TRIGGERnometry - How Civilisations Die - Ancient Greece Expert David Butterfield

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00:00:30.000 What can the West learn from the fall of Athens and ancient Greece?

00:00:36.000 We're in a much worse place than late-day Athens.

00:00:40.000 I do think hubris needs to be a recurrent word.

00:00:43.000 I've never known a more selfish, myopic, frankly philistine and uneducated class of politicians than we have now.

00:00:57.000 if a random citizen has one of these positions of power

00:01:00.540 and things go wrong in the year that they have power,

00:01:04.920 you could be executed.

00:01:06.200 Mate, the joke's right themselves, don't they? 0.99

00:01:10.300 Come on!

00:01:14.240 Dr David Butterfield,

00:01:15.640 we have been waiting to have this conversation for literally months.

00:01:19.380 Welcome to Trigonometry.

00:01:20.780 Thank you so much for having me. It's a thrill to be here, chaps. 0.99

00:01:23.260 Yeah, well, it's great to have you on.

00:01:24.480 we met actually in Greece where you were part of a Ralston College tour there for the students

00:01:29.680 and we were invited along. And you talk, you're a classicist, that's your background. In fact,

00:01:34.220 why don't you tell us your background? Because that will be, you know, helpful to people to

00:01:37.360 understand the conversation we're going to have. Of course. I'm a classicist, a classical scholar,

00:01:41.740 which means I study the ancient Greeks and the Romans. And in particular, I'm interested in

00:01:47.520 how these ancient peoples shaped not just the Western world, but the world as a whole,

00:01:52.500 as we live in it. Now I grew up in northern England. I was fortunate to go to a state school

00:01:59.800 that taught Latin to everyone and I also picked up ancient Greek and those two ancient languages

00:02:05.700 led me into a love of the ancient world. Then it was off to university studying the classics

00:02:12.440 and I realized that the career I wanted in journalism was ultimately going to be a waste

00:02:17.680 of time and be far more interesting to get my head down and explore the classics so long story short

00:02:24.000 I became a lecturer at Cambridge I stayed there for 20 years and although I had a job which

00:02:32.320 employed me until retirement which would have been somewhere in the 2050s I decided for a series of

00:02:39.380 reasons mostly linked to the decline I was seeing in that great university and in higher education

00:02:46.420 more broadly, I decided to resign and to tie myself to a new college that was seeking to

00:02:55.240 teach the humanities, starting with ancient Greek, in a way that went back to first principles and

00:03:01.920 did things properly. That's Ralston College. That's how I met you two in the flesh in Greece

00:03:06.940 last summer. And now I'm professor of Latin and provost of Ralston and very much enjoying my life.

00:03:13.460 Well, it's great. And look, there's a lot to unpack in what you've said. We'll probably come

00:03:17.160 to that later because we want to talk about the history. Actually, when we were in Greece and you

00:03:22.740 were basically showing us around, showing us the history, but also explaining the history of

00:03:28.460 ancient Greece, I think I remember by day three, you said, you know what, I had a bit of a nightmare

00:03:32.680 that you were still asking me questions during the night. Because Francis and I were both so

00:03:37.400 curious and interested in what you had to say. So let's get into it. A lot of people talk about

00:03:42.560 the history of our civilization being rooted in Athens and in Rome. And if we talk about the

00:03:48.720 Athens portion of that, before we even get to that, David, I've always wanted to ask someone

00:03:54.180 with your knowledge and expertise this question. What is civilization? It's a big question. It's

00:04:00.920 not a simple matter. And indeed, it's a controversial question, but I think unduly

00:04:06.180 controversial. Civilization is a useful word and it's one we should use. But what is and what

00:04:12.520 is not a civilisation, the best we can do is to point to certain things which seem to be

00:04:18.100 necessary to a civilisation and see how far that takes us. So to be a civilisation,

00:04:24.040 a group of people need to have stability. That means geographical stability. They are sedentary

00:04:30.720 in one place. And that typically means having an agricultural and economic base, which allows them

00:04:37.180 to be rooted in that place. But more than that, they need stability politically and socially.

00:04:43.940 Often that means a fixed law code. Often it means some kind of social hierarchy that gives a sense

00:04:49.840 of place within the society. And often, but not necessarily, it means a standing military

00:04:54.900 to defend that civilization from external encroachments. But there's more than that

00:05:01.440 that's required. And I would point to a self-awareness, a self-conscious realization

00:05:09.000 of the shared civilization of that group of people. And what that means in practice is the

00:05:14.320 desire somehow to memorialize and to monumentalize what that civilization stands for.

00:05:21.900 And what that means in practice is a desire to somehow communicate across time and space.

00:05:27.960 The civilization may want to make monuments for the gods transcendent beyond our human world,

00:05:33.480 or more likely, they may want to leave monuments for their future selves.

00:05:38.640 So I personally would say that writing or something akin to writing is a necessary

00:05:44.240 technology that a civilization must have. Why? Because if you're not able to express your thoughts,

00:05:51.320 ideas, and achievements in language through writing, all you can do is preserve an oral

00:05:57.660 tradition. So although it's not often seen as a technology, it should be seen as one. Writing

00:06:03.780 is a necessary part. That sort of mixture and having the stability to last for, let's say,

00:06:11.240 centuries at a minimum, seems to me to lead us towards a rough definition of a civilization.

00:06:18.340 As for Western civilization, that's even more contested a claim. It is a phrase that I use,

00:06:26.760 but it's not the most apt way of describing what I think we mean. I much prefer the term

00:06:32.900 Western tradition. The reason is twofold. Civilization as a word, like any word that

00:06:40.900 ends in shun, T-I-O-N, all such words are processes in origin. They come from Latin words which are

00:06:48.020 about a process. So even a word like nation, which sounds like a static thing, actually in origin

00:06:53.800 means birth, coming into being. So civilisation, when it was used, was conceived of as a progression,

00:07:02.040 a civilising movement from not having the characteristics I mentioned,

00:07:08.120 following some sort of linear progress, and then reaching the goal. What was the goal?

00:07:13.260 When the term was used, it was mostly something looking like Western democratic society.

00:07:18.020 But I, perhaps you too, I'm extremely pessimistic about the notion of linear progress, about the

00:07:25.860 fact that there's a clear telos or end point in our society. So I think that's the wrong way of

00:07:32.100 conceiving of what a civilization is. We're not necessarily heading somewhere better tomorrow.

00:07:38.900 Tradition's better because, as another word ending in shun, it's about the act of handing on.

00:07:44.220 Latin tradere, traditio, is the handing over. And the reason why that's such a good metaphor 0.57

00:07:50.760 to think of the history of the West is that it involves two kinds of people and you need both.

00:07:56.880 One is someone in a position actually to pass on, actively to stretch the arm out and give to

00:08:04.320 another the thing deemed worth preserving. But crucially, that baton is going to be dropped

00:08:09.540 if there isn't also the second person who is willing to receive it and sees the value in

00:08:14.680 picking it up. And that is really the metaphor we should use when we think of the West.

00:08:21.480 If you read modern books, modern op-eds, criticising the term Western civilisation,

00:08:29.120 generally the arguments seduced are a series of childish and really not very logically powerful

00:08:36.000 counterclaims. So someone will say, well, how can it be the West because some of the countries that

00:08:42.920 are part of the Western civilization movement are in the East? Or how can it be truly Western

00:08:48.880 if some parts of the West don't have these features? Or how can it be a meaningful civilization

00:08:53.980 if I can point to you periods in the last 3,000 years where these ideals have not obtained in a

00:09:00.520 given place or time in the West. All of that's just noise. It's just not meaningful to understand

00:09:06.620 the world we're in as we are. Fundamentally, the West would look nothing like it does. And there

00:09:14.160 is no way we would be having this conversation without the intertwined threads of the Greco-Roman

00:09:20.580 intellectual, philosophical, artistic tradition and the core thread of Christianity, which itself

00:09:27.960 emerges from Judaism, but it's Christianity intertwined with the Greco-Roman legacy that

00:09:35.480 leads us to where we are now. And that's just indisputable fact. So that being indisputable

00:09:41.000 fact, let's talk about the Greco-Roman intellectual and philosophical tradition.

00:09:46.000 What is it? How is it different from what people in other places believed around the same time

00:09:51.480 to this day? That's a very big topic. We'll ask all the big questions.

