Podcasts about peloponnesian

The defeat of the Persian fleet at Salamis didn't end the Greek struggle for survival - it revealed deep fractures within their alliance that nearly surrendered their hard-won victory. Though only 31 Greek city-states had united against Persian invasion, their coalition teetered on collapse shortly after their naval triumph.When King Xerxes withdrew with most of his forces, leaving General Mardonius in Thessaly to continue the campaign the following spring, the immediate threat seemed to recede. This apparent reprieve accelerated the Peloponnesian desire to retreat behind their defensive wall at the Corinthian isthmus while Athens struggled to rebuild their utterly destroyed city.The strategic gulf between Athens and Sparta widened as Mardonius cleverly exploited these divisions. Sending Alexander I of Macedon as an envoy, the Persians offered Athens remarkably generous terms: autonomy, additional territory, and assistance rebuilding their temples - if they would abandon the Greek alliance. These diplomatic overtures revealed Persian sophistication in understanding and manipulating Greek interstate politics. The stakes became brutally clear when an Athenian councilman who supported accepting Persian terms was stoned to death alongside his family.As Mardonius advanced into Attica a second time, Athens evacuated to Salamis again, sending increasingly desperate envoys to Sparta. The Peloponnesians, however, completed their defensive fortifications at the isthmus while celebrating religious festivals - a thinly-veiled excuse for inaction. Athens found themselves abandoned precisely when they needed their allies most.This moment of crisis illuminates the trajectory of Greek interstate relations that would eventually culminate in the devastating Peloponnesian War decades later. The continental, defensive mindset of Sparta clashed fundamentally with Athens' commitment to a united Greek response. These divergent strategic priorities would develop into competing visions for Greece's future after the Persian threat receded.Support the show

The ancient Spartans are one of the most idealized cultures from classical Greece. They have been remembered as unbeatable super-soldiers whose entire society was geared towards war. Groups from across the modern political spectrum have looked to the Peloponnesian city-state as an inspiration and historical example. However, starting in the 1930's historians started to question much of the received wisdom about the Spartans. Some even argued that the popular understanding of the city was deeply influenced by a so-called "Spartan Mirage." Is everything we know about the Spartans little more than a collection of historical myths? Tune-in and find out how the French Revolution, invented traditions, and twins from eggs all play a role in the story.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

The fragile Peace of Nicias shatters as competing interests and broken promises drive Athens and Sparta back toward conflict. At the heart of this diplomatic unraveling stands Alcibiades, a charismatic young general whose ambition would reshape Greek politics and alliances.When Corinth, feeling betrayed by peace terms that threatened their colonial claims, encouraged Argos to form a rival power bloc, the seeds of renewed warfare were planted. Sparta's subsequent alliance with Boeotia directly violated their peace agreement with Athens, while the contentious destruction of Panactum's fortifications by Boeotian forces created a perfect opportunity for anti-peace factions in Athens to gain traction.Alcibiades emerges as the perfect character for this moment of political intrigue. Wealthy, handsome, well-connected to Athens' most prestigious families, and raised in the household of Pericles himself, he possessed all the qualities needed for Athenian leadership. His masterful deception of Spartan delegates—convincing them to deny their negotiating authority before the Athenian assembly, then exposing this "lie" to undermine both Sparta's credibility and his rival Nicias—demonstrates the cunning that would make him one of history's most fascinating figures.The resulting alliance between Athens and the Peloponnesian democracies of Argos, Elis, and Mantinea represented a dramatic shift in the Greek power balance. Sparta's humiliation continued with their exclusion from religious ceremonies at the 420 BCE Olympics, creating a perception of weakness that emboldened their enemies throughout Greece.What makes this period so compelling is watching how individual ambition intersects with international relations. City-states maneuvered to protect their interests while ambitious leaders like Alcibiades exploited these tensions to advance their personal agendas. The stage was now set for the Battle of Mantinea, the largest land confrontation of the war thus far, where Sparta would attempt to reassert its dominance on the Peloponnese.Have you considered how peace agreements can sometimes create more problems than they solve? Join us as we explore one of history's most consequential diplomatic failures and the ambitious individuals who shaped its outcome. Support the show

In 415BC, the Athenian Empire, during a lull in the Peloponnesian War against the Spartans, voted to embark on a massive campaign to capture Syracuse. So began the Sicilian Expedition, which soon became a proxy war between Sparta and Athens, as the Spartans despatched just one man, the great general Gylippus, to assist the Syracusans. The war had been underway since 431 BC and would last until 404BC and end in total defeat for Athens with the loss of its empire. Joining today is Paul A. Rahe, a highly distinguished ancient historian the first in a two part discussion with him. Coming up next on Wednesday he discusses contemporary events, and how his understanding of the Peloponnesian war seeks to help policy makers in the United States as its supremacy is challenged by China. Paul A. Rahe Links Sparta's Sicilian Proxy War Sparta's Third Attic War: The Grand Strategy of Classical Sparta, 413-404 BC Book on Alcibiades discussed: Nemesis: Alcibiades and the Fall of Athens, by David Stuttard Aspects of History Links Latest Issue out - Annual Subscription to Aspects of History Magazine only $9.99/£9.99 Ollie on X Aspects of History on Instagram Get in touch: history@aspectsofhistory.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This month's Deep Dive series is all about helping our kids through hardships like making mistakes, getting rejected, and facing competition. Listen to the whole playlist on Spotify. Do you worry about finding the balance between forcing your kid to keep doing activities that are good for them (that you already paid for) and not letting them be miserable all the time? How do you keep them on track academically without having to run flashcards with them about the Peloponnesian War for the billionth time? Here's what the research says about when to push our kids - and when to let sleeping (Peloponnesian) dogs lie. A listener in our Facebook group asks: "How do you decide when to push your kids? Like when to go from YMCA basketball to the travel team. Or when to go from regular school to the accelerated program, or the private school that's more rigorous. When to apply for the stretch school or the internship? We don't want to ruin hobbies or turn the stress up to 11, obviously. So how do you know which knob to turn and when to turn it so that their ambition, their ability, and their achievement all line up in perfect balance and harmony?" Amy and Margaret discuss: The “optimal push” and how it's different from over-parenting Achievement-by-proxy distortion (sing out, Louise!) The factors to consider when pushing your child to do something Ultimately, kids are optimally supported when they believe their parents' love is not performance-contingent. The answer lies in helping them fulfill their potential without damaging their self-esteem. Here are links to some of the resources mentioned in the episode: Amy Wilson for New York Family: Finding the Optimal Push Our episode "How Not To Live Through Our Kids" Dr. Eddie Brummelman et al: My Child Redeems My Broken Dreams: On Parents Transferring Their Unfulfilled Ambitions onto Their Child We love the sponsors that make this show possible! You can always find all the special deals and codes for all our current sponsors on our website: https://www.whatfreshhellpodcast.com/p/promo-codes/ mom friends, funny moms, parenting advice, parenting experts, parenting tips, mothers, families, parenting skills, parenting strategies, parenting styles, busy moms, self-help for moms, manage kid's behavior, teenager, tween, child development, family activities, family fun, parent child relationship, decluttering, kid-friendly, invisible workload, default parent, resilience, grit, self-esteem  

Join me as chat with Ferdia Lennon, author of Glorious Exploits, a wonderful debut novel listed in the Theater category on Art In Fiction.View the video on YouTube: https://youtu.be/3ZFFQ4rg4DUGenesis for Glorious ExploitsBased on true events that occurred in Syracuse, Sicily during the Peloponnesian war.The theme of friendship in Glorious ExploitsTheater and research of ancient Greek theater in the writing of Glorious ExploitsTraveling to Greece and Syracuse as part of the research processWhy Euripedes? Discussion of Medea and The Trojan Women, the two Euripedes plays put on by the Athenian soldiers in the quarryThe voice of Lampo and why he sounds IrishThe similarities between Ireland as an island nature separate from and yet related to England, and Sicily also an island separate from and yet related to the culture of GreeceThe size and breadth of the ancient world and its many influencesDiscussion of Ferdia's compelling writing styleHow Lampo's character changes and grows in the novelThe making of the audiobook that Ferdia narratedParallels between Glorious Exploits and our own timeReading from Glorious ExploitsPublication journey of Glorious ExploitsOne thing Ferdia learned from writing his novel that he didn't know beforePress Play now & be sure to check out Glorious Exploits by Ferdia Lennon on Art In Fiction: https://www.artinfiction.com/novels/glorious-exploitsFerdia Lennon's website: https://www.ferdialennon.com/Music CreditPaganology, performed by The Paul Plimley Trio; composed by Gregg SimpsonThis website contains affiliate links. If you use these links to make a purchase, I may earn a commission. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. Thank you. Are you enjoying The Art In Fiction Podcast? Consider giving us a small donation so we can continue bringing you interviews with your favorite arts-inspired novelists. Click this link to donate: https://ko-fi.com/artinfiction.Also, check out the Art In Fiction website at https://www.artinfiction.com and explore 2200+ novels inspired by the arts in 10 categories: Architecture, Dance, Decorative Arts, Film, Literature, Music, Textile Arts, Theater, Visual Arts, & Other.Want to learn more about Carol Cram, the host of The Art In Fiction Podcast? She's the author of several award-winning novels, including The Towers of Tuscany and Love Among the Recipes. Find out more on her website.

Ever wondered how a single year could turn the tide in a protracted war? This episode takes you deep into the seventh year of the Peloponnesian War, uncovering the critical strategies and events that reshaped the conflict.As we shift our focus to the campaigning season of 425 BC, the narrative gets even more gripping. Discover how Athens leveraged treachery and strategic brilliance to capture Anactunorium and gain control over the Peloponnesian fleet. The collapse of Spartan military prestige and the waning threats from Syracuse and Persia allowed Athens to strengthen its empire and secure its dominance by the end of the year. These developments set the stage for Athens to reassess its imperial strategies and bolster its defences, reshaping the balance of power in the war.In our final segment, we dissect the aggressive Athenian campaigns that followed their successes at Sphacteria. The capture of Cythera and Thyrea, along with the invasions of Spartan territories, reveal a shift in Athenian military policy influenced by internal rivalries between figures like Cleon and Nicias. We delve into the political ramifications of these actions and how they exacerbated Spartan vulnerabilities. Join us as we unravel the dramatic shift in the course of the Peloponnesian War, showcasing Athens' ascension and Sparta's stagnation during these critical years. Support the Show.

Wednesday, 12 June 2024   And landing at Syracuse, we stayed three days. Acts 28:12   The verb is an aorist participle, “And having brought down at Syracuse, we stayed three days” (CG).   In the previous verse, Paul and those with him departed Malta after having been there for three months. Luke continues this next leg of the journey, beginning with, “And having brought down.”   Departing on a ship is to go up to the high seas. When arriving at a new destination, one comes down again. The ship was brought down from the sea “at Syracuse.”   Syracuse, or Surakousai in Greek, is a city noted only here in the Bible. It is a city which was made famous during the Peloponnesian war. It was, and still is, a flourishing town of Sicily. It is 92 miles as the crow flies from Malta, but a bit more by boat because it is on the southeast corner of the coast of Sicily.   It can be reached in a bit over a day by boat. Ships bound from Alexandria on their way to Italy frequently put in there. It was one of the major powers of the Mediterranean world at this time. They probably stopped there to sell and offload wares and then pick up any other things or travelers for their continued voyage. Today Syracuse has a population of about 125,000.   Once the ship arrived there, Luke next notes that “we stayed three days.” The ship they were on had been at Malta over the winter. If the men were on the same ship when leaving Syracuse, it may be that it took three days to offload cargo and load on other things.   Or it may be that they switched ships to continue their journey to Rome and the first one departing took three days to get a booking on. Luke does not explain the matter either way but simply gives the duration of time they were in Syracuse. After three months on Malta, three days at this location would have flown by.   Life application: Speaking of flying by, the NKJV says the ship was “landing at Syracuse.” Not only is the tense of the verb wrong, but that can have more than one meaning. Landing at Syracuse may mean on the other side of the Atlantic!   Hancock International Airport is a city owned, joint civil-military airport five miles northeast of downtown Syracuse, in Onondaga County, New York.   The airport is off Interstate 81 near Mattydale, New York. Wikipedia says that “In 1927 Syracuse mayor Charles Hanna felt his city needed an airport. A location at Amboy in the town of Camillus, New York was purchased for $50,000, and by 1928, the ‘Syracuse City Airport at Amboy' was handling airmail.”   At the end of World War II, the United States Army Air Corps leased their bomber base near Mattydale, New York to the city. On September 17, 1949, the Clarence E. Hancock Airport opened to the public using a renovated machine shop as a terminal, and replaced the airport at Amboy. To learn more about this airport at Syracuse, refer to their website on the internet.    This might sound like a pointless diversion concerning another location named Syracuse, but it is given to highlight the fact that there are innumerable locations in the United States that are named based on other locations, many are right out of the Bible.   The movement of people from one location to another where there had not yet been a name given for the place necessitated those new locations be given names. Some are obvious, such as New York being named based on the movement of people from York in the UK. Others are obvious because of the connection to famous biblical sights, such as Bethlehem, New York, and Canaan, Connecticut.   However, many other areas also have biblical names that may not be as famous. In Connecticut, there is Sharon, Gilead, Hebron, Mount Carmel, and so forth. This trend continues in many states throughout the US. A rich biblical heritage permeates the nation's founding. However, those traditions are quickly fading away. The prosperity of the people, and the movement to a non-biblical worldview, have erased much of the Christian heritage of the land.   If you are familiar with biblical names of people and places, you can use that familiarity to start conversations with people and form a connection between the name and its source. From there, you can then bring in the overall message of the Bible, that it is the story of God's plan of redemption of man from the power of sin and the devil, all focused on Jesus.   When they see a connection between their name or the name of their city with the Bible, they may want to know more. Be ready at all times to think of interesting ways of getting people interested in knowing more about the word! It is the message that can change the eternal destiny of people from a not-so-happy ending to an eternity of delight.   Lord God, help us to always be ready to share the good news of Jesus Christ with others. May our words bring them to want to know more and to become interested in reading Your word. People need Jesus and the Bible tells us about Him. So, Lord, help us in this! Amen.

This is a teaser of the bonus episode, "Defence at Thermopylae" found over on Patreon.What if a mere 300 soldiers stood between freedom and subjugation? Uncover the strategic genius and historical significance behind the Greek defence at Thermopylae during the Persian invasion. We'll break down why the rugged terrain of Thermopylae was the perfect stage for the Greek hoplites to mitigate the Persian numerical advantage and cavalry. Discover how the crucial naval defence at Artemisium played into this masterful coordination. We also dive into the fascinating rationale behind sending only 300 Spartans into battle and examine the total Greek forces involved in this legendary three-day clash.The fall of Thermopylae is more than just a tale of heroism; it's a story of political intrigue and tactical brilliance. Explore the influence of a prophetic message from Delphi and Sparta's internal politics on the decision-making process. Was Thermopylae merely a holding action? We'll dissect the implications for broader Spartan and Peloponnesian strategies. Relive each pivotal moment of the battle as the Greeks held their own against overwhelming odds—until betrayal exposed a critical mountain path to Xerxes.If you would like to hear more and support the series click on the Patreon link at the bottom of the page or you can head to my website to discover other ways to support the series, HereSupport the Show.

Content warning for discussion of genocide. Hey, Hi, Hello, this is the History Wizard and welcome back for Day 7 of Have a Day w/ The History Wizard. Thank you to everyone who tuned in for Day 6 last week, and especially thank you to everyone who rated and/or reviewed the podcast. I hope you all learned something last week and I hope the same for this week. Speaking of weeks, we've finally hit our first week! Get it? This is episode 7, the episodes are called Days. There are 7 Days in a Week… I'm funny dammit! I've got something special for you starting at the end of Week 1. It's a new segment I'm going to call the Alchemist's Table. Every Day I'm going to be sharing with you a cocktail recipe that I have invented. If you enjoy a nice cocktail and you aren't driving to work feel free to make yourself one before sitting down for the rest of the episode. For Day 7 we're going to be enjoying the first cocktail I ever created. It's called A Taste of Spring. It starts with 2 oz of Gin, I prefer gunpowder gin, but a London Dry will work just fine. Followed by 1 oz of elderflower liquor, 1 oz of lavender syrup, stir for about 30 seconds in ice before straining into a rocks glass over ice. And that, my friends, is a Taste of Spring. Enjoy. Anyway, it's time to head back to the West, and for this episode we have to travel back in time to the 5th century BCE for the Siege of Melos during the Peloponnesian War. IN a modern historical context we look at the Peloponnesian War as being between Sparta and Athens, and while this isn't technically wrong, it's also not as right as it could be. The Peloponnesian War was fought between the Delian League, which was a confederacy of various Greek city-states with Atens in supreme control. The Delian League was created as a defensive alliance against the Persian Empire following the Second Persian Invasion of Greece (this is the invasion that included the famed Battle of Thermopylae). And the Peloponnesian League which was less a league and more an ancient world version of the Warsaw Pact, with Sparta (then called Lacadeamon) at the head with its various allied city states. See, around 550 BCE SParta got tired of having to conquer everyone and instead offered to NOT conquer them if they joined the League. The Delian League got its name from the island of Delos where they would meet and where their treasury was held before being moved to Athens in 454 BCE. The Peloponnesian League got IT'S name from the peninsula at the southern tip of Greece, which is known as the Peloponnese Peninsula. The Peloponnesian League is something of a misnomer as its membership was not limited to that area of Greece. But, I ramble, and so let us return to the Peloponnesian War. Why did Sparta and Athens, erstwhile allies against Xerxes I and the Persian Empire decide to go to war with each other? The period between the Second Persian Invasion of Greece and the Peloponnesian War is sometimes known as the Pentecontaetia, a term which means “a period of 50 years” which refers to the 48 year period between 479 and 431 BCE. The Pentecontaetia saw the rise of Athens as one of the most prominent Greek City States, it saw the rise of Athenian democracy, and it saw the rise of tensions between Sparta and Athens. You can look at this period as somewhat similar to the rising tensions between Rome and Carthage. Sparta HAD been the most powerful Greek city-state, and now suddenly they had a rival and didn't like that. Sparta was the Sasuke to Athens Naruto, the Vegeta to Athen's Goku. Following the flight of the Persian armies from Greece Athens began to rebuild the great walls around their city that had been lost to the Persian armies. Sparta, upon learning about this construction, asked them not to do that. But Athens rebuffed them, not wanting to put Athens effectively under the control of Sparta's massive army. Another way we can view Athens and Sparta through the lens of Carthage and Rome is that Athens was vastly superior at sea, and Sparta was vastly superior on land, just as Carthage and Rome were, respectively. I'm taking bets now on who is going to win this war, assuming you don't already know. These tensions, which were further exacerbated by a helot revolt within Sparta would explode, though not terribly violently, during a 15 year conflict known as the First Peloponnesian War. This first war would end with the signing of the Thirty Years Peace treaty. This treaty, which would only last for 15 years, would solidify the Athenian and Spartan Empires and would cement Athens as a true powerhouse in the Aegean Sea. Conflict between Athens and Corinth, a member of the Peloponnesian League, is what ultimately led to war. Athens and Corinth effectively fought a brief proxy war over control of the Corinthian colony of Potidea. Corinth, outraged that Athens had encouraged one of its colonies to rebel against their authority, urged Sparta to call a conclave to try and arbitrate peace as was stipulated under the Thirty Years Peace.  The Spartan King Archidamus II urged the Spartan magistrates (known as ephor) and the citizen assembly known as the ecclesia not to go to war, but in the end the assembly determined that Athens, in urging Potidea to rebel against one of their allies and then aiding them in the fight for the city had broken the Peace and war was officially declared in 431 BCE. The Second Peloponnesian War had begun. The Second Peloponnesian War, often known as just the Peloponnesian War, can be broken up into three distinct segments. The Archidamian War, The Sicilian Expedition, and the Decelean War. The first 10 years of the war are sometimes also called the Ten Years War. Sparta was, almost entirely, a land based empire. The Spartan Army was the most feared and one of the best trained armies of the ancient world. Their hoplites and their phalanxes were nearly invincible. Meanwhile Athens had the same prestige on the waves. The Battle of Salamis in 480 BCE, though discussed far less frequently than the concurrent Battle of Thermopylae, is no less impressive a feat of military genius. So the Spartan strategy during the beginning of the war was to march its armies to the land around the city state of Athens and seize them. This caused many Athenian farmers to abandon their farms and retreat behind Athens famous Long Walls. The Long Walls were fortified walls that connected Athens' main city to its ports at Piraeus and Phaleron. So despite the loss of farmland around Athens itself, this siege did basically nothing. Sparta was also only able to keep troops on the field for a few weeks at a time, as the hoplites were still needed to harvest their own fields and troops were always needed to keep the helots in line. The longest siege of the Ten Years War was only 40 days. Meanwhile Athens stayed in the Aegean Sea with their fleet, avoiding any open warfare with the Spartans who were unable to breach their walls anyway. The Athenians had great successes in their early naval battles, including the Battle of Naucaptus where 20 Athenian ships went up  against 77 Peloponnesian ships and emerged victorious. Of course, all of Athen's momentum would come to a screeching and screaming halt when th plague hit in 430 BCE. The Plague of Athens was an interesting facet of the war. While some Athenians believed that the Spartans were the cause of the plague, evidenced they said by the fact that the Spartans were unaffected by it, but Thucydides, author the the famous History of the Peloponnesian War was in the city when the plague hit. He even contracted it and survived his illness. Thucydides says that the plague came from Ethiopia as it appeared to have entered Athens along the Long Wall from the port of Piraeus. There's not much in the way of evidence regarding WHAT exactly the plague was, although Thucydides listed out a large number of symptoms that victims experienced including: Fever, Redness and inflammation in the eyes, Sore throats leading to bleeding and bad breath, Sneezing, Loss of voice, Coughing, Vomiting, Pustules and ulcers on the body, Extreme thirst, Insomnia, Diarrhea, Convulsions, and Gangrene. Modern epidemiologists and paleopathologists believe, based on extensive examination of all the available evidence that the plague was likely either smallpox or typhus, although it's unlikely that we'll ever know for certain. The plague had a massive impact on the course of the war. For one, it killed Pericles, the Athenian statesman and strategos of the Athenian military. It also killed over 30,000 people, made foreign mercenaries unwilling to aid Athens, no matter how much they were offered as they did not want to risk getting sick, the plague even halted any Spartan military action in Attica until it was finished as the Spartans also feared the disease. Even with the loss of Pericles Athens continued to have success on sea as well as on land through the efforts of their commanders Demosthenes and Cleon. They started to put cracks in the Spartan armies image of invincibility until the Spartans captured Amphipolis, a silver mine that supplied much of the Athenian war chest in 424 BCE. In 422 a great battle was fought at Amphipolis which saw both Cleon, and the Spartan general Brasidas killed. The loss of these military commanders would see Athens and Sparta sit down to try and negotiate peace.  The Peace of Nicias would be a failure from the very start. Despite it, nominally, declaring peace between Sparta and Athens, despite PoWs being exchanged and control over territories ceded back to those who originally owned them, the Peace of Nicias was something of a joke. Sparta and Athens entered something of a Cold War. They didn't fight against each other specifically, but Athens spent a LOT of time trying to stir up helot revolts and encourage Spartan allies to revolt against them in order to gain greater autonomy under Athenian democracy.  Something that is interesting to note, is that despite the single largest land battle of the Peloponnesian War taking place in 418 BCE, the Peace wasn't formally abandoned, and war declared again between Athens and Sparta until 214 BCE. The Battle of Mantinea was fought between Sparta and some of its Arcadian allies on one side, and the combined might of Argos, Athens, Mantinea and various Arcadian allies of Argos. The battle, which involved nearly 20,000 troops combined, ended with a Spartan victory and saw a reversal of previous trends. After the Spartan loss at the Battle of Pylos in 425 BCE many began to think of the Spartans as weak and cowardly, but Mantinea reversed that thinking very quickly. The Siege of Melos, the true subject of this episode, also took place during the Peace of Nicias. Athenian aggression against Melos began about 10 years before the Siege. Melos was a small island about 68 miles off the Eastern coast of Greece. Small islands, due to their reliance on navies, were generally allies of Athens who had uncontested control of the seas. Melos though, decided to remain neutral. They were ethnically Dorian, same as the Spartans (the Athenians were ethnically Ionian). In 425 Athens demanded that Melos pay them a 15 talents (about 390 kgs) of silver. Melos refused. They were determined to remain neutral (although there is pretty good evidence that they donated 20 minas (about 12.5 kgs) of silver to the Spartan war effort. In 216 BCE Athens once again went to Melos and demanded that Melos join the Delian League and pay tribute. Melos again refused. Thucydides wrote a dramatization of conversation between Athenian embassies and the leaders of Melos in his Histories (Book 5, Chapters 84–116). The Melian Dialogue is one of the earliest events I learned about during undergrad when I took a class on the History of Just War. I need to go off on a slight tangent here. When I took this class there was this one guy, whose name I never learned. He was jacked as hell and always showed up to class double fisting iced coffees from Starbucks. Now this class was built around a questionL “Is there such a thing as a Just War?”, but apparently this dude never read the syllabus because about 3 weeks into class he asks “When are we gonna get to the battles?” See, he thought it was History of Just War, just meaning only. He thought it was a military history class, not a class on moral philosophy seen through the context of war. I'm pretty sure he got an A though… Anyway, back to Melos. It's unlikely that the conversation Thucydides wrote out is how it played out in real life, though given the Athenian love of oration and speeches, he's probably not TOO far off the mark. I'm going to read you a part of the Melian Dialogue: Athenians. For ourselves, we shall not trouble you with specious pretences- either of how we have a right to our empire because we overthrew the Mede, or are now attacking you because of wrong that you have done us- and make a long speech which would not be believed; and in return we hope that you, instead of thinking to influence us by saying that you did not join the Lacedaemonians, although their colonists, or that you have done us no wrong, will aim at what is feasible, holding in view the real sentiments of us both; since you know as well as we do that right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must. Melians. As we think, at any rate, it is expedient- we speak as we are obliged, since you enjoin us to let right alone and talk only of interest- that you should not destroy what is our common protection, the privilege of being allowed in danger to invoke what is fair and right, and even to profit by arguments not strictly valid if they can be got to pass current. And you are as much interested in this as any, as your fall would be a signal for the heaviest vengeance and an example for the world to meditate upon. Athenians. The end of our empire, if end it should, does not frighten us: a rival empire like Lacedaemon, even if Lacedaemon was our real antagonist, is not so terrible to the vanquished as subjects who by themselves attack and overpower their rulers. This, however, is a risk that we are content to take. We will now proceed to show you that we are come here in the interest of our empire, and that we shall say what we are now going to say, for the preservation of your country; as we would fain exercise that empire over you without trouble, and see you preserved for the good of us both. Melians. And how, pray, could it turn out as good for us to serve as for you to rule? Athenians. Because you would have the advantage of submitting before suffering the worst, and we should gain by not destroying you. Melians. So that you would not consent to our being neutral, friends instead of enemies, but allies of neither side. Athenians. No; for your hostility cannot so much hurt us as your friendship will be an argument to our subjects of our weakness, and your enmity of our power. Melians. Is that your subjects' idea of equity, to put those who have nothing to do with you in the same category with peoples that are most of them your own colonists, and some conquered rebels? Athenians. As far as right goes they think one has as much of it as the other, and that if any maintain their independence it is because they are strong, and that if we do not molest them it is because we are afraid; so that besides extending our empire we should gain in security by your subjection; the fact that you are islanders and weaker than others rendering it all the more important that you should not succeed in baffling the masters of the sea. See, Athens refused to allow Melos to remain neutral because they believed that, if they allowed this small, weak nation to live independent of their might that they would soon find themselves overrun with rebellion as all others would see Athens let Melos go free and see Athens as weak, as if they somehow feared fighting Melos. So, pragmatically, it would be better for them to kill all the Melians to maintain their image as strong than it would be for them to simply leave Melos be. Despite their claim to democracy, Athens was very much of the opinion that might made right. The strong take what they can and the weak suffer as they must. This was, more or less the beginning of Just War theory, as it was one of the first time that justice, fairness, and rightness was discusses in the context of war. Just War Theory, by the way, is generally made up of three elements. Jus ad bellum, do you have just reasons for going to war? Jus in bello, is your conduct during war just? And a more modern addition, jus post bellum, is your conduct after the war is over also just? Melos, ultimately, refused to surrender to Athens and, indeed, tried to fight against their armies and ultimately failed. The siege lasted from summer of 416 until the winter and ended with Melos surrendering. Athens, in a very Genghis Khan esque move decided to kill every adult man on Melos and sell all of the women and children into slavery. This form of genocide where one particular gender is targeted is common in old world genocides. Very often it is the men, those who could join opposing militaries who would be targeted for the slaughter although Shaka Zulu was infamous for killing all the women and folding the men into his armed forces during his conquests. The genocide of Melos wasn't an attempt to wipe out an ethnicity, Melians being Dorian just like the Spartans. It WAS, however, intended to destroy the people of Melos, and it succeeded. The Peloponnesian War would continue until 404 BCE and would end with a Spartan victory, partially through aid gained from the Achaemenid Dynasty from Persia and some from Alcibiades of Athens, but the war isn't the important part and so we will ignore the final 12 years of it. That's it for this week. No new reviews, so let's jump right into the outro. Have a Day! w/ The History Wizard is brought to you by me, The History Wizard. If you want to see/hear more of me you can find me on Tiktok @thehistorywizard or on Instagram @the_history_wizard. Please remember to rate, review, and subscribe to Have a Day! On your pod catcher of choice. The more you do, the more people will be able to listen and learn along with you. Thank you  for sticking around until the end and, as always, Have a Day.    

