Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 331 - The March of the 10,000

Episode Date: September 30, 2024

SUPPORT THE SHOW ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys Grab tickets to our live show in Belfast: www.universe.com/events/lions-led…t-tickets-83V5QD Can't make it to Belfast? We're streaming it! Get your stream tickets here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/livestream-lions-led-by-donkeys-live-in-belfast-tickets-1008166803047?aff=oddtdtcreator&keep_tld=1 Greek Mercenaries get trapped after a job goes wrong. Now, they have to try and find their way home in a series of war crimes, ragers, and making the worst boots known to man. Sources: Xenophon. Anabasis. Robin Lane. The Long March: Xenophon and the Ten Thousand https://www.thecollector.com/ten-thousand-greek-hoplites/ https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/article/the-battle-of-cunaxa-and-the-march-of-the-10000/

Hello Lions led by donkeys fans Just a heads up if you're interested in attending our Belfast show on October 26th But are not on this side of the Atlantic or anywhere close to it We wanted to present another option, which is live streaming The venue has a live stream setup and we have a ticketed event set up now as well where you can watch the show Live from wherever you are in the world. Check the link in the show notes. It's got all the information you need about how to get a ticket and also the time zone information, which is obviously very important. Once again, that is Saturday, the 26th

of October in Belfast. So British summertime, GMT plus one at 8 p.m. And if you click the link in the show notes, you can find all the information that you need if you are interested. Anyway, thanks for being a Lions fan and we hope you enjoy this episode. ["Sweat by Guns"] Hey everybody! Welcome back to the Lines Led by Donkeys podcast. I'm Joe. I'm wearing my finest hoplite armor, marching across the beautiful Anatolia plains and thinking

it's so nice, something awful certainly couldn't happen to my family here in a few generations. With me is Tom. Looking around, he's realizing this is a great investment opportunity to open the Persian Empire's first ever Irish bar. But he's gotten sidetracked the heated argument with our Spartan coworker in fury that they cannot seem to comprehend the brilliance of Nas's 1994 studio album, Illmatic. Hey Tom!

Do you know what? I can't, judging, I had no idea what we're going to do. So I'm just going to assume by Hopline armor and Anatolia that I'm arguing with a Greek guy about why Illmatic is one of the best pop albums ever made. I assume a Spartan has some arguments for it, though. I'm not sure what Spartan hip hop would be. Whatever it is, is terrible. Yeah. It's all about like owning slaves and fucking dudes. Yeah. I mean, maybe there's like a Greek East coast, West coast rap war we're unfamiliar with.

Yeah. It just reminds me of that like dude who's like, it's Spartan something. He's like a very strange guy on Tik Tok who's like talks about living like the Spartan lifestyle, but it's just like prostate massages and like smelling his own butthole. I just assume that's how Spartans lived. You know, it's uh, it's the age old joke. Why do you think they invented olive oil? Ancient Greece. We all know it. We all love it. And that weird guy with a Spartan obsession and clearly visible by the decals on his truck and that strange teenager with the Greek statue avatar on social media do not understand it. Yeah, Greece by name, Greece by nature.

One of the few countries to rival Armenians with the amount of body hair. There's a reason why Greeks and Armenians are kind of like, you know, handshake across the Europe Balkans caucuses, whatever it is you want to call it. Now, oh, you've brought up the perennial question, our Greeks Balkans. Look, yes, I say yes, but I'm sure every Greek person is very mad at me right now. There's just one Serbian guy who like telepathically has been activated by this. Like, thing, these, these terms of like Balkans, Europe, uh, you know, caucuses, as we have discovered through international organizations and spawning events and whatever, are very fluid when it comes to definitions and who is included in whatever club.

Like, you know, countries that aren't in Europe play in the Euros or compete in Eurovision and get included into the European Union. Now suddenly you are Europe. You'll find the line is quite blurry depending on geopolitics and sports and also corruption. It's mostly all just corruption. Yeah, we just have to accept that all countries exist in some continuity of the idea of either greater Albania or greater Kurdistan exactly yeah and depending on what kind of flavor around for the day you can sub out Albania for like I don't know massive well actually

let's say greater Macedonia because today we're pissing off Greeks yeah greater Macedonia are like what version of like a very thin crisp bread are you wrapping minced meat in? Further you open the Balkans, you're replacing it with cabbage. The further down you go, you're doing bread and then you go to East. It's grape leaves. Yeah, it's all meat and leaves all the way down. Yeah, I still think one of my favorite stories of all time,

which I think I've repeated on the show multiple times, is like Greece bullied northern Macedonia into changing their national name and the Name of their international airport what yeah Because that's why for the longest time North Macedonia was known as the former Yugoslav Republic of Northern Macedonia Because they want to just call themselves Macedonia and the Greeks are very mad about that and also because their airport was like the Alexander the Great International Airport and the Greeks are like no he wasn't from there we refuse to accept this and finally Macedonia back down change their name to Northern Macedonia

and then change the name of their airport. Yeah listen the true owners of the GNC are Greater Macedonia but it's also like the cause like it's really funny, not funny. It is really grim when you think about it for more than two seconds, but like the conceptualization of like different national ideas of fascism. So like obviously Romanian and Hungarian fascists are like Moldova just does not exist. It is part of one of our countries. This is where I fundamentally disagree with all these fascists are like Moldova just does not exist. It is part of one of our countries. This is where I fundamentally disagree with all these fascists. This is where we disagree with them. Yeah. Nothing else. Moldova is actually just part of greater transnistria.

We're making big transnistria people. Today we're going to be talking about the March of the 10,000. Otherwise known as that time that a bunch of Greek mercenaries discover that being self-employed has its downsides. Being self-employed is great because you technically are your own boss, but you know, I want to see these Greek mercenaries like filing invoices and then getting paid six months late. Filing a whole bunch of invoices,

having to file the most complicated tax returns known to human history. And then at the end of the day they don't have health insurance. I mean, you know, some things never change. Some people might know this story better as The Anabasis by Xenophon. Some people might not. For the people that don't, you're in for an interesting journey. Tom, have you ever heard of The Anabasis? Never. Once again, solidifying my role on this show as someone who has literally no knowledge

about military history at all. That's the perfect type of guy to be. This episode, we will be Greek maxing. We had Dracula maxing, now we're Greek maxing. I still don't know what any of this means, because you're my conduit into like TikTok culture because I refuse to download the app. The podcast does in fact have a TikTok, but I do not run it. It is run by our head of production here at the Netherlands. And she manages all of that. I do not fucking touch that shit.

