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S1.E3 - Wrestling with Power: James Romm on Plato, Tyranny, and Democracy
35 Plays3 months ago
Classicist and author Dr. James Romm joins us to explore Plato not just as a philosopher, but as a wrestler obsessed with training both body and mind.
Drawing on his new book, Plato and the Tyrant, Romm walks us through Plato’s failed attempts to turn the rulers of Syracuse into philosopher-kings, and how those experiments reshaped his thinking about power, law, and education.
Along the way, we connect ancient debates about tyranny and virtue to the way we live, train, and practice democracy today.
Special thanks to Dr. James Romm. Checkout Plato and the Tyrant as well as other works at: https://www.jamesromm.com/books
If you enjoyed this episode, subscribe, share, and check out our collections and upcoming events at santofi.com.
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Transcript
Plato's Physical and Mental Education
00:00:00
Speaker
That's a wonderful picture of ah Plato as wrestler. Of course, wrestling was central to Greco-Roman athletics. We still have in the Olympics ah Greco-Roman wrestling, which is an inheritance from the classical world.
00:00:17
Speaker
Plato certainly advocated physical education along with mental, and the training of philosophers begins with education. gymnastics and other kinds of physical exercise because philosophers have to be soldiers in his system.
00:00:35
Speaker
The political class of his ideal state are both the philosophers and the military. And for that, they need strong bodies and agility and stamina. So, um yes, he was not a ivory tower intellectual, he he lived in the world of the body as well as the mind.
Plato's Political Vision and Philosopher King
00:01:07
Speaker
That was Dr. James Rahm talking about Plato being a wrestler and why strength of body and strength of mind were inseparable in Plato's ideal city. Dr. Rahm is a professor of classics at Bard College in New York.
00:01:19
Speaker
He's written about some of the most volatile moments in ancient history in books like Dying Every Day, Seneca at the Court of Nero, and Ghosts on the throne Throne, The Death of Alexander the Great, and The Bloody Fight for His Empire.
00:01:31
Speaker
and his essays have appeared in places like The New Yorker and The Wall Street Journal. In his new book, Plato and the Tyrant, he follows Plato's journey to Syracuse, where the philosopher tried to turn an autocrat into a philosopher king, and what that failed experiment reveals about power, idealism, and the gap between ideas and institutions.
00:01:51
Speaker
In this conversation, we talk about Socrates, Plato's philosophy, and why ancient texts still matter, and how we think about democracy today. I just want to quickly apologize beforehand as my mic was a bit muffled during the conversation.
00:02:05
Speaker
I'm James Rahm. I'm a professor of classics at Bard College, meaning that I teach about Greece and Rome. And I'm the author of Plato and the Tyrant, as well as other books about the ancient Greek world.
00:02:21
Speaker
what first drew you to plato well plato is a is a difficult person to know because he doesn't tell us anything about himself in his famous dialogues.
00:02:35
Speaker
He writes philosophic dialogues that have Socrates as a main character, but he never represents himself or speaks in the first person.
00:02:48
Speaker
So he's kind of opaque. He's sort of hidden behind a mask. But When I discovered that a body of letters exists in which he does speak in his own voice and he does talk about his life and his feelings and especially his mistakes when he went to the island of Sicily, I realized that there was a lot more to the story than meets the eye.
00:03:19
Speaker
Do you mind just giving a brief overview of who Socrates was and his impact on philosophy and political science as we know it?
Socrates and the Nature of Knowledge
00:03:29
Speaker
Well, Socrates is also ah hard person to understand because he never wrote anything.
00:03:38
Speaker
And the only evidence we have about him comes from Plato and a couple of other sources, which who fictionalized him, made him a character in their fan fictions, essentially.
00:03:52
Speaker
We know that he went around the city of Athens talking to people in power or in positions of authority, asking them questions about what they thought of moral ideas, what they thought justice was, or what they thought virtue was, and revealing that they didn't really know what they were talking about.
00:04:17
Speaker
They didn't understand anything about morality or about ethics. And those conversations, of course, were deeply embarrassing to the people that he interviewed and revealed their ignorance. That is part of what got him executed by the Athenian state. He was ah put on trial and put to death at the age of 70, one of the terrible sins of the Athenian democracy.
00:04:45
Speaker
Do you believe that there was a stronger impact from Socrates and his philosophy on Plato? You know, these are great questions because we really just don't know how much Plato represents what Socrates thought in his dialogues where he uses Socrates as a main character or whether he's making it up and just putting words in Socrates mouth.
