(Part 1)
Ok, this is a further effort to remember what S told me happened in history, before the fun is ruined by the various spoilers in popular culture, S enthusiastically trying to educate me, and the powerful combination of those two (S enthusiastically encouraging me to watch 300 with him and play Greek-history-based Civ IV scenarios). The rest of this post is history as I vaguely recall it from some conversations in recent weeks, now with added Civ IV and 300 so probably wrong.
I.
We left off sometime early in Greece’s history (let’s say 450BC), when the Persians were a large and successful military force to the East who had never lost a war. At this time Greece was pretty interesting. The people in Athens and around were a group called something like Iberians, and they had many especially clever people who did things like philosophy and political innovation, of a calibre that gets them remembered today. Greece was a democracy, which I think was unique.
Sparta (near Athens, to the West) was populated by Spartans, who were terrifying warriors whose main interest in life was being terrifying warriors. Sparta was a very small city relative to others around—it had maybe a few thousand people while other big cities were hundreds of thousands. But everyone was scared of them because each Spartan was such a devastating military asset.
Persia decided to take over Greece, so they sent in a small army, figuring that would be plenty. The Athenians were worried about this, and went to ask the Spartans for help.
The Spartans agreed that Persia coming to conquer everyone was troubling, and at any other time they would have helped, but they were having an important festival for like a month, so they couldn’t right now. In their defense, work-life balance is hard.
So the other Greeks went and fought off the Persian army themselves. And they won! I think because they had an excellent general or something. But this was pretty surprising to the never-before-defeated Persians. The battle was at Marathon, and when they won, a guy ran as fast as he could back to Athens to give them the good news. He dropped dead from exhaustion upon arrival, because he ran really fast, and Athens was however many miles away a modern marathon is long (26 maybe? —one of those numbers that is vastly bigger than it seems to be possible to run, empirically). For some reason this made people at the time think running that far was a good idea, and so they commemorated his feat by starting the athletic event, the marathon.
The Persians were not permanently discouraged, and returned with a larger military force. Again it seems the Spartans were busy with the same festival, which was unfortunate since they really liked being great warriors so much, and totally would have thrashed the Persians in a moment if they weren’t already fully booked with all these festivities.
This time 300 Spartans decided to fight though, and went up North to head off the Persian army, joined by another small army of ‘Thespians’ from a place called Thespius or something. This stand was sort of ridiculous seeming, because the Persian army was really, really big. Probably like tens of thousands of troops. However, as depicted in the movie 300, the Spartans were very manly, and very well trained warriors, and they had very cutting edge military technology—for instance the idea of standing close together with your shields so that your shield defends the people next to you. The Thespians (as a society) were very good actors, and inspiration for the modern word ‘thespian’. As far as I know they were not inspiration for fear in the hearts of their enemies, so while there were more of them than Spartans, they do not seem to have been a main factor in this military action. (Though note that Spartans and Thespians alike are now represented to us by actors, presumably because actors are more convincingly warrior-like than actual warriors, so maybe the Thespians were pretty scary, but everyone just assumed they were especially Spartan-seeming Spartans).
A key fact in the Greek side’s favor was that they were defending a narrow gap. So as long as they didn’t get too tired, it would always be however many people fit face to face in the gap, meeting face to face. Plus however many arrows or whatnot could be hurled over the top of the frontline. The Persians said that the number of arrows would be enough to blot out the sun, to which some Spartan, probably the king, who might have been called Peleponides II or something, famously responded that they would then fight in the shade.
So, the Spartans did astonishingly well, and killed heaps of Persian soldiers, and were eventually defeated not by being worn down by the massive Persian army, but because a Greek traitor showed the Persians a route around that didn’t involve dealing with Spartans.
The Athenians meanwhile had emptied Athens onto a small nearby island, figuring that they couldn’t beat the Persian army, but they might be able to defeat the Persian navy, given that they had a pretty good navy themselves. So they were going to let the Persians take the mainland, but defend this island, and then maybe work their way back again from there. The Persian army did come down into Athens, though weakened by the 300 Spartans, and then by the whole Spartan military when it was done with the festival. But the Athenian navy won the seas, leaving the Persians in Athens without the water-based supply lines that they relied on, back to most of Persia. So having come so far, Persia had to retreat home, and Athens went back to Athens, and all was more or less ok modulo lots of deaths, and Greece remembered ‘that time we beat the Persians’ with fondness for a long time.
