Montana Classical College

Hello and welcome to Montana Classical College! Today we are joined by Dr. Yiftach Ofek, a scholar of political philosophy and modern Jewish history who specializes in the history of political thought and the contemporary crisis of liberalism. He is a former officer in the Israel Defense Forces who served as Head of the NATO and European Union Desk at the IDF Strategic Division. Dr. Ofek went on to earn his PhD from the University of Chicago and currently teaches in the Core Curriculum and the Department of Philosophy and Jewish Thought at Shalem College in Jerusalem.

We had a wonderful discussion of Michael Anton’s recent book, Dispatches from the Late Republic!

You can also find him on X: https://x.com/yo101

If you enjoyed this conversation about Anton’s vision of the best practical regime, the grave difficulties that regime is now mired in, and the differing responses to those difficulties, you might enjoy these other conversations as well:

David Azerrad

Jeremy Carl

Matthew Peterson

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Here is lecture to kick off a reading group on Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick; or, The Whale.

In the first part, I talk about epic poetry and what in particular might make Moby-Dick an epic in a strict sense (for more on what an epic is, see this). In the second half, Ishmael’s “problem of the universe,” which I take to be the question of whether or not God exists.

As far as the reading group is concerned, we will start tomorrow. We’ll read one chapter every other day. So we’ll discuss the Etymology tomorrow, the Extracts on Tuesday, chapter one on Thursday, chapter two on Saturday, so on and so forth.

I’ll put up a page each week for you to post your observations. I won’t offer lectures on each chapter, but will point out a couple things and then reply to comments.

As Nathaniel Philbrick says in Why Read Moby-Dick?: “Most of all, however, I am interested in getting you—yes, you—to read, whether it be for the first time or the twelfth time, Moby-Dick.”

I’ll put up the page for the opening chapters later today.

And there are still a few spots left for our in person 3 day seminar on Moby-Dick in Pittsfield, MA (July 30th - August 1st)

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Melville alludes in very direct ways to Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” in chapters 42 and 52 of Moby-Dick. In an effort to better understand Melville and to understand poetry more broadly, I asked Stephen Pimentel and Byronic Heroine if they would help me understand this mysterious, beautiful, and terrifying poem.

The outcome was pretty extraordinary, if I can say so without being too self-aggrandizing. I say this because I learned more from this conversation than just about any of the other ones that I have recorded. I went in with a poor grasp of the poem—despite a lot of effort to do otherwise—and came out having a much stronger sense of the stakes and different threads and questions that unite the poem.

Each of us offered 10 - 15 minute prepared presentations at the start. I offered something like the moral interpretation or what the soul of the listener in the frame is like, Byronic brought to light an extraordinary number of Homeric connections and the difference between the Homeric and Christian worlds, and Stephen offered a provocative interpretation showing how unsettling the poem is. After that, we followed up the questions raised by each interpretation to try to move closer to finding the real nerve of the argument of the poem.

Enjoy!

Other work on trying to understand Melville:

Why Scholars Should Never “Correct” Great Thinkers (this is one of my favorites)

Reading Fast and Reading Slow

The Virgin Visits

Why You Should Love Cetology

Moby-Dick: Tragedy, Philosophy, and Encyclopedism (with Byronic and Alejandro)

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Here is the second conversation in a series interviewing outstanding educators. I had the great good fortune to speak with Dissident Teacher, who is a veteran public school teacher, currently a classical school teacher, and who writes about K-12 education on her outstanding Substack:

The first half of our conversation covered the problems in K-12 education today, focusing on the incentive structures for students, teachers, and administrators. The schools are not there to help your kids become educated and free; they are more like patronage jobs programs. In the second half of the conversation, we discuss classical education and homeschooling, and the challenges that these alternatives face.

Here are some of her essays that I got the most out of in preparing for the conversation:

Your Kids Aren’t Learning Anything. At All.

School Trains Your Kids to be Unsuccessful

The Branson

The Cell Shapes the Prisoner

Check out her latest essay, hot off the presses: A Library to Build Great Americans, Ages 3 - 99

As you peruse that list, you might consider listening to some of MCC’s lectures on some of those books in our Introduction to Literature course.

If you enjoyed this episode, you might enjoy:

* Our conversation with Brian Kemple on the problems of the university and alternative forms of higher education.

