Athenian Steel: Roman Annihilation 423 BCE (The Hellennium)

by P. K. Lentz

  IV. Up the Tiber

  Weighed down by a breastplate of bronze, the kind that cash-poor Sparta could no longer afford but a mercenary could, long locks fluttering in the coastal wind, Styphon sat upon the crowded deck of a wave-ploughing Athenian trireme. The boards beneath his bronze-greaved legs and sandaled feet shuddered with the rhythmic pounding of oars which churned the waters of a barbarian sea, while above, from behind a dome of stars, the gods gazed down in anticipation of the battle to come.

  He could not shake a feeling that he'd been here before. And he had; not in this particular sea, of course, and not on an Athenian ship, but in Pylos harbor where the enemy waiting on the beach had been under the leadership of Demosthenes, the very general who was now his employer. The battle that day, so many seasons ago, had left hundreds of Spartiates stranded on Sphakteria, leading them into privation and death and finally the surrender for which their city had never forgiven them. Twenty of the other hoplites clustered on the deck around Styphon had been prisoners with him in Athens. Like him, they had chosen to live in exile rather than be shunned and spat upon in Lakedaemonia.

  The mercenary band which he led was based out of the Theban countryside, and half of its fighters were Theban, while the rest were Ambraciots and Lokrians and men like Styphon who had no country. The Spartans among the band comprised an elite core within the force and had adopted as their common shield device, to replace the lambda they were no longer welcome to use, a white boar's head on black.

  Selling his loyalty had come surprisingly easily. He fought now alongside his old sworn enemies and felt no qualms about it. Greeks were accustomed to changing sides and had ever done so with ease. It was part of the reason this 'Hellenic League' forged by Demosthenes would never last. Styphon was no supporter of the League but it did seem to make good, plain sense to kill barbarians instead of Greeks if given the choice. Loot from foreign cities made men just as rich, and if Roma turned out to be poor, he was still being paid well in Athenian silver from Demosthenes' own coffers.

  The invasion fleet consisted of forty triremes, more than half Athenian, the rest from Chios and other islands, and each deck was crammed with about forty armed men, for a total force of one and a half thousand. Four hundred of those were Styphon's mercenary band, and then there were the several thousand rowers, some of whom were armed but would be of little use except for guarding the ships and, later, gods willing, securing conquered Roma.

  The Athenian trireme which bore Styphon was near the center of the fleet that crept by starlight up the Italian coast in search of the river mouth on which sat Roma's port. They were so near now, or must be by Styphon's reckoning, that it seemed impossible, even in the dark, that the fleet had not been spotted. Or were the Romans so arrogant as to consider invasion from the sea such an unlikelihood that they posted no watch? According to Demosthenes, Roma possessed incomplete walls, but that did not necessarily make her easy prey. Sparta, after all, had no walls at all.

  The problem of using Neapolis as a base from which to attack Roma was that the two lay more than a day's journey apart under oar, giving their enemies ample time to muster a defense. The rowers would arrive exhausted, too, instead of fresh and ready to face the enemy's navy, should it float one. Sail could hasten their arrival, but then their ships would arrive without having been stripped for battle. The solution which Demosthenes had devised was to sail north and west out of Neapolis, passing by Cumae, the liberation of which had been their publicly announced objective, and proceeding instead to a tiny uninhabited island which sat beyond the western horizon in relation to the Italian coast. The place was little more than a hill jutting from the ocean, but its beaches were of smooth sand perfect for landing ships.

  They had left Neapolis today, and by noon they reached the island, where they remained until after nightfall, resting, eating, praying, sacrificing, and stripping and storing the triremes' masts and sails. Then they set off under oar for Roma with the aim of striking just before daybreak with its population none the wiser about the war fleet which had curiously vanished from Neapolis. And so, hammering the black sea, the Athenian rowers, free men all, proved themselves worthy of their fame by achieving speeds no Spartan or other trierarch dared ask of his mostly enslaved crew. The Athenians even accomplished this in silence, without the aid of a piper, while the allied ships at the rear struggled to keep pace.

