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We then come at this point to what you said are the aitiai or the causes of complaint sets against that underlying cause?

2
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And again, this is all prescribed reading.

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We've got two main complaints that these are these goes into the dispute over Corcyrea and Epidamnus and the situation up in Potidaea. 

4
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And then we've got various others, which he doesn't say very much about.

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In particular, the Megarians and Corcyrans, so poorly

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Just very, very quickly, the Epidamnus episode students should be familiar with it.

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Do you think that Athens's response was reasonable and acceptable?

8
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The idea of sending initially ten ships in a defensive alliance only?

9
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I think it's a fudge. I think that it's the fact that they they go for this defensive alliance shows that they know that they're on thin ice.

10
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I think, in terms of the terms of the 30 years peace. 

11
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And it's an attempt to sort of keep in the in the letter, but not really in the spirit of the treaty would be how how I would read it.

12
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And again, since I suppose following accepting facilities interpretation of what motivates the Athenians to accept

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the course I an offer but they're thinking about their own interests and what's going to benefit them,

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particularly in their Western policy. This is a point where the epigraph evidence can be helpful.

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We know from inscriptions actually much more from inscriptions than we know from facilities that the Athenians are

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looking west already in the from the four forces and definitely as about this time before the outbreak of the war,

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they renew alliances, existing alliances with the cities of play on TV and radio.

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So they're thinking about how to build up that power in that bit of the Greek world.

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So I would think that defensive alliance is an attempt,

20
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and this picks up on the point that Neville just made about we shouldn't assume that Greek states are just happy to ignore treaties.

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Treaties do have a force and that they have a religious force. So you don't want to just wantonly break a treaty.

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If you can find a way of keeping the treaty while still doing stuff that you want to do, and then that's that's the ideal scenario.

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And I think that's what they are trying to do here. And it's worth saying as well as and set that the Corcyran Navy was really very significant.

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I think we have the figure of 120 ships.

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And if you add those hundred and 20 ships to the ships of the Athenian Navy, it really does make Athens a super superpower on the sea.

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By contrast, because Corcyra will inevitably join the Peloponnesian War if we don't join you,

27
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and that with the Corinthian ten ships that may have eaten things up a bit.

28
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It really is a key hinge moment, isn't it? Yeah, I think that that's right.

29
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That it sort of is presented,

30
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I think quite plausibly as a sort of zero sum choice for the Athenians if if they don't get this alliance then the Corinthians are going to gas it,

31
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this is a slight risk, again, of seeing things with hindsight. And we know that that this war is going to happen.

32
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Will the Athenians or by the mid thirties,

33
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maybe the Athenians were now pretty sure that a war was going to happen and were thinking more strategically about how to bolster that power.

34
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So another bit of epigraphic evidence.

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We have inscriptions that suggest that you think is a starting maybe to put their economy on a bit of a war footing,

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restricting what they can spend their their money on, starting to to put their treasures in safe places.

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So by this point, it perhaps makes more sense to think that the Athenians would be thinking about how can

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they maximise their military power and minimise the military power of potential enemies?

39
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Okay, great. Well, Neville, let's come across to you again and think about Potidea. 

40
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A very interesting city, because it's a member of the Athenian empire and is in an alliance.

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It was also the only city of northern Greece to have joined the Hellenic League against the Persians in the late forties.

42
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So it's very much in the Athenian camp by the terms of the treaty, but it has this long relationship with Corinth.

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It was a colony of Corinth, and Corinth sends out magistrates each year to help run the city.

44
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So again, students should be familiar with what happens.

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Who do you think has got more of a grievance over that situation or who is more in the right, if we can say that?

46
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Neville, Corinth or Athens? I mean, to be honest, I don't know.

47
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I think it's a really, really tricky, complicated situation.

48
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And you could always think, okay, this is being set up to be a potential flashpoint.

49
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Maybe it's even surprising it hadn't happened before.

50
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I think one of the reasons it's complicated, as you say, is we're talking about different sorts of relationships between cities and.

51
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How they are supposed to affect your behaviours.

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You know, this has come up obviously in the whole Corcyrean episode to the Corinthian.

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Demand is Corcyra is a Corinthian colony.

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Therefore it owes us a whole load of obligations.

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And therefore, it's absolutely nothing to do with Athens.

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And clearly, there are all expectations that a colony owes something to its mother city.

57
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And Potidea seems to be a more unusual example, that Corinth is still involved in the day to day running, in sending out magistrates,

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whereas, you know, your typical colony after it's become established would then more or less run its own affairs.

