do some legitimate comp. civ., for those of you into that kind of thing. Stan, I can’t

help but feel that we have perhaps too many globes.

That’s better. Today we’re going to learn about the horrible totalitarian Persians and

the saintly democracy-loving Greeks.

But of course we already know this story: There were some wars in which no one wore

any shirts and everyone was reasonably fit; the Persians were bad; the Greeks were good;

Socrates and Plato were awesome; the Persians didn’t even philosophize; The West is the

Best Go Team.

Yeah, well, no.

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Let’s start with the Persian empire, which became the model for pretty much all land-based

empires throughout the world. Except for—wait for it—the Mongols.

Much of what we know about the Persians and their empire come from an outsider writing

about them which is something we now call history, and one of the first true historians

was Herodotus, whose famous book The Persian Wars talks about the Persians quite a bit.

Now the fact that Herodotus was a Greek is important because it introduces us to the

idea of historical bias. But more on that in a second.

So the Persian Achaemenid dynasty- Achaemenid? Hold on...

[audible computer pronunciation] AkEEmenid or AkEHmenid

So they’re both right? I was right twice!

Right, so the Persian AkEEmenid or AkEHmenid dynasty was founded in 539 BCE by King Cyrus

the Great.

Cyrus took his nomadic warriors and conquered most of Mesopotamia, including the Babylonians,

which ended a sad period in Jewish history called The Babylonian Exile, thus ensuring

that Cyrus got great press in the Bible.

But his son, Darius the First, was even greater: He extended Persian control east to our old

friend the Indus Valley, west to our new friend Egypt, and north to Crash Course newcomer

Anatolia.

By the way, there were Greeks in Anatolia called Ionian Greeks who will become relevant

shortly.

So even if you weren’t Persian, the Persian Empire was pretty dreamy.

For one thing, the Persians ruled with a light touch: Like conquered kingdoms were allowed

to keep their kings and their elites as long as they pledged allegiance to the Persian

King and paid taxes, which is why the Persian king was known as The King of Kings.

Plus taxes weren’t too high and the Persians improved infrastructure with better roads

and they had this pony express-like mail service of which Herodotus said:

“… they are stayed neither by snow nor rain nor heat nor darkness from accomplishing

their appointed course with all speed.”

And the Persians embraced freedom of religion. Like they were Zoroastrian, which has a claim

to being the world’s first monotheistic religion. It was really Zoroastrianism that

introduced to the good/evil dualism we all know so well. You know: god and satan or harry

and voldemort...

But the Persians weren’t very concerned about converting people of the empire to their

faith. Plus, Zoroastrianism forbid slavery, and so slavery was almost unheard of in the

Persian Empire.

All in all, if you had to live in the 5th century BCE, the Persian Empire was probably

the best place to do it. Unless, that is, you believe Herodotus and the Greeks.

We all know about the Greeks: Architecture. Philosophy Literature. The very word music

comes from Greek, as does so much else in contemporary culture.

Greek poets and mathematicians playwrights and architects and philosophers founded a

culture we still identify with. And they introduced us to many ideas, from democracy to fart jokes.

And the Greeks gave the west our first dedicated history, they gave us our vocabulary for talking

about politics.

Plus they gifted us our idealization of democracy, which comes from the government they had in

Athens.

Mr. Green, Mr. Green, Mr. Green, Mr Green—did you say fart jokes?

Uhhh. You don’t ask about Doric, Ionian, or Corinthian columns. You don’t ask about

Plato’s allegory of the cave. It’s all scatological humor with you—it’s time

for the open letter? Really? Already? Alright.

[rolls in] An open letter [the whoopee cushion sounds]- Stan! To Aristophanes.

Dear Aristophanes, --Oh right, I have to check the secret compartment.

Stan, what... oh. Thank you, Stan. It’s fake dog poo. How thoughtful.

So, good news and bad news, Aristophanes. 2,300 years after your death, this is the

good news,you’re still a reasonably famous. Only 11 of your 40 plays survived, but even

so, you’re called the Father of Comedy, there are scholars devoted to your work.

Now, the bad news: Even though your plays are well-translated and absolutely hilarious,

students don’t like to read them in schools. There always like, why do we gotta read this

boring crap?

And this must be particularly galling to you because so much of what you did in your career

was make fun of boring crap, specifically in the form of theatrical tragedies. Plus,

you frequently used actual crap to make jokes.

Such as when you had the chorus in The Acharnians imagining a character in your play throwing

crap at a real poet you didn’t like.

You, Aristophanes, who wrote that under every stone lurks a politician, who called wealth

the most excellent of all the gods..

You, who are responsible for the following conversation:

Praxagora: I all to have a share of everything and everything to be in common; there will

no longer be either rich or poor; [...] I shall begin by making land, money, everything

that is private property, common to all. [...]

Blepyrus: But who will till the soil?

Praxagora: The slaves.

Blepyrus: Oh.

And yet you’re seen as homework! Drudgery! That, my friend, is a true tragedy. On the

upside, we did take care of slavery. It only took 2,000 years.

Best wishes, John Green

When we think about the high point of Greek culture, exemplified by the Parthenon and

the plays of Aeschylus, what we’re really thinking about is Athens

in the 4th century BCE, right after the Persian Wars.

But Greece was way more than Athens. Greeks lived in city-states which consisted of a

city and its surrounding area.

Most of these city-states featured at least some form of slavery and in all of them citizenship

was limited to males.

Sorry ladies...

Also, Each of the city-states had its own form of government, ranging from very democratic—unless

you were a women or a slave—to completely dictatorial.

And the people who lived in these cities considered themselves citizens of that city, not of anything

that might ever be called Greece. At least until the Persian wars.

