The mighty panoply of Xerxes made its way slowly across the Hellespont via two bridges of boats; along the north coast of the Aegean, where a canal had been dug for his fleet across the dangerous Mt. Athos peninsula, and down into Greece. Everywhere the native peoples and states surrendered. As Xerxes approached Thermopylae, his fleet encountered a violent storm that raged three days and sank many ships; the Greek forces, in the sheltered lee of Euboea, were not damaged. The enemy navy suffered further damage when Xerxes sent a large detachment around Euboea to bottle up the Greek fleet, for another storm blew the 200 Persian ships of this flotilla onto the rocks of the island.
The main fleet then fought three battles with the Greeks off Artemisium, in which neither side could secure a decisive victory. While his fleet was trying to force a passage by sea, Xerxes also launched an attack by land at the defenders of the narrow pass of Thermopylae. For two days his Persian "Immortals" died in droves before the stern Greek lines; but on the second night a local traitor revealed the existence of a trail up the mountains behind the Greeks. The movement of the Persian flanking force was detected by Leonidas in time to send off most of his army; he and his Spartans sacrificed themselves to delay the main Persian thrust. The Greek navy had no recourse but to retreat to the island of Salamis, off Attica.
The Greeks could gain comfort from their success in whittling down the enemy navy, yet as their council of war met on the shore of Salamis they could see smoke spiraling up from the Athenian Acropolis, where the Persians had quickly overcome the resistance of the priests and set fire to the temple roofs. All other Athenians had abandoned their homes and were now on the island of Salamis or at Troezen in the Peloponnesus.
Some of the Greek admirals wished to withdraw to the isthmus of Corinth and anchor off its wall. Themistocles argued forcefully that the only Greek hope lay in sticking to the main line of strategy of naval action and in response to a taunt that he no longer had a country or a right to speak threatened to sail off with the Athenian ships and citizens to found a new state in the western Mediterranean. Since all realized the Greeks had no chance without the strong Athenian navy, they yielded once more to his keen analysis and agreed to hold their position. So both sides remained indecisive, for Xerxes could not settle whether to advance by land on the isthmus of Corinth or deal with the Greek naval forces off his flank.
As dissensions arose again in the Greek naval command, the wily Themistocles took the dangerous course of sending by night a trusted slave, Sicinnus, to the Persians to tell Xerxes that the Greeks were quarreling, that the Athenians were willing to turn traitor, and that if he wanted a great victory he needed only to attack. Xerxes fell into the trap and ordered his fleet to advance for the final blow; to make victory doubly sure he sent a detachment around to the west end of the strait to bottle up the Greeks. He himself sat upon a throne on a hill overlooking the battleground so that he could award prizes to the most valorous of his subjects.
On a morning in late September the Persian fleet, now reduced to some 350 ships, rowed in line abreast from its anchorage on the Attic shore toward Salamis. The Greeks, who had about 300 ships in the action, knew that they were encircled from the rear and prepared for the decisive battle; Athenian hoplites were embarked on the ships. As the Persians closed in, their line was split by the little island of Psyttalia; the resulting confusion was heightened by the apparent retreat of the Greeks, who backed water on seeing the Persians enter the narrow reaches of the bay. This tactical maneuver, however, was designed only to suck the enemy farther in; suddenly the Greeks rowed forward from front and flanks and threw themselves into hand-to-hand battle with the Persians, who had no chance to use maneuvering tactics. By the close of the day the despondent Xerxes could see his remaining ships rowing away in utter defeat. Some 200 Persian warships, mostly of the Phoenician contingent, were lost, as against only about 40 Greek ships.
Xerxes struck his tents and returned speedily to Asia Minor. Since the Persians could no longer be sure of supplies by sea, he also took back much of his army. As has usually been the case in history, the proper use of sea power can facilitate victory, but the final step must come by land. In the next year (479) at Plataea the allied army under Spartan command was equal in strength to the Persian force and routed it in a very untidy battle.
