Lords of the Sea: The Epic Story of the Athenian Navy & the Birth of Democracy (4 page)

Yet the fires of innovation and genius, even Plato’s own, were fueled by sea power. In legendary times the Delphic Oracle had foretold that Athens would be unsinkable, a city destined to “ride the waves of the sea.” So long as it had ships, commanders, strong crews, and the iron will to take risks and make sacrifices, Athens weathered every storm and recuperated from every disaster. In the end, weakened by a dearth of leaders and undermined by the disaffected upper classes, the Athenian navy and Golden Age ended together in 322 B.C., as abruptly as if someone had put out a light.

Athens was the first truly modern society, ruled not by kings or priests or nobles but by a sovereign democratic Assembly. The Athenians had to wrestle with the same polarities that confront the democratic nations of the modern world. Like us, they were caught up in conflicts that pitted West against East, liberal against conservative, and scientific inquiry against religious faith. They too confronted insoluble political paradoxes. The same navy that made Athens a democracy at home made it an imperialistic power abroad and at times an oppressor of the very cities that it had helped to liberate from the Persians. The Golden Age was funded in part by payments of tribute that Athens demanded of its maritime subjects and allies. As for the Parthenon, that iconic ruin in pure white marble makes today’s world imagine a serene ancient Athens of lofty visions and classical balance. In fact, at the time of its building the Parthenon was a bitterly controversial project, paid for in part with what Pericles’ opponents considered to be misappropriated naval funds.

Time and winter rains have washed the original gaudy colors of scarlet, azure, and gold off the Parthenon. Passing centuries have also washed the blood and guts, sweat and struggle, from the modern conception of Athens. In losing sight of the Athenian navy, posterity has overlooked the vital propulsive force behind the monuments. A living sea creature, all muscle and appetite and growth, generated the glistening shell of inspiring art, literature, and political ideals. Today we admire the shell for its own beauty, but it cannot be fully understood without charting the life cycle of the animal that generated it. The beat of oars was the heartbeat of Athens in the city’s Golden Age. This, then, is the story of a unique and gigantic marine organism, the Athenian navy, that built a civilization, empowered the world’s first great democracy, and led a band of ordinary citizens into new worlds. Their epic voyage altered the course of history.

FREEDOM

—Pericles to the Athenians

CHAPTER 1

One Man, One Vision
[483 B.C.]

—Aristophanes

 

 

 

 

ALL THE GLORY OF ATHENS—THE PARTHENON, PLATO’S Academy, the immortal tragedies, even the revolutionary experiment in democracy—can be traced back to one public meeting, one obstinate citizen, and a speech about silver and ships.

On the day of the meeting Themistocles awoke well before dawn. Athenians tended to be early risers, but for him this was no ordinary morning. The Assembly of Athens met on a rocky hilltop near his home about three times each month. The published agenda for today’s meeting included a proposal to share out silver from a rich strike recently made in the mines of Attica. Themistocles intended to make a counterproposal. In near darkness he got up from the bed that he shared with his wife, Archippe, put on his tunic and sandals, and went downstairs.

Breakfast was a simple affair of bread dunked in wine. Many others were astir besides Themistocles. The house was full of children: three sons and two daughters. Even so there was an empty place at the table. The oldest boy, Neocles, had died young, killed in an accident with a horse. As Themistocles prepared for his speech, his younger sons made ready for their daily round of lessons. The sky was brightening over the enclosed courtyard. Themistocles donned his wool cloak, opened the door, and stepped outside. If all went well, by the time he came home for dinner he would have mended his own fortunes and changed his city’s future as well.

The house was modest even by Athenian standards. It stood on an unpaved street near a city gate that led to the sea. As Themistocles climbed the rocky hill to the place of the Assembly, Athens gradually came into view: a huddle of some ten thousand flat housetops divided by twisting lanes and by the open space of the Agora, the marketplace and civic center. Smoke rose from ovens, potters’ kilns, foundries, and forges. Hemming in the mass of shops and houses was an irregular city wall, mud brick on a stone footing. In the center rose the Acropolis, citadel of Athens.

Athens was in those days a humble place. Many city-states overshadowed it in military strength, religious prestige, or commercial success. Arts and sciences flourished elsewhere. Athens could boast no famous monuments, no remarkable philosophical schools or feats of engineering, no world-famous sculptures. Even the temples on the Acropolis were outclassed by those in other Greek cities and sanctuaries. Yet Themistocles cherished a vision in which Athens would surpass its rivals. “I cannot tune a harp or play a lyre,” he would say, “but I know how to make a small city great.”

He had no illusions about the rough yet slippery path that led to civic leadership. From their close-knit ranks the blue bloods of Athens looked down on him as an upstart and outsider. His father, Neocles, was neither very rich nor very famous; his mother was not even an Athenian citizen. When Themistocles was a young man, his father had taken him for a walk on the seashore, hoping to deter his son from seeking a career in politics. The two came to a place where old triremes had been hauled up on the beach and left to rot. “Look!” Neocles said, pointing to the abandoned hulks. “See how the people cast off their leaders when they have no more use for them.”

Themistocles reached the topmost ridge of the Pnyx, the hill where the Assembly met, with its wide view of Attica, territory of the Athenian city-state. The surrounding countryside was flat and fertile: good farmland ran right up to the city walls. Humpbacked hills surrounding the plain were clad with timber or scarred with stone quarries. To the south lay Phaleron Bay, the port of Athens, and beyond it the sea. Most painful in Themistocles’ eyes were the unfinished port installations at the Piraeus, four miles away to the southwest, toward the island of Salamis. The city had undertaken the construction project on the rocky promontory at Themistocles’ own recommendation ten years earlier. He had intended these walls to transform Athens into a sea power and to protect the citizens in case of an invasion—an invasion that Themistocles believed to be inevitable.

