This new Delian League (so called because its treasury was originally on the island of Delos) contained the seeds of AthensвЂ™ speedy transformation into a naval empire. Themistocles also, against strong Spartan objections, encircled Athens with a strong city wall. Aristocratic pro-Spartans in Athens nixed the proposal in horror but they nevertheless went along with a scheme to form AthensвЂ™ own separate league, mostly of islanders and East Aegean cities, that would contribute ships or cash to defend against any Persian aggression. Themistocles, the Athenian architect of naval victory, wanted to burn the Spartan fleet. Not surprisingly, almost the moment the Persian threat receded, cracks appeared in the wartime alliance. Two less likely chalk-and-cheese allies, forced together by harsh necessity, could hardly be imagined. During the war it was the mass members of this Athenian demos - shipbuilders, dockyard workers, chandlers, captains, rowers - who crewed the new fast warships (triremes) that broke the back of XerxesвЂ™ fleet at Salamis. Athens, northeast of the isthmus on the Saronic Gulf, had, in the years before the Persian Wars, developed a limited popular democracy.

Sparta, located in the Peloponnese (the not-quite-island that forms southern Greece, attached to the northern mainland by the Isthmus of Corinth), was a nation of ferocious and privileged militarist landowners. Fifty years before that, they had been uneasy allies against XerxesвЂ™ Persian invasions (480-479 BC). About 2 1/2 millenniums ago, a couple of small Greek states (neither much bigger than Rhode Island) lurched into war with each other.

Ancient wars sparta egyptian