The Delian League: Ancient NATO?

in prehistoric island, or what made Alexander truly great.

“With a subscription to History Hit, you can explore our ancient past alongside the world's”

leading historians and archaeologists. You'll also unlock hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a brand new release every single week covering everything from the ancient world to World War II. Please visit historyhit.com/subscrib. 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 De Leon 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 no one better than the leading expert in ancient Athenian imperialism in the story of the development of the De Leon League and that is Professor Pauli 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 De Leon League. 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, epitomised 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 De Leon League, after the sacred island of De Los, in the central Eegean. 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 De Leon 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 for an expedition's internal revolt tribute, you name it, and just as interesting, what do we still not know about this League? Well, 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 De Leon

League, with our guest, Professor Pauli Lowe. Pauli, 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 through

cities, 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 De Leon 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 De Leon League and the Athenian empire are, 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 5th century.

And first and foremost, I've got to ask about the name, The De Leon League, why is it called that and not just the Athenian empire from the get-go? So, the name, I mean, it's obviously is in 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 G-in, and that is where a few cities 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 is sort of symbolically important, and that's where, originally, according to a few cities, 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 story line of this league. So, said the context for us first of all, probably, when discussing the De Leon League, how far back in time are we going, what century, what period in ancient history?

bit, not a very long way back, probably back to the Persian wars.

So, for 90, first Persian invasion of mainland Greece, Battle of Marathon, and then the

second much larger invasion in 48479, that invasion was resisted successfully by an alliance of Greek states, which included Athens, but also included Sparta, and a number of other Greek states. Persians are defeated, retreat with draw from mainland Greece back into Western Anatolia, what's now, 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?" We probably, there after 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 Delinig, it's set in the fifth century BC, essentially that's often associated with, almost like the great age of classical Greece almost, of cities like Athens and Sparta, coming to the four, as you say, following the end of the Persian wars, it's very much that century in which the story of the Delinig is centered.

Yes, exactly. So, it coincides, and this isn't coincidences with the period in which the 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, this sort of, the period that wants 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 had a very”

much linked to the evolution of the Delinig and Athens. Finally, before we delve into the narrative, the chronology of the Delinig, Pauli, 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 Delinig, 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 fifth century. He wasn't writing a history of the Delinig, he was writing a history of the Peloponnesian War, so the great war between Athens and Sparta in the last third of the fifth 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, posthed history of the Delinig, the foundation and the growth of the Delinig, from 477, down to 430ish. 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. And we have a little bit of inscribed evidence, epigraphic evidence, so documents that the

Athedians wrote on stone, but they're a little bit, they start really only from about the 450's 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 Athedian power, and many people these days read Herodotus

as really writing a warning to the Athedians or to the Greeks about what the Athedian empire might have. We have text like misclasses Persians, and not really about the Athedian empire, but produced in this period. So the evidence is really difficult, actually, for the early years.

“And he's because that's an Athedian 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 Salamists, but because it's written for Athedians after the war, it may be sort of capture some of some of the spirit of how Athedians were feeling in the 470's. At a long side, this literature that we have surviving, I've also got my notes, I think who typed as 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 kind of with their inscriptions and so on. So do we also have inscription or 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,

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, he said it is, gives us a version, 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 organization change.

So it's generally accepted that it changes it evolves. Maybe it 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, training why we get the name "Deanian League" today. So, Pauli, let's get into the story of the Deanian 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, don't forming or with Athens leading, this league of cities created on this island in the central of the region. 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. Two cities and Herodosus give us slightly different spins on why the Spartans did this and how much sort of sub-to-fuse there might have been by the Athedians 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 into cities really suggests that this new alliance is effectively the same as the alliance for the Persians, but mine are a couple of states. So the Spartans and a few other Peloponnesian states, so that's the region around Sparta, lead the alliance at that point and then everyone else just carries on.

So there's 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 organization. So the Persian wars end, that alliance also ends, because it's fulfilled its purpose and then the Athedians form a new alliance with different objectives and set that up on D-Loss.