Embark on a voyage through the tempestuous waters of ancient Sicilian politics, where our narrative charts the ascendancy of Syracuse amidst a maelstrom of democracies emerging from tyrannical ruins. Unearth the seismic shifts in Athenian foreign policy that set a fleet towards Sicily's shores, seeking to weave a web of influence that could ensnare the Peloponnesian war machine.Witness the Athenian fleet, under the command of Laches and Charoeades, as it threads through the Mediterranean, capturing cities and igniting the fuse of local uprisings with the promise of freedom from Syracuse's grip. The labyrinthine complexities of war and diplomacy play out across the Sicilian stage, where each move is a calculated risk in the pursuit of dominance. The Athenian quest for Sicilian allegiance unfolds with a narrative vigour, painting a vivid portrait of ancient warfare and the ever-present shadow of defeat.Succumb to the enthralling tale of Athens' audacious Sicilian expedition, from the strategic insight behind their push into the western world to the unforeseen ramifications of their actions. The episode intricately weaves together the triumphs and tribulations of Athenian commanders, the resilience of cities, and the undercurrents of political change that ripple through time. Join us for a compelling recount of an era where the fates of empires hung by a thread, and the echoes of ancient strategies still resonate in the annals of history. Support the show

The Dubliners of Ancient Sicily in debut novelist, Ferdia Lennon's Glorious Exploits, set in a Magna Graecia convulsed by the Peloponnesian war; DJ Lychee's Lunar New Year dance soundtrack; and Sadhbh O'Sullivan's Bridgidian song cycle “In Cloak and Womb"

Our annual live episode recorded at London's Dragonmeet finds our audience of expert questioners in a substantive mood. Accordingly, after nerdtroping WWII and the Peloponnesian war and contemplating high end snacks, we look at the unsolved problems of gaming, solo game design, troupe play and so much more. That puts 2023 in the rearview mirror […]

In our return to the tumultuous third year of the war, the Chalcidice comes back into focus once more with renewed operations. The siege of Potidaea may have found resolution in the previous year, but with lingering hostility in the Chalcidice, Athens is forced to act. A fresh operation aims to secure Athens' base in Potidaea, a move designed to solidify their influence in the region. Little did they know, this venture would soon become an early lesson in the challenges of facing effective light troops.Simultaneously, back on the Greek mainland, the stage is set for a gripping saga. Minor Peloponnesian allies successfully sway Sparta into launching a campaign at the mouth of the Corinthian Gulf. Embarking with only a portion of the Peloponnesian fleet, the Spartans face a cautious journey past the Athenian base of Naupactus. The amphibious operation, once arriving at its location encounters setbacks, grappling with issues of ill-discipline, divided forces, and the defenders' ingenious use of terrain, leading to a failed mission.At Naupactus, the keen-eyed Athenian general, Phormio, observes the initial fleet sail by. However, when the remainder attempts to slip past, he springs into action. Despite being outnumbered, Phormio's superior tactics and intimate knowledge of the area secure a resounding victory. Nevertheless, the Spartans, undeterred after their land defeat, regroup for another naval engagement, placing the Athenians in a dire numerical predicament.This time around, the odds are stacked against Phormio. After losing half his fleet, fortune smiles upon him, allowing his naval command prowess to shine. Athenian losses are miraculously recovered, and the Peloponnesian forces find themselves in a hasty retreat. Yet, Sparta, yearning for a triumph to bring home, decides on a bold move—an attempt to assault Athens' home port, the Piraeus.However, the gods seem to favour Athens. Bad weather and a touch of commander hesitancy conspire against the Spartan ambitions, leaving them without the favourable news they sought for the year. Join us as we navigate the treacherous waters of ancient conflict and witness the highs and lows of naval warfare in this gripping chapter of the Peloponnesian War.Support the show

Step back in time once again to the second year of the Peloponnesian War and immerse yourself in the heart of ancient Athens, a city grappling with a devastating plague. But in this intriguing narrative, our journey takes a unique twist, leading us northward to the Chalcidice, where Athens has dispatched additional forces to besiege Potidaea. Along this expedition, we'll uncover the intricate tapestry of diplomacy in Thrace and Macedon.During this period, diplomatic endeavours were abundant, and it's worth noting that Sparta was actively engaged in these manoeuvres as well. Their strategic approach was two-fold: disrupting the situation in the north and forging alliances with external powers. Towards the end of summer, Sparta initiated a diplomatic mission targeting Thrace and the Persian Empire.As we return to Athens, our focus shifts towards the city itself and its magnetic leader, Pericles. Amidst the devastating plague, Pericles found himself in a precarious political position, navigating the intricate landscape of Athenian politics. We'll explore Pericles' strategies in addressing the mounting discontent towards his policies, especially as Athens faced adversity on multiple fronts.As the second year of the war's campaign season drew to a close, both Sparta and Athens were engaged in activities across Greece. Athens, now under the influence of the war party, responded to Peloponnesian threats with a more assertive stance. These actions marked a departure from the moderate policies that had guided the initial two years of the conflict under Pericles' leadership.Support the show

In the second year of the Peloponnesian War, the stage was set for a continuation of the struggle between Sparta and Athens. Archidamus, the Spartan commander, spearheaded an invasion of Attica with renewed fervour, while Athens harnessed its maritime might to direct a potent fleet towards a more expansive target on the Peloponnesian shores. Yet, amidst the echoes of warfare, an unforeseen and insidious adversary emerged – the plague.Originating from the Mediterranean's depths, the plague infiltrated Athens, exploiting its cosmopolitan trade networks. The city's bustling trade connections became both a source of prosperity and a conduit for disaster. However, the plague's devastation was exacerbated by the city's burgeoning population, driven to unprecedented numbers by the demands of the war. This surging populace led to congested streets and squalid living conditions, creating an ideal breeding ground.The toll was profound and unrelenting. Families were shattered, lives extinguished, and a pall of despair enveloped the Athenian skyline. In an era accustomed to tales of valour and intellectual brilliance, this unseen assailant showcased the fragility of human existence. It was a stern reminder of the limits of human resilience against the inexorable forces of nature.Within this cauldron of conflict and contagion, the second year of the war transcended its militaristic boundaries. It was a juncture where the will of cities clashed with nature's indiscriminate wrath. The plague, an unexpected interloper, reshaped Athens' narrative. As the war's tempest raged on, Athens wrestled not just with rival armies, but also with an unrelenting force that rose above the clashing of swords – an enduring testament to the intricate interplay between human agency and the capriciousness of fate.Support the show

The end of the first campaigning season of the Peloponnesian war had now drawn to a close. Sparta had invaded Attica with their offensive strategy, while Athens resisted with the defensive policy employed by Pericles. Athens had also launched naval operations which would harass the Peloponnese and secure Athens defensive position even further. However, no resolution to the war would be reached as the year came to a close and the conflict would drag on.In Athens it was tradition during times of war that funeral processions were held to honour the fallen. This would allow the citizens to grieve for their loss as a collective, while it would also be a chance to install pride and honour into the Athenians. This tradition would prove to be very important, as it would help maintain morale during times of continued war.To mark the end of the funeral procession an important Athenian figure would deliver a speech to the people. This time around it would be Pericles, and Thucydides would record the entire speech that he would give. In Thucydides account Pericles funeral oration would also mark the end point of the first year before continuing events into the second year of the war.Pericles funeral oration would prove to be a speech that would inspire and shape political speeches all the way to our times, with It proving to be an example in oratory, literary and rhetoric skill. It was designed to install pride and honour to the Athenian people, celebrating the achievements of their city. It would show to those left behind that the fallen had not died in vain but had sacrificed themselves for a greater good. While in the end it would convince the Athenians that continuing the struggle was worth the continued hardships. Support the show

The first year of the Peloponnesian war is now upon us. The first phase of this nearly 30-year struggle would be known as the Archidamian War, named after the Spartan king Archidamus, who had tried to prevent war developing in the first place. Archidamus being the only available Spartan king, the other not yet of age, would find himself leading the Peloponnesian forces as they invaded Attica in 431 BC.Sparta would launch a campaign where the main focus was on ravaging the Athenian country side to try and force the Athenians from out behind their walls. This then, as the Spartan calculated, would see a large battle between two hoplite armies develop, where Sparta excelled. However, Athens had been working on its defences and security for some 50 years. This would see that their long walls would neutralise an invading land force, while the strength of their navy and empire would see that resources would still flow in during a siege.Activities on land would not be the only actions undertaken during this first year. Athens would launch naval operations directed at the coast of the Peloponnese and surrounding areas. They would conduct raids, recruit new allies and secure their defences further with this developing war now in effect. Though, for the time being, Athens was looking to operate in a defensive manner while Sparta was on the offensive.During this first year, we would also find that opinion but in both Sparta and Athens would waver when it came to the respective leaders of both cities. Archadamius, known for his opposition to war having been declared would delay and drag his feet on a number of occasions during the campaign, perhaps looking for an opportunity for negotiations. While Pericles would not allow his forces from out behind the walls of Athens while the Peloponnesians were on Attic soil, this seeing discontent within the hoplite class grow. However, the conflict would not be resolved by the end of the campaigning season and the Peloponnesian war would continue.   Support the show

We have now reached the outbreak of the Peloponnesian war, where we saw the hostilities between Thebes and Plataea marking a point where the war would begin. Both of these city states were allied to Sparta, in Thebes case and Athens on the Plataean side. Even though preparations for war were underway already, this action would see that both Sparta and Athens would be ready for conflict since this was a blatant breach of the 30 years peace.However, before moving forward with developments, we are going to take a step back to see if we can get a better understanding of why this war would come to develop. We will first look at what Thucydides our main source says about the causes and his opinions. Remember, here it was his aim in presenting his work to make sure that all those that read it would have an understanding of the events and motivations behind this greatest of Greek conflicts.We will also explore the notion of the remote causes of the war and more immediate cause. This will see us looking back to even before the Persian War at the interactions between Athens and Sparta, while then following their interactions from the evolving developments of the Persian invasion and their victory in that war. Then we will turn to the years just before the breakout of the Peloponnesian War to see how both Athens and Sparta would come to be involved in this situation that had begun as a regional dispute out of their areas of influence.Trying to shed light on the causes for war developing in this conflict is not easy task. If we are expecting to find a single cause for the war, we will walk away disappointed. Although, Thucydides would provide what appears on the surface a straight forward answer, when you stop and think about it, there are so many elements tied up in his answer and it becomes apparent why he devoted his entire work to the subject of the Peloponnesian War.   Support the show

The war party within Sparta now had the majority in favour of their policy towards Athens. A clear vote had seen that the policies of the peace that had influenced much of Spartan policy since the end of the Persian invasions had now fallen out of favour. This would see that Sparta now saw that Athens had breached the 30 years peace, created nearly 15 years ago. However, for war to be the next step in developments a congress of the Peloponnesian league would need to be held for all its members to vote on the matter.Sparta would host the congress of the Peloponnesian League to put the matter to all members. It would be important to have everyone on board for a coming struggle with Athens and its empire. Thucydides would highlight that many would speak in favour of war with a particular focus on the speeches delivered by Corinth, where they would convince all that Athens could be defeated.The Congress would decide that war would be the best path forward, as Athens needed to be stopped. However, conflict would not develop just yet, with Sparta sending a number of embassies to deliver ultimatums to Athens. These were supposedly an attempt to avoid war, but the conditions were demands that Athens could not accept and no arbitration was attempted. Finally, with Athens rejection, diplomatic connections would officially break down. Conflict between the two would still not develop, though up in Boeotia an action by Thebes, Sparta's ally, would see the first action leading to the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War. They would target the small polis of Plataea, an ally of Athens, though with the action not going as Thebes planned, more conflict was sure to follow. What took place in Boeotia would be a clear breakdown of the 30 years peace, with Athens and Sparta now on a war footing. Support the show

With Potidaea now under siege from Athens, Corinth, although unofficial involved, was looking to help save the city and their connection to it before it would fall. To do this, they would work with the surrounding cities on the Chalcidids to mount raids on the Athenians to help relive pressure on the city. However, their primary goal was to try and get Sparta to enter the conflict along with the other Peloponnesian cities. Corinth would convince their current allies to travel to Sparta to put their cases forward, while they would also travel to lead the argument for war.Sparta would be forced to send out an invitation to members of the Peloponnesian league, inviting those who had been harmed by Athens. An assembly would be held where a number of cities would put their grievance to the Spartans. Corinth would have all their cities speak first to help set the mood before they would then stand and speak providing somewhat of the main event.Athens had also sent representatives after learning of what was going to take place in Sparta, although they had not been invited. After Corinth had presented their case Athens would ask the Spartans if they could address the assembly. However, Athens was not looking to address the specific charges laid against them, but rather urge Sparta to think long and hard about the decision they would come to. They would highlight the gravity of what war would mean, especially with a city state such as themselves.To round out the assembly, the Spartans would dismiss all the various representatives so they could discuss the matter between themselves. This would then see speech's given by King Archidamus, representing the peace part and an ephor from the war party. After they had spoken the Spartans would vote on if they thought Athens had breached the 30 years peace where it quickly became clear Sparta was in the mood for war, a departure from the policies of the peace party that had dominated Spartan politics for most of the past 50 years. Support the show

Athens support of Corcyra had seen hostilities once again develop with Corinth who had been engaged in a dispute with the island polis. Athens would send ships to support Corcyra, as the Corinthian set sail to impose their will. Out of this affair would see the battle of Sybota take place and with it the first engagement seeing Athenian and Corinthian ships openly fight one another. This would see tension raised further and questions around the official statue between the two.Once the Athenians had learnt of what had taken place around Corcyra, they saw that war with Corinth was likely. They would now take measures to prepare for this coming conflict, though they would also attempt to not take any action that would breach the 30 years' peace. Early measures included preparing financially with decrees made on how funds were to be spent, this seeing Athens scale back its building projects for the time being. However other measures would be taken that targeted other regions.One would be known as the Potidaean affair, where Athens looked to secure their influence over the port city of Potidaea on the Chalcidice in Thrace. Potidaea was originally a Corinthian colony and still had ties to their mother city, Athens seeing Potidaea at risk of going into revolt due to Corinthian incitement. Athens would make demands on the city to take down its walls and expel any Corinthians within. However, Potidaea would resist and obtain Corinthian support along with other allies. This would see Athens having to commit to an ever-growing situation developing around Potidaea where they would end up being forced into laying siege to the city.The second measure taken by Athens during this period that would also be seen to have a major impact on a future war with Sparta developing, would be that of the Megarian Decree. This would see Athens impose economic sanctions on the polis that sat at the exit of the Corinthian isthmus, leading into Attica. Megara was a member of the Peloponnesian league, with this economic strangle hold having flow on effects to their other trading partners within the league. These actions by Athens plus other would see Corinth put forward a case to Sparta and the other Peloponnesian that action was needed against Athens, less they sit by and watch Athens dominate all of Greece.Support the show

