Historically High - Ancient Athens

Episode Date: November 8, 2023

Ah Ancient Athens, the crown jewel of Greece. A beacon of philosophical enlightenment, birthplace of Democracy, and ass kicking factory of the ancient Persian Empire. The modern world owes more than a few thanks to the city named after the Goddess of War and Wisdom. BUT the road was always paved in gold, Greece was in an almost constant state of war between its Grecian neighbors vying for power, it was conquer or be conquer, so you might be wondering, in all this chaos, how did Athens find the time to revolutionize the world. Tune in and find out. Support the show Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

We are back in session once again. Hey, hey. I hope you enjoyed your time off from class. I know we were hard at work, bringing you more episodes. And this week's going to be pretty cool. We got a good one. Yeah. I'm excited.

I was pleasantly surprised doing the research for this one. That lovely voice that you hear over there. He is the rudder that steers the historically high ship. he was touched by the Greek god podcastiest I thought you're going to say touched by an angle angel he's one of the people that was touched above the belt by a Greek god

and also if two chains wrote a song about him he would be the man whose chain hangs down to his dangling okay that is I don't need to know about two chains to know that that's a compliment that's our lovely podcast host Professor Chris

what's going on folks. Yeah, excited about this one. We are taking it back to ancient Greece, more specifically. We are opening up essentially our textbook on Greece by talking about Athens. We're opening up the Greek theater. There you go. In more ways than one. We're taking a trip to the academy or the academia, which we'll get into a little bit later. It seems fitting. Essentially, this place is where the term Academy came from. We're sitting here at the Academy of

I can't think of a clever pun. Oh boy. Yeah, what pot words start with A? I don't know. There's going to be so many people that are screaming something right now. I know. But yeah, just our Academy. We don't get to create

as many words as the Greeks did. As far as the Athenians go, which is our focus today, Athens turned so many words. I don't know if they claimed them as words that they created. But I feel like we get a lot of our words. I guess Greek is a pretty decent root language. Well, it's because it's Latin.

Because they did use some Latin to a degree from what I was saying. So that's where we do get words that we still use today. But the thing is, is the invention of those words, a lot of them are rooted in this. Like democracy, demos, the people, like things like that do come out of. It's amazing how much shit came out of Athens, especially just based on the fact that Greece, for the most part was just fucking fighting each other almost for the entire history of the kind of you know ancient Greece but yeah before we get into it always remember rate review subscribe got to get those numbers up and we'll keep doing this for you folks but uh everyone strap on those togas lace up your sandals sheath your swords grease yourself up for this one because we're going to grease so where do we're we're going to grease right so where do we

essentially kind of give me a little backstory on on ancient Athens Adam. If I could start out with my favorite geography joke. If Iraq attack Turkey from the rear, do you think Greece would help? It's an old, old dad joke. My dad loved that shit. But Greece seems to have been around forever. And when I say forever, I'm talking millennia, which that seems to me like just a crazy amount of time that we really can't wrap our heads around.

I think average age for us. Not like Greece itself. You mean like an habitation of Greece of what would be known as Greece. Yeah, it is a cradle of civilization. I know that there's a lot of those that seem to be popping up around the world as we figure out and uncover just these old ancient societies.

But the cave of Schist is the oldest known human evidence. Schist. Yes. S-E-H-I-S-S-T. I don't think that has any sort of... Felt some cool shit in the cave. Of Schist. Got to be.

But yeah, the oldest known human inhabitants of the area from the 11th millennia to possibly the seventh millennia. My man, that's called the Neolithic times. We're talking fucking like stone age shit. That's a long-ass time ago.

There were a lot of cavemen walking around there. Five thousand years? They definitely did not. Yeah. How about that? The area that Greece lies within is called Attica, not the prison. maybe where we got the term for the prison.

But the Attica area, the surrounding area of Athens, including Athens, has been continuously inhabited for over 5,000 years. And that's a long-ass time for just that one area. Well, when you're thinking about it from a geographical standpoint, you know, with places like, you know, ancient Greece, you had to live next to some place that could essentially provide, you know, resources for you to actually live. And so...

That's not what Greece is known for. No, no, no, it isn't. What I'm getting at is this. So you have like the Attican, yeah, Attican or the Attican area. And one of the things that they kind of touched on as far as like the actual portion of Greece that it's located in is that fantastic for grown olives. There's a reason why that region is known for olive oil and all that good stuff. But it's really hilly and rocky. Not a lot of area to perform like mass agriculture. And so the reason that, civilizations were able to kind of thrive and survive here is because they turned to the sea. They essentially started fishing things like that. And so that's kind of where, you know, Greece being not narrow in the sense of like, you know, you can fucking throw, you know, I can throw football across it. But Greece itself essentially, I think they said the country of Greece has the most coastline per landmass of any country on Earth, right? proportionate to the size of the country? Yeah, I would probably assume so.

I guess Australia is a continent, not a country, right? Correct. Maybe it's something like that. But I think also what they're taking into account is you have the entire island chain, which, what's the Sicilities? Yeah, the island chain around the, you know, to essentially what you consider mainland Greece. There's a bunch of islands kind of off the north, or I'm sorry, the southeast portion of it. Those are called the Sicilities. And the reason they named it that is they kind of form a weird geographical circle. They drew a circle around it like during a documentary.

And I was like, that's pretty weak trying to fit all that into a circle because it doesn't even make that shape. But it's a chain of islands known as the cyclades. And that's where you get like mechonos and things like that. So you have already like an ancient culture that's basically can't really scratch us living off of the land. And so part of me is kind of like are these early Neolithic period people, the first ones that really turned to like the sea for survival? I probably could have been, but at the same time we kind of know about some of those older cradle of civilization

that they were nomadic. So they probably were roaming in and out of the area and finding some more. Do you think because like everywhere you turn like the way Greece is shaped, there's bays and waterways and everything? They just thought they were on an island. That's the whole point. They get walking to a certain point.

They turn this way and they're like, fuck water. And they're like, okay, we'll go this way. And they're like, fuck more water. And then at some point they just get turned around enough. They forgot the way they came. They're like, did we walk onto a fucking, okay, we're just got to fish now, people. Can we just maybe throw some shells behind us so we know which way we were coming from? Yeah.

But yeah, I'm sure that they really thrived kind of moving around, finding different areas. But yeah, it had to have been mostly fishing. But that in and of itself To have some sort of a thought process To be like, oh shit, there's water You don't know that there's fish in there Like that's not something that's just You automatically know when you become a person

You would have to have trial and error You'd have to see like dead fish washing up on the shore That's technically you've got also be a sorts of danger Because it's not usable, drinkable water And you're yeah, you're definitely going to drown Because it's not like you inherently know how to swim But once you do As a civilization and we're kind of

getting past now that Neolithic time frame and everything like that. Kind of when it starts getting settled, civilization starts to advance. Once you figure out how to traverse those waterways, you find out that you're able to travel a lot faster than you are on land with less of the danger. As weird as that sounds, it was still less dangerous to travel by sea

when like sea-going vessels were still very new than it was to travel by land because bandits didn't know how to build a boat, but they knew how to fucking shank you on the trade routes and steal your shit. You also run into that same thing you were talking about on land. Like once you get on the water

and you start paddling out and you see a piece of land over there. You're like, oh shit, did we just go all the way around the world? Yeah. Where is that? That's the thing too is there's these huge chains of islands.

So you're just kind of, you can even just almost island hop your way over across the Aegean. More into like the kind of middle section halfway between like the north where Macedonian Thrace is. That's going to be more open. You're not going to have as many islands to hop across.

But just to kind of give some pretext, everyone knows that I love my fucking maps and geography. Essentially, the Greek world at this point is not just the peninsula, the Greek peninsula. You also have what's called, like the area of, was it, Ionia? Like the Ionian Greeks? It was basically like a band of city states that all... And they were on the eastern portion of the...

Aegean. What you would consider, oh, they don't call it, it's not the far east, what is it? Not Eurasia. Asia Minor? Asia Minor, which is now today Turkey. But that's where you're going to get countries that are along the coast are actually, like Adam was saying, Greek city states, and that's kind of where you get Ionia or the Ionian Greeks. If you head from that region and go south, when you're trying to work your way around the top of the Aegean, you're going to find yourself in Thrace as you work. work down back kind of west and then start heading south, you find yourself in Macedon,

or what I'll refer to as Macedonia. It's interchangeable. Macedonia for everyone, that's where we're going to get Philip and then Alexander the Great's going to come in to play. Not during this episode, of course, but just giving you some pretext of where that's located. We'll play just a tip with him at the end. There you go. As you move down south, now you're heading down into Thessaly. as you move through Thessaly you can travel to the east a little bit more on another peninsula. That's when you're going to find yourself

in Attica. Attica essentially, like we were talking about before, Athens is the capital of Attica. If you then turn west, you're going to start heading and you head through a small straight where Corinth is. If you look at a map of the straight of Corinth, it's crazy to even look at because

it literally just looks like a tiny little maybe a few miles wide that separates essentially Laconia and Arcadia, which is the location of Sparta from kind of the Greek mainland. So they do connect, but there's this small portion that's holding this all together. So because we're going to talk about so many of these Greek city states, it's better just to kind to provide context of kind of whose neighbors, who's not. And especially when it comes to talking about like the Persian invasion of where they're coming in and how the Greeks are able to kind of handle that

situation, it's good to kind of know the geography of the land. A lot of waterways, a lot of ways to to places. Athens is kind of located probably about three and a half, four miles inland of the coast, but it does essentially have a ton of coast and its main coastal city is a place called,

what was that, Parraeus? Yeah, Parraeus. So Athens is going to be widely known for its Navy and because it has so much shoreline it makes sense that they would have a powerful Navy. And Parayas was big business for in the 1400s BCE, so we're still talking, what, 700 years away from really the pop-off of Athens,

the Micean civilization made Athens the center for their kingdom, and they actually marked it with a massive fort that was where the Acropolis stands now. That's right. It sits on, okay, so the Acropolis is actually where the Parthenon sits. Yeah, we'll get into that. Yeah, I just kind of want to provide context. Sometimes you hear the Acropolis, and when I used to hear that when I was younger, I was like, is that another monument? I didn't realize that was the actual, like, stone that kind of rose in the middle of the city, had that was flattened out. Then, yeah, like you said, my city and it's literally like a plateau in the middle of the city.

Like, daily life in Athens is just basically centered around the Acropolis. So where does the name come from? Oh, Athens? Yeah. Athena. Goddess of Wisdom and War Warrior Princess That's...

Oh, that's Zena. No, no, but do you think that's also where a little TV fact for you If any of you guys are 90s kids Then you'll be very familiar With the Hercules

Fuck Kevin Sorbo And also the Lucy Loll is still Got it going on Zena Warrior Princess But that's got to be where comes from Because Athena was the goddess of wisdom

And war And I want to touch base On this little legend This Greek mythology I'm not going to go too much into it, but I like it because you had such a strong reaction to it. Yeah, Greek mythology is worthless to me. But yeah.

You're going to have to fucking, like, get comfy with it at some point because we are going to have an episode on it. Yeah, I'm sure we will. I don't look forward to it, but... So the legend of these people that essentially lived or were, you know, birthed by the bosom of Greece and for Athens and everything, I was listening to a British guy, I tried to explain it and watching a proper British. try to dance around jizzing on your sister's leg.

Crazy, yeah. Okay. So we have Athena, daughter of Zeus. We also have Hephaestus. Hephaestus is the blacksmith of the gods. Their brother and sister, Hephaestus gets real hot and horny working with around those furnaces all day. He wants him some Athena. He tries to reach out for her.

He's looking that there might be some, there's a rapy situation potentially going on. An incestrial rapist situation. Yes. He's hard as a rock. but essentially he can't hold. Harder than the steel he pound. Exactly. And as she like brushes him,

I don't know if just the simple touch of her brushing him off, she goes to reject him and he busts himself on her thigh. Now hearing the fancy Brit try to explain this, where he's like, he left a mocking of his lust on her thigh. Well, she takes a piece of wool and she's like, yuck. And as she wipes it up, she throws the jiz rag. Pardon. Is there a better way that I can say that?

She cleans up the load. I just meant for the actual thing itself. Oh, probably not. Okay. Basically throws it down to the ground, and out of that is birth, a half man, half snake type creature, and that's where essentially the descendants of,

but it's like part God, because it's a product of that, that's where the descendants of Attica or Athens, the Mycinians come to play. I just like more so the basic Greek legend when they're trying to name this and they're like, hey, we're building this, you know, big fancy city here. What are we going to call it?

And Athena's like, hey, you know, big thing was to name your city after Adi. It was going to be your patron god, who you're going to pray to, who's going to provide good fortune for your city. And Athena's like, hey, I'd like to get in on that. And then Poseidon pops up. He's like, hey, you know, you guys are ocean people. I want to get on this too. So they have a contest. Who can provide essentially the best service to?

the city and Poseidon slams his chit trident into the ground and a saltwater spring springs up. I also heard there may have been a provision of a horse. He was like, hey, I made you guys this four-legged animal. And Athena was like, guess what? Step back. Boom, olive tree. And the people are like, an olive tree. What is this? Well, you can make oil from it. They're, you know, they're going to pioneer all this kind of stuff but basically they're like fuck it athena you're in the city is athens so the parthenon all that kind of stuff those are actually all temples to athena there's was actually a statue in the parthenon about for athian correct yeah but we don't that doesn't come in until the golden age of course i'm just saying that yeah from this point on the city the patron god

of the city is athena athens nike's right in there too wasn't yeah she was something to do with Nike, right? Yeah. He was a separate god. Nike was a woman. Oh. She was a goddess. Okay.

She was, I believe, like the goddess of victory. Ooh, so was there a thing there going on there? I don't know. They're all family. That would explain the Xena, Gabrielle, kind of unspoken love affair that happened during that. I'm just tying it all back together, man.

I think we're digging too deep into Zena on this one. Right. So as far as, you know, Athens, we're going to going to get into these guys a little bit later, but some of Athens' greatest hits, just so we can name these off. Socrates, Plato, Epicurus,

Pythagoras, Pythagoras, The Theorem Man. The theorem man. Is it Euripides? That's right, Euripides and Sophocles. Yeah, and Sophocles, called Athens home. Some of them are also from Athens as well.

