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
I mean, I do agree that already in that early period, Athens is clearly ambitious and wants to extend its own power.
I'm on the fence about exactly when it becomes an empire.
And to the extent that I'm not sure that there's a single date that we can point to, particularly because, and again, this is something Elias I think alluded to already, of all these communities that are in the empire,
Different communities have quite different experiences of what it's like to be part of this organisation.
And for some people, so Naxos, which is this state which is forced to rejoin in the 470s, I suspect they realised quite early on that this wasn't just an old fashioned alliance that they were part of.
Other communities who might have had a rather more positive experience and been less exposed to Athenian power.
might have sort of carried on feeling like they were part of a league, maybe down until the 420s.
Athens is quite deep into this war against Sparta.
And it's in the 420s we get this flurry of Athenian regulations, which are preserved for us as inscribed documents, documents inscribed on stone.
And we can see the Athenians really clamping down
particularly on the financial management of the empire and starting to squeeze the allied communities much harder, probably because they need the money to fight the war.
And there's much more emphasis on officials.
There are penalties for people who don't comply.
And so I think the 420s, it might have been quite hard for many or even most communities to deny that they were now living in something like an empire.
But for some communities, I think the realisation would have come earlier than that.
I think the picture is overwhelmingly negative in terms of how later sources talk about and think about the Delian League.
There's criticism for the bad things that the Athenians did to other Greeks.
But what I find even more striking is there's criticism for the way that the Delian League is claimed to have damaged Athens, that this was a sort of morally corrupting force on the Athenians.
It caused the Athenians...
to become too greedy, too hungry for power.
Showing 61–80 of 117 · page 4 of 6
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