Lords of the Sea: The Epic Story of the Athenian Navy & the Birth of Democracy (50 page)

For Aristotle, the prime example of energy overcoming inertia, and of living things imparting motion to inanimate ones, was the image of a crew dragging a ship down to the sea. One of his followers included a number of nautical questions in a book called
Mechanics.
“Why is it that those rowers who are in the middle of the ship move the ship most? Is it because the oar acts as a lever? The fulcrum then is the tholepin (for it remains in the same place); and the weight is the sea that the oar displaces; and the power that moves the lever is the rower.” This particular observation related particularly to the new quadriremes and quinqueremes, where the oars were double-manned and the rower seated inboard did indeed have more leverage. “Why is it that the rudder, being small and at the extreme end of the ship, has such power that vessels of great burden can be moved by a small steering oar and the strength of one man only gently exerted? Is it because the rudder, too, is a lever and the steersman works it?” And again, “Why is it that the higher the yardarm is raised, the quicker does a vessel travel with the same sail and in the same breeze? Is it because the mast is a lever, and the socket in which it is fixed, the fulcrum, and the weight which it has to move is the boat, and the motive power is the wind in the sail?”

Aristotle’s favorite student was Theophrastus, his faithful companion from the years of wading and waterside research on Lesbos. In his monumental
Enquiry into Plants
Theophrastus collected the lore of shipwrights concerning the trees traditionally used in shipbuilding and listed the species most appropriate for the various parts of a trireme. His researches even included the folk wisdom of woodsmen concerning the best seasons of the year for cutting different types of timber, and the direction of slope—north-facing and shady, or south-facing and exposed to the sun—that would produce the best wood. In his treatise Theophrastus reported a miracle. An oar carved from olive wood was left propped up with its handle resting in a pot. The pot contained some damp earth, and after a few days the oar suddenly came back to life and sprouted green leaves.

Yet another follower of Aristotle, a disciple whose name is now forgotten, wrote about weather and atmospheric phenomena in a work called
Meteorology.
He noted that rainbows occurred at sea when sunlight struck the spray kicked up by a trireme’s oars. “The rainbow that is seen when oars are raised out of the sea involves the same relative positions as a rainbow in the sky, but its color is more like that around lamps, being purple rather than red.” In terms of scientific study the Athenian navy was inspiring more focused inquiry than at any other time in its existence.

During these years Aristotle himself was working on his
Politics
and
Nicomachean Ethics.
At the end of the latter work he wrote, “From the collection of constitutions we must examine what sort of thing preserves and what sort of thing destroys cities.” In Aristotle’s view, one of the destructive things was sea power. He identified four species of maritime people—those involved with triremes, like the Athenians; ferrymen, like the islanders of Tenedos; traders, as at Aegina and Chios; and fishermen, like those at Byzantium and Tarentum. Some harm to the city might arise even from seaborne trade, with the influx of foreigners and exotic merchandise that it promoted. The real enemies of a well-ordered state, however, were not mer chantmen but triremes. Aristotle agreed with Plato on very few things, but the danger of thalassocracy was certainly among them.

Among the eleven stages or revolutions in the life of the Athenian constitution, Aristotle called the seventh “the constitution to which Aristides pointed and which Ephialtes accomplished by overthrowing the Areopagus. In this the city made its greatest mistakes, because of the demagogues and its rule of the sea.” Geography played a role in national character. “At Athens there is a difference between the dwellers in the city itself and those in Piraeus; the latter are more emphatically democratic in outlook.”

At the end of his
Politics
Aristotle considered the importance of the sea for a well-ordered state. A city seeking greatness, or simply security, might be compelled to build up a navy. In that case Aristotle concluded that the only safe course was to exclude rowers and other mariners from participation in the city’s political affairs. “The large population associated with a mob of seamen need not swell the citizenship of the state, of which they should form no part. The troops that are carried on board are free men belonging to the hoplite infantry. They are in sovereign authority and have control over the crews. A plentiful supply of rowers is sure to exist wherever the outlying dwellers and agricultural laborers are numerous.”

