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

by John R. Hale

  Three years later Demosthenes was back on the bema. This time he ignored due order and usurped first place among the speakers. His urgency was brought on by new threats to the Athenian ships and even the coast of Attica, all emanating from a single source: Philip. The Macedonian king was responsible for kidnapping Athenian citizens on the islands of Lemnos and Imbros, launching piratical raids on Athenian shipping, and attacking Piraeus-bound freighters off the southern cape of Euboea. One of his roving squadrons had actually landed on the beach at Marathon and brazenly towed off one of Athens’ sacred ships. Demosthenes had found the cause he had been seeking.

  Demosthenes’ speech against Philip was the first in a bitter and angry series that came to be known as Philippics. The King of Macedon was only thirty-one, two years younger than the orator himself. Philip’s boyhood had been as difficult and uncertain as Demosthenes’ own. His father, King Amyntas, was so unsure of his power that he adopted the Athenian general Iphicrates as a son, hoping that this strong man would protect young Philip, his older brother, and the rest of the royal family. As a youth Philip had been handed over as a hostage to the Thebans, who had recently beaten the Spartan phalanx at the battle of Leuctra. Like Demosthenes, Philip turned his predicaments to his own advantage. He studied phalanx warfare carefully in Thebes, and when he returned to his mountain homeland, he first usurped the throne and then created a formidable Macedonian phalanx armed with eighteen-foot pikes. Constant drill transformed brawling warriors into professional soldiers who ignored distance and time of year in service to their master, Philip.

  No Macedonian was physically tougher than the king himself. Philip put himself at risk in all his battles, suffering a broken shoulder, maimed limbs, and the loss of an eye in the process. Warlike and robust, he would nevertheless use diplomacy, intrigue, and deception whenever they served his purpose. And his purpose was to rule a Macedonian empire that would stretch from the Danube River southward into the heart of Greece. The only important obstacle to his ambitions was the Athenian navy.

  Macedon’s rise had been fueled in part by Athens itself, for the navy required constant supplies of timber. Plato had already described the deforestation of Attica and its devastating effects on the Athenian countryside. With the trees cleared from the hillsides, the soil had eroded to the sea. Athens’ loss had been Macedon’s gain. Over many years Athenian silver had been enriching the northern kingdom through purchases of oak, fir, and pine for ships and oars. Philip could now cut off this resource at will. Up to now Athenians had paid little heed to Macedon’s growing power or to the remarkable abilities of Philip. In his first Philippic, Demosthenes set out to open their eyes.

  The Macedonian king had grown powerful, he told the Assembly, not because he was strong but because they were negligent and weak. State festivals and religious processions at Athens were always lavishly funded and well rehearsed, while everything to do with war was disorganized and uncertain. To check Philip’s advance, Demosthenes called on the people to man and launch two emergency fleets.

  One fleet would be a small amphibious force of troop and horse carriers convoyed by ten fast triremes. It would operate year-round in northern waters: “If we are unwilling to fight Philip there, we may be forced to fight him here.” Citizens would serve in relays during this running war. In summer Demosthenes’ proposed northern fleet would avoid pitched battles with the Macedonian phalanx, waging guerrilla warfare instead. In winter they would station themselves on three islands. From Skiathos they would watch the approaches to Attica, from Lemnos the route to the Hellespont, and from Thasos the mining regions of the north. Demosthenes estimated the annual cost of maintaining this force at ninety talents—scant wages, which the men would be eager to increase by plundering enemy territory and ships. “If this proves not to be the case,” he said, “then I am ready to voyage with the fleet as a volunteer and to suffer the worst myself.”

  His second fleet would consist of fifty triremes, permanently equipped and on call at the Piraeus: “We must get it into our heads that if necessary we citizens will go on board and man them ourselves.” The triremes would be augmented with carriers for horses and troops, so that a land army could be rapidly transported to strategic points such as Thermopylae. “My proposal is bold, but it will soon be tested in action, and you will be its judges.” It was a touching article of faith with Demosthenes throughout his life that evils would melt away as soon as one took action against them.