00:09:57.680 You do. And then there are a few bigger questions than that. So if I can set out some sort of

00:10:02.880 core elements in my answer before we get to particulars. So Rome is extremely important

00:10:10.900 and also not important in this tale. It's extremely important because most of the Greek 1.00

00:10:18.120 ideas that matter to the tradition of the West end up surviving and being catalyzed and being

00:10:26.000 refined through Roman conquest of Greece. Without the Romans, it's a really open question what the

00:10:33.500 fate of the Greek world and what the fate of the West would have been. So the Romans preserve and 0.69

00:10:37.740 propagate a lot of the Greek ideas. But it's also unimportant because, you know, if we had a weighing 0.57

00:10:44.740 scale of the intellectual contribution of the Greeks versus the intellectual contribution of

00:10:50.200 the Romans, the scale would break in the Greeks' favour. There is comparatively very, very little

00:10:59.200 innovative intellectual thought among the Romans compared to the Greeks. And that is not because

00:11:04.700 the Romans weren't innovative or original. No, they were really sharp, curious, clever people,

00:11:11.940 broadly speaking um it's it's that the greeks were operating at a level of originality ingenuity

00:11:20.440 energy and joy in discovery that to my knowledge is utterly unparalleled uh in in the world

00:11:26.820 so that's one important part of the story another is that a lot of the things that in the modern

00:11:33.420 West really matter to us in our values have retrospectively been picked up again. So we talk

00:11:41.840 about democracy being a natural good, even though it's a very complex thing. For most of the history

00:11:47.600 of the West, democracy was not obviously a good thing. In fact, through the Roman period, through

00:11:54.240 the early, late medieval period, even after the Renaissance in the early modern period, no one is

00:12:00.900 celebrating democracy. It's not a continuous virtue in that Western tradition I'm talking

00:12:07.880 about. However, come the 18th century, come the Enlightenment, come the growth of the nation-state

00:12:14.680 and various revolutions which try to put the people ahead of the vested interests of monarchs

00:12:20.020 and despots, then suddenly democracy is the thing to investigate. And at that point,

00:12:26.020 thanks to the preservation of these ideals in both Greek and Latin literature,

00:12:31.220 there's a conscious look back to the very specific period of 5th century Athens.

00:12:37.440 And it's beyond doubt the innovations made in this very experimental mode of government

00:12:44.320 in classical Athens were not only unlike anything the world had ever seen,

00:12:50.840 but they've never been tried again at anything like the degree they were.

00:12:56.020 the ultra direct democracy that the Athenians pioneered and thrived with before ultimately

00:13:03.700 having a tragic downfall, much like the tragedians would depict on stage, is a unique phenomenon.

00:13:12.680 So democracy is a major part of the answer to your question, but also philosophy. We assume

00:13:19.140 that philosophy is asking the big questions and humans the world over presumably have always been

00:13:25.580 asking the big questions. But it's not so. There are genuinely turns, intellectual turns that

00:13:32.360 happen in the sixth and fifth centuries BC in Greece, not just in Athens, but in various Greek

00:13:38.260 city-states, which as far as we can tell, and we have a lot of cross-cultural evidence,

00:13:43.440 are entirely new. So the word philosopher is invented actually by Pythagoras on the island

00:13:50.780 we met in Samos, but a few generations before him in a place called Miletus, which is just across

00:13:57.540 the water now in Western Turkey, someone called Thales starts to ask questions which break from

00:14:03.940 the tradition of seeing the world around us as divinely controlled and ultimately intertwined

00:14:10.540 with myth. He starts to ask what we would now call scientific questions, cosmological questions,

00:14:17.660 questions about physics and biology. And he is able to use inherited mathematics and

00:14:25.160 astronomical knowledge to predict a solar eclipse in 585. And that day is regarded by some as the

00:14:32.180 day science began. Not because a calculation could be made of that kind, but because the very fact

00:14:39.420 an eclipse could be predicted show that there were rational principles underpinning these amazing

00:14:46.620 cosmic events, which hitherto had been seen as divine. And within 100 years of Thales,

00:14:55.340 half a dozen, 10 very individual philosophers emerged around the Greek-speaking world,

00:15:02.820 each tackling problems, not just of cosmology, but of how we know things, epistemology,

00:15:09.580 of what existence is, ontology. And when it comes to 5th century Athens, questions about how we

00:15:17.400 should live, ethics. And that's when we get to Socrates and his legacy. So another major part

00:15:24.460 is that the sense of self and our place in the world is suddenly rationalized in the 6th and

00:15:31.940 5th centuries by this series of philosophical developments. One more thing worth mentioning,

00:15:39.580 before we take up any of these particular threads, is on the artistic and literary side.

00:15:46.780 There is almost no kind, no genre of artistic production that we could think of now in 2026,

00:15:56.700 which was not live and thriving in classical Greece. And again, they didn't inherit that from

00:16:03.900 other parts of the world, be it tragedy, comedy, historiography. Instead, they innovated these

00:16:12.060 ways of enacting with the world around them in poetry, in drama, in written texts, now that they

00:16:22.060 had the technology of writing. And it's unparalleled both in its innovation and in its enduring legacy.

00:16:29.940 Everything of that kind goes back to the Greeks.

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00:17:53.940 point, because I don't think people are aware of the legacy that the ancient Greeks give us.

00:17:59.860 How much of that is ancient Greece and how much of that is ancient Athens?

00:18:07.220 Ancient Athens is doubly important. One, because its democratic experiments

00:18:14.500 happens to combine with an unparalleled flowering, blossoming surge of cultural activity in Athens.

00:18:23.180 However, that meant that Athens was a great draw of people in the Greek-speaking world.

00:18:29.000 So a lot of the philosophers I mentioned were not Athenians, but they came to Athens.

00:18:33.760 Epicurus came to Athens.

00:18:35.740 Protagoras, Democritus came to Athens.

00:18:38.680 These figures were drawn there because it was the place to be.

00:18:41.040 It was the genuine, literally, marketplace in the agora of ideas.

00:18:46.620 So yes and no, Athens is at the heart.

00:18:49.580 but fundamentally Athens comes later than a lot of these revolutionary moments. Athens is not

00:18:57.320 really important until the late 6th century BC and a lot of these major turns in how the Greeks

00:19:05.160 view themselves and their place in the world are happening in a century before that. Because I

00:19:11.440 think we should talk about Athens a little bit because the story of Athens is fascinating because

00:19:17.500 it started off like relatively every city civilization, and then it transformed into

00:19:23.380 something quite different, didn't it? It did. So the geography of Greece is something

00:19:28.120 always worth thinking about because I think it's a genuine causal factor in what we might call

00:19:34.460 the Greek miracle, this period of unparalleled innovation. In that part of the Mediterranean,

00:19:40.460 everything is post-volcanic, it's craggy, it's rocky, it's broken up, it's fragmented.

00:19:48.140 And what that means is the Greeks living around all of these hundreds of islands,

00:19:53.740 these various inlets, are divided from one another. They are small city-states, what we call

00:19:59.660 poleis. And by virtue of that, although they're united by a shared language,

00:20:04.640 they are each operating almost like a control experiment separate from the rest in terms of

00:20:11.240 how they structure their society and what ideas seem to work and what don't. And because they're

00:20:18.400 so interconnected by trade and by travel by sea, what works spreads and what doesn't doesn't. So

00:20:26.720 it's a really sort of organic community of different things being tried. And it so happens

00:20:32.540 that this Athenian experiment, kicked off by Cleisthenes, really,

00:20:37.200 in the late 6th century BC, not only works,

00:20:41.420 but proves to be utterly revolutionary for the people of Athens

00:20:45.800 until it didn't work.

00:20:48.160 And before we come to Cleisthenes,

00:20:50.140 let's talk about what actually precipitated Cleisthenes and those changes.

00:20:54.660 Because Athens was pretty much, from what I read,

00:20:58.040 it was ruled by authoritarian leaders.

00:20:59.900 I mean, the most notorious example is Draco.

00:21:03.340 Yep, Draco is there about a century before the major democratic reforms.

00:21:09.500 Our English word draconian is all about over-the-top and harsh laws.

00:21:14.300 Draco set up a legal code where punishments were extreme for minor peccadillos.

00:21:21.020 And as such, it was very, very rigid and oppressive, but deemed suitable to the time.

00:21:31.700 That didn't last so long.

00:21:33.800 A guy called Solon comes in and starts to set in train some of these evolutions which lead to democracy.

00:21:43.380 But we should be clear about a particular word that comes up a lot, which is the word tyrant, the Greek tyrannos.

00:21:50.460 A lot of rulers in a lot of these city-states were tyrants, but that doesn't mean they were

00:21:55.540 tyrannical in the modern sense of the word. There were good tyrants and there were bad tyrants.

