David Butterfield
speaker
739 appearances
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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
It wasn't acquisitive in the hope of gaining overseas colonies and the Spartan culture spreading.
It simply wanted to be left to its own thing, but its own thing, paradoxically, was warfare.
So Thucydides was very puzzled by Sparta.
He couldn't understand why a culture that was so self-confident did so little of those things I said at the start about civilization.
It wasn't really memorializing itself.
It wasn't thinking of its long-term future.
It wasn't spending time on culture.
It wasn't concerned with that.
It was concerned with being a number one military machine.
So he said, although Sparta and Athens are these two great dominant entities in the Greek world,
When a future generation looks at the ruins of these two cities, they will imagine Athenian prowess to have been double what it actually was, such is the splendor of what they've left to us.
But the ruins of Sparta will be so meager that no one could imagine how big a role Sparta played in world history.
So they are an enigma, and they wrote very little, which adds to their mystique.
But by the time of the Roman conquest, rather sadly, Sparta had become a sort of Disneyland.
It was a theme park where people would go visit and sort of marvel at this absurdly militarized form of life.
And the Spartans were sort of putting on a show because they had no power.
They were conquered by the Romans at this point.
They were simply living out the only thing they knew how to do, which was to live with a view to war.
It's hard to take a lesson from the fall of ancient Greece because that is more complicated and it's really down to Rome's growth rather than Greece's failure.
But Athens in particular is a very important place.
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