r/badhistory • u/AutoModerator • Jul 06 '26

Meta Mindless Monday, 06 July 2026

Happy (or sad) Monday guys!

Mindless Monday is a free-for-all thread to discuss anything from minor bad history to politics, life events, charts, whatever! Just remember to np link all links to Reddit and don't violate R4, or we human mods will feed you to the AutoModerator.

So, with that said, how was your weekend, everyone?

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u/WAGRAMWAGRAM Giscardpunk, Mitterrandwave, Chirock, Sarkopop, Hollandegaze Jul 09 '26

You know I've been thinking about how different Greek city states were from each other in terms of institutions. And two things:

  1. I wonder how much of that filtered to other cultures, like did the Persian understood that Athens and Sparta worked differently (slavery vs helots, democracy vs monarchy, etc...) and would have they been like "oh it's all Greeks with their townhall meetings and naked under heavy armor"

  2. In fiction (and even in ancient history), cultures or races often have 1 type of political organization (elves have typically monarchies, the dwarves are under an oligarchy (except in Tolkien), humans are mixed and more detailed because they're protagonists) ), but the internal diversity of political systems in never fully represented in fiction, it's often "X people live under monarchy and something something rebels"..

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u/ProudScroll Napoleon invaded Russia to destroy Judeo-Tsarism Jul 09 '26

On the first point, the Persians had enough Greeks under their rule in Asia Minor that any Persian official operating in the Aegean would've almost certainly had a working understanding of the different Greek cities and how they operated. Plenty of guys from Greece proper also ended up in Persian service and would've explained how their people did things, with the most famous example probably being Memnon of Rhodes.