“I think scholars tend to prefer the Thucy to D inversion, 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 Aegean Sea. So surely many of those cities who have also recently been united fighting the Persians,

don't feel like 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 the 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 Greece would say we need to liberate those cities. So that's part of the motivation. The other thing and this is what facilities 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 one side as Haxia, and then the other side justifiably wants to seek revenge. So what the city 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 who is the Greek strikeback kind of thing is it on over the Persian holdings around the Gian, and so on? You mentioned how Athens would have sparked a 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, poly, how wild a geographic area are these cities located, which just be thinking mainland Greece, or is it further than that? Yes, again, we don't know if we're sure it depends which source we believe is actually really hard,

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 a course that many Greek city states in this period are tiny. There are a few hundred male citizens, so total population probably under a thousand, so even a hundred of these states is not a huge number of people who are very big total population. But it may have been much smaller than that, and that same uncertainty about the geographical area is probably focused as she not so much on mainland Greeks as on the islanders.

So the ciclatic 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 sort of initial operations, in very early years of the league heading out to the east and those Greek cities on the coast of Western Ireland's earlier. And these are islands today, like, I'm getting like Samos or Lesbos, Naxos, Thassos, those

those islands, which should be thinking of. Exactly, exactly those islands. Yeah, but interesting.

“Gives you a site, therefore, of Athens's 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 you 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 Deity and 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 the facility says is what's one of the things that's discussed and decided at this first meeting on Deeloss 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, facility says and most people would agree with him,

it enables this alliance to turn into an empire, because most states 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 Deelion League, how does it fare over the following years? Do we know much about the Deelion League and its activities against Persia in the 470s BC?

So we know a little bit, again, this is almost entirely from what the facilities tells us and it's a very, very compressed account, because after all, this isn't strictly speaking, what we 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, so if you go to Thessaloniki

and headed east from there along the coast heading towards Turkey, so there's a place up there called Aeon, 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 present. And also precious metals, so the”

Athedians, that's one of their first operations, they kick the Persians out of there and claim

it to the Athedian possession, and then there are further operations in Western Anatolia against the Persians, and then heading down that coast a bit further east again, culminating and we're maybe skipping a bit far ahead of your narrative in the battle at the Urimith and River, so we're down into the four sixties by that point, which is a land sea battle against the Persians, which in which the Athedians are successful. I'm probably not interfering with the narrative at all,

because this is important, isn't it? So you do have these clear cart battles against the Persians, by dealing in league forces, yes, the Athedians are there, but the other cities are evidently contributing with either ships of their own or with the money that they're providing. So in those early decades, four seventies and four sixties, there is clear evidence of the Dealy and League undertaking that purpose of revenge against the Persians, you know, removing their threat around the

Eugenian. Yeah, so I think that's fair to say, we could, if we were cynical, as I often am,

or is this a way for the Athedians to submit their own power? A on, 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 have a foothold and the Athedians, you know, they're liberating in scarecotes, galaxies from the Persian Empire, but then the Athedians become the people who are in charge of those cities. So they are doing what they 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 Eugenian 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 the going even further back before the Persian invasions, there's the signs that already even in the sixth century, the Athedians were aware of the potential to expand their power out into the east. So this isn't a holy new idea that they've had.

And do we get a sense, say, during the four seventies and into the four sixties, mentioning that battle there, you're in it on, whilst that's going on, do you see more cities starting to join the delion league? You mentioned how had 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 the cities 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 these”

of these mentions, one is the island of Thassos up in the north. So quite close to A on it, and that's 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 buy force, prevent it from doing so, and forcibly re-incorporated, and not happy days for Thassos. And they're also the island of Naxos. That's down in the

area in the cyclides, very large island, quite wealthy island, also attempts to leave and not told much about why, but presumably just as hard as it wasn't happy with what the Athenians were up to, and is, again, forced to rejoin the alliance. And facilities 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 characterously been used of what the Persian empire does. So, if you're in the Persian empire, or you're in slave to the Persians, and now Thassos says the Athenians are starting to enslave Greek states as well. The chronology is really hard to pin down at this point to Thassos in these narratives. So, exactly when this happens, but again, probably late four seventies, four sixties sometime around then. And do we think so, Naxos tries to leave first, and then Thassos tries

to leave a few years after that. Okay, hence why so, 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 through cities 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 the Athenians. Is there, do you see that change as well? That's typically what happens.

