[JL’s thoughts in brackets.]

[I don’t know where the curve is. I’m outside of it and have followed nothing, such as the link below, which this computer cannot access. The media I observe is entirely up to my hosts, most of whom have no TV.]

Over the last few years, it seems more and more of the relatively mainstream are looking to antiquity and "barbarians"/tribal groups for how to eat, train, and so on. More than a couple of times this year alone, I've heard relatively serious independent researchers with combat sports experience talk about how the original Olympics and similar games probably produced the greatest combat athletes the world has ever seen, and ever will, and compared Galen's summary of training methods favourably with modern NFL protocols. And then you got channels like AMO Pankration: agreeing with you that almost all, if not all, of the academic work on that period's physical culture isn't just inadequate, it's flat-out wrong.

[All of the academic work must be wrong, because they are looking at athletics from a seated position, and they are academics. Additionally, as I found in researching ancient athletics, the academics conflate the time periods. Galen was 200 A.D., in a time when athletes had become very modern, highly specialized, spectator avatars that were not functional warriors. You could use them to guard a bride or a breech in the wall—but they were 1,000 years removed from the first Olympics when a darter and a slinger dueled, campaigning for rival armies, with sword and shield. In 178 AD., no one would even fight Asclepius of Alexander in the pankration, an event that stipulated no killing—that is lame.]

[Homer, writing around 725 B.C. described the heroes of old, about 1200 B.C. as eating a lot of meat garnished with bread and wine. These men prepared their own meat. The slaves and women prepared the bread and wine. He often states that the heroes of yore were much stronger than “how men are now,” and that was in deep antiquity, in the 700s when the first money and grain systems dominated Greece so much that Solon and Lycurgus made radical traditionalist reforms and many poets wandered the world singing of inequity having lost their homes: to include Hesiod, Theognis, Archilochos, Alceus, Tyrteaus. I suggest that any reading of the ancients be organized in time. Read the oldest on down, giving you a view of how their traditions waxed, waned, renewed and finally fell into oblivion.]

With all that out the way, I have a couple questions for you:

When going through the primary sources of antiquity, who should men look to? Should we be combing through it all to try and get glimpses of how barbarians like Celts, Scythians, and others lived and thought, trying to emulate that?

[Start with Homer and Hesiod. Don’t read anything until you’ve read that and then go back and use those five books as references. Next, all of the poets down to Pindar. Then the historians, Herodotus and Thucydides and Xenophon, the latter having the most practical insight into the struggle between Europe and Asia. Xenophon, in Anabasis and Horsemanship provides masculine culture insights far in excess of the pondering of Plato and Aristotle.]

Or should we copy Panhellenic athletes and gladiators?

[I don’t advise copying, but adapting, by selecting elements that fit into our present condition.]

Especially as far as diet goes - should a family eat along the lines of a Mediterranean diet, with the father and pubescent-and-older sons adopting the gladiator version to be barley-, beans-, and pork-eating machines?

[I don’t abide should. I suggest eating to survive and thrive according to what you can learn about available options for you and yours.]

Or should it be nothing but nomadic barbarian recipes, like how Herodotus describes Scythians cooking animal stews in their own bellies?

[I have noticed that various diets have differing effects on different people. Simply keep in mind that dietary advice form current medical mainstream has been designed to create diabetics who require lifelong medical, cardiac and memory care.]

Reading Whitaker's "Strong Arms and Drinking Strength," the Rigveda basically all cattle raids and other violent deeds, along with the fire-based rituals one performs before undertaking them. And the pehlewans were formidable wrestlers in the 1800s, successfully competing with the best grapplers in the world on not much more than milk, chickpeas, and tons of calisthenics.

[Test out your body and how it reacts to various diets. Eating is partially social. As I travel I find myself eating to be polite and drinking to be polite in ways that are not optimal for my body. But, my body is substandard and now a wreck. So long as it carries what is left of the mind across the face of this accursed place to visit with link minds, I will prioritize society with my fellows. For a younger man I can offer no eating advice. I have never studied diet. I have not been interested in health or longevity and do not believe in science, medical strictures or ideologies, which now include dietary regimes.

[Warning: do not make diet a point of contention with family. The table is very important to what we have left of the Arуan family, which has been under attack since Antiquity.]

With all that said, have you ever looked at Sanskrit works? 

[No. I tried reading the book that begins with a B but the type was too small. Maybe one day I will try some. But I must first reread all of the Greek and Roman works.]

If you haven't, what's your gut instinct - something you might have tackled if you had another youth in front of you, or best to just stick to the Greek and Latin stuff?

[I have never had any interest in India, its people, its religion, its culture or martial arts. I never felt critical of this area. What put me off is the same thing that put me off about Japanese, Korean, Filipino and Chinese martial arts, that Arуans who know nothing of their own arts, boxing, wrestling, knife and stick fighting, etc, flock away to some other culture, that our forefathers defeated in war, for advice on fighting. My instinct was correct. Because all of the MMA leagues that grew up in the wake of this Asian craze have been dominated by Arуan fighters using wrestling and the fist as the primary means of victory. I will neglect alien literature as I did karate for boxing. To read a few books from every culture will be to learn nothing in depth. I have, at best hundreds of books left to read. Time begisn to slip in your 60s. The Plantation America project has dominated my reading and owns mey for 2.5 more years. Rereading, mostly via audio, books that I failed to properly plumb in my youth and prime, now occupies what is left of eye and time.

[What I would like, before I go, is to, having read more deeply into my folk’s lore, to have a discussion with someone who has read his own people’s books, an open discussion with an eye on understanding and concord.]

Sir, thank you so much for pulling my head out of the Plantation America rabbit hole for an hour. I hope something I wrote helps you in your own quest. The plight of you and your family is of more importantance than that of any nation waxing or waning on this deluded planet of the apes.

-JL, Pittsburgh, 7/9/25