The largest ships of this early period were penteconters, so called because they carried fifty oarsmen. A penteconter with one bank of rowers would measure twenty meters or longer, which would make for a vessel that was heavy, difficult to maneuver or defend, and an unnecessarily large target. So it is not surprising that the same period saw the development of the first two-banked ships—biremes—which carried the same number of oarsmen seated on two levels in a hull little more than half as long. These stronger, more compact ships could support a raised deck for infantry, archers, and spearmen, which gave them a further offensive capability while keeping the rowers protected and out of the way. For ordinary cruising, oarsmen probably rowed from the upper deck, while the lower position was used only in battle. Eighth-century BCE illustrations show ships with rowers on two levels, but the first true biremes are depicted on reliefs from Nineveh showing Luli of Tyre’s flight to Cyprus. These show two banks of rowers; the lower oars protrude through ports cut in the hull (leather sleeves keep out the water), while the upper oars are on the gunwale level. Rather than seating the oarsmen directly on top of each other, the benches are staggered, to keep the ship’s center of gravity low.
A natural extension of the bireme, the trireme evolved over the course of the seventh century BCE and was created by the addition of a third bank of oarsmen. (The word “trireme” comes from the Late Latin, meaning “three-oared.” Both Greek and Roman sailors used the Greek term trieres, meaning “three-fitted.”) The most common warships of this period were triaconters, “thirty-oared,” and penteconters, or fifties; sixth-century BCE illustrations show both single-and double-banked triaconters and penteconters. Triremes, on the other hand, were vessels with a more or less standard number of oarsmen who sat in a fixed configuration: twenty-seven oarsmen per side on the lowest and middle banks (thalamians and zygians, respectively) and thirty-one thranites per side on the upper bank, for a total of 170. As in biremes, the rowers were staggered, the zygians just above and forward of the thalamians, the thranites just above and forward of the zygians. To compensate for their height above the water—about 1.5 meters as opposed to half a meter for the thalamians—the thranite oars rested on an outrigger that gave the rowers greater leverage.
At Athens, the wealthiest citizens served as trierarchs, responsible for fitting out triremes and paying their crew on behalf of the state. While the title means “trireme captain,” if the trierarch lacked naval experience, operational control was left to a professional. In addition to the rowers, triremes carried people to keep time with flutes and drums, lookouts, boatswains, and helmsmen, and a contingent of infantry, archers, and spearmen. The number of the latter differed depending on the manpower available and the preferred tactics. At the battle of Salamis in 480 BCE, Athenian ships carried about ten marines, while the Persians carried thirty. The low number of Athenian marines may reflect the enormous drain on manpower required to provide thirty-four thousand oarsmen for the fleet, many of them recruited from their allies. The Athenians later widened the upper decks of their triremes to accommodate more marines, a development that also allowed for protective screens to be fitted around the thalamians.
Trireme fleets sailed either in line-ahead formation (that is, aligned bow to stern), or line-abreast (side-by-side), the former being standard for cruising, the latter for going into battle under oars. Although triremes carried a sailing rig (two masts by the fifth century BCE), sails were probably not used when the vessel was being rowed because if the wind was coming from anywhere but dead astern, the vessel would heel too much for effective rowing. Ships could reach impressive speeds under oars alone. Thucydides records one nonstop passage from Piraeus to Mytilene that a trireme made in little more than twenty-four hours, about 7.5 knots, and Xenophon describes the 129-mile run from Byzantium to Heraclea on the Black Sea being covered at an average speed of about seven knots. A replica trireme called the Olympias attained sprint speeds of seven knots in its first season. (Triremes were as much as 30 percent faster than penteconters, which remained the standard warship for smaller city-states lacking the resources to build or man larger vessels.)
