Answer:
Explanation:
The tributary states had much cause to rebel. There was something ominous about the sheer physical scale of the first (in chronological order) of the stone blocks on which were carved, as a permanent record, the tribute payments due to Athena. The block, preserved in the Epigraphic Museum in Athens, is a towering 142 inches (3.61 metres) high and had plenty of room for many years of tribute. Evidently the Athenians of 454 expected the empire to go on indefinitely, despite the failure in Egypt, which must have made many observers reflect that peace with Persia could not be far away. Yet tribute, exactingly collected, as Thucydides says, was not the only grievance. It was not even the only economic grievance. In the period of the early Peloponnesian War there were, as inscriptions show, strict Athenian controls on the traffic of grain from the Black Sea, including “Guardians of the Hellespont.” According to one view, those controls were a purely wartime expedient, but, given the state of the evidence, that charitable view is an abuse of the argument from silence; in any case, a prewar inscription does in fact attest a 10 percent tax on shipping from the Black Sea. Grain bound for Athens itself was probably exempt from this.
