30. 4.42.1 to 4.44.1. The critical role of the Athenian horsemen at the battle, and the dramatic nature of their appearance by maritime transport, quickly became a source of Athenian pride. Cf., e.g., Aristophanes, Knights, 565–80, 595–610.
31. 5.73.1, 4.95.2; cf. 4.89. The alarmist logic of Hippocrates is puzzling, inasmuch as the year before, the Athenians had taken the Spartan captives from Sphacteria and threatened to kill them all should Sparta ever again invade. And between 425 and the construction of Decelea in 413 there was no Spartan invasion at all—despite the Spartans’ ability to call on the Boeotian cavalry at almost any time they wished.
32. See the gory account in Diodorus (13.44–115), a native of Sicily, of the unsuccessful Carthaginian operations between 410 and 405 to take the island, an especially brutal conflict that may have cost more lives than were lost in the main theaters of the contemporaneous Peloponnesian War, and in part explains why the victorious Syracusans in 413 were in no position to aid Sparta in finishing off Athens.
33. For the confusing array of postbellum events, see Finley, Sicily, 68–73, and especially Lintott, Violence, 191–96. The amazing effort in creating fortifications on Syracuse is told by Diodorus 14.18.1–6.
34. For the famous assessment of Thucydides, see 2.65.11, which most scholars believe was one of his latest in the history and written in light of the end of the war. See Hornblower, Commentary, 1.347–48, and Gomme, Commentary, 1.194–96.
35. Cf. Gaebel, Cavalry Operations, 100–09. The cardinal rule of Greek warfare—cavalry could never charge the unbroken spears of the hoplite phalanx—remained unchallenged. But the Peloponnesian War proved that Greek fighting need not any longer be decided solely in small enclosed plains, between neighbors no more than a two- or three-day march away.
Chapter 8
1. See Diodorus 13.37–8, and the famous description in Thucydides (8.2) of the city-states of the entire Greek world stirring at the news, preparing to shed their neutrality and actively support the Spartan cause, with the subjects of the Athenian empire ready to revolt “beyond their ability” to do so.
2. Aristophanes, Frogs, 1074. Comedy and literature in general attest to blistered hands and rumps, exhausted crews, dire thirst and cold, all suggesting that trireme service was as unpleasant as it was dangerous. See Morrison, Oared Warships, 324–40, for the difficulties of the crew and the calculus of trireme oarage.
3. For crews, see Xenophon, Hellenica, 1.6.16. Given the apparent uniformity of the ranks of the phalanx and rowers in a trireme, it is hard to tell whether ancient commanders went through their call-up rosters to find hoplites or oarsmen with exceptional records of excellence. In preparation for Sicily, Thucydides says that the trierarchs gave bounties to the thranite rowers, and the generals tried to cull through the hoplite rosters to find the best oarsmen (6.31.3).
4. There is a fine description, replete with ancient references, to a trireme’s striking appearance in Amit, Athens and the Sea, 12–13; cf. Torr, Ancient Ships, 66–69. On the magnificent return of the Athenian fleet in 408, see Diodorus 13.68.2–5.
5. On the sights, sounds, and impressions of contemporary triremes, see ancient observations at Xenophon, Oeconomicus, 8.8; Aristophanes, Knights, 546; Aristotle, History of Animals, 4.8.533B6; and Thucydides 4.10.5.
6. In theory, sailors could hear as well as infantrymen; apparently the roar of oars hitting the water would have been no more noisy than the clattering of hoplite bronze and wood as thousands marched forward. For the war cry and other songs, see Aristophanes, Frogs, 1073; cf. Wasps, 909. Cf. Thucydides 1.50.5; Diodorus 13.15.31 and 99.1; and Pritchett, Greek States, 1.105–08.
7. 2.89.9. Far more important than numbers per se was seamanship. In most battles victory hinged on the ability of triremes to launch quickly, get into close formation and stay there in the face of variable winds, and ram enemies heading their way.
8. Ships getting rammed: Diodorus 13.16.1–5; one hit sinking a trireme: Diodorus 13.98.3; importance of formation: Thucydides 4.13.4; stone throwing in sea battles: Diodorus 13.10.4–6; cf. Thucydides 2.92.3–4. In general, we have more graphic accounts of sea fighting than hoplite warfare. But then the former was far more common than the latter in the Peloponnesian War. And perhaps there was something about the added danger of drowning and the more frequent horror of unrecovered bodies that incited a morbid curiosity among observers.
