The Greeks (2016–…): Season 1, Episode 3 - Chasing Greatness - full transcript

NARRATOR: It's a rainy
September morning in Athens,

and some 350 athletes from
all over the world are gathering

under the Acropolis to reenact
the most high-stakes run in history.

For the next 36 hours,
they will attempt to run from the

heart of Athens,
across some of Greece's most treacherous

terrain, to Sparta,
six marathons away.

It would seem beyond the
limits of human endurance.

But 2,500 years ago,
facing annihilation by the Persian

Empire, Athens sent a single
runner on this same desperate

race to plead for Sparta's help.

His name was Pheidippides;
he seemed their only hope.



MAN: Whopla!

DEAN (off-screen): Pheidippides
knew the Persians would wipe Athens

from the map.

He knew democracy would
be completely obliterated.

NARRATOR: Democracy
then was merely 17 years old,

and it was about to set off a
chain reaction of art, drama,

philosophy, and science that would
have been unthinkable anywhere else.

JOSH (off-screen): It is a world
of almost constant innovation.

They never sit and
just rest on their laurels.

BETTANY (off-screen): They were
working out the best way to be human,

the best way to live in the
world and that's an idea that

is as strong now as it was
when it was first conceived

25 centuries ago.

NARRATOR: In the
crucible under the Acropolis,



the modern mind
had been unleashed.

CROWD: Two, one, go!

NARRATOR: The 152-mile Spartathlon,
from Athens to Sparta,

honors a pivotal moment in
Greece's quest for greatness,

when the earliest sparks
of Western civilization were

nearly stamped out.

It was 490 BC.

And Greece wasn't anything
like the nation we think of today.

It was a network of some
1,500 often warring city-states,

each with vastly different sizes,
strengths,

and forms of government.

Athens, the largest city-state,

was unique among them.

It had undergone a major
political revolution less than

two decades earlier,
where ordinary people rejected

tyranny and instituted a
radical new form of government.

Democracy.

For the first time in history,
power was truly in

the hands of the people.

They could serve in government
and vote on everything from

tax rates to
declarations of war.

In a world of kings and tyrants,

the Athenians recognized
that by empowering individuals,

from the wealthiest landowner
to the lowliest foot soldier,

they could be far greater
than the sum of their parts.

BETTANY (off-screen): How incredible
would it have been to spend some

time in Athens in
the fifth century BC?

Just electrically exciting.

Democracy is really
fetishized and cherished.

It comes to be
worshiped as a goddess,

as a fantastic stone steely
in Athens of democracy as

a goddess crowning ho demos,
the common people.

NARRATOR: It was the beginning of
the ancient Greece we think we know

that 170-year-long
Golden Age whose legacy is

invoked everywhere,
from the streets of modern Athens to

the steps of the
US Supreme Court.

But democracy
almost died in its teens.

EDITH: So Athens had
become a democracy in 507 BC.

But just 17 years later,
she faced the greatest challenge

she'd ever faced,
the Persian Empire.

NARRATOR: The Persians
had amassed the world's first

global empire,
under powerful King Darius,

conquering south to Egypt,
east to India,

and west to Turkey.

Now,
they had their sights set on Europe,

and only little Athens,
and its vastly outnumbered army

here on the shores of Marathon,
stood in their way.

That's where Pheidippides'
storied run comes in.

DEAN (off-screen): Pheidippides
was what they called an all-day runner.

That was a strategic advantage
the Greeks had to communicate.

It was like, it was like the Internet,
you know, 2500 years ago,

and they did it on foot.

NARRATOR: Modern marathons
are based on the legend that

Pheidippides ran about 26
miles from Marathon to Athens,

naked of course,
to alert leaders of the battle's

outcome,
and promptly dropped dead from exhaustion.

It's a tale immortalized
in poetry and paintings.

But it turns out that our
marathons may only represent

the last piddling 26
of a much longer run.

JOHN (off-screen): Greeks would've laughed
their heads off at this idiotic story.

26 miles? That's nothing!

