A

Wartok Ancient Greek Edition. We have with us the delightful rule Ko9 and Dyke, professor the University of Oxford. We talk about, oh, my goodness, Grim ALLISON, the Thucydides trap 300 and how it, you know, pollutes teenage boys. In defense of war. Secretaries, minds. Homer really liking Blood, guts and gore. Military ethics.

B

This is just.

A

This is a really good show. You guys are going to have a lot of fun. All right, let's roll the tape. So how do ancient Greek historians today feel about Xi Jinping talking about this Thucydides trap?

C

So Thucydides trap is an idea that was invented in 2017, I think, by Graham Ellison. Like, he's not an ancient historian. So it's one of those moments where, on the one hand, okay, it's great, everybody's talking about Thucydides, surely that's good. But on the other hand, it is in an extremely shallow way. So I read the book, Graham Allison's book on this, and I noticed that within a few pages, he never talks about Thucydides again. Right? He talks about Thucydides, but he doesn't have any examples from ancient history. First of all, except for the Thucydides thing about Athens and Sparta, he just talks about modern warfare or modern strategic situations, shall we say. And so he's not interested in ancient history as such. He's just mining it to get a nice little slogan for a phenomenon that he's observed in the modern world that's absolutely legitimate. I'm not saying that that's wrong, that we need to discard this, but it means that for us, I mean, that engagement with antiquity is very shallow. And I think most scholars of Thucydides now would say that there is not that much to the Thucydides trap that needs to have Thucydides name on it, so to speak. There is, of course, an understanding in Thucydides that there is a dynamic between states, which he was the first to formulate, in which there is an established power and a rising power, and that creates tension, which, according to Thucydides, inevitably led to war. But his own narrative can be easily used to disprove that point, because it's not actually that which leads to war. I think it's not because Sparta is afraid or because he was even able to gauge that Sparta was afraid that this war happened. It's because of a host of other reasons that he also mentions, most of which don't have anything to do with Sparta. They have to do with Corinth being offended at its naval empire being encroached upon by the Athenians. So there's a lot of ways in which you can say, okay, well this, if you were to read this a little bit more closely, you might just decide that what you call the Thucydides trap should be called something else. But it's a nice little label that makes people think that Thucydides still relevant. So I guess on that level, we're pretty grateful.

D

When I read it, my takeaway was I couldn't identify if this was really a metaphor we were going to use. Who is Sparta and who is Athens? Because the way that he applies the metaphors, it's both, both countries are both at all times and it's constantly changing.

C

It's like gender.

D

So I have. Yeah, exactly. So I had no idea. Like who.

C

No, I think that's, that's, you know, an interesting point about the idea of like, let's, let's make parallels between ancient Athens and Sparta is that of course there have been certain historical parallels that have been drawn, especially between sort of commercial and maritime and outward looking and global US versus sort of land bound conservative Soviet Union. That is the classic one that, that was very dominant during the Cold War. But like the Soviet Union was not the established power. Right? So in that sense, Thucydides trap doesn't apply there. They are the new ones, they are the rising ones, they are the ideological threat to the world order kind of thing. And similarly now, like, if you wanted to make that parallel with the Thucydides, with the situation Thucydides described in the 5th century BC, you would have to say that the US is Sparta with the most powerful fleet in the world and with, you know, these overseas trade interests and like this, their cultural hegemony as well. There's just no way that this can never work. Right? It doesn't work, except at the most superficial level, which is exactly what we're saying. We'd love to go into a discussion about how Thucydide in this is, or just a discussion of like, okay, let's talk about the Peloponnesian War. Let's talk about what's actually going on here, because it's a lot more complex than that. But then we're always, you know, this is a journalist writing about like modern politics, and this is me, the historian laying out the ultimate cliche line of every historian. Actually, it's more nuanced than that.

A

Journalist. Ladies, gentlemen.

C

Sorry.

D

I mean, it's not, not wrong.

C

Is he not a journalist?

D

I thought he was opinion editor or some type of professor or something?

A

Does he have a terminal degree? Has he done all life?

C

A person who writes stuff about current events? I don't know what you call that.

A

Brutal. He does have a PhD in political science.

C

It's a political scientist. I should call him a political scientist. Fair enough. Um, but, like, you know, a political scientist, but not someone who has necessarily made a detailed study of the ancient world of classical Greece, of the cities.

A

It's just even, like, you can try, right? That's really the point.

D

It's like, you don't.

A

You don't have to. You don't have to be deep in your Dell Brook to, like, you know, understand some nuance.

C

A general point that I always try to make is we shouldn't try to gatekeep antiquity. Right. It's actually good that he wrote a big book that made everybody look at Thucydides again. Like, great. Obviously, Kagan as well did this in the past. Like, he was always trying to make sure that everybody was reading Thucydides, at least if they were taking any kind of liberal arts degree in American universities. He really pushed for people to read that. Now, I don't know if Thucydides is necessarily the source that I want you to read from classical Greece, but at the same time, like, it's a great book. Read it by all means. It'll make you think it has a lot to it, you know, like. Like Homer, like we just talked about earlier, there's a lot of stuff in Thucydides that feels timeless and relevant. And that was exactly his intention. Right. He meant to. He explicitly set out to write something that was going to be around forever. And so, you know, that is something that we are grateful for and that we don't want to go out to Graham Allison's house and tell him, like, you can't. You know, you can't write about this. This is illegal. You're not a historian. No, I mean, by all means. What I'm just saying is that as far as ancient historians are concerned, that engagement is, to some extent, you know, facile, convenient. It's not really an engagement with the ancient world. It's an appropriation of a model for the purposes of making a point about modern politics, which is fine, you can do, but that means that I have less to say on it than I would have if he had tried to find, you know, examples throughout history or even throughout ancient history, that. That would have been really cool.

D

Yeah, I think that's one of the. One of the reasons he used it is, at least in my opinion, is because a lot of military war colleges in the US Especially use Thucydides, at least portions of Thucydides to start discussing, like the beginnings of strategy early on issue being that it's also not great for that because it's not a great look at strategy because of the way Thucydides was both too close and not close enough to the decisions that were being made on all sides. Like, yes, his investigations are great, but then to try to apply that to the U.S. china, or even the U.S. soviet Union, I think is just. It's doing a lot with that narrative that doesn't necessarily fit.

C

No, for sure. I mean, this is always the thing about historians. When I say, okay, it's actually more complicated than that. What I mean is one of the fundamental things that is absolutely just at the heart of history as an academic discipline is that we acknowledge that every historical society is different, right? The cliche goes like, history is always repeating itself. The first thing you learn when you study history is history never repeats itself, right? Every single historical situation is different. And so you always have to worry, okay, how comparable are two historical situations really? And on what level are they comparable? And so what Alison has done with the Thucydides trap, obviously, is to say, okay, well, at a very zoomed out level, you have a similar dynamic where there is an established power and a rising power. But at almost any closer level of detail, this comparison breaks down. So you just have to say, okay, well, is that still a legitimate comparison? Well, in that one sense, sure it is. Right? But in most other senses you would say, okay, no, these historical situations are too different for us to say that, you know, the US is Sparta. How would you. How what? It's. It's just not. The dynamics are not the same. And similarly, with, you know, a lot of people who want to compare the, the modern US to the Late Roman Empire or something like that, it just. Like these are not the same entities in any meaningful sense, except that there is a narrative. Again, we come back to this idea of like telling ourselves stories. You know, there is a narrative in which the, you know, the protagonist is going through the same process, right? Or something. That is what people have in mind, this idea that the downfall of empires is a process that always looks the same or something like that. And then you can ask yourself, first of all, is that what's happening? And secondly, is the Late Roman Empire a meaningful comparison, comparative case, when the nature, the environment of that empire, the way it's run the way it's thought of itself. All of this is radically different. The world is different. Right. You can't just say, okay, well what happened there will happen here. So in that sense, whenever somebody tries to make a model that's supposed to apply to all of history, you have to immediately think, wait a minute, how universal are these factors that you're implying here? And that obviously applies to the Thucydides trap very strongly. So yeah, it's just something that I think historians don't necessarily do very much. And if they do, you have to always be extremely critical of what they put out.

D

Okay, Justin, News of the week is that the United States military is going to be the T nation, I guess, which is an old bodybuilding website that definitely wasn't about the use of steroids. It was about the use of steroids. But yeah. So the Department of Defense is going to start looking at everybody over 30 to see if their testosterone is low and then giving them more. Couple of things. Testosterone being low is a real thing. There is a thing called operator syndrome. And if you actually read the memo the hegseth signed, that's what he specifically addresses. That is a real condition that affects a small portion of operators who have been in continual high stress environments where they've had adrenal fatigue and their body's hormones are out of balance. That said, I think it has like a 5% occurrence in, in the normal population. So I don't know that this is really going to fix much, but the way that he decided to come out with his video talking about the high T army or high T military.

A

Well, it's just like, do we have 300 to blame for this?

C

I think so.

D

I think I told you this. So I was in 5th Special Forces Group role. You have no reason to know this, but 5th Special Forces Group, when they were in Vietnam in the 60s, became known as the Legion. That name carried over when they through the years and they still are referred to as the Legion. They use some Roman symbols whenever they make their unit crest and things like that. The battalion I specifically was in, though called themselves the Spartans, confusingly. And that only happened after the movie 300 came out.

C

Yep.

D

The commander at the time was like, we're going to be the Spartans. And that's absolutely like there's this whole thing where that's where that came from.

C

There's a lot of that. I mean, there's people who specifically study this as a way of reception in the ancient world. Right. So this is the idea of people Trying to take things from antiquity and reimagining and reapplying it to their own lives. And there's a whole sort of cottage industry of people writing about how different organizations and different groups of people have used essentially the version of Sparta that you find in 300 to kind of identify themselves as being very tough, very manly, very brave. That is obviously because, I mean, 300, when I watched it now, like, when I watched it, when I came out, like I was a teenager, I was like, my mind was blown, right? Like, that was super cool. I watched it, I think it was. I watched it in imax, actually. So it was this huge screen. I went with a friend, which is like, wow, this is amazing. Best thing ever. Blah, blah. Now when I watch it, I'm just like, this is, like, really quaint. But also, it's the only way that I can take it seriously. It's a study of masculinity, right? This is about, like, okay, what is it like to be a man? That's what it's about. That is very explicitly what it's about, right? Like, it is all about the perfect man, Leonidas being a perfect man. And no one can possibly touch his sheer raw manliness. And that's fine for a movie. It's just a bit ridiculous. When you realize nowadays, surely we are a little bit more critical of that image. We're a little bit less inclined, I would say, to glorify that particular type of manliness. But obviously Hegset's not quite there yet. So we need to now deal with the reality with which we're confronted. But that is, I think, why 300 appeals so much to people who want to picture themselves as big, manly men is in this very traditional guise, in this very sort of militarized, or at least quasi sort of fantasy militarized sense. I think they see 300 as an ultimate expression of who they want to be or who they wish they were or who they aspire to being. I think that's disturbing because that masculinity is. The masculinity of. The Spartans in 300 is a death cult, right? That is explicitly what it is. These men live to die. That's all they want. And they don't want to beat the Persians. They want the Persians to keep on coming forever so that they can keep on killing and dying forever. They don't actually want peace. They want Persians to kill them. That is what they desire in life. That is the pinnacle of achievement for them. This is something that I think is very disturbing. If it starts to affect the ideology of modern militaries. I would say you don't want soldiers thinking in these terms. You don't want them to glorify the idea of dying for your state. You also don't want them glorifying the idea that that act of dying for your state is all you live for. That's what you're there to do. You obviously want them to think much more pragmatically about how they're going to, you know, achieve strategic objectives and maybe hopefully survive and get home in one piece. You know, these are the kind of things that, you know. But whatever. So this is why I think. Why I think Hegseth loves it so much and why it affects his thinking so much and why a lot of other people like him are also just really enamored of that version of Sparta. It's just that version of Sparta is entirely a modern product. Like, this is the result of, you know, Zack Snyder having a very weird interpretation of Frank Miller's graphic novel, which is already, like, really extreme in this regard, but which is not about Spartans. It's about USMC in fancy dress, as I always like to say. Like, it's about a modern military training or a vision of modern military training applied to the ancient world. It's kind of recursive in that sense. Like, it comes out of the US Military. It's about the US Military. It comes back to the US Military, and the US military says, this is awesome. We want to be like this. Yeah, of course. You're already like this. Like, this is based on you. This isn't based on the ancient Spartans. Right. Same with Pressfield's Gates of Fire, this novel, which you may have read, I think a lot of people in the services read it.

