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

by John R. Hale

  At the start of the war’s second summer, the Spartans led the Peloponnesian army into Attica to destroy crops and farms. And for the second year the invaders watched helplessly as an Athenian fleet rowed out of the Piraeus to attack their own coasts. The armada included ten of the new horse carriers and fifty ships from the Athenian allies on Lesbos and Chios.

  To the Athenians, all seemed well, but there were in fact troubling signs at the Piraeus. Fatalities were reported from an unknown disease. In the heightened mood of suspicion brought on by the war, the Athenians blamed the enemy. The Peloponnesians, they said, must have somehow poisoned the water in the Piraeus reservoirs. When the fleet departed for that summer’s cruise, the mysterious malady was still unidentified.

  Pericles himself commanded the naval expedition, but the itinerary was much less ambitious than that of the first year. Perhaps the horse carriers slowed the fleet, or perhaps Pericles was reluctant to voyage too far from Athens. After assaulting a few cities on the Saronic Gulf and the eastern coast of the Peloponnese, the fleet turned back. Pericles reported that they had almost taken the town of Epidaurus by storm, but the expedition had achieved no solid success. At the Piraeus they discovered that the sickness they had left behind them had become a plague, and had already claimed hundreds of lives.

  After a short time in port some of the triremes were handed over to new generals for yet another expedition to Potidaea, where the siege was still dragging on. Wooden siege machinery was loaded onto the ships, and the crews embarked again, this time heading north. The plague went with them. Within the cramped hulls of the triremes the explosive disease could not be controlled. When the fleet arrived at Potidaea, the plague spread from the ships to the entire Athenian camp.

  An aristocratic young Athenian named Thucydides caught the plague that year but survived to write an account of the disease, from the burning head and eyes at the start on through the bleeding mouth, the chest pains, the bilious vomiting, the eruption of pustules on the skin, and the restless insomnia. Most victims died after seven or eight days.

  By the time the new generals at Potidaea abandoned their effort and led the fleet home, more than a thousand of the expedition’s hoplites had died of the plague. Arriving at the Piraeus, they found the plague everywhere. Starting around the harbors, it had spread through the crowded huts between the Long Walls and swiftly reached Athens itself. Corpses of rich and poor alike littered the temples and choked the water tanks. Pericles lost his two elder sons, Xanthippus and Paralos. As he was placing a wreath on Paralos’ body before the lighting of the pyre, Pericles finally broke down and wept in public. Only Aspasia and their illegitimate son, young Pericles, were spared. Responding to an emotional appeal, the Assembly agreed to rescind Pericles’ own citizenship law so that the boy could be recognized as an Athenian. One-third of the hoplites died of the plague—a number that could be determined exactly from the register of names kept by the generals and the tribal commanders. Other segments of the population probably perished in the same proportion.

  The most famous of Sophocles’ plays, Oedipus Rex, or “Oedipus the King,” seemed to hold up a mirror to the tragic fates of Pericles and Athens. Like Pericles, the hero Oedipus insisted on the rule of reason and order, never suspecting that his own actions and destiny were bringing disaster on the city. Like the Athenians, the people in Sophocles’ drama had been struck by a devastating pestilence and called on their leader to save them: “Better for you to rule a land with men than an emptiness. Walls and ships are nothing without men living together inside them.” As events spiraled downward toward catastrophe, even Queen Jocasta admitted that the ship of state might be doomed: “Now we all feel fear, seeing the ship’s steersman fail.”

  As for the real plague, the Athenians eventually learned that they could blame neither the Peloponnesians nor the water supply of the Piraeus. Ships, not Spartans, had brought the sickness to Athens. The epidemic had originated in Ethiopia and then spread down the Nile River to the ports of the delta. From there, a hidden cargo in holds and cabins, it crossed the sea to the Piraeus. When the Spartans and their allies destroyed the wheat harvest of Attica, they left the Athenians more dependent than ever on imported grain. The Peloponnesians grew much of their own wheat and were cut off from foreign supplies by the vigilance of the Athenian navy. The epidemic scarcely touched them.