NARRATOR: The historian
Herodotus tells us that before

the Battle of
Marathon even began,

Pheidippides had to
run 150 miles to Sparta,

and back to plead for support
from the warrior Spartans.

Today's Spartathletes are
trying to complete that first leg.

(crowd clapping)

Some take it more
seriously than others.

Ultra-marathoner Dean Karnazes
is trying to manage it on only

the foods Pheidippides
would have eaten.

DEAN (off-screen): It's basically a,
a ground sesame paste.

Figs.

Cured meat. Nuts.

NARRATOR: He feels
this run in his blood.

DEAN: I am 100% Greek and
my dad always insists we're from,

you know,
this same region as Pheidippides.

Can you imagine,
Pheidippides out here, by himself,

running to save democracy?

NARRATOR: Without roads,
over mountains,

and through the dark of night,
Pheidippides is said to have

reached Sparta in just 36 hours,

only to face one of
history's cruelest rejections.

In the midst of
a sacred festival,

the Spartans wouldn't
fight until the full moon.

DEAN (off-screen): They said,
we'll come help you but it's just gonna

be three or four days.

NARRATOR: And so Pheidippides
made the 176-mile return trip

back to the
battlefield at Marathon,

to alert the generals that the
Spartans would be "delayed."

The Athenians would face
down the world's first true

superpower without them,
outnumbered by more than two to one.

PATRICK: This is a critical,
critical moment.

To push back
against the Persians.

No one's done it
successfully before.

NARRATOR: But there'd never
been an army like this before.

The 10,000 Athenians were
now free and equal men.

Bound by a communal
sense of brotherhood,

they weren't about to
surrender their hard-won

rights over to an
autocratic ruler.

WAYNE: One of the really
unique things about Greece

is the way in which
those bonds of community

translate into the
way that they fight.

WAYNE (off-screen):
Its intimately cooperative.

NARRATOR: Right down to the
way they hold their 16-pound shields.

WAYNE (off-screen): The
shield quite famously extends

a foot and a half to the
left of an individual fighter.

When he is holding
the shield up,

half of the shield is
covering the person to his left.

WAYNE (off-screen): The whole
ethic of the fight is built around

that mutual protection.

Stand there and
protect your neighbor.

NARRATOR: The Greeks stood
shield over shield in a four-day standoff

against the Persians.

Until finally,
in what seemed a desperate move,

they charged the
much larger army.

When the Athenian
center seemed to falter,

the Persians pushed forward,
only to find themselves

surrounded by the
Greeks' stronger flanks.

It was a rout.

The Persians
lost 6,400 soldiers,

according to Herodotus.

The Greeks, only 192.

Democracy was safe,
for the moment.

And Pheidippides' fabled cry
of victory with his dying breath,

after now running
more than 350 miles,

even the ancient Athenians wouldn't
begrudge an epic demise like that.

The Battle of
Marathon left the young

democracy feeling invincible.

And it soon found
itself wealthy as well,

striking a rich vein of silver
in a mine near Cape Sounion,

later home to the
Temple of Poseidon.

It was worth about $60
million in today's money,

and Athenians were eager
for their share of the spoils.

But one general, Themistocles,
knew full well that the

Persians would be back, and he
wanted that silver to mount a defense.

Democracy being what it is,
he first had to convince the

citizens of Athens
to part with it,

a political reality no
tyrant ever had to deal with.

JOHN (off-screen): It's not popular
today in the world of scholarship

to admit that you've got heroes,

but I have one, and that hero in the
entire ancient world is Themistocles.

JOHN (off-screen): Folks were
deciding what to do with that silver,

and he played upon
their sense of pride,

their sense of security,
their sense, above all,

of potential
greatness as a city,

which Athens had not achieved.

BJORN: Themistocles
convinced them to use this silver to

build a huge navy.

NARRATOR: Here at
Athens' Port of Piraeus,

archaeologist Bjorn Loven
and his team are excavating the

immense harbor that
Themistocles built for

his dream navy.

With it are clues about
how he might have swayed

public opinion into
building it in the first place.

