RSM In Conversation Live with Tom Holland

so good evening ladies and gentlemen welcome once again to um rsm live in conversation and you can possibly tell we actually are in the royal society of medicine this evening this is a major step forward um next time we'll be in and it will be a full audience at the moment there's just three people here but we know there's hundreds of people who've tuned in so we're nearly back to where we were and it's a and last time my last interview i did was mike brelia a few weeks ago the cricketer and psychoanalysis and i got comments that said it was far too much cricket and not enough psychoanalysis and then the other comments said far too much psychoanalysis and not enough cricket so we may have that problem again because now we have tom holland the incredibly distinguished historian but also i believe a slightly mad cricket fan and player so we might get that uh possibly possibly okay but we're going to this time be clear we're going to start off with history and there'll be a bit of cricket at the end as well so tom welcome lovely to see you thanks very much for inviting me and for you know being here physically it's amazing oh god it's just so much better isn't it it really is i was about to say nothing can possibly go wrong that's obviously the worst thing to say well there's a challenge yes you must have had things gone you've got your amazing podcast that you're just telling me about with a million downloads every minute or something i mean you must have you had any terrible disasters with that yet oh well the classic one is that one of us forgets to because i do it with my friend and colleague dominic sanbrook and um one of us invariably forgets to record it um so i think there was one where we had to completely re-record it um but the thing i mean he he he did that first so i had massive bragging rights over him and could smug away and then three weeks later i did it so i think we're kind of evened out okay well if that's the worst that's happened then that's not so bad so anyway now then now let's so i say you you are incredibly well known historian and we've got a selection of your books here all of these are mine so i can actually say i actually do read your books uh they are genuinely brilliant and uh folks if you haven't read them then now's your chance but uh they're quite heavy just have to carry them all in so you know you've done it that is devotion oh that's a question uh six all right so i'm on to my seventh 987 okay i've got i think i'm just missing one then okay which one it is okay and but now you didn't start off as a historian that that's uh right to say um well i started if i wanted to be a great novelist uh and so i left university and i thought being a great novelist is going to require me to um basically go on the dole but i didn't want to do that so i started doing a phd and the phd was on lord byron um and i was about halfway through it when i decided that this this was this was a kind of waste of time that that i wasn't a great novelist but that's studying byron's life and byron is kind of the model for the aristocratic vampire and this was uh in the early 90s when aristocratic vampires were all the craze so um i wrote a novel in which byron was literally a vampire and it did it did sufficiently well that i um i got a three book contract out of it which kind of locked me into writing about vampires which had never really been part of my career plan because i was basically you know i wanted to be kind of choice or proof that i didn't want to be writing about myself but what i found was that i was interested in writing about vampires if i could set them in specific historic historical periods and i could discover enough evidence from this historical period to demonstrate that byron or christopher marlowe or akhenaten had literally been vampires and i i basically i i enjoyed the history so much that i realized that this was what i wanted to do and i think that um that it you know if you if you want to be a writer it can actually take time for you to work out you know what you're going to most enjoy doing and i and i after i'd done that i then got commissioned to write rubicon which was the first work of history i did which was about the the fall of the roman republic so this was you know caesar cleopatra all that and i started i got the commission and i cannot believe i don't have to put any vampires into this i could just read about this period i can just write about it and it was i think it was one of the happiest times of my life the kind of the the joy of discovering what it was that i wanted to do and what would make me happy doing and i mean the reviews you got for that first uh i was about to say novel because it's not a novel the first history book were pretty amazing not many of quotes on them and have you do you think you've ever suffered a little bit with professional historians though because i mean you had a double first in history but in in english but not in history or is that now all water than bridge because you clearly know what you're doing um i i i was i was um treated with incredible kindness by um by classicists when i wrote um rubicon and one of them actually who who was a particular patron was mary beard and this was beca before she'd become kind of world famous um i mean i i knew who she was because she was a big star in the field of of the late roman republic but she wasn't a kind of you know she wasn't a celebrity she wasn't kind of being mobbed when she went to buy shoes or anything like that um and she was incredibly kind and and that kind of set the template for um the kind of the generosity that that i've received from kind of leading figures in in in the fields that i write about so i i i of course this occasional snippiness but i think there's the snippiness whether whether you're an academic or um writing for general audience or whatever i think i mean it slightly comes with the territory but by and large i think that um scholars are and have been incredibly generous and i would not have been able to write the books in the way that i have done without that generosity and she was kind enough to come and do an interview in this series and she was absolutely brilliant almost as brilliant as you know you're going to be now look you've got all you've got a huge repertoire i mean from the rubycon you crossed the rubicon and continued east and we would we were having a chat beforehand as to what to concentrate on because you know we can't do justice to your work and because of a particular anniversary uh this year we have decided to go back to persian fire so we're going to concentrate on persian fire and then see where that takes us so do you want to lead us in and tell us what is the anniversary i have to say i didn't realize that it was but well so it's a good one it's the 2000 500th anniversary of uh the great persian invasion of greece in 480 bc led by xerxes um the king of kings king of