Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. Before we start today's episode, one more time, we are going to do a live show at the Indiana Historical Society. This is on Friday, July nineteenth, twenty twenty four. So if you are listening to this podcast way in the future, twenty twenty four, that's the year we're talking about. This is going to be at the Eugene and Maryland Glick Indiana History Center again July nineteenth, twenty twenty four. Holly and I did a show there back before the pandemic started, had a great time. It's been a very long time since we've done a lot of live shows, so it's nice to be working toward doing some again. Yes, indeed, this will be from seven thirty to eight thirty. There will also be a meet and greet before the show, so folks can either buy a ticket to the show or a ticket that includes that meet and greet. And to get more information, you can go to www dot Indianahistory dot org slash events. And now we will move on to the actual episode. Back in twenty seventeen, when everyone in the world, it seemed like, was talking about the solar eclipse that was about to be visible from North America. Holly put together an episode on a handful of eclipses in history, and I don't think it really entered our minds at the time that in almost seven years after that there would be another total solar eclipse visible from North America, and that it would also, like that earlier one, be happening on a day when a new episode of our show comes out. For my pot art, pretty much the minute the twenty seventeen eclipse was over, the group of folks that I was traveling with started talking about where we should go to see the next one. Uh. I definitely though, was not thinking, hmm, what should we do on the podcast for the next solar eclipse? Uh? Did not enter my mind. But here we are, solar eclipse happening today on the day this podcast comes out. So I found another eclipse related topic. On May twenty eighth, in the year five eighty five BCE, there was a total solar eclipse during a battle between the kingdoms of Media and Lydia, and this eclipse had been predicted by Thailees of my leadas, and it led to the ends of both the battle and the war that the battle was a part of. Except turns out there is debate about every single thing that I just said that has been going on for centuries. We're going to be talking about these events and the debate around them. Also, according to Herodotus, one of the reasons that this battle was being fought involved a particularly horrific incident of cannibalism. So just heads up on that. The details surrounding the eclipse and the battle aren't the only subjects of debate in today's episode. Another is Stalley's of Militis himself. There are lots and lots of references to him in ancient writing, but we have no contemporary sources about his life. All the references we have on him first appeared in writing much much later. Let's just start with when he lived. One source on that is Diogenes Lartius, who was born around one eighty CE. Just to be clear, that is not the same person as Diogenes the Senic, who we have covered on the show before. Diogenes the senc lived a long time before Diogenes Laardius also, we are not going to pretend to try to say any of these names the way they were quote authentically pronounced. That's kind of not possible to piece together at this point. But Diogenes Laardiis was referencing a Polydorus of Athens, and a Polydorus of Athens was born around one eighty BCE, so these two men were born more than three hundred and fifty years apart, and then Thales was born another three hundred and fifty years or so before a Polydorus of Athens. Ancient Greek chroniclers and historians used Olympiads to count years, with each Olympiad spanning the four year period between Olympic Games. According to Diogenes, who was referencing a Polydorus, Thales died at the age of seventy eight and was born during the thirty fifth Olympiad that started in six forty BCE. He died during the fifty eighth Olympiad, which started in five forty eight BCE, but this would have made his age more like ninety not seventy eight. Most sources agree that there's a transcription error in the Olympiad of his birth, and that Thales was really born during the thirty ninth Olympiad that started in six twenty four BCE. So if you're keeping score, we have one source quoting another source, both of whom lived centuries later, and a mistake, and we are only three paragraphs into this thing. We also know very little about Thales's life, including who his parents were. There are some ancient sources that say his mother was Phoenician. Others give his parents names as Examise and Cleobulin, but we don't know anything about them either. Beyond those possible names, there is general agreement that he was born in Miletus in Ionia on the aeg and c. This was a trading hub and an intellectual center, and that's on the Aegean coast, in an area that today is part of Turkya. Guess what else. We don't have any surviving writing by Thales or any exact quotes of his writing in other later material. Instead, what we do have is lots and lots of descriptions of what he wrote about, and references to ideas that he put forth, and various facts and ideas that are attributed to him. So all that said, Thales was reportedly brilliant. He was named as one of the seven wise men or sopoy of Plato's Protagoras. Plato described Theales and these six other men as quote enthusiasts, lovers, and disciples of the Spartan culture. And you can recognize that character in their wisdom by the short, memorable sayings that fell from each of them. They assembled together and dedicated these as the first fruits of their lore to Apollo in his Delphic temple. So these maxims include things like no thyself and nothing in excess, both of which are attributed to Thales. He's also credited as being one of the founders of the Milesian school of philosophy, also called the Ionian school. The three figures most associated with this school are Thales, his student an Aximander, and an axemander student in Aximenes. All three had a focus on astronomy and cosmology, and all three put forth ideas about what the universe was fundamentally made of. Some of their ideas were really dissimilar, though, so some scholars described the Milesian school as more of a geographic descriptor than any kind of unified school of thought. Here are some ideas that various ancient sources attribute to Thales. Water or perhaps fluid, is the fundamental substance that makes up everything in the universe. Also, everything has a soul, which is sometimes described as gods residing in everything. This offered an explanation for magnetism. Loadstones could attract iron because of the souls that were residing within them. According to Aristotle, Sales described the Earth as floating on an infinite sea of water. Seneca said he used this floating earth to explain the cause of earthquakes. Of course, this is not what causes earthquakes, but this is sometimes described as a step away from blaming natural phenomena on the behavior of gods and towards a more rational and observable science. Side note, sources written today often describe Sale's concept of the earth as a flat disk floating on that water, but surviving references don't actually specify a shape for this floating earth. It's pretty easy to conclude that he meant that it was a disk, because if there were a globe floating on the water, how would the people on the underwater portion of it breathe? Like? Is there an atmosphere? Like? How is it working is it concased in something? Don't know? According to Aristotle, Anaximenes and an Aximander believed that the Earth was lats, but earlier in the same sentence that he mentioned them, he also said some people thought the earth was spherical? So does that some include bailies? If this description was meant to be in chronological order, it could have, but like, we just really don't know. The entry on Thales of my Ladas at the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy argues that Thales likely thought the Earth was a sphere for the same reasons that Aristotle did, including things like seeing ships sail away into the distance with their hulls disappearing below the horizon before their masts and sails. This entry doesn't really explain why Anteximotes and an Aximander, who would have had access to these same observations, would have concluded otherwise, though, or why we should conclude that Theales had different ideas on this idea than the two of them. Yeah, I've read this entry and I felt kind of convinced, and then I was like, wait, why am I convinced? Though I'm not, I still have questions. Also reportedly calculated the height of