Yeah, just to know that all those names still mean something in society today and they all came from Athens or studied in Athens, worked in Athens basically made Athens their home base for what they were doing. You're talking about some of the greatest mathematicians, philosophers, playwrights, just, I mean, it's almost like this was the center for intelligence and it sort of was because Athens and Greece were kind of the center of the world at that point. I kind of feel like when Alexander, you know, kind of of going on later in his life. I feel like when he was creating Alexandria, he was doing it off a blueprint from like a philosophical learning, scientific, you know, that kind of standpoint of

Athens, like a blueprint of that. He's like, I want this to be like Athens was. Well, and it really could have been, too, they had already owned Athens where he wanted to make his own Athens. Like, he wanted to leave his indelible mark further in or closer to the, where they were coming into the Mediterranean. They're like, we've heard this city's Athens. He's like, actually, Alexandria, it's right here. Way cooler. Yep. You don't want to have to go all the way to Athens. Just stop right here. And he probably named it Alexandria so it would show up alphabetically before Athens. Oh yeah. That's why you named Apple. Faster in the phone book. There you go. So by the sixth century, BCE, the residents of Attica basically were kind of getting unruly, mounting debts. It was ruled

by kings up until the ninth century, which if we're working our way back, as we're at BCE, everything is going forward. So time progresses, we're counting down from, you know, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Yeah, BC, same thing as BC instead of before Christ or whatever they want to call it. Before Common Era. Yes. So being ruled by Kings like most places were, we're going to get into the talk on democracy because essentially being the epicenter and the founding city of democracy in its form back then. But basically planning the seed for that, most countries at this point, no, no, sorry. All countries at this point were either aristocracies or they were monarchies or ruled by some type of ruling class. Didn't have to be one person, but there were people that were not representative of the people or chosen by the people in leadership positions. Aristocrats, any sort of richer people were usually in these positions.

Oligarchs is a word that I didn't realize would come from them, but it actually, there were oligarchs back then as well. Yeah. Yeah, it just, everything kind of started to take its toll on the city because of this debt that was really starting to mount. They had to figure out a way to take care of it. And one of the issues with debts is the poor lower class people that would start to accrue these debts were accruing them to, like, high-ranking aristocrats that had more money. and once they would close out on their debts, basically like they would foreclose on this debt deal that they had with them,

they could actually take a hold of them and sell them as slaves. So your lowest portion of the people besides the slaves that were already there are then being turned into slaves because they aren't able to pay back these already wealthy people. Can you imagine like predatory lending

takes on an entirely new fucking meaning? Yeah, that's literally what this was. All you have to do is you want some slaves You're like, I want to build up a, you know, a big collection of slaves. Instead of just going out and having people come to you and being like, hey, can I borrow some money and be like, hey, if you don't pay this back, you're going to make you my slave. Ha ha, ha. Think of how many people went out and were like, hey, go into a village. I mean, like, who needs some money?

We'll do some real nice rates here. Looks like you could buy a few new animals. Hey, I bet you would, you know, love some more food to keep that child alive for the winter and everything. And basically, you could go out and lend money. have people build debt with you, and then from a legal standpoint, when they couldn't pay up, you could make them essentially, yeah, your slaves, not essentially your slaves. So in the seventh century, we get this guy. His name is Draco. There's some longer term for, but with these Greek names, you're going to have to apologize or you're going to have to forgive us and apologies to any

of our Greek listeners. We love you. We want to come to your beautiful land and travel your islands and experience all your culture, you're going to have to pardon us because some of these names, they're hard to get, right? Yeah, I'm just going to plead dumb. I mean, it's not, it's not that these... Cultural ignorance. Yeah, very much so. So we get this guy named Draco, his name's going to come into play is a term that we still use today, but he's essentially like the first recorded legislator. And basically because of all this unrest, you're talking about these citizens, right, he's going to be like, hey, we don't want to be slaves if we owe a little bit of fucking money. They're like, all right,

Attica, Athens, we need to come up with essentially kind of a set of laws are like a constitution type thing. And he takes the first crack at it. His were really harsh. And they failed. They were super complicated too. Yes, but this is

where we get the term draconian. So when people refer to draconian rules, draconian rulership, it's always in a sense of like those are very harsh or very antiquated out of date. This is where... Drackel Malfoy.

There we go. I'm guessing that's where there was probably some inspiration for that. A little crossover, it could be. So they end up failing, and in 549 BCE, we get this cat that comes along called Solon. And with Solon, he basically creates a new constitution. And with his, what were kind of some of his main ideas? His ideas were more to give power to... when I say everyone, I think he probably meant everyone.

As we're going to talk about here shortly, it certainly wasn't everyone. You think he meant everyone? I think he meant, like, for all men, like Lincoln meant. Like, all men are created people. It could have been more like Lincoln, but I also think it sort of the idea behind this makes some sense, because it was sort of self-serving. Before that, when there would be. a change of rule, it would always be like a coup, like a hostile takeover.

Military conquest or something like that. Someone dying and not having a error and then someone else in power steps, yeah. But if you fucked up and you didn't gain or seed power, you were immediately banished. You were sent away. Wow, we can't think of the word. I just had it. What is it where they said? Exiled.

Exiled. And so that's not really a good look. You have to figure out a way to be able to challenge for power without the failure being exile. So if you're able to put this in the hands of the people. You mean in a sense if someone tried to create a coup, take power by force, the punishment were to be unsuccessful, because if it's successful, then they're in power, it's exile automatically. So you're saying that Solon basically is like we still need that system of people being able to. change power and not just have one power base, but it has to be something where someone has a legitimate avenue

that doesn't like require a knife or a sword to get into that position. So why don't, how do we create a system in which that person is chosen or gets supported enough to do so? And then the person that loses doesn't have to leave. Yes. They can still be a member of the system. Yeah. Well, exile most of the time would mean just go away because they would end up

eventually coming back and trying to do it again. Oh, that's true. Before that. Oh, yeah, you'd flee. Yeah. Yeah. So basically, it was a system of saying, you can put somebody in power because the, uh, everybody that lives there, all of the people of Athens will have the power to vote somebody in at the same time to vote somebody in. Whoever doesn't get the most votes doesn't have to leave.

But the guy that you voted for, if he doesn't do well, that's not on us. So you guys can't really overthrow us. because you were the ones that chose to put him into power. Yes. So it sort of worked out better for the aristocrats and the people that would be in that position. Solon did quite a few other things. Some of them are questionable as to if he did him or not.

But democracy isn't just about political power. Democracy also comes in the form of the court system. Correct. And the word democracy, where we get that from, we get it from Demos, which means the people. we also get it from Kratos, which means power. So it's the people power, the power of the people. Also on a side note, we get Kratos in there, got a war, probably because the name means power.

Probably has something to do there. But you basically get power people, so that's where we're getting democracy from. As far as the early forms of democracy, they don't look like our democracy, like we have right now in the United States. Other countries have versions of democracy. I'm not familiar intimately with how those other countries,

how their democracy works, so I can't touch on it too much. But in a nutshell, this type of democracy was essentially rule by representation or election by representation. Yeah, it was put into power by representation. And it was almost a republic in that way. Yes. And when, you know, we think of like, you know, democracy for all. There's was like democracy for male citizens of Alica. You can't be a foreigner, you can't be a woman, anything like that. You have to be a son of an Athenian. So when you would go to... But anyone in Attica was known as an Athenian.

Not necessarily, because they were still travels. If they were from Attica. If they were from Attica, yes. They didn't just have to be in Athens to be an Athenian. Anyone that resided in was a born person in Attica was known as an Athenian. They even pushed it far enough as... to when you finally became 18 and you were legally able to vote. I don't know how they chose 18 too.

Maybe we just chose 18 because they chose 18. But you would have to go down to register. And when you registered, you would have to bring like a trusted adult that was already registered to come down and vouch for you to say that his father was born in Athens, his mother was born in Athens. He is from Athens and born in Athens as well. So you had to have like two generations of Athenian blood to be able to be able to be to vote.

So what we get with this new constitution, in addition to this, you know, system of election for people in power, we get forbidding enslavement over debts. What it also did is Solon's, and essentially Solon's thing failed in the short term, but it planted enough seeds of the things that worked that people were able to pick and choose when refining this system of democracy in order to go ahead and keep building it, to keep it going. There was enough good things that it wasn't like scrap the whole fucking thing and let's figure out something else. one of the things he did was he broke up these large land estates from these like huge landowning families basically freeing up trade and commerce and basically what that did is that opened it up for all of these like lower level people that would be considered like the common man so they were able to then take part in this economy and it was able to grow it much faster and much more effectively was he the one that broke them up into 150 areas no so he did well uh i'm not sure if he did that but he established the four classes

Solon gets credit for some things that people say now probably weren't him while other things are. So some of this stuff is probably alleged Solon. It could have come along later. Just going on the poor and lower class citizens, there was something called the Council of the 400 that had been installed as a Democratic arm. The Council of the 400 would be usually called upon to rule on any of the constitutional laws or anything like that. and he actually was a push for poor and lower class citizens to be able to be in there as well because if you're just having rich people make laws, they're going to make laws that only benefit them. Yeah, so there were the four classes.

They were based on wealth and ability of military service. So there was a class, the lowest class was the Thetai. And they were a class that never before this really had any power at all as far as choosing who they wanted to rule them. They were kind of like the serfs or whatever you consider them. They actually gained voting rights. Again, you have to meet certain requirements of, you know, having a penis and being from Attica for a few generations. So 20 years later, they're kind of finding out that there's some holes in this system and this guy name, I'm going to butcher the shit out of this. Pissistratos.

Oh. Pesistratos. I'm just going with that. He sees his power in kind of a coup type situation. but keeps the Constitution that's so long and created, but basically just plugs all of his family into, like, public offices. So he keeps the... I know, so he basically keeps the Constitution, kind of by...

He's like, I don't know if it's a smokescreen. Like, he can't get rid of all of it or, you know, you know, it doesn't end up in a revolt or something like that. Well, and once people taste democracy, they're probably going to want to fight to keep it. Exactly. And good for him, though, you know, I'm just going to call him P-Dog. Peadog is popular

He starts creating You know how people love aqueducts You want water from the mountains I'm gonna bring You used to have to walk to the mountains I'm bringing the mountains to you He creates a system of aqueducts Um

He also Do you think this was Something that they figured out Or do you think this was something That traveling helped to understand Like bringing They sought somewhere else They brought it back to

It's hard to say man Like it's Do you just look at a mountain stream and is like, well, this flows this way. Is there any way we can just make the stream flow this way? And then eventually someone just diverts some rocks. And then you're like, okay, well, can we divert the rocks in a fancier way? And they're like, how about we do it this way? I mean, I don't know if you just find that on your own. I'm sure a lot of it, to some degree, was found from other places or portions of it. But I mean, we know where the Romans got it.

I mean, the Romans got so much from the Greeks. They did. But even before that, did the Greeks see something like this when they were down in... Are you getting at something? No, it just, it's, it's kind of one of those things that blows me away that all these ancient civilizations all sort of fun or find upon like the exact same idea. Because we talked about aqueducts in the Nabatians. I know, but you have to. I don't think the. You think it was just like a necessity that they figured out?

It's an invention of necessity that has to be figured out in order to survive. I mean, you even look at it back with the Aztecs in the mines. it's simply, you know, the whole aqueduct system when people think about that, it doesn't mean that it's the same version that you look at a Roman aqueduct and you see the arches and it's the giant thing that carries water across a gorge and all that shit.

An aqueduct system could be something as simple as just rerouting it, building a stone basin or a stone sluice or I don't know what you want to fucking call it, a canal. It takes a lot of brain power to figure that shit out though. That's a very intellectual idea to be able to do it,

And especially if they're sending it uphill sometimes. To make it reliable and usable, yes. But I think it could also be the invention of a simple person where they're just like, I need to get water from here to there. And someone just goes along. And when you're farming, you dig a trench. So you have irrigation. Someone looks at that and is just like, why don't we do that with like a whole bunch of water on like a large scale?

You then have to go to the smarter people to make that happen. It's like, I want to build this house. I know what I want it to look like. And I know what I want it to do. but you need to go to like an architect for square footage and like proportions and that kind of shit. Yeah. It's just cool to me that the human mind all can kind of, no matter what you have or haven't seen before and where you are in the world, like you can just suss out this issue and just get it all figured out.

Well. Especially all sort of around the same time. Yeah. I mean, they have so many travelers coming through this land. All one person has to do is look and be like, take it back somewhere else. I mean, like, guess what I fucking saw? Yeah. Now we can move out into the desert where we wanted to move.

Yeah. Just via aqued. What do you mean? You don't have plumbing. Fucking savages. So, Pea Dog, he ends up dying, though, in 527 BCE, and he's got two sons that secede him. One of them is assassinated, and he's, like, hippa something. And then his two sons were named very similar.

That's why I'm saying that. I'm not just trying to be, like, dismissive. One of them was, like, hippostratus or something like that. The other one was hippist. and hippiest, the one that didn't get assassinated, he ends up establishing basically a dictatorship. And the people are like, no, that's not going to work. And they overthrow him in 510 BCE.

So at that point, you're like, well, what happened to the democracy? Well, this guy is paulstition. His name is Kleisthenes. I'm glad you took a shot at that first. Kleisthenes? I think it's Kleisthenes. He says right. Yeah, Kleistinis.

He takes charge and reestablishes, tweaks, and gets democracy going in Athens again. And he makes these tweaks to it. So this is what they set up. I'm going to try to get through this whole thing and hopefully everyone can... I had to go through this a few times, so I'm hoping one time is enough

for everyone to follow along. He replaces the four-class system with 10 other classes. He calls them File, which is Greek for tribes. And he names them after Greek mythological heroes. That's pretty fucking badass. That like you get to like,

you're like, I'm part of the Hercules tribe or the Heracles tribe. And, you know, I'm part of the, like, Perseus tribe. Like, whatever the Greek heroes are. Like, Achilles. Like, I'm part of the Achilles tribe. And that has to be where we get file that we use now for, like, people that, like, movies that are scenophiles. I'm not sure.

I thought you were going to say, like, the rank and file. Maybe. That actually sounds like it fits right in, but file for that word for us to use it as, like, a lover of something. It's P-Y, or sorry, P-H-Y-L-E. so maybe just because we always changed because a file when you say like a synophile it's P-H I-L-E

yeah so he names them you know what else reminds me of when you go to fucking Disneyland you're like we parked in the E-O-R lot never been there I know but yeah the lots used to be named after animals so he has these you know files or tribes

created having no class spaces and these were basically the electorates these were the bodies that you're going to get your you know your representatives from and they were there 150 of them. So each file was divided into three tritees, trites, each having one or more demos or areas, city-states.

