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

by John R. Hale

  So the Athenian blockade resumed, while the Spartans sent away for more troops and looked for ways to provision the men on Sphacteria. In the end they recruited divers to swim across the bay with skins packed with honey, poppyseed, and linseed. On stormy days, when the Athenian triremes stayed in the bay, seafaring helots risked their lives—and hoped to win their freedom—by landing boatloads of flour, cheese, and wine on the island’s seaward side. The Spartans on the island survived in this way for over a month, till the Athenians at home began to doubt the success of the entire enterprise. Their dissatisfaction boiled over at a session of the Assembly, when the people voted to send the general Nicias to Pylos with archers and javelin throwers. These light-armed troops could fight effectively on the rough terrain of Sphacteria, where it was difficult for a hoplite phalanx to operate.

  Cleon could not resist issuing a few verbal barbs, for he hated Nicias almost as much as he hated the Spartans. During his speech he blamed the current board of generals for the long delay in capturing the stranded Spartans; he also insulted the mild-mannered Nicias, questioned his manhood, and claimed that he himself could do a better job if only given the chance. Acting with uncharacteristic decision, Nicias promptly offered to surrender his generalship to Cleon. At first Cleon jokingly proclaimed himself ready. When Nicias made it clear that his offer was serious, Cleon in dismay tried to wriggle out of his rash challenge.

  By this time the Assembly had taken up the idea and greeted the proposal to substitute Cleon for Nicias with acclaim. Now that Cleon was cornered, his spirits rallied. He accepted command of the mission to Pylos and boasted extravagantly that he would return inside twenty days, bearing either Spartan hostages or news of their destruction. Many Athenians watched the fleet depart with amusement, sure that Cleon would return either dead or permanently discredited. But to the stupefaction of friends and foes alike, Cleon proved as good as his word. Before the twentieth day had passed, he and his ships were back in Athens, along with 292 Spartan prisoners. The rest had been killed in fierce fighting when Cleon’s light-armed troops combined with Demosthenes’ hoplites for a dawn attack on Sphacteria.

  Exultation exploded in Athens. A new set of desperate Spartan envoys came to sue for peace and the return of their men. The Athenians followed Cleon’s lead. They told the Spartans that they would immediately execute the hostages if the Peloponnesian army invaded Attica again. Having tied the hands of their enemies, the Athenians proceeded to celebrate. The most prized trophies from Pylos were the hundreds of round bronze shields taken from the dead and defeated Spartans. They offered them as dedications to the gods, to be hung up in sanctuaries and other public places, each shield displaying the proud inscription THE ATHENIANS FROM THE LACEDAEMONIANS ON PYLOS.

  For the first time since the beginning of the war, the people pushed forward with new buildings on the Acropolis. Pylos was a victory that outshone any military success of Pericles. To celebrate it, the Athenians raised a new temple to Athena Nike, goddess of victory. It was set on a bastion that jutted forward pugnaciously beside the main entrance, elbowing aside Pericles’ stately Propylaea. Thus the builders managed to capture in stone the brashness of Cleon and the pride that Athens took in his astounding victory. Cleon had indeed made himself, almost overnight, the first man in Athens.

  Another monument to the victory at Pylos, just as enduring as the marble temple of Athena Nike, was a comedy called Horsemen by the young playwright Aristophanes. Before writing comedies himself, Aristophanes had passed through a varied apprenticeship in the theater. He likened his own career to a series of promotions on board a trireme.

  Before handling the steering oars, one should first know how to row,

  Then keep watch at the prow, then master the winds,

  And only then be steersman oneself.

  Though still in his teens, Aristophanes was Cleon’s harshest critic. In an earlier play, Acharnians, he had ridiculed the atmosphere of paranoia that Cleon stirred up with his alarmist speeches and denunciations of harmless foreigners.

  Informer: That lamp wick will set fire to the Navy Yard!

  Citizen: The Navy Yard and a lamp wick? Oh my! How?

  Informer: If this Boeotian sticks the wick in a beetle, then sends it, lighted, down the drain to the Navy Yard, when a stiff north wind is blowing, one trireme will catch fire, and in an instant all will be ablaze.

  Citizen: You scoundrel—a blaze forsooth, with a wick and a beetle!

