Paul Cartledge
speaker
193 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 16 Jul
Paul Cartledge’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
of our empire.
Do we need to worry about them?
Well, the Persians eventually decided to launch a vast invasion, amphibian, in the late 480s and that resulted in what we call the Greco-Persian Wars and thereafter the Delian League.
Well, it's a bit like the Holy Roman Empire, which Voltaire said was neither holy nor Roman nor an empire.
So it was Delian only in the sense that the oaths of the initial allies, who some of them had been allied before, they're now new allies.
They're meeting together to form a new alliance on the island of Delos.
Delos is pretty much bang in the middle of what in Greek is Cyclades.
We say the Cyclades in the central Aegean.
And it belongs to the bit of the Greek culture which we call Ionian because that's the way in which they spoke Greek and the cults that they shared in common.
For example, a festival called the Aperturia.
So Athens is the principal lead on this.
It is going to be the lead ally.
And it is Ionian, Ionic, and therefore it needs a base which consorts with its own intellectual, political, religious, and so on, outlook.
And most of the initial allies were probably Ionian Greeks, Ianders and mainlanders on both sides of the mainland, that is on the western side of Vigian and Ionian.
the eastern, that is, mainland Greece.
And they swore the oaths of alliance.
They did not create a league in a modern sense wherein every ally is allied to everybody else.
But in this league, every ally was allied with Athens, not necessarily with any other ally.
OK, so our principal written narrative source for the actual wars which preceded and made possible the Delian League is Herodotus, who was born within the Persian Empire.
So he's a very interesting character that he, on the one hand, knew firsthand what it was like to be a subject of Persia.
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