The Delian League

30:05But that might, of course, have been the Athenians claiming, oh, no, it wasn't our idea, it was the Samians. Polly, talking about Samos now, You mentioned before that some of the allies had had enough at various points, and it seems to me the Delian League was studied with very serious uprisings. Can you tell us about those communities which were resisting the Athenians? Yes. So there are regular revolts or attempted revolts. There are very few that are successful, at least until the very final years of the empire when Athens is becoming less powerful. So, I mean, there's, I think, about 60 or so attempted revolts over the entire 70 year history of the alliance.

30:50Some of those are the same community rebelling more than once. You might say, well, if there are 350 odd communities in the whole organisation, then maybe that means that it's a minority, a sizable minority, but still a minority of states who are annoyed enough or upset enough to want to secede from this organisation. And what do the Athenians do when faced with such rebellion? So military force, very major military intervention. And then in the case of Samos, after a long campaign, when they succeed in bringing the Samians back into line, they impose quite severe financial penalties. The Samians have to pay reparations to Athens.

31:37And also, according to Plutarch, who actually reports this story and says that he himself isn't quite sure if he believes it. Pericles, who led the campaign against Samos, took the ringleaders of the rebellion and had them crucified, which is not a thing that the Greeks, the Greeks like to believe that this isn't the sort of thing the Greeks normally do. This is something that would be associated with non-Greek behaviour, so a very extreme form of punishment. Leah, we've heard about the paucity of written sources. Can you tell us a little bit about numismatic sources, what the coins tell us from the period?

32:17Absolutely. So coinage had been invented about 200 years or so earlier than this in what is now Western Turkey. And by the 5th century, a lot of Greek cities are minting their own coins, usually using silver. And they minted coins, not as we might think from modern parallels to maintain a monetary supply, but usually when they need to pay for something in particular. And that something in particular often was military expenditure. So soldiers pay or the building and maintenance of a fleet. And we see this really clearly with Athens in the Delian League period. From the Greco-Persian wars onwards, there's a massive explosion in levels of Athenian monetary production.

33:11So we've heard how they're getting silver coins, money in from their allies, that they're also operating a massive mining operation at a place called Larion in their territory. And they're getting this money, they're minting coins, and they're using it in great part to pay for their fleet. So there's a direct relationship between increased monetary production at Athens in the 5th century and the expansion of Athenian naval power. and one of the consequences of this is that there was a big influx of Athenian currency in the Aegean and beyond and Athenian coinage which looked very distinctive it had the goddess Athena on the one side it had her owl on the other side it became really commonly recognized and accepted.

34:04It was, I guess, the US dollar of its day. And we even find other communities minting coins to a lesser extent because they're just using Athenian currency. Paul, you mentioned Pericles and the building of the Acropolis, the Parthenon. He went on a statue and temple building spree. Was this all around Athens or did they also build temples and statutes to the gods around the entire league? Yeah, well, there are two sorts of issues here. One is Pericles, of course, was totally dependent on the ordinary people of Athens agreeing with whatever he suggested. Because it was a democracy. Yes, I was just going to say, we've been sort of avoiding the word democracy, which does apply also within the Allied states.

34:53And in terms of within Athens in the 5th century, there are at least two other major temples outside Athens' city, and one of them Ramnus and one of them at Sunion, and the Sunion one you can still go and visit. It's utterly beautiful. And they're about the same period, so 440 or so. 440 is as the Parthenon's going up, and it took 15 years. These are the two temples outside Athens, and then there's a very big one in Athens called the Hephaestion, which looks over the city centre, where both commercial and political business was transacted. So it was systematic, it's not random, and it was very, very expensive.

35:35And it did indeed generate opposition, not only from outside, but also from within. There is one rival of Pericles who chose to make the amount Athens was spending of both its own money and of Allied tribute, a political issue such that it was going to decide whether Pericles or this rival politician were to continue as the leading politician of Athens, and Pericles won. Polly, Leah's said that she considers it legitimate to call the Delian League an empire from the very beginning, and it seems to me that this is the big issue about the Delian League. Is it an empire or not? Do you agree with her that that's when it starts, or is there a moment later on where it shifts to an imperial structure?

