In 382, BCA Spartan commander named Foibidas was leading
troops to reinforce a campaign in northern Greece.
They were passing by Thebes. This is not out of the ordinary.
Greece is very small, there's not a lot of room to move armies
in neutral territory. But suddenly they turned and
made a surprise attack on Thebes.
On the surface is not so strange.
Sparta is a unique, emotionally disciplined and authoritarian
place. They're often at odds with other
Greek city states because of their differences and their
desire to rule. And Thebes was a frequent enemy
given their strong democratic leanings and focus on including
love in their military ideals, which Sparta didn't really like
that. This triggered a series of
events that led to Thebes ascending to at least
equivalents with Athens and Sparta, turning it into a
recurring conflict between three city states, something far more
complex than a war between 2 powers.
A tale of three city states, if you will.
Each will take turns, or did take turns, allying with one
another against the other or others with various involvement
from foreign powers, and each took turns dominating the other
powers in the region. As fans of A Song of Ice Fire,
we know this very well. We know the rise and fall and
general chaos that revolves around these sorts of
engagements and these sorts of situations.
Even when much of the narrative in the Game of Thrones was
focused on Stark versus Lannister, it was more than
clear that the Baratheon brothers and Daenerys and maybe
the Ironborn would make their claims to the Iron Throne, or at
least get very involved. As Virus told Illyrio very early
in the book, this is no longer a game for two players, if it ever
was. And truly, it never was.
So in this we have instead of the Iron Throne, we have a
struggle for supremacy in Greece from within and without.
Just like the Iron Throne includes powers from Essos, so
does this include powers from the East?
This unrelenting civil conflict, which that many times is going
to remind us of the War of 5 Kings was very exciting, but
also it made them a target of foreign powers who took
advantage of this chaos that, hey, look, you guys are going to
fight each other, that makes you weak, and we can come and attack
you instead. So they wanted to make the
Greeks into subjects or slaves or something along those lines.
And they also wanted to get involved in that highfalutin
Greek culture because we're fans of A Song of Ice and Fire, and
that's our anchor, though characters are the most
important. We're going to talk about a lot
of fun events and things that happened, but mostly we're going
to focus on the characters because that's the most
interesting thing. This is why I'm so excited to
deliver these episodes. Yes, episodes.
This is going to take more than one episode.
It's been a favorite period of mine for decades.
In ancient history, you do have some incredibly exciting and
colorful characters from the ancient world and it's a span of
time that's surprisingly well documented.
Our sources are pretty good. It's it's better than a lot of
medieval sources and or sources from other eras that come later.
I mean this is 2500 years ago ish, but we have worse records
on some things that were only 1000 or 1500 years ago.
And a lot of these characters, they're so well described and so
vivid, they're very easily comparable to a lot of familiar
a song by some fire characters. So it's as we do with this style
episode, it's like a fast forwarding.
I can tell you, hey, this guy is like, well, I'm wearing a Prince
Damon shirt because there's a character very similar to Prince
Damon in this episode, very featured.
So that helps you understand this guy right away.
I don't have to go through 20 minutes of describing someone's
personality when I can just say, hey, think of Prince Damon.
So it's a head start on getting in their heads and what they're
all about. Along those lines, we have a
character who's kind of like Stannis mashed up with Baylor
breaks beer and Core in Half Hand.
There's another man kind of like Brandon Stark mashed up with
Bearish in the Bull. That's Ned's brother, not Bran.
We have a Cersei with the brains of Olenna.
We have a sea Snake. And of course, like I said, we
have a Prince Damon. We have an unbelievable Tywin
parallel who was actually called the Lion of Sparta.
But he also has elements of his children, Tyrion and Jamie, a
major player here, as well as Persia.
They're going to really make you think of Valyria a little bit
like Slaver's Bay. They engage in enough incest to
make Targaryens blush, and you're going to hear some things
that are far crueler than anything Megor ever did.
And a good God, they're wealthy. Thessaly and Macedon are also
going to get involved, though more so in the second-half.
But I wanted to mention that now we have two different monarchs
in the story that ruled for over 4 decades.
We have a rebel pharaoh, A tyrant poet, a Pythagorean
general, and a bit of an Iron Bank situation.
We have prophecies and oracles, ancient relics, temple robbers,
absurd sums of money, poisonings, backstabbings, you
name it. Extreme excess, extreme
restraint, the sacred and the profane, philosophers and
phalanxes, murder and madness, Hittiras and harems, archons and
assassins, gods and generals, bronze and blood, bribery and
betrayal, love and lust, incest and innovation, olympiads and
oracles and so much more. That was a lot, but there's even
more. And of course, as I said, this
is through the lens of A Song of Ice and Fire, resulting in a
potent pantheon of parallels. All that and more on this
episode of History of Westeros podcast.
Hello and welcome to another episode of History and Westeros,
one of our fun subcategories where we dive into real world
history through the lens of A Song of Ice and Fire.
If you're watching this live, it must be 3:00 Eastern because
that's when we go live on YouTube most Sundays.
If you aren't here catching it live, well, you can catch it
later on Spotify as an edited version will cleaned up a little
nicer sounding. Or if podcasts are your
preferred vehicle, you can find us on any podcast platform.
And if you sign up to become a member on Patreon, you can get
it ad free. Speaking of Patreon, our members
voted on a series of topics this year, which we call Topics Moot.
This is the final episode of Topics Moot 2025, except that we
added six more at the end because, well, Duncan Egg Show
got moved to 2026, so we had to add some more content for the
year. So Mini moot to follow.
But this is the end of the regular Topics Moot if you have
questions for us, especially an episode like this where I'm
going into an area where I don't have as much expertise.
I have expertise, but not nearly as much as I have in A Song of
Ice and Fire. Of course, I'm always open to
feedback. We're always open to that.
Corrections, additional content. I expect there may be even a
little more here because it's a bigger topic.
Some of you already know it pretty well or know parts of it.
So definitely would love to hear from you all if there's anything
you want to add, anything I missed, something I got wrong,
etcetera. Let's start with the trivia
question. What is the name of the region
in which Sparta resides? Like their little country around
them. It's not called Sparta.
The city is called Sparta, but the the country around it.
And I don't mean Greece. That's smaller region than that.
A word that means using as few words as possible.
Answer at the end. Our sections today.
Let me read you that real quick, folks.
We've got our set up. Then we have the bloodless coup
of 382. Yeah, that rhymes the judgement
of Sparta, followed by flashback Persia and the Peloponnesian
War, then civil War. Then we have the defense gets
offensive, Then we have the Corinthian War, then the King's
Peace. That's a familiar term, and that
is indeed what they call it. That's not a term I'm using.
That is what they called it, the King's Peace.
Let's introduce our main source, someone I've spoken of many
times throughout the years. That's Plutarch.
This episode is where we will cite him perhaps more than any
other time, but here is what other people have to say about
Plutarch's Parallel Lives quote. Plutarch's Parallel Lives has
received widespread praise from notable figures throughout its
centuries of popularity. The 1559 first French edition
was hailed by French author and philosopher Montagne, who
commented We dunces would have been lost if this book had not
raised us out of the dirt. Beethoven, with the progression
of his deafness, wrote in 18 O1. I have often cursed my creator
and my existence. Plutarch has shown me the path
of resignation. If it is at all possible, I will
bid defiance to my fate, though I feel that as long as I live
there will be moments when I shall be God's most unhappy
creature. Resignation.
What a wretched resource. Yet it is all that is left to
me, British General Gordon wrote.
Certainly I would make Plutarch's Lives a handbook for
our young officers. It is worth any number of arts
of war or minor tactics. Ralph Waldo Emerson called the
lives quote a Bible for heroes that.
Is insane praise from some serious heavy hitters.
Beethoven. Ralph Waldo Emerson?
Seriously. Wow.
Right? That is a wide spectrum of
expertise and accomplishment. Like Ralph Waldo Emerson and
Beethoven are famous for very different reasons, right?
And of course, there's a lot more praise out there for this
is just a selection of praise for Parallel Lives and for
Plutarch. I mean, it's 2000, some years
old, right? Imagine how many likes, views
and comments and shares Parallel Lives would have if YouTube
existed back then. I wish I could see how many
downloads the Audible version, which you can get on Audible,
you can get Parallel Lives on Audible.
It's read by the most British sounding person ever.
How many downloads will that have 2000 years from now?
Plutarch would have a lot of subscribers.
Someone would still be putting out content on his channel,
making shorts and just releasing clips.
And yeah, I mean, it's an amazing resource, but we as
people living 2000 years after things were written, it's so
rare that we get anything from that long ago.
Most things written that long ago, we don't have any more.
They were destroyed. They were lost.
It's such a gift when we have anything.
But this is actually really well written.
That is a way a cut above. It isn't just information from
the ancient world, which we will take anything.
We'll take any information from the ancient world because it's
scarce and there's a lot of gaps.
But this guy, he wrote it really well.
He's a great author and a great manager of the information.
His purpose, though, wasn't to write history.
He's honest, but he wasn't trying to write history, he was
trying to write about people, which is what makes this so
great as a great source is we're trying to talk about people 1st
events, times and places come after that in terms of
importance. Plutarch is writing about
behavior, morality, influence, destiny.
And he was Theben. So that's that's handy.
He lived well after Greece lost its independence, which is what
we're building up to the end of Greek independence, when Greek
became Greece became one state. What you'll, if you don't
already know, well, you'll find out whether it gets conquered
from within or without or whatever.
During Plutarch's life and well before and after.
Yeah, Greece was ruled by Rome. Now, that's not who's going to
win in the end here. Rome comes along much later.
But during Plutarch's life, Rome was ruling and he lived during
the time of Augustus, the first emperor, which was widely
regarded as one of the best times to be in live alive in
history. Well, if you're free and male
that is, which makes the women who are in the story, and there
are some, they stand out even more because of how hard it is
to stand out as a woman in this era.
But we're also not dealing entirely with the Greek world.
As we said, there's other nations getting involved.
Plutarch wrote. 25 parallel live pairs, a pairing of a Roman and
a Greek, 50 people, right? 25 pairs of 2.
So we can set aside the Romans because of course they're they
come way after all this. They were only a seedling as a
nation at this point in history. But of the 25 Greek figures,
Plutarch chose to write about the most impressive, most
outstanding Greeks from the year 800 BC all the way up to about
100 BC. So 700 years of history in this
25 to 30 year period where we're talking about four of those are
in this story, 1/5 is going to die right away and two more are
going to join. So we have nine of those 25
living in this era, which is a 700 year era.
So more than a third of them are in this really short period of
time, which really packs a punch.
You can see why I'm drawn to this time and why I'm excited to
tell you about it. He also wrote some biographies,
most of which are lost. One was about a certain Persian
great king, though, and that's also in this story, the the one
who features most mainly. So we just have a lot of sources
normally from an era that's very scarce.
And some of what we're going to get into, of course, is George's
parallels. The fact that some of these
things happen in real life goes to show how realistic George
writes. We don't need any more context
than that. I wrote the episode such that we
can add context as we go, rather than just fire hosing you all at
once. I just wanted to give you a
little bit about Plutarch. Let's get going.
And the only other notes I wanted to have here are city
states are pretty comparable to the top houses in A Song of Ice
and Fire in terms of how strong they are in terms of how much
money they can put in the field. Now they're cities instead of
castles, so that's a little different, but they still hold
the land around them as well. Obviously the democratic city
states aren't quite the same, but the the ones ruled by kings
or tyrants or oligarchies. Very similar to to houses in
Westeros. And like that like a house in
Westeros. Imagine that when the Lord dies,
a new Lord takes over. That can entirely change the
picture because this new Lord might have a very different
attitude towards ruling. Or maybe it's a lady, or maybe
it's a region. The same thing happens here the
the the city states. Their attitude, their rulership,
their behavior can change on a dime based on who's in charge.
Luckily, we have a better situation here than we've had
with a lot of other historical episodes, real world historical
episodes. And what I mean by that is there
aren't a bunch of Edwards, Henrys, and Roberts.
There's only a couple of Alexander's and almost besides
that, there's almost no name that repeats.
So that's cool. And the names are less familiar,
but at least they don't repeat. So this is an era in Greece
where coups could almost be called common.
What's odd about the coups that happened so commonly in Greece
in this era is they weren't always bloody.
Sometimes the losing party, and it was almost always Democrats
taking power from oligarchs or oligarchs taking power from
Democrats. Usually they would just get
kicked out of the city. A lot of times they would
survive, like maybe a couple of them died, but they would just
get kicked out, which often meant they would come back with
some friends and try to take power back, which they often
did. So yeah, sometimes there were
deaths and sometimes there were a lot of deaths.
But this is the setting we're in.
It isn't. The killing of the other party
wasn't as common as you might think, compared it to, like,
something like Westeros. Do we start in the year 382 with
one of those coups? We'll call this chapter 1.
Three chapters in this episode today, with more chapters to
follow in the next episode in the year 382.
As I described in the in the intro, we have the Spartan
commander Forbidas. He was leading a group of
soldiers to Olympus to reinforce a campaign going in up there.
Now, Olympus had defied an alliance that Thebes was part
of, but they weren't really happy being a part of it, so
they didn't send any troops to help Sparta, even though Sparta
kind of expected that. Even with Sparta right outside
their walls, they weren't worried.
Hey, we've got walls. This isn't this is a relief
army. It's not some big invasion for
us, so we're not worried. Go ahead, they can hang out
there. We'll just keep an eye on them.
Just keep an eye on them, make sure they don't do anything.
That's fine. So you get some people standing
on the walls watching Sparta, make sure nothing happens.
Eventually the Spartans break camp, start to March away, looks
like they're leaving, but then suddenly they turn and run
towards the city. Now thieves is not the size of
King's Landing, but it's called 7 gated Thebes because it has
seven gates to get in, just like King's Landing.
Now Athens in this era pretty much is about the same size as
King's Landing, although neither of those population figures are
well established. We're looking at like 1/2 a
million. This was some kind of
prearranged signal or time or something because one of those 7
gates, the one that Spartans were charging right at, was
thrown open. This something was planned here.
The Spartans ran inside and no one tried to stop them because
they didn't even know it was happening.
Also, the Spartans timing was very precise.
This was a holiday. It was the a holiday called the
famous Foria which was honoring Demeter and her daughter
Persephone. It's a religious festival only
for women. The men are just supposed to
like hang out and chill and wait for it to be over.
So people were pretty distracted.
The Spartans didn't go about killing anyone.
As far as we know. They didn't kill a single
person. They went straight to the city
fortress, which is called the Cadmia.
Because it was. Built by the legendary founder
Cadmus. Now this is like the Red Keep of
Thebes. If you control the cadmia, you
control the city. So they went right to the Cadmia
and someone had given them like a key, like object.
It's not actually a key, but it was the equivalent of a key.
They used the key to get inside. They went right in.
But wouldn't you think there's Stevens inside the fortress?
No, actually there weren't, because this Themisphoria
festival celebrated inside the keep and the men not being
allowed to participate weren't in the keep.
So this is the the rare time, maybe once a year, maybe not
even per year, where the only people in this all important
fortress are women celebrating a religious festival.
That sounds like a security flaw, doesn't it?
Yes, in fact it very much does. And this the Spartans took full
advantage of it. They didn't kill anyone, or as
far as we know, they didn't do anything untoward to the women.
The Spartans are very pious, so interrupting a religious
festival is already kind of, it's already kind of a thing
that isn't comfortable for them to do.
So they weren't going to mess with the women too much.
You can be a little skeptical of that, which is fair.
But they were very pious, not always in good ways, but they
didn't want to, you know, messing with a religious
festival. Like I said, that's a little,
that's a little big for them. And there would be people in
Sparta who objected to this action.
Now there's three polymarks of Thebes.
These are the rulers. It's kind of like triarchs.
Now to be confusing, there is a term called triarch in Greece at
this time, but it wasn't a ruler, it was a person that of
their own money fitted a ship, a trireme.
So if you are contributing to the citizen army with a trireme,
you are a triarch. So Polomark is a much higher
level rank. It's the three rulers of
thieves. Now, like the triarchs of
Lantis, they have to be elected. It's a yearly thing.
They're almost always very rich because to campaign and to get
attention and to do all that stuff, you need to have money.
There were three, the three polymarks at this time were Land
Tides, Ismenius, and Phillip. Forget about Phillip, he wasn't
even here at the time, didn't get involved.
As far as we know. He doesn't get mentioned, so I,
I don't even know, but just so just forget about him.
Now Ismenius was the newer 1 and he was a Democrat.
Land Tides was an oligarch. Didn't like him?
Well, of course, Democrat oligarch.
They don't like each other. That's not uncommon.
Nothing. No surprise there.
But it was Lee and Tides that worked with the Spartan
commander Foybidas here. Apparently he's the one with his
friends that opened the door, let them in and let them seize
the Cadmia. So Lee and Tides knew this was
happening. He may have even been the one
that gave them the key, the key to the city.
And so as soon as Foybidas and his troops captured this the
Cadmia and kicked out all the women, he just walked right to
the city square where a lot of the men were hanging out waiting
for the festival to play out and said, hey, y'all, Sparta's our
friend and they have control of the cadmium now.
So that's what's up. And the people are like, wait,
what? This was such a surprise, right?
You don't expect to just be hanging out in the city of Gora
just, you know, having a drink or chatting with your friends
about philosophy. Maybe you're exercising.
All of a sudden someone walks up, one of your own citizens,
and it's like, hey, actually, Sparta's in charge now.
Wait. No one even.
Wait, what? We didn't have a fight.
There was nothing. It just that just happened,
like, without anybody being killed.
Like, really. Yeah, that's really what
happened. It's kind of embarrassing,
actually. And Lynn Tidy says, hey, since
I'm a Polymark, we Polymarks have the right to prosecute
anyone who is against the common peace, such as my fellow Paula
Marcus Menius here. Oh, Democrat bad.
Also, he's accepted a lot of money from Persia.
Now that's a pretty big deal. Accepting money from Persia is a
problem. That's called you can.
It can be corrupting. A lot of people look down on
that. Persian influence is a negative
thing. They don't want to be like
Persia. It's called medism.
It's actually a thing you can be tried for in court for being too
too friendly with Persia. As we're going to see, there's a
lot of people who get too friendly with Persia that never
get called for it. But because this is this is just
a political excuse to go after his enemy.
Now to be fair, he did accept a lot of money from Persia, but on
the other hand, it was to fight against Sparta, which doesn't
make him look good in this moment when Sparta has just
taken over. Plato wrote about as many as and
actually said he was kind of weak.
He said he was a weak moral fiber man.
Either way, he was convicted and put in jail and a new Paula Mark
was replaced him named Archaeus. And of course, Archaeus was an
oligarch. Meanwhile, the leading Democrats
of the city, word spread around, they found out and they left.
They fled. They're like we got to get out
of here. These they already threw as many
as in prison. We could be next.
They're probably going to execute as many as.
So we really don't need to be here.
The leader of this group was called Andracleides and there
was a young man called Palapadus who's going to be pretty
important that was in this group, a very outspoken, high
spirited, aggressive, charismatic guy who is our
actually our Brandon Stark parallel.
They ran to Athens. They fled to Athens, which of
course is a hub of democracy. But Athens is wary about
upsetting Sparta, especially in this era, because Athens was a
little weaker than they had been.
They had lost a big war to Sparta only 20 years before, a
long, long war. So they're like, they're kind of
scared of Sparta. But when they were having this
war with Sparta, a bunch of Athenian exiles fled and took
refuge in Phoebes. So they kind of wanted to return
the favor, even though it was a little dangerous.