persia who was easily the most powerful man on the face of the planet at the time um king of this vast empire unprecedentedly vast empire stretching from um from the aegean all the way to uh to beyond the hindu kush um and he essentially wanted to to conquer greece and specifically to swat two particularly annoying cities athens and sparta and so the odds were overwhelmingly in his favor but heroically the um the athenians and the spartans managed just about to see this invasion off and what happened in um uh in in 480 bc are two very very famous battles one of them uh the battle of thermopylae a defeat but an incredibly heroic defeat the 300 spartans standing against this vast army in the past and ultimately being wiped out but kind of lighting up you know the torch of freedom that has endured forever i mean actually the history is slightly more complicated than that but that is the myth and then in due course um the battle of salamis the great naval battle off this island just north africa after the persians of occupied athens and burnt it so it's incredible drama incredible excitement and certainly in greece it's big news so in in greece they're celebrating it but they i i saw that they uh they'd invited a load of spartan reenactors into the athens metro i think this week and they put up posters celebrating it all over the the athens metro so uh yeah so it's it's uh it's a big it's a big um festival so they don't reenact it too vigorously now okay so and this is clearly something very close to your own interest because i know you're coming back to the subject um at the moment and we'll finish with that at the end and i know you've also translated herodotus who is our main source for what we know about this okay so this this was the story this was the story and i say story advisedly that that first as a child got me into history so i i'd been i was the kind of child who's obsessed by dinosaurs and i like dinosaurs because they were they were fierce and glamorous and predatory and safely extinct and i then i kind of moved seamlessly onto the greek gods who were very similar i mean they were kind of brutal but charismatic and i was obsessed by greek mythology i just kind of hoovered it up um and then i and then basically i felt well i've done that i've done greek mythology what happens what happens after after that um so i started looking at greek history and there is you know the story of the persian invasion is it kind of offers everything that greek mythology had done because it's it's you know it's it's a clash of east and west as the trojan war had been um it it features spartans you know the city of helen it's got athens the city of theseus it's got incredible heroes it's got incredible drama uh and i was i was just obsessed by it and i read everything that i could um and i began to realize that if i was going to to get to grips with this story then i was going to have to read herodotus who is basically our only source for it um and so this was my first experience of reading any classic i mean i read it before i read uh you know jane austen or dickens or anything like that um and basically it's kept company with me over the entire course of my life because uh yes i i adapted him for radio then i wrote persian fire which is a history then i translated herodotus and i've i'm just in the process of finishing off a children's book in which the um don't spoil it we'll come on okay but essentially so essentially this is i i think it's such a wonderful story and i think that the the the more you look at it the more kind of fascinating and complex it becomes because what fascinated me as a child isn't necessarily what fascinates me now but it's it it retains its kind of allure as a subject so now herodotus then okay you're the expert on it you've translated him from the from did we need a new translation obviously we did i think you always need a new translation okay yeah right well because because it's for penguin classics and so the the previous one i think was 50s and you know and is it true this is where the word history actually comes from yeah so it means inquiries in greek so herodotus didn't think of himself as a historian because the concept didn't exist so what did he do well basically so basically he he's interested in everything right and he says in the in in the opening of his book that his his aim is to explain how it was that the greeks and the persians went to war and and to commemorate all the incredible deeds that they performed so when i was a child and i got it at the library i read that and i thought brilliant that's what i want great you know let's get on to marathon let's get on to thermopylae um but then he he goes very badly off piste and he starts talking about this um this king who wants his bodyguards to watch his wife naked uh and then he's talking about um a guy who jumps off a ship and gets rescued by a dolphin and there's all kinds of stuff that's absolutely nothing to do with the battle of marathon or thermopylae at all so as a child i was very disappointed and then he gets onto the persians and i think brilliant great and then the persians invade egypt and so herodotus says i'm just going to pause at this point and tell you why the egyptians are so interesting and peculiar which he then does for another kind of 200 pages and as a child very very impatient and basically it took about kind of 400 pages before we got to the stuff that i've been waiting for but what i now realize is that what herodotus is is doing is following where his curiosity leads him and he's basically curious about everything so he is interested in in um kind of applying the the rational approach of ionian philosophers to the past and and that effectively does invent history but he's also interested in in basically everything that he comes across so he's interested for instance in the egyptians he's interested in all the weird stuff they do he's interested in why they like cats he's interested in why they build pyramids he's interested in how they mummify things he's interested in the fact that as he says um women uh urinate standing up and men urinate sitting down all this stuff is great he's interested in the scythians who are nomads up in uh ukraine russia why they uh why they're all kind of getting stoned on hash and things so he's recording all this he's also interested in animals he's interested in rivers he's there's almost nothing he's not interested in and so actually what he he is kind of writing history but he is also writing the equivalent of wikipedia and people have described him he's called the father of history and people have have rather sniffly said well he's the father of lies and undoubtedly there is there are some tall stories in his in his uh his researches but what's amazing is it's not that he gets things wrong but that he gets anything right at all because he what he he is essentially trying to understand the world in terms that makes sense of everything and no