Andrew Schulz

So I don't know that we can have a society quite like that again.

Yeah, so this is a period called the Peloponnesian War.

And this is sort of the backslide of the classical period, this height of ancient Greece.

And actually, the Athenians didn't keep the Spartans at bay.

The Peloponnesian War...

was between sparta and athens and sparta won and uh there was a i believe there was a greek traveler named

Maybe Polybius in the 2nd century AD, or maybe it's before that.

But he essentially has something where he writes... Maybe it was Thucydides that wrote this.

I think it was Thucydides.

He was an Athenian that was living during the Peloponnesian War and writing about it while he was alive.

And he said that if you visited the city of Athens, you would think that it was twice as powerful as it was.

If you visited Sparta, you would think it was half as powerful as it was.

And...

And so Sparta, what's interesting is they had no stone public architecture.

It was all wood and all like wood and perishable materials.

They didn't care about like the big grand public architecture, but their philosophy and their way of waging war...

I actually basically know nothing about the Peloponnesian War, but I know that ultimately the Athenian, basically their empire was stretched way too thin.

They tried to send an expedition off to conquer some cities on the island of Syracuse, which a lot of southern Italy was occupied by Greeks at the time, and there were a lot of Greeks living on Syracuse.

And so Athens sends out an expedition to Syracuse.

It goes horribly because Sparta is somewhere right in here.