Lords of the Sea: The Epic Story of the Athenian Navy & the Birth of Democracy (19 page)

Nearby lay the greatest prize of all: Memphis. There the Persians had maintained a royal navy yard called the House of Boats, staffed with thousands of workers. The harbor was crowded with ferryboats, fishing craft, cargo vessels, and transports, and the city walls rose almost from the water’s edge. Memphis had fallen at least once before to an army in ships: an invading Nubian king had brought his tall-masted warships right up to the walls. Some of his men swarmed across to the battlements on the yardarms, while others reached shore on pontoons made of local boats.

Inarus and his Greek allies enjoyed the great advantage of having friends within the walls—most Egyptians resented the Persians just as they had resented other foreign rulers. In short order the rebel army liberated two-thirds of the city. The remaining Persians and their Egyptian collaborators retreated through the streets to a stronghold that the Greeks called the White Fortress. Except for this fortified place, all of Lower Egypt from Memphis to the sea was now in the hands of Inarus and his Greek allies. Not only was this the richest and most populous part of the country, but the Greek fleet at Memphis could act like a stopper in a bottle, taxing or impounding cargoes from higher up the Nile as they made their way to the sea.

The Athenians proudly considered themselves to be champions of freedom, but they had not undertaken the expedition solely for the cause of Egyptian liberty. In terms of wealth, Egypt stood third among the twenty satrapies of the Persian Empire. Only Babylonia and India surpassed Egypt’s annual tribute of seven hundred silver talents, a greater amount than the Athenians collected each year from their entire maritime alliance. Egypt also provided 120,000 bushels of grain annually to feed the Persian army. And it was through Egypt that the Ethiopians had been accustomed to send their own tribute of ebony logs, elephant tusks, and unrefined gold. By wresting Egypt from the Persians, Inarus and his Greek allies had deprived the Great King of a fortune in annual income, some of which would now find its way to Athens.

But Egypt meant more to the Athenians than treasure. A century before the Persian Wars, the famous Athenian lawgiver Solon had voyaged in his own trading ship from Athens to Egypt and had brought back history and wisdom gleaned from priests in the cities of Saïs and Thebes. Generations later, when the Athenian philosopher Plato wrote his famous myth of Atlantis (in truth an allegory on the evils of maritime empire), he claimed that Egyptian priests were the keepers of the most ancient historical traditions. Egypt offered Athens wheat, papyrus, mathematics, medicine, and the world’s richest tradition of stone sculpture and architecture.

Most of the Greek fleet returned to the Aegean at the end of its successful first year of campaigning, along with the first loads of booty that Inarus had promised. Charitimides stayed behind to command the Greek allied forces. The army of several thousand hoplites would besiege the White Fortress in Memphis, while the fleet of forty triremes controlled shipping and transported troops up and down the Nile.

In order to support its mission in Egypt, the Athenians needed a naval base on the coast of Lebanon or Palestine. They could avail themselves of well-known landing places as far as Cyprus, but as yet they had no secure way station where the crews could rest on the long haul from Cyprus to the delta. The success of any maritime empire built on oared ships depended on its control not of large tracts of territory but of strategically situated coastal sites that offered fresh water, provisions, and protection from bad weather and enemy attacks. The Phoenician cities of Sidon and Tyre held much of the mainland coast, and they were still loyal to Persia. Fifty miles south of these urban centers, however, the Athenians found an isolated and tempting target.

The ancient town of Dor stood atop a rocky promontory, protected on its landward side by a marshy swale that formed a natural moat. Beyond the coastal lowlands rose the majestic ridge of Mount Carmel. To the south of Dor a chain of islets enclosed a lagoon and a sandy beach. An unfailing freshwater spring welled up at the sea’s edge. Taking advantage of Dor’s distance from its rightful master, the King of Sidon, the Athenians came ashore and seized the place. As they settled into the little hilltop town of straight streets, with its Persian-built fortifications and Phoenician dye pits for the purpling of cloth, these adventurers were establishing on the Great King’s doorstep the most remote outpost of the seemingly invincible Athenian navy.

