The map takeover stuff does nothing special. It gets you some XP and loot at the end of the battles, but it doesn’t influence the game in any mechanical way.
Well, the real war sort of petered out with Sparta more or less on top, but with little to show for it other than a period of slow decline of the Greeks and the eventual rise of the Macedonians. In the end, maybe Ubi’s meaningless push-pull area control mechanic winds up being an accurate simulation!
The narrative about Greece’s “slow decline” has come about simply because Thucydides – ostensibly the greatest of the Greek historians as per nineteenth-century discourse – didn’t write about the fourth century BC (because he was dead). Arguably, the Greek city-states were more prosperous than ever in the fourth century BC. Athens did better than ever. The “rise” of the Macedonians was Philip II deciding at one point to annex (most of) the city-states and modern historians shifting their perspective to what he (and Alexander) got up to, then reinterpreting the period after the Peloponnesian War in this strictly teleological light. There was no slow rise on the part of the Macedon nor a steady decline on the part of the Greek cities.
Culturally speaking, Classical Greece reached its pinnacle in the fourth century BC.
This is no excuse. Stop slacking Thucydides and die later!
I’m only maybe 2/3 of the way through, but I was hoping there would be more coverage of (or at least insinuation about) the Persians playing Athens and Sparta against each other. I guess the cult kind of took on that role.
The Atlantis dlcs were my favorite part of the game as a whole. I skipped First Blades, though. I liked the mythological stuff in Odyssey more than I liked the main story, which I found to be a drag.
Just to be absolute sure, I was being sarcastic. Thucydides’ reputation as a historian is no doubt severely overestimated (cue those 19th century scholars, equally and fortunately as dead as the middling Athenian admiral), just as Xenophon is horrendously underestimated in modern scholarship. Xenophon, BTW, is worth reading if you’re interested in the history of the (first few decades of the) fourth century BC.
People had much cooler names back then.
“Xenophon” --does that work out to be “foreign-language speaker”?
Interesting. Not my area of specialty at all, so I’m glad we have someone for whom it is. I always thought of the war in terms of a sort of less than satisfactory victory for Sparta, and I never really hear much about Athens after that (though that might be as you say because of the lack of an enthusiastic chronicler).
More: “strange sound”.
Xenophon gets short shrift by modern scholars, as this tumblr of a friend of mine (who is actually the expert when it comes to Greece in the fifth and fourth centuries BC!) documents. But that wasn’t always the case, as evidenced by the fact that he’s the only Greek author from the ancient world whose entire body of work has survived to the present day. And all of those books are well worth reading, including the Hellenika, his follow-up to Thucydides’ (unfinished) history. He was also an experienced military man, who had led an army of Greek mercenaries back from behind enemy (Persian) lines – the story is told in his Anabasis.
Oh, for the Spartans it felt like a decisive victory, and no doubt for the Athenians it was a grievous defeat. After all, the Athenians being forced to disband the Delian League and tearing down their Long Walls. (Of course, the Athenians almost immediately set about rebuilding the walls and later founded a new Delian League.) Also, the Persians continued to meddle heavily in Greek affairs, pitting city-states against each other by first favouring one, then another; something they had a great deal of experience in.
Athens continued to play an important role as a cultural centre, which was to become even larger during the Hellenistic period and after Greece had been absorbed the Roman Empire (by contrast, Sparta dwindled and became an ancient tourist attraction). The fourth century, especially the period ca. 400-350 BC, was, among other things, the Age of Plato – I actually used that to build an entire issue of Ancient History around it back when I was still that magazine’s editor.
I actually like the fort takeover. It is like base take over in Metal Gear Solid 5, but easier (sometimes too easy). It showcases the combat mechanics in ACO: you can sneak, fight or snipe your way in, or a combination of above.
If it is fun, I don’t mind more-of-the-same. (Oops I used the eff word.)