the Great Pyramids of Egypt using geometry by comparing the length of their shadow to the length of the shadow of his staff. He may have written a navigational work called the Nautical Star Guide, although Diogenes Leargists says this was by Phocos of Samos. Some accounts say Thales diverted the river hallis now known in Turkish as the Kazillermac River into a channel so that King Criesus could cross it with an army, and that he united the city states of Ionia in the face of aggression from the Kingdom of Lydia. We mentioned in our episode about Gerardis Mercader that Theal's is sometimes credited with making the first map projection. In this case, it was a star chart. Since making a map projection involves making a two dimensional map from a three dimensional globe, that's what it is. This means that he recognized that the visible night sky had a curved surface, even if he thought the earth below it was flat. Again seen two arguments on this that kind of contradicts the infinite sea concept. Well, if you sort of imagine, like, uh, one of those poppamatic bubbles where the flat part is the earth, and the domed part is the night sky, and then infinite sea all around it. Oh yeah, I guess sometimes. Daylees is described as bringing geometry to Greece from Egypt, and he's sometimes credited with several geometric theorems. Some of them include that a circle is bisected by its diameter, that if two sides of a triangle or of equal length, the angles opposite those sides are also equal, and that opposite angles formed by intersecting straight lines are also equal. Daylees is sometimes even credited with coming up with the entire idea of geometric proofs. There are also a couple of anecdotes about Daylies that paint almost contradictory pictures of him as a person. One as that once upon a time someone criticized him for not using his wisdom to get rich. So based on his observations of the heavens, he predicted that there was going to be a larger than normal olive crop that year, and he got control of all the olive presses in the area, so when that crop was harvested, everybody had to pay him to press their olives into oil. And then, having proved his point that he could get rich with his brain if he wanted to. He went back to his own work and left olive pressing behind. Aristotle is one of the sources for this story, but he doesn't actually seem to really believe it or think. He thinks that if it did happen, it wasn't something that Theales did. Among other things, even if the olive crop hadn't been particularly large, he still would have had a monopoly on all the presses. Theylies definitely didn't invent the idea of the monopoly. The other is his story reported by Plato, who said that one time Thales was so focused on studying the night sky that he fell into a well listen who among us? When a servant pulled him out, She made fun of him, asking rhetorically how he could hope to learn about the heavens when he could not even watch his feet. Yeah, according to the stories, he was both very astute and incredibly absent minded. Uh. This episode feels like it was already two thirds caveats, but we have still more caveats, Like we really don't have any way of knowing whether Thalies actually accomplished a lot of these things that were attributed to him. It's possible that since he was an early Greek philosopher who was reputed to be very wise, people just gave him credit for things that didn't have a clear origin point. It was not all that unusual to sort of attribute things to early Greek philosophers. Even the ancient Greek sources that comment on his life and work do not suggest that they had any first hand access to any of his writing to back any of this up. And there are so many sources today that describe Thales as the first Greek philosopher or the first scientist or first astronomer, and claim that ancient Greek scholars described him that way as well. But the idea that Thales established Greek philosophy and that Greek philosophy then formed the foundation for the entirety of Western thought really seems to have started to evolve in Europe around the eighteenth century. In writing that is threaded through with so much xenophobia and racism, it's likely that much of Thali's seemingly groundbreaking knowledge actually came from Egypt. Thales's eclipse prediction and the Battle of the Eclipse are intertwined. We are going to start with that battle after a sponsor break, and that is the part of the show that will have the horrific cannibalism in it. Our earliest source on the Battle of the Eclipse is by Herodotus, who lived from around for eighty four BCE to around four thirty BCE, so that was more than one hundred years after the death of Thales, in a century or so before this battle is believed to have happened. Here is what Herodotus had to say. Quote, there had a risen war between the Lydians and the Medis, lasting five years, in which years the Medis often discomfited the Lydians, and the Lydians often discomfited the Medis, and among others they fought also a battle by night, and as they still carried on the war with equally balanced fortune, in the sixth year a battle took place, in which it happened when the fight had begun, that suddenly the day became night. And this change of the day Theales the Milesian, had foretold to the Ionians, laying down as a limit this very year in which the change took place. The Lydians, however, and the Medis, when they saw that it had become night and said of day ceased from their fighting and were much more eager both of them that peace should be made between them. So to contextualize that a bit, Lydia occupied much of what is now western Turkia, and it was heavily influenced by neighboring Ionia, where Thales was from. The Medis were the people of Media, which occupied what's now northwestern Iran as well as parts of what's now Azerbaijan and Iraq. It's possible that there was a pretty mundane reason for this war. It had started when Aliades was king of Lydia and Sayagsaris was king of Media. Both were trying to expand their kingdoms and annexed the territory that lay between Lydia and Media, which brought the two kingdoms into conflict with each other. But sometimes Herodotus's histories included stories that were really compelling but not necessarily substantiated. We've mentioned that previously on the show, and we've talked about Herodotus and he offers a way more horrifying and gruesome explanation for this war that was connected to a group of Scythians. Scythians were a nomadic people who migrated from Central Asia to what's now Russia and Ukraine. Eventually their empire was centered on what's now Crimea. Their history can be tricky to put together because they didn't use writing, and a number of ancient sources that did write about them sometimes conflated them with other nomadic peoples who spoke Iranian languages. Also, a lot of these sources were describing a society that their own people or their allies had been attacked by, which of course influenced how they wrote about these other people. But the Scythians were known for their horsemanship, their archery, and their prowess in combat, very broadly speaking. When this war took place, the Scythians controlled territory to the northwest of Media and across the Black Sea from Lydia. But more than a century prior, the Scythians had controlled Media and the Medes had expelled the Scythian Empire from their territory sometime around six hundred BCE, but there were still small groups and bands in the area after this point. So according to Herodotus's history, there was a group of Scythians who were feuding with the rest of their people at first, Syaksaris offered them his protection, and he also sent some boys to the Cythians to be taught their language and to learn archery. But one day the Cythians went hunting, and they came back empty handed, and Sayaksari's quote dealt with them very harshly and used insult towards them. According to Herodotus, in response, the Scythians quote planned to kill and cut up one of the boys who were being instructed among them, and having dressed his flesh as they had been wont to dress the wild animals to you, bear it to siaks Aris and give it to him, pretending that it was game taken in hunting. There are also some later sources that suggest that this boy was one of Syaxari's's own children, or some other child who was part of the royal family. Once they had done this, the Scythians fled from media, and quote Sayasaris with the guests who ate at his table tasted of that meat, and the Scythians, having so done, became suppliants for the protection of Aliades. Sayasis demanded that Aliades return the Scythians to him so they could be brought to justice, and Aliades refused, and