Lords of the Sea: The Epic Story of the Athenian Navy & the Birth of Democracy (41 page)

To pay the costs of their new navy, the Spartans demanded tribute at more than double the rate once assessed by Aristides the Just. Under Athenian rule the allies had complained when they had to go all the way to Athens for legal redress of official abuses. Under the new regime these same allies found that they had no legal redress anywhere. Spartan officials, even private Spartan citizens, operated outside the law, with nothing to curb their greed, their lust, and their congenital Spartan urge to give orders.

The Spartans’ hubris touched off an ominous reaction. Foolishly they antagonized their old partners the Persians with attacks on the satrapies of Asia Minor. Chief among the injured parties was Pharnabazus, satrap of the lands along the Hellespont. This impetuous leader once rode his horse into the sea to help Spartans keep Athenian triremes off a beach. It was a dark day for Sparta when the embittered Pharnabazus sent a messenger up the Royal Road to Susa, urging that some action be launched against them. A war at sea, Pharnabazus suggested, might curb Spartan aggression on land.

In response to this appeal, King Artaxerxes II, great-grandson of Xerxes, named as his admiral the only experienced naval commander within the realm: Conon. The Great King also ordered Cyprus, Cilicia, and Phoenicia to contribute triremes for an expedition against the Spartans. Only seven years had passed since a Persian prince provided the pay for Lysander’s crews at Aegospotami. Overnight Conon the Athenian was catapulted from his obscure exile into the forefront of a new campaign.

Within the Persian Empire the cities were slow to answer the king’s call for ships. Once news of Conon’s royal appointment reached Athens, however, the effect was electric. Hundreds of Athenians rallied to his distant banner. Triremes began to slip away from the Piraeus to join Conon on Cyprus. Even the Assembly dispatched a few ships, then blandly disowned them (on Thrasybulus’ recommendation) when the Spartans protested. Renegade Athenians manned other triremes on their own initiative and at their own expense. Ship by ship an Athenian “navy in exile” began to congregate in the harbor of Cyprian Salamis.

Conon was still waiting for the full Persian levy of triremes. The delays and false starts stretched into years, until Conon at last took his grievances directly to the Great King at Babylon. The negotiations were strained. Go- betweens had to carry messages back and forth from Artaxerxes to Conon, who refused to kowtow in the groveling obeisance that would have admitted him into the royal presence. Nevertheless the king attended to every one of Conon’s complaints. He confirmed Conon’s position as supreme admiral, ordered all Persian officials to follow his lead, and provided more money to pay the crews. Artaxerxes also offered Conon the privilege of choosing a Persian colleague to command with him. Conon asked for Pharnabazus.

Midsummer was well past when Conon and Pharnabazus led their fleet of almost one hundred triremes west to the Aegean. They established a base near Cnidus, in the southwestern corner of Asia Minor. The city was famous for its temple of Aphrodite, a goddess whose birth from the foam of the sea had made her a patron of mariners. In happier days Cnidus had been an Athenian ally. Now it served as the base for the Spartan fleet. Conon’s antagonist was the Spartan admiral Peisander, who owed his command not to experience but to nepotism. (King Agesilaus of Sparta was his brother-in-law.) Possessing eighty-five triremes, Peisander was slightly outnumbered. To draw Peisander into battle before reinforcements arrived, Conon decided to employ the same ruse that had helped Alcibiades bring on the battle at Cyzicus.

Conon began by leading a small vanguard of Athenian triremes across the bay in full view of the Spartans. As he intended, Peisander impulsively manned his ships and put out to sea. In the ensuing clash all seemed to go well for the Spartans at first. Then the allies on the left wing of Peisander’s fleet saw Pharnabazus bearing down on them with the main body of Persian triremes, a move that threatened to envelop them. Abandoning their foolish admiral to his fate, they turned and began to row back toward Cnidus. Their flight exposed Peisander to a flanking attack. Athenian triremes surrounded the Spartan flagship and forced it toward shore, where the ship was rammed and Peisander killed. Conon ordered a chase of the fleeing Spartan allies, snapping up fifty triremes and five hundred prisoners. Most of the crews ignominiously abandoned their vessels, jumping overboard and swimming to shore.