9. 2.92.3–4. The most notable military figures in the war—Pericles, Thucydides, Demosthenes, Nicias, Lysander—at one time or another found themselves at sea in command of a fleet. Ostensibly, there was not much divide between land and naval service: Pericles both organized a seaborne attack on the coast of the Peloponnese and invaded Megara with hoplites. Lysander, the architect of the final successful Spartan naval strategy, died at Haliartus in a hoplite skirmish nine years after the war’s close.
10. 1.49. Thucydides’ full description of the sea fight goes on to chronicle the familiar confusion and killing of sailors in the water.
11. For various accounts of trireme fighting, see the descriptions in Thucydides at 7.23.3, 7.40.5, and 7.67.2. For problems with the current, see Diodorus 13.39–40. We should remember that the historian was both a sailor and, as an admiral, a firsthand observer of trireme warfare.
12. Xenophon, Hellenica, 1.6.19–20. The ships could be propelled in some fashion by half the crew. In fact, it is uncertain to what degree all 170 rowers always manned a trireme, or the tactical calculus involved in preferring fewer fully manned triremes to more numerous (and slower, less maneuverable) ships with partial crews.
13. The desperate fighting in the harbor at Syracuse is the locus classicus of naval warfare, inasmuch as Thucydides’ account captures the desperation of the Athenians and emphasizes the enormous aggregate size of the two fleets, cf. 7.25, 7.41.3–4.
14. See 7.41.2; Aristophanes, Knights, 764; Diodorus 13.78.4. The tactics are the maritime equivalent of the besieged Plataeans’ efforts to drop weights on the battering rams of the Peloponnesians.
15. For various aspects of trireme fighting, see 2.90.6 and 8.105.1; cf. 1.50.2 and 7.23.4. On the numbers of crewmen who went down with their ships, see the rare details of the Spartan losses at Mount Athos provided by Diodorus 13.41.2–3. On Notium, see Diodorus 13.71.3–5, and for the massive losses at Arginusae, 13.100.3–5. Reinforcements: Diodorus 13.46.
16. Aristotle, Constitution of the Athenians, 34.1; cf. Xenophon, Hellenica, 1.7.35. The Thebans’ refusal to give back the 1,000 dead hoplites after Delium—they lay exposed for days in the autumn sun—similarly sparked outrage and may have prompted Euripides to produce his Suppliant Women, a tragedy in which Athens under the mythological Theseus defeats the Thebans for their outrageous treatment of the corpses of the Seven Against Thebes. See Hanson, Ripples, 187–88.
17. Xenophon, Hellenica, 2.1.31–2. Plutarch (Alcibiades, 37.3) says that 3,000 were executed, while Pausanias (9.32.9) records 4,000. Well before 404 Lysander was one of the more brutal Spartan generals. Earlier at Miletus he was indirectly responsible for the murder of 340 Milesians in efforts to undermine the democracy there (Xenophon, Hellenica, 1.6.12; Plutarch, Lysander, 8). For the execution of prisoners shown on vase paintings, see Van Wees, Greek Warfare, 216–17.
18. On Lysander’s action after Aegospotami, see Plutarch, Lysander, 14. By 404 the Spartans were convinced of their victory and saw no reason not to give in to vengeance, given the utter destruction of the Athenian fleet and a litany of past wrongs committed by the Athenians.
19. 1.50.1, 2.90.5–6. Trireme warfare was often not so much a naval encounter as a land and sea operation, with infantry fighting over the proximate shores in expectation that there would be plenty of ships floundering in the surf—the crews almost defenseless and easy to harvest by waiting hoplites.
20. See Strauss, “Perspectives,” 275–76, for a fascinating account about why Athenian dead sailors were not usually accorded the same degree of honorific civic attention as fallen hoplites, t
he causes involving not just the difficulties involving in retrieving bodies and of accurate fatality accounts at sea but a general prejudice against the lower classes who more often made up the crews of the imperial fleet. On an example of a sea fight where most on deck died under a hail of stones, see Diodorus 13.78.3–5.
21. Cf. 2.24.2. The paranoia that followed the breakout of the German battleship Bismarck in 1941 and the fear of Japanese capital ships in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor in 1941 were logical following such initial one-sided victories at sea: once a fleet established its credentials in sinking easily enemy ships, the mobility on the seas and the lack of credible deterrence guaranteed that it could do pretty much what it pleased until stopped.
22. For Phormio’s success, cf. 2.87.3–4; for Hermocrates: 4.63.1. Athenian superiority was developed over the half century between Salamis and the outbreak of the war, when the Athenian fleet had been in near nonstop service acquiring and enlarging the empire in the Aegean and off Ionia.
23. For Thucydides’ remarks about Phormio and the change of perception toward the Athenian fleet, see variously at 2.88.3 and 2.89.5–11; cf. 8.106.1–4.
