The Ancients - Thucydides: Thoughts on the Athenian Empire

Episode Date: December 17, 2020

From 478 BCE until 404 BCE, a collection of Greek city-states were united under the leadership of Athens. Beyond inscriptions and a few minor sources, there is very little to tell us about life within this empire … that is, except the works of Thucydides, an Athenian historian and general who wrote a history of the Peloponnesian War. Professor Polly Low from Durham University spoke to Tristan about what we can learn from Thucydides work about this Athenian empire. How did Athens come to have this power? How did they keep their subjects in line? What did Thucydides miss out?

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like The Ancients ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. It's the Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and in today's podcast we are looking at the Athenian Empire that thrived in the 5th century BC. We're going to be looking at how the empire rose in the aftermath of the Persian Wars. We're going to be looking at how the empire was run. We're going to be looking at its allies. And we're going to be looking at how the empire was run, we're going to be looking at its allies and we're going to be looking at the empire through the lens of one of the most

significant ancient historians that survives to us today, the contemporary Athenian Thucydides. Now joining me to talk through what we know about the Athenian empire, I was delighted to be joined by Professor Polly Lowe from the University of Durham. Polly specialises in ancient classical history, particularly classical Greece, and it was great to get her on the show to talk through all things Athenian Empire, particularly on how this empire was run. Here's Polly. Polly, thank you for joining me today.

It's a pleasure to be here. Now, Thucydides and the Athenian Empire. This is a story of a man who appears to have had quite a negative view of his home cities. Can we say imperial addiction? Yes, I think so. I mean, trying to pin down Thucydides' views is always quite a hard task. And there's one reason why we keep reading and arguing about him, because there's endless debate on exactly what he thought about anything. But my reading of the text is that he's very critical of his home city and how his home city

behaves to other Greeks. And if we go into the background, first of all, what sort of world is Thucydides born into? This is the 5th century BC. Yep, so he is a wealthy Athenian. His family are part of the Athenian elite. They made their money from gold mining up in northern Greece and they have connections with non-Athenian cities, which is a hallmark of being in the upper echelons of society. And Thucydides must have been active in politics. He was elected as a general during the Peloponnesian War. He's pretty reticent about himself, apart from telling us that, but we can place him definitely in the upper strata of Athenian society. And we think of Thucydides for his coverage of the Peloponnesian War,

but he's also a very important source for understanding the Athenian Empire. Yeah, he's our only narrative literary source really for the Athenian Empire. We have lots of evidence from inscriptions and we have references in Aristophanes' Athenian comedy, but as a contemporary literary account, Thucydides is our only source. But he's also not really writing about the Athenian Empire. So his subject is the Peloponnesian War. So the stuff about the Athenian Empire comes in almost incidentally into his narrative. So it's absolutely not comprehensive. And there are great gaps in what he says or doesn't say about the Athenian Empire. And so is that where the additional,

you mentioned the epigraphic evidence or the evidence from plays really comes into play to get a good understanding of the empire at this time? use particularly the epigraphic evidence the inscriptions to sort of plug the gaps in Thucydides but often we have to also try and use Thucydides to explain the epigraphic evidence so there's a real danger of going round in circles in this. Ah okay and we've been talking about the Athenian Empire right now so let's have a quick look at the background before we go into it in the Peloponnesian War context. Where does the Athenian Empire come from as it were where does it originate? Well the conventional answer to this which is sort of the answer Thucydides gives us, is it starts in the Persian Wars. So the Greek wars against Persia or the Persian wars against Greece come to a head in the late 480s and early 470s BCE. And as I'm sure you know,

an alliance of Greek states is formed to fight against the Persians and that's an alliance which includes Athens and Sparta and a considerable number of other Greek states. After the Persians are defeated the Spartans withdraw from the alliance and different sources give us different explanations for why that happens and Athens is left in sole charge of this alliance of Greek states and And then there again, the sources give us different versions of events. But effectively, what happens is an agreement is reached that there has to be a continuing alliance because there is still a threat from Persia. Or perhaps the Greeks want to take revenge on Persia and the Athenians take the lead in that alliance. And then at some point, and this is hugely debated and contested, this voluntary

