The young man of Thebes threw off the Spartan yoke, but much
of Greece was still under their hegemony, in part thanks to
Persia, and despite it being broken, the King's peace still
mattered. With Athens on the rise again
and Sparta still powerful despite this set back and a few
others, there is now a three-way race for supremacy as Thebes
capitalized on their momentum. But to the north, new kingdoms
were forming and looking beyond their own borders to the Greek
mainland with hungry eyes and deeply held ambition.
These are states that used to be very tribal, that were starting
to come together and become dangerous to more than just
their neighbors. Some of these kingdoms will
become allies of the three city states.
Some will become enemies. Some will be both at different
times in some form or fashion. As the ever shifting nature of
these exciting times continues, leaders of war, politics, art
and other forms of culture are bound as well.
Some are involved in all. Four of those are just one or
two, or what have you. Some are names we know well even
today, and some claim descent from others we know well.
For example, today we've got a dynasty that claims descent from
Achilles. And some have stories even more
interesting than the most famous.
They just aren't as well known, which is part of the value of
talking about this stuff. We have further doings and
adventures of Ajisalaus, Artaxerxes, Epaminondas,
Palopitas parasatus. That's our Sersi Cabrias, our
Jaime Lannister Tirabazas, and more players will enter the
picture, of course. That's how history works, right?
There's always people coming and going.
The Greek world is growing too, though in this period it was.
Well, besides it being the most important perhaps, and in my
opinion the most interesting period of ancient Greece, it's
certainly growing and gaining wealth and power and influence,
which makes it more of a player outside of its region.
That's part of why Persia got invested in the first place, in
conquering them. And that means more ambition.
There's more to take, more power to hold.
The more powerful a country is, the more incentive ambitious
people have to seize that. So there's more intrigue that
follows, more at stake, more impact on us today and more
great comparisons to A Song of Ice and Fire as our journey
through one of my favorite periods in history continues.
All that and more on this episode of History of Westeros
podcast. Hello and welcome back
everybody. It's part three of our delving
into, I say ancient Greece. This is technically it's
classical Greece. Ancient Greece is like Trojan
War era. This is, you know, 800 years
after that. It's all blur, right?
Ancient Greece sounds cooler than classical Greece.
So you know, but you know, I want to get the terminology
right just so you know that I do know the right terminology.
And so you know too, we're here almost every Saturday or Sunday,
that is almost every Sunday for live streams on YouTube.
And during the TV season, those will be Monday at six.
That is our standard and that will continue into 2026.
If you prefer to catch us on podcast only platforms, you can
catch us on any of them. All podcast platforms have
history of Westeros, and if you listen on Patreon as a member,
it's ad free. This is actually Topics Moot
episode #16 from last year. But you know, it's part three of
a topic that yeah, it was a lot bigger than I originally
intended, but that's fun. You know, we're going bigger
than with it, and that's a good thing.
You know, like get to go delve deeper.
Deeper dives are fun. Certainly we'd love to hear your
feedback on this one. It's not something I know as
well as A Song of Ice and Fire and in with that in mind, the
parallels to A Song of Ice and Fire.
As I said last time, I believe here in 2025, still catching new
parallels in A Song of Ice and Fire, let alone here in
classical slash ancient Greece. So I've probably missed some
parallels. Every once in a while I'm
writing here and I'm like, oh, a new one strikes me like we got
hundreds of A Song of Ice and character, Ice and Fire
characters and even more real world people here.
So there's so many connections that could be made and well, I
can't have made them all by now. So if you catch any or something
occurs to you like that, absolutely, let us know and I'll
throw out those mentions. And Speaking of that, I'll
mention some episodes that relate to this one at the end.
Here's our trivia question for the day, which will also have
the answer revealed at the end. It is who is said to be
responsible for creating the Sacred Band of Thebes, Sacred
Band of Thebes. We talked about them a lot last
time at the end of the episode, and they're certainly going to
feature for quite a while. They're historically important
from this era for several decades.
Poll question. Shea is putting that up here in
on YouTube. You'll be able to catch it at
the podcast platform if you listen on Spotify, I believe.
And the questions are, are you familiar with this era of Greek
history? The possible answers are yes,
very or somewhat or no. It's all Greek to me.
So let me know. Let us know.
I'm curious how much of this is new to you though.
This episode absolutely functions as a stand alone.
That's the thing about history. No matter what years you're
looking at, there's always something interesting that came
before, even if you go back all the way to when there is no
written history. Yeah, it just, it keeps going
back. There's archaeology and related
fields. Give us the stories there when
there's nothing written. So.
And that's a factor that I think is underrated here is that
people that lived in the 4th century BC, whether in Greece or
elsewhere, they're more connected to our prehistoric
ancestors than we are because, well, 2500 years earlier they
were. They live closer to those times.
Their technical level of technology, level of
understanding of the world, level of what we would call
superstition, what they would call beliefs, right?
Those were closer to the beliefs of people, far more ancient.
They had a closer connection to all that, right?
And their concept of where they came from, Greek mythology,
right? Well, it's a collection of some
of the most influential stories in the Western world, right?
To them, though, it's not story, it's history.
There are people who genuinely believed in Zeus and Hera and
Athena and Aries and Aphrodite, and these are beings who
resemble the great figures of the age of heroes in Westeros,
right? Like the the Grey King and Garth
Greenhand. These are very similar type
figures to the deities of Greek myth.
Interestingly too, they believed in things like guest rite and
kinsling. Kinsling caused religious
pollution, right? That's, that's the idea.
In fact, murder can cause religious pollution.
Sparta had that pit they threw people into.
Athens had one too. It's just a Pitt's executions
were the thing in this era. In fact, the Athenian pit was
called the Barathron. So it's only one letter
different than Baratheon. And they believed in part
because killing somebody with a blade or anything like that,
that would cause religious pollution.
But if you throw them in a pit, well, it's the ground that
killed them, not you. So that was their way like
around that problem. Anyway.
It very fascinating these beliefs that they had and how
some of them are George uses them and doesn't necessarily
always understand himself where that original world, real world
influence came from. Usually he does.
I'm sure we're going to get into this story for another 40 more
years roughly in terms of what we're setting out to do with
this series. Now that I've gotten a better
handle on it, we're aiming to get to the three 30s.
This is the three 70s we're in right now and it won't take
quite as long as that sounds like some of the years.
I mean, we only covered about three years last episode and
this year this episode will probably cover up the same.
But in future episodes we're going to have we're going to
cover 10 or 15 years because some of the years there's just
not much happens. These years quite a bit's
happening. So that's our plan.
We're going to keep taking this, doing this about once every four
to six weeks until it's done. And then sometime in 2026, we're
going to pick it back up again as the time period shifts into
another very interesting phase that I also want to cover.
And it's featuring a lot of same characters.
So we'll do that in 2026 anyway. That era is really interesting
because it's a bigger version of the Game of Thrones, much larger
armies, much more powerful leaders.
The scale is much, much bigger than what we're dealing with
now, and it's fascinating to see the process transition from one
to the other. When these things happen,
culture and trade and humanity in general prospers more.
These high Lords are playing their Game of Thrones an awful
lot in this era. The people deserve a break,
right? So when they stop, that's when
new versions of culture and trade and humanity, That's when
that stuff starts to bubble to the surface, when it's not
distracted or pushed back by war.
They lived in very interesting times.
These folks, they don't know that.
They know that they lived in such interesting times.
But what I mean by that, I gave a prior example of this when we
were talking about all the different people that Plutarch
featured in his parallel lives of Greeks and Romans.
Now we're not talking about the Romans, but the Greeks,
something like half of the Greeks that are that the 25 that
he chose from all of Greek history, more than half of them
fall into the 75 to 100 year period that we're looking at
here. So that's just goes to show 100
years prior to this era, very interesting, less spoken of and
just a lot less influential 100 years after the time we're
talking about similar. It's just not as interesting.
It's interesting. I'm there's pretty much always
something interested in history, at least to me.
But yeah, just it's, it's amazing how more interesting the
third and 4th centuries are than the second and 1st, which are
just like, yeah, these are OK, but not worth getting into
really that much, mostly for academic purposes.
These are the times that stick with us.
These are the people that live that we still talk about 2500
years later. The names are still big.
So that is really cool to me. I think that if you, if you can,
if you want to make your mark on history and you're still being
spoken of 2500 years later in a small country, that's a that's
well, well done you, you accomplished your goal there by
getting into history. Here are our section headers for
today. The Owl awakens, that's the year
378. Then Athens joins Thebes, the
Boesian war, the year 377, the year 376, the power of the
north. We'll get a little more deep
into who the players are in the north and how that's playing out
like what's going on there. And then we'll work our way
through the year 375, which I believe we will finish this
episode with. We're going to start with a
quote from Plutarch to get us started.
I just think this guy is just such a great writer.
Not only is he valuable because of his historical insight and
the fact that he's a source that there aren't many sources of for
this time period, just actually a great writer.
Fear is the bloodiest passion in Prince's confidence.
On the other hand, being merciful, gentle, and
unsuspicious. So we see among wild beasts, the
intractable and least tameable are the most timorous and most
easily startled. The nobler creatures whose
courage makes them trustful are ready to respond to the advances
of men. Now this was said in relation to
Artaxerxes, who was a fearful ruler.
He would just have nobles and people killed sometimes because
he was mad or paranoid. That's why he says fear is the
worst thing for a leader to have because they exercise their
power with fear and that just as bad for everybody, including
them. So you need you need confidence
in leadership, something that the ancient Greeks were very
aware of that maybe a lot of leaders of today fake confidence
because they know how important it seems or are they?
Yeah, express confidence when they don't really feel it.
These are the nature of these are the things that ancient
Greeks really discussed a lot of like the nature of leadership,
the nature of humanity, like where it all comes from.
And, and like I said, the comparisons to nature, because
they live closer to nature back then.
If they're going to look at the behavior of animals and
recognize that they as humans are not that different, you
know, they all, you know, they're different, certainly.
But there are things that we have in common with the animal
Kingdom. That's why this philosophers of
this time are so important, because these are the questions
they tackled. And some of their answers are
still valid. They haven't been expanded on
all that much. Some of them have been expanded
on a lot. Some of it's complete bunk.
But the fact that any of it is still relevant 2500 years later,
Wow. The owl awakens.
Even when fighting is minimal to nil, there's always intrigue,
right? The plotting never ends, even
we're not aware of it. There's always somebody plotting
somewhere. There's always power to be had.
The world doesn't rest. There's just too many people.
There's always somebody aiming for something and trying to
gather other people all together to do that.
So in the year 378, the year after Thebes got their city
back, just a Laos had men in Athens.
He had, you know, his spies, his informers.
What happened? Some of them are diplomats, some
of them are just there as ambassadors.
It's their job, right? And they were very concerned
with keeping Athens from joining with thieves, right?
It's a three-way power struggle. The last any of them wants is 2
against one to be the one in a two on one situation.
They either want to keep all three independent or they want
to be the two versus 1. So it just allows more of the
younger king at this time with Sparta's 2 kings was Cleam
Brodus. But it just allows and Cleam
Brodus were not working together.
They did not have the same goals here.
Now it just allows obviously more powerful.
But Cleam Brodus was there. He was on the scene.
His army was the one on the March.
He was actually out in the field where it just allows was
maneuvering and intriguing from Sparta.
It just allows his goal. Wasn't that just to keep Athens
from joining Spark, joining thieves?
That was Liam Brodis's goal. Makes sense.
He's like, well, let's let's keep these two from being
allies. I just allow us remember, he
hates thieves so much. He wanted Athens not just to not
be Thebes's friend. He wanted them to be hostile.
If he's like not you can't be neutral.
You have to be their enemy. So he's like you three, US two
should be their enemy. And as Athens is like, but why?
We don't hate them like you do. We don't have a personal issue
with them. In fact, they've done some good
things for us. And we were kind of helping them
in return for the good service they did us when our city was
conquered by tyrants. They helped us then.
So we were just returning the favor.
But I just allow us very stubborn, very proud, and very
powerful. So he had three men there in
particular, these diplomats. One was named Tim Mcleese.
He was of the Jerusia, which if you recall, those are the 28
elders that are one step below the five elders who are the
ephors who are a step below the 2 kings.
Now it's almost like a proto parliamentary system where yes,
they have two kings. Part of the reason they have two
kings is so that one king doesn't have too much power.
But that's also why they have 5 ephors and 27 or 28 Jerusia is
to also balance out the power of the monarchs.
So it's a very interesting system.
Now a temical ease was a friend of a just allows something we
can't forget. This is a very small, tight knit
state. Even though it's a a city state
that has reached all throughout the Aegean, all throughout
Greece, it's still just kind of a handful of people are making
the calls here and these people are friends with each other.
So it's like an old boys network of of power and connections
there. So they're all but of so of
course, the opposite happened for a very unexpected reason,
right. What it just allows wanted to
happen at Athens being aggressive towards thieves.
He got the opposite. Athens decided to become hostile
to Sparta. But for yes, like I said
unexpected reasons but understandable.
Let's get to it. At this point the city of Thespi
was pro Spartan and only 36 miles from Thebes so that Thebes
isn't cool with that. Like you got these Spartan
friends really close by. That's a problem.
They had a Garrison, a military governor was ruling it, a
Spartan military governor. If the SPI normally is not ruled
from outside, they're ruled from like any Greek city state.
They have their own leaders, but in this case, Sparta's got them.
They have a guy named Phodrias. He's the Harmos, the military
governor. So he's in charge of the SPI,
and he was one of Cleam Brodus, inner circle.
So he's really close to the younger king, the one who's
actually out in the field at this point.
Phodrias, for some reason, he decided to do a similar thing as
the Cadmia to Athens. He's like, well, what if we make
a little sneaky attack when they're not ready for it and we
seize? In this case, he wanted to seize
the Piraeus, which is their port.
Hugely important, right? Because Athens is a maritime
city. Their naval power is their
power. I mean, sure, they have an army,
but it's their naval power that really sets them apart from
everybody else. So taking their port would be
huge. So this is very similar to what
Foibados did and just with to the to Thebes.
And we also know, as we discussed at the time that
Foibados was probably working with Adis allows that's who
probably gave him the go ahead, gave him the order.
In this case, it probably wasn't because remember what we just
said, Adis allows once Athens to be hostile to Thebes.
So the worst thing you could do is attack Athens.
That's not going to make them hostile to Thebes.
That's going to make them hostile to you, right?
That's blatantly obvious. So why would Phodrius do this?
Why would he launch an attack in March with his Garrison
attacking the Pyreus? I'll conceived plot by the way,
the one with Leontides and Foibadas.
That was well made. They pulled that off and it was
perfect. Not a single person was even
killed. They conquered the city without
a single death. That was amazing.
Not good, but well done. In this case, Sfodrius and his
men were marching towards the Piraeus and morning came.
It wasn't even like they didn't get there in time because it was
poorly planned. They weren't going to they they
should have known that they weren't going to be able to make
that in time before the dawn came.
So when the time morning comes, they're just standing there in
the open plains and people are like, there's like a Spartan
army right there. What are they doing?
They weren't anything. There wasn't anything they could
accomplish. So they're just like OK, we
better turn around and go home The gig is up the jig is up The
gig and the jig they're both up. They didn't want to go home
empty handed though, so they just started burning some farms,
destroyed a few estates, what have you They got some spoils,
you know, a little bit of loot, certainly not enough to break
the King's peace though. It was not worth it to re break
this this arrangement. Now, who did this, though, since
it probably wasn't a just allowance because, well, he had
his three diplomat friends in Athens.
They were in big danger. All of a sudden, everybody in
Athens is mad at Sparta. And these three diplomats are
like, uh oh, everybody's mad at us.
