transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:05] Scott here with another episode of the History Unplugged Podcast. Of the estimated 1,500 plays written in Ancient Greece, only 33 complete works survive today. The rest were lost because medieval scribes deemed lowbrow comedies and mass entertainment unworthy of the laborious process of translating them to Latin, or buying the expensive parchment during the transition from papyrus to durable vellum, and wanted to prioritize tragedies in Christian-compatible text over Menander's experimental works about shape-shifting heroes. The only reason we know anything about hundreds of these vanished plays is because of Joannes Stobaeus. He was a 5th century Byzantine who compiled the Anthologion, a four-volume anthology of excerpts from over 500 Greek authors, compiled to educate his son Septimus. This book preserves bite-sized quotations that warn good people don't always prosper, power favors the shameless, and politics rarely rewards the jest. Today's guest is James Romm, author of Since You're Mortal, Life Lessons from the Lost Greek Plays. We discuss how Stobaeus reveals lost works, like Sophocles' Achilles' Lovers, which features shape-shifting and humanized heroes that are far more experimental than surviving plays, why some of the lost plays may have deserved to disappear forever, sort of like VHS copies of B-movies like Deathbed, The Bed That Eats, that are rotting away on thrift store shelves and haven't been transferred to HD format, and how Romm became the first scholar to translate many of these fragments as poetry for English-language readers. Hope you enjoy this discussion with James Romm. And one more thing before we get started with this episode, a quick break for word from our sponsors. You translated many fragments of Greek poetry from the Anthologion that were completely inaccessible to non-Greek readers for 1600 years. And we're going to talk about what those fragments are, what the process was like of translating them, what we have gained from understanding the summaries of Lost Works. But before we get into all that, I think at the top of the show, it's worth taking a moment to appreciate how hard it is to do this, to take Lost Works and transfer them to another medium. When people write about monks in the Middle Ages who are translating Greek and Roman works into Latin, a lot of the criticism is that they picked and chose and they kept some works like Boethius' Logic, but they threw away Greek drama because they were too prudish to appreciate these things. We make it sound like they had all the time in the world and could have preserved 100 percent of everything in Greek and chose not to. I think that overlooks the painstaking process of how hard this really is. Did you get a sense of that as you were translating these fragments from the Anthologion?

Speaker 2:
[02:49] Yes, I did. The people who transmitted these works from Antiquity into the Middle Ages, such that they got into our current editions at very different tastes than we do, and they made choices that we don't always concur with. They preserved the entire work of Strabo, a geographer of the Early Roman Empire, who I would say is read today by about 0.05% of the people who would read Homer or Greek tragedy or other literary works. But Strabo was immensely important because he was a geographic encyclopedia. He gave a body of knowledge to the Middle Ages that they might not have otherwise had. So the survival of works from antiquity is very quirky and arbitrary. And so the task of recovering things for a modern scholar is often looking in places where you might not have looked, you might not have thought you would ever go.

Speaker 1:
[04:02] Let's first give an overview for people who don't know much about Greek drama because it changes over the centuries and the themes that are explored are different. The ones that we have preserved are actually the older ones from the dramatic classical age, Escalus, Sophocles, Euripides. And then it's the later ones like Menander who writes comedies. We have fewer of those that survive and that's covered by the Anthologion. Let's first look at these because this can give an explanation of why some are preserved and some aren't preserved. As a crash course in the 5th century BC of the classic writers, like Stavros, Sophocles, Euripides. Can you tell me just a bit about those for people who don't know anything about them? And this can explain why these ones are usually preserved?

Speaker 2:
[04:48] Sure. So the only place in the 5th century that had a theater, the only place where theater was performed, was Athens. And the only place where plays were being written for performance was Athens, at least until the very late 5th century. So, the city of Athens had a yearly ritual called the Dionysia, Festival of Dionysus, at which they would choose three playwrights to perform four plays each on three successive days. So there were 12 plays that were put on every year and put on just once for the entire city. So, over a century that amounts to several hundred plays, of which we only have 33 surviving, and those are the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. There were many other playwrights during the 5th century. We know some of their names. We know that some of their plays were thought to be better than those of those three. Sometimes they would win the tragic crown for that year because these plays were put on in competition and the best playwright was given a laurel wreath, a laurel crown, which is where we get the term poet laureate, the poet who is given the laurels. So at some point, the plays were collected and canonized, that is, a corpus of them was created, that were sort of the official plays, and it was recognized by that time that there were three Escalosophicalism repudies who had won the most prizes and were really the greatest poets of the classical age.

