Lords of the Sea: The Epic Story of the Athenian Navy & the Birth of Democracy (60 page)

 

Diogenes Laertius
(third century A.D.), Greek biographical writer. He did for philosophers what Plutarch had done for Greek and Roman men of action. Diogenes Laertius drew on more than two hundred ancient sources to create anecdotal
Lives
of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Theophrastus, and many others.

 

Eupolis
(ca. 450-410 B.C.), Athenian playwright and contemporary of Aristophanes. The fragments of his comedies provide details about Athenian naval figures and maritime life. Ancient scholars claimed that Eupolis wrote the passage in Aristophanes’
Horsemen
in which the Athenian triremes discuss, like angry women, a proposal to send them to Carthage. Eupolis’ comedy
Taxiarchs
brought the Athenian general Phormio onstage as a leading character.

 

Euripides
(ca. 480-406 B.C.), Athenian playwright. He introduced many innovations into Attic tragedy through his ninety or so plays, of which nineteen survive. Many of them were parodied by Aristophanes. Though apparently lacking the direct contact that Aeschylus and Sophocles had with the Athenian navy, Euripides wrote detailed descriptions of ships and maritime exploits in
Helen, Iphigenia in Aulis,
and
Iphigenia Among the Taurians.

 

Hermippus
(fifth century B.C.), Athenian playwright. His comedies included scenes with rowers and other nautical subjects. Again, as with all poets of the Athenian Old Comedy except Aristophanes, only fragments of Hermippus’ plays survive.

 

Herodotus
(ca. 485-425 B.C.), Greek historian, born in Halicarnassus but in later life a citizen of the panhellenic colony at Thurii in southern Italy. Herodotus’ historical work in nine books, often called
The Histories,
wove eyewitness accounts, oral traditions, and local chronicles into an epic account of the wars between Greeks and Persians. Herodotus is the indispensable source for the Persian Wars down to the capture of Sestos in 479 B.C. As Herodotus said himself, he considered it his mission to record the historical traditions of the Greeks—not necessarily to believe them.

 

Hippocrates
(fifth century B.C.), medical pioneer, from the island of Cos in the Athenian Empire, who founded a school based on the careful recording of symptoms and their daily progress. Among the cases preserved in the immense Hippocratic corpus of writings (much or all of which was written by his followers) are some that deal with mariners.

Homer
(ca. eighth century B.C.), Greek epic poet from Asia Minor and fountainhead of Greek literature. His works contain descriptions of ships and voyages: the “Catalog of Ships” in the
Iliad
purports to record the number of ships that Agamemnon levied from the different kingdoms of Greece for the expedition to Troy (Athens contributed fifty), while the episode in the
Odyssey
in which Odysseus builds a raft or vessel on Calypso’s island remains the most detailed literary account of the ancient shipwright’s art.

 

Isocrates
(436-338 B.C.), Athenian patriot and teacher of rhetoric. Immensely long-lived, he was born while the Parthenon was still under construction and died shortly after the battle of Chaeronea. Isocrates circulated his “speeches” as political pamphlets and addressed such important issues as panhellenism, Athenian imperialism, and the rise of Macedon.

 

Nepos, Cornelius
(first century B.C.), Latin writer. His short biographies of famous generals may have inspired Plutarch, more than a century later, to write more extensive
Lives
of Greek and Roman leaders. Like Plutarch, Nepos wrote biographical essays on Themistocles, Aristides, Cimon, Alcibiades, and Phocion. But Nepos also treated some important Athenian commanders ignored by Plutarch, such as Miltiades, Thrasybulus, Conon, Iphicrates, Chabrias, and Timotheus.

 

Oxyrhynchus Historian or “P”
(fifth to fourth century B.C.), anonymous Greek historian whose work survives only in fragments. He picked up Greek history where Thucydides broke off in 411 B.C. and continued it down to 395 B.C., a decade after the official “end” of the Peloponnesian War. Passages from his work were recovered on scraps of papyrus in the ancient rubbish dumps at Oxyrhynchus in Egypt, west of the Nile. Correspondences between his history and the version preserved in the text of Diodorus Siculus suggest that Diodorus at times used “P” as a source. The Oxyrhynchus historian is often at variance with Xenophon, whose
Hellenica
is the principal surviving contemporary source for this period. Many identifications have been proposed, but none has won universal acceptance.

 

Pausanias
(second century A.D.), Greek from Magnesia in Asia Minor. His
Description of Greece
provides historical background about hundreds of classical buildings and statues that were still standing during the time of the Roman Empire. Pausanias often quotes inscriptions that have now vanished and sometimes anecdotes from local guides as well. Among his passages most important for Athenian naval history are his descriptions of the tombs in the state cemetery along the Sacred Way, starting with those of Thrasybulus, Pericles, Chabrias, and Phormio next to the city gate and ending with those of Ephialtes and Lycurgus near the entrance to the Academy.

Plato
(ca. 429-347 B.C.), Athenian philosopher and disciple of Socrates. Plato’s dialogues contain numerous nautical images, along with anecdotes concerning such Athenian naval commanders as Nicias and Alcibiades. Many passages are harshly critical of the Athenian navy. Plato also wrote the myth of Atlantis as an allegory of the archetypal thalassocracy or naval power.

