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 with the rise of Philip and then Alexander in Macedon, ultimately Athens is conquered and never rears its head again politically in the history of the world.

They were.

The Spartans are a very interesting case study, and they're almost unique, not just in the Greek world, but cross-culturally.

They are a populace that decided early on that their thing was going to be military excellence.

And it doesn't seem as though they ever really stepped back to interrogate why that's the goal.

They just remain wedded to it.

And they operated in a different way from the Athenians, even from the get-go, because whereas all of these Greek city-states had slaves, generally slaves were non-Greeks.

They were captured or purchased somehow from outside the Greek world.

And for Greeks of this period, if you don't speak Greek, you just speak ba-ba-ba, you're a barbaros, a barbarian.

and therefore liable to enslavement.

But the Spartans conquered other Greeks on the Peloponnese and made them effectively their serfs.

These are called the helots, the captives.

And as such, Sparta decided at an early stage that other Greeks were going to be subservient to them.

that had problems because these helots shared Greek and could work together and overthrow the government in a way that the typical slave in the typical Greek city-state couldn't and wouldn't.

So almost to defend against its own choices, Sparta had to become heavily militarized, and it put everything into that.

So literally from birth, males would be tested.

They would be put through an extreme form of military testing, then sent out in their latter teenage years for two years, not to find themselves, but actually to prove that they're a real man in the world.

and the rest of their life would be surrounded by military activity.

But here's the thing.

Sparta didn't really want an empire.

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