In Essos, we see that the Game of Thrones plays out in Slaver's
Bay and elsewhere, presumably just not first hand.
It's different than in Westeros, but not so much that we don't
see the massive similarities. And you all are seeing these
patterns here in real history, in this very well documented era
that we've been covering. It's familiar despite so many
unfamiliar elements, meaning the characters and places you're not
as familiar with, but the concepts, the ambitions, the way
the game is played, that stuff. Yeah.
You guys know this, especially because most of you listening
have Valar re read probably several times, if not at least
once. And that gets you very close and
familiar with Westeros, the cultures, the characters, the
history. It becomes second hand and the
more you build on it, the more you delve in, the more familiar
it is, the more at ease you are going through it, understanding
it, experiencing it. The same thing is happening here
with this series. The more familiar you all got
with this portion of Greek history, world history, the more
familiar you are with the characters, the nations, the
cultures, the gods, everything else that closest is going to
keep paying off as we get further into the story.
Rather than maybe some of y'all in episodes one and two, maybe 3
saying things like wait, which? Which guy was as he's just
talking about Which dude with that Greek sounding name was
that? You're starting to get to the
point, if you haven't already, where you're saying things like,
oh, yeah, that's that's exactly what it just allows us to do.
Oh, hard as Xerxes never change. Or, wait, Epaminondas did what
now? Well, I guess I can see that
we've been learning about him or something along the lines of,
yeah, I can see why Aziz thinks Palopitus is like Brendan Stark.
As we've been seeing, this era features great stories and like
a great story, a lot of different plot threads we've
been following separately are slowly but surely coming
together and connecting to one another, becoming entangled or
enmeshed. I think entangled is better.
This is becoming less and less of several different smaller
Game of Thrones playing out near each other and all within the
Eastern Mediterranean. More of a tale about the Game of
Thrones of the Eastern Mediterranean.
In fact, in about 100 years, that's what the big players will
be fighting over. Pretty much all of it as a
whole. Not always, but the pieces that
are getting fought over get larger and larger as these power
structures grow and can be seized from within or without.
We are slowly but surely heading there as well and having a hell
of a good time along the way. And this is all the more amazing
because as I say this, the story's becoming tighter while
we're including more and more locations and places, which
usually that's not how it works. Usually that makes the story
harder to follow. But all these people are coming
into the story and doing a lot of the same things, fighting for
the same thing. So it's not as complicated as it
might seem in that sense. There is no Tale of Three City
states without these other players.
We have to include them. We can't just focus on those
three because they're inextricably linked to all these
other things happening around them.
It's not just because it's fun, it's because it's relevant.
And well, if we're trying to do full coverage, well, that's what
it comes down to. Persia wants peace in Greece for
the purpose of starting their own wars using Greek
mercenaries. And if Persia isn't the most
powerful nation in play at this point, they're definitely the
richest. So the wishes of Artaxerxes the
second count for a lot, then he's an old man with a lot of
wishes. Many things are going to come to
a head basically in this episode, including the head of a
snake, literally. And metaphor.
All that and more on this episode of History of Westeros
Podcast. Hello and welcome back
everybody. Part 4 of Game of Thrones at the
end of Ancient Greece. Technically classical Greece,
but I've explained that before. Ancient Greece just sounds
cooler. We are here most Sundays at 3:00
Eastern with a live stream, and that is the case for, like I
said, most Sundays, unless we're in ATV season, in which case we
stream on Mondays. That'll be hot D season in a few
months, but here we are with book and historical topics
moving forward as we always do. You can catch every video on
YouTube and on Spotify. You can catch the podcast
version anywhere you find podcasts, and it's ad free on
Patreon. If you have questions for us,
comments, things you want to say about this series, hit us up in
any social media platform we're on.
We're on pretty much all of them.
Or you can e-mail us at westeroshistory@gmail.com.
Here's a trivia question. This is from a previous episode.
I think the name will come up in this episode, but maybe not.
Which geometry minded philosopher did Epaminondas and
his brother Cafesius follow the teachings of answer at the end?
Now you might be listening to part 4 right after Part 3.
I don't know when you're listening to this, but in real
life, Part 3 and Part four were separated by about six months
because of the Night of the Seven Kingdoms Season 1.
So I'm going to give a little recap, which is probably useful
even to those of you who just heard Part 3, and as often as
possible if you're somewhat new to this.
I relate the characters in this history to A Song of Ice and
Fire characters as much as possible because it's a shortcut
to understanding who they are. But don't take that too far.
These characters are never going to be carbon copies of their
Song of Ice and Fire parallels. Here's our sections for today.
The different parts we'll be covering mostly through the end
of the year 374 till near the end of the year 371.
We have invasion at last 100. The city states battle aisles,
not battle aisle, battle aisles, Helica.
Then we'll go on to war declared at the peace talks and the
Battle of Lutra. It's a lot, not a lot of
different sections, but it's a lot of content.
Let's get to it, but first a quick poll.
I'm just curious you all. This isn't some sort of deep
cut, I'm just curious which city, state, slash nation have
you been rooting for or you find the most entertaining?
It doesn't mean you have to think they're the best or the
most upright because that would make this a lot easier.
I think just the one you find the most entertaining.
The choices are well as usual. YouTube only gives us 4 choices
so Athens, Sparta, Thebes, and Persia.
If you find one of the others more entertaining, type it in
the comments and I'll be doing one for characters probably next
time. Part 5.
And if you are catching this on Spotify, the poll is there too,
even though this is a live poll during the live stream, so let
us know what you think. In the North, many tribal states
were turning into kingdoms, and those kingdoms were coalescing
into larger kingdoms. That's what happens, right?
Larger, powerful kingdoms, culturally similar to Greece,
but much more militant in terms of the everyday populace and
less advanced in terms of government and technology.
A bit like how the North and the South differed after the Andals
were established. We have Tago's Jason Afire,
effectively ruling Thessaly and possessing his own sort of
Golden company on the payroll. We have King Amontos, the third
of Macedonia, who was learning how to leverage the great and
largely untouched natural resources of his Kingdom to
increase his own power and that of his country.
King Bardillos of Illyria, the guy who rose from coal miner,
kind of like the first faceless man, emerged in the minds of
Valyria, kind of loosely like that.
But this man had a famous face. Everybody knew who he was, and
the great natural resource of his country wasn't coal, it was
warriors and also, yeah, pirates, who are kind of a
subset. King Alcitas, the first of
molasses, the smallest of these kingdoms and the last I'm a name
for now, but from great and proud Olympian ancestry.
Now this guy made wise alliances with the biggest players, Athens
for one, and Jason of Mirai, which when you have powerful
allies, being so small isn't such a big deal.
You can manage. You won't have to worry about
big picked on because you got big friends to come help you if
need be. Now of course those big friends
are going to want things from you too, so that's something to
worry about, but it's better than just getting overrun and
conquered. So these are players whose
nations were generally not players historically, as I said,
new players on the scene. And that's an interesting part
about this time of history. You have kingdoms and countries
becoming players because they've emerged out of that tribal state
that allows them to play on this stage, for better or worse.
We're not making a judgement here, It's just what happened.
So it's interesting to see them go from pawn to player and to
see if they can become major players or whether they just
fall back to pawn status or worse to fall back to nothing.
Meanwhile, Persia and Egypt, well Egypt had undergone a civil
conflict won by Nectonabo the first, which is one of the
cooler named Pharaohs. And Persia, well they could have
taken advantage of that conflict to re add it to their empire.
Artaxerxes sent Farna Bezis, who we've been calling Farna Bezis
the paymaster and he was slow. He began preparations in like
380 or 379. Here we are 374, no invasion
yet. What his pace frustrated his
allied Athenian general Ethicrites, who we call
Ethicrites the innovator. So the only thing of note that
Farna Bezos had done in these six years besides get the army
somewhat ready, was that he got Athens to recall Cabrius.
Cabrius, the guy who gave that famous at ease command when it
just allows his phalanx, was bearing right down on them
calling their bluff. Now this guy was working for
Egypt and Persia's like, hey, why do you have an Athenian
general working for Egypt? Get him out of there.
So that was the only thing they did was get Cabrias to go home.
And even that kind of backfired because Cabrias went and fought
against Sparta while Persia is trying to get Greece to be at
peace. So Cabrias returning home only
increased the confidence of Athens and and allowed them to
stand tall against Sparta instead of caving to some of
these peace demands. Meanwhile, Sparta itself was
nonplussed. They were all about the Athens
is so starved for a victory that they get excited about a guy
caught saying at ease when no soldiers were actually killed.
Y'all, we were invading them. We were in their territory.
They didn't stop us. They just called our bluff.
Is that really some sort of great victory?
Come on guys, you're getting excited about nothing.
That's the Sparta attitude about this.
Like not a single soldier was killed.
You guys are all proud of that. Come on.
But as you may recall from last time, this was followed up by
thieves under Palopitus in the Sacred band actually defeating
Sparta in the battle of Tagayra, which is small battle, small
encounter, not a lot of soldiers.
But it was meaningful in that this had never happened before.
Sparta hadn't lost a land battle of any size.
Now they still hadn't lost a set piece battle.
We're going to have a set piece battle though today.
So maybe that will change, or maybe they will re establish the
reputation as just basically unstoppable and this could just
be a blip on the on the radar, something that is easily
forgotten, but maybe not. And that one of the things that
made Tagira so shocking was not only was Sparta beaten, but they
were beaten by a smaller army. So Thieves was building a
momentum of of bravery, pushing back against the myth of Spartan
invincibility, and now had a test case to prove it to a
certain degree. And that high morale was going
to make it build on. But it's nothing if you don't
build on. If you don't have more
victories, then again that's just going to get forgotten and
become pretty irrelevant in the long run.
Athens was helping Thebes but Persia was saying hey guys,
peace, peace, we want all you in Greece to stop fighting.
And now they preferred the Spartans to be in charge of
enforcing that peace because they were the most ideologically
aligned. But overall peace was the most
important thing because they wanted to hire Greek
mercenaries. If Greek Greece is fighting
itself, well, we can't hire your soldiers away to come fight for
us now can we? So there was a piece, it was
called the piece of 375. It was sort of a re
establishment of the piece of Antolsidas from 386.
In this case it was a bit of a reset.
They were garrisons all over Greece and those like Spartan
garrisons in the even territory and in the reverse in some
cases. So all these were taken down.
Everybody kind of agreed, no more garrisons, let's kind of
reset. Everybody has their own
autonomy. That was part of the deal.
All these cities, states have their own autonomy.
But it wasn't really true, was it?
Sparta had to concede a lot of this because they had more
garrisons, more occupied territory.
So this benefited Thebes. And the fact that this was the
deal showed Sparta's loss of power, lost some authority, but
they were still in charge of the peace.
Sparta still put them in charge of this.
And so the Thebons may be benefited a lot by the loss of
Spartan garrisons, but still Sparta had the upper hand.
Overall, Athens loved this mode. They may have benefited the most
from this because the peace treaty said, hey, no more
leagues, no more alliances like that with it on land.
But they didn't forbid naval alliances.
And of Athens is like, well, that's our that's the top thing
we do. So they made a statue of peace,
a peace statue of marble. And this is the first time
they've ever done that, personifying peace as a being.
But the personification was wealth.
Like, yeah, peace. That means money.
Because allowing Athens's Navy to just go everywhere and trade
and start dominating the Aegean and met eastern Mediterranean
again was, well, they knew what was going to happen.
Athens. And they're like money, money,
money, money. The statue wasn't even finished
before the peace was broken. Y'all, to the surprise of
nobody. So again, Artaxerxes wanted all
of Greece to be at peace so he could hire their soldiers and be
like, hey, I want to use your soldiers in Egypt.
But money, of course, money can be used a lot of ways, right?
It's not just about bribery. Persians were experts at all
these different ways of using money because they had so much
of it and had a little experience.
And one of the ways they can do this is you don't want my money,
You're not willing to take my money.
You're not scared of my troops because they're 1500 miles away.
OK, Fairpoint, well what if I give money to your next door
neighbor who hates you? Lots of money.
I also give them armor and swords and and things that you
would buy with money to start wars.
Maybe I'll give them mercenaries.
Maybe they have enough money with the money I give them to
hire their own mercenaries. That is not a problem you want
to have happen. That's a a use of Persian money
that. Well, it's better if you accept
their bribe than take that as a secondary result, right?
Right. This is the implied threat of
their unlimited wealth, basically at all times.
But also, this is the ancient world, and things can move
slowly, given the vast differences in scale and time
and the sheer logistical challenges of communication and
in quality of information. But sometimes things move
surprisingly quickly because, again, this area of Greece is
small again. It's like one day to get from
Sparta to Athens. Now, here's a quick footnote
before we get into the meat of the story with grain, grain meat
of the story. Get it?
Athens changed their grain taxes around this time in 374.
And you're, you might be willing.
Well, who cares? Well, John said the same thing
to Sam when Sam was going off about, hey, these books tell us
what the Night's Watch eight, 500 years ago.
And John's like, why the hell do I care about that?
Well, it's very useful and and enlightening in fact.
And Sam explained why here. I will explain why it's useful
in this case, because the grain tax was on their allies, Athens
allies, in this case Skyros, Lemnos and Imbrose.
They own grain and barley and they have to give it to Athens
at very specific times. According to this deal, that
grain is then sold in Athens. They even denote exactly where
the grain is going to be stored. That grain is then sold and the
profits to Athenians and the profits fund military actions.
The law. The law is very specific about
this, the percentages, who owes how much, how much grain, how
much barley, things like that. The reason we know this is
almost as interesting as the the contents, the terms were carved
on a marble. Stella OK.
That's how a lot of these things were done.
They wanted to give it a sense of permanence like a gravestone
or something like that. It's it's a lot more permanent,
even though, like we said, this didn't last.
I like a lot of things. I mean, this is just a tax.
I don't know actually when it ended, but anyway, at some point
in history, we have no idea when the marble Stella was taken
down. It was no longer valid that
grain tax, so it was probably just whatever.
In 1986, someone found it. Almost exactly 40 years ago, it
was found as part of a repair project.
Basically someone had taken it out of the ground and used it to
patch up a section of wall near the Great Athenian Drain giant
drain they have. This is a 1.1m tall piece of
marble. So even though it's used in this
drain where there's just been like maybe hundreds of years of
water flowing past it, you can read every single bit of the
text on this thing. Now recall they don't use dates.
It doesn't say the year 373 BC. What do you mean BC before
Christ, who's Christ they'd be saying.
What does that mean? It says in the Archon ship of
Socratides mark on ships were a one year term, so it's narrowed
down quite well. But the actual first word of the
inscription is gods. So thanks to whichever sculptor
carved that one. Because he clearly dug deep with
his inscriptions. If if he hadn't if he had
shallowly carved it, it probably would have been wiped out by the
water damage anyway. I thought that was cool.
King of Vega, King Evegoris of Cyprus and his son Penintegoris
were assassinated in this year. This was a Kingdom that had long
staved off Persian dominance that often allied with Egypt
because Egypt was also trying to stave off Persian dominus.
You know, your enemy enemy, your enemies my friend, that kind of
thing. They're all so close to each
other. Cyprus is an island, Egypt is
just S etcetera. Now this was a very virus like
thing that happened because the murder was perpetrated by the
court eunuch named Thresidaeus. Well, we don't know what
happened to Thrazadaus, whether he got away with it or not, but
King of Vegoris's second son or third son younger son was put on
the throne. Nicocles, historians and people
of the time, contemporaries all seem to agree that Nicocles had
nothing to do with this. This was all the court eunuchs.
Thrasadaus who just switched to is in charge and maybe benefited
from the new ruler. It's kind of hard to imagine
that Nicocles would allow this man to live, but I guess he
wouldn't have done it if he didn't think he had a success.
A good chance of success. I don't know, it's it.
We don't get a lot of details on this, but hard to not connect it
to virus right at court. Eunuch murdering the king and
his heir to bring his own candidate in like Aegon the 6th
perhaps Young Griff, right? So Nicocles continues his
father's pattern of Hellenizing Cyprus.
Hellenizing basically means making it more Greek.
Historians and contemporaries agree that this is also
something that was very common in this era.