one had tried to do that before no one had tried to set it all down as he does and so to read it i think in the kind of age of wikipedia and the internet and our kind of craving for knowledge and our ability to source information you know absolutely kind of you know the the the touch of a keyboard it's incredibly moving to see the beginnings of this and to think how much it must have cost him how much effort and just how unfailingly entertaining and amazing what he writes is i mean he is the most i think he's the most lovable of of ancient writers ancient writers tend not to be particularly lovable but herodotus you feel would would just be a kind of wonderful person to meet you'd love him at a dinner party time you really would sit next to him yeah you really would but now he's a persian subject is these but he lives in halicarnassus which has just been burning down or something they wanted to rescue all the tourists but but he's is he actually a greek yes so he's a greek but um the greeks are there are lots of greeks on what's now the turkish seaboards you mentioned bodrum um yeah so he's born and raised as a persian subject and one of the things that um you know as a child all the accounts i read were kind of pro-greek it was all in favor of the greeks and when i read herodotus one of the things that surprised me was actually how positive about the persians herodotus is i mean he's he's interested in them of course he is he's a rodgers he's interested in everybody but he he he makes real efforts to understand them so he he famously says of the persians that they um they teach their children three things to um to ride a horse to shoot bow and arrow and to tell the truth and he obviously regards this is incredibly estimable xerxes the great king who leads the invasion at one point herodotus says that everybody agrees that his stature his his kind of royal qualities absolutely fitted him to lead this invasion that he was a kind of impressive and admirable man i think that's important because it's all too easy to think of them as decadent murdering incestuous um vicious bastards i'm sure they were i mean i i'm sure they were vicious bastards i'm sure they were i mean i think they were all i think everybody was a vicious bastard basically back then but but um in their own terms and in herodotus his own terms the persians aspired to do right they aspired to uphold as they saw it truth um and there is this one incredible passage in herodotus where um he's talking about how different people do different things and and he of all people understands that because he's he's kind of tabulating all the different approaches that different peoples in different parts of the world have to uh to living and he offers us an example of this um darius who is the great king the father of xerxes who had sent the expedition that gets defeated at marathon and um herodotus says that darius had summoned some greeks and some indians and in greece um they they when their parents die they burn them and in india in this indian tribe herodotus says when they die they when their parents die um they eat them so you've got burning them and eating them that's not true isn't it i mean probably not probably not probably okay fair enough so darius says to the greeks how much would i have to pay you to eat your dead parents and the greeks go horrible i would never never do that and then he says to the indians how much would i have to pay you to um to burn your parents and the indians are equally shocked and appalled and you know throw their hands up in horror and um says that this proves the maxim of the great poet pinder that custom is king of all but the thing that's amazing about that is that herodotus is offering darius the persian king as the kind of fulcrum the the kind of the central point for this anecdote and he and herodotus who is a greek is seeing the greeks as a person would as a kind of peripheral people on the margins who can be compared with the indians who are likewise a peripheral people and the kind of effort of will that it must have taken for herodotus to think himself into the kind of platform heels of the great king the great enemy of the greeks i think is stupefying and they did wear platform yes they did yes they did they invented the high heels i mean basically the person's invented everything we might get to that last but we went up time but because the thing about the greeks is we know about the greeks because they write the history yeah and so we identify with the greeks you know kind of we think of ourselves as them the persians didn't write history and they didn't write in the way that the greeks did but again and again when you look at things that we take for granted assumptions all kinds of things the thread goes back as often to the persians it does to the greeks i just want you to expand on that a bit you say the persians didn't write history is that because they didn't write at all that can't be the case or nothing has survived or what no matter how hard you try all the sources are going to be greek the archaeology is persian and things like that but the sources are greek well there's an exception that proves the rule which is a great inscription put up by darius at a place called bisiton which is on the high road that leads from iraq up to iran and in it he describes how um there was a great convulsion that that a a a liar had seized control of the throne and that darius was called on by uhuru mazda who is the the the great god of truth of light of order um to destroy this this liar and under i says that he did so uh and he's written this up so that everyone will know that that he derives as the defender of the truth now there's the definite sense here that he's protesting too much uh in other words probably what happened was that the guy that derives over through was the legitimate king and darius himself is is the liar and so he puts this up but from that point on we have nothing equivalent to that all we have is portrayals of of kings that are kind of an abstraction of royalty and and monarchy and the statements that they put the decrees it could come from any king it's saying i uphold order i uphold truth and essentially the idea is and this is what this is one of the things that the persians do why they're so fundamental to the future course of history is that they are the first great empire in a way to moralize power to say that the world is divided into good and evil and of course the persian kings identify themselves with good which then um equates those who oppose them with evil and so the origins of the idea of the world being divided into into into light and darkness which gives us you know when i was writing the book it was against the backdrop of um line 11 and afghanistan afghan war and the iraq war talks of axis of evil from from president bush and um you know from al-qaeda saying that america was the great satan this idea that you can divide the world into good and evil