Ep. 043 – The Delian League: High and Dry in Egypt

Today we continue following the evolution and exploits of the Delian League. In the 450s BCE, they become embroiled in two theaters of conflict. The first saw them begin to more squarely meet Sparta and many other allied cities of the Peloponnesian League in what is called the First Peloponnesian War. At the same time, Athens and the Delian League answered the call of a rebel leader in Egypt and there the League got tangled up fighting Persia yet again. A siege at the White Castle (no, not that one) ensues, and in the end the Delian League suffers some pretty heavy losses in a foreign land.

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Episode Transcript

Introduction

Today we are basically just continuing right where we left off last episode. In some ways then this is almost a Part 2 in conjunction with Episode 042 where we saw the conflict between the growing power of the Delian League in the Aegean against the attempts that Persia made to try and blunt or slow that power in the 470s BCE down to the double battle at Eurymedon where Cimon led naval and land victories, both on the same day in what we can roughly estimate as 469 BCE.

We’ve discussed how the Delian League began as an anti-Persian coalition in the Aegean, led by Athens who stepped in at the request of many Ionian cities. Over the course of years the structure of that league led to Athens becoming the hegemon in that entire region, all built on the base of their sea power. Some league members began to regret their decision to join, and that is if they even were given a choice. This tone increased after Persia was severely defeated at Eurymedon, because the clear question became one of why the Delian League was any longer necessary if Persia, the whole point of the league forming to begin with, was no longer a threat. The discontent spread within the League, as we’ll see today, but despite this, Athens was still flush with cash and with a large navy as well. Athenian power is what caused Persia to attempt their buildup we discussed last episode, and Athenian power also concerned the Spartans and their allies in the Peloponnese, so it is on that footing that we now jump back into things following the Delian League’s victory at Eurymedon.

There are really two fronts of war to try and work through today, so we will do our best to tackle them both and to keep the threads from becoming tangled. The best way to do that is, in my mind, to just tackle them in order. So let’s begin with what scholars officially call “The First Peloponnesian War.”

Lead-up to the First Peloponnesian War

Given that the overall Peloponnesian War as a whole is one of the most deeply studied wars of all history, there’s a ton that we are going to just skip on past in this podcast. The politics and the diplomacy, and much else beside, just have no direct connection to maritime history and would be far too burdensome to try and even summarize. Very broad strokes will help get us a framework in place and then we can focus in a bit from there.

One political shift that occurred in the years after the Eurymedon River battles was that Cimon fell out of favor in Athens. Pericles became the rising star, and as he assumed a position of power, he was able to institute democratic reforms in Athens that were brought about partially because of the great wealth the the Delian League had funneled toward Athens. Cimon fell out of favor when the political winds shifted, and this was not helped by the fact that he had a reputation as a Spartan sympathizer, to a degree. He was reputed to appreciate Sparta’s, well, Spartan culture, to reduce it to the modern shorthand label. Cimon suffered the same fate that Themistocles and others before him had suffered: he was ostracized in 461 BCE.

The other leading democratic leader in Athens, a man named Ephialtes, was murdered in that same year, and with both of these other leading men off the scene, Pericles assumed a sole leading role in Athens in 461.

Now, one event that had occurred in the years prior to this leadership change involved yet another rebellious Delian League member, but this one had the unfortunate added element of Sparta becoming somewhat involved, an element that was not really in the mix during the events that we considered last episode. In 465 BCE Athens founded a colony called Amphipolis on the Strymon (stree-mon) River in what could be called Thrace, it is on the far northern coast of the Aegean Sea and in modern Greece today.

The island of Thasos is in that same vicinity of the northern Aegean, and when Athens decided to set up a colony in the neighborhood, Thasos became concerned that Athens seemed to be encroaching on her personal interests in the gold and silver mines that dotted the mountain range in that region. Thasos was a member of the Delian League, but she took the drastic step in 465 of requesting direct assistance from Sparta to discourage Athenian interest in the region. 