The victory at Cnidus really belonged to the Great King, but the Athenians celebrated as if it were their own. As for Conon, he had redeemed a lifetime of near misses in one glorious action. When a solar eclipse darkened the sky a few days after his triumph, it seemed to signify the passing of Spartan thalassocracy. The maritime empire created by Lysander had lasted only eleven years.

Conon and Pharnabazus immediately set out on a cruise through the eastern Aegean, liberating the Greeks from their despised Spartan governors. Cities and islands as far north as Lesbos joined the revolution. At Samos and Ephesus, citizens erected bronze statues of Conon and his son Timotheus, honoring these saviors as if they were divine heroes. On Conon’s advice, Pharnabazus assured the Greeks that if they left the Spartan alliance of their own free will, he would respect their traditional forms of government and install no Persian garrisons. Such honorable treatment prompted even more defections from Sparta.

The Persian-Athenian fleet now enjoyed the freedom of the seas. Conon and Pharnabazus used that freedom to take their ships to the Isthmus of Corinth. There in the sanctuary of Poseidon the two victorious admirals found the estranged allies of Sparta sitting in council. Less than a century earlier the Spartans had summoned their allies to the Isthmus to plan the resistance to Xerxes. Now the world was turned upside down. The satrap Pharnabazus urged the Corinthians and Thebans to push forward with their war against the Spartans, and he provided Persian cash to back up his words. He then prepared for the voyage back to Asia, confident that he had caused Sparta enough trouble.

Conon had other ideas. He asked that he might keep the Great King’s fleet in Greek waters to continue hostilities. No money would be required: loot and contributions from the islands would cover the costs. Conon also suggested that the fleet relocate to Athens. If refortified, the Piraeus would provide a secure naval base. Pharnabazus approved and gave Conon both the fleet and the princely sum of fifty talents to pay for work on Athens’ fortifications. The satrap felt no friendship for Athens—he meant simply to punish Sparta. As Conon had said, “I can think of no action that would hurt the Spartans more. By doing this you will not only have given the Athenians something for which they will be grateful, but will really have made the Spartans suffer. You will make null and void that achievement of theirs which cost them more toil and trouble than anything else.” As Pharnabazus’ flagship rowed away from the Isthmus into the blue of the Aegean, Conon launched the rest of the fleet, now his and his alone, and steered for home.

Even before Conon’s return, the Athenians had tried to rebuild the Long Walls. But the work might never have been completed had Conon not arrived with Persian money to pay for stone and timber, and for skilled masons and carpenters to complete the work. Conon’s crews—thousands of Athenian citizens who had not seen their city for over a decade—came ashore to help raise those mighty ramparts. With his own money Conon built a temple for Aphrodite in the Piraeus. As goddess of Cnidus, she was dear to his heart, and it was as Aphrodite Euploia (“Aphrodite of the Fair Voyage”) that he and his fellow Athenians now worshipped her.

One hundred years had passed since the archonship of Themistocles, and work on the new Piraeus foundations laid bare the foundations of his original walls. Themistocles’ descendants had long ago brought the great man’s ashes back from Asia, where he had died in exile. To celebrate the restoration of the Piraeus, the Assembly honored the hero of Salamis with a tomb, an altar, and a pillar on a point of land just outside the Cantharus Harbor. An Athenian poet wrote commemorative verses.

With the raising of this monument to the founder of the navy and the hero of Salamis, the Athenians formally rededicated themselves to the quest for victory at sea.

Not all Athenians were happy about the resurrection of Athenian naval power. The philosopher Plato told his students that the walls “should continue to slumber in the bosom of the earth.” And in Aristophanes’ new comedy
Ecclesiazusae
(“The Assembly Women”) a chorus of Athenian matrons noted the difficulty of dealing with a public opinion divided against itself. They observed that the mass of citizens voted for new ships, but the farmers and the rich opposed them. In the real-life Assembly, Conon warned the Athenians to be satisfied with getting back their freedom and their walls. The imperialistic plans advocated by Thrasybulus, as Conon reminded them, came from a man whose very name meant “Rash Adviser.”

