The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World (19 page)

Although the
Iliad
focuses chiefly on the land campaign at Troy, the poem reveals a considerable amount about ships and shiphandling in Homer’s day. Large ships were often rowed, the crews sitting on benches that spanned the open hulls—hollow ships, Homer calls them—and in general ships were distinguished only by the number of rowers they carried. Homer writes of twenty-, fifty- and hundred-oared ships, and
images on vases of the twelfth to eighth centuries
BCE
depict vessels that fit his descriptions. The number of oars corresponds roughly to the number of total crew, although additional hands could also be carried; the Boeotian contingent included fifty ships with 120 men each. This we know from Homer’s “
catalogue of ships,” which enumerates the captains and crew (by town or region) of the 1,186 Greek ships at Troy. Yet the epics include neither ship-to-ship encounters nor fleet engagements, because the vessels at Troy were essentially troop transports propelled alternately by sails
and oars. Homer describes the actions of a crew as their ship enters a harbor:

The landing here is a brief one in a sheltered bay, but when weather threatened or for longer stays ships were drawn onto the beach and shored up with timbers or stones.

Despite the great number of large ships at Troy, most vessels of the age were small, required only a handful of crew, and depended more on sails (most carried only one) than oars for propulsion, not unlike one that features in the earliest account of shipbuilding in Greek literature. When the
Odyssey
begins, Homer’s hero is a virtual prisoner on Calypso’s isle and everyone in his crew is dead. With
Athena’s help,
Odysseus builds himself a small ship, felling and squaring the trees for planking, then boring holes through the planks before “
knocking them home together, locked with pegs and joints”—that is, mortise-and-tenon joinery characteristic of ancient
Mediterranean practice. Whether the planks would have been fastened with
mortise-and-tenon joinery, sewn, or both, is unverifiable. With the outer shell of the hull complete, Odysseus inserts close-set frames to stiffen the hull and rigs a mast supported by forestays and a backstay, with a single yard fixed at the top from which is set a single square sail. The ship is turned by a steering oar or
quarter rudder.

Homer’s account of how Odysseus sailed from Calypso’s isle for seventeen days and nights offers a brief but telling glimpse of the sort of celestial observation required of navigators in this early period. Racing across the night sea, Odysseus maintains his course by reference to the Pleiades, Boötes, and especially Ursa Major: “
Hers were the stars the lustrous goddess told him / to keep hard to port as he cut across the sea.” With their low
freeboard and lack of decking, Greek vessels of this period were exposed to the elements and sailors preferred to land at night if they could. But days-long offshore voyages were by no means exceptional.

Since antiquity, commentators have made valiant efforts to match Odysseus’s itinerary with real landmarks in the Mediterranean. One difficulty is Homer’s seductive if indiscriminate mixing of real places and place names—Troy,
Athens, and
Sidon—with places invented, otherwise unknown, or identified only by their monstrous inhabitants—the
Lotus Eaters,
Cyclops, or
Scylla and
Charybdis. The matter is further complicated because Homer draws on the geography of earlier stories such as
Jason and the
Argo (which he describes as “
sung by the world,” that is, already well known), the action of which takes place in the Black Sea, and on Near Eastern antecedents such
as the
Epic of
Gilgamesh, but transposes them to the west. This reorientation makes sense from an Odyssean perspective because
Ithaca is off the west coast of Greece. It is also consistent with the new orientation of Homer’s Euboean audience, which included sea traders who had been out west and returned with their appraisals, frank or embellished, of the new lands seen and people encountered.

Among the first places settled by the Euboean pioneers of westward expansion was
Pithecoussae, where colonists from the town of
Chalcis focused on the iron trade, importing ore from the Etruscan island of Elba. Pithecoussae was not an exclusively Greek enclave, and
Phoenicians comprised roughly 15 percent of the population. By about 740
BCE
, relations between the colonists and the
Etruscans were friendly enough for the Greeks to settle on the mainland at Cumae (near
Naples). Other settlements soon followed, notably at Rhegium (Reggio
Calabria) and Taras (
Taranto) in southern Italy, and on Sicily. These colonies, whose founders hailed from different cities, lay along the sea road between Greece and
Etruria rather than in the western Mediterranean, which was within the Phoenician sphere of influence. (
Greeks and Phoenicians occupied Sicily’s eastern and southern coasts, respectively.)

