Polly Low
speaker
117 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 16 Jul
Polly Low’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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So the short answer to that is that we don't know for sure, because, and this is something we might say quite a lot, I think, we don't have any contemporary evidence.
We don't know what the Athenians said.
At that meeting in 478-477, there's two versions in the ancient sources.
So Thucydides, who's writing...
About 50 years after the event says that what the Athenians said the alliance was for was to take revenge on Persia for the damage that the Persians had done to the Greeks, particularly in the great invasion of 480.
But we have another source, a later source attributed to the philosopher Aristotle, probably written by one of his students as writing in the
second half of the fourth century BCE, who says that the alliance has much more general aims.
So he says they swear to have the same friends and enemies.
So that's a very open-ended commitment to mutual defence and also mutual offence.
That source also says that when the Allies swore the oaths that Paul just mentioned, they affirmed the oaths by throwing lumps of iron into the sea.
The usual way that that is interpreted is a symbolic act to mean that the oaths will last until the iron floats back to the surface, which is to say that they'll last forever.
Whereas Thucydides gives the impression this is an alliance with, in theory, an end date, because at some point you would have taken enough revenge on Persia and then...
The objectives would have been fulfilled.
The version we get in the Aristotelian source suggests that this is an alliance that could be used to fight against anybody and could, in theory, last forever.
So Athens offers allies a choice.
They can either contribute in the conventional way to the alliance by providing men and material, or they could give Athens money, which we call tribute, and Athens, at least in theory, will use that money to spend on men and military material.
That, again, is a very good question to which there is no settled answer.
Thucydides, when he talks about what the Athenians promise at this first meeting, says that the Athenians give the declared intention that the purpose is revenge on Persia.
And there's been a lot of debate over that.
There's one word in the Greek, whether Thucydides is encouraging us to think that the Athenians already at that point
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