II.
Greece was happy and successful for about a hundred years, roughly between 450-350BC.
There were lots of famous philosophers, including what we would now think of as scientists. For instance, Democritus invented atoms. Someone, maybe also Democritus, came up with the notion that at a tiny scale something must be random, which also seems impressive (unless its just that someone believed every random thing possible in the ancient past, and we primarily remember the winners).
One guy (probably called Herodotus) discovered recording history, and he spent a lot of time carefully talking to various people about what had happened in the past and writing it down. Apparently the distinction between true statements and made up statements implicit in this agenda was novel, and some of his interviewees do not seem to have grasped it well. Some of these histories are very interesting, especially if interpreted as non-fiction.
He wrote about Xerxes trying to cross a narrow sea way up North where it was necessary to let the Persian army across. First Xerxes made a bridge out of boats, and everyone was happily jumping boat to boat, but then the wind moved the boats and out of bridge-alignment, so Xerxes whipped the sea into submission and then they continued.
He wrote about Darius’ ascent to leader via horse neighing contest, described previously.
He wrote about some other things I forget. Oh, one was probably the fate of King Croesus. This story took place earlier, before Persia attacked Greece. Croesus was extremely rich. I think he was the son of King Midas, who at much personal cost had discovered how to turn all kinds of things into gold. Or possibly Croesus had a good economy for some other reason. Anyway, he was worried about the Persians, who were getting to be a big empire to his East, and he had a bunch of money, so like a good rationalist he set out to determine whether any of the oracles around were really oracular. To do this, he did the weirdest thing he could think of —some series of wrapping disgusting things in other things and boiling them in things and eating it. Let’s say he took the heart of a lamb and wrapped it in pig skin and then boiled it and sliced it and wrapped the slices in leaves and then ate the pieces. And then he went to the oracles in turn, and gave them some money, and said “guess what I just did?” Most of them got it wrong, but the Oracle of Delphi was like “you took the heart of a lamb, and wrapped it in pig skin…”, so he gave her money and asked what would happen if he went to war with the Persians. She said that if he went to war, he would destroy a great empire. He hadn’t heard about cryptic prophesies with double meanings yet, because he was in possibly the first story about them, so he went to war, and this destroyed his great empire. The end.
Socrates was another still-famous philosopher from that time in Greece. His fame was more for his style of clarifying questions than any particular discovery, so he was more like a modern philosopher than a scientist. His student Plato famously wrote a lot about Socrates, making him very much like a modern philosopher. He also wrote about what an ideal republic would be like, in a book that is still well known, though I think mostly famous for being a very early work of political philosophy, rather than for not embodying terrible ideas for how to run a country. His student Aristotle was famous for all sorts of philosophy and science.
Toward the end of Greece’s golden age, Macedonia (to the North of Athens and Sparta) controlled a lot of Greece, under the reign of Philip. Philip hired Aristotle to teach his son, Alexander. When Alexander became leader, he decided to take over Persia in revenge for the earlier attacks. Persia was still doing well enough that this was an insane plan. But in an astonishing turn of events ascribed sometimes to Alexander’s training in science and philosophy and reason, and sometimes to his biological father being a major god who his extremely creepy mother had an affair with one time, he succeeded in conquering everything as far as India in about a decade. India was probably unappealing because it had elephants and such in it, and he had had about enough anyway. He went back to somewhere near Egypt, and had some other plans (maybe to have a thriving society of reason and peace?) but died of malaria within a decade.
There were some endearing stories about Alexander the Great, during his life. One time a philosopher studying astronomy told him that there were other worlds out in the stars, and he sat down and cried. When asked why, he said that there were so many worlds out there and he hadn’t even conquered one.
He met another philosopher called Diogenes the cynic, who was an early thinker on social status, and had decided to live without any. Appreciating the breadth of status’ infiltration into life, Diogenes forwent all sorts of things that are marks of status, such as sobriety and hygiene. Alexander approached him in the gutter one day with great respect, said he really liked his work, and if he wasn’t busy with being Alexander the Great, he would like to do what Diogenes was doing. Diogenes said no he wouldn’t, or he would do it now. Alexander was like ‘yeah, good point’.
