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Hi there, it's Claire. If you're hearing me, that means you're listening to the free preview of one of our Patreon episodes. We switch off every week between free and Patreon exclusive episodes. So if you'd like to hear the rest of this conversation, head over to patreon.com thisguysucked and join our honorary Haters club. A list of sensitive themes and topics included in this episode can be found in the episode description.
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Foreign. Welcome to this Guy Sucked the show
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where we prove that it's never too late to have haters and you can't libel the dead. I'm your host, Dr. Claire Aubin, and I'm a historian, writer, and most importantly, as we all know, certified haters. On this show we talk about people from throughout history with legacies that need a little updating. Whether it's because of their politics, their behavior, or their impact on society and culture, these guys actually kind of sucked. And we bring in a new scholar every week to tell us why. With me today is Curtis Dozier, who is an associate professor and chair of Greek and Roman Studies at Vassar. He is an expert on the use and abuse of Greco Roman history in extremist and white nationalist narratives.
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So I'm excited about talking about and around that.
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And he has a wonderful website tracking this called Doing justice to the Classics bonus.
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B
On top of this, he has a brand spanking new book out that I
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highly recommend purchasing which is next to me and I just showed him because it has lots of little tabs in
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it highlighting things I thought were important.
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It's called the White How White Nationalists Use Ancient Greece and Rome to Justify Hate. Welcome to the show and congratulations on all of the things I just said.
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C
Thanks for having me on the show, Claire. It's great to be here.
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B
So I would personally love to know
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what drew you to studying Classical antiquity and the Greco Roman world in general. I'm always curious about this.
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C
Well, it's a dirty business actually, because if I'm really honest, what drew me to studying classics and Greco Roman history are some of the things I'm criticizing in my book. You know, this is going back, gosh, 30, 35 years now, but I think child me saw acculturated as a white man in America, you know, in a certain way I think I saw studying classics as a really serious, impressive intellectual endeavor that I could be proud of studying. And I saw studying this as a way to participate in a great and important tradition and maybe preserve and pass on that tradition of Western Civilization. And that carried me for a long time. And I bring up my identity because I never had any reason to question that. Because the materials that I was studying and primarily the way they were being taught to me, there was no kind of friction between my identity and what those things were saying and my attitude toward that material. And it really wasn't until much later in my career that I don't totally know why, but I started listening to other people in the field of different identities who had a different experience of studying it and learning about the ways that the narratives and assumptions about the value of the ancient world that drew me and many, many other people to it are complicit in a lot of violence and oppression both throughout history and in the contemporary world. And kind of what I try to do in my book is invite the readers to go on that journey with me.
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B
I think you do do that in the books. I think you aren't just trying, and I think you are sort of succeeding at doing that. And it's interesting because I don't know if everyone has this experience of reading or if it's a me thing.
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I really like reading acknowledgments, and I
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really appreciated your acknowledgments. I think you do an interest. Interesting thing where you have them, like, up front right away in the book. There's a lot of thought that goes into the start of the book, which I really appreciate. That helps to set up the whole tone of what you're gonna be doing. And one of the things that you do in the acknowledgments is say, oh, I'm acknowledging the people who have basically kept me from writing the kind of thing that I am critiquing in this book that have sort of, like, helped to lead me away from that. I think it's so interesting because this is a way that people first encounter history, right? Like, this is a constant battle that I'm fighting through this show and through reception of and reaction to this show, where people are like, no, history has to be beautiful and great and preserved and all these things. And it feels to me the earliest way of encountering this, right? Like, you start off by saying, this is a beautiful, wonderful, amazing thing, which it is. But also perhaps it's that for reasons other than the ones you imagine it being wonderful and interesting, perhaps it's not. Someone is perfect, and that's why we're interested in them. Perhaps it's not. Even democracy is built in this beautiful way, worth preserving exactly as it is. That is what makes it interesting, but it's hard sometimes because that's not how
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it's presented to us initially.
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And I can't speak for other fields, but, I mean, I do think that ancient Greece and Rome get a, like, version of that treatment that's turned up to 11.
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B
Yeah.
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For various reasons, which we can talk about. But that period of history enjoys, I think, like, a special prestige and a special admiration and a special assumption of sophistication and enlightenment that I was and remain very susceptible to. But it took me a long time to learn that being critical is a form of love and that people can be very energized and engaged and smart historians if their project is a critical one, one of, like, throwing mud on the. On the things that are widely admired and sophisticated or regarded as sophisticated.
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B
Yeah. Because surely that means you want them to be better.