Hellenizing was going on a lot and it's not hard to see why
people liked Greek culture like the northern city States and
countries, kingdoms, whatever you call them, depending on
which is which. Thessaly, Illyria, Macedonia,
they're all getting Hellenized. They're all becoming more and
more Greek. Some of them were kind of Greek
to begin with. And you can see why it's spread,
as I said, because democracy, art like these are, it's just
basically freedom, right? Of course that appeals.
Even though it's old democracy where it's just for men, just
for land, that's still better. That's still an improvement from
everyone is subject to one authority figure, like a king.
Like that's still an improvement.
It's, it's a, it's a ways away from where we're all trying to
be as a society, even in modern times, But it's a step in the
right direction, or maybe several steps.
The Greeks constantly look at Persia and denigrate Persians as
slaves to their great king. Like all you guys are slaves.
You don't have to bow and prostate.
You're all slaves. And that's a thing, which is
ironic because even Greek Democrats owned slaves for the
most part. So but if you're out here
denigrating people for living under a king, then it just
follows that you're going to build yourself up for and, and
be proud of being free Democrats in this era.
And more people are going to go like, yeah, I want that.
I want freedom. I want, I don't want to be a
slave, you know, using the euphemism of slave because they
obviously no one literally wants to be an actual slave.
So, yeah, I mean, early democracies weren't inclusive.
Like I said, women didn't have much power.
They did sometimes ownership was tricky.
But, you know, you got to start somewhere.
And This is why a lot of people even to this day say Greece was
the place of democracy was born. It's pretty much true.
It's certainly very different from ours, but we wouldn't be
where we are now without that. I suppose maybe some things
would have been different, but who knows.
Anyway, other reasons why Greek culture spread so much besides
this appeal is Persia. They accidentally spread
Hellenization even as they were trying to Persianize everything
with their huge empire. And why?
Well, we've already been over it.
We just didn't at speak to this aspect of it.
What have I been saying? For episode after episode, the
Persians continuously hired Greek mercenaries to fight their
battles for them. So you constantly have Greek
soldiers hanging out with Persian soldiers.
And this soldiers are sometimes there's a language barrier, but
they're like they learn things like wait, you don't have to bow
before a before anyone. You don't bow to anyone.
Wait, no, but you literally don't bow to a single person,
even the people who are your leaders.
Whoa, you don't have. Wait, you don't actually have a
king at all? OK, I don't get that.
There's no king. Sparta has 2 kings.
OK, that's weird. Wait, how small is your name?
You're that small you guys can walk from?
That's crazy. They're used to Persia being
gigantic, right? Everything about this is
different to them. You guys discuss how to spend
taxes, discuss the king. Just you discuss it.
It's open to debate. What's a citizen, What's a
public forum? Tell me about that.
What does that mean? What is public?
What is forum right? Even modern countries and to in
current times, try to keep their soldiers away from, you know,
ideas. North Korea is a great idea.
What a what a place that's just completely cut off from the rest
of the world as much as possible to control the TV, the radio,
Internet, everything is highly controlled.
Propaganda is really effective when there's no other source of
ideas. The only ideas you get about
everything are coming from one source.
It's pretty hard to have alternative considerations
there, isn't it? Like, you know the truth.
So in the longer term, this is going to lead to things like the
Unsullied, the rural world equivalent of the Unsullied.
That's how you keep people from getting ideas in the long term,
is you train them brutally from the moment they're born to
believe one set of things and to reject anything else.
It's awfully effective because of how children are, and it's
terrible. You do this with foreign slaves.
So they don't even have a connection to the culture that
they belong in yet. They're paid like regulars so
they still have an existence to be proud of in a certain sense,
even though it's bizarre and and twisted.
Some of you may recognize what I'm that I'm talking about the
Janissaries who were both mostly Christian children taken and
enslaved and turned in Janissaries who this white army
in Muslim countries that are deadly and dangerous.
I'm getting a bit off topic here because the Janissaries didn't
come along until the 1300s. So we got 1600 years before that
develops. But still, this is the outset of
things like slavery. When you're when you're losing,
you get more extreme with your methods.
And you know, some of those things are already happening
here because Greek ideas were starting to spread to Persians
and Persians were starting to be like him.
Hmm, freedom, eh, democracy, eh, hmm.
And Artaxerxes is like, no, shut that down.
But he still hired Greek mercenaries who would in
thousands and thousands who would spread the ideas.
So yeah, now what happens when Spartan or Athenian or Theban
Greek leadership styles are put alongside Persian leadership
styles? What happens when Persian
officers are sat next to Greek military officers?
Their styles are very different, their cultures are very
different. If you thought I can see some
friction developing, you are correct.
Invasion at last. After all that six years plus of
development, Farna Bezus was finally about ready to invade
Egypt with his giant Persian army.
If Ficrites, the Greek general mercenary general wondered aloud
at one point to Farna Bezis how it is that you can be so good at
talking and negotiating, yet so slow with your actions?
He said this out loud. Farna Bezis replied.
Well, that's because Farna Bezis is in control of the words of
Farna Bezis, but Artaxerxes is in control of the actions of
Barnabas, so he basically blamed the Great King for his slowness.
I don't know if it's true, but it very well could be.
However, later events are going to show that maybe Farnabasis
was shifting blame unjustly. And as usual, these quotes are
not likely to be directly genuine.
Rather, they're meant to express the general difficulty between
these leaders that historians have put some words into, Right?
They've added some dialogue where we don't actually know the
exact words. But this is basically what
happened. And this is an irony too, right?
If thicker Tees is Athenian democracies are known for
getting bogged down, right? Too many opinions, mob rule,
propaganda, shifting opinion when it shouldn't.
Decisions often don't come until a lot of talking happens, even
in the better cases. Now, if you ask me, this is
still way better than oligarchy or monarchy, but we can be
honest about some of the downsides, right?
But if thicker Tees is also cell sword, the armies don't act
under democracies. They may be the democracy may
vote on who they fight, but not the tactics.
Once the war begins. That's the matter of the
commander authorities structures change in that situation.
But still, it's funny that the Democrat is the one saying, you
guys are slow get it going, you know?
And this is, again, men from diametrically opposed cultures
working together just doesn't always work.
We might see this in The Song of Ice and Fire if we haven't
already. Like Jon Snow adapting to having
free folk on his side. Like you can't talk to them the
same way. You can't deal with them the
same way. And his own people hate those
guys. So you got to soothe over that
friction. And that's a thing too.
A lot of Persians just hate Greeks and vice versa, yet here
they are having to work together because their commanders say so.
So you guys smooth that over. There's lots of little things
from the high level to the low level that don't necessarily
work unless you are ahead of the game, you know, making sure
these things don't happen. So to be fair, this was a
monstrous army. Egypt is Egypt in part because
it has very distinct natural borders.
Now, monster, what I mean by that is monstrous army, Yeah,
that's hard to move a monster's army.
We're talking 200,000 soldiers here, 500 ships.
Yeah, That's bigger than anything we've seen in the Song
of Ice and Fire. So those natural borders of
Egypt, they're very defensible. A lot of them, especially the
ones the Persians and Greek mercenaries had to get past.
So they weren't going to try a straight land invasion.
They weren't just going to try crossing from modern Syria into
Egypt. That's just too hard, too many
rivers to cross, too difficult. It's ridiculously hard.
Other people have tried, it failed.
Other people are going to try it again later and will fail.
These guys at least didn't try that.
They had a different plan. They, they were going to sail
from north of Cyprus the in the eastern Mediterranean past it to
get to Egypt and drop their drop their soldiers off on land
rather than try to fight their way over the river.
The Nile has seven mouths. It's huge, right?
Each has a city with fortified towers guarding that mouth.
So it is also well defended. Now he dug new channels and he
meaning neck to Nabo and he was as defence, but also the
Persians were making channels to to try to help land in different
spots and connect their soldiers.
This was insufficient though, because 200,000 soldiers, well,
it's enormous, right? And they're not all going to
necessarily land in one place. And neck to Nabo the fair is
like, well, we're going to try to defend our shores, but we
have no idea where they're going to land.
They could land anywhere. It's it would be a lot easier if
they were just trying to cross over the eastern border here.
We'd know exactly where they're coming from but no, they could
land anywhere. So they just did as what they
could. And something else familiar from
A Song of Icewood Fire, You know how the Ironborn are often
sighted before they attack because they don't sail really
far out. They stick close to shore.
Euron's surprise attack worked particularly well because they
didn't do that. They were out to sea where no
one could see them, and then they come in really quickly, so
there's no advance warning. This is what happens here as
well. The Greek and Persian ships
stayed far out to sea so that the Egyptians couldn't spot
them, so they had no idea where they were going to land.
So at last it it actually happened during this brief time
where Greece was in that brief peace.
The statue wasn't finished. They're still like, hey, Athens
is tired of helping thieves get bigger, so they're going to back
out, do their own thing. They agreed to the peace terms.
Sparta and thieves are still kind of fighting a little bit,
but mostly at this point, they're just jockeying for
position. There's not a lot of actual
fighting. You know that it's going to come
back any minute now, but at this point it hadn't yet.
So the Egyptian invasion actually happened during that
brief interim, and they attacked what's called the Mendesian
mouth. That's one of the seven
fortified mouths. This was close at first.
The battle was, but the Persian numbered.
There were just too many of them.
They really concentrated a lot of guys there.
And the defenders didn't have time to bring other guys in to
help because again, they were very spread thin, not knowing
where the Persians were going to attack.
So the defenders fled the outside and and got inside the
city, leaving their fortified towers.
The tower was destroyed. Those who didn't escape were
enslaved. Standard operating procedure.
So remember that foreign basis earlier tried to blame our
deserxes. And I said that there was an
example that showed maybe it wasn't our Deserxes's fault
where here we go. The thicker tea is of course,
very active, very energetic, ready to make moves.
He discovered on his own with his scouts and soldiers that the
city of Memphis was poorly defended and they could get
there real fast. Farna Beza said, OK, good idea,
but let's wait for the rest of our huge army to land so we can
bring them too. Ficrete has responded.
Did you hear me? I said Memphis, the most
important military strategic city in Egypt.
Did you also hear me when I said undefended?
We do not need more men. If we wait, we might, because
they will defend it. They're not going to sit here
and leave that undefended for very long.
Our opportunity is now in front of bases, Said.
OK, All right, Well, no. So the ficardy said, dude, all
right, just give me the Greek mercenaries, full command of
them. I'll do it.
I'll do it right now. You don't have to risk anything.
Let me go take care of it. In front of bases is like,
what's this guy's angle? Is he trying to take this for
himself? He's trying to conquer Egypt for
himself. That's a pretty paranoid
thought, but it's apparently the thought he had.
Now, a Greek mercenary commander making himself pharaoh isn't
that crazy, But it's it's pretty crazy.
It's mostly paranoia on Farna Basis's side, as I'm saying.
Or just he didn't like him and just said no because he didn't
like him. Either way, it was a no.
So the remainder of the Persian army slowly arrives.
They begin their inward progress.
But hey, what's this? Memphis is now defended.
Who could have seen that coming? Oh, and they've increased to
Ford V. They've added to the defenses.
Gosh, I didn't see that coming either.
And Ficrites is like I told you, I told you, it's so obvious.
This isn't, this is common sense, man.
This isn't some deep strategy. This was terrible for morale.
All the other Persian commanders were kind of on the side of a
Ficrites. But because of their system,
they're not going to voice these things.
You know, they don't, they don't talk back to leadership as much
in Persia as they do in Greece. So what does Farna Basis do?
He starts to shift blame. He's like, oh, well, you know,
it was this guy's fault. This guy's fault.
Either way, morale's terrible. The persons are like, they know
better. They're not speaking out.
But since and since they're not allowed to speak out, this
allows the higher officers to believe that people are
listening to them. They're like, yeah, well, they
believe me when I say it's somebody else's fault because
they didn't complain. How would you know they're not
allowed to complain So they can. The Persians are like, yeah,
this is bad. We're not going to get more
territory. This this campaign has been run
poorly. And guess what happens?
The natural defenses of Egypt prove even mightier than the
soldiery, which they should have seen coming.
Egypt has been around a while. As you guys know, it's not a
young country. It's older than Persia, older
than Greece by a lot. Why is this region so fertile?
Why is it 300 years later that this region feeds Rome?
Because it's so fertile. And it's so fertile because it
floods frequently, seasonally. And this happened at this time.
All of a sudden the Persian army's like it's no longer
fortifications we have to get past.
It's knee deep water. At least, you know, you can't
take an army through that. Where are you going to camp?
Where are you going to rest? Where?
Yeah, it's it's a disaster. And they were expecting to eat
Egyptian conquered food, but now they got to ship more food in
from elsewhere. The campaign gets way more
expensive. That's a lot of soldiers they're
having to feed. So neck to Nabo was victorious
and it looked really bad. It looked like he was going to
lose. But he also did so much.
He tried really hard even though it was grim.
And that turned out to give him a lot of credibility because
they not the common citizen doesn't necessarily know what
we're talking about now. They don't necessarily know how
close it was or how they really should have lost.
It was just a bad generalship on Farnabez's part.
But it looks like to them, like to a lot of Egyptians, like
Nectanebo did all the right things and makes it seem like
the gods favored him. He had just won a won a civil
struggle, and this kind of proved that he was the right
guy. He defeated the rival dynasty,
and now he defeated Persia. OK, we picked the right guy.
We backed the right horse. So Necta Nabo, what had, you
know that what you call basically the right to rule.
Everybody was behind him at this point, about as much as he could
be. The ficcates now wasn't just
clever in war and with inventions and with politics.
He's just clever. He understood the nature of
powerful, proud Persians like Farna Bases, the paymaster.
I don't know how well he understood alliteration, but he
had a feeling he would be scapegoated because he was the
one who had it right. He's like, well, this guy hates
me. I'm the one who had it right.
The best thing for him to do is to scapegoat me to minimize his
embarrassment. He also recalled the lesson of
Conan, father of Timotheus. Conan worked with Farna Bezis
and as a Greek mercenary slash general of Athens and was
betrayed and ended up dying. The ficker is like, I'm not
going to let that happen to me. So rather than be sacrificed for
another man's failures, he snuck off into the night like Edrick
Storm on a single ship. And Farna Bezis found out, you
know, the next day or two and sent his own ship to Athens to
complain. And the complaint was, hey,
that's the guy who ruined my Egyptian campaign.
It's all his fault. And now you're letting him get
away with it. That's why he's running away,
because he doesn't want to take responsibility for what he did
give him back. Athens treated this a lot like
Sparta treated the affairs of Foibidas and Phodrias.
They're like, oh, yeah, we'll, we'll punish him.
Definitely we will. We'll hold a trial and we'll do
whatever we need to do. He's and, and you're probably
right, he's guilty, right? We'll, we'll, we'll almost
certainly punish him. They didn't punish him.
We'll, we'll do our own internal investigation.
Their internal investigation revealed what I've been saying,
that Iffiqrates didn't do anything wrong.
Now this is the opposite of course, of Foybidas's Foggerios
in that case, because Foybidas's Foggerias were actually guilty,
whereas Iffiqrates was not. So they, they were very
diplomatic about it. They're like, hey, sorry Persia,
sorry Farnabezis, you don't need to deal with this.
You got a lot on your plate. You got that whole Egypt thing
going on. Why, why don't you let us run
this trial a few months later if Ficardis was given command of
the Athenian Navy. So that's what they thought
about that. Now, Farnabezis was in his 70s
and Greece was well familiar with him.
They had been dealing with this guy for decades.
They knew his methods. They knew who he was.
He was a very well known commodity, perhaps even more
known than Artuzerxes because he had a lot more direct influence,
directed contact with them. Artuzerxes felt the same.
He recalled Barna Basis. He said, bro, time for
retirement. He was nice this time.
No, you know, execution, no punishments, just you're done
now. Remember, Artuzerxes was real
crappy about giving his daughters away and you know he
can't either. Those two different times where
he gave a daughter to Tira Bazas and then took it back, well, he
didn't do that to Farna Bezos. Farna Bezos married the daughter
of Ardesertes Appa Maya, and that held they actually had
children, Artabazos the second and Ario Barzanes.
And I'm giving you those names because while Farna Bezos does
have a peaceful exit from the story, his children, this is the
story of dynasties, isn't it? Yes.
