Lords of the Sea: The Epic Story of the Athenian Navy & the Birth of Democracy (48 page)

Philip’s opportunity came when a minuscule squabble erupted about the plowing of sacred fields near Delphi. Invited to help protect the Delphic Oracle, Philip marched south with his army through the pass at Thermopylae. The Sacred War, however, was only a pretext. Now that Philip had entered Greece, he intended to stay. His well-drilled army would subdue or eliminate his opponents on their own ground. Only Thebes stood between the Macedonians and the frontiers of Attica, and Thebes was by long tradition hostile to Athens. Demosthenes carried out a mission even more difficult than his embassy to Byzantium when he persuaded the Thebans to ally themselves with Athens in resistance to Philip.

Preparations for a decisive land battle engaged both sides for months. Late in summer the two armies met on a plain near the town of Chaeronea. Philip’s forces destroyed the power of Thebes and inflicted heavy losses on the Athenian hoplite phalanx as well. His young son Alexander took part in the historic victory as commander of the Macedonian cavalry. Rumors from the battlefield quickly reached Athens, seemingly on the wind—terrifying reports that Philip was now marching toward the city. Always energetic and decisive when prospects were at their worst, the Athenians immediately prepared to resist a siege. They appointed Demosthenes to secure the grain supply and sent him by ship to seek support in other cities. The older men marched down to the Piraeus to man the harbor fortifications; others strengthened the city’s defenses. To replace the thousands of citizens killed or taken prisoner at Chaeronea, the Assembly voted to enfranchise slaves and metics, as their forefathers had done before the battle of Arginusae.

In the midst of this frenetic activity envoys arrived from the Macedonian headquarters in Boeotia. Unexpectedly, Philip was in a conciliatory mood. The two thousand Athenian prisoners were to be returned to the city without a ransom. The Macedonians would also burn the bodies of the fallen, and a guard of honor would convey their ashes to Athens. What could account for this unexpected show of kindness to a beaten enemy?

Athens had been saved by its ships, though no battle had been fought at sea. Ever since the naval action at Byzantium, Philip felt a renewed respect for the Athenian navy. In its own element it was still invincible, and the Piraeus was still a well-nigh impregnable base. He would no longer attempt to defeat Athens at sea. Instead, even as he extended a conciliatory hand toward Athens, Philip was devising plans that would harness Athenian naval power to his own purposes, along with other military forces of Greece.

Philip followed up his victory at Chaeronea not with an assault on Athens but with a summons to a peace conference at the Isthmus. At Corinth, surrounded by anxious envoys from Athens and the other cities, Philip created a new Hellenic League with an ancient goal: a holy war on the Persian Empire. The rhetoric was religious: Xerxes’ burning of the Greek temples was at last to be avenged. Philip told the cities that he expected them to contribute troops and ships. Isocrates would have been happy to see his dream fulfilled, but he did not live to see it. He had died at the age of ninety-eight, just as the news of Philip’s victory at Chaeronea was brought to Athens.

One casualty of the new alliance against Persia was Athens’ Second Maritime League, founded almost forty years before. Philip could brook no hegemony alongside his own, so Athens must free its remaining maritime allies from their oaths of allegiance. Even here he was willing to make concessions. In view of Athens’ vital role in patrolling the seas, Philip recognized the city’s right to retain its essential territories abroad: the island of Samos with its Athenian cleruchs; the holy isle of Delos; and Skyros, Lemnos, and Imbros on the route to the Hellespont. So along with the other allied delegates at the Isthmus, the Athenians swore to follow Philip in making war on Persia and on all those who broke the peace that Philip had established. With Greece now brought to heel, Philip returned north. Before attacking the territory of the Great King, he planned to preside at his daughter’s wedding.

At Athens the citizens awaited the royal order that would levy ships and men for the war in Asia. Long accustomed not to follow but to lead, the prospect of obeying Philip as commander in chief was galling. Yet it was technically no worse than the subordination of their ancestors to Spartan leadership in the alliance against Xerxes, and infinitely better than their subjection to Sparta after the Peloponnesian War. Looking back over the years of struggle against Philip, Demosthenes pondered the wisdom of the course he had pursued.

