Athens vs Sparta: Adrian Goldsworthy on the Rivalry That Made the West

00:00:31 Andrew Keen: Hello, everybody. A couple of weeks ago, we had a new kind of historian on the show, Patrick Wyman. He's a very popular podcaster, had several shows including Tides of History. He had a show about Rome as well and he has a new book out. It's called How Humans Tried, Failed, Succeeded, and Built Our World and he doesn't talk much in this book. In fact, he doesn't talk at all about antiquity Rome or Greece, so he's departing from traditional history both in terms I think of his career or maybe absence of career and his subject. Today we have a very different kind of historian perhaps a more traditional one. Adrian Goldsworthy, has a PhD from Oxford, a real expert on antiquity written on everything from Julius Caesar to the Punic Wars to how Rome fell to Augustus and Pax Romana real authority, and he has a new book out, right in that vein classic book on classical antiquity called Athens and Sparta, the rivalry that shaped ancient Greece. Adrian is joining us from Penarth in South Wales where it's not raining where he lives. Adrian, congratulations on the new book. It's out this week.

00:01:57 Adrian Goldsworthy: Thank you very much.

00:01:58 Andrew Keen: Am I unfair, Adrian, in the intro to juxtapose yourself or contrast someone like you, a classical historian in the traditional British, vein, to somebody like Wyman, who, he also has a PhD, but does his business on the Internet, on podcasts?

00:02:23 Adrian Goldsworthy: No. I don't think so. In the end, we're all trying to understand the past. And whether you're writing it on the page of a book or whether you're talking about it online, you're trying to communicate what you've discovered and also the enthusiasm, that love for the past. So, ultimately, you can study as long as you like, but you need an instinct to try and understand human beings, societies, how things have worked, and then that communicator's talent to explain it. You know, there are plenty of incredibly brilliant academics and universities who struggle even to communicate to undergraduate students, and to anyone other than the colleagues who've read most of the same stuff that they've read. So you can assume from the word or idea of evidence, all the debate. But history is too important, but also too interesting just to be left at that. A lot of people want to know about the past. A lot of people want to understand it, whether it's because of places they visit or just that sense of how did we get to where we are. So I think there's all sorts of approaches to this and styles of doing it. The main thing is you've gotta be honest about it. If you go to any topic with a fixed idea of what you want to find, you will find it. You have to try and start, look at what the evidence is, and then try and understand it, and also be very honest and say, there's lots of stuff we don't know. There's lots of gaps in the evidence. The further you go back, the more problems there are, the more difficulties there are in saying very precisely, this is what happened, and even more, this is why an individual or a group did something. So as far as I'm concerned, the more the merrier. You know, history is really interesting because it's about people, and people are interesting. So there are plenty of different ways of doing this, and I think there's room for everybody.

00:04:10 Andrew Keen: Yeah. And when it comes to perhaps not being honest, you also write novels, which is a form, I guess, of honesty, also a form of making stuff up. So you have it both ways. And to be fair, Adrian, you also have a very popular channel on YouTube. So you're not some sort of reactionary only doing your stuff in books. One of the things that, Wyman talked about, and this is what drove his book in some ways, is the new technology that allows us to discover stuff about the world that we didn't know before. I mean, he goes a long way back before classical antiquity. In terms of your book, Athens and Sparta, obviously, so much has been written. You know that much better than I did. You've probably read most of it. What are the things that we don't know about Athens and Sparta that you were trying to answer? Are there new stories, new facts that you've uncovered, or are you just trying to present Athens and Sparta, these two pillars, so to speak, of antiquity in an accessible way for a modern audience?