Sent out to the Hellespont with a fleet, Thrasybulus had once again defeated Spartans and won Byzantium and other cities back to friendship with Athens. The time of the older generation, however, was drawing to a close. Aristophanes had written his last play. Conon and Thrasybulus, architects of Athenian reconstruction, died within four years of each other, Conon in the course of a diplomatic mission to the Persians, Thrasybulus while campaigning on the Eurymedon River. Their ashes were brought back to Athens and buried in the public cemetery along the Sacred Way.

Now the mission to restore Athenian sea power was taken up by a younger generation of Athenian generals. So successfully did they assert Athens’ claims to the Hellespont, the Aegean, and points east that the Spartans appealed for help to their former paymaster, the Great King of Persia. Vexed by endless wars on his western frontier, Artaxerxes handed down a peace and commanded the Greeks to swear obedience to its terms:

“I, King Artaxerxes, regard the following arrangements as just. The cities in Asia and, among the islands, Clazomenae and Cyprus should belong to me. The other Greek cities, big and small, should be left to govern themselves, except for Lemnos, Imbros, and Scyros, which should belong to Athens, as in the past. And if either of the two parties refuses to accept peace on these terms, I, together with those who accept this peace, will make war on that party both by land and by sea, with ships and with money.”

No sooner had the Spartans secured the oaths of the Athenians and other Greeks than they began to violate the King’s Peace themselves, attacking small cities and installing pro-Spartan regimes or even Spartan garrisons. Finally a Spartan commander led an army of ten thousand in a night raid against the Piraeus. Even though unsuccessful (dawn had found the slow-moving Spartans still on the march, miles away from the port), this outrage led the Athenians to declare that the Spartans themselves had now violated the King’s Peace. At once they hung the massive gates back on the portals of the Piraeus, which had been open since they swore their oaths at Sardis, and prepared for war.

Athens was not alone. Twenty-six years had passed since Spartans stripped Athens of its allies and claimed them as their own. Now fear and loathing of Sparta had driven a number of cities to seek alliances with Athens. One year after the abortive attack against the Piraeus, these and many other Greek states united with Athens in a formal confederation. This was in fact nothing less than a Second Maritime League, which resurrected the Delian League of a century before. (Like the so-called Delian League, the Second Maritime League was known in its own day simply as “the Athenians and their allies.”) This time, however, there would be no assessment and no tribute. In every way possible the Athenians purged the new league of all the evils and abuses that had bedeviled its predecessor.

The Delian League had united its members in a perpetual fight against the menace of Persia. The new alliance just as explicitly named Sparta as the common enemy. The charter stated that it was formed “so that the Spartans shall leave the Greeks free and autonomous, to enjoy peace, holding their own lands in safety.” So appealing was the charter of this Second Maritime League that some seventy cities and peoples eventually became members. The upsurge of goodwill toward Athens seemed a redemption, a wiping away of past guilt. Athens had stumbled only to rise again.

While the Second Maritime League offered its members protection from the Spartans, the charter also safeguarded them from their own hegemon, Athens. Any Athenian who owned or claimed land in the territory of an allied city now had to give it up. The much-resented practice of sending out Athenian colonists or cleruchs was explicitly forbidden on lands belonging to league members. To finance the enterprises of the league, Athens would collect not tribute but a tax, one-fortieth of the value of cargoes that passed through the Piraeus. Every clause of the charter breathed a new air of liberalism. The Athenians seemed determined to avoid the path of oppression and empire that had ruined them before. They were in truth a changed and chastened people and had learned as much from the misfortunes they inflicted on others as from their own.

The league charter called for a fleet of 200 triremes. At present the Athenians had 106—a motley collection that included some ships brought to Athens by Conon, others captured in naval engagements with the Spartans and their allies, and still others recently built in the Piraeus. So the Athenians tackled the challenge of rebuilding their navy. They meant not just to match the old navy of Periclean Athens but to surpass it, drawing more Athenian citizens than ever before into the navy’s funding, organization, and operation. The Assembly counted on the new navy to protect the allies, secure the grain route, and raise money but also to provide employment for the mass of the Athenian population. Sea power and democracy would again work hand in hand.