Two Forms of Funding

Temple of Hephaestus (wikisource)

In theory, the Athenian government (such as it was) collected taxes for two distinct purposes: hiera, sacred matters relating usually to specific deities, and hosia, a word with debated meaning. Some scholars see hosia as something like the opposite of hiera, catching all non-religious uses of funds. But, almost all are careful to explain, the Greeks had no concept of separating expenditures into religious and non-religious categories. hosia in fact means something like "sanctioned by the gods" (according to the Great Scott), so it can't have really been much removed from religious matters.

What the use of hosia suggests to me, if we can take it to pertain to divine sanction of some kind, is that the spenders of the money clearly had to show that anything Athens spent money on was pious, and therefore sanctioned by the gods, even if it was tabbed for ostensibly non-religious purposes like war against Sparta.

Adding further complication, funds designated as hiera could be spent, in times of crisis, on non-religious matters. Clearly the distinction was less than absolute.

Either way, the presence of these ideas shows that people in Athens in charge of spending money had a significant obligation to establish the piety of their actions - an important fact to keep in mind when analyzing decisions made during the Peloponnesian War.