Hello, hello, welcome back to Young Heretics for Episode 3.

This is the show that brings you Western culture without the culture wars,

where we shrug off identity politics and radical critical theory and all that nonsense and just get down to what makes the West.

Great, this is an exciting episode. I'm really excited to do this episode because it's our first guest.

We have an honorary heretic. We're going to have guests from time to time on this show.

I will still be doing the classic, lovable Spencer Clayvin monologues,

but we will also have from time to time experts in other areas because obviously there are a vast amount of stuff

in Western literature and history that I am not an expert in at all.

And so we're going to call in all sorts of other experts from around town.

Our first honorary heretic is, I'm really excited about this, it is very strouse.

Who is many things, he's a professor of Roman history, but he also writes generally, more generally,

about ancient history and Roman history in books that I really love.

You should definitely check them out if you haven't checked them out yet.

His latest one is called Ten Seasurs, it's really excellent.

And one of the things that Barry does really well that is actually quite,

quite hard to do is he makes ancient history as exciting as it actually is.

The funny thing about this stuff is there's all this just blood and gore and sex and intrigue

that goes on in the ancient world.

And because it can be hard to really get down at the facts of what happens,

it can be difficult then to pull out of all of those many different ancient sources,

pull out an exciting but true narrative that really gets it what's so cool about all of these stories.

Barry has great at that and he's also great at applying some of the lessons that he

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