00:05:22 Adrian Goldsworthy: It's primarily the latter. My feeling was that there hasn't been a good overview of the heart of classical Greece, the fifth century BC or long fifth century BC where these two city states are the most important powers around. And it's you know, we had this thing a year or two ago when supposedly large numbers of men sit and ponder about the Roman Empire a couple of times every week or every day. Greece doesn't get the same attention. It gets a lot of attention in terms of, oh, were the Greeks very clever? So we have the stuff about philosophy, political ideas. We still marvel at the artistic, creations, whether it's on stage and the comedies, the drama, but also the artworks, the sculpture, the architecture. We've almost divorced the Greeks from any reality of actually being people who enough of them earned a living, enough of them made things and even more of those great thoughts or create works of art. So I wanted something that brought it back down to Earth as very real history, everyday stuff. And to cover that, again, you get books on the Persian wars. And one of the few things that people do know about, if they know about the Persian Wars, tends to be Thermopylae, Last Stand of the 300 Spartans. But they don't really know why it was going on and who the Spartans were and how different they were to other Greeks in some respects and similar in others. So there is some new archaeological material. There's always something coming through, and what's there is being reinterpreted. So I've tried to make this up to date, but this is more about trying to synthesize all this scholarship that is going on all the time but doesn't tend to filter out into the wider perception and give people a starting place with some understanding. Now along the way, hopefully, I've come out with some new ideas and new interpretations looking at particular incidents or what's going on and the emphasis. But a lot of this, as I admitted right at the start, it draws on the work of other people. There hasn't been a drastic discovery that has revolutionized our understanding of Greek history. A few fragments of sources crop up every now and again, but, you know, people are working on the, the carbonized manuscripts from Herculaneum and hoping to turn up all sorts of things. So far, it's mostly philosophical poetry. Nothing like that has appeared with a new detailed historical source of narrative, things we know existed or something we don't even know was written and existed different perspective on what was going on. So this is, to some extent, coming and looking back at stuff that's been there for a long time. And in the end, when you're doing narrative history, which is, for me, the best way of getting people into the subject and presenting it as a story, you're dealing with Herodotus, the father of history, father of lies, depending on which viewpoint of him you take, Thucydides, again, you're dealing with these historians whose works have been known for a very long time and studied many times. So it's a lot of it is about presentation, but I hope that in the presenting, not only am I bringing to light to a wider audience lots of new research by other scholars, but I'm giving my own slant on it as well.

00:08:40 Andrew Keen: Yeah. And I've I think one of the things that I've taken at least from the success of guys like Patrick Wyman, Tom Holland, who does the excellent Rest is History podcast, is if there's a real desire for traditional narrative history. The academics, as you say, half of them barely know how to talk to themselves or their families, let alone their students. They're so specialized and archaic. So the convention of people who don't know much about Athens and Sparta is that Athens, they were these rival city states, classic rivals, completely different, and yet bound up together for better or worse. They had no choice. Athens was the chaotic democracy, the place of Socrates. Sparta was the military dictatorship, disciplined, effective, and, of course, they fought in the Peloponnesian war for dominance of antiquity. Is that a fair beginning, Adrian?

00:09:42 Adrian Goldsworthy: It's a lot more complicated than that because they're all Greeks, but this is a when you have Greeks before there is a Greece. So the Greeks find themselves they seem to identify more with local communities. Athens and Sparta are two of the big cities, but there are about a thousand altogether. Little Greek city states in Greece itself, on the islands, spread around the Mediterranean world as far as the Ukraine. And these are people who speak the same language even if different dialects, but they can all understand each other. They have a common culture. They revere Homer. They have the same stories of the Trojan War and like the same gods and goddesses. Every four years or so, they'll compete together at the Olympic games. But as part of that, they have to declare a month's truce so that you can travel to the games and back from them without falling afoul of your enemies. So they're not united in any way. So competition between them, whether it's at the individual to be the best in your event at the Olympics or whether it's between a city wanting to be bigger and better than its rival. And its rival is probably within walking distance. I mean, it's a very small world. Athens and Sparta is only a few days' journey apart. So it's everything's very concentrated. But the irony is that when they come under the big threat of Persian invasion in 490 BC and then again in 480 BC, the Athenians and the Spartans ally together. They lead the alliance, the Spartans most prominently because they are the famous warriors. So there's truth in that, in Sparta as the great martial power. It's not a dictatorship. It's more like an extreme apartheid system where you have the Spartan elite that are freed from work because they have a population of serfs, effectively called helots, who do all the work for them, provide them with food so that they can concentrate on training for war and being a good citizen, being living the aristocratic life in a sense, a sort of gentlemanly good life by Greek standards. But they ally with the Athenians, and it's because the Athenians have built themselves a navy in a very short time and at huge expense in both money but also resources, the manpower you need to demand this and then maintain it. That allows them together to beat back the Persian invaders. And it's really after that Athens and Sparta fall out because the Athenians now are the great naval power. They've got a fleet of, from the start, 200 warships, these things called triremes, these old galleys. Now that's hugely more than any other Greek state. When they have a big fleet to fight the Persians, they can maybe muster from all the different allies about 350 altogether. 200 of those were Athenians, so nobody can match them. And they see this as a sign that they're now as strong and as important as Spartan. Athenians are, of course, the open society that talk themselves and talk about either by Athenians or people who are associated with Athens, whereas the Spartans don't really talk to anybody much at all, aren't so inquisitive in the same way. But the irony is that over the generation after that victory against Persia, they see each other as a bigger enemy eventually than the Persians. So when they do go to the Peloponnesian War, from the start, the Spartans are asking for Persian gold to fund their war effort against the Athenians, and very soon the Athenians are doing the same thing to fund their war effort. So your fellow Greeks and your relatively close neighbors have become the big enemy. So the two states are different, but they've also got they're all part of this wider Greek culture.

