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

by John R. Hale

  Only one Athenian general and a handful of crews kept their heads. Conon had stayed near his ships that afternoon and was among the first to see the enemy fleet. He managed to man eight triremes and row out to sea before the Peloponnesians reached his section of the beach. There he was joined by the Paralos. Like Conon’s crews, the Paraloi had managed to get on board and run out their oars in time to escape. It was impossible for Conon to aid the thousands of his fellow countrymen caught on the beach, where Lysander and his forces were rapidly completing the capture of the Athenian navy. He could only hope to save his own life and the lives of his men.

  Putting as much distance as possible between themselves and the slaughter, the escaping Athenians came in sight of the promontory at Abarnis where Lysander had left his cruising gear. Here was a heaven-sent sliver of luck. The Athenians had had no time to fit out their ships for sailing before they made their escape, and they were in desperate need of masts and sails for the long voyage ahead. Landing on the flat shore, Conon’s men quickly took what they needed from the equipment the Spartans had fortuitously left in their path.

  Conon joined the Paralos as they fled down the Hellespont to the open sea. Lysander’s dispatch vessel, a Milesian pirate ship bearing news of the tremendous victory to Sparta, would soon be on their heels. When word of the catastrophe at Goat Rivers spread, no port would be safe for an Athenian ship. From the mouth of the Hellespont, Conon led his little squadron away into southern waters, seeking refuge beyond the reach of Spartan power and Athenian retribution. He had no intention of ending his days with a draft of hemlock. The Paraloi, however, had a sacred duty to carry word back to the Assembly. Having parted from Conon near Troy, the Paralos made its solitary way homeward through the Aegean.

  Young Xenophon, a disciple of Socrates, recollected years later how the report reached the city. “It was at night that the Paralos arrived at Athens. As the news of the disaster was told, one man passed it on to another, and a sound of wailing arose and extended first from the Piraeus, then along the Long Walls, until it reached the city. That night no one slept. They mourned for the lost, but more still for their own fate. They thought that they themselves would now be dealt with as they had dealt with others.” The navy was gone, and hope seemed to have gone with it.

  Next morning the people rallied. At an emergency meeting of the Assembly they voted to barricade the entrance to the two military harbors of Zea and Munychia—now empty and useless—and keep only the Cantharus Harbor open to receive shipments of food. Rather than surrender, they intended to withstand a siege. The city braced itself for the arrival of Lysander’s triumphant fleet from the Hellespont.

  Instead, more survivors of Aegospotami arrived, followed by ships loaded with Athenian soldiers from the garrisons at Byzantium and Chalcedon. The men explained that they had surrendered to the overwhelming forces of the Spartans, and, to their surprise, had been released on condition that they return home. More and more ships continued to pour in, filling Athens with soldiers, settlers, and traders who had been similarly expelled from former allied cities. It was Lysander’s plan to fill Athens with as many hungry mouths as possible, then starve the multitude into submission. By his orders, anyone carrying food to Athens was to be executed.

  Among Athens’ allies, only the democratic islanders of Samos held out for a time against the Spartans. In a burst of gratitude, the Assembly voted to extend Athenian citizenship to the loyal Samians. Had they seen fit to offer citizenship to all the allies in their days of power, the fate of their maritime empire might have been very different. Lysander installed Spartan governors and garrisons in “liberated” Greek cities from the Bosporus to Ionia. The old Athenian Empire was thus transformed into a vast new Spartan domain. Then the victor of Aegospotami brought his fleet to the island of Aegina and settled down to the blockade of Athens.

  The city held out over the winter, but hunger and hopelessness eventually drove the people to surrender. In the spring the Athenians opened the mouth of the great harbor, and Lysander’s fleet rowed in to take possession. The long struggle was over. Athens had been at war with the Peloponnesians off and on for fifty-five years, and it was twenty-seven years almost to the day since the outbreak of the conflict that Thucydides (and posterity) would call the Peloponnesian War.

