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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Those Egyptians would have been living in the shadow of the pyramids, who they thought were built in tribute of great kings, right? Their whole society reinforces the idea of God-kings, right? You're living under the rule of a living God, right?
And the center of your society is either the temple built to the god and the pharaoh in the middle of the city or the pyramids that sit across the Nile ominously from you. That's the center of Egyptian society. It's all about the god-king. Go to Roman society. The center of the city is the Colosseum.
You know, you would be able to go to the Colosseum only on days when the Colosseum was open and you had to pay to go, right? So, you're paying money back to... the palisade or you're paying money back to the emperor just to be able to go have the biggest show in town, right? Or, or it's, or the Roman forum, but you know, that's a little bit more complicated.
The center of Athenian society is the agora, which is the marketplace, right? And in that marketplace, you had these buildings, you had this one, the main building that was this long stoa. And a stoa is a covered, long colonnade building. And there were several of them built throughout Athens. But they were built for the sole purpose of the Athenians using them however they wanted to.
And all that it ended up being was a building that while you were running out into town to go to the market, which we think people went to the market every single day, you buy fresh produce and take it home for that night for dinner and you have to go back to the market the next day. But this is where people met and mingled. But that stoa is where people just gathered around and just talked.
They just talked and they hung out. And there was a group of philosophers, I think under Zeno, that would meet there so often that when they would come by, everybody would be like, okay, let's get out of the way. All the stoics are here because they were the people that met at the stoa. So these group of philosophers that meet at the stoa, that's where we get the name the stoics.
And I just think that that is such a perfect example of who the Athenians are as a people. Their central piece of public architecture is not a pyramid, which they think glorifies some god king. It's not a coliseum, which glorifies giving money to the government to watch violence take place, which would have been fun. It's just an open colonnade building for people to meet and talk to one another.
There's the stoa. So, um, and, uh, so, you know, all the philosophers would hang out here, people would gather and talk and all the questions that humanity would ask later on. Um, they say, they say that, uh, there's a famous, here we go. That's what it would have. So this is the recreated Stoa that's at the Agora right now in Athens. And so, you know, Aristotle would have hung out here.
Socrates would have hung out here. Plato would have hung out here. All their students would have hung out here at the Stoa. And as the saying goes, is that all of the study of philosophy in later history is just footnotes or derivative of Plato's writings, that he covered everything. Every question that's ever been asked was asked by the ancient Greeks. And I just think about...
that fight for independence and freedom and for a civilization that's able to rule over itself to then turn around and create a marketplace that's just for the people to meet and it's central it's the the central part of its public architecture is not a pyramid it's not a coliseum it's a it's an open colonnade for people to gather and talk to each other that is the society
That as one of my favorite historians, Jeremy McInerney, he says that Athenian society, I have it written somewhere. I mean, they give us mathematics, history, philosophy. I can go on and on and on and on and on about everything.
all of the things that were invented in Greece after they basically pushed off the Persians, after the Persian Wars, in the height of classical Greece, everything that laid the foundation for all of Western society occurred in 150 years, over the course of 150 years in Athens, Greece.
It was one of these few moments in time where people reached an endless capacity and were able to do things at the highest level. They were so, so smart. And another thing that makes them unique is that they're so free. They have this – the closest thing that the Greeks had to what the Romans had in the Colosseum was the Greek theater.
And people would go to the theater once a year, and for three days, you'd watch from sunup to sundown. You'd watch these plays after plays after plays. And they were written and practiced all year long. And the plays were relevant, whether they were comedic or tragic, they were relevant to what was going on in Athenian society at that time.
And it was also highly critical of Athenian society as well. So they were like...
they of all the things that they gave us this sense of freedom the sense of fighting for freedom the sense of bravery philosophy asking questions mathematics invention or whatever the most important thing that they gave us is what was on display in the theater and it's self-awareness a civilization to be able to look at itself and be critical of itself because it won't
it won't step on the ego of a ruler, right? When there's no ruler, you can be critical of yourself. And so the Greek plays would call out politicians in the middle of the play. They would make a joke out of somebody and talk directly to this politician.
Or there would be in the play, the Lysistrata, the women of Greece from all around Greece come to Athens and they gather and they meet and they figure out, well, how are we gonna stop the war between Athens and Persia? And they all agree, all the women, well, Lysistrata, she proposes, she goes, well, what I say we do is I say we just stop having sex with our husbands.
And then the other women go, okay, I'm out of here. I'm not doing this now. And so it's this whole play where it's like the women decide that they're gonna restrain from having sex with their husbands. And throughout the play though, even though it's a comedy, there's these tragic elements and these self-aware elements where they kind of lament the fact that Athens and Sparta aren't close anymore.
This would have hit hard with the people watching this because the people watching this are literally the Athenian soldiers who have killed Spartans yesterday Literally yesterday they killed Spartans and tomorrow at the end of at the end of or you know in three days at the end of this they're gonna suit back up and go back out into the Peloponnese or wherever to fight the Spartans these are these are people who would sit and watch plays and gather and
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