alliance turns into the Athenian Empire. And that's the thing that no one really agrees exactly when that happens or how that happens. Is it the case the Athenians knew from the start that they were going to be setting up an empire and they duped the Greeks into signing up to this? So did they know from 478 or even before that an empire was their goal? Or was it a much slower process, taking maybe 20, 30, 40 years, and the Athenians gradually became more and more coercive and exploitative and ended up almost by mistake, by accident, with this empire? So it sounds like there's this evolution from an alliance to an empire, So it sounds like there's this evolution from an alliance to an empire, which perhaps encompasses most of the 5th century BC. Yeah, I think that's certainly one way of thinking about it and reading

the evidence. And maybe that the Peloponnesian War is instrumental in this change, that the Athenians were happily ticking along, leading the Greeks, being nice, friendly, not quite imperialists. And then under pressure of the Peloponnesian War, the pressure of war meant that they had to be stricter and harsher. And that's when we get the more coercive, exploitative thing, which we call the Athenian Empire. I'm not convinced that that at least was Thucydides' view. And Thucydides, it seems to me, the way he tells the story

makes the Athenians imperialist from a much earlier stage, maybe even from the very beginning. And before the Peloponnesian War breaks out, from Thucydides, do we hear of any Greek city-states in this Athenian alliance slash empire trying to break away? Yeah, so that's one reason why I think Thucydides thinks that it becomes an empire earlier on. So the way he tells the story, he tells us about the end of the Persian Wars and this voluntary alliance being formed, and then very quickly afterwards tells us that some states try to leave. So Naxos is the example that he points to. So an important and quite wealthy island, strategically significant, and it tries to leave and is forced back into the alliance or the empire.

And Thucydides says that was the first state which the Athenians enslaved, which is a very loaded choice of terminology to use. And he says it was contrary to the Greek is ambiguous, either the agreement or custom. So it's not quite clear whether he's saying this violates the terms of the alliance, or this is just a change in Greek expectations of how states should behave. So Thucydides points to Naxos. His chronology is very unclear at this point, but we're in the 470s probably. So this is no more than 10 years after the foundation of the alliance. And in terms of his narrative,

it's about a paragraph after the beginning of the alliance. So I think he's saying this is how it was from the very start. That's really interesting. So quickly after the end of the Persian Wars that the Athenians are already forcibly stopping people from leaving. Yeah. And I think one question, a big question that maybe we don't want to go into is what we go to count as making something an empire, how we define imperialism as distinct from other sorts of alliance. But I think one important criterion, and it's certainly important for Thucydides, is whether or not it's voluntary. And his view is that when they signed up, it was a voluntary thing, but it stops being voluntary fairly shortly afterwards. And that's surely an important distinction for Thucydides.

shortly afterwards. And that's surely an important distinction for Thucydides. So before the Peloponnesian War, and also during it, you mentioned this direct intervention, these forcing people to stay in the league. How do the Athenians keep their allies, keep their subjects in check? I think if we asked Thucydides, he'd say it's fear. Fear is driving both sides. Actually, the Athenians are terrified of what the allies might do to them, and they keep their subjects in check through fear. What's interesting is if we try and look at the machinery of empire and think, well, how the Athenians actually make people behave, it seems very light touch. So there's not much evidence of military imposition. So what seems to be the case is if a state causes trouble, then the Athenians might impose a garrison to keep them in line, but usually after they've rebelled.

So there isn't a systematic policy of putting a garrison in every single member state. There may have been no Athenian officials in a large number of the allied states, maybe no more than one or two in quite a lot of them. lot of them. So either the Athenians are really good at keeping everyone so terrified that they don't need to actually have much on the ground presence, or another way of interpreting what's going on is that actually quite a lot of states were pretty happy being part of this empire and didn't need to be kept in line by active measures. In regards to the manpower question, this idea of the Athenians being able to send garrisons to managed places all around the empire, did the Athenians have able to send garrisons to managed places all around the empire did the athenians have enough soldiers to do that no i think probably they didn't that's one explanation

for why they don't make extensive use of garrisons they might have used mercenaries of course to fill up these garrisons but there's also an expense so in fact some places where we do see a garrison it's fairly clear that the locals have to pay the cost to keep the garrison running. So it's manpower, but it's also expense. So yeah, manpower is an issue for the Athenians, and maybe one reason why it's quite a light touch imperial system. It's just a thought when you're mentioning that, because the Greeks at this time, they're all city-states, they're just cities, they're not regions. And it's amazing then again to think how one city could control such a vast amount of territory. And in that regard, you were mentioning earlier how they sometimes respond to a crisis with force, with imposing a garrison.

