4. The Greeks and the Irrational

Baby naming ceremonies, except in the nude and with gifts of cuttlefish! Wandering shamans preaching the mystical power of numbers! A living oral tradition that goes back to the last Ice Age!

Behold, the Ancient Greeks. Against a skeptical interlocutor, it is argued that they were stranger and more interesting by far than we now imagine.

Also featuring a whistle stop tour of the Mycenaean Age, the Bronze Age Collapse, Homer, the Persian invasions and the birth of classical antiquity and all that came  with it - philosophy, history, drama, democracy, athletics, and everything else that makes us think the Greeks were more relatable than they actually were.

Episode Transcript

Proxy: In this episode, I managed to genuinely upset my co-host with the suggestion that the Greeks are boring. But first, some poetry.

Cipher: "As men talk in a dream, so Corinth all, throughout her palaces imperial and all her populous streets and temples lewd, muttered like tempest in the distance brewed, to the widespread night above her towers. Men, women, rich and poor, in the cool hours shuffled their sandals o'er the pavement white, companioned or alone, while many a light flared here and there from wealthy festivals, and threw their moving shadows on a wall, or found them clustered in the corniced shade of some arched temple door, or dusky colonnade." And that, of course, as all our listeners will immediately know, was Keats.

Proxy: I thought it wasn't ancient Greek.

Cipher: The ancient Greek for that would be so far beyond me as to be slightly absurd. That's Keats' Lamia, talking about Corinth. I think Corinth is a good city to focus on in this episode. Perhaps you could explain why.

Proxy: I have no idea why Corinth is a good city to focus on. But to back up — my question was because Cipher is really into the Greeks. Greek culture, Greek language, philosophy, all that. And my problem is that from the outside, they seem a bit boring.

Cipher: I —

Proxy: To explain myself: if you look at old art from other cultures — Aztec or African or Syrian, classical Indian — there's always a sense of the transcendent there, or the spiritual, or something weird going on. If you look at Greek art, it's just a really good statue of a person, and there's not much else going on. And this extends to what we read from them — instead of wild religious tracts, you get Socrates and Plato having quite civilised discussions that are extremely rational and relatable, having abandoned the superstitions of their forebears. Not bonkers. Which is what I want.

Cipher: You really think Plato is rational and sane?

Proxy: I think he's approaching generally mundane subjects in a way that's relatable to us.

Cipher: He thinks that philosophers should be king in a sort of philosophic autocracy.

Proxy: What he's talking about is how to run a successful government, rather than, you know, “why’s the sky so big?”

Cipher: I cannot tell you how wrong you are about this. I was worried I'd be preaching to the converted when you suggested this topic, but I can now see there's plenty of work to do.

Proxy: I'm aware of dissenting opinions. There's a book called The Greeks and the Irrational by E. R. Dodds that I was made to read at some point.

Cipher: 1952 — very old now.

Proxy: I can only really cope with blog posts at this point.

Cipher: The translations of things like the Iliad in the standard Penguin texts are all from the early fifties as well. Sometimes the choices they've made with certain words make you raise your eyebrows. But — where to begin?

Proxy: Corinth.

Cipher: Corinth. Here's a fact: in Strabo, he says the Temple of Aphrodite at Corinth was so wealthy that it had a thousand prostitutes — slaves who were prostitutes — all there to make money for the goddess. So immediately we're in a pretty distant and alien culture where prostitution is a sanctioned religious activity.

I think people have taken these couple of lines of Strabo and run quite far with them. The consensus now is that there definitely weren't a thousand in the temple — someone worked it out and thinks you'd get a hundred in at most.

Proxy: How much space does one need?

Cipher: I don't know the exact metrics of the calculation. But the explanation is even stranger: these thousand slaves were probably a donation of property to the temple, rather in the way that wealthy people might donate money to a religious institution today.

Proxy: You could create a brothel today and call it the Temple of Aphrodite and that would work fine.

Cipher: No, no — there was definitely a big temple. Multiple sources — Pausanias, and I think the archaeological remains. It's all pretty secure.

Proxy: It was a long time ago.

