"Thucydidies - The History Of The Peloponnesian War" - читать интересную книгу автора (Thucydidies)

These were the most powerful navies. And even these, although so many
generations had elapsed since the Trojan war, seem to have been principally
composed of the old fifty-oars and long-boats, and to have counted
few galleys among their ranks. Indeed it was only shortly the Persian
war, and the death of Darius the successor of Cambyses, that the Sicilian
tyrants and the Corcyraeans acquired any large number of galleys.
For after these there were no navies of any account in Hellas till
the expedition of Xerxes; Aegina, Athens, and others may have possessed
a few vessels, but they were principally fifty-oars. It was quite
at the end of this period that the war with Aegina and the prospect
of the barbarian invasion enabled Themistocles to persuade the Athenians
to build the fleet with which they fought at Salamis; and even these
vessels had not complete decks.

The navies, then, of the Hellenes during the period we have traversed
were what I have described. All their insignificance did not prevent
their being an element of the greatest power to those who cultivated
them, alike in revenue and in dominion. They were the means by which
the islands were reached and reduced, those of the smallest area falling
the easiest prey. Wars by land there were none, none at least by which
power was acquired; we have the usual border contests, but of distant
expeditions with conquest for object we hear nothing among the Hellenes.
There was no union of subject cities round a great state, no spontaneous
combination of equals for confederate expeditions; what fighting there
was consisted merely of local warfare between rival neighbours. The
nearest approach to a coalition took place in the old war between
Chalcis and Eretria; this was a quarrel in which the rest of the Hellenic
name did to some extent take sides.

Various, too, were the obstacles which the national growth encountered
in various localities. The power of the Ionians was advancing with
rapid strides, when it came into collision with Persia, under King
Cyrus, who, after having dethroned Croesus and overrun everything
between the Halys and the sea, stopped not till he had reduced the
cities of the coast; the islands being only left to be subdued by
Darius and the Phoenician navy.

Again, wherever there were tyrants, their habit of providing simply
for themselves, of looking solely to their personal comfort and family
aggrandizement, made safety the great aim of their policy, and prevented
anything great proceeding from them; though they would each have their
affairs with their immediate neighbours. All this is only true of
the mother country, for in Sicily they attained to very great power.
Thus for a long time everywhere in Hellas do we find causes which
make the states alike incapable of combination for great and national
ends, or of any vigorous action of their own.

But at last a time came when the tyrants of Athens and the far older
tyrannies of the rest of Hellas were, with the exception of those
in Sicily, once and for all put down by Lacedaemon; for this city,