From Marathon and On

Welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything along the way. I’m Emily Maxson here with Greg Uttinger and Rachel Voytek, and we’re on to the Greco-Persian Wars today. Last time we talked about Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther, and the restoration, so we’re getting into the Hellenistic period.

Hellenic period.

Sorry. They should be the same thing but they’re not. They’re very different things, in fact. The Hellenic period is when Greece is rising to the top of the world, overcoming Medo-Persia, and we’re going to talk about that process today, the Greco-Persian Wars. Is Marathon the first?

There’s an interesting thing about that. Wikipedia allows us to see what the world of scholarship said as of about a year ago, before it gets updated and changed again. As I was looking through Wikipedia refreshing my memory, that and other sites as well said, “Marathon is the turning point of the Greco-Persian Wars,” and I said, “What?” As far as I know it was the first major battle.

Is it the first major battle that the Greeks won, and that’s why it’s the first one that we remember?

Essentially yes. We haven’t talked about Greece yet to lay in all the background, so everybody out there, you’ve got to take this by faith, and we’ll try to fill in the gaps as we talk about Greece, and that’s going to take a while.

The Greeks were defined not so much by the peninsula and isthmus on which they lived, but by their descent from common ancestors, their participation in the Olympic Games, their common language and so on. They were Japhetic people who had split into many groups, and many of them eventually made it to what the rest of the world calls Greece.

They still call themselves Helos after their mythical or historical ancestor Helen, possibly the one that the Bible calls Elishah, but somewhere back in there there was this common Japhetic ancestor, but the people didn’t all splash down in Greece. Some of them settled along the coast of what we call Turkey – Asia Minor. So when Persia came along and began conquering its world, Asia Minor was high on the list of things to be conquered, and Persia did that quite successfully.

There was already a kingdom in charge of a lot of this called Lydia. If you read Herodotus, he gives all kinds of background about Lydia and their king. This is the king who didn’t listen to the Oracle about, “If you go to war you’ll destroy a great nation.”

The Greek city-states along in there had not been terribly independent to begin with, and Persia came along and subdued everything. So after awhile those Greek city-states decided that the rulers that Persia had put in place to keep an eye on them were not people they liked a whole lot, and they began to one by one throw off these – the Greek word is tyrant, and a tyrant is simply somebody who seized a kingdom without the proper authority. Here the proper authority would be Persia.

In doing this they realized, “We’re up against the mightiest empire on the earth. Maybe we should whistle for some help,” and they whistled to the Greek mainland, and only Athens and one other city-state responded and began sending weapons, troops, and supplies, to the point that eventually they took out what was now the Persian city of Sardis and burned it to the ground.

The Persians didn’t appreciate this and came in and chased them off and re-subdued these cities, so technically these were Greek peoples. They just weren’t from Greece. They shared the same ancestry and background, but they were not living on the Greek mainland, except for Athens and Sparta.

It’s at this point that Darius the Great looks across and says, “Oh, there’s more of these guys and they’re kind of interfering in my empire. I need to tell them to knock that off. They need to recognize who they’re dealing with,” so he sends a little message that says, “Give me some of your land and water as symbols of tribute,” and Athens and Sparta throw the guys into wells and ditches and say, “There’s your water and earth – ha!” and that precipitates the Battle of Marathon.

Had there been conflicts? Yes, but not with the Greek mainland particularly. They were primarily with the Ionian city-states in Asia Minor in Turkey. Somehow in growing up and going through high school and college I missed all of that. I mean I knew that was there, but I never heard anyone say that that’s where the Greek wars actually began, because in the simple nationalistic fashion of someone born in the 20th century Greece is Greece, but not so much then. So the Greek wars had begun.

In essence, Marathon is a turning point in that the Greeks win and therefore, yes, the historians highlight it as, “Wow, isn’t this great because this is where the champions of freedom and rationality begin to turn the tables on the forces of despotism and luxuriousness and paganism and all that.”

