Ep. 042 – The Delian League v. Persia: Eurymedon

Now that we have witnessed the birth of the Delian League, in today's episode we trace their exploits in the 470s BCE. The league does a good job landing more blows against the Persian Empire, but at the same time they begin to more strongly resemble an empire, and some league members are not amused. A new military leader named Cimon emerges to lead the Delian League. He suppresses some piracy, and his trireme fleet is overhauled to more better suit their campaign objectives. We consider all of this, and more, as the Delian League's navy expands and then defeats a Persian fleet at the Battle of Eurymedon River.

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Episode Transcript

Introduction

Last episode we outlined the institution that is most often called the Delian League. After Persia’s second invasion failed, Greece had some breathing room to rebuild Athens, and to reexamine some of the ways that the city-states related to one another. Athens had emerged as the naval power, while Sparta had done her duty to lead the Hellenic League in their defense against Persia. But, once the dust settled, Sparta’s unique political structure led her to withdraw from that league, giving Athens room to seize the reins. The Delian League emerged, and with this institution Athens was able to steer the foreign policy of the Aegean city-states.

Last time we also outlined the differences between the Peloponnesian League, the Hellenic League, and then the Delian League, which I think was important and useful to do. We do need to keep in mind that this summary and comparison is just high-level, though, and today we are going to zoom in a bit to see how the Delian League interacted with the events that immediately followed the Persian withdrawal. At a one-to-one scale they were perhaps not immediate, but with the expanding scale of history as a factor, the decade following Salamis was not really all that long of a time span.

Themistocles v. Cimon

We paused the clock right around 478/477 BCE last time, which is not too far removed from the aftermath of the allied Greek victories at Plataea and Mycale which saw the Persians driven back. We discussed in depth how many Greek expected a quick Persian retaliation, and while Sparta was hesitant to remain in her role as the hegemon of the Greek alliance, Athens was not so gun-shy. Although domestic Athenian politics pumped the brakes enough so that Themistocles could not lead the huge offensive that he is said to have desired, once Ionian cities requested assistance, Athens obliged nicely and some other events combined to leave Athens as the only remaining hegemon with influence in the Aegean and the areas occupied by the eastern Greek cities.

Thus, the Delian League was born.

While the league was formally created on the island of Delos, which is where the treasury was also housed at first, the obvious driving force was Athens and her leadership. We really haven’t said the name ‘Themistocles’ since last series, and while we did follow his thread through to its conclusion, it bears mention here that in 477 he was still in Athens and was still a political leader, although he was not really in military leadership anymore at this point.

Themistocles was a man famously wily, ambitious, and driven; he was also able to win the affections and support of what we might today call the poor and working classes of Athens. It’s for this that some historians call Themistocles a populist, and I suppose the label does fit, although there is so much more going on besides just that simple label. 

Nevertheless, after the war had ended, and Themistocles was back in domestic politics without the distraction of military glory to prop up his name and legacy, things began to sour a bit. He’d been famous for so long, that some of the working class who had once supported him, had by then grown tired of hearing his name repeated. That’s how the story goes, anyways. He made some choices that did not help his reputation either, for that matter, but in the end it became clear that some of the conservative factions in Athenian politics had it in for the once-great Themistocles. Sparta of course supported some of these conservative politicians behind the scenes, because that had no love lost for Themistocles either.

And it’s here that a man named Cimon enters the stage. Cimon was the son of the Athenian general Miltiades, who had won fame because of his tactical engineering of Greek victory at the Battle of Marathon during the first Persian invasion of Greece. Miltiades had been a tyrant at an Athenian colony and then when Persia invaded he had served as a vassal to the Persian king for several years before he and his family fled to Athens. As such, Miltiades was decidedly conservative in the context of ancient Athenian politics; he was not thrilled about the rapid democratic reforms that had taken Athens by storm and that had put good old-fashioned tyranny out of fashion.

