Lords of the Sea: The Epic Story of the Athenian Navy & the Birth of Democracy (22 page)

The
Paralos
took on the role of flagship for the entire navy. At times the
Paralos
served as a ship of war, but it also carried important dispatches, conveyed embassies on diplomatic missions, provided scouting reports to the rest of the navy, or served as a sacred ship to take priests and celebrants to rites and festivals overseas. Every four years the ship transported the city’s Olympic athletes and their entourage around the Peloponnese to Olympia for the prestigious games celebrated in honor of Zeus.

Closer to home the crew of the
Paralos
would row their ship southwest to the Isthmus, where the Corinthians sponsored games to honor Poseidon. The athletic events of the Isthmian games were held beside the pine trees in the sanctuary where Themistocles and the other Greek delegates had planned the resistance to Xerxes. At the stadium the Athenian contingent was traditionally allowed as much space in the grandstand as could be covered by the sail of the
Paralos,
set up as an awning. Unlike the Olympic games, the Isthmian games included races for ships, so the crew of the
Paralos
had the chance to compete against contenders from Corinth, Megara, Sicyon, and many other Greek cities. The victor’s crown at the Isthmus was woven from twigs of pine, the wood most useful to shipwrights and therefore the sea god’s special tree.

Every member of the
Paralos
’ crew was an Athenian citizen. The ship had no trierarch: the democratic crew was in command. The highest-ranking officer on board was the treasurer, known as the
Tamias Paralou.
The selection of this treasurer was considered so important that the entire Assembly voted on it and also assigned to the treasurer the funds needed to keep the sacred ship in constant readiness. At times the Paraloi served in a body as Athenian ambassadors abroad. Crew members who performed exceptional services were rewarded with gold crowns, an honor normally reserved for the aristocratic trierarchs.

The experiment in democracy ensured that the fruits of naval victories were shared by all Athenians, transforming the life of even the poorest citizen. The age of the common man had dawned. For the first time anywhere on earth, a mass of ordinary citizens, independent of monarchs or aristocrats or religious leaders, was guiding the destiny of a great state.

EMPIRE

—Pericles to the Athenians

CHAPTER 9

The Imperial Navy
[446-433 B.C.]

—Fragment of a lost comedy

 

 

 

 

IN GREEK MYTH, HUMAN HISTORY BEGAN WITH A GOLDEN AGE. Cronus, father of Zeus, ruled the world. During this idyllic period our ancestors enjoyed long life, perfect health, and food in abundance. As time passed, the golden race declined through cycles of silver, bronze, and iron. For Athens after the Peace of Callias, naval supremacy seemed to have brought back the legendary age of gold. The people prospered. Art, architecture, philosophy, drama, historical writing, and scientific inquiry flourished as never before. Pericles was the architect of this new Golden Age, and under his benign guidance the Athenians were justified in believing that they were setting in motion a new cycle of human history.

Pericles built upon four mighty pillars: democracy, naval power, the wealth of empire, and the rule of reason. In Pericles the Athenians had found a leader whose genius for public affairs pervaded all these realms. For more than three decades he was the city’s leading politician, orator, naval commander, administrator, and promoter of arts and learning. True, he stood on the shoulders of giants. In the course of his long career Pericles followed the precedents of Themistocles as a maritime proponent and sponsor of politically oriented plays, Aristides as an architect of empire, Ephialtes as a democratic reformer, Cimon as a civic benefactor, Tolmides as a naval strategist, and Anaxagoras as a scientific thinker. Yet as a visionary leader he surpassed them all. Partly in admiration, partly in jest, his fellow citizens called Pericles “the Olympian,” or just Zeus.

In the Assembly Pericles made few speeches, reserving his appearances on the speaker’s platform for momentous occasions. One wit compared him to the sacred state trireme
Salaminia,
which was launched only for important missions. He had a knack for coining phrases that stuck in the mind. He visualized Aegina as “the eyesore of the Piraeus,” threats of conflict as “war bearing down from the Peloponnese,” and the loss of young Athenian soldiers abroad as “the taking of the springtime from the year.” The philosopher Socrates remembered to the end of his days that he had been in the Assembly when Pericles proposed the construction of a third Long Wall to secure Athens’ link to the Piraeus. The comic playwright Eupolis compared Pericles’ speeches to the work of bees: sweet as honey, but leaving a sting behind in the memories of his listeners.

Peace with Persia and the Peloponnesians did not diminish Athens’ naval effort. Naval power demanded a constant investment of material, effort, and money. Like the boar in Aesop’s fable, which spent all its leisure time sharpening its tusks, the Athenian navy could not relax in time of peace. Ships required time to build, large sums to maintain, and constant practice to operate. During Pericles’ projected age of peace, Athens would devote itself to its fleet as much as during Cimon’s time of perpetual war.

Pericles took it upon himself to set up a peacetime routine for the navy. Every spring sixty triremes would put to sea with crews composed entirely of citizens. Twelve thousand Athenians were regularly involved in these expeditions. The right to serve on board the triremes was reserved for men who could prove Athenian ancestry on both their father’s and their mother’s side. Athenian citizenship was a cherished prize, as was the pay that came with naval service, and the citizenship lists were jealously guarded against pretenders. Special naval judges or
nautodikai
heard accusations against men of suspect birth. They judged these cases each year during the month of Munichion, at the start of the seafaring season.