Cipher: It was. But immediately you're in an extremely different world. Nobody at the time thinks there's anything amiss about this. We're in a very different religious context, a very different social context. That's a healthy corrective to the idea that the Greeks are slightly worthy, rational old men exclusively thinking about dull topics. There's so much weirdness in ancient Greek religion. Do you want to hear about the naming ceremony?

Proxy: I would love to hear about the naming ceremony.

Cipher: It's called the Amphidromia, which in Greek carries a notion of running around. So — you have to imagine you're in ancient Greece, your child is born. You've almost certainly been kept in what is essentially a prison inside the house called the gynaikeion, because you're a female, and the Greeks — certainly the rich ones — were not pro-female. Women were kept within a particular room in the house so they didn't accidentally encounter any male they weren't related to or married to.

Proxy: That is how a lot of Arab houses run themselves these days, especially in Yemen and the more conservative places.

Cipher: And you love Arabic society, so there's something you can relate to. Anyway — you're up there, probably giving birth with a midwife. The child won't be presented to the father for at least five days. The sources differ — five, seven, or ten — and the thinking is that the weak children will die before then. Something like half of all children would be dead before they were five in the ancient world.

Proxy: Similar statistics rather more recently in most of the non-Western world. A lot of cultures where you don't name your child until they're two years old, because why bother?

Cipher: Basically the same thing. Have you heard of the child sacrifice stuff in Phoenician settlements? The tophets?

Proxy: Is that Moloch and all that?

Cipher: A lot of them think that actually — there are something like the remains of twenty thousand infants in the tophet at Carthage, but actually a lot of them weren't alive when they were placed there.

Proxy: So I always thought it was gleefully feeding your babies into the flames. They might already have been dead? Children who died of natural causes?

Cipher: That's the latest thinking. I've just read David Abulafia, who's usually pretty sound. But I don't think they would have been gleeful about it either. The whole point is that it's the most profound sacrifice you can make, which goes to the heart of the weirdness of sacrifice. But the Phoenicians aren't Greek — although the Greeks saw them as a kind of anti-Greeks. Very similar, but uncannily different.

Proxy: I always thought of Phoenicians as in the same frame as ancient Rome, but I hadn't thought about them in the same frame as ancient Greece.

Cipher: Initially they're from the Levant — culturally they're Canaanites. They come from Tyre and a few other cities up and down that coast. Tyre was particularly powerful, and they sent out colonies. Carthage is Phoenician for "new city" — Qart Hadasht or something like that. They colonised exactly like the Greeks, but they were there before them.

Proxy: And were south of them, so had different currents in the Mediterranean and went to different places.

Cipher: Although the currents go counterclockwise around the eastern Mediterranean, so they were actually taking the same routes westward. You can't go west along the coast of Africa — you have to go south of the Peloponnese, up the west coast of Greece, across to Sicily, and then from there to what is now Tunisia, and further to the Pillars of Hercules — Gibraltar.

Anyway — the naming ceremony. Five to seven days after the child was born and survived, they had this ceremony where the child is ritually introduced into the household. It's not quite clear whether they're placed on the central hearth or whether people run around them.

Proxy: Central hearth — so a fireplace in the middle of the room?

Cipher: It's probably central conceptually rather than physically. It's the ritual centre of the house — there's a goddess of the hearth, Hestia, who's quite important. The father, as best we can tell, runs around carrying the child a few times. And it seems they did this naked, which is an interesting detail. And it also seems that cuttlefish were sent as gifts.

Proxy: Of course.

Cipher: Those are the tantalising details we have. Conjuring any scenario from those fragments in your mind's eye is a healthy corrective to the idea that these are dull people only talking about political theory.

Proxy: I guess the question then becomes: how did they talk so well about political theory, when in their spare time they're running around with naked babies and giving each other cuttlefish?

Cipher: This is the other fascinating thing about ancient Greece. Culturally, they're very unified. They're very clear that they are Greeks, with a very clear boundary.

Proxy: Even though they're split into city-states at war with each other.

Cipher: Exactly. That's like war between siblings — they know the Persians are something completely different. Some scholars think it's actually the Persian Wars that create this strong sense of cultural unity; it's not clear it really existed much before then. Although if we're getting anything historical from the Iliad, it might suggest some notion of unity earlier. But that's quite tenuous.