So to explain that, each of these tribes were divided, each had, they were divided into threes, and each one of those three could have one or more city-states. So they just covered a geographical area, counties, territories, things like that. they became the base of local government. So you would have these areas, these counties, if you want to call them that, territories. What do they call them provinces too? Is that what they call them in, like, Britain and stuff like that?

I think that's, like, their word for... Towns? Provinces. I think that's, like, their word for states. Okay. Because they don't really have states. Oh, yeah. Well, Canadians also use provinces. Yeah, but they don't have states. That's true. Okay.

So that became the basis of local government. Now, each fire... tribe each elected 50 members to the B-O-U-L-E, probably not pronouncing that correct. This was the council which Athens, which ran Athens Day to Day, and by turn ruled Attica. So you had 50 members of each of these 10 tribes being sent to Athens to run Athens and the rest of the country day to day. You literally had local representation that was giving you an equal voice for the running of the country. He also made it so, excuse me, so, I don't want to use the word convoluted, but he branched the tree off so far to be able to stop major power sources of people to be able to just elect in one area.

That's why, like, when you were talking about they had multiple city states in there, it wasn't just like one city sway that had a ground swell of support that could put their puppets in there and then end up representing and not being the accurate representation of the area that that was yeah makes sense so the assembly basically the bull was the assembly the assembly was open to all citizens and so citizens again you had to meet certain qualifications to be considered citizen um and was both legislative and basically served as their supreme court yeah i mean just the court systems in general they had it was so it was called the ecclesia was the assembly um they had to have a minimum of 6,000 people per meeting so they would hold these meetings basically like every nine days

and excuse me as they would set these up they would bring in 6,000 people they would get them started and as far as like talking out whatever they were that day and then when they would go to vote. As they were pushing these people up to where the assembly met, they had a red rope that was wrapped around them. And as they were pushing people in, everybody would touch

this red rope. And this red rope was covered in chalk or something like that. So if you were found outside of the assembly with red chalk on you, you could be arrested because you left without voting. So it was almost like a way of

keeping roll and making sure that everybody that was there at the assembly. Either somebody extra didn't sneak in. Yeah. Either somebody extra without the red chalk on them didn't sneak in to vote or somebody didn't leave early without voting. So it was a way of holding that kind of electorate to task. And the way that everything else ran as far as the courts like I was talking about

earlier, they had something called the Hilae court. It was the main Athenian court for all of the cases besides state officials and murder. State officials and murder were held. um, like their trials were basically heard by their peers. So other state officials, except for murder trials, right? There was something about murder trials when it came to that court thing of being like a jury or peers. There was still almost a murder was the entire assembly. So all 6,000 people. Okay. Gotcha. Um, a normal trial by the jury to just kind of basically these

trials by jury were to uphold democracy because everybody, you were able to be judged by your peers, which is the exact same shit that we do now. Juries, like, between 102 was one of the smaller juries. They would get up to like the thousands of people. Thanks for jury duty. Well, in the system that they used, they actually used two systems to vote on this. The first one that they used after basically the jury was just there to hear. They didn't play any part. They were just there to watch the whole case and everything like that. After they heard the whole case, and it was time to vote, guilty or innocent. They used to walk up with a white shell and a black shell.

You would throw your white shell in for guilty. You would throw your black shell in. Or your white shell for innocent, black shell for guilty. Then they realized that this was sort of tipping everybody else off because you could either see, like if somebody's walking back with a black shell, clearly they voted innocent, vice versa, that type of thing. So they actually went to... People could get threatened in situations where someone had like,

not threatened, but like if they saw someone, if it was someone like with power or something like that, and they were like, that guy fucking voted guilty for me, if he got out or had, you know, enforcers, he could be like, just fucking kill that guy. Yeah. So they went to a second system of brass

cylinders where you would go up and you would put your brass cylinder in. A hollow cylinder meant innocent. A solid cylinder meant guilty. So that way you couldn't tell by color or any sort of variation as far as how everybody else was going. These juries were actually sequestered, not really sequestered,

but they were chosen for a year, would be the court cases that they would see. God, that sounds fucking. Can you imagine if you got a jury summons, and it wasn't for like a case you get out of it? It's like, it's your year for jury duty. You're going to hear everything that we want you to hear in that time. Excuse me, but the way that they would change them up

and make them sort of randomized so you wouldn't get like a bunch of people that may have been supportive and knew this guy was everybody would go up. They would bang out their bronze tablets of all their information and everything like that. They would be randomly put into these lines. And then much like we were talking about during the lottery episode, there were white and black marbles that they would drop down basically like a Plinko machine. And as they would lay down, the white ones would be the jurors that were chosen in that row of brass tablets. And the black ones weren't chosen for that trial.

So it was always a jury at random so you couldn't try to go out. Come on black. Come on black. Yeah. You wouldn't be able to go out and try to influence. a jury because you would have no idea who is going to be on the jury. Well, talking about the lottery, man, and we literally just talked about that a few weeks ago. Public offices. So we just discussed kind of how they went about feeling like the legislative offices.

Well, we would know if you're listening, you know, in the U.S. as like our House of Representatives, Senate, things like that. If you're over with some of our UK people that we love, it'd be like your House of Commons, parliament, things like that. You still have public offices. And what I mean by that is you have people that are serving as what, like the mayor, people that are like the treasure of your town. Comptroller.

Comptroller, police chiefs, that kind of stuff. This was where the lottery kicked in. And when we talked about the origin of the lottery, we're referring to it right now. Those offices were actually filled by the lottery. So you would get citizens within those places that were being elected to these positions and freaking Jimsius down the street

or Piedis down the street could get elected. You just saw, you've seen him get kicked in the head by a mule. and now he's your mayor or now he's the police you would still probably have people that like would be prohibited from maybe being

in that situation well like we talked about during the lottery episode they would ask these people questions they would get a large amount of that's right it wasn't just anybody there was a pool of it that's right but I'm remembered

Cleetus that got Clecius that got kicked in the head by the donkey down the street would be able to go in and run for this position. He might not pass all the questions, but there's always that chance that he could sneak through

and find these positions. So with the exception of 10 positions, which were generals of, you know, the Athenian military, those ones were not left up to lottery. That's a good idea. Looking at that, can you imagine that it's like electing?

And he's like, please don't make me a general. Please don't. He's like, it's, you know, Aranesius. And he's like, shit. He's like, you are now in charge of our cavalry. He's like, I've never fucking seen a horse or ridden a horse before.

How many legs does a horse have? What are we doing? Exactly. So that's where you would have people that were actually selected out of a pool. And that's where you had your classes, too, when he was creating that, where he had they kind of kept that of having people that were capable of military aid or military

like capabilities that were voted into these generals. Well, I think, like you and I were talking about earlier in the week doing the research, these people weren't elected to long terms to be able to do this stuff. These people were only given most of the time they would get a year in office,

which to me, a year in office seems like either the best thing or the worst thing ever, because if somebody's fucking up, you can kick them out within a year. But if you're coming into a new position that you really have to be able to understand, you're going to have to be trained for an amount of time for you to become proficient at this job.

What if you're actually good? Like, you start out, you have a couple of mistakes, six months goes by, and then you fucking hit a, starting you're like, oh, shit, I've got this figured out. And everyone's like, but remember those two mistakes, you don't have enough time to fuck up and have a couple learning fuckups. Well, and the other thing, too, is that was very important for, like, the treasurers and things like that, is you would have to keep such a meticulous record of every shekel or whatever they use going...

Uh, uh? Dracma. Dracma, yes. To go in and out of that place. Because once you left office, if there was an amount of money in the bank or wherever it was that wasn't accounted for and you didn't keep record of it, They're going to think you stole it, and they're either going to exile you or kill you. Yeah. The other thing, going back to the court that I had forgotten about,

when they would sentence somebody for murder, they actually had a difference between murder and manslaughter. Okay. So they were able to say, was this more legitimate that you killed this guy than... Did he walk out in front of your cart and get hit? He's still dead. There's still someone that has to take the heat for that. Or did you catch him in bed with your...

Ooh, that was also another rule. something about if you caught some of pain. Passion. Yeah, it was pre-meditation. If you caught the guy while he was in your house, there was like no fucking penalty. Well, if you caught the guy in your house, I think you could legally divorce your wife at that point, but... And you wouldn't get punished for killing him.

Yeah. He's like, I gotta fucking make it out the window. So, um, going by that standard, when they would find somebody guilty of murder, if you were really bad, they would absolutely murder you. They would decapitate you.

They would do just whatever they could think of to kill you. I feel like this is a big stoning culture. Yeah. The other thing was, was just like those people that had failed coups, they could be exiled. And more likely than not, they would sometimes give you a choice,

uh, not Socrates, was it Socrates? Plato, Aristotle. They gave, that had the choice of how he was going to die. Oh yes. And he chose hemlock.

Uh, but he was actually given that choice. Are we going to talk about that then or do we want to talk about it now? Yeah, we can talk. Well, actually, let's go ahead and save that because that takes place after the Peloponation Wars and everything like that. But yeah, you were basically like, this wasn't such a murderous culture that everybody that was found guilty of murder would just be immediately beheaded. They were actually given some options and most of the time it just would be exile. So you would leave, you would go away, all of your shit that you had accrued by living in Athens would then be taken in by the state.

There had to have been some way, too, that you were not, like, marked for it. Because, like, part of that almost seems like, yeah, you're leaving everything behind, but you're also then having an opportunity to go somewhere else to start over again, which much harder than it probably seemed back then. But you would have to probably have some type of, like, scarlet letter or something that was, like, like, they're not going to be, like, when you moved to that new town, did you go door to door like a fucking sex offender and have to introduce yourself and be like, hey, I was exiled for murder from Athens.

and they're like, hey, great, welcome to the neighborhood. There had to be something else. Do you think? Or do you just think, hey, he's not our problem anymore? Or life was just so hard outside of a city or if you didn't have any support system, they're just like, yeah, it's pretty much a death sentence. And if you made it to a new city, you're not Athens problem anymore. That's true. You just have to get the fuck out of Attica or some shit like that.

Exactly. And I mean, this system, we're kind of wrap it up on the democracy portion of it because there's such a history as far as just what, Athens and Attica as a civilization went through but you can't talk about the birthplace of democracy and not kind of provide examples of like how they develop that and kind of what how advanced it was

even from the get-go and I mean it remained mostly stable for 170 years until this guy named Philip of Macedonia ends up rolling through but that is a tale for another day so go ahead and just it rolled on pretty well there were some question

movements by oligarchs to try to throw out democracy. But in the end, democracy always win until it ran into Big Dick Phil. There you go. So kind of backing up a little bit from Philip, and that takes place the whole Philip of Macedonia thing. That's going to take place way down the road in 338 BC. Let's back it up a little bit to 449 to 49B.C. When we have a little thing called the Ionian Revolt.

You mean 499 to 449? because we're BC, we're going down. That's how you said 499 to 493. Oh, I thought you said 449. Oh, no, sorry about that. So we have this thing called the Ionian Revolt, and basically what it was is, kind of as I was talking about geographically before,

Greece itself wrapped itself around the Aegean. And you had these city-states that were on the east coast of the Aegean, and those were right up next to the Persian-Imbuds. empire at that point. And even so much so that during kind of the early portion of Athens, before the Ionian War, Persia had pretty much taken over this entire area. And these areas of Ionia and that coast up through Thrace to some degree, those were all part of the Persian empire. And from the Aegean, it also stretched way, way to the east. It was one of the largest

empires at the time. Or it might have been the largest to date at that point. because again, this is before Alexander's Macedonian Empire, and then again, in turn, this is way before the Roman Empire. So at this point, you have this guy, Darius. I've heard Darius. I've heard Darius. I feel like any time I say Darius, I just think Darius Rucker. Darius Miles, yeah.

And Houdian the Blowfish. So I'm going to go with Darius, because I also think it sounds a little bit more appropriate for the time frame. and he's ruling over Ionia and the rest of the Persian Empire. Well, the Ionians with Athenian support, they're like, yeah, we'll throw some support behind you. We'll throw the Navy behind you and everything. They kind of start revolting for their freedom,

and they capture this large city within the Persian Empire called Sardis, and capture it, burn it to the ground, and then start hightailing it back to, like, the coast of like, like, you know, where Ionia is at. And basically the only action that like the Ionian revolt did as far as an offensive action, they were just like

we burn Sardis, fuck, we got to start like backing away and they were on defense. It's like a Monty Python's kid. Exactly. They're just like trying not to get beat this entire time. So the first battle where they're kind of put back on their hills is the Battle of Ephesus.

And the Greeks are again, they're playing defense. They're walking backwards the entire time. Persia ends up retaking Ionia in 493. And that's where you basically get the end of the revolt, sorry. But Darius, because of the Athenian support,

he's like, okay, you done fucked up now. I got my eyes on Athens, and I want to get revenge on you guys. And that, the Ionian revolt was basically the contributing factor to what we're going to be discussing as the Persian-Greco war.

And before we get into that, I do have to go pee. Well, hey there, all you sexy historians, how are you guys doing? It is time for socials. Where can they find us on Instagram? If they want to follow us, they can find us at Historically High Pod on Instagram. That goes the same for threads as well. You can also find us on Twitter. Tell them about Twitter.

Historically high. That's historically H.I. on Twitter. And if you want to email any of your comments or suggestions, where can they find us at, Adam? Historically High Podcast at gmail.com. Gmail. All right. And back to the show. All right, everyone, take your seats once again.

All right, Greco-Persian Wars. this isn't going to get settled by greased up naked wrestling. If it could have been, Grishians, they may have been down to the like, we've been working on this for a long time. The other weird, I guess maybe it's just because we have more people now, but when you see the casualties in these wars,

it's like you guys only lost 197 people. Yeah. That seems like you probably should have won. And then you think about it, it's like, okay, well, there's probably like maybe a thousand people that were fighting. There was a lot more of a tendency to like, turn and fucking ran. Yeah, a retreat was definitely in the playbook.

Yeah, and a lot of these battles, it's going to sound weird, but like a certain almost, you know, it's a big event, but almost seems small in the course of the battle, can completely turn the tide of a battle. Like, it wasn't, it's not like battles you hear were like, our commanding officer was killed and another guy stepped and was like, we got to go and that guy got it. It was like, every man like stepping up into his role. If the guy got killed, they were like, fuck, run. Because there was no one there to give him orders.