  The same rich citizens who sponsored the dramatic productions also served as trierarchs for the navy. Most were loyal patriots who loved their city, yet many deplored the current war. In the Assembly they were outnumbered by the masses and drowned out by the demagogues. But in the theater these citizens could get their messages across without interruption. Aristophanes composed plays that popularized the views of his sponsors, the trierarchic class. Behind the raw jokes about sex and other bodily functions, his comedies routinely satirized demagogues like Cleon and urged an end to the war.

  A few months after the astounding victory at Pylos, Cleon went to the theater. The occasion was the Lenaea, a late winter festival honoring Dionysus, god of wine. The festival’s chief object of veneration—an erect wooden phallus as big as a man—set the tone. At this festival comedy, not tragedy, dominated the stage. The principal actors sported clownish potbellies, while the men in the chorus waggled giant phalluses, sometimes referred to as their “oars.” Thanks to his recent appointment as general, Cleon for the first time had a seat of honor on the front row. To his left and right stretched the long curving line of priests, public benefactors, and generals, including his rivals and colleagues Nicias and Demosthenes. At his back crowded thousands of Athenians who had come to see and judge the contest.

  It had been known for months that Aristophanes would be presenting a new comedy. Two years earlier, after the rebellion of Mytilene and the famous trireme race to Lesbos, Aristophanes had lampooned Cleon mercilessly in his Babylonians. Cleon counterattacked with an accusation of slander. Aristophanes was convicted and fined by the jury. Now, hedged about by the heroic aura of Pylos, Cleon could surely expect immunity from the bawdy humor of Aristophanes and his ilk. But Aristophanes had other ideas.

  Backstage, officials marshaled the actors, choristers, pipers, costumers, and stagehands for three new plays: Cratinus’ Satyrs, Aristomenes’ Scabbard Bearers, and Aristophanes’ Horsemen. Out front the three wealthy sponsors took their seats in the audience. Vendors were selling nuts and raisins. Then the statue of Dionysus was carried in so that the god could watch the plays. A torchbearer entered the theater and cried, “Call on the god!” The audience shouted, “Son of Semele! Iacchos! Giver of Wealth!” And the competition began.

  Once Horsemen started, it quickly became evident that Aristophanes had written the play as his revenge on Cleon. Pylos figured prominently in the dialogue, and references to the Athenian navy peppered the play throughout. In the first scene, two actors dressed as kitchen slaves ran or limped onto the stage, howling. The first tilted his masked face up to the audience—a startled moment, then laughter—to reveal a portrait of the general Demosthenes. The second slave joined in the miserable wailing. More laughter: he was masked as Nicias. Both slaves, it was plain, had just been whipped.

  Demosthenes explained to the audience that he and his fellow slave served a crusty old master named Demos (that is, the Athenian people), short-tempered and hard of hearing. Demos resided on the Pnyx. At the last new moon Demos had bought another slave, a tanner. The naming of the new slave’s occupation stirred a ripple in the audience, for leather was of course the source of Cleon’s wealth. The interloper had been scheming to make Demosthenes and Nicias look bad; hence the beatings and bruises. Any doubts about the identity of this third slave were laid to rest when Demosthenes complained, “The other day when I cooked up a Spartan cake at Pylos, he slipped by me, grabbed the dish, and brought it to the master as his own!”

  To supplant their rival, Demosthenes and Ni
cias decided to recruit a passing sausage seller whom they saw trundling his stand toward the Agora, a true Athenian “man in the street.” Finding the sausage seller reluctant to fall in with their plans, Demosthenes told him that tomorrow he would be ruler of all these rows of people (gesturing at the audience), not to mention the Agora, the harbors, the Assembly, the Council, and the generals.

  Having assured himself of the sausage seller’s qualifications (disreputable career, low birth, little education), Demosthenes proclaimed him the perfect demagogue and coached him on how best to confront the terrifying tanner. If the audience hoped for the sensation of seeing a mask that caricatured Cleon’s familiar face, they were disappointed. Before the new slave made his entry onto the stage, Demosthenes explained in another aside that the mask makers had been too frightened to carve a true likeness, but that the audience would be bright enough to identify the man anyway. On this cue “Cleon” at last burst onto the scene, roaring with fury. Rumor said that Aristophanes himself was behind the mask, to spare any actor the danger of playing the hero of Pylos.