that started a war, one in which, according to what we read earlier, the two sides were pretty evenly matched for more than five years. Herodotus states that after this battle, in which the day turned into night and the two armies were inspired to lay down their arms, two men helped negotiate a peace. One was si Ansis of Cilia and one was Libidinous of Babylon. Other sources say that the Babylonian negotiator was actually King Nebuchinezer. The second this treaty involved a marriage between Aliats's daughter Arhinius and Sayaksaris's son Astyages. There are some other fragmented writings that suggest that maybe there was also a second marriage between a Median princess and either Aliates or Aliati's son Cretius. We have all whole episode on Cretius, and since this is the second time that he has come up, we will run that as a Saturday Classic sometime soon. It's probably not surprising based on how many caveats were involved in our discussion of Thales, but there are various conflicting accounts of this war. Besides the conflicting details that we've already mentioned and scholars have been trying to piece together all of these details for literally centuries. One question is whether Sayaksaris was king of Media for the entire content. The account of Herodotus suggests that he was, as does Clement of Alexandria, but Cicero and other sources say that Saya Czaris died at some point during the conflict or during the battle, and was succeeded by his son Astyages, who continued the war with the Lydians. Some translations of Herodotus interpret the treaty negotiations as happening under Astiagies and not Saya Csari's. There's also some debate about exactly where the border between these two kingdoms was set under this treaty. The Kazillarmac River is a logical and kind of widely assumed borderline, but it's not really spelled out specifically in the surviving accounts. But the last big question is when and where the battle happened, which is connected to when and where the eclipse happened, and that ties in to exactly what Theales predicted about the eclipse and how or whether he could have made such a prediction. And we're going to talk more about all of that after or a sponsor break. If you read about the battle of the eclipse in a newspaper or a magazine, maybe a website meant for a general audience today, maybe today specifically, because this is something that's gotten just a lot of attention in the run up to this today's eclipse, it'll probably say that this eclipse happened on May twenty eighth, five eighty five BCE. That's the date that I said up at the top of the show. And most of the time it comes across as like this is and always has been the definitive date that was established for the eclipse and consequently the battle. Some sources go so far as to say that because we know exactly when and where this eclipse occurred, we also know exactly when and where the battle happened, meaning it is one of the first events and where we can pinpoint the exact date, time and place. Naturally, it's way more complicated than that. The account of Herodotus doesn't really say that there was a solar eclipse. He said that day turned tonight. Most sources interpret that as being about a solar eclipse, and that's the most obvious possible explanation. This is especially true since Herodotus also put it in the context of a prediction, unless someone just makes a lucky guess. Successfully predicting an eclipse requires knowledge of math, geometry, and astronomy, and predicting where it will actually be visible also requires a knowledge of geography, so the ability to predict eclipse is also seen as an indication of where a society is. In terms of all of this needed knowledge, it would make sense for someone who had the reputed brilliance of Thales to be credited with this kind of prediction. At the same time, there are also Greek accounts of philosopher anex Agoris predicting a meteor strike that is not something you can predict in the same way that you would predict an eclipse. We've talked about EnEx Agris on the show before, but not about this whole meteor prediction. So it's like within the realm of possibility that Theyales predicted some other phenomenon that could turn day into night, one that wouldn't necessarily be predictable in the same way that an eclipse is. Some of the other possible explanations for the day turning intonight include more mundane things like a very sudden, dense cloud cover moving in, or things that are a lot more dramatic, like atmospheric debris from a volcanic eruption or smoke from a massive fire. Herodotus also didn't specify when exactly they Lees had predicted this eclipse would happen. According to the translation that Tracy used for this episode, Herodotus just said Theaylees had foretold it to the Ionians quote laying down as a limit this very year in which the change took place. Neither he nor later Greek writers specified which year they Lees had predicted, although some did correlate that prediction with a specific eclipse that by that point was known to have occurred sometime in the six or seventh century BCE. There are so many not entirely answered questions about all of this. First, if Theyales really did successfully predict a solar eclipse, meaning he did some kind of calculation rather than just making a lucky guess, how did he do it? One common idea is that he used something called the Babylonian saras, which is a cycle of two hundred and twenty three lunar months or eighteen years ten days and eight hours in which there is a repeating pattern of eclipses. This cycle does exist, but it's not entirely clear what the Babylonians knew about it. Lunar eclipses are visible only at night, and solar eclipses are very brief and are fully visible only in a narrow band that is not in the same place from one solar eclipse to the next, So it's possible that the Babylonians had enough records of lunar eclipses to spot a pattern among them, but this probably would not be true for solar eclipses. In nineteen fifty two, mathematician Otto Neugebauer argued that the idea that the Babylonians used the Sero cycle to predict eclipses came from an error made by Edmund Halley in the late seventeenth century and then picked up by basically everyone else who wrote about eclipses for the next three hundred years. I guess if you're going to pick up somebody's mistake and repeat it for Halle's a good one, why not start with Edmund Halley? Again? There is a real pattern there. It's pretty obvious using something like a color coded chart of all the various types of eclipses, and today we have things like measurements taken using reflectors that astronauts left on the Moon in order to allow us to like more specifically track and measure the movement of the Moon. We have way more precise data on this and what this pattern actually looks like. It is just not as clear how much the Babylonians understood about this and whether it could have been enough to allow Thales to use it to make a prediction about a solar eclipse. While there's various other speculation about methods Dalies may have used to predict the eclipse, it's possible that it was just a lucky guess, or it could be that the dramatic intersection between a battle and eclipse and the end of a six year war seemed like something someone as wise as Day's would have predicted. Some of the sources that were used in this episode conclude that there was no prediction and that this entire story is made up, or that the idea of day turning into night was actually more of a literary trope than an actual description of what was happening in the sky. There are even some arguments that the armies were so preoccupied with fighting that they fought into the night and then decided to lay down their arms when they realized what they had done. This last interpretation, though, doesn't work with translations that also say that night then turned back to day unless it all took a really long time. By the sixteenth century, mathematicians and astronomers knew a lot more about the solar system and mathematics, and were using the movement of the Earth and the Moon to more precisely calculate when previous eclipses had happened, and they started proposing eclipses that could have been the one connected to Thales, again based on more specific math rather than kind of guessing. Setus Calvisius put the year at six O seven. Isaac Newton said it was five eighty five BCE. Henry Usher said six zho one BCE. That is really just a sample. I don't think that's even half of the ones that were put forth. But these and other astronomers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries kind of narrowed it down to eclipses that had happened sometime between six