History of the Peloponnesian War | Page 6

navy in the reign of
Cambyses, with which he reduced many of the islands, and among
them Rhenea, which he consecrated to the Delian Apollo. About this
time also the Phocaeans, while they were founding Marseilles, defeated
the Carthaginians in a sea-fight. These were the most powerful navies.
And even these, although so many generations had elapsed since the
Trojan war, seem to have been principally composed of the old

fifty-oars and long-boats, and to have counted few galleys among their
ranks. Indeed it was only shortly the Persian war, and the death of
Darius the successor of Cambyses, that the Sicilian tyrants and the
Corcyraeans acquired any large number of galleys. For after these there
were no navies of any account in Hellas till the expedition of Xerxes;
Aegina, Athens, and others may have possessed a few vessels, but they
were principally fifty-oars. It was quite at the end of this period that the
war with Aegina and the prospect of the barbarian invasion enabled
Themistocles to persuade the Athenians to build the fleet with which
they fought at Salamis; and even these vessels had not complete decks.
The navies, then, of the Hellenes during the period we have traversed
were what I have described. All their insignificance did not prevent
their being an element of the greatest power to those who cultivated
them, alike in revenue and in dominion. They were the means by which
the islands were reached and reduced, those of the smallest area falling
the easiest prey. Wars by land there were none, none at least by which
power was acquired; we have the usual border contests, but of distant
expeditions with conquest for object we hear nothing among the
Hellenes. There was no union of subject cities round a great state, no
spontaneous combination of equals for confederate expeditions; what
fighting there was consisted merely of local warfare between rival
neighbours. The nearest approach to a coalition took place in the old
war between Chalcis and Eretria; this was a quarrel in which the rest of
the Hellenic name did to some extent take sides.
Various, too, were the obstacles which the national growth encountered
in various localities. The power of the Ionians was advancing with
rapid strides, when it came into collision with Persia, under King Cyrus,
who, after having dethroned Croesus and overrun everything between
the Halys and the sea, stopped not till he had reduced the cities of the
coast; the islands being only left to be subdued by Darius and the
Phoenician navy.
Again, wherever there were tyrants, their habit of providing simply for
themselves, of looking solely to their personal comfort and family
aggrandizement, made safety the great aim of their policy, and

prevented anything great proceeding from them; though they would
each have their affairs with their immediate neighbours. All this is only
true of the mother country, for in Sicily they attained to very great
power. Thus for a long time everywhere in Hellas do we find causes
which make the states alike incapable of combination for great and
national ends, or of any vigorous action of their own.
But at last a time came when the tyrants of Athens and the far older
tyrannies of the rest of Hellas were, with the exception of those in
Sicily, once and for all put down by Lacedaemon; for this city, though
after the settlement of the Dorians, its present inhabitants, it suffered
from factions for an unparalleled length of time, still at a very early
period obtained good laws, and enjoyed a freedom from tyrants which
was unbroken; it has possessed the same form of government for more
than four hundred years, reckoning to the end of the late war, and has
thus been in a position to arrange the affairs of the other states. Not
many years after the deposition of the tyrants, the battle of Marathon
was fought between the Medes and the Athenians. Ten years afterwards,
the barbarian returned with the armada for the subjugation of Hellas. In
the face of this great danger, the command of the confederate Hellenes
was assumed by the Lacedaemonians in virtue of their superior power;
and the Athenians, having made up their minds to abandon their city,
broke up their homes, threw themselves into their ships, and became a
naval people. This coalition, after repulsing the barbarian, soon
afterwards split into two sections, which included the Hellenes who had
revolted from the King, as well as those who had aided him in the war.
At the end of the one stood Athens, at the head of the other
Lacedaemon, one the first naval, the other the first military power in
Hellas. For a short time the league held together, till the
Lacedaemonians and Athenians quarrelled and made war upon each
other