The Ancients - The Delian League: Ancient NATO?

Episode Date: March 26, 2026

What happens when a defensive alliance slowly turns into an empire? Tristan Hughes and Professor Polly Low explore the Delian League, the so‑called “ancient NATO”, from its Persian War origins to Athenian domination. Discover tribute, revolt, contested sources and how a league of allies became Athens’ hard-edged maritime empire.MOREThe Persian Wars: Xerxes, Thermopylae and SalamisListen on AppleListen on SpotifyThe Parthenon: Wonder of AthensListen on AppleListen on SpotifyPresented by Tristan Hughes. Audio editor is Tim Artsall. The producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.All music courtesy of Epidemic SoundsThe Ancients is a History Hit podcast.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe. Hello and welcome to this latest episode of the ancients, where we're exploring an alliance that has been described as the ancient history version of NATO. It was known as the Delian League, and it existed in the 5th century BC, a league of Greek cities spearheaded by Athens formed at the end of the Greco-Persian Wars that would ultimately transform into the Athenian Empire. And we've got on the show, one better than the leading expert in ancient Athenian imperialism in the story of the development of the Deelian League, and that is Professor Polly Lowe from the University of Durham.

We're going to give you the surviving evidence and we'll let you decide how far we can draw parallels, how far we can draw links between modern-day NATO and the ancient Deelian League. What are the similarities, but also what are the stark differences? Let's go. In the 5th century BC, Athens became a superpower. Defiance against the mighty Persian Empire, epitomized by a famous naval victory at Salamis, saw this city emerge from the conflict stronger than ever before. The Athenians commanded a newly built navy, unmatched by any other Greek city, and they spearheaded a powerful new alliance.

A league of cities dotted along the Aegean coastlines and beyond, seeking security and vengeance against the Persians. It was known as the Delean League, after the sacred island of Delos in the central Aegean. This would prove to be no ordinary alliance. Over time, through coercion, tribute and its unrivaled maritime dominance, Athens would transform this League of Cities into its empire, forced to support Athens with money against Persians and fellow Greeks alike. Today, we're going to explore the story of this Delian League and how it transformed into an Athenian Empire. We'll explore how it functioned, the relationship between Athens and its dependent allies, key events, foreign expeditions, internal revolts, tribute, you name it.

And, just as interesting, what do we still not know about this league? because there is still a lot of mystery surrounding it. Welcome to the ancients. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and this is the story of the Deelian League with our guest, Professor Polly Lowe. Polly, it is a pleasure to have you back on the podcast. Thanks so much for having me.

You're more than welcome. It's been too long since we last talked to all things Thucydides. I think more than five years ago now. You're one of our first ever guests on the ancients, and we've got you back now to talk about the Delian League. And it feels like if you want to learn more about how Athens made its empire, you have to learn about this league. You have to learn about this alliance. Yes, absolutely. And in many ways, the Delian League and the Athenian Empire are, what could be argued to be the same thing. They're both modern English terms that we apply to

this organisation that Athens leads in the fifth century. And first and foremost, I've got to ask about the name, the Delian League. Why is it called that and not just the Athenian Empire from the get-go? So the name, I mean, it's obviously it's an English name. It's not a name that we find in the Greek sources. It comes from the island of Delos, which is sort of smack-bang in the middle of the Aegean. And that is where, Fucydides tells us, the Athenians called a meeting of Greek states who wanted to be part of this alliance. And it met on Delos, so not in Athens originally, which was sort of symbolically important. And that's where originally, according to facilities,

the collective meetings of the alliance took place. Thank you for sorting that out first and foremost. No doubt we will return to the island of Delos as this chat goes on. We're going to do it chronologically. We're going to create a narrative of the storyline of this league. So said the context for us, first of all, Polly, when discussing the Deelian League, how far back in time are we going? What century, what period in ancient history?

So the date of the creation of the league is 478-7-7 BCE, but we have to sort of go a little bit, not a very long way back, probably back to the Persian Wars. So 490, first Persian invasion of mainland Greece, Battle of Marathon, and then the second much larger invasion in 484-7-9. That invasion was resisted successfully by an alliance of Greek states, which included Athens, but also included sparse. and a number of other Greek states. Persians are defeated, retreat, withdraw from mainland, Greece back into Western Anatolia, what's now Turkey, which was still at that point, still part of the Persian Empire. So then the question in 478, 477 is, well, what happens next? What does this alliance of Greek states do? Do they carry on fighting the Persians? Do they say, okay, well, that's enough? They're out of Greece. We can sort of stop and sort of go back to how things were

before. So that's what sparks that meeting of Greeks on the island of Delos. And so very much this league, the story of the Dealing League, it's set in the 5th century BC, a century that's often associated with almost like the great age of classical Greece, almost, of cities like Athens and Sparta coming to the fore, as you say, following the end of the Persian Wars. It's very much that century in which the story of the Dealingan League is centered. Yes, exactly. So it's, It coincides, and this isn't a coincidence with the period in which Athens is most powerful, most wealthy, with the great building projects that you associate with Athens, so the building of the Parthenon,

for example, the great period of Athenian naval power. So the period that once used to be called the golden age of Greece, but there's lots of quite awful stuff happens in that period as well. It's not golden for everyone. Yes, and that will certainly probably explore a couple of episodes of that. which are very much linked to the evolution of the Delian League and Athens. Finally, before we delve into the narrative, the chronology of the Dealing League, Polly, you mentioned right at the beginning the figure of Thucydides. And can you elaborate a bit on Thucydides and the types of sources we have available

to learn more about the Delian League, its structure and its story? He's a historian writing a history of the period through which he himself lived, so primarily the second half of the 5th century. He wasn't writing a history of the Delian League, the Athenian Empire. He was writing a history of the Peloponnesian War, so the Great War between Athens and Sparta in the last third of the 5th century. But in order to explain why that war happens, he decides, which is good for us. He decided that he needed to fill in some of the background,

explain why Athens had become so powerful. So he gives us a very compressed and, in many ways, quite sort of problematic, posited history of the early years, the foundation and the growth of the Delian League from 477 down to 430-ish. One of the challenges of studying the period is that we can see that Thucydides' account isn't complete and it isn't perfect, but there's very little else to go on. We have a little bit of inscribed evidence, epigraphic evidence, so documents that the Athenians wrote on stone, but they're a little bit, they start really only from about the

450s, and they're often very incomplete or hard to date. We have Herodotus, who obviously he wrote a history of the Persian Wars, so this is after the end of his history, but there are illusions in his text about what's going to happen next in terms of the growth of Athenian power. And many people these days read Herodotus as really writing a warning to the Athenians or to the Greeks about what the Athenian Empire might be done into. We have texts like Ischalus Persians, again, not really about the Athenian Empire, but produced in this period. So the evidence is really difficult, actually, for the early years. And Eastclos, that's an Athenian tragedy, isn't it? Yes.