Miltiades ended his career, and his life really, in a naval expedition against the Greek Cycladic island of Paros in 489 BCE. This was well before the second Persian invasion, but it is relevant. After Marathon he was apparently so popular that as Herodotus tells it “the Athenians were thrilled to grant his request when he asked them for 70 ships, an army, and some money, without revealing against what country he would lead these forces.”

He sailed for the island of Paros to carry out what was basically a personal vendetta, although he tried to excuse it by saying the island had medized during the Persian invasion. He tried to extort them by laying seige to the city but failed. He injured himself during the siege and when he returned to Athens empty-handed, the true motive of his foray to Paros came out. He was sentenced to death for having deceived Athens, and although that sentence was not carried out, he died from gangrene that had developed in the wound he sustained in the end. Basically then, a hero in Athens died an ignoble death after having tarnished his reputation.

That outcome obviously impacted   his son Cimon and made it more difficult for him to open doors and all that. The sentence against his father had included some hefty fines which were passed down to Cimon, so there as well he started his career in the hole, so to speak. He followed in his father’s conservative views, and before long, he developed a reputation as acting more like a Spartan than an Athenian in some ways. Plutarch says that “he lacked entirely the Attic cleverness and fluency of speech; in his outward bearing there was much nobility and truthfulness, and the fashion of the man’s spirit was rather Peloponnesian, ‘plain unadorned, and in a great crisis brave and true.”

These qualities will come into focus again later, but it is a good marker for us to get a sense of how he differed from Themistocles, especially. Now some of the conservative land-owning clans in Athens worked their schemes in such a way that in 476 BCE, Themistocles was ostracized. We know the ending to his life story so I won’t rehash it today. 

Right in this same timeframe, when the Delian League is in its infancy, Cimon was elected to be the league’s main commander, and it is here, in the military and naval side of matters, that Cimon truly distinguishes himself and comes into his own as the next big thing in Athens.

It’s perhaps not surprising that he has military skills, as he did come up in the events surrounding the Battle of Salamis, although I can’t recall if we discussed his role back in prior episodes. In short, he was of the landed class and was fighting as part of the cavalry forces during the Second Persian Invasion. However, when the debate raged between Themistocles who was pushing for the stand against Persia to take place at Salamis where ships and close confines could be the advantage, vs. those who wanted to fight at the Isthmus, it was written that Cimon was the first to understand that Themistocles’ proposal was the winning proposal.

Cimon is said to have led a band of men up to the Acropolis, where he dedicated his horses’s bridle to a goddess, symbolizing that he understood that what the “city needed then was not knightly prowess but sea-fighters.”

He then displayed heroism during the battle itself, we can only surmise that he did so on board a ship somewhere amidst the melee.

Delian League Militarism in the 470s BCE

And it’s now with Themistocles off the scene and with a tested commander leading the Delian League in the Aegean, that we turn to a consideration of the League’s military exploits in the 470s BCE.

A lot of the source material for this time frame comes from Thucydides and is not really mentioned elsewhere, I want to note. His first book is known informally as the Pentecontaetia, which means “period of fifty years” in the Greek language. It’s called this because Thucydides’ first book in his history of the Peloponnesian War outlines the events of the period that came between the second Persian invasion of Greece, ending in 479 BCE, and the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War as it’s formally defined, which happened in 431 BCE. These roughly 50 years are not described in very great depth elsewhere in ancient history, so we owe a debt to Thucydides for his focus on the timeframe. It would of course be nice to have some additional perspectives, but here we don’t have that luxury.

So then, the upshot is that early in the life of the Delian League, Cimon becomes the military commander. Themistocles is off the scene back in Athens, and quickly Cimon begins to heap up accolades for his military performance. It’s being done in the name of the league, of course, but it unsurprisingly proves to be profitable for Athens.

The character of Cimon’s exploits as Delian League military leader basically fall into two categories: either campaigns against Persia, or campaigns against other Greek city-states. I’ll try to sketch a representative chronology, although it is likely that even Thucydides and Plutarch did not give us all the details either, and that these next few anecdotes are purely representative of what took place in the 470s BCE.

