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

by John R. Hale

  In the fading light the two lines approached each other, the Corinthian troops singing their paean as they rowed forward. Then the chant abruptly ceased. The Athenians awaited the attack. Yet after a short hesitation the Corinthians began to back away. Oars reversed, they retreated from the line of battle, keeping their rams toward the enemy as they moved off. The Athenians and Corcyraeans watched this strange maneuver, mystified, until their lookouts caught sight of the apparition that had motivated the Corinthian retreat. More triremes were coming up over the southern horizon, twenty in all: triremes of Athens, sent by the Assembly. Second thoughts had convinced the Athenians at home that the original squadron had been too small. Through a watery field of wreckage came these reinforcements, arriving at the end of their long voyage a few hours too late to rescue Athenian honor. Still, they had come in time to save the lives of their fellow citizens.

  The next morning the remnant of the Corcyraean fleet and the squadron of Athenian ships, doubly shamed by the events of the day before, arrayed themselves in line of battle offshore from the Corinthian camp. The Corinthians launched their ships but did not advance, unwilling to attack a fleet that included even thirty Athenian ships in open water. Eventually the Athenians saw a small boat rowing across from the enemy line. When the boat was within hailing distance, a Corinthian on board called across to the Athenians, ignoring the Corcyraeans. He accused the Athenians of breaking the Thirty Years’ Peace and thus putting themselves in the wrong. The Corinthians, the herald claimed, were only chastising rebellious allies of their own. If the Athenians intended to block their way to Corcyra or anywhere else, and if they meant to break the peace, then they could start by seizing the Corinthians in the boat as their first prisoners.

  The Corcyraeans all shouted to the Athenians to take the Corinthians and kill them. The Athenians were more moderate. They told the Corinthians to take their ships anywhere that they wished, so long as they left Corcyra alone. The Corinthians and their allies then rowed away to the south, confident that the Athenians would not risk a further breach of the treaty by attacking their rear. Corcyra had been preserved, but at a cost of seventy Corcyraean triremes, a thousand prisoners now in Corinthian hands, and thousands more killed in the fighting or drowned. As the Athenians made their way home through autumn seas, they could add two other casualties to the list: the military and political career of Cimon’s son Lacedaemonius, and the Thirty Years’ Peace itself, now gravely wounded but not quite dead.

  The Corinthians lost no time in descending upon the leaders of their alliance, the Spartans, to accuse Athens of breaking the peace. The Corinthian cause attracted others. Megarians complained that Pericles had barred them from the harbors under Athenian control. Islanders from Aegina bemoaned their lost autonomy. There were even Macedonians among the throng, fearful of Athenian power in the north. That winter Sparta hummed with angry allies demanding that Athens be attacked and humbled.

  When the Athenians heard the generals’ report on the battle of the Sybota Islands, they sent a peremptory order to the one and only Corinthian colony within their empire, the wealthy northern city of Potidaea. Though the Potidaeans had as yet done nothing wrong, the Athenians doubted their loyalty. To prevent the Corinthians from using Potidaea as a base, the Athenians ordered the Potidaeans to expel their Corinthian magistrates, pull down part of their fortifications, and send hostages to Athens. The Potidaeans delayed responding to the Athenian demands, while secretly they sent messages to Sparta, begging for aid.

  On receiving a covert and unfounded assurance that the Spartans were prepared to invade Attica, the Potidaeans revolted openly from Athenian rule. Many neighboring cities followed their lead, creating a crisis for imperial Athens. Unmoved by these events, the Spartans took no action at all. A Corinthian force went by sea to defend its colony. Athens in turn sent fleet after fleet to recapture the city and the surrounding region. When the strong walls of Potidaea withstood their first attacks, the Athenians dispatched a fleet under the veteran general Phormio carrying sixteen hundred hoplites, the pick of Athens’ land forces, to join the siege.

