Lords of the Sea: The Epic Story of the Athenian Navy & the Birth of Democracy (16 page)

Expanding the range of naval activity, Pausanias first led the fleet to Cyprus and then, having stirred up a rebellion against the Persians throughout the island, cruised around the entire western end of Asia Minor to Byzantium, a Greek colony lying at the gateway to the Black Sea. After capturing Byzantium, the Spartan admiral became increasingly tyrannical and inaccessible even to his own allies. Eventually some of the allied contingents mutinied. The Ionians begged the Athenians to take over the leadership of the fleet. Such an act would ratify the informal arrangement of the previous autumn, when Xanthippus had led a united Athenian and Ionian fleet at Sestos. In addition to sharing a common ancestry, the Ionians put more trust in the Athenians to protect them from reconquest by Persia. Athenians were energetic and adventurous; Spartans (with the exception of the volatile Pausanias, of course) tended to be stolid and earthbound. The universal respect inspired by Aristides also played a part in their decision.

When the government in Sparta sent a new admiral to Byzantium to replace Pausanias, the Ionians refused to take orders from him. The die was cast. The frustrated admiral went home to Sparta, and the Peloponnesian triremes also abandoned the expedition. Aristides remained behind with the fleet of Athenians and Ionians to lay the foundations of a new world order in which Athenians would lead a league of their own.

The Ionians proposed that they and the Athenians form a new naval alliance patterned after the Spartan-led alliance that had won the war against Xerxes. The Spartans had convened their councils at the Isthmus; the Athenians and Ionians would meet on the island of Delos, in the heart of the Aegean. Within the alliance Athens would play the role of hegemon (literally “the one who goes in front”) or leader. Athenian generals would command the allied fleet, and Athens would take the lead in all decisions, with the council of allies serving in an advisory capacity. Their mission was simple: perpetual war against the barbarian. The new Athenian alliance would exact revenge on the Persians for all the injuries that they had done to the Greeks.

Because this new alliance was dedicated to naval warfare, it needed something that Sparta’s alliance had never required: regular contributions of money and ships. The huge crews of rowers would have to be paid; new triremes would have to be built and old ones repaired. A standing fleet was far more costly than an army to maintain, and it remained a heavy financial burden even when the ships were in port.

To ensure that each ally shouldered a fair share of the burden, the Athenians proposed a system much like the annual tribute of the Persian Empire. Each city or island would be assessed a yearly contribution based on its resources and would pay either in cash or in kind (that is, by sending triremes) as Athens determined. Aristides himself was to make the assessments. Contributions of silver would be sent each spring to Delos, and entrusted to ten Athenian citizens bearing the grandiloquent title of
Hel lenotamiai
or “treasurers of the Greeks.” The proper name of the new alliance was The Athenians and Their Allies. Later historians dubbed it the Delian League.

Aristides made an initial assessment of tribute that yielded 460 silver talents each year. The amount would grow as more Greeks joined the alliance. The Athenians decreed that those with large fleets, such as the islanders of Samos, Lesbos, Chios, Naxos, and Thasos, would contribute quotas of ships. Other allies possessed only small and antiquated galleys; they paid in silver from the start. When all were in accord, the representatives on Delos swore oaths of allegiance to the new Athenian alliance on behalf of their cities. Then they ceremonially cast iron bars into the sea. This act symbolized their intention that the oaths would endure until the iron rose again. It was a heady moment. Gazing east from Delos, they must have thought the Persian Empire looked big enough to sustain an eternity of pillage and plunder.

To lead the new allied expeditionary force, the Athenian Assembly appointed none of the successful naval commanders of the previous three years—Themistocles, Xanthippus, Aristides—but Cimon, a newcomer to the generalship. It was he who had rallied the city’s young horsemen to the naval effort before Salamis. Cimon was a tall, athletic man with a crop of curly hair and a genial, gregarious manner. His father was Miltiades, his mother a Thracian princess. Part of his youth had been spent in his family’s fiefdom on the northern shore of the Hellespont, watching the rich argosies sailing downstream from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean.

Now just thirty-one years old, Cimon launched the new alliance on its first campaign. The most pressing target seemed to be Eion, a walled city on European soil that was still in Persian hands. Eion lay on the Strymon River in Thrace, the native land of Cimon’s mother, and commanded access to the Thracian gold fields. Cimon’s allied forces disembarked and defeated the enemy in a battle outside the city; but then the surviving Persians defied the Greeks from behind Eion’s strong fortifications. Cimon promptly imitated the Persians’ own penchant for engineering feats. He turned the course of the Strymon so that the river flowed against the city’s walls. As they were made of mud brick, the walls began to melt. In despair, the Persian commander committed suicide, and Cimon was able to take the town. Those who had collaborated with the Persians were sold into slavery, and the proceeds were divided among the cities and islands of the alliance. Cimon turned the collaborators’ rich farmlands over to Athenian settlers.

