Lords of the Sea: The Epic Story of the Athenian Navy & the Birth of Democracy (42 page)

The waterfront of Zea Harbor was limited, the dreams of the Assembly vast. Shipbuilding was now the responsibility of the Council, who would annually appoint ten
trieropoioi
or trireme builders. This board was assisted by a treasurer of naval funds and five naval architects who supervised the design and refitting of triremes by the city’s shipwrights. The tasks were so arduous that the members of the Council routinely received gold crowns for successful completion of a year’s work.

The shipbuilding campaign called for timber. By now the Athenians had stripped Attica of its forests. The philosopher Plato, looking up at the bare hillsides around the city, noted that the trees that had provided mighty roofbeams in the days of his forefathers were long gone. The forests had been replaced by heather, the loggers by beekeepers. And as Plato foresaw, the process was irreversible. Without trees, rain eroded the soil from the hills and carried it away to the sea. The barren rocky hills that remained (and that still remain) were “like the skeleton of a body wasted by disease.” Athenian deforestation had prompted the first awareness that the resources of the earth were not inexhaustible.

The big new navy would have to be constructed entirely from imported timber. To accommodate more triremes, the shipsheds at Zea were rebuilt with slipways double the length of the original ones. Two triremes could now be fitted end to end between each row of columns. The roofs of the new shipsheds were made with whitened tiles, so that they gleamed in the sunlight like marble.

SHIPSHEDS AT ZEA HARBOR, Fourth Century B.C.

The might of the resurrected navy was soon to be tested. Conon’s victory at Cnidus had been only a beginning: the war against the Spartans at sea had still to be won. The adversities of the last quarter century had bred an extraordinary new generation of naval commanders, led by Chabrias, Phocion, Timotheus the son of Conon, and Iphicrates. Relay races were popular events in Athens: instead of a baton, a lighted torch was passed from hand to hand through the team of runners. Never before had the navy enjoyed the services of such a team as was about to take up the torch in the cause of Athens’ new maritime league. Their efforts would determine, once and for all, the outcome of the long struggle between Greece’s two warring alliances.

Chabrias, the son of an affluent Athenian trierarch and horse breeder, took an interest in the technical side of naval operations. He invented new foul-weather fittings that improved his triremes’ performance on rough seas, including extra steering oars and an extension of thick screens that completely enclosed the rowing frames. To train inexperienced oarsmen, Chabrias built wooden rowing frames on shore where beginners could learn technique and timing before they went on board ship. On one occasion he lashed his triremes together in pairs to create double-hulled catamarans, a ploy that fooled Spartan scouts into believing the Athenian fleet to be only half its actual size.

One year after founding the Second Maritime League, the Athenians sent Chabrias to protect the incoming flotilla of grain ships from a Spartan fleet that was hovering, piratelike, in the vicinity of Cape Sunium. At the approach of Chabrias and his squadron the Spartans melted away, and the grain arrived safely at the Piraeus. To lure the Spartans to a decisive battle, Chabrias cruised south to the green and hilly island of Naxos, rich in vineyards, almond trees, and fine white marble. The oligarchs of Naxos were still loyal Spartan allies, and Chabrias rightly guessed that an attack on their walls would bring the enemy fleet to him at once. Shortly after he unloaded his siege machinery, the Spartan fleet appeared over the horizon.

Over and above his orders, Chabrias had a personal score to settle with the Spartan admiral, Pollis. The Athenian philosopher Plato happened to be a close friend of Chabrias. A dozen years earlier, when Plato voyaged to Sicily for a view of Mount Etna, Pollis took him captive and sent him to be sold at the slave market on Aegina. Plato’s friends were able to buy his freedom, but the degrading insult had yet to be avenged.

The battle at Naxos would be the first actual sea fight between Athenian and Spartan fleets since the battle of the Arginusae Islands, thirty years before. Unlike Chabrias’ force, the Spartan fleet was an amalgam of various contingents, each bearing its own heraldic emblems. Before launching his ships, Chabrias ordered his trierarchs to remove the golden images of Athena that identified all Athenian warships in order to disguise, if only briefly, their identity. His crews were still untried, and he intended to give them every possible edge.

The antagonists met at dawn in the wide channel between Naxos and the neighboring island of Paros. The Spartan admiral Pollis scythed through the Athenian left wing, killing the commander Cedon in the process. Chabrias had his hands full with the ships attacking his center and right, so he ordered a young trierarch named Phocion to take a contingent and save whatever might remain of the now-leaderless Athenian left.

As the two original lines disintegrated into a mass of dueling ships, the enemy lookouts and steersmen began to hesitate in ordering their ramming strikes. Without the familiar golden figureheads of Athena to guide them, they could not quickly distinguish Athenian ships from their own allies. The removal of the ensigns bought precious moments for the Athenians as the Spartans held off. Though the Spartans rammed and destroyed eighteen Athenian triremes, the Athenian tally was twenty-four, more than a third of the Spartan fleet.

Young Phocion’s dash to the left wing turned the battle. With defeat looming, Pollis signaled his ships to break off the engagement and save themselves. Chabrias could easily have taken prizes during the rout. Instead he ordered a rescue mission on the watery battlefield, now littered with wrecks, to save Athenian survivors who were clinging to timbers or swimming for shore. Even after three decades, the Arginusae Islands cast a long shadow.

