Lords of the Sea: The Epic Story of the Athenian Navy & the Birth of Democracy

by John R. Hale

  After several years of Athenian engagement in Egypt, Aeschylus took notice of the great venture once again, this time in his famous trilogy the Oresteia. When his hero Orestes cried out to Athena for help, the goddess was imagined a long way off, fighting alongside her friends in North Africa. Aeschylus also meditated on justice and civil strife, on wars and wealth. His verses warned the Athenian audience to revere justice, comparing a prosperous but unjust man to a ship carrying a rich cargo through a stormy sea. Athena herself issued a commandment against civil strife at home: “Let our wars rage on abroad, with all their force, to satisfy our powerful lust for fame.”

  When news of the Egyptian rebellion reached Susa, King Artaxerxes considered how best to deal with the Athenians. It would be years before he could assemble a force big enough to drive them out of Egypt. In the meantime striking a blow closer to Athens itself seemed worth trying. Fitting out a royal embassy with chests of gold from his treasury, Artaxerxes sent an envoy from his court all the way to Sparta, with orders to bribe the Spartans into launching a war against the Athenians. An attack from the Peloponnese would surely force the Athenians to withdraw from Egypt. It seemed inconceivable to the Great King that Athens could wage war on two fronts at once.

  The Spartans showed no interest in the Persian gold. Their naval allies, however, were ready to attack Athens with or without bribes. The Corinthians were angry that the Athenians had sided against them in a border war with Megara, while the islanders of Aegina bitterly resented the eclipse that their own navy and shipping had suffered. The Athenians aimed a preemptive strike at a Peloponnesian port called Halieis, but Corinthian hoplites drove them back to their ships. Then Sparta’s maritime allies assembled a fleet and engaged the Athenians in battle near the rocky islet of Cecryphaleia in the Saronic Gulf. Fighting on their own element this time, the Athenians were victorious. After the battle they vengefully followed the Aeginetans back to their island stronghold. There the Athenian navy won an even greater victory, capturing seventy enemy triremes and setting up a blockade of Aegina Harbor. Crossing back to the Piraeus, the Athenian general Leocrates mounted siege machinery on the decks of his triremes and then returned to assault the Aeginetans’ city walls.

  The siege lasted for months, but neither Sparta nor the Peloponnesian allies could do anything to raise it. King Artaxerxes summoned his envoy back to Persia, his mission a complete failure. Nothing could check the Athenians. They were still entrenched in Egypt, and they now had a pretext for conquering their old rivals on Aegina. Never had Athens known such a year of fighting. Never before had there been such a heavy toll of dead and so many heroes to bury along the Sacred Way.

  That year the monument over the common tomb was a long wall of names inscribed on stone slabs. Generals and even a prophet were listed democratically alongside the rank and file. Above the names, in a mixture of grief and pride, the people had set inscriptions to tell of the campaigns that had claimed the men’s lives. “These died fighting in Cyprus, in Egypt, in Phoenicia, in Halieis, in Aegina, at Megara, in the same year.” A few months earlier the men on those lists had crowded into the Assembly to hear the debates on the far-flung campaigns and to raise their hands in the voting. Their boundless ambition was equaled only by their readiness to pay the price.

  Back in Athens, the hostilities with Corinth and Aegina made the completion of the Long Walls to the Piraeus seem an urgent matter. Before Cimon’s ostracism, he had stabilized the wet ground west of Athens, preparing a solid base for the wall that would run to the Piraeus. A second wall would connect the city to the old port of Phaleron. With the wealth of Egypt and the Thracian mines filling the treasury, the Assembly was now in a position to vote the necessary funds for a building project greater than any other in Athenian history. The scale was heroic. Eight miles of walls were to be constructed, sixteen feet thick at the base and soaring to a formidable height. The vertiginous walkway along the top of the wall would be twelve feet broad. Stone blocks would form the lower courses, bricks the upper, and the plan also called for projecting towers. Once completed, the walls would make Athenian access to the sea as secure as if the city had been an island: the realization of Themistocles’ dream.