Does this emphasise how the Athenians, they were willing to respond with a heavy hand, but only after a crisis had developed? That seems to be the case, certainly in the early years of the empire. crisis had developed? That seems to be the case, certainly in the early years of the empire. The evidence that we've got suggests they're reactive rather than proactive in how they manage things. So we have the example of Naxos, Thassos up in the north, which rebels and is treated in a similar way. And then when we get down a little bit later, the very striking examples in Thucydides' text during the Peloponnesian War of the treatment of Mytilene and the treatment of Melos, where massacres and confiscations of land become the way that the Athenians respond. When we get into the 420s, there starts to be better evidence of what look like more systematic attempts to regulate the entire empire.

But those are more to do with financial and sometimes religious obligations rather than military or political impositions. And what happened in the case of Mytilene that you mentioned just then? Mytilene rebels in the 420s and it's seen as a particularly problematic rebellion because Mytilene had a favoured position in the empire. So most city-states in the empire pay Athens a cash payments tribute, and in exchange for that, don't have their own military forces, they don't have a fleet. The Mytholomeans had kept their fleet and had a greater degree of independence than many allies. But in spite of that, or maybe because of that, rebelled, the rebellion fails. And this is one

of the most dramatic bits of Thucydides. And the Athenians initially decide, as a punishment for the rebellion, that they're going to kill the entire male population and sell the women and children into slavery. Then they sleep on it and think, actually, maybe that was a bad idea. And Thucydides gives us, he invents for us a debate on the subject of how do we keep the allies in check? And it's a really interesting theoretical discussion of deterrence and the power of how do we keep the allies in check? And it's a really interesting theoretical discussion of deterrence and the power of deterrence.

Is it best to terrify the other allies into behaving or is deterrence, in fact, an ineffective way of keeping people in check? After the second debate, they think, well, maybe it was a bit harsh to kill everyone. So they decide only to kill a thousand men, which if you think of it, is still a pretty awful punishment.

And they send a second ship, which if you think of it is still a pretty awful punishment. And they send a second ship which just gets there in time. So the ultimate punishment for Mytilene is a thousand men are executed and all of their territory is confiscated and given to Athenian citizens. So this is another way that the Athenians control and exploit their empire is that they confiscate land, which is a financial benefit for the Athenians, but also a loss for the allies because they don't have that land anymore. It's interesting. It sounds that Thucydides goes into a lot of detail about this pretty infamous episode in Athenian history. Yeah, it's one of the great set pieces of his work, and it comes at a very interesting moment. So it's set alongside the Spartan attack on the small city of Plataea, which had been an Athenian ally, which is also pretty atrocious and gruesome in the fate of that city. So it's a particularly bleak moment of Thucydides, which is pretty full of bleak moments of the whole work for this as part of the structure of the text it's a particularly highly emotional set of events and this debate that he gives us he says there were lots of speeches were made but he just zooms in on these two speeches one of them given by his great enemy cleon who was making the case for killing everybody and then another given by this person that we don't hear of ever again called diodatus who may be a thucydidean invention who knows of sort of dramatizing these different ways of thinking about

how do you run an empire my view is that the whole thing is invented by thucydides at least the content of the speech is precisely to explore this problem of how should the athenians be running their empire ah so the creation of the speech is actually, well, you think Thucydides trying to emphasise problems with the empire? I think so. The revolt of Mytilene happened, I'm sure. And I'm sure the Athenians did respond in the way that Thucydides said that they did. But he is explicit that he has chosen just to give us these two speeches of all the many speeches that were given on this subject so there's definitely a level of artfulness in how he presents the debate and the fact that the issue in question is so central to the problem of what should we be doing with our empire i'm