ultimately you know it goes back to persia and the irony for me was that um obviously the the the american um uh the the americans in washington who were pushing um the invasion of iraq were doing it in defense of democracy and lots of them were saying well we are the heirs of athens we you know we we inherit this from from from ancient greece but actually their kind of sense of the world is a great cockpit divided between good and evil was was persian and and and what the persian king what xerxes was doing when he looked to greece it was a remote mountainous backwater full of terrorists so he was going in there basically to you know get rid of the terrorists smoke them out and uh banish this axis of evil between athens and sparta and bring greece into the kind of orbit of truth important i mean cyrus is darius's father no no it's complicated no no um all right no not close okay no because because it's probably cyrus's son who darias overthrows oh yes okay and these are those seven false kings yes the lion king yeah it fails a lot of them doesn't he yes that's delayed yes but anyway cyrus when asked about sparta famously says or her honesty says who are who are the spartans yeah well as as i guess an american in 1973 would have said who are the afghans or you know who who's bin laden i mean they've been saying who is bin laden kind of you know shortly before 9 11. i think i think that um so basically what happens is that the uh the there's a revolt among the greek cities on the you know the asian side yeah and the athenians join in and it all goes horribly wrong the persians are obliged to to banish the demons from ionia by you know incinerating the city by purging it with fire this is their duty to to the order of the cosmos and then of course they have to do the same to athens and the athenians all this time have been thinking oh dear we might have we might have made a bit of a mistake here i hope they'll just go away um but but there's a you know there's a kind of and then on top of that both the athenians and the spartans when the persian king sends his ambassadors around to say well you know you basically surrender give us earth and water as a symbol of your submission the the athenians put the persian ambassadors on on trial and kill them and the spartans chuck them down the well and anyone who's seen 300 will will remember the scene um so i mean this is a terrible offense i mean even the greeks know this is a terror you can't do this kind of thing i mean it's just it's not the done thing at all let's cross over there let's go to athens and i do want to start off a bit on marathon a bit just because there's a couple of things i do want to go through um i mean first of all um i don't know if you need to do the build-up to marathon but it's it's a close-run thing as it's thrillingly exciting yeah it is close it's very close but up to this point no greek army has ever faced the persian army and won persians have archers and they have a cavalry and all the greeks basically have is heavy infantry which means that they're kind of slow-moving and ponderous and can be picked off very easily so the persians are fully expecting that that they will easily destroy the athenians and sack athens so that's what they've been told to do burn the city kill the men take the women and the children into slavery and they castrate the boys they castrate the boys yeah they can straight the boys put the girls into the hurry and sell them off not good to lose it's not it's not going to be good news for athens in any way um so they land on the plane of marathon because the plane of marathon offers scope for persian cavalry the athenians debate should we stay inside athens or should we go out and confront them they decide to go out and confront them because if they stay inside they're nervous of traitors so that's that's the kind of measure of how much dispute and debate and controversy there is in the athenian like ranks that there there are persian spies everywhere the persians are brilliant kind of espionage sympathizers absolutely everywhere so so the athenians go out and they line up uh on the top of the hill blocking the road that leads from marathon to athens and and they basically wait and what they're waiting for is the spartans to come because the spartans are the best soldiers in greece but the spartans are busy celebrating a festival and they're afraid of angering the gods if they come too early so basically they've got to wait and of course the the persians learn this and so they what the persians do is they start loading the cavalry onto their transport ships to go round the back and land them in in the harbour at athens the athenians see this and they know that without the cavalry this is their one perhaps their one chance to catch the person's napping and so to universal astonishment on the persian side because the persians massively outnumber them and they look on the greeks as a bunch of losers this great kind of body of men heavy shields spears heavy armor starts lumbering down the hill and then they break into a run and they smash into the persian line and the result is this spectacular victory it is an extraordinary victory isn't it so i want to ask you about it's one thing i don't think even dominic have talked about so this is something new but it's i'm a psychiatrist and there'll be psychiatrists listening as well there's a passage in herodotus about one person at marathon called episalis and um i just want to ask you first to say who he is and it'll then be obvious why i'd just like to talk a little bit about the case of episodes well so this is a character this is this is a man who herodotus is obviously his his story is one that herodotus has picked up on and he is an athenian he's in the the battle line um he is going down towards the persians and joins with the persians and episodes says that as he is fighting he looks up and he suddenly sees a a basically a giant with a great beard who and the person is about to kill him this this giant swats the person aside and then knocks down two further persons and then vanishes and from this point on epsilon is blind and for herodotus and clearly for for the athenians who tell him about this this is a divine intervention because the the great heroes of athens it is said later are seen fighting in the athenian ranks and as a child um this is what i loved about the persian wars was that actually uh there was a sense that you know this was on a level with troy that perhaps the gods were there the ancient heroes were there um and i mean i i guess that you would you would interpret it as as well would we i mean that's the question isn't it any doctors listening now will say so he went he went blind on the spot and he didn't recover his sight we know that and we know he's real because he's on the marathon memorial so it's a real story um so we will say that's well uh the best or whatever it's a hysterical blindness he wasn't he didn't lose his eyes