Proxy: Should we back up a little for people who aren't intimately familiar with the chronology of the formation of classical Greece?

Cipher: Who are these people?

Proxy: Not our listeners. But they might share this with their friends.

Cipher: Right. Ancient Greece. You've got the first proto city-states forming in what's called the Mycenaean Age, named after the city of Mycenae. That's basically late Bronze Age — 1600 to 1200 BC. Then there's something called the Bronze Age collapse around 1200 BC, an extremely mysterious event that seems to have either been caused by or precipitated huge movements of peoples and massive economic disruption, and basically the entering into a new dark age. This is when we get records out of Egypt about the Sea Peoples trying to invade — most likely Mycenaeans and people from Anatolia who are basically climate or economic refugees.

Proxy: A bit like things more recently.

Cipher: It's actually quite a normal phenomenon once shipbuilding technology reaches a sufficient stage. It's quite normal for people to just set sail once things get too hairy at home. But it's not clear what precipitates it all. There's this huge Völkerwanderung, as the German scholars call it — a vast movement of peoples. But our sources are very thin.

Proxy: It is fascinating, because it's common to think that history is all about development — things steadily getting better, more advanced. But actually, we hit these peaks of civilisation and then everything collapses, and then it's darkness for a few centuries, and then you might get another peak. The ancient Egyptians are the classic example — the dynastic periods where they're building pyramids and making hieroglyphs, then the interdynastic periods where everyone's just trying to scrape a living with no time for anything creative.

Cipher: It's really weird when you think about it. If you're a Greek living in the Dark Age, you're surrounded by the ruins of a former civilisation that displays technological abilities you can't even imagine. You're looking at these walls around Mycenae built with stones that are absolutely massive. The Greeks living in the shadow of the ruins thought they'd been built by Cyclopes, because they couldn't conceive of how else it could have been done.

We're so used to the Whiggish view of history — the idea that technological power increases over time, that human beings get more powerful, more knowledgeable. We almost think of that as an immutable law. But if you were a Greek living in the shadow of Mycenae around 950 BC, history goes in the completely opposite direction. The past was glorious, full of unknown mysteries and almost unfathomable power — or full of monsters who were either way much more powerful than you. You are the lesser generation, living in their shadow. Things get worse.

Proxy: The Anglo-Saxons had the same thing. There's a great poem by some Anglo-Saxon wandering around Roman ruins — "What giants built these, and what incredible parties they must have had."

Cipher: He's got right to the heart of it. Think of the parties.

Proxy: This opens up the possibility that we are blind to signs of perhaps even older civilisations that reached greater peaks than ours. We just don't recognise them because we think we're the best there's ever been.

Cipher: Maybe all these solar systems that act like clocks and have planets in the perfect habitable zone — maybe it's not just physics playing itself out.

Proxy: Giants built this.

Cipher: That's one explanation of Fermi's Paradox, isn't it? We can see the aliens all around us, they're just so advanced that we don't recognise it.

But think about how different your view of the world would be if you believed that power decreases and that you are the lesser generation after a previous glorious one. I think it would almost feel like time was going backwards if we could shift ourselves into that mindset. I genuinely think that, and I'm not willing to articulate it further because I don't think I can.

Anyway — around 1200 BC you have the Bronze Age collapse. A layer of ash in the archaeological record. Then a dark age lasting at least four hundred years. No stone buildings being built, nothing being written down. In the Mycenaean age they had Linear A and Linear B. We've cracked Linear B — basically records of what's in the storehouses, not poetry. Nobody can still work out Linear A. And then there's no writing at all. Very little archaeological evidence. Even the pottery degrades — they call it sub-Mycenaean.

Around 800 BC you start to get the green shoots of what we'd think of as organised societies. We're talking about the first identifiable rebuilding of centres of power in defensible locations — things the size of a three-bedroom house, and that's the biggest fortress for miles around. But it shows that organisation is happening again.

Proxy: More food than they need to survive the winter.

