A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War

by Victor Davis Hanson

  Yelling, confrontation, perhaps even outright fights were common as rowers elbowed one another. Anyone who has tried to put on football gear in a jam-packed, steamy August locker room can get some idea of the petty squabbles and temper tantrums below the deck. Sometimes crewmen fouled each other’s oars, or encroached on another’s cramped rowing space. By the end of the war, after thousands of citizen rowers were long dead, the poor, foreigners, residents, and slaves were drafted and all sat together, finding a messy equality on benches that was unknown even in the democratic assembly.

  Crewmen always preferred striking calm seas to achieve the greatest efficiency. Yet because of the disharmony of three tiers of oarsmen, only 30 of some 170 rowers ever really hit completely undisturbed seas. Most rowers, then, were pulling their oars in the wake of others and found it difficult to hit choppy and swirling waters squarely with any force.

  Right above the lowly thalamites sat the middle bank of 54 zygite oarsmen, who were perched on the ship’s main crossbeams (zyga). They, too, could not see the water and rowed through portholes. But at least these “crossbeamers” in the middle bank had more room and did not have to contend with the legs and the rumps of the oarsmen above.

  The top row of two banks, the most prestigious slots and so often the best paid, was occupied by 62 thranites in total, port and starboard. These elite rowers were above the splashing of the seas and enjoyed constant breezes. They sat on an outrigger, and besides the fresh air, sunlight, and greater room could alone of the crew see their oars hit the sea and communicate with the rowers below. If they were the most vulnerable to enemy missiles, thranites were also the most likely to get out of the ship alive if it was rammed and sank.

  Presumably those rowers with either the greatest experience or demonstrably superior skills, whether judged by consistently hitting the water with a full stroke or stamina in maintaining a steady pull for hours on end, were selected for these favored benches on the ship. Thranites seemed to have set the pulse of the oarage for the entire crew. They were those most attuned to the vagaries of wind and current, nearby ships, and their combined effect on the trireme’s speed and steadiness. Indeed, because of the elite rowers’ expertise and experience, nominal thranites may have sometimes been scattered throughout the ship on all three banks to ensure that such steady role models were never far away.

  The competence of rowers varied widely within a fleet. Sometimes oarsmen could be culled out and assembled together to create a small elite flotilla that could achieve speeds consistently greater than normal. Experience seems to be the requisite for rowing excellence. So it is probable that many of the best rowers were in their thirties and forties and—at Athens, at least—veterans of dozens of campaigns when the war broke out.3

  Battle Afloat

  When a phalanx—thousands of men in polished armor arrayed in neat columns—lowered its spears in unison, it was lauded as a fierce hedgehog raising its bristles. For the Greeks the banked oars of a fast-moving trireme swishing in perfect rhythm in and out of the sea lent an equally profound impression of a living, breathing entity. As dozens of such eerie vessels bore down on an enemy in matched order and cadence, crews and onlookers alike were caught up in the spectacle. On the ships’ prows, painted or inlaid-marble apotropaic eyes glowered like sea monsters at the doomed target ahead.

  Part of the trick in turning mundane wooden triremes into frightening visual spectacles centered on their multifarious decorations: eyes, nameplates, painted figureheads, and various ornaments. Perhaps the only way to tell one state’s trireme from another’s was the wooden statue of the particular tutelary deity affixed above the ram—in the case of Athens, representations of Pallas Athena. Because many of these ships were paid for and outfitted by private citizens, there was a natural rivalry among the wealthy to launch the most impressive trireme in the fleet, one that might not only startle potential enemies but also encourage the better oarsmen to sign up as rowers.

