Themistocles and the Dangers of Democracy

At the port of Piraeus, the triremes employed by the ancient Athenians had to be periodically beached to dry, their wooden hulls otherwise susceptible to water rot. The quaintness of such a problem poignantly conveys the almost unbridgeable distance between the world of Themistocles and our own. And yet, for how far-off such a problem seems, one can similarly imagine a space-faring race of humans, thousands of years into the future, looking back at the world today, struggling to comprehend the quaintness of the problems bedeviling humanity in 2026.