Cipher: And sometime between 800 and 700 BC, the Greeks start using a writing system adapted from the Phoenicians. The crucial innovation is that they introduced symbols for vowels as well as consonants. The Phoenicians had these guttural stops, and the Greeks repurposed some of those symbols for vowels. For the first time, you had an alphabet with a symbol for basically any sound the voice box can produce. You only have to learn twenty-six or so characters instead of five thousand.

Proxy: Or thirteen, and not being quite sure what it says.

Cipher: Thirteen, but you're not sure whether it's Yahweh or your donkey. And almost the exact instant that alphabet is formulated and spreads, you get the creation of the Iliad and the Odyssey.

Proxy: Just as we're coming out of the dark.

Cipher: The consensus now is sometime between 800 and 700 BC, and people keep pushing it further forward — 700 BC is now quite comfortable, whereas when we were at university it was 850. But these are actually oral poems from an oral tradition. They tell stories set in the Mycenaean age.

Proxy: So — stories of the Mycenaean age written around 700. Were they first told then and recorded later?

Cipher: The fascinating thing is that, as best we can tell, these stories have been told since the last ice age. It's an oral tradition that goes back as far as we can glimpse.

Proxy: So it's not a modern poet talking about what happened a few hundred years ago. It's someone retelling the same story that was told a few hundred years before that.

Cipher: It's a living tradition. There's a canon of stories that gets told and retold by professional storytellers who just remember it all. It comes in these chunks which you can cut and paste in different ways. We know it goes back into deep time because when you look at Gilgamesh — this other epic poem written down thousands of years earlier in a much more clunky alphabet — we find some of the exact same details. There's a grand hero, his friend dies, the friend comes to him in a dream, he tries to embrace him three times but can't because he's just a phantom. The exact same thing happens in the Iliad. That's pretty specific.

Proxy: You could say that image is just locked in everyone's subconscious.

Cipher: It's actually a continuous tradition — the same story being told and retold. So what you get in the Iliad and the Odyssey is a very mature and sophisticated oral storytelling tradition that for some reason gets written down. And it's the best thing that's ever been written — and it's basically the first thing that really was ever written.

Proxy: Do you think it changed when it was written down?

Cipher: Almost certainly. If you read the Iliad aloud, it would take about twenty-four hours. The new tool of writing allowed a particularly genius oral poet to really go to town. He just happened to create the greatest thing ever.

So that kicks off what's called the Archaic era, where you get the first city-states reforming over a few centuries. That slowly develops into the Classical period, which kicks off around 500 BC. That's when the polis — the Greek city-state — is maturing into its most fluorescent form. It begins with the wars against Persia, the famous invasions that are repelled.

Proxy: I have seen 300.

Cipher: I love that film. Then you have the Peloponnesian War, which American strategists love talking about — the Thucydides Trap and all that. Thucydides is the first recognisably modern historian. It's shocking how modern he is. And I mean, Herodotus was a genius, but Thucydides is the first one you'd call proper history.

You're getting the invention of history, philosophy, politics, democracy — left, right, and centre — for about a hundred years between 500 and 400 BC. Some of the most fundamental things that define Western culture are all dreamt up or evolved in this time. Everything from drama to forms of political organisation to Western philosophy — Platonism and Aristotelianism. It's all happening. And this is when you're getting all those lovely statues.

Proxy: Accurate statues.

Cipher: Well, we can talk about that. People think these were supreme rational folk in white garments sitting around talking about mathematics. But it was much weirder and more interesting than that.

After the Persian Wars, they had this incredible sense of cultural unity — I think it might have been Herodotus who said they share language, they share gods, and they share forms of worship. An incredibly strong sense that they are a single cultural unity, but unbelievably politically divided. At war with each other all the time. They mocked themselves for how poor they were at getting along. It's a running thing in Greek culture that they just cannot agree.

Proxy: And they knew this was strange?

Cipher: They could look at Persia — this incredibly vast empire where, within the empire, there's usually peace among an incredible variety of cultures and peoples and ethnicities. The Greeks are all looking at this thinking, "We're all the same people and we're always killing each other." Greece is tiny, but within it there are over a thousand city-states.

Proxy: How big is a city?

