David Butterfield

speaker

739 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard May 2026 last heard 20 May

David Butterfield’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

TRIGGERnometry · How Civilisations Die - Ancient Greece Expert David Butterfield · 20 May 2026 podcast

Random mixture, which means no emerging tribe

is tied to any historic power block.

It's like you're randomly putting a new team, a new set of football teams are invented, and you're told that you're now a lifelong supporter of this one.

So people had to rub shoulders with people who historically might have been their enemies and people whose interests did not exactly align with their own.

So there was a fundamental reset of how Athenians viewed one another and how they voted.

But it gets more extreme than that.

Any citizen was liable to be part of the workings of government.

So the assembly ultimately decided what should be laws, whether people should go to war, and the assembly needed 6,000 people to gather together.

If you were in Athens doing your thing as a male citizen, wandering around, talking to Socrates, whatever it may have been, on the day of the assembly, a group starts to approach you with a long rope, and that rope is covered in wet red paint.

and the rope comes closer and closer towards you and it starts to surround you.

And you're being corralled to head towards the Pnyx to engage in the assembly and do your duty of democratic voting.

If the rope touches you and you have red paint on you, you were trying to flee your democratic duty and you will be punished.

So male citizens were corralled literally into the act of pursuing democracy.

The really ingenious thing Cleisthenes did was not just to force citizens to be engaged in democracy.

It was slowly and by gradation to remove the obstacles for normal citizens to have power.

They were twofold.

One was wealth.

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

But if that means you can't do your actual job where you're earning money to feed your family, well, it's not very attractive.

And in fact, you need some leisure to be democratically active.

Showing 221–240 of 739 · page 12 of 37