Professor Polly Lowe

And many people these days read Herodotus as...

really writing a warning to the Athenians or to the Greeks about what the Athenian Empire might turn into.

We have texts like Aeschylus' Persians, again, not really about the Athenian Empire, but produced in this period.

So the evidence is really difficult, actually, for the early years.

Exactly.

Yeah.

So, I mean, in theory, it's a play about the Persian invasion and the defeat of the Persians at the naval battle of Salamis.

But because it's written for Athenians after the war, it maybe sort of captures some of the spirit of how the Athenians were feeling in the 470s.

About its formation, no.

The thing we haven't got, which I would very much like to have, is anything like the sort of foundation document, which we do for an alliance the Athenians make in the following century.

We have the inscription which sort of sets out the terms and conditions, but we don't have that.

And in fact, Thucydides gives us a version, but we have another source, a later source, attributed to the philosopher Aristotle, which gives us a quite different version of the foundation of the league.

So that's a problem.

The inscriptions are quite useful for working out how the mechanics of the league, sort of officials, procedures, but those texts date rather later.

So most of them are now dated to the 420s.

So one of the challenges that historians have is how much

Does this organisation change?

So it's generally accepted that it changes, it evolves, maybe becomes more oppressive, more like an empire, less like an alliance over time.

But one of the ongoing debates in scholarship is when does that change happen?

It isn't completely clear because our sources give us slightly different versions.