The Athenian Empire

Further reading: Kallet - 'Did Tribute Fund the Parthenon?'

Transcript:

 Okay, really good episode for you today. And a very, very special dear guest who is so close to my heart. Would you like to introduce yourself, please? 

Hi, I'm Christy Constantakopoulou. I have a very long name because I'm from Greece. I used to be Alexandra's history professor back at Birkbeck, but I have now left Birkbeck where I was professor of classics and ancient history and I have moved to Greece to the National Hellenic Research Foundation where I am a senior researcher and I research the history of the classical Greek world. 

I wouldn't ask anyone else to do this episode. We're going to be talking about Athenian imperialism and I think Athens gets a really good rap. The general public, we look on Athens quite benevolently. We think of theatre and philosophers and it's all very positive. Let's try and ruin a bit of that today! So, brief recap for a little bit of context. The Ionians revolted in the 490s, we have two Persian invasions, and then we get to the Pentecontaetia, which I'm very proud that I can finally pronounce. Can you explain what that is, what it means and what it means for Athenian history? 

So as you said, the Persians invade and the Greeks manage to defeat them over the course of two invasions and when the Persians withdraw, and that is a year of 478 BCE, which is important here because that's the beginning of our story, there is no guarantee that they're not going to come back for a third invasion. So the coalition of Greeks who fought the Persians decide to continue the war and take it over to the Persian side over the other side of the Aegean Sea. So they've defeated the Persians on the Greek mainland side, but of course the Greeks living in Asia Minor, that is the modern coast of Turkey, are still under a Persian rule. So the Greeks decide to take the war to the Persians, liberate the Greeks of Ionian and they need a military leadership to do that. 

Now for traditional military terms, Sparta was the leader during the Persian wars because it was the biggest military power, especially for land warfare. But the Spartans, for various reasons that have to do with the role, kind of specific identity and ways of doing things, are not willing to continue the fight and certainly they're not willing to continue the fight so far away from their home, Sparta. We have various stories of how things start, but one of the stories that we have says that the allies ask the Athenians, who are the second biggest military power, and of course they have the biggest navy, to take up the leadership of the so-called Hellenic League, the Greek League, to continue the war against Persia. And the Athenians, again, for various reasons, and again, the sources, it depends, we have various versions of why and how the Athenians pick up the leadership and they become the leadership of this new League, which we now call in history the  Delian League because it had its headquarters on the island of Delos, the sacred island of the Aegean, and the birthplace of the gods Apollo and Artemis. 478, the Greeks swear and oath that they will continue the war and they will serve under the Athenians until the Persians are defeated and the Greek cities are liberated. That happens in 478. And what seems like a very natural consequence of two acts of invasions by the Persians over to the Greek side is really the beginning of a whole new story now, a whole new chapter and one that marks the Greek world because at 478, we also place the beginning of the classical period as opposed to the previous period which we call archaic because at that point, through the foundation of the  Delian League, through the decision of the Athenians to continue the war against the Persians leading the Allies in that war, we have the origins of what we now know is the Athenian Empire. Basically, a rule over the Allies that may begin relatively well with relatively equal terms but very soon becomes a brutal imperial rule of Athens over essentially the entire Greek world living around the Aegean Sea. 

The 50 years that Alex mentioned, and I'm so proud that you can actually pronounce this word, Pentecontaetia, which literally means the 50 years is the period between 478, the end of the Persians wars, and 431, the beginning of the Peloponnesian War, the big war between Sparta and Athens that is a big point of rupture in the Greek world and that creates a whole new dynamic of power in the Greek world and ends in 404, 431 to 404, the 27 years of the Peloponnesian War ultimately with the defeat of Athens by Sparta and the end of the Athenian Empire. So the Athenian Empire is a very short-lived phenomenon in historical terms. It lasts seven decades. I mean, we can't really talk about imperialism as such from 478 but soon enough and it certainly ends with the end of the Peloponnesian War, the Athenian defeat. But nevertheless, even though for historical terms it's quite a short-lived empire, it has a very long-lasting impact because things change in the Greek world, things change in Athens, but things change also in the entire Greek world because of empire and imperialism and that's why we still talk about. 

So you've mentioned that Athens was invited to take over this league. What were they invited specifically to do? 

So this is some of our sources. We have quite a few sources talking about it, but all of them writing much after, a very long time after the fact and of course through their narratives they also reflect the preoccupations of their own days and of course hindsight because by the time they're writing, the Athenian Empire, first of all the Athenians had an empire out of that league and the Athenian Empire also collapsed. So you know, hindsight is a wonderful thing in history but it's not a very good judgment of facts of what actually happens in 478. But in any case, I think we can certainly assume that those allies who wish to take the war over to the Persians really did want a leader to pick up that role, especially since Sparta refused to do it. And to have as a leader the power, the biggest navy made absolute sense because if you're taking the war over to Turkey, you need a navy. You don't just need hoplites and that is the land warriors who will fight the battles but you need to defeat the Persians also by sea. So it makes sense that some allies or some groups within the allied states for their own purposes and for the role of liberating the Ionians ask the Athenians to do it. And it seems very possible that the Athenians grasp that opportunity exactly because they already had imperial ambitions from before and they were very eager to expand their zone of influence. 

I don't think anyone in Athens, not even the most foresighted politicians, would have thought where that decision would lead 30 or 40 years down the line. How much money and how much power and how much impact onto the lives of Greece that decision would have but they certainly were not going to pass over the opportunity to place a mark. So they say yes. 

So later on in this series we're going to have an episode that is dedicated to Athenian democracy, how it developed, the kind of frameworks and institutions within it. That's going to be coming up soon with Owen Rees. But for now, if you could just recap for us, In the 470s, what stage is democracy in Athens? Is it in its final form or is it still developing, still fledgling? 

So this is a complicated question. Basically all historical questions have easy answers but also more difficult answers and then super difficult answers. Athens certainly has what they call a democracy by 470 but democracy is not just one thing. Democracy is a spectrum of different constitutions. What Athens has is a democracy because everyone who is a citizen, and that is all adult male citizens, have a right to vote and to participate and to take decisions and to be elected officials for most positions of power. But the power at 470 is not in the hands of the many as it will be some years down the line. In other sense, we would say it's still quite a restricted democracy. It's not what we know from later periods is a full radical democracy. And let me explain what radical democracy is so we can go back. Radical democracy is a constitution that the ancients, especially those who were anti-democratic, so they came from an aristocratic background, they didn't have democratic tendencies, considered a constitution where the power lies not in the hands of the many but in the hands of the poor. And that's a slightly different qualification. Demos, democracy means power, kratos, cracy, to the people, to the demos. Demos in ancient Greek means both the people as in the majority, as we understand democracy now, power to the people, but it also means the lower classes, the poor. So when we say someone has a demotic accent or a demotic appearance, it means he has a poor accent, a poor appearance, a lower class accent. 