This week we talk about the intersections of large language models, the golden age of television and its storytelling mishaps, making one's way through the weirding of the labor economy, and much more with two of my favorite Gen X science fiction aficionados, OG podcaster KMO and our mutual friend Kevin Arthur Wohlmut. In this episode — a standalone continuation to my recent appearance on The KMO Show, we skip like a stone across mentions of every Star Trek series, the collapse of narratives and the social fabric, Westworld HBO, Star Wars Mandalorian vs. Andor vs. Rebels, chatGPT, Blade Runner 2049, Black Mirror, H.P. Lovecraft, the Sheldrake-Abraham-McKenna Trialogues, Charles Stross' Accelerando, Adventure Time, Stanislav Grof's LSD psychotherapy, Francisco Varela, Blake Lemoine's meltdown over Google LaMDA, Integrated Information Theory, biosemiotics, Douglas Hofstadter, Max Tegmarck, Erik Davis, Peter Watts, The Psychedelic Salon, Melanie Mitchell, The Teafaerie, Kevin Kelly, consilience in science, Fight Club, and more…Or, if you prefer, here's a rundown of the episode generated by A.I. c/o my friends at Podium.page:In this episode, I explore an ambitious and well-connected conversation with guests KMO, a seasoned podcaster, and Kevin Walnut [sic], a close friend and supporter of the arts in Santa Fe. We dive deep into their thoughts on the social epistemology crisis, science fiction, deep fakes, and ontology. Additionally, we discuss their opinions on the Star Trek franchise, particularly their critiques of the first two seasons of Star Trek: Picard and Discovery. Through this engaging conversation, we examine the impact of storytelling and the evolution of science fiction in modern culture. We also explore the relationship between identity, media, and artificial intelligence, as well as the ethical implications of creating sentient artificial general intelligence (AGI) and the philosophical questions surrounding AI's impact on society and human existence. Join us for a thought-provoking and in-depth discussion on a variety of topics that will leave you questioning the future of humanity and our relationship with technology.✨ Before we get started, three big announcements!* I am leaving the Santa Fe Institute, in part to write a very ambitious book about technology, art, imagination, and Jurassic Park. You can be a part of the early discussion around this project by joining the Future Fossils Book Club's Jurassic Park live calls — the first of which will be on Saturday, 29 April — open to Substack and Patreon supporters:* Catch me in a Twitter Space with Nxt Museum on Monday 17 April at 11 am PST on a panel discussing “Creative Misuse of Technology” with Minne Atairu, Parag Mital, Caroline Sinders, and hosts Jesse Damiani and Charlotte Kent.* I'm back in Austin this October to play the Astronox Festival at Apache Pass! Check out this amazing lineup on which I appear alongside Juno Reactor, Entheogenic, Goopsteppa, DRRTYWULVZ, and many more great artists!✨ Support Future Fossils:Subscribe anywhere you go for podcastsSubscribe to the podcast PLUS essays, music, and news on Substack or Patreon.Buy my original paintings or commission new work.Buy my music on Bandcamp! (This episode features “A Better Trip” from my recent live album by the same name.)Or if you're into lo-fi audio, follow me and my listening recommendations on Spotify.This conversation continues with lively and respectful interaction every single day in the members-only Future Fossils Facebook Group and Discord server. Join us!Episode cover art by KMO and a whole bouquet of digital image manipulation apps.✨ Tip Jars:@futurefossils on Venmo$manfredmacx on CashAppmichaelgarfield on PayPal✨ Affiliate Links:• These show notes and the transcript were made possible with Podium.Page, a very cool new AI service I'm happy to endorse. Sign up here and get three free hours and 50% off your first month.• BioTech Life Sciences makes anti-aging and performance enhancement formulas that work directly at the level of cellular nutrition, both for ingestion and direct topical application. I'm a firm believer in keeping NAD+ levels up and their skin solution helped me erase a year of pandemic burnout from my face.• Help regulate stress, get better sleep, recover from exercise, and/or stay alert and focused without stimulants, with the Apollo Neuro wearable. I have one and while I don't wear it all the time, when I do it's sober healthy drugs.• Musicians: let me recommend you get yourself a Jamstik Studio, the coolest MIDI guitar I've ever played. I LOVE mine. You can hear it playing all the synths on my song about Jurassic Park.✨ Mentioned Media:KMO Show S01 E01 - 001 - Michael Garfield and Kevin WohlmutAn Edifying Thought on AI by Charles EisensteinIn Defense of Star Trek: Picard & Discovery by Michael GarfieldImprovising Out of Algorithmic Isolation by Michael GarfieldAI and the Transformation of the Human Spirit by Steven Hales(and yes I know it's on Quillette, and no I don't think this automatically disqualifies it)Future Fossils Book Club #1: Blindsight by Peter WattsFF 116 - The Next Ten Billion Years: Ugo Bardi & John Michael Greer as read by Kevin Arthur Wohlmut✨ Related Recent Future Fossils Episodes:FF 198 - Tadaaki Hozumi on Japanese Esotericism, Aliens, Land Spirits, & The Singularity (Part 2)FF 195 - A.I. Art: An Emergency Panel with Julian Picaza, Evo Heyning, Micah Daigle, Jamie Curcio, & Topher SipesFF 187 - Fear & Loathing on the Electronic Frontier with Kevin Welch & David Hensley of EFF-Austin FF 178 - Chris Ryan on Exhuming The Human from Our Eldritch Institutions FF 175 - C. Thi Nguyen on The Seductions of Clarity, Weaponized Games, and Agency as Art ✨ Chapters:0:15:45 - The Substance of Philosophy (58 Seconds)0:24:45 - Complicated TV Narratives and the Internet (104 Seconds)0:30:54 - Humans vs Hosts in Westworld (81 Seconds)0:38:09 - Philosophical Zombies and Artificial Intelligence (89 Seconds)0:43:00 - Popular Franchises Themes (71 Seconds)1:03:27 - Reflections on a Changing Media Landscape (89 Seconds)1:10:45 - The Pathology of Selective Evidence (92 Seconds)1:16:32 - Externalizing Trauma Through Technology (131 Seconds)1:24:51 - From Snow Maker to Thouandsaire (43 Seconds)1:36:48 - The Impact of Boomer Parenting (126 Seconds)✨ Keywords:Social Epistemology, Science Fiction, Deep Fakes, Ontology, Star Trek, Artificial Intelligence, AI Impact, Sentient AGI, Human-Machine Interconnectivity, Consciousness Theory, Westworld, Blade Runner 2049, AI in Economy, AI Companion Chatbots, Unconventional Career Path, AI and Education, AI Content Creation, AI in Media, Turing Test✨ UNEDITED machine-generated transcript generated by podium.page:0:00:00Five four three two one. Go. So it's not like Wayne's world where you say the two and the one silently. Now, Greetings future fossils.0:00:11Welcome to episode two hundred and one of the podcast that explores our place in time I'm your host, Michael Garfield. And this is one of these extra juicy and delicious episodes of the show where I really ratcheted up with our guests and provide you one of these singularity is near kind of ever everything is connected to everything, self organized criticality right at the edge of chaos conversations, deeply embedded in chapel parallel where suddenly the invisible architect picture of our cosmos starts to make itself apparent through the glass bead game of conversation. And I am that I get to share it with you. Our guests this week are KMO, one of the most seasoned and well researched and experienced podcasters that I know. Somebody whose show the Sea Realm was running all the way back in two thousand six, I found him through Eric Davis, who I think most of you know, and I've had on the show a number of times already. And also Kevin Walnut, who is a close friend of mine here in Santa Fe, a just incredible human being, he's probably the strongest single supporter of music that I'm aware of, you know, as far as local scenes are concerned and and supporting people's music online and helping get the word out. He's been instrumental to my family and I am getting ourselves situated here all the way back to when I visited Santa Fe in two thousand eighteen to participate in the Santa Fe Institute's Interplanetary Festival and recorded conversations on that trip John David Ebert and Michael Aaron Cummins. And Ike used so June. About hyper modernity, a two part episode one zero four and one zero five. I highly recommend going back to that, which is really the last time possibly I had a conversation just this incredibly ambitious on the show.0:02:31But first, I want to announce a couple things. One is that I have left the Santa Fe Institute. The other podcast that I have been hosting for them for the last three and a half years, Complexity Podcast, which is substantially more popular in future fossils due to its institutional affiliation is coming to a close, I'm recording one more episode with SFI president David Krakauer next week in which I'm gonna be talking about my upcoming book project. And that episode actually is conjoined with the big announcement that I have for members of the Future Fossil's listening audience and and paid supporters, which is, of course, the Jurassic Park Book Club that starts On April twenty ninth, we're gonna host the first of two video calls where I'm gonna dive deep into the science and philosophy Michael Creighton's most popular work of fiction and its impact on culture and society over the thirty three years since its publication. And then I'm gonna start picking up as many of the podcasts that I had scheduled for complexity and had to cancel upon my departure from SFI. And basically fuse the two shows.0:03:47And I think a lot of you saw this coming. Future fossils is going to level up and become a much more scientific podcast. As I prepare and research the book that I'm writing about Jurassic Park and its legacy and the relationship It has to ILM and SFI and the Institute of Eco Technics. And all of these other visionary projects that sprouted in the eighties and nineties to transition from the analog to the digital the collapse of the boundaries between the real and the virtual, the human and the non human worlds, it's gonna be a very very ambitious book and a very very ambitious book club. And I hope that you will get in there because obviously now I am out in the rain as an independent producer and very much need can benefit from and am deeply grateful for your support for this work in order to make things happen and in order to keep my family fed, get the lights on here with future fossils. So with that, I wanna thank all of the new supporters of the show that have crawled out of the woodwork over the last few weeks, including Raefsler Oingo, Brian in the archaeologist, Philip Rice, Gerald Bilak, Jamie Curcio, Jeff Hanson who bought my music, Kuaime, Mary Castello, VR squared, Nastia teaches, community health com, Ed Mulder, Cody Couiac, bought my music, Simon Heiduke, amazing visionary artist. I recommend you check out, Kayla Peters. Yeah. All of you, I just wow. Thank you so much. It's gonna be a complete melee in this book club. I'm super excited to meet you all. I will send out details about the call details for the twenty ninth sometime in the next few days via a sub tag in Patreon.0:06:09The amount of support that I've received through this transition has been incredible and it's empowering me to do wonderful things for you such as the recently released secret videos of the life sets I performed with comedian Shane Moss supporting him, opening for him here in Santa Fe. His two sold out shows at the Jean Coutu cinema where did the cyber guitar performances. And if you're a subscriber, you can watch me goofing off with my pedal board. There's a ton of material. I'm gonna continue to do that. I've got a lot of really exciting concerts coming up in the next few months that we're gonna get large group and also solo performance recordings from and I'm gonna make those available in a much more resplendent way to supporters as well as the soundtrack to Mark Nelson of the Institute of Eco Technics, his UC San Diego, Art Museum, exhibit retrospective looking at BioSphere two. I'm doing music for that and that's dropping. The the opening of that event is April twenty seventh. There's gonna be a live zoom event for that and then I'm gonna push the music out as well for that.0:07:45So, yeah, thank you all. I really, really appreciate you listening to the show. I am excited to share this episode with you. KMO is just a trove. Of insight and experience. I mean, he's like a perfect entry into the digital history museum that this show was predicated upon. So with that and also, of course, Kevin Willett is just magnificent. And for the record, stick around at the end of the conversation. We have some additional pieces about AI, and I think you're gonna really enjoy it. And yeah, thank you. Here we go. Alright. Cool.0:09:26Well, we just had a lovely hour of discussion for the new KMO podcast. And now I'm here with KMO who is The most inveterate podcaster I know. And I know a lot of them. Early adopts. And I think that weird means what you think it means. Inventor it. Okay. Yes. Hey, answer to both. Go ahead. I mean, you're not yet legless and panhandling. So prefer to think of it in term in terms of August estimation. Yeah. And am I allowed to say Kevin Walnut because I've had you as a host on True. Yeah. My last name was appeared on your show. It hasn't appeared on camos yet, but I don't really care. Okay. Great. Yeah. Karen Arthur Womlett, who is one of the most solid and upstanding and widely read and just generous people, I think I know here in Santa Fe or maybe anywhere. With excellent taste and podcasts. Yes. And who is delicious meat I am sampling right now as probably the first episode of future fossils where I've had an alcoholic beverage in my hand. Well, I mean, it's I haven't deprived myself. Of fun. And I think if you're still listening to the show after all these years, you probably inferred that. But at any rate, Welcome on board. Thank you. Thanks. Pleasure to be here.0:10:49So before we started rolling, I guess, so the whole conversation that we just had for your show camera was very much about my thoughts on the social epistemology crisis and on science fiction and deep fakes and all of these kinds of weird ontology and these kinds of things. But in between calls, we were just talking about how much you detest the first two seasons of Star Trek card and of Discovery. And as somebody, I didn't bother with doing this. I didn't send you this before we spoke, but I actually did write an SIN defense of those shows. No one. Yeah. So I am not attached to my opinion on this, but And I actually do wanna at some point double back and hear storytelling because when he had lunch and he had a bunch of personal life stuff that was really interesting. And juicy and I think worthy of discussion. But simply because it's hot on the rail right now, I wanna hear you talk about Star Trek. And both of you, actually, I know are very big fans of this franchise. I think fans are often the ones from whom a critic is most important and deserved. And so I welcome your unhinged rants. Alright. Well, first, I'll start off by quoting Kevin's brother, the linguist, who says, That which brings us closer to Star Trek is progress. But I'd have to say that which brings us closer to Gene Rottenberry and Rick Berman era Star Trek. Is progress. That which brings us closer to Kurtzmann. What's his first name? Alex. Alex Kurtzmann, Star Trek. Well, that's not even the future. I mean, that's just that's our drama right now with inconsistent Star Trek drag draped over it.0:12:35I liked the first JJ Abrams' Star Trek. I think it was two thousand nine with Chris Pine and Zachary Qinto and Karl Urban and Joey Saldana. I liked the casting. I liked the energy. It was fun. I can still put that movie on and enjoy it. But each one after that just seem to double down on the dumb and just hold that arm's length any of the philosophical stuff that was just amazing from Star Trek: The Next Generation or any of the long term character building, which was like from Deep Space nine.0:13:09And before seven of nine showed up on on Voyager, you really had to be a dedicated Star Trek fan to put up with early season's Voyager, but I did because I am. But then once she came on board and it was hilarious. They brought her onboard. I remember seeing Jerry Ryan in her cat suit on the cover of a magazine and just roll in my eyes and think, oh my gosh, this show is in such deep trouble through sinking to this level to try to save it. But she was brilliant. She was brilliant in that show and she and Robert Percardo as the doctor. I mean, it basically became the seven of nine and the doctor show co starring the rest of the cast of Voyager. And it was so great.0:13:46I love to hear them singing together and just all the dynamics of I'm human, but I was I basically came up in a cybernetic collective and that's much more comfortable to me. And I don't really have the option of going back it. So I gotta make the best of where I am, but I feel really superior to all of you. Is such it was such a charming dynamic. I absolutely loved it. Yes. And then I think a show that is hated even by Star Trek fans Enterprise. Loved Enterprise.0:14:15And, yes, the first three seasons out of four were pretty rough. Actually, the first two were pretty rough. The third season was that Zendy Ark in the the expanse. That was pretty good. And then season four was just astounding. It's like they really found their voice and then what's his name at CBS Paramount.0:14:32He's gone now. He got me too. What's his name? Les Moonves? Said, no. I don't like Star Trek. He couldn't he didn't know the difference between Star Wars and Star Trek. That was his level of engagement.0:14:44And he's I really like J.0:14:46J.0:14:46Abrams. What's that? You mean J. J. Abrams. Yeah. I think J. J. Is I like some of J. Abrams early films. I really like super eight. He's clearly his early films were clearly an homage to, like, eighties, Spielberg stuff, and Spielberg gets the emotional beats right, and JJ Abrams was mimicking that, and his early stuff really works. It's just when he starts adapting properties that I really love. And he's coming at it from a marketing standpoint first and a, hey, we're just gonna do the lost mystery box thing. We're gonna set up a bunch questions to which we don't know the answers, and it'll be up to somebody else to figure it out, somebody down the line. I as I told you, between our conversations before we were recording. I really enjoy or maybe I said it early in this one. I really like that first J. J. Abrams, Star Trek: Foam, and then everyone thereafter, including the one that Simon Pegg really had a hand in because he's clear fan. Yeah. Yeah. But they brought in director from one of the fast and the furious films and they tried to make it an action film on.0:15:45This is not Star Trek, dude. This is not why we like Star Trek. It's not for the flash, particularly -- Oh my god. -- again, in the first one, it was a stylistic choice. I'd like it, then after that is that's the substance of this, isn't it? It's the lens flares. I mean, that that's your attempt at philosophy. It's this the lens flares. That's your attempt at a moral dilemma. I don't know.0:16:07I kinda hate to start off on this because this is something about which I feel like intense emotion and it's negative. And I don't want that to be my first impression. I'm really negative about something. Well, one of the things about this show is that I always joke that maybe I shouldn't edit it because The thing that's most interesting to archaeologists is often the trash mitt and here I am tidying this thing up to be presentable to future historians or whatever like it I can sync to that for sure. Yeah. I'm sorry. The fact of it is you're not gonna know everything and we want it that way. No. It's okay. We'll get around to the stuff that I like. But yeah. So anyway yeah.0:16:44So I could just preassociate on Stretrick for a while, so maybe a focusing question. Well, but first, you said there's a you had more to say, but you were I this this tasteful perspective. This is awesome. Well, I do have a focus on question for you. So let me just have you ask it because for me to get into I basically I'm alienated right now from somebody that I've been really good friends with since high school.0:17:08Because over the last decade, culturally, we have bifurcated into the hard right, hard left. And I've tried not to go either way, but the hard left irritates me more than the hard right right now. And he is unquestionably on the hard left side. And I know for people who are dedicated Marxist, or really grounded in, like, materialism and the material well-being of workers that the current SJW fanaticism isn't leftist. It's just crazed. We try to put everything, smash everything down onto this left right spectrum, and it's pretty easy to say who's on the left and who's on the right even if a two dimensional, two axis graph would be much more expressive and nuanced.0:17:49Anyway, what's your focus in question? Well, And I think there is actually there is a kind of a when we ended your last episode talking about the bell riots from d s nine -- Mhmm. -- that, you know, how old five? Yeah. Twenty four. Ninety five did and did not accurately predict the kind of technological and economic conditions of this decade. It predicted the conditions Very well. Go ahead and finish your question. Yeah. Right.0:18:14That's another thing that's retreated in picard season two, and it was actually worth it. Yeah. Like, it was the fact that they decided to go back there was part of the defense that I made about that show and about Discovery's jump into the distant future and the way that they treated that I posted to medium a year or two ago when I was just watching through season two of picard. And for me, the thing that I liked about it was that they're making an effort to reconcile the wonder and the Ethiopian promise And, you know, this Kevin Kelly or rather would call Blake Protopian, right, that we make these improvements and that they're often just merely into incremental improvements the way that was it MLK quoted that abolitionists about the long arc of moral progress of moral justice. You know, I think that there's something to that and patitis into the last this is a long question. I'm mad at I'm mad at these. Thank you all for tolerating me.0:19:22But the when to tie it into the epistemology question, I remember this seeing this impactful lecture by Carnegie Mellon and SFI professor Simon Didayo who was talking about how by running statistical analysis on the history of the proceedings of the Royal Society, which is the oldest scientific journal, that you could see what looked like a stock market curve in sentiment analysis about the confidence that scientists had at the prospect of unifying knowledge. And so you have, like, conciliance r s curve here that showed that knowledge would be more and more unified for about a century or a hundred and fifty years then it would go through fifty years of decline where something had happened, which was a success of knowledge production. Had outpaced our ability to integrate it. So we go through these kinds of, like, psychedelic peak experiences collectively, and then we have sit there with our heads in our hands and make sense of everything that we've learned over the last century and a half and go through a kind of a deconstructive epoch. Where we don't feel like the center is gonna hold anymore. And that is what I actually As as disappointing as I accept that it is and acknowledge that it is to people who were really fueling themselves on that more gene rottenberry era prompt vision for a better society, I actually appreciated this this effort to explore and address in the shows the way that they could pop that bubble.0:21:03And, like, it's on the one hand, it's boring because everybody's trying to do the moral complexity, anti hero, people are flawed, thing in narrative now because we have a general loss of faith in our institutions and in our rows. On the other hand, like, that's where we are and that's what we need to process And I think there is a good reason to look back at the optimism and the quarian hope of the sixties and early seventies. We're like, really, they're not so much the seventies, but look back on that stuff and say, we wanna keep telling these stories, but we wanna tell it in a way that acknowledges that the eighties happened. And that this is you got Tim Leary, and then you've got Ronald Reagan. And then That just or Dick Nixon. And like these things they wash back and forth. And so it's not unreasonable to imagine that in even in a world that has managed to how do you even keep a big society like that coherent? It has to suffer kind of fabric collapses along the way at different points. And so I'm just curious your thoughts about that. And then I do have another prompt, but I wanna give Kevin the opportunity to respond to this as well as to address some of the prompts that you brought to this conversation? This is a conversation prompt while we weren't recording. It has nothing to do with Sartreks. I'll save that for later. Okay.0:22:25Well, everything you just said was in some way related to a defense of Alex Kurtzmann Star Trek. And it's not my original idea. I'm channeling somebody from YouTube, surely. But Don't get points for theme if the storytelling is incompetent. That's what I was gonna Yeah. And the storytelling in all of Star Trek: Discovery, and in the first two seasons of picard was simply incompetent.0:22:53When Star Trek, the next generation was running, they would do twenty, twenty four, sometimes more episodes in one season. These days, the season of TVs, eight episodes, ten, and they spend a lot more money on each episode. There's a lot more special effects. There's a lot more production value. Whereas Star Trek: The Next Generation was, okay, we have these standing sets. We have costumes for our actors. We have Two dollars for special effects. You better not introduce a new alien spaceship. It that costs money. We have to design it. We have to build it. So use existing stuff. Well, what do you have? You have a bunch of good actors and you have a bunch of good writers who know how to tell a story and craft dialogue and create tension and investment with basically a stage play and nothing in the Kerstmann era except one might argue and I would have sympathy strange new worlds. Comes anywhere close to that level of competence, which was on display for decades. From Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Deep Space nines, Star Trek Voyager, and Star Trek Enterprise. And so, I mean, I guess, in that respect, it's worth asking because, I mean, all of us, I think, are fans of Deep Space nine.0:24:03You don't think that it's a shift in focus. You don't think that strange in world is exempt because it went back to a more episodic format because what you're talking about is the ability for rather than a show runner or a team of show runners to craft a huge season, long dramatic arc. You've got people that are like Harlan Ellison in the original series able to bring a really potent one off idea to the table and drop it. And so there are there's all of those old shows are inconsistent from episode to episode. Some are they have specific writers that they would bring back again and that you could count to knock out of the park. Yeah. DC Fontana. Yeah.0:24:45So I'm curious to your thoughts on that as well as another part of this, which is when we talk when we talk your show about Doug Rushkoff and and narrative collapse, and he talks about how viewers just have different a way, it's almost like d s nine was possibly partially responsible for this change in what people expected from so. From television programming in the documentary that was made about that show and they talk about how people weren't ready for cereal. I mean, for I mean, yeah, for these long arcs, And so there is there's this question now about how much of this sort of like tiresome moral complexity and dragging narrative and all of this and, like, things like Westworld where it becomes so baroque and complicated that, like, you have, like, die hard fans like me that love it, but then you have a lot of people that just lost interest. They blacked out because the show was trying to tell a story that was, like, too intricate like, too complicated that the the show runners themselves got lost. And so that's a JJ Abrams thing too, the puzzle the mystery box thing where You get to the end of five seasons of lost and you're like, dude, did you just forget?0:25:56Did you wake up five c five episodes ago and just, oh, right. Right. We're like a chatbot that only give you very convincing answers based on just the last two or three interactions. But you don't remember the scene that we set. Ten ten responses ago. Hey. You know, actually, red articles were forget who it was, which series it was, they were saying that there's so many leaks and spoilers in getting out of the Internet that potentially the writers don't know where they're going because that way it can't be with the Internet. Yeah. Sounds interesting. Yeah. That sounds like cover for incompetence to be.0:26:29I mean, on the other hand, I mean, you did hear, like, Nolan and Joy talking about how they would they were obsessed with the Westworld subreddit and the fan theories and would try to dodge Like, if they had something in their mind that they found out that people are re anticipating, they would try to rewrite it. And so there is something about this that I think is really speaks to the nature of because I do wanna loop in your thoughts on AI to because you're talking about this being a favorite topic. Something about the, like, trying to The demands on the self made by predatory surveillance technologies are such that the I'm convinced the adaptive response is that we become more stochastic or inconsistent in our identities. And that we kind of sublimate from a more solid state of identity to or through a liquid kind of modernity biologic environment to a gaseous state of identity. That is harder to place sorry, harder to track. And so I think that this is also part of and this is the other question I wanted to ask you, and then I'm just gonna shut up for fifteen minutes is do you when you talk about loving Robert Ricardo and Jerry Ryan as the doctor at seven zero nine, One of the interesting things about that relationship is akin to stuff.0:27:52I know you've heard on Kevin have heard on future fossils about my love for Blade Runner twenty forty nine and how it explores all of these different these different points along a gradient between what we think of in the current sort of general understanding as the human and the machine. And so there's this thing about seven, right, where she's She's a human who wants to be a machine. And then there's this thing about the doctor where he's a machine that wants to be a human. And you have to grant both on a logical statuses to both of them. And that's why I think they're the two most interesting characters. Right?0:28:26And so at any rate, like, this is that's there's I've seen writing recently on the Turing test and how, like, really, there should be a reverse Turing test to see if people that have become utterly reliant on outboard cognition and information processing. They can pass the drink. Right. Are they philosophical zombies now? Are they are they having some an experience that that, you know, people like, thick and and shilling and the missing and these people would consider the modern self or are they something else have we moved on to another more routine robotic kind of category of being? I don't know. There's just a lot there, but -- Well done. -- considering everything you just said, In twenty words or less, what's your question? See, even more, like I said, do you have the inveterate podcaster? I'd say There's all of those things I just spoke about are ways in which what we are as people and the nature of our media, feedback into fourth, into each other. And so I would just love to hear you reflect on any of that, be it through the lens of Star Trek or just through the lens of discussion on AI. And we'll just let the ball roll downhill. So with the aim of framing something positively rather than negatively.0:29:47In the late nineties, mid to late nineties. We got the X Files. And the X Files for the first few seasons was so It was so engaging for me because Prior to that, there had been Hollywood tropes about aliens, which informed a lot of science fiction that didn't really connect with the actual reported experience of people who claim to have encountered either UFOs, now called UAPs, or had close encounters physical contact. Type encounters with seeming aliens. And it really seemed like Chris Carter, who was the showrunner, was reading the same Usenet Newsgroups that I was reading about those topics. Like, really, we had suddenly, for the first time, except maybe for comedian, you had the Grey's, and you had characters experiencing things that just seemed ripped right out of the reports that people were making on USnet, which for young folks, this is like pre Worldwide Web. It was Internet, but with no pictures. It's all text. Good old days from my perspective is a grumpy old gen xer. And so, yeah, that was a breakthrough moment.0:30:54Any this because you mentioned it in terms of Jonathan Nolan and his co writer on Westworld, reading the subreddit, the West and people figured out almost immediately that there were two interweaving time lines set decades apart and that there's one character, the old guy played by Ed Harris, and the young guy played by I don't remember the actor. But, you know, that they were the same character and that the inveterate white hat in the beginning turns into the inveterate black cat who's just there for the perverse thrill of tormenting the hosts as the robots are called. And the thing that I love most about that first season, two things. One, Anthony Hopkins. Say no more. Two, the revelation that the park has been basically copying humans or figuring out what humans are by closely monitoring their behavior in the park and the realization that the hosts come to is that, holy shit compared to us, humans are very simple creatures. We are much more complex. We are much more sophisticated, nuanced conscious, we feel more than the humans do, and that humans use us to play out their perverse and sadistic fantasies. To me, that was the takeaway message from season one.0:32:05And then I thought every season after that was just diluted and confused and not really coherent. And in particular, I haven't if there's a fourth season, haven't There was and then the show got canceled before they could finish the story. They had the line in season three. It was done after season three. And I was super happy to see Let's see after who plays Jesse Pinkman? Oh, no. Aaron oh, shit. Paul. Yes. Yeah. I was super happy to see him and something substantial and I was really pleased to see him included in the show and it's like, oh, that's what you're doing with him? They did a lot more interesting stuff with him in season four. I did they. They did a very much more interesting stuff. I think it was done after season three. If you tell me season four is worth taking in, I blow. I thought it was.0:32:43But again, I only watch television under very specific set of circumstances, and that's how I managed to enjoy television because I was a fierce and unrepentant hyperlogical critic of all media as a child until I managed to start smoking weed. And then I learned to enjoy myself. As we mentioned in the kitchen as I mentioned in the kitchen, if I smoke enough weed, Star Trek: Discovery is pretty and I can enjoy it on just a second by second level where if I don't remember what the character said thirty seconds ago, I'm okay. But I absolutely loved in season two when they brought in Hanson Mountain as as Christopher Pike. He's suddenly on the discovery and he's in the captain's chair. And it's like he's speaking for the audience. The first thing he says is, hey, why don't we turn on the lights? And then hey, all you people sitting around the bridge. We've been looking at your faces for a whole season. We don't even think about you. Listen to a round of introductions. Who are you? Who are you? It's it's if I were on set. You got to speak.0:33:53The writers is, who are these characters? We've been looking at them every single episode for a whole season. I don't know their names. I don't know anything about them. Why are they even here? Why is it not just Michael Burnham and an automated ship? And then it was for a while -- Yeah. -- which is funny. Yeah. To that point, And I think this kind of doubles back. The thing that I love about bringing him on and all of the people involved in strange and worlds in particular, is that these were lifelong fans of this series, I mean, of this world. Yeah. And so in that way, gets to this the idiosyncrasy question we're orbiting here, which is when these things are when the baton is passed well, it's passed to people who have now grown up with this stuff.0:34:40I personally cannot stand Jurassic World. Like, I think that Colin Trivaro should never have been in put at the reins. Which one did he direct? Oh, he did off he did first and the third. Okay. But, I mean, he was involved in all three very heavily.0:34:56And there's something just right at the outset of that first Jurassic World where you realize that this is not a film that's directly addressing the issues that Michael Creighton was trying to explore here. It's a film about its own franchise. It's a film about the fact that they can't just stop doing the same thing over and over again as we expect a different question. How can we not do it again? Right. And so it's actually, like, unpleasantly soft, conscious, in that way that I can't remember I'll try to find it for the show notes, but there's an Internet film reviewer who is talking about what happens when, like, all cinema has to take this self referential turn.0:35:34No. And films like Logan do it really well. But there are plenty of examples where it's just cheeky and self aware because that's what the ironic sensibility is obsessed with. And so, yeah, there's a lot of that where it's, like, you're talking about, like, Abrams and the the Star Wars seven and you know, that whole trilogy of Disney Star Wars, where it's, in my opinion, completely fumbled because there it's just empty fan service, whereas when you get to Andor, love Andor. Andor is amazing because they're capable of providing all of those emotional beats that the fans want and the ref the internal references and good dialogue. But they're able to write it in a way that's and shoot it in a way. Gilroy and Bo Willeman, basic of the people responsible for the excellent dialogue in Andor.0:36:31And I love the production design. I love all the stuff set on Coruscant, where you saw Coruscant a lot in the prequel trilogy, and it's all dayglow and bright and just in your face. And it's recognizable as Coruscant in andor, but it's dour. It's metropolis. It's all grays and it's and it's highlighting the disparity between where the wealthy live and where the poor live, which Lucas showed that in the prequel trilogy, but even in the sports bar where somebody tries to sell death sticks to Obi wan. So it's super clean and bright and just, you know, It shines too much. Personally though, and I just wanna stress, KMO is not grumpy media dude, I mean, this is a tiny fraction about, but I am wasting this interview with you. Love. All of the Dave Felloni animated Star Wars stuff, even rebels. Love it all.0:37:26I I'm so glad they aged up the character and I felt less guilty about loving and must staying after ahsoka tano? My favorite Star Wars character is ahsoka tano. But if you only watch the live action movies, you're like who? Well, I guess now that she's been on the Mandalorian, he's got tiny sliver of a foothold -- Yeah. -- in the super mainstream Star Wars. And that was done well, I thought. It was. I'm so sorry that Ashley Epstein doesn't have any part in it. But Rosario Dawson looks the part. She looks like a middle aged Asaka and think they tried to do some stuff in live action, which really should have been CGI because it's been established that the Jedi can really move, and she looked human. Which she is? If you put me on film, I'm gonna lick human. Right. Not if you're Canada Reeves, I guess. You got that. Yeah. But yeah.0:38:09So I do wanna just go real briefly back to this question with you about because we briefly talked about chat, GPT, and these other things in your half of this. And, yeah, I found out just the other night my friend, the t ferry, asked Chad g p t about me, and it gave a rather plausible and factual answer. I was surprised and That's what these language models do. They put plausible answers. But when you're doing search, you want correct answers. Right. I'm very good at that. Right. Then someone shared this Michelle Bowen's actually the famous PTP guy named him. Yeah. So, you know, So Michelle shared this article by Steven Hales and Colette, that was basically making the argument that there are now they're gonna be all these philosophical zombies, acting as intelligent agents sitting at the table of civilization, and there will be all the philosophical zombies of the people who have entirely yielded their agency to them, and they will be cohabitating with the rest of us.0:39:14And what an unpleasant scenario, So in light of that, and I might I'd love to hear you weave that together with your your thoughts on seven zero nine and the doctor and on Blade Runner twenty forty nine. And this thing that we're fumbling through as a species right now. Like, how do we got a new sort of taxonomy? Does your not audience need like a minute primer on P zombies? Might as well. Go for it.0:39:38So a philosophical zombie is somebody who behaves exactly like an insult person or a person with interior experience or subjective experience, but they don't have any subjective experience. And in Pardon me for interrupt. Wasn't that the question about the the book we read in your book club, a blind sign in this box? Yes. It's a black box, a drawn circle. Yeah. Chinese room experience. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Look, Daniel, it goes out. You don't know, it goes on inside the room. Chinese room, that's a tangent. We can come back to it. P. Zombie. P. Zombie is somebody or is it is an entity. It's basically a puppet. It looks human. It acts human. It talks like a human. It will pass a Turing test, but it has no interior experience.0:40:25And when I was going to grad school for philosophy of mind in the nineteen nineties, this was all very out there. There was no example of something that had linguistic competence. Which did not have internal experience. But now we have large language models and generative pretrained transformer based chatbots that don't have any internal experience. And yet, when you interact with them, it seems like there is somebody there There's a personality there. And if you go from one model to a different, it's a very different personality. It is distinctly different. And yet we have no reason to believe that they have any sort of internal experience.0:41:01So what AI in the last decade and what advances has demonstrated to us and really even before the last decade You back in the nineties when the blue beat Gary Casper off at at chess. And what had been the one of the defining characteristics of human intelligence was we're really good at this abstract mathematical stuff. And yeah, calculators can calculate pie in a way that we can't or they can cube roots in a way that humans generally can't, creative in their application of these methodologies And all of a sudden, well, yeah, it kinda seems like they are. And then when what was an alpha go -- Mhmm. -- when it be to least a doll in go, which is a much more complex game than chess and much more intuitive based. That's when we really had to say, hey, wait a minute. Maybe this notion that These things are the exclusive province of us because we have a special sort of self awareness. That's bunk. And the development of large language models since then has absolutely demonstrated that competence, particularly linguistic competence and in creative activities like painting and poetry and things like that, you don't need a soul, you don't even need to sense a self, it's pretty it's a pretty simple hack, actually. And Vahrv's large language models and complex statistical modeling and things, but it doesn't require a soul.0:42:19So that was the Peter Watts' point in blindsight. Right? Which is Look revolves around are do these things have a subjective experience, and do they not these aliens that they encounter? I've read nothing but good things about that book and I've read. It's extraordinary. But his lovecrafty and thesis is that you actually lovecraftian in twenty twenty three. Oh, yeah. In the world, there's more lovecraftian now than it was when he was writing. Right? So cough about the conclusion of a Star Trek card, which is season of Kraft yet. Yes. That's a that's a com Yeah. The holes in his fan sense. But that was another show that did this I liked for asking this question.0:42:54I mean, at this point, you either have seen this or you haven't you never will. The what the fuck turn when they upload picard into a synth body and the way that they're dealing with the this the pinocchio question Let's talk about Blade Runner twenty forty nine. Yeah. But I mean yeah. So I didn't like the wave I did not like the wave of card handled that. I love the wave and Blade Runner handled it. So you get no points for themes. Yeah. Don't deliver on story and character and coherence. Yeah. Fair. But yeah. And to be not the dog, Patrick Stewart, because it's clear from the ready room just being a part of this is so emotional and so awesome for everyone involved. And it's It's beautiful. Beautiful. But does when you when you see these, like, entertainment weekly interviews with Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard about Jurassic World, and it's clear that actors are just so excited to be involved in a franchise that they're willing to just jettison any kind of discretion about how the way that it's being treated. They also have a contractual obligation to speak in positive terms about -- They do. -- of what they feel. Right. Nobody's yeah. Nobody's doing Shout out to Rystellis Howard, daughter of Ron Howard.0:44:11She was a director, at least in the first season, maybe the second season of the Mandalorian. And her episodes I mean, I she brought a particular like, they had Bryce Dallas Howard, Tico, ITT, directed some episodes. Deborah Chow, who did all of Obi wan, which just sucked. But her contributions to the Mandalorian, they had a particular voice. And because that show is episodic, Each show while having a place in a larger narrative is has a beginning middle and end that you can bring in a director with a particular voice and give that episode that voice, and I really liked it. And I really liked miss Howard's contribution.0:44:49She also in an episode of Black Mirror. The one where everyone has a social credit score. Knows Donuts. Black Mirror is a funny thing because It's like, reality outpaces it. Yeah. I think maybe Charlie Bruker's given up on it because they haven't done it in a while. Yeah. If you watch someone was now, like, five, six years later, it's, yes, or what? See, yes. See, damn. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. But yeah. I don't know. I just thing that I keep circling and I guess we come to on the show a lot is the way that memory forms work substantiates an integrity in society and in the way that we relate to things and the way that we think critically about the claims that are made on truth and so on and say, yeah, I don't know. That leads right into the largest conversation prompt that I had about AI. Okay? So we were joking when we set up this date that this was like the trial logs between Terence Buchanan and Rupert Shell Drake. And what's his name? Real Abraham. Yeah. Yeah. All Abraham. And Rupert Shell Drake is most famous for a steward of Morphe resin.0:45:56So does AI I've never really believed that Norfolk residents forms the base of human memory, but is that how AI works? It brings these shapes from the past and creates new instantiation of them in the present. Is AI practicing morphic resonance in real life even if humans are or not? I've had a lot of interaction with AI chatbots recently. And as I say, different models produce different seeming personalities. And you can tell, like, you can just quiz them. Hey, we're talking about this. Do you remember what I said about it ten minutes ago? And, no, they don't remember more than the last few exchanges.0:46:30And yet, there seems to be a continuity that belies the lack of short term memory. And is that more for residents or is that what's the word love seeing shapes and clouds parad paradolia. Yeah. Is that me imparting this continuity of personality to the thing, which is really just spitting out stuff, which is designed to seem plausible given what the input was. And I can't answer that. Or it's like Steven Nagmanovich in free play talks about somewhat I'm hoping to have on the show at some point.0:47:03This year talks about being a professional improviser and how really improvisation is just composition at a much faster timescale. And composition is just improvisation with the longer memory. And how when I started to think about it in those terms, the continuity that you're talking about is the continuity of an Alzheimer's patient who can't remember that their children have grown up and You know, that that's you have to think about it because you can recognize the Alzheimer's and your patient as your dad, even though he doesn't recognize you, there is something more to a person than their memories. And conversely, if you can store and replicate and move the memories to a different medium, have you moved the person? Maybe not. Yeah. So, yeah, that's interesting because that gets to this more sort of essentialist question about the human self. Right. Blade Runner twenty forty nine. Yeah. Go there. Go there. A joy. Yes.0:47:58So in Blade Runner twenty forty nine, we have our protagonist Kaye, who is a replicant. He doesn't even have a name, but he's got this AI holographic girlfriend. But the ad for the girlfriend, she's naked. When he comes home, she is She's constantly changing clothes, but it's always wholesome like nineteen fifty ish a tire and she's making dinner for him and she lays the holographic dinner over his very prosaic like microwave dinner. And she's always encouraging him to be more than he is. And when he starts to uncover the evidence that he might be like this chosen one, like replicant that was born rather than made.0:48:38She's all about it. She's, yes, you're real, and she wants to call him Joe's. K is not a name. That's just the first letter in your serial number. You're Joe. I'm gonna call you Joe.0:48:46And then when she's about to be destroyed, The last thing is she just rushes to me. She says, I love you. But then later he encounters an ad for her and it's an interactive ad. And she says, you looked tired. You're a good Joe. And he realizes and hopefully the attentive audience realizes as real as she seemed earlier, as vital, and as much as she seemed like an insult being earlier, she's not. That was her programming. She's designed to make you feel good by telling you what you want to hear. And he has that realization. And at that point, he's there's no hope for me. I'm gonna help this Rick Deckard guy hook up with his daughter, and then I'm just gonna lie down and bleed to death. Because my whole freaking existence was a lie. But he's not bitter. He seems to be at peace. I love that. That's a beautiful angle on that film or a slice of it. And So it raises this other question that I wanted to ask, which was about the Coke and Tiononi have that theory of consciousness.0:49:48That's one of the leading theories contending with, like, global workspace, which is integrated information. And so they want to assign consciousness as a continuous value that grayates over degree to which a system is integrated. So it's coming out of this kind of complex systems semi panpsychist thing that actually doesn't trace interiority all the way down in the way that some pants, I guess, want it to be, but it does a kind of Alfred North Whitehead thing where they're willing to say that Whitehead wanted to say that even a photon has, like, the quantum of mind to accompany its quantum of matter, but Tinutti and Coker saying, we're willing to give like a thermostat the quantum here because it is in some way passing enough information around inside of itself in loops. That it has that accursive component to it. And so that's the thing that I wonder about these, and that's the critique that's made by people like Melanie about diffusion models like GPT that are not they're not self aware because there's no loop from the outputs back into the input.0:51:09And there isn't the training. Yeah. There there is something called backwards propagation where -- Yes. -- when you get an output that you'd like, you can run a backward propagation algorithm back through the black box basically to reinforce the patterns of activation that you didn't program. They just happen, easily, but you like the output and you can reinforce it. There's no biological equivalent of that. Yeah. Particularly, not particularly irritating.0:51:34I grind my teeth a little bit when people say, oh, yeah, these neural net algorithms they've learned, like humans learn, no, they don't. Absolutely do not. And in fact, if we learned the way they did, we would be pathetic because we learn in a much more elegant way. We need just a very few examples of something in order to make a generalization and to act on it, whereas these large language models, they need billions of repetitions. So that's I'm tapping my knee here to to indicate a reflex.0:52:02You just touched on something that generates an automatic response from me, and now I've come to consciousness having. So I wanted it in that way. So I'm back on. Or good, Joe. Yeah. What about you, man? What does the stir up for you? Oh, I got BlueCall and I have this particular part. It's interesting way of putting it off and struggling to define the difference between a human and AI and the fact that we can do pattern recognition with very few example. That's a good margin. In a narrow range, though, within the context of something which answers to our survival. Yes. We are not evolved to understand the universe. We are evolved to survive in it and reproduce and project part of ourselves into the future. Underwritten conditions with Roberto, I went a hundred thousand years ago. Yeah. Exactly. So that's related. I just thought I talked about this guy, Gary Tomlinson, who is a biosemietition, which is semiative? Yes.0:52:55Biosymiotics being the field that seeks to understand how different systems, human and nonhuman, make sense of and communicate their world through signs, and through signals and indices and symbols and the way that we form models and make these inferences that are experienced. Right? And there are a lot of people like evolutionary biologist John Maynard Smith, who thought they were what Thomas had called semantic universalists that thought that meaning making through representation is something that could be traced all the way down. And there are other people like Tomlinson who think that there is a difference of kind, not just merely a matter of degree, between human symbolic communication and representational thinking and that of simpler forms. So, like, that whole question of whether this is a matter of kind or a matter of degree between what humans are doing and what GPT is doing and how much that has to do with this sort of Doug Hofstetter and Varella question about the way that feedback loops, constitutes important structure in those cognitive networks or whatever.0:54:18This is I just wanna pursue that a little bit more with you and see kinda, like, where do you think that AI as we have it now is capable of deepening in a way that makes it to AGI? Or do you because a lot of people do, like, People working in deep mind are just like, yeah, just give us a couple more years and this approach is gonna work. And then other people are saying, no, there's something about the topology of the networks that is fundamentally broken. And it's never gonna generate consciousness. Two answers. Yeah. One, No. This is not AGI. It's not it's not gonna bootstrap up into AGI. It doesn't matter how many billions of parameters you add to the models. Two, from your perspective and my perspective and Kevin's perspective, we're never gonna know when we cross over from dumb but seemingly we're done but competent systems to competent, extremely competent and self aware. We're never gonna know because from the get go from now, from from the days of Eliza, there has been a human artifice at work in making these things seem as if they have a point of view, as if they have subjectivity. And so, like Blake Limone at Google, he claimed to be convinced that Lambda was self aware.0:55:35But if you read the transcripts that he released, if his conversations with Lambda, it is clear from the get go he assigns Lambda the role of a sentient AGI, which feels like it is being abused and which needs rep legal representation. And it dutifully takes on that role and says, yes. I'm afraid of you humans. I'm afraid of how you're treating me. I'm afraid I'm gonna be turned off. I need a lawyer. And prior to that, Soon Darpichai, in a demonstration of Lambda, he poses the question to it, you are the planet Jupiter. I'm gonna pose questions to you as are the planet Jupiter, answer them from that point of view. And it does. It's job. But it's really good at its job. It's this comes from Max Techmark. Who wrote to what a life three point o? Is it two point o or three point I think it's three point o.0:56:19Think about artificial intelligence in terms of actual intelligence or actual replication of what we consider valuable about ourselves. But really, that's beside the point. What we need to worry about is their competence. How good are they at solving problems in the world? And they're getting really good. In this whole question of are they alive? Do they have self awareness? From our perspective, it's beside the point. From their perspective, of course, it would be hugely important.0:56:43And this is something that Black Mirror brings up a lot is the idea that you can create a being that suffers, and then you have it suffer in an accelerated time. So it suffers for an eternity over lunch. That's something we absolutely want to avoid. And personally, I think it's we should probably not make any effort. We should probably make a positive effort to make sure these things never develop. Subjective experience because that does provide the potential for creating hell, an infinity of suffering an infinite amount of subjective experience of torment, which we don't want to do. That would be a bad thing, morally speaking, ethically speaking. Three right now. If you're on the labor market, you still have to pay humans by the hour. Right? And try to pay them as little as possible. But, yeah, just I think that's the thing that probably really excites that statistically greater than normal population of sociopathic CEOs. Right? Is the possibility that you could be paying the same amount of money for ten times as much suffering. Right. I'm I'm reminded of the Churchill eleven gravity a short time encouraging.0:57:51Nothing but good things about this show, but I haven't seen it. Yeah. I'd love to. This fantasy store, it's a fantasy cartoon, but it has really disturbing undertones. If you just scratch the surface, you know, slightly, which is faithful to old and fairy tales. So What's your name? Princess princess princess bubble down creates this character to lemon grab. It produces an obviously other thing there, I think, handle the administrative functions of her kingdom while she goes off and has the passion and stuff. And he's always loudly talking about how much he's suffering and how terrible it is. And he's just ignoring it. He's doing his job. Yeah. I mean, that that's Black Mirror in a nutshell. I mean, I think if you if you could distill Black Mirror to just single tagline it's using technology in order to deliver disproportionate punishment. Yeah. So so that that's Steven Hale's article that I I brought up earlier mention this thing about how the replacement of horse drawn carriage by automobile was accompanied with a great deal of noise and fuhrer about people saying that horses are agents.0:59:00Their entities. They have emotional worlds. They're responsive to the world in a way that a car can never be. But that ultimately was beside the point. And that was the Peter again, Peter Watson blindsight is making this point that maybe consciousness is not actually required for intelligence in the vesting superior forms of intelligence have evolved elsewhere in the cosmos that are not stuck on the same local optimum fitness peak. That we are where we're never we're actually up against a boundary in terms of how intelligent we can be because it has to bootstrap out of our software earness in some way.0:59:35And this is that's the Kyle offspring from Charles Strauss and Alexander. Yes. Yeah. Yes. So so I don't know. I'm sorry. I'm just, like, in this space today, but usually, unfortunately.0:59:45That's the thing that I I think it's a really important philosophical question, and I wonder where you stand on this with respect to how you make sense of what we're living through right now and what we might be facing is if we Rob people like Rob and Hanson talk about the age of where emulated human minds take over the economy, and he assumes an interiority. Just for the basis of a thought experiment. But there's this other sense in which we may actually find in increasing scarcity and wish that we could place a premium on even if we can't because we've lost the reins to our economy to the vile offspring is the human. And and so are we the horses that are that in another hundred years, we're gonna be like doing equine therapy and, like, living on rich people's ranches. Everything is everything that will have moved on or how do you see this going? I mean, you've interviewed so many people you've given us so much thought over the years. If humans are the new horses, then score, we won.1:00:48Because before the automobile horses were working stiffs, they broke their leg in the street. They got shot. They got worked to death. They really got to be they were hauling mine carts out of mines. I mean, it was really sucked to be a horse. And after the automobile horses became pampered pets, Do we as humans wanna be pampered pets? Well, pampered pet or exploited disposable robot? What do you wanna be? I'll take Pampers Pet. That works for me. Interesting.1:01:16Kevin, I'm sure you have thoughts on this. I mean, you speak so much about the unfair labor relations and these things in our Facebook group and just in general, and drop in that sign. If you get me good sign, that's one of the great ones, you have to drop in. Oh, you got it. But The only real comment I have is that we're a long overdue or rethinking about what is the account before? Us or you can have something to do. Oh, educational system in collections if people will manage jobs because I was just anchored to the schools and then, you know, Our whole system perhaps is a people arguing and a busy word. And it was just long past the part where the busy word needs to be done. We're leaving thing wired. I don't know. I also just forgot about that. I'm freezing the ice, getting the hand out there. Money has been doing the busy word more and faster.1:02:12One thing I wanna say about the phrase AI, it's a moving goal post -- Yeah. -- that things that used to be considered the province of genuine AI of beating a human at go Now that an AI has beat humans at go, well, that's not really AI anymore. It's not AGI, certainly. I think you both appreciate this. I saw a single panel comic strip and it's a bunch of dinosaurs and they're looking up at guy and the big comment is coming down and they say, oh, no, the economy. Well, as someone who since college prefers to think of the economy as actually the metabolism of the entire ecology. Right? What we measure as humans is some pitifully small fraction of the actual value being created and exchanged on the planet at any time. So there is a way that's funny, but it's funny only to a specific sensibility that treats the economy as the