Artonius gets his foot stuck between two rocks. He's kind of our guy, maybe we pull back. Yeah. Not today. So the first kind of stage of the Greco-Persian war is the first Persian invasion of Greece. And so this guy, Persian General Mardonius, he marches up through, because you have to march around. So with all of these wars just kind of also set some precedence for this, until naval power was a big thing, everything was by land. even when naval power became a thing,

there was still land combat. That's pitched battles is what they referred to them. We have one army on one side, one on the other. That's what basically really decided this type of stuff. You could have pitched naval battles as well. But the Navy was essentially there to kind of like supplement the land forces. So where you had like an army marching up, the Navy would basically be like, hey, they wouldn't be like,

hey, we're going to meet you there. They'd be like, we're just going to follow you along the coast. So you guys aren't having to pack all of this shit. Yeah. And we can move more people and supplies. They're water donkeys. Exactly. We're going to stay close enough to where we can support each other.

We get attacked by, you know, another Navy. We'll come into the coast and then we can all fight. You guys get attacked. We'll bring the boats in and try to help you guys out that way. Do you have the name of the Athenian boat? Yeah. Triremes. Those things, I don't know what tickles me about those things, but they're so fucking cool.

I know. So you have Mardonius. He marches essentially up through, you know, goes up, then across Thrace to go along the top of the Eegean, and into Macedonia. And apparently some mishaps within the campaign end up derailing that and ending campaign. For the Persians. For the Persians. So also keep in mind that, like, there are, and we discuss this, there's like war seasons.

So this is still an area where certain places are going to get snow, supplies. You can't live off the land places, especially if you're marching a large army. and so there are only certain times that you can have campaigns going on where it's favorable. Well, and also going through that every one of these Greek armies is all a citizen army.

So they're all taken from all classes in Athens. With the exception, I think, of the Spartans. The Spartans were kind of their own deal. Well, I'm sure, talk about the differences during their war, but you would have to have like, everybody in Attica

that was a farmer would either have to go themselves or they would have to send a child. You would have like in the closet, in the back of the closet, you would have a sword, a shield, a spear, and like a helmet. And what were they called? The traditional Greek soldier that you're used to seeing with the helmet, some of them have like the Mohawk,

the plumage on it, the other, some of them have it facing the other way. Those were called hoplites. And those were rich fuckers. Yes. That wasn't, every soldier wasn't given that. No, but you also had like the cream of the crop. Like if you had Spartans, Spartans would be assigned like seven hoplites.

So they would have like, soldiers underneath them. And they would be like the leader of that group of soldiers. But again, like you said, their own different beast. So you had, you know, all these armies basically being raised by these city-states, but you had all these city-states that didn't fucking agree with each other. So when you have a situation where you have one enemy coming in to take over, and in this situation, the focus was kind of on Athens from Darius,

you have these other places that have to get marched through by the person. Army and a lot of times they figure, hey, we don't already rule here. We'll just fucking take you over while we're here. And with Athens being so far down on the Greek Peninsula, you were getting a lot of places like Thrace, like Macedonia, that were in like Thessaly, that were going to get conquered. And so thankfully during this first invasion, they had to kind of cut it short. The second force, so the first one was in 492 BC. 490 BC two years later, this is when the second force gets sent across the Aegean. So it gets sent across the Aegean, and there's a place called Marathon, which is on the coast of Greece, kind of Greece proper. And it's kind of in Attica, or I'm sorry, it is in Attica. So it's where you can land, and they'd be basically marching across land to get to Athens. So the Persian army was like, well, fuck it. We'll just ferry the army over there with all the boats and the Navy, and then they'll just walk across the landmass and destroy Athens. We won't have to worry about all the time it takes to march through Thrace and then go through Macedonia and all that shit.

And probably maybe have to fight more people that we left a year ago. Yeah, and you just, there's only a certain amount of resources that you can carry for a certain amount of time. And I mean, to kind of let you guys know how small a region this is as far as distance-wise, like, Marathon was only 25 miles from Athens. Fun fact, the legend behind the invention of the Marathon, which I believe is 26.2. miles is that during the Battle of Marathon, which is where the Athenians went out to meet the Persian invasion force, they beat them back at the Battle of Marathon. And the reason they chose marathon is because essentially like the terrain was advantageous for the Greeks because like the Persians

couldn't use their horses, cavalry, anything like that. And we've talked about battles a little bit. But if you had a horse, especially think of it like from the conquest of like Mexico. And And like all those in South America, the horses were like, would just bowl people over. So, I mean, cavalry could completely just decimate ground troops. Scary beasts that need a nice rubber padding underneath their feet. So you have the Battle of Marathon, which basically repels the Persian invaders. And the legend behind the actual invention of the marathon is because it was 25 miles away. Myth.

The myth. Sorry. Legend or myth. Like, legends can be like the same thing. There's just no way. A legend, I think, doesn't suggest it it's true. The legend of Paul Bunyan. Come on.

John Henry versus the state. That's a legend. I believe that one. All right. Can I get that a little bit when you're done? So we have this guy running back to Athens and supposedly he ran back the entire... He had to go around something, I think, a mountain.

So he had to run like 26.2 miles is what they say. And that's where we get the distance from an actual marathon. Oh, and then he collapsed and died, didn't he? After he rushed into whatever they considered their Senate, their assembly, announced that because they were scared that during the battle, they had saw some Persian ships leaving to head around the coast. They thought they were going to try to get to Athens and attack it that way because the main army was in Marathon.

So he ran to kind of like, I don't know if he was to announce, you know, we'd won the battle or else it could have been that and then a combination of the, what the fuck is the guy, the British Academy? Paul Revere. Yeah, or it was a Paul Revere situation where he was kind of giving them mourning. Either way, I think when he barged and he told him what was going on, then myth has it, he died.

Thank the Greek gods that he didn't collapse on the steps walking up to tell something that was going on. Can you imagine? Yeah, terrible. So, Darius is basically like, fuck! Two times I've been thwarted. So he plans for the entire conquest of Greece. He's like, fuck Athens.

If I'm going back a third time, I'm taking everything. I think that was also probably kind of writing on the wall. He's like, well, if it wasn't for a couple of these issues during the first one, we probably could have made our way into Greece. We kind of got our asses stomped when we tried it just strictly the naval route. So let's do a combination and we'll march the entire army and navy around the coast, and then we'll just conquer all the fucking Greece while we're at it. Well, womp, womp, wamp, Wamp, 486 BCE, he ends up dying,

and historically accurate person. Darius? Yes. We get Xerxes, who becomes king. And he's not quite... Did you do any research of watching the movie 300? Yes, I've seen the movie. I saw it in IMAX.

We saw it together, didn't we? Yeah, I think so. But you do get a guy named Xerxes. He was not the 10-foot-tall, golden, bald man that he was. He was a Persian king? Have you seen that episode of South Park? I think I have. The scissoring?

Yes. When, uh, Oh, scissor me zerx. Yes. Yeah. Okay. I remember.

I wish, now I wish I had not remember because that's all I'm thinking about. Um, so, but he was a Persian king and basically a deity to his people. And so yeah, he was probably pretty, in pretty baller fashion. Yeah. Cool dude.

He had a throne that was carried around for him, all that kind of crazy shit. So I think it was just exaggerated a little bit in that movie, a little bit. and then took some artistic liberties with with a lot of other things. A lot of them. Well, he ends up kind of inheriting the mission

and in 480 you get the second Persian invasion of Greece. This is where we get the famous Battle of Thermopyla. So Thermopyla is essentially on the coast, closer to, closer down past Macedonia just a little bit, kind of into Thessaly, but it's not like it's right next to Athens. it's not like it's right next to

Spartan or anything like that from where they marched it was like it had to have been close to what 300 miles 400 miles to Thermopyly yeah and probably and I don't really know if we're going to do an episode on that

it's hard to do an episode on the Battle of Thermopyla because comparing it to what people have as a knowledge of the movie then you're just like well that sucks less well that sucks the movie was better that sucks the movie was better So I'm just going to offer some a little bit of the, the finer points on it. It was not just 300 Spartans.

I think it was 300 Spartans. And then they also had a few thousand other Greek city state soldiers that were helping do this stuff. They did inflict. They were called the Delian League, I believe. The Deelian League hadn't formed yet. Okay. But, and that's going to come up here in a second.

But there were supporting groups behind them. Yeah, because when it came down to this whole Persian invasion, there were like a hundred Greek city states, like all in various sizes and everything. You had major powers, and basically the two major powers that were vying for what they call the hegemony or the primary power of the city state

was Sparta and was Athens. And so... Two vastly different places to be in the same country. And so you basically, Athens before this whole second invasion, after marathon, they started building ships, these triremes,

because... They knew that they were going to have to engage in another naval battle. They knew it wasn't going to be the last time they dealt with this. So they were kind of gearing up for war in a sense. But the whole Spartan thing, Battle Thermopyla, that was sent essentially to buy time for evacuations and for Athens to basically keep preparing for the Persian invasion. So it was never meant to essentially rep—I mean, if they could have repelled them, they would have.

But it was meant as kind of like a token resistance and a holding pattern to just buy more time. So, King Leonidas is there. There is the legend of, you know, lay down your weapons, come and take them. I think that's on the actual statue there at the Hot Gates, which is a fucking, like, highway now. And it looks completely different. You can't even imagine what it looked like in ancient Grecian times. Hot Gates is a cool name, though. It is.

But basically what it was is it was a area in which the mountains came down and allowed a small pass through where you can move an army. Now you're like, well, why didn't they just go fucking around the mountains and not how. to go through here. Probably two reasons. One, you're marching your soldiers away from the coast in which your Navy's at, so you're not going to have your support structure there. Secondly, I think Xerxes probably had a point to prove it been like, it doesn't fucking matter who's in front of us. We're just going to keep going whatever direction we want to come. And so in that battle, everyone did die from, you know, the side of Greece, but they did actually inflict like very disproportionate losses to the Persians.

and did buy time essentially for, you know, places like Athens, Thessaly, all those city-states to kind of prepare themselves a little bit more or kind of evacuate. Turns out this wasn't Sparta. No. Well, they knew that Athens was going to be the first and primary target of this invasion. And so Athens was essentially evacuated. And after, sorry, after the Battle of Thermopyly, it was clear roads. the Persian army to Athens.

So they got to Athens. It had been evacuated. And they completely just destroyed burn Athens to the ground. At this point, Athens did have the Parthenon on the Acropolis. It gets fucking destroyed. Yeah. They did. Are you sure?

Yep. Because I thought that was built by... It was rebuilt after. And what we see now today is the ruins of the rebuilt one. Okay. But because essentially they ended up being victorious. And so they were still Athens. they needed to keep Athena happy, so they just rebuilt her temple.

We good? Yeah, I didn't Persia also have a little bit of an axe to grind with Athens because of some loyalty that they had pledged to Persia? As far as that goes, I don't know kind of... Athens did end up, there was going to be a couple of examples here where they used... So I thought that was part of the whole deal with the Iodian thing. was they had already talked to Persia and they're like, hey, we don't really want to fight with you. And they're like, okay, well, do you want to be under Persian rule?

They're like, no, they're like, well, we'll come in and take it. They're like, okay. Persian rule sounds okay. They provided support and were fighting against the Persians with the Ionian Greeks. But that's what pissed off the Persians was they thought that Athens was going to be a part of Persia. I don't know. That's what I had watched in a documentary that Persia kind of had an extra grind with Athens because they had already made contact and were supposed to be working as an Asian.

an agent under Persia. Before or after the Ionian revolt? Before. Because... Oh, yeah, I don't know about that. It's possible that they had contact and everything like that, but I know that they essentially

didn't go through with that then. I assumed it was... I assumed that it was probably less about that because that probably would have been the king before Darius and everything. I'm not sure. I just know that the biggest acts to grind

against Athens was the fact that they assisted in the revolt of the Ionian Greeks. And that was what I was sort of led to believe by the documentary was they were pissed because they thought their own people of Athens of the Persian Empire threw help to the Ionians

to try to take their stuff back. It would have pissed them off either way. So it's just two different ways of getting to the same result. Those states up there were all the Eurasian, or not Eurasian, Asia Miners, weren't they? Yes. Yeah. But they were still considered Greek states.

But they were Greece Asia Minor. Like they were the highest ones towards Asia. Asia. That was like Thessaly and then like the Ionian Greeks were more like actually south like almost directly across from. If you kind of look at the map, see that's Ionia right there. Look on the, I'm trying to it's basically almost directly across, maybe a little bit higher than Athens. You can see it right on like about midway up the board there, buddy. Okay. So regardless of the reason, the Persian still had a fucking extra grind just for the simple fact that, the Athenians took part in this revolt. So after this holding tactic and after of Thermopyla, Athens, you know, again, gets burned to the ground.

And there needs to be something to kind of turn the tide of what's going on here. So the Athenians have pulled back to this island of Salamis or Salamis, and it's basically right off the coast of like Attica, kind of like closer to where Athens is. but that's where all of like the Greek Navy is that's for all the army that's where a ton of their citizens are and so the Persians to kind of have this battle to wipe out the Navy the leader of the Navy his name is Themistocles I'm just going to say themistocles Themistocles he's kind of a politician general warrior for Athens and basically he also has like the United or Allied

Greek Navy there. So he's got Spartans. I think he had some... There were only a total of 31 of these Greek city states. They were like, yeah, we'll fight against Persian domination. The other of them were like, eh, I guess we'll just be Persian. Either they were just too far away to be invaded.

I mean, but there were so many of them. The whole thing was going to be invaded, man. Like, there wasn't going to be a portion where the Persians were just going to stop and be like, oh, you didn't fight against us. You're cool. They were going to take over. everything. You didn't think it was just dominance of the Aegean? Yes, yeah, completely. And

those city-states were just, they didn't want to die or be wiped out and everything. Because I think that was the biggest thing is that, you know, he tries to wipe out Athens. He tries to burn the thing to the ground. And I think if you're going to stand against him, he's not going to allow any of you, anything about your culture to exist. I think these ones that kind of just stood to the side and was like, yeah, whatever you need, they just hope to survive. I think that was kind of what it was about survival. So only a total of 30 round, one out of these, you know, over a hundred Greek city states are actually standing up to this Persian invasion. And so the Spartans are like, hey, we're going to actually pull our Navy back. We think we'll have a better chance of like defending,

you know, Corinth from the Persians. We want to keep our Navy in reserve in case we need to defend like Sparta, which is further to the south, also kind of, you know, out there on a little Peninsula and so we're going to hold back. And so Themistocles sends basically an agent. This is kind of the story of the legend. A lot of this history is written and documented by this by Herodotus. And Herodotus is basically like the go-to-chronographer or whatever you want to say about like this timeframe in like Greek culture. He wrote this stuff down. They said somewhere like 10 years after it all occurred is when he kind of wrote the histories of this stuff happening.