So radical democracy is when power shifts from the dominating families who are well-bred and come from aristocratic families, aristocratic lineage, and who control politics pretty much throughout the 5th century. And it goes away from their hands to the hands of people who are born commoners, the sons of fishmongers, your average poor person. And that is radical democracy because suddenly, by a series of constitutional change that takes place over the 5th century, the power that belonged to the old aristocratic bodies of government is taken away, is given to the assembly, which is where all Athenian citizens or other male citizens can participate. And that, as I said, is a series of reforms that take place by the 440s. It's pretty clear to the Athenians and to the rest of the Greek world that radical democracy is at play. And that is a slightly different democratic constitution than the one in 470. So go back, circle back. Athens has at 470 a democracy, so decisions are collective. They have to go through the assembly and so on. But narratives of power, negotiations, and so on still belong to a handful of aristocratic families and their leaders. Through a series of reforms over the first half of the 5th century and certainly by 440, Athens is transformed into a radical democracy where all power lies in the hands of the many, and by many, we mean the poor. 

So we've got two scenarios. One - that the Persians invade for the third time and two - that Athens leads a Greek force over to Persia and invades there. Are either plausible, is it possible that Athens at that point had any chance of defeating the Persian Empire? Or is that even what they wanted to do? 

Well, they did defeat the Persian Empire when they defeated them both at the Battle of Marathon in the first invasion in 490 and in the second invasion where with the coalition of the Greeks defeated the Persians in two battles. Salamis, the naval battle, and Plataea, the land battle. So Greeks and the Athenians, the Athenians by themselves defeated them at Marathon in 490 and the Greeks and the Athenians defeated them the second time. So defeating the Persians is entirely plausible. But one thing saying defeating the Persians is another thing. So I see what you did there! I see it now! 

You don't defeat the Persian Empire because the Persian Empire is massive. It's absolutely wealthy. It has three capitals. It's all the way in Iraq and Iran. It's way away. And the Athenians are not interested. No one. I mean, you have to reach the level of madness of Alexander the Great to say, Hey, I'm going to go to Persia and defeat them in their land. I'm going to go to, as the Americans say, Iraq and Iran. Just kind of, you know, defeat them. No sensible Greek in the fifth century would have thought that. What they're interested, the Athenians and the Greeks, is first of all, as I said, guarantee that there is no third invasion. So safeguard their birth land. And also to liberate the Greeks who live in Asia Minor Coast, the littoral coast of Turkey on the Aegean, and who are under Persian control. And that's actually what they do. Through a series of battles in the early 470s, they managed to defeat the Persian army and the Persian navy and liberate the Greeks who are now living in freedom, so not under Persian yoke. But of course, they have to pay tribute, not to the Persians as they used to, but they have to pay to the Athenians. 

So you could say if you were very, very, what is nasty, that the Ionians changed one yoke for another. But actually, harsh imperial rule over the Ionians takes some years to develop by Athens. And I'm still pretty certain that most Greeks would rather be left alone to manage their affairs and paying a bit of tribute to Athens rather than be part of a Persian empire that was perhaps more intrusive onto their own affairs by, say, imposing tyrants as they did in the 6th century. 

So we shouldn't give them the ambition that they're going to completely destroy Persia. That's not what they're aiming to do. They just want to get the Greeks freedom? 

Freedom? That's certainly... Freedom, yeah. No, it's freedom. As a historian, I'm always sceptic about when people say freedom and democracy and so on. It's like, what do they mean? But freedom from Persia is actually a very, very strong motive. On the other hand, one of the other things that our sources tell us, and we cannot disregard that, is the importance of booty. So the Persians are, of course, a super massive and super wealthy empire. And, I mean, the palaces at their capitals, at Susa, Persepolis, and so on, have gathered unbelievable wealth from their massive empire. When the Persians destroy cities, such as they destroy Athens in 480, they raze it to the ground, they burn the Acropolis, and parenthesis, because they burned the Acropolis, that's why then the Athenians commissioned the fantastic building program that resulted to us having the Parthenon and the rest of the buildings of the Acropolis and so on. The Athens and other cities are completely razed to the ground. And the Greeks and the Athenians are, of course, very eager to get Persian booty as compensation for all the wealth that they lost, but also for the emotional compensation. So, of course, I want to continue the war, and we know that after one battle, the Battle of Eurymedon, where there is one of the final, I think that's the final defeat after the Battle of Eurymedon, we don't have another kind of direct confrontation between the Greeks and the Persians in open battle. There are some exceptions, but on the whole that marks kind of the end of the confrontation. The Greeks received so much booty, we have stories about it, they didn't know what to do with it, not just in terms of gold and silver and jewels and furnishings and all that, and slaves, which they can sell or keep, but also captives that they can then sell back to their families, to the Persian families, for a massive amount of money. So, booty and wealth is also a very important factor for continuing the war. They get a lot out of it. 

So, what we now know as the Delian League, Athens is in charge because they've been invited, but how is that supposed to work in real terms? What were they actually being invited to do and how did they decide to run it? 

So, they, at the beginning, they continue the war against Persia. That's why they are a league that pretty much is the same as a league that fought the Persians. The Persians were, with some exception, the Spartans, for example, and the Allies. So, they work as an open assembly with Athens as the leader. That's how it would work. By the time they swear to become the new league to continue the war, they have various institutions in place. Now, a problem with the sources here. The narrative, as we said, the so-called 50-year narrative, we have it mostly from the greatest historian of all times, Thucydides, but it's a very condensed narrative. For those 50 years, 478, 431, so the early years, especially the early years of the Athenian Empire, we have a lot of gaps on how it works and a lot of these gaps are filled by later historians with kind of retrospective narratives. So, it's quite difficult to know exactly what's going on, but I think we can be safe and say that there is certainly assembly of the Allies. Athens is at the top, is the one that basically manages most decisions. 

The headquarters are set on neutral ground on the island of Delos, which is a sacred island and a meeting place of all Ionian Greeks and other Greeks and islander Greeks who go there to celebrate the cult of Apollo and Artemis, so it's a very natural meeting space for the League. And they also decide that in order to make the war happen, they need to set some kind of tribute so that Allies who don't necessarily have a big navy to contribute to the war or a big army to contribute to the war can give money and that money funds the war efforts of the bigger cities that are able to provide the army and the navy. Again, it's very unclear how it happens, but we have stories, and I think we can believe that, that an Athenian, the so-called Aristides the Just, exactly because he was so just, he followed justice here in defining how much money its allies should pay, so Aristides sits down and says how much tribute its allies should contribute in the event that they cannot contribute to the army or navy. And what he said as tribute is basically the main blueprint for the rest of the years of the empire or the Delian League, so throughout its life, for Allies to contribute. 

Now what happens is that initially, a lot of states contribute navy and army, and especially the big states with a lot of navy, which are the three big island states of the Aegean, Lesbos, Chios and Samos, are very proud in contributing a lot of navy. But it seems smaller states contribute navy, but as years go by, and this is very unclear how and why it happens, states start to kind of prefer not to send their men to fight the war, but instead pay money, and it makes for them sense, in the sense that tribute is not necessarily, I mean this is something we can circle back to, it's not necessarily so burdensome. So some states can pay a reasonable amount of essentially taxation and then keep their men back safe to cultivate the feuds and to manage their affairs and to do their commerce and to do their mining and what not. But this has a consequence. It means that as Allies withdraw from sending their men to train and participate in wars, Athenians become more and more adept at training and fighting wars. Their Athenian navy, which was one of the best navies to begin with, becomes the best navy after all that training and money and resources that goes into. And therefore when some Allies decide to revolt against the Athenian rule, they can no longer beat Athens, not only because Athens is so much more powerful and wealthy, but also because their men are no longer essentially trained for war as much as the Athenians. That is what Thucydides tells us, that inevitably this is what happens. The Allies complain about sending men, but that was the beginning of their end because they were no longer trained for warfare and that allowed Athens to exercise more harsh imperial rule over the Allies. 