  Among Sparta’s allies, the Corinthians and Thebans were quick to demand that Athens be destroyed and its people enslaved. At a banquet held during the congress of victorious allies, however, a man from Phocis happened to sing a well-known chorus from Euripides’ tragedy Electra. The great works of Athens’ Golden Age were now the common property of all Greeks. The song moved the delegates to tears, and the vengeful plan to raze the city was given up. Athens had been made rich and powerful by its navy, but it was saved by its poets.

  In the end, the Spartans spared the city and its people but destroyed anything and everything that had contributed to Athenian rule of the sea. The democracy was terminated. Athens would be ruled by an oligarchy of thirty rich citizens handpicked by Lysander. The Long Walls and the fortifications of the Piraeus must be torn down. The navy itself, the heart of Athenian power and glory, would be reduced to just twelve triremes—probably the sacred ships Paralos and Salaminia, and the ships dedicated to the ten Attic tribes. Athens would no longer have any overseas policies of its own but would follow Sparta’s lead on land and sea alike.

  On the day that the Long Walls began to come down, Lysander decided to make a holiday of the historic event. He had pipers brought out from the city—not the men who kept time for the rowers but girls who performed at parties. So it was to the music of drinking songs that the Spartans dismantled the towering ramparts. Once those symbols of democracy and maritime empire had toppled, the umbilical cord that had linked Athens to the sea for half a century was cut.

  The new government of thirty oligarchs shared Lysander’s ruthlessness. Soon to be known as the Thirty Tyrants, they moved swiftly to eliminate every trace of the navy. The shipsheds of the Piraeus, built at a cost of a thousand talents and among the architectural wonders of the Greek world, were sold off to salvagers for three talents and demolished. On the Pnyx, where the speaker’s platform for Assembly meetings had always faced out to sea, the Thirty ordered that it should be reversed to look inland, away from the dangerous element that had fostered the Athenian maritime empire.

  Within a short time the tyranny of the Thirty became so violent and lawless that a leader came forward to oppose it. Thrasybulus was a veteran of naval victories at Cynossema, Abydos, Cyzicus, and Arginusae. In the same spirit of defiance to tyrants, this former trierarch had stepped from the ranks on Samos, seven years before, to lead the navy’s own counterrevo lution against the oligarchs. Now he led a resistance movement that took as its headquarters the old democratic stronghold of the Piraeus. Even with the fortifications in disarray, thousands of Athenians rallied around Thrasybulus and defied the forces of the Thirty. The Spartans themselves bowed to the voice of the people after their oligarchic puppets had ruled for little more than a year. Democratic government was restored. Whether Athenian democracy could survive without ships or walls remained to be seen.

  Two momentous deaths marked the demise of the old order: Socrates and Thucydides. Five years after the city’s surrender Socrates was accused of heresy and of corrupting the minds of the young. At his trial Socrates denied the charges and reminded the 501 jurors of his war record under Phormio and Lamachus. “When the generals whom you chose to command me assigned me my positions at Potidaea and Amphipolis and Delium, I remained at my post like anyone else and faced death. Afterward, when god appointed me, as I believed, to the duty of leading a philosophic life, examining myself and others, how inconsistent I should have been to desert my post then, through fear of death or any other danger!” He also spoke of the role he played in the trial of the generals after Arginusae, when he had upheld the law rather than give in to the crowd.

  The jury sentenced Socrates to death, but his execution
was unexpectedly delayed because of a ship. One day before the trial began, the sacred galley Delias had embarked on its annual spring voyage to Delos for the festival of Apollo. Until the triakontor returned, the city could put no man to death. So Socrates lived on in prison, passing his time by creating poetical versions of Aesop’s fables, comforting his family, enjoying long talks with the jailer, and holding philosophical conversations with a few faithful disciples. His life was preserved for many days by the strong winds that blew over the Aegean, holding back the sacred ship.

  In his last days Socrates reminisced about his career as a philosopher. His early scientific interest in the workings of the cosmos had given way in midlife to an obsessive questioning about human nature and the pursuit of virtue. Borrowing a proverbial phrase from Athenian seafarers, he called his change of course a deuteros plous or second voyaging. When mariners cruising under sail met with a dead calm, they would run out the oars and venture on by rowing. In the same way Socrates had turned away from the natural world and studied mankind instead. When word came that the Delias had landed near Cape Sunium, his reprieve was over. Like so many others who had incurred the anger of the Athenians, Socrates drank the hemlock, walked about for a little while, and then lay down to die. He had written down nothing of his philosophy, asserting that the only thing he knew was that he knew nothing.

