Lords of the Sea: The Epic Story of the Athenian Navy & the Birth of Democracy (26 page)

During the war’s first year Athenian triremes were also operating in home waters. One hundred of them were patrolling the seas around Attica. Another fleet attacked Aegina. The Athenians landed, forced the Aeginetans into exile, and distributed the island’s territory among settlers from Athens. Thirty triremes were cruising the seas around Euboea to guard Athenian livestock and other property from privateers. Before the summer was over, they set up a small naval station on an islet called Atalante. From there the campaign against piracy could be kept up throughout the year.

Now that the war seemed certain to last for two or even three years, the Athenians took additional steps to secure their territory. Guard stations were created at strategic sites around the coast of Attica. One thousand talents were set aside on the Acropolis as a reserve, to be used only in the event of an enemy attack on the city by sea. Any proposal to expend these funds for a different purpose would be punishable by death. In addition to the reserve of silver, the Athenians voted to set aside one hundred of their best triremes every year and appoint one hundred trierarchs to keep them ready.

ATHENIAN HORSE CARRIER

Over the winter Athenian shipwrights began work on a new project in the Navy Yard. They selected ten old triremes and converted each one into a
hippagogos
or horse carrier. To make the change, the interior of the trireme’s hull had to be altered. The carpenters dismantled the rowing seats of the lower two tiers of oarsmen and sealed up the oar ports, leaving an enclosed space some eighty feet long by sixteen feet wide. The empty hold, formerly the domain of 108 zygian and thalamian rowers, would now accommodate thirty horses.

Fifteen animals could be tethered along either side, spaced about five feet apart. Floor width was constricted at the waterline, but at head height the flaring sides of the trireme would provide additional room for the horses’ forequarters. Storage spaces were then created for fodder and fresh water, saddles and bridles, and for the lances, shields, and helmets of the horsemen. The shipwrights refitted the sterns of the vessels with removable sections and gangways so that when the ships came to shore, the horses could easily be led or even ridden out onto the beach.

The creation of these horse carriers marked the first major innovation in Athenian naval architecture since Cimon introduced the fully decked troop carrier thirty-five years earlier. New ships called for new names:
Hippodromia,
“Horse Race”;
Hipparche,
“Queen of Horses”;
Hippocampe,
a mythical monster that was half horse and half fish. There were still Athenians alive who could recall the sight of King Darius’ horse carriers and their equine cargoes landing on the beach at Marathon. For the first time the Athenian navy could transport cavalry to war zones overseas, just as the Persians had once done.

One year had passed since the Peloponnesian War began. As the signs of spring appeared, the Athenians seemed poised for success. They had survived a Spartan invasion, inflicted damage on the enemy’s coasts, and brought over new allies to their side. Waging war from the northern Aegean to the western isles, Athens had proved again, as in the days of the Egyptian expedition, that it could fight on many fronts at once. The monetary reserves on the Acropolis would sustain three years of such operations. By then Pericles predicted that the Peloponnesians would be glad to end the futile struggle. Even with winds of war blowing all around it, the ship of state seemed to be cruising forward on an even keel.

At the start of the war’s second summer, the Spartans led the Peloponnesian army into Attica to destroy crops and farms. And for the second year the invaders watched helplessly as an Athenian fleet rowed out of the Piraeus to attack their own coasts. The armada included ten of the new horse carriers and fifty ships from the Athenian allies on Lesbos and Chios.

To the Athenians, all seemed well, but there were in fact troubling signs at the Piraeus. Fatalities were reported from an unknown disease. In the heightened mood of suspicion brought on by the war, the Athenians blamed the enemy. The Peloponnesians, they said, must have somehow poisoned the water in the Piraeus reservoirs. When the fleet departed for that summer’s cruise, the mysterious malady was still unidentified.

Pericles himself commanded the naval expedition, but the itinerary was much less ambitious than that of the first year. Perhaps the horse carriers slowed the fleet, or perhaps Pericles was reluctant to voyage too far from Athens. After assaulting a few cities on the Saronic Gulf and the eastern coast of the Peloponnese, the fleet turned back. Pericles reported that they had almost taken the town of Epidaurus by storm, but the expedition had achieved no solid success. At the Piraeus they discovered that the sickness they had left behind them had become a plague, and had already claimed hundreds of lives.

After a short time in port some of the triremes were handed over to new generals for yet another expedition to Potidaea, where the siege was still dragging on. Wooden siege machinery was loaded onto the ships, and the crews embarked again, this time heading north. The plague went with them. Within the cramped hulls of the triremes the explosive disease could not be controlled. When the fleet arrived at Potidaea, the plague spread from the ships to the entire Athenian camp.

An aristocratic young Athenian named Thucydides caught the plague that year but survived to write an account of the disease, from the burning head and eyes at the start on through the bleeding mouth, the chest pains, the bilious vomiting, the eruption of pustules on the skin, and the restless insomnia. Most victims died after seven or eight days.

By the time the new generals at Potidaea abandoned their effort and led the fleet home, more than a thousand of the expedition’s hoplites had died of the plague. Arriving at the Piraeus, they found the plague everywhere. Starting around the harbors, it had spread through the crowded huts between the Long Walls and swiftly reached Athens itself. Corpses of rich and poor alike littered the temples and choked the water tanks. Pericles lost his two elder sons, Xanthippus and Paralos. As he was placing a wreath on Paralos’ body before the lighting of the pyre, Pericles finally broke down and wept in public. Only Aspasia and their illegitimate son, young Pericles, were spared. Responding to an emotional appeal, the Assembly agreed to rescind Pericles’ own citizenship law so that the boy could be recognized as an Athenian. One-third of the hoplites died of the plague—a number that could be determined exactly from the register of names kept by the generals and the tribal commanders. Other segments of the population probably perished in the same proportion.