  Among the troops who went north with Phormio were two citizens very much in the public eye: Alcibiades and Socrates. Alcibiades, a young kinsman and ward of Pericles, was setting out on his first military campaign. Only eighteen, wild and handsome, Alcibiades had already become notorious for escapades that not even the sober Pericles could keep under control. The young man had inherited martial courage from his father, who had been killed in action under general Tolmides’ command, and political gifts from his mother, a great-niece of the lawgiver Cleisthenes. Alcibiades’ ungovernable passions, however, seemed to be very much his own. His rich horse-breeding clan must often have dealt with rogues among their herds. Now they had one in the house, eager to make himself master of the family and then perhaps of all Athens.

  The philosopher Socrates, the constant companion of Alcibiades, was in his late thirties. He reminded Athenians irresistibly of a satyr, or the pot-bellied, snub-nosed, wine-imbibing companion of Dionysus called Silenus. A familiar figure in the Agora, Socrates was the first native Athenian to vie intellectually with the many foreign-born philosophers who had made Athens their home, from Anaxagoras with his primordial elements to Zeno with his paradoxes. Socrates’ father was a sculptor, his mother a midwife. Early training as a sculptor had given way to an interest in natural history. Now he bemused his fellow Athenians with theories about the origin of the sun and moon, and whether humans think with their blood. However rarefied his scientific pursuits, Socrates was a citizen of the hoplite class. When his name appeared on the call-up lists, it was his duty to appear bearing his arms and three days’ rations to join the expedition.

  As the troop carriers rowed north, the air grew cold, but Socrates wore only one cloak as usual. He seemed oblivious to physical discomfort. Alcibiades, universally attracted and attractive, fixed on the imperturbable philosopher as his next amorous target. Socrates for his part was interested in the challenge of educating a youth who promised, more than Pericles’ own sons, to become a force—whether for good or evil—in the city’s future.

  Phormio’s forces made a landfall nine miles south of Potidaea and advanced slowly toward the city, ravaging the farms in the countryside in the hope of provoking the citizens within the walls to come out and attack. When the Potidaeans declined the gambit, the Athenian troops launched a series of direct assaults. During one attempt to storm a defensive wall that ran from sea to sea across a narrow isthmus, Alcibiades battled alongside Socrates. At length he exposed himself so rashly that he was struck by an enemy missile and fell. The Athenian line moved on and left the pair exposed. Socrates stayed on guard, shielding the wounded Alcibiades till a rescue party reached them. After the battle Phormio awarded Alcibiades the coveted prize for valor: a complete bronze hoplite panoply. Socrates was eager in approving their general’s decision. Alcibiades just as eagerly insisted that by rights the prize belonged to Socrates.

  While the Athenians in the north kept up their long and costly siege, Spartan envoys began to arrive in Athens. They declared that Athens had indeed broken the Thirty Years’ Peace and must be punished with war if they did not redress the wrongs they had done to the Peloponnesians. The Spartans had formulated three demands. First, the Athenians must end the siege of Potidaea, where Phormio and other commanders were attempting to starve the rebels into submission. Second, they must restore the autonomy of Aegina. Finally, they must rescind the notorious proclamation known as the Megarian Decree, which excluded citizens of Megara from the Agora and the harbors of the Athenian empire. If not, there would be war.

  It was—initially, at any rate—a war of words. In response to the Spartan demands Pericles posed a series of awkward questions. Why had the Spartans not asked to submit their complaints to arbitration? Athens was willing. Why did the xenophobic Spartans not open their own borders to the Athenians? The Athenians would allow the Megarians into their harbors as soon as the Spartan
s ceased to exclude foreigners from their own territory. Finally, when would Sparta permit its allies to choose their own governments, even if the choice was for a democracy? Athens would agree to free its allies as soon as Sparta led the way.

  Pericles assured the Athenians that as long as they maintained their rule of the sea, they held an insuperable advantage over the Spartans. The Athenians had gained experience of land fighting through amphibious naval operations. He predicted that the Spartans would find seamanship difficult to learn. After half a century of practice, the Athenians had still not entirely mastered the subject. How could Spartans make much progress? They were landsmen, not seafarers.