So that's what happened. Now, like I said, coups were
common, but this was really outstanding because of how
wildly successful and bloodless it was.
So A was a big coup for Sparta and a big embarrassment for
Thebes. But as I also said, not everyone
in Sparta liked this because A, it it wasn't necessarily
something they all agreed to. B, it was during a religious
festival. C Well, there's AC and AD and an
E we'll get to. There's a lot of other issues
here. Now, this is again, a very small
region we're talking about. The distance from Thebes to
Athens is 57 miles. You can get there in a day.
The distance from Athens to Sparta, 133 miles, you couldn't
get there in a day there too, pretty hard, maybe more like two
or three days. But if you're going as fast as
you can on foot or by horse, you can totally do that.
Sparta to Thebes is only a little more 148 miles.
So these three powerful city states in a relatively small
country of Greece, not very far from each other, this is a
parallel to A Song of Iceland's Fire.
Because you might, might be saying what?
Aziz? Westeros is huge.
Yeah, it is huge, but they make it feel smaller by messenger
Ravens. Information goes way faster than
it could normally go because of the Ravens.
So we have the equivalent here, which is that, well, we don't
have messenger Ravens. We just have short distances.
So a message can go from one of these cities to another in a
day. So it isn't a matter of, oh, no
one knows this happened yet. People find out things quickly.
On the other hand, the big player Persia here, the Empire
Persia, is 1800 miles away. So that's just for perspective.
They're very far away. They do take a while to learn
things. That said, Persia had one of the
most advanced postal systems, one that wasn't matched by for
centuries after they fell. So they were really actually
quite fast with delivering messages.
That said, it still probably took weeks, the judgement of
Sparta. So let's, let's get Sparta's
reaction to this seizure of the Theben Kadmea.
They were of two minds about it, which is kind of a typical thing
to happen in Sparta cause Sparta had two kings.
Yeah, that's kind of weird, right?
2 kings. They had two kings.
They also had five E Fours or the E Fours were like a council
of elders. They had a lot of power.
The Ephers absolutely could stop a king or condemn a king or do
what they couldn't like have it killed, but they could overrule
a king. There are also 28 Jerusia who
are like a third level, like a Senate of sorts.
So yes, Sparta had a very unique set up with they had a
constitution with two kings, but all these other lower level guys
who are quite high and then the citizens, and this citizens is
part of their only job is to prepare for war.
That's it. That's their only thing they do.
Anything else is unmanly to them, war, that's it.
Every other job is done by their slaves.
Now this is something we'll get into much later.
Spartan slavery is common in Greece, even more common in
Persia in this era. But the Spartans enslaved their
own neighbors, other Greeks, which is, you know, to us that's
like, well, what's the difference in slaving and
slavery is slavery. But to Greeks, this was a big
deal because they all thought they were superior.
So Greeks enslaving other people, that's fine.
They're lesser. Greeks enslaving other Greeks,
that's a rub because they're all Greeks and they supposedly
should be somewhat equal. That's going to come up later.
Sparta's problem is that their society was so hierarchical, so
elite, so exclusive, that to be a Spartan citizen became
increasingly different. The the Spartan citizen body was
just every generation it was getting smaller and smaller
because it got harder to get in and was decreasing in numbers
over time. This is a really internal
problem that was really going to rear its head several times.
So Foibidas, the commander, they recalled him to face trial
again, only had to, you know, probably took him two days to
get back, maybe 3. And they sent a different
commander to take his place in the meantime.
So first of all, not only was this a strange thing to have
happen, Spartan commanders, because of their very rigid
authoritarian system, a Spartan commander taking the initiative,
changing the plan, especially to this degree, almost unheard of.
So that alone was very strange. But you got to take another look
at this. It's a different way to look
because it's so out of line. That creates a little confusion,
a little chaos, and a smart person can use that chaos to
manipulate the situation. Introducing King Ajisilaos, the
older of the two kings, the much more dominant of the two.
Foibidas was asked on the stand of the equipment, the equivalent
of the witness stand. Did you do this on your own or
did someone order you? There was a suspicion that
someone ordered him to do it secretly, and that suspicion
fell on King Ajisilaos. Adislaus really didn't like
Thebes, as we're going to see. I'm going to get into plenty of
detail on that. Adislaus stepped forward and
said, look, Foibidas, what he did was good for Sparta.
If it's good for Sparta, it's good.
That's what our attitude should be very like.
It's unfair for everyone else, but if we can do it, it's fair.
You know, it's very hypocritical, very unjust.
Like if it's help Sparta, it's it's positive, it's good, it's
ethical. Not a very agreeable moral
position, but one that you'll see.
It just allows us very consistent with.
So he Foydas was like, no, I'm not going to say who did it.
I don't want I'm not going to say anything.
They took his position away. They find him.
It just allows said I'm going to pay that fine for you Foydas.
How suspicious is that? He pays the guys fine and then
in like a maybe a few months later after it all blew over
Foy, but that's was given another command position.
It's like nothing even happened. This is just blatant, isn't it
like a just allow us totally told this guy to do it, didn't
he? And as we'll see, Oh boy,
there's going to be so many reasons for a just allow us to
want to go after thieves. Even without all that detail.
It seems pretty straightforward almost, though again, these two
cultures have very different attitudes towards war and
culture. Even though they're Greek and
they have the same gods, certain gods are more important to them.
They more the Thebans care more about Heracles and Iolus who was
his nephew because they were lovers and thieves was real big
on male love. Now Sparta had plenty of male
love too, it just wasn't as coordinated.
It wasn't as a part of their society written down.
It was like a, you know, it was more of a don't ask, don't tell
thing, even though it was pretty common, whereas thieves made it
just straightforward. They talked about it openly.
It was a big deal. It was included in their
military. That's going to be something
that builds throughout our story.
So just allow us let's talk about him.
This is a very, this is one of our most important characters.
He became king in the year 400. So 18 years prior to the seizure
of the Cadmia that he was already 45 when he became king
and he wasn't expected to become king.
He was born with lame. He was born with one leg longer
than the other. Normally in Sparta, you if
you're born deformed, you get tossed in the pit.
You remember that pit that Leonidas in the movie 300?
This is. Sparta and he kicks the Persian
emissary into that chasm. Well, that probably didn't
happen, but they really do have that chasm and they really did
throw babies in there and and other people if the baby wasn't
perfect or right enough. But because a just allowance was
royal, they let it pass. Also because they didn't think
he would ascend. He was way out the line of
succession. So like I will let him go.
Despite his being short and a bit lame, he excelled at hoplite
warfare, which is really just you got to be so strong and
tough. You're carrying this giant
shield way bigger than anything Westerosi use something that
Dunk or Brienne would. It would be a chore for them to
keep up, even a big person like that.
And they're all packed close together, just pushing on each
other, stabbing at each other with Spears with their bronze
helmets way heavier. And these guys are really strong
and tough And just to last somehow made it through the
brutal Spartan training that begins at age 7 for all boys.
Sometimes they died doing it. He made it through with honors
and his father died rather and his brother was going to become
king. But there was a battle of
oracles and bloodlines, so to speak, where an Oracle said,
hey, we can't have a lame king or a lame rule.
And there was like, well, that guy is literally lame, right?
We can't have butt. Oracles are symbolic.
They're like, well, that's just a straightforward and perturb.
We're talking about lame as in poor rule.
We can't have Sparta be lame. We're not talking about an
individual. We're talking about the country
and helped in this argument is Lysander.
Lysander was the leading man in Sparta at the time.
Even though he wasn't a king, he's our Prince Damon.
He was the hero of the 27 year long war against Athens called
the Peloponnesian War. He was the victor, the great
victor for Sparta. So he was extremely popular,
extremely powerful, and his manipulations helped just allow
us to become king. He beat his brother because of
the rumors of bastardy and how big a problem that would be for
Sparta if a bastard ascended. Now the the person that
supposedly fathered his brother is a character that will come up
later. Someone that's an enemy of
Lysander as well. Now Lysander had his own ends
here. He supported it just allows our
Tywin character. He was also his lover, Lysander
like a lot of Greeks, it was very common for an older man and
a younger man. It's often portrayed as a boy.
That's not really true. It's like the term boy more like
lad in England, where it refers to a a younger man, but not a
boy. They this was common in Greece.
Both thieves and Sparta did this where you'd have a Anne Athens
and all these other cities where you'd have a it was very common
for you to have a a older man and a younger man to be a
couple. And the idea was that the
younger, the older man is, is also a mentor.
So it's it's a sexual relationship, but it's also a
political and mentoring relationship.
It has some things in common with marriage alliances in
Westeros or in medieval times, but it's men instead of a man
and a woman. Of course, you still had
political marriages between men and women in this era too.
But this, these were more prominent, these were written
about more because of how patriarchal the society was.
It's like, well, what's the only man?
Only only equal of a man is another man, right?
And that's kind of the the attitude there.
So the other king wasn't really in the picture.
He was controversial and weak. And so that's why Lysander
wanted to just allow us to be king because then he could use
to just allow us to just allow us though this is a puppet that
was no puppet. He was heavily influenced by
Lysander, but he had his own plans.
So This is why he's so much like Damon Lysander, because super
aggressive, a guy that United a whole bunch of Greek islands,
kind of like the Stepstones under him.
And they all owed him favors. So he was very powerful because
he had done a lot of things for a lot of people and it amassed a
lot of followers, a lot of people that owed him favors and
a lot of wealth, a lot of glory. And he of course had these big
ambitions. So he helped jizz allow us
become king and expected that favor to be returned.
But as I said, it just allow us. He's no Viserys.
He's a Tywin proud, haughty, very tough minded, never forgets
an insult, a big believer in the superiority of Sparta like Tywin
is a big believer in the superiority of the Lannisters.
It just allows was impressive when he was young, just like
Tywin, maybe for different reasons, but very impressive
also just like Tywin just allows head of and a wife who was very
influential for him. Hardly anyone could tell just
allow us what to do. He didn't really consider anyone
to be above him, but his wife was very, very influential.
And her name was Cleora, which even kind of rhymes with Joanna.
Now, unfortunately, we don't know hardly anything about
Cleora. We just know that she was
influential. We don't really have specifics.
So that's that's kind of a bummer, but it it does work as a
parallel. So he's very much a hypocrite,
this guy, which that fits with Tywin.
And when his friends and family are concerned, he's all good to
them. He wants to give them favors,
you know, be hypocritical, etcetera.
When it's his enemies, he'll do anything.
So this is a great pairing. We have an extremely ambitious
Lysander, an extremely ambitious A Just allow us and another
power that traded in both money and favors loomed over this all.
And that's where we're going next.
Persia and the Peloponnesian War.
This is 25 years prior. This is when Lysander was at his
peak and a just allows us just getting started now 25 years
before just allows wasn't quite king yet.
He was about 8 years away from being king.
Now we need to introduce our Iron Bank, our mash up of old
geese and Valyria, a huge and decadent and long standing power
to the east that included almost everything from western India
all the way to Turkey, plus Egypt and Libya and other things
in the South. Persia was absurdly rich in ways
we can't really comprehend in modern times, like the scale of
their wealth, the relative ownership they had of all the
money in their country. Also their government system was
interesting in that they had satraps, which are governors.
I'm just going to call them governors even though the proper
term is satrap. They could legally go to war.
They had a lot of independent authority.
They were often cousins or nephews or relatives of the king
or of other noble families because of their size and
because their territory ends in Turkey, modern Turkey, they
called it Ionia or Anatolia. There's a lot of names for it.
Anyway, it's right next to Greece.
That's the point. And so they would get involved a
lot. Again, I refer you to the
example of the 300 and Thermopylae to get your
bearings. Thermopylae was 480 and the
seizure of the cadmium was 382, so almost exactly 100 years
apart. Leonidus, this famous part in
general was king and general was killed at Thermopylae on the
orders of Xerxes army. The details in that movie are
all wacky, but the basics are accurate.
There was a Xerxes. He did come with his army.
He did. He'd have an enormous army.
The Spartans did stand with 300. They're also thebans and
Thespians that stood with the Spartans.
They don't get as much press. They weren't in charge.
Leonidas and those guys get all the, you know, all the glory.
But there were Thebans and Thespians that stood by the
Spartans and died with them. The Thespian stayed loyal after
the loss. Thebans didn't though.
After Persia won at Thermopyly, Thebes is like, you guys are
like right at our front door with your giant army.
All right, we're on your side now.
Fine. Thespi is right next door.
And they didn't though, So that good for Thespi, bad for Thebes.
Remember what I said? Needism, very bad kowtowing to
Persia, very bad culturally. So this was a, a thing that
stained Thebes for a long time. And Greece remembers like the
north remembers, right? It's also a thing that gave them
a little chip on their shoulder. They wanted to be redeemed for
that as a, as a city. They didn't like that stain on
their honor. On the flip side, since
Thermopolis, since since the Xerxes invasion, there had been
a long standing collective Greek desire to get back at them.
Even though it had been 100 years, they hadn't forgotten.
Persia's been embroiled in all sorts of their business.
No one's going to forget about Persia when they're constantly.
Involved or with war or bribery or this and that, aligned with
Sparta, aligned with Athens, aligned with, who knows, just
playing the Game of Thrones their way.
So the Greeks were like, yeah, we need to get back at them.
They came at us, they invaded us.
We never really, we kicked them back out, but we didn't really
hit them where it hurts. We embarrassed them, but they
just went home and went back to being rich as hell.
So really didn't really bother them that much.
You know, it was embarrassing. That's about it.
Persia stopped trying to do what Xerxes did.
Xerxes plan was bad. Why invade and conquer and
manage this place of Greece when when you can just manipulate it
with your absurd wealth? Because Greece wasn't that rich
so that Persian money went a long way.
Ironically a lot of times Persia would make coins with soldiers
portrayed on them. So it's kind of like they were
still using their soldiers, but in a in a manner of speaking.
And they were really good at using their money.
They got savvy at bribing the right people.
A bribe here, a bribe there can totally turn a war bribe the
proper commander. Yeah, money instead of fighting.
It was effective. And the Greeks looked down on it
a lot. But they were more than willing
to accept the bribes. Like if someone else takes the
bribe. Oh, that guy's terrible.
But if the bribe is to me, I have my reasons.
It's fair for me to do it. So yeah, a lot of hypocrisy
there. It's hard to turn down the
amount of money Persia tends to offer here.
But Persia also didn't want to have Greece fighting each other
too much. They that was good for them.
Because then if, if Greece is fighting itself, then they're
not going to unite and come after Persia.
But there's a balance there. Because the Greek soldiers were
the best of this era. Well, the infantry were not the
cavalry, the infantry. And so Persia's like, well, we
get this giant empire. We're always having problems on
the border. Greece isn't our only issue.
They loved hiring Greek mercenaries to help them fight
their other battles, you know, because they were the best at at
infantries like what we need these great Greek infantry to
fight the Sogdians and the Bactrians and all these other
cultures that we don't have much room for in this story.
So there was a lot of, there's a bit of a tightrope walk, a
juggling act that Persia was always trying to do, trying to
keep Athens, Sparta and Thebes kind of equal to each other, but
not too weak so that they could still hire mercenaries from
them. They wanted that.
They wanted those soldiers on their side.
If you think that sounds unsustainable, delicate, hard to
manage, you're absolutely right. So this is the This is why I'm
saying Persia's, the Iron Bank, because they had the they had
the ability to completely flip a war by giving a bunch of money
to one side that would completely turn the tables.
And then they could pull that support and give it to the other
side if they didn't like that was going.
That's going to happen at many times as it had already had by
this era. So that big back and forth that
I said happened earlier, the Peloponnesian War, it lasted 27
years. It was Athens versus Sparta, and
they just shredded each other to bits.
Athens superior on the sea, Sparta superior on land.
Neither could really get an edge the other way until four O 8,
four years before the war ended. So 23 years in, what finally
turned the tide, Persian money, they gave money to Persia or
money. Persia gave money to Sparta,
specifically to Lysander. Lysander built a Navy.
All of a sudden Sparta has a Navy that's can match Athens's
because Persian money. The the sailors aren't Spartans.
They're just, you know, paid hirelings.
And Lysander was very smooth about this.
He's like, I'm going to pay my soldiers, my sailors more than
the Athenians pair of theirs. And so a lot of the Athenian
sailors left to come sail for Lysander, the war behind the war
kind of thing, you know, the war of money rather than the war of
just blood and and salt here. So Lysander also just happened
to be extremely talented. Our Prince Damon character was
really good at warfare, very patient at sea, which is unusual
for this area. You got a lot of guys that are
just like very manly and you, you know, insults really drive
them. Like remember how we talked
about Victorian and how a lot of characters in A Song of Ice and
Fire, all you got to do is say, what are you scared?
And it totally gets them. They just, they get so mad if
you threaten their manhood, their bravery, the.
Marty McFly Effect. There it is.
That's right. So this work, there's a lot of
cases in the ancient world, in this era where just taunting
someone had an amazingly powerful effect.
Lysander was immune to this, mostly immune to this.
Listen, not entirely immune to this, mostly immune to this.
He, he was very patient. He would wait for his enemies to
make a mistake and pounce on that mistake.
He wouldn't charge right at them.
He wouldn't just fight for the sake of fighting.
He was very calculating and very good at it, very talented, kind
of like, kind of like Damon. He would attack when attacking
was right, be patient when patient wasn't.
And he was the first Spartan who was a really good Navy
commander. They never had anyone like that
before or really much after. So he was a really unique
talent. The kind of they didn't, they
didn't produce naval talents because they didn't really have
a Navy. They didn't have ships.
That just wasn't their thing. Sparta's very inland and they
they didn't consider it manly and they thought being a sailor
made you soft, which is kind of funny to think about considering
how hard it is to be a sailor. Like, that is a rough job.
But the Spartans, they're like, that makes you soft, makes you
weak. Really.
Well, yes. So that broke the stalemate.
And four years later, Lysander made all these moves, defeats
Athens and more on that in a minute.
One thing I like to do here is include things that aren't just
about war and politics. I want to include other elements
of Greek culture here. So every four years I'm going to
describe a little bit about what happened in the Olympics.
It's also going to help us keep track of the timeline.
So in four O 8 BC, four years before the end of the
Peloponnesian War, 26 years before the seizure of the
cadmium by Foibidas, we had the 95th Olympiad, the most
important 95th Olympiad already in the year 4 O 8 BC.
That's so many, right? The most important race or the
most important event in the Olympiad was the Stadion.
It's the race, a foot race, like a 200 yard foot race, 180
meters. For a while it was the only
event they they did a lot of they developed it a lot.
Eventually they had like kind of a cool little starting spot
where they had like a a groove, a stone groove in the ground for
the starting spot where you could dig your toes into it.
And it was like how you could. It was kind of like the
equivalent of starting blocks. They didn't have starting
blocks, but they had these little stone groove that you
could dig your toes into kind of like get a a push off.
Anyway, this year 4 O ABC, this guy, you Botis of Cyrene, that
he went to the Oracle of Libya, Cyrene's in Libya and the Oracle
said you're going to win. You're going to win the Stadion,
the most important event of the Olympics.
And you notice it's like, cool, I'm going to go ahead and get
ahead of that and go ahead and Commission a statue of my
victory. Before the race, he made a
statue of himself being the winner.
Now it's common for winners to make a statue and dedicate it to
Olympia. Olympia just full of treasure,
full of statues, gold, silver dedications.
No one would think to take this stuff because it's for the gods.
Hold that thought. Anyway, he dedicates the statue
ahead of time. So he's like, Yep, I'm going to
win. Before the event, he meets the
famous Corinthian hitaira laisse.