So the 470s are ending, the cities of Ionia are freed, doesn't look like the Persians are coming back for a third invasion, so the League can be dissolved and we can all go home!

 You'd think, right? And this is what I like to call the inevitability of imperialism. And I hate to make such huge generalisations, but I will make one in that powers that taste the taste of imperialism never ever voluntarily let it go. Never ever. And this is something we all have to think, it's one of the most powerful lessons of history that we can take. I always believe in historical context, in the sense you can't say just like today, so back in the 5th century it's exactly the same, because context, historical context, and even the personality of historical actors plays a role in how things happen. But one of, I think, of the universal rules of history, I have spent a lot of my life thinking about imperialism and how power works, is that a state that has power will never ever give it away voluntarily. 

So by the time Athens has gained, essentially, the power to be given or gain control over what in Greek terms is quite a large area, I mean it's unheard of for Greek standards to have that much influence. Essentially Athens controls the entire Aegean littoral and all its islands, with the exception of Crete and the Peloponnese, but for Greek standards it's just like unbelievable power. And it controls also the resources of that area. And by the time it takes that power and realizes they have the military capability and the economic capability because of tribute and because of their own resources to continue that control over the Aegean, they're not going to give it up. 

And we have the first instances of discontent and the consequences of discontent. Again, we don't know exactly the dates because the narrative is not very precise, but we know that a relatively wealthy island, Naxos, in the 470s, possibly around 472, that's only six years after the Delian League begins, asks not to be part of the revolt, exactly as Alex said, you know, the presence of coming back, sending money, sending manpower, we don't want to be part of this. And the Athenians already in the 470s, right at the very beginning, sent an army and they crushed what they called the revolt of Naxos, Naxos revolted. It's very unclear what they do, but I can't think that was bloodless. I mean, there must have been defeats and deaths and so on, or perhaps surrender. But what they certainly do is that they take the Naxian fleet, Naxos no longer has a fleet, and they take the entire land belonging to the people of Naxos and give it to Athenian settlers. So if you think that in Greek terms, the basis of wealth for a city or for a family or for an individual is agriculture, nine out of ten. I mean, you also have commerce and other activities, but agriculture is a basis for the foundation of wealth. And the Athenians just go in there and take the entire cultivating land from an island and give it to Athenian settlers to cultivate, you realize that they basically reduce that city into absolute poverty. The Naxians may be free and not enslaved. I mean, I don't think that we don't have any narratives of them being sold as slaves as we do for later, crushing of revolts, but they certainly no longer have land to cultivate for themselves. If they do, they cultivate it for the Athenian masters and they have to pay rent. So that's a crushing of a revolt already at the beginning. And it's a very clear testament that Athens is not taking no for an answer. It's just not going to let anyone leave. We have further revolts down the line. 

Seven years later in 465, another big island, big for Greek standards. Okay, remember we are a small island country. Another island in the northern Aegean, Thassos, which also is extremely wealthy because not only is a big island, but it controls chunks of the territory across its islands on the mainland. And part of that territory has the golden mines of Mount Pangeon. So literally they're sitting on a gold mine. And also Thassos is one of the most, one of the biggest exporters of wine, so they have a very strong commerce going on over there. So they're super wealthy in all kinds of accounts. They decide to revolt, that we don't want to pay money to the Athenians. We want to be independent. The Athenians go produce a siege as a response to the revolt. And a couple of months later they defeat the Thasians. And now again, we have the stories of what happened later. We don't hear of them being sold as slaves, although I would think some of them would have been sold as slaves. Perhaps those of the Athenians would consider the leading actors in making the Thasians revolt. But they take their fleet. They destroy the Thasian wars, so no longer Thasos has an opportunity to resist an attack. They take control of the entire area across their islands, so the mountains, basically the gold of Mount Pangeon. And they make Thasians not just pay tribute, but pay huge indemnities of war. Again, it's very difficult to know how much, but perhaps ten times as much tributes as they would have paid before. So again, that's another signal. Thinking of going? Think again. 

Now, I've mentioned two powerful allies revolting. Naxos not so much, but Thasos is certainly powerful. And the later years' revolts that we hear in the 440s are again very powerful cities. That tells us something. The small city-states that were part of the Athenian Empire were very unlikely to revolt. That may have to do with thinking about there is no chance we can actually defeat the Athenians. So that's a negative view. We have no choice in the matter. We just have to stay put. But you can see from a positive view that what the Athenians offer, which is security at sea, the fact that if the invading Athenians are going to do all the fighting, not the small islands and so on, it's a positive view. They're thinking, okay, tribute is not too much to have our head at rest about the whole situation. And the other factor, of course, is one of class. Now I've talked about, like the ancient historians do, that the Thasians decide to revolt, the Naxians decide to revolt, but of course they're not collectively deciding to revolt. Someone instigates a revolt and someone has profit in having the revolt. And we know from later revolts, later accounts, that those who were very eager to revolt from Athens were not the common people, not the demos, not the poor, but actually the rich aristocrats who were in charge of the politics of those cities because those cities on the whole did not have democracies. They had oligarchies that were under the rule of the few. 

So it tells us something that perhaps what we call the popularity of the empire was also something that was divided across class lines. And we can't just talk about popularity as a blanket, but it depended on your class position within that society. And that's why, to bring back the issue of democracy, one of the things that the Athenians do for cities that are revolted is to get rid of the old constitution, whatever it was, in most cases it was not a democracy, and impose democracies. Because as the classical sources tell us, the Athenians knew that if the cities they ruled were under a democratic constitution, it was less likely that they would revolt. In other words, the Athenians knew that if they gave power to the hands of the people, the hands of the people were less likely to cause trouble for the Athenians than if it was under the rule of the rich aristocrats. And why was that? I believe in that if you have politics where people decide, they're on the whole going to decide for their best benefit, on the whole. I mean, there are always exceptions, but on the whole, they're not going to do things against what is their best interest. And obviously, the demos, the poor people of those cities knew that they were better off under a democracy and paying tribute to the Athenians than outside the Athenian Empire, under an oligarchy that would squeeze the resources and sometimes their lives out of them. So I'm sounding very pro-imperialistic here, but as with everything, there are shades of interest and shades of consequences and shades of different developments taking place depending on how you're asking the questions and what you're looking at. 

So very early we can already say there wasn't a one-size-fits-all imperial policy. They were taking context into account and tailoring how they treated each city. 

Indeed, and that is one of the most, I think, important research developments in the history of the Athenian Empire the last ten years, is this emphasis on regionalism of how exactly, as you said, there was no one policy fits all. But both the Athenians and their allies were very adept at negotiating their position depending on regional context and regional dynamics of power. And that's why we can talk about big narratives of the Athenian history, the Athenians do that, the Peloponnesian War and whatnot, but in fact what's happening in the Aegean is a far more complicated story of regional alliances between Athens and various cities, Athens and the elites of those cities, Athens and democratic leaders of those cities, those cities with other cities, a much more a much richer tapestry than say a narrative that just focuses on key political performers, Pericles, my pet hate, and key battles. 