36:24I mean, I do agree that already in that early period, Athens is clearly ambitious and wants to extend its own power. I'm on the fence about exactly when it becomes an empire and to the extent that I'm not sure that there's a single date that we can point to, particularly because, and again, this is something Leah's, I think, alluded to already, of all these communities that are in the empire, So different communities have quite different experiences of what it's like to be part of this organisation. And for some people, so Naxos, which is this state which is forced to rejoin in the 470s, I suspect they realised quite early on that this wasn't just an old fashioned alliance that they were part of.

37:07Other communities who might have had a rather more positive experience and been less exposed to Athenian power might have sort of carried on feeling like they were part of a league, maybe down until the 420s. Athens is quite deep into this war against Sparta. And it's in the 420s we get this flurry of Athenian regulations, which are preserved for us as inscribed documents, documents inscribed on stone. And we can see the Athenians really clamping down, particularly on the financial management of the empire and starting to squeeze the allied communities much harder. probably because they need the money to fight the war.

37:46And there's much more emphasis on officials. There are penalties for people who don't comply. And so I think the 420s, it might have been quite hard for many or even most communities to deny that they were now living in something like an empire. But for some communities, I think the realisation would have come earlier than that. Leah, we come now to my favourite question in this episode. Can you tell us about Cloud Cuckoo Land and why it's relevant to the Delian League? I think it's my favourite question as well. So in classical Athens, there were big public performances of comic plays, actually in the context of religious festivals.

38:30And these comedies were the closest we can get to Athenian popular culture. And they often engaged with the really hot political topics of the day. And of course, as we've been discussing, a big part of the political scene at Athens was the Delian League. So some of these comedies engage with the Delian League. And I think the best example of this is a play called Birds, composed by the comic playwright Aristophanes and performed for the first time in 414 BC. and this was a moment when Athenian power was really trying to expand. The previous year the Athenians had sent what would ultimately be a disastrous expedition to conquer Sicily and Byrds comes in just after this and seems to offer quite a critical view of Athenian power.

39:27So the plot of the play is that they're two disaffected Athenians. They decide they're fed up of Athens and they're going to found their own city in the sky called Cloud Cuckoo Land. That's where the word comes from. And Aristophanes uses Cloud Cuckoo Land in various ways to send up Athenian power. So as soon as the city is founded, there's this parade of really annoying individuals who come along, including Athenian officials. there's a seller of decrees of the imperial regulations that Polly was just talking about offering imperial regulations to this new city and there's even a joke about how people might want to go to the toilet on them so clearly not very popular and in addition to that cloud cuckoo land itself becomes an imperial power so it's in the sky and it starts stopping offerings from people on earth reaching the gods.

40:27So it's offering this very critical view of Athenian power and I think that it's the closest we can get to how the man on the street might have perceived the Athenian empire, the Delian League, because the jokes would have had to be familiar in some way for them to be funny. Paul, clearly when Aristophanes is writing The Birds that the Delian League is beginning to collapse if it hasn't already done so. How does it all end? Not well. So, he's presumably died, but at any rate, he failed to complete his project. He died writing about seven years before the actual war ended. And it came to an end mainly, and this is an irony, thinking back to where we started from, Greece versus Persia, Greece, Athens and Sparta together versus Persia.

41:17Well, it was actually the Persians' intervention in the Atheno-Spartan War via money that decided the outcome of the whole war. Because in order to beat the Athenians, you have to beat them on sea. So you therefore need a fleet. And typically there are certain choke points in the Aegean and its outliers. And one of them is the Hellespont. So if you can get a really good fleet into the Hellespont, block off the Athenians' supply of, for example, grain, but also challenge them to take you on, there is therefore the sense that from 412, which is when the Spartans manage to persuade the Persians to come in on their side, it's a foregone conclusion.