  The historian Thucydides had returned to Athens after his twenty-year exile in Thrace. He settled down to finish writing his history of the Peloponnesian War but died (or, according to one account, was assassinated) before he could finish. In view of the war’s outcome, Thucydides believed that in the final analysis the decisive factors had been ships, money, and sea power. The sea had been the true battleground, and all the major turning points in his history were naval actions. The Athenians had largely adhered to Pericles’ policy of avoiding land battles; the Spartans had surprised everyone by patiently mastering the nautical skills that Pericles had claimed they would never learn.

  Thucydides died believing that the war between Athens and Sparta had ended with the surrender of Athens, and that it had lasted twenty-seven years. He was wrong. The contest was not over, and Athens was not yet beaten. It was not enough to pull down its walls and destroy its beloved triremes. Thucydides had reckoned without the unsinkable spirit of the Athenian people. Athens itself was about to embark on a deuteros plous. Soon the battered ship of state would again be afloat, lifted from its resting place and swept one final time into the surge.

  Part Five

  REBIRTH

  It is right to endure with resignation what the gods send, and to

  face one’s enemies with courage. This was the old Athenian way.

  Do not let any act of yours prevent it from still being so. Remem ber, too, that the reason why Athens has the greatest name in all

  the world is because she has never surrendered to adversity, but

  has spent more life and labor in warfare than any other state.

  Thus the city has won the greatest power that has ever existed

  in history, a power that will be remembered forever by posterity,

  even if now (since all things are born to decay) there should come

  a time when we were forced to yield.

  —Pericles to the Athenians

  CHAPTER 17

  Passing the Torch [397-371 B.C.]

  Brave men are made bolder by ordeals, but cowards achieve nothing.

  We have not come this long way by oar only to turn back now from

  our goal.

  —Euripides

  AFTER THE SURRENDER OF ATHENS AND ITS NAVY TO THE Spartans, eight Athenian triremes under Conon’s command still remained at large. The runaways had found shelter on Cyprus, far beyond the reach of the Spartans. There they landed at an ancient city called, auspiciously enough, Salamis. Its Greek ruler, King Evagoras, was a vassal of King Artaxerxes but nursed secret hopes of liberating all Cyprus from Persian rule. Evagoras welcomed this windfall of an Athenian squadron. He encouraged Conon and his sixteen hundred men to stay as his guests. A remnant of the Athenian navy would live on in Cyprus, homeless but still free. And where there was life, there was hope.

  Now in his forties, Conon could look back on a decade’s experience as a naval commander. His record was dubious. It was not only at Aegospotami that he had dodged actions where other generals had lost their reputations or even their lives. At the time of the Sicilian expedition, Conon had led a squadron to guard duty at Naupactus instead of to death and destruction at Syracuse. Two years later he missed the fleet’s democratic revolution on Samos, being otherwise engaged on Corcyra. After Alcibiades’ steersman lost the battle of Notium, it was Conon who took charge of the demoralized fleet, but he had been well out of range during the debacle itself. And Conon had watched the distant battle of Arginusae from the walls of Mytilene, where he lay blockaded by the Spartan fleet. Glory eluded Conon, but no one could deny that he had a knack for survival. Now a rapid current of events in the distant Aegean was about to sweep Conon back into the very eye of the maelstrom.

  If there had been any harmony among Spartan leaders or any honor in Spartan treatment of the other Greeks, Athenian democracy and naval power might have sunk without a trace. “Freedom for the Greeks” had been the Spartans’ rallying cry against Athens. Yet within months of winning the war, the Spartans betrayed the trust of the very allies who had made their victory possible. They handed the Greek cities of Asia back to the Great King of Persia in return for the gold that he had poured into their naval effort. In the islands Lysander’s brutal military governors took control of the cities. Shattered pieces of the old Athenian maritime empire were quickly reforged into an even more oppressive Spartan maritime empire.