D

It's highly, highly recommended. When I was a young guy. And, yeah, it's exactly. It's that same. Like, just the same thing.

C

It's the same. It's about American, like, Special Forces or about, like, the U.S. marine Corps, whatever it is. Like, I don't know exactly where you would draw the parallel, but it's about a modern military, right, and its ethos and it's its training methods and its attitudes, and it's like the whole vocabulary that they use. It's modern with a little sauce over the top, which makes it feel a little bit ancient. And I think that's why it appeals. Right? It's a study of this particular kind of masculinity that emerges from that world and is now being sort of imposed back on it in an Ever more extreme, radicalized way. It's almost like you're asking sort of chatgpt to keep repeating, keep summarizing the same piece, and it gets more and more wild and extreme. It goes further and further off track. Right. Because you're perpetuating the errors within the system as you're replicating it.

D

So I mean, I guess if you wanted to correct, let's say, just quickly correct the narrative on the Spartans. What is the best source? Is it. Is it Aristofans? Is he the Xenophon? Is he the best source of the Spartans?

C

Yeah.

D

What their actual life was up. Yeah.

C

You can read Xenophon's Constitution of the Spartans, which is a very short text which literally just sets out like I one day I woke up thinking, why are the Spartans so great? And then I thought about it and here's the answer. And so this is literally just about how they organize their society. And obviously that is very much based on the idea the Spartans are great and wonderful and especially militarily effective. But when you read that, you have to bear in mind, like, this is all we know about Spartan military methods. This is all he says about it when he's trying to prove that they're so much better than everybody else. And it is so little, right? There is so little about the upbringing, There is so little about the military training. There's so little about the military methods that we would say is like, oh, yeah, they're really being put through it here. They're really being prepped for the worst. Right. What you see is just a bunch of guys who are trying to manage their society and control the values of their children and maintain high birth rates, which is also something Hegseth would probably enjoy. But these kinds of things that don't necessarily have a direct effect or direct impact on their military abilities, but is really just trying to generally foster good civic spirit. These people are obedient, they're deferent to their elders. They obey the laws, they know what's good for them. They don't say very much. That is very much the Spartans that they want fighting. Meh. Very secondary. Doesn't go into much detail, not very important. That's not a skill they prize. And all these sources agree on this. If you want a more nuanced picture of Sparta, there's a very good book by Nigel Kennel, which is just called Spartans, came out in 2010. It's a much more nuanced account of what the Spartans were like. There's also Andrew Baylis's Spartans which is. Okay. It's similar in the sense that it's trying to introduce some of the new ideas about how people now think about Sparta. And that's really, really very different from the way that it used to be interpreted at the time when Frank Miller was writing 300. You can go and read 300. I mean, I have a copy of it here. And you can go flip to the back and say, what is his inspiration for this? It's Victor Hansen. That is what he read in order to write 300. So, again, it's ouroboros of cultural influences into which historical knowledge penetrates very little. Right.

D

Yeah, yeah. I mean, like, that's. I always wondered, like, this idea that they were completely divorced. The soldiers were completely divorced from their families, and they only lived in the barracks, and that's all they ever did. And they just weren't. They were separate from the society, basically, until they had had, you know, reached manhood as being incredibly weird. And then I was like, when you go look and like, where does it say that in the historical text? It's like, not really anywhere.

C

Yeah, no, especially not in. In contemporary texts. In Xenophon, I mean, they just go home, right? They just hang out with the boys during the day, and then they go home. And that's.

D

Doesn't sound that much different than, like, the gymnasium that the Sophocle sophomore of Athens is described. They go. They hang out, they wrestle, they go back home.

C

Yeah, exactly. And it's just about social conditioning, right? I mean, just like the gymnasium. Yeah, you do a bit of physical exercise, but you're also just being socialized, right? You're being. You're. You're being used to having these conversations with these older men who are. Who are there to kind of instruct you on how to be a good citizen. And that's kind of what you're expected to pick up. And also, for a little while, you're like, you're looking really good, and that's going to be good for you because you'll be healthy. And also because older men will want to, you know, get into relationships. Relationship with you. So that's all fine, because then you can get patronage, you can get better connections, you can get all sorts of benefits out of that. So there's all sorts of ways in which, you know, that kind of fits together. But then in. In Plutarch, so in the much later sources from the Roman period, they suddenly do live in barracks. They suddenly are separated from their parents, and. And they do have to do a lot more Training especially to learn how to sing and how to talk like a Spartan. Because that is what. What Plutarcharch is really exercise with. Like, they really have to learn how to sound like a Spartan. Because there's a lot of songs you got to know, right?

D

Yeah. A lot of marching songs. You got to know all of them.

C

But that's the thing. That later source is written after multiple documented reforms of the Spartan education system. So we know that this is not the system they had before. This is the system after they lose their prominence. But they're doubling down on their traditions, which is something that societies will do. Right. Like, you're no longer very important, but you are unique. People will look at you like you're special. So you kind of double down. Yeah, sorry.

D

They get pushed across the battle, right? Yeah.

A

By 300 A.D. i mean, come on, what are.

C

What are we even doing?

D

They're getting. I mean, they get pushed around. What is it? After the Peloponnesian War, they get thrice. I think it is that. That just pushes them around the battlefield and like.

C

Yeah, it's the Thebans. Why aren't they Thebans? Defeat them a couple times.

A

Oh, this is the. This is the question I wanted to end on. So, like, what do you actually think Epaminandas did?

C

Oh, God, that's a big one. So, I mean, it's a combination, and I think I read about this in my book, right? It's a combination of tried and tested methods. So the story is always that he must have done something revolutionary because he beat the Spartans. Right. And no one's been able to do that for a while. I mean, what he ultimately did, according to the best accounts that we have, is he just didn't run away when the Spartans bore down on him. Right. Like, that is already quite special. He managed to, you know, first get an army together that was already decently experienced. Of course, the Sacred Band may have something to do with that. They were a very experienced sort of picked unit of men who had some physical training, who'd spent some time together, who'd been in the wars together. So you have an experienced unit leading your phalanx, and then he masked the rest of them very deep. So there's a very deep theme, information, which is very strong for morale. Right. You literally can't run away, so you're more likely to stand your ground because there's a physical block against you doing that. And the people behind you are in really high spirits because the fight's not going to get to them. For a long time. So everybody's kind of like, yeah, let's go. They're much more keen and they prevent preventing you from running away. So in that formation, that very deep formation with the sacred band likely at the head, he was able to sort of slam into the Spartan formation, possibly when they were in disorder, out of a bungled maneuver that they were trying to pull. Their own cavalry had disrupted their lines when they were being driven back into them. So there was some disorder in the Spartan line and they sort of smashed into that. And then they were willing to engage Spartans in hand to hand fighting, which most Greeks just didn't do. Like they were afraid when they saw the Spartans advancing with their regular formations, their good order, marching in order and wearing sort of uniform equipment, they would just break and run away. And the Thebans decided to stand their ground. And once you stand your ground against a Spartan, he's no better than you, right? That is something that follows from the way. What we know about their training is their training is not about skill at arms. Their training is not about strength or anything like that. It's not about becoming individually a superior fighter. It's just about that sort of moral and discipline conditioning, right? It's about becoming part of a well oiled machine of devoted citizen reasons. But in a fight, one on one, a spartan's no better than anyone else in the Greek world. So if you're willing to stand and face him, you can beat him, you know, 50, 50 at that point. And then the enormous weight of that Theban column, where there's all these ranks upon ranks behind them, that is one of the things that really then comes, you know, comes to the fore when you can just say, okay, we can stick in this fight for as long as we want. You can't, because your formation is not as deep as ours. Do you want to take these odds? Do you want to keep flipping that coin over and over again until you're all gone? And the Spartan royal guard, to their credit, say, yes, we'll do that, they all die. But the rest of the line is not that tough, right? Something like 400 Spartiates are killed in this fighting, which likely includes most if not all of the 300 who are guarding the king. But this is the rest of that

A

army doesn't saying he's the greatest of all time. Like, is that enough to get you there?

C

Well, he did something that no one had done right for a long time. So that's definitely something. But the greatest of all time is like, you know, that Sits Cicero trying to give credit to someone he admired because in part, he was a Democratic leader fighting against a king. Right. He is somebody who represents the republican ideals supposedly, that Cicero himself stood for. So he's obviously going to pick for somebody like that, who then go into the Peloponnese and strip away all these governments that have been imposed by the Spartans and replace them with more pro Theban regimes. He will consider that to be a real act of liberation. So that matches his own idea deals. He did sort of permanently break Spartan power. Like they never recovered from that. Right. So in that sense, you know, he wasn't just a battle.

A

He ended an empire, changed the map. We'll get some credit for that. He didn't just win a battle, he, like, ended an empire.

C

He's like, yeah, exactly, exactly. And that isn't just because of the battle. Right. It's because he followed through. And that is something that you can definitely credit with. In fact, I mean, Victor Hanson, in one of his more lucid moments, did write an article about this where he's talking about. Talking about EP Menondas as the inventor of strategy, in a sense, because he followed through, because he said, I'm not just going to win this battle. I'm now going to march right into your home territory, strip away your assets, clear your allies, break all your alliances, reduce you to a rump state. That is essentially a much more decisive way of waging war than just saying, okay, we beat you now. Let's come to terms.

D

So funny you saying that in one of his more lucid moments, because I was rereading his. His take on the Peloponnesian War recently, and he was talking about the. How they never. He basically how they never run. And then it follows that paragraph up, talking about Athens or how they never follow. They never. They never follow a retreating army. And he follows that up with Athens fleeing from the. From, I think, Thebes on the plane, and the. And the Thebans following them and then slaughtering them as they. As they follow them. And it's like you just said they don't do this and then wrote a whole chapter on how they did this.

C

This is what I mean. Like, he knows, but he doesn't know. Like, how is this possible? You asked me to explain this. Like, how can they just ignore certain evidence? I don't know, man. Like, sometimes. Sometimes they just forget. I guess this is very like, you know, Benioff and Weiss saying you forgot about the fleet. I mean, sometimes these scholars will just forget that they just said something that Completely disproves what they're arguing. I don't get it. I don't know. I don't know. But this is what I'm saying with Victor Hansen is that he's increasingly just sloppy. Right. He doesn't need to be a good scholar. He's selling books anyway. He's got it made. So in that sense, maybe he just doesn't care enough. Maybe he's too invested in the model that he's built up and he just can't let it go. But there's so much scholarship now that proves him wrong. If he just take a month or two to read some of that stuff, then hopefully he would actually, if he were willing to seriously engage with that, he might change his mind on a lot of stuff. But of course he's not, because his career hinges on him being right. So I don't know. It's. There's that personal element as well.

D

Has he.

A

Has he been to this Pentagon yet? Like, that's got to happen at some point, right?

D

If he hasn't, I'd be shocked. I haven't seen it in any reports, but he did. Was it this. Was it last Trump administration that he released End of Empires or End of Civilization?

C

No, it's a long. I mean, he was a supervisor during the Bush years, so, I mean, that was when he was most influential.

A

Yeah. I mean, he wrote the case for Trump.

D

Yeah, I know. He did write that.

C

Yeah.

A

Right.

D

Yeah.

C

Anyways, no, it's also, I mean, that book, the War like no other. The book on the Peloponnesian War.

D

Yeah.

C

I mean, that was propaganda for the Iraq War. Right. That is explicitly why he wrote.

D

Yeah. Very clear.

C

And that's just depressing. Okay. When we're talking about modern authors using the ancient world. Don't do that, man. It's not cool. You're not making us look good here. And so, yeah, it's hard for me to have to keep citing him on various points because it's just his academic career has so nakedly come to be at the service of his political and pundit career that you can no longer really take anything he says seriously. But at the same time, he is a very important voice in my field or the. He was in the 80s and 90s. So you kind of have to acknowledge that.

A

What has Hegseth done compared to Obama? Writes Victor Davis Hansen, as they dissect the effort to impeach Secretary of War Hegseth. Oh, my goodness.

C

Embarrassing.

A

Yeah, let's just.