  Fleets could become symbols of national power and were often specially adorned to galvanize public support and acclaim. Returning admirals often garlanded their triremes, decked them out with captured arms, and towed dozens of captured ships into port—such as Alcibiades’ magnificent return to the Piraeus from triumph in the Hellespont, when the Athenian fleet arrived hauling in 200 captured Peloponnesian triremes.4

  “A terror to enemies” and “a joy to her friends,” Xenophon wrote of an oared ship in ramming mode, the chief method of attack. The swish of the oar, the rhothion, of a rapidly advancing trireme was famous. Both the sound and the look added to the drama, and presaged something terrible to come. Thucydides emphasized “the fear of the swishing” (phobos rhothiou), which only compounded the scary sight of a trireme bearing down. Triremes, like later full-masted men-of-war, were beautiful and occasionally noisy vessels, and they captured contemporaries’ imaginations in ways most other more workmanlike warships, from Roman galleys to ironclads, did not. With a length six or seven times its width and a massive ram, the sleek trireme in one sense was simply a floating spear.5

  The protocols of sea battle by intent resembled a hoplite encounter on water. The generals harangued their troops before embarking. Both sides usually sought to ram and smash each other. Combatants chanted a war cry. Upon conclusion, the dead were given up under truce, and a trophy was erected nearby on shore. If Greek infantrymen ran into battle yelling, Eleleu! or Alala!, sailors kept mostly silent, at least until the final seconds. Sometimes as they went into their ramming strokes for the last few thousand yards before collision they chanted in unison, Ryppapai! Ryppapai! Ryppapai! and O opop! O opop!—or so Aristophanes wrote.

  Just as often, as if they were hoplites in the phalanx, they broke out in a longer, more formulaic war cry or chant, the paean, to keep cadence, promote élan, terrify the enemy, and ward off evil. As triremes approached the enemy, trumpets would sound, the war cry would reverberate throughout the fleet, and general shouting would erupt, veteran rowers especially eager to be the first to strike the enemy fleet.6

  Order and unity were critical on board oared ships, amid the distractions of the loud swishing and the piper’s tune to guarantee good rowing time. Idle chatter and its resulting inattention might mean that a Greek trireme’s 170 oars—broad, short shafts for the calm waters of the Mediterranean—would soon fall out of synchronization. In a matter of seconds, the relatively light ship could stall or become buffeted by winds. So, for example, in 429 the Athenian admiral Phormio reminded his sailors as they set out for a second engagement against the Peloponnesian fleet in the Corinthian Gulf, “Be careful to keep order and silence”—the keys to battle success—“especially in sea warfare.” The challenge for trireme warfare was not just enemy ships but also the very intricate mechanics of oared propulsion itself.7

  Most trireme sailors rowed blindly, not just by rote and practice but also through the sheer inability to see the sea below. Indeed, 108 of the 170 rowers, those in the two lower vertical banks, sat enclosed inside the hull. They could not even steal a momentary glance to see their own oars hit the water. To learn where and how far away the enemy was, these sightless oarsmen counted on the warnings of the coxswain, and perhaps even the top bank of rowers, perched on the outriggers. The latter might for a few seconds lift their heads up to scan the oarage and warn of problems, periodically apprising the rest of the crew of the efficacy of their own blind strokes.

  Yet given the low ride of a trireme in the sea, even the officers and seamen in the top bank of oars could take in very little of the battle. Greece’s ubiquitous headlands and promontories often cut off sight lines in battles, which were typically fought close to shore. In the case of the Ionian theater, especially in the battles in the Hellespont at Aegospotami, Cynossema, Cyzicus, and Sestos, triremes were often rarely more than two or three miles from the coast. Unlike land warfare, there were no hills from which trierarchs might look down upon the nature of their deployment either before or during the battle—or the tall mas
ts of later men-of-war, by which the pilot could send up lookouts to shout coordinates to officers below.

  The blind world of a Greek warship suddenly ended when the trireme either hit the enemy or was rammed itself. “Quite simply, over the entire harbor arose the crash of the colliding ships and the cry of desperate struggling men, killing and in turn dying,” Diodorus wrote of the Athenian fleet as it smashed into its Syracusan counterpart in the Great Harbor. “No one could hear any of the commands once the boats hit each other and their oars smashed together, and at the same time was added the racket of the men fighting on the ships and their supporters on shore.” Diodorus reminds us, “When a ship was caught by several triremes, and struck in every direction by their massive rams, once the water poured in, the ship and its entire crew were swallowed by the sea.”