in battle he lost his vision just like that and most doctors will have seen this at some stage in their career and this is what we call hysterical blindness but is this i mean and indeed the start of the first world war episalis became quite famous because he was seen as the first case of shell shock yeah the officers were they'd all read their herodotus they'd all be to public school they all knew they knew the story yeah he was put down as the first case well i i think the first thing to say is that um to do what the athenians did that day must have taken i mean breathtaking courage to advance kind of slowly and even though you know towards the end they they do break into a run but to advance slowly with arrows raining down on you against an adversary that no greek army has ever defeated knowing the stakes knowing that you are the odds are that you're likely to die and knowing that if you break then the whole phalanx breaks yes so the stress must have been absolutely intense and we know from accounts of other battles that that you know people's bowels would just give way that that as they advance they'd be this kind of trail of excrement as they advanced wetting themselves i mean just the most terrifying thing imaginable so the pitch of stress must have been incredibly high so i don't know how that would impact i'm not a psychiatrist but against that i do think that um one of there's a huge temptation when you look at ancient texts and particularly texts that deal with the supernatural to try and find kind of rational explanations for things and the truth is that um to understand how say the athenians thought i think that there is a kind of requirement to park that and to try and get into the mindset of people who believe by our lights fantastical things and there's a kind of tendency to think well the athenians didn't really believe in their gods they didn't really believe in this nonsense there's a there's a tremendous identification with those kind of uh philosophers who who who doubted the existence of the gods or who laughed at the stories told about about homer but i think that the the the greeks had an incredible ability to to hold kind of different ways of seeing the world simultaneously in their heads and i think that unless we take their understanding of the supernatural seriously unless we understand that the supernatural wasn't something to kind of park on on the side it was you know there wasn't the kind of dimension of of the rational and the secular with all the kind of weird stuff they shoved off in a corner everything was weird by our lights everything was strange um and unless we do that we can't properly understand what the athenians or indeed the greeks generally or indeed any ancient people were about so our modern look back and saying well this is hysterical blindness it tells us very little then is what you're saying well i do no because i think if you're a psychiatrist i think if you're a psychiatrist then of course i mean it's fascinating of course because because that's your that's the field that you know that you're interested in but i think that if you're trying to make sense of um of how the greeks understood marathon or or what it meant to fight in a battle i don't think it's very helpful because i don't think it would have made any sense to them i think it's more useful to to see them as figures who were in a world where homer was kind of true where gods did hover where you know pan the great god does come and does spread panic in the in the persian ranks you know this isn't just the kind of metaphor this is this is this is somehow true helps the famous runner through that's right yes who's been sent to sparta to get this far that's it thank you um and and then he's he's coming back and he has this vision of pan that he says you know the thing is you haven't been you haven't been uh you know paying me much respect but if you show me respect then i will be there at marathon and again you could absolutely say you know this is a guy who is you know he's run from athens to sparta in kind of a day and a half and now he's got to run all the way back and he's got the incredible stress of having to go back and tell peop tell the athenians that the spartans aren't going to be coming as soon as they need so again i mean i'm sure that that there would be a psychiatric explanation perhaps of exhaustion and hope and desperation kind of creating visions um but again i i i i think it's you know from the point of view of understanding uh the the the mentality of people at marathon it's more interesting to kind of park that and to say yeah pan did appear i'm actually with you but a lot of my colleagues aren't with me on this one i have to say but but that we would often say as well a hysterical phenomena is something that gets you out of a situation you don't want to be in but um episodes he doesn't run well he stays in the lime doesn't he yeah there he's still fighting apparently and he becomes he's clearly not seen as any form of coward or deserter because yeah but what happens sometimes in the 300 thermopylae famously actually it isn't 300 who dies it because three survive well there's there's there's one who survives there's one who survives there's one who survives and um he i warned you about this but so he said so he so he and his friend uh one of the 300 that they they've kind of got an eye infection so they can't see so again it's this kind of motif of blindness um and the end of the battle um the 300 are going to make their stand they they know that they're going to die they're going to be surrounded there's no question of that um the din of battle rages um one of them says to uh to to to hit the heli the kind of slave who's with him lead me into the battle even though i can't see and he goes into the battle and he's kind of swaying you know swinging with his sword and gets cut down the other one doesn't and he goes back to sparta and he is viewed with the utmost contempt and he's kind of kind of called the trembler um and no one will speak to him he gets boycotted um and then uh the following year there's a there's a kind of climactic land battle at plateau which is a city um just not far from athens where the persians get defeated and that's the end of the persian invasion and he performs prodigies of valor but the spartans don't award him um any any credit for this because they say that he's trying to to kind of burn off the uh the the the taint of cowardice um and again um i i think that unless you see unless you put this in the context of the obligations that the spartans felt towards one another which which has a you know they saw themselves i mean they basically said 300 the the 300 are men who've all had children so that they're going on their suicide mission they've already had children but classically the 300 was the bodyguard that surrounded the king and these were people these were young men who'd basically come out top in the duke of edinburgh