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

Why is learning about Roman history useful or instructive at helping us in the modern world? Why should anybody care? I think that so when I was starting my podcast, uh I had I'd been doing it for a couple of months with a kind of hunch on this question, and I wasn't really able to articulate it to my satisfaction. Um But it a friend of mine a few months in recommended that I read this book by Nietzsche, one of his early books that um, and I'd read some Nietzsche before.

It's called On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life. And Nietzsche talks in there about how history can sort of drain the life out of you and turn you into a kind of crippled um you know shell of a person. It can kind of uh get you in this state where you question all of your decisions. Uh it can kind of overload you with knowledge and cause you to retreat into the the cloister or the library or, you know,

be a kind of uh opiate for a life that is not fulfilling. But he says that, and and he quotes Goethe at the beginning of that that book, that something like, uh, Goethe said, I hate all knowledge that does not quicken and enliven me, like away with it. And and history can be very quickening and enlivening. And the way that Nietzsche frames it is um the most like enlivening approach to history is embodied by one of his favorite authors, Plutarch, this this great ancient philosopher, who was also one of history's most widely read and entertaining biographers.

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