twenty six BCE and five eighty five BCE. Astronomer Francis Bailey took up the question again in the nineteenth century and concluded that the Theailey's eclipse had taken place on September thirtieth, six ' ten BCE, because based on his calculations, that's the only one that would have reached totality and would have crossed what was then known as the River Hallas in the general area where the battle was believed to have taken place. By this point, so many people had tried to figure this out. In Bailey's words, quote, there is probably no fact in ancient history that has given rise to so many discussions and to such a variety of opinions as the solar eclipse, which, according to Herodotus, is said to have been predicted by Thales, in which, owing to a very singular coincidence, put an end to a furious war that raged between Sayaksari's King of Media and Aliaates, king of Lydia. Bailey wrote this in eighteen eleven, which was before even more work about it was published later in the nineteenth century, after astronomers started to realize that earlier calculations didn't account for small shifts in the moon's movement known as secular acceleration. These small shifts could have a big effect on exactly what a solar eclipse looked like from Earth, where it was visible, and where the path of totality was, and how the eclipse moved along that path. Other astronomers started proposing other eclipses as possibilities, including one on May eighteenth, six oh three BCE, and then one on May twenty eighth, five eighty five BCE, which seemed to be the general consensus for the so called right eclipse at this point. There are still arguments against the five eighty five BCE eclipse, though One major argument is when exactly the eclipse would have been total in the area where the battle probably took place. Totality of a solar eclipse does not last for very long. It's you know, very very roughly speaking, between two and four minutes. In this region, the eclipse would have started around five thirty PM, so just with the Sun starting to be covered. Totality would have started about an hour after that and lasted for a couple of minutes. Then the eclipse would have ended around seven twenty PM, with the Sun no longer blocked by any part of the moon. But then sunset would have started another ten or fifteen minutes after that. Most translations of Herodotus and other accounts described the day turning into night not long after the battle began, So one argument is that it would have been unusual for a battle to start so late in the day, although Herodotus did also note that these two armies fought at least one battle at night during this war. The other is that two armies in the middle of the battle probably would not have even noticed a solar eclipse that started that close to sunset, when the sky was already darkening. Okay, we'll talk about this more on Friday. But personally, having been in the path of totality in twenty seventeen, and also being a person who routinely hikes in like the thin, sad light of four pm in the winter in New England, I disagree with the idea that they would not have noticed an eclipse close to sunset. We'll talk again more about that on Friday. This examination of when Thailey's eclipse may have happened is It's not the only such effort to try to apply astronomy to history. There are a lot of references to eclipses in old historical documents or two astronomical events that might have been eclipses. So when Isaac Newton and others were trying to figure out the date when the eclipse of Thales happened, they were also doing similar work on other historical eclipses, and the focus of this research shifted over time. At first, the historical record was the starting point. What actual eclipse could this document be referring to? Astronomers and other researchers would look for an eclipse that exactly matched the account, But over time it became clear that historical accounts weren't always totally accurate when it came to astronomical phenomena. This was especially true in the works of people like Herodotus, who were often reading about things that happened more than a century earlier. Sometimes no specific year was mentioned, but sometimes when there was a year mentioned, it wasn't a year that had an eclipse at all. So the focus shifted a little bit from finding the eclipse that matched the written record to correcting the written record based on the only options for when the eclipse could have happened. So even though if you read this like one page article, that's many of them floating around about the battle of the eclipse the day. It'll probably make it sound like there was definitively or almost definitely an eclipse on May twenty eighth of five eighty five BCE, and that it definitely did interrupt a battle that day. There's still just a ton of debate around this. Based on what's become our typical schedule, this episode should hopefully be out before the eclipse starts in Mexico today and a couple of hours before it reaches the southwestern US. So if you are about to try to watch it, good luck and please protect your eyes. If you're in the Pacific and it's already passed you, I hope, we hope that you had clear skies and that you were able to get a glimpse. Yeah. And if you're not watching an eclipse to day, if it's three years from now or whatever, you know, if you've seen one before, I hope it was great. I have some listener mail from Kieran and Kieran's listener mail was titled Etiquette the Outbursts of Everett True, and Kieran wrote, Hi, Holly and Tracy, I just finished listening to the new episode on etiquette, and it immediately reminded me of this American comic that ran from nineteen oh five to nineteen twenty seven. I originally came across it on social media, and forgive me that I haven't researched it as thoroughly as I could have. I'm sure there are some things about it that have not aged well, but I was surprised at some of the comics being more progressive than I would have expected from a white comic creator during this time period. Unlike the etiquette books you covered in the episode, which emphasize being prem and proper, it takes on the rather different tone of an older, portly man pummeling people into good sense and manners. I especially enjoyed the ones where Everett true calls out someone racist, another of him correcting someone who was abusing a dog, as well as one as Everett being decided anti quote man spreading things we are still dealing with today. Obviously, I'm not advocating for violence, but bits of the comic did make me chuckle, and I hope it offers an interesting addition to your etiquette research. I'm attaching here the original post that caught my eye. Thanks so much, for that wonderful podcast and all that you do. All the best, Kieran. Kieran then sent another email shortly thereafter that said, PS, I forgot to add this to the original email, but I'm afraid I cannot pay the pet tax at the moment, as my precious for a baby of fourteen years passed away back in twenty twenty one and I haven't been ready for new for babies yet. But I do have some recently finished quilts and quilts and progress. I hope y'all are into some textile goodness. Thanks again, First, these quilt pictures are beautiful. What us send it? Textiles? What yuck? Thank you so much for sending these quilt pictures. They're so lovely beautiful. Yeah. So when I got this email, I was like, Everett True, all of this is ringing a bell to me. We have to have talked about this before. When was it? And the answer was it was during the episodes where we sort of talked about our prior episode on the nineteen eighteen flu pandemic in our new context of having lived through a year at that point of COVID nineteen pandemic. Because other things that Everett True beat people into a pulp about were refusing to wear a mask in places that masks are supposed to be worn and coughing without covering their mouth. So yes, Outburst of Ever it true. I similarly have no idea about like this comic beyond those kinds of things that we just talked about or the creator. But I did appreciate getting this email. If you would like to send us a note about this or any other podcast, we are at History podcast atiheartradio dot com. Our social media our username is typically missed in History. Email is the best way to get us. I will say, for the most part, I personally do not look at any of my social media mentions on any platform, so if you try to talk to me there, I'm probably not gonna see it. You can subscribe to our show on the iHeartRadio app or anywhere else you'd like to get your podcasts. Stuff you missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. 