  It remained for Pericles to calm Athenian concerns that the Spartans could defeat them by invading Attica. Here again the great statesman assured the Assembly that the navy would prove their salvation. His strategy evoked the vision of Themistocles. “Sea power is of enormous importance. Look at it this way. Suppose Athens were an island, would we not be absolutely secure from attack? As it is, we must try to think of ourselves as islanders; we must abandon our land and our houses, and safeguard the sea and the city.” With Athens linked to the sea by the Long Walls, and the navy ensuring that food and other supplies continued to reach the Athenians, no Spartan attack or siege could have any hope of succeeding.

  The strategy that Pericles had devised was entirely based on the Athenian navy: its ability to control the seaways that brought food to Athens, and its power to keep the treasury full. He foresaw a war in which the Athenian army would never have to confront the Spartans on land, regardless of the temptations of honor and national pride. Instead, Pericles would voluntarily give up Attica and its farmlands to the invaders, just as Themistocles had once done. With the Peloponnese stripped of its troops, the Athenian fleet could attack the enemy’s coasts with impunity. Yes, there would be war, or something very like a war, but it would be a war without battles. The combatants would be locked in mutual hostilities without ever actually confronting each other. Soon the fire-breathing Spartans, balked of a decisive battle and worn down by seaborne raids, would sue for peace. Pericles’ strategy was as triumphantly scientific, as coolly calculated, as a mathematical formula or a medical prescription.

  Young Athenians were eager for war, but Pericles’ strategy made no demands on their enthusiasm, courage, or willingness to die for their city. Those hot emotions belonged to hoplite warfare. They would be a positive danger to Athens in the coming war with the Peloponnesians. Pericles called instead for naval virtues: self-control, timing, and silence. As steersman of the ship of state, he would devote himself to the plotting of courses and balancing of odds. So long as the Athenians could resist the natural urge to defend their land, they might wage and win a war without risk, indeed almost without inconvenience. It was for this that they had built the Long Walls. Athens was now an island, fed by its fleet, and as long as it remained so it was unconquerable.

  As for the Spartans, they had confidence in their army but were acutely conscious of their inferiority in naval matters. While their envoys were visiting Athens, they were sending other messages to their seafaring allies in Sicily and southern Italy. The Spartans appealed to these fellow Dorian Greeks for aid against the despised Ionians led by Athens. The wealthy westerners could surely spare some money for the cause. The Spartans also requested, with almost stupefying naïveté, that the Sicilian and Italian cities assemble a fleet of five hundred triremes for the coming war against Athens.

  After two years of provocations and planning, neither great power was willing to initiate hostilities. The spark was finally touched off by one of Sparta’s hotheaded allies. The citizens of Thebes, a member of the Peloponnesian League, had long coveted the small but free city of Plataea, a loyal Athenian ally since before the Persian Wars. On a stormy night in early spring the Theban army launched a surprise attack. It failed to capture Plataea, but all parties recognized that the war had now begun. Just forty-nine years had passed since Xerxes’ invasion, when a common danger had brought Sparta and Athens together for the good of all Greeks. The war between these two former allies would prove far more destructive to Greece than any disasters inflicted by the Persians.

  Following the strategy laid down by Pericles, the Athenians who lived in the villages and farms of Attica prepared for evacuation. Abandoning their own countryside, they shipped their livestock across the channel to Euboea, just as their ancestors had done almost fifty years before in the face of Xerxes’ invasion. This time, however, the people did not seek refuge across the water. At first they crowded into Athens itself, filling every available space except the sanctuaries. When that situation became intolerable, thousands of temporary dwellings were hastily constructed in the corridor between the Long Walls. These were allotted to the displaced population.

  When the Peloponnesian army marched into Attica in early summer under the command of a Spartan king, Pericles prevented the Athenians from making any attempt to protect their farms and crops. Unopposed, the Peloponnesians fanned out across the deserted country, plundering and burning. Under the shock of seeing smoke rising from their fields, the people forgot all about the master plan. They turned on Pericles, blaming him for their losses. To keep their unreasoning anger from finding a vent, Pericles postponed all meetings of the Assembly. Democratic principles were thus sacrificed on the altars of two great gods: Expediency and Security.

