It's time for the podcast introduction for this

The Rome journey.

Yeah.

So David I was in Rome.

When in Rome?

I've been so fortunate.

I've been asked for the past few years to go to Rome twice per year, once each semester to teach a capstone course in the humanities

for a Catholic university here in North Dakota, the University of Mary, which is under the direction

of an enlightened monseigner, James Shay, and he asked me if I do this, of course, I've been

thrilled.

It's not Jefferson's Paris.

But it is the mothership of Catholic Christianity and one of the greatest art centers in the world and I get to take my students to places that they otherwise wouldn't go.

So we've gone to Mussolini sites, we go to Enlightenment sites, we go to Classical sites, Hadrian's Tivoli.

You know, it's, the reason that I think it's so important, David,

is that it's, and you've heard it, and the shows in the last couple of years,

it's deepened my understanding of Jefferson because the classics were

central to him in a way that they no longer are to our culture. And so I studied all these things

30 years ago at Oxford and the University of Minnesota and then

the University of Colorado, etc. But now here in my older time I've had this chance to go back

to read these great texts again, you know, Plutarch, Plato, Caesar, Cicero, Tacitus,

Livvy, Polybius.

You had to make a real mad dash to the barn to pick up your life of Julius Caesar.

...