Lords of the Sea: The Epic Story of the Athenian Navy & the Birth of Democracy (57 page)

The comedies of Aristophanes:
Acharnians
in 425 B.C. (source of the exchange about the beetle and lamp wick setting fire to the Navy Yard),
Horsemen,
or
Knights,
in 424 (source of his comparison of a playwright to a rower working his way up to the office of steersman, as well as the choral
Hymn to Poseidon
), and
Peace
in 421. For a reconstruction of the conditions under which Aristophanes wrote and produced his plays, see Kenneth McLeish,
The Theatre of Aristophanes.

Epigraph, page 185: Sophocles,
Ajax,
lines 1081-83.

Historical narrative: Thucydides, books 6 and 7. (Nicias’ letter sent to the Assembly in winter 414-413 is quoted from Thucydides, 7.11-15, translation by Rex Warner.) Additional historical material: Diodorus Siculus, 12.77-13.33; Nepos,
Life of Alcibiades;
Plutarch,
Life of Alcibiades
and
Life of Nicias;
Polyaenus,
Stratagems,
1.39 (Nicias), 1.40 (Alcibiades), 1.42 (Gylippus), and 1.43 (Hermocrates). Excavations at Athens have unearthed official inscriptions related to various phases of the Sicilian campaign, ranging from the vote of the Assembly that enlarged the original plan of the expedition to Syracuse, to the list of Alcibiades’ personal property put up for public auction after his condemnation in absentia. Modern accounts of the Athenian campaign at Syracuse include Donald Kagan,
The Peace of Nicias and the Sicilian Expedition,
and Peter Green,
Armada from Athens.
Timon of Athens congratulates Alcibiades:
Life of Alcibiades,
16. The promise to show the Athenians that he is “still alive”: Plutarch,
Life of Alcibiades,
22.

Archaeological surveys and excavations at Syracuse have revealed that in the fifth century B.C. the Little Harbor covered an extensive area that is now dry land. The theater and the nearby quarries where the Athenian prisoners were held after their surrender can still be visited today. The impressive fortifications that crown the heights of Epipolae postdate the Athenian campaign. On the other hand the inconvenient rocky coast at Plemmyrium where Nicias stationed his triremes is still exposed, as is the stretch of shore south of the marshy estuary of the Anapus River in the Great Harbor where the Athenians built their stockaded camp. The remains of ships and weapons that sank during the naval battles in the Great Harbor now lie sealed under a protective layer of mud from the Anapus River. In this zone underwater archaeologists may one day recover extensive physical evidence for the battles described by Thucydides, from javelin points to entire charred hulls of Syracusan fire ships.

 

Epigraph for Part Four, page 203: Pericles’ Funeral Oration of 431 B.C., in Thucydides, 2.43, translation by Rex Warner.

Epigraph, page 205: Sophocles,
Women of Trachis,
lines 655-57.

Historical narrative of Athenian naval recovery after the Sicilian disaster, the split between oligarchic Athens and the democratic fleet on Samos, and naval victories up to the return of Alcibiades to Athens in 407 B.C.: Thucydides, book 8, which breaks off after the victory at Cynossema in autumn 411 B.C.; Xenophon,
Hellenica,
1.1-5 (including text of the Spartan message home after the battle of Cyzicus); Aristotle,
Constitution of Athens,
29-33 (on the oligarchic regime of the Four Hundred); Diodorus Siculus, 13.34-69; Nepos,
Life of Thrasybulus
and
Life of Alcibiades;
Plutarch,
Life of Alcibiades.
For this and the following two chapters, an authoritative account with references to modern scholarship can be found in Donald Kagan,
The Fall of the Athenian Empire.
“Men in exile feed on dreams”: Aeschylus, Agamemnon, line 1668, translation by Gilbert Murray. The observation that democracies are at their best when things look worst: Thucydides, 8.1. “The sea can wash away all human ills”: Euripides,
Iphigenia Among the Taurians,
line 1192. The Athenians both love and hate Alcibiades: Aristophanes,
Frogs,
lines 1425-26. The Spartans as “most convenient enemies”: Thucydides, 8.99.

