250 HISTORY OF GREECE. project was, when we learn that the wall, though in practice always found sufficient, was only carried up to half the height which he had contemplated.i In respect to thickness, however, his ideas were exactly followed : two carts meeting one another brought stones which were laid together right and left on the outer side of each, and thus formed two primary parallel walls, between which the interior space — of course, at least as broad as the joint breadth of the two carts — was filled up, " not with rubble, in the usual manner of t^ie Greeks, but constructed, throughout the whole thickness, of squared stones, cramped to- gether with metal." 2 The result was a solid wall, probably not less than fourteen or fifteen feet thick, since it was intended to carry so very unusual a height. In the exhortations whereby he animated the people to this fatiguing and costly work, he labored to impress upon them that Peireeus was of more value to them than Athens itself, and that it afforded a shelter into which, if their territory should be again overwhelmed by a supe- rior land-force, they might securely retire, with full liberty of that maritime action in which they were a match for all the world.3 We may even suspect that if Themistokles could have followed his own feelings, he would have altered the site of the city from Athens to Peirseus : the attachment of the people to their ancient and holy rock doubtless prevented any such propo- sition. Nor did he at that time, probably, contemplate the pos- sibility of those long walls which in a few years afterwards consolidated the two cities into one. Forty-five years afterwards, at the beginning of the Pelopon- nesian war, we shall hear from Perikles, who espoused and carried out the large ideas of Themistokles, this same language ' Thncyd. i, 93. To 6e vipnc f/fiiav fiuTiiara ETe}.EO-&ri ov dievoeiTO • i^ovXero ■yctp T(j fzeye'&ei koi tCi ttuxel cKpiaruvai rag tuv iTO/.Efiiuv iTn^ov2.uc, uviipCi- 1TUV 6e kvo/iii^Ev oTiiyuv Kal tuv axpecoTuruv apKECELv ttjv <pv7iaKTjv, rovf 6 a7Ji.ovg £f raf vavg iadr/CTEa&ai.
- Thucyd. i. 93. The expressions are those of Colonel Leake, derived
from inspection of the scanty remnant of these famous walls still to be seen — Topography of Athens, ch. ix, p. 411 : see edit. p. 293, Germ, transl. Compare Aristophan. Aves, 1127, about the breadth of the wall of Nephel- okokkygia. ' Thucyd. i, 93 (compare Cornel. Nepos, Themistok. c. 6) raif vaval