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Right.
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Like you're saying, I'm criticizing this because
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I imagine a better version of it that comes out of my critique.
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Otherwise, why would you do it? And I think you're right that the classics have a particular reputation for this. I did my master's and my PhD in Edinburgh, which listeners will be very familiar with because I've said it a thousand times on the show. But Edinburgh has a very robust classics program. It's a whole thing there. Like, I was in the history class in archeology school. It's a thing. And there's a particular type of school that has a particular type of classics program. And you don't really realize how the ways that has sort of bled out into broader culture as being the kind of pinnacle of the humanities. I was thinking about this, actually, earlier today while I was preparing for this episode. I've been watching this show, Industry, which is about finance in London, and it's, like, not at all related to what we're doing. But there's a character in the first two seasons of the show who is in finance. But part of what makes him so attractive to all these people in finance is that he did a great degree at Oxford, and he's always talking about his understanding of, like, classical antiquity. And that makes him a good financier guy. And it's just so interesting to me that that's also, like, even in the world of finance, having some connection to the classics is particularly valuable. If you just said, I have a history degree, they'd be like, okay, whatever, you know?
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C
And it reminds me, do you know this concept of banal nationalism?
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Yes. Yeah.
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There's a famous book. Michael Billig wrote this book about banal nationalism. About how we shouldn't just be focusing on, like, open patriotic rallies and things like that, but how are the sort of symbols of the national identity pervasive around us in ways that aren't even recognized? And I think there's like a. There's a version of banal classicism, this sort of, like, unrecognized, pervasive assumption of the inherent worth of ancient Greece and Rome that, like, it sounds like, you know, this character in the show industry is a kind of, like, the way he's treated is a kind of example of that. Like you say, it has nothing to do with the themes of the. But it's there and it's put in by the writers and it's assumed that it'll be legible to the audience. You know, it all feeds into what we're talking about today.
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Yeah.
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I mean, there's a difference between saying, oh, I've read Arthur Miller or I've read Shakespeare and saying, ah, I read Sophocles.
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Right.
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Like, there is a sort of gradation in terms of the prestige that you get if you are associated with one of these. But this is a little bit of a digression. It does, however, actually lead into what we're talking about. Right. Because I think a big part of
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what we're going to be doing today
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is I suspect this will be an episode that is or will be as much about the guy as it is about memory and reception of the guy. Am I right in thinking that that's.
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You're right.
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Okay.
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You are right. Well, and I mean, I bet that. I mean, anybody who. We need to say this guy sucked. That's sort of true. About. Right. Is that the memory of them needs to be revised or updated. I forget how you put it in
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the opening, but yeah, updated. Revised, whatever. Some of the people we talk about are not famous at all. And we're saying, oh, this guy isn't famous, but he actually made your life worse. And so you should know about him.
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C
Okay, yeah, good point. No, today we're talking about someone who
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is remembered wrongly, someone who's very famous. But there are some blurred lines in how we're remembering him. With that being said, who are we talking about today?
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We are talking about Pericles from Classical Athens. So called Classical Athens, sometimes even called Periclean Athens.
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Really? Okay.
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The period of Athenian history that traditionally is regarded as the high point of classical Greek culture is sometimes called Periclean Athens. That's how tightly Pericles is associated with that period and how admired he is. He's thought to epitomize everything great about this period of Athenian history.
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To be clear to listeners, I suspect, and I said this to Curtis before we started, that this is going to be an episode where I am going to learn some stuff. I've done the base level research that I always do as well as read
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Curtis's book, as I said.
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But I feel kind of underprepared for whatever he's about to say in this, which is what always happens whenever we talk about someone who is alive during classical antiquity. It's always like a real learning experience for me. And I'm also almost definitely going to pronounce something wrong. So heads up on that. So we've already have this backdrop of him being associated with Athens and being this sort of leading statesman. Can you tell me some more things that he's sort of famous for or how people might have encountered him previously
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or where they might have encountered him previously?
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Yeah, I'll tell you a little bit about him and then we'll think about where we might encounter him. I mean, he's basically a politician in Athens. This is in the 5th century BCE, so years in the 400s, basically. And probably a lot of your listeners know that ancient Athens in this period had a democratic system of government. But it was different in some ways from the way we practice democracy here, which was that the vast majority of the leadership positions in the city were chosen by lot, that they were chosen randomly. There was like a drawing every year for who was going to, you know, fulfill the different roles that the state required. And so these were things like who's going to be the garbage collector and who's going to be in charge of maintaining the roads, but also high level things. Who are the people who are going to make the decisions for the city state? Who's the person who's going to actually represent the city state in their interactions with other city states. All these are just chosen randomly.