So, of course, this is going to be through accounts and things like that. But 10 years is still a decent amount of time to get an accurate representation of what happened. What's been bumped up? I'm not sure. But the story goes is that Themistically sends this guy over to the Persians and is basically like, hey, Themistically says that Athens doesn't want. you know anything else to do with this but these other Greek states that are causing you guys issues we're actually going to go ahead and bounce and if you guys want to swing in and clean up all

these other Greek city states we'll go ahead and be no loyal to you guys but you can make sure these other troublemakers get taken care of all in one fell swoop but they're getting ready to leave so you're going to need to do it now you're going to have to do it like tonight or whatnot so he ends up coming back and he's like hey I think they bought it so Themistocles basically and the reason he does this is the Spartans, like I said, they're threatening to kind of pull support. So he knows he has to do something now to get these guys

to stay and fight. Desperate move. So as the Spartans are basically getting ready to leave, all of a sudden, they're like, there's fucking Persian ships coming in here. Well, he also plans this to take place within, I don't know if they're called the Straits of Salamis, but basically Salamis is very close to the mainland.

And when you have a, you know, a larger number of these Persian ships coming in, you basically get them in a position where their numbers don't count for anything because it's a smaller, tighter area. You also have the advantage of, they said with all of these ships during the Battle of Slamis

that Themistocles was in charge of and leading, they were newer ships and these triremes were actually heavier. They had to be. There were so many people on them. There were, but because it's newer wood and everything, it hasn't had a chance to fully dry out or gets waterlogged easier.

These things were able to, they weren't, you know, quicker, more maneuverable, but these, the whole thing with naval warfare, this wasn't like, you know, firing cannons and arrows and, you know, flaming arrows and stuff like that. This was just ramming fucking ships. And so these heavier, sturdier ships,

these triremes, they had three tiers of ores men on each side. So you had fucking, like, three sets of oars, and these things would get cruising, and you'd basically try to position yourself, not ramming frontly, because you would break off your ram on the front. You would get around to the side of them, ram them in the side, and then break their ship apart.

Well, they basically had spears on the front of them. Yeah, like if you look at a picture of a tri-room, if anyone wants to pull it up, it doesn't look like it on the front of it like a spear, but if you go right below the water line, instead of being like a boat that you're traditionally comes in, you know, from the front and it sweeps back, it goes and bows out where you basically have this giant wooden ram on the front of it. They also had bronze, a three-tip, like a trident spear. at the top of the battle of the boat. Yes.

Oh, well, that too, but the primary purpose of the whole ram was to break the other boat below the water line and then sink it. So if it ever got to the point where it would get up to that ram, that would probably be for like trying to get like the soldiers off the deck. I think it's just destruction. Even if you hit a boat high and you take out everything. That's true.

The top level. I mean, they were basically just like fucking can openers. Well, what's crazy about these things too is like they didn't have railing around the, decks. They were just like a flat platformer barge. So after they ram these ships, if they needed to, they could literally just jump off these things onto the enemy boats and just start fucking fighting hand to hand. See, I think that's the least crazy thing about it. Really? I think the most crazy thing about it is that guy that's on the bottom rung underneath two dirty butts that have to

sit there in ore and or in or in row and row. I think they said that there was in total, I think there was three levels of 50. So that, yeah, some of the, and I think they said Athens had worked to build during the interim period between the invasions. They wanted to build or got close to like 200 of these things. But there's 150 people below deck that are sitting there paddling. So you have the arm power of 150 people, but you may be in that thing for an entire battle. So you're living underneath deck with all these other dirty, stinky, smelly, hot, swatling.

sweaty people. Not to mention if your arms burn out underneath, what do you do? You don't sit there and not row when everybody else around you is doing the same thing. I think you develop a system in which you know how much you can row and can't row. You're not, here's the thing. You have 150 these guys rowing these boats.

And again, you know, ram, they would hit, reverse. They would reverse and they would pull the boats back to go watch this boat sink or go ram another one. It's fucking nuts. It's just any way you want to slice it. It's like talking about horsepower for cars. They had 150 arm powers underneath there that were doing it. And this is

sort of where this whole citizen army thing comes back around is usually the people of means, the aristocrats, the rich folks, even I'm sure if they had a middle class, the middle class, those guys would be soldiers on the ground in hand-to-hand combat. But since it was all a democracy and everybody got a say and everything, the poor people still had the same obligations to be there and they would be the rowers because it didn't cost you any money for weaponry or swords or anything like that to go below deck. I think there's a trade-off to that. I get what you're saying as far as like you feel like that's like the ass position. It's the worst, dude. Okay. But at the same time, how you want to sell that is, hey, can you fight? No. Okay, well, you still have to serve so you're going to be a rower. Okay. Yeah. Well, well, that sucks, though. Can you teach me out of fight? Well, to be honest with you, you have a better chance of surviving if you're below decks protected by the wood planks and everything. You have a better.

better chance of survival than being on the top where you're exposed to actual fighting and arrow. So I think you'd be a better rower than you are a fight. Yeah, you know what? And most of these guys that didn't come from a culture where they were constantly fighting or being trained to fight, they're probably like, yeah, I'd like to stay as far below deck out of the fucking danger as I can. I know you think, but when you think in your head, you're like, the prestige would be fighting and all that kind of stuff. I think they were smart enough to be like, well, let's put the guys that can fight up in the fighting positions. and if this motherfucker can't fight heroes. That's also probable at the same time,

if you get stabbed or something on the surface, there's a chance you live. If you get rammed and you're sinking, you're just all dead. Yeah, but that's the thing. The whole point of this is that, like, a lot of the Persian ships and everything weren't built for this. They were built as transports. They weren't built with the intention.

That's why these, and that's why these triremes were all so stronger. They were meant to, you know, these guys trained essentially, instead of naval warfare that was faring troops and everything, their naval skills were like, no, we are trained to get in position around the sides of these boats and just ram the fuck out of these things. It was also the fact of the amount of slaves that they had at one point. I'm guessing it was a little more disproportionate on the Persian side for Persian rowers.

But I still think, of course, it's going to be heavy on the Greek side too. Because on the Greek side, just in Athens and in Attica, slaves outnumbered citizens, three to one. Yeah. So there were three times as many slaves that were also being used in these attempts to defend themselves. That's a lot of extra person power. I think it is.

I do think it is disproportionate to the Persian ones. My thought on it's my thought on it's kind of. All the Greeks that they just enslaved and took their land up there. That's true that they were also. They had, because they had conquered Ionia and all that area, they had Greek-like or Greek-speaking soldiers that were part of their armies that were fighting other Greeks. That definitely happened. Kind of thinking about it from that perspective. If you're fighting for a free Greece, I think you're going to get a lot more people fighting for your home country and your freedom. You are using slaves

for a lot of shit. You also have to have people keeping like the farms going and stuff like that while your people are out fighting. And to give yourself the best chance of survival, you're using people. You're not training slaves to fight. So if you're put in a situation where you can either have somebody that has maybe had a little bit of training to fight as a rower because there's better fighters above. And if we need him to jump into a spot and start fighting, we'd rather have that guy than a slave who has only known farming and can row. But like if we need them to do anything, they're just a body. I think there's a, I think there's a little bit of a thought process to it. Their slave system is a sentence that I never.

I know. Never really wanted to utter... Because of the Enlightenment. Well, no, this is something that I never thought would come out of my mouth. Their degrees and levels of slavery, which we'll talk about in the golden age, is extremely fascinating. Because if you think about it, all the slaves that they're getting aren't like the traditional slaves that we would think of. They were going through and taking over and conquering these cities. So you could have a slave that was a teacher.

in another city. Yes. Or you could have a teacher, or not sorry, you could have a slave that you're like at the market and someone else in the town can be like, hey, that's my cousin. Yeah. That just happens to live in another city state that happened to have been conquered or some shit. But their slave labor wasn't just like a hard workforce. Like their slave labor did. You would have like the lady of the house is slave.

You would have the slave that taught the children that was educated in shit. You would have. It was such a broad reaching term that like you could have a, weird different social standings. You could have slaves that were smarter than you working for you. Exactly. Kind of like, I imagine it kind of like on horrible bosses,

Colum Farrell's character versus Jason Sedakia's character. Yeah, a little bit. Yes, exactly, but he has to work for him. And less cocaine. Yeah. So, due to some fancy strategy, um, the Athenians and the rest of the Allied Greeks actually win the Battle of

Salamis. Cool thing about this is during this battle, Xerxes actually had, because they were on mainland Attica, and all of the, you know, Athenians and the Greek forces were on the island.

Xerxes had a throne set up overlooking the straits. I mean, he couldn't see individual boats and being like, hey, that's mine. But he could see the battle taking place and watched

his Navy get their asses kicked. That's got to be a set. You probably don't sit there for the whole thing, right? I don't know, but you're definitely, not letting anyone else up there watch it. Like everyone else has to have their back turns.

Like no one is going great, everyone. Exactly how I planned it. No one fucking look. But after that, we then get the Battle of Plataia and Plataia took place and was instead of a naval battle was kind of the turning point.

Salamis was kind of like what I would refer to as, I heard someone make this reference, but it made a lot of sense. Like the Stalingrad or the Midway. It didn't win the war. it wasn't the decisive war-winning victory, but it was what flipped it around and started the trajectory

and the momentum going the other way. It was like the precursor to a recovery. Yes. And so then we get the Battle of Plataea, which takes place near the town of Plataia. This ended up being a piqued battle between the armies, and this is where we actually get

the Greek victory. Persian invasion ended. This is where you get the actual army of the Spartans teaming up with all the other Greeks. There's some, like, seven days of them doing, like, sacrifices and hoping, like, the animal entrails are going to show that they should be going to war.

And, like, each side is, like, we're waiting for them to make the first move. And then they are switching positions of who's, like, on the flanks. And then the Persians keep doing the same thing. It's just weird fucking dance that takes place for, like, days before they actually fight. That's just desperation. That's just looking for anything because if you're on the Persian side, shit's gone, real wrong for you. It was going real right. Now it's real wrong. But if you can turn the tide

and win this, you're going back the other way. Well, here's the thing too is it wasn't like, so you have the Greeks that are like, we kind of need like some omens for like to go to war to go to battle and everything, which is so weird that you have all this enlightenment to one degree but then they're still like with the mythology

and gods and shit. And they're still listening to this Oracle of Delphi for fucking everything. And you know that this woman is just in their fucking tripping balls on whatever fucking ergon. wine or acid they had back then is just like, I think. But. You're talking about a state in Athens that was named after a woman who got spunked on by her brother.

I know. And you're saying that the, you're, you're shocked that this lady is. Listen, those guys later in the history didn't name the city. But what I'm saying is you have this democracy, philosophy, all this kind of stuff, but you're still trusting this person on acid. Yeah. That's what the Greek. do. But anyway, the reason that the

Persians had to kind of tolerate this stuff wasn't like out of a respect thing like, oh, we have to wait for them to like fight with us. They had so many of those Greek soldiers from like only in those territories. They had like the same type of rituals. They're like, hold on man, like we can't fight

either if like the animal intestines aren't coming out the right way. Like Serrano needing a bucket of chicken before a baseball game. Hat for bat. Keep bat warm. Brum for Joe Boo. It was that guy. is shit. So ends up in a Greek victory. Persian invasion ends

and basically over the next few years the allied Greeks are on the offensive and are just like walking the Persians back up the way they came and pushing them out of they get as far to push them out of Macedonia. And then they push them so

far around that even Ionia ends up gaining its independence. Yeah, just push them all the way back into Persia. Like Persia proper. Yeah. Yeah. So Once you clear all that stuff out, that's got to be a pretty good feeling. Like, you've got to be, Athens has to be patting themselves on the back. Like, they just basically single-handedly in their own mind as a coalition, just push the Persians all the way back into Persia.

Well, yeah, and because they had, you know, it was them and between them and Sparta, there was still, you know, the only reason that they were allied together is because it was for survival to both not be conquered by the Persians. and so you end up getting a situation where this war's over, both sides feel like they've contributed, now you're kind of back to the fucking problem of like, now who's going to lead this newly confirmed freed Greece? Like who's going to be in the position for it? So there was this Spartan general. He was kind of the lead guy at the Battle of Plataia,

and his name was Pozzan. And Pozzan was accused of a Persian-coniore. he was conspiring with the Persians. And what they called back to is when they were forcing them, you know, back over across Macedonian, Thessalonian, everything. And I think one of the places was Byzantium. I'm not sure exactly where that was in the grand scheme of all that. Somewhere on the way that he had released a bunch of Persian POWs

that just happened to be family members of Xerxes. And, you know, there was some back and forth about it, whether he was truly guilty or not, but essentially that created a lot of distrust of the Spartans out of these essentially newly liberated, like free Greek city states. And so they kind of, and Athens was like, we didn't let any prisoners go. And so they're like, hmm, we should probably put Athens in charge of this whole thing. And so what you were saying before, those Greek states in Athens become the Deelian League. And essentially Sparta is supposed to be part of this Deelian League at this point.

but all of these other city states are basically looking at Athens as the leader of the Dealian League Well, and the people have spoken I'm sure also along those same lines The words of democracy have gotten out to these other places And they're like, huh? You guys do what? The Spartans don't do that They're a little less fun to hang out with

They're probably not a great hang You guys are you're cutting edge like democracy's a foreign word. You seem to be going forward. Yeah. Yep. You make us, you won't make us fight from this age. Like we don't have to like be,

our children aren't going to be tossed out if they have like a slight malformation or something like that. Yeah, probably not. Yeah. So as this goes, you know, through Greece continues, you know, they're still kind of expelling Persian and everything like that.

And Persia's fine. I'm like, okay, we're good. You forced us out. and Greece is like, you guys good? All right, let's sign this thing called the Peace of, I think it was Callias, Calais. And that is basically just like, you're cool, we're cool,

no one's going to fuck with each other anymore. No hard feelings, man. So you would think, oh my God, peace can come to the land. Greece is united. We can all advance and live prosperously and happily. But you'd be fucking wrong. Because that doesn't happen.