Cipher: Tiny. About fifty thousand male citizens for the biggest ones, and male citizens are maybe a third of the population. So the very biggest, we're talking six figures if there's no plague or famine. Most of them are just a few thousand, controlling a few square miles of fertile farmland.

They're constantly fighting the people in the next valley. And the result is an incredible combination of the ability to communicate — because you're part of the same culture — but also to compete, because you're in constant competition. Not only with the city over the hill, but within the polis, where there's huge competition for political power all the time.

Proxy: So like Renaissance Italy, or even Renaissance Western Europe, but even more intense.

Cipher: That is exactly right, and the parallel is exactly right. That's the grand dénouement of my argument. Why does an unbelievable amount of cultural and technological innovation come out of Greece? For exactly the same reason a further absolute tonne came out of Enlightenment Europe. The same conditions: just enough in common to communicate and spread ideas efficiently, close-packed together so ideas spread quickly, but all in competition — that enormous drive to innovate.

With the Greeks, it's not quite that warfare is driving technological innovation. It's more that because things are so kaleidoscopic and divided politically, there was space for original thinkers. If you grew up in a city where everyone worships the god on the hill, but you think the sun is made of condensed vapour, you can just wander to the next valley. Once you've wandered over, you'll find people who understand you perfectly and know how to get along with you, but they're a completely different polity. To them, you're a wandering wise man, and you might be tolerated. If not, you can try the next valley. So you get this phenomenon of peripatetic innovators wandering around, and there's space for them to wander.

Proxy: Rather than "you believe the correct things or we kill you."

Cipher: It might not even be that crude. Because there are so many different cities with completely different mindsets, they develop their own micro-cultures. That creates incredibly diverse and nutritious petri dishes for weirdness, and when the weirdness grows, it's able to escape and go viral precisely because no one person has complete political control or can enforce uniformity.

It's remarkable how often these thinkers are moving around. And it's remarkable how often the ones who stay put are put to death — Socrates being the classic example.

Proxy: Of course. But by moving around, you mean going twenty miles.

Cipher: Or even less. And then there's the fact that Greece is mountains and sea. Not much space for growing crops, so they were incredible sailors — they had to get food from the sea, they had to trade, they had to found colonies when the population grew too large. That creates a culture of travelling and discovery.

Proxy: Dealing with uncertainty and thinking on your feet. You can't plan ahead too much if you're a naval power. One of the theories behind Britain's intellectual contribution is that we're a nation of seafarers — you can plan all you want, but then the storm comes through. What do you do?

Cipher: You have to be quick-witted, but also extremely competent. I refer to my thoughts on British sea power — see previous episode. But ultimately, it comes from geography. The mountains split the city-states apart. Every single city is surrounded by enormous natural fortifications. You've got the tiny isthmus joining the Peloponnese to Attica, and from Attica to central Greece, a tiny narrow strip. All choke points. An absolute nightmare for any would-be unifier until the superpowers come in — first Macedon, then Rome — and do it by overwhelming force.

Proxy: You've explained very well why they were so innovative. But you haven't explained why they were weird. They can still have achieved all these advances in political philosophy while being boring.

Cipher: They're certainly not rational. Look at ancient Greek religion. These gods — were they just made up by the poets? Fun stories you tell each other, but nobody actually believes Aphrodite is a real goddess?

Proxy: That's what I assumed.

Cipher: Wading into the subjective reality of ancient belief is brave, because how on earth can anyone state what some Demetrius from Attica actually believed? But what we can say is that the Greek gods were always personalities. There's stuff written in Linear B from the Mycenaean age which seems to show predecessors of Athena and the others — so they were always personalities. That's actually a difference from Roman religion, which seems more animist.

The Greeks believed in witches — huge belief in witchcraft. They believed in daimones — where we get our word "demons" — which are spirits, more animistic, that are all around everywhere. Not necessarily bad, not necessarily good. They explain things like cattle dying. If it wasn't the witches, it might have been a daimon.

And the gods themselves are incredibly weird. We've talked before about Dionysus, the great releaser. Drama is a form of worship of Dionysus — that's where it starts. "Tragedy" comes from the Greek for something like "goat song." Some people think the prize was a goat; I think there's a link to Dionysus through the satyrs — the half-goat, half-man creatures that represent uncontrolled desire and lust, boisterous, rough, uncivilised, libidinous.