  As the comedy continued the players decried Cleon as a cheat, a liar, and an embezzler. He was also a thief who had stolen the credit for Pylos from Demosthenes, the true maker of the winning strategy. In answer to their taunts, Cleon stirred up big winds with his tirades, and the other characters “reef [ed] their sails” so as not to be blown offstage. The tanner (Cleon) then threatened to punish his enemies by assigning them old hulls and rotten sails whenever they served as trierarchs.

  Old man Demos, disturbed by the uproar, came out of his house. Learning of the quarrel between the sausage seller and the tanner, Demos declared that he himself would sit in judgment. His buttocks were still sore (after fifty-six years!) from his hard rowing at Salamis, and he was touchingly grateful when the sausage seller offered him a cushion to sit on. In the agon or contest that ensued, Cleon claimed that he had done more for the city than the great Themistocles himself, and even quoted the famous Wooden Wall oracle about Athens’ navy. The sausage seller countered that the appropriate wooden wall to enclose Cleon would be the public stocks. Each then tried to outdo the other in conveying tasty dishes to Demos.

  Throughout the action the chorus of aristocratic horsemen joined in the verbal and physical attacks on Cleon, just as in the Assembly the real Cleon was opposed, though ineffectually, by the Athenian upper classes. Between charges, however, Aristophanes’ chorus of horsemen offered the audience a more inspiring message—an appeal for reconciliation between masses and elite, between democratic navy and aristocratic cavalry. The chorus reminded the citizens that they had recently joined the naval effort themselves in the new horse carriers (an expedition commanded by Nicias). In a flight of fantasy, they told how their own horses had manned the oars and rowed all the way to Corinth to attack the enemy. Being horses, the equine crews naturally mixed cavalry commands with nautical orders and substituted a chant of “Hippapai!” for the proper Athenian rowing chant of “Rhyppapai!”

  For the lyric high point of his play, Aristophanes composed an invocation to Poseidon, god both of horses and of the sea, patron of riders and seafarers alike.

  Horse-lord Poseidon, O!

  You who hold dear the cymbal-clashing hoofbeats of horses,

  And their neighing,

  And the speeding triremes, dark-beaked and mercenary,

  And the race of lads in chariots, lighthearted or unlucky,

  Come down to our dance.

  O gold-tridented, O guardian of dolphins, adored at Sunium,

  O Geraestian son of Cronus:

  Best beloved of Phormio, above all other gods,

  Stand by Athenians now!

  Eventually Demos showed that his heart was in the right place. He cast off Cleon, promising in future to spend more of his funds on trireme building than on lawsuit hearings. Further, he resolved that when the navy came home, the rowers should immediately receive their back pay in full. (“Many well-worn rumps will rejoice at that!”) Then Demos slipped off to his farm, arm in arm with two beautiful women identified as “Thirty-Year Peace Treaties.” Cleon himself was condemned to trade places with the lowly sausage seller. In the final moments of the play the chorus carried the tanner offstage in the direction of the city gate, there to bawl his wretched merchandise among the bathhouses and brothels.

  After all three comedies had been presented, the competing choruses trooped across the orchestra in turn so that the ten judges could determine which one received the loudest applause. Rarely did Aristophanes prove a favorite with the audience. So it was a bitter moment for Cleon, sitting in the full glare of ten thousand citizens, when the herald announced that Horsemen had won first prize.

  Cleon’s dramatic humiliation did not shake his hold over Athenian policy. For three more years the Athenians continued their attacks on the Peloponnesian coasts, their attempts to win back their old land empire, and their meddling in Sicily. None of these campaigns prospered, but one of them launched the literary career of yet another gifted young Athenian: the historian Thucydides. It happened after Brasidas had made a dash to the north and captured the rich Athenian colony of Amphipolis during a snowstorm. In an attempt to oust Brasidas and retake the city, Thucydides as general took a squadron of seven Athenian triremes up the Strymon River. When his mission failed, the angry Assembly sent him into exile. Their action deprived the city of a genius who might have become a statesman in the mold of Pericles. Withdrawing to his family’s gold mines in Thrace (he was a kinsman of Miltiades and Cimon), Thucydides began to compile and commit to writing every detail of the current war. If he could not make history, he would write it.