  To pay the costs of their new navy, the Spartans demanded tribute at more than double the rate once assessed by Aristides the Just. Under Athenian rule the allies had complained when they had to go all the way to Athens for legal redress of official abuses. Under the new regime these same allies found that they had no legal redress anywhere. Spartan officials, even private Spartan citizens, operated outside the law, with nothing to curb their greed, their lust, and their congenital Spartan urge to give orders.

  The Spartans’ hubris touched off an ominous reaction. Foolishly they antagonized their old partners the Persians with attacks on the satrapies of Asia Minor. Chief among the injured parties was Pharnabazus, satrap of the lands along the Hellespont. This impetuous leader once rode his horse into the sea to help Spartans keep Athenian triremes off a beach. It was a dark day for Sparta when the embittered Pharnabazus sent a messenger up the Royal Road to Susa, urging that some action be launched against them. A war at sea, Pharnabazus suggested, might curb Spartan aggression on land.

  In response to this appeal, King Artaxerxes II, great-grandson of Xerxes, named as his admiral the only experienced naval commander within the realm: Conon. The Great King also ordered Cyprus, Cilicia, and Phoenicia to contribute triremes for an expedition against the Spartans. Only seven years had passed since a Persian prince provided the pay for Lysander’s crews at Aegospotami. Overnight Conon the Athenian was catapulted from his obscure exile into the forefront of a new campaign.

  Within the Persian Empire the cities were slow to answer the king’s call for ships. Once news of Conon’s royal appointment reached Athens, however, the effect was electric. Hundreds of Athenians rallied to his distant banner. Triremes began to slip away from the Piraeus to join Conon on Cyprus. Even the Assembly dispatched a few ships, then blandly disowned them (on Thrasybulus’ recommendation) when the Spartans protested. Renegade Athenians manned other triremes on their own initiative and at their own expense. Ship by ship an Athenian “navy in exile” began to congregate in the harbor of Cyprian Salamis.

  Conon was still waiting for the full Persian levy of triremes. The delays and false starts stretched into years, until Conon at last took his grievances directly to the Great King at Babylon. The negotiations were strained. G
o- betweens had to carry messages back and forth from Artaxerxes to Conon, who refused to kowtow in the groveling obeisance that would have admitted him into the royal presence. Nevertheless the king attended to every one of Conon’s complaints. He confirmed Conon’s position as supreme admiral, ordered all Persian officials to follow his lead, and provided more money to pay the crews. Artaxerxes also offered Conon the privilege of choosing a Persian colleague to command with him. Conon asked for Pharnabazus.

  Midsummer was well past when Conon and Pharnabazus led their fleet of almost one hundred triremes west to the Aegean. They established a base near Cnidus, in the southwestern corner of Asia Minor. The city was famous for its temple of Aphrodite, a goddess whose birth from the foam of the sea had made her a patron of mariners. In happier days Cnidus had been an Athenian ally. Now it served as the base for the Spartan fleet. Conon’s antagonist was the Spartan admiral Peisander, who owed his command not to experience but to nepotism. (King Agesilaus of Sparta was his brother-in-law.) Possessing eighty-five triremes, Peisander was slightly outnumbered. To draw Peisander into battle before reinforcements arrived, Conon decided to employ the same ruse that had helped Alcibiades bring on the battle at Cyzicus.

  Conon began by leading a small vanguard of Athenian triremes across the bay in full view of the Spartans. As he intended, Peisander impulsively manned his ships and put out to sea. In the ensuing clash all seemed to go well for the Spartans at first. Then the allies on the left wing of Peisander’s fleet saw Pharnabazus bearing down on them with the main body of Persian triremes, a move that threatened to envelop them. Abandoning their foolish admiral to his fate, they turned and began to row back toward Cnidus. Their flight exposed Peisander to a flanking attack. Athenian triremes surrounded the Spartan flagship and forced it toward shore, where the ship was rammed and Peisander killed. Conon ordered a chase of the fleeing Spartan allies, snapping up fifty triremes and five hundred prisoners. Most of the crews ignominiously abandoned their vessels, jumping overboard and swimming to shore.