Despite the central role that the Hellespont played in Greek history, the waterway and its coasts have not been extensively explored by archaeologists. The exact location of many sites, including important cities like Sestos, remains to some extent conjectural. Part of the problem lies with the burial of ancient settlements under modern construction. In addition, the course of the stream may have altered over the last twenty-five hundred years, eroding away some classical sites altogether and leaving others well inland from the modern coastline. It is clear that the naval battles of Cynossema and Abydos (fought in late summer 411 B.C.) must have taken place in the lower reaches of the Hellespont, but it is difficult to be more precise at this time.

Cyzicus, a Greek city on the southern coast of the Sea of Marmara, or Propontis, presents a different set of problems. First, aerial photographs show that the ancient harbor of Cyzicus, held by the Spartans in the spring of 410 B.C., lay on the sandy isthmus that joins the peninsula to the Asiatic mainland, but is now completely silted up. Second, the accounts of Xenophon, Plutarch, and Diodorus (supplemented by Frontinus, a Roman writer on military tactics and stratagems) do not make it absolutely clear where the Athenians set their army ashore on the night before the battle. In 2006, in company with Muharrem Zeybek of Izmir, I conducted a survey of the mainland shore west of the isthmus. We found that the steep and rocky coasts would have prevented a landing anywhere except at the point where the isthmus joins the mainland. This spot was identified as Mindarus’ emergency landing place (equivalent to the ancient site of Cleri, or Kleroi, “the allotments”) by Kagan,
Fall of the Athenian Empire,
pages 242-43. I believe that in the darkness before dawn the Athenians set their army ashore on the long sandy beach of modern Erdek (ancient Artaki), close to the unwalled city of Cyzicus but hidden from Spartan lookouts by a high rocky spur of land. Alcibiades’ speech to his men before the battle of Cyzicus: Xenophon,
Hellenica,
1.1.14, adapted from translation by Rex Warner.

The little island called Polydoros, where Thrasybulus and Theramenes concealed their fleet and where the Athenians erected a trophy after the battle, lies just off the point of this rocky spur, and is separated from it by the channel through which Alcibiades led his flying squadron of twenty to lure Mindarus away from the safety of Cyzicus harbor. It rained heavily when I visited Erdek in 2006, with conditions like those Xenophon described on the night before the battle. As a result of the downpour some of the modern roads and streets were impassable due to runoff and mudslides. The Athenian troops would have found it hard going to work their way along the coast to the northern edge of Cyzicus, but they could certainly have counted on accomplishing their mission undetected by the Spartans who held the city. Spartans’ message home after their defeat at Cyzicus: Xenophon,
Hellenica,
1.1.23. The Athenians now elect as generals men who would formerly not have been chosen as wine inspectors: Eupolis,
Cities,
fragment 219.

Epigraph, page 221: Euripides,
Hecuba,
lines 28-30, translated by John Davie, Penguin Classics, 1998.

Historical narrative of the naval battles at Notium, Mytilene, and the Arginusae Islands, and the trial of the Athenian generals in 406 B.C.: Xenophon,
Hellenica,
1.5-7 (including Euryptolemus’ speech in defense of the generals, translation by Rex Warner); Oxyrhynchus historian or “P,” fragment 4, mentioning a
naulochein,
or naval ambush, associated with the battle of Notium; Diodorus Siculus, 13.69-103 (including the episode of Thrasyllus’ dream before the battle of the Arginusae Islands); Nepos,
Life of Conon;
Plutarch,
Life of Alcibiades.
Message of Callicratidas to Conon regarding Athenian fornication with the sea: Xenophon,
Hellenica,
1.6.15.

Socrates as
epistates
or president of the Assembly at the trial of the generals: Xenophon,
Hellenica,
1.7.15, and
Memorabilia,
1.1.18 and 4.4.2; Plato,
Apology,
32, and
Gorgias,
473. Socrates is not mentioned in the account of the trial in Diodorus Siculus, 13.101-2, nor is his participation included in the anecdotes about Socrates presented in Diogenes Laertius’
Lives of Eminent Philosophers.
Because Socrates’ heroic role at the trial is attested to only by his former students Xenophon and Plato, some modern historians doubt the truth of their account.