00:13:18 Andrew Keen: And, of course, in when it comes to the Peloponnesian War, we still are reliant on Thucydides whose history of the Peloponnesian War many people consider the first real Work of history or certainly amongst the first works of history How accurate was this book and how important is Thucydides to understand? Athens and Sparta?

00:13:41 Adrian Goldsworthy: He's essential, but then, of course, you have the danger that in the end, this is one man's opinion. And this is a man who was elected to military office by the Athenians, is dealing with incidents up near Macedonia, up in the North, fails to save a city from a Spartan led army, but one that doesn't actually consist of Spartans, and is goes into exile as a result of this. So he's a slightly embittered man as he's writing all of this.

00:14:06 Andrew Keen: Yeah. He got time in that sense of Machiavelli, somebody who failed in failed in the real world and then wrote these classical works that we still refer to now.

00:14:18 Adrian Goldsworthy: He does seem to have that insight, in that it's not personal. He very rarely tells you anything about himself or only occasionally mentions things he's seen. But you can tell he gives a far more detailed portrait of how Athens works. It's obviously biased. He likes some people. He doesn't like other. You know, you get this demagogic politician, Cleon, who crops up, and Thucydides just cannot stand the man and makes this very clear in the way he's depicted. The speeches he's given to him, he's presented as a self interested buffoon. But he was quite successful. He does eventually, get killed in battle, but nevertheless so he's, you know, he is not wholly independent. On the other hand, he is analytical. You don't get with Herodotus, you will often explain things by omens, by chance. Thucydides tries to present it in a way we find very familiar. It seems very modern, this logical sense of, well, how do you do this? And, you know, how do you get this many ships, this many crews, and then how do you feed them? What are you trying to do? What are you trying to attack? So he's still compared to so many ancient authors, he commands a lot of respect, but scholarly opinion tends to inevitably sway back and forth. And every now and again, people will stop believing anything he's saying, whereas in the past, the tendency was to believe absolutely everything. You have to be careful. But the most of these events, he is really the only source we have. So it does mean if you think, yeah, I'm not sure about this. This doesn't quite ring true or there might be reasons why he's biased here. If you reject it, there is nothing else to put in its place. So you have to be honest with the reader and say, well, we're a bit suspicious about this, but we don't know. We don't know anything else. We can't replace it with a better source. So it's the nature of doing ancient history, Greeks or Romans. There is always very limited evidence from the time. We're lucky to have someone like Thucydides. But even he, you know, it's very frustrating. He deals in detail for the period from 431 BC onwards. He talks in a sort of vague sense about what happens between the Persian wars and the Peloponnesian War in 431. But often, he's not strict on his chronology. We don't quite know what order he meant things to have occurred in. He talks about this big Athenian disaster in Egypt, but so vaguely that scholarly opinion has varied that some people see this as this absolute catastrophe where a large chunk of your citizen population dies. I don't really buy that. It doesn't seem to fit. It doesn't seem logical. But, again, he is he is vague. He tells us about what he wants to tell, what he wants to talk about, inevitably. So for all the sense of balance and thoroughness, and it is remarkably detailed, There's still big gaps. There are still problems. There are still bits where you have to doubt him. But by the standards of ancient history, he is a very good source.

00:17:20 Andrew Keen: So Athens and Sparta reminds me of Coke or Pepsi or Avis and Hertz. Yeah. We have to make this choice and of course most modern Western thinkers philosophers historians know a great deal about Athens and very little as you say about Sparta so many twentieth twenty first century thinkers have gone back to Athens now in our crisis of democracy people are returning to Athenian democracy We've done a number of shows on civic assemblies, which were citizen assemblies, which were inspired by the Athenian democracy. Do you think that, Sparta Adrian has got a rather bad deal or maybe Athens has got rather too good a deal and how obsessed we are with Athens we twenty first century Westerners whereas Sparta is the model of what we want to avoid Seems to be I mean, I'm sure there are some who still admire Sparta, but it doesn't seem to be a paradigm for many thinkers.

