Lords of the Sea: The Epic Story of the Athenian Navy & the Birth of Democracy (44 page)

Triremes of Atlantis
[370-354 B.C.]

—Plato

 

 

 

 

WHEN PEOPLE OF LATER AGES LOOKED BACK AT THE REVIVAL of Athens’ Golden Age, the figure of Plato dominated the scene. The philosopher possessed the most towering intellect that the city, or perhaps any city, ever produced. Like Thucydides before him, Plato saw the quest for sea rule as the defining issue of Athenian politics and history. In time he became the navy’s most articulate and vehement opponent, though only in his writings, not in the Assembly.

Plato liked to trace things back to their beginnings, but his revisionist view of Athenian history differed widely from the version recited by the jingoistic demagogues. Theseus’ heroic action in ending the tribute payments to Minos took a darker turn in Plato’s vision: “It would have been better for them to lose seven youths over and over again rather than get into bad habits by forming themselves into a navy.” He also disputed the popular belief that Themistocles, Cimon, and Pericles had been benefactors of the people. “Yes, they say these men made our city great. They never realize that it is now swollen and infected because of these statesmen of former days, who paid no heed to discipline and justice. Instead, they filled our city with harbors and navy yards and walls and tribute and such-like trash.”

Part of Plato’s hostility to the navy was inherited, part was personal. His uncle Critias had been the powerful arch-oligarch who led the government of the Thirty Tyrants, so Plato grew up among men opposed to democracy and the “naval mob.” In his teens he became a disciple of Socrates, most of whose disciples came from aristocratic and oligarchic families. Antagonism to the popular majority was natural in a young man whose uncle had been killed during the restoration of democracy led by Thrasybulus, and whose beloved teacher had been condemned to death by a jury of his fellow citizens. After these two tragedies, Plato left Athens to study the lore and customs of distant cities, voyaging southeast to Egypt and west to Sicily. It was on one of these voyages that he had suffered the insult at the hands of a Spartan commander that his friend Chabrias avenged at the battle of Naxos. On his return to Athens, Plato established a school at a grove of the hero Akademos on the Sacred Way, the world’s original “Academy.”

Despite his abhorrence of the navy, Plato’s famous Socratic dialogues were full of ships and the sea. To Plato, a man’s will was the steering oar of his soul; a quick-tempered man was like an unballasted ship, easily swept away; and the passing of a human life was like a boat slipping from its moorings and drifting from shore. He even described his vision of the cosmos in nautical terms: “This light is the girdle of the heavens, like the girding cables of a trireme, and in the same way it holds together the entire revolving vault.”

How, according to Plato, did the gods govern the first humans? “They did not use blows or bodily force, as shepherds do, but governed us like steersmen from the stern of the ship, holding our souls by the steering oars of persuasion.” What is his mission as a philosopher? “To frame the shapes of lives according to the modes of their souls. Thus figuratively laying down their keels, I try rightly to consider by what manner of living we shall best navigate our vessel of life through this voyage of existence.” Why will a philosopher never become the head of state in a democracy? “The true steersman must give his attention to the time of the year, the seasons, the sky, the winds, the stars, and all that pertains to his art if he is to be a true ruler of the ship. He does not believe that there is any art or science of seizing the steering oars, with or without the consent of the others.” Plato used the venerable metaphor of the ship of state to demonstrate the folly of democratic rule. How could it be right or even safe for inexperienced passengers to share equal votes with the captain? These were not academic questions. When Plato was in his seventies, Athens was confronted with a crisis at sea that threatened to revive all the city’s most dangerous imperialistic instincts.

The demise of Spartan power had abruptly knocked away the cornerstone on which the Second Maritime League had been founded. The charter of the alliance proclaimed the league’s purpose: to protect the allies from Spartan aggression. Why then should it continue to exist after the fall of Sparta? Pericles had managed to keep the Delian League together even after concluding peace with the Great King. Now the Athenians of a later generation decided to hold on to their naval hegemony with or without a Spartan menace to justify it. Fortunately for them, marauding fleets of pirates or Thessalians or Thebans almost annually stirred up trouble in the Aegean. The raids endangered trade and shipments of grain and thus obligingly provided Athens with a pretext for maintaining the league. As so often happens in empire building, an apparent enemy proved a valuable friend.