Arna Bazos, the second and Ario Barzanes, they will continue in
the story. They're not today to replace him
in Egypt because, hey, this is just one year.
Yeah. Farnabezus failed.
Yeah. The campaign stalled out in his
first year, but they weren't done.
They still have those soldiers over there.
They're going to try again. Another year is going to happen,
and they're going to try. So in this case, Artaxerxes
replaced Farnabezos with Datames.
Remember Datames? We talked about him before he
was. He's considered the most able
warrior and general of Persia. And this time, so a a real heavy
hitter has been put in place. But things are not going to go
as expected. We'll come back to you.
That campaign progresses in the next episode.
For now, we're going to focus I believe most of the rest of the
episodes strictly on Greece, if I remember correctly.
We'll see, as I've alluded to before, the concept of 100 city
states, which is where we're going now.
It is a lot like the 100 kingdoms of Westeros period,
with the wrinkle that those were kingdoms, these are city states,
some of these were kingdoms. Sparta was a Kingdom.
And they're still at war with thieves, as I said before, not
an all out war, you know, They're just kind of, like I
said, just jockeying for position.
Nothing too big happening, nothing worth really getting
into detail on. And Sparta had that truce with
Athens. It's easy to see that that
wouldn't last, and not just because it never lasted,
although that is a good reason too.
In this case, the troops just wasn't very well designed.
There was nothing in it to stop Athens or Sparta or anyone from
helping other cities. They weren't allowed to make
alliances with them. But that doesn't mean you can't
say, hey, I'll send you some money or hey, I'll send you some
troops. That's not an official alliance.
We're just sending you help. So that was that just wasn't
addressed in the contract. Maybe they were sloppy about it
because they knew this isn't going to last anyway.
But I think it's just in looking back, it's like, how would you
expect this to work? On the other, other hand, what
whatever work it's writing, it's a deal.
It's words written down at best, trying to stop people from kill
each other. There's only so much that can
do. No matter how many oaths you
take, no matter what gods you swear to, we know how this
works. Oaths are only as good as the
men who hold them, or women, whoever people holding them,
right? And these are generally not good
people making them. They're generally going to do
what's best for them or their country or their family, rather
than adhere to some words that they spoke a year or five years
ago. So basically, this is a ticking
time bomb. Both of these cities have free
reign to help whoever they want. It's only a matter of time
before they both find themselves helping opposite sides in the
same city, Spartans helping the oligarchs in one place while the
Athenians or Thebans or both help the Democrats in that city.
And then it just comes to a head.
It just snowballs from there, an incident that effectively allows
the warlike elements on both sides to fire up support and
say, hey, see, we're fighting again, let's fight more.
Hey, they started that. Whatever it takes to get people
fired up. But first, we must speak again
of Timotheus, son of Conan, right?
We talked about Conan being betrayed by Farna Bezis.
That was a while ago. His son Timotheus is ruling the
household now and doing some stuff.
While Thebes and Sparta fought and Persia invaded Egypt,
Timotheus was at work doing the work of Athens or reestablishing
the Second Athenian League. Uh oh, another league.
Yep. Another league.
So he's saying he's making allies.
He's like, we're, we're, we're powerful again.
We Athenians, don't you want to be nice to us?
He wasn't forcing it on them, but it was like the reading
between the line things like, hey, we're big again and we're
here. What are you going to do about
it? I suggest you give us things.
He'd also want to see battle against Sparta right before the
peace. So he was doing pretty well.
He won some more allies, people that we have mentioned.
He won as an ally for Athens King Alcitas, the first of
molasses the the clever one that was making allies with bigger
parties. Well, here he is.
This is this is that alliance with Athens, Jason of fear.
I was an ally. What a big important ally to
have. You don't want that guy's an
enemy. So was Amentos, the third king
of Macedon. Now these are interesting allies
cause none of these are democracies.
These are kings. Jason wasn't technically a king,
but he was basically a dictator, a military dictator.
Not a lot of difference. So Athens, the hub of democracy,
has all these monarchies on their side.
Better than having them as enemies, though.
Now Cabrias and Focion, both of them are out there winning
allies, too. Cabrias also kind of goes like
Timotheus sales in force. A little bit of a show of awe, a
little intimidating. They're not trying to attack
anybody, but they are trying to say, hey, this is, you know,
maybe if you don't join us, maybe these ships come back and
we're not so friendly. They don't say those things, but
that's the implication. Focion, Remember, Focion, I
think you guys may not remember who this guy is.
He's the guy that is keen on the one liners, the the guy that's
once time when the crowd was cheering him, he looked at his
friends and said what did I say? Something awful public acclaim
to him meant bad things usually because he he thought tough
decisions usually weren't popular.
He was a tough decision guy. He hated the trend of constant
talking and so much oration that was sweeping through Athens.
So he tried to be as succinct as possible, which makes him very
quotable to us. And here this isn't so much to
quote so much as an attitude, which again, everything about
this guy I respect and and like him.
He's he's he's this is, again, he's Stannis.
He's Stannis without a lot of the baggage.
He did not choose to sail in force when he was going to seek
allies. He's like, look, that's what you
do when you're trying to intimidate people.
But if I'm trying to win allies, I'm going to take one ship.
I'm a show up of 1 ship. That's not intimidate.
That means if they're likely to accept that their acceptance is
genuine, this guy does it right. But he's still kind of an up and
Comer, and people would rather take the lead of a Cabrius or a
Timotheus or the the Others, right?
Foky on here is the one going against the grain, and he's
still on the younger side, even though he's a subordinate of
Cabrius. So the second Athena League was
growing, and it was growing just enough to heighten the tension
to win the inevitable that we discussed a minute ago.
Eventually, something's going to break out.
Well, this makes the inevitable all the more explosive because
Athens is going to have so much more power on their sides when
it does happen. And here we go.
Here's when the battles happen. This section is called a Battle
Isles. You all are familiar with Battle
Isle in ancient times near Old Town.
It's we don't know what battles were fought there.
We do know what battles were fought here.
Well, for the most part, there's always gaps in the record and
there's a particularly big one here, but most of it is here.
And it's really interesting. It would be ironic if another
large grease sweeping conflict started over a small, relatively
meaningless place, wouldn't it? Well, that's not what happened.
It happened in an important place.
Actually, it happened in two important places at the same
time. Now they're important places,
though we've spoken of neither of them because the map we're
working with, Eastern Mediterranean, basically focused
on Greece, Northern Eastern Mediterranean, you can say these
two places just haven't come up yet and they're on the fringes
of the map of this region. And the first problem we'll
describe is on the island of Zakynthos.
Ashea is putting up the map. You can see where Zakynthos is.
It's island far to the West of the center of the action here.
This is called the Ionian Isles. The farthest South of the Ionian
Isles is here is Zakynthos. Now, if you Look North of
Zakynthos, you'll see the island of Corkaira, which is nowadays
called Corfu. A lot of you know that name
Corfu, not Corkaira. Then if you have a date in
Corkaira, they'll be waiting in Corfu.
You can see to the West as well all those Ionian islands, like
the northeast, the northeast northernmost is Corkaira, the
southernmost is Zethenthos. It's actually began on the way,
and I mean, on the way to Timotheus, who was operating in
the field, some Athenian diplomats went to tell
Timotheus, hey, there's a peace deal, now stop fighting.
And on the way to accomplish this, on the way back from being
told this, the war kicked off again.
So while telling someone about the peace deal, the guy informed
about it, kicked the violence off kind of because, well,
we'll, we'll see why it wasn't just he wasn't flouting the
peace deal. Let's explain.
But it's just so wild that the war started while people were
telling each other about the peace.
It's it's bizarre. Anyway, let me get to it.
Spartan thieves are still just kind of jockeying for position
that we can ignore them for a minute continuously or continue
to ignore them for a minute. So Timotheus was collecting
allies, as we said. And at this juncture, he was on
the West side near these islands.
Athenian envoys like say deal, we signed a deal with Sparta.
Stop fighting. He said, OK, I'll sail back home
then. But see, while he had been out
there, one of the allies that he had courted was Zekinthos.
Zekinthos and he, they were having internal problems.
The Democrats of Zekinthos had been driven out by the
oligarchs, and of course, that made them erstwhile allies of
the Athenians. Like you Democrats have lost
your power. We're here to help you.
So. But he didn't immediately attack
Zekinthos or he just took them on and added them to his fleet.
So they were fighting for him. So all of a sudden he's like,
sorry guys, you guys still have a fight on your hands, but I
can't fight Sparta anymore. I'm not supposed to.
So I don't know what to do. I can't just put you back or can
I? Like what?
Where does he leave them? Where does he?
Does he take them to Athens? Like they don't belong there.
It's a strange position he's in. So he didn't really have a non
risky option here. So he did what he did was he
just went back to Zakynthos, helped the Democrats build a
Fort and and then left with that Fort.
The Kindian Democrats started to assault the oligarchs and it was
like a little mini civil war going on.
Now, there's a gap in the records here.
Timotheus may have actually done more than this, but it seems
like he went home. And is it the Kindian oligarchs
got mad because of what was happening and they complained to
Sparta, of course. And Sparta's like this violates
the peace deal that we just signed.
But also independent of all this, in Corkaira, the Democrats
got the upper hand on the oligarchs and started driving
them out, pushing them out. They hadn't fully been pushed
out, but they were losing power and they were afraid of being
kicked out entirely. So who did they appeal to?
Sparta again. Now, Sparta, of course, is.
They're not stupid. They're in charge of the peace,
but they're not just going to embroil themselves in another
war with such a powerful person like Athens over nothing.
So they had to have something to care about here.
It can't just be these two islands with people.
It can't just be about, hey, these are more people on our
side. These are a few more ships on
our side. It has to be worthwhile.
Well, I told you these places were important, and they're
important to both sides. It's not just that they
represent additional manpower, although that does matter.
And of course, if you don't win them as an ally, maybe your
enemy does. If they're not on our side, they
might be against us. Zakintos was a major source of
tar. You might be like, is that
important? Yeah, it's really, really
important. It's an alternative to pitch on
ships, which it it seals the wood from leaking.
It keeps it from rotting. It saves them so much money,
just thousands and thousands of pounds of silver.
Tons of, I don't know, I don't know the exact amounts, but Hugh
Navies are so expensive. By the way, this is part of why
Athens backed off on their support of thieves a little bit.
Not only did they not want to help thieves become so powerful
that they became dominant, but Athens is supportive.
Thieves required their naval power, whereas Thebes is
maintaining mostly a infantry base which is cheaper.
So Athens is spending a lot more money to be an ally so that the
deal isn't great for them in that sense.
On the other hand, Athens does not want Sparta to rise up as a
sea power like they had under Lysander.
That was a big problem. Lysander kicked their butts.
Now Lysander to be fair, was able to do a lot of what he did
with Persian money. But here comes Corkaira.
This is almost a substitute because Korkyra is the center
spot. It's the transition point
between Italy and Greece. Huge amounts of traffic coming
to and from Italy going to Greece or the reverse stops off
at Korkyra. It's pretty much the second most
important port builder of ships next to Athens.
So if Sparta gets this, they can almost instantly match what
Athens has, maybe not know how, maybe not with commanders, but
in terms of sheer resources and number of ships and the ability
to make more. So Athens is terrified of that
happening. They really, really do not want
it. And Sparta really, really does.
This is quite an opportunity. They're like, huh?
And the this wasn't just implied.
The corkyrie and oligarchs, they knew what they were talking
about. They were smart.
They said if you push out these Athenian Democrats or these
Democrats that are being helped by Athens, we'll give you
exactly this. We'll give you these ships, we
will be your ally fully. You get our naval power.
So that is that's an offer they could not refuse, Sparta says.
So it's actually very easy with all that to understand why these
two places were a new battleground.
You've got a place that has a lot of ships and a place that
makes all your existing ships a lot cheaper.
So back when it started happening, that start, Spartans
had already denounced Timotheus's actions.
But Athens at the time were like, yeah, we're going to side
with the Democrats, we're going to stay the course.
This time Sparta actually sent an army or a Navy because they
couldn't get Athens to back down through diplomacy.
So they sent 25 ships with their nave arc of the year.
Because remember, that's a yearly office just like a lot of
these other things to help the oligarchs.
Now this man had the most on the nose hero of the aristocracy
name I've ever heard. His name was aristocracy, I kid
you not. So man, imagine this guy was a
hero of the people and he'd have to change his name.
Anyway, by the time of anything note occurred, his yearly term
was over and it seems he had been replaced.
And we don't even know the name of the man who replaced him
because there'd be a third man that came along by the time
anything important happened. So Aristocrates only joins our
story to entertain us with his name, and now he's gone.
So at the same time though, they dispatched a slightly smaller
fleet, which I don't know why this one was smaller given
Korkyra seemed a lot more important.
Maybe they had more help. I don't get it necessarily, but
they sent ships to Korkyra to help take it.
Now the goal there was the Korky and oligarchs agreed to meet
them and sneak them into the city.
So maybe that's part of why they had a smaller force, because
they were trying to be clever with it.
But the Democrats found out, They found out about this plan.
We were able to keep the gates closed.
No Navy was able to sneak in. And they told Athens they're
like, look, y'all these Spartans and the Quarkyrion oligarchs
have a plan to sell out to Sparta.
You guys don't want that happening.
And they're like, yeah, we don't want that happening.
So guess who is sent back out? Timotheus.
They send the same guy back to come help, but he wasn't given
enough soldiers. He's like, I got all these
ships, but my sold, my ships are half full.
I need more men. So he goes E instead of West to
his allies that he just made to Jason and a Mintas.
And he's like, hey, give me some dudes, you know, I need
soldiers. And this he did, but it took
time. And in the meantime, Sparta
attacked. The sneak attack was foiled.
So they went with a regular attack.
It failed, but not in a way that was a big set back.
They were able to establish a siege on Coursera or Kyra, I
don't know the right name. The Spartan commander.
He was Manasipus, and he took a position on a hill near the
city. This hill was a very commanding
position. It allowed his men to look out
into the sea and see if any relief ships were approaching.
It was high enough to see in all directions.
They also could see what the city was doing, and what they
did was anytime someone would emerge from the city to try to
go to the farms to get food because they were running low
inside the city because of the siege, he would attack.
So his men would attack anyone who's trying to go get food.
And so the situation got worse and worse inside the city.
Monasapus was a little bit patient.
He was he's like, yeah, I see how this is going.
And he decided to let things just get worse for the
Corkairans. He's like, well, they're
starving. Certain people started to flee
and just run away. They ran from the city, try to
get away. And what Monasapus would do is
he would capture them and enslave them, and he would tell
the Corkairans that this has happened.
He's like anyone that flees is getting enslaved and of course
they're fleeing because they're starving.
So what actually happened was so many people started fleeing that
Manassepas couldn't enslave them all.
He's decided to change his tactics and started deploying
men with whips and they would be whipped back towards the city
because this would accelerate the starvation of the city,
having these empty mouths back inside.
But the in people inside saw those that ran away as traitors,
as cowards, as cravens. They're no better than slaves.
Go ahead and slave them. So they were not let back in.
So Monasapus grew cocky. He was like, oh, they're
desperate, they're so bad, things are falling apart.
We're going to win any minute now.
So he started to look ahead greedily.
Now what did we say before about Spartan commanders?
They're a lot like because of their system of no money or
money that doesn't spend elsewhere, they get out there in
the world, they get in charge of huge amounts of money and the
dollar signs just they can't help, they lose control.
The greed, they've never dealt with this.
It's like a person that's always wanted to have a drink but we're
never allowed to. And then they become an
alcoholic because they just, you know, like kind of like that.
So Monasapus got real greedy. He's like, I got all this money.
Part of the reason he had so much money is a lot of the
Spartan allies, their choice is to send men or money.
Most of them send money. So he had all this money that he
could use to. Well he was using it to pay
mercenaries. So he started to underpay some
of his mercenaries and he let some of the other ones go.
He just said go home, I don't need you anymore.
This was not smart. On one hand, he knew he had more
allies coming to the Tyrant of Syracuse was sending some ships
as well. He didn't send money, he sent
actual ships. They hadn't arrived yet, but he
knew they were coming, so maybe that was part of his angle.
