What did Athens nearly do with the silver that built its navy?

Share it out. A rich strike at the Laurion mines around 483 BC produced a windfall, and the standard proposal in the assembly was to distribute it among the citizens - roughly ten drachmas each, a real sum. Themistocles argued instead for spending all of it on two hundred warships.

He did not argue that Persia was coming, or not openly. The case he made was about Aegina, a nearby commercial rival Athens was already fighting - a modest, plausible, local reason for a fleet, at a moment when the assembly had shown no appetite for the larger argument. The ships were ready when Xerxes invaded three years later.

That vote is one of the strongest candidates for a single decision changing European history. Without the fleet there is no Salamis, and the counterfactual - a Persian-administered Greece - removes the conditions in which Athenian drama, philosophy and democracy developed. It is also a reminder that the decision looked like a public-spending argument at the time, and that the people voting had no idea what they were deciding.