the second Persian war, had forced her whole population to become
marines; and the glorious results of that struggle confirmed them in
their zeal for their country's service at sea.

The voluntary suffrage of the Greek cities of the coasts and islands of
the Aegean first placed Athens at the head of the confederation formed
for the further prosecution of the war against Persia. But this titular
ascendency was soon converted by her into practical and arbitrary
dominion. She protected them from piracy and the Persian power, which
soon fell into decrepitude and decay, but she exacted in return implicit
obedience to herself. She claimed and enforced a prerogative of taxing
them at her discretion, and proudly refused to be accountable for her
mode of expending their supplies. Remonstrance against her assessments
was treated as factious disloyalty, and refusal to pay was promptly
punished as revolt. Permitting and encouraging her subject allies to
furnish all their contingents in money, instead of part consisting of
ships and men, the sovereign republic gained the double object of
training her own citizens by constant and well-paid service in her
fleets, and of seeing her confederates lose their skill and discipline
by inaction, and become more and more passive and powerless under her
yoke. Their towns were generally dismantled, while the imperial city
herself was fortified with the greatest care and sumptuousness; the
accumulated revenues from her tributaries serving to strengthen and
adorn to the utmost her havens, her docks, her arsenals, her theatres,
and her shrines, and to array her in that plenitude of architectural
magnificence the ruins of which still attest the intellectual grandeur
of the age and people which produced a Pericles to plan and a Phidias to
execute.

All republics that acquire supremacy over other nations rule them