The Hellenistic Mediterranean
The triumph of Thebes over Sparta in 371 BCE heralded a shift in the center of political power from southern to northern Greece. A dozen years later, Philip II came to the throne in Macedonia, whose people contemporary Greeks regarded as barbarians, and in 357 BCE he precipitated a decadelong war with Athens by seizing the port of Amphipolis. After taking Byzantium and defeating Athens and Thebes, Philip formed the League of Corinth and committed the Greeks to war with Persia. Assassinated before he could embark on this venture, he was succeeded by his son Alexander in 337 BCE. In a decade of military campaigns, the young Alexander the Great trailed a thin veneer of Greek military might and culture across a large swath of Southwest Asia as far as the Indus River. His strategy reveals his strong sense of the uses and limitations of naval power. Although the Persians had more than three times as many ships, Alexander seized the ports of Ionia to deny them the ability to operate in the Aegean and threaten his rear in either Asia or Greece. In accordance with his interpretation of a prediction that he would “overcome the ships from dry land,” he captured Miletus from the landward side while 160 ships blockaded the harbor. Marching east, Alexander defeated Darius at the battle of Issus and turned south toward Egypt, besieging Tyre for six months en route. Egypt offered little resistance and after being enthroned as pharaoh at Memphis, Alexander sailed down a western branch of the Nile until he “went ashore where the city of Alexandria, named after him, is now situated. It struck him that the position was admirable for founding a city there and that it would prosper.”
The establishment of Alexandria must count as the most beneficial and enduring of its namesake’s achievements. Laid out by the engineer Deinocrates, the city is situated on a bay enclosed by the island of Pharos, to which it was connected by a man-made mole that created a double harbor. To the east lay the protected anchorage of the Portus Magnus of Roman antiquity, the primary port for overseas shipping. To the west was the larger but more exposed Eunostos (literally “good yield,” and the god of grain mills), which was the primary outlet for goods from the interior, especially grain, which reached Alexandria via a canal leading from Lake Mareotis to the south. The island of Pharos later gave its name to a 140-meter-high lighthouse designed around 280 BCE by the engineer Sostratus. Said to have been visible for thirty-five miles, the Pharos was considered one of the wonders of the ancient world. As well as a major port, Alexandria was the capital of Egypt, a major seat of learning, and home to one of the greatest libraries in antiquity. After Egypt’s annexation by Rome in 31 BCE, it continued to flourish because of the state-sponsored grain trade, which continued until the seventh century ce. Although many of its ancient structures have been submerged or pillaged, Alexandria remains a leading Mediterranean seaport and a lasting testament to Alexander’s strategic appreciation of the sea.
The Macedonian’s subsequent campaigns across Mesopotamia and Persia were bound to the land until he reached the Indus, where he built a fleet to transport his army to the Indian Ocean. There he divided his forces, part of which returned to the Persian Gulf by sea while he led a smaller group overland to Mesopotamia. When Alexander died at Babylon in 323 BCE at the age of thirty-two, he had no designated successor, and it was not until the start of the third century that the principal centers of power, each ruled by one of Alexander’s generals or their descendants, were more or less fixed. Chief among these were Egypt, ruled by the Ptolemies from 304 to 30 BCE, Mesopotamia and Persia by the Seleucids (304–64 BCE), and Asia Minor and the Levant by the Antigonids (279–168 BCE).
According to some accounts, at the time of his death Alexander was considering a Mediterranean campaign against Carthage. Given his relatively limited experience of naval warfare—as distinct from his grasp of the essential strategic considerations—it is difficult to imagine the results of a full-fledged naval contest. The year after his death, a Macedonian fleet crushed an Athenian effort to overthrow Macedonian rule at Amorgos, in the Cyclades, a battle that signaled the end of Athenian power as decisively as Salamis had heralded its beginning 250 years before. Yet Alexander would have met considerable opposition not only from the Carthaginians, then at the height of their power and influence, but also from the Greeks of Magna Graecia and Sicily. The latter had not played a major role in the Persian Wars of the preceding century, and to the Athenians and others they were conspicuous by their absence. Even as Themistocles was arguing for a two-hundred-ship navy for Athens, Gelon, tyrant of the Sicilian city-state of Syracuse, already had one. When a mainland embassy requested his help, he agreed with the proviso that he be given overall command of the Greek forces. He may have attached this unrealistic condition to ensure that he would be refused, thus giving him an honorable way out and allowing him to concentrate on a looming threat from Carthage, which was attempting to enlarge its presence in Sicily.
