Lords of the Sea: The Epic Story of the Athenian Navy & the Birth of Democracy

by John R. Hale

  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.

  CHAPTER 2

  Building the Fleet [483 - 481 B.C.]

  Come! Haul a black ship down to the shining sea for her first cruise.

  —Homer

  ATHENIANS HAD BEEN SEAFARERS SINCE EARLIEST TIMES, BUT their ventures were always overshadowed by maritime powers from Asia Minor, the Near East, and the rest of Greece. Legend claimed that even in the days of the first king of Athens, Cecrops, the people of Attica had to contend with raiders who terrorized their coasts. Several generations later King Menestheus led a fleet of fifty ships to Troy as Athens’ contribution to the Greek armada, twelve hundred strong. The city’s record in the Trojan War was undistinguished, outshone even by the contingent from the little offshore island of Salamis under the leadership of Ajax. After the end of the Bronze Age the royal citadels throughout Greece gave way to Iron Age communities, and they in turn grew into prosperous city-states. New currents in overseas commerce and colonization left Athens behind. Cities like Corinth, Megara, Chalcis, and Eretria took the lead.

  Meanwhile the noble clans of Athens were pursuing their own initiatives and policies with private warships, armies, trading contacts, royal guest-friends, and religious rites. Some of the most powerful Athenian families even seized and held strategic sites around the northern Aegean and Hellespont as private fiefdoms. The one thing they seem never to have done was to unite their ships and efforts into a state navy. Even the conquest of Salamis, the Athenian state’s first nautical mission since the Trojan War, was said to have been carried out by a single thirty-oared galley and a fleet of fishing boats. But the spirit of free enterprise that ran strong in the ship lords

  ATHENIAN TRIREME

  of Attica was to remain a vital force within Themistocles’ new trireme fleet.

  Actual naval battles were rare events in early Greek history. Homer knew nothing of fleet actions on his wine-dark sea, though in his Iliad and Odyssey he often cataloged or described ships of war. Their operations were limited to seaborne assaults on coastal towns (of which the Trojan War itself was just a glorified example) or piratical attacks at sea. As the centuries passed, two sizes of sleek, fast, open galley eventually became standard among the Greeks: the triakontor of thirty oars and the pentekontor of fifty. The traders, soldiers, or pirates who manned these galleys (often the same men), thirsting for gain and glory overseas, usually pulled the oars themselves

  It was the Phoenicians of the Lebanon coast who literally raised galleys to a new level. These seagoing Canaanites invented the trireme, though exactly when no Greek could say. Enlarging their ships, the Phoenician shipwrights provided enough height and space to fit three tiers of rowers within the hull. Their motives had nothing to do with naval battles, for such engagements were still unknown. The Phoenicians needed bigger ships for exploration, commerce, and colonization. In the course of their epic voyages, Phoenician seafarers founded great cities from Carthage to Cádiz, made a three-year circumnavigation of Africa (the first in history) in triremes, and spread throughout the Mediterranean the most precious of their possessions: the alphabet.

  The first Greeks to build triremes were the Corinthians. From their city near the Isthmus of Corinth these maritime pioneers dominated the western seaways and could haul their galleys across the narrow neck of the Isthmus for voyages eastward as well. The new Greek trireme differed from the Phoenician original in providing a rowing frame for the top tier of oarsmen, rather than having all the rowers enclosed within the ship’s hull. Some triremes maintained the open form of their small and nimble ancestors, the triakontors and pentekontors. Others had wooden decks above the rowers to carry colonists or mercenary troops. Greek soldiers of fortune, the “bronze men” called hoplites, were in demand with native rulers from the Nile delta to the Pillars of Heracles.

  Like the Phoenician cities of Tyre and Sidon, Corinth was both a great center of commerce and a starting point for large-scale colonizing missions. Triremes could greatly improve the prospects of colonizing ventures, being able to carry more of the goods that new cities needed: livestock and fruit trees; equipment for farms and mills and fortifications; household items and personal belongings. For defense against attack during their voyages through hostile waters, or against opposition as the colonists tried to land, the large crew and towering hull made the trireme almost a floating fortress.

  The earliest known naval battle among Greek fleets was a contest between the Corinthians and their own aggressively independent colonists, the Corcyraeans. Though the battle took place long after the Corinthians began building triremes, it was a clumsy collision between two fleets of pentekontors. The outcome was entirely decided by combat between the fighting men on board the ships. Naval maneuvers were nonexistent. This primitive procedure would typify all Greek sea battles for the next century and a half.

