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

by John R. Hale

  In these new ships, only half the rowers needed any experience or skill. While one rower maneuvered the oar handle, his partner simply provided brute force to drive the oar through the water. The oars were worked through an enclosed oar box instead of the trireme’s open and vulnerable rowing frame. The crews grew in size: a quinquereme employed 300 rowers compared to the trireme’s 170. The building of these superships bore witness to Athens’ determination to retain the rule of the sea. Thanks to Lycurgus, Athens eventually boasted a navy of 360 triremes, 50 quadriremes, and 2 quinqueremes, plus troop carriers, horse carriers, and triakontors.

  All these activities brought renewed life to the Piraeus. In the years after Lycurgus instituted his new financial regime, the naval base once again provided steady employment for thousands of citizens who found work as administrators, inspectors, guards, scribes, craftsmen, and crew members. The resident aliens who had established themselves at the Piraeus as merchants or manufacturers also prospered. Some gave generous contributions every year to support the finances of their adopted city. Others beautified the Piraeus with temples of their own gods.

  To house the growing fleet of warships, Lycurgus and his successors at the public treasury provided funds for the building of yet more shipsheds. At the same time they repaired the Long Walls and the other fortifications. The greatest single achievement of the Lycurgan program, however, was the completion of a gargantuan building to house the sails and rigging from the warships. Later known as “Philo’s Arsenal,” its proper name was the Skeuotheke (“Storehouse for the Hanging Gear”). Never had canvas and cordage received such a palatial home. Like the Parthenon, Philo’s Arsenal was built in the Doric style, but it surpassed in size any temple in Greece. Seventeen years in the building, the Arsenal extended from the gate at the west corner of Hippodamus’ Agora to the shipsheds of Zea Harbor. Philo himself, who had also designed the new hall of initiation for the Eleusinian Mysteries, felt so proud of his naval arsenal that he wrote a book about it. No such sign of respect or public interest had been accorded the more prestigious Parthenon on the Acropolis.

  The Arsenal was plain; the walls of soft yellowish Piraeus limestone were ornamented only by gray marble frames for the doors and windows. The corners were given a touch of additional grandeur and strength by ashlar blocks that projected beyond the surface of the walls. Down each long side ran a row of thirty-four small windows, set high up under the eaves of the low-pitched roof. The roof itself was covered with tens of thousands of Corinthian tiles.

  On entering through double doors sheathed in gleaming bronze, one passed immediately from the glare and uproar of Hippodamus’ Agora to a vast quiet space, cool and dimly lit. Thirty feet overhead the wooden rafters almost vanished in the shadows. To the left and right were bays, like stalls in a barn, enclosed by wooden railings and filled with equipment. Within the bays were wooden shelves, chests, and cabinets to hold the sails and rigging for 134 warships. Despite its immense size, Philo’s Arsenal could meet less than half of the navy’s storage requirements. The cabinets had open-work sides, so stored items could dry quickly if brought in wet. Space was also found for various odds and ends—anchors, chains, and the thin oval-shaped plaques of painted marble that served as eyes for the ships. Except at noon when the sun stood overhead, the windows high up in the walls admitted shafts of light, along with ventilation to prevent rot or mildew.

  Finally, stretching from end to end was the longest covered walk in the Greek world, a spacious aisle twenty feet wide and four hundred feet long. Through this central aisle Athenian citizens could stroll as on a promenade, conversing, gazing, and marveling at the magnificent array of naval gear. Their pride in the Arsenal, like the Arsenal itself, was the mark of a people who valued their past but whose eyes were fixed firmly on the future.