So we've talked about the Delian League and it being based on the Holy Island of Delos, which is pretty central in the Aegean. That's significant, right, but it doesn't stay there. What happens? 

Now this is the year of 454 when the headquarters of the Delian League moved from the island of Delos to Athens. And for many that year is the kind of watershed moment of transformation from a league to a far harsher the Athenian Empire, even though I'm not one of those who believe that, because as I said, harsh imperial rules already starts from the 470s and 460s. It's not a gradual development, but a very harsh reality from the very start. But what happens in 454 is that the Athenians decide to transfer the treasury from Delos to Athens. And that has two I would say important consequences. One is the practicum. By taking the headquarters of Delos, what they do is that they take the treasury that is the money of the league from Delos to Athens. So obviously the money was theirs because they were managing it. I mean, the officials who are managing the tribute are called Greek treasurers, but in fact are Athenian officials. It's a bit of like I don't know, a Frankenstein name. It's not, you know, they're not Greek officials, they're Athenian officials. But even though they're managing it, the money is on Delos. By moving it to Athens, suddenly they have absolute control. They can just go in and do whatever they want with it. And in fact, one of the reasons why the Athenians decide to go through that massive building program that resulted in the Parthenon and the Acropolis, as we know it, is exactly to build a temple so that they could house the treasury that they brought from Delos, along with all the other treasurers that they have that belong to the gods. So that's a very practical issue. Athens is now in absolute control of the finances of the empire, and they're not anymore on neutral ground. They're just saying, hey, we're taking it in Athens. Why? Because we can. 

I mean, one of the narratives, and I can explain that, is that actually a couple of years before 454, they have sent a massive force to Egypt to help the local satrap, the local leader there, to revolt against Persian rule. And of course the Persians defeat the Athenians and the Egyptians, and the Athenians suffer a massive disaster. So they're suddenly paranoid that since they've lost a large chunk of their navy, perhaps more than half of their navy in a single expedition, that the Persians might find the opportunity to go to Delos, which is unfortified and still the money. That doesn't happen, but again, the Athenians don't know that. So they say, okay, we're bringing it to safekeeping in Athens because, you know, in Athens they're behind the walls. 

So they do have a practical consideration, but it's also a huge imperial testament. So the practical considerations, they have control of the money, but there is also a very big symbolic impact of the act of moving the treasury from Delos to Athens. And that is that now Athens is telling everyone, we no longer need to have neutral ground, it's no longer the Delian League, I mean, they don't call it a Delian League, we call it a Delian League, but it's no longer a league with headquarters on the neutral space belonging to the gods. It's actually an Athenian rule over the allies. Suck it, people. And indeed, that's what the people do, they just suck it, because there's nothing they can do. 

There are some instances, we hear of revolts at a very difficult to date, but perhaps they take place in the 450s, or not just exactly revolts, but some island states and some Ionian states refuse to pay the tribute, it seems, we're not certain. It seems they refuse to pay the tribute, and it seems that this is linked with dissatisfaction about the move, but whatever dissatisfaction there is, that soon disappears and business continues as usual for the Athenians that now actually have now the entire empire under a much tighter control. But here is the wonderful thing, and I'm going to jump before Alex asks a question, is that 454 marks a very important turning point for us, because from 454, we actually have the evidence to know how the league is working. So I said how we don't really know much about the early years of the league, the shock of 50 years, but from 454, what the Athenians do, and it's fantastic for us as historians, is we decide to inscribe on big slabs of stone on inscriptions, marble, on marble stone inscriptions, the amount of tribute that reaches Athens and is dedicated to the patron deity of Athens, goddess Athena. That the Athenians call aparche, it means a gift, a portion, because as I said, this is a sacred money that belongs to the goddess, to goddess Athena. But for us, because we inscribe this on stone, we get the name of the ally, normally the city, and the amount that goes to the goddess. And if we multiply that by 60, because we know the upper parche is the one sixtieth of the tribute, then we get the name and the number, we multiply this by 60, and we get how much tribute each ally pays. And that is a fantastic resource for us, because we have this on a yearly basis, year after year after year, the Athenians inscribe this on stone, and set it up on the Acropolis for everyone to see, because it's a gift to the god, this is a sacred money. So we can reconstruct how much tribute each one pays, and by 454, pretty much everyone pays tribute, no one other than Samos, Lesbos and Chios contributes ships, everyone pays tribute. And we can see the economic power of these cities, because tribute was on the whole linked with economic capability of each allied city. So if you were a rich city, because of agriculture land, because of marble quarries, because of gold mines or whatever, then you would pay higher tribute than if you didn't. And this is fantastic, I keep going on about this, not just because this is what I've been studying for the past 35 years, but also because it's a unique source for the Greek world, we notoriously lack hard figures for the ancient world, and we notoriously lack hard figures for the Greek world, we have more on the Roman side, because they were more eager on taxation and demography and the rest. But for the Greek world we have pretty much nothing, we have very few, a handful of numbers for the whole of the 5th century. 

Suddenly, from 454 down, we have a yearly account of how much it pays and how it reaches Athens. And suddenly we can see the inner workings of empire. And then we can reconstruct how much money is being spent, how much they're receiving, and it's actually a lot. And that is one of the reasons why Athens becomes a powerful city, it becomes over the second half of the 5th century, because it gets quite a lot of money from tribute, from how many allies, anything between 250, 500 entries per year send tribute to Athens. 

It's a lot, it is a lot. 

It's a lot. We've gone over these lists in detail. 

Yeah, we did! So let's talk about how much cash this really means then. What are they able to buy per year with what they're getting? 

Alright, I over-reface how much we know, and now I can start with the uncertainties. The lists are very fragmentary. We have very few complete lists. And we don't have every single year. I mean the lists go down to the 420s, and then they kind of disappear, we don't have the fragments. And at 414, the Athenians decide to change, to replace the tribute system with a system of port taxation, which doesn't work, but that's a different story. So we know how much money comes, but it doesn't necessarily always add up from the lists. The historians tell us, and that's a number we see repeated in two or three different accounts, is that the Athenians received 460 talents of tribute per year from the allies. Now let's cut this down. Talent is a measurement of silver, of weight of silver. One talent is 6,000 drachmas. One drachma is the daily payment of a skilled labourer, say, an architect, as we know from accounts from the Parthenon and elsewhere. Some architects take two drachmas, but a lot of them take one drachma. So say, I don't know how much a skilled person will gain today, but that's the equivalent, a daily wage. Half a drachma is the daily wage of an unskilled labourer. So by 6,000 drachmas, we're talking about 6,000 daily wages of a skilled labourer or 12,000 daily wages of an unskilled labourer. If you think there are about 250 days a year, if it's 12,000 drachmas and you have 250 per year, that's four. And we should clarify 250 working days, because festival days were a day off. I'm thinking about weekly wages. 50 years' wages. 

That's a lot. 

