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

by John R. Hale

  The victory at Cnidus really belonged to the Great King, but the Athenians celebrated as if it were their own. As for Conon, he had redeemed a lifetime of near misses in one glorious action. When a solar eclipse darkened the sky a few days after his triumph, it seemed to signify the passing of Spartan thalassocracy. The maritime empire created by Lysander had lasted only eleven years.

  Conon and Pharnabazus immediately set out on a cruise through the eastern Aegean, liberating the Greeks from their despised Spartan governors. Cities and islands as far north as Lesbos joined the revolution. At Samos and Ephesus, citizens erected bronze statues of Conon and his son Timotheus, honoring these saviors as if they were divine heroes. On Conon’s advice, Pharnabazus assured the Greeks that if they left the Spartan alliance of their own free will, he would respect their traditional forms of government and install no Persian garrisons. Such honorable treatment prompted even more defections from Sparta.

  The Persian-Athenian fleet now enjoyed the freedom of the seas. Conon and Pharnabazus used that freedom to take their ships to the Isthmus of Corinth. There in the sanctuary of Poseidon the two victorious admirals found the estranged allies of Sparta sitting in council. Less than a century earlier the Spartans had summoned their allies to the Isthmus to plan the resistance to Xerxes. Now the world was turned upside down. The satrap Pharnabazus urged the Corinthians and Thebans to push forward with their war against the Spartans, and he provided Persian cash to back up his words. He then prepared for the voyage back to Asia, confident that he had caused Sparta enough trouble.

  Conon had other ideas. He asked that he might keep the Great King’s fleet in Greek waters to continue hostilities. No money would be required: loot and contributions from the islands would cover the costs. Conon also suggested that the fleet relocate to Athens. If refortified, the Piraeus would provide a secure naval base. Pharnabazus approved and gave Conon both the fleet and the princely sum of fifty talents to pay for work on Athens’ fortifications. The satrap felt no friendship for Athens—he meant simply to punish Sparta. As Conon had said, “I can think of no action that would hurt the Spartans more. By doing this you will not only have given the Athenians something for which they will be grateful, but will really have made the Spartans suffer. You will make null and void that achievement of theirs which cost them more toil and trouble than anything else.” As Pharnabazus’ flagship rowed away from the Isthmus into the blue of the Aegean, Conon launched the rest of the fleet, now his and his alone, and steered for home.

  Even before Conon’s return, the Athenians had tried to rebuild the Long Walls. But the work might never have been completed had Conon not arrived with Persian money to pay for stone and timber, and for skilled masons and carpenters to complete the work. Conon’s crews—thousands of Athenian citizens who had not seen their city for over a decade—came ashore to help raise those mighty ramparts. With his own money Conon built a temple for Aphrodite in the Piraeus. As goddess of Cnidus, she was dear to his heart, and it was as Aphrodite Euploia (“Aphrodite of the Fair Voyage”) that he and his fellow Athenians now worshipped her.

  One hundred years had passed since the archonship of Themistocles, and work on the new Piraeus foundations laid bare the foundations of his original walls. Themistocles’ descendants had long ago brought the great man’s ashes back from Asia, where he had died in exile. To celebrate the restoration of the Piraeus, the Assembly honored the hero of Salamis with a tomb, an altar, and a pillar on a point of land just outside the Cantharus Harbor. An Athenian poet wrote commemorative verses.

  Fair is the point where your tomb is raised,

  A welcome sight to greet all traders.

  It gazes on them, outward or homeward bound,

  And views the long ships racing past.

  With the raising of this monument to the founder of the navy and the hero of Salamis, the Athenians formally rededicated themselves to the quest for victory at sea.

  Not all Athenians were happy about the resurrection of Athenian naval power. The philosopher Plato told his students that the walls “should continue to slumber in the bosom of the earth.” And in Aristophanes’ new comedy Ecclesiazusae (“The Assembly Women”) a chorus of Athenian matrons noted the difficulty of dealing with a public opinion divided against itself. They observed that the mass of citizens voted for new ships, but the farmers and the rich opposed them. In the real-life Assembly, Conon warned the Athenians to be satisfied with getting back their freedom and their walls. The imperialistic plans advocated by Thrasybulus, as Conon reminded them, came from a man whose very name meant “Rash Adviser.”