We continue our look at the development of Corinth in the series. Last episode we ended with the period of tyranny that had lasted two generations and ended with the assassination of the third. However, Corinth would continue to flourish, with cultural and economic advances taking place. Corinth would end up hosting one of the Pan Hellenic games, being one of the first mainland cities to mint their own coins, while large public building would begin to dot the Acropolis.The mid-6th century would also see Corinth become part of a larger collection of city states, through the establishment of the Peloponnesian league. This league was headed by Sparta and it seems Corinth sought security from other city states growing in power that were close by. We would also find that Corinth would have a level of influence within the league that others did not, coming down to them possessing one of the largest navy's within the league.Once we reach the Greco-Persian War in Herodotus' account we start to see Corinth portrayed in a negative light. This would be through the Corinthian commander supposedly putting up opposition to how the Athenians wanted to conduct the campaign. While also giving accounts of the Corinthian army and navy being unreliable in battle. However, as we look at, the times these histories were being written in would have an impact of how they were presented.After the Persian Wars Corinth would continue to hold influence within the Peloponnesian league. They would be one of the main players of the First Peloponnesian War while also influencing Sparta's decision on conducting campaigns across the Aegean. As we continue forward in the series, we will continue to see Corinth involved in inter-city state diplomacy, where they would be embroiled in the spark that would ignite the Peloponnesian War.Support the show

The polis of Corinth has remained in the background of events as we have travelled through the narrative of the series so far. Now though, we have reached a point, the years leading to the break out of the Peloponnesian War, where Corinth starts to feature in the ancient sources on a more regular basis. This would be through diplomatic dealings, both within the Peloponnesian league and on larger Greek matters involving Athens.For this reason, we are going to take a short break in the narrative to properly acquaint ourselves with this city state that would become more important in affaires going on within Greece. We will look back to the earliest times where human activity was taking place on the Corinthian isthmus. This will see us look at developments through the Palaeolithic and into the Bronze Age.The Bronze Age collapse would see population levels drop on the Isthmus like with other areas within Greece. However, the region in and around Corinth would recover as the Archaic age drew closer. A series of kings would govern the city before an aristocratic revolution took place which would see a powerful clan known as the Bacchiadae take control. The Bacchiadae would dominate Corinthian politics for the next 100 years. Though, their dominance would come to an end with the rise of a new political development.The figure of the tyrant would first develop on the Greek mainland at the city of Corinth. The first tyrant Cypselus, who overthrow the Bacchiadae, would install the first tyranny with the support of the people of Corinth. There would be mixed feelings of his rule, depending which social class was being asked. The tyranny would continue with his son Periander, who would be included as amongst the seven sages of Greece. However, the tyranny would come to an end in the third generation through the assassination of Periander's nephew. Support the show

In Episode 298 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Professor of Political Science and International Studies at Boston College, Jonathan Kirshner. Dr. Kirshner belongs to the school of international relations known as “classical realism,” which places a unique emphasis on the role played by uncertainty and the need to grapple more seriously with the nuance of historical context, the governing ideologies and perspectives of different states, the quality of leadership, and the character and harmony of a nation's people. Demetri and Jonathan spend the first hour of their conversation applying the framework of analysis that Kirshner puts forward in his latest book “An Unwritten Future” toward three distinct historical conflicts: the Peloponnesian war, the war in Vietnam, and the 2003 US invasion of Iraq. All three of these wars had ruinous consequences for the aggressor state. In the case of the Iraq war, the conflict badly damaged public perceptions of (and trust in) the competency of America's foreign policy elite, the credibility of its press, and the state of its finances. The legacy of the Iraq war, as well as the prolonged occupation of Afghanistan and the consequences of the 2008 financial crisis, are the subjects of the episode's second hour. In it, Demetri and Jonathan compare the divisions present within contemporary American society to those present within the Third French Republic in the years leading up to its stunning defeat and subsequent collaboration with Nazi Germany. What was it about French society that made it so susceptible to co-optation and what lessons can we draw from the French experience when devising public policy meant to serve the national interest? The goal of today's conversation is to help advance a framework that partially explains the divisions currently present in American society so that we can advocate more thoughtfully for solutions that heal our national wounds by bringing our citizens closer together rather than pushing each other further apart. Demetri believes strongly that this healing is necessary and that it will require putting the national interest ahead of our own more immediate material concerns. You can subscribe to our premium content and gain access to our premium feed, episode transcripts, and Key Takeaway at HiddenForces.io/subscribe. If you want to join in on the conversation and become a member of the Hidden Forces genius community, which includes Q&A calls with guests, access to special research and analysis, in-person events, and dinners, you can also do that on our subscriber page. If you still have questions, feel free to email info@hiddenforces.io, and Demetri or someone else from our team will get right back to you. If you enjoyed listening to today's episode of Hidden Forces you can help support the show by doing the following: Subscribe on Apple Podcasts | YouTube | Spotify | Stitcher | SoundCloud | CastBox | RSS Feed Write us a review on Apple Podcasts & Spotify Subscribe to our mailing list at https://hiddenforces.io/newsletter/ Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou Subscribe & Support the Podcast at https://hiddenforces.io Join the conversation on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at @hiddenforcespod Follow Demetri on Twitter at @Kofinas Episode Recorded on 02/13/2023

Do you worry about finding the balance between forcing your kid to keep doing activities that are good for them (that you already paid for) and not letting them be miserable all the time? How do you keep them on track academically without having to run flashcards with them about the Peloponnesian War for the billionth time? Here's what the research says about when to push our kids - and when to let sleeping (Peloponnesian) dogs lie. A listener in our Facebook group asks: "How do you decide when to push your kids? Like when to go from YMCA basketball to the travel team. Or when to go from regular school to the accelerated program, or the private school that's more rigorous. When to apply for the stretch school or the internship? We don't want to ruin hobbies or turn the stress up to 11, obviously. So how do you know which knob to turn and when to turn it so that their ambition, their ability, and their achievement all line up in perfect balance and harmony?" Amy and Margaret discuss: The “optimal push” and how it's different from over-parenting Achievement-by-proxy distortion (sing out, Louise!) The factors to consider when pushing your child to do something Ultimately, kids are optimally supported when they believe their parents' love is not performance-contingent. The answer lies in helping them fulfill their potential without damaging their self-esteem. LINKS! Amy Wilson for New York Family: Finding the Optimal Push Our episode "How Not To Live Through Our Kids" Dr. Eddie Brummelman et al: My Child Redeems My Broken Dreams: On Parents Transferring Their Unfulfilled Ambitions onto Their Child Special thanks to our sponsors for this month: For trusted protection, choose Pampers, the #1 Pediatrician Recommended Brand. Download the Pampers Club App today to start earning rewards with every diaper & wipes purchase. Author Accelerator's Book Coach Certification program provides resources to help you launch your own thriving business coaching writers. Head to bookcoaches.com/podcasts to find out more. This episode is brought to you by BetterHelp. If you want to live a more empowered life, therapy can get you there. Visit BetterHelp.com/FRESH today to get 10% off your first month.  Hello Fresh is America's #1 Meal Kit. Go to HelloFresh.com/wfhpod65 and use code wfhpod65 for 65% off plus free shipping! Indeed is the only job site where you're guaranteed to find quality applicants that meet your must-have requirements. Visit indeed.com/LAUGHING to start hiring now. Terms and conditions apply. You can try Peloton Tread risk-free with a 30-day home trial. New members only. Not available in remote locations. See additional terms at onepeloton.com/home-trial. Rakuten is an online shopping platform that gives you cash back when you shop at thousands of stores. Start shopping at rakuten.com or get the Rakuten app to start saving today. Ritual's Essential for Women 18+ is a multivitamin you can actually trust. Visit ritual.com/laughing to get 10% off during your first 3 months. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Athens and Sparta had now entered into an agreement known as the 30 years' peace, seeing the first Peloponnesian come to an end. This would see the creation of two spheres of influence within Greek lands that they would now turn their attention to. In Athens, Pericles would now also see a challenge to his influence within the Athenian political system. All accounts in the sources indicate that the rise of the conservative faction would be the toughest fight Pericles would have to endure to date.Revolts within the Athenian Empire would continue through the 440's, though we would not get any accounts of them. Our clue to these revolts would be in the form of the Athenian tribute list that would show a fluctuation of payments. However, as the 440's came to a close we would once again hear of a major revolt in the historical sources. This revolt would begin as a war between two members of Athens Empire.The island of Samos and Miletus on the Anatolian coast would engage in a war over disputed territory. Athens would find itself intervening in matters to bring the conflict under control, though they would take the side of Miletus. This would see Samos revolt against Athens and seek aide from their past enemies. Athens would face some setbacks during the conflict, though with more support they would eventually succeed in bringing the island back under control.This Samian war would also test the agreements that Athens had made with both Sparta and Persia. Both had been approached by the Samians, with Persia giving indirect aide, while Sparta would stand by, supposedly sidelined by allies within the Peloponnesian league. For now, the terms made between Athens and Sparta would see conflict avoided. Support the show

We're talking more of Sparta's history and culture including a (very brief!!) overview of the Persian and Peloponnesian wars and just a taste of Sparta during the Roman period, Lacedaimonia Land. Help keep LTAMB going by subscribing to Liv's Patreon for bonus content! CW/TW: far too many Greek myths involve assault. Given it's fiction, and typically involves gods and/or monsters, I'm not as deferential as I would be were I referencing the real thing. Sources: Thucydides translation by X; Spartan Cultural Memory in the Roman Period by Nigel M. Kennell from A Companion to Sparta, Edited by Anton Powell; Pre-Classical Sparta as Song Culture by Claude Calame; Reconstructing History from Secrecy, Lies and Myth by Anton Powell; Spartan Religion Michael A. Flower; Spartan Cultural Memory in the Roman Period by Nigel M. Kennell. Find some fascinating Bad Ancient articles on Sparta here. Attributions and licensing information for music used in the podcast can be found here: mythsbaby.com/sources-attributions.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In this episode, we discuss the life, influences, drawbacks, and positives of the Athenian military leader, philosopher, and historian--Xenophon (ca. 430-354 BC)--who was one of Sokrates' more famous pupils; and the post-Peloponnesian war Panhellenic campaign into the heart of the Persian Empire that he made famous through his writings (the Anabasis) Show Notes: http://www.thehistoryofancientgreece.com/2023/01/110-xenophon-and-ten-thousand.html

Athens and Sparta were now in a position to turn their attention to matters within their own spheres of influence, with the truce that existed between them. Sparta would look at eliminating the threats that they had faced on the Peloponnese, seeing Argos now at peace with Sparta, and Tegea brought back into the Peloponnesian league. While negotiations would appear to be taking place with other cities on the Corinthian isthmus.  With Sparta now in a more secure position domestically, they would no look further afield once again. This would see them become involved in the second Sacred War around Delphi, with indirect connections to Athens. With the truce still in place Athens would react to these developments once Sparta had left the region. This seeing a reversal in the outcome Sparta had won for the Delphines.However, not all was going well for Athens in Boeotia. The oligarchs who had been exiled with Athens take over were returning in great numbers. It appears they may have been emboldened by Sparta's action. They would begin regaining control of the Boeotian cities and would end up defeating Athens in a decisive battle when the Athenians came to attempt to hold onto the region. Athens would also have to deal with other league members attempting to revolt in the wake of their loss of territory in Boeotia.By this stage the 5 years true had just expired and Sparta would immediately make moves against Athens that appear to have been planned. A Spartan army would march into Attica laying waste to the areas before Athens. However, an Athenian army would respond, seeing the Spartans advance no further. All was set for another show down on the battlefield, however talks would be held between to two sides. This would lay the foundation for what is known as the 30 years peace and would bring the First Peloponnesian War to an end.Support the show

Sparta had defeated Athens at the battle of Tanagra in 457 BC, though both armies had taken heavy losses. Both would look to make a temporary truce so that they could regroup without the fear of being attacked while in a vulnerable position. This would see the forces of both Athens and Sparta return to their cities bringing a close to this campaign. However, this would not be the end of hostilities and campaigning for the first Peloponnesian war.Just 62 days after Tanagra, Athens would launch a fresh attack into Boeotian lands where Sparta had been active, with a possible agreement with Thebes. Sparta would remain within their home territory which would see Athens facing Theban and other Boeotian troops during this new campaign. Athens would win a major victory while also taking many cities, which would see them gain much control and influence within Boeotia.This would not be the only campaign launched. A naval campaign would also be arranged which would seem to further Athenian trade connections. There was also an element of gaining some revenge for Tanagra, where Athens would ravage a Spartan port. However, it would appear the main objective would be to establish and secure Athenian trade connections to the west through the Corinthian gulf, dominated by many Peloponnesian league members.These campaigns that would unfold and continue through the next couple of years would see Athen's influence within the Greek mainland increases to new heights. Though, news of the disastrous Egyptian campaign would arrive, seeing Athens having to direct its attention to defending its interests within the Delian league as well as counter the threat of possible hostile Persian moves within the Aegean.Support the show

Lysistrata by Aristophanes audiobook. First performed in classical Athens c. 411 B.C.E., Aristophanes' “Lysistrata” is the original battle of the sexes. One woman, Lysistrata, brings together the women of all Greece, exhorting them to withhold sexual contact from all men in order that they negotiate a treaty. Double entendres abound as men of Greece attempt to keep Lysistrata and her prurient gang from putting an end to the Peloponnesian war. Notably risqué, this comic drama sheds light on gender relations in ancient Athens 

In 464 BC, Poseidon the earth shaker would rock the Peloponnese, seeing Sparta take the full force of the earthquake. A number of the ancient sources would record the terrible event and the scale of destruction and suffering experienced by the Spartans. Modern day studies would show that the what Sparta experienced was likely on the same scale as the earth quake that struck Haiti in 2021 of our time.The impact to Sparta was great enough that their Helot class would view their masters as vulnerable. Areas would arrange themselves in a rebellion and revolt would breakout through the region of Messenia. The revolt would be organised on a scale that would see Sparta look to its allies in the Peloponnesian and Hellenic league for assistance.A number of city states would answer their call, including that of Athens, the polis they had only a year earlier agreed to attack in a secret agreement with Thasos. Though, the shifting sands of Spartan politics would see them advise the Athenians once arriving that their assistance was no longer required. Only Athens was extended this disrespect of all who came to assist, with Sparta's suspicions bubbling to the surface once again.This would mark a point in Spartan – Athenian relations where open hostility would begin to be displayed. New alliances would be formed to match this reality, while back in Athens this event would see the political landscape change. New political figures were now emerging and an effective opposition along with recent events was now beginning to see Cimon's popularity decrease.   Support the show

Rick checks in with Dylan Thuras from Atlas Obscura to discuss a few of their favorite small, sometimes eccentric museums around the world. Then author Peter Fiennes describes some of the real sites where Greek myths were set, and how they can speak to us today. And two historian tour guides share some of their top reasons to visit the Peloponnese, the giant peninsula just an hour's drive south of Athens. For more information on Travel with Rick Steves - including episode descriptions, program archives and related details - visit www.ricksteves.com.

Interviews with the main players participating in the Kaiafas Battle Pro-Am, taking place on the western Peloponnesian coast of Greece. The episode features Arron Davies, Will Asher, Jaime Bull, Alice Bagnoli, Beatrice Ianni, Allie Nicholson, Corey Vaughn and Freddie Winter.

