The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World (20 page)

Other sources report similar undertakings. Shortly before the time of Sataspes, a
Carthaginian merchant named
Hanno sailed south of
Mogador perhaps as far as Cape Juby,
Mauritania (27°58′N), possibly to Cerne Island (16°45′N), off the coast of
Senegal, or maybe even to the equatorial coast of Cameroon in the Gulf of Guinea. A sixth-century
BCE
periplus
(mariner’s guide) from
Massilia (
Marseille) suggests that some sailors reached Finisterre in northwest Spain, and it refers also to Albion, or England. The fifth-century
BCE
sailor
Himilco took four months on a voyage north of Gibraltar that may have taken him as far as
Brittany or southern England, and in the fourth century
BCE
a Massilian Greek named
Pytheas explored the
Bay of Biscay, the British Isles, and perhaps unidentified lands farther north, a voyage discussed below in
Chapter 9
. Most
Mediterranean sailors, however, remained in their home
sea—“
like frogs round a pond,” in
Plato’s phrase—perfecting their trades, their navigational skills, and, above all, their ships.

Archaeological finds of merchant ships from 1000 to 400
BCE
are rare, and while the remains of their cargoes have yielded valuable clues about trade and traders, most of the hulls have disappeared and what survives adds little to our understanding of shipbuilding techniques. Although no warships have survived, these were the largest and most complex—and are today the most intensely studied—vessels of the early first millennium
BCE
. The
Phoenicians and Greeks were the first people to make a hard distinction between vessels intended for trade and those built for combat. The idea of using ships to disable other ships rather than as simple troop carriers to be turned into floating platforms for hand-to-hand combat came to the fore around the ninth century
BCE
, the date of the earliest pictorial evidence of the ship’s ram. This may have originated as a forward extension of the keel. In its more developed form it was capped with a heavy bronze fitting, thereby creating what was in essence a massive torpedo of great strength, speed, and hitting power, and designed to punch holes in enemy ships. The only surviving example of a ram itself, found on the Israeli coast near Athlit and dating from the second century
BCE
, measures 2.25 meters long and was fitted to an armature of
cedar, elm, and
pine. To support the ram—the one from Athlit weighs 465 kilograms—and prevent the ramming ship from being shattered by the impact of driving into other vessels, ships’ hulls had to be heavily constructed.

The largest ships of this early period were
penteconters, so called because they carried fifty oarsmen. A penteconter with one bank of rowers would measure twenty meters or longer, which would make for a vessel that was heavy, difficult to maneuver or defend, and an unnecessarily large target. So it is not surprising that the same period saw the development of the first two-banked ships—
biremes—which carried the same number of oarsmen seated on two levels in a hull little more than half as long. These stronger, more compact ships could support a raised deck for infantry, archers, and spearmen, which gave them a further offensive capability while keeping the rowers protected and out of the way. For ordinary cruising, oarsmen probably rowed from the upper deck, while the lower position was used only in battle. Eighth-century
BCE
illustrations show ships with rowers on two levels, but the first true biremes are depicted on reliefs from
Nineveh showing
Luli of Tyre’s flight to Cyprus. These show two banks of rowers; the lower oars protrude through ports cut in
the hull (leather sleeves keep out the water), while the upper oars are on the gunwale level. Rather than seating the oarsmen directly on top of each other, the benches are staggered, to keep the ship’s center of gravity low.

A natural extension of the bireme, the trireme evolved over the course of the seventh century
BCE
and was created by the addition of a third bank of oarsmen. (The word “trireme” comes from the Late Latin, meaning “three-oared.” Both Greek and Roman sailors used the Greek
term
trieres
, meaning “three-fitted.”) The most common warships of this period were
triaconters, “thirty-oared,” and penteconters, or fifties; sixth-century
BCE
illustrations show both single- and double-banked triaconters and penteconters. Triremes, on the other hand, were vessels with a more or less standard number of oarsmen who sat in a fixed configuration: twenty-seven oarsmen per side on the lowest and middle banks (
thalamians and
zygians, respectively) and thirty-one thranites per side on the upper bank, for a total of 170. As in biremes, the rowers were staggered, the zygians just above and forward of the thalamians, the thranites just above and forward of the zygians. To compensate for their height above the water—about 1.5 meters as opposed to half a meter for the thalamians—the thranite oars rested on an
outrigger that gave the rowers greater leverage.

