The Delian League

Misha Glenny and guests discuss the origins and evolution of an alliance which transformed the geopolitics of the classical world: the Delian League. Since the start of the 5th Century BCE, city states across Greece had been fighting a series of armed conflicts in the Greco-Persian Wars. After the defeat of a second Persian invasion in 478 BCE, a league of cities across Greece came together and formed a new alliance led by Athens. That alliance is now known as the Delian League, after the island of Delos where it was established. In the following decades, Athens used the Delian League to grow its own wealth and formidable naval power. Cities which tried to leave the alliance found themselves violently put down and their lands confiscated by the Athenians. What had begun as a cooperative alliance sworn to resist the Persian Empire gradually started to seem like it may have created another imperial power: the Athenian Empire. With Leah Lazar Lecturer in Hellenistic Culture at the University of Manchester Polly Low Professor in the Department of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Durham And Paul Cartledge AG Leventis Senior Research Fellow of Clare College, University of Cambridge Producer: Martha Owen Aristophanes (trans. David Barrett and Alan H. Sommerstein), The Birds and Other Plays (Penguin Classics, 2003) Mary Beard, The Parthenon (Profile Books, 2010) M. Canevaro and D. M. Lewis, 'Between ‘The Character of the Athenian Empire’ and The Origins of the Peloponnesian War (and beyond): The Popularity of the Athenian Empire Revisited' (Polis 41:1, 2024) Paul Cartledge, Ancient Greece: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2011) Lisa Kallet and John H. Kroll, The Athenian Empire: Using Coins as Sources (Cambridge University Press, 2020) Leah Lazar, Athenian Power in the Fifth Century BC (Oxford University Press, 2024) Polly Low (ed.), The Athenian Empire (Edinburgh University Press, 2008) Malcolm F. McGregor, The Athenians and their Empire (UBC Press, 1987) Robin Osborne (ed. and trans.), The Athenian Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2023) P. J. Rhodes, The Athenian Empire (Clarendon Press, 1985) Thucydides (trans. Robin Waterfield, introduced by Polly Low), The History of the Peloponnesian War (Basic Books, 2025) Thucydides (ed. Robert B Strassler), The Landmark Thucydides: A Comprehensive Guide to the Peloponnesian War (Free Press, 1998) Thucydides (trans. Rex Warner), History of the Peloponnesian War (Penguin Books, 2000) Thucydides (trans. Martin Hammond), The Peloponnesian War (Oxford University Press, 2009) In Our Time is a BBC Studios production Spanning history, religion, culture, science and philosophy, In Our Time from BBC Radio 4 is essential listening for the intellectually curious. In each episode, host Misha Glenny and expert guests explore the characters, events and discoveries that have shaped our world.

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  This is In Our Time from BBC Radio 4, and this is one of more than a thousand episodes you can find in the In Our Time archive. A reading list for this edition can be found in the episode description wherever you're listening. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello. In 478 BCE, the Greco-Persian Wars had seen a series of armed conflicts for over twenty years. After the defeat of a second Persian invasion, a league of cities across Greece came together. They formed a new alliance, led by Athens, an alliance which we now call the Delian League.

• 2:27Speaker 05

  In the following decades, Athens used the Delian League to grow its own wealth and formidable naval power. But cities who tried to leave the alliance found themselves violently put down and their lands confiscated. What began as a cooperative alliance, sworn to fight back and defend Greeks against the Persian Empire, gradually started to seem like it may have created another imperial power: the Athenian Empire. With me to discuss the Delian League are Leah Lazar, lecturer in Hellenistic culture at the University of Manchester, Polly Lowe, professor in the Department of Classics and

• 3:09Speaker 05

  Ancient History at the University of Durham, and Paul Cartledge, aged eleven, his senior research fellow of Clare College, University of Cambridge. And Paul, it's to you I want to come first, to give us, if you can, a sense of the geopolitical landscape of this period. What did Greece look like and what did the Persian Empire look like?

• 3:33Speaker 06

  You started off in 478, so I'm going to take you back seventy-plus years, to about 550. And that's when the Persian Empire, sometimes we say the Achaemenid Persian Empire, rose, very, very suddenly, in, of course, Iran. Within fifty years, it had spread east-west, far east as Afghanistan, Pakistan, as far west as the Aegean Sea, and indeed slightly over into Europe. So we're dealing with a vast territorial empire, such as the Greeks. Never were to know, for quite a long time, until After the period we're looking at. So what was Greece?

• 4:16Speaker 06

  Well, there was no such thing as a nation-state of Greece. There was a Kulturkreis, German for a cultural circle of Hellas. People who spoke Greek, thought Greek, behaved Greek. And they were spread all over the Mediterranean, all around the Black Sea. So no one focus. But the nearest bit of the Greek world to the Persians was actually within the Persian Empire. So as the Persians expanded west in the second half of the sixth century B.C., they conquered a whole string of Greek cities along the western seaboard of what is the Aegean Sea for the Greeks.

• 4:58Speaker 06

  You have therefore a confrontation potentially, a potential crunch point at the Aegean border of the Western Persian Empire. But fifty years or so after they'd first been incorporated in the Persian Empire, a bunch of Greeks decided they didn't want to be in the Persian Empire anymore. So, one particular Greek city is called Myelitus. It's now in western Turkey. A representative went to mainland Greece seeking aid in order to support them militarily, that is principally with ships, but also with men and money, in rising up against the Persian Empire. The Athenians accepted.

• 5:38Speaker 06

  And that is the beginning of the Greek-Persian Wars as seen from the mainland of Greece. If you're looking at it all from Iran, well, these pesky Greeks on the far west of our empire. Do we need to worry about them? Well, the Persians eventually decided to launch a vast invasion, amphibian, in the late 400s. And that resulted in what we call the Greek-Persian Wars, and thereafter the Delian League.