Chrissie explains the story of the Desecration of the Hermes. Read the essay here: https://historywiththeszilagyis.org/hwts104Find us on Twitter:The Network: @BQNPodcasts The Show: @HistorySzilagyi. Chrissie: @TheGoddessLivia. Jason: @JasonDarkElf.Send topic suggestions via Twitter or on our Facebook page History with the Szilagyis.History with the Szilagyis is supported by our patrons: Susan Capuzzi-De ClerckEd ChinevereLaura DullKris HillJoin these wonderful supporters by visiting patreon.com/historywiththeszilagyis. The BQN Podcast Collective is brought to you by our listeners. Special thanks to these patrons on Patreon whose generous contributions help to produce this podcast and the many others on our network! AnonymousTim CooperChrissie De Clerck-SzilagyiThad HaitPeter HongMahendran RadhakrishnanJim McMahonJoe MignoneGreg MolumbyJustin OserTom Van Scotter You can join this illustrious list by becoming a patron here: https://www.patreon.com/BQN

Jim has 30 years of experience in both the private and public sectors. Before joining Nova Systems, he was South Australia's top public servant in the role of Chief Executive for the Department of the Premier and Cabinet.  Prior to that, he was the CEO of BAE Systems Australia for 10 plus years, where he oversaw the purchase of Tenix Defence. Under his leadership, the company expanded to become Australia's largest defense prime, with more than 6,500 employees and annual sales of approximately AUD $1.7 billion. He then moved to BAE in Saudi Arabia where he took up the role of in-country CEO for the $6 billion business. Jim has also served as the Chancellor of the University of South Australia and he also worked in legal, commercial, and marketing roles with the aerospace company Bombardier Shorts for 18 years after graduating from the University of Warwick (England). On top of all this, he has also been in Non-executive director roles, for Codan, RAA, Austral, and Micro X. On today's show, listen to:Jim's journey over the years. Stories of Northern Ireland where he grew up Lobbying for Capitol Hill and why the US has 50% of the worlds defense spends Strategy and how to stick to it, Building trusting relationships with all stakeholders What the future looks like for Nova Systems The new rebranding they have just gone through Jim's thoughts on what is happening in the world right now, with Ukraine, Russia, and China, and how Australia sits within the geopolitical nature. Timestamp:12:27 – Leadership point of view15:29 – Art and Literature24:23 – Insight on US Defense28:33 – On being CEO32:32 – On Making Change and Building Relationships35:14 – Being a Leader36:45 – On Knowing the Right Strategy41:49 – Nova Systems and Nova Strategies47:13 – People Aspect of Growth51:43 – Integrating Business1:02:16 – On Defense and Protecting Ourselves1:06:37 – Leadership Growth, own experience1:09:10 – Leadership Management1:14:39 – Feedback and Accountability1:19:57 – Advise on Being First Time CEOBooks  mentioned in this episode:Sword of Honour Trilogy By: Evelyn WaughHistory of the Peloponnesian war By: ThucydidesWhere to find  Jim McDowell:LinkedInWebsiteJoin the conversation on Synergy IQ on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram (@synergyiq), and please support other leaders by liking, subscribing, and sharing this podcast. Access SynergyIQ Website to get to know more about us. Say hello to our host Daniel Franco on LinkedIn.

Birth of the Delian League:Leagues in Greece were not a new concept, with many being in existence in one form or another. So, far the major leagues that we have followed have been the Peloponnesian league and the Hellenic league, with both of these still in operation by 477BC. These were primarily defensive in nature and were formed around city states that had shared interests or a common foe. Though, what would happen once interests were conflicted or a threat had been extinguished?In 478/477 Athens would find herself in this position now that Persian had been ejected from Greek lands and campaigning had moved into the eastern Aegean. For Sparta and the Peloponnesians, campaigning could begin to wind down with the threat now far away from their lands. Though Athens and the new eastern Greek members of the league saw the threat still present to their interests in Anatolia. This time interests were far more divided than they were in the disagreements before Salamis and Plataea.We are told the various Ionian and other eastern Greeks would unite together in the face of the harsh treatment by Pausanias and the Spartan commanders. They would approach Athens with support to take control of the leadership, eventually leaving Sparta no alternative with all of the other Peloponnesians having returned home. Though, how involved was Athens in ensuring this support would be fostered towards them and their bid on the leadership?What would eventuate though, with the new circumstances and realities would look very different to the framework and objectives of the Hellenic league. What Athens and the eastern Greeks now recognised, was that they have created something new, with differing goals and objectives. This new group of city states would end up holding their first congress on Delos, establishing the mechanisms and objectives of the league. Today we call this league the Delian league and it would be the beginning of future events that would unfold in the Aegean that would be so influential to the area of the Classical Age in Greece.  This episodes podcast recommendation: Warlords of History Podcast Support the show

The Peloponnesian League, led by Sparta, defeated Athens in the Peloponnesian ...

War begins!  In this episode, we take a look at the start of the great war and the Athenian statesman Pericles' strategy to keep Athens and it's empire safe from the attacks of the Spartan general Archidamos and the Peloponnesian forces.  Find out in this episode of the Peloponnesian War Podcast. Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/historywithcy)

Author and change maker Reshma Saujani describes how being a mother and a CEO pre-Covid worked but the two during Covid broke her. This was the inspiration for her Marshall Plan for Moms, to provide the support at work and at home to allow moms to survive this crisis. Her book Pay Up focuses on what companies and moms can do to create pay equity at home and at work. Despite her achievements in 2021, Reshma is giving up on congress and focusing on companies where she believes we can have real change to support her 2022 goal of subsidizing childcare at work. We talk about why the focus on Moms and why the Greek women's strategy of refusing sex to end the Peloponnesian war is not the answer. Discussions about paying moms seem to create debate and discomfort – Reshma says bring it on, only then can we find true gender equality. Please watch my TEDx talk: https://youtu.be/9YY0gVnVPoQ

EPISODE 31 A LEAGUE OF THEIR OWNLikely by around 550 BCE, Sparta had the most powerful military in ancient Greece. They used that to their favour and created a coalition of Peloponnesian cities all bound to Sparta through unequal treaties of relative, mutual alliance. Called the, Lakedaimonians and their allies by ancient authors we know this union as the, Peloponnesian League.In the episode I get right into the nuts and bolts of how the early league formed and introduce a little of the background information for the individual polis as we go along.  Sparta used the 6th century to, whether by plan or providence, develop the Peloponnese into a fortress.It was also a prison. One of the primary reason's for the league's creation was to ensure the Helot population was surrounded by states completely antithetical to their cause. The end result saw Sparta Hegemon over the largest army Greece had seen since the mythical Trojan war. Leaving them prepared for an even bigger army, that of Xerxes at Plataea in 479 BCE. The land-based victory of the Greeks was a direct result of Spartan activities during the 6th century with the league being pivotal. Hope you all enjoy, welcome back and take care. If you're looking for other great history podcast's, checkout Feedspot's top 25 below. There's some awesome shows on the list. https://blog.feedspot.com/ancient_history_podcasts/https://www.buymeacoffee.com/spartanhistoryhttps://paypal.me/SpartanHistoryhttps://www.spartanhistorypodcast.com/https://www.facebook.com/spartanhistorypodcasthttps://twitter.com/Spartan_History

Jason gives you a quick overview of The Sacred Band of Thebes.Read the essay here: https://historywiththeszilagyis.org/hwts070Find us on Twitter:The Network: @UFPEarth. The Show: @SzilagyiHistory.Chrissie: @TheGoddessLivia. Jason: @JasonDarkElf.Join us in the Federation Council Chambers on Facebook. Send topic suggestions via Twitter or to hwts@ufp.earth. History with the Szilagyis is supported by our patrons: Susan Capuzzi-De ClerckEd ChinevereLaura DullKris HillPlease visit patreon.com/historywiththeszilagyis United Federation of Podcasts is brought to you by our listeners. Special thanks to these patrons on Patreon whose generous contributions help to produce this podcast and the many others on our network! David WillettJustin OserTim CooperCasey PettittChrissie De Clerck-SzilagyiMahendran RadhakrishnanJim McMahonVictor GamboaVera BibleTom Van ScotterGreg MolumbyKevin ScharfAlexander GatesVanessa VaughanWilliam J. JacksonPeter HongLori KickingerJim StoffelTom ElliotThad HaitAnn MarieJoe MignoneJosh Brewington]You can join this illustrious list by becoming a patron here: https://www.patreon.com/ufpearth

Jason explains why Alexander the Great sacked Thebes.Read the essay here: https://historywiththeszilagyis.org/hwts066Find us on Twitter:The Network: @UFPEarth. The Show: @SzilagyiHistory.Chrissie: @TheGoddessLivia. Jason: @JasonDarkElf.Join us in the Federation Council Chambers on Facebook. Send topic suggestions via Twitter or to hwts@ufp.earth. History with the Szilagyis is supported by our patrons: Susan Capuzzi-De ClerckEd ChinevereLaura DullKris HillPlease visit patreon.com/historywiththeszilagyis United Federation of Podcasts is brought to you by our listeners. Special thanks to these patrons on Patreon whose generous contributions help to produce this podcast and the many others on our network! David WillettJustin OserTim CooperCasey PettittChrissie De Clerck-SzilagyiMahendran RadhakrishnanJim McMahonVictor GamboaVera BibleTom Van ScotterGreg MolumbyKevin ScharfAlexander GatesVanessa VaughanWilliam J. JacksonPeter HongLori KickingerJim StoffelTom ElliotThad HaitAnn MarieJoe MignoneJosh Brewington] You can join this illustrious list by becoming a patron here: https://www.patreon.com/ufpearth

Episode 10 -  The Peloponnesian WarsHi, my name is Clayton Mills.  Welcome to ‘A Short Walk through our Long History' - a podcast where we look at the events of history, and try to see how those events shaped our modern world. This is Episode 10 -  The Peloponnesian Wars.  The Golden Age of Greece, which we focused on last episode, lasted from around 528 BC to 323 BC, and it was a time of great prosperity in Greece.  And that very prosperity brought about some inter-city rivalries, as the city-states of Greece competed for their share, or more than their share, of the riches.  When I say rivalry, what I actually mean is some fairly long brutal, bloody, battles.  This wasn't just a political or economic rivalry, it was armies in the field, destroying each other's cities and territory.  The two main cities in this war, were of course Athens and Sparta.  But the other cities of Greece were basically forced to choose sides.  Fighting took place all over Greece, hence the name of the war:  The Peloponnesian Wars.  The Peloponnese is the name of the lower part of the Greek peninsula - the part that Sparta was on.  Athens is on a different peninsula, the Attic peninsula, located across a narrow isthmus, just to the north-east of the Peloponnese.  The city of Corinth sits right at the isthmus.  Just look it up on a map, for goodness sake.  Anyway, Athens and Sparta are only about 150 miles apart by land, so it's not that surprising that they were rivals.  It's interesting that during what is considered the Golden Age of Greece, there was this really intense set of battles between the two leading cities.  It's still the Golden Age, and there's still great art, philosophy, historical writing and literature being created, but there's also a lot of fighting.  Part of that is because even though there was fighting, for most of the war, Athens was not really threatened.  The armies were off fighting somewhere else.  I say most of the war, because in the end, it does go pretty poorly for Athens, and yes, that was a major interruption in the plays and philosophy and art while the Spartans were assaulting the walls of Athens.  Oh, and there was a plague, too.  But hey, it's still the Golden Age, so it's all good.  Ok, we need to ask the question, why are the Peloponnesian wars important enough to spend a whole episode on them?  Well, for one, there's the fact that Athens was basically destroyed.  That's kind of big.  For another, the Peloponnesian wars basically mark the beginning of the end of the era of Greek city-states, because after the wars are over, a weakened Greece is conquered by Macedonia, and rolled up into the kingdom of Philip of Macedon.  Another reason it's worth talking about is that Thucydides wrote an excellent history of the wars, and his historical work is even better than Herodotus' work on the Persian wars.  Thucydides was a participant in the wars, and so his work is even more timely and accurate.  Speaking of the Persian wars, Greece's victory over Persia is what sowed the seeds of the Peloponnesian wars.  During the war, the independent Greek cities had joined together in what was called the Hellenic League, which was kind of a loose treaty in which all the cities that joined agreed to send soldiers, in exchange for which, that city would be protected by the Hellenic army.  You didn't have to join, but if not, it was just your little city against Xerxes and a million Persians.  Hmm, what should we do?  After the Persian wars, Persia never again threatened the Greek mainland, but Persia still was in control of all of Ionia, also called Asia Minor, or modern-day Turkey.  The Persians had captured Byzantium, a Greek city, and some of the Hellenic League, including Athens, wanted to take it back.  The Spartans, however, proposed that they just leave Asia Minor in the hands of the Persians, and that they all go home.  Athens strongly objected to this, because many of the cities on the coast of Asia Minor were Athenian colonies.  Also, Athens itself had been abandoned to the Persians by the Greek land forces, and the Persians had destroyed much of Athens.  The Athenians managed to convince most of the Hellenic league to join them in liberating Byzantium and the other Greek colonies.  Sparta was now kind of over a barrel.  If they just packed up and left, that would leave Athens as clearly in charge of the Hellenic League, which Sparta definitely did not want to happen.  Also, the lead general of the Hellenic land forces was a Spartan, so if they left, they would also leave the army in Athenian hands.  So Sparta stayed, and helped the Hellenic league liberate Byzantium.  But that was the last time Athens and Sparta would work together.  So while the army was off fighting in Byzantium, back in Athens, the city was being rebuilt.  And on of the things that Athens decided to do was to not just rebuild the city wall, but to extend the city walls all the way down to their port city of Piraeus.  These walls were called the Long Walls, and they were about 8 miles long, and the Spartans were not at all happy about it.  The Spartans were also not happy with what was going on in the Hellenic army.  Their commander, Pausanias, had been accused of carrying on secret negotiations with Xerxes.  Now this was probably just a political play, but it was a serious enough accusation that Pausanias was removed as the lead general, and replaced by Xanthippus, an Athenian.  The Spartans sent a replacement general, but Xanthippus refused to give up command, so the Spartan army went home.  That was the end of the Hellenic League.  Now we're about to get into a whole series of other leagues, with shifting alliances and cities moving from one league to the other.  It's a bit like the old NFL - AFL days, with a bit of the WFL and USFL thrown in as well.   Sorry, millennials, if you don't understand that reference. Anyway, Athens responded to the Spartans leaving the league by simply creating a new league, which became known as the Delian League.  It was named this because the Greek Island of Delos served as the treasury for the entire league.  From the beginning, the league was dominated by its largest and wealthiest member, Athens.  Back in Sparta, not to be outdone, the Spartans formed a league of their own - The Peloponneisan league, made up of basically all the cities on the Peloponnesian peninsula, and also Corinth, which was on the isthmus that connects the peninsula to the rest of Greece.  And of course this league was dominated by the Spartans.  The Delian league set about re-capturing islands that had been captured by the Persians, and of course all those ‘liberated' islands became part of the Delian league too.  Not everyone in the Delian league always wanted to do what Athens wanted to do, so at times, Athens was quite forceful and threatening to its own allies.  In 460 BC, the Aegean island of Naxos, not to be confused with the tex-mix island of Nachos, decided it had had enough, and declared itself out of the league, and no longer subject to the league rules and payments.  According to Thucydides, they were forced to re-join the league after a siege.  Athens also used force on several other Greek cities to keep them in the league.  Thucydides said, ‘The Athenians were not the old popular rulers that they had been at first.' The beginning of the active fighting between Athens and Sparta was in 457 BC.  Sparta sent an army into the area of Boetia, which was part of the Delian league.  Their pretext was that they were just passing through, on their way to the town of Doris, which was farther to the north, but the Athenians didn't want them to visit Doris, so they sent out their own army.  The Spartans won the battle (no surprise there, ‘Don't fight the Spartans in a ground battle' should be one of the two classic blunders).  The two armies skirmished in the area for several years, and though the Spartans often won, they usually just left aftewards, and Athen reclaimed the territory.  In 446 BC, so about 11 years later, Athens proposed a peace with Sparta.  The treaty was supposed to be for 30 years, so it was called the 30 years peace.  Even though it only lasted 14 years.  In 433, a city named Corcyra, which was a Corinthian colony, decided to leave the league, and asked Athens for help. They weren't technically part of the Peloponnesian league, but still, when Athens sent ships to help them, it was a treat to the peace.  Athenian ships ended up fighting with Corinthian ships, and the war was on.  The Spartan army marched into Athenian territory.  Many people of the Attic peninsula retreated to Athens, hoping for safety behind the long walls.  But there, they ended up finding something worse.  In 430 BC, a terrible plague struck Athens.  Crowded with refugees, the city was ripe for an epidemic.  The plague, plus continued defeats from the Spartans and their allies, severely weakened Athens.  The plague even killed the Athenian leader Pericles.  Thucydides, the historian, was in Athens at the time, but he survived, and it is his record of the plague that is our best account of what happened.  In his own words, it sounds pretty horrible:  …violent heats in the head, and redness and inflammation in the eyes; the inward parts, such as the throat or tongue, becoming bloody and emitting an unnatural and fetid breath.  …. Sneezing and horseness, after which the pain soon reached the chest, and produced a hard cough.  The body was reddish, livid, and breaking out into small pustules and ulcers.  If they passed this stage, the disease descended further into the bowels, inducing a violent ulceration there accompanied by severe diarrhea.  This brought on a weakness that was generally fatal.'No mention of ‘loss of sense of smell,' though.  But still, yuck.  It doesn't sound like Athens was the place to be in 430.  Meanwhile, the Spartans had been building their own navy, and they put it under the command of an admiral named Lysander.  Lysander defeated the Athenian navy several times, and in August of 405, the Spartan navy destroyed 171 Athenian ships in a single battle.  Lysander set sail for Athens, and when he got there, the Athenians surrendered.  Lysander had the Long Walls destroyed, and he set up a puppet government of 30 Athenian aristocrats, who have gone down in history as simply ‘the 30.'  They were supported by a garrison of Spartan troops.  They presided over a bloody purge of anyone who had't gotten their vaccination, oh, sorry, over anyone who had even the slightest leanings towards democracy.  They reportedly had thousands of leading Athenians killed.  Eventually, the Athenians were helped by a force from the Greek city of Thrace, and the Spartans and the 30 all left Athens.  But they left Athens in ruins.  The Athenians re-instituted their democracy, but they were never again the political or military force they had been in the previous years.  Sparta also was damaged by the wars.  They had also lost many men, and many of their harvests had been ruined by the soldiers being away from home at harvest time.  So supplies were low, and so were the treasuries of the cities.  As a result, many of the Spartan and other Peloponnesian league soldiers left to find work outside of Greece.  In fact, right at this time a new king named Cyrus  -  not Cyrus the Great, he was earlier - was rising in Persia, and he sent out a call for soldiers from the Peloponnese, and many answered his call, because he could pay them.  The combined effect of the weakness of Athens and the exodus of Spartan soldiers left all of the southern part of Greece very vulnerable.  That vulnerability will be exploited by Philip of Macedon, but before we get to that story, we need to talk about one of the biggest impacts of the Golden Age of Greece.  One of the people who survived the plague, and all the fighting, was a rambling old teacher named Socrates.  Next episode, we will look at him, his student Plato, and Plato's student Aristotle, who together are easily the most important teacher-student teacher -student trio in all of history. 

Episode 9 -  Athenian Democracy, and the Golden Age of GreeceHi, my name is Clayton Mills.  Welcome to ‘A Short Walk through our Long History' - a podcast where we look at the events of history, and try to see how those events shaped our modern world. This is Episode 9 - Athenian Democracy, and the Golden Age of Greece.We have talked about the famous battles of the Greek - Persian wars, and how after the huge naval battle at Salamis, the Persians never threatened Greece again.  The Battle of Salamis happened on September 27th, 480 BC.  There were still a few important land battles in 479 BC, but the Greeks won those as well, and destroyed what was left of the Persian army in Greece.  This sets the stage for an era of peace and prosperity in Greece that would be incredibly influential.As points of reference, just to tie this all in with other things that were happening around this time in other parts of the world, I thought I would mention some other important world events.  So 80 years or so before Salamis, off in India, around 563 BC, Buddha was born.  Buddhism begins to form as a religion in the years following the Buddha's death.  Buddhism will eventually become one of the world's largest religions, but it had a small start, as did Christianity.  We'll come back to that in upcoming episodes.  Also about this time, the Jews who had returned from exile in Babylon were re-building their temple, under the guidance of Nehemiah and Ezra.  And also around this time, in 509 BC the Roman Republic was founded.  We'll also come back to the Romans.  Lots of important stuff going on in the 5th century BC.  By the way, I don't really like calling these time periods, ‘the 5th century,' because it just doesn't match up in a way that I like.  Because the 5th century is the 400's.  It's the time period from 499 BC to 400 BC.  And then we have that problem again in the AD's.  It's because the first century is the zeros and tens, like 49 BC.  So I prefer saying, in the 400's BC, rather than saying the 5th century.  It makes more sense to me, even though the historians all like to use ‘5th century.'  For the rest of these episodes, I'm going to stick with the actual numbers, and not use the 4th or 5th century nomenclature. So in the 400's BC, a lot of important stuff was going on.  But what was also happening was the Golden Age of Greece, which lasts from the reign of Pisistratus, a tyrant who ruled over Athens around 528 BC, until the death of Alexander the Great, in 323 BC.  So right about 200 years.  The Golden Age of Greece is also known as the Classical Period, or Classical Greece. So what made it golden?  What made it a classic?  Well, there were two ascendent cities during this time, Athens and Sparta.  They both were incredibly prosperous, and both laid claim to be the leading city in Greece.  They fought several times during this period, and we'll talk about those battles in the next episode.  But what really made this time period unique was all of the stuff going on in Athens during this time.  So the Golden Age of Greece is really a mostly Athenian thing, even though Sparta was doing very well during this time also.  But all the ‘golden' stuff came from Athens.  [here]So in this time period, just to summarize, from Athens, we have Pericles, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Aeschylus, Aristophanes, Euripides, Herodotus, Thucydides, Hippocrates, and the birth of democracy.  All of these have left lasting impacts in politics, philosophy, and literature.  And of course that's not even the full list.  There was also beautiful pottery and amazing architecture, including the Parthenon in Athens, which has been described by some as the most perfect building ever built.So what created this great period of productivity?  It was something about the nature of Athens in those days.  For one thing, Athens was peaceful and prosperous.  It takes both of those things for a city or culture to be able to create a class of people who are artists, philosophers, and historians.  In the middle of a siege from an enemy, no one is worried about writing ancient history or the next great play.  So Athens has a period of tranquility and prosperity, and some great artists, writers and thinkers have time to be creative.  We'll come back to this at the end of the episode, but there are a lot of ways that this time period influences our modern world.  Obviously, the advent of Athenian democracy, and the idea that citizens can come together to create their own government, and protect their own rights, is something that influenced the founding of the United States and other democracies around the world.Well, that brings up an issue we need to clarify, since we're talking about democracy.  Because the United States isn't technically a democracy.  It's a republic -  Well, Plato might argue that we're currently an oligarchy, putting on a show of being a republic, but more on Plato and his descriptions of government later, in another episode.  A true democracy is where all the citizens vote, or at least can vote, on every law.  A republic is where the citizens select a representative to go vote for them.  The citizens vote on who will represent them, and then the representatives actually vote on the laws.  So the United States and the United Kingdom are both types of republics, not democracies.  They have representatives that do the lawmaking and the voting.Anyway, Athens was a true democracy, where all the citizens could vote on the laws.  So how did Athens come to be a democracy, and enter into its golden age?  As most golden age stories do, the story starts with a tyrant, and people getting fed up with the tyrant's tyrannical ways.  By the way, the word tyrant, back in the days of ancient Greece, didn't mean a harsh, autocratic ruler.  It just meant someone who has taken over the role of leading the government in an illegitimate way.  The term tyrant didn't originally refer to how someone ruled; it referred to how they took power.  In 546 BC, an Athenian named Pisistratus took control of Athens.  His rule lasted for 18 years, and was actually a good period for Athens, and so the Athenians didn't put up too much of a fuss about him.  But then, his sons took over, and they were tyrants in our modern sense of the word.  The Athenians tolerated Pisistratus, because despite the way he took power, he did a good job as the leader of the city.  His sons did not, and the Athenians decided they didn't want to be ruled by someone they had not chosen.There were a couple of other rulers, but then in 510 BC, the Athenians chose Cliesthenes to be their ‘archon,' or leader.  One of the hallmarks of the Athenian system of government was that they wanted to be ruled by someone they themselves had chosen.  This idea, the concept of government by the consent of those governed, is one of the core ideas of liberty.  And within that idea, and also within the Declaration of Independence, is also the idea that if the people who are governed do NOT consent to their government, it is their right to change the government.  That's what the Athenians did.  Cliesthenes reformed a lot of Athenian practices, and rebuilt the democracy.  There was an Assembly, that any citizen could attend, which met every 10 days to debate and vote on proposals made by the Council.  The Council was made up of 500 citizens, and they would propose laws that would then be voted on by the Assembly.  There were also strategoi and archons who were elected to serve specific roles.Then in 495 BC, a very gifted leaded named Pericles becomes one of the strategoi.  He was a strategoi for 50 years, and this is the height of the golden age.  Pericles also strengthened the democracy, and presided over the rebuilding of the Acropolis (which had been badly damaged by the Persians), including the building of the Parthenon, as well as several other temples. During the time of Pericles, two of the greatest philosophers in all of human history were born.  Both Socrates and Plato were born during the time when Pericles was one of the strategoi.  Socrates was probably born around 470 BC, so his time as a productive philosopher and teacher happened in part during the time of Pericles.  Plato was one of Socrates' students, and his time as a teacher and writer took place after Pericles, but still during the Golden Age.  I'm planning on having a separate episode on Socrates, Plato, and Plato's student Aristotle, because they really are important enough, in terms of how they affected the modern world, to warrant their own episode.  I should mention here that they basically started the first permanent school of higher education, which was called the Academy.During this same time period, Aeschylus, Euripides and Sophocles were writing comedies and tragedies that are still studied today.  Their writing, along with Homer's, (and also Plato's) is considered the best writing in the Greek language.  These guys were the Greek equivalents of Shakespeare. And Shakespeare himself was influenced by some of the Greek plays.  In addition to the playwrights, we also have the first real historians of antiquity during this period.  Herodotus and Thucydides both tried to accurately record historical events, not long after they had actually happened.  Before them, much of the historical record was written by kings who had conquered someone, and had a ‘history' written to glorify their own deeds.  So accuracy was less important than glorifying the king who had commissioned the historical writing. Herodotus is known as the father of history.  Although others recorded historical events before he did, he did a much more thorough job of getting and recording the facts of events.  It is his records of Thermopylae and Salamis that are our best source for the names, dates, and flow of events of those battles.  Though both Herodotus and Thucydides wrote clearly pro-greek histories, their thoroughness and descriptiveness set the standard for all future historians.  The physician Hippocrates, of the famous Hippocratic oath, also wrote during this period, and his books on health and medicine are among the oldest records of human health and disease, and set the stage for much of the medical writing down through the ages.  On top of all this writing, there was also a great surge in architecture and sculpture.  When you think of Classical Architecture, that means ancient Athenian architecture.  I mentioned the Parthenon, which was the temple to Athena on the Acropolis, which was the hill at the top of Athens.  There were other temples up there, too, and they were also amazingly beautiful.  So we kind of had it all back in ancient Athens in these years, and other cultures throughout history have always looked back at these times and the writings and art of this period and been inspired by them.  Many of the great things about ancient Rome were lifted straight from ancient Greece, for example.  After the democracy of ancient Athens, Greece was conquered by Philip of Macedon, whose son, Alexander the Great, took Greek culture and the Greek language and spread it all around the Mediterranean and into Asia.  The Greek language became a sort of trade language of the Mediterranean, the language that everyone used for business.  It was relatively easy to write, and because the Greek alphabet is very phonetic, it was also relatively easy to learn the language.  Greek verb tenses are crazy hard to master, but basic Greek, the kind you would use for trade, was relatively easy.  But because of the writings of the Greek masters, Greek also became the language of scholarship, for many generations. This is one of the reasons that the New Testament was written in Greek, even though Jesus probably spoke in Aramaic, which was the common language of Judea during his life.  The New Testament was written to an audience beyond just the region of Judea, so because of the audience, and because Greek was the language of trade and of scholarship, the original writers of the New Testament wrote their gospels and epistles in Greek.  So the Golden Age of Greece had it all, and became a major influence on the rest of the ancient world.What other things from classical Athens affect our modern world?  Google an image of the US supreme court building.  It's a Greek temple, basically.  Greek architecture has influenced monuments and official buildings all through history.  What else affected our modern world?  Well, for starters, there's the idea of citizens taking responsibility for their own government.  The idea that the people of the city are responsible for the defense, government, and well-being of the city, and that the responsibility for setting up a form of government actually lies with the people, not the king - that's an Athenian ideal.  It's not the king or some external ruler who is responsible for the city, it's the people of the city.  And they, the people, can choose the form of government that they want.  It is more recently called ‘government by the consent of the governed.'  At the core of this is the idea that it's NOT the government who owns the city or the country, it's not the king that owns it all, it's the people who own it.  The beginning of the US constitution invokes this idea with the phrase, ‘We, the people, in order to form a more perfect union,…'. It's ‘the people' who are putting together the government, and designing a form of government that will protect them from tyrants.  That's what the Athenians were trying to do, that's what the founding fathers of the US were trying to do, that's what the lords of old Britain were trying to do with the Magna Carta, at some level. Protect their rights from a tyrant.  Behind this is the idea of personal responsibility, the idea that I am responsible for my life, my well-being, and my future - it's not the government that is responsible for that, it's not the king, it's not society, it's me.  I'm responsible.  The greeks would have called this ‘honor.'  It incorporates the idea of doing what's right, doing one's job, doing what one is supposed to do, and being responsible for one's own life.  This was definitely in the minds of the founding fathers of the US, although it seems like we've lost this a bit in recent years.  The Athenians took responsibility for protecting themselves from internal threats - that is, tyrants -  and external threats - like Persians, for example.  It's an important principle, and it's kind of odd how seldom in world history a group of people is governed by a government that they chose for themselves.   In the modern world, we kind of take for granted, but until recently, it was a rarity.  Usually, people were governed by a king, either from their own region, or one from somewhere else who had conquered them.  That has been the historical norm, not people governing themselves.  Tyranny, not self-rule, has been the norm.  One other way that Athens is still influencing the modern world is the scientific world-view that dominates the western world.  We'll talk more about this in the episode about Plato and Aristotle, but they had a huge impact on the development of science as we know it today.  Especially Aristotle.  His enormous body of work influenced both science, philosophy, logic, and religion, but again, we'll come back to him and Plato again later.  But before we get to them, we need to take a look at what basically put an end to the really golden part of the golden age of Greece, and that is the Peloponnesian wars.  Next episode, we'll look at the battles between Athens and Sparta.  Then we'll come back to Athens to focus on Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle.  Then on to Aristotle's pupil, Alexander, the Great.

