States in the Peloponnese were always looking to reach nautical parity with Athens or Corcyra by promises that they could outbid competitors on the open market and that way hire away experienced mercenary rowers from what was an apparently limited pool. But even Peloponnesian leaders acknowledged that matching long-held Athenian rowing expertise “would take time.” So they agreed with Pericles’ confident prewar prediction that sea power was “a fulltime occupation,” something not so easily acquired by farmers and amateurs. That for twenty years Spartan triremes had little chance against the Athenians bears out his cocky assessment, just as the early-nineteenth-century Napoleonic fleet found its wonderfully constructed ships still no match for centuries of British naval mastery. Pericles apparently was prescient when he warned that there would be little opportunity for the Spartans to gain belated expertise in a real war—as if enemies could suddenly learn to row when the Athenian fleet was systematically scouring their shores. At war’s end, when Spartan parity with the Athenians was reached, it is difficult to ascertain whether the Peloponnesians had become qualitatively better as oarsmen or, after the losses to the plague and at Sicily, the Athenians had gotten far worse.27
Swamping Triremes
What was the goal of the classical Greeks, then, in adopting such an awkward method of naval construction and operation, a nautical science that seems to have reached its apex at Athens shortly before the war broke out? Clearly, the desire for speed and power relative to displacement was a central driving force: sea battles were to be decided not always by marines but by quick ships that could ram, withdraw, and nimbly maneuver to strike again. To achieve ramming power required speed, and speed in turn necessitated 170 actual rowers on a relatively light vessel—and that near-impossible calculus of weight, speed, and manpower explains the complex method of banking three oarsmen to allow so many men to fit in such a small space. Impressed philosophers often commented on this peculiar method of rowing, calling oared ships “mills,” a crowded factory that turned out as its product sheer muscular propulsion.
The Athenians, who screamed freely among their betters in the assembly, baptized their triremes with names (apparently always in the feminine gender) not merely like “Empire” (Hegemonia) or “Most Powerful” (Kratistê) but also “Freedom” (Eleutheria), “Democracy” (Dêmokratia), “Free Speech” (Parrhêsia), and “Justice” (Dikaiosynê). Perhaps the frequent references to Athenian maritime excellence do not arise out of the state’s commitment to building numerous triremes or even the long service accrued from overseeing a maritime empire. At least at the start of the war, at Athens the rowers were for the most part all free voting citizens in a manner not true of the Peloponnesian fleet, suggesting that their unique élan at sea was a reflection that oarsmen felt that they had a stake in the very society they rowed to defend. In any case, wide-scale mutinies were rare in the Athenian fleet, but perhaps more common among the Peloponnesians, even in the last decade of the war, when things were beginning to go Sparta’s way.28
The Athenians—who put a far greater premium on nautical skills than on the presence of hoplites and boarders on their triremes—mastered two general methods of ramming. Both required well-trained crews and quick, light ships. When employing the diekplous (“sailing through and out”), a row of ships tried to blast an enemy line of triremes. Once through, the attackers could then ram their targets from the inside of the enemy formation. In contrast, under the more subtle periplous (“sailing around”), the fleet tried to outflank or even encircle the enemy. Most fleets lacked such seamanship, and if it was a question of ramming Athenian triremes in a fair fight, the Peloponnesians would usually lose, suggesting the more desperate alternative of boarding and missile attack.
