Encyclopedia › Places

Laurium

The silver mines of southern Attica that paid for Athens' fleet, 483-480 BCE

Laurium is the hilly district of south-eastern Attica, rich in lead and silver ore. In 483 a new vein was struck there, and Themistocles persuaded the Athenians to spend the silver on ships instead of sharing it out. Those ships fought at Artemisium and Salamis.

In the game: Laurium is named in the Marathon and Thermopylae levels' Athens trade partner notes and in Themistocles' texts, as the silver that built the fleet.

Themistocles' ships

Ancient account

Herodotus says the Athenians had a great sum in their treasury from the mines at Laurium and meant to share it out at ten drachmas a man. Themistocles persuaded them to build two hundred ships instead, for the war with Aegina, and these were the ships that saved Greece.

Herodotus 7.144

The vein of Maroneia

Ancient account

The Aristotelian Constitution of the Athenians dates the strike to the archonship of Nicodemus, 483/2, at Maroneia, with a hundred talents of profit. It says Themistocles had a hundred rich men each build a trireme. The figures differ from Herodotus's, but both make the silver pay for the fleet.

Athenaion Politeia 22.7

Mines and slaves

In the record

Shafts, galleries, ore-washing tables and cisterns survive across the district, most of them from the fifth and fourth centuries. The work was done mostly by slaves, many thousands of them by the later fifth century. Athens's owls were struck from this silver.

Excavations at Thorikos and Laurium; Xenophon, Ways and Means 4

Thorikos

In the record

The mining town of Thorikos, on the coast near Laurium, has an early theatre and houses and workshops for processing ore. Its finds show mining from long before the Persian wars, so the strike of 483 was a new rich vein, not the first silver.

Belgian excavations at Thorikos