A hitaira is sort of like a courtesan or a geisha girl and
kind of like that. A high, very high end, a sex
worker, but more than a sex worker.
Not just that, but that's a one of the first things that come to
mind. Now Lyce was the most beautiful
woman of the era, according to our sources, and she was into
him and he but he's like, I'm training for my race here.
I got no time for relationships. So he to to kind of push her
off, trying to blow her off a little bit.
He's like, I'll marry you if I win, which you know, he already
knew he was going to win according to the Oracle, right?
He's like, I can't, but I got no time for you right now.
I got to train, you know? And so when he won, he did win.
What? He was ready to go with his
statue. He's like, yeah, here's your,
here's your Laurel wreath, your victor's wreath.
They didn't have the gold, silver, bronze medals.
They had the olive wreath. You know you would wear that
victor's thing on your head. Usually the statue would come a
few weeks or months later. But he was raised like, I got my
statue ready to go y'all, here it is.
And then he used semantics to wriggle out of that marriage
offer. For some reason, he didn't want
to marry the most beautiful woman of the year anyway, so he
got out of that and married someone else and his that
someone else made a statue of him again to show his
restraints. Like he he was so restrained he
didn't marry Lice. Well, Lice will reappear in the
story later. The pancreation is another
important event that's basically mixed martial arts.
It's still called that in some circles today.
You still hear the pancreation or pancreatist.
A pancreatist is a is a pancreatic is an athlete who
competes in that. This guy named Polydamus of
Scotusa won the pancreation. He was so impressive, he was so
big and strong that the Persian king derives the second brought
him all the way the 2000 miles over there to perform feats of
strength at his court. So this guy was a real
something. Supposedly he died in a cave in
because he's he thought he was strong enough to hold the rocks
back and got crushed. Anyway, some guy named you, you
Agoris of Elis. Elis is important because this
is where the Olympics are held. They're the first people to hold
the Olympiads and they're this is a rich culture, rich
community, a lot of horse racing.
As you'll see, horse racing became a big part of the
Olympiad. The two horse chariot race is
called the Sonoras. This, this Euagoris of Ellis won
that, and the tetrapon was worn by Archelaus, the first of
Macedon, the king of Macedonia. That's right.
He entered his horses and won. This is kind of a weird
situation where these are rich people entering their horses
into races. The they're not the ones driving
the horses. It's either a slave or some paid
athlete. And they were allowed to enter
more than one team. So some of these times, you
hear, like this guy won, but he might have entered five times.
He might have had five Chariots in there.
There might have been 10 Chariots and half of them were
his. We don't know exactly.
The records aren't that great, but it's neat to see.
Moving on, a quote from Lysander.
I cheat boys with dice and men with oaths.
Yeah. Now the money flowed from Persia
to Sparta because not just because of politics, not just
because it was in the Persian King's best interest to support
Sparta at this particular junction.
Yeah, he could switch his money support to Athens or Thebes
later if he wanted to. Right now he was giving money to
Sparta, and partly it was because of politics, but partly
it was because of friendship and partly because of conspiracy.
Derice's younger son, Cyrus, who was called Cyrus the Younger,
the founder of the Persian dynasty was Cyrus the Elder, I
guess. And Cyrus, like a lot of
Princess, was given a title. He was a governor in Asia Minor,
which is, you know, Turkey's included in that.
And Cyrus and Lysander became friends.
Lysander was really good at making friends with people and
given he had a sexual relationship with just allows,
it's possible he had one. Cyrus too.
We're not really sure. The two were remarkably loyal to
each other, possibly because they had agreed to help each
other out. They both were, they were men of
like minds and similar ambition, and they could help each other
rise. Now you got to ask yourself,
well, if you're Cyrus, you're a younger son of the Persian great
king, You're the only rise you can make is to the king, which
means you have to usurp or murder or whatever your older
brother. You're exactly right.
If you're thinking along those lines, Lysander was totally,
totally willing to help Cyrus become king.
Now wait, what is Lysander's end game?
Though He's not in the royal family, he is a descendant of
Heracles. Like a lot of Spartan and Steven
and. Athenian nobles.
That's a. Big deal to trace your bloodline
to Hercules Heracles. So Cyrus and Lysander make some
sort of mutually beneficial alliance.
They'd each help each other rise within their own country and
then profit from there. Now, Cyrus's mother was Queen
Parasatis, who was a niece of the same Xerxes that led the
battle, led the army into Thermopylae in 480 during the
the adventures of the 300. Yeah, incest from the Persians
is outrageous. It's worse than the Targaryens.
Now this example isn't worse than Targaryens if she's a niece
that ends up marrying back into the line marrying King Darius,
the son of a different the grandson of Xerxes.
Rather now she just straight up says hey husband, why don't you
name Cyrus your heir instead of Arsakis who was the older
brother. Now that's her son too.
Those are both her sons. I know you might be thinking
these Persian kings have multiple wives.
You're right. Darius may have had, like, more
than 100 children, and the next one's going to have even more.
So she kept pushing for it. She's like, yeah, Come on,
Darius. Come on, husband.
I helped you get the throne. If if it wasn't for me, you
wouldn't have gotten the throne. Husband, you're a bastard.
Your ascent was very unlikely. But because of me, you're
sitting on that throne. So return this favor to me and
make our younger son king. He didn't do it.
He didn't budget. Now, you got to respect just how
powerful Pirosatus was. She had been at court for like
50 years. She had a big network of spies.
She was extremely powerful. This is our mash up of, let's
say, Olenna Tyrell. Her nickname is the Queen of
Thorns. What if she was an actual queen?
Yeah, this is Cersei with the brain power of Olenna, the
attitude of Cersei, the high mindedness, the pride, the
viciousness that she's got that, but she's also got the the
cunning, the spy network, the political understanding, the
ability to have multiple faces. That's that's Parasatus.
She probably had 13 children from Darius, too, but he still
just wouldn't do it. He wouldn't change the
succession, all this maneuvering, all this.
Pushing to change. The succession.
Got. Statara mad at her.
Statara was the wife of the elder son who was set to be
queen. She's like, stop trying to make
my husband not king. Stop that now, Parasatus had.
Already. Executed or allowed the
execution of Tara's entire family because of her brother.
Married Statara. Married Parasatus's other
daughter but she he wasn't really in love with her and he
was really after his own half sister instead and that became a
big scandal and the king ended up having them all executed.
But Parasitis asked Stuttera to be spared because she's the wife
of her older son. This is ironic because this
becomes her biggest rival. She saves to Tara and then Tara
becomes her biggest rival at court.
Satara becomes basically a Marjorie Tyrell, the actual wife
to the king where she's the are Cersei.
Queen Paracatus is the mother to the king.
Switching back. To Lysander for a minute.
He, his mother, was a slave. So that's.
A big deal that he rose this far again.
He didn't have the birth of it a just a Laos or a Cyrus.
He's not a king, but he's powerful enough and he earned a
lot of respect along. The way and like we.
Said lover to A just allow us. At one point, A just allow us
said to Lysander. My father taught me nothing but
Spartan ways, and now you ask me to rule like an Athenian.
So they had a good relationship, but they were also at odds with
certain styles of leadership and all that.
So with Cyrus and A just allow us, what do we have here?
Looking at Lysander's perspective, he's got the second
in line to the throne in his back pocket of Persia, second
line to Persia, and then. He's got to.
Just allow us to at this point wasn't king yet but was really
close to the line of succession too.
So he's just two of his best friends who was biggest allies
are people just outside the top spot and with his manipulation
they could both be at the top spot.
I already described how he helped just allow us to become
king by manipulating the Oracle and manipulating the the whole
stories of bastardy and all that.
He did a similar thing with Cyrus.
So Lysander's actual position was Nave Ark.
That's Admiral. But like a lot of these.
Greek. Positions.
A lot of these offices, even in Sparta, it was an elected
position and it was an elected position you could only hold
once. So you could only be nave ark
for a year and your entire life so be, but this guy was so.
Talent. He was so.
Much better than any nave ark they ever had before or after.
They were like do we really? Do we really want to have him
not be in office? Actually, yes.
A lot of Spartans are like this guy's too powerful.
He's doing too many non Spartan things.
He's not doing it our way. We don't want him in charge
anymore. Even though he's effective.
He's he's changing our cultural values.
We don't like that. Even though he's conquering
Greek islands left and right, even though he's kicking out the
Democrats and installing the oligarchs who are loyal, those
oligarchs are mostly loyal to him, not Sparta.
So he's building this big network.
Like I said, the crown jewels of this network are Cyrus, and it
just allows. But he has all these other
oligarchs on all these other Greek islands.
Take one look at the map of the Aegean, all the islands east of
Greece and West of what's now Turkey.
There's so many. And Lysander was just one after
the other, picking these off and making them Spartan, but
actually making them his. They were in Spartan in name,
but the actual people in charge there were loyal to him.
So it was very clever. Sparta was getting all this
benefit, all of this wealth, all this power under, but Lysander
was collecting for them. But really it was his power.
Nominally it's Spartan power, but really, you know, these
people were loyal to him. If you know your Roman history,
this is exactly what Pompey Magnus, Pompey the Great did.
He conquered a whole lot of territory for Rome, but he
installed people to rule those places that were loyal to him.
So yeah, they were Roman, but when the civil war in Rome
happened, those places fought for Pompey against Caesar.
Now as a quick. Aside, this is.
More than a slight parallel here, Plutarch's parallel lives.
Remember their comparisons of famous Greeks to famous Romans.
The comparison of Lysander was to Pompey the Great.
There you go. So as I said, Lysander was very
clever. He he increased the pay by one
Oval a day. It's like a penny.
They were getting 3 pennies a day.
Now they got 4. That's actually not a lot of
money, but it's a big increase, relatively speaking.
It's a 33% raise. That's a lot, right?
So not only did he give them the money, he made it.
He made himself the champion. He made himself the hero.
He's like, I fought to get you more money.
You guys are doing such a great job.
You're such hard workers. You deserve to be paid more and
I brought that to you. He made himself a hero of the
soldiers, really, really good at.
Framing everything that happened as he did it and he did it for
you. He never kept money.
This is a very I compared him to Damon, but he's a little bit
Euron like in that his he didn't keep much for himself.
He he was, he was like, yeah, I'm just giving all this money
away. Partly because he cared more
about amassing power than he cared about wealth.
He figured if I have enough power, the wealth will come.
Second of all, he's Spartans. The Spartans were not very big
on wealth anyway and he didn't want to.
He was already being anti Spartan in a lot of other ways
cultural. He didn't want to.
He didn't want to flout that cultural tenet of amassing
wealth for himself that would have that would be even more
anti Spartan or non Spartan. He didn't want to open himself
up to that sort of complaint or charges from the the people in
Sparta who didn't like him. So he was very smart in keeping
his hands as clean as possible while doing all these corrupt
things. But again, one year term, when
his one year term expired, he the money to pay those soldiers,
right? What he got that from?
Cyrus, right? Cyrus gave him that money to
spread around and help. So they were allies, right?
Persian money, so much of it. Not a big deal for Cyrus, but
they had their. Conspiracy, right?
Their little backroom. Plan that they were working on.
And how did this play out? Well, Lysander gave up his
office, he told the new guy. Callicritis, Kalikratitis
rather, he said, hey, I'm giving you the best Navy SPART he's
ever had. And he's like, yeah, you, you
probably are. Thanks for that.
But Lysander didn't. Want callikritis to succeed?
He wanted. Callikritis to fail and he so he
gave all of Cyrus's money back. He's like, Cyrus, take your
money back, even though Clikritis needs it to pay the
the crews. So he basically sabotage
Caliquitas. This is a guy.
This guy was good. He was talented, but he's no
Lysander, and he's no match for Lysander's cunning and
underhandedness. And Cyrus was in on it.
Cyrus was like, yeah, I'm keeping this money.
I'm not helping you, Caliquitas. My buddy Lysander said not to.
And that's how it's going to go. Caliquitas was smart enough to
figure out this was happening, so he had to work extra hard to
like get more money from their allies.
Which made their allies not like him.
They liked Lysander because he was.
Giving them stuff where? Calicritis is taking stuff from
him because kind of because he has to, because Lysander left
him with nothing. It was a brilliant move by
Lysander, very cynical, very selfish, but it worked.
Eventually Calicrititis got into a naval engagement, got into a
battle, and was killed. He probably wouldn't have lost
if he had Cyrus's money though, because the crews that deserted
to him to to the Lysander because of the extra pay went
back because that extra pay went away and all those soldiers
associated the extra pay with Lysander.
They're like, that's the guy that was paying us more.
So Calicratidis dies, the Sparta's like OK, who are we
going to make nave? Arc now.
An envoy, envoys from Greece or from Grecian, Turkey, Grecian
Ionia, they call it Ionia, the West Coast of Turkey.
There's a lot of Greek cities there.
And an envoy from Cyrus show up at Sparta, and they go, we want
Lysander, put him back in charge.
We're your most powerful allies. That's what we want.
As far as like, OK, the problem is our constitution says one
year only. You want us to break our own
constitution. And they're like, yes, we do.
And they're like, well, we're not going to do that, but we can
get around it. Let's use some.
Legalese. We'll send a different guy who's
in charge. We'll send Lysander as his Co
commander and we'll tell the guy at the top what the real deal
is. Officially you're in charge, but
you got to do whatever Lysander says.
So it's just a big, like we're getting around our own rules
thing. Lysander's back in charge,
right? So I just, it worked.
His plan worked. So this is kind of like what
happened in Fire and Blood after the Dance of the Dragons, where
we had an attempt to put someone over Oakenfist where But
Oakenfist was like, Nah, I'm not doing that, I'm in charge.
This was kind of like that, except the both.
Everyone was in on it. Everyone's like, yeah,
Lysander's really in charge. Four years later, this is the
end of the Peloponnesian War, the final year of the
Peloponnesian War. But coincidentally, King Darius
of Persia is dying. That's a big deal because King
Darius was fell under Lysander's spell too.
Cyrus his son convinces him this is important.
Lysander gets to talk to Darius. Access to Cyrus gave him access
to the great King. His amazing charisma work on
Darius too. Whatever he said he put a spell
on Darius. Darius was even after, even
when. He's on his.
Deathbed. Even with Lysander amassing all
this power, he's like, yeah, not only did he give Lysander more
money, he. Put.
Lysander in charge of the treasury?
Temporal, the Persian king put this Greek guy in charge of his
own treasury for a little while. That's bizarre, but this goes to
show how incredibly talented at talking and and alliance
building that Lysander was and he was able to push against.
Athens cause durais didn't like. Athens like he had a problem
with them for his whole reign and durais have been king for a
while. He just didn't like Athens.
Athens is the hotbed of democracy.
Athens had done all sorts of things to him.
Sparta and Persia are a little more aligned in the way they run
a government. Even though Persia's like super
wealthy and and full of excess and Sparta isn't, they still
both are authoritarian states, so they agree on that much.
So what did Lysander do? He badly outmaneuvered Athens
several times in the final decisive battle.
It was what I said before. He waited for them to make a
mistake, pounced on that mistake, basically won this big
naval battle with almost no casualties because his surprise
attack was so effective. He basically captured half of
the Athenian fleet with almost no blood spilled.
Incredible. And then with Athens not having
a fleet anymore, he's like, all right, I don't need to do this
expensive siege on land. I will blockade your port, which
you need because you import food.
And if you can't import food, you're in big trouble.
And that's what happened. They eventually were starved
into submission, and he sailed into the port victoriously.
And killed a lot. Of the Democrats.
Had them executed, restored a lot of the oligarchs to their
positions of power. They had been exiled, Put them
back in place, gave them their jobs back, gave them their
wealth back, their estates, their positions in government.
Then he did something that is very Tywin like.
Now this isn't our Tywin character, this is our Prince
Damon. But this is a Tywin like
activity. He said, hey, bring me a bunch
of lady flautists from Athens. Bring me a bunch of women who
can play the flute, then bring me a bunch of workers.
Captured Athenians, probably, certainly not his own men, and
said tear down these walls, Mr. Gorbachev, tear down these
walls. No, the Athens had long walls.
They were called the long walls. They were 4 miles long.
And yeah, he said, Bring these walls down.
Work crew tear. Down the walls.
Also, burn the fleet. We're going to burn the fleet
inside of the walls being torn down.
And you lady flautists of Athens, you're going to play
music to accompany this? So he made them accompany play
company music to the destruction of their own city?
Yikes. This is some Rains of Castamere
stuff, isn't it? Right, Lysander was also the.
First known Greek. Person to have songs of triumph
written about him, which is also very reigns of Castamere ish or
even the Ironborn like that, like reaving songs of victory
and battle, things like that. And he also had some of the
smaller client states, those islands that he subjugated, some
of them were so overwhelmed by him, so like impressed by him
that they actually offered sacrifice to him as if he was a
God, which apparently is also the first time that it ever
happened. So this guy who's not even a
king of Sparta is, is achieving things that no Spartan king has
ever achieved before. Noel Greek has achieved before.
Lysander wanted to destroy Athens entirely.
He voted to have it turned into sheep pasture.
But the E 4 is that Sparta overruled him.
Like, no, we need this balance of power to be maintained.
We need actually want Athens to exist.
We want them to be subject to us.
So they installed the 30, what was called the 30 tyrants.
The 30 tyrants ruled Athens. They were kind of Lysander's
proxies. So he kind of, at this juncture,
Lysander wielded more power through his clients, through his
proxies in Athens, through his relationship with Cyrus than
Sparta probably had without him. He was probably more powerful
than the Spartan state by himself and he knew it.
He's like, they need me and they can't piss me off, right?
They they have to keep working with me 'cause I'm bringing them
so much. What's Sparta going to do to
him? Out Navy him?
They can't. He's the master of the sea.
He's the only successful Admiral they ever had.
And they're not good at at building alliances.
Sparta as a whole, this is very domineering.
When they made alliances with someone, it always had to be
like, we're better than you. It was it was very rarely was it
an equal partnership. Sparta always had to be like,
no, it's we're on top and you are, you are a lesser partner.
They would always rub people the wrong way.
They would always just try to import their cultural values,
which were very unique and very rigid and just people didn't
like it. It's a recurring story Sparta
gets. Powerful they.
Dominate and no one likes it. Everyone wants to push back
against them. So what was Lysander's end goal?
Well, I told you, he's a Prince Damon.
His end goal was to make himself a king, not a Sparta of a whole
new Kingdom of these islands that he created, maybe including
Athens or not created these islands that he created, these
islands that he conquered, that owed him all these favors with
Cyrus's money helping him, he had a big plan, right?
And eventually the looks like the Spartans figured that out.
This is a guy that's very charming when he wanted to be
very nasty, when he wanted to be very formidable.
He's a fighter. He's a warrior.
This is a lead from the front kind of guy too, which all
Spartan leaders were. So, yeah, he was kind of
building a Kingdom of the Stepstones, but something much
more powerful than the Stepstones.
The Stepstones aren't very powerful.
They're they're they're strategically located, but they
don't really generate a lot of wealth.
These island cities did very important.
These were these these island cities were paying for that Navy
in whenever Cyrus wasn't or they were both paying for it.
So it's kind of like Damon's biggest enemies were mere Thai
Rosh and Lise. We kind of have a little similar
thing here. Sparta, Thebes, Athens.
Even though he himself was Sparta in a lot of ways he was
closer to Persia specifically to Cyrus.
The Sparta is also weird in that they didn't have money.
You're like, wait, what? They didn't have money to avoid
corrupting their own citizenry. Sparta did made it illegal to
have silver, gold, platinum, nothing.