  Finally the warmongering Cleon was killed while fighting at Amphipolis, and the same battle claimed the life of the Spartan hero Brasidas. With these two hawks out of the way, Nicias soon succeeded in negotiating a peace settlement, later called the Peace of Nicias. By its terms the Spartans formally recognized the rule of the Athenians over their maritime empire and even granted them Nisaea, the port of Megara. Otherwise both sides pledged to give back the places that they had captured during the war and agreed to open panhellenic sanctuaries such as Olympia and Delphi to all Greeks. They swore to keep the peace for fifty years. The terms were a triumph for Athens and would have gratified Pericles, had he been alive to hail this new accord.

  The war had lasted almost exactly ten years. Important members of the Peloponnesian League—the Corinthians, Thebans, and Megarians—were bitter and blamed the Spartans for abandoning the war on such easy terms. To protect themselves against their irate allies, the Spartans went beyond the peace accords and concluded an independent fifty-year alliance with the Athenians. In fulfillment of Cimon’s dream, Athens and Sparta seemed securely yoked as joint leaders of the Greeks. But already some viewed the Peace of Nicias as little more than an uneasy cessation of hostilities rather than a true peace.

  At the next dramatic festival Aristophanes presented a new comedy called Peace. The play’s hero, an Athenian grape farmer, flew up to Mount Olympus on a gigantic dung beetle to ask Zeus why he had allowed the Greeks to destroy one another. Did the gods not understand that the Persians might still conquer them all, once both sides were exhausted? Back on earth, a chorus of Greek farmers rescued the goddess Peace from a deep pit where the war god Ares had buried her. As they hauled Peace back to the light with ropes, the god Hermes rebuked those Athenians who still lusted after an empire on land. “If you want Peace to be saved, you must draw back and stick to the sea!”

  Pericles began the war, Cleon prolonged it, and Nicias brought it to an end. But Aristophanes and comedy had the last word.

  CHAPTER 13

  The Sicilian Expedition [415-413 B.C.]

  Where there is hubris and self-will, know this:

  The city, after a fair voyage, in time will plunge to the bottom.

  —Sophocles

  PEACE CAME TOO SOON FOR ONE AMBITIOUS YOUNG ATHENIAN. Alcibiades had just turned thirty, old enough at last
to take his rightful place among Athens’ generals and civic leaders. Peacetime robbed him of his chances to shine in battle, exploit a great crisis, or pose as the savior of Athens. Happily for him, the Spartans were unwilling or unable to abide by the terms of the Peace of Nicias. So Alcibiades set out to stir up trouble among the Greeks, like a boy shoving a long stick into a hornet’s nest.

  Even without his incendiary policies, Alcibiades’ flamboyant behavior and mannerisms kept him always in the public eye. The comic poets of Athens ruthlessly mimicked Alcibiades’ idiosyncratic lisp and hesitant speech. He enjoyed the glory of seeing his four-horse chariots take first, second, and fourth place at the Olympic games. Even more than his sporting victories, Alcibiades’ sexual adventures fascinated the Athenians. Far from hiding his erotic obsessions, Alcibiades went so far as to replace the traditional family crest on his shield with an image of the god Eros standing on a field of gold, wielding a thunderbolt. His marriage to the richest heiress in Athens did nothing to stop his scandalous escapades. When she sought a divorce, he seized her from the court and carried her home again through the crowds in the Agora.

  Like all rich Athenians he had served the city as a trierarch, and his outrageous behavior carried over to the decks of his triremes. Alcibiades ordered the ship’s carpenters to cut away sections of the stern decks so that his bed could be slung on ropes in the gap. No hard pallets for Alcibiades. He slept as if rocking in a cradle, the first recorded swinging of a hammock on a ship at sea. His steersman, a citizen named Antiochus, was befriended on the strength of nothing more than a prank in the Assembly. One day a pet quail escaped from under Alcibiades’ cloak when he lifted his hands to applaud a speech. Antiochus happened to be standing nearby. He won Alcibiades’ eternal regard by recapturing the bird following a noisy chase through the ranks of laughing citizens.