Panic, stress and fear reigns among the intellectual elite with a masters in classical literature. They have found out that people with conservative views are not only reading classical literature, but they are also trying to embody its spirit in life. Our progressive intellectual overlords are not pleased with this. Young men and women reading about traditional values like virtue, about empires dying through mass immigration and the inherent flaws of multiculturalism? This is not what they want. You might think, why does reading books from two thousand years ago matters? My goal is to not only convince you that this matters, but to actively get you to engage with the greatest and wisest men the world has ever known.

What Can You Find In The Past?

I want to start off with a personal story on how I got introduced to Roman & Greek literature. As a young man, I wanted to master the art of rhetoric. From my school days, I remembered that the Greeks had written volumes on how to do this. Why not start there I thought? So I purchased the book ‘selected speeches’ from the Athenian rhetorician; Demosthenes. I was blown away. Not because it taught me the art of Rhetoric. It turned out that the young Athenian democracy in the 4th century BC had exactly the same problems as our European democracies have now. Demosthenes argued that speakers played to the whims of the voters, that foreign money was diluting the democratic process and that in a democracy, the ignorant are the majority and not the minority. Progress seemed to be non-existent when we were are talking about the fundamental problems in our democracies.

I was intrigued and dived deeper. I started reading more books written by Roman & Greek authors. By reading a poem of Juvenal on why the common man doesn’t care about the fate of a nation when he is distracted by bread and games. I read Vegetius who was critical of the hiring of foreign barbarian mercenaries within the once so mighty Roman legions, he claimed this lead to the weakening of this former great military institution. (Angela Merkel wants to do the same these days) I learned that Emperor Augustus wanted to stop degeneracy within his empire by encouraging marriage and the forming of a family. Augustus also banned adultery which he saw as a threat to the society. I read the stories of men who chose to not just serve themselves by indulging every impulse, they chose to learn how to restrain their impulses and how to serve a higher purpose. Most importantly, voices from the past explained to me why barbarians with inferior cultures should be kept at bay and not be allowed within our borders. They argued that this would be detrimental to our wealth, security and future.

Why Does This Matter?

As a young man who grew up in a large city, I had learned that I should live life to please my impulses, that all were equal and that we should welcome any foreigner who wants to come and live here. When I watched TV, read the paper or talked to the people around me, these views were only reaffirmed. Yet these authors of the past warned me of this kind of behaviours. Juvenal’s critiques rang familiar when you live close by a stadium built to mirror the colosseum, especially when all people around you only seem to care about the games. Demosthenes showed me that democracy is full of flaws and Augustus made me understand that moral decay is a threat to the stability of the nation. All these men did not care about political correctness, some of these men died because they remained true to the ideals they held sacred. They did not bow down to the popular whims of their countrymen, or to foreign barbarians who came to plunder and rape.

These books carry voices from the past matter. They show that progress is merely a relative concept. That the struggles which we endure, have been endured many times before. The mistakes that we make have been made before. In a time where our way of life and our people seem to face existential threats, classical literature offers us lessons to be learned on how to tackle these issues. More importantly, they teach us which road led to ruin. The progressive Intellectual establishment does not want you to learn these lessons, they want you at the colosseum distracted from everything. They want you to serve yourself, to be a degenerate and to not think of any silly higher goal like virtue, people or nation. Knowledge breaks the chains that bind us. Let me tell you, my friends, we are in chains. Release yourself! Classical literature is not just a hobby we use to entertain ourselves, it is a hammer we can use to smash our enemies. The elites know this, when will you know?