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Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. Before we start today's episode, one more time, we are going to do a live show at the Indiana Historical Society. This is on Friday, July nineteenth, twenty twenty four. So if you are listening to this podcast way in the future, twenty twenty four, that's the year we're talking about. This is going to be at the Eugene and Maryland Glick Indiana History Center again July nineteenth, twenty twenty four. Holly and I did a show there back before the pandemic started, had a great time. It's been a very long time since we've done a lot of live shows, so it's nice to be working toward doing some again. Yes, indeed, this will be from seven thirty to eight thirty. There will also be a meet and greet before the show, so folks can either buy a ticket to the show or a ticket that includes that meet and greet. And to get more information, you can go to www dot Indianahistory dot org slash events. And now we will move on to the actual episode. Back in twenty seventeen, when everyone in the world, it seemed like, was talking about the solar eclipse that was about to be visible from North America. Holly put together an episode on a handful of eclipses in history, and I don't think it really entered our minds at the time that in almost seven years after that there would be another total solar eclipse visible from North America, and that it would also, like that earlier one, be happening on a day when a new episode of our show comes out. For my pot art, pretty much the minute the twenty seventeen eclipse was over, the group of folks that I was traveling with started talking about where we should go to see the next one. Uh. I definitely though, was not thinking, hmm, what should we do on the podcast for the next solar eclipse? Uh? Did not enter my mind. But here we are, solar eclipse happening today on the day this podcast comes out. So I found another eclipse related topic. On May twenty eighth, in the year five eighty five BCE, there was a total solar eclipse during a battle between the kingdoms of Media and Lydia, and this eclipse had been predicted by Thailees of my leadas, and it led to the ends of both the battle and the war that the battle was a part of. Except turns out there is debate about every single thing that I just said that has been going on for centuries. We're going to be talking about these events and the debate around them. Also, according to Herodotus, one of the reasons that this battle was being fought involved a particularly horrific incident of cannibalism. So just heads up on that. The details surrounding the eclipse and the battle aren't the only subjects of debate in today's episode. Another is Stalley's of Militis himself. There are lots and lots of references to him in ancient writing, but we have no contemporary sources about his life. All the references we have on him first appeared in writing much much later. Let's just start with when he lived. One source on that is Diogenes Lartius, who was born around one eighty CE. Just to be clear, that is not the same person as Diogenes the Senic, who we have covered on the show before. Diogenes the senc lived a long time before Diogenes Laardius also, we are not going to pretend to try to say any of these names the way they were quote authentically pronounced. That's kind of not possible to piece together at this point. But Diogenes Laardiis was referencing a Polydorus of Athens, and a Polydorus of Athens was born around one eighty BCE, so these two men were born more than three hundred and fifty years apart, and then Thales was born another three hundred and fifty years or so before a Polydorus of Athens. Ancient Greek chroniclers and historians used Olympiads to count years, with each Olympiad spanning the four year period between Olympic Games. According to Diogenes, who was referencing a Polydorus, Thales died at the age of seventy eight and was born during the thirty fifth Olympiad that started in six forty BCE. He died during the fifty eighth Olympiad, which started in five forty eight BCE, but this would have made his age more like ninety not seventy eight. Most sources agree that there's a transcription error in the Olympiad of his birth, and that Thales was really born during the thirty ninth Olympiad that started in six twenty four BCE. So if you're keeping score, we have one source quoting another source, both of whom lived centuries later, and a mistake, and we are only three paragraphs into this thing. We also know very little about Thales's life, including who his parents were. There are some ancient sources that say his mother was Phoenician. Others give his parents names as Examise and Cleobulin, but we don't know anything about them either. Beyond those possible names, there is general agreement that he was born in Miletus in Ionia on the aeg and c. This was a trading hub and an intellectual center, and that's on the Aegean coast, in an area that today is part of Turkya. Guess what else. We don't have any surviving writing by Thales or any exact quotes of his writing in other later material. Instead, what we do have is lots and lots of descriptions of what he wrote about, and references to ideas that he put forth, and various facts and ideas that are attributed to him. So all that said, Thales was reportedly brilliant. He was named as one of the seven wise men or sopoy of Plato's Protagoras. Plato described Theales and these six other men as quote enthusiasts, lovers, and disciples of the Spartan culture. And you can recognize that character in their wisdom by the short, memorable sayings that fell from each of them. They assembled together and dedicated these as the first fruits of their lore to Apollo in his Delphic temple. So these maxims include things like no thyself and nothing in excess, both of which are attributed to Thales. He's also credited as being one of the founders of the Milesian school of philosophy, also called the Ionian school. The three figures most associated with this school are Thales, his student an Aximander, and an axemander student in Aximenes. All three had a focus on astronomy and cosmology, and all three put forth ideas about what the universe was fundamentally made of. Some of their ideas were really dissimilar, though, so some scholars described the Milesian school as more of a geographic descriptor than any kind of unified school of thought. Here are some ideas that various ancient sources attribute to Thales. Water or perhaps fluid, is the fundamental substance that makes up everything in the universe. Also, everything has a soul, which is sometimes described as gods residing in everything. This offered an explanation for magnetism. Loadstones could attract iron because of the souls that were residing within them. According to Aristotle, Sales described the Earth as floating on an infinite sea of water. Seneca said he used this floating earth to explain the cause of earthquakes. Of course, this is not what causes earthquakes, but this is sometimes described as a step away from blaming natural phenomena on the behavior of gods and towards a more rational and observable science. Side note, sources written today often describe Sale's concept of the earth as a flat disk floating on that water, but surviving references don't actually specify a shape for this floating earth. It's pretty easy to conclude that he meant that it was a disk, because if there were a globe floating on the water, how would the people on the underwater portion of it breathe? Like? Is there an atmosphere? Like? How is it working is it concased in something? Don't know? According to Aristotle, Anaximenes and an Aximander believed that the Earth was lats, but earlier in the same sentence that he mentioned them, he also said some people thought the earth was spherical? So does that some include bailies? If this description was meant to be in chronological order, it could have, but like, we just really don't know. The entry on Thales of my Ladas at the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy argues that Thales likely thought the Earth was a sphere for the same reasons that Aristotle did, including things like seeing ships sail away into the distance with their hulls disappearing below the horizon before their masts and sails. This entry doesn't really explain why Anteximotes and an Aximander, who would have had access to these same observations, would have concluded otherwise, though, or why we should conclude that Theales had different ideas on this idea than the two of them. Yeah, I've read this entry and I felt kind of convinced, and then I was like, wait, why am I convinced? Though I'm not, I still have questions. Also reportedly calculated the height of