David Butterfield

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

Very chaotic.

I mean, I remember, I think we discussed this.

I remember reading something about a huge battle the Romans fought and finding out, to my shock, that they had a system where generals would alternate on days.

So, like, Tuesday, you know, David's in charge, and Wednesday, Francis is in charge of the same army.

Running a whole city like that with this constant alternation, is that really a good recipe for government?

No.

And they were very explicit about this.

That council I mentioned, which sort of frames things for the Assembly to vote on, a powerful place to set the agenda, literally, you could only serve on that twice in your life.

And in all of these randomly chosen by lot positions, you couldn't serve consecutively.

So you had your one year's term and then you were out.

So the continuity was almost nil.

There was almost a full change of government with each year.

The strength of that was it meant no one could arrogate power or push a particular agenda against the will of the people more broadly.

The downside is that people were literally learning on the job every year, and a lot of people simply didn't have the merit, the skill to do the job well.

what the consequence of that emerges to be was tragic, which is that those who really did want to make something happen had to do it either behind the scenes in a way which undermined democracy, or they had to do it through their military prowess as a general.

You could keep getting reelected as a general,

And that was a place to wield power.

So Pericles, probably the most famous statesman of 5th century Athens, he's able to remain dominant because he keeps being re-elected as general.

So the tragedy is, because there couldn't be a clear handing over of power

power in a way that built to something, it meant the democracy was always fragile.

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