He was like, I can send some of these mercenaries home, save
some money. I'll have some replacement
troops here soon anyway, and I won't have to pay them.
They're paid by their their tyrant back home.
And what was he going to do with that extra money?
Well, if you guess he was going to keep it, you're right.
That's almost certainly what he was going to do.
So he just kept sending mercenaries home and underpaying
the others, and just kept waiting for Corkaira to
capitulate while his allies were on the way.
However, this delay cost him. Now, ironically, Timothe is
taking his time getting soldiers pissed off the Athena.
They're like, bro, you were supposed to head W attack
Corkaira here, you are going east.
What the hell is that? So they summoned him back home
to face charges. That's not exactly going to
speed things up is it? So they're kind of shooting
themselves in the foot here. But Timotheus's allies showed up
for him big time. Jason Afiri, Alcitas, the first,
they showed up in person and pleaded his case.
They were like, Nah, he's doing the right thing, y'all?
Kenya, Amantas. The third had the coup here,
though. He really sent the message.
This guy was supplying timber to Athens.
Athens doesn't have a very good timber supply locally.
And of course, they're making so many ships, they really need
this. Amantas sense sent the lumber,
the timber directly to the estate of Timotheus, not to the
not to Athens directly, but to this guy's house.
And the message was there. The implied threat's there.
It's like if you throw this guy in jail, I met.
Where are these wood shipments going to go?
They might not go to Athens at all.
They might go to Sparta, they might go to somewhere else
entirely. So y'all, if you don't let this
man go, you could lose a lot. The cost of letting him go is
going to be way cheaper than the cost of, you know, putting him
in jail or or finding him guilty.
So Athens was pretty pissed about this, though they did not
like being forced into a verdict and they didn't like Timotheus,
even though he was so successful.
There's some Tyrion here. He's put on trial for things he
didn't really do wrong. Of course the difference is this
guy won his trial where Tyrion did not.
But either way the guy went E to get allies and then came back
and of unfortunately he won his court case but he wasn't
reinstated so. He was acquitted, but he put his
own money into this expedition. Presumably he was expecting to
get it back once he took Corkair.
He's like, well, I could pay myself back with this, with the
loot here, which is fine. That's actually fairly normal.
But he didn't get the chance to go back.
So he's like, yo, I did all this stuff for my country.
I made these powerful allies, and you guys just kicked me to
the curb. So what does he do?
He does what Tyrion does. He sails east and becomes a
mercenary for the King of Persia.
We'll return to him later because he's not going to be in
play for a bit, but damn, you screw that one up.
Athens. So they sent a different guy in
charge, Satessicles, which whose name is really close to
Testicles. He sailed into Korkyra despite
the blockade. He pulled a Davos.
He snuck in at night. Manassas didn't see it coming
because he was watching, you know, well, you can't see at
night. So clever move there.
So he didn't realize that a new leader had arrived and morale
had been greatly boosted. They were on the verge of giving
up. They were starving all of a
sudden. I mean, it was presumably he
brought some food with him too. So refreshed leadership there.
They were not going to give up. Manassas still thinking any
minute now they're going to, they're going to bail.
Nope. And, you know, this, this whole
watching the towers thing goes both ways.
Manassas was able to see the problems with inside the city.
Well, the city Watch of Corkaira started to take notice of the
fact that, you know, Monasapus's army seems a little smaller.
Remember, he was sending mercenaries home because he
didn't think he needed them. So they're like, they think
we're weak, they're getting weaker, they think they're on
the attack. What happens if we attack them?
They were that what a surprise that would be, right?
Monasapus did not see it coming because he didn't think they had
fresh troops. He thought everyone in there was
starving wrong, because these Athenian soldiers had showed up.
So they Sally forth an attack. Monasapus, he's a Spartan, wars
his business. He's not terribly caught off
guard. He gets his men together, orders
his officers, you know, get the mercenaries ready.
His officers say, Sir, these men haven't been paid in two months,
can we really count on them? To which he replied with his
spear. He beat them.
Two different officers he smacked with his spear, which is
what Spartan officers do when lesser's buck authority.
That's it's. But I can only imagine what the
subordinates were thinking. Yo beating us?
That's not going to make the mercenary troops more loyal.
They're not Spartans, they're mercenaries.
You can't use Spartan discipline on non Spartans.
They didn't grow up with this you goof.
Yet they're still Spartans, they're still badass, they're
still bred for war. Even though not many of them are
actual Spartans. They followed orders, the
mercenaries did their job even though they weren't happy about
it. Morale was bad, but it still
worked, at least at first. So they pushed back to Sally,
back towards the city and kept pushing.
So they get close enough to the walls.
You know what happens when they get close enough to the walls?
The citizens and the other people start throwing shit.
They're like AB missiles, arrows, Spears, cups, roof
tiles, whatever. So the Spartans back off.
They're like, ah, OK, we got too close.
We shouldn't have gotten this close.
They're holding bravely, trying to back off.
It looks their back off looks like a retreat.
And a smaller detachment of Athenians and locals comes out
of a side gate and attacks a sortie.
And the Spartans hold off that army, too.
But everyone inside who's watching from the walls, like
you got to imagine like a lot of the citizens are watching.
Their fate depends on this. This is, you know, they're not
necessarily participating. They just want to see what
happens. Like they might die or live
based on the result of this. All of a sudden they're thinking
maybe we should join in. Maybe we shouldn't just watch.
We're getting the upper hand. I I've got a knife, you know,
I've got a spear. Why not run out there and help
my fellow citizens? That's exactly what happened.
The whole citizenry, or at least a lot of them, emerge from the
front gates to help the soldiers.
And that's just too much for the Spartans.
Monasapus is overrun and killed along with many of his men.
Now he had left his second in command back in their base to
guard things. Not every single soldier they
had was there on the field. They find out what happens.
The second in command is like, we got a jet.
This is bad. We just lost.
So he flees with as many men as he can.
And whatever ships they can take.
They had to flee so quickly that they did not take all the people
they were planning to enslave, all those starving people that
they captured. Most of those regained their
freedom, although they were forever seen as cowards by their
fellow citizens. But that's better than being
enslaved. But let's not forget there were
still those ships on the way from Syracuse, right?
Those still hadn't arrived yet. And they, of course, didn't know
what had happened in the interim.
They'd been at sea all this time.
But however, however, also on the way was Iffiqrites.
Remember what I said he was let go from.
He escaped Egypt and they investigated him and put him in
charge of the Navy. Well, this is when that
happened. So he sailed West and put on a
show of leadership that just, it's very much the polar
opposite to what Monasapus just did.
It makes for a great story here to show these opposites.
So he had a lot of rookies on his ships because this war has
been going on for a while back and lots of different wars are
happening. They already sent a bunch of
soldiers out. So his crews were mostly green.
He's like, well, and he knows what he has to do.
He's going, well, how am I going to prepare them for this?
I, I can't sail into battle with these green crews.
I got to get them some experience.
So he organized games, things like fastest to shore at night,
gets the biggest dinner, fastest back out to sea gets a wreath.
They made it. He turned, he gamified, Right.
That's a modern thing. He did this back then.
It was very clever. And of course, their motivation
to win is making them stronger and faster and more adept.
They're eager to train and get better.
It's genius. It's also just like kind of
straightforward. Treat your men well.
Give them something to work for. Don't just tell them what to do.
Don't make demands. Give encouragement.
Also, you got to have, you know, you also got to have the the
threat behind it all. You know, if you don't do your
job, there's still that threat. It's still a military but but
you lead with plus rather than minus.
The minus is when you need it. The Spartans would lead with the
minus like you're bad. You do what I say.
Nah, Athenians are this especially this Athenian did it
differently. He's like, no, I encourage you
all. I want you to do your best.
I'm with you, right? You can see why this is very,
very favorable and and preferable.
So he got there first in part because his men were training
and working and eager on the way.
And he found out what was happening.
He's like, OK, so you guys have already done really well here.
Good job on pushing back this Spartan Manassepus, but we've
got more enemies coming, right? So they were sneaky, they held
off and they waited. And when the Syracuse and ships
showed up, they basically ambushed him, caught all but one
ship, and he captured their commander, Critipus, who he was
going to ransom and get some cash for.
But Critipus took his own life in captivity, captivity.
So that didn't happen. And then now this Corkaira is a
is on the island, like I said of Corfu, it was called now, but
this isn't the only city on the island then or now.
So if Fikrites's job was to finish the job, his job was to
finish the job. Nice little bit of repetition
there. He took all the rest of the
island, the smaller cities and such, and he didn't have much
trouble with it because he had these very motivated troops.
Quarkarians were much more predisposed towards the
Athenians than the Spartans. Even though it was quarkarian
oligarchs who invited the Spartans in the 1st place, the
run-of-the-mill quarkarians were not on board with that.
So that's very successful. Ethiquity is kind of wanted out
now. Remember our author, historian,
soldier Xenophon, the Athenian guy who loved Sparta, who was
friends with Ajis Elias who lived in Sparta on in the state
they gave him? He's our source for these
leadership tales. Get that straight here.
Make sure you understand what I'm saying.
The guy who hates his own country and loves Sparta
brutally criticized Manasipus and praised the hell out of
ethiquity. So for once, the guy was honest
because there's a lot of times where Xenophon's histories are a
little sketchy because he's just so blatant with his biases.
He just leaves things out. He hates Thebes, for example.
He just leaves them out of things that they did.
But in this case, he was honest and it's pretty cool.
So I mean, for example, Xenophon will just ignore the fact that
Palapados or Epamondas did something.
He just leaves them out. Sometimes the footnotes in his
book are really something the historians are like.
Again, he leaves out the deeds like this guy, but other times
his he's the only source for things.
And when if he's not talking about Thebes, you can kind of
trust him. Anyway, it's what we have now.
All that was for Korkaira. What about Zakynthos?
Well, I don't actually have that much to say about Zakynthos.
There is no detailed history of what actually happened.
We believe that Athens just held on, they kept it and Sparta had
to back off and other things happened.
And we're not sure either way, Timotheus must have been a
little bitter. He set all this up.
He it was his allies that supplied a lot of the troops
that did the work. And then they won.
And the victory in the credit went to a ficker tease in
Wikipedia, which is a sometimes a good source.
I can't use it too much for these things because the sources
disagree so much. You might find a Wikipedia
article that quotes Theodorus here and another one on a very
related topic that uses Xenophon and they dis completely
disagree. Or they disagree a little.
Like ones this year. One will say it's two years
later and both of these historians have made obvious
mistakes. But if you go to Wikipedia right
now, it will say if thicker Tees won the Corcarian campaign.
But I just got through telling you how many other people were
involved in that. So it's a really good example of
popularity going to one place or one person getting the credit
for something that other people did.
Now, he does get partial credit. It's not like this is a complete
scam here. But this again, Tyrion.
Tyrion, we've compared to Timotheus here a bunch of times.
And what happened at the Battle of Blackwater.
He did a lot. He may have been the single most
important Lannister leader there yet Tywin got so much credit
because he won the last part of the battle.
He finished it. That's very much what happened
with Aficretes here. Aficretes got an undue amount of
credit because he's the one that finished it, rather than doing
the more difficult work of getting it started.
I don't think anyone here would argue that Aficretes had a
harder job. I think that the defeating
Monasapus with starving Korkarians seems like a more
impressive thing. But anyway, let's talk about
something entirely different. Helika on the southern side of
the Corinthian Gulf, there are a whole bunch of small rivers
which serve as borders for a whole mess of city states.
This is the realm of IKEA. Ache is putting it up on the
map. One of these cities was called
Helica. Emphasis on the word was it
fought with Agamemnon in the Trojan War.
And these this IKEA, this place called IKEA eventually became
the IKEA League. And Helica was often the head of
the Ikean League and was sometimes called Dodecopolis
City of 12 because it ruled the 12 Acadian cities.
People have been living there since 3000 BC or so.
Like a lot of ancient Greek sites, some of these places have
had people for just longer than even archaeology can be sure
about, but they're sure it's pretty damn far back.
Their patron God was Poseidon. Now Poseidon is called the Lord
of Helicon for reasons not entirely known, but the name
similarity is undoubtable. Helicon.
Helica, now not uncommon in Greece, generally speaking, but
especially common not just on the coast, but in but around
places like this. Earthquakes, lots of
earthquakes. The Peloponnese southern portion
of Greece, which this is the northern part of, is the
residence of Poseidon. That's the common name for it.
Poseidon is the God of the sea, as you all well know, probably,
but he's also the God of earthquakes.
One of his most common epithets, perhaps his most common epithet
was Earthshaker. And the connection between the
two is straightforward, especially if you're a culture
familiar with the connection which they very much were.
Which is to say, earthquakes are very often followed by floods,
right? We all know that.
And each magnifies the damage caused by the other.
Less straightforward is Poseidon's connection to horses.
He's often considered the tamer of horses.
Maybe that's because earthquakes, I don't know.
The galloping of horses can feel like an earthquake.
So the that vibe is familiar at least.
But here is a Homeric verse that I believe speaks to some of
this. It's pretty cool.
I begin to sing about Poseidon, the great God, mover of the
earth and fruitless sea, God of the deep, who is also Lord of
Helicon and wide AGI A2 fold office.
The gods allotted you, O Shaker of the earth, to be a tamer of
horses and a savior of ships. Now, horses also our connection
to those northern Greek city states like Thessaly and
Macedonia, these horse country states, whereas like Sparta is
not Athens, is only a little bit.
It's not. It's not horse country.
It's very straightforward in that sense.
Now, the inhabitants of ancient Helico who are listening right
now, which I'm sure there's lots of.
Y'all, you're thinking, wait, where are you going with this?
What's all this about? Earthquakes and floods in our
city was what is this? What are you going?
Sorry, y'all. Yeah, things are indeed about to
go down. And I do mean your city in the
winter of 373, they were columns of flame described in the sky.
Now, this isn't one of those. I know you might be thinking one
of those retrospective added pieces of signs that happened
that people said happened before some great event like, oh, yeah,
there were signs for that. No, there really were.
This really happened because this is an unknown natural
phenomena. When there's tectonic activity,
sometimes there are lights kind of like northern light type
things that pop off in the sky above where that tectonic
activity is happening. And that's what this was.
And more directly, animals left a bunch of animals like 5 days
before what happened. A bunch of like all the animals
went inland. Boy, that's scary isn't it?
Now we know that's a natural phenomena.
The animals know what's happening to to the Greeks.
Some of them would have seen it as natural phenomena, most of
would have seen it as an omen. Some would have seen it as both.
Now, the Roman historian Seneca many years later wrote that it
was a comet. But this was probably the.
It's actually called Earthquake Lightning, which is a really
cool name. There's actually other names for
it, but Earthquake Lightning is the coolest name of of the
several names. So, yeah.
So that's probably what it was. Now you can kind of understand
the ancients not understanding what was going on, not
thoroughly, But why would you stay if all the animals leave?
Maybe because you don't have anywhere to go, but still, if
you're really superstitious and the animals leave and there's
flames in the sky, that's not a good omen, right?
I, I mean, omens are interpreted in a variety of ways, but it's
really hard for me to think that was a good one.
Anyway, there was a, also an after the fact reason for all
this. There have been colonists from
Helica that settled in Ionia. Like this is the, the, these
were the kind of the source of a lot of the Ionian colonists,
including the Ionian islands that we just talked about.
Now, they wanted to have a copy of the Poseidon statue that was
at Helica so they could have the same representation, But there's
different stories about the Helicans saying no to going as
far as killing the people who asked.
That's probably an exaggeration. But either way, Poseidon was
pissed about something because five days after the animals
fled, there was an earthquake and shortly after there was a
tsunami and it flooded. The entire city was flooded,
even though it was a mile and a quarter inland.
So a hole that far inland and it was still completely submerged.
There were 10 Spartan ships there at anchor.
They vanished. Just gone.
You got to wonder what the Spartans thought about that,
given how pious they were. And they were like, what did we
do wrong? Whoops.
Sorry, Poseidon. I we're sorry.
What? What do we need to do to make it
up to you? 2000 men got together to try to
recover bodies. Again, very important to recover
bodies in ancient Greece. They got nothing.
They found no bodies, as far as we're told, so this is very
confusing from a religious point of view.