At the end of the eighth century
BCE
, decades of war had exhausted the Euboean cities of Chalcis and
Eretria and the mantle of Greek expansion passed to a new generation of city-states, notably
Corinth, on the isthmus that joins the
Peloponnese to northern Greece. To avoid sailing around the Peloponnese, many traders frequently used the isthmus as a shortcut, moving their cargoes and often their ships overland from the
Saronic Gulf (or Gulf of Aegina) to the
Gulf of Corinth. To facilitate this, the
Corinthian tyrant
Periander built a six-kilometer-long
ship track, or
diolkos,
across the isthmus. This was probably an improvement on a preexisting path, and it remained in use for more than a millennium; a ninth-century
CE
Byzantine admiral hauled a hundred war
galleys over it en route to lift a Muslim siege of
Ragusa. The
diolkos
was, in effect, an alternative to a canal that Periander had contemplated, the Roman emperor
Nero attempted in the first century ce, and which was finally cut in 1893.

Seafarers of the ancient Mediterranean were by no means confined to that sea. The Phoenicians had long since exited the Strait of Gibraltar to settle Atlantic
ports from
Lisbon to
Lixus, and there are several credible if distorted reports of voyages and attempted voyages around Africa and to northwest
Europe. Unlike the Phoenicians, who expanded only to the west, the Greeks also turned north into the Black Sea, possibly as a last resort; they initially knew the Black Sea as the
Pontos Axeinos (“Unfriendly” or “Inhospitable” Sea), but later dubbed it Euxeinos (“Friendly”). The Black Sea extends about 290 nautical miles from north to south and 540 miles from east to west. To the south and east, the coast rises quickly into the mountains of northern Greece,
Turkey, and Georgia, while the north and west are bounded by the flat steppe and broad river plains of
Russia,
Ukraine,
Romania, and Bulgaria, and the Volga, Don, Dnieper, and
Danube Rivers provide channels of communication with northern and eastern Europe.

At some point around 700
BCE
, Anatolia was thrown into turmoil by tribes native to the shores of the Black Sea who sacked the Lydian capital of
Sardis in 652
BCE
and attacked a number of
Ionian Greek cities. Hard-pressed as they were,
Ionian Greeks looked abroad for secure places to resettle. Various Ionian cities had long been interested in the northern Aegean, the
Hellespont, and the
Sea of Marmara, but the people of
Miletus were the first to establish a permanent
settlement on the Black Sea in the seventh century
BCE
, on the island of Berezan in the Dnieper-Bug estuary in what is now Ukraine. Since antiquity, the assumption has been that the impetus for this wave of colonization was a quest for grain and metals, including gold. According to the first-century
CE
geographer
Strabo, there was gold in
Colchis (modern Georgia), and the story of
Jason and the
Golden Fleece was based on the Colchians’ practice of using sheep’s wool to strain gold from the waters of the Phasis River, a view repeated by many scholars and an aspect of Georgian popular culture today. In fact, gold is not found in Colchis. Greek goldsmiths did not reach there until three centuries after the Milesians established themselves in Berezan. When they did they worked with imported gold, and their handiwork was intended probably as tribute to local rulers in exchange for the right to settle on the coast. The Milesians established seventeen Black Sea colonies that became important centers of trade in their own right.
Olbia, on the mainland near Berezan, was close to central Europe; the harbor at
Theodosia (
Feodosiya, Ukraine) was said to have room for a hundred ships; and Panticapaeum (Kerch) was on the
Sea of Azov near the Crimean granaries that accounted for the bulk of Milesian trade with Greece, especially
Athens, for three hundred years. In exchange for Black Sea goods, the Aegean cities exported finished bronze goods, pottery, wine, and
olive oil.

