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

So some of these comedies engage with the dealing league.

And I think the best example of this is a play called Birds, composed by the comic playwright Aristophanes and performed for the first time in 414 BC.

And this was a moment when Athenian power was really trying to expand.

The previous year, the Athenians had sent what would ultimately be a disastrous expedition to conquer Sicily.

And Birds comes in just after this and seems to offer quite a critical view of Athenian power.

So the plot of the play is that they're two disaffected Athenians.

They decide they're fed up of Athens and they're going to found their own city in the sky called Cloud Cuckoo Land.

That's where the word comes from.

And Aristophanes uses Cloud Cuckoo Land in various ways to send up Athenian power.

So as soon as the city is founded, there's this parade of really annoying individuals who come along, including Athenian officials.

There's a seller of decrees of the imperial regulations that Polly was just talking about, offering imperial regulations to this new city.

And there's even a joke about how people might want to go to the toilet on them.

So clearly not very popular.

And in addition to that, Cloud Cuckoo Land itself becomes an imperial power.

So it's in the sky and it starts stopping offerings from people on Earth reaching the gods.

Yeah.

So it's offering this very critical view of Athenian power.

And I think that it's the closest we can get to how the man on the street might have perceived the Athenian Empire, the Delian League, because the jokes would have had to be familiar in some way for them to be funny.

Well, I think you know my answer.

I would argue for the latter that this was an exploitative imperial power and that we shouldn't sanitise it or talk about it in apologist language.

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