• 6:09Speaker 05

  Okay, so why the name Delian League? It comes from the island of Delos, where the alliance was established. But why was Delos, it's quite a small island, why was it chosen?

• 6:21Speaker 06

  Well, it's a bit like the Holy Roman Empire, which Voltaire said was neither holy nor Roman nor an empire. So it was Delian only in the sense that the oaths of the initial allies, who, some of them had been allied before, they're now new allies. They're meeting together to form a new alliance on the island of Delos. Delos is pretty much bang in the middle of what in Greek is Kiklavis. We say the Cyclades in the central Aegean. And it belongs to the bit of the Greek culture which we call Ionian, because that's the way in which they spoke Greek and the cults that they shared in common. For example, a festival called the Apaturia.

• 7:05Speaker 06

  So Athens is the principal lead on this. It is going to be the lead ally. And it is Ionian, Ionic, and therefore it needs a base which consorts with its own intellectual, political, religious and so on outlook. And most of the initial allies were probably Ionian Greeks, Ianders and Mainlanders on both sides of the mainland, that is, on the western side of the Aegean and the eastern, that is, mainland Greece. And they swore the oaths of alliance. They did not create a league in a modern sense wherein every ally is allied to everybody else.

• 7:49Speaker 06

  But in this league, every ally was allied with Athens, not necessarily with any other ally.

• 7:57Speaker 05

  So, Paul, what was the Delian League actually for? What were its concrete aims?

• 8:04Speaker 01

  So, I mean, the short answer to that is that we don't know for sure because, and this is something we might say quite a lot, I think, we don't have any contemporary evidence. We don't know what the Athenians said at that meeting in 478477. There's two versions in in the ancient sources. So Thucydides, who's writing about fifty years after the event, says that what the Athenians said the alliance was for was to take revenge on Persia, for the damage that the Persians had done to the Greeks, in particularly in the great invasion of four eighty. But we have another source, a later source attributed to the philosopher Aristotle, probably written by one of his students, is writing in the second half of the fourth century BCE,

• 8:49Speaker 01

  who says that the alliance has much more general aims. So he says they swear to have the same friends and enemies. So that's a very open-ended commitment to mutual defence and also mutual offence. And that source also says that when the allies swore the oaths that Paul just mentioned, they affirmed the oaths by throwing lumps of iron into the sea. And the usual way that that is interpreted is a symbolic act to mean that the oaths will last until the iron floats back to the surface, which is to say that they'll last forever. So whereas Thucydides gives the impression this is a an alliance with, in theory, an end date, because at some point you would have taken enough revenge on Persia and then the the objectives would have been fulfilled.

• 9:35Speaker 01

  The version we get in the Aristotelian source suggests that this is an alliance that could be used to fight against anybody and could in theory last forever. So Athens offers allies a choice. They can either contribute in the conventional way to the alliance by providing men and material, or they could give Athens money, which we call tribute, and Athens, at least in theory, will use that money to spend on men and military material.

• 10:03Speaker 05

  So Paul mentioned that the allies all committed to an alliance with Athens, but not with each other. So what was Athens's intentions by creating this alliance?

• 10:16Speaker 01

  This, again, is a very good question to which there is no settled answer. Thucydides, when he talks about what the Athenians promise at this first meeting, says that the Athenians give the declared intention that the purpose is revenge on Persia. And there's been a lot of debate over that. There's one word in in the Greek. Whether Thucydides is encouraging us to think that the Athenians already at that point, that isn't their real intention, that their intention is to expand their own power and ultimately to establish an empire. But there is an alternative view which would say actually the Athenians at that point were really focused on the threat from Persia and that's what they were trying to achieve.

• 10:58Speaker 01

  And then their aims develop over the lifetime of the alliance.

• 11:03Speaker 05

  Leah Lazar, the Delian League, the Athenian Empire. Can you unpick these terms for us? Was it described as such at the time? And would you call it an empire, what Athens created?

• 11:20Speaker 04

  Well, the title of this episode is obviously the Delian League. But I prefer in my teaching and in my writing to talk about the Athenian Empire from the get go. It's a topic that's much debated among scholars. But I think Athens satisfies the basic definition of what an empire is. So.

• 11:42Speaker 05

  So you think that Athens knew what it was doing from the very beginning? In slight contrast to what Polly was saying, that there's some confusion?

• 11:53Speaker 04

  Certainly, I think that there's at least imperial intent. As Polly said, the intent to expand Athenian power from the beginning, potentially even from before the Greco Persian wars. There's evidence to suggest that the Athenians were already expanding in some ways before that. And if we take a common definition of empire, that of Doyle, of two political entities where the dominant entity is exerting political control over both the external and internal affairs of the less dominant entity. We have evidence for Athens doing that, I think at least from the middle of the fifth century.

• 12:36Speaker 04

  But both these terms, Delian League and Athenian Empire, are complicated and difficult to use because neither of them have exact parallels in the original Greek texts. So we were just hearing from Paul and. Polly about the Athenians establishing themselves as leaders of this alliance. These cities, when he's talking about this moment, initially uses the term hegemonia hegemony. But very quickly, he switches to using another Greek term, arche, which is quite hard to translate in English. Some scholars do translate it as empire or as power. But in addition to that, These cities also continues to use the language of alliance throughout.

• 13:21Speaker 04

  So the other cities are usually described as allies. And we even get that term in Athenian political documents throughout the fifth century. And I think it might have been a convenient fiction for the Athenians to carry on using this language of alliance, even when it was no longer that at all.