Right there they were. Must have been massive calls to
placate Poseidon, things like that.
But this same earthquake also destroyed the Temple of Apollo
at Delphi, which was one of the most important temples in all of
Greece. It's a really special rich
temple. And I guess the interpretation
was like, Poseidon's mad at Apollo.
They're fighting each other. The actual priestess was killed
by the earthquake, which is, whoa, that's a big deal, too.
So of course, what does Greece do?
They're like, well, we got to build a new one.
So they started creating, They started collecting funds.
Everyone around the entire continent.
I keep calling it a continent. It's not a continent.
Everyone around Greece started contributing to this.
It took decades to do. And we'll get back to that when
it happened because it's it's nowhere near now.
When they finished. This in turn, triggered
historical confusion akin to that which Maester Eamonn
deduced at the end of his life because of a translation error.
Yeah, The Princess that was promised bit, right?
He's like, we thought it was a Prince, but it was a Princess, a
translation error. In this case, what happened was
the city sank into what ancients call a chorus.
Scholars don't know what that word is.
The context LED them to believe it was the Gulf of Corinth,
which is what we saw on the map there.
If it Shay, I could put it back up for a second.
You see, this whole area that Achaea exists in is the northern
shore of the Gulf of Corinth. The Gulf of Corinth almost cuts
Greece in half entirely, but not quite.
So they argued about what that meant and they thought Gulf of
Corinth for for long time, centuries and centuries.
That's what they thought. But and also by the way, people
considered it from a natural scientific POV, even back then,
I said that it was mostly religious thing, but they're
even in the ancient histories, people talked openly in our
sources and elsewhere about, hey, maybe this is just some
natural phenomena. Pretty cool that that people
thought about that way even in a very, very superstitious time
and place. But of course, Greeks were very
curious and questioning and studious and, you know, they,
they asked, they wanted to know. And that's great for us.
And now that they were. So now a similar earthquake
tsunami combo happened there in 1817, right?
So it's, it's periodic, right? Yes.
In fact, more on that in a moment.
Jacques Costello looked for it. There was just too much evidence
that it really happened. People didn't think it was a
myth. Just too many ancient sources
attested to it. Honestly, there were people, it
didn't sink all the way out of sight at first.
It's just now in modern times, it sank it, it was, it was, it
wasn't visible. But at the time, like 300 years
later or a little less maybe because 300 years later there
was another earthquake. There's basically an earthquake
there every 300 years. That's, that was determined in
the year 2025. A large, very large research
project determined this. A historical memory would always
preserve these disasters because they weren't that far apart and
they would always come again. So no wonder this place was so
dedicated to Poseidon. Anyway, Roman tourists would
take boat rides over the site and you they could look down
into the water and still see the city.
That would have been crazy, right?
To be able to take a boat ride over a sunken city and just look
down. You can see the walls.
There was a bronze statue of Poseidon that still jutted out
of the water. It was the one thing that hadn't
sunk completely. Think of the ruined Roynar
cities, the pole boats, they were around there.
It's very similar to that. And this bronze statue of
Poseidon, His hand was jutting out of the water, holding a
hippocamp, which is. A horse fish, it's like a
Centaur, but instead of a horse body and the head of a man, it's
the head of a horse and the body of a fish, more like a Murph, a
horse fish. A horse made a mur horse anyway.
And people this, this, this statue was like a problem for
fishermen because they could get their Nets stuck on it.
And you know, it was so close to the surface, you had to watch
out for it basically out of course, over time, you know,
there would be there were future earthquakes and the location got
lost. Now eventually people, so
eventually people figured out that Poros didn't mean the Gulf
of Corinth, it meant lagoon. So again, the translation error
was figured out. And in 1988 it was when that was
finally figured out 1988 y'all, 38 years ago, a guy named Steven
Sotter and Dora Katsunapuppu decided and that it must mean
lagoon. And they were proven right in
2001. So they had the idea in 88 and
proved it 13 years later, and that was the beginning of that
huge research project that revealed all this stuff about
the underwater sea and the frequency of the earthquakes and
allowed them to find it. They did find it.
They found walls, they found tiles, they found stuff, they
found coins. Really incredible.
Now, back in the day, one of the sources that we're using a lot
here, Diodorus, he visited, he saw it.
So did Strabo, Passanius, Ovid, Alien, a lot of kind of famous
historical names. Plato probably visited too.
And Plato wrote about Atlantis 13 years later.
Atlantis is just such a mess in the modern times, people.
There's so many conspiracies and kind of frankly silly stories
about it. Plato lived through this, an
actual city sinking in his home near his homeland, you know,
miles away from where he lived. You know, a walking distance
from where he lived. Seriously, that is not an
exaggeration. And people are.
Why do people imagine Atlantis was a real place when it sank?
Because it attacked Athens. All great.
Athens. It's it's it's destroyed itself.
It sank into the sea. No, it's a metaphor.
Countries that get so corrupt internally that they start wars
with other countries unprovoked. That.
No, we don't know of any other examples of that happening in
modern times. Do we know no one ever starts
unprovoked wars to distract from other things?
Never happens in the real world. Yeah, it happened back then too,
right. Y'all?
This is this is how the world works.
I suppose. So Plato was inspired to write
about nations that reach their end state.
End state states when they're corrupt and their biggest enemy
is themselves. But that by extension creates
problems for their neighbors because they start to attack
them. Now he's probably talking about
Persia, because Persia is the one that keeps attacking from
afar, so-called advanced nation that has existed for a long time
and is above everybody else is so powerful, yet it attacks
glorious, mighty, upstanding, moral Athens and meets its end.
And Plato had all sorts of examples.
Like in the Republic, he imagines the perfect state.
He imagines all sorts of cultures and writes about them
as if they're real. That's what he did.
He these were metaphorical. These were academic studies.
These were ways to bring these are subject matter to foster
other discussions. He was a philosopher.
It's crazy to think that we have all these wild ideas about
Atlantis when we have this very straightforward example that
happened 13 years before he wrote about it.
Like, how could this not be a major influence?
Like, oh, yeah, I wrote about a sunken city that everybody.
But it wasn't related to this at all.
Come on, that's ridiculous right now.
The people helic are not like the Atlanteans versions are.
Like I said, the Carthaginians are.
And the Carthaginians had a similar thing happened.
They had overreached and and fell back.
And I'm I'm not even talking about the Carthaginians of Roman
time because that's obviously hasn't happened yet.
The messianian civilization of Agamemnon and others was also in
part destroyed due to earthquakes.
The Isle of Crete, where their power structures lay a lot of
the old Nossos Minoan civilization ruled from prior to
Agamemnon and the Mycenaeans was particularly vulnerable to that
as well. They were they had a whole
palace culture, but all these palaces were destroyed by
earthquakes and that all literally collapsed.
Minoan Santorini, the Isle of Santorini, some of y'all may
have heard of that was destroyed by a volcano.
It it it kind of looks like it's like a like a Crescent with some
islands in center of it. George made a version of that.
What is that one called? It is Mara High.
See, this is Santorini. Yeah.
George's inspiration from ancient Greece is all over the
place. Right.
So that is my tale of Atlantis and the inspiration of Atlantis.
And can you guys believe that's not a more well known story?
It's so blatantly connected to Plato, who created Atlantis, yet
people just don't talk about this very much.
It blows my mind. Like, it's so straightforward.
Anyway, one last tidbit before we take a break.
An interesting footnote about dates and reckonings.
Again, they didn't have dates. Remember that example about the
taxation grain tax in the year of the Archon ship of
Aristocratides or Socratides? It was.
Yeah. So they didn't track years.
They tracked important events. So this event, the sinking of
Helica, it wasn't the event that people used as a milestone.
You'd think 2 years before the sinking of Helici, 2 years after
the blah blah, blah. No, it was.
You're used to things like 2 years after the fall of Troy or
five years after the plague, and people at the time would know
which plague was referred to. Maybe later that comes difficult
to track, but at the time they knew the singing of Helico was
often referred to as two years before the Battle of Lutra, not
the other way around. It's the Battle of Lutra that
was the important one, not the sinking of Helico, which I don't
know what I mean. Seems like they're both really
darn important. But we are indeed headed for the
Battle of Lutra as the end of this episode.
I am very, very, very grateful to you all for indulging me in
the series. I asked you all if to speak up
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you like and we'll keep doing it.
Lots to cover, so let's move on. It's the year 372 now, although
sometimes we move to an event or place that covers more than a
year, then we have to bounce back.
But here we're officially speaking to the beginning of the
year 372, which was the 102nd Olympiad.
It's the year 3391 and to two on the Hebrew calendar, the year
4381 to 2 in the Assyrian calendar or in the Tibetan
calendar. It's the male Iron dog year
transitioning to the female Iron bore year.
Chinese is similar with metal dog transitioning to metal pig.
Not different from iron dog and iron boar, right?
In the Olympics of the year 372, the naked Sprint was won by
Damon of Thurii. It's been a while y'all, but
Damon of Thurii won last time also.
And remember that's the most important event, the naked
Sprint. The Stadia boys boxing was won
by Thirsalacus of Corkira of Corkira.
This kid who won the boxing title was under siege as a child
and survived. Tough kid.
You got to think he made it through that.
Maybe he was one of those people that ran out with the others to
attack with the rest of the citizens.
Maybe he speared a Spartan that have been really cool.
Either way, I got to imagine this is no ordinary kid living
through something like that. Boys wrestling was won by
Xenocles of Menelaus. There were two men of methadry
who won some event. Remember all we have is the
inscriptions and sometimes the inscriptions are like half
missing. Now these senoris which is the 2
horse race, remember the this the two horse chariot that was
one by Troilis of Aelis, the Tetrapon young Tetrapon the four
horse young 4 horse race was won by Troilis of Ellis again.
Now, in both cases, he was also the referee.
That's a quirk of ancient sports.
You have things that just really don't make any sense.
Yeah, this guy was competing in the same event.
He was judging, but that was the last time that happened.
They changed the rules after. They're like, yeah, we're not
going to allow you to judge and compete in the same event.
Like, we really shouldn't have allowed that in the 1st place,
but they fixed it going forward. Now, at the outset of this
episode, I pointed out the clever Alcitas, the first of the
small Kingdom of Molassos and Pyrus, who allied with Athens
and Jason Efira, powerful allies.
Now here in 372, the entanglements or peace
enmeshment, I don't know what to call it.
Like, it could fall apart and everyone go to war with each
other, or it could mean that everyone's so tightly tied
together with peace deals that no one fights.
Yeah. Which is going to happen.
Well, we'll see because Jason after his alliance with them,
allies with Amintos the third, his powerful neighbor to the
east. So he's basically allies with
everyone around him now. And then Jason allies with
Athens directly. And this was partly to resolve
the tension of him allying with Amintos.
Cause Amintos was like, you know, he was supplying Athens
with timber. Athens saw the alliance with
Jason and saw that threatened be like, wait a minute, is he going
to keep giving us timber? Because if he doesn't, we might
have a big problem. And if Jason's making him an
ally, then Jason might sort of, oh, you want to be our ally too.
All right, that alleviates the pressure.
OK, so he's not moving against us, at least not obviously,
because he's making an alliance with everyone.
He didn't just make an alliance with them, though.
He formally joined the Second Athenian League.
This is a big deal because you remember what Athenians were
telling people they're like, hey, this won't be like last
time. Last time we, you know, we
pushed you around. We'll admit it.
We pushed you around. We, we told you what to do.
It wasn't really an alliance. It was us telling you what to
do. We promise it won't be like that
this time. Now, a lot of them probably took
that promise with a grain of salt.
But now Jason Afiri joins. Well, Athens can't push him
around. They literally cannot.
He's arguably more powerful than them.
So that ironically gave credibility to the notion that
Athens wasn't going to dominate its own league because here's
somebody they just can't dominate.
And Jason, like Athens, was allied with other kings who
really who also weren't in the league.
But it was still creating this really big connection of
alliances, as I've been alluding to here.
Jason seems to be at the center of it all.
And and lest Thebes be left out, don't forget he was friends with
Palopitus and his wife was Theben.
He named his first daughter Phoebe.
Like, so Thebes without an S, this is a real strategy.
Here he was. He used bullying, intimidation,
treachery to take over in Thessaly.
But once he got there, he kind of kind of stopped doing that.
He started doing things like this, putting himself in the
middle of everything without violence.
There's the threat of violence because he's powerful and you
know that you don't want to fight him.
But he wasn't actually making aggressive moves.
He was just letting reminding of you of who he was and being
like, yeah, you don't want to mess with me, but imagine how
great of a friend I could be. Let's, let's forget about all
that. What happens if we fight
business? Let's be friends, y'all?
What's his game here? You all know Dune, I think most
of you. What was Frank Herbert writing
about? Something that a lot of people
missed? The message of doom.
Beware of charismatic leaders. Jason is the absolute avatar of
charismatic leader. This guy is everything in one
the your best friend and your worst enemy.
The biggest charmer of politicians, philosophers and
soldiers like he he was beloved by all because he was just
better at everything. Xenophon didn't phrase it that
way, didn't say he's better than everyone, but he said it kind of
in an inverted way. He said this is the one man in
Greece that nobody could look down on.
So this wasn't quite putting him ahead of everybody in that
sense. He was maybe are leaving room
for some people to be maybe on equal footing with him.
And let's not forget that Xenophon was always keeping his
best friend Ajislaus in mind when he writes such things.
So he's like, well, yeah, maybe no one can look down on him.
Just allow us is kind of implying that Ajislaus is on his
level 2 just without saying that he's at least could say that to
Ajis allows by and closed doors, you know.
Hey, buddy, keeping you up there at the top, too.
So again, it's threatening, but in a defensive, threatening way.
He's like, hey, I'm making alliances with everybody and I'm
in the center of it all. I'm the only one who's an ally
with everybody. He's kind of like rising to
power by putting himself in the middle and just being better
than everyone. And it's really clever.
And why would you want to fight this guy?
He's like, yeah, be my friend again, Like, isn't that better?
Just let me do these things and we'll all benefit from it.
Even Artaxerxes doesn't want to fight Jason.
Even Persia's great might is a little like, I don't know if we
want to go fight him, but Jason started talking about going for
Artaxerxes, and that got Artaxerxes and some other
Persians like, oh, oh, can he do that?
We're the ones who are always attacking.
W can, can can he actually reverse this?
And Greece starts to attack Persia?
Well, the logic behind this is extremely straightforward.
Sure Persia has the money, but who does he keep hiring to fight
his war? Greek soldiers?
What if instead of fighting for him, they fight against him?
And if Jason is leading this with his elite Golden Company
style mercenary army that he's always at the head of that
everyone has to match his level of stamina and endurance and
bravery, And he gives heroic funerals to soldiers who fall
like he treats them really well. I've heard the term Marshall
cult referred to him and what he was doing there because he just
everything was built around the soldiery and, and just revering
that aspect of society. So he's moving up the ladder of
authority without fighting any battles.
He's being in charge of more and more people, more and more
people looking up to him without him actually killing or, you
know, winning elections or just his influence was just so
all-encompassing in so many ways and so many places and so many
facets of society. He couldn't help but just
continue to rise. And this talk about attacking
Persia, oh, boy, did that go well with Greeks.
About, as you know, in the opposite way that it went poorly
for how Persians received it. Because they're like, yeah, we
hate them. They're always pushing us
around. They're always telling us what
to do. They're corrupt.
They're all, they're slow and lazy.
They got too much money. They aren't men.
They're not. They wear makeup.
This is this is actual things they would complain about.
They always bow. They have to kneel to their
king. How pathetic.
Well, those aren't men, right? That this is the way they
thought. So Jason's sort of capturing
that spirit and directing it towards who?
The real enemy. He's like, why are we fighting
each other? Why do Greeks keep fighting each
other? Isn't and isn't Artaxerxes part
of the reason why that keeps happening?
Isn't he encouraging that even when he's telling us to be at
peace so he can bring us to fight in Egypt, he's still
manipulating us. Y'all, that's what's happening.
A lot of people are thinking that like he's he's swaying a
lot of people. This starts to work.
A lot of people are like, yeah, why are we fighting each other?
Not only is it wrong to fight your own countrymen to a certain
degree, but those guys are Barbarians with lots of money.
