The same ingenuity of response and counterresponse that had characterized the siege of Plataea was extended to sea, or at least to fighting on calmer waters near land. Merchant ships might cluster around harbors or places of refuge to offer safe haven for their own retreating triremes. On rare occasions crews hung enormous lead weights (“dolphins”), or even heavy stones, from their much longer spars, which could then be dropped opportunely onto enemy triremes as they raced in, plunging through the benches and decks, and tearing holes in the hull.14
Even straightforward sea fights rarely resulted in simple contact between two opposing triremes. More often it was instead a matter of three ships hitting two, or four against one—and being rammed while ramming the enemy. Besides ramming and boarding ships, there was a third way to ruin a trireme: cutting off its path to the open seas and gradually forcing it landward, where it could be driven onto shore, beached, and its crew rendered temporarily helpless as land-based infantry rushed into the surf to cut down sailors struggling to leave the ship.
Thucydides emphasizes just such chaos at the infamous battle of Sybota, on the eve of the war, when the Corinthians had no idea whether they were winning or being conquered by the Corcyraean fleet. Out of this bedlam within an hour or two a general consensus arose that one side—in the first few years of the war usually the more skilled and numerous Athenians and their allies—was destroying more ships than it was losing. Then the call went out among the defeated for each ship to save itself and row in frenzy back to base. Because triremes were costly and, like bronze panoplies, universally used by all sides in the Peloponnesian War, disabled ships and even floating wrecks were precious. They were also easily salvageable, since without ballast ruined vessels rarely were lost, but bobbed about only partially submerged. Because triremes relied on speed rather than stability to guarantee survival there was very little sand or stone in the hold as ballast, and water jugs were probably all that was carried to provide stabilizing weight.
Trireme buoyancy explains why ancient descriptions of sea battles are replete with broken ships and planks fouling the surface. The victors immediately tried to rope and tow away any ship worth possible salvaging on the theory that these showy trophies were far less expensive to repair than the construction of entirely new triremes and might offset the enormous costs involved in naval warfare. As in the case of hoplite panoplies, the equipment of trireme warfare was recyclable, the winners sometimes ending even hard-fought battles with more ships than when they’d begun. The aftermath of a trireme engagement must have been a strange sight, as dozens of wrecks were tied to the victors’ ships, which rowed off with tow cables. Indeed, so similar in appearance were the respective fleets that both sides were often unsure whether sudden reinforcements were friendly or hostile.
In general, sea fights lasted far longer than hoplite battles, inasmuch as marching forward to spear and slash in heavy armor was a more exhausting task than to row at sea.
Lots of Ways to Die
Greek sailors were familiar with the seas, and in almost every maritime battle the fighting took place within a few thousand yards of shore. Mass drownings should have been relatively avoidable, unlike the debacle at Salamis, where perhaps 40,000 Persians and their allies, many fully clothed and unused to the water, were lost amid the wreckage. The scandal at the battle of Arginusae, after which six of the victorious Athenian generals were executed for allowing hundreds of their kindred sailors to drown while clinging to debris in storm-driven seas, was an aberration, thus explaining the unusual wrath of the Athenian assembly, which could not be assuaged even by the fact of the enemy’s far greater losses.
Frequent drowning was relatively common inasmuch as few Greeks swam on a regular basis to guarantee their survival in rough seas. When a ship was hit, it was not easy to get out from the cramped rowing bench, climb through dozens of panicky seamen, avoid jagged wooden debris, missiles, and boarders, and then swim the thousands of yards to shore. On a crippled ship, the key to survival was to manage to disengage, row away, and allow the crew to jump overboard well distant from the enemy—such as the Athenians who escaped after their defeat at Notium in 406, losing 22 ships but saving most of the sailors.