A very different piece of writing, but I guess one that's contemporary and relevant to what's happening in Athens at the time. Exactly. Yes. So, I mean, in theory, it's a play about the Persian invasion and the defeat of the Persians at the naval battle of Salamis. But because it's written four Athenians after the war, it maybe sort of capture some of the spirits of how the Athenians were feeling in the four-seventies. And alongside this literature that we have surviving, I've also gone on my notes. I think Plutarch does a life of one of the big generals, a guy called Kaimon, who will probably talk about in this chat. The Greeks, they like writing stuff down. The Athenians, especially they like to kind of with their. inscriptions and so on. So do we also have inscriptions all evidence to support this literature to learn more about the league and its formation? And how it worked? About its formation, no, the thing we haven't got, which I would very much like to have, is anything like the sort of foundation document, which we do for an alliance the Athenians make in the following century.

We have the inscription which sort of sets out the terms and conditions, but we don't have that. And in fact, Cucydides gives us a version, but we have another source, a later source, attributed to the philosopher. Aristotle, which gives us a quite different version of the foundation of the league, so that's a problem. The inscriptions are quite useful for working at how the mechanics of the league, sort of officials, procedures, but those texts date rather later, so most of them are now dated to the 420s. So one of the challenges that historians have is how much does this organisation change? So it's generally accepted that it changes, it evolves, maybe becomes more

oppressive, more like an empire, less like an alliance over time. But one of the ongoing debates in scholarship is when does that change happen? Well, I think we've done all the background questions there, the sources, the context, explaining why we get the name Deelian League today. So, Polly, let's get into the story of the Deelian League. First of all, that original meeting, that sets it all up. How do we go from various Greek cities like Athens and Sparta, fighting together against the Persians. So within a couple of years, them forming, or with Athens leading, this league of cities created on this island in the central of the Aegean. It isn't completely clear because our sources give us slightly different versions.

So one thing that we do know is that the Spartans withdraw from the alliance of Greek states that fought against the Persians. Thucydides and Herodosus give us slightly different spins on why the Spartans did this and how much. much sort of subterfuge that might have been by the Athenians to encourage the Spartans to pull out of the alliance. But we can say definitely the Spartans don't want to be part of any subsequent alliance. So then the version we get in Thucydides really suggests that this new alliance is effectively the same as the alliance for the Persians, but minus a couple of states. So the Spartans and a few other Peloponnesian states, so that's the region around Sparta, leave

the alliance at that point, and then everyone else just carries on. So there's a lot of the much more continuity with the alliance that fought against Persia. The source I mentioned a moment ago, so the text attributed to Aristotle gives the impression that actually this is more of a brand new organisation. So the Persian Wars end, that alliance also ends because it's fulfilled its purpose, and then the Athenians form a new alliance with different objectives and set that up on Delos. I think scholars tend to prefer the Thucydidean version. But it could be that neither of those versions are exactly right. And there was some slight other thing going on.

Because surely there's a feeling at the time that, yes, the Persian King Xerxes has gone and the great Persian army has gone. But there's still a Persian presence around the Egenc. So surely many of those cities who had also recently been united fighting the Persians don't feel like, well, the Persians are never going to come back again. They may well come back. And surely that could be, as you say, it's debated, but a key motive behind why this new alliance is formed. Yes, I think there's a sense of unfinished business. So one thing is that there are Greek city states in Western Anatolia, coast of modern Turkey, which are still, after the Persian retreat from mainland Greece, part of the Persian Empire.

And don't want to be part of the Persian Empire, or at least some Greeks would say we need to liberate those cities. So that's part of the motivation. The other thing, and this is what Lucidides includes, is a desire for revenge, which is a really important driving force in international politics in the Greek world. It's something that in contemporary international politics, I think states don't at least publicly talk about revenge. But that's quite acceptable. And it's a real light motif of relations between Greeks and Persians, which they sort of retroject all the way back to the Trojan war, that this is, you know, one side attacks the other. And then the other side justifiably wants to seek revenge.

So what Thucydides says is that the declared purpose of this alliance was to seek revenge on the Persians, the Persian king, for the damage that he'd inflicted on the Greeks. So is the Greeks strike back kind of thing, is it, over the Persian holdings around the Aegean and so on. You mentioned how Athens, with Sparta, deciding not to take part in this alliance. Athens is clearly the most powerful city in it. But regarding the other cities that decide to join this league that had fought alongside the Athenians against the Persians, I mean, Polly, how wide a geographic area are these cities located? Should we just be thinking mainland Greece or is it further than that? Yes, yet again, we don't know for sure.

And it depends which source we believe it's actually really hard, even to come up with a ballpark number for how many states are in this alliance at the start. So it could be 100 or so, but it might be fewer than that. It might be, we think there's probably about 300 in the alliance at its biggest point, but it wasn't that big at the start. Remembering, of course, that many Greek city states in this period are tiny. There are a few hundred male citizens, so total population probably under 1,000. So even 100 of these states is not a huge number of people who are a very big total population.

but it may have been much smaller than that. And that same uncertainty about the geographical area is probably focused actually not so much on mainland Greeks as on the islanders. So the Sakatic Islands and the islands of the eastern Aegean, primarily, heading up a little bit into the North Aegean, and then over as it extends, so in the sort of initial operations,

in very early years of the league, heading out to the east, and those Greek cities on the coast of the coast, Western Anatolia. And these are islands today, like, I'm guessing, like Samos or Lesbos, Naxos, Thassos, those islands we should be thinking of? Exactly, exactly those islands. Yeah.

