Luke Caverns
speaker
1,858 appearances
5 recordings
5 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 27 May
Luke Caverns’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
You have, you know, maybe during the Bronze Age, you have an emperor like, you know, Agamemnon in a certain way ruling over all of Greece, but then it goes down into kings during the Dark Ages. In the Archaic Period, you have kings. And then as the Archaic Period is emerging into the Classical Period, Athens moves to this era of tyrants, and it's all based around Athens, Greece.
They had this era of tyrants, and then a tyrant is not, it doesn't have the negative connotation back then that we give it today. People quite liked tyrants, like Pasistratus. He was a pretty good guy. He built a lot of, he made a lot of public architecture for Athens, and they look upon his rule with You know, like rose-colored glasses. They liked him.
But eventually they move away from that, and they move into a democratic society. They have the Athenian democracy, which is basically mob rule, and it had a lot of problems. But it was very special. You know, it was the first time that people had this idea... that we don't have to be ruled. We can rule ourselves and we don't need a king. Where did this come from?
In a world that was only ruled over by kings, how do you have the epiphany to break the chains of... You're defying the laws of reality at that point, right? And I think... A really poignant thing here is the two longest lasting democracies in all of human history. The United States were roughly 250 years. At number one, we're the longest lasting.
And people don't realize how special we are because the second longest lasting is Athens at 189 years or 186 years. That's it. What we live in is such a special little piece of paradise that human beings are able to grab onto and hold for just a little bit of time.
You know, the Roman Empire, if you include the late Roman Republic, which is really kind of an empire without a name, lasted centuries. And well, we don't really know exactly when Rome fell and it's kind of controversial, but hundreds and hundreds of years, vastly longer than Athenian democracy and vastly longer than the United States. But I think that something I connect deeply with
is this battle at Thermopylae when 300 Spartans, you know, they couldn't send the whole Spartan army. The Spartans have to answer to the Oracle of Delphi. The Oracle of Delphi gives this really ominous message back to the Spartans that's saying, all of Sparta will fall unless a king of Sparta dies.
And basically, all of the other religious leaders of Sparta are totally against this war against the Persians. Most of the Greek world is like, I don't really want to go to war against the Persians. They're open to just letting the Persians come in and wreck everything and establish complete, reassert their dominance over Greece.
And the main players are Athens and Sparta that want to fight against Persia. Now, the Athenians had already won the Battle of Marathon, but the Battle of Thermopylae is more famous because it's like the Alamo. It's the first time in history that we have a recording of the loser being the moral victor of the war, or of a battle.
So you have these 300 Spartans that are accompanied by other Greeks, but we just look at the Spartans. And it's this vastly outnumbered army, but you have these 300 Spartans that go up to Thermopylae Pass and they kind of, they go against the wishes of of the religious leaders of ancient Greece, and they're led by Leonidas.
And he knows how important this is to go meet the Persians up here, and he funnels them into Thermopylae Pass, where the Persian army, I think it was Herodotus that said that the army was so big that it drank the rivers dry. It was a massive army, and they think anywhere from 130,000 to 300,000 Persians are marching along the northern coast of the Aegean to come down and storm Greece.
And so Leonidas and his 300 Spartans accompanied by, I think, 5,000 other Greeks, but not all of those 5,000 Greeks stay. A lot of them flee when they see the size of the Persian army. They position themselves at Thermopylae Pass, and essentially what they're doing is these 300 Spartans to preserve Greek identity, to preserve Greek freedom.
Now, this doesn't mean that Spartans weren't ruled by a king, that Sparta itself wasn't ruled by a king, but the idea of Greek society, and they don't realize it yet, but what Western society... is either going to be crushed or 300 Spartans are gonna stand there and give the rest of Greece time to prepare for the Persian invasion and give Athens time to prepare.
And Greece and Athens are bitter rivals and becoming more and more rivals. And they'll have an entire war against themselves later on. But those 300 Spartans give this selfless, brave sacrifice. Not one of those men thought that they were gonna make it out of there alive. And they drew the line in the sand on that day in the early fifth century BC between West and East.
And that's where Western society was born on that day. They drew the line in the sand and they said, we are Greeks, we are free. And those 300 Spartans, that battle of Thermopylae at the end of the day, every Spartan had died and roughly about 20,000 Persians had been killed out of the maybe 100,000 to 300,000 person army. which was insane losses.
Like it completely demoralized the Persians as far as we know from Greek sources. but it invigorated all of Greece. And they realized that they're more disciplined, unified, trained armies that actually had formations could actually inflict damage upon this massive slave army that the Persians had. And that the idea of Greek freedom was worth fighting for.
And I think it was the first time that the Greeks realized that their identity as a people could be completely eviscerated. And so they, all of a sudden they become invigorated in who they are and they become very patriotic. And then, so the Persian Wars continue, the Greeks win the Persian Wars at slim odds. And then all of a sudden, classical society, because of that, explodes.
The Parthenon, the Acropolis of Greece is rebuilt. And then you have this, you know, glorious golden era of ancient Greece that forms from this. And you have this explosion of, okay, so let's say Athens is a result of this incredible amount of wealth from all the different Greek city-states, giving money to Athens to help Athens build their fleet, to help Athens build their army.
Sparta also benefits from this, but Athens has a much more liberal approach to society. They don't have kings, but Sparta does. But again, Sparta is also not like Persia, so there's some nuances there, but we focus more on Athens. So think about this. What is at the center of... What's at the center of Egyptian civilization? The pyramids.
If you go based on traditional Egyptian thought, and let's just go on, not even the actual, necessarily the purpose of the pyramids, but let's go to like... The central focus, the juiciest time of Egyptian society, which is during the New Kingdom, like the biblical time.
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