* MCC’s summative statement on our mission and vision

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It was a delight to talk with Brian Kemple, the founder and executive director of the Lyceum Institute. In the first half, we discussed the structural problem in most universities and the purpose of the Lyceum Institute. In the second half, Brian explained his paradoxical interest in Thomas Aquinas and semiotics; he offers one of the best concise introductions to semiotics and the thought of Charles Peirce that you can find. As you can see below, Brian is doing a lot of good in the parallel education world.

* Here you can find links to his scholarly monographs as well as—and I was surprised at how interested I am in this book—a book on grammar.

* Follow Brian on X and follow his institute there as well.

* See his academic journal Reality and a new issue should be coming out soon.

* Here is the Substack article of his that we briefly touched on.

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In this lecture, I walk through Leo Strauss’s unpublished lecture on Plato’s Euthyphro, as a prelude to offering a careful, line-by-line interpretation of the dialogue which will soon follow.

One might object to paying such close attention to an unpublished writing, but Strauss considered including a refurbished version of the lecture, in a proposed, but then rescinded collection that would have been entitled Jerusalem and Athens; it would have included his famous essay by that title, then his essay on Genesis to make a case for the Biblical perspective and then the essay on the Euthyphro would have been meant to make the case for the philosophical perspective. In Strauss’s view, these are the only two sources from which a serious human being can take guidance, and these two sources admit of no synthesis.

Furthermore, a recent volume came that published Strauss’s 1948 notebook on Plato’s Euthyphro, which includes a Stephanus page by Stephanus page commentary on the dialogue. I note a few of the significant differences in interpretation between the two. I also profited from reading Wayne Ambler’s essay on Strauss, and from reading Svetozar Minkov’s and Hannes Kerber’s reflections included in the Strauss notebook volume.

Also, if you can’t get enough Strauss and Euthyphro content, a conference dedicated to the same matters I discussed above took place a couple of years ago.

Other MCC posts on Strauss:

Kojeve vs. Strauss on the Universal and Homogeneous State

Leo Strauss on Relativism (with Phocaean)

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The painting above, Uccello’s “Hunting in the Forest,” is the image that Mrs. MCC refers to at the beginning of the conversation.

Mrs. MCC and I read and discussed the first half of Part Three, “What is Religious.” Mrs. MCC did a lot of digging into some of the peripheral figures that Nietzsche calls our attention to in this dense and difficult section as well as showing how this part of the book anticipates much of what is to come in the book.

Previous Discussions:

Aphorisms 1 - 9

Aphorisms 10 - 17

Aphorisms 18 - 23

Aphorisms 24 - 29

Aphorisms 30 -35

Aphorisms 36 - 44

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This time, Mrs. MCC and I finished up part two, The Free Spirits. Mrs. MCC offers some very helpful birds-eye view thoughts on this part in addition to our usual reading and discussion. Nietzsche’s most direct account of will to power is discussed along with the difficulty that the free spirits have in fully grasping this teaching. Their difficulty in understanding the teaching when stated directly, informs Nietzsche’s presentation of the idea through different means for the rest of the section.

I think this is the best conversation in the series so far, and a great jumping point if you haven’t listened to the previous sessions.

Previous Discussions:

Aphorisms 1 - 9

Aphorisms 10 - 17

Aphorisms 18 - 23

Aphorisms 24 - 29

Aphorisms 30 -35

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Before we begin, please be sure to see William’s essay on this book of the Aeneid over on his stack.

Last time we heard Aeneas tell the tale of the destruction of Troy and the deaths of both Priam and Aeneas’ wife Creusa—events that Homer did not get to in the Iliad. Today we will read and discuss Aeneas’ “odyssey”.

* Thrace and Crete: The Two False Starts

To begin with, Aeneas does not know that he needs to be headed to Italy. Thus we get two false starts. In the first of these, the Trojans land in Thrace and Aeneas immediately turns to building walls. He does this later as well. He yearns for protection from the dangers of the world. Perhaps this is the one way in which Aeneas is not entirely trusting of a good outcome for his fate; that is to say, walls represent a reliance on one’s own arms so to speak. It is understandable that Aeneas wants to do this, but fate or the will of the gods means everything, and this is perhaps something that Aeneas does not entirely trust in even though he is exceedingly pious. The walls at Troy may very well have been strong enough to keep out the Greeks if neither side received divine support, but they ultimately weren’t enough to save the Trojans because of Zeus’ will or because of fate. So, again, it is very understandable that Aeneas wants walls first and before anything else, but perhaps this is representative of him having not thought things through all the way or wanting to take matters into his own hands since he has already seen Troy burn.