00:18:30 Adrian Goldsworthy: I think it's only the, those who value the sort of the manly, the martial virtues see Spartan discipline, Spartan courage, Spartan skill at war and refusal to submit as an admirable thing. And I noticed my son's playing a computer game, Halo, where the main character is one of the Spartans. It's this group of super soldiers of the future. It's like what's it called? The 300, and the comic book that was based on. It brings to life these very butch, very formidable fighters, and there is a certain amount so the Spartans get that, but most people don't really know anything much about Spartan society, and they don't necessarily know how nasty it was. The curious thing is at the time is that there were a fair few philosophers living in comfortable Athens who admired the Spartans for, you know, the simplicity of their life.

00:19:25 Andrew Keen: And that when that includes the Plato?

00:19:28 Adrian Goldsworthy: Yes. I mean, it's because in a sense, aspects of his ideal city draw on the Spartan as well as the Athenian idea. And it's that sense and, of course, Xenophon, who ends up another Athenian who ends up in exile for a while, having served with Spartans as mercenaries in the East, he goes to live there. His sons may have gone through part of the Spartan education system. So he writes in a I think there was even then it was a mixture of, those who emphasized the sort of excellence of physical strength, courage. That was admirable. There's also probably an aristocratic tradition that sees the Spartans as almost a throwback to the good old days. Life was simple. We didn't have luxuries. We just, you know, fought for the state when necessary and then went back home. It's a little bit like I can remember when I was at Oxford. You know, our head of history was a Marxist, and he was a lot more comfortable in the late nineteen eighties to living life in Oxford than he was in Moscow. It was Ross McKibben, a modern historian. Did a lot of twentieth century British stuff. And very nice chap and excellent historian, but there were there was a surprising number in British and American universities of self declared Marxists who didn't want to go and live in a Soviet Republic. And we're often but we're often saying how much more admirable that was than our own flaws. It's rather like you look at Tacitus in, round about the year one hundred, couple years before that, writes this book, the Germania, where he contrasts the decadence of Rome with the simplicity of the German barbarian tribes. And it was something that allowed everybody from Luther to Bismarck and let alone the Nazis draw on this sense of from the classical tradition. It was rediscovered in the renaissance, This inherent German manly virtue and courage. So, you know, all sorts of these ideas wash around and every now and again come to the surface, usually used by somebody who doesn't bother to understand either the source itself, let alone the setting and the reality on which it's based.

00:21:29 Andrew Keen: And, of course, just as we don't know much about Sparta and don't seem mostly interested maybe outside video games, we're obsessed with Athens, with Socrates, with Athenian democracy. Are we right, Adrian, to be still so obsessed with Athens, this remarkable city state? I mean, of course, we can still go to, Athens and see some of the monuments. We can climb up to the, Parthenon. We can walk around, antiquity, imagine what it was like. What is your take on the relevance of Athens today?