So whatever some like weird TikTok thing erupts into my life, it's always your fault. Yeah. Like last night, I came across a woman who is trolling people on TikTok by claiming that she's crossbred an XL bully with a leopard. But I saw that because of you. Yeah. It's just a paint job. Yeah, it's very clearly She has made a stencil. I just spray painted her dog, which in and of itself is animal cruelty. Yeah. Yeah. Don't do that. Don't spray paint your fucking dog. But like I'm so equally fascinated with like the people who are rightfully pointing out. It's like, this is not what you have done, but even more fascinated with

the people who are defending her for spray painting the dog or for hypothetically creating a chimera technically both. I just love it. Excel bully version of like the scene from full metal alchemists. Someone has bred an Excel bully chimera. Oh, why'd you have to bring up that scene format? I must join them Thomas! No, Thomas! But yeah, so like people are like full throatedly believing that she's cross, which is not how biology or zoology works. It's not how anything works! You can't just breed a fucking, was it a leopard or a cheetah? With a dog?

You can't do that! You're creating CatDog. CatDog just writhing around on the ground, screaming for its death. I mean, like, listen, who would look at an XL bully and think, do you know what this animal needs? It needs to be really fucking fast. Be able to climb trees. Your children aren't safe anywhere.

Doing like big brain shit of creating like the XL Bully that can run at extremely fast speeds in order to train the next great Olympic sprinter. Which is something that the Spartans probably would have done if they had the capability. Yeah, I mean to be fair they would breed a dog that solely just ate like pellets. Now the epic tale of the 10,000 Greek mercenaries, which as far as I know, involves zero XL bullies. They take my XL bully. I have come to fight this war and I have specifically crossbred, this is going more time, but I don't really care.

I have specifically crossbred XL bullies with very fast cats and we are going to hunt down the Turks so we can control Anatolia and the greater Aegean Sea. You know, occasionally I want to ask the guy who acted as my advisor for my master's thesis, like what he thinks of what I do for a living now. my master's thesis, like what he thinks of what I do for a living now. And says a sentence like the Greek mercenaries involved at zero XL bullies in four 10 BC. And then his eyes just roll into the back of his head and he starts tasting blood. Yeah. And then I have to listen to an Irish guy do bad accents for like 30 seconds at a time.

Now, all of this has to do with the Peloponnesian War and its aftermath. To make a very long story short, this is not a series about the Peloponnesian War. I'm sure we'll do that at some point. But this war had torn the region apart, and Greece was just starting to pull its very naked live body from its ashes. For normal people, this is a good thing. It's a great time to be alive as far as, you know, this period of history is concerned. For once, there would be peace as much as peace existed back then.

But for the fighting men of Greece, peace kinda sucks. You see, over the course of the war and those before it, the mercenary trade boomed. As Greece solidified into a system of city states, bands of mercenaries, professional soldiers, all at the beck and call of whoever would come and pay them became a very important part of the economy effectively. It employed tens of thousands of people. Even if the very concept of a mercenary went against every classical Greek understanding of honor, civics,

and politics. The idea was that a healthy state could and would protect itself, and it was the citizens' duty to, in times of crisis, to defend their city. It was considered a price you paid for the benefits that the state could provide. Of course, we all know that is and always has been a crock of shit. Yep. But that is the idea. Yeah, as always, as I usually bring up big domino, small domino, like all this stuff

happens and then suddenly we have guys on Twitter who see a beautiful woman and just go, suddenly I'm a gay pedophile. That's enough about the British state. Or the Dutch Olympic volleyball team. The big domino is just like, this is just now half of all the people that JD Vans follows on Twitter. Yeah, yeah. It's a, it's a whole type of guy.

You know, that's what I hate about the internet amongst a million other things is that someone who was weirdly into like Rome or ancient Greece or Sparta 20 years ago was probably just like your dad who watched too much History Channel. Now it's a fascist. Now they're probably a fascist. But like functionally like 20 to 25 years ago, like up until I would say really, because all this stuff like started on YouTube in like the really the 2010s, but it's like- Wait, are you saying we have Gamergate to thank for this? Yeah, kind of. Fuck me!

I've never been so happy to be in Afghanistan in my life, because I missed all of this. I mean, I'm not saying like I was the prime population to be turned by that, because I wouldn't have been, but I didn't catch any of this drama, any of this concept of Gamergate or anything until like 2015 or 16. And I think I have Hbomberguy to thank for that because someone introduced me to his videos and that's what I learned about. I'm like, Oh wow, this sounds really bad. I'm like, Oh, this happened like 2009. Where the fuck was that? Oh right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You, you were like coming across the like scene of like a giant battlefield full of decaying corpses of men who've never

felt the touch of a woman complaining about boob physics. Actually that does kind of happen in this episode. Once again we're doing the temporal handshake between Greeks in whatever AD this is and nerds who have like such an intense vitamin D deficiency that they look like the pale man from pans labyrinth. Let me get a look at those jiggle physics. They open up their hands to reveal their eyes. But yeah. Okay. So I'll try and keep this in like under two minutes. So appraisal of

Greek classics and general Greek history has like always been used in fascism. If you look at like it's particularly like from Italian fascism, but then also worked its way into German fascism, AKA the Nazis. So like the classics in the kind of, but wait, Tom, everybody keeps telling me they're national socialists. I knew that would piss you off so much. Like listen to quote November from trash future from Twitter last night. And I don't know if she was quoting someone else. Socialism is a good thing and nationalism is where I live. So surely national social socialism is a good thing,

but essentially like the Greek and Roman times were like this foundational myth for fascism because it's like the historicization and historiography of how the classics era was studied led so many people to believe that like essentially it was perfect and not like people are running around in the nude starving all the time and like getting beheaded by mercenaries constantly. Not a great time to be alive. No, no. Like I like being alive in the era of the PS5. You know, I won't even aim that high. I think antibiotics are really good.

And as a man that wears glasses to see, I do enjoy not living in democratic Campuchea, but Greek. Yeah. Like I really don't want a form of government. That's like what if Pol Pot was Spartan? Well yeah like how like this stuff has always been like a big part of like white supremacy but like it got filtered through like youtubers like people like Varg Vikrnus are like huge proponents of all this weird shit.

Yeah but someone who ends up falling into the camp of Varg Vikrnus they were already there. I think like Stefan Malinou had a lot to do with it. Oh God. That's a name I haven't heard. To be fair, that's also a word that Stefan Malinou hasn't heard in many years because he's in get to like talk to anyone anymore. He's completely astrosized. Yeah. Like people like siren on the cat, but yeah, to keep it very, very short, the rise of political aestheticization of the past 10 to 15 years, all the fascists re-adopted Greco-Roman iconography and use it as like,

you know, it's the fucking hard times make hard men bullshit. Anyway, rant over. You get the gist. People are easily distracted by shiny things. I mean it's like we've talked before about Mussolini on this show and one of the dreams that he wanted to do is reform the Roman Empire and the only thing he managed to do is reform the collapse of the Roman Empire but yeah he's a fucking idiot. Yeah and this whole thing may be true at some point when it comes to you know service to the state and the benefits it would give a common citizen in the form of ancient Greece. But as economic and social drivers began to change, so did military campaigns.

