The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World

by Paine, Lincoln

  As successive ranks of Persian ships rowed into the constricted strait, the battle became general. The lead ships tried to back out of the narrows even as their comrades continued coming up from Psyttaleia and “The Grecian warships, calculating, dashed / Round, and encircled us.” The battle seems to have been decided early, but the fighting went on all day and thousands died with their ships, the sailors all but entombed on their benches below, the soldiers thrown from the upper decks and drowned by the weight of their weapons and armor. Those in the water were not spared, “Like mackerel or some catch of fish, Were stunned and slaughtered, boned with broken oars and splintered wrecks.… The sum Of troubles, even if I could rehearse them for ten days, I could not exhaust.” The Persians took the measure of their defeat more rapidly than did the Greeks, who anxiously prepared for a new attack but awoke two days after the battle to learn the Persian fleet had quit Phaleron during the night. The battle had probably cost the Greeks 40 triremes, leaving them with about 270, while the Persians had lost around 200 ships, bringing their strength down to 250—a fraction of their number at the start of the campaign. As Artemisia had warned, no fleet meant no supply line and Xerxes evacuated the bulk of his troops from Attica as quickly as possible.

  In addition to vindicating Themistocles’ strategic vision, Salamis forced the Persians onto the defensive and won for the Greeks unassailable control of the Aegean. The end of the war also ushered in the era of Classical Greece, a period at once profoundly different from and remarkably similar to the Archaic Age that preceded it. People of a common language, religion, and general cultural outlook still inhabited much of what comprises modern Greece, as well as the Hellespont and Ionia, parts of the Black Sea coast, and much of Sicily and southern Italy. Politically the Greek world was rent with ancient rivalries. Yet the differences between the Archaic and Classical periods were of greater moment. If Athens had not eclipsed Sparta as the most powerful city-state in Greece, the two were at least equals. Moreover, Athens’s newfound authority derived from a navy that for size, organization, and proven ability was unlike any that preceded it, anywhere in the world. Themistocles’ interpretation of the Delphic oracle had had profound consequences not only for Athens and the Greek world, but for the subsequent course of maritime history down to the present. In Thucydides’ words, Themistocles believed that “if the Athenians became a seafaring people they would have every advantage in adding to their power. Indeed it was he who first ventured to tell the Athenians that their future was on the sea. Thus he at once began laying the foundation for empire.” For the first time it was possible to imagine a far-flung imperial power that derived its wealth from long-distance maritime trade without middlemen and whose prerogatives were enforced by naval superiority.

  The Peloponnesian Wars, 460–404 BCE

  Athens’s opportunity came shortly after the Persian withdrawal, when a joint Greek naval force was sent to root out the last of the Persian threat between Crete and the Hellespont. Relations between Sparta and Athens were good, and when the Spartans were forced to recall their disgraced general, they ceded responsibility for patrolling the Aegean to the Athenians. In 478 BCE, the Athenians formed the Delian League, an alliance intended for the common defense against Persian aggression, with Athens as first among equals. The Athenians appointed the “Hellenic treasurers” to receive tribute at the island of Delos (hence the league’s modern name) in the form of silver and ships. The wealth generated by these contributions and from the commercial prosperity that made Piraeus a center of Aegean trade was not used simply for the league’s defensive needs. It also helped fund the extravagant building projects such as the Parthenon that are the enduring landmarks of Classical Athens. Because the league’s 170 cities were encouraged to contribute silver in lieu of ships, the Athenians shouldered the burden of the league’s fighting and consequently developed a navy that could beat all comers. In time the league was transformed from a free association of Athens and her independent allies to a coercive Athenian empire. In 465 BCE, the Athenians suppressed an attempt by the silver-rich island of Thasos to secede, and fifteen years later all pretense of a cooperative alliance was abandoned when the treasury was transferred from Delos to Athens.