  Among Lycurgus’ other building projects was a new gymnasium at the Lyceum. In the year after Alexander became king, the philosopher Aristotle arrived in Athens and made the Lyceum his headquarters. His school of scientific, political, and ethical studies formed the brightest light in Athens’ constellation of new undertakings. Aristotle was a northern Greek whose father had served as doctor to Philip of Macedon. He first came to Athens at the age of seventeen to study with Plato, in the days when Chabrias and Timotheus also frequented the Academy. Master and pupil did not see eye to eye. Plato nicknamed Aristotle “The Colt” and criticized his sardonic expression, incessant talking, and objectionable haircut. Aristotle eventually left Athens and for several years investigated marine life around a lagoon on Lesbos, laying the groundwork for his unprecedented scientific works of description and classification. In time he was called away from his octopi and barnacles to fill the most prestigious academic post on earth: tutor to the young prince Alexander of Macedon.

  Now that his royal charge had grown up and left the nest, Aristotle was free to return to Athens. Morning and evening he walked through the groves and colonnades of the Lyceum, surrounded by young disciples. Occasionally a shipment of exotic zoological specimens arrived, gifts of Alexander to his old teacher. Unlike Plato’s Academy, the Lyceum gave pride of place to practical and applied knowledge. Thus it happened that in the final years of the Athenian navy, ships and maritime matters (along with most other things under the sun) were subjected to a more searching formal study than ever before.

  One of Aristotle’s followers compiled a book called Problems. Some of the mysterious problems were maritime. “Why do ships seem to be more heavily loaded in harbor than out at sea?” And “Why is it that if anything (for example, an anchor) is thrown into the sea when it is rough, a calm ensues?” And again, “Why is it that sometimes vessels that are journeying over the sea in fine weather are swallowed up and disappear so completely that no wreckage even is washed up?”

  For Aristotle, the prime example of energy overcoming inertia, and of living things imparting motion to inanimate ones, was the image of a crew dragging a ship down to the sea. One of his followers included a number of nautical questions in a book called Mechanics. “Why is it that those rowers who are in the middle of the ship move the ship most? Is it because the oar acts as a lever? The fulcrum then is the tholepin (for it remains in the same place); and the weight is the sea that the oar displaces; and the power that moves the lever is the rower.” This particular observation related particularly to the new quadriremes and quinqueremes, where the oars were double-manned and the rower seated inboard did indeed have more leverage. “Why is it that the rudder, being small and at the extreme end of the ship, has such power that vessels of great burden can be moved by a small steering oar and the strength of one man only gently exerted? Is it because the rudder, too, is a lever and the steersman works it?” And again, “Why is it that the higher the yardarm is raised, the quicker does a vessel travel with the same sail and in the same breeze? Is it because the mast is a lever, and the socket in which it is fixed, the fulcrum, and the weight which it has to move is the boat, and the motive power is the wind in the sail?”

  Aristotle’s favorite student was Theophrastus, his faithful companion from the years of wading and waterside research on Lesbos. In his monumental Enquiry into Plants Theophrastus collected the lore of shipwrights concerning the trees traditionally used in shipbuilding and listed the species most appropriate for the various parts of a trireme. His researches even included the folk wisdom of woodsmen concerning the best seasons of the year for cutting different types of timber, and the direction of slope—north-facing and shady, or south-facing and exposed to the sun—that would produce the best wood. In his treatise Theophrastus reported a miracle. An oar carved from olive wood was left propped up with its handle resting in a pot. The pot contained some damp earth, and after a few days the oar suddenly came back to life and sprouted green leaves.

  Yet another follower of Aristotle, a disciple whose name is now forgotten, wrote about weather and atmospheric phenomena in a work called Meteorology. He noted that rainbows occurred at sea when sunlight struck the
spray kicked up by a trireme’s oars. “The rainbow that is seen when oars are raised out of the sea involves the same relative positions as a rainbow in the sky, but its color is more like that around lamps, being purple rather than red.” In terms of scientific study the Athenian navy was inspiring more focused inquiry than at any other time in its existence.

  During these years Aristotle himself was working on his Politics and Nicomachean Ethics. At the end of the latter work he wrote, “From the collection of constitutions we must examine what sort of thing preserves and what sort of thing destroys cities.” In Aristotle’s view, one of the destructive things was sea power. He identified four species of maritime people—those involved with triremes, like the Athenians; ferrymen, like the islanders of Tenedos; traders, as at Aegina and Chios; and fishermen, like those at Byzantium and Tarentum. Some harm to the city might arise even from seaborne trade, with the influx of foreigners and exotic merchandise that it promoted. The real enemies of a well-ordered state, however, were not mer chantmen but triremes. Aristotle agreed with Plato on very few things, but the danger of thalassocracy was certainly among them.