Interesting. Gives you a sight, therefore, of Athens' future naval dominance, isn't it? If it's focused on all of these islands in the Aegean, in regards to when they all unite at the beginning, we'll get to the alliance growing in size as time goes on. Do we know what they were supposed to contribute to the alliance? Is it very much that they're all sending troops to help fight the Persians in the, you know, the Greek cities strike back this idea?

So this is what makes the Delian League really different and distinct from other alliances that have existed up to this point in the Greek world. The Greeks have been making alliances for a long time by this point. But the traditional model, as you suggest, has always been that you send men, contribute through military power. And what Thucydides says is one of the things that's discussed and decided at this first meeting on Delos is where the states are going to contribute, with manpower, particularly ships, because this is a naval-based alliance, or whether they prefer

instead to send money to Athens, and then the Athenians will buy and build and crew the ships. And this is one of the things that, well, Fucydides says, and most people would agree with him, enables this alliance to turn into an empire because most states, and by the end of the alliance, pretty much all of the states, contribute money rather than manpower. And that means that Athens ends up with a monopoly on military power, which reduces the ability of other states to resist Athens. And so how does this Delian League, how does it fare over the following years? Do we know much about the Deleon League and its activities against Persia in the 470s BC? So we know a little bit.

Again, this is almost entirely from what Thucydides tells us, and it's a very, very compressed account. Because after all, this isn't strictly speaking what he's meant to be talking about, so we can't blame him completely. But we know that there are operations against Persia. So it's not the case that they completely forget about the war against Persia. So they go up to the north. The region, now it's in northern Greece, sort of. of if you go to Thessaloniki and headed east from there along the coast heading towards Turkey. So there's a place up there called Aon, which was occupied by the Persians.

It's strategically very important. It's at the mouth of an important river, which gives access to timber, which is a vital resource, particularly if you want to build ships and also precious. Yes, absolutely. And also precious metals. So the Athenians, that's one of their first operations. They kick the Persians out of there and claim it as an Athenian possession. And then there are further operations in Western Anatolia against the Persians.

And then heading down that coast and a bit further east again, culminating, and we're maybe skipping a bit far ahead of your narrative, in the battle at the Erimitton River. So we're down into the 460s by that point. Right. Which is a land-sea battle against the Persians, which the Athenians are successful. I mean, probably it's not interfering with the narrative at all because this is important, isn't it?

So you do have these clear-cut battles against the Persians, you know, by Deelian League forces. Yes, the Athenians are there, but the other cities are evidently contributing with either ships of their own or with the money that they're providing. So, you know, in those early decades, 470s and 460s, there is clear evidence of the Deelian League undertaking that purpose of revenge against the Persians. removing their threat around the Aegean? Yes, I think that's fair to say. We could, if we were cynical, as I often am, question what the Athenians' motivations are. Are they actually, are they really very bothered about the Persians?

Or is this a way for the Athenians to cement their own power? Aon, as I've just mentioned, is strategically extremely important, especially if you want to head further east. If you want to go down into the Black Sea, which is a very important lucrative grain route, that's a good place to have a foothold. And the Athenians, you know, they're liberating, in scare quotes, Greek cities from the Persian Empire, but then the Athenians become the people who are in charge of those cities. So they are doing what they've said. They're fighting the Persians,

but it's not wholly altruistic, I would suggest. But it's almost as a pretext to expand their own power in the coastal regions around the Aegean and beyond. I mean, I don't want to say it's clever, because, I mean, it's imperialistic, but it's a way to get rid of the Persians and pave your way for expansion, isn't it? Yes, exactly that. And if we look back to going even further back before the Persian invasions, there's the signs that already, even in the 6th century, the Athenians, were aware of the potential to expand their power out into the east. So this isn't a wholly new idea that they've had. And do we get a sense, say, during the 470s and into the 460s, mentioned that battle there, Eurimidon, Whilst that's going on, do you see more cities starting to join the Deleon League?

You mentioned how, at its height, it may have as many as 300 members. So surely there's some growth. Yes, almost certainly. Again, it's very hard to pin down from Thucydides' account. What he does tell us is about cities who decide that they would quite like to leave and aren't allowed to leave. So two really important cases that Thucydides mentions. One is the island of Thassos up in the north, so quite close to Aon in that strategically

very important region in terms of controlling trade routes, controlling access to the valuable resources on the mainland up there. Thassos tries to leave and the Athenians by force prevent it from doing so and for forcibly reincorporates and not happy days for Thassos. And then also the island of Naxos, that's down in the Aegean in the Sicilities, very large. island, quite a wealthy island, also attempts to leave. We're not told much about why, but presumably just decided that it wasn't happy with what the Athenians were up to, and is, again, forced to rejoin the alliance. And Thucydides, when he mentions that, uses very loaded language. He says, this was the first state, the first city, to be enslaved by the Athenians. And that language

of slavery is the language that has previously characteristically been used of what the Persian Empire does. So if you're in the Persian Empire, you're enslaved to the Persians. And now Thucydides says the Athenians are starting to enslave Greek states as well. The chronology is really hard to pin down at this point in Thucydides' narrative. So exactly when this happens. But again, probably late 470s, 460s sometime around then. And do we think, so Naxos tries to leave first and then Fassos try to to leave a few years after that.

Okay, hence why he says Naxos is the first one to be enslaved. And more regarding that Naxos case in particular, because these are really interesting case studies. As you say, it's now clear. The facade of this as a voluntary alliance is evidently not there if the Athenians are saying, no, you cannot leave. But with the case of Naxos, is Thucydides also saying this is the first people to be enslaved

because had they been contributing to the league by giving ships, I'm guessing it's probably a powerful island city, but now they're forced just to give money to Athens to make them more reliant on Lithuania's? Do you see that change as well? That's typically what happens. I think with Nexus, I think we don't know for sure if they were contributing ships before, but we know for sure that afterwards they are contributing money and not ships. So that is often the pattern, and definitely by the time we get down to the point where we can see who's contributing money and who isn't, which is the late 450s.