Their coinage was iron, which is worthless elsewhere.
It's not actually. It's not actually worthless
elsewhere. They soaked their iron in
vinegar so that it would be brittle.
You wouldn't be able to reforge it, so that's how they cool it.
Instead of cooling it in water, they cooled it in vinegar, which
means you can't melt it back down, it would just fall apart.
So they were so intent on making their currency worthless that
they did this. So Lysander was like, ha, ha, I
don't care about Spartan society.
I only pretend to care about Spartan society.
What am I going to do? I'm going to, I'm going to throw
off. I'm to stabilize the.
Entirety of Spartan. Civilization by doing what?
By money, all that money that he didn't want, he gave it all to
Sparta. All the money he didn't give to
his friends that he wanted support from, he gave it to
Sparta. Sparta all of a sudden has all
this wealth that is illegal, but they're they can't say no.
It's all this wealth and it's getting given to the people at
the top. They're like, all right, well,
we'll make exceptions. They they found, they talked
themselves into it. They're like, well, we got to
pay our mercenaries. We got to pay.
We don't have to keep the money, but we can use it outside of
Sparta. Yeah, right.
They didn't. They told themselves that, but
no. They did not.
They it worked. This is a a map.
OK, a lot of y'all are. Familiar with Mormon culture, at
least to a shallow degree, which is to say that Mormons, a lot of
them, they're not, they're not allowed to have, you know, soda
or drugs or a lot of these things that are sugary or
caffeinated or whatever. Sometimes a Mormon kid will go
off into the world and just so much sugar and caffeine and they
just go nuts. That's Sparta with money now
because they just were, they weren't allowed to have money
and all of a sudden they have a ton of it and they're just like
wee money. We're not supposed to have this,
but he, he, we can buy whatever we want.
It made them uncomfortable because it goes against their
values, but it also made them comfortable because they could
buy things and they have nice things.
And it was a big problem because there was half of Sparta's
conservative. Well, they're all conservative.
The ultra conservatives were like this should not be, but the
less ultra conservatives were like yay money.
So they just too many of them were saying yay money for it to
be shut down, but too many of them were saying no money to for
it to be completely overwhelming.
So there you have it. It's a very divided Sparta.
And surely Lysander knew this would happen.
He knew. He knew this would happen.
It was all a plan, most likely. He grew up in Sparta.
He's in his 50s by now. It was all a plan, right?
Most likely. So they had to accept this
corruption by their own general, their own Admiral.
They couldn't really stop it, and they would lose their fleet
without it. They're like, look, if we don't
take this money, we're going to lose our fleet and then we won't
have all these islands, which Lysander's like, you mean my
islands? But Persian help is fickle,
remember? And Darius is dying.
What happens if Darius dies and the new king is like, Nah, I
don't want to support Sparta anymore.
I want to support Athens, or I want to support Thebes, or I
want to support none of you, or I want to support someone else
entirely. It's a big unknown.
And that unknown made them uncomfortable.
It made Lysander uncomfortable. It made a lot of people
uncomfortable. So what does Lysander do?
Digs in deeper with Cyrus. If Cyrus, if Cyrus's mother
wants him to be king and Lysander's most powerful ally
wants him to be king, maybe that can be arranged and then the
money will keep flowing. The problem is, if their plan
fails, then the new king will be very angry with Sparta and the
money will almost certainly stop flowing.
So it's a tightrope walk. They got to keep that money
flowing, but if they go too far, they might lose it.
The four O year, four O 4 the same.
Year that Lysander sailed victoriously into Athens and
destroyed their walls and played the had the flutes played, they
still had the Olympiad. I misspoke.
The 90, the four O 8. The year 4 O 8 was the 93rd
Olympiad. This is the 94th Olympiad, which
is still an absurd number. Good Lord, they've been going
for so long this year. The foot race, and I didn't
mention this, the foot race was done naked, so I'm just going to
call it the naked race from now. And the naked Sprint was won by
Croquinas of Larissa, which is over in Thessaly.
The wrestling match was won by Simakos.
There was a guy who won the stadium in 428 and 424 named
Simicos. This might be the same guy.
A boxing was won by a Euclis of Rhodes.
Rhodes is the island that the Colossus will be built on.
It hasn't been built yet though. It's about 200 years away.
The Delicos, which is the long distance race, was won by, I kid
you not, a guy named Lastthenes. The race was won by a guy named
Lastthenes of Thebes, the Pancrasian.
The mixed martial arts was one by a guy named Promacus of
Pelina, which I believe is in Macedon, Macedonia.
That same year, four O 4, I believe, after the Olympiad,
King Darius, who was the great. Grandson of Xerxes.
Was on his death that he finally passed.
So I knew again, what's going to happen.
It's all up in the air. The Persian crown's up in the
air. What's the new king going to do?
Who's he going to support? How's he going to spend his
money? What's the deal?
His name was Arsakis, as I said before, but he, like a lot of
monarchs from a lot of different times and places.
He took a royal name in place of his regular name, and he became
Artaxerxes the second. Now, regardless of what he might
end up doing with Greece, whatever his Greek policy will
be, first priority is just securing his own hold on the
throne. This is a giant empire, as we
said, and that's his first priority, to make sure that the
transition to power goes smoothly.
But it did not. It's not easy to have a smooth
transition in power when your own mother plots to kill you.
Yes, our Cersei parasatus plotted against her own son.
She was not done trying to make her favorite son king, even
after Derias refused to change his succession.
She's like, well, I that doesn't.
I'm not giving up. I can still push my younger son
to win here. And so apparently Cyrus tried to
have Artaxerxes assassinated during his coronation.
The plot was foiled by a man called Tisifernes.
Tisifernes was another governor and a rival to Cyrus.
So they were governors like of neighboring territories, all
part of the Persian Empire. So they were already kind of
rival. So Tisifernes was happy to rat
out Cyrus's plot. Tisifernes was the grandson of
Hidarnes who was the commander of the Immortals.
Remember those like the 1000 Immortals that you may have seen
during the 300 movie? Those are a real thing too.
Not those masks that they wore, but they really were an elite
infantry unit. And this guy's grandson or
grandfather was their commander during Xerxes invasion and he
was a conspirator that put Darius the Great on the throne.
Darius was the father of Xerxes and the third king of Persia
ever. So this is a very important man
too to Sephernes. Now, Peresatis Arsurci.
Even though she plotted against her own son, he didn't
apparently find out about it. Or maybe history is wrong and
she wasn't actually involved. Either way, her influence over
Artaxurxes is a lot like her influence over a Tommen or a
Joffrey. But assume this Tommen and
Joffrey are adults, so they're not quite as helpless or, you
know, young or naive. She convinced him not to execute
Cyrus. She's like, don't kill your
younger brother for, you know, just pardon him.
Give. Him.
His governorship. Back and he did.
This is wild, right? This is unbelievable that cause
normally these Persian kings are ruthless.
They kill people and they kill them in very mean, cruel, nasty
ways. So this goes to show how
influential Parasatus was. This also meant that Cyrus
getting his job back meant that he could keep bankrolling
Lysander. Very important.
So Artaxerxes is like, yeah, go for it.
I don't mind. You can.
No, fine. I'll give the pardon.
And this is kind of like nothing compared to some of the things
that Parasatus will convince Artaxerxes to do later.
So keep stay tuned for that. So one of the other famous
characters in Plutarch's lives a guy named Alcabiades.
He was a warrior, a general, a student of Socrates.
He might be the guy that cuckolded Agisilaus's rival, A
rival's father there or rival's mother there.
A father. I said it right the first time.
And he switched several, switched size several times and
back again. This guy Alcobide.
So he's an unbelievable story. He doesn't really play a role
here, except that he gets killed by Lysander.
He's again a worthy story. If you want me to tell the story
of Alcobides someday, I gladly will.
Now, Lysander of course, didn't wield the blade himself.
He was one of his many friends and allies.
This was a guy named Farnabazis. Farnabazis was a governor of
Phrygia. Phrygia is the part of Turkey
that concludes the Hellespont, the part where, you know, the
closest spot where Greece and where Europe and Asia meet, The
little tiny space between the, the Dardanelles, the Bosphorus,
that where Istanbul is on the other side of it.
Now it used to be Constantinople, right?
So the other side, eastern side of that, the Asian side, that's
what Farnabaz has controlled. That's a very important
territory because it controls the crossing from Europe to Asia
and back and and reverse. So Lysander is making all having
all sorts of success, but one thing that didn't work out for
him was the 30 tyrants that he left in charge of Athens.
They just couldn't handle it. They were not cut out to handle
Athens's strong democratic spirit.
Athens would not be held down by tyrants.
Athens fought back a guy named Thrasibulus very who has been
compared to Winston Churchill by some modern writers for his
Athenian pride. And his.
Leadership at a dark hour, which is what Winston Churchill is
certainly associated with for his leadership during World War
Two, he led an A revolt that was successful.
They they've stationed themselves on a hill and the the
tyrant sent their army and were in their army themselves and
tried to attack. And the leader of the 30
tyrants, Curtius was killed in this battle and the rest of the
30 tyrants fled. And now the other Spartan king
by this era is the one that I said was worthless and not
really a part of things. So it just allows that free
reign. This is 3 years before it just
allows his king. And this is him being weak.
This is an example of why he was kind of pushed to the side
because he showed up with the Spartan relief army to try to
take Athens back, but he wasn't really didn't really want to.
He kind of just let Athens re establish their democracy.
He was kind of, yeah, he wasn't really that Spartan for a
Spartan king. He just was like, you know, I
kind of like democracy here. Just do it, you know?
Have your way. I don't, I don't want to get
into this long campaign against you guys.
And this is part of why he was a target, part of why Lysander.
And it just allows we're able to push him out of the way.
And in fact, he was condemned for his actions later and was
forced into exile. Pausanias was Pausanias went
ahead and retired to Corinth, which is, you know, like 100
miles away from Sparta. They just left him there.
They're like, fine, you can live in Corinth.
We don't care. You're worthless now.
And he became an author. And he wrote about Spartan legal
system. So from king to author.
Yep. So, Lysander.
Was. Not done.
He was against this. He was like he was mad at what
Passanius did. He's like we had Athens and you
just let it go. This upset him and he started
behind the scenes working to nothing big, just change
Sparta's constitution. He's like, I don't want this to
ever happen. Again.
We cannot have a weak ass king, so I don't want to have
hereditary monarch anymore. Let's change to elective
monarchy. He wanted to change the system
that they had in place for 500 years.
And let's not forget how conservative this country is.
Changing their laws. That's a big ask.
This sheer audacity, right? Wow.
Yeah, sheer audacity. Again, this guy's so much like
Damon. Let's take a quick 5 minute
break here and take care of some business.
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Civil war, a disallow has once said.
It is just that the Asiatic Greeks should suffer for their
own inadequacy. This is a guy that really
believes in might makes right, and if you can't do what's
necessary, you don't deserve it. If you can't, if you're not
free, it's because you're too weak.
That's his attitude. Very, very hard.
Hard ass, right? So what happens here?
Artaxerxes gets the. Throne in Four O 44-O3 goes
about trying to secure his reign.
It's difficult because Persia's so huge and there's a lot of
people to please and a lot of people who aren't pleased.
Now, Cyrus was very popular. Cyrus was intelligent, he was
very Marshall, He was athletic. He was brave but also modest.
A lot of qualities that other men like to follow.
There's an amazing anecdote about how a bear emerge from the
woods while he and his friends were hunting and the bear went
right at Cyrus and Cyrus didn't flinch.
He was mounted on a horse, but he didn't flinch.
He stay stood his ground. The bear like attacked and he
grappled the bear and killed it. He got some permanent scars from
it. That's kind of hard to believe,
but this is the kind. Of story told about.
This guy, whether it's true or not, it's part of his reputation
and that helped him win support like this is again an age of
warriors and and Marshall prowess and that is whoa, this
dude fought a bear. His brother Artaxerxes didn't
have stories about him killing bears or anything like that.
Not even close. So that was Cyrus's advantage is
that people liked him more. Artuzuksi's advantage was, well,
he was the older one and he inherited.
That's a pretty big edge too. So of course, Lysander and
Cyrus, they're still plotting. They're doing their thing.
Cyrus raises an army and people are like, what are you raising
an army for? He's like, oh, there's some
rebellious tribesmen in these mountains.
That's the kind of thing that happens regularly.
So it it is believable. These are basically like the
free folk of the area. They're getting uppity either
hill tribes, whatever. But he was actually raising an
army so that he could do a sneak attack, get a little lead time
before Artaxerxes knew it was happening.
He'd already have his army in the field.
He's like, I'm going to fight Klansmen.
Actually, I'm going to fight you.
And Artaxerxes be like, Oh my gosh, I don't have an army
ready. But Tisa Furnace again, the guy
that ratted out Cyrus's assassination plot, ratted out
the true purpose of this army. He figured it out.
So it became a full blown rebellion, an open rebellion
rather than a sneaky attempt. Cyrus is fine with that.
He's a front and center kind of guy.
He's a proud, brave dude. So he just announces his intent.
He's like, yeah, that's my intention.
Fine. Yeah, you.
You've discovered me. What are you going to do?
I'm coming for you, brother. So Sparta, they have to make a
decision, right? Lysander wants to work with
Cyrus, of course, but Lysander's not in charge.
He has influence, but he's not the top dog.
Now, again, a Disallow Us is still a year away from being
king. So he had influence, but he also
didn't have a big say here, and we're not sure what he would
have said, but he didn't have that say.
Ultimately, Sparta chooses Cyrus because while they were
uncomfortable with Lysander's relationship with him, they
didn't have any sort of relationship with Artaxerxes at
all. They didn't know the guy, they
just had nothing to do with him. So they were like, well, let's
go with the guy. We know Cyrus hires 10,000 Greek
mercenaries, brings them over and these are, you know, the
spear and shield hoplite guys. They this this group included
Xenophon. Xenophon is an author, a warrior
who is also an author. You don't see a lot of those.
We have several of his books still today, including the the
full story of these 10,000 mercenaries and you'll see in a
minute why this is an important story.
It's called the Anabasis. Now the battle was called
Kunaksa. The leader of these 10,000
mercenaries was Clearchus. He was Spartan, Spartan
mercenary named Clearchus, a very disciplined veteran.
You know, Spartan he was, he knew his business, very good at
war, brazed to war, war all his life, etcetera.
He's also kind of arrogant though.
He didn't really like taking orders from Cyrus even though he
was hired to do so. So Cyrus ordered him to be on
the right wing to face, but to go towards the center and attack
the center of Artaxerxes army clear.
August didn't want to do that. He's like, no, that's not what
we do. We go forward, we fight their
left, their right wing fights are right wing, or rather their
left wing fights are right wing and their left wing fights are
right wing. That's how it's done.
Spartans being very conservative, they don't even
really like to change how battle is done.
So he's like, I'm not doing that, I'm doing this.
That was a pretty big mistake by a Clearchus, someone who was
very experienced, did something pretty foolish.
This left Cyrus's flank exposed. That in itself didn't end the
battle. It did make things difficult for
Cyrus. So he adjusted and charged.
He went right at his brother, tried to make it despite the
large sizes of these armies. He tried to make it decisive
between the leaders. That's the kind of thing a brave
guy would do, right? But Cyrus was killed.
He was struck by a blow, fell off his horse and got there's.
Actually it's a bit of a dare on the daring situation, which is
we got three stories of his death and we don't know which is
the real 1. Now 1 was Artisurxes himself.
I'm not actually sure and history isn't sure that
Artisurxes claimed it. But Parasatus, his mother wanted
him to have credit for it so she claimed it kind of on his behalf
and wasn't really happy with anyone else telling a different
version of the story. So we have 3 versions of the
story today, but at the time the other two stories were very
dangerous to tell because Parasatus didn't like those
ones. For example, there was a guy
named Mithra Datis who said he got really drunk and said hey it
wasn't our deserts. He said it was me.
I'm the one who killed Cyrus, I deserve the credit.
That was a very foolish thing to say.
Parasitis found out and sentenced him to scaffism.
If you are squeamish, don't listen to the definition of
scaffism. This is when they basically put
this guy between like a leather encasement.
It looks like 2 boats sewn together so we can't move but
there's a lot of space inside. Your head sticks out but your
body is in in contained. Then they rub milk and honey on
your face, point you towards the sun and wait for the flies.
The flies Burrow into your face and roost in all the excrement
that's in your boat that you're sitting in.
And they force feed you milk and honey as well as rubbing it on
your face. And after 17 days, he died from,
you know, the maggots and all that.
Yeah. So that's pretty bad, right?
Another guy, Masabatis, that was Artaxerxes, eunuch.
There's a lot of eunuchs in Persia.
Masabatis cut off Cyrus's head and hands and gave them to
Artaxerxes, a trophy. Parasatus didn't like that
either. So she got her son to play a
game of dice with him or with her.
And she's like, hey, let's raise the stakes.
That eunuch of yours, Masabatis put him up for a wager, so you
know he did. And she won.
So she won. The eunuch that killed her
favorite son and had him flayed alive.
Yeah, that's what she did. The. 3rd.
Person that claimed to have killed Cyrus was Tisifernis, the
guy who ratted out the assassination plot and the guy
that ratted out the surprise attack.
But this guy's a governor. He's not a court eunuch.
He's not just a random soldier like Mithridati's.
This guy was a governor, so he, Parasitis couldn't just get him.
Well, he's not right away. Now Parasitis is Marjorie
equivalent. Here's to Tara, who is of course
the queen married to her son Artaxerxes.
She had her rivalry with with with Parasatis and one thing she
did was speak out in court over what she did to Masabati.
She's like you took your son's. Ally and.
Flayed him alive. Like that's bad, that's evil.
You, you know, you shouldn't have done that.
And the 10,000 mercenaries, they didn't know what to do after
their leader was killed. They're like, we're 2000 miles
from home and our the guy paying us is dead.
We're going to go home now. We're going to try to make our
way back home. It's going to be hard.
It's going to be dangerous. And this guy's Xenophon, that
soldier author was in the in the group.
He wrote this book about their adventures trying to get back to
Greece. Almost half of them died before
that, before they actually started going back home, before
they figured out what they had to do.
Tisa Furnace invited the leaders.
Of the 10. 1000 to a banquet to discuss what's next.
Like, you know, you guys, we don't have to be enemies, do we?
Maybe that was his, that was what he said, but actually, when
they showed up to dinner, he had them all seized and sent to
Babylon. Interestingly, Parasatus wanted
them released. Even though.
They were they had failed to fight properly for her son.
Their leader didn't obey the order.
But she maybe she didn't know that part.
But Staatera was like these 10,000 were hired to fight
against my husband. I want their leaders killed.
She got her way, Marjorie got her way.
And the leaders of the 10,000 were decapitated.
And that's when Xenophon, the author.
And a few others. Had to elect new leaders.
He was one of them and they had their adventure, which is a
story for another time, a story that again we have that book.
He wrote it over 2000. Years ago.
But we have it a little while later, Parasatius invited to
Tara to dinner. This is what they do from time
to time. Yet Marjorie and Cersei, they
dine together. They hate each other, but they
sit there with their inscrutable faces, making cutting remarks to
each other and trying to maintain their composure.
Who can be better at insulting the other person without making
it obvious that it's an insult? That kind of thing.
Now, of course, neither of them are stupid.
They're both wary of poisoning of underhanded maneuvers.
Like that? Don't you know they, they don't
trust each other? They both hate each other.