So their argument was, hey, if we had known about this, why
would we still be here? Why wouldn't we leave?
Like, you guys are mad at us, and that's obvious, right?
We knew you'd be mad. We would have known you'd be mad
at us for this. So why would we stay?
We would have fled the city if we knew this was going to
happen. And they're like, OK, that's
actually a good point. You would have fled.
OK, All right, well, we buy that.
And also guys, this guy's Phodris who did that, he's
clearly breaking the we're we're going to have him executed.
Don't you worry about that. We're going to have him executed
for sure, for sure. So Athens is like, all right,
these diplomats can go, we'll let them off.
Let's fine one theory that that happened here is that Palopitus
and Mellon sent some guys, some talkers to Phodrius and.
Primed his ego, talked him into thinking that this was a good
idea. The the idea being that these
were men who dressed as Spartan allies or pretended to be
Spartan allies, but they were actually agents of the Thebans.
Now this is just a theory. We don't actually know now, but
because Phodrus was in Cleam Brodis's inner circle, that
could be it, right? It could be Cleam Brodis's plan.
It could be like Cleam Brodis is trying to be like a just allow
us making these moves, but he's just not as good at it.
So we just don't know. And if you know, it's a pitiful
sneak attack, it just something is weird about the whole
situation. So Athens is like, all right,
fine. You, you give justice to
Phodrius. You can, you guys can go home.
So Phodrius was recalled to Sparta to face trial by the
Jerusia, right? He feared that he would be
executed. Reasonable, right?
That's what they said they'd do. So he fled.
He didn't go back to Sparta. He ran off.
This created for the first and only time ever in Greek or Roman
history, a person tried in absentia was acquitted.
Yeah, Sphodrius was acquitted, just like Foibidas.
They said, oh, yeah, we're going to punch this guy.
And then they didn't. But it's really messy.
It isn't just, it isn't just Spartan authoritativeness or
just their hypocrisy. It's a little bit different than
that. Sphodrius's son Clayonymus,
apparently a very, very handsome young man and he was the lover
of Ajisalaus's son Archodimus. So you've got a, a royal tryst
going on here that's interfering with justice being done.
So that's very likely why there's something happened here,
or at least behind the scenes, the wrangling, the the
difficulty here. The oh, that's that's that's
dirty, isn't it? You know, you got people just
young men affairs and that's why this justice was subverted.
Probably now just allows his excuse was Sodrius was a is a
full Spartan. He's a good soldier.
We shouldn't be punishing Spartans who try to do things
that are for the good of our country.
Again, he's just using this very hypocritical argument.
Yeah, but you all agreed to the King's peace.
You can't just make this argument after you said yeah, no
wars between any of us. So he's he's using weasel words,
doing what he often does. He's being a hypocrite.
That's that's a disallow us. But he may have done it for
clean bronus. He may have done it to get a
favor out of clean. Look, I'm standing up for you.
You did this. I'm going to take some of the
heat for it. Even though I had nothing to do
with it, even though you you actually hurt my plans.
You almost got some of my friends killed.
I'm going to take this hit for you.
I'm going to put myself in the in the way of this and you're
going to owe me a favor. That is very believable.
Now Thespi was without their military governor because
Phodrius was recalled. So who did they send to replace
him? Foimidas.
The guy that took the cadmium reassigned to be the Garrison
commander 36 miles from Thebes. You can't tell me that was not
an intentional insult by probably by a disallows, but
maybe by the Sparta in general. They were like, this'll this'll
really stick it up their craw. This is going to insult the hell
out of them. He, he, he that's what they did.
They sent the most one of the most hated man in thieves or in
Yeah, in thieves. They sent to be a military
governor less than 40 miles away.
Yep. So, yeah, Athens had enough of
all this. They were like, you again,
didn't punish the guy that broke the King's pieces.
This is twice now even he thought he was going to be
executed. He fled, and you acquitted him
in absentia. This is unheard.
It literally was unheard of. So they're like, all right,
that's enough. You gosh darn hypocrites.
They declared war on Sparta. They elect Timotheus as one of
the strategos. Remember, That's General, he was
the son of that man Conan. That was a big part of the
earlier phase of the war. Chabrias was also sent out in
charge of 5000 mercenary troops and Iffiquities was not around
though, because he had been sent to Egypt to help Persia
reconquer them. Afarna Bazas had the paymaster
had overall command and Iffiquities and him.
We're going to work together. However, this is going to take
so long to get going, we're not going to even talk about it
today. Even though you would think that
a few years would be enough to launch an expedition against
Egypt. It's going to take them like 5
years to get started. So that's not going to be a part
of this episode. This whole time they're just
getting that ready now. Athens is also reforming their
league. The Athenian league was
basically an empire. It was like hey, you join us,
but then they just tell you what to do and and make you give up
money and soldiers. This time they're like hey guys,
it's not like that this time. Last time it was subjugation,
this time it's an alliance. We're just going to be friends.
I promise. They promised.
Yeah. We'll see about that, won't we?
What do you, how many of you actually out there think they're
going to keep that promise? Well, we'll see.
I mean, he took the chance anyway because, well, even if
Athens is lying, Sparta's still worse in their eyes.
So. So, yeah.
Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
So to commemorate, they made a large Stella, like, you know, a
large stone carving thing affirming their alliance with
Persia and their enmity with Sparta.
So this made it part propaganda in a sense like yes, we're
alliance with Persia. I mean that's not something they
want to really flaunt, right. I mean Persia's not popular meat
ISM right, That's a that's a cultural No, no, so Sparta's
like all right, we're going to war.
Fine, We'll we'll fight you. Athens.
We don't back down. That's their attitude.
They never back down. They call their allies, which
were lots of them. Just allow us went back into the
field. He's he's an old man, but he's
still marching around. He's still leading troops,
18,000 men. Now Cabrias was sent out with
those men, those mercenaries and a few citizen soldiers to block
the mountain passes into Attica. So that way they knew the
Spartans would be on the March. But if they could defend the
mountain passes, then Sparta wouldn't be able to do anything
to them. And so I just Laos was like,
Yep, I see you guys guarding the passes, but I don't care.
That's not where we're going. We're going to Thebes.
So they marched past Cabrias, marched path Athens towards
thieves. That's who he wanted his his
enemies, the one his his hated. Remember all the things they've
done to him, at least from his perspective.
They ruined his expedition to Persia.
They ruined his sacrifice to be like Agamemnon.
All these things that's not even nearly a full list, but he hates
them. The Boesian War.
So this is basically the phase of the three 70s that's
considered the war between Sparta and thieves at this time.
It's kind of a funky way to think about it because they're
kind of almost always at war. And even when they're not at
war, they're they're kind of still at war anyway.
Plutarch, again we're going to quote him, points out something
about Greek warfare in this era that is the the reverse of
Westeros quote. Homer always brings his boldest
and most valiant heroes into battle, well armed and equipped,
and the Greek law givers punish him who casts away his shield,
not him who throws down his sword or spear.
Thus teaching that his own defense from harm, rather than
the infliction of harm upon the enemy, should be every man's
first care, and particularly if he governs a city or commands an
army. Yeah, I mean, I prefer that.
Like this is basically saying that, yeah, you're, you're a
soldier, you're in the military, but your life is the most
important thing here, right? It's it's, it's the value of a
military that values the weapon versus that values the the
defense, right? The thing that keeps you alive.
So that's why the shield was esteemed over the spear or the
sword, because the shield represents defense, represents
the life of the citizen, which is important later.
Militaries don't care as much about their soldiers, their
citizens. And a lot of militaries don't
even use citizens as soldiers and they care about it even
less. So that's an interesting
cultural value here that they believe that, yeah, if you throw
your shield and if you show your sword and spear down, like
that's that's the problem in Westeros, They don't care if you
throw your shield down like you've already.
If you're throwing your weapon down, you've already thrown your
shield down. That's kind of how they see it.
But here it's the opposite. It's like, no, if you throw your
spear down or you throw your sword down, we don't really
care. It's your shield that's the one
that matters. Your life as a citizen of our
city state is important, and that's partly because there's
fewer of them. These cities aren't huge, not by
modern standards anyway. Well, Athens maybe kind of was,
but the individual soldier has more importance to the city when
there's just a much smaller population.
The ratios are different. By the way, isn't this the
coolest mug? This is my my friend Jessica
gave me this. It's a it's a climber's mugs.
You can only hold it by pinching the side here.
Oh, actually backing up a little bit.
One last comment about this. What is one of the most noble
ways to die in Westeros in service of your Lord?
Dying in service of your fighting for what?
You believe in this? It's a the sentiments different.
Yeah. They want you to fight for your
city. They want you to to stand up and
be brave and not back down and not let people walk over you,
but you still have to protect you.
They don't want people who are just like out there like
berserker mode. We want a careful and thoughtful
soldier, you know, fight but don't throw your life away.
Interesting bit of the view of humanity on the ancient world.
That maybe isn't always what we expect, given how prominent
slavery and and murder and other things were.
The rare moment of human decency there amidst war right.
So in 378 it just allow us his his invasion proceeds.
Like I said he took his army past Athens headed straight for
Thebes. Boisha the command of Thebes was
held by Gorgadas, the guy who founded the Sacred Band or
perhaps refounded it. We're not there may have been a
different name 300 group before them that they were sort of
reforming. It's not clear.
Anyway, he ordered large defensive fortifications built
not around the city because they've already got their walls.
I mean, around the countryside they built huge trenches and
Palisades stretching from Thespia to Nagara.
So like like maybe two dozen or more miles of trenches and
Palisades. That's a huge amount of
fortifications, right? So that must have taken quite a
lot of work. So in in the spring of 378, it
just allows gets there and he's like, oh, all right, I see you
guys are prepared. So he started looking for
weaknesses. He said he sent men maybe kind
of like Tywin Lannister at the Red Fork when Ed Muir was
defending. And he's like, all right, I'm
going to see if I can find any spots where this isn't well
defended. And then if we can find a a
pressure point like that, we'll hit it really hard.
He couldn't find one that it was pretty evenly distributed and
well made. But he did find a different
mistake. It wasn't the fortifications
themselves that were flawed. It was the patrols, he realized
that just allow us did that the Thebans were not mixing up the
time of their patrols. Their patrols would pass at the
same time each day. So he was able to, you know,
kind of use a rhythm to say, OK, they just this this patrol just
passed. There won't be another one for
an hour and a half attack. So they basically got over the
border without having to fight anybody.
They just, you know, waited for the guards to be gone and then
moved up quickly, filled the barrier, crossed it and moved
on. They got to about 3 1/2
kilometers from Thebes where the Athenian and Theban army was
waiting. Cabrios, after seeing the the
Spartan army pass by, took a different mountain pass to get
the Thebes. So he was still there.
He was combining with Thebes. So there's the Theben Athenian
army now is is combined. So he's like, all right, we're
Sparta. We're not afraid.
This is again the 1st action by the Sacred Band.
Gorgadas had them spread throughout.
So we kind of like stiffen the ranks all around.
Now. He marched forward did it just
allows did while some of Gorgadas and Cabrice's men threw
javelins and slings at them. And as it just allows advanced,
those men ran back up the hill to take cover and it just allow
us to position this man at the bottom of the hill.
OK, so even if you don't know much about military stuff, you
it's pretty count. It's pretty intuitive that
marching up a hill to attack people who are at the top of
hill is dangerous. The people at the top of the
hill have the advantage on the people coming up at them, right?
That seems pretty straightforward.
So marching up the hill would put his phalanx at a
disadvantage. But this is the guy that took
Thebes head on when he didn't have to, just to get some extra
casualties. And he also has a very strong
belief in the supremacy of his army.
So what does he do? He's he's shown a willingness to
take casualties. This is his most hated foe.
So there was the military equivalent of an awkward pause
where they just kind of sit there and stare at each other
for a minute. And then it just allows.
Does it? He orders his men forward up the
hill. The Spartans themselves might
have been a little surprised at the command.
And I wonder what went through their minds.
Like, really? But they're obeying.
They're not hesitating. These are Spartans.
They are very, very inured and used to following commands.
It's drilled into them from a young age.
So they did it no hesitation. They may have had some second
thoughts, but their feet didn't. They marched.
So many of the allies as well, who are Spartan allies are like,
oh, well, that's interesting. It just allows his takings up
the sill. Well, he knows what he's doing
now. On the other side, the Thebens
and the Athenians are like, oh, fear excitement, like I don't
want to fight Sparta. They're unbeatable.
No one has beaten a Spartan army on land in hundreds of years,
literally, right. It was pretty much unheard of.
So that's like they're all that's that's in the back of
their heads. Like even though we but but on
the other hand, they're like, wait, we have a high ground.
Maybe we can actually win. Maybe this is our maybe this is
the edge we need to overcome their advantage.
But let's not forget who was in charge here.
Yes, Gorgodos and Cabrias. And what have we said about
Cabrias? What has has been his modus
operandi that we've seen? This is why I named him like a
Jaime Lannister, because he's extremely confident, maybe to
the point of cockiness. We could even call him Cabrius
the confident. And this is a young man too.
So he has that little bit of that youthful cockiness and it
just allows who's not young. He's in his 60s at this point,
if I remember correctly. So when he sees the Spartan army
coming at them, rather than getting excited or scared or
some combination of the two, he knows exactly what's going on.
He thinks it's a bluff. He's like, Nah, it just allows.
He's just trying to intimidate it.
He's trying to put the fear of his men into ours.
He's going to not March up the hill.
He just wants our men to feel scared for a second and then to
have them remember that. Be like, see, you guys are
afraid of us. He wanted to put that in them
and and hurt their morale for later.
But Cabrias had the exact answer to counter this move.
He gave the equivalent order that in modern times would be
called at ease. So get this, get this straight.
It just allows his orders, his men to start marching up the
hill to attack. And Cabrias, his response is at
ease. Men, take a breather.
The most dangerous, unbeatable army for centuries is coming
right at you. And he's like, chill, guys, no
problem. And gorge, gorge at us.
The Theben leaders like, oh, all right, that's what we're doing.
All right, at ease. Maybe he perceived, maybe he
understood in that moment what Cabrias was doing.
It was a gesture of contempt. It was like, yeah, you guys
aren't doing this. I see through your plan.
You're not doing this. It also demonstrated their
discipline. One single command, everyone
goes at ease. Just one.
That's that shows discipline like that shows how well
organized they are, which Sparta usually believes they have the
advantage on discipline and organization like that.
So seeing that, oh actually these guys have it together.
So he sent a message. So a just Laos was just trying
to scare them to remind them that they dare not fit.
It's a bully move. He was trying to make you
flinch, like made you flinch, made you flinch like hold his
first out like that made you see you're scared.
It gives morale to his men to show how afraid the enemy are
and puts fear into the in the eyes of or in the minds of his
enemy. Clever move, but Cabrias saw
right through it and turned it around on him so he didn't get
the message across after all. Cabrias flipped it, instead of
the men being scared they became incredibly confident.
They're like boom our leader just way outplayed that Spartan
and that guy is 3 times older and one of the most fear he
might be. It just allows is probably
considered the most powerful man in Greece at this point and
Capri has just owned him. That's a great move.
So Sparta. He knew he could perceive that
this was using fear as a weapon, not actually trying to start a
battle. So word spread about this
tactic. It became a big deal.
He would have had huge Internet fame if there had been an
Internet. It would it would have been
memes about him, right? They put a statue up of him and
he asked for that rest pose to be the statue.
Like them resting their Shields on their knees and just like
taking a knee. Like, like you see that in like
football. Take a knee, everybody.
And listen, you know, it's very much like that.
