Lords of the Sea: The Epic Story of the Athenian Navy & the Birth of Democracy (30 page)

Demosthenes and sixty Athenian marines took up positions on their landing place at the north end of Pylos Bay, while the rest of his force prepared to defend the newly fortified citadel. A landing by all forty-three Peloponnesian ships at once would have overwhelmed the Athenians, but submerged rocks prevented a mass assault. In the face of this natural barricade the Spartans had to divide their fleet into small detachments. While the main fleet waited beyond the line of surf, cheering them on, a few triremes at a time tried to thread their way through the reefs and force a landing. No maneuver could have been more hazardous than this attempt to reverse ships through shoals toward a hostile coast.

Among the impatient Spartans in the Peloponnesian fleet was Brasidas, now serving as a trierarch and still smarting from his encounter with Phormio four years earlier. Shouting that it was shameful to think more of saving ships’ timbers than destroying Athenians, he ordered his own steersman to drive the trireme ashore with all speed. As the keel touched land, Brasidas set his foot on the boarding step beside the steersman’s seat. Before he could jump, an Athenian arrow struck him. Wounded, he collapsed backward into the rowing frame among the oars of the thranite rowers, and his big round hoplite shield fell into the sea. At once the Peloponnesian oarsmen pulled away from the beach and rejoined the rest of the fleet. Brasidas would live to fight another day, but the Spartan attack had lost its momentum.

THE PYLOS CAMPAIGN, 425 B.C.

All that day Demosthenes and his small force held off the enemy, a few dozen men keeping eight thousand at bay. The world had turned upside down. A Spartan fleet at sea was fighting an Athenian army on land, and even more paradoxically, the Athenians were winning. At evening the Peloponnesians gave up the attempt on Pylos. A wave washed Brasidas’ shield onto the beach, and the Athenians set it up as a victory trophy. After two more days of futile Spartan assaults, the main Athenian fleet of fifty triremes finally arrived. When the Peloponnesian fleet declined to come out and fight in open water, the Athenians charged into the bay through the channels at either end of Sphacteria island. Once inside the bay they launched an impetuous attack on the Peloponnesian ships, capturing five and driving the rest onto the mainland shore.

The Athenians were now masters of the bay. One result of their victory hit the Spartans hard: more than four hundred of their best troops were now marooned on Sphacteria with almost no fresh water or provisions. The Athenians quickly grasped the plum that fortune had dropped in their laps. To prevent any escape to the mainland, a pair of Athenian triremes kept up a constant patrol by day, rowing around the island in opposite directions. By night, when the darkness made rowing dangerous, the entire Athenian fleet anchored in a great circle around Sphacteria. True Spartans were a dwindling breed, increasingly outnumbered by helots. The loss of any single Spartan citizen was a threat to all, and the news that the Athenians had trapped more than four hundred struck Sparta like a thunderbolt. Officials were sent at once to Pylos to negotiate an armistice. From Pylos an Athenian trireme conveyed the envoys to Athens.

At Athens the Spartan representatives offered the Assembly an immediate end to the war and even a treaty of alliance in exchange for the men on the island. The warmongering demagogue Cleon, however, demanded a more tangible ransom. He proposed that the Spartans hand over four strategic towns or territories that had been stripped of their Athenian garrisons twenty-two years earlier, at the end of the First Peloponnesian War, when the Athenians gave up their newly won land empire in exchange for a group of Athenian hostages. The enemy was now caught in a similar predicament, and Cleon’s solution might be seen as no more than poetic justice.

The Spartans avoided any open discussion of exchanges or ransoms. They asked instead that the Athenians appoint a small committee to negotiate the terms one by one in a calm and orderly atmosphere. Cleon denounced them for preferring secret negotiations to plain talk in the Assembly, and the Spartans went back to Pylos without a settlement.

So the Athenian blockade resumed, while the Spartans sent away for more troops and looked for ways to provision the men on Sphacteria. In the end they recruited divers to swim across the bay with skins packed with honey, poppyseed, and linseed. On stormy days, when the Athenian triremes stayed in the bay, seafaring helots risked their lives—and hoped to win their freedom—by landing boatloads of flour, cheese, and wine on the island’s seaward side. The Spartans on the island survived in this way for over a month, till the Athenians at home began to doubt the success of the entire enterprise. Their dissatisfaction boiled over at a session of the Assembly, when the people voted to send the general Nicias to Pylos with archers and javelin throwers. These light-armed troops could fight effectively on the rough terrain of Sphacteria, where it was difficult for a hoplite phalanx to operate.

Cleon could not resist issuing a few verbal barbs, for he hated Nicias almost as much as he hated the Spartans. During his speech he blamed the current board of generals for the long delay in capturing the stranded Spartans; he also insulted the mild-mannered Nicias, questioned his manhood, and claimed that he himself could do a better job if only given the chance. Acting with uncharacteristic decision, Nicias promptly offered to surrender his generalship to Cleon. At first Cleon jokingly proclaimed himself ready. When Nicias made it clear that his offer was serious, Cleon in dismay tried to wriggle out of his rash challenge.