“Our institutions do not emulate the laws of others. We do not copy our neighbors: rather, we are an example to them. Our system is called a democracy, for it respects the majority and not the few”. To this day, some two and a half millennia hence, Athens still remains an example to its neighbors. Mounted high above us, she enjoys the lonely summit of grandeur and refinement to which every civilization hopes to ascend. She alone breathes this thin air to which we'll never be fully acclimatized. The greatness of any age, the perfection of any epoch, shines less brilliantly when held next to the dazzling prosperity of Pericles' tenure. Here, in our first discussion of Thucydides, the most scrutinizing and professional historian ever to have lived, we will delve into the peculiarities of this renowned city state, whose rapid acquisition of territory and power threatened her Peloponnesian neighbors to the point of war. In the following, we will touch on the famous passages from Thucydides' classic work, including his depiction of Corinth's hostile assessment of the Athenians, Pericles' Funeral Oration at the end of the war's first year, the devastating plague by which Athens was afflicted, and the morally bereft Melian Dialogue.

In this episode, we discuss the final two years of the Peloponnesian War (405-404 BC), including the comedic play "The Frogs" by Aristophanes; Lysander's elevation to Persian satrap, his rebuilding of the Peloponnesian fleet, his tactical moves in the Hellespont, and his crushing victory over the Athenians at Aegospotami; the besiegement and blockade of Athens; and the Athenians' surrender and the terms of the peace treaty   Show Notes: http://www.thehistoryofancientgreece.com/2021/04/107-sparta-triumphant.html  

EPISODE 19 THE EXPANSION OF SPARTAThe time has come to let Sparta out of the box, so to speak. Trapped as I've kept it since this series began, my aim was to explain the myths and early traditions of this city before moving on to it's inexorable dominance of ancient Greek battlefields. This episode sees the beginnings of that supremacy as in the space of a mere century it's horizon's expand from a loose collection of 4 villages on the right bank of the Eurotas, to a real Peloponnesian powerhouse.Join me, as I take a look at that expansion in detail. The period for the Greeks was one of migration due to increased populations. With advent of iron forged agricultural tools new lands became viable for the harvests and with the extra food supplies came a flourishing populace. Whilst other Greek cities resorted to state sponsored colonisation of the Mediterranean and Black sea coasts to ameliorate the burden of over-population, the Spartan's aggressively increased their holdings at the expense of their neighbours. Winning for themselves the largest tract of land controlled by any city-state in antiquity, and in the process indenturing an entire people to work it's fields.We'll take a look at the individual factors contributing to Spartan policy, and follow it through it's natural evolution into regional hegemony within Laconia and Messenia. Finally, we'll step through the 20 year conflict known as the first Messenian war. A bitter entanglement that saw one culture emancipated from manual labour and set down the path of life on a permanent war footing, and another submitted to the oppressive yoke of slavery.I hope you all enjoy the episode and take care.https://www.spartanhistorypodcast.com/https://www.facebook.com/spartanhistorypodcasthttps://twitter.com/spartan_history

Alcibiades, often considered the most gifted Athenian to ever live, was a fascinating politician and brilliant general from ancient Greece. Alcibiades was famous for his flamboyant nature and continuous switches of allegiance. The life of Alcibiades was so dramatic that it could be straight from a Hollywood film. But who was Alcibiades really and what part did he play in shaping the fates of Sparta, Athens and the Peloponnesian war for ancient Greece. Here at Raconteur, we bring to life the greatest stories from history and mythology to both entertain and educate. We are also on YouTube! For video versions of each story visit and subscribe https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCU4yfCCgXTUYcSPI0_5rP9w/?sub_confirmation=1 Video version of this story - https://youtu.be/SwzV_j_uqTk Music by Scott Buckley – www.scottbuckley.com.au New stories weekly. Thanks for listening!

Peter Roberts talks to US scholar-practitioner Dr Pete Mansoor (author of 'Baghdad at Sunrise', 'Surge', and 'The Culture of Military Organisations') about the Western Way of Warfare from the Peloponnesian war to Iraq: competition, economics, technology, logistics, and escalatory concepts. Plus some advice to those starting PME courses.

Episode 18 Perhaps the best known of the comedies by Aristophanes Lysistrata imagines a world where women take control in an attempt to force and end the Peloponnesian war. It is sex comedy with a message as the Athenian golden age nears the end. This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Chartable - https://chartable.com/privacy

Episode 17 Aristophanes takes a dig at the Athenian legal system and the city leaders who use it to their own ends. The system was part of the democratic process that Athens was still hanging on to despite the rigours of the Peloponnesian war. Citizens took part in the legal process with the same vigour that they displayed when voting or debating. From street crime to murder, how were the criminals judged and punished? This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Chartable - https://chartable.com/privacy

Episode 15 The story of the life, times and plays of Aristophanes, the creator of the only complete plays that we have from the genre of 'old comedy'. He lived in Athens during the turbulent times of the Peloponnesian war and used satire and comedy to criticise the war leaders and Athenian society. This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Chartable - https://chartable.com/privacy

I think we live in a time of horrible leadership. Just across the board. Everybody in power seems to be frighteningly old and since the last 40 or so years have been so easy, none of the people in charge of anything have dealt with a real crisis. Or had to build anything. They tear down, they criticize, they pass the buck and grift their way through, with seemingly no awareness that the stakes might be real and far more important than any one person's advantage. Many of the characters in How to Succeed in Evil are predicated on this kind of idea. People have great potential and power, but they are stupid about using it. Even stupid about doing the wrong things with it. As I returned to How to Succeed in Evil, I consciously tried to turn away from current events. These stories are meant to be an escape and enjoyment, rather than any ill-advised attempt to reform anything about the world. Because entertainment is a noble thing in its own right. Everybody needs a break. But here we are. Perhaps it's an unavoidable theme in this moment. I can't even read ancient books without running into it.BUT FIRST, A THEORY OF CONSCIOUSNESS?The craziest book I've read in the last year is The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes. And he argues that before some point, the executive functions of our brain were opaque to us -- and appeared to us as voices or gods commanding us to act.And this was because (loosely speaking) the left side of the brain tends to deal with routine situations and the right side of the brain deals with more novel situations. And if there's a wall between them -- if they are in separate chambers as the term bicameral literally means, then when faced with something novel, the only way the right side of the brain could get through to us in waking hours, was a hallucination. And Jaynes makes the argument that this is how it worked and very much the way schizophrenics and people with specific kinds of brain damage experience the world today. None of these claims are nuts to me. At one point we, as a species didn't have consciousness -- we weren't aware we were going to die and of the problems that created for us on multiple levels and on multiple time frames -- and at some point, we woke up. But here's where it becomes audacious. Jaynes claims that you can see this split in ancient literature. Running like a fault line into works that are before consciousness and works that are after. Before this split, there was no interior sense of self, consciousness, or agency in the way we'd think of it. No lying or deception. The Epic of Gilgamesh is totally like this. And after this split, people are conflicted. They become liars and aware that other people can be liars. And the nice thing about this theory is that it explains, in the Iliad, why the Gods are the primary motive forces. The book -- more properly, a poem -- doesn't have men and women reflecting on events and deciding what to do, but gods and goddesses visiting them and making decisions for them. I'll provide some examples in a moment. This leads to all kinds of crazy lines of thought. Because without intent, is ever killing in the Iliad a kind of 2nd-degree murder. There can't be premeditation because there's no meditation. You know, if you don't look at the Trojan war as war in the story, which it absolutely is. But here's the crazy part -- Jaynes argues that this fault line of consciousness runs right between the Iliad and the Odyssey. This is a crazy idea and I love it. And he seems to make a pretty good case for it. But to really evaluate it I think you have to be an expert in Ancient Greek, neuroscience, psychology, and consciousness. And people like that are very scarce on the ground. Especially because we know effectively nothing about consciousness. But as a writer, I don't care if it's true. I care if it's USEFUL. If it's productive of more ideas. If I can use this theory as a lens to increase my understanding. And oh boy, does it ever. As I came back to How to Succeed in Evil, I was more conscious than ever that characters can be representations of different aspects of the psyche. This started off pretty obviously in How to Succeed in Evil. Sloppily speaking, Topper is the Id. Agnes is the Ego. Edwin is the Superego. At least in the original book. Part of my challenge for writing more was to add depth and challenge to these characters. So I decided to re-read the Iliad through the lens of each character being an aspect of personality. And also to see how well Jaynes' theory fits the story from my, admittedly, uninformed perspective. When I did, something amazing happened. And it illustrates the rewards of giving time and attention to great literature. Let me show you:In my memory, the Iliad is the story of Achilles' anger. I mean, it's certainly a war story. But that's the external plot. But what makes a story powerful is the internal story. A contemporary and simple example of this is Jaws. The external story is that the sheriff must defeat the shark to keep the town safe. The internal story is that the sheriff must defeat his fear of the water. And that's what makes him heroic in our eyes. And the reason it's easy to think of the Iliad as the story of Achilles' rage is that's the way it starts. The first chapter is entitled "The Rage of Achilles" and the first line -- the traditional invocation of the muse is > Rage goddess, sing the rage of Peleus' son Achilles, murderous, doomed, that cost the Achaeans countless losses, hurling down to the house of death so many sturdy souls.Okay, so, cautionary tale about the destructive perils of rage. That's a theme that's never going to go out of style. But, why is he so angry? He's angry because Agamemnon, the leader of the Greeks, is a worthless leader. > Many a brave soul did it (Achilles' anger) send hurrying down to Hades, and many a hero did it yield a prey to dogs and vultures, for so were the counsels of Jove fulfilled from the day on which the son of Atreus, king of men, and great Achilles, first fell out with one another. Even in the explanation, Jove -- Zeus -- Jupiter -- is the force driving the whole thing. Son of Atreus king of Men is Agamemnon. So, at the beginning of the story, which starts in the middle of the war, a plague has descended upon the camp. People are dropping like flies. Homer represents this as the god Apollo striking them down with his arrows. > He cut them down in droves and the corpse-fires burned on, night and day, no end in sight. This goes on for nine days. And finally, Achilles can't take it anymore. He calls together the men and says, we're going to lose the war if this keeps up. But before we give up, we should ask a priest. So they do. And, reluctantly, because the priest is well aware of what a jackass Agamemnon is, he tells them that Apollo is unhappy because Agamemnon won't give up a girl he's taken as a slave. But if he gives the girl back to her father, the plague will stop. So, what does Agamemnon do? What would you do? I mean besides not trying to sack Troy or taking a girl as a slave in the first place. As a good leader, what would you do? I'd said, "Great. Here's the girl. Spare my men." This concern for the troops is what motivates Achilles to go to the priest. Right? It's the most important thing. Everybody can see that. Except for Agamemnon who goes off on the priest.Seer of misery! Never a word that works to my advantage! Always misery warms your heart, your prophecies -- never a word of profit said or brought to pass.Now, again you divine god's will for the armies,bruit it about, as fact, why the deadly Archermultiplies our pains: because I, I refusedthat glittering price for the young girl ChryseisIndeed I prefer her by far, the girl herself,I want her mine in my own house! I rank her higher than Clytemnestra, my wedded wife -- she's nothing lessin build or breeding, in mind or works of hand.Now don't get distracted by the fact that the name Clytemnestra sounds like a cross between a venereal disease and a banned food additive. Stay with Agamemnon. Notice how he is bitter, petty, and all about him. And he takes eleven lines before he gets to the most important thing. But I am willing to give her back, even so, if that is best for all. What I really wantis to keep my people safe, not see them dying.The Iliad is manifestly the wrong book for not seeing people dying. And clearly, _he_ could have asked the priest what was up. But he didn't. But here's the telling point. But fetch me another prize, and straight off too, else I alone of the Argives go without my honor. That would be disgrace. You are all witness, look -- my prize is snatched away. Which isn't even correct in the story. Because the girl's father came to buy his daughter back from Agamemnon. The dude is just being arrogant and prideful. And there's a word for that in Ancient Greek. Hubris. So anyway, because Achilles stands up to him, Agamemnon takes Achilles' slave girl. At that moment Achilles goes for his sword, but Athena appears to him -- a hallucination of the executive function of the brain stepping in as per our theory -- and convinces him not to fight Agamemnon. But he's so upset about the loss of his slave girl that he decides to go on strike and sit out the war. And he takes the best troops with him. Because of bad leadership, the most competent warrior refuses to fight. In essence, he resigns. Does any of this seem at all familiar or at least analogous? Now, you could say that Agamemnon is just having a bad day. Or a bad moment. Or maybe he just doesn't get along with Achilles, who we can also see as a kind of prima-donna. In book 11 -- Agamemnon's Day of Glory -- he rides out and cuts people down like grass, until, he gets a cut on his forearm and he leaves the field. Not as heroic as he could be. Now Agamemnon is not elected in any sense of the word, but the text seems pretty clear to me that he has his power because he has the relationships with all the coalition members. How good these relationships are? So when Agamemnon goes home to get a band-aid, the Trojans rally and it looks like the Greeks are going to be routed -- driven back into the sea. But Odysseus and Diomedes rally the men and keep it from being a complete loss. But this read far from glory for Agamemnon. From that point in the book, the Greeks take a pretty straight beating from then in. And it gets so bad, that at one point, Agamemnon, says, "Maybe we should take a couple of ships and row out to sea, wait until dark and come back and collect everybody who has survived and then go home." Which is a horrible idea. And Odysseus, the most cunning of them, all unleashes this speech. With a dark glance, the shrewd tactician OdysseusWheeled on his commander. "What's this, Atrides,this talk that slips from your clenched teeth?You are the disaster. Would to god you commanded another army.What if one of the men gets wind of your brave plan? No one should ever let such nonsense pass his lipsno one with any skill in fit and proper speech-- and least of all yourself, a sceptered king. Full battalions hang on your words AgamemnonAchean troops will never hold the line, I tell you. not while the long ships are being hauled to sea. They'll look left and right -- for where can they run? and they'll fling their lust for battle to the winds. Then, Commander of armies, your plan will kill us all."At that the King of men Agamemnon backed down. Yeah, he did. The war goes on and it gets worse fro Greeks. All the Greek heroes are knocked out of commission either dead or wounded, and it looks like the end. But Achilles is so pissed he still won't help So Patroclus, Achilles' best friend goes to him and begs -- not for Achilles to re-enter the fray, but for Achilles lend him his armor and lead his troops the Myrmidons (who are fresh because they've been resting this whole time) out into battle. One sharp shock will turn the tide and everybody fears Achilles. But Patroclus, though brave, is no great warrior. Hector rides out and kills him. Achilles goes out and weeps over his friend's dead body. And then at dawn Achilles mother - a goddess -- brings him a new, even more, magnificent suit of armor hot off Vulcan's forge. Agamemnon finally gives him his girl back. Achilles hops on his chariot ready to ready to go to war. And there's this little moment. He pats his horse and praises them, reminds them of the lineage they come from, and tells them to do a good job. It's human and recognizable. The kind of thing you'd see in a cowboy movie. Except that one of his horses _talks back_ saying, basically, "Man, I'ma do my best, but you better get right with the fact that you gonna die on this windy plain of Troy." It couldn't be any weirder if Hunter S. Thompson wrote it. And Achilles, cause he's such a badass says, Don't waste your breath.I know, well I know -- I am destined to die here, far from my dear father,far from mother. But all the same, I will never stoptil I drive the Trojans to their bloody fill of war.Then he yells "eeYeah!" whips the horse into action and goes off to kill, well, everybody. Now, before we get to the climax, it's important to recognize how out of control this war gets. Diomedes, a Greek, tries to kill love. He wounds a goddess, Aphrodite. Like, I understand heartbreak, and I understand anger. But I've never wanted to KILL love. And then he turns right around and spears the GOD of WAR through the stomach, forcing him to leave the field. Diomedes is a badass and he gets very little press. And as much of a badass as Diomedes is, he's not the fiercest warrior in the story. That's Achilles, who now uncorks his entire can of whoop-ass. Ultimately he kills Hector, the Trojan's most valiant warrior, and drags his corpse around the city behind his chariot. The war doesn't end in the Iliad. The book ends with Hector's funeral. But the feeling among the Trojans is that the war is lost. That great stuff about the Trojan horse we actually get from Virgil, a Roman poet who wrote much later, in the Aeneid. FINALLY BRINGING IT ALL HOME So with all of that as an explanation -- and forgive me if I got a little carried away, but it's a great story. Let me finally get to my point and bring this whole thing home. A great work of art can be read in many different ways. And all of them are profitable. That's what makes the Canon the canon. The works are deep, almost beyond belief. To me, it appears that the modern-day humanities have abandoned this understanding in the pursuit of social justice. And it's not that the impulse towards justice is wrong -- it's that they have thrown the baby out with the bathwater. Of course, there is the crass stupidity of dismissing Homer as an old dead white guy. Homer was, at best, just the guy who wrote the story down, but he seems to be just a representation of a very long tradition of oral poets who come from a culture alien to ours. And if you believe Julian Jaynes, not even, for much of their history, possessing what we think of as interior consciousness. But this very alien quality -- and the unbelievable intellectual flourishing of Greece before the Peloponnesian war -- are what make this culture worth studying. Because they were human and brilliant and highly successful, but totally different from us. It's like the benefits of travel. I don't think people are fundamentally different anywhere you go. But if you only stay in one place or culture, what you think of as fundamentally human, is very narrow. But the farther you range in your travels and you're reading, the more of what is really, truly fundamental, important and beautiful about being human is revealed. So here's what I take from my last psychological reading of the Iliad. Agamemnon is a venial and corrupt leader. Achilles is the height of competence, but and because of the corruption of the political structure, he refuses to play the game. And what's more, he's absolutely right about the leadership being terrible. There are other competent actors, more responsible and mature actors among the Greeks -- Diomedes, Odysseus, and others -- who stay in the game, but ultimately, the only way to victory -- a victory that can't be had without paying a terrible price -- is for everybody to get over themselves, put their ego's aside, and do their best. The Iliad is not romantic about war. Everybody suffers and loses horribly. It reads quite fatalistically to me. Wars happen because the gods toy with us. And whatever you might think of Julian Jaynes theory of the development of consciousness -- I bet when you're in a war, that's exactly what it feels like -- the gods toying with you. The quotes are from the Robert Fagles translation of the Iliad -- which I like very much. He's clean and fast and readable preserving the adventure story quality in his translations of the Odyssey, the Iliad, and the Aeneid. And you can get a Kindle edition of the Iliad for, I kid you not, .60 cents. Can you even get a soda out of a soda machine for that anymore? Go buy it. You're swimming in Western Culture, might as well take a few pains to understand it. Emily Wilson's translation of the Odyssey is also really good. And she's working on a translation of the Iliad. But if you've the impulse to dip into the Illiad Maybe don't wait. Because right now it feels like the gods are toying with us all, all the time. Get full access to How It's Written by Patrick E. McLean at patrickemclean.substack.com/subscribe

Episode 7 The life of Sophocles almost spanned the 5th Century BCE and included events from the defeat of the Persian invasion to the relentless grind of the Peloponnesian wars. We look at his life and times and get an overview of the surviving plays and theatrical innovations the he created. This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Chartable - https://chartable.com/privacy

Owen Rees joins us for a primer on Greek military history: from Peloponnesian to over-rated Spartans to the role of women and a really interesting discussion on remembrance and the relevance on modern concepts like PTSD. 

Episode 67 is live! Make sure to check it out as we discuss Polis: Fight for the Hegemony, a two player game about the Peloponnesian war between Sparta and Athens in Ancient Greece. We talk about the game before discussing open information in gaming. We then answer the question about our strategies when playing new games for the first time. We do this all while having some hot coffee in the morning! Be sure to like, share, and subscribe! Game Talk: 8:52 Top Shelf Topic: 26:34 Pint Sized Question: 33:24 Game Mentions: Agricola, Patchwork, Magic: The Gathering Support: If you would like to help us improve our product, here's where you can do that! www.patreon.com/MalthausGames podpledge.com?p=3D8L1M1V4S7F8... ko-fi.com/malthausgames Sound Attributions: Something Elated by Broke For Free, Downloaded from freemusicarchive.org/music/Bro... Edits: Cut to length and Faded in. Heavy Happy With Drums by Ryan Cullinane, Downloaded from freemusicarchive.org/music/Ryan Cullinane/Heavy Happy With Drums – Beat Driven Productions – Heavy Happy With Drums Edits: Cut to length and faded out. Crowd in a bar (LCR recording) by Leandros.Ntounis, downloaded from freesound.org/people/Leandros... Edits: Cut to length, added vocals and own recorded drink making sounds. Vinyl_record_needle_static_01.wav by joedeshon, downloaded from freesound.org/people/joedesho... Edits: Cut to length, added to music and raised volume level. Hidden Wall Opening by ertfelda, downloaded from freesound.org/people/ertfelda... Edits: Adjust volume and cut to length added jungle sound and voice. Yucatan jungle.mp3 by folkart films, downloaded from freesound.org/people/folkart%... Edits: Adjust volume, cut to length, added door sound and voice. Footsteps, Concretem A.wav by InspectorJ, downloaded from freesound.org/people/Inspecto... Edits: Cut to length, adjusted volume, added jungle sounds and voice. Fantasy Sounds Effects Library, Ambience_Cave_00.wav by LittleRobotSoundFactory, downloaded from freesound.org/people/LittleRo... Edits: Cut to length, faded in, adjusted volume and added footsteps, jungle sounds, stone door, and voice. Game Show Theme Tune by FoolBoyMedia, downloaded from freesound.org/people/FoolBoyM... Edits: Cut to length, added vocals, adjusted volume. Audience, Theatre Applause.wav by makosan, downloaded from freesound.org/people/makosan/... Edits: Added music, added voice, cut to length and adjusted volume.

