Thermopylae - The Hellenic Alliance - Extra History - #1
Added 2018-06-07 17:30:01 +0000 UTCBONUS: Here's a behind-the-scenes thread on Rob Rath's Twitter about a story we had to cut from this episode! https://twitter.com/RobWritesPulp/status/1004817048747139073
A small handful of Grecian city-states have come together to stand off against the invading Persians at Thermopylae. At this fateful mountain pass, Greece will discover its identity as a nation.
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Comments
So why did they not use horses to run the Marathon rather than having runners?
Hao Sun
2018-07-02 20:12:06 +0000 UTCNo, they just weren't terribly individualistic in general. Of course, individualism is a slippery term that is used to both refer to being concerned with success or failure on your own merits and with expression of your individual identity. But either way, the Athenians were quite concerned with following the customs of your city and with virtue over self-advancement. They were more individualistic than the Spartans, but not a whole lot compared to, say, the Romans or for that matter the Persians. I mean, these were people who had "corrupting the youth" as a capital offense, even if the most famous usage was to silence a political dissident and supporter of a previous regime.
Christina Maria Jessen
2018-06-09 00:34:47 +0000 UTCWell it's been a quite a few centuries since those days. THings do change over time. Their definition of democracy is totally different from what we define as such and it is still evolving and changing. Just check out the different types of democracy we have today. Individualism might have been defined differently back then.
Byron Becker
2018-06-08 08:29:35 +0000 UTCI can't really agree that the Athenians valued individualism. Aeschylus' play The Persians is pretty much a work of Athenian propaganda explaining why they're so awesome that they could kick Persia's ass. The description presented lists two primary causes. The first is that they're tough, ascetic people hardened by living in a hard land sparse in natural resources forcing them to forego womanly luxury. The other is that they had democracy, which meant that they all labored for the state rather than for individual gain, letting go of their own petty wants and self-expression for the sake of the sake of the people. Individualism is presented as the weakness that made Persia soft enough to lose to the Hellenes in the play. Beyond that, Athens was hardly some paradise of culture and egalitarianism. Only wealthy, male citizens well into adulthood were allowed to participate in democracy, a group that probably didn't represent more than a few percent of the entire population. Not just that, the most brutal slavery in the entire Hellenic world, quite possibly the most brutal slavery in the history of the entire world, was that of the Athenian silver mines. Slaves weren't even expected to survive within them for a full year. The Athenians weren't exactly wilting flowers militarily either. Citizenship was contingent on military service. They had also been the winners of the first Greco-Persian war at the battle of Marathon. In fact the entire first invasion came about because Athens had supported Ionian rebels against the Persian Empire, setting them up as a military threat from the Persian perspective. And like the Spartans, the Athenians had executed the envoy sent to demand their submission to Darius. It's also worth pointing out that following the Persian Wars, Athens developed the most expensive and most elite military unit of any Hellenic city state - Its heavy cavalry. Just feed for the warhorses cost more than all the city's expenses unrelated to the heavy cavalry, even major ones like maintaining the extensive fortifications of Athens and Piraeus. Similarly, a lot about the harshness of the agoge and Spartan eugenics are probably exaggerated. Most accounts we have of Sparta are heavily politicized Athenian speeches and documents. These either presented Sparta's toughness and asceticism as virtues that Athens had lost to decadence or as a brutish hellhole devoid of virtue and civilization. What little we have from Sparta and other parts of Greece presents a somewhat more nuanced picture. Those show a city that was build on brutal of oppression of the Helots, but also gave women actual independent property rights and right to legal representation, as well as maintaining considerably more equality among the citizens than other Hellenic city states. Also, they included considerably less child murder, though eugenics was a thing in Hellenic society in general, just not to the extend of the myth of Sparta.
Christina Maria Jessen
2018-06-07 22:19:44 +0000 UTCHere's a behind-the-scenes thread on Rob Rath's Twitter about a story we had to cut from this episode! <a href="https://twitter.com/RobWritesPulp/status/1004817048747139073" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://twitter.com/RobWritesPulp/status/1004817048747139073</a>
Extra History
2018-06-07 21:42:53 +0000 UTCPersia expanded to Ethiopia? That sounds a bit off. The Kushite empire largely prohibited any Persian expansion south of Nubia, so stretching all the way down to modern Ethiopia is a bit of a stretch. Were you referring to Aethiopia? That may have been possible, but once again, the Kushites wouldve stopped much expansion into Nubia.
HiddenHistory
2018-06-07 20:51:56 +0000 UTCHardly anyone ever talks about the Athenian Navy during Thermopylae. Kudos.
Sean Sarff
2018-06-07 19:14:08 +0000 UTC300 memes will block out the sun
Thomas Alfred Weaver
2018-06-07 19:10:36 +0000 UTCWow, how did I never know that the Persians were, by some lights, the good guys on the world stage? This is gonna be a fantastic series!
Amy Reynolds
2018-06-07 18:06:34 +0000 UTC"SPARTANS! PREPARE FOR GLORY!"
Martin Verran
2018-06-07 17:35:08 +0000 UTC
