Discipline of the study of the Greeks and Romans turns out is filled with people who think the

Greeks or Romans are awful and not worth emulating at all and problematic and patriarchal and you know like stand for everything that's

bad in society and so by the time I I'm like locked in so far that I have a tenure track job and I've like apparently committed my life to this.

I realize that the whole discipline wants to self-destruct.

Let's go.

Welcome to Citizen.

We got a special guest today Dr. Alex Petkiss. We were just

talking about I guess a little bit about your background being having a PhD in classics and what that entails.

We'll get to that in a minute.

But first let's start with you.

Where did you grow up? I grew up in Houston Texas yeah

went to a typical kind of middle you know middle class public school education

uh...

sort of sort of unremarkable childhood probably

a lot of average american components in that.

Like what do you mean?

Well, you know, I, I got, I had a public school education, which is a, you know, I think a kind of bad education in retrospect I hated it I

slept through much of my high school years failing classes and drooling on textbooks. So it's odd I ended

up being an academic. My parents were liberals. They had worked in the in Washington for a while,

before coming back to a nest in Texas.

And so we had that, and then I was raised in the Orthodox Church, which is a pretty hardcore church, and so in some I was very confused.

Like I got all these mixed signals from these various places that authority figures are coming from.

...