  The resumption of work on the Long Walls jolted Athens’ oligarchs into action. A small group of upper-class citizens still hoped to destroy the radical democracy. These men feared that once Athens was permanently and inseparably linked to its navy by the Long Walls, the common people would never be unseated from their rule. Before the walls had been completed, the oligarchs sent secret messages to a Spartan army that was at that moment encamped not far from the frontiers of Attica. The oligarchs invited the Spartans to attack Athens, promising to assist in the overthrow of the current regime. In their own minds these men were patriots, pledged to restore the ancestral constitution.

  Somehow the plot was betrayed, and the entire Assembly was warned of the danger. The hoplites were as eager to defend their democracy and the Long Walls as were the rowers in the fleet. The full army of Athens marched out and confronted the Spartans on a field near Tanagra in Boeotia. The Spartans won a narrow victory, but the Athenian citizens had not fought in vain. Discouraged by the unexpected resistance, the Spartans gave up any further idea of interfering with the Long Walls and marched home.

  The Athenians wanted revenge. Their hotheaded general Tolmides (his name meant “Son of the Bold”) proposed that an Athenian fleet should carry out a novel expedition around the Peloponnese to punish the Spartans and force them for once onto the defensive. Coasting along from one target to the next, the Athenians would destroy fortifications, collect booty, and spread terror. Before local defenders could reach the scene, the raiders would have boarded their ships and moved on. In short, Tolmides proposed that the Athenians act exactly like pirates. The Assembly voted Tolmides a fleet and a military complement of one thousand hoplites, but his scheme was so popular that many young citizens joined as volunteers. The trireme design that Cimon had introduced before the Eurymedon campaign allowed extra hoplites to be accommodated on the wide decks.

  With fifty triremes Tolmides cruised south to Cape Malea. After rounding this dangerous promontory, the fleet descended without warning on the Spartan port of Gythium and set fire to the docks. The marauders then continued their hit-and-run tactics all the way around the Peloponnese. Before returning to Athens that autumn, Tolmides landed at the seaside town of Naupactus in the Corinthian Gulf and turned it over to a band of Messenian rebels. These men had been recently expelled from their homeland by the Spartans. From Naupactus the refugees would be a thorn in Sparta’s side for years to come. Tolmides’ expedition proved so profitable on so many levels that during each of the next two summers the Assembly sent Pericles west with a fleet to keep up the tradition.

  Of all Tolmides’ successes, none gave more happiness to Athenian shipwrights than the alliance he concluded with the islanders of Zacynthus, a little paradise of white cliffs and sandy coves. At the bottom of one of its lakes the island had a black treasure: tar. In the continual battle against rot, decay, and the teredo, a coating of tar could protect a trireme’s planking even more effectively than pitch from pine trees. At Zacynthus the tar was dredged up from a depth of twelve feet in the lake using leafy myrtle branches tied to the ends of poles. After being collected in pots, it could be carried to the beach and swabbed directly onto the hulls, or shipped home for storage in the Navy Yard at the Piraeus.

  Bad news from Egypt put a temporary check on Athens’ campaigns in Greece. For six years the Athenians had shared the rule of the country with the rebel king Inarus. But Artaxerxes, though slow to act, felt that he could not afford to let Egypt go. A massive Persian counterattack overcame both the Egyptians and their Greek allies. The victorious Persians besieged the Athenian and Ionian troops on the island of Prosopitis in the Nile delta and, after Persian engineers drained the channels surrounding the island, captured or killed them all. Meanwhile the Great King’s force of Phoenician triremes a
mbushed and annihilated a relief fleet from Athens as it was entering the easternmost mouth of the Nile.

  After the unexpected failure of the Egyptian venture, Pericles and the other generals attempted for the time being no more expeditions overseas. When Cimon returned from ostracism, he led an allied fleet of two hundred ships once again into the east, undaunted by the recent events on the Nile. One hundred forty triremes stayed with Cimon in Cyprus, while the remaining sixty went south to aid the continuing resistance to the Persians in the Nile delta. One Athenian trireme coasted westward from the delta on a sacred mission. Sent by Cimon himself, a deputation went ashore to consult the oracle of Zeus Ammon at the oasis of Siwa, eight or nine days from the sea. After their long journey, Ammon’s prophetic voice ordered them to go back to Cyprus. Cimon, said the god, was already with him.

