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

Let's build hundreds upon hundreds of triremes with 170 rowers and a crew of 30, and let's make those war machines.

And he does that in the 480s, which means come the Battle of Salamis, the Athenians are not only well-equipped, but they're well-trained in attack.

And they're able to outmanoeuvre and defeat the Persian navy, despite the skill of the Phoenicians within that battle.

And they rout the naval force entirely.

It then flees back to the east, where it's destroyed off Samos, next to Mycenae.

And in the following year, the land troops, the infantry, are destroyed at the Battle of Plataea, again with a huge force of Greek strength.

The Spartans are involved this time round, and their heroic defence of Thermopylae, the 300 who held back the force for a while, is an important moment.

But fundamentally, this is one of those crux points, one of those forks in the road of history.

And by the skin of their teeth, the Greeks defended against the Persians for good.

The Persians never came back for a full-scale attack on Greece.

And how does Athens and Greece more broadly end up declining and being replaced and taken over by Rome eventually?

Like the Greek tragic heroes on stage, they become victims of their own hubris, their own overweening pride, their arrogance that they will endure.

And that manifests itself quite particularly in an episode in the Peloponnesian War against the Spartans.

That war spiraled out all across the Greek-speaking world because Athens and Sparta got into a bit of a standoff where they didn't fight.

Athens had become a naval superpower.

Sparta was landlocked, so it couldn't really be attacked.

And Sparta was a superpower on land, and the Athenians just retreated behind their walls.

So there wasn't a lot going on.

Instead, it was through proxy wars elsewhere.

What were they fighting over, David?

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