Professor Polly Lowe

And what's really striking about the casualty list that we have for one of the years of the Egyptian expeditions is that

Egypt is just listed alongside multiple other theatres, and it's not differentiated from the wars that the Athenians are fighting against other Greek communities.

So we have Egypt and other places in the Persian Empire, but then also Greek cities, places like Halleis, which is a Greek community.

And it's all described as the war.

So it's like the Athenians are just fighting a big war against Persians, against Greeks.

It's all one thing.

And the other striking thing about that list is that it just says these Athenians died.

So there's no sense that there are any other Greeks involved.

It's not presented as a Delian League campaign.

And I think the sense we get from Thucydides as well is that the Athenians have decided to do this.

campaign.

We do have a monument created by someone from the island of Samos commemorating their participation in this campaign.

And again, this is really unusual.

We have very little evidence of, as I said, from subject communities.

So we know that there are

members of the Delian League fighting.

It seems like at least one community was happy to commemorate its participation in this campaign, but that's about as far as we can go.

The Athenians, particularly in the later years of the League, but probably already from the start, aren't super keen on acknowledging the fact that they're having help from other Greeks when they're fighting their campaigns.

Because then the payoff is that they get all the credit if it was just them.

So there's a speech that Thucydides attributes to the politician Pericles towards the start of the Peloponnesian War, explicitly saying the allies don't do anything.