  The plague wrecked Pericles’ grand strategy. He could not have foreseen or prevented such a calamity, but the people laid the blame on him. Athens could no longer assemble great fleets for the amphibious campaigns that were to have countered the annual Spartan invasions of Attica. The danger of contagion made it too dangerous to pack the crews together inside the ships. The crowded conditions created by bringing all residents of Attica inside the walls had in the end cost thousands of lives. Pericles’ powers of reason seemed no match for the forces of nature. Not content with fining him, the angry Assembly voted to strip Pericles of his official powers as general. Athenian envoys traveled to Sparta seeking peace, but the Spartans rebuffed the offer. Instead they were negotiating with the Persians, hoping to bring the Great King into the war on their side. In that dark hour Athenians no longer thought of victory, only of survival.

  CHAPTER 11

  Fortune Favors the Brave [430-428 B.C.]

  “But tactical science is only one part of generalship,” said Socrates. “A general must be capable of equipping his forces and providing for his men. He must also be inventive, hardworking, and watchful—bullheaded and brilliant, friendly and fierce, straightforward and subtle.”

  —Xenophon

  THE ONLY GENERAL CAPABLE OF SAVING ATHENS WAS AT THAT moment living in poverty, disgrace, and dishonor, almost forgotten by his fellow citizens. Phormio had been a successful commander through almost three decades of service to the city, but like Pericles he had fallen victim to the people’s hunt for scapegoats during the plague. Always ready to answer the trumpet’s call even without pay, Phormio was Ares in the civic pantheon of celebrities, a counterpart to the Zeus of Pericles. Both Olympians had fallen from favor.

  Though his ancestry was as noble as any Athenian’s, Phormio was now a poor man. In the course of his honest generalship at Potidaea he had helped provide for his troops from his own personal funds. After his return to Athens the civilian scrutiny board censured him for his conduct of the campaign and fined him one hundred silver minai. Phormio was too proud to beg or borrow the money from friends. His failure to pay the punitive fine led to an official ban of atimia or dishonor. Until it was lifted, he could not set foot on consecrated ground, including the Acropolis, the Agora, and the Pnyx.

  In this crisis Phormio left the city and retired to his ancestral home at Paiania on the far side of Mount Hymettus. The family farm lay in the heart of the broad plain called Mesogaia or Middle Earth and had been visited earlier that summer by the marauding Peloponnesian army. For forty days the Spartans and their allies had worked their way through Attica, spreading fire and destruction everywhere. Phormio had been a small boy when Xerxes’ army had devastated the countryside. Just as the men of his father’s generation had done, Phormio settled down to live off the blackened earth, work his fields, and plant his crops. His career as a naval commander seemed over.

  Now almost sixty, Phormio was used to living rough. On his many campaigns he had shared the hardships and short rations of his troops. Every day he stripped down and exercised naked, like a boy toughening his body in the gymnasium at home. Phormio had kept up this regimen in all weathers, winter and summer. Exposure to sun and wind had burned his body dark brown, so the men gave him one of Heracles’ nicknames, Melampy gous or “Black Butt.” At night he slept on the ground. His pallet was a reed mat so thin and poor that “Phormio’s sleeping mat” became a proverb in Athens to describe anything of truly wretched quality.

  His look of a simple, weatherbeaten campaigner was deceptive. He had stormed cities, won allies, enriched the public treasury, and even beaten fifty enemy triremes
with an Athenian fleet of only thirty. Phormio’s genius lay in quick improvisation on unexpected themes, and in his conviction that every situation, no matter how discouraging, offered a chance for victory. That chance had to be discovered and exploited through mêtis. Through cunning intelligence young Phormio had once tricked a city into opening its gates. On that occasion he borrowed techniques from the playwrights of Athens, including disguises and a dramatic messenger’s speech that he wrote and recited himself in order to fool the enemy. In the case of the sea battle of fifty against thirty, Phormio used a standard cavalry formation to hide the true numbers of his ships, thus luring the foolish enemy into undertaking a hasty and disordered charge. For Phormio as for Themistocles, the general’s mêtis was the decisive element in war.