• 13:39Speaker 05

  Yes, I have to say, when I first read about it, it struck me, it was rather like a protection racket, the whole thing, that if you don't join in with and deliver money or whatever, we will take you over. I mean, it seemed a fairly tough arrangement as far as the allies were concerned, and we'll come to the allies later. But can you firstly give us a sense of scale here? How many city-states were there in the Delian League? And how much territory did it actually cover?

• 14:09Speaker 04

  So to echo Polly, that's actually quite a difficult question to answer.

• 14:14Speaker 05

  I think there's going to be a lot of this.

• 14:17Speaker 04

  Partly because of the fragmentary nature of the evidence and partly because there are different ways that one could define membership of the league. To take one of the most commonly applied criteria, the payment of tribute of annual monetary payments to Athens. We have records of, I think, around 330 or so states at least being assessed for that tribute in the course of the fifth century. And most of those states were located on the Aegean Islands that Paul has talked about in what is now northern Greece, around the cities of Thessaloniki and Kavala in modern terms.

• 15:00Speaker 04

  And also on the western coast of Turkey, those cities that had previously been under Persian control. But in various ways, the Athenian power stretched beyond the Aegean, so also into the Black Sea.

• 15:14Speaker 04

  The Ionian Islands on the western coast of Greece and even to Italy and Sicily at points in the 5th century.

• 15:23Speaker 05

  But although Sparta and Athens had cooperated in resisting the Persian invasion, Sparta was not part of the Delian League, is that right?

• 15:33Speaker 04

  That's correct. Sparta had leadership of the alliance of states that had fought against the Persians, but Athens took over the leadership in the aftermath of the Greco-Persian Wars.

• 15:43Speaker 05

  Paul, we've had a lot of we don't knows so far and quite a few mentions of Thucydides. So can you tell us about what exactly are the written sources about the Delian League?

• 15:55Speaker 06

  Okay, so our principal written narrative source for the actual wars which preceded and made possible the Delian League is Herodotus, who was born within the Persian Empire. So he's a very interesting character that he, on the one hand, knew firsthand what it was like to be a subject of Persia. On the other hand, his city, under the terms of the Delian League, joined the Delian League. And he personally, Herodotus, decided that his life's project was to explain why Greeks and non-Greeks, barbarians they called them, had fought each other. And he wanted both to celebrate and to explain what was going on. Some people

• 16:39Speaker 06

  think that he wrote his entire history with an arrière-pense. So behind what he's writing about ostensibly, which ends in 479, actually what he's got in mind is the rise of the Athenians. And as Leah says, I agree with Leah, that the Athenians very soon adopted an imperial posture. And so therefore, Herodotus also is indirectly a historian of the rise of the Athenian empire.

• 17:11Speaker 05

  And he's justifying the Athenian imperial project.

• 17:15Speaker 06

  This is one thing that's not been mentioned yet, that another part of Athens's propaganda, which is actually wholly in principle admirable, is liberal.

• 17:25Speaker 05

  So Herodotus is is one source.

• 17:28Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 17:28Speaker 05

  A justification, as it were, leading up to the Delian League. The other big source is Thucydides.

• 17:34Speaker 06

  Quite.

• 17:34Speaker 05

  What about Thucydides?

• 17:35Speaker 06

  Well, his subject is the war which broke out in four thirty one. But we call it the Peloponnesian War typically because we see it from the Athenian point of view. If I was a Spartan writing the history of that war, it would be the Athenian War. And of course, this is Thucydides. He wanted to be both Herodotus and Homer at once. So my war is bigger than your war. And in fact, it's bigger even than Homer's war. Now, Homer's war lasted ten years. My war, this is Thucydides, lasted twenty seven. So beat that.

• 18:12Speaker 05

  Does he describe the history of the Delian League in in Peloponnesian War?

• 18:16Speaker 06

  Polly started us off with this ambiguous language of pretext. Or was it reason why the Athenians took the lead in four seven eight, four seven seven? Rather briefly, and just sort of like a butterfly, he hops from one episode to another. Between four seven eight and four three one, he sets up his war in terms of its immediate antecedents. But he's an extremely sophisticated historian. So he distinguishes between occasion and real deep dive causation.

• 18:53Speaker 05

  Polly, let's go to the start of the league in four seven eight and its first couple of decades, up until about the four the four fifties. What's it doing initially?

• 19:05Speaker 01

  So as as Paul has mentioned, the Athenians and and the allies do spend quite a lot of time fighting the Persians, liberating Greek communities in the northeast Aegean. They win a significant victory over the Persians. It's a place called Eurimiden Eurimiden River, which is in southwest Anatolia. They then get involved in Egypt, which is where things start to go wrong. So Egypt has been part of the. Achaemenid Empire for some time, an Egyptian ruler

• 19:37Speaker 01

  leads a rebellion, an attempt to secede from the empire and the Athenians get involved in that rebellion.

• 19:43Speaker 05

  Supporting the rebellion or trying to?

• 19:45Speaker 01

  Supporting the rebellion, so undermining the Achaemenid Empire, exactly what they were hoping to achieve, the Athenians is unclear, whether they were just trying to weaken Persia or whether they actually thought that they, Athens, might be able to take over rule of Egypt, which would be

• 20:04Speaker 01

  an extremely ambitious thing to try to do, but maybe at this point the Athenians think that this could be possible for them. It isn't possible, it goes disastrously wrong, it's a sort of slow burn disaster, but over the course of about five years, the Athenians invest a lot of manpower and resource in this expedition and it's almost completely wiped out. And that really marks the end of any open conflict with Persia. I think it's the case that the Athenians make a formal peace settlement with Persia in the late 450s. But the other thing which the Athenians are also doing, I think from the very early years of the alliance, is fighting other Greek states, which is a bit harder to square with what Thucydides said they said they were going to do.

