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Tides of History

What Made Classical Greece Special? Interview with Professor Josiah Ober

Tides of History

Wondery / Patrick Wyman

Documentary, Society & Culture, History

4.86.3K Ratings

🗓️ 2 May 2024

⏱️ 56 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

We're often told that Classical Greece lies at the root of our modern world in some way, but what made it a special place? Professor Josiah Ober, author of The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece, joins me to discuss his approach to that question. We discuss the unique political ecology of the Greek city-states, demographic growth, and the role of institutions in making Greece a place quite unlike the rest of the ancient world.

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Transcript

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0:00.0

Wundery Plus subscribers can listen to Tides of History early and ad free right now.

0:04.3

Join Wundery Plus in the Wundery. Welcome to another episode of Tides of History. I'm Patrick Wyman. Thanks so much for being here with me today.

0:25.8

In every realm from literature and political thought to artistic and architectural ideals,

0:30.2

the achievements of those Greeks have exerted and continued to exert a strong influence on the millennia that followed.

0:35.0

Not always in the same ways over that period of time, not continuously, but often enough that their ways of thinking and engaging with the world have shaped our own at a deep and fundamental level.

0:44.7

But if that is indeed the case, then why? Is it because of the relationship that later people have

0:50.9

imagined themselves to have with those classical Greeks as the progenitors of a particular way of life?

0:56.0

Or was there something truly outstanding about that time and place? Some combination of factors and

1:01.5

processes that we can identify and understand.

1:04.4

To help us answer those questions, we couldn't ask for a better guest on today's show.

1:08.9

Josiah Ober is Constantine Mitsotakis chair in the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford University.

1:14.8

He is an exceptionally wide-ranging and innovative scholar of ancient Greece and democracy over the very, very, very long run.

1:22.3

He's the author of a book I really enjoyed entitled

1:24.7

The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece. That's just one of his works, along with

1:28.6

the Greeks and the rational, the discovery of practical reason. Demopolis,

1:32.3

Democracy Before Liberalism in Theory and Practice, and most recently with

1:36.4

Brooke Manville, the Civic Bargain, how democracy survives.

1:39.9

Professor Ober, thank you so much for joining me today. Thanks so much, Patrick, delighted to be here.

1:45.1

So what drew you to the study of ancient Greece?

1:48.0

And I mean, as you've been doing this for quite some time now,

1:51.0

how has your interest in that time and place changed over the years?

1:54.3

Initially it really was a bit of an accident. I was not a particularly

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