That’s interesting because in some ways the Greeks do owe the Persians things, because the Persian push to go more western to the mainland of Greece forces the city-states to stop fighting each other and instead fight the Persian threat, such as Sparta and Athens. Many other city-states were regularly at war with one another. They had a lot of their own problems, so Marathon is one of those times where they stop and actually look at an outside threat rather than their neighbors.

And we’re told that Athens looked at Sparta and said, “Come and help us, because here’s an outside threat and we can all get behind turning them back,” but the Spartans apparently were observing some kind of religious festival or something and thus could not come at that point, so the Athenian armies met the Persian forces at this plain called Marathon.

The Athenians had superior advantages in some ways, and apparently superior tactics, but both sides waited for the other to make a move. The Greeks had forced the battle at a place where the Persian calvary – and the Persians were really good with horses, firing arrows off horses and all that – but it was a marshy plain with some hard and high ground that the horses really couldn’t get into. So the Persians didn’t want to commit so much without their horses, and the Greeks were waiting for the Persians to do something, and they were looking back and forth.

And then, depending on who exactly you believe or how you interpret it, the Persians apparently pulled their horses back and said, “Well, we can’t use them anyway. Let’s put them on the ships and send them on. They can attack Athens, which is now deserted because the army is here, while we deal with these people.” So that or something triggered the Greek assault.

The Greeks take credit for being the ones who started this. They may have been responding to that, or maybe the Persians said, “Let’s go get them,” and the Greeks said, “Finally they’re out in the open. Let’s get them now.” The battle happens and the Persians lose rather badly.

There are lots of mythical stories that go along. People claim to see King Theseus of the labyrinth and the minotaur and all that, fighting ghost-like with his armies against the Persians, and other such manifestations. Whether we should put any credit in there of were they facing demonic delusions or do people just like good ghost stories, we don’t know.

When it was over – and again there are multiple versions. At least we’ve got some good records. They just don’t all agree with each other. But a messenger was sent back to Athens to say in so many words, “We won!”

The later stories say that he ran the distance, which was about 40 km or 26 miles, and discarded everything he could along the way so he could get there and make it. He pushed and he pushed and it was hard and he was losing his breath and his heart was beating hard against his chest, and he bursts into the town and says, “We won!” and falls down dead. Whether or not that actually happened we don’t know. Later it’s repeated in the writings of Plutarch, but the earlier writers don’t mention the dying part. Anyway, that runner’s journey later on by older historians and then again at the end of the 19th century will be raised to the level of athletic myth.

The Olympic Games didn’t have a marathon because that was kind of long, but the new Olympics, in order to gain public support and prestige and impress the world said, “Let’s put a really really long race in there.”

“How long?”

“Well, that marathon thing. How long was that?”

“It was about 40 km.”

“Well yeah, let’s do something like that.”

It eventually settled down to the exact measurements it has today when the Olympics were held in England, and Queen Alexandra wanted it to start on the lawns of Windsor Castle so the little royals could look out and watch, and then come back around to where the royal box was set at the end, which was a little further than where the finish line had been, so that the royals could be there to see the end of the race, at least that’s the story.

It seems like good reasoning to me.

And from that point on, that fixed the exact length of what a marathon would be. I was reading through my history notes and saw, “Hmm, I don’t say any of that. I need to go back and edit my history notes apparently.” Well, I’m teaching world history next year so it will give me a chance.

That was one of my moments of having my younger year history class mind blown, because either I had assumed or I had been taught that the particular length that that runner had gone was 26.2 miles and that’s why it was that. I saw somewhere else that it was 25 miles or 40 km and I went, “No, no. I know this. It’s 26.2 miles. What’s wrong?” so I started doing the same thing and went, “Oh, okay. That’s a little bit of a letdown. All right.”

But if you’re an Anglophile it’s great.

It’s one more piece of trivia for when we eventually all go on Jeopardy.

Yes. Well, this upset Darius’s plans. He withdrew most of his armies, who got sick along the way and many died, and that was a rather dismal end to his enterprising career.

