Splendid Exchange, A

by Bernstein, William L

  The coming of the Prophet would sweep away this fragmented and pluralistic pattern of trade in the ancient world. Within a few centuries of Muhammad’s death, one culture, one religion, and one law would unify the commerce of the Old World’s three continents nearly a millennium before the arrival of the first European ships in the East.

  2

  THE STRAITS OF TRADE

  And so against these men, our greatest enemies, disorganized as they are and betrayed by their own fortune, let us go into battle with anger in our hearts; let us be convinced that in dealing with an adversary it is most just and lawful to claim the right to slake the fury of the soul in retaliation on the aggressor, and also that we shall have that greatest of all pleasures, which consists, according to the proverb, in taking vengeance on an enemy.—Gylippus, Spartan commander, on the eve of the defeat of the Athenian naval force at Syracuse harbor1

  Whoever is lord of Malacca has his hand on the throat of Venice.—Tomé Pires2

  Few stories from classical antiquity stir the modern soul as does that of the destruction of the Athenian expedition to Sicily during the Peloponnesian War. On the plains above and in the harbor below the eastern Sicilian port of Syracuse, the Spartan-led forces of that far-flung outpost of Greek civilization picked off soldier after Athenian soldier and ship after Athenian ship. Thucydides, a meticulous observer not given to overstatement, minced no words, “This was . . . the greatest action that we know of in Hellenic history—to the victors the most brilliant of successes, to the vanquished, the most calamitous of defeats.”3

  Just what does the Peloponnesian War have to do with the history of trade? A great deal indeed, because the reasons that drove Athens to seek empire sprang directly from the commerce in that most basic of commodities—grain—and in the peculiar geography of the Hellenic cradle of Western civilization. Further, just as the cultural and institutional foundations of Western civilization first saw the light of day in ancient Greece, so did the obsession of the modern West with the control of vital sea lanes and strategic maritime choke points derives from Greece’s unique agricultural and geographic configuration, which left it dependent on imported grain. The forces that drove Britain and the United States to control the world’s shipping lanes in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, respectively, first saw light of day in Greece’s need to feed itself with imported wheat and barley.4

  The question of why proud Athens overreached the limits of its power and resources and suffered defeat on the remote shores of Sicily has vexed Western historians since Thucydides, a cashiered Athenian general, first wrote his famous chronicle. It is no accident that modern-day interest in this ancient conflict intensifies as history’s greatest superpower becomes ever more mired on the battlefields of the Middle East. It is hard not to associate today’s principal foreign policy advocates with the main Athenian actors: the arrogant, brilliant, and perfidious hawk Alcibiades, and the cautious and loyal dove Nicias, whom the Syracusans captured and executed.

  But what drove Athens toward empire in the first place? Ancient Greece consisted of hundreds of more or less independent small city-states arrayed in a kaleidoscopic and ever-changing pattern of alliances, almost continuously at war with one another. “Greece” was a cultural and linguistic concept, not a nation. Only external threats of the first order, such as the Persian invasion at the beginning of the fifth century BC, could unify this fractious brotherhood into a coherent whole, and even then, only briefly.

  A brief look at a map of the Aegean area sets the scene. Greece’s coastline is convoluted, a tapestry of innumerable islands, peninsulas, inlets, bays, and channels. This complex topology, combined with the relatively mountainous landscape of Greece, dictated that almost all trade went by sea.

  Along with geography, the other key player in Greek trade was the poor soil of almost all its city-states, most of which existed hard by famine’s precipice. The first human civilizations that took root in the fertile land between the Tigris and Euphrates and along the lush banks of the Nile were blessed with some of the world’s most productive farmland. Not so mountainous Greece, which lacked the rich alluvial valleys of the two older societies and possessed only a thin, limestone soil watered by an average of just sixteen inches of rain per year. Because of limited agricultural opportunities, its population clustered on the coasts and engaged in fishing, manufacturing, and trade.

