The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean

by David Abulafia

  QUEEN ATOSSA: Say where, in all this peopled world, a city men called Athens lies?

  LEADER: Far distant, where our Lord the sun sinks and his last effulgence dies.

  ATOSSA: And this far western land it is my son so craved to make his prey?

  LEADER: Aye, for if Athens once were his, all Hellas must his word obey.3

  Whether the Greeks were really fighting for liberty against Persian tyranny is questionable. In the late fifth century, at the height of their struggle against one another in the Peloponnesian War, the Spartans and the Athenians were constantly trying to win the favour of the Persians; submitting to the Persian king was not always seen as a despicable act. The story grew in the telling, first with Herodotos and then, much later, with the biographies of great Athenians and Spartans written in the Roman period by Plutarch. Vast armies led by the Persian king invaded Greece; yet among them there were many Greeks, reluctant or otherwise, who found themselves fighting other Greeks. Persian rule brought periodic irritations such as demands for troops and taxes, but the general policy of the Persians was to leave largely alone those cities that rendered without complaint a simple tribute of earth and water.

  From a Greek perspective the Persian problem began with the destruction in 546 of the kingdom of Lydia, whose ruler Kroisos (Croesus) was renowned for his wealth. The Persian king, Cyrus, invited the Greek cities of Ionia, which owed Lydia nominal allegiance, to join him in overthrowing the Lydians, but the Ionians expressed interest only once Lydia had fallen, and that was too late: by then, Cyrus was no longer prepared to offer the easy terms under which the Ionians had lived as notional subjects of Lydia. Some did submit, and found themselves obliged to provide troops; the load was relatively light under Cyrus, but became more burdensome under later rulers, who sought funds to pay for grandiose wars. The citizens of other towns took advice from the Greeks of Hellas and emigrated en masse, notably the Phokaians. Miltiades, who was to become a distinguished general in Athenian service, set out from his native Ionia with five ships, a crowd of refugees and all the wealth of his town; unfortunately, one ship was seized by Phoenician pirates. Much more important to the Persians, at this stage, were the lands of the great Middle Eastern empires. The fall of Babylon to Cyrus in 539, later commemorated in the vivid tales of the biblical book of Daniel, was followed in 525 by the fall of Egypt to Cyrus’s son Cambyses; in the meantime the Persians reduced the Phoenician cities to submission. For the Phoenicians this did not prove to be wholly bad news. The Persians stimulated new life into the trade routes that ran through Tyre and Sidon, bypassing Ionia. The Phoenicians provided the backbone of the Persian navy in the Mediterranean, though the Ionian Greeks were also expected to produce ships for the royal navy. Around 525 one Ionian ruler, Polykrates of Samos, who became an ally of Cambyses, could mobilize 100 penteconters (ships manned by fifty oarsmen) and forty triremes (ships with triple banks of oars); these vessels were also developed by the Phoenicians, who sent 200 triremes against Naxos in 499.4 In other words, thousands of sailors were required to man an effective fleet, and it is likely that Polykrates drew on manpower well beyond Samos itself. Herodotos wondered whether to compare him with the thalassocrat Minos.5

  The Greek cities of Cyrenaica accepted Persian overlordship after the fall of Egypt, so that the Persian empire now stretched as far as modern Libya; Carthage, like other Phoenician cities, seems to have viewed Persian successes with sympathy. This is not to say that the Persians sought to establish a Mediterranean dominion. The Greeks suggested to their brethren in Sicily that their island too was at risk. Yet the area within Europe that most worried the Persians was not Greece but the great swathe of lands in what is now Ukraine, inhabited by the nomadic Scythians, whom both Greeks and Persians regarded as wild barbarians; King Darius of Persia campaigned against them in 513. A few Greeks and others made trouble for the Persians in the northern Aegean, and the Persians responded with brutality, occupying Lemnos in 509, and massacring many of the inhabitants. The Persians greedily aspired to control Euboia, famous for its natural resources.6 There was unrest in Ionia from 499 onwards, sometimes supported by cities in Greece itself, resulting in vicious reprisals as Phoenician sailors paid off their grudges against their Greek rivals in blood and pillage. Yet, as the Ionian revolt petered out, the Persians were surprisingly considerate, accepting democratic governments and attempting to remove a source of tension between cities by demanding that they make trade agreements with one another. The Persian Great King was conscious of his responsibility before his god Ahura Mazda to act mercifully towards his subjects and to promote stability. Even so, the prosperity of Ionia did not recover.7