Even with these periodic purges, the Athenian population was experiencing an explosive period of growth. One of the greatest benefits of empire was the acquisition of new territory overseas that could be divided among the poor citizens of Athens, transforming them from urban masses to private landowners. Such allotments were called
klerouchoi
or cleruchies, meaning lands assigned by lottery. The Athenians who took possession of these parcels of land kept their Athenian citizenship rather than becoming citizens of a new colony. Tolmides established cleruchies on the islands of Euboea and Naxos, Pericles divided land in the Gallipoli peninsula among Athenian cleruchs, and certain tracts in Thrace were specifically reserved for citizens of the two lowest classes, the thetes and the hoplites. Thus the conquests of the Athenian navy provided land and livelihoods for thousands of commoners.

The triremes of Pericles’ peacetime navy were launched in early spring. They remained in service for eight months, until the onset of winter storms brought them back to their shipsheds in the Piraeus. During those months the triremes of Athens performed many tasks. Twenty ships guarded the coasts of Attica and the approaches to the Piraeus. Ten collected tribute from allied cities and islands. Some triremes carried embassies to foreign lands or ran sacred missions to distant sanctuaries and religious festivals. Others hunted down pirates. Still others conveyed troops of Athenian hoplites to islands and cities where they would serve as garrisons, supporting local democratic factions against their oligarchic opponents. Whatever their orders, all Athenian crews used their time at sea to perfect the skills needed in naval battles. Athenians were talkative and self-willed by nature, but on board the triremes the common citizens learned the disciplines of silence and instant obedience. The Athenian navy depended upon their skills, and the people’s political power depended on the navy.

The annual cost of Athens’ peacetime navy of sixty ships was 480 talents for their eight months at sea. Lower-class citizens benefited greatly from the steady income, which was drawn from the tribute paid by the allies. At home more than twenty thousand Athenian citizens depended for their livelihoods on naval and maritime income. The city’s swarms of jurors, archers, horsemen, councilors, Acropolis guards, prison guards, and orphans might have no direct connection with the naval effort, but they were all paid with wealth from the sea. There were five hundred guards in the Navy Yard, and seven hundred civil officials who were sent out annually to enforce compliance among the allies.

To regularize the annual tribute payments, the Athenians gradually organized the allies into five districts: Islands, Caria, Ionia, Hellespont, and “Thraceward.” The districts had no independent political identity, nor did the Assembly appoint governors to rule the districts on the model of the Persian satraps. In time the Athenians introduced standardized coinage, weights, and measures and even required many judicial matters that arose in allied cities to be tried in Athenian courts. The Athenians took a hint from both the Persians and the Spartans and ordered the cities in their realm to dismantle their walls and fortifications. Thousands of troops were shipped out from Athens to serve on garrison duty, protecting Athenian interests and guarding subject cities and democratic factions throughout their realm. The true guarantee of their safety, however, was the Athenian navy. In an empire of coastal cities and islands, ships constituted the best defense. The Wooden Wall now safeguarded a frontier more than fifteen hundred miles long.

The empire’s geographical extent more than doubled when the Athenians extended their thalassocracy into the Black Sea. This fathomless expanse of dark water, so unlike the aquamarine Aegean Sea, dwarfed the cities on its shores and the ships that plied its surface. In crossing the immen sities of the Black Sea, a freighter could sail for nine days and eight nights and see nothing on the horizon but waves and water. With its storms, fogs, and wild currents the Black Sea seemed hostile to seafarers bred in the south. To ward off its dangers they called it the Euxine (“Friendly to Strangers”) or simply Pontus (“The Sea”). Earlier Greek colonists had long controlled the shores of the Black Sea, but the hinterlands were inhabited by non-Greek tribes known for archery and horsemanship. These included the Thracians, the Scythians, and somewhere out on the steppes, the legendary Amazons. The riders had little interest in the sea, and the Greeks seldom attempted to penetrate far inland.

The Black Sea was a place of riches. The most venerable of all Greek seafaring sagas, the tale of Jason’s quest for the Golden Fleece at Colchis, told of the voyage of the ship
Argo
to the eastern end of the Black Sea. In Pericles’ day its waters teemed with tuna, sturgeon, and other fish that migrated in huge schools from their spawning grounds in the rivers Danube, Dnieper, and Don. The salt pans along the northern coast supported a highly profitable trade in salt fish. Along with horses the Scythians produced cattle and hides. Amber was transported along the rivers from unknown lands to the north; minerals and ores washed down from the mountains to the sea. The true gold of the Black Sea, however, was yellow wheat. The fields started near the mouth of the Danube River and stretched to the Crimea and beyond. In places the grain was sown right down to the edge of the sea, and flocks of black crows mingled with wheeling seagulls. The wheat, like the other precious commodities, was shipped across the Black Sea and down the Bosporus during the short sailing season of two months after midsummer.