by Bob Bennett
The region and how it was placed between the rival kings could also have a major bearing on how sieges in this era played out. The political instability translated into a failure of will to resist occurred most particularly in the regular cockpits of war where rivals armies came and went repeatedly. Where at one time one dynast was up, and then the other, so local politicians could always hope that their sponsor would soon be along to shoulder them up the greasy pole again.
It was often very different in those places further out on the edge, where local elites mainly interfaced with just one of the great rulers. A particular example of interest is Lysimachus’ relations with the Black Sea cities. There we do not have any great detail but what we do know indicates no lack of communal will to resist. No aggrieved partisans open the gates to the invader here; there is a determination to resist that borders on the heroic. They were not always successful but the presence of this truly patriotic spirit frequently translated into long drawn out sieges, often with neighbours, Hellenic and otherwise, offering succour against a regional power that was perceived as a threat by other potential victims in the area.
Thus the city of Callantia was repeatedly besieged by Lysimachus, who for many years was undistracted by wars with the other Diadochi. He could concentrate on these impertinent citizens, but still he found it no easy job to suppress them. It is, in fact, unclear when he was able to establish full control of the town and in the end it seems many of the inhabitants preferred a move to a new foundation under the sponsorship of Eumelus, king of Cimmerian Bosporus, as against submitting to Lysimachus.
Nor was it just the volatile politics of the citizen body that might undermine the spirit of defence. It could also be military leadership that had feet of clay. It is particularly noticeable in the invasion of Anatolia by Lysimachus in 302 BC that the generals left by Antigonus to protect his strongholds were very prone to changing sides for straight lucre and for promises of a good future in the new order. At Sardis, Phoenix gave over the town to the invader and at Synnada, Docimus (an old hand as a turncoat) was also only too happy to hand over the keys to the stronghold.
Humanity was always more important than technology and this remained true in the decades and centuries after as great sieges punctuated the history of the western world. In Greece, the great Attic capital seemed often at the centre; from the time shortly after our era when the Macedonians of Antigonus Gonatus took two years to force a heroic Athens to surrender in the climax of the Chremonidean War (when Sparta and Athens geed on by the Ptolemies had again challenged Macedonian power); to the long and awful siege of Athens by Sulla in 87/86 BC, in the First Mithridatic War, that finally ended in the merciless sacking of the venerable city. Or to the west in the Roman world, where again great sieges were the epics establishing and ruining reputations, whether the enemy were the Greeks of Syracuse and Capua, the African powers of Carthage, the Iberians of Numantia or even down to the Gauls of Vercingetorix at Alesia.
Chapter Eight
Naval Warfare
Plato described the Greeks as living ‘like frogs round a pond’and the sea was always crucial to ancient life in the Mediterranean world.1 Overland travel could be difficult and communications between communities that were frequently near or by the sea was best done by ships that progressed by hugging the coastline. In a world where warfare was endemic, control of the sea was important for supplying and reinforcing troops that were engaged in warfare.
The first attested sea battle seems only to have occurred around 1210 BC between Shuppiluliuma II, the king of the Hittites, who defeated a Cypriot fleet. Naval battles were fairly rare and it was not till the Persian Wars of the fifth century that there were records of any substantial naval operations. The Greeks, in the Trojan War, famously launched a ‘thousand ships’ to regain Helen, but they were essentially transports and any naval combat would have simply consisted of crews engaging in hand-to-hand combat or using missiles from a distance.
What transformed naval warfare was the invention of the ram in the ninth century BC. The ram was a beam sheathed in bronze attached to the bow underneath the waterline. With this a ship could ram an enemy vessel. But even then it still needed the development of a ship that would make most use of this technology. The basic ship at this time was the pentekontor which was a simple, long, narrow, one-level ship used for transporting goods and people. These had long been in use; it is thought, for instance, that they may have been used in the Trojan War. They were fitted with twenty- five oars a side, thus holding at least fifty men. By about 700 BC a new type of ship, the bireme, had been invented. It was developed probably in Phoenicia and it added another bank of oars above the first. As a ship it had a long life being used, for example, in the Roman invasion of Britain by Julius Caesar in the first century BC. But it was only with the invention of the trieres (trireme) in the sixth century BC that naval warfare really came into its own. The trireme had, as the name suggests, three times the number of oars of the pentekontor but how they were arranged is, as in so much else of our era, disputed.
