Lords of the Sea: The Epic Story of the Athenian Navy & the Birth of Democracy (31 page)

To supplant their rival, Demosthenes and Nicias decided to recruit a passing sausage seller whom they saw trundling his stand toward the Agora, a true Athenian “man in the street.” Finding the sausage seller reluctant to fall in with their plans, Demosthenes told him that tomorrow he would be ruler of all these rows of people (gesturing at the audience), not to mention the Agora, the harbors, the Assembly, the Council, and the generals.

Having assured himself of the sausage seller’s qualifications (disreputable career, low birth, little education), Demosthenes proclaimed him the perfect demagogue and coached him on how best to confront the terrifying tanner. If the audience hoped for the sensation of seeing a mask that caricatured Cleon’s familiar face, they were disappointed. Before the new slave made his entry onto the stage, Demosthenes explained in another aside that the mask makers had been too frightened to carve a true likeness, but that the audience would be bright enough to identify the man anyway. On this cue “Cleon” at last burst onto the scene, roaring with fury. Rumor said that Aristophanes himself was behind the mask, to spare any actor the danger of playing the hero of Pylos.

As the comedy continued the players decried Cleon as a cheat, a liar, and an embezzler. He was also a thief who had stolen the credit for Pylos from Demosthenes, the true maker of the winning strategy. In answer to their taunts, Cleon stirred up big winds with his tirades, and the other characters “reef [ed] their sails” so as not to be blown offstage. The tanner (Cleon) then threatened to punish his enemies by assigning them old hulls and rotten sails whenever they served as trierarchs.

Old man Demos, disturbed by the uproar, came out of his house. Learning of the quarrel between the sausage seller and the tanner, Demos declared that he himself would sit in judgment. His buttocks were still sore (after fifty-six years!) from his hard rowing at Salamis, and he was touchingly grateful when the sausage seller offered him a cushion to sit on. In the
agon
or contest that ensued, Cleon claimed that he had done more for the city than the great Themistocles himself, and even quoted the famous Wooden Wall oracle about Athens’ navy. The sausage seller countered that the appropriate wooden wall to enclose Cleon would be the public stocks. Each then tried to outdo the other in conveying tasty dishes to Demos.

Throughout the action the chorus of aristocratic horsemen joined in the verbal and physical attacks on Cleon, just as in the Assembly the real Cleon was opposed, though ineffectually, by the Athenian upper classes. Between charges, however, Aristophanes’ chorus of horsemen offered the audience a more inspiring message—an appeal for reconciliation between masses and elite, between democratic navy and aristocratic cavalry. The chorus reminded the citizens that they had recently joined the naval effort themselves in the new horse carriers (an expedition commanded by Nicias). In a flight of fantasy, they told how their own horses had manned the oars and rowed all the way to Corinth to attack the enemy. Being horses, the equine crews naturally mixed cavalry commands with nautical orders and substituted a chant of
“Hippapai!”
for the proper Athenian rowing chant of
“Rhyppapai!”

For the lyric high point of his play, Aristophanes composed an invocation to Poseidon, god both of horses and of the sea, patron of riders and seafarers alike.

Eventually Demos showed that his heart was in the right place. He cast off Cleon, promising in future to spend more of his funds on trireme building than on lawsuit hearings. Further, he resolved that when the navy came home, the rowers should immediately receive their back pay in full. (“Many well-worn rumps will rejoice at that!”) Then Demos slipped off to his farm, arm in arm with two beautiful women identified as “Thirty-Year Peace Treaties.” Cleon himself was condemned to trade places with the lowly sausage seller. In the final moments of the play the chorus carried the tanner offstage in the direction of the city gate, there to bawl his wretched merchandise among the bathhouses and brothels.

After all three comedies had been presented, the competing choruses trooped across the orchestra in turn so that the ten judges could determine which one received the loudest applause. Rarely did Aristophanes prove a favorite with the audience. So it was a bitter moment for Cleon, sitting in the full glare of ten thousand citizens, when the herald announced that
Horsemen
had won first prize.