There are a number of important Athenian official inscriptions that survive from these years, including a marble slab that thanks king Archelaus of Macedon for allowing the Athenians to build new warships in his country. See Russell Meiggs,
Trees and Timber in the Ancient Mediterranean World,
page 128. The most important inscription is IG II
²
1951 (now renumbered IG i
³
1032), which is spread over a number of fragments that were found in the area of the Erechtheum on the Acropolis and the slope below it. This is a list of complete crews for a fleet of triremes. At least eight ships are represented on the surviving fragments. Each ship was commanded by a pair of trierarchs, an innovation that links the inscription to the last decade of the fifth century B.C. or later. Each crew includes large numbers of non-Athenians and slaves (identified by place origin and name of master, who is in some cases a trierarch on board the same ship).

Any explanation of this inscription should take into account its provenance: the sanctuary atop the Acropolis, not the Agora or the Navy Yard at the Piraeus. (Most of the fragments came from the foundations of a small Christian church that was erected within the shell of the Erechtheum.) Lionel Casson supported the interpretation of earlier scholars that linked this inscription to the battle of the Arginusae Islands. See Casson’s
Ships and Seamanship in the Ancient World,
page 323. The inscription may have been set up on the Acropolis as part of a victory monument. It is my belief that the placement on sacred ground would also ensure that slaves who fought in the battle could point to a permanent and ineradicable record of their emancipation. Similar inscriptions attesting to the emancipation of slaves cover the wall of the Athenian Stoa in Apollo’s sanctuary at Delphi. The interpretation of events presented in this book places the emancipation of the slaves
before
the battle as an emergency measure to man the ships (like the offer of Athenian citizenship to metics or resident aliens), rather than bestowed in gratitude after the battle as is commonly thought.

An important ancient source on the question of slaves in the navy is Xenophon the Orator (Pseudo-Xenophon or the “Old Oligarch”) whose
Constitution of the Athenians
has been quoted in this chapter to show Athenian attitudes toward and treatment of slaves. Xenophon the Orator noted that slaves learned to row when they accompanied their masters to sea, and that they earned bonus money for themselves when their masters hired them out to the navy. Whether they worked in the Navy Yard or on board the triremes is not specified. I follow Lionel Casson, John Morrison, and other scholars in holding that in Athens slaves did not row on warships except in exceptional cases such as the battle of the Arginusae Islands (and if these men were freed before the battle, then slaves did not row there either). Other scholars believe that slaves routinely rowed on Athenian warships and also served as petty officers: see Borimir Jordan,
The Athenian Navy in the Classical Period,
and Peter Hunt,
Slaves, Warfare, and Ideology in the Greek Historians.

Topography helps explain the Athenian disaster at Notium and the Athenian victory at the Arginusae Islands, though uncertainties about the layout of ancient Mytilene on Lesbos still leave us in the dark about the exact location of its inner and outer harbors, and how Conon moved his triremes from one to the other. With regard to Notium, lying west of Ephesus with a view south to Mount Mycale and the island of Samos, the ancient town lay on a high promontory that blocked off the view toward Ephesus for anyone on the beach below. Thus the Athenian trierarchs could see nothing of Lysander’s sudden attack on the squadron of the rash steersman Antiochus. The promontory would have continued to screen the approach of Lysander’s fleet until the last minute, resulting in the scramble of Athenian launch ings from the beach at Notium and the ultimate victory of the Spartans.

Visiting the Arginusae Islands in 2006, I told the fisherman who kindly ferried me out to the archipelago from the coastal village of Bademli that I only wanted to see the two big islands. He insisted that we visit a third island, one that is omitted from many modern maps. It lay north of the outer Arginusae, surmounted by a crumbling chapel and surrounded by reefs and flocks of cormorants. Clearly in antiquity this had been an island of considerable size. The half mile of sea between it and the northern tip of the outer Arginusae was great enough to accommodate the Athenian right wing, which would then have been protected on its south flank by the reefs of the big island, and on its north and most exposed flank by the islet. The presence of this islet also explains why Xenophon described the opposite or south wing of the Athenian formation as being “out to sea,” since there was no islet in that direction to protect the outermost triremes (Xenophon,
Hellenica,
1.6.29). It also gives more point to Diodorus’ statement that Thrasyllus “embraced” or
symperiélabe
the Arginusae Islands in his formation (Diodorus Siculus, 13.98.4). The eastern island lies too far away to have been incorporated in the Athenian battle line; it must be the northern islet that justified Diodorus in referring to islands in the plural.