> Ultimately, the Athenian sailors,
> not the Spartan elite, defeated the
> Persians. And until the Athenian
> elite really fucked up in Syracuse
> Athens (as Pericles had predicted)
> weren't doing badly at all against
> the Spartans.
Right. And those sailors also frustrated the oligarchs' coup in Athens in the aftermath of the Syracuse disaster. On the negative side, those sailors had imperialistic impulses (similar, mutatis mutandis, to those of the stereotypical working- and "middle-class" white Americans), which the Athenian demagogues exploited repeatedly.