Cleon’s dramatic humiliation did not shake his hold over Athenian policy. For three more years the Athenians continued their attacks on the Peloponnesian coasts, their attempts to win back their old land empire, and their meddling in Sicily. None of these campaigns prospered, but one of them launched the literary career of yet another gifted young Athenian: the historian Thucydides. It happened after Brasidas had made a dash to the north and captured the rich Athenian colony of Amphipolis during a snowstorm. In an attempt to oust Brasidas and retake the city, Thucydides as general took a squadron of seven Athenian triremes up the Strymon River. When his mission failed, the angry Assembly sent him into exile. Their action deprived the city of a genius who might have become a statesman in the mold of Pericles. Withdrawing to his family’s gold mines in Thrace (he was a kinsman of Miltiades and Cimon), Thucydides began to compile and commit to writing every detail of the current war. If he could not make history, he would write it.

Finally the warmongering Cleon was killed while fighting at Amphipolis, and the same battle claimed the life of the Spartan hero Brasidas. With these two hawks out of the way, Nicias soon succeeded in negotiating a peace settlement, later called the Peace of Nicias. By its terms the Spartans formally recognized the rule of the Athenians over their maritime empire and even granted them Nisaea, the port of Megara. Otherwise both sides pledged to give back the places that they had captured during the war and agreed to open panhellenic sanctuaries such as Olympia and Delphi to all Greeks. They swore to keep the peace for fifty years. The terms were a triumph for Athens and would have gratified Pericles, had he been alive to hail this new accord.

The war had lasted almost exactly ten years. Important members of the Peloponnesian League—the Corinthians, Thebans, and Megarians—were bitter and blamed the Spartans for abandoning the war on such easy terms. To protect themselves against their irate allies, the Spartans went beyond the peace accords and concluded an independent fifty-year alliance with the Athenians. In fulfillment of Cimon’s dream, Athens and Sparta seemed securely yoked as joint leaders of the Greeks. But already some viewed the Peace of Nicias as little more than an uneasy cessation of hostilities rather than a true peace.

At the next dramatic festival Aristophanes presented a new comedy called
Peace.
The play’s hero, an Athenian grape farmer, flew up to Mount Olympus on a gigantic dung beetle to ask Zeus why he had allowed the Greeks to destroy one another. Did the gods not understand that the Persians might still conquer them all, once both sides were exhausted? Back on earth, a chorus of Greek farmers rescued the goddess Peace from a deep pit where the war god Ares had buried her. As they hauled Peace back to the light with ropes, the god Hermes rebuked those Athenians who still lusted after an empire on land. “If you want Peace to be saved, you must draw back and stick to the sea!”

Pericles began the war, Cleon prolonged it, and Nicias brought it to an end. But Aristophanes and comedy had the last word.

CHAPTER 13

The Sicilian Expedition
[415-413 B.C.]

—Sophocles

 

 

 

 

PEACE CAME TOO SOON FOR ONE AMBITIOUS YOUNG ATHENIAN. Alcibiades had just turned thirty, old enough at last to take his rightful place among Athens’ generals and civic leaders. Peacetime robbed him of his chances to shine in battle, exploit a great crisis, or pose as the savior of Athens. Happily for him, the Spartans were unwilling or unable to abide by the terms of the Peace of Nicias. So Alcibiades set out to stir up trouble among the Greeks, like a boy shoving a long stick into a hornet’s nest.

Even without his incendiary policies, Alcibiades’ flamboyant behavior and mannerisms kept him always in the public eye. The comic poets of Athens ruthlessly mimicked Alcibiades’ idiosyncratic lisp and hesitant speech. He enjoyed the glory of seeing his four-horse chariots take first, second, and fourth place at the Olympic games. Even more than his sporting victories, Alcibiades’ sexual adventures fascinated the Athenians. Far from hiding his erotic obsessions, Alcibiades went so far as to replace the traditional family crest on his shield with an image of the god Eros standing on a field of gold, wielding a thunderbolt. His marriage to the richest heiress in Athens did nothing to stop his scandalous escapades. When she sought a divorce, he seized her from the court and carried her home again through the crowds in the Agora.