They grew in size, they grew in scope, and they grew in time. Soon relying on an army of levied citizens really didn't make any sense anymore. Because as military campaigns expand and expand and expand beyond the immediacy of your city state, these guys who are farmers, shopkeepers, you name it, like, well, we also have to go home and work. So, you know, they have to change things. However, there was a core of those guys who really figured out, you know what, I'm really good at killing and stealing shit. And they made far more money from loot than they ever did from their shitty old day job at like the Greek DMV or whatever it was. Hence mercenaries

were born in a time where there's no shortage of jobs for Greek men who happen to be really good at stabbing one another in more than one way. Renewing my, uh, you know, ancient Greece driver's license for my horse and car at the DMV. And this turned into like an economic boom for 30 years. This created decades of people who were professional killers. And then the war came to an end and peace emerged. And now suddenly there is generations of trained and hardened killers looking for work. It's that age old thing like during times of peace, interstate, intergroup violence has to be mediated

through the same quote unquote clandestine actors. It's a tale as old as time and it's not necessarily a new thing where essentially PMCs exist. Yeah, and like the birth of the modern PMC has been a pretty big game changer for many of the same reasons. And they were born of many of the same reasons that these Greek guys were for instance like you know you have a core of like a state military either that state collapses or they

rapidly downsize their military and there's nothing for these guys to try to convert themselves into being civilians You know some kind of transitional program to be like yeah We knew yet you learned how to stab someone or how to block errors with a shield or fast forward to the modern day, you learned how to use a gun and there's no jobs out there for you. So we have this transition to be like, how about be a welder or something? But in that instead it's like, all right, buddy, hit the fucking bricks and figure it out. Yeah. Either you end up, you know, looting wagons on deserted trails or you're a guy from Nantucket who somehow ends up in South Sudan.

That guy's probably a veteran, you know, some people, let's say don't become civilians very easily or ever. I mean, that that was the foundation of Sandline International, famously a lot of white Rhodesian and South African mercenary groups that popped up in the late 80s and early 90s because you had all these veterans from the Bush War and then apartheid fell apart and obviously they didn't want to go home because you know crimes and such so they formed these mercenary outfits and then probably moved to Australia. But. And I'm not saying you need to coddle these people to get them to enter back into polite society, but another good option is not just let them scatter to the wind. Now luckily for men who kill people for a living and unluckily for everyone else, there's

always another war. And Greeks soon found another outlet for their skills and another guy willing to pay them. Just to the east in the Persian Empire, shit was falling apart. King Darius II died in 404, leaving the throne to his eldest son, Artaxerxes II. However, Artaxerxes had a younger brother, Cyrus. And I don't know what it is about fiction and history but whatever a guy named Cyrus is involved, it's not good. Yeah, famously name checked by RZA on four chamber on the Jesus Seminal album. Yeah. And Cyrus has never recovered. He's never even attempted to record

a response to that. Some people say he's quote shook. Now, Cyrus had long been plotting to take the throne with the help of their mother. Their mom favored the younger son over the older one as king. You see, she didn't believe Artaxerxes had a legit claim to the throne because she had given birth to him before Darius had taken the throne, while Cyrus had been born during his reign. So she believed, obviously, since Cyrus is born when dad was king, that meant Cyrus should be king. And I must say, as a younger brother myself, it's really nice to see the stereotype of the younger

brother never being able to do wrong carries over all the way through history. So you just looked at her older son, he kinda has fucked vibes. Art of Xerxes, your shit. Fucked. It's too weak. To be fair, most monarchies operated in times of succession, not necessarily just on bloodline, but on a very, very substantial vibe check. Yeah, I mean, what is palace politics other than a continuous series of vibe checks? Hey, look at what happened to Peter the second. That's all I'm going to say. Now, the mom's plotting could not undo the will of Darius. So Cyrus and a few others

plan to kill Artaxerxes. The plot quickly fell apart and he was arrested, and this is normally when he's killed in some horrific way. But he wasn't. The older brother had mercy on his younger brother and paroled him to send him back to his lands in the east of the Empire. This is widely regarded as a bad idea. Once there, Cyrus did not let the issue rest and rather than be thankful he wasn't killed via like, I don't know, having his eyes gouged out and his skull full, filled full of molten gold or some shit. He began to rally his forces loyal to him to go to war against his brother. Then he learned he didn't have enough men to do that, but he did have a substantial bank account.

Yeah, once again, Khajiit has wares if you have coin. Khajiit has min if you have coin. That could go in many different ways. That Khajiit is either slinging flesh of the stabbing or getting stabbed variety. Yeah, everyone's high on skooma. They're marching across the whole area. Ancient Greeks loved skooma. So, you know, many people say it's because the downfall of their civilization was skooma addiction.

Yeah, we weren't doing harm reduction yet. They didn't have naloxone. Everyone was just out of their mind on scuma. Cops in Athens kept passing out whenever they arrested someone who had scuma on them because they had a panic attack. But everybody knows scuma doesn't actually transfer through skin. So like it's a huge thing. Yeah. Yeah. We're fucking stupid, Tom. No, the scuma itself wasn't necessarily the problem. It was when the scuma got adulterated with other contaminants and other substitute drugs. That's when it became a problem. I can't remember another drug in Skyrim now. It's scuma all the way down. So he sent his advisors to go to Greece and find mercenaries, knowing there'd be plenty at hand, as well as knowing that Greek hoplites have a very good reputation and a very good

track record against the Persian military. So he shelled out the money for 10,000 men, hence the name of the now legendary story, and he believed that would give him enough power to threaten his brother. He was even able to secure the services of a Spartan general to lead his new army named Clearch. And Clearch was a pretty good choice. He was a decorated Spartan leader, but eventually became such a war hungry, bloodthirsty asshole he was declared an outlaw by the governing ephors of Sparta.

They all have just like, extremely over leveraged loans to buy a chariot. What's very funny here is he managed to be so brutal that the ephors in Sparta were like too much. So Cliarch led an army that attacked the Byzantium. He murdered its government and then ordered most of its citizens to be executed via manual strangling. Yeah, this is a bad move. Also they weren't necessarily enemies of Sparta at the time, so he got the old exile treatment.

Yeah, the Spartan E4s getting popped for green mode on like a drug test. I love the idea of the Spartan E4s being literal E4s in the army. Instead of it being like a whole bunch of old creepy sex pests, which as they're, you know, depicted in the movie 300 documentary even, it's just like a dude wearing a monster flat bill snapback, like a tan t-shirt that's supposed to go with his uniform, but he's too fucking lazy, and a pair of jeans that haven't been washed since he purchased them at Walmart for $10. And he's like, look man, you're not really working with us anymore. You're going to be exiled unless you pay us tribute of four white monsters and a pack

of marble reds. And Cliarch's like, this will not stand. I'm going to Persia. The modern day Eve 4 just falling through a wormhole and ending up in this time in Greece and just like showing the ancient Greeks how to do like dips bit tricks. But, Clearch agreed to the job mostly because he knew he can never return home and he needed some way of continued survival. He cozied up to what he saw as the possible next king of Persia, and failing that, the Prince.