So, you know, there's always a, there's a little bit of wariness
involved here. Parasatus had a, a game hen
cooked for them to share, took a knife.
Well, she didn't take a knife. Her servant Gigas took a knife
and slice the bird clean in half, right down the middle.
What Parasatis had done was put poison on one side of the blade
only. So when the knife cuts through
it, only the blade on one side had poison on it.
So only 1/2 of the bird got poison on it.
So when when Cetera sees Parasatis eating, she's like OK,
I'm good, I'll eat 2. Whoops, she died.
Painfully, it was a. Several days of dying.
This is like something out of the TV show.
Or Cersei poisoned her Dornish prisoners, very similar to that.
And Artaxerxes forgave her. What?
You killed my wife? But he forgave her.
This is what I mean about her having really powerful hold over
him. Apparently she was banished to
Babylon for a little while, but I mean, Babylon was one of the
royal capitals. She probably lived the just as
powerfully as she did, maybe just a little bit less
influence, but eventually she was allowed back.
The servant Gigas, who actually did the cutting of the game hen
Artaxerxes had her killed brutally, like had her head put
between stones and crushed these Persians in their executions.
Just unbelievable. Right?
Side note, Bostatera and Parasitis have asteroids named
after them. One in 1916 and one in 1918.
Yeah, so. Tisifernes.
Still had a problem with these. 10,000.
Mercenaries. He had obviously screwed them
over and killed their leaders, but they were trying to pass
through his territory to get home.
He basically was able to play it off by his enemy.
Farnabasis. So we mentioned earlier,
Farnabarsis is the one who helped Lysander by murdering
Alcibiades. Tisifernes and Farnabasis, as
neighboring governors often do hate each other.
So Tisifernes basically was hated by everybody.
Tysiphernes, we'll call him Tysiphernes the the Terrible or
Tysiphernes the treacherous. He, the Greeks hated him.
Both Spartans and Athenians hated him.
Half of the royal family hated him.
All of Cyrus's allies hated him. Lysander hated him.
But King Artaxerxies thought he was one of the most loyal guys
that he had, so that he had that going for him.
Tysiphernes story is not over. He is continuing in this one,
the year 400 hits. Now we have the 95th Olympiad,
the Stadion, the naked race. Naked Sprint was won by Minos of
Athens, the boxing by Demarcos of Par Asia, the wrestling by
Balkis of Troisen, the pancreation mixed martial arts
by Antiochus of Leprion. And the four horse race was won
by Timon of Ellis, another Elysian winning again.
The Elysians are the ones who founded the Olympics and they're
very rich and had a lot of horses.
So even though Cyrus was dead, the reason for the war, there's
no rival claimant, the war still popped right back up with
basically the same people, as we'll see in a minute.
Because Tessa Furnace, the year later, wanted to punish the
Greek cities of Ionia, the Turkish Greek cities, for siding
with Cyrus that he wanted. He wanted to get back at them
for that. And Sparta, because they're
friendly with those cities thanks to Lysander, rose to
their aid. So you get the same exact people
minus Cyrus fighting against each other two years later just
like that, thanks to Tony. Sled 6976.
For the Super chat, appreciate says I love this.
You guys rock. I'm glad you love this.
I love it and I hope to get to do more of it.
So let's not waste any time and get right back to it.
The defense gets offensive before Tyssafernis launched
launched his attack of punishment.
There there was the Game of Thrones played in Sparta, which
I already described. This now happened the the time
when Ajiselaus, with Lysander's help, outmaneuvered his cousin
Leotaijudis Leotaijudis Leotichidis.
Rather. Mostly by that bastardly rumor.
It didn't help. By the way, I didn't mention
this before that Leotaijudis wasn't recognized by his father
till his father was on his deathbed, so it really did seem
like the rumor that he wasn't legitimate had a lot of legs to
it now. No, no word if Agis was gored by
a boar like Robert. We have a change of air on or a
clarification of errors on the deathbed.
Very similar to Robert and Ned there now, very early in his
reign. Just allows his reign, that is.
The economy was messed up because of what Lysander did.
He brought all that money back and it was all screwed up.
And I told you there were conservatives, ultra
conservatives within Sparta who were really against this.
And a group of them were led by a man named Synodon.
This is called by the this is called the conspiracy of
Synodon. And they were pushing back.
They were trying to fix the economy.
They were trying to like get these other Spartans to give
their money back or to give it to the States and not to throw
off the this inbound. The economy was crashing.
It was it was a really big problem, but just allow us just
had them killed. I didn't really address the
problem. Spartan society got a little.
Bit more. Titchy, a little more
problematic, a little more civil conflict became likely, and this
is when Ticifernes made his attack.
Now, I said Sparta was still part of this war and they got
involved fighting back against Cisifernes, but Sparta's
sometimes they're a little slow, and they were slow this time.
It took them a few years to get involved, but it was Lysander at
the head of it when it. Happened.
Lysander, these cities that Cisifernes is getting revenge
on, these are the cities that he had alliances with.
These are the cities that owed him favors.
These, if he wants to keep those relationships, if he wants those
cities to still owe him favors, he needs to make sure that
they're not conquered or or messed up by Tysafernes or
Tysafernes could come change who's in charge there.
And all of a sudden Lysander won't have allies anymore, not
in those cities anyway. Now, again, the Conservative
Party's like, dude, you screwed up the economy.
This is another campaign far away.
We're a country that looks inward.
We care a lot more about Greece and what's going on here.
Plenty of us don't care about Persia or about having a Navy or
about any of that. The other half are like, we care
about having a Navy, we care about Persia and all of that.
They had to reach a compromise, and the compromise was OK,
Lysander says. I'm not going to take very many
citizens. I'm only going to take 30
Spartans at 30. That's it.
The rest would be freed slaves and allies.
So they're like, all right, we can agree to that.
That's a fair compromise. It just allows us is going to be
the king on this mission. Lysander's going with, but he's
not in charge. He's 1 of 30 royal attendants.
He can't be given the nave arc position.
So they got to give him a job that allows him to have
influence, but they can't. But they also don't want to
break their own rules. They got to get around that.
They're still doing this with Lysander, just finding ways to
give him positions that normally he shouldn't have.
But his talent and his influence were just so dominant that they
just kind of had to. So it just allows, remember
Spartans are very pious. He wants to go to, he's going to
go to Asia. He's going to take.
The fight to the Persians, he's going to take the army back to
Turkey, to Anatolia, to Ionia, all there's different names that
all basically mean the same thing.
Now remember how he's 44 now, or 43 in the year 396, but he's
never LED a major. Campaign.
In Greece. So this first major campaign
he's going to lead is in Asia, over in Ionia, A little unusual.
But before he goes, he's got to do all the proper religious
things, the ceremony. So he goes to Olympia, gets a
favorable Oracle from them, goes to Delphi, gets a favorable
Oracle from them. But he's not done.
He wants to go big on the pomp and circumstance.
He wants this to be a big moment for all of Greece.
He wants to get support from the rest of Greece, and he wants to
glory. So what does he do?
He goes to Alice Palace is where Agamemnon launched the Trojan
War. He sacrificed there.
That's where the famous incident of the God Artemis appears to
Agamemnon is like no, the sacrifice is insufficient.
Makes him sacrifice his daughter instead to have favorable winds.
Very Stannis moment where you know he's sacrificing.
It's kind of like sacrificing. This has been compared to the
sacrifice of Shereen many Times Now.
This works out very poorly for Agamemnon in the long run.
When he, when he goes to the Trojan War, comes back, his wife
murders him for killing their daughter.
So I don't know exactly if it just, it just allows us looking
at it that way. He's like, yeah, I want to be
like Agamemnon. I'm like, Are you sure you want
to be like Agamemnon? So, but he does.
He's like, I want to remind everybody of Troy.
I want to remind everybody, hey, y'all remember we wanted to get
Greece back. I mean, we want to get Persia
back for invading us. And we did that back in the year
1200 or so. We, we attacked them.
It wasn't Persia, but it was the same area.
The I, what's now Ionian Greece was Troy back then.
We're going to the same place to fight for the similar 'cause he
wanted everybody to remember all that.
So he goes to Thebes and gets ready to do a sacrifice.
And we'll I'll tell you what happens in.
Just a second. 1st, a quote from Lysander where the lion's skin
falls short, it must be eked out with the foxes.
That's a great one, he's saying. Yeah, when you, when frontal
aggressiveness, when straightforward attacks don't
work, you got to be sneaky. You know, you got to work
things. You got to be underhanded.
If you can't do it with straightforward means, you got
to be underhanded. Now, frankly, I think Lysander
preferred to be the fox and the lion, but you know, he's a
Spartan, so he's got to give lip service to manly frontal
assaults. This was the year 396.
Like I. Said so the 90. 6th Olympiad.
Yeah, that's an amazing thing about Greece.
I told you how small it was. They kept doing the Olympics.
Even when they were wars. They could, the entire country
could be war-torn and they would still do the Olympics.
It's they were very dedicated. They really were into their
athletics. The Stadion was won by U Polemos
of Elias, another Elysian winning.
So that's the naked Sprint. The Diallos, which is the double
naked Sprint just twice the distance was won by Croquinas of
Larissa. Now Croquinas of Larissa, if you
recall, won the Stadion back in four O 4.
So he won the the naked Sprint in four O 8 and then or in four
O 4 and then won the naked double Sprint in four O 4.
Fast Guy apparently knew there were new events that year.
The Herald contest, the Loudest Voice I guess, and the Trumpet
contest. These were, yes, trumpeting and
Harold speaking orating. Were.
Olympic events. They were won by.
Timaeos of Elis and Kratis of Elis.
But Siniska or Kaniska, a Spartan Princess, became the
first woman known to breed horses for competition.
She trained them and bred them herself, which is unusual.
Rich people, often they don't do the training part.
They just hire people to do that.
But apparently she was very involved in it and her horses
won. She got a statue made to boast
of this accomplishment. That said, you know, I'll read
you the quote just a SEC Rochet. I'll read you the quote just a
second. And this made it just allow us
very happy. Anything that's increasing the
glory of Sparta. I think it's a win for Sparta is
nice for him. Oh, but also, this was his
sister. Yeah.
So he's very proud. He.
There's some evidence that he pushed her to enter this because
he observed her talent and was like, well, you know, you're a
you're a woman. They don't let women do this.
But we can get we can make this happen.
And she did it. And this wasn't just a one off.
Not only is she going to compete in the next Olympics, which I'll
tell you the results of when we get there, but it opened the
floodgates for more women to get involved in chariot racing.
There's multiple women's sports organizations today that are
named after Cynisca. There's a hero shrine erected to
her in the in plain tree Grove, which is a Spartan religious
ceremonial place. So she had her own shrine made
for this. Pretty cool.
Now here now, like I said, a lot of Olympic athletes when they
win, they they make a statue of themselves and donate it to
Olympia. We have what hers read.
The inscription is still a visible and it says quote Kings
of Sparta are my father. And brothers I, Cynisca,
victorious with a chariot of swift footed horses, have
erected this statue. I declare myself the only woman
in all Halas to have won this crown.
A Peleus, son of Calacles, made it.
Gotta love that. Gotta love that.
Back to the campaign, this may have happened before the
campaign or just after either way, it just allows would be
very happy for his sister and for his family and for Sparta
given the magnitude of the campaign and given how.
It just allows WAS. Selling it as a pan Hellenic
enterprise. We're all going after Persia.
We're all going to save these Greek cities of Persia from
Persian dominance. We all have an A vested interest
in this, don't we? Nah, Athens, Thebe and Corinth,
which Corinth would be the probably the fourth most
powerful city in this era. Although they were more
interested in art and partying, so they they're less involved in
the wars, more involved in the economy, in the art and stuff
like that. So as I said, Ajis allows when
to offer that sacrifice, billing it as the second Trojan War.
But the problem is that Alice is in Boisia, which is theben
territory, and Ajisalaos didn't ask for permission.
Worse, he used his own priest, his own seer to perform the
rites. Big no no.
This was a this was like him just being an 800 LB gorilla.
I think he can get away with everybody wants.
He didn't bring his army with him.
His army was still stationed back at their camp.
He only brought his 30 royal attendants with him, including
Lysander. Thieves sent out a cavalry
detachment when they heard what was happening and they
interrupted the ceremony. They took the sacrificial
victim, which is an animal, not a person, and they threw it on
the ground like like a lonely Island songs threw that stuff on
the ground. The Spartans were horrified.
How many times have I pointed out in this episode how pious
they are? These dudes just interrupted
their religious ceremony through the sacrificial offering on the
ground. Big deal, mad.
They were very angry. It just allows proud, pious,
pissed but couldn't. Do anything about it, he only.
Brought his 30 attendants. They're not going to spill blood
in a in A at a religious place like this.
He just had to swallow his anger and sail off.
But what did I tell you at the beginning of this episode?
Why did a disallow us sneakily, underhandedly probably push this
sneak attack, the secret coup on Thebes in 382 because of stuff
like this? He hated Thebes, but he did his
job. He kept going.
He continued. On to.
Asia with the campaign, many of those 10,000 soldiers that had
by this time made it back joined up.
They were like, yeah, I've been there before.
I want to go back there. So a lot of those guys re signed
up with a just allow us, including the author Xenophon.
Xenophon and a just allow us formed a relationship.
They knew each other. Xenophon really liked a just
allow us. I'm not saying it was a sexual
relationship, just a friendship. But Xenophon big, big fan of a
just allows. He wrote about him.
He's one of the reasons we know so much about a just allows is
because Xenophon wrote about him.
But this popularity of Lysander became a problem once they got
there. Once they get in front of all
these Greek city states, Lysander's popularity became
more apparent. It was something that he was
able to keep under wraps because, well, Sparta wasn't
having direct contact with any of these leaders.
Everything was through Lysander or through the other temporary
Navarre Calicratidis, who is now dead.
So he's observing this, and just as Alex is looking around, he's
saying all these powerful men, all these oligarchs, all these
rulers of these cities that are our allies, they all defer to
Lysander. I'm the king.
He's again proud man.
He does not like this. They're constantly deferring to
him, to Lysander. They should be deferring to just
allow us the king. I'm the leader.
He was upset about this. It wasn't just the Ionians too.
It wasn't just the Ionian Greeks, but the Persians that
upset him even more in a way because it's because these
Persians are lesser to them. Like even the Persians are
giving more deference to Lysander.
Oh, that bothered him so much. So this is an Aries Tywin
situation. Even though it, even though it
just allows us our Tywin, he turns to Aries here because he
really doesn't like seeing this lesser guy.
This lower ranked man gets so much acclaim, gets so much
deference, gets so much pride and so much honor.
So what does it just allow us to do?
He. Even though this used to be his
lover, even though this guy helped him take the throne, even
though this campaign wouldn't be happening without him, What does
it just allow us to? He makes Lysander his royal meat
Carver. Think of Robb Stark and that
joke with the Great. Just like my Lord father told me
it was death to bear steel against your Liege Lord.
But that lists you just meant to cut my meat, right?
Yeah. The idea was to humble him, of
course, and it it it wasn't enough entirely He so he let him
keep this job for a little while just so he could shove it in
people's faces, so enough people would see Lysander doing this
and just allow us. Was known to quip like, yeah,
these powerful men need to go consult with my meat Carver.
So eventually he's just like after a little while of making
people watch him cut meat, he sent him to guard the rear and
then sent him back to Sparta after that.
And of course, this is risky as hell, right?
This is the guy that without him, this campaign might not
work. None of these cities would even
be under Spartan control in the 1st place without Lysander.
This guy is a is a genius, a military genius.
A just allow us, a sending away because of his pride, his best
military asset. But a just allow us is really
good, too. He's really talented.
We haven't seen him in action yet, but he's confident.
He knows what he's capable of. He's not wrong.
He's not. This is not going to.
Backfire. Horribly even.
Though you might think it would, but what does Lysander?
Do. Back at Sparta, he goes right
back to his plotting, goes right back to his plan of trying to
change the constitution. He's like, all right, well, I'm
back in Sparta, so let's go back to that plan.
Let me go try to change back to elective monarchy.
Let's let's get away from this hereditary monarchy crap and go
to elective monarchy. We'll return to him and his
plotting in a little bit. Let's stick with the just allow
us. Who was it?
Who was his opponent in the field?
Tisa furnace, of course, the Tisa furnace.
The traitorous, the treacherous. Who do you not agree to a truce
with? A guy who I just called
treacherous. Well, they did have a truce.
They swore holy oaths to obey this truce, give each other a
few months to get their business together, and then they'd go
back to fighting. But Disafernis, the minute his
reinforcements arrived, he broke the truce, Adisilao said.
Thanks. Thanks.
For. Breaking the truce you broke a
holy oath. You put the gods on our side by
breaking a holy oath. The.
Gods are now on our side. He masterfully used that for his
advantage and giving his own troops morale.
Yep, look, the gods are on our side.
He he broke a holy oath y'all. And the Spartans being so pious,
they totally bought it. They totally believed him.
And probably a lot of the other Greeks did too.
Very effective use of morale there.
So this is what I'm saying. It just allows us.
He knows what he's doing. Sending away a genius commander.
Not going to backfire like you might think so.
He. Told.
Ticiphernes he. Declared this out loud, made
sure everybody heard it. He wanted all of the region to
hear that the gods were on his side 'cause that's a great thing
to trumpet. And he's like, the gods are on
the Spartan side. That could win him more allies,
right? If people believe it, a lot of
pious people out there might be like, yeah, that's a good point.
Ticiphernes broke a holy oath that's he's the bad guy.
So he when declaring this, he also said we're going to March
on Caria Qoraya. I don't know whatever the name
is, Caria Qoraya doesn't matter. Yeah, I'm going to March on
Qoraya. And Tisa Furnace was like, oh,
he heard this declaration, sent his army to to Qoraya.
It just allows didn't attack Qoraya.
He lied. Tisa Furnace sits there with his
army. Waiting for.
It just allows us to show up, never does.
It just allows us to tax elsewhere.
Tisa Furnace is rightfully fooled and rightfully angry and
looks looks foolish. He looks like he got played,
because he did get played. It just allow us.
Then says I'm going to attack Sardis.
Says it very loudly. Make sure everybody knows.
And this sounds like a Spartan thing to do.
They're so aggressive and straightforward.
He's. Yeah, declaring his intention to
attack. Meet me there.
We'll face each other. We'll see who's stronger.
That's a Spartan thing to do. This time, he was lying again.
He didn't attack Spartis, Sardis.
He was reverse bluffing. Tsifernes thought he would do
the same thing. He's like, I'm not, I don't
believe you. This time I'm not sending my
army to Sardis 'cause you're just tricking me.
He did go to Sardis and he did burn it.
So again, Tsifernes looks real dumb and it just allows looks
real smart. Now, this is an important spot.
Sardis is not just some random city.
Sardis 100 years before had been burned by Athens during a
different Ionian revolt. That.
Ionian Revolt led to the Persian Wars, which led to the Battle of
Thermopylae. That is what Xerxes was coming
over to Greece to do to punish them for burning Sardis 100
years before, over 100 years before.
So. So yeah, Tystifernis said the
old fool me once, fool me, yeah, you did get fooled twice, but
and he did get fooled again. So yeah, Sparta was so happy.
They're like, yeah, just allow us.
Good job. Some of the conservatives were
happy because he pushed Lysander to the side and they were.
They were happier seeing their king do this rather than this
upstart. And they made him commander of
both land and sea armies. That had never been done before.
No Spartan king had ever had full command of land and sea
armies. Also, for most of Spartan
history, command of their sea armies doesn't mean very much.
But again, this is despite very little experience.