• 20:49Speaker 05

  Do you mean Greek states like Sparta or do you mean Greek states who are actually theoretically allies of theirs in the Achaemenid League?

• 20:56Speaker 01

  Well, a bit of both, but this does include states which have joined the league and then have attempted to leave. And the Athenians forcibly reincorporate those states into the league.

• 21:08Speaker 05

  So that brings me on to the allies in the alliance. We've talked a lot about Athens, Athenian strategy and aims. Leah, what do we know about their allies, up to, I believe, about 300 of them at its greatest extent? Do we know what they're thinking about all of this? It's really hard to know how Athenian power was received by the allied communities because there are multiple issues.

• 21:38Speaker 04

  With the evidence, firstly, we have much more evidence for the Peloponnesian War period, the later part of the fifth century than we do for the earlier part. And also, the majority of our evidence is Athenian. So we're really getting Athenian perspectives on this. We're not getting the perspectives of other cities, especially less powerful communities. I think it's fair to say, though, from the sources that we do have, there were varied responses to Athenian power. As Polly has mentioned, there was resistance, there was revolt, and in some cases, violent reintegration of those communities back into the league. Other communities also negotiated with the Athenians

• 22:21Speaker 04

  for more favorable possessions within the alliance. And I think there's some evidence, in some cases, for ideological buy-in on the part of particular communities to the Athenian imperial project. So to give an example, at least by the 420s B.C., so a bit later than what we've been talking about so far, we have evidence to suggest that the Athenians demanded that allied cities sent delegations and offerings to Athenian religious festivals. This was an important part of the ideology of empire, this religious aspect. And centuries later, we find a small city in western Turkey called Prayini

• 23:06Speaker 04

  still sending those delegations and offerings. And I wonder whether it's evidence that Prayini really bought into this religious aspect of Athenian power, so much so that they're still doing this years and years later.

• 23:20Speaker 05

  Well, presumably for some of these allies, there must have been advantages being in this alliance as well, if only for protection.

• 23:28Speaker 04

  Precisely. It might have been the case that some of these cities were between a rock and a hard place with Persia or with other powers outside of the Adillean League, and that Athens was simply the better of two options.

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  My fresh detector.

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  There it is.

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  What is it detecting?

• 24:18Speaker 02

  Fresh produce? Fresh meat?

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  Okay, what happens if it detects something really fresh?

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  Apparently, we celebrate.

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• 25:51Speaker 05

  Paul, Polly indicated that after the end of the Egyptian campaign, the confrontation with Persia appeared to come to an end. So around 450 BCE we're talking about now, there appears to have been one or two fundamental shifts in the League. Can you describe what those are?

• 26:10Speaker 06

  Well, one of them is, this is again one of these unknown unknowns.

• 26:16Speaker 05

  I think we might have to change the title of this episode, The Unknown Delian League.

• 26:21Speaker 06

  If there had been sworn in 479, an oath by the Athenians before a major battle, which is actually the final decisive battle on land against the Persians who are invading. If the Athenians had sworn an oath, which includes the clause, "We will not rebuild the shrines and other buildings that the Persians have destroyed until and unless we have either, as it were, beaten the Persians or and made a peace with them such that they're not going to come again and destroy the buildings they've destroyed." And that ties in with, it's only in one source, it's in Plutarch, it's a biography of Pericles.

• 27:05Speaker 06

  He says, "Pericles, then, a leading figure in Athens in the 440s, sends round to all the Greeks who were involved, not just in the Delian League, but to Sparta, to the old alliance against the Persians. Let's have a universal congress and come together and make a kind of deal that we will all unite against the Persians and live in harmony." It actually sounds very suspiciously unlike the way in which the Greeks in fact conducted their diplomacy. At any rate, the Spartans allegedly just said, "Buzz off, you know, we're not interested in you leading a peace congress." But from this early part of the 440s,

• 27:48Speaker 06

  very concretely, actually in marble, we can specify that in 447, a huge building programme on the Acropolis, under the Acropolis.

• 27:59Speaker 06

  And the centerpiece of all that building programme is of course what we call the Parthenon. They didn't actually call it the Parthenon, the building as a whole. We're not quite sure what it was called. It might have been the one hundred footer. The Parthenon was a particular building within the big building. Anyway, that's so massively clearly anti Persian. We've done it for you Greeks. This is not just Athenian, it's Pan Hellenic. Come to Athens, bring your offerings that Leah has mentioned to our two biggest festivals, Panathenaia, Dionysia, and then you'll look up on the Acropolis and you'll see what we have done for you.

• 28:40Speaker 05

  Pericles had preceded this by, I believe, shifting the treasury from Delos to Athens, which is a centralising move, if ever I've heard.

• 28:50Speaker 06

  Well, yes and no, because four, five, four, when the treasury was definitely moved, because that's when the tribute quota lists start getting written. Pericles was not yet much of a power. He was a general, he was a leading politician, but it wasn't actually his proposal. And there is a source which says one of the allies proposed the move. And that was Samos, which is one of the biggest, most sensitive, most important allies. But that might of course have been the Athenians claiming, oh, no, it wasn't our idea, it was the Samians.

• 29:22Speaker 05

  Polly, talking about Samos now, you mentioned before that some of the allies had had enough at various points. And it seems to me the Delian League was studied with very serious uprisings. Can you tell us about those communities which were resisting the Athenians?