59
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But clearly, you know, Corinth has got the idea that, you know, we have a long standing relationship with the city.

60
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There are almost certainly connections between the members of the upper classes and therefore Corinth naturally objects.

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When the Athenians come in and start laying down the law about you will tear down your walls.

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You will give us hostages, you will stop having any to do with these Corinthian magistrates,

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whereas the Athenian case would be it's a member of our alliance.

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So under the terms of the treaty, this is our business.

65
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It's nothing to do with currents, and it's even more complicated than that.

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The reason it matters is because it's in a strategic position for Athenian grain supplies coming from the Black Sea region,

67
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and Athens is interested in what goes on in the northern Aegean.

68
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At the same time, you've got other people playing local games, so you've got Perdiccas, the King of Macedon,

69
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who is basically interested in expanding his power in the region and is therefore seizing opportunities to make

70
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short term alliances with different sides and to try to exert influence over other people's colonies in the region.

71
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And it's just a mess, basically. I think this is one of the reasons it's a problem.

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You know, the Corinthians can plausibly claim that the Athenians have issued unreasonable demands and then started blockading their colony.

73
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And the Athenians can say, look, you have incited one of our allies to revolt.

74
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This breaks the terms of the treaty. I think each side plausibly can think that its in the right.

75
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If we could see into their hearts, maybe we could discern that some of them are being more cynical than others.

76
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Probably both of them all being highly cynical.

77
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Well, yeah. And talking of being cynical. Polly mentioned the fudge, the idea that the ten ships to Corcyra is a fudge.

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Talk about another fudge. The Corinthians.

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You're not allowed to send troops.

80
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Of course, the Corinthians can't send their troops to both sides here to help the audience, because that really would be breaking the treaty.

81
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And so volunteers give up from Corinth, don't they?

82
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So they're not official. They're not maybe in all terms, wearing the badge of Corinth on the helmets, but they go off as volunteers.

83
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So they're not official Corinthian troops. They are just choosing to do it of their own.

84
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But that feels very much like a fudge as well. Yes.

85
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It also feels terribly, terribly modern.

86
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So, I mean, an awful lot of this period, you can see and I mean,

87
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people did all the way through the Cold War after the Second World War, the idea of proxy wars,

88
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the idea that you've got two superpowers and actually they don't directly confront one another,

89
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but they spend a lot of time jockeying for position and getting their people into strategic places.

90
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But with the plausible deniability side of things from the outside, an entirely cynical power play that you can just say,

91
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No, no, there aren't any Corinthians there, or at least there aren't any Corinthians.

92
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They're officially, if accidentally, a bunch of tourists happen to have been fighting.

93
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You know, this is not our official problem. Okay.

94
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Well, before we come on to the Megarian decree, let's just say there were one or two other hints and pieces of these of other issues.

95
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So he talks about a complaint that we don't really understand.

96
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And also, there's a suggestion elsewhere, I think, in book two of the western Greek city of Ambracia here having a complaint.

97
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So, Neville, very briefly, just tell us a little bit about these two. Yeah.

98
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I mean, it's we don't know very much about them. We don't know how important they were.

99
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So it could be they're actually quite significant.

100
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But you said it is isn't bothering to tell us. It could be.

101
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We've got to the point where, you know,

102
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the Corinthians in particular have determined that they now think Athens is a menace and they want to push Sparta into recognising this.

103
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And therefore, they are coming up with lots and lots of examples where they can say, Aha, the Athenians have broken the terms of the treaty.

104
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It's their fault. If we find them, we're in the right.

105
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So, I mean, Ambraccia was a Corinthian colony, but it wasn't a member of the Peloponnesian League.

106
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So again, it's number of these slightly anomalous places and.

107
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The suggestion is, you know, Athens had given aid to people who were fighting Ambraccia.

108
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And therefore the argument is, well, again, they are aiding the enemies of one of our allies.

109
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Aegina is in some ways a better case because.

110
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Athens should have returned Aegina to full autonomy.

111
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Only the terms of the 30 years peace. So Aegina should have been allowed to become completely neutral,

112
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not dominated by Athens, decide its own destiny, and they kind of never got around to it.

113
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Now it's possible that this is a kind of a long running sore.

114
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It's possible that actually no one was terribly bothered. Until it becomes, again, a convenient pretext to bring into the argument.

115
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We just don't know enough about it. Thank you.

116
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And again,

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it's very important for students to be aware of the limits of our knowledge and not to be afraid to talk about that if you're writing an answer.

