Like there's no way I'm buying all
twenty some books of Pliny's Natural History until I actually
have the money to do so, or so my wife
tells me. But yeah, like, I think that's a good
general breakdown. Although there are specific texts like the Odyssey
that I don't have it with me, but there's like
specific authors you could go from, and people are I
actually like the Fagel's translation of stuff. But I know
a lot of kind of people in our sphere stray
away from those.
Speaker 2: I don't know enough about it to really give an
educated opinion. I'm the layman when it comes to this stuff.
Speaker 4: Well, guys, it was a ton of fun having you on.
I'll have you back on again soon.
Speaker 5: I am.
Speaker 4: Not firing in all cylinders today, just a little out
of the weather. It's a ton of fun to have
you guys here. Where can people find you? Where can
they find the podcast?
Speaker 2: You can find the podcast on all of your various
audio podcatchers, uh, Spotify, Apple Podcasts. Podcast. There's a bunch
of different ones. And if it's not we're gonna make
a Twitter handle for it's duo Salty Salty is the
podcast name. We're gonna make a Twitter for it. I'll
probably gonna do that today. But you can go follow
Dune on Twitter gimm Our Insights and.
Speaker 5: Then what can I follow you on Twitter at.
Speaker 2: Don't don't follow me on Twitter? And if you're gonna
follow me on.
Speaker 5: T Thanks for having us all Jay, good fun.
Speaker 4: Yeah, guys, thank you so much for having for making time,
even with my sub up for scheduling. It's great talking
to you. Guys, thanks you talking with you.
Speaker 2: One of.
Speaker 5: What what
Speaker 4: What Gary Gary