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
Well, I would slightly differ in that I don't think empires are all the same.
So our word empire comes from Rome, imperium infinitum.
The Romans' notion of power of an imperial kind, not an internal legal kind, was extreme.
It amounted to life and death.
Archi, as Leah mentioned, can mean rule, just regular, republican, annual, perfectly decent.
It literally means a beginning.
So they never developed a word that corresponds to the sort of entity that Lear describes.
Polly?
Yes.
I mean, the answer is twofold, both economic and political.
So economically, they were extremely self-sufficient.
It was a command economy exploiting locals who are Greek and they are enslaved.
They are much less dependent than the Athenians on external sources of e.g.
bread.
The Athenians imported their bred wheat from the Black Sea, from what's today Ukraine, and therefore that raised the living standards of the ordinary poor Athenians, who otherwise would have been eating either inferior wheat or barley.
The Spartans weren't so fussy.
They typically were happy with a kind of porridge.
But the helots made, grew the barley and the wheat.
They grew the vines.
They grew the olives.
Showing 121–140 of 193 · page 7 of 10
← Previous
Next →