  When triremes collided, men were immediately jarred from their seats, and bedlam followed. If they were on the attack, the orders—how the boatswain’s commands could be heard in the midst of battle is unknown—went out to back immediately to disengage the ram from the struck ship, lest the doomed enemy seamen and marines swarm onto their own decks.

  In turn, if struck broadside at ten knots with a wooden ram weighing four to five hundred pounds and sheathed and tipped with bronze, seamen either jumped into the water or boarded the attacker in the few seconds before their own trireme, penetrated at the waterline, was partially submerged. When the Athenian assembly voted to put down the rebellion at Mytilene or to launch an armada against Sicily, most of the 6,000 to 7,000 voters crammed onto the rocky Pynx—the meeting place below the Acropolis—were themselves veterans of this macabre warfare at sea: rowers and rammers first, participants in democracy second.

  At top speed a trireme could power into a targeted hull with fifty tons’ worth of destructive force and send in thousands of gallons of seawater in seconds. Indeed, sometimes the first hit put such an enormous hole in the enemy hull that the ship was immediately swamped. But a Greek warship could attack only in one direction. Even its own few missile troops offered little offense amidships. In some cases skilled crewmen could orchestrate ramming attacks against a number of ships that found themselves unable to turn about, knocking apart targeted triremes even as they sought to flee past, to shore.

  Free-for-All

  Prepositioning in trireme fighting was everything. Amid wind, waves, and other ships, once battle commenced it could take critical minutes to turn around such a large oared ship to face an attacking enemy. On a normally outfitted ship, only about 4 or 5 archers and some 10 or so marines on deck hit passing ships with missiles, or were ready to board and fight on enemy decks once a trireme came into range. If the fight was in the calm waters of harbors, crews could stockpile stones. Then when two ships were stuck in a death grip, dozens who were not trained archers or marines might pelt their adversaries, in hopes of killing the enemy’s available oarsmen. This auxiliary crew of soldiers was vital: if a ship lost its own infantry defenders, enemy hoplites could easily slaughter the packed crew trapped below as it scrambled to climb out, the men for the most part half-naked and without arms. And when a trireme went down, enemy sailors might hover around to spear defenseless oarsmen who frantically reemerged, gasping for air. At the battle in the Great Harbor at Syracuse (413), “those who were swimming away from their sunken ships were wounded by arrows or killed outright when struck by spears.”8

  Admirals usually commanded the fleet from the lead ships. There was no flagship full of officers at the rear. Some of the most well-known commanders—in the manner of Lord Nelson—died at sea, like the Athenian Eurymedon at Syracuse and the Spartan Mindarus at the battle of Cyzicus. On rare days defeated commanders killed themselves, and their bodies were washed ignominiously to shore—such was the case with the Spartan Timocrates at the second defeat in the Corinthian Gulf in 429.9

  The rowers had to sense the pulse of the battle, since most verbal orders were impossible to hear when wood hit wood. Most sailors were probably trained to row blindly and adjust their rhythm to what they felt and sensed rather than saw or heard. Being rammed in the vulnerable broadsides was not the only worry. Sometimes ships hit each other head-on and got locked together, victory in that case going to the vessel that could pull out more quickly and had suffered less from the leakage caused by a damaged ram. In theory, a dozen or so crewmen scurried around with extra oars, planking, and rigging to plug holes and ensure that a disabled ship could stay afloat. In fact, even a small leaking hole would partially submerge a trireme in minutes. In engagements of 200 to 300 ships—and there were several such showdowns in the latter Peloponnesian War—40,000 to 60,000 men, the equivalent of a large Greek city, were at once hurling missiles, rowing, boarding, clinging to wreckage, and swimming to shore. So in minutes the seas were flooded with the flotsam and jetsam of broken triremes, bodies, and men splashing and clinging to debris.