He showed talent and clearly had learned things from when he
wasn't king, but that he was new.
He also was learning a new style of warfare.
Fighting in Asia Minor very different than fighting in
Greece. Greece is very hilly, very
small, not a lot of cavalry, room for cavalry, not a lot of
Archers. That's why they have those big
heavy infantry everywhere. That's it's, that's the core of
their armies there. That's what it's all about.
Big wider spaces in Turkey, way more cavalry, way more like
javelin ears and slingers and Archers.
I just allow us, despite coming from very conservative country,
adapted to the style of warfare very quickly.
Which is going to matter a lot when he goes back to Greece and
has these cross trained skills now.
Tis a furnace after these two losses was definitely
embarrassed. His status dropped a little bit.
He had a chance to get back in it.
If he could win a battle or two, he'd look good.
But remember his nearby governor Farnabasis, who didn't like him.
Farnabasis was like, I don't like Tisifernes.
I know who else doesn't like Tisifernes?
Parasatus. Our Cersei who still wants
revenge on Tisifernes for twice ratting out, writing out Cyrus
and this. This gave them an opening.
So Parasatus along. With.
Farnabasis and a third guy named Tethrowstis convinced the king
Artaxerxes that Tisifernes, he's a failure, he's got to go.
And Artaxerxes, he didn't care that much.
He's like, OK, sure, fine. His mother's very influential.
He goes along with it. So Tithraustis goes to Asia
Minor and gets a meeting with Tisafernis and gets him to go to
Farna, gets him to go to someone's house and they murder
him and Tithraustis instead. That or that rather Tis Routhis
then takes his place. He becomes the new governor of
the of the region and now he has to deal with Ajis Allowance, but
he takes a much different strategy.
He's like, I don't want to fight this guy in the field.
Tisa Furnis didn't lose because he's an idiot.
He lost because Ajis Allowance was smarter and he's a smart
guy. I don't really want to go up
against Ajis Allowance either, so I'm going to offer him a
bunch of money. He's like, hey, I'll give you 30
talents to go attack Farna Bazis, even though that's this
different. Persian Governor.
Even though they're under the same auspices of the same chain
of command. He's like, yeah, I'm going to go
attack my new my new rival. 30 talents is a ton of money. 1.
Talent is 9 man years of skilled labor, so that's 270 man years
of skilled labor worth of money. That's just an ungodly amount of
cash. It's it's all apparently was all
silver. So he's just allows he's like,
yeah, OK, I I'll happily go do that.
There's Greek cities over there too that need freeing, so I can
do that with more money. Now.
Farnabazis is like, OK, two can play that game.
And this is where Farnabazis acquires his nickname.
This is the nickname I'm giving him.
A lot of these nicknames come from me because it makes them
easier to remember, but it's also how the Greeks did it.
The Greeks didn't do Farnabazis the first or Artaxerx, he's the
second. They gave them nicknames like
I'm trying to do. They didn't.
We don't know what a lot of the nicknames are, so I'm just
giving them ones that help you remember.
So Farna Bazis. Here's where he becomes known as
Farna Bazis the paymaster, or Farna Bazis the balancer.
He responded by offering huge sums of money to Thebes.
He's like, OK, Sparta, you got paid to come attack me.
I'm going to pay Thebes to attack you back in Greece.
So. He's like, I'm not going to
fight you in my. Own.
Territory. I'm going to go fight you in
your territory and make you want to go home to defend your own
land. Now I'm going to get rid of you
by attacking your homeland, not by attacking you.
He's going to. He's going to force to just
allow us to go home. At first it doesn't work though.
Just allows us like, yeah, it doesn't matter.
We can handle ourselves back there.
My Spartan compatriots can handle you.
They can handle Thebes. We're not afraid of Thebes.
Go ahead. In fact, he.
Doubled down, he says. Not.
Only do I say go ahead and invade us, we'll fight you
there. I'm going to go deeper.
I'm going to go farther into Persia.
I'm going to leave Ionia and start going east towards the
Persian capital. Now Persian capital is still
super far away. And this time you might have
been bluffing. He he wasn't bluffing when he
said he was going to attack Sardis, and he maybe not wasn't
maybe wasn't bluffing when he said he's going to stay.
But the whole moving towards Persia, that might have been a
bluff to get a reaction. Regardless of whether it was a
bluff or not, Farnabazzis wasn't bluffing.
He gave a bunch of money to Thebes.
Thebes took that money and a new war started back in Greece, and
that's called the Corinthian War.
Spartan walks with his feet not. With his mouth, a just allows so
Sparta's domineering rule. Again as I.
Pointed out a bunch of times it doesn't go well.
None of the Greek city states really like being ruled by
Sparta. They're very they're very
domineering. They don't approve of a lot of
the other cultures. So and Farna Baz's knew that
he's he was. Pretty.
Easy for him to find people that didn't like Spartan rule and pay
them. This goes to show just how
insanely rich Persia is. This guy's just a governor and
he changed the balance of power in Greece by himself by bribing
one city state and maybe a few other lesser ones that aren't
worth mentioning to get to attack Sparta.
Sparta. This is dangerous, even.
Though despite just allow us making these claims about them
being not bothered, if Sparta had all of Greece turn against
them, Athens and Thebes and Corinth and all these other
ones, that's a problem. But no one wanted to be first.
Sparta hadn't been beaten on land in centuries.
Like not if it was full Sparta. Maybe smaller skirmishes, you
could argue maybe some of these they lost, but no significant
battle where the Spartans were the majority of the opposition
had been won by somebody else. They were that dominant on land.
So even though Greece could gang up on them, no one wanted to be
first. No one wants to be the guys that
actually steps up to Sparta and has to face them across a
battlefield in an infantry battle.
Like who's going to which of us is going to step up and do that?
Not me, not me, not me, not me. So this continued by the way the
money continued to flow back to Sparta cause of Lysander's
corrupting of the country continued like just allow us was
continuing that he was making money at in Persia, winning
battles and sending the loot home like Lysander.
He wasn't keeping the money for himself.
This is where he differs from a Tywin.
He's is where he's more like a maybe a little more like a
Stannis or again like a Euron, where the money is for his is
for his own power, his own status, not for his own
gratification or for his own self, whatever, however you want
to put it. He wanted it to elevate his
country and his own status within his country.
Meanwhile, of course, this is while this is all happening,
Lysander still trying to change the constitution behind the
scenes. So thieves did accept
Pharnabazzis offer to attack Sparta, but they didn't want to
do it directly. They still were like, yeah, I
don't want to. We're still not going to go
straight at Sparta. So they found a way to do it via
proxy. They took their ally Locris,
who's close by, and they convinced them to attack Phosis.
Locris attacks Focus. Locris is an ally of Thebes.
Focus is an ally of Sparta. So Locris and Focus start
fighting and Locris says, hey, thieves, we need your help.
And Thieves is like, Yep, you're our ally.
Honor demands us to come. We're not trying to go fight
Sparta. We got to go help our ally.
And same thing happens with Focus.
They're like, hey, we got to call in our friends Sparta.
Sparta's like, well, we're in charge here.
We would look weak if we didn't defend our ally, so let's go
defend them. So proxy war begins.
Neither of them went right at each other, but here they are
fighting over the same things. So Sparta sends 2 armies.
They've already got their big army in Asia Minor with a just
allow us. They send out Lysander, he's
still a big deal. So they give him commander, one
of the armies, possibly they give him command of one of the
armies to get him to stop conspiring about changing the
constitution because he's not going to get to do that while
he's on campaign. The other army is sent by
Pausanias. This is that same, this is the
son of that same Pausanias who was too weak, the one that was
like, you know, I kind of like Athens and all.
Let them have their democracy back that remember that guy got
exiled and became an author. His son is the other king.
He's not a weakling or softy like his father, but he's not
exactly a powerhouse either. He doesn't like Lysander either.
He's a, he's like a, he's more conservative.
And he didn't like Lysander's attempts to change the
Constitution because that would affect his own son, right?
His own son would be disinherited, potentially.
So any attempt to change the system would threaten the
current monarchs. So unsurprisingly, Lysander, the
more aggressive, the more efficient, the more experienced
commander, got there first. He got to the city Haliarchis
first. And but again, Greece is not
very large. Palisanis is only a few days
behind. Lysander sends a message back to
Palisanis and says, hey, get here on this day.
When you do, I'm going to attack.
All right, I'll be attacking you.
Join the attack. And he sent that message to
Palisanis. But Thebes intercepted the
message. They got a hold of Lysander's
plans. The plans didn't even work out.
Lysander's waiting. He's waiting.
Palisanius doesn't show up.
He's like, what? The hell why isn't?
Palisanius there, he assumes it's politics, probably assumes
Palisanius is playing games Palisanius is doing, making this
move to make Lysander look bad. Or it's it's about the
Constitution thing. It's about Lysander, it's not
about the battle. That's probably Lysander's
assumption now. This is a guy who was really
patient, though. Normally I told you that his
success as an Admiral. Was.
Built on being patient and waiting for his enemies to make
a mistake. In this case, it looks like the
roles were reversed. Lysander became impatient and is
like all right, we're Sparta. The element of surprise is on
our hand. If the longer we.
Wait, the worse things are going to get.
I want this done now. He attacks Thebes waiting behind
a Ridge because they knew what he was going to do and they knew
Palestinians army was still a ways away.
So once Lysander attacks he attacks the walls and starts to
try to storm the walls. The Thebans emerge and attack.
So they have Lysander trapped between the city of Haliartis
and this attacking force by Thebes.
Lysander was killed. That's it.
He's dead. No more messing with the
constitution, no more plotting, no more Damon Targaryen.
He's dead. And he was killed in part
because of his his impatience. The one thing that he was really
good about doing this one time, he didn't do it and it cost him
everything. Palestinians eventually did show
up and he's like, can we have the bodies?
Can we have our bodies to bury them?
Big deal in Greece, burying, burying the dead, huge deal.
Very common after a battle for the losing side to say, hey,
y'all, can we have the bodies? The winning side will say, yes,
go ahead. It's a way to acknowledge that
they won. And the meanwhile the victors
are like building a trophy. They set up like a little thing
to commemorate their victory. So the the themes are like, you
can have the bodies on the condition that you go ahead, go
back home. Once you do that, Pausanias was
like OK and he went home and was also he got prosecuted for
failing to aid Lysander in time. So both palisaniuses came to bad
ends there. It's actually possible.
I got the. The fates of the two
palisaniuses. Mixed up, he may have been the
one that became the writer, but doesn't matter.
They aren't big in our story. So Lysander generational figure
the likes of whom Sparta never saw again, a guy raised to be an
infantry commander that somehow was an Uber talented naval
commander and even more extraordinary builder of
alliances, politician, seeker of power and claimer of power.
So far. Too bad as his plan worked out
way better than he thought it would.
He is like I'm going to bribe thieves to just distract Sparta
and what he did was end up killing Lysander.
Boom. And that worked even better
because Pausanias was just prosecuted.
He's out of the picture and his replacement's like 12.
So they don't have a king that can March into the field yet.
It just allow us is in Asia. Lysander's dead.
It just allow us is like, you can't make me go home.
Farnabassus is like, yes, I can. Sparta itself was like just the
last. We need you to come home.
Lysander's dead. Palestinians is out of action.
We don't have any leaders. We need you.
Sorry. You're doing great over there.
But we've got to come home now. Just allow us plate it off.
He obeys the summons. Even though he's a king, he does
have to obey. It's it's it's in the
constitution and all that. He played it off though.
He made some comments. He said I was driven out of
Asian, Asian minor by 10,000 Archers.
What he meant by that was The Archers that are printed on the
gold coins that were bribed, given in bribes to Thebes.
So Persian derricks named for King Darius, Derrick Darius,
they have those Archers on one side.
So there you go. But who is he?
So he's actually mad at Thebes? Again.
Right first, he's mad at Thebes for spoiling his glorious launch
to re to you know, calling to mind a king Agamemnon and his
glorious sacrifice. The Thebes has messed with him
again again worse, the death of Lysander shook all of Greece.
Everybody knew what what a big deal he was and and how
important he was. They're like, oh, Sparta just
lost an important leader and lost that battle it.
Wasn't a. Big defeat of their infantry.
It didn't. It wasn't like that kind of
embarrassment, but it was a loss.
So Athens and Corinth and Argos. Argos is probably the fifth
biggest city around here. They all join thieves.
They're like, yeah, let's get Sparta.
You started it off. You kicked it off.
We didn't want to be the ones to start it, but you did.
Let's join. Even though Corinth isn't very
militaristic, they're militaristic enough.
This is still the ancient world. Everyone's got armies.
So the Allies hosted there and they did that because Corinth is
near to Sparta and Corinth is very traditionally under Spartan
control. So they wanted to make a
statement and keep Corinth allied so that Sparta didn't
try. To flip them back.
To their side this was a new leader, Aristodamus by Sparta.
He was the Regent for this new young king.
Agysepolis is the new young king and they had a little battle
here. This is where I have to.
Remind you all of how hop light battles go.
This is going to come up a few times, so just a quick
explanation here. It's very silly.
The ancient world battles in Greece were they put their
strongest guys on the right, their weakest guys on the left.
The other side would do the same.
So the strong guys on one side would be aligned with the weak
guys on the other side. So the two sides would come
together. The two strong sides facing the
weak sides would crush the weak guys and then they turn and
crushing the weak guys on either side of them.
They'd eventually meet in the middle.
And it so it often became who crushes the which right crushes,
which left fast enough to attack the other right before they can,
you know, get their positions right and their their their
discipline, their formation. It's like a shin facing off a
steel toed boot. Both sides like A2 boots facing
each other where each toe of each boot is lined up against a
shin and they just, they're kicking each other and they set
up this way every time. Of course the shin's going to
lose to the steel toed boot, but this is just how they did it for
centuries. This was no different.
Yes. I'm setting it.
Up for a time when it will be different, but it's not this
time. So Thebes was excited.
They're eager, but they're undisciplined and Sparta's still
very good at their They're still good at their business.
They're still the best on land, even though they're maybe
they're, their reputation's slipping a little bit.
They're still just ultimately their, their, their citizens do
nothing but practice war. That's still not the case for
anybody else. Not thieves, not Corinth, not
Sparta, not, I mean, not Argos, not Corinth.
So Sparta wins. It's not an overwhelming
victory, but it is a win. It's clear enough.
But it wasn't enough for them to breakthrough and get to Corinth
and put Corinth under siege or anything like that.
Remember, Greece is very hilly. So so they were able to protect
the passes into Corinth and Sparta didn't win by enough
margin to force the issue. So they they took their victory
in March back home. At the same time there was a big
naval battle at Canidas. Now the allies won this, beating
Sparta badly. And the part of the reason they
won because of a dude named King Evagoris, King Evagoris of
Cyprus. Cyprus is that island that's
like right off the coast of Lebanon and Palestine and all
that, near Israel, etcetera. So this King Evagoris by the
way, claimed descent from Ajax. So cool guy.
Maybe he was really big. Anyway, very clever to this man.
So Sparta's power at sea just done that, was it All that power
Lysander built? They lost badly in this in this
battle, and they lost their Navy.
And that was it for at least for now.
They may never get it back, but they didn't have it.
They might, but they don't have it right now.
So Farna Bazis is having crazy success here.
He thought to just distract and just allow us force him to go
home, but actually his campaign of payment is going way better
than he could have thought. So many of the allies, so many,
so much of Greece turned on Sparta, more than he could have
predicted. And now with Sparta's sea power
gone, that's just going to embolden more allies, right?
So he gives money to a guy named Conan, who is an Athenian.
Strategos, general strategos, same thing.
And Farna Bazas and Athena and Conan take their fleet and go to
all those islands one by one, start flipping them back.
Lysander and company had flipped so many of those, like with
flipped them to oligarchies, exiled or killed Democrats,
installed people loyal to him, and then went on.
Now it was getting flipped back, flipping back to the Democrats,
to the Thebans and the Athenians, which is a little
odd. Remember that this is a Persian
effort. So Persia's flipping things to
democracies, which is not normally what they do, but
they're fighting against Sparta and that's the best way to beat
Sparta. So a lot of these, as soon as
they flip them, they join. They're like, all right, we're
on your side now too. And they add their strength.
So as Conan and. Farna Bazis the.
Balancer, Farna Bazis, the balancer are going through here
flipping islands. They're also adding strength.
So basically Lysander's burgeoning Kingdom that he
wanted to be king of one day is kind of gone now, only a few
months after his death. Farnabazos, that went further.
The paymaster gave Conan enough money to rebuild those four mile
long walls. How much money would that be?
I don't know, but a huge amount. And he wasn't done.
He didn't just give him enough money to rebuild the walls, he
gave him enough money for 80 ships to guard the project.
Because, you know, someone could sail in and blow all that up.
That amount of money is just absurd.
I mean, 80 ships, all those crews.
We got to talking earlier about how one of the bigger sea
battles wasn't a battle but a war of wages between Lysander
and some of the Persians there and some of the others.
So this, again, was playing out. Now Farnabazzis so successful
that he's recalled back to Persia and offered a daughter of
Artaxerxies to marry, named Apame.
He does, he goes and does that and he's going to exit the story
for now, but he'll be back. He will be back.
Farnabazis will be back. Farnabaxis, he's replaced by
Tirabazis. So from Farnabazis to Tirabazis
and we'll talk about him in a minute.
Back in Sparta, that new Regent, Aristodemus, LED an other, LED
another army against the allies. And again, the allies were a
little screwy. They couldn't decide who was in
charge. They argued about who's the
leader. And meanwhile, Sparta's
perfectly focused. They know exactly who's in
charge. They have their very strict
authoritarian system. And in this battle of Nemea, it
was called, they fought in a dry riverbed.
You know they they were. Victorious.
So Orsodemus wins another battle against the Corinthians, but
again, they're not able to capitalize on the victory
because it's just too hard to break into that that region and
too much of their strength was overseas.
So a just allow us is slowly making his way home.
Ironically, he has to pass through Farnabezas territory to
get back. But Farnabezas actually said go
ahead. He's like, I don't I'm not going
to stop you go home. That was my whole purpose in the
1st place was to attack your homeland.
So you would go home and leave my territory.
So he doesn't stop him. This is straight from Storm of
sorts. Remember that Edmure had that
great plan that everyone agreed to to stop Tywin from crossing,
to break Tywin's strength in at the Red Fork Rob wanted him to
let. Tywin go by.
Because then Tywin would go to the West, and Tywin would be
eating his own food, supplying himself from his own territory,
and bleeding the river, breeding, bleeding the
Westerlands dry. Rob wanted Tywin to go back to
the West. He wanted him to leave the
Riverlands. Same thing here.
Farnabazis. He's got an enemy in his
territory, but that enemy intends to leave and he like,
well, let him go ahead. Meanwhile, it just allows.
His leadership was so good, so quality, so strong and confident
that a lot of the allied cities, some of those Greeks that he
helped out, they went with him. They marched back to Greece with
him. At one point he pillages
Thessaly on the way home. He's got to feed his army if
thessily steals 2 of his envoys and and takes them hostage when
he sends them over to discuss and he makes a very Tywin S
comment, he says those two envoys, those two Spartan envoys
are worth more than all of Larissa.
That's their capital. So yeah, that's pretty cool.
So when he gets home, he's he's trying to March back.
He has to March through Theban territory and he's he took ship
through Theban territory before and marched through it and and
took the Peloponnesis, you know, and now he's got to March back
through it. Thebes is ready for that.
They're like, oh boy, we're not going to let you March through
our territory without a battle. You don't you don't think so, do
you? So they're ready.
