Athens alone of Greek states had the ability to reach even farther abroad, to additional millions of Mediterranean peoples in Cyprus, Egypt, southern Russia, Italy, and Sicily, in much the same manner that tiny sixteenth-century Venice was enriched by scores of trading outposts in the eastern Mediterranean. But what is meant by “reach”? Perhaps that maritime commerce was possible only through the presence of warships that could protect merchant ships from pirates and hostile powers and provide a degree of coercion to establish favorite trading relationships. Out of such free, safe trade arose an Aegean economy that was integrated through constant export and import of goods—and humans as well.
The Piraeus, and the Long Walls that linked it to the city, became almost a secular religious entity in Athenian thinking. Throughout the war there was a paranoid fixation on the harbor’s safety, this vital emporium of the empire in the Aegean. Thucydides once remarked that an aborted Peloponnesian attack against the Piraeus created among Athenians “a panic as great as any throughout the war.”48 Aristophanes used almost reverential tones to describe the chaos at the port when the Athenian fleet made ready to sail: captains shouting, money being paid, ships’ figureheads being gilded, food and water being carried on board, farewell parties, fistfights, and last-minute repairs. An anonymous conservative Athenian critic, sometimes called the “Old Oligarch,” hated his city’s naval power and the democratic culture it fostered, but then waxed eloquent about how it ensured a lucrative trade and vibrancy unmatched in the Greek world.49
Thus, the Athenians realized that such fortifications were the linchpin of an entire way of democratic and prosperous life. Despite having their fleet wiped out, facing famine, and with the Spartans camped outside the walls and demanding surrender, the Athenian assembly nevertheless initially made it a crime for any Athenian citizen to agree to Spartan armistice demands to tear down large sections of the Long Walls—and, with them, the real and symbolic guarantor of the entire idea of radical Athenian democracy.50
Militarily, maritime Athens could do more than landlocked Sparta: send troops to Pylos, raid the coast of the Peloponnese, supply a sustained war in northwestern Greece, put down revolts on the island of Lesbos, and blockade rebellious cities on the shores of the Chalcidice. As Pericles put it, sea power could not be compared to “the use of houses or agricultural land.” Rather, it represented a strength altogether different, something unrivaled that gave Athenians the freedom to go wherever they pleased, one matched by neither the king of Persia nor by “any other nations of those now on earth.” What he meant by such majestic rhetoric was that the Athenian fleet allowed the city to achieve numerical superiority in almost any local theater without the muster of a huge, ponderous land army of the type that had lumbered into Attica in the first decade of the war.
Athenian maritime flexibility, coupled with the protection of the city proper offered by the Long Walls, was the theme of almost all of Pericles’ speeches outlining Athenian wartime strategy. At the very beginning of the war, the Athenians thought that by winning over neighboring states and gaining key islands off the coast of the Peloponnese—Cythera, Cephallenia, and Zacynthus—“they might encircle the Peloponnese and conquer it.”
In addition, food, supplies, weapons, and troops themselves—all these could be transported by sea at a fraction of the cost of land support. Other than helot attendants, the Spartan army essentially had no “lift” capability whatsoever, and could operate abroad only to the degree that it could bring along a few days’ supply of food and scrounge the rest from the surrounding countryside. The Greeks deprecated the Spartan ability to conduct sieges, but inherent in that perceived weakness was their inferiority in ships, inasmuch as assaults were most often conducted against port cities. Nor was Greece a Mesopotamia or Nile Valley, where overland travel entailed level marches on well-watered ground; rather, it was a mountainous and often inhospitable country, and even today some of its mountainous coastal communities are accessible only by sea. King Agis moved against Athens from the Spartan base at Decelea only when Lysander’s triremes were in its harbor. Land powers could fight each other without warring at sea. Thebes and Sparta, for example, would later do just that for nearly thirty years during the first half of the fourth century. But they could make little headway on land against a sea power with urban fortifications.