After several years of Athenian engagement in Egypt, Aeschylus took notice of the great venture once again, this time in his famous trilogy the
Oresteia.
When his hero Orestes cried out to Athena for help, the goddess was imagined a long way off, fighting alongside her friends in North Africa. Aeschylus also meditated on justice and civil strife, on wars and wealth. His verses warned the Athenian audience to revere justice, comparing a prosperous but unjust man to a ship carrying a rich cargo through a stormy sea. Athena herself issued a commandment against civil strife at home: “Let our wars rage on abroad, with all their force, to satisfy our powerful lust for fame.”

When news of the Egyptian rebellion reached Susa, King Artaxerxes considered how best to deal with the Athenians. It would be years before he could assemble a force big enough to drive them out of Egypt. In the meantime striking a blow closer to Athens itself seemed worth trying. Fitting out a royal embassy with chests of gold from his treasury, Artaxerxes sent an envoy from his court all the way to Sparta, with orders to bribe the Spartans into launching a war against the Athenians. An attack from the Peloponnese would surely force the Athenians to withdraw from Egypt. It seemed inconceivable to the Great King that Athens could wage war on two fronts at once.

The Spartans showed no interest in the Persian gold. Their naval allies, however, were ready to attack Athens with or without bribes. The Corinthians were angry that the Athenians had sided against them in a border war with Megara, while the islanders of Aegina bitterly resented the eclipse that their own navy and shipping had suffered. The Athenians aimed a preemptive strike at a Peloponnesian port called Halieis, but Corinthian hoplites drove them back to their ships. Then Sparta’s maritime allies assembled a fleet and engaged the Athenians in battle near the rocky islet of Cecryphaleia in the Saronic Gulf. Fighting on their own element this time, the Athenians were victorious. After the battle they vengefully followed the Aeginetans back to their island stronghold. There the Athenian navy won an even greater victory, capturing seventy enemy triremes and setting up a blockade of Aegina Harbor. Crossing back to the Piraeus, the Athenian general Leocrates mounted siege machinery on the decks of his triremes and then returned to assault the Aeginetans’ city walls.

The siege lasted for months, but neither Sparta nor the Peloponnesian allies could do anything to raise it. King Artaxerxes summoned his envoy back to Persia, his mission a complete failure. Nothing could check the Athenians. They were still entrenched in Egypt, and they now had a pretext for conquering their old rivals on Aegina. Never had Athens known such a year of fighting. Never before had there been such a heavy toll of dead and so many heroes to bury along the Sacred Way.

That year the monument over the common tomb was a long wall of names inscribed on stone slabs. Generals and even a prophet were listed democratically alongside the rank and file. Above the names, in a mixture of grief and pride, the people had set inscriptions to tell of the campaigns that had claimed the men’s lives. “These died fighting in Cyprus, in Egypt, in Phoenicia, in Halieis, in Aegina, at Megara, in the same year.” A few months earlier the men on those lists had crowded into the Assembly to hear the debates on the far-flung campaigns and to raise their hands in the voting. Their boundless ambition was equaled only by their readiness to pay the price.

Back in Athens, the hostilities with Corinth and Aegina made the completion of the Long Walls to the Piraeus seem an urgent matter. Before Cimon’s ostracism, he had stabilized the wet ground west of Athens, preparing a solid base for the wall that would run to the Piraeus. A second wall would connect the city to the old port of Phaleron. With the wealth of Egypt and the Thracian mines filling the treasury, the Assembly was now in a position to vote the necessary funds for a building project greater than any other in Athenian history. The scale was heroic. Eight miles of walls were to be constructed, sixteen feet thick at the base and soaring to a formidable height. The vertiginous walkway along the top of the wall would be twelve feet broad. Stone blocks would form the lower courses, bricks the upper, and the plan also called for projecting towers. Once completed, the walls would make Athenian access to the sea as secure as if the city had been an island: the realization of Themistocles’ dream.