The divers can barely
see a foot in front of them.

By sifting through the
murk of almost 2,500 years,

they're starting to uncover
the actual structures that

housed and launched
Themistocles' fleet.

BJORN (off-screen): So
it was a massive structure.

Imagine the whole shoreline
lined with ship sheds.

NARRATOR: The ship sheds would
form one of the largest structures

in the ancient world,
housing 200 of the greatest fighting

galleys of the day.

Triremes: battleship, speedboat,

and torpedo all in one.

Themistocles though didn't
pitch triremes as just weapons

of war,
but as engines of democracy,

giving lower class citizens a
chance to rise through Athens'

political ranks.

JOHN: You get power as
citizens by fighting for your city.

NARRATOR: Each trireme
required 200 crew members.

So for 200 ships.

BJORN: You would
need close to 40,000 men.

JOHN (off-screen): Poorer-class
citizens were doing the mathematics,

and saying,
there's a crew of 200 at every trireme.

That sounds like me.

Ultimately every post in
Athens was open to the poorest

citizen because of the navy.

NARRATOR: In 480 BC,
just ten years after Marathon,

Themistocles' worst
fears came true.

The Persians struck first here,

at the narrow pass
of Thermopylae,

where for days more
than 100,000 besieged

an allied Greek
force of only 7,000.

But this time it would
be Sparta's finest hour.

Under their king, Leonidas,
300 Spartans famously fought

to the death, holding back the
Persians long enough for their

Greek allies to escape.

But the pass eventually fell,
and the Persians poured into

the Greek peninsula,
bent on revenge against Athens.

Themistocles had to
do something drastic.

In an urgent order,
he called for the complete evacuation of

women,
children and the elderly from the city,

all men to the triremes
of his new navy.

Athens itself would be left
to the mercy of the Persians,

who'd burn it to the ground.

Themistocles would
now take the battle to sea,

to the nearby
Straits of Salamis.

BJORN (off-screen): The
Athenians brought 200 warships to the

Battle of Salamis,
and the allies brought around 200.

So around 80,000 people
at sea on that morning.

NARRATOR: And that's
just the Greek allies.

The Persian fleet
was twice as big.

Luring the Persians into
Salamis' narrow straights,

Themistocles sprung a trap.

His triremes ran circles
around the hulking Persian ships,

torpedoing them with their rams,

and sending nearly half
of them to the bottom.

It was the first major naval
victory in recorded history.

BJORN: The Battle of Salamis is a
turning point in western civilization.

BJORN (off-screen): The young men
that were sitting at the oars they had

fought together against
incredible odds and they had won.

NARRATOR: Men of free will
had pulled together to defeat the

superpower of the day.

Democracy, it seemed,
was no flash in the pan,

but a force to be reckoned with.

BETTANY (off-screen): They'd defeated
against the odds the vast Persian Empire

and that seems to give
them an extraordinary sense

of themselves as a
people and as a culture.

NARRATOR: Free from
tyrannical rulers and imperial threats,

Athenians were now
free to build a new society,

an ideal state that actively
sought perfection in all

things,
from government and architecture,

to philosophy and art.

MICHAEL: They tried
to reach and understand

that perfect world.

MICHAEL (off-screen): Everything
that we do must be perfect.

NARRATOR: The great Golden
Age of Athens had dawned.

And under the rule of a
powerful new statesman named

Pericles, it would trumpet
its arrival from the unoccupied

heights above the city.

EDITH (off-screen): Pericles
decides he's going to make a lasting

memorial to Athens
greatness for all time.

So he commissions
the best architects,

the best sculptors,
the best artists,

and he designs the
building plan of the Acropolis.

NARRATOR: Like Themistocles,

Pericles appealed to the new
democracy's sense of civic pride

to foot the bill, to the tune of half
a billion dollars in today's money.

100,000 tons of
the finest marble,

hundreds of breathtaking
sculptures that seemed to

breathe life into stone,
and a fantastic,

four-story statue of Athena,
decorated in gold and ivory,

as expensive as
the building itself.