Not the time freezing kind of Prince of Persia, not the Jake Gyllenhaal kind, you know? Yeah. Those games fucking slap. Never played one. Like, they don't- I know that movie was bad. Oh man, you know, Prince of Persia Sands of Time, goated game, anyone who was like my age remembers it, it was fucking slap.

I mean, I was of the right age to be on the Prince of Persia bandwagon. It just never appealed to me. I don't like platformers. You just don't like Persians. I don't like Persians. You caught me. The thing that stopped me from playing this Ubisoft, I don't know if it's Ubisoft, this Ubisoft or EA game was my innate bigotry towards ancient Persians.

Joe, you're, you're not really helping the perception of us as CIA operatives with this anti Iran propaganda. Prince of Persia had nothing to do with Iran. It had more to do with Jake Gyllenhaal. Okay. Jake Gyllenhaal is the agent of Ayatollah Khomeini's ghost. Now what's an important thing to point out here is Cyrus and his assistants, whatever it is you want to call them, who was hiring all these mercenaries, did not actually tell these guys what they were doing, which makes sense because you can hardly go around putting up help wanted posters to commit treason and not expecting your government to come and kill you for it.

So instead he told all these Greeks, Clearch included, that I'm hiring an army to go to the frontier and subdue a group of bandits. Most of them signed up because this job sounded very very easy to them as hardened and trained hoplites like yeah We can kill some bandits, catch some checks, call it a day. So they didn't think too much about it. So with that the Greek hoplites began their months-long journey to catch up with the rest of Cyrus's army, which is outside Babylon, finally arriving in the summer of 401 BC. When they got there, they saw that maybe we signed up for something that was a bit sideways. Cyrus was a fucking tyrant. He treated his men like shit. He forced them to march to the point they outran their own supply train.

Most of his troops had no basics like food or water. And as soon as Cyrus is outside of earshot, most of his commanders are just constantly bickering with one another to the point of made getting anything done impossible. And this is not a great first day at your new job. Yeah. Once again, you can take it off your bingo card. Um, army marching without water or food, water is very or food, but specifically water is very important. It becomes more important if you happen to be camped out outside a fucking Babylon. Once again, another guy who's fallen through the wormhole

is like a white guy from London who thinks he's Jamaican and he's like, I've ended up at the wrong Babylon. There's also this interesting episode here where Clearch is suddenly becoming aware we're not fighting bandits are we? His army is numbering at this point, like Cyrus's combined army is about 40,000 and Kliark's like, why do you need 40,000 people to fight bandits? And that's when on the other side of the horizon, they see Artaxerxes army under the flag of Persia marching toward them under the, you, the king the king of kings banner and

Cyrus is like look there may have been a misunderstanding The recruiters are really supposed to tell you about this whole thing. So it's definitely not my fault Exactly, and we understand that you might be a little little angry about we have hired you into a civil war Treason thing that we may or may not win. So what if I gave you a pay raise? I only joined on this march because you said you'd pay like my GI bill. Like, I really want to go study on their play, though. So like, look, I'm here for that.

So this whole like over leverage loan for the chariot and everything. Don't worry about that. I will only fight as long as you let me go and do platonic dialogues. You know, like I respect the ancient Greece, Montgomery, a kiss GI Bill, but the clear arc was like, well, a raise is good and we're already here. It's not like we can not fight this battle now. So we'll settle for a raise and we'll talk about a bonus afterwards. And Cyrus is like, you know what?

That sounds good. We'll talk about that when the battle's over because we shouldn't really have to do this more than once. Artaxerxes is in that army. We simply route the army from the field. I kill Artaxerxes. Bam. I'm king of kings.

You get your payday. You can go back to fucking Greece. Everybody daps up and it's good to go. You can go back to your chariot. You're like two bed hut. You're two kids and your wife, who's probably cheating on you right now. She isn't cheating on him. It's just Greek culture.

Just like they're fucking everything that moves, including themselves. Once again, we need to keep the E4 thing going. And what's the most E4 thing to happen is getting cheated on while you're and having all of your blogging staking. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. You go home, you find out that there's like a potter or a Cooper or like someone who has a local trade. Like you find the local blacksmith has just moved into your house. You roll back up to your home in your Chevy Camaro horse and buggy that you purchased at 24% interest and find all of your loved ones have gone. They've taken all of your barrels of wine or whatever and the only thing they left is

the Greek version of the single male living space. No you get home and there's just a guy called Myo Genie Poulos like is just sitting down playing your Xbox. Some things are just a step too far. Myo Genie Poulos I challenge you to a duel. He's ordered a Greek McDonald's and didn't get any for your kids like he's throwing grapes at your kids head saying your dad's a deadbeat loser. He even uses your jug of olive oil that you use to bathe in. Everything is everything is fucked. Yeah. Yeah.

So the two armies pull up next to each other and the battle of Kunoxa begins, named after a tiny village near the Euphrates River. Cyrus put the Greeks on his flank, an important position to secure the entire army, knowing that the Greek hoplites would be good at that kind of thing. Hoplites are made to stand their ground and therefore anchor his army. Cyrus himself would be at the center and other Persians would be on his opposite flank. And with that, the battle commences. Now, due to the realities of battle back then and kind of the realities of battle today, the both sides close in on one another, begin stabbing one another, and individual parts of the army all pretty much

get lost in the mix, right? That means generally no part of the army actually knows how a battle is going, whether you're winning or losing until it's over and you're still standing there alive. Yeah, inside you are two Greeks and they're both mercenaries. There's like versions of events during battles where like nobody has any idea what's happening outside of their own little cluster of dudes stabbing, and they think that they're winning. And in reality, they realize, oh God, I'm surrounded. Or they think that they're losing, and then you realize, oh shit, everybody under the

other flag is dead. Also they couldn't tell the difference always between the two different armies. So two different units would just start stabbing one another until their officers are like, wait, what are you doing? You're on the same side. Like, shit, sorry, bro. I owe you a six pack later. Battles back then were even more confusing.

Yeah. And like probably as well, like a lot of the combatants are probably armored in the same way and look very similar, except they're just fighting under a different banner. So it's kind of hard to tell who you're stabbing. During the battle, Cyrus's army quickly began to push Artaxerxes forces back with the Greek troops on the flank, quickly shoving their way forward, which is the way that Hoplates fight was by pushing. They folded the Persian army back on itself. In the center, Cyrus saw his brother in the midst of battle and began breaking from his own formation, charging forward, trying to close the deal

and kill him, therefore securing the throne. As he was about an arm's length away from his own brother, a javelin came falling down from the sky and impaled his fucking head straight through the eyeball, killing him. Oooh, fuck me, what a fucking way to die, holy shit. It's like the ancient Greek version of like, just getting shot in the head, I guess. Yeah, just like, then the Halo announcer voice, headshot. Double kill!