D

Yeah, I think we could.

A

Longtime theme on war talk the influence of technology, particularly emerging technologies, on how war changes. What's the right place to start when thinking about that and the classical Greek context.

C

So I think there's kind of like the expected answer and the real answer. I think there are two different things here. The expected answer is that I'll start in a Bronze Age and then say, okay, well, iron comes in, right? That's the big change. It's not really though, in the sense that society changes so comprehensively around the end of the Bronze Age anyway, that we don't really have a good strong sense of continuity between the Bronze Age and the Iron Age. So in that sense, it's very difficult for us to reconstruct how the technology actually affected things. We do know that when we get Homer's poetry, for instance, a lot of the weapons that they're talking about are still described as being bronze. There's a lot of continuity in the use of bronze. It doesn't just sort of go away. It's not like iron comes in and displays, replaces it entirely. And so what you're actually seeing is Greeks holding on to bronze weaponry and bronze armor and things like that, partly because it just has other functions beyond the practical need to use it to harm people. And so, for instance, even in the classical period, when iron has been around for centuries, they have iron headed spears, but the butt spikes of those spears, the counterweight of those spears are bronze a lot of the time. So you get this kind of situation where they're using both kind of technologies at the same time for slightly different purposes. So it isn't really as simple as saying, okay, iron gets introduced, radical technological revolution, everything changes. Right? That is an old assumption and I think a common and very easy assumption. That's just not really what happens on the ground. So what you're instead talking about is the slow sort of adoption of different weapons that change the way that warfare looks, but that you have to imagine are not defining that development. It's not like, oh, they suddenly introduce a certain weapon and that changes everything and that turns their whole way of fighting. It really doesn't do that unless you have corresponding changes in sociopolitical development and organization. So for instance, in the period that we're talking about now, around the time that these poems, the Homeric poems, come to their final form, you have the introduction of a new type of shield, which is this big round double grip shield that you know from Greek history of the hoplite shield, it's called the Aspis in the sources now that seems to be really really influential. And there is an old argument in scholarship that this determined the use of kinds of tactics because it only works in certain formations. And that means you have to work together with large groups and you have to create these homogenous formations, and that determines the whole shape of warfare for centuries to come. But actually, more recent scholarship has really pushed back against that and basically said, actually, we can't see any of that. We don't necessarily even need to assume that that's the case. Nothing confirms that this is the only way that you can effectively use this weapon. And initially, the number of people who could afford it would have been really small. And so the argument there is like, you need changes in society. You just need people to get a lot wealthier and cities to become lot bigger before you can say, okay, this shield leads to things like hoplite phalanx formations and things like that. So that development is actually much more complex and ties into a lot of other features rather than just saying, okay, this new technology has arrived. You know, this either, you know, use it or lose it. Like, pick it up and otherwise you'll be defeated by these other Greeks who have already adopted it, that kind of thing.

D

I think. I think that's a really, really interesting segue because you're. You're talking about the. The kind of. The. The economic culture that also kind of underpinned. Obviously, there's the. The core differences between Sparta and Athens. Like, when you get into the time of the Peloponnesian War, do you think the hoplite army dictated the differences in the way their economies developed or the movements towards those? Or were those just byproducts of, like, Athens having access to silver and seafaring, whereas Sparta using iron spicks and helots, slaves, like, as kind of the differences in their economy?

C

Yeah, it's really. I mean, the important thing to know when you talk about the Peloponnesian War is that there's no technological difference between the two sides. Right. They have exactly the same kind of weapons and armor, and that goes right down to, like, naval warfare. Like, you can say, okay, the Athenians have the much more powerful fleet. They really specialize in that they really know what they're doing with the fleet. But, like, their triremes are exactly the same as the Corinthian triremes they're fighting. Right. There's zero difference as far as. As we know. So it's really about how you use it, essentially. It's really about the kind of tactics, the kind of experience that you have using them. How confident you are using them and what you want strategically to do with them. And so that is partly affected by the economy. I mean, Athens has a lot of overseas interests, so they invest a lot in basically making sure that their navy is strong, that they can protect their allies, keep their trade lanes open, push their influence elsewhere. Whereas for the Spartans, I mean, their society has grown for different reasons into this really. This society is very rigidly hierarchical and that is dominated by this leisure class, right? So they have this large number of people who don't work, who have an enslaved underclass doing all the work for them. They just kind of get band together and run the state. They're also available for military service when necessary. And that kind of way of life where you have this very agricultural economy propping up this kind of leisure class that expresses itself militarily in this large hoplite army, essentially, that is what the Spartans do. But I mean, it's not like the Athenians don't have a large hoplite army. They have a larger hoplite army than the Spartan one, right? They. They have more hoplites than the Spartans. It's just that most of those guys are not actually leisure class in the same way. They don't specialize in the same way. And you know, a lot of them basically don't see themselves as defending a way of life when they're picking up that shield and spear and defending or fighting for the land or anything like that. They don't have the same attachment to. To that way the society is organized. So I would say those different ways of war, I mean, they come very much out of different strategic considerations which themselves grow out of essentially the way in which these states have developed in a socioeconomic and political sense. And modern scholarship has pointed out that Sparta is not that different from a lot of other Greek states in that sense. There's a lot of other states as well that really focus on just all of the means, all of the resources available, prop up this huge leisure class. They stay in power, they oppress everybody else. And militarily, they're quite effective precisely because they are permanently available for military service when needed and because they have the economic means to supply themselves the best available armor and weapons. And that's all obviously privately arranged, right? They all pay for their own stuff.

A

So in your book Classical Greek Tactics, A Cultural History, your sort of key is these few quotes from it's one Aristophanes play and another little piece of Plato where they're just, just make. Where they're like making fun of the idea that anyone in Athens would ever want to train militarily, that this was just like the lamest thing you could possibly be doing with your time in like, you know, 475 B.C. it's like, you know, you could, you could philosophize, you can, you know, drink with your friends, but the idea that you would be like putting on armor and like learning how to hold your spear and shield is just like, like it's unconscionable that you would ever spend your time doing that.

C

Yeah, you'd think.

A

Ridiculous. Well, I guess, you know, thinking about like the sort of. Generally when we talk about this stuff, you have two things. You have like, technological overhang and then you have like the operational overhang of like, okay, here's the technology that's available to you in any given year. Have you figured out the right way to sort of like organize your society and train and have the right doctrine to like, get to the sort of frontier, what's possible, whatever, with whatever has been invented? It was just so shocking to me that this was just like a big limit is like no one wanted to deal with this. I mean, maybe for starters, we're all like, why, why doesn't this get like, I don't know, competitively, like eaten out of existence? Is it just like the geography of, of of Greece or something that you could not train and still like exist as a city? How does this, how do you even get in, into this as an equilibrium?

C

Well, it's very effective. That's the weird thing. Like, it's completely counterintuitive to us, right? Like we, we imagine, obviously if you're, if you're, if you're trying to be a fighter and you have to survive, you rely on your skills, your ability with the weapons, you're obviously going to try and be as good at it as you can, right? Like that's, you rely on that for your self preservation. The Greeks don't have that attitude. And I argue that, like, not because it makes sense to me. I actually, I don't really get it. Like, it's very hard to explain. I'm arguing that because that's what the evidence tells me, right? We have these explicit quotes that you mentioned that they don't tr. Say they don't train. They actively, repeatedly, like assert that no one does this. They find it silly and ridiculous. They explain why they think it's silly, right? Like, you know, you're making a fool of yourself. Everybody's going to scrutinize you. You're gonna, you're gonna, you know, you're gonna slip up someday and everybody's gonna laugh at you like they don't wanna do it. Why do they do that? Like why do they exclude it from their military experience? I mean, the best answer that I've been able to come up with, and this is really speculative, it's just trying to make sense of the evidence that we have have is that there emerges from these societies, especially in the democratic ones like Athens, but elsewhere as well, like in these societies that rely on a citizen militia, right? So in wartime they don't have a military, they don't have a professional army. When war comes, all of the adult males get called up and they have to march out and fight. Obviously all of those guys in an economy that is to a large extent still like subsistence, you know, it's more market oriented in the classical Greek period, but you still have quite a lot of people who are living hand to mouth. They don't have the time to set aside to go and do this kind of training, right? They don't have the time to say, okay, I'll take my weekends, I'll take my time off and I'll go and drill with my buddies and then we'll figure out how to do this properly. They get called up and they serve. And I think with that necessity, with that reliance on a militia comes this ideology, this need to establish this ideology that as long as you're willing to do that, as long as you turn up when the call comes, that's enough, right? It's enough for you to be willing to serve your state. That's all we ask of you essentially. Because otherwise immediately you get these enormous differences between those who have the time to train and those who don't. And you're going to feel like a lot of people are going to feel inadequate. They're going to feel like it's not worth it for me to turn up. They're going to feel like, oh, my contribution is not needed compared to yours, et cetera. If you want that buy in, right? If you want everybody to be willing to take part, you have to tell them, as long as you churn up, we've got what we need from you, you can just do your part. And so there develops this ideology that you don't actually need to train or prepare for this. You just need to have the spirit. You just need to have the right attitude to be there and to have your spirit and shield with you to up on the battlefield and not to run away. And that's going to See us through. And I think a large part of that is affirmed by the fact that a lot of these Greek battles, they're over in a flash. When one side breaks, right? That is what happens most of the time, that one side will almost immediately collapse, run away, get speared in the back. That's how these victories happen. And so to some extent, like learning, spending a lot of time trying to get better with a sword or better with a spear, it's not actually going to help you very much in that very small window in which you would actually use those skills. And the Greeks themselves debate that to some extent. It's like in Basel itself, you don't actually need that. What you need is this sort of the spine, the spirit, to say, okay, I'm not going to be the first to run away. You run away, that's what you want to inculcate, right? That's what you want to foster. And the result of that is that even the Spartans, who take warfare quite a bit more seriously than other Greeks, as sort of quite famous, when they train, they don't train with weapons, right? They don't train weapons drills or weapon proficiency like that. They don't think that part of military skill is important. What they care about is unit cohesion, formation drills, formation evolutions, keeping the line steady. That's what they care about. And that kind of expresses the same idea, is that it's not individual skill that's going to make the difference here, it's the individual will to stay in the line, to keep your position post. And you don't train that essentially, not directly by requiring people to spend their time doing sword fighting drills or whatever.

D

I think that's interesting. How did the mercenaries change that? Because you have a portion about Ison of Pharaoh and then obviously Alcibiades, after the Peloponnesian War, he goes off and becomes like a mercenary for hire or a raider. Does that change the way the Greeks start looking at warfare as the rise of this mercenary class? Or is that just kind of a add on offshoot?

C

No, it's a couple of ways in which this kind of system, this militia system gets sort of changed over time, right? I mean, states are developing again, this has to do with their political, their economic developments as well. Like as they develop more means, they get to devote more of those means to warfare. They start to think seriously about how can we be safer in war. Right. One of the things they do, for instance, is from the classical period onwards, they are investing hugely in, for instance. So this is one of the Ways in which they can just say, okay, well, we can throw money at this, right? Like, we can get better at this by, you know, investing our resources. The Athenians, obviously, investing massively in their fleet, et cetera. This is all the same idea, but they're also figuring out that, of course, if you have that kind of money, if you can pay people to serve you in certain ways, then that can make up for certain weaknesses, that can allow you to rely on specialists for certain functions in battle or in warfare. And it can also allow you to essentially foster within a certain part of your population the kind of skills that they need to do better. Right. Because there is kind of an understanding that obviously people who have experience in war will do better than those who don't. And so that is their first kind of connection to the concept of what we consider to be the necessary military training is to say, well, we need to foster people's military experience. We need to make sure that people have done it before. It's not the first time that they're encountering these problems, encountering these situations and the emotional responses that prompts.

D

Right.