The resumption of work on the Long Walls jolted Athens’ oligarchs into action. A small group of upper-class citizens still hoped to destroy the radical democracy. These men feared that once Athens was permanently and inseparably linked to its navy by the Long Walls, the common people would never be unseated from their rule. Before the walls had been completed, the oligarchs sent secret messages to a Spartan army that was at that moment encamped not far from the frontiers of Attica. The oligarchs invited the Spartans to attack Athens, promising to assist in the overthrow of the current regime. In their own minds these men were patriots, pledged to restore the ancestral constitution.

Somehow the plot was betrayed, and the entire Assembly was warned of the danger. The hoplites were as eager to defend their democracy and the Long Walls as were the rowers in the fleet. The full army of Athens marched out and confronted the Spartans on a field near Tanagra in Boeotia. The Spartans won a narrow victory, but the Athenian citizens had not fought in vain. Discouraged by the unexpected resistance, the Spartans gave up any further idea of interfering with the Long Walls and marched home.

The Athenians wanted revenge. Their hotheaded general Tolmides (his name meant “Son of the Bold”) proposed that an Athenian fleet should carry out a novel expedition around the Peloponnese to punish the Spartans and force them for once onto the defensive. Coasting along from one target to the next, the Athenians would destroy fortifications, collect booty, and spread terror. Before local defenders could reach the scene, the raiders would have boarded their ships and moved on. In short, Tolmides proposed that the Athenians act exactly like pirates. The Assembly voted Tolmides a fleet and a military complement of one thousand hoplites, but his scheme was so popular that many young citizens joined as volunteers. The trireme design that Cimon had introduced before the Eurymedon campaign allowed extra hoplites to be accommodated on the wide decks.

With fifty triremes Tolmides cruised south to Cape Malea. After rounding this dangerous promontory, the fleet descended without warning on the Spartan port of Gythium and set fire to the docks. The marauders then continued their hit-and-run tactics all the way around the Peloponnese. Before returning to Athens that autumn, Tolmides landed at the seaside town of Naupactus in the Corinthian Gulf and turned it over to a band of Messenian rebels. These men had been recently expelled from their homeland by the Spartans. From Naupactus the refugees would be a thorn in Sparta’s side for years to come. Tolmides’ expedition proved so profitable on so many levels that during each of the next two summers the Assembly sent Pericles west with a fleet to keep up the tradition.

Of all Tolmides’ successes, none gave more happiness to Athenian shipwrights than the alliance he concluded with the islanders of Zacynthus, a little paradise of white cliffs and sandy coves. At the bottom of one of its lakes the island had a black treasure: tar. In the continual battle against rot, decay, and the teredo, a coating of tar could protect a trireme’s planking even more effectively than pitch from pine trees. At Zacynthus the tar was dredged up from a depth of twelve feet in the lake using leafy myrtle branches tied to the ends of poles. After being collected in pots, it could be carried to the beach and swabbed directly onto the hulls, or shipped home for storage in the Navy Yard at the Piraeus.

Bad news from Egypt put a temporary check on Athens’ campaigns in Greece. For six years the Athenians had shared the rule of the country with the rebel king Inarus. But Artaxerxes, though slow to act, felt that he could not afford to let Egypt go. A massive Persian counterattack overcame both the Egyptians and their Greek allies. The victorious Persians besieged the Athenian and Ionian troops on the island of Prosopitis in the Nile delta and, after Persian engineers drained the channels surrounding the island, captured or killed them all. Meanwhile the Great King’s force of Phoenician triremes ambushed and annihilated a relief fleet from Athens as it was entering the easternmost mouth of the Nile.

After the unexpected failure of the Egyptian venture, Pericles and the other generals attempted for the time being no more expeditions overseas. When Cimon returned from ostracism, he led an allied fleet of two hundred ships once again into the east, undaunted by the recent events on the Nile. One hundred forty triremes stayed with Cimon in Cyprus, while the remaining sixty went south to aid the continuing resistance to the Persians in the Nile delta. One Athenian trireme coasted westward from the delta on a sacred mission. Sent by Cimon himself, a deputation went ashore to consult the oracle of Zeus Ammon at the oasis of Siwa, eight or nine days from the sea. After their long journey, Ammon’s prophetic voice ordered them to go back to Cyprus. Cimon, said the god, was already with him.