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What?
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Sorry, I had. I knew some of this, but I didn't know that it like was at such a granular level as like, are you collecting?
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Yeah.
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And so it's like, you know, just think about like your circle of people, you know, don't say friends because your friends, you might like them to be in these jobs. But I'm just saying like, I don't know, your co workers or something. Just imagine a world where like just one year out of the blue, one of them becomes a representative of the nation to other nations. And it sounds like a kind of crazy system to us, although I Do kind of wonder, like if in 2026, like randomly selecting people doesn't sound like a much worse than what we have.
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Look, I'll try it. I'll try anything.
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Yeah, right, Maybe we'll try it. But anyway, you know, it was all in the service of this idea of like, we need to make sure that no individual or group of people can have too much power in the society. It was a kind of reaction against a previous period of tyrannical authoritarian rule and so on. That was the theory of it. But even the Athenians recognized that there are certain things you don't want to have randomly selected. And so one of these were the leaders of the military. They decided we better have elections for the people who are going military.
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So they did it better than we're doing it right now, unfortunately.
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Yeah, maybe, maybe. Although Athens sucked. So we're. I don't want to, I don't want to celebrate him too much, but, but we're talking about Pericles. So Pericles is a politician who figured out how to accomplish the thing they were trying to prevent people from accomplishing things. He figured out how to get a lot of power for himself. And the way he did that was he kept getting elected to be one of these generals in the military. And it's a little unclear how many times he did this. I think Plutarch says there were 15 years in a row he got elected. He had about a 30 year political career in Athens, but he was apparently a very good speaker. He had significant monetary wealth also. He was just very skilled at getting himself elected. And so even in this weird system to us, where no one could have too much power, he kind of was the dominant political figure for this 30 year period. The exact dates aren't totally known for when it started, but we can sort of say around 460 until his death in 429. And so this was a period of Athenian history where Athens was very powerful militarily, very wealthy monetarily. And it was this destination for intellectuals and artists. Many of the most famous Greek tragedies were performed in this period. The Parthenon, the Acropolis was built in this period. You know, a lot of the iconic stuff about ancient Greece dates to this period. Socrates was active in this period. So Pericles is the dominant political figure in Athens of this period. And there's all these celebrated things happening in Athens. And so he's really kind of associated with them. And so he's kind of taken to represent the belief that Athens in this time was a Enlightened, artistically sophisticated, architecturally sophisticated, prosperous, exciting and democratic society all at the same time. So then we ask, how do people encounter him? So Pericles is kind of held up as like the model democratic statesman, especially for his oratory. And in connection with his oratory, Thucydides, the Greek historian, records this speech Pericles gave during this period. Athens is at war with Sparta in the Peloponnesian War. And one of the Athenian practices was someone would give a speech honoring the war dead every year. And Thucydides says that one year Pericles gave this funeral oration to honor the war dead. And in that speech, Pericles says, you know, it's basically like a patriotic speech as one gives in time of war when you're commemorating the people who are dying in this war. It's a patriotic speech. Thucydides says Pericles makes the move of saying, let's talk about why we're so great. It's because of our form of government, it's because we are a democracy that we should be really proud. And so in this speech he gives all these reasons that Athens should be proud and Athenians should be proud of their democracy. And so historically, Pericles is viewed as like the ancient man who understood democracy, who understood why democracy is so great, who articulated, maybe not for the first time, but gave a very strong articulation of democratic ideals that we in modern times should turn to and follow if we want to nourish and keep our own democracy strong.
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I feel like this is unintentionally heavy handed foreshadowing, like something is going to be wrong here. We all know this. And so I think it's very funny that we're like, this is what everyone thinks. He's the most democratic guy. He cares so much about these things. I was actually going to ask you about what is known as the funeral oration. So I'm glad that you already explained because that was something that I needed to understand a little bit more. So I'm glad that this was already kind of covered.
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I mean, I want to talk more about the funeral oration when we get there.
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We can now or we can later when we're saying what's wrong with him.
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Whichever, okay, we can save it for them. But you can already tell he sucked from the funeral oration if you actually read the funeral oration.
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Okay, this is good. This is where good teasers some little tidbits for people to stick around.
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Thanks for listening to this preview of a Patreon exclusive episode to subscribe and listen to it in full. Head over to patreon.com thisguysucked homes.com knows
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