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

And as I said earlier, if Greece is over, Rome looks nothing like the Rome we know, which means the Western world looks nothing like we could identify as Western, be a different world entirely.

So there we are.

King Xerxes is sitting on a mountain overlooking the strait next to the island of Salamis.

Athens has been ruined.

The Parthenon has been destroyed.

The temple of Athena pulled to the ground.

It's occupied by the men of Mardonius, the general of Xerxes.

Women, children, the old, the young have fled to Salamis and it all comes down to this naval battle.

Between 490 and 480,

a miracle happened for the Athenians.

And that was the discovery, quite by chance, east of Athens, of an extremely rich seam of silver.

It's a bit like Norway discovering oil.

There's this sudden windfall of massive amounts of money.

And there's a debate among the Athenians in the 480s.

What do we do with this sudden windfall of immense wealth?

the majority of people said, let's just all take a dividend.

We'll all have a piece of the pie and jobs are good.

But themistically as a general,

had a longer perspective, and he knew that the Persians were not going to stay away for good.

And he said, no, let's actually do something we've never really tried to do, which is to build a good navy.

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