And I bring up football intentionally because from then
on, athletes at the Olympics would adopt that pose and be
like, I'm the winner. They're like, this is just to
show their confidence, to show how is in control.
They are they they adopt Cabrias's move there.
It's just like, like I said, it became a cultural meme.
People just did it to remember that and honor it.
And yeah, public speakers would do it sometimes too.
They would like it would be just show that they were done.
It'd be like, hey, you know, like it pause for applause.
Like you take the knee. And they'd be like, oh, yeah,
yeah, it brings them on. Is this the right way to fire up
the crowd? So just allows really, that
really backfired for him. But on the other hand, he's
like, yeah, OK, you had your moment, but you, you didn't win
anything. You didn't beat anything.
You got some confidence. But I still have an army in your
territory. You know, I'm marching around
doing stuff. This isn't going to really
matter in the long run. So that was his, that was his
attitude. Meanwhile, while Ajis allows his
ravaging farms, destroying estates, while that army sits on
the hill behind him, his men are regaining their confidence.
Like, yeah, they, they yeah, they that guy, he had a good
move against us, but we're still in charge.
They're still afraid to fight us.
Right? Like, that's plain.
They're still on their hill, and we're just marching around
destroying their territory, and they're not doing anything about
it. So meanwhile, Foibidas, he's
like, all right, well, my king is in the region, so I'm going
to start launching some attacks from Thespia.
We're so close by. We've got a great base of
operations to strike at Thebes from less than 40 miles away.
So he starts raiding, you know, like Ironborn style rating, but
without the ships. The allies split their forces,
right? So Cabrias doesn't neither of
them take on a just allows Gorgatas heads to go deal with
Foibidas while Cabrias. Takes his army to attack Spartan
allies and eventually he takes ship and starts attacking some
islands. So he does a lot of work but
neither of them actually stop it, just allow us.
So he continues destroying farms and just does a lot of damage to
thieves. His his goal is to try to maybe
'cause long term harm by destroying enough farms to cause
a food shortage. Because he doesn't have the
ability to take the city they don't have.
Taking thieves isn't possible even with the size of the army
he has. It's just too big.
It's like, imagine like a lot of times you have an army that just
isn't like, Stannis's army isn't big enough to take Winterfell,
that kind of thing. You know, like he has to do,
he's going to have to do something sneaky to to make that
work. So eventually he just marched
home. It just allows to he's just
like, all right, well, campaign season's over.
We destroyed a lot of farms and estates.
That's all we could accomplish. Let's go home.
His Spartan allies and Spartan itself, not impressed by it,
just allows his campaign. They're like, yeah, you that's a
little weak, actually. Yeah, you know, you dominated
them on the ground. They didn't fight you.
That's nice. But you didn't like all you
destroyed was some food. You know, that's that's going to
grow back. So Gorgadas is heading towards
Foibidas. Nice similar names here to to
get into a a war here or a battle.
And on his way with his squad, including the Sacred Band and
other Thebans, they encounter a squad of 200 enemies and killed
them all. And then they start raiding
Thespian territory. So they counter rating their
ratings Thespi, while Thespi is rating them.
It accomplished little. Gorgodas is just like, it just
allows just destroying some farms and stuff like that.
It's just not, it's not going to get you very far.
It's something. But yeah.
And Floybidas is still rating thieving territory and he's
accomplishing more. So Floybidas is partly because
thieves is much bigger. They have a larger population.
Destroying food has a bigger effect.
But Gorgadas says, OK, well, we're going to have to, we have
to have it out here. Let's go fight.
Let's go see if we can get him to into a pitch battle.
So Gorgadas, it takes his men towards where he believes
Foibadas is. And they wanted some payback for
sure, right? They know who this is.
They know Foibadas is the guy that sees the cadmium.
They definitely want him, right? He didn't get justice from
Sparta. They'd let him go.
Well, this is their time to give him justice if they can.
So at one point, Gorgadas orders the orders in advance against
the two armies are arrayed facing each other and Gorgadas.
OK, come at you. Foibadas has Peltas, the
javelins, slingers and all them and a few Archers hit them
pretty hard. So Gorgadas is like sends, pulls
his men back, and then it becomes a retreat, and then it
becomes a route. They start running.
Foybaras is like, oh, yeah, charge, get them, get as many as
you can, stab them in the back, kill us.
Get get them. Now, Foybaras hadn't heard about
what happened on the hill. Apparently, he didn't realize
these very disciplined soldiers, as they demonstrated to just
allow us. So yeah, it's a trap.
It was a trap, yes. And it ironically, this new
discipline of Thebes, this attitude, this spine that they
grew while living under Spartan hegemony for three years.
Remember how Epaminondas would go around and tell the young
thebans, hey, challenge them to wrestling and when and then
after they would win these wrestling matches, say, hey, you
can beat Sparta, yet we're still under their control.
Isn't that embarrassing for us? So after years of that and and
then seeing that they can win, this is a new generation of
thebans who aren't, they're not as inflicted over the spell of
Spartan fear as as their ancestors had been.
They're they're braver about it. They're like, hey, times are
changing. So this is those men.
This is who's facing Foy Badass and his squad, a group of people
that are really want to prove themselves, really want to get
back at this guy in particular and really have a lot of
ambitions for the future of their city.
So the Theven cavalry's already superior.
They just have better horses than Sparta.
Sparta. Sparta's cavalry is pretty
pathetic, actually. In fact, that it's it's also, I
think it's kind of backwards from Westeros, backwards from
most places, really, because horses are expensive.
So by definition, cavalry tend to be come for richer families.
Yeah. So it's the Knights on
horseback. Those are the main guys in
Westeros. Right.
And the foot soldiers are the backups.
The, you know, the, the, the quantity rather than the quality
here. It's kind of similar for most of
the nations. But with Sparta, infantry is
their thing. That's how that's their dominant
thing. That's the thing that they
regard as important. It's manly riding horses is is
for weak people. Even that's so militarily
useful, they still look down on it.
So their their way of deciding who was the cavalry was just the
the losers. The weakest guys have to be the
cavalry. So it's like they would just put
that job on the weakest soldiers, which is the opposite
of most other nations in Westeros or in real life.
So this trap happens. The the Steven cavalry turns
around and strikes back at the charging Spartans and does an
encircling maneuver. So they're they're not only are
they surrounding them and it can attack them from the sides,
They're cutting off their retreat.
And it was quite a quite a victory.
Floydas was killed. They got him.
Must have been a big celebration.
They're like, yeah, we got this guy finally.
All right, Justice. The Sacred Bands had their first
victory. And as is the norm in Greece,
they erected a trophy to commemorate the battle.
As you know, dedication to the gods.
They would usually leave some Shields and broken arm or
whatever to some captured armaments is usually how they do
it. And a lot of times those trophy
would stay there forever. Like enemies don't take those
trophies down. It was just a Greek cultural
thing. Like you win the battle, it's
your right to be able to put that trophy up.
And the the losers have to come ask you for permission to get
your dead. And that we've discussed how
important burying the dead is. That's the thing that they would
agree on almost always like 99.9% of the time, like yes, you
can come collect your dead bodies.
Go ahead and do that peace truce while you collect your dead.
Go give them the proper burial. They fought, they deserve a
burial there. You know, it was a little bit of
some aspects of war. They still had some, you know,
some unity about South Sparta just said, all right, well, that
didn't work. So they sent a new commander to
Thespi and a new Garrison. So they just re re armed Thespi
at the end of this year. 376 Rome builds its first city
walls, the Serbian wall. Very famous.
That's the Serbian wall is why Hannibal, after defeating
multiple Roman Roman armies could not take Rome because he
didn't have a large enough army. Same deal with Aedisolaus and
Thebes. In fact I'm pretty sure their
armies were similar sizes around 18,000 at the time.
Also, Dionysius of Syracuse lost his third war to Carthage and
had to pay 1000 talents annually and basically seat all territory
West of the Halseus River. You don't need to know what that
is. It's basically on the western
half of Sicily. 377 Thebes reestablishes the Boesian league
and Athens the second Athenian league.
Remember the second Athenian league was there.
They're going on telling everybody this time we're going
to be allies, not not dominators, right?
Well, we promise. Meanwhile Thebes Boesian league
was an older thing and this reforming now that they have
regained their power. Basically it's all the region of
Boesha with Thebes at the middle.
Thebes is the the powerful one. They all get to elect boatarks.
Everything is a something a tark.
In Greece if you're in charge of something, you're something a
tark. They even have like the guy who
cleans out the all the drains like like a Tyrion.
They have, it's like a taxi arc or something like that.
Anyway, like, yeah, they have it like a skull arc.
It's like a school administrator, scholarly
administrator skull arc. Yeah, this is everything's an
arc. So the boatarks, there would be
7 boatarks, 7 military leaders. It's the equivalent of the
Athenian strategos. And basically the way they
arranged it, 4 boatarks would always be from Thebes and the
other three would be from the other Bohesian ally or other
Bohesian city states. Spring of 377 it's campaign
season again, but just allow us invades again and again uses a
ruse to get around the Theben wall.
This guy's pretty clever. Even though his last campaign
didn't didn't accomplish a whole lot, he still knows what he's
doing in general. So this time he goes to the city
of Platea, which is another place that they had dominated at
the time. Platea is not very far from
Thebes, so they have these multiple bases that they can
kind of threaten thieves by having an army close by.
So what does he do? He goes to Platea and orders
them to set up an outdoor market for his troops, knowing that
everybody would hear about this. So thieves hears about it, as
expected, and they go, oh, let's attack that market.
They're going to be vulnerable. It's a trap, but not the same
kind of trap. They show up with their army
ready to attack and there's nobody there at all.
It's just an outmaneuver. It just allows it already take
took his army in different direction knowing that they
would fall for this bait. So this time a just allows
destroys the other farms, the farms he didn't destroy the
previous year. So this starts to really add up.
I mean, like he destroyed a bunch of farms last year, then
he destroys a bunch of farms this year.
That's really taking its toll on thieves food supply.
So it's a similar thing like and arguably doesn't seem like it's
accomplishing unless the startup wants more than just destroying
food. A just allows knows what he's
doing, but he isn't. Not everybody's on board with
this long term plan. They want quicker results and it
just allows gets sick. He's an older man, right?
And he gets sick. He couldn't even walk.
So they have to take him back home and his campaign ends a
little bit early. Cleombrodus, the other king,
remember, he takes advantage of it just allows being a little
bit out of it to push for a new strategy.
He says, hey, yes, we're an infantry power, a land power,
but we have had success at sea before We've done it.
Let's pivot. Instead of trying to beat Thebes
on land, let's try to beat Athens at sea, because look what
trying to beat Thebes on land has gotten us.
All we've done is burn a bunch of farms.
It's not that helpful, right? But at sea, we can conquer
islands. We can get more tribute that
way. There's just more for us out
there. And if we let Athens do it,
well, then they're going to be a problem.
So basically he's arguing that Thebes is, you know, they're
taking away some of their some of their vibe, some of what
they're known for. But pragmatically speaking,
wouldn't it be better to go after what Athens is doing?
Wouldn't, won't won't that gain us more to be clear on what
happened with it just allows he had like a rupture in his foot
and his blood started to fill. His legs started to fill with
blood, which was like all swollen and eventually they like
lanced it and he passed out from blood loss and then it's
miraculously stopped. He they thought he was going to
die, but he was bedridden for a while.
And at this point, Antol Cetus. Antol Cetus was the guy the
Spartan who was an in law of Adisalaus.
He's the guy that arranged the King's peace.
He's the guy that blockaded Athens so that they didn't have
their grain supply, which brought them to the negotiating
table, which enabled the King's peace to finally happen.
Antol Cetus went to Adisalaus and said hey, isn't it amazing
how good they've gotten after all the training we've given
them? What he means by that this is an
insult he's telling and and and an accusation at the same time.
Because what I just allow us was doing somewhat violates the
ancient law of Lycurgus, the semi mythical Spartan lawgiver.
The guy who wrote most of Sparta's laws for this era
basically came up with their constitution, you know, several
centuries before. Lycurgus said don't make war on
the same people over and over, too close together, because
you're going to teach them how to fight.
They're going to learn by necessity, and then they'll be
more dangerous in the long term. You're you're giving them
fighting laws. That's what he said.
You've given them training. You attacking them has taught
them how to fight. And if you keep doing it over
and over, they're going to get really good at fighting.
You're making this happen. It's an interesting point and
one that you kind of have to somehow you can see his point
kind of right, especially given how fired up these current
generation of Thebans were to, to get back at Sparta after what
they did. But it just allows can't do much
about it right now. He's bedridden and possibly
dying. Now, I know they're a little, a
little sidetrack here for the birth of a very important person
in Athens, Demosthenes. He will become the most
important orator of the ancient world, right up there with
Cicero. Cicero's a little more famous,
in fact. Plutarch's Parallel lives,
comparing Cicero to Demosthenes. There you go.
There's an eerie number of coincidences between Cicero and
Demosthenes apart from their everlasting fame as speakers,
including their deaths at the hands of very powerful and
tyrannical people that they spoke out against.
They orated against people that were dangerous, but after long
careers, it's not like this was the first time they spoke out
against someone dangerous. But at this point, Demosthenes
is 7 years old, so he's not a big part of the story yet.
But even as a child, he was fascinating because he was
orphaned. His, his parents had some money,
they had an estate of some kind, but his caretakers embezzled it
all after the after the family, after the parents died, and they
kind of ignored him. He was small, he was picked on
by other kids. So he had no talented speaking.
He he had a he would slur his words, he would stutter, but he
had overwhelming drive to improve.
He practiced speaking with pebbles in his mouth so that he
just to make him more clear, you know, he would just form words
while making it harder, which would make, you know, it's like
doing anything under those difficulties.
When you take the difficulty away, it gets easier.
So he would train himself to speak clearly by holding rocks
in his mouth and he would train himself to speak clearly after
running, after sprinting, he would hike up a big mountain,
run up the mountain and be like and try to speak clearly after
that. So I'll just all this effort
into speaking well into being an orator.
And this is a trend orators, there weren't really orators the
previous century. This is a new thing, people that
have a lot of influence based on speeches that are delivered to
the citizenry, a lot of which survived.
Today, a lot of these are written down.
Cicero's writings, Demosthenes writings, you can you can find
them now. They still influence modern
writing, modern writers, they're still analyzed quite a bit.
So anyway, we don't have much to say about him right now.
I just wanted to introduce him. A naturally uncharismatic person
who became such through hard work, kind of inspiring in that
regard. Not militarily capable at all,
but an amazing speaker and someone who's very self-made.
So we'll catch up with him when he's a bit older and to keep him
back in your mind around this time as well.
Masolos is made satrap of Koriah.
Koriah, remember that's one of the regions of what's now
Turkey. Now Mazalos is pretty important,
and his wife, though arguably more important, more
interesting. Artemisia, the second sister
wife at that. So yeah, now her story's
amazing, but we're not to her time period yet.
Now they are part of the Hekatomnid dynasty.
Remember sister wives of both Artemisia and Masalas are of the
Hekatomnid dynasty from Hekatomnus.
He was the 1st satrap of a Persian region who wasn't
Persian? Hekatomis.
So he was an important guy and he, you know, Mazalis was his
descendant. And Hekatomis was made satrap
after the death of Tisifernes. Remember, Tisifernes was the one
that ratted out Cyrus's rebellion to Artaxerxes.
And Tisifernes was eventually assassinated on orders of
parasitis. So Masalas you might wonder.
That name might sound a little familiar.
Well, yeah, Masalos is where we get the word mausoleum right for
real. And he is the man buried in the
mausoleum of Masalos. Artemisia built it for him for
as his as his tomb, his again, that's his sister wife.