24. Strauss, Athens After, 78–81. He goes on to suggest that the oligarchic revolution of 404, and the relative impotence of the dêmos in the postwar years, might well be a result of the staggering losses of poorer Athenian sailors, who were actually outnumbered by hoplites by war’s end.
25. 6.31. Cf. 3.17 (the fleet on active duty in 428 of 250 ships). Thucydides has a good description of the rivalry among trierarchs as the Athenian fleet assembled to depart for Sicily (cf. especially 6.31.2–3). In general, the complex nature of the strange workings of the trierarchy is discussed in detail by Gabrielsen, Athenian Fleet, 105–45, and Jordan, Athenian Navy, 61—111—a system that was nearly ruined by the horrendous costs and losses of the Peloponnesian War and thus radically restructured in the fourth century.
26. Morrison, Coates, and Rankov (Athenian Trireme, 179–230, 115–17) discuss a number of passages in ancient texts that reveal just how difficult trireme service was—and how navies took extraordinary steps to ensure that their crews were experienced and in shape.
27. Aeschylus, Persians, 396. For passages in Thucydides attesting to the value of expertise and the Athenian prewar monopoly on such skill, see, e.g., 1.31.1, 1.35.3, 1.80.4, 1.142.6–9, and 3.115.4. On Athenian excellence, see [Xenophon], Constitution of the Athenians, 1.19–20.
28. “Mills”: Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1411124. Naming of triremes: Jordan, Athenian Navy, 277; Strauss, “Trireme,” 318–19. Many scholars have seen the close synchronization among the oarsmen, themselves mostly landless and poor, as a valuable civic experience that lent unity and political cohesiveness to the underclass at Athens. The discipline of rowing together may well have empowered the solidarity of the “naval mob” in the assembly—or vice versa. On the ideological nature of naval service, see, for example, Strauss, “Trireme,” 319–22. One wonders whether solidarity of trireme service had any empowering effect at all on the poor in oligarchic Corinth or in the Peloponnesian fleet. For sedition in the Peloponnesian fleet, cf. 8.78–80.
29. See the famous speech of the Athenian admiral Phormio, who outlined the basics of trireme tactics: 2.89.8–9. Often fighting between scores of marines on deck is referred to as battle in the “ancient fashion” (e.g., 1.49.1), which suggests that real maritime expertise was a relatively recent and largely Athenian phenomenon, one that stressed ramming and mobility and sought to evolve beyond ships merely pulling up alongside one another to board. Athenian superiority in ramming: Diodorus 13.40.
30. On breaking oars, see Diodorus 13.78; 13.99.3–4, and on the physics involved in such an intricate tactic, see Morrison, Oared Warships, 368–69.
31. Grappling irons were often known as “iron hands,” and are ubiquitous in descriptions of fighting. For their use at some naval fights, see Diodorus 13.67.2–3 and 13.78.1. On close-in fighting on triremes, see Diodorus 13.45–6.
32. For the graphic fighting on Sicily, see 7.70–2 and especially Diodorus 13.9.3. “Amazing”: Diodorus 13.45.8. The fact that such a large Athenian fleet—heretofore mostly undefeated—fought so close to shore in view of tens of thousands, and for the salvation of 40,000 men some 800 miles from home, made it a favorite topic for historians and perhaps the most famous and detailed sea battle recorded in all of ancient literature. The aftermath of battle: Diodorus 13.100.
33. “Good triremes” (which apparently meant both crews and construction): Aristophanes, Birds, 108. [Xenophon], Constitution of the Athenians, 1.19, grudgingly offers respect for Athenian seamanship. For various passages in Thucydides, including Brasidas’ remarks, that reflect differences between Spartan and Athenian naval strategy, and the parameters under which both fleets operated, see 2.87.5–7; cf. 2.83.3, 2.94, 3.13.73; and 3.32.3; cf. 4.25.2–6.
34. 7.34.4–8 and 7.36.5. This same notion of a tie as victory was also true in land battles involving the Spartans. At Sphacteria they were outnumbered by many thousands, but still the surrender of a mere few hundred Spartiates shocked the Greek world and was a blow not remedied until the victory at Mantinea over six years later.
35. Xenophon, Hellenica, 1.6.33. There seems to be no major land battle of the classical age recorded in which a general survived when his army was defeated. Yet there were numerous occasions in the Peloponnesian War of defeated admirals sailing away despite the wreckage of their fleet. Demosthenes, Nicias, and Conon at times all survived catastrophic naval losses. Cf. Diodorus 13.77 for Conon’s preparations.
36. For information on crews and the quality of rowers, see various quotes in Thucydides at 7.14.1–2 and 7.31.5; cf. 7.18.3 and 7.19.3.
