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

by John R. Hale

  At last Phormio called a halt. Most of the Peloponnesians had escaped, taking with them one Athenian trireme with its crew. Even with this loss Phormio and his small force had won an epic victory. The Athenians now sang the paean in their turn, then rowed back to Naupactus. Someone fished the body of Timocrates out of the harbor, where it had been washed up by the currents. The Athenians set up their trophy by the temple of Apollo, overlooking the place where the Paralos had turned the fortunes of war. Later they learned that the Spartans considered that there had really been two battles that day, and that the Peloponnesian fleet had won the fight on the shore. So the Spartans too set up a trophy—on their own safe shore at Panormus, well out of reach of vengeful Athenians.

  The next morning the southern shore of the gulf, lately so crowded with ships and troops, was empty. Fearing the arrival of reinforcements from Athens, the Peloponnesians had slipped away in the night, too broken in spirit to face Phormio again, though they still outnumbered his little fleet more than three to one. A few days later as autumn ended, the twenty triremes from Athens finally appeared. The newly arrived trierarchs explained that contrary winds and various setbacks on Crete had delayed them. Their absence from the battle of Naupactus merely underscored the dazzling supremacy of Athenian seamanship and the genius of the navy’s supreme tactician.

  When spring came, Phormio bade farewell to his Messenian allies and took his fleet and his prizes back to the Piraeus. Now sixty, he had fought his last battle. He had also revived the Athenians’ flagging efforts and will to fight. After Phormio’s victories at Patras and Naupactus there was no more talk of suing the Spartans for peace. To commemorate his triumphs the Athenians dedicated an offering to Apollo in his sanctuary at Delphi. Shields and prows that Phormio had taken from enemy warships were set up in a stoa near the oracular shrine, and an inscribed stele listed the names of the eight members of the Peloponnesian League that Phormio had defeated. The man himself took on a numinous heroic aura. The next time that the Acarnanians sent to Athens for aid, they specified that a son or other kinsman of Phormio should be sent to help them.

  The western adventure had begun when Phormio dedicated a lead tripod to Dionysus, and it was in the theater of Dionysus that he underwent his ultimate apotheosis. To honor the victor of Patras and Naupactus, a young Athenian playwright named Eupolis wrote a comedy called Taxiarchs after its chorus of regimental officers. The plot brought Dionysus down from Olympus to learn the art of war from Phormio, who put the soft and pleasure-loving god of wine through hard training in rowing and combat skills. At one point the actor playing Dionysus actually rowed a little boat across the playing area, while the actor who played Phormio stood in the bow, giving instructions and complaining when he was splashed by a misplaced stroke. Phormio also introduced Dionysus to the celebrated reed mat on which he slept when in the field. Eupolis’ popular comedy was the first to exploit the humorous potential of a tenderfoot’s transformation into a soldier. Along with accounts of Phormio’s victories in histories and tactical manuals, it carried the great general’s fame down to remote generations.

  Phormio had been only a boy when Themistocles proclaimed that the Delphic Oracle’s Wooden Wall was in truth the Athenian navy, a god-given defense that would not fail the Athenians in their hour of need. Serving the navy had been his life, and at the end of his career he crowned the beloved Wooden Wall with a pair of unsurpassable victories. His stratagems would long be remembered and imitated by other naval commanders. All those gifts of mind and spirit that set Athenians apart shone at their brightest in Phormio: optimism, energy, inventiveness, and daring; a determination to seize every chance and defy all odds; and the iron will to continue the fight even when all seemed lost—even when the enemy had already begun to celebrate their victory. For Phormio, it was never too late to win.

  After his death, a statue of Phormio was raised on the Acropolis near the west front of the Parthenon, where both Athena and Poseidon could look down upon this most favored son from their perches on the pediment. The people interred Phormio’s ashes in a tomb beside the Sacred Way. Pericles had already been given the place of honor just outside the city gates, but next to him the Athenians made a monument to Phormio, the greatest naval hero of them all.

  CHAPTER 12

  Masks of Comedy, Masks of Command [428-421 B.C.]

  Anyone who commands a ship and keeps the sheet too taut, never slackening, is sure to capsize and go the rest of the cruise with his rowers’ benches upside down.

