The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World (21 page)

Equally ambitious was digging a canal across the Athos peninsula to avoid
a repeat of the disaster of 491
BCE
. Although there were doubts about the accuracy of Herodotus’s account even in antiquity, excavations in the 1990s revealed a trench 2.5 kilometers long and about 30 meters wide, “
broad enough for two triremes to be rowed abreast.” Herodotus disdained the project, not because the Persians were seeking to avoid the perils of the sea, but because it was a demonstration of Xerxes’ ostentation: “he wanted to show his power and to leave something to be remembered by. There would have been no difficulty at all,” Herodotus continues, “in getting the ships hauled across the isthmus on land,” as was done on the Isthmus of
Corinth.

In the meantime, the Athenians had not been idle. Following Marathon, there had been a stark division between the hoplites (soldiers of the landed class), who took credit, justly, for the victory, and those who favored a naval solution. The staunchest advocate of the latter was
Themistocles, a veteran of Marathon who nonetheless argued that the best defense would be to abandon Athens and seek refuge in the newly developed harbor of Piraeus and a powerful navy. Preparation for the defense of Piraeus proceeded, but there were no surplus funds for a fleet until a rich vein of silver was discovered at the nearby Laurion mines. Although the Greeks were aware of Xerxes’ preparations for a new invasion, Themistocles argued for a fleet as a defense against not Persia but
Aegina, with which Athens was again at war. As Herodotus put it, “
The outbreak of this war [with Aegina] at that moment saved Greece by forcing Athens to become a maritime power.” Under the program pushed through by Themistocles and the navalists, the Athenians launched six to eight triremes per month over the next three years.

By coincidence, the year before the second Persian invasion, the oracle of Delphi pronounced that Athens’s best hope of defense lay in her “
wooden walls,” and that “Divine Salamis … will bring death to women’s sons.” When the meaning of these utterances was debated at Athens, Themistocles insisted that the “wooden walls” referred not to the wooden palisade around the Acropolis (the most obvious interpretation), but to Athens’s triremes, and that the reference to “divine” Salamis, the large island just south of Attica, was auspicious for the Greeks. Themistocles’ argument won the day and the Athenians evacuated their women and children to the Peloponnese and the older men and movable property to Salamis. The men of Athens and their allies, including Sparta, Corinth, and even Aegina, were assigned to ships, half of which sailed to
Cape Artemisium at the northern end of Euboea. Themistocles argued for this forward deployment to forestall the Persian fleet’s passage down the
coast and prevent its linking up with the army, which he hoped the Spartans could stall at the pass of
Thermopylae about sixty-five kilometers west of Artemisium. A pair of mid-August storms sank about a third of Xerxes’ fleet. Two battles were fought, a skirmish initiated by Themistocles to gauge the Persians’ ability and resolve, and a Persian attack at Artemisium. The latter engagement was violent—half the Athenian ships sustained damage—though inconclusive, but when Themistocles learned that the three hundred Spartans had been annihilated at Thermopylae, he ordered the Greeks back to Salamis. As the Persians moved south, the Spartans voted to abandon Attica and Salamis in order to concentrate their defense of the Peloponnese on the
Isthmus of Corinth. Themistocles pointed out that in the open waters of the
Saronic Gulf, the larger Persian fleet’s freedom of maneuver would give the enemy a pronounced advantage. He also announced that if the Peloponnesians refused to fight at Salamis, the Athenians would take their two hundred ships, embark their families, and sail to a colony in Italy, leaving the others to fend for themselves.

The Strait of Salamis is a long irregular channel, the eastern approaches to which are guarded by the island of Psyttaleia. The strait narrows quickly to about half a mile before opening into the
Bay of Eleusis between Salamis and the mainland. The S-shaped
Megarian Channel to the west is narrower still. It was to the Persians’ advantage to draw the
Greeks into open water, but it was not in Xerxes’ interest to prolong his expedition any longer than necessary and all but one of his advisors argued for an immediate attack. The dissenter was the tyrant of
Halicarnassus,
Artemisia, whose blunt advice was to exercise patience. She reasoned that, lacking supplies and fearing an attack on the Peloponnese, the Greek coalition would dissolve quickly. She also noted the Persian army’s logistical reliance on the navy and with considerable prescience counseled that “
If … you rush into a naval action, my fear is that the defeat of your fleet may involve the army too.” Xerxes esteemed Artemisia’s candor, but ignored her advice.