  The maritime city-state also cast its eye beyond the Aegean. A memorial stone of 460 BCE inscribed with the names of 177 soldiers testifies to the reach of Athenian power in this period: “These died in war in Cyprus, in Egypt, in Phoenicia, in Halieis, in Aegina, in the Megarid, in the same year.” Cyprus was a perennial battleground between Greeks and Persians, its chief attractions being copper, grain, and wood, while Egypt offered the prospect of a rich grain trade as well as an opportunity to support resistance to Persian rule. In 450 BCE the Greeks beat the Persians in a battle fought at the Cypriot port of Salamis. After this, Persia’s Artaxerxes decided to negotiate the Peace of Callias, a supreme triumph for Athenian naval power: the Persians were prohibited from sending warships west of Lycia in southwest Anatolia or south of the Black Sea, and they could not bring their armies within three days’ march of the coast of Ionia, to which they renounced all claims.

  The Athenian memorial of 460 BCE also refers to hostilities with Corinth at the start of a fifteen-year conflict known as the First Peloponnesian War. When Athens later intervened in a three-way conflict between Corinth and two of its colonies, the Corinthians urged their Spartan allies to invade Attica to free Greece from the Athenians’ overweening power. Destined to last more than a quarter century, the Peloponnesian War is divided into four phases: the Archidamean War (431–421 BCE), the Peace of Nicias (421–415), the Sicilian expedition (415–413), and the Decelean War (413–404). At the outset, the Athenian leader was Pericles, an aristocrat by birth and demeanor but a populist and, in his advocacy of naval power, Themistocles’ political heir, which almost guaranteed that the Peloponnesian War would depend more on fleet actions than any fought previously. As reported by Thucydides, Pericles enunciated a comprehensive vision of sea power:

  The whole world before our eyes can be divided into two parts, the land and the sea, each of which is valuable and useful to man. Of the whole of one of these parts you are in control—not only of the area at present in your power, but elsewhere too, if you want to go further. With your navy as it is today there is no power on earth—not the King of Persia nor any people under the sun—which can stop you from sailing where you wish.

  In the first six years of the war, the Spartans confined the Athenians to Athens, Piraeus, and the corridor between the long walls that joined them. Yet the Athenians were in no imminent danger so long as they controlled the sea and could import what they needed. Their chief strategic aim was to maintain the free flow of grain from the Black Sea, for which they enlisted the support of Thracian and Macedonian rulers, and which enabled the city to survive a plague that killed a quarter of the population, including Pericles. The conflict widened in 427 BCE when the Athenians sent a fleet to support their Sicilian allies against Syracuse and to interrupt grain shipments from Sicily to the Peloponnese. The first Sicilian campaign ended inconclusively after three years. Of greater consequence was the loss of Athens’s naval base at Amphipolis, strategically located near supplies of shipbuilding timber on the border between Macedonia and Thrace. Marching northward, the Spartans seized the town before the Athenian general (and historian) Thucydides could reach it.

  This paved the way for a peace that lasted until the citizens of Segesta, in western Sicily, appealed to Athens for help against Syracuse. Leadership of the Sicilian expedition was ill-fated. The opportunistic Alcibiades sailed under suspicion of impiety and was later exiled, and Nicias proved indecisive until a fellow general argued that a withdrawal would be better than a defeat, when Nicias overruled him. Shortly thereafter, in September 413 BCE, the Syracusan fleet attacked the Athenians in the confines of the harbor. Crushed in battle, forty thousand Athenians and their allies attempted to flee on foot, but most were killed or died while imprisoned in nearby stone quarries. Summa
rizing the campaign, Thucydides declared it “to the victors, the most brilliant of successes, to the vanquished the most calamitous of defeats … their losses were, as they say, total; army, navy, everything was destroyed, and out of many, only few returned.”

  Thucydides’ account of the war ends the same year and his verdict belies the Athenians’ resolve. Although their fleet numbered barely a hundred ships and the Spartans had invaded Attica and again confined them within the long walls, they resumed campaigning in the Aegean in 411 BCE. The Athenians sought to protect the Black Sea grain ships, receive tribute from members of the Delian League, and engage the Peloponnesian fleet. Stretched to the limit, they kept the Spartans and their allies on the defensive, but the odds were against them. By 405 BCE, the Athenian fleet was crewed by “all men of military age, slave or free,” and a Spartan admiral promised that he would “put a stop to your fornication with the sea. She belongs to me.” The following year, the Athenians and Spartans met for the last time in the confines of the Hellespont where in the course of a few hours Athens lost her navy, and with it control of the strait, the grain trade, and her empire. Faced with starvation, the Athenians accepted Spartan peace terms: their navy was reduced to twelve ships, they were forced to join the Spartan-led Peloponnesian League, and the Spartans imposed an oligarchic form of government.