The Trojans leave Thrace because plants bleed the blood of a Trojan, Polydorus, who tells them to move on from this polluted place. One interesting thing to note, is that Aeneas relates the treachery of the Thracians in killing Polydorus and taking his gold once they sensed that the Greeks would win and he says that in doing so, they “broke all human laws” (in the Fagles rendering). It seems more like they broke one law, but Aeneas is a very moral man. Following the law is important to him, and it would appear that he wishes to live in a world where human law means something real, instead of something like naked or raw force or nature being that which is actually real, though it is often covered over by convention.

After consulting with the priestess at Delos, Aeneas consults with his captains, especially his father, Anchises, who thinks he knows the ancestral location that the priestess has in mind, and so they set out for Crete. It turns out that there are abandoned buildings in Crete, so it looks ready made for them to inhabit–like a divine gift. Again, Aeneas’ first task is to start building walls; many men get married; and then Aeneas turns to drafting laws. If all goes well, the walls will keep out the nasty people who break human laws and the Trojans will happily submit to the wise laws of their founder. However, this is not to be either as a plague strikes the Trojans. Fate acts quickly and forcefully. Why was this the best way to tell the Trojans to move on? Why not the gentler way of before? One of my unanswered questions from this section is: why don’t the gods make it clearer to Aeneas earlier, where he needed to go? Why permit the false starts? Is there something that they learn from these experiences? Are they supposed to learn that fate, while iron, is inscrutable without constantly checking with the gods?

However this may be, they are told by the household gods who were contacted by Apollo that they need to go to Italy. Interestingly, Anchises relates that he didn’t listen to Cassandra when she pointed this very thing out, but she wasn’t believed. Her prophecies were measured by the expectations of unassisted human reason, which found the prophecy to be unlikely. In terms of my question above, it seems important to pay attention to when Aeneas and the Trojans rely on reason and when they rely on revelation and why. This is an especially interesting question because Virgil outlined the injustice and cruelty of the gods in the opening lines.

* Strophades, Actian, and Buthrotum

Aeneas and his men see apparently unguarded cattle but then have to confront a fleet of Harpies. After some combat, the Harpy Celaeno speaks: “take what I say to heart and stamp it in your minds” and goes on to mention generally bad news: there will come a day they gnaw on platters. As an aside, I’m curious if there is anything significant in the word order, namely, are our hearts or our minds more determinative in how we come to a decision or hold onto a conviction? The harpy lists the heart first…

Actian features games and a trophy is mounted with the spoils of the first Greek that Aeneas killed in book 2 when he was disguised with Greek gear.In Buthrotum, we see Hector’s wife Andromache. Now to be clear, the reader experiences the compressed narration as a couple of days, but the ground we have covered so far must actually be years, for we learn that Andromache was forced to be the bride of Achilles’ aggressive son Pyrrhus; she has born him a son and been passed on to another man. Pyrrhus by the way, was killed at his father’s altar by Orestes, just as he killed Priam at an altar. Is this a way in which Virgil is suggesting that those who live a might makes right kind of life will indeed be dealt poetic justice in this life? Or, is this what Aeneas thinks?

However that might be, Buthrotum is a miniature Troy. Andromache spends her days longing for Hector. There is something kind of eerie or sad in seeing this city. It is like Disneyland but worse. It is a return to tradition, and an attempt to recreate the past, except that it can never house the things from the past that they really want: the people. We cannot return; the only way out is through.Helenus, the prophet king of this mini-Troy offers an extremely detailed account of what Aeneas will face and what he needs to do to be successful. Suffice it to say, the Trojans cannot take the quickest route if they want to be successful. I’m reminded of a line from Xenophon’s Memorabilia:

“Hesiod too says somewhere, ‘It is easy to choose badness even in abundance; the road is smooth, and it lies very near. But immortal gods have placed sweat before virtue. The to it is long and steep and rough at first. But if one ever arrives at the peak, then the going is easy, although it was hard’” (2.1).

