The influential Athenian Greek vase painter Douris, who flourishes in the early fifth century BCE, works in the Red Figure style for three potters: Euphronius, Kleophrades, and Python, mostly for the last.

A prolific and skillful, if unoriginal painter, Douris generally prefers genre subjects but also paints mythological scenes, and his work displays an interest in spatial illusion and the female nude.

Douris signs thirty-nine known vases over his long career; approximately three hundred others have been attributed to him.

Pausanias, a young man flushed from his success at Plataea and now admiral of the Greek fleet, wins victories in Cyprus (a temporary conquest) and the Bosporus, and captures Byzantium in 478.

Aristides commands the Athenian contingent of thirty ships in the fleet that Pausanias leads.

While Pausanias is at Byzantium, his arrogance and his adoption of Persian clothing and manners offend the other Greeks, “not least,” Thucydides says, “the Ionians and the newly liberated populations,” and raises suspicions of disloyalty.

Recalled to Sparta, he is tried and acquitted of the charge of treason but is not restored to his command and is instead replaced by Dorcis; yet Dorcis and others like him lack Pausanias' charisma, and Sparta sends out two more commanders.

When the Athenians separate from the Spartans to form the Delian League, Pausanias returns to Byzantium “in a private capacity,” setting himself up as a tyrant to intrigue with Persia, and holds the city until his expulsion by the Athenians (probably in 477).

Miletus, after the defeat of the Persian invaders in 479 BCE by the Greeks, joins the Athenian-dominated Delian League.

Cimon helps Aristides in 478 BCE to secure the transference from Sparta to Athens of the leadership of the recently liberated Greek maritime states.

Under the leadership of Themistocles and Cimon, the Athenians in the summer of 478 BCE reform the alliance into a new body, the Delian League (a modern expression).

Organized to preserve the freedom of the newly liberated Greek states and drive the Persians from the rest of the Ionian cities and islands in Asia Minor; the League also contemplates carrying the war into Persian territories.

Athens, by using monetary contributions from other member states to build its own military forces, will essentially transform the Hellenic League into its own empire.

Themistocles outwits the Spartans when they attempt to prevent Athens from rebuilding its defensive walls, but he fails to induce the people either to transfer their capital to Piraeus or, at this time, to reduce the powers of the Areopagus.

The Athenian people, after their tremendous war effort, are in a mood of reaction.

Themistocles, a strong democrat, is hated by the Athenian upper classes, who come to suspect him of plotting with the Persians, and, though praised (not by name) in Aeschylus' Persians (472 BCE), he is at last ostracized.

The eastern Greek allies revolt from Spartan control toward the end of 478 and at Delos offer their allegiance, through Aristides, to Athens.

The new alliance, established on the basis of equality of its members, convenes on the island of Delos, sacred to Apollo.

The original organization of the league, as sketched by Thucydides, indicates that all Greeks were invited to join to protect themselves from Achaemenian Persia.

Athens is in fact interested in further supporting the Ionians in Anatolia and exacting retribution from the Persians, whereas Sparta is reluctant to commit itself heavily overseas.

The Athenians are to supply the commanders in chief and to decide which states are to provide ships or money; money is to be received and controlled by ten Athenian treasurers (hellenotamiai).

Representatives of all member states, each with equal vote, are to meet annually at Delos, where the league's treasury is kept in the temple of Apollo.

The original membership probably includes most of the Aegean islands, except Aegina, Melos, and Thera, most of the cities of Chalcidice, the shores of the Hellespont and Bosporus, some of Aeolia, most of Ionia, and a few eastern Dorian and non-Greek Carian cities.

Apart from the big Ionian islands and some mainlanders, there are in fact Dorian members like Rhodes and Aeolians like Lesbos; there even are some non-Greeks on Cyprus, always a place with a large Semitic component. (Some Cypriot communities probably join at the outset.)

Some Thracian cities are surely enrolled very early.

Aristides, who is with Cimon one of the chief architects of the League, is chosen to assess the contributions to be paid by the member state; some contribute ships and men instead of money.

The Athenian fleet harasses Andros for supplying ships to Xerxes in 480.

The westernmost of the Cyclades, Kéa, inhabited since early Helladic times, had fought on the Greek side in the naval battles of Artemisium and Salamis (both 480 BCE) during the Greco-Persian Wars, and it subsequently joins the Delian League and the Athenian alliance.

Páros, although a Persian ally in both 490 BCE and 480 BCE, becomes a member of the Delian League.

Lesbos, freed only in 479 BCE with the defeat of Persian naval forces, and …

…Náxos, which had deserted Persia in 480 BCE, joining the Greeks at the Battle of Salamis, join the Delian League under Athenian leadership.