More clearly than any of his elders, the tyro politician recognised that the best chance for his city’s survival lay not on dry land but on the sea – and that any warship would depend for power upon the massed muscle of its rowers. This was hardly a convincing prognosis, it might have been thought, when Athens possessed barely a harbour, let alone a battle fleet. Themistocles, however, his gaze fixed in visionary fashion upon the long term, was undaunted. Drawing up his manifesto, he began to argue for the urgent downgrading of the existing docks and their replacement by a new port at Piraeus,
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