Aristotle Koskinas on Greek History

This is one of 2 interviews that I conducted while visiting Greece this summer. Greek history is deep routed in many things as philosophy, democracy and culture and has laid the foundation of so much of what we know and how we live today. Today I speak with Aristotle Koskinas (@aristotlekoskin), a guide with Athens walking tours. He's one of the best guides you can find in Athens. In order to be a guide in Greece, an individual must complete a 2½ year program at the School of Tourist Guides in Greece - which is a state school under the Ministry of Development. Some of the courses in the curriculum include Ancient Greek history, Byzantine history, Prehistoric Archaeology, Mythology, Geology, history of Theater –and psychology of the tourist. Listen in for details on the history of Athens over the past 3000 years, the influence Greek culture has had across the world, and some insight on what surprises him meeting visitors from different countries. Go Premium: Members get early access, ad-free episodes, hand-edited transcripts, searchable transcripts, member-only episodes, and more. Sign up at: https://fs.blog/membership/ Every Sunday our newsletter shares timeless insights and ideas that you can use at work and home. Add it to your inbox: https://fs.blog/newsletter/ Follow Shane on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/ShaneAParrish Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:08Shane Parrish?

  Welcome to The Knowledge Project. I'm your host Shane Parrish, curator behind the Fernum Street blog, which is an intellectual hub of interestingness, covering topics like human misjudgment, decision-making, strategy, philosophy, and culture. The Knowledge Project allows me to interview amazing people from around the world to deconstruct why they're good at what they do and get inside their head. It's more conversation than prescription. It's about seeing the world as they see it. The next episode is one of two interviews that I conducted while visiting Greece this summer. Greek history, which is deep-rooted in many things, is philosophy, democracy, and culture, has laid the foundation of so much of what we know and what we live today. Today, I'm going to speak with Aristotle Koskinas, one of the best guides you can

• 0:50Shane Parrish?

  find in Athens. In order to be a guide in Greece, an individual must complete two-and-a-half-year program at the School of Tourist Guides in Greece, which is the state school under the Ministry of Development. Some of the courses in the curriculum include Ancient Greek History, Byzantine History, Prehistoric Archaeology, Mythology, Geology, History of Theatre, and the Psychology of the Tourist. Along with completing the required written and oral exams, the professionals must also complete 110 hours of lessons in a museum about archaeology and 260 hours of visiting sites and practicing guides. It's not like you just walk up to the boss and get a guide here. I contacted Athens Walking Tours to

• 1:33Shane Parrish?

  find out who their best guide was, and that's how I came to meet Aristotle. With his first degree in archaeology, Aristotle decided to continue his studies in order to become a certified guide in Athens. And we're lucky that he did. Today, you'll hear us speak about the history of Athens over the past 3,000 years, the influence of Greek culture has had across the world, and some insights on what surprises him, meeting visitors from different countries. I hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did.

• 2:10Shane Parrish?

  Hi and welcome.

• 2:13Speaker 01

  Thank you, welcome. Welcome to Greece, Athens.

• 2:17Shane Parrish?

  Do you want to tell us a little bit about yourself Aristotle?

• 2:19Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, my name is Aristotle Koskinas, I'm an archaeologist and qualified tourist guide. I was born in Athens and I have lived in this city for most of my life. Although I had to go out from my university studies to be trained as a tourist guide, so I have been outside of Athens for several years. But I have returned to this big city and I'm working since, say, 2003 as a tourist guide, which is my full-time job. And archaeology now has become a passion. I wouldn't call it a hobby,

• 3:00Speaker 01

  but I pursue my research when I have some spare time, which fortunately it is limited, unfortunately financially because I'm busy, I'm working. On the other hand, I have a ton of roof tiles waiting for me to study them and I'm getting phone calls from the directors of the Dics saying, "Okay Aristotle, we have found some new roof tiles, will you come over to see them?" So November, December, next year probably, anyway.

• 3:31Shane Parrish?

  How many people live in Athens?

• 3:33Speaker 01

  How many? About 5 million people, although those who are registered are about 4 million.

• 3:40Shane Parrish?

  Okay.

• 3:40Speaker 01

  It just happens that during the census people leave and go back to their villages or towns because they believe that if they register there, the government will have a different approach and attitude towards the local communities. But the population of the Greater Athens area is 5 million, which is about 40% of the population of the country.

• 4:05Speaker 01

  We're about eleven million, according to the census of 2011.

• 4:09Shane Parrish?

  What do you find most interesting about being a professional tour guide?

• 4:14Speaker 01

  That's not a strange, that's a difficult question. Well, first of all, is that I come in contact with different people every time and I have the opportunity to talk to them about the history of Athens and Greece. Of course, it's my version of the history of Athens and Greece. I try to make them see the country through my eyes. And yeah, that's what makes it interesting. Sometimes, however, you have people who are not particularly interested about the history. They just want to take a selfie, in which case, yeah,

• 4:58Speaker 01

  it's not that interesting for me to do that. Because you can find a place to take a selfie. There are plenty of opportunities in the city to take a selfie. Now, you cannot see it, the audience cannot see that, but wherever you have, you have a look of the Acropolis, so it's great.

• 5:14Shane Parrish?

  The history of Greece dates back so far and goes on for so long and it's so vast. It seems like there's an endless amount of threads that you could pick up. For someone who wants to learn or somebody looking for where to start, where would you suggest?

• 5:33Speaker 01

  Well, start reading or visiting. Because that's, for example, if you visit the country, you want to have an introduction to its history. I would say Athens will be the first place of choice because you have the National Archaeological Museum, which has antiquities from all the periods of Greek history, from the Neolithic, say, 7,000 BCE, to the Roman. Although, just a note, when we say the history of Greece, we must make a distinction. You have the history of Greece as a country, which starts back in the Paleolithic period, 200, 300,000. You say then you have the history of the Greek people.

