480-432 BC
In which two small city-states defeat an Asian superpower, build a defensive alliance against their enemies, then fall out among themselves; while one of the cities builds a great empire and a glorious city, and pioneers a new form of government called democracy.
Surrounded
The world in which Socrates grew up was born in 480 BC, a mere eleven years before Socrates’ birth. The city whose duties and responsibilities he took upon himself at his swearing-in as a citizen circa 449 resulted from three decades of destruction, war, reform, and reconstruction. Socrates knew his city’s story intimately, for his parents had lived through the upheavals and his teachers drew their lessons from the tragedies and triumphs of recent history.
Around the autumn equinox of 480, the people of Athens faced the end of their world. A massive Persian army had marched around the rim of the Aegean Sea from Asia Minor and had overflowed the land of Greece from Thrace all the way to the Attic peninsula. The small army that Athens fielded against the invaders had no chance of stopping these eastern hordes, with warriors from the borders of India to the banks of the Nile to the eastern coasts of the Aegean Sea. In desperation the Athenians abandoned the city and were ferried across the straits to the island of Salamis. The Persian army occupied their city and slept in their houses.
The Athenians stood on the island, across the narrow strait from the Attic mainland, in sight of their beloved city. Between them and annihilation or slavery, lay only a mile of water and a fleet of wooden galleys.
Throughout the following night small boats shuttled back and forth between the island and the mainland: scouts, messengers, perhaps traitors had been in contact with friendly forces or the enemy. A council of war was being held late into the evening, wherein it was reported that the great fleet that accompanied the Persian army had blocked the entrances to the island on both east and west sides, trapping the Athenians in a vise. In the mists of the early morning, enemy ships began penetrating the bay between the island and the mainland. The enemy’s war galleys came from several nations. Phoenicians, Egyptians, Carians, and Greeks from the coasts of Asia Minor had been forced to sail as part of the campaign of the Great King Xerxes against the Athenians and their Spartan allies. As the sun began to rise over the Attic peninsula to the east it was clear that there would be no escape for the Athenians.
Yet this was just what the Athenian admiral Themistocles wanted: a desperate fight between the Athenian fleet and the Persian fleet, a no-holds-barred duel to the death. On land the Greek forces were no match for the massive Persian army. On sea there was a chance. The Greeks were at least a match for the Persians, ship for ship. The Persians actually had no ships of their own, but depended on subject peoples to supply their navy, peoples who were required to perform for King Xerxes, but who had no personal stake in the outcome. Themistocles had engineered the naval blockade by sending his trusted slave, Sicinnus, as emissary to the Persian camp to promise Xerxes that if the Persian navy surrounded the island, the Greeks would surrender. Posing as the traitor-in-chief, he offered Xerxes an easy victory in return for doing what he asked. Themistocles for his part knew that a blockade was the only way to keep other Greek crews who were allied with the Athenians from fleeing to their own cities and abandoning the Athenian island as a lost cause.[1] Xerxes, on the other hand, saw the blockade as assuring an easy victory, either by the capitulation of the Greek forces, or by their annihilation if they resisted.
[1].Herodotus 8.75-76, 80-83; Aeschylus Persians 355-63. For the battle, see Strauss 2004.