There's a lot of appeal to attacking them and taking their
stuff, to turning the tables on them, right?
A lot of a lot of Greeks saw the logic, the ambition, the
positives to all this, right? Persia's rich as hell.
Imagine going there and winning spoils, collecting the loot,
taking their gods, the money from their temples.
That's going to dollar signs flashing in a lot of Greek
soldiers eyes right there. Not even greed, although some of
it is greed. Just profit benefit.
You know, this is a way to make enough money to live the rest of
my life on one campaign to Persia.
Now he's not actually organizing campaigns to Persia.
This hasn't started. He hasn't gone that far.
It's just to something he's floating and it's being received
very well. So what's next though?
Is he going to start just attacking Persian?
No, of course not. You got to he's, he's more
clever than that. It's not an all frontal of war.
He's doing so much by getting people on his side.
Why not apply that to Persia? Why not see if some of the
Persian satrap, some of those Western Persian entities, maybe
they'd sign up for this too. Maybe they prefer Jason.
How old is Artaxerxes? Right?
What happens when he died? I'm young and healthy, man, am I
not? The future?
Well, who? Anybody could take over after
our desert? Who's it going to be?
One of his sons? Somebody that's been raised at
court, living in a harem half the time.
Like, is that really who you want to be in charge next?
Why not me? I train in armor.
Armor I invented. I run around in armor I
invented. Making myself stronger.
Proving my physical prowess. Xerxes sits around with 12,000
talent, literally like a billion dollars in wealth on his person.
He didn't earn any of that. He didn't pay the iron price for
that right? How he slips in a harem.
I live in my armor out in the field like he just every single
thing this guy does sets him above Persians and above other
Greeks and above just everybody, but without the arrogance that
comes with it just he just proves it over and over so but
continuing to rise this man very interesting.
This this player is, is looking like he might be the big one or
one of the big ones anyway, but let's move on because this is
these are the maneuvers of Jason that we got a lot of other
places to cover. Back to Thebes and Sparta back
to some of the core issues here. The city of Platea, it's a place
right on the border of Boisha and Attica.
Boisha's the region of Thebes, Attica's the region of Athens
right Now, Platea historically had pretty much always preferred
Athens to Thebes. So it was frequently at odds
with Thebes. Thebes didn't like that.
Now we're talking about, you know, different times of
history. This is a build up over a long
time. During the Peloponnesian War,
some 40 years before, some Theben commandos tried to sneak
into Platea with the help of some insiders and seized the
city. Sounds familiar, doesn't it?
That's the obviously that's the thing that Sparta did to thieves
during the King's peace, the cadmere, right?
The difference being Sparta succeeded.
At least they held it for three years.
Their mission succeeded. This did not the the Thetans
found out. They captured the Theban
commandos and executed them all the next day.
So Thebes was not so happy about that and then?
Thebes attacked, they were able to take the city and they
inflicted catalysis on it. Catalysis means every building
is torn down, the people are usually sold into slavery or
killed, and it's like the place never existed.
That's catalysis wiping it from the map.
But in 386 it was restored by Sparta because it was a long
term strategy against Theba Thebes.
It was like, hey, if we put the city back and we, you know, we
invest in it and we put our people there and they get
they're on our side, we've got a base of operations close by and
it's going to be a problem for them indeed.
Now, during this current situation, during the current
year, we're in Platin, farmers were unable to go farm because
whenever they went to their farms, the Boesian League would
attack them. They're like, aha, we see you.
We're we're attacking you. So they realized we can go to
our farms whenever the Boesian League is having it's meetings.
Those meetings can last for weeks.
You know, they do their democracy stuff, they're
talking, they're floating all the different ideas.
It's a it's like Senate is in session or the House is in
session, like let's go farm. So that became the pattern.
They're like, all right, we go farm during your meetings until
the Thebans noticed the pattern that the Plutaeans had noticed
after they noticed the Theben pattern.
So they they went to their next assembly under instructions to
bring weapons. So they met for their assembly
and then went straight to Platea and started capturing farmers.
They captured so many farmers that Platea had no choice but to
surrender. And they got catalyzed again,
but not as bad this time. It was still really bad.
It was without the slavery bar part.
They still tore every building down and sent everyone to
Athens. It was kind of like the Free
folk surrendering to Stannis. He made them all swear an oath
to never set foot in Boesha again.
Yeah. What are the odds this oath was
held to? Not very good, huh?
Like, it's an oath at swordpoint.
You're not going to adhere to that, Right?
So we'll see if they get their chance.
So this was not popular though, like the rest of Greece is.
Like, these are just Greeks. They didn't really do anything
that wrong to you. And Athens, who's an ally of
thieves at this point, is particularly annoyed by it
because Platea's got a good relationship with them, even
though it's a Spartan enclave of sorts.
Because where did all the people get sent?
The ones that they didn't enslave?
They were like, you got to go to Athens, like you're putting all
these people on us, your ally. Come on.
So that was not cool. It didn't break the alliance,
but it was not cool. It was a set back.
It was a negative. Now, don't worry, there is going
to be a Platea 3. It's going to come back yet
again, but we'll, we'll talk about that when it happens.
So Sespi was next. That's another nearby to Thebes
place that wasn't always on great terms with SBI so or with
Thebes. So thieves.
But thieves decided to go a little lighter this time because
they saw the reaction from Athens.
They're like, all right, maybe that maybe that was too
heavy-handed. So all they did was say you got
to take down your walls. Everything else you can keep
nothing, no other problems. Just keep down your walls and
they're like you jerks. But they did it.
They didn't. They figured it was the lesser 2
evils. So they took down their walls.
Now let's move to the next year. 372 had some interesting things
happen, but it's 371 where the big action happens.
And this is the big climax of this episode, nicely featured
near the end here. Now remember, Sparta has 2 kings
that just allows, and it just allows hasn't been in the field
for a while. If you recall last episode he
had a blood clot in his leg that nearly killed him and he still
hadn't recovered. His leg was still a problem and
he's in his 70s now. It's like maybe he's not going
to recover is kind of one of the thoughts.
But he's still a king. He's still the most powerful
person in Sparta, maybe the most powerful person in Greece, and
his mind still works very well. This is not Farnabezus, even
though he's about the same age as Farnabezus.
Nothing slow about him, nothing incapable about him.
The younger Spartan king was Cleomberdus, and he was in
focus, the city of Focus, which is not that far from Thebes with
10,000 soldiers. Now, his stated goal was to
protect them from Thebes, but Artaxerxes got everyone to agree
to peace talks. Again.
The prevailing wisdom here is that 10,000 soldiers hanging out
near thieves. That's not defense.
That's leverage in the upcoming negotiations.
Agree to our terms or else. And that's exactly where this is
going. The next section is called War
Declared at the peace talks. I hope some of you thought of
Doctor Strangelove with that line.
You gentlemen, you can't fight. And here, this is the war room.
Well, yeah, that's where we're headed.
The Greeks are brought to the table by our deserts.
He's a massive power of money once again, and promises and
threat. Whatever worked, He, all the
above were used to bring the Greeks to the negotiating table.
Certain nations needed encouragement.
Some needed threats, some needed money.
Some needed promises, some needed some of the above.
Both of the above, All of the above.
Whatever. So everything was going pretty
well in that sense because of this offer.
Like Greece is like, yeah, I mean, kind of like what Jason's
saying, Like, yeah, isn't it better if we don't fight each
other? Even if isn't it better if we go
fight Persia? Persia's saying, well, hold off,
hold off on that thought. Don't fight each other.
I'll pay you to come fight Egypt.
So Egypt is the one going, hey, what?
Why are you saying this is all good here?
Why are we're the scapegoat? So he's saying stop fighting for
less money. I'll pay you more money plus the
opportunity to win spoils. Come fight for me in Egypt.
Yeah. Things weren't going well.
You know, I know the first part of this campaign didn't go that
well, You know, Fik or tease. Let's say he was right.
But yo, I got rid of Farna Basis.
We got this new guy Battames here.
It's going to go so much better. Come work for me.
If you want to keep fighting, you can for me.
You don't have to. You get paid better and you you
aren't going to lose your home if things go badly.
You know, Adisalaus is in charge of the peace talks because the
Spartans are still the ones empowered to enforce the Persian
peace, the peace of Antalcetus. Antalcetus was Spartan, so he's
Agisalaus is the one in charge of the proceedings.
He's sitting in the big chair or whatever and he's still fierce
and everyone's afraid of him even though he's 71 years old
and maybe no longer capable of soldiering to look at him there.
He would have seemed capable, but you know, it's more looking
is only half the battle, I suppose.
So a lot of the other ambassadors and signees were
afraid of him. Everyone knew he hated thieves
too, so they weren't going to like, maybe push him on that too
much because he's a little unreasonable about it.
You know, It's like don't bring up that hot button issue too
much with the man that might lose his temper and do something
that you can't stop or you might regret.
Some sources, Xenophon especially, say that the
Athenian stood up to a just allow us and and criticized him
for the Kadmaea and for some other unprovoked aggression.
Most historians think that Xenophon was doing his thing and
just ignoring the fact that this was Epaminondas standing up to a
just allow us because he hated to give Epaminondas credit for
anything. So it's one of these little
historical disputes. It was probably Epaminondas, but
some think it was some Athenians.
Anyway, the point is what was said and Epaminondas said if we
are to have peace, it must be on the basis of equality and
justice. If we are not equal, then peace
won't endure. Hello.
Yeah, True. I mean, that's a modern thing,
too. We get it.
It's like, yeah, you cannot have peace without justice.
You cannot have peace without equality because the people with
more power will inevitably use that power in aggressive, if not
violent ways. So by the way, how cool is this
that we have actual conversations, real historical
conversations between the leaders of these nations who are
at war, who've been fighting each other, who are been
diametrically opposed for so long.
Usually when this happens on TV or even in books, it seems
contrived, like, yeah, the the two leaders are talking to each
other, having a conversation. Like when does that happen?
Yeah, it does happen sometimes, but a lot of times it's
contrived. This really happened.
We have a lot of the actual dialogue, unlike a lot of times
when it's a military speech because there's no historian
there. This was a peace talk.
There were non soldiers there. This isn't a battlefield.
There are people writing things down, recording it or at least
memorizing it, remembering a lot of it.
So actual scenes of dialogue that aren't made-up.
So it goes pretty well. At first.
Everyone is like, yeah, we like this idea of Persian peace.
This is a pretty good sales pitch.
You know, some of us are happy to sign up to go fight in Egypt.
So a bunch of the cities sign. They're all they all agree to
sign. So when Thebes turn comes to
sign, they're like, yeah, all right, we're signing for Boesha.
And it just allows us like what? No, no, no, no, no, no, no, that
is not allowed. Only individual signings.
No leagues can sign, no signing for other people.
We are individuals autonomy and Epam.
And on the surface that's reasonable, right?
They're trying to keep they're they're trying to keep the the
dominance, the entangling alliances, that thing from
piling up, right? It's become a problem, but on
the surface is a lie. Thebes is making a power play
here. They are trying to get their
league accepted tacitly by the signature and being saying, hey,
you accept this, that means you accept our league.
But Sparta has conquered their neighbors 300 years ago.
This is way worse than signing for someone who has given you
permission to sign for them, which is effectively what Thebes
is doing. Sparta was signing for their
olive Laconia, which included conquered enslaved neighbors who
were Greek, the Messenians. Now I want to get deeper into
Messenia, but there's going to be better opportunities for the
history of this and why they're in such a sorry state because of
Sparta's, well, frankly, evil conquest of them.
And the ways they enforce it is very evil too.
It's when we get to it, you'll see what I mean.
It's the ways they kept Messenia down is startlingly evil,
systematically enslaved. And they figured out over the
course of hundreds of years the the most evil ways to keep this
in place. So, so he Pam man has had a
great point. He's saying, you wait, we can't
sign for her. He said, OK, you got a good
point. It just allows everyone should
sign for themselves. So that means the Messenians and
all the rest of Laconia are going to sign for themselves
too, right? Rather than just allow us to
sing? Nah, that's not what it means.
He flips out. He sees like he jumps out of his
chair, which means his leg is maybe a little OK, right?
And basically repeats himself. He's like, will you allow the
Bohesian cities to sign for themselves?
And he Pan Mons is like, will you allow the Laconian cities to
find for themselves? He just repeats himself too.
And it just allows blows a gasket, even though he's on the
side of extreme hypocrisy and everyone can kind of see it.
Pam Anandis just trapped him rhetorically and everyone knows
him. That's probably why he got so
mad, because he just lost a battle of words to a man at this
point he's never heard of. Most people don't know who Pam
Anandis is at this point. I've talked about him a lot
because I know where this story is going and because he's one of
my favorites. But we talked about him ahead of
time because of moments like this and because of future
moments where he is just the star or a star and is doing
amazing things that are make him a great character and a reason
to spend a lot of time talking about him.
He just owns, just allows verbally here and it shows.
Just allows brave on the battlefield cannot keep his cool
here. He's never been spoken to like
this. It's maybe maybe that's a bit
telling that his the system he lives under not enough pushback,
not enough criticism. This is a guy that isn't told no
often enough. He's told no publicly and he's
just furious his prize. Remember, this is a Tywin clone,
right? We've we've compared him to
Tywin in a lot of ways, not in all ways, but this is one that
pretty Tywin like here, he's he's pissed even when he's being
challenged on something that he's being a blatant immigrant
for. So what happens?
They just allow us early. I said what?
They don't want him to lose his temper.
Well, he lost his temper. He said, screw you Thebes.
I'm in charge. I rule these proceedings.
You're out. He uses the word Expondo.
Sounds like some sort of something a magician would say,
right Expondo, you're out. That's what it means.
You are not included in the term.
You are not in the peace deal. Everyone in Greece is included,
but you now take a step back here.
It just allows us. Clever.
Probably he did just lose his temper and was actually mad.
But this might have been performative because the end
result here is that everyone else is bound to the tree.
They signed it before this disagreement happened.
They already written their name down.
They signed the pieces. They're beholden to it, right?
All of a sudden, thieves is left out.
Thieves now can't have local allies.
They've all signed to not do that.
Sparta still has their conquered territory and has all their all
this so they have more power. So now it's just Sparta versus
Thebes. No allies on either side other
than the one Sparta hypocritically still has that
Hippamand has called them out on.
They can't. So the other allies their their
hands are tied. We just signed.
I'm sorry, we can't help. So Epaminondas might have
screwed his his fellow countrymen here.
According to what we know, they were on board with his speech.
They were fine with him pushing back like that, consequences be
damned. But the consequences appeared to
be severe. They had to run home.
They had to rush back to Thebes and get the army ready because
they, well, boy well, they already knew Cleam Brotis's
10,000 men were close by and focus that leverage bit.
Well, they used that leverage. It didn't actually get them any
leverage, but the threat remained.
So as cool as it is to see someone stand up to just allow
us like that, a lot of people were like, yeah, go, my man, he
needs to talk to him like that. Yeah, tell him what's right.
The rest of the Grease might have at the same time saw it as
folly, like tough talk. But if Pam Anandis had never LED
soldiers before, he had fought in battles, absolutely, but he
hadn't LED. He'd never been a general
before. So like, yeah, tough talk.
But did you guys just get yourselves all killed?
Sparta still the dominant land power, and you got to face them
on your own. Are you sure you wanted this?
Like, great talking you all, but you might all just get killed
here. So a lot of people saw that
coming. Like, oh boy, Thebes is screwed.
They just talk themselves out of existence.
They just pissed off the most powerful man in Greece, the one
guy you shouldn't piss off. They already had soldiers ready.
At the same time, there was a lot of buzz about his ideas,
whether or not he, Pam Anon just lives another week or two.
He made some good points, and those points started to spread.
People talked about his word. They're like, you know what?
He pointed out the hypocrisy of the Spartan system.
You'd think it's obvious, but it's not because it had been in
place for so long. You know, these these ideas
aren't as necessarily as straightforward to us as they
would have been back then because, well, they're in,
they're in the middle of it, they're living it.
You know, things aren't always obvious when you're in the
middle of something, when you're on, you take sometimes,
sometimes it takes an outsider or a different sort of thinker
like him hamming on just to point out the obvious.