The allies were still haunted by the specter of the old oppressive Athenian Empire, with its imperial tribute and bloody massacres. Despite the Assembly’s original pledge to promote liberty and justice, it was drifting in the direction of empire once more. Ignoring the league’s charter, the Athenians installed governors and garrisons in certain cities and islands, just as in the bad old days. Because the Assembly continued to send expeditions to sea with insufficient funds to pay the crews, Athenian generals had to raid the territories of neutrals and even allies. Blatantly Athenians interfered in the internal politics of other states and increasingly employed the navy on missions that had nothing to do with the league.

This rising tide of abuses almost washed out the benefits that the league still provided to its members and to the Greeks at large. The Athenian navy policed the seas, kept down piracy, and protected small allies against aggression from powerful neighbors. Athenian maritime courts offered fair and speedy judgments to all. And the Athenians were carrying out all these duties and services without the steady income from tribute that had sustained them in the days of the empire.

To ensure that Athens would be able to finance its fleet without recourse to tribute, a citizen named Periander proposed a major financial and administrative reform of the trierarchy. Periander himself knew the burden of outfitting and maintaining a trireme: at the time when he made his proposal, he was serving as joint trierarch on a ship with the appropriate name of
Hegeso
(“Leadership”). His reform called for enrolling no fewer than twelve hundred Athenians as potential contributors for the trierarchic fund. Most would never command at sea. Periander’s new list was based solely on wealth and even included heiresses. The twelve hundred were to be grouped into sixty boards called
symmoriai
(“joint contributors”). The Assembly voted the proposal into law, and from then on it sent out fleets of sixty ships, calling up one trireme from each of Periander’s new symmories.

With all their failings, the Athenians had learned as much from the sufferings they inflicted on others as they had from their own. It was inconceivable that the Assembly in the time of Plato would have voted to kill or enslave entire populations as their forebears had done in the time of Socrates. The city had gone far to purge itself of hubris. Ironically, its own liberal spirit encouraged rebellions and enemy attacks. The allies did not love the Athenians, but neither did they fear them.

The storm broke fourteen years after the final peace with Sparta, when Byzantium joined the islands of Chios, Rhodes, and Cos in seceding from the league. Their mutiny provoked Athens to send out sixty triremes under Chabrias. Almost two decades had passed since he faced the Spartan fleet at Naxos, but the veteran had lost none of his fire. When the rebel fleet refused to come out of Chios Harbor and fight, he ordered his steersman to force an entrance. The Athenian trierarchs in the other ships hesitated, and as the enemy swarmed in around him, Chabrias was cut off. A rebel rammed his flagship. As water poured through the breach, the rowers scrambled overboard, followed by the archers and marines. All swam toward the main Athenian force that was hovering outside the harbor mouth. Chabrias stood on the foredeck in full armor, apparently unaware that only his ship had advanced and that his own men had abandoned him. He fought on while his trireme slowly sank: one old warrior—but an Athenian!—against an entire fleet. Once the enemy leaped across to the foredeck, Chabrias was quickly overwhelmed and killed. The Athenians conceded defeat, having lost exactly one ship and one man.

From this wretched beginning the War with the Allies or “Social War” went from bad to worse. As news spread of Athens’ humiliation at Chios, the rebellion gained momentum. Naval squadrons of the former allies rampaged through the Aegean, raiding, destroying, and threatening islands along the grain route. The Assembly sent out another fleet of sixty triremes under a group of generals that included Timotheus, Iphicrates, Menestheus, and a former mercenary commander named Chares. They met the rebel fleet at a place called Embata. Chares attacked while the other generals stayed on shore. A storm had blown up with high winds and dangerous seas. On their return to Athens, Chares accused the other three generals of failure to do their duty. Timotheus was fined a staggering one hundred talents, the largest fine in Athenian history. After their trials the accused generals either withdrew from active service or left Athens never to return.