00:22:10 Adrian Goldsworthy: It's relevant as with so much of history because in the end, these were flesh and blood human beings, and, you know, they're not that different from us. So some of the things they do and that don't necessarily work out well or they do work out well, we can find inspiration in even if you can't copying things is rather more difficult. The Athenian experiment is a remarkable one. I mean, you've got to look and think this is a system whereby every citizen, every man gets a vote, and that vote is equal. And that's pushing democracy far further than anybody else at the time. Now, obviously, women don't get the vote. You've got resident foreigners. They don't get the vote. They do get a few rights, but nothing like citizens. And if you're a slave owning society, and in that weird sense where often you can see from inscriptions to do with the construction of the Parthenon that you would have slaves working alongside free workers and free craftsmen and receiving the same wage. Though, presumably, in the slaves case, a lot of this would go to the owner or whoever had hired out a body of slaves to do it. But there is something you know, this sense of they have elected posts, but they also have an awful lot of things that are decided by lot. It's like jury duty today, but taken far further where you could end up being in the guiding council of the city for a year because your number has come up, your name has come up, and you're paid to do it so you don't suffer ruin if you're not so well off. It's staggering in the sense, obviously, modern states have such big institutions around them, whereas this is everything paired to the bone. So when the assembly decides to do something, then in principle, that is immediately enacted. It doesn't have to go before another house. You know, it's like going to the House of Lords over here. It doesn't have to be then assessed, reviewed by bureaucracies, by the courts, by these other bodies that have authority of their own. Hence, the fact that you can have with the debate over the, a rebel group in Mytilene, one of these allied cities that's rebelled. On one day, the Athenians decide to execute all the men, send everybody else into slavery. Overnight, they start thinking this might be a little bit harsh, and the next day, they hold the debate again and decide to just kill the ringleaders. And then the ambassadors who've come from Mytilene, from the city, actually give food and bonuses to the rowers in the ship that's going carrying them the message to get them. Thankfully, the second message arrives not before the first, but before the first one had actually been implemented. But it shows how popular opinion can shift back and forth. I mean, we've got local regional elections in Wales today, that won't decide very much. But, in Athens, as a voter, as a citizen, you are so directly involved and even to the point where you vote whether or not to go to war or whether or not to declare peace. And if you vote for war, you're not voting in an abstract sense for an army to go off and fight. It's you. It's your brother fighting, and Athenians do this, and they die in considerable numbers. So it's a very direct democracy, but one of the lessons of it as well is that the Athenians consider themselves to be special, better than everyone else in part because of this system, and they don't tend to treat other people very well at all. You know, they're they also they get very exclusive. So to be to be an Athenian citizen becomes harder. You have to prove Athenian birth for several generations. So it they become very jealous of these citizen rights, but it's in part because they really do have a much more direct involvement in how the community, the state runs than in any modern democracy, in part because of the size. You know? It's big by ancient standards. It's small by modern standards.

00:26:05 Andrew Keen: Aristotle, of course, wasn't a great fan of democracy. How does he play in all this? If Socrates is the quintessential Athenian and Plato, perhaps the philosopher who idealized Sparta, is Aristotle the bridge, or is he a bridge to Rome? How would you place, Aristotle in this narrative of Athens and Sparta?

00:26:28 Adrian Goldsworthy: It's I mean, it's all coming afterwards. The great era, Socrates is there, fights in the Peloponnesian War, is famously forced by his fellow citizens to commit suicide in its immediate aftermath when an Athenian democracy is shocked and they don't know what's going on and they panic and they turn against each other. With Plato in the late fifth century BC. So one interesting thing, Thucydides, but it's also there in the philosophers, is this sense that a good constitution for a state will make that state effective at war making. And to do that, you need to be internally stable. So this is you know, it's a lot of Plato's ideal republic has to do with this capacity to be organized and to make war. Aristotle comes from a different point of view. It's frustrating. We have this Politeia, he wrote or one of his pupils wrote about Athens, where he analyzes the development of the Athenian state and democracy, and it's one of the best sources we have for how things actually work. And it is critical at times. It does argue that you can push your aristocracy aside too much. You can give too much power to the mob who will vote for demagogues like Cleon and others of that kind. But it's so he is he's there in a sense, but, again, he's living in a world this is a man who for a while is tutor to Alexander the Great. He's living in a world where the monarchy comes to dominate southern Greece, the monarchy of the Macedonians who've always been on the fringes of whether or not the other Greeks, the southern Greeks, see them as Greek or not. Yes. They speak the language, but in a rather sort of, outlandish way. So that but it's Philip the Second who defeats the Thebans and the Athenians at Chaeronea in 338 BC. And after that, you have the continued link, at least for a while, between Aristotle and Alexander as Alexander goes off to conquer the Persians. And that's really it's building on the fourth century has some different ideas that aren't there. You have the Panhellenists starting to talk about this idea of perhaps we should come together. We're all Greeks. Therefore, we should unite. Though, again, they talk about that as we need to unite so we can go and fight the Persians, conquer them, treat them as our slaves, and live proper, civilized, gentlemanly lives. So he's part of that world, and a lot of these ideas it's one of the problems is that we get what survives, and so much of this even of Aristotle and Plato is lost and others where it's disputed that it's very hard to know. But I don't think the Romans really who will come along later and sort of replace the Macedonians as the dominant force, They don't really think these things through. If you look at Cicero's political philosophy, yes, it draws upon Greek examples, but it is put in a very Roman, very different context. Because this odd thing has developed in between since Athens has done terribly well for a while, but then it's lost to Sparta. So its democracy, its system seems to have flaws. It revives in the fourth century, gets beaten by Philip the Second. So, again, there's a suggestion of flaws, and after that, never really comes back to its former self. They start to look abroad and you get schools will start to admire the, for instance, being more stable politically as having these mixed constitutions, which, again, is an idea they start playing around with, and they then try and shape how they see these other states with a very it's quite a narrow perspective. It doesn't necessarily fit with how the states have actually developed and what the people there think they're doing.

