Professor Polly Lowe

Black Sea, really important in terms of grain supply, one of Athens' ongoing

needs in this period, really throughout its history, is that it can't grow enough grain to feed its own population.

So it has to import grain.

So getting good access to Black Sea grain is really important for the Athenians.

So there's that going on.

There's this colony up in the North Aegean, a place we don't exactly know where it is, but we know that a colony was founded up there.

That's another strategically important place for the Athenians.

I think, strictly speaking, probably not.

In that, insofar as we can reconstruct the quite complicated finances of this operation,

The Athenians at least sort of launder the money, the Athenian league money a bit before they use it to build the Parthenon.

But it could well be that it's separate.

It's not the tribute money.

It's a different stash of Athena's money that is used directly to fund the building of the Parthenon and the other stuff on the Acropolis.

But you could say, well, the reason they've got that spare money is because they're using the tribute money

to fund other bits of Athens' economy.

So ultimately, they probably couldn't have afforded to do it if they didn't have the cushion provided by the tribute money.

Plutarch's life of Pericles is brilliant on this, and that really goes all in on saying this is the most scandalous thing that Pericles specifically, and then the Athenians, because they did what Pericles wanted, did.

was spending this money to, and he uses the analogy of prostitution, of sort of spending this money and tarting Athens up.

And this is the most unseemly use of this money that was given for this good cause.

And they're just blowing it all on fancy stuff in the center of Athens.