Lords of the Sea: The Epic Story of the Athenian Navy & the Birth of Democracy (18 page)

CHAPTER 7

Boundless Ambition
[462-446 B.C.]

—Xenophon the Orator

 

 

 

 

THE OAR AND ROWING PAD OF THE COMMON CITIZEN OF ATHENS might seem less poetical and glorious than the hoplite’s shield and spear, but all the world now knew that the city’s power rested on swift triremes and strong crews. Abroad, the Athenian commoner ruled the seas. At home, he was still a second-class citizen. The law allowed to him a vote in the Assembly, but he was barred from holding public office. The pressures of his daily work often kept him away from Assembly meetings. Athens was in fact less a democracy than a commonwealth governed by the richest citizens. All archons and generals came from the ranks of the wealthy, and the bar of property qualification was set so high that even the ten thousand hoplites were excluded. The common citizen could do no more than choose his leaders: leadership itself was denied him.

Ever since Salamis a council of aristocrats and wealthy citizens had been steadily encroaching on the power of the democratic Council and Assembly. It was called the council of the Areopagus or “Hill of Ares,” an exclusive body of men who had previously served as archons. As members-for-life in the Areopagus, about three hundred of these upper-class citizens exercised what influence they could on Athenian politics. They held their meetings on a spur of the Acropolis sacred to the war god, and from their high perch they looked down in every sense on the rest of Athens.

In the years after the victory at Eurymedon, while Cimon was engaged in a war over the markets and mines of Thasos, the radical democratic element in Athens at last found an effective champion. He was Ephialtes, a citizen who had already established his credentials as a political leader by undertaking a naval command. As a general he had led a fleet to the eastern Mediterranean; as a public figure he had acquired an unassailable reputation for being upright and incorruptible.

Ephialtes was among the few Athenians who could find their own names in Homer’s
Iliad
and
Odyssey.
These stories told how a giant named Ephialtes set out to scale Mount Olympus, piling Pelion atop Ossa in his ambition to dethrone the gods. The giant was a true son of the sea. His mother, a young maiden in love with Poseidon, had conceived twin sons by pouring sea water into her lap. Once they had grown to titanic size, Ephialtes and his brother started their revolt against the gods by capturing mighty Ares and binding him in chains. As had happened before with Cimon and Theseus, the ancient myths were again shedding a luster of divine prophecy on daily events in Athens. Once the contemporary Athenian Ephialtes began a political revolution, his challenge to the rulers who sat on the Hill of Ares must have seemed foreordained even to his opponents.

Ephialtes began by hauling individual Areopagites into court on accusations of official misconduct, using judicial procedures to achieve political ends. Having weakened the venerable council, he launched a broadside attack on its accumulated privileges and prerogatives. New laws reassigned them to the democratic Council of Five Hundred, the Assembly, or the jury courts. In the end the Areopagus was left with nothing but jurisdiction over two kinds of cases: homicides and injuries to the sacred olive trees. In a grand symbolic act, Ephialtes uprooted the tablets of the law from their traditional place of seclusion on the Acropolis and carried them down to a new site in the Agora, where they could be read and consulted by all.

Among the Greeks revolution usually meant
stasis,
violent civil strife between factions. But the radical changes precipitated by Ephialtes were carried through, not by armed mobs in the streets, but by an orderly show of hands in the Assembly. It was a bloodless revolution—until a lone assassin murdered Ephialtes himself. The killer was never caught, but it became known that he was a man from Tanagra in Boeotia, acting on behalf of parties unknown. In the ancient myth of the giants, the Olympian gods shot out Ephialtes’ eyes with arrows and roped him with vipers to a pillar in hell. The Areopagites and their aristocratic sympathizers must have wished even worse torments on the man who had robbed them of their powers. But to most Athenians, Ephialtes died a hero.

The torch of radical democracy was passed forward to Pericles, the son of Xanthippus, who pressed ahead with the reforms. A decade earlier, when he was still in his twenties, Pericles had launched his public career by sponsoring the first production of Aeschylus’
Persians.
Like Phrynichus’
Phoenician Women,
Aeschylus’ tragedy presented the battle of Salamis from the Persian point of view and made the Athenian victory seem part of a divine punishment of the Great King. Aeschylus was not only Athens’ first playwright of genius but a veteran of Salamis, and he brought the battle to life with his vivid poetry. Two lines of the play hinted at Pericles’ democratic convictions. Concerning the Athenians, the Persian queen mother asked, “Who shepherds them and rules their host?” And the chorus of Persian elders replied: “They are not called slaves or subjects to any man.”