We start to get some inscribed evidence for this. Almost no one is left. contributing ships. So there's three states or three islands. Chios in the Eastern Aegean, the island of Lesvos, which has multiple city states on it, and the island of Samos. So there's just three islands left and everybody else is paying money. Well, let's get to the state of the Dealing League at that time then when you get that inscriptional evidence body. So those three islands that you mentioned, Hios, Lesbos, and Samos, because they are still paying ships to the Athenians, is that very much a case that the Athenians see them as their most, I guess, loyal allies? They don't need to coerce them into paying just by money. They trust them completely. I think that could be some of it. I mean, one of the tantalizing things is that we have no evidence at all for what sort of negotiations or discussions happened when an island said we want to, or did they say we want to start paying money now, or was that something the Athenians imposed? It could be, particularly for a very small island or small communities, it wasn't really an option because building, maintaining a fleet requires a lot of infrastructure because you have to have ship sheds and you need.

craftsmen who can maintain these things and build the things you need access to timber. And so it could be that for some small communities, the possibility of just outsourcing your defence to Athens was seen as a simple benefit. And they wouldn't have been at all upset about handing that over to Athens. But it could be that for others there was a bit more coercion involved. And yeah, one of the frustrations is that we can speculate about what this would have looked like from the perspective of the allies, but we have pretty much no evidence.

It's funny to speculate, though, isn't it? Because you have those two cases of particular islands trying to leave. But if the league, you know, this hegemonically, you know, clearly Athens is the top dog in it, consists of probably over 100 cities or, you know, by this time, the fact that the only two members have tried to leave over all of those years feels like almost they're actually outliers. And that maybe the majority were quite happy with that, union hegemony that they, well, I don't know, it's funny, isn't it?

Yeah. I mean, it's more than two. So there's one that I haven't mentioned, which is Caristos on Olimbya. So at least three that she said these names. But one of the issues is we don't know, we have the sort of no non-notes. So we don't know who else was trying to leave and that Hasn't told us about. I guess also sort of more generally the sort of methodological problem of how when you're trying to study an empire or.

organisation when all of your evidence really comes from the imperial power, which is the position we're in with Athens. How can we reconstruct what things look like? The subjects, the people who are the victims of imperialism. And is it safe to infer happiness from a failure to revolt? Or could that actually just mean that the imperialist is extremely effective at repressing revolt because people know, you know, that's possibly why Thassos and Naxos are treated so brutally is a warning to everyone else. Don't get any ideas about leaving. Because if we can do this to Naxos, which is big and powerful, imagine what we can do to your tiny island. I mean completely, yes, I think I was wrong to say happy there. Content is the strongest, isn't it? But when you have

a clearly dominant power overarching and your city is nowhere near the size of Athens, I say, It could also very much be that fear, as you highlight of, you know, if you revolt, you break the status quo. Equally, you could say, well, we can't assume that everybody hated it and that no one was getting anything out of it at all. So it's a very sort of, it's one of the things I find most interesting about studying this sort of, this sort of organisation in this period, because I think the experience of being in this empire must have been very different for different communities and for individuals within those communities. particularly again thinking about those states which had been part of the Persian Empire. They might still be part of an empire, the Athenian Empire, but maybe it's less bad being in the Athenian Empire than being in the Persian Empire, at least for some people. And are the Athenians still using the façade at this time of Delos still being the centre?

So it's not like everything's focused on Athens, at least symbolically at this time, early 450s? So, yep, so down to we think about 454, DELOS is in theory the headquarters of, the League, and sometime around then, a big change seems to happen in that the Treasury of the League, so all of this money the Athenians have been collecting to pay for ships to fight the Persians, in theory, had the Treasury been kept on Delos in the Temple of Apollo. And sometime in the late 450s, the Treasury is moved, relocated from Delos to Athens, stored on the Acropolis in the Parthenon. and that is seen by many as a very important symbolic move because in practical terms as well,

the Athenians now have much easier access to this cash, but also symbolically the centre of the league is now in Athens and no longer in Delos. Is it very much a statement, I mean, does it look like to you and other historians that this is the moving of money from kind of neutral, sacred ground to Athens, proper, you know, to the heart of Athens, with the Athenians now making a clear point. They're not

hiding behind this facade of, you know, putting it on this holy island in the centre of the Aegean anymore. They're taking it for themselves. I think that is how it's usually taken. One could, again, put a more positive spin on it and say the reason it's moved, and we find this mentioned in Plutarch, the source you mentioned earlier, is that it's vulnerable. The Persians are still a force in the Eastern Aegean, and you've got a huge amount of money sitting on an island and the worry is that the Persians might just come and help themselves to it. So it's a security measure to move it to Athens, which is much less exposed. So that would be the positive interpretation of why this move happens. But I think most people, including

Lutarch, don't think that's the real reason. They think it's because the Athenians want to have the money for themselves. That's really interesting to highlight that, you know, at least how they portray it, they still see the Persian. as a threat in the 450s. So, Polly, that brings me onto a really interesting event that I love you to explain, which happens just before, if my notes are right, the official moving of this money, which is the Deelian League going on this big expedition in their boats and deciding to fight the Persians elsewhere.

What is this expedition? So this is the Egyptian expedition, sometimes called the Egyptian disaster. Spoiler alert for how this is going to... going to play out. So Egypt at this point is, it has been for some time now, part of the Persian Empire and is a very important part of the Persian Empire. Egypt is the case throughout antiquity is much prized because it is such a good source of grain above all. So people want to have control of Egypt. There's a local king, an Egyptian king called Inaros, who attempts a rebellion, attempts to secede from the Persian Empire.

He gets in touch with the Athenians and says, do you fancy being involved in my rebellion? And the Athedians say, yes, let's do it. And it's a disaster. So it's quite a sort of slow motion disaster. Again, we get very little, it's very compressed accounts in Thesudides, it's sort of a paragraph of the text.

So we don't get a lot of detail about exactly what goes on. but they get bogged down. There's sort of an attempt to some fighting in some marshes that doesn't end at all well. And there's sort of two separate attempts to make headway in Egypt, but they both end in disaster and the Athenians have to withdraw. And that's really the end of any serious Athenian attempt to make sort of positive headway into the Persian Empire, to detach places from the Persian Empire. because they realise that they've met their limit.