  While a traditional Greek farm might not grow grain adequate even for its own needs, it could produce sufficient wine and olive oil to exchange for more abundant wheat and barley from abroad. Thus the Greek farmer depended on trade not only to feed his family, but also to allow him enough excess income to afford the time and resources needed for participation in the assembly and in the basic local military unit, the hoplite formation.5

  Athenian Grain Routes

  At about the same moment that some of the Greek city-states first developed as democracies in the early first millennium BC, they also began to outrun their food supply. Even for Greece, the soil of Attica—the territory ruled from Athens—was especially poor. Thucydides thought that the infertility of the soil made Athens unappealing to invaders, thus affording it a sturdy political climate. This “stability of poor soils,” he felt, attracted those of wealth, power, and knowledge from wealthier and more powerful, but fractious, city-states.6

  Greece’s barley production was probably adequate, at least early on, for subsistence needs, but over time the increasingly prosperous and discriminating Greek palate began to demand wheat. The cultivation of this crop, which requires well-timed watering for germination, proved especially difficult in an environment with scant and unreliable rainfall. As with the English medieval folk hero John Barleycorn, the ceremonial sacrificial bread of both Greece and Rome was cake of barley, which is much easier to grow in a dry climate and in poor soil. Until the advent of active grain trade in the sixth century BC, wheat bread was eaten only on Greek feast days.7

  Where did the demanding Greek homemaker get wheat? Before the sixth century BC, mainly from Egypt, granary of the Mediterranean. Herodotus records that the pharaoh Amasis8 gave the city of Naucratis on the Canopic arm of the Nile delta to the Hellenes as a trading city for merchants from many Greek cities.9

  The Greeks also colonized Sicily in order to take advantage of the rich volcanic soil around Mount Etna on its eastern coast. Syracuse itself was founded south of its peak in the late eighth century BC by colonists from Athens’s powerful rival just to its southwest, Corinth. But it would be in the vast, rich hinterlands of the Black Sea’s northern shore that the Greeks found pay dirt, so to speak. At about the same time that Corinthian farmers were founding Syracuse, the Aegean city-states began sending large numbers of colonists to the extraordinarily fertile valleys of the Bug and Dnieper rivers, in what is now the southern Ukraine (hereafter, the “Pontus,” after the Greek Pontus Euxine—the modern Black Sea).

  As Greek citizens began to acquire grain from the colonies in the Pontus and Sicily, simple geography dictated that one group of states—Athens and its allies in the Aegean islands—sent ships northeast to the Pontus for additional grain supplies. It also dictated that a second group—Sparta, Corinth, and Megara (which lay midway between Athens and Corinth), and their allies—looked west to Sicily. Corinthian and Megaran ships could sail directly west out the Gulf of Corinth toward Sicily, or take the longer route south around the Peloponnese. Both routes ran through narrow waterways, and were thus highly vulnerable to rival city-states and pirates. For example, vessels from Corinth and Megara sailing to and from the Gulf of Corinth could easily be blocked at its western entrance, which is only about a mile wide. The southern route to Sicily was also exposed to enemy states and pirates as it passed through the island-studded strait between the southern Greek landmass—the Peloponnese, which contained Sparta—and the island of Crete.

  The grain supplies of the Athenians and their Aegean allies were even more vulnerable. The route to their breadbasket in the Pontus thr
eaded through not one, but two perilously constricted passageways between the Aegean Sea and the Black Sea: the Dardanelles (the Hellespont—“bridge of the Greeks”) and just to the north, the even tighter Bosphorus. Further, maritime traffic to and from Piraeus, Athens’s port city, had to pick its way through straits among the islands forming the outlet of the Saronic Gulf. By the middle of the seventh century BC, Attica’s infertile valleys provided an ever smaller portion of the food supply of a burgeoning Athens. The city-state found itself increasingly dependent on foreign grain obtained in exchange for its sophisticated crafts goods and cash crops—pottery, textiles, olive oil, and wines.

  Athens thus depended for its very survival on one of the most tenuous supply routes on the planet. Worse, tempestuous seas and cloud cover “closed” the sea most of the year, constricting the sailing season to between early May and late September—just four and a half months.10 (Before the invention of the magnetic compass, overcast skies largely prevented open-water navigation, particularly at night.)

