Professor Polly Lowe

Spoiler alert for how this is going to play out.

So Egypt at this point is and has been for some time now part of the Persian Empire and is a very important part of the Persian Empire.

Egypt

Throughout antiquity, it is much prized because it is such a good source of grain above all, so people want to have control of Egypt.

There's a local king, an Egyptian king called Inaros, who attempts a rebellion, attempts to secede from the Persian Empire.

He gets in touch with the Athenians and says, do you fancy being involved in my rebellion?

And the Athenians say,

say, yes, let's do it.

And it's a disaster.

So it's quite a sort of slow motion disaster.

Again, we get very little, it's very compressed accounts in Thucydides, it's sort of a paragraph of the text.

So we don't get a lot of detail about exactly what goes on, but they get bogged down.

There's sort of this attempt to some fighting in some marshes that doesn't

end at all well.

There's two separate attempts to make headway in Egypt, but they both end in disaster and the Athenians have to withdraw.

That's really the end of any serious Athenian attempt to make positive headway into the Persian Empire, to detach places from the Persian Empire, because it

They realise that they've met their limit.

It's a really interesting question, actually, because if you look at how the Athenians talk about it, which they don't have a huge amount of evidence, but we have a war memorial, a casualty list set up by the Athenians, which the Athenians do every year.

They commemorate the dead of combat of that year.

They typically set up and inscribe on stone the names of the people who died.