sure that's part of why that debate is there in the text and with cleon just there you mentioned that he was this enemy of thucydides. Did Cleon embody quite a lot of imperialist Athenian views? That's certainly how it's presented in Thucydides, and to some extent also in Aristophanes. We get the impression that he is very hawkish and gung-ho and pushing the more extreme Athenian imperialist policy in a way which doesn't turn out well, as we tell because this empire collapses. And definitely the impression that we get from Thucydides is that Cleon is being presented as one of the people who is to blame. So there's a contrast in Thucydides' work between Pericles,

who is generally read as being one of Thucydides' great heroes, and Cleon as the sort of anti-Pericles. So Pericles was able to keep the empire in check somehow and stop it from becoming too extreme and too excessive. But after Pericles' death, that's when the real slide into disaster starts, and Cleon exemplifies that anti-Periclean politics. So perhaps before the demise of Pericles, when maybe Athens does still have what they might call an empire, can we say that Thucydides isn't as hostile to it as he was later on? Does he view it as it could potentially be very useful, very effective, but under good reasoned leadership? really important and impossible question about what did Thucydides think? Did Thucydides think the empire could have worked out? Because Thucydides isn't, I think, completely consistent on that question. So the really critical passage is the so-called obituary of Pericles just after

the death of Pericles in book two, where he says under Pericles, a famous line that Athens was a democracy in name, but in practice it was or was becoming ruled by one man and then he says Pericles gave this advice to be restrained not try and expand the empire look after their existing possessions but people after Pericles ignored that advice and that's what led to disaster so on the one hand the answer to your question seems to be yes Thucydides thought that if Pericles had lived the empire would have survived but on the on the other hand, there are inconsistencies. So again, when he talks about the start of the empire in book one, there we get the impression that already under Pericles, or even pre-Pericles, the seeds of disaster are already there. And actually,

when he starts to talk about the disaster of the Sicilian expedition, what he says there about why that fails isn't necessarily completely consistent with what he says in Book Two. So it's not, I think, absolutely clear precisely what Thucydides thought, whether he thought the empire was always doomed to fail or whether he thought it could have been saved under better leadership. Well, let's have a look at one of those keystones of the Athenian Empire's administration, the idea of tribute. How important is tribute for the running of the Athenian Empire's administration, the idea of tribute. How important is tribute for the running of the Athenian Empire? I think it's important practically in terms of economic benefit, but it's also hugely symbolically important. It's a novelty, or at least is presented as a novelty, that this is a thing the Athenians invent at the foundation of their empire.

It's a novelty in the Greek world, but it has a very clear antecedent in Persian imperialism. And this is probably not a coincidence that the Athenians, having defeated the Persians, are then taking on some of the things which they've been fighting against. And the Athenian empire is a sort of new Persian empire as a recurring theme. And so the symbolism of tribute is really important, that it marks the way of marking the inferiority of the Allies to the Athenians, that they have to come and give or send this money. And that comes out really clearly in fourth century sources, which there's a writer called Isocrates who says, if the Athenians had wanted to think of a way to make everyone really hate them,

the best thing they could have come up with is the system of tributes and the fact that they made the Allies bring it to Athens and had a parade, which Isocrates thinks is just a way of humiliating the Allies. And when the Athenians have a second go at imperialism in the 4th century, they say, we're absolutely not having tribute again. There's no tribute here. We're going to be having something completely different called syntaxis, contribution, and it's not the same as tribute. So I think symbolically tribute is super important,

but it also brings in a huge amount of cash for the Athenians. So thousands of talents by the height of the empire are coming in, which are funding the Peloponnesian War and other things as well. Yeah, it definitely sounds like they're rubbing it in their allies' faces. They've got to go to Athens to give them this tribute at the centre of the empire. Yes. Yes, I mean, you could spin it as a lovely, inclusive sort of festival.

Everybody's invited to a nice party in Athens and because there's a religious element to it, so this is about also being able to participate in cults at the centre of the empire. So I think, as with many things to do with imperialism, one could choose to sort of argue that something in fact is more positive or has a potentially more positive aspect to it. But there's definitely, I think, pretty good evidence that it was perceived as an imposition.