After 15 years, it was done,

and Athens had announced
its supremacy to the world.

2,500 later,
the Parthenon has shown its age.

Natural disasters.

Wars.

Conversions into a church,

a mosque, a treasury,
have all taken their toll.

In 1687 gunpowder stored inside exploded,
nearly destroying it.

Later on, the English Lord Elgin chiseled
off half the inner sanctum's marble frieze

and shipped it to London, where it
controversially resides to this day.

Despite all it's been
through though,

the Parthenon still stands
as democracy's light on a hill,

a proud symbol of Greek
and human achievement.

But in ancient Athens, the real business
of humans during the Golden Age didn't

take place up on the Acropolis,
but far below.

JOHN (off-screen): The thing up
on the hill is the sanctuary to Athena,

and she is
tremendously important.

But down here is the
civic life of the city.

This area behind
me is the Agora.

It's basically, in antiquity,
a great big open square,

where you can get all
the people together for a

variety of functions.

JOHN (off-screen): You
could come down here one day,

and it would be set
up for an election.

You could come
down the next day,

it'd be set up as a marketplace.

Next day,
there'd be athletic contests.

So it's the central square where
you can get all the citizens together.

NARRATOR: By the time archaeologists
arrived to excavate the Agora in 1931,

there was a train
running through the site,

and they've been digging
around it ever since.

John Camp has led the
excavations here for two decades.

JOHN: We're standing basically
at ground zero for democracy.

JOHN (off-screen): This is where
the concept was first invented,

and where it was
practiced for 150 years.

NARRATOR: Democracy,
whether we like it or not,

requires bureaucracy and
the foundations of the Agora

buildings show that's
as it's always been.

There was a senate,
a mint, courts of law,

buildings you might
find in capitals today.

But this newborn democracy
would barely be familiar to us now.

For starters, Athenians didn't
elect most of their leaders;

elections could be
bought and rigged.

So they selected most
officials jury-duty style.

JOHN (off-screen): They would
pull 500 names out of a hat,

and those guys would
serve for one year.

They would meet every day,
except festival days,

and they would
consider legislation.

NARRATOR: Participation
wasn't simply voluntary either,

it was a sacred duty.

BETTANY (off-screen): If
you didn't get involved in public

life or in politics,
you were described as one of the idioti,

as an idiot,
and it is where we get our word idiot from.

And if you looked
just to serve yourself

rather than the common good you
were described as a parasatoi, a parasite.

NARRATOR: Once in office,
the leaders couldn't vote on new laws,

they could only propose them.

Passing them came
down to ordinary citizens,

who voted by a show of hands.

JEREMY: Every Athenian voted
on whether they were going to

raise taxes, or whether they
were going to build the Parthenon.

Every Athenian male voted.

They didn't delegate it to
a group of representatives.

JEREMY (off-screen): If you had a time
machine and if an Athenian dropped into

the US, an Athenian would say,
well, you're not a democracy.

You know,
you yourself didn't vote on the latest tax

increase or Obamacare
or anything like that.

That was decided for you.

JOHN (off-screen): We could be a democracy,
but we're not.

We like to call ourselves that;

we are not a democracy.

It is not power to the people,

it is power to a
chosen set of leaders,

who the people have yes chosen,

but then have to
put up with once they

are in the corrupting
position of being in power.

NARRATOR: Athenians
knew power corrupted,

and came up with their
own way to deal with it.

All along the
roads of the Agora,

archaeologists have found
discarded shards of pottery,

called ostraca.

Once a year,
citizens could carve the names of dubious

politicians onto the clay
fragments and cast them into a jar.

If enough votes were tallied,
the official was ostracized,

banned from the
city for ten years.

JOHN: Pretty much every
prominent Athenian in the

first half of the
fifth-century BC took one of

these ten-year vacations,
courtesy of the Athenian people.

NARRATOR: Even Themistocles,
the hero of Salamis, wasn't immune.

Ostraca with his name on them

show he was banished
about ten years after the war.