  Seafaring and Society in Classical Greece

  Peace proved elusive and in the early fourth century BCE, Sparta and Persia were frequently at war, with Athens and other Greek cities often siding with the Persians. Amid this tumult, the Athenians recovered from their humiliating defeat in the Peloponnesian Wars and in the 370s BCE they concluded a number of alliances that in many respects revived their fifth-century empire. Protecting markets and sources of supply remained foremost of their aims. The Black Sea grain trade was the most important and heavily regulated, but fourth-century documents reveal a robust and diverse commerce. Of particular significance was the development of the bottomry loan—“the only form of genuinely productive investment known at the time”—in which a merchant pledged his ships, or its cargo, or both, in exchange for a loan payable at the conclusion of a voyage. Interest rates were variable, but generally high—as much as 22.5 percent in one instance—and they were subject to tight restrictions: loans to shippers resident at Athens could only be made for grain cargoes bound for that city. Such protectionist measures were not unique to Athens. Wine from Thasos could be exported only in Thasian ships, and although Athenian coinage was the most widespread in the Greek world, the Black Sea port of Olbia refused to honor any currency but its own.

  The busiest Greek port of the fourth century BCE remained Piraeus, where building had been vigorous after the Persian Wars. Laid out in the previous century by a Milesian architect named Hippodamus, whose rectilinear street schemes were widely imitated, Piraeus was divided into a naval port, a market, and a residential area and had three distinct harbors: Kantharos on the west side of the peninsula, and Zea and Munichia to the east. In 331 BCE, Piraeus had sheds for 372 triremes, and the ships’ equipment was stored in the Arsenal of Philon, which measured 120 by 16.5 meters and stood 8 meters high. Kantharos was the site of the grain market and the general trading area where merchants brought samples of their wares, the bulk of which remained in their ships until they were sold. The entrance to Kantharos was guarded by two artificial quays between the ends of which was strung a chain that could be raised to the surface to keep raiders out, a typical form of harbor defense down to the twentieth century. Aristophanes’ comedy The Acharnians captures the vitality of the harbor, its whiff of sea wrack and odors of goods and ships, the percussion of heavy cargoes, oars, and rigging all in movement, and the accompanying chorus of human voices: “shouting crows around ships’ captains, pay being distributed, figureheads of Athena being gilded, the Piraeus corn market groaning as rations were measured out, people buying leathers and rowlock thongs and jars, or garlic and olives and nets of onions, garlands and anchovies and flute girls and black eyes; and down at the docks, the sound of planing spars for oars, hammering in dowels, boring oar-holes, of reed-pipes and pan-pipes and boatswains and warblings.” Though not unique, this brief portrait of the Piraeus waterfront is among the most sensuous and densely populated from the hand of an ancient writer.

  Despite their dependence on ships and their crews for everything from their daily bread and defense to their extraordinary wealth, the Athenians and most of their contemporaries disparaged merchant mariners and their world. It is difficult to appreciate the hostility that sailors faced in Classical Greece. Starting in the late sixth century BCE, the Athenians’ increased reliance on sailors, shipbuilders, shipowners, and investors fostered an increasingly heterogeneous and cosmopolitan society, a natural and potentially revolutionary consequence of expanded maritime trade throughout history. Despite the crucial importance of commerce, neither sailors nor merchants—most of whom were foreigners—were held in high regard. While the battle of Salamis ensured the Persians’ withdrawal from Greece, it also brought the tensions between merchant-sailors and the landed aristocracy into high relief. For the latter, the acme of Greek resistance to the Persians was not Salamis but Marathon. Despite his having fought in the naval battles at Artemisium and Salamis, and written about the latter in The Persians, Aeschylus wanted to be remembered solely for his part in the battle of Marathon. But Salamis helped validate the notion of democracy in Athens (where the last tyranny had been overthrown only thirty years before), because the defense of the city involved citizens of humble birth, and not just contingents of wealthier hoplite soldiers. The role of the former became permanent in the fifth century BCE as Athens nurtured an ever-expanding empire bound to the home city by its merchant and naval fleets. Not surprisingly, when the Peloponnesian War ended, aristocrats blamed Athens’s defeat on its democratic political system.