And it was always very interesting what you were saying there about the Persian influence, especially if we think that this empire started off as this anti-Persian alliance, and then it transforms into using a key element of the Persian empire. because this idea that the Athenians become the Persians is an idea that is there, I think, in Herodotus and Aristophanes plays on it a lot as well. So there's maybe a little bit of exaggeration in our sources. But in terms of practicality, the states which become part of the Athenian Empire, many of them, particularly on the coast of what's now Turkey, have been part of the Persian Empire. And what seems really to happen to them is they just swap. They're just swapping masters. Their daily life doesn't change very much. And the money is just going in a different direction than it had before. And really they're just paying off the local bosses for a

quiet life. And there's some suggestion that some states in that region pay tribute to both empires. They're paying off the Persians and also paying off the Athenians at the same time. I'd definitely like to get into what they actually thought about Athens in a bit. But first of all, going back to Thucydides, I mean, it might be a difficult question, but do we have any idea what Thucydides thought about the tribute system? He singles it out as a thing he talks about at the start. So when he describes the foundation of this league, notionally anti-Persian, the one bit of admin information he gives us is that they set up this

system for collecting tribute, so that's about the only set of Athenian officials that he talks about. A little bit later on he gives us a figure for the amount of money which was coming in from the tribute at the start of the Peloponnesian War, and then he tells us about the abolition of the tribute in Book 7 of the history, so towards the end of the sicilian expedition but very frustrating he doesn't really tell us why the athenians decide to abolish the tribute just passes over that very very briefly so he gives us snapshots and this is a feature of how he talks about the athenian empire but then doesn't tell us about a lot of other stuff that we can see going on from the epigraphic evidence in terms of the admin of the tribute so if we want to know how

the system actually works we have to look at the epigraphic evidence to see how the athenians are actually collecting this money and what the processes are and how they force people to pay and how they stop people embezzling it and all of that stuff and in regards to officials when we think of the athenian empire and we think of officials outside of athens who were these officials? Can we imagine Athenians being in each of these cities, making sure that everything's in check? Or was it other people? It could be either. So in some cases, it looks like it's Athenians who were sent out. And certainly for sort of visiting missions, we know the Athenians send out inspectors to certain places. inspectors to certain places and we know that in some cases the athenians will impose an athenian to be effectively the governor of a town especially if there's some rebellion there

but otherwise sometimes the inscriptions just talk about the officials and don't really say who they are and i think it's quite possible that those officials might be locals who have just been put in charge of making sure that the money and it is often just the money is what the Athenians want, make sure that the money gets to Athens. We know that there is a system of appointing friendly locals to this post known as the Proxenos, who would be a local but would keep an eye on Athenian interests in their town, and the Athenians make a lot of use of that. So this Proxenos system was quite significant in the running of the Athenian Empire? Yeah, it's not something the Athenians make a lot of use of that. So this Proxenos system was quite significant in the running of the Athenian empire? Yeah, it's not something the Athenians invent, so it already exists and it continues to function. Actually, right down into the Roman period, it's a bit like

the system of honorary consuls, so again, a fairly low budget way of doing diplomacy. But the Athenians deploy it particularly to help control their empire, as far as we can see. Again, particularly from the epigraphic evidence, Thucydides doesn't talk about it very much, that these are people who would be on the spots and basically be Athenians' eyes and ears on the ground and let them know what was going on. And if an Athenian had to come and visit, would make sure that that Athenian was safe and would get them access to the people they needed access to and so on. And in regards to Thucydides himself, you mentioned at the start how he's from quite

high-ranking family in Athens. Because of his background, was he expected to become an important official in the empire somewhere? That's a really good question. I don't think we know enough about the topography of who gets to be an official, whether it tends to be high-ranking people or whether this is a way, a sort of job creation scheme for the less wealthy Athenians, which is what certainly the Aristotelian Athpol suggests, that this is a way of finding work for the lesser-least Athenians, who wouldn't get a job otherwise, but they can go off and maybe not be an official, but certainly get some land, some confiscated land somewhere in an allied state. That's the impression we get from the constitution of the Athenians. Although it's certainly the case that

wealthy Athenians are snapping up land in the empire as well. So I'm not sure if there's an expectation that he would have been an Athenian official. There definitely is a tendency for people who serve as generals to come from the more elite or wealthy bits of athenian society generalship is quite unusual in athens because it's an elected office rather than an office chosen by lot and as soon as you have an election then money starts to matter more than it would do if you're just being chosen by ballot keep with the military theme then especially in the peloponnesian war with these Athenian armies going around and fighting in this war, do we hear of allied Athenian states or members of the empire, do we hear of soldiers from perhaps maybe the

