Professor Polly Lowe

Yet again, we don't know for sure, and it depends which source we believe.

It's actually really hard even to come up with a ballpark number for how many states are in this alliance at the start.

So it could be 100 or so, but it might be fewer than that.

It might be... We think there's probably about 300 in the alliance at its biggest point, but...

It wasn't that big at the start.

Remembering, of course, that many Greek city-states in this period are tiny.

There are a few hundred male citizens, so total population probably under a thousand.

So even a hundred of these states is not a huge number of people or a very big total population.

But it may have been much smaller than that.

And that same uncertainty about the geographical area is probably focused actually not so much on mainland Greeks as on the islanders.

So the Socatic Islands and the islands of the Eastern Aegean, primarily, heading up a little bit into the North Aegean.

And then over, as it extends, so in the sort of initial operations in the very early years of the League, heading out to the east and those Greek cities on the coast of Western Anatolia.

Exactly, exactly those islands, yep.

Interesting.

This is what makes the Delian League really different and distinct from other alliances that have existed up to this point in the Greek world.

The Greeks have been making alliances for a long time by this point, but the traditional model, as you suggest, has always been that you send men, contribute through military power.

What Thucydides says is one of the things that's discussed and decided at this first meeting on Delos is

is whether states are going to contribute with manpower, particularly ships, because this is a naval-based alliance, or whether they prefer instead to send money to Athens and then the Athenians will

buy and build and crew the ships.

This is one of the things that, well, Thucydides says, and most people would agree with him, enables this alliance to turn into an empire because most states, and by the end of the alliance, pretty much all of the states, contribute money rather than manpower.