  In response to the Peloponnesian invasion by land, Pericles ordered the preparation of a large fleet to carry out reprisals on enemy territory. One hundred fast triremes were equipped, carrying a combined force of a thousand marines and four hundred archers. Leaving the scorched earth of Attica behind them, the fleet set out to capture enemy towns and raid enemy territory while the Peloponnesians were occupied in Attica, too far off to protect their own coasts.

  Following the strategy that Tolmides had pursued with such success, the Athenians launched surprise attacks followed by speedy withdrawals, swooping down on undefended shores like birds of prey and departing almost as swiftly. When the fleet reached western waters, it was joined by fifty triremes from Corcyra, in accordance with the alliance. At the southwestern cape of the Peloponnese they attacked Methone and almost took the town. After squalls interrupted their assaults on Elis, the Athenians crossed over to northwestern Greece, capturing two cities and bringing the large wooded island of Cephallenia over to their alliance. Returning home, the expeditionary force found the Peloponnesian army gone and the Athenian army invading the territory of Megara in reprisal for the invasion of Attica.

  During the war’s first year Athenian triremes were also operating in home waters. One hundred of them were patrolling the seas around Attica. Another fleet attacked Aegina. The Athenians landed, forced the Aeginetans into exile, and distributed the island’s territory among settlers from Athens. Thirty triremes were cruising the seas around Euboea to guard Athenian livestock and other property from privateers. Before the summer was over, they set up a small naval station on an islet called Atalante. From there the campaign against piracy could be kept up throughout the year.

  Now that the war seemed certain to last for two or even three years, the Athenians took additional steps to secure their territory. Guard stations were created at strategic sites around the coast of Attica. One thousand talents were set aside on the Acropolis as a reserve, to be used only in the event of an enemy attack on the city by sea. Any proposal to expend these funds for a different purpose would be punishable by death. In addition to the reserve of silver, the Athenians voted to set aside one hundred of their best triremes every year and appoint one hundred trierarchs to keep them ready.

  ATHENIAN HORSE CARRIER

  Over the winter Athenian shipwrights began work on a new project in the Navy Yard. They selected ten old triremes and converted each one into a hippagogos or horse carrier. To make the change, the interior of the trireme’s hull had to be altered. The carpenters dismantled the rowing seats of the lower two tiers of oarsmen and seal
ed up the oar ports, leaving an enclosed space some eighty feet long by sixteen feet wide. The empty hold, formerly the domain of 108 zygian and thalamian rowers, would now accommodate thirty horses.

  Fifteen animals could be tethered along either side, spaced about five feet apart. Floor width was constricted at the waterline, but at head height the flaring sides of the trireme would provide additional room for the horses’ forequarters. Storage spaces were then created for fodder and fresh water, saddles and bridles, and for the lances, shields, and helmets of the horsemen. The shipwrights refitted the sterns of the vessels with removable sections and gangways so that when the ships came to shore, the horses could easily be led or even ridden out onto the beach.

  The creation of these horse carriers marked the first major innovation in Athenian naval architecture since Cimon introduced the fully decked troop carrier thirty-five years earlier. New ships called for new names: Hippodromia, “Horse Race”; Hipparche, “Queen of Horses”; Hippocampe, a mythical monster that was half horse and half fish. There were still Athenians alive who could recall the sight of King Darius’ horse carriers and their equine cargoes landing on the beach at Marathon. For the first time the Athenian navy could transport cavalry to war zones overseas, just as the Persians had once done.

  One year had passed since the Peloponnesian War began. As the signs of spring appeared, the Athenians seemed poised for success. They had survived a Spartan invasion, inflicted damage on the enemy’s coasts, and brought over new allies to their side. Waging war from the northern Aegean to the western isles, Athens had proved again, as in the days of the Egyptian expedition, that it could fight on many fronts at once. The monetary reserves on the Acropolis would sustain three years of such operations. By then Pericles predicted that the Peloponnesians would be glad to end the futile struggle. Even with winds of war blowing all around it, the ship of state seemed to be cruising forward on an even keel.