Now in his early thirties, Pericles had naval achievements of his own to celebrate. After the victory at the Eurymedon River he led a fleet of fifty Athenian triremes on an expedition to the eastern Mediterranean. As heir to Ephialtes’ revolution, Pericles took advantage of Athens’ brimming treasury to institute pay for jurors. Thanks to him, poor citizens were now able to leave their daily work to serve on immense juries of up to 501 that dealt out justice around the Agora. Thus the judiciary was democratized also. And six years after Ephialtes’ death, the office of archon was officially opened to the citizens of the hoplite class. Eventually the archonship was even held by thetes.

One prominent opponent tried in vain to stem the onrush of radical democracy. Cimon made every effort in the Assembly to restore the status of the Areopagus. With his naval campaigns he had done even more than Themistocles to empower the lower classes, but he had not foreseen the consequences. Nor had Cimon anticipated the change in Athenian feeling that suddenly made his admiration for Sparta appear treasonous. A catastrophic earthquake had devastated Spartan territory and touched off a rebellion of the Messenian helots, but the Spartans had brusquely dismissed Athenian efforts to aid them. Angered by Spartan mistrust and suspicion, the Assembly repudiated the alliance that Cimon held so dear. He had often told them that Athens and Sparta were in truth two horses yoked to the same chariot. Should either member of the team go lame, all Greece would suffer.

In opposing the city’s spirit of revolution, Cimon suddenly seemed irreconcilably at odds with his fellow citizens. In the spring after Ephialtes carried his democratic reforms, a vote of ostracism sent Cimon into exile. Only six years had passed since the victory at the Eurymedon River had seemingly put Cimon at the summit of Athens’ pantheon of heroes. His father, Miltiades, had suffered a similar fate within a year of his victory at Marathon. There was no question that the Athenians often dealt more harshly with their leaders than they did with their enemies.

The Assembly, now in an expansive mood, was willing to reconsider an alliance that had been offered some years earlier, an alliance that would embroil them in a war more distant than any Athens had yet undertaken. Shortly after the death of Xerxes a rebellion broke out in Egypt. Led by a Libyan king named Inarus, a descendant of the last native Egyptian pharaohs, the population of the Nile delta had driven out their Persian governors and tax collectors. Inarus sent envoys to beg the Athenians for aid. If they would send a fleet to support his war of liberation, he offered to give them a share in running the country and monetary rewards far greater than the cost of the expedition.

The possibility of an alliance with Egypt intrigued Aeschylus, who loved to make references to remote parts of the world in his plays. While the Assembly was debating Inarus’ invitation, Aeschylus presented a tragedy called
The Suppliants
that intertwined a mythical plot with a specific political agenda and a general plea for helping foreigners in distress. Just as he had done in
Persians
ten years earlier, Aeschylus gave the Athenian audience a geography lesson. He reminded them of the Egyptian cities of Memphis and Canopus, the remote land of the Ethiopians, and the fabulous wheat harvests of North Africa.

From its opening lines,
The Suppliants
conjured up images of the Nile delta with its many streams, papyrus plants, buzzing insects, and sand dunes. The play even included a reference to nomadic women riding camels. The chorus sang of the sea voyage from Greece to Egypt, a simple matter of crossing the Aegean, passing Asia Minor, continuing onward to Cyprus, and then turning south. Aeschylus’ plot hinged on the ancestral ties that linked Egyptians and Greeks as descendants of the mythical brothers Aegyptus and Danaus. On the surface the play seemed timeless, and it would in fact endure for ages to come. But like most Athenian art,
The Suppliants
also reflected the current topics of debate in the Assembly and Agora at the moment of its creation.

