About this episode

Misha Glenny and guests discuss the origins and evolution of the Delian League and its impact on classical geopolitics.

Misha Glenny and guests discuss the origins and evolution of an alliance which transformed the geopolitics of the classical world: the Delian League. Since the start of the 5th Century BCE, city states across Greece had been fighting a series of armed conflicts in the Greco-Persian Wars. After the defeat of a second Persian invasion in 478 BCE, a league of cities across Greece came together and formed a new alliance led by Athens. That alliance is now known as the Delian League, after the island of Delos where it was established. In the following decades, Athens used the Delian League to grow its own wealth and formidable naval power. Cities which tried to leave the alliance found themselves violently put down and their lands confiscated by the Athenians. What had begun as a cooperative alliance sworn to resist the Persian Empire gradually started to seem like it may have created another imperial power: the Athenian Empire. With Leah Lazar Lecturer in Hellenistic Culture at the University of Manchester Polly Low Professor in the Department of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Durham And Paul Cartledge AG Leventis Senior Research Fellow of Clare College, University…

People in this episode

Host: Melvyn Bragg

Guests: Misha Glenny, Leah Lazar, Polly Low, Paul Cartledge

Topics covered

• Delian League
• Athenian Empire
• Greco-Persian Wars
• classical geopolitics
• ancient alliances

Keywords

• Delian League
• Athenian Empire
• Greece
• classical world
• city states
• Persian Empire
• naval power

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: University of Manchester, University of Durham, Clare College, University of Cambridge

Books & works: The Birds and Other Plays, The Parthenon

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