But although it is largely Athenians who are taking part in this expedition, is it very much promoted as, you know, a league-wide, an alliance-wide attack on Egypt and how it's structured, how it's talked about? It's a really interesting question, actually, because if you look at how the Athenians talk about it, which they don't have a huge amount of evidence, but we have a war memorial, a casualty list set up by the Athenians, which the Athenians do every year.

They commemorate the dead of combat of that year. They typically set up, they inscribe on stone, the names of the people who died. And what's really striking about the casualty lists that we have for one of the years of the Egyptian expeditions is Egypt is just listed alongside multiple other theatres and it's not differentiated from the wars that the Athenians are fighting against other Greek communities.

So we have Egypt and other. and other places in the Persian Empire, but then also Greek cities, places like Hallease, which is a Greek community. And it's all described as the war. So it's like the Athenians are just fighting a big war against Persians, against Greeks,

and there's all one thing. And the other striking thing about that list is that it just says these Athenians died. So there's no sense that there are any other Greeks involved. It's not presented as a Deidian League campaign. And I think the sense we get from Thucydides as well is that this is the Athenians have decided to do this. And the campaign, we do have a monument created by someone from the island of Samos

commemorating their participation in this campaign. And again, this is really unusual. We have very little evidence of, as I said, from subject communities. So we know that there are members of the Debian League fighting. And it seems like at least one community was happy to commemorate its. participation in this campaign. But that's about as far as we can go. The Athenians, particularly in the late years of the league, but probably already from the start, aren't super keen on acknowledging the fact that they're having help from other Greeks when they're fighting their campaigns.

It's an interesting mentality, isn't it? I mean, apart from a couple of states that we've already mentioned, including Samos, how the Athenians and their alliance aren't as interested as bringing in allied troops, allied military support on their endeavors, they're almost just like, no, we've got this, we can bring in the manpower, you just give us money so that we can go and, you know, equip more of them, maybe bring in mercenaries? Is that what they think? Or do they just think they've just got enough manpower to do all of it themselves? Yeah, I think it's the latter. They'd like to think that it's just them. And then, because then the payoff is that they get all the credit if it was just them. So there's a speech that Thucydides attribute

to the politician Pericles towards the start of the Pelopnesian War, explicitly saying the allies don't do anything. They don't provide men or horses, which is untrue because we can see from other evidence that there are allies involved in Athenian campaigns, but probably never systematically. So it doesn't seem to be the case that the Athenians have any sort of system of conscription or levying systematically troops from allied communities that they probably were allies there, but they were there on a slightly sort of ad hoc basis as far as we can tell. That's interesting. You mentioned Pericles' speech there, and Pericles, this really important Athenian statesman, who I feel now, probably as we're getting to the end of the

450s and 440s will certainly come more onto the stage of this story. But with the speeches that survive of certain leaders, statesmen of Athenians at this time. Do you get regular mentions of these allied cities and an idea of how the Athenians view them? Do they treat them with contempt? Do they clearly portray themselves as the top dog and almost demean the contributions of these other cities, islands and so on? What do we know about that relationship almost? Again, this comes to the big disclaimer that we don't have any real speeches from this period. What we've got, primarily is Ducydides imagining or reporting. It's obviously disagreement about how much creativity there is in his speeches, but in attributing speeches to Athenian politicians. And those are,

for the most part, very dismissive of the contributions of the Allies. There's a tendency, it's a little bit subtle. So it doesn't always come out. absolutely explicitly, but to be particularly dismissive of islanders. So people who live on islands, which is, as we've discussed, the majority of the league is made up of these island communities, that they're especially sort of poor, maybe a little bit backward, maybe not really ready for self-determination. So they're the sorts of people who, the Athenians are almost doing them a favour by enslaving them or making the part of their empire. That maybe comes out, I mean, the place where it comes out, most explicitly is later on in the famous

Melian dialogue that Fucydides composes in the latter part of the Pelopnesian War. So Milos is an island, another cyclatic island, very small island, that doesn't want to be part of the Athenian Empire, the Athenians are trying to incorporate this in one of their arguments is. Obviously, you should be part of our empire because you're a tiny island, so why would you not? It's interesting to get that little insight into maybe Athenian opinions towards their allies and island allies at that time. To summarize, we've gone down to the 450s and do you say around 454 that they move the treasury from Delos to Athens itself? That's what we think on the basis of the Athenian set up inscriptions recording the amount of this money that they get from the allies, which they then give to the goddess Athena. the slightly sort of complicated way of doing things.

So we don't have an absolute record of all the money, but the amount that goes to the goddess Athena. And they set those up, they inscribed them on stone, they set them up on the Acropolis. And the first one that we have, which says, usefully, this is the first one, dates to 454 BC. So that's why we come up with that date.

And so how powerful, even with the recent setback, that Egyptian venture, how powerful is the Deelian League, when we get to about 450 BC. Very powerful, I think is the answer. I think in spite of the setback in Egypt, and maybe one could say, well, that ultimately ends up helping the Athenians

because it focuses their mind a little bit about where they should focus their energies. So Egypt is a disaster, but in other theatres, the Athenians are doing quite well. The other thing that has happened in the background, although not really in the background, is that conflict has erupted with Sparta. and with Sparta's allies.

So towards the end of the four-60s, Athens and Sparta had been on a sort of position of d'a-tomte since the end of the Persian Wars, but that breaks down at the end of the four-60s. And a conflict breaks out, which confusingly was sometimes called the first Peloponnesian War, not to be confused with the famous Peloponnesian War, between Athens and Sparta and some allies of Sparta, particularly Thee, which is Athens' most powerful northern neighbour. Again, the ebbs and flows, and ultimately Athens isn't successful in that conflict.