  As Greece grew ever more populous, the competition for increasingly scarce grain supplies and its fractious geopolitical atmosphere conspired to split it into two rival groups: one led by Athens, one by Sparta. These two alliances squared off again and again, and their rivalry culminated in the catastrophic Peloponnesian War.

  As early as 700 BC, the “Great Game” of the Hellenes, the fight for control of the Hellespont and Pontic grain, was well afoot. Around 660 BC, Megara—Athens’s archrival and neighbor, and an ally of Sparta—founded Byzantium and Chalcedon, the guard dogs of the Bosphorus. Not long after, the western Aegean city-state of Mytilene occupied Sigeum, at the mouth of the Hellespont, just a few miles from the ruins of Homeric Troy.

  Athens counterattacked by seizing Sigeum from Mytilene in about 600 BC. In 535 BC, the Athenian tyrant Peisistratus began an extensive program of colonization around the Black Sea and fortification of the straits (along with the other development projects of his thirty-three year reign, which included a municipal water system and the first public library in Athens).

  Peisistratus also secured the three islands just south of Sigeum that commanded the southwestern approach to the Hellespont: Tenedos, Imbros, and Lemnos. In 506 BC, Athens seized the fertile western coast of the western Aegean island of Euboea from the city-state of Chalcis; this acquisition had the dual effect of improving its grain supply and completing a “marine superhighway” through which ships could sail unmolested between Piraeus and the Hellespont. On a number of occasions, the Persian invasions of the late sixth century and early fifth century BC temporarily interrupted the Black Sea trade. But Athens never took its eye off the ball, finally ejecting the forces of the Persian emperor Xerxes from Sestos, inside the Hellespont, two years after defeating the emperor’s navy at Salamis (an island just southwest of Athens) in 480 BC.

  Athens had barely survived the Persian attack, the city having been evacuated during the battle of Salamis. Chastened by this harrowing experience, the Athenians built the “long walls.” Consisting of two parallel ramparts a hundred or so yards apart, they ran four miles south of the city to its port at Piraeus, allowing Athens to survive a land-based siege indefinitely with supplies landed at the docks from overseas.

  Ultimately, however, the “long walls” merely shifted Athens’s vulnerability from land to sea. In 476 BC, Sparta made a lunge for the jugular of Athens at the Hellespont and Bosphorus when the Spartan commander Pausanias seized both Sestos and Byzantium, respectively. Athens ejected the Spartans from these cities almost immediately.

  By 450 BC, in order to secure its trading routes, the greatly enlarged Athenian navy began patrolling the Black Sea in strength more or less continuously, an unheard-of action in a world of part-time soldier-citizens and temporary armies and navies. Pericles himself led a squadron of warships in a show of force on its waters.

  During peaceful years, Athenian merchants shipped over a million bushels of grain through the Hellespont. In times of famine, shipments to Athens swelled to as much as three million bushels per year. Most of this Pontic grain was loaded at Theodosia, situated east of the juncture of the Bug and Dnieper rivers.

  The coasts and hinterlands of the Black Sea also provided Greece with cattle, wool, fish, and timber. In turn, the less sophisticated local populations valued manufactured Greek wares far more than the civilized and jaded Egyptians. Because Greek traders obtained a better return on their investment in the Pontus than in Egypt, commerce gradually shifted north.

  By this point, Athens realized that merely becoming a naval power would not suffice. The ease with which an enemy could blockade the narrow straits of the Aegean, Hellespont, and Bosphorus led it to acquire political control of the tightest points along those routes. Moreover, simply capturing a few cities and forts was not enough; other states in the region were just as dependent on the same sea-lanes and choke points, and all needed to contribute men and resources to police them. The only way to accomplish this was with a cohesive, centrally directed group of like-minded states, which gradually coalesced into the Athenian Empire.

