Professor Polly Lowe

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442 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Mar 2026 last heard 26 Mar

Professor Polly Lowe’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Mar 2026 with 1.

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The Ancients · The Delian League: Ancient NATO? · 26 Mar 2026 podcast

all the money, but the amount that goes to the goddess Athena.

And they set those up, they inscribed them on stone, they set them up on the Acropolis.

And the first one that we have, which says, usefully, this is the first one, dates to 454 BCE.

So that's why we come up with that date.

Very powerful, I think is the answer.

I think in spite of the setback in Egypt, and maybe one could say, well, that ultimately ends up helping the Athenians because it focuses their mind a little bit about where they should focus their energies.

So Egypt is a disaster, but in other theatres, the Athenians are doing quite well.

The other thing that has happened in the background, although not really in the background, is that conflict has erupted with Sparta.

and with Sparta's allies.

So towards the end of the 460s, Athens and Sparta had been on a sort of position of detente since the end of the Persian Wars, but that breaks down at the end of the 460s.

And a conflict breaks out, which confusingly was sometimes called the First Peloponnesian War, not to be confused with the famous

Peloponnesian war between Athens and Sparta and some allies of Sparta, particularly Thebes, which is Athens' most powerful northern neighbour.

Again, there are ebbs and flows and ultimately Athens isn't successful in that conflict.

But along the way, Athens does win some successes, including briefly conquering enough of the region around Thebes, Boeotia, so that's the region immediately to the north of Athens, and incorporating that into the Athenian Empire.

So this could have been, if the Athenians had managed to hold on to it longer, that could have been very significant because that's a big land possession.

They've got this very powerful sea-based naval maritime empire.

Then, for a moment, it looks like they can add on this really significant portion of territory to their north.

The empire is looking quite good at moments in the late 450s and 440s, but then they don't manage to hold on to that land part of their empire.

Yes, I think exactly that.

Again, we don't have...

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