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The small boy crawled along the claustrophobic tunnels underground, some of them only two or three feet in diameter and too narrow for most fully grown men. He was one of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of slave-miners, who extracted silver-bearing ore from rich seams at Laurium in southeastern Attica.
There were three strata of ore, separated by limestone. Mining had been going on for centuries (Xenophon said, “since time immemorial”), probably open-cast to begin with. During the tyranny of Pisistratus systematic exploitation of the mineral resources of Athens began. Shafts were driven down into the ground and galleries opened where slaves, chained, naked, and branded, worked the seams illuminated only by guttering oil lamps. An unrecorded number were children. It was a miserable, dangerous, and brief life.
The mines were state-owned and leased to wealthy speculators. We know of one leading Athenian statesman in the fifth century who rented out a thousand slaves, for one obol per head per day, to a Thracian mine manager, whom he had probably bought and then freed. (An obol could buy a jug containing about six pints of wine; three obols would purchase time with a prostitute.)
The mines brought the state welcome income. Then in 484/3 a shaft was dug through the second limestone crust to reveal the bottom stratum, an apparently inexhaustible new source of silver. Untold riches were to cascade onto Athens and its citizens, like the beautiful Danae whom Zeus visited in a shower of gold. After only one year’s exploitation, the additional annual revenue from Laurium may have been as much as 100 talents or some two and a half tons of pure silver.
It was a miracle and Themistocles had every intention of making the most of it. He knew exactly how the windfall ought to be spent.
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Archilochus, a seventh-century poet from the island of Paros, whom some compared favorably to Homer, once wrote: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” Themistocles certainly had the fox’s cleverness and cunning, but in truth he was also a hedgehog. Throughout the length of his political career he promoted a single overriding idea.
Athens had a navy of sorts, but was more proud of her land army, her hoplites. After all, not so long ago, they had won what many came to regard as the greatest land battle in Hellenic history. But Themistocles believed he had good grounds for arguing that the future of Athens lay elsewhere—at sea.
His thinking was both strategic and tactical. The population of Athens was still growing and, as we have seen, Attica’s bony, largely mountainous landscape was not producing enough food for it. The polis depended increasingly on imports of grain; these were most readily available from the fertile arable lands along the northern littoral of the Black Sea. There was no way that hoplites could guard a long maritime supply line. It would have to be protected by a much stronger fleet.
In addition, more had to be done to encourage trade. Solon had taken action, but it had not been enough. If Athenian warships policed the Aegean Sea they would make sailing safe and so create a favorable climate in which Athens’s merchant navy could carry on its business.
And then, of course, there were the Persians. If and when the Great King came back, the city’s hoplites would be massively outnumbered and would probably be unable to prevent him from invading Attica and even capturing Athens itself. To judge from Marathon, one could not depend on military powers like Sparta. Should the worst come to the worst, a large Athenian fleet could evacuate the population to a neighboring island, such as Salamis, or even sail to Italy and found a New Athens. If it was joined by the navies of other maritime city-states in the Aegean Sea, the Greeks would be able to muster enough triremes to hold off the fleet of Xerxes.
As Chief Archon in 493 Themistocles was in a position to promote his big idea. The first step was to build a new, defensible harbor to replace Phaleron, whose only advantage as a port was that it was visible from Athens. The fleet had to be pulled up the beach, placing it at the mercy either of high seas or hostile ships. It was not fifteen years since the ferocious islanders of Aegina had set fire to the fleet there.
Not far along the coast at Piraeus and five miles from the city there were three closely grouped natural rock harbors. Hippias had already seen the advantages of the site, for this was where he had built his emergency getaway castle. Themistocles persuaded the ecclesia to finance the fortification of Piraeus and the development of the triple harbor. It was a tremendous enterprise, which took sixteen years to complete. Solid walls with finely dressed masonry rose from the ground, which were wide enough to allow two wagons to pass each other abreast.
However, his proposal that, if the polis was threatened by land, the seat of government should be moved from Athens to the new port met with less favor and was shelved. To abandon the Acropolis and the shrines of the gods would almost be sacrilege.
The Archon also laid out a plan to maintain a larger fleet. This was not only expensive but politically sensitive, and failed to win support. If cavalry was the costly prerogative of the aristocrat and the heavily armed hoplite was a member of the affluent middle class, warships were reserved for the poor, the thetes. They were the rabble that had the unenviable task of rowing them. Plato, writing a century later, expressed his disapproval in the offended tones of the respectable rich. Themistocles, he wrote, “deprived the Athenians of the spear and the shield and degraded them to the rowing bench and the oar.” The demos was ready neither to finance more of the greedy poor nor to entrust its own future to the inconstant waves.
However, the new seam of silver at Laurium, when it was discovered nearly ten years later, and continuing fighting with its nearby trade rival, Aegina, changed its mind. The island had not been forgiven for medizing during the Marathon campaign.
A popular suggestion for spending the income from Laurium was to distribute it equally among all the citizens of Athens. It would be the dividend from a highly successful commercial enterprise. Themistocles insisted at the ecclesia that this would be an unpardonable waste. He told the assembly why this “fountain of silver,” as the tragedian Aeschylus called it, would be better spent on the navy. But Aegina, although a genuine nuisance, was only his cover story; his real concern was with Persia. He did not broadcast this partly because he had to purchase wood for his triremes from Macedonia, then a Persian protectorate, and partly because his fellow-citizens refused to take the threat from Xerxes seriously.
Despite strong opposition, approval was finally given in 483/2 to the construction of two hundred triremes. Athenians took the view that if they could not beat the Aeginetans at sea, they could at least outbuild them in the number of warships and in that way overawe them.
It has been estimated that at top speed the shipwrights of Athens could build between six and eight triremes per month. Aegina did not have the resources to compete and watched with dismay the mass production of a navy that would treble the size of their own and the creation of a great port where it could safely shelter. As for Xerxes, he was probably not informed of these events, but if he was he will have dismissed them. His fleet far outnumbered the best that Athens could provide and it was manned by the most respected and feared sailors in the Mediterranean, the Phoenicians.
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The trireme (“triple-rower”) was a three-banked warship and although it had two square-set sails it was primarily a galley powered by oars. It has been well described as a glorified racing eight. Highly specialist, it was lightweight, rapid, and agile.
A development from the penteconter, an old-fashioned vessel with a single row of twenty-five oars on each side, it appeared around the year 600 and may have been invented by the Egyptians. It was exclusively designed to fight other triremes either by ramming them or boarding them. Its main weapon was a heavy bronze beak fastened to the bow at the waterline and designed to pierce an enemy’s hull.