His successor is named Xerxes I. He’s the son of Darius, I believe, and he decides, “Well, you know, we started well – bigger army, better preparation, a little more strategy and tactics. These Greek people are annoying. We need to take them out.”

One of the problems was that the Greeks aren’t great at a lot of things, but they do have a navy and they do have a rugged coastline. It’s not exactly always easy to get your ships there and disembark your people and get them settled without being harassed or threatened. So Xerxes says, “Let’s just march there,” more or less.

So he and his armies marched to the Dardanelles, that little strait that separates Asia Minor from the Macedonian coastline, and arranged for little floatie things that they could just walk over to get to where they belonged – barges and such – and he brought his army down from the north. This is again a story that probably every schoolchild still knows, despite our horrible education system, because it’s been in the movies. I believe the last movie was called The 300. Does anyone remember that?

Yes.

Oh, yeah. That was with Sparta?

Yeah, this is Sparta. This time Sparta was ready to fight, but Xerxes found himself going through a very, very narrow pass, Thermopylae, where there were hot springs, which is what that word means. The Spartans and friends – because it wasn’t just Sparta there. We’re often told, “Oh, it was just these 300 Spartans against millions or whatever.” No, there were a lot of city-states that were represented, but the Spartans prided themselves on being the best warriors in Greece, so they were going to take the point here.

When it was time to withdraw, they stayed but they weren’t even the only ones who stayed to fight. They were the ones who stayed and fought and died to the last man, so give them credit where credit is due. They were formidable warriors and Xerxes found very quickly that whereas his soldiers – his immortals they were called – could take out anybody, if you just sent enough of these immortals at your enemy army you could wipe them out.

Unfortunately, there’s this little narrow pass thing and you can’t get many people through at a time, and the Greeks were fighting for their lives. They were fighting for their families. They were fighting for their homes and their future, because if the Persians got through it looked like that would be the end of everything.

For a day or so they held it successfully, but then a traitor went to Xerxes and said, “Hey, Your Majesty, there’s a way around all this. There’s this mountain pass. Let me show your guys and I’m sure you’ll be very generous with your rewards.” And so this traitor shows them and it becomes a synonym for the boogey man. Mothers would tell children, “Don’t do that or the boogey man (this guy) will come and get you,” because they couldn’t think of anything more evil than betraying all of Greece for money.

I think his name was Ephialtes. I probably didn’t pronounce it correctly, but I’m reading the letters that are there.

Good. I don’t think I’ve ever seen it in print, I’ve just heard it pronounced and it’s been a long time.

Once the Spartans realize, “We’ve got a problem here,” they do tell the other Greeks to go home. Many do. Some stay, and the Spartans fight a rear-guard action to the last men, and yes there were about 300 of them, and it goes down in history as one of the great battles for freedom and such. From their point of view it was, no doubt. But with that done, the Spartans have a clear shot to Athens.

Is Thermopylae where “Molon Labe” came into use – the famous Spartan response?

Yes, “Come and take it.”

You see that sometimes on bumper stickers of something when people have done Spartan races.

Sorry, missed that. I don’t do Spartan races.

Athens is wide open and they are very concerned because their Spartan allies are down and out. They send to the Oracle in Delphi – and again we’re assuming a lot here. We’re assuming that you know that Sparta is a Greek city, and you know what the Oracle in Delphi is. We’ll fill in all of this later when we get there, so for now pretend you understand if you don’t.

The Oracle was an oracle of Apollo. He revealed himself to a particular priestess, who under the influence of certain fumes from the earth or elsewhere, would go into trances and babble things, and the priests would interpret for the inquirer what the message from Apollo was.

The first message was not too hopeful, but then the Oracle spoke again and it seemed at the end like there was something. It had to do with, “You’re safe behind wooden walls,” and something about Salamis, which was a bay around about the city. People weren’t quite sure what to make of that.

