The Delian League
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This is In Our Time from BBC Radio 4, and this is one of more than a thousand episodes you can find in the In Our Time archive. A reading list for this edition can be found in the episode description wherever you're listening. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello. In 478 BCE, the Greco-Persian Wars had seen a series of armed conflicts for over 20 years. After the defeat of a second Persian invasion, a league of cities across Greece came together. They formed a new alliance, led by Athens, an alliance which we now call the Delian League. In the following decades, Athens used the Delian League to grow its own wealth and formidable naval power. But cities who tried to leave the alliance found themselves violently put down and their lands confiscated.
What began as a cooperative alliance sworn to fight back and defend Greeks against the Persian Empire gradually started to seem like it may have created another imperial power, the Athenian Empire. With me to discuss the Delian League are Leah Lazar, lecturer in Hellenistic culture at the University of Manchester, Polly Lowe, professor in the Department of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Durham, and Paul Cartlidge, AG Leventis Senior Research Fellow of Clare College, University of Cambridge. And Paul, it's to you I want to come first to give us, if you can, a sense of the geopolitical landscape of this period. What did Greece look like and what did the Persian Empire look like?
You started off in 478, so I'm going to take you back. 70-plus years, to about 550. And that's when the Persian Empire, sometimes we say the Achaemenid Persian Empire, rose very, very suddenly in, of course, Iran. Within 50 years, it had spread east-west, far east as Afghanistan, Pakistan, as far west as the Aegean Sea, and indeed slightly over into Europe. So we're dealing with a vast... territorial empire, such as the Greeks, never were to know for quite a long time until after the period we're looking at. So what was Greece? Well, there was no such thing as a nation state of Greece. There was a Kulturkreis, German for a cultural circle, of Hellas, people who spoke Greek, thought Greek, behaved Greek.
And they were spread all over the Mediterranean, all around the Black Sea. So no one focus. But the nearest bit of the Greek world to the Persians was actually within the Persian Empire. So as the Persians expanded west in the second half of the 6th century BC, they conquered a whole string of Greek cities along the western seaboard of what is the Aegean Sea for the Greeks. You have therefore a confrontation potentially, a potential crunch point at the Aegean border of the Western Persian Empire. But 50 years or so after they'd first been incorporated in the Persian Empire, a bunch of Greeks decided they didn't want to be in the Persian Empire anymore. So one particular Greek city is called Miletus.
It's now in Western Turkey. A representative went to mainland Greece seeking aid in order to support them militarily, that is, principally with ships, but also with men and money, in rising up against the Persian Empire. The Athenians accepted, and that is the beginning of the Greco-Persian Wars as seen from the mainland of Greece. If you're looking at it all from Iran, well, these pesky Greeks on the far west side of our empire. Do we need to worry about them? Well, the Persians eventually decided to launch a vast invasion, amphibian, in the late 480s and that resulted in what we call the Greco-Persian Wars and thereafter the Delian League.
Okay, so why the name Delian League? It comes from the island of Delos where the alliance was established, but why was Delos, it's quite a small island, why was it chosen?
Well, it's a bit like the Holy Roman Empire, which Voltaire said was neither holy nor Roman nor an empire.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–8:03
2
What historical events led to the founding of the Delian League in 478 BCE?
8:03–35:04
3
Why was the island of Delos chosen as the meeting place and namesake of the League?
35:04–45:26
4
What were the Delian League's original aims and how did Athens structure membership and tribute?
45:26–46:07
5
How do primary sources like Thucydides, Herodotus and Aristotle differ in describing the League's purpose?
46:07–57:14