Drama in ancient Greece is incredibly strange. They've got terrifying masks on. They're doing it as an act of religious worship for the god who is present in the theatre. His statue is there — it's been carried in. He's watching.

Proxy: Decoration, that is.

Cipher: No, no — he's there. They put it down. He's placed. And the drama seems to have grown out of the democracy as well. Aristotle analyses it and says what's happening is catharsis. People think of catharsis as a release of pressure, but that's a very Freudian interpretation — the Victorians, where everything was about steam engines. The brain likened to a steam engine: "let off steam," "I'm under pressure." That's all Victorian language. They interpreted Aristotle's catharsis as a steam engine needing to vent. But in the original Greek, catharsis means something more like tempering or purifying — it's more metallurgical.

Proxy: Because that was their most advanced technology.

Cipher: And it seems that by watching horror happen in tragedy — right in front of you but at a distance — you vicariously experience it, and that purges the impurities, the psychological ones.

Proxy: So Greek theatre isn't rational people working out how to make storytelling more immersive or more profitable. It emerged out of religious worship.

Cipher: Very strange religious worship.

Proxy: And I suppose this is the direction I thought you'd take — that if you look at a lot of great scientists, Isaac Newton being the famous example, they make these huge advances while believing in all sorts of weird stuff.

Cipher: Newton was a great alchemist.

Proxy: And you see this even into the modern day. In a previous episode — or maybe a future one, depending on release order — Jacques Vallée, a renowned computer scientist who's all about UFOs. And you get this especially in Californian tech culture. Jack Parsons is famous for being a follower of Aleister Crowley while also being one of the foremost rocket scientists.

Cipher: Another friend of the show.

Proxy: He comes up weirdly often.

Cipher: Just briefly for listeners — what's the relevance of Aleister Crowley?

Proxy: The self-styled wickedest man in the world.

Cipher: That'll do.

Proxy: He kept inventing Satanist orders and rituals and thought he was the avatar of some Egyptian god. Sadly quite an unpleasant person as well — not just in a cool way. But the direction I thought you'd take is that you need more than rationality to advance things beyond where they'd been conceived before. The advances the Greeks made weren't evolutionary — they weren't building on what had gone before. They were revolutionising. And for that —

Cipher: I couldn't agree more. To innovate at this really base layer, you have to step beyond the bounds of what is known and what makes sense. You just have to step out into the void, because it's uncharted mental territory. And what was happening in Greece is that you had these guys in thousands of little petri dishes of creativity, stepping out in all directions.

Most of them went nowhere and sound completely bonkers. There was Anaximenes, who thought that everything was made of condensed vapour — the sun was just a particularly bright cloud, the moon a sort of bright cloud that came up out of the sea. There was another who thought every single day brought a new sun, as if the earth moved on a constant conveyor belt.

And then another guy, thinking equally crazily outside the box, says: actually, the earth is a sphere, the sun is a huge piece of mass that's really hot because of its incredibly fast rotation, and the moon doesn't emit its own light — it's just reflecting the sun. And you know what? You've got pretty far there.

Then when you look at Lucretius — his De Rerum Natura, obviously a Latin writer and much later, but putting together the greatest hits of Greek philosophy. What they managed to get to just by thinking about it is absolutely incredible. It comes from Empedocles — a Greek philosopher; we'll have to edit that out if that's wrong* — who says that things must be made of atoms, atomos being Greek for "indivisible." And there must be a lot of empty space between the atoms within a given substance, because how else could sound travel through stone?

When you really think about that, it is one hundred per cent correct. You can figure out atomic theory just from thinking about something in a really clever but outside-the-box way. In order to make these innovations, you have to go crazily in all different directions — if you throw darts everywhere, eventually one hits the bullseye. You just need the right cultural conditions where that's possible.

And there's the fact that they were all taking psychedelics at Eleusis as well.

**[Editor's note: the atomic theory is usually attributed to Democritus and Leucippus, not Empedocles, who proposed the four classical elements.]