A military leader who would quickly become an admiral, Themistocles, sat up and said, “Well, isn’t it obvious? Wooden walls, those would be ships, so what we need to do is put everybody in ships and get them out in the Bay of Salamis and take on the Persians there.”

It didn’t take a lot of convincing, and eventually the Athenians went along with this, so when the Persians arrived they found a deserted Athens and they saw ships out in the harbor waiting and smiling and saying, “Come and get us,” as it were. They had sent the Persian navy ahead so that they would come in and so there would be this immediate war, and there was, and it turned out that the Persians really weren’t great on boats.

The Greeks actually were seafarers. They had so vandalized their own land, stripping it of all its vegetation and such – and in the Greek mountains there wasn’t much room for farming or grapes or olives in the long run, so sea trade was major and they had become really good with ships.

They managed to take out the Persian navy, and then the Persians met them again in one last battle called the Battle of Plataea, and there the Greeks delivered a final decisive defeat to the Persians, and the Persians went home and left the Greeks alone.

We’ll pick up the Greeks and fill in space later, but now we need to finish with Persia.

As far as western culture is concerned, this is usually where the history books jump ship, so to speak, and follow Greece. Persia gets left behind except for a footnote of, “Oh yes, when Alexander came there was still this thing called the Persian empire.”

We’re not going to do a whole lot better because as far as scripture is concerned at this point, there really is not much in the way of prophecy after Xerxes. The Persians go into moral and spiritual decline and are no longer guarding God’s people the way they need to be. They’re not actively persecuting them, but they’re not particularly useful, and God has other plans. God has things to set in motion.

Daniel spoke of this. This is in chapter 11. The angel comes and says –

Also I in the first year of Darius the Mede [Persian], even I, stood to confirm and to strengthen him. And now will I shew thee the truth. Behold, there shall stand up yet three kings in Persia…

Darius the Mede is Cyrus, then Cambyses, then Bardiya, who claimed to be his brother but may not have been, and then Darius. Also I saw for the first time on Wikipedia that Darius was accused of being a usurper. He believed that Bardiya was the usurper, as did his fellow generals, and that they were simply restoring order. I’m sure there’s a lot of things you could argue back and forth there that I don’t care about. The Bible simply says there’s these three kings, and there’s a fourth.

…and the fourth shall be far richer than they all:

That would be Xerxes, and this is what it says of him.

…and by his strength through his riches he shall stir up all against the realm of Grecia.

Of Greece, of Ionia. The prophecy then skips ahead and says this –

And a mighty king shall stand up that shall rule with great dominion and do according to his will. And when he shall stand up, his kingdom shall be broke and shall be divided toward the four winds of heaven; and not to his posterity, nor according to his dominion which he ruled:

That’s Alexander the Great, so even the Bible says, “And whatever happens in Persia is not terrible relevant, and at the same time whatever happened in Greece is not terribly relevant.” It’s all God’s story and if you want to look closer at the story there is much to learn and there are all kinds of interesting things in both nations, in the Persian empire and the many city-states of Greece. It wasn’t a nation, it was a collection of city-states that generally didn’t get along with each other.

You can track the wars between the city-states, and if you have the patience for it that’s all fine and well, but in terms of the flow of redemptive history there’s nothing here that God points out as immediately pressing in following the main thread of his story.

There’s no victory of liberty and rationality that God is relying on here.

Most certainly not. You would think that if this was going to be significant to the flow of the gospel and the spread of God’s kingdom that God might have dropped a little hint, thus bringing reason to the world or something. I don’t know.

Of course, what Alexander does do is terribly significant. He spreads a new trade language, koine Greek. That’s important. When we get to the New Testament we find everybody everywhere is speaking a certain brand of Greek. God used the Greeks for that. Most of the other encounters with Greek thought forms and Greek culture aren’t all that great.

Paul of course ministers in Macedonia first and then in the Greek mainland below. Thessalonica is Macedonia. Corinth is Greece. He spends some time in Athens, and on the Areopagus confronts the pagan philosophers with Jesus and the resurrection, and so on.