The first campaign that Thucydides mentions was against the Persian forces that still controlled the city of Eion. This city had been founded as an Eritrean colony in Thracian Macedonia, but as Persia expanded, the city was engulfed by the empire. Now, after the series of defeats that Persia had suffered, she was beginning to withdraw, and Cimon’s charge as leader of the Delian League’s forces was essentially to help speed up Persia’s withdrawal from any area that bordered the Aegean.

At Eion in 477/476, the Persians refused to retreat willingly after being defeated on the battlefield outside the city, so Cimon and his forces laid siege to the city to finish the job. Because Xerxes still sat on the Persian throne, and, as we saw in looking the naval battles of the second invasion, his commanders were terrified to be labeled as a coward by Xerxes, the commander at Eion took a dramatic exit. When he realized he could not emerge with his life or his dignity, he “set fire to the city, and destroyed with it his family, his treasures, and himself.”

The main aim of these types of campaigns and sieges must have been to push Persia back and then to sign up the liberated city in the Delian League. Doing this would have the dual benefits of weakening Persia yet further, while also adding another source of contribution or ships to the roll of cities that had to make their contribution at Delos each year. While the main target was only Persia, this may of course have worked well, but in time, things began to shift.

The next outing mentioned by Thucydides is one that is arguably a third category of campaign, but we’ll just describe it in due course. It was against the Aegean island of Skyros, which up to this point in history had apparently maintained a native and independent population. At least, it was native as far as Plutarch and the contemporaries at that time could discern. Anyways, Cimon and the league attacked and subjugated the island, settling their own colony there even. The native population which they defeated were called the Dolopians, and Plutarch says that due to their poor income from farming the land, they turned to piracy on the high seas, and even began to rob merchants who tried to deal with them reasonably, such that when Cimon took the island, the allies that formed the Delian League had no qualms with the decision.

There’s a whole side story about Cimon seeking the grave of the legendary Theseus on the island of Skyros, but there is a fairly substantial thread to be traced on that topic. Cimon made very adept use of the Greek myths connected to Theseus to help cast Athenian imperial ambition in a good light, and I think a talk about some of these topics might be perfect for a member episode, so do check out the subscriber only episodes if you are so inclined. I think the next one will be really enjoyable.

But, let’s get now into the third type of campaign that Cimon would have undertaken. He fought direct battles against Persian holdout forces, sure. And he even quelled piracy and took land from the so-called pirates. But last of all, the Delian League began to harass what we could call their own. There are even gradations of shade within this category, if we’re being detailed, but that would serve just to drag out the narrative even further, frankly. 

First, Cimon led forces against cities who had not yet joined the league, but who also were not subject to Persia. The example of this is type of measure is the one that was taken against Carystus, a city on Euboea. She had not yet joined the league, and was basically compelled to join the league at the point of a spear that was itself brought to the island thanks to the league’s navy. A quote from Kagan is sufficient to describe the significance here. He writes: “Apart from the unpopularity of the Medizing  Carystans, there were other reasons for the campaign. It would scarcely seem fair that a city should benefit from the league’s war against the Persians and its protection from piracy, while allowing its neighbors to bear the cost. The Athenians acted with the support of the league, but the use of compulsion was ominous.”

Ominous is a good word to describe the feeling. For me, I keep thinking of the Borg of Star Trek fame, also. In a sense, the Athenians traversed the Aegean and greeted all holdouts with the phrase: “We are the League. You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile.” And perhaps such is the nature of all empires.

These campaigns against Persian remnants or against holdout Greek islands took place during each sailing season down through the 470s BCE, it seems. Details are scant, but it is not until this next event in 470 BCE that we have a rough estimate on timing. So during the 470s, Cimon continued to increase his image in Athens while helping to grow the league and the resources which it could pool at Delos.

Then, in 470 BCE, a league member rebelled.