So the Mausoleum of Masalas, in case you weren't aware, is one
of the seven wonders of the ancient world.
Let's take a quick moment to discuss those because well, hey,
we're in the ancient world, right?
The Pyramid of Giza is the only one of the seven wonders of the
ancient world that is still standing.
And it's also the oldest of those.
So it's kind of funny that the oldest one is the only one
that's still around. Now that one, it was roughly
built around 2584 or so. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon,
which may not have actually existed, would be the next
oldest at 600 BC. Then the Temple of Artemis.
Of course, Temple of Artemis is very relevant here.
That was built in 550. Then it was destroyed and
rebuilt in about 356. And that's at Ephesus, the city
of Ephesus. There's the statue of Zeus at
Olympia, which was built in 435. And then the mausoleum isn't
built yet. It will be built after Mazalis
dies. The Colossus of Rhodes is the
other. There's another one that hasn't
been built yet, but will be built in our the second-half of
our story in later 2026, and the Pharaoh's lighthouse at
Alexandria built by Alexander the Great, who also doesn't
exist yet but will also be part of our story later.
The walls of Babylon at the time were considered a wonder of the
ancient world in that period. They aren't now, but the walls
of Babylon were built something like 1800 BC, if not earlier,
and they were 86 kilometers long and 24 meters thick, 97 meters
high. They were huge, especially for
the ancient world. Those are probably some of the
biggest walls by far. For 1000 years or so they were
built out of brick and bitumen. Another ancient world wonder was
the palace of Cyrus. Cyrus was the not to be confused
with Cyrus the Younger, the failed rebel against Artaxerxes.
But the founder of the Persian dynasty was Cyrus the Great.
And so, yeah, he is palace is still remembered, although
there's the Pergamon altar. I don't know much about that.
But that's another one that was built around 180 that was
considered a wonder. The ancient world that isn't
considered one now. So let's go to Persia while
we're there. Let's stick.
Let's stick stick with them for a minute.
Catch up on that. Let's let me give you the tale
of Aspasia, AKA Milto. Now this is a interesting
nickname. She was considered the most
beautiful woman in the world at the time.
She was from Focia, which is western Turkey.
So she was Greek, but you know, Ionian Greek so very much often
under the yoke of Persia when she was young, she was carried
off to be in the harem of Cyrus the younger because so
beautiful, she told the and she was brought into his presence
and all the other women were like flirting and trying to make
friends with the Prince, trying to catch his attention.
And Cyrus is like, hey, what about that one, You know, send
her over here. She was kind of being sullen and
not like not being all flirty like the rest of them.
And she says and he's so he's she's like, no.
And so the his chamberlains are like going to go grab her and
force her to go towards him. And she just speaks up, says
anyone who lays a hand on me will ruin it.
Like, and she's like basically a slave.
And she says this so it's very brave.
And Cyrus basically says she's the only real 1 here.
This is the only real woman you brought me because this is this
is how extremely powerful men would react to strong willed
women. They would look at it like a
curiosity. They still wouldn't be they
wouldn't be impressed. It's like they look at it like
like the way Drogo treated Daenerys, It was like he's
treating her like a horse, you know, like he's, she thinks
she's being, you know, he's this man of of valor and trying to
treat her well. But really he's just going he's
treating her how he would treat a horse.
This is the same kind of thing. Like he's impressed by her, but
he's still. Looking down on her while he's
like, oh, a woman that speaks up.
Oh, you know, wow, what how different.
So this is to him. This is intriguing because most
women are just so scared of him. You know, it's still very.
Anyway, this is not far from the time that Artuzerxes became
king. And then so a few years later,
Cyrus tries to take the throne, fails Aspasia is taken as a
spoil of war by Artuzerxes. Cause they had everybody had
heard of her by now, like the woman that was super beautiful
and spoke up to Cyrus like directly like that so that
everybody heard about it. So she was brought to him in
chains and because of her reputation artistic, she was mad
about that. He was like, you brought her in
chains, how dare you? He gave her, he the officers
that brought her in chains. He threw them in prison and gave
her a bunch of presents. And then later he married her
because of course he did. He married, you know, like a
bajillion people. At one point he became sad
because his favorite eunuch boy Tiridades died.
And this was a young beautiful, the most beautiful boy of the
air, apparently. And boy, I mean, he's like a 16
year old, still really young, not an actual boy, but very
young anyway, and a eunuch. So like, why would they do that?
Well, because they're, well, that's what they did anyway.
So she gets the idea that you can get even closer in his good
graces by wearing Tiro daddy's clothing.
So she shows up in his clothing and is like, hey, is this giving
you comfort? And he's like, yes.
So also around this time, it's not standard practice, or rather
it's not automatic that the eldest son inherits.
In the Persian Empire it was normal, but it wasn't automatic
like it would be in Westeros. So his eldest son, another
Darius, was named Air at this time.
So he was the eldest in this case was named Air.
And they had a custom very much like the Carthene wedding
custom, where when the Persian king names his heir, that heir
is allowed to ask for a boon, a single thing that the king is
not allowed to refuse. What did he ask?
So remember, that's what Zaro tried to do.
Zaro tried to marry Danny. And then Jaro's like, hey, you
know what, Danny? Zaro is trying to trick you.
Because there's a marriage custom in cars where each spouse
gets to ask for a favor from their spouse and they they
cannot refuse. He's going to ask you for a
dragon. She's like, oh, damn, yeah, he
is going to do that, isn't he? So what does durais do?
He asks for Aspasia. He asks for the woman.
And I heard Xerxes like, oh, damn it, I don't I don't want to
give her up. But this is very public.
It's going to make me look bad. I don't want to I'll I already
broke the law once. You know, remember he how he
took remember how he offered a daughter to Tira Bazis, his
daughter Atosa, and then said, actually, never mind, I'm going
to marry her myself. So this is a guy that is already
gone. What, too far many times.
So there's nothing You can't put this past him.
But he said, OK, fine, I will grant your boon.
But there's a condition only if she agrees to it.
She has to agree. She has to, basically.
But he didn't phrase it like that.
He said she has to choose. Vespasia has to choose between
me or Darius. What a loaded question.
She is a lose, lose situation for her.
So she's like, I don't know what to do here.
I guess I'll choose Darius because he's my future.
Because Artaxerxes is older at this point.
Artaxerxes is like in his 70s, so and durais is like 50, so
he's not a young man either, but still the future, more future
there. So sheeps uses durais and and
Xerxes is like our Xerxes like all right, fine, but he but it
ate at him. He just didn't like it.
So he pulled a jerk move as he's won't to do.
He was a big proponent of the Goddess Anahita.
He was actually quite a builder. We we didn't really talk about
this much, but art desserts, he's actually built a lot of
things. He was a big building project, a
guy, and a lot of his buildings are still there.
Very important structures that he had built or restored are
still there. And that's part of why we know a
lot about him. There's a lot of like artwork
that says quite a bit, you know, Stella's and carvings, things
like that. So he was big on this particular
goddess, Anahita, who's like the God of goddess of waters and
stuff. So he's like, you know what, I'm
going to make Aspasia the high priest of Anahita, which is a
position with strict celibacy. So she had to live on temple
grounds in strict celibacy for the rest of her life.
And Darius was mad about that, understandably.
He would Stew and get angry, and Tierra Bazis took notice.
Tierra Bazis who lost, who was, had the old marriage offer
rescinded. You know, he's like, maybe I've
got a, maybe I've got an ally here, someone that's upset for
similar reasons to me. So they start to talk.
Nothing comes of it just yet, but give it a little time.
By the way, there's a lot of people who believe the story of
Aspasia is the seed for the story of Cinderella.
How cool is that long a long, it's a long line of stories that
leads to that. But there's an, there's an
academic tradition that believes this.
It's pretty cool. Not enough time for us to talk
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Save a little time. Is it a little confusing to hear
the term Thespii, the city, because it's nothing to do with
the term thespian, even though it sounds almost identical?
There was a guy before this, before this era we're discussing
called Sepsis. Not to be confused with Sepsis,
that was his sister. No, just kidding.
Sepsis was the first actor in a written play.
He may have invented touring for artists, musicians, you know,
like touring in different cities and doing, he may have been the
first guy to do that. This series that we're
discussing this entire Greek series and into the later parts,
the the second series that we'll do in 2026.
There's a lot of omens, right? We saw that especially last
episode with the the way the Thebans took the different
things that were happening as they were moving towards
liberating their city. And these interpretations could
turn on a dime like, oh, this is a terrible omen.
Oh, wait, that little detail, It's a great omen, you know, or
here's a different interpretation.
It's like there's nothing that changes.
There's two different people interpreting it differently.
It's kind of fascinating even in A at the same time being kind of
weird, you know, like, how do they don't they see how in how
inconsistent this is, how shifting ground this is?
Yeah. And there were some ancient
Greeks that definitely toyed with atheism because it didn't
make sense to them either. But for the most part, you're
not going to see much of that. We continue to see things that,
well, it's life, isn't it? Things that still happen now in
2025, you know, like people reacting.
There's still superstitions all over the world today, people,
not as many things that people look at as omens, but to a
lesser extent they do. They just don't call them omens.
You know, people talk about things like karma and things
that are meant to be, you know, like Destiny or This happened
for a reason. That's kind of a similar
concept. So these are things that humans
have been doing forever since the beginning of time.
It's very neat to see what those versions, their version of that
was like and compare it to ours because, yeah, like I just said,
we still have it. It's just spoken up differently.
We have a little bit different information.
There's things we know better, but there's still so many things
we don't know. So this is this is pretty neat.
These are things that they weren't written about and thus
passed down in smaller numbers rather than just knowledge held
by a whole society for generations, if not centuries,
right? This is, these are widespread
beliefs of the era. The war sits at the center of
all this. Of course, war is the major
driving factor for so much of it.
When war is happening, it tends to dominate all other
considerations, after all. But we're not only focused on
that element. We, we, I, I like to insert as
much as I can here. That is something other than
war. 376. It's a neat year for the
Olympiad because the first ever Olympiad was 776.
So this is the 101st Olympiad. So it's the 100 years prior or
400 years prior was the first one. 100 years prior was the
76th Olympiad. The a man named Theogenes of
Fasos was the most famous athlete of his time and long
before or after. It kind of depends on how you
count it, but by a few different ways of counting it, Theogenes
of Fasos wasn't eclipsed by an Olympic athlete until Michael
Phelps. Who the amazing swimmer who
dominated what, 15 years ago was that Maybe 20?
I don't remember exactly, but this guy's records stood for
2728 hundred years. What?
That's an athlete y'all? In the same year of this 101st
Olympiad, Nectanabo the First entered his third year as
pharaoh of Egypt. The Assyrian calendar entered
its year 4375 and in China it was the year of the wood dragon
and the wood snake. I believe the dragon is the male
and the snake is the female. I'm maybe I have it backwards,
but either way that's what's a little tidbit from China.
On the other side of the world at the actual Olympia on the
naked Sprint was won by Damon of Thoryi Boxing by Lab Axe of
Leprion. What a great name Lab Axe of
Leprion. Very, very alliterative and his
alliterativeness was matched by the boys boxing winner
Criterodamus of Klytor. The pentathlon was won by
Stomios of Ellis. The pen creation was won by
Stomios of Ellis. That's why he won the pentathlon
and the mixed martial arts event.
Whoa again, what an athlete. However, yeah, this guy was also
a warrior. He won three times at the Nemean
Games. Nemean Lion, like a Hercules
reference, Heracles reference. Similar to the Olympic Games but
came later. This guy once killed a general
from Sikion in single combat. The guy challenged him.
He was like, I want to fight you, Stomios of Ellis.
And he's like, yeah, I'll fight you back.
And he won. So in addition to Olympic glory,
this guy won glory in battle. And guess what he might have
been doing? Not this guy, but the current
winners like Lab Acts, Critidamus and maybe Stomios and
Damon. They probably at least one or
two of them did the Chabrias pose.
This was the Olympics right after the Addy's move that
became mimified throughout Greece.
So and as I told you at the time, especially Olympic
victories who fought and who did events that were more like
fighting, like wrestling or pancreation would, would, were
the most likely to adopt that pose.
So some of the winners of this year's Olympics probably did the
tubrious pose for and their statues would have been seen
like that for hundreds of years. Here's a brief recap of where
we've been so far. We started the series with the
year 4 O 8. Now we're in. 370-6408 was
Lysander's year as nave arc. It was 8 years before Adis
Allowance becoming king. Four years before our Deserxes
becoming king. Here we are.
Like I said, 337632 years later both Adis Allowance and our
Deserxes are still going. They could have had a showdown
too, if not for those meddling kids.
I mean, Siebens and Farnabas is the paymaster giving them lots
of money and that's again, why it just allow US1 of many
reasons why he hates Thebes. They stole his glory.
They did all this other stuff and they don't they they eat and
drink. They like eating and drinking.
You know, it's part is like, no, you shouldn't do that.
You shouldn't enjoy eating and drinking and you shouldn't love
so much either. It's it's it's improper.
So I don't know about you all, but it's pretty easy to side
with Thebes on most of these things because they're just more
like us, you know, like Sparta is just so strict and
militaristic and authoritative. And I don't know, I don't want
to say good guys and bad guys, but it's just so easy to side
with Thebes on so much of this, especially with these new
figures that are arising. Some of them are just really
compelling people that you kind of want to root for.
Pelopodus and Impeminandas and Gorgodos, these guys, although
maybe Gorgodos was older, it's not clear, but Cabrius as
Athenian, a part of the youth movement, Climbrodus, the the
Spartan king, different than it just allows.
And this guy, Jason and Firai. Firai for the straight guy we're
going to talk about soon. The latest Athenian to come on
the scene was Fokyon. He was born in four O 2 SO two
years before it just last became king two years after our
deservesies He the that 27 year long Peloponnesian war ended in
four O 4. This Fokyon was born right in
the calamitous era, right after that failure, that big loss,
the, the, he's part of that generation that stood in the
shadow of their past generations that had so much more power.
So he he and his generation really wanted to help regain
some of that, but he wasn't ambitious in the same kind of
way he was a he had a lot of morals, he had a lot of ethics
and he was very much like Stannis.
I said Epaminondas is a bit like Stannis, but maybe Epaminondas
is more like corn half hand and Rhaegar with a little bit of
Stannis. Focion is almost pure Stannis,
which I will demonstrate via quote.
Demosthenes once said to Fokyon that he might be killed someday
if the people became irrational. Fokyon responded.
Yes, however, they would kill you if they came to their
senses. It's pretty good.
He was an order a orator of sorts, but he didn't like
orators. He he his existence was a push
back against orators because he would try to do things like
that. He would try to communicate a
lot with one sentence, whereas the orators would just say so
much. They would speak flowery, this
convincing that reference this, this anecdote that all these
different things to sway opinion where fokey on just he didn't
like that. He was like, no, just say what
you mean. Be blunt.
Let people decide on the basis of facts only, no persuasion
that he was blunt and efficient and made a point of it to push
back against the current trend of orations.
Now this, at this period, he's only 20 years old.
So he's already like a kind of acts like an old man, like a
stodgy old man, a get off my lawn kind of guy.
But he's, of course, he's already in the military, already
serving, already trying to help Athens restore their glory.
His grandfather, another folky on was a commander of a ship in
the Peloponnesian War, was killed in action.
This guy was also a pupil of Plato.
Yeah, that's pretty cool. Fokyon, pupil of Plato.
He was also a friend of the famous philosopher Xenocrates.
Another couple of quotes from Fokyon, just because he's so
good. Remember that comment that
Stannis made about Robert and. And how, like, Robert could piss
in a cup and everybody would praise the vintage?