What percentage of a ship’s crew was lost when a trireme was submerged is not recorded. Yet there are plenty of descriptions in Greek literature to suggest that on occasion a ship’s entire complement of seamen could be killed, lost, or taken prisoner. Inclement weather—as, for example, off Cape Athos in 411 (12 of 10,000 saved) or at the battle of Arginusae in 406—seemed to ensure that sinking warships would doom their entire crews.15
It was not an easy thing for the wounded and bleeding to be picked up by friendly ships or to swim to land. And very few of the uninjured could climb out of the cramped hull safely and quickly—not when the task of merely embarking took several minutes, as the crew tried to find their proper places. Even if oarsmen made it out of a damaged ship without major injuries, they were not home free. Rough seas, foul weather, the cold, and more could easily ensure that thousands went down even when clinging to floating debris.
Drowning was considered the most nightmarish of deaths in Greek popular religion. It was angst over that dreaded end of hundreds of their comrades that led the Athenians to put their own generals on trial after the victory at Arginusae in 406. Thousands back home lamented their kinsmen’s souls roaming the netherworld without rest while their unclaimed bodies rotted without proper burial observance. The scapegoating after Arginusae, along with the vote and revote concerning the fate of the prisoners on Mytilene and the postbellum trial of Socrates, is usually recalled as one of the worst moments in the history of Athenian democracy. One of the most eerie scenes in Aristotle’s Constitution of the Athenians is his account of the show trials: the inebriate demagogue sauntering into the assembly hall, decked out in his breastplate, ready to denigrate, browbeat, or accuse any who stood between him and butchering the very men who had given Athens its greatest victory. In any case, the people soon repented their stupid and immoral action. Callixeinos, the proposer of the illegal motion to try all the Arginusae generals on death charges en masse, “was hated by everyone and died of starvation.”16
Often the victors were more brutal than the chilly and choppy seas. Rowers, after all, like aircraft-carrier crews, were also premium military assets who took months to train and who, once lost, were not easily replaced. Although the rules of war in theory protected prisoners at sea, as the conflict wore on clemency was ignored and the more savage protocols of the siege and ambush took hold. Often it made better sense to row away and leave the wounded of the enemy to the seas. Only that way could the manpower pool of skilled oarsmen be permanently reduced, without incurring the odium of violating understood conventions that might prompt retaliation—the sea, not men, killing the defenseless in the water.
Yet sometimes captured crews were brought ashore and either cut down or maimed—often grotesquely, by cutting off the right hand or thumb to guarantee that they could never row again. It is unclear which side began to initiate such brutal practices. But in the later part of the Ionian War, the Athenian general Philocles persuaded the Athenian assembly to go on record as allowing trireme captains to chop off the right hand of all prisoners taken at sea. Presumably his idea was that only such tough measures would stop the desertions of imperial seamen tempted to join the Spartans by promises of higher pay.
Philocles himself was known to have ordered captured oarsmen thrown overboard on the high seas, which explains why the Spartans executed almost every Athenian they got their hands on after their final victory at Aegospotami—a staggering number that might have reached 3,500. On an early-fifth-century black-figure vase, prisoners at sea are shown bound with rope, thrown overboard, and then pushed underwater with sticks and spears—suggesting that such a cruel fate was not uncommon.17
The execution of the Athenian prisoners after Aegospotami—Philocles himself was executed on Lysander’s orders—may have ranked as
the worst single-day execution of Greeks in the entire war. More were probably butchered than those cut down at Mytilene, Scione, and Melos and the dead exceeded the number of those murdered by the infamous Thirty Tyrants, who overthrew the democracy at war’s end. The toll from Aegospotami was not matched until Alexander the Great killed almost every Theban male when he razed Thebes in 335 or cut down most of the Greek mercenaries in the aftermath of Granicus, a year later. Lysander would have done better to spare the crew, sell them into slavery, and share the profits with his own oarsmen, a practice that was common by war’s end as well.18