  Styphon was not prone to seasickness, but neither did he care for being shipboard. If he looked at the waves too long, his stomach began to surge, and thus his gaze was on the planks when one of his men, another long-haired Equal, nudged him to call his attention to a prick of light on the dark coastline ahead. A signal fire, almost certainly. These Romans had watchmen after all. Turning, Styphon said to his men by way of encouragement, “It's good we've been spotted. We didn't come all this way to slaughter men in their beds. Now they can give us a fight.”

  As the fleet drove on, they passed by more such fires, a chain of them leading up the coast and ending, presumably, at Roma. At length, the lights of a town glided into sight, and Styphon rose from his long-held seat on the deck. His knees cracked with the movement. He donned his helmet, not the pilos-style cap of Sparta but a good Chalkidean helmet with cheek guards, and took his spear in his right hand and bowl-shaped black hoplon in left. His closely-packed comrades on the deck followed his lead, and quickly the activity spread to adjacent ships, moving outward across the fleet like ripples in a pool. The sharp clatter of metal, the thump of spear butts on deck planks and the crack of neighboring shield rims meeting in darkness subsumed, for a while, the quiet pounding of a thousand oars.

  Harbor lights came into view. Hardly a minute after, the first flaming arrow arced into the night sky. It vanished harmlessly into the sea, but it was followed in rapid succession by some twenty more burning, pitch-dipped shafts. The pitiable size of the volley bespoke a desperate enemy, for even ten times twenty fire-arrows could not hope to set ablaze a single wet hull stripped of its most flammable component, its sails. Even in the event one hit the ships, Demosthenes had equipped each of the outermost triremes with wooden bulwarks and heavy netting along one side which would block most incoming spindles without impeding the ability of the Greek archers to fire outward.

  The initial volley, and the two which followed, drew neat lines of light and smoke across the stars before hissing to extinction in the sea. “These Romans have a strange way of fishing,” one of the Theban mercenaries on the deck joked, to chuckles from the Athenian sailors and some of his countrymen. The arrows continued intermittently, achieving nothing, and the fleet pressed on unimpeded through the darkness. Every oar stroke brought them closer to the torchlights of Roma's port town, Ostia, which sat on the southern bank of the mouth of the Tiber. The Roman archers occupying the heights outside the town, overlooking the sea, stopped setting their arrows alight and sending them in high arcs and instead aimed unlit shafts flat across the water at the men crowding the ship's decks. Styphon's trireme was not yet in danger, but he heard the scattered cracks and thumps of arrows striking hulls. He saw, faintly, fletched shafts pass over men's heads and into the sea. If any Greeks were hurt or killed in the paltry enfilade, they received their fates without a sound, for no anguished groans rose over the rhythmic sounds of oars churning water and of surf rolling on the close foreign shore.

  His attention next was drawn ahead, to movement in a dark place just below the harbor torches, where black shapes were slipping off the beach and into the surf. They were Roman triremes, and they joined others already on the sea. The call went out to all the Greek trierachs, spreading ship to ship from the trireme of Demosthenes in the fleet's van: ignore the Roman ships. It was easy to see why; the enemy crews could hardly get their sails up fast enough to catch the wind and flee north away from battle. Wisely, Roma hoped to save her ships for another day rather than throw them away in a hasty defense.

  At the Tiber's swirling mouth, the Greek rowers, straining hard against the current, pulle
d the fleet into a narrow, snakelike formation just three ships wide while a fresh volley of Roman arrows went up from some high ground on the river's northern bank, the side opposite Ostia and closest to Styphon's ship. None of the Greek triremes were equipped with bulwarks or netting on their port sides, but those were untrustworthy artifices anyway, in Styphon's view; he preferred to rely on the hide covered boards of the shield which he, like the men on every deck of the fleet, crouched low behind. Suddenly arrows flew from the rooftops of Ostia to the south, and Styphon split his men and arrayed them back-to-back. As the shore slid by, arrows embedded in or clattered off of his men's boar-head shields, but somewhere someone died, for his scream pierced the night. Now an Athenian archer captain launched a single flaming arrow northward, a marker showing his men where to aim. It came down on the hill where the Roman archers were flitting shadows, and seconds later a swarm of black darts sped landward from the ships to converge on that spot.