This dramatic success brought the first campaigning season of the new alliance to an end. The grateful Athenians set up a war memorial at the main entrance of the Agora. Its inscribed verses compared Cimon and his troops to the Athenians who fought in the Trojan War, “masters of warlike arts and leaders of valiant men.” Pleased with their choice of general, the Assembly continued to send Cimon out to lead allied expeditions for fifteen seasons. As his tally of victories mounted, so too did membership in the alliance, which eventually reached a total of about 150 cities and islands.

Cimon’s most popular exploit involved him in a quest for sacred relics: the bones of the hero Theseus. The Athenian navy had established itself as a force in the world: it was time to endow it with a patron hero and a creation myth. Theseus—voyager, liberator, slayer of monsters—seemed the right hero. In his youth Theseus had entered the Labyrinth at Knossos and killed the Minotaur, a fearsome beast that was half-man, half-bull. By this daring exploit he had freed Athens from its bondage to King Minos of Crete, who had demanded a regular tribute of Athenian youths and maidens to feed the Minotaur. During his long life Theseus took part in so many other quests and adventures that the phrase “Not without Theseus!” became proverbial. He was supposed to have died on the island of Scyros, but no one knew his burial place.

Several years after the founding of the Delian League, the Delphic Oracle announced that the Athenians must retrieve Theseus’ bones and worship him as a divine hero. Cimon undertook the mission. After a long search on Skyros, he happened to see an eagle tearing at a mound of earth. Recognizing the omen, Cimon ordered his men to dig. They uncovered a sarcophagus containing a sword, a spear, and the skeleton of a very big man. With elaborate ceremony Cimon conveyed the bones back to the Piraeus in his flagship. The Athenians welcomed the relics with parades and sacrificial offerings and laid the bones to rest in a sanctuary in Athens devoted to Theseus’ cult. An annual festival by the sea commemorated the date when Theseus was supposed to have begun his epic voyage, just as a second festival in the autumn celebrated his return. Each year the steersmen of Athens held a festival in honor of the man from Salamis who had piloted Theseus’ galley to Crete and back.

Athenians inherited many myths from the remote past, but when current developments, such as the rise of the navy, seemed to cry out for mythical precedents, they readily invented new ones. Cimon abetted the process. Among the creative artists whom he patronized was a genealogist and mythographer named Pherecydes. He had already traced Cimon’s family tree back to the hero Ajax of Salamis. Now Pherecydes rewrote the Theseus myth. In this exciting new account, a desperate Theseus rushes back to the harbor near Knossos after killing the Minotaur and ensures a safe escape by ramming the hulls of the Cretan ships so that they cannot pursue him. A later mythographer named Demon improved the tale by transforming the Minotaur into a Cretan general named Taurus and claiming that Theseus defeated him in a naval battle—the first naval battle in Athenian history!—at the mouth of the harbor. Thus Theseus metamorphosed into a true naval hero, with exploits that foreshadowed naval warfare of Cimon’s own day.

ATHENIAN TROOP CARRIER

In addition to the bones, Athens laid claim to a second tangible relic of Theseus. The little triakontor called the
Delias
was the city’s oldest ship. Each spring it conveyed a sacred embassy to Delos, birthplace of Apollo, where the Athenians and other Ionian Greeks honored their ancestral god at a sort of family reunion. In one of the earliest recorded acts of historic preservation, the city’s carpenters continually replaced worn-out or rotting timbers in the sacred galley with new wood. The
Delias
had the typical design of an Iron Age galley, complete with ram, but that did not prevent the Athenians from identifying it as the very same vessel in which Theseus had voyaged to slay the Minotaur. It was another relic, another link in a chain that bound Athens to an imagined heroic past.

THE MYTHICAL VOYAGES OF THESEUS

THE DELIAN LEAGU, Founded 4780477 n.c.

One of the paintings that decorated Theseus’ temple was the creation of an Athenian artist named Mikon. The mythical scene showed Theseus deep under the sea, surrounded by tritons and dolphins. The goddess Amphitrite, queen of the sea, was handing a crown to the young hero while Athena stood by as witness. Other additions to Theseus’ myth enhanced his role in Athenian history. It was said that during his kingship Theseus had unified Attica, established the first democratic assembly, encouraged the immigration of resident aliens, and stood as champion to the poor and oppressed, even to slaves. Thus the primeval founder of the city’s sea power also became the originator of Athenian liberty, unity, and democracy.

Meanwhile Themistocles, the real founder of the navy, was still very much alive. The powerful clans of Attica had united against him in the Assembly, and his personal reputation suffered from a smear campaign that accused him of corruption and treason. In an attempt to restore his standing and to counter Cimon’s mythmaking, Themistocles sponsored the production of a new tragedy by the playwright Phrynichus. The play,
Phoenician Women,
recounted the battle of Salamis as a tragedy seen from the Persian point of view. In the opening scene a eunuch of the Persian court spoke a soliloquy while arranging cushions in the council chamber of the royal palace. A chorus of wailing women, the grieving widows of Xerxes’ Phoenician mariners, lamented their fate. Themistocles thus reminded his fellow citizens of his own role in humbling the Persians at sea. He also presented the story of Salamis on a stage that was usually dominated by tales of gods and heroes, thus elevating it to the realms of epic and myth.