  II

  The accession of Xerxes in 485 shifted Persian policy from tough accommodation with dissidents to vigorous suppression of Persia’s foes; the Great King intended to punish the Greeks for supporting the Ionian rebels. The Phoenicians and Egyptians received orders for massive ropes out of which a pair of boat bridges could be constructed across the Hellespont; these cables must have been formidably strong to withstand the fierce currents. Because an earlier fleet had suffered severe damage off the great promontory of Mount Athos, the king ordered a canal to be dug through the neck of the mountain; and it was done. Food stores were established along the route the army would follow through Thrace. The Greeks well understood that this war would be fought as much on sea as on land, and the Spartans were assigned the high command of the naval forces, further proof that Sparta’s power at sea should never be underestimated. Not surprisingly, many Greeks were tempted to ‘Medize’, to submit to the Medes and Persians before Xerxes’ armies obliterated their cities and enslaved their citizens. The Pythian Oracle at Delphi instructed the Athenians to abandon their homeland and migrate westwards; on further prompting she made some vague references to the Wooden Walls that would survive the Persian onslaught, and implied that something terrible would happen at Salamis, a little to the west of Athens.

  The land campaign reached its most dramatic moment at the narrow pass of Thermopylai in 480 BC, when 300 brave Spartans fought to the death against overwhelming forces; thereafter, the Persians stormed through northern and eastern Greece, and Athens, now empty, was sacked, including the ancient temples on the Acropolis.8 The sea campaign offered better opportunities for Greek success, for the Persian fleet was largely composed of Phoenician triremes, fast-moving and lightly constructed, against which the Greeks had some hope of mobilizing their own heavier triremes. The Phoenicians might have the advantage in numbers, but the Greeks knew these waters much better.9 By holding the Persian fleet at Salamis in 480 BC the Greek allies were able to delay what seemed almost inevitable, a full-scale Persian invasion of the Peloponnese. Salamis is an island separated from the Attic mainland by narrow straits in the east, where the fleets faced one another, and broader straits beyond the bay facing Eleusis to the west. With more than 200 sea-worthy vessels (some estimates reach 380) the Greeks, mainly Athenians, faced between 800 and 1,200 enemy ships; the Greeks therefore needed to draw the Phoenicians into the narrow straits between Salamis and the Greek mainland and trap them there.10 This they did by an Odyssean ruse: an Athenian spy reported to the Persians that the Greeks were planning to steal away westwards under cover of darkness. The Phoenicians were sent to patrol the western exit. But the Greeks stayed still, and when morning came the patrols sent to block a Greek exit were puzzled by the silence. Meanwhile, the Greeks engaged with that part of the Phoenician fleet that had remained in the eastern straits. Corinthian shipping hoisted sail and appeared to flee up the straits westwards towards Eleusis, acting as a magnetic draw to the enemy, who found themselves unable to manoeuvre in the narrow entrance. All the while, King Xerxes sat on a golden throne on the heights above the Bay of Salamis, expecting to watch an enjoyable day of pursuit and victory by the Persian navy. Instead, 200 Phoenician and other Persian ships were sunk or taken, and the Greeks lost about forty vessels.11 The Ionian Greeks in Persian service avoided an engagement with t
heir mainland cousins, and sailed off in a hurry. It was a curious sort of victory: the Persian navy was not smashed – perhaps 1,000 vessels of various types were still afloat, and there was a Persian army parked close by. But Salamis proved that Xerxes could not press on to conquer southern Greece. The Spartans and Athenians held the Aegean. They had prevented it from becoming a Persian sea. Victory on land at Plataia the next year confirmed the impregnability of the Greek alliance. With a certain amount of calendar adjustment, it was soon claimed that, on the same day as the victory at Salamis, the Syracusans under Gelon decisively defeated a Carthaginian invasion of Sicily. This invasion may have been launched in an attempt to create a second front for Persia and its Phoenician allies. The idea that the Persians had been defeated in both the east and the west had obvious appeal.