  Among the eleven stages or revolutions in the life of the Athenian constitution, Aristotle called the seventh “the constitution to which Aristides pointed and which Ephialtes accomplished by overthrowing the Areopagus. In this the city made its greatest mistakes, because of the demagogues and its rule of the sea.” Geography played a role in national character. “At Athens there is a difference between the dwellers in the city itself and those in Piraeus; the latter are more emphatically democratic in outlook.”

  At the end of his Politics Aristotle considered the importance of the sea for a well-ordered state. A city seeking greatness, or simply security, might be compelled to build up a navy. In that case Aristotle concluded that the only safe course was to exclude rowers and other mariners from participation in the city’s political affairs. “The large population associated with a mob of seamen need not swell the citizenship of the state, of which they should form no part. The troops that are carried on board are free men belonging to the hoplite infantry. They are in sovereign authority and have control over the crews. A plentiful supply of rowers is sure to exist wherever the outlying dwellers and agricultural laborers are numerous.”

  Aristotle here passed from a condemnation of maritime empire—no novelty in Athens, even among patriots like Isocrates and Demosthenes—to a more dangerous claim. Naval power was compatible with good government only if the nautical, democratic element could be suppressed. Walking under the trees of the Lyceum, Aristotle planted in the minds of wealthy young Athenians the conviction that a “trireme democracy” was inevitably an evil to itself and others. With or without Aristotle, such treasonous ideas were swiftly gaining ground among the city’s upper classes.

  While Aristotle’s students were collecting the constitutions of existing city-states, the Athenians were preparing an expedition to found a new city of their own—a colony in the Adriatic. In recent years Athens and the rest of Greece had suffered bad harvests and food shortages. The Hellespont and Egypt lay under the thumb of the Macedonians, who might at any time cut off the vital shipments of grain. As war clouds gathered in the east, Athens felt once again the lure of the golden west. This time they aimed not at Sicily but at the great Adriatic Sea, running wide and free from the heel of Italy northward to within sight of the Alps. With this bold and (for Athens) unusual plan to found a colony, the city’s great rejuvenation reached its high-water mark.

  The colony’s purpose was to secure Athens’ grain supply “for all time to come.” Its harbor would offer a safe emporium for Greeks and non-Greeks alike and provide a base for operations against marauding Etruscan pirates. The Athenian colonists would keep the expedition’s fourteen ships to form the nucleus of their own fleet: eight triremes and quadriremes, two horse transports, and four triakontors.

  The Assembly appointed a citizen named Miltiades to lead the mission. The choice of this man symbolized the return of the old heroic days. Seven generations earlier his ancestor Miltiades had led the Athenians to victory at Marathon. An even earlier Miltiades had founded the famous colony among the Thracians on the north side of the Hellespont. Because of the high priority set on the Adriatic mission, the Assembly ordered the Council to go down to the Piraeus and hold their sessions on the jetty itself every day until the fleet departed. Anyone who impeded the expedition was to be fined ten thousand drachmas, payable to the goddess Athena herself.

  One member of the expedition was Lysicrates, trierarch of the Stephanophoria (“Bearer of the Crown”). He had recently made his mark on Athens by erecting one of the loveliest monuments in the city: a victory trophy for a boys’ chorus that he had sponsored at one of the annual festivals. The song that his winning team had performed took as its theme the mythical triumph of the young god Dionysus over a shipload of Etruscan pirates. Lysicrates’ monument stood in the shadow of the Acropolis, and its ring of slender Corinthian columns provided a delicate counterpoint to the massive Doric order of the Parthenon on the high rock above it. Atop the columns ran a circular frieze carved with the figures of the pirates who had kidnapped Dionysus and as a punishment were transformed into dolphins. The grotesque metamorphosis was shown through strange creatures with human legs and dolphin heads, plunging into the sea. With his service in the colonizing mission, Lysicrates would have an opportunity to deal with the contemporary descendants of those legendary Etruscan pirates in a much more practical way.