  Sent out to the Hellespont with a fleet, Thrasybulus had once again defeated Spartans and won Byzantium and other cities back to friendship with Athens. The time of the older generation, however, was drawing to a close. Aristophanes had written his last play. Conon and Thrasybulus, architects of Athenian reconstruction, died within four years of each other, Conon in the course of a diplomatic mission to the Persians, Thrasybulus while campaigning on the Eurymedon River. Their ashes were brought back to Athens and buried in the public cemetery along the Sacred Way.

  Now the mission to restore Athenian sea power was taken up by a younger generation of Athenian generals. So successfully did they assert Athens’ claims to the Hellespont, the Aegean, and points east that the Spartans appealed for help to their former paymaster, the Great King of Persia. Vexed by endless wars on his western frontier, Artaxerxes handed down a peace and commanded the Greeks to swear obedience to its terms:

  “I, King Artaxerxes, regard the following arrangements as just. The cities in Asia and, among the islands, Clazomenae and Cyprus should belong to me. The other Greek cities, big and small, should be left to govern themselves, except for Lemnos, Imbros, and Scyros, which should belong to Athens, as in the past. And if either of the two parties refuses to accept peace on these terms, I, together with those who accept this peace, will make war on that party both by land and by sea, with ships and with money.”

  No sooner had the Spartans secured the oaths of the Athenians and other Greeks than they began to violate the King’s Peace themselves, attacking small cities and installing pro-Spartan regimes or even Spartan garrisons. Finally a Spartan commander led an army of ten thousand in a night raid against the Piraeus. Even though unsuccessful (dawn had found the slow-moving Spartans still on the march, miles away from the port), this outrage led the Athenians to declare that the Spartans themselves had now violated the King’s Peace. At once they hung the massive gates back on the portals of the Piraeus, which had been open since they swore their oaths at Sardis, and prepared for war.

  Athens was not alone. Twenty-six years had passed since Spartans stripped Athens of its allies and claimed them as their own. Now fear and loathing of Sparta had driven a number of cities to seek alliances with Athens. One year after the abortive attack against the Piraeus, these and many other Greek states united with Athens in a formal confederation. This was in fact nothing less than a Second Maritime League, which resurrected the Delian League of a century before. (Like the so-called Delian League, the Second Maritime League was known in its own day simply as “the Athenians and their allies.”) This time, however, there would be no assessment and no tribute. In every way possible the Athenians purged the new league of all the evils and abuses that had bedeviled its predecessor.

  The Delian League had united its members in a perpetual fight against the menace of Persia. The new alliance just as explicitly named Sparta as the common enemy. The charter stated that it was formed “so that the Spartans shall leave the Greeks free and autonomous, to enjoy peace, holding their own lands in safety.” So appealing was the charter of this Second Maritime League that some seventy cities and peoples eventually became members. The upsurge of goodwill toward Athens seemed a redemption, a wiping away of past guilt. Athens had stumbled only to rise again.

  While the Second Maritime League offered its members protection from the Spartans, the charter also safeguarded them from thei
r own hegemon, Athens. Any Athenian who owned or claimed land in the territory of an allied city now had to give it up. The much-resented practice of sending out Athenian colonists or cleruchs was explicitly forbidden on lands belonging to league members. To finance the enterprises of the league, Athens would collect not tribute but a tax, one-fortieth of the value of cargoes that passed through the Piraeus. Every clause of the charter breathed a new air of liberalism. The Athenians seemed determined to avoid the path of oppression and empire that had ruined them before. They were in truth a changed and chastened people and had learned as much from the misfortunes they inflicted on others as from their own.

  The league charter called for a fleet of 200 triremes. At present the Athenians had 106—a motley collection that included some ships brought to Athens by Conon, others captured in naval engagements with the Spartans and their allies, and still others recently built in the Piraeus. So the Athenians tackled the challenge of rebuilding their navy. They meant not just to match the old navy of Periclean Athens but to surpass it, drawing more Athenian citizens than ever before into the navy’s funding, organization, and operation. The Assembly counted on the new navy to protect the allies, secure the grain route, and raise money but also to provide employment for the mass of the Athenian population. Sea power and democracy would again work hand in hand.