• 6:18Speaker 01

  Which started a little later than that, because based on the, although there's a debate about it. The archaeologically, we can prove that the Greek people arrived in this region during the second millennium B.C. So if you want to be very strict and precise, the history of the Greek nation starts in the second millennium. But in the narrative of the formation of the Greek state, if you read the books, you'll see that the Minoan Cretans are also included in the history of the Greek nation. The people of the Cyclades, who were living here since the, well, probably since the fourth millennium B.C., were also included in the Greeks.

• 7:02Speaker 01

  So we're not certain if they were, actually we don't know what language they were speaking. So we're not certain if they were Greeks or a different ethnic stock. So, yeah. But anyway, visiting Athens, you'll get to see all that continuity from the seventh millennium to the Roman period. And then you have other places, so you can see the modern revival of Greece and the modern sequel of the country after the War of Independence against the Ottoman Turks, when Greece became a sovereign state in 1831, to the present. So, yeah, I know that Athens hasn't got the beaches and the white-washed churches that people are accustomed and they know from the commercials.

• 7:46Speaker 01

  But, yeah, staying in Athens for at least a couple of days, I think it's important to get to know the history of Greece.

• 7:56Shane Parrish?

  What's the history of Athens, the city itself?

• 7:59Speaker 01

  Well, we have to go back to the fourth millennium, about 3400 B.C., when we have the first inhabitants who settled on the Acropolis and in the surrounding plain. And from, since that time, the city has a continuous habitation. So you say that the city has a history of 6,000 years and several meters of archaeological remains beneath the modern city.

• 8:28Speaker 01

  You had a period, well, until the 10th century B.C. We cannot say that, well, you can't say if you have the city-state of Athens. Just note, in ancient Greece, you had, we had hundreds of independent city-states. Athens, Sparta, Corinth, just to name the three of the most important.

• 8:51Speaker 01

  But we believe that the city-states were formed during the 10th century B.C.

• 8:57Speaker 01

  So, since that time, since the 10th century on, you have the formation of the ancient city. It started spreading out around the acropolis. And the heyday of Athens was the 5th century B.C., when it was the, it had the strongest navy. They controlled all the Aegean. They had multiple sources of revenue from the harbor of Piraeus, they had silver mines, manufacturing activities. And in this period when the Athenian democracy was developed, you had philosophy, art.

• 9:35Speaker 01

  When we say the 5th century B.C., that's a period between 480 to 430 B.C., about that period, when Athens is at its strongest and the most prosperous.

• 9:44Speaker 02

  Bonjour, compadre. It's the

• 9:48Speaker 02

  How do I negotiate so many great travel deals? My greatest gadget, the Priceline app. It's got hotel deals, flight deals, rental car deals, all of those deals in a bundle. Deals, game day deals, concert trip deals. No one deals more deals than Priceline. Hold your horses, there's more. The app lets you filter hotels by neighborhood, vibe, star level, and amenities like pools and spas and beachfronts. Wait, I'm not done. Stop cutting me off.

• 10:15Speaker 03

  There is so much NFL on ESPN right now. Monday Night Football, plus pre-game and post-game. NFL Live, NFL Primetime. Everything you need to stay on top of every game, every week.

• 10:30Speaker 03

  And now, NFL Network is on the ESPN app. More football, more coverage, more ways to watch. Football's on, all season long, on ESPN and streaming on the ESPN app.

• 10:45Speaker 01

  And then after 430 B.C., they had to fight a long war against the city of Sparta and its allies. It lasted for 27 years. And that's a very controversial period in ancient Greek history. Because, well, we can see that all the sophisticated and refined Athenians who would attend theatre, they wouldn't hesitate of exterminating an entire island because they opposed their policies and their expansion. For example, in 417, they destroyed the island of Milos because the Milos refused of paying tribute to the Athenians.

• 11:25Speaker 01

  And in 404, when the Athenians surrendered finally to the Spartans, Athens was at its knees. You had, even their democracy was abolished for a year or so. The city was revived, but not as a major political or military power. It retained that aura of cultural, of a cultural centre throughout the ancient times, I would say, not just in the classical period. So, and then you had periods of prosperity, especially when it was supported and endowed

• 12:06Speaker 01

  by the rulers of the time, precisely because it was Athens, the centre of civilisation and the fountain of culture and art. During the late Roman period, after the 3rd century A.D., the city itself had been destroyed, so it had become a much smaller settlement. After 267, it was destroyed by the barbarian tribe of the Heruli. The city was confined in the zone around the Acropolis. Okay. So, and then, but, and then in the 6th century A.D., the schools of the city were closed after an imperial edict.

• 12:45Speaker 01

  And that was the final blow to the significance of Athens as a major educational centre. During the Middle Ages... It was, well, a prosperous market town.

• 13:00Speaker 01

  And it still had the memory that it was Athens, of all the Athens of Pericles and the philosophers. And there is, in the 12th century AD, a bishop was sent to Athens. He was highly educated in the classics. He imagined that he would see the city that was described in the ancient texts, and he was completely disappointed. And he's making references that, okay, this is not Athens, that's something, that's some complete difference, that's some entirely alien to what I had in my imagination. The city, in the 15th century AD, was occupied by the Ottoman Turks. And it's interesting that during the first 200 years of the Ottoman occupation,

• 13:46Speaker 01

  Athens prospered. And in the census of the 16th century, it was, it had a population of 17,000 people, which makes it the fourth-largest city of the Ottoman Empire in Europe. Okay. Was this, well, and as I say, it's interesting because it wasn't an administrative center. Was it a trading outpost? Not even, because we don't have, in other cities, the Ottomans would build large markets. In Athens, there was just the bazaar, which was developed over the ruins of the ancient markets and the ancient libraries.