Sparta declined the offer, they were busy back at home dealing with what was up to that point the largest revolt of her helot population that had ever occurred. A devastating earthquake had hit the region there and effectively flattened Sparta, and the slaves seized the chance to try and break free. 

As a side note, relations between Sparta and Athens were not at all helped when following the earthquake and during the helot revolt, Sparta requested aid from Athens. Cimon was still in power then, and he convinced Athens to actually oblige, but once Athens had undertaken the cost and planning and had marched into Spartan territory, the Spartans took the insulting step of just changing their minds at the last second, and sending Athens home. Perhaps they feared the democratic leanings that Athens might spread into the situation, or something. Either way, this offended Athens and was one domino in the chain that led to the ostracism of Cimon. 

But the broader point is the step that Thasos took in asking Sparta to intervene against another League member simply because Thasos was displeased and was the weaker party. The fact that the relations between Athens and Sparta were already strained and then this also unfolded just introduced a new level of tension, basically.

As reprisal, Athens and the other participating league members laid siege to Thasos, and this is an example of the Delian League leveling severe punishment on a member who had effectively tried to leave the league. The walls of Thasos were demolished after the 2 year siege ended in surrender. Thasos had her land, entire navy, and her wealth taken by Athens, and she was humiliated and forced to pay tribute from then forward.

So the siege of Thasos really is a marker in the evolution of the Delian League and its relation to Sparta, too. After the siege was concluded, Athens turned her attention toward planning for potential future conflict with Sparta. Kagan also says that Athens may have been looking for ways to get back at Sparta since they were offended by the incident where Sparta sent Athenian troops home after having first requested aid. I think Kagan is largely right though, to say that once the Delian League was formed, and once Athens grew so powerful, it seems that war between the Athenians and their allies against Sparta and her allies, war was almost inevitable.

Thucydides also points to the rapid expansion of Athenian power as the main cause for the First Peloponnesian War, which is basically saying the same thing. The more direct events that perhaps can be seen as final straws are these, though. After the insult of having their troops sent away from Sparta, Athens pursued a policy of making alliances with city-states that could be antagonistic toward Sparta. It’s the old story of alliances shifting and eventually building up to the point where shared alliances lead to war.

In short, Athens allied with Thessaly, Argos, and Megara. Thessaly was perhaps less incendiary as far as the Spartans were concerned, although Thessaly was still a powerful city-state that could bolster the Athenian naval and military strength. Argos, though, had been an enemy of Sparta going back into Ancient Greek history, so this clearly would be interpreted by Sparta as Athens kind of ramping up the pressure. Argos was also a very close neighbor of Sparta and was located on the Peloponnese, so this is Athens forming an alliance with one of Sparta’s closest enemies in the geographic sense.

The last alliance is the most notable for me, it was with Megara. Megara had previously been allied with Sparta, and traditionally she had been an enemy of Athens, or at least not on good terms. However, Megara found herself in a border dispute with Corinth right in the years prior to 460 BCE, a dispute which saw her leave the Peloponnesian League and formally join the Delian League. Megara and Corinth both occupied the Isthmus of Corinth, which is that strategic chokepoint between the Peloponnese and Attica, but possession of that isthmus also had implications for the naval and maritime shipping aspects of the maritime powers in that region. So when Megara essentially defected from her alliance with Sparta, this gave Athens a huge strategic upper hand in the area, but it obviously also raised the stakes in the growing enmity between the Delian League and the Peloponnesian League, and between Athens and Sparta, specifically. The Delian League formally only had obligations as against Persia, but where the concerns of Athens turned, in time, the League would have little choice but to follow.

Rebellion against Persia in Egypt

In the interest of keeping our narrative flowing at a reasonable pace, we will try to hit the high points of the First Peloponnesian War. I will say before we look at the events in Greece that the other theater where Athens became embroiled in 460 BCE was all the way in Egypt. Scholars have often questioned the thinking behind this move from the Athenians, because on its face, it truly does not make sense why she would have chosen to deploy significant fleet and force contingents into two widely separated places, one being in the Peloponnese and areas closer to Athens, and the other being at first Cyprus, but then into the Nile Delta.

