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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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
That isn't their real intention, that their intention is to expand their own power and ultimately to establish an empire.
But there is an alternative view which would say actually the Athenians at that point were really focused on the threat from Persia and that's what they were trying to achieve.
And then their aims develop over the lifetime of the alliance.
So, as Paul has mentioned, the Athenians and the Allies do spend quite a lot of time
fighting the Persians, liberating Greek communities in the northeast Aegean.
They win a significant victory over the Persians at a place called Eurymedon River, which is in southwest Anatolia.
They then get involved in Egypt, which is where things start to go wrong.
So Egypt has been part of the Achaemenid Empire for some time.
An Egyptian ruler leads a rebellion, an attempt to secede from the empire, and the Athenians get involved in that rebellion.
Supporting the rebellion.
So undermining the Achaemenid Empire.
Exactly what they were hoping to achieve, the Athenians, is unclear.
Whether they were just trying to weaken Persia or whether they actually thought that Athens might be able to take over rule of Egypt, which would be...
an extremely ambitious thing to try to do.
But maybe at this point, the Athenians think that this could be possible for them.
It isn't possible.
It goes disastrously wrong.
It's a sort of slow burn disaster.
But over the course of about five years, the Athenians invest a lot of manpower and resource in this expedition.
And it's almost completely wiped out.
Showing 21–40 of 117 · page 2 of 6
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