Triple kill! I don't think anybody in this situation is catching like, a javelin to the skull and turning into the ancient version of Phineas Gage. They're all pretty much dead immediately. I used to be King Ascendant until I took a javelin to the eye. Then the Persians, seeing or getting word that the man they supported in the rebellion was dead, decided to fuck this, it's time to get out of here. And Cyrus' Persian supporters began to flee from the field, leaving the Greeks behind.

And because the Greeks had pushed so far forward on the flank, they had no idea what was going on behind them, that Cyrus was dead, or that they were losing the flank, they had no idea what was going on behind them, that Cyrus was dead, or that they were losing the battle, so they just kept fighting. Eventually, Artaxerxes flank broke and fled, and the Greeks chased after them, leaving the battlefield further and further behind. They eventually chased the fleeing Persian troops until it was clear that they wouldn't return to the battlefield. Then Clearch ordered his men to turn back around and return to the battlefield, which he thought he'd be securing in a triumph at victory. But when he returned, he found the battle was over and the only thing that

was left was a field of corpses. Cyrus's body was in the middle and their camp was looted and burned. God, like, god damn, taking it like the force of a javelin falling out of the sky and going straight through your fucking eyeball. Like he was definitely like pinned to the ground, still standing up. I hope so, like caught in motion like a stop motion puppet. Coming to the conclusion that they had not only lost the battle, but also their employer, Pliarch and the Greeks, suddenly discovered, were fucked.

Their whole march was pointless, they had no paycheck, and now they were stuck in the middle of Mesopotamia, surrounded by enemies and a very, very, very pissed off king they had just tried to help overthrow. Not sure as to what to do next, they rebuilt the camp, butchered the dead pack animals that were laying around, and began to draw water from the Euphrates and, you know, just kind of make themselves at home next to a battlefield that had around 15,000 rotting bodies in it baking in the summer sun.

Mm-hmm. And this is when the sea people from the Bronze Age collapse, like, re-emerge out of the banks of the Euphrates and, like, change the battle forever. I mean, even they would show up late at this point. Sorry, someone sent us a runner. It takes a long time, you know, you know, listen, Poseidon had us like, we were busy, like rebuilding Atlantis and like we had loads of pay infrastructure week at Atlantis. We were busy. We had some problems with the payroll. So a lot of the guys just like we, we sent them home. We got to fix them.

We didn't want them working without getting paid because, you know, Atlantis is, you know, it's a fair work for fair pay city. I'm like we have, you know, rent controls and minimum wage and everything. So like we wanted to be fair to the guys. Like, I'm sorry, we're like hundreds of years late. But look, what can you do? The Atlantis Soldiers Union headed the CBA argument come up. It took us some time to work through it.

Yeah, we had to like do loads of ceremonies because loads of like, we had lots of NCOs that we had to like, you know, properly do the ceremony for. Like look, what can you do? Atlantean NCOs are known for being very lazy. Eventually word gets back to the Persian government about these random Greeks camped out in the middle of their neighborhood charnel house and they sent an envoy out to talk to them. The envoy asked, like, do you plan on continuing the war? Which Cliarch told him, no, we're mercenaries. We were working for Cyrus.

Cyrus is dead. There's no point for us to continue. We just want to get home, but we don't have the supplies to get home. Enter Cisiferenes, the local Persian governor. He said, that's fine, all this is great. I'll tell you what, I'll give you supplies and me and my soldiers will lead you out of Persian land. Seems like a good deal, right?

Sisyphairnese seems like a trustworthy guy. That seems like the most reasonable thing to do and what he probably actually should have done. Yeah, probably. Like you have no beef with these guys. They weren't there because they're getting paid. So they joined up and began marching towards Greek territory. And during the march, the two sides remained miles apart at all time. With part of the Persian army taking the lead, the Greeks kinda sorta in the middle, another group of Persians trailing behind them, and Persian cavalry would occasionally ride on either flank. Each time the Greeks stopped, friendly locals would give them food and water,

but the Persian forces stayed just barely within eye shot. It was very clear to the Greeks that these Persians were not just doing this out of kindness. They were watching them and soon they became incredibly suspicious. Yeah, it's a military escort. So it's like, hmm, they like they're watching us a lot. They're keeping their distance. Aren't they actually leading us back to Greek lands or are they leading us into a desert where they're going to go either way? And there's a few hints as to what the Persians might be doing. The Greeks noticed that every time they stopped,

the Persians arrayed themselves in battle formations. And it seemed that their numbers were growing. There were other issues that Clearch was just kind of figuring out. For example, it came to him that it wasn't exactly good for the Persian reputation to just let this army leave after fighting them. It makes them look soft. Also there's a bit of a revenge tale here.

Clearch learned that Cisaphernes was the commander of the Persian left flank that the Greeks had embarrassed during the battle. Cisaphernes' army was originally much smaller than Clearch's, but now it seemed the bastard was buying enough time playing nice to slowly usher more forces into his ranks and shift the balance of power. The tension between the two sides is growing to the point that it seemed to Cliarch that there was a blow up coming somewhere on the horizon. It was imminent, you know? So he sent a letter to the governor asking, let's have a sit down between our collective commanders and hash this whole thing out. The other Greeks pointed out, I understand what you're doing, but this seems like a really bad idea. You shouldn't go over there. And they were ignored.

According to Xenophon, 200 men went with the 20 or so Greek commanders over to the Persian dinner. These weren't bodyguards or anything. It's kind of explained that they were just dudes who were really hungry and willing to ignore how dangerous this whole situation seemed. I mean like the food would have fucking slapped. Look when I get hungry I would put myself in danger for a good fucking plate of food you know? I mean like I'd do a lot of things for a good shawarma. How much more dangerous could it possibly be than everything else they've already done

at this point? Like, okay, so downside is I get stabbed. Upside is I get some sick peel off. Like every day out here I might get stabbed or die from some horrible disease from that field of corpses that we're living in. So I might as well get some food out of it. Yeah, you're not getting paid. So it's like, you know what?

Some swarm of some peelaf, you know, I'm gonna risk it. At first, Sisyphores welcomed them with open arms and enough wine and meat to feed everyone. Just as soon as they let their guard down, they were ambushed. The 200 starving guys were killed immediately and five of the officers, Clearch among them, were brought in front of Artaxerxes so he could watch as they got their heads cut off. But the worst was saved for one man, Menon, who was tortured for a year before finally being executed. And I'm not entirely sure why so much hate was saved for him.

I just assume he really fucking deserved it. He failed the vibe check. The execution vibe check. You're not good enough to die immediately. This is just like playing fucking disco Elysium. Art of Xerxes. I have this entire core of torturers who's kinda out of work at the moment. I promised people when I became king of kings I'd really work on a jobs program. So, men on.