We are forced to assemble the most logical timeline we can based on fragmentary comments from Thucydides and a handful of other ancient writers, but it seems that the alliance with Megara had just been made, and that hostilities back in the Peloponnese had not truly taken off yet, when in 460 Athens received a request from Egypt that they may have felt was just too good to pass up.

In 460, Athens received an invitation from a man named Inaros. He was a Libyan king who managed to kickstart a rebellion that swept Lower Egypt and the delta. Remember, Persia had controlled Egypt going back 60 years or more, back almost to the time of Cyrus the Great. Persia ruled Egypt as she did many other vassal states, through the use of local satraps, but there were other local rulers who also were part of the structure including Libyan soldiers who came from the Nile Delta region and had old ties to that region and to Egypt prior to Persia’s takeover. They had instigated several rebellions during the decades of Persian control, often after the Persian king died and there were periods of transition. After Darius died there was a rebellion in Egypt, which Xerxes then had to quell. And then, when Xerxes himself was assassinated in 465, Inaros emerged to lead a new uprising in Egypt.

It is in that context that in 460 BCE, Athens received the request from Inaros and the Egyptian rebellion against Persia, asking that Athens send ships and men to help fight Persia. The anti-Persian purpose of the Delian League no doubt influenced their decision to respond. It is likely too that the wealth of Egypt, both in goods and in agricultural produce, these must also have been attractive reasons for Athens to jump into the fray down in Egypt. Still though, given what we know about the escalating tensions with Sparta, it is still a bit odd that Athens would have elected to spread forces so thin. Perhaps the most logical explanation is purely that the Egyptian involvement was that of the Delian League as a whole, while the quarrels with Sparta, Corinth, and Aegina, were more on the level of personal issues between Athens and those cities. Hard to know for certain.

But, in 460 BCE the Delian League had a contingent 200 ships already engaged in a campaign off Cyprus, one that we know nothing further about. They diverted these 200 ships at the behest of Inaros, and they sailed south to Egypt, entering the Nile and quickly winning a series of victories that gave Athens and the rebel Egyptians control of 2/3 of the Nile, as Thucydides calculates matters.

The most noteworthy clash occurred at the Battle of Papremis in 460. A land battle was the main focus of events, and there the Athenian and rebel army managed victory despite being heavily outnumbered by Persia’s army. However, there was also a naval side to the battle too, and here a Greek commander named Charitimides led 40 Greek ships against 50 Persian ships, and Athens managed to win a comprehensive victory according to an ancient writer named Ctesias. He writes that the Greeks captured 20 of Persia’s ships and sunk the other 30, which is pretty astounding. We have no other details and no other sources to support this, and I should also mention that scholars generally view the claims of Ctesias as being unreliable, so if we are forced to remove his details from the narrative we really aren’t left with much. Just keep that in mind as we talk about things today, I guess, generally. The broad strokes are confirmed by Thucydides and Diodorus, but the detailed specifics are less reliable, unfortunately.

We do know on the basis of all 3 writers that after this battle at Papremis, things got bogged down. The parts of Persia’s army that survived that first battle and remained in the area managed to link up with some loyal Egyptians, and together they found refuge in a citadel in the city of Memphis, a place known as ‘White Castle.’ No idea if this place has any ancient connection with sliders and that most famed of fast food establishments with which we American Midwesterners are familiar. I somewhat doubt it, but in any event, Persia took refuge and the Delian League and rebel Egyptians settled in to lay siege to the White Castle of Memphis.

It’s from this point forward that the timeline gets murky and that Athens is fighting almost two wars at once, so advance apologies if things get hard to follow. Thucydides is the best framework we have, so that’s where most of the remaining discussion comes from.

