Steven Solomon

by Power;Civilization Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth

  When the Persians returned a decade later to exact a crushing revenge on Athens and its allies, Darius’s son, King Xerxes, amassed an overwhelming 180,000- to 360,000-man military force and a 700- to 800-ship naval fleet, most of which it had commandeered from its subject states Egypt, Phoenicia, and Ionian Greece. In the spring of 480 BC, Xerxes’ army crossed the Hellespont on two bridges constructed of boats that they lashed together. To avoid a march through rugged mountains, the Persian soldiers painstakingly dug a canal through the Athos peninsula. As it marched, the army was sustained by seaborne supplies previously stocked at depots along the northern coast of Greece and on its accompanying fleet.

  All but some 20 Greek cities surrendered without a fight to the advancing Persians. Panicked Athenians consulted the oracle at Delphi, which in its usual enigmatic manner advised putting their faith in their wooden walls. No one knew whether this meant the traditional fortifications at the Acropolis or the hulls of the naval fleet it had built in preparation for the Persian invasion at the clever politicking of its brilliant young leader, Themistocles. Three years earlier, the forty-four-year-old Themistocles had persuaded Athens’s democratic assembly to invest the windfall from a recent discovery at a state-owned silver mine in a modern naval fleet that could attack Persia’s weak point—its extended naval supply lines—rather than relying upon the traditional army. When a small, valiant force of Spartans and Athenians were finally defeated by the advancing Persians at the mountain pass at Thermopylae to open the road to Athens, Themistocles made his decision. He ordered the evacuation of Athens, which the Persians proceeded to ransack and burn, while he retreated with his navy. Xerxes pursued, intent on destroying it, lest it retain the potential to disrupt Persian supply lines and command of the Aegean. At a narrow channel between Salamis Island and the mainland just west of Athens, the Persian fleet caught up to the Greeks.

  On the morning of September 23, 480 BC, Xerxes ascended a hillside and, from a majestic throne, sat back to watch history’s first recorded major sea battle, which he confidently expected to culminate with the utter demolition of the Greek navy. In the three-mile-long and one-mile-wide sound below him he could see the entire Greek fleet of 370 ships bottled up at either end by his own fleet, which had twice as many warships. Yet unbeknownst to Xerxes, Themistocles had consciously enticed the Persians to fight the showdown battle inside the confined waters at Salamis.

  Although his ships were fewer in number, Themistocles’ navy consisted of newly designed triremes, one of the great warships of history. With three banks of oars manned by 170 oarsmen who rowed with their backs to the direction they traveled, the trireme lay low in the water and had vastly more power than the traditional, two-banked, 50-oared, 100-foot-long Aegean penteconter. Under expert seamanship, it was fast and nimble, able to sprint into battle at nine knots and turn around in one minute in an arc of two and a half ship lengths. It had two main weapons: a new, more deadly and readily extricable bronze-tipped ram to punch a hole in the hull of its enemies; and armored marines, who launched projectiles at the enemy ship as the ram closed in and, as necessary, grappled alongside to board for hand-to-hand combat.

  Themistocles knew that Greeks could not win a battle in the open seas, where the enemy could deploy its entire fleet of much heavier, slower-moving war galleys. So with great cajoling, he maneuvered his reluctant allied Greek commanders to allow themselves to be entrapped in the strait at Salamis in the hopes of inducing Xerxes’ navy to fight in constricted waters, where their numerical advantage would be diminished and the Athenian-designed triremes’ tactical strengths most exploitable. On the morning of the battle, Themistocles lured the Persian fleet deeper into the narrow strait with a retreating maneuver, then ordered a sudden about-face. His rams charged the bewildered Persian fleet. Many Persian ships foundered, while trailing Persian vessels pressed in upon them from the rear. Almost half the fleet sank. Only about 40 Greek triremes were lost.

  With his naval supply lines interdicted, and his land forces suddenly vulnerable, Xerxes expeditiously withdrew much of his army to Asia Minor. Fearful that the Greek fleets might cut off their escape route by destroying the bridge of boats at the Hellespont, the Persians beat a starving, dysentery-racked retreat, in which, by Herodotus’s account, “they gathered the grass that grew in the fields, and stripped the trees, whether cultivated or wild, alike of their bark and of their leaves, and so fed themselves.”