The Trojans will have to sweat and suffer, but the founders of Rome will make it to the peak.

However this may be, Andromache gives gifts to Iulus / Ascanius and speaks directly to him as he reminds her of her dearly departed son Astyanax–reminding us in turn of Hector’s last conversation with Andromache in the Iliad where she implores him not to fight beyond the walls.

* The Sea Journey

Anchises is now increasingly calling the shots. Just as old impotent Priam ruled over the Trojans, now impotent Anchises is functionally in charge. Is it the case that especially pious societies are more vulnerable to being ruled by the old? That priestly power can be wielded by the infirm?

By taking the longer route, Aeneas is able to pass by Charybdis in such a way as to lose no men, outdoing Odysseus. So too do they avoid losing men to Polyphemus the Cyclops. Odysseus’ carelessness toward his men is further highlighted by his having left this man Achmaenides behind, who now begs for asylum aboard a Trojan vessel. The discussion with Achmaenides is a very curious episode that parallels the perfidious Sinon who helped make the plausible the fiction that the Trojan horse was a gift to Athena. In both cases, Sinon and Achmaenides claim to have been wronged by the Greeks. Strikingly, no suspicion is aroused in the Trojans! Now, it would appear that they were correct in taking him at his word, but prudence would seem to dictate the necessity of taking a little bit more caution when confronting Greeks. Perhaps Virgil means to point to the Trojan / Roman magnanimity. That even after being wronged in the maximum way possible way, they can still be gra…

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We made a small change to the format, breaking the reading into three parts and having discussions after each part. My interpretive notes are below. You should go check out William’s stack for his essay on the reading.

1) Lines 1 – 305 To take the horse or not to take the horse? Sinon’s deception and the sea-serpents.

Aeneas tells the Carthaginians about Troy’s final hours. In his prefatory remarks, Aeneas speaks of it as a tragedy in which he plays a leading role; to play a role in a tragedy (a play) is to speak lines written by someone else, which is to say, the description emphasizes the fated character of Aeneas’ life. However this may be, Aeneas embarks on his story, and in this way, takes on the role of Virgil, just as Odysseus took on the role of Homer in books 9 – 12 of the Odyssey.

The Greeks have sailed away—though not too far away—and have left behind a massive wooden horse as a gift for Pallas Athena (not for the Trojans as is sometimes popularly assumed). The first Trojan to speak, Thymoetes, wants to take in the horse. The second, Capys, suspects a trap and even goes as far as to accurately describe precisely what the Greeks have in mind to do: hide men in the horse. He suggests that they destroy it. Laocoon, a priest of Neptune (mentioned in Book Three of the Iliad), lends his voice to those in opposition to taking the horse: “Whatever it is, I fear the Greeks, especially bearing gifts.” He throws a spear into the horse and it makes “echoing groans” which must mean that it is hollow and thus may contain enemy combatants. (an interesting Virgilian omission from the Homeric account presented by Odysseus is Helen testing the resolve of the men inside by calling out to them as if their wives were calling)

Before further deliberation can take place, a young Greek named Sinon comes into view, ready with a treacherous story. Sinon establishes his trustworthiness as a speaker by emphasizing that the Greeks, and especially Ulysses, are his bitter enemy. His kinsman who opposed going to Troy was killed by Ulysses. Sinon wants revenge against the Greeks. Because of this, he says that if the Trojans were to kill him, they would be benefitting the Greeks, not themselves. Sinon further establishes his credibility by saying that Ulysses viciously tried to sacrifice him, to bring about a safe voyage home; however, he managed to get away at the last moment. This part of the speech also points to the Greeks being serious enough about leaving that they would sacrifice one of their own. Throughout his speech, he characterizes Ulysses as functionally in charge of the Greeks—not Agamemnon.