(Incidentally, to the modern eye this looks like Diogenes had discovered countersignaling. Our best understanding probably agrees with Diogenes: not being a drunkard covered in your own urine is often for status. However, if a person is sufficiently high status that they are unlikely to be considered low status even when pissed on and pissed—for instance because they are also a renowned philosopher—then they can actually mark themselves as higher status by conspicuously setting out to look low status and failing.
After Alexander the Great died, his empire was divided between four generals, but none of them were especially great, so they didn’t prosper that much. One of them was called Ptolmy, and he was a forebear of Cleopatra, queen of Egypt later.
III.
That was around 350 BC. Around that time, before about 200BC, the Roman Empire was getting to be a big thing, centered around Rome in Italy. There is a myth about how Rome was founded that involve Romulus and Remus setting out to start a new great city, then having a fight about what to call it, and then Romulus killing Remus, and that is why we have Rome rather than Reme. This was before humanity had discovered ‘picking your battles’.
Rome was a democracy early on. I’m not sure how this related to Athens being a democracy. There were a bunch of wars, probably just with everyone around the edges. At some point young general Julius Caesar and another more experienced general who had made his money from the first fire department, and another rich guy teamed up to do some military conquest, going off in different directions with a bunch of Roman military. Caesar took Gaul—roughly the region of modern France—which proved him more impressive than expected. He also took lots of other things, like the British Isles, which belonged to the Angles and the Saxons. The rich guy died. I can’t remember what the other general did, except after a while worried that Julius Caesar might take over Rome. Generals weren’t allowed to bring their armies into Rome for this reason. Caesar did, and took it over.
The other Roman Senators promptly murdered Caesar, including his friend Brutus (depending on how you want to assign blame for stabbing people who are already thoroughly stabbed). This prompted Caesar to say ‘et tu Brutus?’, which is for some reason really famous.
In spite of Caesar’s murder, the democracy was over for a bit, because it was unclear whether it should go back to the democracy or to the next in line after Caesar, and the latter won. There were some other Caesars, such as Augustus Caesar. There some other Emperors, such as Nero (who was bad and somehow caused Rome to burn) and Caligula (who went crazy and married a horse) and Claudius (who was a nerd and one of the few people in this part of the story not intent on killing everyone around).
At some point Rome had some war with the Carthaginians, who lived across the sea in much of Northern Africa. The Carthaginians were descended from the Phoenicians, who had lived somewhere near Lebanon a thousand years or so earlier, and invented the first alphabet. Usually the war happened across the sea, but a Carthaginian general called Hannibal took a whole lot of Elephants all the way around through Spain and Europe to attack from the North. I remember that this caused surprise, but I forget whether it had further geopolitical implications.
In around 400AD, the climate was cooler and many smaller groups of people living in the Northern parts of Europe tried to move South-Westish to improve their situation. These people spoke strange languages, so their speech was summarized as ‘bar bar’, which was the Roman equivalent of ‘bla bla bla’. So they were called ‘barbarians’. If we had been there, we might have called them ‘blablarians’.
Gotland is a lovely island in Sweden, that was the original home of the Goths, one successful group of barbarians. They moved to the South and took a chunk of central Europe—roughly Germany. They separated into the Ostrogoths (East Goths) and the Vizigoths (West Goths) and took more things in their respective directions.
Some other barbarians were the Vandals, who modern vandalism is named after. There were also the Gauls, and the Angles and the Saxons, though I’m not sure how they fared after Julius Caesar conquered Gaul and Britain. And possibly the Celts were considered barbarians.
The Western part of the Roman Empire including Rome was taken over by barbarians in the 400s and 500s. Constantine was was the last Rome-based Roman emperor. He moved the capital to the Eastern city of Byzantium, which he renamed Constantinople. Constantinople stood at the point where two land masses nearly touch, dividing two seas (The Black Sea and the Mediterranean Sea). So every journey by land or water was funneled through this one point. It was a naturally powerful city. The Empire came to be known as the Byzantine Empire, or as the Eastern Roman Empire, and lasted for another thousand years or so, centered in Constantinople.