00:30:28 Andrew Keen: Adrian, a couple of weeks ago, we had a fellow Welshman of yours, Glyn Morgan. What could be more Welsh a name, although he teaches in America? He has a new book out on, the rise and fall of American Europe, Which of course raises all sorts of comparisons with what's happening, in Rome and Greece is history repeating itself in terms of your broader understanding Athens and Sparta Europe, I mean and The United States is I mean I think Christopher Hitchens and he's not alone used to say that Europe was Athens and Or antiquity, Greek antiquity, whereas Rome is The United States. Is there some accuracy to that?

00:31:18 Adrian Goldsworthy: It's so broad, Andrew. I mean, you have to be careful. Obviously, Thucydides would be absolutely delighted because he declares that these sorts of events will occur again. They will repeat themselves. So to talk like this and there's been that trend, you know, Macmillan even when he was,

00:31:34 Andrew Keen: Harold Macmillan.

00:31:36 Adrian Goldsworthy: Yes. Back during the Second World War when he was attached to the staff in the Mediterranean, he used to like talking about the British being the Greeks to the Americans' Romans. You know, you're starting to have the industrial clout, the military power, but we're just a bit more sophisticated and civilized than you. Sorry — I lost connection for a minute there. One interesting parallel is that, of course, you have the Athenian alliance that turns Athens into this great power, which comes after the Persian wars and after the Athenian fleet has helped them turn back the Persians. And they have an alliance with probably 200-plus Greek states, most of them tiny, many of them on the islands. And the obligation is that we should communally defend ourselves. So it has a sort of NATO aspect to it. You've just won the Second World War. You're now concerned about the perceived other threat of the Eastern Bloc, and therefore, let's pool resources. We can't all afford to have the same sort of armed forces we've had during the war, but can we collectively defend ourselves? And there's an interesting question there in that the Athenians keep complaining — as successive US presidents have done in, well, pretty much all of my lifetime — that the allies aren't paying enough, that they expect protection from the Athenian fleet but they're not willing to pay for it. And it ends up that the Athenians excuse themselves that the fleet ends up overwhelmingly Athenian because none of the other states are willing to send ships. They'll just send a bit of cash instead. They'll send a few men. So there's an interesting parallel, but there's also that feeling of, well, as the threat recedes, then the perception that we need to do this at all seems like a burden to many of these little communities. So there is that odd parallel in a sense that you have the power that has had the potential to become a great power, but has come — like The United States — through participation in a big war and mobilizing for that and then decides not to demobilize fully, but to remain the big superpower. Particularly perhaps the naval aspect of it has parallels. But then so many other things are different. Again, this world is so much smaller. The Greeks that come in the Athenian alliance are much more culturally homogeneous than Europe certainly is at the moment. You know, they feel a much stronger bond, and the identity is the local city and then to similar allies. It's not like nation states that are trying to form into bigger blocks. So I think you can't push it too far. History gives you an idea of what human beings might do under pressure and some of the ways friction is likely to arise. But it isn't as simple as that, because, you know, who is Persia in the modern world?

00:34:43 Andrew Keen: Persia is always there. Yeah. And when it comes to pushing it too far, I'm gonna push try and push you too far. You write about the outcome of you talk about in the great irony as the Spartans won the Peloponnesian war by securing subsidies from the Persians. Of course, America now is involved in its own modern or postmodern Persian war in well, I mean, just there is know you're a specialist there, Adrian, so there's always exceptions. But is there anything in your book on Athens and Sparta and the role of Persia that might be a warning, for example, to an America now involved in a war in Iran, which was once known as Persia, or Europe that chose not to be involved in this war?

00:35:35 Adrian Goldsworthy: It's, I mean, a lot has changed since then, and I've written as well on Roman relations with the Parthians and the Persians as well. It's one interesting thing that this does highlight is actually the Athenians come across as quite modern in the sense that Athens grows to be a very big city, and it ends up where —

00:35:55 Andrew Keen: Sorry to interrupt. When you say big, give me some numbers.