• 29:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, so there are regular revolts or attempted revolts. There are very few that are successful, at least until the very final years of the empire, when Athens is becoming less powerful. So, I mean, there's, I think, about sixty or so attempted revolts over the entire seventy year history of the alliance. Some of those are the same community rebelling more than once. You might say, well, if there are three hundred and fifty odd communities in the whole organisation, then maybe that means that it's a minority, sizable minority, but still a minority of states who are annoyed enough or upset enough. To want to secede from this organisation.

• 30:24Speaker 05

  And what do the Athenians do when faced with such rebellion?

• 30:29Speaker 01

  So military force, very major military intervention. And then in the case of Samos, after a long campaign, when they succeed in bringing the Samians back into line, they impose quite severe financial penalties. The Samians have to pay reparations to Athens. And also, according to Plutarch, who actually reports this story and says that he himself isn't quite sure if he believes it. Pericles, who led the campaign against Samos, took the ringleaders of the rebellion and had them crucified, which is not a thing that the Greeks. The Greeks like to believe that this isn't the sort of thing the Greeks normally do.

• 31:10Speaker 01

  This is something that would be associated with non-Greek behaviour, so a very extreme form of punishment.

• 31:17Speaker 05

  Leah, we've heard about the paucity of written sources. Can you tell us a little bit about numismatic sources, what the coins tell us from the period?

• 31:28Speaker 04

  Absolutely. So coinage had been invented about 200 years or so earlier than this in what is now western Turkey. And by the fifth century, a lot of Greek cities are minting their own coins, usually using silver. And they minted coins not as we might think from modern parallels to maintain a monetary supply, but usually when they need to pay for something in particular. And that something in particular often was military expenditure. So soldiers pay or the building and maintenance of a fleet. And we see this really clearly with Athens in the Dealing League period.

• 32:14Speaker 04

  From the Greco Persian Wars onwards, there's a massive explosion in levels of Athenian monetary production. So we've heard how they're getting silver coins. Money in from their allies, that they're also operating a massive mining operation at a place called Laurion in their territory. And they're getting this money, they're minting coins, and they're using it in great part to pay for their fleet. So there's a direct relationship between increased monetary production at Athens in the fifth century and the expansion of Athenian naval power. And one of the consequences of this is that there was a big influx of Athenian currency

• 32:59Speaker 04

  in the Aegean and beyond. And Athenian coinage, which looked very distinctive, it had the goddess Athena on the one side, it had her owl on the other side. It became really commonly recognised and accepted. It was, I guess, the US dollar of its day. And we even find other communities minting coins to a lesser extent because they're just using Athenian currency.

• 33:24Speaker 05

  Paul, you mentioned Pericles and the building of the Acropolis, the Parthenon. He went on a statue and temple building spree. Was this all around Athens? Or did they also build temples and statues to the gods around the entire league?

• 33:45Speaker 06

  Yeah, well, there are two sorts of issues here. One is Pericles, of course, was totally dependent on the ordinary people of Athens agreeing with whatever he suggested.

• 33:56Speaker 05

  Because it was a democracy.

• 33:58Speaker 06

  Yes, I was just going to say, we've been sort of avoiding the word democracy, which does apply also within the allied states. And in terms of within Athens in the fifth century, there are at least two other major temples outside Athens city. And one of them Ramnus, and one of them at Sunion. And the Sunion one, you can still go and visit, utterly beautiful. And they're about the same period, so 440 or so, 440 is as the Parthenon's going up, and it took 15 years. These are the two temples outside Athens. And then there's a very big one in Athens called the Hiphestion. Which looks over the city centre where both commercial and political business was transacted.

• 34:42Speaker 06

  So it was systematic, it's not random, and it was very, very expensive. And it did indeed generate opposition, not only from outside but also from within. There is one rival of Pericles who chose to make the amount Athens was spending of both its own money and of allied tribute, a political issue such that it was going to decide whether Pericles or this rival politician were to continue as the leading politician of Athens, and Pericles won.

• 35:14Speaker 05

  Polly, Lea said that she considers it legitimate to call the Delian League an empire from the very beginning, and it seems to me that this is the big issue about the Delian League, is it an empire or not? Do you agree with her that that's when it starts, or is there a moment later on where it shifts to an imperial structure?

• 35:36Speaker 01

  I mean, I do agree that already in that early period Athens is clearly ambitious and wants to extend its own power. I'm on the fence about exactly when it becomes an empire, and to the extent that I'm not sure that there's a single date that we can point to, particularly because, and again this is something Lea's, I think, alluded to already, of all these communities that are in the empire, different communities have quite different experiences of what it's like to be part of this organisation. And for some people, so Naxos, which is this state which is forced to rejoin in the 470s, I suspect they realised quite early on that this wasn't just an old fashioned alliance that they were part of.

• 36:19Speaker 01

  Other communities who might have had a rather more positive experience and been less exposed to Athenian power, might have sort of carried on feeling like they were part of a league, maybe down until the 420s.

• 36:33Speaker 01

  Athens is quite deep into this war against Sparta. And it's in the 420s, we get this flurry of Athenian regulations, which are preserved for us as inscribed documents, documents inscribed on stone. And we can see the Athenians really clamping down, particularly on the financial management of the empire and starting to squeeze the allied communities much harder, probably because they need the money to fight the war. And there's much more emphasis on officials, there are penalties for people who don't comply. And so I think the 420s, it might have been quite hard for many or even most communities to deny that they were now living in something like an empire. But for some communities, I think the realisation would have come earlier than that.

• 37:18Speaker 05

  Leah, we come now to my favourite question in this episode. Can you tell us about Cloud Cuckoo Land and why it's relevant to the Delian League?

• 37:26Speaker 04

  I think it's my favourite question as well.