“I think with Naxos, 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 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, the all three islands. Heos in the eastern of Gian, the island of Lesvos, which has multiple city states on it and the island of Samos. So,

this is just three islands, left in everybody else is paying money. Well, let's get to the state of the Dealing League at that time, then when you get that inscription of Levidence body. So, those three islands that you mentioned, Heos, Lesbos and Samos, because they are still paying ships to the Athenians. Is that very much a case that the Athenians see them as the 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

or did they say we want to stop paying money an hour 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 ships yet”

and you need craftsmen who can maintain these things and build 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 it 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 just 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 fun 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 token it consists of probably over 100 cities or, you know, by this time. The fact that 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 Athenian hegemonie that they, well, I don't know, it's

fun, isn't it? Yeah, I mean it's more than two, so there's one that I haven't mentioned, which is Karastos on or the deal. So at least three these names but and one of the issues is we don't know, we have this sort of no non-notes, so we don't know who else was trying to leave and that his disease hasn't told us about. I guess it also sort of more generally, this sort of methodological problem of how to when you're trying to study an empire or organization, 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 for 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 Axos are treated so brutally is a warning to everyone else, don't get any

ideas about leaving because we can do this to Axos, which is big and powerful, imagine what we can

“do to your tiny island. I've been 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 overaraching and your city is nowhere near the size of Athens, 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 else with 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 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, if you didn't empire, but maybe it's less bad, if you didn't empire the thing in the Persian empire, it's for some people.

And are the things you're still using the facade at this time of Delos still being the center, so it's not like everything's focused on Athens, at least symbolically at this time, early forces. So yeah, so down to, we think about four, five, four, Delos is in theory, the headquarters of the league, and some time around there, 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, it's well,”

the Athenians now have much easier access to this cash, but also symbolically the center 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 neutral sacred ground to Athens proper, to the heart of Athens? With your thing is now making a clear point, they're not hiding behind this facade of putting it on this holy island in the center of the adjean anymore,

they're taking it for themselves. I think that is how it's usually taken. One could put a more

the source you mentioned earlier, is that it's vulnerable. The Persians are still a force in the

eastern adjean, and you've got the huge amount of money, sits here on an island, and the worry is that the Persians might just come and help themselves to it, so it's security measure to move it to Athens, which is much less exposed. So that would be the positive interpretation of how this move happens,

“but I think most people, including Plusarch, don't think that's the real reason they think”

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That's really interesting to highlight that, you know, at least how they portray it,

they still see the Persians as a threat in the 450's. So, Poly, that brings me onto a really interesting event that I love you to explain, which happens just before, if my notes are right, at the official moving of this money, which is the daily and league, going on this big expedition,

“in their boats and deciding, you know, to fight the Persians elsewhere. What is this expedition?”

So, this is the Egyptian expedition, sometimes called the Egyptian disaster, as a spoiler alert for how this is going to go to play out. So, Egypt at this point is it has been for some time now part of the Persian Empire, and there's a very important part of the Persian Empire, Egypt, in this case, throughout antiquity is much prized because it is such a good source of grain, about above all. So, people want to have control of Egypt. There's a local king and Egyptian

king called Inneros, who attempts a rebellion, attempts to succeed from the Persian Empire. He gets in touch with the Athenians and says, "Do you fancy being involved in my rebellion?" and the Athenians say, "Yes, let's do it," and it's a disaster. So, it's quite a slow motion,

“disaster. Again, we get very little, it's very compressed accounts in these entities.”

It's a paragraph of the text, so we don't get a lot of detail about exactly what goes on. But, they get bogged down this river's tent 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, after 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 is a huge amount of evidence, but we have a warmer moral, a casually set up by the Athenians, which the Athenians do every year, they commemorate the dead of combat of that year. They typically set up an inscription on stone the names of the people who died, and what's really striking about the cash-to-list that we have for one of the years of the Egyptian expolitions is, Egypt has just listed alongside multiple other theatres, and it's not differentiated

from the war that the Athenians are fighting against of the Greek communities. So we have Egypt,

places like Halleace, which is a Greek community, and it's all described as the war.