They're they position their armies to block his path.
It just allows. Remember he's returned from Gree
from Asia because of Thebes. Oh, and Thebes is allies.
He's mad a partial eclipse hits on the way there right before
the battle and they're nervous about it, but it just allows
he's a he's a he's very good at this.
He says, hey, remember the battle of Kinetis that we that
we fought, that just happened. My brother Pisander, I appointed
him Navark. He bravely fought and died for
you. They won.
They won for you. He gave his life to win that
battle. Do you all remember, guys, I
told you that they lost that battle?
Yeah. Adislaus just straight up lied
to his army and said that they won this famous sea battle over
there. He said, yeah, we won, so let's
build on that and win another one.
Yeah, just straight up lied. So again, you have a this is
actually a pretty big army. You got 25,000 allies facing
about 20,000 men led by Adislaus.
So it's the shins versus the toes of the boots again.
It's the same set up and it was the archive army.
Facing the Spartans. And they were like, wait, why
are we facing the Spartans? We don't want to face the
Spartans. So before the 2 lines even came
together, the archives ran away. The Spartans were like, yeah, we
won. And some of I just saw us as
allies are like, hey, you, you deserve a, a, a, a wreath to
commemorate your victory. Take this wreath and yay.
And meanwhile, the Thebans had won on their side, their boot
kicked through the enemy shin, which wasn't Spartans, it was
Spartan allies. And what do they do?
They kept moving forward and they find themselves in a just
allows his baggage train, which contains loot, loot that he got
in Asia. So all of his Persian loot
sitting in his baggage train And they're like, let's, let's steal
that. It just allows finds out that
this is happening. He gets back into armor and gets
his men back together and marches that way, and he's mad.
He's very mad. Now, in normal hoplite battles,
they don't have a lot of casualties.
They often they try not to. Go straight at.
Each other because it just becomes this insane slugfest
where they're just pushing and shoving and no one can get the
advantage. But it just so how it sought
this out. This is an experienced
commander, but he's mad. They should have been.
He should have let the Theven phalanx pass through and then
attack him from the side because phalanxes are vulnerable from
the side and rear and only strong at the front.
And they're very unwieldy. It's hard to turn.
You know, you got all these like, you got like 100 men and
rows. And yeah, yeah, they're very
unmaneuverable. And they're not meant to be
super maneuverable because this is hilly grease where you don't
have a lot of room to maneuver. But Ajisalaus didn't want that
to happen. He decided to block their pass.
Xenophon was in Ajis allows his army and he wrote about it.
He said. So shield pressed upon shield.
They struggled, killed and were killed in turn.
One of the bloodiest hoplite battles of all time.
The Thebans eventually got away back to their city.
They retreated and got back home or got to the mountain nearby.
Some of them went to a nearby temple of Athena of Athena and
it just allows himself was. Seriously wounded, he.
Had to be pulled out of the battle.
He was bleeding in, in serious, serious straits there.
He told his men to to leave alone the ones that took a
shelter in the temple of Athena and donated 10% of his wealth
that he had taken from campaign to the Oracle Delphi, which he
had got an Oracle from before he left to go to Asia.
So he was kind of returning and finishing that off and he sent a
detachment over to Locris. Remember the original target of
the proxy war thieves got Locris to attack focus.
Well, this wasn't over yet. So it just allows us like, hey,
let's go get Locris while we can.
He sent his one of his polymarks over there, but that polymarks
screwed it up, got killed. And so it just allows marched
home, although he didn't maybe wasn't doing much marching
because of his serious injury. So think about now Sparta's big
problem with leadership. They lost Lysander, they lost
Pausanius, they have this Eros Adamus character, but now it
just allows us seriously injured.
So he can't really be a leader either.
He might not even survive. And this is only a year after
Lysander's death. So under the big deal, just
allow us because of this play, because of this head on assault
against the Thebans, even though it's manly and you know, brave,
it's Sparta didn't like it because their citizens, their
Spartan warriors are worth more than any other country's
warriors. Again, they put all their effort
into making them soldiers. It's all they do.
Theban soldiers archive soldiers.
They're farmers half the time, more than half the time, they
aren't worth as much on a battlefield.
So 300 Spartans getting killed in a battle like this doesn't
matter how many they killed of the enemy, that's too many to
lose. They are supposed to preserve
that core Spartan strength because again that citizenry is
is collapsing internally. They can't afford to lose
Spartan citizens. Especially not because you hate
Thebes. Yet it just allows says things
like I rule because I am ruled more than others.
It's a way to say he has more discipline but he's a real
hypocrite about that. Yes, he is more ruled than
others, but he also rules because he's cunning and sneaky
as well as aggressive and and a great warrior and a great leader
Because while he's laid up with his injury back in Sparta, he
can't lead on campaign. He's pretty old now, and this is
he's in his 50s old for a warrior.
Certainly he starts to sink his hooks into the new young.
King of Josepholis. The 10 year old, he's like,
well, you're a young guy. Our culture's big on older men.
Influencing. Younger men and you're a future
king, my Co king. I'm a king, you're a king.
I'm the older guy. Let me teach you what it's all
about. So yeah, I just allow it.
Starts teaching Jecepolis basically his way.
He's like, I got a young king. He's very open to suggestion and
that's what he does. He starts manipulating and
teaching him and getting him to do things the way he does.
The Corinthian War is not worth getting deep into.
It's a seven-year long war, and it's a lot like that March of
Aristodamos where they win a small battle, but nothing really
much happens because of it. They can't build on that.
What's interesting about the Corinthian War is just a few
things. There's a couple, here's a
couple of notes on it, some interesting things that happen
rather than us going through the whole thing.
Plato, the philosopher, was probably in some of these
battles that amounted to very little.
He may have even been in that battle where Arcadamos won, but
then went back to Sparta after accomplishing very little.
There was a time when it just allows got back into command.
He recovered and lived several years in.
He started leading armies again and there was one small battle
he lost to a man named Ethicrites, who we'll call
Ethicrites the innovator. Ethicrites the innovator.
He changed a few things about phalanx warfare.
I told you all that. It was just very
straightforward, very conservative.
They face each other, they go head on.
Sometimes there's the boot and the shin.
All that business. Well, if Ficritis said, well,
we're always doing the same thing, why don't we make the
Spears just a little bit longer? Then we have a little more
reach. We can start hitting poking at
them before they poke at us. It seems kind of obvious, but it
wasn't done. He also, like, changed their
shoes, made their boots, but he designed better marching sandals
for them. Yeah, they wear sandals, not
boots. Like he uses boot metaphor, but
none of them are wearing boots. So I just allow he didn't.
Really lose much. He lost another.
A group of Spartans. So that was that hurt because
again, those are precious, but they didn't really lose a
military advantage. And it was more about.
Pride and status that he lost there.
But again, because of the pride angle and because Corinth is so
close to Sparta, he's marching back home.
He has to pass by Mantinea. Mantinea is a city in the region
of Arcadia. Arcadia is the region just north
of Laconia, also called Lacodemonia, which is the region
that Sparta's in now. The Mantineans, I guess to pass
by the Mantineans, the Mantineans climb their walls.
They knew he lost and they start mocking and they're like you
lost to a Fiker, tease you lost to an Athenian, blah, blah,
blah. They're mocking him.
He is mad. He doesn't know yet.
Mockery in the ancient world, it works, right?
He's pissed. So the next time he passed
Mantinea, he he marched at night.
So that they. Couldn't mock him when they
walked by, but he also didn't. Forget and he would.
He would have the last laugh, as we'll see here, but not quite
right away. There was an internal struggle
in Corinth when the oligarchs and Democrats went at each other
and they just ended up splitting things.
The oligarchs lost, they got some help from Sparta, and they
captured Corinth's port. The port asked the the port part
of the city was captured by the oligarchs and they held it where
the Democrats held the main city.
And that state of affairs kept for a while until Argos, the
neighboring city, the 5th largest, probably where as I
said, Corinth is the 4th largest.
They addressed this problem by saying, you know what, let's
become one city. Let's become Argo, Corinth or
Corinth, Argos, destroy the border stones between our two
cities and just join together. And that means this, then we'll
be able to push back against these oligarchs even better.
I told you, it just allows went back into the field, right?
He's about 58 now. He had been manipulating and
corrupting and instructing young King Agicepolis, who during this
Corinthian war came of age and started leading minor campaigns
of his own. Nothing of note though, at least
not yet in 392. There was the 97th.
Olympiad. We don't know who won the naked
race, but the boys naked race was won by a kid named Dyke
Dickon. We'll call him Dickon.
Yes, the naked race was won by Dickon.
Boxing was won by Forbion of Halicarnassus.
Wrestling was won by Euthymoneses of Manila.
Menelos and Euthymoneses had won the boys wrestling event eight
years prior. And guess who won the four horse
race again? It was Caniscus.
And it's got all again. She won 2 Olympics in a row.
No word on whether she made a second statue, but I'm sure she
trumpeted her achievements because, well, that's what they
do. Sparta.
The Conservative. Conservative Party.
Rather than the regular. Conservative party sent
Antalcatus who is just allows his in law, but not his friend.
They did not like each other. He's a diplomat.
So already that's a little different than Sparta is.
Usually they're very warlike, very militaristic.
This guy's a diplomat. He goes to Tira Bazis, and
Tierra Bazis is, remember, he's the replacement for Farna Bazis.
And so he's a governor. And he said they want peace.
They're like, hey, can we have peace until, until Kiedis is
like, hey, how about we stop all this?
Let's have peace. Because the Corinthian war is
dragging on. Everyone's fighting Sparta, and
Sparta's starting to feel it, right?
They already lost their fleet, and that's what they're after.
They want a new fleet. So that's the deal.
They say, hey, Tierra Bazis, we'll give you back all these
Asia Minor cities. Asia Minor cities are like,
wait, what? But they don't have a say.
If. You stop attacking.
US. And you give us a new fleet.
It's a big argument. It's a big ask.
But they had a convincing argument.
They're like, look at what Athens is doing.
Yeah, you didn't want us to be powerful, but Athens is doing
the same thing. Athens is flipping all those
cities back to them from us. And what do you think they're
going to do once they flip all those cities?
They're going to be a big problem for you.
And they're actually competent at sea.
And they were a big problem for you, you know, 70 years ago when
they were the dominant power in the region, which ended when the
Peloponnesian War just, you know, sacked all their power.
So, yeah, Conan and Farnabazis were taking all these islands
away. And so it's a good argument.
They're like, yeah, hmm, that's a good point.
And they were also working with King Evagoris of Cyprus.
Remember, this guy rebelled against Persia.
So Cyprus is in rebellion against Persia, and Athens sends
help to him. They send a guy named Cabrios.
Cabrios is our sea snake. He's not going to have a big
role in this episode, but he'll. Have a big role in the.
Next one because well, he's the sea snake and that's really
cool. This is a guy that changed size
a few times. I was a expert at sea, very
brave and wasn't always on the same side.
So he staged a trap on the Spartan Garrison in Cyprus.
He tricked them into a merging to fight a battle because, you
know, they like doing that. They don't like hiding in their
territory, hiding in their castles or whatever their
fortresses. But he had hidden.
Cabrias did some more troops nearby, and once the Spartans
emerged, they were caught between these two armies and
killed. And Sparta lost their presence
on Cyprus. So King of Evagoras moved to,
rather than just trying to reclaim his island, he invaded
Persia and started taking cities in Phoenicia, including Tyre.
Tyre is the model for tyros. Tyre is where purple dye comes
from. Tyros is where colorful dyes
come from. Both those cities get their
colorful dyes from sea snails. He also encouraged another
province in Persia under Persian rule to revolt.
So there's more revolts happening.
Colicchia is the current revolutionary.
So there's Colicchia, Cyprus and all these others, and some of
the Ionian Greek cities. Tirabasis agrees to Antalkidis,
terms Antalkidis rather, and gives him the fleet in exchange
for the cities. All right, I'm going to give you
that fleet. You can have those cities back
but Artaxerxes is like wait. Wait, Wait, wait, wait, wait,
wait, wait. Governor Tirabasis, you did what
now? No, he reversed.
It he said no. He said no, I'm Aries, you're
Tywin, I'm reversing that. You, we don't agree to
antilchitis terms. You can't have a fleet.
He fired Tirabasis. And put a new guy.
Struthas in Struthas went back to anti spartanism but like 2
years later struthas got fired. And Tira Bassus was.
Replaced, and we don't know why. We don't know what happened
behind the scenes. My guess is parasitis, his
overbearing, very controlling mother had something to do with
it. We don't know what her deal is
at this point. She's very old.
She might be in her 90s. It's possible she's not even in
the picture anymore. But if she was, she's doing
things 'cause that's what she did.
She doesn't sit back. That's not her her her vibe.
It could have just been that Antalkidas just was that good of
a diplomat. Either way, Artiserxes flipped
back to being pro Sparta anti Athens.
So the Athenian envoys, including Conan who have been
working with Farna Bazis. He's this powerful general and
he's working as an envoy. Now he gets snatched up and
thrown in prison by Tierra Bazis.
Throwing an envoy in prison. Not cool, but they did it.
Now that Winston Churchill dude Thracibulus, he is appointed to
replace Conan and starts raiding different places throughout the
Aegean, raiding a territory of the Persians and Spartans.
Conan actually escapes from prison, gets the job back from
Thracibulus, then goes to back to Cyprus and dies of like a
fever or something. Which puts Thracibulus right
back in charge again and and Talcott has finally found a way
to stop all this. When the new ships were ready,
he sent them to blockade. The Black Sea.
Which had the same effect Lysander had those 20 some years
before when he entered the Peloponnesian War by blockading
Athens's grain supply. That's again what Antalkidis
did. The grain supply of Athens was
blocked, and Athens didn't have enough ships to break that
blockade. So they're like, all right, you
got us. We'll at least come to the
negotiating table. We'll show up, we'll talk to
you. We'll see what we can do without
Athens. It war, Corinth, Argos and
Thebes. They're like, all right, we're
not going to fight these guys by ourselves, not without Athens.
So we will also come to the negotiating table.
The year 388 was the 98th Olympiad.
The Stadion was won by Saucipos of Athens, the wrestling by
Aristidemos of Ellis, the boxing by You Pelos of Thessaly.
The two Horse by Clayogenes of Ellis and the four horse by
Xenarcos of Sparta. This episode's running a little
longer than we intended, so we're going to do one more
section and then call it. And we'll just keep going.
We'll take, we'll take as many episodes as it needs to get
through all this. I love this story.
I hope you all do too. So we'll just run with it until
it's done and you guys tell us what you think.
One of the stops that Thrasybulus made along the way,
when one of his many raids was the city of Aspendis.
He raided them for food and the Aspendians were pretty pissed
about that. They counter raided him,
attacked his camp at night and killed him.
That's it for Thrasybulus. So that's again a loss for
Athens, which effects their negotiating strategy.
They're like, ah, we lost another general, Dang it.
And so he was a really big deal. And he remember he was one of
the guys that overthrew the 30 tyrants.
So that's a big loss and they felt it.
The King's Peace 380. 7. Valor.
Would cease to be a. Virtue.
If there was no injustice that just allows this, King's Peace
meeting was a huge deal. Picture a Great Council or
something like that where everyone's there, just allow us
was there and he claimed the right to preside.
He like took the high seat and was like, hey, I'm in charge
here. Artaxerxes wasn't there in
person or else he would have done that.
It's it's obviously his spot. Tira Bazis was there as the main
representative for the Persians. Athens had representatives, of
course, and all these others, you know, Sparta and thieves.
Everybody had the other representatives there.
Here's the terms that were inflicted upon them, with Athens
and Athens and Corinthian, Argos and Thebes having the the worst
of it. They had to accept terms that
were not favorable to them. Athens had to give it all back.
Everything they just flipped away from Sparta, away from
Spartan Persia, they had to give back.
Everything Thrasibulus and Conan and Farnabazos had done had to
be reversed. Now, Farnabazos didn't care
'cause he was working for Persia anyway.
He's Persian, so it doesn't really matter to him, and he'd
already gotten rewarded. He's not even in the picture
right now. Avogoris, through very clever
maneuvering put pitted Tirabasis and Orontes and other Persian
satrap against each other and managed to get out of all this
despite rebelling. He got to keep his Kingdom, he
got to keep Cyprus as a client, he had to pay taxes, but he got
to keep the title king. Which is really amazing because
no one else really did. Corinthargo stayed combined into
one. No more.
Part of the deal was they had to go back to being 2 cities.
Thebes had to give up their. Allies Their.
Close local allies the Boesian League, which had existed since
5:20 so thieves had to say no you're individual now and this
was accomplished by a just allows thieves was like OK we'll
sign this deal on behalf of the Boesian league and a just allows
said no everyone signs individually you can't sign on
their behalf. You don't rule them.
So this was that's how he put that to paper was by having the
individual cities sign individually for themselves a
hey, we agree to this peace deal on our own behalf, not because
of Thebes. So by those means, they just
allow us pulled power away from Thebes.
In some ways, the King's peace is amazing.
Think about Aegon's conquest. It was the first true framework
for a unified peace throughout Greece, just like it was for
Westeros when when the Iron Throne was forged.
A set of rules for everyone to adhere to.
We just got through saying over and over and in many different
ways, all these different city states in Greece, including many
that we never mentioned, have different styles of government,
different attitudes, different this, different that.
So they don't have the same set of rules.
They don't agree to what peace and war and why you should have
either of those two, but with a agreed upon framework for
everybody. Hey, peace is worth a lot.
You can accept a little authoritarianism, a little loss
of freedom if it keeps this endless cycle of civil war from
happening. If if right, it's a big.
If like if you. Break the King's peace in
Westeros. Aegon would answer with Dragons,
and everybody knew that, and you knew what the Dragons could do.
So it's not quite so bad here. You don't have to answer to
Dragons, but you have to answer to Persia.
And Persia's really, really powerful, really, really
wealthy, really, really underhanded.
And they'll kill you in really, really awful ways.
But they're really far away. They have power in the in the
Mediterranean, but their capital, the the center of the
power super far away. So Sparta was appointed top dog
in Greece by Persia here. That's how this worked.
They were the framework for this piece was, hey, we Persia, we're
too far away to to enforce the peace.
So we got to appoint someone else to do that.
It's going to be Sparta. People did not like that.
I'm like, we just got through saying we don't want Sparta to
rule us and now you're putting them in charge of us.
At least though, you're saying that even Sparta can't attack
us. They can only attack us if we
break the rules. So that's the rub, right?
Interpretation of the rules is going to become the new
battlefront for the next few years because can Sparta what?
Sparta's. Right What?
When are they allowed to attack? Somebody else for?
Breaking the King's peace. Because if they attack somebody
with an invalid reason, then they've broken the King's peace,
right? Yeah, so.
Sparta's top dog. They get to call the shots, but
they're very restricted. Maybe right it it.
Remains to be seen just. How restricted they will be?
Just how strict will Artaxerxes be?
Just how strict will Sparta be? Nobody knows at this point.
It's also kind of embarrassing, though.
As good as this is, as much as this is a positive outlook for
peace, as long as, even though this is something that will be
later built upon when Greece becomes a little more unified,
having Persia dictate all this is embarrassing.
We've, we've said at plenty of points about this episode that
Greece doesn't like Persian culture.
They think they think they're soft, they think they're corrupt
and too feminine or whatever. You know, these things that
aren't necessarily insults, but they think they are.
And so having Persia Lord over them, king over them like this,
they, even though it was creating peace, they didn't like
it. And it really didn't take very
long. For.
