Professor Polly Lowe

The Athenians in turn promised that they won't go further east than that.

So it's basically saying the Persian Empire keeps what's now the Persian Empire.

The Athenians aren't going to go any further.

They're not going to cause any more trouble for the Persian king from now on.

So if that's

peace treaty really happened.

And if it happened on broadly those terms, then we could say, well, that's when certainly the goal of taking revenge on Persia has gone because you're not going to go and kill the Persian king or attack the capital cities of the Persian empire.

You promised not to do that.

But the big problem is, I mean, this seems like quite an important thing, and Thucydides does not mention it, and 5th century sources do not mention it.

So we only hear about it first about 100 years later.

So there are many modern historians who think that this treaty didn't exist.

didn't happen.

And it was something sort of invented after the fact, possibly to justify why the Athenians give up what they were meant to be doing, which was fighting the Persians.

We don't have good enough evidence to sort of pin down the chronology that neatly, unfortunately.

And we don't know about what's happening in most of these cities.

We have little snapshots.

So again, we get stuck in problems of when we do have some evidence, we often can't date it.

So there's a city called Erythrae.

which is on the coast of Anatolia, just sort of across from the island of Chios, so about halfway down the coast of Anatolia.

And we know that sometime, maybe in the 450s, there is civil war in that city, which seems to involve a pro-Persian faction and a pro-Athenian faction.