• 37:30Speaker 04

  So in classical Athens, there were big public performances of comic plays, actually in the context of religious festivals. And these comedies were the closest we can get to Athenian popular culture. And they often engaged with the really hot political topics of the day. And of course, as we've been discussing, a big part of the political scene at Athens was the Delian League. So some of these comedies engage with the Delian League. And I think the best example of this is a play called Birds,

• 38:09Speaker 04

  composed by the comic playwright Aristophanes and performed for the first time in 414 B.C. And this was a moment when Athenian power was really trying to expand. The previous year, the Athenians had sent what would ultimately be a disastrous expedition to conquer Sicily. And Birds comes in just after this and seems to offer quite a critical view of Athenian power. So the plot of the play is that they're two disaffected Athenians. They decide they're fed up of Athens and they're going to found their own city in the sky called Cloud Cuckoo Land. That's where the

• 38:52Speaker 04

  Word comes from and Aristophanes uses Cloud Kukuland in various ways to stand up Athenian power. So as soon as the city is founded, there's this parade of really annoying individuals who come along, including Athenian officials. There's a seller of decrees of the imperial regulations that Polly was just talking about, offering imperial regulations to this new city. And there's even a joke about how people might want to go to the toilet on them. So clearly not very popular. And in addition to that, Cloud Kukuland itself becomes an imperial power. So

• 39:31Speaker 04

  it's in the sky and it starts stopping offerings from people on earth reaching the gods. So it's offering this very critical view of Athenian power. And I think that it's the closest we can get to how the man on the street might have perceived the Athenian empire, the Delian League, because the jokes would have had to be familiar in some way for them to be funny.

• 39:54Speaker 05

  Paul, clearly when Aristophanes is writing the birds, that the Delian League is beginning to collapse if it hasn't already done so. How does it all end?

• 40:05Speaker 06

  Not well. So, so he's presumably died, but anyway, he failed to complete his project. He died writing about seven years before the actual war ended. And it came to an end mainly, and this is an irony, thinking back to where we started from, Greece versus Persia, Greece, Athens and Sparta together versus Persia. Well, it was actually the Persians' intervention in the Athenos Spartans war via money that decided the outcome of the whole war. Because in order to beat the Athenians, you have to beat them on sea. So you therefore need a fleet. And typically,

• 40:46Speaker 06

  there are certain choke points in the Aegean and its outliers. And one of them is the Hellespont. So if you can get a really good fleet into the Hellespont, block off the Athenians' supply of, for example, grain, but also Challenge them to take you on. There is therefore the sense that from four twelve, which is when the Spartans managed to persuade the Persians to come in on their side. It's a foregone conclusion. The Athenians finally find themselves blockaded by a Spartan fleet over winter, four or five to four, they're starved into submission and total submission, not agreeing to surrender

• 41:28Speaker 06

  on their terms, but surrendering on the Spartans' total terms, total victory.

• 41:34Speaker 05

  Polly, how was the Delian League seen by the classical world in the centuries after its demise?

• 41:40Speaker 01

  I think the picture is overwhelmingly negative in terms of how later sources talk about and think about the Delian League. There's criticism for the bad things that the Athenians did to other Greeks, but what I find even more striking is there's criticism for the way that the Delian League is claimed to have damaged Athens, that this was a sort of morally corrupting force on the Athenians. It caused the Athenians to become too greedy, too hungry for power, they lost their self-control and therefore it was a thing that the Athenians were wrong to have done and that they should never attempt to do and no other Greek state should attempt to get this sort of power in the future. One of my favourite bits of inscribed evidence from the ancient world, from the three seventies

• 42:25Speaker 01

  BCE, when the Athenians decide to have another go and set up another alliance, which we now call the Second Athenian League, and we do have the foundation documents of this organisation. And what's really interesting is that it includes a long list of things the Athenians promised not to do this time around, which maps almost directly onto the terrible things we know they did the first time around. So they say, we won't levy tribute, we won't impose garrisons, we won't send out governors, we won't confiscate land, we won't meddle in your internal political affairs. So I think not only-

• 43:02Speaker 05

  That's a really important document, surely.

• 43:04Speaker 01

  Yes, it's a fascinating document in all sorts of ways. The other thing though, I mean, in spite of this- What the document also reveals is that a large number of Greek communities joined the league because their names are included on this inscription. So either the Athenians were very persuasive when they promised not to do any of this stuff again, or the Greek communities were very naive. Or there's enough positive stuff that comes out of this sort of alliance that Greek communities thought, or at least some Greek communities thought, well, the risk is worth taking to sign up for a second go around.

• 43:40Speaker 05

  Okay, Leah, I'm going to come to you as the first in a quickfire round at the end. And that is, I want to know your opinion as how we should look at the Delian League now. Was this a sinister coercive hegemony? Or was power more balanced? You first, then Paul and then Polly. Well, I think you know my answer. I would argue for the latter, that this was an exploitative imperial power and that we shouldn't sanitize it or talk about it in apologist language. I think the way that we talk about past empires matters for how we understand empire now. And it's important to understand the Delian League as it was. Paul?

• 44:22Speaker 06

  Well, I would slightly differ in that I don't think empires are all the same. So our word empire comes from Rome, imperium infinitum. The Romans' notion of power of an imperial kind, not an internal legal kind, was extreme. It amounted to life and death. Archie, as Leah mentioned, can mean rule, just regular, republican, annual, perfectly decent. It literally means a beginning. So they never developed a word that corresponds to the sort of entity that Leah describes.

• 44:58Speaker 05

  Polly?