  The Persian War confirmed the moral ascendancy of Sparta, heroic losers at Thermopylai, and of Athens, which, after sacrificing the city itself by abandoning it to the Persians, had won a victory in the waters of Attika. Both Athens and Sparta were able to follow through with further naval successes, notably in Samos, which they freed from Persian rule, and at the promontory of Mykale nearby, where they managed to set the Persian fleet on fire in 479, and helped stir up revolt in Ionia. Xerxes was thus left with less than he had started with; Aeschylus represented him as a tragic figure who over-reached himself by challenging the Greek gods and thus bringing misery on both Persians and Greeks. Aeschylus insisted that there was an underlying principle, liberty, for which the Greeks had fought:

  The right wing led the van, in order due,

  Behind it the whole fleet, prow after prow,

  Then one great shout: ‘Now, sons of Hellas, now!

  Set Hellas free, set free your wives, your homes,

  Your gods’ high altars and your fathers’ tombs.

  Now all is on the stake!’12

  III

  Athens, spectacularly rebuilt, now became the ardent defender of democracy (democracy that was confined to the free male citizen body, excluding the many metics, or foreigners). It also became the seat of a regional empire, making use of its navy to exercise dominion over the islands of the Aegean.13 Sparta concentrated on maintaining authority within the southern Peloponnese, where a small elite of highly trained Spartan soldiers (the hoplites) controlled a much larger population of enserfed dependants (the helots) and subordinate allies (or perioikoi). Sparta was ‘simply a collection of villages’, as Thucydides observed, without grand monuments, whereas Athens, he thought, gave the impression from its own monuments of being twice as powerful as it really was.14

  Religious cults bound together the emerging Athenian empire. The most influential cult in these waters was the worship of Apollo on the sacred island of Delos. Delos stands in the middle of the Cycladic chain, about halfway across the Aegean, easily accessible from the lands inhabited by the Ionian Greeks: Samos to the east-north-east, Chios to the north-north-east. The great pirate Polykrates of Samos took a strong interest in Delos, and dedicated the island of Rheneia, very close to it, to Delian Apollo; he constructed a great chain to tie Rheneia to Delos not long before he died in 522 BC.15 Delos attracted the attention of the inhabitants of several neighbouring islands, such as the Naxians, who installed a sculptured terrace (the ‘Terrace of the Lions’), made of the fine marble for which Naxos was famous. By participating in the cult of Delian Apollo the Ionians expressed their bonds of solidarity with their fellow-Greeks around the Aegean. The cult of Apollo was expressed not just through sacrifices but through festivals that included athletic games, choral performances and dances; Thucydides cited an early poem addressed to the god Phoibos Apollo:

  Chiefly, O Phoibos, your heart found delight in the island of Delos.

  There, with their long robes trailing, Ionians gather together,

  Treading your sacred road, with their wives and children about them,

  There they give you pleasure with boxing and dancing, and singing,

  Calling aloud on your name, as they set in order the contests.16

  A cult centre in the middle of the Aegean was an obvious place in which to create a sworn association of Greek cities, the Delian League, in 477 BC; its overt task was to maintain pressure on the Persians after the withdrawal of Xerxes. Apparently it was the Athenians who suggested Delos should be the headquarters of the league. This was not just in recognition of the sanctity of the place; it also drew attention away from the fact that Athens dominated the league. At first the treasury was based in the Athenian sanctuary on Delos, but in 454 it was transferred to Athens, for by then it was obvious that the Delian League was a tool of Athenian policy – the Athenians appointed the entire panel of administrators, who were supposed to be drawn from Ionia and the Aegean islands.17 The Athenians both believed in and exploited the holy nature of the League.