And then it takes a little while for people to kind of let that
settle in and kind of, well, you know what, he's right.
So it it might have been a bigger deal than we think in
terms of getting a lot of people's attention and causing
them to start thinking differently.
Whether or not it actually got them to take the battlefield or
pick up their spear is a different matter.
But just the the pervasive nature of freedom, right?
And Greece is getting more and more free Spartan.
The Spartan system is always kind of not fit that well with
these ideas of emerging democracy and freedom.
And pushing back against Persia like that has never really
meshed very well. So now it was like a leap
forward of this. So despite all that though,
yeah, people weren't very optimistic about what was going
to happen next to Thebes. So it just allows rushed home.
Also met with the F Fours and Jerusia, you know, the other
people in charge down at Sparta, the 5F fours.
And was it 2827 Jerusia? He some other guy stood up and
was like, let's follow the peace terms.
The peace terms require us to summon allies to go attack
Thebes. And we were like, well, because
they've broke the peace deal, of course thieves did, according to
Sparta. So if anyone breaks the peace
deal, then the allies are required to help go fight
whoever broke the peace deal. So it isn't just thieves against
Sparta, it's thieves against Sparta and whoever Sparta brings
to the table. However, Sparta doesn't want to
bring anyone to the table, despite what this guy is saying.
And he also points out that this is a holy oath we took.
This is a matter of piety. We should do the terms that we
agreed to. So just allow us responds with a
speech encouraging everyone to call that guy ridiculous.
And it worked. They laughed at him even though
he was following the rules they had set out.
I just, I was like, dab this guy rules.
We make the rules. We're Sparta.
We're in charge. We do what we want.
That's the real law here. And they're like, yeah, Sparta.
Sparta number one. Yeah, let's go.
So word was sent. A fast rider sent out.
Clam Botus March on Thebes give them one last chance to dissolve
their league if they don't agree that's it attack thieves said
no, we are maintaining our Nope, we will not bow down to this
pressure. So they started blocking
mountain passes to be like all right we're going to guard our
mountain passes We can use fewer men can stop a lot more.
But Cleam Brodus saw that coming He went through a different
mountain pass difficult mountain pass one that was not expected
to be used. He didn't have too much trouble
with it, Spartans being tough and well prepared and all that,
even though a lot of his army wasn't fully Spartan.
Again, it's full of allies. They made it through.
So in only three weeks after the peace talks, Cleam Brotis was on
the plane of Lutra, which is very near Thebes with 10,000
plus soldiers. It was the summer of 371, the
Battle of Lutra. So with limited time, the
Spartans were camped on the field of Luchtra, and the
Thebans were camped across from them.
And they were already having to make decisions that you would
expect would have been made before, like naming leaders.
Ipam Anandis, despite his complete lack of military
experience as a leader, only as a warrior, only as a man in the
phalanx, was nominated general. They're like, all right, man,
you got us this far. Keep it going.
We're going to stick with you. He was given 7 boatarks as his
command staff and the Sacred Band of course would have been
included in that. Palopitus was almost certainly
one of those boatarks he ordered everyone of age conscripted.
That was one of his first actions.
And all the families were sent to Athens in case they lost.
All the women and children wouldn't be captured and sent to
slavery. Well, maybe they would because
maybe Athenians would betray them, but better odds there then
sitting in Thebes hoping that Sparta doesn't win.
Now one thing that they took heart about was that this was
clean Brotus not it just allows it just allows us still back in
Sparta making moves. Now they had to figure he was
going to March with his own army probably, but maybe if his leg
allowed him. They were definitely concerned
about that. But their primary concern was
the army that was already there. Now there's an old story of
Luptra. It's a dark story.
Long ago there were two young girls that lived on a farm.
Some Spartan soldiers were passing through and they stopped
at this farm and asked for, you know, hey.
Guestrite, which they were given because, yeah, guestrite's a big
deal. In ancient Greece, Zeus was the
perfector, was the protector of guestrite, so a big deal.
So they were given guestrite, whatever the equivalent of it.
And they made some rude comments about the girls.
They were like, hey, yeah, your girls look really good, You
know, it's cat calling type stuff.
But nothing happened. They went on their way to Delphi
and did their prayers, you know, they went to the temple, did
their stuff. On the way back, they came
through again and they're like, hey, I don't see Dad.
And they raped the 2 girls, killed them and threw them in a
well, neighbors had seen them. So they were outed.
And the father knew it was those Spartans he had, they were
recognized. So he went to Sparta to seek
justice. He went to the public square and
yelled about it. He went to the kings, he went to
the Air Force, he went to anybody.
No one listened. They ignored him.
So he very publicly made this plea to the Furies.
And the Furies are the the beings, supernatural beings in
Greek mythology who or Greek belief system who are in charge
of giving justice to the those who didn't get justice.
And he did it very demonstrable. He didn't just demand justice
loudly. He hanged himself.
He hung himself. He hung himself.
No hang. That's right.
Yeah. Stannis.
Thank you.
Stannis. He hanged himself.
So it was very public, very visible, very like.
Whoa, this guy's serious. And so it became a story for
years and years afterwards, there were oracles that would
say, beware the wrath of the luktrodai, the Luktrodai being
those two murdered girls, and then the father, whose spirit
also would be considered to haunt them.
So as they're camped on the plane, worried about what's
next, looking at their army, looking at the Spartan army
going theirs is bigger than ours, that's a problem.
So they're looking for ways to help their morale, looking for
ways to get the troops to not be so afraid because one, it's the
Spartans, they're afraid just because it's Sparta 2.
They're afraid because they're outnumbered.
The Sparta's reputation for being unbeaten despite Tagira,
it was a small battle. This is something else.
This is people are scared, they're very scared.
So you got to find ways to boost morale.
Now I don't know if Palapa has made this up or not, but he told
the other senior officers while they're camped inside of the
Spartan army. He's like, man, I just had a
dream. I dreamt of the Lucridi, I
dreamt of their father. I dreamt of them weeping over
our camp and that they demanded the sacrifice of a fair haired
virgin. Now that is not a thing that
thebans do spark like they're human sacrifice.
It's not that it never happens, but fair haired, that's not what
they would do. They don't sacrifice their own
people like that. It's an outrageous thing.
But while Palapitus is telling the story, Theocratus the seer
is there. Remember, Theocratus is the guy
that was there during the taking back of the cadmium.
He's the guy that advised the Spartan commander on how to
properly seal the tomb. You know, all this stuff.
The there a white mare runs through the camp as Philopis is
telling us. He's like, there, there's your
fair haired virgin. And Greeks were like, Oh yeah,
perfect. They got no trouble sacrificing
a horse to them. That's no, that's nothing at
all. So, yeah, so they do that, and
that helps morale a little bit, you know?
OK, cool. That's a boost, buddy.
Pam Anandis himself, he's like omens.
Only one omen is best to fight for one's country.
That's a a Homer quote. So men are like, yeah, all
right, I can get behind that. But how many soldiers does Homer
have for us here? So what a Pam Anandis is
starting to realize he's like painting a picture of a guy who
doesn't like omens but realizes how important they are because a
bad one happened next. A messenger came with a with a
spear and a a banner on it and the wind blew the banner and it
came off and the banner landed on a gravestone.
Soldiers were killed by a disallowers and they were like,
oh, that's really bad. A bunch of people were just
like, that's it. No battle's over.
We can't do it. That's the worst omen possible.
And if I'm on just just ignored it.
He's like, no, that was his way of handling it, ignoring it.
Meanwhile, he contrive to create positive omen.
He's like, Yep, ignore the negative ones and create the
positive ones. So, and again, they seemed to
need it. They had about 7500 men, 10,000
Spartans were on the other side. So he had a story put about that
back home at Thebes, which, you know, they're out in the plane,
they can't see what's happening back in the city.
He's like, hey, I just got word that the tomb of Hercules and
Elias and all these other Theban heroes, the arms that were left
there to decorate their tombs, they're gone.
The axes and Spears and swords and shifts, they're gone.
It must mean the heroes have risen to fight at our side.
They're like, yeah, it must that What else could it mean?
And then he has another guy. He tells this other guy to
spread word that Zeus came to him in a dream, commanding him
to hold a festival of victory. After this battle, the
implication big that they're going to win.
It's like, yeah, Zeus has already told you that you're
going to win. He's already telling you what to
do after you win. Have a festival.
Yeah. A Spartan defector, a guy named
Cleandritis, son of Jilipus. Jilipus was one of those Spartan
commanders that was sent to do work elsewhere and ended up
stealing money and got caught and was exiled.
This is his son, so no wonder he's this guy's in exile, too.
He's like, yeah, back in Sparta, we have an Oracle.
We've been for decades, we've been hearing that Sparta's going
to lose their supremacy at Luktra.
Y'all should be confident this is almost certainly made-up.
But something else changed, a more straightforward thing,
which was that climb brought us hadn't brought his whole army
forward yet. They were some of them were
still back there. And so now when the full army
was in camp and everyone could really see what they were faced
with, the thiebens got scared again.
So all of this back and forth with the morale and it started
to dip again. And and they they're like, look,
let's call a vote. All right, The Pamela has agreed
to this. He said, OK, we'll call a vote
the seven Botarks vote. I'm not I'm not one of the
voters, just the seven Botarks, yes or no.
Do we do with this battle? Three of them said yes.
Three of them said no. One of them wasn't there.
He was off guarding one of those passes, right?
So Pam Menanda just sends a messenger to that guy.
He was like, hey, this is the situation.
You know, you got a tie vote. You come down here and vote.
And he encourages the yes vote somehow.
Or maybe he knew the guy would vote yes because the guy comes
and he votes yes and that's it. All right, 7th vote, yes it is.
Battle goes and to be fair, this is yeah, this is tricky.
This is cunning, this is underhanded.
But if hammer on his nose that look, Sparta's just going to
come back. They, they're they're close by.
What if we leave? What are we going to do
withstand a siege? Then when they come back next
year, we'll be weaker because we, we're holed up all year in
inside and a bunch of us died of malnutrition.
We, it's it's now or never, y'all?
That was his attitude, but he didn't present it that way
because that's not a good way to build morale.
Was telling people that we have no choice but to fight now is
not the most optimistic. So he does these omens, these
fake omens again. This is his first time being a
general. Y'all like this is advanced
morale maneuvering, very advanced stuff, very clever
stuff that you would expect an old Wiley veteran general to do
a a veteran of 100 battles type guy to do this, but this is his
first. It's crazy.
This guy's a philosopher, right? A him and his brother were
students of Lysis who was a student of Pythagoras.
And this is this is a philosopher warrior general in
action. Y'all, it's really something.
But was it enough? Was it enough?
They're still outnumbered and it's still Sparta, right that.
So let's get to the dispositions.
We're getting very close to the actual battle.
Arcademus, son of Agisilaus, his heir.
He commanded the other wing, which is a fairly standard
Spartan phalanx arrangement. Of course, the first wing
controlled by Clambrotus himself.
They had 9000 infantry and 1000 cavalry.
But don't get the wrong impression.
When you're thinking Game of Thrones, you're thinking the
cavalry is the best, right? Whether it's Dothraki, whether
it's Westerosi Knights, they're generally the best.
And the less it's Unsullied, of course.
Now it isn't the case that the Spartans should be thought of
like unsullied, although that's not too far off.
But it's more that the cavalry sucks rather than the infantry
is so much better. It is better, but it's it's not
that they're better than some great cavalry.
It's that the cavalry actually sucks.
And I don't mean they're just low quality.
I mean, literally the Spartans give their worst troops the
horses. They they're that infantry
obsessed that it's almost like they're not even a sign.
It's like, OK, who are our current worst 1000 guys?
You're the horseman. That's weird, right?
So Epaminondas, however, he is doing all sorts of different
things. The Spartans are very
conservative. They and most of ancient Greece
is too. They said through their set
peace battles, they line their phalanxes up.
Remember what I told you many times before, Best guys on the
right, you're right fights their left, their left fights your
right, their worst fights, your best, our best fights their
worst and then you meet in the middle, Epaminonda said.
Nope, I'm not just an innovator of morale strategy.
I'm going to change everything about how we do the setup.
He instead of saying your worst fights our best and our best
fights your worst, he's saying our best are going right after
your best. Kind of like what Palapas did it
to Gyra. He's like, our best are going to
fight your best and if our best win, your best are going to be
leaderless and confused and not know what to do.
And Epaminon just demonstrated this with a visual metaphor.
He got in front of the entire army, held a live snake up and
crushed its head in his hand and said the Spartan army is this
body. If you kill the head, all of it.
But he's taking the metaphor further than that.
Palapa has killed the Spartan officers and the rest of the
army fell apart. This is a much bigger army.
If Pymanandis's idea isn't just to kill the Spartan officers all
that. That is his plan.
He wants to kill as many of the actual Spartans as possible so
that the allies not just don't want to fight, but they realize
they don't have to. They're not there because they
want to be. They're not there because
they're ideologically behind Sparta.
They're there because they got no choice.
It's that or else, and they sign that deal.
But what happens if Sparta loses a lot of men right in front of
them? Then they can go, wait a minute,
how are they going to make us fight for them anymore?
They just lost like a bunch of dudes, a bunch of soldiers, and
we could break free. That's exactly what EPA minus is
ending, ending aiming for. He's wants them to perceive
that. He wants them to see that they
don't have to fight for Sparta. And so his strategy goes even
further. Not only does he put his weakest
on one side to face their weakest, he tells his weakest to
line up an echelon formation. If you don't know what echelon
formation, it's like this. It's like a backward diagonal
line. So each man going farther out to
the right is slightly farther behind than the rest.
And this is by design because he does not want the right, the
left wings to meet at all. He doesn't want any bad blood
between the allies of Sparta that he's trying to detach from
them. He's like kill the head of the
snake. They won't fight us.
They don't hate us unless we make them.
So he doesn't not he doesn't just tell his his left wing
weaker soldiers to hold back. He tells them to back up.
He's like do not fight them. Give us time you back up by time
we're going to move forward at double speed, finish off those
Spartans if we can and then you guys won't have to do anything.
Now they he doesn't actually tell them all this the full
plan, because then the plan would get out.
But that's the idea. And now standard phalanx is 12
deep. If I'm going to said, you know
what, let's go 50 and remember, this isn't just like a line of
soldiers. They're all pushing each other.
The one guy in the back has his shield planted into the back of
the guy in front of him and he's pushing.
He's pushing. So 12 guys pushing against each
other in a standard failings range.
But Spartans would always win this because they spend all day
practicing pushing. It's like an NFL scrum or rugby
scrum where they're just shove it and shove it.
They do this all day long every day because they don't farm.
They don't right. They don't do anything but learn
how to fight. So they're really good at it.
But twelve against 50, they're not that good right now.
So I put him on it says quite a plan.
It's quite, quite a plan and and Clair brothers doesn't know any
of this. He doesn't see he doesn't have
an inkling of any of that. So right as they're lining up to
do battle, they're getting their dispositions in their echelon
formation for the allies, the ones that but Pam Ananas isn't
even counting on them much. The Thespians are like, you know
what? We're pissed about that whole
walls thing. We're leaving.
We're not fighting. We're not going to fight Sparta
for you, you wall taking down jerks.
Any Pam Ananas is like, OK, that's cool.
We're not here to force you to fight battles that you don't
believe in. Hint, hint.
Spartan allies, in fact. Remember the Mantenaeans?
We talked about the Mantenaeans. They're the ones whose walls
came down thanks to a diverted river, like the rains of
Castamere. Well, they were fighting for
Sparta that day. They saw the Thespians get to
leave. Maybe they didn't know exactly
because it was about the walls, but I bet they did.
They heard about that. News gets around.
It's a small country. They're like they got let they
their walls were taken down and he's letting them go.
We got our walls taken down by Sparta and we're standing here
fighting for them. How good could their morale
possibly be? Yet they didn't leave.
They were still afraid of the pushback from Sparta.
They were still expecting to be on the winning side.
The trumpets blue, the horns started the battle.
Here it comes now, there may have been trickery and
preparable. There was trickery and
preparations and dispositions, but no side was caught off guard
at the start of the battle. It was it was like a set piece
battle. We start now.
Now Klienbroad hasn't taken heat for for this.
Actually, he should have attacked sooner.