118
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Okay. So we come to the Megarian degree. How can we unwrap this one?

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Let's start. Polly just outlined the factual evidence that we know about this Megarian decree

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Okay. So the Athenian complaint against the Megarians is that they have been cultivating sacred land,

121
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so land which was dedicated to to the goddess upon the borders between Athens and Megara and the Megarians who have Expropriated it and are

122
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 farming it. So it's a religious complaint with territorial implications.

123
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And the Athenians also complained that the Megarians are harbouring runaway slaves from Attica.

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And the Athenians, in response to this, pass a decree, at least one decree, possibly more than one,

125
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imposing some sanctions on the megarians, who are prohibited from entering the agora the marketplace of Athens,

126
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and prohibited from entering the harbours both of Athens and of anywhere in the city to the delian league, the Athenian empire.

127
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So that's that is the core Megarian decree.

128
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That's what this tells us. Plutarch reports some other decrees, the historicity and details of which are disputed.

129
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And we maybe don't need to get into those into too many details here.

130
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And do we have any sense of exactly when this decree was enacted?

131
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Nope.

132
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In short, some time before the start of the Peloponnesian War, probably in the 430s, probably fairly recently, but we don't have an exact date.

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And that's another of the problems in understanding exactly how important it is as a trigger for war.

134
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Is this something a bit like the examples it never was just talking about,

135
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which has actually been bubbling along for a while and it is picked up on when the Corinthians and others need to find something to complain about.

136
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And then it's sort of made into a significant thing because it's convenient,

137
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or is it actually quite an immediate trigger, something that happens very, very shortly before the outbreak of the war.

138
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And just to finish where we're thinking about this, would I be right in saying that it's not technically a breach of the 30 years piece?

139
00:14:32,330 --> 00:14:36,140
Athenians there's nothing in there about economic sanctions, is that correct?

140
00:14:37,620 --> 00:14:41,219
No. I mean, it's it can be just as an economic sanction.

141
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That's one of the questions is is this is this an economic sanction or is it a religious sanction?

142
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This is the sort of core argument of Geoffrey Dawson in his origins of the Peloponnesian War book,

143
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is that the Megarian decree might have some economic impact, but that wasn't the point of it.

144
00:14:57,780 --> 00:15:01,470
The megarians had committed, according to your genes, a religious offence,

145
00:15:01,830 --> 00:15:08,580
and so they're being punished with a religious sanction because they're being banned from religious spaces.

146
00:15:08,790 --> 00:15:13,109
So the agora is a commercial space, but also a religious space.

147
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And so to be banned from that would be a religious sanction.

148
00:15:16,950 --> 00:15:17,640
To be honest,

149
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the argument I think that's a hard argument to make for the ban from from harbours, someone has a go but it's it's it's not to my mind,

150
00:15:27,540 --> 00:15:34,100
very, very plausible but. A case has been made that we should see the beginning decree is primarily religious.

151
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But in any case, to come back to the question you actually asked. There is there's nothing as far as we know in the terms of the six years piece

152
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that would say that if unions aren't allowed to impose this sort of penalty,

153
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unless we were to see it as some sort of infringement on the autonomy of the megarians.

154
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But that would be an arguable point, I think. Okay.

155
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Thank you. It's getting really interesting. So Neville, we now have to come across and think about Thucydides' accounts of the victory.

156
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So he's given us lots and lots of information about the whole situation.

157
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He's given us lots of information about Potidea. And as part of those complaints in the debates and in spots that he just mentions,

158
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almost in passing the Megarians decree, almost as though, well, we don't know why he didn't think he's very important.

159
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But then as his narrative develops and but one, it turns out that has to be really important because while for two reasons.

160
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First of all, the Spartans in the winter of four, three, two, four, three, one, one of their ultimata, which they say, well, we can avoid war.

161
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If I think the second ultimatum is to say, well, if you rescind the Megarian decree, then we will keep the peace.

162
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So clearly becomes very important, has done. And then he has Pericles delivering a speech about why they shouldn't rescind the Megarian decree.

163
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So that seems to be some contradiction in Thucydides about whether or not this is actually significant.

164
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Talk to us a bit about that to start with. The final point, a case can be made that actually Thucydides is not contradicting himself.

165
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The Pericles' point is not so much that the Megarian decree itself is incredibly important,

166
00:17:29,350 --> 00:17:35,350
but it's much more if we give in on this, then they'll just come back with some other stupid demands.

167
00:17:35,380 --> 00:17:39,880
So it's much more a sort of how do you respond to people?