Speaker 1:
[06:39] So we know that, let's say, 10 percent or so did survive, that we do have, many more didn't. Before we look at why some survive and some don't survive, how do those that did survive make it down to the point that they could be immortalized and it's hard to imagine them disappearing today? Homer, for example, after he composes his poem, there are Homeroi, people who memorize it, and then at some point a few centuries later, it does get written down. For those works from these Greek dramatists, how do their works survive over the centuries?

Speaker 2:
[07:14] That's a great question, and we'd give a lot to know how the plays made it from the very first version, that is, the actor's scripts that must have been circulated for performance into some kind of a library or collection. That we have no insight into, but someone recognized that these were exceptional works and needed to be preserved and rounded up whatever copies were available. It's similar to how Shakespeare's plays were preserved. The versions that Shakespeare produced were just for performance. He never published them in a collected works or anything like that. That happened later in time. But they were collected, they were put into libraries, they were preserved and continued to be recopied onto papyrus scrolls, which, as your listeners probably know, is the primary medium of literature in the classical world for centuries. So, all through Greek Antiquity into Roman times into the early Middle Ages, these plays were recopied onto new papyrus scrolls whenever the old ones seemed to be wearing out. And in that process, mistakes happened and scribes made errors and some passages got lost. So we have plays that survive, but the ending has been lost, or maybe the beginning has been lost because the first page, or the first section of a papyrus scroll was damaged. But 35 plays, did I say 35? I think maybe it's 34. It's not clear because some of them, they're two plays that the authorship is contested. We don't know exactly who wrote them. But in any case, 30 some odd plays were eventually canonized as the essential plays of those playwrights, the ones that everybody had to read, especially school children who were being taught Greek in the classrooms of Byzantium in the early Middle Ages. And those plays, especially the classroom plays, were the ones that eventually got copied onto vellums, onto animal skin pages of books. The modern notion of a book had already emerged at this time. And those are the plays that survive to this day.

Speaker 1:
[09:50] The playwright Menander, who's writing in the 4th century, early 3rd century, or late 3rd century, I get my BCs backwards when I'm trying to think what's early, what's late. He writes comedies instead. And this is a new period of what are the popular plays in the Greek world. They're no longer dramas with moral themes that become the canon you mentioned. The comedies are focused on entertainment. And much fewer of these particular plays survive. So it's hard to know what does and doesn't survive or the why of it. But as best as we can understand, why don't these later plays survive to the degree that the others that make up the canon do survive?

Speaker 2:
[10:36] So that's a question that gets into Greek history a little bit. The Classical Age, the age of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides up until the middle of the fifth century and the middle of the fourth century BC were a time when the Greek city-state was the primary political and social unit of the Greek world. And the city-state had its own dynamic, its own cultural landscape. And the Byzantines, the people who were preserving these plays and eventually getting them into books, thought of the Classical Age as the sine qua non of Greek culture. That was the essence of ancient Greek civilization. What happened after in the time of Menander, as you say, the late fourth century, is a very different cultural milieu called the Hellenistic Greek world, the world that was ushered in by the conquest of Alexander the Great. When Greece became essentially a unified country or a province of a great empire, the city-state ceased to be so important as a unit. Drama came to play a very different function because it wasn't addressing a single citizenry, it was addressing the Greeks all across the civilized world. So that era did not seem to the Byzantines to be as central or as important for school children or for those getting an education or for adult readers. It was a classical age that really mattered. And so they kept going back to those three great playwrights of the fifth century. Menander got shunted to one side.

Speaker 1:
[12:27] Yeah. And I wonder if because of the spread of the Greek language, that would also, let's say, water down the type of works that would be accessible to a mass audience. So during the classical period in the fifth century BC, Greek is isolated mostly to the Greek Peninsula and the different Greek colonies in the Mediterranean, the Pontic Coast, etc. But after Alexander, Greek is everywhere. It's all the way out to Central Asia. So no longer like Herodotus, he asked to bring along a translator when he's going to Egypt. Now, Greek will get you very far. And I wonder, I don't know if this makes for the push for mass appeal the way that writing something in English in 1500 would be much more parochial, and Shakespeare is writing for his island people. Now, if you have something in English, it can be spread around the world, but it's homogenized entertainment like Transformers. I might be reaching here, but is there anything to that?