The Athenian object was, again, to maneuver into the line of exposed ship sides that could be rammed by columns of fast-moving triremes—a sort of “crossing the T” in the pre-dreadnought age. The Athenians believed that in the relatively open seas the greater maneuverability and speed of their own ships would eventually ensure that the usually more inept enemy would become confused and exposed to easy attack. In other words, under optimum conditions the contest would be a true naval battle rather than a land fight between hoplites and missile troops on pitching decks close to shore.29
In Hollywood films sometimes one galley smashes the oarage of another. Many classical scholars doubt that this was possible. How, after all, could a trireme perfectly navigate to within a few feet alongside another, the attacker’s rowers giving a final strong pull before yanking their oars from the water, while their vessel glided on by its adversary, knocking off the enemy’s unsuspecting oars in succession? Yet while it was no doubt a rare tactic contingent upon a skilled crew meeting up with a more poorly manned trireme, sometimes oar slicing seems to have worked. Off Mytilene in 406, for example, the Athenian admiral Conon was forced to retreat—but not before “shearing off the oars of some ships.”30
Often crews resorted to grappling hooks. They were probably on board every trireme. Attackers sought to catch an enemy and pull him over for boarding, in the expectation that their own rowers could provide superior power and pull rather than be yanked instead. And if a targeted ship was damaged or some of its crew killed, it might be hooked and towed away, either toward the fleet or to friendly shores, where the crew would be captured or killed. Boarders preferred to come alongside and spear the enemy; but just as often they might jump over to the enemy and finish the business with swords.31
Trireme fighting became a real show. The skill of the pilots in maneuvering their triremes for hits, the cohesion of the crews in pouring on the speed in the last moments before the collision, and the explosive impact of 170 rowers smashing into their enemy counterparts—no wonder Diodorus called all that “an amazing spectacle” (kataplêktikon). Sometimes thousands of spectators lined the beaches to gaze at dozens of ships ramming, boarding, and showering each other with missiles. Soldiers were eager to watch the deadly business, rooting their respective sides on, slogging into the surf to help out, and finishing off or aiding any crews that beached their vessels. Nowhere was the grisly fighting at sea more notorious than in the Great Harbor at Syracuse. There, in a succession of sea battles, thousands of Athenians fought the Sicilians in almost every imaginable manner—ramming, boarding, missile warfare, grappling, driving ships to shore, dropping stones from cranes, and employing underwater stakes. Although the seas washed away the flotsam and jetsam of battle, at least in the immediate aftermath of a major sea fight, there could be thousands of bodies and hundreds of wrecks in the waters, while the shores were quickly made a grisly scene of bloated bodies and debris.32
In a sea battle two years before the Peloponnesian War that broke out between the Corinthians and Corcyraeans, both sides fought in the “ancient fashion.” That is, javelin throwers and archers boarded ships and in a conflict “more like a land battle” showered the crews. The subtext of Thucydides’ description is how inferior both fleets were to the Athenian navy, which would never have allowed its ships to be grappled and boarded since their superior oarsmen could easily win a battle of maneuver and ramming.
The Spartan general Brasidas once summed up the respective naval strategies of the two fleets: Athenians relied on speed and maneuverability on the open seas to ram at will clumsier ships; in contrast, a Peloponnesian armada might win only when it fought near land in calm and confined waters, had the greater number of ships in a local theater, and if its better-trained marines on deck and hoplites on shore could turn a sea battle into a contest of infantry. A character in a contemporary comedy of Aristophanes’ says of this naval dominance, “Athens is where the good triremes come from.” Most Greeks agreed. For the Athenians, rowing was “second nature,” a skill learned “from boyhood.”33
In the first major sea battle of the war off Naupaktos (430), Phormio with a mere 20 Athenian ships attacked and routed a larger Corinthian contingent of 47. Such superiority was to last nearly twenty years, until the disast
er of Sicily weakened Athens, necessitating a crash program to rebuild ships and hire green crews. That unforeseen catastrophe prompted Sparta to renew her efforts to acquire a top-notch fleet, and thus set the stage for the last decade’s climactic deadly battles in the Aegean, which would end the war.