The most famous of Sophocles’ plays,
Oedipus Rex,
or “Oedipus the King,” seemed to hold up a mirror to the tragic fates of Pericles and Athens. Like Pericles, the hero Oedipus insisted on the rule of reason and order, never suspecting that his own actions and destiny were bringing disaster on the city. Like the Athenians, the people in Sophocles’ drama had been struck by a devastating pestilence and called on their leader to save them: “Better for you to rule a land with men than an emptiness. Walls and ships are nothing without men living together inside them.” As events spiraled downward toward catastrophe, even Queen Jocasta admitted that the ship of state might be doomed: “Now we all feel fear, seeing the ship’s steersman fail.”

As for the real plague, the Athenians eventually learned that they could blame neither the Peloponnesians nor the water supply of the Piraeus. Ships, not Spartans, had brought the sickness to Athens. The epidemic had originated in Ethiopia and then spread down the Nile River to the ports of the delta. From there, a hidden cargo in holds and cabins, it crossed the sea to the Piraeus. When the Spartans and their allies destroyed the wheat harvest of Attica, they left the Athenians more dependent than ever on imported grain. The Peloponnesians grew much of their own wheat and were cut off from foreign supplies by the vigilance of the Athenian navy. The epidemic scarcely touched them.

The plague wrecked Pericles’ grand strategy. He could not have foreseen or prevented such a calamity, but the people laid the blame on him. Athens could no longer assemble great fleets for the amphibious campaigns that were to have countered the annual Spartan invasions of Attica. The danger of contagion made it too dangerous to pack the crews together inside the ships. The crowded conditions created by bringing all residents of Attica inside the walls had in the end cost thousands of lives. Pericles’ powers of reason seemed no match for the forces of nature. Not content with fining him, the angry Assembly voted to strip Pericles of his official powers as general. Athenian envoys traveled to Sparta seeking peace, but the Spartans rebuffed the offer. Instead they were negotiating with the Persians, hoping to bring the Great King into the war on their side. In that dark hour Athenians no longer thought of victory, only of survival.

CHAPTER 11

Fortune Favors the Brave
[430-428 B.C.]

—Xenophon

 

 

 

 

THE ONLY GENERAL CAPABLE OF SAVING ATHENS WAS AT THAT moment living in poverty, disgrace, and dishonor, almost forgotten by his fellow citizens. Phormio had been a successful commander through almost three decades of service to the city, but like Pericles he had fallen victim to the people’s hunt for scapegoats during the plague. Always ready to answer the trumpet’s call even without pay, Phormio was Ares in the civic pantheon of celebrities, a counterpart to the Zeus of Pericles. Both Olympians had fallen from favor.

Though his ancestry was as noble as any Athenian’s, Phormio was now a poor man. In the course of his honest generalship at Potidaea he had helped provide for his troops from his own personal funds. After his return to Athens the civilian scrutiny board censured him for his conduct of the campaign and fined him one hundred silver minai. Phormio was too proud to beg or borrow the money from friends. His failure to pay the punitive fine led to an official ban of
atimia
or dishonor. Until it was lifted, he could not set foot on consecrated ground, including the Acropolis, the Agora, and the Pnyx.

In this crisis Phormio left the city and retired to his ancestral home at Paiania on the far side of Mount Hymettus. The family farm lay in the heart of the broad plain called Mesogaia or Middle Earth and had been visited earlier that summer by the marauding Peloponnesian army. For forty days the Spartans and their allies had worked their way through Attica, spreading fire and destruction everywhere. Phormio had been a small boy when Xerxes’ army had devastated the countryside. Just as the men of his father’s generation had done, Phormio settled down to live off the blackened earth, work his fields, and plant his crops. His career as a naval commander seemed over.

Now almost sixty, Phormio was used to living rough. On his many campaigns he had shared the hardships and short rations of his troops. Every day he stripped down and exercised naked, like a boy toughening his body in the gymnasium at home. Phormio had kept up this regimen in all weathers, winter and summer. Exposure to sun and wind had burned his body dark brown, so the men gave him one of Heracles’ nicknames, Melampy gous or “Black Butt.” At night he slept on the ground. His pallet was a reed mat so thin and poor that “Phormio’s sleeping mat” became a proverb in Athens to describe anything of truly wretched quality.

His look of a simple, weatherbeaten campaigner was deceptive. He had stormed cities, won allies, enriched the public treasury, and even beaten fifty enemy triremes with an Athenian fleet of only thirty. Phormio’s genius lay in quick improvisation on unexpected themes, and in his conviction that every situation, no matter how discouraging, offered a chance for victory. That chance had to be discovered and exploited through
mêtis.
Through cunning intelligence young Phormio had once tricked a city into opening its gates. On that occasion he borrowed techniques from the playwrights of Athens, including disguises and a dramatic messenger’s speech that he wrote and recited himself in order to fool the enemy. In the case of the sea battle of fifty against thirty, Phormio used a standard cavalry formation to hide the true numbers of his ships, thus luring the foolish enemy into undertaking a hasty and disordered charge. For Phormio as for Themistocles, the general’s
mêtis
was the decisive element in war.