The Assyrian encroachment on Phoenicia in the seventh century BCE had left the Carthaginians free to pursue their own destiny. After defeating a fleet from the Greek colony of Massilia (Marseille) at the battle of Alalia, off Corsica, in 535 BCE, the Carthaginians and their Etruscan allies effectively closed the western Mediterranean to Greek shipping. The Etruscans had been the dominant force in central Italy since the end of the ninth century BCE and reached their apogee around the time of Alalia. Their territories extended across the peninsula from the Tyrrhenian Sea (so-called from the Greek name for the Etruscans) to the Adriatic (named for the Etruscan town of Adria). Numerous models, carved images, and graffiti of boats and ships attest to their involvement in seafaring, as do the proximity of their towns to the sea, manifestations of Phoenician, Greek, and Carthaginian influences on Etruscan culture, and the evidence of an Etruscan presence in Sardinia, Corsica, and other western islands. Etruscan shipwrights are the first known to have rigged ships with two masts, the earliest representation of which, dated to the 450s BCE, is on a painted wall in the Tomb of the Ship at Tarquinia, near the Tyrrhenian coast north of Civitavecchia. They also employed rams, and the oldest written (as distinct from pictorial) reference to a ram is in Herodotus’s account of the battle of Alalia.
Made around 675 BCE by a potter who signed this work, the Aristonothos krater was found in the ancient Etruscan city of Caere (Cerveteri, Italy). This scene seems to show a Greek ship with a ram and raised deck for fighters (left) overtaking an Etruscan sailing ship. It is the oldest depiction of a ship fitted with a ram from the western Mediterranean. While this scene has no immediate literary counterparts, on the opposite side of the krater the artist has shown Odysseus blinding the cyclops Polyphemus—son of Poseidon, god of the sea—from Book Nine of the Odyssey. Photograph by Faraglia, D-DAI-ROM 8208. Courtesy of the Deutsche Archäologische Institut, Rome.
The fifth century BCE was a period of substantial change in Italy and Sicily. Most notable was the waning power of the Etruscans, whom the Romans bested for the first time in 510 BCE, and whom a Cumaean-Syracusan fleet defeated at the naval battle of Cumae in 474, when they were still regarded as “masters of the sea.” Even before this, the Syracusans entered a period of rapid expansion under Gelon. When other Sicilian cities appealed for help, the Carthaginians sent two hundred ships and two hundred thousand crew, infantry, and cavalry from North Africa, Iberia, Italy, Sardinia, and Corsica “under the command of Hamilcar … king of Carthage.”a In 480 BCE, the year that Xerxes invaded Greece, Hamilcar sailed for Sicily only to be defeated by Gelon at the Himera River. Nonetheless, the Carthaginians continued to expand their presence in Sicily, although the Syracusans remained indomitable foes, especially under Dionysius I, who was tyrant from 405 to 367 BCE. Among the most ambitious, multifaceted, and long-lived rulers in ancient Sicily, he checked the Carthaginian advance in Sicily and extended his rule over much of southern Italy.
Polyremes and Catamarans
Dionysus is credited with being one of the first people to experiment with polyremes, galleys with more than one rower to an oar. Less is known about the manning of pol
yremes, which were designated by the number of oarsmen in a single vertical file of rowers, than about triremes. But galleys probably never had more than three banks of oars, and polyremes could have only one or two. Later European practice indicates that the maximum number of rowers per oar was eight, so the largest polyreme would have been designated a “twenty-four.” A four (quadrireme in Latin, or tetrereis in Greek) could have one thalamian, one zeugite, and two thranite rowers, while a five (quinquereme, or pentereis) might have three rowers per oar on one level and two per oar on another. The flagship of the Carthaginian commander at the battle of Mylae in the First Punic War “was a single-banked vessel with seven men to each oar” and designated a “seven.” Aristotle attributed the invention of the quadrireme to the Carthaginians, and Dionysus is credited with the invention of the quinquereme, but whether they originated with Syracusan or Carthaginian shipwrights, polyremes were a central Mediterranean innovation.
