Flag and Fleet | Page 7

many
Phoenicians did trade with the French and British Celts, who probably
learnt in this way how to build ships of their own.
CHAPTER III
EAST AGAINST WEST
(480-146 B.C.)
For two thousand years Eastern fleets and armies tried to conquer
Europe. Sometimes hundreds of years would pass without an attack.
But the result was always the same--the triumph of West over East; and
the cause of each triumph was always the same--the sea-power of the
West. Without those Western navies the Europe and America we know
today could never have existed. There could have been no Greek
civilization, no Roman government, no British Empire, and no United
States. First, the Persians fought the Greeks at Salamis in 480 B.C.
Then Carthage fought Rome more than two hundred years later. Finally,
the conquering Turks were beaten by the Spaniards at Lepanto more
than two thousand years after Salamis, but not far from the same spot,
Salamis being ten miles from Athens and Lepanto a hundred.
Long before Salamis the Greeks had been founding colonies along the

Mediterranean, among them some on the Asiatic side of the Aegean
Sea, where the French and British fleets had so much to do during the
Gallipoli campaign of 1915 against the Turks and Germans. Meanwhile
the Persians had been fighting their way north-westwards till they had
reached the Aegean and conquered most of the Greeks and Phoenicians
there. Then the Greeks at Athens sent a fleet which landed an army that
burnt the city of Sardis, an outpost of Persian power. Thereupon King
Darius, friend of the Prophet Daniel, vowed vengeance on Athens, and
caused a trusty servant to whisper in his ear each day, "Master,
remember Athens!"
Now, the Persians were landsmen, with what was then the greatest
army in the world, but with a navy and a merchant fleet mostly manned
by conquered Phoenicians and Greek colonists, none of whom wanted
to see Greece itself destroyed. So when Darius met the Greeks at
Marathon his fleet and army did not form the same sort of United
Service that the British fleet and army form. He was beaten back to his
ships and retired to Asia Minor. But "Remember Athens!" was always
in his mind. So for ten years he and his son Xerxes prepared a vast
armada against which they thought no other force on earth could stand.
But, like the Spanish Armada against England two thousand years later,
this Persian host was very much stronger ashore than afloat. Its army
was so vast that it covered the country like a swarm of locusts. At the
world-famous pass of Thermopylae the Spartan king, Leonidas, waited
for the Persians. Xerxes sent a summons asking the Greeks to surrender
their arms. "Come and take them," said Leonidas. Then wave after
wave of Persians rushed to the attack, only to break against the
dauntless Greeks. At last a vile traitor told Xerxes of another pass
(which the Greeks had not men enough to hold, though it was on their
flank). He thus got the chance of forcing them either to retreat or be cut
off. Once through this pass the Persians overran the country; and all the
Spartans at Thermopylae died fighting to the last.
Only the Grecian fleet remained. It was vastly out-numbered by the
Persian fleet. But it was manned by patriots trained to fight on the
water; while the Persians themselves were nearly all landsmen, and so
had to depend on the Phoenicians and colonial Greek seamen, who

were none too eager for the fray. Seeing the Persians too densely
massed together on a narrow front the Greek commander, Themistocles,
attacked with equal skill and fury, rolled up the Persian front in
confusion on the mass behind, and won the battle that saved the
Western World. The Persians lost two hundred vessels against only
forty Greek. But it was not the mere loss of vessels, or even of this
battle of Salamis itself, that forced Xerxes to give up all hopes of
conquest. The real reason was his having lost the command of the sea.
He knew that the victorious Greeks could now beat the fighting ships
escorting his supply vessels coming overseas from Asia Minor, and that,
without the constant supplies of men, arms, food, and everything else
an army needs, his army itself must wither away.
Two hundred and twenty years later the sea-power of the Roman West
beat both the land- and sea-power of the Carthaginian East; and for the
very same reason. Carthage was an independent colony of Phoenicians
which had won an empire in the western Mediterranean by its
sea-power. It held a great part of Spain, the whole of Sardinia, most of
Sicily, and many other islands. The Romans saw that they would never
be safe as long