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
And it so happens that this Athenian experiment, kicked off by Cleisthenes really in the late 6th century BC, not only works, but proves to be utterly revolutionary for the people of Athens until it didn't work.
Yep.
Draco is there about a century before the major democratic reforms.
Our English word draconian is all about over-the-top and harsh laws.
Draco set up a legal code where punishments were extreme for minor peccadillos.
And as such, it was very...
very rigid and oppressive, but deemed suitable to the time.
That didn't last so long.
A guy called Solon comes in and starts to set in train some of these evolutions which lead to democracy.
But we should be clear about a particular word that comes up a lot, which is the word tyrant, the Greek tyrannos.
A lot of rulers in a lot of these city-states were tyrants, but that doesn't mean they were tyrannical in the modern sense of the word.
They were good tyrants and they were bad tyrants.
What it fundamentally meant was that it was a single ruler who had taken up power outside a bloodline of a monarchy handing on to natural descendant.
And yes, Athens had its tyrants, most famously Pisistratus and his family.
But it wouldn't be true to say that that was a despotic, tyrannical time where the Athenians were completely oppressed.
It was simply power ultimately lay with one man rather than with a larger group.
Democracy emerges from that kind of picture.
And as far as we can tell, Cleisthenes was thinking on his feet and inventing something as he progressed.
Presumably had no confidence it would work, but he did some extremely ingenious things to reset the power balance.
And since we're talking about democracy, one of the things I found really interesting was
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