• 14:31Speaker 01

  That's fascinating in Athens, that you could see a building of Roman period, which was a library, and then it was repurposed into a bazaar during the Ottoman times. So you have the same location, but it was changing through the centuries. So, no, it probably has to do with the thriving countryside. Because during the Ottoman, the process of the Ottoman occupation, the countryside of Athens was not ravaged. So you had a strong population base, and you had the interaction between the city and the countryside. That's the only reason, as far as we know.

• 15:10Speaker 01

  Then, because in the 18th century, the revenue and the taxation system changed in the Ottoman Empire. So instead of collecting the taxes directly, the Ottoman state would lease out the taxes to tax farmers.

• 15:27Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 15:28Speaker 01

  Which would collect the taxes with interest for their own profit. And by the late 18th century, this population has dropped to 11,000 people. We have references that people would leave the city to be released from the tax burden. People would mortgage their farms to the monasteries or to wealthy Greeks or wealthy Ottomans. So gradually had accumulation of land to more and more people. And that was the financially and socially, that was a fatal blow to the city.

• 16:08Shane Parrish?

  Was it they were trying to extract too much taxes or was it just a revolt against?

• 16:12Speaker 01

  The idea was that every year, the Ottoman treasury would have the sum that they had in the budget. And they wouldn't bother of collecting it to build up the mechanism to collect it. So you had these entrepreneurs, actually, they were usually members of the Ottoman elite, who would hire other people to do the dirty, it would be the facade.

• 16:38Shane Parrish?

  The dirty work, yeah.

• 16:39Speaker 01

  And they would say, okay, look, how much do you want from Athens? You are supposed to take 40,000 coins. Okay, this is 40,000 coins.

• 16:47Shane Parrish?

  Yeah.

• 16:47Speaker 01

  At the beginning of the year. And then, coming back to Athens, these people would collect the taxes.

• 16:57Shane Parrish?

  I'm suspecting a lot more than 40,000.

• 16:59Speaker 01

  No, no, 60, 70,000 because they had, not only to make a profit, they also had to come up with the money to pay the other Ottoman officials who were their superiors. So they would get that, grant that concession. There was a network of bribing or, not bribing. I know that people in Turkey would, we're saying that. Gift exchange from the lower to the upper.

• 17:28Speaker 01

  And of course, those who suffered, most of them were the people on the lower level who had to give the money.

• 17:34Shane Parrish?

  The tributes, yeah.

• 17:35Speaker 01

  And it was a distributive system, so if a small community had to pay, say, a hundred coins, it didn't matter if you had a thousand or ten people, it would be still a hundred coins.

• 17:51Shane Parrish?

  Yeah.

• 17:52Speaker 01

  So when people started living, you ended up with a couple of, well, a few families taking all the burden of the taxation. So there were at least two riots against those tax collectors in Athens during the 18th century, where Greeks and Muslims participated. So it was not just an ethnic thing, it was a social and economic phenomenon. So in 1821, when the Greek War of Independence was declared, the people were more than ready to join and expel the Ottoman authorities and the Ottoman population from the city.

• 18:34Speaker 01

  Although Athens suffered a lot during the War of Independence, especially between 1826 and 1827, the Greeks were in possession of the Acropolis, which was a castle, always the Acropolis was a castle. The Ottoman army was besieging them, so imagine that, we know that by the end of that siege, there were only forty buildings standing with their roofs, out of two thousand buildings. 1834, three years after the end of the war, Athens was declared the capital of Greece. And again, that choice was ordained by the history of the city, not its significance as a town during the 19th century. It was Athens.

• 19:19Speaker 01

  It was the city that was mentioned in all the ancient texts. It was the city where democracy was created, it was the city where philosophy... So the first king of Greece, who was a German, by the way, and his advisors decided to establish the capital in Athens to showcase the link between modern Greece and its ancient glories. There was even a plan, which was just a... only a plan, fortunately, to build the royal residence on the Acropolis. It never happened, thank God.

• 19:58Shane Parrish?

  So the city that invented democracy ended up with a monarchy?

• 20:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, it's not just the city, it was Greece. During the War of Independence, we had made a declaration of independence. We had the parliaments.

• 20:12Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 20:14Speaker 01

  And the constitutions that were drafted during the War of Independence were very progressive and liberal for the standards of that time. Don't forget that is the War of Independence started a few years after the end of the Napoleonic Wars, so the monarchies of Europe wanted to retain the status quo. So they didn't want to hear anything about parliaments and elections.

• 20:37Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 20:38Speaker 01

  During the war, unfortunately, the Greek people also were fighting civil war. That is interesting, we were fighting, actually we fought two civil wars during the War of Independence. We're fighting against each other to establish who would be the ruler or the power broker when we would become independent. We also contracted two loans from British banks. All that money were just squandered during the civil wars and to irrelevant purchases of military material. We purchased six steamships. Because we thought that this superior technology would give us an advantage over the Ottoman Navy.

• 21:23Speaker 01

  Of these six steamships, only one arrived during the war and it was deployed. It's actually the first steamship that was used in battles.

• 21:35Shane Parrish?

  Okay.

• 21:35Speaker 01

  The other two arrived after the end of the war. The three were never built, although we had paid for them. And we even bought a frigate from the United States. We have commissioned, we have ordered three, only one arrived. We had paid for all of them, but that's another story.

• 21:52Speaker 01

  But these loans were very important because by taking the loans, Greece acquired an entity.

• 22:00Speaker 01

  And the governments of England wanted, well, they had to take care of their own interests, economic and political interests.

• 22:10Shane Parrish?

  It's a form of legitimizing.

