Professor Polly Lowe

Thanks so much for having me.

Yes, absolutely.

And in many ways, the Delian League and the Athenian Empire are what could be argued to be the same thing.

They're both modern English terms that we apply to this organisation that Athens leads in the 5th century.

So the name, I mean, obviously it's an English name.

It's not a name that we find in the Greek sources.

It comes from the island of Delos, which is sort of smack bang in the middle of the Aegean.

And that is where, Thucydides tells us, the Athenians called a meeting of Greek states who wanted to be part of this alliance.

And it met on Delos, so not in Athens originally, which was sort of

symbolically important.

And that's where originally, according to facilities, the collective meetings of the alliance took place.

So the date of the creation of the League is 478-7 BCE, but we have to go a little bit, not a very long way back, probably back to the Persian Wars.

So 490, first Persian invasion of mainland Greece, Battle of Marathon, and then the second much larger invasion in 484-79.

That's

Invasion was resisted successfully by an alliance of Greek states, which included Athens, but also included Sparta and a number of other Greek states.

Persians are defeated, retreat, withdraw from mainland Greece back into Western Anatolia, what's now Turkey, which was still at that point still part of the Persian Empire.

So then the question in 478, 477 is, well, what happens next?

What does this alliance of Greek states mean?

Do they carry on fighting the Persians?

Do they say, okay, well, that's enough.