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

by John R. Hale

  The stratagem that would lure the Spartans away from Cyzicus followed the precepts of Alcibiades’ old commander Phormio: “Feign weakness to make your enemy overconfident. Draw a disorderly charge by making your own force appear small.” Alcibiades moved forward until the enemy lookouts saw him, and enemy ships broke away from the drill to challenge the newcomers. Then he ordered his steersmen to veer west toward the open sea, drawing the Spartans after him in an exuberant chase. Mindarus’ entire fleet was soon racing along in the Athenians’ wake, losing order as the faster triremes outdistanced the rest. Once the chase had pulled west of Polydoros island, Thrasybulus and Theramenes moved into the open. A short row brought them far enough into the bay to cut off Mindarus’ retreat. On seeing his colleagues take up their new position, Alcibiades hoisted the signal for his own squadron to attack its pursuers. At once the twenty ships swung into a hard turn that brought them back around until their rams pointed at the enemy fleet. Then each trireme picked a target and charged.

  Alcibiades’ sudden turn and the appearance of the main Athenian fleet took the hapless Spartans completely by surprise. Mindarus could tell that he had lost Cyzicus, but he still hoped to save his fleet. With the way to the harbor blocked, he turned toward the only stretch of level shore in the area, a beach below the mercenary encampment. If his fleet could reach land, the conflict would no doubt degenerate into a standoff between Spartans entrenched on the beach and Athenians fearful of leaving their ships. The sea, not the land, was the Athenians’ element. In the battles of Cynossema and Abydos, back in the autumn, the Spartans had been beaten on the water but survived the struggle on shore without much difficulty.

  As the Spartan forces fled back toward the southeastern corner of the bay, Alcibiades’ triremes were close behind, smashing into the rear guard. Despite the Athenians’ best efforts, most of the enemy fleet managed to reach land at a place called Kleroi. It was time now for Alcibiades to abandon the naval battle and return to the main fleet. Thrasybulus and Theramenes were waiting for him in the middle of the bay, ready for the assault on Cyzicus.

  For Alcibiades, however, the prospect of one more inconclusive victory seemed suddenly intolerable. His marines were casting grappling irons on enemy hulls at the water’s edge, hoping to tow them off as prizes. The Spartans and their allies, led by Mindarus, were fighting back from the decks of their own ships. Away to the Athenians’ right, beyond the chaotic mass of triremes in the shallows, lay a strip of open beach. Ignoring his colleagues, Alcibiades rallied his fastest ships and made a dash for the shore west of the grounded Spartan fleet. Despite his many failings, he possessed a lionlike physical courage, and it did not desert him now. As soon as the steersman brought his ship close enough, Alcibiades jumped to shore fully armed, like Achilles leaping onto the sands at Troy.

  The marines and archers followed him. The fighting force from all twenty triremes amounted to fewer than three hundred men. As soon as Mindarus got his own troops off the ships and onto shore, the Athenians would be outnumbered by about three to one. But at their head was a general in the grip of full battle fury, behaving like a man possessed. The mania quickly spread through the ranks behind him. Their position was hemmed in on the left by the hulls of the beached ships, and on the right by the hillside. Surprised once again, Mindarus called his troops together to crush this mad charge on his flank.

  Watching from the deck of his flagship, Thrasybulus realized that the naval battle was melting into a fight on land. He could also see Pharnabazus’ mercenaries as they came streaming out of their fort to join the struggle on the beach. Unless he acted quickly, Alcibiades and his men would soon be overwhelmed by sheer force of numbers. Plan or no plan, the assault on Cyzicus would have to wait. Thrasybulus was well known for his stentorian voice. Shouting across the water, he told Theramenes to fetch Chaireas and the Athenian land forces, now stranded on the northern side of Cyzicus. If they were to join the battle by the ships, Theramenes would have to ferry them across the bay.

  As his colleague hurried away with half the remaining Athenian ships, Thrasybulus headed for the beach. The crisis gave him only moments to consider how to save Alcibiades. Deciding that his best hope lay in dividing their opponents, Thrasybulus steered for a point east of the beached fleets, at the opposite end from the place where Mindarus and Alcibiades were now locked in combat. The main enemy force was too busy with Alcibiades to prevent Thrasybulus’ triremes from setting his men ashore. When word reached Mindarus of yet another Athenian landing, he sent some of the allied Greeks along with the freshly arrived Persian mercenaries to dispose of Thrasybulus. This horde quickly closed in around their prey. Though successful at the start, Thrasybulus and his company of marines and archers were soon thrown on the defensive. Still they resisted, and the losses were heavy on both sides.