  —Sophocles

  PERICLES WAS DEAD, AND NO ONE IN ATHENS COULD TAKE his place. Had Zeus himself disappeared from Mount Olympus, he could not have left behind a greater void. For over four decades Pericles had been at the forefront of Athenian politics, naval affairs, dramatic productions, the battle between science and religion, diplomacy, city planning, and temple building. The navy had been the cornerstone of his activity as leader. It provided power and prestige for the democratic element in the Assembly, funds for the building programs, and a seemingly invincible safeguard against the city’s enemies. Pericles laid down a plan for winning the war against the Peloponnesians but died before he could bring it to a successful end. His overwhelming presence had cast a shadow over rivals and successors alike. The plague had carried off Pericles’ sons, and his brilliant but unpredictable ward Alcibiades was still too young to hold a generalship or other elected office. For the first time in a century Athens seemed lacking in leaders.

  During the prosperous years of the maritime empire, ordinary working Athenians with no connections to the old landed families had acquired immense fortunes through industry. Manufacturers of everything from bronze shields to musical instruments, these men represented a new elite class in Athens. With the departure of Pericles they promptly took the stage. The first was a rich sheep dealer named Lysicles, who married Pericles’ consort Aspasia but was killed soon thereafter while leading a naval expedition to collect tribute in Asia Minor. Another was a fabulously wealthy silver-mining magnate named Nicias, who made up for his lack of noble ancestors with a great show of piety, genteel behavior, sponsorship of festivals—and naval successes at Megara and Cythera. It did not hurt Nicias’ public image that his name meant “Man of Victory.”

  Nicias’ chief rival was Cleon, a rich manufacturer of leather. This energetic citizen in his early forties wielded enormous influence in the Assembly, not through feats of arms but through oratorical prowess and a genius for politicking. Like Pericles he was a demagogue or “leader of the people,” but a more un-Periclean figure would be hard to imagine. Cleon was passionate, blustering, and verbose. Casting aside statuesque reserve, he bestrode the speaker’s platform as if it were the stage at the theater, stamping and gesturing to drive his points home. As watchdog of the empire, Cleon was completely Periclean in his conviction that imperial rule required an iron fist. He was also expert at squeezing ever-larger amounts of tribute from the allies. Athens needed the money to continue the war, and Cleon’s brutal treatment led one important city, Mytilene on the island of Lesbos, to rebel. To pay for the siege of Mytilene, the citizens of Athens raised two hundred talents from a war tax on their own property—the first such tax in the history of the Athenian democracy.

  Where Pericles and Nicias had been too honorable, or perhaps merely too rich, to take bribes, Cleon harked back to that first naval demagogue, Themistocles. Without shame he used his influence to feather his own nest. The common people supported him loyally, but most of the wealthy citizens who served as trierarchs and horsemen loathed him. Cleon returned their hostility with interest. When motions in the Assembly failed, the ever-litigious Cleon would drag his opponents into the courts.

  Pericles’ strategy for winning the war posed a serious stumbling block for all of his successors. Despite its ineluctable logic, nobody could pretend that it was succeeding. After years of fighting the Peloponnesians, the Athenians had no prospect of outright victory, nor even of a negotiated peace. And the Spartans were prov
ing to be surprisingly troublesome opponents. Instead of seeing reason and realizing the hopelessness of continuing the war, they doggedly continued to march against the territories of Athens or its allies every campaigning season. Pericles had predicted that the Spartans would take a long time to learn seamanship, but they certainly seemed ready to make the effort. While the Spartans, of all people, were experimenting, the Athenians stuck doggedly to Pericles’ plan and in so doing were losing momentum and control of the war.

  Nevertheless they rose energetically to meet the many challenges related to the war and the pursuit of Periclean policy. Plague had depeted the ranks of citizens, so when hoplites were sent to Mytilene, they rowed themselves, as did the horsemen sent with their mounts to Corinth. In the war’s fourth year the Assembly actually manned and launched 250 ships for the war effort—as many as at any time in the city’s history. Athens seemed unsinkable still.