C

And in that sense, mercenaries are obviously one of the arguments there. Like, mercenaries are just better in a fight. And largely the Greeks understand that in part by their weapon skill, but largely because they're just not, you know, they're not as afraid anymore. They're not as nervous anymore, Right? They. They've. They've seen it all. Right? So mercenaries in that sense are more effective because they are just, you know, they're just doing a job and they know how it's done. And that kind of feeds into the. The rising ideology that, okay, well, if we can try and invest in that, we can have at least some part of our militaries that can be a bit more reliable, can be a bit more dependable, maybe more flexible as well, on tactical level. But the problem is, of course, that these states are very small, and when they're calling up the army, they're calling up all of their population. They cannot actually afford to have all of that population be raised to that same level because they have lives to live. They have an economy to run. They have farms to farm and shops to shop. And so there's a lot of ways in which the sheer tiny scale of these Greek states puts a hard limit on how much of that professionalization you can do. But the spread of mercenary service, especially by the 4th century, a lot of these states will have at least some mercenaries in their service. Sometimes they're light infantry specialists, sometimes they're just hoplites, sometimes they're cavalry, whatever. And those forces are kind of a sign that all of these states are thinking seriously about, okay, how can we get at least some of the advantages of professionalism, training and military experience.

A

I want to stay on the, you know, the sad militia who don't have time to train for a second longer. So you mentioned formation evolution. Like in, in the book. You kind of have this awesome contrast between the sort of 19th century Germans who all, you know, fought under von Moltke and like have this vision of warfare where like everyone's doing these like cute little turns on the battlefield and reshaping how deep their lines are. And then you have these, these, these, these Greek hoplites who like can't even turn. Like, this is like totally, this is like a totally insane concept. Like the Spartans probably can turn, but everyone else just sort of like drifts away from the open side of where their shield is. So talk a little bit about sort of how hard it was for these, for these Germans who, you know, idealized, you know, Pericles and, and Epaminondas and all these, you know, heroes of, of, of ancient Greek history reconciling with, and, and you know, reconciling with modern scholarship and the fact that like, no, these, this is just not what they were good. Like you, like, you, you, you had like 15 year old Prussians who were way more functional than, you know, what you were getting out of Thebes.

C

Yeah, they've been put through their paces. No, this is a really interesting thing about the way in which the period that we're writing affects the way that we, the warfare affects our understanding of the warfare of the periods we're writing about. So these Prussians are the first guys to have seriously written about Greek warfare in an academic way. But of course they were hugely influenced by the warfare of their own day, in which Prussia was just spectacularly victorious over all of its rivals in the second half of the 19th century and established itself as something like the best army ever, or the best army in Europe, or at least, least, at the very least of its day, one of the most efficient and well oiled machines in military history. And so they obviously saw this as something that every other society must have been at least striving towards. They must have been trying to be like us. But that way of running a disciplined army in the 19th century is already based on. The idea, grows out of the idea of these Napoleonic musket drills. You have to make sure that you are as quick as possible when you're reloading, and you have to be as precise as possible in your maneuvering because you're trying to form a coherent line. You want to be defensible against infantry, cavalry charges. You want to make sure that you present this sort of intimidating front to the enemy. Some Greeks had some awareness of these advantages. And it actually goes right back to Homer, that in the account that you get of the great battle outside of Troy in the Iliad, the Greeks are advancing, or it's the Trojans, I think, are advancing, advancing. No, wait, the Greeks are advancing quietly. They're advancing in silence. And the Trojans, who are not used to that, are terrified by the idea. That in itself kind of demonstrates this idea that, okay, we understand the power of discipline. We understand the importance of keeping your cool or appearing to keep your cool in front of the enemy. That is intimidating. That's scary. The enemy doesn't want to fight you. So the Greeks definitely had that sense. But the problem is, if you want to inculcate that, if you want to structurally impress upon your. Your, you know, the entire military, that you have, the entire militia, the entire army that you've raised, that this is effective. You need to get them to, you know, all get together and take the time to figure out how these maneuvers work, how to operate them smoothly. And you have to imbue them with the confidence that when the time comes and, you know, the order is given, that they'll be able to do this without a hitch. Right? Otherwise, they're actually going to be even more scared because they think this is going to be, you know, chaos and confusion. You know, this is what happens in a couple of Greek battles. Battles. Cleon, outside of Amphipolis, at one point wants to retreat from the city, orders his army to wheel. They don't know how to wheel, so they fall into complete disorder. And the Spartans just attack them as they're running away. Essentially complete slaughter. Like seven Spartans and 600 Athenians are killed. This complete disparity of the death toll, because the Athenians at that point are just completely rendered helpless by their own confusion. And this is explicitly why the Spartans choose that moment to attack. So there's this understanding. You have to try and get them to take the time to drill. And the simple fact is, from various accounts, we learned that the other Greeks beside the Spartans, just didn't get it right. They didn't understand why it would work and how it would work. Spartan drill is very simple, and it's described by several sources, especially Xenophon, who had personal experience with it, Spartan drill is very simple. You essentially just have officers in front and you just follow them, right? You follow the guy with in front of you, and all you do is just do exactly what he does and then everything will be fine. But that is something that he explains at length in several of his writings to his audience. Clearly assuming that they don't get this right, they don't understand how this works, and they think it's all way too complicated. And we teach this with students. I can teach them in 20 minutes. It's very easy. But you have to have the mindset. And that is something that these Prussians have brought in or that we inherit from generations of people who've been in the army in a more modern, modern way. We inherit this idea. We understand how parade ground drill works. We get why this would be functional. So you explain it to us and in a couple of minutes we can do it. But for the Greeks, this is really still quite a novel idea. And very, very few of them know instinctively how to do it. Very few of them are ever seen doing it. And most of the ones that are seen doing it have clearly had Spartan training. And that's basically what happens, is the Spartans will bring others into their army and then they will say, okay, right, we got to do this first before we do anything else. Get these basic formation drills and evolutions into your head and then we can, then we can continue. And so that's where a lot of these guys are getting it. And that seems to be the singular source for this kind of tactical sophistication.

A

So kind of on that note of how they didn't understand how Spartan warfare worked, where did military thought rank in the philosophizing and socializing? Like, how did Greeks think about what it meant to think about military thought? Was it something that was valued or was it something that much like training, they'll wait until war comes?

C

That was an excellent question, actually. So you don't have militaries, right? In the Greek world, you don't have military academies. So all of this is informal. When they're talking about warfare and how to get better at it, they are doing that essentially among friends. And that's because there are no professional soldiers. So in Athens, for instance, a board of generals is elected every, every year and they only serve for a one year term. And then the next year, I mean, you might get reelected. The generalship is one of the few magistracies in Athens where you can get reelected. Some people are considered very good at it. So they get reelected Lots of times Pericles like 30 times. Phocion, who's a general in the 4th century, gets reelected 45 times. He holds the record. That's basically his entire adult life. He's a general, but that is very rare. And some of these guys only get elected once. Some of them go into battle, immediately die. There isn't that much of a continuity of expertise in this. There is is no old generation of generals that's informing the new one. They are doing this informally. And so you have to imagine people just getting together at these drinking parties or maybe sitting outside talking to philosophers, just chatting about current events and then rehearsing various ideas that they've heard or that have been told about or trying to pass on the necessities to the next generation. And so you get some philosophical dialogues where this happens, where Socrates has to explain to some kid who comes up to him and says, oh, I've been training with this drill master for hire that go around the Greek world sometimes who teaches, teach some basic military skills. And Socrates has to go like, yeah, but did he teach you how to be a general? Actually no, he just taught me tactics, just how to position a formation, how to stand in a line. So Socrates then has to say, well, there's a lot more to being a general. I'm just going to tell you a few things and you're going to have to dig into the rest of it. So you have to imagine that this is something that isn't being in any sense officially done, but that is increasingly along with a lot of other things by the end of the fifth time century starts to be considered something teachable. And that's really a new development in classical Greece. Right before that they kind of just seem to want to reinvent the wheel each time. There is no awareness that we have of any kind of continuity of knowledge as such. You have some philosophers, but you don't really have that same sense of like, okay, I am trying to write something that teaches you how to do something. That's quite a new genre of text that emerged in the late 5th century century BC and from then on you start to see, especially in the 4th century, military treatises, which are explicitly just written because you all got to know how to do this and no one's going to teach you unless you read my text. That is essentially how they do it. So the first of those texts are very pragmatically aimed at, for instance, Athenian cavalry commanders. There's a text from Xenophon that specifically says, here's what you need to do if you're commanding the Athenian cavalry or Aeneas Tacticus Defense under siege, which is basically just a manual that says, if your city is under siege, here's what you do, here's how you prepare, here's how you fight them when they're not at the wall. Here's how you fight them when they are at the wall. And these kinds of things are coming out of that world because they fill a need. Right. There's a vacuum essentially. There is no systematic education in these matters. And so they're gradually starting to think about, okay, we have to make sure that we don't have to reinvent the wheel every time. We have to make sure that this knowledge isn't lost, and then hopefully we can iterate.

D

Wasn't there some resistance within the philosophers for, like, the adoption of spear throwers or projectile throwers and people that weren't hoplites because of the, like, the kind of the tiered structure you had, for lack of a better term, lower. Lower on the hierarchy, People who were in these other odd jobs, the light infantry and this and the projectile thrower and their ability to inflict damage on the oligarchic class that was in the hoplites using these weapons that were, I guess, less manly. Did they also serve a stagnating function a little bit on some of the advancements during, like, the Peloponnesian time?

C

Yeah. So, I mean, we're all familiar with the idea that the effect that ideology has on management. Right. We're not just trying to solve a problem in the best possible way. We're also imbued with all these values and all these ideas that tell us who we are and what we're like and that. That inform our decision making. And so for the Greeks, this is very important. One of those things is most of the people in charge are wealthy and they have a certain way of fighting because of how they can afford to equip themselves in a certain period, like from the end of the Archaic period, that is mostly as hoplite, so as heavy infantry. And so an ideology develops in which that is the correct way to fight. And everything else is kind of like for foreigners and the poor, right? Like that is not for real men who are citizens, who fight for their skills, city as hoplites. But there's a couple different points there where this kind of ideology starts to crack. I mean, one of them, of course, is the idea that this is one of the other things that combines in this edifice of everybody fighting as a hoplite, but being completely Unprepared. One of the supports of that idea, like, okay, we can go into battle and win even though we have no training, no preparation, is the idea that as long as we fight as hoplites, we are being real men. We are being the old ultimate warrior. We just stand our ground. And the emphasis of that entire ideology is never on, oh, I'm a very good spearman, or I'm very good in a fight, hand to hand, whatever it is, always on standing your ground, keeping your place in the line. And that is very much the ideology of a man who has absolutely no idea what he's doing and needs a simple line to hold onto and be able to say. I was a man, though, because I stood my ground. I was able to say, I kept my pride, I did what I needed to do to protect my city. I stood where they told me to stand, and that's all I did. Ultimately, Leonidas being the ultimate example, just like, oh, I can't imagine anything else. That's what I'm doing. So that's the idea. You kind of use that ideology as well to prop up a very sort of faulty military system. But the other part is, of course, once it becomes more and more normal for people to be able to afford hoplite armor, so you get these large masses of citizens who can just about afford a spear and shield. It's not that expensive. You can equip yourself as a hoplite for about 30 drachmai, which is like a month's wage. So you can just very basically, right, like, you need more equipment, but you can get the basics for like a month's wage, right? So a lot of people start to be able to afford this by the end of their cake period. The wealthy obviously want to distinguish themselves from the common people because they are not like the common people. And so you see the rise of a lot of them fighting as cavalry instead. Right? They. They can afford a horse. You can't afford a horse, right? That's the. The sports car of antiquity. So there's a lot of ways in which that will set you apart from ordinary people. And so the ideology of the hoplite, which is like the baseline, we're all hoplites here, we all know how to. To fight, also has to kind of accommodate people trying to sort of move away or break away from that because they want to have more different, more hierarchy in their society. So you get a lot of that pulling out on one side, and on the other side you get the fact that, yeah, you can look down on light Armed troops, you can sneer at them, but they still beat you, right, because you can't catch them. And so there's a couple of famous fights where hoplites just straight up lose against these poor, poorly skilled, poorly equipped troops, being. Because ultimately there's nothing you can do about them, they will just slowly bleed you white. And that's just the end of it. There's no two ways. And so from both ends, that ideology that we're all hoplites here has to be sort of caveated with the practical realities of Greek warfare. And so I've argued that actually, to some extent, that idea that we're all hoplites here, it's culturally very important. You see it in art quite a lot. You see it in people's self image. People will claim that they're hoplites regardless of whether they actually fight as cavalry or can't afford to fight as hoplites. It's like a citizen ideal. But when these ancient authors start talking about warfare, they very quickly leave that behind. Right. They will just be able to tell you in very sort of detailed terms how other forms of warfare are also effective. So I'm not entirely sure that it had a very great deal of practical effect.