island of Naxos or the island of Lesbos fighting with the Athenians at battles on the mainland? Yeah, we do. They're often hard to pin down because the cities will tend to say, you know, there were 500 Athenians and some allies or, you know, 200 allies. The one place we get a very detailed catalogue is in the Sicilian expedition, where Thucydides gives us in a quite Homeric style a catalogue of all the forces before the really critical battle towards the end of the campaign. And there we can see that there are very large numbers of allied forces present as land forces, but also particularly rowing on the ships of the Athenian fleet. So alongside financial tributes, these allies would have to give military contributions as well? Yeah, well, this is among the many things we don't quite know. So in theory, no. So that was

the promise of the Athenian Empire, is that in exchange for paying their tribute, the allies don't have to fight anymore. So that's the payoff. And Thucydides says that's one way that the Athenians keep control, because the allies lose their independent military capabilities, so they can't resist the Athenians anymore, because they're just handing over the cash and they don't have an army anymore. But in practice, as we've just seen, there are allies present in the Athenian army and in the Athenian fleet. So it could be that they're there voluntarily for financial reasons, or maybe because they don't mind fighting on the Athenian side, they've opted to serve in the Athenian army.

It could be that they've been press ganged into serving, and that's extremely hard to work out exactly why those people are there and how voluntarily they're there. Of course, if they're forced to, or if they actually want to, as you said, it sounds like one of the big questions of this age. Yeah, definitely. I think it'd be something that would be very nice to have evidence from people who aren't Athenian in terms of the experience of being in the Athenian empire. It's one of the massive gaps, but we know that there are non-Athenians fighting in the Athenian army but it's very hard to reconstruct why they were there or even to try and sort of people think well these allies stay at the end of the Sicilian exhibition when everything's completely obviously

doomed and they don't run away so maybe that means that they voluntarily were there but it could also just be what are you going to run away to at that stage maybe you're better off just sticking in the awfulness that you know rather than running away to something potentially even worse we know that at the end of the expedition the syracusans differentiate in their treatment of the athenians and the allies in terms of how they treat the prisoners of war which again that might just be clever politics on their part but maybe suggests that the Allies were deemed to be less culpable in some way. In regards to these Allies then, do we have any sources that can give us any idea of their viewpoint under the Athenian Empire? Really, no. It's one of the great frustrations of studying the Athenian Empire is that we are really at a loss for non-Athenian voices. So there's a later writer, Theopompus of

Chios, who has a very bleak view of the Athenians in general, but he's writing in the 4th century, but he says some things about the way the Athenians have cheated the Greeks in the way that they've exploited the Persian wars to bolster their own power. So we get a very occasional glimpse of that sort of thing. Even the epigraphic evidence outside Athens in the 5th century is very, very scanty. So we have almost nothing from non-Athenian viewpoints. I'm so sorry then for asking this question in advance. It's the big question about how popular do you think the Athenian is among its member states? Yeah, that is a big question and much debated.

There was a fairly extended academic debate about this in the 50s and 60s, which is a rather difficult or problematic way of thinking about empire in terms of balance sheets, costs and benefits. But it tried to think about, well, if you are a farmer, say in Mytilene, might your life get better as part of being the Athenian empire? And in particular, if we of being the Athenian Empire? And in particular, if we think that the Athenians supported democracy in their empire, would you rather,

if you're a poor Mytilenean, have a democratic government which would give you more political power at the cost of the loss of some of your autonomy in the interstate arena, rather than be free in terms of your international politics, but subject to possibly an oligarchic government in your domestic politics. So that's the sort of theoretical debate that was carried on and is still carrying on. And I think there's something helpful in there, even though we can't answer it, in terms of thinking about differential experience. So there are some people in some cities for whom the Athenian Empire would have been a much more significant imposition. So if you're a Mytilenean and you've lost your land, then there's no way you could feel positively

about the Athenian Empire because you've been reduced probably to the status of a serf. So a quite likely outcome is that you're still working your land, but you don't own it anymore and all the profit goes to some Athenian instead if you're a merchant then maybe your life possibly doesn't change very much if you're in one of those cities in asia minor which was paying tribute to persia and now you're just paying tribute to athens then again maybe doesn't make a whole lot of difference to your day-to-day life so it's a really hard question even to sort of think about the terms in which we should answer the question and then made harder by the fact we have no evidence actually to answer it. Yes, sorry.

