Lords of the Sea: The Epic Story of the Athenian Navy & the Birth of Democracy (45 page)

The proud and wealthy city of the sea met its nemesis in the forces of a land power that lived in simplicity, virtue, and righteousness. The people of this other city had no use for seafaring or trade. The state was governed by an elite class of fighting men—and in fact the women of this class were as warlike as the men. They lived apart from the lower classes and did no work with their hands, constantly vigilant for the safety of the state. The fighting men held all possessions in common and even built communal dining halls for their meals. Their courage and virtue had made them leaders of other Greeks, who followed them willingly.

All appearances to the contrary, Plato was not rewriting the history of the Peloponnesian War. He did not name his maritime empire Athens; nor were the noble warriors who opposed it Spartans. On the contrary, he claimed that the land power was really primeval Athens as it had been “before the deluge,” while the sea power was a lost continent or island called Atlantis. His account of the war between Atlantis and Athens combined myth and history into a gigantic allegory on the evils of sea power.

Plato presented his allegory in a Socratic dialogue. Socrates has joined three friends for conversation on the day of the Panathenaic festival. Among them are Plato’s uncle Critias and, of all people, the Syracusan patriot Hermocrates, who masterminded his city’s resistance to the armada from Athens. The one thing that these two historical figures had in common was their opposition to the Athenian navy. The subject of their conversation with Socrates is the ideal city, which was also the subject of Plato’s earlier dialogue the
Republic.
Socrates says that a static description is not enough: he wants to see their ideal state in action, struggling for survival. At this Hermocrates chimes in with a happy thought. Critias should repeat a story that he told on the previous day when Socrates was absent: the tale of early Athens, a truly ideal state, and its daring resistance to the power of Atlantis.

Critias explains that this story, unknown to other Greeks, was told to him by his grandfather, who heard it from the lawgiver Solon, who in turn learned it from Egyptian priests at a temple in the Nile delta. These Egyptians knew more than Solon himself about Athens’ origins. “Many great and wonderful deeds are recorded of your city in our histories. But one exceeds all the rest in greatness and valor. For these histories tell of a mighty power which unprovoked made an expedition against the whole of Europe and Asia, to which your city put an end.”

Ten thousand years ago, according to Plato’s story, a gigantic island called Atlantis lay in the ocean beyond the Pillars of Heracles, bigger than Asia and Africa put together. From Atlantis it was possible to cross westward to other islands and ultimately reach the mainland on the far side of the ocean. When the gods divided the world among themselves, Poseidon claimed Atlantis. On the island’s southern side was a rectangular plain that stretched three hundred miles along the coast and two hundred miles inland. Encircling mountains protected the plain from the harsh north winds, making it an earthly paradise. Poseidon married a local girl named Cleito. To protect his bride, he surrounded a hill near the sea with three rings of water. The couple named the first of their ten sons Atlas, and the island was called Land of Atlas or Atlantis after him, just as the surrounding ocean was called the Atlantic. Poseidon allotted a portion of the island to each son, but Atlas ruled them all. The Atlanteans were great delvers in the earth, digging mines for clay and metal ores as well as quarries for building stone.

The people were also seafarers. Poseidon’s three rings of water became circular harbors. Though Atlantis was rich, it imported goods and luxuries from abroad. The Atlantean navy boasted twelve hundred triremes, housed by pairs in double slipways cut into the rock. Nearby was storage space for the naval gear. The central plain of the island was divided into sixty thousand districts by a crisscrossing grid of canals. Each district was required to furnish four men for service in the Atlantean trireme fleet, along with two hoplites, two slingers of missiles, three slingers of stones, and three javelin throwers. Atlantis was first and foremost a state organized for war.

In the beginning the Atlanteans were noble and long-lived, but with time and affluence the race degenerated. Zeus decided to punish their hubris. With their great fleet the Atlanteans had already seized the neighboring islands. Now, goaded by Zeus, they launched an armada against the peoples of the Mediterranean. None could withstand them. The navy and army of Atlantis conquered the African coast as far as Egypt, and Europe as far as central Italy. At last their forces confronted the soldiers of Athens, leaders of a Greek alliance.

