Professor Polly Lowe

They're out of Greece.

We can sort of stop and go back to how things were before.

So that's what sparks that meeting of Greeks on the island of Delos.

Yes, exactly.

So it coincides, and this isn't a coincidence, with the period in which Athens is most powerful, most wealthy, with the great building projects that you associate with Athens.

So the building of the Parthenon, for example, the great period of Athenian naval power.

So the period that once used to be called the Golden Age of Greece, but there's lots of quite awful stuff happens in that period as well.

It's not golden for everyone.

He's a historian, writing a history of the period through which he himself lived, so primarily the second half of the 5th century.

He wasn't writing a history of the Delian League, the Athenian Empire.

He was writing a history of the Peloponnesian War, so the great war between Athens and Sparta in the last third of the 5th century.

But in order to explain why that war happens, he decides...

which is good for us.

He decided that he needed to fill in some of the background, explain why Athens had become so powerful.

So he gives us a very compressed and in many ways, quite sort of problematic posse history of the early years, the foundation and the growth of the Delian League from 477 down to 430-ish.

One of the challenges of studying the period is that we can see that Thucydides' account isn't complete and it isn't perfect.

but there's very little else to go on.

We have a little bit of inscribed evidence, epigraphic evidence, so documents that the Athenians wrote on stone, but they start really only from about the 450s and they're often very incomplete or hard to date.

We have Herodotus, who obviously he wrote a history of the Persian Wars.

So this is after the end of his history, but there are allusions in his text about what's going to happen next in terms of the growth of Athenian power.