Like 18 years later, we get into a situation where the Spartans are like, yeah, we want to revisit this whole dominance of Greece thing. And we get into what's called the Peloponnesian War. We got to talk about the good times before that. You know what? Yeah, before we get back into the doom and gloom, I'll talk about the good times a little bit.

The Golden Age of Athens was a pretty just incredible time with the amount of thought. in artisanship that just flowed through Athens. And it was really primarily funded by the fact that this Deelian League that they had just won over gets moved to Athens. So as that treasury and all the money and everything in this Deelian League comes to Athens, they start to have a lot more money in the coffers to start doing some stuff. So one of the first things that this gentleman who was in power named Pericles did, was he rebuilt, as you were talking about earlier, the Acropolis.

Well, that money was not earmarked for that. Oh, no. That money was supposed to be used for like, basically it was supposed to be like a national defense budget. Yeah. And everything. And he's like, you know, guys, I think what could really protect us and would look really good for Athens.

I mean, we did help mostly win this war and everything is we should probably. probably rebuild, rebuild this, this Parthenon, the Acropolis. Once you get the money, that's your, your choices.

And who is going to say something against you? At that point, you're made the leader of this. We just won the war. So the Acropolis and the Parthenon and everything are just,

to me, they're some of the most fascinating works. And right now, they were restored in, I believe it was the mid-90s. Now, as far as like, when you say the rule of Pericles, if you can kind of refresh my memory on this,

was Pericles like he was like the head politician right he was the elected leader he wasn't like we didn't switch back to a no he wasn't a ruler he was democratically brought in

and basically his first movement and to rebuild the Acropolis the Acropolis kind of entails a few different things the Parthenon which is just a giant temple

dedicated to Athena absolutely beautiful made of that marble that you really enjoy. Oh, from Mount Pellis. Oh, yeah. It's, it's, there's a, so there's a mountain that's 12 miles, I think, from Athens, and Mount Peloponnesia. Could be.

And there's a type of, it's what the Parthenon ends up being constructed out of, but I think the first Parthenon just had, it was like, a facade of marble. So like the interior was, like a veneer. Yeah, and so the interior was built out of like a lesser stone. and then the outside. We're like, well, this saves a ton of money because you're not using as much of this material. Well...

Buddy, we're flushed with De Leon, buddy, this time. So Pericles is like, no, we are fucking just going whole hog. I want the entire thing rebuilt out of like this white, this beautiful marble. They say the way that when they first built this thing, not to go into too much detail on it,

but it was so advanced that had they built the thing exactly perfect to where it had the, the perfect, you know, angles and sides, that from a distance, everything blurred together and it looked imperfect. And they somehow had the foresight that they almost bulged the building a little bit. So it's like, you know, when you see like a funny picture of a car that looks like it has too much air put into it. It's like they overinflated it a little bit and had the angles a certain way to where you can see like even from a distance, it looked perfect from every angle.

and then they said the way that this marble it almost had a point to where it had like a layer of opakness that was like, you know, below the surface a little bit and when the moonlight hit it, it appeared to like glow. Like, I want to fucking see something like that. That's why I was trying to order a piece of that so I could look at it and then I'd put it under light and be like, could you imagine a whole fucking building built out of this?

Yeah, they just going through and doing this restoration, they did, I guess a restoration, I believe it was in the 90s. and they just did it really haphazardly and tried to go through and do it the way that they would have built it in the 90s. Yeah. This new restoration that they're going through and doing now, they're actually going back to these old techniques that they like the strike patterns in the marble. Yeah, they're sourcing the stones from the same place because they're able to, yeah. But they're using like the same technologies that they would have had in their hands at that point to rebuild it in the correct way.

They're not rebuilding it to finish. They're rebuilding it to what it basically should have looked like now if it hadn't been torn down and destroyed. Okay, gotcha. So it's still going to look like only partial ruins, but everything will be fully. There's no roof on it, anything like that. Gotcha. So they're not going to recreate it. They're going to repair and restore everything that's currently existing right now, how it should look.

Cool. Then you also had the temple of Nike that we talked about earlier, and this was dedicated to Nike and Athena. the big reason Goddess of victory The big reason that this is happening to is they found that Athens has sort of taken on a new meaning because since they did just win

this Greco-Persian war they're saying that Athena the goddess of Wisdom and war Yeah protected them and brought them through Nike

the goddess of victory has also seen them through and they were the reasons that they won. And also, you've got to think about it too. Like, while they're doing, I'm not sticking up for the fact that Pericles is like, let's fucking use this money, yo. Because it wasn't meant for that and it's going to lead to this whole other fucking war. But they're already rebuilding the city. And so he's like, at the same time, let's just make a couple improvements. It's like the garage burned down. Next time we rebuild it, why don't we wire this bitch for speakers and maybe put a flat screen in? Well, then we get to the Erecteon, which is just a bunch of sanctuaries that are built up next to the Parthenon.

So they're sort of starting to spend the extra money to do some extra things. We also get the theater of Dionysus that was built right around this time. I don't know if it was with these funds. Dionysus, God of Wine. God of Wine. I believe she becomes like the god of play. He becomes the god of playwrights. So you also have that being built.

the agora sat down below the parthenon down off of the Acropolis and it was the city center you would get together to do business that's where they would hold public meetings and gatherings was the theater of Dionysus

was that the like 15,000 foot one that had all the stone steps like the amphitheater and everything so they had theaters before but Pericles was the first one to build a stone theater they still use that today right I believe it might have been restored

and it should still be there. Nice. But the Agora was where you wanted to be. The igora was the middle of the town. They would have merchant vendors that would set up in there, but also at the same time they would be holding public meetings. That's where they would hold some of the juries and everything. They had sort of like a court that was off to the other side,

the High Leia court that we were talking about earlier. But it had so many different, like it was the city center that was built around all of the other basically like jobs that there were. So it was truly a city center where you would pass through it every single day to go to work. In the northwest corner of the

Agora, there's something that was called the Ceramacos. And Greeks, especially Athenians, are known for their pottery. So Ceramacos is where we get the term ceramics. Ooh. And it was just where all the potters worked. Pottery was such

a big important part of it because like you were talking about earlier, they had aqueducts that would feed into fountains. These fountains were the things that were giving water to everybody in town. So in order to get all your water back

for potable means or anything like that, to clean out chamber pots, do anything in the house, every morning the women would have to go to these fountains, and they would need these big ceramic pots, vases, anything like that to be filled up so they would have water

for the day at their houses. They also started building gymnasiums. Yeah. And here's a little thing that people might not know that I thought was pretty funny. The name gymnasium comes from the ancient Greek gymnos, which means naked or nude. Now, only adult male citizens in Greece were allowed to use the gyms. And there's a reason that it was Greek for naked or nude. You'd be working out naked.

Can't be getting that toga sweaty. Yeah, I don't think that you carried around a bag with like your gym toga in it. and then you switched into that. No. No, I just, I don't see. The thought of working out naked. Could you imagine if that was still a thing? All I'm thinking too is like, hey, you're going to wipe down that bench?

And he's like, what? And he's like, come on, man. Do you think that there would ever be in America the choice or chance that we would see a gym that was like, you want to go back to the old Greek ways? Like, you know how fashion trends and fads catch on? within the gym. Yeah, it's like how now it used to be where the

gym was like the hardcore gold workout gym with like none of the bullshit or anything like that and now gyms that do that are strictly like strength training gyms are like none of the bullshit like planet fitness can fuck off and everything. So you get those

gyms now that's going to be the next extreme. It's going to be like fuck those muscle factories come to the naked gym. Do you think people would actually do it though? Oh yeah. Really? You think people would be confident enough to go to a gym? There would be such a select few people I think that would be... Do you not see people?

Do you not watch TV? I'm not saying this is going to have a sustainable membership. But yeah, you're going to get some people signing up and trying it. I'm not going to say these are the people you're going to want to see naked. Oh, I think it is. If you give somebody a place that they are allowed to get naked in front of other people and have to sign a waiver saying that those other people can't really complain about them being naked. no boners. There's a no boner

policy. I don't know if it has the thing Planet Fitness that goes off if you drop the weights too much. If someone gets a boner, it's like, do, do, do. I just think the amount of confidence that you would have to have in your physique to go do that. That was a big thing back then, man, is... Well, it was

all dudes back then. It was, but I'm saying within Greek culture, physical fitness was a big thing. Like, it wasn't like in some cultures were being like a large fat individuals, like a sign of wealth. Like, that's why you do get people like look at all the Greek statues like look at images of the Greek gods. David.

Fucking Plato missed out on being an Olympic wrestler by like one match. Plato was jacked apparently. You think he had a... Do you know that Plato is not his real name? I will get to when we talk about him. Plato is the Greek word for like shoulders because he was jacked and had huge shoulders. He must have a young boy apprentice that didn't want to hang out. A strong young boy apprentice.

He liked to wrestle, man. There wasn't a lot of stuff to do back then. It was just like, that's where you get the, that's where you get to sing like, hey, want to wrestle. That was just like maybe the, like we've been at philosophy the entire afternoon. He's like, do you want to wrestle? He's like, fuck yeah, I want to wrestle. Well, if you're going to bring up gymnasiums, then we have to talk about the sexual proclivities of the Greek culture. Honestly, man, if you're going to talk about Rome, if you're going to talk about Greece, anything like that, yeah, you're going to have that stuff going on.

I'm having a good podcast. If we cannot talk about, like, the kid stuff, I would appreciate it. It goes without saying, people know it. Yeah, it happened. There was dude on kid action. All that kind of stuff that happened. Let's, I'm not saying. There were mentorships.

Yes, they were, however they wanted. You know what, there were things called mentorships. What did they call them in the church? Whatever, you were, you were an altar boy, and there was some type of, like, it wasn't a mentorship, but it was. was like something that you were assigned to from within the church. Listen, we know it happened. I'm not trying to skirt over that what is a serious issue and I don't have a problem with it.

I'm just, I'm having a good time talking about the interesting stuff. Do you want to talk about why the mentorship's happened? Yeah, go ahead. So because this was such a warring society, there would be a lot of times where there wouldn't be another man in the house because they would be a way at war fighting to try to keep Athens a democracy or fighting to try to keep people out and they wouldn't have a father figure in the home. So these children more of means would then go to these mentorships underneath. I'm not going to make the literally joke.

I was getting forward. I almost bit it. But they would work underneath. He tried to bait me, son of a bitch. These great philosophers and these mathematicians. And it was, uh, there was a, there's a reason why you hear stuff about like, boy lovers and why there was joke like there were jokes about like the Spartans because they were always training and wrestling like as young boys and everything there were like things about the

Spartans there were things about like the Greeks there were things about the Thebian like it was just but to leave that out of it I don't want to use the word opportunity because we know what was going on on the other side of the opportunity but when that's not happening you're learning underneath the greatest minds in Athens yes like you don't it's school you're sending someone off. Not a trade-off. Not a trade-off by any means. No. But there is something to be gleaned from these...

I'm glad that you're stirring this through what you're saying. You're saying the reason why... You're not saying that the result is justified. Yes. You're saying that if you just take away the touchy, what they were sent being initially sent to do, these parents weren't like, hey, teach my kid and touch him. It was just like, hey, teach my kid.

I shouldn't have to tell you not to touch my kid. Or maybe that was just how it fucking... worked, but it was just like the purpose of this whole thing is to like essentially teach these, these kids how to be the next, you know, generation of thinkers. Yes, of thinkers and of Athenian society. So there was some benefit. All right. But just to go along with their kind of daily lives and all that kind of stuff and

talking about the slavery, like we were saying, certain slaves would. accompany children to and from school and actually sit there in school to make sure that the kid was paying attention in class. Like it was that far. The smart ones would be tutors for the children at home to help them with their homework or do anything like that. The oddness... It was like having like a servant that they didn't pay. Yeah. That's essentially what it was. It was a servant that you owned. The oddness around childbearing and things like that, there were Greece had dowries too

so along with marrying off your daughter there would be a dowry that you would have to pay and so there were sort of choices that were made along the lines of male and female children there was a ceremony that was held a week after the birth and it was to cleanse and purify

the mother after giving birth and anyone else that touched her and maybe got like her pregnancy juices or anything like that on there. And once she was clear to that and she was purified, she could go back to doing her daily work and everything. But until that week was up, they would, like she would be secluded and all that kind of stuff. Also, that week was to signify that they had wanted the child. So you were, it was against the law to kill your child.

It wasn't against the law. It was just frowned upon to leave your child to their own devices. and if they die, they die. But once that week hit, and the mother was purified, and you said, yeah, we're good to go with this kid. Then if you killed your kid, you would be in trouble. Are you kind of thinking that this was a,

I'm not making light of this or anything like that. Do you think that it was devised to basically keep the, because there is essentially that drive within a mother that like, that mother regardless, like with all of, you know, that feeling of, just seeing your child and everything like that. And this isn't exactly the time when, like, you know, fathers are super involved,

especially if it's like a girl or some shit, but like are really involved. They have servants and everything like that to raise their kids. So unless you're providing essentially like a son or unless you have a bunch of sons, then maybe a daughter would be welcome. You're basically pulling the mother away from that situation. And if the dad's just like, nah, I don't want this one. the mother isn't around to protect that kid. I feel like that would be like the only reason to do that.

I would also go with just purely religious beliefs because there is... Yeah, these people do still think lightning storms, the guy up in the sky is either having an orgasm or angry at something. That, but also I think sort of in like the Judeo-Christian, like Old Testament times, there was a lot of talk about impurities. like women back then when they would have their periods would actually have to leave the house because they were considered unclean. So I think there might have been some religious beliefs and she was impure and whoever helped her

with the pregnancy was also impure. I guess it's true. I guess one thing doesn't have to be, you know, if one thing's true, the other is not true. So it could have been for several reasons. They also wouldn't call in midwives unless things went real wrong. So like if the kid came out with like the cord wrapped or anything like that, that's when they would step in. So there wasn't somebody like coaching them along the way. Yeah, I imagine like, you know, by today's standards, of course, the birth rate is going to be like crazy low.

Way low. But like, probably high for the time. Yeah. For like, you know, you know, being in the city of Athens and everything like that. They had that type of modern medicine, like that time period of modern medicine. Yes, they would have been at the peak essentially probably for Greece as far as like, you know, medicine and like medical procedures go, I guess. Yeah. So it was just, the other thing too was this golden age was where Pericles focused on creating the naval dominance that Athens had.