  As the conflict between the Spartan and Athenian alliances continued, its alarms and excursions took on some of the theatricality of the dramatic festivals. A few days after their defeat at Phormio’s hands, the Peloponnesian crews crossed the Isthmus in secret, each oarsman carrying his oar and oar loop and rowing pad. Arriving at Nisaea, they waited for darkness and then manned a fleet of Megarian triremes to undertake a sneak attack on the Piraeus itself. But the ships had spent so long in dry dock that their seams had opened. The more the triremes leaked, the slower became the Peloponnesian advance. In the end they gave up their grand plan and settled for a nighttime raid on Salamis Island. The alarm beacons touched off a citywide panic in Athens, though the feckless enemy got nowhere near the port.

  An even greater sensation occurred two years later, when Cleon browbeat the Assembly into passing a sentence of death on all the citizens of Mytilene on Lesbos, as punishment for the rebellion that a few of the Mytilenean oligarchs had started. A trireme was dispatched that very day with the order for the mass execution. By the next morning the Athenians had come to their senses. They ordered a second trireme to carry the reprieve, but no one knew if it would be able to overtake the first.

  In a rush the second crew dragged the trireme from its shed, loaded it with provisions, and set off to catch the first ship before it reached Mytilene, 185 miles away. From the moment the second trireme was launched, its oars were in constant motion. The rowers worked all day, into the evening, and through the night, eating barley mixed with olive oil and wine as they rowed. They took breaks for sleep in rotation. As they approached Mytilene, the lookouts could see the first ship already in the harbor. The Athenian general Paches had opened the original decree and was about to start the executions. The heroic efforts and breathless arrival of the second ship saved the day, as well as several thousand lives. But the episode marched inexorably on to a tragic climax. When Paches returned to Athens, he was brought to trial for his conduct as general. Beleaguered by relentless prosecution, he pulled out his sword and killed himself in the court.

  In this fourth year of the war, the stage on which the Athenians were contending began to widen dramatically. Wherever the navy ventured in those years, natural disasters seemed to follow. In Sicily the Athenians saw fiery streams of lava pouring down the slopes of Mount Etna, a volcano that had not erupted in many years. In the Black Sea, while collecting tribute, the Athenian general Lamachus beached ten triremes at a river mouth in rainy weather and lost them all when a rising torrent lifted the empty hulls and swept them out to sea. And in the Euboean Gulf a tidal wave struck the Athenian guard station on the islet of Atalante, lifting a trireme over the wall and tossing it among the buildings inside. The tsunami had been triggered by an earthquake that split Atalante itself in two, opening a channel so wide that a trireme could pass through.

  The deadlock in the fighting finally broke in Athens’ favor during the war’s seventh year. The turning point was a dramatic amphibious action masterminded by a tough and battle-hardened commander named Demosthenes (a distinguished soldier, not the orator of a later generation). This general had been following up on Phormio’s victories in the west and had earned the respect of the Messenians and other western allies. The setting for his novel stratagem was to be the vast and lonely bay of Pylos in the southwestern corner of the Peloponnese. Demosthenes dared not air his plans in the open Assembly. Success would depend upon secrecy and surprise.

  Early in a summer that was notable for its bad weather, Demosthenes landed at Pylos with a small expeditionary force and began to fortify a hilltop that overlooked the north end of the bay. The men collected rough fieldstones for the walls and carried clay for mortar on their own backs, stooping forward and clasping their hands behind them to form improvised hods. The Athenians also fortified a strip of beach to serve as a landing place for receiving supplies or reinforcements. Demosthenes manned his new base with the crews of five Athenian triremes and a boatload of Messenian troops from Naupactus. He intended for the Messenians to fight as insurgents, blending in with the helots in the countryside and spreading terror among the Spartans.

