The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean

by David Abulafia

  The outbreak of the Peloponnesian War can be traced back to events in the Adriatic, in a small but strategically placed town founded on the edge of the land of the Illyrians: Epidamnos. It was a staging-post on the increasingly important trade route that carried goods up from the Gulf of Corinth towards the Etruscan and Greek colonies at Spina and Adria, a route in which Athens was taking an ever stronger interest. Epidamnos had been created by Corinthian colonists from Kerkyra (Corfu); it was thus a granddaughter of Corinth, and, like many Greek towns, it was riven by factional fighting between aristocrats and democrats (436–435 BC). The democrats, under siege from the aristocrats and their barbarian allies the Illyrians, appealed to Kerkyra for help; but the Kerkyrans were distinctly uninterested.30 They saw themselves as a respectable naval power, with 120 ships (a fleet second in size to Athens), competing at sea with their mother-city of Corinth, with which relations were decidedly cool: the Corinthians were convinced that the Kerkyrans did not show the respect that was due to a mother-city, while the Kerkyrans claimed that ‘their financial power at this time made them equal with the richest states in Hellas, and their military resources were greater than those of Corinth’.31 Relations deteriorated further when Corinth responded to the appeal from its grandchildren in Epidamnos, and sent colonists to help the besieged town.32 So an apparently pointless conflict broke out between Corinth and Kerkyra over Corinthian intervention in what the Kerkyrans were convinced were their waters. Kerkyra appealed to Athens for aid: the Kerkyrans argued that Athens, with its mighty fleet, could block the pretensions of Corinth; ‘Corinth’, they said, ‘has attacked us first in order to attack you afterwards.’33 They asked to be brought into the Athenian network of alliances, though they were aware that, under the terms of past treaties between Sparta and Athens, which had sought to balance the Delian and Peloponnesian Leagues, this might be viewed amiss:

  There are three considerable naval powers in Hellas – Athens, Kerkyra and Corinth. If Corinth gets control of us first and you allow our navy to be united with hers, you will have to fight against the combined fleets of Kerkyra and the Peloponnese. But if you receive us into the alliance, you will enter upon the war with our ships as well as your own.34

  Judging from these words, there was a fatalism about the coming of war. In 433 the Athenians despatched ships to help the Kerkyrans, heading for Sybota, between Kerkyra and the Greek mainland, where 150 ships from Corinth and its allies faced 110 ships from Kerkyra. The main impact of the Athenian fleet was psychological: the Athenian squadron arrived as battle was joined, and, at sight of them, the Corinthian navy scuttled away, convinced that an even larger fleet was on its way, which was not in fact the case. Sparta wisely held itself aloof from these events.35

  Thucydides was interested in war and politics, and especially in the rationale behind the political decisions of the Greek states during the conflict between Athens and Sparta. There are mysteries he does not resolve: why the Athenians, who had built an empire in the Aegean, should wish to become involved in the waters to the west of Greece, the Ionian and Adriatic Seas; and how significant the commercial interests of Athens, Corinth and Kerkyra were in the decisions to go to war. The Corinthians and Athenians were not blind to the new business opportunities that had been opening up in the Adriatic during the fifth century BC. Economic considerations surely lay behind another decision of the Athenian assembly: to besiege Potideia, a Corinthian colony (and Athenian ally) on the Chalkidian peninsula, not far from the modern city of Thessaloniki; Thessaly gave access to some of the grain lands from which Athens drew its supplies, and control of Thessaly would also determine control of the northern Aegean islands, such as Lemnos, which were dominated by Athens. Meanwhile, the Peloponnesian League was faced with a growing chorus of complaints against Athens, even from its own allies: Aigina, the island that lay between Attika and the Peloponnese, grumbled at the presence of an Athenian garrison, compromising its autonomy.36 In other words, the other Greeks witnessed the way the Athenians had been turning their system of alliances into an empire, and wondered when and where the process would end. The Spartans decided they had to give a lead; many in Sparta were deeply reluctant to go to war, and, when the matter was put to a vote in the Spartan assembly, it was not at first obvious whether those in favour of the war were shouting louder than those who argued for appeasement.37