JOHN (off-screen): If somebody gets
too high, by definition in a democracy,

you have to cut
'em down to size.

It would be nice if we had the
option today of voting a Washington

politician outside the
beltway once a year.

NARRATOR: It all sounds nice,
in theory.

But in practice,
Athenian democracy was also profoundly

limited; fewer than 20% of
the population could vote.

JOHN (off-screen): Women didn't
count; the lots of people came from other

Greek cities, and lived here,
but they weren't citizens;

and there were plenty of slaves.

So yes, in that sense it is
not a very democratic society.

SUE (off-screen): So this idea
that they're all walking around and,

you know, white tunics,

and going to the theater,
and going to worship, that's all happening,

but its not the full story by
any stretch of the imagination.

NARRATOR: One thing
Athenians were very good at was

networking,
and the Agora was the place to be.

Here,
riffraff rubbed shoulders with the greatest

minds to grace the earth.

JOHN (off-screen): You can imagine,
and it's true that they were here,

Pericles, Sophocles, Thucydides,

all these great Athenians,
spending time in the square

and in the public buildings
around the square.

NARRATOR: And at
the center of them all,

a hypnotic figure whose radical,

new way of thinking could only
have taken root in this free society.

The father of Western philosophy,
Socrates.

YANNIS: Socrates explored everything,
whatever, whatever was the issue of the day.

And he would engage.

YANNIS (off-screen): People
would be interested in him,

looking at him, this strange,
smelly, very ugly.

And, and a pug nose, and,
and bulging eyes, and thick lips.

But totally magnetic.

NARRATOR: Actor and producer,
Yannis Simonides,

has played the inquisitive
Socrates in performances

around the globe.

YANNIS (off-screen): He says,
"the unexamined life is not worth living."

If you do not explore it,
if you do not examine it,

you might as well go die.

NARRATOR: Socrates' notorious
line of questioning, though,

was also relentless.

And in the Agora,
he became a professional thorn in the

side of almost everyone.

JOHN: Just,
just a pain in the ass.

He's just bothering everybody,
but he's not shutting up,

and questioning people
and harassing them.

As he calls himself, a gadfly.

NARRATOR: Like a gadfly
stinging a sleepy horse awake,

Socrates confronted
politicians and poets,

craftsmen, and kids,
questioning them ad nauseam

about their views on
everything from democracy and

tyranny, to love,
war, and death.

It would be called
the Socratic method,

a question-and-answer
dialogue in which he challenged all

assumptions,
always in search of a deeper truth.

Especially if that truth was
exceedingly annoying to those in power.

But philosophy was
not the only path to truth.

Within just a few generations
of the Persian defeat,

as culture flowered
all over the city,

the Greek love of storytelling,

harkening all the way
back to the epics of Homer,

exploded into a wildly
popular new art form.

With the introduction of actors,
a chorus, a narrator,

and perhaps most importantly,

a theater,

the Greeks invented comedy,
tragedy and all of Western

drama, confronting themes
we grapple with to this day.

MARLENE (off-screen):
Power. Revenge.

Love. Hate.

The, the big ones.

GREG: It was Civics 101
to listen to tragedy and to try

to become more moral by,
by processing the most important

questions of life.

(speaking Greek)

GREG (off-screen): The experience
of dying in war, falling in love,

being aware of forces around you
that are beyond the human realm.

How do we explain them,
and if we can't explain them,

what do we call them then?

EDITH (off-screen): So tragedy gives
you serious philosophical problems.

Comedy is there to actually
put your politicians on trial,

by laughter.

NARRATOR: As it does today,
comedy offered people a

platform to poke fun at
their fellow citizens and to

criticize those in power.

Even that celebrated
visionary behind the Parthenon.

EDITH (off-screen): Pericles
himself had caricatures of him in the

comic theater.

He always wore
his helmet in public,

we don't really know why.

EDITH (off-screen): So he
often had an onion on his head,

but he got elected
year after year.

He survived trial by
democratic comedy.

(applause)

NARRATOR: By 431 BC,
Athens had become the center

of a cultural empire.