• 22:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, in a way, we were, we weren't recognized officially

• 22:16Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 22:16Speaker 01

  as a, as a people fighting against the Ottoman Turks, but yeah, essentially we were. When you give money to someone, first of all, you have a vested interest that that someone will be able to pay you the money or give you the collateral in the end. Yeah. So yeah, that's, in a way, we'd be, although there are historians that would disagree with that, but an important factor in the, in the success of the War of Independence was those two loans. They were, yes, they were divisive, they, they were never used for the war itself, but politically, they played an important role. Anyway, I think we paid those loans in the late 90s, anyway. That's a, that's a Greek joke, they were still paying the, the bonds of the Greek War

• 23:00Speaker 01

  of Independence. Then in, and in 1827, finally, the European superpowers decided to intervene. They send us a joint fleet, England, France and Russia, they destroyed the Ottoman fleet. And then it was just a matter of time when the Ottoman army and garrisons would, would leave the country. And we, originally, the plan was to, for Greece to become a vassal state to the Ottoman Empire, but due to the diplomacy of the first governor of Greece, who was a very competent diplomat, we were able to become an independent state.

• 23:45Speaker 01

  And part of the agreement was that Greece would become monarchy. And since we didn't have any nobility in Greece, okay, there were people who called themselves barons and princes, but they were not, they didn't have any real claim. But also because of the civil war, people were reluctant to accept one or the other of the, of the factions. So when we were offered...

• 24:09Shane Parrish?

  So going outside actually kind of made sense.

• 24:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, that we, Greek people believed that an outsider would bring stability in the Greek society. So the prince from Bavaria, Otto, became, was appointed the king of Greece. For him, it must have been quite a shock. When he came to the country, he was seventeen years old.

• 24:34Speaker 01

  Maybe he knew about the history of Greece.

• 24:37Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 24:38Speaker 01

  He must have seen the warriors who came as a delegation to offer him the crown. But yeah, we have these descriptions of his arrival that he was a little shaky, that he even lost his footing when he came off the boat. So he was grabbed by one of his bodyguards, who have been a quite humiliating arrival for a king just to fall.

• 25:02Shane Parrish?

  Right away.

• 25:02Speaker 01

  Anyway. And Otto, well, the father of Otto, King Ludwig of Bavaria, was fascinated with Greek history and culture. He had created a large collection of Greek art. The Gliptothek in Munich is actually started as his collection. And of course, he was happy to have his son as the ruler of Greece. So Athens was chosen as the capital. And that's actually the milestone for the modern history of Athens is eighteen thirty-four. And since then, you have a history of expansion and growth.

• 25:45Speaker 01

  In eighteen thirty-four, the city had only four thousand people, because it was after the war, people had left. Just in sixty years, when the first Olympic Games were held in Athens, the population was more than a hundred thousand. Yeah. And you have that increase. There were also two periods of dramatic population increase. The first was in nineteen twenty-two. By that time, the city had about seven hundred thousand people. But within one year, a quarter of a million were added to the population.

• 26:16Shane Parrish?

  Oh, wow.

• 26:17Speaker 01

  That was after the First World War. Greece got a mandate to garrison the area around the city of Ismyr, Greek Smyrna, where more than eighty percent of the population were Greeks.

• 26:35Speaker 01

  And the idea was that after five years, there would have been a referendum. And then inhabitants of that region would decide if they wanted to be united with Greece.

• 26:47Speaker 01

  Or they would have an autonomous or state status. And the plan of the Greek government was that Greek populations that were Greeks and Christians would flow, who would leave the areas in Anatolia and come into this district. So we'd have 150% Greeks in that area. It didn't work that way because the Turks started their own war of independence. And it was up to the Greek army to pursue them. By 1922, we were defending the frontier 700 kilometers long. We were just, at one point, our army reached 50 kilometers of Ankara. My grandfather, who was in that campaign, had stories that, okay, we could see Ankara

• 27:33Speaker 01

  somewhere in the distance, but then we had to retreat. And when 1922, the Turkish army counterattacks, the city of Ismir is destroyed and thousands of people were killed. And the next year, when the peace treaty was signed, they agreed for a mandatory exchange of populations. So one and a half million Greeks left their villages and towns in Turkey. They were settled in Greece and about half a million Turks and Muslims left northern Greece and they went to Turkey. And there are still, I think, there's, I don't remember the name of the villages, but there is a ghost village in Turkey, which was, used to be 100% Greek.

• 28:19Speaker 01

  And you see the houses immediately after the, when the people left it.

• 28:23Shane Parrish?

  And they all left at the same time.

• 28:24Speaker 01

  Yeah. And imagine that you have several municipalities in Athens who started as refugee camps. And then they became communities that were added to the, to the city. Whenever you see in the map, New Smyrna, New Philadelphia, these are actually, they have the names of the communities from which these people came originally.

• 28:49Shane Parrish?

  I want to talk a little bit about Greek culture. That's kind of taken on its own term and own meaning throughout the world. And it sounds like more and more we're meaning Athenian culture historically. Can you walk us through what it is?

• 29:05Speaker 01

  You mean a culture, historical culture, or the modern culture?

• 29:13Shane Parrish?

  A little bit of both. I mean, like, what does the modern culture connotate? And where did it become that way from the historic perspective?

• 29:20Speaker 01

  Well, the modern culture, well, Greece, modern Greece is a curious mix of the memory of its ancient glories and globalization.

• 29:35Speaker 01

  First of all, you have the culture of Athens. It's a melting pot where you have Greeks from all around. Someone have said that Athens is just a agglomeration of thousands of villages. Because you have people from Corfu, you have people from southern Greece, you have people from Crete. These people brought their own customs, their own ideas. They had to adjust in the environment of the big city. Don't imagine that every year during the festivals you have in every neighborhood of Athens, you have a traditional festival. No. It's like has been Greek, all elements of traditional Greek culture have been put into a mixer. And now we see them through a modern filter.

• 30:20Speaker 01

  So you have, we celebrate all the religious festivals, which is a great opportunity for eating and drinking and meeting with friends.

• 30:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, you see that now modern Greeks using devices and computers and all that. On the other hand, sometimes they'll still have the social restrictions that they have carried from their villages. They say, okay, let's behave this way because the people of our environment will start making comments.

• 30:56Speaker 01

  So they still have the mentality of the of the small community, although they live in a big city and they live in the way, I don't know if it's

• 31:07Shane Parrish?