You're gonna have to do a bit of solid here. I really hope you're not that attached to your teeth and fingernails. You know? Mmm. But one man did escape. A regular soldier, his belly sliced open and his guts hanging out, staggered back to the Greek camp and told them what had happened and to prepare themselves for a fight. And then he promptly dropped dead because that is what tends to happen when your insides

become your outsides. Yeah, getting your belly sliced open. Persian sepuku. Persian sepuku, you get your head cut off with a giant shawarma, getting beaten to death with a giant kebab. Like once again, we are litigating the who invented kebab argument. Like is it the Greeks with heroes? Is it the general Persian area with kebab, shawarma, et cetera,

et cetera. I feel like this is the only way we can settle it is with another war. Yeah, that should do it. That should normally fixes most things, right? Yeah. This is when Xenophon suggested to the rest of the men that they amongst themselves need to elect new generals to take the place of the ones that the Persians had killed because if they didn't, they'd be fucked. And the men agreed.

They elected five new generals with Xenophon among them. The newly elected officers would then put forward plans and they would all vote on them and decide what they would do based on the five votes. They would discard anything that they didn't need, like tents and wagons, whether or not that you had a really high interest loan on them from the Spartan ephors because they wanted to march their army as far north as fast as possible in order to protect themselves from what they sure was coming from the Persians. A Spartan named Sherry's office was placed in command of the vanguard, Xenophon was in the rear, and everybody else was in the middle. So they adopted a hollow

square formation that was suggested and voted on during the night's council. In essence, the camp followers, the baggage, animals, whatever, because they still need to bring as much of like, kind of sort of rotting meat at this point with them to try to stay alive. And they put it in the middle, guarded on all four sides by effectively a wall of hoplite infantry. And that's when the ambushes began. on all four sides by effectively a wall of hoplite infantry. And that's when the ambushes began. As soon as they set out cavalry, archers, slingers, all that attacked the Greeks. However, it's not like they're being assaulted by a massive army.

There's only a few hundred men at a time staying at the fringes, hitting them over and over and over again, and then retreating. And because the mercenaries had no horses yet, they couldn't even attempt to chase them down. So the mercenaries decided that they should just keep their square formation, shields up, and keep marching forward as rocks, arrows, and javelins crashed in on them. They were eventually able to secure some horses, and they decided to put them to work. That night, the Greeks quickly organized a defense against the harassers, a corps of 50 horsemen and slingers from the island of Rhodes, and they quickly ran out in a counterattack. This caught the Persians completely off guard and wiped them

out. Then, the Greeks, as a warning to all the possible coming attackers, skinned 18 prisoners alive and left them out for all to see. Oh, like the, the effort you have to go to, to actually skin someone alive. The screaming, you know, like I, I assume you have, um, well seen descriptions of like, oh yeah, like doing that sort of shit, like the screams of skinning someone alive and then just actually seeing it. I don't know what would be more terrifying. I feel like I wouldn't want to be on either side of that.

I don't want to be conscripted into an army that has to fight someone who's skinning people alive, nor do I want to be part of an army that's like, let's skin this guy alive. Yeah, and you know that none of the people who did it were like, you know, trained butchers, so it wasn't with like an amateur hour in this and in the skinning tent You see this is why Arnax Xerxes has the torturers jobs program the e4 from Nantucket. It's just like hell I don't know how to do but I'll give it a go. I feel like I could I'm gonna delegate this one Yeah with that out of the way the Greeks went back to mindless, endless marching through the beating sun, still wearing all of their armor, slowly crossing into the mountainous country, but they were now forced to go up and down hills, all through more and more ambushes.

Even with their screening forces of cavalry and slingers, the wounded began to pile up. And since they had no doctors or surgeons to speak of, which back in the day just meant your most sober friend who owned a bone saw, the wounded were pretty much just told to walk it off. If they couldn't walk, they were left behind. Finally, the army got to the Tigris River, but found it too deep to cross. That's what a member of the army came forward and told the generals, look, I got an idea how to cross this river, but you want to hear my idea, you gotta pay me. I admire that man's hustle.

You're thousands of miles away from home, you're all being attacked, you're all cut off, you have no food or water really anymore, and you are still trying to secure that bag. This man is like the patron saint of hustlers. He's hustling even when it's not even good for him to hustle. Yeah, you know, you're you're marching you Like that high leverage the high interest like loan you've gotten for your chariot Some Armenian guys after stealing the wheels off but like about that thought the Armenians are coming. Oh fuck off The generals agreed to pay this guy and to hear him out and the man came up with probably

the dumbest fucking idea in the world. Listen here guys, generals, how about we secure all this livestock in this area, then we butcher it, we skin them, we inflate their skin with air that we blow from our mouths and simply float across the river on all of these flesh balloons. According to him, each one of these balloons would be good for two men, meaning they'd now have to make around 5,000 of them. Jesus Christ. And the generals took one look at him like, no, man, we're not going to do that.

Yeah, that's like, you know, necessity is the mother of invention. And quite often, you know, during warfare, like people will come up with's like, you know, necessity is the mother of invention and quite often, you know, during warfare, like people will come up with like hokey solutions to problems, but like this is very far beyond the idea of the guy for mad mid Don Draper, like trying to sell them on flesh balloons across the Tigris river. But everybody is haggard sunburned. Their armor is grafted to their skin from dirt and grime and they're like, how about flush balloons? You see the modern man is faced with many problems How often are you besieged by Persians on the banks of the Tigris and you're there and you don't know how to get across

There's one simple solution inflating cows all the generals are on the table simultaneously just slap their fucking foreheads Like who paid this guy? Someone javelin that motherfucker. So we put a javelin in his eye. So instead it was decided we're not making flesh balloons We're gonna go north and today if there's any justice in the world would be called Kurdistan greater Kurdistan show The Greeks assume that well, they hate the Persians too, so maybe they'll be cool if we cut through their territory en route to the Black Sea on the other side of Armenia. And as soon as they got to Kurdish territory, however, all goodwill was immediately destroyed because they began to loot villages for provisions.

Because at this point, everyone kind of was starving to death. A group of Kurdish soldiers wandered up, saw thousands of Greeks swarming over their village like a band of oiled up locusts, and quickly attacked the Greeks in the rear. The joke writes. Now this part was commanded by Xenophon, and shocked at the sudden attack, the vanguard decided, we need to get the fuck out of here and push out. Assuming the rear, commanded by Xenophon, which was under attack, would follow them. But the rear was so heavily under attack, it could not fight its way through for hours, during which time the vanguard never even bothered to turn around and offer help, leading to a fistfight between the two commanders that nearly ended in a murder.