460 talents a year. One talent, as I said, is 50 years' payment of an unskilled labourer. So if they get 460, you get a grip of how much money we're talking about. It would have been hundreds of thousands, if not millions, in today's money. And they get that every year. What that does is pay for various things. Now, we don't know directly what the tribute pays. But what we know is that the Athenians get the tribute and they can use it for whatever thing they do. So, for example, we know that the tribute is paid for the wages of those who fight wars, because those who fight wars, of course, are paid daily wages. Both the people who pull the oars in the trireme, the military warship of the Athenians, but also the hoplites that are on board the trireme and actually fight the land warfare. So expeditions actually cost a lot of money. So the tribute pays for that. And what that means is that if the Athenians went on war, they would have to pay that out of their own pocket. So by using tribute to pay for this kind of expeditions of warfare, it basically frees their internal resources, which are already quite considerable because, parenthesis, the Athenians have in their land the silver mines of Laurion, which are, which were in antiquity. They're extinct. They don't have any silver left anymore. But in antiquity, there were the richest silver deposits on the whole planet. So the silver mines in the territory of Attica are the richest silver deposits that have ever been found on our entire planet. They're incredibly rich, the Athenians, because they're basically sitting on the goose that lays a silver egg, right? The golden eggs. They can just pump up money with no consequence. I mean, they pay a bit for the extraction of the silver, but still, you know, like they just have incredible amounts of silver. So it frees, a tribute frees their own resources to do whatever they want with them. 

One of the things that they do is the building program, right? They build these extremely lavish temples. They have a golden ivory statue for the goddess Athena, the Parthenon, the virgin Athena, the Parthenon inside the Parthenon, and so on. They can also expand their radical democracy by reducing wages for various officials. So whereas in the past, if you wanted to be to participate in the law courts, because of course the law courts had judges just taken by lot from the everyday Athenians, from the kind of people of the assembly. But if you had to work for a living, then you couldn't go and sit in a courthouse all day, because who would, you know, who would earn money for you to survive, you and your family to survive. The Athenians introduce wages so that people can go and sit at the law courts and therefore participate directly in the Athenian assembly without losing their wages. So they expand their radical democracy because they have the internal resources to do that, and they have the internal resources to do that because a tribute is covering the other expenses. So it's a very elaborate balance sheet mechanism, but tribute does make a difference on the Athenian finances. 

So, we've mentioned that they were building up ships. How much does a ship cost? 

We know tribute pays for the wages of the crews and the hoplites and the rest. Now, you asked how much does it cost to build a ship, because the real power of Athens is the navy, it's not the land army. Now, a triad, which is the amazing warship of the Athenians, costs one talent to build. And that money, you know, for the wood and everything, that money is covered by the state coffers. So that is covered either by tribute or by the silver mines at Laurion and from other kind of income such as import tax that Athens has or booty, you know, all the money they got from the Persians. Now, the other cost, which is another talent, so 6,000 drachmas, is all the bits and pieces other than the wood, so the equipment, the sails, the ropes, the tar, the oars, the weapons, what, you know, everything that goes onto the ship. That, of course, another talent, and that the Athenians have an internal form of taxation that makes the rich pay for it. So basically, the Athenians, they do not have direct taxation, so there is no income tax. But if you're rich, you're expected to pay for various acts. So one of the most expensive acts is the so-called trierarchy to pay for the equipment of a trireme. And the rich Athenians do that because they have no choice. That's radical democracy for you. You can force the rich to pay for whatever it is that you want, and the rich do not have the power to say no. So that's another talent. And finally, one talent is the wages for the crew for a month. 

So you could realistically pump out quite the fleet every single year. 

Yeah, and they do that. I mean, we know they have a 200 trireme fleet, which is massive. It's the biggest that the Greek world knows at the time for the 5th century. They have it. I mean, most of them have a hundred in dock and a hundred active sailing around the Aegean. But in years of war, and there are probably more years of war than there are without war during the 50 years, 478 to 431, they have more than a hundred sailing around with captains, trierarchs, navies, crews, 172 rowers for each trireme. It's quite, quite a lot. And it all costs money. And that's why you need a tribute. And the tribute pays for the navy and the navy supports the empire and it all becomes like a cycle of power, money, radical democracy and imposition of power over allies. 

So the Athenians are taking the money and saying, you give us the money, we will protect you as long as you keep paying up. Each ally, realistically, who is paying? Is it the poor? 

This is another question that we can't really answer. Now, we have very few information because most of the evidence that we have comes from the Imperial Center, it comes from Athens and, you know, like another bracket here of me ranting, but this is, you know, like what most people recognize as the classical Greek world is in fact the culture of classical Athens over that second half of the 5th century. So theater, tragedy, you know, the development of theater with tragedy and comedy, philosophy, Plato later on and so on, the Sophists, Socrates, Plato and eventually Aristotle who comes a bit later. Democracy, the building program, the beautiful temples, all of that that is kind of the unique selling point of classical Greece is a product of a very specific city, Athens, that controls a massive empire and is super wealthy. So it's not exactly typical. So we have the story from the Imperial centre. 

We don't have the story from the allies. We have scraps and pieces of evidence and one of them is a fantastic piece of evidence, one I love, is three fragments of speech delivered by the representatives of an island of the Aegean member of the Athenian Empire called Samothrace that a century later becomes famous for its Samothracean mysteries, but in the 5th century is quite a poor island. That says, we have asked the richest among us to be the collectors. That's all it says. Now these are fragments of a speech written by an Athenian speech writer called Antiphon who was commissioned by the Samothracians to write a speech for them for when they came to Athens to beg for a reduction in the tribute because the Athenians fixed the tribute, but they also had processes where as an ally you could appeal the amount you bring and present your case in the law courts judged by the Athenians and then perhaps they would make the case where you could have a lower tribute. It did happen. Some tribute does go down in some cases. So the Samothracians, we have three fragments of that speech. The Samothracians, one of the fragments says we are a poor and rugged island which means we don't have agricultural land, we're not wealthy. And the other says we asked our richest among us to become the collectors. What does that tell us? It is very possible that the Greeks developed a system of tax farming whereas the tribute that was supposed to be paid to the Athenians was collected at an initial stage by the city and paid, right? And it's very likely that at least in the initial stage it was the rich who paid the tribute because the tribute had to be paid in silver, either silver coins or silver bullion, so uncoined silver, but it had to be paid in silver or some other. We won't go into that. Mostly it had to be paid on silver. And who had silver to pay? Certainly not the poor. The only people who had silver to pay in the cities were the rich, the ones who had massive agricultural land and could export their products and those who were involved in commerce. So it's very likely that it was the rich who paid the tribute who may or may not have had then systems to recover part of their expenses, part of the tribute from internally the community. But we have no evidence as to how that happened and if that happened. 

We know tax farming were because we have it in later periods, in the Hellenistic period, and we have it in the Roman period as the main process of payment to the Roman state by the provinces. So this statement by Antiphon, we ask the richest among us to become the collectors, means that there might be a system of tax farming. But for me it means that at least initially the rich paid for the tribute. And that may explain why the rich were the ones really, really eager to revolt in any case, even when revolt may mean, as it does happen later on, the execution of all adult males. That happens in the case of Milos, actually not a revolt because they haven't joined, and that happens in the case of Scione, a city in northern Greece, Halkidiki, who revolts. And the Athenians go there and kill all adult males and enslave all women and children. The price is incredibly harsh to pay, and yet there were people who wanted to revolt. 

