re: #378 The Ghost of a Flea

Like, the magic trick is so effective that somehow people read Thucydides, who lays out the politicking and demagogy and deal-cutting very clearly, and somehow come away having not absorbed anything that he described.

“The Greeks repelled the Persians” is a more emotionally fulfilling story than “all these fucking cities were out there hustling because Greece is kind of land-poor.”

Thucydides doesn’t write about the Persian wars, he’s talking about the Athenian League vs. Sparta and its allies.