Professor Polly Lowe

They don't provide men or horses, which is untrue because we can see from other evidence that there are allies involved.

involved in Athenian campaigns, but probably never systematically.

So it doesn't seem to be the case that the Athenians have any sort of system of conscription or levying systematically troops from allied communities.

There probably were allies there, but they were there on a slightly sort of ad hoc basis, as far as we can tell.

Again, this comes with a big disclaimer that we don't have any real speeches from this period.

What we've got primarily is Thucydides saying,

Imagining or reporting, it's obviously disagreement about how much creativity there is in his speeches, but in attributing speeches to Athenian politicians.

And those are, for the most part, very dismissive of the contributions of the allies.

There's a tendency, it's a little bit subtle, so it doesn't always come out absolutely explicitly, but to be particularly dismissive of islanders, so people who live on islands and

which is, as we've discussed, the majority of the league is made up of these island communities, that they're especially sort of poor, maybe a little bit backward, maybe not really ready for self-determination.

So they're the sorts of people who the Athenians are almost doing them a favour by enslaving them or making them part of their empire.

That maybe comes out, I mean, the place where it comes out most explicitly is later on in the famous Melian Dialogue,

that Thucydides composes in the latter part of the Peloponnesian War.

So Milos is an island, another Cycladic island, a very small island, that doesn't want to be part of the Athenian Empire.

The Athenians are trying to incorporate it in one of their arguments is

Obviously, you should be part of our empire because you're a tiny island.

So why would you not?

That's what we think now.

on the basis of the Athenians set up inscriptions recording the amount of this money that they get from the allies, which they then give to the goddess Athena.

It's a slightly sort of complicated way of doing things, so we don't have an absolute record of what...