Salamis made possible the almost unbelievable Greek deliverance, and Themistocles was the indomitable agent to help engineer the success. True, others had a hand in the glorious days of 480-79: the Spartans provided leadership, which the allies accepted without demur; after the battle of Salamis it was the Aeginetans who got first prize for their role. The Athenians did not have sufficient manpower for all their warships by themselves; at Artemisium they provided 127 galleys, but some were rowed by Plataeans, and 20 by men from Chalcis. At Salamis all 200 were present, but again Chalcis manned 20.8 Even so, Herodotus' judgment was sound:
At this point I find myself compelled to express an opinion which I know most people will object to; nevertheless, as I believe it to be true, I will not suppress it. If the Athenians, through fear of the approaching danger, had abandoned their country, or if they had stayed there and submitted to Xerxes, there would have been no attempt to resist the Persians by sea; and in the absence of a Greek fleet, it is easy to see what would have been the course of events on land. . . . It was the Athenians who-after God-drove back the Persian king.9
So too it was the Athenians who were to capitalize on the Greek success by moving steadily if unintentionally to consoli date the first great thalassocracy, one of the most productive and important in Western history. In this development Themistocles, the initial fons et origo, played no part; he soon fell victim himself to the bitter fights of Athenian politics and eventually wound up a pensioner of the Persian king in Asia Minor.
The Spartans, having done their duty in 480-79, were ready to stop; to counter the strong possibility that the Persians would regroup their strength, as they had in the Ionian revolt, the Spartans suggested simply moving the people of the cities on the coast of Asia Minor to the Greek mainland. The Ionians were reluctant to leave the homes and graves of their ancestors, and Athens stepped forward, willing to serve as the leader in taking revenge on the Persians and securing the liberty of the Aegean states. As Thucydides put it, the Spartans "were anxious to be rid of the war against the Medes. They thought that the Athenians were capable of undertaking the leadership and that at that time they were well disposed towards them." This may be too simple, but the Spartans did have enough troubles at home to keep them preoccupied, and political direction at Athens by this point had passed to the aristocrat Cimon, a pro-Spartan figure.10
A number of Asiatic and island states met at the sacred island of Delos in the summer of 477 and formed a league; each state was to provide warships or, in the case of smaller states, cash to help defray the expenses of war. Leadership was voluntarily assigned to Athens, which would furnish admirals (and the largest fleet), treasurers, and presidents of the league assembly. In flamboyant fashion the allies threw lumps of iron into the sea and swore to remain united until the iron floated; but in reality none of them probably expected lasting military involvement. As a modern historian succinctly observed, "What they had neglected to stipulate was the time for which they were to remain allies."11
Athens duly marshalled Greek strength to sweep the Persians out of the Aegean and then the south coast of Asia Minor, also largely occupied by Greek states; the greatest triumph was the destruction by Cimon of the renascent Persian fleet at the battle of the Eurymedon river, early in the 460's. By this time the nature of the league was subtly altering. When the small state of Cary- stus on the island of Euboea had been liberated, it was then, against its will, forced to join the league; the crusade must not be weakened by local unwillingness to participate. Soon the island of Naxos grew weary of the annual burden of providing ships, but Athens quickly compelled it to resume its role in the common effort. Worst of all was the "revolt" of Thasos, a large
state, in 465, which had to be recalled to its fealty by a siege. Voluntary league, in sum, slowly, almost unconsciously, was becoming empire. Modern students date the point at which the process was complete to 454, when the treasury of the league, safeguarded at the temple of Apollo on Delos, was moved to Athens, where Athena and her priests could better protect it on the Acropolis in the event of a sudden Persian foray into the Aegean.