  Rejoining the main fleet, the Athenians discovered that Cimon was indeed with the gods. He had fallen sick and died while they were away. Fired by the spirit of their dead commander, the allied fleet fought a battle against another large Persian fleet and succeeded in capturing one hundred Phoenician triremes. Coming quickly to shore after the victory at sea, the Greek hoplites disembarked and defeated the Persian army on land. It was a victory that echoed Cimon’s own great double victory at the Eurymedon River, sixteen years before.

  When the bitter news reached Susa, King Artaxerxes made a momentous decision. He could see no end to the vengeful attacks of the Athenians on his empire. Only four years earlier they had suffered heavy losses of men and ships in Egypt, yet now they were back, threatening to take Egypt from him once again. It was time to end the war that his forefathers had started. Artaxerxes sent riders along the Royal Road to the coast with a message for the Athenians. The Great King invited an embassy from their city to Susa, where his ministers would negotiate an end to hostilities.

  When Artaxerxes’ invitation was delivered to the Assembly, the people voted to send Cimon’s brother-in-law Callias to Susa. As hereditary herald of Athens, he was given full powers to negotiate with the Great King. Months later Callias returned with a number of valuable items: golden bowls, a pair of peacocks, and a peace treaty. The Persians agreed to keep their naval forces east of the Chelidonian Islands in the Mediterranean and east of the Cyanean Rocks in the Black Sea. The Great King thus tacitly recognized the Aegean Sea, the Hellespont, the Sea of Marmara, and the Bosporus as Athenian waters. The Persian Wars were over.

  While Callias negotiated peace with Persia, the most remarkable generation in Athenian history was passing into retirement. These citizens were members of the annual cohort who had now reached the age of sixty. The turning points of their lives had been turning points in Athens’ fight against Persia as well. They had been the first crop of Athenian babies born into a free city in the year after the last tyrant was thrown out. At twenty they had fought the Persians at Marathon, the youngest Athenians on the field. At thirty they had boarded the triremes with Themistocles at Artemisium and Salamis. Before reaching the end of their active service at forty-five, they had followed Cimon to the Eurymedon River.

  Now they would turn over to their sons the headship of their families and the governance of Athens. They themselves were embarking on the sheltered lagoon of old age, a placid round of family rites and jury duty. In the shade of Cimon’s plane trees, their spears and oars exchanged for walking sticks, they would recount their own deeds and remember fallen comrades. As youths many had taken the traditional oath: “I shall hand on my fatherland not less, but greater.” More than any other generation, these men had fulfilled that promise.

  The hostilities with the Spartans and their allies still remained to be resolved. For years the Athenians had been aiding democratic factions in the cities of central Greece. As oligarchic rulers were expelled, these cities joined the Athenian alliance and received Athenian garrisons to ensure democratic rule and loyalty to Athens. By the time of the Peace of Callias an Athenian sphere of influence stretched from the northern Peloponnese almost to Thermopylae. When the forces of the exiled oligarchs finally struck back, the general Tolmides impetuously demanded that the Assembly give him an army to protect the land empire. Pericles opposed the expedition, but the Assembly voted in favor. The army lost a great battle at Coronea in Boeotia, Tolmides was killed, and many of the troops were taken prisoner. To ransom these hostages, the Athenians gave up their newly won territories and concluded a Thirty Years’ Peace with the Spartans and their Peloponnesian allies. In the future the Athenians recognized the wisdom of Pericles and accepted rule of the sea as their destiny.

  CHAPTER 8

  Mariners of the Golden Age [MID-FIFTH CENTURY B.C.]

  We must add to our knowledge of the countryside, both animals and plants, knowledge of the sea, for we are in a way amphibious, no more land dwellers than sea dwellers.

  —Strabo

  AN ATHENIAN SERVING ON ONE OF HIS CITY’S TRIREMES commanded a wide view of the world, and the world teemed with wonders. Great fin whales forged through the Aegean, leviathans that were guided on their way (or so the Greeks believed) by cunning pilot fish. At the opposite end of the scale, the delicate paper nautilus scudded along by spreading a translucent membrane to the breeze, a miniature ship under full sail. Dolphins leaped and sported alongside the triremes, encouraged by whistling and singing from the mariners. Sailors believed that dolphins brought good luck and at times even carried castaways to shore. Solitary sea turtles basked on the surface or plied their powerful forelegs like pairs of oars. Elsewhere a migrating school of tuna might suddenly appear, snaking across the sea’s surface in a turbulent stream of flashing fins and frothing water. These big blue and silver fish were worth a fortune. When fishermen spotted the migrating tuna, they would corral them within a ring of nets, then kill them with clubs or spears.