Proxy: There's a vibe that we live in a time of relative stagnation — that there's no space for people to just go out on one and try stuff.

Cipher: Do we live in a time of relative stagnation? What do you mean?

Proxy: I don't feel like there's been a major revolution in thought or science for a few decades.

Cipher: There was a massive revolution in culture in the sixties.

Proxy: And I think the sixties was the last time people were able to be this weird. The San Francisco thing — a kind of hippie colony where people were experimenting with psychedelics and cults, and out of it came computers.

Cipher: One can argue those came out of the Second World War as much as anything. It depends how you look at it. The rate of technological development is still recursively increasing. We both remember a time before smartphones, and we're only in our thirties. The absolute difference in society that that alone represents — for an ancient Greek, the rate of technological change was so slow it was completely imperceptible. They genuinely believed the world had always been like what was in front of them and always would be.

That was still true in the 1500s. You could take a Greek and put them in 1500s Greece and they wouldn't be completely nonplussed. Put them in now, and they're just not going to understand what's happening. It would be like us having a tea party with a Culture Mind.

Proxy: I agree the smartphone has had a huge impact. But the smartphone itself wasn't a revolution in terms of its creation — it was an evolution that happened to trip past some threshold that broke everyone's brains.

Cipher: It's about the density of computing power in a given space.

Proxy: It wasn't inventing drama, or inventing political philosophy.

Cipher: So what you mean is that we're stagnating in terms of inventing novel cultural modes.

Proxy: Things that change the paradigm the way Newton did, or Einstein.

Cipher: Was it immediately obvious to someone living contemporaneously with Newton that the paradigm had just changed? I think paradigm shifts that we think of as happening on a sixpence actually take decades, and when you're living through those decades, it doesn't feel like anything is happening.

Proxy: Did the Greeks have a sense that they were living through a time when things were changing quickly?

Cipher: I think when great states rose and fell, that felt apocalyptic. The Persian Wars, the defeat of Athens in the Peloponnesian War, the conquest by Alexander and then the Romans — they perceived these as grand historical events heralding in new and usually worse ages. But I don't think they had the same sense of cultural paradigm shift. Although some Greeks were disturbed by the Romanisation of Greek culture under the Empire — they thought gladiatorial games were terribly infra dig, very vulgar. But everybody loved it, obviously. Very distressing.

Proxy: A bit like Facebook.

Cipher: Polybius sets himself the task of explaining how Rome came to dominate the Mediterranean in fifty years, so that was clearly a shocking event that needed explanation. And the Athenians did have a sense they'd done something quite special when they invented democracy — they knew it was theirs, something completely unique. So yes and no. They did sometimes perceive paradigm shifts, but they're much slower and further between than in recent centuries.

Proxy: I'm surprised Pythagoras hasn't come up.

Cipher: Pythagoras is one of these peripatetic wanderers. Belief in the magical and mystical powers of numbers was very widespread. At the Oracle of Delphi, there were three things inscribed above the entrance to the precinct. One was "Nothing too much." The other was "Know thyself." And then there was an epsilon, and nobody knew what it meant — some think it's linked to systems of numerology.

The belief that numbers were a way into the fundamental magic underlying everything seems to have been a real thing. Pythagoras' theorem fits in that light: when they found you could work out the length of a triangle's third side from the other two, that appeared to show that numbers somehow underlay the universe. You could derive information you didn't have from prior information using numbers. Maths is magical in the sense that it gives you mastery over something fundamental and otherwise hidden.

Proxy: Alphabets had the same impact. If you read pre-Islamic poetry in the Arabian Peninsula, they're aware of alphabets and words written down, and they fear them.

Cipher: The first things the Greeks seem to have written down — they wrote on pots: "I'm a pot." Or underneath a statue: "I am Chrysippus." They were bringing things to life by writing on them. It creates a voice where there was none. Pythagoras is not some sort of mathematician. He's a mystic. If he exists at all — whoever he was — he was almost certainly a mystic.

Proxy: And a vegan.

Cipher: Maybe. The Orphic vegetarians — it was because they believed in metempsychosis, the transmigration of souls. If you eat a cow, you might be eating your great-uncle Diogenes. Which is not on.