Practice was essential to perfect the highly refined tactics of trireme warfare, which required coordinating the actions of not only the oarsmen within each ship, but also the actions of different ships. As a defensive measure, ships could maneuver themselves into a circle with their rams pointing outward, against which the best offense would be to circle around the group—a maneuver called a periplous—before turning into the enemy ships. Another form of periplous involved a ship’s wheeling around on a pursuing attacker to strike it from astern or abeam. A distinct maneuver was the diekplous, “sailing through and out,” in which ships in a line-abreast formation rowed through the enemy line before coming about to strike the ships from astern, the most vulnerable part of a trireme.
As in any age, naval power in classical antiquity depended on vast reserves of natural and human resources as well as a rationale for deploying these at sea. Maintaining a navy required an enormous civic commitment and the statesman Pericles exaggerated only slightly when, at the outset of the Peloponnesian War in 460 BCE, he reminded the Athenians that “Seamanship, just like anything else, is an art. It is not something that can be picked up and studied in one’s spare time; indeed, it allows one no spare time for anything else.” This the Athenians well knew. On the eve of the second Persian invasion of Greece twenty years before, they had the money, matériel, and motive to build the most powerful and best trained fleet in the eastern Mediterranean. The navies of Syracuse and Carthage were possibly equal to or even larger than theirs, and while the Persian Empire might dwarf Athens and its allies, its ships were drafted from the ranks of disparate subjects commanded by alien officers. This is not to suggest that the outcome of the Persian invasion was never in doubt, for it certainly was, and the Greek victory was due to a combination of scrappy politicking, strategic overreach by the Persians, and a tactical gambit that could have as easily ended in failure as in success.
The Greco-Persian Wars
In 559 BCE, the Neo-Babylonian Empire was laid low by Cyrus the Great, founder of the Achaemenid Dynasty (550–330 BCE), which had arisen among the Persis, a tribe of southwest Iran and from which Persia took its name. Ten years later Cyrus was king of the Medes of northern Iran and by 525 BCE he had conquered Egypt and Lydia with its Ionian Greek city-states. The Ionians accepted Persian rule until 499 BCE, when Cyrus’s successor, Darius, mounted an expedition to take Naxos, largest of the Cycladic Islands, about halfway between Ionia and the Peloponnese. Miletus rallied the other Ionian city-states to revolt against Persian rule, but appeals to mainland Greeks garnered a less than enthusiastic response. Sparta, most powerful of the city-states, sent a single trireme to investigate. Athens and Eretria were the only cities to offer substantive help, sending twenty and five ships, respectively, the sailing of which was, in Herodotus’s pithy summation, “the beginning of evils for Greeks and barbarians.”
After crossing the Aegean, the Athenians marched to Sardis, which they burned before beating a hasty retreat. With only 353 triremes between them, the Ionians were no match for Persia’s fleet of 600 Phoenician, Egyptian, and Cappadocian triremes that attacked Miletus in 494 BCE. The few Ionian ships that had not abandoned the cause were destroyed or captured in a battle at the nearby island of Lade that effectively ended the Ionian Revolt. The Persians continued mopping-up operations around the Hellespont and captured a number of Greek cities on either side of the strait. Despite this success, Darius swore to punish the Athenians for the destruction of Sardis and “commanded one of his servants to repeat to him the words, ‘Master, remember the Athenians,’ three times, whenever he sat down to dinner.” In 491 BCE, the Persians launched their first invasion of Greece under Darius’s son-in-law, Mardonius. Ferrying his troops across the Hellespont, Mardonius turned south intent on taking Eretria and Athens. After landing the army in Europe, the Persian fleet sailed south along the coast
as far as the forbidding promontory of the Athos (Acte) peninsula where a gale sank three hundred ships and drowned twenty thousand sailors. The Persians also suffered military setbacks in Thrace, and while they eventually got the upper hand, Mardonius elected to return home.