  His career had fallen in between the two supreme challenges to Athenian liberty, the Persian invasion and the Peloponnesian War. Phormio had been too young to fight against Xerxes and would soon be too old to participate further in the war against the Spartans. His antagonists had been unruly westerners, rebellious allies, and Corinthian colonists, with no chance to measure himself against the city’s principal foes. Phormio’s gifts had been squandered while he played minor roles in distant campaigns, and now, when Athens most desperately needed able commanders, it seemed his disgrace would keep him from coming to his city’s aid until it was too late.

  One day a party of men approached his farm through the desolate landscape. They were not Athenians but Acarnanians, distant allies who had come to beg Athens for protection. During that second summer of the war, when the plague cut short the Athenian naval expedition around the Peloponnese, enemy fleets had ventured to sea with more than a hundred ships. Corinthians and other Spartan allies had made landings on the territory of Acarnania and other western allies. It seemed clear that the Peloponnesian fleet would return the following year to complete the job unless Athens sent a force to prevent them.

  As general of that force, the Acarnanians wanted Phormio. He had been a hero in their country ever since the day long before when he arrived with thirty triremes, stormed a hostile city, and handed it back to its rightful Acarnanian owners. Local families had even named their sons Phormio in honor of the liberator. This party of Acarnanian envoys had arrived at Athens at summer’s end after a dangerous voyage, only to learn that the man whom they sought was now banned from office. So they had journeyed through Attica to Phormio’s farm, hoping to persuade him to abandon the Athenians and come west with them as a general at large, an honored guest who would take into his own hands the defense of their country. If Athens did not want Phormio, Acarnania did.

  Phormio declined the offer. He told his visitors that as a dishonored man and a debtor, he would feel ashamed to face his men. This reply was not completely open. He saw in this unexpected offer a lever that might move the Assembly to reconsider his case. Phormio had no intention of spending his declining years as a soldier of fortune in the wilds of western Greece. Time was running out if he wanted to render any last great service to his city.

  Meanwhile back in Athens a strong reaction had emerged in Phormio’s favor, perhaps simply because he was now in demand with other Greeks. To cancel his fine, the Assembly resorted to a ruse. The citizens appointed Phormio to decorate the sanctuary of Dionysus for an upcoming festival. One hundred minai of silver from public funds would be handed over to him to cover the cost. Of course Phormio took the money to the scrutiny board instead and paid his fine. He then fobbed off the god Dionysus with a cheap gift, inspiring a couple of comic verses from an anonymous playwright:

  Phormio said, “I’ll raise three silver tripods!”

  Instead he raised just one—made out of lead.

  With Phormio’s debt cleared and his honor restored, the Assembly reelected him general in charge of a special mission: the defense of Acarnania and other western allies. His base would be Naupactus, a seaside town that had been given to a group of friendly Messenians during Tolmides’ circumnavigation of the Peloponnese. From there Phormio could blockade the Corinthian Gulf in both directions, preventing enemy fleets from rowing out, and Sicilian or Italian grain freighters from sailing in. He would face a combination of Spartan allies that had mustered one hundred ships earlier that year. How many triremes would the Assembly assign to him? Twenty. The plague had left Athens incapable of more.

  In the first year of the Peloponnesian War the Athenians had launched a war fleet of 180 ships; in the second year, even with the outbreak of the plague, 150. In the war’s third year, Phormio’s 20 triremes would be the sum of the Athenian naval effort. This squadron was smaller than the vanguard of an Athenian fleet in their days of glory, but with Phormio in command its chances of survival were not as desperate as the numbers suggested. His flagship would be the Paralos, pride of the Athenian fleet.

  During the winter Phormio left the Piraeus and led his little force around the Peloponnese to Naupactus. The town faced south across a broad oval of water, the westernmost reach of the Gulf of Corinth. Cold streams tumbled down from the hills to the flat reedy shore. To the west the coast curved south toward the Peloponnese, a long finger reaching out as if to touch the opposite shore. The cape at the tip of this finger, Cape Rhium of Molycria, guarded the gulf’s narrow entrance. The Messenian exiles at Naupactus gave a warm welcome to Phormio and his fleet. The harbor had room for twenty slipways but little more. The fortifications of Naupactus came right down to the beach and joined the harbor walls to create a complete defensive circuit.

