Lords of the Sea: The Epic Story of the Athenian Navy & the Birth of Democracy (5 page)

Other Greeks had to procure their precious metals from the Aegean islands or the mountains of the north. The Athenian people owned the Laurium mines collectively, but the actual investment and operations were privatized. Mine leases were auctioned off at the start of each year to the highest bidders, and the Athenians also collected a percentage of each mine’s yield at the end of the annual lease.

ATTICA, ca. 500 B.C.

The lands of Themistocles’ family lay at a township called Phrearroi (“Wells”), on the edge of the mining district. He knew that in recent years the miners had unexpectedly broken through to a zone where the ore lay in a vast subterranean reef. The annual trickle of silver from Laurium soon swelled to a mighty stream. Inspectors reported the increase in silver to the Board of Mines, which passed the news on to the councilors. The lucky strike at Laurium created a surplus big enough for a public distribution. The Council was submitting a proposal to keep half the silver in the treasury but to divide the rest in equal portions among all thirty thousand citizens. According to the draft resolution on the notice boards, ten drachmas would be the amount of the dole. Themistocles, however, had other ideas.

That morning a flag had been hoisted at daybreak to remind citizens of the Assembly meeting. Before Themistocles arrived at the Pnyx, officials had climbed to the hilltop and purified the place with prayers and sacrifices. Soon the ground in front of the speaker’s platform began to fill as citizens came up from the Agora. The noise increased: an irrepressible Athenian hubbub of greetings, comments, arguments, obscenities, and jokes. At the rear of the talkative and straggling procession walked a line of slaves. They carried a rope dripping with dye and herded the slow-moving citizens toward the meeting place. Any laggard found with a red stripe on his tunic would be marked down for a fine.

The nine archons took their seats, led by the eponymous archon who gave his name to the year. Ten years ago Themistocles had held this post; now it was a man named Nicodemus. Places were also reserved for the fifty Council members whose tribe happened to be presiding that day in the annual rotation. The secretary prepared his stylus and wax tablets. At a signal from the president, the herald stepped up to the speaker’s platform and spoke the invocation. There was no separation of religion and state in Athens: the government had no higher duty than propitiating the gods through almost constant rites and sacrifices. After the invocation the herald read out the first draft resolution on the Council’s agenda and cried, “Who wishes to speak?” The Assembly of Athens was open for business.

The thoughts of most citizens that morning were pleasantly occupied with the question “What shall I do with ten drachmas?” The sum was enough to buy a new riding cloak, an exceptionally fine painted cup, or even an ox. It was a negligible bonus for men in the city’s upper three citizen classes—the three or four hundred richest landowners, the twelve hundred horsemen, and the ten thousand hoplites who donned their bronze armor to fight in the phalanx. But for the great mass of Athens’ landless workers, the citizens who were known as thetes, ten drachmas represented a major supplement to their scanty incomes.

These men of the fourth and lowest class numbered about twenty thousand. Most worked for hire in agriculture, manufacturing, or transport. Individually they lacked wealth or influence, but as a mass they were the
demos,
the “people” at the heart of Athenian democracy. Though the thetes constituted a clear majority of citizens, the city’s laws still barred them from holding any elected office. This nondemocratic restriction was likewise placed on the hoplites. Unlike hoplites, however, thetes were excluded even from membership on the Council of Five Hundred. Thus the agenda for Assembly meetings rested firmly in the hands of the wealthy, and the thetes could only vote yea or nay to proposals that seemed good to members of the upper classes. At the time when Themistocles stepped forward to make his speech, Athens may have called itself a democracy, but in some ways it was a democracy in name only.

In anticipation of the Assembly’s favorable vote on the silver dole, the mint had struck thousands of silver coins for distribution. One side of each coin was stamped with the head of a smiling Athena, wearing a helmet and a pearl earring, while the other displayed the goddess’s owl, emblem of her wisdom. Unlike the Spartans, who claimed to scorn private wealth and did not even have a coinage or currency of their own, Athenians were hard-headed men who knew the value of a drachma. They were not likely to pass up such a windfall.

In response to the herald’s cry, Themistocles came forward and mounted the speaker’s platform or bema. He was a robust man of forty, with a wide challenging gaze and a neck like a bull. His hair was cropped short in the style of a workingman, not a noble. Along with an infallible memory for names and faces, he possessed one other prerequisite for a political career in Athens: a loud voice.

No one read from notes while addressing the Assembly: speeches were either memorized or extemporized. Themistocles had to keep in mind a number of rules while speaking. He must not wander from his point or address more than one topic. He was not permitted to slander a fellow citizen, step off the bema while speaking, or assault the president. Most important, he could not speak twice on the same proposal unless ordered by the Assembly to do so. Before stepping down from the platform Themistocles would have to provide every detail of his plan, explain all its benefits, and rebut in advance every possible argument against it. It was most unwise to incur the Assembly’s impatience, usually expressed with hooting, booing, and other verbal abuse. But so long as a speaker broke no rules, he could not be interrupted.

Without flamboyant gestures or theatrical tricks Themistocles faced his fellow citizens and presented his proposal. The Council had reported the surplus of silver and proposed a dole. He believed that there was a better use for the silver. Rather than break up the enormous hoard, he urged the Athenians to devote the year’s mining revenue, all six hundred thousand drachmas of it, to a single project: the building of a navy. With the full amount Athens could provide itself with one hundred new warships, fast triremes designed for naval warfare. In combination with the existing fleet of about seventy and some modest annual additions, the total would quickly climb to two hundred. This was about the maximum number of ships that the city could hope to man from its own population. At a stroke, Athens would become the greatest naval power in Greece.

