Lords of the Sea: The Epic Story of the Athenian Navy & the Birth of Democracy (34 page)

Too exhausted to think clearly, Nicias and Demosthenes made the fatal mistake of postponing the retreat yet again. Their credulity sealed their doom. When the Athenians finally broke camp two days later, the Syracusans had sobered up and were waiting for them in deadly earnest. The long line of retreating Athenians met enemies at every pass and ford. They had little food or water, and the thousands of rowers did not even have weapons. The Syracusans, mounted or on foot, harried and hounded them along like a pack of wolves around a herd. Many Athenians had already been slaughtered by the time the generals surrendered to save the lives of the rest.

A few Athenians got away into the countryside to become bandits. Most were marched back to the city as prisoners. The democratic Syracusans convened an assembly to decide their fate. Shouting down the objections of Hermocrates, Gylippus, and the other leaders, the vengeful Syracusans demanded the blood of the two Athenian generals. Nicias and Demosthenes were butchered, and their bodies were dumped outside the city gates. The seven thousand remaining captives were penned up in the city’s famous limestone quarries. These vast pits had been excavated in a hillside next to the theater of Syracuse. The theater had been inaugurated fifty years earlier by Aeschylus himself with a performance of
Persians.
It was a bitter irony that a place that once celebrated Athenian liberty and naval victory should have adjoined a prison for the defeated remnant of Athens’ imperial navy.

The prisoners’ daily rations were a pint of meal and half a pint of water. As the months passed they died of exposure, hunger, and sickness. Contagion spread from the rotting corpses, which were soon heaped up on all sides. By midwinter the Syracusans began to remove some prisoners. A few who knew by heart the latest songs of Euripides came to the notice of young Syracusans, who released these lucky ones to sing at drinking parties. Most of the Athenians were kept in the quarries for eight months. After that any who survived were taken out, branded, and sold as slaves.

No one escaped to carry word home. Athens knew nothing of the disaster until one day a stranger from overseas arrived at the Piraeus and sought out a barbershop. Once in the barber’s chair and engaged in the inevitable chatter, the traveler began to speak about the catastrophe in Sicily as if it were already well known everywhere. The barber, horror struck, abandoned his customer and darted out into the street. He ran all the way from the Piraeus to Athens. There he found the archons sitting in the Agora and told them what he had heard.

The officials violently denied the possibility of such a disaster, until more messengers arrived bearing the same tale. Unbelievably, the magnificent fleet launched with such fanfare from the Piraeus, as well as all the ships and men sent afterward as reinforcements, had perished to the last dispatch boat. In their fury and grief the Athenians looked for scapegoats. At first they laid the blame on Alcibiades or Nicias or the oracle-mongers. But in the final reckoning they could blame only themselves. Those whom the Assembly sent to conquer Syracuse had paid with their lives for the folly and hubris of Athens.

CATASTROPHE

—Pericles to the Athenians

CHAPTER 14

The Rogue’s Return
[412-407 B.C.]

—Sophocles

 

 

 

 

AFTER THE DISASTER AT SYRACUSE MOST GREEKS EXPECTED universal rebellion among Athens’ allies and the fall of Athens itself soon afterward. Pleasant anticipations warmed the Spartans through the winter months as they waited for the start of the next campaigning season. But nothing turned out as they had imagined. The troublesome Athenian democracy declined to accept the destiny that seemed so inevitable to everybody else. And by a strange twist of fate, the leading role in Athens’ recovery was to be played by that traitorous and evil genius of the Sicilian expedition, Alcibiades.

For two years he had lived among the Spartans, doing his best to wreak vengeance on the Athenians. Alcibiades knew Athens well, and he used his knowledge to hurt his native city more deeply than any stranger could have done. The Spartans were mere tools in his campaign for revenge. Thanks to the success of his counsels, Alcibiades stood high in their regard, but what had really won their respect was his total adaptation to Spartan ways: a regimen of black broth, daily exercise, and hard living. He had embraced the simple life of a Spartan warrior as if born to it. So complete was the transformation that his contemporaries likened him to a chameleon. Biding his time, Alcibiades awaited the overthrow of his political enemies and his triumphant return to Athens. As the playwright Aeschylus put it in one of his tragedies, “Men in exile feed on dreams.”

The prestige of Athenian democracy suffered with the failure of the Sicilian expedition, but Alcibiades and the rest of the Greeks overestimated the disaster’s impact. In this supreme crisis the Assembly rallied swiftly. Timber was found and new ships built. To retrench, the Athenians called in the triremes and troops from distant outposts. Messengers were sent to Athenian garrisons in allied cities, warning them that the Spartans could back oligarchic coups. All these steps were taken over the winter. When the historian Thucydides recorded the people’s energetic response, he observed that democracies are always at their best when things seem at their worst.

Even before the Sicilian expedition ended, the Athenians had begun to seek a more just relationship with their maritime allies. On their own initiative they ended the annual demand for tribute, the most hated practice of their imperial rule. Instead they collected a five percent tax on all maritime commerce. The new system was more directly tied to the benefits conferred by Athenian rule of the sea, and it actually brought in more money than the annual tribute payments. Above all, the Assembly tacitly renounced the terrible practice of enforcing imperial rule through the wholesale killing of defeated populations. Athens was rewarded for its reforms by the loyal adherence of most cities in the empire.