00:22:00.720 What it fundamentally meant was that it was a single ruler who had taken up power

00:22:05.800 outside a bloodline of a monarchy handing on to natural descendant. And yes, Athens had its

00:22:15.420 tyrants, most famously Paesistratus and his family. But it wouldn't be true to say that that

00:22:22.260 was a despotic, tyrannical time where the Athenians were completely oppressed. It was simply power

00:22:29.900 ultimately lay with one man rather than with a larger group. Democracy emerges from that kind

00:22:37.220 of picture. And as far as we can tell, Cleisthenes was thinking on his feet and inventing something

00:22:44.300 as he progressed. Presumably had no confidence it would work, but he did some extremely

00:22:51.860 ingenious things to reset the power balance. And since we're talking about democracy,

00:22:57.840 one of the things I found really interesting was the words the same, but the way they practiced

00:23:03.520 democracy was not exactly the same as we do today. Can you talk about what the roots of democracy,

00:23:08.560 what it looked like on the ground, etc.? Of course. So as we know, democracy,

00:23:14.060 demokratia, is giving the power, the strength, the kratos, to the demos, the people. The people

00:23:21.140 have the power. And by the people, we don't just mean people in general. We mean the people beneath

00:23:28.240 the typical ranks of the aristocracy. So it's not an oligarchy. It's not a meritocracy. It's

00:23:34.940 actually allowing all people to have power. Big caveat here, which is a big one, but actually

00:23:43.680 it's not an interesting one, and I can explain why. The big caveat is when we say the people

00:23:49.000 have power, we mean citizens in Athens. That means males over the age of 20 who've done their

00:23:57.120 two years military service and people who have Athenian parents, initially just fathers, but then

00:24:05.820 father and mother's citizenship was restricted. And therefore it doesn't mean children, doesn't

00:24:10.940 mean slaves. It doesn't mean visiting foreigners. So when we talk about the people in classical

00:24:17.020 Athens, we mean all of the males over 20 who are full Athenian citizens. However, not allowing

00:24:25.540 slaves, not allowing women, not allowing children to have political power, is the norm cross-culturally

00:24:31.300 in almost all of the world, in all of world history. It is 6th century BC. They weren't as 0.75

00:24:37.480 woke as we might want them to. Exactly. The Greek for woke is not known as yet.

00:24:44.280 So, within that scale, which is maybe 20, 30, 40,000 Athenian citizens, power was not only

00:24:54.400 made available to citizens, but they were compelled to be part of it. So just to go back to

00:25:00.540 Cleisthenes, who, if you're interested, is 508-507. That's when this suddenly happens.

00:25:06.220 He realizes that although Athens is a city, it's surrounded by lots of villages which are part of

00:25:12.420 broader Athens. And these people have very different interests in the world. Some live on

00:25:17.460 the coast and they're interested in maritime affairs. Some are landholders who live in the

00:25:22.600 countryside, and some are urban traders. And he treats those three categories as separate blocks.

00:25:30.240 Before that period, there had been four different tribes which Athenians belonged to,

00:25:35.900 but those tribes had their own political, sort of ethnographic links. They were voting blocks,

00:25:42.480 really. They were ghettoized. So out of nowhere, Cleisthenes decides he's going to make up

00:25:48.580 10 new tribes. The four are gone. It's going to make up 10 new tribes. They're going to be named

00:25:52.900 just after Athenian heroes. And each of those tribes is going to have a mixture of coastal,

00:26:01.120 urban, and rural people within it. Random mixture, which means no emerging tribe

00:26:07.820 is tied to any historic power block. It's like you're randomly put in a new team.

00:26:13.620 a new set of football teams are invented, and you're told that you're now a lifelong supporter

00:26:19.120 of this one. So people had to rub shoulders with people who historically might have been their

00:26:24.300 enemies, and people whose interests did not exactly align with their own. So there was a

00:26:29.600 fundamental reset of how Athenians viewed one another and how they voted. But it gets more

00:26:35.220 extreme than that. Any citizen was liable to be part of the workings of government.

00:26:47.280 So the assembly ultimately decided what should be laws, whether people should go to war,

00:26:53.800 and the assembly needed 6,000 people to gather together. If you were in Athens doing your thing

00:27:01.020 as a male citizen, wandering around, talking to Socrates, whatever it may have been.

00:27:06.620 On the day of the assembly, a group starts to approach you with a long rope. And that rope is

00:27:13.140 covered in wet red paint. And the rope comes closer and closer towards you and it starts to surround

00:27:19.700 you. And you're being corralled to head towards the PNICs to engage in the assembly and do your

00:27:27.000 duty of democratic voting. If the rope touches you and you have red paint on you, you were trying

00:27:33.440 to flee your democratic duty and you will be punished. So male citizens were corralled, 0.69

00:27:39.300 literally, into the act of pursuing democracy. The really ingenious thing Cleisthenes did was 0.96

00:27:48.300 not just to force citizens to be engaged in democracy. It was slowly and by gradation to 0.59

00:27:55.740 remove the obstacles for normal citizens to have power. They were twofold. One was wealth.

00:28:04.540 It's all well and good saying we've got to spend our day voting on the future of Athens.

00:28:09.340 But if that means you can't do your actual job where you're earning money to feed your family,

00:28:14.820 well, it's not very attractive. And in fact, you need some leisure to be democratically active.

00:28:20.020 Well, over the course of the 5th century, various reformers introduced pay, first to those who attend the Council of 500, then to those who do jury duty, and then finally to people who attend the assembly.

00:28:33.220 You get a good day's pay by the end of the 5th century for doing your democratic duty.

00:28:39.320 So that breaks the aristocratic stronghold over democracy. Anyone, regardless of their means, could spend their days as a democratic citizen.

00:28:47.840 The second, and this is really shocking, was to remove elections. You would think that asking

00:28:57.060 the people their democratic will as to who would be best placed to decide what we should do

00:29:03.160 is a good system. You could look at the merit of what people have done. You could judge on that

00:29:09.000 basis. You could choose people who are known to you for their skill set and elect them. The problem

00:29:15.240 was, the problem that Cleisthenes wanted to combat was that money would corrupt elections. People

00:29:22.720 would campaign, they would bribe, and people who really wanted the office and had the pockets to

00:29:27.600 pay for it would get it. So what do you do if you want to get rid of elections? You go for random

00:29:34.460 lot. Your name will be picked out of the hat and that may mean you end up on the council. You may

00:29:42.440 say, okay, there's 500 people on the council. I can probably keep my head down. No. The 500 people

00:29:49.720 on the council over the 10 months of the Athenian year, each group of 50 from each of the 10 tribes

00:29:58.000 for one month have to live together in a special building and they're in charge. Worse than that,

00:30:05.340 each day, a random name of those 50 is chosen and whoever's name is chosen is the Epistateres.

00:30:12.440 and that guy is running the whole show. If war is declared, that guy has the responsibility.

00:30:21.500 If suddenly some ambassador comes, this guy, who ultimately is a random citizen,

00:30:26.980 has to play host and to handle scenarios, has to handle what happens in the assembly.

00:30:32.720 So there is no keeping of your head down in a world of random sortition, that is, selection

00:30:39.460 by lots. So democracy is not just inclusive of all-male citizens. It actively requires

00:30:47.660 engagement, but delegates power to anyone who's prepared to step forward. The only caveat to this,

00:30:55.320 which makes it only a slightly mad system, is that there were two areas where elections were kept.

00:31:01.520 for military generals 10 were elected and they could be re-elected and for those accounting

00:31:10.080 roles that involve dealing with big budgets they were also elected generally they wanted wealthy

00:31:15.220 people to have those positions so that they didn't embezzle money or if they did embezzle money they

00:31:20.360 had the wealth to pay it back final thing to say if a random citizen has one of these positions of

00:31:27.000 power, and things go wrong in the year that they have power, you could be executed. The

00:31:34.760 Assembly could decide that you so egregiously failed in your political duty that death is 0.94

00:31:42.080 the best response. And that happened.

00:31:43.780 Mate, the jokes write themselves here, don't they? You can see what... These boys knew

00:31:52.700 what they were doing. You know what I'm saying. They did. They did. So, yeah, talk about

00:31:59.580 accountability. One other thing. You'll be aware of the word ostracism, which we generally mean

00:32:07.820 these days of someone who's just banished from society. They become a pariah. Actually,

00:32:12.740 this process of ostracism was really elegant and in some way quite merciful in the Greek system,

00:32:20.200 Athenian system in particular. What was it? Well, clearly in this sort of hothouse of democracy

00:32:26.340 we're describing, things do go wrong. Different parties emerge. Different people are able to

00:32:33.840 rouse up the assembly as demagogues and fall out with other groups. It's not as though party

00:32:38.820 politics disappears. And at times, the assembly will be extremely angry with an individual.

00:32:45.180 But rather than deciding that the death penalty is the best way of handling that person, they could collectively vote as to whether they wanted to ostracize a given person.

00:32:56.820 And what that meant was banishing someone from Athens for 10 years, but not confiscating his property, not giving him any legal stigma once he returned,

00:33:09.080 but effectively removing him from the hothouse

00:33:12.520 and giving him an enforced decade-long cool-down period.

00:33:16.220 And there are plenty of cases of people being ostracised

00:33:18.600 and coming back and sort of getting their head down,

00:33:22.200 learning from their lessons and continuing.

00:33:25.840 What's particularly nice about it is the Assembly couldn't just get angry one day

00:33:30.900 and say, let's ostracise this person.

00:33:33.180 It's a two-stage process.

00:33:34.740 The Assembly had to decide whether it wanted to do an ostracism

00:33:38.900 and then there was a month or two-month gap

00:33:41.700 and you would write a name on a pot shard,

00:33:45.700 an ostracon, which is where we get the name,

00:33:48.340 and that would be voted on anonymously.

