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.

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

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

If suddenly some ambassador comes, this guy, who ultimately is a random citizen,

has to play host and to handle scenarios, has to handle what happens in the assembly.

So there is no keeping of your head down in a world of random sortition, that is selection by lots.

So democracy is not just inclusive of all male citizens, it actively requires engagement,

but delegates power to anyone who's prepared to step forward.

The only caveat to this, which makes it only a slightly mad system, is that there were two areas where elections were kept.

For military generals, 10 were elected and they could be re-elected.

And for those accounting roles that involve dealing with big budgets,

they were also elected.

Generally, they wanted wealthy people to have those positions so that they didn't embezzle money.

Or if they did embezzle money, they had the wealth to pay it back.

Final thing to say, if a random citizen has one of these positions of power and things go wrong in the year that they have power, you could be executed.

the assembly could decide that you so egregiously failed in your political duty that death is the best response.

And that happened.

The jokes write themselves here, don't they?

You can see what... These boys knew what they were doing, you know what I'm saying?

They did.

So, yeah, talk about accountability.

One other thing, you'll be aware of the word ostracism, which we generally mean these days of someone who's just banished from society.

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