I give them clean water and they sniff at it and stare at it in
suspicion. He's this.
He's lamenting how it's the truth doesn't matter.
These people, they care more about who the message who the
words come from. That is a bigger bellwether to
them on truth than the the the words being spoken and the the
facts, the data, whatever backs it up that whatever evidence
there is so fokey on's equivalent comment here is my
frown never yet made any of you sad, but these jolly men have
given you plenty of sorrow, right.
So he's saying his, you know, attitude, his toughness, his
bluntness. Yeah, it might upset you, but
it's not going to cause real problems in your life.
But these happy, positive orators, they've LED us to
calamity. You know, they're happy, but
that doesn't mean that their results have been good.
Don't fool yourself like that. At another time there was a man
who was speaking to the crowds and he was trying to play humble
like, you know, no, but I'm a humble man.
I'm a humble man. And Focion said, don't be so
humble. You're not that great.
It's like I'll only someone who's really great should be
that has caused to act humble. It's like you're not actually
that great. Though another time the crowd,
he said something in the crowd cheered him and he doesn't like
it. He's like that must be I must
have said. He said, have I unwittingly said
something vile because he couldn't understand why the
crowd? He's like, if the crowd is
cheering me, I must have said something awful because if I've
gotten popular acclaim, like, he associates popular claim with
negativity. So yeah.
So he's going to be a part of our story for a while as both a
speaker and a soldier, such as our next event, the Battle of
Naxos. Now, at this point, remember,
Athens wasn't actually trying that hard to beat Sparta.
After two years of helping Thebes fight off Sparta, they
didn't really get much out of it.
They were. So they became more concerned
with not so much as helping beating Sparta, but not letting
Sparta beat Thebes so they could maintain that balance of power.
Partly because if Sparta's fighting Thebes on land, that
frees them up to go back to their maritime power and try to
bring back their empire over the Aegean in the Mediterranean,
which would bring them back to dominance.
So, and again, remember, they're still trying to tell people
that, hey, yeah, we're we're going to be allies this time.
We're not going to dominate you. Sparta saw this coming though.
They, they sussed us all out. They're like, MMM, Athens is
just going to try to re establish their empire while
we're slogging it out with Thebes.
They're going to go over there. MMM, we got to, we're going to
have to stop that. So they attempted to repeat one
of Lysander's strategies. They deployed the Admiral Paulus
with 60 ships to repeat the Entalcitus plan, which was to go
send these ships to the Black Sea and stop the grain
shipments, cut Athens off from its grain supply.
They have to import grain. So this was their plan to try to
mess up Athens. But Athens figured this out.
They got wind of it either because they saw it coming,
because it's an obvious enough counter strategy.
They'd seen it happen already this, so they could see it
coming the second time. So they sent out Cabrias with 84
triremes, 20,000 men and some siege engines.
So he went out there. To the grain ships and escorted
them like aha, you're not going to get us like that brings the
grain ships into Athens and so they're they bring they they're
brought in UN unmolested. The food got there and but he's
still got the ships. So he goes over to Naxos, which
was a island that's pro Spartan. Naxos is in the middle of the
Aegean. It's like near really near the
center. Legend says Zeus himself was
raised in a cave on Naxos and it's the place that Theseus
abandoned Ariadne. If you're familiar with your
story of Theseus. By the way, if you want to read
a fictionalized version of the story of Theseus, I highly
recommend The King Must Die by Mary Renault and the sequel The
Bull from the Sea. Both books life of Theseus super
interesting her her imagination of the ancient world is really
unparalleled. So Paulus arrived anyway.
He was like he arrived to interfere with the siege.
He couldn't stop the grain ships so he decided to attack
Cabrias's fleet so that way maybe they could get the grain
ships next time or something. Just try to establish dominance
one way or the other. So the two navies face each
other about 3 miles apart and as they got closer it there was
something became apparent to the Spartans.
Cabrias was using trickery as was his want.
He against tradition ordered all his ships to remove insignias.
It's like basically going into battle without sigils.
He's like, hey all you guys imagine about a Westerosi
battle. He's like none, take all your
badges off. None of you are wearing any of
your clothes that indicate what house you came from.
And so the Spartans, this threw the Spartans into confusion
because they didn't know who were the allied ships.
They didn't know which were the Athenian ships and that mattered
to them because of they really wanted to hit Athens the most.
And well, so they that was affected their morale a little
bit. They didn't quite know what to
do. It gave them gave Cabrios a
little bit of an advantage. So it's kind of like a phalanx
battle where you have the right facing the right and the left
facing the left where the the strongest guys in the right
side, right side, my right here, you're right here.
And Paulus overwhelmed the Athenian left and killed the
squadron commander over there. And Cabrios, sitting back
watching the battle unfold, sees the collapse of his left, sends
his reserves, commanded by Focion to reinforce that part of
the battle. Now Focion did the job really
well. Focion's 20 ships came over,
restored the battle lines over there, and eventually the
Athenians won. The Spartan fleet retreated as
Cabrios, despite how confident he was, he did not pursue them,
even though he could have done serious damage.
Because again, recovering the bodies, you got to recover the
bodies. You got to, Even though it
sacrificed A distinct military advantage, collecting the bodies
of the slain is just that important.
Remember, way back in the Peloponnesian War, I think I
told you all this, there was a famous battle that Athens won,
but there was a storm about to come, so they had to leave,
which meant leaving the bodies behind.
So even though Athens won this big war, and they've been this
big battle, and they had, the war had been raging for decades,
they were so mad about the not collecting the bodies that they
executed all the generals. What?
Yeah. So Cabreras was clearly worried
about that. But this is also a really big
deal because this is the first battle Athens won at sea with
their own ships since the Peloponnesian War.
They'd won other sea battles since then, but those were
Persian ships or Persian funded ships.
This is their own ships that they built with their own crews
with their own money. So that gave them a boost in
terms of city pride. Like, all right, we are
restoring our strength. We beat Sparta.
We did our job. We got this.
Two young commanders doing really well.
We're we're we're getting back in the swing of things.
This somewhat restored there was supremacy in the Aegean
certainly put the Aegean on notice.
Persia took note again, lots of things happen now.
This is the this battle happened on the same day as the
Illusinian mysteries, which is quote the most famous of the
secret religious rites of ancient Greece.
It's a cult of Demeter and Persephone.
Persephone was kidnapped by Hades.
If you recall your myths and Persephone's, this was resolved
by Persephone has to spend half the year in Hades living with
him and the other half above ground.
That's why we have seasons according to the myths, right?
Winter and autumn or when Persephone is in Hades or with
Hades down in the underworld and when spring and summer come when
she's above ground. So that's interesting and it
would have certainly given the Athenians even more like
additional like the gods are on our side.
This happens on the same day as this really important ritual
rites, whatever. So that's good for their their
morale. And they were so pleased.
Cabrias was awarded exemption from liturgies.
What does that mean? And his descendants?
Cabrias and his descendants granted exemption from the
liturgies. What does that mean?
Well, rich people are supposed to pay taxes for certain
religious feat processions and other stuff.
It's basically a tax break. Let's just keep it simple.
Tax break and his descendants. But Cabrias was such a a big
spender. He's a rich guy that loved to
flaunt his wealth and spend. So he's like, Nah, I don't need
to be exempt. Oh, I'm going to keep spending
money on stuff and getting credit for it.
So what you have here is Cabrias brilliantly talented, flaunts
his wealth, you know, very outward, you know, extroverted
guy Fokey on working for him. They're really like an ice and
fire combo. Cabrias is the, you know, fiery
and all over the place, but very talented Fokyon, very talented
dude, but very calm and collected and and and kind of
icy demeanor. Make a good pair, make a good
team. Even though Cabrias is in
charge, he's not that much older than Fokyon now.
Meanwhile, Thebes has capitalized on just allows his
not terribly effective invasions and their win over Foibidas.
Very gradually they started getting rid of all the different
Spartan garrisons in their territories one by one.
In Boesha, they got rid of all the Spartan garrisons and
replaced them with native garrisons.
Thespi. Yep.
Also Tanagra, where they slew a guy called Pantheidis and
Platea. They just destroyed it and
they're like Nah, screw this town.
We're we're sick of it. They burned it to the ground.
Except a city called Orkomenis. Orkomenis was the last city in
Boesha that was still Spartan. Palapadas was determined to fix
that, to get that one city back. Now he learned through his
agents, his spies, that the Spartan Garrison at Orca Menes
was about to leave and had to go to Locris to do some fighting up
there. So he's like, oh, here's our
chance. Let's attack the town right when
that Garrison is gone before they come back.
And we'll probably get some help from the locals.
They'll probably rise up and and help us because, well, they're
Bohesians. They see which way the wind is
blowing. They don't want Sparta ruling
them. It's a reasonable plan.
So he takes the Sacred Band, which is ironically the Garrison
of Thebes and some cavalry. So not a huge army, just enough
to maybe accomplish this goal while there's no Spartan
Garrison there. So they rush to Orca me as they
go there as quick as they can and as they arrive, like, oops,
another Garrison, Spartan Garrison arrived.
So it wasn't actually a blind spot for Sparta.
They didn't just send the Garrison away, leaving the city
undefended. They spent the Garrison away and
replaced it with another one from the South.
So Pelopitus is like, oops, our intelligence wasn't so
intelligent. So he decides, let's just go
back, let's get out of here. This isn't going to work.
So they're walking back home and on their way they run right into
the original army that they were trying to attack or commit us
while this army was gone. So the one that they were
dodging, like, uh oh, we just ran into the army we were trying
to avoid. 2 Spartan Mora. That's their military
distinction for this. It's kind of, again, it's kind
of like a legion, but a different term.
Anyway, one of them was led by Gorgolion, one by Theo Pompous.
Looked like the secret band had outplayed themselves.
It seemed a member of the band is supposed to have supposedly
recognize this conundrum, this trap they had put themselves
into and said quote. We are falling into our enemies
hands, Palopitus responded. And why not they in two hours,
battle was on. There's no way to avoid it.
Palopitus was not scared despite being outnumbered and facing the
Spartans, who still haven't been beaten on land in centuries with
the full Spartan army. So this is the birth place of
Apollo, by the way, this area, this region is right where this
battle happened. It's called the Battle of
Tajira. And yeah, that's where Apollo
was supposedly born. So there's a little extra extra
vibe there. A standard battle plan never
going to work here, right? For for Palopitus, 1200 infantry
versus something like 3 or 400. Remember the Sacred Band is
IS300 guys. And maybe they had a few extras,
but not much. Stevens did have some cavalry,
as we said, and the Spartans probably had no cavalry because
this is a Garrison, garrison's cavalry.
You don't, that doesn't really usually happen.
On the other hand, there's not a lot of room to to maneuver.
They're in a kind of in a mountain pass sort of situation
here. So cavalry isn't at its most
effective. So Palapidis, dynamic leader
that he was, ordered his men to pack tight, tighter than normal.
Like you have a phalanx formation, like no, actually
stand even closer together than normal.
I want you to guys like elbow to elbow, like you're touching the
guy next to you. It may have looked to the
Spartans like they were taking a brave last stand.
Like, all right, we're not going to go down easy.
We're going to get close and it's going to be really hard for
you to to kill us, But we're going to we're going to face
you. You know, we're going to go down
fighting. So the Spartans advance.
They're like, all right, we got 1200 versus your 300.
We're going to encircle you, right?
We're going to get all our guys around you and then you're
screwed. But Palapa, this is like, OK, I
see you coming, spreading out to get around us.
So as soon as they spread out to encircle them, he says charge,
not just run, run as fast as possible.
This was not a desperate plan. This is a man who found
confidence in a tough spot to avoid encirclement.
They didn't just charge this straight ahead to try to break
free. No no no no no.
They charged the Spartan left where the the leaders were, the
2 sub, the two main commanders Gorgolian and Theo Pompous were,
plus all the lieutenants. The sub officers were right at
them. So he didn't just try to get
away, he went for the so-called head of the snake.
Now this is a big deal. This is pretty clever because
the Spartans are so military hierarchical, hierarchical
defined that his idea was, well, hey, if we can maybe take out
the leaders, their army will descend into confusion and they
won't, you know, their command structure will breakdown and
they won't know what to do. And that'll give us a big
advantage. So and he was not holding back.
He put himself at the front. This is like a like a spearhead
of wedge of dudes charging forward at a full run, just like
a with wild abandoned just going at them going at the most
intimidating fearsome army 1st that's been so for centuries.
So this was very unexpected. The Spartans didn't expect to
get charged by the smaller army, and the Spartans were very
surprised by this strategy and did not adapt to it.
They were trying to attack the sides of the the sacred band,
but meanwhile this sacred band is attacking the leaders of the
much larger Spartan phalanx. It may have the Steven cavalry
may have bought them some extra time by, you know, keeping the
encirclement from being as quick as it could have been.
Either way they did it. They attacked the left.
The surprise maneuver was they did not.
The Spartans didn't adapt to it and Gorgolian and Theo Pompous
and several sub commanders were killed.
And this revealed a weakness in the Spartan authoritarian
system. The soldiers, remember, we said
these guys are like Unsullied. They're treated, their training
is unbelievably brutal. They're taught not just to
fight, but to accept death and do things that are immoral in
order to win. You know, it's just, yeah, like
the the whole puppy strangling thing from the from the
unsullly. Just Spartans had to do similar
things. So what, they're supposed to
always follow their leaders, but what happens when all the
leaders are dead? No one's.
They're waiting for orders that aren't going to come.
They're not good at independent thinking.
They're not good at thinking on the fly.
This isn't where they where they've been trained.
What happens when your commanders are too busy like
fighting for their lives against these these crack troops from
the Thebans? What happens when they're dead?
Well, that's what happened. They found out what happens when
your leaders are dead. Palopitus and the Sacred Band
just press the advantage rather than killing the after killing
the leaders. They didn't move on and escape.
They've their phalanx broke outward and it kept attacking,
just attacking, mowing down these confused, you know,
absolutely starstruck, completely flummoxed.
Like what? How can this happen?
How can we be losing? What is going on?
We outnumber them 4 to 1. So just like Cabrias, they
couldn't pursue. The Spartans ran away from 4
times more men and they ran away because they were just so
confused. They didn't know what to do.
So they couldn't chase them very far though, because Orca Menis
was nearby and that other Garrison was there.
So like, yeah, well, we, we beat this group.
We don't know if we could beat them if they were twice as large
now. So they would be feeling really
good about this. They, the cavalry probably
picked off some stragglers and then they went back home.
Now, I don't know what happened to Gorgodas.
Gorgodas was the commander of the Sacred Band just prior,
right? He's the one who his men, his
commands. They killed Forbidas, but at
this point he just kind of disappears from the record.
My I have two guesses. I think he went.
My guess is he went back to being a cavalry commander
because that's where he started as and the taker band is
infantry and that he might have been needed there more.
You know, he did his term as leader and they moved on.
It could have also been that the nature of the sacred Band was
that you're, you know, you fight beside your lover.
Well, what happens if your lover is dead or injured or doesn't
exist? You aren't in the sacred band.
We don't know how they handled things like that, but this, that
could be it. You know, he's you don't have a
partner, so you don't really fit in the group anymore.
Now also a change that Palapados made here that stuck was
Gorgatas in that first encounter.
He had the sacred bands spread out, stiffening the ranks
throughout, giving confidence to some guys here, some guys here,
some guys here. And then Palapados said, no,
actually this should be a single unit that doesn't spread out,
just the elite cracks squad, the the stormtroopers of sort the
shock troops, whereas the rest of the levees can still do their
thing. We can take the lead, but we
don't want to be spread out. We're more effective when we're
packed together. And here's another quote from
Plutarch. He thought that brave men were
most ardent and serviceable in a common cause when they inspired
one another with a zeal for high achievement.
