David Butterfield

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739 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard May 2026 last heard 20 May

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TRIGGERnometry · How Civilisations Die - Ancient Greece Expert David Butterfield · 20 May 2026 podcast

the scale would break in the Greeks' favor.

There is comparatively very, very little innovative intellectual thought among the Romans compared to the Greeks.

And that is not because the Romans weren't innovative or original.

No, they were really sharp, curious, clever people, broadly speaking.

It's that the Greeks were operating at a level of originality, ingenuity, energy, and joy in discovery that, to my knowledge, is utterly unparalleled in the world.

So that's one important part of the story.

Another is that a lot of the things that in the modern West really matter to us in our values have retrospectively been picked up again.

So we talk about democracy being a natural good, even though it's a very complex thing.

For most of the history of the West, democracy was not obviously a good thing.

In fact, through the Roman period, through the early late medieval period, even after the Renaissance in the early modern period, no one is celebrating democracy.

It's not a continuous virtue in that Western tradition I'm talking about.

However, come the 18th century, come the Enlightenment, come the growth of the nation state and various revolutions which try to put the people ahead of the vested interests of monarchs and despots, then suddenly democracy is the thing to investigate.

And at that point, thanks to the preservation of these ideals in both Greek and Latin literature, there's a conscious look back to the very specific period of fifth century Athens.

And it's beyond doubt.

The innovations made in this very experimental mode of government in classical Athens were not only unlike anything the world had ever seen, but they've never been tried again at anything like the degree they were.

the ultra direct democracy that the Athenians pioneered and thrived with before ultimately having a tragic downfall, much like the tragedians would depict on stage, is a unique phenomenon.

So democracy is a major part of the answer to your question, but also philosophy.

We assume that philosophy is asking the big questions and humans the world over presumably have always been asking the big questions, but it's not so.

there are genuinely turns, intellectual turns, that happen in the sixth and fifth centuries BC in Greece, not just in Athens, but in various Greek city-states, which as far as we can tell, and we have a lot of cross-cultural evidence, are entirely new.

So the word philosopher is invented actually by Pythagoras on the island we met in Samos.

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