Abstract
Nowhere is the impact of mineral resources on the military history of western civilization better shown than by the story of the Battle of Salamis in 480 BCE, the culmination of the struggle between the Greeks and Persians for eastern Mediterranean hegemony. After blunting an earlier Persian threat at Marathon, the citizens of Athens were advised by the Oracle at Delphi that a “wooden wall” would save the city. The Athenians came to believe that this meant building a much larger fleet of ships and decided to use the revenue from the silver mines at nearby Laurion to accomplish the task. Silver from Laurion had long given Athens the financial means to support its rise to prominence in the Aegean world. Now, the citizens voted to forego their usual dividends from the mines, instead using the money to add 200 ships to their naval armada.
“Victory had always gone to the side with the greatest material resources”
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Notes
- 1.
Minerals are defined by geologists as naturally occurring inorganic materials with a fixed and symmetrical internal structure that gives them important properties such as crystal faces (so prized by gem collectors and jewelry wearers), hardness, strength, and the like. In this book, we will consider mineral resources simply as natural substances that can be economically extracted from the earth.
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Whisonant, R.C. (2015). Introduction. In: Arming the Confederacy. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-14508-2_1
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