Lords of the Sea: The Epic Story of the Athenian Navy & the Birth of Democracy Read Online Free PDF

and the Aegean islands. Ten years earlier there had been warning signs that the Persians would invade Attica with an army coming overland and a fleet attacking by sea.
    As archon or chief magistrate for the year, Themistocles persuaded the Assembly to fortify the Piraeus promontory with its three natural harbors. The walled port would provide a safe refuge for Athenian families while the citizens manned their ships and repelled the Persian fleet. Trusting his foresight, the Athenians had expended much money and effort to raise a massive wall of stone blocks clamped together with iron and lead, a wall so thick that two oxcarts could pass along it. But within a few years the Persian threat seemingly evaporated, and the costly project was left unfinished. The wall and the stumps of towers at the Piraeus now stood to only half the height that Themistocles had envisioned, a constant reminder of his poor powers as a prophet.
    Athens had incurred the wrath of the Persians when Themistocles was still in his impressionable twenties. At one of the most memorable meetings ever held on the Pnyx, Aristagoras of Miletus had asked the Athenians to support a rebellion of Ionian Greeks against their overlord, King Darius of Persia. With Athenian help, the revolt might grow from a limited fight for freedom to a war that would reach all the way to the Persian capital at Susa, beyond the Tigris River. The Athenians voted to aid their kinsmen in Asia Minor and sent twenty ships filled with troops across the Aegean Sea. These men joined the Ionians in attacking the Persian provincial capital at Sardis. A fire broke out during the sack of the city, burning most of the houses along with the temple of the Mother Goddess Cybele.
    Retribution was swift. A Persian army caught the Athenians as they marched back to the coast and beat them in battle. When the twenty ships limped home and the defeated troops told their story, the Assembly voted to have nothing more to do with the Ionian rebellion. The struggle lasted for six years. Shortly before Themistocles was elected archon, the Great King’s navy defeated the fleet of the Ionian rebels near an island called Lade. Themistocles was convinced that Athens’ turn would be next: hence the fortification of the Piraeus.
    As Themistocles prophesied, Darius did send an army and fleet to conquer Athens. That first Persian attempt ended when a violent north wind drove the Great King’s triremes onto the rocky coast of Mount Athos in the northern Aegean, where the Persians lost hundreds of triremes and thousands of men. The second Persian invasion came to grief at Marathon, in the northwestern corner of Attica. Led by the charismatic Athenian general Miltiades, Athens’ phalanx of heavily armed soldiers called hoplites defeated a seaborne expeditionary force on a plain that lay just over twenty-six miles from Athens. King Darius’ third attempt to conquer the Athenians was in preparation when he died, three years after Marathon. Since then, rebellions within the empire had kept the Persians at home. Themistocles looked like the boy who cried wolf in Aesop’s fable. The city was still safe and free. After so many false alarms Athenians stopped believing in the Persian threat and stopped working on Themistocles’ folly at the Piraeus as well.
    Yet the man himself had never lost his conviction. At today’s meeting he still intended to strengthen Athens’ power to resist Persia, but by oblique means. The Assembly would have no patience if he predicted a Persian invasion yet again. No, Persia would not even be mentioned. There would be no direct attack on public opinion. Themistocles would use mêtis instead.
    This distinctively Greek quality was virtually untranslatable into other languages. Indeed it ran contrary to the values of many nations, most notably the Persians. Mêtis embraced craft, cunning, skill, and intelligence, the power of invention and the subtlety of art. It was the weapon of the weak and the