Lords of the Sea: The Epic Story of the Athenian Navy & the Birth of Democracy (2 page)

Even after Cambridge, when I returned home and took up a post as archaeologist at the University of Louisville, the siren song of the Athenian navy continued to haunt me. Digging at an ancient villa in Portugal, I saw Roman mosaics depicting the mythical hero Theseus, legendary slayer of the Minotaur and founder of the Athenian navy. When I was surveying the site of the Delphic Oracle in Greece, the dark tunnels through which I squeezed brought me close to the spot where the famous “Wooden Wall” oracle had been pronounced—the cryptic prophecy that foreshadowed the rise of Athenian naval power and the Greek victory over the Persian armada at Salamis. Lecturing in Finland, I encountered modern Vikings who seemed to have reinvented ancient Greek rowing technique complete with rowing pads. They had matched the legendary feats of Athenian triremes by crossing the Baltic Sea in a single day at—yes—an average speed of ten knots.

Nothing might have come of these sporadic reminders had it not been, again, for Don Kagan. In the spring of 2000 he invited me to lecture with him on the subject of “great battles of antiquity” during a Yale alumni cruise. Kagan tackled the land battles when we went on shore at Marathon, Thermopylae, or Sparta, re-creating his unforgettable classroom drills. I recounted the naval battles on the deck of the
Clelia II
as we voyaged through the home waters of the Athenian navy—cruising through the straits at Salamis, passing the Sybota Islands near Corfu (site of the battle that precipitated the Peloponnesian War), and forging at sunrise up the Hellespont, the strategic waterway that the Athenians had once expended so many men and ships in order to control.

On the long flight back home I told Kagan that he should do the world a favor and publish his history of the Peloponnesian War in a version for the general reader. The suggestion bore fruit for both of us. Some months later I received the message that led to the writing of this book. It came from Wendy Wolf, an editor at Viking Penguin in New York. “We are going to publish Don Kagan’s
The Peloponnesian War.
He says that we should also publish a book on the ancient Athenian navy, and that you are the man to write it. Are you interested? I think it could be a blast.”

Yes, I was interested. I had been interested for over thirty years. But if by “blast” Wolf envisioned something rocketlike and soon over, she was sadly misled. At a meeting in August 2001 I assured her that the research was complete and that I could finish the book within a year. Wolf prudently recommended that I plan on two. In the event, she has had to wait for seven years. It seemed that the more I looked, the more there was to learn.

Thanks to my editor’s patience, I was able to visit the site of every Athenian naval battle and amphibious operation for which a detailed description survives, from Syracuse in Sicily to the Eurymedon River in southern Turkey, and to identify for the first time the location of Aegospotami (“Goat Rivers”), site of Athens’ most terrible naval disaster. At the Piraeus, headquarters of the ancient Athenian fleet, I looked on as a team of young Danish and Greek archaeologists led by the indomitable Bjørn Lovén mapped the submerged slipways of the shipsheds where the triremes had been drawn ashore when not in use.

Finally, I went in search of triremes on the floor of the sea with my esteemed friends and colleagues Shelley Wachsmann and Robert Hohlfelder. In partnership with Greek oceanographers and underwater archaeologists, our Persian Wars Shipwreck Survey made four expeditions to sites in the Aegean Sea where, according to the ancient historian Herodotus, triremes had sunk in storms or naval engagements during campaigns of the Persian kings Darius and Xerxes to conquer Greece. From the Greek research vessel
Aegaeo
we scoured the search areas with side-scan sonar, the remote-operated vehicles
Achilles
and
Max Rover,
and the submersible
The-tis,
a real “Yellow Submarine.” The quest turned up items that had probably spilled from triremes, along with a number of ancient wine freighters and even a lost cargo of marble blocks from the time of the Roman Empire. On the island of Euboea we had a mystical encounter with villagers, known locally as the “Whistlers,” who claimed descent from Persians who had succeeded in swimming to shore in 480 B.C., when high winds in the Hollows had wrecked their squadron.

