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In the Meiggs seminar, I gave a talk about ‘the Peace of Kallias’, into which I had put a lot of work. Most text books and other histories said that Kallias, a high-ranking Athenian, had gone to Persia and, in or around 448/449 BC, concluded a peace treaty with the authorities there to guard against future invasions of the Greek city states by the Persians, like the ones which the Greeks had almost miraculously warded off over a generation earlier. But this peace treaty, if it was concluded, receives no mention at all in Thucydides’s history of the Peloponnesian wars, though it would reasonably have been expected in his account of their antecedents. My argument (abbreviating a lot) was that the treaty had actually been invented much later by a Hellenistic pamphleteer with an axe to grind. Meiggs praised my contribution. It was much later that I came to know that the view which I had carefully argued, was the opposite of his own, despite his salute for my argumentation.
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