This is CBSI in the world. I'm John Bachelors, and I welcome Victor Davis Hanson of the Hoover

Institution, a classic scholar. Victor writes of the current events in the 21st century

in the politics. However, he is trained to write of the current events in Greece and Rome

2,000, 2,500 years ago, and politics. So I take us to an interview that he had recently

a conversation about his education as a classic scholar. Victor, a very good evening to you.

You grew up on a farm in the wonderful bread basket of the solar system that would be the

San Joaquin Valley, and you had an opportunity to learn classics. How did you first discover

that you had an aptitude for classics before you went to UC Santa Cruz? What did you do

in high school about the classics? Good evening to you. Good evening. Almost nothing.

I mean, there was no Latin where I went to a rural school, and it was a very impoverished

area. I grew up mostly with Mexican-American kids, and then I only went to UC Santa Cruz

that had just opened. And my father took a compass and found that it was very close to like

160 miles, and we could all three. I had two brothers, and one was there, and get all three

go there and save money if we lived off campus together. But then when I took a Western

civilization class, I had a very gifted classics professor from Yale and John Lynch, and he

had formed a, was forming a new classics program at this new university, and they were all

Ivy Lake trained young enthusiastic classisists, and he said to me at the end of my first year,

you write well, and you're good in these translation classes, but you don't know any language

as I said, well I'm too old. I just turned 18, and he said, well you can go to Yale for

summer school. It's all graduate students in their 20s and 30s, but you'll be okay. So it

was a miserable summer in New Haven, but I did learn Greek very quickly, and then I came

back and took a lot, and then I had taken advanced placement courses. I had no core requirements,

...