Hey, hey, welcome back to Young Heretics, the last best hope of the West.

This is where we bring you Western culture without all of the other crap that is raging outside,

that all the identity politics and all that nonsense.

And today we are focusing on Escalus, the Greek Tragedian Escalus, and his play The Persians.

This is the earliest, extant European dramas, the earliest drama from Europe that comes down to us.

It's fantastic play, tremendously rich. I actually got the idea to do this episode because I was on

John Miller's show over at National Review. He has a show called The Great Books Podcast,

and we did an episode on Persians, which I thought came out really well. It's not out yet,

but when it's out, I'll let you know you should totally go and listen to it. But it was another one

of those things where we were talking about this play, and I just thought there's so much here,

we can do a Young Heretics deep dive. And then I went to sort of make my notes for that deep dive,

and I was like, actually, there's more here than just one episode. There's just so much here.

So what we're going to do here is we're going to do a series of episodes, and it's not going to be,

you know, don't worry, we're not going to do Persians every week for the next 12 weeks,

but I'm going to come back to this play kind of again and again, and just return time after time,

and emphasize different themes each time. It's kind of like holding the thing up to the light

in different ways, and eventually we can release the whole thing as just one big giant,

small to sport, but each episode will kind of visit a different theme, because I just think that

this play is so profound and so deep, and there's also a lot that we have to talk about to kind of

get into tragedy and what tragedy is. And in fact, I think it was last week that I finished up

by talking about the tragic mindset, right? I was noting that we kind of don't understand

the tragic mindset as much as we should, the truly tragic mindset in America and in modernity.

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