  Not only was Greece saved, but Athens’s supremacy on the sea was also established for generations to come. Salamis also was one of the earliest dramatic examples of the asymmetrical advantages of naval power in enabling small, less-populous states in the age of sail to offset the balance-of-power advantage of much-larger, predominantly land-based rivals. At once it enlisted the natural impediment of the sea as a stalwart defensive ally, while conferring formidable, tactical advantages in controlling supply lines, projecting offensive military force, and disruptively blockading enemy ports. Economically, it provided key advantages in transporting and profiting from trade in international goods.

  Throughout history, from ancient Greece to the British Empire and the modern era of nuclear-powered navies, naval superiority has always been a key axis of power. Although great battles like Salamis were relatively rare events, by determining control over the seas they often were associated with decisive turning points. In the Mediterranean world, given its absence of strategically dominant inland waterway routes, it has been especially true that empires repeatedly rose and fell on naval sea power. Subsequent sea battles from Rome’s victory over Carthage off Sicily in the First Punic War to the defeat of the Spanish Armada by England in 1588, the Napoleonic War battles of the Nile and Trafalgar in 1798 and 1805 and World War II’s decisive ocean battles involving the Bismarck in the Atlantic and Midway in the Pacific reiterated the early lesson of Salamis.

  The Battle of Salamis catapulted Athens, like Minoan Crete before it, into the role of eastern Mediterranean naval and commercial superpower. The rebuilt city-state soon became the wealthy epicenter of a glorious burgeoning of arts, philosophy, rhetoric, politics, history, mathematics, and scientific inquiry that created the foundations of Western civilization. Immediately after Salamis, Athens and the Greek world experienced its classical golden age.

  Athens’s turn to naval power at Salamis under Themistocles spurred a democratizing influence as well. It elevated the voice—eventually institutionalized in voting rights—of the large number of poor oarsmen required to man the galleys and diminished the relative influence of the traditional army, which was drawn more heavily from the aristocracy.

  Reinforced by Athens’s international free-trade policy, an articulated market economy with safeguarded private property rights evolved. The new Athens did not prosper merely by trading local olive oil and wine to obtain wheat and other vital goods. Its port city, Piraeus, became a thriving international clearinghouse market for goods destined for ports throughout the region. As in Venice, Amsterdam, London, and New York and other great shipping entrepôts of future centuries, a complex of private warehouses, shippers, bankers, wholesalers, and other commercial service suppliers grew up around its docks. A rudimentary commodities market for grain developed, in which a benchmark grain price for the entire Mediterranean was established from the demand and supplies arriving from the Black Sea, Sicily, and Egypt. The government treasury bulged with revenues from the 2 percent toll levied on all cargo using its port. Athens’s democratic citizens’ assembly, in turn, encouraged these burgeoning private markets by improving the port with breakwaters, docks, dredging, and other public services to accommodate more and larger ships. To protect its maritime commerce, Athens also provided naval escorts for the grain freighter convoys making the slow journey to Piraeus from the Crimea through the Bosporus and the Hellespont. As the unspoken marriage of convenience between government and private markets yielded rising prosperity and power for both, the democratic base of the Athenian polis became more representative and
pluralistic.

  Seafaring culture itself further nurtured the evolution of a new model of society based on representative, liberal market democracy for vested citizens. In contrast to the centralized river irrigation and land-oriented hydraulic states in which the populace had few practical economic alternatives other than complying with the policy commands and heavy taxes of the central government, private sea merchants had the natural freedom to trade in harbors where taxes were lower for the services offered and their rights better safeguarded. Thus it was no coincidence that many of history’s leading seafaring trading states were also its leading representative market democracies and shared lineage with the political economic traditions born in Athens. With the rise of Athens, civilization’s great dichotomous tension was joined between the main competing forms of mobilizing economic goods and manpower—by authoritarian government command, on the one hand, and market price signals and private profit incentives on the other—that have competed for supremacy in numerous forms through the ages into the twenty-first century.