But along the way, Athens does win some successes, including briefly conquering enough of the region around Thebes, Beosha, so that's the region, immediately to the north of Athens, incorporating that into the Athenian Empire. So this could have been, if the Ethiopian, is to hold on to a bit longer, that could have been very significant because that's a big land possession. So they've got this very powerful sea-based naval maritime empire, and then for a moment it looks like they can add on this really significant portion of territory

to their north. So yeah, the empire is looking quite good at moments in the late 450s and 440s, but then they don't manage to hold on to that land part of their empire. Polly, is this a significant moment in the story of the Delian League, you know, the fighting of the Spartans and the Thebans in the fact, or I guess maybe now we should say the Athenian Empire, the fact that although maybe, you know, as we mentioned, the members of this alliance, the Isler members and so on, they're not giving troops that will be fighting alongside the Athenians attacking the Spartans. Their money is going into these Athenian campaigns. Now, not against the Persians, but against, you know, rival big cities on the mainland. Is that the significance of this,

that now their money is going to finance war against other groups? Yes, I think exactly that. Again, we don't have, well, we don't have detailed financial accounts, certainly not for this early period, and it's very hard to reconstruct exactly sort of where the precise funds are coming from. But we know, for example, and another speech Thucydides composes is four puts in the mouth of official people from the city of Maitolini, which is one of the cities on the island of Lesbos, when they're trying to justify why they're attempting to revolt from the alliance. This is later on. This is the early four-twenties. But one thing they say is we were quite happy to be part of this alliance when we were fighting the Persians. That's fine. But then we saw that the Athenians have stopped fighting the Persians and instead they're trying to oppress other Greek states. And we're not. got okay with that. So that's why we want to rebel from the alliance. Gosh, but there's still many, many more years in the future, that particular revolt of

Mytilini. So when do the Athenians officially stop fighting the Persians? Is there a point where you can say, yes, the alliance stops its original purpose, if you believe, Thucydides, which is to keep fighting the Persians and get revenge? So, it's another crux of our sources, because it is the notable slash scandalous omission from Thucydides is the possibility of a peace agreement made with Persia, again, probably in the late 450s. So this is the thing known modern scholarship as the piece of Callias. Kalias is an Athenian politician. So he's the person who would have been sent to Persia to negotiate the terms of the deal. If it happened, then what it effectively was, is a sort of

non-aggression pact. So we have later sources. from the 4th century that give us versions of the terms of this peace treaty. And it says, basically, the Persians are going to stay three days ride from the coast of Western Anatolia. So it's pushing the western frontier of the Persian Empire a little bit further east and effectively seeding to Athens, those Greek communities on the west coast of Anatolia. The Athenians in term promised that they won't go further east than that. So it's basically saying the Persian Empire keeps what's now the Persian Empire, the Athenians aren't going to go any further, they're not going to cause any more trouble for the Persian king from now on.

So if that peace treaty really happened, and if it happened on broadly those terms, then we could say, well, that's when certainly the goal of taking revenge on Persia has gone because you're not going to go and kill the Persian king or attack the capital cities of the Persian Empire. You promise not to do that. But the big problem is, I mean, this seems like quite an important thing, and Thucydides does not mention it. And fifth century sources do not mention it.

So we only hear about it first, about 100 years later. So there are many historians, modern historians, who think that this treaty didn't exist, didn't happen. And it was something sort of invented after the fact, possibly to justify why the Athenians give up what they were meant to be doing. which was fighting the Persians. So potentially a pretext as well. But I mean, do we know that those cities, you know, supposedly that the Persian seed, you know, on the coastline of Asia Minor, do we know that they fall into Athenian hands around this time? Maybe the Athenians with a pretext of we are liberating you.

But in fact, what they say is liberating, they're actually taking control of themselves. We don't have good enough evidence to sort of pin down the chronology that neatly, unfortunately. and we don't know about what's happening in most of these cities. We have little snapshots. And again, we get stuck in problems of, when we do have some evidence, we often can't date it. So there's a city called Erythry, which is on the coast of Anatolia, just sort of across from the island of Gios, so about halfway down at the coast of Anatolia. And we know that sometime, maybe in the 450s, there is civil war in that city. which seems to involve a pro-Persian faction and a pro-Athenian faction.

And it's settled in favour of the pro-othelian faction. And then Eryry is incorporated, re-incorporated into the Athenian Empire. And we have the inscription that sets up the terms for Eryry rejoining the Athenian alliance. And it's tempting. We could put that inscription, put it in the 450s, and make it part of a sort of bigger story of sort of sorting things out in the Athenianian. this region after the piece of Calias. But that inscription, some people put it in the 460s, some people put it in the 430s. So, you know, we have to be quite cautious trying to make a

very neat picture. Well, Polly, you're bashing apart my attempts of a neat narrative, but you're being absolutely as an academic would be with saying that we can't be sure on certain things. But nevertheless, it's a great story. But it feels very clearly now, doesn't it? If we're around 450 BC, the alleged time of this peace treaty, you know, Athens bar only a few cities that we know of, they're demanding tribute from these various cities across the Aegean, more than 100 by this time. They're saying that you can't leave and, you know, they're using the money for their own ends to expand here, there and everywhere, sometimes against other Greece. It seems clearly an empire by this time. And is there even an Athenian recognition of

this, that, okay, we're now more overtly showing ourselves as, you know, the enslavers, you know, the clear hegemonic leader. Do they then try, okay, let's go into this 100%? Let's try and cement our control over these cities to ensure that there aren't any future attempts to leave. I'm going to frustrate you again by saying that we can't be sure because we used to think that we did know this because we used to think there was a cluster of inscriptions, inscribed documents that showed the Athenians being very heavy-handed in running their empire and sending out officials and passing very sort of quite brutal regulations about the consequences of not doing what the Athenians wanted,

what happens if you don't pay your tributes, that sort of thing. And those used to be dated in the late 450s into the 440s and again connected with this the end of the war against Persia and a big change in the Athenian Empire. Issyrians have, as we all want to do, who changed our minds about the date of most of these texts, and they're now put in the 420s, which doesn't mean that the Athenians weren't being horrible earlier on,

but just means that they weren't writing it down, or if they did write it down, we haven't got the evidence for them writing it down. So this is one of those cases where the last 30 years of scholarship have ended up with us knowing less that we once thought we knew about exactly what was happening in the in the 450s, 440s. Because I have this word in my notes,

which feels important to kind of the whole setup of at least this idea of Athens consolidating its power, that this word clericry, can you explain, Polly what this word is and how it was used, or at least we thought it was used, by figures like Pericles and other great Athenians at the time, to try and cement their control over the cities of what was the Dealing League.

