ABSTRACT
Themistocles saw that the narrow waters inside Salamis would give the Greek fleet a chance of victory, while at the Isthmus they would certainly be defeated - even if the fleet held together, which was unlikely. Themistocles, says Herodotus, spoke with great severity both of Adeimantos and of Corinth, and said the Athenians even had a bigger polis and more territory than Corinth, for so long as they had two hundred ships fully manned they could conquer anybody's territory. Plato says, in the Gorgias, that Themistocles, Cimon and Pericles 'filled the city with fortifications and rubbish of that sort', but failed miserably in the statesman's first duty, of making the citizens more virtuous. There is very little similarity between Greek slavery in the fifth and fourth centuries and the Roman latifundia, large estates worked by slaves, which were created by the depopulation of the countryside.
