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Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness Podcast.

Well, ancient Greece and Rome have a heavy influence on the idea of manhood we promote on the art of manliness.

In fact, this classical conception of manliness was how much of the West defined manhood up until about the middle of the 20th century.

For example, if you were to ask a man living in 1920 what manliness meant, he'd probably give you roughly the same answer as a Greek or Roman man living in 2000 years ago.

My guest on the podcast today is a classical scholar who has spent time thinking and writing about Greek and Roman notions of manliness.

His name is Ted Linden. I head to the podcast a while back ago to discuss his book Soldiers and Ghosts, which was about battle and antiquity.

That was episode number 231 if you want to check that out.

Well, today on the show Ted goes into detail how the Greeks and the Romans defined manliness.

We begin with the Greeks and how the Homeric epics, particularly the Iliad, served as their Bible and how to be a man and how Achilles and Odysseus were held as differing models of manhood.

Ted then explains how the Athenian philosophers, like Plato and Aristotle, tried to tame the Bronze Age notion of manliness by making self-control an important element of being a man.

We then shift gears to the Romans and discuss how they borrowed elements of Greek manliness to shape their own culture of manhood, as well as how Roman ideas and manliness differed from the Greeks.

And we end our conversation talking about why the virtue of self-control pops up in definitions of manliness not just in the West, but also Eastern cultures like in Japan or China, and also how we're living in an age of self-control.

If you want to check out the show notes at the shows over where you find links to resources and build deeper in this topic, just go to aum.is slashbeertus.

It's VRTUS. It's manliness and Latin.

Ted Linden, welcome back to the show. Delighted to be here.

So we had you on the show about, I think a year ago, to talk about your book, Soldiers in Ghosts about the history of battle and classical antiquity and Greece and Rome.

And when we were talking after the show was over, we were talking about the website, the art of manliness and kind of what the idea of manliness that we're promoting.

I studied classics in college and that the idea of manliness, I'm kind of tapping into as a bit of the ancient Roman idea.

And then you said, well, I study that. That's what I do that. That's what I think about. And I write about and research about.

So after I heard that, I said, I got to have you back on so we can dig deeper into classical notions of manliness.

So I think I'd be good to start off with the ancient Greeks because they were before the Romans.

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