  Both sides fired more volleys, but Styphon could scarcely tell whether they were effective. He remembered how Demosthenes' spindles had bled his men dry on Sphakteria, but thank the gods that was not how they intended to fight this day. Let the archer-women have their hearthside duel; this battle would be decided by the arms of real men.

  Distant commands went up in an alien tongue, and moving bronze glinted in the shadows between hills and buildings on either side of the river as the defenders scrambled about according to whatever plans they had made. Whether bested by their Athenian counterparts or ordered to preserve their lives and arrows for the greater battle to come, the Roman bowmen ceased their fire and disappeared. The serpent-fleet of Demosthenes pushed upriver unopposed while behind and to the north, in the sea beyond the river mouth, the forest of white sails which was Roma's intrepid navy shrank into the distance. Four of the rearmost ships of the Greek fleet were Chian and carried peltasts from Ionia under the command of an Athenian officer, Leokrates. Rather than pivoting into the river mouth, those ships would break away and land at the very beach which the Roman galleys had just abandoned with the aim of overrunning and securing Ostia.

  Styphon's trireme was among the thirty-six destined for Roma itself. Those thirty-six pushed on, past banks which were still and silent but for cricket song and the beating of oars. His ship was six back from the fore, which put him near the center. The Athenian crews proved their worth once more by maintaining a tight formation in an enclosed space while fighting the current. The islander crews held their own, too, and a good thing it was, for a single wreck in the fleet might have proved disastrous for all behind. As it was, even the several abrupt bends in the Tiber, a river which not one man among them had traversed before, failed to slow the fleet's steady progress.

  The going was easy for nearly an hour. Then there appeared ahead on the river's northern bank, against the slowly brightening sky, a low promontory around which the Tiber flowed in a blind leftward turn. It was the place where Styphon, were he charged with defending Roma instead of assaulting it, would choose to mount an ambush.

  Scarcely had that thought passed his mind than he heard shouts and splashes ahead and saw rocks tumbling down onto the fleet from atop that very promontory. “Shields!” Styphon bellowed, as did every officer in the fleet, and on every deck hoplites crouched low and raised their hoplons over their heads. There was little else one could do as a cascade of rocks, most fortunately no larger than a human head, bounced down grassy slopes and sailed out into the air over the triremes to fall where they may. A few broke oars, fewer still bounced off decks or even shields, but most missed and plunked straight to the river bed.

  Athenian archer captains cried out, and a hail of black arrows slashed upward into darkness. The rocks stopped coming, but the Romans were not yet done. Now their hidden archers made a reappearance, but they were not on the promontory's highest point, as might have been expected, the place from which the rocks had come. They fired instead from the gentle slopes around the promontory and they were close enough that Styphon heard the twangs of their bowstrings. Then he heard men groan as the shafts slipped through the gaps between raised shields to pierce men's necks and arms and ribs.

  “Shields left!” Styphon cried. As one, his men presented a defensive wall to the nearby slope. Arrows flew from both sides now, in ones and twos and threes rather than decisive volleys, as archers at close range picked their targets in the dim but rising light of the coming dawn. Javelineers joined the fight next, and their iron-tipped missiles thumped and crashed on deck and shield. Those, of course, were the hits that did not matter; the ones that did ended in grim silence or the piercing wail of a man as his shade flew free.

  The screams were few, thankfully, but Styphon knew there must be worse to come. The Romans could not think that rocks and javelins would offer anything but annoyance to a war fleet such as this.

  He was right. As the head of the snake rounded the blind bend formed by the promontory, a flash lit the shadowy riverine landscape like a festival bonfire.

