way through which it travelled.
She had consequently great money resources, as is shown by the epithet
"wealthy" bestowed by the old poets on the place, and this enabled her,
when traffic by sea became more common, to procure her navy and put down
piracy; and as she could offer a mart for both branches of the trade,
she acquired for herself all the power which a large revenue affords.
Subsequently the Ionians attained to great naval strength in the reign
of Cyrus, the first king of the Persians, and of his son Cambyses, and
while they were at war with the former commanded for a while the Ionian
sea. Polycrates also, the tyrant of Samos, had a powerful navy in the
reign of Cambyses, with which he reduced many of the islands, and among
them Rhenea, which he consecrated to the Delian Apollo. About this time
also the Phocaeans, while they were founding Marseilles, defeated the
Carthaginians in a sea-fight. 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 ex