42:04The Athenians finally find themselves blockaded by a Spartan fleet over winter, 4 or 5 to 4. They're starved into submission and total submission, not agreeing to surrender on their term, but surrendering on the Spartans' total terms, total victory. Polly, how was the Delian League seen by the classical world in the centuries after its demise? I think the picture is overwhelmingly negative in terms of how later sources talk about and think about the Delian League. There's criticism for the bad things that the Athenians did to other Greeks. But what I find even more striking is there's criticism for the way that the Delian League is claimed to have damaged Athens, that this was a sort of morally corrupting force on the Athenians.

42:54It caused the Athenians to become too greedy, too hungry for power. They lost their self-control and therefore it was a thing that the Athenians were wrong to have done and that they should never attempt to do. And no other Greek state should attempt to get this sort of power in the future. One of my favourite bits of inscribed evidence from the ancient world from the 370s BCE, when the Athenians decide to have another go and set up another alliance, which we now call the Second Athenian League. And we do have the foundation documents of this organisation. And what's really interesting is that it includes a long list of things the Athenians promised not to do this time around, which maps almost directly onto the terrible things we know they did the first time around.

43:38So they say we won't levy tribute. We won't impose garrisons. We won't send out governors. We won't confiscate land. We won't meddle in your internal political affairs. So I think not only... That's a really important document, surely. Yes, it's a fascinating document in all sorts of ways. The other thing, though, I mean, in spite of this, what the document also reveals is that a large number of Greek communities joined the League because their names are included on this inscription. So either the Athenians were very persuasive when they promised not to do any of this stuff again, or the Greek communities were very naive, or there's enough positive stuff that comes out of this sort of alliance that Greek communities thought, or at least some Greek communities thought, well, the risk is worth taking to sign up for a second go around.

44:29OK, Leah, I'm going to come to you as the first in a quick-fire round at the end and that is I want to know your opinion as how we should look at the Delian League now. Was this a sinister, coercive hegemony or was power more balanced? You first, then Paul and then Polly. Well, I think you know my answer. I would argue for the latter that this was an exploitative imperial power and that we shouldn't sanitise it or talk about it in apologist language. I think the way that we talk about past empires matters for how we understand empire now. And it's important to understand the Adelian League as it was.

45:11Paul? Well, I would slightly differ in that I don't think empires are all the same. So our word empire comes from Rome, imperium infinitum. The Romans' notion of power of an imperial kind, not an internal legal kind, was extreme. It amounted to life and death. Achi, as Leah mentioned, can mean rule, just regular, Republican, annual, perfectly decent. It literally means a beginning. So they never developed a word that corresponds to the sort of entity that Leah describes. Polly? I think I'm closer to Leah in that I think, yes, we absolutely can't sanitise the Dealing League, but we have to find a way to square that with the fact that some people, including non-Athenians, did quite well out of this.

46:03So some people benefited from this alliance at the same time as it was doing absolutely unspeakable things. And that sort of complexity of how imperial power works, I think, is something that we have to grapple with in this league, but also in empires of other periods. My thanks to Leah Lazar, Polly Lowe and Paul Cartledge. Next week, Marie Antoinette's official portraitist, who shocks society by painting smiles with open mouths. Scandalous. We'll be discussing the artist Elisabeth Vigée-Le Brune. Until then, thank you for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Misha and his guests.

46:50OK, and now we go on to the podcast thing. So, first of all, I'm still intrigued about Sparta and what Sparta's calculations are, having collaborated with Athens, are they simply a more self -contained operation? yes i mean the answer is twofold both economic and political so economically they were extremely self-sufficient it was a command economy exploiting locals who are greek and they are enslaved they are much less dependent than the athenians on external sources of e.g bread and the athenians imported their bread wheat from the black sea from what's today ukraine and therefore that raised the living standards of the ordinary poor Athenians who otherwise would have been eating either inferior wheat or barley.

