How to Get History to Work - Rome Retreat 2024

Ralph Waldo Emerson believed “history” on its own is useless - except if some key conditions are met. Here’s one: You must look at the achievements of the past and say “that is mine.”

With great stories and great art works, this happens almost subconsciously, as Emerson explains:

“It is remarkable that involuntarily we always read as [though we are] superior beings… in their grandest strokes we feel most at home. All that Shakespeare says of the king… a boy that reads in the corner feels to be true of himself.”

(Emerson, Essay on History)

In other words, when we read of great deeds, or view great art, we should feel greater ourselves, as though we are “superior beings.” And this process makes it more likely that we will become such.

What is true of heroic fiction, as in the Rockwell painting below, is also true of history, rightly told and rightly heard:

It’s supposed to be that way - Nature designed us with the power of Zeal.

This is also the spirit that we bring to the Cost of Glory Men’s Retreat in Rome.

Most trips - even educational ones - don’t go much beyond the surface level of the places they interact with, because they don’t make the crucial step that Emerson alludes to:

“There law was enacted, the sea was searched, the land was found, or the blow was struck, for us.”

We’re going to Rome to be changed by the place.

In particular, we are going not just to contemplate the great statesman and orators of the past, but to study their methods of speaking and leading: the Cost of Glory Men’s Retreat is focused on the ancient art of persuasion, that is, Rhetoric.

How do you address a crowd? Build a following? Write a letter to an Important Person? Negotiate for better terms? These are timeless human problems, and they all fall under the domain of what the ancients called rhetoric - the “speaker’s art.”

Come to Rome and make it “yours” with us - learning from its greatest exemplars, the towering figures of the Roman Republic.

Go to costofglory.com/retreat for more information, and to fill out an application.

Stay Ancient,

Alex