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

by John R. Hale

  PLATO’S ATLANTIS

  A similar historical disaster may have suggested the name that Plato gave to his island-continent. He had been born at the time when an earthquake in the Euboean Gulf split the little island of Atalante in two; the resulting tsunami picked up an Athenian trireme moored on the shore and threw it far into the town. From “Atalante” it was a short step to a description of a North African tribe called “Atlantes” that was recorded in the history of Herodotus, as well as the Atlas Mountains and Atlantic Ocean (all of which had been given their names long before Plato invented Atlantis). So using details from myth, history, geography, and his own fertile imagination, Plato fashioned an ancient thalassocracy to stand as the forerunner of all later naval powers, and devised for it a tragic fate as a warning to all its successors. Naval power breeds hubris, and the gods punish hubris with destruction.

  More than anything else, however, the story of Atlantis was an allegory of Athens. With wishful thinking, Plato pulled apart the city of his own day, disentangling the realm of Poseidon and triremes from the “true Athens” of Athena, Hephaestus, and traditional virtues. In setting his true Athens in opposition to Atlantis, the philosopher expressed his dream that Athens’ better self might overcome the seductive temptations of maritime wealth and power. Atlantis embodied everything that was wrong with Athens, and its destruction was a warning to the Athenians of Plato’s own time.

  Later Greeks forgot Plato’s moral purpose and plunged into a hunt for Atlantis on maps or in ancient history. Could Atlantis really have been Troy? Or perhaps the island of Scheria, home of the seafaring Phaeacians in Homer’s Odyssey? Eventually the myth of Atlantis floated free of Plato altogether and became world famous. The location of Atlantis became a topic of intense interest and debate for enthusiasts who had never read a word of the Timaeus or Critias. The lost continent was identified with the volcanic island of Thera, with Minoan Crete, with Helgoland in the North Sea, even with Bimini in the Bahamas. Plato’s pupil Aristotle, however, seems to have classified Atlantis, not among places of real history or geography, but among poetic creations. Aristotle’s pronouncement on such works of the imagination may have applied specifically to Atlantis: “He who created it, destroyed it.”

  But Aristotle was mistaken. Atlantis was real and clearly visible from the Acropolis. To visit it, one had only to follow the line of the Long Walls down to the sea and enter the Piraeus, noisy hub of shipping and maritime enterprise. After climbing around the shoulder of Munychia Hill and descending through Hippodamus’ grid of streets, one reached the edge of Zea Harbor and the double shipsheds, the home of the Athenian navy. Centuries later the remains of the Navy Yard would glimmer through the water of the harbor, submerged by the rising sea and subsidence of the land. Here lay the heart of Plato’s dark vision. This was Atlantis.

  CHAPTER 19

  The Voice of the Navy [354-339 B.C.]

  When mariners are swept along by rushing winds, in the matter of steering, two points of view, or a whole body of experts, are no match for one man of average ability exercising his independent judgment.

  —Euripides

  WHILE PLATO WAS DOING HIS BEST TO TURN ATHENS AWAY FROM the sea, one obscure citizen embarked on a campaign to resurrect the city’s pride and naval dominance. Demosthenes of Paiania had only one gift that qualified him as a champion of the Athenian navy: a genius for writing and delivering speeches. But his patriotic fervor was strong, and during his lifetime Athens had to contend with one of the most dangerous enemies it would ever know. The threat came from northern Greece, where King Philip of Macedon was rapidly building an empire on land. Inevitably Philip’s conquests began to impinge on Athens’ maritime realm. In speech after speech Demosthenes warned his fellow citizens of their peril. His zeal for naval reform and his opposition to Philip inspired orations of such power that they were hailed as classics even in Demosthenes’ own lifetime—even by his antagonists.