At some point navies began to reinforce their rams with lateral side beams designed to ensure that the heavier trireme might survive a head-on collision. Such was the case late in the war off Naupaktos, when some specialized Corinthian triremes managed to disable seven Athenian ships by ramming them head-on. Throughout the war the less skilled navies of the Peloponnesians sought such ways to nullify the advantages in Athenian seamanship: if the Corinthians were less adept at maneuvering for a more difficult broadside ram, then perhaps at the battle’s outset they could charge directly into the oncoming Athenian fleet in expectation that their heavier rams might give them the best of the collision. So while the Athenians practiced long and hard in mastering the more difficult but survivable lateral hits, their enemies counted on superior naval construction to blast ships head-on. Thucydides seems to assume as much when he reminds us that “the Corinthians considered themselves as winners if they were not decisively beaten, and in contrast the Athenians accepted that they lost if they were not clearly victorious.”34
Yet throughout the war it was the Peloponnesians, not the Athenian masters of the sea, who showed themselves most adept at adopting new tactics and modifying their ships to nullify traditional Athenian superior seamanship. The Athenian tragedy in the Great Harbor at Syracuse was the story of complacence and even arrogance. The scrappy Syracusans and their Peloponnesian allies fitted out new rams to hit their more nimble enemies head-on in confined waters, as well as driving stakes into the harbor bed, chaining off the harbor entrance, and deploying stone throwers from the decks. Only at the end of the war did the Athenian admiral Conon take special measures to prepare his ships in a manner unprecedented by past fleets, apparently to ensure that his triremes were as seaworthy and reinforced as the enemy’s.
Unskilled rowers did not back their ships well. When ramming, such poorly manned triremes often stayed enmeshed in the target vessel, in the hopes that hoplites and light-armed troops could kill the enemy crews and eventually free the ship, along with its captured trophy. Sometimes the concussion of the hit knocked officers and marines overboard, given that there were no rails on the suddenly unstable deck. Such was the fate of the Spartan admiral Callicratidas, who fell off his ship at Arginusae when it was rammed in battle.35
A Zero-Sum Game
Triremes were often deemed “fast” or “slow” depending on the quality of the crews, the nature of their construction, and the conditions of the hulls. In theory, newer ships, fully manned by 170 seasoned rowers, were far more nimble and faster than older triremes with leaky or waterlogged bottoms manned by rookies—a deterioration that could set in within months if boats were not allowed to dry on shore between voyages, and their hulls periodically scraped and caulked. In fact, the skill of the boatwright, the quality of the timber, and modifications in design all influenced the speed of a trireme in addition to its age and upkeep.
Still, all the criteria that made for a “fast” trireme are not clear, but it was an acknowledged fact that “the excellence of crews lasts only a short time.” After only a brief period at sea, given the likelihood of illness and physical exhaustion, there remained only a few skilled seamen who could keep a ship in steady motion and “keep the oar strokes in time.” Even within fleets on the high seas there was often a culling that went on to put the best rowers on a few select triremes that could serve as a sort of advanced flotilla to speed on ahead of the main armada. The assumption was that there were always a few rowers who were stronger or more experienced—or both—than most.
A ship’s officers were critical to its performance. Besides the trierarch (who was the official commander of the vessel) and the kybernêtês, or helmsman, who oversaw the rowers and gave orders, success hinged on the quality of the proratês (pilot) at the helm and the keleustês (rowing master), who either yelled out the rowing beat or hit stones together to keep time for the oarsmen. They were to the crew as the maestro is to the orchestra, and for much of the war Athens possessed thousands of such veterans who had crisscrossed for decades the seas of the empire.
There were several other drawbacks for such an elegant vessel, one that weighed probably little more than twenty-five tons empty, and not many more than fifty when fully manned. First, a trireme when fitted out as a pure warship could carry beside the rowers only about thirty crewmen and combatants, including marines, archers, captain, helmsman, boatswain, piper, and assorted crewmen in charge of gear, sails, and repairs. That meant that to convey any larger land forces, the 170 rowers would have to double as infantry of some sort, resulting in either oarsmen or infantrymen who were less than expert.
Alternatively, the number of rowers could be reduced, perhaps by two-thirds, and the ship essentially turned into a slow-moving troop transport or “hoplite carrier.” Usually the thranites on the top benches alone rowed, as hoplites with their heavy equipment sat in the lower two banks. To what degree a “hoplite carrier” meant that none, some, or sometimes all infantrymen helped out in the rowing is not known.