Perhaps the most common method of dispatching defeated seamen was to sail amid the wreckage and spear them like fish. The accepted idea was that the battle was not quite over, and thus men clinging to enemy wreckage were still fair game and could be killed without moral censure or fear of reprisals. After the battle off the Sybota Islands, the Corinthian ships rowed among the wreckage killing all the Corcyraean survivors they could find. So intent were they on finishing off the helpless enemy that they ignored towing back the damaged ships and finally even inadvertently began murdering their own men in the water. At the second battle off Naupaktos a contingent of Athenian ships got cut off and was driven to shore. Once beached, all the crewmen who could not lumber out of their triremes were executed on their benches by boarders.19
Two millennia before the victorious Christians at Lepanto (1571) had scoured the wreckage to execute any Ottomans found alive in the water—after that battle at least 30,000 Turks were presumed killed—the Greeks of the Peloponnesian War accepted the brutal calculus that the murder of helpless sailors meant less chance of meeting such trained rowers in the next round of battle. Hoplites on all sides were farmers or property owners; in contrast, rowers were the poor and foreigners—even, at times, slaves—who shared no gentlemanly pretensions about some mythical common agrarian status. Often it was the marines, mostly hoplite soldiers themselves, who did much of the spearing of trapped rowers—and who would have been the first to have perished in their breastplates once the ship was swamped. Most of those killed on deck may well have been lost to missiles rather than drowning. Yet because Thucydides and other historians almost always record naval losses by triremes destroyed or captured, it makes it nearly impossible to translate such generalization into any accurate number of killed or wounded. The particular condition of the seas, the nature of nearby land, the attitude held toward the enemy, and the status of the ship could all determine how many sailors escaped a doomed trireme.20
Reputation and Fear
The Spartans were essentially wiped out at the sea battle of Arginusae. The Athenian fleet ceased to exist after Aegospotami. In the former case, the Athenians enjoyed immediate naval supremacy and the Spartans sought peace. In the latter, the Athenians lost the war in a single day as Lysander’s fleet made ready to sail into Athens.
Entire fleets that acknowledged their seamen to be inexperienced were often scared that a superior navy would make short work of them. It was precisely that fear that prompted Athens to keep a reserve fund of 1,000 talents and 100 of “the best” triremes to protect the Piraeus, as a last resort should the Peloponnesians ever achieve naval supremacy and thus cruise freely in the Aegean and then right into their home port. Even the Athenians accepted the fact that at sea anything could happen, that whole fleets with thousands could go down in a few hours.21
Because there was no way to stop Pericles’ navy in the early years of the war, Corinthian ships were often terrified at the very approach of the Athenian triremes. Against Phormio in the Corinthian Gulf they became so confused by superior Athenian seamanship that they gave up defending themselves and tried to row away to safety. In response to the acknowledged asymmetry, the Syracusan Hermocrates conceded to his followers the superior proficiency of his Athenian enemies—“the skill of the enemy that you so especially dread”—but insisted that their own greater number of ships and courage could still trump such Athenian advantages if they confined the battle to favored locales. Phobos, or fear of “the dreadful Athenian presence,” is often alluded to as a prime factor in all sea battles with the Athenians before their catastrophe in Sicily, as if most other Greeks admitted that they had little chance of survival in a fair fight against such seamen.22
When the war broke out the Athenians themselves proved arrogant, convinced after the fifty-year administration of a maritime empire that they were de facto invincible at sea, “lords of the sea,” as they were generally acknowledged. Like the nineteenth-century British navy, the Athenian fleet felt that its qualitative superiority meant that it could attack any enemy at any time—whatever the theater imbalance in numbers. At the famous battle in the Corinthian Gulf in 429 Phormio told his men to disregard the size of the enemy armada: “Inasmuch as they were Athenians, they would never retreat before Peloponnesian ships, however great their number.” In the Athenian mind, victory now paid dividends later, since the rest of the Hellenic world would be constantly reminded of the futility of challenging Athenian ships. As Phormio further put it, “When men have once experienced defeat, they are not willing to maintain the same ideas about facing the same dangers.”