“If the lightning that struck us was too great not only for us but for the rest of Greece, what were we to do? One might as well put the blame for a shipwreck on the ship’s captain, even after he has taken all precautions and fitted his vessel with everything he believes will guarantee its safety. Then the ship encounters a storm, and its rig is damaged or utterly destroyed. But I was not captain of a ship, nor was I in command as general, nor could I rule fate. No, it was fate that ruled all.”

Instead of mobilization orders, earthshaking news arrived from Macedon. King Philip was dead, struck down during a public procession by a lone assassin. The killer, one of Philip’s own household officers, brought a concealed dagger to the royal wedding celebration and stabbed the king as he rode by. On hearing the news, the Athenians voted public ceremonies of thanksgiving. A jubilant Demosthenes almost convinced the Assembly that Philip’s death meant the end of Macedonian power. He proved a poor prophet.

Within months a Macedonian army marched once again into Greece. At its head, astride the legendary stallion named Bucephalas, rode Alexander, the son of Philip. Though just twenty years old, the new king had already eliminated threats to his succession at home. He was now moving at high speed to reassert his control over Greece. Alexander aspired to be not another Philip, but rather a second Achilles. Hoping to absorb the fiery spirit of his hero, he slept with a copy of Homer’s
Iliad
under his pillow. In imitation of the eternally youthful Achilles, he even declined to grow that indispensable symbol of Greek manhood: a beard. The royal moods, too, were Achillean, swinging unpredictably from warmhearted enthusiasm to murderous wrath.

Athens had the good luck to be one of Alexander’s enthusiasms. The new king revered the city as the central hearth of Hellenic culture. He especially loved Athenian tragedies and took scrolls of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides to read while on campaign. Not only did he respect Athens, he sincerely courted the city’s friendship and approval. Athenians had been slow to acknowledge him as their overlord. But Alexander gave a friendly welcome to the envoys that brought him the Assembly’s apology. The message was carried not by Demosthenes, who prudently stayed at home, but by a bluff and hearty citizen named Demades, a shipwright and ferryman who had lately taken up a career as an orator.

For all his boyish looks and ways, Alexander made it clear from the start that he would not loosen his father’s iron grip on Greece. He summoned the Greeks back to the Isthmus, where they renewed their oaths of loyalty to the Hellenic League, and to Alexander himself as hegemon, commander supreme on land and sea. Alexander in turn pledged himself to the league’s goals: peace in Greece and war in Asia. He had inherited Philip’s dreams of eastern conquest along with Philip’s army. After two years of campaigning, Alexander had secured his frontiers in Europe all the way to the Danube River in the far north. The time was ripe for his invasion of the Persian Empire.

Alexander needed ships to transport his army across the Hellespont, and he ordered his Greek allies to provide the ferry service. Athens’ share of the burden was light: only twenty triremes, leaving the main fleet untouched at the Piraeus. Alexander considered Athens most valuable to him as a free and self-sustaining maritime ally. The famous navy would assist his imperial ambitions by policing the seas and suppressing piracy—at Athenian expense, not his. To keep a watchful eye on Greece in his absence, Alexander left his father’s old general Antipater behind him as regent in Macedonia.

As the third year of Alexander’s reign began, the 20 Athenian triremes voyaged to the Hellespont to join an allied Greek fleet of 160. Alexander’s forces crowded the northern shore in tens of thousands: foot soldiers, cavalry, engineers, armorers, bakers, doctors, prophets, heralds, day runners, grooms, camp followers, and slaves. No Persians troops appeared on the Asiatic shore. No Persian ships blocked the channel. Alexander would cross the Hellespont unopposed.