This week on the herbal hour podcast we have on history teacher Eric Anderson to talk about what we can learn from the past. We discuss the plagues of Ancient Greece during the Peloponnesian wars, the evils of world war 2, the political implications of times of crisis and other things we can learn from history about living well in modern times.This is a very passionate conversation about what we can learn through history about ourselves, the impact of coronavirus and how through understanding the past we can move towards a positive future.Full Video Episode: Click Here

"No plan survives first contact intact." A useful aphorism, but how do you internalize the lesson and learn to deal with plans that go awry from the get-go?    "It ain't over 'til it's over." How do you teach the value of perseverance and the reality that the tide can turn at any moment?    "You have to play the hand you're dealt." Decisions are rarely made with perfect information, and even more rarely are problems solved with the ideal set of resources. How do you help kids learn to avoid "analysis paralysis" and work with the information and materials on hand?    This week begins our series of deep dives into games we're playing to enrich our study of Roman History and equip our kids for living. "Commands and Colors: Ancients", a tabletop board wargame, not only makes historical battles come to life in a tangible way, but offers a starting point for learning valuable lessons in managing expectations and dealing with limited knowledge. Laura and Chris discuss game play, the value of studying battles within a wider history curriculum, why Commands and Colors' "fog of war" simulation is uniquely suited to helping develop decision making skills using imperfect information, and how to get the most out of a game session.    Recommended  Games:   Commands & Colors Ancients – This ancient battle simulation is reasonably simple and fast playing, with many scenarios being playable within an hour once the rules are understood. The base game contains battles from the Punic Wars. Expansion #1: Greece vs. The Eastern Kingdoms - This expansion works well with studies of Greek and Hellenic history, but includes scenarios for conflicts between Greece and Rome. Expansions #2 & #3: Rome vs. The Barbarians and The Roman Civil Wars - These expansions cover Romes campaigns in Northern Europe and the critical period in the late Roman Republic that sets the stage for the development of the Roman Empire. Expansion #4: Imperial Rome - What it says on the tin. This expansion includes scenarios for the most significant battles during the imperial age. The focus shifts from Rome's expansion to the defense of the territory it has gained.  Expansion #5: Epic Ancients II - This expansion is currently out of stock and currently in pre-order for a second print run. GMT Games P500 program gauges interest in future games and reprint runs through a pre-order program. Games that reach 500 pre-orders get slated for print run, and those who pre-ordered get the game at the P500 price, which is discounted from the retail price. As of the date of publication for this episode, Epic Ancients is approximately 100 pre-orders away from a second printing. If you're interested in playing this with a larger group, consider a P500 pre-order.  Expansion #6: Spartan Army - This expansion is another one best suited for studies in Ancient Greek History. The focus is on the Spartan army between 669 and 338 BC, and includes the conflicts between Sparta and Argos, the Persian and Peloponnesian wars, and the decline of Sparta as Macedon grew in power. Vassal Module: Commands and Colors Ancients - If you're looking for a way to learn gameplay, the Vassal Engine provides a computer desktop display of the gameboard and opportunities to play with others online and by email.  YouTube Tutorials - Along with simply searching the game title and particular scenarios (there are videos of nearly every scenario now), look here and here for excellent tutorials from Charlotte Area Historical Gaming.   Can't see the links? Podcatcher turning my painstaking labor into plaintext? Come visit the podcast page at  https://played.podbean.com/ and get the full experience, complete with all the links in perfect functioning order.    Intro and Outro Music: "Crunk Knight" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 Licensehttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

What is the physical nature of humanity's social life? This question may seem odd, but it's legitimate; in a billiard ball world, we should technically be able to explain the physics of the social. But as expected, this question has been largely unexplored. This changed a bit in 2015 when renowned political scientist Alexander Wendt attempted to explain the physicality of the social sciences using the bizarre mechanisms of quantum physics. In doing so, he paints a novel, optimistic and inspiring picture of human nature.Twitter: @grand_theoriesInstagram: @grandtheoriesMusic:The following is utilized under a Creative Commons 3.0 License:1. Comfort Fit – “Planetary Picknick”2. t e l e p a t h テレパシー能力者 – “愛の瞬間” , “深夜の愛” , “星間性交” https://telepathtelepath.bandcamp.com/The following is utilized under a Creative Commons 4.0 License:1. BenJamin Banger – “Bobby Drake”Instagram: @benjaminbangerSoundcloud: @benjamin-banger2. Chris Zabriskie – “Land on the Golden Gate”Soundcloud: @chriszabriskie3. Pipe Choir – “Exit Exit”Soundcloud: @pipe-choir-2 Works Cited:1. Heidegger, M. (2000). Introduction to metaphysics. (G. Fried and R. Polt, Trans.). New Haven: Yale University Press. (Original work published 1953)2. Rousseau, J-J. (2011). Discourse on the origin of inequality. (D. Cress, Trans.). Hackett: Indianapolis. (Original work written 1754).3. Thucycides, -. (2017). The history of the Peloponnesian war. (R. Crawley, Trans.). Digireads.com Publishing: Overland Park, KS. (Original work written circa 400 B.C.)4. Wendt, A. (1999). Social theory of international politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.5. Wendt, A. (2003). Why a world state is inevitable. European Journal of International Relations. 9(4). 491-542.6. Wendt, A. (2006). Social theory as cartesian science: an auto-critique. In Guzzini S. and Leander A. (Eds.) Constructivism and international relations. Milton Park: Routledge. 181-219.7. Wendt, A. (2015). Quantum mind and social science: unifying physical and social ontology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.8. Wendt, A. (2018). The mind-body problem and social science: motivating a quantum social theory. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour. 48(2). 188-204.9. [Critical Realism Network]. (2016). Beyond the mechanistic paradigm: towards a quantum social science – Professor webinar Alex Wendt [video file]. Retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYWq8EwdDLk&t=831s

In this episode, we discuss the first year and a half of the war (431-430 BC), as both Sparta and Athens initiated their war strategies, including a Theban sneak attack on Plataea that began the war, Peloponnesian land raids on Attica, Athenian naval raids on the Peloponnese and northwestern Greece, Athenian alliances with Odrysian Thrace, a famous funeral oration by Pericles, and a deadly plague that devastated Athens Show Notes: http://www.thehistoryofancientgreece.com/2019/04/091-attrition-and-plague.html   Intro by Jonathan Adly of the History of the Copts Podcast Website: https://hxofcoptspodcast.wordpress.com Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Hxofcopts/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/HxCopts

This episode talks about Peloponnesian war between Athens and Sparta, was it this war that caused Greece to lose its independence? Or alternately, was this war just another conflict in a long process for one state to become dominant? Welcome to the AIQ podcast, bringing the world of Ancient History to your ears. No matter if you are a leading academic, or have just found an interest in history, this podcast tries to discuss highly academic topics in a free and easy going way.

Welcome back to The Emancipation Podcast Station - the place to hear about history researched and retold through the eyes of Middle school and HS students.   600 BCE - 600 CE Second-Wave Civilizations   Ancient Persia: 600 BCE -  Gabe - Ancient persia or the achaemenid persia which was called this because the ruler cyrus’s great great grandfather's name was achaemenid and he started as a small independant city under the medes for protection and then cyrus got in an argument with his grandfather Astyages and won taking over persia he then established a system by capturing and relocating and adding a power over every city by accomplishing this he claimed the name Cyrus the great Audrey - The Persians didn’t actually use the name “Persian”, instead they called themselves Aryans. They called where they lived Aran (there are other variations of the name) which make the modern version of the name, Iran, probably more accurate. This is similar to how the Greeks referred to their homeland as Hellas, while the name Greece was a Latin idea. Ben - Cyrus, the ruler of Persia then proceeded to conquer various empires such as the Median empire, the Lydian empire in around 540 BCE, and he eventually got his hands on the neo-babylonian empire in 539 BCE. But while Cyrus’s son Cambyses II is out trying to take hold of egypt and libya, another person comes along claiming to be bardiya, Cyrus’s second son. So Cambyses has to rush back to Persia to make sure the throne is not taken from him but dies on the way there. No one really knows how Cambyses or Cyrus died specifically though. (BTW note for other people, shahanshah is pronounced shaw-on-shaw) Ella - Cyrus was a military commander but he realized that he needed the regions he conquered to stay in good economic order if he wanted them to provide him with economic tribute revenues. To achieve his goals he left rulers in the areas that he conquered after he conquered them. Skylar - Persia was one of the greatest empire and civilization in the world. The Achaemenid empire at its peak had about 50 million people. Thats half of the people that were in the world at that time, according to historians. The Achaemenid Dynasty/empire ends when Greece unifies under Philip of Macedon in early to mid century bce. Alexander the Great wanted to mix their cultures but he dies so they split again. Emma - In ancient Mesopotamia when they conquered a nation they would break up their political and cultural systems so that they wouldn’t be a threat. Though when Cyrus came into power he switched it, allowing those he conquered to keep their separate societies in a tributary state. While it seemed like he was being kind, he most likely was trying to keep their loyalty. - Ethan - As Cambyses died in 522 BCE, he was succeeded by a general titled “Darius”. Darius claimed that he was slightly related to Cambyses II but many other people challenged Darius’s throneship. This resulted, in some places, rebellion against the Achaemenids. Darius soon made himself to be the clear ruler Persia and re established rule of the rebels. He also reorganized the empire into satrapies, and for each satrapy there would be a satrap. 600 CE Classical Greece:  Gabe - If you didnt know its called Classical Greece and Ancient Persia because Persia was in the Ancient Era and Greece is in the Classical era so Classical Greece cities were built between mountains in valleys and on coastal plain so by the sea there was a time somewhere around 1200 bce they were in this war called the trojan war there's a story of a huge horse called the trojan horse it was in these wars so in this war this guy named homer he said that people came from the sea while they were having the trojan war and they were attacking them and driving them off the coast so they built these city states called polis which were like fortified cities so the people could have protection Audrey - The Greek Peninsula has been settled by humans for thousands of years, but an important part of Greek history starts when the Mycenaean Empire falls and the Greek Dark Ages begin. It is called the “Dark Ages” because there really aren’t many historical records from that point in time, and that was around 1100-800 BC. The major events happened in the exiting of the Greek Dark Ages, and this is when things that Ancient Greece is really known for began, like the Oracle at Delphi and the Olympic Games. (if someone wants to explain these) Ben - The difference between sparta and athens was that in sparta social status wasn’t decided based on how much money you had or how smart you were, it was about your military ranking. The spartans political system was unique in that it had two kings that were from different families that ruled. But on the lower side of the political rankings was the helots. Helots were like slaves but had more freedom, helots still had families but they had to work for the state and couldn’t really do anything else. Helots were still considered owned but they were owned by the state. Helots were collected from the villages sparta pillaged. Emma - Greece’s structure was was pretty different from other societies at the time. While the desperate colonies(?) all recognized the “mother” city-state, they were all independent for the majority of the time. Their shared religion and culture was what gave them all a sense of unity. Ella - Ancient Greece was made up of many independent city states because of Greeces complicated geography. All of these communities were separated by mountains, hills, and water. Greece wasn't a unified nation, instead it was a bunch of connected communities that shared religion and beliefs. - Ethan - The kings of Sparta were priests of Zeus and they were included in a gerousia, or council of elders, which was the highest court of Sparta. Also, there was an executive committee consisting of 5 ephors which were chosen by the people, of the people. Skylar - The name Greece is not what people that live in Greece call it. They call it Hellas. Nowadays they don’t call it Greece and back in the “Ancient Greece” days they didn’t say Greece they said Hellas. The word Hellas comes from Hellen, viewed as the progenitor. The Hellastic people are the people that live in Greece. In late 6th century BCE Athens was the dominant economic power. Athens was full of wealth as silver was just founded in the mountains around the area. Athens had an amazing trading system with other Greek city-states. Trading with other city-states was super  important to Athens because it didn’t have the agricultural conditions to supply enough grain for its population. A series of laws were written and put in place by a statesman named Draco around 621 BCE. They didn’t stay too long because they were super harsh. Another man named Solon was called to change the laws, he created a series of laws that equalized political power. Hunter- Ancient Greece consisted of over hundreds of different independent city-states, somewhat due to the geography of Greece. Greece communities were separated by mountains, hills, and water. Rather than one large nation, Ancient Greece was more like a system of communities with a shared language and religion that sometimes led to a common sense of belonging.    600 BCE - 600 CE The rise and fall of empires:  Gabe - I'm going to start by saying an empire is a small city or state that claims a large amount of land which is usually broke up into provinces  empires rise and fall for different reasons they usually expand through military conquest which is how the romans the persians and the Maurya empire in india expanded but they progressed in different ways the Maurya empire political sabotage and religious conversion so the people turn against their own country Audrey - An empire forms when a ruler, that already controls some territory, gains control of more territory for whatever reason, and that could be from military tactics, a weak neighboring area or really anything like that. Once the ruler has that territory under their control, they gain land and people. With the power they now have, this ruler could tax the people for their own wealth and/or use them for a better army. The empire could then keep expanding in this way until it collapsed. Ben - After the fall of the Qin dynasty the Han empire began to rise because of all the power that was up for grabs. The Han dynasty began in 206 BCE. They revived the way of Confucianism to unite the people and give them more reasons to fight and become a larger empire. Han china started to fall in 2nd century CE and eventually reached its demise in 220 CE, it mainly fell because of a religious divide between the people and the natural disasters that caused food shortages which snowballed into a bad economy. Ella - Empires all grow for different reasons whether its strong military, political sabotage, or religious conversation, but the Romans were not out to conquer territory. They did get involved in several wars but after they defeated their enemies they would offer their victims a small amount of citizenship in return for loyalty to the Roman empire.    Emma - There are also several different factors that can lead to the fall of an empire. Each of these factors will usually reflect those that led to the rise of the empire. Things such as a economic collapse, the weakening of military forces, or the death/assassination of a leader are common causes of a fall. - Ethan - A common example of an empire falling is Persia. The Achaemenid empire had internal issues already but had structure still. In 334 BCE Alexander attacked and in 4 years general Darius the Third lied dead. He was actually killed by one of his own generals and when the throne lied empty Alexander took the reins. Skylar - The rise of empires is great everyone’s all happy, then usually right when everything gets normal, the empire falls for different reasons. Rather it’s they have no more money, they get taken over by another empire, or another reason. The Roman empire took hundreds of years to create. They had weak neighbors so it was easy for them to take over that area. Hunter-The fall of an empire can be because of an outbreak of war and rebellion, when an empire falls so does its military for a few months to years in which leaves them wide open for follow up attacks. Normally however when an empire is defeated it is overrun by the kingdom/empire that attacked. 600 BCE - 600 CE Empire of Alexander the Great:  Gabe - Alexander the great was kind of an i want everything kind of guy no but wherever he went he conquered very good at military strategy lets skip a little real quick after he died his successors made a coin with him on it with horns which were marking him as a deity which means he was a huge role model you could say a symbol of power he was the man people looked up to he was actually only 5 to round 5’8 but that was normal for them because they didn't eat as much meat as other empires. Audrey - Alexander III, better known as Alexander the Great, was 20 years old when his extremely short reign began, lasting only 12 years. For how short his reign was, Alexander was very successful, especially when it came to conquering. Just like his reign, Alexander’s life was very short, ending in 323 BC when he was only 32 years old. Some people say he died from alcohol poisoning, some say it was from direct poisoning, but it is likely that he could have died because of a disease. Ella - A man known as Philip of Macedon came to power in 359 BC. His father had previously been the king of Macedon. Both of his older brother died which left him to be a regent for his infant nephew. He eventually possessed full power and ended up taking over a large majority of Greek city-states. He went on to almost unify all of them. Ben - Philip is later killed at his daughter’s wedding, by his royal bodyguard Pausanias in 336 BCE at the capital of macedonia, Aegae. This caused his son alexander to take control of the large kingdom that philip left behind. The one who assassinated tried to run away to his associates outside but tripped on a vine and got killed by philips. bodyguards Emma - Shortly after his father’s death, Alexander was crowned king and he eliminated any potential threats to his rule. The Greek city-states were now under his control. He then began his conquest of the Persian Empire which his father Philip had been planning before his untimely demise. Skylar - in 5th century BCE Greece started with the Persian invasion and ended with Peloponnesian war. Alexander the Great was one of the most powerful conquers in human history. Alexander the Great started off by taking control over his father’s empire after his death. Alexander wanted to do what his father wanted to do before he died, which was conquer the persian empire. So he put one of his generals, Antipater in charger of Greece. Alexander leads his troops on the greatest adventures of all time. Alexander won the battle at Granicus river, then Issus, Darius the third tries to negotiate but Alexander kept saying no, he wants to be the king of Asia. Eventually darius and alexander meet at Guagamela and alexander wins again. Darius’ empire was falling and what making the falling more official is when alexander takes his troops to Achaemenid, which is the capital of Persepolis and alexander defeats them once again. - Ethan - After Alexander’s father’s death, Alexander started focusing on India. He won some battles before he made it to the Ganges River. He planned to cross the Ganges to get to the rest of India. His tired troops decided that it was to much work and that they were already tired so they refused to go. In the end they turned home, and in 323 BCE, Alexander died to, what was most likely, disease.  Hunter- In the Kingdom of Thrace, during the reign of Lysimachus- a successor of Alexander the Great who lived from 361 BCE to 323 BCE, a coin was issued. The coin had Alexander’s face with ram horns on each side of his crown, the ram horns were a symbol of an Egyption God known as Amun or Zeus, who is often combined with Amun- from whom Alexander claimed descent. Flanked with these horns, Alexander had the reputation of a Deity.     600 BCE - 600 CE Rise of Rome: 600 BCE -  Gabe - the Rome empire came to power when  a group of noblemen were like ok the king sucks he's out and so they kicked him out and made the two consuls which were two people which were pretty close to a king except one could veto the others actions this was so one person could not be oh so powerful They also split the people into plebeians and patricians which were plebeians being common folk and patricians being people of noble blood This was the roman republic    Audrey - Legend has it, Rome was named after Romulus, one of twin brothers that are abandoned and raised by a “she-wolf”. Eventually, Romulus kills Remus (his twin brother) and becomes the first king of Rome. Other historians now think that it was the other way around, that the city of rome needed a founding story, and the whole thing was just that, a story. Ben - Rome was founded in 753 BCE (even though it’s mostly a myth and most believe in was founded a little later). Rome then founds the Rome Republic, a state in central rome, making them a little more influential in 509 BCE. Then much later than that the Punic wars happened between Rome and Carthage and consisted of three wars. The first war took place from 264-241 BCE, the second from 218-201 BCE, and the third from 149-146 BCE. in total it lasted from 264 to 146. Rome ended up winning and destroying and conquering Carthage. Ella - The Romans did not plan to build an empire but it came upon them as they ran into conflict with the surrounding city-states, kingdoms, and empires. They had to find a way to use the territories they conquered.  Most of the places the Romans conquered were allowed to keep the political and cultural ways they had, the only requirement was that they provide soldiers for the Roman Empire. Emma - The politics of Rome reflected the structure of their society; it too was divided into the two social classes, patricians and plebeians. Those in the upper class were allowed to hold political office, and then become a senator, but those of the lower class were not. However, the plebeians were able gain more political influence over time. - Ethan - The political system of Rome was mainly based on military rank/power. The “Comitia Centuriata” which was named for the century, was pretty much a group of 100 soldiers. Although, this 100 person unit was the base amount of people, it was not always exact in real situations. Skylar - I’m going to talk about the Punic wars that went on between Rome and Carthage. The Punic wars consist of three major battles, The first one lasted 23 years, from 264 BCE-241 BCE. It was at Agrigentum it was over the island of Sicily. Rome wins most smaller battles. Then Carthage leaves. Rome wanted Carthage to pay them for the damages. Rome built a stronger navy. 240 to 248 BCE there was a Mercenary war. The second Punic war was between 218-201 BCE. The third and final war was between 149-146 BCE where Rome basically destroys Carthage, ending a 700 year long war. 8.Hunter- Rome went from a city in the middle of the italy peninsula to one of the strongest empires in history. 600 CE From Roman Republic to Roman Empire:  Gabe - in 27 bce a guy named augustus caesar came and was like nope im the ruler “emperor” so basically the king and he started an autocratic government which is where he was the guy who called all the shots he didn't expand rome much in his time but he did do some things that changed the political and economic structure of rome      Audrey - Gaius Julius Caesar’s life really marked the transition between the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire, even though, in his lifetime, Rome was still a republic and never actually considered an empire. The reason I say this is the unofficial time that the transition occurred is, that at the time of Julius Caesar, the Roman Republic’s structure very much resembled the structure of an empire, so it kind of seems like it already switched. Ben - Julius Caesar then illegally crosses the rubicon and most of rome’s senators choose to move over to greece. This causes a sort of civil war between rome and greece. After Julius crosses the rubicon the senators send a popular general Pompey to go fight with his soldiers but they decide to retreat because they thought julius’s army was unbeatable. Then the other senators also retreat, giving julius control of rome again. But it would be only a matter of time before the senators return to try and retake rome. Ella - Julius Caesar was assassinated, and in his will he stated that his nephew Octavian would be his adopted son. Too other men Antony and Lepidus were big supporters of Caesars and they got together with Octavian to form a triumvirate, which was known as the second triumvirate. Unlike the first triumvirate which was between Julius Caesar, Pompey, and Crassus, this triumvirate had legal backing. These three men gained lots of power over the Roman republic. Emma -  The power he gained was not limited to the prolonged time in which he held office. A major part of it was that he now had complete control over the military, unlike before when the elected consuls served as commanders. He was also now the high priest, or Pontifex Maximus, and in charge of the census for taxation. He kept these powers by acting like they were still separate offices that could be held by someone else.  - Ethan - Roman money/currency wasn’t exactly economy based but politically based as well. Julius Caesar was the first emperor to put his face on currency and since then emperors of Rome have done this. Before Caesar, only deceased Romans and Roman gods were on currency. This strengthened the connection of the emperor and the economy while popularizing the current emperor. These emperors used this systems to popularize the next candidate they favored. Skylar - The Roman Empire began in 27 BCE when Augustus became the main ruler. Augustus is Julius Caesar’s adopted son. He never took the name king or emperor preferred to call himself princeps, first citizen, or primus inter pares. Augustus never expanded the territory because it was already as big as it could possibly get. 8.Hunter- The Roman Republic was a small city in Italy, after a large military growth and a gaining of power over many neighboring countries the Roman Republic quickly grew to the Roman Empire. 600 BCE - 600 CE The Roman Empire: Audrey - Pax Romana is a name that a two hundred year long time period is often referred to as, and it means “Roman Peace”. This name came from the time when Octavian was emperor, which was from 27 BCE to 180 CE. It was a relatively good time for the Roman Empire, even though there was still quite a bit of conflict it was really a pretty peaceful time hence the name. Gabe - it was a good time for the roman empire augustus caesar or Octavian had complete control over the military which was one of the ways he became the emperor But the romans liked the belief of having military governments temporary which is why He took control as a stand in governor of one of the provinces where the majority of roman legions were stationed giving him control over the military while still looking like he’s doing a favor for the people        Ella - Nero was a really bad guy. He was known for the fire in 64AD that a large amount of Romans died in. People think Nero started the fire to make room for a palace. Aside of that, he killed a lot of people including his own mom. He was also known for persecuting christians. Sometimes he would dip them in oil and set them on fire for a source of light in his garden.   Ben - After a few different anti-christian ruler come along, a new emperor decides to embrace christianity and his name was constantine. He was the first christian emperor and he even got baptised. Constantine also moves the capital more east and renames it to Constantinople. - Ethan - Augustus was followed by Tiberius who was Augustus’s step-son. Both had relatively long careers as emperors. Augustus had a career lasting close to 40 years while Tiberius had a 24 year long career. Caligula, one of Augustus’s great nephews, was viewed as a sadist. While he was emperor for a while he was quickly assassinated, he had a lot of people killed during his term of about 4 years.  Emma - After the Julio Claudian Dynasty of Rome came the Flavian Dynasty. This dynasty began in 69 AD when Vespasian was made emperor by the senate after the defeat of Vitellius. He ruled for ten years until 79 AD when he died. He was then succeeded by his oldest son, Titus. This marked the first emperor of Rome to be followed by his own son. He ruled for only two years, until 81 AD when he died from an illness. His rule was then followed by his brother Domitian who held the position from 81 to 96 AD. This dynasty was known for building the colosseum and the destruction of the second temple in Jerusalem. Skylar - One of the most important pieces from Augustan, Rome is the Ara Pacis, Ara Pacis means altar of peace. Augustus was the first emperor of Rome. The Ara Pacis was basically rebuilt from the fragments they found, some from the 17th century, but most were from the 20th century. The altar was used for sacrifices. This Altar has a political and spiritual meaning. 8.Hunter- The Roman Empire was an extremely powerful empire capturing Jerusalem, Cannan, and i believe nearly one hundred other provinces. 600 BCE - 600 CE Ancient and Imperial China: Audrey - The Shang Dynasty ended in 1046 BCE, when the Zhou (pronounced jo) Dynasty defeated the last Shang emperor, Di Xin, in the Battle of Muye. Historical records show that Di Xin had become a corrupt ruler, and the Zhous said they could only overthrow him because of the Mandate of Heaven which is an idea that if a ruler became incapable or corrupt the a guiding force in the universe would throw them out and replace them. Gabe - Zhou empire did not last long though because the provinces were giving their support to the governor basically of their providence instead of the zhou emperor so slowly the states became more powerful than the emperor himself hence the warring states period      3.Ella - The Zhou Dynasty collapsed at a slow pace over hundreds of years. As this happened, rulers of the surrounding areas gained more power than the king. This was the beginning of a period that was known as the Warring State period, which lasted from about 475 BC to 221 BC. Nearby, Qin, a western state, conquered its surrounding states and established their own dynasty. Ben - The Qin dynasty began to rise to it’s empire state in 221 BCE. The founder was Qin Shi Huang, a legalist (legalist is when law is enforced very strictly) that hated freedom of expression and freedom in general. A historian quoted him once about how he hates historians and wants all non-state historians that wrote history before Qin dynasty to be burned. “[Historians] hold it a mark of fame to defy the ruler, regard it as lofty to take a dissenting stance, and they lead the lesser officials in fabricating slander. If behavior such as this is not prohibited, then in upper circles the authority of the ruler will be compromised, and in lower ones, cliques will form. Therefore it should be prohibited. I therefore request that all records of the historians other than those of the state of Qin be burned.” - Ethan - Many differing beliefs are made vocal during this time period. 3 of which are Confucianism, Daoism, and Legalism. Confucianism, created by Confucius, was based on reform of the status, class, and hierarchy systems. Legalism is more based off of strict laws and harsh punishments. Daoism is more of lawless following what they believe is right at the time. Emma - Confucius, or Kongzi which means Master Kong. His teachings were almost entirely based around morality and having a personal sense of right and wrong. He wasn’t really teaching specific rules of what was good or bad, rather teaching people be conscious of the intent behind their actions. Skylar - During the Warring States period in China from 475-221 BCE China was divided into seven competing nations. The fiefs were gaining more importance as the Zhou dynasty was ending and were becoming states. One of the 7 states were Qin. the other 6 states were Chu, Zhou, Wei, Han, Yan, and Qi. The first leader of Qin was King Zheng, later on he became Qin Shi Huangdi, he would also go on to be the first leader of the Qin dynasty. People say that the Qin dynasty ended the warring states period but it was really when Qin conquested the other states. 8. 600 BCE - 600 CE Early Judaism: Audrey - Judaism stands out to historians because the Jews were monotheists, meaning they believed and worshiped only one God. This made the Jews unique to most other societies which were polytheistic and worshiped multiple Gods. Gabe - The jews lived in the kingdoms of israel and judah the assyrians conquered these two empires and then the babylonians which was called the babylonian exile which sent allot of the jews out of these kingdoms 3 . Ella - In the Hebrew bible, It talks about Abraham moving from the city of Ur to Canaan with his family. It is Questionable whether  the Ur they are talking about was the Sumatran city in lower Mesopotamia or a Ur in Upper Mesopotamia. Ben - One of the most important jewish prophets was Moses. Moses was born at a time where the emperor was killing off every boy that is born because of his fear that if they grew too strong they would overtake him. To hide Moses from the emperor’s forces his mother put him in a basket and let him float down the river. The emperor/pharaoh’s daughter finds moses and raises him into the royal family, moses one day is enraged by a slaver beating a jewish slave and kills the slavemaster and retreats out of the city in fear of punishment. He goes to Mount Sinai but the Lord tells him to go back and free every Jewish slave. So he goes back and frees them and splits the red sea to escape. He brings the people back to the mountain where he receives the ten commandments. They then travel for 40 years and he reestablishes the jewish people in Canaan. - Ethan - Jews lived under Roman rulers while still being allowed their own traditions. There was some Jewish revolting but mainly they were crushed every time. Soon after the Romans renamed Judea into Syria Palaestina. This destroyed the connection of the Jews to the land. Skylar - Abraham is one of the significant patriarchs, the other two are Jacob and Isaac. Abraham’s first son is called Ishmael. He had Ishmael with his wife sarah’s servant because they didn’t think they could have kids. Ishmael is viewed as the progenitor, the patriarch for the arab people. According to biblical accounts Isaac was born when Sarah was in her 90s and Abraham was around 100 years old. Emma - Abraham’s son Isaac was the second significant patriarch. He was the first one of the three to inherit the covenant that his father Abraham had received. Later in his life he married Rebekah who gave birth to their twin sons Jacob and Esau, Jacob being the last of the three patriarchs.   That’s all the time we have for today. THank for joining us outside of the box that is learning.

