T.O.P. Podcast Episode 7 - The Weight of Legacy

We all inherit something. A name, a story, a dream left unfinished by those before us. Sometimes that inheritance feels like a gift, but often it becomes a burden. That’s what I’m calling today: the weight of legacy.

In my Flavius Fettotempi novels, this theme is front and center. Flavius lives under the shadow of his father Honorius, chasing a vision that was never truly his own. It’s a tragedy not only of ambition but of inheritance—the cost of living someone else’s story.

History echoes with the same struggle. Alexander the Great carried his father’s conquests but burned out at just 32. Rome’s emperors lived and died under Augustus’s shadow. Winston Churchill admitted he spent his life trying to redeem his father’s disappointment. Dynasties from the Habsburgs to America’s political families inherited not just opportunity but expectation.

Literature gives us the language for this weight. William Faulkner, in Absalom, Absalom!, wrote: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman shows Willy Loman crushed by a dream he inherited and tried to pass down. Toni Morrison’s Beloved reminds us that even trauma is a legacy, carried forward until someone finds the courage to face it.

This episode is about asking: what do we carry forward, and what do we set down? Legacy is never neutral. It shapes us whether we embrace it or reject it. The challenge is deciding what belongs to us—and what belongs to the past.

Join me as I connect the tragedy of Flavius Fettotempi with history, literature, and the legacies in our own lives. Because maybe the real weight of legacy isn’t the past at all. Maybe it’s the present—the courage to decide, here and now, what story we will make our own.