  Word quickly reached Sparta, fifty miles away. The Spartans at home called their army back from Attica and also sent for the Peloponnesian fleet from Corcyra. Army and navy would meet at Pylos to deal with these squatters at Sparta’s back door. After establishing camp on the coasts of the bay, the Spartans ferried 420 of their best officers and fighting men across to a ridge-backed island, three miles long, that closed off the bay from the open sea. The island bore the ominous name Sphacteria (“Place of Sacrifice”). The Spartan hoplites proceeded to bivouac in its dense scrub and rocky fastnesses, determined to deny any landing place to the Athenian fleet. Just so had Xerxes landed his best troops on Psyttaleia island before the battle of Salamis. Demosthenes sent messengers to summon the main Athenian fleet. Before it could reach Pylos, however, the enemy attacked.

  Demosthenes and sixty Athenian marines took up positions on their landing place at the north end of Pylos Bay, while the rest of his force prepared to defend the newly fortified citadel. A landing by all forty-three Peloponnesian ships at once would have overwhelmed the Athenians, but submerged rocks prevented a mass assault. In the face of this natural barricade the Spartans had to divide their fleet into small detachments. While the main fleet waited beyond the line of surf, cheering them on, a few triremes at a time tried to thread their way through the reefs and force a landing. No maneuver could have been more hazardous than this attempt to reverse ships through shoals toward a hostile coast.

  Among the impatient Spartans in the Peloponnesian fleet was Brasidas, now serving as a trierarch and still smarting from his encounter with Phormio four years earlier. Shouting that it was shameful to think more of saving ships’ timbers than destroying Athenians, he ordered his own steersman to drive the trireme ashore with all speed. As the keel touched land, Brasidas set his foot on the boarding step beside the steersman’s seat. Before he could jump, an Athenian arrow struck him. Wounded, he collapsed backward into the rowing frame among the oars of the thranite rowers, and his big round hoplite shield fell into the sea. At once the Peloponnesian oarsmen pulled away from the beach and rejoined the rest of the fleet. Brasidas would live to fight another day, but the Spartan attack had lost its momentum.

  THE PYLOS CAMPAIGN, 425 B.C.

  All that day Demosthenes and his small force held off the enemy, a few dozen men keeping eight thousand at bay. The world had turned upside down. A Spartan fleet at sea was fighting an Athenian army on land, and even more paradoxically, the Athenians were winning. At evening the Peloponnesians gave up the attempt on Pylos. A wave washed Brasidas’ shield onto the beach, and the Athenians set it up as a victory trophy. After two more days of futile Spartan assaults, the main Athenian fleet of fifty triremes finally arrived. When the Peloponnesian fleet declined to come out and fight in open water, the Athenians charged into the bay through the channels at either end of Sphacteria island. Once inside the bay they launched an impetuous attack on the Peloponnesian ships, capturing five and drivi
ng the rest onto the mainland shore.

  The Athenians were now masters of the bay. One result of their victory hit the Spartans hard: more than four hundred of their best troops were now marooned on Sphacteria with almost no fresh water or provisions. The Athenians quickly grasped the plum that fortune had dropped in their laps. To prevent any escape to the mainland, a pair of Athenian triremes kept up a constant patrol by day, rowing around the island in opposite directions. By night, when the darkness made rowing dangerous, the entire Athenian fleet anchored in a great circle around Sphacteria. True Spartans were a dwindling breed, increasingly outnumbered by helots. The loss of any single Spartan citizen was a threat to all, and the news that the Athenians had trapped more than four hundred struck Sparta like a thunderbolt. Officials were sent at once to Pylos to negotiate an armistice. From Pylos an Athenian trireme conveyed the envoys to Athens.

  At Athens the Spartan representatives offered the Assembly an immediate end to the war and even a treaty of alliance in exchange for the men on the island. The warmongering demagogue Cleon, however, demanded a more tangible ransom. He proposed that the Spartans hand over four strategic towns or territories that had been stripped of their Athenian garrisons twenty-two years earlier, at the end of the First Peloponnesian War, when the Athenians gave up their newly won land empire in exchange for a group of Athenian hostages. The enemy was now caught in a similar predicament, and Cleon’s solution might be seen as no more than poetic justice.

  The Spartans avoided any open discussion of exchanges or ransoms. They asked instead that the Athenians appoint a small committee to negotiate the terms one by one in a calm and orderly atmosphere. Cleon denounced them for preferring secret negotiations to plain talk in the Assembly, and the Spartans went back to Pylos without a settlement.