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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   2973 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 14, 2025

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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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