the Great Pyramids of Egypt using geometry by comparing the length of their shadow to the length of the shadow of his staff. He may have written a navigational work called the Nautical Star Guide, although Diogenes Leargists says this was by Phocos of Samos. Some accounts say Thales diverted the river hallis now known in Turkish as the Kazillermac River into a channel so that King Criesus could cross it with an army, and that he united the city states of Ionia in the face of aggression from the Kingdom of Lydia. We mentioned in our episode about Gerardis Mercader that Theal's is sometimes credited with making the first map projection. In this case, it was a star chart. Since making a map projection involves making a two dimensional map from a three dimensional globe, that's what it is. This means that he recognized that the visible night sky had a curved surface, even if he thought the earth below it was flat. Again seen two arguments on this that kind of contradicts the infinite sea concept. Well, if you sort of imagine, like, uh, one of those poppamatic bubbles where the flat part is the earth, and the domed part is the night sky, and then infinite sea all around it. Oh yeah, I guess sometimes. Daylees is described as bringing geometry to Greece from Egypt, and he's sometimes credited with several geometric theorems. Some of them include that a circle is bisected by its diameter, that if two sides of a triangle or of equal length, the angles opposite those sides are also equal, and that opposite angles formed by intersecting straight lines are also equal. Daylees is sometimes even credited with coming up with the entire idea of geometric proofs. There are also a couple of anecdotes about Daylies that paint almost contradictory pictures of him as a person. One as that once upon a time someone criticized him for not using his wisdom to get rich. So based on his observations of the heavens, he predicted that there was going to be a larger than normal olive crop that year, and he got control of all the olive presses in the area, so when that crop was harvested, everybody had to pay him to press their olives into oil. And then, having proved his point that he could get rich with his brain if he wanted to. He went back to his own work and left olive pressing behind. Aristotle is one of the sources for this story, but he doesn't actually seem to really believe it or think. He thinks that if it did happen, it wasn't something that Theales did. Among other things, even if the olive crop hadn't been particularly large, he still would have had a monopoly on all the presses. Theylies definitely didn't invent the idea of the monopoly. The other is his story reported by Plato, who said that one time Thales was so focused on studying the night sky that he fell into a well listen who among us? When a servant pulled him out, She made fun of him, asking rhetorically how he could hope to learn about the heavens when he could not even watch his feet. Yeah, according to the stories, he was both very astute and incredibly absent minded. Uh. This episode feels like it was already two thirds caveats, but we have still more caveats, Like we really don't have any way of knowing whether Thalies actually accomplished a lot of these things that were attributed to him. It's possible that since he was an early Greek philosopher who was reputed to be very wise, people just gave him credit for things that didn't have a clear origin point. It was not all that unusual to sort of attribute things to early Greek philosophers. Even the ancient Greek sources that comment on his life and work do not suggest that they had any first hand access to any of his writing to back any of this up. And there are so many sources today that describe Thales as the first Greek philosopher or the first scientist or first astronomer, and claim that ancient Greek scholars described him that way as well. But the idea that Thales established Greek philosophy and that Greek philosophy then formed the foundation for the entirety of Western thought really seems to have started to evolve in Europe around the eighteenth century. In writing that is threaded through with so much xenophobia and racism, it's likely that much of Thali's seemingly groundbreaking knowledge actually came from Egypt. Thales's eclipse prediction and the Battle of the Eclipse are intertwined. We are going to start with that battle after a sponsor break, and that is the part of the show that will have the horrific cannibalism in it. Our earliest source on the Battle of the Eclipse is by Herodotus, who lived from around for eighty four BCE to around four thirty BCE, so that was more than one hundred years after the death of Thales, in a century or so before this battle is believed to have happened. Here is what Herodotus had to say. Quote, there had a risen war between the Lydians and the Medis, lasting five years, in which years the Medis often discomfited the Lydians, and the Lydians often discomfited the Medis, and among others they fought also a battle by night, and as they still carried on the war with equally balanced fortune, in the sixth year a battle took place, in which it happened when the fight had begun, that suddenly the day became night. And this change of the day Theales the Milesian, had foretold to the Ionians, laying down as a limit this very year in which the change took place. The Lydians, however, and the Medis, when they saw that it had become night and said of day ceased from their fighting and were much more eager both of them that peace should be made between them. So to contextualize that a bit, Lydia occupied much of what is now western Turkia, and it was heavily influenced by neighboring Ionia, where Thales was from. The Medis were the people of Media, which occupied what's now northwestern Iran as well as parts of what's now Azerbaijan and Iraq. It's possible that there was a pretty mundane reason for this war. It had started when Aliades was king of Lydia and Sayagsaris was king of Media. Both were trying to expand their kingdoms and annexed the territory that lay between Lydia and Media, which brought the two kingdoms into conflict with each other. But sometimes Herodotus's histories included stories that were really compelling but not necessarily substantiated. We've mentioned that previously on the show, and we've talked about Herodotus and he offers a way more horrifying and gruesome explanation for this war that was connected to a group of Scythians. Scythians were a nomadic people who migrated from Central Asia to what's now Russia and Ukraine. Eventually their empire was centered on what's now Crimea. Their history can be tricky to put together because they didn't use writing, and a number of ancient sources that did write about them sometimes conflated them with other nomadic peoples who spoke Iranian languages. Also, a lot of these sources were describing a society that their own people or their allies had been attacked by, which of course influenced how they wrote about these other people. But the Scythians were known for their horsemanship, their archery, and their prowess in combat, very broadly speaking. When this war took place, the Scythians controlled territory to the northwest of Media and across the Black Sea from Lydia. But more than a century prior, the Scythians had controlled Media and the Medes had expelled the Scythian Empire from their territory sometime around six hundred BCE, but there were still small groups and bands in the area after this point. So according to Herodotus's history, there was a group of Scythians who were feuding with the rest of their people at first, Syaksaris offered them his protection, and he also sent some boys to the Cythians to be taught their language and to learn archery. But one day the Cythians went hunting, and they came back empty handed, and Sayaksari's quote dealt with them very harshly and used insult towards them. According to Herodotus, in response, the Scythians quote planned to kill and cut up one of the boys who were being instructed among them, and having dressed his flesh as they had been wont to dress the wild animals to you, bear it to siaks Aris and give it to him, pretending that it was game taken in hunting. There are also some later sources that suggest that this boy was one of Syaxari's's own children, or some other child who was part of the royal family. Once they had done this, the Scythians fled from media, and quote Sayasaris with the guests who ate at his table tasted of that meat, and the Scythians, having so done, became suppliants for the protection of Aliades. Sayasis demanded that Aliades return the Scythians to him so they could be brought to justice, and Aliades refused, and