And this is building on the idea of the sacred Band saying, hey,
yeah, they'll you fight better when you're standing next to
your lover because that's the person you would least want to
shame, most want to impress. And that's part of why having
them all packed together adds to that impact.
That effects like a geometrical, you know, growth of that
concept. So this is really big deal.
The idea that Sparta could be beaten on land was pretty
shocking, but by a smaller army was just overwhelming.
Like people, surely many people in Greece heard that and were
like, Nah, that's that didn't happen.
This is fake news, but it really happened.
The morale boost was enormous. Thebes had never, ever erected a
trophy against a full Spartan army.
Now they did that against Forbidas, but that was mostly
Thespian soldiers. It's one thing for Sparta to get
outspent or out intrigued or to lose on the sea, but to lose on
land? That's the that was the one
thing they could count on. They could not be beaten on
land. This was a real change.
The whole Greek world took notice and Sparta would be eager
to correct that views like, hey, we got to get people back to
thinking we can't be beaten. We got to do some, we got to get
some wins to, you know, bring this back around.
But they just kept making small mistakes.
Things kept not going well for them.
You can kind of see maybe a little bit of problem from not
having a disallow us available. The guys still bedridden from
that nasty foot thing that happened.
He's still hanging on. He's not dead, but he might die.
Like there's definitely worried that that could happen.
So another incident happened that did not look good for
Sparta and did look good for Athens.
This doesn't have anything to do with thieves in this case.
Now there was there's an island off the coast of Athens called
Uboa. It's pretty big.
It's maybe like the size of Fair Isle and it's a little similar
to Fair Isle in some ways in which it's very nice place and
it grows a lot of crops. It fulfills some of Athens's
large food needs. So a Spartan named Alcitas had
captured it and was in charge of holding it.
And he held the center fortress whatever with his men.
But at night he would sneak out of the fortress to go see his
boyfriend, some young man in Uboa that he liked.
He had an affair with or had a tryst with that.
An affair Cuz that makes it sound like it's he's doing
something wrong. Well, he was doing something
wrong, but the affair wasn't the problem.
It was he was shirking his duty as a military commander because
while he one of these nights, while he went to go see his
boyfriend, the Garrison, the locals revolted and seized the
Fort. So he just ah, it looks real
bad, doesn't it? You're supposed to be the
Spartan commander. And why did you allow this to?
Well, I was, I was hooking up with my boyfriend.
Sorry. So, yeah, that's also
embarrassing. So Sparta's embarrassments are
mounting here. Let's take a diversion to the
north. We've, I've been saying all
along, I've been teasing this all along that the northern
states are going to become a problem.
So let's get to them a bit. Let's let's explain what's
happening there and set them up. There's some very fun stuff
happening there. But first, a little extra update
on Persia. They're still slowly preparing
that attack on Egypt, right? They're like, OK, got to get
Egypt back, got to get Egypt back.
But we're not going to move quickly on this.
Like I said, we will. We'll get to that next episode.
Meanwhile, Tierra Bassis he's upset that Artaxerxes reneged on
marrying his daughter Atosa right now, something that made
all that worse. That yes, Tirabasis was offered
a Tosa, Farnabasis was offered a different daughter, and the
third guy was offered a different daughter.
Those two got to have their Persian princesses.
No one. There was no reneging in their
case. So he maybe felt a little
singled out, right? So Artaxerxes gets around to
making up up to Tirabasis, and even though Tirabasis is
plotting with Darius, who was wronged in the issue of Aspasia,
Artuzerxes maybe sniffs this out or gets wind of it, we don't
know. But either way, Artuzerxes says
OK, look, I'm sorry. I'll offer you my daughter a
mestress instead. A different Princess, Still a
royal Princess, still a daughter of him and Satara, same lineage.
He wouldn't do it again, would he?
He wouldn't renege a second time, would he?
Yeah, he would. He did.
He did it again. He offered Tear Bass as his
daughter again changed his mind again, married her himself
again. Most likely Parasatus pushed him
to it, but what the hell? Yeah, this really?
Like I, this is Aegon the Unworthy, isn't it?
With a mother who's like Visenya the unworthy, just like like
pushing him to do these things. It's crazy.
It's like they have a whole team anyway.
So Tirabassus again goes to drys.
Like, look, you're kidding me, right?
Like, look what your father did to me.
He promised you that he you're the heir, right?
But can you trust this guy? Look what he did to me.
What happens if he reneges on making you the heir?
It will drives his like, well, would that be so bad?
I guess. I mean, I don't want that.
But what's the I mean, I want to be the king, but is it that bad?
He's like, well, if your brother Ochus becomes king instead of
you, that's bad, right? And he thinks he's and Art
deserves these things. For a minute he's like, yeah,
that would be bad or sorry. Darius thinks for a minute and
says, yeah, that would be bad. Ochus is a very violent,
murderous guy. So if Ochus became king, he
would have me executed. Now you could become king and
you wouldn't execute Ochus because you're not like that.
So you should be king. You're the better man for it.
So Tear Baz's really gets his hooks into Darius and he's a
Darius is a very willing to listen because they've both been
wronged very similarly over over a woman or multiple women in the
case of Tierra Basses. So they have a lot in common
here. Meanwhile, this Okus, who I just
mentioned, he approaches Otosa, the daughter that the first one
that was offered, and that's his sister.
Otosa is Okus's sister and he starts to plot with her and he
says, look at all this happening around us.
I'm going to maneuver. I'm going to be king one day.
You, you just wait and watch. And if you help me do that, I'm
going to reward you, sister. You know, maybe I'll make you my
wife. And so she starts listening.
So multiple plots are happening here.
We got a two different sons of Artaxerxes plotting against him
with the help of Tira Bazis, who of course, was a very powerful,
important leader. Now Artaxerxes hears about this
battle of Naxos, the the win of Cabrias over Paulus.
And he's like, all right, you guys, what about the King's
peace? Weren't we agreeing to stop all
this? So he he sends emissaries and
like, hey, let's get this back on, stop it.
And Athens is very amenable to it because again, they aren't
really excited about fighting Sparta.
They just don't want Thebes and Sparta to be imbalanced, so
they're all about it. So we'll come back to that as
the rest of the Greek states decide what to do about Persia
in trying to re establish the King's peace.
Unfortunately, around this time, parasitis just disappears from
the record. She's just gone, but she was in
her 90s. So I mean, natural death very
likely, I guess you never. And if that is how she dies,
then, you know, karma did not get her.
She did lots of awful things to lots of people and she died of
old age. So never really, never really
got her just desserts. So, yeah, let's talk about these
northern powers of Greece, some of which are considered partly
Greek, but some of them aren't. It's it's a little, a little
column, a, little column B. Some of them want to be
considered Greek because Greek is because like Greece is the
Cultural Center, like the Greece proper, like Athens.
They just want to be a part of that, you know, you want to be
part of where the the high society is.
This is this is how it works right now.
One of the reasons the northern region was becoming more
important, more dangerous, more powerful, was because that
region, speaking from a very high level, was transitioning
from tribal existence to statehood.
But not like the other Greek states.
They weren't becoming city states.
They were becoming monarchies or things very like it, and we're
talking about the states of Thrace, molasses slash Epiris,
Macedonia, Thessaly, and Illyria.
Now let me diverge just a minute to kind of give you all an idea
of where everything is. I came up with a little bit of a
shortcut for explaining the map of visually or verbally.
Hopefully this isn't a fire hose of information, but I think it
should be able to help you all picture some of this a little
bit better. Imagine Greece on the left,
Turkey on the right. The Aegean Sea is in between
them, separating the two. Lots of little islands in
between. Now put a clock right in the
middle of that. OK, 12 o'clock 1:00 That's
Thrace, which is Bulgaria and Romania now, and, and they also
control the Hellespont the the crossing from Asia to Europe.
So it's kind of like controlling the twins, but only 1/2 of it
instead of both halves, right? 2:00 To me, this is 2:00 for you
guys to be this way. If you're looking at me, Troy,
Phrygia and the other side of the connection, Hellespont, the
Bosphorus, it's called now. That's where Farnabez has had
control for a while. 3:00 Ionia and Lydia. 4:00 Karaya and the
island of Rhodes, which is where the Colossus will be built in
another 100 years or so. 5:00 is open sea.
Nothing there. If you keep going that
direction, you'll eventually hit Libya and Egypt.
By the way, Libya had the best horses at this time.
Straight S 6:00 is Crete, which used to be a dominating power.
Now not so much. Directly east of of Crete, 500
miles is Cyprus, which we would come up a few times. 7:00 open
sea and the island of Kathera, which you can ignore.
Nothing really at 7:00, eight o'clock, very important.
That's where Laconia, that's Sparta, Messenia, which is
conquered and enslaved by Sparta, and Arcadia, which is
just north of it and very often at war with Sparta or dominated
by Sparta. That's also near where Corinth
is. 9:00 is where Attica is. That's Athens.
Just above that is Boesha, that's Thebes.
And Delphi is near there, which is the Oracle of Delphi where
they get a lot of their prophecies and, and things like
that. At 10:00 would be Thessaly,
Molossos and Iprus. That's modern Albania and also
parts of Romania, Bulgaria, and at 11:00 Macedonia, which is
still Macedonia today. And it's also where the the
Chalkidian League is. And if you go past Macedonia to
the northwest, you get to Illyria, which was the most
tribal nation of all these nations that are ceasing to be
so tribal. But the most important of all
these states is definitely Thessaly.
Right now in the year 375, it's Jason of Firai.
Firai for the by guy. He continued to extend his
dominance, not just his home region, but all places now,
including Upperas. He made their King Alcidas a
subject more on them in a minute.
Now he was sort of following the model of that Syracusan tyrant
Dionysius that we've mentioned a few times in terms of how he
grew his power. He got some money, he hired some
mercenaries. He got more power with the
mercenaries. That enabled him to keep paying
those mercenaries and then get more mercenaries and then
farther up the ladder that enabled him to get actual state
power so he could call up troops, levies and things like
that, which supplements his mercenaries.
So he's now he's got 2 armies basically.
But Dionysus's leadership style, other than that, very different.
He was more of a Persian style king, feared more than
restricted, threw his money around a lot, steeped in luxury.
You know, Jason's mercenaries were actually loyal to him
because they respected him. He paid them well, he paid them
semi permanently kind of. That was the idea that they
would not have to look for work. They could just work for him for
as long as the well, for as long as the future could be held.
He would train with them, he would March with them.
He would lead by example. Persians don't do that right?
That's that never happens. Diane Isius didn't do that.
He would. He was a big overweight guy that
would just give orders and sit back on his big chair.
Certainly our desert season isn't doing that right.
So this is a new style of leader, a guy who is extremely
competent and really willing to do the work, really willing to
put himself at risk and put in a lot of effort.
And this, a lot of people respected this.
This is a very virtuous thing to do as a Greek in this era.
Xenophon, our soldier author, quoted Jason as saying this.
I have men of other states as mercenaries to the number of
6000 with whom, as I think, no city could easily contend.
As for numbers, he said, Of course, as great a force might
March out of some other city also.
But armies made-up of citizens include men who are already
advanced in years, and others who have not yet come to their
prime. Furthermore, in every city very
few men train their bodies, but among my mercenaries no one
serves unless he is able to endure as severe toils as I
myself. So he started with quality over
quantity, but then he started adding quality to the quantity
to that quality. I guess you could say it sounds
a lot like the Golden Company but as if they were hired semi
permanently like a a group of sell swords who are cut above in
terms of their trustworthiness and their general personage.
But they're not exiles like the Golden Company.
However, they would want to live in these other places and be
accepted by Greeks and some of them would be exiled.
That's why they're mercenaries because they got kicked out of
their home city state. Some of them would be from
Athens or Thebes or even Sparta or other places we haven't
talked about. A lot of them are just from
Thessaly where Jason's from too the majority of them.
But still, he's looking for quality, not what nation you're
from or anything else. He just wants people that can
hang with him in terms of marching for many hours and
handling physical exertions and all that stuff.
And even more so, these mercenaries were motivated
because he was such a different kind of leader that was willing
to pay them for the long term. Well, they know that that's
almost certainly going to end if he dies.
So they were very motivated to keep him alive and to help him
with his goals because he wasn't one of these leaders that just
uses people to get ahead without giving them anything.
Yeah, he used people to get ahead, but he would make sure
they were rewarded and that they came out on top and were
respected. Right.
There's nothing like a Xerxes or Xerxes or And it just allow us
who's like you do what I say, not what I do.
You know, I'm above you. I have a different set of rules
for me. No, he was a lot, even though he
was extremely ambitious, extremely confident and
extremely like, I'm better than you.
He would be. He's just super nice about it,
super diplomatic about it. You know, nothing you could say
would upset him. Nothing you could say would.
He would just look at it as like, oh, I'm just going to one
up you. I'm going to find a way to one
up this, you know, but not in a way that insults you, in a way
that just proves I'm better, not in a way that I have to fight
you to beat you, but I will do that.
So he wasn't, he didn't lead by fear, but you knew he could be
fearsome. So he was like a Damon Blackfyre
in a lot of ways. He was more dynamic because he
had a broader skill set. Maybe not, you know, a once in a
generation warrior, but a very gifted warrior too.
Had a lot of similar qualities. Physically gifted, charismatic,
a shining ideal of what men in his era were supposed to be, an
avatar of current cultural virtues.
Damon was seen as the perfect Westerosi knight.
Jason was the perfect Greek soldier.
They were both people whose birth gave them a lot of
advantages and privileges, yet were more esteemed for their
abilities than for their birth. They were more virtuous than
deserving. They were both, but they were
there was their virtues that really stood out, their
achievements, their capacity, rather than who their father
was, who their mother was, what their last name was.
So they both also represented cultural shifts.
Damon Blackfyre represented knighthood.
He was chivalrous. He was anti Dornish, he was
warrior culture. He was pushing back against the
maesters and poets and artists that populated Deron the
Second's court. Jason was chivalrous before that
word existed, before the era of chivalry, before the era of of
knighthood. And the term knight was used in
this era, but of course it had a different connotation than
medieval Knights. So he was aggressive, but also
didn't use aggression as his first tool.
Mostly he would be like, look, join me, join me.
And he would try to convince you to join him by pointing out the
alternative. Look, do you really want to
fight me? Look how good I am, Look how
talented I am, look how strong I am.
But he wouldn't put it like that.
He's not. He wouldn't phrase it like
arrogantly. He would just kind of put it in
plain tables. Look, I got 20,000 men.
My men are stronger, they're more out, they're in better
shape. I pay them better.
Just be realistic here, man. You can't beat that.
So just join me. Yeah, it is very convincing.
Like, yeah, you're right. I can't beat that.
And he is a really impressive guy.
And this is not a guy that talks himself up.
It's the guy that proves himself.
Yeah, he really does go out there and and March all day,
March all night in armor and can handle running in full kit for
miles and just all these exertions and physical
challenges like that. People respect that no matter
what the scenario, Jason would claim superiority and he'd have
a strong case. I have to mention Renly is a
comparison here too, which some of you might have seen coming
because I have often compared Renly to Damon Blackfyre too.
So it's like a three-way comparison here.
Someone who's claimed to supremacy was legally chintzy
and if not just completely bogus but overlooked due to sheer
popularity. Like, he made-up for it because
he was just so talented or so popular or both, so charismatic.
That's Renly, right? Renly?
Everybody's like, Renly, You're not.
Stannis is ahead of you. But no one cared.
Only Stannis really cared. Everybody's like, yeah, you're
right about that, but I don't care.