  The Athenians were close to exhaustion when Theramenes’ squadron finally arrived, the ships crowded with Chaireas’ troop of hoplites. As these reinforcements disembarked on the short length of beach still held by Thrasybulus, the tide of battle began to turn. The Persian mercenaries gave way first, then the Peloponnesians. Theramenes’ men were still full of fire, and he led them west along the beach to relieve the sorely beleaguered Alcibiades. To meet this new threat from his rear, Mindarus was compelled to divide his forces a second time. Shortly after Theramenes’ arrival the Spartan admiral was killed, and once he had fallen even the Spartan hoplites broke ranks and ran. The Athenians chased them inland, until the thunder of hooves on the road from the hills warned them that Pharnabazus and his Persian cavalry were approaching.

  As they turned back to the sea, the Athenians saw flames spouting from the row of triremes that the Syracusans had abandoned. These Sicilians had voyaged all the way across the Greek world to lend a hand in the destruction of the Athenian navy. Now the crews from Syracuse had chosen to burn their ships rather than see them fall into Athenian hands. So the day that began in rain ended in fire. All the other ships of Mindarus’ fleet were captured intact. Alcibiades’ wanton disregard for plans and prudence had transformed what would have been a modest gain at Cyzicus into the greatest Athenian naval victory since the Peloponnesian War began.

  The triumphant Athenians put up two trophies: one on the islet of Polydoros for Alcibiades’ victory at sea; the other on the mainland for the battle by the ships. That night the Peloponnesian garrison slipped out of Cyzicus, and the next day the Athenians marched in and took the city, unopposed by Pharnabazus and the Persians. Soon afterward the Athenians intercepted a secret message sent back to Sparta by the officer who had taken Mindarus’ place. Written in the true laconic style favored by Spartans, the text was short, but very sweet to Athenian eyes: SHIPS LOST MINDARUS DEAD MEN STARVING DON’T KNOW WHAT TO DO.

  One casualty of the naval battles in the Hellespont was the playwright Eupolis. He had taken advantage of the license granted to comic poets in Athens to criticize the conduct of the war. As he wrote in one play, “Men whom once you would have deemed unfit to be wine inspectors you now elect to be generals. O Athens! Athens! You are more lucky than wise.” Eupolis had lampooned Alcibiades in a play called Baptai or “The Dippers.” To the poet’s misfortune, he had been posted aboard one of Alcibiades’ ships. Eupolis soon discovered that the general had neither forgotten nor forgiven his witty insults. Alcibiades had him dunked in the sea, calling the dip in the brine a return for the dipping that Eupolis had given him in the theater. When Eupolis was killed in action, the Athenians were so distraught at the loss of this shining comic light that they passed a law exempting poets from military service.

  As for Alcibiades himself, his exploits at Cyzicus were immortalized in histories, biographies, and tactical manuals. It was the great battle that he had been restlessly seeking all his life, and it improved his reputation in Athens more than anything else could have done. Ever since the democratic restoration in Athens the previous year, an active faction in the city had been working to bring Alcibiades back from exile. He seemed a
talisman of victory. The fortunes of Athens had prospered until his condemnation and exile. The Spartans’ star had been in the ascendant during the years when Alcibiades advised them. And the goddess Nike had started to smile on the Athenian navy as soon as the democratic assembly on Samos elected him general.

  Even the venerable poet Sophocles lent his support to the “Return of the Exile” movement with his Philoctetes, first performed in the dramatic contests that followed the great victory at Cyzicus. The play, which was Sophocles’ contribution to the new genre of romances, featured the rescue of the marooned hero Philoctetes from an island, and a happy ending as he rejoined his old companions (who had themselves banished and marooned him) to help them win a war. There were still dissenters who blamed Athens’ troubles on Alcibiades and pointed out that it was really Thrasybulus who had won the battle of Cyzicus, but they were increasingly in the minority.