  The Athenians held their station unchallenged through the winter and spring. At about midsummer two messengers arrived at Naupactus almost simultaneously, both bearing bad news. From Acarnania came a desperate appeal: the Spartan admiral Cnemus had dodged Phormio’s blockade and landed an army that was about to attack the cities that Phormio had been sent out to protect. From the opposite direction Phormio received a report that a large fleet was ready to put to sea from Corinth and other Peloponnesian ports.

  Phormio was caught in a dilemma. Without his help Acarnania might fall. He had already failed his friends by letting the Spartan ships elude him. But it was his first duty to block the gulf. The fleet launched by Sparta’s maritime allies was no doubt coordinated with the Spartan invasion under Admiral Cnemus. The close timing suggested an attempt to draw him away from Naupactus. Hoping that the Spartans would wait for their reinforcements before proceeding with their attack, Phormio told the unhappy Acarnanian messenger that he could not abandon his post.

  The Athenians did not have long to wait. Within a few days they spotted enemy warships cruising westward along the gulf’s opposite shore. At once Phormio launched his full force of twenty triremes and rowed south to observe them. A closer view revealed an assemblage of forty-seven triremes with a flotilla of small support vessels bobbing in their wake. Only a few were fast triremes; the rest were heavily laden troop carriers. Phormio had no intention of challenging them inside the gulf. Instead he shadowed them as they passed between the capes and entered the open sea to the west. That evening the Peloponnesian fleet camped at Patras. Instead of returning to Naupactus, Phormio chose to bivouac on the opposite shore. He suspected that the enemy would attempt a night crossing, and he was right.

  Several hours before sunrise the Athenians were again at sea, feeling their way southward across the dark water. The sea was flat, the air still. Ahead they could hear the sounds of an approaching fleet. But the enemy was already aware of their presence. By the time the two fleets made contact, the Peloponnesians had arrayed their forces in the same kyklos or wheel formation that the Greeks had used with such good results at Artemisium. The troop carriers formed a wide circle with their rams pointing outward, protecting the support vessels like dogs around a flock of sheep. Five fast triremes were also stationed inside the circle, ready to attack any Athenian that dared to break through.

  After studying the enemy’s wheel, Phormio decided on an oblique and delayed attack. He intended to imitate the ploy used by Gree
k fishing boats when tackling a big run of tuna. Once alongside the huge fish, the fishermen would row quietly around the school, enclosing their prey within an ever-tightening circle of nets. Herded together, the jostling and terrified tuna inevitably started to leap from the water. As they landed in or near the boats, the fishermen clubbed them to death. Phormio had no nets, but he meant to go fishing nonetheless.

  Following their general’s lead, the twenty Athenian triremes formed a single line and began a leisurely encircling maneuver, rowing around and around the perimeter of the motionless kyklos. At times a single trireme broke from the line to make a ramming charge at a Peloponnesian troop carrier. Convulsively the threatened ship would retreat deeper into the circle, and its companions on either side would pull back to close the gap. At the last moment the Athenian steersman veered away and resumed his place among the prowling triremes in the line. Little by little the Peloponnesian circle contracted. At last the Athenians drew the noose so tight that the oar banks of the troop carriers became enmeshed in a tangled ring.

  Even now Phormio held off. He was waiting for the dawn, and the stiff easterly wind that blew every morning out of the Corinthian Gulf. It came at last, catching the Peloponnesian hulls and driving them against one another. Long poles struck planking as mariners tried to fend off neighboring vessels. Choppy waves kicked up by the wind added to the confusion of the colliding ships. In the rough sea the raw Peloponnesian rowers could not lift their oar blades clear of the water, and without steerage way the steersmen were helpless. An uproar of shouts, warnings, and curses drowned the orders of the officers. In the center of the chaos lay the five fast triremes, trapped between small craft and troop carriers.