At Athens, the wealthiest citizens served as trierarchs, responsible for fitting out triremes and paying their crew on behalf of the state. While the title means “trireme captain,” if the trierarch lacked naval experience, operational control was left to a professional. In addition to the rowers, triremes carried people to keep time with flutes and drums, lookouts, boatswains, and helmsmen, and a contingent of infantry, archers, and spearmen. The number of the latter differed depending on the manpower available and the preferred tactics. At the battle of Salamis in 480
BCE
, Athenian ships carried about ten marines, while the Persians carried thirty. The low number of Athenian marines may reflect the enormous drain on manpower required to provide thirty-four thous
and oarsmen for the fleet, many of them recruited from their allies. The Athenians later widened the upper decks of their triremes to accommodate more marines, a development that also allowed for protective screens to be fitted around the thalamians.

Trireme fleets sailed either in line-ahead formation (that is, aligned bow to stern), or line-abreast (side-by-side), the former being standard for cruising, the latter for going into battle under oars. Although triremes carried a sailing rig (two masts by the fifth century
BCE
), sails were probably not used when the vessel was being rowed because if the wind was coming from anywhere but dead astern, the vessel would heel too much for effective
rowing. Ships could reach
impressive speeds under oars alone.
Thucydides records one nonstop passage from Piraeus to Mytilene that a trireme made in little more than
twenty-four hours, about 7.5 knots, and
Xenophon describes the 129-mile run from Byzantium to
Heraclea on the Black Sea being covered at an average speed of about seven knots. A replica trireme called the
Olympias
attained sprint speeds of seven knots in its first season. (Triremes were as much as 30 percent faster than penteconters, which remained the standard warship for smaller city-states lacking the resources to build or man larger vessels.)

Practice was essential to perfect the highly refined
tactics of trireme warfare, which required coordinating the actions of not only the oarsmen within each ship, but also the actions of different ships. As a defensive measure, ships could maneuver themselves into a circle with their rams pointing outward, against which the best offense would be to circle around the group—a maneuver called a
periplous
—before turning into the enemy ships. Another form of
periplous
involved a ship’s wheeling around on a pursuing attacker to strike it from astern or abeam. A distinct maneuver was the
diekplous,
“sailing through and out,” in which ships in a line-abreast formation rowed through the enemy line before coming about to strike the ships from astern, the most vulnerable part of a trireme.

As in any age, naval power in classical antiquity depended on vast reserves of natural and human resources as well as a rationale for deploying these at sea. Maintaining a navy required an enormous civic commitment and the statesman Pericles exaggerated only slightly when, at the outset of the
Peloponnesian War in 460
BCE
, he reminded the Athenians that “
Seamanship, just like anything else, is an art. It is not something that can be picked up and studied in one’s spare time; indeed, it allows one no spare time for anything else.” This the Athenians well knew. On the eve of the second Persian invasion of Greece twenty years before, they had the money, matériel, and motive to build the most powerful and best trained fleet in the eastern Mediterranean. The navies of
Syracuse and Carthage were possibly equal to or even larger than theirs, and while the Persian Empire might dwarf Athens and its allies, its ships were drafted from the ranks of disparate subjects commanded by alien officers. This is not to suggest that the outcome of the Persian invasion was never in doubt, for it certainly was, and the Greek victory was due to a combination of scrappy politicking, strategic overreach by the Persians, and a tactical gambit that could have as easily ended in failure as in success.

In 559
BCE
, the Neo-
Babylonian Empire was laid low by
Cyrus the Great, founder of the Achaemenid Dynasty (550–330
BCE
), which had arisen among
the Persis, a tribe of southwest
Iran and from which Persia took its name. Ten years later Cyrus was king of the
Medes of northern Iran and by 525
BCE
he had conquered Egypt and Lydia with its
Ionian Greek city-states. The Ionians accepted Persian rule until 499
BCE
, when Cyrus’s successor,
Darius, mounted an expedition to take Naxos, largest of the
Cycladic Islands, about halfway between Ionia and the Peloponnese.
Miletus rallied the other Ionian city-states to revolt against Persian rule, but appeals to mainland Greeks garnered a less than enthusiastic response. Sparta, most powerful of the city-states, sent a single trireme to investigate. Athens and
Eretria were the only cities to offer substantive help, sending twenty and five ships, respectively, the sailing of which was, in
Herodotus’s pithy summation, “
the beginning of evils for
Greeks and barbarians.”