  In the campaigning seasons that followed the victory at Cyzicus, Alcibiades and his colleagues went on a rampage. Sometimes they worked together; often they undertook separate expeditions. Thrasybulus recovered Thrace and the mining district, Theramenes fought against Pharnabazus on the Asiatic side of the Bosporus, and Alcibiades used stratagems and night attacks to recover the greatest prize of all, Byzantium. From a fort that they named Chrysopolis (“Golden City”), the Athenians levied a ten percent tax on all cargoes passing through the Bosporus from the Black Sea. Enriched by tolls and by booty from Cyzicus, Alcibiades and the other Athenian generals extended their campaigns to Ionia. The Spartans, stripped of naval power, were unable to prevent their opponents from rolling back many of the gains made since the war resumed.

  Part of the money from the Bosporus tolls was shipped back to Athens, and from that moment the city’s finances began to recover. Up on the Acropolis, architects and stone carvers resumed work on a wondrous new temple called the Erechtheum, for the naval victories and the flow of wealth from overseas gave a buoyant impulse both to the public works projects and to offerings of gratitude to the gods. Now the treasury could pay artisans to complete the Erechtheum’s marble statues and fluted columns. As delicate and mysterious as the Parthenon was massive and orderly, the new temple was graced by a high porch where six marble maidens, in place of columns, held up the roof. These strong young women gazed across the ruins of the old temple that Xerxes had destroyed toward the Parthenon and were silent observers at each summer’s Panathenaic procession. The Erechtheum provided a spectacular setting for Athena’s sacred olive tree, but it celebrated Poseidon as well as Athena. Here stood an altar to the sea god, here was the ancient mark where Poseidon’s trident had struck the bedrock of the Acropolis, and here too lay Poseidon’s deep saltwater well or “Sea.” Athenians who hung their heads over the well believed that they could hear the surf when the wind blew in from the coast.

  After three years of fighting on Athens’ behalf, Alcibiades finally felt that it might be safe to return to the city. The final mark of civic forgiveness was his election in absentia to the post of general, not by the men in the fleet this time but by the entire Athenian Assembly voting on the Pnyx. By now he was back on Samos, so it was from the island that had witnessed the turn of his fortunes that Alcibiades began his long voyage home.

  Most of the men and ships had been away from Athens for years, and Alcibiades wanted their return to be a triumphal procession. He loaded the holds of his twenty triremes with figureheads from captured Spartan warships, and he hung Spartan shields and other trophies from the railings. A purple sail billowed on his flagship’s mast, a famous virtuoso played the pipes for his crew, and an equally famous singer chanted the rowing cadence. Alcibiades and his friends decked themselves with garlands of leaves and flowers. In his splendid progress he visited the island of Paros and even took a detour to the Spartan harbor at Gythium. There Alcibiades looked alertly for signs of shipbuilding even as he brazenly flaunted his trophies to the Spartans on shore. He was reminding them, as he had reminded the Athenians during the Sicilian campaign, that he was indeed still alive.

  At the Piraeus, Alcibiades’ bravado deserted him. The crowd was immense, the shouting incoherent. Not sure whether they were hailing or cursing him, Alcibiades hesitated on the deck of his flagship until he spotted his cousin Euryptolemus and other family members waving a welcome. Then at last he climbed down from his ship and set foot on shore. Well-wishers mobbed him, laughing, cheering, weeping. Someone put a crown on his head, as if he were a victorious athlete, a divine hero—or a king. Through a cordon of friends Alcibiades made his way up the road between the Long Walls.

  As soon as possible he presented himself to the Council and then spoke before the Assembly. The people revoked the death sentence, restored his citizenship and property, and even voted him strategos autokrator, commander supreme on land and sea. Priests and priestesses lifted their ritual curses from his head. The marble slabs inscribed with the record of Alcibiades’ condemnation were pulled down and thrown into the sea, from which they have not yet risen. The beautiful line that Euripides gave to his heroine Iphigenia had proved to be prophetic: “The sea can wash away all human ills.”

  CHAPTER 15

  Of Heroes and Hemlock [407-406 B.C.]

  There I lie, one moment on the shore, another in the sea’s swell, carried along by the constant ebb and flow of the waves, with no one to weep for me or give me burial.