A

Those poor peltasts, man. No one makes amphora about them. They don't have any.

C

You know, they still do to, like,

A

run around and throw rocks. Right.

C

They do make a lot of vases of them because they look like funny foreigners with like, you know, like big mantles and things like that. They have funny boots with floppy, like, upturned edges and things like that. No, there's a lot of fascination, I think, with these people, but that is again, like, fascination from a Greek perspective with people who are different from them. Whereas for the Greeks themselves, they will try to define themselves as hoplite in art, for the most part.

D

You mentioned the Iliad earlier, and I think I do want to ask one cultural thing. So there's long passages in the Iliad that talk about, like, Ajax being imbued and being able to draw blood from Mars. There's Hector being able to fight off the gods, or being imbued by the spirit and fight as an individual and just heaping bodies on the umpires. Why is it that that isn't something that is held in actual Greek warfare? Why is it the unit, the phalanx, what the body is able to do? Whereas in their text, at least, what we have of Homer, I realize there's only two of the books. Books, but it's very much a Focus on the capabilities of the heroes and their individual abilities in battle.

C

Yeah, so that's actually a huge question, because that is one of the key differences between how we picture later it's a classical Greek hoplite warfare, and how we picture Homeric warfare, which is all about these singular heroes. And I think the most compelling way to account for that is that society's changed. So you have this earlier world in which you have much fewer people who are wealthy enough to afford full armor. They lord it over others. They're literally in the poem called basiles, which means kings in later Greek. Like, these are lords, princes. They have a much more exalted station in society, and there's fewer of them. And one of the ways that's explicit in the Iliad, how they justify their position in society is by being better warriors, right? That brings them personal glory, but it also makes people around them, you know, the ordinary people, the Laos, the masses, essentially makes them look at them and say, okay, well, fair enough. You know, of course he's rich. Of course he's in charge. Charge. Because he's a badass, right? And so there is a way in which that feeds into itself where these heroes have to prove that they are the best in war in order to sustain their position. And also because it means they get spoils, it means they get rewards, it means they can use that to affirm their position in this gift exchange program, et cetera, et cetera. So you have a system of stages that even though in actual reality it's based on wealth, it's based on these guys being richer. They have an ideology that it's based on merit, right? They're better, better fighters. And so they have to prove that in these narratives by, you know, achieving feats that are beyond ordinary people. And so all these poems are about how individual heroes of this stripe are just vastly better than others in a fight. Because that is what they need you to believe, right? That is what they need you to believe in order to retain their position in society, retain their legitimacy as lords. And to some extent, you can imagine that that's probably true if you had better armor and, you know, you were fully decked out in this stuff, then you would probably be more willing to go to the front and pick out your man and throw a javelin at him than you would if you were just sort of showing up in your tunic and picking up a rock from the ground. So there is an extent to which they take responsibility as well. And you get that in archaic poetry outside of Homer as well. That There is a huge emphasis on telling people. And you get it even in some tomb monuments, right down to the end of the archaic period, that they claim, I was with the promakoi, I was with the front fighters, right? That is their claim. Their boast is saying, like, I fought in front. And we shouldn't see that as a front rank. It sometimes gets mistranslated as a front rank in a formation. No, these guys go out in front of others and they challenge their enemies directly, right? They will call out and in the Iliad, they literally do this. They will say, you over there, I know you, I knew your dad, now fight me. This kind of thing, you know, this kind of like, my dad could beat your dad. There's a lot of that very personal, very deliberately like showmanship kind of way of fighting to it, because these guys depend on it. Over time, of course, that becomes subsumed by this communal need to work together in order to be militarily effective. The more of these guys you have who have heavy armor, the better they are, the more effective they are when they're working together. So you have to kind of suppress that impulse, right? You have to kind of try and get rid of this urge by these people to stand out in front of the others and prove themselves. But even then, I mean, this is the thing that a lot of scholarship highlights, is that it's not perfect actually. It doesn't go away completely. There are these really strong anecdotes right down to the Persian wars and even beyond the, the Persian wars of individual warriors who deliberately go out in front of others and challenge enemies to single combat, win single combats, try to make themselves conspicuous in a fight, make sure everybody sees who they are, everybody knows that they did something that's above and beyond what's asked of the ordinary hoplite. That is absolutely something they continue doing. They don't just sort of forget that that was something they used to do. But increasingly, because warfare comes under the control of larger communities and communal institutions, institutions, they no longer get their share of the spoils that gets pooled and sold off. They no longer get to go out in front of the formation, because that's actually a problem. It creates a weakness. They still try, they still are sort of imbued with this Homeric value system. They still learn that they get spoon fed this idea that that's how you behave as a hero. And as a result of that, it sits a bit awkwardly, right? There's always this tendency, I think with these warriors to go out and be a Homeric hero, even though there's no longer really a place for it.

D

I referred to as Mars, and obviously that's me showing off my lack of classical learning. Ares, I guess.

C

Ares, of course. Yeah. It's actually Diomedes the hero. Diomedes is always ignored in all the different versions. I hope he's in Nolan's Odyssey. I don't know yet, but Diomedes is the one who hurts various divinities, who just actually beats gods. And in the fight, Diomedes is the perfect hero. That's the problem of the Iliad. We're always focusing on the wrong people here. He has help from Athena, to be fair.

D

Yeah, yeah. He is beset by the gods, but he's also helped by them.

A

So, you know, helps to have friends in powerful places. I want to talk about, like, let's start with glorifying violence and then going to, like, how violent these fights actually were. So, you know, I mean, these famous similes, right, in the Iliad and a little bit in the Ott Odyssey, too, where it's just like the blood is spurting everywhere. Like, oh, look how fucking badass I am. I mean, it makes for kind of nauseous reading in 2026. Roll.

D

Like, how do you.

A

How do you process or what? What's the right way to think about how excited they were to see, you know, literal heads roll?

C

Yeah, the phrase bite the dust, it's. It's Homeric, So that's. That's a phrase that we get from Homer, where people, like, literally, they die, they fall over, they bite the dust. Like, that's the last thing they do is I, like, just kind of grimacing and fall. So, I mean, this is something that, especially in the Iliad, you get these really graphic descriptions of exactly what happens when a spear meets a face. Right? Like, how many teeth are knocked out on its way through and that kind of thing. And it's really quite shocking. But that is really unique. I mean, there aren't that many sources that go into such graphic detail. Like, that is something that Homer in particular was really interested in. And I think part of that is to do with just the spectacle. They absolutely are playing that up in order to let you know, like, okay, first of all, the stakes are very, very high here. This is very serious. They're also not trying to sugarcoat that it is a war. I mean, obviously they know that the more you amplify the horror of it, the more that you also amplify the heroism of people who endure it, which is obviously something that is still a factor in modern war fiction as well. And then the other thing is, I think this is something we can relate to when we're watching modern action movies as well. There is a degree of spectacle in gore that is. You know, it makes it more interesting to watch. Like, the more you push the envelope of how gruesome something is and how spectacular the, you know, the blood effects and the splatter are, the more it becomes almost entertaining in its gruesomeness, in its horror. And that's something that obviously these. These poems needed, right? They have an audience. They're being performed for an audience. They're being sung. And that audience needs to be engaged. So there is a degree to which you need to acknowledge that that audience should be getting what they want to hear out of a war story. So if what they want to hear is, oh, we want to see how, if you stab someone in the abdomen, how many organs are severed before it comes out the other end, or that sort of thing, that is something that Homer will give you just to be like, okay, well, that's part of the reality that he's wanting to conjure up, that we want to sort of envision together how you deal with that as a modern reader. I mean, I think it's actually a really good reminder that they are not trying to say that war isn't horrific, right? They are not trying to argue that this is all beautiful and everybody's a hero. They are trying to say that, you know, if you're on the wrong end of Achilles, you're going to have a really terrible time and you're going to die in agony. Right? And that is not something that's celebrated, because Achilles is not celebrated. Right? We're not here to say, okay, he's the hero. He should win, and then the good guys win, and then we get our high happy ending. He is, you know, a man who transgresses the rules of human society. He is behaving badly in that moment, and his victims are suffering for it. So there is a degree to which it is necessary for Homer to say, like, this is not good, Right? This is not, like, nice and clean. This is a horrible act of violence. So these kinds of things, I think, all factor into it.

A

Let me do my favorite one. I like the fish. The suitors getting piled up like fish.

C

Yeah. Let me find what's very cool in that scene. You get them picking up the little tables to use as shields. So they're improvising weaponry in the banqueting hall, and there's actually Vase paintings of that. Like, you see them sort of picking up little tables to hold up and, like, arrows sticking out. It's really great. Like, these kinds of scenes. Greeks realized how theatrical that was, right? They absolutely wanted to. Wanted to show you that.

A

All right, so this is from Fagels. He found them, one and all in blood and dust. Great halls of them, down and out, like fish that fishermen drag from the churling gray surf in looped and coiling nets and fling ashore on a sweeping hook of beach. Some noble catch heaped on the sand, twitching, lusting for fresh salt sea. But the sun God hammers them and burns their lives out. So the suitors lay in heaps, corpse covering corpse. Eat your heart out, Christopher Nolan.

C

It's 108 of them, right? You have to remember there's 108 secrets. They're numbered. So this is an absolute slaughter. But the other thing is some of these similes, like you said, okay, he's throwing fish out onto dry land and they're being beaten to death by the sun God, as in being dried out by the sun. There's another simile that he uses when this is really gruesome. I don't know why. This is the one he picked. And it really kind of set you a picture of the world that we're talking about when he's talking about how the cycle treats the crew of Odysseus, right? He grabs them two at a time and he smashes their heads against the floor. And the simile he uses is like you would a puppy, generally, the simulate. This is how you kill puppies, I guess. Puppies you don't want or something, but dashing their heads against the floor until there's brains everywhere. Like a puppy. That's how he puts it. And so you're like, wow, this is a world in which also perhaps life, you know, isn't always, you know, treated with the same amount of reverence that we tend to be taught by our own society to. To have for it.

A

Well, it's fun because, like, you know, when you read when. When, like, I don't know, presumably for Christianity, too. But in. In. In you read the Old Testament and synagogue, and, like, you have to keep doing the. The rabbis have to keep doing this thing being like, oh, yeah, it's really bad. But, like, you know, God's still a nice guy in the end. Like, don't. Don't like on all this, like, smiting. But when you read Homer, you don't have to, like, you know, turn them into heroes. Or, like, think that, like, conclude that, like, Homer is a good person and a positive influence on your life or anything. It's almost easier to just accept that this is, you know, what some human being was thinking, you know, 2800 years ago, and kind of just go from there and try to live in their head as opposed to, like, I don't know, ethically justifiable, like, how it's still okay.

C

I mean, it's kind of similar to it. I like the fact that the new Odyssey has already generated so much discourse about all sorts of things. Because when you see these scenes in the Odyssey, you have to imagine that even in the ancient Greek world, this was meant to generate discourse, right? Like, you have to ask yourself, as you're hearing this song from the Bard, do we think this is right? Do we think this is proportional? Right. Do we think that this is the correct response to this situation? And to some extent, you know, killing the suitors, yeah, they were very bad guests. They were misbehaving, they were a threat to the household, et cetera. They were a threat to the. To the community. You are kind of led to think that this is good riddance. You know, these suitors were no good and we're better off without them. But the poem immediately then says, but of course. I mean, they were prominent people in Ithacan society from all the surrounding islands. And so immediately when you kill them, their families show up with weapons and they demand satisfaction, right? Odysseus at the end of the Odyssey is with Telemachus and his dad Laertes at the farm, preparing to die. Because it's three against an army, right? An army of the families of the suitors who are coming to kill them. The only reason they survive is because literally the gods step in and say, that's enough. You're just going to stop fighting now. But that's the idea. It's like you can say, okay, well, these individual acts are right, morally justified, whatever else. But there's always this sense in Homer. Like, but they do have consequences, right? You can't just do whatever you want because it's, you know, because you think that you're doing the right thing. You have to accept that that means, you know, somebody else is going to think you did something horrible or somebody else is going to try and avenge you for it, or somebody. You know, there is more in this world than your own personal relationship to your morality.