As is the trend, Thucydides doesn’t give us much detail in describing this rebellion, but it is still noteworthy because it is the first example we have of a city or island who was a league member, but then had misgivings of some degree.

The short quote from Thucydides is this: “Naxos left the confederacy, and a war ensued, and she had to return after a siege; this was the first instance of the confederacy/league being forced to subjugate an allied city, a precedent which was followed by that of the rest in the order which circumstances prescribed.”

Really, this description by the Greek historian is pretty straightforward and leaves us to speculate more than I might wish. Kagan speculates a bit about what this subjugation might have entailed, but thankfully the original historian then goes on to elaborate about why Naxos herself might have felt compelled to try and leave the Delian League. We can imagine that the subjugation and siege part entailed a literal siege of the capital city, and it’s possible that Naxos might have had her navy seized and folded into the Athenian/League navy. Naxos was an island that actually wasn’t too far away from Delos, the nominal capital and home of the league’s treasury.

Nevertheless, Thucydides mentioned that Naxos was not the only instance of a league member seeking to alter that membership status, so here’s his explanation for why membership in the Delian league had begun to taste a bit sour for some of the members by 470 BCE or thereabouts, only about 8 years into the league’s existence.

We mentioned at the conclusion of last episode why the league began to feel a bit more like an enforced empire to the members who had joined, and why Athens found herself in the position of “emperor” in a sense. Thucydides again writes: “Of all the causes of defection, that connected with arrears of tribute and vessels, and with failure of service, was chief.” So not a big shocker, honestly. The cost imposed on the numerous league members, many of whom were small fries compared to Athens, was just too great. Athens assessed the amount due from each member-state each year, and within 8 short years we read that the about due from these member-states, regardless of whether they tried to contribute pure tribute in the form of gold or silver, etc., or whether they tried to give ships into the navy, it mattered not. The expectations of league membership quickly proved onerous.

Now, I can only speculate, but as with most situations where the word empire comes into play, it is is entirely possible that Athens was putting a thumb on the scale and expecting more from these members than was perhaps necessary. The end there would of course be some profit coming into the control of Athens. But, it’s also possible in my view simply that the costs of a far-flung naval empire were more than Athens anticipated.

If that second possibility has any truth, that’s obviously still not justification. And there was blame to go around, as well, besides. Thucydides goes on to say that in time, the league members found it was easier to just contribute money rather than to even attempt to contribute ships and men, simply because of the cost disparity between those two options. As such, the power balance began to skew in favor of Athens, rapidly. She quickly had control of almost all of the ships, and so much money flowing in on top of that, despite the league’s voting structures, such that she found no obstacles in the way when league members needed to be put back in place, like Naxos in our initial example.

The Naval (and land) Battle at the Eurymedon River

So then, just to briefly recap before we launch into the final item today. We’ve seen that when Cimon was installed as the Delian League’s commander, he quickly demonstrated capability on the naval and military front. He took to heart the league’s stated purpose of snuffing out any remaining embers of Persian influence that could hope to influence events or control of events in Greece and their sphere of influence along the western shores of Asia Minor. But, once he’d started those campaigns, he found that Greek cities and islands might not be so eager to join the league as had been assumed. Some needed encouragement, you might say. Others needed a backhand to keep them in line, too. Let’s just be honest. These measure began to tip the scales even further in favor of Athenian empire than had originally been the case. The league was a league in name, and in form, but in time Athens was viewed as holding an empire, no doubt.

So then, our concluding event today can be viewed either positively if you look from the Athenian perspective, or perhaps with a negative fringe if you look at it from the perspective of any allied league members who were perhaps looking on their decision to join the league with any regret.

The event occurred in 469 BCE, so right at about the 10-year mark for the number of years where Cimon had been leading the league’s military campaigns. He’d managed to grow the league membership dramatically, no thanks to his questionable tactics, and it seems likely that Persia’s King Xerxes began to feel a bit threatened by this new force to be reckoned with in the Aegean, led by his old nemesis, Athens.