The fact that they listened is pretty cool.

Yes. They do get to be the showcase against which Paul presents the gospel, so in that sense they’re significant as an archetype of how we present the gospel to a world that has no knowledge of Christ. Most of the sermons in the book of Acts are addressed to a Jewish audience who know the Bible, and the apostles can walk through Old Testament history. They usually go back to Abraham, pass through David, come to John the Baptist, and then here’s Jesus.

In Greece on Mars Hill, Paul doesn’t have any of those advantages. But he does appeal to something that had happened in their past, when a plague had come to Athens and they were forced to seek help from elsewhere. A Cretan prophet said, “Offer sacrifices to the god you don’t know, who might help you, and see what happens,” and it worked. So they raised altars to this unknown god, in the hopes that one day he would come back and interfere in their culture again.

Paul was able to say, “Without lying and without cheating, let me tell you about that god, because there’s only one God, and the God who saved you from the plague is the God I preach, and he has appointed Jesus to rule and judge the world.” So it is important to know about Greece. It’s important to understand Greek culture and philosophy, and that’s why we’re going to spend a lot of time with it.

I would add one more thing about Greece. In some ways it’s not so much important in its own time or even at the time of the gospels, but the amount that later generations in the church have used and depended on Greek ideas and all – so many things from Greece have been interwoven into heresies and things like that. By understanding the origin when somebody begins from them, we should already be suspicious.

I like that. “Oh, you’re starting from the Greeks? We already don’t trust you, but continue.”

Yes, and it’s typically a false version of what Greece really was, that then has been interwoven and integrated into various parts. We take it piecemeal. We take the things we like and ignore the things we don’t.

But those things are very deeply embedded in our culture and everything in western civilization.

I think in some ways that’s actually a really interesting point for someone who wants to study history from a biblical starting point. Look at what the Bible cares about, and the Bible thought the only thing Greece was good for was the language that it gave us that it was written in, and then the opportunity of how to approach a completely pagan audience with the gospel. It didn’t care about any of the happenings or the culture or any of the ways that they were involved with God’s people. There’s very little there.

Yes, and we will come back and talk about this a lot before we’re done. We’ll be taking several weeks at least with Greece.

As far as Persia, the throne passes through a number of hands, sometimes through regicides within the palace itself. Sometimes Persia tries to interfere a little more in Greece, but it doesn’t come to a whole lot. In the end it’s the Greeks who go looking for the Persians.

There’s a man named Philip, a lover of horses, who’s a Macedonian noble and he spends some time as a prisoner in Greece, and there he learns to admire Greek culture. To our minds Macedonia and Greece are like Indiana and Illinois. It’s all the Midwest. We in California don’t know the fine differences, which I’m sure are wonderful and beautiful.

They’re wonderful and beautiful if you’re in Indiana.

Philip manages to get back home and tells everyone how wonderful Greece is. In fact, it’s so wonderful he needs to own it. So as king he raises armies and descends upon Greece. Some of the Greeks cut deals with him and surrender. Some like Athens decide, “No, we’re going to stand up against this guy,” and we’ll come back and talk about this when the time comes. But he manages to secure Greece, and he turns his mind toward Persia. You’ve got Macedonia. You’ve got Greece. That’s a lot of territory. That’s a lot of manpower. That’s a booming economy that can support a war.

This is a time which I don’t know if we’ve exactly escaped from, but you didn’t really need reasons to go attack other nations besides you wanted something from them, like land or treasure or a right of way to the ocean or whatever. There was no real moral “Thou shalt not start wars” command that anyone anywhere really listened to.

The only reason to not start a war is you might lose. That was a valid reason, but that was about the only reason in the ancient world, because those people out there weren’t really people. They were outsiders. They were ‘them.’ They were ‘the others.’ They live to serve us. So Philip is looking at Persia and thinking about it, and then he dies.

