Professor Polly Lowe

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442 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Mar 2026 last heard 26 Mar

Professor Polly Lowe’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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The Ancients · The Delian League: Ancient NATO? · 26 Mar 2026 podcast

Or was that something the Athenians imposed?

It could be, particularly for a very small island or small communities, it wasn't really an option because building, maintaining a fleet requires money.

a lot of infrastructure because you have to have ship sheds and you need craftsmen who can maintain these things and build the things.

You need access to timber.

It could be that for some small communities, the possibility of just outsourcing your defense to Athens was seen as a simple benefit and they wouldn't have been at all upset about handing that over to Athens.

But it could be that for others, there was a bit more coercion involved.

And yeah, one of the frustrations is that we can speculate about what this would have looked like from the perspective of the Allies, but we have pretty much no evidence.

I mean, it's more than two.

So there's one that I haven't mentioned, which is Charistos on Olympia.

So at least three of Thucydides' names.

But one of the issues is we don't know, we have the sort of, the known unknowns.

So we don't know who else was trying to leave and that Thucydides hasn't

told us about.

I guess also more generally, the methodological problem of how, when you're trying to study an empire or an organization, when all of your evidence really comes from the imperial power, which is the position we're in with Athens, how can we reconstruct what things look like for the subjects, the people who are the victims of imperialism?

Is it safe to infer happiness from a failure to revolt?

Or could that actually just mean that the imperialist is extremely effective at repressing revolt?

Because people know that's possibly why Thassos and Naxos are treated so brutally, is a warning to everyone else.

Don't get any ideas about leaving.

Because if we can do this to Naxos, which is big and powerful...

Imagine what we can do to your tiny island.

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