Thucydides mentions the Battle at Eurymedon River, but only in the briefest way; so we must turn to Plutarch to help fill out the details. The River Eurymedon terminates on the southern shore of Asia Minor, emptying into the Mediterranean in the modern day Antalya Province of Turkey. It is far enough east that the Delian League and Greek city-states had not quite gotten to re-assert their influence there. As such, we read that Xerxes had ordered some sort of military and naval buildup centered around Pamphylia, the region where the Eurymedon River meets the Mediterranean. We’re left to draw the conclusion, but it seems reasonable to conclude that Persia had finally found some degree of agreement and breathing room enough so that they had rebuilt some measure of naval strength and was seeking to land a blow on Greece if they could. Most likely they would have aimed not to launch a full-scale invasion of Greece as in prior times, but just to move along the coast of Asia Minor and retake control of some areas where the Delian League had freed cities from Persian control to then funnel them straight into league membership.

Once the league gained word of this Persian buildup, we read that Cimon set sail with 200 triremes. There is an issue where he attacked the territory of Phaselis, a Greek territory in Asia Minor, because they refused to let his armada land in their territory. Perhaps the Delian League’s reputation had preceded it, but as you might imagine, the strength of a 200-strong trireme fleet was influential. There is more to the story, but I’m more focused today on a fact that Plutarch shares about some advancement that had been made in the construction and outfitting of triremes between Salamis and this campaign at Eurymedon.

Salmis was in 480 BCE, and we’re now looking at 469 BCE, so only 11 years difference, or so. Here’s what Plutarch tells us in his Parallel Lives about Cimon’s trireme fleet: “These vessels had been from the very beginning very well constructed for speed and manoeuvring by Themistocles; but Cimon now made them broader, and put bridges between their decks, in order that with their numerous hoplites they might be more effective in their onsets.”

Essentially, Cimon and Athens had been able to stretch the service lifespan of at least some of these triremes up to 10 years, so it’s possible that some of them had fought at Salamis and in the ensuing seasonal campaigns throughout the Aegean as well. Where they had been originally built for maneuverability and may have been constructed with a narrower beam, Cimon apparently widened the beam to give them a bit more stability, but he also then added more decking on top, decking which we assume had not been put there before. This would obviously add to the ship’s weight, but in this case it allowed Cimon’s fleet to add more marines to each ship, an important piece if they planned to do much close-quarters fighting, or, if they planned on the need to have more trained men available for fighting on land should that become necessary. In that sense, it added a bit more versatility to the fleet’s overall ability.

The Decree of Themistocles that is associated with the Battle of Salamis and the formal appointment of men to the Athenian trireme fleet there gives us an indication that when the triremes were in their form as lighter, narrower ships focused on ramming ability in the tight confines of Salamis Strait, also without the added decking, each ship was assigned 10 marines and 4 archers. Other sources, references to the naval battle at Lade, for example, indicate that in other situations a trireme could carry up to 40 marines, so I think it entirely reasonable to estimate that for the Battle of the Eurymedon here that the 200-strong trireme fleet of Cimon could have been carrying at least 5,000 hoplite marines.

I find it interesting to note that in the study done by Morrison and Coates in their indispensable book called The Athenian Trireme, they state that 10 to 15 years of service is about the time you would expect that a trireme would begin to “age out” so to speak, and that it is not necessarily surprising that Cimon chose to sacrifice lightness and agility for, in this case, added decking, decreased maneuverability, but higher troop numbers. In a way he turned triremes into troop transports, much like we see in other instances from this era of ancient history that old ships were turned into horse transports.

Now to the battle itself, though. It’s actually a double-battle if we’re being technical, but we’ll see why that is as we move forward today.

Plutarch says that the Persian commander was not particularly eager to fight the Greeks. Maybe he’d seen the fate of many commanders before him in the timeline, and really, who could blame him. He was apparently also waiting for an addition 80 Phoenician ships to join his forces, ships that were supposed to be sailing north from Cyprus to meet him.