He has a son, Alexandros III, who picks up his father’s dream and sets his eyes on Persia. “There’s a lot of wealth there, but hmm, I don’t know.” And this is something that comes at the end of the story and we’ll come back to it when we talk about Alexander, but he would later tell his generals, “While I was there thinking this through and debating it, I had this vision, this dream, of a man dressed very oddly in robes and a turban and this golden breastplate and such. I’ve never seen any barbarian dressed like this before. He’s obviously not Greek. And he was calling me to come into Persia and guaranteeing that I would have complete success. So I took this of course to be a message from the gods, showing their great favor for me, and so I moved my armies into Asia Minor and then down into Persia.”

We can dispense with Persia pretty quickly at this point, and we’ll do it again when we talk about Alexander in detail.

Alexander attacked the Persian armies again and again and again, and their current emperor Darius III kept running away and backing off and retreating. Finally he just ditched the battlefield and ran for it, at which point his nobles caught him and killed him. They went to Alexander and said, “Hey boss, you’re in charge now. This guy’s a jerk. What do you want?”

So the Persian empire passed into the hands of Alexander the Great, who consolidated his power and went on through Persia, and on past Persia on toward India, until his Greek troops said, “We’re tired. We’re going home. We’re not going any further.” Then Alexander went into his tent and pouted, and his soldiers said, “Don’t care, boss. It doesn’t matter. We’re going back.”

According to one writer, Alexander bemoaned, “My astrologers tell me there are other worlds out there and I have not even conquered one.”

“Yeah, well, sorry.”

So he went back into the heart of Persia and found interestingly enough the remnants and what was left of old Babylon and said, “Hey, this would be a great place for the capital of the world. It’s kind of centrally located.”

“Wow! You’re the first person to think of that.”

“So I’m just going to rebuild this city.”

He was dead very shortly after that and his kingdom splintered among his generals, and then the Hellenistic age began. Hellenic means Greek, of Helos. Hellenistic means Greek-like, because Alexander’s soldiers and generals had taken over the known world, and just because he died didn’t mean they went away. They were still in charge of various regions. His kingdom was divided among them and Greek language flourished and Greek literature and philosophy flourished.

Alexander had planted a number of cities including Alexandria in Egypt, which became the cultural capital of the world, and sometimes the age that follows is called not the Hellenistic age but the Alexandrian age. But that’s in the future after we go back and pick up the remnants of Greece.

So Persia passes away, but does it? Remember the dream that Nebuchadnezzar had of the humanoid statue. Each kingdom is but an extension of the one that went before, and a preparation for the one that comes after. These four kingdoms were appointed to care for God’s people, to preserve them intact until Messiah should come.

Israel had had its chance at a great kingdom and they blew it. They went into apostasy, and yet God continues to preserve his people but he’s going to use Gentiles to do it until the time of the Gentiles come and the gospel is ready to go everywhere.

So we can look at Persia and Greece, and they hated each other’s guts and they saw all kinds of differences between the two. We look back and say Persia at the beginning had a lot of influence from some very godly people – think of Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther, Mordecai and others – but by the end it was one more pagan empire that really didn’t have a whole lot to offer the world, and God handed things off to Greece.

Alexander was too busy to do a lot. We’ll talk about his interaction with the Jewish people later, but then his empire falls into these Hellenistic little kingdoms, and they in turn were swallowed up by Rome, and then Jesus comes. So we’re getting closer and closer.

Greece appears in Daniel’s prophecies, but it does not appear in the Bible histories. With the Persian empire reaching its strongest phase, God closes the historical book and will not reopen it until the coming of Rome because what happens there, although some of it is prophesied, not enough changes for God really to worry about telling us a whole lot.

We speak of the 400 silent years. This is hardly the first time that God has gone silent. We tend to look at the Bible and think, “Wow, God was every day doing miracles and revealing himself by prophets?” Really? No, not so much.

It’s because it was weird that they wrote about it.