  Is is historic Greek culture really Mediterranean culture in the sense that I believe the Romans conquered Greece, but Greek culture permeated throughout Roman Empire?

• 31:20Speaker 01

  Well, Greek culture, the Romans recognized that the supremacy of the Greek civilization and the Greek culture. Actually, one of the Roman authors says that Greece was captured with our weapons, but the culture of Greece managed to, we are the captives of the Greeks because of their of their culture.

• 31:43Shane Parrish?

  So what did they mean when they said Greek culture?

• 31:45Speaker 01

  Well, you can say philosophy, the art, primarily the arts and literature. That's when you say, when it's in a historical perspective, what the Romans took from the Greeks was first of all the the arts, which they adjusted to their own social and political requirements. They also took the the luxury of the of the Greeks, because by the time the Romans had occupied occupied Greece, you had Greek and Oriental elements that were fused. And you have all this idea of of good living, of drinking, of commonality,

• 32:29Speaker 01

  perfumes, textiles, carpets, things that the Romans, there were some Roman traditionalists who said, no, no, these are decadent things. We don't need them, not even the, we don't even need their statues and poetry. They're not worthy for us, Roman warriors. But by the first century B.C., you start having all the Roman elites assimilating the Greek ways of of life and entertainment, collecting Greek arts. When they ran out of originals, they started producing copies. So there was an entire industry of producing copies or recordings of earlier Greek statues.

• 33:14Speaker 01

  You go to several, you know, all around the world. And most of the statues that we have, the exception is Greece, but we have a lot of originals. But anyway, you have there Roman copies of ancient Greek originals.

• 33:28Shane Parrish?

  That's interesting.

• 33:29Speaker 01

  And to be, you had Romans who would study in Athens. Because Athens still had that distinction that if you want to be educated, you'll go to Athens. It's like they're going to Harvard or Cambridge or Oxford. That was the... And during the Roman period, Athens was that, that's a nice, calm college city. Where you had all the philosophers and you had students from all around.

• 33:59Shane Parrish?

  What did it mean to get a Greek education? Like what was like, what did that consist of back in that period?

• 34:05Speaker 01

  Well, first of all, there was a small number of people who could do it. By the Roman period, only the elite could be educated in that high level. I'm not talking about know how to read and write. I'm talking about being trained in the art of rhetorics to study philosophy. Yes, poets, authors, politicians could do it. Other wealthy people could also do it. Sometimes it would be just, I think that some people visit Athens, they would study in Athens just as a nouveau riche, so off, say, look, I have studied in Athens.

• 34:46Speaker 01

  And I'm speaking, and I'm writing the Athenian dialect, the Athenian way. So yeah, I think that during the Roman period, that's what they perceived as Greek culture. The Athenian expression of Greek culture.

• 35:04Speaker 02

  Bonjour, compadre. It's the

• 35:08Speaker 02

  How do I negotiate so many great travel deals? My greatest gadget, the Priceline app. It's got hotel deals, flight deals, rental car deals, all of those deals in a bundle. Deals, game day deals, concert trip deals. No one deals more deals than Priceline. Hold your horses, there's more. The app lets you filter hotels by neighborhood, vibe, star level, and amenities like pools and spas and beachfronts. Wait, I'm not done. Stop cutting me off.

• 35:35Speaker 03

  There is so much NFL on ESPN right now. Monday Night Football, plus pregame and postgame. NFL Live, NFL Primetime. Everything you need to stay on top of every game every week. Unbelievable. And now NFL Network is on the ESPN app. More football, more coverage, more ways to watch. Football's on all season long on ESPN and streaming on the ESPN app.

• 36:04Speaker 01

  And let's face it with, because most of the history of Greece was written by Athenians or by people who were living in Athens or they were writing about Athens. It's an Athenocentric perspective that we get about ancient Greek history.

• 36:24Speaker 01

  Of course, during the third and the second centuries B.C. you had other cities which were even more important. For example, you have the city of Alexandria. It was a metropolis of half a million people with its own center of production of art. You had there the museum and the library of Alexandria, which was a major center of advanced research and studies. You have the city of Beirut, which was famous for its low studies. But even with that, Athens was still the first among equals.

• 37:04Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 37:04Speaker 01

  Because it had the long tradition. Because everything started from Athens.

• 37:09Shane Parrish?

  Speaking of starting in Athens, can you walk me through a little bit of the history of philosophy in Greece and specifically in Athens?

• 37:19Speaker 01

  Because despite my name, I'm not that much of a philosopher, but anyway. You have the... We divide Greek philosophy more or less in two periods. We have the pre-Socratic philosophy and the philosopher's after Socrates. Socrates is the... Say is the pivot, you know, in all that. So during the sixth and the early fifth century B.C., philosophers who were particularly active in cities such as Myelitus or Ephesus, the big cities along the east coast of the Aegean, started researching the origins of nature.

• 38:04Speaker 01

  You can call them more like physical philosophers. Okay. They... Okay, some of them were also pursuing issues such as morality, but primarily they were looking how the world... What the world is made of. Is it air, fire, soils, a combination of all that? What happens when these elements come into conflict and all that? With Socrates, in Athens, who was active during the second half of the fifth century B.C., this Socrates, or at least the Socrates we know through the writings of Plato, because Socrates never wrote anything.

• 38:47Speaker 01

  So personally, I think that Plato used Socrates as his own mouthpiece. And, okay, he has, say, 30% real Socrates and 70% Plato. Plato, yeah. But, okay, that's my... That's my view. What is good and what is evil? And what makes you good and evil? Issues such as love, things that characterize the pursuits of modern philosophy.

• 39:15Speaker 01

  And with his student Plato and then with Aristotle. Aristotle is about a generation after, two generations after Socrates. Of course, there is a difference. Plato was searching about spiritual and elevated issues. Aristotle was more down to earth. And that's why in the painting "The School of Athens", which is in Florence, I think,

• 39:45Speaker 01

  they saw Plato pointing upwards and Aristotle is pointing downwards. Ah, that's interesting. So what Plato was... Plato believed that the ideas were these internal elements. And what we see in real life is just a pale shadow of the ideas. And you have to reach further to find the true meaning, the true essence of things.

