Hello and welcome to the history of Japan podcast, episode 626, Flowering Fortunes, Part 1.

Is success in life a matter of luck or skill? Does fortune in fact favor the bold, or is it a fickle

mistress whose whims are to put it mildly as changeable as the whims of fate? It's a question

as old as humanity itself. Do we write our own

fates? Is fate outside of our control? And there are as many different answers as there have

been people trying to grapple with the question. In my experience, it's a question many people

turn to history to grapple with, and in fact, arguably, one of the origins of history as a discipline

was as a way for the ambitious to understand and mold their ambition.

A big part of the enduring popularity, for example, of the Greco-Roman philosopher Plutarch

and his parallel lives of Greeks and Romans, is arguably that the stories of the great men he profiled

provided a sort of template for what greatness even was and how to achieve it. Certainly, I recall

reading once about a young kid named Napoleon Bonaparte, who was quite enamored of Plutarch's

views on Julius Caesar and treated them as a roadmap for his own ambition.

Can't quite remember how that one turned out, but I'm sure it was fine.

Even in our modern day, I've heard great hay made from the fact that, say, Mark Zuckerberg

has found himself quite enamored of Augustus Caesar as a model for ambition and greatness,

which, you know, is kind of problematic given the whole

overthrowing the republic thing, but I digress. In the East, one could argue the entire

Confucian historical tradition originated, at least in part, out of a desire to provide

guidance for ambition. Confucian philosophy traditionally equates personal morality with political morality, good people

who channel their ambition to virtue make for good rulers and create good societies.

The earliest Confucian histories, such as Sima Qian's shirji, make the comparison fairly explicit.

...