Probably. He had shown passivity in
general towards Thebes and most of his life he had shown a
preference for being at war with Athens over Thebes, but
generally lost out on that 'cause it just allows held more
power, more sway, was much older, much more entrenched.
And Clayton Brodus was warned. Hey bro, if you persist and you
don't attack Thebes, you might get exiled.
Your grandfather got exiled for that exact thing.
So it wasn't an idol threat. Remember King Pausanias, we
talked about that guy. That's the guy that was exiled
from Spartan and went out to to write a history of Spartan lots.
What he did in exile was like, hey, write about Spartan
authority structures. The one I got kicked out of, who
knows it better than me. Anyway, Clayton Brodus took that
seriously, I suppose. And battle was joined.
It went off as ordered. Initially, the Spartans advanced
in a manner not unlike Gregor Clegane.
Confident, perhaps contemptuous, bigger for a certainty, not
running, but not slow. They use flutes to keep time,
not drums. Sounds kind of creepy actually.
I know that flutes are a big part of like Cthulhu lore, so I
always think of that when I think of flutes in battle.
It's it's not like the, you know, it's something dark and
evil sounding. Maybe it isn't.
That's how I perceive it. And they're so confident and so
pious at halfway to meeting the the even lines, they stop
sacrifice to the gods, then continue like that's that's how
they do it. Epaminondas with the Sacred Band
led by Palopitus advanced like some Greek Red Viper.
Especially in Palopitus case, this guy was eager.
He wanted to fight them, not just because he was confident,
maybe a little bloodthirsty like the Red Viper, but also very
eager for justice, very eager for violently achieved justice.
With Spears too, like the Red Viper, right, but without the
poison. So the demons were on a razor's
edge of internal struggle here, where their fear of Sparta was
facing off with their fear of complete destruction, balanced
by the great morale tricks and actual leadership of Epaminondas
and Palopitus, who were genuinely confident.
You have to fight if you're going to lose everything if you
don't, right? I mean, that's kind of what it
comes down to. But there might be a voice in
the back of your head saying maybe not, maybe you can get
away. Maybe your city's destroyed, but
you can get away. You can run.
You can get your family and go live somewhere else, can't you?
Yeah, maybe. The leadership of thieves was
really remarkable. They they were able to predict
and counteract this pervasive thought that must have been
going through the heads of so many soldiers.
I mean, it's Sparta 300 years. Sparta has not lost a battle
like this. That's what they're facing.
What is a what is a mashed snake head against that?
So I've given you all this underdog setup for the battle,
obviously focused on Thebes dispositions, because Sparta is
a very standard. Thebes is very much the underdog
story who kind of kind of mean you expecting them to win?
Well, I just compared them to the Red Viper, so beware someone
who loses when they're about to win.
Don't be too sure here, but let's continue.
Clam Brod has positioned his cavalry in front of the failing.
That is weird, very odd, because the one we just got through
talking about how they're the weak part, they're the weakest
aspect. And even though Clam Brod has a
larger army, he has less cavalry and his cavalry sucks and the
even cavalry is good and more numerous.
What the heck was he doing? We don't know.
Historians to this day are like, what was he doing?
Xenophon doesn't even comment on it, probably because he has no
idea and doesn't want to delve into a subject that's kind of
embarrassing for Sparta. He might have been trying to
create a dust cloud to obscure something.
I don't know why. And if he did, it backfired, as
we'll tell you in here in a minute.
Usually the point of horsemen in this spot is to protect the
flanks. Like their flanks are
vulnerable. Their Spears and Shields are
facing forward. There's nothing over here.
So the horses, the horsemen, mobile can swoop in and make
sure nothing happens there. That's the whole point, right?
So he, Pam Anandis, his very early in his generalship career,
gets the very one of the easiest calls he has to make.
He's like, all right, well, he sent his thousand crappy cavalry
forward. I'll send my 1500 awesome
cavalry forward to face them. He's probably like, is this a
trap? What is going on here?
Like, it's it's too easy. So, yeah, Cleveland Rd. starts
off by offering a preliminary skirmish.
He's sure to lose. What is going on here?
Again, good thing for thieves to just allow us wasn't in charge.
So that's what happens. It wasn't some trick.
The Theven cavalry defeats the Spartan cavalry easily.
Some of the Spartan cavalry flee backwards and this causes
problems. They flee backwards and some of
them slam into the formations. The phalanx formations and
phalanx formation cohesion is extremely important, as we've
talked about. It's the whole, everyone's
pushing forward. If you got a gap in your line,
all of a sudden your buddy's shield isn't protecting you
anymore. All of a sudden you're
vulnerable. All of a sudden you're not all
pushing together. Lots of things go wrong if the
phalanx goes wrong, if unit cohesion is broken.
But Spartans so good at this, they practice again all day,
every day. Unit cohesion, follow orders,
stay together, bravery, piety, always winning.
But this did 'cause some real problems that these horses
slamming into them, there's a little bit of yeah, get back in
formation. That's when the Sacred Band
charges. They're like, this is what we've
been waiting for. Now it's a gyra.
They didn't wait for an opportunity.
They just went right for the enemy leaders and hope for the
best and and at maximum speed, hope that surprise and momentum
would be enough. And of course, then it worked
here. Well, let's see what happens.
The dust cloud actually helped the Thebans.
That's why I said I don't. If Climb Brods was trying to
make a dust cloud to block something, it backfired because
by creating a dust cloud, which did happen by the two cavalry
detachments coming together. Climb Brodus and his men did not
check, did not catch the fact that they weren't facing the
weak. Theban left, they were facing
right on right, the strong verse the strong.
And they didn't see that it was A50 rank deep phalanx instead of
the standard 12. So they had no time to adjust.
In fact, they had no time at all because the Thebans charged as
soon as there was a bit of disruption in the Spartan lines.
And again, they did something unexpected.
The Thebans, the Spartans, like, whoa, what's going on?
OK, we're Spartans, we can handle this.
Get back in charge. Be cool, but wait, these guys
aren't coming straight at us, they're coming at us at an
angle. They're moving like this.
They're trying to get around us on our side to hit us from the
side. Which is really weird because
you don't usually outflank armies that are bigger than you.
But they had their unusual depth of formation that would make it
impossible to surround them. And they weren't aiming to
surround the whole Spartan army, just the Spartan command parts
just to kill as many actual Spartans and Spartan officers.
They were trying as hard as they could to kill those and as hard
as they could to not kill the Spartan allies.
So indeed, the Sacred Band, with Palopitus Epaminondas by their
side, because again, these guys lead from the front, come
together. It's the Spartan Elites versus
the Sacred Band and the picked man of Epaminondas.
The rest again Cleam Brodis is surrounded by Spartan Elites
veterans confident they have Phodrios himself.
Is there the one who took the Cadmia, his son Cleonimus, The
one who was so pretty but also apparently a good fighter?
The one who was beloved if it just allows his Erakodamus who
is currently leading the other detachment, The other Spartan
wing plus 300 so-called Knights. Yes, they were actually called
Knights who were the core, the elite Knights of Sparta that
were there to protect the king, fight at his side.
But Palopitus in the Sacred Band forced their way into that
formation like a spear point, driving further inward,
preventing cohesion from being restored to the Spartan lines.
They were not able to operate as accustomed. 150 pairs of lovers
wrought devastation on Spartans who would never allow such a
thing in their own army. There's some some metaphors here
aplenty like love wins right now.
At times like this, a lot of the individuals have forgotten this
is a Spartan unit versus the Sacred Band.
We know what they're about, but we don't know most of their
names. Phalanxes operate and die by
their cohesion. The Theben lines would have been
seeing people they recognized. There would have been melon
pamonies, perhaps Theocritus. I don't know.
If the Seer fought in the battle it wouldn't be weird though.
I mean, Socrates fought in phalanxes, you know, Plato, like
these guys. It's not this is the time when
everybody fought in the army. Y'all, if you're a man of age,
you we were in the army. Or people really look down on
you like you're not going to help with the defense of your
own country. What kind of man are you?
Like, you don't deserve this. Of course, Socrates have been
dead for a few decades. Not at this point, but still.
So it, it was continuing. The the fighting was fierce.
The Spartans gave good account, but the Thebans were just too
ready, too determined. Their strategy was superior and
there was no adjustment by the Spartans.
That was all they could do but to fight.
They couldn't change their order of battle.
They were they couldn't reform orders couldn't really be given
in the heat like that. It's just too confusing, too
chaotic. Svodryos was killed, and I
wonder if the Theban who who killed him knew who he had
killed there again, it's a small world here.
Svodryos was a in Thebes as the Garrison commander for three
years. Well, not all three years, he
was sent back to face trial and all that, but still, he was a
well known person. They would have a lot of people
would have recognized him. It may have been entirely what
the person was aiming for. Like that's Faudrius.
I'm getting him, you know. Cleonimus fell next.
The Sacred band got him too. Father and son both went down.
He was maybe more likely to be recognized because he was
apparently so handsome. Surely many of the band fell
too. Nameless, but not forgotten,
certainly not by their lover if their lover survived and their
to see their partner fall. What do you do when your partner
falls in battle? Well, in this society, you still
believe they're watching you. You still believe they're seeing
you from the afterlife. And there's the immediate
emotional reaction. You might go into a frenzy.
You might have No Fear for yourself, if you even had any to
begin with. I mean easier.
They are the elite of the elite. They may wish to join their
partner in the afterlife with some brave deed.
They may fight on coldly, who knows?
We're all different. Humans react differently to
seeing their beloved die. And and it's not just I mean,
there's a lot else going on. A lot of people are dying,
right? None of us know what it's like
to be in a battlefield like this, if a battlefield at all,
you know, so climb Brodis fell next.
He took several hits and and fell didn't die, though.
And that changed the dynamic of the battle bodies.
Kings so important. The Spartan focus became less
about winning and more about recovering their king.
They couldn't all know whether he was alive or not.
They just know he went down. Remember, people were officers
have been put to death for failing to recover bodies, and
this was a king and they succeeded.
Some of the Knights were able to pull him from the field.
Risking a lot, most likely, probably took a lot of
casualties in the process. Now, there's a tradition of
setting up a trophy after a win. We're not unfamiliar with it
here. We've talked about it before,
but I haven't gotten into some of the details of it.
It's generally placed as close to the precise spot on the
battlefield where the winners believe the battle turned, where
this was the moment at which we won.
It's usually when the enemy starts running away.
And that happened. The Spartans ran.
They had never run before, right?
They It was unbelievable, not in a battle like this.
They ran back to their camp. The surviving Spartan leaders
knew this as they arrived in flight of the camp.
They didn't think it was lost yet.
They still thought they could win.
They knew that the Turning Point trophy wouldn't have gone up yet
and they thought they still had a chance to stop it.
They was to them that would be everything.
Like if they if they don't have time to put up the trophy, then
they didn't really win, did they?
It's not a not a victory unless you can put up a trophy.
So hey, let's reform. Let's go back out there.
Oh, our king just died. All the more reason to go out
there. We got to avenge him.
Yeah. He died right there.
So let's do it. Let's go back.
We've got enough men. We're Sparta.
Let's reform. We know what they're going to
do. We we can handle their tricks
now. We'll be prepared.
We didn't really lose that many men, did we?
Yeah. But if Hammond's plan, it
worked. The Allies, they looked about,
the Spartan allies were like, we didn't really take any
casualties, but look at all the dead Spartans.
Look at how the Thebans won. We didn't expect that to happen.
Not only did Thebes win, but Thebes killed a lot of Spartans.
You know what? Spartan leaders were going home.
What are you going to do about it?
See ya. So that was it.
The Spartan leaders wanted to fight again, but their allies
deserted them. The plan worked.
Epaminon just cut the head off the snake.
With the help of the Sacred Band, with the help of that
morale, with the help of the Thebans, it worked.
Sparta had really, truly lost. There was no denying it now.
There was no sugar coating it. It was unheard of, but it
happened. The shockwave throughout Greece
is going to be something, it's going to be really something,
especially for Sparta and for thieves, but not just for them,
for Athens, for Persia, for all the smaller city states.
Holy crap, nothing like this has ever happened.
What a turning point, what a milestone.
And that's where we'll pick it up next time with the aftermath,
because Oh my. And I what I mean, pick it up
with the aftermath. I mean, the bodies on the field
aren't even cold yet. We're going to pick it up from
the collecting of the dead, which in itself is an amazing
story. I can't want to tell.
I can't wait to tell even that part of it to you all because
it's so cool. Yet more cleverness from
Epaminondas, even in the body collecting.
Like how? Yep.
But we're going to tell you and you're going to love it.
Again, I said that Wikipedia isn't a great source for this
stuff. It's useful for some things, but
I've mostly been using Diodorus and Xenophon in this book.
The Sacred Band. That's that talks a lot about
those basically academic scholars that have put a lot of
this together, helping me save some time rather than going
directly to the sources, but I do directly to the sources as
well because I want to know what they say.
And on that subject, a reminder about thieves and Spartan
Athens. I've mentioned this before, but
you you can argue they're the most important here, but they're
not that's not the reason why they're the focus.
They're the focus because they're the ones who wrote it
all down, right. We don't have Illyrian history
books, Macedonian history books from that many Cypriot Cyprus
history books, Persian sources. Maybe we have some, but like I'm
part Iraqi, I'm not Iranian, Persian's Iranian, I don't speak
Arabic. Greek sources are trans.
Like I got a shelf of Greek sources up here with
translations. I don't have a single Persian
translated into English source. It's just hard to find.
Greek sources are just out there.
That's what we have y'all. The stories we have are because
people wrote it down back then and that stuff survived and is
in English now. Let's be realistic here.
But yeah, in terms of the story and the fun that's to come, the
aftermath of Luchtra, it is really something.
The game changes, Greece changes, Persia changes, but
there's still a lot of other people that will react to this
too, and their reactions will be to the other Powerball.
What's Jason going to do? What's King Amontas and Alcides
going to do? What's our Deserxes going to do?
Right. One thing I'll tell you, one
thing I'll tease is a lot of people are going to die next
time. A lot of important characters
are going to die. And of course they'll be
replaced with other important characters because that always
happens, right? But some famous players are
going to exit the story, and some of them are going to do so
in very entertaining ways, maybe some tragic ways, but we're
going to have fun with it no matter what.
I'm excited for that. We'll be back in a few weeks
with another one of these. And in the meantime, more song
advice and fire content. If you were hoping for a Persian
court intrigue and drama to return, well, it absolutely will
come roaring back and it will absolutely impact that campaign
to recapture Egypt. And I also promise more stories
of artists and sculptors, musicians, attire at non
political, non military figures. Basically.
Harder to sometimes find information on that.
But I do try to include as much as I can stuff that I think is
fun, interesting, entertaining, just cool trivia, things like
that. We'll definitely be adding more
of that. I'm enjoying adding that stuff
like the Olympic stuff, and we'll continue to do so.
Trivia answer. The question was, which geometry
minded philosopher did Epaminanis and his brother
Cafesius follow the teachings of Pythagoras, the Pythagorean
theum? Right?
That's the geometry minded part, yeah.
If you said Lysis, I'd accept that because Lysis was a student
of Pythagoras who Permanonis and Kathesius directly studied with.
So if you said either of those, good job.
As for poll results, which city, state slash nation have you been
rooting for? Or do you call your favorite so
far? Y'all, I'm disappointed.
Thebes is last the the Epaminonis and Palopitus are
Latin. Maybe they wouldn't be after
this episode, but I asked you this question before it.
But you guys have Athens first, which is cool.
Athens, they're very entertaining.
And you have Persia next. I get it.
Persia's pretty entertaining there.
If I said which do you think is the best, like which is the best
nation, I bet this order would be different.
So I get the order. I get this order, but only 15%
of you said Thebes. As far as 22% overall, it's a
pretty even distribution though with Athens pretty much winning
it there though. I get it, I get it.
Go Athens. Athens is cool.
They're the biggest, they get the most people, and we
certainly have plenty more Athens coverage to come.
That's it y'all. Thanks for hanging out.
Thanks for being here today, thanks for in taking this in
later. If you're not catching the live
stream, which is most of you, we'll be back with more next
time. Until then, you know what to do,
my friends. Valar Riritas Riritas.