Priam frees Sinon who explains that the massive horse is to appease Pallas, who is angry at Ulysses for stealing her image out of a Trojan temple. Finally, Sinon relies on the pious character of the Trojans, telling them that the horse is sacred, and any violation of it would lead to disaster. And, this last statement is miraculously and spectacularly confirmed when serpents emerge and kill Laocoon and his children for Laocoon’s audacity to test the horse. Virgil seems to present Fate as heavy-handed or immediately effectual. There is no leaving it up to chance whether or not the Trojans would be convinced by Sinon’s words; there isn’t a subtle goddess taking away the wits of the Trojans, but an overwhelming apparently divine intervention which admits of no ambiguity. Usually omens admit of ambiguity…think of Penelope’s dream. It had a kind of clear-ish meaning where one could plausibly read it as Odysseus coming home to kill the suitors, but a closer look reveals that Penelope might at least have mixed feelings (she is sad to see geese killed in the dream, etc).Should the Trojans have admitted the horse? Even if they granted that the horse ought not to be disturbed in light of the serpents, wouldn’t prudence dictate that they send a vessel of some kind to investigate Tenedos? It would appear that their hopes for the cessation of the war and fear of the gods combined to blot out such prudential considerations from their minds.

2) Lines 305 – 727 The Greeks brutally destroy Troy, taking no prisoners.

It is incredible how effective Virgil’s presentation of the Greeks is at making me morally despise them. I was about to start this section with a sentence like, “That b*****d Sinon opens the womb of the horse…” We are meant to see the Greeks as vicious, rapacious, predatory, and willing to lie about the gravest matters. Virgil really pushes us to see things from the Trojan point of reference; I don’t think in my reading of Homer that I ever felt this same kind of morally charged affect.

An interesting line that is related to this comes at 487 when Aeneas kills a few Greeks and dons part of their gear in order to deceive the Greeks: “Call it cunning or courage: who would ask in war?” If one were to apply this dictum equally to the Greeks…well, then it doesn’t make as much sense to moralize about how they approach the war. After all, Troy is an imperial city! (in the Iliad, we learn that the Greeks overcame 23 of their cities, and many foreigners come to assist the Trojans.) Strikingly, Aeneas is punished for doing this, as some Trojans wind up throwing spears at him. It almost like Aeneas is in this strange world where he is punished for being slightly immoral, while the Greeks are able to light the Trojan altars on fire without consequence. At any rate, a war ravaged ghost of Hector appears to Aeneas in a dream and tells him to escape Troy. The battle cannot be won, but a new city can be founded. Hector is exceedingly clear; again, there is no room for misinterpretation. Nevertheless, Aeneas doesn’t act on Hector’s advice. Instead, he thinks to himself: “what a noble thing it is to die in arms.” His initial plan, then, is to kill as many Greeks as he can before he falls.As an aside, it is remarkable that Aeneas’ piety never falters. Even as he says, “The gods who shored our empire up have left us, all have deserted their altars and their shrines” (440 – 441) he is also dead set on making sure that the hearth gods are well attended to (892 – 893).

The most disturbing episode in this section is when Achilles’ son Pyrrhus / Neoptolemus kills Priam’s fleeing son, Polites, right in front of him. Priam says that Achilles was much more honorable than his son. Pyrrhus replies that Priam can have the pleasure himself of reporting that message to Achilles in the underworld. Before this, Hecuba had tried to get Priam to go to the altar—presumably with the hope that the Greeks would respect the altar and not wish to pollute it. That hope makes it all the more impious or outrageous when Pyrrhus “drags the old man straight to the altar” and buries his sword deep in his flank. Subsequently the head is severed from the body. And this, after Priam impotently threw a spear at him. So we see the strong do what he wills and the weak suffer what he must. We’ll have to bear these scenes in mind when we see how the Trojans deal with subsequent enemies.

3) Lines 728 – 998 Venus steers Aeneas toward his family; all but Creusa escape

I found Venus’ speech to Aeneas to be perhaps the most striking part of the reading. Aeneas briefly considers punishing Helen for her role in the destruction of Troy. Venus turns her son’s attention to his family, whom Venus claims she has protected. She also tells Aeneas where all of the blame lies:Think: it’s not that beauty, Helen, you should hate.

Not even Paris, the man that you should blame, no,

It’s the gods, the ruthless gods who are tearing down

The wealth of Troy, her toppling towers.This is a kind of inversion of what Zeus says in Book One of the Odyssey, where he says that mortals often blame their misery on the gods rather than on their own foolishness. Here it is the gods alone who bear the blame. I wonder if Aeneas does not fully accept this; otherwise, he wouldn’t include such morally charged descri…

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