To travel even short distances, triremes needed safe ports at intervals of fifty miles or so, where ships could find food (barley bread, onions, dried fish, meats, fruit, and olive oil), water, wine, and shelter for their crews to sleep in. Not all ports were equal. Most often ships were forced to beach on the sand or venture into streams or rivers, with sometimes disastrous results. Lamachus, for example, nine years before he was killed on Sicily, in 423 sought refuge for his small fleet of 10 Athenian triremes near Troy, in the river Cales, which flows by Heraclea. But a sudden storm came up and created such a strong current that the triremes were torn loose and completely destroyed on the rocks in a purportedly protected inland river.
Even a small fleet of some 20 to 30 triremes might entail an aggregate force of well over 5,000 crewmen—larger than most city-states in Greece—all descending on a port at once in search of food and water. If there was not careful planning, the resources of seaside communities could be overwhelmed when a fleet approached over the horizon. Most small communities did not mind the lucrative business of selling provisions to desperate sailors—as long as such suspect seamen kept clear of town and confined themselves to ad hoc markets on the beach.40 Much of Athenian foreign policy, including its efforts to maintain an overseas empire in the Aegean, cultivate allies such as Argos and Corcyra, and establish dependencies at distant Amphipolis and Potidaea, was predicated on just the need to create permanent bases to facilitate long-distance cruises. Trireme harbors were not unlike the British Empire’s network of coaling stations throughout Africa and the Pacific to service its late-nineteenth-century global fleet.
The Limitations of Triremes
Modern Olympias found that the trireme had to be cleaned every five days or so, so bad was the smell from just the collective sweat of 170 rowers, who at least left their benches to use toilet facilities rather than relieve themselves, ancient style, in the hold of the ship. In Venetian times, returning galleys were periodically sunk in friendly harbors to rinse the hold of excrement, trash, and vermin. Few things for soldiers in the Peloponnesian War could have been as unpleasant as rowing for any length of time, given the vagaries of wind, cold, the sun, and the human miasma of 200 men crammed into such small quarters for hours on end.
Hulls became quickly soaked, waterlogged, and leaky if not periodically brought up on shore to dry.41 Frequent reference to the constant refitting of triremes in the middle of campaigns suggests that the ropes, oars, rudders, masts, and sails needed continual attention as well. The need to dry out the hull on the beach often left an entire fleet vulnerable in the late evening and early morning, should an enemy come upon the ships without warning. In one of the longest continuous deployments in Greek history, the Athenian imperial fleet of over 200 triremes was, except for brief beaching on the shores surrounding Syracuse, in the water almost constantly from the time it left the Piraeus in 415 until its final destruction in September 413 in the Great Harbor.42
Even excellently maintained ships lasted only about twenty-five years. At that rate of attrition, during peacetime Athens had to build 20 craft almost every year just to maintain a fleet of 300 triremes. That optimal number had been reached during the intended Thirty Years Peace of 446–431, when Athens had not only kept up regular maintenance and replacement of its 200-ship navy, which had won the Persian War, but added another 100 triremes to its armada. The shores around the port of Athens were perennially littered with the wrecks and hulls of old triremes that were left to rot once they were beyond repair, in a continuing cycle of Athenian abandonment and building of triremes. The challenge for the Athenian maritime bureaucracy was not just that in theory 60,000 seamen—Athenian poor, some farmers, resident aliens, allied and subject rowers, freedmen, and slaves—were on call to man 300 ships, but that perhaps as many as another 10,000 to 20,000 workers were busy in the dockyards of the Piraeus building and repairing the hulls and rigging of such an enormous fleet.