In the time of Themistocles’ grandfather, the distant Persians had begun to build the largest and most powerful empire that the world had ever seen. Themistocles had believed, and still believed, that the Great King of Persia meant to conquer Athens just as he had already conquered Greek cities in Asia Minor and the Aegean islands. Ten years earlier there had been warning signs that the Persians would invade Attica with an army coming overland and a fleet attacking by sea.

As archon or chief magistrate for the year, Themistocles persuaded the Assembly to fortify the Piraeus promontory with its three natural harbors. The walled port would provide a safe refuge for Athenian families while the citizens manned their ships and repelled the Persian fleet. Trusting his foresight, the Athenians had expended much money and effort to raise a massive wall of stone blocks clamped together with iron and lead, a wall so thick that two oxcarts could pass along it. But within a few years the Persian threat seemingly evaporated, and the costly project was left unfinished. The wall and the stumps of towers at the Piraeus now stood to only half the height that Themistocles had envisioned, a constant reminder of his poor powers as a prophet.

Athens had incurred the wrath of the Persians when Themistocles was still in his impressionable twenties. At one of the most memorable meetings ever held on the Pnyx, Aristagoras of Miletus had asked the Athenians to support a rebellion of Ionian Greeks against their overlord, King Darius of Persia. With Athenian help, the revolt might grow from a limited fight for freedom to a war that would reach all the way to the Persian capital at Susa, beyond the Tigris River. The Athenians voted to aid their kinsmen in Asia Minor and sent twenty ships filled with troops across the Aegean Sea. These men joined the Ionians in attacking the Persian provincial capital at Sardis. A fire broke out during the sack of the city, burning most of the houses along with the temple of the Mother Goddess Cybele.

Retribution was swift. A Persian army caught the Athenians as they marched back to the coast and beat them in battle. When the twenty ships limped home and the defeated troops told their story, the Assembly voted to have nothing more to do with the Ionian rebellion. The struggle lasted for six years. Shortly before Themistocles was elected archon, the Great King’s navy defeated the fleet of the Ionian rebels near an island called Lade. Themistocles was convinced that Athens’ turn would be next: hence the fortification of the Piraeus.

As Themistocles prophesied, Darius did send an army and fleet to conquer Athens. That first Persian attempt ended when a violent north wind drove the Great King’s triremes onto the rocky coast of Mount Athos in the northern Aegean, where the Persians lost hundreds of triremes and thousands of men. The second Persian invasion came to grief at Marathon, in the northwestern corner of Attica. Led by the charismatic Athenian general Miltiades, Athens’ phalanx of heavily armed soldiers called hoplites defeated a seaborne expeditionary force on a plain that lay just over twenty-six miles from Athens. King Darius’ third attempt to conquer the Athenians was in preparation when he died, three years after Marathon. Since then, rebellions within the empire had kept the Persians at home. Themistocles looked like the boy who cried wolf in Aesop’s fable. The city was still safe and free. After so many false alarms Athenians stopped believing in the Persian threat and stopped working on Themistocles’ folly at the Piraeus as well.

Yet the man himself had never lost his conviction. At today’s meeting he still intended to strengthen Athens’ power to resist Persia, but by oblique means. The Assembly would have no patience if he predicted a Persian invasion yet again. No, Persia would not even be mentioned. There would be no direct attack on public opinion. Themistocles would use
mêtis
instead.

This distinctively Greek quality was virtually untranslatable into other languages. Indeed it ran contrary to the values of many nations, most notably the Persians.
Mêtis
embraced craft, cunning, skill, and intelligence, the power of invention and the subtlety of art. It was the weapon of the weak and the outnumbered. Athenians knew that no physical force was mightier than the mind. In the world of myth, Mêtis was the ancient goddess from whom Athena derived her own wisdom. Not brawn but
mêtis
was the special attribute of Athena’s favorite hero, Odysseus, whose stratagem of the Trojan Horse succeeded where ten years of direct assaults had failed. Every educated Athenian knew the famous lines in Homer’s
Iliad
on the uses of
mêtis.

As a fervent advocate of naval power, Themistocles saw further than other Athenians of his time. There was more at stake than the Persian threat. Athens’ future, he believed, lay with the sea. The projected fortification of the Piraeus had been just one step toward transforming his city into a maritime center with a commercial emporium and a strong fleet of warships. Over the past decade those hopes had been repeatedly frustrated. But when the agenda for the upcoming Assembly meeting was posted a few days earlier, listing a proposal concerning income from the Athenian silver mines at Laurium, he realized that fate or luck had finally turned in his favor.

Laurium (“Place of Silver”) was a rugged knot of hills near the southern tip of Attica, about twenty-five miles from Athens. Prospectors had been working the Laurium lode for a thousand years. They had first dug out the greenish ore from surface deposits, then followed the glittering veins deep underground. By Themistocles’ time there were shafts that reached depths of three hundred feet. Miners, most of them slaves, were lowered into the shafts armed with iron picks and clay lamps that held enough oil for an eight-to-ten-hour shift. Ropes and winches lifted the ore to the surface, where it was crushed, washed, sieved, and smelted. In Athens the mint master received the silver and used his iron anvils and punches to manufacture the city’s coins or “owls,” stamped on one side with the helmeted head of Athena, and on the other with the goddess’s owl and an olive sprig.