  A tortuous path had led Demosthenes to the speaker’s platform. His boyhood had been lonely. A weakling with a chronic stutter, he made no friends at wrestling practice or hunting parties. His father died when Demosthenes was only seven, and from then on Demosthenes lived at home with his mother and sister. To an outside observer the boy must have appeared starved for companionship. But he had one constant friend, a familiar spirit from the past: Thucydides. The historian had been dead for some three decades, but his stirring voice lived on. Thucydides’ account of the Peloponnesian War fired Demosthenes’ imagination with tales of perilous adventures and epic battles. Unrolling his copy, he was transported back to an age when Athens blazed with glory, its navy seemingly indomitable and its leaders larger than life. Demosthenes read the whole book eight times and knew parts of it by heart.

  Demosthenes’ father had left him an inheritance worth fourteen talents, some of it tied up in a factory that manufactured swords. He therefore expected to be financially independent when he turned eighteen, an event that took place five years after Athens made its final peace with Sparta. But it proved a painful coming of age. The three guardians appointed in his father’s will had stolen or squandered most of his inheritance. Of the fourteen talents in money and property left to Demosthenes, only a little over one talent remained. To rub salt in the wound, the embezzlers had concealed their depletion of the estate by enrolling young Demosthenes in the highest bracket for taxes and liturgies. At the age of seventeen he was already listed among the trierarchs and had made partial payment for the outfitting of a trireme. Two of the guardians were his own cousins, but Demosthenes filed a lawsuit against them, family or no.

  Two years passed before the case came to trial, and during that time Demosthenes prepared tirelessly for his day in court. Athenian juries expected citizens to speak for themselves, even if professional speechwriters had been hired to compose the speeches. Demosthenes, intensely self-critical, knew that he made a poor impression. He could do nothing about his wretched physique or habitual scowl, but he learned by listening to actors and orators that he could at least train and strengthen his voice. He began to make solitary excursions to a deserted beach and strained to make himself heard through the whistling wind and crashing waves. To overcome his speech impediment, Demosthenes would put a pebble in his mouth and work his tongue around the stone while still trying to pronounce words clearly. Away from the beach, he declaimed speeches while walking or running up steep hillsides. Skinny legs working, narrow chest heaving, his delivery eventually became smooth even as he almost gasped for breath. Demosthenes had inherited a true Athenian’s competitive nature, but he turned it not toward wrestling or running but toward public speaking.

  Demosthenes decided to write his own speeches for the trial. The best speechwriters commanded fees higher than he could afford to pay. In any case, over the years he had mastered the principles of rhetoric from a superlative teacher. His absorption with Thucydides had immersed him in a great school of oratory: Pericles delivering a funeral oration; Phormio rallying his mutinous men; Alcibiades urging the Athenians onward to Sicily; Nicias exhorting the doomed men at Syracuse before the last battle. Demosthenes found in Thucydides a style that was concentrated, analytical, lively, and passionate—a balance of clear ideas and vividly reported facts.

  It must have been a shock to the guardians—rich men with established reputations and influence—when the jury voted in favor of their untried and unknown accuser, just twenty years old. It was Demosthenes’ first victory, but like many of his later ones, it proved hollow. His guardians dodged the court’s ruling with a barrage of ploys both legal and illegal. Demosthenes was left with nothing.

  And yet, not quite nothing. He had acquired in his legal battle a skill that could provide a steady income. As a speechwriter for hire, he began to make his way in the world. Athens being Athens, this new endeavor inevitably brought him into intimate and constant contact with the maritime world. Trierarchs were continually embroiled in legal battles over the performance of their duties and the equ
ipping of their triremes. Seafaring merchants and shipowners had special courts in the Piraeus to resolve disputes concerning freighters, investments, and loans on ships and cargoes. Demosthenes familiarized himself with a daunting mass of laws, decrees, and historical precedents, as well as such arcana as the cost of a set of oars and the change in interest rates after the rising of the star Arcturus. He worked far into the night, a young man whose little household consumed more lamp oil than wine.