According to Herodotus and
Aeschylus—a veteran of the battle, which is the subject of his oldest extant play,
The Persians
—the night before the battle a Greek messenger told the Persians that some of the Greeks were planning to escape via the Megarian Channel. The bulk of the Persian fleet was positioned in the eastern approaches around Psyttaleia, and to prevent a breakout a squadron was sent to guard the channel. As the sun rose on the morning of September 25, Xerxes and his retinue overlooked the Strait of Salamis from the mainland. When a Greek squadron turned into the Bay of Eleusis, he ordered his ships to advance into the funnel of the strait on the assumption that the Greeks were fleeing toward the blockaded Megarian Channel,
but when the Phoenicians advanced, other Greek ships were launched from Salamis.

As successive ranks of Persian ships rowed into the constricted strait, the battle became general. The lead ships tried to back out of the narrows even as their comrades continued coming up from Psyttaleia and “
The Grecian warships, calculating, dashed / Round, and encircled us.” The battle seems to have been decided early, but the fighting went on all day and thousands died with their ships, the sailors all but entombed on their benches below, the soldiers thrown from the upper decks and drowned by the weight of their weapons and armor. Those in the water were not spared, “Like mackerel or some catch of fish, / Were stunned and slaughtered, boned with broken oars and splintered wrecks.… / The sum / Of troubles, even if I could rehearse them / for ten days, I could not exhaust.” The Persians took the measure of their defeat more rapidly than did the Greeks, who anxiously prepared for a new attack but awoke two days after the battle to learn the Persian fleet had quit
Phaleron during the night.
The battle had probably cost the Greeks 40 triremes, leaving them with about 270, while the Persians had lost around 200 ships, bringing their strength down to 250—a fraction of their number at the start of the campaign. As
Artemisia had warned, no fleet meant no supply line and
Xerxes evacuated the bulk of his troops from Attica as quickly as possible.

In addition to vindicating Themistocles’ strategic vision, Salamis forced the Persians onto the defensive and won for the Greeks unassailable control of the Aegean. The end of the war also ushered in the era of Classical Greece, a period at once profoundly different from and remarkably similar to the Archaic Age that preceded it. People of a common language, religion, and general cultural outlook still inhabited much of what comprises modern Greece, as well as the
Hellespont and
Ionia, parts of the Black Sea coast, and much of Sicily and southern Italy. Politically the Greek world was rent with ancient rivalries. Yet the differences between the Archaic and Classical periods were of greater moment. If Athens had not eclipsed Sparta as the most powerful city-state in Greece, the two were at least equals. Moreover, Athens’s newfound authority derived from a navy that for size, organization, and proven ability was unlike any that preceded it, anywhere in the world. Themistocles’ interpretation of the Delphic oracle had had profound consequences not only for Athens and the Greek world, but for the subsequent course of maritime history down to the present. In
Thucydides’ words, Themistocles believed that “
if the Athenians became a seafaring people they would have every advantage in adding to their power. Indeed it was he who first ventured to tell the Athenians that their future was on the sea. Thus he at once began laying the foundation for empire.” For the first time it was possible to imagine a far-flung
imperial power that derived its wealth from long-distance maritime trade without middlemen and whose prerogatives were enforced by naval superiority.

Athens’s opportunity came shortly after the Persian withdrawal, when a joint Greek naval force was sent to root out the last of the Persian threat between Crete and the Hellespont. Relations between Sparta and Athens were good, and when the Spartans were forced to recall their disgraced general, they ceded responsibility for patrolling the Aegean to the Athenians. In 478
BCE
, the Athenians formed the
Delian League, an alliance intended for the common defense against Persian aggression, with Athens as first among equals. The Athenians appointed the “
Hellenic treasurers” to receive tribute at the island of
Delos (hence the league’s modern name) in the form of silver and ships. The wealth generated by these contributions and from the commercial prosperity that made Piraeus a center of Aegean trade was not used simply for the league’s defensive needs. It also helped fund the extravagant building projects such as the Parthenon that are the enduring landmarks of Classical Athens. Because the league’s 170 cities were encouraged to contribute silver in lieu of ships, the Athenians shouldered the burden of the league’s fighting and consequently developed a navy that could beat all comers. In time the league was transformed from a free association of Athens and her independent allies to a coercive Athenian empire. In 465
BCE
, the Athenians suppressed an attempt by the silver-rich island of
Thasos to secede, and fifteen years later all pretense of a cooperative alliance was abandoned when the treasury was transferred from Delos to Athens.