By this time the Assembly had taken up the idea and greeted the proposal to substitute Cleon for Nicias with acclaim. Now that Cleon was cornered, his spirits rallied. He accepted command of the mission to Pylos and boasted extravagantly that he would return inside twenty days, bearing either Spartan hostages or news of their destruction. Many Athenians watched the fleet depart with amusement, sure that Cleon would return either dead or permanently discredited. But to the stupefaction of friends and foes alike, Cleon proved as good as his word. Before the twentieth day had passed, he and his ships were back in Athens, along with 292 Spartan prisoners. The rest had been killed in fierce fighting when Cleon’s light-armed troops combined with Demosthenes’ hoplites for a dawn attack on Sphacteria.

Exultation exploded in Athens. A new set of desperate Spartan envoys came to sue for peace and the return of their men. The Athenians followed Cleon’s lead. They told the Spartans that they would immediately execute the hostages if the Peloponnesian army invaded Attica again. Having tied the hands of their enemies, the Athenians proceeded to celebrate. The most prized trophies from Pylos were the hundreds of round bronze shields taken from the dead and defeated Spartans. They offered them as dedications to the gods, to be hung up in sanctuaries and other public places, each shield displaying the proud inscription THE ATHENIANS FROM THE LACEDAEMONIANS ON PYLOS.

For the first time since the beginning of the war, the people pushed forward with new buildings on the Acropolis. Pylos was a victory that outshone any military success of Pericles. To celebrate it, the Athenians raised a new temple to Athena Nike, goddess of victory. It was set on a bastion that jutted forward pugnaciously beside the main entrance, elbowing aside Pericles’ stately Propylaea. Thus the builders managed to capture in stone the brashness of Cleon and the pride that Athens took in his astounding victory. Cleon had indeed made himself, almost overnight, the first man in Athens.

Another monument to the victory at Pylos, just as enduring as the marble temple of Athena Nike, was a comedy called
Horsemen
by the young playwright Aristophanes. Before writing comedies himself, Aristophanes had passed through a varied apprenticeship in the theater. He likened his own career to a series of promotions on board a trireme.

Though still in his teens, Aristophanes was Cleon’s harshest critic. In an earlier play,
Acharnians,
he had ridiculed the atmosphere of paranoia that Cleon stirred up with his alarmist speeches and denunciations of harmless foreigners.

The same rich citizens who sponsored the dramatic productions also served as trierarchs for the navy. Most were loyal patriots who loved their city, yet many deplored the current war. In the Assembly they were outnumbered by the masses and drowned out by the demagogues. But in the theater these citizens could get their messages across without interruption. Aristophanes composed plays that popularized the views of his sponsors, the trierarchic class. Behind the raw jokes about sex and other bodily functions, his comedies routinely satirized demagogues like Cleon and urged an end to the war.

A few months after the astounding victory at Pylos, Cleon went to the theater. The occasion was the Lenaea, a late winter festival honoring Dionysus, god of wine. The festival’s chief object of veneration—an erect wooden phallus as big as a man—set the tone. At this festival comedy, not tragedy, dominated the stage. The principal actors sported clownish potbellies, while the men in the chorus waggled giant phalluses, sometimes referred to as their “oars.” Thanks to his recent appointment as general, Cleon for the first time had a seat of honor on the front row. To his left and right stretched the long curving line of priests, public benefactors, and generals, including his rivals and colleagues Nicias and Demosthenes. At his back crowded thousands of Athenians who had come to see and judge the contest.

It had been known for months that Aristophanes would be presenting a new comedy. Two years earlier, after the rebellion of Mytilene and the famous trireme race to Lesbos, Aristophanes had lampooned Cleon mercilessly in his
Babylonians.
Cleon counterattacked with an accusation of slander. Aristophanes was convicted and fined by the jury. Now, hedged about by the heroic aura of Pylos, Cleon could surely expect immunity from the bawdy humor of Aristophanes and his ilk. But Aristophanes had other ideas.

Backstage, officials marshaled the actors, choristers, pipers, costumers, and stagehands for three new plays: Cratinus’
Satyrs,
Aristomenes’
Scabbard Bearers,
and Aristophanes’
Horsemen.
Out front the three wealthy sponsors took their seats in the audience. Vendors were selling nuts and raisins. Then the statue of Dionysus was carried in so that the god could watch the plays. A torchbearer entered the theater and cried, “Call on the god!” The audience shouted, “Son of Semele! Iacchos! Giver of Wealth!” And the competition began.

Once
Horsemen
started, it quickly became evident that Aristophanes had written the play as his revenge on Cleon. Pylos figured prominently in the dialogue, and references to the Athenian navy peppered the play throughout. In the first scene, two actors dressed as kitchen slaves ran or limped onto the stage, howling. The first tilted his masked face up to the audience—a startled moment, then laughter—to reveal a portrait of the general Demosthenes. The second slave joined in the miserable wailing. More laughter: he was masked as Nicias. Both slaves, it was plain, had just been whipped.

Demosthenes explained to the audience that he and his fellow slave served a crusty old master named Demos (that is, the Athenian people), short-tempered and hard of hearing. Demos resided on the Pnyx. At the last new moon Demos had bought another slave, a tanner. The naming of the new slave’s occupation stirred a ripple in the audience, for leather was of course the source of Cleon’s wealth. The interloper had been scheming to make Demosthenes and Nicias look bad; hence the beatings and bruises. Any doubts about the identity of this third slave were laid to rest when Demosthenes complained, “The other day when I cooked up a Spartan cake at Pylos, he slipped by me, grabbed the dish, and brought it to the master as his own!”