The First Peloponnesian War in a nutshell

The best segue is one that Thucydides shares. He says that after the Persian army had been defeated at Papremis and was under siege in Memphis, Artaxerxes “sent Megabazus to Sparta with money to bribe the Peloponnesians to invade Attica and so draw off the Athenians from Egypt.” Again, it seems that they were unwilling to do so, but perhaps that is because hostilities were already in full swing in Greece and Sparta could not afford to undertake a full-on invasion of Athens given all the other city-states who were involved. So, although the Persian king Artaxerxes found no success in attempting this tactic, it is a clear sign that the ancient world was well aware of how strained the relationship between Sparta and Athens had become.

Let’s try now to summarize all the events that were occurring in the Hellenic world which would have kept the attentions of both Athens and Sparta outside of Egypt.

The best one-stop example of how far-flung the involvement of the Athenian people was in 460/459 comes from an inscription which lists those who died from the Athenian tribe of Erectheis. This inscription was followed by the names of 185 Athenians who died in one year. The inscription reads: 

Of the tribe Erectheis, These men died in the war: in Cyprus, in Egypt, in Phoenicia, in Halieis in Argos, on Aegina, at Megara, IN THE SAME YEAR.

We’ve already seen how some of these Athenians would have died in Egypt, and although the reference to Phoenicia is a bit mysterious and not mentioned in any other source, it is possible that there was also fighting connected with Phoenicia about which little is known. Cyprus, as well, was a site of conflict, but what about these others?

Well, the reference to Halieis is shorthand for the a land battle where Athens was defeated by forces from Corinth and Epidaurus. But, there was a naval battle that also occurred in this same phase, or at least, Thucydides lumps it together in his narrative. We know nothing about it other than that Athens won victory at sea against a Peloponnesian fleet off the small island of Cecryphaleia. Kagan sums it up well by writing: “The first battles of the war were ominous; the Athenians lost on the land and won on the sea.”

The naval victory at Cecryphaleia only served to anger the perennial enemies of Athens, the Aegninetans. They then opted to enter the war in full force, and because they were an island with a maritime history older than even some of the “great powers” of that time, they joined their naval force with what the Peloponnesians already had, forcing a much larger naval confrontation with Athens off the island of Aegina. Again, we have no detail other than what Thucydides supplies, and in this case, he tells us that: “there was a great sea battle off Aegina between the Athenians and the Aeginetans, each being aided by their allies; in which victory remained with the Athenians, who took 70 of the enemy’s ships, and landed in the country and commenced a siege.”

While Athens had Aegina under siege, Sparta tried to land 300 hoplites on the island to break that siege on behalf of their allies. This was ultimately unsuccessful, and when Aegina surrendered Athens stripped them of their navy, tore down the city’s walls, and effectively forced them into Delian League membership and tribute requirements. At the same time, Corinth marched into Megara, thinking that Athens was already busy in Aegina and in Egypt, so they would take the chance to win a self-interested victory closer to home. Another battle ensued, which sounds somewhat inconclusive from the way Thucydides describes it.

That is really the whirlwind tour of 460 BCE to 458 or so, as Thucydides sums it up, and you can get a sense of how many different balls Athens was trying to juggle. More importantly, you can also get a sense of how the alliances at play among all of these various players served to kind of fan the flames of conflict.

Now, in the first 3 years of this war, Sparta really hadn’t taken much direct action against Athens. This is partially because Athens had built up a defensive wall across the Isthmus of Corinth thanks to the alliance they had made with Megara, and this wall hampered the Spartan army’s ability to march on Attica. This may have been another reason why Sparta was not swayed by Persian attempts to bribe them into action against Athens, too.

Now, there are tons of internal politics and other wrinkles connected with Sparta and the campaigns they were involved in, things not as closely linked to the maritime history aspect of Athens on which we tend to focus. I think the point that bears making here is that in time, Sparta did begin to get more involved directly, such that Athens felt that danger begin to increase. In response, Athens finally undertook construction of the famed Long Walls that would connect the city of Athens with the ports of Piraeus and Phaleron. The idea had been around, but nothing that would fully protect the city came into being until direct confrontation with Sparta became an imminent threat.