that started a war, one in which, according to what we read earlier, the two sides were pretty evenly matched for more than five years. Herodotus states that after this battle, in which the day turned into night and the two armies were inspired to lay down their arms, two men helped negotiate a peace. One was si Ansis of Cilia and one was Libidinous of Babylon. Other sources say that the Babylonian negotiator was actually King Nebuchinezer. The second this treaty involved a marriage between Aliats's daughter Arhinius and Sayaksaris's son Astyages. There are some other fragmented writings that suggest that maybe there was also a second marriage between a Median princess and either Aliates or Aliati's son Cretius. We have all whole episode on Cretius, and since this is the second time that he has come up, we will run that as a Saturday Classic sometime soon. It's probably not surprising based on how many caveats were involved in our discussion of Thales, but there are various conflicting accounts of this war. Besides the conflicting details that we've already mentioned and scholars have been trying to piece together all of these details for literally centuries. One question is whether Sayaksaris was king of Media for the entire content. The account of Herodotus suggests that he was, as does Clement of Alexandria, but Cicero and other sources say that Saya Czaris died at some point during the conflict or during the battle, and was succeeded by his son Astyages, who continued the war with the Lydians. Some translations of Herodotus interpret the treaty negotiations as happening under Astiagies and not Saya Csari's. There's also some debate about exactly where the border between these two kingdoms was set under this treaty. The Kazillarmac River is a logical and kind of widely assumed borderline, but it's not really spelled out specifically in the surviving accounts. But the last big question is when and where the battle happened, which is connected to when and where the eclipse happened, and that ties in to exactly what Theales predicted about the eclipse and how or whether he could have made such a prediction. And we're going to talk more about all of that after or a sponsor break. If you read about the battle of the eclipse in a newspaper or a magazine, maybe a website meant for a general audience today, maybe today specifically, because this is something that's gotten just a lot of attention in the run up to this today's eclipse, it'll probably say that this eclipse happened on May twenty eighth, five eighty five BCE. That's the date that I said up at the top of the show. And most of the time it comes across as like this is and always has been the definitive date that was established for the eclipse and consequently the battle. Some sources go so far as to say that because we know exactly when and where this eclipse occurred, we also know exactly when and where the battle happened, meaning it is one of the first events and where we can pinpoint the exact date, time and place. Naturally, it's way more complicated than that. The account of Herodotus doesn't really say that there was a solar eclipse. He said that day turned tonight. Most sources interpret that as being about a solar eclipse, and that's the most obvious possible explanation. This is especially true since Herodotus also put it in the context of a prediction, unless someone just makes a lucky guess. Successfully predicting an eclipse requires knowledge of math, geometry, and astronomy, and predicting where it will actually be visible also requires a knowledge of geography, so the ability to predict eclipse is also seen as an indication of where a society is. In terms of all of this needed knowledge, it would make sense for someone who had the reputed brilliance of Thales to be credited with this kind of prediction. At the same time, there are also Greek accounts of philosopher anex Agoris predicting a meteor strike that is not something you can predict in the same way that you would predict an eclipse. We've talked about EnEx Agris on the show before, but not about this whole meteor prediction. So it's like within the realm of possibility that Theyales predicted some other phenomenon that could turn day into night, one that wouldn't necessarily be predictable in the same way that an eclipse is. Some of the other possible explanations for the day turning intonight include more mundane things like a very sudden, dense cloud cover moving in, or things that are a lot more dramatic, like atmospheric debris from a volcanic eruption or smoke from a massive fire. Herodotus also didn't specify when exactly they Lees had predicted this eclipse would happen. According to the translation that Tracy used for this episode, Herodotus just said Theaylees had foretold it to the Ionians quote laying down as a limit this very year in which the change took place. Neither he nor later Greek writers specified which year they Lees had predicted, although some did correlate that prediction with a specific eclipse that by that point was known to have occurred sometime in the six or seventh century BCE. There are so many not entirely answered questions about all of this. First, if Theyales really did successfully predict a solar eclipse, meaning he did some kind of calculation rather than just making a lucky guess, how did he do it? One common idea is that he used something called the Babylonian saras, which is a cycle of two hundred and twenty three lunar months or eighteen years ten days and eight hours in which there is a repeating pattern of eclipses. This cycle does exist, but it's not entirely clear what the Babylonians knew about it. Lunar eclipses are visible only at night, and solar eclipses are very brief and are fully visible only in a narrow band that is not in the same place from one solar eclipse to the next, So it's possible that the Babylonians had enough records of lunar eclipses to spot a pattern among them, but this probably would not be true for solar eclipses. In nineteen fifty two, mathematician Otto Neugebauer argued that the idea that the Babylonians used the Sero cycle to predict eclipses came from an error made by Edmund Halley in the late seventeenth century and then picked up by basically everyone else who wrote about eclipses for the next three hundred years. I guess if you're going to pick up somebody's mistake and repeat it for Halle's a good one, why not start with Edmund Halley? Again? There is a real pattern there. It's pretty obvious using something like a color coded chart of all the various types of eclipses, and today we have things like measurements taken using reflectors that astronauts left on the Moon in order to allow us to like more specifically track and measure the movement of the Moon. We have way more precise data on this and what this pattern actually looks like. It is just not as clear how much the Babylonians understood about this and whether it could have been enough to allow Thales to use it to make a prediction about a solar eclipse. While there's various other speculation about methods Dalies may have used to predict the eclipse, it's possible that it was just a lucky guess, or it could be that the dramatic intersection between a battle and eclipse and the end of a six year war seemed like something someone as wise as Day's would have predicted. Some of the sources that were used in this episode conclude that there was no prediction and that this entire story is made up, or that the idea of day turning into night was actually more of a literary trope than an actual description of what was happening in the sky. There are even some arguments that the armies were so preoccupied with fighting that they fought into the night and then decided to lay down their arms when they realized what they had done. This last interpretation, though, doesn't work with translations that also say that night then turned back to day unless it all took a really long time. By the sixteenth century, mathematicians and astronomers knew a lot more about the solar system and mathematics, and were using the movement of the Earth and the Moon to more precisely calculate when previous eclipses had happened, and they started proposing eclipses that could have been the one connected to Thales, again based on more specific math rather than kind of guessing. Setus Calvisius put the year at six O seven. Isaac Newton said it was five eighty five BCE. Henry Usher said six zho one BCE. That is really just a sample. I don't think that's even half of the ones that were put forth. But these and other astronomers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries kind of narrowed it down to eclipses that had happened sometime between six