LogFAQs > #890094998

shadowsword87 posted...

Let me look that up and see what happened...
Oh shit

The democracy of Athens is overthrown by the oligarchic extremists, Antiphon, Theramenes, Peisander and Phrynichus in an effort by the oligarchists to exert more control over the conduct of the war with Sparta and its allies. A "Council of Four Hundred" is set up.

Hello plot.

Shortly after that, you've also got this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_Tyrants

There's a lot of that sort of thing going on in the time period.

And again, a lot of that back and forth is what weakened Greek strength and internal cohesion enough so that, a few decades later, one of the "barbarians" of the north came out of the backwater hick land of Macedon, conquered the entire peninsula, and then handed off the ensuing empire to his son. Who then went on a prolonged vacation to the east and caused a bit of trouble.

Also, look up stuff like the Delian League if you're interested in some of the more complicated politics of city-state interaction (and a lot of the things that eventually led to Sparta going after Athens in the first place).



shadowsword87 posted...

Oh also, how likely are the Gauls going to be poking and proding? We're they doing that constantly, or a special time?

Not very. They were mostly "stay at home" apart from the occasional trader or mercenary sort of deal (though you'd probably be more likely to see British Celts via the tin trade).

Though you've also got Massalia/Marseille, which was one of a number of Greek colonies in southern Gaul (in much the same way they had colonies like Syracuse in Italy), so there was SOME interaction, depending on where you were in the Greek world and who you were dealing with. If anything, colonies like that (and their eventually absorption into Rome) are a large part of what ultimately led to the Greek influence over Rome changing Roman culture so dramatically (which is why we tend to see the classical era as Greco-Roman in the first place). The Romans were turning Greek before they even made it to actual Greece.

In the same vein, one could argue that similar Greek colonies and lands in "Ionia" - what is present-day Turkey - are a large part of what triggered most Greek interaction with Persia in the first place, and which in turn could have potentially spurred a similar sort of backwards cultural transmission into Persia over time. Though in that case, Alexander got the job done much faster by killing his way into the heart of Persia and basically Hellenizing the fuck out of it all in one shot. And honestly, Persia's inherent culture and history was probably far more resistant to that sort of slow influence creep than Rome was, because early Rome kind of feels like a civilization without much strong sense of personal identity or culture to go with it. There; Greek sort of slipped in and filled in the gaps, but in Persia, a lot of that foundation already existed and was quite strong (strong enough that it persisted through both Greek and Roman domination to rise again later). If anything, Persia did to Greek rulers in Asia was the Greeks did to Rome, making them more Persianized.

At least until the Arabic Muslims came through and bulldozed their way through thousands of years of tradition and culture - but even there, Persian influence tended to color things in ways it never really did in the western Islamic cultures.

But since I've been talking about it, here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hellenization


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