Yet while the Athenians could scarcely field an army of 10,000 preeminent hoplites of the caliber that had plowed through the Persians sixty years earlier on the beach at Marathon, their aggregate imperial military strength—ships, financial capital, manpower—was greater even than that of all their potential Greek enemies combined. Athens was stronger precisely because it had evolved beyond placing its national security in the sole hands of doughty hoplite farmers. These living anachronisms, after all, were a one-dimensional force, as irrelevant off a small flat battlefield as it was deadly on
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