As we know, Athens had her eggs pretty fully in the naval power basket, especially compared to the hoplite strength of Sparta. So the Long Walls were effectively a way to help Athens withstand a siege. She may get surrounded, but as long as a connection to the sea remained, she could come and go and trade as she pleased, always able to replenish the city’s food and water needs, too. Construction on the walls was begun at some point in this rough timeframe, then, and this project was possible because of the flow of wealth that continued to come to Athens from the Delian League’s continuing campaigns in Egypt and elsewhere, not to mention the dues that League members had to contribute each year.

Along with the project to build the Long Walls, the years 457 to 454 BCE saw relative success for Athens, although the details don’t much concern us here. They involve battles against Sparta, Boeotia, Thebes, Phocis, and Chalcis. These battles were by and large land affairs, although Athens did use her sea power to sail against some coastal cities of the Peloponnese, and Thucydides even alludes to the Athenian navy sailing around and “burning the arsenal of Sparta,” which could refer to Spartan dockyards that were burned. Unfortunately we have little detail to go on here again.

Delian League Disaster in Egypt

The overall theme is that Athens was relatively successful between 457 and 454, managing to repel any Spartan threat, and even taking the fight to Spartan home soil while winning victories against other Peloponnesian allies. Athens also finished building the Long Walls, which gave them that security predicated on their naval power. It is at this point that we turn the page back to events in Egypt, and, well, let’s just say that things were not going quite so swimmingly down there. Thucydides transitions his narrative back to Egypt with this sentence, which I view as being slightly ominous. He writes: “Meanwhile the Athenians in Egypt and their allies stayed on and encountered all the vicissitudes of war.”

We left them as they laid siege to the White Castle in Memphis, where the Persians had taken refuge all the way back in 460 BCE. Thucydides fills in the narrative with a bit of a flashback, to inform us that after Sparta declined Persia’s bribery to march on Athens, Persia then opted to just send a huge army down to Egypt to try and quell the rebels and their Athenian helpers.

The timing of what comes next is the subject of much debate in the academic world, I dredged up at least a dozen journal articles discussing only the Delian League’s foray to Egypt and debating the details. So we could certainly get lost in the weeds if that was the goal, but hopefully we can avoid that as we wrap up today.

To set the stage for our analysis, I want to read the entire passage from Thucydides, just because it is always the focal point of any discussion on this whole ordeal. He again writes: 

“Arriving by land, Persia defeated the Egyptians and their allies in a battle, and drove the Hellenes out of Memphis, and at length shut them up in the island of Prosopitis, where Megabazus besieged them for a year and six months. At last, draining the canal of its waters, which he diverted into another channel, he left their ships high and dry and joined most of the island to the mainland, and then marched over on foot and captured it. Thus the enterprise of the Hellenes came to ruin after six years of war.”

Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, 1.109.

I’m fairly sure that Radiohead hadn’t yet released their sophomore album The Bends by the time Thucydides was writing his history of the war, but I’m glad he could sneak in a reference to one of the stronger tracks. I’ll spare you may ham-fisted attempts to work in references to their oeuvre throughout today’s episode, so, uh, you’re welcome. But the Greek ships being left high and dry on the banks of a drained canal is the best snapshot picture of how their Egyptian adventure fell apart.

Anyways, the end outcome and the focal point for everyone trying to work out a chronology is obviously that last sentence, the allusion to six years of war for the Greeks in Egypt. Consensus tends to land on what we’ve been using today, which is to say that the Greek involvement with the rebellion in Egypt began in 460, just slightly after their first steps to get embroiled with the Peloponnesian alliances and all we already discussed. Six years later places the “ruinous” outcome as unfolding in 454 BCE, which again aligns with the good outcomes which they were seeing in Greece at that time.

So, timing aside, what actually happened to them in Egypt and what was the significance? That’s really what it comes down to. The short version is what Thucydides tells us. It seems that once Persia realized the gravity of the situation, a large army was assembled to go relieve their defeated brethren who were under siege behind the walls of the White Castle.

