Delian League

Architects and sculptors, stone workers, and other craftspeople collaborated to turn political and religious ambition into this beautiful marble masterpiece.

And where did they get the money from? Well, Athens benefited from the leadership of the Delian League, an alliance originally formed against the Persians.

The use of the allied resources for Athenian monuments became controversial because other Greek communities could see the building program as a display of Athenian dominance.

Think about that for a moment.

And if you like what you hear, you can add The Partial Historians to your regular listening lineup.

And don't forget, Ancient History 101 will be back next week, October the 21st, with the first episode of Series 2, where we will be talking about the ins and outs of the Athenian Empire with my hero, Christy Constantopoulou.

It's going to be great.

I can't wait for you guys to hear Series 2.

At Thermopylae, we know it well, and at Plataea, the naval equivalent.

But now, Athens has spent those 50 years putting together what is called the Delian League, but also it's an Athenian empire.

built upon the strength of their navy, the Athenian navy, and also their building of good walls and training lots of allies to fight with them.

They're very well prepared.

At the same time, he acts like a kardio, a strongman.

And it's odd to read that Athens is a democracy every time you read about Pericles because he seems to have not only been a strongman...

when it comes to dealing with enemies of Athens or people who are, let's say, being difficult and forget that they're a member of the Delian League and should obey Athens.

But also, there are questions about money, lots of questions about money and about building.

But that's what we're doing.

We're following the Athenian Empire did the same thing.

Roman Empire, Austro-Hungarian.

I mean they – that's what late empires do.

We have such a second series coming up for you.

Much of it is already recorded and in the can, so I can exclusively reveal that in the coming months you can look forward to episodes, in no particular order, on Clodius, the Battle of Marathon, food and dining in ancient Greece, the Emperor Tiberius, the Athenian Empire, Arminius, the Catiline Conspiracy, the Emperor Julian, Mark Antony, the building blocks of epic poetry, Augustan monuments of the city of Rome, the Battle of Actium.

There'll be an episode on Hadrian and another one on Antinous.

We will learn how exactly Athenian democracy functioned.

Right.

The setting is this crumbling Athenian empire, and we are focusing on the teen years of Alexander the Great.

Which is a very specific choice.

Yeah, and the narrative engine is the arrival of Aristotle, who is widely considered the greatest mind in the world at the time, right? And he comes to Macedonia to tutor this incredibly volatile prince.

We have covered an immense amount of ground today.

We started this deep dive looking at the creative whiplash of Jacob Tierney's career, moving from a creator of comedies to the architect of a historical epic.

We traced the unlikely path from the fast-paced, aggressive dialogue of Letterkenny and Shoresy through the massive 10 million viewer cultural phenomenon of heated rivalry all the way to the political intrigue of the crumbling Athenian Empire.

We analyzed how a creator leverages that staggering viewership into a straight-to-series green light, entirely bypassing the traditional Hollywood pilot process by bringing in heavyweight partners like Jason Bateman and delivering polished spec scripts directly to the buyers.

Yes.

Well, as I write in the introduction to Aristotle book about this, and I say that when I was way back when, 35 years ago, 40 years ago, when I was interviewing for my first jobs, I went to a college and was talking about Aristotle and was talking about the importance of... understanding the time period he lived in, the collapse of Athenian empire and things like that.

And they said, no, that doesn't really matter.

You know, like you said, a classic stands on its own.

I learned about a lot too, just doing the research.

I had also read tons of Aristotle and taught Aristotle, but I'd never really dug deeply into his life.

He's born in the 380s, so the Athenian Empire, the great 5th century Athenian Empire has collapsed.

Athens has lost the war to Sparta, the Peloponnesian War.

This is known as the Peloponnesian War, and Athens was losing pretty badly.

And the very next year in 404 BC, Athens would eventually surrender, the walls would come down, and the Athenian Empire as we know it would be over.

And that's the audience that first sat in the dark and actually watched Pentheus die and saw this whole story play out and saw the power of Dionysus, a city that had spent generations convinced that it could control everything.

The Athenians at the time thought, "Hey, we can control our empire, we can control our enemies, and we can control our own fate just through how smart we are and how dedicated we are to controlling our inner beast and our willpower." And they saw a play ultimately sort of get manifest in front of them about a proud young ruler who believed the same exact thing and ultimately got destroyed by forces that he was too arrogant to respect.