Although Attica's land was barren, the Athenians did not rely entirely on trade for food. Except during the siege in the Peloponnesian War, all Athenians retreated behind the Long Walls.
The Spartans laying siege would not farm either. In such a war of attrition, it came down to which side had stronger supplies. That was also why the previous archons had insisted on building the Long Walls, linking Athens with the port of Piraeus.
When Napoleon besieged Acre, that isolated city endured for six months because it lay close to the sea and received British supplies by sea. But Pomona doubted anyone would connect that war with one fought two thousand years earlier.
It was also during the Second Peloponnesian War that plague broke out in Athens, and Pericles died in it.
The Black Death also broke out in Jaffa, but Napoleon survived. He had even touched soldiers infected with the plague.
It was he who proposed building the Suez Canal, though the canal built by the pharaohs had long since been forgotten beneath the dust of history.
An Italian named Belzoni had once written: "I do not say that fortune made me rich, nor do I believe that all rich men are fortunate. But fortune gave me that satisfaction, that supreme happiness which wealth cannot buy—the joy of finding what had long been sought but never found, the joy of showing the world a new and perfect monument of Ancient Egypt... On the day we entered the tomb of Pharaoh Seti I, they looked as though they had just been completed."
Pharaoh Seti I was Ramses II's father. Compared with his famously renowned son, the father was far less well known. There were even legends that the pharaoh who pursued Moses to the Red Sea had been Ramses II.