00:05:14
Speaker
That's a debate that's gone on for centuries and will probably never be resolved to anyone's satisfaction.
Understanding Plato's 'The Republic'
00:05:22
Speaker
But Socrates didn't really claim to have any particular views, philosophical ideas of his own.
00:05:31
Speaker
He always said, my but my knowledge consists in knowing that I don't know. Everyone else thinks they know things about virtue, about beauty, about justice.
00:05:43
Speaker
I at least know that I don't know. And that makes me smarter than everyone else. So, If that's really his view, then he he wasn't a philosopher at all. He was a kind of provocateur. Plato did develop a philosophic system in which he believed that these ideas, justice, beauty, virtue, courage, could be understood only by a kind of mental journey into a
00:06:19
Speaker
a world that he called the world of the forms. That is, they're absolute versions of these things in some transcendent reality that could only be accessed by the mind. And the goal of the philosopher is to reach that realm through rigorous mental training and education over the course of one's entire adult life.
00:06:45
Speaker
And his academy the institute that he founded, what we might call higher education, was designed to allow students to develop their minds and reach this alternate realm.
00:07:00
Speaker
There was a quote by a philosopher that basically said, all of Western philosophy ends a footnote to Plato. i think most people have this outlook of Plato being this ideal figure, but most people consider the work of the Republic his most influential book do you believe it is plato's most important work if so do you believe everybody should read the Republic?
00:07:23
Speaker
I think there's no question that the Republic is Plato's most important work. It's got all his most central ideas neatly packaged, made into a ah kind of a composite.
00:07:40
Speaker
So he deals with this alternate realm, this reality that can only be accessed by the mind in his famous allegory of the cave, where human life is represented as a cave that we have to escape from in order to behold the sun. We're looking now at shadows that are cast by the light of a fire when we look around us at the visible world, the world of the senses.
00:08:11
Speaker
But if we could get outside the cave, we'd realize there's an alternate world that is illuminated by the sun, a much more brilliant and and beautiful light.
00:08:24
Speaker
And that's where true knowledge comes from that realm. So he explores his theory of forms, as we call it, his his ideas about where knowledge comes from.
00:08:39
Speaker
He explores politics and what the best system of government would be by constructing a state, an imaginary city-state that would be completely just.
00:08:54
Speaker
And that is the what most people think of when they think of the republic. It's a an ideal city-state that represents complete justice.
00:09:05
Speaker
That in all these ways, Republic is really his magnum opus, his masterpiece. If you were going to give us a syllabus, a reading list to, let's say, every U.S. citizen, would you recommend that everybody should read the Republic?
00:09:21
Speaker
Well, it's funny you should ask that because I'm teaching right now in a general education course at Bard, my my home college, that requires all freshmen to read the Republic.
00:09:36
Speaker
And it's a heavy lift for some of them. And it it would be a heavy lift for many general readers. I can't say I recommend it to everyone. There's a lot of it that takes some work to get through.
00:09:51
Speaker
In my book, I've tried to introduce it and give a basic sense of its message without necessarily um recommending that everyone read it.
00:10:04
Speaker
If someone has an interest in philosophy and has some background, then I think it's a great work to read and and reread. It really requires more than one reading.
00:10:17
Speaker
But if you just want to get a sense of it and know basically what it's trying to do, I think my book provides that sort of foundation.
Plato's Influence on Philosophy and Christianity
00:10:29
Speaker
Just quickly going back to the Republic, as you mentioned, the Allegory the Cave and how it has just so much of an enduring legacy even to today. do you think that is still relevant, the ideas that are explored in the Allegory the Cave?
00:10:46
Speaker
I think all of Plato is relevant in in some way. It's not for everyone to follow. It's a system that Plato admits is is only for a few who are willing to really commit themselves to philosophic study.
00:11:09
Speaker
He thought that a youth who wants to become a philosopher should plan to spend about 30 years developing the mind in order to be able to perceive these forms. but It's still an intensely appealing system. it's in In some ways, it's at the root of our Christian system, in that Plato imagined this perfect world, i.e. heaven, in which a single form, the form of the good, exerted this
00:11:41
Speaker
benign influence, much like our Christian God. So Platonism has a lot of links to early Christianity, to foundational ideas of of Christianity. And as you said, you quoted a famous line by Bertrand Russell that all of Western philosophy are footnotes to Plato, that Plato was the first to think about a lot of the problems that have since become central to the philosophic tradition.