The Burdens of the Athenian Navy
Only when warfare turned into a true transcontinental enterprise did the value of plentiful triremes diminish somewhat. For example, in the fourth century, after the loss of empire and tribute, the Athenian fleet reached its greatest size ever, 400 triremes by 300 B.C. But in a world where the new composite army of Alexander—heavy cavalry, missile troops, phalangites, and sophisticated logistics—was designed to march thousands of miles into the interior of the Persian Empire, the old parochial harbors and choke points of the city-states became irrelevant and, with them, the value of triremes themselves.
Even in the heyday of the fifth-century trireme, naval superiority came at a cost. The expense could nearly bankrupt a maritime state in a few seasons, as the British almost learned at the beginning of the twentieth century and the Russians discovered at its end. During some years Athens sent out between 200 and 250 triremes at once, and the expense nearly exhausted the state.51 The single naval catastrophe at Egypt in 454, a nightmare where at least 100 triremes were lost and, with them, in theory as many as 20,000 imperial sailors and support troops, sent aftershocks throughout the Athenian empire. The destruction of so many ships and men so quickly probably explains why in the disaster’s aftermath the Delian treasury was moved for safekeeping to Athens, the land war on the mainland was curtailed, the empire in the Aegean was tightened up, and peace feelers were extended to Persia.52
The philosophers weighed in negatively against the social effects of sea power. A disgusted Plato scoffed that the sea was a “bad neighbor” and that the glorious victory at Salamis, which had started it all, made the Athenians “worse.” It would have been better, he huffed, to send Athenian youths to the mythical Cretan Minotaur than for the city to find its autonomy and safety through a hated armada! Aristotle also could not deny the value of navies, but he urged that the seamen be kept away from the city, quarantined in an apartheid existence in a secluded port, to preclude the mongrelization of society that maritime life ensured. How insidious was a city built on sea power: paying its slaves to row, offering them freedom after victory, empowering the poor. The chaotic result, according to such abstract critics, was that a proper gentleman walking along an Athenian street could not distinguish a free man from his servant, much less expect a slave to step out of his way!53
Yet in the end it seems incredible that Athens could build and lose at least two entire fleets, pass up at least three Spartan entreaties for peace, and press on with the war for twenty-seven years. But it was not just the defeat of Athens that was at stake. Rather, for 20,000 poor Athenians, half the city’s citizenry at war’s outbreak, victory meant freedom and prosperity, while defeat was thought by many to presage a return to powerless existence under a hated landed oligarchy. Poor people, not reactionary elite horsemen or conservative yeomen farmers, wanted the Peloponnesian War, and the assurance that their bulwark of radical democracy, an imperial fleet, and an empire of tribute-paying democratic subject states would be the future of Greece. Accordingly, the last decade of sea fighting was so violent and savage precisely because hundreds of thousands of poor Greeks, in places like Byzantium, Chios, and Samos, now understood that they would either continue to vote under the aegis of an often stern Athenian imperialism or, with Athens’ defeat, be forced to accept oligarchic rule.
The wealthy in Athens felt that they had only so much capital that could be taxed. Despite the riches generated by state-owned silver mines, additional income from abroad was needed if the triremes were to stay afloat. By the second or third year of the war, the city was already nearing financial insolvency as a result of constant patrolling around the Pelo
ponnese. In response, measures were taken to increase tribute and imperial revenue as early as 428. But with continual naval action off Sicily, Melos, and Mytilene, by 426 the costs of triremes grew voracious. The old prewar annual assessment on some 200 imperial subjects had been around 500 to 600 talents, as Athens was a protection racket that billed its clients for the cost of providing their own security. Yet by just the fourth year of the war, the assessment had skyrocketed to 800 talents.
After all, if 200 ships were, in theory, in service for eight months a year and thus could consume almost 2,000 talents to outfit and man, even more tribute was required. By 425 the imperial levy soared to somewhere between 1,200 and 1,300 talents. And still the hungry triremes of Athens were short of money. A city that had once engaged in a twenty-year conundrum over the excessive cost of 1,000 talents for temples on the Acropolis was consuming more than that expense every year and showing very little progress in the war for all the sacrifice.