The most moving story of seasonal erosion in the seaworthiness of a fleet is found in the Athenian general Nicias’ pathetic account of how quickly the once magnificent armada wore itself out on constant sea patrol outside the harbor of Syracuse, with a myriad of problems that markedly diminished its combat efficacy. “The ships,” Nicias lamented, “are waterlogged since they have been at sea for such a long time, and the crews have wasted away. The reason is that it has not been possible to drag the ships onto the shore and dry them out.” In contrast, the Syracusans inside the blockade at least could periodically maintain their hulls.43
Trans-Mediterranean voyages, as were possible in the age of Venetian galleys, were almost unheard of—and when attempted, often disastrous. The Athenian fleet that headed for Sicily plotted a leapfrogging course along the Greek and Italian coastlines, inasmuch as it had to follow the shortest route across the Adriatic of some eighty-four miles from Corcyra (modern-day Corfu) over to the heel of Italy. It never contemplated plying the straight voyage from Greece to Croton (some two hundred miles), which would not have allowed any overnight stops.
Depending on winds and currents, triremes might move easily under muscular power for six to eight hours at four to five knots an hour—or a steady thirty or so strokes per minute. In rare cases, if they encountered no headwinds, ships could row even longer and cover distances of fifty to sixty nautical miles. But should a stiff wind of, say, twenty knots arise, it could almost nullify the effort of the rowers and force the vessel to shore to avoid being buffeted endlessly at sea. Superb crews and new ships on rare occasions could row for sixteen hours, and thus cover 120 miles in a day. Thucydides records the singular achievement of a messenger ship dispatched to Mytilene that made it from the Piraeus to Lesbos (184 miles) in twenty-four hours, at a clip of almost eight nautical miles per hour. Yet this feat of rowing across the Aegean by an elite crew in one bold stroke was clearly exceptional. In fleets of 70 to 100 ships, the armada usually had to move at the speed of the slowest ships in order to maintain formation. And pilots had to be careful not to wear out their crews prematurely; sometimes overzealous pursuit could result in exhausted seamen, who in turn could not maintain formation and thus fell victim to an opportunistic enemy counterattack. Pacing a trireme’s oarsmen was critical, since any warship with worn-out rowers was left for several minutes essentially dead and helpless in the water, entirely dependent on wind to sail away to safety—and not even that recourse was possible if the rigging had been left on shore in expectation of battle.44
There is also no recorded instance of “power cruising,” in which sails and oars were used simultaneously—perhaps because of the near impossibility of coordinating the rowers’ strokes with the unpredictable breezes. Any winds approaching fifteen knots would require ships to pull down their sails and head for shore to keep an even keel and avoid seas splashing into the lower oar holes or over the sides. In most cases, ships sailed whenever possible under wind power at a slow clip of about three to four knots, from port to port. Triremes then usually relied on oarage only when heading out to battle, when masts and sails were either stowed or more likely left behind on land.
Naval warfare in the Peloponnesian War, however, was not merely subject to the limitations of these fragile oared ships at sea. The construction of triremes was also costly, usually requiring the equivalent of some 6,000 man-days of labor. For a state like Athens to launch a fleet of 300 triremes consumed about the same outlay as outfitting an enormous hoplite army of 18,000 with full armor. But even that is a facile comparison: hoplites usually bought their own panoplies, and marched to battle and back within a few days, thus requiring little further logistical expense from the state.
Each trireme, in contrast, cost one talent for construction and another talent of both private and public expenditure per month to keep afloat. If Athens had on average two-thirds of her ships at sea for the 240 days during the eight sailing months, from March through October, these 200 ships might in theory cost the city 1,600 talents, or more than twice the entire annual tribute fro
m the empire. That cost was unsustainable for more than a year or two. To wage a multifaceted naval war, in which such a sizable fleet went out on annual patrol for some twenty-seven years from Sicily to Corcyra to the Aegean and Ionia, could have cost over 43,000 talents, seven times the entire financial reserves of Athens at the beginning of the war and more than its aggregate imperial income over some three decades. Did the empire exist to provide a navy or did the navy create the empire—or both?