This peculiar pattern of imperialism does not accord neatly with modern theories of the rise of imperialist powers as explicable entirely in economic terms. Hobson, the fountainhead of this view, who was followed by Lenin, built his thesis almost entirely on the career of Cecil Rhodes, a very untypical example of English expansion; perhaps we should keep in mind an alternative explanation. Schumpeter, for instance, described the rise of the Persian empire as a good illustration of the ambition of upper classes throughout history; a recent powerful assessment of Roman imperialism by W. V. Harris attributes Roman conquests to an "ideology of laus and gloria" among the leading Roman families and only secondarily to the profits gained from vic- tory.12 To return to Athens, the main objective driving the Athenians was, in the words of Jacqueline de Romilly, "the desire which they have for fame, renown, and honours. In its highest form, their ambition aims at glory, in its lowest at the use of power."13
Financial profit was an incidental by-product, though Athenian leaders were well aware that their mastery could be used economically for political purposes, and in particular they controlled by means of Hellespontophylakes, or guards of the Hellespont, the import of Russian grain by other states. One of the first salvoes in the events leading to the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War in 431 was the Megarian decree of the Athenian assembly, under the instigation of Pericles, which banned Megarians from the harbors and markets of the Aegean; later, at a meeting of Spartan allies at Sparta to discuss going to war, the Corinthians warned that the sea was vital, even for those who lived inland off the main trade routes.14
Although it was useful to suppress piracy and protect Athenian grain supplies, the main objective of thalassocracy was Athenian political and military mastery of the Aegean world. At its height Athens ruled directly 179 states which included perhaps 2,000,000 Greeks; the most remote of these were only an eightday voyage (200-250 miles) from Athens. But Athenian naval power could be projected over the Mediterranean from Sicily to Egypt and the Black Sea, so that the world which had to consider Athenian policy seriously embraced perhaps 20,000,000 people.l"
The fruits of Athenian naval mastery were many and varied. On the Acropolis rose the Parthenon, the most perfect and expensive Doric temple ever built, thanks to imperial revenues; beside it stood the Erechtheum and the Propylaea. Down below in the Agora appeared other religious and secular buildings; farther afield the hall of mysteries at Eleusis, the temple crowning the crags of Sunium, and other magnificent edifices were constructed as visible testimony to Athenian hegemony. In earlier days Athens had not been distinguished as a literary center. Now the tragic and comic stages came into existence; Herodotus spent some time at Athens, and by the end of the century Thucydides was writing his somber tale of the Peloponnesian War; then too Socrates was exploring the way a man should live. It would be too much to ascribe the birth of tragedy, comedy, and history to Athenian imperialism-Aeschylus, after all, was a mature man in 480 and fought in the battle of Salamis-but the vibrant, optimistic tone of Athenian life certainly helped to incite the support of the audiences attending the plays in the theater of Dionysus or the auditors of the Father of History.
Although most citizens continued to be land-rooted, the industrial and commercial sectors of Athens and its port of Piraeus became far more important. In the decades before 500 the city of Athens had numbered no more than about 10,000 inhabitants; by the close of the fifth century they had swelled probably to about 100,000, including "naval architects, shipbuilding contrac tors, merchants who now dealt exclusively in timber and pitch from the northern Aegean, cinnabar from Kea, hemp and flax, and leather" as well as tavernkeepers, ladies of the night, bands of cutthroats, and other fruits of naval power.'6 The port itself was restructured by Hippodamus of Miletus, the first urban planner to take into account economic as well as religious and political requirements; one comic poet could even proclaim, "Just as the Parthenon is beautiful so is the Piraeus."17
Athens had been fully democratic since the reforms of Cleisthenes, but across the fifth century the assembly of citizens became ever more the font of political power. Oddly enough, Thucydides, though discussing early Greek history almost exclusively as measured by the rise of interest in the sea, does not comment on the interconnection of imperialism abroad and democracy at home, but another writer known as the Old Oligarch saw these ties in his ironical comment:
It is only just that the poorer classes and the common people of Athens should be better off than the men of birth and wealth, seeing that it is the people who man the fleet and have brought the city her power. The steerman, the boatswain, the lieutenant, the lookout-man at the prow, the shipwright-these are the people who supply the city with power rather than her heavy infantry and men of birth and quality.ls
Pericles, the political leader from about 450, instituted pay for jurors, who were the older part of the population, and according to Plutarch initiated his building program partly to provide work for the poor.