Like all rich Athenians he had served the city as a trierarch, and his outrageous behavior carried over to the decks of his triremes. Alcibiades ordered the ship’s carpenters to cut away sections of the stern decks so that his bed could be slung on ropes in the gap. No hard pallets for Alcibiades. He slept as if rocking in a cradle, the first recorded swinging of a hammock on a ship at sea. His steersman, a citizen named Antiochus, was befriended on the strength of nothing more than a prank in the Assembly. One day a pet quail escaped from under Alcibiades’ cloak when he lifted his hands to applaud a speech. Antiochus happened to be standing nearby. He won Alcibiades’ eternal regard by recapturing the bird following a noisy chase through the ranks of laughing citizens.

The fragile Peace of Nicias needed constant nurture if it was to survive, but the Athenians instead gave Alcibiades free rein in his provocative ventures abroad. So long as he did not violate the letter of the peace with a direct attack on Spartan territory, they supported all his schemes. Summer after summer this ambitious and charismatic young general set out with Athenian fleets to aid anybody opposed to the Spartans.

Alcibiades was good at impulsive beginnings, but all his projects had a way of fizzling out in the end. His character lacked the steadiness to push any enterprise through to completion. Even so, the trouble that he caused was enough to win congratulations from the famous misanthrope Timon of Athens. This eccentric hater of his fellow citizens seized Alcibiades’ hand after one Assembly session and told him, “Well done! Keep this up and you will ruin them all!”

Five years after the signing of the Peace of Nicias, envoys from Segesta in Sicily arrived in Athens. The Segestan envoys asked that Athens send its navy to settle a squabble that involved the powerful Sicilian city of Syracuse. As a makeweight argument they threw in a fresh appeal from the Sicilians of Leontini, old allies of the Athenians, who had been expelled from their city by the Syracusans. Athens had already made one unsuccessful attempt to help the people of Leontini, and at least one veteran of that first Sicilian expedition, the general Eurymedon, could attest to the uselessness of another. Nevertheless the Assembly sent a delegation to find out the facts about Segesta. They returned with reports of a wealthy city along with sixty silver talents as a gift from the Segestans. It was enough money to pay the crews of sixty triremes for a month.

The veterans of the recent war with the Peloponnesians opposed new military undertakings, but younger Athenians took a different view. Their city and navy had emerged from the ten years’ war unscathed. The treasury was filling up again. They longed for great enterprises worthy of Athens’ power and glory. Even the dreary turn of events in Greece played its part. After they conquered Sicily, might they not finally subdue the Peloponnesians and make themselves masters of the entire Greek world?

In response to the appeal of the Segestan envoys, the Assembly voted to send a fleet of sixty triremes to Sicily, led by a team of generals that would include Alcibiades. A second debate was convened when Nicias urged the Athenians to change their minds while there was still time. When Alcibiades made a fervent plea that the Assembly stick to its resolve, Nicias tried to scare the citizens into abandoning the scheme. With a great show of concern he deliberately exaggerated the numbers and costs needed to win such a war. But his ploy backfired. The Athenians reaffirmed the decision to send out the expedition but also vastly increased its scope. Nicias himself, no more in control of this meeting than he had been at the debate with Cleon over Pylos, was cornered into specifying the excessive numbers that he deemed would guarantee safety and success.

The Athenians threw themselves into the preparation of the armada with feverish enthusiasm. Anyone not employed in fitting out the fleet congregated in the wrestling schools or stood on street corners in eager conversation. Those who knew Sicily used the tips of their walking sticks and drew maps of the island on the ground for their more ignorant friends. Sicily was three-cornered, and it was easy to pinpoint Syracuse on the side of the triangle closest to Athens. There was Italy! And there was Africa! Down in the sand at their feet it all looked so close, so small, so possible.

An outburst of religious piety thickened the atmosphere of runaway patriotism. Athenian oracle-mongers retailed prophecies that foreshadowed the destiny of Athens to conquer Sicily. During these days of preparation the sacred trireme
Ammonias
returned to the Piraeus from Africa bearing a favorable prophecy from the oracle at Siwa in the Egyptian desert. Zeus Ammon assured Alcibiades that the Athenians would capture all the Syracusans. Even the gods seemed to be urging the people forward.