Yes. There were a lot of silent periods. This one was just a little longer than a lot of them. But the Bible is going to skip over Greece, besides these prophecies, and when the New Testament opens we’re in the Roman empire and it’s already been around a little while, at least if you count Julius Caesar, so that’s where we are, and I’m going to guess that maybe we’re within our time limit.

Yes, we should be wrapping up. It’s just a thought that the ancient world is so different from today’s world that we can look at these different cultures and really feel like they have more in common with each other than they would have ever seen, because we live so differently and we think so differently. But that reminds me of what C.S. Lewis says – “Actual Christianity has so much more in common with ancient paganism than with modern Christianity” – that it does bear some study in this.

I remember how you learn about the covenant and the structure of the covenant and biblical theology and this and that, and then you read about ancient Greek religion and it’s like, “Oh, this is the cultural context where God gave this order of things.” They do have this concept of how you belong to this god, and if you move you’ve got to leave that god behind, but that gives you an identity. Your identity is found in your god.

I think that’s something in modern Christianity that you really have to take a lot of time to explain nowadays, where your entire identity is in who you worship and that’s who defines you.

Yes. You are who you worship. You become like the one you worship. The psalmist’s comment about idols is, “They that make them are like unto them.” We hope to be transformed into the image of Christ. Pagans become like their gods, but their gods in the long run don’t see or speak or think.

Shall we wrap up with some recommendations?

I can give one to start. Again mine’s a little different, but given my recent experiences as a pastor’s wife I’ve had the opportunity to attend a regional church gathering of the pastors and elders, and then more recently a national church gathering of pastors and elders. In both of those instances it has given me a greater appreciation for the individual men that make that up, because I’ve seen often in recent years a lot of generic condemnation of men in Reformed denominations and things like that, just generically being called all these names.

Being able to put faces and personalities to not just your pastor and elders, but the others, and to see the body of Christ in its diversity even in a singular denomination has been very encouraging to me and it’s made me appreciate the denomination I’m in more.

So I guess my recommendation is if you have a church that has any kind of these gatherings, if they’re open, which most of them are when they’re outside of just an individual church, I recommend going to one sometime just to appreciate how much bigger the church is than what you see every Sunday.

Excellent. Emily?

I’m going to recommend gummy vitamins.

My children would approve.

I did lots of research on what prenatal vitamins were the best and all this stuff, and some are better than others. One of the big things people talk about is methyl folate instead of folic acid, and that’s great, but the best kind of vitamin is the one you will actually take, and for me that is a gummy vitamin. So make the changes that will actually make a difference in your life, instead of the ones you aspire to make in your life. That’s my recommendation.

That’s a good one.

I am going to recommend a video. It’s about Thermopylae. It was originally produced by or for The History Channel. The thing that makes it special, and probably still makes it special, it certainly did when it came out in 2004, was that the producers used state-of-the-art-then video game technology to show us the battle.

We see the war fought with little animated soldiers, and from our point of view now it looks kind of hokey, but it does give you a good idea of what the armies would have looked like and what the field commanders would have seen as they sat up on the hills and watched what was going on. And in terms of its history it seems to be fairly accurate.

If you have a teenager who is interested in military history it’s a good starting point. It’s part of an entire series called Decisive Battles, so if you type in Decisive Battle Thermopylae in The History Channel it should come up and you should be able to find it on YouTube.

How long is the video? Like is it a 10-minute investment or is it an hour investment?

It looks like it’s about 22 minutes. It’s not super long. I’ve played it in my history classes before and got done with it without any difficulty, as long as they start right away. It’s fun. I would recommend it. I would also recommend some of the other battles in the same series.

The man and woman who act as narrators are awfully handsome, beautiful, good-looking, stylish and all that, but could use some acting lessons.

It’s a lot to ask someone to be beautiful, fabulous, and a good actor.

Exactly, so anyway there you go, Decisive Battles from The History Channel on Thermopylae.

Great, thank you. Thank you both also so much for this conversation. It’s been a pleasure. Thanks also to David, our producer and my lawfully-wedded husband.

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