  The waterfront of Zea Harbor was limited, the dreams of the Assembly vast. Shipbuilding was now the responsibility of the Council, who would annually appoint ten trieropoioi or trireme builders. This board was assisted by a treasurer of naval funds and five naval architects who supervised the design and refitting of triremes by the city’s shipwrights. The tasks were so arduous that the members of the Council routinely received gold crowns for successful completion of a year’s work.

  The shipbuilding campaign called for timber. By now the Athenians had stripped Attica of its forests. The philosopher Plato, looking up at the bare hillsides around the city, noted that the trees that had provided mighty roofbeams in the days of his forefathers were long gone. The forests had been replaced by heather, the loggers by beekeepers. And as Plato foresaw, the process was irreversible. Without trees, rain eroded the soil from the hills and carried it away to the sea. The barren rocky hills that remained (and that still remain) were “like the skeleton of a body wasted by disease.” Athenian deforestation had prompted the first awareness that the resources of the earth were not inexhaustible.

  The big new navy would have to be constructed entirely from imported timber. To accommodate more triremes, the shipsheds at Zea were rebuilt with slipways double the length of the original ones. Two triremes could now be fitted end to end between each row of columns. The roofs of the new shipsheds were made with whitened tiles, so that they gleamed in the sunlight like marble.

  SHIPSHEDS AT ZEA HARBOR, Fourth Century B.C.

  The might of the resurrected navy was soon to be tested. Conon’s victory at Cnidus had been only a beginning: the war against the Spartans at sea had still to be won. The adversities of the last quarter century had bred an extraordinary new generation of naval commanders, led by Chabrias, Phocion, Timotheus the son of Conon, and Iphicrates. Relay races were popular events in Athens: instead of a baton, a lighted torch was passed from hand to hand through the team of runners. Never before had the navy enjoyed the services of such a team as was about to take up the torch in the cause of Athens’ new maritime league. Their efforts would determine, once and for all, the outcome of the long struggle between Greece’s two warring alliances.

  Chabrias, the son of an affluent Athenian trierarch and horse breeder, took an interest in the technical side of naval operations. He invented new foul-weather fittings that improved his triremes’ performance on rough seas, including extra steering oars and an extension of thick screens that completely enclosed the rowing frames. To train inexperienced oarsmen, Chabrias built wooden rowing frames on shore where beginners could learn technique and timing before they went on board ship. On one occasion he lashed his triremes together in pairs to create double-hulled catamarans, a ploy that fooled Spartan scouts into believing the Athenian fleet to be only half its actual size.

  One year after founding the Second Maritime League, the Athenians sent Chabrias to protect the incoming flotilla of grain ships from a Spartan fleet that was hovering, piratelike, in the vicinity of Cape Sunium. At the approach of Chabrias and his squadron the Spartans melted away, and the grain arrived safely at the Piraeus. To lure the Spartans to a decisive battle, Chabrias cruised south to the green and hilly island of Naxos, rich in vineyards, almond trees, and fine white marble. The oligarchs of Naxos were still loyal Spartan allies, and Chabrias rightly guessed that an attack on their walls would bring the enemy fleet to him at once. Shortly after he unloaded his siege machinery, the Spartan fleet appeared over the horizon.

  Over and above his orders, Chabrias had a personal score to settle with the Spartan admiral, Pollis. The Athenian philosopher Plato happened to be a close friend of Chabrias. A dozen years earlier, when Plato voyaged to Sicily for a view of Mount Etna, Pollis took him captive and sent him to be sold at the slave market on Aegina. Plato’s friends were able to buy his freedom, but the degrading insult had yet to be avenged.

  The battle at Naxos would be the first actual sea fight between Athenian and Spartan fleets since the battle of the Arginusae Islands, thirty years before. Unlike Chabrias’ force, the Spartan fleet was an amalgam of various contingents, each bearing its own heraldic emblems. Before launching his ships, Chabrias ordered his trierarchs to remove the golden images of Athena that identified all Athenian warships in order to disguise, if only briefly, their identity. His crews were still untried, and he intended to give them every possible edge.