But these mathematical advances almost certainly came out of mystical number cults. And we know the Babylonians already had Pythagoras' theorem — this is quite clear now. So you have this cultural milieu in the eastern Mediterranean that the Greeks are very much part of, constantly importing stuff from the East, and anything from the East carries cultural capital and mystique. These eastern civilisations were older, grander, and wealthier. So if you go in thinking of Pythagoras as a rational mathematician in 700 BC — that is absolutely not the case.

Proxy: I guess Pythagoras and the ancient Greeks — I already knew they were important. But it's not just that they were important and they were weird. It's that they're important because they were weird.

Cipher: Their importance grew out of their weirdness. You couldn't have had their importance without it. And we haven't even gone into the real weirdness of Greek religion. There are hundreds of different versions of Zeus. You've got Zeus of that hill, Zeus of this hill, Zeus of hospitality, Zeus of the marketplace, Zeus of the fence. The fence is very important — it divides up property. There's a Zeus for it. And the obvious question that all students ask is: is it all the same Zeus, or different ones? And the Greeks never asked that question. It's just not addressed.

Proxy: It seems like the elephant in the room.

Cipher: To us it is. But they're weird in a way that's also not relatable, which we don't really anticipate going in.

Proxy: You read Plato's dialogues and they feel relatable. But there's this undercurrent.

Cipher: It's only relatable because you're a direct intellectual descendant of Plato. We're quite weird ourselves, in our own way. But when you read his allegory of the cave — his theory of the forms — it's completely mad. This perfect universe behind it all where the forms exist, and everything in this universe is just an imperfect reflection. Some scholars have argued that this was all derived from his experience at Eleusis — that it's basically his story of coming up out of the cave of shadows into the light of truth.

Proxy: It's him on psychedelics.

Cipher: This is where it all comes from. And Platonism underlies Christianity. With our Christian heritage, we're preconditioned to think in these terms — that there's this world, but it isn't the real world, it's corrupted and problematic, and through acting in the right way or through dying you can get to the perfect world. We're preconditioned to think that way, but only because we're descendants of Plato. If you found someone untouched by that tradition — and that tradition has now almost entirely conquered the globe — they'd think it was completely bonkers. Because it is.

Proxy: I've been subtly trying to wrap up for the last five minutes. Any closing thoughts?

Cipher: The Greeks were not a rational race of people. Most of them were peasants with an extremely confusing set of beliefs. They didn't even have a word for religion, because religion wasn't separate from existence — it was part of everything. And everything was weird. You've got chthonic sacrifices — burying pig carcasses in the fields for the gods of the underworld. Women going up to the mountainside covered in animal skins for the rites of Dionysus. Incredibly odd forms of religious worship, such as drama and athletics. An unbelievable state of constant warfare between thousands of city-states, every single one with a separate constitution and a separate nationalist — anachronistic word — story they tell about their own city. Almost all of it is lost.

It's an incredibly bewildering, kaleidoscopic, strange world where beyond the mists of the horizon there are Cyclopes and harpies and monsters, but also incredibly ancient kingdoms to the east. A weird, strange, sunlit, sparkling, dark, scary world. Trying to get back into that mindset when you strip away all the millennia of retrospective perception is a very rewarding task.

And I haven't even spoken about the art. The whole reason we have an image of the perfect male physique — that's a Greek image. They invented it. All these guys in the gym pumping iron, getting ripped — that's a Greek thing. They invented gyms. They spent all day in the gym because the perfect body is the perfect form — symmetrical, perfect, a way of a man becoming like a god.

Proxy: A form of worship.

Cipher: A very strange form of worship.

Proxy: I'm sold.

Cipher: Greeks not boring. Very good.

Proxy: I shall read more.

Cipher: I can suggest some strange things to read. But I know you don't really think they're boring — you're just being kind.

Proxy: There are two wolves. One thinks the Greeks are boring. One thinks they're weird and awesome.

Cipher: They are. There are other people just as weird and awesome, but weird and awesome in different ways. The Greeks are our weird and awesome ancestors. Their culture is just as rich as anybody else's. And I'll fight anyone who says otherwise. On that note —

Proxy: All right.