So we've got these allies paying huge amounts of money. We've seen that the consequences for refusing to pay are harsh. What are the Athenians doing to make sure that they are looking as honest as possible with the money that they're taking in? What are the checks and balances, the accountability and transparency that they're trying to display to keep everyone as amenable as possible? 

I don't think the Athenians are interested at all in accountability and transparency in relation to allies because the money is theirs. On Delos was like, so that, we're taking it to Athens and we're just going to keep it. They are interested in transparency and accountability in relation to their own audience. So the Athenians, because they have a radical democracy, and radical democracy, I would say, if I had to say one line, is the constant fear of the Athenian elite. So the Athenian democracy does whatever it can to control the power of the rich. And to do that, it has very strict processes of transparency and accountability so that no one can steal money, no one can abuse power and so on. They develop very elaborate systems of bureaucracy and law courts exactly to control the elite. Not just the elite, all officials, but the officials are normally, in many cases, part of the elite. I'll mention one example. In another speech, again by Antiphon, we have a very passing remark that said, and remember that year where the entire board of the Hellenic officials, remember these are the ones in charge of managing the tribute payments in Athens, right? Hellenic officials, Hellenic treasurers. Remember that year where the entire board of 10 Hellenic treasurers were put to death? Yeah, that happened because it was a kind of balancing error, and the Athenians thought these people have stolen some money from the tribute, so they executed all of them, the entire board, until the next year they found it was a balance error and these people have not stolen any money. But I ask you this, okay, 10 people died, but would anyone actually steal after that? I find that very, very unlikely. So they have a very, very brutal system of accountability and transparency to just manage their own affairs. And that's why they record things on stone and that's why they produce documents on how to manage the tribute and the tribute collection and the tribute dispersal and that the tribute, we know this from descriptions, has to be put in bags and sealed with the official seal before dispatch, so when it reaches Athens the officials bring it and open it in front of the assembly so they're not opening it in the back office and then put a handful of the coins in the pockets. It has to be opened and counted in front of the assembly and so on and so on. 

They're really concerned about transparency and accountability, but for their own internal audience and of course for the audience of the gods when it comes to the apartheid, the sacred money of the tribute that goes to the goddess Athena. That they care what the allies think. I don't think they're that bothered, but they do produce a series of documents, very important documents for us, inscriptions that record in excruciating, as you remember Alex because she had to do it for her exams in excruciating detail, exactly how tribute is collected, put into bags, the seals, so that no one can turn around and say, you know, don't get my tribute, the house flooded and the tribute fell down the sink and then I lost the tribute. None of that. It's all very, very tight so that the money comes to Athens. But it's not because they care what the allies think. I don't think so. 

Athens is clearly getting greedy, it's getting power hungry. I think the 5th century, if we talk about major events, everyone thinks Peloponnesian Wars, are the Athenian imperial policies a catalyst for the Peloponnesian Wars kicking off? 

Yes. The ultimatum issued by the Spartans, which kick-started the Peloponnesian War, was what Athens was doing in relation to various allies. Now we can discuss whether that was Spartan true intentions or whatever, but certainly the Athenian power was one of the reasons why Spartan declared the war. Not, I would say, for necessarily good reasons. When they get in charge of the Greek world after the Athenian defeat in 404 at the end of the Peloponnesian War, their rule is even harsher than the Athenians. So it's not a matter of good nature and good motives, but it is the Athenian Empire that is ultimately the reason behind the Peloponnesian War. But it's not just the beginning of the Peloponnesian War. Possibly the biggest turning point of the war is the middle phase of the war, the so-called Sicilian expedition, when the Athenians in 415, when there is a lull in the war, they have signed a peace treaty in 421 and things are quiet and not much is happening. The Athenians in 415 decide to send a massive expedition to Sicily to help one of the cities there in their war against the big kind of beef in Sicily at the time, Syracuse. And of course the expedition goes there and they send more ships, more troops later on because it's not going very well. And they stay there for two years and it all ends in complete disaster when the Syracusans with their allies, which includes Spartan generals and the enemies in the Peloponnesian War back in Athens, manage to defeat the Athenians, destroy the fleet and essentially prison or kill the entire Athenian army and its allies. That is a turning point because power of Athens slips away after that. The Sicilian disaster takes place in 413 and Athens manages to fight for another nine years, which shows how incredibly the resources were for the Athenians with the fleet gone, their built a fleet, their manpower gone and so on. They still continue to fight. But it was imperial ambitions that basically were the beginning of the downfall of Athens. This is what I call the instability of imperialism. You already control the entire Aegean. You've just managed through sheer luck to end the war with Sparta through the peace treaty in 421 just because you were lucky enough to capture 200 Spartan captives. Never happened before. So you can negotiate whatever you want. And what do you do? You just say, oh I'll just sail halfway around the world to go destroy this city. What were they thinking? What were they thinking is imperialism. Imperialism is never satisfied. It never says, oh that's enough. It always as a mechanism goes for more. And that is the downfall of Athens. That it went halfway across the world to an incredibly powerful city, Syracuse. It was in many ways the anti-Athens and got defeated. 

So while the Peloponnesian war is going on, it's possibly not going quite as well as Athens might have hoped that it would go. Can we see them taking out their frustrations on the Allies, turning the screws, trying to bleed them even drier? 

Certainly Athens tries to increase tribute as much as it can over the years. We have inscriptions that record the increase in tribute and one of it says because of the war and that's the Peloponnesian war. We also have a very brutal episode of the war taking place just before the Athenians send the expedition to Sicily during the same summer in 415. And that is a very famous episode. It's the episode of the destruction of the island of Milos because Thucydides, who is writing of course the history of the war, writes a very bizarre section in his history, the so-called Melian dialogue, which is a dialogue between anonymous Athenians who says Athenians and Melians. Normally when Thucydides has speeches he gives the speaker's name and it's someone we know, we don't know, but here he anonymizes the interlocutors exactly because he wants to highlight the kind of philosophical and universal value of this discussion. Now I'm saying it is very famous because it's a discourse on the concept of power and the abuse of power. And as such it has been used by diplomats and international relations theorists. I think recently it was used by the president of Canada to discuss a US policy, made a reference to the Melian dialogue. It's a very famous piece of rhetoric. It has sections such as the weak suffer what they must. I mean it questions the whole concept of power relations. And it's written on the base of a historical episode. I mean we don't know if this dialogue actually took place. There were certainly negotiations between the Melian oligarchs who were in charge of the city of Milos and the Athenian general who said be part of the empire because Milos is independent at that stage. Be part of the empire, come with us, pay tribute. I mean they're just saying be a member and pay tribute. And the Melians say no we will not because we want to maintain our independence. And the Athenians say if you do not we will kill you all. And the Melians say we will hope to gods that they won't let us suffer this horrible fate. What happens is they do suffer the horrible fate. Milos falls after some months of siege, of Athenian siege and the Athenians kill all the adult males and sell all the women and children into slavery and get hold of the land they give it to Athenian cleruchs. It's a truly brutal, brutal episode of as harsh imperialism as it goes. But this is the interesting thing. The Athenians are the perpetrators. They are the ones who decide to impose this brutal act on the island of Milos. 