  As Demosthenes’ income grew, so did his ambitions. He dreamed of using his gifts of argument and persuasion on behalf of his city. In those days Timotheus was capturing outposts in the Aegean and along the Hellespont: adventurism and imperialism were on the upsurge in Athens. Once Demosthenes reached the age of thirty, he could address these momentous issues in speeches before the Assembly. But why would anyone listen to him? The famous leaders of the past had first proved themselves as men of action before they achieved leadership in the Assembly.

  At the age of twenty-four, already a rich and self-made man, Demosthenes put his name forward for a trierarchy. This would be no paper appointment, however, such as the joint trierarchy forced on him when he was seventeen. Now he intended to equip the trireme himself and command it at sea. An old friend of Demosthenes’ father had been elected as general, a man named Cephisodotus. He received orders from the Assembly to lead a squadron of ten triremes on a mission that promised to be both difficult and dangerous, and Demosthenes volunteered to serve under him.

  Trierarchs were thrown into daily contact with every element of Athenian society: generals, treasurers, and bankers; the Assembly, the Council, the boards of finance and inspection; merchants, porters, scribes; and then the crew, from the highly skilled steersman who directed the trireme’s course to the lowly piper who kept the rowers in time. The city provided the trierarch with an empty hull and with oars and gear in a condition that depended on the honesty of the previous trierarch. The trierarch also received a modicum of money to hire a crew. The rest was up to him.

  Demosthenes threw himself into the task with naïve fervor. While other trierarchs farmed out the burdensome duty to contractors, Demosthenes went himself to the shadowy shed where “his” trireme rested and undertook to bring the ship into first-rate condition. By offering bonuses, he attracted the best rowers in the Piraeus to his crew. His zeal was contagious, and before any of the other nine ships were on the water, Demosthenes’ trireme had been fitted with its girding cables, dragged down the slipway, and launched on the harbor. His crew rowed around to the jetty in the Cantharus harbor, where the inspectors waited to assess the presence and working condition of all sails, rigging, oars, and anchors.

  All was in order. Demosthenes eagerly applied for the golden crown or wreath that was awarded to the first ship to reach the jetty. Then came the exhilarating experience of taking the fully manned trireme into open water for its sea trials. As was the custom at the Piraeus, a crowd of interested citizens lined the shore to criticize the performance. The steersman and crew executed the maneuvers, and the young trierarch—the least experienced man on board—stood proudly on the afterdeck. So impressive was the crew’s performance that Cephisodotus chose Demosthenes’ trireme for his flagship. At the launching Demosthenes had the honor of standing beside the general in the sacrifices and libations.

  Their destination was the historic seaway that ran through the Hellespont, the Sea of Marmara, and the Bosporus to the Black Sea. Thanks to the recent campaigns of Timotheus, Athens had secured the mouth of the Hellespont and was now attempting to regain control of the rest of the route by concluding treaties with a Thracian king. Demosthenes estimated that the harbor duties collected along the waterway amounted to two hundred talents per year. But he also had a family interest in the route to the Black Sea: his grandfather on his mother’s side had commanded an Athenian garrison in the Crimea during the waning days of the Peloponnesian War.

  Demosthenes had undertaken the trierarchy in search of experience. He was not disappointed. During his time at sea he saw the mighty Hellespont with its river of shipping, legendary coasts and islands, great walled towns, amphibious assaults, ambushes at dawn (in fact, in the middle of breakfast), mercenary armies, and piratical bands. The expedition also laid bare to the young idealist the true state of Athens’ naval forces: ill prepared, overconfident, and easily outmaneuvered in both combat and diplomacy.

  After many adventures Cephisodotus set out for Athens with a covenant signed by the Thracian king. This document proved so unsatisfactory to the Assembly that the people fined the general five talents. Demosthenes himself was taken to court by some of his envious fellow trierarchs, who challenged his right to the golden crown. Thus the expedition ended in legal charges and countercharges, the leaders suffering more harm from their fellow citizens at home than they had from their enemies overseas.