168
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Why should we give in, than we would give in on those lots of things.

169
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But Megara is terribly, terribly important. So there's a case to be made there.

170
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And of course, it's partly how do we interpret Thucydides, especially when he is putting words into the mouths of his characters and you think,

171
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okay, this is not Thucydides speaking, this is pericles speaking, albeit as a kind of sock puppet.

172
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So this is what Thucydides wants us to see as being what Pericles is saying.

173
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Do we necessarily believe it? Do we necessarily think he's sincere, etc.?

174
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So there may not be a contradiction.

175
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I mean, generally the assumption of a lot of readers is that Thucydides does not treat the megarian decree as terribly important.

176
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But maybe he should, because the suggestion and I mean, this does come up in Plutarch,

177
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particularly, the suggestion is this is a policy that's very closely associated with

178
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Pericles and it's Pericles pushing the decree possibly for entirely unworthy motives.

179
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So the suggestion is that Pericles' war policy is actually less about the grand strategy for the good of Athens and more

180
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about covering his own back and distracting the attention of the Athenian Demos from accusations that Pericles is actually,

181
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you know, corrupt and unworthy and so forth.

182
00:19:26,960 --> 00:19:30,050
So you could take a reading of the megarian decree as.

183
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It's not terribly important,

184
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but Pericles is using this as a distraction and actually is therefore responsible for triggering a kind of international incident.

185
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And Thucydides doesn't say very much about this because he wants to excuse Pericles.

186
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You can also say Thucydides doesn't think it's terribly important because it's actually not terribly important.

187
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I mean, a lot depends on well, it depends. As Polly says, do we think this is more religious or more economic?

188
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If we think it's economic, well, how important is it?

189
00:20:11,980 --> 00:20:18,670
The suggestion is, for example, that it applied only to citizens of Megara.

190
00:20:19,030 --> 00:20:22,380
Maybe they wouldn't have been terribly involved in trade.

191
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So it's not necessarily cutting off megara from all trade in the Aegean.

192
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Maybe it's just a sort of minor inconvenience or sort of symbolic inconvenience, and it kind of depends,

193
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you know, how important do we think access to the harbours of the Delian League was for megara in modern terms?

194
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Phrases like economic sanctions.

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We then start to think in terms of when you know they're being prevented from exporting their manufactured goods and this is hitting their economy.

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I mean, it's not at all clear that that's a major factor for Megara.

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It's perhaps more likely that this is sort of undermining their ability to get what they need.

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I mean, why do you need access to harbours and trade when it can be you need food if there's a local harvest disaster.

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You need to be able to import food for your population on a short term basis.

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And maybe if you're cut off from the Delian League, then actually that's putting you in a seriously weak position.

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So as I say, Thucydides does have a tendency to come down to people imagining what subsidies, motives might be.

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Is he a massive Pericles fan who is trying to protect his hero?

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Is he actually neutral or even critical on the subject?

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Apparently. But he genuinely doesn't think Megara is terribly important.

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Maybe he's right. Maybe Megara is not, in fact, terribly significant.

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But. It is a provocation.

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I mean, there is the case, as you mentioned earlier, that you could see the Megarian decree as.

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Not breaking at least the letter of the 30 Years Treaty.

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But it does put Athens in the position of interfering directly with a member of the Peloponnesian League, just not in military terms.

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So you could say, you know, this could indeed be a sort of, you know,

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a cunning dodge to demonstrate Athenian power and indeed put two fingers up at the Spartans that Athens is going to punish Megara,

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but then say we haven't broken the treaty. So it may be Megara is not important in material terms,

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but actually is important as a signal that Athens thinks it can do what it likes, even with allies of the Peloponnesians.

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Okay. Thank you. And Polly, is there any sense can we understand why the Spartans in the second ultimatum?

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Why is it that it's just the Megarian decree?

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Why do they not say, Well, pull out of Potidea or stop your alliance with Corcyra that all the Spartans are just trying to stir things up with?

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The thing is, do they now want to go to war? Or why did they choose that one complaint and make such a thing and drop the others essentially?

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And it really a tricky question to pin down because there are, as we've established, so many sort of other unknowns that hinge on it.

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If we were to take the view that the Megarian decree is particularly associated with Pericles and is seen as Periclean policy,

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then you could construct an argument that said what the Spartans want to do is get rid of Pericles, get rid of Periclean policy.

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So they're picking up on the things which have a specifically sort of Periclean connotation and making that their wedge issues,

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because they think if they can get rid of Pericles, then that gets rid of a big threat to them.