Wealthy Versus Poor
The trierarchs on board also took on some of the expenditures for maintenance. Thus a large part of the state’s military budget was covered by private contributions that did not figure in the state’s fiscal accounting, explaining why the fleet could cost more than the income of the city. Perhaps more than half of all Athens’ expenses came from the forced donations of wealthy citizens. In that context of skyrocketing naval costs, exacerbated by catastrophic defeats at sea at Sicily and Aegospotami, it was natural that reactionaries in both the revolutions of 411 and 404 sought to curtail the power of the naval lobby and seek some type of peace with Sparta. When, after 413, the landed elite were often barred from their own estates in Attica, insult was added to injury by asking them to pay to replace a fleet lost eight hundred miles away, one that would do nothing to protect the soil of the city-state from Spartan ravagers a few miles off.
So the war quite literally was bankrupting the rich conservatives of Athens, who paid to employ the poor for what seemed like a perpetual war that devoured hundreds of Athenian triremes. These revolutionary movements at home in some sense could mark the most important events of the war: should Athens, the beacon of democracy and the font of imperial aid to radical egalitarians throughout the Aegean, “flip” and become oligarchic, there would be no ideological basis for an empire at all, at least one that professed its reason to be the protection of the “people” from coercive elites. Such radical change later on was always the hope of rightists like Plato, for example, who felt that the moral decline of the city had begun with Themistocles’ creation of a navy and the diminution of hoplite warfare—a process accelerated by the Peloponnesian War and only to be curtailed through revolution.45
Yet the financial challenge was not just building ships and paying crews. There was also an enormous investment required in dockyards and ship sheds as well. Since the materials for construction had to be imported (mostly from northwestern Greece), stored, and protected from the elements, a veritable arsenal at the Piraeus—almost two millennia before the extravagant galley factory at Venice—was constructed to launch and repair ships. There was nothing like it in the ancient world; and the inventory of ship parts and the sophistication of its arsenals explain why Athens alone of the city-states could build and maintain a fleet of 300 seaworthy triremes. Long-term maintenance involved thorough cleaning of the planks beneath the waterline of ships, which quickly became encrusted with marine life, waterlogged, and worm-eaten. To keep an expensive trireme afloat for some twenty years meant that it had to be drawn up on land and protected in a covered shed, where maintenance work on the delicate craft was nearly constant.
A Precious Investment
The fastest vessels were probably built of silver fir, or in some cases of either pine or cedar, lighter materials that lacked the strength and resiliency of the occasionally employed hardwoods like oak. Modern reconstruction has also revealed how quickly the multitude of a trireme’s intricate parts can break. Olympias was no quicker put to sea than immediate maintenance and repair were needed. Just assembling some 300 to 400 triremes in one place, as happened in the last gigantic battles of the Peloponnesian War, was an amazing feat of logistics, as thousands rowed on fragile and temperamental craft across the Aegean without sure provisions, navigation, or any real sense of meteorology.46
The chief problem in trireme warfare, however, was always manpower. In theory, Athens itself had over 20,000 thetes who would customarily row. But that number could man only a hundred or so ships, even if every citizen left municipal employment or his own private job to serve for months in the Athenian fleet. So to man an imperial fleet of 200 to 300 triremes, tens of thousands of rowers were needed from subject states in the Aegean, along with resident aliens and on many occasions thousands of slaves, if not off-season farmworkers. Toward the end of the war, after tens of thousands were lost to the plague and at Sicily, non-Athenians may have made up as much as 20 to 30 percent of some of the crews. To pay for such a horde was one thing; to lose it at sea was catastrophic, weakening the very stability of the empire.