They had the port. The port was where all the shipbuilding and everything like that took place. They had the resources and the means to bring everything into that port because it was a major trade, that they would always have the raw goods and materials to just continuously make more boats. Was it Pericles that did the wall? I believe so Okay, so this is fucking crazy I don't know if it's just me that thinks this is nuts

Okay So you have Athens which is I think Three point from the center of the city I think they said it was like four or five miles So from like the outskirts of the city The portion closest to The port city which was Was it Perseus?

Yeah something like that Or Parias Paras yes I keep on to say Peronis Isn't that we can't get It's a dick thing. It's where you break your dick. Is it?

Yeah. Oh, shit. Or that may be when you have an erection for too long. I can't remember. I was thinking of parogi. Someone let us know. I was thinking of the delicious potato dumpling. That's a parogi.

Yeah, that's what I was saying. So you have broken eggs. You have parias. This place, again, being the kind of the naval power hub, also the hub of trade and everything like that for Athens, getting everything in. without this, they could be surrounded and cut off and essentially have a siege to the city. What this guy does is he builds a wall. And it's not just one. It was two walls technically. Parallel walls that were wide enough to where there was like you could walk multiple people. And it was on the ground, raised these two walls for 3.7 miles down to this city where it had its own walls.

and basically just connected a protected highway. And does this because he's like, well, now we can't have a siege against us because now we can just keep bringing in and we can send people to the ports to support the Navy. We can bring in supplies. We're not going to get starved out or anything like that.

And as they're building this, a little bit of a precursor, the Spartans kind of see what's going on. They're like, hey, you don't need to be doing that. Well, the Spartans are pissed because with these walls, Athens is shit on land. They don't fight well on land.

That's not what they're built for. As much as the cultures are juxtapist, it falls down to like the military where it's like, even the colors. Like, I know this isn't factual and everything like that, but, you know, our audience and everything where, you know, a ton of you guys

are in that key age group where you love the Assassin's Creed games. If you played, you know, PlayStation, Xbox, things like that. But one of the best games is Assassin's Creed Odyssey, which takes place during the Peloponnesian Wars. and you basically have the two different cultures that you get, of course.

But Athens is even to the point where, like, their primary color that they wear into battle for their hoplites and everything is blue, where Spartan's primary colors of the capes and everything like that is red. Really? So you have these almost complete polar opposites. You know, we're naval power. We're land power. Just these crazy, we're still like a monarchy and have a king and they're like, we have a demon. Like, it's so fucking difference in their, you know, 150 miles apart.

and so they're just so different that yeah like you're saying like they're kind of pissed off in everything because they basically have it in their head at a certain point they're going to have to go to war with Athens if they hadn't been planning already well because Athens is extending their reach further and further

in basically on their imperialism shit yes and it's not going to be too long before the areas in um not Ionia but I'm trying to think Laconia sorry Laconia is the area like Attica is to Athens. Laconia is like Sparta is the capital of Laconia. And then the area of that little section that's barely connected to the rest of Greece, that's Polyponese. So you have... Kind of. Or it almost looks, it's almost like, I don't know what else it would be. Like the ass sticking out if you're like squatting down or something like that. But yeah, so they already,

I think, have plans kind of knowing what's going on possibly because of like the ideas of Athens spreading, but now they see like the one thing that's a weakness of Athens, they're like, fuck, they're fixing it. Like, that's how we were going to attack them. They're like, hey, you guys don't need to be building that. Like, what are you doing that for? Like, oh, we're not coming.

They're like, why do you, why do you fuckers care? Like, we're just protecting our, just protecting ourselves in case, you know, the Persians come back or something like that. And eventually through this, you know, not just because of the wall and everything like that, but this eventually just boils over.

And then the Spartans have had enough. They team up with a couple. I think they've had enough essentially playing second fiddle in Greece. Could be. Very well. And so they're able to actually, during that, the next like series of wars between Greece is just basically like, I feel like it's this.

The strongest city, all the other cities look at it is like they're getting too strong. And he's like, yeah, they're getting too strong. Those cities that are not as powerful will then form an alliance. and go to war with like the one powerful one. It was a reality check basically. Correct. Okay. Then what would happen is out of those groups,

another one would get a little bit more powerful than the other. And then the one that's less powerful would turn it the one that just got beat or other areas and being like, hey, these guys are getting a little too powerful? Do you want to team up? Then like, of course we do. And then it just worked in like around to different fucking city states. And so the Peloponnesian war between Athens and Sparta, The first phase of that is 431 BCE, and it basically kicks it off with what we call the 10-year war.

And that's where we get a Spartan king by the name of Archadamus. Archademes, I think. Archademes invades Attica and is basically like, fuck the walls! And so that whole 10-year, he tries to invade and attack several times and everything, but not a lot comes out of that first phase, the 10-year war. Yeah, not a lot as far as Spartan wins. Exactly.

The single biggest Athenian loss happens at this time. So like you were talking about the push into try to take over Athens, you have to pull everybody in Attica into the city. So your population density goes up tenfold is you're pulling all these people into Erframatica into your city. More waste, more people, all that kind of stuff. Where do they go to live?

They got nowhere to live, right? We got these big fucking hollow walls in here. Let's all store them inside the walls to be where they can live. Set up camps along that entire three-mile section. Inside of it, yeah. Yeah, on all side. You also then have, you know,

what's their greatest power, their naval power, their trade, their reach to the rest of the world. You don't always bring, bring in stuff that you want. Yep. It's like you come home from Vegas. Sometimes you don't get a choice which you bring home.

Now, when you have a manageable population and, you know, diseases were not like uncommon for them to come into this. But you had to handle kind of one thing at a time. When you combine multiple situations of like

mass population explosion within a small area, close proximity, and you bring in the diseases, it's just going to fucking run through and transfer that much faster. Yeah, and that's where we kind of get the onset of the Athenian plague. The Athenian plague was, I would, the only reason I'm going to say that this is probably

accurate is because it makes sense. They said that it came from Africa. I don't know if that was some kind of weird Greek racism back then. No, I think it was because what they were trying to figure it out based on kind of the documentation and kind of the accounts of it. looking at the symptoms, it could have potentially been like several different things, but the most the side effects, or I'm sorry, the symptoms and everything like that that kind of have the most descriptors matching up was either like typhoid or typhus, could have been Ebola.

But I think what they did at that point is that then tracked back through the histories of what countries have maybe been suffering that if there was any documented from before or like we're able to track back the epidemiology, I think that's where they kind of try to look at where the origination of those types of diseases could have come from. Yeah, I mean, the guy that wrote that it probably came from Africa maybe didn't have that sort of reach and extension as far as to do that research. But it also sort of would make sense if a boat from Africa came in and people were sick on that boat or somebody died.

It could have been as that. It could have been like it came from, that's the other thing too. You got to understand at this point, like in Africa, like that's a part of the Persian Empire, which has people from all different types of countries and everything like that. So it's not to state that it was from like an Afro... I think that's what you're kind of saying is when it sounds like that, the connotation is that it's from an African person. Yeah.

When it comes from Africa, you've got to remember there were times in Egypt when there were, you know, Grecian and Roman people ruling Egypt and there was, you know, Cleopatra was Greek. Yep. And so, you know, that's not to say that it was... I think it's more so to say that that's probably... where it actually came from because that's where the ship that had all the fucking people that were, hey, what happened on there?

We got like five dead bodies. Oh, that's a couple more than usual. And I just stack them in the corner. Yeah. And I mean, it sort of is like the reverse colonialism. Maybe it was the Greeks that didn't have the stronger immune systems and pick something up on a voyage down to Africa. And then brought that back.

Just long enough to bring it back across the Mediterranean into the Aegean. Yeah, it was rough. The Athenian plague hit three separate times. times from 430 to 426. And could have hit different things. If they'd opened up a new trade route to a certain section in Africa or along the coast that they were getting stuff from, it could have been like getting fucking triple whammed with different diseases every time.

Well, part of the issue that they ran into was its communicability was through touch. Yeah. So when everybody that is from out... Everybody's touching. Yeah, everybody from outside Athens is stuck in that wall. Fucking assholes to elbows. They're all, yeah, they're living, you know,

Like you just say nuts to butts in there. Everybody's going to be touched. Everybody's going to end up getting this. Everyone's going to be hugging. This is actually, this wasn't just like a poor person's disease. This is where we see the end of Pericles. Indiscriminately. Yeah, Pericles, the leader, the head lawmaker is not immune to this plague that they get hit with.

It kills 75 to 100,000 people in Athens. It killed a quarter of the population of Athens. Which is nuts that it could have been 400,000 people. in Athens. Yeah? For a city back then, 400,000 people, that's fucking crazy.

4,000 was unheard of. 400,000, let alone is incredible. But, you know, how many of those people were actually from outside, you know, in Attica, from outside the area,

living in there, being crammed in there as well. Yeah, it was, like, they brought the suburbs into the city. Needless to say, it was not a good result. But it also might have

helped him out a little bit, too, because the Spartans heard of the plague, we're like, maybe we hold back. That's what I was going to say, like, the Spartans at the walls. I mean, like, how are we going to break these things down? You just hear people inside

and going, and one of the guys is just like, you know what? Let's just head home. I think this thing's just going to kind of resolve itself here in the next few years. You got a scratchy back of your throat too? Yeah. Okay, let's go. Yeah, we're getting out of here. So it did lighten up the war load because they were fighting a battle with germs inside of the city of Athens. Well, then, you know, along that, it leads to this kind of this piece. a little bit, this understanding of like, and basically I think it's more of a an understanding of piece of necessity

because at some point do you think that like if the Spartans were going to come in that like Athens is like, we still have a large assortment of sick people. We'll just start fucking running sick people into your guys' ranks. Guess what? Just touching everybody. Like touching

touching faces, licking hands and everything. Like, do you guys want that? And they're like, no, you guys handle your shit. Let us know when all that stuff's blown over. I think a lot of that I also think that there was so much work to get through these walls that they just couldn't do. The only other way that they were going to be able to fight Athens

is to- All I see is them trying to like scale these walls and start breaking the walls down and they just see one guy fall off the top and one guy kind of backs up and looks at each other and looks down and he's like, are they fucking throwing people at us? And the other guy is like, I guess, they kicked the guy over and he's got like the pusjules and everything.

He's like, fuck! Even that though, just if you're trying to climb those, I want to say they were like eight or nine meters tall. Yeah. So we're fucking around. Yeah. You get three quarters of the way up that wall and you end up slipping and falling backwards and falling off. As you get closer, all of a sudden, people are just going and just coughing in your faces.

You get to the top. But if you can't get there, you have to go the waterway. And naval supremacy is by far and away in the hands of Athens. So you're not going to be able to fight them on water. You can't get through to them on land. There's really not much else you can do. if you can't bring the offensive, you sort of have to have a stalemate

peace treaty. Yeah. Well, after that, well, guess what? The peace does end. So, a little bit... Can we hit bathroom break first? Yeah. Mediterranean. Mediterranean? Okay. Mediterranean.

So you have to cross by the people that you were just hiding behind walls so you didn't have to engage them. That seems like a foolhardy move. Like, you're telling me there's not another place that they could have gone and dominated. Do you think that maybe they thought

Syracuse wasn't cool with Sparta shit, or what? Because it seems like a weird place to attack. Well, the other thing too is, kind of looking at where Syracuse is, it's actually part of, and I just figured this out,

we probably should have figured this out a little easier. It was part of Sicily. Yeah. Well, that's why they were headed over there. It's Syracuse and Sycli. I'm sorry. I didn't know. I was wondering to myself, I'm like, the fuck are they going all the way over to, like,

Sicily for, like, that's, because that's the, that's like past the Adriatic scene and everything. Yeah, it's dumb as fuck to try to go over there and do that. I don't, maybe it was that Syracuse was a better outlet. That's what I'm thinking. That makes a lot more sense. Here's the thing to. Port City that they could. That too, but, like, that gave essentially, that protected Sparta's that side of Sparta and, like, Laconia and everything like that, because you could have. maybe. You could also have like supplies and support and everything like that. Here's the other thing too. We're going to get something within the third stage of this that I definitely am not crazy about and makes me dislike the Spartans doing this shit.

But based on like them making, I don't even think that Syracuse and Sicily were, they're not even considered Greek because Italy had its own thing still. But if you're... Sicilians don't even think they're Italian. They just think they're Sicilian or Sicilian. There you go. So the fact that they're getting support, it could have just simply been them trying to cut off supply lines.

Like we're going to cut off your supply lines and then you're going to be by yourself in Peloponnese. And then we're going to be able to go ahead and surround your block. Do you do anything like that? Well, regardless, it does not end well. No. For Athens in the Dealian League, they basically lose like most of, if not all of their Navy.

Well, so everybody that didn't fall in the Navy, tried to retreat on foot, and they just got mowed down. Where are you going to go? Yeah, where are you going to run to? There's nowhere safe. You got to go all the way up Italy, and then do you even know where the fuck you're at that point? No, you're just...

Just not a good overall, you know, one out of ten would not approve that plan. No. It just completely wiped out everybody that was involved there. But the Athenians are just really undeterred. They, for some reason, think that Sicily is the hill that they have to die on. And I just, I don't know, man. Like you say, it has to be the cutoff thing. Because for Sicily's area and the geography of it,

it just doesn't make sense to give that much of a shit about Sicily. And I think that kind of ends what happens in Sicily as far as the Sicilian expedition. Then we get into the second war. And the second war is this kind of third part of what was going on. Third phase, second war. Yeah, I don't know what their obsession is with three of everything. Well, here's the thing that I kind of think of this too is history is written by the victors or the history that you reckon or that's kind of more recognized. Yeah.

Maybe they didn't even consider the Athenian campaign as part of it. We only hear about that through other means. And so then you have the Spartans writing and they're like, well, now the second war starts. And basically saw the Spartans and the rest of the Polypennesian League reinforced Sicily as the Athenians actually refused to withdraw. And basically sent what, like 5,000 more troops with a hundred more boats. Yeah, dude. You just lost that decisively. And the thought process was just said more.

At that point are all your eggs in one basket? And you're like, we got to go, we committed already too many. resources we can't allow this to be a failure because it's going to be if they end up we lose this it's just going to be we don't have enough men and enough ships to to win this anyway so we got to hope to just try to turn the tide of this shit yeah i i guess i don't know it could have been fucking the or it could have been yeah okay a sacrifice it at athena and they're like well the you know the the incense burned and swirled up in a you know counterclockwise formation send fucking everyone.

