The Athenian Empire (Bad History)

***History Summarized: The Athenian Empire*** is the first episode of the History Summarized series by Blue. In this first episode, Blue discusses the Athenian Empire in all of its extortionate glory. Please note that this episode is a part of the Bad History Playlist, a list of episodes that Blue has decided are not up to snuff on OSP quality.

## Introduction

The episode begins with a Star Wars title crawl as the Imperial March plays in the background for thematic effect. Red explains that this as-of-yet unknown anomaly in the upload schedule is because she more time to finish Dante's Inferno.

Blue then begins by saying there are two 5th centuries: the cool BCE one and the lame CE one. He then begins to talk about the Athenian Empire of the cool 5th century BCE.

## Summary

One day, a bit before 500 BCE, the Athenians got drunk and decided that they didn't need kings anymore. Instead, they began rule by the people, specifically the upper class white dudes, in what they called democracy. This worked and Athens was doing pretty well for 15 years, at which point the Persians showed up in 490 BCE.

The Persians sailed into Marathon with 25,000 troops compared to the Athenians' 10,000. However, the Athenians won anyhow thanks to the wizardry of good strategy, and the Persians went back home. Athens then celebrated their victory and poorly thought that the Persians wouldn't show up again. Unfortunately, the previous king's son, Xerxes, came again but with hundreds of thousands of more troops. They then proceeded to defeat Athens and burn the Acropolis because the Athenians were too busy chilling with their democracy to notice them before it was too late.

After that loss, the Athenians sent out a call for help, an opportunity which Leonidas, the king of Sparta, took eagerly. While he did a *300*, Athens built up a beefy navy at Salamis to fight on water. In 480 BCE, the Athenians and Persians battled at Salamis. However, the Persians high volume of ship meant they were very squished and couldn't move much, so the Athenians just rammed them, causing them to sink. Persia then again took the Walk of Shame back home, inspiring Aeschylus' play *The Persians*.

Athens, after a bit of reflection staring at their burnt city, decided to build a powerful navy powered by the Trireme in order to be ready for future conflicts. This was an expensive venture, so they decided on extortion to pay for the whole thing. To do this, Athens established the Delian League, named so because the main treasury was situated on the island of Delos. Their main method was condescendingly threatening the other members of the league to pay up with soldiers, ships, and money for protection from Persia, or Athens would show them how sweet their Triremes were.

By the 450s BCE, Athens had gotten stupid rich on their extortion scheme, so Pericles, a prominent politician, called for the construction of a giant temple to Athena on the currently burnt Acropolis to show how awesome they were. The Athenian assembly loved this and built the giant Parthenon on the Delian League's dime. Blue takes a moment here to appreciate how the entire thing is curved, not flat, in order to make the building look perfect. When the Parthenon was completed nine years later, Pericles got the assembly to decide to move the money in treasury on Delos to the giant treasury they built into the Parthenon. The Athenians loved this, but the rest of the league didn't share the sentiment as their money was being taken away. Unfortunately, it turns out the Delian League was a big lie as the Athenians and Persians had negotiated a peace treaty years ago.

Sparta was pretty miffed at this, so they formed the Peloponnesian League to counter Athens' Delian League. They got into a war, Pericles made a big speech about how Athens would persevere, and then Sparta started a plague epidemic by throwing corpses into Athens, which killed Pericles. His death caused everyone to realize that the gods wouldn't really protect them all that much, and Athens descended into an anarchist state for a year.

Athens, despite their time with chaos, did not learn their lesson about being good people and decided to go out and extort the neutral island of Melos. Then they butchered some peacetime by attacking Spartan interests in Sicily, losing most of their navy in the process and leaving most of the sailors shipwrecked. They took their sweet time rescuing the few survivors, who, after complaining about being almost left for dead, were executed. Sparta then took advantage of this and finally defeated Athens, ending their little democracy thing they had going on.

## Conclusion

Blue concludes by saying that despite the plague and losing to Sparta in the end, the Athenians still had a strong culture and military victories, having beaten the Persians twice. He then gives them a 10/10.

The video concludes with another title crawl, this time from Blue's perspective, where he makes the argument that this is basically Portal 2.