seangabb
Published 23 Mar 2026Greece: A Brief History, c.700 BC – 500 AD
What drove the greatest invasion force of the ancient world to march against Greece?
In this lecture, we move from the aftermath of the Battle of Marathon to the momentous decision of King Xerxes of Persia to launch a full-scale invasion of mainland Greece in 480 BC. We examine the political, strategic, and psychological factors behind the Persian decision, including the legacy of Darius, the revolt in Egypt, and the internal debates within the Persian court.
Drawing on Herodotus and other ancient sources, this video explores:
– The consequences of Marathon for both Persia and Greece
– Xerxes’ consolidation of power
– The famous debate at the Persian court
– The role of honour, revenge, and imperial ideologyThis is the essential starting point for understanding how a regional conflict escalated into one of the defining wars of the ancient world.
Part of a full lecture series on the Persian Wars.
August 13, 2026
The Ancient Greeks 04 – The Persian Invasion 1 – Xerxes Decides
QotD: Marx was right about “class consciousness”
Marx thought the Proletariat would develop class consciousness — that is, solidarity based on their mutual exploitation by the “capitalists” and “bourgeoisie” — and from that all else would flow. Lenin modified that, arguing that The Proletariat would never achieve class consciousness without a “Vanguard Party”. That’s why it’s Marxism-Leninism to this day. Lenin was closer to correct, but with this crucial difference: Instead of leading the Laboring Masses to Socialism, the Vanguard Party has decided “hey fuck the Laboring Masses, we’re getting ours“.
Marx called religion “the opiate of the masses” for a reason — by dulling their pain, it prevented them from realizing their true class position, thus achieving class consciousness, thus sparking The Revolution. What religion really does, of course, is satisfy a deep yearning in the human soul. There is more to life than shit, shoes, and bread. Karl Marx didn’t want to hear that, because his religious yearning was satisfied by his substitute god, Dialectical Materialism, and the half-assed (but very real) ceremonial it produced. Again, there’s a reason every Leftwinger practically from the French Revolution looked like [this]
I don’t know how you say “fake and gay” in Russian, but every single thing in that photograph is fake and gay. A pose. An affectation. And as with their look, so with their behavior. Leftwingers are, and always have been, famously boorish. They have no idea how longshoremen actually act, but they sure think they know, and so that’s how they act — like the worst caricature of a crude, illiterate, drunken longshoreman.
(I don’t know any longshoremen either, but I do know some folks who make a living from the sweat of their brows, and they’d turn Lenin’s head around for him if he came to their neighborhood and started acting like that. The Laboring Masses might indeed be “rude mechanicals” in Shakespeare’s sense — meaning, without too much formal education — but they’re surely not rude in the behavioral sense, because in their world, running your mouth gets you punched in it).
Dressing and acting like that is, quite literally, a religious ceremony for them … and ceremonial can only take place in a designated space, a liminal space that the community respects. A priest can indeed hold a mass on a street corner, but only if the passersby have enough residual respect for the institution of religion not to beat and rob the worshipers while their backs are turned.
The intelligentsia never understood that consciously. They sure as hell understood it unconsciously, though, which is why they immediately self-segregated — getting “sent down to the countryside, to reconnect with the laboring masses” was one of the worst punishments Mao’s boys could dish out to one of their mandarins, and again, there’s a reason for that. The upshot is, the intelligentsia, the Apparat, the Cloud People, whatever you want to call them, are the only ones who developed “class consciousness” in the Marxist-Leninist revolutionary sense …
… and their class consciousness is entirely oppositional. They are not us. That’s their sole criterion for virtue. Whatever we like, they dislike. Whatever we do, they must not do; and whatever we eschew, they must embrace.
Severian, “On Losing the Cold War”, Founding Questions, 2022-07-02.
