Greg Nagy
Last updated at
July 8, 2020, 2:50 p.m.
{"blocks":[{"key":"2tttl","text":"In the glory days of the Athenian Empire, a most celebrated visual marker of the magnificence as well as the power of its thalassocracy was the architectural complex of colossal buildings known as neōs oikoi ‘ship-sheds’ at the dockyards of seaport of Peiraieus. I have invited Mills McArthur to write a comment here about these buildings. [[GN 2014.04.13]]","type":"unstyled","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[{"offset":197,"length":10,"style":"ITALIC"}],"entityRanges":[],"data":{}},{"key":"1crlc","text":"The neōs-oikoi ‘ship-sheds’–literally ‘ship houses’–of Peiraieus sheltered the warships so critical to the military success of the city of Athens. Ships would be drawn up out of the water on ramps into their ‘houses’. But these utilitarian dockyard structures ultimately transcended their function, gaining great symbolic importance for the Athenians—so much so that Demosthenes (fourth century BCE), enumerating some of the prominent symbols of Athens’ glory, grouped the ship-sheds of the dockyards of Peiraieus together with the Parthenon itself (Speech 22 section 76)! The atmosphere of the docks on the verge of an expedition is vividly captured in Greek literature, ranging from the hustle and bustle (Aristophanes Acharnians 544–554) to a mixture of hope and foreboding on occasions when the ships were launched in the glory days of the Athenian Empire (Thucydides 6.30–32). Even after the empire went into decline, the glory of the dockyards of the Peiraieus was still very much in evidence, as we see from the testimony of Demosthenes. See also Pausanias 1.29.16, where he speaks about the rebuilding of the neōs oikoi ‘ship-sheds’ of the Peiraieus in the era of the statesman Lycurgus of Athens, who dominated the cultural and political life of Athens in the late fourth century BCE. The Roman general Sulla sacked the Peiraieus in 86 BCE, and so Pausanias in the second century CE would have seen just a trace of the structures that formerly highlighted the naval power of Athens. [[MM 2014.04.15.]]","type":"unstyled","depth":0,"inlineStyleRanges":[{"offset":4,"length":10,"style":"ITALIC"},{"offset":550,"length":6,"style":"ITALIC"},{"offset":721,"length":10,"style":"ITALIC"},{"offset":1117,"length":10,"style":"ITALIC"}],"entityRanges":[],"data":{}}],"entityMap":{}}