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So that might be one reason why they may go into peace, become central.

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That would require us, I suppose, as is never was explained by Thucydides

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accept the the more Plutarch in view of apparently in policy empirically and dominance in this period.

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So that's that's one possibility. Another possibility, something that's often said about the Spartans is that they are genuinely a

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very religious state to a greater extent than other Greek city states over,

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as you say, take religion seriously. But if we were to see them acquiring decrees as an argument about religious practice

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in some ways and maybe this falseness in sort of picking up on that religious aspect,

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that might be why this appeals them or why they think it's something worth making more of, that the other issues.

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So that's two possibilities. But it's it's hard to know.

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I mean, Corinth Corinth is a factor in all of this. So that isn't something that differentiates Megara from from Potidea from Corcyra.

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So I don't think it could directly be to do with the involvement of Corinth, but maybe,

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maybe Megara is is a slightly more clear cut case of Peloponnesian affiliation than the others.

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Thank you. And of course, we should probably also say that Aristophanes in two of his plays in the fall 2018 account in some piece he also

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presents will be very comically the Megarians and issues around Pericles as being the key cause of the war.

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Yes. And that's another reason, I think,

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for being suspicious of the way that Thucydides spins his accounts and the lack of emphasis he gives to Megara is that,

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as you say, you can't take Aristophanes absolutely seriously.

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But the fact that these these are the sorts of things that you would make the heart of a joke in in a comedy.

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So something intended for public and for mass public consumption that would suggest that this is when people think about the causes of the

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Peloponnesian War Megara is something that they think about as part of the sort of popular understanding of of how this war happened.

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That doesn't mean Aristophanes is right, but it does suggest that the version that Thucydides gives us isn't the only version

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that is circulating in Athens and might not be the dominant version either.

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Okay, so we've got to the vote. We've got to the declaration of war.

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NEVILLE Was there sufficient cause to deem the treaty broken?

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I'm going to go for a nice clear answer of no on the basis that actually the Spartans eventually come to that conclusion as well.

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Now, admittedly, this is when we get off into the war and admittedly the aftermath of them suffering some very embarrassing defeats.

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And their explanation for this is okay. Maybe we were at fault in launching the war.

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And this is a kind of divine punishment. Beyond that, it's oh, dear, it's tricky.

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All of these things, are matters of interpretation.

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So it's not clear cut, except in so far as you could say,

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the Spartans have made a clear proposal for what the Athenians need to do and the Athenians have refused.

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So you could say at that point the Spartans certainly persuade themselves that they are in the right,

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that they have not demanded every single grievance be sorted out.

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They've identified a couple of specific things and the Athenians have refused.

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They've had their chance. On the other hand, as subsidies makes Pericles say.

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The Athenian perspective is these may look like little things,

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but we think war is coming anyway and people respect you if you stand up for them, not if you make concessions and certain falls.

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The longer answer is, obviously, I'm really not sure. I mean, you can see why.

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The Spartans and still more The Corinthians have come to this point because you would say it's actually the accumulation of things,

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all of the different incidents which suggest that the Athenians are going to do what they like.

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The Athenians are not taking the treaty seriously, even if they come up with technical ways of wriggling around it.

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So the sense that Athens will have to be stopped sooner or later, you can certainly see why the Spartans have come to that conclusion,

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which obviously isn't the same as the technical question of whether the treaty has been broken or not.

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So, Polly, over to you. What what are your thoughts?

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Yeah, again, I think that Neville has summed up very, very accurately, the problem in sort of getting a definitive answer to this question.

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I think one other thing maybe to to Chuck in is the question of arbitration, strictly speaking.

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And again, this is something that Thuycidides mentions later on as the Spartans later on worry about.

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What should have happened is before the war broke out, they hadn't got to the point of making these demands, of the demands not being refused.

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Then there should have been a point of arbitration. So.

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Is that plausible? Could arbitration have happened?

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Who would have been the arbitrator between Sparta and Athens when things had come to this point?

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So maybe, maybe arbitration was never a realistic possibility anyway.

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But that is, you know, if we were trying to basically get Athens off the hook or pin the blame on Sparta for the final outbreak of war,

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then the failure to go to arbitration could be relevant.

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But yeah, has the treaty been broken? If you want it to be broken, then I think you could find a way to argue that it had been.

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But you could equally argue that it hadn't yet been broken.

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And I think that's precisely why this is a difficult question, because there isn't a clear cut moment of breach of the treaty.

