Professor Polly Lowe

So one thing that we do know is that the Spartans withdraw from the alliance of Greek states that fought against the Persians.

Thucydides and Herodotus give us slightly different spins on why the Spartans did this and how much sort of subterfuge there might have been by the Athenians to encourage the Spartans to pull out of the alliance.

But we can say definitely the Spartans don't want to be part of any subsequent alliance.

So then the version we get in Thucydides really suggests that this new alliance is effectively the same as the alliance of the four Persians, but minus a couple of states.

So the Spartans and a few other Peloponnesian states, so that's the region around Sparta, leave the alliance at that point and then everyone else just carries on.

So there's much more continuity with the alliance that fought against Persia.

The source I mentioned a moment ago, so the text attributed to Aristotle, gives the impression that actually this is more of a brand new organization.

So the Persian Wars end, that alliance also ends because it's

fulfilled its purpose.

Then the Athenians form a new alliance with different objectives and set that up on Delos.

I think scholars tend to prefer the Thucydidean version, but it could be that neither of those versions are exactly right and there was some slight other thing going on.

Yes, I think there's a sense of unfinished business.

So one thing is that there are Greek city-states in Western Anatolia, coast of modern Turkey, which are still, after the Persian retreat from mainland Greece, part of the Persian Empire and don't want to be part of the Persian Empire, or at least some Greeks would say we need to liberate those cities.

So that's part of the motivation.

The other thing, and this is what Thucydides includes, is a desire for revenge.

which is a really important driving force in international politics in the Greek world.

It's something that in contemporary international politics, I think states don't at least publicly talk about revenge, but that's quite acceptable.

And it's a real leitmotif of relations between Greeks and Persians, which they sort of

retroject all the way back to the Trojan War, that this is one side attacks the other, and then the other side justifiably wants to seek revenge.

So what Thucydides says is that the declared purpose of this alliance was to seek revenge on the Persians, the Persian king, for the damage that he'd inflicted on the Greeks.