00:35:59 Adrian Goldsworthy: Okay. Right. Well, we talk about Athens, but we really mean Attica, the area around it, where you probably have 40 to 50,000 Athenian citizens. That's adult men. Maybe a total population including resident foreigners, women, children, slaves, 200,000, 250,000. So very small by modern standards, huge by Greek standards. Sparta may have the same sort of overall population.

00:36:27 Andrew Keen: You're right. It's bigger than where you are, Penarth, about the same size as Cardiff up the road from you.

00:36:32 Adrian Goldsworthy: Yeah. Yeah. That would I mean, it's, Sparta has about the same number of people, but at most, 9,000. And by the end of the war, only a couple of thousand of them are actually Spartan citizens. So they're very the very narrow top of a small pyramid. But Athens outgrows its capacity to generate food, which is partly why they get so interested in developing areas of the Southern Ukraine, Crimea, that area, colonizing that, but also establishing the Athenians live off wheat that comes from Southern Russia to a great extent, or what would today be that? And protect protecting that trade route to get through the Dardanelles and get you to Athens becomes vital for them. So they're very concerned to control all the islands that will allow them to dominate this route. So you get a sense, and this starts to break down when those islands rebel. And it's one of the reasons Athens has to surrender to the Spartans at the end. Apart from losing their last fleet, they were they're faced with the prospect of running out of food because they cannot bring it in anymore. So you can see how closing the Straits of Hormuz has very quickly disrupted these very long supply chains of staples. You know, they're talking about in Britain that we might be short of potatoes within a month or two.

00:37:44 Andrew Keen: Oh, wow. What will we do without our potatoes?

00:37:47 Adrian Goldsworthy: Well, exactly. How will we possibly cope? But we get very complacent, as do most powers. We always think that what's happening now is normal, and we forget how quickly things change. Things change for Athens really fast and how they became a great power.

00:38:14 Andrew Keen: Finally, Adrian, we've talked about the sort of the birth of historiography, both Thucydides and Herodotus. How would the Athenians and Spartans — you talked at the beginning about this being a human story — how would they think about our obsession with them, with Athens and Sparta? Do you think they would be intrigued? Would they be troubled? Would they be inspired?

00:38:59 Adrian Goldsworthy: I think they would feel it was their due. They did consider themselves to be very special. The Spartans are descendants of conquerors ruled by sons of Hercules, and they are the greatest warriors, the greatest fighting men in all of the Greek world. And since the rest of the world consists of barbarians, well, they're not even worth considering at all. And the Athenians, you know, one of the reasons Athenian culture celebrates itself so much is they really have a very high opinion of themselves. They are riding high as this empire. And the monuments like the Parthenon, it is not there as a pure artwork. It is not there to celebrate Greek culture in a way it's often presented today. This is the Athenians saying, we are better than all of you. You know, we deserve your respect, your admiration, and your fear. And so much of — you know, even when we think of the comedy and the drama, most of these will all be presented initially in competition to prove that not only are we the Athenians, so we're better than everyone else, but I'm the best Athenian around. So they were not short of ego and self confidence. And, of course, Thucydides, again, he's telling this story because he thinks it will last through the ages because it matters. So I think a lot of them would actually just feel this is natural. They would, obviously, they would find so much of our society as alien as we find so much of theirs. But then the fact that so many of the ideas still have some resonance even if we perhaps interpret them in a slightly different way to the way they were intended in the first place, The drama is still often very moving. The comedy can be funny.

00:40:33 Andrew Keen: Mhmm.

00:40:33 Adrian Goldsworthy: They've still you know, there's this element where there's a common humanity that's running through. So I think they would feel that it's only their due, that they really were special. And in later centuries in particular, which does distort the evidence a bit, much of what we know about classical Greece gets written in the Roman period when they are part of the Roman Empire, but they are almost sort of university cities or, theme parks in Sparta's case, where they are celebrating how great we used to be, and that still makes us a bit better than you. You know? Alright. We might be Romans now, but, you know, our past is far more distinguished than yours. So they really did have a very high opinion of themselves.

00:41:11 Andrew Keen: Well, there you have it. If any Athenians or Spartans are watching this, you're getting your due from one of the world's premier authorities on antiquity, Adrian Goldsworthy. His new book is out this week, Athens and Sparta, the rivalry that shaped ancient Greece. It's incredibly readable and erudite, an important piece of work. Congratulations, Adrian, and keep doing the good work of making antiquity so accessible. Thank you so much.

00:41:40 Adrian Goldsworthy: Thank you for having me. It's been great fun.