Free Republic

If there is a single moment in time in which the fate of Western civilization was decided, it is the battle of Marathon, 490 BC. The Persians under their king Darius landed in Greece, only 26 miles from Athens itself. A vastly outnumbered Greek force marched out to meet them. The Persians had already conquered huge swathes of the Middle East and South Asia. A relative handful of quarrelsome Greeks seemed unlikely to pose much of a challenge to them. But they were. When the day was done, the Persians were vanquished. The idea of Persian invincibility was destroyed forever....

Danish and Greek archaeologists have discovered the remains of one of the largest building complexes of the ancient world -- a naval base that 2,500 years ago housed Athens's enormous fleet. Featuring massive harbor fortifications and sheds designed to hold hundreds of war ships called triremes, the base played a key role in the most decisive naval battle of antiquity. The remains lay hidden under the water of the Mounichia fishing and yachting harbor in the Piraeus. University of Copenhagen archaeologist Bjørn Lovén, who led the expedition as part of the Zea Harbor Project, identified and excavated six ship-sheds that...

After the Battle of Marathon ten years earlier, in 490 BCE, the Athenian statesman Themistocles outlined a military defensive program against the Persian invaders that was based entirely on sea power. As Plato put it, "Themistocles robbed his fellow-citizens of spear and shield, and degraded the people of Athens to the rowing-pad and the oar." Construction work in Piraeus had already begun in 493 BCE (also on Themistocles advice).  Now, recent underwater excavations conducted by ZHP Project, which combines land and underwater archaeology of the ancient Zea and Mounichia harbors in Piraeus, have uncovered naval bases and huge fortifications that...