Had they pursued their original objective, the Persians would have found little in the way of organized resistance. Athens and Aegina, perennial rivals, had been at war for fifteen years and the Aeginetans had recently defeated a fleet of Athenian and Corinthian ships. It was against this backdrop that Darius mounted a second expedition. Herodotus offers somewhat more detail about the composition of the Persians’ “naval contingent,” which included “all the ships and men which the various subject communities had been ordered to supply—including the horse-transports which Darius had requisitioned from his tributary states the year before. The horses were embarked in the transports, the troops in the ships of war, and, six hundred triremes strong, they sailed to Ionia.” This time, the Persians sailed straight across the Aegean, “presumably because the commanders dreaded the passage around Athos.” But there were military and political advantages, too. After subjugating Naxos, the Persians landed on Euboea in preparation for an attack on Attica. There, on the plain of Marathon forty-two kilometers from Athens, the Athenians and Plataeans threw back the invaders and seized seven of their ships. The Persians regrouped and attempted to attack Athens by sea, but by the time their ships stood off the beaches of Phaleron, which served as Athens’s port, the Athenian army had returned overland to oppose them and the Persians departed.
Darius plotted a new invasion of Greece, but a revolt in Egypt and a dispute over the order of succession (settled in favor of his son Xerxes) forced its postponement. After Xerxes quelled the Egyptian revolt, his advisors—including Athenian exiles living in the imperial capital at Susa—urged him to renew the war with Athens. Ignoring his uncle, Artabanus, who argued that the war faction was intentionally underestimating the Greeks’ ability and resolve, Xerxes prepared an invasion force of 1,207 triremes and 1,800 transports. As before, the Persians left most of the naval operations to the Phoenicians, Egyptians, and Ionian and mainland Greeks who preferred an alliance with the most powerful empire in the world to fighting alongside a handful of their squabbling cousins. It is estimated that as many Greeks fought for as against the Persians.
The size of the fleet alone easily justified Artabanus’s concern that Persia’s most powerful enemies were not the Greeks but the sea and the land: “So far as I know there is not a harbour anywhere big enough to receive this fleet of ours and give it protection in the event of storms: and indeed there would have to be not merely one such harbour, but many—all along the coast by which you will sail. But there is not a single one.” Artabanus must have been well versed in the extensive logistical preparations then under way, which included the forward deployment of provisions, warhorses, and pack animals, and two remarkable feats of engineering. The first was spanning the Hellespont with two bridges of ships (completed in May 480 BCE) so that the army could walk from Asia to Europe. Because the current can run at four knots or more, throwing a bridge of ships across the Hellespont is a considerable undertaking, but there was nothing novel in the idea. Darius had bridged both the Hellespont and the Danube during a campaign against the Scythians in 512 BCE. Xerxes’ bridges consisted of triremes and penteconters anchored in the Hellespont—according to Herodotus, the northern, upstream span comprised 360 and the southern span 314 penteconters and triremes—and joined by two flax and four papyrus cables that ran from shore to shore. When this framework was ready, planks were laid from ship to ship and the sides were built up to keep the horses and pack animals from panicking at the sight of the water.
Equally ambitious was digging a canal across the Athos peninsula to avoid a repeat of the disaster of 491 BCE. Although there were doubts about the accuracy of Herodotus’s account even in antiquity, excavations in the 1990s revealed a trench 2.5 kilometers long and about 30 meters wide, “broad enough for two triremes to be rowed abreast.” Herodotus disdained the project, not because the Persians were seeking to avoid the perils of the sea, but because it was a demonstration of Xerxes’ ostentation: “he wanted to show his power and to leave something to be remembered by. There would have been no difficulty at all,” Herodotus continues, “in getting the ships hauled across the isthmus on land,” as was done on the Isthmus of Corinth.
In the meantime, the Athenians had not been idle. Following Marathon, there had been a stark division between the hoplites (soldiers of the landed class), who took credit, justly, for the victory, and those who favored a naval solution. The staunchest advocate of the latter was Themistocles, a veteran of Marathon who nonetheless argued that the best defense would be to abandon Athens and seek refuge in the newly developed harbor of Piraeus and a powerful navy. Preparation for the defense of Piraeus proceeded, but there were no surplus funds for a fleet until a rich vein of silver was discovered at the nearby Laurion mines. Although the Greeks were aware of Xerxes’ preparations for a new invasion, Themistocles argued for a fleet as a defense against not Persia but Aegina, with which Athens was again at war. As Herodotus put it, “The outbreak of this war [with Aegina] at that moment saved Greece by forcing Athens to become a maritime power.” Under the program pushed through by Themistocles and the navalists, the Athenians launched six to eight triremes per month over the next three years.