• 40:15Speaker 01

  Aristotle was more about what we can get from experiencing and studying the environment, the nature around us. So he was writing books about physics, about mathematics, about zoology, about plants, about politics. So he was more like what today we will call a scientist with a wide field of expertise. Then, again, in Athens, you have philosophers who, such as the Stoics or the Epicureans, who were trying to find a way to cope with the adversities of life. Right.

• 40:57Speaker 01

  So they were creating their own ideas of how you behave and what is your life. In order to deal with anxiety, the goal was to reach apathy. That you won't be, you are not affected by... Your daughter dies. No problem, you will see that, you will think it over, you say, "Okay, that... It just happens." Yeah. But that is because during the fourth and the third centuries, this was a time, and later, was a very insecure time. First of all, the Greek, with the campaign of Alexander the Great...

• 41:39Speaker 01

  The Greek world had expanded tremendously. From what used to be a small area of a few hundred city-states became a cosmopolis of hundreds of, thousands of kilometers. A Greek could travel all the way to modern Afghanistan, and even there Alexander the Great had created Greek cities, cities that were according to the model of Athens. Because that's interesting, he was a monarch, but he was using Athens as the model for his new creations. Greek had become the common language of thousands, millions of people.

• 42:21Speaker 01

  People who were not ethnic Greeks, but they had, they would learn Greek because that was the lingua franca of the time. You have, politically, things changed. Your life depended not on the decisions of a small city council, of your fellow citizens, independent on what a king would decide, hundreds of kilometers away. So, because of all these changes, because life had become very fluid, societies were also changing, there were also a lot of sources of stress and anxiety. So, they had to find a way to deal with those. That's why you have the different approaches.

• 43:03Speaker 01

  And then after the, during the Roman period, you have reworkings of the same type of the ideas of Plato, of Aristotle, of the Epicureans, of the Stoics. The Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius was a Stoic himself, and you can see in his writings that he follows the tenets of the Stoic philosophy.

• 43:22Shane Parrish?

  What else happened in the Alexander the Great period? What was, can you walk me through a little bit of that in Greece and...

• 43:30Speaker 01

  Well, in the period of Alexander, you have, first of all, in 338 B.C., because that's when things started for Greece and Alexander. Philip II, the father of Alexander, defeated the Greek city-states in the Battle of Carneia. And...

• 43:54Speaker 01

  According to most of ancient and modern historians, that battle spelled the end of the independence of the Greek city-states.

• 44:07Speaker 01

  Philip had, I think his policy was a little more complicated than than that. He guaranteed the independence of all the Greek city-states. Right. But what Philip considered as independence was that, okay, I'm not going to be involved in your internal affairs, but I'm going to guarantee your territorial integrity and status, but you are not going to be able to expand or attack another city-state, because I'll be here to guarantee the peace. And that's why he created, we call it the League of Corinth, because he would meet in Corinth, where all the Greek city-states, well, not all of them, but most of them participated.

• 44:52Speaker 01

  And they declared Philip the commander-in-chief of the army of that league, which would be the police force enforcing order and peace in Greece. But also, he would be the commander-in-chief of the campaign against the Persian Empire. And then Alexander, his son, presented that campaign as a common Greek endeavor against the Persians to revenge the Persians, what they have done in Greece during their own invasion.

• 45:28Speaker 01

  There were some Greek cities which retained their independence, even the nominal independence, such as the Spartans, who never participated, although they didn't have any way of affecting the situation. They said, no, we are the Spartans and we don't want to participate. They said that when Philip asked them, "Do you want me to come to visit your city as a friend or as an enemy?" And the reply was neither. We don't want you in the city. They asked in a very laconic Spartan way. Philip visited Sparta, he destroyed the countryside around them. He saw them, who's the power now, and he left.

• 46:12Speaker 01

  And when later Alexander, he had his first victory against the Persians. He dedicated 300 suits of armor, which were made of gold, that were dedicated on the Acropolis, here in Athens. And there was an inscription saying, "Alexander and the Greeks accept the Spartans."

• 46:32Speaker 01

  So, in 336, Philip is murdered. And Alexander becomes king of Macedonia. And of course, he takes on the mantle of being the commander-in-chief of all the Greeks. And then, three years later, he starts his campaign.

• 46:54Speaker 01

  Which was indeed a very fast world tour of conquests. In just 10 years, he destroyed the Persian Empire and he created his own empire. Well, actually, in a way, he replaced the high king of Persia and he became the high king of Persia. That's interesting about Alexander. He didn't say, "Okay, now all of you become Macedonians. I am the successor of the high king." When he went to Egypt, he said, "I am the successor of the Pharaohs." When he went to Jerusalem, he said, "Yes, I recognize that there is one God." And, okay, he had a very...

• 47:36Speaker 01

  In his diplomacy, he was very wise not to suppress the pre-existing situation. He just used it, he used it for his own needs. Alexander died early. He was 36? He was 33, about 33. He died in 323.

• 48:00Speaker 01

  Being Alexander, he wanted to continue his campaigns. That was interesting, that he had plans of conquering the Arabian Peninsula. He had plans of conquering Northern Africa and Carthage. I think if he had another ten, fifteen years of life, the map of the world and world history would have been very different. Probably we would never have had the Roman Empire. Yeah. Because he would have conquered Rome. If you have the tactical and strategic genius of Alexander, with the battle-hardened army, with all the resources of the East,

• 48:44Speaker 01

  I don't think that the Romans could stand against it. But when he died, he had two minor sons who were used as pawns in the political games. Afterwards, both of them were assassinated, a few years later. And that empire was dissolved into three, then they became four kingdoms, then they became, actually, you had started to have spin-ups from all different kingdoms. The kingdoms were splintered. And did Greece go back to city-states? Greece, we still had the city-states, but most of Greece was under the control of the Macedonians. So you had Macedonian garrisons in the cities.