  Athens’s glory age came to an end when its political ambitions overreached its naval power. It lost the Peloponnesian War when Sparta matched its sea power sufficiently to be able to impose a blockade on its ports to starve it into submission. In 338 BC it submitted to the rising, neighboring northern inland kingdom of Philip of Macedon, who plowed the wealth earned from his introduction of irrigated agriculture in Macedon’s fertile central plain into building an expansive military force capable of controlling the gateway city on the Bosporus, Byzantium, and with it gained a strategic stranglehold over the Greek bread supply coming from the Black Sea. Yet in one of history’s many unforeseeable twists, Athens’s fall to Macedon became the instrument of implanting its Hellenic civilization and Greek language far and wide throughout the Mediterranean and Eurasia. The agent of this brilliant diffusion was Philip’s son, Alexander the Great.

  Tutored in Greek civilization as a teenager by no less than Aristotle himself, Alexander came to power as a twenty-year-old in 336 BC upon Philip’s assassination. From the time he led his army of 43,000 soldiers and 6,000 cavalry across the Hellespont two years later to launch his conquest of the Persian Empire, Alexander never lost a single military engagement in a triumphal 15,000-mile, eight-year military march. When he died in 323 BC in Nebuchadrezzar’s palace at Babylon at only thirty-two years of age, he reigned over the expanse of the Old World from the Nile to the Indus. His conquests were a dividing line of ancient history, inspiring later great conquerors from Caesar to Napoléon and instilling a millennium-long flourishing of Greek cultural influence in the western half of the Old World that was ultimately subsumed into Islamic and Christian European civilization.

  In creating his empire, Alexander displayed a versatile mastery of the military and civil arts of water management. Although at the outset he had no navy, he understood the paramount strategic importance of controlling the sea-lanes, and he devoted many of his earliest military campaigns to neutralizing his rivals’ naval advantages through unconventional land assaults from the rear that closed all enemy Mediterranean ports throughout Syria, Phoenicia, and Egypt. Turning inland, he hastened to cross the Tigris in 331 BC before his Persian enemy could employ that river barrier in its defensive stand, and then won a decisive victory at Gaugamela, not far from the ancient Assyrian city of Nineveh. Beyond Persia into central Asia and India, Alexander not only overcame armies but also diverse hydrological habitats, including the mountain snows of the Hindu Kush, the turbulent Oxus River, and central Asia’s parched steppes. After crossing the Indus River in the spring of 326, he penetrated victoriously into the Punjab by attacking during the torrential monsoons, a time when Indian troops normally took a hiatus from fighting and conditions rendered their formidable charioteers, archers, and elephant corps less effective.

  Already lord of the largest terrestrial empire in history, Alexander now quested to reach “Ocean”—the vast water body Aristotle and other Greek scholars believed surrounded Earth—and gain the enlightenment of knowledge. But when he urged his exhausted soldiers to press forward into the unknown, dense Ganges forests in search of Ocean, they refused to go on. Only this brought Alexander’s stunning conquests to their end. But he determined to use his return to explore the coast of the uncharted Persian Sea and the harsh Gedrosian desert, which no army ever had crossed. A fleet of ships was built and outfitted. Alexander himself barely survived the six-month trip down the Indus River to the sea when an enemy arrow pierced his lung. To convoy his swollen entourage of up to 85,000 troops plus noncombatant camp followers across the Gedrosian desert, the army dug wells to provide water for itself and the ships, which stocked a four-month food supply for the army. As water supplies dwindled after mountain barriers forced Alexander to turn inland, however, the journey became a march of desperation. Alexander turned it into an opportunity for inspirational leadership. Like a common soldier he marched on foot. When a soldier found a small water source and brought the first drink in his helmet to his king, Alexander first asked whether there was enough for all the troops; upon being told “no,” he dramatically poured out the water and announced he would wait until all his men could slake their thirst before drinking. Up to 25,000 are believed to have perished on the march.