  Then, at about the time of Themistocles’ birth, two landmark battles at opposite ends of the Greek world brought about a seismic shift in naval warfare. First, in a battle near the Corsican town of Alalia, sixty Greek galleys defeated a fleet of Etruscans and Carthaginians twice their own size. How was this miracle achieved? The Greeks relied on their ships’ rams and the skill of their steersmen rather than on man-to-man combat. Shortly afterward, at Samos in the eastern Aegean, a force of rebels in forty trireme transports turned against the local tyrant and crushed his war fleet of one hundred pentekontors. In both battles victory went to a heavily outnumbered fleet whose commanders made use of innovations in tactics or equipment. Ramming maneuvers and triremes thus made their debut in the line of battle almost simultaneously. Together they were to dominate Greek naval warfare for the next two hundred years.

  Now everyone wanted triremes, not just as transports but as battleships. Rulers of Greek cities in Sicily and Italy equipped themselves with triremes. In Persia the Great King commanded his maritime subjects from Egypt to the Black Sea to build and maintain trireme fleets for the royal levies. The core of Persian naval power was the Phoenician fleet, but the conquered Greeks of Asia Minor and the islands were also bound by the king’s decree. All these forces could be mustered on demand to form the huge navy of the Persian Empire. Themistocles believed that Athens’ new trireme fleet might soon face not only the islanders of Aegina but the armada of the Great King as well.

  While many cities and empires jostled for the prize of sea rule, ultimate success in naval warfare called for sacrifices that few were willing or able to make. Only the most determined of maritime nations would commit the formidable amounts of wealth and hard work that the cause required, not just for occasional emergencies but over the long haul. With triremes the scale and financial risks of naval warfare escalated dramatically. These great ships consumed far more materials and manpower than smaller galleys. Now money became, more than ever before, the true sinews of war.

  Even more daunting than the monetary costs were the unprecedented demands on human effort. The Phocaean Greeks who won the historic battle at Alalia in Corsica understood the need for hard training at sea, day after exhausting day. In the new naval warfare, victory belonged to those with the best-drilled and best-disciplined crews, not those with the most courageous fighting men. Skillful steering, timing, and oarsmanship, attainable only through long and arduous practice, were the new keys to success. Ramming maneuvers changed the world by making the lower-class steersmen, subordinate officers, and rowers more important than the propertied hoplite soldiers. After all, a marine’s spear thrust might at best eliminate one enemy combatant. A trireme’s ramming stroke could destroy a ship and its entire
company at one blow.

  Themistocles had specified that Athens’ new ships should be fast triremes: light, open, and undecked for maximum speed and maneuverability. Only gangways would connect the steersman’s small afterdeck to the foredeck at the prow where the lookout, marines, and archers were stationed. The new Athenian triremes were designed for ramming attacks, not for carrying large contingents of troops. By committing themselves completely to this design, Themistocles and his fellow Athenians were taking a calculated risk. For many actions, fully decked triremes were more serviceable. Time would tell whether the city had made the right choice.

  The construction of a single trireme was a major undertaking: building one hundred at once was a labor fit for Heracles. Once the rich citizens who would oversee the task received their talents of silver, each had to find an experienced shipwright. No plans, drawings, models, or manuals guided the builder of a ship. A trireme, whether fast or fully decked, existed at first only as an ideal image in the mind of a master shipwright. To build his trireme, the shipwright required a wide array of raw materials. Most could be supplied locally from the woods, fields, mines, and quarries of Attica itself. Many local trades and crafts would also take part in building the new fleet.

  First, timber. The hills of Attica rang with the bite of iron on wood as the tall trees toppled and crashed to the ground: oak for strength; pine and fir for resilience; ash, mulberry, and elm for tight grain and hardness. After woodsmen lopped the branches from the fallen monarchs, teamsters with oxen and mules dragged the logs down to the shore. The shipwright prepared the building site by planting a line of wooden stocks in the sand and carefully leveling their tops. On the stocks he laid the keel. This was the ship’s backbone, an immense squared beam of oak heartwood measuring seventy feet or more in length. Ideally this oak keel was free not only of cracks but even of knots. On its strength depended the life of the trireme in the shocks of storm and battle. Oak was chosen for its ability to withstand the routine stresses of hauling the ship onto shore and then launching it again. Once the keel was on the stocks, two stout timbers were joined to its ends to define the ship’s profile. The curving sternpost rose as gracefully as the neck of a swan or the upturned tail of a dolphin. Forward, the upright stempost was set up a little distance from keel’s end. The short section of the keel that extended forward of the stempost would form the core of the ship’s beak and ultimately support the bronze ram.