Euripides and Sophocles were
competing for best playwright.

And the Parthenon had
just opened to the public.

This temple to Athena,

also pronounced the arrival of new heroes,
the Athenians themselves.

It's marble frieze,
a third of which survives in the nearby

Acropolis Museum, depicts the
annual festival of Athena's birthday.

But the real focus of
the sculptures isn't gods,

but people,
and the perfection of the human form.

NICHOLAS (off-screen): Greeks
thought that human beings are in the center

of the world.

They were thinking that the
protagonists were themselves.

NARRATOR: Man was
the measure of all things,

to quote the Greek
philosopher Protagoras.

Humans, not gods,
were behind Athens' extraordinary rise.

Of course,
with every great rise,

comes an equally
fantastical fall.

And in the din of
self-congratulation,

Athenians had grown tone
deaf to the cautionary myths that

had guided their ancestors
for hundreds of years.

BETTANY: One of the most
famous and favorite myths of

the Greeks was the story
of Daedalus and Icarus.

So the inventor Daedalus
and Icarus his son.

NARRATOR: Daedalus built
wings made of wood and wax for his

son Icarus,
allowing him to take to the skies.

But he also issued
a warning: fly too low,

and the moist sea air
would dampen the wings.

Fly too high,
and the sun would melt them.

We all know what happens next.

BETTANY (off-screen): Icarus
flies up to the, up to the sun,

and the wax in the wings melt
and Icarus plunges down to Earth.

NARRATOR: Icarus,
tempted to see the world as the gods did,

became the ultimate
symbol of hubris,

Greek for excessive pride,
and paid the ultimate price for it.

BETTANY (off-screen): And the
Greeks told one another this story because

they were saying go for it,
make your mark in the world,

but also remember that
as a species we have limits.

NARRATOR: If Athens
had forgotten the lessons of

hubris,
the rest of the Greeks had not.

The richest city in the Greek
world had built the ultimate

temple to itself on
the backs of others,

by extorting exorbitant taxes,
protection money, really,

from hundreds of
neighboring cities.

And all this time
Athens was flourishing,

that other great ancient city-state,
Sparta,

had been watching
with growing resentment.

Spartans venerated athletic
and military might over

cultural perfection.

By age seven,
boys were taken from their mothers and

raised as soldiers.

They ran without shoes
to harden their feet;

they were beaten and deprived
of food to harden their bodies

and hearts.

They would have
approved of the Spartathlon.

MAN (off-screen): Good luck.

NARRATOR: 100 miles
into the 150-mile race,

Dean Karnazes is struggling
on with his self-imposed

fifth-century BC diet.

And others aren't
faring much better.

(speaking Greek)

(applause)

MAN (off-screen):
You're always smiling.

WOMAN (off-screen): You like it?

MAN: No.

WOMAN (off-screen): We
admire you. You're a hero.

Really.

NARRATOR: The ones who forge
on will now face their most punishing

challenge yet: Mount Parthenio,

a 4,000-foot climb,
through the dead of night.

It's their last big
hurdle before Sparta,

a mere two marathons away,
where, by 432 BC,

hardened Spartans had had
enough of arrogant Athens,

and declared war.

The bloody
Peloponnesian War would

embroil the Greek city-states
for nearly three decades.

And even the gods seemed to
have grown weary of Athens' pride.

A plague swept through the city,

killing about a quarter of
the Athenian population,

including Pericles.

And, as the war dragged on,
Athens turned against

everything it stood for.

In 399 BC,
none other than Socrates was put on trial.

(speaking Greek)

NARRATOR: In the one-man show,
"Socrates Now,"

Yannis Simonides reenacts
Plato's account of Socrates'

self-defense before
his Athenian jury.

YANNIS (off-screen):
My fellow citizens.

I don't know if my accusers
have affected you or not.

Despite the fact that there's
no truth in what they said.

Should be careful.

NARRATOR: Socrates' relentless
examining and questioning had grown

increasingly unwelcome to
Athens' leaders during the

long war,
when order and stability became more valued

than new ideas.