Here’s one interesting question though. Why did Persia care so much about retaining control of Egypt? Well, as we said earlier, most of it comes down to the agricultural wealth that flowed out of Egypt into Persia, although there are also elements of historical rivalry between Egypt and Mesopotamia also in the mix, and Persia of course stepped into that role of the Mesopotamian power during the empire’s height. Not to mention, Egypt was also a big source of triremes and ships that made up Persia’s naval power. Recall them playing roles in most of the major naval battles we’ve witnessed thus far when Persia clashed with Greece around the Mediterranean and Aegean. So, Persia at this stage, having been repelled from Greece and Asia Minor in large part, she really could not afford to lose Egypt too. Here we can begin to see why a large army was sent down there to expel the Greeks and to stop the rebellion.

Many of these same reasons are why Greece probably thought it worth the risk to become involved in Egypt against Persia, the agricultural wealth being chief among them. We’ve also discussed the Greek trade colonies and presence at places like Naucratis, so while I didn’t know much about this theater of conflict between Greece and Persia going into the episode today, it really makes sense if we consider everything in the context of history that we have discussed leading up to 454 BCE.

Back to the story. We read that Persia was pretty easily able to relieve the siege of the White Castle at Memphis, and then as the Greeks retreated back up the Nile (we can only assume in their ships) they were trapped on an island called Prosopitis, an island that was a river island lying on an eastern branch of the Nile in the river’s delta and not too far from the Mediterranean. But, far enough that the Delian League’s ships were unable to break free.

The siege lasted for a year and a half, and was concluded by Persia diverting a canal that had been built off of the river so as to turn that side of the island into dry land. The Delian League’s ships were left “high and dry” as one translation of Thucydides puts it, leading to the ruin of the league’s Egyptian enterprise. Most of the Greeks were killed by the Persians, although apparently a small group survived by marching west across the Libyan desert all the way to Cyrene, a distance of roughly 1,000 kilometers. The instigator of the rebellion, Inaros, was also then crucified by the Persians, so brutal stuff all around.

On a royal seal, Artaxerxes I is shown killing the rebel king of Egypt, Inaros. The four captives bound behind him may represent Greek generals from Athens who aided Inaros and died after the siege on Prosopitis.

To cap things off, Thucydides then tells us that a relieving squadron of 50 triremes from Athens had already set sail en route for Egypt to join the Greeks still down there, an infusion of fresh blood if you will. Not being aware of the fate of their brethren, they put to shore at the mouth of the Nile and were instantly pummeled by land troops and then by a Phoenician navy that circled in behind them. Almost all of the 50 ships were destroyed, and Thucydides concludes the saga by saying: “Such was the end of the great expedition of the Athenians and their allies to Egypt.”

The real question for our purposes in the wider context of the Peloponnesian Wars is, how many ships did the League and Athens lose in the Egyptian debacle, and what were the true consequences? It seems fairly clear with the roughly 50 ships that were lost at the very tail end of the entire debacle, we can say that for sure. But otherwise, the general academic debate has centered on whether the League truly would have had 200 ships in Egypt for the entire 6 year length of their foray, or if there is more to the story that was just left unexamined by Thucydides and other writers.

It seems almost certain that the second option is closer to the truth, in my view. Thucydides of course only puts the number at 200 when the ships first make the voyage from Cyprus to Egypt in response to the initial call from Egypt’s rebellious leader in 460 BCE. But six years is a long time, and given the fact that Greece first laid siege to the citadel in Memphis and then was later holed up on Prosopitis and subjected to their own siege, it is valid to assume that perhaps not all 200 ships would have been left in Egypt for those incidents.

A specific article by the historian Eric Robinson published in the University of California’s journal Classical Antiquity is the one I’ve found to be the most enlightening. Sources are always on the website in case you want to get lost in the weeds yourself, but as we wrap up today I’ll try to boil it to the salient points.