Salamis, 480 BCE
By coincidence, the year before the second Persian invasion, the oracle of Delphi pronounced that Athens’s best hope of defense lay in her “wooden walls,” and that “Divine Salamis … will bring death to women’s sons.” When the meaning of these utterances was debated at Athens, Themistocles insisted that the “wooden walls” referred not to the wooden palisade around the Acropolis (the most obvious interpretation), but to Athens’s triremes, and that the reference to “divine” Salamis, the large island just south of Attica, was auspicious for the Greeks. Themistocles’ argument won the day and the Athenians evacuated their women and children to the Peloponnese and the older men and movable property to Salamis. The men of Athens and their allies, including Sparta, Corinth, and even Aegina, were assigned to ships, half of which sailed to Cape Artemisium at the northern end of Euboea. Themistocles argued for this forward deployment to forestall the Persian fleet’s passage down the coast and prevent its linking up with the army, which he hoped the Spartans could stall at the pass of Thermopylae about sixty-five kilometers west of Artemisium. A pair of mid-August storms sank about a third of Xerxes’ fleet. Two battles were fought, a skirmish initiated by Themistocles to gauge the Persians’ ability and resolve, and a Persian attack at Artemisium. The latter engagement was violent—half the Athenian ships sustained damage—though inconclusive, but when Themistocles learned that the three hundred Spartans had been annihilated at Thermopylae, he ordered the Greeks back to Salamis. As the Persians moved south, the Spartans voted to abandon Attica and Salamis in order to concentrate their defense of the Peloponnese on the Isthmus of Corinth. Themistocles pointed out that in the open waters of the Saronic Gulf, the larger Persian fleet’s freedom of maneuver would give the enemy a pronounced advantage. He also announced that if the Peloponnesians refused to fight at Salamis, the Athenians would take their two hundred ships, embark their families, and sail to a colony in Italy, leaving the others to fend for themselves.
The Strait of Salamis is a long irregular channel, the eastern approaches to which are guarded by the island of Psyttaleia. The strait narrows quickly to about half a mile before opening into the Bay of Eleusis between Salamis and the mainland. The S-shaped Megarian Channel to the west is narrower still. It was to the Persians’ advantage to draw the Greeks into open water, but it was not in Xerxes’ interest to prolong his expedition any longer than necessary and all but one of his advisors argued for an immediate attack. The dissenter was the tyrant of Halicarnassus, Artemisia, whose blunt advice was to exercise patience. She reasoned that, lackin
g supplies and fearing an attack on the Peloponnese, the Greek coalition would dissolve quickly. She also noted the Persian army’s logistical reliance on the navy and with considerable prescience counseled that “If … you rush into a naval action, my fear is that the defeat of your fleet may involve the army too.” Xerxes esteemed Artemisia’s candor, but ignored her advice.
According to Herodotus and Aeschylus—a veteran of the battle, which is the subject of his oldest extant play, The Persians—the night before the battle a Greek messenger told the Persians that some of the Greeks were planning to escape via the Megarian Channel. The bulk of the Persian fleet was positioned in the eastern approaches around Psyttaleia, and to prevent a breakout a squadron was sent to guard the channel. As the sun rose on the morning of September 25, Xerxes and his retinue overlooked the Strait of Salamis from the mainland. When a Greek squadron turned into the Bay of Eleusis, he ordered his ships to advance into the funnel of the strait on the assumption that the Greeks were fleeing toward the blockaded Megarian Channel, but when the Phoenicians advanced, other Greek ships were launched from Salamis.
The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World Page 14
