Leah Lazar
speaker
97 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 16 Jul
Leah Lazar’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Well, the title of this episode is obviously the Delian League, but I prefer in my teaching and in my writing to talk about the Athenian Empire from the get-go.
It's a topic that's much debated among scholars, but I think Athens satisfies the basic definition of what an empire is.
Certainly.
I think that there's at least imperial intent.
As Polly said, the intent to expand Athenian power from the beginning, potentially even from before the Greco-Persian Wars.
There's evidence to suggest that the Athenians were already expanding in some ways before that.
And if we take a common definition of empire, that of Doyle, of two political entities where the dominant entity is exerting political control over both the external and internal affairs of the less dominant entity, we have evidence for Athens doing that, I think at least from the middle of the 5th century.
But both these terms, Delian League and Athenian Empire, are complicated and difficult to use because neither of them have exact parallels in the original Greek texts.
So we were just hearing from Paul and Polly about the Athenians establishing themselves as leaders of this alliance.
Thucydides, when he's talking about this moment, initially uses the term hegemonia, hegemony, but very quickly he switches to using another Greek term, arche, which is quite hard to translate in English.
Some scholars do translate it as empire or as power.
But in addition to that, Thucydides also continues to use the language of alliance throughout.
So the other cities are usually described as allies.
And we even get that term in Athenian political documents throughout the fifth century.
And I think it might have been a convenient fiction for the Athenians to carry on using this language of alliance, even when it was no longer that at all.
So to echo Polly, that's actually quite a difficult question to answer.
Partly because of the fragmentary nature of the evidence and partly because there are different ways that one could define membership of the league.
To take one of the most commonly applied criteria, the payment of tribute, of annual monetary payments to Athens.
We have records of, I think, around 330 or so states at least being assessed for that tribute in the course of the 5th century.
Most of those states were located on the Aegean islands that Paul has talked about in what is now northern Greece, around the cities of Thessaloniki and Kavala in modern terms, and also on the western coast of Turkey, those cities that had previously been under Persian control.
Showing 1–20 of 97 · page 1 of 5
Next →