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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   1990 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 14, 2025

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Interestingly, Leo Strauss argues (briefly, in his seminars) that Plutarch is esoterically trying to show the moral superiority of the Greeks over the Romans, or of the Classical era over more recent times - esoterically, because he lived under Rome and didn't want to offend them.

I don't particularly think Plutarch would have to argue all that esoterically, the superiority of the men of the past over the men of the present was a truism of the ancients.

The element of it I do see is that Plutarch's Greeks are much more individuals, their vices and virtues are those of individuals, whereas most of the great Romans (Caesar being the exception, and Coriolanus/Mark Antony cautionary tales) are shaped more by their relationship to the State and the Mos Maiorum. Where the Romans put their individual greatness first, it tends to go wrong, whereas when the Greeks do it it tends to go better for them. But, by the time of Pyrrhus, that largely makes the Romans into better men than the Greeks, even if it may be less ideal a world from Plutarch's perspective.

I saw a twitter post that really confused me recently where someone said something along the lines of "Most of the time history is all about great important movements and forces and institutions but then you run into Julius Caesar and he just changes everything..." And I thought, really, Caesar? The guy who was like the fifth person in a row to try the exact the same thing? By the time we get to Caesar, we can reasonably say that men like Caesar is exactly what the state is producing.

And it parallels the novel, in that a great novel like Infinite Jest (the same title) produces this obsessive desire to think about it but is at the same time a sincere attempt at a perhaps impossible human-to-human communication. Both the great novel and the Entertainment grab us by appealing to deep, primal aspects of human psychology (in the Entertainment, the Oedipal mother/baby/death stuff) but the question is if this can only be narcotizing, if the only path a novel opens is passive consumption, or if it can be a path to reaching Hal/you.

Huh. That's an interesting angle. I was thinking about that earlier today shoveling snow, how reading a novel like that is inherently selfish in some ways, but then I only managed to finish it through a book club, so it was inherently social and connection based for me.

I don't particularly think Plutarch would have to argue all that esoterically, the superiority of the men of the past over the men of the present was a truism of the ancients.

Well, the idea that Greeks are better than Romans might have raised some hackles, and Plutarch did have his political career to think about. But I don't know the exact situation in Greece under the Flavian and Nerva-Antonine dynasties, it could have been that valorizing the Greeks under Hadrian was the classy thing to do. I suspect Strauss was reaching with that one, it was only a casual remark to students.

I saw a twitter post that really confused me recently where someone said something along the lines of "Most of the time history is all about great important movements and forces and institutions but then you run into Julius Caesar and he just changes everything..." And I thought, really, Caesar? The guy who was like the fifth person in a row to try the exact the same thing? By the time we get to Caesar, we can reasonably say that men like Caesar is exactly what the state is producing.

I tell my populist friends all the time that this is something to meditate on, that these things are long-term processes and we are definitely at the Gracchi stage rather than the Caesar one.

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