For two years after the democratic revolution the Assembly was engaged in creating new alliances with Argos, Thessaly, and Megara in case of Spartan aggression. Once these friendships were formalized, the people felt ready to undertake more distant ventures. With Egypt still on their minds, the Athenians fitted out a large number of ships, called for contingents from the maritime allies, and dispatched a fleet of two hundred triremes to Cyprus under a general named Charitimides. The island was still bitterly divided between Phoenician cities that paid tribute to the Persians, and Greek cities struggling to maintain their independence.

Soon after the Athenians arrived in Cyprus, messengers from King Inarus brought an appeal for immediate help against the Persian satrap and his army of occupation. The entire western delta was now in rebel hands, and a crisis seemed imminent. The Athenians broke off their campaign on Cyprus and headed south. The Nile River made its presence felt a full day out from their landfall. As the Greek lookouts cast sounding leads into the water, they brought up thick mud from a depth of about sixty-five feet. This silt had been pushed far out to sea by the river’s annual floods. Soon they caught their first glimpse of the long sand dunes broken by gaps where the river channels flowed out to the sea. From here the two hundred triremes began to traverse the immense wedge of land on which Greeks had bestowed a name borrowed from the triangular fourth letter of their alphabet: delta.

To the Athenians, used to rocky hills and dry summers, this flat green world was intoxicatingly strange. Water mingled with black mud, teeming with life. The air was humid and fresh; the earth smelled like a garden. From the decks of their triremes the Greeks looked out over a boundless expanse of papyrus, hemp, sedge, and lotus: heavy vegetation never touched by snow or frost. Above the rippling water plants rose slender palms, their crests nodding in the steady northerly breezes. Flocks of wild ducks, geese, and ibises burst into view, startled by the passing of the ships. Squealing hippopotami (“river horses” to the Greeks), challenged their passage. Nile perch and other monstrous fish swam alongside the triremes in the froth stirred up by the oars. Mosquitoes tortured everyone who could not get a sleeping net.

The long line of triremes shared the narrow channels with local craft from a tradition immeasurably older than anything the Athenians knew. They saw cargo boats built of short planks laid together like bricks in a wall, rafts made of bundled papyrus, and flat-bottomed punts propelled through shallows with long poles. Strange, strange: a man leaned from a papyrus skiff to harpoon a crocodile; a calm bare-breasted woman squatted at the steering oar of a passing barge; funeral barques bore wailing mourners and mummified corpses. On shore the people drank mugs of frothy beer instead of wine. Strange.

In the delta the allies from Samos, Lesbos, and Chios came into their own. Many steersmen from those islands knew Egypt well. Their forefathers had been among the Greek “bronze men” who had served the pharaohs for more than two centuries as mercenary troops and later as traders. Like the Aeginetans, the Ionians had been granted an emporium on the Canopic branch of the Nile. The Greek merchants named their city Naukratis (“Ship Power”), and the Egyptians allowed the little expatriate community to build temples to their gods.

The Athenians and their allies were cheered by news from the rebel king Inarus, whose army had just won a great victory near Naukratis. Following the battle the Persian survivors had fled upriver toward the ancient city of Memphis. Soon afterward Charitimides arrived with his fleet; Inarus and the Egyptian troops boarded the Greek triremes and set off in pursuit. Up to now the Persians had cruised about at will with their own trireme fleet. The Nile was the highway of Egypt. Whoever controlled the river controlled the entire country.

The Canopic branch was too narrow for fleet actions. Above the delta, however, where all the branches were united in one stream, the great river broadened dramatically. Here the Greeks caught their first view of the Great Pyramid, rearing up amid attendant tombs and temples on the western bank. Though two thousand years old, it was still the largest and tallest structure on the face of the earth. From Giza southward the river matched the monuments in majesty, spreading more than a mile from bank to bank. In some places and seasons the Nile was in fact wider than either the Hellespont or the Salamis strait. Much of it was shallow, but the triremes with their shallow drafts could navigate the river easily.

In one of the broad reaches upriver from the delta, Persian triremes at last came into view. Though only eighty in number, they had an initial advantage as they swept down on the Greeks with the force of the current behind them. But at Salamis the Athenians had been more than a match for the Egyptians in Persian service, and they faced them now with two additional decades of training behind them. In the final tally twenty Persian ships were sunk, thirty were captured, and the remaining thirty managed to escape, either passing through the delta to the sea or fleeing southward to Upper Egypt, where some Persian garrisons still held their ground.