However, it is generally thought that the oars were arranged in three tiers with one man to an oar. Excavation of the harbour ship sheds at Piraeus near Athens in the 1890s enabled some intelligent estimates to be made of a trireme’s length and depth. They are now thought to have been approximately 120 feet long, 18 feet wide and 8.5 feet deep. Unfortunately no wreck of a trireme has ever been found but a famous replica ship, the Olympias, was built in the 1980s and can still be seen at Athens’ modern day harbour. Such a ship with its numerous oars could be both fast and extremely manoeuvrable. It survived in use until the fifth century AD. The triremes were made of wood with metal spikes to hold the wood together. The most common woods used were fir, cedar, and pine.
Naval tactics in classical Greece revolved around two manoeuvres. The first was the diekplous manoeuvre, which, translated, means ‘break through and ram’; the oarsmen rowing very quickly into the hull of the enemy vessel. With a fleet of ships this required them to row at the enemy often in a straight line to break through and expose them to ramming. Such a manoeuvre was quite complicated with a whole fleet of ships and needed intense training to enable the right degree of co-operation to carry it out successfully. The other tactical manoeuvre was the periplous, which involved one fleet outflanking the other and ramming the enemy ships in the flanks. If carried out successfully it could decide the outcome of a battle in very little time. An easier manoeuvre than the diekplous, it still required a high level of skill to accomplish successfully. The most successful exponents of this and all naval warfare were, of course, the Athenians. Their triremes were manned by the poorer Athenian citizens (not slaves as is so often thought) and it is said with good reason that the skill they used in cooperating in naval tactics helped give rise to the idea of democracy, which they so assiduously practised.
Bigger boats than triremes had begun to be used by the middle of the fourth century, usually credited to Dionysius I of Syracuse which he developed for his war against Carthage. By the era of the Diadochi they were standard. The tetreres or ‘four’ (better known by the latin-derived term ‘quadrireme’) was the ship of the line, the penteres or ‘five’ (latinized as quinquereme) was the dreadnought and the heptares (‘seven’) and dekares (‘ten’) were the superships and carried the commander’s flag. But all were larger than the kind of vessels that went at each other’s throats at Salamis in 480 BC. And what this meant was that they could not only transport many more soldiers, but also catapults and other missile-throwing machines. Indeed they might even carry, if bound together, siege towers, rams and much else to threaten the defences of ports that had not had to face this kind of threat before.
The names refer to the numbers of oars but how they were arranged is a matter of some dispute, even more so than in the case of triremes. According to some commentators, the numbers used to describe galleys counted the number of rows of men on each side, and not the banks of oars. Thus, the quadrireme has been po
sited as being possibly reconstructed in three different ways. Firstly, one row of oars with four men on each oar, though this is felt to be unlikely as this would mean a very broad vessel. Secondly, oars on two levels with two men on each oar and finally oars at three levels with two men pulling the top oars and one each on the remaining two. The most obvious arrangement, given the name, of four banks of oars, is a physical impossibility. Similarly, the fives (quinqueremes) are thought to have had three rows of oars, with two men pulling each of the top two oars and one pulling the lower. Likewise, it is thought that the seven had one bank of four oarsmen and one bank of three whilst the tens had two banks of five. But though the technology is debated and the practicality wondered over, what is considered sure is that it would not have been practical to have had more than three layers of oars and probably no more than eight men rowing on each individual oar.