47:46The Spartans weren't so fussy. They typically were happy with a kind of porridge, but the helots made, grew the barley and the wheat. They grew the vines. They grew the olives. It's entirely self-contained domestic economy. Secondly, being very inward looking, Generally, the Persian Wars, 484, are an exception to the general rule that Sparta did not indulge in international enterprises, especially not of a pan-Hellenic kind. So many Spartans, once the Persian Wars have been won, the final battle, Patea, think, great, this is the time we'll just go back to the way it was before, because that was pretty difficult.

48:33Secondly, if the Spartans had decided to go on in an international way, they would then have required to build a fleet, which they in fact didn't do until the very end, as I've said before, of the Atheno-Peloponnesian War. And that involves using helots, they're called helots, the enslaved persons, as crew people. And one of the distinctive features of the Athenian navy is the power that ordinary Athenians derived from them being what we in this country call the senior service. Ever since the 17th century, the navy has been our senior service. We're an island nation. Well, the Athenians from the 470s decided we're going to go over.

49:19The navy is the number one. Army, that's the ordinary troops, infantry, second. Cavalry, very minimal. Archers, not at all. And that presumably explains why the Delian League existed, because of the fact that they suddenly had the emergence of this extraordinary fleet. There's a slight chicken and egg question. I mean, the fleet was built originally, well, to go back a little bit. The Athenians find silver at Laurion in Assica and they have this money. And according to Herodotus, they have a debate. What should we do with the money? Should we do a big cash handout to the population or should we use it to build a fleet?

50:06And the original target of the fleet was Athens' close neighbour, the island of Aegina. This is before the Persian invasion. Then that fleet becomes very useful because they can use it also to fight the Persians. But the fleet was built to fight other Greeks. So the fleet sort of enables Athens to take this leading role in the Greco-Persian wars. which then further enables Athens to take the leading role in the Delian League. And then through the process of tribute, then they can invest in their fleet more and more and their fleet gets bigger and bigger. Everyone else's fleet gets smaller and smaller.

50:41Am I right in thinking from the conversation that basically it was over-expansion that led to the end of the Delian League? I mean, we've heard about these disastrous campaigns in places like Egypt. Do you think that's right, Leah? It's certainly, I think, Thucydides' answer. So I think he sees this expedition to Sicily in 415 BC as a major turning point, an overexpansion of Athenian ambition. And also he tells us about how it brought political instability at home. So the democracy which had been ruling the empire was really shaken by this expansion. And at the end of the fifth century, there were two moments when it was actually overturned by violent oligarchic coups.

51:29So a combination of overexpansion abroad, the instability of the political situation within Athens. And also, as we've heard from Paul, I think, the Persians deciding to get financially involved on the Spartan side and the Spartan development of a navy that could. It's, yeah. Is that why the Spartans were able to take Athenian cities way up in the north in Thessaly? I think it's, is it? Yeah, it's slightly different. That's a land campaign. It's a land campaign. So how have they managed to get all the way up there? Well, just simply by walking. So remember, Sparta has most of the cities in the Peloponnese on their side.

52:15They're allies. So it's not that difficult to get through to the Isthmus, which divides the Peloponnese from central Greece. Where Athens sits, of course. Right. Immediately on the Isthmus is Corinth, which is Sparta's main ally, most important, and it supplies the majority of any fleet that Sparta manages to put together. Corinth provides the ships. You then get to Megara, which is next door to Athens. Well, thereafter, a man called Brasidas decided to play the card of, we are liberators. These Athenians, they're your oppressors. They claim they freed you from the Persians. Yes, but only so as they could dominate you for their purposes, economic, political.

53:01We are genuine liberators. So what this guy does is he revives the rhetoric of the 480s against the Persians, against the Spartans. and there's been a ding-dong battle ever since the Persian Wars, who was most responsible for beating the Persians? Was it the Spartans? Was it the Athenians? Anyway, so it's all part of... And you argue that the Spartans are probably more important than the Athenians, or at least they offer more than... Have you been reading my secret diary? But it is a balance, because had the Spartans not agreed to join the anti-Persian alliance of defence, the main target of which was Athens, not Sparta.