We did not, however, realize our dream of finding the remains of a trireme. The classic warship of the Athenian navy remains as elusive now as it was in 1881, when French classicist Augustin Cartault reflected on the highly perishable trireme and its enduring legacy in his book
The Athenian Trireme: A Study in Nautical Archaeology.
“The grand monuments that bear witness to the power of Athens, the temples on the Acropolis, the Propylaea, the theatre of Dionysus, still survive; architects and scholars have measured and reconstructed them. But the trireme, without which they would not have existed, was more fragile and has disappeared. It was swallowed up by the sea, broken open by enemy rams, or perhaps demolished in the dockyards after glorious exploits.”

The Athenians in their years of greatness were first and foremost a people bound to the sea. This book is a tribute to the builders and rowers of those long-lost triremes, to the crucial role that they played in creating their city’s Golden Age, and to the legacy they bestowed on the world.

 

—The Piraeus, June 24, 2008

INTRODUCTION

AT DAWN, WHEN THE AEGEAN SEA LAY SMOOTH AS A BURNISHED shield, you could hear a trireme from Athens while it was still a long way off. First came soft measured strokes like the pounding of a distant drum. Then two distinct sounds gradually emerged within each stroke: a deep percussive blow of wood striking water, followed by a dashing surge.
Whumpff! Whroosh!
These sounds were so much a part of their world that Greeks had names for them. They called the splash
pitylos,
the rush
rhothios.
Relentlessly the beat would echo across the water, bringing the ship closer. It was now a throbbing pulse, as strong and steady as the heartbeat of a giant.

Soon other sounds would become audible, always in time with the oar strokes: the reedy skirling of pipes, the rhythmic shouts of the coxswain as he urged the crew onward, and in answer the deep chant of the rowers. The ship’s own voice joined the din, with tons of timber and cordage creaking and groaning. As the trireme hurtled forward, the steering oars and the bronze ram hissed like snakes as they sliced through the water. In the final moments, as the red-rimmed eyes set on the prow stared straight at you, the oar strokes sounded like thunder. Then the ship either ran you down or swerved aside in search of other prey.

This fearsome apparition, black with pitch, packed with men, and bristling with oars, was an emblem of liberty and democracy but also of imperial ambition. It was a warship of Athens, one vessel in a navy of hundreds that served the will of the Athenian people. At the height of their power they ruled a great maritime empire, almost forgotten today. This vast realm embraced more than 150 islands and coastal city-states and extended from the southern Aegean to the far reaches of the Black Sea. To patrol its seaways and defend its frontiers, the Athenians required fast and formidable ships. The answer was the trireme.

Built for speed, this torpedolike wooden ship measured some 120 feet from the nose of the ram at the bow to the curve of the upward-sweeping stern. The trireme was so slender and its construction so light that it had to be held together with gigantic girding cables that served it as tendons. When the winds were fair, the mariners unfurled the big square sail, but the prime means of propulsion was oar power. The Greek name
trieres
means “rowed by three,” a reference to the three tiers in which the 170 oarsmen were arrayed. Rowing crews could maintain an astounding ten knots over a full day, a speed unknown to anything else that moved on the sea. Greeks classified the trireme as a
naus
or long ship. From that linguistic root we derive an entire constellation of marine terms: navy, navigator, nautical, astronaut (“star mariner”), chambered nautilus, and even nausea—the Greek word for the “feeling of being on a ship.”

Athenians were a people wedded to the sea or, as one blustering Spartan crudely put it, “fornicating with the sea.” The city staked its fortunes on a continuing quest for sea rule. Greek historians coined a term for this type of power:
thalassokratia
or thalassocracy. Throughout history fleets have clashed repeatedly on the enclosed sea that stretches from the coast of Lebanon westward to the Rock of Gibraltar. As Alfred T. Mahan observed in
The Influence of Sea Power upon History:
“Circumstances have caused the Mediterranean Sea to play a greater part in the history of the world, both in a commercial and a military point of view, than any other sheet of water of the same size. Nation after nation has striven to control it, and the strife goes on.”

