By The Art of Manliness
Published January 19, 2022 11:09am
In a period of only about 100 years, Athens went from relative obscurity, to becoming an influential empire, to collapsing into ruin.
My guest today will guide us through the dramatic arc of this city-state and the larger-than-life characters that contributed to it. His name is David Stuttard, and he's a classicist and the author of Phoenix: A Father, a Son, and the Rise of Athens, and Nemesis: Alcibiades and the Fall of Athens.
We begin our conversation with the rise of Athens and why its aristocratic families decided to institute a radically democratic form of...