I’ve worked with Republic a bit, in teaching a first-year gen ed class, but am by no means any sort of authority on it. It always seemed to me that Plato (and Socrates, it’s hard to tell which voice your getting sometimes) was rather down on Athens and Athenian democracy. In much of Republic, he comes across as somewhat sympathetic to the Spartans, or at least to some of their world view. He certainly doesn’t seem to be very enamored of democracy, Athenian or otherwise.
That is a part of the First Blades DLC,which I found interesting and fun.
Aristocrats/rich people didn’t (and don’t) like democracy, no. Plato, Xenophon, and (nearly) everyone else whose writings have survived from ancient times were part of the elite who, of course, preferred to disenfranchise as many people from outside their own little clique as possible. “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.”
Well, Plato’s ideal (ha, see what I did there) form of government was rule under the wise hand of the philosopher king, so sure.
The problem with that is that these seem rather rare in history. For every Marcus Aurelius, there are too many Caligula’s, Commodus’s, Caracalla, Nero, etc.
You do seem to have hit on the core of the problem.
It’s even more weird than that, too. Socrates doesn’t just outline a benevolent despotism. He outlines a system based on the quasi-mystical ability to know exactly what a person is best and naturally suited to do, and then creates a mechanism by which we would create a (completely made up) mythology that would justify dividing people based on their supposed natural qualities (the Myth of the Metals). Because theses people would, in his view, be perfectly happy because they were doing exactly what they are cosmically suited to do (shades of dharma here), and thus in harmony with their ideal role more or less, he sees this as just. Of course, he hedges his bets through stripping the top strata of society of personal wealth, family ties, or personal status, raising their kids in creches, and distancing them from the masses entirely. The masses can have their kids and money and stuff, but no power. The supposed philosopher kings, who make the journey out of the cave and go back again to drag everyone out kicking and screaming, work with this system, and so in many ways are just as much prisoners of it.
At least, that’s my own probably wobbly gloss on a book that even after twelve years now of teaching it I still don’t fully get.
I knew, so was I! I found it comedic to complain about a historic figure who died too soon. Dying before your work is done is no excuse!
I think people take Plato and Aristotle too far out of their own contexts. The Allegory of the Cave is clearly in some ways related to Parmenides’ Way of Opinion vs the Way of Truth, and Socrates’ whole project is related to essentially confronting the mess of things Parmenides made. But if you think about it that’s a very academic concern and excerise, and Xenophon’s Socrates is probably closer to the day to day reality of Socrates, and Plato’s Socrates more the refined, distilled and philosophized version, as Plato could see the gleaming nuggets that Socrates was getting at but probably never really refined.
Maybe it’s just me but I feel like the big problem Socrates and Plato faced was the shock that Parmenides’ Way of Truth made in the Greek world - there was no such thing as objective reality, only the person who could best argue. The absurdity of genuinely arguing that movement was impossible or that there were not parts, only one undivided whole, in the face of such obvious and self-evident contradictory evidence really seemed to cause a bit of a local furor that might seem minor today but was dramatic at the time since it gave rise to this Sophistical argumentation that there was no such thing as good or bad, just one person out-arguing another.
The shock of this rejection of absolute reality seemed in Socrates to cause him a bit of a philosophical panic and so he proposed, without really understanding all the ins and outs of it all, this idea that “floating free” somewhere up there, objectively reality still exists, beyond the reach of annoying Sophistical arguments.
Funny enough we’re closer to Plato’s Athens then the West has been for many generations. A society that doesn’t believe in objective reality, that makes the worse the better, that abuses the powers they have for petty and vindictive and oftentimes brutal policies with their neighbors and themselves, and it’s easy to see why Plato was no big fan of Democracy. But of course back then people could migrate from one city to and live under another regime but still breathe the same “air”, so a rejection of Democracy wasn’t this earth shattering embrace of despotism. It was more like one little state in the Holy Roman Empire switching from Lutheranism to Calvinism. Or at least, that’s how I imagine they saw things, that rejecting or accepting Democracy wasn’t an existential decision.