YANNIS: Anything
but a skillful speaker.

And they have filled your
ears with wild stories about me.

Slandering me.

NARRATOR: They drummed
up charges to silence him.

YANNIS: Socrates is guilty
of wrongdoing because he

corrupts the young.

He doesn't believe
in the gods of the city,

but rather in new demons.

His sentence should be death.

NARRATOR: For the first time
in democracy's short history,

a citizen had stretched
the bounds of free speech

and free inquiry to the breaking
point and illuminated its limitations.

The trial of Socrates
is one that continues

to this day.

YANNIS (off-screen): If he was here
today with us he would be persecuted.

He would be vilified,

and God knows what we
do to all the ones that dare,

you know, resist.

YANNIS (off-screen): We can look at those
that are pushing for women's equality.

Or for gay equality,
or for equitable income.

They disturb the system.

They make waves,
and whether you like them or not,

they make us think.

NARRATOR: Socrates was
given the chance to avoid his death

sentence,
if he'd abandon his incessant questioning.

He famously downed a cup
of poison hemlock instead.

Though his message
would span the ages,

his death would mark
the beginning of the end

for Athens' Golden Age.

(shouting)

BETTANY (off-screen): With
his seven most famous words,

"the unexamined
life is not worth living,"

in a way he gives
us the modern world.

He tells us that inquiry and
exploration and expanding

your mind should be
something that isn't seditious,

but that is central to
the human experience.

NARRATOR: By the
time of Socrates' death,

Athens had lost the brutal
Peloponnesian War with Sparta.

The Athenian Empire
was slowly crumbling,

and in 338 BC,

a mere 170 years
after its invention,

its democracy finally fell.

IOANNES (off-screen): The
Greek world was upside down.

I mean,
the Athenian democracy was falling apart.

I mean, the city-states were,
were fighting each other.

IOANNES (off-screen): But Greece
doesn't come to an end when Athens falls.

We have something that is new.

NARRATOR: That "something"
came in the form of an

unlikely force from
northern Greece.

Macedon, led not by citizens,
but a king,

Philip the Second.

Taking advantage of the
weakened Greek city-states,

Philip conquered them all,
except for Sparta,

and for the first time ever,
united them into one kingdom.

Archaeologist Angeliki
Kottaridi helped excavate

Philip's tomb in 1977.

ANGELIKI: Philip is a very,
is a genius.

ANGELIKI (off-screen): He
developed a new system of government,

by mixing the royalty,
the kingdom,

and independent city-states.

NARRATOR: Inviting
the greatest artists,

architects and thinkers from
Athens and beyond to his

palace here in Vergina,
Philip wanted to be the first

"Philosopher King,"
an enlightened monarch as

described by Plato,
Socrates' famous disciple.

With Greece conquered,
Philip longed to invade Persia,

and the rest of the known world.

But in 336 BC,
at a wedding in this very theater,

Philip was murdered
by his own bodyguard.

The task of world domination
would instead fall to his

20-year-old son, Alexander.

Trained by Spartan warriors,
and steeped in philosophy by

Plato's star pupil, Aristotle,
Alexander was impatient for greatness.

Within two years of his
father's assassination,

he led a force almost
50,000 strong into Asia,

and brought down Greece's old adversary,
the Persian Empire.

From there he
marched on to Egypt,

declaring himself pharaoh,
and establishing Greek rule that

would last all the
way to Cleopatra.

Alexander then spent the next
decade expanding his empire

all the way to India.

Along the way,
he won hearts and minds,

paying respects to local gods,
marrying several local women,

and forcing his
men to do the same,

and always spreading
the Greek ideals.

ANGELIKI: Alexander tried
really to connect people.

ANGELIKI (off-screen): So that
through marriage, mixed together,

they, they forget the ideas
of Greek and barbarians.

ANGELIKI (off-screen): It was
the beginning of a beautiful new era.

Different people, different nations,
different religions,

and they create this
common civilization,

the Hellenistic civilization.