Cimon somehow got wind that this Phoenician fleet was sailing to meet up with the Persian forces at the Eurymedon River, and he hastened his timing to make sure that he could arrive at the Eurymedon River before any reinforcing Phoenician fleets could join the Persian ranks. It seems he succeeded, because Plutarch tells us that “at first, the Persians put into the river, that they might not be forced to fight.” Surely visions of Salamis and Mount Mycale floated before their eyes.

Plutarch continues: “but when the Athenians bore down on them there, they sailed out to meet them. They had six hundred ships, according to Phanodemus; three hundred and fifty, according to Ephorus. Whatever the number, nothing was achieved by them on the water which was worthy of such a force, 6 but they straightway put about and made shore, where the foremost of them abandoned their ships and fled for refuge to the infantry which was drawn up near by; those who were overtaken were destroyed with their ships. Whereby also it is plain that the Barbarian ships which went into action were very numerous indeed, since, though many, of course, made their escape and many were destroyed, still two hundred were captured by the Athenians."

Basically, what we just witnessed was another route of a Persian fleet along with the land forces that it was supporting. The fact that their ships first fled for the shelter of the river’s mouth, but then decided to give battle to the Greeks after all, only to turn and flee again once they began to lose, that is pretty telling to me that Persia’s forces were still lacking confidence against the Greek fleet that had already bested them so many times. 

The battle then played out in a similar fashion to the battle at Mycale. The Greek ships followed the fleeing Persians, picking off however many ships they could on the way toward the beach, but we also read that the Greeks captured a fair number of Persian ships. Once they made landfall, they disembarked and formed up to bring a land battle against the Persians. Here, the superior armor and skill of the hoplites that had hitched a ride on Cimon’s fleet was useful, and the Greeks quickly routed the Persian army, overrunning their camp and completing the victory.

Now, to call back to how I said this was a double-battle in reality, let’s finish out the story. Winning a battle that started on the sea and then coasted in to the land was not enough for Cimon on this day, it would seem. Remember how the Persians who had set up at Eurymedon were waiting for a reinforcement of 80 Phoenician ships? Cimon got word from a scout somewhere out that that the 80 Phoenician triremes realized they were late and cut off, so they put in to shore somewhere en route, but since they were unaware of how the battle had ultimately panned out, Cimon decided to put that element of surprise to good use. We don’t have much detail in the ancient sources, but Plutarch does tell us: “they were . . . panic-stricken at his attack, and lost all their ships. Most of their crews were destroyed with the ships. This exploit so humbled the purpose of the King that he made the terms of that notorious peace, by which he was to keep away from the Hellenic sea-coast as far as a horse could travel in a day, and was not to sail west of the Cyanean and Chelidonian isles with armoured ships of war.”

So then, the victory that Cimon won at the Eurymedon River, a double-battle, one victory on land and one at sea in a single day, this victory was so decisive as against Persian power in Asia Minor, that Xerxes was forced to agree to peace terms that forbade him from coming within a day’s ride of any sea-coast. I should note that modern scholars tend to scrutinize the timeline and they have good arguments for why this peace agreement probably came later, but for our purposes the point is that Persia was dealt another heavy blow, and this time it occurred closer to their own homeland than it did to Greece proper. Or at least half-way in between. The Delian League had solidified their influence over the Aegean and over Greek colonial holdings, such that Persia was effectively not a threat any longer.

It didn’t take long for some of the league members to notice that reality and to start asking tough questions about the league’s continuing purpose if the stated goal of the league (as was formally held forth) was only to oppose Persia. The answer to that question obviously also had implications for the stringent tribute requirements that the league members were still being saddled with. Many of them were still happy to maintain the arrangement, but the camp of dissenters and question-askers was starting to grow, and to get a bit more vocal.

We’ll pick that thread back up next time around, but for today I want to introduce one more person to our historical stage, someone who you no doubt have heard of and who we’ll get to know better in upcoming episodes.