Speaker 2:
[13:24] Yes, there is something to that. And the dialect of Greek, the style of Greek that emerged in the Hellenistic world is called Koine, which is a Greek word that means common, the common dialect, because, as you say, it's homogenous all across three continents in which the Greek language was spoken. And as some of your listeners know, Koine is also the dialect in which the Bible is written, the New Testament, because Greek was being spoken on the shores of the Levant in that time, and the apostles all wrote in Greek. But it was a Koine Greek, very different than the classical Greek that had preceded it, which again was canonized as sort of the great style, the great dialect of the Greek language.

Speaker 1:
[14:17] So if we jump forward, we now arrive in the 5th century AD to Joannes Stobaeus. He's combining a huge anthology, it's called the Anthologion, the work of anthology basically. He wants to give a moral education for his son, so he gathers excerpts from over 500 Greek authors to do so. The distance in time from him to one of these authors originally composed them is somewhere between today and Chancer, or maybe even farther back today in the Norman Conquest of England, so it's very far back even though he feels a common affinity with that culture because he's compiling this information. Why does he do this? What is his purpose of assembling this and why does he choose the authors that he chooses?

Speaker 2:
[15:02] So Stobaeus was a man of the Balkans, the city Stobae is in the Balkans, so he's already well outside of the Southern Greek world where Athens is located. He's kind of in the sticks and he's also far removed from Rome, which at the time is the center of Western civilization. But in his provincial backwater, you might call it, he decided to give his son, a man named Septimius, a great classical education, and expose him to the best of ancient Greek literature, literature that, as you say, goes back almost a millennium from the time that he lived. So he compiled a vast work, you could call it the anthology, or some people just refer to it by his name as Stobaeus, in which he presented his son with moral lessons taken from the great literature of Greek antiquity. He used passages from poetry, he used passages from prose, he incorporated huge stretches of philosophy, Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, some of the thinkers that are still studied today. And he incorporated fragments from Greek tragedy and comedy because the quotes that he found in those plays summarized or encapsulated for him the kind of moral wisdom that he wanted to pass on to his son.

Speaker 1:
[16:39] And this is where it gets really frustrating because he starts making all these references, some of the works are known, but then he's making all sorts of references to works that if were not for Stobaeus, we wouldn't even know these existed. And these are works by really famous authors and we didn't even know these existed until Stobaeus came out and did them. And before looking at these, I wonder, what do you make of what was available? If he's in Constantinople, are there these works, they still survive, these Epirvites plays, they're still somewhere in a papyrus work, in a research library, maybe they're available in the market somehow, but in a century or two, they're going to disintegrate or be gone, or what do we make of these things that still exist during his time, but they don't exist afterwards and they don't survive long enough to get copied down?

Speaker 2:
[17:33] Yeah, it's a mystery as to what sort of resource he had, what kind of library or collection he was using to find all these passages. He must have had a big book collection himself, or else had access to a really huge public library. He seems to have had access to hundreds of plays, far more than are preserved today, and that's where I come in. That's my project was to find the best passages from the lost plays, the plays that we can't access by going to our libraries or ordering books from Amazon. We could never be exposed to these ideas, these very witty passages if someone, i.e. me, didn't find a way to get them into print.

Speaker 1:
[18:29] To give a sense of what is available in there, what are some of the works that are featured here? And maybe we only have parts of them in fragment form, but what are some of the main ones?

Speaker 2:
[18:39] So my book contains a lot of Escalus, Sophocles, and Euripides, and Menander, as well as a bunch of names that very few of your listeners have ever come across. People like Antiphanes, Ion, Alexis, Philatyrus. And a lot of them are anonymous because Stobaeus, for one reason or another, didn't bother to record the name of the author that he was quoting. And so it's a mélange. It's some great names and some very minor ones, and some that have no name at all.

Speaker 1:
[19:22] Hey, everyone, Scott here. We're going to take a short break for a word from our sponsors. There are some there that it really makes you wonder a what if of who are people that are incredibly influential in the past, but we just simply don't know anything about them because it wasn't recorded. One was Archytas of Tarentum. He's a friend of Plato and he wrote political treatises. Is there a sense of what was lost here? Is it like finding out that Thomas Jefferson had a best friend we know nothing about who wrote equally important works as Thomas Jefferson about constitutional liberty, but we just have no idea because everything he wrote is gone or is that exaggerating it?