A first revealing point involves the number of men that a force of 200 triremes would have required. The rough number for a fully manned trireme is 200 men, as we’ve seen often on the podcast. So 200 triremes equates to 40,000 men. Just hearing that number for me reveals how unlikely it was that Greece could have kept a force that large intact and supplied all the way in Egypt for the entirety of their siege on Memphis, and then later as they were trapped on the island of Prosopitis for 18 months. There seems just no physical way that a force that large could have survived that long, in either case, but the reality is too, that a force that large would not have been necessary either. And that is the more important point for me.

It seems much more reasonable to draw a conclusion we are somewhat forced to draw on little basis other than logic. No direct evidence exists in any of the ancient sources to confirm this, but given the totality of the circumstances, it would make sense of for the Greeks to have only maintained a constant presence of 40 to 50 triremes in Egypt once that first season of the campaign had concluded. They won quick victories in 460 BCE, but once the siege settled in, 200 triremes would not have been needed or even useful, and no doubt were put to use elsewhere or returned to their home ports for repairs over the winter season. The somewhat tight geography of the Nile’s delta branches and the canals built off of them also dictates that 200 triremes would not have been needed there for an extended duration.

Again, there is no direct evidence for this conclusion outside logical deductions based on geography, other concurrent events in the Aegean and elsewhere, and the nature of sieges too. But I tend to agree with Robinson that it seems most likely that the League would have maintained 40 to 50 ships in Egypt each season, and they could easily have rotated these ships each season as needs required.

This then leads to a conclusion that still aligns with the assessment of Thucydides. The League and Athens could have lost up to 100 triremes in the “ruinous” year of 454 BCE, which may have included the loss of up to 20,000 men. This loss was not enough to trigger collapse of the League or of Athens, but it would certainly have been the largest loss sustained by both entities up to that point, and it had to have been doubly impactful seeing that it occurred completely apart from the more direct and escalating pressures applied by Sparta and the Peloponnesians.

Conclusion

So then, disaster in Egypt was really the most momentous event to unfold in the 450s BCE, despite the good fortunes that Athens and the League had gotten used to elsewhere. But, one major defeat like that would certainly be enough to temper any prior good fortunes.

Not a whole lot to add in conclusion today other than 2 events. The first is what most historians label as the clear and simple point where the Delian League transformed into an Athenian Empire. That is, following the defeat in Egypt and the unfolding events as regarding the Peloponnesians, Athens moved the treasury of the Delian League off the island of Delos. And big surprise, in 454/453 BCE, the riches of the league and all the plunder and tribute that had piled up was brought back to Athens.

After that shift, several years later Cimon’s ostracism ended. He endured the entire 10-year duration of that exile and then one of his first acts upon returning to Athens in 451 was to help broker a truce between Athens and Sparta. Cimon seems to have accepted the democratic reforms and leadership of Pericles, although some historians argue that this is simply because Pericles had become so powerful that Cimon had no realistic alternative.

Pericles himself was involved in some of the campaigns against the Peloponnesian League during the First Peloponnesian War, but we don’t have many specific details about those beyond places and outcomes. What we are left with today then is that in 451 BCE, Athens and Sparta and their respective leagues concluded a 5-year truce. Athens and the Delian League had suffered a bloody setback because they tried to perhaps bite off more than they could chew against Persia’s power in Egypt. But despite that setback, they had largely managed to shift alliances against Sparta and to win a series of victories in the Peloponnese, otherwise.

We have a lot more to clean up in next episode’s discussion that will help us make sense of how this situation evolved into the Second Peloponnesian War, which is the one that is typically thought of when that term in general is used. The discussion today is really just a prelude to that conflict, and today’s discussion doesn’t have a tidy conclusion. Athens was bloodied, and in many ways the failure in Egypt and the emergence of an Athenian Empire also led to members of the Delian League showing open opposition to the situation over and above what we have discussed in past episodes. Kagan refers to the time of the 5-year truce, between 451 BCE and 446 BCE as the years of “crisis in the Aegean,” so we’ll try to unpack that and much much more as we move forward.

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