NARRATOR:
Unfortunately for Alexander,

it was a civilization
he'd never get to witness.

In 323 BC,
carried off by typhoid fever or perhaps

poison, he was dead at just 32.

But his short reign would
seed Greek language,

thought and culture from
the warm islands of the

Mediterranean to the sands of
Egypt to the foothills of the Himalaya.

IOANNES (off-screen): The culture
that is rooted here and was spread all over

the world by Alexander the Great is lasting,
lasts till, till now, I mean, until today.

Yes, of course.

NARRATOR: Of course,
that their revolution would be passed

all the way down to us
was in no way assured.

MAN: Thank you.

MAN (off-screen): Bravo.

MAN (off-screen): Wow. Amazing.

(applause)

NARRATOR: It's 6
AM in modern Sparta,

and crossing the finish
line of the impossibly long

Spartathlon is a child of
another great civilization.

Running the 152 miles
in less than 23 hours,

Ivan Cudin of Italy
is first to kiss the

Spartan King Leonidas' feet.

(applause)

And fittingly,
it was Italy's ancient forebears, Rome,

who beginning in around
the third century BC,

would pick up the Greek torch.

JOHN (off-screen): The Romans
admired everything the Greeks did.

They didn't like them as,
what do we wanna say,

they thought they
were kind of effeminate,

that they were disorganized,
but they recognized that they

were creative.

JOHN (off-screen): And so
they stole Greek sculpture.

They brought in tutors from
Greece for their children.

All significant Romans came here,
Caesar was here,

Pompey was here, Cicero was here,
pretty much everybody.

NARRATOR: Rome carried
the Greek tradition forward for

hundreds of years until,
in the fourth century AD,

the Roman Emperor Constantine
converted to an insurgent new

religion, Christianity.

All things Greek were soon
given a new label: pagan.

Science became heretical.

Philosophy, dangerous.

And any celebration of the
Greco-Roman gods blasphemous.

After nearly two millennia
of continual operation,

the church shuttered the
venerated Oracle of Delphi,

extinguished the Olympic flame,

and all but wiped so-called
paganism off the map.

It would be another 1,000
years before the secret

history of Greece was
rediscovered in the West,

sparking the Renaissance.

Reigniting ideas of logic and reasoning,
realism in art,

and a belief in the human
potential to determine one's own fate.

It was a way of thinking
that inspired a band of

Enlightenment revolutionaries,
who in 1776 launched a new

world of their own,
with democracy at its very core.

PATRICK (off-screen):
Greece lives on.

We are still the intellectual
children of Greek thought,

of Greek ideas.

The idea that everyone has
a voice and should be heard.

This is something that we're
directly in debt to Greece.

ANGELIKI (off-screen): To be
a Greek is not a matter of blood,

but a matter of mind.

(applause)

NARRATOR: After 34 hours,
45 minutes, and 27 seconds,

Greek-American Dean Karnazes
is finally reaching the end of

his own journey,
besting Pheidippides' storied time by

over an hour.

DEAN (off-screen): It was well
beyond what I thought it would be,

it was the hardest
struggle I've ever fought.

DEAN (off-screen): It's unfathomable,
how Pheidippides was able

to accomplish this.

NARRATOR: Unfathomable,
but it happened.

Which is pretty much
the story of Greece.

They were sometimes flawed;
they were sometimes arrogant.

And they brought
about their own downfall.

But in their voyage
from cavemen to kings,

from Olympians to
architects of the world's first

democracy, they unleashed
ideas that could never be put

back in the bottle.

BETTANY (off-screen): From there on in,
there can be no sort of

society that doesn't at least
engage with the idea of people

having a say in how
they should run their lives.

No, they were not perfect,
but there is just something

special, there is almost a
kind of perfect storm when it

comes to the Greeks.

MICHAEL (off-screen): It's not just
things like democracy or science or,

or medicine or
law or architecture.

You know, the list goes on and on and on,
but it goes deeper.

I think the real contribution of
the Greeks is the belief in humanity.

(applause)

(music plays through credits).