Plato's Ideal State and Democratic Values
00:12:11
Speaker
mission of plato was to advocate of education being able to transform the soul or to change people's lives in some sense not only with themselves but you know through the state are you in agreement with this do you believe that education in the same way that plato believes it is the way to reform our society and to get us closer living the good life well i think he had ah a lot of the right ideas. Of course, his ideal state in the Republic is not ideal from our point of view because it requires censorship of art and literature.
00:12:52
Speaker
It requires that a military class be slavishly devoted to the ruler. It requires ah that most people are simply producers and consumers and don't have any role in government.
00:13:10
Speaker
They're more or less a herd of sheep that have to be led by the shepherd. So I don't think i would want to live in the state that he creates in the Republic.
00:13:22
Speaker
But nonetheless, he causes, he forces us to get outside of our preconceptions about democracy, about liberty ah about um private property, all the things we take for granted as part of our political life. He makes us question, are these really the best way forward? or Could we have an alternate system?
00:13:53
Speaker
And in that sense, I think he's very um beneficial thinking about one's role as a citizen.
00:14:03
Speaker
your book and having it be resonating with us today in our contemporary lives because there are a lot of people who often question you know what is the purpose of reading ancient texts or what is the purpose of looking to lessons learned from the ancient past in the context of your book and in what you explore in your book how would you say and ideas in your book still resonate with us today in contemporary life and what's going on current affairs?
00:14:35
Speaker
Well, I don't want to um get too topical ah with regard to current affairs, but um let's just say that um ah citizens of a democracy have an obligation to think about what kind of government they want and what the best way forward is for their society. One can't simply ignore these questions and and leave them to others.
00:15:04
Speaker
It's part of our responsibility. And Plato forces us to think about those things and ah to take politics seriously as a as something that rests on all of our shoulders.
00:15:18
Speaker
It was interesting to learn that Plato used to rest his nickname was broad shoulders, what we're doing with the brand, you know, we primarily grapple and do some form of wrestling, whether that be through jujitsu or just traditional, you know, what you might see at a college level wrestling.
00:15:33
Speaker
It is fascinating to know that he was, you know, a champion wrestler, but he also had these philos philosophical ideas. Yes, that's a, that's a wonderful picture of ah Plato as wrestler.
00:15:46
Speaker
Of course, wrestling was central to Greco-Roman athletics. We still have in the Olympics ah Greco-Roman wrestling, which is an inheritance from the classical world.
00:15:59
Speaker
Plato certainly advocated physical education along with mental, and the training of philosophers begins with gymnastics and other kinds of physical exercise because philosophers have to be soldiers in his system.
00:16:18
Speaker
The political class of his ideal state are both the philosophers and the military. And for that, they need strong bodies and agility and stamina. So, um yes, he was not a ivory tower intellectual he he lived in the world of the body as well as the mind briefly about yourself cycling five miles that per day whenever the weather permits yes
00:16:52
Speaker
Yeah, so I'm assuming you're in agreement with Plato that you have to have some sort of strong body for the development of philosophy or um mental fortitude in that sense.
00:17:06
Speaker
To be a whole person, to be a a whole individual, one needs both physical and mental development. Yes, I think Plato was dead right about that.
00:17:22
Speaker
Going to your book, what was the initial inspiration for Plato and the Tyrant?
Plato's Syracuse Experiments
00:17:28
Speaker
So I talked before about the letters of Plato, a collection of 13 what appear to be his personal letters that have been miraculously preserved since the 4th century BC, 2400 years ago. Not all of them are genuine, and scholar there are some scholars who believe that none of them are genuine.
00:17:51
Speaker
That is, they're fakes. But the five which I deal with in my book are, I think, certainly Plato's genuine writings.
00:18:05
Speaker
And that makes them immensely important because, as I said earlier, they reveal his personality in a way that the dialogues do not. So when i first came upon these letters,
00:18:19
Speaker
I realized this was a story I had to tell the story of his journeys to Syracuse on the island of Sicily and the terrible mistakes that he made there and his efforts in the letter, in the letters to patch things up, get things back on track and more or less cover up his own mistakes.
00:18:44
Speaker
And What would you say Plato learned about trying to guide, we say, a tyrant? So Syracuse, at the time that Plato went there, he went there three times over the course 25 years. And during those years, the city was ruled two autocrats whom the Greeks called tyrants, a father and a son, both named Dionysius.
00:19:14
Speaker
So we can call them Dionysius the Elder and Dionysius the Younger.