After crossing the Aegean, the Athenians marched to
Sardis, which they burned before beating a hasty retreat. With only 353 triremes between them, the Ionians were no match for Persia’s fleet of 600 Phoenician, Egyptian, and Cappadocian triremes that attacked Miletus in 494
BCE
. The few Ionian ships that had not abandoned the cause were destroyed or captured in a battle at the nearby island of Lade that effectively ended the
Ionian Revolt. The Persians continued mopping-up operations around the Hellespont and captured a number of Greek cities on either side of the strait. Despite this success, Darius swore to punish the Athenians for the destruction of Sardis and “
commanded one of his servants to repeat to him the words, ‘Master, remember the Athenians,’ three times, whenever he sat down to dinner.” In 491
BCE
, the Persians launched their first invasion of Greece under Darius’s son-in-law,
Mardonius. Ferrying his troops across the Hellespont, Mardonius turned south intent on taking Eretria and Athens. After landing the army in Europe, the Persian fleet sailed south along the coast as far as the forbidding promontory of the Athos (Acte) peninsula where a gale sank three hundred ships and drowned twenty thousand sailors. The Persians also suffered military setbacks in
Thrace, and while they eventually got the upper hand, Mardonius elected to return home.

Had they pursued their original objective, the Persians would have found little in the way of organized resistance. Athens and
Aegina, perennial rivals, had been at war for fifteen years and the Aeginetans had recently defeated a fleet of Athenian and
Corinthian ships. It was against this backdrop that Darius mounted a second expedition. Herodotus offers somewhat more detail about the composition of the Persians’ “
naval contingent,” which included “all the ships and men which the various subject communities had been ordered to supply—including the horse-transports which Darius had requisitioned from his tributary states the year before. The horses were embarked in the transports, the troops in the ships of war, and, six hundred triremes strong, they sailed to Ionia.” This time, the Persians sailed straight across the Aegean,
“presumably because the commanders dreaded the passage around Athos.” But there were military and political advantages, too. After subjugating Naxos, the Persians landed on
Euboea in preparation for an attack on Attica. There, on the plain of Marathon forty-two kilometers from Athens, the Athenians and Plataeans threw back the invaders and seized seven of their ships. The Persians regrouped and attempted to attack Athens by sea, but by the time their ships stood off the beaches of
Phaleron, which served as Athens’s port, the Athenian army had returned overland to oppose them and the Persians departed.

Darius plotted a new invasion of Greece, but a revolt in Egypt and a dispute over the order of succession (settled in favor of his son
Xerxes) forced its postponement. After Xerxes quelled the Egyptian revolt, his advisors—including Athenian exiles living in the imperial capital at
Susa—urged him to renew the war with Athens. Ignoring his uncle,
Artabanus, who argued that the war faction was intentionally underestimating the Greeks’ ability and resolve, Xerxes prepared an invasion force of 1,207 triremes and 1,800 transports. As before, the Persians left most of the naval operations to the Phoenicians, Egyptians, and Ionian and mainland Greeks who preferred an alliance with the most powerful empire in the world to fighting alongside a handful of their squabbling cousins. It is estimated that as many Greeks fought for as against the Persians.

The size of the fleet alone easily justified Artabanus’s concern that Persia’s most powerful enemies were not the Greeks but the sea and the land: “
So far as I know there is not a harbour anywhere big enough to receive this fleet of ours and give it protection in the event of storms: and indeed there would have to be not merely one such harbour, but many—all along the coast by which you will sail. But there is not a single one.” Artabanus must have been well versed in the extensive logistical preparations then under way, which included the forward deployment of provisions, warhorses, and pack animals, and two remarkable feats of engineering. The first was spanning the Hellespont with two bridges of ships (completed in May 480
BCE
) so that the army could walk from Asia to Europe. Because the current can run at four knots or more, throwing a
bridge of ships across the Hellespont is a considerable undertaking, but there was nothing novel in the idea. Darius had bridged both the Hellespont and the Danube during a campaign against the
Scythians in 512
BCE
. Xerxes’ bridges consisted of triremes and penteconters anchored in the Hellespont—according to Herodotus, the northern, upstream span comprised 360 and the southern span 314 penteconters and triremes—and joined by two flax and four
papyrus cables that ran from shore to shore. When this framework was ready, planks were laid from ship to ship and the sides were built up to keep the horses and pack animals from panicking at the sight of the water.