So Pollis and the Spartan navy survived, though with diminished force and prestige. Athens had no funds to follow up the victory at Naxos. In this hour of need Chabrias turned again to Phocion. He put the twenty-six-year-old hero in command of twenty triremes and assigned him the formidable task of collecting contributions from Athenian allies in the Aegean. Phocion, clear-sighted and blunt-spoken, told his general that twenty was the wrong number: too many for a friendly visit, too few for a fight. Chabrias gave in and let him go in a single trireme.

Phocion made such a good impression on his cruise that the league members not only provided money but assembled a fleet to carry it to Athens. Thus began a remarkable career. The grateful Athenians would in years to come elect Phocion general a record-breaking forty-five times, more often even than they had elected Pericles.

Chabrias won his great victory on the sixteenth of Boedromion, the second day of the Eleusinian Mysteries. As the navy fought at Naxos, the Athenians at home were answering the herald’s cry of “Seaward, Initiates!” and wading into the sea to purify themselves. For the rest of his life Chabrias provided a celebratory bumper of wine to every Athenian household on that date. With the recurring commemorations of Naxos and Salamis, the latter falling on the nineteenth of Boedromion, the victory celebrations for the Athenian navy became intertwined with the city’s annual rites of mystical rebirth.

The Aegean was secure, but Sparta still ruled the western seas. The following spring the Assembly sent sixty triremes around the Peloponnese. The torch of command now passed to Timotheus. His expedition was intended to forestall Spartan attacks on league members and win over new allies. Timotheus had spent his youth in Cyprus, sharing the exile of his father, Conon. Growing up far from Athens, he tended throughout his life to be more at ease with foreigners than with Athenians. His fellow citizens saw in Timotheus a small and unprepossessing fellow who could not exhibit the strong physique expected of a war hero. But his lack of brawn was offset by an excess of intelligence, energy, and honor.

Timotheus’ unmatched record of bringing twenty-four cities over to the Athenian alliance with apparently little trouble made him the good-humored target of the world’s first known political cartoon. The anonymous artist depicted Timotheus as a fisherman dozing beside his lobster pot, as city after city crawled up to the trap and fell in. Above the scene floated the goddess Tyche (“Fortune”). She was directing the procession of lobsters while Timotheus enjoyed his nap.

The western campaign was Timotheus’ first independent naval command. He quickly succeeded in bringing Zacynthus, Cephallenia, Corcyra, and even some mainland cities back to the Athenian alliance. This string of diplomatic victories posed a starker threat to Sparta than any number of successful raids. When Timotheus learned that the Spartan fleet had landed on the island of Leucas, he bivouacked on the mainland opposite at an isolated place called Alyzia. This curving beach near a sanctuary of Heracles occupied a place in his family lore. Thirty-eight years earlier, at the time of the Sicilian expedition, Timotheus’ father, Conon, had been cruising the western seaways to protect Athenian allies from attack by the Peloponnesians. At Alyzia Conon bade farewell to Demosthenes and Eurymedon as those two ill-fated generals voyaged west to their meeting with destiny at Syracuse.

A high ridge hid Timotheus’ camp at Alyzia from Spartan scouts, but from its crest the Athenians had a clear view of the Spartans. With fifty-five triremes the enemy fleet was already almost a match for the Athenians, and Timotheus knew that reinforcements were on their way to the Spartans: ten triremes convoying a fleet of Italian grain freighters, and half a dozen more from the Ambracians in the Gulf of Arta. These western Greeks had been bitter enemies of the Athenians since the early campaigns of Phormio. Timotheus decided to attack while he still held the advantage in numbers.

The battle coincided with the Athenian religious holiday known as the Skira, held on the twelfth of the early-summer month of Skirophorion. Garlands for the Skira were traditionally woven of myrtle branches. Mindful of his crews’ morale, Timotheus let them cut myrtle from the surrounding countryside and decorate the triremes with green wreaths. In this way the ships were consecrated to the gods being honored that day in far-off Athens: Athena, Poseidon, and the sun god Helios.

As the crew boarded Timotheus’ flagship, a man happened to sneeze while coming up the ladder. At the omen, the steersman called a halt to the boarding process. But Timotheus was no Nicias, to let a portent interfere with his plan of campaign. Myrtle wreaths were one thing; calling off a battle because of a sneeze was quite another. “Do you think it a miracle,” he demanded of his superstitious steersman, “that out of so many thousands one man has caught a cold?” The men laughed at the rebuke, and the process of boarding resumed.

Timotheus first launched only twenty of his triremes, leaving the others behind on shore. As soon as this ridiculously small Athenian squadron rowed into view around the southern tip of the promontory, the entire Spartan fleet eagerly advanced to meet it. The Athenian vanguard had plenty of sea room, but Timotheus did not intend to use it at present for the classic maneuvers of
diekplous
or
periplous.
Instead, he instructed his trierarchs and steersmen to break formation and execute any maneuvers they pleased, provided that they kept the Spartans on the attack and stayed out of range of enemy rams and missiles. So the scattered Athenian ships led the Spartans in a lively chase, turning, twisting, or feigning flight, transforming the sea west of Alyzia into a watery dancing floor.