• 49:25Speaker 01

  Important fortresses were under Macedonian control. The Kingdom of the Ptolemies, who were ruling Egypt, who wanted to fight against, to undermine the Macedonians, were supporting the Greeks when they wanted to start a rebellion against the Macedonian garrisons. It happened a couple of times, but with meagre successes, just for a few years. And that's why, when the Romans finally arrived and they defeated for the first time the Kingdom of Macedonia, they declared their dependence...

• 50:07Speaker 01

  of the Greeks. It was very fashionable of declaring the independence of the Greeks. But always independent men, okay, you can take care of your own affairs. But we call the Sots in important issues of diplomacy and.

• 50:20Shane Parrish?

  Independent to an extent.

• 50:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, you have a municipal independence.

• 50:24Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 50:25Speaker 01

  Okay, and within your territory, outside your territory.

• 50:29Shane Parrish?

  It's very much how politics still works today, right? Like you have municipal dependence and then provincial or.

• 50:35Speaker 01

  Modern Xerxes say that in the fourth century, we see the institution of the city-state started declining. And you can say that politically it did because now the Greek world was not all that mosaic of small or large city-states was interacted with each other. In order to survive, you either had to pledge your allegiance or to be subjugated by one of the great kingdoms, or you had to participate in a federation or an alliance, which were formed to stand against the these kingdoms, where again you would lose part of your independence.

• 51:16Speaker 01

  But on the other hand, the idea of the city-state as a model of civic organization thrived during that time. First of all, you have all these new cities that were created by Alexander the Great. They were modeled on the system of the city-state. They would have their citizens, their city councils, there are the agora, the theater, the sanctuary, the gymnasium, where people would work out and educated. Then you have several more cities that were created by the successors of Alexander. So the model of the city-state, I would say that it thrived throughout

• 51:59Speaker 01

  as an organization system, not politically, yes, it had declined because they had lost, they didn't have the resources. To cope with the greater powers of the time.

• 52:12Shane Parrish?

  If we were going to start reading about Greek history, where would you start? What would you recommend people start with in terms of they want to come visit, but before they come, they want to learn about?

• 52:24Speaker 01

  Well, definitely, they must, they should read a general overview of Greek history. And they're a couple in English. And then, again, as a general, for general reading, there are books, say, Companion to Greek History, or the Oxford Dictionary of Classical Greece, or the Cambridge Dictionary of Classical Greece, where they would get, first of all, the frame of Greek history, but also details about politics, about religion, about everyday life, about warfare, about all that, about technology.

• 53:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, for ancient Greece, I think that should be the approach. And then, of course, but Greece is not just, it's ancient history. Greece had a rich history during the Middle Ages, and, I would say, in the Middle Ages, it was especially rich in military events. And then, and modern Greece, which is very interesting to see, the wave of ascendency and collapse, ascendency and collapse, triumph and disaster, now we're in the disaster curve, down curve. Then there are also books have been written recently about this.

• 53:54Speaker 01

  So, yes, I think first, a general overview about ancient Greek history and its, and the different aspects of its culture, and then move on to the, to the modern period, because the modern history of Greece is unknown to the general audience. When they hear Greece... They know the Acropolis, maybe Mycenae, which is the late Bronze Age, because it's related to Troy. But the modern history of Greece, it's what happened here in the Second World War, or happened after the Second World War. Because knowing the modern history of Greece, they will understand why we have this situation

• 54:38Speaker 01

  now, in the last five years.

• 54:41Shane Parrish?

  You interact with tourists all the time. What most surprises them about Greece?

• 54:48Speaker 01

  Well, first of all, especially in the last five years, a large number of people are surprised that we still operate, that the museums are open. And because I've been told, you see they're doing construction. I say, yes, why? Because you're bankrupt. Well, not exactly, because we are, but not exactly bankrupt. Yeah, because they get through the media completely...

• 55:18Shane Parrish?

  A distorted view.

• 55:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, a distorted view of what's going on in Greece. Even when, for example, we had in 2010, 2011, when we had all these demonstrations and riots, people believed that they would come to Athens, and they would find a post-apocalyptic landscape of buildings on fire, police patrolling in the streets, helicopters, not even, no. And probably Batman jumping from roof to roof, but anyway.

• 55:46Shane Parrish?

  I guess they've never been to France either.

• 55:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, we had situations like this, but they were just for a couple of days, confined in a very small area of the city. You would be, I will give you one example. It was in 2011, May. I had a tour on the Acropolis, and then we come to the Agora, and then we had lunch in the Plaka, which is not very far from Syndagma Square where the demonstrations take place. So we finished the tour, and I made the mistake of switching on my radio to listen to the news, and I listened to that, there is a demonstration, and the National Garden is on fire.

• 56:30Speaker 01

  Say what? The National Garden is on fire? So I walk towards the square, which is just, what? About five minutes away if you are in a hurry. Because I want to see the National Garden on fire. And what was the National Garden on fire? Just a pine tree, slightly cinched, on the fence. Now, if I was in my house, being in Athenia, and I wouldn't, I would believe that, yeah, the National Garden was burned by the demonstrators. So you get what people listen and see through the media and the idea they have about the city. So, yes, they are, I think that's when they are surprised about the current situation.

• 57:15Speaker 01

  Other times, other people are surprised that the archaeological sites don't close at 3 o'clock. Because there are some archaeological sites that even in the summer, close at 3 o'clock. And, yeah, then you have to explain to them that the Greek Ministry of Culture hasn't got the budget to hire the extra personnel. And they think that it's better to have their sites closed instead of hiring extra people.

• 57:40Shane Parrish?

