The

The Americans have often looked at their founding fathers as demigods.

Sometimes we see them as almost mythical figures and have made statues and memorials in their name,

forgetting that they were real humans.

We hear tall tales of George Washington chopping down a cherry tree and turn them into paragon's

of virtue, worthy of imitation.

Well, the truth is that they were great men, brilliant men, exceptional men, but also men, flesh and blood, and as flawed as the rest of us.

And one thing that has always struck me about them is the fact that they had their own heroes.

Many Americans look at the founders as heroes, but they had their own heroes, the figures of ancient Greece and Rome.

And just as Americans have revered

Washington, Franklin, and Jefferson, Washington, Franklin, and Jefferson revered Pericles,

Plato, Cicero, and Marcus Aurelius. They studied their lives and their beliefs and learned from

their achievements and failures and patterned their lives after them. Our guest today has written a

new book about the American founders and what they learned from the ancients. His name is Jeffrey

Rosen and the book is titled The Pursuit of Happiness, How Classical Writers on Virtue

inspired the lives of the founders and Defined America. So Mr. Rosen, thanks for being on our show.

Wonderful to be here. Please call me Jeff. Thank you. Thank you. So you started writing this book

in the middle of the pandemic. So what's the story there? During the pandemic, I was struck by a few

synchronicities that led to this unusual reading project. I'd been reading

Benjamin Franklin's plan to achieve moral perfection in his 20s, where he made a list of

13 virtues, and every night we put an X mark next to the virtue where he fell short. He found

this very depressing, but he tried it for a while and thought it was a good means of self-improvement.

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