David Butterfield
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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
Sparta instigated this war, and it did so because Athenian supremacy was becoming too great.
Like a lot of European wars, the wars are not over a matter of principle.
They're over a way of
reigning in and clipping the wings of a particular state or empire or person that is growing beyond the bounds that are going to be sustainable.
So they're preventative.
And it's true.
The Athenians by this point were breaking a lot of their own rules.
They'd set up this alleged league, this amalgam of allies,
But most of the money coming in from that was being siphoned off to Athens.
They were spending it on huge sculptural, architectural, artistic undertakings.
And they actually moved the treasury from the island of Delos to the Parthenon and basically were embezzling the money of others.
The reason why that's an important detail, by the way, is it's hard to see the Athenian miracle of the fifth century working without there being so much external income.
It doesn't look as though there could have been that amount of philosophical, artistic, literary leisure
without actually relying upon not a slave populace, which was there in Athens, but subservient other Greeks whose money was ultimately bankrolling the experiment.
So Sparta and Athens are at war over broader supremacy in the Greek world.
And in 415, the Athenians decide that they're going to attack the second largest Greek city of them all, Syracuse, over in Sicily, on the east coast of Sicily.
As you'll know, Sicily, southern Italy in modern terms, were Greek lands in this period.
And unfortunately, everything goes wrong for the Athenians.
Alcibiades, this charismatic playboy figure who bounces around the world in his allegiances, is recalled.
His tactical brilliance isn't in play.
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