Greeks also migrated to North Africa, though in modest numbers. Population pressures compelled colonists from
Thera to establish
Cyrene, near Benghazi, Libya, around 630
BCE
. Cyrene grew so strong that it was invaded by the Egyptians, whose defeat led to a civil war that the pharaoh lost, despite
having at his command thirty thousand
Carian and Ionian Greek mercenaries. These had been recruited first during the seventh century, and in 620
BCE
the
pharaoh Psammetichus settled them at
Naukratis near his capital, Saïs, in the Nile
delta. Naukratis became a major grain port, but as always intangibles were also in circulation. The most distinctive of these were
Egyptian notions of religious architecture, temple complexes, and statuary, the influence of which animated Greek practice starting in the early 500s
BCE
.

The Egyptians remained as dependent on the sea as ever, and Herodotus gives accounts of three maritime initiatives undertaken by Psammetichus’s successor,
Necho II: the digging of a
canal between the Nile and the Red Sea, the establishment of a fleet on the Red Sea, and an effort to circumnavigate Africa. The canal was intended to facilitate trade between the Red Sea and the Nile (not the Mediterranean), but it was only completed during the reign of the Persian
Darius I a century later. Necho halted the project because of “
an oracle which warned him that his labour was all for the advantage of the ‘barbarian’ ”—that is, non-Egyptians—and by that point the project had cost the lives of 120,000 laborers. Herodotus continues: “He then turned his attention to war; he had triremes built, some on the Mediterranean coast, others on the
Arabian gulf [Red Sea], where the docks are still to be seen, and made use of his new fleets as occasion arose.” Necho probably sought to defend Red Sea shipping against attacks by pirates. Whether the vessels were built and manned by Greeks,
Phoenicians, or Egyptians is unknown, but Greek crews and shipwrights were doubtless available at Naukratis. There was ample precedent for Tyrian collaboration
in Red Sea ventures, and the antipathy of Phoenician merchants to their
Assyrian and Babylonian neighbors may have convinced many to seek their fortunes there, as their ancestors had.

Herodotus has been accused of gullibility and worse, especially with respect to his account of the
circumnavigation of Africa ordered by Necho. But he was a keen observer and faithful recorder who logged thousands of miles traveling around the Black Sea and Aegean, in
Mesopotamia, the Levant and Egypt, mainland Greece and Italy. A native of the bustling Carian seaport of
Halicarnassus (Bodrum, Turkey) in southwest Anatolia, he spent considerable time at sea and was fully aware of what ships and seamen of his day could do. According to Herodotus, the voyage around Africa took three years during which the sailors stopped each fall to plant crops for the following year. He also tells, in some disbelief, how in the course of their voyage from east to west, the sailors had the sun on their right.

This last detail lends credence to the story, for when sailing east to west along the southern coast of Africa, the sun is to the right—that is, the north. Although many have considered Herodotus’s account to be the product of a fecund imagination, the fact that it would take more than two thousand years for another such passage to be completed does not put it beyond the realm of possibility
in antiquity. Even allowing for two harvest seasons of four months each, a three-year voyage around Africa—about sixteen thousand nautical miles—required an advance of no more than twenty miles per day. Herodotus follows this story with one about a failed circumnavigation of Africa in the fifth century
BCE
. Sentenced to death for rape, a cousin of Persia’s king
Xerxes named
Sataspes was offered a reprieve if he would sail counterclockwise around Africa—from Egypt, through the Pillars of Hercules, and then south. Sataspes sailed along Africa’s
Atlantic coast for several months but was forced to turn back because “
his ship was brought to a standstill and was unable to make headway.” On such scant details, it is impossible to know how far he might have sailed, but contrary currents and winds in the
Gulf of Guinea would have impeded the square-sailed vessels of antiquity. As a Persian noble, Sataspes almost certainly lacked the requisite experience to contemplate, much less complete, such a voyage. Whatever excuses Sataspes may have offered for his failure, Xerxes was unmoved and had his cousin impaled.