Alarms and excursions might come and go, but at Athens the theater was eternal. The eighty-year-old Sophocles had been appointed to a new board of councilors, so his younger colleague Euripides came to the fore. Retreating to an isolated cave on the island of Salamis, Euripides undertook to write tragedies for a people whose lives were now steeped in real tragedy. Thousands of citizens had lost loved ones in Sicily. The entire city was still in a state of trauma from the horrors of the disaster. At this time of deep grief, any tale of bloodshed or divine punishment would have seemed unendurable. In the past, Euripides had produced plays like
The Trojan Women
that savagely rebuked Athenian arrogance and inhumanity, but he was now a changed man. His new plays were meant not to cut but to heal.

Instead of harping on death, sorrow, and retribution, Euripides invented a different type of tragedy: the romance. His themes were deliverance, redemption, and reunion. The new plays featured the stock mythological characters and situations of Attic tragedy, but they ended happily. Gods and heroes rescued the innocent from great perils, and loved ones believed dead were discovered alive and well. In his romances Euripides fashioned a theater of escape, but on a higher plane than mere physical escapism and diversion. The new plays were metaphors for renewal, purification, and fresh beginnings.

The sea dominated Euripides’ romantic tragedies, both as a setting and as a force of nature. His protagonists now always faced dangers at sea, but their trials concluded with daring and joyful rescues. In
Iphigenia Among the Taurians
the young Orestes, son of King Agamemnon, crossed the Black Sea and rescued his long-lost sister Iphigenia from savage local tribesmen. At the end the actor playing Athena was hoisted up by the crane and hovered over the stage as a deus ex machina. The goddess assured the audience that Poseidon would smooth the waves, while fair winds wafted the wan derers safely to the shores of Attica. Wish fulfillment could go no further. Euripides put his most hopeful and consoling line into the mouth of Iphigenia, a woman stranded upon a foreign shore who had given up hope of rescue: “The sea can wash away all human ills.”

Soon after the festival of Dionysus, the sea became the theater for an epic conflict that most ancient chroniclers called the Ionian War, though Thucydides regarded it as the final eight-year phase of his great Peloponnesian War. Continuous naval actions and amphibious assaults raged up and down the coasts of Asia Minor from Halicarnassus to Byzantium and embroiled the islands of Rhodes, Samos, Chios, and Lesbos as well. For the Athenians, survival depended upon holding on to Ionia and the Hellespont. For the Spartans, these eastern seaways held the key to defeating a city that was still impregnable at home, thanks to its Long Walls. The Athenians established their principal naval base on the loyal island of Samos, while the Spartan fleet used the harbor at Ephesus on the Asiatic mainland.

Among the first commanders to cross from Greece to Ionia was Alcibiades. He had pressing personal reasons for making a speedy exit from Sparta. Eros with his thunderbolt had struck again. As sexually irrepressible as ever, Alcibiades had taken advantage of King Agis’ absence with the Spartan army in Attica to seduce his wife, Timonassa. Now he had every reason to believe that the child she was bearing was his own. It would be best for him to get away before the secret became known. After stirring up a revolt against Athens on the island of Chios, he continued eastward to Asia.

Since neither the Spartans nor the Athenians had enough money to pay their crews, the Great King and his satraps became once again an important force in Greek affairs. In exchange for Persian gold sufficient to engineer the defeat of the Athenian navy, the Spartans were even willing to restore the Greek cities of Asia to Persian rule—an extraordinary offer from men who claimed to be fighting for Greek liberty. Alcibiades took advantage of the negotiations between Spartans and Persians to ingratiate himself with Tissaphernes, the satrap at Sardis. The two men were rogues and opportunists of the same stamp. Amid the cushions and courtesies of the satrap’s court, Alcibiades transformed himself into the luxury-loving companion of Tissaphernes’ feasts and hunting parties.

Alcibiades gave Tissaphernes two pieces of advice. First, he should provide as little money as possible for the rowing crews, to keep them poor and tied to the Spartan fleet. Second, he should not favor the Spartans exclusively but should also give something to the Athenians so that the two sides would wear each other down. Alcibiades had in fact been distancing himself from the Spartan cause ever since an Athenian victory on a plain near Miletus (another Athenian ally that Alcibiades had persuaded to revolt). It had been a shock for Alcibiades to confront his fellow citizens on the battlefield and to witness their vigorous resistance to the Spartans. Now almost forty, he felt dissatisfied with his life. A great yearning grew in him to be accepted back by his own countrymen. Alcibiades had played the part of a Spartan, and more recently of a Persian. Now he meant to be an Athenian again.

To achieve this end, Alcibiades decided to instigate an oligarchic revolution among the Athenians. He envisioned himself returning home as leader of the revolutionary party. His complicated intrigues brought about in rapid succession a brutal oligarchic coup at Athens, the overthrow of the democracy, and the establishment of a new government under a group of oligarchs called the Four Hundred. The crew of the
Paralos
brought word of the revolution to the Athenian naval base on Samos. Defiantly, the mass of citizens serving with the fleet repudiated the tyrannical oligarchs, set up a democratic assembly on the island, and declared themselves to be the true, legitimate Athens. Democracy now resided not in the Agora or on the Pnyx but in the triremes of the navy. Themistocles’ vision of a city in ships had unexpectedly become a reality.

After their declaration of independence the Athenians with the fleet realized that well-trained crews and good intentions would not win the war with the Spartans. Victory required a master strategist. In this crisis they were driven to offer command of the fleet to the one man who had done more than any other to injure both the democracy and the navy: Alcibiades. He was again with Tissaphernes at Sardis, since the oligarchs in Athens, having happily accepted his hints about a revolution, wanted nothing more to do with him. Now the seemingly impossible had come to pass. As Aristophanes said, puzzling over the mysterious obsession of his fellow citizens for Alcibiades, “They love him and they hate him. They cannot live with him and they cannot live without him.”