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

But a few generations before him, in a place called Miletus, which is just across the water now in Western Turkey, someone called Thales starts to ask questions which break from the tradition of seeing the world around us as divinely controlled and ultimately intertwined with myth.

he starts to ask what we would now call scientific questions, cosmological questions, questions about physics and biology.

And he is able to use inherited mathematics and astronomical knowledge to predict a solar eclipse in 585.

And that day is regarded by some as the day science began.

not because a calculation could be made of that kind, but because the very fact an eclipse could be predicted show that there were rational principles underpinning these amazing cosmic events, which hitherto had been seen as divine.

And within 100 years of Thales, half a dozen, 10,

Very individual philosophers emerge around the Greek-speaking world, each tackling problems not just of cosmology, but of how we know things, epistemology, of what existence is, ontology.

And when it comes to 5th century Athens, questions about how we should live, ethics.

And that's when we get to Socrates and his legacy.

So another major part is that the sense of self and our place in the world is suddenly rationalized in the sixth and fifth centuries by this series of philosophical developments.

One more thing worth mentioning before we take up any of these particular threads is on the artistic and literary side.

There is almost no kind, no genre of artistic production that we could think of now in 2026, which was not live and thriving in classical Greece.

And again, they didn't inherit that from other parts of the world, be it tragedy, comedy, historiography.

Instead, they innovated these ways of enacting with the world around them in poetry, in drama, in written texts, now that they had the technology of writing.

And it's unparalleled both in its innovation and in its enduring legacy.

Everything of that kind goes back to the Greeks.

Ancient Athens...

is doubly important.

One, because it's democratic experiments happens to combine with an unparalleled flowering, blossoming surge of cultural activity in Athens.

However, that meant that Athens was a great draw of people in the Greek-speaking world.

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