The maritime city-state also cast its eye beyond the Aegean. A memorial stone of 460
BCE
inscribed with the names of 177 soldiers testifies to the reach of Athenian power in this period: “
These died in war in
Cyprus, in Egypt, in
Phoenicia, in Halieis, in
Aegina, in the Megarid, in the same year.” Cyprus was a perennial battleground between
Greeks and Persians, its chief attractions being copper, grain, and wood, while Egypt offered the prospect of a rich grain trade as well as an opportunity to support resistance to Persian rule. In 450
BCE
the Greeks beat the Persians in a battle fought at the Cypriot port of Salamis. After this, Persia’s
Artaxerxes decided to negotiate the
Peace of Callias, a supreme triumph for Athenian naval power: the Persians were prohibited from sending warships west of
Lycia in southwest Anatolia or south of the Black Sea, and they could not bring their armies within three days’ march of the coast of Ionia, to which they renounced all claims.

The Athenian memorial of 460
BCE
also refers to hostilities with
Corinth at the start of a fifteen-year conflict known as the First Peloponnesian War. When Athens later intervened in a three-way conflict between Corinth and two of its colonies, the
Corinthians urged their Spartan allies to invade Attica to free Greece from the Athenians’ overweening power. Destined to last more than a quarter century, the Peloponnesian War is divided into four phases: the Archidamean War (431–421
BCE
), the Peace of
Nicias (421–415), the Sicilian expedition (415–413), and the Decelean War (413–404). At the outset, the Athenian leader was Pericles, an aristocrat by birth and demeanor but a populist and, in his advocacy of naval power,
Themistocles’ political heir, which almost guaranteed that the Peloponnesian War would depend more on fleet actions than any fought previously. As reported by
Thucydides, Pericles enunciated a comprehensive vision of sea power:

In the first six years of the war, the Spartans confined the Athenians to Athens,
Piraeus, and the corridor between the long walls that joined them. Yet the Athenians were in no imminent danger so long as they controlled the sea and could import what they needed. Their chief strategic aim was to maintain the free flow of grain from the Black Sea, for which they enlisted the support of Thracian and
Macedonian rulers, and which enabled the city to survive a plague that killed a quarter of the population, including Pericles. The conflict widened in 427
BCE
when the Athenians sent a fleet to support their Sicilian allies against
Syracuse and to interrupt grain shipments from Sicily to the
Peloponnese. The first Sicilian campaign ended inconclusively after three years. Of greater consequence was the loss of Athens’s naval base at Amphipolis, strategically located near supplies of shipbuilding timber on the border between Macedonia and
Thrace. Marching northward, the Spartans seized the town before the Athenian general (and historian) Thucydides could reach it.

This paved the way for a peace that lasted until the citizens of Segesta, in western Sicily, appealed to Athens for help against Syracuse. Leadership of the Sicilian expedition was ill-fated. The opportunistic
Alcibiades sailed under suspicion of impiety and was later exiled, and Nicias proved indecisive until a fellow general argued that a withdrawal would be better than a defeat, when
Nicias overruled him. Shortly thereafter, in September 413
BCE
, the Syracusan fleet attacked the Athenians in the confines of the harbor. Crushed in battle, forty thousand Athenians and their allies attempted to flee on foot, but most were killed or died while imprisoned in nearby stone quarries. Summarizing the campaign, Thucydides declared it “
to the victors, the most brilliant of successes, to the vanquished the most calamitous of defeats … their losses were, as they say, total; army, navy, everything was destroyed, and out of many, only few returned.”