All that futile expense was to change in the last decade of the war, when Sparta at last came out to meet the Athenians at sea. More Greeks would fight and die in the Aegean after 411 than had during all the battles of the first two decades of the conflict, as the combatants finally agreed to meet each other in decisive battles and settle the war for good.54
CHAPTER 9
CLIMAX
TRIREME FIGHTING IN THE AEGEAN (411–405)
Sparta Builds a Fleet
After the defeat of much of the Corinthian fleet by Phormio in 429, the Peloponnesians had essentially given up the idea of defeating the Athenians at sea, much in the same way as the latter avoided pitched battle with Spartan hoplites. In response, the Athenians were often given a free hand to patrol the empire. They would do so with near impunity for almost the next sixteen years; the Peloponnesians, in contrast, resembled more the smaller German navy of the two world wars, venturing out to terrorize merchants and neutrals only when the British fleet was elsewhere or asleep.
Then, suddenly, the unexpected Athenian catastrophe of 413 in Sicily—216 imperial triremes (perhaps at least 160 of them Athenian) and almost 45,000 men of the empire were lost or captured—gave new impetus to Sparta’s efforts to catch up and build a new Pan-Peloponnesian fleet fueled by Persian money. The vast armada of Athens had always been a fluke beyond what should have been the limited resources of any single city-state. Indeed, its creation in 482 was a result only of a rich strike in the silver mines of Laurium, and it was later sustained by the imperial tribute of hundreds of subject states. In contrast, without mines or tribute-paying subjects, Sparta’s old pipe dream at the beginning of the war of creating a vast armada of 500 ships could be realized only by an unholy alliance with the empire of Persia.
It was not just that Athens had lost two-thirds of its once magnificent imperial fleet or that the roughly 100 reserve triremes that remained in the Piraeus were in various states of unreadiness. Instead, the greater dilemma was that the human losses at Sicily, coupled with the thousands of dead from the plague, had wiped out an entire generation of experienced Athenian rowers, teachers, and students of the sea, all almost impossible to replace at once. In a similar example, after the defeat of Lepanto (1571), the Ottoman catastrophe was not just the loss of almost 30,000 seamen and 200 galleys—or the thousands more sailors who were unaccounted for. Rather, the destruction of thousands of trained bowmen, archers who made Turkish ships deadly but took years to train properly, ensured that even after the hasty reconstruction of their fleet by the next year, the Ottomans would rarely again venture into Italian-controlled waters.
A third to half of the thousands of imperial rowers who were lost at Sicily were probably Athenian citizens and resident aliens. The death or capture of the remaining 20,000 foreigners and allied seamen not only drained the empire of manpower but also created waves of resentment against Athens among bereaved subjects. Long gone was the memory of the festive spectacle of cheering and merriment, and expectations of easy loot and glory on the cheap, when the grand flotilla had sailed from the Piraeus in 415. Sailing with the Athenians could quite literally get you and your sons killed.
Something had also come over the Greeks after Sicily. Perhaps it was the length of the war; it was now almost twenty years since Sparta had invaded Athens, and both desperate sides were beginning to sense that the end could not be too far away. Or maybe the increasing savagery was attributable to the mounting losses and the barbarism unleashed at Scione, Torone, and Melos. In any case, in the Archidamian War one does not sense that Spartans and Athenians hated each other. But in the last phase of the conflict, there is a real feeling of growing fury on both sides, that trireme war in the eastern Aegean was perhaps more like the Japanese, rather than the European, theater of World War II, when most soldiers gave no quarter and harbored a deep visceral and racial dislike of their enemies.