But as you were saying there, when we think of this period, I mean, of course, these are all independent city states which each cherish this strong self-identity, isn't it? So one city state's experience of the Athenian Empire might be completely different to another city-state's experience. And then I guess also, if you're thinking that many of these city-states, especially neighbouring ones, hate each other, is it possible that maybe one city-state would like the Athenian Empire more if they know that their neighbouring city-state, who they don't like, really don't like the Athenian Empire? Yeah, and I think we do get an interesting insight into that in a really lovely inscription honouring a group of people called the Eteo Carpadians, who have sent a cypress tree to Athens. So the Athenians pass a degree thanking

them for this gift of a tree. And you might think, well, that's not super interesting. But what seems to be the case here, among the things that the Athenians give them by way of thanks, they send them this nice inscription, but they say, we will also protect you and we will ask people on the island of Rhodes to make sure that the Aetio-Carpathians are kept safe. So what this probably is, is a very small community trying probably to assert its political independence from its immediate neighbours, and by cosying up to the Athenians by sending them this tree, which the Athenians use to build a temple, it's a useful tree to have, what they get in return is the protection of the Athenians against their immediate neighbours. So I think we can definitely

say that that's a possible benefit for certain communities in the Greek world, but the Carpathians neighbours, the Eto-Carpathians neighbours, presumably would have been extremely annoyed that the Athenians basically meddling and stopping them from exercising their power over their neighbours. And Athens' relationship with the Black Sea, particularly for grain imports and all that, and when we think of those Greek city-states that won the Dardanelles, the Hellespont,

those city-states, do the Athenians consider them more valuable than others, perhaps perhaps in the empire? The Black Sea is a really interesting one because that's one of Thucydides' blind spots actually that he misses out the Athenian expansion in the Black Sea possibly to get Pericles off the hook a bit as an expansionist imperialist because that seems to have been there's some debate about exactly how expansionist the Athenians were but if it happens,

it happens under Pericles, and Thucydides doesn't really tell us about it. So we're a little bit in the dark about exactly what the Athenians are up to in the Black Sea. And the other complication with the Black Sea is that the people that the Athenians are particularly dealing with there are often not city-states, but the local kings. So they're outside their city-state comfort zone, and possibly operating in a slightly different way in how they deal with the Black Sea. So that's not quite an answer to your question, sorry. No, no, no, no, absolutely fine. Going back to the Allied perspective and going back to Thucydides as well, and we kind of touched on it earlier, especially when looking at the Peloponnesian War,

does Thucydides, he seems to see the empire as declining and does he see the empire becoming more brutal, especially as the Peloponnesian War progresses? He gives us more examples of brutality as the war progresses. You could almost see a progression. So we have Mytilene where they almost massacre everyone, but don't quite. They recoil from it just in time. But by the time you get to Melos,

there's no debate about what happens to the Melians who weren't even in the empire so it's not that they've rebelled they've just refused to join and then without thinking about it apparently the Athenians massacre everyone all the men in Milos and sell all the women and children into slavery and then I mean it's not the Athenians but it's mercenaries hired by the Athenians the really appalling massacre at Mycolesus where even the children in the school are slaughtered so we see a sort of progression of brutality in terms of what Thucydides reports and describes in detail, whether that actually reflects reality or whether there were massacres going on from the very start and Thucydides doesn't tell us about them, so that's less clear. Yes, how accurate do you think Thucydides' portrayal of this really is?

I think it's highly selective. I suspect that what he tells us is accurate insofar as any ancient historiography is accurate, I'm sure. There's an embellishment of various sorts going on. But I think the real difficulty with assessing Thucydides' account is not knowing how much he isn't telling us. I think that's the critical thing. So he gives us snapshots from in the 470s and then he says he's going to give us a really thorough account of this period called the Pentecon to Etio, which is really a crucial moment

for the growth of empire between the 470s and the start of the Peloponnesian War. But he covers a huge amount of time in very little space and he's clearly missing a lot out. And some people would say that that was the key moment for the growth of empire, and Thucydides tells us very little about it. So it's the omissions, I think, which are really difficult, rather than errors in what he does tell us.