Why polyremes were developed in the first place is unclear, but the stability provided by a wider ship would have been one advantage. Larger ships could mount catapults, the oldest form of long-range shipboard artillery. Alexander used shipborne catapults during the siege of Tyre, but the seagoing catapult did not come into its own until the development of “super-galleys” by the Antigonid king, Demetrius the Besieger. Catapults were specialized affairs; a fourth-century BCE inventory of the naval warehouse at Piraeus lists both arrow-shooting and grapnel-hurling catapults. More creative tacticians recommended hurling pots of vipers, scorpions, and other natural-born killers, while improvements in fire weapons were sought constantly. Ramming continued to be an important aspect of naval warfare in the Hellenistic and Roman periods, but taking enemy ships by boarding remained a preferred tactic, and Roman quinqueremes of the mid-third century BCE carried 300 rowers and 120 marines.
The development of polyremes led to the building of ever more extravagant ships and made control of the timber supplies in Macedonia, Cilicia, Cyprus, and Lebanon a primary objective of Alexander’s Hellenistic successors. Because access to tall trees was essential for the shipbuilding industries that sustained maritime trade, and for the naval forces required to protect that trade from rivals and to secure access to the wood, the naval struggle in the Hellenistic period fed on itself. The appetite for wood was further whetted by the development of ever-larger ships, including leviathans believed to have been massive twin-hulled vessels. In the mid-third century BCE, the Egyptian fleet of Ptolemy II Philadelphus boasted two “thirtys” and that of his grandson Ptolemy IV Philopator included a “forty.” The dimensions of the latter, given by the historian Athenaeus, are fantastic, but credible: 15 meters wide, 122 meters long, with room for 4,000 oarsmen, 2,850 marines, and 400 officers and other crew. Theoretically no galley could be larger than a “twenty-four”—a vessel with three banks of oars, with eight men pulling on each oar. It is thought that Ptolemy IV’s “forty” comprised two “twentys”—that is, with twenty oarsmen in a single file distributed in some combination among the upper, middle, and lower banks—with a raised platform deck that spanned the two hulls to accommodate the marines and others. The only catamaran galley known by name is Demetrius the Besieger’s Leontophoros, with 1,600 rowers distributed between two “eights.” While larger ships had definite tactical advantages—those of Demetrius “had a speed and effectiveness which was more remarkable than their great size”—the most extreme of these vessels were intended to magnify the power of the rulers who built them rather than for any practical purpose. Plutarch notes that Ptolemy IV’s “forty” was “only for show. Hardly differing from buildings that are fixed in the ground, it moved unsteadily and with difficulty, to make appearance for display, not use.”
Such showboating reflects the increased importance of navies and naval power in the Hellenistic period, but it was not confined to warships. Athenaeus also describes the Syracusia, a huge three-masted grain ship built for Hiero II of Syracuse by the engineer and mathematician Archimedes. Pine and fir were obtained from the forests of nearby Mount Etna and southern Italy, cordage from Spain, and hemp and pitch for caulking from the Rhône valley in France. The hull was fastened with copper spikes weighing up to seven kilograms, and the planks were sheathed in a tarred fabric covered by lead sheets, an inexpensive form of surface caulking. Anticipating the grandest twentieth-century transatlantic liners in opulence, the middle deck featured cabins for 142 first-class passengers—“All had floors done in multi-colored mosaic; in these was worked, in amazing fashion, the whole story of the Iliad”—in addition to accommodations for “bilge-watchers,” or steerage passengers. The lower deck was reserved for cargo. First-class passengers could use a library, a gymnasium, promenades lined with flower beds, a chapel dedicated to Aphrodite, and a bath. Twenty horses could be carried in separate stalls, and there was ample provision for freshwater and a saltwater fish tank for the cook’s use. The ship was defended by four hundred marines who could fight the ship from the bronze tops of the three masts or from a raised fighting deck, the latter fitted with a catapult of Archimedes’ design. The number of crew is not specified, but Athenaeus says that “although the bilge was extraordinarily deep, it was bailed by only one man using a screw pump, one of Archimedes’ inventions.” No linear dimensions survive, but the cargo on the ship’s maiden voyage to Alexandria included 60,000 measures of grain, 10,000 jars of pickled fish, 20,000 talents of wool, and 20,000 talents of miscellaneous cargo, about 1,900 tons burden, not including provisions for the ship’s complement. The ship proved too large for most ports, and Hiero decided to rename his ship for Egypt’s main port and to give the Alexandria to his ally Ptolemy III.