  How Athens accomplished this feat—the velvet glove covering the mailed fist—will be ominously familiar to the modern American reader. Athens aided its friends in the Aegean Sea and the Black Sea by helping them fend off pirates and attacks from the local “barbarians” who had the temerity to try to reclaim the land taken from them by Greek settlers. In turn, Athens collected tribute from these allied states and also forgave export duties on grain bound for Piraeus. Contrariwise, control of the Aegean sea-lanes enabled Athens to punish its enemies—Sparta, Corinth, and Megara. At the beginning of the Peloponnesian War, for example, Athens established a base at Naupactus at the narrow western entrance to the Corinthian Gulf in order to blockade shipping to and from Corinth and Megara.11 Athens used this full range of political and military tools to retain wavering allies, such as Rhodes (located just off the southwest coast of what is modern Turkey), and the western Aegean islands of Chios and Lesbos. It could even manipulate the price of grain and maintain a reserve for use in times of blockade or plague; any merchant, Athenian or foreign, caught trying to corner the market or reexport grain found himself on trial for his life.

  Like World War I, the Peloponnesian War began in 431 BC over a relatively minor conflict, in this case a struggle between oligarchs and democrats in the tiny city-state of Epidamnus (present-day Durrës, on the Albanian coast). The democrats appealed for help to Corcyra (present-day Corfu), which had founded Epidamnus and was also a naval power allied with Athens. Corcyra refused to help the democratic forces, who then requested and received a fleet from Corinth.

  The Corcyrans, angered by the Corinthians’ interference in their former colony, proceeded to defeat the Corinthian fleet. The Athenians grew alarmed that the Corinthians might join forces with their Spartan allies to capture the large Corcyran fleet and tip the balance of power against them. This triggered a naval conflict between Athens and Corinth, which quickly mushroomed into the great “global conflict” of the Greek world.

  Initially, things went well for the Athenian Empire, which won a victory at Pylos in the southwestern Peloponnese, where they captured a large number of Spartan soldiers. At this point the Spartans, chronically short of manpower with which to suppress their large population of helot slaves, would probably have made a generous peace with the Athenians in order to recover the captured soldiers. Instead, the Athenians let the war drag on.

  In 415 BC, the brash young expansionist Alcibiades and the older, cautious veteran warrior Nicias debated the invasion of Sicily. Alcibiades cited the value of its grain to Athens; Nicias argued that its bounty was a reason not to invade: “The greatest advantage they have over us is . . . the fact that they grow their own corn and do not have to import any.”12

  The hawks won the debate, and the resulting devastation to the expeditionary force to Sicily left the home city vulnerable to attack. The great Spartan admiral Lysander, rather than attacking
Athens directly, once again went for the empire’s exposed throat at the Hellespont. Slowly, the wily commander gathered his forces and waited until the high summer of 405 BC, when the largest number of grain ships were preparing to head south with their precious cargoes before the sea closed. At precisely the right moment, he fell on the remains of the Athenian fleet at Aegospotami, inside the Hellespont near Sestos. The Spartans sank or captured almost all of the Athenian ships and slew thousands of troops. The Athenian sacred galley survived and raced home with the dreadful news; when word of the defeat arrived in Piraeus, “The lamentations spread . . . up the long walls of the city, one man passing on the tidings to another so that night no man in Athens slept.”13

  At that point, an invasion of Athens was no longer necessary, for the cruel sword of starvation could defeat Athens more efficiently and cheaply than the fearsome Spartan hoplites. In the humiliating peace settlement, Athens kept its independence, but just barely; it abandoned its remaining fleet, razed the fortifications of Piraeus, and tore down the “long walls” that until then had made it immune to siege. As a final indignity, it was forced to become an ally of Sparta.

  Athens would rise again, and it would even reassert dominance over the Black Sea trade from the weakening naval forces of Sparta, but it would never regain its former heights of power and influence. Its next challenger was Thebes, which took control of the straits in 360 BC, though Athens reoccupied them just three years later. Soon after, Philip of Macedon, father of Alexander the Great, attacked the Hellespont at Perinthus (a small city on the Propontis, the inland sea between the Hellespont and the Bosphorus) and then at Byzantium itself. Once again the Athenians, rallied by the orator Demosthenes, held on. Athens had once again regained its lifeline, albeit just barely.