A

So there's some of this modern discourse, particularly in America, of that, you know, battlefield ethics are a modern creation. I mean, I think that the story of Achilles is perhaps, you know, the. The best argument against that. But can you talk about how battlefield ethics were kind of discussed and considered during that time period?

C

Yeah. So, I mean, there is. There is some evidence that the Greeks were particularly brutal in battle. Right. They don't actually recognize a lot of different kinds of battlefield ethical restraint. Moral restraint, I would say, and that is one of the arguments that I made in my book is fundamentally, there's a lot of ideas that they supposedly thought all sorts of things were distasteful, like attacking by surprise or killing wounded people or whatever else. They don't really. They don't have those restrictions to their behavior. There's only a few rules that they recognize, but they do recognize them. And I do acknowledge that there are ways in which you can transgress. Right. One of them is if somebody is a suppliant at a temple, they stretch out their hands to seek the protection of a divinity. Those people are off limits. Now, that doesn't mean they never get killed. I mean, there's various occasions when the Greeks do kill them. But that is understood to invoke a curse upon you. That means that your family into the nth generation is going to be cursed. The gods are going to want to get some kind of comeuppance from you. And so these kinds of understandings do exist. And they exist both in a religious. Religious sphere. People, envoys of the gods, people who are going to the Olympics, for instance, who are obviously going to go and attend this festival which is dedicated to Zeus. Those people, you can touch them, right? There's a truce that hands off, as they literally call it, against those people because they are sacred, they're under protection of the gods. But there's also practical understandings. If somebody supplicates you, if they try to, as they always describe it, sort of reach out and clap, grasp your knees and throw themselves at your mercy, and you can kill them. And in the Iliad, when Menelaus tries to seek mercy or wants to offer mercy to somebody who does this, Agamemnon has to step in and say, no, you should kill them all, but it isn't good. Right? Like, this is something that you shouldn't do. And there's a couple of occasions where this comes into play. Like, you know, if people have fallen into your hands as prisoners, there's very rare occasions when, for instance, they are mutilated, killed. They are sometimes, but mutilated is very rare. You very rarely mutilate either corpses or living captives. So these Kinds of things are absolutely recognized by the Greeks as, that's just wrong. You just don't do that. Violence against women and children is sometimes practiced, but sometimes also deliberately eschewed. They try to avoid doing that. It depends on the situation. In some cases, they are actually horrifically violent against women and children as well. Obviously, the enslavement process that they often go through is absolutely horrific, and we should. Shouldn't or try to sugarcoat that in any kind of way. But sometimes those populations of. For instance, a city that surrenders from a siege are allowed to go free. You know, they're allowed to essentially become refugees and then look after themselves. So there are ways in which the Greeks recognize that, you know, it is better to be good. That doesn't necessarily always restrict their actions, but they do definitely recognize a morality in those. In those actions.

A

Yeah. I mean, just coming back to the Odyssey, right at the end, we have Odysseus, like, he gets three supplicants, saves two, kills one. You know, kind of unclear why, where, where exactly he draws the line. And then he also murders some of his female slaves, like, who he's blaming for getting raped by the suitors. So I don't know. Just like. Yeah, it seems like Homer's a little. You're getting a bit of that judgment in there, I think. Even though he's trying to make you sort of feel for the guy.

C

Well, absolutely. So this is why I mentioned. I think this is one of those cases, especially that scene where he kills the enslaved women in his own household because they collaborated with the suitors, essentially. And this is obviously something that also happened, for instance, in occupied Europe after the liberation. A lot of women in local populations suffered horrific punishment and ostracism because they had relations with the occupying forces. Right. With the Nazis. And, you know, you can say, okay, well, they weren't doing that out of free will, or they weren't doing that because they happily did. So you could also say they were doing that because, you know, the Netherlands, for instance, was occupied for almost five years. Right. You have a reality that doesn't seem to be going away. So you. You kind of deal with it. You. You can try to continue a normal life as best you can. So there's all sorts of ways in which you can say, okay, well, this is just something that happens, you know, anywhere. Some of that may be open to, you know, people's free will. Some of that may not. But populations do have a tendency to react to that as if this is all deliberate collaboration with the enemy. Right. That is deliberate attempt to help those who you consider to be enemy. And so that is often unfair, but it is also something that happens. And so that's one of those occasions where I think Homer wants you to talk about it, right? He wants you to discuss this and say, do you think this is right? Do you think Odysseus and Telemachus are justified doing this? Or do you think this is where he goes too far? And that's also obviously true in the Iliad, right? The Iliad is also about people transgressing. And you can debate a lot about who the good guys and the bad guys are in the Iliad, but there's always people who cross a line. Agamemnon is not wrong to say that he should be the most honored because he has the most, you know, he has the largest contribution and the most authority in this army. But when he refuses to give up Briseis, when he steals her from Achilles, essentially when he demands her specifically as his prize, he is going too far. Because he's not just granting himself the highest honor, which everybody agrees he deserves, but he is taking it away from someone else. And then later, when he tries to make up for it, when he tries to sort of say, okay, Achilles, I'm sorry, here, have all of the gifts you could possibly imagine. There's a huge list of gifts that he gives in exchange, including entire cities, right? Like, he just gives them absolutely everything. If you would just, you know, accept and come back into the fold and start fighting again. And then Achilles refuses him. Then we are meant to understand that it's Achilles who's transgressing, right? He refuses good compromise. He refuses a generous offer, and he's not willing to play ball with the way that human society works. Yet you're trying to say, sorry, and someone says, no, I don't actually forgive you, then the onus comes to be on you, right? And Achilles goes further and further from there. He transgresses further and further in the anger that he dwells on that he sees in. Right. Ultimately, one of the things he does is he takes a couple of Trojan captured prisoners of war and he throws them onto Patroclus funeral pyre. And every Greek knows that that's going too far, right? You cannot do that. You're just sort of making human sacrifices to your buddy. No, this is absolutely unacceptable. And so everybody knows at that point, Achilles is transgressing, right? He is the one who's gone too far. And so there's a lot of those moments where I think Homer is deliberately trying to tell you, like, yeah, you can come along with me as I describe this very emotional, very recognizable, relatable response to something. But I'm also going to show you that there is a limit to how much you are willing to stomach, how much you're willing to say, okay, I'm with this character so far. I believe in them. I believe they're doing the right thing. And then he says, okay, but how about now? Right. He keeps on pushing that. And I think that's deliberate. I think he wants you to. Or he. Whoever he is. I think the composers of this poem want you to think about what's right in these different scenarios.

D

Achilles is, you know, the. The greatest hero name written in the stars, talked about for thousands of years, and then his oration as a ghost when he talks about how if he was given the choice again between life basically being immortal and being remembered forever, he would choose to be immortal because death is terrible. Like, what is your interpretation of what Homer was trying to say about this? The value of the legacy and the martial virtue versus just life?

C

Yeah, I mean, it's hard to know that. So you have those two contradicting accounts, basically, that Achilles very deliberately chooses a short life and eternal glory. But then once he's dead, he shows up in the Iliad briefly, or in the Odyssey briefly, and he says, oh, actually, I was wrong. I mean, there isn't necessarily a single morality there. I think it is, like, it just makes sense from the perspective where you feel like Homer is trying to explore the human condition. Right. He's trying to say, ultimately, what good is anything to you if you're dead? Right. Like, what is the point of having eternal glory and having your name remembered if you're not around? Like, you can't experience anything. You're living. And the way that they describe the underworld is obviously, like, there are shades living in an eternal fog, in the darkness. There's nothing for them. They're hungry, they're thirsty, they're suffering, essentially. And so he would have obviously given up a lot to have a few more days or a few. Few more years just living life, just getting to enjoy the things you enjoy and getting to suffer the things you suffer as a human being. And the Greeks certainly didn't think that being alive was good per se. The life of an ordinary person was very hard. There's a lot of poetry, like the works and days, Hesiod's poetry, that describes how you have to work really hard in order to live even a little bit comfortably, even just to have what you need, you have to work all the time. It's hard. And there's cold winters and hot summers and hard work and bad people. People. But all of that still means you get to at least experience things. And I think all of us who think about the afterlife in any form will usually consider, like, is it better to be in whatever that place is? Or is it better to just keep on doing this, right? To keep on experiencing my own consciousness in this world and all the things that are there to it? It's one of the ways in which you can see that even though this is a poem that was composed 2700 years ago in the form that we have, it's incredibly prescient, I guess, in the sense of which questions are going to matter, which questions are actually going to keep us talking for a very long time. Because there are a lot of other pieces from that time I mentioned works in days, just now, when you read the works and days, you'll find very little that makes you go, oh, yeah, I could really use this as a way of opening a conversation or talking about my view on life or whatever else. Whereas the Odyssey is absolutely packed with it. And in that sense, you can see, okay, we know why this survived, right? Why there is so much else that was produced in the ancient world, but this survived. It's because it keeps us talking, it keeps us thinking. It keeps us making this same kind of consideration of, yeah, was Achilles wrong? What should he have done? That's another one of those things that must have been in the forefront of the minds of all these people who live in this world where you have to quite somewhat regularly go to war yourself, risk your life in battle, where the only reward that you can be expected to receive is a memory to be well remembered as a person who died doing what's right. As a citizen, you have to wonder, do I want that, or is it better to run away so that I can live a little bit longer? And that's something that is obviously on a lot of people's minds in that world. And after,

A

if you're thinking about what literature is going to last, and by last, we mean like hundreds, thousands of years, right? You can't just, like. It can't just be compelling. It can't just be the sort of, like, blood, gore, popcorn stuff. It needs to, like, have people split on it and, like, have reason to people split and have people continue to split on it, like, in totally different cultural context. So you want to keep talking about it so that. So that the debates that you're having. I mean, like, I'm sure there's some, like, you know, Hesiod arguments about, like, is this God the better God, or is that God the better God? But, like, no one cares once Christ comes around. Right? So, like, getting. Getting on those, you know, timeless human themes.

C

It's.

A

It's hard. It's a pretty hard thing to do in the moment. But I'm, you know, hats off to Homer for pulling it off.

C

No, for sure. I mean, some of it is timeless. Other things, you're just like, okay, well, I guess there must have been an environment in which this was very useful. But I don't think now we need Hesiod to explain to us that we shouldn't piss in the river where we get our water, which he spends some time explaining.

D

If you had worked with privates in the military, you would know that you still need to teach that lesson regularly.

A

Yeah. Unfortunately, battlefield hygiene is still a challenge

C

for a lot of folks. Very much so. There we go. We do need heed after all.

A

Let's go bring him back.

D

I. I mean, tie it to the 250th anniversary of America. It was a Prussian who came over and had to look at Washington and be like, you recognize that your men are shitting next to where they're cooking their food, Right. That's the reason you all have dysentery.

C

That's that Prussian military method rearing its head again. Actually, I read about that when he's training the Continental army, where he started out drilling Washington's guard, and they just sort of passed it on to the rest of the army. Right. So the idea there is very much similar to what you get in the Greek situation, where these are militia that have received very little training and they're constantly being defeated by a more professional force. And what they're learning is not that difficult. And it took them. It was like two weeks that he spent training them or something. And that's for musketryl. That's way more complicated than what Greek hoplites would have to do. And so just that basic element. It's not that you necessarily have a lot of trouble figuring it out. It's just you need someone to kind of tell you, okay, this is what you're going to do, and, you know, take you through your paces, take the time, you know, set aside the time which they had in Valley Forge, I guess, to actually do that, and you come out a much more effective force. So this is ties back exactly to what we were talking about before. Sometimes you just need someone to drop in and say, you know, this is. Here's how you're going to do it. Here's how you can get much better very easily. And similarly with the hygiene thing or everything else that we've talked about, I mean, this is one of the ways in which knowledge was being passed on. In a period before you had these dedicated treatises that will tell you, okay, let's learn how to manage a cavalry force. You did have these poems essentially aspiring to teach everything from morality to the practicalities of military organization and combat and farming and whatever else, proper marriage relations and all sorts. And so those kinds of things are being discussed and being composed and into, like, songs and texts that last longer precisely because there is no, you know, there's no community college. You can go and take a couple courses. There is no kind of way in which you can get this from a professional. You are passing it around as stories, as oral tradition, and eventually as written poetry.

