Last fall, Alex Petkas, the host of Cost of Glory, a “personal development podcast based on dramatic retellings of Plutarch’s Lives,” published an article with The American Mind entitled “‘Great Books’ Is for Losers.” The subtitle of this article was “If you’re making a list, you’ve already lost.”1 The premise of this article is that “Great Books” curriculums which hold the hope of restoring American culture are designed by losers for losers, and anyone placing faith in such a program should first ask themselves, “What exactly is being restored?”
It’s an excellent question. Petkas rightly takes aim at the expedient uses for which these curriculums are proposed to solve the many problems of modern American education, not least of which is, as Petkas puts it, the bulldozing of “patriarchal moral roadblocks” in order to “make straight the way for social progress.” He also rightly points out that curriculums based on the Greek and especially the Roman classics with their predominant emphasis on reading these works in their original language had largely been jettisoned from institutions of higher learning by the time that “Great Books” programs such as that developed by Mortimer Adler attempted to “stanch the bleeding” in the twentieth century.
It is Petkas’s assertion that reading and discussing an established “canon” of the Great Works of Western civilization will not restore “the dynamic and dangerous spirit that forged America and other great states.” He asserts that the reason for this is the lack of attention in these programs to mimesis, or the study and emulation of the great men of past ages. However, he does not merely point out what he considers to be a remedial defect in these programs. He goes on to say, “In fact, the Great Books perspective makes few real claims on its students at all, other than a vague devotion to thinking hard, about a whole bunch of good stuff, some of it old. Its harmlessness, one suspects, has been key to the idea’s survival in polite circles to this day.” In this, Petkas goes beyond a purely pragmatic argument concerning the best way to revitalize American education and attacks the entire idea of the study of the Great Books as a meaningful way to promote the development of a human soul.
There are two very basic logical fallacies contained in this argument. The first is that Petkas begs the question in the truest sense of the phrase–he does not ask by what standard “great men” are considered great.2 Secondly, he creates a false dichotomy between the Great Books programs and the mimesis emphasized by Renaissance humanism, which he favors. These two options are not mutually exclusive. The answer to the problem of effective education which inspires students to virtue and greatness is not an either/or between the two but a both/and.
First, Petkas does not ask by what standard we or men in any age judge greatness. In fact, he boldly states, “The criterion for inclusion in this ‘canon’ has little to do with ‘ideas,’ and is more akin to the Homeric concept of aretē, understood as frightening manly excellence. Indeed, it is less a canon of ‘Great Books’ and more a canon of ‘Great Men’ worth imitating.” However, the Homeric concept of aretē was not a fixed and rigid standard but changed throughout the centuries of Greek thought. It did originate as “frightening manly excellence.” Werner Jaegar states in his classic work Paideia, “In the Odyssey as in the Iliad, the highest standard of manly character is the traditional ideal of warlike valour. An ancient hero-spirit for which battle and victory are [the] highest distinction.”3 However, Jaeger goes on to say that even the ancient Greeks began to see this ideal as lacking. The Odyssey also begins to extol other qualities as well: “In other characters too the emphasis is laid less on their heroic than on their human qualities . . . Telemachus, for instance, is frequently called prudent.” Further, women too begin to be included in aretē: “It is said of Nausicaa that she did not fail of right understanding; Penelope is described as clever and prudent.” By the time of Aeschylus, “the tyrannizing image had become primarily that of justice rather than courage.”5
The process of education which Petkas is describing as mimesis is a valuable and necessary one. He is extolling what David Hicks, like Jaegar, terms a tyrannizing image. Hicks likewise calls this process the tyranny of the Ideal type and further says that the Ideal unites both mythos and logos in education: “Myth began this process by defining the Ideal Type in the works and days of men. . . Later, reason measured the Ideal–the tyrannizing image of human perfection–as the distance between what a man is and what he ought to be.”6 At the risk of being pedantic, it is worth pointing out that the word “ideal” encapsulates and is directly related to “ideas.” The mythos of the Ideal presented in story, such as in Homer’s great cultural works, must be also discerned and clarified by reason in order to be emulated well. This articulation of how the qualities that make up an Ideal type are evaluated by reading and discussing the Great Works that were also being read and written by Great Men is vital. To emulate these men, you must also know what they knew, and you must be able to employ the virtue of prudence to apply their example to your own life in a reasonable manner. When the understanding exemplified in wise imitation is lacking, the result is often not virtue, but fanaticism.
Petkas further says that “it was this paradigm [of mimesis] that made not Virgil, not Catullus, not Plato or Aristotle, not even Caesar, but the mimesis-obsessed Parallel Lives of Plutarch the most popular ancient book (besides the Bible) in the American colonies.” His parenthetical phrase “beside the Bible” is perhaps the most significant part of that statement. Plutarch was loved in the colonies because his Lives were seen as best exemplifying the Ideals of the Bible. All great men are now judged by the one truly Great Man to ever live. This does not mean, however, that the founding fathers were not reading other classical literature. They certainly knew their Livy and their Cicero, to which the form of our government bears abundant witness. It was the virtue of the old Romanitas which had replaced the arete of ancient Greece which spoke to them within the context of the Scriptures, and the Scriptures held the precedent place in learning of the standard by which greatness was judged. As Socrates pointed out millennia ago, man is not the measure of all things.7 To return to Petkas’s original question, any curriculum which proposes to restore American virtue without a firm foundation of Scriptural understanding will ultimately miss the mark, whether based on the lives of Great Men or the Great Books which they wrote.
Aristotle reminds us that prudent decisions regarding the exercise of virtue are always dependent on individual circumstances.8 To say that we only need to emulate great men without thinking through the distinctions of what made them great in the circumstances of their day is an incomplete process, and would have been foreign to the great thinkers of the past. Both the mythos of their stories and the logos of measuring them against a firm standard are necessary and cannot be held in isolation from each other. As classical educators, let us take Petkas’s admonition well and not allow our students to remain in a realm of ideas isolated from their everyday lives but help them to see how the ideas they are considering relate to questions of virtue by emulating those whose lives are worthy of imitation. But let us also not fall into the ditch on the other side of the road, and imagine that the Ideas contained in the Great Books are irrelevant to virtuous action.
[1] https://americanmind.org/salvo/great-books-is-for-losers/
[2] The phrase “to beg the question” properly means to avoid a question, not to raise it. Although, of course, avoiding an evident question often does draw attention to it in the minds of attentive readers or listeners.
[3] Werner Jaeger, Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture. (Oxford, 1939: Oxford University Press), 22.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ibid., 328.
[6] David Hicks, Norms and Nobility: A Treatise on Education. (New York, 1999: University Press of America), 43.
[7] Plato, Theatetus, 162a.
[8] Nicomachean Ethics, 1104a.
Tracey Leary is an instructor of Great Books at Kepler Education and has written for such publications as the Circe Institute’s Forma Journal, Houston Christian University’s An Unexpected Journal, and the Consortium Journal. You can find her class offerings for the 2025-2026 school year here: https://kepler.education/t/tracey.leary/?tab=courses