Ironically, that truism was never more valid than after the Athenian calamity in Sicily; the Athenians became as paralyzed with fear as the Spartans had been over a decade earlier after their own debacle on Pylos. Immediately the Athenians lost their confidence at sea. For the first time in two decades they systematically began to lose ships to the newly constructed Peloponnesian fleet. For two years, imperial seamen were fearful of battle altogether, until the victory at Cynossema in summer 411 restored some of their old swagger.23
Because naval battles took place among frail ships in often unfriendly waters and involved tens of thousands of combatants, the real lethal theaters of the Peloponnesian War turned out not to be hoplite battlefields or even sieges. The historian Barry Strauss once systematically counted only the precise fatality figures for Athenian infantrymen and their landless counterparts as recorded by contemporary sources—a fraction of the actual number, since most ancient Greek historians far more often use vague words like “many were lost” or omit casualties figures at specific battles altogether. He nevertheless observed that over twice as many Athenian thetes (who were mostly sailors) died than hoplites during the twenty-seven-year war, most of them in the brutal final decade of naval fighting. If the hoplites and cavalrymen had suffered inordinately in siege and amphibious operations during the first decade of the war, the greater losses after 413 were almost all among the rowers. When one speaks of the Peloponnesian War, the specters of Sicily, the plague, and the executions at Melos and Scione haunt our imaginations. Yet the real carnage came late in the war and at sea battles whose names are now mostly forgotten.24
The Crews
The most bizarre facet of ancient naval power was the general method of manning the triremes, a mixture of private and public finance and control that was common practice in most of the city-states. Each year at Athens, for example, four hundred of the wealthiest citizens were put on notice as being liable for obligation as trierarchs (trireme commanders), which entailed, among other responsibilities, active command of a warship at sea. Because the fleet during the war numbered about 300 ships—at one point in the war 250 triremes were at sea at the same time—three out of four annual designees were then further selected and proceeded to the dockyards at the Piraeus to take control of their allotted ships for one year.
The state usually supplied the hull, the fittings, and the crew, although in a few instances some rich men bought and outfitted their own warships altogether. But the trierarch was mostly responsible for much of the ship’s daily expenses—repairs, food, and water for the crew—and usually served as the de facto captain while on patrol. Although a few grandees sought to skimp on expenses, more often trierarchs spent far more than was required, in keen rivalry with one another to find the best rowers and helmsmen. Such, apparently, were the wages of military
philanthropy.
Private largess lavished on public ships—better rigging, hiring the best pilots, and adding bonuses to the daily wage of the rowers—might not only bring trierarchs renown but also increase the odds that in battle they themselves would survive. Thucydides says that when the Athenians left for Sicily, they departed with the best crews, ships, rigging, and figureheads. In both fighting ability and appearance, the flotilla of 415 was far more impressive than any prior armada, even those past great expeditions to Epidaurus and Potidaea at the beginning of the war, which had nevertheless set out with “poor equipment.”
At first glance such private initiative seems out of character for an all-inclusive state government like that of imperial Athens. In fact, the trierarchy was a forced contribution on the part of the wealthy to the state, what the Greeks called a liturgy. Besides finding a way to tap the capital of the rich, the polis also wished for its most wealthy citizens to serve side by side with the poorest while at sea. Some hoplites and cavalrymen, owners of farms and conservative in their political thinking, might resent the rise of a naval state. Yet the richest of all in times of war found themselves being honored for serving at the cutting edge of Athenian power. The trireme, in other words, was an extension of the democratic Athenian state and served the larger civic interest of acculturating thousands as they worked together in cramped conditions and under dire circumstances.25
Throughout classical literature the need for skilled rowers is a constant refrain. Three men from different elevations plying about the same length oars would have to maintain a synchronized sweep, always hitting the water, never striking a nearby oar, thus insuring what the Greeks called the “simultaneous hits of the oar” (kôpês xymbolê). Practice in rowing in unison was a constant requirement, and apparently a skill easily lost through inaction. It was not just that rowers had to have strength and learn to row in synchronization; they also had to get used to hitting rough seas with their oars, become accustomed to the crash and roar of battle, and expect to cruise for long hours in both heat and cold.26
A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War Page 34