Welcome back to The Emancipation Podcast Station - the place to hear about history researched and retold through the eyes of Middle school and HS students.   600 BCE - 600 CE Second-Wave Civilizations   Ancient Persia: 600 BCE -  Gabe - Ancient persia or the achaemenid persia which was called this because the ruler cyrus’s great great grandfather's name was achaemenid and he started as a small independant city under the medes for protection and then cyrus got in an argument with his grandfather Astyages and won taking over persia he then established a system by capturing and relocating and adding a power over every city by accomplishing this he claimed the name Cyrus the great Audrey - The Persians didn’t actually use the name “Persian”, instead they called themselves Aryans. They called where they lived Aran (there are other variations of the name) which make the modern version of the name, Iran, probably more accurate. This is similar to how the Greeks referred to their homeland as Hellas, while the name Greece was a Latin idea. Ben - Cyrus, the ruler of Persia then proceeded to conquer various empires such as the Median empire, the Lydian empire in around 540 BCE, and he eventually got his hands on the neo-babylonian empire in 539 BCE. But while Cyrus’s son Cambyses II is out trying to take hold of egypt and libya, another person comes along claiming to be bardiya, Cyrus’s second son. So Cambyses has to rush back to Persia to make sure the throne is not taken from him but dies on the way there. No one really knows how Cambyses or Cyrus died specifically though. (BTW note for other people, shahanshah is pronounced shaw-on-shaw) Ella - Cyrus was a military commander but he realized that he needed the regions he conquered to stay in good economic order if he wanted them to provide him with economic tribute revenues. To achieve his goals he left rulers in the areas that he conquered after he conquered them. Skylar - Persia was one of the greatest empire and civilization in the world. The Achaemenid empire at its peak had about 50 million people. Thats half of the people that were in the world at that time, according to historians. The Achaemenid Dynasty/empire ends when Greece unifies under Philip of Macedon in early to mid century bce. Alexander the Great wanted to mix their cultures but he dies so they split again. Emma - In ancient Mesopotamia when they conquered a nation they would break up their political and cultural systems so that they wouldn’t be a threat. Though when Cyrus came into power he switched it, allowing those he conquered to keep their separate societies in a tributary state. While it seemed like he was being kind, he most likely was trying to keep their loyalty. - Ethan - As Cambyses died in 522 BCE, he was succeeded by a general titled “Darius”. Darius claimed that he was slightly related to Cambyses II but many other people challenged Darius’s throneship. This resulted, in some places, rebellion against the Achaemenids. Darius soon made himself to be the clear ruler Persia and re established rule of the rebels. He also reorganized the empire into satrapies, and for each satrapy there would be a satrap. 600 CE Classical Greece:  Gabe - If you didnt know its called Classical Greece and Ancient Persia because Persia was in the Ancient Era and Greece is in the Classical era so Classical Greece cities were built between mountains in valleys and on coastal plain so by the sea there was a time somewhere around 1200 bce they were in this war called the trojan war there's a story of a huge horse called the trojan horse it was in these wars so in this war this guy named homer he said that people came from the sea while they were having the trojan war and they were attacking them and driving them off the coast so they built these city states called polis which were like fortified cities so the people could have protection Audrey - The Greek Peninsula has been settled by humans for thousands of years, but an important part of Greek history starts when the Mycenaean Empire falls and the Greek Dark Ages begin. It is called the “Dark Ages” because there really aren’t many historical records from that point in time, and that was around 1100-800 BC. The major events happened in the exiting of the Greek Dark Ages, and this is when things that Ancient Greece is really known for began, like the Oracle at Delphi and the Olympic Games. (if someone wants to explain these) Ben - The difference between sparta and athens was that in sparta social status wasn’t decided based on how much money you had or how smart you were, it was about your military ranking. The spartans political system was unique in that it had two kings that were from different families that ruled. But on the lower side of the political rankings was the helots. Helots were like slaves but had more freedom, helots still had families but they had to work for the state and couldn’t really do anything else. Helots were still considered owned but they were owned by the state. Helots were collected from the villages sparta pillaged. Emma - Greece’s structure was was pretty different from other societies at the time. While the desperate colonies(?) all recognized the “mother” city-state, they were all independent for the majority of the time. Their shared religion and culture was what gave them all a sense of unity. Ella - Ancient Greece was made up of many independent city states because of Greeces complicated geography. All of these communities were separated by mountains, hills, and water. Greece wasn't a unified nation, instead it was a bunch of connected communities that shared religion and beliefs. - Ethan - The kings of Sparta were priests of Zeus and they were included in a gerousia, or council of elders, which was the highest court of Sparta. Also, there was an executive committee consisting of 5 ephors which were chosen by the people, of the people. Skylar - The name Greece is not what people that live in Greece call it. They call it Hellas. Nowadays they don’t call it Greece and back in the “Ancient Greece” days they didn’t say Greece they said Hellas. The word Hellas comes from Hellen, viewed as the progenitor. The Hellastic people are the people that live in Greece. In late 6th century BCE Athens was the dominant economic power. Athens was full of wealth as silver was just founded in the mountains around the area. Athens had an amazing trading system with other Greek city-states. Trading with other city-states was super  important to Athens because it didn’t have the agricultural conditions to supply enough grain for its population. A series of laws were written and put in place by a statesman named Draco around 621 BCE. They didn’t stay too long because they were super harsh. Another man named Solon was called to change the laws, he created a series of laws that equalized political power. Hunter- Ancient Greece consisted of over hundreds of different independent city-states, somewhat due to the geography of Greece. Greece communities were separated by mountains, hills, and water. Rather than one large nation, Ancient Greece was more like a system of communities with a shared language and religion that sometimes led to a common sense of belonging.    600 BCE - 600 CE The rise and fall of empires:  Gabe - I'm going to start by saying an empire is a small city or state that claims a large amount of land which is usually broke up into provinces  empires rise and fall for different reasons they usually expand through military conquest which is how the romans the persians and the Maurya empire in india expanded but they progressed in different ways the Maurya empire political sabotage and religious conversion so the people turn against their own country Audrey - An empire forms when a ruler, that already controls some territory, gains control of more territory for whatever reason, and that could be from military tactics, a weak neighboring area or really anything like that. Once the ruler has that territory under their control, they gain land and people. With the power they now have, this ruler could tax the people for their own wealth and/or use them for a better army. The empire could then keep expanding in this way until it collapsed. Ben - After the fall of the Qin dynasty the Han empire began to rise because of all the power that was up for grabs. The Han dynasty began in 206 BCE. They revived the way of Confucianism to unite the people and give them more reasons to fight and become a larger empire. Han china started to fall in 2nd century CE and eventually reached its demise in 220 CE, it mainly fell because of a religious divide between the people and the natural disasters that caused food shortages which snowballed into a bad economy. Ella - Empires all grow for different reasons whether its strong military, political sabotage, or religious conversation, but the Romans were not out to conquer territory. They did get involved in several wars but after they defeated their enemies they would offer their victims a small amount of citizenship in return for loyalty to the Roman empire.    Emma - There are also several different factors that can lead to the fall of an empire. Each of these factors will usually reflect those that led to the rise of the empire. Things such as a economic collapse, the weakening of military forces, or the death/assassination of a leader are common causes of a fall. - Ethan - A common example of an empire falling is Persia. The Achaemenid empire had internal issues already but had structure still. In 334 BCE Alexander attacked and in 4 years general Darius the Third lied dead. He was actually killed by one of his own generals and when the throne lied empty Alexander took the reins. Skylar - The rise of empires is great everyone’s all happy, then usually right when everything gets normal, the empire falls for different reasons. Rather it’s they have no more money, they get taken over by another empire, or another reason. The Roman empire took hundreds of years to create. They had weak neighbors so it was easy for them to take over that area. Hunter-The fall of an empire can be because of an outbreak of war and rebellion, when an empire falls so does its military for a few months to years in which leaves them wide open for follow up attacks. Normally however when an empire is defeated it is overrun by the kingdom/empire that attacked. 600 BCE - 600 CE Empire of Alexander the Great:  Gabe - Alexander the great was kind of an i want everything kind of guy no but wherever he went he conquered very good at military strategy lets skip a little real quick after he died his successors made a coin with him on it with horns which were marking him as a deity which means he was a huge role model you could say a symbol of power he was the man people looked up to he was actually only 5 to round 5’8 but that was normal for them because they didn't eat as much meat as other empires. Audrey - Alexander III, better known as Alexander the Great, was 20 years old when his extremely short reign began, lasting only 12 years. For how short his reign was, Alexander was very successful, especially when it came to conquering. Just like his reign, Alexander’s life was very short, ending in 323 BC when he was only 32 years old. Some people say he died from alcohol poisoning, some say it was from direct poisoning, but it is likely that he could have died because of a disease. Ella - A man known as Philip of Macedon came to power in 359 BC. His father had previously been the king of Macedon. Both of his older brother died which left him to be a regent for his infant nephew. He eventually possessed full power and ended up taking over a large majority of Greek city-states. He went on to almost unify all of them. Ben - Philip is later killed at his daughter’s wedding, by his royal bodyguard Pausanias in 336 BCE at the capital of macedonia, Aegae. This caused his son alexander to take control of the large kingdom that philip left behind. The one who assassinated tried to run away to his associates outside but tripped on a vine and got killed by philips. bodyguards Emma - Shortly after his father’s death, Alexander was crowned king and he eliminated any potential threats to his rule. The Greek city-states were now under his control. He then began his conquest of the Persian Empire which his father Philip had been planning before his untimely demise. Skylar - in 5th century BCE Greece started with the Persian invasion and ended with Peloponnesian war. Alexander the Great was one of the most powerful conquers in human history. Alexander the Great started off by taking control over his father’s empire after his death. Alexander wanted to do what his father wanted to do before he died, which was conquer the persian empire. So he put one of his generals, Antipater in charger of Greece. Alexander leads his troops on the greatest adventures of all time. Alexander won the battle at Granicus river, then Issus, Darius the third tries to negotiate but Alexander kept saying no, he wants to be the king of Asia. Eventually darius and alexander meet at Guagamela and alexander wins again. Darius’ empire was falling and what making the falling more official is when alexander takes his troops to Achaemenid, which is the capital of Persepolis and alexander defeats them once again. - Ethan - After Alexander’s father’s death, Alexander started focusing on India. He won some battles before he made it to the Ganges River. He planned to cross the Ganges to get to the rest of India. His tired troops decided that it was to much work and that they were already tired so they refused to go. In the end they turned home, and in 323 BCE, Alexander died to, what was most likely, disease.  Hunter- In the Kingdom of Thrace, during the reign of Lysimachus- a successor of Alexander the Great who lived from 361 BCE to 323 BCE, a coin was issued. The coin had Alexander’s face with ram horns on each side of his crown, the ram horns were a symbol of an Egyption God known as Amun or Zeus, who is often combined with Amun- from whom Alexander claimed descent. Flanked with these horns, Alexander had the reputation of a Deity.     600 BCE - 600 CE Rise of Rome: 600 BCE -  Gabe - the Rome empire came to power when  a group of noblemen were like ok the king sucks he's out and so they kicked him out and made the two consuls which were two people which were pretty close to a king except one could veto the others actions this was so one person could not be oh so powerful They also split the people into plebeians and patricians which were plebeians being common folk and patricians being people of noble blood This was the roman republic    Audrey - Legend has it, Rome was named after Romulus, one of twin brothers that are abandoned and raised by a “she-wolf”. Eventually, Romulus kills Remus (his twin brother) and becomes the first king of Rome. Other historians now think that it was the other way around, that the city of rome needed a founding story, and the whole thing was just that, a story. Ben - Rome was founded in 753 BCE (even though it’s mostly a myth and most believe in was founded a little later). Rome then founds the Rome Republic, a state in central rome, making them a little more influential in 509 BCE. Then much later than that the Punic wars happened between Rome and Carthage and consisted of three wars. The first war took place from 264-241 BCE, the second from 218-201 BCE, and the third from 149-146 BCE. in total it lasted from 264 to 146. Rome ended up winning and destroying and conquering Carthage. Ella - The Romans did not plan to build an empire but it came upon them as they ran into conflict with the surrounding city-states, kingdoms, and empires. They had to find a way to use the territories they conquered.  Most of the places the Romans conquered were allowed to keep the political and cultural ways they had, the only requirement was that they provide soldiers for the Roman Empire. Emma - The politics of Rome reflected the structure of their society; it too was divided into the two social classes, patricians and plebeians. Those in the upper class were allowed to hold political office, and then become a senator, but those of the lower class were not. However, the plebeians were able gain more political influence over time. - Ethan - The political system of Rome was mainly based on military rank/power. The “Comitia Centuriata” which was named for the century, was pretty much a group of 100 soldiers. Although, this 100 person unit was the base amount of people, it was not always exact in real situations. Skylar - I’m going to talk about the Punic wars that went on between Rome and Carthage. The Punic wars consist of three major battles, The first one lasted 23 years, from 264 BCE-241 BCE. It was at Agrigentum it was over the island of Sicily. Rome wins most smaller battles. Then Carthage leaves. Rome wanted Carthage to pay them for the damages. Rome built a stronger navy. 240 to 248 BCE there was a Mercenary war. The second Punic war was between 218-201 BCE. The third and final war was between 149-146 BCE where Rome basically destroys Carthage, ending a 700 year long war. 8.Hunter- Rome went from a city in the middle of the italy peninsula to one of the strongest empires in history. 600 CE From Roman Republic to Roman Empire:  Gabe - in 27 bce a guy named augustus caesar came and was like nope im the ruler “emperor” so basically the king and he started an autocratic government which is where he was the guy who called all the shots he didn't expand rome much in his time but he did do some things that changed the political and economic structure of rome      Audrey - Gaius Julius Caesar’s life really marked the transition between the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire, even though, in his lifetime, Rome was still a republic and never actually considered an empire. The reason I say this is the unofficial time that the transition occurred is, that at the time of Julius Caesar, the Roman Republic’s structure very much resembled the structure of an empire, so it kind of seems like it already switched. Ben - Julius Caesar then illegally crosses the rubicon and most of rome’s senators choose to move over to greece. This causes a sort of civil war between rome and greece. After Julius crosses the rubicon the senators send a popular general Pompey to go fight with his soldiers but they decide to retreat because they thought julius’s army was unbeatable. Then the other senators also retreat, giving julius control of rome again. But it would be only a matter of time before the senators return to try and retake rome. Ella - Julius Caesar was assassinated, and in his will he stated that his nephew Octavian would be his adopted son. Too other men Antony and Lepidus were big supporters of Caesars and they got together with Octavian to form a triumvirate, which was known as the second triumvirate. Unlike the first triumvirate which was between Julius Caesar, Pompey, and Crassus, this triumvirate had legal backing. These three men gained lots of power over the Roman republic. Emma -  The power he gained was not limited to the prolonged time in which he held office. A major part of it was that he now had complete control over the military, unlike before when the elected consuls served as commanders. He was also now the high priest, or Pontifex Maximus, and in charge of the census for taxation. He kept these powers by acting like they were still separate offices that could be held by someone else.  - Ethan - Roman money/currency wasn’t exactly economy based but politically based as well. Julius Caesar was the first emperor to put his face on currency and since then emperors of Rome have done this. Before Caesar, only deceased Romans and Roman gods were on currency. This strengthened the connection of the emperor and the economy while popularizing the current emperor. These emperors used this systems to popularize the next candidate they favored. Skylar - The Roman Empire began in 27 BCE when Augustus became the main ruler. Augustus is Julius Caesar’s adopted son. He never took the name king or emperor preferred to call himself princeps, first citizen, or primus inter pares. Augustus never expanded the territory because it was already as big as it could possibly get. 8.Hunter- The Roman Republic was a small city in Italy, after a large military growth and a gaining of power over many neighboring countries the Roman Republic quickly grew to the Roman Empire. 600 BCE - 600 CE The Roman Empire: Audrey - Pax Romana is a name that a two hundred year long time period is often referred to as, and it means “Roman Peace”. This name came from the time when Octavian was emperor, which was from 27 BCE to 180 CE. It was a relatively good time for the Roman Empire, even though there was still quite a bit of conflict it was really a pretty peaceful time hence the name. Gabe - it was a good time for the roman empire augustus caesar or Octavian had complete control over the military which was one of the ways he became the emperor But the romans liked the belief of having military governments temporary which is why He took control as a stand in governor of one of the provinces where the majority of roman legions were stationed giving him control over the military while still looking like he’s doing a favor for the people        Ella - Nero was a really bad guy. He was known for the fire in 64AD that a large amount of Romans died in. People think Nero started the fire to make room for a palace. Aside of that, he killed a lot of people including his own mom. He was also known for persecuting christians. Sometimes he would dip them in oil and set them on fire for a source of light in his garden.   Ben - After a few different anti-christian ruler come along, a new emperor decides to embrace christianity and his name was constantine. He was the first christian emperor and he even got baptised. Constantine also moves the capital more east and renames it to Constantinople. - Ethan - Augustus was followed by Tiberius who was Augustus’s step-son. Both had relatively long careers as emperors. Augustus had a career lasting close to 40 years while Tiberius had a 24 year long career. Caligula, one of Augustus’s great nephews, was viewed as a sadist. While he was emperor for a while he was quickly assassinated, he had a lot of people killed during his term of about 4 years.  Emma - After the Julio Claudian Dynasty of Rome came the Flavian Dynasty. This dynasty began in 69 AD when Vespasian was made emperor by the senate after the defeat of Vitellius. He ruled for ten years until 79 AD when he died. He was then succeeded by his oldest son, Titus. This marked the first emperor of Rome to be followed by his own son. He ruled for only two years, until 81 AD when he died from an illness. His rule was then followed by his brother Domitian who held the position from 81 to 96 AD. This dynasty was known for building the colosseum and the destruction of the second temple in Jerusalem. Skylar - One of the most important pieces from Augustan, Rome is the Ara Pacis, Ara Pacis means altar of peace. Augustus was the first emperor of Rome. The Ara Pacis was basically rebuilt from the fragments they found, some from the 17th century, but most were from the 20th century. The altar was used for sacrifices. This Altar has a political and spiritual meaning. 8.Hunter- The Roman Empire was an extremely powerful empire capturing Jerusalem, Cannan, and i believe nearly one hundred other provinces. 600 BCE - 600 CE Ancient and Imperial China: Audrey - The Shang Dynasty ended in 1046 BCE, when the Zhou (pronounced jo) Dynasty defeated the last Shang emperor, Di Xin, in the Battle of Muye. Historical records show that Di Xin had become a corrupt ruler, and the Zhous said they could only overthrow him because of the Mandate of Heaven which is an idea that if a ruler became incapable or corrupt the a guiding force in the universe would throw them out and replace them. Gabe - Zhou empire did not last long though because the provinces were giving their support to the governor basically of their providence instead of the zhou emperor so slowly the states became more powerful than the emperor himself hence the warring states period      3.Ella - The Zhou Dynasty collapsed at a slow pace over hundreds of years. As this happened, rulers of the surrounding areas gained more power than the king. This was the beginning of a period that was known as the Warring State period, which lasted from about 475 BC to 221 BC. Nearby, Qin, a western state, conquered its surrounding states and established their own dynasty. Ben - The Qin dynasty began to rise to it’s empire state in 221 BCE. The founder was Qin Shi Huang, a legalist (legalist is when law is enforced very strictly) that hated freedom of expression and freedom in general. A historian quoted him once about how he hates historians and wants all non-state historians that wrote history before Qin dynasty to be burned. “[Historians] hold it a mark of fame to defy the ruler, regard it as lofty to take a dissenting stance, and they lead the lesser officials in fabricating slander. If behavior such as this is not prohibited, then in upper circles the authority of the ruler will be compromised, and in lower ones, cliques will form. Therefore it should be prohibited. I therefore request that all records of the historians other than those of the state of Qin be burned.” - Ethan - Many differing beliefs are made vocal during this time period. 3 of which are Confucianism, Daoism, and Legalism. Confucianism, created by Confucius, was based on reform of the status, class, and hierarchy systems. Legalism is more based off of strict laws and harsh punishments. Daoism is more of lawless following what they believe is right at the time. Emma - Confucius, or Kongzi which means Master Kong. His teachings were almost entirely based around morality and having a personal sense of right and wrong. He wasn’t really teaching specific rules of what was good or bad, rather teaching people be conscious of the intent behind their actions. Skylar - During the Warring States period in China from 475-221 BCE China was divided into seven competing nations. The fiefs were gaining more importance as the Zhou dynasty was ending and were becoming states. One of the 7 states were Qin. the other 6 states were Chu, Zhou, Wei, Han, Yan, and Qi. The first leader of Qin was King Zheng, later on he became Qin Shi Huangdi, he would also go on to be the first leader of the Qin dynasty. People say that the Qin dynasty ended the warring states period but it was really when Qin conquested the other states. 8. 600 BCE - 600 CE Early Judaism: Audrey - Judaism stands out to historians because the Jews were monotheists, meaning they believed and worshiped only one God. This made the Jews unique to most other societies which were polytheistic and worshiped multiple Gods. Gabe - The jews lived in the kingdoms of israel and judah the assyrians conquered these two empires and then the babylonians which was called the babylonian exile which sent allot of the jews out of these kingdoms 3 . Ella - In the Hebrew bible, It talks about Abraham moving from the city of Ur to Canaan with his family. It is Questionable whether  the Ur they are talking about was the Sumatran city in lower Mesopotamia or a Ur in Upper Mesopotamia. Ben - One of the most important jewish prophets was Moses. Moses was born at a time where the emperor was killing off every boy that is born because of his fear that if they grew too strong they would overtake him. To hide Moses from the emperor’s forces his mother put him in a basket and let him float down the river. The emperor/pharaoh’s daughter finds moses and raises him into the royal family, moses one day is enraged by a slaver beating a jewish slave and kills the slavemaster and retreats out of the city in fear of punishment. He goes to Mount Sinai but the Lord tells him to go back and free every Jewish slave. So he goes back and frees them and splits the red sea to escape. He brings the people back to the mountain where he receives the ten commandments. They then travel for 40 years and he reestablishes the jewish people in Canaan. - Ethan - Jews lived under Roman rulers while still being allowed their own traditions. There was some Jewish revolting but mainly they were crushed every time. Soon after the Romans renamed Judea into Syria Palaestina. This destroyed the connection of the Jews to the land. Skylar - Abraham is one of the significant patriarchs, the other two are Jacob and Isaac. Abraham’s first son is called Ishmael. He had Ishmael with his wife sarah’s servant because they didn’t think they could have kids. Ishmael is viewed as the progenitor, the patriarch for the arab people. According to biblical accounts Isaac was born when Sarah was in her 90s and Abraham was around 100 years old. Emma - Abraham’s son Isaac was the second significant patriarch. He was the first one of the three to inherit the covenant that his father Abraham had received. Later in his life he married Rebekah who gave birth to their twin sons Jacob and Esau, Jacob being the last of the three patriarchs.   That’s all the time we have for today. THank for joining us outside of the box that is learning.

The first epistle of Paul to the Corinthians is a very, very important letter for us because it so thoroughly captures the problems that we face as moderns living in this modern age. The reason is, of course, that Corinth was the most American city in the New Testament -- it was a resort city, the capital of pleasure in the Roman Empire. If you remember your geography you know it was located on the Peloponnesian peninsula, and the conditions under which the Corinthians lived were very much like the conditions under which we live, or to put that the other way, the conditions under which we live today are Corinthian conditions. Corinth was a beautiful city, a lovely city of palms and beautiful buildings, the center of pleasure for the whole empire, and it was devoted to two things -- the pursuit of pleasure (largely passion), and of wisdom. It was a Greek city, and its inhabitants loved to philosophize, and they were given to what Paul calls, "the wisdom of words."

Tour guides from Scotland recommend their favorite Caledonian experiences, from elegant Edinburgh to clan castles in the Highlands, and even budget getaways for backpackers. Then a pair of world travelers explain why they’ve settled down in Greece’s Nafplio, the picturesque Peloponnesian town that’s a getaway for big-city Athenians, a jumping-off point for history-rich sights nearby, and delightful in its own right. For more information on Travel with Rick Steves - including episode descriptions, program archives and related details - visit www.ricksteves.com.

What can the rise of Japan and Germany in the last century - or the rise of Athens 2,000 years earlier - tell us about the risks facing the US and China today? Is a US-China war inevitable? Graham Allison, among the most astute geostrategic observers of his generation, terms this “Thucydides’s Trap.” He takes us back to the Peloponnesian war to remind us of the timeless insights of the historian Thucydides: When a rising power rivals a ruling power, danger is near. In fact, in 12 of the 16 occasions this global power pattern has repeated, the outcome was war. With this view to history, the existential challenge of our era is not violent Islamic extremists or a resurgent Russia; it is the impact of China’s ascendance on the international order. According to Allison, "Never before in history has a nation risen so far, so fast." Even Chinese President Xi Jinping has urged that the world “work together to avoid the Thucydides trap… Our aim is to foster a new model of major country relations.” But is being aware of danger enough to avoid it? While the West seeks to encircle and constrain, China demonstrates, with aggressive naval exercises in disputed seas, that it will demand the respect due a major power in its own region and the world. Can the world escape the perilous prophecy of Athens and Sparta? Graham Allison, director of Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, founding dean of Harvard’s Kennedy School and advisor to every secretary of defense from Reagan to Obama, shares insights from his career, and outlines the painful steps both China and the US must take to avoid disaster. SPEAKER: Graham Allison Director, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard University MODERATOR: Michael M. Nacht Thomas and Alison Schneider Professor of Public Policy; Interim Director, Center for Studies in Higher Education, Goldman School of Public Policy, University of California, Berkeley For more information about this event please visit: http://www.worldaffairs.org/event-calendar/event/1732

53 Legacy of Ancient Greece with 6th Grade Test Review Questions (First 10 here on the podcast) Watch our Hauger History Podcasts on YouTube! Legacy of Ancient Greece Final Mr. Hauger Name:_____________________ Score” _____ / The ___________________ War was the beginning of the decline of Ancient Greece. Peloponnesian b. Anglican c. Spartan d. Trojan A _____________ is a story that symbolizes morality for life in Ancient Greece.   Haiku b. Soliloquy c. Myth d. Sonnet This word translates to “high city” in English ___________________________. The highest ranking of the Ancient greek gods was _____________________. The polis that we think of as the birthplace of Democracy was _____________. Why was access to the sea beneficial to Athens (2 reasons)? ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Sparta/Athens was the better polis for women to live in. Sparta/Athens was the better polis to live in if you were physically weak. Sparta/Athens was the better polis for warriors to reside in. What are two aspects of literature or language that we credit to the ancient Greeks? ___________________________________________________________________

In this episode, we discuss the early history of the polis of Lacadaemon (Sparta), including their expansion in the southern Peloponnesus with the 1st and 2nd Messenian Wars (that brought about the formation of the helot system of slavery); Spartan society's social-class tensions and civil strife that led to reform, supposedly by the semi-mythical lawgiver Lykurgas in the 8th century BC, but more likely a gradual process during the 7th and 6th centuries BC; its military growing pains as Sparta suffered a series of losses to their neighbors, Argos (in the Argolid) and Tegea (in southern Arcadia), before eventually defeating them; the life of Chilon, one of the Seven Sages, and his role in making amendments to the Spartan constitution and in guiding foreign policy; and Sparta's ultimate rise to hegemony over their Peloponnesian and Isthmian neighbors, resulting in what modern scholars call the "Peloponnesian League" Show Notes: http://www.thehistoryofancientgreece.com/2016/08/022-sparta-ascendant.html

In this episode Angus is joined by Josho Brouwers, Murray Dahm, Mark McCaffery, Owen Rees and Roel Konijnendijk. We're looking at Ancient Warfare Magazine Volume X issue 1, Conflict between Sparta and Athens: The Archidamian War. Don't forget if you want to send in any questions for the team you can find us on Facebook either The History Network or Ancient Warfare Magazine.

In this episode Angus is joined by Josho Brouwers, Murray Dahm, Mark McCaffery, Owen Rees and Roel Konijnendijk. We’re looking at Ancient Warfare Magazine Volume X issue 1, Conflict between Sparta and Athens: The Archidamian War. Don’t forget if you want to send in any questions for the team you can find us on Facebook either The History Network or Ancient Warfare Magazine.

Transcript: In the 5th century BC Anaxagoras deduced the true cause of eclipses. He realized that the curved shadow of the Earth on the Moon during a lunar eclipse supported the idea that the Earth was round.  In fact, a sphere is the only three-dimensional object that, whatever its orientation, always casts a circular shadow.  He was aware of a meteorite that had fallen in his native Greece and deduced from it that objects could move between the celestial and terrestrial spheres.  He also speculated as to the true size of the sun, saying that it might be an incandescent stone larger than the Peloponnesian peninsula. Such ideas were heretical in Greece at the time, and so he was banished for impiety.

The essence of ancient Greece is actually an easy drive from the busy city of Athens. We're looking at the pleasures of the Peloponessian Peninsula where historical sites and mythology mix with laid-back small towns and uncrowded beaches. Also, an expert on Michelangelo highlights some of the personal influences that helped define him as the epitome of the Renaissance man. For more information on Travel with Rick Steves - including episode descriptions, program archives and related details - visit www.ricksteves.com.