So it's like Athenians are just fighting a big war against Persians, against Greeks, there's all one thing. And the other striking thing about that list is that it's just says these Athenians died. So there's no sense that there are any other Greeks involved.

“There's not presented as a Debian League campaign. And I think the sense we get from these”

cities as well is that this is the Athenians have decided to do this. And that 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 last years of the League book probably all already from the start, aren't super keen on acknowledging the fact that they're having helped from other Greeks when they're fighting their campaign. 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, 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 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 two siblings attribute to the politician, paracles, towards the start of the Palabnesian 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, 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 paracles to speech there. And paracles, it's really important Athenian statesmen who I feel now, polys, we're getting to the end of the 450s and 440s will certainly come more on to 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? We've contempt? Do they clearly portray themselves as the top dog and almost kind of demean the contributions of these other cities, islands and so on? What do we know about that? Relationship almost. Again, this comes with a big disclaimer that we don't have

any real speeches from this period. What we've got primarily is to send these imagining or reporting. It's obviously disagreement about how much creative see there is in his speeches, but in sort of attributing speeches to Athenian politicians. And there was our offer 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 discuss, 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 favor by enslaving them or making the past part of their empire. That maybe comes out, I mean the place where it comes out. Most explicitly

is later on in the famous million dialogue that facilities, composers in the the last part of the of the Peloponnesian wall. So meelosses and island, another cyclatic island for a small island, that doesn't want to be part of the Athenian empire, the Athenians are trying to incorporate

“this and more of their arguments is. Obviously you should put about 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 and island allies at that time, to summarise that we've gone down to the 450s and you said around 454 that they moved the treasury from Delos to Athens itself. That's what we think on the basis of the the Athenian set-up inscriptions recording the amount of

sort of complicated way of doing things, so we don't have an absolute record of what all the money but the amount that goes to the goddess Athena and they set those up, they describe them on stone, they set them up on the Acropolis and the first one that we have, which says,

“usually 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 delion league

when we get to about 450 BC. Very powerful, I think is the answer and 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 a conflict has erupted with Sparta and with Sparta's

allies, so towards the end of the four sixties, Athens and Sparta had been not on the sort of position of date ont since the end of the Persian wars but that breaks down at the end of the

“four sixties and a conflict breaks out which confusing me sometimes call the first Peloponnesian war,”

not to be confused with the famous Eleponnesian war between Athens and Sparta and some allies

of Sparta particularly thieves which is Athens, most powerful, more than neighbour. Again, that sort of

absent 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 and incorporating that into the Athenian empire. So this is could have been if the Athenians are managed 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 four fifties and for fifties but then it does they don't manage to hold on

to that land, parts of their empire. Poly, is this a significant moment in the story of the Deedianly, you know the fighting of the Spartans and the Thibians, in the fact, oh I guess maybe now we should say the Athenian empire, the fact that although maybe as we mentioned, the members of this alliance, the island 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 Greeks. 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 through cities

composes, four puts in the mouth of official people from the city of Mytilini 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 Lacerom, this is the early four 20s but one thing they say is we were quite happy to be part of the alliance when we were fighting the Persians, that's fine, but then we saw that the Indians have stopped fighting the Persians and instead they're trying to oppress

“other Greek states and we're not okay with that so that's why we want to, we want to rebel from”

the alliance, we're not 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? It's original purpose if you believe through cities which is to keep fighting the Persians and get revenge? So another crux of our sources because it is the notable slash scandalous omission from these cities is the possibility of a peace agreement made

with Persia, again probably in the late four 50s. So this is the thing known modern scholarship as the peace of Calias, Caliasas and Athenian politician, so he's the person who we would be sent to Persia to negotiate in 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 fourth century that

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 terms promise that they won't go further

east then 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 then they're not going to cause any more trouble from the Persian king and now on. So if that peace treaty really happened and if 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 the capital seas of the Persian Empire and promise not to do that. But the big problem is