Speaker 2:
[20:04] Well, it is exaggerating a little bit maybe. I mean, the Byzantines who preserved Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, they knew something of what was important and what wasn't. It's not exactly like we lost one of the founding fathers. We do have intact most of the really great works, at least in prose. We've lost a lot more of the plays, including plays that were judged in their time to be some of the best plays. Because, for some reason, the taste of the Byzantines in drama was not as reliable for modern readers as that in prose. They thought of Aeschylus' Suppliance as one of the plays that everyone should read from Aeschylus. It's not a very interesting play. And of the plays of Sophocles, they're plays that are talked about by ancient authors as being really the great plays. And those were not preserved in favor of others that maybe are not so great. So the loss that we've had in drama seems to me, it's a lot more damaging than the losses in philosophy or other prose genres.

Speaker 1:
[21:25] Right. Euripides, he writes 90 plays. He has many 19 of them total that survive in full. But the anthology has excerpts of the lost plays. What do we get from these? Tell me a bit about these excerpts from these lost plays that are featured in your book.

Speaker 2:
[21:44] Well, what I love about quotations, these nuggets that one finds in Stobaeus is that he selected them for their pithiness and their punchiness and the way that they might really hit home for his son or for other readers. The very sort of most memorable lines, as if you were taking from Shakespeare, neither a borrower nor a lender be, to thy known self be true, and thou canst be false to no man. Those nuggets from Hamlet that we think of as great pieces of moral wisdom. I then boiled down, so he's boiling down drama into a kind of very powerful reduction by taking only these great passages. Then I did a double reduction by taking only the best of his quotes, because he has hundreds and hundreds of quotes from which I've taken a small percentage, trying to focus on the ones that would really matter to a modern reader.

Speaker 1:
[22:54] What was that process like? Why did you think these particular quotations make more sense in an antique mind, but these other ones make more sense to a modern mind? How has that selection process gone about?

Speaker 2:
[23:06] Well, it varies. Some things I took because they really ring true. Some things are just really well phrased. They have a turn of phrase that is very catchy and memorable. Some things have a beautiful poetic touch, like a metaphor, that is very eye-catching. So it's a combination of style and substance, where in the best ones, the two of them come together.

Speaker 1:
[23:34] Also the translation process, it is different how poetry is rendered in English versus Greek. With the way that you hit the punch and you hit the beat in each languages, it's different. I don't know, like listening to four-four time versus three-four time waltz. With English, your Shakespeare will typically have the ten syllables, five beats, what you would find in Shakespeare, iambic, pentameter. Greek has iambic, trimeter. So you have three, well, you can describe it better. Six syllables, three beats, is that right?

Speaker 2:
[24:07] Three feet each of four syllables, so twelve syllables in a line, generally.

Speaker 1:
[24:12] So what is that like translating, when you have a structure that's hitting beats in different time, you're transposing a three-quarter time song to a four, four time song. Do you think it mostly preserves a heart, or is there something lost in there?

Speaker 2:
[24:25] There is a bit lost. The iambic, trimeter line is twelve syllables, and the iambic, pentameter line, which is the one that I use for Greek drama, is ten syllables. So, right there, we've lost a percentage, we've lost about 15% of the capacity of the line. And that means one has to condense, if one wants to keep to the same number of lines, which I do, you have to condense a bit, streamline, and that does result in a little bit of loss. But I wanted to keep the line-for-line correspondence, and I wanted to keep to the iambic pentameter verse line, because that's the one we know from Shakespeare, from Milton, from all the great Elizabethan poets. And that's what we relate to as high literature, high drama.

Speaker 1:
[25:24] Yeah, the aphorisms in here, it's sort of like Sun Tzu, but then it covers all sorts of different topics. One by Menander says, Of all the gods, Eros' strongest, as shown by this, on his account, the oaths we take on other gods are for sworn. Or another anonymous source says, Oaths sworn and lost are not enforceable.

Speaker 2:
[25:43] Ah yes, I love that one.

Speaker 1:
[25:45] Are there any other that really stick out to you?

