This talk will discuss a curious variant of the celebrated representation Lie_n of the symmetric group S_n on the multilinear component of the free Lie algebra on n generators. Introduced by the speaker a few years ago, the variant Lie_n^(2) satisfies the analogue of almost every known property of Lie_n. As one example, the exterior powers of the variant Lie_n^(2) decompose the regular representation of S_n. The classical free Lie algebra counterpart of this result is the 1942 theorem of Robert Thrall which also follows from the earlier Poincaré-Birkhoff-Witt theorem: it is the well-known decomposition of the regular representation given by the symmetrized powers of the representations Lie_n (the higher Lie modules). The talk will survey this and other properties of Lie_n^(2), including some recent developments.