53:44Had Sparta not agreed to join, there would have been no land army capable of resisting the Persian land army. So it wouldn't have mattered that the Athenians beat the Persians at sea if there was still an army that could come and destroy the Peloponnese or whatever. So it was absolutely critical, the amphibious nature of the resistance by land, by sea. So the irony of Greek history in the 5th century is the land-loving Spartans defeat the naval Athenians with foreign Persian aid. Oh, my goodness. Yeah. So what else did we miss out, Polly? I mean, one thing, and this follows on from what we've just been talking about, is what Persia is up to.

54:32Yes, do tell. And one possible way of interpreting this period of history is that the Athenians are essentially acting as a sort of client state for the Persians. And that might be the deal that was struck or one way we could understand. You mean after 450 BCE, after the possible peace treaty? Exactly. And the Persians see the advantage because what the Athenians are doing effectively is keeping peace for them on the western edge of this enormous empire. So the Athenians are helping the Persians out by ensuring stability in what would otherwise potentially be quite a problematic edge of the empire for the Persians.

55:12And that might also explain why the Persians are willing to get involved again at the end of the war, because Athens is no longer able to keep things quiet. So they see chaos is about to erupt again, and therefore they get involved. And what happens after the Spartan victory in that case? Do things stabilize in the way that the Persians might have wanted? No. Everyone's shaking their head. In one word. No. And the Spartans even have their own ultimately unsuccessful attempt at maybe empire building. I'm not sure if that's the term that Paul would use, but certainly. No, I would. You would? Yeah, yeah.

55:50And they're doing what the Athenians are doing, using liberation of Greeks in Asia, because as soon as Persia comes back, it's able to exert influence without necessarily actually putting a garrison in. But nevertheless, whatever happens in the Western Asiatic seaboard after 404, unless the Spartans attack Persia, which they decide to do, these cities are very vulnerable. They've got no protector. Yeah. Yeah, and I suppose, I mean, as you said, it was a kulturkrisis. It was a cultural community that the Greeks had, but it was very ill-defined in terms of territory and coherence of political structures.

56:33And it was never translated into permanent political institutions except from above. So when Philip of Macedon conquers significant Greek cities in the south, he comes from the north. For the first time, there is, as it were, a united Greek, but united in subjection to Macedon. Was that the Sicilian campaign which results in defeat? Is that also the sort of end of empire moment because military defeat always has serious repercussions back home? it's certainly seen as a very serious moment in the history of Athenian power I think that its consequences in our eyes is certainly also down to the construction of Thucydides narrative and the fact that we actually don't get the end of his narrative because he doesn't get to describe the end of the war but there are certainly other moments later which are also considered really significant.

57:38For example, the nearby island of Euboea, now Evia, which had been another major source of Athenian grain. When the Spartans conquered that, that's really serious for the Athenians. But as Paul described, they carry on fighting right down to 404-403. So the Sicilian expedition ending in 413 did not see the end of the empire or of the war. Well, I think at that moment we can ask Martha to bring us a cup of tea. Or coffee if you would so like. I'm afraid we don't have any Greek coffee. In Our Time with Misha Glennie was produced by Martha Owen. It's a BBC Studios production for Radio 4. Zandi, happy anniversary.

58:24What are you talking about? Have I missed something? Yes, Zandi, you have. We are over a year into making WhatsApp docs. You didn't even get me a card. Is it really over a year? It is. Think of all the episodes we've done. How to look after our feet, our shoulders, our hips, our teeth. We've explored snoring, cholesterol, the immune system, endometriosis. All with the help of expert guests. I think it's fair to say we have plundered the world of health and well-being, equipping ourselves and our listeners with the best information out there on how to look after our minds, our bodies, our souls even.

58:57And we're not stopping, are we, Chris? We're most certainly not, son. We have a lot of new topics coming up, from tinnitus to acne, crying, male fertility. We are holding steadfast in our mission to sort facts from fiction, debunking wellness myths along the way. And you can find all of our previous episodes of What's Up Docs in the feed on BBC Sounds. And don't forget to subscribe on BBC Sounds and turn on the notifications so you don't miss any of these upcoming episodes.

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