We still like Renly more. And Renly was not like, This is
why, you know, Robert had some of those qualities, too.
But Robert was easily angered. Robert was really proud.
Robert drank and ate a lot, and he slept around a lot, too.
Renly didn't. Renly wasn't a big drinker, big
eater, didn't sleep around a lot, and given Greek men were
very bisexual in this era, Jason probably had male lovers like
Renly. Well Renly probably just had the
1 lover and Loris, but same point.
Comparing Jason to Artaxerxes though, this is where you really
get to a lot of the heart of the matter.
This is you kind of get to what Jason was doing in terms of his
public persona and the image he was trying to cultivate.
This reminds me of the analysis we've done in comparing Valyria
to and All cultures or and All values, which is that the Andahl
virtues and cultural values developed as a response to
Valyria. Some of you have heard this
before, but let me recap briefly.
Valyrians, what do they do to the weak?
They enslave them. The the Andahl answer to that
was knighthood, chivalry. Protect the weak, don't enslave
them, protect them. Valyrians, Incest, polygamy, all
that. Andahl's monogamy.
That's it bastards bad, you know, multiple wives bad, incest
real bad. OK, like very much the opposite,
right? So a lot of these you can keep
going on with these comparisons, but there's I think that's the
that's the basic point of it. And these comparisons, as I
said, very much apply to Jason versus Artaxerxes.
Persia ruled by authority, not by example.
Now Jason was using money to get ahead like Persia does, but not
in the same way. He, he approached it
differently, rather than just Persia, would overwhelm with
just enormous numbers of soldiers.
Jason's like, no, no, no, no, no, we're going to go with
quality over quantity. So instead of bribes, which is
what Persia would do a lot with a lot of their extra money, what
Jason would do is invest into military infrastructure to
hiring the best people, effectively making them not
mercenaries anymore and making them loyal to him.
And this would pull mercenaries from lots of different places.
He would be pulling the best talent into his army, making it
unavailable to anyone else because he wasn't just
recruiting, like I said, from his own territory.
So that leading by example alone is a good example of not of how
different he was than the Persians.
They don't do that for the most part.
This is a man who inserts. This is a man who inserts
himself into power and shows why he deserves it, rather than a
man who sees his power and expects you to go along with it.
And and violently asserts that this is a guy that says, look,
I'm good enough, I deserve this. Who's better than me and
embracing. Yeah.
Well, OK, you know, you're kind of right.
So it's like, This is why I think he may have done this on
purpose. He would cultivate this image
because it would be, this is a guy that talked about going to
war with Persia, that maybe Greece should conquer Persia.
You know, maybe we could do that.
So it would be entirely fitting for him to position himself as
the best man for that job as the ultimate anti Persian person.
There's an anecdote where Artaxerxes led his troops on the
March back from Kaduzia. Kaduzia was the place where they
almost starved to death. The place that Tirabazzis kind
of saved them with his Samuel Tarly ruse.
And Datamise was did great service.
But when Artaxerxes led the troops himself personally when
they were coming home, moral went up so much just from him
doing that that they were able to travel faster than normal.
Like they, they marched faster when Xerxes Artaxerxes was
leading the army, but of course, they didn't learn from that.
Like, oh, well, this is the one off.
We won't learn. We won't use you at the at the
head again. Nah, we can't do that.
You're you're you're too much of A God king.
You're too luxurious. Your authority derives from all
the bling you wear, not from your deeds.
That's that's they're too steeped in that way of thinking.
So Jason didn't want you to bow to him.
He wanted you to respect him so much that you wanted to follow
him. Charisma mixed with respect, if
not admiration, perhaps even love.
But but yeah, fear too. Like, yes, he you want you're
encouraged to join him. But there is that gauntlet
beneath the silk glove. He will absolutely destroy you
if you don't. He had that confidence.
It was kind of like Jaharis. How you know, remember rogue
Arboratheon when he finally admitted all his that he done
wrong? He's like, I'm sorry, Jaharis.
I shouldn't have, you know, tried to unseat you, You know,
please don't destroy my family. I'll take the black.
And Jaharis is like, no, you were trying to serve the realm.
I think your heart was in the right place.
It's better if you serve me. We're all better off if you're
on my team rather than you just going off and doing, you know,
ending your career. I'm certainly not going to
destroy your house. You just have to be on my side,
and that's fine. He's like, OK, I'll do that.
Absolutely, I'll do that. Do you want hostages?
He's like, I don't need hostages, man.
I got my dragon. And Rogar at that point realized
that all of Westeros is Jaharius's hostage when you have
Dragons. The entire continent is your
hostage. You don't.
That's why you don't need them. That's the confidence, Jahari
says. That's the confidence Jason had.
He's like, yeah, I just know I'm better.
I know you aren't better. I know I'm going to win.
It wasn't. It's not bravado, it's just a
deep seated sincere belief in himself.
While the great Persian kings showed off absurd amounts of
luxury, Artaxerxes is said to have 12,000 talents worth of
accoutrement on him at all times.
Do you remember how much the talent was?
You could pay like a soldier, like many soldiers, for a year
with one talent? So whoa.
Well, Jason just kind of dressed like maybe a little bit nicer
than a regular soldier with a little bit of bling just to show
off who he was. Just a little bit of flair, but
certainly not covered in gold and jewelry.
You know, Persia, you got to bow and scrape and kneel.
The Greeks were like the free folk in this era.
Kneeling kneelers. That's to be mocked.
Yeah, they don't do that. So Artaxerxes had a harem.
He had over 200 children. He drank the finest wines, ate
only delicacies on golden platters.
What did a dunk say to about to make our about Aryan.
I bet he never, never slept in ditches.
He only ate bloody meat. You know, the Greeks aren't.
Don't look up to that. That's not a thing to aspire to.
That's weakness. That's a that's lug overdoing
it. That's yeah, that's going too
far. That's gluttony.
That's not virtuous. So Jason was only had children
with his wife and was extremely disciplined with his pleasures
with his food and drink. Our desserts, he said Flatters
courtiers. Jason learned from and debated
with scholars and philosophers, including the famous philosopher
Isocrates. It's very confusing that there
was a famous Socrates and an Isocrates who almost lived at
the same time. Isocrates at this time would
have been just past his 60th birthday.
Well established, famous philosopher, very well known.
He and Jason corresponded. Our desert cheese isn't
corresponding with philosophers. Even an An Isocrates encouraged
Jason to unite the people. He was a proponent of a unified
Greece. So that's part of the part of an
angle here. Even their names are very
different. Even it expresses the dichotomy
here. Artaxerxes means King of heroes
or the great King or righteous ruler.
The second of those is my favorite because he's already
the great king. So his name is like he's the
great king, the great king. That's his.
That's what his full name translates to.
Jason just means healer or to heal.
Way more humble than King of Heroes, Artaxerxes occasionally
had nobles executed just because he didn't like them or because
he was mad. And of course his mother
probably encouraged that. Sometimes for her own ends,
although sometimes probably because he really was in danger.
She may have just made-up threats against him to get a
result, but that tactic was effective in part because murder
of Persian kings was not uncommon.
Now. Jason was very Renly Brathing in
this. Not only did Renly make friends
from foes like Robert did, he was fairly immune to insults and
slights on his pride. He would just.
To him, that's just the nattering of children, to him,
that's the Tywin Lannister attitude.
The lion does not concern itself with the opinions of the sheep,
and everyone's a sheep to him. Jason's the only lion you know,
kind of in his mind. Now to be fair, these are both
slave societies. Everyone had slaves pretty much
in this era. There are a few exceptions and
we'll praise them when they come along for being tried making the
world a better place very slowly in a in a very hard way.
But the Persians were way more about that.
The Persians had way more slaves and treated their slaves a lot
less like people. So yeah.
Now Jason tried to talk a guy named Polydamus of Farsalis into
joining him. Farsalis was the last big
holdout in the Kingdom of Thessali or the region of
Thessali and is a big city, so it's really important.
So he tried to talk him into but Polydemus first.
He says he just declined because they were friends of Sparta.
So Jason again, just takes the High Road.
He's like, all right, you're loyalty to Sparta.
You're not breaking the deal. That's exactly why I want men
like you. You're this you should be
praised for sticking to your guns.
Do what you, you agreed to do this.
You're sticking to it. I I honor you for that.
So he rather than being like, man, I'm going to kill you.
But he also says that first he praises him for his, his
character, his virtue. But then he says, but if you
don't join me, I'm going to March on.
You just be aware, you know I'm going to come one way or the
other. This is happening.
So here's what you should do. Go, go to Sparta.
I'll let you go. I won't stop you.
Go to Sparta, ask for help. See what they say.
If they help you, be careful. Make sure they send you enough
men. If they don't send you enough
men, then I'm going to win. And you've just sent a lot of
men to their desks for no reason.
If they don't send you enough men, come back to me and say
never mind, and I will join you. It's not too late.
You can change your mind. You can get all the way to the
day of battle and then change your mind if you want.
But if Sparta doesn't offer help, then what choice do you
have, right? Come on, be smart.
So Polly Diamonds did exactly that.
He took Jason and was like, OK, all right, I'm going to go to
Sparta and see what they say. This is crazy, right?
This is very fascinating. So, Xenophon, Here's a nice
long, lengthy quote about what happened.
Xenophon tells the story quote. For you can be sure that the war
will have to be fought against a really strong force, and against
a man whose generalship is of the highest quality, one who,
whether his methods are plain force or working in the dark, or
of seizing an unexpected advantage, yet seldom fails to
achieve his objects. He can use the night time as
well as the daytime, and when he wants to move fast he will put
breakfast and dinner into one meal, so as not to interrupt his
work. He will not think it right to
rest until he has reached the point for which he set out and
done all that had to be done. And he has trained his men to
behave in the same way, although he also knows how to gratify the
feelings of his soldiers when they have won some success as
the result of extra hard work. So all who follow him have
learned this too, that one can have a good time also if one
works for it. Then too he is more self
controlled than any man I know with regard to all bodily
pleasures. These never take up his time and
prevent him from doing what has to be done.
So that's Polytimus talking to Sparta.
This is making his case to them, saying, hey, look, I mean, this
is what we're up against. You what?
What should we do? It's like the if you're going to
send some, if you're if you're going to help, it needs to be a
lot of help. He's making the case this is a
serious enemy. And yeah, so this is the this is
the conundrum we're in, you know?
So what do you want to do? Sparta says, yeah, we can't.
We can't fight that right now. We can't, we can't do it.
So just do your best. So he goes back to Jason and
says, hey, yeah, they're not going to send an army.
So, you know, you were right. But can I talk to Fesla?
Can I talk to Farsalis? Let me convince them to
surrender because they put their trust in me and I need them to
agree to it. I can't just turn them turn this
over to you. They'll see that as a betrayal.
I need to do right by my people. And Jason, again, is like, yeah,
I respect that. I respect that.
And he says, can I go ahead? Go ahead.
And it worked that Farsalis was convinced.
They're like, yeah, like, we don't want to fight that guy.
And, you know, it's better to be on his side than against him.
He seems like a decent fellow despite his aggression.
We could do a lot worse. You know, like, at least he's
virtuous. At least he's someone to look up
to in terms of how he behaves with his person.
So that happened. And now with Thessaly pretty
much fully in hand, he reinstalled a tax system that
had been in place from a ruler many generations before.
Some it was something that was kind of familiar and that
allowed him to start collecting more revenue, which really set
him up well, not only to continue to make sure he had
enough money to pay his mercenaries, but to go beyond
that. Let me return to the issue of
Isocrates the philosopher, because he's a really
interesting guy and the fact that he was sort of very pro
Jason here. This is a guy that was rather
than what a lot of philosophers discuss, which is like the
meaning of life and why are we here and how the cosmos work.
Isocrates couldn't be bothered with that.
He wanted practical application. He wanted philosophy for him was
a way to solve regular human problems, ethics rather than
metaphysics, you know, application of things like
things he could do not just like imagine or or picture, you know,
how how to help people day-to-day that he cared about
that more. He's still studied by people
interested in rhetoric, you know, so there's he's still an
academic tradition around Isocrates, one of many people
from his age that continue to have a big influence 2500 years
later. Now Plato was his rival.
In fact, Plato founded the Academy somewhat as a response
to Isocrates school of thought. So these two were kind of, you
know, they were opposed in some ways of thinking.
Isocrates did favor democracy, but he also favored Greek
peoples conquering non Greek people.
Remember this time anyone who wasn't Greek was barbarian.
That's just barbarian doesn't mean doesn't have the current
connotation. Barbarian just meant non Greek
speaker back then. So and to then that did have a
connotation of looking down on them, but it's not the same as
the way we use the word barbarian now.
So he wanted Greek unity. He's like, yeah, I'm 60 years
old, I'm a student of history. We just fight each other all the
damn time. Let's not do that.
And we to do that, we need a powerful leader to unite us.
So he wanted that. He wanted to be Greek.
He didn't want some non Greek leader.
He wasn't about Persia. He didn't want Persia to come
over and dominate. That's not good.
Is this a good thing? Is it?
Is it a good thing to combine the to conquer to cause all this
death in order to save people in the future?
It's a difficult moral question. Aegon the Conqueror has a strong
argument for yes. In Westeros there was way less
war after the conquest than there was before.
Way less people dying in war or from the side effects of war.
Way fewer people starving. The population of Westeros
peaked under Jairus. I mean.
And this was directly a direct result of Aegon causing so much
peace. The King's Peace of Westeros was
huge for prosperity and peace, and for the average commoner's
life went way up in expectation. So that's kind of what Isocrates
is getting at. He's like, look, the only way
we're going to stop all this internecine struggle is if a
strong leader unites us. And any of this guy
corresponding with Jason Efirai, the guy who seems most capable
of doing that in this era. Jason, in fact, once said that
he had to do some few unjust things in order to do many just
ones. Isn't that the argument Egg and
the Conqueror would effectively be making?
I had to do some unjust things, do some just ones.
Like I made Westeros a much more peaceful place to get it there,
I had to kill some people, you know, some people who maybe
didn't deserve it, a few who did.
Now, the other side of this argument is, you know, Magor.
People like Magor. So yeah, Aegon comes along and
then you have Megawar. You have Harris and LSA on the
good side, but you have Megawar on the other side who's just
killing septons and, and people who follow the religion that he
doesn't like. So yeah, that's, that's the
downside, the very downside. And of course you have people
like Artaxerxes who are like Aegon the Unworthy.
This is a dynasty that has become corrupt and is just
overly steeped in luxury. And yeah, now Greece also in
this era, we said this before, there's like a balance that
Persia wanted to maintain. Persia still wants to be able to
hire Greek mercenaries because the hoplite Greek phalanxes were
the still the best infantry of the day anywhere.
So Persia wanted to hire those to help fight against anyone who
was rebelling or just to, you know, make themselves stronger
to to enforce their empire. So he can't have too much war in
Greece, else there's no soldiers to hire.
But if there's too little, then they're going to be an enemy to
Persia so that they could unite and become a problem in that
sense. So a lot of the, at this era, a
lot of the mercenaries were being hired by, by Artaxerxes or
through Farna Bazis trying to get that Egyptian campaign going
again very sluggishly. So note how Jason built this
power. He hired mercenaries and then
use them to make himself a ruler and then he's able to rule the
whole state and call up citizens.
I think I said that already, but it's just it goes to show this
is a new model like this is he did something no one else had
done before and a lot of other leaders perspective ambitious
people are going. That's a really good way to do
it, man. That's a new model that really
works. I I respect that that's clever.
I could do that. Maybe so and and on top of all
this, Greece is just becoming a wealthier place this the
population is growing, the average person's lifespan is
going up. The knowledge base is going up.