Unlike hoplite battle, which was rarely ruinous—the average fatalities in such land engagements were usually around 10 to 15 percent of the combined forces—naval warfare held the potential to take out a city’s entire fleet and its enormous human investment in a single clash. Besides the disaster at Sicily, the numbers involved in battles on the eve of and during the Peloponnesian War were staggering: Sybota (433): 300 ships, 60,000 seamen; Cynossema (411): 162 ships, 33,000 seamen; Arginusae (411): 263 ships, 55,000 seamen; and Aegospotami (404): more than 300 ships and 60,000 seamen. So such losses at sea could in theory nearly bring down an entire state in a few hours. The 216 ships, 45,000 men, and perhaps over 3,000 talents in wages, capital investment, and provisions that were lost in the two armadas sent to Sicily changed the course of the war, representing as it did a sum almost the equivalent of the city’s entire financial reserves present on the eve of the hostilities, capital acquired through some fifty years of empire. The Athenian disaster at Aegospotami almost a decade later immediately brought the war to a head in late 405, once a depleted Athens had gambled on putting to sea its last reserves of 180 ships with 36,000 men. In not more than an hour or so they lost 170 ships and the vast majority of the crewmen, who were either killed, captured, or scattered throughout the Hellespont. Aegospotami was a one-day financial disaster of some 400 talents alone in lost capital and wages—and the added expense of lost thousands of man-hours of labor, both military and civilian, for years to come.
The Advantage of Sea Power
Given the dangers and the horrendous costs of trireme warfare, why fight at sea at all? Thucydides apparently felt it necessary to explain in rather explicit terms why ships were so valuable. He starts his history off with a lesson about the early Greek thalassacracies (“sea powers”). And his long account of the war abruptly ends nearly in mid-sentence hundreds of pages later, with the Athenian victory at Cynossema in 411. Thematic throughout is his belief that money, walls, and ships represented a new horizon in warfare, one not envisioned until the rise of powerful maritime states. Their commerce and strong central government emerged in the half century of prosperity after the Persian War, and alone could fuel sufficient manpower and capital to create real navies. Yet did the Peloponnesian War prove Thucydides right about the advantages of sea power? Prewar Sparta, after all, at far less cost had created a system of land alliances in the Peloponnese that rivaled the power of Athens.
True, late-fourth-century Sparta managed to maintain a large fleet; but it was still eventually emasculated only by Theban spearmen, not rowers. In general, throughout history, one can count on one hand the world’s formidable commanders—Themistocles, Don John of Austria, Nelson, Jones, Nimitz—in contrast to dozens of great captains like Alexander, Hannibal, Caesar, Genghis Khan, Saladin, Cortés, Napoleon, Wellington, Grant, Rommel, and Patton. Entire wars—the Second Punic War, the Crusades, the American Revolutionary and Civil Wars, the western fronts in both World War I and World War II—have been fought mostly without decisive sea battles. People, after all, live on land, not water; most food is grown in the soil, not the sea; and men need not build vessels to fight on the ground. Victorian England could blockade imperial Germany; but victory was possible only with the destruction of the formidable German army. In turn, Germany probably could have won both world wars on the Continent without defeating the British fleet. The Soviet Union was kept alive by the American and British merchant marines, but the batt
les that broke the Third Reich on the eastern front were all fought on land.
Why then do states, ancient and modern, if they are to be great and imperial, look to the sea? The dilemma of ships versus infantry is best resolved not in an either- or proposition but, rather, in terms of a cost-benefit analysis. In a strictly military sense, did building and maintaining a large fleet bring advantages to justify the enormous human and material investment, as well as the risk of losing such aggregate capital in a single bad day? Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon, and Hitler might argue otherwise; their power, after all, was created and maintained by infantry forces largely acting alone against like armies. But then the latter two eventually came to ruin, and the former often won only through maritime support and transport.
At the most basic level, ships gave to a state a vast array of alternatives, both military and economic. With the addition of a potential fleet of more than 200 active and 100 reserve ships, Athens found that within a three-hundred-mile radius it could unite, or rather coerce, nearly two hundred Greek states—perhaps comprising almost a million people, and all reachable by a fleet of triremes in a little over three or four days. Island states that had surrendered their navies, unlike land powers, were easily kept separate and isolated, and had no mechanisms for uniting. In turn, their imperial ruler could coerce all piecemeal with its magnificent fleet, making a maritime empire easier to control than its landed counterpart. It was a difficult task to cut off and surround a landlocked city, but not so much an island, which could be blockaded and separated from trade, commerce, and help.47
A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War Page 36