James Romm - Plato and the Tyrant

A Book with Legs

Smead Capital Management

Investing, Business, Management

4.2 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 18 August 2025

⏱️ 71 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In this episode, Cole Smead sits down with professor and author James Romm to discuss his book, “Plato and the Tyrant: The Fall of Greece's Greatest Dynasty and the Making of a Philosophic Masterpiece.” They cover a series of letters that Romm believes to unmistakably be Plato’s writing. The two discuss Plato’s encounters with a tyrannical father and son, both named Dionysius, and the legendary philosopher’s impact on the opulent city of Syracuse.

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to A Book with Legs, a podcast presented by Smead Capital Management.
0:07.9	At Smead Capital Management, we advise investors who play the long game.
0:12.3	You can learn more at Smeadcap.com or by calling your financial advisor.
0:55.6	Welcome to a book with legs podcast. I'm Cole Smead, CEO and portfolio manager here at Smead Capital Management. At our firm, we are readers and we believe in the power of books to help shape informed investors. In this podcast, we speak to great authors about their writings. The late great Charlie Munger prescribed using multiple mental models in analysis. We analyze their work through the lens of business, markets, and people. In this episode, we are going to the classics and really ancient Greece. We will add to our knowledge of Plato as we welcome James Rom to discuss his recently published book, Plato and The Tyrant, the Fall of Greece's Greatest Dynasty and the Making of a Philosophic Masterpiece.
1:02.4	Mr. Rahm is the James H. Ottawa, Jr. Professor of Classics at Bard College, an editor of the
1:08.1	Ancient Lives biography series from Yale University Press.
1:17.9	He has published a voluminous number of books on Greek and Roman history and has written essays that are regular in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Review of Books.
1:26.8	He has held the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Berklin Fellowship, and the Biography Fellowship at the Leon Levy Center of the City at University of New York.
1:27.6	I might add, he has a PhD from Princeton University
1:30.8	and a BA from Yale University.
1:33.2	Thank you for joining me today.
1:34.5	Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure.
1:36.7	This will be a lot of fun.
1:38.0	So, you know, as I just mentioned just a second ago,
1:39.9	you've written a lot of books about Greek and Roman history.
1:43.5	What caused you to want to write
1:45.2	about this particular history? I think, you know, I assume from your writing, you know,
1:49.2	you thought about this a long time of really kind of being a centerpiece for talking about Plato.
1:54.7	Yes. Well, Plato, of course, is one of the headline names from Greek antiquity.
2:02.4	He's often thought to be the founder of Western philosophy.
2:05.8	It was said by Bertrand Russell that all subsequent philosophy are footnotes to Plato.
2:11.4	Yet we know very little about him from his dialogues.
	...

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