In the Athenian fleet, some 10 or so specialized triremes, with as few as 60 rowers, were used as horse transports. They could carry as many as 30 mounts for short distances if all the benches of the lower two banks were removed. A fleet of 10 such transports would have given Athens the ability to move about 300 horses in an emergency. As the conflict continued, troops of all sorts were increasingly often moved around theaters by sea. Indeed, one of the great fears of the Athenians on Sicily was the rumor that the Peloponnesians were sending sizable numbers of their best hoplites and freed helot troops on merchant ships.36
So it was impossible to cheat the arithmetic of such a zero-sum game: to transport any large number of infantry, the ship would have to be so reduced of oarsmen as to make it slow and vulnerable. In contrast, retaining a full rowing crew ensured speed, but only a handful of quality infantry. To have hoplites or light-armed troops row meant that they could not be used at sea, and since they were mediocre rowers, they only hampered the optimum use of the ship. If skilled sailors were to become hoplites on landing, then the quality of the ensuing army was questionable from the start.
Because waves of three feet or so might swamp the vessels, fleets were often kept on shore in even light storms. A number of ancient commentators reflected the ancient maxim that “a sea battle could only be fought in calm waters.” Thucydides, for example, recalling the fight in the relatively quiet Corinthian Gulf between the Athenians and the Peloponnesians, remarks how the latter were sent into fatal confusion once a small wind came up and the seas grew choppy:
They at once fell into confusion: ship fell foul of ship, while the crews were pushing them off with poles, and by their shouting, swearing, and struggling with one another, made captains’ orders and boatswains’ cries alike inaudible, and through being unable for want of practice to clear their oars in the rough water, prevented the vessels from obeying their helmsmen properly.
The vast majority of naval engagements in the Peloponnesian War took place in three or four areas of relatively protected seas: the Corinthian Gulf, the harbor at Syracuse, the strait of the Hellespont, and the protected waters between the coast of Asia Minor and the large Aegean islands right offshore. While all these regions could experience sudden choppy seas and high winds, they were at least safer than miles out in the Aegean.
There was not a single major trireme battle on the high seas in either the Mediterranean or the Aegean, in the same manner that all of history’s great sea engagements—such as Salamis, Lepanto, Trafalgar, Midway, and Leyte Gulf—were fought relatively close to either islands or the mainland. Admirals, ancient and modern, like calm seas, nearby refuge, and close ports of call. And if a sudden storm came up without warning, trireme
battle ceased as crews almost immediately headed for shore; they found it impossible to ram or even navigate in choppy seas—as Alcibiades learned when he approached the Hellespont in 411 and was met with such rough water that he quit all pursuit of the Spartan fleet.37
It is hard to speak in the normal sense of a true “blockade,” or even “voyage” or “patrol,” in the Peloponnesian War, since triremes could venture out for only a few hours each day. They were entirely dependent on friendly shores to provide food and water each evening. There was very little room to stow food and water in the ships, given the number of rowers and the need for spare rigging and parts. Yet almost two gallons of water was needed per man per day to prevent dehydration. How the rowers were given periodic rations and water while stationed at their benches is not known, but every captain had to berth his trireme each night someplace where fresh water was abundant. In most cases, oarsmen brought some of their own rations and stowed them near their berth. If rowers were kept too long at sea without a meal, fatigue quickly set in. The precise calculation of the effects of heat, sunlight, and lack of ventilation on the efficacy of oarage is unknown, but modern simulations suggest that a trireme’s speed could be markedly reduced if its crew was exposed to constant summer sunlight, denied refreshing breezes, and shorted on drinking water.38
Common was the sudden ambush of and attack on sailors who were foraging for food, water, and firewood—especially by horsemen and light-armed troops. Indeed, provisioning was a prime reason for the Athenians’ defeat on Syracuse. Their sailors had to bivouac and search for supplies. The Syracusans, in contrast, had plenty of horses to hunt them down. The verdict of the entire war finally hinged on questions of logistics: learning very little from the disaster at Sicily, the Athenian fleet made no preparations for easy provisioning at Aegospotami and thus was ruined when Lysander surprised the crews, most of whom were off finding food.39
A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War Page 35