 

Plutarch
(ca. A.D. 50-120), Greek biographer, philosopher, scholar, and essayist from Chaeronea in Boeotia. He also served as a priest of Apollo at Delphi. Such essays as “Were the Athenians more notable for war or wisdom?” reflect Plutarch’s wide reading in historical sources, many of them now lost to us. His most important works for Athenian naval history are his famous
Lives.
Plutarch wrote biographies of Theseus, Solon, Themistocles, Aristides, Cimon, Pericles, Nicias, Alcibiades, Demosthenes, and Phocion. Passages in his biographies of such important non-Athenians as Lysander, Philip II, and Alexander the Great also shed light on Athenian naval history.

 

Polyaenus
(second century A.D.), Macedonian writer on tactics. He dedicated his compilation of stratagems to the Roman emperors Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus. Athenian naval exploits are represented by entries on Themistocles, Aristides, Cimon, Tolmides, Pericles, Phormio, Diotimus, Nicias, Alcibiades, Aristocrates, Thrasyllus, Conon, Iphicrates, Timotheus, Chabrias, and Phocion. For some major battles, such as Phormio’s “Battle of Fifty and Thirty” and Timotheus’ victory at Alyzia, Polyaenus is the only surviving source. The entertaining trireme tactics of the Athenian naval commander Diotimus also appear only in Polyaenus. The final two sections in the Florentine codex’s summary of Polyaenus are “Naval affairs” and “Capture of coastal sites and cities.” Intriguingly, Polyaenus seems to have had access to an ancient pilots’ manual: he describes several stratagems credited to specific steersmen on warships, including a Corinthian who faced the Athenian fleet at Syracuse.

 

Sophocles
(ca. 496-406 B.C.), Athenian playwright. Sophocles also served his city as a naval commander during the Samian War in 440 B.C., as a treasurer of tribute money from the Athenian alliance, and as a proboulos or advisory councilor after the Sicilian disaster. His tragedies, including
Antigone
and
Oedipus Rex,
are permeated with nautical images and metaphors. Sophocles’ evocations of the sea reach their climax in the romancelike rescue drama
Philoctetes,
which is set on the island of Lemnos.

 

Theophrastus
(ca. 371-287 B.C.), natural scientist from Lesbos and follower of Aristotle. His monumental work
Enquiry into Plants
describes the species of trees used by shipbuilders for various parts of ships as well as for oars, masts, and other gear. Theophrastus’ writings also preserve woodsmen’s lore on the best seasons and locations for cutting trees and on methods for producing pitch. In a different vein, his comic sketches in the
Characters
depict contemporary Athenians from the period of Macedonian domination, many of whom are portrayed in maritime settings.

 

Thucydides
(ca. 455-400 B.C.), Athenian historian of the Peloponnesian War. A naval commander himself, Thucydides was exiled from Athens following his failure to save Amphipolis from the Spartans in 424 B.C. During his years of banishment he devoted himself to writing a detailed history of the Peloponnesian War. His work in eight books reaches its overpowering climax in the account of the Sicilian expedition. Unlike Herodotus he avoids anecdotal and romantic elements, as well as variant versions of events from different sources. As an introduction to his history, Thucydides wrote a lengthy analysis of sea power in the Greek world, from the heroic age of the Trojan War down to the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War. His work is studded with public orations by such figures as Pericles as well as battle speeches delivered by generals. Some documents are quoted verbatim. Thucydides lived to see the end of the twenty-seven-year war in 404 B.C., but his year-by-year chronicle of events breaks off in 411 B.C. According to his ancient biographer Mar cellus, Thucydides was murdered when he returned to Athens following the end of the war.

 

Timotheus
(ca. 450-360 B.C.), poet of Miletus famous for his musical innovations. He wrote a long poem on the battle of Salamis that included a vivid scene involving a Greek and a captive Persian on the shore. The work survives only in fragments on papyrus.

 

Xenophon
(ca. 428-354 B.C.), Athenian commander, historian, and essayist. His
Memorabilia
provide firsthand accounts of his teacher Socrates discoursing on generalship and other practical matters. In addition to “Revenues,” in which he addresses some maritime matters, and extended naval descriptions and metaphors in the
Oeconomicus,
Xenophon provided vivid descriptions of voyaging in the Black Sea at the end of his
Anabasis.
His continuation of Thucydides’ history of the Peloponnesian War, called
Hellenica,
ultimately took Greek history down to 362 B.C.

 

Xenophon the Orator, also known as Pseudo-Xenophon or the “Old Oligarch”
(fifth century B.C.), Athenian writer whose important essay
Atheniaon Politeia
(“Constitution of the Athenians”) purports to be an open letter written by an Athenian oligarch to correspondents outside Athens. In it he explains why good men like himself must put up with democracy in Athens. The writer was apparently an Athenian general or trierarch: at one point he refers to “my warships.” The date of his composition is hotly debated, but seems to me to belong to the first year of the Peloponnesian War in 431-430 B.C., after the first Peloponnesian invasion or invasions of Attica but before the outbreak of the plague. His views on the navy and sea power echo or prefigure those of Thucydides, while his appreciation of the commercial benefits of maritime empire recall lines by the playwright Hermippus. There was a wealthy Athenian citizen named Xenophon the son of Euripides, of the
deme
of Melite, who served as hipparch (or cavalry commander, a quintessentially aristocratic post) in the mid-fifth century. This Xenophon (not known to be related to the more famous historian of the same name) was elected regularly to the generalship from the time of the Samian War in 440 until his death in battle in 429. Xenophon the Orator (or the “Old Oligarch,” as he has been nicknamed) spelled out the link between the Athenian navy and the political power of the thetes more clearly than any other surviving ancient writer.

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