00:33:52.960 The votes would be counted

00:33:53.900 and the top names, whatever they be,

00:33:57.380 would be ostracized.

00:33:59.880 Unfortunately, the system is hackable.

00:34:02.040 All you need is a bit of money

00:34:03.480 and you pay someone to smash up some shards,

00:34:07.160 write the same name on a lot of ostraca,

00:34:08.900 and then you give it to people and say,

00:34:12.280 could you vote on this?

00:34:13.940 And then you can get someone you want ostracized

00:34:16.460 gone for at least 10 years.

00:34:18.440 We know that happened.

00:34:19.820 We found in Athens places where whole hordes of one name

00:34:24.560 written again and again and again have been found,

00:34:26.620 which were abandoned before being used in the vote.

00:34:29.340 So it's an elegant system, as I say,

00:34:31.740 but like most things politically, open to hacking and abuse.

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00:36:33.760 But isn't the problem with ostracization, David, that, look, what we talk about on the

00:36:40.640 show a lot are unpleasant truths, because sometimes the truth is unpleasant.

00:36:44.740 And if you have somebody who's brave enough and has integrity and goes, look, we're not

00:36:50.160 addressing the real issue here, in many ways, that's not in everyone's best interest.

00:36:54.620 And if you want this person gone because it's an unpleasant truth, then that is a way of dealing with and silencing free speech.

00:37:05.160 I agree entirely with what you say there, Francis, but it wouldn't be true to say that ostracism was used to get rid of someone who was saying awkward things.

00:37:14.500 In fact, quite the contrary. One of the things that really allowed classical Athens to flourish

00:37:18.980 was its unbelievable commitment to free speech and the free exchange of ideas.

00:37:27.000 So there are two concepts which are at the heart of Athenian society and indeed Athenian politics.

00:37:32.720 One's Isegoria and one's Paresia. The first is the equality of everyone to speak.

00:37:39.340 anyone could stand up in that assembly. If they had something to say, they would be heard out

00:37:44.960 and people could act on it or reject it as they saw. Everyone had the right to speak

00:37:50.360 among the male citizens. Then there was paresia, which is the freedom to say whatever you want. 0.81

00:37:56.640 And this wasn't, you know, standing on awkward eggshells about this or that particular issue.

00:38:04.140 It was the freedom to be as offensive and as extreme in your criticism of your fellow people

00:38:12.460 as you wished. And on the stage, especially in comedy, we see full-blown heresia. So the kind

00:38:19.220 of people being ostracized were not those saying awkward things or things that were offensive.

00:38:24.380 Instead, they were people whom the Athenian demos felt were on the trajectory that was going to

00:38:31.900 cause Athens problems. So maybe they were gathering power to such a degree that they might attempt a

00:38:38.040 tyrannical coup and overthrow democracy. Or maybe they were showing an allegiance to Persia or to

00:38:45.580 Sparta, which was not in Athens' interest, and they just needed to be out of the system.

00:38:51.080 So please don't get me wrong. Ostracism was not used to shut down free speech or cancel people

00:38:57.280 in the way one might think it was.

00:38:59.660 On the contrary, it was political dangers

00:39:02.560 rather than intellectual challenges.

00:39:05.180 Socrates is a classic case in point.

00:39:07.220 Socrates spends his whole life doing nothing more

00:39:11.380 than asking awkward questions of people who should know better.

00:39:16.540 He ended up being killed for that, ultimately.

00:39:20.720 But not ostracized.

00:39:21.800 Not ostracized. He stayed in Athens.

00:39:24.860 David, let me try and have a go at the ancient Greeks

00:39:27.100 from a different perspective.

00:39:28.300 I mean, the system you're describing

00:39:29.700 sounds pretty wild, very chaotic.

00:39:33.360 I mean, I remember,

00:39:34.480 I think we discussed this,

00:39:36.080 I remember reading something

00:39:37.400 about a huge battle the Romans fought

00:39:40.160 and finding out to my shock

00:39:42.040 that they had a system

00:39:43.240 where generals would alternate on days.

00:39:46.860 So like Tuesday, you know,

00:39:48.980 David's in charge

00:39:49.740 and Wednesday, Francis is in charge

00:39:51.280 of the same army.

00:39:53.260 Running a whole city like that

00:39:56.460 with this constant alternation.

00:39:59.580 Is that really a good recipe for government?

00:40:02.360 No.

00:40:02.980 No.

00:40:03.940 And they were very explicit about this.

00:40:06.080 That council I mentioned,

00:40:07.560 which sort of frames things for the Assembly to vote on,

00:40:10.860 a powerful place to set the agenda, literally.

00:40:14.100 You could only serve on that twice in your life.

00:40:17.520 And in all of these randomly chosen by lot positions,

00:40:23.240 you couldn't serve consecutively.

00:40:24.860 So you had your one year's term and then you were out. So the continuity was almost nil.

00:40:30.800 There was almost a full change of government with each year. The strength of that was it meant no

00:40:36.220 one could arrogate power or push a particular agenda against the will of the people more

00:40:41.320 broadly. The downside is that people were literally learning on the job every year and a lot of people

00:40:48.160 simply didn't have the merit, the skill to do the job well. What the consequence of that emerges to

00:40:55.760 be was tragic, which is that those who really did want to make something happen had to do it either

00:41:03.280 behind the scenes in a way which undermined democracy, or they had to do it through their

00:41:09.420 military prowess as a general. You could keep getting re-elected as a general, and that was

00:41:14.380 a place to wield power. So Pericles, probably the most famous statesman of fifth century Athens,

00:41:20.320 he's able to remain dominant because he keeps being re-elected as general. So the tragedy is

00:41:27.020 because there couldn't be a clear handing over of power in a way that built to something,

00:41:34.520 it meant the democracy was always fragile. And when that big war happened at the end of the

00:41:40.240 5th century between Athens and Sparta, a big Peloponnesian war which lasted 27 years, twice

00:41:49.320 Athenian democracy completely pivots, both times to an oligarchy or a tyranny, depending on what

00:41:57.940 term you want. So although it seemed as though it was baked in to the very system and in the

00:42:03.280 bloodstream of Athens to be democratic, its fragility was very real. If the frustrations

00:42:08.420 were high enough, the people would pivot and look for a strong man, a strong group who seemed to

00:42:14.140 have better ideas, and the whole dream could die. Because what is so interesting about the Greek

00:42:21.900 states is that sometimes they're at war with one another, Athens and Sparta, and then sometimes

00:42:28.660 when you have the Persian Empire looking to invade, they became allies. It's really quite

00:42:35.080 bizarre in many ways, because that's not how you saw states within a country behave.

00:42:40.820 No, but it is quite a human response. I mean, where I'm from in Cumbria, you know,

00:42:47.400 two villages are rivals and they might play a derby, but they would very much band together

00:42:51.900 if Lancashire, the county next door, were fighting them and Cumbria and Lancashire against each other.

00:42:56.820 But Cumbria and Lancashire would band together if it was North versus South.

00:43:00.280 And North and South would be against each other, but band together if it's England against France.

00:43:03.740 So the sort of scaling up of where the enemy is and where allegiances make sense and don't

00:43:10.120 make sense is a dynamic one. So city-states were against one another for the most part,

00:43:16.460 but in the 5th century, after this incredible and unexpected victory over the Persian invasion,

00:43:24.060 Athens starts to form a bigger band of allies, which ends up running as an empire. But it's

00:43:30.520 prepared to work with its Greek enemies when the external threat becomes real.

00:43:36.540 So can we actually just talk about the Persian War briefly?

00:43:39.100 Yes, let's get into it, because the Greeks and the Athenians, they were the underdogs.

00:43:45.400 Persia had a huge army, they had what many people believe was a superior navy, and there

00:43:51.380 were three major battles.

00:43:53.560 And one, which if you don't know anything about ancient Greek history, is a word that

00:43:58.500 we use all the time now, which is marathon. Exactly. So although the Greeks are doing

00:44:04.720 their things around the Greek-speaking world, there is no Greek nation. There's no Greek empire

00:44:10.320 in the late 6th century BC. The Persians are growing and growing and growing. Darius is

00:44:17.940 in charge by the early 5th century BC of not just the largest empire in the world,

00:44:23.920 but the largest empire the world had ever known, perhaps having towards half of the world's

00:44:29.440 population within it, within two million square miles. And because various Greek states, including

00:44:36.520 Athens, had come across the Aegean and defended their Greek colonies when Persia tried to take

00:44:43.020 them, Persia decided that mainland Greece, and Athens in particular, needed punishing.

00:44:48.860 So Darius drew up an army and a navy of immense size.

00:44:54.520 Persia at the time had northern Greece, had western Turkey, Asia Minor, had North Africa, and almost had surrounded mainland Greece.

00:45:04.540 And both the navy and the army headed down towards Athens.