Speaker 2:
[25:48] Well, my old time favorite is one from Sophocles, because it sums up perfectly the tragic viewpoint of Sophoclean drama. The truly happy man should not leave home, which is to say, if life is going great for you, you shouldn't step out of doors, because something bad is waiting for you. It's only a matter of time.

Speaker 1:
[26:11] So what do you think until now that of the many different works have been translated from antiquity into English, that this particular work hasn't been, or these particular selections from the anthology haven't been translated?

Speaker 2:
[26:25] So there is a project underway right now, and that's how I first got interested in these fragments, that I'm part of a project to translate all of Stobaeus for the first time into English, and the first volume of that is, schedules come out possibly in 2027. It's required a team of translators, a couple of dozen, because of the huge amount of material in the original. But Stobaeus, it's a late classical work. It's not something that most classicists want to deal with because it falls sort of between antiquity and the Middle Ages. And it's just too big. It's too vast. It has, as I say, it's required upwards of 20 translators to put it all together. So that's kept it from getting into English up to this point.

Speaker 1:
[27:19] I guess that's a good way to understand it because people would think, well, why haven't more things been translated? Hasn't it been 1500, 2000 years? Is it because people underestimate how difficult it is to do something like this? Or there are only so many specialists that someone like yourself, who can do early Byzantine Greek, that's a different skill set than somebody who does classic Greek versus somebody who does medieval Byzantine Greek. Is it an issue of resources?

Speaker 2:
[27:46] I think it's more a matter of incentive. The scholarly world doesn't reward translation very highly. Most schools, research institutions don't think of it as a worthwhile enterprise. So people who do translation are generally looking for a text that really turns them on, a poetic text or a great work like Plato's Republic, or a work that's in very high demand by schools, because then it becomes a paying proposition. But Stobaeus is none of those things. He's not literary, he's not lucrative, and he's not respected by the research institutions that govern promotions and hiring in the scholarly world. So there's very little to motivate someone who knows Greek, who's studied Greek, and therefore is in an academic setting, presumably, to be interested in Stobaeus.

Speaker 1:
[28:49] Yeah, as you become a scholar and get into the different works you need to use, you're just shocked by the things out there that are some of the most important texts in your field that have never been translated. In the area that I look at, the Ottoman Empire, one of the best chronicles we have of the conquest of Constantinople in 1453, there's a chronicle by George Sfrantes that was never even translated into a modern language until the 1950s, and that was German, and then it wasn't translated until the 1980s, and it's just one of a small handful of texts that have been translated to English. There's many others that you absolutely have to read, but they just were never translated, whether by resources, like you said, due to the incentive structure where if you want to make your mark as an academic, you want to write a critical edition or a survey history, not just a straight up translation. Save that for the full professorship, whatever, or when you have your time for your interests, but the incentive structure makes it surprising the things that are out there that haven't been translated, so like this work, it just, you would never expected that.

Speaker 2:
[29:51] Yes, exactly so. It's surprising to me actually that it's being done now. The people who are giving their time to it are essentially volunteering their time, often large amounts of time, in order to get this thing into print.

Speaker 1:
[30:08] Going back to the phrases and the quotes and the points that are made in the book, a big theme that encompasses a lot of them is that being virtuous, it doesn't guarantee fortune and fame and rewards, but it prevents you from becoming monstrous, from suffering the fury of the fates. What are some lines or references and drama that flesh out that theme?

Speaker 2:
[30:33] So I have a chapter called Virtue Poor Creature, which is about the disappearance of virtue or the fact that virtue goes unrewarded in such of the world that Stobaeus lived in. I could read you a couple of fragments from that. Virtue Poor Creature, I see you were only a word. That's how it begins. The just are not the ones who shun wrongdoing, but the ones who can do wrong but still don't want to. That's by a playwright named Philemon. Euripides wrote in one of his plays, Cry woe, this is some more than human evil, when one knows what is good and doesn't do it. And Euripides also wrote, This is a more hopeful line, One just man, with God and justice as allies, prevails over ten thousand who are not just. We profoundly hope that that is true.