00:19:20
Speaker
Plato saw the opportunity presented by an autocrat that a person with absolute power could change government and society almost at will.
00:19:39
Speaker
That is, if he could be converted to philosophy, he could institute a philosophical regime an enlightened dictatorship that would put the city of Syracuse on a much better path morally and and politically.
00:19:56
Speaker
And if Syracuse could get on a better path, other cities might follow suit and the whole of Greece might eventually become philosophic. Plato believed that Greece was in a terrible decline politically and that its existing governments were all failing.
00:20:15
Speaker
And so he was looking for a radical change, a philosopher king, and he saw Syracuse as his best opening to create that.
00:20:26
Speaker
Because again, if if you have a ruler with absolute power, he can snap his fingers and make the government philosophic. I mean, just to ask you personally, are you in agreement with this?
00:20:40
Speaker
Do you agree with this initial view of Plato at this particular point? Well, I think the outcome, so not to um give away too much of the ah story of my book, because it is a suspenseful story, I hope, but um his efforts in Syracuse completely failed and caused a civil war that really almost destroyed the city.
00:21:05
Speaker
And I think that shows that efforts his ideas were were badly misguided, didn't take account of the realities of politics.
00:21:18
Speaker
Plato was an idealist. He was working with ideal notions of what could be accomplished in politics through philosophy. But when those ideas came up against human nature,
00:21:33
Speaker
and a very flawed and difficult ruler, Dionysius the Younger, whom Plato had to deal with and whose moral character was not at all amenable to philosophic instruction, then he more or less wrecked the city.
00:21:55
Speaker
So ah I think if we're looking to the the one experience he had of practical politics, It shows that philosophy doesn't always work when it hits the ground.
00:22:07
Speaker
Yeah, there seems to be pattern in in history where there is an interpretation of somehow a strongman or a dictator being some sort of philosopher king as they
The Philosopher King Concept
00:22:21
Speaker
see it.
00:22:21
Speaker
But why do you think the enlightened strongman is such a seductive concept? Yeah, that's a great question.
00:22:32
Speaker
It's a fantasy that um the Western world has and entertained for centuries, for millennia. And many people have tried to claim that they represent the the fulfillment, that they are philosopher kings.
00:22:51
Speaker
I think it's a basic human desire that a single person would unite total wisdom with total power. It's like having the best father in the world or the best, I suppose, it has a religious element that we want our ruler to be like God, to have omnipotence and also omniscience, that um then society would be totally reformed and we'd all be well taken care of and blissfully happy.
00:23:26
Speaker
So, Who wouldn't want that? it's a It's a very attractive fantasy. Do you believe that wisdom and power in this context are fundamentally incompatible?
00:23:40
Speaker
No, because as Plato recognized that people who want power and our system only allows people who want power to get power because you have to run for office, you have to work hard in order to get power,
00:23:57
Speaker
Those people are non-philosophic. Plato was convinced that the philosopher, his ideal philosopher, would not want to take part in politics, would have to be compelled.
00:24:12
Speaker
And so the people who should rule are the ones who don't want to rule. And of course, that has never arisen in our historical memory.
00:24:25
Speaker
how would you say these platonic letters that you really honed in on, how would you say that reshapes the view of the Republic?
00:24:39
Speaker
So the Republic posits that a philosopher king is the only just form of governance, that society will be forever miserable and and ridden with abuses until philosophers are in power.
00:25:00
Speaker
Plato was trying in his voyages to Syracuse to educate a man who was in power in philosophy.
00:25:12
Speaker
So in a sense, he was trying to create a philosopher king, although he realized the material he was working with was very limited But i it's clear that the Republic was being written at the same time as these journeys to Syracuse were taking place.
00:25:30
Speaker
And so I can't help but think that he's trying to, number one, justify with the Republic what he was doing over there.
00:25:42
Speaker
because a lot of people thought he was up to no good by going to the court of an autocrat, hanging out with a person who was recognized as a baddie.
00:25:54
Speaker
Number two, he was trying to institute in Syracuse the theories that he was developing in the Republic. So in my introduction to my book, I say this is a study of how Syracuse changed Plato and Plato changed Syracuse.
00:26:11
Speaker
There was a kind of symbiotic relationship. He was writing and acting at the same time.
Plato on Tyranny
00:26:19
Speaker
Early signs of just a tyrannical psyche.