• 45:00Speaker 01

  I think I'm closer to Leah in that I think, yes, we absolutely can't sanitize the Delian League, but we have to find a way to square that with the fact that some people, including non-Athenians, did quite well out of this. So some people benefited. From this alliance at the same time as it was doing absolutely unspeakable things. And that that sort of complexity of how imperial power works, I think, is something that we have to grapple with in this league, but also in empires of other periods.

• 45:33Speaker 05

  My thanks to Leah Lazar, Polly Lowe and Paul Cartledge. Next week, Marie Antoinette's official portraitist who shocked society by painting smiles with open mouths. Scandalous. We'll be discussing the artist Elizabeth Vigé Le Brun. Until then, thank you for listening.

• 45:54Speaker 03

  And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Misha and his guests.

• 46:01Speaker 05

  Okay, and now we go on to the podcast thing. So first of all, I'm still intrigued about Sparta and what Sparta's calculations are, having collaborated with Athens. Are they simply a more self-contained operation?

• 46:22Speaker 06

  Yes, I mean, the answer is twofold, both economic and political. So economically, they were extremely self-sufficient. It was a command economy, exploiting locals who are Greek and they are enslaved. They are much less dependent than the Athenians on external sources of, e.g. bread. And the Athenians imported their bread wheat from the Black Sea, from what's today Ukraine. And therefore, that raised the living standards of the ordinary poor Athenians, who otherwise would have been eating either inferior wheat or barley. The Spartans weren't so fussy. They typically were happy with a kind of porridge. But the

• 47:03Speaker 06

  helots made grew the barley and the wheat. They grew the vines, they grew the olives. It's entirely self-contained domestic economy. Secondly, being very inward-looking, generally, the Persian Wars, 484, are an exception to the general rule that Sparta did not indulge in. International enterprises, especially not of a pan-Hellenic kind. So, many Spartans, once the Persian Wars, as would have been won, the final battle, Patia, think, great, this is the time, we'll just go back to the way it was before, because that was pretty difficult.

• 47:45Speaker 06

  Secondly, if the Spartans had decided to go on in an international way, they would then have required to build a fleet, which they in fact didn't do until the very end, as I've said before, of the Athenopeloponnesian War. And that involves using helots, they're called helots, the enslaved persons, as crew people. And one of the distinctive features of the Athenian navy is the power that ordinary Athenians derived from them being what we in this country call the senior service. Ever since the 17th century, the navy has been our senior service. We're an island nation.

• 48:26Speaker 06

  Well, the Athenians from the 470s decided, we're going to go over. The navy is the number one. Army, that's the ordinary troops, infantry, second. Cavalry, very minimal. Archers, not at all.

• 48:40Speaker 05

  And that presumably explains why the Delian League existed, because of the fact that they suddenly had this, the emergence of this extraordinary fleet.

• 48:50Speaker 01

  There's a slight chicken and egg question. I mean, the fleet was built originally, well, to go back a little bit. The Athenians find silver at Laurion in Asica, and they have this money. And according to Herodotus, they have a debate, what should we do with the money? Should we do a big cash handout to the population? Or should we use it to build?

• 49:14Speaker 05

  Always popular.

• 49:15Speaker 01

  Should we use it to build a fleet? And the original target of the fleet was Athens' close neighbour, the island of Agina. This is before the Persian invasion. Then that fleet becomes very useful, because they can use it also to fight the Persians, but the fleet was built to fight other Greeks. So the fleet sort of...

• 49:34Speaker 05

  Enables Athens to take this leading role in the Greco Persian wars.

• 49:39Speaker 05

  Which then further enables Athens to take the leading role in the Delian League and then through the process of tribute, then they can invest in their fleet more and more and their fleet gets bigger and bigger. Everyone else's fleet gets smaller and smaller. Am I right in thinking from the conversation that basically it was over expansion that led to the end of the Delian League? I mean, we've heard about these disastrous campaigns in places like Egypt's. Do you think that's right, Leah?

• 50:08Speaker 04

  It's certainly, I think, Thucydides' answer. So I think he sees this expedition to Sicily in four fifteen B C as a major turning point, an over expansion of Athenian ambition. And also he tells us about how it brought political instability at home. So the democracy which had been ruling the empire was really shaken by this expansion. And at the end of the fifth century, there were two moments when it was actually overturned by violent oligarchic coups. So a combination of over expansion abroad, the instability of the political situation within Athens and also as we've heard from Paul, I think,

• 50:53Speaker 04

  the Persians deciding to get financially involved on the Spartan side and the Spartan development of a navy that could.

• 51:01Speaker 05

  Is that why the Spartans were able to take Athenian cities way up in the north in in Thessaly? I think it's, is it?

• 51:11Speaker 06

  Yeah, slightly a different, that's a land campaign.

• 51:14Speaker 05

  It's a land campaign, so how do they manage to get all the way up there?

• 51:18Speaker 06

  Well, just simply by walking. So remember, Sparta has most of the cities in the Peloponnese on their side, they're allies. So it's not that difficult to get through to the Isthmus, which divides the Peloponnese from central Greece. Immediately on.

• 51:35Speaker 05

  Where Athens sits, of course.

• 51:37Speaker 06

  Immediately on the Isthmus is Corinth, which is Sparta's main ally, most important, and it's.

• 51:44Speaker 06

  Applies the majority of any fleet that Sparta manages to put together. Corinth provides the ships. You then get to Megara, which is next door to Athens. Well thereafter, a man called Brasidas decided to play the card of we are liberators. These Athenians, they're your oppressors. They claim they freed you from the Persians, yes, but only so as they could dominate you for their purposes, economic, political. We are genuine liberators. So what this guy does is he revives the rhetoric of the four eighties against the Persians, against the Spartans. And there's been a ding dong battle ever since the Persian wars. Who was most responsible for beating the Persians?