After sacrificing to the gods, Alexander performed the symbolic actions of steering the first trireme across and casting a spear into the soil of Asia from the deck of his ship. Then he leaped ashore, Achilles incarnate. Once the commander in chief had enjoyed his theatrical moment, the army could follow. The main crossing route ran from Sestos to Abydos, like Xerxes’ bridges of long ago, where the channel between the two continents narrows to about a mile. In these familiar waters the Athenians plied back and forth across the swiftly rushing stream, carrying Alexander’s army on the first stage of its immense journey into the heart of the Great King’s empire. Freighters were also pressed into service, their holds packed full of men and provisions. It was impossible to employ sails in the narrow Hellespont, so the triremes took the freighters in tow.

When all had crossed, Alexander sent his fleet south under the command of a Macedonian admiral named Nicanor. Unlike Xerxes, Alexander made no effort to coordinate the movements of his army and navy. The land forces struck inland, bearing the entire brunt of Alexander’s mission of conquest. Meanwhile the fleet cruised independently along the coast of Asia Minor to a rendezvous at the port city of Ephesus. By the time Alexander rejoined his ships, he had already triumphed over the Persian cavalry at the Granicus River, accepted the surrender of Sardis, and enrolled newly liberated Greek cities in the Hellenic League. With his customary flamboyance, Alexander sent Persian shields from Granicus as trophies to Athens, where they were hung in a long row on the east front of the Parthenon.

On a darker note, the victory at the Granicus also netted hundreds of Athenian prisoners. These men had fought as mercenaries in the Persian ranks. Furious with the “traitors,” Alexander shipped them off to do hard labor in the mines of Thrace. Along his march Alexander would encounter many more Athenian soldiers of fortune, including a younger son of the great Iphicrates.

Had Athens possessed the funds to keep them at home, these men could have restored the fortunes of the Athenian navy. The eastward trickle that began with Themistocles, however, had become a torrent after the Peloponnesian War, and the loss of so many potential commanders was an irreparable tragedy. But it was not only Persian gold that lured ambitious young Athenians across the Aegean. Given the Assembly’s relentless attacks on its democratically elected generals, and the punitive record of Athenian juries and review boards, service to the Great King had become less hazardous than service to their own fellow citizens. Alexander’s experiences proved that Athenian families were still producing tactical geniuses and valiant warriors. If they were absent from the city in the crises that lay ahead, the blame lay with Athens itself.

After the Ephesians opened their gates, Alexander advanced to his next target: the ancient metropolis of Miletus. Scouts reported that a Persian armada was in the offing, some four hundred ships from Phoenicia and Cyprus. At all costs they must be kept out of Miletus Harbor and prevented from reinforcing the Great King’s garrison of Greek mercenaries. The veteran Macedonian general Parmenio urged the king to challenge the new arrivals in a naval battle. He said that he had seen an eagle near the Greek ships beached on the island of Lade, outside Miletus Harbor, and claimed it as a portent of victory. Parmenio was the father of the young admiral Nicanor and may have hoped to give his son a moment of glory. Alexander rejected the idea outright. Like Philip before him, he would use actions on land to defeat enemies at sea. Despite his appointment of Nicanor as admiral, all Alexander’s trust still rested on his phalanx, his cavalry, and his engineers.

Alexander merely commanded the Athenians and other naval allies to crowd their ships together and block the harbor mouth at Miletus. He himself had already neutralized the enemy fleet by the simple expedient of occupying all landing places anywhere near Miletus. Unable to beach their ships, the stymied Persians cruised away in search of fresh water, food, and campsites. Once they had left the scene of action, Alexander struck.

EARLY CAMPAIGNS OF ALEXANDER THE GREAT, 336-331 B.C.

The Macedonian siege engines rolled forward to batter the walls and towers, followed by an irresistible rush of Macedonian troops. As the defense of Miletus collapsed, desperate Greek soldiers attempted to escape across the water using their hollow shields as skiffs and their hands as paddles. Most were killed. The survivors surrendered from a rocky islet, the site of their last stand. The Persian armada, outmaneuvered and impotent, vanished away to the south. Alexander soon learned that it had gone to ground within the circular harbor of Halicarnassus. In that historic city of Artemisia and Herodotus, the naval forces of King Darius would again try to halt Alexander’s headlong advance.