Aristotle here passed from a condemnation of maritime empire—no novelty in Athens, even among patriots like Isocrates and Demosthenes—to a more dangerous claim. Naval power was compatible with good government only if the nautical, democratic element could be suppressed. Walking under the trees of the Lyceum, Aristotle planted in the minds of wealthy young Athenians the conviction that a “trireme democracy” was inevitably an evil to itself and others. With or without Aristotle, such treasonous ideas were swiftly gaining ground among the city’s upper classes.

While Aristotle’s students were collecting the constitutions of existing city-states, the Athenians were preparing an expedition to found a new city of their own—a colony in the Adriatic. In recent years Athens and the rest of Greece had suffered bad harvests and food shortages. The Hellespont and Egypt lay under the thumb of the Macedonians, who might at any time cut off the vital shipments of grain. As war clouds gathered in the east, Athens felt once again the lure of the golden west. This time they aimed not at Sicily but at the great Adriatic Sea, running wide and free from the heel of Italy northward to within sight of the Alps. With this bold and (for Athens) unusual plan to found a colony, the city’s great rejuvenation reached its high-water mark.

The colony’s purpose was to secure Athens’ grain supply “for all time to come.” Its harbor would offer a safe emporium for Greeks and non-Greeks alike and provide a base for operations against marauding Etruscan pirates. The Athenian colonists would keep the expedition’s fourteen ships to form the nucleus of their own fleet: eight triremes and quadriremes, two horse transports, and four triakontors.

The Assembly appointed a citizen named Miltiades to lead the mission. The choice of this man symbolized the return of the old heroic days. Seven generations earlier his ancestor Miltiades had led the Athenians to victory at Marathon. An even earlier Miltiades had founded the famous colony among the Thracians on the north side of the Hellespont. Because of the high priority set on the Adriatic mission, the Assembly ordered the Council to go down to the Piraeus and hold their sessions on the jetty itself every day until the fleet departed. Anyone who impeded the expedition was to be fined ten thousand drachmas, payable to the goddess Athena herself.

One member of the expedition was Lysicrates, trierarch of the
Stephanophoria
(“Bearer of the Crown”). He had recently made his mark on Athens by erecting one of the loveliest monuments in the city: a victory trophy for a boys’ chorus that he had sponsored at one of the annual festivals. The song that his winning team had performed took as its theme the mythical triumph of the young god Dionysus over a shipload of Etruscan pirates. Lysicrates’ monument stood in the shadow of the Acropolis, and its ring of slender Corinthian columns provided a delicate counterpoint to the massive Doric order of the Parthenon on the high rock above it. Atop the columns ran a circular frieze carved with the figures of the pirates who had kidnapped Dionysus and as a punishment were transformed into dolphins. The grotesque metamorphosis was shown through strange creatures with human legs and dolphin heads, plunging into the sea. With his service in the colonizing mission, Lysicrates would have an opportunity to deal with the contemporary descendants of those legendary Etruscan pirates in a much more practical way.

The expedition to the Adriatic had only a little time to create an Athenian stronghold overseas. As Miltiades and his fellow emigrants were pursuing their way west, momentous events in the east overshadowed their venture. The Macedonian army, after six years of wars and wanderings in lands almost unknown to the Greeks, had suddenly reappeared in Persia. Alexander was back, convinced now of his own divinity and determined that the Greeks should do his bidding. Athens would need all its newfound strength to resist him.

CHAPTER 21

The Last Battle
[324-322 B.C.]

—Sophocles

 

 

 

 

ALEXANDER LOST NO TIME IN MAKING HIS PRESENCE FELT. At Olympia that summer an emissary from the king made a most unwelcome proclamation to the Greeks who had gathered for games of the 114th Olympiad. It was the will of the king that all Greek cities should take back their exiles, restore them to citizenship, and then give them back their lands. The Exiles Decree was intended to dissipate the hordes of mercenaries adrift in Alexander’s new dominions. But the decree violated the autonomy of the Greeks. Alexander had forgotten by now that they were nominally his allies; viewed from his imperial capitals at Susa and Babylon, they looked like nothing more than distant subjects. To provide a sort of legal basis for his autocratic act, the new Great King also told the Greeks that they could now worship him as a god.

