Professor Polly Lowe

We've been doing good work.

keeping people safe from the Persians.

But if Samos isn't buying that story anymore and the things that happen in Samos, again, if we believe the stories about the crucifixions and so on, and just the military cost and the loss of life in crushing this revolt, I think it could have been quite a sort of shock to the Athenians' system.

I'm increasingly keen on the Samian revolt.

It's a harder argument to make because we don't have one source that says this was the moment.

And this is an argument historians like to make.

But Thucydides' silence or his relative silence on the Samian revolt, I mean, he mentions it and he doesn't put a lot of weight on it.

I think one thing that Thucydides is doing throughout his history is trying to push his reader probably away from things that were maybe the consensus in his own time and pushing them towards a different way of looking at what was going on.

So in some ways, Thucydides' silence is an argument in favour of this being maybe more important than we've realised in the past.

So, yeah, I'm quite keen on pointing the finger at Samos.

But I think, again, to go back to something I said earlier, it might be a mistake to try and just pinpoint one moment, because depending where you are in this empire...

The key moment might have come at a very different point.

If you're a Naxian, I think from the moment you get enslaved, this feels like an empire.

But there are probably small communities in the Aegean that are pottering on quite happily and haven't noticed that anything's changed in particular.

So I think perhaps we need to allow for multiple turning points.

I think so.

I mean, they might not have thought of it quite in the terms of an empire, but I think they were out for power maximization, profit maximization from the beginning, and they saw this opportunity.

Yes.

So this is a new translation of Thucydides by Robin Waterfield.

It's a wonderful translation, very readable, probably more readable than Thucydides himself was in Greek, but really sort of captures the spirit of the book.