  In the first phase of the conflict between Athens and Sparta, the so-called Archidamian War (431–421 BC), Athens was able to demonstrate its superior skill at sea; in 428, the Athenians responded vigorously to a rebellion in Lesbos, which began when the citizens of its capital, Mytilene, conspired to throw off Athenian rule over the island and expanded their navy.38 They told Sparta that the Athenians ‘felt some alarm about our navy, in case it might come together as one force and join you or some other power’; however, ‘if you give us your whole-hearted support you will gain for yourself a state which has a large navy (which is the thing you need most)’.39 The Peloponnesians admitted the Mytileneans to their league forthwith; but that did not save Mytilene from its recapture by the Athenians. In the famous, or infamous, debate that followed, the self-regarding, exclusive flavour of Athenian democracy can be detected: the Athenians agreed with the ruthless proposal of generals such as Kleon to put to death all male Mytileneans, and to enslave all women and children. A trireme was sent to Lesbos posthaste to enact this decree. The Athenians kept having second thoughts, however, and a second trireme was sent to rescind the sentence. It raced after the first one, never actually overtaking it; but it arrived just in time to save the population. This then was empire; as the rebels insisted, the Athenians had gradually deprived their own allies of independence, and no longer treated them as equals.

  The Peloponnesian War saw massive loss of human life as a result of both disease and sheer human cruelty. Plague, possibly bubonic, arrived in Greece in 430, and devastated Athens. The sea routes of the Mediterranean have always provided a means for the transmission of pandemics, as the better documented cases of the plague under Justinian in the sixth century AD, or the Black Death in the fourteenth century, would dramatically reveal. Not much attention was paid to the pathology of this disease, which was seen as a punishment by the gods for human sins.

  In 425, the Athenians attempted to bring the war into the Peloponnese by creating a base at Pylos, ancient Nestor’s former capital, from where they could interfere with supplies bound for Sparta.40 As a result, 440 Spartan hoplites found themselves stranded on the island of Sphakteria opposite Pylos, and for a time their fate seemed bound up with the future of this war. These men may have constituted one tenth of the elite Spartan army, so their recovery was an issue of great importance to Sparta. A local truce between the Spartans and the Athenian general resulted in the surrender to Athens of the Spartan fleet in these waters, about sixty vessels, as hostages to be held until negotiations between the two sides were complete. All this seemed to promise an end to the war itself; but, once Spartan delegates actually faced the Athenian assembly, they found it impossible to concede effective victory to their enemies.41 So the war continued, and an Athenian commander, Kleon, surprised everyone by leading a taskforce to Pylos and obtaining the surrender of the hoplites on Sphakteria – this was no repeat of Thermopylai.42

  The war soon spread beyond the Aegean and the waters around Kerkyra. Quite why the Athenians opened a new front in Sicily during 427 is a mystery. Thucydides thought that the Athenians hoped to prevent Sicilian grain from reaching the Peloponnesian cities, and that the Athenians were also beginning to wonder ‘whether it would be possible for them to gain control of Sicily’.43 Accustomed to rule over islands, the Athenians failed to realize how large this island was and how many rivals for its control existed: the Carthaginians were one potential enemy; the Syracusans were a more immediate threat, for they were Dorian colonists, well armed with a large fleet that might enter service on the Peloponnesian side.44 Ancient loyalties came to the fore: according to Thucydides, the Sicilian
colonists divided neatly between Ionians, who supported the Athenian alliance, and Dorians, who instinctively supported Sparta. Leontini, an Ionian colony in eastern Sicily that was at war with Syracuse, appealed to Athens for help, and the Athenians sent twenty ships; Athenian self-confidence was boosted by rapid successes, including the relief of Leontini and the establishment of Athenian mastery over the Straits of Messina. Syracuse seemed feebler than had been expected, and Sicily appeared to be a viable conquest. This was a disastrous assumption.

