The Lacedæmonians, on hearing this, did not let their anger appear to the Athenians; for they had not sent their embassy to obstruct their designs, but to offer counsel, they said, to their state; and besides, they were at that time on very friendly terms with them owing to their zeal against the Mede; in secret, however, they were annoyed at failing in their wish. So the ambassadors of each state returned home without any complaint being made.
In this way, Thucydides continues, the Athenians walled their city in a short time. And the building shows even now that it was executed in haste; for the foundations are laid with stones of all kinds, and in some places not wrought together, but as the several parties at any time brought them to the spot: and many columns from tombs, and wrought stones, were worked up in them.[b]
THE NEW ATHENS
The first indispensable step, in the renovation of Athens after her temporary extinction, was now happily accomplished: the city was made secure against external enemies. But Themistocles, to whom the Athenians owed the late successful stratagem, and whose influence must have been much strengthened by its success, had conceived plans of a wider and more ambitious range. He had been the original adviser of the great maritime start taken by his countrymen, as well as of the powerful naval force which they had created during the last few years, and which had so recently proved their salvation. He saw in that force both the only chance of salvation for the future, in case the Persians should renew their attack by sea,—a contingency at that time seemingly probable,—and boundless prospects of future ascendency over the Grecian coasts and islands: it was the great engine of defence, of offence, and of ambition. To continue this movement required much less foresight and genius than to begin it, and Themistocles, the moment that the walls of the city had been finished, brought back the attention of his countrymen to those wooden walls which had served them as a refuge against the Persian monarch. He prevailed upon them to provide harbour-room at once safe and adequate, by the enlargement and fortification of the Piræus. This again was only the prosecution of an enterprise previously begun: for he had already, while in office two or three years before, made his countrymen sensible that the open roadstead of Phalerum was thoroughly insecure, and had prevailed upon them to improve and employ in part the more spacious harbours of Piræus and Munychia—three natural basins, all capable of being closed and defended. Something had then been done towards the enlargement of this port, though it had probably been subsequently ruined by the Persian invaders: but Themistocles now resumed the scheme on a scale far grander than he could then have ventured to propose—a scale which demonstrates the vast auguries present to his mind respecting the destinies of Athens.
Piræus and Munychia, in his new plan, constituted a fortified space as large as the enlarged Athens, and with a wall far more elaborate and unassailable. The wall which surrounded them, sixty stadia in circuit [about seven and a half miles], was intended by him to be so stupendous, both in height and thickness, as to render assault hopeless, and to enable the whole military population to act on shipboard, leaving only old men and boys as a garrison. We may judge how vast his project was, when we learn that the wall, though in practice always found sufficient, was only carried up to half the height which he had contemplated. In respect to thickness, however, his ideas were exactly followed: two carts meeting one another brought stones which were laid together right and left on the outer side of each, and thus formed two primary parallel walls, between which the interior space—of course, at least as broad as the joint breadth of the two carts—was filled up, “not with rubble, in the usual manner of the Greeks, but constructed, throughout the whole thickness, of squared stones, cramped together with metal.” The result was a solid wall, probably not less than fourteen or fifteen feet thick, since it was intended to carry so very unusual a height. In the exhortations whereby he animated the people to this fatiguing and costly work, he laboured to impress upon them that Piræus was of more value to them than Athens itself, and that it afforded a shelter into which, if their territory should be again overwhelmed by a superior land-force, they might securely retire, with full liberty of that maritime action in which they were a match for all the world. We may even suspect that if Themistocles could have followed his own feelings, he would have altered the site of the city from Athens to Piræus: the attachment of the people to their ancient and holy rock doubtless prevented any such proposition. Nor did he at that time, probably, contemplate the possibility of those long walls which in a few years afterwards consolidated the two cities into one.
Forty-five years afterwards, at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War, we shall hear from Pericles, who espoused and carried out the large ideas of Themistocles, this same language about the capacity of Athens to sustain a great power exclusively or chiefly upon maritime action. But the Athenian empire was then an established reality, whereas in the time of Themistocles it was yet a dream, and his bold predictions, surpassed as they were by the future reality, mark that extraordinary power of practical divination which Thucydides so emphatically extols in him. And it proves the exuberant hope which had now passed into the temper of the Athenian people, when we find them, on the faith of these predictions, undertaking a new enterprise of so much toil and expense; and that too when just returned from exile into a desolated country, at a moment of private distress and public impoverishment. However, Piræus served other purposes besides its direct use as a dockyard for military marine: its secure fortifications and the protection of the Athenian navy, were well calculated to call back those metics, or resident foreigners, who had been driven away by the invasion of Xerxes, and who might feel themselves insecure in returning, unless some new and conspicuous means of protection were exhibited.
To invite them back, and to attract new residents of a similar description, Themistocles proposed to exempt them from the metoikion, or non-freeman’s annual tax: but this exemption can only have lasted for a time, and the great temptation for them to return must have consisted in the new securities and facilities for trade, which Athens, with her fortified ports and navy, now afforded. The presence of numerous metics was profitable to the Athenians, both privately and publicly: much of the trading, professional, and handicraft business was in their hands: and the Athenian legislation, while it excluded them from the political franchise, was in other respects equitable and protective to them.
We are further told that Themistocles prevailed on the Athenians to build every year twenty new ships of the line—so we may designate the trireme. Whether this number was always strictly adhered to, it is impossible to say; but to repair the ships, as well as to keep up their numbers, was always regarded among the most indispensable obligations of the executive government. It does not appear that the Spartans offered any opposition to the fortification of the Piræus, though it was an enterprise greater, more novel, and more menacing, than that of Athens. But Diodorus tells us, probably enough, that Themistocles thought it necessary to send an embassy to Sparta, intimating that his scheme was to provide a safe harbour for the collective navy of Greece, in the event of future Persian attack.
Works on so vast a scale must have taken a considerable time, and absorbed much of the Athenian force; yet they did not prevent Athens from lending active aid towards the expedition which, in the year after the battle of Platæa (478 B.C.), set sail for Asia under the Spartan Pausanias. Twenty ships from the various cities of the Peloponnesus were under his command: the Athenians alone furnished thirty, under the orders of Aristides and Cimon: other triremes also came from the Ionian and insular allies. They first sailed to Cyprus, in which island they liberated most of the Grecian cities from the Persian government: next, they turned to the Bosporus of Thrace, and undertook the siege of Byzantium, which, like Sestus in the Chersonesus, was a post of great moment, as well as of great strength—occupied by a considerable Persian force, with several leading Persians and even kinsmen of the monarch. The place was captured, seemingly after a prolonged siege: it might probably hold out even longer than Sestus, as being taken less unprepared. The line of communication between the Euxine Sea and Greece was thus cleared of obstruction.