scheme so the spartans had this kind of murderous duke of edinburgh scheme where the best would be sent off up into the mountains and they'd go down the other side of the mountains where the spartan slaves lived and any slaves who had been kind of fingered as being you know brave or clever or proactive they'd have to kill them you know it's it's a culling it's a kind of inverted you know eugenics yes and um social darwinism yes absolutely and this this directly inspired um the nazis in in in poland you know they wanted to reduce the polls to the status of helix which were the the the spartan slaves um and you you as a kind of young spartan you do this you then come back and your reward would be to fight as part of the 300 and to us again you just think how could they possibly do that i mean it's horrible it's kind of murderous um and it was seen as murderers by by the greek so herodotus says that the the spartans are the only people who do not hold murder to be uh to be a fault but what the spartans would do is every year they would declare war on the helots so then they were allowed to do it so it's all kind of tied up in obligations to the gods in obligations to each other in um in a a sense that um the the duty is kind of to the pack so there's a qual so so the wolf lords they the spartans you know they are linked to the idea of the wolf and the pack and all of this i think is is to be taken you know you need you need to be sympathetic to this because if you're just doing it in terms of of um understandings of how the world work that we have then you're not going to understand how the greek world is working just want to pick up one thing you said um the guy i've written his name down uh aristodemus i think i'll tell you and he was known as the trembler is that right that's the shaker yeah because i you you this you i don't think you would know but um in the first world war in germany um warnie roasted his creekneros and was also called um zitum uh it's trembling neurosis that that was its word so that was the word that they used and of course there is one german private who also develops a hysterical blindness um in 1918 is treated in silencia and uh probably did have adrenaline neurosis and develops a hysterical blindness um and any idea who that is hello it is hitler very good was he going to be here einstein oh well done yes it is hitler yes and uh he's treated by a famous neurologist who treats that kind of stuff who then mysteriously commits suicide in rather strange circumstances in 1934 it's a completely unexplained episode yeah but so there and of course hitler was a great fan of sparta he was well i mean there's a kind of really yes i mean there's a really interesting nexus there and the thing about aristodemos is that actually um he wasn't i mean he wasn't a coward uh he you know he was he couldn't see he did the obvious thing uh i mean he wasn't meant to go and fight it's just because the other guy had that therefore he was shown up but so he wasn't actually a trembler but the fact that obviously the spartans were familiar with with the fact that you know dread in battle could lead to physical shaking but running or giving in to that let's let's say the shaking is fear i think that's i think most that's a reasonable hypothesis that those kind of emotions probably are universal but what keeps them in battle is is shame presumably and in the spartan case incredible training oh yeah so they're they're they're brutalized and kind of remolded and re-fashioned to become soldiers rather in the way that the romans were as well that what makes the spartans and then the legions so proficient is that they are broken into doing something that is not natural namely to advance very very slowly towards a lot of terrified people who are all kind of you know shooting arrows at you and spears and howling and yelling and the whole survival of a phalanx or a legion depends on this because it unless everybody advances then it only needs two or three to retreat and the the whole body go so that's why there's this kind of taboo against against cowardice and this attempt to kind of break people into um you know into into showing kind of by our lights insane levels of courage but that's also how it joins in with the first world war because this is serving as a model for you know european elites not just the british but but the germans as well i mean the ability to to walk very slowly across no man's land towards a trench i mean that's that's a spartan or a roman level of courage and and they knew that yeah that's true good point and um a quick bit we're on spartan now so we and but true or false did they really throw their babies into a ravine well there's no there's no archaeological evidence for it really but i think i mean i don't think why not i mean that's what that's what people said um it was it was they were admired for it um and infanticide was pretty much universally taken for granted um the only people who who did not practice it later sources tell us later roman sources there were some weird german tribes that didn't and inevitably the jews who were always doing you know just by nature very odd and did things opposite to everybody else so this is then why christianity is so christians are so peculiar because they likewise are very much opposed to infanticide and that's of course the subject of your current book which is out there yeah now i'm not asking questions because i'm not seeing any questions actually um oh i've got one now actually which i will pick up actually in the end then first of all let's begin there weren't just 300 spartans at thermopylae were they they were for the final act well no there's also uh 700 thespians which actors always love the idea that there are kind of 700 actors all standing there so that's their they're from a city called thespia and they also die so um they they deserve to be commemorated as much as these spartans then there are thieves who and thebes is um a city that uh is so basically greece is is not a coherent state it's loads of different cities and the issue for um the various greek cities as the persians invade is whether they hate the persians or their neighbors more yeah and the thebans basically hate the athenians more than they hate the persians so they see the persian invasion as a brilliant chance to get one a from the athenians so most people in thebes want to collaborate with the persians [Music] there are some however who want to to you know fight for greek freedom all that kind of thing and so basically they go with leonidas the spartan king to thermopylae which is just north of thieves to try and hold the gates and um there are about 5 000 greeks from various cities who who are at the hot gates and they hold them for kind of two days and then the persians managed to go round the side of the pass and it's then that lanier says the rest of all the other greeks get out of here you know live to fight another day he stays the thespians