The Kurds also secured the only way out of the mountains, trapping the Greeks inside an area that they knew absolutely nothing about. The Greeks decided, well, if the Kurds already hate us for stealing all their shit, we might as well kill some people too. They captured two villagers and demanded that you're going to tell us how the fuck to get out of these mountains. One refused, so they smashed his skull in with a rock in front of the other one who then quickly began to talk. That's probably not a good idea when your main route was blocked by loads of angry Kurds. You know you fucked up. You know it's not going to make the Kurds any happier? Beating villagers to death?

Yeah. And finally this worked, that survivor led them out of the mountains and toward the eastern Tigris. Then, on the other side of the hill, on the other side of a different river, an army of Armenians appeared. Now, the Armenians at the time were under the thumb of the Persians, but as always during periods of colonization, Armenians kind of had a tendency to ignore the ruler. Furthermore, Armenians may have been kind sorta culturally Persian, which true, still are. But they're way more Greek. The Armenian nobility spoke Greek, rather than Armenian, which was considered a language for peasants. Armenians studied in Greece. Hell, Armenian coins stamped with the heads of Armenian kings would also have the term lovers of Greek culture etched onto the

back. So like, you know, when a whole bunch of Greeks show up to their front door like, oh yeah, you guys can come in. It's fine. Yeah. And with the Kurds chasing them, which the Armenians also hated, they're like, well, come on in boys. Across the river, made camp and sent an envoy to the Armenians asking for provisions and safe passage. Suddenly from down the mountains the Armenians marched towards the Greek camp, but it was clear that they were not arrayed for battle. An Armenian general said, you know, look, if the Persians show up, we're going to have to fight you. We kind of have no choice, but as long as they're not here, we're cool.

And then they all sat down, had a fat barbecue and began to get fucked up on beer and wine. Yeah, they're like, listen, relax. We'll fight tomorrow sometime after three p.m. You know, before then, we'll probably sleep in until one. Greeks are like, you guys too? Hell yeah. We're doing the handshake across the Caucasus Mountains. They were very cool with one another.

Instead of immediately leaving, the Greeks and the Armenians stayed to barbecue and drink for about three days. I mean, listen, you know, it's hospital. Then a Persian officer, obviously working for the King of Kings court, came through. The local Armenian governor saw that there was Persians there sent to run her out to the army like, hey, the boss is showing up. You have to get rid of the Greeks. So the Armenian general's like, you guys, you have to go, but you know, take as much food and water as you want and go in

that direction. Unfortunately, though, the Persian army did eventually catch up and joined with the Armenians who are now compelled to fight with them. However, the Greeks outmaneuvered this army with the Armenian contingent of the Persian force being suspiciously slow and dragging down the path of the entire Persian army. They probably didn't want to kill their new drinking buddies. And they also were asked to mark before 3pm. It's too hot, it's too cold, I'm tired, I don't wanna. The foundational national myth of Armenia is a country that does not exist before 3 p.m. In the afternoon

I mean, it's something that Persians Greeks and Armenians all have a comment Which is why this campaign started promptly at like 4 o 5 otherwise known as breakfast But by now it was November the Greeks hit it on the road for months And if that wasn't enough it began to. Since their campaign had begun in the desert, they were dressed for it, and they were now facing down the winter, which meant they might as well be naked. Even the ones who tried to adapt to the weather found themselves completely fucked. For example, most wore sandals, so as to not lose their toes to frostbite, they began to slaughter livestock and tried to make a kind of nasty ass shoe out of the untanned

and untreated skins. This is the new Jordans that are coming out that are just made from raw animal skin. Come get your flesh force one. Imagine the trench foot you would get from your foot being ensconced in blood. We know that. Because one of the problems with this is they're untreated. So you can't even call this leather. It's not tan.

That doesn't keep the weather out. The skins freeze to their feet. A long time ago during the Bloody White Baron series, we talked about the eternal boot, which was a cow's leg that you slipped inside of your foot and then it froze and rotted to it So we have a Greek eternal boot Men and animals began dropping dead from exposure going blind from snow blindness or you know sometimes called white blindness and

Fainting from lack of food when one group of men found a hot spring They just refused to leave it and Xenophon was like, look guys, the Persians are coming. The Armenians can only slow them down for so long. We gotta go. If we stay, they're gonna kill us. And the guys looking up from their chill ass hot spring like, we're fine with that. But we'll die relaxed as a motherfucker. Robb – Yeah, look at his chill ass volume. You know, how could you interrupt it?

The one thing that probably saved this entire expedition's life were tiny remote Armenian villages who gave them supplies each time they stumbled upon them. They just they didn't have much to offer, but it was enough to stop them from starving to death.

But they never had a shortage of liquor. Armenians at the time were pretty well known for, of course, everybody knows about brandy, cognac, but beer as well, which is not exactly anybody thinks of when they think of Armenian alcohol as beer, but it was a staple to early village life. And they're like, we don't really have any food, but would you like literal tons of beer? And the Greeks who at the time didn't really have much of a beer culture and were unfamiliar with it were like, yeah, sure. So the whole march, beer pretty much stopped them from starving

to death as well as dying of thirst. It was Greek Hewl. Like listen, Wheat and Barley are a food group, they have calories. Then just drink em. Just make it a blood, just blend that shit. Just surviving on nothing but carbs. Doing reverse keto. Imagine how fucking hammered they were. I'm sure beer back then was not that strong, but still if it's the only thing you're consuming. Also, the beer shits must have just been otherworldly. Oh, it's the you're shitting while you're marching. It's freezing on your cow leg. Oh, the shit mixed together with my flesh force ones. Stomping in my flesh force ones.

Damn I got my flesh force ones creased and there's dirt on them now. Let me get out my wet wipe. You gotta pull it off and your toes just come off with them. Like degloving your entire foot when you take them off. The best part is when they get back to Greece and the ancient Greek version of Nelly gets sponsored by them and makes the song flesh force one, you know, finally they make it to a small village and one of the villagers is like, so where the fuck y'all headed anyway?

And it was when the village elders, hence why he spoke Greek and Xenophon and four of them were going to the Black Sea because there were small Greek towns there and they figured we could go there, get on a boat and get the fuck home. The village elder was like, oh yeah, I know where that is. About five days away, follow me. I'll bring you there. The rest of the march went off without any issues and within a week they were standing on the Black Sea coast. The men collapsed, crying and screaming in joy. Several of them stripped naked and ran out into the sea despite the fact it was winter. They're like, nope, don't care. Also, they probably just wanted to wash themselves because

it has been, it's January now? It's been a long time. It's been what, six to eight months? Out of the original 10,000 who went into battle in June, 8,000 had made it to safety. So like, not as horrible as it could have been. I mean in terms of, in the grand scheme of things, in terms of marches like this and campaigns like this we have talked about, like a 20% attrition rate isn't actually that bad. It's actually astonishingly good. You would assume that more of these dudes would have

dropped dead from disease at this point. Small problem though, the Black Sea town of Trebizond did not have enough boats to ferry 8,000 men back to the homeland. So after a month of recovery the vast majority of the men had to continue marching. Probably more pissed off than they have ever been in their entire life, they launched an attack on a Persian settlement on the coast of the Hellespont, storming into town and slaughtering everything that they found until they came up against the ruler, this guy named Farnabezus, who was like,

look, we'll stop killing people, but you got to give us all your fucking boats immediately. We are going home." And with that, the governor is like, that's all you want? You just wanted boats? You could have just paid for them. And eventually the leader is like, okay, take them, go the fuck back home. And they did.