  The antagonists met at dawn in the wide channel between Naxos and the neighboring island of Paros. The Spartan admiral Pollis scythed through the Athenian left wing, killing the commander Cedon in the process. Chabrias had his hands full with the ships attacking his center and right, so he ordered a young trierarch named Phocion to take a contingent and save whatever might remain of the now-leaderless Athenian left.

  As the two original lines disintegrated into a mass of dueling ships, the enemy lookouts and steersmen began to hesitate in ordering their ramming strikes. Without the familiar golden figureheads of Athena to guide them, they could not quickly distinguish Athenian ships from their own allies. The removal of the ensigns bought precious moments for the Athenians as the Spartans held off. Though the Spartans rammed and destroyed eighteen Athenian triremes, the Athenian tally was twenty-four, more than a third of the Spartan fleet.

  Young Phocion’s dash to the left wing turned the battle. With defeat looming, Pollis signaled his ships to break off the engagement and save themselves. Chabrias could easily have taken prizes during the rout. Instead he ordered a rescue mission on the watery battlefield, now littered with wrecks, to save Athenian survivors who were clinging to timbers or swimming for shore. Even after three decades, the Arginusae Islands cast a long shadow.

  So Pollis and the Spartan navy survived, though with diminished force and prestige. Athens had no funds to follow up the victory at Naxos. In this hour of need Chabrias turned again to Phocion. He put the twenty-six-year-old hero in command of twenty triremes and assigned him the formidable task of collecting contributions from Athenian allies in the Aegean. Phocion, clear-sighted and blunt-spoken, told his general that twenty was the wrong number: too many for a friendly visit, too few for a fight. Chabrias gave in and let him go in a single trireme.

  Phocion made such a good impression on his cruise that the league members not only provided money but assembled a fleet to carry it to Athens. Thus began a remarkable career. The grateful Athenians would in years to come elect Phocion general a record-breaking forty-five times, more often even than they had elected Pericles.

  Chabrias won his great victory on the sixteenth of Boedromion, the second day of the Eleusinian Mysteries. As the navy fought at Naxos, the Athenians
at home were answering the herald’s cry of “Seaward, Initiates!” and wading into the sea to purify themselves. For the rest of his life Chabrias provided a celebratory bumper of wine to every Athenian household on that date. With the recurring commemorations of Naxos and Salamis, the latter falling on the nineteenth of Boedromion, the victory celebrations for the Athenian navy became intertwined with the city’s annual rites of mystical rebirth.

  The Aegean was secure, but Sparta still ruled the western seas. The following spring the Assembly sent sixty triremes around the Peloponnese. The torch of command now passed to Timotheus. His expedition was intended to forestall Spartan attacks on league members and win over new allies. Timotheus had spent his youth in Cyprus, sharing the exile of his father, Conon. Growing up far from Athens, he tended throughout his life to be more at ease with foreigners than with Athenians. His fellow citizens saw in Timotheus a small and unprepossessing fellow who could not exhibit the strong physique expected of a war hero. But his lack of brawn was offset by an excess of intelligence, energy, and honor.

  Timotheus’ unmatched record of bringing twenty-four cities over to the Athenian alliance with apparently little trouble made him the good-humored target of the world’s first known political cartoon. The anonymous artist depicted Timotheus as a fisherman dozing beside his lobster pot, as city after city crawled up to the trap and fell in. Above the scene floated the goddess Tyche (“Fortune”). She was directing the procession of lobsters while Timotheus enjoyed his nap.

  The western campaign was Timotheus’ first independent naval command. He quickly succeeded in bringing Zacynthus, Cephallenia, Corcyra, and even some mainland cities back to the Athenian alliance. This string of diplomatic victories posed a starker threat to Sparta than any number of successful raids. When Timotheus learned that the Spartan fleet had landed on the island of Leucas, he bivouacked on the mainland opposite at an isolated place called Alyzia. This curving beach near a sanctuary of Heracles occupied a place in his family lore. Thirty-eight years earlier, at the time of the Sicilian expedition, Timotheus’ father, Conon, had been cruising the western seaways to protect Athenian allies from attack by the Peloponnesians. At Alyzia Conon bade farewell to Demosthenes and Eurymedon as those two ill-fated generals voyaged west to their meeting with destiny at Syracuse.