Speaker 1:
[31:35] Scott here, one more break for a word from our sponsors. We'll look a little bit more about Euripides, that Antigone and some of his other ones, that we have fragments in your text. There was something else I was thinking of, when we consider fragments and works that could be lost and preservation and sometimes you really feel that something great was lost, that there could have been something equal to Shakespeare, but we don't have it because it simply didn't survive. There could have been a library fire, there weren't enough copyists, whatever reason you could think of. But if let's say people a thousand years in the future are looking back at our own time and they wish, they see that we didn't preserve everything we could have and they're blaming us in the same way. I like to think that the good art, the good music, the good films, they're being preserved but there's all sorts of different things that are floating out there today that still exist now but nobody is doing the work to preserve it. If you go to any thrift store, there are all sorts, hundreds, thousands of VHS cassettes. I was looking at B-movies that as far as I know, don't have a DVD or HD update and that includes Deathbed, The Bed That Eats from 1977 or Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death. I don't know if those are going to be preserved for posterity and some future historian might think that, well, look, they just let their civilization crumble and die. Were the Greeks at a similar place where they could have? The comedies for every one Sophocles play that didn't make it. There were a hundred Deathbed, The Bed That Eats that died and Coppius thought, this isn't that great. No one has time for this whatever. The same way that we're letting VHS cassettes rot on the shelf at a thrift store.

Speaker 2:
[33:20] Yes, that's not a bad analogy. To carry that one step further, the best picture winners are inevitably preserved because those have got the seal of approval of the whole culture. No one would ever allow those to become extinct. And similarly, the plays that survived from antiquity were prize winners or at least were in competition for the prize, meaning they'd already been selected out of a large pool of submissions for production in a particular year. So they are, in a sense, the Oscar contenders or Oscar winners for ancient Greece.

Speaker 1:
[34:01] And going back to the different themes here, the chances of fates and the seemingly randomness of it, it reads like the Book of Job or Ecclesiastes. A lot of these come from Menander when he's saying, luck's on your side, sleep on, don't work too hard. You've got no luck, sleep on, no point in working. He also says, no lucky person goes to a seer, and the lucky ones only look that way from outside. Inside, they're just the same as all the others. There's a fatalistic sense in here. Is that something that's general in Greek dramatic thought, or is that just Menander in his particular style?

Speaker 2:
[34:40] That's general to Greek culture and especially tragedy, because after all, tragedy is a world that's ruled by fates and gods. And often, malevolent fate. So, there is a certain amount of fatalism in these fragments, but there's also a note of extreme optimism that we're responsible for much of what happens to it, and that we do wrong to blame the gods. There are several passages that address that point of view.

Speaker 1:
[35:15] So, what do you hope overall is the takeaway from readers? Because you titled this Since You're Mortal, and there's a sense that Greeks aren't writing to, for an detached way. They're not writing theoretically, but it's for real people who have to deal with corruption, unreliable leaders, unpredictable lives. There could be natural disasters, wars, early death, all the hardships that they faced. Things could get thrown upside down. He had just lived through a number of wars. Many of the writers did. So, in general, what do you hope is the takeaway for people who read about these excerpts from different writers?

Speaker 2:
[35:56] Well, there's no one moral lesson. These fragments are all over the map in terms of their moral perspective, but they show us that people of 2500 years ago were facing the same problems and feeling the same feelings and asking the same questions that we do today if we're trying to live a good life. I think that's the essential takeaway, as you call it, what I hope readers will get from the book. As they would get from any encounter with Greek literature, the best Greek literature that connects to essential and timeless human themes, it shows us that we have a kinship with the people of the deep past, and that's a great thing to be aware of.

Speaker 1:
[36:45] Absolutely. Well, thank you for sharing all of this with us. Then also your translation work, which was you said the top of the episode is not easy to do. For listeners, I want to check out James' book. It's called Since You're Mortal, Life Lessons from the Lost Greek Plays. James, thank you for joining us.

Speaker 2:
[37:01] Thank you. It's been a pleasure.

Speaker 1:
[37:05] All right. That is it for today. If you would like to see show notes for this episode, along with all my others, go to parthenonpodcast.com. That's the name of the podcast network that I'm a part of, along with James Early's Key Battles of American History, Steve Guara's Beyond the Big Screen, and History of the Papacy, and other great history shows as well. If you'd like to support History Unplugged, the two easiest ways to do so are to subscribe to the show on the podcast player of your choice and leave a review. The second way is to join our membership program. If you do so, you'll get completely ad-free episodes of the entire back catalog, which is 600 episodes and growing. Just go to patreon.com/unplugged. Thanks for listening and see you next time.