Choose your friends ....The Delian League ....power politics in 5th century Greece on the wireless

Now this is one I am going to listen to.

Hoplite 5th century, 2018

It's the latest offer from In Our Time on BBC Radio 4.

"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. But cities who 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 of Cambridge

Producer: Martha Owen"*

Location; In Our Time, BBC Radio 4

Pictures; Hoplite 5th century, 2018, Jona Lendering, his file is made available under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication and the Thermopylae pass at the area of the Phocian Wall, Author Fkerasar, Licensing, I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby publish it under the following licenses

*The Delian League, In Our Time, BBC Radio 4, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002xp5l