• 52:29Speaker 06

  Was it the Spartans? Was it the Athenians? Anyway, so it's all part of.

• 52:32Speaker 05

  And you argue that the Spartans are probably more important than the Athenians, or at least they they offer more than.

• 52:40Speaker 06

  Have you been reading my secret diary? But it is a balance because had the Spartans not agreed to join the anti Persian alliance of defence, the main target of which was Athens, not Sparta. Had Sparta not agreed to join, there would have been no land army capable of resisting the Persian land army. So it wouldn't have mattered that the Athenians beat the Persians at sea if there was still an army that could come and destroy the Peloponnese or whatever. So it was absolutely critical, the amphibious nature of the resistance by land, by sea.

• 53:19Speaker 06

  So the irony of Greek history in the fifth century is the land loving Spartans defeat the naval Athenians with foreign Persian aid. Oh, my goodness. Yeah.

• 53:32Speaker 05

  So what else did we miss out, Polly?

• 53:36Speaker 01

  I mean, one thing, and this this follows on from what we've just been talking about, is what Persia is up to.

• 53:43Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 53:44Speaker 01

  And and one possible way of interpreting this period of history is that the Athenians are essentially acting as a source of client state for the Persians. And that might be the deal that was struck or one way we could understand.

• 53:58Speaker 05

  You mean after four fifty BCE, after the the possible peace treaty?

• 54:03Speaker 01

  Exactly. And the Persians see the advantage because what the Athenians are doing. Effectively is keeping peace for them on the western edge of this enormous empire. So the Athenians are helping the Persians out by ensuring stability in what would otherwise potentially be quite a problematic edge of the empire for the Persians. And that might also explain why the Persians are willing to to get involved again at the end of the war because Athens is no longer able to keep things quiet. So they see chaos is about to erupt again and therefore they they they get involved.

• 54:38Speaker 05

  And what happens after the the Spartan victory in that case? Do do things stabilise in the way that the Persians might have wanted?

• 54:46Speaker 01

  No.

• 54:47Speaker 05

  Yeah, everyone's shaking their head.

• 54:48Speaker 06

  In one word, no.

• 54:51Speaker 04

  And the Spartans even have their own ultimately unsuccessful attempt at maybe empire building. I'm not sure if that's the term that Paul would use, but certainly.

• 54:59Speaker 06

  No, I would, I would. Yeah, yeah. And they're doing what the Athenians are doing, using liberation of Greeks in Asia. Because as soon as Persia comes back, it's able to exert influence without necessarily actually putting a garrison in. But nevertheless, whatever happens in the western Asiatic seaboard after four oh four, unless the Spartans attack Persia, which they decide to do, these cities are very vulnerable. They've got no protector. Yeah.

• 55:29Speaker 05

  Yeah, and I suppose, I mean, as you said, it was a cultur crisis. It was a

• 55:34Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 55:34Speaker 05

  A cultural community that the Greeks had, but it was very ill-defined in terms of

• 55:41Speaker 06

  Absolutely.

• 55:42Speaker 05

  territory and coherence of of political.

• 55:44Speaker 06

  And it was never translated into permanent political institutions except from above. So when Philip of Macedon conquers significant Greek cities in the south, he comes from the north. For the first time, there is, as it were, a united Greek, but united in subjection to Macedon.

• 56:05Speaker 05

  Was that the Sicilian campaign, which results in defeat?

• 56:12Speaker 05

  Is that also the sort of end of empire moment? Because military defeat always has serious repercussions back home.

• 56:24Speaker 05

  It's certainly seen as a very serious moment in the history of Athenian power. I think that its consequences in our eyes is certainly also down to the construction of Decidides' narrative and the fact that we actually don't get the end of his narrative because he doesn't get to describe the end of the war. But there are certainly other moments later which are also considered really significant. For example, the nearby island of Euboea, now Evia, which had been another major source of Athenian grain. When the Spartans conquered that, that's really serious for the Athenians. But as Paul described, they carry on fighting right down to 404, 403.

• 57:07Speaker 05

  So the Sicilian expedition ending in 413 did not see the end of the empire or of the war.

• 57:15Speaker 05

  Well, I think at that moment, we can ask Martha to bring us a cup of tea or coffee, if you would so like. I'm afraid we don't have any Greek coffee.

• 57:27Speaker 03

  In Our Time with Misha Glenn, it was produced by Martha Owen. It's a BBC Studios production for Radio 4.

• 57:34Speaker 02

  Zandi, happy anniversary. What are you talking about? Have I missed something? Yes, Zandi, you have. We are over a year into making What's Up Docs? You didn't even get me a card. Is it really over a year? It is. Think of all the episodes we've done. How to look after our feet, our shoulders, our hips, our teeth. We've explored snoring, cholesterol, the immune system, endometriosis. All with the help of expert guests. I think it's fair to say we have plundered the world of health and wellbeing, equipping ourselves. And our listeners. With the best information out there on how to look after our minds, our bodies, our souls even. And we're not stopping, are we, Chris? We must certainly not, Zandi. We have a lot of new topics coming up, from tinnitus to acne.

• 58:15Speaker 00

  Male fertility, we are holding steadfast in our mission to sort facts from fiction, debunking wellness myths along the way. And you can find all of our previous episodes of What's Up Docs in the feed on BBC Sounds. And don't forget to subscribe on BBC Sounds and turn on the notifications so you don't miss any of these upcoming episodes.

• 58:41Speaker 05

  Hello, Misha Glennie here. Did you know you can get episodes of In Our Time 28 days early with a subscription to the BBC website and app? Just head to bbc.com/subscribe to find out more.