  Steersmen navigated by the stars on clear nights and by landmarks during the day. The archipelagoes of the Aegean were drowned mountain ranges with peaks rising high above the sea, and the mainland coasts were mountainous also. In the watery realm of the Athenian navy, a lookout on a mast top was seldom beyond sight of land. The mountains brewed winds, however, and through most of the summer stiff northerlies ruffled the sea from midday till sunset. The Greeks called them etesian or “seasonal” winds. When they were blowing, the triremes plowed through choppy waves or stayed in port. Occasionally the mountains created violent down-drafts called katabatic winds, cold gusts that hit the sea and fanned out in a rushing wall of white spume. Then the rowers would hear a curse from the lookout followed by a shout of “Squall! Squall coming!”

  At day’s end the evening star Hesperus appeared above the western horizon, herald of the great wheeling pageant of moon, stars, and planets. Winds dropped after sundown, and triremes could make good time by rowing through moonlit nights. Sometimes the dark sea was lit by a phosphorescent glow, and balls of greenish-white fire burned at the ends of the yardarms. Like the dolphins, these lights meant good luck. They signified the presence of two divine guardians of seafarers, the twin heroes Castor and Pollux. As dawn approached, the celestial fires faded until only one remained. It was the morning star Phosphoros, the “Light Bearer,” bringing up the sun to start another day.

  During these years of peace Athenian ships ventured far beyond their home waters. A sacred trireme carried Athenian envoys to Libya, where they consulted the oracle of Zeus Ammon at Siwa in the Sahara Desert. In the north Athenian emissaries negotiated with the local Scythian and Thracian tribal chiefs for access to wheat, salt fish, and other resources. One diplomatic mission went west as far as the Bay of Naples in Italy and the famous Greek colony at Neapolis (“New City”). There the Athenian crews saw a high conical mountain called Vesuvius, quiet for so long that the world had forgotten it was a volcano.

  The same voyage took them past the famous rocks of the Sirens off the Amalfi coast, where a pair of beautiful seductresses once tried to lure Odysseus from his ship with their irresistible song. The general in command of the miss
ion to Neapolis was Diotimus. On another occasion Diotimus’ service to his city took him two thousand miles east of Athens as an envoy to the Great King at Susa. Expeditions like these left their mark on the Athenian character, breeding citizens who were active, adventurous, restless, and proud of their exploits.

  The experiences of the common Athenian in seafaring and fighting were beginning to rival those of the aristocrats. He might not know Homer by heart, or trace his ancestry back to a warrior who had fought in the Trojan War. But the average thete had now seen Troy with his own eyes, a small hill off to the south as one rowed into the Hellespont on the run to Byzantium. During his naval service the ordinary citizen would follow the sea routes hallowed by the legends of Odysseus, Theseus, Jason, and Cadmus to Asia, Africa, Europe, and the islands between. Although he cut a modest figure ashore in foreign parts, carrying his rowing pad as his only weapon instead of shield and spear, a mariner from Athens was the Odysseus of his time, widely traveled, many-minded, facing dangers on the deep in the struggle to bring himself and his shipmates safely home.

  As winter approached and the seafaring season drew to its close, the widely scattered triremes returned like homing pigeons to the Piraeus. While still far out at sea, they were greeted by a flash of light on the summit of the Acropolis, four miles inland. It was the sun reflected on the shining spear tip and crested helmet of a colossal bronze statue of Athena, one of the first great masterpieces of the Athenian artist Phidias. The statue had been nine years in the making and stood thirty feet tall. As the triremes approached the end of their voyaging, the crews strove to look their best with perfect timing and oarsmanship. There was a popular saying, “As the Athenian goes into the harbor,” for any task done with utmost precision. The mariners knew well that thousands of critical eyes were watching and judging their performance.