Professor Polly Lowe

and not happy days for Thassos.

And then also the island of Naxos, that's down in the Aegean, in the Cyclades.

Very large island, quite a wealthy island.

Also attempts to leave, not told much about why, but presumably just decided that it wasn't happy with what the Athenians were up to, and is again forced to rejoin the alliance.

Thucydides, when he mentions that,

uses very loaded language.

He says this was the first state, the first city, to be enslaved by the Athenians.

That language of slavery is the language that has previously been used of what the Persian Empire does.

If you're in the Persian Empire, you're enslaved to the Persians, and now Thucydides says the Athenians are starting to enslave

Greek states as well.

The chronology is really hard to pin down at this point in these narratives, so exactly when this happens, but again, probably late 470s, 460s, sometime around then.

That's typically what happens.

I think with Naxos, I think we don't know for sure if they were contributing ships before, but we know for sure that afterwards they are contributing money and not ships.

So that is often the pattern.

And definitely by the time we get down to the point where we can see who's contributing money and who isn't, which is the late 450s, we start to get some inscribed evidence for this.

Almost no one is left contributing ships, so there's three states or three islands.

Chios in the Eastern Aegean, the island of Lesvos, which has multiple city-states on it, and the island of Samos.

There's just three islands left and everybody else is paying money.

I think that could be some of it.

I mean, one of the tantalizing things is that we have no evidence at all for what sort of negotiations or discussions happened when an island said we want to, or did they say we want to start paying money now?