Yeah. So a quite common tactic the Athenians used, I think we can say, in fact, that they are doing this in the 440s, certainly, is that if a city tries to rebel and fails, then one of the punishments which is inflicted is confiscation of land. So the Athenians will seize the land that was owned by members of that community and take it for themselves and usually distribute it among Athenian citizens. So we know that this happens in a couple of communities on the island of Ubea,

which is Athens in Mijia, it's the island just to the east of Athens. We know that this happens on Samos. Later on, it's what happens to Maitilini. And then either the Athenians rent back that land to the original owners who stay there and farm it but have to pay Athens for the privilege of doing so, or they send out settlers, Athenians, who go and then live in those communities. And so they become effectively

a bit like a sort of garrison because these are now Athenian men who are living in that place. So it's a sort of it's a win-win for the Athenians because they get the financial benefit of having this land, but also they secure their hold over those places because there's a bunch of Athenians living there. Is it kind of like a colony but not a colony as of such? It's like an Athenian presence there, kind of like maybe also kind of keeping an eye as well and what's happening on the ground in that place. Yeah, so the distinction, the sort of technical distinction is that a cleric would still be an Athenian citizen. So a colonist, the sort of standard model, forms an entirely new community and is a citizen of that new community and then gives up their citizenship of their original community. The Athenians do found at least one colony in this period that we know about, or maybe a little bit later that we know about. But a cleric, it's a bit more temporary. So it could be that they're not permanently resident there. So they own They'd probably go out and farm that property, but they would also still be an Athenian and be able to go back to Athens and they'd fight. If they were fighting, they'd be fighting

as part of an Athenian army and not, say, Assamian army. So the Athenians at the same time, as well as growing their alliance or their empire of cities by this time, they are also founding their own colonies elsewhere. Is it in the Black Sea and Crimea? that I think Pericles goes and explores around there as well, making more cities. There's lots of activity in the Black Sea, again, not at all well recorded by Thucydides, but we hear about this in Plutarch's life, life of Pericles. And that's important because it's quite hard to square that with the original terms of the Delian League. But that's something that very obviously benefits Athens, as I've already mentioned.

Black Sea really important in terms of grain supply, one of Athens' ongoing. needs in this period really throughout its history is that it can't grow enough grain to feed its own population, so it has to import grain. So getting good access to black sea grain is really important for the Athenians. So is that going on? This colony up in the North the Gian place we don't exactly know where it is, but we know that a colony was founded up there. That's another strategically important place for the Athenians. So they're very much flexing their muscles around this time. And we're about to get to the end point for this chat, which is the Samian Revolt, which was very important. And actually, when we were emailing back and forth,

preparing for this chat, Polly, you said, well, if you want to stop somewhere, stop at this one, because this is a big moment. But before there, I just want to do one quick tangent going more on the Athenians kind of flexing their power, showing off their power at this time. And you mentioned it in passing earlier. When the Athenians decide to move the treasury, the funds that are being paid by the cities to Athens to show they're very much clearly in charge, kind of many cities, you know, clear an empire by that time. When Pericles then decides, you know, the great Athenian statesmen to rebuild the Acropolis with all the stunning monuments like the Parthenon, the Eryk Theam, the Great Gateway, the Propylia, it's commonly said that they use the money from the league, from these

cities to fund it. My question to you is, is this a case of just like one of the biggest cases of embezzlement in history? I think, but strictly speaking, probably not in that insofar as we can reconstruct the quite complicated finances of this operation. The Athenians at least sort of launder the money, the Tehran League money a bit before they use it to build the Parthenon. But it could well be that it's separate. It's not the tribute money. It's a different stash of Athena's money that is used directly to fund the building of the Parthenon and the other stuff on the Acropolis. But you could say, well, the reason they've got that spare money is because they're using

the tribute money to fund other bits of Athens economy. So ultimately, they probably couldn't have afforded to do it if they didn't have the cushion provided by the tribute money. Plutarch's Life of Perigris is brilliant on this. And that really goes all in on saying this is the most scandalous thing that Pericles specifically, and then sort of the Athenians, because they did what Pericles wanted, was spending this money to, and he uses the analogy of prostitution, of sort of spending this money and tarting Athens up. And this is the most unseemly use of this money that was given for this

good cause and they're just blowing it all on fancy stuff in the centre of Athens. Using money for, you know, intended for a good cause, but actually for, you know, this vanity, well, that's a bit of strong, is it? But yeah, this, this, this, monumental kind of glorifying of Athens itself, isn't it? Thank you for that quick tangent there because it felt a good story to talk about. But come on, okay, let's get to 440 BC around that time and the Samian Revolt. What is the story of the Samian Revolt? So the Samian Revolt actually starts off in a local conflict between two members of the Alliance.

Samos, which is a big, very wealthy, very important island in the eastern, southeast regime. and the city of Miletus, which had been part of the Persian Empire and then had been liberated. Miletus is sort of the biggest mainland towns of opposite. Samos, Samos allegedly has been interfering or was trying to steal some land, lay claims of some land that the Milesians think belongs to them. And then this sort of escalates. And the Athenians initially are intervening to stop conflict between two members of the alliance, which is the thing that shouldn't be happening.