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If the Spartans intervened in Samos in 440, then that would have been very straightforward.

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That would be the breach of the treaty. But the stuff we're dealing with in the thirties is much more shades of grey.

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Okay. And I'm going to this might be a bit unclear, going to put you both on the spot if we take it from the angle of which side was more to blame.

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Have you got an answer, Polly? One word. 

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Have I got an answer? No.

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I think my my view of Athens from the end of the person was almost is Athens is aggressive and expansionist and is going to keep on expanding.

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And to that extent, you could say they are ultimately to blame.

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I suppose in that they're not going to back down whether they're specifically to blame for this war breaking out at this moment.

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I'm less sure about that. And Neville.

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Very similar.

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I mean, you could imagine Sparta being able to live with a different Athens that they did not wish to see Athens wiped off the face of the map.

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They just wanted kind of Athens to stay in her lane, so to speak.

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Athens is not going to do that.

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I mean, it's not that Athens wants to see Sparta wiped off the face of the map.

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But certainly Athens clearly was going to continue this very aggressive, expansionist policy.

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You know, all of the evidence that they are very active all round the Aegean,

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but actually they're moving out to the west and sort of starting to interfere out off into the Adriatic.

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That their goal might have been almost okay, by pass Sparta and carry on expanding until Sparta is simply an irrelevance.

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So in those terms, again, I think we do come back to Athenian aggression being the critical factor that the status quo was not an option.

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However much the 30 years peace might have hoped that it would be an option.

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And then, you know, the more that Athens shows itself to be.

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Expansionist and ambitious. Then the more that Sparta and Corinth and other cities were.

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Sooner or later going to think, okay, enough is enough.

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They just going to roll over us if we don't stand up to them.

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I think it's worth stressing. You know, again, it's never just Athens and Sparta.

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It is always powers like Corinth and potentially old Argos are also significant.

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And, you know, any number of little cities pursuing their own interests could become a flashpoint in one way or another,

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leads to increasing tensions as well.

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But if we boil it down to Athens and Sparta, we do tend to end up with a version of Thucydides' line that this is about the expansion,

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the ambition of Athens and the response of Sparta, rather than this being about Sparta's actions and how Athens responds to them.

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Okay. And that sounds like I was going to finish with a question asking was the war inevitable to take that Thucydides' idea,

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that war was inevitable from four, seven, eight?

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It sounds a little bit there Neville was that you feel that it possibly was, but maybe that's come across to Polly first and then Neville after that.

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Polly, simply, do you agree with Thucydides who says war was inevitable.

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Is there any way in which they could have cohabitated as superpowers?

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I mean, possibly they could have kicked the can down the road a bit for a bit longer, kept the thirty years peace going,

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decided to one side or another, sort of backed down over the over the middle area and decreased.

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Then again, we sort of get into the realm of counterfactuals. At some point, the Athenian empire would have collapsed.

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And then at that point where Athens is no longer this expansionist power,

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then as we see in the fourth century, it does become more or less possible for Athens and Sparta to coexist.

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So there is a possible world, I think, in which the Peloponnesian War didn't happen,

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and we just carry on more with the sorts of things we see in the four fifties.

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And four forties, just brief flare ups of hostility, which never quite become an all out war.

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So I wouldn't want to completely commit to it being absolutely inevitable, but I think it was always likely.

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Okay. And Neville? Yeah. I mean, it's really a question of what do we think was inevitable?

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I think hostilities were inevitable. It's more uncertain whether this kind of grand convulsion affecting the whole of Greece was inevitable,

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as opposed to years and years of kind of skirmishes and niggles and ongoing tensions, I suppose.

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You know, so tensions were inevitable.

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It's a question of was it absolutely inevitable that the tensions would escalate to the point of all out confrontation?

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I think it probably was sooner or later will be my position on this,

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that it's only the loss of the empire and I suppose the sort of being brought down to earth

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of the loss of the Peloponnesian War that leads the Athenians towards a slightly more,

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I don't know, modest view of their place in the world and therefore slightly more, you know, limited approach to how they deal with other states.

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Well, thank you both so much. This has been a brilliant conversation.

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I've enjoyed it hugely and I've learnt so much and I know our students will.

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I think one sense that we really take from that is the complexity of these issues and the fact that the sources just don't give us clarity.

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And that's something for students to not be afraid of and to to really realise that you can argue this from different angles,

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but just really think about sources. So Neville and Polly, thank you hugely for your contributions today.

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Oh, thank you so much for the invitation. Thanks for having us.