Conclusion

Back in Athens, in 472 BCE, a man named Pericles financed the first production of Aeschylus’ play The Persians. We’ve encountered a few scenes and passages from this play already, specifically those that dealt with the gory scenes of the battle at Salamis and the carnage that was wrought there as triremes clashed in the narrow strait. I love these scenes because the playwright Aeschylus was himself present and fighting at Salamis, so they are perhaps the closest perspective we have of what that scene would have been like.

That’s not the point though. The play dealt with the battle and the Persian personalities specifically, casting Xerxes as the arrogant ruler who invited the displeasure of the gods by thinking himself great enough to try and conquer Greece. This play coming nearly 8 years after the victory at Salamis itself, roughly coincided with the waning days of Themistocles in Athens. His rivals had started to close in, Cimon, the general of the Delian League among them. Those leaders were the conservatives and elites of Athenian politics, seeking to stifle democratic tendencies that men like Themistocles and institutions like his navy had encouraged.

On the scene in 472 emerged Pericles. By financing the production of this play The Persians he was signaling first, that he was also wealthy and wanted Athens to take note. Taking on this role was actually a duty for wealthy citizens, but there were then competitions where plays were put on at a festival, with a winner then chosen at the end. So bragging rights were also at stake, not to mention the message that could be sent depending on what play or production was selected.

When Pericles financed the production of this play about the Persians and about the Greek victory at Salamis, he was young. He was only 23 years old, but by choosing that play was also signaling support for Themistocles, even though he knew that the sharks were circling around the once great naval leader of Athens. Themistocles would be ostracized not long after, and Cimon was by 472 BCE firmly in his place as the military leader of the Delian League, with more victories to come as we have seen today. Those victories continued for a number of years, down through Eurymedon in 469 BCE. But all the time, back in Athens, Pericles was biding his time and building up the democratic party in Athens while the Delian League continued to deal with issues scattered throughout the Aegean.

That does it for our episode today folks, I hope you enjoyed it.

Join us next time as we continue following the Delian League’s evolution. As I said, various members will grow more skeptical of their place in the league, which leads to some events you can perhaps predict. The word rebellion is often used, I’ll put it that way. Then, we’ll follow the league in what might feel like a slight detour down to Egypt, where the chose to embroil themselves. We’ll witness an Athenian naval fleet sailing up the Nile River and participating in a war there, while Athens is simultaneously fighting the opening direct battles against Sparta and her allies that we know as the First Peloponnesian War. There’s a lot of moving pieces that are coming into view for us, then, so I’ll do my best to arrange them in a sensible way and if that means separate episodes for each front, then perhaps we’ll take that angle. I’m not sure quite yet though, so tune in next episode to find out!

Sources

• Everitt, Anthony, The Rise of Athens: The Story of the World's Greatest Civilization, Random House, 2016.
• Hale, John R., Lords of the Sea: The Epic Story of the Athenian Navy and the Birth of Democracy (2009).
• Hammond, N.G.L., A History of Greece to 322 BC (1967).
• Herodotus, The Landmark Herodotus: The Histories (Robert Strassler, Ed., Andrea Purvis, Transl., 2007).
• Kagan, Donald, The Outbreak of the Peloponnesian War, Cornell University Press, 1969.
• Kagan, Donald, The Peloponnesian War, 2003.
• Morrison, J.S., et al, The Athenian Trireme: The History and Reconstruction of an Ancient Greek Warship (2nd edition, 2000).
• O’Halloran, Barry. The Political Economy of Classical Athens, A Naval Perspective, (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 26 Nov. 2018).
• Paine, Lincoln, The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World (2013).
• Plutarch, Life of Cimon in The Parellel Lives.
• Plutarch, Life of Themistocles in The Parallel Lives.
• Thucydides, The Landmark Thucydides: A Comprehensive Guide to The Peloponnesian War, Ed. Robert B. Strassler, 1996.