but then this escalates the Athenians are very heavy-handed in their intervention, and this provokes further resistance from the Samians, and the Athenians have to intervene even more strongly to stop the Samians from resisting. What the Athenians are up to, the whole thing blows up really into what you should really call it the Samian War, because it's a sort of full-on conflict, requires a loss of investment. You know that it's extremely expensive because we have, again, an account, of the money the Athenians borrow from the goddess Athena to spend on the war that they have to fight against the Samians, and that was set up on the Acropolis. Eventually, the Athenians managed

to crush or to defeat the Samians, and they treat the Samians, according to Plutarch, who reports the story, says he doesn't know if he should quite believe it, but he reports this tale of extreme brutality in the treatment of the Samians, that the leaders, the Samian leaders, were taken to Miletus, so the place that they tried to steal land from, and crucified in the marketplace there and then beaten to death. So a very sort of violent and brutal end to this war. Seamus is no longer allowed to contribute ships to the alliance after this episode, perhaps unsurprisingly, and is required to pay very extensive reparations to Athens to repay the cost of the war that the Athenians had fought. And again, we have the inscription documenting the Samian

repayments to Athens. And just to clarify, so had the Thienians at the start when, you know, they hear about this local dispute, Samos versus Miletus, had they very much gone down on the side of Miletus and told the Samians to stop it and the Samians decide, no, we're not going to do that. We want to continue ultimately leading to them fighting. That seems to be the case. Again, Thucydides' account of this is very compressed. It's one among the things he doesn't really give us the full story. But the other thing which is in the mix is that there is clearly Persian involvement here as well. And that one thing that seems to be going on is that the Persians are backing the Samians and that inevitably means that the Athenians are going to take the other

side because this could have been a moment when even if there had been a piece of Kalias, maybe this is a moment the Persian saw an opportunity to get a foothold back in the Eastern Aegean. Because if Samos had been part of the Persian Empire, at one point, it's one of the Persians' first sort of conquests in what we would think of as the Greek world. And if the risk is that the Persians are going to get back into Samos, then that would scare the Athenians. So that probably also explains why this provoked such a strong reaction from the Athenians. And as you mentioned earlier, Polly, you know, Samos was one of those places, few places that were still contributing ships to Athens. So, although we

can't be sure it could infer that they were up to that point. One of the Athenians is like closest, strongest, most dependable allies. But now, because maybe because of that Persian influence, the Athenians, they get involved. And they show that, you know, yes, we may well have been really close allies in the past, but this is against what we're interested in. This is against our interests. And we're going to go down hard on you. It shows, doesn't it? It shows that kind of brutal nature of Athens at the same time that not even the Samians were safe. Yes. I think. I think that's right. Yeah, they've been one of the first allies. They're very strong. There is a rich island. They'd been part of the Egyptian expedition and had been sort of happy to celebrate or at

commemorate their involvement in that. So, you know, there's a practical, strategic danger in losing Samos, but I think sort of psychologically or morally as well, if you can't even rely on this island anymore, then something's, something important has changed. Actually, Thucydides doesn't at the time say this, but much later on. So almost at the end of the history, he has one of his characters say, we thought that we were going to lose the empire in the Samin revolt. That was a moment when it could all have just come crashing down.

If Seymot had been successful, that could have been the end of the empire. Oh, like the domino effect. So other cities would join in kind of thing and then more and more would try to get rid of Athens. So sort of existential moment. And maybe it's sort of a shock to the self-image, I think up to that point, the Athenians could perhaps still tell themselves, we're still leading

this alliance, you know, we're still the nice guys in this organisation. We've been doing good work, keeping people safe from the Persians. But if Samos isn't buying that story anymore and the things that happen in Samos, again, if we believe the stories about the crucifixions and so on, and just the military cost and the loss of life in crushing this revolt, I think it could have been quite a sort of shock to the Athenians system. Well, this is a nice place to wrap up our chat because I know there's, I remember doing it as an essay question all those years ago at university. There's a lot of, do I say, fun debate amongst scholars about which particular event that we've

covered is the one that most clearly shows a transition from this defensive alliance to a full-blooded Athenian empire. You know, was it as far back as Naxos? Was it the treasury being moved? or is it the Samian Revoltz? I guess, Polly, I mean, where would you place it? I'm increasingly keen on the Samian Revolt. It's a harder argument to make

because we don't have one source that says this was the moment. And this is all argument historians like to make. But Thucydides' silence or his relative silence on the Samian Revoltz, I mean, he mentions it and he doesn't put a lot of weight on it. I think one thing that Thucydides is doing throughout his history is trying to push his reader probably away from things that were maybe the consensus in his own time and pushing them towards a different way of looking at what was going on. So in some ways, Thucydides' silence is an argument in favour of this being maybe more important than we've realised in the past. So, yeah, I'm quite keen on pointing the finger at Samos. But I think, again, to go back to something I said earlier,

it might be a mistake as trying to just pinpoint one moment because depending where you are in this empire, the key moment might have come at a very different point. If you're an Axian, I think from the moment you get enslaved, this feels like an empire. But there are probably small communities in the Aegean that's all pottering on quite happily and haven't noticed that anything's changed in particular.

So I think perhaps we need to allow for multiple turning points. Polly, this has been an absolutely great chat. I mean, last but certainly not least, do you think we should view the Delian League today? Do you think the Athenians from the get-go always had an idea of transforming it into their own imperial possession? I think so. I think they I mean, they might not have thought of it quite in the terms of an empire, but I think they were out for power maximisation, profit maximisation from the beginning, and they saw this opportunity. Well, Polly, this has been great. You have also written a book very recently about

the main man we've talked a lot about during this chat, Thucydides, or you've contributed to this new book, it is. Yes, so this is a new translation of Thucydides by Robin Waterfield. It's a wonderful translation, very readable, probably more readable than Thucydides himself was in Greek, but really sort of captures the spirit of the book, and I've written a short introduction and the notes. Polly, this has been fantastic. We may well name this episode with an ancient NATO question mark, and given everything that we've covered today, we're going to very much focus on the ancient history as we've done. But, you know, listeners, you can make up your mind.

How much could you link the story today with the functioning of NATO? Or is that not a right tree to climb comparisons to make? This has been fantastic. It just goes to me to say, thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show. Thanks again, having me. Well, there you go. There was Professor Polly Lowe talking through what we know and what we don't know about the Deerian Lee.

and key events during this league's evolution, story as the 5th century BC progressed. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the ancients. As mentioned at the start, we're going to leave it to you, how much you think this ancient alliance, this Delian League, is there any ways in which it resembles the NATO of modern day? But at the same time, there are many ways in which it doesn't. So we'll leave that to you and let us know your thoughts in the comments

we love hearing from you. And once again, thank you so much for listening to this episode. Now, if you're enjoying The Ancients, please make sure that you're following the show on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. That really helps us, and you'll be doing us a big favour.

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