  In the fourth century BCE, Plato and Aristotle were among the most virulent critics of the “naval mob” unleashed by Themistocles. Plato argued that death was preferable to adopting the ways of sailors and “their plausible and ready excuses for throwing down their arms and betaking themselves to ‘flight without dishonor,’ as it is called. Phrases like this are the normal consequences of employing men-at-arms on shipboard, and what they call for is not infinite commendation, but the very reverse.” He also recommended that to avoid the corruption that inevitably arises from sea trade a city should be situated at least eighty stades (fifteen kilometers) from the sea. Aristotle was hardly more generous, allowing that “There can be no doubt that the possession of a moderate naval force is advantageous to a city,” but insisting that “The population of the state need not be much increased, since there is no necessity that the sailors should be citizens.” Given such disdain, it is hardly surprising that only two shipowners of Classical Greece are known to have owned more than one ship, Phormio and Lampis, “the largest shipowner in Hellas.”

  Biases against mariners and merchants were by no means limited to the Greeks, and Herodotus noted, “I have observed that Thracians, Scythians, Persians, Lydians—indeed, almost all foreigners—reckon craftsmen [including traders] and their descendants as lower in the social scale than people who have no connexion with manual work.” Despite their conspicuous and measurable contributions, seafarers remained suspect and marginalized in many societies, even as merchants and others both relied upon and profited from their labor, not just in the Greek world but elsewhere. There were of course exceptions, and conspicuously absent from the list of “almost all foreigners” are the Phoenicians and Carthaginians, whose embrace of maritime commerce can be seen in their commercial diaspora and the fact that the most important of the three gods they recognized, Melqart, was a patron of trade and overseas colonies. Largely unaffected by the Greeks’ incessant wars, by the start of the fourth century BCE Carthage was among the Mediterranean’s strongest powers, and territorially the most extensive. Stranger still, the greatest challenge to its maritime preeminence would come no
t from Greece, but from a most unlikely quarter, the republic of Rome, which would make the sea its own.

  Chapter 5

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  Carthage, Rome, and the Mediterranean

  Despite a shared history, language, and religion, the city-states of Greece were too fractious to remain at peace with each other for long. Two centuries of almost uninterrupted warfare had left them exhausted and power in the Greek heartland ebbed following the meteoric rise of Macedonia’s Alexander the Great. His premature death in 323 BCE left the eastern Mediterranean in the hands of powerful warlords who carved huge states from the corpse of the Persian Empire. At the same time, maritime-oriented states in the central Mediterranean were tilting the balance of power away from the east. Phoenician Carthage controlled much of the trade of the western Mediterranean, while the Greek cities of southern Italy kept a watchful eye on each other, Carthage, and the rising power of Rome. The latter emerged as the dominant city of the Latin League by the end of the fifth century BCE, but the Romans did not take to the seas until the First Punic War (264–241 BCE). For the next five centuries Rome’s growth and prosperity was inextricably tied to its control of the Mediterranean sea-lanes.

  The ascendancy of republican Rome would have been impossible without its citizens’ willingness to use the sea for war and trade. So long as they were ignorant of seafaring, the Romans were a threat only to their immediate neighbors on the Italian Peninsula. As they adapted their military abilities to naval warfare they became indomitable. Cultivating their own sea power and that of their allies, they were able to extend their rule to Ionia; to have a say in the foreign affairs of Syria, Palestine, and Egypt long before they formally annexed these countries; to move their armies; and to feed their citizens from the rich granaries of Sicily and Africa. By the start of the common era, Rome was a Mediterranean and Black Sea empire. Although the next few centuries are known as the Pax Romana, the Roman peace, it would be more accurate to call the period the Pax Mediterraneana, for it was only here, on what the Romans called Mare Nostrum, “our sea,” that they were undisputed masters.