Do we have any evidence from inscriptions or perhaps fragments of any other sources that might have evidence for a particular major event from this period that Thucydides has missed out? So the really critical one, and it's an old chestnut, is the Peace of Callias. It seems likely that at some point in probably the 450s, the Athenians made a peace agreement with the Persians. And if Thucydides is right, that this alliance was set up to fight the Persians, and that was the point of this thing, you would have thought that the fact that they make a peace with the Persians would have significant consequences for the point of this alliance, the justification of this alliance existing. And even if it didn't,

this seems like a fairly major event. And Thucydides gives not one trace of this, to the extent that for a long time, historians argued that maybe it didn't happen at all, because how could he have not mentioned such a significant thing? I think most people now think there probably was a peace agreement with the Persians, but it's very striking that Thucydides doesn't mention it. Another thing he doesn't mention is the tribute money initially was stored on the island of Delos.

Again, and that's symbolic as a sign that this isn't Athenian money this is belongs to this league this alliance called the Delian League and at some point again probably in the 450s it's moved and it's stored in Athens where the Athenians can get their hands on it much more quickly and Thucydides doesn't mention it. So although it seems that Thucydides, he's not hiding away from later infamous episodes in the Athenian Empire's history, but certain earlier cases, and you mentioned the Black Sea earlier as well, does it feel like he's hushing them up? Yes, to put it briefly, I think he is. And that doesn't have to be, we don't have to be completely tinfoil hat conspiracy theory about it. It might be that he thought this has been covered by other writers he's not writing history of the athenian empire he's writing history of the

peloponnesian war and maybe we don't need to know the minutiae of athenian policy in the black sea to understand the peloponnesian war would be a way of justifying his omissions but if we wanted to be conspiracy theory about we might say this is a way of enhancing this contrast between pericles and cleon as pericles as the man who could have invented a way of sustainable empire and restrained empire and then making more stark the contrast when cleon comes onto the scene in the 420s i think from history and everything we'll keep away from conspiracy theories that's a very difficult tin of fish to really go down i don't know if that's even the correct way to say it but yeah i think we'll avoid that for the moment and that's all really interesting Thucydides opinion

on the Athenian empire and how difficult it is to really get an understanding what he says but if we finish on this because we're looking at the Peloponnesian war and we're looking at Thucydides' account of it in particular. Do we think there's any particular event in the Peloponnesian War that Thucydides wants to highlight as being a key moment when he probably believes that the empire is going downhill and can't be rescued? Now the problem is I can think of about three key moments. Let's go through those three key moments and absolutely so i think you know death of pericles and that's a rare moment where thucydides in his own voice says this was critical after the death of pericles everything went wrong you can't come back from not having

pericles there anymore so that's possible moment number one possible moment number two i think probably would be the mytilenean debate, where it's not in Thucydides' own voice, so we don't actually know what he thinks, but he dramatises this point of decision about how is the empire going to be run. And then key moment number three is probably the Sicilian disaster, the end of book seven,

where this attempt to expand the empire has ended in complete disaster. And he draws that contrast, really striking contrast, at the end of Book Seven, that this fleet which had set out with the highest of hopes, and it ends in just complete abject disaster. I think if you're just reading through the text, you think, well, that's it. That's the end. It's all finished now. In fact, of course, the war carries on for another 10 years.

But the way it's written, Thucydides gives the impression that everything is settled at the end of book seven. Wow, so you might be able to get an idea of what Thucydides is really thinking from the way that he writes the story of the disastrous Sicilian expedition. Yeah, I think so. I think that the shaping of those two books is so fascinating and again, very highly, highly crafted surely in terms of how, you know, everything Sicilian is packed almost entirely into those two books. And the sense of closure at the end of book seven. And then we sort of bounce back in book eight and say, actually, the war carries on for ages and it's not that easy to get rid of the Athenians at all. But yeah, I think book seven really is a critical bit in the history.

Fascinating. Polly, that was fantastic. Thank you so much for coming on the show thanks very much for having me it's been fun Thank you.