  Democracy at home and empire abroad have rarely been treated as inconsistent with one another; the historian Sir John Seeley’s motto was imperium et libertas, ‘empire and freedom’.18 The Athenians knew why they needed an empire; it was not solely to keep the Persians at bay. There were essential resources on which the city had to call in order to ensure its survival; there were places from which to obtain supplies and, just as importantly, places that guarded the longer routes leading to sources of supply. The most important challenge was gaining access to grain supplies. There is some disagreement about how large Athens was in the fifth century; a good estimate for the late fifth century is 337,000 inhabitants in Athens and its dependent territory in Attika.19 All these people could not be fed simply from local resources. Although the terrain is not at first sight promising, intensive agriculture was practised in parts of Attika, and Aristophanes described the enormous variety of products the Athenians could buy from the surrounding countryside: cucumbers, grapes, honey, figs, turnips, even managing to grow crops out of season so that you could no longer tell what time of year it was.20 But classical evidence indicates that Attika could feed about 84,000 people from its own resources – in any case, not more than 106,000.21 Athens therefore imported grain to feed itself, and much of this came from as far away as Euboia, the Black Sea (or Pontos) and Sicily. About half its grain supply was imported; there were shippers and grain-dealers (predictably, the butt of criticism) who ensured the city was fed.

  The rhetorician Isokrates, writing in about 380 BC, described the klerouchoi, Athenian colonizers sent out to the territories Athens controlled in order to manage the estates from which it drew its supplies. They were a necessity because ‘we had in proportion to the number of our citizens a very small territory, but a very great empire; we possessed not only twice as many warships as all other states combined, but these were strong enough to engage double their number’.22 He stressed the importance of Euboia – ‘we had greater control over it than over our own country’, for as early as 506 the Athenians had seized the lands of the great families of Chalkis, and parcelled them out among 4,000 citizens, with a further distribution by Perikles sixty years later.23 However, in 411, towards the end of the disastrous Peloponnesian War, Euboia escaped from Athenian control; Thucydides remarked that ‘Euboia had been more useful to them than Attika itself’, and the loss of Euboia caused more panic even than defeat in Sicily, which was another good source of grain.24

  The common assumption that the Black Sea was always the major source of grain is based on evidence from the fourth century and later.25 Earlier than this, references to Black Sea grain are occasional, reflecting the odd year when supplies were short within the Aegean. The obvious sources for Athens lay all around the Aegean, in Thrace, in Lemnos, in Euboia and in Lesbos, where land worked by 20,000 Lesbians was conveyed to 3,000 Athenian beneficiaries, who permitted part of the old population to remain as their serfs.26 All this suggests a systematic and well-organized grain trade which was the creation of Athenian policy, and not simply a haphazard dependence on whatever supplies could be found by merchants in the Aegean and beyond.27 Its main beneficiaries were the wealthy
men who had been granted lands in the overseas territories (chôra) of the Athenian empire.28

  IV

  Athens did not tolerate dissent, and, when the Naxians tried to break free in 470, Athens imposed money payments in lieu of the ships Naxos had earlier provided; this was then extended more widely to Athens’ allies, and a number of tribute lists survive that speak loudly for the way Athens was asserting itself in the Aegean. But the Delian League was well matched by a Peloponnesian League, embracing the towns of southern Greece and dominated by Sparta. Thucydides commented on the difference between the two leagues:

  The Spartans did not make their allies pay tribute, but saw to it that they were governed by oligarchies who would work in the Spartan interest. Athens, on the other hand, had in the course of time taken over the fleets of her allies (except for those of Chios and Lesbos) and had made them pay contributions of money instead.29

  Thus Sparta worked with allies; Athens asserted its dominion over dependants. On the other hand, the allies of Athens were impressed by the successful leadership it provided, often far from Greece – the Athenians well understood that foreign victories could be used to promote their own hegemony within the Aegean. In 466 the allies, led by the Athenian commander Kimon, literally smashed to pieces the Persian fleet, numbering 200 ships, off the coast of Asia Minor, at the mouth of the river Eurymedon. The allies struggled manfully against the Persians, sending 200 ships of their own to Egypt to support a revolt against Persian rule (459); this, however, resulted in humiliating defeat. Ten years later, the Delian League sent its fleet under Kimon to make trouble in Cyprus, where the Persians held sway. Meanwhile, Athens bullied rivals and rebels, tightening its grasp over Euboia, while also making peace with the most obvious competitor for hegemony, Sparta, in 446. Since Sparta and Athens had different obsessions, Athens seeking to hold on to its possessions in the Aegean, and Sparta to maintain supremacy in the Peloponnese, it was not difficult to separate their spheres of interest. The real difficulties would arise when lesser towns drew Athens and Sparta into their own squabbles.