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There were innumerable dishes of fish, reminding the Greeks of the viands of their native land, and between mouthfuls they discussed the glauci from Megara, the eels from Scione, and breams and xiphiae from the coasts of Phalerum and from the Hellespont.
The Persian fleet, too, finding the channel of the Euripus clear, sailed down it, and rounding Sunium, came to anchor in the bay of Phalerum. In the councils of the Greeks all was doubt and irresolution.
In a word, every thing seemed ready for the decisive and final blow, and Xerxes summoned a grand council of war on board one of the vessels of the fleet as soon as he arrived at Phalerum, to decide upon the time and manner of striking it. The convening of this council was arranged, and the deliberations themselves conducted, with great parade and ceremony.
It was probably under these circumstances, when Athens owed the recovery of her greatness in no small measure to the Phoenicians, that those relations of friendship and intimacy were established between the two peoples of which we have evidence in several inscriptions. Phoenicians settled in Attica, particularly at Phalerum and the Piraeus, and had their own places of worship and interment.
To cure his shortness of breath he practised the uttering of long sentences while walking rapidly up-hill. That he might be able to make himself heard above the noise of the assembly, he would stand in stormy weather on the sea-shore at Phalerum, and declaim against the roar of the waves.
He corrected his defective elocution by speaking with pebbles in his mouth; he prepared himself to overcome the noise of the assembly by declaiming in stormy weather on the sea-shore of Phalerum; he opened his lungs by running, and extended his powers of holding breath by pronouncing sentences in marching up-hill; he sometimes passed two or three months without interruption in a subterranean chamber, practising night and day either in composition or declamation, and shaving one-half of his head in order to disqualify himself from going abroad."
Near the sea on the one side the harbor of Piraeus, on the other that designated Phalerum, with crowded arsenals, their busy workmen and their gallant ships. Not far off in the ocean the Island of Salamis, ennobled forever in history as the spot near which Athenian valour chastised Asiatic pride, and achieved the liberty of Greece.
But the greatness of the victory itself is overthrown, and the end of that so celebrated action comes to nothing, nor does it seem to have been a fight or any great exploit, but only a light skirmish with the barbarians, as the envious and ill-willers affirm, if they did not after the battle fly away, cutting their cables and giving themselves to the wind, to carry them as far as might be from the Attic coast, but having a shield lifted up to them as a signal of treason, made straight with their fleet for Athens, in hope to surprise it, and having at leisure doubled the point of Sunium, were discovered above the port Phalerum, so that the chief and most illustrious men, despairing to save the city would have betrayed it.
Yet, when the enemy's fleet was arrived at the haven of Phalerum, upon the coast of Attica, and with the number of their ships concealed all the shore, and when they saw the king himself in person come down with his land army to the seaside, with all his forces united, then the good counsel of Themistocles was soon forgotten, and the Peloponnesians cast their eyes again towards the isthmus, and took it very ill if any one spoke against their returning home; and, resolving to depart that night, the pilots had order what course to steer.
Three land-locked harbours gave ample room for the fleets of Athens to lie in shelter and safety; and this great sea-port town was afterwards united to the original city by two long walls, which met the sea, one at the north-western corner of Peiraeus, and the other at the south-eastern point of the Bay of Phalerum.
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