Not everyone in Athens approved either of overseas imperialism or its internal political and social effects. The Old Oligarch rhetorically proclaimed that "in a country which bases its power on the navy . . . we become slaves of our slaves," and a foreigner, Stesimbrotus of Thasos, laid the responsibility on Themistocles who "degraded the people of Athens to the rowing pad and the oar."19 In 445 Thucydides son of Melesias (not the historian) challenged Pericles in an ostracism as using imperial monies for the decoration of Athens, but himself lost; the citizen body as a whole followed Pericles, who later told the assembly that sea power implied tyranny but was justified by Athenian greatness. Loyalty to democracy then and later was always centered in the Piraeus.20
The most evident burden on the empire itself was the requirement of paying tribute to Athens. By 431 the voluntary contributions set half a century earlier had turned into forced payments. Very few states still had the option of furnishing ships, and by the Currency Decree of 449, which ordered the use of Athenian coinage, weights, and measures throughout the empire, the funds now came in the form of standardized Athenian tetradrachms, the "owls," struck in greater abundance than any previous Greek coinage.21 These funds were safeguarded by Athena and like a good banker she took her fees by exacting one-sixtieth of each state's payment. These amounts were duly inscribed on stone slabs that fortunately have survived more or less intact and give us a detailed picture of imperial receipts.22 The funds from the subjects also met the heavy expenses involved in maintaining a fleet that was at sea a great part of every year to keep the empire under control 23
Unlike the Roman Republic, which required from its Italian "allies" not cash but men for the Roman wars, the Athenian empire does not appear as a rule to have levied contingents of subjects for its galleys. There is one reference to impressment for the great expedition to Syracuse; otherwise considerable numbers of allies were tempted by pay to serve as mercenaries alongside the poorer Athenian citizens drafted for the rowers' benches;24 Athens could never have manned its large fleets in the Peloponnesian War from its own citizen body. Daily pay rose across the fifth century from three obols to six, partly out of this necessity.
To supervise the empire, however, the Athenians made considerable use of garrisons and settled clumps of individual citizens called cleruchs on the lands of doubtful subjects; "residents" also served as standing checks, and traveling inspectors (episko- poi), whose arrogance was mocked by Aristophanes, toured the empire. The fourth-century work, Constitution of the Athenians, reckons these supervisors at 700 a year. In various decrees the independence of local courts was trimmed to require that capital p
enalties (death, exile, and loss of public rights) could be in flitted only by Athenian juries-as the Old Oligarch observed, this was good for the Athenian hotel business.25
These and similar measures, largely in place by 431, helped safeguard Athenian mastery, but they also directly violated the basic principle of Greek political life, autonom.ia, the right of a state to use its own laws.26 Athens could accept any form of local government, including tyranny, but in the case of a revolt had no hesitation in imposing democracy on the rebels. In an ingenious article some years ago Ste. Croix sought to prove that the subjects generally were happy with Athenian rule inasmuch as it did protect local democracy, but a number of rebuttals have properly carried the day in opposition.27 Stripped to its essence the Athenian empire produced "slavery" (douleia), and in the Peloponnesian War the Spartans were able to raise the battle cry of liberation from that enslavement by an Athenian elite. The true judgment of the subjects is evident in that whenever they saw a chance to escape from Athenian naval domination they revolted, and in 404 toppled the Athenian empire. It was most unfortunate that Athenian leaders could not know the pellucid and sagacious memorandum of Sir Eyre Crowe on the underlying responsibilities of naval powers if they were to keep their position:
The Influence of Sea Power on Ancient History Page 4
