I have been reading a book on Greek history lately unrelated to me watching Nolan’s Odyssey and it’s so funny watching spider man talk about the Greeks like they’re a unified civilization because when you look at early Greek history it’s like “And then the Greek speaking peoples couldn’t stop fighting each other for two minutes to try and deal with the bigger problem” over and over again
Greek cities under the Roman Empire had their first ever prolonged period of not trying to stab each other’s necks in hundreds of years and it was weird. They finally had the time to sit down and do some archival work. Most of the surviving Ancient Greek literature we have exists because during the Roman period they actually had a long enough break from raping and pillaging each other to compile some texts and write some history commentaries.