  Fireships. The Romans had packed one or more empty vessels with dry tinder and pitch and set them alight in the river. It was virtually impossible to set fire to a wet ship stripped for battle, but if anything could accomplish that task, a fireship could. It was the rare trierarch who was brave or mad enough to ram one in order to sink it, and so the usual strategy was to give it a wide berth and let it pass. That worked well enough in open sea, but here on a river where the fleet was packed oar-tip to oar-tip, it was scarcely an option.

  The hoplites sheltering behind their shields on all decks of the fleet gasped and muttered prayers and threw worried glances ahead, but the sailors and steersmen and trierarchs remained calm. So did Styphon, for he knew that Demosthenes had foreseen this obstacle and that his crews were prepared for it... somehow.

  The oarsmen slowed their beat just slightly, and ahead, at the bend, two fireships came into view. The flames from one soared high, pouring smoke which obscured the fading stars, while the second burned less intensely. For all Styphon knew, ten more such hulks waited past the bend in the river, awaiting just the casting of a torch.

  From the calmly issued commands that flew across the decks in the fleet's van, Styphon extracted the word vinegar, and it brought to mind the stench coming from the line of wide-mouthed clay pots arrayed on the beach of the island where they had spent the afternoon. Athenian sailors had stuffed those pots with some of the triremes' stripped sails, then loaded the pots back into the ships. Now, in the raging light cast by the fire ships, Styphon saw the purpose of the vinegar-soaked sails: they were draped over prows and over soldiers and crews who huddled together on the decks of the frontmost ships, while the rowers underneath them, at the urging of their trierarchs, put on a burst of raw speed.

  A tremendous crash sounded, and the noise of splintering wood briefly eclipsed the roar and crackle of flames as one of the Athenian galleys scored a broadside hit with its submerged bronze beak on the more immolated of the two fire ships. A second crash marked a hit on the other by a second Athenian ram, but now the four vessels were locked together in pairs. If the Athenian ships could not break loose, they were sure to either burn or capsize. Sailors on both decks rushed forward under vinegar soaked shrouds, wielding poles and axes in an effort to disengage the burning hulks which already had begun to sink. The smoke pouring into the sky increased and mixed with hissing billows of steam as the fireships' holds flooded. Not surprisingly, cities tended to set their oldest and most rotted ships alight, and the fire made them only more fragile. With their very homes at stake, the Romans might have been well advised to burn their best constructed galleys instead, but evidently they had not, and within minutes the Athenian crews were able to dislodge the crumbling hulks. By the time Styphon's ship rowed past, all that remained of the two were bubbles and steam.

  More volleys of rocks and arrows and javelins and four more fireships awaited the fleet past the promontory. The blind bend had been the start of a double switchback in the Tiber, north
then west then north again and east, a meandering path through hilly ground which offered numerous opportunities for ambush, but the Italics squandered all of them with the same futile exercises over and over, offering no surprises. Just one Athenian trireme was lost, a ship three ranks ahead of Styphon which ran ashore and snapped some oars trying to avoid collision in a brief bottleneck caused by a fireship. The Athenian soldiers had swarmed out of that wrecked ship and onto the shore, the first of the invading army to set foot on Roman soil, and when Styphon passed them, he saw the hoplites' spears set in a defensive half-ring around the lamed ship. Most of the hundred and seventy rowers worked by the water's edge to turn the galley and refloat it while archers on the passing Greek decks offered covering fire against an enemy that had yet to show itself. The stranded ship was out of Styphon's field of vision before he could see what befell the men, but he rated their chances of survival high.

  Near dawn, the fleet finished navigating the troublesome bend and the river became a crooked, glittering sword aimed at straight at the heart of unwalled Roma. The first thing to catch Styphon's eye beneath the purpling sky were the two steep hills capped with brightly painted temple complexes. And there between the hills, just as dull-eyed Demosthenes and wild-eyed Alkibiades had informed him, lay a valley and a flat plain which would be the avenue by which they entered Roma.

  The way was not clear. The grassy field at the water's edge was bisected by a makeshift palisade, and beyond that stood a wall of flesh and bronze and oval shields and tall, bristling spear blades: the defenders of Roma, numbering two thousand. Perhaps three.