Professor Polly Lowe

Well, we don't have detailed financial accounts, certainly not for this early period.

And it's very hard to reconstruct exactly sort of where the precise funds are coming from.

But we know, for example, and another speech Thucydides composes, puts in the mouth of official people from the city of Mytilene, which is one of the cities on the island of Lesbos.

when they're trying to justify why they're attempting to revolt from the alliance.

This is later on, this is the early 420s.

But one thing they say is, we were quite happy to be part of this alliance when we were fighting the Persians.

That's fine.

But then we saw that the Athenians have stopped fighting the Persians and instead they're trying to oppress other Greek states.

And we're not okay with that.

So that's why we want to rebel from the alliance.

So another crux of our sources, because it is the notable slash scandalous omission from Thucydides, is the possibility of a peace agreement made with Persia.

Again, probably in the late 450s.

So this is the thing known in modern scholarship as the Peace of Callias.

Callias is an Athenian politician.

So he's the person who would have been sent to Persia to negotiate the terms of the deal.

If it happened, then what it effectively was is a sort of non-aggression pact.

So we have later sources in the fourth century that give us versions of the terms of this peace treaty.

And it says, basically, the Persians are going to stay three days' ride from the coast of western Anatolia.

So it's pushing the western frontier of the Persian Empire a little bit further east and effectively ceding to Athens those Greek communities there.

on the west coast of Anatolia.