00:45:07.560 and on paper, on papyrus, it was beyond doubt that this was going to be not just the temporary

00:45:15.760 but the permanent crushing of Greece. Sparta, down in the Peloponnese, got wind of this and

00:45:22.440 wanted to help, but factually, they arrived too late. And so in 490, at the Battle of Marathon,

00:45:28.900 it's just the Athenians in their full armour as hoplites with a band from the town of Plataea.

00:45:36.040 And incredibly, that force was able to defend and defeat a huge part of the Greek army.

00:45:46.480 The figures we're given...

00:45:47.500 The Persian army.

00:45:48.220 Sorry, the Persian army, of course.

00:45:50.900 The figures we're given are astounding.

00:45:53.820 6,000 to 7,000 Persians killed, 192 Greeks.

00:45:59.300 And it was so shocking to the Persian force that they effectively left to lick their wounds.

00:46:09.420 Meanwhile, Egypt revolts against Persia. Darius dies and it falls to his son Xerxes to approach

00:46:17.580 unfinished business. And that's where exactly right, Francis, we get to 480 and the attack is

00:46:25.060 is renewed. In 480, it's primarily a sea battle at Salamis, but the context of that is again

00:46:33.520 stunning. J.S. Mill, by the way, the great 19th century philosopher and statesman, he says the

00:46:41.560 Battle of Marathon and the Persian Wars in general are, even in British history, a more important

00:46:47.800 moment than the Battle of Hastings. The reason being, it is not hard to see at all that if the

00:46:54.600 Persians do have victory in 490 or 480, Greece is over. And as I said earlier, if Greece is over,

00:47:03.240 Rome looks nothing like the Rome we know, which means the Western world looks nothing like we

00:47:07.940 could identify as Western, be a different world entirely. So there we are. King Xerxes is sitting

00:47:16.760 on a mountain, overlooking the strait next to the island of Salamis. Athens has been ruined.

00:47:24.600 The Parthenon has been destroyed. The temple of Athena pulled to the ground. It's occupied

00:47:28.700 by the men of Mardonius, the general of Xerxes. Women, children, the old, the young, have fled

00:47:37.120 to Salamis. And it all comes down to this naval battle. Between 490 and 480, a miracle happened

00:47:45.240 for the Athenians. And that was the discovery, quite by chance, east of Athens, of an extremely

00:47:52.660 rich seam of silver. It's a bit like Norway discovering oil. There's this sudden windfall

00:48:00.480 of massive amounts of money. And there's a debate among the Athenians in the 480s.

00:48:05.520 What do we do with this sudden windfall of immense wealth? The majority of people said,

00:48:12.960 let's just all take a dividend. We'll all have a piece of the pie and jobs are good.

00:48:20.100 But Themistocles, a general, had a longer perspective, and he knew that the Persians 0.77

00:48:25.760 were not going to stay away for good. And he said, no, let's actually do something we've never

00:48:31.060 really tried to do, which is to build a good navy. Let's build hundreds upon hundreds of triremes

00:48:37.060 with 170 rowers and a crew of 30, and let's make those war machines. And he does that in the 480s,

00:48:44.720 which means come the Battle of Salamis, the Athenians are not only well-equipped, but they're

00:48:49.860 well-trained in attack. And they're able to outmaneuver and defeat the Persian navy, despite

00:48:57.080 the skill of the Phoenicians within that battle. And they route the naval force entirely. 0.99

00:49:04.240 It then flees back to the east, where it's destroyed off Samos, next to Mycolae. And in

00:49:10.640 the following year, the land troops, the infantry, are destroyed at the Battle of Plataea, again with

00:49:17.860 a huge force of Greek strength. The Spartans are involved in this time round, and their heroic

00:49:26.260 defence of Thermopylae, the 300, who held back the force for a while, is an important moment.

00:49:33.800 But fundamentally, this is one of those crux points, one of those forks in the road of history,

00:49:39.660 and by the skin of their teeth the Greeks defended against the Persians for good. The Persians never 0.95

00:49:46.280 came back for a full-scale attack on Greece. And how does Athens and Greece more broadly 0.81

00:49:53.600 end up declining and being replaced and taken over by Rome eventually?

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00:51:22.940 tragic heroes on stage, they become victims of their own hubris, their own overweening pride,

00:51:31.220 their arrogance that they will endure. And that manifests itself quite particularly in an episode

00:51:37.680 in the Peloponnesian War against the Spartans. That war spiraled out all across the Greek-speaking

00:51:44.460 world because Athens and Sparta got into a bit of a standoff where they didn't fight.

00:51:49.360 Athens had become a naval superpower.

00:51:52.260 Sparta was landlocked, so it couldn't really be attacked.

00:51:54.380 And Sparta was a superpower on land, and the Athenians just retreated behind their walls.

00:52:00.920 So there wasn't a lot going on.

00:52:02.180 Instead, it was through proxy wars elsewhere.

00:52:04.620 What were they fighting over there?

00:52:07.580 Sparta instigated this war, and it did so because Athenian supremacy was becoming too great.

00:52:14.060 like a lot of European wars, the wars are not over a matter of principle. They're over a way of

00:52:21.700 reining in and clipping the wings of a particular state or empire or person that is growing beyond

00:52:29.740 the bounds that are going to be sustainable. So they're preventative. And it's true. The Athenians

00:52:34.820 by this point were breaking a lot of their own rules. They'd set up this alleged league, this

00:52:40.700 an amalgam of allies. But most of the money coming in from that was being siphoned off to Athens.

00:52:48.740 They were spending it on huge sculptural, architectural, artistic undertakings.

00:52:56.680 And they actually moved the treasury from the island of Delos to the Parthenon and basically

00:53:03.220 were embezzling the money of others. The reason why that's an important detail, by the way, is

00:53:07.940 it's hard to see the Athenian miracle of the 5th century working without there being so much

00:53:15.660 external income. It doesn't look as though there could have been that amount of philosophical,

00:53:22.680 artistic, literary leisure without actually relying upon not a slave populace, which was 0.60

00:53:29.060 there in Athens, but subservient other Greeks whose money was ultimately bankrolling the 0.54

00:53:34.760 the experiment. So Sparta and Athens are at war over broader supremacy in the Greek world.

00:53:43.420 And in 415, the Athenians decide that they're going to attack the second largest Greek city

00:53:48.600 of them all, Syracuse, over in Sicily, on the east coast of Sicily. As you'll know,

00:53:54.620 Sicily, southern Italy in modern terms, were Greek lands in this period. And unfortunately,

00:54:02.500 everything goes wrong for the Athenians. Alcibiades, this charismatic playboy figure

00:54:09.060 who bounces around the world in his allegiances, is recalled. His tactical brilliance isn't in play.

00:54:18.180 The Syracusans are a very serious force and they utterly annihilate the Athenians over in Sicily. 0.99

00:54:25.340 And as such, the money, the confidence, the momentum of the Athenians is entirely broken. 0.86

00:54:32.500 As a result of that, the democracy is overthrown in 411. A group come in of oligarchs and say,

00:54:38.760 no, let's just row it back a bit. Let's go back to the good old days when the people with a bit

00:54:43.440 of money, with a bit of class to them, could run the system. And the Athenian people are saying,

00:54:48.580 okay, that doesn't last long. Back to democracy. But then at the end of the war,

00:54:54.400 the Spartans win. The Spartans win partly because the Persians are helping them behind the scenes. 0.93

00:54:59.320 And one of the terms of the treatise at the end is that Athens has to have a tyranny. 0.94

00:55:07.340 So 30 tyrants are installed, just like as happens in the Spartan government, where there's 30 old

00:55:14.040 men running the show alongside the two ceremonial kings. And an attempt is made to make Athens 0.69

00:55:19.420 Sparta. Again, it doesn't last, but thousands of people are killed. It's a bit like the latter

00:55:25.020 the days of the French Revolution, when the expectation is it will be so easy just to have

00:55:30.460 a new system, but the new system rapidly collapses and ends in bloodshed. As to your question,

00:55:36.080 how does Athens decline? It has another 60 or 70 years of independence after 404, but ultimately

00:55:43.900 the sense of self has gone, the confidence in the project is over, the innovation declines

00:55:53.100 outside the philosophical schools, and with the rise of Philip and then Alexander in Macedon,

00:55:59.880 ultimately Athens is conquered and never raised its head again politically in the history of the

00:56:05.200 world. And what you're talking about actually has resonance with nowadays, because to me,

00:56:12.660 it seems that Athens was a victim of its own success. It became lost in its sense of decadence

00:56:18.640 and arrogance. And you look at the Spartans, they were anything but. Now, they may not be as

00:56:24.920 technologically advanced or as philosophically sophisticated, but when it comes to the messy

00:56:30.600 business of war, they were streets ahead, weren't they? They were. The Spartans are a very

00:56:37.420 interesting case study, and they're almost unique, not just in the Greek world, but cross-culturally.