While Poseidon had taken possession of Atlantis, Athena and her brother Hephaestus had claimed the territory of Attica as their portion. Attica was small by comparison to Atlantis, but it had a perfect climate, good soil, and abundant natural resources. Faced with the Atlantean armada, the Greek allies abandoned the Athenians, who fought on alone. Thanks to their strength, valor, and military prowess, the Athenians finally defeated the Atlanteans in battle. They liberated all the countries that had been enslaved, and the world’s first maritime empire came to an end. But the story told by the Egyptian priests did not end here. Violent earthquakes and floods engulfed the fighting men of primeval Athens; the same disaster swallowed up Atlantis, which vanished from sight.

No trace of the Atlantis story has been found in other ancient writings, Greek or Egyptian. In creating his lost continent of Atlantis, Plato included details that linked this archetypal maritime power to the thalassocracies known to contemporary Greeks. From the Crete of the first sea ruler, King Minos, Plato borrowed an elaborate cult of bull sacrifice. The number 1,200 given for the island’s trireme fleet recalled not only Periander’s recent creation of 1,200 new trierarchs at Athens, but also the catalog of Agamemnon’s 1,184 ships for the Trojan War and Xerxes’ grand armada of 1,207 for the invasion of Greece. The circular harbor surrounding a circular island conjured up the image of Carthage, and the Atlanteans’ obsession with luxuries, Corinth. Again like Atlantis, both Athens and Syracuse used double shipsheds to house their triremes. As for the earthquake and tidal wave that submerged Atlantis, they recalled the recent disaster at Helike, when a great wave engulfed the Spartan triremes commanded by Pollis and destroyed the last vestige of Sparta’s naval power.

PLATO’S ATLANTIS

A similar historical disaster may have suggested the name that Plato gave to his island-continent. He had been born at the time when an earthquake in the Euboean Gulf split the little island of Atalante in two; the resulting tsunami picked up an Athenian trireme moored on the shore and threw it far into the town. From “Atalante” it was a short step to a description of a North African tribe called “Atlantes” that was recorded in the history of Herodotus, as well as the Atlas Mountains and Atlantic Ocean (all of which had been given their names long before Plato invented Atlantis). So using details from myth, history, geography, and his own fertile imagination, Plato fashioned an ancient thalassocracy to stand as the forerunner of all later naval powers, and devised for it a tragic fate as a warning to all its successors. Naval power breeds hubris, and the gods punish hubris with destruction.

More than anything else, however, the story of Atlantis was an allegory of Athens. With wishful thinking, Plato pulled apart the city of his own day, disentangling the realm of Poseidon and triremes from the “true Athens” of Athena, Hephaestus, and traditional virtues. In setting his true Athens in opposition to Atlantis, the philosopher expressed his dream that Athens’ better self might overcome the seductive temptations of maritime wealth and power. Atlantis embodied everything that was wrong with Athens, and its destruction was a warning to the Athenians of Plato’s own time.

Later Greeks forgot Plato’s moral purpose and plunged into a hunt for Atlantis on maps or in ancient history. Could Atlantis really have been Troy? Or perhaps the island of Scheria, home of the seafaring Phaeacians in Homer’s
Odyssey
? Eventually the myth of Atlantis floated free of Plato altogether and became world famous. The location of Atlantis became a topic of intense interest and debate for enthusiasts who had never read a word of the
Timaeus
or
Critias.
The lost continent was identified with the volcanic island of Thera, with Minoan Crete, with Helgoland in the North Sea, even with Bimini in the Bahamas. Plato’s pupil Aristotle, however, seems to have classified Atlantis, not among places of real history or geography, but among poetic creations. Aristotle’s pronouncement on such works of the imagination may have applied specifically to Atlantis: “He who created it, destroyed it.”