  Less than two years later, in June 323 BC, Alexander himself died of a fever at the end of a long night of banqueting at Nebuchadrezzar’s old palace in Babylon. With him died his master plan to rebuild the famous city as the capital of his new Hellenic empire. Yet his legacy flourished through the Greek civilization that took root in the vigorous rebuilding he and his successors undertook wherever they had conquered. Declining irrigation systems in Egypt and Mesopotamia were rejuvenated and expanded with Greek hydraulic engineering, resulting in blossoming production, wealth, and the civilized arts. Ports and harbors were upgraded, and shipbuilding expanded in the Levant. Wherever Alexander passed he founded new cities—many named Alexandria. His most enduring legacy was Egypt’s Alexandria, a splendid seaport and capital city for the 1,000 years of Hellenic and Roman rule. Within a century of its founding, Alexandria became the Mediterranean’s most vibrant entrepôt and the heart of a Hellenic renaissance that was transmitted, through Rome and Islam, to Western civilization. Alexander personally selected the site because of its good anchorage and ample freshwater from a nearby lake, and designed the master plan for the city. To illuminate the way for toll-paying ships into its famous deep, double harbor, his successors erected one of the Seven Wonders of the World, the towering lighthouse at Pharos—probably taller than the Statue of Liberty in New York harbor—whose bronze mirror reflected sunlight by day and fire by night some 35 miles distant. Alexandria’s world-famous library, built by copying all manuscripts that came into its busy harbor, became the central repository for much of the ancient world’s literature and knowledge. In its heyday from 306 BC to the fire of 47 BC, it held as many as 700,000 items.

  Greek science, mathematics, and medicine, a research institute, and an observatory flourished anew in Alexandria. Archimedes of Syracuse, the great mathematician, inventor, and father of hydrostatics, studied in Alexandria. In addition to the achievements of Euclid, Plotinus, Ptolemy, and Eratosthenes, Ctesibius, a contemporary of Archimedes, invented a floating mechanism of reliable regularity to calibrate the important water clock, or klepsydra (“time thief”), as well as a hydraulic organ. In the first century AD, Hero of Alexandria invented, as an amusement, a working miniature model of a steam engine—had he been motivated to build a full-scale working version, the world might have had the steam engine some 17 centuries before James Watt applied the same scientific principles to the machines that launched the Industrial Revolution.

  It was also from Alexandria in the late second century BC that Greek sailors operating in the Red Sea made the breakthrough discovery of how to navigate the two-way monsoonal ocean winds to sail directly between the Gulf of Aden and southern India and thus projected themselves more prominently into the g
rowing long-distance Indian Ocean trade between Orient and Occident that played such a dynamic role in early world history. In Roman times, Alexandria became the major harbor for exporting Egypt’s indispensable grain surpluses to the imperial Italian capital. To Islam, it bequeathed a seafaring culture. In the Middle Ages, the Alexandria-Venice nexus reigned as the Mediterranean’s premier commercial hub and a vibrant interface between Islamic and Western civilizations.

  For several centuries, Alexander’s own embalmed and perfumed body lay in state in Alexandria in a resplendent sarcophagus with transparent cover. No less than Julius Caesar came to pay homage. It survived for two centuries after suzerainty of Egypt passed to Rome in 30 BC.

  Rome was the first great power to dominate the entire Mediterranean. Located at the sea’s midpoint, it was strategically well positioned to enrich itself both from the natural resources of the western basin and the vibrant markets and know-how of its advanced, civilized eastern half. For several centuries it derived wealth and power by ruling over its sea routes with an authority reminiscent of the control hydraulic-irrigation societies had exerted over their great rivers.

  Although deservedly famous for its great armies, Rome’s rise as a superpower actually began in the third century BC when it seized command of the western Mediterranean’s sea-lanes. Its unique genius as a civilization, indeed, resided in combining its military power with its pragmatic, well-organized, and large-scale applications of engineering technologies—the control and use of water prominent among them. Through water engineering, Rome mastered shipbuilding and seafaring infrastructures for its navy, drainage for the imperial highways used by its army, and construction of massive aqueducts and urban water systems to create something new in civilization—the giant metropolis.