00:56:42.700 they are a populace that decided early on that their thing was going to be military excellence

00:56:50.740 and it doesn't seem as though they ever really stepped back to interrogate why that's the goal

00:56:56.640 they just remain wedded to it and they operated in a different way from the Athenians even from

00:57:02.540 the get-go because whereas all of these Greek city-states had slaves generally slaves were

00:57:09.200 non-Greeks. They were captured or purchased somehow from outside the Greek world. And for

00:57:14.880 Greeks of this period, if you don't speak Greek, you just speak ba-ba-ba, you are barbaros, a 0.96

00:57:20.460 barbarian, and therefore liable to enslavement. But the Spartans conquered other Greeks on the 0.90

00:57:28.780 Peloponnese and made them effectively their serfs. These are called the helots, the captives. 0.64

00:57:34.680 And as such, Sparta decided at an early stage that other Greeks were going to be subservient

00:57:39.180 to them. That had problems because these helots shared Greek and could work together and overthrow 0.95

00:57:47.220 the government in a way that the typical slave in the typical Greek city-state couldn't and wouldn't. 0.99

00:57:54.320 So almost to defend against its own choices, Sparta had to become heavily militarized,

00:58:00.120 and it put everything into that. So literally from birth, males would be tested,

00:58:07.040 they would be put through an extreme form of military testing, then sent out in their

00:58:14.640 latter teenage years for two years, not to find themselves, but actually to prove that they're a

00:58:19.720 real man in the world. And the rest of their life would be surrounded by military activity.

00:58:26.500 But here's the thing. Sparta didn't really want an empire. It wasn't acquisitive in the hope of

00:58:32.860 gaining overseas colonies and the Spartan culture spreading. It simply wanted to be 0.97

00:58:39.700 left to its own thing, but its own thing, paradoxically, was warfare.

00:58:46.320 So Thucydides was very puzzled by Sparta. He couldn't understand why a culture that was so

00:58:51.680 self-confident did so little of those things I said at the start about civilization. It wasn't

00:58:57.520 really memorializing itself. It wasn't thinking of its long-term future. It wasn't spending time

00:59:02.980 on culture. It wasn't concerned with that. It was concerned with being a number one military

00:59:08.040 machine. So he said, although Sparta and Athens are these two great dominant entities in the

00:59:14.860 Greek world, when a future generation looks at the ruins of these two cities, they will imagine

00:59:21.780 Athenian prowess to have been double what it actually was, such as the splendor of what they've

00:59:27.060 left to us. But the ruins of Sparta will be so meagre that no one could imagine how big a role

00:59:33.240 Sparta played in world history. So they are an enigma, and they wrote very little, which adds

00:59:40.200 to their mystique. But by the time of the Roman conquest, rather sadly, Sparta had become a sort

00:59:46.660 of Disneyland. It was a theme park where people would go visit and sort of marvel at this absurdly

00:59:55.320 militarised form of life and the Spartans were sort of putting on a show because they had no

01:00:00.680 power. They were conquered by the Romans at this point. They were simply living out the only thing

01:00:06.440 they knew how to do, which was to live with a view to war. And what can the West learn from the fall

01:00:12.560 of Athens and ancient Greece in particular? What lessons can we take from it? It's hard to take a

01:00:19.840 lesson from the fall of ancient Greece, because that is more complicated and it's really down to

01:00:25.840 Rome's growth rather than Greece's failure. But Athens in particular is a very important

01:00:32.980 episode to study. I do think hubris needs to be a recurrent word. The Athenians did become

01:00:42.200 too confident in their own principles and in their own futurity. And by virtue of that,

01:00:49.460 they didn't allow themselves to innovate and to rethink. Socrates' whole goal when wandering

01:00:56.680 around the Agora and buttonholing people and interrogating them about their supposed expertise

01:01:02.400 is that people don't really know how much they don't know. They're ignorant of their ignorance. 1.00

01:01:09.960 He, of course, famously said, the one thing that I know is that I know nothing. You know, 0.99

01:01:14.800 this was allegedly the root of his wisdom. But what the Athenians, despite having Socrates

01:01:21.580 really badgering them with these questions, never did is to interrogate whether the democratic

01:01:28.020 process in its ultra-extreme form really was working. And because they didn't do that,

01:01:34.360 and the political system didn't really allow them to do that, they left themselves vulnerable to

01:01:39.200 completely ridiculous decisions, such as attempting to take down Syracuse mid-war,

01:01:45.740 and vulnerable to complete political 180s, such as a tyranny stepping in and initially being 0.68

01:01:52.540 welcomed by the people. So the lesson is, if you want stable government, you need to have

01:01:59.740 broad extension of power, but also genuinely self-reflective modes of interrogating how the

01:02:10.220 power works. You need education. You need to take the process of your own governance seriously.

01:02:19.000 Merit matters. Merit is not equally apportioned between everyone. And you need to be able to have

01:02:25.900 grown-up conversations about who can do what better and who is not doing things well. So

01:02:32.300 obviously, all of those are rather banal things to say. But one of the striking things about

01:02:39.080 Athenian democracy is how little, at the time, it interrogated its principles.

01:02:46.780 And you're talking about having grown-up conversations about apportioning merit.

01:02:50.660 Are we doing that in the West? Because a lot of what you're saying about the downfall of

01:02:55.620 Athens. I mean, I'm going to be honest with you, David, there's a few alarm bells ringing in my

01:02:59.620 head. Yeah, we're in a much worse place than late-day Athens. Late-day Athens had still a

01:03:07.680 system of delegated trust in your fellow Athenians that they knew enough to be involved in the shared

01:03:13.920 conversation. And ultimately, there was a shared goal, which for Athens was the survival of the

01:03:19.260 the city-state. That ended up getting hacked and pulled apart in various ways. But fundamentally,

01:03:26.440 education was tied in with citizens having a clear sense of what's happening.

01:03:31.980 There was a high level of transparency and trust, and the system, in principle, was able to work.

01:03:41.600 as to where we are now, so many things are eroding the very bedrock of the kind of democracy we

01:03:50.580 celebrate. Even democracy is something we don't interrogate. We assume that democracy is not just

01:03:57.300 a good thing, but the good thing. We don't step back and think, well, hang on, if there's some

01:04:03.540 genocidal dictatorship sitting around a table and they have a vote on what the next genocide should

01:04:09.640 be, and the majority wins in that democratic vote, we don't wonder about whether that's good or bad

01:04:15.460 democracy. Democracy only means something if it's tied into the broader aims and goals of the people

01:04:22.360 using it. It's a process, not an unalloyed good in itself. And it depends where we're talking

01:04:29.340 about in the world. But if we talk about our shared country of Britain, the democratic deficit

01:04:36.040 is the widest I've ever known it, that's to say, in my lifetime. On paper, everything should work.

01:04:46.420 We have not a direct, but a representative democracy. Anyone over a certain age can vote.

01:04:55.440 If 10% of people in a constituency don't like what their representative is doing,

01:05:01.140 that person can be recalled and you can have a by-election and you can change them.

01:05:05.260 And inside the House of Commons, if a majority decide they don't like the direction of travel,

01:05:11.060 literally on the day, you can pull the government down and there'll be an election as soon as

01:05:15.740 possible.

01:05:16.080 That all sounds great, but it only works if your MPs, your representatives, are of a

01:05:25.000 calibre and of a character that means they spend their time carrying out ultimately the

01:05:32.380 broad will of the people.

01:05:34.680 And I've never known a more selfish, myopic, frankly, philistine and uneducated class of politicians than we have now.

01:05:49.460 The saddest thing about that is less the lack of quality in Parliament.

01:05:56.520 it's how high the hurdles are for the ordinary good British citizen which I really do believe

01:06:03.900 the great majority of people are how high the hurdle is for people to get over if they if they

01:06:09.340 want to be involved in that you know party politics is much more an obstacle to good government than

01:06:15.200 it is a help so I really worry about our own democratic process and the fact that the House

01:06:25.760 of Lords is slowly losing all of its powers as a genuinely scrutinising body that can block

01:06:33.560 poorly made laws. But in education more broadly, we're simply not leading our young people who

01:06:42.080 will become voters to a level of understanding of our history and our values that makes them

01:06:48.920 sufficiently well-informed voters. I mean, right now we have this perverse scenario where

01:06:54.760 a Labour government has lowered the voting age to 16, but at the self-same time is making changes

01:07:00.900 to education and indeed to the freedoms of 16-year-olds that don't give them the information

01:07:06.440 on which to make a considered vote as a notional adult in the nation. So there's very little

01:07:12.780 joined-up thinking going on as to how we can improve in Britain our own democratic process.

01:07:18.440 and we've become scared of merit, of excellence and of exclusion where it's necessary.

01:07:27.880 And that takes me back to where I began with one of the problems in higher education.

01:07:32.560 Well, that was one of the things I actually found most shocking because I guess at the

01:07:37.640 level of the normal person, which is what we are, who is not involved in education,

01:07:42.560 You go, look, the University of whatever on whatever.

01:07:47.540 Yeah, of course, it's a woke madrasa, blah, blah, blah.