If an islander were to row in the future, it might be wiser to enlist for higher pay in the new and larger Peloponnesian fleet, which was likely to patrol in greater numbers in the eastern Aegean, which was now increasingly empty of the old Athenian triremes. As the war heightened in the eastern Aegean and the limits of Greek manpower became clear after some two decades of steady combat losses, the final sea fights became as much a bidding war for mercenary oarsmen as a test of seamanship. In other words, the war would descend into a one-sided financial contest between the limitless gold of Persia and an impoverished Athens.1
Athens started the war with 5,000 talents in reserve. But after Sicily it now had less than 500 in its treasury, scarcely enough to build 100 triremes and keep them at sea for even four months. The special emergency reserve of 1,000 talents to guarantee the safety of the Piraeus was suddenly not so sacrosanct. Thucydides concluded that besides the absence of men to make up the losses and the few triremes left in the ship sheds, there was also “no money in the treasury.” In addition, the two traditional sources of Athenian naval financing—silver from Laurium and tribute from the Aegean—were now imperiled by Spartan ravagers and ships. Most Greeks thought that after Sicily “the war was over.” Thus, should Sparta somehow find the capital to build a fleet and pay for its new crews, there was a good chance that by 413 its rowers would be no more inexperienced than most Athenian replacement oarsmen.2
After a few years of valuable help to the Peloponnesian navy, the Persians decided to take a far more active role when the maverick Spartan admiral Lysander and the renegade teenaged Achaemenid prince Cyrus struck a partnership of convenience in 407, one that meant the Peloponnesians would have a nearly unlimited supply of capital to build ships and hire crews. With overwhelming numerical superiority, the Spartans could afford to keep challenging the Athenians at sea, backed up by the assurance that their losses would be made good as they wore down the Athenian fleet in a theater vital to the continuance of imported food and precious tribute.3 Even earlier, after the defeat at Cyzicus in spring 410, the Persian satrap Pharnabazus had encouraged the demoralized Spartans to remember that there was plenty of timber for ships in Persia, and lots of replacement arms, money, and clothing to reequip any sailors who survived the defeat.4
In the immediate aftermath of the Athenian catastrophe at Sicily, when it came time to pony up for Peloponnesian triremes, the Boeotians, Corinthians, Locrians, Phocians, Megarians, and the states of the Argolid sent out no more than 75 ships. Along with the Spartans’ own paltry 25 triremes, that still made up a combined fleet of only about 100 ships. The Sicilian allies proved an equal disappointment. Despite having been saved by the timely arrival of a Peloponnesian fleet in the harbor at Syracuse, in recompense they added little more than 22 vessels to the Spartan cause—given their worries over a nearby aggressive Carthage. So there loomed the chance that in 412 the Peloponnesians might soon achieve numerical parity at sea, a situation in the short-term that meant Sparta could at least engage the green reconstituted Athenian fleet with an equal number of ships and crews no more inexperienced.
The inclusion of seasoned naval officers fro
m Syracuse and Corinth who long had organized fleets might account for some sharing of nautical experience among the high command of the grand Peloponnesian fleet. At times, for example, there is special mention of skilled navigators like Ariston the Corinthian, who was “the best pilot of the Syracusan fleet.” He had devised a stratagem for feeding his seamen rapidly on shore and getting their triremes back in action as quickly as possible. The same innovator was most probably responsible for attaching shorter and lower rams to the Syracusan ships, to ensure that they struck below the waterline and with greater force.5
Nevertheless, what has never been adequately explained is how a landlocked reactionary state like Sparta, one that not only had little experience with the sea but openly loathed the entire social cargo that accompanied naval power, in the space of less than a decade turned green crews and brand-new triremes into a formidable and seasoned opponent of the great fleet of Athens. The creation of an eastern Aegean Spartan flotilla, alongside the Roman armada during the Punic Wars and the Japanese imperial fleet at the beginning of the twentieth century, ranks as one of the great naval achievements in history.
Ancient observers remarked on the sheer audacity of Spartan naval power, usually through acknowledgment by Spartans themselves that they had no real idea of what they were doing. “Sending out men who had no experience with the sea” to replace “men who were just beginning to understand naval matters” summed up Spartan policy in the eastern Aegean—as if one Spartan hoplite on deck was as good as another.6 Contemplating Spartans out in the middle of the Aegean on rocking triremes, one might paraphrase Samuel Johnson and wonder not that it was done well, but that it was done at all.
A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War Page 37