  Demosthenes was realistic enough to absorb this dose of bitter medicine, but he did not abandon the hope that the Athenians could mend their ways. He believed that he knew how to make his city great again, and, like Themistocles before him, he meant to make himself great in the process. Six years had to pass before he would be old enough to present his ideas to the Assembly. He continued to write speeches and to volunteer for trierarchic service, most notably under Timotheus for an expedition to Euboea. Shortly after this exhilarating campaign Demosthenes put his name forward to address an Assembly meeting on a day when naval matters were up for debate.

  In the six years since his first overseas campaign, Demosthenes had seen conditions deteriorate. Athens had been defeated at sea by rebellious allies. Triremes sat in the shipsheds at the Piraeus, unfit for service. A treasurer of the shipbuilding fund had absconded with public money that should have paid for new triremes. And when King Philip of Macedon attacked coastal cities in the northern Aegean, the Athenian fleet always arrived too late to intervene.

  In one of Aesop’s fables, passengers from a sinking ship suddenly find themselves in the sea. An Athenian among the survivors calls on the gods for help. A man swimming for shore hears the prayer. He turns to the Athenian and says, “Pray by all means! But also move your arms!” Demosthenes intended to be just such a wise counselor to Athenians who seemed to have forgotten that the gods help those who help themselves.

  The morning came when Demosthenes walked up to the Pnyx to make his maiden speech to the Assembly. In due course the herald called upon Demosthenes of Paiania, from the tribe of Pandion, to come forward. As Demosthenes mounted the bema, his head was full of a speech into which he had poured his all. It called for nothing less than a complete reorganization of the Athenian navy. Plans for reform and new beginnings were afloat everywhere that year. Isocrates had just written “On the Peace,” Xenophon had cast his advice into the essay “Revenues,” and Plato was busy at the Academy envisioning lost continents and ideal commonwealths. None of those older Athenians, however, had been bold enough to face the Assembly, the body that Plato had once called “the great beast.” Standing for the first time in the place where Themistocles and Cimon and Pericles had made history, Demosthenes launched into the opening of his speech: “Those who praise your forefathers, O men of Athens, seem to me . . .”

  As he would do throughout his career, Demosthenes plunged quickly into his main theme: how could Athens best prepare for war? In his view the most obvious threat was Persia. Yet he was urging the city not to embark on a new war but rather to prevent future wars by strengthening the navy: “The first requirements for every war must be, in my view, ships and money and strong positions, and I find that the Great King is more fully supplied with these than we are.” In order to surpass the Persians, Demosthenes advocated an elaborate plan for overhauling and restructuring Periander’s symmoriai, the groups of propertied citizens who contributed naval funds. (The speech later became known as “On the Symmories” or “On the Navy-Boards.”) He proposed raising the number of citizens who directly financed the naval effort from Periander’s twelve hundred to two thous
and, all of them potential trierarchs. It would be a people’s navy with a vengeance.

  An enlarged fleet of three hundred triremes would be divided into twenty squadrons of fifteen triremes, each assigned to one of Demosthenes’ new navy boards. He went on to talk about equipment and crews and proposed that specific areas of the Navy Yard be assigned to the tribal divisions so that each citizen would know exactly where to muster in case of an emergency. To round out his speech, Demosthenes again invoked the Persians: “The Great King knows that with two hundred triremes our ancestors destroyed a thousand of his ships. Now he will hear that we have three hundred ships of our own ready to launch. Even if he were mad, he would not lightly provoke the hostility of Athens.” Finally he appealed to the Athenians to prove themselves worthy of their fathers not through speeches but through actions.

  There was no outburst of approval, no spontaneous vote to adopt the plan over which he had labored. As Demosthenes returned to his place, the machinery of the Assembly rolled on, and the attention of the people passed to other matters. The speech had perhaps been too Thucydidean in its analysis of data and statistics, too Periclean in its dispassionate recommendation that Athens keep quiet but take care of its fleet. And surely he could have found a more compelling incentive than the remote menace of King Artaxerxes III. For the moment, as he must have been gloomily aware, he had failed.