As if they were bent on self-destruction, the Athenians had let the greatest generals of the age slip through their fingers like water. Meanwhile the Byzantines were in a position to close the Bosporus, and the Great King threatened to send three hundred triremes into the Aegean to support the rebels. A crisis had been reached. Envoys arrived at Athens from Chios and the other mutinous cities to discuss the future. Some demagogues urged the Assembly to continue the struggle. Would the Athenians choose peace and renounce their imperial ambitions? Or would they battle on, as so many generations of their ancestors had done? The great thinkers of the Academy and the Lyceum were in complete accord: the quest for sea rule was threatening to destroy Athens.

The Assembly bowed to the inevitable. Considering the magnitude of the forces opposing them in the War with the Allies, as well as their own shortage of funds and commanders, it had little choice. Athens officially recognized the independence and autonomy of Chios, Byzantium, Rhodes, and Cos. In so doing it left the door open for other allies to secede from the Second Maritime League. The War with the Allies had lasted only two years and cost very few lives, but its outcome was bitter. Athenians had often experienced and recovered from failure; they were unaccustomed to shame.

During the alarm stirred up by the War with the Allies, Plato and other men of his generation were moved to put their fears and recommendations in writing. The peace movement found an advocate in Isocrates, teacher of rhetoric at the Lyceum. At twenty-one Isocrates had sat in the Assembly and listened to Alcibiades and Nicias debating the Sicilian expedition. He had turned thirty in the year of the battle of the Arginusae Islands and the trial of the generals. Now eighty-one, Isocrates offered his advice in an oration called “On the Peace.”

“I say that we should make peace,” he proclaimed, “not only with the citizens of Chios, Rhodes, Byzantium, and Cos, but with all mankind.” Sea rule was a virulent sickness. As proof, Isocrates pointed to its devastating effect on the once-mighty Spartans. Their ancestral constitution had endured with rocklike solidity for more than seven centuries, only to be dashed to ruin by three decades of naval imperialism. Thalassocracy was a
hetaira
or whore of the highest class, equally attractive and equally deadly to all comers.

Xenophon, another luminary in the Athenian renaissance, sent a letter to the Athenians from his self-imposed exile in Corinth. It was published under the title “Poroi” (“Revenues”). During his half century away from Athens, Xenophon had written a completion of Thucydides’ history, as well as an account of his march through the Persian Empire with the Greek army known as the Ten Thousand. His soldiers’ cry of
Thalassa! Thalassa!
(“The sea! The sea!”) rang in the imagination of every reader. Xenophon loved order and practical wisdom. To fill the city’s coffers without preying on allies, he recommended the creation of a new kind of navy: a merchant marine. The Athenians should invest in a fleet of freighters that could be leased out like the mines and other public property. Shipowners whose business benefited the state would be encouraged to stay at Athens by such amenities as new hotels at the Piraeus and front-row seats at the theater. In the end the Athenians accepted Xenophon’s advice to reopen the silver mines at Laurium, but the merchant marine remained no more than a gleam in the old campaigner’s eye.

At about the same time that Isocrates and Xenophon were advocating an end to maritime empire, Plato embarked on a set of dialogues that would put the insatiable quest for sea rule in a cosmic context. In the dialogues
Timaeus
and
Critias
he recounted the story of a war between an imperial naval power and a small but valiant state that relied entirely on its army. The naval power had a capital city built on and around a hill that stood five miles from the sea. Its ships were served by three circular harbors of graduated size. The smaller harbors accommodated the immense fleet of triremes while the largest harbor was filled with merchant ships that brought the wealth of the world to the port. A long wall with towers and gates surrounded the harbors and the central citadel. There were cisterns for water, and the region was cut up in a rectangular grid.

The people who ruled this maritime empire had good land of their own, but in their greed and arrogance they set out to take over others, including neighboring islands and the continent beyond. In the end they controlled the waters and coasts of half the Mediterranean. So much good fortune eventually led to a fall from grace. As Plato put it, “They appeared glorious and blessed to those who could not recognize true happiness. Yet at the very same time they were in fact full of greed and unrighteous power.”