  During the next phase of the conflict between Athens and Sparta the Sicilian Question re-emerged. The network of Athenian alliances in Sicily extended across the island, even encompassing the Hellenized Elymians of western Sicily. The inhabitants of Segesta or Egesta had recently started to build the splendid temple that still stands. They saw Athens as their protector against Syracuse and its allies; when Dorian Selinous, to the south, attacked Segesta the Segestans sent an embassy to Athens asking for aid (416/415 BC). Selinous (Selinunte) is another ancient Sicilian city whose sizeable temple still survives. The Segestan envoys stressed that this was just the start of an attempt by Syracuse and the Dorian Greeks to gain hegemony over the whole island, which is credible enough – several Syracusan tyrants had pan-Sicilian ambitions. All these arguments fed the enthusiasm of the Athenians for reopening their Sicilian front.45 Segesta was prepared to pay the Athenians for their help, sending a substantial gift of sixty talents of uncoined silver; Athenian ambassadors to Segesta were wined and dined off gold and silver plates, and carried away the impression of a fabulously wealthy island whose acquisition would serve Athenian interests very well. But the Segestans had re-used their relatively small stock of fine plate, moving it from house to house as the Athenian ambassadors were passed from host to host.46 All this, though, was more than enough to tempt the greedy Athenians, and the assembly voted to send sixty ships to Sicily; one of the commanders was Alkibiades, who was an outspoken supporter of a Sicilian expedition, and who would later shamelessly switch sides between Athens, Sparta and Persia, only to be greeted by Athens, towards the end of the war, as the city’s potential saviour.47 But Alkibiades was not given the chance to prove his worth; he was accused of involvement in a strange act of sacrilege, the nocturnal defacing of several herms, phallic sculptures, that were scattered across the city of Athens. Deciding that he was in greater danger in Athens than in Sparta, he defected to the enemy.

  In 415 the Athenians at last launched an assault on Syracuse, a difficult place to master because the city stood on a spur blocking the entrance to the grand harbour, while to the north lay marshes, quarries and open land that the competing sides sought to enclose with walls – defensive walls built by the Syracusans to keep the Athenians away, and offensive walls built by the Athenians to hem in Syracuse and dry up its supplies. Yet this struggle was not fought in isolation: the Spartans sent reinforcements, and the Athenians appealed to non-Greeks – the Etruscans and Carthaginians – for naval support. The Etruscans sent a few ships, which proved their worth; the Carthaginians were happier to sit on the sidelines, for Athenian hegemony in Sicily offered as many disadvantages to them as Syracusan.48 The arrival of a Spartan commander, Gylippos, with a small fleet and army, undermined these Athenian initiatives and, when battle was joined, the Syracusan fleet stood firm at the entrance to the Grand Harbour and was eventually able to smash the Athenian navy (including some newly arrived reinforcements).49 This was soon followed by dramatic victories on land; 7,000 Athenian soldiers were captured and taken to the quarries near Syracuse where they were left to fester in the heat, so that thousands more now died of heatstroke and malnutrition. Many were sent into slavery, though according to Plutarch one route to freedom was an ability to recite the verses of Euripides, whose plays were passionately admired by the Sicilian Greeks.50 The Sicilian expedition had therefore ended in a human disaster as painful as the plague; and it had ended in political disaster, with a tremendous loss of prestige, a sense that Athenian policy lacked direction, and the knowledge that the most capable Athenian politician of his generation, Alkibiades, was now the guest of the Spartans.

  Having gone to war over Sicily in the hope of interfering in the flow of grain towards the Peloponnese, Athens now experienced the nightmare of threats to its own grain traffic. By 411 the Spartans were trying to activate an alliance with Persia that would, they hoped, bring Phoenician ships into the Aegean. The Persian stance was ambiguous, for the Persians also parleyed with the Athenians: it would be better for them if the Greeks could fight each other to an exhausted standstill, and they could then take control of whatever they wanted. So the Phoenician fleet that was promised to Sparta in 411 never arrived, but the Peloponnesians used their own naval resources to gain control of the Hellespont and to foment revolt in the strategically vital city of Byzantion. A series of naval battles in the Hellespont demonstrated that Spartan inexperience gave the Athenian navy the edge in a pitched battle at sea; but these were not easy victories for Athens, and had it lost a single battle it would probably have had to concede the whole war.51 In 406, at Arginoussai, between Chios and the Asian mainland, the Athenians won a spectacular victory at sea, losing only twenty-five out of 155 ships, but they then squandered the victory by putting the naval commanders on trial: they had committed sacrilege by failing to recover the bodies of drowned Athenian sailors from the sea.