stay basically to to ensure that they will hold the persians up long enough for all the other greeks to get away so the thebans also do it because they know there's no point in going back to thebes because they'll they'll get killed by their that they do it actually end up surrendering but they they're kind of they're spared okay now so we've got a question from mattias rugos but the the thing is in the end did leonardo leona did leonidas a sacrifice other than providing um a motif for the next two and a half thousand years of history it was completely pointless was it his future he's basically he's a terrible general uh i mean he he should have been able to hold the past for longer than he did and the reason that he doesn't is that it never crosses his mind that the persians will be able to go up round the back um he he's been told that there's his path he's put some troops up there to garrison it but he should have done more to stop them um and the reason that the persians are able to do it is that they are masters of intelligence and they're they're they're masters of mountainous warfare so um it's a brilliant operation on the persian part i mean the the way it's portrayed is that haha the persians use those they just you know they can't get rid of these brave spartans but actually it's it's a brilliant i mean that superb control of intelligence superb control of specially trained uh troops who can go up mountains um but i think the fact that it's this amazing myth that we're still talking about now and it's you know it it inspires hollywood films and you know joe butler in tight black speedos and all that kind of stuff i i think it's because um [Music] it gets cast there'd been an oracle from delphi that said that sparta would burn unless a a spartan king died and so there's the definite sense you know he's taking these guys who have all had children that they are on a suicide mission and um i think it's the sense of sacrifice that inspires both sparta and the and the greeks generally but i think it gets spun by the by the athenian general the mysticallys who is the kind of the churchill of athens and i think that he he spins it to try and cut to try and encourage the spartans to stand next to the athenians are going to have to sacrifice their city and it kind of beds in this idea that we sacrifice something some of us die you know we we lose something that is precious to us and that in a sense is the offering we have to make to the gods to allow them to allow us to defeat the persians and i think that it's not the kind of thing that that the spartans would have done they didn't have a you know they weren't very good at the propaganda but the mysticals was a genius at it so you know there's no evidence for it it's the the evidence is circumstantial but i think it's probably spun by him in the aftermath of thermopylae to make this kind of disaster look like it's it's kind of like dunkirk perhaps you know it's spinning dunkirk which is a defeat to look like a a victory okay well matthias's question is um of course and we should be clear for those who don't know athens is destroyed well but in the end the persians lose but in what is possibly a sideshow of persian history but what would have happened if they'd won what would happen then if they'd won at salamis well um herodotus asks this question so it's it's it's the very first question counterfactual the first kind of attempt you know what if and herodotus says well what would have happened the persian fleet would have um would have gone around the the so there's you think of um the fork of greece the peloponnese there's this very narrow isthmus peloponnesians were planning to defend that isthmus obviously if the persians had one salamis that would have been useless because they would have just been able to flood the peloponnese with amphibious troops um and herodotus says that probably the spartans would have gone down fighting they would have achieved prodigies of valor but they would have been wiped out and greece would have been conquered by the persian king and that would have been that um i mean the the huge question is would the course of history have been fundamentally different and you could you could make a case that perhaps it wouldn't that um it was perfectly possible for the greeks to function under persian rule some of the great you know early philosophers um herodotus himself you know flourished under under persian rule so perhaps that would have been okay and perhaps anyway um the persians were overstretched uh probably after you know a few years few decades the greeks would have got back their freedom but so you could make that argument i i think against that um specifically if the athenians had been wiped out uh you wouldn't have had socrates you wouldn't have had plato you wouldn't have had aeschylus you wouldn't have had aristophanes uh if you didn't have plato you probably wouldn't have aristotle if you didn't have aristotle then you probably wouldn't have uh christianity and islam and judaism emerging in the way that they that they did and so you can you know a butterfly beats its wings and there's a tornado in denmark or whatever it is i mean you can imagine um no socrates no plato no aristotle a lot would have been altered and i think on top of that the there's so much about about athenian culture in the fifth century bc and and and the fourth century that was dependent on it being a democracy um and without that i think so much would have been different um that i think the stakes were pretty high i think things would have been pretty different had salamis been lost was it to democracy or it would i mean well so so this this goes back to the what we were talking about about how actually the greeks were much stranger and weirder perhaps than we're willing to allow and yeah the athenians are absolutely a democracy but democracy did not have the meaning that it has for us so for us democracy is founded on rights each individual has a right to a vote and so that's why when we look back at the athenian democracy notoriously women did not have the boat uh obviously slaves didn't have the vote and so um the assumption is is that this wasn't a real democracy by our lives because not everybody had the vote but that's not demos means you know be translated as people power but that's not quite the heft that demos had in greek because the demos for the athenians wasn't just the the it's the people who have sprung from the soil of africa so unless you were born in attica you can't be an athenian citizen but the dmos is the sum of everybody who has been and will be born from this this attic soil so there's there's a kind of incredible supernatural dimension to it it's this sense that the athenians have a kind of intimate supernatural relationship with the earth that has given them birth they they're all toxinous they're sprung born of the soil and that required the the democracy the power of the dmos is dependent of course