Much happened at sea in the era of Alexander’s Successors. Many campaigns were fought (though for all but one the sources are scant indeed), many developments occurred which need describing but equally much remained the same. However big the battleships of Demetrius or Ptolemy became, they still remained rowing shells that must hug the coast, never seagoing cruisers that could stray far from sight of land. They would be beached most nights, though they might stay out for a few days if it was absolutely required. But, whether a trireme or dekares they were full to the brim with rowers and seamen and they just did not have the capacity to carry the supplies all these men needed, nor indeed the space to allow them to stretch and to sleep once the day’s rowing was done. Water, especially, could never be carried in sufficient volume. A trireme would seldom carry fewer than 170 oarsmen, sailors and marines and bigger vessels proportionally more. A quinquereme would have usually carried at least 300 men and perhaps many more when a battle was anticipated. On an occasion before the Battle of Ipsus, Cassander’s brother, Pleistarchus, is reported as travelling on a sixer and also that he was accompanied by 500 men; this would have been far more than normal, as essentially the ship was acting as a troop transport, but it still shows how crammed full these big galleys might become. So the great fleets that Demetrius launched might be manned by well over 60,000 men and they would have to beach at the end of the day somewhere near where there was fresh water for these myriads to slake their thirst.
Control of the coastline was always a crucial matter and island stepping stones were vital to any puissant commander of the sea who aimed to make his power more than just a mark in the shifting sand. Also because of this, one of the most commonly used of naval strategies was not open to the big maritime players of the period. Blockade was very difficult to achieve because staying at sea was so difficult, even in fair weather, never mind in foul. So, any blockade runner had just to wait until the enemy ships had beached for the night to get in or out. Few examples exist in ancient times where it was tried and none that were achieved without great difficulty. Pompey’s fleet tried to cut off Caesar’s army from supplies and reinforcements after he first crossed to Epirus to track down his enemies in the siege of Dyrrachium in 49/48 BC. The Pompeians were by far the dominant party at sea but they still could not really keep up the blockade for any length of time. Mark Antony managed to get the second half of the army over so Caesar was able to achieve some numerical parity to bring on the great battle he desired. And, if this subordinate had his troubles, the greatest damage was done by the weather rather than the galleys of his opponent’s fleet.
The future rulers of the world Alexander took east in his conquering army were not naturally men of the sea. Yet, they knew their strategy whether it was practised on brown earth or blue water. Most of them were well-prepared and capable of leading navies as much as they were a land army. Some, like Seleucus for a number of years, had naval careers (though after this period he never wet his feet again) and Cleitus the White, before being snuffed out in the Thracian Chersonese, seemed to have specialized in maritime warfare, though he had also led cavalry under Alexander in the far eastern wars.2 Medius, who hosted the party where Alexander fell fatally ill, served as an admiral for Antigonus for many years.3
Ptolemy always kept his eye on developments at sea and led his navies in person on a number of occasions. And of course, Demetrius’ greatest claim to fame, apart from being the era’s greatest besieger, was as a monarch of the seas. Cassander managed at least one victory at sea but Lysimachus and Antigonus of the major players never seem to have ventured on the element personally, though the latter poured mountains of resources into boosting his clout in the nautical arena.
At the very beginning of our period, in the Lamian War, it became apparent there were choke points that would crop up again and again in the maritime story of the Macedonian Empires. The crossing of Europe to Asia was just such a one. When the Greek navy laid its plans in 323/322 BC the Athenian admiral, Evetion, had at his disposal 200 triremes and 40 quadriremes, a formidable fleet manned by Athenian oarsmen, who for centuries had been some of the most expert sailors in the world of the eastern Mediterranean.4 His strategy demanded the fleet be divided; the larger detachment sailed to the Hellespont to deny any passage to Macedonian reinforcements while the other detachment moved to bottle up the 110 triremes Antipater had brought to the Malian Gulf to support his land campaign.