  The expedition to the Adriatic had only a little time to create an Athenian stronghold overseas. As Miltiades and his fellow emigrants were pursuing their way west, momentous events in the east overshadowed their venture. The Macedonian army, after six years of wars and wanderings in lands almost unknown to the Greeks, had suddenly reappeared in Persia. Alexander was back, convinced now of his own divinity and determined that the Greeks should do his bidding. Athens would need all its newfound strength to resist him.

  CHAPTER 21

  The Last Battle [324-322 B.C.]

  Walls and ships are nothing without men living together inside them.

  —Sophocles

  ALEXANDER LOST NO TIME IN MAKING HIS PRESENCE FELT. At Olympia that summer an emissary from the king made a most unwelcome proclamation to the Greeks who had gathered for games of the 114th Olympiad. It was the will of the king that all Greek cities should take back their exiles, restore them to citizenship, and then give them back their lands. The Exiles Decree was intended to dissipate the hordes of mercenaries adrift in Alexander’s new dominions. But the decree violated the autonomy of the Greeks. Alexander had forgotten by now that they were nominally his allies; viewed from his imperial capitals at Susa and Babylon, they looked like nothing more than distant subjects. To provide a sort of legal basis for his autocratic act, the new Great King also told the Greeks that they could now worship him as a god.

  Demosthenes brought the bad news back to Athens from Olympia. Quite apart from the horde of undesirables—traitors, criminals, and troublemakers—that would be forced on the Athenians, the decree threatened to rob them of Samos. The rich island had been liberated from Persian control by Timotheus more than forty years before (the biggest of all the lobsters that fell into his famous pot) and held tenaciously by Athens ever since. So even at the risk of triggering a war with the divine Alexander, the Athenians ordered to sea that bulwark of democracy, the Paralos. The flagship of the navy reached Samos before the exiles returned. And as the elated Samian oligarchs sailed back to Samos to reclaim their estates under the terms of the decree, an Athenian general took them prisoner as they landed and sent them to Athens. Samos was almost the only remnant of maritime empire left to the Athenians, and they would defy the world and the gods to keep it.

  If Alexander had his way, the Athenian navy would soon be overshadowed by new Macedonian fleets. Ever since his trek back from India, the king’s head had been full of ships. In his early campaigns Alexander had given scant
attention to the sea. Now he launched ships to explore the Caspian Sea and the Arabian Gulf, started an immense new harbor at Babylon, and contemplated a circumnavigation of Africa. Alexander even dreamed of building one thousand new warships, all bigger than triremes, for an expedition against Carthage and the lands of the western Mediterranean. There were, after all, many worlds, and he had not yet completely conquered even one.

  Early the next summer, one year after promulgating the Exiles Decree, Alexander held a conference with his new admiral Nearchus to discuss these naval initiatives. It was to be his last act as king. Already feverish following a heavy bout of drinking, further sickened by the steamy summer heat of Babylon, and perhaps the victim of poison poured into his cup by someone near the throne, Alexander fell mortally ill. He died at the age of thirty-six without naming an heir.

  The news of his death at first provoked incredulity in Athens. Demades exclaimed, “Alexander dead? Impossible! The whole world would smell of his corpse!” Once the report from Babylon was confirmed, the majority of citizens swiftly voted that Athens should lead a war of liberation against Alexander’s successors. The landowners and other rich Athenians opposed the war but were outnumbered. Messengers departed at once to seek the support of other Greek cities. The Assembly’s resolution rang with the same idealistic fervor that had motivated Themistocles in the face of Xerxes’ invasion: “The Athenian people recognize it as their duty to risk their lives and treasure and ships in the cause of the common freedom of Greece.” Cities throughout central Greece and the Peloponnese rallied to the call.