Demosthenes brought the bad news back to Athens from Olympia. Quite apart from the horde of undesirables—traitors, criminals, and troublemakers—that would be forced on the Athenians, the decree threatened to rob them of Samos. The rich island had been liberated from Persian control by Timotheus more than forty years before (the biggest of all the lobsters that fell into his famous pot) and held tenaciously by Athens ever since. So even at the risk of triggering a war with the divine Alexander, the Athenians ordered to sea that bulwark of democracy, the
Paralos.
The flagship of the navy reached Samos before the exiles returned. And as the elated Samian oligarchs sailed back to Samos to reclaim their estates under the terms of the decree, an Athenian general took them prisoner as they landed and sent them to Athens. Samos was almost the only remnant of maritime empire left to the Athenians, and they would defy the world and the gods to keep it.

If Alexander had his way, the Athenian navy would soon be overshadowed by new Macedonian fleets. Ever since his trek back from India, the king’s head had been full of ships. In his early campaigns Alexander had given scant attention to the sea. Now he launched ships to explore the Caspian Sea and the Arabian Gulf, started an immense new harbor at Babylon, and contemplated a circumnavigation of Africa. Alexander even dreamed of building one thousand new warships, all bigger than triremes, for an expedition against Carthage and the lands of the western Mediterranean. There were, after all, many worlds, and he had not yet completely conquered even one.

Early the next summer, one year after promulgating the Exiles Decree, Alexander held a conference with his new admiral Nearchus to discuss these naval initiatives. It was to be his last act as king. Already feverish following a heavy bout of drinking, further sickened by the steamy summer heat of Babylon, and perhaps the victim of poison poured into his cup by someone near the throne, Alexander fell mortally ill. He died at the age of thirty-six without naming an heir.

The news of his death at first provoked incredulity in Athens. Demades exclaimed, “Alexander dead? Impossible! The whole world would smell of his corpse!” Once the report from Babylon was confirmed, the majority of citizens swiftly voted that Athens should lead a war of liberation against Alexander’s successors. The landowners and other rich Athenians opposed the war but were outnumbered. Messengers departed at once to seek the support of other Greek cities. The Assembly’s resolution rang with the same idealistic fervor that had motivated Themistocles in the face of Xerxes’ invasion: “The Athenian people recognize it as their duty to risk their lives and treasure and ships in the cause of the common freedom of Greece.” Cities throughout central Greece and the Peloponnese rallied to the call.

At first all went well. The Macedonian regent Antipater attempted to crush the uprising, but he was no Alexander, nor even a Xerxes. Under Athenian leadership, the Greeks successfully held the pass at Thermopylae against the invaders. Helpless to deal with the rebels alone, Antipater appealed to the Macedonian generals in Asia for reinforcements and a fleet. The ultimate test of the new Greek alliance, and of Athenian sea power, would come in the following spring.

Pressing forward with the war effort, the Athenians resolved to equip themselves with two hundred new quadriremes and forty new triremes. That winter every Athenian citizen under the age of forty was conscripted for service. Three tribal regiments would defend the frontiers of Attica. The other seven prepared for campaigns abroad. As the warm weather returned, armies of Macedonians began to cross the Hellespont into Europe, preparing to reinforce Antipater’s troops and crush the rebellion in Greece. In an effort to stop these troops, the Athenians launched a fleet of triremes and quadriremes and sent it northeast across the Aegean. Of that year’s board of generals, Phocion alone could claim experience of a naval battle, and that had been at Naxos, more than half a century before. As he was now almost eighty, it seemed best to send a younger man. Euetion from the
deme
or township of Cephisia, an aristocrat and a former cavalry commander, was given charge of the war at sea.

If the Athenians had hoped for the same happy outcome that had met Phocion’s expedition to Byzantium eighteen years before, when he faced down Alexander’s father Philip, they were deluding themselves. The days of Macedonian timidity at sea were long gone. Arriving in the Hellespont, Euetion and his fleet encountered a force commanded by a Macedonian general named Cleitus. A battle was fought in the familiar waters off Abydos, and the Macedonians were victorious. Euetion managed to escape with the bulk of the fleet, but he left many Athenians behind, stranded or captured. Loyal friends of Athens in the city of Abydos rescued as many of these men as they could, gave them money for the voyage back to Athens, and sent them home.