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
So a lot of the philosophers I mentioned were not Athenians, but they came to Athens.
Epicurus came to Athens.
Protagoras, Democritus came to Athens.
These figures were drawn there because it was the place to be.
It was the genuine place.
literally marketplace in the agora of ideas.
So yes and no, Athens is at the heart.
But fundamentally, Athens comes later than a lot of these revolutionary moments.
Athens is not really important until the late sixth century BC.
And a lot of these major turns in how the Greeks view themselves and their place in the world are happening in the century before that.
It did.
So the geography of Greece is something always worth thinking about because I think it's a genuine causal factor in what we might call the Greek miracle, this period of unparalleled innovation in that part of the Mediterranean that
Everything is post-volcanic, it's craggy, it's rocky, it's broken up, it's fragmented.
And what that means is the Greeks living around all of these hundreds of islands, these various inlets, are divided from one another.
They are small city-states, what we call poleis.
And by virtue of that, although they're united by a shared language,
They are each operating almost like a control experiment separate from the rest in terms of how they structure their society and what ideas seem to work and what don't.
And because they're so interconnected by trade and by travel by sea,
What works spreads and what doesn't, doesn't.
So it's a really sort of organic community of different things being tried.
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