But the Melians who Thucydides says are oligarchs are also to blame because the price of joining the empire was not that harsh. It was just paying tribute and being members of the empire. So why were they not doing it? And Thucydides has the Athenians say at some point, well, we're meeting you here, you guys, you government of the Melians, behind closed doors because we know that if you let us speak in front of your assembly, we would convince them to join us and surrender. But you don't want that and you just want to have the secret negotiations. They say, yeah, that's what it is. So the Melian oligarchs are also to blame. It's a very, very complicated narrative of power on the one hand imperialism, of course, and the brutal nature of rule. No choices offered to the island. Be with us or you die. There's no middle ground. But of course it also has a comment. It comments on the nature of power within the city and how the oligarchs would rather have everyone killed than actually give some of the power over to perhaps a different kind of constitution that the Athenians would have imposed. 

They also got defeated in the Peloponnesian War itself. How? They've got this huge navy, they've got all of these allies that they can click their fingers and say, send us ships, send us money, send us men if you need to. How is it that they're not able to win against Sparta? 

Well, first of all, because they suffered a massive defeat in Sicily. Secondly, because Sparta goes to Persia, who's been sitting in the dark line so far and just watching out to see how the war is going to turn out. Because Persia, what it's interested in is of course regaining the lost territories of Asia Minor, the tribute of the Greeks there, which included very important cities and of course the navy that these Greek cities would contribute to Persia. Persia is not really interested in invading Greece that much as regaining the power that they had over modern Turkey. So the Spartans, realizing they cannot defeat Athens with their own resources, mostly because they don't have an equivalent navy. I mean, their allies is Corinth, and Corinth has a powerful navy, but not at the same level as Athens at this stage. So the Spartans, who remember are the ones who defeated the Persians in the Persian War, goes to Persia, asks for money, builds a fleet, and finally defeats Athens at sea. And that's how Athens loses. They've extended the power in Sicily, Sparta got money and built a navy, and thirdly, Athens doesn't control the empire anymore to the same extent, because after the Sicilian disaster, word spreads out into the allies, and lots of allies, especially the big allies, begin to vote, because now they know, or they recognize that Athens won't be in a position to crush them in the way that they did before. So you have those three factors taking place, and Athens loses the war after a very protracted siege, where they finally, even with their fleet destroyed in the Battle of Aegospotami, where the entire fleet gets destroyed, they still try and negotiate to keep their navy in the walls, and of course Sparta doesn't accept that, Athens surrenders, and Sparta destroys the walls, or part of the walls, to the music of flute girls, Xenophon tells us. So they made a performance out of the symbolic destruction of Athenian walls. Sparta destroys, gets hold of the fleet, destroys part of the walls, and of course, this is the other thing, this is where the ideological dimension of the war plays out, Sparta imposes a very, very strict oligarchy on Athens, the so-called thirty tyrants. I'm going to ask a question now. 

We've seen that the Sicilian expedition and the massive failure there had a knock-on effect of allies saying, oh wait a minute, they are beatable. On the other hand, we've also seen that Sparta couldn't beat them until they begged Persia for some money. So if Persia hadn't have got involved, would Sparta and their allies have been able to defeat the empire? 

Those 'if' questions are really, really tough. Did it have to be a perfect storm of all of those things happening at once, the planets aligning? I think, you know, the planets have to align, but on the other hand, people have argued, what you're asking has obviously occupied historians for decades, if not centuries. And those people who have said, eventually Athens would have been worn out because also the Sparta military machine was so great, so unbeatable by the fifth century, that, you know, it's just attrition would have got to the Athenians and they would have lost. What these people don't actually get is, as I said, the silver mines of Laurion, the single richest deposit of silver the world has ever known. We always knew that silver mines of Laurion were rich, but I think I had to go and listen to a geologist speak and say those exact words for me, for the penny to drop and realize what the Athenians were sitting on. So I find it very difficult to believe that Athens would have lost had the Sicilian expedition not happened and had Sparta not got Persian money. We would probably end up, have ended up seeing something along the lines of a hundred years' war of just war going on and on and on and nothing being resolved. But of course it was resolved and Athens lost and Sparta tried to kind of create its own mini empire. They gave Asia Minor to the Persians because that was the agreement, but they kept the kind of continental side of the allies. But their rule was so harsh that it only lasted for ten years until the Greeks started to revolt against Sparta and asked Athens to lead an army to defeat the Spartan rule so they would regain their independence. So the imperialism, Athenian imperialism ends in 404 with the defeat of Athens, but the dream of Athenian imperialism survives throughout the fourth century, whereas Athens at various instances tries to recreate contexts of imperial power, but of course not at the same scale. But they can't do it. They're all worn out, Persia is playing up and then of course here enters Macedon with Philip II, the king of Macedon and Alexander the Great's father and then Alexander the Great and that creates a whole new story for the Greek world. 

So democracy and empire are developing at the same time. Do they rely on each other for their survival? 

I think so. For two reasons. One is, as I said, the financial one. The tribute creates enough internal resources for the Athenians to decide to invest them onto promoting democracy by introducing wages for various officials and therefore allowing the lower classes to participate in power. But also through the confidence that is installed in the Athenian citizen body. What do I mean by that? The backbone of Athenian military power is seapower, is the triremes. And the triremes have to have rowers who all come from the lowest class, they are the poor. If these people become the machine behind Athenian imperialism, then they also get the power to ask and demand for more power within their cities. And the upper classes who owned the whole until the 470s controlled the political situation in Athens. It was named democracy, but it wasn't radical democracy as we've already said. Because they also benefit from the empire that rather have radical democracy at home and keep the empire, than not have radical democracy and not have the empire because then you wouldn't have the fleet necessarily working. So that's a sacrifice. The loss of political power for the rich is a sacrifice they do because they get so much out of having the empire in terms of economic benefits and power. 

And for the allies, we've heard about revolts and massacres, but we've also heard that Sparta was worse. If you could sum up, which is difficult because we also have heard that they didn't have a one size fits all policy, should we consider this a hostile empire? Were they quite benevolent? Were they somewhere in between? 

I don't think any empire can ever be benevolent. The sheer existence of the threat of power is just, it's a monstrous thing to have. As slavery as an institution is one of the possibly the worst thing that humans have ever dreamt up of doing and they've done it in such a horrific extent. So imperialism is the worst form of political power ever, has ever existed in the world and it's the cause for so many monstrous, truly monstrous events that affect, I hate innocence because, you know, who's not an innocent, affects humans. Imperialism is the opposite of humanity. Athens created and sustained an empire through brutal force. There were benefits for the allies. They had security against Persia. In the cases where the Athenians promoted democracy for the lower classes there, the free lower classes, that is it was probably better living under a democracy than not being under a democracy. But to the other hand the threat of losing your land because someone who voted of living in poverty of you may remember this, I used to teach a class on the balance sheet. Right? You know, benefits for, you know, this and that. But then the more I read about post-imperialism, post-colonial practices, I realized the very concept of the balance sheet is wrong. And it is reproducing the view of the powerful. In a sense, we've, you know, taken all of Indian resources and caused famine but we built roads, right? How much suffering and death and rape and famine can we put on the side for one Parthenon to be built? The whole concept of a balance sheet is inherently wrong and it reproduces discourses of immoral power and imperialism. So even though I am a huge fan of radical democracy and I think I'm an optimist, I think radical democracy exactly because of the huge resources of Athens would have developed, perhaps not as speedily but would have developed in Athens because of other preconditions and so on. I can't see any benefits in having an empire. 