So between 490 and 480 BCE, the Persians made war on the Greek City states. This was the

war that featured the battle of Thermopylae where 300 brave Spartans battled--if you believe

Herodotus--five million Persians.

And also the battle of Marathon, which is a plain about 26.2 miles away from Athens.

The whole war started because Athens supported those aforementioned Ionian Greeks when they

were rebelling in Anatolia against the Persians.

That made the Persian king Xerxes mad so he led two major campaigns against the Athenians,

and the Athenians enlisted the help of all the other Greek city states.

And in the wake of that shared Greek victory, the Greeks began to see themselves as Greeks

rather than as Spartans or Athenians or whatever.

And then Athens emerged as the de facto capital of Greece and then got to experience a Golden

Age, which is something that historians make up.

But a lot of great things did happen during the Golden Age, including the Parthenon, a

temple that became a church and then a mosque and then an armory until finally settling

into its current gig as a ruin.

You also had statesmen like Pericles, whose famous funeral oration brags about the golden

democracy of Athens with rhetoric that wouldn’t sound out of place today.

“If we look to the laws, they afford equal justice to all in their private differences

… if a man is able to serve the state, he is not hindered by the obscurity of his condition.”

When you combine that high minded rhetoric with the undeniable power and beauty of the

art and philosophy that was created in ancient Athens, it’s not hard to see it as the foundation

of Western civilization.

And if you buy into this, you have to be glad that the Greeks won the Persian Wars.

But even if you put aside the slavery and other injustices in Greek society, there’s

still trouble.

Do I have to say it, seriously? FINE. TROUBLE RIGHT HERE IN RIVER CITY WITH A CAPITAL T

WHICH RHYMES WITH P AND THAT STANDS FOR THE PELOPONNESE.

Pericles’s funeral oration comes from a later war, The Peloponnesian War, a 30-year

conflict between the Athens and the Spartans.

The Spartans did not embrace democracy but instead embraced a kingship that functioned

only because of a huge class of brutally mistreated slaves.

But to be clear, the war was not about Athens trying to get Sparta to embrace democratic

reform; wars rarely are.

It was about resources and power. And the Athenians were hardly saintly in all of this,

as evidenced by the famous Melian Dialogue.

Let’s go to the Thought Bubble.

So in one of the most famous passages of Thucydides’ history of the Peloponnesian War, the Athenians

sailed to the island of Melos, a Spartan colony, and demanded that the Melians submit to Athenian

Rule.

The Melians pointed out they’d never actually fought with the Spartans and were like, “Listen,

if it’s all the same to you, we’d like to go Switzerland on this one,” except of

course they didn’t say that because there was no Switzerland, to which the Athenians

responded, and here I am quoting directly, “The strong do what they can and the weak

suffer what they must.”

Needless to say, this is not a terribly democratic or enlightened position to take. This statement,

in fact, is sometimes seen as the first explicit endorsement of the so-called theory of Realism

in international relations.

For realists, interaction between nations (or peoples or cultures) is all about who

has the power. Whoever has it can compel whoever doesn’t have it to do pretty much anything.

So what did the meritocratic and democratic Athenians do when the Melians politely asked

not to participate in the fight?

They killed all the Melian men, and enslaved all the women and children.

So, yes, Socrates gave us his interrogative Method; Sophocles gave us Oedipus; but the

legacy of Ancient Greece is profoundly ambiguous, all the more so because the final winner of

the Peloponnesian War were the dictatorial Spartans.

Thanks for the incredible bummer, ThoughtBubble.

So here’s a non-rhetorical question: Did the right side win the Persian wars?

Most classicists and defenders of the Western Tradition will tell you that of course we

should be glad the Greeks won.

After all, winning the Persian war set off the cultural flourishing that gave us the

classical age. And plus, if the Persians had won with their monarchy that might have strangled

democracy in its crib and gave us more one -man rule.

And that’s possible, but as a counter that argument, lets consider three things:

First, it’s worth remembering that life under the Persians was pretty good and if

you look at the last five thousand years of human history, you’ll find a lot more successful

and stable empires than you will democracies.

Second, life under the Athenians wasn’t so awesome, particularly if you were a woman

or a slave and their government was notoriously corrupt.

And ultimately the Athenian government derived its power not from its citizens but from the

imperialist belief that Might Makes Right.

It’s true that Athens gave us Socrates, but let me remind you, they also killed him.

Well, I mean they forced him to commit suicide. Whatever, Herodotus, you’re not the only

one here who can engage in historical bias.

And lastly, under Persian rule the Greeks might have avoided the Peloponnesian War,

which ended up weakening the Greek city states so much that Alexander “Coming Soon” the

Great’s father was able to conquer all of them and then there were a bunch of bloody

wars with the Persians and all kinds of horrible things and Greece wouldn’t glimpse democracy

again for two millennia. All of which might have been avoided if they’d

just let themselves get beaten by the Persians.

All of which forces us to return to the core question of human history: What’s the point

of being alive?

I’ve got good news for you, guy. You’re only going to have to worry about it for about

8 more seconds.

Should we try to ensure the longest, healthiest, and most productive lives for humans? If so,

it’s easy to argue that Greece should have lost the Persian Wars.

But perhaps lives are to be lived in pursuit of some great ideal worth sacrificing endlessly

for. And if so, maybe the glory of Athens still

shines, however dimly.

Those are the real questions of history: What’s the point of being alive? How should we organize

ourselves, what should we seek from this life? Those aren’t easy questions, but we’ll

take another crack at them next week when we talk about the Buddha.

I’ll see you then.

Crash Course is produced and directed by Stan Muller. Our script supervisor is Danica Johnson.

The graphics team is ThoughtBubble and the show is written by my high school history