Sparta to start rubbing people the wrong way again.
The Corinthian War ended in 387 with the signing of the King's
Peace, and even though not much changed, both sides had spent a
lot of resources reaching that stalemate.
So Sparta maintained its dominance over the Greek
mainland, but their grip wasn't as strong as it was because now
they have a weaker army, weaker leadership, and restrictions
placed upon them by the King's peace.
In 385, Sparta decided to go at. Mantinea.
That same city that laughed at Ajisa, Laos and.
What was their? Reason.
Because they had walls. They're like, you can't have
walls. That violates the King's peace.
It doesn't. But that was Sparta's pretext.
Yet even Thebes joined them because they didn't want to.
This wasn't the battle to pick with Sparta.
Like we got to enforce the rules and if we're going to stand up
to Sparta, this isn't the time, so we'll go along with it.
We don't have any alliance with Mentania, so they said some.
They sent the group to help Sparta out, including Palapas
and Epaminondas, two very important characters, the two
who I'm the most excited to talk about.
Most of that will have to wait till next time, but here's where
we get to at least introduce them.
Although also, by the way, Aristophanes, the father of
comedy, died in this year 385 or maybe 386.
We still have 11 of his plays in in modern times.
He was a master of satire. He was maybe the first ever like
famous successful satirist. His plays were so good and
satire had so much power in this era that he could turn public
opinion about kings, leaders, anybody with his playwriting.
Plato blamed Aristophanes in part for the death of Socrates
because Aristophanes portrayed Socrates in a way that was not
very friendly, and that helped lead to Socrates getting charged
with blasphemy, which led to his execution.
So whoa, yes, we got the philosophers getting mixed in
here. Philosophers and playwrights are
getting mixed in here, but they're mixed in directly in
politics, directly impacting these things we're talking
about. So for some reason it just allow
us. Didn't lead.
The Spartan army that went to Mantinea.
Maybe because he wanted to keep a distance, maybe because he had
been censured for his direct anger at Thebes, his non Spartan
like his vendetta against thieves, which is not not good.
And talcatus. The diplomat once accused a
disallowers of breaking a a Spartan tenet of war, which was
like you sure we're certainly paying we're certainly paying
them a a lot to teach them a lesson, which is an underhanded
way of referring to Sparta's rule, which is Sparta's not
supposed to make by their own constitution.
They're not supposed to make war on the same country or same city
too many times in a short period of time because that country
will then get tougher and learn how to fight Sparta.
If you fight them a bunch of times, they're going to adapt
against you. Don't teach them, don't give
them lessons in warfare too often or your neighbors will be
good at fighting. So it's Sparta has this very
long term plan about making sure they're still the best.
So this started to break down in this era because you had a lot
of these indecisive skirmishes that made Sparta look like maybe
they weren't quite as strong as they look like they weren't
getting beaten, but they weren't exactly dominating either.
So here we go. At Mansinea, it's Agisepolis,
the young king, the second king, the one that came of age during
this era that Agisilaos has been putting his hooks into.
So Agisilaos is probably dictating a lot of what happens
next. So Agisopolis shows up with his
with his army. He's probably in his mid to late
20s at this point. He leads the army to Mantinea.
It's only 50 miles from Sparta, so it's close by.
He had a plan, Mantinea. Just like.
We're not coming out, we're staying in our walls, taunting
them from atop the walls like they're the French knigates from
Monty Python. But I just suppose had a plan or
maybe it was a plan given to him by I just allow us.
Either way, it's the rains of Castamere and one of many
reasons why I just allow us is Tywin.
He diverted the river Ophis, which was nearby, into the
walls. You might be saying, well, what
good would that do? They're walls.
They're stone. They're not stone.
This is 385 BC. They were mud brick walls.
The lower part was was brick, the upper part of stone.
So the water slowly undermined the walls and they collapsed.
We're given a different version of the story where their
Mantinea then came off, came out to fight, or whether the walls
were still partly in place and they held out a little longer.
Either way, the flooding continued and either way it came
to a battle. Eventually they had to fight,
and the Thebans were the Shin this time.
So the Thebans were facing down the best of the Arcadians slash
Mantenaeans, while Josephilis fought the weaker side of those
foes, our burgeoning heroes, Palopitas and Epaminondas.
Epaminondas was is interesting in part because he was a very
high minded, very philosophical. He's our Corin half Stannis.
That's the best I can describe him right now.
The rest will just be have to come from describing his deeds.
Palopitus, as I've said a few times, is our Brandon Stark, son
of our brother of Ned. So these two are standing near
each other, they're fighting and because they're the Shin and
they're facing the enemy's best, they're theben friends.
They're they're patriots start to run.
They start to run away, but he Pam Anandis and pull Pullopitus
are like that's not their thing. They mess up their vibe.
They don't run. So they they stand there ground,
they're surrounded. A bunch of bodies are lying
there. Palopitus gets hit by a spear,
then another, then another. He gets hit seven times and
finally passes. He fall, he collapses.
He collapses on a peep of bodies.
He's probably going to bleed out.
The Paminanda stands his ground. He gets wounded as well.
He gets hit in the chest with the spear, gets hit in the arm
with a sword, and he he's still holding his ground, though he
will not back down. He won't give up the body.
And remember how important bodies are.
Recovering bodies and giving them a proper barrier is a huge
deal. There was a battle in the in the
Peloponnesian War where in a naval battle where the Athenian
generals won but they did not properly click the bodies.
Six of them were executed by the Athenian damos for that.
That's how big of a of a problem it was.
So Agesepolis one on his portion of the battlefield crushed their
the line that they were facing and moved towards the
beleaguered Thebans and rescued Epaminondas and those other few
that were with him. Pelopitus managed to survive.
He was grateful to Epaminondas and this forged an important
friendship. Pelopitus was the the headstrong
passionate guy, like I said, ragey, you know, kind of a guy
that thought ask, you know act first, ask questions later.
You know that kind of guy. Pam Anand is very thoughtful,
both of them very capable warriors, very brave, very
patriotic thebans, but different in a lot of ways.
You Pam Anandis has self enforced.
Poverty Fallopidus. Inherited in the state from his
father, but he gave all his money to poor people.
He did not manage his own estate.
He just gave it away. He just used his estate as a
means to empower poor thebans and to just be a good citizen.
He's a very likable guy, brave leader, gives to the poor,
etcetera. The Pam Anandis, arguably even
more likeable with the two of them together.
Yeah. There's so much more they're
going to do and I'm excited to tell you all later about it.
This The penalty for Manzania was to separate the town.
They had to break into four different villages and be
considered separate. Eventually.
They got back together that, but it would be a ways away.
That's a penalty. This is a penalty for violating
the King's peace. We get sort of an idea of how
it's going to work. Violate the King's peace, lose
your walls, and get split into individual communities after you
know you're losing a lot of your male soldiers. 384 was also.
The 99th Olympiad. The first Olympiad under the
King's Peace. By the way, Plato founded his
Academy. The famous Academy of Plato
founded the following year 383 The naked Sprint was won by Dick
on of Syracuse who won the boys naked race back in 388.
The double Stadion was also won by Dick on.
What the hell, this guy was really fast.
He may have also won the haplodromos, which was a not
naked foot race where you wore full heavy infantry armor and
ran in that. So that's got to be really hard.
The long distance run, which was also naked, was run by Satades
of Crete, boxing by Demoxadenus of Manilos, wrestling by
Narcotus of Phigalia. The pentathlon, now the
pentathlon. According to Aristotle, the
pentathletes are the most beautiful of all the athletes
because they do. Five different events, I guess.
And so they're they're getting beautiful for five different
types of exercise. Those exercises are the long
jump, the discus, the javelin wrestling and the the naked
Sprint. This was one by Hisman of Ellis,
another Elysian. The four hole horse race was we
don't know who won the main one, but the four horse.
Race. Of Colts was won by Eurabatos of
Sparta. The famous Athenian orator
Lyceus gave a speech kicking off the Olympics.
This is a highly respected man. He was an orator, as I said, and
he was partly respected because of this succinctness and
plainness of his speech. He could have been Spartan,
given how he was very succinct. And yeah, I don't know if he was
laconic, but he kept his speech simple.
He may have been in his 70s at this time.
He gave this opening speech. He preached about Heracles, who
founded the Olympics. Heracles founded the Olympics to
support and foster. Greek.
Unity. Lyceus wanted to remind everyone
there of the importance of Greek unity and to remind everybody of
the person that also wanted that Heracles, who they now worship
as a God, especially the Thebans.
He spoke out against the tyrant Dionysius.
Yes, Dionysius, not Dionysius. Dionysius of Syracuse.
Syracuse is a Greek place, hasn't had any part thing to do
with our story at this point in the world.
Southern Italy is part of Greece, it's Grecian Rome and
the rest of Italy hadn't taken it yet.
And Syracuse was also very Greek.
So a lot of the Greek world was ruled by the tyrant of Syracuse,
this Dionysius guy, and Lyceus was speaking out against him.
Dionysius had sent a bunch of athletes and they were richly
decorated. They were given bribes.
They were probably entering this the horse races with multiple
times and his horses were decorated in gold and it a lot
of Greeks were disgusted. They didn't really.
They weren't even sure that he should be allowed to compete.
Also, he spoke out against Persian control for very similar
reasons. It's just as worse.
At least Dionysius is Greek. But Persian control over Greece,
it's disgusting, it's unmanly, it's UN Greek.
How can we allow Persia to dominate us like this?
They're inflicting this peace on us, this unmanly peace that we
didn't earn ourselves. He's really riling the crowd up.
People are mad. People are agreeing.
They're amending him. Whatever Greek Amen is, they're
saying it. So he's calling on unity, but
stirring up, you know, anger. And it's kind of an interesting
way to do, you know, it's like a kind of a little of column A,
little of column B. This guy Lyceus is pretty
interesting. We have 34 of his speeches still
around, including this one. I didn't look it up.
I mean, it's not just out there to read.
You got to. It's, it's a obscure source.
You got to find it. I don't.
I don't even know where I would get it.
Might be probably for academics only or whenever.
It's definitely not just on the Internet.
But yeah, Lyceus, you could read his speeches, 34 of them.
How cool is that? This brings us all the way back
to the start. This is where we'll leave it
with Foibadas seizing the cadmium of thieves.
Remember I told you that it was weird for a Spartan sub
commander to do that and I was probably just allow us and we
went through a lot of reasons why I just allow us hates
thieves and why he would be motivated to do that.
But what we didn't mention was the King's peace.
Sparta violated its own agreement.
The only the thing it was in charge of enforcing it violated.
So when Foibadas was not penalized, when he was released,
it was The hypocrisy was even bigger than I first let on,
because not only was he not punished, not only did they
violate the King's peace, not only did they censure Foibidas.
So they said it was a bad. Thing to do they didn't give it
back they kept it so hypocrisy and justice treaty violations
and you can see why I just allow his kept his distance from the
seizure of the Kadmea and maybe kept his distance from the.
Melting of Mantania's walls because it's too obvious that he
might be behind these so he's got to keep a little distance
from it and he remember he's the one that oversaw the breaking up
of the Boichian League. Thebes is a close by neighbors
that were their allies. So he just is done so much
against Thebes after all the humiliations they piled up on
him, after forcing him to come back from Asia, after throwing
off his sacrifice that made him look like Agamemnon, after all
the after all the business before that with the marching in
into into Greece and all that. There's so many different things
they embarrassed him on he. I didn't forget.
I mean, this is Tywin. Do you think Tywin was done when
he when he embarrasses his enemies?
Tywin wasn't done when with the Red Wedding.
He had more to do. There's still enemies to beat.
There's still more insults to pile on.
There's still more pride of his own to advance.
That wasn't the end of it, nor was it for a disallows.
To make the hypocrisy even worse.
The reason Forbidas was passing by thieves.
We told you that he was bringing a relief force.
Who is he bringing a relief force to?
To the city of Olympus. Olympus was the head of the
Chalkadian league. The Chalkadian league is
northern Grecian states. They had a a league like many
Greek states had a league, the Boesian league, the
Peloponnesian league, the Delian league.
Greek was Greece was all about leagues in this era, but the
Spartans? Didn't.
Like the Chalkadean League, they're like, we are coming for
you. Why?
There was another thin pretext to start a war.
The Chalkadean League. You're not supposed to have
leagues under the King's piece, but they had had it all this
time and no one cared. But the king of Macedonia had an
agreement with the Chalkadean League.
He said, hey, hold on to some of my territory temporarily while I
go fight this war and when I'm done, you give me the territory
back, I'll join your league and we'll all be allies.
They said cool. He went off and did that and
he's like, OK, I'm joining your league, give me back my
territory. They're like, Nah, you can join
our league, but we're not giving back your territory.
So he went and told Sparta and Sparta's like, that's not cool.
So that's their pretext for attacking Olympus.
They didn't want them to have a league.
They didn't want them to get more powerful because they just
claimed of several of Macedon's cities here and they wanted to
have him in toss the third the Macedonian king that was a good
ally for them to have. So in other words, they were.
Marching on Olympus. To attack them for very thin
pretext. So they were also violating the
King's peace before they violated the King's.
Peace with Floyd, badass. 'S sneak attack.
He was marching to further violate the King's peace and on
his way to violate the King's peace, he violated the King's
peace in a different way. And it was probably it just
allow us behind all of it. And again it just allow us held.
Back because. You know he can't be the one to
be seen breaking the King's peace.
If this rogue operator breaks the King's peace, well, that's
not a good enough. Reason for Persia to.
Start a whole war if their king does, Yeah, that's a reason.
But if just this Garrison commander, we're not going to
start a war over a Garrison commander, are we?
Clever. Clever.
It just allow us now one other little mention that that escaped
us here is it just allows his half brother to Luteus was
involved in that Olympian campaign fighting the
Chalkaudian League and he was killed.
So that's another reason that he was mad because his half brother
was killed in that conflict. So this is the state of northern
Greece at this time. It's a buffer to the northern
kingdoms that I've only barely touched on.
Remember I said at the beginning that Greece, this is the end of
Grecian independence. This story that we're building
up to, we're showing you how Greece has torn itself apart.
Building up to that and breaking about the Chalka Dean League is
kind of an accident. Sparta doesn't realize what
they've done. They've weakened the northern
border, which opens up to anybody, whoever could be
invading. From the north.
Whoever it might be, whether it's a nearby neighbor, whether
it's somebody far away, whether it's Persia, whether it's
someone from the West, which we haven't really discussed at all,
they have an easier time of it. That's what we started with,
saying Greece should be more worried about their neighbors to
the north, their threats to the north, than they are with
fighting each other. And the fighting each other is
what's going to screw them. And this is a big milestone in
that, a great place for us to end.
Even though it's not where I intended us to end, it's a great
place for it because this is going to have dire consequences.
Sparta thinks they're defending Greece, they're holding it
together, but they're actually weakening it.
To them, this threat isn't as big because northern Greece,
that's pretty far away. They're on the pretty much the
farthest southern part of Greece.
So it's that's just so far away to them.
So they can kind of ignore it, right?
Wrong. In Part 2, what we will have is,
well, you saw me talk about Plutarch's Chosen 25.
Many of them are in this episode, but only our Prince
Damon candidate Lysander is dead.
All the rest are still alive. Plus more that need to enter the
story. We need to find out what
happened. What happens to Artaxerxes that
just allow us Tirabasis the balancer Parasatus, the Cersei,
the return of Farnabasis the paymaster?
What about Palopitus and Epaminondas?
Our Corin half Stannis? What about our sea snake
Cabrius? We barely touched on him too.
There's a new Spartan Kingdom will rise as well.
But before it just allows us out of the picture and it just
allows us got a while left. We've barely talked about if
thicker tease the innovator too. And like I said, two more
Plutarch's 25 chosen parallel lives are going to enter the
story as well. Plus the sacred Band of Thebes.
Let me give you a brief teaser on the sacred band of Thebes.
They are 300 men, 150 pairs of lovers, right, 300 guys each
pairs of lovers. That was the theben like peak of
their ideal as warriors like you will not shame your lover in
combat. That's the last guy you would
look bad in front of cause male male Love Is All about in
Greece. It all is all about looking
great, looking brave and being strong and being warlike because
that's those are the peak of, of, of masculinity.
And thus you would never do anything not masculine in front
of your lover, your beloved, the guy you love the most, the
person you love the most in this world that you want to look good
in front of. You would never shame them by
running away. You would always fight your
hardest. It's an interesting argument,
isn't it? Some people fight better for
their country. Some people fight better for
their king. Some people fight better for
their lover. Honestly, that'd be a lot of
people. It's a different ball game with
them right next to you in the line with Spears and swords and
everything coming right at you. That's that's different, but
that's part of what makes the Sacred Band of Thebes so very
interesting. So we'll talk about them a lot
too. We'll talk about the further
consequences of the depletion of the Chaka Dean League will
actually tell you who the great enemy to the north is going to
be and the greater enemy to the north 'cause there's two.
So yeah, this one was. Really fun, really difficult.
And longer than I intended, but I wanted to do it right.
I didn't want to leave anything out.
But I also was wary of including too much, which maybe I did.
I assume you guys are mostly pro more context and less, and I
think some of these details are included are really fun.
So tell me how I did. Tell me if this was too much or
if you like the way I'm doing it.
Definitely going to have more of these to follow it up.
I want to tell this whole story, and we'll see how long it takes.
It's a lot. These episodes take more
preparation than most because I'm studying things that I don't
know as well as long as Ice and Fire.
But I love it. It's fun to learn these things.
It's fun to make these parallels, and I think you can
tell from my enthusiasm level that I'm eager to continue.
Lots of hours went into this, but they were fun hours, and
we'll get back to it next time. The trivia question was what?
Is the name of. The region in which Sparta
resides. Hint.
It's derived from a word that means using as few words as
possible. What's up?
Worth noting it's the opposite. That word derives its origin
from that region. It's the inverse.
Oh, I'm sorry, you're right. I meant to say that you're
absolutely right. The.
Word came from Sparta's region here, not the other way around.
The word is laconic or Laconia is the region.
If you've watched The Expanse or read At The Expanse, you're
familiar with the term Laconia. The a certain political group
named themselves after that. Now the the region's also called
the the people are also called the Lacademonians sometimes
instead of the Spartans. It's kind of an interchangeable
term. Although Lacademon refers to the
whole region. It's spelled Lace Damon as if as
if Damon Targaryen was all a decked in lace.
But it's pronounced Lacademon, but it's spelled the same way
Lace Damon. Is this a picture of Lace Damon?
That's the idea that I want you to leave this episode with Lace
Damon mentioned in this episode or well, not mentioned in this
episode, but related to this episode is our episode Rage of
Heroes, which was a Valaritas world of Ice and fire related
episode. We did a parallel lives episode
inspired by this many, many years ago.
Got a lot of relevance to this one.
We we did this song of ice and fire in Rome.
Not directly related, but it's another one of our history and
Westeros episodes. The black dinner of Scotland,
the Wars of the Roses, followed up by pretenders and impostors.
Those two are companions. So yeah, we love doing episodes
like this and we are excited that you all came for this one.
Thank you to everyone that was here live.
Thank you to all of you on Patreon who are members and and
support our show and are delving into many things like this.
And of course, our main, A Song of Ice and Fire focus on behalf
of Ashea. I'm Aziz.
We'll see you all next time. Thanks to Michael Klarfeld as
well for our video intro. You know Michael Klarfeld, he's
a great man, claredax.de. You can find that in the
description if you want to get some of his maps for yourself,
Maps like these that are behind me.
And until next time, Valar Rereadus.