  Because there were no uniforms or clear naval insignia—oarsmen probably wore little more than a loincloth during summer sailing—crews sometimes even attacked their own ships, killing friendly sailors in the heat and panic of battle. Often ships were grappled and snagged. Then the sea fight “of the old style” might better resemble a land battle, as both marines and rowers joined in the confused melee. The immediate goal was to kill more enemy sailors than you lost friendly seamen, and then to choose the more seaworthy of the two craft and try to disentangle and row away from the wreckage. Thucydides concludes of the battle of Sybota, fought two years before the war, that the killing was so tumultuous, no one could hear anything at all in the clamor; he adds that victory hinged more on force than on skill:

  The sea battle was brutal, not so much due to skill, but rather because it more resembled an infantry battle on land. For whenever they crashed against each other, the ships could not easily be separated, partly because of the sheer number and crowding of the vessels, but still more because they trusted in the hoplites deployed on the decks, who stood and fought while the ships remained motionless.10

  The Peloponnesians and, later, the Syracusans learned that to defeat the Athenians it was necessary to neutralize their superior seamanship—inasmuch as almost all Greek maritime states throughout the eastern Mediterranean had “gone trireme” and built ships that were remarkably uniform in size and construction. Overcoming Athenian expertise was sometimes accomplished by fighting in the narrows, employing head-on crashes with reinforced rams, or using small boats with missile troops to row alongside and shower the enemy with javelins. Just as the Athenians had learned never to meet Spartan hoplites in a so-called fair fight on a level plain, her enemies acknowledged that it was equally perilous in the early years of the war to take on the experienced Athenian fleet in open waters. The key to understanding the Peloponnesian War is not just that Athens was a naval power and Sparta fought by land; rather, of the 1,500-some city-states Athens was by far the strongest seapower, while Spartan hoplites were the preeminent infantry in Greece.

  Only superbly trained crews could maintain their triremes in any formation, given the vagaries of wind and current and the fear of enemy attack. The Athenian admiral Phormio, for example, at the first battle of Naupaktos completely encircled the Corinthian fleet and left it in confusion, buffeted by panicking sailors struggling to row in seas that were choppy and full of confused triremes. One of the problems of waging the Ionian War in or near the Hellespont was that the strong current of the strait often made operations nearly impossible.

  Even when fighting started, the running, hurling, and jumping of even a half dozen combatants on the deck, in addition to their sheer weight, must have made the careful work of the rowers beneath almost impossible, explaining why the triremes were often “motionless” as the deck fighting proceeded. Rarely in the history of sea warfare has the range of options been so severely curtailed by the fragile nature of the craft involved. Often defeat at sea is attributed not to enemy action but to the simple confusion and misdirection of desperate rowers trying to keep their shi
ps in proper attack formation against the variables of wind and current. For example, the Spartan general Gylippus assured his crews at Syracuse (413) that the Athenian plan to load their triremes with extra marines—to turn the battle in the Great Harbor into a sort of infantry tumult—would be counterproductive precisely because so many men scrambling on deck and their lack of training at throwing javelins while sitting would confuse the rowers and put the ships off keel.11

  Modern simulations have suggested that even the presence of a single man moving about on the canopy deck of a trireme could adversely affect the rowing. And the accuracy of such missile troops was not very good anyway except at very close ranges, given that both platform and target were rolling on the waves. Part of the crew’s training, then, was not merely rowing but the ability to work without extraneous movement that could interrupt offensive operations of the ship, and even jeopardize the ship’s safety while in transit.

  All sides tried to apply innovations to the standard trireme design to gain an advantage in what was mostly a collision between like ships. As triremes raced into battle, crews often put up side screens (pararrumata) to deflect missiles with flat trajectories from hitting the top bank of rowers (the thranite seamen) or to keep arced shots from raining down among the entire crew. The idea of such airborne assault was not to kill all the crew but perhaps to stun, wound, or disable enough oarsmen to disrupt the very movement of the ship, since a trireme’s smooth strokes could be ruined by losing key rowers to wounds or panic.12

  In other instances, ship-to-ship engagements were not even the focus of sea battle. Instead, sometimes in harbor battles divers drove stakes into shallow waters to tear out the hulls of unsuspecting triremes. In response to these close-to-shore tactics, specially outfitted triremes were equipped with cranes to pull such obstacles from the bottom of harbors, while forces on land fought over forts and docks, on the assumption that at some point the fleet would have to come in, be resupplied, and undergo repairs.13