A

I want to come back to violence. Sorry, circle back to it. It was a fascinating theme in your book, this idea that everyone kind of wanted to think that these battles were, like, clean and respectable and, you know, these citizens, you know, oligarchs of this city didn't really want to kill that many oligarchs of that city. What was so weird was the evidence that you used to, To. To. To argue against that is just like. It's right there, right? It's, like, pretty obvious in a lot of these texts that, like, once the, The. The other army starts fleeing, you, like, run and try to kill as many as you. You can. I guess, given that, you know, we spent a lot of time on this podcast talking about, oh, lessons from Ukraine. And there's like, so much data, right? There's so many different things you can look at. Like when you're thinking about these battles, right? You have a limited amount of text and, you know, like, artifacts that you're working with. It's just. It's just kind of boggles my mind that people will just overlook things because there's. They have so much, like, cultural blinders of what they're present day in. And I'm sure 50 years from now, they, you know, your, your PhD students, PhD students will say the same thing about you. But I, I don't know, any, Any thoughts or reflections on just, like, people missing stuff in the text that they don't want to read.

C

No, it's. It's a really interesting point. So that, that's the argument that I made in the book Is is that fundamentally these, these earlier authors were so guided by their own conception of what these battles look like and how they wanted to model them, like how they wanted to kind of create a template and of what these battles normally or typically look like, in which they included statements from the sources that seemed very sort of generalizing and generally applicable, like, okay, the Spartans never pursue a fleeing enemy or something like that. These statements occur. They're not true, they're not actually right, but these statements occur. And if you want, you can say, okay, I'll privilege that information over the counter examples that I could sort of conjure up from various. His specific account. And I think that is something that they did initially because they had this model in mind, because they had this very strong sense of like, we want to make this make sense as an overall picture and they don't care so much about the smaller details. And because they had this investment in the idea, of course, that the Greeks were in some ways deliberately hobbling themselves, like denying themselves the opportunity for the victory of annihilation that Clausewitz would privilege because they were sort of more civilized, more gentlemanly, but also because hadn't quite invented yet how to be maximally effective in war, right? This goes through a linear progression. You get first from the Greeks to Alexander and then from Alexander to the Romans. They get better and better at figuring out how to be maximally effective. And that allows them to conquer larger empires and control larger states and defeat harder enemies, et cetera. So there is this understanding. If you have a linear development, then you got to start simple. You got to start somewhere where it's not very effective and then build it up. But the other thing thing is just, I mean, there is a degree to which, as you can tell from the amount of the sheer amount of data that we're working with trying to analyze modern warfare, there is a point at which this kind of thing grows above the head of an ordinary person trying to make sense of it all. This is why increasingly, when you're working with large data sets, we rely on all sorts of automated processes to try and help us understand these things, to analyze them, to put them into graphs, to put them into charts and tables, because otherwise we just can't handle the data, right? Like, we can't make a single sort of pronouncement about what this all means. And I think in the study of ancient warfare, despite the small amount of evidence comparatively that we have, there is already this sense in which people will try to decide on something to privilege or some kind of narrative Some kind of story to tell. And in doing so, they will just decide that other things are less deserving their attention. Right. Like they are just not important. And a lot of the time that is very explicitly they will say, okay, this is just a sideshow. This is something that I think is not the main issue.

A

And people decide the story because it fits with some, you know, Victor Davis Hansen, broader political narrative they have. They just want to piss off their advisor. Like, where do the stories. When you see people go story first, where does it offer come from?

C

I mean, very often it comes from just the historiographical tradition. So this is other scholars that they've read that has so much influence on the way people think about things. I encounter that all the time, is that you have these older ideas in scholarship that now if you talk to someone, talk about Sparta, for instance, we all have this image of Sparta as this sort of super conservative, militaristic society that was focused exclusively on war. There's all sorts of cliches about that society. If you talk to an expert who works on Sparta now with the, you know, I don't know, the center for Spartan and Peloponnesian Studies, the University of Nottingham, they will reject all of that, right? They don't believe any of that. But that's the cutting edge of scholarship. Whereas if you pick up a book from a bookstore, you'll pick up like Paul Cartridge's book on the Spartans from the 1970s or something, and you will read all of that exactly as I've just said it, right? You will read all of that old account. And it's not that that was wrong, it's just that was believed at the time, or that was the best of their understanding at the time, or that was the narrative at the time, which may have come from all sorts of reasons. It may have come from those political. Political ideologies that you said, or it may have come from personal proclivities and opinions, whatever else may have influenced that. But now they're just around. And it's very hard for me to say, yeah, well, you know, you have a bunch of books on Sparta that are all written by respected academics, but these are wrong and these are good. It takes a long time to come round to the level of critical ability to be able to do that for yourself. Right? And so if you start out with a book that is maybe not the most sort of up to date, or maybe not the most incisive or even just a pop history book that didn't really do the due diligence on these kind of theories or on the latest ideas, then you're going to start out essentially feeding yourself ideas that are not necessarily correct or relevant or up to date. And then you have to kind of undo that later. Right? And that can be a very difficult process. And some scholars just never get there. I know colleagues who work on other areas, who work on other parts of the Greek world. They're extremely good on what they do. They write the absolute top of the line, cutting edge works on those pieces. But if you ask them on something like Sparta, which they've never really looked at in detail, the account that they give you is essentially that of somebody who at best can teach undergrads, right, with the use of a couple of textbooks that may be decades out of date. And so ideas percolate far longer and stay grounded in a lot of people's minds and develop sort of build foundations in people's minds far longer than they necessarily are credited in scholarship.

A

I guess the idea that something can be decades out of date, right, like, that's the thing I want to get at. Right, because you're, okay, World War II historiography, you have new injections of data. When, like, archives get released, generals write their memoirs, right? And then all of a sudden we go from thinking the Nazis were really on their shit to like, no, they actually had these, like, really big structural problems. And they weren't the greatest army the world. The Wehrmacht wasn't the greatest army the world has ever seen. When, when. I guess we. We only really start the clock in the 19th century with Germans. So it's not like we have 2,000 straight years of people really thinking deeply about this, but I don't know thoughts on that. And also just, is there exciting stuff? Are people using AI? I know, like, you can find new cities in Guatemala using satellites. Is there any, like, that sort of thing? And going on in ancient Greek scholarship,

C

there's always stuff going on. I mean, there's always new stuff being found. But in terms of the kind of understanding of Greek warfare, apart from archaeology, which can be very, very helpful, there's a lot of very insightful locations. But there are bits and pieces. Mostly I rely on my work on literary sources, and the latest big chunks of literary evidence relevant to my work were discovered in the 1890s. And we still sometimes talk about that as like, new in a sense. Like the tradition hasn't quite, you know, know, incorporated this. No, they have. I mean, at this point, obviously, that's. We always hope that something like that will happen again. But it hasn't for a long time, right? So we're not talking about new data. We're mostly looking at new, like, looking at new ways of interpreting that data, like the information that we have. And some of that is, what I've tried to do, is kind of disentangle what the evidence actually says from long traditions telling us what it says, right? Long scholarly traditions saying, this is how we should interpret it. This is the lens through which we. We're looking at this, saying, okay, well, what if we take that lens away? What do we actually see? And that is something that I think every few generations can do. Like, there's going to be, as you said, like, you know, 50 years from now, someone's going to pick up my book and say, I don't know, I can't believe he could be so blinkered. Like, this is not at all what it says. Here's the actual truth of it. And that is because a lot of readers have a different reaction to the same material, right? That is one of the reasons why humanities scholarship in general keeps on going. Because the facts aren't hard, right? The facts are, or interpretations. And so to some extent, you can say, okay, this is forever going to keep changing. There is no single end point. But I do think that we also are just getting better at understanding this kind of material. Or making more sense of more of the evidence is a phrase I like to use. So you're trying to sort of hone the model that you're using in order to try and incorporate more of the stuff we have, which is very limited, and also to make that stuff sort of fit together better. And that is just a continuous process of new minds dedicating themselves to trying to figure out these questions, right? So when it comes to Sparta, for instance, I mean, up to around 1990, everybody had more or less the same idea about what that society was like. And then suddenly a number of different scholars from different sort of angles started to completely reinterpret the evidence that we have, which is basically a question of trying to privilege other parts than the ones that had previously been taken as a sort of baseline for how we understand Sparta and saying, oh, we need to look more at contemporary than later evidence, or we need to look more critically at what the evidence tells us, because it isn't always just straightforwardly telling us what we want to know, right? So becoming more critical with the evidence, becoming more judicious about which evidence should weigh more heavily and which one might be sort of suspect, getting a better understanding of what genre and Propaganda and these kinds of things do to the records that survive. All of these things contribute to just us thinking better about this material. And that is why views in scholarship can change quite radically. Even in ancient history, where you feel like, okay, the material that was we are using at least on the literary side, has been more or less stable for 120 years at this point or even longer, but the ideas that come out of that are still going to keep on changing. And then of course, depending on what archaeological subject you're working on, you might have absolutely, radically reinterpreted how ancient history is fit together. I mean, I understand that there's constant discovery of more data to help us understand the rise of sort of early hominids, for instance. There's so much more detail now to the picture that we have of the earliest humans than we would otherwise. And similarly, when it comes to Greek history, the period between the end of the Bronze Age and the start of what we call the Archaic period, so what used to be called the Greek Dark Age, nowadays more commonly the early Iron Age, that period is so much better understood because of the vast amount of archaeological evidence that has come out of settlement, complexity and diversity, the range of different materials that survive, survive, and the origins of the kind of material culture that we're seeing. So we're really revising our idea of what happened in that period for which we have no writing. So in those kinds of cases, archaeology also just constantly contributes more information.

A

One of the things you alluded to, this idea of just having the sources in your brain. And whenever I read someone like Hans Delbruck or even Montaigne, the amount of working memory that they have where they just remember all of the references of like, oh yeah, this poet said this and this thing said that. And, you know, this random city no one cares about was mentioned these four times. It's like how they did that before technology kind of astounds me. I'm curious Ro, like, maybe like, you know, you know, you, I don't know, maybe you're not a TikTok person, but like, you had like movies and, and music in your life, presumably. Is there some. Now that we're getting into the chat GPT Claude 8 and you can just like ask these models to like surface all of the references or, you know, you don't have to like go back to the books and flip through. Do you see anything interesting like in how your grad students are using these tools or has it changed your process at all?

C

So, I mean, you probably encountered other humanities scholars also being extremely hesitant to foster this kind of technology because we generally don't trust it. I mean, like, you can say, okay, it can get all this information for you, but you do have to then still check whether its references actually exist and whether the material that it's bringing up is actually says what it says it says. And so in that sense, I think the use case is limited. I mean, it's not necessarily that no one's using it. Obviously, you know, this has become universal now, but it isn't necessarily as useful as it may seem. People are using this kind of technology in ancient history, especially where there are large data sets. So we're talking about things like, you know, inscriptions in Latin, there are tens of thousands, or this kind of material that can be very, very difficult to understand for scholars who are just learning how to sort of piece together what these things said, how to fill in the formula, how to fill in the gaps of these inscriptions that are often partial, often damaged. And so they try to use this kind of, like, large language model to feed in all of the ones that we have and then say, okay, well, how does that help you predict what might be here in this gap or how we might fill in the rest of this. Of this form, so to speak. So it's used for that sort of thing where you have large amounts of data, and then there are also people who can use it for scanning huge bodies of text, like, I don't know, the works of Cicero, things like that. But when you're looking at something like what I'm studying here, which most of my research has been qualitative and literary, you can't just say, okay, well, I can ask the question, and then this machine will tell me all I need to know. You need to have not just a familiarity with those passages, but also know what they are in context. You need to know what this text is about. You need to know what's going on around it. And a lot of the time when I take my students through some of these passages, the advantage that I have over them when I'm teaching them, we can all read the same passage in a short amount of time. A lot of the time in ancient history, you can read all of the available evidence in half an hour for a particular question. But that doesn't mean that those students are then immediately able to say anything that I would say, because they don't have the same amount of context, they don't have the same amount of grounding in the material. They don't necessarily know what these sources are. And how we can rate them, how we can evaluate them. And so a lot of the time, as is often true in humanities research more generally, the journey is the end. Right. It's about trying to build up the expertise that you need in order to assess these things critically, in order to assess them effectively. And you can't necessarily outsource that because the machine can't do that. It doesn't know what you want to know. Right. You can ask it specific questions, but you can't tell it to explain to you how to do these things. Things you have to learn that. And so there are ways in which machine learning has been used in this field for a long time. You know, papyrus studies, inscription studies, coin studies, these kinds of things. That is obviously being massively accelerated now because the tools are so much more easily available, because there are different tools available that are coming out. But in terms of the kind of research that I do, I hope that people don't try to use LLMs to replace the kind of work that I do, because the work would be terrible. Right. You need to commit your own expertise and your own critical thinking ability to these questions. Otherwise you're not going to produce anything that is worth having. You're just going to regurgitate what was already there.