twenty six BCE and five eighty five BCE. Astronomer Francis Bailey took up the question again in the nineteenth century and concluded that the Theailey's eclipse had taken place on September thirtieth, six ' ten BCE, because based on his calculations, that's the only one that would have reached totality and would have crossed what was then known as the River Hallas in the general area where the battle was believed to have taken place. By this point, so many people had tried to figure this out. In Bailey's words, quote, there is probably no fact in ancient history that has given rise to so many discussions and to such a variety of opinions as the solar eclipse, which, according to Herodotus, is said to have been predicted by Thales, in which, owing to a very singular coincidence, put an end to a furious war that raged between Sayaksari's King of Media and Aliaates, king of Lydia. Bailey wrote this in eighteen eleven, which was before even more work about it was published later in the nineteenth century, after astronomers started to realize that earlier calculations didn't account for small shifts in the moon's movement known as secular acceleration. These small shifts could have a big effect on exactly what a solar eclipse looked like from Earth, where it was visible, and where the path of totality was, and how the eclipse moved along that path. Other astronomers started proposing other eclipses as possibilities, including one on May eighteenth, six oh three BCE, and then one on May twenty eighth, five eighty five BCE, which seemed to be the general consensus for the so called right eclipse at this point. There are still arguments against the five eighty five BCE eclipse, though One major argument is when exactly the eclipse would have been total in the area where the battle probably took place. Totality of a solar eclipse does not last for very long. It's you know, very very roughly speaking, between two and four minutes. In this region, the eclipse would have started around five thirty PM, so just with the Sun starting to be covered. Totality would have started about an hour after that and lasted for a couple of minutes. Then the eclipse would have ended around seven twenty PM, with the Sun no longer blocked by any part of the moon. But then sunset would have started another ten or fifteen minutes after that. Most translations of Herodotus and other accounts described the day turning into night not long after the battle began, So one argument is that it would have been unusual for a battle to start so late in the day, although Herodotus did also note that these two armies fought at least one battle at night during this war. The other is that two armies in the middle of the battle probably would not have even noticed a solar eclipse that started that close to sunset, when the sky was already darkening. Okay, we'll talk about this more on Friday. But personally, having been in the path of totality in twenty seventeen, and also being a person who routinely hikes in like the thin, sad light of four pm in the winter in New England, I disagree with the idea that they would not have noticed an eclipse close to sunset. We'll talk again more about that on Friday. This examination of when Thailey's eclipse may have happened is It's not the only such effort to try to apply astronomy to history. There are a lot of references to eclipses in old historical documents or two astronomical events that might have been eclipses. So when Isaac Newton and others were trying to figure out the date when the eclipse of Thales happened, they were also doing similar work on other historical eclipses, and the focus of this research shifted over time. At first, the historical record was the starting point. What actual eclipse could this document be referring to? Astronomers and other researchers would look for an eclipse that exactly matched the account, But over time it became clear that historical accounts weren't always totally accurate when it came to astronomical phenomena. This was especially true in the works of people like Herodotus, who were often reading about things that happened more than a century earlier. Sometimes no specific year was mentioned, but sometimes when there was a year mentioned, it wasn't a year that had an eclipse at all. So the focus shifted a little bit from finding the eclipse that matched the written record to correcting the written record based on the only options for when the eclipse could have happened. So even though if you read this like one page article, that's many of them floating around about the battle of the eclipse the day. It'll probably make it sound like there was definitively or almost definitely an eclipse on May twenty eighth of five eighty five BCE, and that it definitely did interrupt a battle that day. There's still just a ton of debate around this. Based on what's become our typical schedule, this episode should hopefully be out before the eclipse starts in Mexico today and a couple of hours before it reaches the southwestern US. So if you are about to try to watch it, good luck and please protect your eyes. If you're in the Pacific and it's already passed you, I hope, we hope that you had clear skies and that you were able to get a glimpse. Yeah. And if you're not watching an eclipse to day, if it's three years from now or whatever, you know, if you've seen one before, I hope it was great. I have some listener mail from Kieran and Kieran's listener mail was titled Etiquette the Outbursts of Everett True, and Kieran wrote, Hi, Holly and Tracy, I just finished listening to the new episode on etiquette, and it immediately reminded me of this American comic that ran from nineteen oh five to nineteen twenty seven. I originally came across it on social media, and forgive me that I haven't researched it as thoroughly as I could have. I'm sure there are some things about it that have not aged well, but I was surprised at some of the comics being more progressive than I would have expected from a white comic creator during this time period. Unlike the etiquette books you covered in the episode, which emphasize being prem and proper, it takes on the rather different tone of an older, portly man pummeling people into good sense and manners. I especially enjoyed the ones where Everett true calls out someone racist, another of him correcting someone who was abusing a dog, as well as one as Everett being decided anti quote man spreading things we are still dealing with today. Obviously, I'm not advocating for violence, but bits of the comic did make me chuckle, and I hope it offers an interesting addition to your etiquette research. I'm attaching here the original post that caught my eye. Thanks so much, for that wonderful podcast and all that you do. All the best, Kieran. Kieran then sent another email shortly thereafter that said, PS, I forgot to add this to the original email, but I'm afraid I cannot pay the pet tax at the moment, as my precious for a baby of fourteen years passed away back in twenty twenty one and I haven't been ready for new for babies yet. But I do have some recently finished quilts and quilts and progress. I hope y'all are into some textile goodness. Thanks again, First, these quilt pictures are beautiful. What us send it? Textiles? What yuck? Thank you so much for sending these quilt pictures. They're so lovely beautiful. Yeah. So when I got this email, I was like, Everett True, all of this is ringing a bell to me. We have to have talked about this before. When was it? And the answer was it was during the episodes where we sort of talked about our prior episode on the nineteen eighteen flu pandemic in our new context of having lived through a year at that point of COVID nineteen pandemic. Because other things that Everett True beat people into a pulp about were refusing to wear a mask in places that masks are supposed to be worn and coughing without covering their mouth. So yes, Outburst of Ever it true. I similarly have no idea about like this comic beyond those kinds of things that we just talked about or the creator. But I did appreciate getting this email. If you would like to send us a note about this or any other podcast, we are at History podcast atiheartradio dot com. Our social media our username is typically missed in History. Email is the best way to get us. I will say, for the most part, I personally do not look at any of my social media mentions on any platform, so if you try to talk to me there, I'm probably not gonna see it. You can subscribe to our show on the iHeartRadio app or anywhere else you'd like to get your podcasts. Stuff you missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. 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