Young Heretics
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Young Heretics
The classical education you never knew you were missing. Join scholar and writer Spencer Klavan on a tour through the great works of the West. In a world gone mad, we're not alone: the great men and women who went before us have wisdom to guide us. With their help, we can recover truth, beauty, and...
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304 episodi
Aeneas Gets a Hot Latina Baddie
Today on Young Heretics: a violent and unjust seizure of indigenous land!!! At least, according to Juno and the Furies, goddesses of retribution and b...
THE PROPHECY HAS BEEN FULFILLED
...And also, pizza. Kind of. This might be one of the coolest parts of Virgil ever, and even though I’ve been reading the Aeneid since high school, I...
Make Love, Not War
And now for something completely different. The Odyssey portion of our tour is over, and the Iliad portion will now begin. But wait! Wasn't the Iliad...
Augustus to Virgil: Are you Mad at Me? 🥺
It's time we finally talked about the elephant in the room: does Virgil actually like Augustus? Or is he just pretending? This doesn't seem to have be...
Is There Life Out There?
Everyone, everywhere, thinks about the afterlife. If you think you don't, you're wrong: you do. Because what you believe about life after death is an...
Do You Even Prophesy, Bro?
One of the West's great recurring characters, the Sibyl of Cumae, takes center stage today. Deranged, holy, prophetic, and apparently totally jacked,...
ARE YOU NOT ENTERTAINED???
If, like me, you're still sore about what they did to the Gladiator franchise, let this episode be part of your healing journey. It's certainly part o...
I Will Go Down with This Ship
There are some indelible scenes inscribed forever into the psyche of the West, and the death of Dido is one of them. When William Congreve wrote that...
Once in Royal David's City, ft. Doron Spielman
Major Doron Spielman has dedicated much of his life to excavating the City of David, the ancient archaeological site just outside modern Jerusalem whi...
Dido and Aeneas need Couples Therapy
I'm not saying that the catastrophe in Carthage could have been avoided. I'm just saying, everyone--the two main characters especially--behaved very b...
Mean Girls
This is it: Book 4 of the Aeneid. The storm of love that's been brewing now breaks into full force. Two human sisters start flirting with disaster whi...
An Odyssey without an Ithaca
Virgil, master of the setup, is now laying the groundwork for some of the Aeneid's major setpieces: the love affair with Dido, the voyage into the und...
Galileo: The Elon Musk of the Renaissance? Ft. Dr. Brian Keating
My friend Dr. Brian Keating, leading cosmologist and all-around mensch, joins me to discuss one of the most brilliant, complicated, and misunderstood...
Who Says You Can't Go Home? Virgil Does.
It's time to embark on Book III of the Aeneid, and with it a mini-Odyssey. But there's a catch: Odysseus had home waiting for him at the end of all hi...
The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God, ft. Justin Brierley
I'm back from Hungary, where the topic of the day was the future of faith in the West, without which it seems unlikely we'll survive. But are we on th...
Israel and Civilization, ft. Josh Hammer
This is a podcast about the West, which means Athens and Jerusalem. Without the second part of that equation you don't get the key notion of the "Imag...
The One That Got Away: Creusa, Aeneas' AI Girlfriend
Speaking just for myself, I'm still not over Creusa. Aeneas' first wife, the woman who bore the future forefather of Rome's emperors, must stay behind...
Tech and the Future of the Family, ft. Jon Askonas
We will not live in the pod. We will not eat the fake meat. We will not perform robot necromancy. But then...what should we do? With the Right in poli...
After the End
When we first met Aeneas, he wished he could have died at Troy. Today, we find out why. By all accounts, the honorable thing to do would have been to...
Snakes on the Plain
Hey look, it's some Greeks! Bearing gifts! What could possibly go wrong?
Today the Trojans will find out the answer to that very question, which...
That's the Power of Love
Don't take money...don't take fame...just takes a primordial deity whose powers of creation and destruction supervised the origins of the world, who i...
TarSHEESH
Wail, O Tyre and...where now? Just where WAS Jonah going when he got re-routed via fish? The possibilities aren't limitless, exactly, but there sure a...
They Say All's Fair
It's Aeneas and Dido: A Tale of Love and War. As we get into the first major episodes of Aeneas' journey, we embark upon an intricate composition of w...
More than a Woman: Dido and Aeneas's Epic Love Affair
Who's that dime walking down the temple corridor? Is it Juno? Venus? Diana? Cleopatra? No, it's Dido, queen of Carthage and warrior princess of Tyre....
C.S. Lewis's Lost Aeneid
When I tell you my finger smashed the "order now" button--apparently there's a fragmentary translation of the Aeneid by C.S. Lewis that he was working...
I'm In Danger: Ralph Wiggum versus the Phoenicians
Of all the gin joints on all the shores of the Mediterranean, Aeneas had to wash up onto this one. He doesn't know it yet, but this is Carthage: the h...
The Three Little Words no One Can Resist
If you've ever wanted to make the ladies or the fellas swoon with just three little words, now is your chance. I'm talking, of course, about the words...
Aeneas: the Frodo of Epic Poetry
Aeneas really, really does not want to be in this poem. As in, he would rather be dead. That's how the Aeneid starts out: when we're introduced to our...
The All-Time Best Aeneid Translation
How many English editions of the Aeneid can we possibly need? Which one is the best one, and why? Is the C.S. Lewis version real, or just a myth? Toda...
Get in Loser, We're Reading Epic Poems
It's a new year, and it's time for a new epic. You asked, we delivered: here comes Virgil's Aeneid! BUT FIRST: while we were gone over the Christmas v...
Epic Fail: My Review of the Return
I wanted to like this movie. Really, I did. I tried to like it. But modern realism is just totally unsuited to the Homeric epics and like, also...mayb...
The Inklings Awards for Literary Excellence
And the Inkling Award goes to...
This year, for the first of what I hope will be many times, I'm announcing my awards for the best books I read...
Odysseus: Where Is He Now?
"I cannot rest from travel," says Odysseus in Alfred, Lord Tennyson's Ulysses. But wasn't resting from travel...kind of the whole point? Come to think...
It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Advent
Hey you! Yeah, you!! PUT DOWN THAT NAT KING COLE CHRISTMAS ALBUM. It's not time yet!! Technically, it won't even be time on December 1, which is the b...
The Suitors Get Theirs: The End of the Odyssey
It's payback time. Odysseus at last throws off his disguise and wages holy war on the men who tore up his house and home for ten years, in what is sti...
What I Learned about Lord of the Rings by Inventing a Language
Confession: for a long time I never understood why Tolkien had to make up a language to go with The Lord of the Rings. It felt a little bit like tryin...
The Sins of the Father: How Odysseus got his Name
Odysseus' journey isn't over when he reaches Ithaca's shores. It won't be fully over until he takes back his rightful place at the head of his househo...
How to Learn Old English (feat. Colin Gorrie)
My guest today is someone who I believe, without exaggeration, will help transform the way people learn ancient languages for years to come. While our...
This One's For the Boys: Ithaca's Favorite Dog
We've met the ladies at the end of Odysseus' journey--though not, of course, the most important one. But now it's time for the main man to get re-acqu...
Word and Tomato Salad (Words, Words, Words 30)
If tomatoes are a fruit, why can't you put them in a fruit salad? Somewhat more importantly, did you know cashews aren't nuts? And most importantly of...