  So I have to ask the last question. If we are going to spend 10 days, if somebody is going to spend 10 days in Greece, knowing what you know about it, how would you recommend that people spend those 10 days?

• 57:52Speaker 01

  Definitely, a couple of, maybe three days in Athens as an introduction. And to allow also time for the deadlock. Because arriving from a Transatlantic flight and then going immediately for a tour is not always the best idea.

• 58:09Shane Parrish?

  I know, I had three hours of sleep last night.

• 58:12Speaker 01

  Also, in Athens, it may sound strange, but you can take the tram and you can be at very nice beaches in just an hour, maybe half an hour. Then do a small, you can do, let's say three days, then you can do a small tour of the Peloponnese. Or maybe you can use Athens as a base and you can do a full day tour, you go to the city of Naupalyon and to visit Mycenae, which is a Bronze Age citadel, and to a very impressive site. The city of Naupalyon is also very, very beautiful. It was the first capital of Greece, unfortunately for Naupalyon, the capital was transferred to Athens.

• 58:57Shane Parrish?

  Wait, why was that fortunate for them that it was transferred?

• 58:59Speaker 01

  Because the city, it remained a very beautiful, small city. While Athens was also a very beautiful city, especially during the development of the 60s. I don't know if you have walked through the placca already, but imagine that until 1960, most of the city of Athens had very beautiful architecture of the 19th and early 20th century, and a few apartment office buildings of the modern style. But with all the development of the 60s, all the old buildings were condemned. So I would say Athens had if we were wise and we have kept Athens as it was in the 60s,

• 59:43Speaker 01

  we have been a city as beautiful as Prague, even more beautiful. Northern Greece is usually out of the itineraries, and that's a pity because it's a very beautiful area and with also very rich archaeology. So if you are interested about Alexander the Great and this period, definitely a couple of days in Thessaloniki or in the cities close to Thessaloniki. And the islands, now the islands can, I know that people definitely would like to go to Santorini and Mykonos, because that's where everyone is going.

• 1:00:18Speaker 01

  But I would recommend, if you want to visit the Cycladic Islands, to visit Naxos, Paros. Yeah, I think that in 10 days, that would be, 10 days of Burgling enough just to have a

• 1:00:30Shane Parrish?

  A good taste.

• 1:00:31Speaker 01

  A taste. So Athens, the mainland, the Peloponnese, and then the islands. Or you can do, you can visit, just fly to Athens, to Thessaloniki, which saves a lot of time. Fly to Thessaloniki.

• 1:00:49Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 1:00:50Speaker 01

  Use Thessaloniki as a base to visit the sites related to Alexander and that period. And then return to Athens and go to the islands.

• 1:01:01Shane Parrish?

  What's one part of Athens that people don't see, because they probably don't know about it or don't think about it, that you would recommend they check out? Maybe a historic site, maybe a cultural site?

• 1:01:14Speaker 01

  Well, historic site, the site of the Karamakos, which was the formal cemetery of the ancient city, is usually, because it's the furthest away from all the sites. And, well, usually we don't go there. And it's a very nice, it's a very, it's a beautiful site. And very interesting.

• 1:01:38Speaker 01

  Now, other areas of Athens? Well, I would say there is a residential area called Metz. It's a small area, but it's not touristy at all. But it worth just, say, just the hour to walk through, to see. Because it has its own particular character, architecturally, and the way it is organized.

• 1:02:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, these areas that personally I don't see people, tourists, they don't visit those areas a lot.

• 1:02:08Speaker 01

  And then there are other, well, depending, if you want to see the, an interesting area, not very beautiful, but it's interesting, is the area of Gazza. It is on the, it's very close to the Karamaikos and it used to be an industrial neighborhood. So from where you can see the construct, this large brown building.

• 1:02:30Shane Parrish?

  Yep.

• 1:02:30Speaker 01

  There is that general area.

• 1:02:32Shane Parrish?

  Okay.

• 1:02:33Speaker 01

  And it is an area in flux. So you have the, the old industrial buildings which are used for, as entertainment venues or as cultural venues. You have small houses where refugees and immigrants are staying. And then next to them you have the lofts and super modern architecture. And it's also one of the, has become one of the main entertainment areas of the city. Has been gentrified. And it's good, for some people it's good. And also it's an excellent gallery of street art. So just, it is an area where, well, people go, but, Greek, Athenians go, but not a lot

• 1:03:18Speaker 01

  of tourists. Because usually people visit Athens for the first time, they go, well, they walk through the plaka, they walk in the area around the acropolis, they may go to Syndagma Square, maybe at the Hill of Lycabertus. Sometimes they don't have the time to, to visit other areas. And it's difficult, I was thinking from the perspective of a tourist guide, to tell them, okay, you have only one day in Athens, let's go to Gazza.

• 1:03:46Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 1:03:46Speaker 01

  And then, or let's go to the, to the hills of, of the, to, outside of the acropolis where you can see an ancient street and the ruins of, of houses. Yeah, it's, it's difficult to recommend things like that, because people say, okay, we want to see the highlights, not just a random ancient street, which may be even more interesting than the Parthenon.

• 1:04:09Shane Parrish?

  Aristotle, this has been fascinating. I think I'm gonna have to come back next year to learn all about the Greek gods and the myths.

• 1:04:15Speaker 01

  Oh yeah, it's, that's an inexhaustible, uh, subject.

• 1:04:20Shane Parrish?

  We'll save that for another time. Thank you so much, I really appreciate this.

• 1:04:23Speaker 01

  Thank you for having me.

• 1:04:28Shane Parrish?

  Hey, thanks for listening and I hope you enjoyed the conversation with Aristotle as much as I did. Having had the opportunity to speak one-on-one with him gave me a greater appreciation for the city. I'd highly encourage that if you're curious about a place you're traveling, seek out a guide for professional tour to enhance your experience and learning along the way. In the second episode from my trip to Greece, I talk about one of my favorite subjects: wine. I hope you check it out. Thanks.