One thing is certain: George W. Bush was no Pericles. For which reason it is a pity that John Hale’s new history of Athens in the fifth and fourth centuries BC is launched with a rhetoric more Texan than Attic.
The ancient Greeks knew that building a navy was an undertaking with clear-cut political consequences. A naval tradition that depended on the muscles and sweat of the masses led inevitably to democracy: from sea power to democratic power. Athens was exhibit A in this argument, and radical democracy would indeed be the Athenian navy’s greatest legacy.
To be sure it was not Dubya — nor even Hale, a classical marine archaeologist from the University of Louisville, Kentucky — who called Athens ‘a democracy based on triremes’ and who argued that
Athenian democracy was strengthened by the masses who served in the navy and who won the victory at Salamis, because the leadership that Athens then gained rested on sea power.
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