  It was not to be. Only a few years had passed since Athens’ renascent imperialism had been punished in the war with Byzantium, Chios, Cos, and Rhodes. Isocrates, a fervent advocate of peace, denounced Demosthenes as a warmonger and alarmist. Many influential citizens felt a natural aversion to overseas campaigns and to policing the entire Aegean with little or no allied support. Others were actually in Philip’s pay and ready to pour oil on any waters that Demosthenes might trouble with his speeches. A handsome actor named Aeschines was the leader of these apologists for Philip. Other Athenians were just as Demosthenes described them: self-absorbed. To them, the remedy that Demosthenes proposed looked worse than the illness he sought to cure.

  So Athens took no effective action against the Macedonian king. Demosthenes once compared the Athenians to unskilled boxers, always one move behind Philip. Foolishly they grasped the spot where his last punch had fallen instead of looking to prevent the next. For the next ten years Athens kept up its flailing attempts to parry both Philip’s military advances and his diplomatic maneuvers. The Assembly was so bewildered by Philip that it did not take strong action even when his plot to burn the Navy Yard was exposed. The man sent to start the fire had actually reached the Piraeus when he was apprehended, yet still Demosthenes’ speeches could not unite the city in resistance to the threat.

  With nine other Athenian ambassadors Demosthenes traveled north to Philip’s court and at last came face-to-face with his larger-than-life antagonist. Both men were at this time in their late thirties, and both were famous for their eloquence. But in all other respects the sociable, hard-drinking monarch, wreathed in battle scars and unexpected charm, appeared the complete antithesis of the scrawny, nervous Athenian. As the youngest envoy, Demosthenes spoke last. It was the only occasion on record when he fumbled over his speech. On Philip’s home ground, surrounded by Philip’s vibrant aura, he was unmanned.

  From the beginning Demosthenes had said that the most serious threats to Athens’ survival would come not from Philip but from the Athenians themselves. At the age of ninety Isocrates wrote an open letter to Philip, urging him to unite the cities of Greece under his leadership. After that the king should muster the forces of the Athenians and the other Greeks for a great war in the east. There he might reasonably hope to conquer the entire Persian Empire and liberate the Greeks of Ionia. It was the same dream of a panhellenic campaign that Isocrates had long ago proposed for the Athenian navy and the Spartan army. Unlike his previous addressees, however, Philip seems actually to have read the letter and taken the advice seriously.

  Soon Philip’s army was marching eastward through Thrace. It first brought the remainder of the northern Aegean seaboard under Macedonian control and then threatened Athenian settlements on the Gallipoli peninsula beside the Hellespont. Philip had already made alliances with the cities of Perinthus and Byzantium. It seemed inevitable that he would go on to seize control of the grain route.

  As he had done so often over the previous decade, Demosthenes addressed the Assembly. With Philip about to grasp the entire seaway from the Hellespont to the Bosporus, Demosthenes was filled with the spirit and almost the very words of Themistocles: “Do not court disaster by fixing on the naïve strategy of your former war against the Spartans. Instead, order your policies and your armament so that your line of defense may lie as far as possible from Athens. Give Philip no opportunity to move forward from his base, and never let him close in on you.” Athens was still strong; it must attack Philip while its strength was undiminished: “While the ship i
s still safe and sound—that is when the mariner and steersman and the rest must show their zealous care for it, so that it may not be overturned by sabotage or by accident. Once the sea overwhelms the ship, care comes too late.” In this third Philippic Demosthenes proposed that the Assembly send out ambassadors to seek allies against Philip. But with or without allies, Athens should prepare to fight.

  THE RISE OF MACEDON UNDER PHILIP II, 359 -336 B.C.

  For years Demosthenes had been asking and urging this course of resistance in his Philippics and Olynthiacs and other harangues, with no result. But now his persistence and Philip’s threat to the grain route had finally brought popular opinion in Athens to the tipping point. Even so he must have been astounded when the vote was taken, and the count of raised hands showed that his proposal had passed. The Assembly would dispatch envoys throughout Greece and the Aegean, even to the Persians. Athens was roused at last.