“I mean this seems like quite an important thing and through cities does not mention it and”

if it's entry sources do not mention it. So we only hear about it first about a hundred 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 Persian. So potentially a pretext as well but I mean do we know that those cities supposedly that the Persian seed on the coastline of Asia Minor do we know that they fall into Athenian hands around this time maybe the Athenians were the 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 the cities so we have little snapshots so 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

Irythri which is on the coast of Anatolia just sort of a cross from the island of Hiosa but 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 settled in favour of the pro Athenian faction and then Arythri is incorporated Reincorporated into Athenian empire and we have the inscription that sets up the terms for Arythri rejoining

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 this region after the piece of Caliass but that inscription some people put it in the 460s some people put it in the 430s so

“you know it's so we have to be quite cautious trying to make a very neat picture”

well probably that you're bashing apart my attempts of a neat narrative but you're being absolutely as an academic would be we've seen that we can't be sure certain things but nevertheless it's a great story but it feels very clearly now it doesn't hit if we're around 450bc the alleged time of this this piece treaty you know Athens bar only a few cities that we know of their demanding tribute from these various cities across the region 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 they're in 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 and 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 and we go sort of 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 our officials and passing various sort of quite brutal regulations about the consequences of not doing what the Athenians wanted what happens

if you don't pay your tribute 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 if you didn't empire it's all in to have us we all want to do change down minds about the date of most of these texts and then I'll 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

the last 30 years of scholarship prevented up with us knowing less that we once thought we thought

we knew about exactly what was happening in the 450s 440s because I have this this word in my notes which was important to kind of the whole setup of at least this idea of Athens consolidating its power that this word clericky can you explain probably what this word is and how it was used to at least be 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 daily need so a quite common

“tactic the Athenians use and 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 Athenians will cease 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 Ubeer which is Athens immediately as the island just to the east of Athens we know that this happens on Samos later on it is what happens to to mytylini 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 our Athenian men who are living in that place so it's”

also if it's a win-win for the Athenians because they get the financial benefit of having this land but also they secure that at all over those places because there's a bunch of Athenians living there it's kind of like a colony but not a colony as of such it's like an Athenian presence there kind of like kind of maybe it was a kind of keeping an eye as well and what's happening on the ground in that place. Yeah so the distinction, the little technical distinction is that a

cleric would still be an Athenian citizen so a colonist sort of standard model goes forms an entirely new community and is a citizen of that new community and then gives up the citizenship of their original community. The theme is do found at least one colony in this 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 permanent in resident there so their own property they're probably

go out and farm that property but they would also still be an Athenian and go be able to go back to Athens and later fight if they were fighting they'd be fighting as part of an Athenian army or not say Athenian army. As the saying goes if these walls could talk and on the betwix the sheets podcast we make it our business to discover what happened behind closed doors and even more importantly in the bedrooms of people all throughout history. King's, Queen's,

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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 a tall roll well recorded by two cities but we hear about it. That's quite hard to square that with the original terms of the Dealing League but that's something that very obviously benefits Athens as I've already mentioned. The Black Sea really important in terms of grain supply. One of Athens's ongoing needs in this period of relief throughout its history is then 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

exactly know where it is but we know that a colony was founded up there that's another strategically

important place in 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 sameian revolt which was very important and actually when we were emailing back and forth preparing for this chat

“policy you said well if you want to stop somewhere, stop at this one because this is a big moment.”

But before they just want to do one quick tangent going on the Athenians kind of flexing their power showing off their power 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 see it's you know clearer and empire by that time.

When pericles then decides the great Athenian statesman to rebuild the Acropolis with all the stunning monuments like the Parthenon, the Eric Tham, the great gateway, the proper layer. It's commonly said that they use the money from the league, from the cities to fund it. My question to you is is this a case of just like one of the biggest case of investment in history? I think but strictly speaking probably not in that insofar as we can reconstruct the quite