I really forgot that rational thought wasn't a big part of their strategy. As rational as they were in some situations, insanely irrational. Sometimes that's just the way the goad entrail falls. Exactly. So yeah, they get wiped out again.

They get completely defeated again. And not to mention the fact that they're getting crunched overseas in Italy, there's this thing called the rise of the group of 400. and it was basically 400 oligarchs, aristocrats, anybody that wanted to take power, seized all control of Athens.

Not just from Attica, but from all over Greece, kind of what it was, okay. Yeah, they just, they swooped in, they took over power, but they ended up getting run out of power through the fight of democracy because there was one last Athenian fleet. It was like a hundred boats

that they had stashed over off of the mainland. The secret fleet. Yeah. They stashed it over across the mainland. And basically the 400 were like, well, we don't want you guys to keep fighting because you're all we have left. So why don't you guys not do it? And they had elected a guy named Alcibides. A-L-C-I-B-I-A-Sibiotis.

Okay, Alcibiades, sure. And he's like, no, fuck you guys. You're not in charge of us. We're a democracy. You swoop in there or he swooped in there and took power. He's like, we're going to keep fighting this war. Whoa, whoa, we're going to need you in those ships. He's like, uh-uh.

He's like, I'm taking all this shit to war. Yeah. So if you don't have a Navy who were the only people that are any worth of shit to defend. That's the craziest thing. You're like, in order for you not to have this shit, I'm going to run all of it into a losing situation. Just fucking head on. That's how much we like democracy is we want to see you fail. So we're just going to run into the buzzsaw ourselves.

Mm-hmm. And that didn't work. I mean, as soon as the 400 lost power through democracy taking over because the only people they had to defend them were gone in the Navy, it just, they swoop right back into democracy. Then there was another comeback against the Spartans that happened at the Battle of Cetius in 410. And this win, they were able to pull enough spoils of war and to retake enough territory that it just, just flooded the bank again. They were back to being a financial power. We're flush, baby. Yeah. Yeah, let's start building some shit again. Flush with

cash! Good times are coming. That's what's going to happen. Here's the thing too is like kind of like we were talking about. You're like, what the fuck? There's all these battles and everything going on like in comparison to modern World War I, World War II, those types of battles. You got to understand like

you to die, you have to get hit with an arrow, you got to get stabbed, you got to get like people are getting wounded and backing now armies are retreating and all this kind of stuff, you're getting basically these battles usually aren't ending with like the slaughter of the enemy's forces. It's usually like shit, we've taken some losses.

Fucking goose at boys, we've got to get out of here. So that's why these battles are able to continue. You know, they're going one way. You know, it's not looking good for one side, but they're not being decimated. It's like an attritional thing. And they don't have like, it's like we're sending in 100,000 guys.

It's like, no, this battle is between like 20,000 troops and in this battle 100 got killed. And in this battle, too, so like, there's a lot of shit going on, but it's not like where it could be catastrophic where it's like, no, there was an artillery barrage in World War II that killed 50,000 troops. Yeah. That kind of shit. We're not talking about everybody dies in these situations. Enough people die that they just. Exactly.

Pull away. So, you know, after this little, after a comeback, the Spartans continue, you know, they're like, okay, well, we've lost a little bit and everything, but, you know, momentum is still on our side. they continue putting pressure on Athens and is basically stopped. Is Alcibiades coming back again? He ended up losing his reelection because he was believed to be a traitor because his deal with the 400 that he had made wasn't that he was going to come back and overthrow them. It was that he was going to withhold their basically like their valuables. from them. So he wasn't strictly physically opposed to the 400. He just didn't want to help them

out. So they considered him a traitor for doing that. So he loses his reelection campaign. And he gets pushed into exile, the thing that they were trying to avoid. But since he was a traitor and he lost his reelection, they're like, fuck you, dude, you got to get out of here. You, you were complacent with the 400. Even though you didn't help them, you still didn't try to fight them. Gotcha. And that really fucks up. Yeah, you do the crime. You do the time. Yeah, Athens at that point, the Athenian forces sort of lost their way once he went into exile. And the Spartans finally fucking figured out how to cut off the Athenians head. And it wasn't through direct war.

It was through marching into basically where all their grain and wheat and fields were that they were bringing in to feed everybody. They just torched it. Completely flamed through everything 404 BC. Um, the Athenians ended up having to surrender because they were just going to die of starvation because they didn't have any sort of like, you would still have things coming into the port. Yeah. But what was coming into the port wasn't sufficient. It wasn't. It wasn't nowhere near, you know, I'd have to do that.

And thus ends the golden age of Athens. Well, yeah, uh, because it just throughout this whole entire thing. after before they had finally surrendered, Sparta had come in and sacked Athens two times. So like they had just come through and run a bulldozer through it. So Athens just didn't have anything left. Yeah. Everybody else that was in, what was Sparta's League?

The Dealian League. Oh, no, no, the Polypennesian League. The Polypennesian League. We're like, fuck Athens, knock it down, burn it to the ground. Let's just forget it ever happened. Sparta's like, no, we're going to take them into our Spartan Empire. and anybody who is a friend of or Sparta is a friend of Athens

anybody who's an enemy of Sparta is an enemy of Athens So they were just basically sucked right in too I mean that makes sense because they're like Well we can rule you You're also apparently really good at shipbuilding Could always use a Navy You're going to be good for paying You know whatever dues or taxes

Or wherever the fuck we want to charge you We're going to be able to use you as a supply line for soldiers In case we need to fight against somebody else Because I'm sure, you know, after Spartan does, after Sparta takes over Athens, they've now controlled that entire area of, like, Laconia, Polypenesia. Now they're moving their way up through Corinth. Now they control Attica. Chances are, if they're like, we're winning. Now we have more allies.

We're just going to keep pushing up toward like Macedonia and Thessaly and that shit and Thebes. And that's fucking exactly what happens is we get what's called the Corinthian War. Oh, we got to. Athens fights back first. And Sparta is sort of like apathetic towards what happens because their whole idea in bringing Athens into

the Spartan Empire was they send over not 400 tyrants this time they send over the 30 tyrants and they're all Spartan rulers that go in there to take care of Athens. What does Athens hate more than anything? Oppression.

So they're They fight back, wipe out these 30 tyrants, restore democracy, put back into power through democracy is this guy named Thrashibulus. I butcher the shit out of that. We'll just call him thrashy. But, uh... Thrasyllabus. Okay, Thrasyllabus. That sounds.

Tras Syllibulus. Way better. All right. It's deep into the podcast. Yeah. But, uh, he ushers back. back in this democracy that Athens has thrived on for so many years, that gets Athens really fired up. The Spartans like, well, we tried.

They're, I guess, just going to be what they're going to be. Athens is like, no, man, you guys took us over. You sent these 30 tyrants in here. We're coming back. And that's where we get to what you were talking about with the Corinthian War. Okay, there go. So, Amir, what is it, like nine years after they've taken over, you know, Athens and everything, like that. This is what I was talking about, all the different alliances. So basically, this is where we get the

second Athenian league. And Athens is like, hey, Thieves, you up? And Thieves is like, yeah, what's up? He's like, how do you want to take over Sparta and just beat them back? And thieves is like, yeah, that sounds cool. So they basically team up. And in this situation, because Athens is still, it's not the primary power that it was. It kind of now has to play second fiddle Thieves. And so, thieves end up ends up being the one that defeats Sparta and that happens in 371

and so after that thieves is now the power so you get 371 there's a weird nine year thing here where it's like I think there was a nine year season when like the Oracle was like

we had a war in nine years and someone's like no because in 362 after thieves beat Sparta after team enough with Athens Sparta's like Hey Athens

Hey Thieves is getting a little A little powerful isn't it And Athens is like yeah You know what? Come to think of it they are And so in 362 Sparta and Athens team up In an alliance to take out Thebes

Got the old band back together To beat the Persians To beat up the Theebus Hey man remember when we Do you think that's how the conversation started Like hey remember like when we beat the Persians And someone's like God, that was fun, wasn't it?

That was good times. Like, yeah, I was good. Hey, you want to like one more? One more for old time's sake? One last ride. Yeah, we can do some wrestling in between. This is like the fucking Fast and the Furious franchise. With fucking the villains becoming the heroes

and the heroes becoming the villains. I don't know what to make of this. But, you know, that takes us all the way up to 362. And so I don't know out of that who kind of came out as then the primary Athens. Athens did. You think Athens did out of that?

Athens did because Athens is really the only city-state. I mean, they're the capital of Greece. That's true. So to be the capital of Greece, I mean, you have to come out on top. Modern day capital of Greece.

Well, and then that takes us into, I think what we referred to a little bit earlier in the podcast, we get up to 338. It's clobber in time. Here's the thing too is like do you think okay so Macedonia is basically at the top of the Greek like peninsula

Uh huh below it's Thessaly and then northwest yes and then all the shit's happening like down south Do you think at some point like Macedonia is just sitting there and being like What the fuck is happening down there? Like they're all just beating the it's like someone up in the stands watching a three-way fight where everyone's just beating the shit out of each other and then after everyone's like tired of and everything. Massadonia's like, okay, just stretches and takes off the robe and just steps in

and literally just like punches one time, everybody in the face to knock everybody out because 338, this dude named Philip. The second. Philip the second,

turns his eyes south and basically rolls into Greece being like, children, enough. I'm here to fucking put you all in your place and to unify the Greek world. We all like the sardines

are coming out of the Aegean, you fuckers keep fighting and ruining our supplies of anchovies getting to us, or sardines getting to us. Putting to stop to that shit right now. And so, this is ours now. So basically in this scenario, that's where we're going to end it,

is when Philip comes in because when Philip rolls in, right behind Philip rolling in in this situation is when we get into the Macedonia, or Macedonius. Macedonia, the Macedonian Empire and the conquest of Alexander the Great. The Macedonian masochist. Exactly, there you go. So that will be a tale for another time. Yeah, just to lead into that, King Philip II,

unified the Greek world except for one thing that he couldn't do. And that was bring Sparta into the Greek world. Luckily, his offspring, Alexander changes that. He's like, who's still holding now? He's like, mm-mm. Who couldn't dad beat? Yeah, got this.

Exactly. So, I mean, Athens itself and its contribution to, what did they call it, it's the cradle of Western civilization? Yeah. Is what they consider it just for its contributions.

I think it's a perfect little, it's the perfect way to dip our toesies into the Greek pool and everything. You know, a lot of things to love That have to do with Greek Yeah, five favorite Greeks People? Yeah I can't name you five Greek people

Really? Okay, he'll... I think we can do this Stavros Halikis, number one Stavi baby Number two, I'm gonna go with Janus Antitoumpo Basketball player For the bucks

Balkeibar Takamos Wasn't he Greek? Oh, I don't think so He was his cousin from Mipos Okay, cousin Yeah. We also have Janus Poppus, the other Greek

comedian, very funny. And then we have Greek salad? No. We got the main Greek. We got Uncle Jesse. Oh, what was Jesse's last name? Stamos. That's John Stamos. What was Uncle Jesse's last name? So are you saying Uncle Jesse is

John Stamos is Greek? Yeah, John Stamos is Greek. Hmm I don't remember Maybe is Jesse Stamos in full house too I don't know I want to see who these fictional Greeks are Jimmy the Greek

The Gambler Another good one Is this a wrestler? No no he was a mobster If I'm gonna You know Here's what I was prepared to do I like

Feta Yeah. Olives. Where are you going to be without olive oil? No, it's very incredible to know that the staples that they had that help them survive in Greece are now like staples of Greek food. Like they've gone through all this different transition period and everything like that. But the fact that their main resources that they can still grow there are the things that still like make you think Greek food. And just so we all know, Balkei Bartakamos from the show, Perfect Strangers.

He's from the fictional island of Meatbos, which is near Greece and is based on Greek culture. It counts. Yep, chalk it up. So we got Stav, Janus, Janus, Balchi, John Stamos. I'm glad he's on the bottom of the list. There you go. Here's the other thing, too, is you can't really mention anything about Athens without kind of digging back into the Greek, philosophers, the most widely known ones.

So just a couple shoutouts. We have first Socrates, the father of philosophy, the godfather of philosophy. Did you know that he actually fought in the Polypennesian War? I imagine. So he didn't even come into play until after the Polypennesian War and after kind of like, during that time, like when Greece was still being kind of like tugged over by Spartan all that kind of stuff,

like he was doing his thing when he was training Plato. Plato, who, as I mentioned before, almost an Olympian wrestler, lost one match beforehand because I think they said when you won the competition to get to the Olympics for wrestling, your prize was a giant jug of olive oil. And they said that he drank too much olive oil and couldn't perform in his like qualification wrestling match. Yeah, dude, he drank olive oil. That might have been a thing. That could have been like, what would that be? that would be like, what do people take now,

metamusal? That would be like ancient metamusal, just, just loob up the entire works. Now, Plato trained Aristotle.

And Aristotle, in turn, leading into a future episode, was the personal tutor, an educator of Alexander the Great, who Philip hired to do so. Now, why,

you know, why are you still mentioning this, Chris? There's a saying, there's a saying and I had to stop and think about this for a second Plato once said wise men speak

because they have something to say fools speak because they need to say something and I was thinking myself oh my God which camp do we fall into and the wise man portion I feel like sometimes we do have

something to say. So it's applicable. Other times, I feel we just need to say something. Yeah, like, kid touching stuff. That was not the wise man. So, I think we are the perfect amalgamation of one of Plato's most famous sayings. I think when he was speaking, he wasn't just talking about one type of man. I think he was, it was a foretelling of a future podcast, which would one day talk about his homeland. He called a shot. Two wise men that fell and hit their heads somewhere along the way. I don't know if I ever sat there and was like, man, I'm like, right in the middle.

I feel like we're right in the middle of this. Yeah. All right, man, you got anything else? No. Greece is cool. Just got to fix their names. That's true. Do you remember, and this is the last thing I'll say about it, you remember what Greek used to mean?

You don't understand it. It's all Greek to me. No, Greek used to be in terms of like a sex act. Do you remember what Greek used to mean? Oh, yeah, anal. Yeah, Greek used to mean anal. So it doesn't really mean that. No one uses that term anymore.

So congratulations Greece for wiping that one off the board. All right, guys. Well, we will catch you next week on the next episode. Hope you like this one. And we'll see you later. Thanks for joining us for another episode. If you like what you heard, hit that subscribe and like button. Follow us.

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