on the men doing what they have to do be that voting uh in in the assembly on laws or taking their place in the phalanx to fight for athens all the kind of things that that that we don't have any problem imagining them having to do to keep the democracy on the road but it also required the gods to be kept on board and particularly athena and the relationship between the gods and mortals is fundamental to the functioning of the democracy and the people who take the lead in that are women so we might be tempted to say well this is you know we're fobbing the women off they're they're you know gods don't exist this is all nonsense um real power lies in the assembly or you know with with the vote but that's not how the athenians saw it the athenians you know when when when they think when the great procession goes up to the the parthenon it's women who lead it and this gives to to the function that women have in the opinion of athenians and equal status it's just it's different and unless we recognize that our understanding of democracy which is founded on rights has a fundamentally different basis we can't properly understand what's going on in the athenian democracy okay so we're coming towards the end now but i said there were two things we'd let you do one is you've now mentioned women in uh athens women in sparta are also very interesting one in particular well you are kind yes you are guys yes tell us about google why your interest in her as we speak so gorgo is the daughter of a very cool king called cleomenes who is actually the king who chucks the persian ambassadors down the well it's not leonidas as in 300. um but she then marries um leonidas and she's she's kind of very sassy very she's one of the few um in fact i think the only spartan woman who gets named by um by herodotus as a kind of a key player in the in the political game so uh she's she's she's a great figure and um she is the heroine of the children's book that i've just in the process of finishing and in this children's book um i i said that the reason i loved greek history when i was a child was this sense that the gods still were still manifest and that extraordinary strange things could happen so in my retelling of it the gods do exist the spartans do turn into wolves there's a wonderful story that um athenian girls would every year go out to this temple to artemis um the the huntress god and our soul says they would go to this temple and there they would turn into bears and in my account the girls do turn into bears so all this kind of stuff okay there's some bits i don't think you're going to put in a children's story though are you no there are some bits my favorite you're not going to put in is you have a wonderful eye for the grizzly you really do and cambisi's now is the son of cyrus i've got that bit right haven't i yet he overwhelms the egyptians by pinning cats to the shields of his soldiers it is said it is it i don't think that's true but it is safe i need to make a couple of announcements then come back to you again so just to remind people that next week we have sanji bhaskar will be in the in the psychiatrist chair whatever not psychiatrist chad i don't know why i said that but uh mimi malhotra will be interviewing he's the actor comedian television presenter goodness gracious me the kumar's at number four so that's definitely worth coming to that's next wednesday and on the 14th we'll be back within the lunch time with kovid and diabetes now back to you so we haven't mentioned the thing that you're most famous for which is of course you once scored a six yeah thank you my only ever six you're only over six okay but you you are a fanatical cricketer aren't you i mean well it comes over from your twitter feed yes i i am and i'm i'm i play for a team called the authors yeah who uh it was originally founded by arthur conan doyle and jay and barry so real heavyweights and then it went into slight advance with the first world war and it's been revived at various stages since then and in its current incarnation it was um revived 10 years ago at the point where i was about to retire so it gave me a complete new lease of life and i'm now kind of clinging on to my playing career with my fingernails i would say and you are unique you're an amateur cricketer but you're having a benefit that's right so benefit is given to professional cricketers after they've played for their county team for 10 years and you raise money and the tradition was that you'd use it to buy a sports shop or a pub or something like that when you retired we're not doing that so the money is going to three homelessness charities so there's the passage uh there's a a charity based at st martin in the fields and there's a charity that's devoted to helping yazidi refugees who uh religious minority who suffered terribly at the hands of the islamic state and who desperately need help so we've been we've been doing various kind of the kind of things that you do on a uh on a benefit so to finish off then we would very much like people to donate to us so we always ask after that otherwise the presenter they will get at me but when you finish donating to us please donate to thank charities as well thank you because you've done this for nothing for us and it's the least we can do and um and you know they are wonderful causes as well and you are a wonderful cause i also have to say and to look forward to i probably won't get your children's book i'll be honest but oh it's great it's great yes i think you'd love it and it's got it's got um so i'll not give anything away but it's it's it's got the um the battle marathon and the great bearded supernatural figure is actually really it's actually athena oh yeah she's in disguise so don't go don't give it away don't give it away okay but for those who haven't read persian fire it's still available we have copies here and there's so much else i mean we could do one of these every week on each of your well half of your book we'll fill up as in this we haven't even got into persia we're going to do that we have done it we just haven't managed to do it but i don't think we've been bored i'm not sure who's i know we've been going down well in israel greece and australia because i can see people replying i'm not quite sure what's happened elsewhere because we didn't get the number of questions anything from iran that's not i know everybody from iran but um i've certainly enjoyed it i hope you have he's had it i hope sufficient people were able to get enough of this to get a full sense of of just just ah you just you're just a fantastic talker on fantastic subjects and it's been a real pleasure thanks thanks so much tom thanks for doing this thanks so much okay pleasure

Channel: Royal Society of Medicine

Views: 11,907

Keywords: #RSMlive, Tom Holland, Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind

Id: JQSIouYiL_s

Length: 59min 3sec (3543 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 08 2021