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to Greece to be prepared to divert the ‘silver windfall’ from their own pockets and those of their fellow citizens into such a vast expenditure on defence.
    Since the name of Athens herself, as well as of the far-sighted Themistocles, will always be associated with the word ‘trireme’, and its importance in the forthcoming Persian invasion would affect the whole issue, the vessel and its crew are dealt with separately. For the moment, however, what mattered was that the brilliance of Themistocles and the intelligence of the Athenian Assembly led to the construction of a great new fleet. Themistocles had an additional argument with which to convince those in the
    Assembly who were sceptical of a further Persian invasion, and therefore demurred at such an expenditure of money. He could point across the water at Athens’ ancient enemy, the island of Aegina, and remind them that the Aeginetans were hostile as ever to Athens and that their navy was even larger.

5 - THE SPARTANS
    The Spartans were something of an enigma even to their fellow Greeks. They formed the most powerful state in the Peloponnese, and later in all of Greece. Their capital Sparta was situated at the northern end of the central Laconian plain on the River Eurotas. It commanded the only land-routes into Laconia as well as the two principal valleys from Arcadia to the north and the main pass over Mount Taygetus leading to Messenia. Tradition has it that the city was founded by Lacedaemon, a son of the god Zeus. Unlike the Ionian Greeks, however, including the Athenians, the Spartans came of a different branch of the Greek stock known as Dorians, who had invaded the Peloponnese in waves about 1000 B.C., dividing into several branches, one of which pushed on south down the Eurotas valley to found their capital at the point south of the junction of the Eurotas river with the Oenus. Thus was Sparta born.
    The language of these Dorians was Greek like that of the Ionians, but with some differences, including a broader accent. The nation that was to become known as Lacedaemonia or Sparta (after two place-names) settled the fertile hill-girt plain which had been described earlier by Homer as ‘hollow Lacedaemon’. Of a different temperament to the Ionians in many respects, being less lively and considerably less individualistic, they were destined to evolve a strange and austere state-system unlike that of other Greeks and, indeed, unlike almost any other that has followed in human history. Notwithstanding this, the Spartan values and disciplines were to arouse the admiration of a number of later Greek philosophers for the very reason that they were so different from the anarchy that so often prevailed in other Greek states.
    The expansion of Sparta entailed securing the upper Eurotas valley, then the land to the south, and ultimately the whole of Laconia. This inevitably brought them into conflict with the ancient city of Argos whose territory had included the whole of the eastern coast of the Peloponnese and the island of Cythera. The Argives, formidable though their history was, were driven back. They were never to forgive or forget and, as their conduct would later show during the Persian invasion of Greece, they were prepared to stand aside and even come to terms with the Persians rather than fight together with, let alone under, Spartan command. By the middle of the sixth century B.C., after a series of other local wars, some fought with savage intensity, the Spartans had come to be recognised as the foremost state in all Greece and the bulwark of Hellenism.
    From the very start, having conquered the native peoples of the Eurotas valley, the Spartans, unlike most other Greeks, do not seem to have intermingled with the subject people, not intermarrying, and holding themselves curiously aloof, except in their role as masters. In this very beginning lay the seeds of their future state. Some Greek writers, Herodotus among them, thought that the institutions