00:26:24
Speaker
And whether you can see that in a personal level or in a societal level. Yes. So Plato um talks about the tyrant, the sort of generic figure of the tyrant, as a man of unbridled desires, sexual, physical, and greed that ah the tyrant is is controlled by his um his libido and by desires. Once those desires get hold, he compares it to
00:27:02
Speaker
A swarm of bees that get aroused. Your your desires are are bees. Once it gets stirred up and they start stinging you, then you're totally controlled by them and willing to do any crimes, any commit any abuses in order to fulfill them.
00:27:23
Speaker
Modern psychology would support this, that tyrants have of the 20th century and of recent history are are controlled by desires in in just this way, and and also by nightmares. So the the tyrant in the Republic is forced to act out his nightmares in waking life. It's a very interesting conception.
00:27:45
Speaker
you want to expand on that a little bit? you have a night here In other words, that you know the stuff one sees in one's worst dreams, committing murder, committing incest, committing cannibalism, things that we regard as the worst abuses of decency, tyrant acts those out in waking life, whereas the philosopher King has only good dreams.
00:28:13
Speaker
he He goes to bed after having... He goes to bed after having studied ah ah philosophical texts and and this gives him good dreams. And so his um his waking life is totally different.
00:28:30
Speaker
If only. i mean, Dr. Raman, I'm sure you've read plenty of philosophical texts. ah you You having in those good dreams or you like the rest of us?
00:28:42
Speaker
Well, ah you know... My wife and I watch ah TV, serial some kind of serial drama before we go to bed. And there are certain dramas that I don't like to watch at night because they do give you bad dreams or they make it hard to get to sleep. So I think we're all familiar with that phenomenon.
Pragmatism in Plato's 'Laws'
00:29:01
Speaker
After writing your book, do you still view Plato as an idealist or do you see this experience in Syracuse and this kind of like symbiotic experience he has with Syracuse?
00:29:12
Speaker
in some way changes him to be maybe a little less idealist? Or do you think he's even more of an idealist coming out of this whole experience in Syracuse? I think it's clear he was very much changed and and lost a lot of his idealism as a result of his failures in Syracuse.
00:29:36
Speaker
And I say this because his last work of philosophy, his laws, work called the laws, does not posit a philosopher king and instead lays down a legal code, literally ah ah set of laws that ought to be followed to create a better social system than anything that existed in the Greek world.
00:30:10
Speaker
But it leaves aside these ideal forms, the journey to the other world and the gaining of absolute knowledge and the philosopher king.
00:30:22
Speaker
All these things are now off the table. It's simply a matter of following a good set of laws. And that seems to me an abandonment of his earlier idealism.
00:30:38
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, you know, you you mentioned it earlier about importance of a democracy and the education of its citizens, and certainly that Plato would advocate through citizens to really critically examine the world around them.
00:30:57
Speaker
and
00:30:59
Speaker
yeah it's a great book. I don't want to ruin really too much. Is there anything else that you just wanted to mention or bring up about the book or any of your current work or anything that might be upcoming for any projects you might be working on?
Dr. Rahm on Stoicism and Seneca
00:31:14
Speaker
In addition to Plato's philosophy, the Greek world also gave us Stoicism, and many of your listeners may be familiar with that system because it's become popular today as life guidance, a way to structure one's life, one's emotions, as to produce the best mood, the best happiness.
00:31:40
Speaker
I have ah several works in that vein ah from the philosopher Seneca in a series that comes out of Princeton called the ancient wisdom for modern readers. So um readers who are interested, I'm sorry, listeners who are interested in stoicism can find my translations of Seneca on topics like how to keep your cool, ah how to live, how to have a life,
00:32:11
Speaker
How to Give, these are titles in that series from Princeton University Press. There you go. How to Live. mean, that's probably what we all need right now, right? How to Live. That says it all.
00:32:30
Speaker
ah it's ah It's a done deal. you You sold me. How to Live. I'm still trying to figure that out. i ah How to Live is coming out in there in the spring, I should say. It's not out yet, but it's coming out this spring.
00:32:48
Speaker
As the young kids say, we're hyped. We're hyped for the book, i Dr. Ram.
00:32:55
Speaker
Yeah, well, I really appreciate it. Big thanks to Dr. James Romm for joining us. You can dive deeper in today's conversation in his new book, Plato and the Tyrant.
00:33:07
Speaker
This season, we'll keep tracing the influence of ancient Greece from theater and art to philosophy and sport and what all that still means for our lives today. If you enjoyed this episode, subscribe, share, and check out our collections and upcoming events at sanofi.com.