  To Demosthenes himself fell the most difficult assignment: Byzantium. The city was already allied to Philip, whose army was close while Athens was distant. The Assembly sent Demosthenes in a trireme to persuade the Byzantines to abandon the Macedonian alliance and join Athens. He had to overcome deep resentment over the tolls on shipping that the Athenians had for years exacted on all commerce passing through the Bosporus. But in the end, Demosthenes registered one of the most important victories of his career when the Byzantines swore allegiance to the Athenians.

  Philip regarded this alliance as a hostile act. He demanded that the Byzantines and Perinthians support him in a war against the Athenians. They refused. Loading siege equipment on board his ships, Philip moved through the straits to bring these allies to heel. Even with siege towers more than one hundred feet tall, however, he could not capture Perinthus. The rows of houses were built up a theaterlike slope so that each row formed its own defensive wall. When he saw Byzantine vessels slipping into Perinthus Harbor to aid the resistance, Philip abruptly took his army east and assaulted Byzantium itself. Messengers set out at once to appeal for help from the Athenians.

  Summer was ending; the annual fleet of some two hundred grain freighters from the Black Sea was assembling in a bay on the Asiatic side of the Bosporus. Riding at anchor, they awaited their convoy, a fleet of forty Athenian triremes under the general Chares. Such a prize was too tempting for Philip to ignore. When his fleet failed to capture the freighters, Philip sent part of his army to attack them from the landward side. He succeeded, and the sale of the cargoes brought in seven hundred talents.

  Meanwhile the news of his sieges spread throughout the Aegean. In Athens Demosthenes was the first to call for war and the launching of a fleet. The ardor of the Assembly was now equal to his own. It voted that the inscribed marble slab that bore the terms of the peace treaty with Macedon be taken down and destroyed. More important, it voted the immediate preparation of a fleet of triremes and appointed the veteran general Phocion, hero of the battle of Naxos, to command it. As Phocion led the Athenian force to the scene of action, he found that they were not alone. Athenian diplomacy and Macedonian aggression had raised fears among the islanders. Ships from Chios, Rhodes, and Cos joined the fleet that now swept up the Hellespont to save Byzantium. The former antagonists from the War with the Allies were reunited.

  Their arrival staggered Philip. He had supposed that once he seized the grain fleet, the Athenians would come to terms. All the world knew that they had surrendered to Lysander and the Peloponnesians once the supply was cut off, and some years later Athens had accepted the King’s Peace when Artaxerxes II threatened to hold up the grain. Yet here they were in force, with allies beside them as in the old days.

  Philip had no intention of risking a battle with this armada from Athens. Like all master tacticians, he believed in attacking weak points, not strengths. He decided to give up the siege of Byzantium and return home. Unfortunately for him the oncoming Athenian fleet was blocking his route back to Macedon. He could not risk a naval battle with Phocion. Casting about for a way to elude the enemy, Philip repeated Phormio’s ruse of a mock summons. He sent a letter in his own handwriting to one of his generals, a Macedonian named Antipater, naming a rendezvous point to which he was moving his forces. Deliberately Philip arranged for both messenger and letter to fall into Athenian hands. The upright and unsuspecting Phocion never considered the possibility of a trick. While the Athenians and allies dashed off in the wrong direction, Philip launched his ships and escaped.

  Though Philip eluded them, the Athenians were elated at the success of their naval expedition and gave full credit to Demosthenes. For ten years he had been telling the Athenians that the best way to check their enemy was through decisive action. The events at Byzantium proved his wisdom. The Athenians had put their navy to sea, and the Macedonian threat had disappeared before it like snow before the summer sun. Byzantium was saved. For the first time in Demosthenes’ life, he found himself popular.