  The Spartans knew how to respond; they were busily building a fleet of their own.52 Simply ravaging Attika would not bring them victory; this was a war that had to be won at sea. In the sixth century Sparta had already challenged Polykrates of Samos at sea, and Sparta’s commitment to its navy must not be underestimated; the Spartans managed to mobilize their allies and dependants, making use of helot oarsmen. One of their most successful commanders in the last stages of the war with Athens was the naval commander (nauarchos) Lysandros or Lysander, who was regarded as so effective that, when his commission expired and he was no longer eligible to serve as nauarchos, he was appointed deputy to a nominal nauarchos and left to finish the task of defeating Athens. It was he who brought the war to its effective end in the battle of Aigospotamoi (405), where he captured or sank almost the entire Athenian navy.53 Athens sued for peace and its empire crumbled; Sparta was now the Hellenic imperial power, even though it had to struggle hard on both land and sea in the first years of the fourth century to assert its supremacy.54

  The Peloponnesian War resulted, then, in the transformation of the Aegean Sea from an Athenian to a Spartan lake. Yet this war had also had violent repercussions in the Adriatic and in Sicily. It was a war in which imperial ambitions became fatally intermeshed with economic questions, above all the issue of who would control the supply routes bringing grain to Athens and other cities from Sicily, the Aegean and the Black Sea. And yet, by the end of the fourth century BC, the age of the city-states was drawing to a close; the political and economic geography of the eastern Mediterranean, including the flow of grain, altered decisively following the conquests of a Macedonian king obsessed with his own divinity. Moreover, it was in the west that the next great struggle for domination of Mediterranean waters would occur, as Carthage began to face ever more serious rivals to its regional hegemony. Two cities on the coast of Africa, Carthage and Alexandria, dominate the political and cultural history of the Mediterranean over the next couple of centuries.

  6

  The Lighthouse of the Mediterranean,

  350 BC–100 BC

  I

  In 333 BC Alexander III, king of Macedon, whose claims to Greekness were treated with some scepticism down in Athens, wreaked vengeance on the Persian kings who had posed such a threat to Greece in past centuries, by defeating a massive Persian army at the battle of the Issos, beyond the Cilician Gates. Yet he did not pursue the Persian king, Darius III, into the Persian heartlands. He well understood the need to neutralize Persian power along the shores of the Mediterranean, and marched south through Syria and Palestine, where he ruthlessly took charge
of the Phoenician cities that had in the past provided Persia with its fleets; Tyre resisted him for seven months, much to his fury, even after he built the great mole that for ever after joined the island city to the mainland. Once he had captured Tyre, most of its inhabitants were slaughtered, enslaved or crucified.1 He bypassed Jerusalem, choosing the road through Gaza, since his real target at this stage was Egypt, ruled by a Persian satrap for nearly 200 years, since the days of Cambyses, and his conquest of this land transformed not just Egypt but the entire eastern Mediterranean. The result of his victory was that Egypt was turned around, looking outwards to the Mediterranean rather than inwards to the Nile valley.2 In 331 BC he decided to found a city on the northernmost edge of Egypt, on a limestone spur separated from the alluvial lands of the interior by a freshwater lake – a city next to rather than actually in Egypt, as its designation in later Latin documents as Alexandria ad Aegyptum, ‘Alexandria on the way to [or ‘next to’] Egypt’, affirms. This sense that Alexandria was more a city of the Mediterranean than of Egypt would persist for over two millennia, until the expulsion of its foreign communities in the twentieth century. For much of that period it was the greatest city in the Mediterranean.