Leah Lazar

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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.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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In Our Time · The Delian League · 16 Jul 2026 podcast

And by the 5th century AD,

a lot of Greek cities are minting their own coins, usually using silver.

And they minted coins, not as we might think from modern parallels to maintain a monetary supply, but usually when they need to pay for something in particular.

And that something in particular often was military expenditure.

So soldiers pay or the building and maintenance of a fleet.

And we see this really clearly with Athens in the Delian League period.

From the Greco-Persian Wars onwards, there's a massive explosion in levels of Athenian monetary production.

So we've heard how they're getting silver coins, money in from their allies, that they're also operating a massive mining operation at a place called Larion in their territory.

And they're getting this money, they're minting coins, and they're using it in great part to pay for their fleet.

So there's a direct relationship between increased monetary production at Athens in the 5th century and the expansion of Athenian naval power.

And one of the consequences of this is that there was a big influx of Athenian currency in the Aegean and beyond.

And Athenian coinage, which looked very distinctive, it had the goddess Athena on the one side, it had...

her owl on the other side, it became really commonly recognized and accepted.

It was, I guess, the US dollar of its day.

And we even find other communities minting coins to a lesser extent because they're just using Athenian currency.

I think it's my favourite question as well.

So in classical Athens, there were big public performances of comic plays, actually in the context of religious festivals.

And these comedies were the closest we can get to Athenian popular culture.

And they often engaged with the really hot political topics of the day.

And of course, as we've been discussing, a big part of the political scene at Athens was the dealing league.

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