  There was no resting on laurels, however. He immediately used his credit with the Assembly to ram through the long-needed reform of the navy boards and other financial arrangements for building and equipping the ships. Demosthenes’ measures relieved Athenians with middling incomes of a monetary burden that they had been unable to sustain and placed a proportionately heavier share on the rich. The Assembly gave him everything, in spite of the open protests and undercover bribes of the wealthy citizens. Political enemies took him to court over his reorganization of the symmoriai, but he was triumphantly acquitted of wrongdoing by the jury. His reforms were divisive, but the abuses involving trierarchs that had once endangered the very existence of Athenian sea power now became a thing of the past.

  The struggle had been hard, and Demosthenes did not hesitate to point out the difficulties faced by a democratic leader compared to a despot like Philip: “First, he had absolute rule over his followers, which is the greatest single advantage in war. Second, his followers were armed for war all the time. Third, he was well equipped with money, and did whatever he decided, not publishing his decisions in decrees, not being constantly brought to court by malicious accusers, not defending himself against charges of illegality, not accountable to anyone, but simply ruler, leader, master of all. When I took my position against him (for it is fair to examine this), of what was I master? Of nothing. For even the opportunity to speak on policy, the only privilege I had—and a shared one, at that—you extended equally to Philip’s hirelings and to me.”

  Demosthenes, the man whose advice the Assembly had rejected for so many years, was now first citizen in Athens, more clearly in control of policy than any leader since Pericles. The lonely young man on the beach had climbed to a pitch of fame and influence that seemed to rival Philip’s. With his immortal speeches he had inspired his fellow citizens to believe once more in the destiny of Athens and the vital importance of naval power. For the moment, with Philip in retreat from Byzantium and Athens surrounded by admiring allies, Demosthenes seemed poised to preside over the Athenian ship of state in a new age of peace and prestige. The navy’s experienced steersmen could have warned him: smooth and smiling seas sometimes conceal the deadliest reefs.

  CHAPTER 20

  In the Shadow of Macedon [339 -324 B.C.]

  Reversals of fortune are frequent, for sovereign rule never remains in the same hands for long.

  —Isocrates

  THE JOY OF THE ATHENIANS AFTER PHOCION’S EXPEDITION to Byzantium lasted less than a year. Philip had temporarily abandoned his designs on the grain route, but the war was not over yet. He accepted the fact that his Macedonian fleet was no match for the Athenian navy. Further operations against the Greeks would be carried out on land. Thanks to Demosthenes the navy was once again a formidable force, but there had been no Demosthenes to work a similar transformation on the Athenian army. Worst of all was the dearth of talented commanders. The best Athenian tacticians and strategists now served as mercenaries abroad.

  Philip’s opportunity came when a minuscule squabble erupted about the plowing
of sacred fields near Delphi. Invited to help protect the Delphic Oracle, Philip marched south with his army through the pass at Thermopylae. The Sacred War, however, was only a pretext. Now that Philip had entered Greece, he intended to stay. His well-drilled army would subdue or eliminate his opponents on their own ground. Only Thebes stood between the Macedonians and the frontiers of Attica, and Thebes was by long tradition hostile to Athens. Demosthenes carried out a mission even more difficult than his embassy to Byzantium when he persuaded the Thebans to ally themselves with Athens in resistance to Philip.

  Preparations for a decisive land battle engaged both sides for months. Late in summer the two armies met on a plain near the town of Chaeronea. Philip’s forces destroyed the power of Thebes and inflicted heavy losses on the Athenian hoplite phalanx as well. His young son Alexander took part in the historic victory as commander of the Macedonian cavalry. Rumors from the battlefield quickly reached Athens, seemingly on the wind—terrifying reports that Philip was now marching toward the city. Always energetic and decisive when prospects were at their worst, the Athenians immediately prepared to resist a siege. They appointed Demosthenes to secure the grain supply and sent him by ship to seek support in other cities. The older men marched down to the Piraeus to man the harbor fortifications; others strengthened the city’s defenses. To replace the thousands of citizens killed or taken prisoner at Chaeronea, the Assembly voted to enfranchise slaves and metics, as their forefathers had done before the battle of Arginusae.