Medicine is improving, art is improving, culture is improving,
food is improving. Lots of things are, it's just
becoming a better place to live. And that simultaneously is works
against it in some ways because the the more prosperous, the
more powerful it is, the more someone else wants to rule it,
the more someone else wants to take it over.
So yeah, nearby countries, we spend a lot of time on Jason,
but there's some other countries nearby that that we'll spend a
few minutes on here before we wrap up today.
Molossos, that's a place that's now modern day Albania.
It's not really. It's now called Eperus or, or
was later called Eperus. Molossus was one of three major
tribes in the region of Epris. They're the ones that became the
dominant 1, and so Epris eventually was just ruled by the
Milossians, but for a while they were separate.
In this time, it's only five years after this has become one,
so I'm just setting that up now. Now, the ruling dynasty in
Molasses was the Iacidai. These are the descendants of
Neotelimus, grandson of Achilles, and this is the only
dynasty of Molasses or Pyrus that is explicitly purely Greek
or recognized as Greek. The others are recognized as you
know, Proto Greek or nearby Greek neighbors, and that's
important for their ability to get deeper into some of these
other cultural things. At this time in Molasses, the
birth of Princess Polyzena happened.
Now Polyzena. When she was a little older, she
changed her name to Mertal, which is pretty similar to that
God of death in Balder's Gate or D&D Forgotten Realms of Raging.
After joining a mystery culture, she joined a religious cult,
changed her name to Mortal. But then many years later, when
her husband's Chariots did really well in the Olympics, she
called herself Olympias. Now many of you will immediately
recognize that name she was once played by.
But wait, what's that actress that Millie that was married to
Angelina Jolie played Olympias in a movie?
I'm kind of being coy with who whose mother she is.
Some of you already know, but I'll for those of you who don't
know, I'll leave it as a surprise, but this is a very
important person. She claimed descent also,
besides from Achilles, she claimed descent from Trojan
Prince Helenus, who was the one of the sons of Prime and Hecuba
and the twin brother of Cassandra.
So Helenus is the lesser, less famous twin of the two there.
Cassandra's the one that everybody remembers, but he was
a seer. Also, in some traditions,
Helenus was taught by Cassandra, in other traditions, they just
were both kind of born with the ability.
So yeah, molasses out. This area is by 370, so only
five more years from now it's going to be a state rather than
warring tribes. Thrace, Thrace.
Modern day Thrace is Bulgaria, parts of Greece and Turkey.
Back when Persia under Xerxes invaded Greece, when they lost,
when they when their power slipped after their failure
there, the Odresian dynasty emerged in their wake and
dominated the region of Thrace, now Thrace, So it's became a
Kingdom maybe around that time, maybe around 480, so a little
bit earlier than some of these other places, but it's still
very tribal and more like and not unified.
But around this era you have a king named Katis, the first, who
had really pushed it to another level, and it did start to
resemble more of a a state with organization and unity.
And one of his daughters is going to marry if Ficritis the
innovator, which is the real unusual thing, if Ficritis is an
Athenian, marrying a Thracian is very odd because Athens and
Thrace have gone to war many times.
So this is going to be a little bit of an issue down the line
for ethiquities and his he's going to be kind of have his
feet in two camps that are not always happy with each other.
Thrace is also going to play the Game of Thrones by marriage
alliances. That's one of the most standard
elements here. And the Odresian dynasty, not
just Cotis, but some of the others.
We're going to see marriages with Macedonia and some other
neighbors, and that's going to create some important power
blocks. Speaking of Macedonia, we talked
last time about Amintas the Third.
He had lent some of his territory to the Chacodian
League. They refused to give it back.
He got Sparta to help. Sparta helped him.
Sparta and Amintas have things in common because they're both
monarchies. So they have that, you know,
they have some idealism in common.
He was the first Macedonian king in at least six decades to have
a reign free from internal strife.
Of course, he faced strife elsewhere, from his neighbors,
the Illyrians to the West mainly.
So Macedonia was already a state with kings, but this was the
first time in a long time that they had, like, stability.
So some of the states nearby here are forming themselves into
monarchies. Some of them are just sort of
getting through the early stages of violent stages of early
monarchy and becoming more organized and more dangerous to
their neighbors, more capable. At one point, the Illyrians, who
are the most tribal of these states, installed a pretender on
the Macedonian throne. That's how powerful they got
that they installed a a pretender on the Macedonian
throne. Cecily helped by Jason Efirai's
father, like Efron, probably expelled the Illyrians and Jason
was able to maintain that friendship with the Macedonians
and and kept that relationship going as part of this deal with
Illyria. This guy I'm interest the third
he married Yuridiki. Yuridiki is going to have three
children. She her story's pretty
interesting too, but her children Alexander, Perdicus and
Philip are all going to be important.
Philip's birth we took note of last episode.
Now he also tried to get if it critis to marry one of his
daughters. But he he married Cotis, the
first daughter instead, but he still wanted that relationship.
So he adopted A ficartese. That's right.
And Mintas the third adopted A Ficartese.
So ficartese is just like everybody uses, everybody wants
a ficartese. He's married to daughter of the
Thracians. The Macedonians wanted him and
adopted him. He's sent to Egypt to fight for
Persia against the Egyptians. And he's a hero in Athens for
beating Sparta a little bit, doing damage to Sparta, helping
them win, and then innovating the army and changing how, like
changing their footwear and their Shields and their
everything. Like this guy is just what a
reputation. Now in this year, the year 375,
Amontos the Third sent Ptolemy of Aloros to be his envoy to
Athens. This Ptolemy of Aloros was
making some plans behind the scenes.
Unbeknownst to Amintas, he may have been having an affair with
Yuridiki, Amintas's wife. Now, Macedonian kings often had
multiple wives, which, you know, makes it a little easier for
them to have affairs because, you know, you know, distracted
by other people. This affair may not have
happened till after Amintas's death.
We'll see. But either way, they're, they're
making moves. They're they're doing some
intrigue behind the scenes there.
As we, as we've said, the Macedonian throne mostly very
unstable. Most Macedonia.
I think we even use it as an example in the pretenders and
impostors episode of of a monarchy where just everyone is
murdered. You know, like they're just the
amount of times you could find a Macedonian king in this era or
100 years before that didn't die of murder is like a one or two.
And some of those were just they died of illness within two
years, like no one had time to murder them yet.
Hey, if he hadn't died of illness, he probably would have
been murdered. You know, I just the sickness
got him first. So Illyria, let's talk about
Illyria. It's the it's the second to last
of these. Oh no, it's the last of these.
My bad. Now Illyria has a reputation for
piracy rating and even into Roman times, the Illyrian
pirates were a thing. There was a queen of Illyria,
the queen of pirates that just a lot of really neat stories that
that come out over the course of several centuries In this era,
they're coalescing a bit. They're not like a full Kingdom
yet not the not the way these other nearby kingdoms would
recognize, but they have their first royal dynasty ever.
And this guy is called Bardilas. He was born in 448 BC.
He was a coal miner. That's something else
fascinating about this era or some of these earlier eras or
any era that's where our country is new.
Because once you have a dynasty, it's just people that are from
that dynasty. But when a dynasty is new, it
can come from anywhere. It can be someone that claims to
descend from Achilles or Zeus or something like that, but can
also just be a coal miner. And that is just something you
just don't see any other time. Like you don't have a coal miner
in the middle of a dynasty. You might have it at the end or
the beginning, like when someone else takes over, but during no.
So he was just a bad ass, just ambitious, strong, capable, low
birth. But goes to show that doesn't
matter, not always anyway. He developed the first Illyrian
royal dynasty. He was the first to develop
Illyria both militarily and economically to reinvest rather
than just this tribal infrastructure.
He started to, you know, make them more of a state, like I
said. And he had a dream to conquer
eastward, which was shared by a lot of Illyrians.
Again, this is Croatia. So to the West there's there's
water and Italy, which at this area is not nearly as wealthy as
Greece and Persia and all that. Rome, Rome is not much of a
thing yet. They did they exist.
Obviously we've giving some news updates on them from here and
there, but they're not that powerful yet.
Eventually Bardelis did invade Macedonia.
Remember I said that Amintas the third had to pay a tribute back
then and had to have that pretender on the throne for a
while. Well, this is the guy that did
that. That was resolved eventually.
Three years ahead of where we're talking 372, a deal was finally
made. The Illyrians were pushed back,
but he got them. They were such a threat that
Amintas had to pay them a tribute.
So Amintas, king of Macedonia, is sending money to Bardilas,
first king of Illyria, to to not attack.
And by this time, by 372, Bardilas is going to be 76 years
old. So big deal. 10 years prior, 13
years prior, in 385, Bardilas had allied with that Dionysius
of Syracuse, who sent him armor and weapons.
Armor and weapons. Because this is more of a tribal
state, they don't have the infrastructure to build as many,
they don't have as many Smiths and forges and all that.
So a bunch of suits of armor is a real big deal.
And he did this. What he did with that was he
massacred 15,000 Milossians and began raiding Emperors.
He even tried to take the Temple of Delphi, like tried to capture
the Oracle of Delphi. That got a lot more of Greece
interested. Even Adisalaus came forward with
that. Adisalaus with Thessaly and
Macedonia all teamed up to stop Bardelas from taking Delphi, but
they didn't stop him overall. They just stopped that
particular plan. Now Bardelas also going to play
the Game of Thrones with marriage alliances he's going to
have. He's going to have people his
daughters are going to marry into Macedonia and other places.
One of them is the famous warrior Princess Kanane.
But she's not born for another 18 years.
We will definitely talk about her when the time comes.
So teaser there, Princess, Warrior Princess Kanane, she is
a real bad ass. So as you can see, as I set out
to explain, as I hope I've accomplished, several northern
states are coalescing into kingdoms that are capable of
acting as one. They're unified, or at least
partly unified, certainly more than they had been in the past,
and they are dealing with each other as well as Greece proper
and with Persia. And it's creating this bigger
world, this bigger sort of region where our story is taking
place. You've got more characters
entering the picture, more powers, more personas, and more
goals. And with that, the wars get a
little trickier. The the intrigue gets trickier,
you got more considerations. Every country has its enemies
and its allies, and these can be entangling, right?
Some people like this guy might be a A-Team, a friend of this
guy, but that guy's a friend of his enemy.
And people switch sides all the time because as considerations
change, Athens was fired up to attack Sparta after the incident
with Fodrios attacking their port or trying to.
But only two years later, they were like, I don't want to fight
Sparta anymore. We have our own goals.
And, you know, we don't care about that.
We we'd rather have Sparta. Now it's things are even between
Sparta and Thebes, and we're happy with that.
So yeah, it's not ideology, it's self-interest.
And sometimes ideology is a good cover story for self-interest.
But yeah, so just like Persia wanted to dominate Greece
proper, what whether through military force, money or both,
that's what these northern kingdoms are going to do or are
doing. And they're a lot closer.
They're right there. They don't have to March
thousands of miles and then cross the Black Sea, cross the
Bosphorus, cross the the Dardanelles, the Hellespont to
bring an army in that nobody wants.
It's a lot bigger threat to Greece when the armies are
themselves somewhat or entirely Greek.
Like you don't have the the built in prejudice that helps
push back against foreign rule when the rulers that intend to
conquer are close enough culturally that that doesn't
really matter. You know, you can't say
everybody's fired up stop the Persian.
Not that fired up to stop the the Thessalians.
They're kind of Greek too. You know, it's not as people
don't get as fired up about that.
They they hate Persia. Thessaly is just to them, that's
just like those are just the country bumpkins.
They don't want to be conquered by that.
But it's much more preferable than than Persia.
So will these powers unite or and turn their eyes southward?
Will they attack Greece? Or will they just be too busy
with each other the way Greece is kind of busy with itself?
Will these northern states ally with the southern States and
create more entanglements? And, well, what's going to
happen with Jason? What's going to happen with
Bardelis, Cotis, Amintas, Palopitas, Epaminondas?
Just allow us our deserts. These, all these guys are still
alive. Well, you'll have to continue
listening to find out the answer to those questions.
We have plenty more story coming ahead, plenty more news on the
Olympics, plenty more news on other cultural things.
We got news about scholars, doctors, mathematicians,
astronomers, all sorts of fun things besides war and intrigue,
but plenty of that too, 'cause that stuff is good as well.
Next time, showdown between Sparta and thieves.
Well, Athens is happy to take advantage of those two occupied
with each other, trying to rebuild his maritime empire.
Our Deserxes finally goes too far, as if he hadn't already.
No, actually there are some consequences for him going too
far. And his army is finally ready to
invade Egypt. So those are three things to
look forward to next time. But also more more about Fokion,
Cliambrotus, Datamese, Cabrius, Ethiquities, Tira Bazis, Darius,
Ochus unit, you name it. Lots more characters, lots more
intrigue, lots more Game of Thrones in ancient Greece.
Thanks y'all for hanging out today.
Appreciate the the interest. I know this topic isn't the most
widespread popular, but those of you who like it tend to like it
a lot. So I'm I'm I'm definitely
excited to be able to bring it to you and to continue it will
of course be continuing with our Westeros content as per normal
as we lead up here to a big TV season filled 2026.
So it's exciting next year will be great for everyone.
Here is our trivia answer. The question was who is said to
be responsible for creating the sacred Band of Thebes Gargadas,
who I compared to Blackfish cavalry leader, very clever,
maybe leader of younger men at a time when there's a youth
movement, but him not so much. And poll results.
My question was, are you familiar with this era of Greek
history? 41% of you said no, it's all
Greek to me. Almost half. 39% said somewhat
and 20% said yes, very. I'm glad. 20%, many of you
actually, no, that's pretty cool.
I'm glad. I mean, it is a really
interesting era, as I've said, so I'm not obviously not the
only one to notice that, not by not by a long shot, but I just
had no idea how much you already knew some of this.
So those of you who know it really well, well, well, let me
know how I'm doing. Did I miss anything?
Did I get anything wrong or just other takes?
I'm interested. This is a fun thing to discuss.
Whether it's a correction or just in something to add on or
you know, anything, just let me know.
Let us know. Maybe I'll give you a shout out
in a future episode. And those of you who are who are
learning, well, I would love to hear what parts are most
interesting to you. Which characters stand out the
most? And again, as I said at the
beginning, parallels to A Song of Ice is Fire that I that you
have noticed that I haven't expressed.
Hit me with those two. I'm sure there's some that I
haven't noticed definitely out there, maybe some that I have
named that you think is a better parallel for.
I said Jason's like Damon Blackfire.
I said our Deserxes is like Aegon the Unworthy, but who else
are they like? There might be some other
comparisons that are just as good or maybe even better.
Some other related episodes besides the 1st 2 episodes in
this series are The Rage of Heroes.
That's the sort of a play on words with the Age of Heroes.
We definitely have some Greek myth in that one.
We have Parallel Lives episodes, obviously inspired by Plutarch
comparing generally those are comparing Westerosi to other
Westerosi, but sometimes they're two other figures.
We have our Song of Ice and Fire in Rome episode, which is a a
deep dive like this but into Rome's comparisons to A Song of
Ice and Fire, the Black Dinner, the Scottish inspiration for the
Red Wedding. We have an episode on that.
And we have the Wars of the Roses episodes or episode and
the follow up Pretenders and Impostors, which is a dive into
fake kings, especially in the air after the Wars of the Roses
and fake kings in A Song of Ice and Fire.
Thanks to Joey Townsend for our music.
Thanks to Michael Klarfeld for our video intro and for the maps
that you see behind us. On behalf of a Shaya, I'm Aziz.
We'll see you next time for more and you know what to do.
Until then, Valar rereadus or hey, just Valar readus.
Some Greek stuff, either one. See you next time, folks.