“complicated finances of this this operation, the theories at least sort of loamed at the money”

the team you need money a bit before they use it to build the Parthenon or it could well be that it's separate, it's not the tribute money it's a different stash of Athenians 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 to fund other bits of the Athenian economy. So ultimately they probably couldn't

afford it to do it if they didn't have the cushion provided by the tribute money. Plutite life of Parthenon is brilliant on this and that really goes all the end on saying this is the most scandalous thing but Parthenon is specifically at the end of the Athenians because they did what Parthenon wanted was spending this money to any users. The analogy of prostitution of sort of suspending this money and tossing Athen's 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 good cause but actually for you know this vanity well that's a bit surprising but yeah this this monumental kind of glorifying of Athens itself isn't it so thank you for that quick tangent there because it felt a good story to talk about. But come on and 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 switches big very wealthy very important island in the eastern Southeast region and the city of Malita switch had been part of the Persian Empire and then had been liberated. Malita says sort of the biggest mainland towns of opposite Samos. Samos allegedly has been interfering. I was trying to steal

some land reclaims some land that the Malaysians think belongs to them and then this sort of escalates and the Athenians initially 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 very heavy-handed in their intervention in 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 sort of full out for long conflict requires a lot of investment you know that it's extremely expensive because we have again an account of the money Athenians borrow from the goddess Athenia 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 defeat the Samians and they treat the Samians according to Plutarch who reports the story says he doesn't know if he could just quite believe it

but he reports his reports this tale of extreme brutality in the treatments of the 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 sameoss is no longer allowed to contribute ships to the Alliance after this episode perhaps unsurprisingly and is required to pay very extensive

the inscription documenting the the Samian repayment statins and just to clarify so had the thingings at the start when you know they hear about this local dispute the sameoss 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 facilities count of this is very compressed what among the things he doesn't really give us the the full story but the other thing which is in the mix is that there is clearly Persian involvement here as well and 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 have been

a piece of Calias maybe this is a moment the Persians saw an opportunity to get a foothold back in the eastern agian 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 is this provoked such a strong reaction from the Athenians. And as you mentioned earlier probably you know Samos was one of those those places few places that were still contributing ships to Athens so although we can't be sure it could and further 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 that 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 against our interests and we're going to go down hard on you it shows that 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 it's a rich island they'd been part of the Egyptian expedition then have been

sort of happy to celebrate or it's commemorate their involvement in that so you know this is 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 if the city doesn't at the time say this but much later on so in 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 same year involved that was a moment when it could all have just come crashing down if if Samos had been successful that could have been the end of the empire so I would like to kind of dominate our effects so other cities would join in kind of thing and then more and more would we'd try to get rid of Athens so sort of existential moments and maybe sort of a shock

“to the self image because I think up to that point Athenians could perhaps still tell themselves”

we're still leading this alliance you know we're still the nice guys in this 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 costs 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 there are say funder beta among 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 revotes I guess poly I mean where would

you place it? I'm increasingly keen on the Samian revolt it's it's a harder argument to make because we don't have one source that says this was the moment and this is and this is a argument historians like to make but too seriously silence or as relative silence on the

“Samian revolt I mean the mentions it and he doesn't put a lot of weight on it I think one thing”

that facilities is is doing throughout his history is try to push his reader probably away from things that were maybe the consensus in his own time and pushing towards a different way of looking at what was going on so in some ways facility silence is an argument in favor of this being maybe more importance than we we've realized in the past so yeah I'm I'm quite keen on pointing the finger at Samos but I think again to go about something I said earlier

it might be a mistake as try and 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 accident

small communities in the agian that's all pottery on quite happily and haven't noticed that

“anything's changed in particular so I think perhaps we need to allow for multiple turning”

puts probably this has been absolutely great chat I mean last but certainly not least how do you think

we should view the delion 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 this opportunity well product this been great you have also written a book very recently about the main man we've talked a lot

“about during this chat through ciddies or would you've contributed to this new book it is”

yes so this is a new translation of the ciddies by Robin Waterfield it's a wonderful

translation very readable probably more readable than the ciddies himself was in Greek but but really he saw the captures the spirit of the book and I've written a short introduction and that's probably 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 bikes again terribly well there you go there was Professor Pauli Lowe talking

“through what we know and what we don't know about the delian league and the key events during”

this league's evolution story as the fifth 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 are doing us a big favour if you be kind enough to leave us a rating as well what we really appreciate that don't forget you can also sign up to history hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a new release every week sign up at historyhit.com/subscribe

that's all from me i'll see you in the next episode you you you you