The Greek leaders knew the war was bound to turn against them if the soldiers and resources of the Macedonian empire in Asia were allowed to cross over into Europe. The plan was initially pursued with some success, the fleet blockading the Malian Gulf ensured protection for the seaward flank of Leosthenes’ army, and the Hellespontine task force, though unable to deny the crossing of Leonnatus, were soon in a good enough position to prevent any further reinforcements. However, in the spring of 322 BC, Cleitus brought up the Macedonian Asiatic fleet to try and clear the Greek navy from the Hellespont. The two armadas met in a great battle at Abydos where Evetion had 170 warships facing 240 under Cleitus. The Macedonians achieved a decisive victory. Having won the initiative, Cleitus followed the retreating enemy ships intending to eradicate them from the Aegean. He took the opportunity to attack the second fleet in the Malian Gulf and after dispersing them was able to take command of Antipater’s fleet as well, in preparation for a final battle. The remnants of the Greek fleet had withdrawn south to the island of Amorgos in the southern part of the Cyclades archipelago, 60 miles south of Samos, in the hope that they could escape Macedonian attention and be able to recover their strength and regroup.5 Unfortunately for the harassed and desperate Greek sailors, Cleitus was a determined and ruthless foe. He sailed to Amorgos and forced them to fight. The result was a foregone conclusion; with the Greeks outnumbered and in low spirits, only a few of their ships survived to limp back to Piraeus as the fleet was emphatically destroyed by the rampant Macedonian admiral.
Cleitus, not a man given to understatement (under Alexander he had always conducted any business whilst walking on purple cloths), reportedly celebrated his great victory by styling himself ‘Poseidon, god of the sea’, and thereafter carrying a trident. This sea fight ended an era as never again would Athens be a significant naval power. For nearly 200 years her fleet had been a major force in the Aegean, sometimes dominant, sometimes suffering decline but never to be discounted. The victory over Xerxes at Salamis had ushered in this era and the fifth century glory of Athens was based on thalassocracy. At Aegospotami, in 405 BC, Lysander of Sparta had inflicted a serious blow on Athenian control of the Hellenic seas but, even so, during the fourth century the shipyards of Piraeus could still put to sea a fleet of awesome power. It was this naval capability that persuaded both Philip and Alexander to make considerable concessions to ensure Athenian support in the war against Persia. But, after Amorgos, the citizens would never look out again on a harbour with an Athenian fleet that could hold its own against the other Hellenic naval powers.
The second great battle at the junction of Asia and Europe, in 317 BC, hugely compounded the problems Polyperchon had already acquired at the
siege of Megalopolis, but for the self-proclaimed Poseidon it was to have fatal consequences. Cleitus was, by now, the ex-satrap of Lydia, having been ousted by Antigonus, and he had been sent by the guardian to block the Propontis with his fleet. Aided by the forces of Arrhidaeus, the ruler of Hellespontine Phrygia, his task was to ensure Antigonus could not send reinforcements to Cassander in his struggle to win Macedonia from Polyperchon. In response, Nicanor, Cassander’s very capable commander at Piraeus, was despatched to rendezvous with Antigonus’ fleet to try and open up the route.
A fierce naval battle ensued near Byzantium. Nicanor had about 130 ships but Cleitus probably outnumbered him.6 He is described by Diodorus as taking the whole fleet, and as he had 240 ships only a few years before it is reasonable to suggest he still had most of these with him.7 Initially he was successful, sinking seventeen and capturing almost forty ships, and Cassander’s admiral was forced to flee with the remnants of his fleet across the Bosporus to Chalcedon. Lulled into a false sense of security by his apparently decisive victory, Cleitus displayed untypical carelessness which was to cost him dear. He assumed he had rid himself of all the enemies in the vicinity but did not reckon on the indefatigable Antigonus. The latter had arrived on the Asiatic shore facing Byzantium with his army and, utilizing vessels provided by allies in that city, he rapidly shipped over troops to attack Cleitus who had beached his fleet oblivious of any danger:
All this had been arranged in one night. At dawn those on land began to discharge their javelins and arrows; the enemy some still asleep and others just wakened, having nothing to protect them suffered many wounds. Some were tearing off the stem cables, others were pulling up the gangways, others were raising the anchors; there was general noise and confusion. Antigonus signalled to the 60 ships also to go in to the attack and to ram the enemy ships, dashing enthusiastically through the waves. So it soon came about with one group attacking from the beach and the other from the sea that they conquered those who had previously been victorious.8