But Aristotle was mistaken. Atlantis was real and clearly visible from the Acropolis. To visit it, one had only to follow the line of the Long Walls down to the sea and enter the Piraeus, noisy hub of shipping and maritime enterprise. After climbing around the shoulder of Munychia Hill and descending through Hippodamus’ grid of streets, one reached the edge of Zea Harbor and the double shipsheds, the home of the Athenian navy. Centuries later the remains of the Navy Yard would glimmer through the water of the harbor, submerged by the rising sea and subsidence of the land. Here lay the heart of Plato’s dark vision. This was Atlantis.

CHAPTER 19

The Voice of the Navy
[354-339 B.C.]

—Euripides

 

 

 

 

WHILE PLATO WAS DOING HIS BEST TO TURN ATHENS AWAY FROM the sea, one obscure citizen embarked on a campaign to resurrect the city’s pride and naval dominance. Demosthenes of Paiania had only one gift that qualified him as a champion of the Athenian navy: a genius for writing and delivering speeches. But his patriotic fervor was strong, and during his lifetime Athens had to contend with one of the most dangerous enemies it would ever know. The threat came from northern Greece, where King Philip of Macedon was rapidly building an empire on land. Inevitably Philip’s conquests began to impinge on Athens’ maritime realm. In speech after speech Demosthenes warned his fellow citizens of their peril. His zeal for naval reform and his opposition to Philip inspired orations of such power that they were hailed as classics even in Demosthenes’ own lifetime—even by his antagonists.

A tortuous path had led Demosthenes to the speaker’s platform. His boyhood had been lonely. A weakling with a chronic stutter, he made no friends at wrestling practice or hunting parties. His father died when Demosthenes was only seven, and from then on Demosthenes lived at home with his mother and sister. To an outside observer the boy must have appeared starved for companionship. But he had one constant friend, a familiar spirit from the past: Thucydides. The historian had been dead for some three decades, but his stirring voice lived on. Thucydides’ account of the Peloponnesian War fired Demosthenes’ imagination with tales of perilous adventures and epic battles. Unrolling his copy, he was transported back to an age when Athens blazed with glory, its navy seemingly indomitable and its leaders larger than life. Demosthenes read the whole book eight times and knew parts of it by heart.

Demosthenes’ father had left him an inheritance worth fourteen talents, some of it tied up in a factory that manufactured swords. He therefore expected to be financially independent when he turned eighteen, an event that took place five years after Athens made its final peace with Sparta. But it proved a painful coming of age. The three guardians appointed in his father’s will had stolen or squandered most of his inheritance. Of the fourteen talents in money and property left to Demosthenes, only a little over one talent remained. To rub salt in the wound, the embezzlers had concealed their depletion of the estate by enrolling young Demosthenes in the highest bracket for taxes and liturgies. At the age of seventeen he was already listed among the trierarchs and had made partial payment for the outfitting of a trireme. Two of the guardians were his own cousins, but Demosthenes filed a lawsuit against them, family or no.

Two years passed before the case came to trial, and during that time Demosthenes prepared tirelessly for his day in court. Athenian juries expected citizens to speak for themselves, even if professional speechwriters had been hired to compose the speeches. Demosthenes, intensely self-critical, knew that he made a poor impression. He could do nothing about his wretched physique or habitual scowl, but he learned by listening to actors and orators that he could at least train and strengthen his voice. He began to make solitary excursions to a deserted beach and strained to make himself heard through the whistling wind and crashing waves. To overcome his speech impediment, Demosthenes would put a pebble in his mouth and work his tongue around the stone while still trying to pronounce words clearly. Away from the beach, he declaimed speeches while walking or running up steep hillsides. Skinny legs working, narrow chest heaving, his delivery eventually became smooth even as he almost gasped for breath. Demosthenes had inherited a true Athenian’s competitive nature, but he turned it not toward wrestling or running but toward public speaking.