  —Euripides

  NOW THAT THE ANNUAL INFLUX OF TRIBUTE MONEY HAD ENDED, the Assembly was perennially strapped for cash. Rather than sending their generals to sea with an adequate war chest from the public treasury, the Athenians had fallen into the bad habit of expecting them to raise the money for their crews while on the move. This was no way to run a war, let alone to win one, and it led to many abuses. These ranged from extorting money from neutral coastal cities, to committing acts of piracy on the high seas, to taking mercenary service in local wars outside the realm of official Athenian influence. Some desperate generals even resorted to hiring out their crews as migrant workers. The rowers would leave their oars and rowing pads to pick fruit at harvesttime.

  After a halcyon summer at home, capped by a spectacular celebration of the Eleusinian Mysteries (the rites that he had once been accused of desecrating), Alcibiades was sent out as general in command of a fleet. The Assembly was counting on him to bring the war in Ionia to a speedy conclusion. As usual in those years, his war chest was empty. Alcibiades should have protested at once and used his charisma and popularity to squeeze funds out of the treasury. Unfortunately he had sold himself to the adoring people as a superman, a demigod. It was too late now to confess that he was a mere mortal like themselves.

  Alcibiades’ dreams of leadership at Athens ended in disgrace at Notium, near Ephesus. Unable to pay his men, he set off on a round of money-raising and left his steersman, Antiochus, in charge of the fleet. The triremes were moored in the sheltered cove at Notium. This Antiochus was the very man who had long ago caught Alcibiades’ notice by capturing the runaway quail during the Assembly meeting. The wealthy Athenian trierarchs could not have been pleased with the prospect of taking orders from their general’s steersman and drinking partner. To ensure that nothing went wrong in his absence, Alcibiades left Antiochus with strict orders not to engage the enemy fleet, which lay a few miles east of Notium at Ephesus.

  Alas, Antiochus seems to have picked up rashness and opportunism from Alcibiades himself. Soon after the general left Notium, the misguided steersman foolishly precipitated a naval battle in which he himself was killed and twenty-two Athenian triremes were lost. When Alcibiades returned, he led the fleet to Ephesus and challenged the enemy to a fair fight, but the Spartan admiral Lysander would not come out. In these circumstances Alcibiades, though guilty of little more than bad judgment and worse luck, dared not return to Athens to face the wrath of the Assembly. Instead he departed northward with one trireme and went to ground at his private fortress on the northern shore of the Sea of Marmara. This stronghold at Pactye
was a bolt-hole that Alcibiades had created for just such an emergency. There he played the role of local warlord in conflicts between Greek settlers and Thracian tribesmen, much as the great Miltiades had done a century before. An evil destiny seemed to hound him still.

  After the fiasco at Notium the Athenians urgently needed a reliable general in Ionia. Their choice fell on Conon, a commander with experience at Naupactus. At Samos Conon found a dispirited and depleted fleet. Conon manned seventy triremes with the best crews that he could muster and boldly headed north to confront the Peloponnesian fleet. As he rowed up the broad seaway between Lesbos and the Asiatic shore, messengers brought him word that the enemy had captured the city of Methymna on Lesbos. The Athenian garrison had been sold into slavery. Conon also learned that the Spartan admiral had sent him a warning and a challenge: “I shall stop your fornicating with the sea. She belongs to me.”

  These bold words came from the new Spartan navarchos, a brash young man named Callicratidas. He had succeeded Lysander as admiral and commanded a Peloponnesian fleet of 140 triremes, twice the size of Conon’s force. The unequal opponents skirmished the next day. Callicratidas managed to capture 30 of Conon’s triremes and chased the rest into the harbor at Mytilene. A pitched battle was fought along the breakwater at Mytilene. The Athenians anchored inside the barrier and used their ships’ yardarms as catapults to hurl large stones at the enemy. Hopelessly outnumbered, Conon finally ordered a retreat to the city’s inner harbor. Here for the moment he was safe. But Callicratidas did not depart. Almost half of Conon’s ships, the cream of the Athenian navy, were already in his hands, and the Spartan admiral was determined not to leave Lesbos till he had taken the rest. The Spartans settled down to a blockade. Two Athenian triremes broke through and made a dash for freedom. The Spartans captured one, but the other reached Athens with news of the disastrous defeat and blockade.