01:07:50.120 Cambridge, I mean, Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard.

01:07:53.060 And suddenly, when you talk to people who are actually involved in all these great institutions

01:07:57.780 and Cambridge, Oxford, great institutions.

01:08:01.500 I mean, these are the pillars of British history, of British society.

01:08:05.200 He's given us prime ministers on days on end, et cetera.

01:08:08.600 For someone of your caliber, of your intellect, of your sharpness, of your brilliance, to

01:08:15.720 give up, and people need to understand this, you had tenure at Cambridge, which means you

01:08:19.220 had a job for life.

01:08:20.380 You can be there, you can say whatever you want, you can do whatever you want, like some

01:08:23.700 of your colleagues might look at you as cons, but you can stay there, nobody can do anything.

01:08:27.940 For you to give up that job and to go to what's effectively a startup at Ralston College,

01:08:31.980 which is brilliant, but a startup, that's got to be, there's got to be something seriously

01:08:36.760 wrong.

01:08:37.620 Exactly.

01:08:38.060 Exactly.

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01:09:54.140 an asteroid? When I made the decision a couple of years ago, most people, friends, family,

01:10:00.700 colleagues, thought I was mad. But actually, it was one of the most rational decisions I've ever

01:10:07.980 made, and certainly don't regret it at all as things stand. And the calculus was really down to

01:10:13.480 the direction of travel of the university. What I'm about to say is all true, but it's tied in

01:10:20.400 particular to the humanities and the social sciences. Broadly speaking, the STEM subjects,

01:10:26.440 those that are based in tangible, measurable reality and in proofs, they're upstream from

01:10:34.380 this decline and they may hold on. So I'm really talking about the humanities in particular.

01:10:42.180 Fundamentally, at Cambridge and indeed at all the other universities I'm aware of in the Western

01:10:50.000 Anglophone world. A rupture has been building and has almost fully manifested itself between

01:10:59.240 the fundamental commitments of what it is to study the humanities, to ask the questions about

01:11:05.560 the human condition, and to range over as widely as possible the products of human civilizations.

01:11:14.300 there's been a rupture between that and the actual exercise of what it is to be an academic

01:11:20.640 in the humanities that's manifested itself in all sorts of ways in some cases the hyper politicization

01:11:28.340 of what it is to study a different culture certain academics feeling that their role in the world

01:11:34.860 is more that of enacting social justice outside the campus rather than pursuing truth within it

01:11:43.500 There's been a radical rejection, indeed, of the very concept of truth. Many of my colleagues,

01:11:50.940 indeed, probably most people in the humanities, don't believe in an objective truth. They don't

01:11:56.600 believe in a genuine external reality which hard work and scholarship can uncover. And once that

01:12:05.020 rupture has happened, both from why we think the humanities matter and whether we think there's a

01:12:11.140 concrete outcome we can get through that study, decline is not only inevitable, it is rapid.

01:12:19.180 So consider, if we're in a system where how one responds to a particular Greek philosopher

01:12:26.720 does not itself lead to a true and a false response, it therefore follows that there

01:12:35.580 aren't really better and worse answers in that intellectual inquiry. That then follows that the

01:12:43.700 examination system, which literally is meant to grade by degree, that's why we use these terms,

01:12:50.840 doesn't have a sufficient ground to stand on. Which means the very act of going to a university

01:12:57.260 to learn things which can then be tested and you can tell your future employer

01:13:01.360 the degree to which you did well in that exercise, actually no longer is fit for purpose.

01:13:09.280 And this is the main reason that grade inflation has become rampant. The main reason that it's

01:13:14.500 almost impossible to get lower than a 2-1. In the British system, of course, there's a first,

01:13:19.600 then a 2-1. But historically, there was a 2-2, a lower second, then a third,

01:13:24.820 then a pass, and then a fail. All of that category beneath 2-1 has almost entirely been eroded.

01:13:31.360 So long as you've done something, you really will get a 2-1. Why is that happening so quickly?

01:13:38.320 Because there is a complete lack of faith in merit and excellence when it comes to examination.

01:13:46.520 So I looked around at what was happening within the subject, how every change to the syllabus,

01:13:54.480 to admissions criteria to examination methods was in the direction of travel away from

01:14:03.220 identifying excellence and rewarding it. Even appointments at the academic level were starting

01:14:09.640 to be made much less on the ground of academic excellence than either about the socio-political

01:14:17.180 advantage of having such a person there or even about the external optics of being able to have

01:14:22.640 such a person. And I could see that just as one of a few people who were really sticking our heads

01:14:29.560 above the parapet and complaining, the internal governance of the university was not going to

01:14:35.320 change course in the near or indeed middle-term future. And so I decided, as you say, although I

01:14:43.320 could just bury my head in the sand, get in a corner of a library, enjoy my own academic work

01:14:49.140 and be undisturbed until I'm 70,

01:14:52.900 it wasn't a noble or an honest way to live.

01:14:55.440 I love the subject of the classics.

01:14:58.100 I love research and I love teaching.

01:15:00.760 And what I wanted to do was to go back to first principles,

01:15:05.000 to search for what truth we can find in the world

01:15:08.340 and to teach alongside and with academics and students

01:15:14.000 who really have joy in their eyes

01:15:16.080 about the intellectual journey and the curiosity that motivates it. And so Ralston College,

01:15:23.180 where I am now, is genuinely unique in the world. Not only do we start in Greece, which is where we

01:15:29.920 were, but we teach ancient Greek in ancient Greek from scratch on day one, which means not only are

01:15:39.480 the students immersed in the place where the Western tradition emerged, but they are forced

01:15:45.440 to learn it through hearing, through speaking, through private conversations and through classes

01:15:50.160 to make the language their own and therefore to internalize the very thought processes

01:15:55.920 that made this Greek rational term happen. After that, we pursue the rest of the Western tradition

01:16:03.880 back in Savannah, Georgia, but we operate with a rigor and a commitment to objective truth and

01:16:11.600 indeed to transcendent qualities such as the good, the beautiful, that was not something I could get

01:16:20.240 at Cambridge. And I feel liberated as an academic intellectually to be able to have a smile on my

01:16:28.160 face when I teach and research now. I was going to say, because what you're really talking about

01:16:32.760 here, David, and what we saw in the comedy industry and a lot of other industries have

01:16:38.000 seen, and it's a tragedy, is the death of meritocracy. And what people don't realize

01:16:42.860 is that once you get rid of meritocracy, everything else is doomed. It will eventually

01:16:47.620 crumble. That's why so many people love sport. You go and watch a Premier League or the NBA or

01:16:52.560 UFC or a heavyweight boxing championship. When you buy your ticket, what you're buying is access

01:17:01.360 to the elite level athlete doing things that you couldn't possibly dream of at the highest

01:17:07.880 level. But if diversity comes into, for instance, football or basketball, then it's over. And this

01:17:15.480 is what people don't seem to understand. Cambridge is only Cambridge because it's meant to be the

01:17:21.080 best of the very best. Correct. But people have worked themselves into a corner that they

01:17:27.560 intellectually cannot escape. They know on the one hand that Cambridge has existed for its academic

01:17:33.520 excellence and that there's merit behind that. But equally, it has to follow from that that

01:17:40.280 means it is exclusionary to certain types. Now, in part, that is worth interrogating because our

01:17:47.960 school system really is not what it's meant to be. And certain schools will educate to a much

01:17:52.700 better level than others. That holistically needs looking at because we're all fair-minded and we

01:17:58.640 all believe that potential should get as far as it's able to. However, the very idea of Cambridge

01:18:05.380 being elite and selective, these are the same words, elite and selective are the same words,

01:18:11.440 is deemed problematic because it's therefore not for everyone. And some sort of political,

01:18:18.700 almost virus in their worldview has forced them into a conclusion which is actually destructive

01:18:25.720 of the job they hold. They cannot allow themselves to believe that some people are not allowed to

01:18:32.480 come to Cambridge because of their lack of intellectual merit. As such, they're faced with

01:18:38.480 an irresoluble paradox, and the only way they aim to respond to it is to turn down the meritocratic

01:18:45.060 dial, to celebrate excellence less, and to include those who in some cases really should not be

01:18:52.320 included in terms of the principles of what Cambridge stands for. So I'm fully with you.

01:18:58.480 And what really encourages me, Francis, is that as a people, as a nation, perhaps as a species,

01:19:04.700 we are inherently meritocratic and we naturally celebrate excellence. We love athletic prowess.

01:19:11.820 We love art that is beyond our own individual powers. We love music and song that we could

01:19:18.720 never make ourselves. We celebrate excellence, but in certain political climates, excellence

01:19:25.620 gets in the way of the necessary change that some people want to bring in.

01:19:30.460 And which is one of the reasons that they have to erode the concept of truth. And I found what

01:19:34.680 you were saying about truth so powerful because it's permeated everything now. I did this

01:19:41.320 interview with The Telegraph and the journalist was great and he did a great profile, you know,

01:19:44.940 no qualms, but even in that sort of conversation where I think people have a similar page,

01:19:51.860 et cetera, he said, well, Constantine talks about something he calls the truth.