Rhodes and Piracy in the Hellenistic Age
Their alliance with Syracuse, the dominant power to their west, ensured that the Ptolemies could focus their attention on their primary rivals, the Antigonids and the Seleucids. The first major sea battle of the Hellenistic age was fought off Salamis, Cyprus, in 306 BCE. Demetrius the Besieger set more than a hundred ships against an even larger fleet belonging to Ptolemy I in an effort to help his father, Antigonus, establish himself as sole successor to Alexander. Though outnumbered, Demetrius is said to have captured forty warships and one hundred transports before besieging Rhodes. The port held out for a year in part because of the Rhodians’ ability to run the blockade with grain from Alexandria. By a subsequent treaty, Rhodes aligned itself with Antigonus with the proviso that she never be obliged to wage war against the Ptolemies. To celebrate the lifting of Demetrius’s siege, the Rhodians erected an enormous statue to the sun god, Helios. Acclaimed as one of the wonders of the ancient world, the Colossus of Rhodes stood in the port until an earthquake struck the city in 227/226 BCE. The Rhodians’ reputation as honest brokers enabled them to make “such sound practical use of the incident that the disaster was a cause for improvement to them rather than of damage.” Gifts poured in from around the Mediterranean: silver, catapults, and exemption from duties from Syracuse; silver, timber for twenty ships, bronze to repair the Colossus, the loan of 450 masons and builders, and a shipment of more than thirty thousand tons of grain from Egypt; and comparable gifts from other Hellenistic states.
Rhodes’s success owed much to its favorable geographical position, in the southeast Aegean about ten miles off the southwest corner of Asia Minor. At the northern end of the island, the town of Rhodes boasted a complex of five harbors lined with dockyards, ship sheds, and facilities for merchants. The Rhodians fostered alliances with a variety of competing powers—its balancing act between the Antigonids and the Ptolemies being the earliest example—and wielded diplomacy and naval power to achieve hegemony over lesser powers in and around the Aegean. They are also credited with developing the rules that later formed the basis of commercial maritime law in Rome and the so-called Rhodian Sea Law of the Byzantine Empire, although the actual content of their own laws can only be inferred from later writings. The Rhodians also offered protection against pirates and others who tried to inhib
it trade, and they were viewed as “the constant protectors not only of their own liberty, but of that of the rest of Greece.” Unlike the Athenians, who had discouraged allies from making nonmonetary contributions to the Delian League to limit the growth of rivals, the Rhodians supplied the ships, which they distributed among relatively small squadrons based at different islands and harbors, while the allies contributed crews. The importance they attached to their antipiracy patrols is reflected in their development of a variety of smaller patrol vessels. The most common was probably the triemiolia, which is thought to have resembled a trireme, but with only 120 rowers rather than 170. These were not unlike large coast guard vessels of today, imposing in their own right against pirates and smugglers but not fit to face off against full-fledged warships.
While merchants could sail the open sea-lanes to Egypt or from the Bosporus to the Crimea in relative security, piracy was endemic in the island-studded Aegean, in the Adriatic and Ionian Seas between Italy and Greece, and in the heavily trafficked approaches to the Dardanelles and the Bosporus. The Black Sea, whose commerce funneled into the Bosporus, comprised an extremely important source of “necessities” and luxury goods: “the most plentiful supplies and best qualities of cattle and slaves reach us from the countries lying round the Pontus [northern Asia Minor], while among luxuries the same countries furnish us with abundance of honey, wax and preserved fish, while of the superfluous produce of our countries they take olive-oil and every kind of wine. As for corn [grain] there is a give-and-take.” The key to this treasure was held by the people of Byzantium, whom the Greek historian Polybius describes as “of great service to other people” and deserving of “general support when they are exposed to peril from the barbarians.” This praise notwithstanding, in 220 BCE the Byzantines imposed a toll on ships passing through the strait—possibly to finance their own antipirate activities—and a coalition of states appealed to Rhodes to help have it rescinded. This the Rhodians did through a deft mixture of diplomacy and, as a last resort, war.
The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World Page 16
