This is the first installment of Quarantine Stuff You Should Know. To help with the quarantine doldrums, A.J. will be giving you a story almost daily from the Decameron. This episode serves as an intro to the series.

We're almost there, guys, and this is the penultimate chapter of Plato's republic. This one is all about tyranny. A tyranny named Tyrone.

As a follow up to book IX of the republic, Graeme leads us on a thought journey to the medieval land of government. So strap on your cassock and let's get weird.

We've done Dante's Inferno before, so Thomas introduces us to his Purgatorio in this episode. Doesn't "Purgatorio" sound like the Italian version of famous horror movie "The Purge"? It isn't, though.

In book eight of Plato's Republic, Socrates discusses the degradation of an Aristocracy into more mediocre forms of government. Spoiler, democracy is not near the top.

There's a big ol' white horse made of rocks in the UK, and Chesterton wrote some poem about it or whatever. It's okay I guess. Maybe worth a quick jaw wag.

Thomas leads us further up the mountain as we discuss "Climbing Parnassus" by Tracy Lee Simmons. Greek and Latin, he argues, are the organizing principle for classical education. Also, it impresses people when you can tell them what all those words on the dollar bill mean.

Plato finally gets us to the allegory of the cave. We find out that we're just dudes, dudes in a cave, dudes staring at a wall.

Did you know that humans used to be eight limbed creatures that rolled around like silly marshmallows? Yeah, neither did we.

In this actually good episode, Graeme talks about readings of poetry. How do you balance a traditional reading with your own experience? With scales, friend. Scales.