01:19:58.540 And I went, it's not, I call it the truth. There is a truth. And that's not to say that I have

01:20:04.680 access to, or David has access to, or Francis has access to, but I thought the point was

01:20:09.040 of inquiry or debate or discussion is we all sit down, we all go, well, I think this is what

01:20:14.780 the truth. You think that, okay. And we get closer to that objective reality. But the moment you say

01:20:21.020 there is no truth and it's my truth and your truth, then like you said, the entire foundation

01:20:27.180 of this building is not there and the building collapses. Exactly. And it's interesting that you

01:20:32.580 put it that way because that really does bring us back to one of the challenges that fifth century

01:20:38.040 Athens faced. So at this time, when everything rests upon what the assembly decide, clearly

01:20:44.500 rhetoric. Words, oratory, have immense power. And a new kind of intellectual or guru literally

01:20:51.620 turns up in Athens called the Sophist. And the Sophist is built entirely around rhetorical

01:20:58.940 tricks which will make the worse argument sound the better. And one of the leading Sophists was

01:21:05.720 a guy called Protagoras. And the reason he's important is he is the guy who opened the door

01:21:11.440 to relativism. Protagoras, as a sophist, said, man is the measure of all things. But what he

01:21:17.900 meant specifically by that is you, as an individual man, Francis, you can decide how the world around

01:21:24.660 you is. You make your own truth. Everything is unstable and subjective. Words can mean one thing

01:21:31.340 and another. There's no better or worse course. We'll just frame it in a certain way. And the

01:21:36.760 sophists were regarded as a toxic presence in Athenian society because they, as you say,

01:21:44.300 took the foundations away from the democratic principles of wanting to do the actually best

01:21:49.240 thing. So I'm with you entirely. As soon as one believes not only that there isn't an objective

01:21:57.020 truth, but with that we each have our own meaningful truths, the whole academic game is

01:22:01.720 over. We may as well all pack up and go home. It's basically then a sort of vanity project,

01:22:08.000 you know, an art installation, us saying what we like about the world around us.

01:22:13.360 What's really shocking, and maybe the viewers don't know how widespread this is, is that in

01:22:19.060 the humanities and the social sciences, it is a majority view that there is no objective truth.

01:22:24.940 Yeah. I don't know why you're... Look, let's not be fake about it. Why are you pulling that face?

01:22:32.600 We know this. You can see it. The world around you is governed by that principle. You can see it.

01:22:38.320 Look, I think it's... The fact is that... Because there was still part of me holding on to the fact

01:22:44.080 that it was a vocal minority and that the rest of them were cowed into silence and that it was

01:22:50.500 cowardice, effectively.

01:22:52.420 But the fact that the majority of them believe that,

01:22:56.100 to me, that has completely changed

01:23:00.940 the way I see this discussion

01:23:02.340 because I didn't think the majority of them

01:23:04.400 actually believe this nonsense.

01:23:06.260 Yeah, but the only reason I'm interjecting here

01:23:09.160 is like everything you're talking about,

01:23:11.660 the inability to exclude people

01:23:13.360 who ought to be excluded.

01:23:15.180 Look at our government policy.

01:23:16.880 Look at the borders of Western countries.

01:23:19.580 That is, one is a direct consequence of the other, because...

01:23:23.020 It's the same phenomenon, right?

01:23:24.920 It's the same thing in government policy.

01:23:27.240 Exactly.

01:23:28.300 But frankly, Francis, the wheels have just kept turning.

01:23:32.960 So what initially sounded like a conspiracy actually was a conspiracy.

01:23:38.780 But what's surprising is that it was completely successful.

01:23:42.700 So this goes back to Rudi Dutschke, the long march through the institutions, the cultural turn of the Frankfurt School, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, fundamentally realizing that in order to set the conditions for a wholesale revolution of society to a particular set of political principles,

01:24:09.820 the culture is what needs the erosion and since the late 60s a certain particular kind of

01:24:19.280 left-wing academic has not only found access but actually been much the most successful

01:24:26.400 in terms of propagating their own school and bringing in colleagues and so what really would

01:24:32.220 have been a minority view when I entered Cambridge early 2000s has simply replicated

01:24:39.080 in such a way and become standard among those educated there who are now academics,

01:24:44.760 that it really is the majority view. And things that I would say to a normal Brit and would be

01:24:51.180 completely acceptable as basic views of how we understand the world around us would either

01:24:58.800 raise eyebrows or cause genuine objections in academic discussions. It's that divorced

01:25:07.560 from civic reality in both Britain and America

01:25:12.600 that you can understand why some people say

01:25:17.360 it just needs a fundamental reset back to day one.

01:25:22.800 And that's why academics have the lowest trust

01:25:24.960 in the history of the academy.

01:25:27.600 Plato founded the academy back in the 5th century BC,

01:25:30.680 but at no time that I'm aware of

01:25:33.580 have the actual experts been regarded

01:25:37.040 so poorly by the public. That trust has been eroded. Why? Because they have seen academics

01:25:44.260 pursue goals and agendas, which are not ultimately part of the project of the pursuance of truth and

01:25:51.980 the celebration of excellence. And we're not learning the lessons from ancient Greece and

01:25:57.620 ancient Athens, which is, you mentioned that word, hubris, an excess of pride. And you're looking at

01:26:02.840 But the universities, I mean, if that's not an excess of pride to go on TV and go, you know what, you can turn from a man into a woman, I don't know what is.

01:26:11.640 Yeah, no, it's a collective act of self-harm for universities to have allowed themselves to be political agents, especially for those which are known to be not true.

01:26:25.140 David it's great to have you on it's a great honor for us to be able to share your thoughts

01:26:31.620 and your expertise with so many people who watch us and listen to this really appreciate coming

01:26:36.180 i'm sure we'll be delighted to have you back before we head over to substack where our audience

01:26:41.060 get to ask you their questions what's the one thing we're not talking about that we really should be

01:26:47.860 reading it sounds simple it sounds basic and maybe even sounds boring

01:26:55.140 but I genuinely believe the only way we as a society, as the Western tradition, as the world,

01:27:02.020 whatever we want to call it, the only way we're going to keep ourselves sane and safe

01:27:10.040 in the coming decades is to bring back reading. Not just because reading by definition

01:27:19.200 brings you into a fixed corpus of things that have been deemed worth publishing or printing.

01:27:25.480 It keeps you within the actual canon of what has been judged worth its place in written form.

01:27:32.800 But also because the very act of reading, where you as an individual are communing with a page

01:27:39.780 and allowing the long-form argument or narrative of the page to bounce off your brain,

01:27:45.920 There's no external intermediary or interference. That is the safest way that we can ensure that

01:27:54.700 not just the young, but the middle-aged and the old can continue an intellectual process

01:28:02.880 when the rest of the world is trying to destroy it. There's no question in my mind that in the

01:28:09.400 21st century, the biggest threat to the human condition is not warfare. It's not climate change.

01:28:18.480 It's not disease. It's not some bizarre innovation that we can't think of. It's the

01:28:26.460 knock-on effects of AI. Not what AI can do, but the degree to which it erodes the act of being

01:28:35.080 human for AI to take such a dominant role in our lives. And I think we radically and rapidly

01:28:42.320 need to bring people's attention back to this completely open treasury of shared wisdom

01:28:49.880 in a fixed written form. It can't be changed. And the easiest way to do that is something

01:28:55.860 literally as simple as to find time in your day, pick up a book that interests you,

01:29:00.140 and spend alone time with it. So it's an obvious thing, but we're really not talking about it in a

01:29:06.220 way that takes it seriously. And it's one of the few genuine protections I think we have

01:29:12.020 against the storm that is about to hit. And it's exactly this problem with the academics failing

01:29:20.400 to speak to the public and inspire the public on the things that matter to them that led me

01:29:26.240 and a few other academics to found a website called Antigone, which is all about trying to

01:29:32.760 bring the Greeks and the Romans before the public in a way that doesn't patronize the public,

01:29:38.220 doesn't treat the Greeks and the Romans as problematic and racist and not worthy of our

01:29:42.940 attention, but actually treats the reader as an adult and welcomes them in to a world which,

01:29:49.560 of course, has its challenges, has its absurdities, but is also deeply inspiring if we as individuals

01:29:55.880 care about our place in the world and understanding where we've come from.

01:29:59.680 So the Antigone team is a free website all about that.

01:30:04.580 David, what a pleasure.

01:30:06.360 I joy.

01:30:07.180 Make sure to head over to our subset where we carry on the conversation.

01:30:12.260 Is the West actually a Roman misunderstanding of Greece?

01:30:17.120 Did Rome preserve Greek thought, distort it or weaponise it?

01:30:25.880 We'll be right back.

TRIGGERnometry - May 20, 2026

How Civilisations Die - Ancient Greece Expert David Butterfield

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