BATTLE OF SALAMIS: The Naval Encounter That Saved Greece - and Western Civilization, THE

Sea Power, Sep 2004 by Munns, David W

THE BATTLE OF SALAMIS: The Naval Encounter That Saved Greece - and Western Civilization by Barry Strauss, New York: Simon & Schuster, July 2004. 294 pp. $25.00 ISBN: 0-7432-4450-8

The Battle of Salamis, a naval conflict between the Athenians and the Persians in 480 B.C., is perhaps the most important naval encounter in the ancient world because it prevented democracy from being vanquished from Greece.

Barry Strauss, a Cornell history and classics professor, weaves this narrative from ancient texts and supplements it with modern scholarship to suggest a novel view of the Greeks, suggesting they pushed an "imperial democracy" abroad much different than the pure democracy purportedly practiced by the Athenians.

Strauss uses the establishment of the Delian League, the Greek maritime empire, to supplement his view that the Greek imperialist democracy was propagated via sea. This is not only a great book about an ancient sea battle, but a cleverly molded history lesson about the distant past of Western philosophy and democratic principles.