Athenians were early and eager contestants in the struggle. For more than a century and a half their city-state of some 200,000 inhabitants possessed the strongest navy on earth. Athenian thalassocracy endured, with ups and downs, for exactly 158 years and one day. It began at Salamis on the nineteenth day of the month Boedromion (roughly equivalent to September) in 480 B.C., when Athenians engineered the historic Greek naval victory over the armada of King Xerxes. It ended at the Piraeus, within sight of Salamis, on the twentieth of Boedromion in 322 B.C., when the successors of Alexander the Great sent a Macedonian garrison to take over the naval base. Between those two dates stretched the Golden Age of Athens.

Without the Athenian navy there would have been no Parthenon, no tragedies of Sophocles or Euripides, no
Republic
of Plato or
Politics
of Aristotle. Before the Persian Wars Athens produced no great traditions of philosophy, architecture, drama, political science, or historical writing. All these things came in a rush after the Athenians voted to build a fleet and transform themselves into a naval power in the early fifth century B.C. As for the cities of their maritime empire, they may have resented Athenian rule at times, but they also took part in the dynamism of the age. Herodotus of Halicarnassus invented history as we know it with his vast work on the Persian Wars. Hippocrates of Cos established a medical tradition that still flourishes today, along with the “Hippocratic Oath” attributed to the founder. Hippodamus of Miletus established a reputation as the world’s first known urban planner. His most famous project was the Piraeus, and one can still trace his street grid throughout much of the modern port.

The Golden Age of Athens was also the age of the trireme. In their quest for sea rule the Athenians manned their triremes and fought many rivals: Persians, Phoenicians, Spartans, Sicilians, Macedonians, and even pirate fleets. A naval battle or
naumachia
had to be fought on a calm sea, in conditions that would have left a sailing vessel helplessly becalmed. Masts and sails were so useless in a trireme battle that they were unloaded and left on the beach before the ships were launched to meet the enemy. Smooth water was absolutely essential, since a trireme’s lowest tier of oars lay just above the waterline. Early morning was the time for naval battles. Combat would be broken off if the wind began to blow. The crews always spent the night ashore, so all trireme battles were fought within sight of land. To be effective, Athens had to control not only the sea lanes but hundreds of landing places with sandy beaches and sources of fresh water.

Unlike round ships such as the
holkas
or freighter, a heavily ballasted sailing vessel with a deep keel and a capacious hold, triremes spent as much of their time on shore as at sea. Aside from meeting the needs of the enormous crew, the hulls had to be dried out on an almost daily basis to keep the destructive teredo or shipworm at bay. (Freighters could be sheathed with lead for the same purpose, far too heavy for a
naus.
) A trireme from Athens was thus an amphibious monster, thrashing its way through the seas by day, spreading its sail to the wind like a wing, yet drawn to shore as the sun went down. In the circular harbors at their home port, the Piraeus, the weary crews hauled their triremes up stone slipways into the shelter of colonnaded shipsheds. There the ships slept, stabled like racing stallions, until orders from the Assembly sent them to sea again.

Contrary to popular belief, the rowers in these warships were not slaves chained to their oars. This widespread misconception began with Lew Wallace’s novel
Ben-Hur
and caught a second wind in Rudyard Kipling’s “The Finest Story in the World,” the tale of an ancient galley slave reincarnated as a London clerk. Ultimately it achieved immortality through a thousand popular cartoons. As with horns on Viking helmets, the error has now taken on a life of its own. But the stereotype of the emaciated, half-naked galley slave belongs not to classical Greece but to European, Ottoman, and Arab fleets of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Jack Kerouac was memo rably poetical but historically off-base in
Desolation Angels
when he traced his concept of “beat” back to the forced labor of ancient oarsmen.