37. Calm waters: Vitruvius 4.43; Thucydides’ description of the Gulf of Corinth fighting: 2.84.3–4. See Diodorus 13.46.4–6 for rough waters at the Hellespont. The great Athenian victory at Salamis (480) was probably a result of ramming Persian ships more quickly and efficiently than Xerxes’ crews in turn could grapple and board Greek triremes. Thus, the victory lent a sense of confidence in the efficacy of mobility and ramming to the Athenian fleet that was not always salutary during the Peloponnesian War.
38. On modern calculations concerning factors that eroded trireme performance, see Morrison, Oared Warships, 326–27.
39. Fatigue: 7.40.4–5; provisioning: 7.4.6; Aegospotami: Xenophon, Hellenica, 2.1.15–28. In sum, given the context of modern naval warfare, it is difficult for us moderns to appreciate fully how ancient fighting at sea was so closely integrated with land warfare—from the need to find water and beach ships at night to the reliance on infantrymen on board and friendly troops on nearby shores. For the need for bases, see the evidence cited in Amit, Athens and the Sea, 53–54.
40. See Casson, Ships and Seafaring, 70–73, on the problems of provisioning a fleet of triremes in transit. For the fate of Lamachus’ fleet in the river Cales, see Diodorus, 12.72.5.
41. The hulls themselves were also in constant need of repair and thus scraped and patched; e.g., Xenophon, Hellenica, 1.5.10–11.
42. E.g., 7.1.1 and 7.39.2. It was precisely this age-old fear of dependence upon friendly markets and harbors that explains the ultimate evolution in the fighting ship: the nuclear-powered carrier or submarine, which in theory rarely needs to come to shore, given that its fuel is nearly inextinguishable, its drinking and bathing water are by-products of its propulsion, and food can be ferried out to sea by auxiliary cargo ships.
43. On the look about the Piraeus, see Plutarch, Themistocles, 2.6. Nicias’ lament: 7.12.5. For the move to build a 300-ship navy, see Andocides, Peace, 7; Aeschines, Embassy, 174. Amit, Athens and the Sea, 27–28, discusses the Athenian law decreeing construction of 20 triremes per year and also the wear and tear of the hulls.
44. On the famous voyage of the “second” trireme, which rowed without a break to overturn the death sentence carried by the first, see 3.49; cf., too, 8.101. For exhausted crews, see Diodorus 13.77.3–5.
; 45. See the famous passage in Plutarch’s Themistocles (4.3) with reference to Plato (Laws 4.706B–C). Cf. Jordan, Athenian Navy, 18–20.
46. On maintenance, see 2.94.3–4. See Morrison, Coates, and Rankov, Athenian Trireme, 179–230, for acknowledgment of the intricacies and fragility of a modern trireme replica, and 102–06 for a good discussion of potential trireme speeds.
47. For an ancient conservative’s grudging acknowledgment of the advantages that accrued to maritime states, see [Xenophon], Constitution of the Athenians, 2.2–4. In general, the shipping of goods by sea in the ancient world entailed about a tenth of the cost of land transport.
48. 2.94.1. Apparently the idea that a relatively small Peloponnesian raiding force might steal into the Piraeus, destroy triremes, and stay long enough to block the entry of merchant vessels scared the Athenians as much as the approach of 60,000 Peloponnesians into Attica.
49. Aristophanes Acharnians, 544–54; [Xenophon], Constitution of the Athenians, 1.2–3. This anonymous curmudgeon systematically lists the ways in which maritime states of the “worse” people enjoy advantages: sea powers can govern the importation of products of other states; they can raid and then leave far more easily than infantry forces and have considerable more range in operations; their fleets guarantee more commerce; and they are familiar with a far greater diversity of peoples. For the complex nature of the revolution of 411 at Athens, start with Lintott, Violence, 135–55.
50. Xenophon, Hellenica, 2.2.14–15. After the war, the walls, once leveled, were not only resurrected, but auxiliary efforts were made at border fortification, perhaps to enhance the idea of refusing hoplite battle without necessarily sacrificing all the cropland to enemy invaders. See Ober, Fortress Attica, 551–66, for the general idea of a fourth-century defensive mentality born out of the Athenian disappointments of the Peloponnesian War.
51. See Thucydides on naval costs and the remarks of Pericles 2.62.2–2. Perhaps it was no surprise that throughout the Cold War, the United States, with its superior fleet, found it far easier to project power and intervene along the borders of the Soviet Union, whether in Korea, Vietnam, or the Middle East, than the Russians could carve out client states in Latin America and expand their outpost in Cuba.
A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War Page 50