This was no quixotic request: the fleet would protect the Athenians from a very real and immediate threat to their security. Themistocles aimed his revolutionary proposal at an enemy visible to all. From where he stood Themistocles could point across the sea to the dark heights of Aegina, an island that dominated the southern horizon. For generations an aristocracy of merchant princes had ruled Aegina, lording it over the Athenians in both naval power and maritime trade. Athenian “owls” competed in foreign markets with Aeginetan “turtles,” silver coins stamped with the image of a sea turtle. Aegina, not Athens, set the common standards for weights and measures. An Egyptian pharaoh had granted Aeginetan merchants a trading post in the Nile delta, and fleets of grain ships from the Black Sea made Aegina their destination each summer. The island had become the greatest maritime emporium in Greece, while Athens still lacked a protected harbor where a freighter could dock and unload its cargo. The Aeginetans had once even humiliated Athens by placing a trade embargo on Athenian pottery.

Commercial dominance had not been enough for the Aeginetans. For the past twenty years they had been waging an undeclared war against the Athenians. It was the kind of running conflict that the Greeks called a
polemos akeryktos
or “war without a herald.” One day, out of the blue, Aeginetan warships struck the coast of Attica and swept like a pirate fleet through Phaleron and other coastal towns. Their next target was a sacred ship bound for the sanctuary of Poseidon at Cape Sunium. The Aeginetans ambushed the Athenian ship and kidnapped the priest and other dignitaries on board. After this act the Athenians had retaliated and scored a hard-won victory in a naval battle. Most recently, however, the islanders had taken an Athenian flotilla by surprise and seized four galleys with their crews. Athenians seemed incapable of parrying these lightninglike attacks.

At the time of the Aeginetan war, Athens’ fleet was for the most part a disorganized mass of galleys. Since Themistocles’ ambitious project at the Piraeus remained half-finished, some of the ships were drawn up on the open beach at Phaleron while others were scattered among ports and villages all around the Attic coast. To this ragtag force the Athenians had recently added seven Persian warships captured at Marathon during the fighting on the shore, and twenty triremes purchased from Corinth for a token payment of five drachmas apiece. These Corinthian ships had arrived in Athens just one day too late to provide support for a democratic revolution on Aegina, and in fact the revolution failed for lack of Athenian aid. Had it succeeded, the hostilities with the islanders would probably have ended.

Themistocles envisioned a fleet built by private citizens for the common good. According to his proposal, one hundred of Athens’ richest citizens would each be allotted a talent of silver (that is, six thousand drachmas). Each man would then use the money to buy raw materials and organize the building of a warship. Themistocles even included an escape clause. Should the Athenians in the end disapprove of the plan, each wealthy citizen would pay back his one talent to the treasury—but keep the ship. Thus, in the case of a change of heart, the citizens would not have lost their ten-drachma dole but only deferred it for a few months. They had nothing to lose and much to gain. Having appealed to his fellow citizens’ patriotism, pride, common sense, and self-interest, Themistocles stepped down from the bema and made his way back to his place among the ranks of citizens.

One important aspect of his proposal may have remained unspoken. One hundred new triremes would call for seventeen thousand men to pull the oars. Athens already had a fleet of seventy ships. Only by conscripting the citizens of the lowest class, the thetes, could Athens fight a naval battle with the large fleet that Themistocles was proposing. His navy would empower the city’s masses while preserving its freedom of the seas.

Before the president could put the matter to a vote, another citizen asked to speak. The herald called forward Aristides from the
deme
or township of Alopeke, a fellow townsman of Themistocles’ wife. This noble Athenian had earned a reputation as a fair and incorruptible arbitrator; hence his popular nickname, “Aristides the Just.” He was about Themistocles’ age, and the two men were political rivals. Seven years earlier both had fought at the battle of Marathon as generals in command of their respective tribal regiments. After the victory, when most of the army began its twenty-six-and-a-half-mile quick march to fend off a Persian counterattack on Athens, Aristides had been entrusted with the task of guarding the booty and prisoners. The following year he had been elected the city’s eponymous archon. Now he put himself forward to lead the opposition to Themistocles’ plan.

No record of his speech survives. As an arbitrator, Aristides may have wanted to see Athens resolve its quarrels with Aegina through arbitration. Why in any case should the war effort against Aegina be raised to this new level? If Aegina were truly the target, only a small increase in the number of Athenian ships would be needed to give Athens the advantage at sea. If on the other hand Themistocles still feared a Persian invasion, the victory at Marathon showed that the Athenians could best meet the Persians on land. Themistocles had led the citizens astray in the past and might do so again.

The president of the Assembly was an ordinary citizen who had been chosen by lot to act as the city’s chief executive for that one day only. Now that Themistocles and Aristides had finished their speeches, it was time for the president to exercise virtually the only power granted to him and put the proposal to a vote. At Athens the citizens indicated their choice by a show of hands. Except in the case of a very close count, the president and the other officials simply looked out over the mass of citizens and then announced whether the majority had voted yea or nay. On this momentous occasion, despite the plea of Aristides, the Athenians first voted nay to the Council’s proposed ten-drachma dole, then yea to Themistocles’ proposal that one hundred citizens each be given a silver talent for a project that would benefit Athens. One man’s vision had at last become the mission of an entire city.

Themistocles had made his proposal in the very nick of time. Almost two thousand miles to the east, beyond the Tigris River, plans were being laid for an invasion of Greece. Athens would be the prime target. But now, thanks to a chance discovery of silver ore at Laurium, a barricade of wooden ships and bronze rams would stand between the Great King and his goal. Themistocles saw himself as commander of that fleet, the key force in the struggle against the Persian invaders. And after the threat to liberty had passed, Themistocles envisioned a time when Athens would take its rightful place as the first city in Greece—small no longer, but made great by
mêtis,
bold action, and a navy.