Paul Cartledge
speaker
193 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 16 Jul
Paul Cartledge’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 — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Between 478 and 431, he sets up his war in terms of its immediate antecedents.
But he's an extremely sophisticated historian, so he distinguishes between occasion and real deep dive causation.
Well, one of them is... This is, again, one of these unknown unknowns.
If there had been sworn in 479 an oath by the Athenians before a major battle, which is actually the final decisive battle on land against the Persians who were invading, if the Athenians had sworn an oath...
which includes the clause, we will not rebuild the shrines and other buildings that the Persians have destroyed until and unless we have either, as it were, beaten the Persians or and made a peace with them such that they're not going to come again and destroy the buildings they've destroyed.
And that ties in with, it's only in one source, it's in Plutarch,
It's a biography of Pericles.
He says Pericles, then a leading figure in Athens in the 440s, sends round to all the Greeks who were involved, not just in the Delian League, but to Sparta, to the old alliance against the Persians.
Let's have a universal congress and come together and make a kind of peace.
deal that we will all unite against the Persians and live in harmony.
It actually sounds very suspiciously unlike the way in which the Greeks, in fact, conducted their diplomacy.
At any rate, the Spartans allegedly just said, buzz off, you know, we're not interested in you leading a peace congress.
But from this early part of the 440s,
Very concretely, actually in marble, we can specify that in 447, a huge building programme on the Acropolis, under the Acropolis, and the centrepiece of all that building programme is, of course, what we call the Parthenon.
They didn't actually call it the Parthenon.
The building as a whole, we're not quite sure what it was called.
It might have been the 100-footer.
The Parthenon was a particular building within the big building.
At any rate, that's so massively clearly anti-Persian.
We've done it.
Showing 61–80 of 193 · page 4 of 10
← Previous
Next →