D

You can build an LLM in your mind if you just read enough books. Depth of. And you, you like. There's a little bit of the. How do you build the historical context into the mind.

C

Yeah.

D

Where they're not reliant on the LLM, but then also empower them with that once they have that context, to then be able to use it. Kind of like Jordan does, to be able to go and find. I know there was a writer who said this thing or I know this city was mentioned, who go find me these instances of it and bring up this.

C

I mean, we don't know off the top of our heads. Right. I mean, this is obviously something. We have all sorts of tools to our. At our disposal that we can use. I mean, there, a lot of these ancient texts are online in translation and the original text, you can search them. Right. Like if you're looking for a keyword, you've. We've been able to search that for ages. Right. We don't need LLMs for that. So there's lots of tools that are already at our disposal. There's other tools that used to be the sort of, the earlier forms of that. So, you know, you get these studies that in 19th century Germany where people will just sit down and say, right, here's all the attestations of this word. And you know, that sounds like an absolute nightmare to do, to put together,

A

but seeing those books for the first time and just crying, being like, oh my God. But you know, maybe that person loved it. Maybe this is just like the autist's dream is like, look, I can like serve humanity.

C

That's easy money, right? But no, it's, it's the thing. Like it sounds like an absolute nightmare and a mind numbing experience to do that. And you have to be unbelievably skilled with getting all of the resources out, pulling all of the text, all the fragments, everything that you could possibly get your hands on in order to make sure that this is complete. But once someone's done it, you can then say, okay, well this is all I need, right? Like if I need to know about where this word is, here's all the attestations, I can just use that. And that's obviously what people like Delbrik and others were doing, right? Obviously. There's no shortcut to reading a lot. And this is something that I often tell my students as well. You just have to read a lot of different versions or interpretations or readings of the same thing. You just have to go through all of them in order to develop your own own ability to assess which ones of those make sense and which ones are crackpot, right? Like, that's absolutely something you need to just hone and develop over time. But then in terms of the evidence base itself, I mean, obviously we use tools. There are some texts where I can say, okay, I know roughly where that is, right? Battle narratives that I've used a lot. I can probably pin them down and tell you the numbers right now of where that is in Xenophon Salenica or something like that. But those are just a few scenes and a few things that I know exactly where to find because I've used them a lot. And I. By a lot, I mean, like there are single passages in the Greek that are indexed like 20 times in my book, right? Like there's loads and loads of reference to the same piece of text because there's a lot in there. So you use it again and again and then it becomes familiar, the numbers become familiar, you know where it is. But a lot of other stuff, I'm just like, someone's got to tell me that. And that is often what happens is that you go to another author who has looked at this and who has said, here's where you can find more about this, right? You rely on each other to Be honest about that and to be consistent and to be complete. And then you can draw on their work to do that. And there are loads and loads of reference works, specifically those that were drawn up in the 19th century and slightly after that just exist to let you do that. Right? They are research tools in the sense that they will tell you, okay, here's all you need to know about this, right? These are all the evidence, all the instances where this is discussed. Recently I was writing an article where I had to go into prosopography, which is something I've never done before. It's history of names, essentially. If you're encountering someone in a text who's named as a magistrate or a person of. Of note, whatever, who are they, right? Who's their family? Where are they from? What are they? Like, what are their personal circumstances? You can do that by just a couple of reference works that are put together in the early 20th century. 1 In the late 20th century in English, the earlier one, of course, in German. But, like, you just look up their names and then you find all the different places where they are referenced or discussed and all the little details that are discussed there. And then you go through those sources and then you basically, you will know within a study of, know an hour, maybe everything there is to know about this person from the evidence that we have. These are the kind of tools that we can use to get, you know, to get quite far ahead. And obviously that depends on how important this person is. If you're trying to do that with Alcibiades, you'll be here for a while. But if you're trying to do that with some more obscure figure, you can get through that pretty quickly, right? Because there just isn't that much. And a lot of people are just mentioned once in all of the corpus of Greek texts. So then it's just like, yep, that's. That's all there is. We just. Just don't know who this is, right? Aristophanes makes a joke about some politician and you have to be like, oh, who is that? That's interesting. What did they do to merit this? Yeah, we don't know. This is all we know. Like, this reference is all we've got. But he probably go down in infamy. That's why you appear in Aristophanes.

A

And this is kind of my pitch for why. This stuff, I think, is particularly fun to read in undergrad is like, if you're trying to get to the frontier of World War II studies, right? It's like, I'm sorry, that's 10 years. Like, you're not, like you're. You're not going to consume all the primary sources, but if you want to, like, deeply understand what there is to understand, even about something as big as the Peloponnesian War, like over the course of a semester, you can consume a pretty high percentage of the primary source material that's out there. And then all of a sudden, and you can engage with the secondary sources in something approaching a peer level in a way which just isn't possible when doing modern stuff because there's too much out there. So.

C

Absolutely. I mean, it's one of the things I always say that I enjoy the most about ancient history is partly it's the relatively low threshold. Like you can get up to speed on what there is to know about a topic. You can read everything there is to know about Sparta in a year. Everything. Every single thing. But then the next thing you need to do is develop the kind of the empathy, creativity, imagination, critical thinking that lets you actually construct theories about historical reality based on that limited material, right? Like, how do you get from reading all of that material to having something to say on that material? I think that's a fascinating process. And again, something that I think, you know, you can't replicate with, with a machine like that is the excitement and the great fun of, of ancient history is that you really have to use your brain. Like, you can't just say, oh, well, you know, once I've read this part of the archive, I'll go read that part of the archive. You really have to say, okay, I now need to step in and say, what do I make of all this? How do I make sense of all this? Can I resolve these contradictions? Can I, you know, fill these gaps? And that is. That is something that is. That is that you have to do, right? That you have to get to the level of affinity and comfort and, and confidence that you can say, okay, well, this doesn't scare me.

A

What do you want to get the kids going on? What are your primary sources to throw folks?

C

It just depends. I mean, obviously nowadays a lot of people are coming into classics in ancient history through myth, which is really radically different from the way this often used to happen. They're reading myth adaptations, or they're reading Percy Jackson or whatever else, and that's what brings them in. And so if that's what floats your boat, you got to read Ovid's Metamorphosm, Metamorphosis, or you've got to read Apollonius or Something like that. And these are texts that are not very well known, but those are the main sources we have for the myths that we are retelling in these stories. Right.

A

For the war talk audience.

C

For the war talk option. I mean. Yeah. So if you're interested in warfare, I mean, like, the Iliad is great. There's just no two ways about that. It gets very boring in parts at the beginning because you have to go through the catalog of ships and you have to go through who kills who in the fighting. But you have to think about that as something that is also. Also functional for the text. But the Iliad is absolutely wonderful, and there are some really good translations out there, so you kind of almost can't go wrong. That's a really great one. I'm a huge fan of Xenophon, who is himself an experienced commander writing about warfare. Polybius, similarly, although he's very unpleasant as an author, I really don't like him very much, but he's definitely a good military historian who's somebody who really is willing to go into a lot of detail on warfare. These are all people that you can just sort of. You can find cheap translations of these everywhere. You can pick them up easily. A lot of them are online as well. You can read them for free on your browser. Herodotus is always the kind of gateway drug for a lot of people who are interested more on the history side, just because he's so varied. He does so much stuff, some of it very military, especially book seven and nine where he's talking about Thermopylae and Battle of Plataea. This is just all warfare, all the time, but the rest of it is so interested in the enormous scope and diversity of the world around him and all the different stories that he's able to tell about all these different peoples. He's really just fascinating, fascinated by everything, and it's something that infects you when you're reading it. So these are all different texts that I would say, you know, pick them up if you see them somewhere, you know, take a punt on them. Try it. You know, see. See which one you like.

A

And I just want to shout out Lucien of Sada. It has really. I don't think there's any war stuff in there. Maybe I haven't come across it yet, but I don't know. I've been writing more and more satire this year, and I was like, who's some ancient world satire I should love with?

C

No, for sure, there's.

D

The guy's hysterical.

A

He's making Fun of all the philosophers. He's making fun of the gods. He's making fun of society. He has like a sci fi novel in there. Like the humans go to the moon.

B

It's just.

A

He's just a wacky dude and he's from 2,000 years ago. It's like, what a treat.

C

Who would have thought, right? Like, you have to imagine that this is not like the ordinary people that live in that society, right? These are the people whose works are preserved over 2,000 years. And the first, you know, thousand and a half of those, they had to be manually copied, right? Like every now and then, a monk has to sit down and physically write every single word that he sees on the page. Otherwise this will get lost. And so you have to manually work Jesus.

A

I mean, the fact that you make fun of Jesus and then be so loved that you still get the monks to copy you, it's like, you really gotta be.

D

They didn't.

C

That's a boss move. Yeah, it really is.

D

I think my favorite still is the first one that I think I really sat down and read was Antigone. And I don't know why that stuck with me, but then I got to hear Lucy Lawless read the part of Antigone on a show. Like, it's been more than a decade ago, but it was a throwback to my childhood. And I was like. It's like seared into my mind now is like, she is Antigone, which is perfect. She's every woman. Every time I think of a ancient Greek woman, it's like Lucy Lawless becomes that person just because it's all tied

C

into my brain that works.

D

Dating myself.

C

No, it's. It's. It's one of those things. Maybe another one of those examples of a text where they're really thinking about the morality of war. So it's also Sophocles unsinking. Exactly.

D

That's. Yeah.

A

I've been. I've been listening to two Odysseys simultaneously. Like, there cannot be a stronger contrast between Claire Dane's Emily Wilson Odyssey and Ian McKellen Fagal's Odyssey. I'm just like, is this the same text we're working from? That is.

C

That is a.

D

That is a 180.

C

I didn't know Claire Danes did the voice work for that. That's great. That's great. I gotta find that somewhere.

A

She commits and she commits. Like, it's just like the whole thing is like. And then this is the worst possible thing. And, like, it is the worst possible thing, clearly. But like, Just keeping that tone up for 15 hours is a remarkable accomplishment.

C

12,000 lines. Yeah, I wouldn't want to do it.

A

We're going to call it here.

D

We got it.

A

We got to do this again sometime.

C

This was such a treat.

A

Well, thank you so much for being a part of War Talk.

C

No, it's a real pleasure. Thanks so much for having me.

B

At the Department of War, we have the most elite warriors on the face of the earth. Every single day you are pushed to your absolute physical and mental limits to master the profession of arms. We demand your all and you give it. But while we invest heavily in our weapons systems, platforms and gear, our most decisive tactical advantage will always be the individual war fighters. We have a sacred duty to maintain that advantage. Which is why we must constantly look for new ways to optimize your performance, your resilience and your long term health. And to meet that commitment today, I'm authorizing a new screening program for testosterone deficiency for our service members. Ensuring you have the right testosterone levels to operate at your absolute best. Because it's well established science that as we age, testosterone levels often naturally drop. Under the supervision of our world class medical professionals, war fighters aged 30 and older are going to be tested annually as part of their periodic health assessment. It's a health assessment that happens every year. We're just adding this test. Those under 30 can voluntarily choose to get the test as well if treatment is recommended. It's entirely your choice to receive testosterone replacement therapy. This initiative is not about artists enhancement. It's about restoring and optimizing your natural capabilities, protecting your longevity and ensuring you have the biological foundation required to sustain the fight. We owe our warriors the absolute best medical care in the world. And this program delivers on that obligation. Taking care of your law long term health means ensuring you remain strong, resilient and capable. Not just for your next deployment, but for the rest of your life. So you can thrive long after you take off the uniform. As we know, the modern battlefield is brutal and unrelenting. It requires and demands maximum psychological and mental readiness. And by addressing these health markers early, we're keeping you on the leading edge of lethality and giving you the same level of support that you give this nation. The absolute best. Godspeed. Keep going and God bless.