Xenophon is by far the most famous of anyone involved in this story. And we have his work, the Anabasis, to thank for pretty much all the knowledge we come of it, which of course comes with the caveat of Xenophon could have definitely made some of this up, changed a lot of it, made it seem more heroic, and I've done my best to kind of compare it to more modern interpretations of it to make it seem more believable. Clearch was long dead at this point, but the aphors of Sparta gave a blanket pardon to him and any Spartans of any wrongdoing who had taken part in the march. That's something.

Xenophon wasn't done being a soldier or even a mercenary after all of this, going so far as to get hired on the wrong side of a different conflict and getting exiled from Athens at one point. He spent much of his time in Sparta writing extensively about them and since Spartans never really wrote anything down or we don't have any surviving works of them, he's pretty much all we have to thank for what we know about ancient Spartan history. So thanks I guess. The end? No. It's really interesting that the Spartans are not exactly known for being an artistic

or writing people. And we have this guy who survived a march based on a gut full of Armenian beer to thank for most of written Spartan documentation. Yeah, small domino, big domino. Armenians brew beer. We now have surviving accounts of Spartan culture. Small domino, no, the real small domino, big domino is Armenians brew beer. Jared Butler gets spray painted of. It was very interesting about like these early Armenian villages because over the years like the beer culture would go away and Arguably, it's only just now coming back in Armenia specifically and remember like this is take I say Armenia

This is not taking place in the repa the borders within the Republic of Armenia as we know today This is a much bigger piece of land But early Armenian villages as much as they were founded and built, were mostly based on beer making because they began cultivating barley and hops and all of these other things. And they began brewing it, I assume somehow an accident as well as wine, but that was in a different region. And so much of the early village life literally was only based upon growing these crops to drink them. Because it was nutritious, it was a source of water that would not poison them, and they

could trade it with local villages. And also apparently sustain an army on the march, which tells me they made the thickest fucking beer known to mankind. It's like drinking porridge. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I would fuck around that. Why not? I give it a try. Ancient Armenians, if you're listening through a type machine,

you can send your ancient beer to the Netherlands and I will drink it. But that is a podcast. Tom, we do a thing on this podcast called Questions from the Legion. If you would like to ask us a question from the Legion you can do so on Patreon support the show you can ask us through patreon DMS at which point you'll also have access to our large discord community You can ask us on there because we have a channel for it and we'll answer it on air Failing that you can attach the letter to the back of a Greek soldier March him for six months across the deserted Anatolia plains somehow get him to the back of a Greek soldier, march him for six months across

the deserted Anatolia plains, somehow get him to the Hellespont, put him on an even longer boat to get to the Netherlands, and I will read it for the podcast. Please don't do that, he probably has horrible diseases. Now- I really want those flesh force wounds. Stomping on them flesh force wounds. Today's question is about fitness, because it is Tom and I. What is a fitness hobby that you do for fun that people don't know about?

Eh, well people know that I love going to the gym. I bought a bike recently so now all three of us cycle. Cycle gang, cycle gang. So like, I don't know, like fitness, like running. You actually enjoy running. See, I can't say running because I run it, but I fucking hate it. Yeah. Like it's one of those things where it's painful and it's a bit miserable, but like it's, I just think as like a kind of holistic approach to exercise. Like I lift weights and I do cardio in the gym, but it's like, it's fun. Um, other than

that, like, like cycling is more of a functional thing. Like it's a mode of transportation. I cycle to the train, get the train to the, to near where the studio is and then cycle down to the studio. Can you put your bike on the trains in London? You can put them on the overground. You can't them on the tube but I'm lucky in the sense that like I get the overground to work so it's not that bad but yeah like that's really it like I don't really do anything that people would be surprised. I picked up tennis recently because there's a tennis club that's attached to the gym that I go to I know that makes

it sound like really bougie but it's only like 20 euro a month. So it's like super affordable. I like sports in general. I'm absolutely dogshit awful, but it's a lot of fun. It's just something new to do. Stay active. Yeah, obviously everybody knows I go to the gym a lot, but we only could say that so many times. But I just enjoy sports. There's not many sports that you put in front of me that like I'm a golden retriever at heart. If you make me chase a ball, I'm having a good time. Like honestly, that's what it boils down to. Yeah. As I am a man who's approaching his thirties, I will be taking up Brazilian

Jiu-Jitsu soon. So, you know, I actually, I did Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu for years. I still enjoy it. The problem is there's absolutely no gyms anywhere near me from where I live. Like the closest one is like 30 minutes away and that wouldn't be a huge distance to travel, but their classes for some reason are only at 9 p.m. and go until 10 30. So I'm like, okay, but once I add on 40 minutes or an hour of travel to that, like that is way too much to shit to commit to, man. I do not want to do that.

So tennis it is. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you so much for joining me here today. You can find the brand new lions led by donkeys flesh force one on our merch store. No, I feel like that's illegal to do. Tom, you have another podcast. Plug your other podcast. More importantly than the other podcast live show in Belfast. And we are if you want to buy a pair of flesh force ones, come to the live show in Belfast. Oh, please don't bring your pair of flesh force ones.

I feel like it's a public health concern. Yeah. And 26th of October in the OEM Music Center in Belfast. I realized last night that it's going to be Halloween. Yeah, we planned that on purpose. Totally for real. Well, I planned it because it's a bank holiday in Ireland. So more people can come to it if they need to travel. But show up to the live show in costume.

We will all be in costume on stage. Joe's is slowly disintegrating as he wore it in the Hague. I will be wearing a costume, Nate will be wearing a costume and we will have prizes for people with the best costumes in the crowd. But yeah, aside from that, Penet Skin, you know it, it's a history show about the history, a weird history of tattooing and Glue Factory, a show about nothing but riffs. And this is the only show that I do. So support us on Patreon. Five dollars a month gets you years and years of bonus content.

It gets you Discord access. Gets you every episode early. Gets you first dibs on live show tickets. Gets you first dibs on merch. Gets you the, a lock of Tom's hair. Conditions may apply. You have to take the lock of hair yourself. If you can take it, you can keep it. Listen,

I'm not going to begrudge someone. Thank you very much. Once again, leave us a review on wherever it is you listen to podcasts and until next time, the Stomp and the Flesh Force Ones catch a javel into the face.