So just because they are not as bad as Sparta on some metric, we shouldn't assume that that means they're benevolent. 

There is nothing benevolent about imperial force. The sheer, I mean we don't have the narratives, we don't have the narratives of their allies, but imagine you know, not necessarily being involved in political discussions in your city and you're sitting behind the walls and you look up and you see one day the Athenian Navy arriving and you think, fuck, they're going to kill us all. And they do! I mean what kind of life is that? Yeah, what kind? No, it's just I mean, to bring it to a happy point, no empire was as awful as the British Empire. I mean that whole levels of awfulness over the longest period of time imaginable up until the 1940s for crying out loud in recent memory, in living memory. They're not as bad, can we say that? Yeah, they're not as bad as the British Empire, but you know, is that a good thing to say? 

Yeah, lesser of two evils is still evil. 

It's like slavery, yeah, I mean some master treated the slaves well, yeah, but it's slavery, right? There is nothing good about slavery. There's nothing good about empire. 

So let's dig into sources. Herodotus finishes his histories just after the Persian invasion, second Persian invasion, but he's writing it in the heyday of the empire. Can we see him dotting in any spoilers, any hints at what he thinks the Athenian Empire is going to become as he sees it? 

At the heart of Herodotus' narrative is a concern about the morality of power and the role of morality of human actors and destiny in relation to power. So of course when he's writing at the height of the Athenian Empire and he's talking about the fall of a mighty empire, the fall in terms of warfare achievements, Persia, I think his eye is looking forward to what's happening in Athens, and that's why we used to think that Herodotus is just a mismatched narrative of various different historical episodes that have very little connecting glue between them, but now recent work has recognized how much more Herodotus is an achieved whole, and each episode, each fantastic story that he has, actually has a moral tale to say and actually is indispensable for the largest rich tapestry that Herodotus produces in terms of how power works. At the end of his stories he has a dialogue between Cyrus the Great, the first king of Persia, the founder of the Persian kingdom and his advisors, and he says there, rich lands make for soft people, and if you want to have, to keep on your power, you have to stay in rugged land. That is, of course, a narrative about how Persia went on to become this huge empire and it became soft, it's a narrative about East being soft and West being, you know, West being the greats, being, you know, masculine and manly and hard, and East obviously being, you know, soft and womanly, and therefore losing the war, but it's also a comment, we now think, about how Athens is going to lose its power exactly because it's become so wealthy and soft. So Herodotus, he's not just interested in narratives of power, he does have very specific comments aimed at Athenian imperialism, we think, and I think. 

What about Thucydides? Because we see him mostly as a military historian, I suppose, but he is again, he's living through the Peloponnesian War, he's living in the Athenian empire in Athens. What does he say in his histories about Athenian imperialism? Is he seeing it as a net positive?

 Thucydides is another historian whose narratives are permeated by considerations about power. I mean, he tells us right at the start that, you know, I am interested in understanding how Athens, at the height of its power, lost that power, so lost the Peloponnesian War. He's really, he's trying to show for him an enigma, a riddle, of how do you lose power? And in order to do that, he produces various different interpretations, including the role of the individual, you know, he doesn't like democracy because he thinks that democracy and the rule of the mob essentially, you know, was responsible for the series of wrong decisions, such as the Sicilian Expedition. So he blames that for the fall of Athens, as indeed I did, because I'm following Thucydides in that. So he's also trying to understand what happened there. Now, he sees power as an inevitable reality. So he's less of a moralist than Herodotus, in that I think Herodotus sees power as inherently wrong, and one, if you have too much power, the fates will hunt you down and divine retribution will destroy you. Thucydides thinks that power is expedient. You have to have power because if you don't, someone else will and you'll be oppressed. So the best thing that can happen, and that's essentially what he puts in the mouth of Pericles in the famous funeral oration, the glorification of Athens, this kind of glory of Athens narrative, first speech, is that you have to have power so you are on top, so you're not under anyone else's thumb. And that's how he sees it. 

He sees wrong decisions, he suddenly condemns extreme acts of violence. With a Melian Dialogue, he's very, very dry in how he conveys the outcome, and then he says, and in the following summer, the Athenians resolved the cease and killed every single adult man and told every woman and child to do slavery. Two lines, and he just creates such a horror, you know. He's very, very dry about this. So he condemns extreme acts of violence, but he sees the necessity of war and he doesn't condemn imperialism, he doesn't. 

Let's talk about historiography. How has scholarly thought on the Athenian empire, its rise and fall, changed over the decades? 

So this is something I'm acutely interested in, because I'm currently writing a book called The Athenian Empire, which is going to be a new history of that phenomenon, and by doing that, it's going to be a new history of the 5th century Greek world. So I am interested in differentiations of regionalism and how no one size fits all, but how you have different processes of regional control and how a lot of the power exercised within the empire is a product of very active negotiations. So I want to put the agency of the allies back onto the center narrative. I wanted this to be a story not so much of the Athenian imperial center, where most of our sources come from, but also of the allies, with as much as we can recover from our inscriptions mostly, and very fragmentary sources. That's one. I also want to talk about gendered experience to the extent that we can. Of course, writing about gendered experience in ancient imperialism is still something that doesn't happen very often, and I think I have enough narratives and episodes to be able to talk about gender aspects of imperial control. That would be a new development, and certainly the other thing that has happened is that the whole kind of traditional narrative of a very gradual shift from Benevolent League to Delian to Athenian Empire has shifted now, and I don't think I'm the only person who actually thinks that imperialism starts very early and it just continues. The other thing I would add is that talking about intentions is always wrong. I mean, whatever the intentions are, it doesn't really matter, because what matters is the result. It doesn't matter what Athenians intended to do or what the Allies intended to do. What matters is what actually happened and what consequences it had for the lives of the people living in the Aegean Sea. So that would be another aspect. I've lost count of how many aspects I've said. The other thing I would do, I'm planning to do, and that again is built on current developments in scholarship, is talk about the long duration of the Empire. So I started by saying this is a very short historical episode, 478-404, but in fact it has predecessors and it has an afterlife. And for me, placing the history of the Empire not as a kind of unique phenomenon in the history of the Greek world. It is unique is that it's the first time a Greek power has control over such a large state, such a large space, tribute paid to Greeks, regular annual tributes again, first time it happens in history and so on. So various things that happen for the first time. But to the other hand, in order to understand the Empire, we have to place it as a continuation of previous historical phenomena that take place in the 6th century. It has very long kind of roots and a very long afterlife. So it's a longer history than just the 5th century. 

Thank you so much for coming onto the show and talking about Athenian imperialism, my favourite module of my undergrad! 

Well, thank you for allowing me to talk about this. It was easier than I thought. I thought I was going to forget stuff, but it's so deeply ingrained. As I said, 35 years now and counting. I've been thinking about this. Yeah. 

A huge thank you to the mighty Christy Constantakopoulou for coming onto Ancient History 101 and lending her expertise to this fascinating topic. I hope you enjoyed chatting with her as much as I did. And I'm definitely going to be inviting Christy back for more.